COBRA WOMAN (1944)

Here's another in Universal's wartime cycle of exotic Technicolor adventures featuring Maria Montez, Jon Hall and sometimes Sabu. The whole cycle, which began with Arabian Nights and thus was presumably inspired by The Thief of Bagdad, is considered a milestone of camp cinema within the Hollywood studio system, while Cobra Woman in particular is often considered the campiest of them all. Future director Richard Brooks co-wrote it, having taken sole credit for a previous film in the cycle, White Savage, while Robert Siodmak directed. Siodmak was in the middle of an interesting run of films for Universal that included the proto-noir vampire film Son of Dracula, the noirish Cornell Woolrich adaptation Phantom Lady, and the still more noirish Deanna Durbin-Gene Kelly musical, Christmas Holiday. There's nothing noirish about Cobra Woman, but Siodmak's straight-faced direction, apart from scenes with a chimp in a kilt, no doubt enhances the film's camp qualities. To the extent that Siodmak takes the material seriously, the film probably looks less campy today and more like the typical studio fantasy blockbuster of our own time, within the limits of a Universal budget.

Ramu (Hall) and Tollea (Montez) are mission-educated natives on a south sea island who are about to get married. Ramu's wingman, or third wheel, is Kedo (Sabu), who on his way to the wedding has an odd encounter with a blind, mute mendicant who plays some reed instrument in the minor key that indicates that the man, despite his handicap, is up to no good. This unfortunate person is Universal's Master Character Creator, Lon Chaney jr., who is done dirty here by not being allowed to speak. Perhaps he couldn't be trusted to remember lines for this particular picture, but it's more likely that someone thought his distinctive husky honk of a voice would break Cobra Woman's delicate illusion of ethnographic realism. But I digress.

On her wedding day, Tollea vanishes. Evidence left behind indicates that the mendicant kidnapped her, and that he came from nearby Cobra Island. Ramu embarks on a rescue mission, with Kedo tagging along as a stowaway. Meanwhile, Tollea wakes up to find herself not quite a captive. The mendicant, Hava ("hey-va"), who only feigned his blindness but still can't talk, is one of the good guys of Cobra Island, a servant of its dowager queen (Mary Nash). The old lady explains that Tollea is a twin who was removed from the island early in life for her own safety, but must return to take the mantle of high priestess from her identical sister Naja, who under the influence of the evil counselor Martok (Edgar Barrier) has gone mad with power.

It might have been helpful for the old queen to have sent someone who could explain the situation to Tollea's friends. Instead, Ramu and Kedo reach the island and promptly discover who they take to be Tollea taking an elegant walk, attended by numerous ladies-in-waiting, to her afternoon swim. Knowing no better, and not exactly curious about his girl's change in condition, Ramu promptly dives in to join the high priestess. His assumption of privileges eventually gets him into trouble and before long he's tossed into a dungeon. Luckily, he overpowers Martok, steals his clothes, and is back on the loose. Unluckily, Kedo, wondering what's become of his buddy, breaks into the dungeon, sees a body in Ramu's clothes, and helpfully frees Martok.

Kedo is promptly put to the torture, but is rescued by Hava and the aforementioned chimp after a tense scene in which the ape virtually hypnotizes a guard by threading a needle, giving Hava, who clearly has a rapport with the precocious primate, time to sneak up and snap the man's neck. Kedo is barely reunited with Ramu before they're both recaptured. The pair are slated for sacrifice and are sure to be fed to the resident angry volcano unless Tollea can screw up the courage to confront her evil twin and usurp Naja's power. Fortunately, Naja never had to fight her way to power, and it shows. 75 years later we no doubt would get an elaborate, CGI-enhanced back-flipping fight to the death between the sisters. In Cobra Woman, Naja manages to topple backwards out a window after chucking a spear at Tollea and missing by a mile. It won't be enough, though, for Tollea to claim Naja's authority. She must prove herself as high priestess by performing the King Cobra dance we'd seen Naja do earlier in the picture.

That earlier scene is the highlight of the film. As high priestess, Naja's main responsibility is selecting people to be sacrificed to the volcano. The King Cobra dance starts the selection process. Once the priestess gets the snake's attention and dodges its strike, she's empowered to carry out the selection. Maria Montez does this with gusto, sashaying down the temple runway to point her finger of doom at the predestined victims. Once she points the finger, each pointee tries to run for it -- oh they of little faith! -- only to be nabbed by the rest. We see her select several victims, putting different english on the finger point each time -- Zap! You're going to die! And bam! You're going to die! -- clearly enjoying the hell out of herself.  This scene probably had a special resonance for its original wartime audience, since Naja's is the sort of nightmare fantasy of absolute power in a lunatic's hands that Americans were fighting against in Europe. Even now, there's a guilty giddiness about it that tempts you to share in Naja's pleasure, even if you excuse your pleasure as unintended laughter.

The scene repeats itself at the climax, except that innocent Tollea faints before the cobra, somehow more phallic now than during Naja's turn, can strike at her presumably virginal self. This is bound to disappoint the modern audience since it makes Tollea look weak, but we couldn't have the real swashbuckling finish, with Ramu and Kedo swinging all over the place on convenient ropes and Hava tossing Martok into a pit of spears to put the island's tyranny to a definitive end. There's also more stuff with the chimp, proving again that Cobra Woman is a film for the whole family and not just for the gay men who presumably canonized it as a camp classic. I guess I can see what they saw in it, from the beefcake courtesy of Hall and Sabu to the fantastic costumes of the Cobra Island folk, but I assume that the film had, pun intended or not, more universal appeal back in the day. It's definitely silly stuff, but it's also an eye-grabbing spectacle and a comforting allegory of liberation in the midst of war.

DVR Diary: L'ASSASSIN HABITE AU 21 (1942)

Henri-Georges Clouzot is "the French Hitchcock," a master of the thriller genre best known for his films The Wages of Fear and Diabolique. He started out, however, with a film that on story terms is nearly on the level with the Poverty Row stuff of 1940s Hollywood. "The Murderer Lives at Number 21" is a sequel, or at least in the same series, as a film Clouzot had recently written, Le Dernier de Six. Both are taken from detective novels by the Belgian writer Stanislas-Andre Steeman, who co-wrote the screenplay for L'Assassin. Steeman's detective is Wens Vorobeychik (Pierre Fresnay of Grand Illusion fame), a policeman tasked with capturing the brazen serial killer known as "Monsieur Durand." This Durand leaves a calling card on the bodies of his victims, presumably to taunt the police. We see him at work -- more accurately, we walk in his shoes as he stalks a drunken lottery winner in an early scene made up of a nice tracking shot. Wens is under the typical pressure from higher-ups to crack the case, but he also has to worry about his girlfriend Mila (Suzy Delair, still with us at age 101), an aspiring singer-actress who decides to hunt down the killer as some sort of publicity stunt. You've seen her type in many an American film.

Wens gets an important lead when a burglar is arrested with a bunch of Monsieur Durand business cards in his pocket. The crook explains that he stole them from the boarding house at 21 Junot, which must be where the murderer lives. The place is infested with possible suspects or red herrings: a stage magician, a toymaker exploiting the terror by crafting faceless Monsieur Durand dolls, a presumably blind former boxer, etc. Like any great detective, Wens hopes to sort out the suspects by disguising himself as the newest boarder, a Bible-clutching Protestant clergyman. At around the same time, however, the killer starts to strike very close to home. And before long, Mila takes a room as well.

The story may be silly, but Clouzot shows a precocious sure hand with his actors -- I especially like the scene where the magician keeps up a calm, bland conversation with Wens while performing all manner of tricks with his hat -- and keeps his audience hopping with abruptly discovered kills that disrupt the detective's deductions. It actually takes a flash of intuition on Mila's part to get to the bottom of the mystery, though we may be meant to assume that Wens had reached the same conclusion by other means. The climax is simply dumb, spelling the truth out in the most blatant way -- ask yourself why everyone in the scene needs to be there -- and depending on pulp assumptions about criminals' need to boast and explain their methods in order to delay Wens' demise until reinforcements can arrive. To be fair, the film has no real ambition apart from being a goofy comedy-mystery, and it's made with enough panache that you can't really hold its stupidity against it. As a French variation on a Anglo-American potboiler formula it has inherent interest for the cosmopolitan cinephile, as well as flashes of the talent that had masterworks in its future.

