burgbob975
Joined Mar 2002
Welcome to the new profile
We're still working on updating some profile features. To see the badges, ratings breakdowns, and polls for this profile, please go to the previous version.
Reviews9
burgbob975's rating
An unexpected *little* film from James Cagney. No snappy dancing, no slapping dames and bartenders around, no grapefruit saying hello to your face, no weird little body dance with the hitching up of pants, hunching the shoulders or snapping of fingers. No strutting or shooting locomotive engineers, no `Made it, Ma! Top of the World!.' Not even a glimpse of the old and much loved Warner Brothers logo for that matter.
In The Gallant Hours, Cagney, normally a smorgasbord of tics, sideways delights, raw energy, menace, and American good-guyism, does the least expected thing: he strips himself of all his familiar trademarks and instead delivers the most restrained, internalized, uncagneylike performance we've ever seen. Too bad it's a one-dimensional misrepresentation of the man he's playing---the crusty, bushy-eyed Fleet Admiral William F. *Bull* Halsey. But more about that in a minute.
Shot in black and white in semi-documentary style, The Gallant Hours is a low-budget, bare-bones, *cameo* production that doesn't attempt either the wide scope or the heroics of such better-known war films as Flying Fortress, Wake Island or Bataan. Instead, the film tightly focuses on the series of crucial, life-and-death decisions made by Admiral Halsey as he directs the desperate struggle in 1942 for possession of Guadalcanal, after it was discovered that the Japanese were building an airfield there from which they could launch attacks on Australia.
Produced and directed by actor and former naval officer Robert Montgomery, the film is a melange of the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The Gallant Hours has its moments, beginning auspiciously with a memorable opening scene of a lone sailor standing high up on a ship's mast, the camera then slowly panning down to reveal the rest of the ship's company massed on deck behind Halsey, who's crisply reading out his retirement orders. This is followed by a touching and well-done scene between him and his filipino valet, the two of them recalling the bloody, extended battle for Guadalcanal, which the film then turns to in extended flashback.
In place of battle action---there is none---the movie pads itself with several lightweight scenes that are either frivolous or yawn-inducing, such as when Halsey's aides, gathered on the beach, are oohing and ahhing over the ageing Admiral's prowess in the water, and, after Halsey has rejoined them, all of them then indulgently observing Dennis Weaver (as Halsey's chief pilot, Lt. Commander Andrew Jefferson 'Andy' Lowe) romping with a group of adoring navy nurses who are all agog over Dennis's tactical maneuvers.
The picture would have benefitted from scrapping fluff like this and sticking to the business of waging war, but no, the scriptwriters instead assume we require *entertainment*---the more mindless the better---in the form of multiple scenes of Dennis Weaver pursuing tail, or---the running gag for the first third of the film---Halsey finding ways of avoiding the innoculation shots that his medical officer wants to give him. Very jolly.
The production as a whole is intensely stylized and displays a palpable mood of mournfulness and regret over the horrific sacrifice of life among the Americans and their allies, who were desperately attempting to roll back the powerful Japanese advance in the South Pacific. This atmosphere is maintained throughout the film by the use of a soaring hymn-like musical score which suggests that the war at sea was virtually a holy war by the Allied Forces to save the world from the rampaging Axis powers.
Montgomery's direction is uneven and occasionally downright lazy, as when he several times settles for using the same boring establishing shot of Halsey's flagship sitting like a stilllife in port. Maybe, just once, he could have tried something else to establish the scene? And the sight of Dennis Weaver---one of my favorite actors---made to endlessly pursue more-than-willing navy nurses for comic relief shortly becomes tedious. Deprived of the opportunity to show battle action, the scriptwriters frequently appear to be vamping, for want of anything better to do.
