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Gervaise (1956)
almost lives up to the novel
It required some self-convincing before I crossed my fingers and watched this filmed version of Emile Zola's L'Assommoir. Zola's work, I find, is nearly impossible to translate to the screen. To wit, I cite Jean Renoir's horrible adaptation of La Bete Humaine, with Jean Gabin no less and Simone Simon. Somehow film has not succeeded in capturing the dark, dismal heart of Zola's naturalisme. Read Zola's 20-volume series of novels, the Rougon-Macquart. The only question you will have is which one ends on the bleakest note. Few of his protagonists walk away on the final page, if they live to walk away at all, happily into the sunset - the exceptions being invariably the scoundrels, power-hungry Eugène Rougon, his money-grubbing brother Aristide, or the grasping retail magnate Octave Mouret. L'Assommoir, along with Germinal, La Curée and L'Oeuvre, are among the most dismal, though personally I was left most entirely depressed at the end of La Terre and the ironic La Joie de Vivre. That said, I was surprised. René Clément's Gervaise almost succeeds. It comes close to conjuring the darkness and despair and sense of futility in a Zola novel. Almost. He had a tremendous assist from Maria Schell. Her Gervaise is a truly hertbreaking characterization. She is exactly as Zola depicted her: kind-hearted, hard-working, generous, but totally lacking in the ruthlessness needed to survive - a born victim of a ruthless world. Zola would have applauded.
The screenplay changes some of the story, but not nearly as much as do other cinematic adaptations of great novels. It omits some characters, the brutal domestic violence episodes of the family Bijard. But that is to be expected. It reduces the role of Gervaise's in-laws the Lorilleux, who in the novel work rapaciously in their narrow, overheated apartment hammering out enough tiny gold chains to stretch from Paris to Marseille. It exaggerates the character of Virginie, building her into a veritble femme fatale. She, in the novel, is not the machinator of Gervaise's downfall. She is herself a victim of Lantier's parasitism, once he latches onto her household. Life and heredity are the cause of Gervaise's fated fall. Those are her nemeses. Zola himself, defending his work against critics - for the right, L'Assommoir was a left-wing attack on the virtue of the capitalist work ethic; for the left it was a right-wing slander on the noble and virtuous working class - described it as "la déchéance fatale d'une famille ouvrière dans le milieu empesté de nos faubourgs," the inevitable downfall of a working-class family in our sordid suburbs.
Two scenes are perfect evocations of the book: the party scene and the visit to the Louvre. Coupeau's long, agonizing descent into alcoholism is more drawn out and more devastating, and his death, not at home but in the hospital drunk ward in the grip of delerium tremens, is much more harrowing in the novel. The film leaves Gervaise alive. Zola did not. His story continues to her death of starvation, huddled in the tiny cubby-hole once inhabited by père Bru. That, I guess, was a sadness too far for the film. The film leaves us with a wink and a nod as little Nana flaunts out into the street with her new ribbon. Those who have read on in the series know what will be her degenerate life and miserable death once she gets to star in her own novel. For a mediocre filming of that story, try the 1955 movie with Martine Carol and Charles Boyer.
Old Yeller (1957)
Not quite what I remembered when I was a kid
I saw Old Yeller 50+ years ago, when I was young. Before that, my parents read the book to me. Meanwhile I barely thought about it, until the National Film Registry chose it for preservation among its "culturally or aesthetically significant" honorees. Then I thought I had better watch it again (via YouTube) because for all that it had left very little impression on me since and even in childhood. I see here that many people of my generation recall the film as a wonderful formative experience - a boy and his dog - a milestone in their coming-of-age. My problem may have been that, growing up in NYC, I didn't own a dog, and moreover I was afraid of dogs. The only dog with which I had contact then was a little mutt that an uncle brought with him when he visited. It insisted on jumping up at me, harmlessly but scarifyingly, whenever it could. Since then I have had dogs, and I like them. One was even a charming Heinz 57 whose main ingredient was, like Old Yeller, golden retriever. She was adorable (RIP Freddie.) So, I saw this movie when I didn't like dogs, and it made little impression. Now I have seen it while I do like dogs. I still can't cry when Tommy Kirk shoots his canine companion.
All the way through I kept thinking, it's a handsome film but it really has only one outstanding feature, namely the presence of Dorothy McGuire. Any movie with Dorothy McGuire is worth seeing, even if you have to watch Tommy Kirk and a golden retriever. (Why, by the way, does Yeller's offspring, he having mated with what seems to be a little spotted terrier, emerge pure golden retriever? I may not recall all my Mendelian genetics, but I don't think that is likely.) All the way through I kept comparing it in my mind to The Yearling. There I did and do cry when Jane Wyman shoots the little deer. I like dogs now, so it's not a question of which species gets the ax. The Yearling is simply a much better movie, much sadder and better acted. Claude Jarman acts rings around Tommy Kirk. Who would you rather see play the father, Fess Parker or Greg Peck? The story is deeper (though really they should just have penned up the deer at night so he wouldn't eat the corn). The little boy, Bide-a-Wee doesn't play like an imbecile with baby animals, including bear cubs, he caresses them and reveres them as creatures of God. Much better. Then he dies, leaving a bereft family, Chill Wills, Clem Bevans and Margaret Wycherly (if I recall correctly). Much more human than two kids and a dog.
A word to finish up on Dorothy McGuire. She had a difficult part, to keep the mother figure from descending into sappy triviality. She pulls it off. Her first major role in film was as the title character in Claudia, a young woman who must learn the reality of love and death. Then she did Katie Nolan, a woman who must harden herself and do hard things to help her child endure the harshness of life and death - in fact that is the same character as the mother in The Yearling. Here she is a sort of Claudia grown up who has learned the lesson of Katie Nolan. Altogether, the yellow dog is OK. But I'll watch the movie for Dorothy McGuire.
Hold Back Tomorrow (1955)
Unique. A classic. Why is Hugo Haas' work so consistently underrated?
I admit it. I feel a strange fascination (to borrow one of his titles) for the films of Hugo Haas, written, produced and directed by, and starring. I know. They are B movies. He could not command Hollywood's elite. But he had his stock company - Cleo Moore, Beverly Michaels, Jan Englund, Anthony Jochim - just as John Ford had his. His cinematographers, Paul Ivano, Edward Fitzgerald, were craftsmen. His work is idiosyncratic. At its best it is unique and memorable. He was a Jew who escaped the Holocaust while his brother, left behind, disappeared into Auschwitz. He was a man of European sensibility floundering in America. His stories are studies in irony. Some bear the bitter irony of Guy de Maupassant, others the tender twists of O. Henry. He puts his character, a lonely middle-aged man on the downside of life, in the way of his passionate women. He sounds a pervasive note of sadness. The devastating ending of "The Girl on the Bridge" remains for me second only, in its crushing irony, to Vincent Sherman's "The Hard Way." I don't know why, of all the independent filmmakers of the classic era, he gets the least respect.
"Hold Back Tomorrow" is one of the best and certainly the strangest of Hugo Haas' films. Who else would fashion a film almost all of which consists of two people, a man and a woman, talking? They are alone, locked in a death row cell during his last hours on earth. It is a two-person play. The camera just happens to be there. She is weary of a futile and friendless existence. He awaits an unjust fate. They contemplate death. Twenty years earlier Jean Cocteau wrote a one-person play, "The Human Voice," a monologue of despair. One actress, a suicidal woman, talks into a telephone. Francis Poulenc made it into an opera. OK. Hugo Haas was not Cocteau. But he knew the play. In "Hold Back Tomorrow" he wrote a dialogue of despair. Joe has never been able to cry. He cries. Dora has never been able to smile. She smiles. Myself, my eyes are seldom able to drop tears. They were moist.
Neither not-quite-Marilyn-Monroe Cleo Moore nor post-Shirley-Temple John Agar rose to the heights of stardom. Sometimes artists rise to the heights of artistry if they are given the material to inspire it. This material inspired artistry in Cleo Moore and John Agar. Everything, the story, the emotions, must come from them, their actions and reactions. Singers sometimes talk of being naked in the music. That is, they have only bare accompaniment that leaves them exposed. "Hold Back Tomorrow" leaves its actors exposed. They are alone before the camera. Cleo Moore never got the appreciation she deserved. She is heartbreaking when she delivers, at his request, in sadness a wan smile. John Agar makes us feel his emotional release, his catharsis, when he finally weeps after having vowed fiercely that he would never cry. In the end, Dora and Clara pray for a miracle. Hold back tomorrow is the title and the song. It is also the prayer: the hangman's rope will break; Joe will live. It won't break. We know. But maybe God will grant Joe the mercy of an illusion. Will he, in his last instant of consciousness, feel it break,dream that it has broken, and he has returned to Dora? He has already imagined it. He tells her. He has imagined the breaking of the rope. Hugo Haas hints at another ironic storyteller, Ambrose Bierce, and a cruelly ironic tale, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Bierce's hero feels the rope break, though it doesn't. He dreams, in a last instant, that he is free. Joe enters the death chamber. The clock chimes. The dream could be another movie. If I am guilty of overthinking and overpraising a Hollywood B picture, so be it.
Hugo Haas and Cleo Moore, who played in seven of his films, came, I am sure, to form a bond - she a struggling actress from Louisiana who never made it to the A list, he a major artist in his native country now relegated to petty parts in forgettable movies. They shared a complicity born of sympathy and frustration. In "The Other Woman," their fifth collaboration, Haas played what he was, a luckless actor turned director, Cleo a struggling actress under his direction. He wrote these lines of himself: "He was a big star in Europe. Here he played bit parts, just nothing." He wrote these lines for her: "I've got more talent than all those overpublicized dames ... What did you expect, to pay my way back to Louisiana and give me five bucks for expenses?" In "Hit and Run," her last film for him, her last film for anyone, she addresses her last line to his character: "Goodbye, Gus."
The Verdict (1946)
Excellent, atmospheric. For once in a murder mystery the logic doesn't fall apart.
I am not an admirer of murder mysteries. I have read my quota. Mostly, it seems to me, they are either frustratingly contrived or, even more frustratingly, the author has dealt unfairly, withholding a vital clue. The detective springs it at the end. "Aha, Dr. Whipsnide! You are caught. I know about the secret codicil." Great. But the reader didn't know. Locked-door mysteries are among the most frustrating. Conan Doyle tried it. In "The Sign of Four" he left the lockout incomplete, door and windows sealed, but another means of egress available. In "The Speckled Band" we have to believe a trained snake would bite a sleeping person then slither away at the sound of a whistle. I have read only one locked-room story that remains flawless: "The Mystery of the Yellow Room." Gaston Leroux's homage to Sherlock Holmes. Clues are there. Logic is impeccable. Movie murder mysteries seldom achieve that. I make an exception for "The Verdict," logic and clues included. Its trick is to scatter so many red herrings that it keep us unsure.