DVR Diary: KISMET (1944)

The 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad should go down as one of the most influential movies of the Classic Hollywood era, if you judge by the wave of Technicolor Arabian Nights style pictures made in the following years.The best known of these nowadays are the Universal films featuring Maria Montez, Jon Hall and Sabu, which are considered models of camp moviemaking. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer got into the game with a lavish remake of a now-lost 1930 Warner Bros. picture, itself a remake of a 1920 silent adaptation of Edward Knoblock's 1911 play. The lead role of Hafiz, the king of beggars in old Bagdad, must have seemed a natural for Ronald Colman to anyone who had seen him in If I Were King a few years earlier. There's something Chaplinesque about the idea of someone as indisguisably refined and irrepressibly arrogant as Colman playing a sort of heroic gentleman tramp. "I may be dirt to the caliph," Hafiz proclaims, "But to dirt I am the caliph!" It helps that Hafiz lives in a milieu where everyone talks in what we think of as an "Arabian Nights" style of florid rhetoric. It also helps that medieval Bagdad, which should be a totalitarian dystopia in the Islamophobic imagination of the 21st century, was seen for much of the 20th century as a fairy-tale land of sudden social mobility and fluid identity. Not only can Hafiz put on good clothes and pretend to be a prince, but an actual prince -- the caliph, in fact (James Craig) -- can put on humble clothes and mingle with the common people, pretending to be one of them. As the young ruler falls in love with Hafiz's daughter (Joy Ann Page), raised by her father in something like bourgeois respectability, Hafiz becomes embroiled in a plot against the caliph's life, masterminded by the typically treacherous grand vizier (Edward Arnold).

The producers must have known that screenwriter John Meehan and director William Dieterle would have difficulty explaining the power structure of old Bagdad, where there is not only a caliph but a queen. The Macedonian Jamilla (Marlene Dietrich) is neither the caliph's wife nor his mother, but is "queen" by virtue of her primacy in a harem that belongs to the grand vizier, not the caliph. Since the caliph is our juvenile romantic lead, he must be portrayed as monogamous, despite his entitlement to four wives and many more concubines. In any event, this "queen" business left me wondering whether the regal title was a stipulation of Dietrich's contract to appear in the picture. While Colman is billed above her (and the title), Dietrich generated much of the publicity with a dance scene in which her bare legs are painted gold. Dietrich wasn't much of a dancer, but the audience presumably got its money's worth as long as she showed those trademark legs. Anyway, I don't know whether we're to understand that as queen of the harem Jamilla is the grand vizier's wife, but it's a moot point since she's having an affair with Hafiz. As for Edward Arnold, I have to remind myself that the avuncular, chortling scoundrel he plays here really was a typical performance for him, while his great work for Frank Capra, who progressively drained Arnold of all humor and emotion to make him more of a menace, was the exceptional. And speaking of ill-utilized character actors, Hugh Herbert and Hobart Cavanaugh show up as Hafiz's supposed comedy-relief sidekicks, and they made me wonder whether Metro didn't originally have Laurel and Hardy in mind for those parts, until they realized that the characters didn't have enough to do to justify that casting. For that matter, a handful of songs here suggest that this Kismet once was meant to be a full-scale musical of the sort M-G-M got around to filming a decade later, after some musical plagiarists on Broadway ("I'm sure you recognize this lovely theme, A Stranger in Paradise...") wrote the songs for them. Cedric Gibbons' massive production design is more reminiscent of the 1924 Douglas Fairbanks/Raoul Walsh Thief of Bagdad than the 1940 film, but Technicolor garishness takes much of the magic away.  When all is said and done, Colman's character ends up much as his Francois Villon did in If I Were King: exiled from his beloved city, but consoled by his beloved woman. In many respects, the 1944 Kismet seems half-finished or ill thought-out, but the ending marks it as a Ronald Colman vehicle more than anything else.

THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY (1942)

So I'm watching Five Came Back, Laurent Bouzereau's three-part Netflix documentary adapting Mark Harris's recent book about the World War II adventures of five canonical directors: Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler. Sporting a bombastic kickass theme by Thomas Newman, the series, scripted by Harris himself and narrated by Meryl Streep, assigns five current directors as guides to its protagonists: Francis Coppola for Huston, Guillermo del Toro for Capra, Paul Greengrass for Ford, Lawrence Kasdan for Stevens and Steven Spielberg for Wyler. I'm not sure what criteria determined these assignments but the modern directors' comments are usually interesting, particularly when Coppola defends Huston faking battle footage for his San Pietro. Anyway, the first episode climaxes with Capra's intellectual masterstroke of detourning Leni Riefenstahl for his Prelude to War and Ford's baptism of fire when the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Greengrass is understandably a big fan of the short documentary that resulted, even if Ford's shaky-cam effects are purely involuntary. The documentary does a grand job of hyping The Battle of Midway as cinema verite if not avant-garde for Ford's willingness to show the film's rough edges, including frame jumps, as proofs of its authenticity. Netflix has conveniently made the documentaries mentioned in Five Came Back available for streaming alongside it, so I took advantage of the opportunity to watch Midway whole. It's only 18 minutes long but manages in that brief time to be very different from what Five describes.

The incredible footage Ford shot while being bombed (he was slightly wounded in the process) is there, but so is a lot of stuff that Five Came Back deemed not worth mentioning, revealing Midway as an uncomfortable mix of radical realism and Hollywood hokeyness. It must be remembered that Midway is primarily a propaganda rather than a documentary film; Ford's purpose was as much to manipulate public opinion as to record the events of the battle. As a propagandist Ford was learning on the run, puzzling out what his film needed to say as well as show. There's a note of humor early as he shows some birds that are Midway's only native inhabitants and his narrator -- there are several, including Donald Crisp of  How Green Was My Valley, as well as other guest vocal artists we'll mention later -- notes sardonically, "Tojo has promised to liberate them." Then the film threatens to spiral down into Fordian folksiness with a sentimental accordion solo and the most bizarre part of the film, when suddenly we hear voices (including Henry Fonda) discussing one of the soldiers onscreen, identifying him by name and hometown. The idea, I guess, was to anticipate or simulate the voices one might hear in a theater, should they recognize any of the soldiers as one of their own. We then take a quick jaunt to the soldier's home town, where we're shown his father working in a railyard and his mother knitting with one of those special banners honoring her boy's service. The voices will come back in and out of the film wishing the soldiers well or urging medics to help them during the battle. To we moderns these interventions are as jarring as the rough editing of the bomb attack must have been to the original audiences. They may well take you out of the picture, so corny do they seem now. Likewise, after the battle Ford returns to those birds and has a voiceover express their presumed opinion of the situation: "We're just as free as we ever were!"

You can see a bomb dropping from the Jap plane at far left above.

Below, a bomb impact nearly blows the film out of the camera

(the dark line near the top is the frame divider)

Of all the documentaries made by the Five directors, Midway probably has the most obvious directorial signature. That may be a matter of retrospection, since I'm struggling to recall how many funerals Ford filmed before Midway. The documentary may well have helped make such scenes specifically Fordian, and they must have had a strong impact on audiences at a time when many more such funerals could be anticipated. The government apparently feared that the burials of sea would have too strong and too wrong an impact, so that Ford had to butter up President Roosevelt by adding footage highlighting the proximity to battle of one of FDR's sons in order to ensure the film's release on his creative terms. Five Came Back emphasizes ironically how many of the films it covers flopped at the box office, but Midway went over big. It probably helped that Ford followed those grim scenes with a bombastic coda racking up the score of Japanese naval vessels taken out in the battle.

My one reservation about Five as a book and show is that its biographical focus on the big five directors overshadows a more complex account of movie propaganda during the war, but I'll concede that the way these masters (Huston was a comparative neophyte but had just made The Maltese Falcon) tried to work with the biggest story of their careers, and one they could never hope to impose creative control upon, is compelling in its own right. It's interesting to learn, for instance, that while Ford made it through Midway more or less with flying colors, D-Day broke him, driving him to a bender that ended his career as a wartime documentarian. Perhaps he no longer had the confidence in his ability to process what he saw with the Hollywood devices he'd used before.

