Classic Movie Ramblings

Gunga Din (1939)

2012-03-02T01:07:00.001+11:00

Gunga Din is one of those movies that demonstrates that a troubled production history doesn’t necessarily lead to a bad film. It can result in a very good film.

To say that this 1939 production was based on Ridyard Kipling’s poem of the same name would be misleading. It would be more accurate to say it was inspired by the poem and by his collection of short stories Soldiers Three but in fact the screenplay by Ben Hecht and Charles Macarthur is pretty much an entirely original story. Many writers worked on this project but the plot of the final film was largely the work of Hecht and Macarthur.

Several different directors were at various times slated to direct the film, including Howard Hawks. Eventually RKO settled on George Stevens because up to that time he’d had a reputation for bringing movies in on time and on budget. Ironically Stevens went way over budget on Gunga Din!

Many actors were also at various times considered, including Robert Donat and Ronald Colman, before the final lineup of Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr was chosen for the three leads, with Sam Jaffe as Gunga Din and Joan Fontaine as Fairbanks’ love interest.

This was in fact a very very big production for RKO. There was a good deal of location shooting, mostly at Lone Pine in California (a perennially popular movie location), and some impressive sets. And some very large-scale action scenes.

Sergeants Cutter, MacChesney and Ballantine (Grant, McLaglen and Fairbanks) are three firm friends serving in the British Army in India. They’re good if somewhat rowdy soldiers who see themselves as being a bit like the Three Musketeers. Until a terrible disaster intervenes - Sergeant Ballantine announces he’s going to get married and leave the army! His bride-to-be Emmy (Joan Fontaine) thinks the army is much too dangerous. Of course now it’s up to Cutter and MacChesney to save their pal from this awful fate.

Cutter has other plans on his mind as well, like looking for a fabulous treasure rumoured to be found in an abandoned temple. He has two companions in the quest for the treasure. One is the regimental water-carrier, Gunga Din, who has dreams of being a real soldier. The other is one of the regiment’s elephants, Annie (the particular pet of Sergeant MacChesney).

What Cutter doesn’t know that the temple is in fact the headquarters of a revived Thuggee cult. The murderous Thugs were thought to have been eliminated but this is far from being the case. The Thugs have moved beyond their usual practices of ritual murder and are now planning large-scale revenge on the British who had suppressed their cult. This will put the whole regiment in danger. The three friends all become involved in a desperate attempt to foil the Thugs’ plans and Gunga Din will find a role to play as well.

It’s a wonderful rousing adventure tale. It starts in a light-hearted vein but gradually becomes more serious and ends with a spectacular battle scene.

The very strong cast is a major asset. While Joan Fontaine has little to do the film affords the other players plenty of opportunities and they make the most of them. Cary Grant’s performance is heavy on the comedy but that suits the tone of the movie well enough. The standout performance though comes from Douglas Fairbanks Jr, an actor I find myself liking more and more.

George Stevens may have had set an outrageous amount of RKO’s money on this picture but the results are worth it. The movie cost so much that it made a loss on its initial release despite doing good business at the box-office but it was regularly re-released and ended up being a very profitable property.

The Region 1 DVD looks great and includes some worthwhile extras.

One of the classic Hollywood adventure movies.

Phantom Lady (1944)

2012-02-27T22:58:00.004+11:00

Phantom Lady is a movie that is quite special to me because it’s one of the movies that got me hooked on film noir. It still stands up extremely well.

Of course now I can see that this 1944 Universal film is not really film noir, it’s more of a Hitchcock-style wrong man movie. Stylistically however it’s very film noir, and good film noir.

A man (Scott Henderson, played by Alan Curtis) meets a woman in a bar. They’re both down in the dumps. He has two tickets to the theatre but as he explains he’s been stood up. She agrees to spend the evening with him on the condition that they don’t reveal their names. They’re just two unhappy people who will be companions for the evening.

When he arrives home later that evening the nightmare begins. His wife has been murdered. Their marriage was on the rocks and they’d quarreled about a divorce. The circumstantial evidence against him is strong, but luckily he has an alibi. Or he thought he did. Unfortunately no-one now remembers seeing him with the mystery woman. And of course he has no idea who she is or how to find her.

That unsatisfactory and unconvincing alibi helps to get him convicted of murder. One person still believes in him however - his secretary Carol (Ella Raines). She’s been in love with him for as long as she’s worked for him and she knows the man she loves could not be a murderer. Despite the odds she intends to prove that he is innocent and save him.

That damn-fool alibi has been worrying Detective-Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez). Why would a guilty man concoct such a stupid alibi and then stubbornly stick to it like that? The more he thinks about it the more it worries him. So Carol finds herself with an ally. She soon finds herself with another ally - Scott’s best buddy Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone). He’s not such a reliable ally. She has no reason to doubt him but the audience has very strong reasons to think he’s not playing with a full deck.

The usual formula for such movies is that the man accused of a crime he doesn’t commit has to escape from custody and prove his innocence. This movie doesn’t follow that formula. Scott spends virtually the entire movie behind bars. As a result it’s up to Carol to prove his innocence. That makes Carol the central character, and it means that the movie stands or falls on Ella Raines’ performance. Fortunately she’s more than equal to the task. She’s superb. Carol is a sweet kid from Kansas but she’s also a resourceful, intelligent and very determined young woman.

Franchot Tone made a lot of movies but rarely got good roles. This time he has to do some serious acting and he relishes the opportunity.

Elisha Cook Jr gets one of his meatiest supporting roles. He plays a drummer in the theatre where Scott took the mystery lady. He’s a key witness and the famous jam session as seduction/foreplay scene is one of the most memorable, and one of the most erotic, in all of film noir.

Alan Curtis has little to do but he’s solid and Thomas Gomez is good as Detective-Inspector Burgess, a man who has no personal feelings one way or the other about Scott Henderson but he does have a stubborn sense of duty and and it’s his duty to send guilty men to the chair, not innocent men.

Director Robert Siodmak and his cinematographer Elwood Bredell demonstrate a mastery of the visual iconography of film noir. The movie was based on a Cornell Woolrich novel and Woolrich’s dark and twisted novels always adapt superbly to film.

The Region 4 DVD seems to be the only one available apart from a Spanish release. It’s barebones but quite acceptable.

A terrific and very stylish noirish thriller, and highly recommended.

7 Men From Now (1956)

2012-02-25T00:35:00.003+11:00

7 Men From Now was the first of a series of westerns starring Randolph Scott and directed by Budd Boetticher. These westerns are the movies on which the director’s considerable cult reputation rests.

The movie was made in 1956 by John Wayne’s production company, Batjac. A few years earlier Wayne had produced Bullfighter and the Lady which gave Boetticher his major break as a director. Wayne was unavailable to play the lead in 7 Men From Now (he was doing The Searchers for John Ford at the time) but suggested Randolph Scott. It was a momentous suggestion for the careers of both Boetticher and Scott.

Boetticher was not a man who could have worked easily within the strict confines of the studio system but making a modestly budgeted production for Batjac gave him the artistic freedom he craved.

Boetticher’s approach to the western genre was simple and rather austere. He was uninterested in big stories and he was equally uninterested in taking a flashy approach to the job. With a story (by Burt Kennedy) that appealed to him, with a handful of strong characters and a very fine cast, he crafted a deceptively straightforward but immensely powerful film.

We are plunged straight into the action. The backstory will be sketched in later with remarkable economy. A man (we will later learn he is Ben Stride, played by Randolph Scott ) takes shelter from the elements in a cave, with two men. He mentions he’s from Silver Springs, one of the two men remarks that there was a killing there, and the two men are shot.

As we will soon discover, the two men were among seven men who held up the Wells Fargo office in Silver Springs. A woman was shot and killed. She was Ben Stride’s wife. He had been the sheriff but had recently been deposed, not being the sort of man who was good at winning elections. Stride then encounters a young couple, John and Annie Greer, in a wagon heading for California. He travels with them, their journey taking them through country occupied by hostile Indians.

On the journey they encounter Masters (Lee Marvin). While Stride wants to find the robbers for motives of revenge Masters wants to find them to get the $20,000 they stole. They become temporary allies but it’s an uneasy and unstable alliance. Sooner or later they will face a showdown. Further complications arise over Annie Greer. Both Stride and Masters are interested in her while she’s obviously interested in Ben Stride.

It’s a classic western tale cut down to basics but the starkness of the plot gives it a gravity that makes it almost elemental. The subtle characterisations and the quality of the acting make it especially powerful.

Randolph Scott is perfect. Ben Stride is a bleak kind of hero, but not totally unsympathetic. His strengths are qualities that are unfashionable today - a driving sense of duty and a severe view of justice. Scott’s performance is reserved but extremely effective and contrasts nicely with Lee Marvin’s bravura performance. Masters is a complex villain, with a quirky sense of honour combined with opportunism and ruthlessness. Masters and Stride do not hate each other and they even have a sneaking regard for one another. They know that eventually one of them will have to kill the other but this is something that Ben Stride genuinely regrets. Masters was not involved in the robbery which led to Stride’s wife’s death so there’s no personal animosity.

The actual killers are more straightforward villains but they’re not the real focus of the film. In fact they could almost be seen as a McGuffin - their actions drive the actions of both Stride and Masters but they are unimportant in themselves. John and Annie Greer are more important and Walter Reed and Gail Russell give fine performances.

Boetticher’s westerns had an immense influence. When Sergio Leone met Boetticher he assured him that he had stolen all his ideas from the American director! 7 Men From Now has been described as an existential western but while there’s some truth to that it’s wise not to push the point too far. Despite its complex hero and equally complex villain there is a moral centre to the movie that is at odds with the fashionable existentialism of intellectuals of the 50s.

The DVD comes with a host of extras including a quite lengthy documentary. The movie is beautifully restored. John Wayne’s son Michael who has overseen the release of the Batjac movies on DVD insisted that if the movie was going to be released the restoration had to be done properly. The result is a fitting tribute not only to Budd Boetticher but also to the underrated achievements of John Wayne as a producer.

A great western and essential viewing.

The Frightened City (1961)

2012-02-22T20:04:00.001+11:00

The Frightened City is a pretty decent 1961 British crime movie, with added interest by way of one of Sean Connery’s first major roles.

Herbert Lom plays Waldo Zhernikov, a wealthy and successful accountant with some slightly shady connections. For some reason that isn’t made entirely clear he decides to set himself up as a major crime lord. He’s had some dealings with Harry Foulcher (Alfred Marks) who runs a protection racket. There are a dozen or so mobs funning these rackets in London but only six that really count, that are run by professional criminals. The others are just “tearaways and teddy boys” who give crime a bad name. Waldo’s brainwave is that the six organised gangs should unite, drive out the amateurs, and put the whole enterprise on a sound business footing.

They’re going to need someone with more brains and more self-control than the average thug to run the enforcement side of the business. Paddy Damion (Sean Connery) seems ideal. He was a very successful cat-burglar until his regular partner Wally was badly injured and now he needs a steady income so he can look after Wally. He’s a criminal but he has a sense of honour. He’s also a very tough guy and he’s smart enough and adaptable enough to be an asset for the new protection syndicate. He doesn’t like the idea of protection rackets but he’s assured that this one will be well organised and that the idea is to move away from mere thuggery, to tone down the rough stuff and keep things business-like.

The new syndicate thrives but Waldo has bigger ambitions. He wants to find bigger and richer victims, like construction companies. This leads to trouble with Alfie Peters, one of the six syndicate members. Alfie is an old-fashioned villain who believes it’s best to stick to the business you know and not attract the attention of Scotland Yard.

In fact they’ve already attracted the attention of the Yard, in the person of Detective-Inspector Sayers (John Gregson). DI Sayers isn’t an ostentatious tough guy but looks can be deceptive. He’s a dogged policeman who is quite prepared to stretch the rules a little if he has to, and when he decides to go after a criminal he doesn’t give up.

Meanwhile Paddy Damion is living the high life and is about to trade-in his glamorous nightclub singer girlfriend Sadie for a much more glamorous and exciting nightclub singer girlfriend, the exotic Anya (Yvonne Romain).

The conflict with Alfie Peters soon boils over and violence erupts. Violence with guns, which is the sort of thing that Scotland Yard strongly disapproves of. Paddy Damion finds himself in a difficult situation, caught between ambition and loyalty (Alfie Peters is an old friend).

Like a number of postwar British crime movies (such as The Blue Lamp) this film deals with the clash between two different kinds of criminals. There are the old school criminals who know the rules - no guns, very little violence. And there’s the new breed, much more violent and not playing by any rules. Whereas The Blue Lamp sees the new type of criminal as young out-of-control hoodlums with very little sense in The Frightened City we have the beginnings of a conspiracy theory - violent thugs being controlled by powerful wealthy men.

Herbert Lom is wonderfully smooth and sinister. John Gregson was a solid if unspectacular actor and he’s quite adequate. Sean Connery is quite good in what is really the most complex and demanding role in the movie. There’s a fine supporting cast.

John Lemont is a very obscure British director whose career was rather brief but he’s competent enough. Competent is the best word to describe this movie - it doesn’t reach any great heights and it’s not stylistically extravagant but it’s successful enough within its modest limits.

The Region 4 DVD is barebones but it’s a perfectly adequate widescreen print.

Moby Dick (1956)

2012-02-20T19:11:00.003+11:00

By 1956 John Huston was developing a taste for risk-taking in his movie projects. Sometimes his gambles paid off and sometimes they didn’t but the results are always interesting. Moby Dick represented a very considerable gamble and while it found little favour at the time with either critics or the public it’s aged rather well.

Adapting Herman Melville’s novel to the screen presented many challenges. The narrative of the book is broken up by lengthy digressions and it’s more concerned with philosophical and spiritual questions than with telling a story. There is a great story in there though and Huston’s film makes the most of it.

A young man named Ishmael (Richard Basehart) signs on to the whaling ship Pequod in 1841. Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) is not interested in making money or catching whales. He is interested in one thing - revenge. A year or so earlier he had suffered horrific injuries in an epic struggle with a gigantic white sperm whale, a whale known as Moby Dick. He intends to renew the struggle and this time it will be a fight to the death, although as he explains to his first mate Starbuck (Leo Genn) it’s not Moby Dick that he hates. The great white whale is just a mask, and it’s what’s behind the mask that he hates.

Ahab is not just obsessive but also very thorough. He has studied accounts by other whalers and he has charted the movements of whales. He has developed a theory as to their movements and he believes he can accurately predict just where Moby Dick will be found. He intends to be waiting for the whale.

His predictions prove to be accurate but the whale escapes. Ahab sets off in pursuit. By this time he has communicated his obsessiveness to his crew. They regard him as being almost a god and they are as keen for the final showdown as he is.

The screenplay by Huston and Ray Bradbury sticks reasonably close to the book although naturally much had to be omitted. They have also striven for a deliberately archaic feel to the dialogue which suits the material. It gives it a kind of Old Testament feel, combined with some of the flavour of epic poetry. The danger with this approach is that it can make movie seem too literary but in this case that’s not such a disadvantage.

Huston wanted the movie to have the washed-out sepia look of old photographs whilst still being shot in colour and he and director of photography Oswald Morris came up with a complicated process to achieve this. It succeeds extremely well. A few years later Huston did something similar in Reflections in a Golden Eye - he seems to have been obsessed by the idea of getting away from a conventional colour palette in his films made in colour.

Of course you couldn’t make a movie such as this at the time without utilising process shots but they generally work pretty well. The movie avoids any hint of appearing to be studio-bound while at the same time avoiding a realistic look. This is a tale that does not lend itself to a straightforward realistic approach.

A major challenge was to satisfy the commercial requirements for an exciting action-packed entertaining film while preserving as much as possible of the metaphysical dimension of the novel. It has to be more than just a seafaring adventure yarn. It’s an almost impossible compromise that mostly comes off.

The biggest problem was the casting of Gregory Peck as Ahab. While it’s true that someone like Orson Welles would have been more suitable Peck is actually surprisingly effective. You just have to forget his usual screen image. Leo Genn as Starbuck is more of a problem - he’s good but a little too civilised to be convincing as the first mate of a whaling ship. The rest of the supporting is excellent with Harry Andrews particularly good as the second mate. Richard Basehart as Ishmael is fine. As the narrator he has to be a neutral sort of character but also sympathetic. Orson Welles and James Robertson Justice contribute brief but impressively scenery-chewing cameos.

The special effects are excellent. Filming the epic struggle between the Pequod and the whale in those pre-CGI days was awesomely difficult but those scenes are gripping and convincing. Huston also comes up with some memorable visual images - Orson Welles preaching from the prow of a ship mounted inside a chapel in the Pequod’s home port and the typhoon scene with St Elmo’s Fire dancing on the masts are both stunning, but they also contribute to the biblical feel of the story.

The DVD presentation of Moby Dick is quite acceptable and, importantly, preserves the unusual colour scheme.

A very underrated John Huston movie - highly recommended.

Pickup on South Street (1953)

2012-02-17T22:20:00.001+11:00

Writer-director Samuel Fuller’s 1953 film Pickup on South Street is not a straightforward film noir, but then very few of Sam Fuller’s movies could be described as straightforward. It’s also neither a straightforward crime film nor a straightforward spy thriller but it has affinities with all these genres.

It opens with a visual tour-de-force, a lengthy dialogue-free sequence of a pickpocket robbing a woman on a New York subway. This is picking pockets as a kind of seduction. It has a disturbing twisted eroticism to it that sets the mood for the rest of the film.

Pickpocket Skip McCoy gets more than he bargained for. The woman’s purse contained a microfilm. The microfilm contains US military secrets. The woman, Candy (Jean Peters), is acting as a courier for her ex-boyfriend Joey (Richard Kiley). She thinks he’s involved in industrial espionage but in fact he’s a communist agent. Without the microfilm Joey will be in big trouble with his spymaster bosses.

Joey and Candy now have to find the pickpocket to get the microfilm back while the police and the FBI have to find both the microfilm and the spymaster, and in order to do that they have to find the pickpocket. These parallel chases lead them all to professional stool pigeon Moe (Thelma Ritter in an Oscar-nominated performance). Skip knows Moe is a stoolie but he doesn’t hold it against her. As far as he is concerned it’s no more immoral than being a pickpocket - it’s just a living. He’s actually quite fond of her.

Candy’s position is more complex. Joey has manipulated her and she resents it and while she’s quite relaxed about being involved in criminal activities she draws the line at treason. And she’s strangely attracted to Skip. At first it’s pure lust (all the scenes between them have an intense erotic charge) but it soon develops into something deeper. She is torn between conflicting loyalties.

The usual template for film noir is that a basically decent guy finds himself drawn into the film noir universe of corruption and damnation, and then has to struggle desperately to save himself. His downfall generally comes about because he has a weakness, or because there’s a small seed of corruption within him.

This movie offers a twist. We have a basically corrupt guy who finds himself drawn, reluctantly, into the daylight world. This happens because here’s a small seed of decency within him. He still has to struggle desperately to save himself, but he has a better chance of redemption. Of course the redemption may come at the price of his death.

The means by which this happens is the same as in the classic noir template - a woman. She also follows a variation on the classic femme fatale pattern. She tempts him with things he’s never experienced before - loyalty and love. She wants to save him. Like most women who want to save men she’s picked a loser but maybe this time it will work out. There’s not much decency within him but there is a tiny spark buried deep down inside.

She’s also looking for redemption. She’s picked losers before and it’s worked out disastrously and she’s been drawn into that film noir universe herself. In fact her story follows the classic noir pattern more closely than Skip’s. She really is basically decent but she’s been involved with a male version of the femme fatale, a homme fatale if you will, in the person of Joey. He has corrupted her and she is fighting against it.

Richard Widmark is a bit of a noir icon but I find his early performances irritating. They’re all mannerisms and twitchiness and the characterisation is too obvious. By 1953 he was a much more experienced actor and he’s toned things down. He still conveys that sense of a spring that’s been wound too tightly but now he’s in control of the performance. It’s a difficult role because his change of heart has to be convincing, not just a plot contrivance. It works because Fuller’s script provides a believable motivation. Actually two believable motivations, one involving Moe and one involving Candy. Jean Peters is also impressive.

The most amusing thing about this movie is reading some of the online reviews and watching the way the reviewers twist themselves into knots trying to turn it into something they can approve of - a film that is subversive and transgressive and anti-American. Some even manage to convince themselves that the movie is really depicting the police and the FBI and the US government as the bad guys. They’re utterly unconcerned by the fact that there is nothing in the film to support such an interpretation. They believe the line that has been pushed by the film school types that a movie can only be worthwhile if it’s subversive and transgressive and attacks the American Dream.

To the extent that Fuller’s films are subversive they’re subversive in a way such people could never comprehend. They’re stylistically subversive, not politically subversive.

In fact this movie is completely apolitical in any conventional sense. The microfilm is a McGuffin. Communism is used as a metaphor for corruption - the communist agents are evil because they use lies, manipulation and violence to control people. They differ from the straightforward criminals only in being more ruthless and more dishonest. Skip has always been a thief and Moe has always been a stool pigeon but at least they’ve never claimed to be anything else. There are degrees of corruption. Skip and Candy can only save themselves from the noir nightmare world by learning to trust and to be honest with each other, by leaving the world of lies and manipulation.

Skip, Candy and Moe are all outsiders but Fuller avoids glamourising their outsider status. While they’re all complex and to some extent sympathetic characters the criminal underworld is petty and sordid. To survive they will need to escape from that world. All are given a chance of redemption but whether they will achieve it is by no means certain.

A fascinating and stylish, and emotionally multi-layered, movie by one of the most individualistic and eccentric of all American film-makers. Highly recommended.

Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

2012-02-15T14:31:00.002+11:00

Howard Hawks made many superb films, but he made few greater than Only Angels Have Wings. This 1939 aviation adventure romance has everything you expect in a great Howard Hawks movie.

Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur) arrives in the South American town of Barranca. She expects to stay only until the next day, when her ship leaves again. She immediately finds herself mixed up with Geoff Carter’s flyers. Carter (Cary Grant) runs a small airline. The airline has the contract to fly air mail over the mountains. Their aircraft cannot fly high enough to fly above the mountains so they must fly through a narrow pass at 14,000 feet, and they must do this regardless of the weather.

It’s incredibly dangerous flying and accidents, frequently fatal, are common. As Bonnie is just about to find out. She was befriended by two of the pilots as soon as she left the ship and just a few hours later one of them, Joe, is killed. Twenty minutes after his fatal crash the other pilots are laughing and joking and when she berates them for having a good time so soon after his death the response is, “Who’s Joe?” It’s one of the most famous scenes in any Howard Hawks movie, and deservedly so. She soon discovers that their apparent callousness is not a sign that they don’t care; it’s a sign that they care too much. There is no other way they can cope.

Geoff Carter has other problems to deal with. The airline has one year to prove it can get the mail delivered on time. After that they will get a permanent contract which means a lot more money. But with several pilots and several aircraft already lost getting that permanent contract will be a real challenge. And then there’s the new pilot, McPherson (Richard Barthelmess). Only that’s not his real name, and everyone knows he’s the pilot who bailed out of a plane two years ago, leaving his mechanic to die. And the mechanic who died was the younger brother of Geoff Carter’s best friend and right hand man, The Kid (Thomas Mitchell).

And to add to his worries, McPherson arrived with his wife Judy (Rita Hayworth), who just happens to be an old flame of Geoff’s. Not just an old flame in fact, but the great love of his life. He doesn’t need any more problems, but he gets them. Like having to fly nitro-glycerine to a mine site. His pilots are already unhappy about having McPherson there. And what is he going to do about Bonnie? She’s obviously crazy about him but he believes flyers should never marry. He’s seen what happens to the wives when their men get killed and he’s always vowed never to do that to a woman.

You’d think the poor guy already had more than enough to worry about, and then Bonnie goes and shoots him. Now he’s only got one arm that works, one of his other pilots is in the same boat, and he’s had to ground The Kid because his eyesight is failing. They still have one mail run to go before they get that contract, the weather is closing in, they have a new untested Ford Tri-Motor and if the mail doesn’t go through that’s the end of the airline.