Initially - I say this without condescension - it seems obvious. Of course. Sydney Greenstreet is the murderer. The title gives it away. The story revolves around the Verdict; that is, the overturned verdict. Inspector Grodman, humiliated by Inspector Buckley, seeks revenge. Immediately, there is another murder, designed to lure Inspector Buckley into a false arrest. Obvious. But the film continually sows doubt. Perhaps it is too obvious. Has someone set out to trap ex-Inspector Grodman? Peter Lorre's Victor Emmric acts suspiciously (who could do it better than Peter Lorre?), shady and ambiguous. He lacks a motive. That, of course, could be the withheld clue. Joan Lorring's dance-hall girl Lottie is not clever enough to have pulled it off. But she has a suspiciously close relationship with the clever Victor. The last red herring cemented my uncertainty. An innocent man sits on death row. Grodman makes an apparently sincere effort to save him. He goes off to find Lady Frieda, the missing alibi witness. Perhaps he is sincere after all. He's not the murderer. Or is this the culmination of his murderous plot? Now, just as a guiltless man is hanged, he plans to spring the exculpatory witness to humiliate the rival who had humiliated him. He finds Lady Frieda. We see him introduced alone into her residence. He returns. Lady Frieda is dead. What? Did he kill her, poison perhaps? She would inevitably have finished her vacation and provided the alibi. The investigation would reopen, with potentially fatal results for Mr. Grodman. Which is it, sincerity or deviltry? Sydney Greenstreet remains opaque. We cannot tell. None of the possibilities breaks the chain of logic. Inspector Buckley, moreover, is no fool. His solution to the locked-door puzzle is perfectly plausible. The final solution borrows, though the timing is reversed, from "The Mystery of the Yellow Room." There is one possible flaw. But it is not insurmountable. Grodman breaks down the door. Mrs. Benson runs to get a cop. The police will have arrived to find a freshly-killed corpse, the blood uncongealed, perhaps still bleeding, and Grodman alone with the body. Still, one could allow that the murder had occurred and the murderer escaped, however he did, just before Grodman's arrival. Two of Jack the Ripper's victims were discovered within minutes of being killed. In once case Jack may have been there still, mingling in the crowd that gathered. Another victim he killed in daylight, with people waking up all around.
Don Siegel in his debut directs the story straightforwardly, which is essential in a murder mystery. No need even to mention Lorre and Greenstreet. At this point they knew each other's moves and style to perfection; they mesh seamlessly. The other actors ably support them. Rosalind Ivan does a sort of Una O'Connor role, flighty and panicky. She and Joan Lorring must have enjoyed a reunion, having played mother and daughter opposite Bette Davis in "The Corn is Green." Then there's Morton Lowry. Just seeing his name in the credits, you know he will become either the murderer or the murderer's victim. For such a fairly handsome actor, he seldom played pleasant parts: the sadistic school teacher in John Ford's "How Green Was My Valley," Hurd Hatfield's dissolute acolyte, sunk in an abyss of absinthe in "The Portrait of Dorian Gray," Stapleton the murderer, manipulator of the hell-hound unmasked by Basil Rathbone in "The Hound of the Baskervilles." Joan Lorring stands out. She was a tremendously talented actress. Why didn't she become a star? She almost won an Oscar for "The Corn is Green." She's one of those actresses, like Luise Rainer, who could truly have said, "Hollywood didn't know what to do with me." Maybe it's because she was schooled in radio, taught to be subtle, like fellow misfits Agnes Moorehead, Mercedes McCambridge, Everett Sloane or, in this movie, George Coulouris. She turned to the stage and had brilliant success. (In "Three Strangers" she plays a love scene with Peter Lorre. I cannot think of another actress who got to do that. For the only time in movie history Lorre gets the girl; she's the girl.) If you must see a murder mystery film, see this one.
The Sea Wolf (1941)
One of the best. Not just an action movie but a beautiful film.
I gave "The Sea Wolf" 10 of 10. I wish I could give it more. It is, my wife says with detachment, a male movie, the kind men and boys like: adventure, action, lots of people hitting each other. I disagree. Since she declines to watch it, we leave it at that. I do disagree. "The Sea Wolf" is one of the most beautiful movies I know. It is also, in my opinion, the most beautiful film Michael Curtiz did. And I include "Casablanca" in that assessment. Curtiz must have seen in Robert Rossen's brilliant script loneliness and desolation. In the story of men, and a woman, wandering on a soundless ocean under the hand of a tyrannical master, he must have felt a return to his roots in the cinema of German expressionism. He found a kindred spirit in cinematographer Sol Polito, Italian master of German expressionism. The scenes are breathtakingly evocative, from the first shots: a fog-enshrouded street, a carriage passes, dissolute people laugh, a policeman's whistle, a running man, to the last image, George and Ruth drift toward an island of salvation, from the first words as the pickpocket's hand is stopped ("If you find anything in there, brother, I'll share it with you") to the end ("I knew it was a trick, I knew it"). Water is life. Here it is death. Water, not the sea, is the metaphor. Ruth and van Weyden are hauled into the "Ghost," ship of doom. A burst of water wipes the screen. Van Weyden awakes aboard ship. Our first sight is a crash of water, then another, against the porthole. He reaches the deck. He sees water hurled upon a dying man, the first mate, again and again. Cooky opens another porthole. Water drenches him. Water in the lifeboat is poisoned. As the "Ghost" sinks, water does not rise but rushes down on Wolf Larsen.
Who could ask for a sadistic captain better than Edward G. Robinson? He brings out the character's complexity. Wolf Larsen understands that the world has warped him. Yet he embraces his distorted life. Who could play a deliberate, intellectual character better than Alexander Knox (Hollywood's Woodrow Wilson)? His monologues, reciting from memory passages of an unwritten book, are perfect. Who could do an anguished, desperate woman better than Ida Lupino? - her cry, "you should have let me die," her plea, "leave me; I'm a jinx." It is amazing how she could hold her own, the only woman in an entire cast of men all playing blackguards and misfits. John Garfield is at his most intense. When he struggles against Wolf Larsen's oppression ("we're not nobodies, we're somebodies"), I see him confronting the blacklist that finally killed him. And there's fellow future-victim Howard da Silva alongside. Barry Fitzgerald must have relished his role, relieved of playing lovable tipsy Irishmen. He gets his teeth into this one, a low, lascivious, murderous scoundrel. He bites it, chews it, and spits it out. Gene Lockhart gets a rare chance to let loose. Stanley Ridges, Francis McDonald, Ralf Harolde, Louis Mason (noticeable in a bit part as always), among the best, most versatile character actors, fill out the cast. All of it plays to the accompaniment of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score full of leitmotifs. Four portentous notes evoke the advent of Wolf Larsen's ship of evil. Rising and falling arpeggios signal the onset of his migraines and blindness. A forlorn theme trails Lupino and Garfield.
Two scenes, for me, are incomparable. Early in the film the small boat carrying Garfield to the "Ghost" disappears into the fog. A ferry, the "Martinez" bound presumably for that city, emerges from the right. The music shifts, sharp, jarring triplets over ominous chords. We see the ferry's wheelhouse. Captain and pilot peer anxiously ahead. The camera films them lit from below. The foghorn wails desperately. Alexander Knox stands on deck. Disaster impends somewhere. I know it was all done in Warner Brothers' water tank and with models. No "Titanic," even the high-tech epic, does it as well. The other scene - I say this sincerely - is one of the greatest moments ever filmed. George lies beaten in the hold. Ruth enters. Backlit, she stands framed against the open door. Backlighting follows her into the darkness. Behind it, Korngold lays a soft curtain of sound, a simple, melancholy theme first in the harmonica then taken up by strings: a pick-up, two quarter notes, two eighths, quarter; no more. Garfield and Lupino sit facing. The camera moves closer, then closer. Finally, Lupino's fraught face fills the screen. She lifts despairing eyes: "to be free, to be let alone, to live in peace, if only for a little while." Garfield's face replaces hers. Motion freezes, for a second. The screen goes black. A macho adventure, as my wife says? Perhaps. But it is a film of transcendent grace, a product of transcendent genius.
Somewhere in the Night (1946)
A compelling, intelligent noir. Watch for Josephine Hutchinson.
Amnesia. Always a promising premise. Protagonist wakes up in an unexpected place. Who am I? Where am I? Not the most original plot device (think "Random Harvest") but a good one. In this case, since it is a film noir, the protagonist awakes to a sordid affair of theft and murder. "Somewhere in the Night" (I take the title to indicate the night, or fog, of the hero's mind) is far better than the average noir. The characters are developed, not cardboard cut-outs. They hold your interest. The plot holds your attention through its twists and turns. And those twists are among the twistiest. We know from the beginning that the protagonist is innocent. It's not hard to guess well before the end who the villain will be. Once the dialogue in a noir starts insisting that someone is a sterling fellow it's a dead giveaway; he's the heavy. Still, Joseph Mankiewicz's deft direction and an excellent cast make it work.
It is majorly twisty. I found myself left with a dizzy feeling: wait a minute; what happened? does it make sense? let me think. George Taylor is Larry Cravat. I get it. We find that out near the end. That's the big twist. But it was obvious much earlier. George, as he still calls himself, has one clue to his identity. An unknown embittered woman had written him a cursing letter. He still has it. The writing is that of Christy's deceased friend Mary whom Larry Cravat, not George Taylor, had left at the altar. Obviously, she sent it to Larry Cravat. Q.E.D. Well, George is not observant. All the rest hinges on the fact that nobody can recognize Larry Cravat. Larry had been a private detective for years. He must have had dealings with the police. Yet the police cannot recognize him? He remains the suspect of an open murder case. Two men were at the scene of the crime. The police know that one was Larry Cravat. How? The eyewitness, Michael Conroy, must have provided them a description of a known individual. How else could investigators have identified him? Yet they do not recognize him when he returns? Then there's Phyllis. She actually has met Larry Cravat. Yet she is dumbfounded when he says "look; here I am." It can only make sense if we assume Larry's face underwent massive reconstructive surgery. That makes "Somewhere in the Night" a kissing cousin of Bogart's "Dark Passage" that came out the next year. (Houseley Stevenson, who plays the plastic surgeon in that one, shows up here as the demented Michael Conroy.) But in Bogart's case we are in no doubt that his appearance has drastically changed. Here that crucial fact is obscured. We do see Larry/George's hospitalized face heavily bandaged. But there's absolutely no talk of plastic surgery. Apart from one lightning-quick line near the end - "you know, my face got pushed around at Okinawa" - that puzzle-solver disappears. No, we didn't know that the face had been so indescribably "pushed around." It's a venerable Agatha Christie trick, withholding a key tidbit until the end. But it is rather unhelpful to the viewer who's struggling to pull the plot elements together.