For anyone who's seen John Ford's magnificent, eligiac 1945 wartime drama, They Were Expendable, in which Montgomery and John Wayne had starred, it will be obvious that the concept for The Gallant Hours was strongly influenced by the earlier film. Given the chance to direct, Montgomery apparently believed that what Ford could do, *he* could do better. But where Ford had sown his film with subtle tones of sadness, defeat, and loss, Montgomery drenches The Gallant Hours with painted-on emotion, conveyed primarily by its endlessly repeated score and a narrator who crisply and regularly informs you about which onscreen marine will be dead or badly injured in battle forty-five minutes later. They Were Expendable, now recognized as one of Ford's finest films, was effective without having to repeatedly cue its audience, while The Gallant Hours finds it necessary to frequently poke us when it's time to feel sad again or to grieve over incidents that are never depicted.
None of the above, however, is as off-kilter as the picture's biggest disappointment---its highly *edited* depiction of Halsey. The scriptwriters did an outrageous disservice to the public memory of Halsey by sanitizing the admiral into a nearly flawless, one-dimensional cardboard cutout---nearly a saint. He wasn't. According to his biographers, *Bull* Halsey was a salty, aggressive, Ulysses S. Grant-type warrior who liked his liquor---at one point he was receiving a monthly ration of seventeen cases of Scotch and six of bourbon, both for himself and for the purposes of entertaining others---and whose hatred of the Japanese was legendary and who exalted in killing them in large numbers, often allowing them to drown in the sea rather than picking them up and taking them prisoner. This was a man who was famous in naval circles for once erecting a large billboard that said, `Kill Japs! Kill Japs! Kill more Japs!' This wasn't a guy who, like his Japanese counterpart, Admiral Yamamoto, spent quality time arranging flowers to look just right for snapping with his Leica. Unsurprisingly, he was capable of exhibiting a ferocious temper if provoked and had other colorful human failings as well. The men who served with and under him loved and respected him in part for his being altogether human, for being one of them.
The Gallant Hours may get away with failing to show battle action, but it rolls over and dies when it fashions an utterly false picture of this great American wartime figure as a benign plaster saint who was followed by heavenly music wherever he went. Halsey's business was killing the enemy, not serving the Host to them during the Eucharist.
As for the film's lead, admittedly it is simply not possible to watch Jimmy Cagney and not enjoy him. The guy doesn't know how *not* to be interesting. But I would much rather have seen him play one of America's greatest naval warriors with all of that individual's various human qualities intact. It would have made for a much more compelling film.
In The Gallant Hours, Cagney, normally a smorgasbord of tics, sideways delights, raw energy, menace, and American good-guyism, does the least expected thing: he strips himself of all his familiar trademarks and instead delivers the most restrained, internalized, uncagneylike performance we've ever seen. Too bad it's a one-dimensional misrepresentation of the man he's playing---the crusty, bushy-eyed Fleet Admiral William F. *Bull* Halsey. But more about that in a minute.
Shot in black and white in semi-documentary style, The Gallant Hours is a low-budget, bare-bones, *cameo* production that doesn't attempt either the wide scope or the heroics of such better-known war films as Flying Fortress, Wake Island or Bataan. Instead, the film tightly focuses on the series of crucial, life-and-death decisions made by Admiral Halsey as he directs the desperate struggle in 1942 for possession of Guadalcanal, after it was discovered that the Japanese were building an airfield there from which they could launch attacks on Australia.
Produced and directed by actor and former naval officer Robert Montgomery, the film is a melange of the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The Gallant Hours has its moments, beginning auspiciously with a memorable opening scene of a lone sailor standing high up on a ship's mast, the camera then slowly panning down to reveal the rest of the ship's company massed on deck behind Halsey, who's crisply reading out his retirement orders. This is followed by a touching and well-done scene between him and his filipino valet, the two of them recalling the bloody, extended battle for Guadalcanal, which the film then turns to in extended flashback.
In place of battle action---there is none---the movie pads itself with several lightweight scenes that are either frivolous or yawn-inducing, such as when Halsey's aides, gathered on the beach, are oohing and ahhing over the ageing Admiral's prowess in the water, and, after Halsey has rejoined them, all of them then indulgently observing Dennis Weaver (as Halsey's chief pilot, Lt. Commander Andrew Jefferson 'Andy' Lowe) romping with a group of adoring navy nurses who are all agog over Dennis's tactical maneuvers.