Only Angels Have Wings boasts some great aerial sequences (and some spectacular crashes). Apart from the flying sequences everything has a shot-in-the-studio feel which works to the film’s advantage. You feel like these people are in a little universe of their own where they have to work out their own problem and their own salvation.

Hawks was fascinated by what Hemingway referred to as "grace under pressure" - men facing danger and death with dignity and good humour, because how else can you face it? It’s a movie about old-fashioned virtues like friendship and courage, and overcoming fear and failure. It’s the sort of thing Hawks did supremely well. It could have been corny and contrived and conventional but it isn’t.

Cary Grant gives one of his finest dramatic performances. It’s a difficult and complex role. Carter is a cynical tough guy but he has to. He has to live with the knowledge that every time he sends a man on the mail run he may be signing his death warrant. When the weather is so bad that he can’t send anyone up he makes the flight himself. Thomas Mitchell, a wonderful character actor, is in fine form. Rita Hayworth wasn’t yet a star but she shows flashes of star quality. Jean Arthur is solid. Richard Barthelmess is splendid as a man being eaten alive by shame but determined to overcome it even if it costs him his life.

The characters are almost stereotypes, and in the hands of a lesser film-maker that’s what they would have remained. In the hands of Hawks they become much more. There’s not a bad performance in the movie. The flyers are men who know that each flight might be their last but this is the life they’ve chosen and they wouldn’t give it up for anyone.

This is Hawks at his best, a wonderful movie that manages to be both tragic and positive, and a movie entirely lacking in self-pity.

Columbia’s Region DVD release is extremely good despite the lack of extras.

Hell Drivers (1957)

2012-02-13T18:43:00.001+11:00

Hell Drivers, released by Rank in 1957, is the type of gritty thriller the British film industry used to do so well back in the 50s. On the surface it’s an exciting macho action movie but great writing and superb performances make it so much more.

This movie could without stretching definitions too far be described as an example of British film noir. There’s a hero haunted by mistakes in his past that he may not be able to escape, there’s corruption, there’s a femme fatale, there’s a sense of impending tragedy and a tense brooding fatalistic atmosphere. It’s not a crime movie as such but it does feature an ex-con and there are illegal goings-on.

Tom Yately (Stanley Baker) applies for a job as a short-haul lorry driver. He has a few problems with the interview. He can’t produce references because as he explains he’s been abroad. As we find out later he’s actually been in prison. Nevertheless he is given a test run and he gets the job.

It’s dangerous and demanding work. The drivers must make at least twelve runs a day, their trucks loaded with ballast, over roads that are both rough and narrow. And it is impossible to meet that quota without taking risks. Big risks. The drivers are a rough lot. They refer to themselves as hell drivers and they’re not kidding. But Tom has few employment options and the money is good.

The number one driver and road foreman for this firm is Red (Patrick McGoohan). He’s even rougher than the other drivers, a violent and reckless individual who is determined to stay number one and will use any methods necessary to do so. Tom and Red take an instant dislike to one another. In fact the only driver Tom likes is an Italian known as Gino (Herbert Lom).

Gino is hopelessly in love with the firm’s secretary, Lucy (Peggy Cummins, best-known for her extraordinary performance in Gun Crazy). Lucy likes Gino but he’s not in love with him. She doesn’t exactly lead him on but she just can’t find a way to explain things to him. As soon as Tom and Lucy set eyes on each other the sexual sparks start to fly. This is awkward for Tom. Despite his criminal record and his somewhat surly nature he’s a decent guy, the sort of man who thinks there’s nothing lower than stealing another man’s girlfriend. And he likes Gino a lot.

There’s a kind of competition going among the drivers to complete the most runs in a day, with the prize being a very expensive gold cigarette case. It’s more a matter of prestige than the actual prize though. So far no-one has been able to beat Red’s record. Tom is determined to do so. The tensions between Red and Tom continue to mount for a variety of reasons and their rivalry becomes more and more intense and more and more dangerous. It finally becomes absolutely poisonous and potentially deadly.

It seems like everybody who was anybody in the British film industry is in this movie. Apart from the stars already mentioned the supporting cast includes William Hartnell (best-known as the first Doctor Who), Gordon Jackson, David McCallum (soon to achieve TV stardom in the Man from UNCLE), Sid James (of Carry On fame), Jill Ireland and an up-and-coming Scottish actor by the name of Sean Connery.

Patrick McGoohan chews the scenery with great abandon and his approach proves to be the ideal counterpoint to Stanley Baker’s slow-burning tightly wound performance. Herbert Lom is entertaining as always. Peggy Cummins is dangerously sexy, a quality she was exceptionally good at conveying. Without exception the acting is superb.

The action sequences are riveting and realistic. The realism was achieved at some risk. The actors did their own driving and the epic fight scene between Red and Tom was one for real. Both actors had been amateur boxers and both ended up with a collection of bruises and loose teeth. This gives the action scenes a very immediate quality and combined with Cy Endfield’s skillful direction they’re the most impressive element in the film. The driving scenes are truly hair-raising.

The one false note is the subplot towards the end involving the wicked capitalist boss defrauding the noble down-trodden working-class. It gives the impression of being tacked on in an ill-advised attempt to add a political message, always a bad idea. It’s clumsy and quite unnecessary since the rest of the movie has already provided ample motivation for the characters’ actions.

Aside from one minor quibble this is a superb example of 1950s British film-making at its best.

The Region 4 DVD from Madman is a good widescreen print and includes a contemporary making-of documentary and an interview with Stanley Baker filmed in the late 50s.

If You Could Only Cook (1935)

2012-02-12T16:56:00.001+11:00

If You Could Only Cook is an obscure 1935 Columbia screwball comedy that starts a bit slowly but ends up being good lightweight entertainment.

Herbert Marshall is automobile magnate James Buchanan, owner of Buchanan Motors, and also their chief designer. He’s rich and successful and he’s about to get married. So I guess he’s pretty happy, right? Well he isn’t. You see his board of directors have turned down his designs for a revolutionary new line of cars. And then there’s the marriage thing. It’ all very sensible - he has the money, she has the family connections. But there’s no zing to it. No romance. James Buchanan didn’t realise he was a romantic sort of chap but it turns out that he is.

Buchanan heads to the park and sits on a bench to have a think about all this. He happens to sit next to attractive blonde Joan (Jean Arthur). She has her troubles as well. She can’t find a job and her landlady is about to kick her out. She assumes that Buchanan is down on his luck as well, since he seems a bit glum.

Joan has noticed that there are actually plenty of job openings for married couples. There’s one in that day’s paper, for a cook and butler. Buchanan remarks whimsically that if only she could cook she could apply for the cook’s job. Now Joan is in fact an excellent cook and she now gets a brilliant idea. If they pretend to be married then with her cooking skills they’d be sure to get the position. Since this is a Hollywood movie he decides that being a butler might be more fun than running a car factory and he agrees.

Their employer is Mike Rossini. He lives in a big house with his buddy, a guy named Flash. Rossini is a cheerful sort of guy and he’s rather a gourmet. In fact good food is his passion. He’s mightily impressed by Joan’s culinary skills. Flash seems a bit rough around the edges but he’s friendly enough. All goes well until Buchanan discovers that Rossini is a big-time racketeer and Flash is his chief henchman.

Now when I say Mike Rossini is a gangster I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. He’s a pretty nice guy. OK, from time to time he has to have someone rubbed out when they step out of line and Flash has to organise it but that’s just business. In his personal life he’s charming and generous and rather kindly. And Flash isn’t a bad guy either.

Rossini takes a bit of a shine to Joan and when he finds out that his presumably married cook and butler don’t share a bed he figures maybe they’re not really married so he makes a move on her. You see Mike’s idea of the perfect woman is someone who can cook the way Joan cooks. If they’re pretty and blonde as well that’s a bonus but really it’s all about the cooking. She gently rebuffs him. He doesn’t take offence. Like I said, he’s a nice guy and he’s a gentleman.

Of course pretty soon things start to get confused and crazy in standard screwball comedy style. There are stolen car designs, Joan gets arrested, James Buchanan nearly gets rubbed out, his society wedding turns into a kidnapping and everyone gets their wires crossed. And of course James Buchanan and Joan realise they’re in love.

It’s all good-natured silliness and despite its slow start it does get more and more amusing and more and more fun. Don’t expect to be rolling on the floor with laughter but it’s still very enjoyable. Herbert Marshall is impossible to dislike, as is Jean Arthur, and they make a pretty good team. Leo Carillo as Mike Rossini and Lionel Stander as Flash are both terrific and they get the bulk of the laughs.

This movie is part of the first volume of the Icons of Screwball Comedy series. Each of the two boxed sets contains four Columbia screwball comedies and the nice thing is they’re all movies that have previously been difficult if not impossible to find on DVD. In fact I don’t think any of them have been released on DVD prior to this. They’re decent transfers and both sets are superb value for money.

If You Could Only Cook is certainly recommended. It’s not in the same league as the best of the Carole Lombard screwball comedies or masterpieces of the genre like It Happened One Night or Bringing Up Baby but it’s still warmly recommended.

The Blue Lamp (1950)

2012-02-11T01:21:00.001+11:00

The Blue Lamp, made at Ealing Studios in 1950, is in some ways a British version of The Naked City - an early example of the police procedural shot in a pseudo-documentary style.

It’s a style that would later become very popular in British crime television series, and in fact one of the lead characters went on to become the central character of one of the most successful and long-running of all British TV cop shows, Dixon of Dock Green.

While it’s not film noir it does have some affinities to noir, most notably in the way it portrays the sense of postwar disillusionment and anxiety, elements often seen as playing a major role in American film noir. There’s also a background of a society beginning the long slow process of unravelling, a feature of this movie that is usually overlooked.

In this case the principal anxiety is juvenile delinquency. At this period if you were making a British movie dealing with such a subject you had two casting choices - Richard Attenborough or Dirk Bogarde. Two of the greatest of all British actors, and arguably no actors have ever conveyed the sense of menace and of youth dangerously out of control, combined with a sense of vulnerability and hopelessness, as these two stars. In The Blue Lamp the main juvenile delinquent is Dirk Bogarde.

This was in fact the movie that established Bogarde as a major star. It was one of three great crime thrillers he made that year, the other two being So Long at the Fair and The Woman in Question.

The movie is intended to be focused primarily on the police but Bogarde’s twitchy and disturbing presence completely dominates the movie.

PC George Dixon (Jack Warner) is your archetypal loveable English bobby. He’s close to retirement when young PC Andy Mitchell (Jimmy Hanley) arrives at Paddington Green Police Station. Dixon takes Mitchell under his wing.

The police are facing a major challenge - a new breed of young criminal who refuses to play by the established rules. This is one of the major themes of the movie - the divide between the old-school professional criminals who detest violence and this new breed who are vicious violent hoodlums, made even more dangerous by their youthful incompetence. Two such hoodlums are Tom Riley (Dirk Bogarde) and Spud (Patric Doonan). They have teamed up with a young runaway, Diana Lewis (Peggy Evans). The three of them plan to rob a theatre but of course it all goes horribly wrong and there is a shooting. If the victim dies this will become a murder case.

This bungled robbery will have momentous consequences for both PC Dixon and PC Mitchell, in very different ways.

Detective-Inspector Cherry (Bernard Lee) is in charge of the investigation and leads are hard to come by until one of the three young criminals makes a fatal error.

This is a film that couldn’t be made today. Modern audiences would refuse to accept the idea of police officers as decent dedicated men and women. It is a very idealised view of the police, but perhaps we have become so cynical that we cannot even comprehend such concepts. Modern audiences would also be mystified by the sharp divide between the old and breeds of criminal, a gap so wide that the old-school criminals are willing to help the police catch the young hoodlums.

The biggest problem this movie has is the acting. Dirk Bogarde is of course superb but everyone else is too stiff, too formal, too lifeless. The script doesn’t help, relying too much on stereotypical stock characters. The police officers in particular manage to be both dull and mildly irritating.

The movie does have compensating strengths though. Basil Dearden was a fine director and his approach is lively and stylish. There’s some splendid location photography and some excellent set-pieces.

Stilted at times and a little too idealistic in its depiction of police work, it’s still worth a look.

The Seventh Veil (1945)

2012-02-08T15:49:00.001+11:00

The Seventh Veil was one of the most successful British movies of all time. In fact, measured by ticket sales, it’s the tenth biggest box-office hit in British history, well ahead of movies like Jaws, Jurassic Park or The Lord of the Rings. This 1945 production is also one of the most respected of all British movies.

I’m now going to enrage fans of British movies (and I am myself a very big fan of British films of the 40s and 50s) by stating that it’s a very bad movie.

As the movie opens we see a woman we will later earn is Francesca Cunningham (Ann Todd) trying to kill herself by jumping off a bridge. After being taken to hospital she refuses to speak and no-one knows why she did it. Psychiatrist Dr Larsen (Herbert Lom) believes he can find the answer. He explains that the human mind is like Salome’s seven veils. He might remove two or three with friends, and five or even six with a lover, but we never remove the seventh veil. But with hypnosis he can persuade her to remove that seventh veil.

He regresses her to her childhood, which we then see in a flashback. At the age of 14 a caning at school causes her to miss out on a piano scholarship, her hands being too swollen to allow her to play. Her dreams of a career as a concert pianist seem to be dashed. Shortly thereafter she is sent to live with her Uncle Nicholas (James Mason) who is now her legal guardian. The shy Francesca and the moody and taciturn Nicholas do not get on. Then Nicholas discovers her passion for music, a passion he shares.

He begin the process of moulding her into a great concert pianist. He turns out to be an inspired teacher. Several years pass and her talent is becoming more and more obvious. Nicholas sends her to the Royal College of Music but tensions remain between Francesca and Nicholas. She falls in love with a fellow student and announces she is going to marry him but Nicholas forbids the marriage. Given that she is only 17 his decision is probably not unreasonable but Francesca is bitterly resentful.

More years pass and she has now achieved her dream. She is an internationally renowned performer but she is increasingly aggrieved over Nicholas’s rigid control of her life and career. She has also over the years developed an obsession over her hands, natural enough for a musician but she takes it to extremes.

She now decides to run off to Italy with an artist. This leads to a confrontation with Nicholas, and she leaves. Again his opposition is not entirely unreasonable - in the 1940s shacking up with an artist would probably have destroyed her career. There is a car accident and she is now convinced that her hands are irreparably damaged and she can never play again. We are now back to the present day and we have the explanation for her suicide attempt, but Dr Larsen realises she has still not dropped that seventh veil. There is still no explanation of her conviction that her hands are ruined since there is in fact absolutely nothing wrong with them. So what lies beneath that seventh veil?

There are quite a few problems with this movie, most notably with the casting.

Francesca goes from being 14 to being presumably just short of 21 at the end (since Nicholas is still her legal guardian). But Ann Todd was 36 at the time! In fact she was the same age as James Mason! And to be honest she looks 36. It makes it difficult to buy the idea that Francesca sees Nicholas as an incredibly intimidating and yet strangely god-like character. She seems much too mature to fall under the spell of a Svengali. A great actress could have overcome this problem and made us believe in the character anyway, but sadly Ann Todd was not a great actress. It’s not just that she’s too old. We need to not only like Francesca, we need to be fascinated by her. We need to care what lies beneath that seventh veil. Frankly, her performance is dull. Francesca also comes across as being rather selfish. For all his faults Nicholas has devoted almost a decade of his life to helping her realise her dreams. He has his own motivations of course but it’s not as if he pushed her into her career. It’s what she always wanted.

The second problem is James Mason. He’s just too good. He completely dominates the movie. He makes Nicholas a complex, enigmatic but oddly sympathetic character, a man who is terribly vulnerable. He’s a control freak but Mason makes him a lot more interesting than Francesca. Of course, while this is a fault if the movie is supposed to be about Francesca, with Francesca being so uninteresting Mason’s performance at least gives us someone to focus on.

The third problem is the script, which actually won an Academy Award. In the 40s film-makers were obsessed with psychiatry and hypnosis. The results are invariably ludicrous, but usually highly entertaining. I personally adore 1940 psychiatry movies, but probably not for the reasons the film-makers hoped! While I generally dislike the idea of judging movies as being so bad they’re good I make an exception with 40s psychiatry movies. They’re always bad and the worse they are the more fun they are. So whether the script is a disaster or a delight depends on your point of view. It’s certainly very silly.

Herbert Lom as Dr Larsen has the unenviable job of trying to make the psychobabble sound convincing, but being Herbert Lom he ends up making the psychiatrist seem slightly sinister. Certainly not what the film-makers would have intended but it does add to the fun. The script adheres to the then amazingly popular theory that if you could just find out why someone was crazy they would then instantaneously and miraculously be cured. A bit like thinking that if you could find out how someone broke their leg the leg would instantly heal itself!

So while it’s a fairly bad movie it’s thoroughly enjoyable, and James Mason and Herbert Lom are always compulsively watchable. The Seventh Veil is recommended as long as you don’t try to take it too seriously. The Odeon Best of British all-regions DVD is not a stellar transfer but it’s perfectly acceptable.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

2012-02-05T15:01:00.002+11:00

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt was Fritz Lang’s last American film, and it’s one of his most underrated productions. Despite its flaws it’s a complex and interesting film.

According to Lette Eisner (in her book on Lang) by this time Lang was thoroughly bored by the idea of social problem films. That’s an important point to bear in mind since it’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that this movie is a critique of capital punishment. While Lang may well have been against capital punishment that’s not what this movie is about except at a very superficial level. A straightforward anti-capital punishment story would have been too obvious and boring a theme to have interested Lang. There’s little doubt that he accepted this project when it was offered to him because he could see that it had much wider possibilities.

Crusading newspaper proprietor Austin Spencer persuades his friend Tom Garrett (Dana Andrews) to witness an execution. Spencer has been campaigning against capital punishment, and against the very successful District Attorney Roy Thompson (Philip Bourneuf). Garrett had worked for Spencer as a newspaperman and is now a novelist, and engage to Spencer’s daughter Susan (Joan Fontaine)

Spencer has an ingenious plan. If he can get an innocent man arrested and then convicted of a murder and then reveal that it was all a set-up and that the man in entirely innocent then he can not only discredit the concept of capital punishment, he can also wreck Thompson’s chances of becoming governor. Garrett is intrigued by this scheme and agrees to be the innocent man in the phony murder frame-up.

The plan involves planting a trail of false clues, clues that will amount to sufficient circumstantial evidence to ensure Garrett’s conviction. Spencer explains that there’s no actual risk. They will keep records of their activities and more importantly Spencer will take photographs of Garrett planting the false clues, photographs that will include newspaper headlines that will establish unequivocally that they placed the phony clues several days after the murder. Once they present this record to the authorities Garrett can count on an immediate pardon.

All they need now is a suitable murder, one that seems to be baffling the police. And the ideal murder occurs soon afterwards - the slaying of a burlesque dancer. The bogus clues have the desired effect and Tom Garrett is soon behind bars, and is convicted precisely according to the plan. Everything is going very smoothly indeed. And then fate steps in, and suddenly Tom Garrett is sitting on Death Row with apparently very little chance of getting that pardon. There are further dramatic twists but I’m not going to give away any spoilers.

This is a movie about innocence and guilt, truth and lies, appearances and reality. Spencer and Garrett weave a clever but dangerous web of deceit. As does the film itself. If you’re a film-maker making a mystery film you have to lie to the audience, you have to practice the same kinds of deception that Spencer and Garrett use to carry off their scheme. The film-maker has to plant red herrings and present clues in a misleading way in order to maintain suspense. It’s ideal material for Fritz Lang.

There’s moral ambiguity and complexity in abundance. Austin Spencer initially is presented as the noble crusading newspaper owner but his actions are horrifyingly irresponsible and cynical. He risks having his friend sent to the electric chair for a crime he did not commit, he puts his daughter through an appalling ordeal and risks destroying her prospective marriage, he wastes a great deal of police time, he wastes a considerable amount of taxpayers’ money on a totally unnecessary trial and he disrupts an important police investigation in a manner that could easily have led to the real killer (a vicious violent killer) escaping justice and being free to commit further murders. He does all this for the sake of scoring political points and indulging his taste for self-righteous soapbox posturing.

His motives for doing all this are more than questionable. Underneath his annoyingly sanctimonious exterior he clearly enjoys the power that owning a newspaper brings, and he is fairly obviously at least partly motivated by his personal animosity to the DA. It’s difficult not to believe that his enthusiasm for the cause he espouses has quite a bit to do with not wanting the DA to succeed in using his courtroom triumphs as a springboard into the governor’s office.

The DA is seemingly set up as the villain of the piece, an ambitious and ruthless man, a man we are led to believe has few scruples. Ironically he turns out to be the most honest (or perhaps the least dishonest is a better way of putting it) of the major characters.

One aspect of this film that is surprisingly often overlooked is the way the press is portrayed. We have here a cynical manipulative newspaper proprietor who wields his power ruthlessly and irresponsibly. The moral depravity of Austin Spencer is truly extraordinary. He clearly believes himself to be a higher level of government than the actual government. Later in the movie we will see his daughter using the power of the press in an attempt to force the criminal justice system to dance to her tune.

By 1956 television was presenting a major threat to Hollywood and this had a particularly serious effect on the cheaper sort of crime film, the B-pictures and the lower-budgeted A-pictures, in fact pictures like this one. Lang didn’t have the budget to include the kinds of visual flourishes you expect in a Lang film and at times it’s a little flat. The casting is also perhaps not quite ideal, apart from Dana Andrews. Tom Garratt is a challenging role for an actor, a man who is practising deception on several levels simultaneously. Dana Andrews is reasonably effective. A more flamboyant actor might have been too obvious.

Douglas Morrow’s screenplay stretches credibility at times but given that it’s an inherently fantastic and implausible concept that’s probably unavoidable. You just have to accept the slightly contrived nature of the script. Given the themes the movie is dealing with a slightly contrived and artificial feel is perhaps more of an asset than a liability.

These are minor quibbles. Overall it’s an intriguing film and much more successful than its indifferent reputation would suggest.

Reap the Wild Wind (1942)

2012-02-03T15:47:00.002+11:00

Hollywood may have seen better directors than Cecil B. DeMille but very few have ever equalled him when it comes to pure entertainment and his 1942 production Reap the Wild Wind is a fine example of DeMille at his best.

In the 1840s, before the railroad boom, the prosperity of the United States was dependent on seaborne trade. This trade faced many hazards, few being more deadly than the reefs around Florida’s Key West. Salvage operators made a lucrative but dangerous living retrieving the cargoes of ships wrecked on these reefs.

Few were as brave and as daring as the beautiful Loxi Claiborne (Paulette Goddard). She inherited the family salvage business on the death of her father. The lack of a man to run the business has been no problem - Loxi is as courageous and as determined as any man. But the ships sailing these seas face a far more insidious threat than the reefs - ship-wreckers.

Some salvage operators are not content to wait for a wreck. These land-borne pirates arrange their own wrecks, bribing greedy ships’ captains and officers to drive their own ships onto the rocks. The most notorious of all are the Cutler brothers, King Cutler (Raymond Massey) and Dan Cutler (Robert Preston).

Their most recent victim was the command of Captain Jack Stuart (John Wayne). His first mate Mathias Widgeon was in the pay of King Cutler. Jack Stuart, a brave and honourable seaman, has lost his ship, and possibly his career. He would have lost his life as well had it not been for Loxi Claiborne.

While Jack recuperates he and Loxi get to know each other and love soon blooms between them. Jack fears that the loss of his ship may deprive him of the one thing he wants more than anything else in the world - command of the Southern Cross, a brand-new steamship. Jack knows that steam is the future, and whoever commands the Southern Cross will find himself in line to take over the Deveraux Line when the aged Commodore Deveraux goes to a better world.

There is another man with ambitions to run the Deveraux Line - their maritime lawyer Steven Tolliver (Ray Milland). Loxi travels to Charleston, determined to use her feminine wiles to save Jack’s career. She flirts with Tolliver but in her mind she dismisses him as a schemer and a milquetoast. It proves to be the most serious error of judgment of her life.