DVR Diary: WHITE CARGO (1942)

Richard Thorpe's film may well have seemed an anachronism when it appeared. The story behind White Cargo had been in circulation for thirty years by then. It began with Ida Vera Simonton's novel Hell's Playground, which you can sample at the Internet Archive to see for yourselves how oh-lordy bad it is. The playwright Leon Gordon loosely adapted the novel for the stage; his White Cargo had been touring all over the place for twenty years while M-G-M's film was in production. Burlesque queen Ann Corio was playing the half-caste seductress Tondelayo at the same time that retrospectively-recognized supergenius Hedy Lamarr was blacking up for movie cameras. At the brink of the film noir era, the epoch of the femme fatale, Metro was offering a real oldschool vamp, a demoralizing virtual succubus and corrupter of men. But what was the difference, really, between the archetypes? It's easy to differentiate when the vamp is also a racist stereotype as Tondelayo is. She's actually toned down from her stage version, less blatantly African, but she still embodies the idea that outside western civilization, the people are childlike, sensuously materialistic and utterly without ideals. Tondelayo wants sex and she wants stuff, and that's all she knows. She's a brainless parasite with just enough cunning to be dangerous to whomever she might exploit. She latches on to Langford (Richard Carlson), the new English arrival at an African rubber plantation who like a sap falls in love with her despite the warnings of cynical Witzel (Walter Pidgeon), pious Rev. Roberts (Henry O'Neill) and a drunk doctor (Frank Morgan). He wants to marry Tondelayo because he loves her, and to stick it to Witzel, who despises the woman, probably from experience. The long scene in which the other white try to argue Langford out of the marriage is the film's high point, apart from Lamarr's mere presence. It's a scene that simply can't mean the same thing now that it did then, since our instinct now is to take Langford's side almost unreservedly, on the assumption that the other men are howling racists. But in the film's own context they're absolutely right, and if you want to treat Tondelayo as an individual and not as a representative of her sex or ethnicity, you have to realize that she can only be a disaster of a wife. Soon enough she and Langford grow bored with each other, and while Langford might carry her like a cross indefinitely, Tondelayo finally wants out by any mean necessary, only to be forced by the contemptuously righteous Witzel to drink her own poison.

The problem with White Cargo is that it's impossible to extricate the indictment against Tondelayo as a person from the assumption that she's categorically unfit because of what she is, let alone what she does. She's a double-whammy: a savage and a vamp. She's like that because they're like that -- and that, I suppose, makes the difference between a vamp and a femme fatale. For all that the latter is also arguably a misogynist archetype, the femme fatale always has more individuality and often can be indulged sympathetically as a creature or victim of circumstance rather than dismissed as someone (or thing) that can't help being what she is and can't be forgiven for it, either. So much for the dissertation, which is my confession of guilt in taking some pleasure in Hedy Lamarr's slinky antics and the over-the-top duel of Carlson and Pidgeon. As I suggested, White Cargo may well have been treated as camp as soon as it premiered, while now treating it as camp is probably the only way to make it acceptable. Some people today won't accept it under any circumstances, but most of us still find plenty of deplorable things entertaining, in spite of themselves or not. White Cargo isn't really that entertaining, but it's definitely a fascinating film in its sort-of-evil way.

DVR Diary: BLACK MAGIC (1949)

Orson Welles finished so few of his own directorial projects that fans look hopefully -- or forlornly -- for signs of the great man's hand in films in which others directed him. Inevitably, it is claimed that he directed some of his Black Magic scenes in place of official director Gregory Ratoff. In his just-published third installment of the definitive Welles biography, Simon Callow writes that he "quite openly directed his own scenes late into the night [while] Ratoff's directing was confined to the morning." Which scenes are his is unclear, but anyone who watches the picture can single out certain bravura bits of framing that may have been beyond Ratoff's talent or imagination. Callow adds that Welles tried to rewrite the story, a loose adaptation of Alexandre Dumas -- a favorite of producer Edward Small -- to make his character, Joseph "Count Caligostro" Balsamo, into a would-be revolutionary. He didn't get far in that regard; the character's moments of revolutionary potential pass in montage. But Black Magic definitely is torn between two conflicting views of its protagonist, though this arguably is a matter of the main story violating expectations created in a prologue portraying young Balsamo as an orphaned victim of anti-Gypsy persecution by the Vicount de Montagne (Stephen Dekassy). This cruelty puts us on Balsamo's side and appears to set him up as an avenging hero, but while the adult Balsamo definitely has revenge on his agenda, he has also gone mad with the power he discovered quite by accident while touring with his medicine show, when he calms and appears to heal a woman who has accidentally poisoned herself. His stunt attracts the attention of Franz Anton Mesmer (Charles Goldner), who lent his name to the skill Balsamo appeared to possess. Mesmer appears disinterested, unwilling to accept a rich reward when Balsamo seems to heal a palsied aristocrat, but Joseph himself is a poor, hungry Gypsy with big dreams who's found a way to make money. As Cagliostro, he and his powers become the talk of Europe, earning him a visit to the court of Louis XV of France, where the main story takes place.

Caligostro's old oppressor is part of a conspiracy inspired by Mme. Du Barry, the King's mistress (Margot Grahame), to discredit Marie Antoinette (Nancy Guild), the wife of the Dauphin, who disapproves of Du Barry. They've discovered a double for the princess in Lorenza (Guild, quite effective in the dual role), an innocent young woman with a soldier paramour, Gilbert de Rezel (Frank Latimore). If Calgliostro can mesmerize Lorenza -- why not caligostrate her? -- she can be used to trick a high official into buying an expensive necklace with public money. When this is exposed, the real princess's reputation will be ruined. Cagliostro is all for this -- historically, he was acquitted when accused of involvement in the real-life conspiracy -- if it means making Lorenza his mind-controlled mistress, but an even bigger scheme gradually forms in his mind. There are only two problems: Gilbert is implacably determined to track down his lost love, and Lorenza has irrepressible feelings for the soldier -- despite Latimore being one of the stiffest romantic leads ever.

Cagliostro quickly surrenders all sympathy through his ruthless domination of Lorenza and his mounting megalomania. Even Svengali, at least in the Barrymore film, realizes ruefully that when mind-controlled Trilby reaffirms her love for him it's "only Svengali talking to himself again," but if Cagliostro realizes this, it doesn't bother him in the least. One suspects that Welles, behind the scenes, was successfully turning the real man, or Dumas' version of him, into a typical Wellesian narcissist monster, for whom revolutionary tendencies wouldn't necessarily be contradictory. To the extent that Welles participated in the creation of his character, he seems also to be reworking ideas born with his fugitive Nazi in The Stranger. That Ratoff and his credited writers may have been thinking the same way may be tipped off by the extended climax, a bravura variation on Stranger's clock-tower finale, in which Cagliostro and Gilbert fence atop a Roman landmark standing in for a Parisian landmark. There are plenty of bravura moments in Black Magic, whether from Ratoff or Welles, amid spectacular Italian locations, but the film is just about sunk by Welles's shocking failure --especially shocking for a practicing magician -- in the role of a diabolical mesmerist.

First, the script, possibly with Welles's own input, makes Cagliostro so unpleasant that you can't root for him even when the male romantic lead is a hopeless dud like Latimore. Second, there's an irrepressible restlessness about Welles that undermines Cagliostro's credibility. Tellingly, the film depends as much on Welles' voice -- the voice of The Shadow and the voice that convinced millions that Martians were invading Earth -- as on his physical presence to put over Cagliostro's power. When you learn that Bela Lugosi wanted to produce and star in a Cagliostro picture you realize what's missing in Welles's performance -- a certain stillness, an uncanny calm, except for the eyes, that focuses your full attention on the mesmerist. By comparison with Lugosi, Welles isn't doing enough with his eyes, or else is doing the wrong things. He could have nailed this on the radio, but he never was that great of a movie actor and that shows here. In fact, Black Magic has one of the most embarrassing moments in Welles's acting career. On trial for his role in the necklace affair and managing his own defense, Cagliostro has reasserted his control over Lorenza and made her deny any knowledge of his role in the plot. Suddenly, Dr. Mesmer appears and asks to interrogate Cagliostro. The jurisprudence of absolute monarchy permits this, and the good (?) doctor proves that he has more tricks than he taught Joseph Balsamo. Putting the defendant under his control with an irresistible shiny object, Mesmer gets him to confess all, including a lust for power that Welles underscores by croaking "Power!" repeatedly and punctuates with the vow, "I can still do it!" I like to think Ratoff directed that scene, and toward the end of the shoot as payback for whatever abuse Welles reportedly heaped upon him. Whatever Welles was up to, Ratoff and the writers must share most of the blame for Black Magic's failure as a story -- it remains a visual treat -- most likely because they never really figured out what to do with or about their star.