Passing by those quibbles, one thing keeps it afloat, the acting. John Hodiak, as always, is solid ("Lifeboat" is one of my favorites). Nancy Guild does a good job with a role that seems to have been written for Lizabeth Scott. The great German actor Fritz Kortner puts a nice touch to a role that seems to have been written for Walter Slezak. Any film with Richard Conte is worth a watch, just for Richard Conte. Margo Woode as the floozy Phyllis stands out. She invests a standard role with a playful, half-mocking insouciance ("Oh. We're going to have repartee!"). She's a cut-rate femme fatale working for a second-rate con artist. She plays it perfectly. Her seduction, laced with farcical French flourishes ("just this and that and quelque chose"), has the smell of cheap perfume all about it, as it should. A marvelous crew of character actors helps out: Harry Morgan, Whit Bissell, Jeff Corey, Louis Mason. Sheldon Leonard does a semi-comic turn. One actress by herself and one scene make the whole film worth watching. Josephine Hutchinson had a tremendous career on stage. I cannot understand why she faded out of the movies. Perhaps the studios felt her presence was too risky, given her long, unapologetic lesbian romance with Eva la Gallienne. Or maybe she was just too good, impossible to type-cast. She gives a taste of what Hollywood passed up. Her one scene as the lonely, unloved Elizabeth Conroy is unforgettable.: "Dawns are always grey ... nights are black, and they're all empty." She does it simply, without affectation, without manufactured tears. In the end, hers is the one character who sticks in the mind. For a moment she makes us relax from the effort of following the labyrinthine plot and just applaud a great piece of acting. She makes us hope the character will come back for another scene. She makes us regret that it doesn't. Catch "Somewhere in the Night." It's worth it. Sit up and watch carefully when George or Larry by whatever name knocks on Elizabeth's door.
Easy Living (1937)
An underappreciated gem.
According to legend, Edmund Gwenn on his deathbed greeted a visitor with this line: "Dying is easy, comedy is hard." It's apocryphal. But "Easy Living" makes comedy look easy. This is hands down one of the best screwball comedies of Hollywood's golden age of screwball comedies. It's heavier on the slapstick than some, but with more of a serious underlying message than others. "My Man Godfrey" meets "Bringing Up Baby." I imagine - not being an actor, I can't pretend to expertise - that Edmund Gwenn was correct. Comedy must be hard, to get the timing, the inflection, the spirit just right. That's judging by how many dramatic actors and actresses never even tried it. The great ones could pull it off, Stanwyck, Hepburn, James Cagney and Bette Davis (I'm thinking of "The Bride Came C.O.D.") switching seamlessly from melodrama to merriment. Jean Arthur and Edward Arnold were masters at it. It is uncanny how Arnold could take the same character and play it for laughs as he does here or in "You Can't Take it With You," or turn it into a menacing villain ("Meet John Doe," "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"), and be equally convincing. We might also include the marvelous Mary Nash, who did this light comedy then immediately tormented Shirley Temple's Heidi back to back.
Of course, a comedy cannot succeed without comedic actors. "Easy Living" deploys the best, Luis Alberni, Franklin Pangborn, Esther Dale, Robert Greig, and lets them loose. The movie's classic moment is the automat scene. I'm old enough to remember eating in automats in NYC. The movie gets the ambiance exactly right. (I think some entrepreneur ought to bring automats back. They were restaurants. You could eat a meal, not gobble junk - Big Mac with cheese prefab chicken extra crispy or extra grease.) Be that as it may, food fight scenes are a tricky business. How many pies in the face are excess? How many pratfalls are too many? Mitchell Leisen does this one superbly. It's hilarious without becoming tedious. Notice how, with people slipping and sliding and pratfalling all around her, Jean Arthur sits calmly eating her dinner. She's hungry. I do think, really, that the film's quieter comedy is its best. The scene in the limo where Mary completely befuddles the great banker calculating the yearly rate of monthly interest is so right on. "No, No. Listen. If a farmer had 100 cows ..." It had me laughing intermittently for the rest of the film. An hour later in the movie J.B. is still confounded. He starts to dictate a letter to Lillian the secretary (played wonderfully by Esther Dale) trying again to solve the conundrum. He keeps getting interrupted by the stock market ticker. The interruptions inject themselves into the dictation. Or take the scene where Mary and John rest head to head on the sofa. She turns to find him fast asleep. The little look Jean Arthur gives the camera, half laughing half pitying, is pure perfection.
Finally, there is the message. It is a cross between a screwball and a social comedy, a touch of "The Devil and Miss Jones." Twice Mary is reduced to her last dime. She apologizes to the piggy bank before breaking it. She can't afford a nickel at the automat. She can't afford $7 rent for her cramped apartment. Contrast that living space with the hotel suite (or should I say suit?). It is the most extravagant mass of rooms I can recall in any movie. First drawing room, second drawing room, third drawing room; you need a roadmap not to get lost in one penthouse. There was really no need to design such over-the-top opulence, except to drive home the point, the penury of average people and the excesses of the 1% at the top. Notice how, with luxury on all sides, Louis Louis mistakenly opens a door and a ladder falls out of a little closet, just as a ladder or a wall-bed might fall of the wall of a jammed tenement. What is it doing in this place? It's a reminder of the real world. The movie mocks the imbecilities of market capitalism. John Ball's offhand joke, attributed to his father, sets off a selling frenzy that nearly crashes the market. I remember in 1996 Alan Greenspan suggested that stocks were indulging in "irrational exuberance" and with that one remark the market wiped out a billion dollars in assets.
Mitchell Leisen took a lot of heat from screenwriters, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder ("Hold Back the Dawn") who accused him of spoiling their scripts. He didn't spoil anything. His misfortune was to direct the scripts of writers who also wanted to be directors. Mitchell Leisen is undeservedly overlooked. He merits much more recognition, especially for gems like "Easy Living."
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
Kirk Douglas' first, and finest hour.
Of all Kirk Douglas' many films, and I have seen many, this one, his first, is my first choice. Of all his acting, this, I think, his first turn, is most impressive. At the very start of his Hollywood career, he had not yet been typed into the tough-guy, villain ("I Walk Alone," "Out of the Past"), or hero. Walter O'Neil is vulnerable, conflicted, troubled. Kirk Douglas catches the character perfectly. Some comments wonder that he could play so unmanly a role. Walter is not a weakling. He is not, despite Sam's repeated assertion, a "scared little boy." Yes, he has been browbeaten, first by his father and then his wife. He takes to drink. But he shows force and determination, both in his boyhood scenes and as an adult. He takes immediate and violent action as soon as he encounters Sam's return. He has committed reprehensible acts, covering up a murder, prosecuting an innocent man. He is not cowed but guilt-ridden. Guilt, not scared-little-boy fear, accounts for his shakiness, his taking refuge in the bottle. He loves Martha. She torments him. For that love, and for what he has done, in vain, to seek her love, he hates himself. In the end, he kills what he loves. Then he kills what he hates. Kirk Douglas played an edgy, troubled character again in "Detective Story," but not with such nuance as he does here. This one is his masterpiece.
Oddly, it's a shame Kirk Douglas is so good in this film. He overshadows the others. And they too are magnificent. Barbara Stanwyck also embraces a complex character. Martha is headstrong. She's fiercely single-minded. She's determined to be herself, a Smith not an Ivers. She craves power not so much for her own sake but as revenge for the power her grandmother wielded over her. In the adolescent episodes Janis Wilson endows Martha with a terrible ferocity. Martha feels no guilt. Her obsessions have burned her out. "I've lived inside myself for so long," she tells Sam, "I'm desperate for air and room to breathe." Once the past returns, she cannot endure the present. For a moment, as Sam leaves, she tries to go on. "Things will be different now between you and me," she turns to Walter. "Just like nothing ever happened." Then she realizes the futility. Her last look as she guides the gun to a fatal position on her body speaks the tragedy of Martha's life.
In the supporting cast, Janis Wilson as young Martha stands out. She is the perfect complement; she hands Stanwyck a character already formed. Roman Bohnen as Walter's father manages to be both obsequious and overbearing, which is quite a trick. A sparkling crew of character actors is on board to lighten the drama and keep it grounded in humanity: Frank Orth as the jocular hotel clerk, Tom Fadden as the cab driver, Olin Howland in the newspaper morgue, and the ever-dependable Ann Doran who does a marvelous bit as Walter's secretary Miss St. John. Van Heflin deftly underplays his role. Passions surround him. He remains detached, with an underlying air of cynicism that makes his character, like the others, flawed and ambiguous. He dismisses the past. Lot's wife, he says, looked back. She turned to salt. But when he learns the past, he seizes a chance for blackmail. Lizabeth Scott, often underrated, is memorable. Toni Marachek would seem to be a simple role, lost lady in distress. She adds a deeper dimension. There is a pervading loneliness. "I'm so lonesome I like to have died," she says. But there's also a stubborn hopefulness. Adversity has not extinguished that flame. She waits for Sam when waiting seems pointless. At her lowest moments, we still read hopefulness in her eyes. This was Lizabeth Scott's strongest character type. She did it splendidly in "Dead Reckoning" with Bogart, with Dick Powell in "Pitfall," and again with Kirk Douglas in "I Walk Alone."
"The Strange Love of Martha Ivers" is a story of fate. The past, out of darkness and rain, returns inescapable. What if Sam had not run away before the murder, if he had not years later crashed his car on the outskirts of town ("the road curved and I didn't")? But it had to be. He had to run. The road had to curve. Martha, Walter and Sam are caught in a deadly spiral. Lewis Milestone spins that story relentlessly. His pacing and Robert Rossen's screenplay never let it bog down in its twists and turns. Victor Milner's cinematography is perfect, from the opening scenes, thunderstorm and blackout, to the final image, Martha and Walter's ironic Liebestod. The climax is unexpected. Yet it's inevitable. It's a film you need to see more than once. The pieces fall into place.
Back Street (1941)
The story is annoying, but Sullavan and Boyer rescue it.
Three great actresses, each in turn, Irene Dunne in 1931, Margaret Sullavan ten years later and Susan Hayward twenty years after that, took a shot at the role of Rae Smith, the protagonist of Fanny Hurst's popular novel "Back Street." Each tried her best to make sense of a perplexing character. Of the three actresses, Margaret Sullavan comes closest to putting it across. It's almost not fair to include Susan Hayward in the trio because for her the role was drastically rewritten. The others play more faithful versions. Rae Smith is a - I was about to say unique, but I cannot claim an encyclopedic literary knowledge - let us say, rare character. Scandalizing women abound in literature and film. None (at least I can't come up with any) are quite like Rae Smith. She is not a coquette like Manon, or a professional courtesan like Nana. She's not a poor girl seduced by the deviltry of a powerful man, like Faust's Margaret. She's not a conniver like Becky Sharp. She doesn't latch on to an otherwise intelligent man to destroy him, as Marlene Dietrich's Lola Lola in "The Blue Angel," or Arletty's Garance in "Les Enfants du Paradis," or Bette Davis' Mildred in "Of Human Bondage." She is a pure American type: an otherwise intelligent woman who lets a destructive man latch on to her. She ruins her life for love of a man who does not ruin his life for love of her. By the time Susan Hayward's turn came around that idea had become too grating. The story was twisted 180 degrees. Her Rae Smith refuses to surrender her life or her career for her man. He ruins his respectability, and loses his life, for her. That leaves Irene Dunne and Margaret Sullavan. Neither benefited from an indulgent screenplay. They had to struggle with the schizophrenia of their character. Rae is clearly possessed of a gifted and independent spirit. She blazes her way in a male-dominated world. Then she squelches that spirit, renounces her freedom, sacrifices all to the tedium of being a kept woman.