Jack and Steven find themselves in Key West, uneasy allies in the fight against the ship-wreckers. They are very different men. Jack is a rough diamond while Steven is a suave, charming dandy. They have never liked each other and now they are rivals for Loxi’s affections. Jack’s failure to elise that beneath his foppish exterior Steven Tolliver is a brave and honourable man will prove to be a disastrous error of judgment on his part. And King Cutler has plans for the Southern Cross.

There is romance and adventure aplenty here, but there is much more. There is real human drama and complex characterisation. Loxi, Jack Stuart and Steven Tolliver are all complicated people torn by conflicting emotions. They have great strengths and they have real human weaknesses. Even a relatively minor character like Dan Cutler is more than just a stereotype. Faced with such challenging roles all the main players rise to the occasion admirably.

John Wayne, Paulette Goddard, Ray Milland and Robert Preston are all playing somewhat larger-than-life characters but in all cases they manage to combine a certain amount of over-acting with surprising subtleties.

Visually it’s a typical DeMille production. It’s spectacular, filmed in Technicolor and with some impressive underwater scenes.

This is over-the-top melodrama but it’s intelligent and superbly made melodrama. Highly recommended.

The Region 4 DVD lacks extras but looks great.

Moontide (1942)

2012-02-01T19:28:00.002+11:00

Moontide was the picture that was supposed to launch Jean Gabin as a Hollywood star. Like almost everything else connected with this movie it didn’t work out as intended, but it’s still a fascinating movie.

Filming started on this 20th Century Fox production in November 1941 but it had already encountered numerous obstacles and its troubles were only just beginning. The Production Code Authority had absolutely vetoed the original screenplay. The original writer, Nunnally Johnson, was replaced by John O’Hara. Jean Gabin insisted on major changes to the script. Studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck insisted on further major changes. Soon after shooting began director Fritz Lang walked off the picture. Plans to film on location had to be scrapped. As a result it’s a bit of a mess in some ways but paradoxically many of these problems ended up working in the movie’s favour.

It’s a kind of film noir fairy tale love story. French dock worker Bobo (Gabin) arrives in San Pedro, California. He meets up with his old buddy, Tiny (Thomas Mitchell), who has a job lined up for him. Bobo celebrates his arrival by getting so drunk that when he wakes up next morning he has no memory of the night before. Nor does he have any idea how he ended up on a bait barge in the harbour. The arrival of the Chinese owner of the barge, Henry, clarifies things slightly. Bobo and Henry had ended up drinking together and Henry had offered him a job, selling bait.

Bobo’s initial reaction after this is to move on as quickly as possible, but then fate steps in. A young woman tries to drown herself and he saves her. The woman is Anna (Ida Lupino). Like Bobo she’s an outsider and she has a past although we never actually find out any details of either her past or Bobo’s for that matter. That’s mainly due to problems with Production Code Authority. In the original novel and in the early version of the screenplay Anna is a prostitute and Bobo is a man who has had many lady friends, quite a few of whom had followed Anna’s profession.

All this had to be cut but in some ways that strengthens the film. Enough is left to suggest that both have seen quite a bit of life, and to lead us to suspect that both have had colourful pasts, but the fact that we don’t know the details gives them both an odd kind of innocence. All we really need to know is that both of them are outsiders, homeless strays.

Bobo takes Anna back to the barge to recuperate. He’s a tough guy with a fiery temper but he’s the sort of tough guy who would take in a bird with a broken wing. Like Anna. He has a gentle side to his character and it responds to her immediately. She obviously not used to men showing this type of tenderness, and it doesn’t take her too long to realise that she likes it.

Their blossoming love soon faces some obstacles. Tiny has a weird kind of hold on Bobo and Tiny dislikes Anna. He apparently dislikes any woman that Bobo likes. Tiny more or less lives off Bobo - he arranges jobs for Bobo and then pockets half the paycheques. There has also been a murder - an old and rather unfriendly character named Pop Kelly who happens to have been drinking at the same bar as Bobo on the day Bobo arrived in town. Since Bobo remembers nothing of this night, and since Bobo’s friend Nutsy (Claude Rains) finds Pop Kelly’s cap in the barge, we suspect that either Bobo was involved or someone was trying to frame him. It’s not long before Tiny puts this idea into Anna’s head.

The odds seem stacked against the two ill-starred lovers. They set up housekeeping on the barge and they are soon talking of marriage but Tiny is determined to thwart their plans.

The film’s reticence about the characters’ pasts and the downplaying of Bobo’s violence were the results of demands made by both the Production Code and Darryl F. Zanuck. The influence of the Code on Hollywood films in the 30s and 40s is today almost universally viewed as being pernicious and disastrous, as is the kind of studio interference that Zanuck indulged in. In practice however the results were not always entirely destructive and in this case Zanuck’s instincts were undoubtedly correct. The changes forced on the writers have the effect of making both Bobo and Anna much more sympathetic and also much more vulnerable. They give the two central characters a kind of innocence that makes their outsider status much more poignant. We desperately want them to make it and that gives the movie a much greater emotional impact. We feel that they are ill-equipped to deal with a hostile world.

Jean Gabin did not find favour with American audiences at the time and he made only one more film in Hollywood before returning permanently to France. Gabin could not adapt to the Hollywood system of movie-making. That’s perhaps a pity since his performance is extremely good.

Ida Lupino is even better. This is a more vulnerable Lupino than usual and she gives a marvellously subtle performance. Claude Rains was cast against type as the scruffy but wise Nutsy and his performance is very unselfish - Rains could chew scenery with the best of them but he backs off in this picture allowing Gabin and Lupino to maintain centre stage. The big surprise is Thomas Mitchell as Tiny. Mitchell usually played loveable types but Zanuck insisted he’d be wonderful as the sinister Tiny, and Zanuck was right.

Visually the movie is extraordinary. Charles G. Clarke was nominated for an Oscar for his cinematography and deservedly so. It’s a mix of visual styles - there’s a lot of film noir and quite a bit of German Expressionism but it owes its biggest debt to the French poetic realist films of the 30s. This may have been indirectly due to Jean Gabin. The visual approach is strikingly reminiscent of Marcel Carné’s 1938 French hit Port of Shadows which starred Gabin. It’s impossible to believe that Moontide wasn’t influence by that film. One suspects that with Gabin as the star someone at 20th Century-Fox must have watched Carné’s film and decided that the look of that film would be perfect for this one. There’s also a debt to Salvador Dali, who did the original drawings for Moontide’ s celebrated drunken dream sequence. Zanuck also had a major input and at least one important (and very effective) scene was entirely Zanuck’s idea.

Part of the look of the movie was entirely fortuitous. The outbreak of war on December 7 1941 meant that plans to film on location at San Pedro had to abandoned so the studio recreated the harbour setting on a sound stage. This magnificent set, combined with the fog-shrouded cinematography, gives the movie an incredibly artificial look. It’s as if the four main characters are trapped in a strange fairy tale word of their own, with Bobo as the hero, Anna as a kind of princess of the slums, Tiny as the wicked witch and Nutsy as the fairy godmother. This fairy tale ambience suits the material perfectly and proves to be the best thing about the film.

Fritz Lang was director for the first two-and-a-half weeks of filming (before Archie Mayo took over) and many of the scenes he shot remain in the film, although apparently no-one is now sure which scenes they are. Lang and Gabin clashed repeatedly on set but both wanted the movie to be more doom-laden and pessimistic and disagreed vehemently with Zanuck on the general direction the film should take. Much as I revere Lang and Gabin I think Zanuck understood the material better than they did.

Moontide was not a commercial success, probably because it’s so uncompromisingly non-realistic and really seems like a strange hybrid. It’s a combination of European and American sensibilities, of film noir and romance, of crime movie and fairy tale. Like Charles Laughton’s 1956 masterpiece Night of the Hunter (which resembles Moontide in many ways) it was a movie that contemporary audiences were not prepared for. Although by no means a perfect film it’s a strange and rather wonderful experience which I recommend very highly.

The DVD in the Fox Film Noir series looks sensational and includes some terrific extras.

Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1937)

2012-01-28T01:54:00.004+11:00

Bulldog Drummond Escapes was the first of eight Bulldog Drummond movies made by Paramount in the late 30s.

The Bulldog Drummond novels by Herman C. McNeile (“Sapper”) are highly enjoyable thrillers but sadly none of the many adaptations really capture their spirit. The two mid-60s British films are great fun spoofs but turn the hero into a kind of James Bond clone while the Paramount films make him a bit too smooth. In the novels the character is certainly a gentleman, but he’s a tough guy as well and rather edgy with a strong streak of ruthlessness mixed with chivalry and reckless bravery.

Ray Milland payed Drummond in Bulldog Drummond Escapes but in the later films John Howard takes over the role.

Bulldog Drummond Escapes with Captain Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond returning back home to England. On a misty country road he is flagged down by a young woman who then proceeds to steal his car. The lady left her bag in the car and when he has retrieved his car he drives to Greystone Manor to return it. He is informed that the young lady is suffering from a persecution complex but the doctor who is treating her, along with the middle-aged man an his sister who are caring for her, seem to Drummond to be behaving just a little suspiciously.

Drummond immediately senses that adventure may be afoot. And there’s nothing he likes better. His sense of chivalry also helps in convincing him that this unfortunate young woman is a damsel in distress and in need of rescuing. Inspector Nielson of Scotland Yard warns him off the case which naturally makes him even keener.

His pal Algy Longworth is axiouusly awaiting the birth of his first child but Hugh ropes him in anyway. Hugh finds a letter that confirms his suspicions. He still lacks hard evidence but he feels he needs to act even if it puts him (temporarily) on the wrong side of the law.

The movie suffers a little from the problem that afflicts so many American B-movies of that era - too much emphasis on jokiness and not enough on suspense. Algy is played purely as a comic relief character which becomes just a little irritating. Of course if you haven’t read the books this might not worry you so much, but if you have read them you’ll find yourself wishing they’d been more faithful to the tone of the source material. Not that the books are overly serious - they’re essentially just adventure yarns (and very good ones) but without the quite unnecessary comic relief.

Ray Milland is an actor whose work I enjoy enormously. While he’s a lot more polished than McNeile’s original creation he’s charming enough to get away with it. The support cast is adequate enough.

Bulldog Drummond Escapes is reasonable lightweight entertainment and it’s worth a look.

My copy comes from one of the MiIl Creek public domain boxed sets. DVD picture quality is awful but watchable and the sound quality is absolutely deplorable. The best thing that can be said about it is that the dialogue is at least understandable.

Dancing Lady (1933)

2012-01-25T13:12:00.002+11:00

MGM’s 1933 musical Dancing Lady can be seen as an attempt by the studio to do something in the style of Warner Brothers’ 1932 hit 42nd Street. MGM couldn’t capture the hardboiled atmosphere that made 42nd Street so distinctive and they didn’t have Busby Berkeley but they did have plenty of money and they did have two great stars in Joan Crawford and Clark Gable. The result is lightweight but a lot of fun.

Its main claim to fame though is probably that it launched the film career of Fred Astaire. It’s an often overlooked fact that Fred Astaire’s first dancing partner in the movies was not Ginger Rogers but was in fact Joan Crawford.

Even back in 1933 the plot was already hackneyed. Burlesque artiste Janie Barlow (Joan Crawford) will do just about anything to get her break as a dancer. Her opportunity comes when she meets rich dissolute playboy Tod Newton (Franchot Tone). He pulls strings to get her an audition with renowned Broadway producer Patch Gallagher (Clark Gable). Gallagher is tired of having wealthy backers trying to get their girlfriends into his show and tells his assistant to give her the brush-off but the assistant finally persuades him to take a look at her. He can see at once that she has potential, so now she’s got a job in the chorus line.

Tod isn’t really interested in furthering her theatrical career. He’s more interested in getting her into the bedroom than onto the stage, but she’s so single-minded about dancing that he figures that getting her into the chorus line will keep her interested and then when she realises how tough Broadway is she’ll be more inclined to accept her attentions. At last that’s his initial plan, but he soon realises that actually he wants to marry her.

While Janie is kept busy fending off Tod’s attentions Patch has had second thoughts about his new find. He’s decided that she really is something social, that she just might have what it takes to become a star, and that he should take a big chance and put her into the lead role. She’ll be dancing opposite a well-established Broadway star named Fred Astaire. Naturally things aren’t going to work out that smoothly or that simply, the show faces cancellation and Janie faces the even more unpleasant fate of marriage to Tod, that being the only alternative she’s left with.

Of course it can’t end that way and somehow Patch will find a way to save the show, and Janie will get her chance.

The unoriginality of the plot doesn’t matter in the least in a movie like this. What does matter is the charisma of the leads and the quality of the musical numbers. In both those respects Dancing Lady is on firm ground. They may not have had Busby Berkeley but the music is good and the production numbers are spectacular. At times surreal and even verging on the bizarre, but impressive nonetheless.

Crawford and Gable are both terrific and as always they have tremendous chemistry. As a dancer Crawford might not have been Ginger Rogers but she was still a pretty good hoofer. Her dance duets with Astaire are not as elaborate as the ones he would later do with Rogers but Crawford acquits herself extremely well.

There’s a strong and rather varied supporting cast. Franchot Tone is reasonably good as the smooth but somewhat sleazy Tod. Astaire only appears in the dance routines. Robert Benchley is amusing as a slightly scatter-brained gossip columnist. There’s also the first movie appearance of Nelson Eddy. Plus there’s comic relief courtesy of the Three Stooges, a very strange touch that works better than you’d expect.

Robert Z. Leonard is one of those often overlooked directors. He was no auteur but he was a capable craftsman who could handle just about any genre, the kind of director who was the backbone of Hollywood in the days of the studio system. He does his usual competent job here.

There’s not a huge amount of pre-code sex and sin here, but there is some. Janie does after all start her career as a strip-tease artiste, and there are a few risque moments scattered through the film.

This is not perhaps one of the great musicals of the 30s but it’s thoroughly enjoyable and it features Gable and Crawford at their most charming and likeable. Definitely recommended.

The Letter (1940)

2012-01-21T22:30:00.003+11:00

The Letter, directed by William Wyler for Warner Brothers in 1940, contains what may well be Bette Davis’s finest performance. And it’s a great film.

It’s hard to go wrong when adapting a Somerset Maugham story for the screen. For some reason his stories just work perfectly as movies.

The setting is a rubber plantation in Malaya, some time during the 1930s (the war is never mentioned so it’s clearly some time before 1939).

The famous opening sequence is one of the best you’re ever going to see, with Bette Davis emptying a revolver into a man. We have no idea who he is or why she shot him, or why she kept on shooting him after long after he was obviously dead.

The District Officer and her lawyer are sent for and Leslie Crosbie (Davis) tell her story. The man she shot was Peter Hammond, another planter. He had made unwanted advances to her, there had been a struggle, she had grabbed her husband’s revolver and being so upset she hadn’t realised that she had just kept on pulling the trigger. Everyone is very sympathetic. Her husband Robert (Herbert Marshall) arrives shortly afterwards and he is very sympathetic as well. Clearly she had had no choice.

Of course the District Officer has no choice but to arrest her and she will have to stand trial for murder in Singapore but no-one has the slightest doubt she will be acquitted. Until her lawyer, Howard Joyce (James Stephenson), receives information that a letter exists. A Very compromising letter. A letter written by Leslie to the deceased, begging him to come to her while her husband was away. Apart from being very damaging in itself, suggesting n intimate relationship between her and Hammond and casting extreme doubt on her story of being suddenly attacked for no reason, its existence also flatly contradicts the statement she made that she had had no contact of any kind with Hammond for many weeks and that he was no more than a casual acquaintance.

The existence of the letter makes it more than likely that Leslie will be convicted and hanged. Howard Joyce is an honourable man but against his better judgment he is persuaded to try to buy the letter. At the very least this could end his career and he might well face criminal charges for attempting to pervert the course of justice.

The letter is in the hands of Hammond’s widow, a Eurasian woman. She insists she will not sell the letter unless Leslie comes to her personally and at their meeting her hatred for Leslie is all too apparent. But she sells the letter.

It would seem that Leslie is now out of the woods but the killing has had consequences for everyone concerned, for Leslie, for her husband and for Howard Joyce. It may well end by destroying all their lives.

William Wyler was renowned for being a perfectionist who was capable of forcing an actor to do take after take after take and as a result many actors hated working for him. Bette Davis was one of the few who appreciated that Wyler’s methods worked and he got extraordinary performances from her. In a role which could easily have become histrionic and excessively mannered Davis turns in a subtle and controlled performance.

Herbert Marshall and James Stephenson are also superb. While Leslie dominates the film both Robert and Howard Joyce are complex characters thrown into emotional turmoil and not always entirely certain of their own motivations. They are in fact more complex than the self-centred and selfish Leslie.

The visual style certainly has affinities with film noir, although film noir would not truly arrive on the scene for another year or two. The use of shadows and moonlight and in particular the use of light broken up by slatted blinds suggest that The Letter might well have been a major influence on the noir style.

The movie deals indirectly with the effects of colonialism, especially the effects on the representatives of the colonial power. Boredom, despair, alcoholism and adultery are obviously the major ingredients in life in colonial Malaya.

The temptation to give this movie a feminist reading and to treat Leslie as some kind of victim is a temptation that should be strongly resisted. She is a complete monster, thoroughly evil and manipulative. One can’t help suspecting that the signs of remorse she displays have nothing to do with genuine remorse but are merely signs of self-pity and of her frustration that she has been found out and that her elaborate lacework of lies has come unravelled. Leslie’s favourite hobby is lacework and to me the symbolism is clear enough - she constructs intricate patterns of lies and manipulations rather like a spider spinning a web of deception.

Apart from the visual elements there are some thematic similarities to film noir. I suppose you could it tropical noir. It’s a superbly crafted film and fully justifies Wyler’s methodical and perfectionist approach. A great movie.

Little Caesar (1931)

2012-01-19T22:06:00.004+11:00

Little Caesar was released at the beginning of 1931 and it’s the movie that largely defined the gangster movie as a genre. It also made Edward G. Robinson a star.

The movie literally starts with a bang. In fact two bangs as two small-time hoodlums, Caesar Enrico "Rico" Bandello (Robinson) and Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), commit a gas station robbery and two shots are fired. Rico has no intention of staying small-time. He’s going to be a big shot. Joe on the other hand really has no taste for crime. He wants to be a dancer.

They make the move to the big city and Rico quickly establishes himself as the right-hand man of gangster Sam Vettori. Joe gets hired as a dancer in a night-club and falls in love with his dancing partner. Rico’s rise in the criminal underworld is swift but already early on in the movie we see that he has the fatal flaws that will bring him down. As we see in the robbery of the night-club where Joe Massara is now working as a dancer, he is decisive and ruthless, but his judgment is dubious and he is over-confident. He is too quick to use his gun, a mistake that will come back to haunt him.

Rico continues to rise. He and Joe have lost touch, until Joe overhears plans to have Rico killed and sends a warning to Rico. Rico now decides that it’s time to bring Joe back into his organisation. He needs a reliable right-hand man. Rico’s inability to understand that Joe really is determined to have done with crime is his second fateful mistake.

Joe is pushed into a corner where he has to choose between betraying Rico or spending his whole life running. Rico’s nemesis, Detective-Sergeant Flaherty, may be able to get the break he needs to destroy Rico.

Mervyn LeRoy isn’t as celebrated as Howard Hawks or William A. Wellman, who directed the other great early gangster classics Scarface and The Public Enemy but he was extremely competent. To say, as some critics have said, that the one thing that makes Little Caesar exceptional is Edward G. Robinson’s acting is a trifle unfair.

There is certainly no doubt about the greatness of Robinson’s performance however. So much has been written about it that it’s difficult to find anything to add. He’s a wound-up spring of manic energy and menace. Douglas Fairbanks Jr’s performance has been less admired. He was a fine actor but is perhaps just a little too civilised and too nice to be a convincing hoodlum, but then the key to Joe’s character is that he knows himself that he isn’t cut off for a career as a gangster. It’s also an essential plot element that Joe should be a guy who is capable of passing in both worlds, the world of the racketeer and the world of the cultured sophisticates who haunt the expensive nightclubs the gangsters use as a front.

If you’re determined to see every movie through a political prism you can try to force Little Caesar into that mould and see it as the dark flipside to the American Dream or a comment on the evils of capitalism or the despair of the Depression. In reality there’s absolutely nothing in this movie to support such an interpretation. That of course won’t stop film school types from trying.

The author of the novel on which the movie is based, W. R. Burnett, described Rico as a gutter Macbeth and that is the key to what the movie is really about. It’s a kind of ironic parody of classical tragedy. Rico’s single-minded ambition will carry him to the top but the qualities that put him there will drag him back to the gutter again and to his ultimate destruction.

The DVD includes a commentary track by Richard Jewell, a film historian at the University of Southern California. Unfortunately much of what he has to say is the sheerest nonsense. Being an academic he is determined to give the film the correct left-wing political spin. At one point he assures us that Rico could never have reached the very top of the criminal underworld because of the rigid class barriers in the US. One can only assume this guy has never heard of Al Capone. It’s particularly ironic to hear such poppycock from a film historian given that Hollywood itself was a classic example of an industry in which class barriers were non-existent. While a political interpretation might be valid in the case of some other Warner Brothers gangster films the fact is that Little Caesar is remarkably apolitical.

He does, to his credit, admit that the gay interpretation that many have tried to give the film doesn’t really hold water. The gay interpretation is based on scenes such as the one in which Rico is trying on his first dinner jacket and preening himself in front of a mirror. That scene is clearly meant to show us one of the flaws that will bring Rico undone - his overwhelming vanity. That vanity, and the fact that Rico doesn’t have the cool judgment or the intelligence to back up his incredibly high opinion of himself, is stressed again and again in the movie.

As for the relationship between Rico and Joe Massara it always amazes me that so many people today are incapable of comprehending the idea of a relationship between men that isn’t sexual. W. R. Burnett apparently felt the movie could be seen as suggesting that Rico was homosexual and was annoyed by this but I really think he was equally mistaken. The fact that Rico has no involvement with women simply stresses his isolation from his fellow creatures, an isolation that makes him vulnerable in the case of Joe Massara because Joe is the only person who truly likes Rico and shows any genuine loyalty to him.

The friendship between Rico and Joe serves to underline just how twisted Rico’s view of humanity is. While Joe understands real friendship Rico uses Joe the same way he uses everyone else. He wants Joe to be his loyal lieutenant because he needs simple he can trust not to betray him, and someone who can act as a useful front man. It doesn’t occur to Rico to consider Joe’s wishes. In the most crucial scene of the movie, when he realises he will have to kill Joe, Rico gets his first glimpse of what true friendship might mean. Even a man as evil as Rico still has some tiny shred of human decency deep within him but it is too late for Rico.

Just as significant as the absence of women in Rico’s life is the absence of family, again stressing his aloneness.

Rather than taking a political stance the film puts the focus squarely on Rico, on the strengths that allow his rapid rise (his self-confidence, his decisiveness, his ruthlessness) and the weaknesses that cause his equally rapid descent (his isolation and his vanity). There is no mention of the Depression or of Prohibition, no mention of impoverished childhoods, no social context whatsoever. This is the film’s great strength. It makes it a timeless story with universal significance rather than a topical political tract. This makes it very unusual for a 1930s Warner Brothers film.

There had been gangster movies before this film and there would be many more afterwards but Little Caesar remains the greatest of them all.

The Challenge (1960)

2012-01-17T22:25:00.003+11:00

The Challenge (released in the US as It Takes a Thief) is a Jayne Mansfield film noir. That might seem a pretty unlikely concept so you’re probably sceptical at this stage. It does co-star Anthony Quayle and it does have a pretty good director in John Gilling and those two facts were enough to persuade me to give it a chance.

Gilling was responsible for some of Hammer’s best horror movies of the 60s (such as The Reptile and Plague of the Zombies) so there’s no question about his ability to create a sinister atmosphere.