DVR Diary: STRAY DOG (1949)

It doesn't surprise me that when Akira Kurosawa made a cop movie, he was influenced less by American film noirs than by Jules Dassin's shot-on-location procedural The Naked City. Kurosawa was more a naturalist than an expressionist, more elemental than chiaroscuro, so the whole shadows-and-light thing probably didn't impress him as much as it did others. As it is, there are faint parallels with an American procedural noir made the same year, Alfred Werker and Anthony Mann's He Walked By Night, though these shouldn't be overstressed. It comes down to an increasingly desperate manhunt for a seeming supercriminal, but for Kurosawa the criminal matters less than his pursuer, while in He Walked By Night the criminal is the most fully (or nearly) developed character. What Kurosawa mainly seems interested in is personal responsibility, as shown by his protagonist, a rookie police detective whose stolen gun is used in the criminal's crimes. As the rookie, Toshiro Mifune is driven by an already-awful sense of guilt that grows worse as robberies and a murder are traced back to the stolen gun. When the criminal nearly kills his new mentor (Takashi Shimura, inevitably), the rookie's guilt nearly breaks him, despite every well-meaning effort of his more seasoned colleagues to put all the blame for the crimes on the criminal. Once he starts using it it's his gun, not yours, they tell him, but you can't blame the rookie for feeling as bad as he does, especially once you understand that it's exactly that acute sense of responsibility that sets him apart from his antagonist (Isao Kimura). Both men are war veterans who were robbed on their way home. One man lashes out at society for that offense, among others, by becoming a criminal, while our hero becomes a cop. It's not that he blames himself for getting his stuff stolen, but it's his refusal to surrender to cynicism or rage, or to hold the whole world responsible, that makes him a hero.

Mifune is still young here, though Rashomon isn't far away, but it's still impressive that someone we recognize as one of cinema's mightiest badasses can so convincingly play someone so green and, in some ways, naive. Just the same, the film is nearly stolen from him by Keiko Awaji, playing the criminal's showgirl sweetheart, whose tough exterior is under siege by the rookie and her own mother. She gets one of the film's most memorable and gratuitous scenes as one of an dance team hoofing away at some seedy theater. Their routine over, the showgirls stagger back to their dressing room and collapse en masse in an almost orgiastic sprawl of exhaustion. Kurosawa lingers, half-leering, half-sympathetic, as the dancers catch their breath. As one might expect, he has a number of nice set pieces distributed throughout the picture, from Mifune's Droopy Dog-like stalking of a possible lead on the sale of his gun to the stakeout of a baseball stadium and the use of the PA system to lure the criminal into a trap. I said Kurosawa was an elemental director, and there's plenty of rain here to prove it, and an even more effective evocation of oppressive summer heat. Stray Dog is a slickly-made film and I suppose some will take it as further proof that Kurosawa spent too much time aping western genres and archetypes, but the emotional element of the film and Mifune's intensely emotive lead performance set this Japanese cop movie apart from its more world-weary or hard-boiled American models and mark it as an unmistakably personal film.

DVR Diary: THE EXILE (1947)

It's hard not to believe that Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Max Ophuls didn't appreciate where they were, which was Universal Studios, where Ophuls, freshly fired by Howard Hughes and still hoping to make his American directorial debut, would film Fairbanks's screenplay -- he received sole credit for a collaboration with Ophuls and Clemence Dane, among others -- as Junior's first film as an independent producer. The Exile is often described as Junior's homage to his swashbuckling father, but it could as easily be seen as the two auteurs' tribute to Universal itself, as if Ophuls + Fairbanks = James Whale. Why, there's a climactic fight in a windmill a la Frankenstein and IMDB confirms my fleeting glimpse of Michael Mark, Little Maria's poor father, in a bit part. Like Ophuls, Whale liked to move the camera around, though his were halting steps compared to the later master. Perhaps most reminiscent of Whale are the obvious backdrop skies of this setbound yet expressionist picture, which is, to be fair, only superficially an homage to Whale or Universal. The auteurs are greater romantics than Whale or any of the Universal crew ever were and put their personal stamp -- presumably Fairbanks's as much as Ophuls's -- on what looks very much like a Universal film, down to the participation of Maria (Cobra Woman) Montez, Nigel (Dr. Watson) Bruce and Henry (Prof. Moriarty) Daniell in key roles. Moreover, it has more heart, or at least a different kind of heart, than any of Fairbanks Senior's pictures did.

You may know The Exile by its alias, Bonnie Prince Charlie, a title that eliminates any uncertainty over who the film is about. Fairbanks and company adapted a novel about the eventual Charles II by Cosmo Hamilton, portraying the prince in Dutch exile late in the Protectorate and wearying of the grim responsibility his remaining loyalists impose upon him. He doesn't want to risk their lives in another attempt to reclaim England by force and appears content to live a simpler life as an assistant innkeeper, having fallen for the innkeeper's daughter (Pauline Crosset aka Rita Corday). The first half of the picture is doubly comic as the regime in England trembles at the thought of Charles' plots while he romps with his new love Katie, and Charles has to help entertain a preposterous imposter (Robert Coote) calling himself Charles Stuart only so he can mooch meals off the fools who trust his letters of credit. Katie herself doesn't know the truth, despite the appearance of the flamboyant Countess Arabella (Montez), who lavishes attentions on humble Charlie.

Things turn deadly serious once the English government's agent, Col. Ingram (Daniell) arrives at the inn. Daniell, one of the great villain actors, is such a baleful presence that Ophuls's gliding camera seems frozen in his presence as Ingram has a guarded, loaded talk with the inn's English employee. The film hits a peak of suspense as Charlie is about to walk away with Ingram none the wiser on his true identity, and the impostor strolls in and affects a royal tantrum at the sight of a Roundhead. For a moment Charlie seems willing to let this idiot get his comeuppance, but once it becomes apparent that Ingram is credulous enough to kill the fool our hero must stop hiding in plain sight. Now the film becomes the sort of swashbuckler Fairbanks Senior would have recognized, with Ophuls sharing credit with "action scene designer" David Sharpe for some bravura sequences climaxing in the windmill fight. Credit is also due to cinematographer Fritz Planer (and two undredited collaborators) for adding an extra expressionist, almost noir aspect to these night battles. While his collaborators arguably are looking backward, Planer shoots as if he wanted this, rather than Anthony Mann's Black Book, to be the first historical costume noir film. It's not at all inappropriate, of course, in a film that in many ways looks like the last Universal film in the studio's classical manner.

Still, neither Fairbanks nor Ophuls really had noir in his heart. The heart of their picture is the romance of the exiled king and the inkeeper's daughter, Charlie realizing that he really could live out his life happily there, only to face unavoidable responsibility once the once-hoped-for summons comes from England. This sort of bittersweetness is Ophuls's meat, and for all that this is Fairbanks's film as producer and writer, it's also clearly an Ophuls film in its sentiments as well as its mobility. The two worked so well together that it's a shame that their film's flop at the box office kept them from teaming up again. Ophuls went on to greater victories, of course, but Fairbanks, whose career grows more interesting the more I see of it, probably was never as good after this. It's a bigger shame that he's remembered more for Sinbad the Sailor, where he more blatantly apes his father, than for The Exile, perhaps his most personal work of art.

DVR Diary: RED LIGHT (1949)

We often hear about "fate" or "doom" in discussions of film noir, but we hardly ever hear about "providence," and that, if nothing else, makes Roy Del Ruth's Red Light an exceptional noir. Its moral is "vengeance is mine, saith the Lord," and the screenplay by George Callahan and Charles Grayson, adapting a story by onetime cowboy star Donald "Red" Barry, goes about demonstrating the point with the dramatic logic of a golden age comic book. It starts off as menacing as you could ask for, with elite noir baddies Raymond Burr and Harry Morgan unhappily watching a newsreel from a prison projection booth. The news is that a heroic military chaplain (Arthur Franz) has just come home from the war to reunite with his doting older brother, trucking company boss Johnny Torno (George Raft). Burr's character used to work for Torno before he got caught embezzling. He feels entitled to revenge and the newsreel gives him an idea for the perfect revenge. Morgan's character is getting out shortly for good behavior (Morgan says this with as contemptuous a sneer as the words ever got). Willing to do anything for money, for Burr still has his embezzled money stashed someplace, Morgan becomes Burr's perfect weapon. Burr's blasphemous idea is to take revenge on Torno by killing his reverend brother. He doesn't anticipate that Morgan will do something stupid like telling the doomed priest that he's brought him something from Nick -- Burr's character if not Old Nick himself -- before shooting him in a hotel room.