Why? Why does Rae efface herself, consent to live a life of clandestinity, no career, no children, no family, no friends except the man who enters, occasionally, for his pleasure? Margaret Sullavan comes closest to making sense of it all. She had an incomparable asset. Only one thing can plausibly account for Rae's self-destructive obsession. Only one thing can make her, every time she tries to break clear, act like a ball on a rubber string and bounce back to the stick that hits her. The man at the other end of the string must be a supremely attractive force. Irene Dunne had John Boles. He was a good actor and attractive in his way. (I, if I had been the casting director, would have switched him out for George Meeker who played against type as the goofy boyfriend Kurt.) Susan Hayward had John Gavin; we won't go there. Margaret Sullavan had Charles Boyer. Nobody among Hollywood's leading men could be more exotically romantic. Nobody could be more insidiously romantic. His ingratiating manner, his voice with its whiff of the foreign, easily projected a fatal attraction. It could hold in thrall otherwise strong-willed heroines: Ingrid Bergman in "Gaslight," Bette Davis in "All This and Heaven Too," Olivia de Havilland in "Hold Back the Dawn." I'm sure Margaret Sullavan saw that quality. Reportedly, she was so eager to have Boyer play opposite her in "Back Street" that she willingly yielded him the top billing. She was wise. Walter Saxel is a cad. He must be a mesmerizing cad, to imprison her, to hold her believably under his spell. Nobody could make a cad hypnotic better than Charles Boyer. Nobody could play a tormented heroine ("Three Comrades," "Cry Havoc") better than Margaret Sullavan (except perhaps Ida Lupino). She turns it on here full force, in her desperate look as she watches the steamboat carry Walter away up the Ohio, in her frantic reaction when she's hijacked by Frank Jenks' loathsome lothario, in her forlorn features as she sits in her paid-for hotel room after Walter's calamitous demise. Put that pair together before the camera, have them sit against a haystack and talk about the clouds. It makes even a story like "Back Street" work. It is unashamedly a tearjerker. It grates against modern sensibilities. But the chemistry of Sullavan and Boyer lifts it, though it takes some effort, past those liabilities. "Back Street" is worth a look for two great actors at their peak. If only Rae hadn't missed that steamboat ...
I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
A wonderful, haunting masterpiece, in the mold of The Turn of the Screw.
Before there were horror movies there were horror books, gothic novels. Two of the greatest were written by women, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Gothic tales came in two varieties: those in which the horror (Frankenstein) is real, and those in which the supernatural (Udolpho's haunted castle) is only seeming but resolves into a natural cause. Henry James in The Turn of the Screw created a third variation. Is the supernatural imagined or real? We never know. Val Lewton, better than anybody, brought that variation to films, his trilogy of fantasy. Is the were-cat in "Cat People" real? Or is it a figment in the disturbed mind of its alter ego Irena? Does Irena's ghost return in "Curse of the Cat People?" Or is it a little girl's imaginary friend conjured up out of old photos of a beautiful woman and a name overheard in whispered conversation? Is there a zombie in "I Walked with a Zombie?" Or is it a woman whose illness has affected her brain? She has not died, the doctor points out. How can she be a walking dead? She doesn't bleed when stabbed. How can she be alive? It is a question of faith. The grim figurehead, perpetually covered with dripping water as if with blood, represents St. Sebastian. Shot by arrows, he died. But he lived. His nurse, St. Irene, saved him - resurrected him - until he died again. (Screenwriter Curt Siodmak might as well have named Frances Dee's nurse Betsy Irene. Maybe better not. Too obvious.)
The beauty of these films is to leave all unanswered. Wake up from a waking dream and believe what you want. Perhaps the spectral aberrations are meant to be real. I prefer to see them as projections, the products of powerful, disturbed emotions. In "I Walked with a Zombie" they are manifestations of guilt and isolation. White people on the tiny Caribbean island are the dominant caste. They own the land. Their ancestors had brought the slaves to work that land, as they still do though no longer slaves. The whites continue to live apart. Their villa is called "The Fort." The sinister slave-ship figurehead, Ti-Misery, still presides over it. The memory of inherited guilt and sense of present isolation have twisted Paul Holland. He lives in a tropical paradise. He sees death and decay. "Everything dies here," he tells Betsy. The ocean glows phosphorescent. He thinks of the putrefying residue of a million millions of plankton. Remembrance of past suffering haunts him. A baby is born. Black people lament. "The misery and pain of slavery," he says. "They weep when a baby is born and make merry at a burial." Mrs. Rand, a missionary's widow, should repugn the native belief. She joins it. She prays to its god. The African faith surrounds her. It overcomes her. She calls to the sentinel Carrefour. His name means what he is, the Crossroads between two worlds, civilization and exaltation. She crosses over. The zombie is her projection. She herself, she believes, has conjured it.
The acting is superb all around, Frances Dee (her opening voice-over narration is particularly affecting), James Ellison, Tom Conway, Theresa Harris. Edith Barrett, as always, stands out. She adds a flicker of that mental instability, especially in her confession scene, that she did so memorably in "Ladies in Retirement." It's sad to recall her own later similar suffering. The most striking performance - no facetiousness intended - in my opinion is that of Christine Gordon as the catatonic Jessica Holland. I know. What performance? you ask. She has only to adopt a look and maintain it for the movie. Yes. But what a look! Watch her face closely, as she waits immobile at the voodoo ceremony, as she stands blocked at the iron gate. It is not the cliched look. There is not a staring, transfixed gaze, as of one whose mind has been hijacked, or mesmerized. It is the look of one who has no mind - totally blank, not possessed or bewitched but empty. That requires genius to achieve, to seem to have erased every thought, even the thought of having erased every thought. I can only imagine the auditions for the part. "Now turn to the camera, Miss X, and let me see you empty your mind." How many screen tests must they have done before finding one actress who could do it? Her head slightly cocked to the side, eyes subtly downcast, her features supremely, unutterably vacant, voicelessly, she steals the film, even from Edith Barrett.
The whole film, from the opening shot, figures moving along a moonlit beach, to the dreamlike image of two women walking at midnight through windswept sugar cane fields, is a masterpiece. Wesley enters the sea holding Jessica's dead body. I see The Turn of the Screw, the governess cradling a dead boy. What killed little Miles? Was Jessica already dead when she died? We'll never know.
Three Comrades (1938)
Badly overdone, and also nonsensical.
Why did Hollywood so often have such a handsome fellow as Robert Taylor attract such sickly, suicidal women? There's Garbo in "Camille" (terminally ill). There's Vivian Leigh in "Waterloo Bridge" (suicidal). Here there's Margaret Sullavan (terminally ill and simultaneously suicidal). I suppose that's what you get when you act in tearjerkers. I have nothing against tearjerkers. I love "Camille." I love "Wuthering Heights." But this one is over the top. And it doesn't make sense. Three young men are mustered out of WWI. They seem to be educated. All were officers, one with the rank of captain. Yet the best they plan in civilian life is plebeian, to be mechanics and taxi-drivers? Don't blame economic depression. They don't even aspire to anything else. Three dull musketeers. Along comes a fourth, Margaret Sullavan's Patricia. But she's no d'Artagnan. She's more like Pard, the jinxed little dog in "High Sierra." She marries one but hangs around all three, doing absolutely nothing. She fits right in. None of them do anything. Robert Young's Gottfried has some bewildering political convictions - Henry Hull's harangue is a masterpiece of gobbledygook: "There is a cure for all your ills! Find it within yourselves!" - to occupy himself. None of the rest have a life. Even their diet is boring. They eat the same porkchops at the same restaurant every night. Franchot Tone's Otto seems to be a pleasant guy. That's all I can say about him. Robert Taylor's Erich? Go ahead. Name one feature, one dimension that makes his character interesting. Pat spends her time coughing pathetically and bemoaning her uselessness (which is true). She possesses a grand piano, but she can't play it. I don't know why Margaret Sullavan got an Oscar nomination for this. She is much better in "The Mortal Storm" and much, much better (and also far more convincing as a dying woman) in 1943's "Cry, Havoc."
Then, the nonsensicalities: Gottfried is trapped, an armed mob clamoring for his death. Otto rushes to rescue him. Wait. First, he must take time out to buy flowers and kiss Pat goodbye at the train station. That's the way to prioritize, Otto. Of course, he returns to the siege too late. Exit Gottfried. Pat won't tell Erich that she has health issues. Otherwise he might be alert and careful not to overtax her. Is he ever surprised when she fails to do a chin-up and falls almost fatally ill! She won't go to the sanitarium. She goes. Apparently, an expensive operation can cure her. She does it. She's cured, if she rests a few weeks in bed. Great. She can live a normal life, find a job, contribute to the prosperity of the menage a trois (Gottfried is dead). No. Now, AFTER the operation, AFTER she has forced them to sell their livelihood, now she decides to make it all pointless by committing suicide, getting out of bed. I give up. The two survivors go off to Brazil or somewhere. Good. We won't have to hear about their further adventures. Give me "Wuthering Heights" any day. I won't even bother about the film's political cowardice, not daring to label Nazi mobs as what they are. I understand the studio's fear. HUAC came into being that very year, 1938. Its target? Anyone connected to the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.
The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
Not a haunted but a haunting masterpiece.
Haunting is the only word adequate to describe this film, haunting in the sense of a haunting melody or poetic verse, something that takes possession and lingers in the memory. This movie is a haunting melody. It lingers. It sticks in the memory. I can only compare it to Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter." I'm not sure which is the better, the more haunting film.
Sometimes, I read, "Curse of the Cat People" is faulted for being not a sequel. It doesn't continue its story. That is true. It transcends its story. The first story has ended. There is no continuation. There is a result. There is a consequence, the deserved result of what has happened. As you sow so shall you reap. Oliver and Alice in the first chapter have sown heartbreak. They have taken Irena, a fragile, lost woman and broken her, left her to be devoured by her fantasies. Divine justice sends them a fragile, lost child. Their callousness continues. It devours a delicate being. Oliver cannot, in his egotism, understand or empathize with his dream-filled daughter any more than he could his first wife. That wife died a victim of his disregard and betrayal, and Alice's connivance. Here divine mercy intervenes to save a second victim from that fate. Once again there is an element of the supernatural. Again, that element is tenuous. Was there ever truly a were-cat in "Cat People?" Or was it merely in Irena's disturbed mind? Does Irena really return "from great darkness and deep peace" to comfort and rescue a little girl? We never know surely. (Amy has found photos of the late Irena; she may have heard her name mentioned in whispered conversations.) I prefer to think that both specters, the vengeful black cat and the ghostly intercessor, are not entities but fantasies. They live in the minds of tormented people. Oliver and Alice? In the end, Oliver asks Amy, "Do you still see Irena?" "Yes." "I see her too." He doesn't. But he does see his error. He understands his cruelty. "Curse of the Cat People" is a fairytale, a fairytale of the gentlest type. Even the wicked repent and are redeemed.
Screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen had even the genius to add another plot, another redemption. Mrs. Farren (Julia Dean) and her daughter Barbara (Elizabeth Russell) are trapped, condemned to keep terrible, tortured company. Mrs. Farren is consumed by unreality. Her daughter searches for a spark of affection. Lewis Allen's ghost story "The Uninvited" came out in the same year, 1944 (also with Elizabeth Russell, who posed for the portrait of the benevolent ghost). There a ghostly guardian protects an innocent girl. Here Irena's spirit, not a ghost, protects Amy when she wanders into that malign menage. The old lady dies. Her spurned daughter glares: "You have robbed me even of my mother's last moments." Amy, on the stairs, looks down at the anguished figure. She sees her become her imaginary friend. She runs to embrace her. In that moment, in that embrace, Barbara too is redeemed.