Mansfield plays Billie, leader of a criminal gang in London. She has a plan to pull off a daring bullion robbery and she involves Jim (Anthony Quayle) in the venture. Her exact intentions towards Jim remain ambiguous. They’re lovers but whether she really loves him is uncertain and whether she intends to double-cross him remains equally obscure.

The problem is that Billie’s control over her gang is far from complete. Kristy (Carl Möhner) takes orders from her reluctantly, partly because he resents Jim (he wants Billie for himself) and partly because he simply wants to run the gang himself.

Jim is the chump. He’s a nice guy battling to raise a 6-year-old son after his wife’s death. He doesn’t want anything to do with crime but he’s under Billie’s spell and she promised him it would be just one job and then they’d buy a farm together. His job is not to take part in the actual robbery but to take the loot and hide it after the robbery. Kristy clearly intends that Jim should be the fall-guy. Whether Billie intends this or not is uncertain but either ay he does become the fall-guy and serves five years in prison.

Wen he’s released he’s determined to go straight but the money is still hidden somewhere and the gang wants it. The police have him under surveillance, hoping he’ll lead them to the money or to his accomplices.

Billie meanwhile has been doing very well. After pulling off a series of successful robberies she’s now running a strip club. Her control over her gang has however become even less sure. They’re determined to get the money from the bullion robbery no matter how they have to do it while Billie wants the money but she doesn’t want any harm to come to Jim. She’s a criminal but she hates violence and she clearly has some feelings towards Jim even if she herself is probably not really aware how strong those feelings might be.

Kristy is untroubled by any such scruples and without telling BiIlie he has Jim’s son kidnapped to put pressure on him to reveal the whereabouts of the loot. Jim has to find a way to get his son back which is not going to be easy with the police watching him. THe power struggle between Billie and Kristy meanwhile comes to a head.

The classic B noir was pretty much dead in Hollywood by 1960 but the British were still making moody atmospheric low-budget crime films, and doing a very good job of it. The Challenge is a fine example. The plot is nothing special but Gilling’s stylish and energetic directing propels it along in a very entertaining manner. In the early stages in particular there’s plenty of very noirish black-and-white cinematography. There are also some very decent action sequences, especially the scene with Billie (who was the driver for the gang as well as being the mastermind behind their plans) leading the police on a fairly spectacular (by the standards of 1960) car chase. There’s plenty of tension as well as Jim races to save his son from the psychopathic Buddy.

Whether it’s a true film noir is debatable but it certainly has a femme fatale and it has an ordinary man caught drawn into murky and dangerous waters but he’s not a true noir protagonist because he’s never in danger of being corrupted by the noir underworld. It’s more a Hitchcock-style thriller with noir overtones and a dash of sleaze.

Anthony Quayle is very good, as always. The key character though is Billie and that’s where the movie potentially has a problem. It’s the sort of role that would have been tailor-made for Diana Dors who would have pulled it off effortlessly but Jayne Mansfield (who was a fine comic actress) isn’t in the Diana Dors class as a serious actress and doesn’t really have the acting chops for such a complex role. But she gives it her best shot and she’s a lot better than one might have expected.

This is very much a B-movie but it’s consistently entertaining and well worth a look for fans of gritty crime movies.

Renown Productions’ UK region-free PAL DVD release lacks extras but it’s a very nice transfer of a little-known and underrated movie.

You also get to see Jayne Mansfield wearing one of the most bizarre dresses ever worn by an actress. She looks little Little Bo Peep, if Little Bo Peep had decided to forget the sheep (which keep getting lost anyway) and head to the big city to take up a career as an exotic dancer. If I’d been her I’d have asked for extra money for wearing that dress.

Beau Geste (1939)

2012-01-14T21:19:00.002+11:00

I have a real soft spot for Gary Cooper. I know he’s not everyone’s favourite, that many people consider him wooden, but I’m finding that I like him more and more. In particular I think he’s very underrated as a comic actor. Beau Geste gives him some opportunities to display this side of his talent but mostly it’s an old-fashioned adventure film. And a very very good one.

The three Geste brothers are orphans who’ve been raised by the kindly Lady Patricia Brandon, along with the mildly obnoxious heir to the Brandon fortune, Augustus Brandon. The eldest of the Geste boys is Michael, known as Beau (Gary Cooper). The youngest, John Geste (Ray Miland), is in love with Lady Patricia’s daughter (played by a very young Susan Hayward).

Unfortunately much of this fortune has been gambled away by Lady Patricia’s dissolute husband, Sir Hector Brandon. In fact only one real treasure remains to the estate is the fabulous sapphire, the Blue Water. Until the days comes when that too must be sold. Except that it is mysteriously stolen, and Beau just as mysteriously disappears. His brother Digby (Robert Preston) soon departs as well, followed by John.

Needless to say the general assumption is that on of the Geste boys has stolen the sapphire. And where have the three brothers gone? They’ve gone to join the Foreign Legion.

There they find themselves exposed to the none-too-tender mercies of the brutal Sergeant Markoff (Brian Donlevy). He’s as avaricious as he is brutal and he soon gets and of the fact that one of the Geste brothers almost certainly has the Blue water sapphire. And he wants it.

He also wants command. The actual commander of Fort Zinderneuf is Lieutenant Martin but when he falls ill of fever Markoff sees his chance. If Martin dies, which seem certain, he will assume temporary command, but if he can do something incredibly heroic and impressive he would have an excellent chance of getting a commission. Something like putting down a mutiny would do just fine. If there’s no mutiny in the offing, he can always manufacture one. All he has to do is push the men hard enough.

After their experience of Markoff’s sadistic command style most of the soldiers are ready to give him the mutiny he wants. Except for the Geste brothers, Beau and John (Digby has been posted elsewhere), and a handful of others. At this moment a horde of Tuaregs arrives on the scene and mutiny has to take a back seat to survival. For Markoff it’s another opportunity - a heroic defence of the fort will do just as well to earn him his commission. And whatever his failings, Markoff is an able soldier.

The epic defence of the fort provides some spectacular action scenes, ably handled by director Wiliam A. Wellman. We already know the final result since the opening scene of the movie showed us the arrival of the relief column and the shocking discovery they made when they entered the fort. The rest of the movie is essentially one long flashback which will provide the explanation of their discovery.

The cast is uniformly superb. Brian Donlevy goes close to sealing the picture but really everyone plays their parts to perfection.

This is a thrilling combination of action, romance, adventure, old-fashioned heroism and high drama, the sort of things movies were all about back in the days when Hollywood made great movies.

Where Danger Lives (1950)

2012-01-11T15:29:00.001+11:00

Australian director John Farrow made only a handful of movies that could be described as film noir but the ones he did make are exceptionally interesting, and the best of them may well be his 1950 production for RKO, Where Danger Lives.

This is a somewhat underrated entry in the noir cycle and it’s rather odd that it hasn’t received more attention. It was an A-picture with some big name stars (Robert Mitchum and Claude Rains) made by a well-respected director and it not only ticks most of the noir boxes it also has some interesting features of its own.

Mitchum plays a dedicated young doctor named Jeff Cameron. He loves his work, he’s highly thought of and he’s engaged to be married to an equally dedicated nurse (Julie, played by Maureen O’Sullivan). Life is good and it promises to get better. Then fate steps in. Just as he’s about to leave the hospital to go on a date with Julie he’s called back to attend an emergency, an attempted suicide.

The attempted suicide is Margo (Faith Domergue). She’s not in any real danger but she seem a little evasive, and the guy who brought her in seems even more evasive. The following morning when Jeff goes to check on her he discovers she’s given a false address and has discharged herself. Then he gets a cable from her, asking him to meet her at a night-club.

He’s instantly smitten by her. She’s sexy and glamorous and (given the fact that she’s just tried to kill herself) she’s obviously emotionally disturbed. He’s a sensitive man who’s devoted his life to helping people (we discover as the movie progresses that he really is a man who chose medicine as a career for the highest motives and is relatively indifferent to money). A man like that really doesn’t stand a chance - here’s a chance to save somebody who also happens to be sex on legs. Pretty soon they’re dating.

She tells him her sad story. She lives with her father, an elderly man with not long to live who is something of a control freak. He could, and would, cut her off without a penny (and he’s a wealthy man) if she wanted to mary a man he didn’t approve of. And it sounds like he’s a man who’s unlikely to approve of a penniless young doctor who doesn’t even have a practice of his own. Of course she loves Jeff and wants to marry him but she tells him it’s going to be tricky handling her father.

Jeff doesn’t care about her father’s money. He just wants to marry her. After having a few too many drinks he turns up at her house with the intention of trying to talk the old boy around and he quickly discovers that nothing that Margo told him was true. Most importantly, Mr Lannington (Claude Rains) is not her father. Things get out of control rapidly, there’s a struggle and Mr Lannington attacks him with a poker. Jeff punches him and Lannington is knocked out cold. Jeff had received a very nasty blow on the head and he’s extremely groggy but everything is OK, he’ll just get some water and bring Lannington around and then he can leave and go back to his decent ordinary everyday life. He just needs to put his head under some cold water to clear it a bit. When he returns from the bathroom he finds that everything is not OK and he’s not ever going to be able to go back to the daylight world. He’s trapped in the noir nightmare world and there’s no escape. Margo announces that Lannington is dead.

Jeff still thinks everything is not lost. After all it was a clear case of self-defence. But he’s very groggy and he just can’t think straight and Margo tells him nobody will believe him but it’s OK because she has two plane tickets booked for Nassau and they should just head for the airport. Jeff isn’t sure that’s a good idea, they should just call the police and explain everything, but his head is swimming and maybe Margo is right. The airport turns out to be a bad idea and pretty soon they’re in her car heading for the Mexican border and the noir nightmare world has claimed them well and truly.

Jeff is not your typical noir protagonist. He’s not a chump. He’s not the kind of guy who would normally be caught in this kind of nightmare. He’s not a Walter Neff, with the seeds of corruption already inside him just waiting to blossom. It’s the blow on the head that dooms him. All the evidence he needs to work out what is really going on is there before him and normally he’d work it out in quick time but his head just keeps spinning and he can’t put his thoughts together.

Mitchum is terrific, as always. Faith Domergue is the big surprise. She’s not particularly well thought of as an actress (she got her contract with Howard Hughes for the usual reasons) but she’s perfectly cast and does a fine job in a difficult role. Margo isn’t quite the typical femme fatale -she’s clearly not playing with a full deck and we’re never quite sure just how conscious she is of what she is doing and the effects it has on others. The ambiguity is never fully resolved, one of the features that make this movie slightly unusual as 40s Hollywood movies go.

John Farrow shows himself to be a master craftsman. His framing of the scenes involving Mr Lannington, Jeff and Margo is constantly shifting reflecting the unstable dynamics between the three of them, with Jeff and Margo seeming to be drawn together at one moment only to be split apart the next. At times Lannington recedes into the background and seems insignificant only to be suddenly brought into the foreground as the power shifts. The scenes between Margo and Jeff show the instability and ambiguity of their relationship. One moment they seem to be synchronised and then we realise they’re not in tune at all. It’s all done with subtle manipulation of the framing.

Farrow makes extensive use of long takes. One vital scene is done in a single shot, seven minutes without a single cut. Farrow was apparently a prickly character and even more than most directors he detested having his work interfered with. Perhaps long takes were his way of preventing studio interference. When you do your most crucial scenes in very long takes there’s not much the studio can do - they can’t eliminate the scene or shorten it or recut it. Either way it’s a technique that requires not only great skill and self-confidence from a director but also enormous confidence in his actors, and Mitchum and Domergue are equal to the challenge.

Farrow has the advantage in this film of having the great Nick Musuraca as his cinematographer. That, combined with an intelligent and literate script by Charles Bennett, superior acting performances and a director who is in complete command of his craft, makes Where Danger Lives an object lesson in just how good classical Hollywood film-making could be. Highly recommended.

A Scandal in Paris (1946)

2012-01-08T16:28:00.000+11:00

Douglas Sirk’s 1946 film A Scandal in Paris (Thieves' Holiday) is a fictionalised account of the extraordinary career of François Eugène Vidocq, a famous criminal who became an even more famous policeman.

Vidocq’s misspent youth was very misspent indeed. He allegedly killed a fencing instructor at the age of 14, joined the army several times and was cashiered just as many times, fought many duels, was a professional gambler, a thief, a forger and a pirate. After which he became a police spy and went on to found the French criminal investigation department of the Paris police, the Sûreté. He was one of the pioneers of modern police methods, especially the use of undercover operations and was renowned as a master of disguise

When I say the film fictionalises his life it should be noted that most of what is known about Vidocq comes from his own accounts of his life and is most likely highly unreliable. Either way he was obviously perfect material for a movie, and who better to play a charming rogue than George Sanders?

In the movie version Vidocq is as notorious for his pursuit of the ladies as for his pursuit of dishonest money, and ideally prefers to combine both. Stealing the ruby-studded garter of the girlfriend of the chief of the Paris police is one of his more colourful exploits, although it’s one that will come back to haunt him.

Vidocq actually starts the movie in prison. He escapes along with his cell-mate, Emile Vernet (Akim Tamiroff). He gets a job, posing as a model for an equestrian painting of St George and the dragon, and promptly steals both horse and costume. A chance encounter in a graveyard brings him into contact with the family of the Minister of Police. He naturally takes the opportunity to rob their house. And then an idea occurs to him. The Minister has fired his Chief of Police for being unable to solve the crime - if Vidocq could present him with the solution, and the stolen jewels, the Minister might be persuaded to appoint him as Chief of Police. Just imagine the possibilities that might open up for criminal activities on a scale he has not previously even been able to contemplate.

There is a complication however. The beautiful daughter of the Minister, Therese (Signe Hasso), has fallen in love with the man in the painting of St George, who is of course Vidocq. When she meets the actual Vidocq she discovers he really is the man she wants, but she’s a virtuous young woman and could never marry a thief. In fact she wants to save him from his life of wickedness. Will he choose love or crime?

This movie is a delight from start to finish. It’s a complete romp, and makes no concessions to anything as boring as realism. Vidocq’s biography is outrageous and fanciful and the movie takes its cue from that. The dialogue sparkles. The sets and costumes are extravagant. The tone is light-hearted, sophisticated and good-natured. The scene on the Chinese carousel is a nice touch.

George Sanders is of course superb in a role that allows him full scope for his talents. He gets fine support from Gene Lockhart as Richet, the former Chief of Police, and Carole Landis as Richet’s wife.

This movie is total entertainment and I can’t recommend it too highly. Absolute joy.

Odeon’s all-region UK DVD release boasts no extras but sound and picture quality are generally good.

The Sign of Four (1932)

2012-01-04T19:51:00.003+11:00

It’s almost impossible to count the number of actors who have played Sherlock Holmes on either the big screen or the small screen. One of the more successful, although now largely forgotten, was Arthur Wontner.

Wontner played the great detective in five British films between 1931 and 1937 (one of which is sadly now lost). The third of the Wontner Sherlock Holmes movies was The Sign of Four, in 1932. It’s a reasonably faithful adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel of the same name.

The most interesting change is that whereas in the novel the mystery is revealed at the end (as you’d expect in a mystery novel) in the film it’s revealed at the beginning. The movie is therefore not so much concerned with the mystery as such, as with the way in which Sherlock Holmes solves it. It’s a perfectly valid technique and one that has been used with success by some very notable mystery writers. I’ll try to reveal as little as few plot details as possible in this review.

The mystery in this case revolves around a fabulous Indian treasure and an assortment of people who believe they have some claim on it although they’re all in fact thieves.

The mystery begins with the daughter of a British Indian Army officer who inexplicably starts to receive gifts of extremely valuable pearls. She receives a letter explaining merely that the gifts are to right a wrong that has been done to her, and she suspects it has something to do with the mysterious death of her father. He had been stationed in the penal colony in the Andaman Islands. A plan of a fortress with four names on it (the sign of four of the title) will provide another clue.

Wontner makes a pretty good Holmes. There are even those who have claimed that he is the definitive Holmes. I don’t agree (I regard Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett as the two greatest interpreters of the role) but Wontner is perfectly acceptable. Ian Hunter is an adequate Watson.

Director Graham Cutts was a major player in the early days of the British film industry, being a co-founder of Gainsborough Studios. He was apparently somewhat difficult to get along with and his career declined after the introduction of sound. His subsequent reputation has suffered due to the fact many of his movies have either not survived or are difficult to see. On the evidence of this film he was a talented director. For a 1930s British movie it features some rather bold stylistic flourishes, it’s well-paced and it’s exciting with a surprising number of action sequences (and includes an impressive speedboat chase).

If you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan this one is well worth watching.

One of the chief obstacles to the enjoyment of this movie is the very poor quality of the public domain prints that are available. Both sound and picture are terrible. It’s a pity because it’s by no means a bad movie.

Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise)

2012-01-02T20:33:00.002+11:00

Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) is a movie that does not seem to be highly regarded today either by Greta Garbo’s fans or by Clark Gable’s. In fact this 1931 MGM movie doesn’t seem to be highly regarded by anyone which is a pity. Perhaps the problem is that it’s pure melodrama and we live in an age that finds melodrama unsettling without a hefty dose of irony.

The opening sequences are an object lesson in succinct story-telling. A woman in a very conservative Swedish immigrant community in the US dies giving birth to a illegitimate child. The child, Helga (Greta Garbo), is raised by her brother-in-law. He does his duty by her but cannot show her any love, being ashamed of the circumstances of her birth. He arranges a marriage for her but, repelled by the drunken advances of a man she does not love, she runs away before the marriage.

She ends up hiding out in the barn of a neighbour in the middle of a rainstorm. He’s an engineer named Rodney Spencer (Clark Gable) and he’s like no-one she has met before. He’s cheerful, good-natured and kind and it’s obvious they’re going to fall madly in love.

But fate steps in. Rodney has to go to Chicago and while he’s away her brother-in-law and he intended husband turn up. She flees, and ends up joining a travelling carnival (I warned you this was pure melodrama). Rodney sets off in search of her but unfortunately she’s spent the night with the manager of the carnival. She didn’t really have a choice as her husband-to-be turned up again and it was the only way to persuade the manager to hide her but Rodney isn’t very understanding and their relationship seems to have encountered an insurmountable obstacle.

Helga decides that if Rodney thinks she’s a whore then she’ll be a whore. A very successful one. She re-invents herself as Susan Lenox and becomes a wealthy and sought-after courtesan. She is destined to cross paths with Rodney again however and it’s obvious that their love is a strong as ever even if it’s turned to hate. They realise too late that the strength of their hate is simply a measure of the strength of their love. Rodney embarks on a course of self-destruction, but Helga/Susan cannot forget him. Somehow she will find him again, even if she has to scour every low waterfront dive in the country. You cannot fight a love like this.

Garbo and Gable, unexpectedly, generate a very real if unconventional chemistry. They’re both stubborn but sympathetic characters. Gable has plenty of boyish charm and although it’s a little odd to see Gable as a champion of the old-fashioned virtues of fidelity his performance is quite successful.

Garbo plays a typical Garbo heroine, a woman for whom nothing matters except love. Even while selling herself to other men she never forgets Rodney.

Robert Z. Leonard isn’t renowned as the most stylish of directors but he and cinematographer William H. Daniels (who photographed most of Garbo’s movies) do a fine job with the use of light and shadow especially in the early stages of the film. Telling the story of Helga’s childhood entirely as a kind of shadowplay is a nice touch, reinforcing the idea that she has never had her own life.

You have to accept that this movie obeys the rules of melodrama, so criticising the use of coincidence and the fact that a travelling carnival just happens to come along right when the heroine needs one is missing the point.

It’s all gloriously romantic, a product of an age that still understood such things. Highly recmmended.

The Warner Archive DVD-R is a rather nice transfer.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

2012-01-01T12:06:00.003+11:00

It took John Huston a quarter of a century to bring Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King to the big screen, but the wait was worth it.

Like almost everybody who has read Kipling’s original short story Huston had fallen in love with, and being a fikm-maker he recognised that not only would it make a great movie, it would it make a great John Huston movie. His first idea was to cast Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart in the lead roles, but every time he thought the film was going to happen something went wrong. He had almost given up hope, and then in 1975, courtesy of producer John Foreman, he finally got his chance.

In some ways Huston was fortunate he had to wait until 1975 to make this move. While Gable and Bogart could certainly have played the leads there’s no question that Sean Connery and Michael Caine were much more suited to the roles.

The story opens in India in the late 19th century with an encounter on a train between a newspaper reporter named Rudyard Kipling (Christopher Plummer) and a very disreputable character named Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine). Peachy has just stolen Kipling’s watch, but he then looks at the medallion attached to the watch chain discovers to his horror that he has robbed a fellow Freemason. Peachy is a rogue, a cheat, a blackmailer and a thief but he does have a moral code of his own and stealing from a a brother Mason is something he could never do.

As a result of this chance meeting Kipling gets to meet both Peachy and Peachy’s partner-in-crime, Daniel Dravot (Sean Connery). And Kipling comes to learn of their plan. Peachy and Daniel have decided that India is too small for men such as them. They are planning to journey to Kafiristan to become kings. To reach Kafiristan they must pass through Afghanistan and Kipling assures them they will never make it alive.

Peachy and Daniel are not deterred. They have spent every penny of their ill-gotten gains on the purchase of twenty Martini rifles. Being ex-British Army NCO’s they know how to train men to fight and they are confident they will soon carve out a kingdom. Kipling expects that he will never hear from them again but three years later he hears their tale. They achieved their goals, they won their kingdom, but at a terrible price.

Since the source material was a short story a considerable amount of expansion was necessary to make a feature film (the screenplay was co-written by Huston and Gladys Hill).The extra material is a perfect fit with Kipling’s original tale and adds to the power of the story. In particular the movie stresses the extent to which Daniel comes to believe in his destiny. He had always believed in his destiny of course of course but he had thought his destiny was to become fabulously rich by plundering a kingdom. Now he realises there was more to it. He has been hailed as the son of the legendary Sikander (Alexander the Great who conquered northern India in 328BC). Daniel starts to believe he really is the successor to Sikander.

Freemasonry played a role in Kipling’s story but it’s even more important in the film, providing the key to the recognition of Daniel as a god as well as a king and leading him on to a dangerous self-delusion.

Connery and Caine are magnificent. These are larger-than-life characters and they pull out all the stops. The support cast includes Michael Caine’s wife Shakira in one of her rare acting appearances.

The location shooting (done mostly in Morocco) is spectacular, the action sequences are impressive, the movie looks absolutely glorious. It has all the themes that were bound to appeal to John Huston - it’s a story of friendship, of aspirations that are insanely excessive and bound to have tragic results, of greed and ambition, of loveable rogues who are dishonest but brave, and it’s a story of obsession. It was perfect material for the man who’d made movies such as The African Queen, Beat the Devil and Moby Dick. It’s a story that is at times very moving but with a sense of fun mixed with tragedy, and with tragedy mixed with irony.

Of course such a movie could never get made today. It would be accused of cultural insensitivity and countless other sins against political correctness.

The UK Blu-Ray release looks superb and includes a contemporary making-of featurette that shows John Huston clearly having a great time.

This has always been one of my favourite movies of all time and it still stands up as well as ever. Very highly recommended.

Experiment Perilous (1944)

2011-12-28T16:29:00.002+11:00

Experiment Perilous could, at a stretch, be described as belonging to the sub-genre of gaslight noir. Made at RKO in 1944 and directed by Jacques Tourneur, it’s an entertaining psychological thriller.

In 1903 Dr Hunt Bailey (George Brent) meets a middle-aged woman named Cissie Bederaux on a train. She seems rather nervous and informs Bailey that although she’s returning to her family in New York she is determined not to live with them. Her manner suggests something wrong, and Dr Bailey being a psychiatrist naturally takes note.

On arrival in New York he finds himself drawn into the Bederaux family’s orbit. Cissie’s wealthy brother Nick (Paul Lukas) is married to a much younger woman, the astonishingly beautiful Allida (Hedy Lamarr). It doesn’t take long to become obvious that all is not well in the Bederaux household.