The picture would have benefitted from scrapping fluff like this and sticking to the business of waging war, but no, the scriptwriters instead assume we require *entertainment*---the more mindless the better---in the form of multiple scenes of Dennis Weaver pursuing tail, or---the running gag for the first third of the film---Halsey finding ways of avoiding the innoculation shots that his medical officer wants to give him. Very jolly.
The production as a whole is intensely stylized and displays a palpable mood of mournfulness and regret over the horrific sacrifice of life among the Americans and their allies, who were desperately attempting to roll back the powerful Japanese advance in the South Pacific. This atmosphere is maintained throughout the film by the use of a soaring hymn-like musical score which suggests that the war at sea was virtually a holy war by the Allied Forces to save the world from the rampaging Axis powers.
Montgomery's direction is uneven and occasionally downright lazy, as when he several times settles for using the same boring establishing shot of Halsey's flagship sitting like a stilllife in port. Maybe, just once, he could have tried something else to establish the scene? And the sight of Dennis Weaver---one of my favorite actors---made to endlessly pursue more-than-willing navy nurses for comic relief shortly becomes tedious. Deprived of the opportunity to show battle action, the scriptwriters frequently appear to be vamping, for want of anything better to do.
For anyone who's seen John Ford's magnificent, eligiac 1945 wartime drama, They Were Expendable, in which Montgomery and John Wayne had starred, it will be obvious that the concept for The Gallant Hours was strongly influenced by the earlier film. Given the chance to direct, Montgomery apparently believed that what Ford could do, *he* could do better. But where Ford had sown his film with subtle tones of sadness, defeat, and loss, Montgomery drenches The Gallant Hours with painted-on emotion, conveyed primarily by its endlessly repeated score and a narrator who crisply and regularly informs you about which onscreen marine will be dead or badly injured in battle forty-five minutes later. They Were Expendable, now recognized as one of Ford's finest films, was effective without having to repeatedly cue its audience, while The Gallant Hours finds it necessary to frequently poke us when it's time to feel sad again or to grieve over incidents that are never depicted.
None of the above, however, is as off-kilter as the picture's biggest disappointment---its highly *edited* depiction of Halsey. The scriptwriters did an outrageous disservice to the public memory of Halsey by sanitizing the admiral into a nearly flawless, one-dimensional cardboard cutout---nearly a saint. He wasn't. According to his biographers, *Bull* Halsey was a salty, aggressive, Ulysses S. Grant-type warrior who liked his liquor---at one point he was receiving a monthly ration of seventeen cases of Scotch and six of bourbon, both for himself and for the purposes of entertaining others---and whose hatred of the Japanese was legendary and who exalted in killing them in large numbers, often allowing them to drown in the sea rather than picking them up and taking them prisoner. This was a man who was famous in naval circles for once erecting a large billboard that said, `Kill Japs! Kill Japs! Kill more Japs!' This wasn't a guy who, like his Japanese counterpart, Admiral Yamamoto, spent quality time arranging flowers to look just right for snapping with his Leica. Unsurprisingly, he was capable of exhibiting a ferocious temper if provoked and had other colorful human failings as well. The men who served with and under him loved and respected him in part for his being altogether human, for being one of them.
The Gallant Hours may get away with failing to show battle action, but it rolls over and dies when it fashions an utterly false picture of this great American wartime figure as a benign plaster saint who was followed by heavenly music wherever he went. Halsey's business was killing the enemy, not serving the Host to them during the Eucharist.
As for the film's lead, admittedly it is simply not possible to watch Jimmy Cagney and not enjoy him. The guy doesn't know how *not* to be interesting. But I would much rather have seen him play one of America's greatest naval warriors with all of that individual's various human qualities intact. It would have made for a much more compelling film.
Were the 'fifties really this awful? The mind boggles.