Ann Carter deserved a juvenile Oscar, or at least some of the recognition accorded Peggy Ann Garner for "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and Claude Jarman for "The Yearling." Simone Simon is, if possible, even more radiant than in the first film. Elizabeth Russell, for me, almost steals the movie. Her quiet movement, her downcast look half-despairing half-malevolent, her desperate voice, "but I AM your daughter," are heart-wrenchingly done. Val Lewton and DeWitt Bodeen turned a "horror movie" follow-up into something ethereal. The studio was dismayed. They did it anyway. Publicity posters picture a snarling black panther preparing audiences for a dose of terror. Audiences must have left bewildered. The Christmas Eve scene alone is unforgettable. Inside the house carolers sing. Only Amy hears Irena's thin, brittle voice outside: "Il est ne (accent aigu), le divin enfant." ("He is born, the holy child.") Irena and Amy stand together in the snow. The garden is transformed into a shimmering paradise. It is, in my mind, the greatest Christmas movie ever made. Irena's carol invokes the coming of the savior. Amy runs through darkness into danger. She is saved. Barbara is saved. Even the unfeeling Oliver sees the light. And perhaps the lost Irena finds repose.
Crime of Passion (1956)
An intriguing noir. There's a message in it somewhere, but it's far from clear.
Question: what other 1950s proto-feminist film featured Sterling Hayden and, in a supporting role, Royal Dano? Answer, of course: "Johnny Guitar," inimitable classic with its powerful women and fumbling men, its lesbian undercurrent and all-female shootout. "Crime of Passion" is not a classic. It has no lesbian undercurrent. But it does offer a powerful woman (Barbara Stanwyck). She struggles against the stifling male dominion in which she is bound until she commits a passionate crime for which she will pay. At least I think that is the idea of "Crime of Passion." But it works out that idea, if that is the idea, so bizzarely that it ends up defeating its own purpose and denying what it seems to be trying to say. Its attitude is so disconcerting that it's worth watching. It's worth showing, as a moment in women's history - a timid step forward and a scurrying retreat.
Everything revolves around Barbara Stanwyck's Kathy. She is a working woman, liberated, independent, self-sufficient. A troglodytic male (Royal Dano) says she'd be happier if she quit work, got married, made babies and cooked. She is indignant. But no. Evidently, he was right. She is unhappy in her independence. She's desperate to grab a man. (Why is not clear.) She's so desperate that she grabs Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden) after barely 48 hours' acquaintance and one brief dinner out. She gives up her career. She spurns a prestigious job offer in New York. She settles in as the stand-behind-your-man wife of an unambitious cop (who seems to have no understanding of or interest in her mental welfare). She's bored beyond belief. She can't endure the hollow, useless bourgeois existence. The men play small-stakes poker and ignore their wives who bustle about chatting inanely while the men ignore them. She nearly collapses agonized. So, what does she do? Does she tell him, "Bill, I need to work again; this suburban housewife routine is killing me," or words to that effect? No. She decides she will fulfill her life by fulfilling his. Then she can stand behind her man and endure the same deadly insipid cocktail parties, but he'll be a bigger man to be behind. That's it. All the rest involves her intrigue, using the usual feminine wiles, seducing the chief of detectives (Raymond Burr) to secure Bill advancement. The chief refuses to advance Bill. She shoots him. She kill him so clumsily, even though she is supposedly a clever, intelligent woman, that we can only assume she is now insane. Even I, who am not a master criminal, knew immediately that the cops would trace the gun she stole from their property room. She walks off distraught in her husband's custody, presumably to the gas chamber, or perhaps to a padded cell.
What does it mean? Is it a statement about the vacuity of women's lives? Their existence is to stifled it drives them to derangement. Or is it a warning? Women beware; stay in your place, or else look what happens. Maybe that confusion is the point. The buttoned-down '50s were not yet the go-go '60s. A betwixt and between movie reflects a time of transition. In any case, it is a strange little noir. If you can figure it out, I'd like to know.
Impact (1949)
A good, entertaining film, but not a great one. Watch it for Helen Walker.
This is an enjoyable, diverting film noir, though I'm not sure it qualifies as a film noir; it's more like a melodrama such as "They Drive by Night," which also involves a wrongly accused protagonist framed by a scheming woman who's undone in a courtroom scene. But, unlike "They Drive by Night," something just doesn't make it great. I was curious to see what other comments made of the film, and I find a fair number that share reservations. Some put a finger on the acting. I disagree. The acting is very good all around. Some fault the plot. I disagree. I am fairly picky when a movie or a book presents a twisty plot but spoils it with holes or incongruities. There are incongruities, but no real holes. Yes, the police could have used dental records to make sure of the identity of the burnt corpse (the Soviets did that famously a few years before to identify the burnt remains of Adolph Hitler). But why would they do it? Who else but Walter Williams will have been driving alone in Walter Williams' car? If it's not the acting or the plot, what is the problem? I think the weakness lies in the love story. I don't object to a love story inserted in a film noir, or a melodrama. This one doesn't work. It takes up a lot of screen time, and it just doesn't work.
There are, in fact, two love stories essential to the plot. Neither of them works. We have, or course, the love between Brian Donlevy's Walter and Ella Raines' Marsha Peters. Equally essential is the relationship between Helen Walker's Irene and Tony Barrett's Jim Torrence. We don't learn their backstory, but their attraction is a key element. Irene plots her husband's murder not just to acquire his money but to share it and her life with her lover. That motivation leads her to make her fatal mistakes - rushing out to meet him on the very night of the presumed murder, and beginning to write him a heedless telegram - rather than waiting calmly for him to contact her. Tony Barrett acts suitably sinister. (He was very good as the first murder victim in one of my favorites, 1947's "Born to Kill.") But the character needs more. It needs someone with raw male magnetism. Why does Irene find him so irresistible as to commit murder to get him? We need someone like John Garfield in "Out of the Fog," or even a younger Brian Donlevy in one of his villainous roles. That love story's weakness we might overlook. The other one is the problem. Ella Raines plays a lithe, vivacious young woman, prematurely a widow. She has spunk, trying to run her own business. She has verve. She's part of the youthful generation. Why does she fall for the jaded, worn-down Walter? What does she see in him? Whatever it is, I don't see it. I don't mean to be sexist. There's no reason a younger woman cannot find love with an older man. But the older man needs to show us some quality that attracts youthful admiration. (In "High Sierra," teenage Joan Leslie improbably falls for the much older Humphrey Bogart. In the end, we see he was to her only a surrogate father figure.) Brian Donlevy shows no attractive quality. He is mostly withdrawn, sullen and reserved. I think the screenwriters did see the problem, wherefore they inserted a rather silly scene in which Walter chases a fire engine - like something out of "Mr.Deeds Goes to Town" - to join the local bucket brigade; there's still some life left in him. It's too little, too late. Donlevy was a fine actor, though I prefer him as a villain ("Beau Geste," "Destry Rides Again"). He's too old for this part. He lacks vitality. The central love story doesn't work. The movie bogs down. It becomes implausible.
One thing rescues the film, to the extent it can be rescued. That is Helen Walker. No one, not even Claire Trevor, did a noir villainess better. She's mesmerizing in "Nightmare Alley." She does it again here, insinuating voice and penetrating eyes, yet without overacting. Her reactions, when the cops confront her with her missing husband, when the district attorney charges her with attempted murder, are splendid. No histrionics. She is entirely human, almost sympathetic. Her half bewildered half terrified look when the district attorney recalls her to the stand is striking. The court bailiff grabs her wrist. Her simple line, "Oh, no!" (I wonder if she ad-libbed that) is delivered perfectly. Despite its flaws, "Impact" is worth watching for Helen Walker.
Cry 'Havoc' (1943)
A work of art. Far better than its companion of 1943, "So Proudly We Hailed."
Assorted characters trapped in a perilous situation, each with his or her own motivations, backstory, hopes and fears, the sort of story ("The Flight of the Phoenix," for instance) that I find irresistible. Thirteen characters, all women - men are entirely peripheral, practically stage props - find themselves trapped in a perilous situation. For that, any danger could do. Here the peril is war. Will they survive? Will they escape? We know (dramatic irony) that even if they survive they will not escape. Very little action occurs. It is not required. We understand the situation. No need to show it dramatically. The story, originally a stage play, is character driven. The situation encompasses everything. How will the women react, each according to her own character, its weaknesses and strengths? That is the strength of "Cry Havoc." That is what makes it compelling. If you prefer a war movie with non-stop action, or a wartime love story, switch to another channel.
It is a women's picture in the true sense, akin to "The Women," "Stage Door," "Tender Comrade," "Caged." Men make fleeting appearances. There is no love story. True, the unseen Lt. Holt is a presence. But he is not a focus. He serves merely to create dramatic tension, to illuminate the characters of two women, Smitty (Margaret Sullavan) and Pat (Ann Southern), whose mismatched personalities clash. The women reveal themselves as they confront the enveloping menace. Andra (Heather Angel) displays courage, Connie (Ella Raines) fear, Sue (Dorothy Morris) intensity, Flo (Marsha Hunt) serenity, Nydia (Diana Lewis) insouciance. The desperate Smitty alone and the commander Capt. Marsh (Fay Bainter), resigned to her fate, realize what is to come. Luisita, the only Philipina in the group (dancer and actress Fely Franquelli) also seems to know. Surrender approaches. Only she hides her face in despair.
We know more now than the screenwriters knew then. We know what awaits: the death march, mistreatment, possibly rape, evidence that only became apparent at the war's end. The Japanese, perhaps for that reason, but surprisingly for a war movie in wartime, are not completely demonized. They are hardly virtuous. They bomb hospitals. They strafe unoffending people bathing in a stream. Still, I have seen far worse denigration in other films. At the end a voice calls out in accented English for the women to surrender. It is not a caricatural voice, not lewd or sinister. The enemy, like the wounded soldiers and Lt. Holt, are a backdrop. The psychological focus remains on the protagonists, their characters, their response to a perilous situation.
"Cry Havoc" was not alone in 1943. Hollywood's other nurses-on-Bataan movie, "So Proudly We Hailed," came out in the same year. It cannot match "Cry Havoc." "So Proudly's" long, rambling tale, told through a flashback with a clinical, newsreel-like voiceover narration, is principally propaganda (the title gives it away) sweetened with a love story. The enemy are emphatically demonized. Men, and how to attract them, are the nurses' constant preoccupation. The story sends its heroine (Claudette Colbert) on an unblushingly sappy, soap-operatic journey. Husband is reported killed. Claudette succumbs to a morbid catatonic depression. She stares unblinking, for weeks. (It's not even clear when or how she enables herself to eat.) She wills herself to die. Of course, husband pops up alive and well, well enough to write her an interminable cloying letter, which we endure until the music mercifully swells to conclude proceedings. Nurse Olivia (Veronica Lake) hates the enemy with such implacable vehemence (her husband had the misfortune to be at Pearl Harbor) that she blows herself up to kill them, hand grenade tucked into her pocket. One film develops character, the other caricature. One, like Hitchcock's "Lifeboat" (Heather Angel was also briefly a passenger on that raft), transcends a war movie. The other remains a wartime curiosity.