Nick is worried about Allida’s nerves and believes she is displaying a neurotic anxiety over their son. He seem to be trying to persuade Dr Bailey to take her on as a patient, or at least to provide some medical support for his concerns. Dr Bailey however is developing an interest in Allida that has nothing to do with medicine. He is apparently just the latest in a long line of men who have fallen under her spell.

It would be helpful if Bailey could discuss things with Cissie as she seemed to know some secrets about the Bederaux family’s past. Unfortunately Cissie died mysteriously soon after arriving in New York. As it happens an item of Cissie’s luggage had been mixed up with Dr Bailey’s on the train trip, and as luck would have it that item of luggage contained not only Cissie’s diaries but also a lengthy account she had written of Nick’s childhood. Dr Bailey can’t restrain himself from reading this account, and now he is developing his own theories about what is going on. It’s a story of suicide, madness and murder and Dr Bailey suspects there may be more murders to come.

With a fine screenplay by Warren Duff and with Jacques Tourneur’s usual quietly stylish approach as director this is an effective little thriller. The film noir label that has been applied to it by some is not entirely convincing but it’s a good movie in its own right.

Paul Lukas and George Brent give solid performances. Hedy Lamarr is however the star and she gives a nicely nuanced performance, carefully avoiding the temptation to play Allida as a hysteric.

The psychologically unwholesome atmosphere in Nick Bederaux’s house is captured effectively, and the hall of fish tanks is a nice touch suggesting unhealthy decadence.

Odeon’s UK DVD release is barebones but picture and sound quality are excellent.

An obscure movie that deserves to be better known. Recommended.

The Caine Mutiny (1954)

2011-12-26T16:01:00.003+11:00

By the end of the 1940s Humphrey Bogart was growing tired of tough guy roles and was seeking to expand his range as an actor. This led him to take on roles in romantic comedies (Sabrina), adventure romances (The African Queen) and offbeat comedy thrillers (Beat the Devil). It also led him to take on one of his most acclaimed roles of the 50s, in the war drama The Caine Mutiny (which earned him his third Oscar nomination).

The Caine Mutiny is a war movie with very little action. It’s more concerned with psychological stresses and moral choices and it deals with those themes in a more complex way than you’d expect in a Hollywood movie.

It is 1944 and Ensign Willie Keith has been assigned to his first shipboard posting. To say that the posting comes as a disappointment to the wealthy young Yale-educated officer would be an understatement. The USS Caine is not exactly the most glamorous ship in the fleet. In fact it’s just about the bottom of the barrel. It’s a battered destroyed converted for minesweeping duties and it may well be the slackest ship in the US Navy. Keith has an opportunity to take a much more glamorous appointment on an admiral’s staff but he is shamed into remaining on board the Caine.

It’s not that that the Caine is an unhappy ship. The captain is easy-going, the atmosphere is relaxed. It’s just that the captain is a bit too easy-going and the atmosphere a bit too relaxed. No-one on the Caine gives a damn. Being an officer on the Caine is a dead end. The Caine is engaged mostly in boring routine duties such a target-towing and there are no opportunities for an ambitious officer to distinguish himself.

All that is about to change when the ship gets a new captain. Lieutenant-Commander Philip Francis Queeg is regular navy, not a reservist, and he believes in doing thing the navy way. He is determined to enforce some discipline. That does not please the Caine’s officers. The previous captain had allowed the executive officer, Lieutenant Maryk (Van Johnson), to more or less run the ship and he’d allowed officers like Lieutenant Tom Keefer (Fred MacMurray) to do whatever they wanted. So Keefer, a cynical intellectual, had divided his time between working on his novel and complaining. Clearly he believes that it’s a shocking injustice that a man of his exceptional gifts should have to do anything as tedious as doing his duty.

Keefer immediately sets out to undermine Queeg’s authority. Unfortunately for Lt-Commander Queeg he’s rather vulnerable to Keefer’s attacks on his authority. Queeg has seen almost continuous active service since the war began and he’s close to being burnt out. His nerves have been shaken and he makes mistakes. With loyal and competent officers to support him he would undoubtedly overcome those problems, but he’s not going to find loyal and competent officers on the Caine.

To compound these problems Queeg has an approach to command that is entirely foreign to the Caine. He believes in the importance of the little things and is enraged by he slovenliness of the crew. And he’s inclined to be prickly and to obsess over minor infractions of regulations. This gives Keefer (who fancies himself as an amateur psychologist) the perfect opportunity to paint the captain as a paranoid neurotic. And even more unfortunately it creates a situation where the basically decent and loyal executive officer Maryk is inclined to listen to Keefer’s promptings. Finally, after Queeg has made several apparent errors of judgment, Maryk is persuaded to relieve Queeg of his command. Maryk and Keith (who was officer of the deck at the time) now face a court martial at which they will have to justify their extraordinary actions.

This rather far-fetched plot could easily have collapsed but it’s saved by two things - the quality of the acting and the ambiguity of the situation that led to the mutiny. Bogart gives a bravura performance. He avoids making Queeg merely a ridiculous figure and gives him a certain tragic dignity. Because this story is a tragedy. Queeg is not a bad man and he’s not even a bad captain, he’s just seen too much action and he’s tired and he’s increasingly isolated as his officers turn on him. Maryk can be seen as an equally tragic figure, a competent officer with a fatal flaw - he’s a weak man who forgets where his duty lies and is manipulated into committing the ultimate act of disloyalty.

The key question is, when the typhoon hits, is it Queeg who loses his nerve or is it Lieutenant Maryk? It’s a question that the movie leaves open and this is its greatest strength. Queeg certainly exhibits signs of instability, but does this actually make him unfit for command? When he asks his officers to support him, in the film’s most moving scene, they ignore him.

Van Johnson’s subtle performance as Maryk is superbly effective. Fred MacMurray was always at his best playing slimy villains and Lieutenant Keefer is as slimy as they come. José Ferrer is excellent as the defence counsel who would have been far happier prosecuting this case.

Edward Dmytryk wisely doesn’t try anything fancy. He has a superb cast and he’s content to allow the actors to carry the story, which they do in fine style. The Caine Mutiny is a fine example of 1950s Hollywood film-making.

The Black Swan (1942)

2011-12-23T16:21:00.003+11:00

The Black Swan is a colourful pirate yarn with Tyrone Power who was at that time 20th Century Fox’s leading star of swashbuckling epics. And if those sorts of movies are your thing this one will not disappoint.

It’s purportedly based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini, probably the greatest of all authors of swashbuckling adventure stories. In fact the movie has little to do with Sabatini’s novel but it’s still great fun.

The legendary pirate Henry Morgan has been pardoned, given a knighthood and appointed as governor of Jamaica. Acting on the principle that you set a thief to catch a thief Morgan has been given the job of cleaning up piracy in the Caribbean.

Not surprisingly that news draws a mixed response from Morgan’s old buccaneering buddies. Some are willing to accept the royal pardon and the grants of land that Morgan has been given the authority to distribute whilst others refuse to give up their pirating ways.

Chief among those who reject Morgan’s offer is the rough, tough, ruthless and dissipated Captain Billy Leach (George Sanders). Those who accept Morgan’s offer are led by the dashing Jamie Waring (Tyrone Power). There’s a further complication however - Jamie has fallen in love with the beautiful Margaret Denby, daughter of the former governor. Margaret is engaged to Roger Ingram, an elegant foppish wastrel. Ingram sees Jamie as a dangerous romantic rival and he is determined to destroy the handsome reformed pirate But that’s not the end of Ingram’s perfidy - he is also selling information to Captain Billy Leach, assisting the pirate in preying on English shipping.

Jamie Waring is given the task of hunting down Billy Leach but it proves to be a tricky assignment. He finds himself outgunned by Leach’s squadron and Jamie has to pretend he has returned to his piratical ways while trying to find a way to turn the tables.

The mix of action, adventure, romance and humour is irresistible. The action sequences are impressive and it’s all filmed in glorious Technicolor and looks absolutely splendid.

As a swashbuckling hero Tyrone Power is very good although it has to be admitted he’s no Eroll Flynn. He does take his shirt off a lot though which presumably added quite a lot to his sex symbol image. Maureen O’Hara makes a feisty heroine. The strangest thing about this movie is George Sanders’ performance - instead of being the smooth aristocratic villain we expect he’s a scruffy red-bearded old sea dog. It’s bizarre casting but Sanders puts everything into it and he gets away with it.

It’s Laird Cregar though who steals the picture as Henry Morgan. He chews every piece of scenery he can get his hands on and he’s delightful. Anthony Quinn has a small role as Billy Leach’s chief lieutenant.

The Black Swan has everything you could possibly want in a pirate movie. Tremendous fun.

The Region 4 DVD from Bounty is totally lacking in extras but it’s a nice print.

Dead Reckoning (1947)

2011-12-21T17:12:00.000+11:00

Dead Reckoning, directed by John Cromwell, is a 1947 film noir about a man (played by Humphrey Bogart) who sets out to find out what happened to an army buddy whato disappeared immediately after returning from World War 2. It has all the standard noir elements – smooth gangsters, colourful hoodlums, night clubs, a flashback with voiceover, and of course a femme fatale.

The femme fatale in this case is played by Lizabeth Scott, and she sizzles. But then she always did. Once you hear that husky voice of hers you know you’ve entered the world of film noir. Her performance in this movie has been much criticised, and quite wrongly in my opinion. The movie has its problems but she’s not one of them.

The title is important, dead reckoning being a method of navigation that relies on estimating your position based on estimating your course and speed from a particular starting point, and if you don’t know your starting point accurately you will inevitably get badly lost. And that’s the situation Captain Rip Murdock (Bogart) is in.

Murdock tells the tale in an extended flashback. He and Sergeant Johnny Drake are on their way to Washington. The war is over and they’re both going to collect medals, but Johnny disappears. He disappears because there might be press photographers at the medal presentation and that could be embarrassing since he isn’t Johnny Drake at all. In fact he’s a man wanted for murder who joined up under a false name.

Murdock sets off to find his buddy but what he finds is a badly burned corpse in the morgue. Is the body Johnny’s? Murdock’s starting point is that he knows Johnny couldn’t have been mixed up in murder and know he’s determined to unravel the mystery.

His next step is to find Johnny’s girl. Dusty (Lizabeth Scott) is a singer. He thinks she’s the key to the mystery, and he’s right. But falling in love with her means that Murdock doesn’t want to believe she’s the murderer. He also doesn’t want to believe Johnny is the murderer but somebody shot Dusty’s husband and if it wasn’t Dusty and it wasn’t Johnny then he’s left with an embarrassing lack of plausible suspects.

Dead Reckoning has been accused of having a totally incoherent plot. Which is perfectly true. But this is film noir and plot coherence is less important than atmosphere and style and those qualities it has in spades. It also has enough classic film noir dialogue to keep any fan happy, as when Murdock observes that, “Maybe she was all right. Maybe Christmas comes in July.”

And it has Bogart, and he’s in top form. He knows that Dusty is the kind of girl you should never ever fall in love with but somehow he desperately wants to believe that all his instincts are wrong. Bogart and Scott work well together and Scott not only makes Bogart want to believe in her she makes the audience want to as well even though we know as well as he does that she’s probably no good.

So maybe it’s not one of the great noirs but it’s consistently entertaining, it looks good and it’s dripping with noirness. And it has two of the iconic noir stars demonstrating why they’re such iconic figures. So I say check it out.

The Saint Strikes Back (1939)

2011-12-18T01:26:00.001+11:00

The Saint Strikes Back was the first of five films in which George Sanders played the role of master criminal-turned crime-fighter Simon Templar. The role requires a mixture of sophistication, humour, physical menace, ruthlessness and charm. Sanders didn’t quite have the physical menace but he had all of the other qualities in abundance.

The movie is based on one of the best of Leslie Charteris’s early tales of The Saint, Angels of Doom (also published as The Saint Meets His Match and She Was a Lady). Valerie Travers (Wendy Barrie), the daughter of a police officer who had been dismissed from the force for corruption, becomes a criminal mastermind. Her objective is not crime itself but revenge as she believes her father was innocent.

Simon Templar becomes involved when a mobster is gunned down in a San Francisco night-club. The convoluted plot sees the Saint targeted as a suspect while he works in uneasy partnership with his old friend Inspector Henry Fernack to clear the reputation of Valerie’s now deceased father.

The plot is serviceable but the main asset of the movie is the character of Simon Templar and, even more particularly, George Sander’s performance. John Twist’s screenplay gives Sanders plenty of sparkling dialogue which he delivers with his customary panache. The strong supporting cast is highlighted by Barry Fitzgerald, Jonathan Hale as Inspector Fernack and Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon from the Batman TV series).

RKO’s crime B-movies always had plenty of atmosphere and this is no exception. Director John Farrow would go on to helm some notable film noir titles.

The Region 2 DVD is lacking in extras but looks reasonable enough.

I Am Waiting (1957)

2011-12-13T16:16:00.000+11:00

I Am Waiting (Ore wa matteru ze) is the earliest of the five movies in the Nikkatsu Noir boxed set, and it ticks enough of the noir boxes to satisfy most noir enthusiasts.

Jôji Shimaki is a boxer who was banned from the ring after killing a man in a barroom brawl. Now he runs a bar that is a sort of refuge for outsiders and losers. His brother emigrated to Brazil a year earlier and Jôji has been waiting to hear from him so he can go and join him. Brazil is for Jôji a sort of magical talisman, a promised land where he can make a new start.

He meets Saeko. He’s a boxer who can’t box any more, she’s an opera singer whose voice has gone, reducing her to performing in sleazy dives. They’re both broken and they’re not unnaturally drawn together.

Saeko thinks she might have killed a man too, a man who was making unwelcome advances to her. Unfortunately she had become involved with some dubious characters and she has a night-club boss who is also a gangster after her for breaking her singing contract.

Jôji tries to keep Saeko out of of further trouble while at the same time pursuing an obsessive quest to find out why he hasn’t heard from his brother.

Stylistically this film is pure noir, and it has the right mood as well. Most of the characters who inhabit the world of Jôji’s bar are classic noir characters. They’re not bad people, but they’re lost and they can’t find their way back.

The movie benefits considerably from its two magnetic leads, Yûjirô Ishihara as Jôji and Mie Kitahara as Saeko. Mie Kitahara definitely has an iconic noir look. They would go on to co-star in many more films.

The mood owes as much to pre-war French film noir as to Hollywood noir, although without the extreme nihilism of the French variety. Nikkatsu was a studio trying to reinvent itself in the late 50s, trying (with considerable success) to tap into the growing youth market.

The DVD from Nikkatsu’s Eclipse series is reasonably impressive although it lacks extras. The movie is presented in its original 1.33: aspect ratio.

Man in the Vault (1956)

2011-12-10T15:49:00.000+11:00

Man in the Vault is a competent 1956 B noir that provides decent entertainment without reaching any great heights.

Tommy Dancer (William Campbell) is a locksmith who is approached by small-time racketeer Willis Trent in a bowling alley. Trent needs a footlocker opened, a task for which he pays Tommy way too much money. That should have rung warning bells but it’s not until Trent explains that he actually has a much bigger job in mind that Tommy finally figures out he might be getting into something dangerous and illegal. By this time Tommy has fallen for glamorous rich girl Betty Turner (Karen Sharpe) he met at a party at Trent’s place and Tommy isn’t really thinking all that clearly.

He is smart enough to refuse Trent’s approach but it’s too late, Trent has him hooked and will use Betty to force Tommy to play ball.

Trent has a plan to rob big-league mobster Paul de Camp’s safety deposit box at a local bank. Trent used to be de Camp’s partner but while de Camp has moved up in the world Trent is still just a straightforward hoodlum. Trent’s plan is not a very good one, given that he’s the first person de Camp is going to suspect.

Tommy has always been basically an honest guy but meeting Betty has given him ideas. Her family is wealthy and her parents give her anything she wants. Tommy thinks that it’s not fair that he isn’t rich as well, so the lure of easy money starts to tempt him. In fact he starts to think that maybe it would be an even better idea to keep all of de Camp’s money himself instead of splitting with Trent. Tommy’s a nice boy but he’s not real bright.

And security at the bank is so lax that it really does seem like a no-risk plan. Except of course for the fact of having an angry mobster trying to kill you afterwards.

There are in fact a whole bunch of people involved in the pan to rob de Camp and they’re trying to double-cross each other. There’s shady lawyer Earl Faraday, who is also carrying a torch for Betty. There’s also de Camp’s glamorous girlfriend Flo (Anita Ekberg). It’s a pretty standard but serviceable crime movie plot with a touch of noir coming from the involvement of the well-meaning but weak-willed Tommy.

Technically the movie is at best competent. The chase scene in the bowling alley is reasonably well executed but don’t expect anything startling as far as visual style is concerned.

William Campbell is quite effective as Tommy Dancer, playing him as a bit of an innocent but with a bit of an edge as well that prevents the character from being too wet. Karen Sharpe is adequate as Betty, not quite a femme fatale and not quite a spoilt rich girl but a woman who certainly spells danger for Tommy.

Mike Mazurki, who played the heavy in countless crime and horror movies, is as entertaining as always as Trent’s chief henchman. Anita Ekberg is competent and certainly adds glamour.

Man in the Vault was produced by John Wayne’s production company, Batjac. While it’s one of the company’s lesser efforts it’s still worth a look.

The Region 4 DVD is barebones but it’s a decent widescreen print.

Union Pacific (1939)

2011-12-08T23:54:00.001+11:00

Union Pacific is a Cecil B. DeMille western, and in the story of the building of the first tran-continental railroad he found a tale with the grand sweep required of a DeMille movie. Released in 1939, it confirmed DeMille’s ability to make wonderfully entertaining epics.

In the 1860s the Union Pacific railroad is being built from east to west to link up with the Central Pacific railroad in California. Backroom deals by crooked bankers have in effect turned the project into a race with the Union Pacific facing ruin if they lose. And those who are determined that they will lose have hit upon an ingenious method of sabotage. Sid Campeau (Brian Donlevy) has been given the job of supplying the workers building the railroad with cut-price booze, gambling and other distractions to slow down the construction.

To combat this menace the Union Pacific employs as trouble-shooter Civil War hero Captain Jeff Butler (Joel McCrea). Butler is tough, honest, a crack shot and thoroughly decent. He’s like a very tough Boy Scout.

Butler cleans up a lot of the problems by shooting people like gambler Jack Cordray (Anthony Quinn). He has more of a problem with Campeau’s chief lieutenant, Dick Allen (Robert Preston). He and Dick were old army buddies and they’re still good friends but now they’re on opposite sides. Even worse, they’re romantic rivals as well. They’re both in love with feisty Irish beauty Mollie Monahan (Barbara Stanwyck).

Mollie is the Union Pacific’s travelling postmistress. Her father is an engine driver. She was born into the world of the railways, it’s the only world she knows and she loves it.

While Jeff Butler is kept busy trying to counter the machinations of Sid Campeau Dick Allen has stolen a march on him in the romance stakes and Dick and Mollie are soon engaged. Jeff is too noble to do anything underhanded to come between them although he’s clearly still carrying a torch for Mollie.

The villains are suitable villainous and the heroes are suitably heroic. The cast is a strong one and all the players deliver exactly the performances that were required.

There’s plenty of action and excitement, there’s spectacle, there’s romance, there’s everything required to turn this film into box office gold and it was indeed a huge hit at the time. It might seem like an old-fashioned movie by today’s standards when we’re accustomed to seeing heroic subjects treated with cynicism and sneering, but it demonstrates that old-fashioned Hollywood showmanship has a great deal going for it. This is a supremely entertaining movie. It’s also very politically incorrect - if that bothers you then you’re not going to like this movie one little bit.

Union Pacific is included in the wonderful DeMille DVD boxed set that came out a few years back, a set which I recommend very very highly.

Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951)

2011-12-06T10:26:00.003+11:00

The most interesting thing about Tomorrow Is Another Day is the way in which it departs from our expectations. It does this most notably in its treatment of the femme fatale.

This 1951 Warner Brothers B-movie was directed by Felix E. Feist. Feist was always a B-movie director but he made some interesting if rather uneven noirish crime thrillers. Screenwriter Guy Endore worked on some notable horror movies and his own novels provided the basis for several good films, including Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool and the excellent 1961 Hammer gothic horror flick Curse of the Werewolf.

Tomorrow Is Another Day is a story of an ex-con trying to go straight. Bill Clark (Steve Cochran) was convicted of the murder of his violent alcoholic father at the age of thirteen. After eighteen years he is released. Not surprisingly he knows little of women but he’s anxious to learn. Perhaps a dance hall was not the best place in which to commence his education but that’s where he ends up.

At the dance hall he meets taxi dancer Cay (Ruth Roman). Cay is hardbitten and cynical but to Bill she’s the girl of his dreams. He finally manages to get invited back to her apartment and that’s when things start to go wrong. A loud-mouthed bully storms into the apartment and starts pushing her around, a gun is produced, Bill takes a heavy knock on the head and passes out and when he regains consciousness it’s to see the other man staggering out of the door with a gunshot wound in his belly.

All that would be bad enough but the guy with the bullet in his gut turns out to be a cop. Worse still, a detective-lieutenant. Realising that Bill has no memory of what happened Cay convinces him that he shot the detective when in fact she was the one who pulled the trigger.

Since this is a crime movie it doesn’t occur to either of them that Cay in fact shot the detective in self-defence, and maybe if I’d just been released from prison I’d be sceptical about getting a fair hearing as well. So now they’re on the run. And Bill comes up with a clever idea - since they’re on the run together they might as well get married!

Surprisingly enough Cay thinks this is a swell idea. Even more surprisingly she now turns out to be the ideal wife. This is the part of the story that challenges plausibility a little, although I guess if two people are thrown together in such circumstances it’s not impossible that love might suddenly blossom.

They end up fruit-picking in California which goes well until they encounter the one thing that every criminal on the run most fears - a kid with an enthusiasm for true crime magazines. And of course the kid comes across an article about America’s youngest convicted killer, Bill Clark.

Steve Cochran gives a pretty good performance as Bill, a likeable guy who just hasn’t had the breaks. Ruth Roman as Cay has the more difficult role since she has to sell her sudden personality change to the audience, which she does more successfully than you might expect.

This is as much a romantic melodrama as a film noir. It actually makes a refreshing change from the self-pity and misery and nihilistic despair that so often are part of the film noir package. It’s a movie about hope and if you’re too cynical to believe in hope or in true love then you probably won’t like it. Personally I don’t mind movies that actually make me feel slightly better about humanity and about life and I enjoyed it.

The Warner Archive DVD-R offers a very good print of this rather overlooked movie.

Pin Up Girl (1944)

2011-12-03T14:47:00.004+11:00

I’ve been trying to broaden my classic movies education a little, delving into genres that I’ve previously avoided. One such genre is 1940s Hollywood musicals. I’ve come to enjoy the musicals of the 30s but I’ve always assumed that the 40s musicals would be too saccharine for my tastes. In any case, I decided to give Pin Up Girl a whirl.

This was one of Betty Grable’s better known films, and having only ever seen her in How to Marry a Millionaire I’ve never understood the Grable mystique but I was prepared to be enlightened.

Grable plays Lorry Jones, who works at a military canteen in Missouri and has become a minor celebrity thanks to a pin-up photo (which is in fact the very famous Grable pin-up photo). The photo has been so popular with the troops that Lorry is now engaged to several hundred of them. It’s not that she’s a bad person, it’s just that when nice boys in a uniform ask her to marry them she doesn’t like to disappoint them.

Now she and her friend are off to Washington for a USO show but somehow they end in New York, at a very fancy night-club. There weren’t any tables available, until Lorry assured the doorman that she was there to meet Tommy Dooley, the famous war hero just returned from Guadalcanal. That’s Lorry’s other minor fault - she tends to embroider the truth just a little. Well actually she embroiders it a lot.