Torno arrives in time to hear his brother's dying words: "the book." Johnny assumes that the priest means the ornate Bible he gave to his brother years ago. Hoping to find some clue to the killing, he pores through the holy book in search of accusatory marginalia and finds nothing. Some time later, it occurs to him that his brother may have meant the Gideon Bible bound to be found in any hotel room. He returns to the death room and finds that book missing, increasing his suspicion that it contains crucial information. By now several other people have occupied the room; one of them must have taken the book. If so, why? Johnny sets out to track down each of the intervening guests, while Nick, now released in his own right, lurks about recklessly, begging Johnny for another chance. The first one Torno finds is showgirl Carla North (Virginia Mayo), whom he recruits as an assistant once convinced of her innocence. Concerned that Torno may be on to something, Rocky (Morgan) stalks our hero and finally has it out with him in another hotel room. Coming out slightly the worse for wear, Rocky decides his best option is to blackmail Nick and cash out, letting him know that he spoke his name to the priest and guessing that the priest wrote it in the book. Nick responds like a Raymond Burr noir villain should and tosses Rocky from the caboose of a speeding train.

Further complications take us to the belated discovery of the genuine Gideon. As a worried Nick watches with others concerned in the case, Torno desperately thumbs through the tome until he finds a handwritten warning, his brother's last message, against seeking revenge. Assured that the priest named no names, Nick attempts an inconspicuous exit, but whom should he find at the bottom of the stairs but battered and bloody Rocky, ready for a little revenge of his own. Nick gets the better of an impromptu shootout, but Rocky, not quite the forgiving sort, lives long enough to denounce his former pal for his own death and the priest's. This sets up a classic set-piece showdown as Torno chases Nick to the roof of his building, where an electric sign advertises his business. Cinematographer Bert Glennon makes the most of the opportunity to play light against darkness as Burr darts between the big glowing letters, looking for the perfect shot at Raft, until an exposed wire becomes his undoing. Once Nick is properly fried and justice is served, the camera pulls back to make sure you see Johnny Torno's ad slogan, "24 Hour Service." This is what Torno had demanded of God in a moment of sacrilegious impatience when he'd been urged to let God do His thing in His own time. Johhny Torno is film noir's Job, driven to curse God for his affliction yet rewarded, on the assumption that he's bowed to his brother's wisdom, with instant justice. Whether he gets the girl, too, hardly matters since there's zilch chemistry between the monomaniacal (or is it just plain monotonous) Raft and the thanklessly-tasked Mayo. What makes Red Light worth seeing is the direction, the cinematography, and above all Raymond Burr, king of noir villains, in fine, foul form. It cannot be stressed enough to those who know Burr only as Perry Mason, old or young, or as that guy in those Godzilla movies, that film noir Burr is a beast who was best when he was bad. He's dependably evil here and ably assisted by Morgan, who for noir purposes was either sinister, stupid, or both. Their vital villainy and the screenplay's eccentric spirituality make Red Light idiosyncratic enough to earn a look from any noir fan.

DVR Diary: THE IRON CURTAIN (1948)

William Wellman's red-scare drama for Twentieth Century-Fox has one of the most interesting soundtracks of the 1940s. Alfred Newman conducted and presumably curated a selection of themes duly credited to contemporary Soviet composers: Prokofiev, Shostakovich, etc. The idea seems to have been to craft a background musical portrait of Soviet communism. The music in the picture is both diegetic and non-diegetic. For laymen, that means some of the Soviet music is simply soundtrack (non-diegetic) and some is heard by the characters in the story. For instance, in the cipher office where Igor Gouzenko (Dana Andrews) works, music blares at all times for security reasons, so that people can't hear anything in adjoining offices. Later, another character hears a snatch of Shostakovich and identifies it as the first stirring of proletarian culture. For a non-diegetic example, during a moment of moral crisis Gouzenko hears voices from earlier scenes in the picture while we hear a particularly hellish bit from Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony. Throughout, the Soviet music is strident, turbulent, frenetic. The Iron Curtain soundtrack is a Fantasia of totalitarian themes and terror. Depending on your taste in classical music, it may be a more effective argument against Stalinism than the film itself.

The historic Iron Curtain was located by Winston Churchill in eastern Europe, but the Gouzenko story and the Iron Curtain movie take place in Canada. Gouzenko is assigned to the Soviet embassy in Ottowa as a cipher clerk while World War II is still in progress and the USSR is Canada's ally against Nazi Germany. The film shows the Soviets already looking ahead to a resumption of the irrepressible class struggle. Embassy workers and Canadian communists are shown recruiting people (including a member of parliament) to spy on their government and military, and later on the atomic bomb program under way in the U.S. Gouzenko is a loyal communist initially, despite an early mis-step when he recites to his new boss his actual personal background instead of the fake details that have been prepared for him. Gouzenko is warned not to make friends with Canadians, but that's no problem until his wife (Gene Tierney) is sent over to live with him. She can't help trying to make friends with neighbors, especially after their son is born. Occasionally they take walks through the city, once stopping awkwardly outside a church as hymns play inside. It's hard to tell what we're supposed to make of their apparent distress. Does the churchiness of it all disturb them in some way, or do they recognize this as something inviting yet forbidden to them? Later in the picture, an older Soviet observes that he's old enough to know what truth is, or was, while Gouzenko's generation isn't so lucky. That seems to be the screenplay's dig at Soviet atheism, but what's really subversive for the Gouzenkos is the sheer fact of family life. It makes them start to think of having lives of their own, which isn't part, apparently, of the Soviet program.

Gouzenko is increasingly uncomfortable with the embassy's involvement in atomic spying. To him and his wife it all seems to promise a new war so soon after the victory over Germany. Igor (many actors pronounce it "Eager") is also troubled by the breakdown of a colleague grown guilty over his role in state terror. That unfortunate is duly shipped back to Moscow -- it's a damning fact that no one looks forward to being recalled to the old country -- and when Igor learns that his family is to return home after he trains a replacement, the Gouzenkos make a personal decision to defect and a moral decision to expose the atomic spy network. What follows apparently follows fairly closely the events of their actual defection, which fortunately fits the framework of a "they won't believe me" thriller. The Gouzenkos are spurned by government, law enforcement and media, none of the above taking them seriously. In a historically accurate yet thematically significant detail, only when the embassy staff invades the sanctity of the Gouzenko home, having discovered his theft of damning documents, do the police take action to protect the defectors. Governments and other institutions may not be reliable, but at least our society -- Canada for this purpose being effectively an extension of the U.S. -- respects property and family when totalitarianism doesn't.

Like other anti-communist films, Iron Curtain isn't really ideological if that word leads you to expect a defense of capitalism against communism. Communism is primarily a political threat, the tyranny over humanity of a conspiratorial, paranoid party. Curtain is less a polemical or patriotic film than a kind of film noir, and while cinematographer Charles G. Clarke didn't work much in that genre he makes an effectively noirish impression here. Unfortunately, Gouzenko's story doesn't give Andrews much to work with, and Tierney gets even less, and the postwar Fox gimmick of portentous pseudo-documentary narration distances the audience further from the characters. Wellman directs anonymously; it really could have been anyone behind the camera and for all I know the job was a loyalty test like I Married A Communist was at RKO. The music really is the most interesting thing about the picture; it so overwhelms the mostly uninspired proceedings that audiences might have wondered who really had the more interesting culture. More likely they just found the music too loud.

DVR Diary: TEXAS (1941)

Speaking of the wave of 1939 westerns, George Marshall's Destry Rides Again was the Stagecoach of comedy westerns. It's still my favorite of that subgenre apart from the outright burlesque Blazing Saddles. Marshall was on a tear from 1939 through 1941, directing the superior comedies You Can't Cheat an Honest Man and The Ghost Breakers while maintaining his western credentials with the Randolph Scott vehicle (as yet unseen by me) When the Daltons Rode. Texas was his first generic follow-up to Destry: a mostly comic western that turns tragicomic toward the end. Working at Columbia, he had access to two young actors with great futures ahead of them: William Holden, age 23, and Glenn Ford, age 25. In addition, he had Stagecoach's own Claire Trevor as the romantic interest, but Texas is closer to what we might today call a tragicomic bromance. Holden and Ford are Johnny Rebs turned drifters after the Civil War, and the first half of the picture is a picaresque account of their misadventures in search of fortune. Marshall is at the height of his comic powers here. He stages an epic bare-knuckle bout between Holden's character (the actor had gotten his big break in the fight drama Golden Boy two years earlier) and a local champion, Dutch Henry. Lyle Latell, an actor who seems to have spent much of his film career uncredited, plays Dutch Henry. He should have made a career of slapstick comedy because he gives a hilarious physical performance. The bout is fought under London Prize Ring Rules: a knockdown ends a round and the downed man has thirty seconds to toe the line or lose. Dutch Henry toes the line every time like the perfect cartoon of an old-fashioned fighter, striking an outlandishly crouching "put up your dukes" pose that Holden occasionally tries to imitate. They fight like Rockem Sockem Robots, smacking each other in the face, staggering backward, and reassuming the position. Most rounds end with Holden going down; they begin with him staggering back to the mark after getting a bucket of water in the face. Dutch Henry fights dirty by our standards, usually pulling a "What do you think I did?" face afterward, and Holden strives to answer in kind. Holden and Latell take epic pratfalls, Holden opening one round by charging at Latell, missing entirely, and hurtling out of the ring. Holden finally prevails, only to learn that his buddy Ford had blown their stake by betting on Dutch Henry.