Moviegoers in 1954 got excited when they heard that one of their favorite TV shows, Dragnet, had been made into a feature film. (I remember because I was one of them.) One now stares in wonder at this icon of the strange and far-off 'fifties, an era that was Eisenhower-sunny on the surface and dark and menacing just beneath it.
Dragnet the movie (eventually there was a second, on TV), now largely forgotten, was nothing more than an extended television episode made in color, while home sets were still black and white. Judging from the picture's low-rent set-ups, it must have been one of Warner Brothers' most cheaply made films for that year. A couple of scenes take place in empty fields, and---with the single exception when filming was done at the African wing of the Los Angeles County Museum---the indoor sets were not much more imposing. Many of the actors were frequently unemployed second-string players whose work did not make a deep impression.
In the intervening time since it was made the film has largely gone unseen and although it made it to video, it is little viewed in this form. (I found a dusty copy at a Half-Price book store, selling for a desperate-to-get-this-turkey-off-the-shelf $3.99!) Predictably, it has dated badly. That 'fifties audiences accepted the actors' rigidly stylized, robotic impersonations of police officers as representing the way they actually spoke in real life says something about Americans' willingness to uncritically accept virtually anything they saw in movies, and especially on TV. (Remember actors posing as doctors extolling the pleasures of smoking during cigarette commercials?) Dragnet's cops' signature manner of speaking---a flat, semi-technical, bureaucratic argot, spoken in low, monotonal voices---Webb's cops rarely if ever snarled---was one of the most memorable things about the show. Now this is seen for what it always was: unintentional self-satire. (On the other hand, to Webb's great credit, virtually all modern-day cop shows stemmed from Dragnet, untold imitations of which have been launched on television over the past five decades)
For more evidence of the film's antiquated point of view, watch the scene at the jazz club where Friday and Smith, seeking information about a criminal they're pursuing, converse with a musician who's one of their informants. There's a humorous moment when Smith gets a `real hip' handshake from the trumpet player that is nothing more than a quick swipe and a handful of air, then stares at his hand as if to figure out what had just transpired. This is followed by a three-way conversation during which the script clumsily has the musician work his way through an A to Z litany of now-moldy, 'fifties hipster clichés (`How's that chick?' `Really flipped, huh?' `Oh man, that's a drag,' `He was really nowhere,' `I've been diggin' it in the papers,' `He was jumpin' pretty steady with that Troy mob,' `Dig ya.') by way of what the screenwriter apparently must have regarded as establishing a well-rounded character.
Not only was the film disappointing in how little attempt was made to `open it up' for the big screen, but in some ways its narrowly focused two-for-a-nickel script was decidedly less interesting than what was shown on the television show. For example, it missed interesting possibilities for character development, especially as this pertained to Webb's Joe Friday and Ben Alexander's Frank Smith. (Some time after the film's debut, Webb finally recognized that television viewers yearned to know more about Joe Friday in his off-duty hours and so gave them glimpses of this law enforcement automaton's meager social life, including intriguing little dabs of romance.)
The film version also completely wastes the participation of Ben Alexander, the warmest and most appealing of all Joe Friday's sidekicks, leaving him with nothing to do except dutifully tag along with his superior officer and occasionally asking suspects or witnesses the odd question or two. The inspired daffy non sequiturs that his character, Frank Smith, regularly voiced in conversations with Joe Friday on the television show, which viewers loved and looked forward to, were almost entirely absent from the film. The one exception, which occurs during a brief back-and-forth with Webb about their individual food preferences, is so brief and isolated that it comes off as a self-conscious sop to audiences whom the screenwriter knew would be looking for it and falls flat.