When Tommy Dooley actually turns up at the club and has to explain herself to the club owner Eddie Hall (Joe E. Brown) she tells them she’s a musical comedy star. Then of course she’s invited to do a number from the show she’s currently starring in, which is potentially awkward since she’s never even seen the show. But thanks to the magic of the movies it doesn’t matter - she gets up and does the number and it’s a huge success.

That more or less sets the tone for the movie - realism is not going to be allowed to spoil any of the fun. This is a movie where intimate night-clubs have stages as big as football fields.

After the night-club scene we find Lorry working as a stenographer for a chief petty officer who just happens to be Tommy Dooley’s NCO. You’d think he’d recognise her straight away but of course this is the movies where a girl wearing glasses is totally unrecognisable as the same girl without glasses.

Various romantic complications follow as Dooley falls for Lorry the glamour girl but has to deal with jealous night-club singer Molly McKay as well as one of Lorry’s many fiances. And naturally somehow Lorry has to get her big break in show business.

The plot is incoherent and so flimsy it’s hardly there at all but this is a musical so who needs a plot? What it does have are spectacular musical production numbers, romance and good-natured comedy and that’s enough. Grable is amusing and impossible to dislike, the support cast is solid. The sets are pure Hollywood fantasy but they’re fun. It’s shot in Technicolor and looks like a gigantic candy confection.

This movie is about as lightweight as a movie could possibly be but it’s enjoyably silly. These were the days before irony became compulsory in Hollywood movies, an age when sneering cynicism was not considered to be an essential ingredient in entertainment. It’s convinced me that perhaps the musicals of the 40s really did have something going for them.

The Region 4 DVD disappointingly includes none of the extras that come with the Region 1 release. The transfer is OK although the colour balance doesn’t seem entirely right.

Le Samouraï (1967)

2011-12-01T16:39:00.001+11:00

The key to understanding Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï is to put aside any thought that the film has any pretensions towards realism. This is most definitely not a straightforward crime film.

Jef Costello (Alain Delon) is a hitman. His latest job is to kill a night-club owner. He boldly walks into the club, finds the owner’s office, shoots him and then walks out, disregarding the fact that there are at least eight witnesses who got a very good look at him. He is relying on an elaborate two-part alibi. He is quickly arrested. The alibi seems watertight but the cop in charge of the investigation has not the slightest doubt that Jef is the killer.

The alibi is strong enough to force the police to release him but he is now under constant surveillance. He has other problems as well - when he tries to collect his payment for the contract his contact tries to kill him. Now he has to find whoever it was who placed the contract before they find him.

One of the main witnesses against him is a black pianist (Cathy Rosier) who suddenly changes her story. After initially identifying him as the killer she now says categorically that he wasn’t the man. Why has she made this sudden switch? And why is he drawn to her? He is determined to find out. She seems to hold the key, although what it’s the key to remains uncertain.

As a realistic crime drama none of this makes any sense. No professional killer would ever be as reckless as Jef. The manner in which he carries out the first killing suggests that he is deliberately tempting fate, that he is challenging death, flirting with death. In fact he’s doing more than flirting. This is a man totally in love with death, or a man convinced that death is his destiny. He is drawn to the black pianist because she is Death. Perhaps she really is Death, perhaps he merely imagines this. The entire film is like the fever dream of a madman so either explanation is plausible.

He is a man who is utterly alone, disconnected from the world. He lives in a squalid decaying apartment that is devoid of any indication that it is inhabited. Like Jef, his room has no personality. He is in fact quite mad.

Alain Delon was the ideal actor for the lead role. His minimalist acting style perfectly complements Melville’s minimalist visual style. When Melville was trying to persuade Delon to take the role he read the script to him. Delon interrupted him, remarking that after ten minutes there’d been no dialogue at all. The actor then added, “That interests me. I’ll do it.”

Cathy Rosier is equally perfect as the pianist. She doesn’t do very much in the way of acting but she looks right and that is clearly what Melville was looking for. No-one in this film has to do much acting and it’s clear that Melville wasn’t interested in their acting. He cast Delon’s wife Nathalie as Jef’s girlfriend because he thought they looked like brother and sister.

Melville was a control freak who liked to oversee every aspect of his movies. He directed the film, he wrote the screenplay, he was responsible for the set design. The movie was shot in his own studio (which was destroyed by a fire during the making of this film). He was also responsible for the key visual concepts of the movie. He wanted to do a film in colour that would be more or less a black-and-white film, rather as William Wellman had done in Track of the Cat way back in 1954. Cinematographer Henri Decaë achieved Melville’s vision highly effectively.

This is a very strange movie, more like a mythic account of a samurai seeking a warrior’s death than a conventional gangster movie. A strange movie but a mesmerising and fascinating work. Highly recommended.

Picture quality on the Criterion DVD is generally fairly good although grainy at times. There are a host of extras.

Beat the Devil (1953)

2011-11-29T08:58:00.001+11:00

Beat the Devil boasts an extraordinarily impressive cast, a clever and witty script (by Truman Capote) and a fine director in John Huston. The story combines adventure, romance and comedy in exotic settings. With those ingredients you’d think this movie couldn’t possibly go wrong, but it bombed at the box-office.

In fact it’s a terrific movie. Its commercial failure at the time may have been due to the fact that it wasn’t the movie that audiences expected, given the title. Rather than a straightforward adventure movie it’s an offbeat comedy. And perhaps it wasn’t what audiences expected from Bogart. Bogart in the 1950s was trying very hard to escape from stereotyped tough guy roles with movies like The African Queen (which gained him an Oscar), The Caine Mutiny (which earned him another Oscar nomination), The Barefoot Contessa and Sabrina. Beat the Devil is as good as any of these movies and better than most but the fact is audiences at the time just didn’t go for it. Its reputation has grown steadily since then.

The plot concerns an assortment of crooks who intend to get rich from buying up land in East Africa containing rich uranium deposits. Whether the uranium actually exists seems uncertain but it doesn’t matter since it’s purely a McGuffin.

Billy Dannreuther (Bogart) is penniless but he’s full of stories about the riches he used to possess. His wife Maria (Gina Lollobrigida) claims to be spiritually English and has tea and crumpets every afternoon. They’re perhaps not quite out-and-out crooks but they’re certainly possessed of flexible ethics. Petersen (Robert Morley) and his three associates are most definitely out-and-out crooks. They’re killing time in a small Italin port city waiting for the ship to Africa. Also en route to Africa are Harry and Gwendolen Chelm. Harry claims to be landed gentry from Gloucestershire. He is in fact an outrageous liar, as is his wife. But then all the other characters in the movie are outrageous liars.

Maria Dannreuther is soon conducting an illicit love affair with Harry Chelm while Harry’s wife Gwendolen is carrying on with Billy. Everyone else is waiting for an opportunity to double-cross someone. Things get even more confused once the ship actually departs, and it all culminates in a shipwreck leaving our assorted crooks stranded in the custody of an Arab governor with a Rita Hayworth obsession.

It was apparently originally going to be a straight adventure film until Huston decided that would be boring and called in Capote to rewrite the script as a comedy. He also decided that if Peter Lorre (as one of the crooks, a German named O’Hara) and Robert Morley wanted to make things up as they went along that was fine by him. That’s what he was doing as director.

All this could be a recipe for disaster. It works because the actors are superb and they’re all in fine form and striking sparks off one another. This is very much an acting ensemble piece. Robert Morley is magnificent but Jennifer Jones is every bit as good as the delightfully eccentric and breathtakingly dishonest Gwendolen Chelm. Bogart gives a free and easy performance and shows he can handle comedy without any problems. Edward Underdown as Harry isn’t the least bit intimidated by the bevy of stars surrounding him and gleefully chews the scenery, as does Ivor Barnard as a murderous British Indian Army officer.

The basic premise is of course very close to that of the movie that established John Huston as a director, The Maltese Falcon, but played purely for comedy this time.

The movie is one that has fallen into the public domain which is both good news and bad news, the good news being that it can be picked up very cheaply on various DVD releases, the bad news being that none of these DVD editions is exactly a pristine transfer. I have the Alpha Video version. Picture quality is fairly rough and there’s a definite lack of contrast but it’s watchable. It’s such a fabulous movie that it would be a great pity to be put off by the lack of a premium DVD edition. On the other hand this is a movie that really deserves a restoration and a good DVD release.

This is an immensely enjoyable romp, and very much a must-see movie.

The Big Night (1951)

2011-11-26T12:28:00.001+11:00

The Big Night was one of Joseph Losey’s last films in Hollywood before he relocated to England. And it’s one of no less three Losey films released in 1951. Unfortunately it’s far from being a classic.

It’s usually described as a film noir but really it’s a borderline case. It’s more of a coming-of-age movie.

A teenaged boy witnesses his father getting a savage beating at the hands of famed sports columnist Al Judge. He is disturbed not just by the brutality of the beating but also by his father’s unwillingness to offer any resistance. Being a dumb teenager he doesn’t bother to find out what was behind the attack. He merely steals his father’s gun and sets off to get revenge.

Just before the assault on his father we had seen the son (George La Main, played by John Drew Barrymore) being taunted by other teenagers. The reactions of various adults to the beating are curious and suggest that the father (Andy La Main, played by Preston Foster) is perhaps regarded as the sort of man who would not fight back. The boy’s determination to exact revenge may therefore be motivated by a concern about perception of both his and his father’s manhood or lack thereof. One suspects a bit of a Freudian influence on the script here.

George sets out for the fights, hoping to find Al Judge. He encounters an amiable drunk, Dr Lloyd Cooper. He’s not a medical doctor but a teacher of journalism. George meets Cooper’s girlfriend Julie and later meets Julie’s sister Marion (Joan Lorring). Young George (we’re presumably expected to believe he’s around 16 or 17 although Barrymore was 19 when the film was made) is attracted to Marion. It’s the whole teenaged boy falling for sophisticated older woman thing.

George does eventually track down Al Judge, only to discover that the situation was not at all what he thought it was and that Judge had his reasons for administering the beating (and Andy had his reasons for not resisting). The meeting does not go well, as you’d expect when you have an impulsive distraught teenager running around with a gun.

The ending brings both tragedy and understanding.

The biggest problem I had with this movie was that it seemed very stagey.Stanley Ellin and Losey co-wrote the screenplay, based on a novel by Ellin. The screenplay is very very talky and not terribly convincing.

Some fairly bad acting performances don’t help. John Drew Barrymore, billed here as John Barrymore Jr, was the son of the great John Barrymore (and the father of Drew Barrymore) but his career was undistinguished and it’s not hard to see why. I wasn’t impressed by Preston Foster either but it could be argued the script didn’t give him much of a chance.

Coming-of-age movies have about the same appeal for me as social message movies - in other words no appeal at all. If you enjoy these sorts of movies you might be more forgiving of this movie.

It must seem like I’m conducting a vendetta against Joseph Losey after not liking The Prowler either. I do like Losey’s 1960s British movies a great deal but his early American noir films just don’t do it for me.

The Australian DVD release is an all-region PAL disc without any extras. Picture quality is acceptable.

Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)

2011-11-24T15:03:00.004+11:00

Otto Preminger’s movies of the 60s are a rather varied bunch. He was starting to take major risks and do offbeat movies and Bunny Lake Is Missing certainly qualifies as offbeat.

It was made in England in 1965, with Preminger as usual producing and directing and with a script by John and Penelope Mortimer. It was shot in Cinemascope and black-and-white, a slightly odd choice for a film by a major director in the mid-60s but it suits the oddball nature of the movie.

It starts out appearing to be a fairly straightforward police procedural about a missing child. It doesn’t take very long for the first subtle signs of oddness to appear and then it keeps getting stranger until finally it becomes quite bizarre.

Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) is a young American woman who has just arrived in London from the US. She’s enrolled her daughter Bunny in a nursery school. The school is a little disorganised on that day owing to the fact that the headmistress is away and Elvira (Anna Massey) has been left in charge and is just barely coping. Ann leaves Bunny in the charge of the school’s cook for a few minutes while she tries to locate her teacher, and then has to rush off to let the removalists into her new flat. When she returns to the school Bunny is nowhere to be found.

Ann is of course rather upset and immediately phones her husband Steven (Keir Dullea). At least we assume from the way they behave that he’s her husband but later we discover that he is actually her brother. The police are called and Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) takes charge of the investigation.

The curious thing is that nobody at the school can recall seeing Bunny at all. The school has no record of her enrolment. Nobody anywhere has seen her, and the audience hasn’t seen her either. Superintendent Newhouse is clearly puzzled by this case.

I’m not going to reveal any more of the plot, but there are many twists and turns to come and some of these twists are very strange indeed.

Preminger’s style of directing avoids gimmickry. He favoured long takes and liked to take the time to allow characters to develop and to gradually reveal their inner natures. This approach works extremely well here, forming a nice understated contrast to the steadily growing weirdness of the story. The movie is always visually impressive (as were all of Preminger’s movies) but without being intrusive or distracting.

Carol Lynley has had a very long career but never quite achieved the breakthrough to major stardom. Keir Dullea’s career followed a similar pattern. They’re both reasonably effective in this film. Laurence Olivier does not chew a single piece if scenery in this movie, an amazing feat of self-restraint. His subdued performance works well since it doesn’t distract us from the things we should be watching whilst still managing to make Newhouse a believable and interesting figure.

Adding his own touch of oddness to the proceedings is Noël Coward as Ann’s eccentric alcoholic and lecherous landlord. And even more oddness is provided by Martita Hunt as Ada Ford, one of the founders of the school and now retired and somewhat mad and still living at the school. Anna Massey is also excellent, as always. There’s also Finlay Currie as the proprietor of a very creepy doll’s hospital.

This is a movie that often threatens to run off the rails but Preminger manages to hold it all together even as the weirdness grows and grows. A fascinating off-kilter masterpiece and
highly recommended.

Columbia’s Region 2 DVD is barebones but looks stunning.

Flying Down to Rio (1933)

2011-11-21T12:01:00.001+11:00

Flying Down to Rio was the first of the RKO Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, although in fact it’s not really a true Astaire-Rogers picture since they’re strictly supporting players. But it did bring together the most famous dance team in movie history and it’s a thoroughly enjoyable slice of nonsense.

It’s also important as being one of the two pre-code Fred and Ginger films, along with The Gay Divorcee.

The actual leads are Dolores del Rio and Gene Raymond but they’re overshadowed by Fred and Ginger who made such an impression that RKO recognised their potential immediately and the rest is history.

Gene Raymond plays band leader Roger Bond. He’s fairly successful apart from his penchant for chasing the ladies, a habit that ends up getting the band fired from just about every gig they manage to land. His latest obsession is a South American beauty named Belinha de Rezende. And sure enough, he gets them fired again.

They quickly land another job, performing at the opening of the Hotel Atlantico in Rio de Janeiro. What they don’t know is that Belinha is also on her way back to Rio so their paths will certainly cross again. In fact Roger discovers this interesting piece of information before departure and offers to give Belinha a lift in his aeroplane (aviation being his other obsession).

The plane mysteriously develops engine trouble just as they’re flying over a deserted island with a convenient beach. Roger puts the plane down safely. The engine requires only very minor repairs but Roger decides that if he’s marooned on a tropical island with the lady of his dreams then it would be a pity to waste the opportunity so he pretends to be unable to fix the motor until the following day.

Their arrival at the hotel in Rio brings complications. It tuns out that Belinha is the fiancée of Roger’s old pal Julio Ribeira (Raul Roulien). Now both men are rivals for her affections. There’s also some kind of conspiracy by evil bankers to wreck the hotel’s grand opening. That’s pretty much it for the plot but lighthearted fluff like this doesn’t require much more.

So what are Fred and Ginger doing all this time? Fred is Roger’s right-hand man in the band while Ginger is their delightfully brassy singer Honey Hale, and they’re busy stealing every scene they’re in.

This movie is not all that highly regarded by Fred and Ginger aficionados. They only have one dance duet together and it’s not as elaborate as the dance routines in their later pictures. The movie has one other major problem. Gene Raymond is a less than exciting male lead and there is absolutely zero chemistry between Raymond and del Rio.

The movie does offer compensations however. Fred and Ginger do have the necessary chemistry and it’s already apparent. There’s a totally outrageous finale as the Aviators’ Club in Rio puts on a show to support the opening of the Hotel Atlantico, a show featuring not one but dozens of young ladies doing wing-walking stunts in rather revealing costumes. It’s spectacular and bizarre and it’s worth the price of admission on its own.

There’s also a great deal of very risque pre-code dialogue, plus there’s Ginger Rogers singing Music Makes Me while wearing a gown that leaves little to the imagination. It turns out that the things music makes her do are not exactly suitable for family viewing. Ginger is in fact pretty steamy indeed in this movie.

The music is great, there’s plenty of humour and it’s all great fun. And we even get an airborne wedding. It’s a movie that would obviously have benefited from having more of Astaire and Rogers but it’s still thoroughly enjoyable.

The Warner Home Video DVD is reasonably good although there is some minor print damage.

When Strangers Marry (1944)

2011-11-19T14:16:00.001+11:00

In the 50s William Castle would become one of the great B-movie showmen, his low-budget horror films benefitting from his genius for publicity and his extraordinary talent for coming up with gimmicks. Before that he’d directed the usual quotas of B-movies, including the highly regarded 1944 film noir When Strangers Marry.

The second lead in this picture was a young actor called Bob Mitchum. By the time it was re-released in the early 50s (under the less relevant but unquestionably more noir title Betrayed) Robert Mitchum was a huge star and he was hastily promoted to top billing.

It starts with a murder in a Philadelphia hotel. A man has been boasting that he is carrying $10,000 on him and he pays the price for his folly. He is found strangled with a silk stocking.

The scene then switches to New York where we’re introduced to a young woman named Mildred Baxter (Kim Hunter) who has just married, and it’s been the proverbial whirlwind romance. She knows he’s a salesman but she doesn’t even know the name of the company he works for. After one day of marriage he left on a business trip and she hasn’t seen him since. Now, a month later, she receives a cable from him in Philadelphia informing her that he will meet her at the Sherwin Hotel in New York.

He doesn’t show up, but as luck would have it she runs into an old friend (in fact an old flame), Fred Graham (Robert Mitchum). He’s very supportive and suggests she should go to the police and he even persuades Lieutenant Blake of the Homicide Squad to give the matter his personal attention. You might be wondering why a homicide cop would be interested in a routine missing persons case but Blake does in fact have his reasons, and those reasons are connected with the murder case in Philadelphia.

Mildred does eventually find her husband Paul (Dean Jagger) but he seems nervous and secretive. Mildred starts to suspect that something is very wrong, and that it may have something to do with Philadelphia. Then Paul announces he has to leave again, but this time it’s no business trip.

The plot will keep you guessing for about 30 seconds. This is definitely a minor noir B-movie (it was released by Monogram) and it’s not as good as its reputation would suggest. Still, it does have some atmospheric noirish moments and it has a solid cast.

Mitchum seems a little tentative. He would of course improve very rapidly but this is not one of his more memorable roles. Kim Hunter is fine and her character is the emotional centre of the movie. Dean Jagger was always pretty reliable and delivers an excellent performance. Neil Hamilton (best known as Commissioner Gordon in the 1960s Batman TV series) makes a good homicide cop. He’s a decent guy and a good cop.

Considering the deficiencies of the screenplay Castle has made a reasonably entertaining and fast-moving noir thriller and it’s interesting to see Robert Mitchum at a time when he was still learning the ropes and his film persona was not yet solidified. Just don’t expect too much.

Castle’s later horror movies were essentially lighthearted tongue-in-cheek exercises but When Strangers Marry doesn’t show any real evidence of this tendency.

The Warner Archive made-on-demand DVD-R is of perfectly acceptable quality.

The Kiss (1929)

2011-11-17T12:15:00.003+11:00

The Kiss was Greta Garbo’s final silent movie. Actually it’s a hybrid, since it has a soundtrack that includes music and sound effects, but no dialogue.

For some reason MGM had convinced themselves that they were going to have a problem with Garbo’s voice in talking pictures. In fact of course her voice turned out to be an asset - not only did she have a fine speaking voice but she had an accent that was exotic and sexy and that complemented her onscreen image perfectly.

The Kiss was helmed by Jacques Feyder, who would go on to direct her first talking picture, Anna Christie. It’s a romantic melodrama and it’s a classic Garbo picture - she plays a woman for whom love is everything.

Irene Guarry (Garbo) is married to a middle-aged industrialist, Charles Guarry. She’s been having an affair with André Dubail (Conrad Nagel) but the lovers have decided they must break it off.

Irene has also attracted the attention of Pierre Lassalle, the 18-year-old son of a friend and business partner of her husband’s. Irene considers him to be a mere boy but she is reluctant to hurt him and assumes that he will soon get over his infatuation. He’s a harmless young man and his belief that he is in love with her is the sort of thing that boys of his age do. She is after all a very beautiful and very sophisticated older woman, and he’s lucky enough to have chosen a woman who is willing to humour him while taking care to ensure he doesn’t get hurt.

Unfortunately her calculations are upset when a harmless incident is misinterpreted. She has agreed to give young Pierre a photograph of herself and when he calls at her house she allows him to kiss her. This is the fateful kiss of the movie’s title, fateful because at that exact moment her husband arrives home and flies into a jealous rage. The upshot of this is that her husband ends up dead, the victim of a gunshot wound.

Irene is accused of murder and stands trial. But what really happened at her home on that fatal night?

Lew Ayres, soon to become a major star, plays the naïve but well-meaning Pierre Lassalle. Conrad Nagel is Irene’s lover, André. Both give performances that are effective and, by the standards of silent movies, restrained and lacking in the exaggerated qualities that so many people find off-putting in silent cinema. Garbo of course was always naturalistic in her performances. The understated acting makes this a good movie for anyone new to the attractions of silent film.

There are some nice art deco-influenced interiors. William H. Daniels became more or less Garbo’s personal cinematographer, working on no less than twenty-one of her films. He always knew exactly how to photograph her and she always trusted him implicitly. It was one of the great partnerships between a cinematographer and a star and it’s one of the strengths of this movie.

The Warner Archive DVD-R look reasonably good but it appears to be the same severely truncated print that has been shown on TCM. It runs for just 62 minutes whereas the original film (according to the IMDb) ran for 89 minutes, and it feels like a movie that has been savagely cut. One assumes however that this is the only cut of the movie that has survived. It’s not a great print by any mean but it’s watchable.

This is one of Garbo’s more overlooked movies and it’s well worth a look.

Pitfall (1948)

2011-11-14T10:04:00.002+11:00

Pitfall is certainly a film noir and although it mostly lacks the characteristic noir visual style it manages very effectively to convey the necessary mood of paranoia and doom.

It was directed by André De Toth, produced by an outfit called Regal Films and released through United artists in 1948.

The basis of the plot is that one small mistake is all it takes to turn a perfectly happy life into a waking nightmare. Johnny Forbes (Dick Powell) works for an insurance company. He has a lovely wife and he has a son and they live in a comfortable suburban house and his life is placid and well-organised. It’s so well-organised that when he leaves for work he can tell his wife he’ll be home at exactly 5.50 pm.

It’s an idyllic life but it’s the sort of life that a man can easily take for granted. Johnny’s problem is that he’s basically quite happy but he doesn’t realise it. He thinks he’s bored. Today we’d probably say he was having mid-life crisis.

The conviction that his life is dull and routine hits him with special force when he meets Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott). Mona’s boyfriend Bill Smiley has been imprisoned for embezzlement and Johnny’s company had to pay out as a result. Johnny’s job is to try to get some of the money back. Smiley had stolen the money to buy expensive presents for Mona.

Mona seems to represent what’s missing from Johnny’s life. She’s sexy and exciting and she’s bad. Or at least she looks like she’s bad. Johnny loses his head completely. Unfortunately he’s not the only one who’s fallen under Mona’s spell. J. B. McDonald (Raymond Burr) is a private investigator who does work for the insurance company from time to time and he’s well and truly obsessed by her. He’s also completely mad, dangerously violent and entirely untroubled by a conscience.