Later, they witness a stage holdup and decide to rob the holdup men. A posse descends upon them before they can decide whether to turn the loot over. The lawmen are in a lynching mood but Holden, who had left Ford alone to go hunting, tricks them into thinking that Injuns are hot on his tail. As the posse takes defensive positions, our antiheroes separate to make good their individual mistakes, Holden meeting cute with Trevor by hijacking her buckboard. There's plenty of good physical comedy as they grapple for control of the vehicle. After Holden moves on, she meets cute with Ford, who ends up working for her family ranch while Holden takes up with Windy McKay (George Bancroft, also of Stagecoach), the promoter of the Dutch Henry fight and a major cattle buyer. After Holden and Ford reunite, they become friendly rivals for Trevor. We renew our acquaintance with the dentist Doc Thorpe (Edgar Buchanan), who'd been robbed on the stage. In another nicely done comic set piece, he leads a town meeting in choruses of "Buffalo Gals" while Trevor plays an organ powered by bellows that are supposed to be operated by Ford and/or Holden. But they're too eager to ogle Trevor to keep the music running properly. All ends well this time, but things go south from here.

Marshall has cleverly introduced us to a couple of folksy, charismatic characters, played by Bancroft and Buchanan, who prove the film's villains without surrendering any of their folksy charisma. The idea of the mildly curmudgeonly, already elderly Edgar Buchanan as the film's evil mastermind is a masterstroke, but once Texas resolves itself into a battle of good and bad men, with our youthful good-bad men caught in the middle, it loses much of its comic steam. It still has plenty of twists in its plot -- Bancroft sends Holden to rustle cattle on a big drive so he doesn't have to pay top dollar to the cattlemen, but Holden decides the easier score is to rob Bancroft of his bankroll -- but the growing sense that Holden is doomed -- to be killed by Bancroft, Buchanan or Ford -- tends to kill the mood. Marshall and his writers (including Horace "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" McCoy) can't make anything comic out of Holden's fate, but I suppose that part of the picture counts as pathos, which wasn't alien to comedy for old-timers like the director. Marshall doesn't even attempt a comic closing note here as he did with Destry, but Texas, if a lesser film, is entertaining all the way through and a surprising alternative to the patriotic winning-of-the-west pabulum the title led me to expect. Its combination of sympathetic youngsters (Trevor is the eldest of the love triangle), eccentric crooks and well-staged action in both comic and dramatic mode should win over most western fans and  earns Texas the title of an underrated film.

DVR Diary: Keisuke Kinoshita's ARMY (1944)

Introducing this film on Turner Classic Movies, Ben Mankiewicz was at pains to frame Army as anything but a propaganda film, even as he informed us that it was commissioned by the Japanese military. But if Army isn't wartime propaganda, then neither is an American film like Since You Went Away. After all, in that picture Claudette Colbert bawls after sending her husband off to war, and everyone is very sad when they learn that Robert Walker has been killed. Yet no American critic would dare say that those scenes make Since You Went Away a subtle anti-war movie, yet Mankiewicz, or whoever writes his intros, makes such a claim for Army, on no better basis that that Keisuke Kinoshita and his writers dared make their characters fairly rounded human beings. If Army doesn't seem like propaganda to some viewers, that only reflects a very narrow notion of what propaganda can be.

However Kinoshita himself feels about war, nothing in Army subverts the script's propaganda account of 80 years of history leading up to World War II. In short, Army tells us that Japan's WWII enemies -- the U.S., Great Britain and Russia -- have always been hostile elements interfering with Japan's rightful regional aspirations and unfairly favoring China over Japan. At the brink of the Meiji revolution in the 1860s, the English-speaking powers are poised to intervene during a civil war. After Japan whips China in the 1890s, the European powers unjustly force Japan to return a province ceded over by China. The Russo-Japanese War a decade later is portrayed as just revenge on Russia for its role in Japan's earlier "humiliation." In the 20th century, the Chinese need a new rebuke because they've been "looking down" on the Japanese. In the film's most eccentric reading of history, Army accuses China of manipulating the U.S. and U.K. into helping them conquer Japan! But whoever's manipulating whom, all these countries need a beating, and Japan's just the country to do it. Of course, this summary of recent history overlooks Japan's role in World War I, when it allied with some of these benighted nations against its eventual Axis partner, Germany, but history on film is always selective, whatever the filmmaker's intentions may be.

Army follows one family through these turbulent years. The Takagis are patriots who never quite manage to see combat, through no fault of their own. Circumstances keep them off the battlefield, and to compensate the current patriarch (Chishu Ryu) is a superpatriot, while the mother (Kinuyo Tanaka) goads their eldest son to be brave and excel in all things. The lead actors are major figures in Japanese cinema, each with a lengthy and honored career that in Tanaka's case extended into direction. They help make the case against Army as propaganda by effortlessly humanizing their characters. Tanaka in particular has a closing scene that became one of the great moments in Japanese movies as she races through town trying to get a final glimpse of her boy as he finally marches off to war. Her obvious feeling of loss is supposed to belie her eagerness to see the lad become a soldier, and sympathetic viewers of Army take all such moments as subversive of the desired patriotic message. But if Hollywood could have it both ways, so could the Japanese Army. Neither sought to deny that people would feel sad about giving up their boys to war.

Yet when Army invites empathy it's presumed subversive of itself because the script has characters, including the mother, tell us that Japan's young men really belong to the Emperor, while their parents are only caretakers until the boys are ready to go where they belong. I think it's wrong to see a contradiction between that viewpoint and the sadness the mother feels upon finally giving up her son. To see a contradiction is to presume that wartime Japan was a totalitarian state, so fanatical and inhumane that its cinema would only want to show parents rejoicing to send their sons to war. Army suggests a somewhat more relaxed, empathetic attitude, even though the film reportedly was partially censored. It's a propaganda film that takes indoctrination itself as a subject for admittedly gentle satire, the way a Hollywood war film might poke fun at rationing. It can even make fun of excessive patriotism, as when two characters get into a furious argument over whether the medieval Japanese could have beaten the Mongols without the aid of the "divine wind." It's probably a mistake to presume that Kinoshita, his writers, or the Army consider one side of that argument the right one. Yet there are also moments when the film seems critical of its own empathetic impulses. In one scene, a father hears a report of a battle in which his own son was involved, growing increasingly concerned as it appears that the boy's unit suffered heavy casualties. He asks for more detail until his informant rebukes him, seeing that the father is more interested in his own son's fate than the fate of the army or the nation. Army wants its audience to take the larger view while acknowledging their natural feelings. That is only not propaganda if you expect propaganda to portray its people as supermen rather than ordinary human beings. Hollywood propaganda didn't work that way and in this case neither did the Japanese version.