Webb also was the film's director, and he went about most of these duties with a notable lack of imagination. The result is a picture that is dreary and monotonous from start to finish. He elicited almost uniformly wooden-and even occasionally embarrassing-performances from the cast (leaving one to wonder how much of his own money was invested in the film or what his deal was with Warner's, and whether he might even have deliberately restricted himself to printing the first take, no matter much a second or even a third might have been desirable). The scene where as Joe Friday he interrogates the crippled woman whose small-time crook of a husband has just been killed is mawkish, and the actors playing police officers are directed to be so deadly serious that scenes like this were subsequently lampooned to great effect in the Dan Aykroyd satire made in 1987. At one point a very competent actor, Richard Boone, is reduced to miming a series of grotesque scowls while instructing his subordinates. It's a wonder Webb didn't direct him to gnaw on a table leg.
Dragnet was a film that was mired deeply in its time and seems to evidence a disturbing subtext that relates to the American mindset as it was during the bland, conformist, and frightened Eisenhower/McCarthyite fifties. The Cold War was at its height in 1954 and fears by Americans of falling victim to communist manipulations and even outright mind-control were rampant. It may be no coincidence that Dragnet and Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers appeared within two years of each other. The cops in Dragnet are not merely grim, intense, obsessed defenders of the law, they often border on being zombie-like. One of Dragnet's most explicit messages---brought home to audiences several times---was how, if only we didn't have so many laws and that darn Constitution, we could put a heck of a lot more criminals behind bars where they belong. I've replayed this film at least half a dozen times and each time I watched it, the scarier it seemed. It's interesting to contemplate what super-patriot Joe Friday, if given the power and left to his own devices, would have done to lawbreakers. Luckily for the bad guys in the film---and possibly for all the rest of us---he wasn't given access to nuclear weapons.
Moviegoers in 1954 got excited when they heard that one of their favorite TV shows, Dragnet, had been made into a feature film. (I remember because I was one of them.) One now stares in wonder at this icon of the strange and far-off 'fifties, an era that was Eisenhower-sunny on the surface and dark and menacing just beneath it.
Dragnet the movie (eventually there was a second, on TV), now largely forgotten, was nothing more than an extended television episode made in color, while home sets were still black and white. Judging from the picture's low-rent set-ups, it must have been one of Warner Brothers' most cheaply made films for that year. A couple of scenes take place in empty fields, and---with the single exception when filming was done at the African wing of the Los Angeles County Museum---the indoor sets were not much more imposing. Many of the actors were frequently unemployed second-string players whose work did not make a deep impression.
In the intervening time since it was made the film has largely gone unseen and although it made it to video, it is little viewed in this form. (I found a dusty copy at a Half-Price book store, selling for a desperate-to-get-this-turkey-off-the-shelf $3.99!) Predictably, it has dated badly. That 'fifties audiences accepted the actors' rigidly stylized, robotic impersonations of police officers as representing the way they actually spoke in real life says something about Americans' willingness to uncritically accept virtually anything they saw in movies, and especially on TV. (Remember actors posing as doctors extolling the pleasures of smoking during cigarette commercials?) Dragnet's cops' signature manner of speaking---a flat, semi-technical, bureaucratic argot, spoken in low, monotonal voices---Webb's cops rarely if ever snarled---was one of the most memorable things about the show. Now this is seen for what it always was: unintentional self-satire. (On the other hand, to Webb's great credit, virtually all modern-day cop shows stemmed from Dragnet, untold imitations of which have been launched on television over the past five decades)
For more evidence of the film's antiquated point of view, watch the scene at the jazz club where Friday and Smith, seeking information about a criminal they're pursuing, converse with a musician who's one of their informants. There's a humorous moment when Smith gets a `real hip' handshake from the trumpet player that is nothing more than a quick swipe and a handful of air, then stares at his hand as if to figure out what had just transpired. This is followed by a three-way conversation during which the script clumsily has the musician work his way through an A to Z litany of now-moldy, 'fifties hipster clichés (`How's that chick?' `Really flipped, huh?' `Oh man, that's a drag,' `He was really nowhere,' `I've been diggin' it in the papers,' `He was jumpin' pretty steady with that Troy mob,' `Dig ya.') by way of what the screenwriter apparently must have regarded as establishing a well-rounded character.