M (1951)
Brilliant and subversive. More than a copycat version of the original.
The best way to appreciate this film, in fact the only way, is to forget that it is a remake. Impossible, you say? Try. Try to accept it on its own, as its own work of art. Have a hypnotist come over, wave a shiny object: "Until I click my fingers you will forget you ever saw Peter Lorre, ever saw a movie of 1931." Open your eyes and regard a masterpiece. Appreciate the cinematography of Ernest Laszlo, the acting of a great ensemble cast. There's Norman Lloyd (the saboteur in "Saboteur"), Walter Burke (the bodyguard in "All the King's Men"), Glenn Anders (immortalized in "The Lady from Shanghai"), Raymond Burr (the sadistic mobster of "Raw Deal"), not to mention Luther Adler as an alcoholic legal mouthpiece (a touch of Van Heflin in "Johnny Eager"). David Wayne (remember, forget Peter Lorre) is brilliant as the killer.
It's no secret. Many of "M's" contributors soon disappeared into the blacklist: Luther Adler, Norman Lloyd, Howard da Silva, Joseph Losey himself. Usually, it is headscratchingly hard to find subversion in the acts of the hundreds of actors, writers and directors proscribed by the Red Scare. What, in heaven's name, did John Garfield do or say in any of his films that rated him an enemy of his country? Try to figure out what in "The Best Years of our Lives" sent Ayn Rand up the wall screaming un-Americanism. Sometimes, however, Ayn had a point - a nasty, vicious point, certainly, but a point, from her point of view. "M" is one case (though she neglected to point to it). It cannot be a coincidence that, of all the actresses available, they chose Karen Morley to play the mother of the killer's first victim. She was the most unapologetic "subversive" of the day. Once the blacklist got her, she waved goodbye to Hollywood and ran for lieutenant-governor of New York as an avowed socialist. This "M" is a remake. So, it needs to follow the original. But its message doesn't follow the original. Sure, the story requires the criminals to act as cops. But it doesn't require that the cops be criminals. Violate every civil right, the detective lieutenant repeatedly recommends. Let's harass the citizenry. Beat the suspects silly. Use a playbook the SS would have approved. If only we policemen could be a law unto ourselves, he laments, we'd soon sanitize society. I don't remember that in the original. They don't do it. But nobody shuts him up. The killer had been hospitalized. He was released because hospitals are underfunded. (I lived in California when Ronald Reagan made a goal of emptying the state's mental health facilities.) The killer is obviously insane. He'll be hospitalized again. No, the chief of police declares. He'll burn. At which Howard da Silva's weary detective captain sighs, ironically: "That's right. That's right. That'll fix everything." The film ends with anarchy. The criminals stand in judgment on the murderer. That's in the original. They become not the mob but a mob, Paris in 1793. Even their cool and efficient boss (Martin Gabel) becomes unhinged. That's not in the original. The police dream of indulging in unchained brutality. The people are rage-filled and conditioned to inhumanity. We are one step from dystopia. The ending, for me, is perfect. The original ends with a tag scene showing the killer's legal trial. It adds a warning: good mothers, guard your good little children. Here that advice comes much earlier in a police broadcast. The good mothers, clearly, ignore it. Here there's no moralizing tag scene. It ends abruptly, in sheer insanity. It's "King of Hearts." The lunatics have left the asylum. How much more subversive can a movie be? Quick! Get the blacklist.
The Trollenberg Terror (1958)
It changed my life.
When I was a kid growing up in New York City in the late 1950s and 60s, there was on TV something called "Million Dollar Movie." I can't remember what channel, even though there weren't very many back then. I know it was one of the locals, probably Channel 11 or Channel 9. It broadcast old movies. "Old," of course, meant movies from the 30s 40s and 50s. I watched them endlessly. I became what I am to this day, attached to those classic films. Of all Million Dollar Movie's movies, this one, "The Crawling Eye," has forever stuck in my head. It was - no kidding - a life-changing experience. To begin with, it scared the bejesus out of me. Even the title was unnerving. It was not clear how an eye could crawl. But, however it did, it could not be agreeable. It terrified me. And then it entranced me. It became the first horror movie I ever watched, all the way through, without closing my own eyes or ducking out the door at the scary moments and especially at the scary, scary moment I knew would come at the end. I could only do it because Million Dollar Movie had this peculiarity. The same movie played for an entire week - every day the same film. Slowly, slowly I watched, until one day I watched to the end. Whenever I got too scared I turned it off. Next day I went further. Finally, I made it. On that day I became a man (though my bar mitzvah was far in the future). I owe "The Crawling Eye," inflatable rubber squids and human actors, all, an undying debt of gratitude.
It did absolutely scare me silly. It's still scary today, because it relies on suspense. The scariest things are things unseen, not the bump in the night but the imagining of that bump. Something creeps in the blackness. Stare at the blackness. It lurks off-screen. Stare at the screen. Nothing is as terrifying as that which resides in the imagination. I kept my eyes open finally. Finally, the monsters appeared. Giant extraterrestrial octopuses! No way those things could hide under my bed. It was an epiphany. I have slept well ever since. But until that disappointing denouement, the terror had me riveted. What was it? What sneaked up on unsuspecting mountaineers and removed their heads? For almost an hour we never see it. The heads keep vanishing. Victims themselves never see death coming. But they hear it coming, strange noises, something moving in the night. And they tell us, they tell the camera. Something is coming, in the fog, in the mist. Now, I didn't live in a lonely country house where the wind rattles in the eves or whatever. Even in a NY tenement, with cars going by in the street, strange noises arise. Well, I won't go on. You get the idea.
So many marvelous touches... There's the creepy element of second sight. What does it mean? The snow globe scene: the little plastic cabin becomes the real hut on the mountain; Janet Munro's face, frantic, staring; phone call to the trapped climbers; watch out, Dewhurst; too late; something's coming! That was undoubtedly one point at which I switched off the TV. There's the creepy element of the walking dead, first Brent, then Hans. (Zombies were one of my particular phobias at the time.) It all works so well it's scaring me now. Later, creepiness still in my memory, I recognized the same actors - but they weren't scared, they were laughing. There she was, Janet Munro, cavorting with leprechauns and Sean Connery in "Darby O'Gill and the Little People." There he was, Forrest Tucker, slapsticking with Larry Storch and Ken Berry in "F Troop." Years passed. My little daughter got terribly upset when Shirley Temple (on VHS) suffered some mistreatment or injustice at the hands of Mary Nash. I was able to draw on the wisdom I had gained. It's OK, Anna, don't cry. The actors will break for lunch, and they'll be back in a comedy. Thank you, "Crawling Eye."
Cat People (1942)
An absolute classic. More than a horror film. It transcends its type.
Many comments applaud (though a few dislike) "Cat People" as a masterpiece of terror. It is deftly conceived by Val Lewton. It is brilliantly directed by Jacques Tourneur, and marvelously filmed by the great Nicholas Musuraco. It is hardly worth repeating all that. I agree with the praise. Yet, in a way, that praise, "masterpiece of terror," downgrades the achievement, relegates it to a clever specimen of a minor genre of mass entertainment, the "horror film." Sometimes also a word is added to its description. It's not a classic but a cult classic - as if to say only a certain group of obsessed persons insist on appreciating it. (I hate when that word is applied to qualify, essentially to denigrate, films or novels that stand on their own merit and speak sincerely to anybody who cares to watch or read.) All right. Let's say it: "horror film," a minor genre of entertainment. It is possible to take that genre as a vehicle and elevate it to higher levels. Detective fiction, for example, is a minor genre of literature. Shakespeare never wrote a detective story. But Charles Dickens did ("Bleak House"). And Wilkie Collins did ("The Moonstone"). They raised it to a higher purpose. Now, I am not comparing "Cat People" to Charles Dickens. I am comparing the achievement. "Cat People" takes a minor genre and elevates it. That makes it a classic. No qualifying adjectives apply.
The "horror," the scariness, is not the essence of the film. Take away entirely the supernatural element, ailuranthropy - it's a word - the werecat plot device. Omit the paranormal. What emerges? It is a gripping drama: a woman, an immigrant, a "stranger in a strange land;" she finds herself adrift in an alien society; she clings to remnants and fears of her faraway culture; a smooth-talking native courts her; at first he is kindly; then he abandons her; he replaces her with one of his own type; she is devastated; she seeks revenge. Is she, really, transformable into a spectral feline predator? We almost never see the werecat on screen anyway. Take it away. It's in her mind. Fantasy becomes her reality. She is scorned and mistreated. She strikes at those who have hurt her. She stalks her rival, terrorizes her, rips apart her robe as a calling card. An unctuous, libidinous psychiatrist tries to use her troubled mind as a means, to get at her body. She kills him. Cut out the supernatural overlay. Forget all that. The essence remains. "Cat People" paints a haunting psychological portrait. It is the story of a woman tormented. It plays out in her mind, through her illusions, as well as in her body, through her acts. Hitchcock could have done it, though not - of that I am sure - as well as it is done here.
It wouldn't work without the contribution of great acting. Sometimes an actor or an actress credited below the star steals a film. Despite Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, I always think, Walter Catlett steals "Bringing Up Baby." Mercedes McCambridge stole "Johnny Guitar" right out from under Joan Crawford. Is it permitted to say that a top-billed performer stole her own film? Simone Simon certainly did. Irena's vulnerability and her pain come through devastatingly. Take the scene in the museum. She is abandoned, dismissed, coldly and cruelly, by her husband and his girlfriend: "you look at the pretty pictures; we'll go off together to appreciate the art that we love." Or take the scene where she tries for the last time to be a wife. He walks in, without even noticing the table she has set with flowers: "I want a divorce." She's lost in real life and lost in her fantasies. I try to imagine who else might have played the role of Irena - Gale Sondergaard perhaps - and how it would have come out. Nobody, I think, could have done it better than Simone Simon did. She had a troubled career in American films, and, unfortunately, that interrupted her career in French cinema. Mention her name in France, as I have, to an average film buff. You'll get most likely a blank stare. She deserves much more recognition.
A word about the black panther. There is one striking reference in literature to such a creature. It appears in a novel also tinged with the occult and supernatural, Eugene Sue's "Le Juif Errant" (The Wandering Jew). That black panther, who eventually kills its evil master, is named "La Mort" (Death). It's too bad the zookeeper in "Cat People" didn't give us the name of his big cat.
Brief Encounter (1945)
An almost-masterpiece. Celia Johnson, alone, makes it work.