Kinoshita is one of the echt Japanese directors, along with Ozu and to a lesser extent Mizoguchi, whom some critics exalt above the more popular directors like Kurosawa and to a lesser extent Kobayashi whose work is too "western" or allegedly tailored to global arthouse audiences. For certain critics the great subject of Japanese cinema is not the way of the samurai or the soldier but family life. Army is an early film by one of the reputed specialists in intimate domestic stories that is meant to keep up the country's enthusiasm for war. In that respect, it does a good job emphasizing that this particular war will be some people's one opportunity to do something great for their country, to live up to the values listed in various imperial rescripts, etc. Its enduring virtue once its original purpose became obsolete is its ability to do several things at once. While Tanaka's dash through town at the end is the obviously great cinematic moment, an even greater if less flashy moment comes earlier, at the family's last dinner together. The mother asks the son to give her one final shoulder massage, and as he gives her the treatment the younger son, in monkey-see-monkey-do fashion, goes over to the father and gives the old man's shoulders a similar if less effective pummeling. All the while, the family is taking care of last things, but the absurdity of the little boy drumming on dad's shoulders lightens the moment and softens the blow that the mother will feel more strongly later. This scene is the essence of the picture, a mirror to the Japanese people's actual experience of the war -- not counting the bombings that audiences were enduring when the film was released at the end of 1944. The irony of Army is that it might have been most effective as propaganda had it been exported, because no one could watch it without realizing that, no matter how crazy they might be about the Emperor, and no matter how biased their view of recent world history, the Japanese are first and foremost human beings like the rest of us. To say that outside Japan in 1944 would really have been subversive.

DVR Diary: FOLLOW ME QUIETLY (1949)

This RKO quickie -- it's done in 60 minutes -- has a formidable pedigree. Richard Fleischer is the credited director, while Anthony Mann shares a story credit and reportedly did some directing, too. That and the police procedural elements in the story will remind some of He Walked By Night, another film for which Mann was a silent partner behind-the-camera, but it doesn't help Follow Me Quietly to suggest that comparison. He Walked is a minor masterpiece while Follow Me is merely minor. This time the cops are hunting a strangler who leaves notes identifying him as The Judge, if not jury and executioner as well. Our old friend the pesky female reporter is on hand, too, and as is often the case in such stories the conflict between journalist and gendarme is metaphoric foreplay. Cop (William Lundigan) resents Reporter (Dorothy Patrick) because he thinks her paper's an exploitation rag. She takes his insults personally, but her dogged efforts to get his cooperation for a story about the Judge investigation becomes a kind of mating dance. Fleischer, Mann et al make this as blatant as the Production Code permitted; Reporter follows Cop home and badgers him to sign an authorization form while he's taking a shower. The negotiations continue as he prepares for bed, and as he gets into bed. Finally, he asks: "What are you waiting for?" Just as you wonder what he means, she realizes he wants her to get out and start her story. Believe it or not, this is better done than the main mystery story. As a procedural, Follow Me Quietly wants to show off the latest police methods and focuses on one in particular to its utter ruin.

Virtually a co-star of the picture is the law's secret weapon against the Judge: a dummy. I had better call it a mannequin, but they call it a dummy. Built life-size, based on incomplete descriptions of the killer, the idea is to give potential witnesses a kind of 3-D point of reference to jog their memories. The cops show it off to themselves like it's some awesome thing. Lundigan sets it up on the lineup, back to the audience, and interviews it, another voice providing the sort of answers that might be expected from a serial killer. The demonstration climaxes as the recorded voice declares, "I like to kill!" At which point Lundigan turns the dummy around and the soundtrack provides a shock cue for the revelation of its blank face! So the Question is running around killing people; I knew there was something fishy about that guy. After this debacle, and without a trace of flop sweat, the filmmakers press on, convinced of the ... I still don't know what quality of the dummy. We even get a scene in which Lundigan lectures the seated dummy, gets a fake scare when his partner (Jeff Corey) walks in and starts talking, and both leave -- only for us to see that this was not the dummy but the Judge himself, who for reasons known only to the writers has decided to sneak into headquarters, take the dummy's place, and spy on the cops, confident as only the writers could make him that no one would notice a living man in the chair. That's the magic of the movies for you.

Yet the dummy does contribute somewhat to the resolution of the mystery. The Judge himself contributes more by finally leaving a colossal clue at the latest murder scene. Our killer, maybe following a model he'd recently read of, brought a true crime magazine to the victim's home and left it on her floor. It's an issue from the previous year, yet in near-mint condition. From this our intrepid girl reporter finally makes herself useful by deducing that the Judge must have bought it from a second-hand book store. Once they find a store that sells such stuff, the cops figure their man must live in the neighborhood. The dummy gives one more performance as a seated diner at a diner, poring over a magazine, to impress a waitress who identifies it as "Charlie" until the incredible reveal, complete with shock cue, of the dummy's blank face! This sets up a stakeout and a climactic pursuit that no doubt owes inspiration to He Walked By Night, though the setting slightly anticipates White Heat, which would come out later in 1949. Ironically, at the supreme moment the defeated Judge literally becomes a dummy as he takes the big fall. You, too, may feel a little like a dummy for having sat through the picture. With Fleischer and Mann at work it can't be without a few worthwhile moments. The moment when the Judge, at the threshold of his home, realizes that things are too quiet, is a good one, and I always enjoy an appearance by Frank (Mr. McDougal) Ferguson, who here plays a fighting newspaper editor who manages to fight off a Judge attack, only to stumble backwards out a window and die dictating his first-person account of the incident. Follow Me Quietly could have been a good film if its creators didn't get collectively obsesses with an idea that renders the whole thing slightly absurd, if not a singular piece of noir surrealism.

DVR Diary: DILLINGER (1945)

It's hard to believe that the King Bros's poverty-row biopic, a prestige picture for lowly Monogram, was once controversial. Compared to John Milius's 1973 Dillinger and Michael Mann's 2009 Public Enemies, Max Nosseck's picture is a harshly unromanticized view of its subject, emphasizing John Dillinger's essential viciousness and pettiness as Nosseck's successors do not. The viciousness was part of the problem, however. By 1945 standards Dillinger is a very violent movie, and violence has always been crucial to movies' alleged glamorization of criminals. For those who decried that glamorization, and saw it at work in Nosseck's film, the way a gangster story was told often belied its moral. A wise old man of Hollywood saw the danger.

What gangster film doesn't want to tell the audience that Crime Does Not Pay? The proof was the dead gangster at the end of the picture. It was the same way in comic books. At the time Dillinger came out, a comic called Crime Does Not Pay was arguably the most popular title in the country. Yet crime comics were as controversial as crime movies, and for the same reason. The problem was sensationalism and violence. No matter what your ostensible message is, all the shooting and killing could make a different impression on impressionable youth. What does it matter that crime does not pay if violence becomes an end unto itself? From the time of the first crime movies, the great fear has been that violence will inspire violence, that impressionable youth will imitate what thrills them on screen. In more modern terms, Dillinger may die at the end, but while he's killing and robbing kids may find him cool.

Later Dillinger films practically invite you to find the man cool,but Nosseck's film takes more of a Crime Does Not Pay approach. As you can read above, Monogram defended its picture as "the greatest indictment of crime ever produced." And to be fair, the picture goes out of its way to portray Dillinger as a loser, a broken man in his last days, talking big briefly about forming a new super-gang but quickly deferring the event to the following year he'll never see. As played in his introductory role by Lawrence Tierney -- given unusal billing apart from the other actors and after all the other opening credits, with a fanfare of thunder and lightning - John Dillinger is a jerk who never forgets a slight, the kind of man who remembers being called a chiseler by a waiter years afterward and returns to kill the offender who had probably forgotten him within hours. He's an ingrate who bullies and eventually kills his bank-robbing mentor Specs Green (Edmund Lowe). He's kill-crazy in a way the real man really wasn't. I doubt anyone watching the film found him admirable, but some may still have enjoyed the film's violence for its own sake, tame as it is by 21st century standards.

It's tempting to treat Dillinger as a film noir since Dillinger is undone by a woman. Nosseck and writer Phillip Yordan sacrifice history to dramatic unity by making the "Lady in Red" who betrayed Dillinger in Chicago a longtime girlfriend (Anne Jeffries). She's one of his first stick-up victims, a ticket seller for a movie theater -- there's a movie motif throughout, befitting the man who met his end outside the Biograph Theater -- who's turned on by him enough to back out of identifying him in a police lineup. She proves as cynical and materialistic a customer as her boyfriend, blatantly taking up with another man after Dillinger's arrest in Tucson and finally betraying Dillinger for no other reason than the $10,000 reward money once she realizes he's washed up. In a way Dillinger starts as a Crime Does Not Pay morality play and ends up as something closer to a noir. It's telling that the film forgets its initial framing device. We open in a movie theater watching a newsreel account of Dillinger's exploits. Then an old man walks onstage and identifies himself as Dillinger's father. He explains that his son grew up like any ordinary kid, but as an adult simply never got used to the routine of doing the same thing every day. You may assume that we'll return to Papa Dillinger for the moral of the story, but the film ends with the cops' blunt inventory of the dead Dillinger's worldly possessions. On the surface this is a Crime Does Not Pay moment, but Yordan and Nosseck, or a studio editor, decided against giving anyone a definitive last word. As a result, the last we see of Dillinger is a broken man betrayed by his girl once he's used up and out of money. It looks almost as much like victimization as retribution. Rather than glorifying Dillinger, the picture makes him almost pitiable at the end. It was perhaps too subtle a statement of the Crime Does Not Pay argument for the movie moralists to recognize, and the audiences those moralists were afraid of probably only cared for the violence.