Not only was the film disappointing in how little attempt was made to `open it up' for the big screen, but in some ways its narrowly focused two-for-a-nickel script was decidedly less interesting than what was shown on the television show. For example, it missed interesting possibilities for character development, especially as this pertained to Webb's Joe Friday and Ben Alexander's Frank Smith. (Some time after the film's debut, Webb finally recognized that television viewers yearned to know more about Joe Friday in his off-duty hours and so gave them glimpses of this law enforcement automaton's meager social life, including intriguing little dabs of romance.)
The film version also completely wastes the participation of Ben Alexander, the warmest and most appealing of all Joe Friday's sidekicks, leaving him with nothing to do except dutifully tag along with his superior officer and occasionally asking suspects or witnesses the odd question or two. The inspired daffy non sequiturs that his character, Frank Smith, regularly voiced in conversations with Joe Friday on the television show, which viewers loved and looked forward to, were almost entirely absent from the film. The one exception, which occurs during a brief back-and-forth with Webb about their individual food preferences, is so brief and isolated that it comes off as a self-conscious sop to audiences whom the screenwriter knew would be looking for it and falls flat.
Webb also was the film's director, and he went about most of these duties with a notable lack of imagination. The result is a picture that is dreary and monotonous from start to finish. He elicited almost uniformly wooden-and even occasionally embarrassing-performances from the cast (leaving one to wonder how much of his own money was invested in the film or what his deal was with Warner's, and whether he might even have deliberately restricted himself to printing the first take, no matter much a second or even a third might have been desirable). The scene where as Joe Friday he interrogates the crippled woman whose small-time crook of a husband has just been killed is mawkish, and the actors playing police officers are directed to be so deadly serious that scenes like this were subsequently lampooned to great effect in the Dan Aykroyd satire made in 1987. At one point a very competent actor, Richard Boone, is reduced to miming a series of grotesque scowls while instructing his subordinates. It's a wonder Webb didn't direct him to gnaw on a table leg.
Dragnet was a film that was mired deeply in its time and seems to evidence a disturbing subtext that relates to the American mindset as it was during the bland, conformist, and frightened Eisenhower/McCarthyite fifties. The Cold War was at its height in 1954 and fears by Americans of falling victim to communist manipulations and even outright mind-control were rampant. It may be no coincidence that Dragnet and Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers appeared within two years of each other. The cops in Dragnet are not merely grim, intense, obsessed defenders of the law, they often border on being zombie-like. One of Dragnet's most explicit messages---brought home to audiences several times---was how, if only we didn't have so many laws and that darn Constitution, we could put a heck of a lot more criminals behind bars where they belong. I've replayed this film at least half a dozen times and each time I watched it, the scarier it seemed. It's interesting to contemplate what super-patriot Joe Friday, if given the power and left to his own devices, would have done to lawbreakers. Luckily for the bad guys in the film---and possibly for all the rest of us---he wasn't given access to nuclear weapons.
Raintree County, MGM's attempt to make a picture that would faintly remind audiences of Gone With the Wind, did have two things in common with the earlier film: Technicolor and length. Otherwise, it was a disaster, a clichéd period piece heavy on costumes, very light on absorbing human situations.
Raintree had two insurmountable problems: ham-handed direction and a clumsy, uninspired script that failed to flesh out the characters of several cast members including two leading players. Worst impacted was Monty Clift as Johnny Shawnessy, a role so bland that it offered the actor nothing to grab hold of. Johnny is simply a nice person, honorable, loyal, patient, and truthful. He is someone of good values, a person to rely on, occasionally funny in an adolescent sort of way, and a good son to his boring two-dimensional parents. (Correction. Agnes Moorhead as Johnny's mother is one dimensional. The script's fault, not hers.) In short, there's nothing interesting about Johnny. He's ordinary. Apparently, studio executives didn't see a problem with this, even though Johnny Shawnessy is continuously front and center in a film that originally ran for almost three hours, as it does again in the restored video version.