Johnny and Mona on the other hand are very much troubled by pangs of conscience. Mona immediately breaks off their affair when she finds out that Johnny is married. While she looks like a femme fatale and she has the effect of a femme fatale on Johnny’s life she’s actually not bad after all. She never wanted poor Smiley to steal for her and she has no intention of wrecking Johnny’s marriage. But she just can’t help being the sort of woman who makes men crazy.

Johnny has been badly frightened by the whole thing and just wants to go back to being a respectable family man again but McDonald is getting crazier and crazier and he’s not going to leave either Mona or Johnny in peace.

Johnny really hasn’t done very much wrong. The affair with Mona was extremely brief. In the whole of his married life he’s misbehaved for a day or two; all the rest of the time he’s been a devoted husband and father. He has never inhabited the world of film noir. His life has been lived in the sunshine, a life of neatly maintained lawns and duty and responsibility. But that one misstep has changed everything and his orderly life has been plunged into chaos and violence and ultimately murder. He can be accused at most of weakness and poor judgment.

Mona has also done very little wrong. If she has a fault it’s simply that she’s not a very good judge of men. She certainly doesn’t deserve the nightmare that her life becomes.

Dick Powell and Lizabeth Scott are terrific, giving nicely understated performances. Powell is convincing as a nice guy who can’t believe that one little mistake really can destroy his life. Raymond Burr on the other hand goes totally over-the-top, giving us a memorable portrayal of evil and obsession. Jane Wyatt has the relatively thankless role of Johnny’s devoted wife but she does a fine job.

The relative lack of overt noir visuals works to the film’s advantage. This is a nightmare played out in broad daylight and bright sunshine. The ending is where a lot of very good film noirs fall apart but Karl Kamb’s screenplay shows a sure touch in this department - it manages to be both downbeat and hopeful. There is tragedy and there is a price to be paid but there’s no cheap nihilism. These are grownups not teenagers and they don’t have the luxury of adolescent nihilism.

One thing I found amusing was a review describing this as a subversive noir. In fact it’s quite the opposite in most ways. It’s very pro-marriage and the message is that respectability and duty lead to happiness. And I really don’t think this message is intended to be ironic. The lesson Johnny learns is that accepting adult responsibilities is more conducive to happiness than chasing glamorous blondes.

Synergy’s DVD presentation has attracted a lot of negative comment but I have no idea why. It’s a perfectly decent print.

This is film noir at its best. Highly recommended.

The Golden Salamander (1950)

2011-11-12T21:08:00.004+11:00

The Golden Salamander is the sort of movie the British film industry used to do supremely well - a solid unpretentious but well-crafted and highly entertaining thriller benefitting from a superb cast. This one has the added bonus of some great location shooting in Tunisia.

Trevor Howard plays David Redfern, an English archaeologist who has been despatched to Tunisia to retrieve a collection of Etruscan artifacts belonging to a British museum. The collection had been salvaged from a sinking ship and are now in the home of the wealthy and mysterious Serafis in a small Tunisian village. On the way to the village Redfern finds the road blocked by a landslide and has to abandon his car and continue the journey on foot in darkness and driving rain. He’s not the only one having problems - he passes a lorry that has ditched. And, fatefully, he accidentally discovers the cargo the lorry was carrying - guns. He has stumbled upon an international gun-running operation.

Redfern has no wish to become involved and pretends to have seen nothing. Unfortunately the two men running the arms smuggling operation, Max (Jacques Sernas) and Rankl (Herbert Lom), are certain that he spotted them. And Rankl is a sinister and rather frightening figure.

Redfern finds that apart from the collection that he has to catalogue prior to its shipment to the UK the village has other distractions that are perhaps even more enticing. Most notable among these is a young and beautiful Frenchwoman, Anna (played by Anouk Aimée who at that stage of her career was known simply as Anouk). The attraction is mutual, although the situation is complicated by the fact that Anna and Max have been lifelong friends. Redfern is, against his will, finding that he cannot avoid taking some sort of stand in relation to the gun-running that Max is mixed up in. He tries to find an easy solution that will get Max off the hook, keep Anna out of the situation altogether, and clear the decks for his gradually blossoming romance with Anna. He will soon discover that there are no easy solutions, and finds he has become involved with murder as well as smuggling.

Now Redfern can no longer avoid taking a moral stand but he has no idea of the scale of the criminal activity and corruption that he has inadvertently wandered into. And the gun-runners have decided that the meddling English archaeologist must be eliminated. For David Redfern the challenge now is to stay alive.

Director Ronald Neame had a long and varied career as a writer, cinematographer and director. He did not direct a huge number of films but his output included some remarkably interesting projects. He handles the directing duties on this film with considerable skill.

Trevor Howard was of course one of the greats and he’s excellent as a man who is very reluctant indeed to become a hero, a man who thought he could go through life successfully ignoring things that were unpleasant or inconvenient. When he’s pushed too far he discovers within himself the strength to fight back.

Anouk Aimée is an engaging enough heroine. Herbert Lom gives one of his trademark vicious thug performances and he’s terrific as always. Miles Malleson as the village’s French policeman, Walter Rilla as the smooth but villainous Serafis and the always delightful Wilfred Hyde-White as a seedy but good-natured barfly round out the impressive cast.

This is a movie that succeeds admirably in what it sets out to do - to be an entertaining thriller. And that’s enough.

Odeon have released this one in their Best of British DVD series which includes a multitude of lesser known but intriguing British movies. The DVD is all-region and the transfer is quite acceptable.

The Prowler (1951)

2011-11-10T21:10:00.000+11:00

It has been said that there is no such thing as a bad film noir, that even the weakest noirs have something going for them. I used to believe that, until I saw Joseph Losey’s The Prowler.

Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) calls the cops when she spots a prowler outside her bathroom window. One of the cops is Officer Webb Garwood (Van Heflin). Right from the start we know there is something creepy about Garwood. He’s inclined to be dismissive of the woman’s claims but some time later he calls at her house again, alone, telling her that it’s a routine check. The fact that it’s four in the morning and her husband works nights and she’s all alone in the house might have something to do with his call.

Susan is obviously not all that happily married, and she’s just as obviously keen for male company. Especially when her husband’s not home. It’s not long before she and Officer Garwood get to know each other really well. His nocturnal visits become a regular arrangement. Garwood wants to take things further. It’s not so much Susan he wants though. Snooping around her house he discovers her husband’s will - she stands to inherit a great deal of money if something happens to hubby. The money would be enough to set Garwood and Susan up in a motel. That’s always been Webb Garwood’s dream. He even has the motel picked out, on the road to Las Vegas.

If only Susan’s husband were to meet with an accident Garwood and Susan would be on easy street.

So far it sounds like a Double Indemnity rip-off, which it pretty much is, the difference being that both protagonists in Double Indemnity are equally corrupt and equally guilty (and equally sleazy) whereas in this case Susan could be seen as more or less an innocent party. Perhaps not innocent, but certainly less guilty than Garwood.

Everything would be swell except for one problem, and it’s a big problem. Susan is pregnant, and there’s some awkwardness about the timing. Garwood’s fool-proof plan relies on the fact that their affair has been kept secret. If it were to become obvious that they’d been sleeping together since well before her husband’s unfortunate accident then that might raise very inconvenient questions about this remarkably convenient accident. And the baby can’t be her husband’s since it’s an open secret that he couldn’t have kids.

Now the trap starts to close in.

This really is a horrendous mess of a film. The major problem is Dalton Trumbo’s script. It’s frankly ludicrous. Too many things that don’t add up, that aren’t remotely plausible, too many plot holes where events develop in the way the script requires them to do so even though it doesn’t make any sense. We have to believe that the moment someone realises Susan is pregnant then the whole dirty scheme will be revealed whereas in fact it would certainly take quite a while for anyone to connect up all the dots. As the plot unwinds things get sillier and sillier.

There are problems with the characterisations as well. Susan is all over the place and her abrupt emotional transitions are unconvincing. Whether the blame lies mostly with Evelyn Keyes’ acting or Trumbo’s script is difficult to say. Van Heflin is somewhat better as Garwood but the character is so crudely drawn that it’s hard to take him too seriously. The supporting performances are hammy and embarrassing.

On the plus side it’s a visually impressive film with Arthur C. Miller’s cinematography giving it a nicely paranoid edge.

It’s certainly a sleazy little film. The relationship between Garwood and Susan is perverse to an extreme. He’s so obviously a psycho that no sane person could possibly be taken in by him so we have to conclude that Susan is excited by the idea of carrying on a relationship with a dangerous madman.

Thee are good moments in the movie if you can overlook the extreme silliness of the plot. I suspect this movie has been wildly overpraised because both Trumbo and Losey were targeted by the blacklist thus making them automatically heroes in the eyes of the film school crowd.

VCI have done a splendid job presenting this movie on DVD. The transfer is good and there are extras aplenty. If you’re a connoisseur of bad movies then it’s worth a look.

Theodora Goes Wild (1938)

2011-11-08T11:39:00.002+11:00

There are several problems with Columbia’s 1938 screwball comedy Theodora Goes Wild. Firstly, it isn’t very screwball. Secondly, it isn’t very funny. But worst of all, it’s not merely unfunny and dull, it’s actively annoying.

Theodora Lynn (Irene Dunne) lives in a small town and is a pillar of the local community. She plays the organ in the local church and teaches Sunday School. She is also, unbeknownst to the townsfolk, the author of a scandalous novel. And it’s not just a scandalous novel, but a huge bestseller as well. She has managed to keep her real identity a secret until her publisher persuades her to go out on the town during a visit to New York. She makes the acquaintance of a rich young artist named Michael Grant (Melvyn Douglas). Unfortunately he follows her home and proceeds to harass her unmercifully.

He taunts her about her small town life and tries to convince her that she needs to break away and become a free spirit, a rebel. Like he is. He proceeds to create a major scandal in the town. He’s a thoroughly unpleasant and irritating young man so naturally Theodora falls madly in love with him. And then discovers he’s not a free spirit after all. He’s trapped in a loveless marriage. He cannot get a divorce because his father holds a political office and dreads the thought of scandal.

Now Theodora turns the tables on him, following him back to New York and disrupting his life and creating scenes and being generally troublesome.

Now at this point you might be thinking that this doesn’t really sound like a zany fun-filled screwball comedy, and you’d be dead right. In fact it’s a mean-spirited and miserable movie. It even resorts to animal cruelty to try to get cheap laughs, and that pretty much sums up the type of movie this is.

A year later Irene Dunne gave a wonderful performance in another Columbia screwball comedy, The Awful Truth, but that one was a real screwball comedy and she had a great co-star in Cary Grant and in Leo McCarey a director who thoroughly understood comedy. In Theodora Goes Wild her performance is patchy at best. The fact that she falls for a creep like Michael makes it difficult to feel any sympathy for her character.

Melvyn Douglas on the other hand is thoroughly and comprehensively obnoxious as Michael. Generally speaking I have no problems with Douglas as an actor. The blame for his annoying performance here can therefore largely be laid at the feet of director Richard Boleslawski and screenwriter Sidney Buchman. Buchman must accept much of the blame for the film in general since his script is conspicuously lacking in actual humour.

The movie drags along for 94 minutes and let me tell you it was a very very long 94 minutes.

Columbia have released this movie in their Icons of Screwball Comedy series. This DVD series comprises two four-movie sets and is to be welcomed although I certainly hope the other movies are of a higher standard than this one.

Cry of the City (1948)

2011-11-06T11:13:00.000+11:00

Cry of the City is a superb example of late 40s film noir from 20th Century-Fox, enlivened by some terrific performances and directed by one of the masters of the noir style, Robert Siodmak.

The story is not strikingly original. Two kids, childhood friends, grow up in New York’s Little Italy. Martin Rome (Richard Conte) is seduced by the glamour of crime and fast living; his friend Candella (Victor Mature) becomes a cop. It’s a story Hollywood loved - two kids from the same background whose fates are very different but indissolubly linked. Now Rome is in hospital in a critical condition with four bullets in him after killing a policeman in a bungled robbery. He’s so far gone he receives the last rites. If he lives it won’t make any difference because he’ll get the electric chair anyway. We naturally expect that we’re going to get a classic noir flashback to explain how Martin ended up in this situation.

But that’s not what happens. This is not the end of the story, it’s just the beginning. Martin pulls through and finds himself in the prison hospital. While he lay apparently dying he was visited by a crooked lawyer who tried to get him to confess to a jewel robbery, a robbery that ended in a vicious murder, a crime that has been attributed to another criminal who just happens to be the shady lawyer’s client. He’s also visited by a young woman, apparently his girlfriend.

This jewel robbery is a major current case. The jewels have not been recovered and only one of the robbers was ever caught. Detective-Lieutenant Candella and his partner Lieutenant Collins (Fred Clark) start to think that maybe there’s something in the lawyer’s story, and maybe if they can find the girl they can find the real answers.

Martin breaks out of prison, determined to find his girl before the police do. He’s been a notorious womaniser but this time it’s different. He really loves her. He loves her almost as much as he loves himself, which is really saying something. Martin is still in a bad way, his wounds have opened up again and he can barely stay on his feet. He gets help from an old girlfriend, Brenda (Shelley Winters), and a shady doctor but he’s still not much more than a walking corpse. But he’s still capable of killing people. His latest murder has left him in possession of the much sought-after missing jewels and he’s closing in on the person who really committed the jewel robbery, hoping to do a deal - to exchange the jewels for money and a ticket out of the country.

Martin is also being assisted by his kid brother Tony who idolises him. This is one of the major things driving Lieutenant Candella - he’s known the Rome family all his life, he’s very fond of the patents and he can’t stand the thought that Tony is going to end up just like Martin. Candella is a cop who combines toughness with sensitivity and the thought that one day he’ll be watching Tony take the walk to the electric chair upsets him greatly.

The support cast is extremely strong. Shelley Winters’ role is all too brief but she’s excellent. Hope Emerson is extraordinary as one of the most villainous women in film noir.

Interestingly enough it was originally intended that Victor Mature would play Martin Rome. There are those who think this would have produced a better picture, Mature being a more likeable actor than Conte and therefore more likely to make us care about the fate of this killer on the run. I’m not convinced by this. Richard Conte makes Martin a glamorous but rather unsympathetic character. He’s incapable of feeling any real emotions. He uses people and he kills people without hesitation. This actually makes the film better balanced. In a movie such as this you can’t help feeling some sympathy for the hunted criminal but by making Martin so cold-blooded Conte ensures that we also empathise with the dedicated cop who’s hunting him.

Victor Mature’s finely judged performance perfectly complements Conte’s. Candella is a good cop and a good man, but without being dull or sanctimonious. It’s the less glamorous role but Mature shows his quality as an actor by making the most of it. Mature has been criminally underrated as an actor. If you put him in a costume epic he’d give you an outrageously camp performance, because that what’s he thought (no doubt correctly) was expected. But if you put him in a role that required real acting he’d deliver the goods.

In fact everything about this movie is perfectly judged. The cinematography is in the classic noir style and is suitably moody and atmospheric. Robert Siodmak’s direction is faultless. The acting is superb. Everything works just as it should. This is 1940s Hollywood film-making at its best.

Strangely enough although Fox have released most of their notable film noir titles from this era on Region 1 DVD Cry of the City has not been included, a bizarre omission. It is however available nearly everywhere else. Aztec’s Region 4 DVD lacks extras but it’s a nice transfer and is definitely recommended.

Stray Dog (1949)

2011-11-04T11:09:00.004+11:00

Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 Stray Dog (Nora inu) is a crime film that is often seen as an example of Japanese film noir. It certainly has many affinities to film noir and Kurosawa was almost certainly influenced by American film noir but there are some crucial differences as we’ll see.

Murakami (Toshirô Mifune) is a rookie homicide detective. His inexperience causes him to fall victim to a pickpocket on a bus, and his gun is stolen. He assumes he will be dismissed from the force for such an egregious failure but his chief has no time for that kind of self-pity and tells Murakami to get on with his job.

Murakami becomes obsessed by the necessity of getting his gun back. The stolen gun will have fatal consequences and will also drive the plot. The gun is used in an armed robbery and Murakami is convinced that it’s only a matter if time before it’s used in a murder, and his sense of guilt takes him to the edge of self-destruction.

He is teamed with an older detective, Sato. This then becomes the classic cop movie combination of the wise old detective teaching the green youngster the ropes. The gun itself becomes merely a symbol, an example of the workings of fate but Kurosawa is mostly interested in how we respond to fate.

Murakami’s quest for his lost firearm will take him on a journey into the seedy depths of the world of petty crime, a world of casual violence and nihilism. His fate becomes entwined with that of the man who now has his gun, a man who seems set on destroying himself and others with a vicious disregard consequences.

Like American noirs Stray Dog deals with the difficult adjustment to the new post-war world. But Kurosawa has little sympathy for those who use the war as an alibi for failure and despair.

There are major differences compared to American noir (or French noir for that matter). The idea of wallowing in victimhood is explicitly rejected. Yusa and Murakami have both suffered from the blows of fate but the most important line of dialogue in the movie occurs when Murakami’s boss tells him that bad luck can be an opportunity or it can destroy you. What is crucial here is that it doesn’t have to destroy you. It only destroys you if you choose to allow that to happen.

The noir world of chaos and self-pity can be defeated. If Murakami chooses the path of duty, if he accepts that as a cop he has a job to do and gets on with it he will survive. Survival is a choice, a message you can’t imagine finding in an American or a French noir. Kurosawa’s movie is dark but there’s a fundamental optimism that is antithetical to the universe of film noir. Family and duty can bring salvation, another message you don’t normally associate with film noir.

While Murakami feels some sympathy for the criminal the movie in general presents criminals as rabid dogs who must be destroyed. The violent world of the criminal is not glamorous, it is a squalid and pathetic world of losers.

The very fact that Kurosawa takes elements of film noir and puts them to his own uses makes this a particularly interesting film. This is one of Kurosawa’s less known movies but it’s arguably one of his best. Recommended.

Dance, Fools, Dance (1931)

2011-11-02T12:49:00.001+11:00

You could be forgiven for assuming that the 1931 MGM release Dance, Fools, Dance is another of Joan Crawford’s early flapper comedies, something along the lines of Our Modern Maidens. In fact it’s a gangster movie.

She does start the movie as a flapper however. Bonnie Jordan (Crawford) and her brother Rodney (William Bakewell) are the offspring of a fabulously wealthy industrialist. They have been indulged for the whole of their young lives, lives that have been a constant search for pleasure, revolving around yachts, parties and bootleg liquor. Then comes the Wall Street Crash. It’s such a shock that their father promptly drops dead of a heart attack. His fortune had been completely wiped out and Bonnie and Rodney are now penniless.

What are they to do now? Bonnie suggests that the best option might be to get jobs but Rodney has no intention of demeaning himself by performing useful work. Bonnie finds employment as a cub reporter on a major daily newspaper; Rodney goes to work for notorious bootlegger Jake Luva (Clark Gable). He assumes that no actual work will be required - he will simply use his society connections to find more customers for Jake’s bootleg hooch. He soon finds out that he will be required to do rather more than this, and that working for a gangster can be rather unpleasant. Especially when he finds himself in the middle of a major gangland killing.

Bonnie finds that being a cub reporter mostly involves covering things like poultry shows. She gets her big break in tragic circumstances. The paper’s star reporter is gunned down by Jake Luva’s goons. This reporter had taken Bonnie under his wing and she takes his murder rather personally. She jumps at the chance offered to her by her editor to undertake a very dangerous assignment - to infiltrate Jake Luva’s organisation.

She gets a job as a dancer at one of Luva’s night-clubs and soon catches the eye of the mobster. The facts she uncovers will come as a devastating blow to her.

The movie can be seen as a transitional vehicle for Crawford. She plays the kind of wise-cracking hedonistic flapper that had become her specialty but Bonnie is a flapper who grows up and takes on adult responsibilities. This grown-up Bonnie is a resourceful, brave and determined woman and points the way forward to the roles she would play in her later career. We get to see her dance (and she’s a remarkably energetic and sexy dancer) and we get to see her do some serious acting. She completely dominates the movie, as she was to do time and time again in her subsequent career. It’s a fine performance.

Clark Gable was still playing stereotyped gangster roles at this stage of his career but his star quality is already evident. The supporting players are generally solid.

There are a few definite pre-code moments, such as Bonnie suggesting to her boyfriend a kind of trial marriage.

MGM is not the studio that comes to mind when you think of early 30s gangster movies but they did make a few very interesting forays into the genre (Beast of the City being a particularly interesting example). Dance, Fools, Dance is very much a melodrama but it has some very dark moments and on the whole it’s a fairly effective gangster flick with the addition of Crawford’s feisty girl reporter making it part of the newspaper movie genre as well.

This is one of the best of Crawford’s early movies. It’s been issued in the Warner Archive DVD-R series, and it’s a pretty good print. Definitely worth a purchase.

Lonely Wives (1931)

2011-10-31T11:36:00.003+11:00

Lonely Wives is a movie that I discovered in one of those Mill Creek sets of public domain movies but don’t be put off by that. It’s actually a rather outrageous little pre-code sex farce.

Edward Everett Horton is a familiar face to classic movie fans but he’s mostly known for his comic relief supporting performances. Lonely Wives gave him a rare opportunity for a starring role and it’s an opportunity he grabs with both hands.

Horton plays two roles, and this being classic farce much of the humour will come from the resulting instances of mistaken identity.

Richard ‘Dickie’ Smith (Horton) is a successful lawyer who is the soul of probity and clean living, devoted to his work. Until 8 o’clock each evening. At that hour we’re told he “blooms.” His mother-in-law Mrs Mantel tries to keep him on a short leash, especially at the moment when his wife is out of town. When he “blooms” he develops a taste for feminine company, not always of the most respectable kind.

The arrival of a new secretary will be the first temptation put in his way. Minty Minter (Patsy Ruth Miller) is the sort of girl that Smith’s mother-in-law strongly disapproves of. She particularly disapproves of the way Minty walks. When we see Minty walking we can see that she has a point. It’s the sort of walk that is conducive to unclean thoughts.

Minty sees an opportunity for her friend Diane O’Dare (Laura La Plante) to get the divorce she’s after, probably at no cost. Well no financial cost anyway. When Richard Smith blooms he is unlikely to be able to resist Diane’s charms. Diane wants a divorce because her husband goes out most evenings. If he went out every evening she wouldn’t be concerned, but it’s the uncertainty she objects to. Such unpredictability can be inconvenient for a high-spirited girl like Diane. It can disrupt her social life.

With the chance of having a night on the town with not one but two attractive young ladies Smith is understandably anxious to slip way for the evening. But how to evade that mother-in-law? Then a piece of good fortune comes his way. A vaudeville entertainer known as Felix the Great Zero, whose act is based on impersonations of prominent people, wants to incorporate an impersonation of Smith into his act. This entertainer (also played by Horton) does in fact bear a striking resemblance to the lawyer. Smith agrees to Felix’s proposal on the condition that Felix take his place in his home that evening, so that his mother-in-law won’t realise he’s slipped out.

Of course it all soon becomes hopelessly complicated, especially when Smith’s wife arrives home unexpectedly while Felix’s wife also become involved (and unfortunately for Smith he isn’t aware of the identity of Felix’s wife). Everyone seems to be getting mixed up with the wrong husband or the wrong wife. Most confused of all is Smith’s butler, whose permanent state of intoxication does nothing to clarify matters.

Maude Eburne as Mrs Mantel is extremely irritating but the other supporting players are generally very good. What really matters is that Edward Everett Horton is in scintillating form and is good enough to make this a delightful entertainment.

The dialogue is exceptionally risque. There’s scarcely a line or a situation that doesn’t have a sexual connotation. Most importantly, it’s both naughty and funny. It’s all great fun.

Print quality is more or less what you expect from Mill Creek but it’s quite watchable.

Decoy (1946)

2011-10-29T10:52:00.002+11:00

Decoy is an outrageous film noir potboiler that truly has to be seen to be believed.