The 1945 Dillinger sets itself up as an epic with that thunder-and-lightning opening, but it falls short of the folk-epic quality of the Milius and Mann films. While the role of Dillinger made Tierney a short-lived star, and earned him a part in Reservoir Dogs nearly forty years later (his character says someone is "as dead as Dillinger"), the young actor is neither the perfect fit that Warren Oates was for Milius nor the cool icon Johnny Depp was for Mann. Tierney simply contributes a degree of brutality that was unusual and thus fresh for the time, but hasn't dated well. Nosseck surrounds him with ace character actors: Specs Green's gang includes Eduardo Ciannelli, Elisha Cook Jr. and Marc Lawrence, who are all fine, though the final scenes with Tierney and Jeffries probably have the best acting in the picture. I would say this Dillinger has value for illustrating what the culture thought of the man a decade after his death, but the controversy suggests that the culture still wasn't sure what it thought of John Dillinger. It was easier simply to treat him as a legendary outlaw the further we got away from his own time. This Dillinger also illustrates a new uncertainty about how to portray criminals in general, and that tension between moralizing and noirification will probably keep the film interesting to film buffs for as long as the categories matter.

DVR Diary: WOMAN ON PIER 13 (I Married a Communist, 1949)

It's hard to imagine many Hollywood movies more reflexively reviled than this Howard Hughes agit-noir from his recently-acquired RKO studio. According to legend, Hughes tried to make participation in the project a test of loyalty for studio talent -- loyalty to himself, I suppose, as much as to the American Way of Life. In general, overtly anti-communist movies get a tougher rap from critics than the overtly anti-Nazi films of a few years earlier. This is because the anti-commie movies are perceived to target not a fighting wartime aggressor but an underdog dissident faction. Regardless of recent histories demonstrating the complicity of American communists in espionage and crimes against international communists, most people's image of an American communist, if they have one at all, is not of a terrorist gangster actively pursuing the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Posterity has deemed the anti-red rhetoric of the scare years disproportionate to the actual threat. As a result, films like I Married a Communist are dismissed as absurdities if not offenses against truth. The fact that the film's title was changed quite quickly to the almost-pointless Woman on Pier 13 suggests that movie audiences during the actual Red Scare may have felt the same way. But rather than debate whether the film was fair to the actual Reds I want to pay attention to what the screenplay (credited to Robert Hardy Andrews and Charles Grayson) actually says and how it may belie our expectations.

I Married a Communist is a bit of a cheat title. It should have been I Married an Ex-Communist, because the object of the title, Brad Collins (Robert Ryan), quit the party in disgust more than a decade before the story starts. Since his street-fighting days as a labor agitator, Brad has risen, with the help of a name change, from stevedore to shipping executive. He's successful and just married to Nan (Laraine Day), the I of the title, when the trouble starts. Just when he thought he was out, the Reds pull him back in. Christine Norman, an ex-flame (Janis Carter) has the dirt on his Commie past, and so does the Party boss Vanning (Thomas Gomez). Since the revelations will ruin his career, and his role in a strike killing may condemn him to the electric chair, Brad must submit to blackmail. The simple part is the 40% of his salary he has to kick back to the Party. But then it gets interesting.

Brad's company is negotiating a new contract with the union. This being a Hollywood picture, the union honcho Jim Travers (Richard Rober) is a former flame of Nan's. But he's a good guy -- the most positive male character in the entire picture. He's not going to start a strike on his own; he believes in negotiation and compromise. But the Party wants Brad to precipitate the strike -- it presumably serves some international strategic purpose, since it will tie up the San Francisco docks -- by taking an intransigent stand against the union, against compromise. Here are two things worth noting. First, the right-wing propaganda of 65 years ago is different from the right-wing propaganda of today in some significant ways. Most notably, and maybe most surprisingly given Hughes's agendas, his anti-communist movie is not hostile to organized labor. In fact, as I suggested, Jim the union leader is the nearest thing to a hero after Nan herself. Meanwhile, the script seems to be telling us that employers who refuse compromise with unions are doing the Commies' work for them. Robert Stevenson directed this film at the cusp of the "Treaty of Detroit" era when management and labor agreed to share the wealth to an unprecedented extent in return for peace on the shop floor and the elimination of communist influence. 1949 was not a period of economic decline for which unions could serve as a scapegoat as they do now. Some observers might expect anti-communism in the McCarthy era -- the Senator from Wisconsin made his big splash into celebrity a year later -- to be synonymous with hostility to organized labor, but on this evidence it simply wasn't so.

While Brad reluctantly carries on his insincere negotiations, Christine jealously turns her seductive attentions to Nan's younger brother Don (John Agar), whom Brad had given a job before the trouble started. She gradually transforms Brad into a radical union agitator who shouts Jim down when the moderate leader pleads for moderation. This process apparently took longer in an earlier cut of the film, since Brad's radicalization and its role in provoking the strike is shown as part of a lengthy montage of snippets of scenes that clearly had important dialogue in them, while ominous music plays. Left intact is Brad's first introduction to communism at one of Christine's parties. This scene is as ideological as the movie gets. It tells us what the writers (if not Hughes) thought communism stood for. What it stands for, apparently, is "the scientific management of society," as one well-fed intellectual asserts. Nothing here about the proletariat or property or capitalism. An initially skeptical Brad senses that this is a form of elitism and tells his interlocutor that "I prefer democracy." So another thing missing that we in 2014 might expect in an overtly anti-communist propaganda movie is a defense of capitalism. Nothing here about "free enterprise," nor even about "freedom." The opposite of communism is "democracy." Communism, then, appears to be a political system above all, characterized by the rule of an elite justified by an appeal to science. This is actually a fair hit against Bolshevism or Leninism and the concept of necessary, incontestable leadership by a vanguard party who would do the dictating during Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat." Sixty-five years later you may be more likely to hear someone say that democracy and capitalism contradict each other, with capitalism getting the better of the argument. 1949 was a different world.

Where the 1949 film gets most outrageous is in its portrayal of blatant gangster tactics by American communists. Some were certainly involved in the sort of labor-dispute street fighting Brad took part in as a young man, but I Married a Communist goes beyond that. Communists are shown murdering a suspected informant, in part as a way to intimidate Brad. The victim is tied up and dumped off a pier as he begs for mercy. Brad, being Robert Ryan, is unimpressed by the attempt to scare him. Later, the Communists begin to devour their own. When Don begins to get wise to how he's been manipulated, Vanning orders a hit on him. The local Reds farm out much of such work to a carny who runs a shooting-gallery concession on the pier. Eschewing the obvious, the hit man kills Don by running him over with a car. Later still, Christine threatens to turn on Vanning, but he dumps her out a high window. The film's conflicts are ultimately resolved by gunplay, Brad killing Vanning while suffering a mortal wound so he can give Nan back to Jim, from whom he took her. In history, you often hear of "purges" among the American communists, but these weren't the sort of purges you had in countries where communists controlled the state and enforced their own laws. American communists who got purged usually formed their own splinter parties, even more futile than the original party. Mine wasn't the most thorough Google search, but I found nothing indicating that American communists killed each other on American soil to enforce party discipline or to punish informants. Actual labor unions seem more likely to have done such things. American communists seem to have been more "community organizers" in the pejorative sense than men of action or the sort of hard cases who carried out revolutions elsewhere. In Russia, Stalin robbed banks and Lenin condoned it. The category error of American anti-communism was to assume that America's communists were the same sort of people, that to be a communist was to be a criminal at heart. That feeling still persists, and so I Married a Communist will not seem quite as alien or surprising in its overall attitude as I'm suggesting here -- and I must also admit that a non-violent finish would have made a weak film only more dull. But my main point remains: to be against communism doesn't mean automatically that you'll also be against other things, or for other things still. An anti-communist movie of 1949 isn't necessarily a right-wing movie by today's standards -- and it's not really a good movie by any standard. But it's very interesting as a historical document and a great example of what movies can tell us about the culture they were made in and how it differs from our own.