Clift, one of the most gifted American film actors of the twentieth century, knew he was prostituting himself by appearing in Raintree. He responded by delivering what is arguably the worst performance of his career. It's painful to watch him: in most of his scenes he appears pallid, slightly dwarfish, and insignificant, giving the impression that he was privately making believe he really wasn't in the film at all.
The first excruciating hour of the picture is almost enough to drive audiences out of the theater. Since GWTW was long, Raintree County is long--and unfocused. In one particularly vapid scene Monty and Eva Marie Saint linger amid the widescreen splendor of well-scouted, photographically appropriate locations. As the two exchange graduation presents with Laurel and Hardy-like formality, the script calls for Eva Marie to coyly break into girlish giggles and say things like `Isn't that niiieeccce?...We think the same things. Isn't that crazy? Tee-hee-hee-hee-hee.' Privately, Eva Marie must have been wondering what crime she might have committed to have caused fate to whirl her from the triumph of her 1954 performance in On the Waterfront to this swampy mess.
The film is equally inept in making use of Lee Marvin, who was reduced to doing his loutish, clumsy, I'm-so-dumb schtick. Marvin wasn't nearly as good at broad physical comedy as he and some others seemed to think he was. (Doing more subtle comedy, however, where less is more, was another thing altogether for Marvin. Watch him as a clueless wannabe in a wonderful film like Pocket Money to see what he can do with a great comic role.) We watch as Lee challenges Monty first to a race (lots of grotesquely exaggerated, manly calisthenics at the starting line), then to see who can out-drink the other, while a dozen equally buffoonish male extras shout and yell on cue. Johnny, a guileless innocent, gets thoroughly looped for the first time in his life, whoops it up, and executes a flying swan dive into a bunch of liquor barrels. (In real life, Monty was a little less innocent than Johnny Shawnessy; according to his biographers, he was a walking all-nite pharmacy of illicit substances.)
To give credit where it's due, the film is briefly buoyed by the presence of the wonderful Nigel Patrick as a roguish schoolmaster with an eye for other men's wives. Happily for us, Patrick steals all of his scenes, impatiently bellowing at or comically insulting his young charges and generally pumping some desperately needed fire and energy into the film.
After a very long time, something of major interest finally occurs: Elizabeth Taylor makes her entrance. Sexy, conniving, dark-eyed Liz steals Johnny away from poor, decent Eva Marie and soon hornswoggles him into marrying her by falsely claiming to be pregnant. While on their honeymoon aboard a paddlewheeler, she nonchalantly arranges a dozen dolls on their bed and shows Monty her all-time favorite, a hideous half-white, half-black doll, appearing burnt in a fire and looking like it was designed by Bela Lugosi. This creepy figurine seemingly makes no impression on Monty, even as members of the audience are rearing back in horror, crossing themselves, and yelling `Monty! Watch out!!'
Taylor delivers a solid performance that displays the rising talent that she had already shown a few years before in A Place in the Sun and which would later would come to fruition in such films as Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf and Giant. As Susanna Drake, she is initially sexually beguiling towards Johnny. Then, after they marry, she begins to show the first signs of the madness within her. As the atmosphere around her grows slowly darker, you find yourself surprised to realize you're at last being drawn into the story. The actress took a gamble with this unsympathetic role, that of a southern-born woman who fails to see anything wrong with owning slaves and is terrified of possibly finding that she might have a single drop of `negra' blood in her veins. At the same time she manages to elicit a measure of sympathy for this narrow and unbalanced woman by displaying a touching vulnerability simultaneously with her fear of what's happening to her mind.
If anyone triumphs in this upholstered turkey, it's Liz Taylor, always a born survivor.
Raintree had two insurmountable problems: ham-handed direction and a clumsy, uninspired script that failed to flesh out the characters of several cast members including two leading players. Worst impacted was Monty Clift as Johnny Shawnessy, a role so bland that it offered the actor nothing to grab hold of. Johnny is simply a nice person, honorable, loyal, patient, and truthful. He is someone of good values, a person to rely on, occasionally funny in an adolescent sort of way, and a good son to his boring two-dimensional parents. (Correction. Agnes Moorhead as Johnny's mother is one dimensional. The script's fault, not hers.) In short, there's nothing interesting about Johnny. He's ordinary. Apparently, studio executives didn't see a problem with this, even though Johnny Shawnessy is continuously front and center in a film that originally ran for almost three hours, as it does again in the restored video version.