I understand what this movie tries to depict: ill-fated love. Two people meet by chance. They find passion. They must part (invitus invita, to take a Latin phrase from Suetonius). The movie almost succeeds. Almost. It leaves one aspect blank, one question unanswered. Why? Why does any of this happen? What is there in either of these characters to attract the other? The story provides no answer. She, Laura, is a bored housewife. The oomph has gone out of her marriage. I get it. Her husband is placid. He spends his evenings doing newspaper puzzles. Her kids annoy her; they are quarrelsome and, appropriately, immature. What she needs is a new man, a lover, someone exotic, someone full of excitement and, well, someone with oomph. In walks Alec Harvey. Is that what she sees in him? I sure don't. In fact, I don't see anything much at all in him. He's not terribly exotic. He's not terribly handsome. He's not terribly exciting. Now, if a darkly brooding Heathcliff or dashingly elegant Rhett Butler had walked into that railway restaurant ... that would be different. But he isn't Olivier and he isn't Gable. Animal magnetism, that isn't it. Maybe it's his mind, his scintillating conversation. He makes her think of faraway places and romantic adventures. Is that what sparkles irresistibly? Not that I can see. Altogether, he's a pretty dull dog, so far as their dialogue suggests, not much of an upgrade from the model she has at home. He talks about preventive medicine. She's mildly interested. They watch some B movies. Physically he's a reasonable but not an extraordinary specimen. (Can she really be so sex-starved?) Spiritually they don't seem to have much of anything in common. (They do share an enthusiasm for Donald Duck.) She reads novels. (He doesn't.) Otherwise, she's interested in - not much. I guess she likes Rachmaninoff. (Does he?)
So, what accounts for their infatuation? What is there that makes their hearts beat as one? What attracts her to him, and not just as a casual fling, but so desperately - after only four platonic Thursdays together - so desperately that she wants to commit suicide Anna Karenina style when he walks away? I don't know. What attracts him to her? I don't know. Well, yes. It's Celia Johnson. She had an arresting beauty. Is that it? Is he a wolf on the prowl? He walks away not so desperate. He's the one, notice, who initiates the liaison. He aggressively pursues a carnal consummation, appropriating a friend's apartment to facilitate the assignation. He walks away after that assignation fails. It would be nice to know why Alec is dissatisfied with his life and wife. Laura asks him about his domestic situation. All we learn is that his unseen wife is named Madeline, that she's petite and dark haired. What has Madeline done wrong? Has she done anything wrong? What incites him to cast his roving eye on attractive women in railway stations? He keeps his backstory obscure.
Two lonely people fall in love (let's give Alec the benefit of the doubt). We don't understand why their loneliness is so crushingly profound. How can we understand their love? I feel more deeply the yearning of Ernie Borgnine and Betsy Blair in "Marty;" they both are repressed, closeted people. Or Ronald Colman and Greer Garson in "Random Harvest;" memory-less, he is friendless; she feels for the lonely lost lamb. Or take another brief encounter, a truly heartbreaking brief encounter, Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan in "Letter from and Unknown Woman." There we understand the emotions. We understand her passion and his callowness. Here characters are barely sketched out. Motivations are unfathomable. Without character and understanding, the depth, the chemistry just isn't there. And that is the whole movie. There is no more. Still, despite all this, "Brief Encounter" is a memorable film. It does stick with you. It did leave me with an emotional tug. Why? For that there is only one answer: Celia Johnson. She is luminous, the expressiveness of her eyes, the sublimity of her smile, mesmerizing as the image dissolves at the end and the camera moves in on her face lost in reverie. She must have been tremendous on the stage. It's a shame she wasn't filmed more often. "Brief Encounter" is worth watching, for her. Her performance makes you overlook the weakness of the story. Almost.
Nora Prentiss (1947)
Ann Sheridan does her best. She can't redeem an awful plot.
It's a shame to see some fine actors engage in such a mixed-up melodrama. They struggle to make the story acceptable. It can't be done. I began to write a summary of the plot. It's so awful I deleted it. Try, and you'll see. Let's just skip to the creepiest parts. Dr. Richard Talbot, indulging a midlife crisis, finds Nora, a young woman who, inexplicably, finds him attractive. Richard wants to ditch his humdrum life. He doesn't ask for a divorce. Why? He can't inflict the devastation, so he says, the pain that he will cause his family, loving wife and children. His teenage daughter hugs him so, so tenderly. She is so upset when he almost misses her birthday. He can't bear to do it. So, what does he do? He abandons them. (Now he'll miss all her birthday parties.) He fakes his death. He flees, in the middle of the night, forever. He leaves them more than devastated, thinking he is dead. What a monster! Obviously, his family's feelings meant nothing. He's heartless, self-absorbed, and a coward. Face the wife and children? He'd rather have the pleasure of imagining their tears, tender teenage daughter included, mourning for him. They'll endure a monstrous farce of a funeral. They will weep, no doubt, over a coffined, crisply-calcinated corpse that isn't his corpse. He'll be far away in a new life. That's it for Richard Talbot, as far as I am concerned. He's despicable. Yet the movie insists that we find him sympathetic, so we can feel sorry for him at the end. Really?
It gets worse. Richard and Nora escape to New York. He lies. He tells her he is awaiting his divorce papers. But he's terrified they will be recognized. He forces her to hide in a hotel. She's bored. He confesses the whole thing. She's OK with it. She won't leave him. The clear, the obvious, the only thing to do is to move. Go somewhere. Go to Canada. Go to Tahiti, to North Dakota. Go somewhere, anywhere where you won't meet old acquaintances. Then live in blissful anonymity. No. They stay in New York. Now he hides in the hotel and she goes out in public. He gets bored, and jealous, and drunk. I won't even go into what follows. At this point I've given up on the plot. Finally, Richard is arrested for the crime he didn't commit. Now, of course, the moral thing to do, if he had any morals, is to quit the subterfuge, own up to his trick. He and Nora could still go off to some foreign shore and live their love. But no. Richard, craven and self-centered as always, won't identify himself. Imagine, he tells Nora weepily, imagine the reproaches, the looks of hatred I'd get from my former family. How could I live with them? (You won't live with them, Richard; they'll kick you out on your ear.) He swears Nora to silence. He ruins her, as surely as he had ruined his wife and adoring daughter. He condemns her to hold within her a terrible secret. She will drift through a life of loneliness and sadness. Then he can wallow in self-pity while he orchestrates another farce, in the courtroom. The only way to redeem this stuff would be to have Nora blurt out the secret just before the jury comes in with its verdict. That would crush his ego. That I would have liked.
It's a shame to see good actors saddled with bad material. Usually I like Kent Smith ("Cat People," "The Spiral Staircase"). He is bland and flat in this role. Frankly, I don't see what Ann Sheridan's Nora sees in him to begin with. Ann Sheridan does succeed, because she was a very fine actress, in transcending the material as far as humanly possible. Nora is not much of a femme fatale. She's rather pathetic, and that at least lets us sympathize with her. The performance that stands out is that of Rosemary DeCamp. She invests the put-upon wife with a quiet dignity. And she provides a touch of extraordinary acting. In the courtroom scene, the lawyer asks: look at the accused as say whether you recognize him. She stares intently and curiously. Watch carefully. For an instant, just an instant, her eyes light up with recognition. She knows who he is. Then the light goes out and she says no. It's incredibly subtle. She has seen through the plot. She could save him. She sends him to perdition. Or maybe it's just me. Maybe I want to see that message in her look because he deserves a ticket to the netherworld.
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
If this is what high school was like, I must have gone to high school on another planet.
OK. The movie is a classic. Everyone says so. I guess there are classics not everyone can appreciate. For me, this in one. I have the same reaction to it that I had to a novel everyone told me is a classic, "Catcher in the Rye." I was forced to read it in high school, and that is why it comes to mind. That book I actively hated. (I was never so pleased as when my daughter was forced to read it and she told me she hated it too.) "Rebel Without a Cause" just annoys me. It supposedly depicts the period - a little earlier, I admit, but not much - the time when I grew up and entered high school. I went to high school in NYC. Our high school was in Harlem, not the suburban milieu of "Rebel's" rebellious teens. But I had friends who went to high school in Queens and in the suburbs, out on the Island. High school then, and I suppose still today, was not always a calm place. There were bad kids. "Juvenile delinquents" we used to say. But never was any delinquency as delinquent as these high-schoolers' daily amusements. Knife fights over casual disagreement, guns, chains, murderous vendettas, maniacal, suicidal games with cars. And what stupid games! The dead Buzz was probably happy; he won the game, right? None of my friends had cars anyway. All this without the benefit even of organized gangs. Gangs, at least, appropriately use switchblades. Here it's just an average day, high school hijinks. Never happened. Maybe it did in southern California. I wouldn't know. It didn't happen in New York, and we were said to be the land of West Side Story. My high school was on the west side, 135th Street and Convent Avenue. It didn't happen there. I never saw it, never heard it, never read it in the papers. My suburb friends never saw it either. OK. "Rebel Without a Cause" isn't reality. It's Hollywood reality. That's not what it's billed to be. It's whole appeal, presumably, is that it rips aside the veneer, reveals the angst - I had plenty of angst in high school; it revolved around girls, or the lack thereof, not knife fights - the angst of modern American youth. How in blazes did I miss it all? Because it's nonsense. As Mark Twain once said about the characters of his least favorite author, there are real Indians and there are Fenimore-Cooper (ridiculously unreal) Indians. There are teenagers and there are Hollywood teenagers. (And where, where did they come up with Ed Platt's police captain/social worker who specializes in consoling troubled teens? He's about as believable as everything else.)
OK again. Take it at that, a fanciful story of teenage angst. What angst? Who can care about Jim Stark's problems? They're ridiculous. So, Jim, your father is a bit henpecked? Live with it. Dad wears an apron when he does the cooking. Oh, my God. Guess Jim will have to wallow in angst. What else makes Jim the icon of alienated youth? Let's see. He doesn't fit in with the "in" crowd of juvenile delinquents. Who does? Relax. No. Jim will have to drive his car over a cliff. But wait. Maybe he will reconsider. No. He must accept the mortal challenge because "it's a matter of honor." Hilarious! No high school kid I ever knew - and I was around at the time - none of us ever talked like that, like Sir Lancelot when knighthood was in flower, like George Brent in "Jezebel." "Affair of honor." We would have split our sides laughing. That's it for Jim, as far as I can tell. Take him over a knee and spank him. Then there's Judy. I give up. What's her problem? Father thinks she's too old to hug. As for "Plato," he's not angst-ridden. He's insane. I'm sorry, even Nicholas Ray can't rescue this material. Only one thing is outstanding in this movie, and that is Jim Backus. I like James Dean far better in "Giant." That whole movie is better. It makes much more sense, which isn't hard compared to RWAC.
Matewan (1987)
A masterpiece. Compare it to the classics of cinema's golden age.
When I was a latchkey kid growing up in New York in the late 1950s and 60s, I sat before the TV and watched old movies. Old movies then, of course were movies from the 1930s and 40s. Result: a case of arrested development. Past the 1960s my interest, and good opinion, of films fades out. "Matewan" is an exception. It recaptures the essence of what made movies great. John Sayles builds narrative not pizzazz. His storytelling takes the time to develop character and emotion. I don't want to call "Matewan" a throwback, because the term diminishes the idea. It is a recreation of great cinema. Each of the characters conveys a story. Each story enriches the story of the film. Even the Pinkerton (or Baldwin-Felts) goon is humanized. Hickey is not a cardboard villain. He tells his backstory. War has warped him. His experience in the trenches where he unheroically bayoneted bewildered enemy soldiers and found himself hailed a hero, has made him cynical, and indifferent to human life. The despicable company snitch also rises above cardboard villainy, a mere mercenary. He is sincerely an ideologue; when he writes to the mine bosses to warn of the union organizer's arrival he violently underlines the words: "He is A RED." We understand his hatred. When the climax arrives we understand its conflict and its characters. The acting is superb, especially Mary McDonnell and Nancy Mette. Both are magnificent as women, lonely and widowed, who have lost their men through the company's callous unconcern for safety. One struggles to live. The other withdraws into herself, sitting forlornly forever, hoping the train will bring hope. Kevin Tighe, for me, steals the movie. I love to watch an actor who knows how to chew the scenery yet stay on the sane side of histrionics.
"Matewan" is not the only film that delves (no pun intended) into the lives of miners. Its predecessors include Michael Curtiz's "Black Fury" (1935), John Ford's "How Green Was My Valley" (1941) and Martin Ritt's "The Molly Maguires" (1970). "Molly Maguires" is the weakest. Ford's backlot evocation of a Welsh mining village is lyrical, but pulls its punches. "Matewan" is the best. The only one that compares is "Black Fury." It's worth seeing if you can find a way to see it. It too was based on an actual incident. It too is a story of unionizing and strike-breaking. Barton MacLane takes Kevin Tighe's place, agent of the Coal and Iron Police. J. Carroll Naish is the forerunner of Bob Gunton's inside agitator. Paul Muni is the heroic miner. (Muni's co-star in the film, Karen Morley, was in real life one of the most politically radical actresses of Hollywood's golden era. Once the blacklist arrived she was duly proscribed.) I should also mention a French film, "Germinal" with Gerard Depardieu, the adaptation, though in my opinion a very inferior adaptation, of a very great book, Emile Zola's novel of the same name. Zola's vision of striking coal miners in 1885 is harrowing, almost unbearable, and unsurpassed in literature. Watch "Matewan" the movie and read "Germinal" the book for a one-two punch of social injustice underground.
Detective Story (1951)
Policemen do a touch, thankless job. It doesn't help when they are also insane.
"Detective Story" is a great, absorbing film. "A policeman's lot is not a happy one," to quote Gilbert and Sullivan. The movie has been called sometimes simply a filmed stage play. Some of the greatest films are filmed stage plays - "Ladies in Retirement," for instance, "The Big Knife," Bogart's "Dead End" and "Petrified Forrest." A story confined to a minimal space becomes more acute. Concentrate on the characters; the actors alone hold our attention. This requires, of course, great acting. "Detective Story" has it. William Wyler wisely hired four of the play's cast, including Horace McMahon, Lee Grant and Joseph Wiseman. Wiseman, some say, overacts. I disagree. His outlaw needs to be over the top, to complement Kirk Douglas' manic lawman. They are the flip sides of each other. One, the cop, is obsessed with his duty, or what in his warped vision he conceives to be his duty, to cleanse the world of dirt, of imperfection (including his wife's imperfection, when he finds her to be imperfect). A vicariously suicidal end (shades of "Petrified Forrest") gives him release. The other is driven by the opposite obsession. He cannot, four-time loser, stop dirtying the world. He too effectively commits suicide, knowing that he will get the electric chair. One has a mania to sanitize. The other has a mania to pollute.
Joseph Wiseman owned his role. He did it on the stage and on the screen. The other role was done on the stage by Ralph Bellamy. I regret, I was as yet only a fetus when the play played. I cannot imagine somehow Ralph Bellamy in the part. I guess he did it well, since the play was a hit. Apparently, Alan Ladd was considered for the movie. That would have been a disaster. Kirk Douglas took the role. I would have taken Robert Ryan. Ryan played the same sort of role in Nicholas Ray's "On Dangerous Ground," though his overstressed detective is not literally insane. Douglas' Jim McLeod undoubtedly is. He has not been unhinged by his policeman's metier. He has chosen his metier to act out his insanity. He is deranged, tormented by memories of the mother he failed to protect from a hated father figure. He says it himself. He transfers his hatred, he "protects" society from anyone he in turn can brutalize. Douglas is not bad in the part. But Robert Ryan, mesmerizing eyes and subtly venomous voice, would have been stupendous.
Eleanor Parker deserved her Oscar nomination. She is genuinely moving, especially as she realizes, twice, that her husband cannot be cured, that he is possessed. His mania overrides his love. She certainly out-acts Kirk Douglas in their scenes together. Do we really feel sorry for him? We pity her. George Macready is exceptionally good. He makes his character human. Macready was adept at playing unregenerate villains (see "Paths of Glory," again with Kirk Douglas). He does not play it villainously here. He keeps his gaze lowered. His voice is subdued, even in his paddy-wagon confrontation with Douglas. Note that William Wyler has the camera film him as much as possible from the left side, to hide the sinister scar on his right cheek. Is he a wanton butcher of young women, as Jim McLeod screams? Or is he just compelled to operate, pre-Roe-v-Wade, in unsound conditions? McLeod, remember, is insane. An abortion doctor is a perfect object of transference for his Oedipal fixation. (For a harrowing story of abortion, in a Hollywood memoir, read Mercedes McCambridge's autobiography.) Cathy O'Donnell, as always, is radiant. Lee Grant and Frank Faylen lighten the tension, but without overdoing it. Some producer clearly remarked Faylen's performance; he reprised his exact role of a friendly dispatcher in Phil Karlson's noir, "99 River Street."
I am not sure "Detective Story" should be called a film noir. It is, if such a thing exists, a film gris - a film noir with a liberal message. The message here is a warning: society is at war with itself. It turns its dispossessed into predators. It turns its cops into brutes. It devours itself. Lee Grant, for one, was devoured. Immediately after receiving the Academy's congratulations in the form of an Oscar nomination, she was blacklisted forthwith.
The Affairs of Martha (1942)
An overlooked gem. One of Hollywood's sweetest romantic comedies.
To appreciate this movie, I had to watch it twice. After one view I was left with the feeling there was something I had missed. I was left with an impression that the film was better than the impression with which I was left. On second view its intent, and its sweetness, came through. My problem, or mistake, was to anticipate a screwball comedy - which is not there essentially. That assumption came naturally, seeing in the cast such names as Melville Cooper, Spring Byington, Marjorie Main and Allyn Joslyn, in minor roles Ernest Truex, Margaret Hamilton and Robin Raymond. "The Affairs of Martha" is not in the mold of "His Girl Friday," "The Lady Eve." It is a romantic comedy, tenderer and more subdued. I found I had also been misled by a plot summary that suggested the story would revolve around a community's frantic reaction to a tell-all book written anonymously in its midst. That is the opening of the film. But it is not the story. I should have taken my cue from the title. It is the story of Martha and her loves. A lovely young woman (Marsha Hunt) relegated to the life of a menial, a domestic, chooses among three men, three destinies. Will she choose the handyman (Barry Nelson) who is (no pun intended) a small-town rake? Will she choose the New York sophisticate (Allyn Joslyn), or the awkward, intellectual son of her employers (Richard Carlson)? Isobel Lennart's plot is simple. But in the hands of these actors, especially the luminous Marsh Hunt, and director Jules Dassin - Marsha Hunt worked with Juley (as she called him in interviews, again in film and he directed her also on stage before they both fell in the blacklist - it becomes a sweet tale that sticks in the memory.
There is an element of social commentary, satirizing the pretentiousness and insularity of the bourgeoisie. Even the ocean waves must mute themselves so as not to ruffle the repose of this community somewhere on the Long Island shoreline. Every household comes equipped with maid and cook. The locals, milkmen and handymen, laugh at the snobs. The domestic servants plot like a revolutionary underground. It is satire. Bit it is genial satire. Martha aims to rise above her allotted fate. Given that she's the stunning Marsha Hunt, it's clear she'll do it. Still, until the end, it is not clear which destiny awaits her. Barry Nelson's rustic lothario would be a downgrade. But he has charm. Allyn Joslyn's city slicker at heart is honest and sincere; life with him might be rewarding. Richard Carlson's bespectacled anthropologist has a touch of Henry Fonda's stumbling herpetologist in "The Lady Eve"about him. Nobody is unlikable. Even the self-important townspeople (deftly incarnated by Spring Byington and Melville Cooper) are only gently ridiculous.We really do care about these people. The ending is happy. Any ending would be happy. It's a happy picture.
Marsha Hunt is magnificent. This may be the only time she saw her name at the top of the credits. That's a shame. Character actress as she was, she refuses to let her character be one-dimensional. She brings out a range of personality. There's a layer of conniving (she is the anonymous authoress), but also defiance (as when she rallies the maids to conspire against their employers), determination (she won't be put upon or deterred from improving her life). Martha has an edge of Katherine Hepburn toughness in her, and also some of the insouciance Jules Dassin later created for Melina Mercouri in "Never On Sunday." Yet there's the naivete of an ingenue. In some of the movie's best scenes Allyn Joslyn wines and dines her in the city's high society. "This is the life I was meant to have," she says. She carries the picture. Among the rest, Allyn Joslyn stands out in one of his more sympathetic roles, the kind he did as a leading man on Broadway, and Virginia Weidler, delightful as usual. It's meant for laughs, but not entirely. "The Affairs of Martha" grows as you watch it. You may have to see it twice. It's worth the time.
Inside Job (1946)
Mostly forgettable. But what an ending!
This little noir has all the hallmarks of a poverty row quickie, except it was made by a major studio, Universal. The cast includes A-list veterans: Ann Rutherford, Alan Curtis, Preston Foster, in supporting roles Milburn Stone, Samuel S. Hinds, Joe Sawyer, Howard Freeman (memorable two years later in "The Snake Pit" shaking his finger at Olivia de Havilland). Marc Lawrence pops in for a couple of scenes. I can only assume Universal assigned them to do their best for the back end of a double-bill. They walk through the material honestly and professionally. Ann Rutherford does make something of her role. She is, as usual, appealing and sympathetic. Everything proceeds routinely, until the end. The ending redeems the whole film. It actually makes it worth watching.
Claire and Eddie, the protagonists (Ann Rutherford and Alan Curtis) pull off a heist. The police are looking for them, as also is the criminal godfather (Preston Foster) who commissioned the job and would like to appropriate the swag. They hide, holed up in an apartment. They become friendly with their unsuspecting neighbors. There's a cute little boy, Skipper. They rescue his kite from the fire-escape and mend it. They wash his dog. They chat with his amiable caregiver (played by the great radio actress Ruby Dandridge) and his policeman father (Joe Sawyer). On the eve of their planned escape, of course, the godfather locates them. But he bumps into the resident cop. Bang, bang. Godfather is plugged fatally, cop seriously. Claire and Eddie give up their chance to get away. They care for the wounded officer until the other cops come and arrest them. Then the final scene. In the courtroom, they await the judge's (Samuel S. Hinds) sentence. Surely, he will be lenient - extenuating circumstances and all. He looks stern. But he speaks compassionately. "You have committed crime" (I paraphrase) "but you have shown decency. You have saved the life of an officer of the law." Therefore - he sentences them to the maximum. Sorry, losers, society does not admit pity. What a sublime message! It's so jarring it's beautiful. It's so didactic it's wonderful. O theater audience beware, before you finish your popcorn. Delve not into crime. Law is inflexible. We who rule know no mercy. Marvelous! (Parole, you're thinking? Their only indictable crime is robbery, not even armed robbery, since no weapon was used. But I wouldn't bet on the parole board in this jurisdiction. Here even the Monopoly games have no get-out-of-jail-free cards. You can't save your little top-hat or flat-iron here.)