Clift, one of the most gifted American film actors of the twentieth century, knew he was prostituting himself by appearing in Raintree. He responded by delivering what is arguably the worst performance of his career. It's painful to watch him: in most of his scenes he appears pallid, slightly dwarfish, and insignificant, giving the impression that he was privately making believe he really wasn't in the film at all.
The first excruciating hour of the picture is almost enough to drive audiences out of the theater. Since GWTW was long, Raintree County is long--and unfocused. In one particularly vapid scene Monty and Eva Marie Saint linger amid the widescreen splendor of well-scouted, photographically appropriate locations. As the two exchange graduation presents with Laurel and Hardy-like formality, the script calls for Eva Marie to coyly break into girlish giggles and say things like `Isn't that niiieeccce?...We think the same things. Isn't that crazy? Tee-hee-hee-hee-hee.' Privately, Eva Marie must have been wondering what crime she might have committed to have caused fate to whirl her from the triumph of her 1954 performance in On the Waterfront to this swampy mess.
The film is equally inept in making use of Lee Marvin, who was reduced to doing his loutish, clumsy, I'm-so-dumb schtick. Marvin wasn't nearly as good at broad physical comedy as he and some others seemed to think he was. (Doing more subtle comedy, however, where less is more, was another thing altogether for Marvin. Watch him as a clueless wannabe in a wonderful film like Pocket Money to see what he can do with a great comic role.) We watch as Lee challenges Monty first to a race (lots of grotesquely exaggerated, manly calisthenics at the starting line), then to see who can out-drink the other, while a dozen equally buffoonish male extras shout and yell on cue. Johnny, a guileless innocent, gets thoroughly looped for the first time in his life, whoops it up, and executes a flying swan dive into a bunch of liquor barrels. (In real life, Monty was a little less innocent than Johnny Shawnessy; according to his biographers, he was a walking all-nite pharmacy of illicit substances.)
To give credit where it's due, the film is briefly buoyed by the presence of the wonderful Nigel Patrick as a roguish schoolmaster with an eye for other men's wives. Happily for us, Patrick steals all of his scenes, impatiently bellowing at or comically insulting his young charges and generally pumping some desperately needed fire and energy into the film.
After a very long time, something of major interest finally occurs: Elizabeth Taylor makes her entrance. Sexy, conniving, dark-eyed Liz steals Johnny away from poor, decent Eva Marie and soon hornswoggles him into marrying her by falsely claiming to be pregnant. While on their honeymoon aboard a paddlewheeler, she nonchalantly arranges a dozen dolls on their bed and shows Monty her all-time favorite, a hideous half-white, half-black doll, appearing burnt in a fire and looking like it was designed by Bela Lugosi. This creepy figurine seemingly makes no impression on Monty, even as members of the audience are rearing back in horror, crossing themselves, and yelling `Monty! Watch out!!'
Taylor delivers a solid performance that displays the rising talent that she had already shown a few years before in A Place in the Sun and which would later would come to fruition in such films as Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf and Giant. As Susanna Drake, she is initially sexually beguiling towards Johnny. Then, after they marry, she begins to show the first signs of the madness within her. As the atmosphere around her grows slowly darker, you find yourself surprised to realize you're at last being drawn into the story. The actress took a gamble with this unsympathetic role, that of a southern-born woman who fails to see anything wrong with owning slaves and is terrified of possibly finding that she might have a single drop of `negra' blood in her veins. At the same time she manages to elicit a measure of sympathy for this narrow and unbalanced woman by displaying a touching vulnerability simultaneously with her fear of what's happening to her mind.
If anyone triumphs in this upholstered turkey, it's Liz Taylor, always a born survivor.