It has the basic noir trademarks - the flashback, the femme fatale, the basically decent hero led astray by the aforementioned femme fatale, the atmosphere of seediness and despair. What it does with those ingredients is something else, something that explodes the boundaries of the genre. The result is not a great movie, not even a particularly good movie by conventional standards, but certainly a memorable one.

Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie) has a problem. Her boyfriend is bank robber Frank Olins. He has $400,000 from his last robbery stashed away somewhere but he won’t tell anyone where. And he’s on Death Row after killing a bank guard. He wanted the money so they could have a life together but if he’s going to die he doesn’t want to take the chance that someone else will get his money and his girl. So he’s decided the whereabouts of the loot will die with him.

Margot and her other boyfriend, Jim Vincent, need to come up with a plan. The traditional solution would be to try to break him out of prison but they have a much better scheme than that. They’ve discovered there’s a drug called Methylene Blue that is an antidote to cyanide poisoning. And cyanide is the gas used in executions in the state of California. All they need to do is to get hold of Frank’s body after the execution, administer the antidote and then fool the revived bank robber into telling them where the money is.

To do this they’ll need the assistance of the prison doctor, Dr Lloyd Craig. That shouldn’t be a problem. He’s a man, and Margot can get any man dancing to her tune. So the plan seems fool-proof. Trouble is, Frank is a very suspicious guy so all he’ll agree to do is to draw her a map, and then give her half the map while keeping the other half himself. Frank is right to be suspicious but he has no idea just how ruthless Margot is. She’s not into the concept of sharing. Not at all. And if people get in her way she kills them.

OK, so the first thing you’re probably thinking is, hang on, an antidote to cyanide poisoning is all very well but if the guy has been executed then he’s dead. This has got to be a real heavy-duty antidote if it works on dead people. This would be a flaw in most films but this one solves the problem by simply ignoring it. Everyone in the movie simply takes it for granted that reviving dead people is no big deal. It’s a breath-taking piece of effrontery but somehow this movie gets away with it.

The outrageousness of this movie doesn’t stop there. By the standards of Hollywood in 1946 this is a seriously violent, seriously sleazy film. How they managed to get so much casual violence past the Production Code Authority remains a mystery. An even bigger mystery is how they managed to get away with one particular scene, one of the most vicious and sadistic slayings you’ll see in any movie.

Margot is not just a femme fatale. She is the ultimate femme fatale. She has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Jean Gillie’s performance is extraordinary in its intensity. It’s not great acting but you certainly won’t forget it in a hurry.

Mind you, none of the characters have any redeeming qualities. Even the doctor isn’t really troubled by his conscience until he figures out he’s been double-crossed. The tone of this movie is unremittingly cynical.

For a Monogram production it’s reasonably professional. It doesn’t have the technical sloppiness you often associate with Poverty Row productions. It looks cheap but not excessively so and the cheapness adds effectively to the dinginess and atmosphere of moral squalor.

There’s a delightfully hysterical tone to this sordid tale. It’s a bizarre viewing experience but one not to be missed.

The Warner Home Video DVD looks sensational and includes a very very brief documentary on the film plus a moderately informative commentary track.

Stagecoach (1939)

2011-10-27T11:48:00.004+11:00

In 1939 the western had been a staple of Hollywood filmmaking for two decades but it was a genre that was not taken very seriously. Westerns were low-budget potboilers cranked out mainly by Poverty Row studios. John Ford’s Stagecoach changed all that. It ushered in the epic western, westerns made as A-pictures featuring major stars and made by the top talents at the big studios.

It’s worth noting that it was not the only significant western to appear in 1939. Cecil B. DeMoIle's Union Pacific would also adopt an epic approach, and while George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again took a satirical view of the genre it was definitely a major step in the development of the western as something more than just horse operas.

But it was Stagecoach that defined the new style of western. John Ford had discovered two essential ingredients that were to become trademarks of his westerns and major icons of the genre - Monument Valley as the quintessential western location and John Wayne as the quintessential western star.

The plot is simple enough. A stagecoach has to run the gauntlet of hostile Apaches while the nine passengers and crew slowly reveal the depth, or in some cases the lack of depth, of their characters. One of the passengers is the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) and the journey has particular significance for him. He has broken out of prison and when he reaches his destination he will have to confront the three brothers who killed his father and his own brother. Since they’re tough hombres and he’s really just a goodnatured cowboy the probability is that this is for him a journey to his own death. At least the assumption of everyone else is that he hasn’t got a chance.

If you focus on the story then you could easily conclude that Stagecoach is really nothing special. It’s somewhat corny, it’s sentimental, the characters are stock types, the social commentary is heavy-handed and obvious (the social outcasts turn out to be more virtuous than the respectable types). None of that matters. What matters is Ford’s very serious approach to this material. He treats it as the stuff of epic. He gives it a grandeur that makes it work on that level, that forces the viewer to take it as seriously as the director did.

Ford had a good cast to work with and he got the best from them. While the characters may have been stock types that in some ways adds to the epic feel. We don’t expect the heroes of myth to be fully rounded characters. That would get in the way of the myth. And the performances are memorable. There’s a chilling moment when the aristocratic southern gambler played by John Carradine shows that he really does takes his code of chivalry as seriously as he claims to, and while we’re horrified by what he’s about to do it has to be admitted that it forces us to take the character as seriously as he takes himself.

Ford was a Catholic and the theme of redemption is central to the film. And there are three characters in particular need of redemption. There’s the alcoholic doctor (a role that won Thomas Mitchell an Oscar). Secondly there’s the whore, played by Claire Trevor, who manages to persuade us to believe she really is a whore with a heart of gold.

And then there’s the Ringo Kid. This is the role that made John Wayne a star. Prior to this he was regarded as a very lightweight B-western actor. This movie was not just the making of him as a star, but as an actor as well. Ford believed in him and cast him over the strong objections of producer Walter Wanger, and Wayne repaid the director’s faith handsomely. I find myself admiring John Wayne as an actor more and more. In our modern age which regards serious acting as something that should look as tortured and as difficult as possible the quiet authority of Wayne may not seem like real acting but in fact it’s far more effective than the contrived histrionics of today’s stars.

In this film Ford also provided an object lesson in how to shoot an action sequence. The extended chase sequence with the stagecoach being pursued by an Apache war party is a template for just about every similar scene in every subsequent movie but while it’s been copied countless times it’s rarely been surpassed. Ford also provides a lesson in pacing and structure, with character-driven scenes and action scenes in perfect balance. Orson Welles believed that you could learn everything you needed to know about filmmaking from watching Stagecoach and he was probably right.

The first of John Ford’s great westerns, a movie with a huge reputation that lives up to that reputation.

The Egyptian (1954)

2011-10-26T01:15:00.001+11:00

A 1950s Hollywood epic set in ancient Egypt and starring Victor Mature, Gene Tierney and Jean Simmons - now that has to be fun. And The Egyptian does not disappoint.

The Egyptian of the title is a doctor named Sinuhe (played by Edmund Purdom). We see him at the beginning of the film as an old man in exile and his story is told in flashback. He was once young and idealistic, burning with a desire to bring the benefits of modern medicine (and in the 14th century BC Egyptian medicine was most definitely at the cutting edge) to the poor. His father is a doctor as well, but he’s not his real father. As a baby Sinuhe was found floating in the Nile in a small reed basket, this being a common method of disposing of unwanted babies.

Sinuhe has an unlikely friend, a rambunctious but good-natured brawler named Horemheb (Victor Mature). Horemheb’s fondest ambition is to serve in Pharaoh’s Guard but since he is merely the son of a humble cheese-maker this ambition seems unlikely to be fulfilled. Then fate steps in. Sinuhe and Horemheb are hunting lions in their chariot when they come across what appears to be a crazed holy man. They save this unfortunate from becoming dinner for a hungry lion.

It turns out the man really is a crazed holy man, but he also happens to be the pharaoh, the notorious Akhenaten. In saving him they laid hands on him, which is a capital offence. Luckily Akhenaten takes a dim view of hallowed traditions and he not only allows them to live, he rewards them. Horemheb will indeed serve in Pharaoh’s Guard, while Sinuhe will become part-time official physician to Pharaoh’s family.

Fate however is abut to step in again, in the form of a woman. Nefer is beautiful and glamorous and Sinuhe is captivated by her. He will do anything for her. Sinuhe’s judgment is very poor when it comes to women. He has a nice girl, Merit (Jean Simmons), who is crazy about him but he is obsessed by Nefer. Nefer is a courtesan but she is also a very dangerous woman who enjoys seducing and corrupting innocent young men. And Sinuhe is well and truly corrupted. His parents will pay the price for his fatal obsession and Sinuhe himself will be reduced to despair and forced to flee Egypt.

Sinuhe travels the known world and his fame as a physician grows. He is on a quest for redemption and slowly he is rebuilding his life and his self-respect. But fate is not yet finished wit him. It will lead him back to Egypt, and his life will once more be entwined with the lives of Horemheb, Merit and Akhenaten. Akhenaten’s religious innovations and his mystical belief in the virtues of turning the other cheek will lead Egypt to the brink of ruin and Sinuhe will be faced with a terrible dilemma.

It’s all outrageously melodramatic and very camp, just as you’d expect from a 1954 Hollywood costume epic, but this movie has some surprising features. The moral dilemmas are real and they’re complex. Sinuhe is basically a good man but with serious moral weaknesses. Akhenaten is almost saintly but he is also a catastrophically bad ruler. Horemheb proves to be very ambitious indeed but his ambitions lead him on a path that will prove to be Egypt’s salvation. And Akhenaten’s sister Baketamon (Gene Tierney) is also motivated both by personal ambition and a desire to save her country from destruction.

The most morally challenged characters end up doing the most good while the most virtuous characters do an immense amount of mischief. Ruling a kingdom and conducting international relations require common sense and hard-headedness more than they require goodness. This kind of moral ambiguity is very unexpected in this type of movie.

Equally surprising is the very open and non-judgmental treatment of the issue of the illegitimate son of Sinuhe and Merit.

The acting tends towards the melodramatic, but that goes with the territory. Edmund Purdom is rather on the dull side. Victor Mature is enormous fun. Gene Tierney isn’t given enough to do but she does have a few great scenes and her performance is on balance the best of any of the cast members. Michael Wilding is annoyingly other-worldly and mystically woolly-headed but it’s a performance that suits the character. Jean Simmons is solid as always and even Peter Ustinov (as Sinuhe’s dishonest but faithful servant) is less irritating than usual.

Needless to say it’s visually impressive although the use of process shots and matte paintings is very obvious. Personally I don’t mind that - I think the obvious artificiality works in the movie’s favour, making it a kind of fable.

And the very idea of making a movie about the infamous heretic pharaoh is incredibly cool. Akhenaten’s religious reforms did not survive him but they’re extremely interesting. He was in effect trying to replace the established religion of the country with a new monotheistic faith. Had he succeeded he’d be known as one of the great religious leaders of history.

The Egyptian is a strange mix of melodrama and profundity and while it’s an uneasy mix it makes for one of the more intriguing Hollywood movies of the 50s. And it’s wonderfully entertaining. It’s unusual enough to qualify as a must-see movie in its own eccentric way.

Bounty’s Region 4 DVD lacks extras but it’s a lovely transfer and it’s in the proper Cinemascope aspect ratio.

Hell’s Angels (1930)

2011-10-24T05:22:00.001+11:00

Any movies that Howard Hughes was involved with tended to have troubled production histories, and such was the case with his 1930 First World War aerial epic Hell’s Angels.

It wasn’t entirely his fault. He started shooting it as a silent film then when it became obvious that talkies were the wave of the future he reshot it as a sound film. That decision made a very expensive movie even more expensive but money was never a consideration for Hughes. Hughes produced and also got the director’s credit although in fact no less than three directors had a hand in this production, including James Whale (soon to become much better known as the director of Frankenstein.

Hughes wasn’t overly interested in the plot or the characters. For him it was all about the action sequences. Unfortunately far too much time is spent in the first half of the movie on rather aimless scenes that are meant to introduce the characters. The script and the acting are so weak that despite all this effort the characters remain cardboard cut-outs. Once the aerial sequences kick in though the movie goes into high gear.

English brothers Roy and Monte Rutledge and a young German named Karl meet at Oxford shortly before the outbreak of war. They decide to holiday in Germany. Monte, the younger brother, spends most of his time chasing the local female population. Perhaps unwisely he includes among his conquests the wife of a high-ranking Prussian officer. The officer promptly challenges him to a duel. Monte is horrified that there are people who still take adultery so seriously. He has no intention of going through with the duel. He packs his bags and flees back to England, wile Roy fights the duel for him (and surprisingly enough survives).

This sets up the characters of the two brothers. Monte is irresponsible, selfish and cowardly, although also charming. Roy is high-minded, noble and courageous, although he’s also something of a prig. Roy is in love with a girl named Helen (Jean Harlow). He thinks she’s the sweetest and most virtuous girl in existence. Unfortunately his touching faith in her is sadly misplaced. Helen is a good time gal. Once Monte gets to meet her he realises this immediately. She invites him back to her flat, where she delivers her famous line, “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?” No prizes for guessing what happens next.

War breaks out and of course Roy enlists immediately, in the Royal Flying Corps. Monte has no intention of enlisting but is tricked into it. Meanwhile Karl has been called up for service with the German military.

Karl ends up as an observer in a zeppelin. This is a rather alarming occupation which involves sitting in a small one-man gondola which is lowered from the zeppelin, presumably so the zeppelin can remain above the clouds while the observer aims the bombs from below the cloud cover. This sets up the highlight of the movie - the zeppelin raid. This is a visual tour-de-force. It’s not just stunning by the standards of 1930 - it remains one of the most extraordinary action sequences ever put on film.

Hughes follows this up with another extended action sequence that is just as impressive as Roy and Monte volunteer to fly a captured German bomber to bomb a munitions dump. This represents the only way to to give a forthcoming British attack any chance of success. The downside is, once they’ve bombed the target every German fighter aircraft on the front will be after them, and if they’re captured they will be shot as spies (and quite rightly so - it would have been a very dishonourable action indeed, something the movie glosses over rather glibly). Their own fighters will try to protect them, and the resulting aerial battle scenes are spectacular. Three men were killed during the filming of these scenes.

This movie has many problems. The pacing for the first hour is glacial. The script is weak. The characters ate stereotypes, and they’re not colourful stereotypes they’re dull stereotypes. The acting is atrocious. James Hall as Roy and Ben Lyon as Monte are truly awful. Jean Harlow would become a wonderful actress but this was her first significant role. She was still a teenager and her inexperience is all too obvious. On the other hand she is certainly sexy. Her performance is very uneven and at times rather bad there are occasional flashes of the brilliance that was to come.

The movie features a ten-minute sequence filmed in the early two-strip Technicolor process. As was always the case with this early version of Technicolor the colours don’t look quite right. In a movie like Mystery of the Wax Museum this was an asset, adding an eerie atmosphere. It’s less successful here, but it is the only chance you’ll ever have to see Jean Harlow in colour.

There are several other scenes (including the zeppelin raid) that are tinted, a practice that was common in the silent era but very unusual in a sound picture.

There are some pre-code moments although the movie’s pre-code status is indicated mostly in the fairly graphic nature of some of the aerial combat scenes. It’s often forgotten that the Code cracked down just as hard on graphic violence as it did on sexual content.

The Region 4 DVD from Bounty is the print restored by UCLA Film School and it looks splendid.

All in all this movie is a very mixed bag. In many ways it’s a very bad movie. On the other hand if you love aircraft, zeppelins and Jean Harlow then it’s definitely worth a look. And what right-thinking person doesn’t love aircraft, zeppelins and Jean Harlow?

Crime Wave (1954)

2011-10-22T11:36:00.008+11:00

Crime Wave is a movie that had been largely forgotten until fairly recently. This 1954 Warner Brothers production blends film noir themes with a partly documentary feel. This was a combination that was often attempted, but very rarely as successfully as this.

The story of how the movie came to be made as it was is in itself the stuff of legend. It was to have been a relatively prestigious A-picture with Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner lined up to star, and with a generous 35-day shooting schedule. That was until director André de Toth informed Jack Warner he didn’t want Hollywood’s biggest star for the lead, he didn’t want any stars, he wanted Sterling Hayden. Warner decided the director was mad and told him he could forget the big budget and the 35-day shooting schedule. He’d have to do it as a cheap B-picture on a 15-day schedule. Which according to de Toth was what he wanted all along. And he proceeded to complete the picture in just 13 days.

Which was an extraordinary achievement given the amount of location shooting involved.

The locations are one of the highlights. The result was one of the most realistic looking crime films of the 50s.

The plot is pretty basic, but what’s impressive is what de Toth does with it. We’re straight into the action right from the first minute, with a bungled gas station robbery. One of the three robbers is shot and wounded, a cop is killed, and all for $130. The wounded hoodlum, Morgan (Nedrick Young) makes his way to the home of a guy he was in St Quentin with.

Steve Lacey (Gene Nelson) has gone straight. He has a good job as an aircraft engineer, he has a beautiful wife, and they have an apartment. It’s not a luxury apartment but it’s OK and it’s theirs and they’re happy. Now Steve will find that staying on the straight and narrow isn’t so easy.

It’s bad enough having a hoodlum turn up on their doorstep, but things get a whole lot worse when Morgan proceeds to die in their living room. Steve Lacey knows he should call the police but he decides to call his parole officer first. It’s too late. The cops have already arrived at his apartment.

Heading the investigation is Detective-Lieutenant Sims (Sterling Hayden). Sims doesn’t like ex-cons and doesn’t have any sympathy for them. He’s chasing a cop killer and he’s not about to worry about whether poor Steve Lacey really has gone straight and really is just an innocent caught up in this whole mess. He’s also quite happy to lean on Dr Otto Hessler, a doctor who was struck off years ago and now makes a living as a vet and patching up criminals. Hessler is terrified but Sims is determined to make use of him even though it will most likely get the poor guy killed.

Sterling Hayden gives a trademark Sterling Hayden performance. In fact it’s the same performance he gave in every film, but it’s perfect. Charles Bronson (still known as Charles Buchinsky in 1954) is suitable menacing as one of the three bank robbers. Ted de Corsia goes close to stealing the picture as Doc Penney. He’s the brains of this particular criminal outfit, and he’s wonderfully sleazy and sweaty and generally reptilian. And then there’s Timothy Carey, adding a touch of the bizarre as a very creepy and totally insane hoodlum named Johnny. Phyllis Kirk gives a strong performance as Steve Lacey’s wife. The director’s preference for using lesser known actors rather than stars pays off handsomely.

Most scenes are shot in the locations where the action is supposed to taking place, including (according to James Ellroy and Eddie Muller on the commentary track) the actual headquarters of the detective branch of the LAPD. The street scenes in LA are extraordinary, a real time capsule.

There are some process shots but many of the scenes shot in cars really were shot simply by putting a cameraman in the actual car giving the movie a very strong feel of the action being filmed as it happens out on the streets.

What this all adds up to is a triumph of style over substance, and style is something it has in spades. An absolute must-see for noir or crime movie enthusiasts in general.

The Warner Home Video DVD includes a very enthusiastic commentary by James Ellroy and Eddie Muller plus a documentary on the film, and as with most of Warner’s film noir DVDs the picture quality is glorious.

A Girl in Every Port (1928)

2011-10-20T00:28:00.000+11:00

A Girl in Every Port has several claims to fame. It was one of Howard Hawks’ very early movies (released in 1928). It was his second-last silent movie. And a German director named G. W. Pabst saw it and was so impressed by the female lead he decided to cast her in his next movie. The actress was Louise Brooks, the movie he cast her in was Pandora’s Box, and thus a legend was born.

A Girl in Every Port is in fact a male buddy film. Ordinarily not my favourite kind of movie, but you expect a male buddy film made by Howard Hawks to be better than average and it is. It’s also a comedy so it provides an intriguing glimpse of one of the greatest masters of cinematic comedy learning the ropes. It’s not quite vintage Hawks comedy but you can see that the potential was already there.

Spike (Victor McLaglen) is a sailor and he really does have a girl in every port. Or so he thought. But now every time he reaches port he finds that all the girls in his little black book are sporting a heart and anchor tattoo. Some other seafaring Lothario has been making time with Spike’s girls. Eventually he catches up to his rival. They start to fight it out, get caught up in a full-scale bar-room brawl, and end up in the lock-up. They discover that they have something in common besides women - they like brawling. And they like each other. Soon they are fast friends and shipmates.

All goes well until Spike meets a girl who is special (the girl is of course Louise Brooks). This girl, Marie, does a high-diving act in a carnival in a French port and Spike is convinced she is the sweetest girl a man could ever meet. She’s not the kind of girl you add to your little black book. She’s the kind of girl you marry, and settle down with. Maybe buy a little farm. Spike has enough money to do this. And she seem so anxious to share his dream of rural connubial bliss that she offers to look after his money for him, so he can’t be tempted to spend it.

Spike’s a nice guy but he’s a bit of an innocent where women are concerned. He’s had his share of success with the ladies but he’s inclined to take a rather romantic view of the fair sex. And he’s the kind of guy who likes to think the best of people. Anyone else would have figured out that Marie was just taking him for a ride and intending to fleece him, but Spike can’t see it.

Things get more complicated when he proudly introduces his new girl (and his intended future wife) to his best buddy Bill. Bill recognises her immediately. She used to be known as Tessy when she did her diving act in Coney Island. She and Bill were pretty friendly. So friendly that (although Spike doesn’t yet know it) Marie/Tessy sports Bill’s heart and anchor tattoo on her arm. What is Bill to do? Spike is his best friend. Can he allow this girl to take Spike for every penny he has and then leave him broken-hearted?

The movie’s sexual politics, and its moral dilemmas, are more complex than they appear to be. Spike and Bill adopt a love ’em and leave ’em policy towards their various girlfriends but their assumption is that the kinds of girls who date sailors know the score. The movie adopts a worldly view towards sex. Marie adopts a similar attitude towards men as the men in this movie adopt towards women, although their objective is sex while hers is money. In both cases no great harm is done unless you happen to be naïve enough (as Spike is) to not realise it’s all a game.

Mostly it’s a movie about friendship. Spike and Bill are true friends, and while that friendship will be sorely tested it will prove strong enough to survive.

Victor McLaglen and Robert Armstrong are likeable as the two seafaring buddies. Louise Brooks doesn’t get a lot of screen time but she certainly makes the most of what she does get. Her image is already well in place here, as the glamorous femme fatale - it’s obvious why Pabst was so impressed. And of course the camera adores her. Her acting style is not at all what you expect in silent comedy - it’s very understated and very subtle. She is most definitely not a slapstick comedienne. Brooks always admired actors (such as Leslie Howard) who understood the virtues of underacting.

But of course this is a comedy, so the question is, is it funny? The answer is yes, although not in a rolling-on-the-floor kind of way. It’s a cheerful amusing and engagingly amoral little picture, and being a Howard Hawks movie it’s comedy with an edge of intelligence and sophistication.

If you’re a Louise Brooks fan then it’s absolutely essential viewing of course.

Unfortunately this movie is not available in an official DVD release and those prints that are floating about are not in great condition. Most of the silent movies that Louise Brooks made in Hollywood before her departure for Germany survive but despite her huge cult following for some reason they have never enjoyed a proper DVD release.

Cloak and Dagger (1946)

2011-10-17T18:40:00.001+11:00

Cloak and Dagger is not generally regarded as one of Fritz Lang’s more important American films but it’s actually an underrated and very successful production.

Made in 1946, just after the end of the war, it’s the fourth and last of Lang’s American espionage thrillers.

The movie hits the ground running with the opening sequence showing Allied agents in occupied Europe being gunned down in the middle of despatching a vital radio message to their controllers. This establishes the mood of the whole film - heroism juxtaposed with brutality and tragedy. This will be a rather dark spy film, although it’s dark without being cynical. The heroism is as real as the brutality.

The partial message is enough to indicate that the Nazis are fairly well advanced in a program to develop nuclear weapons, but just how advanced remains unclear. The Allies obviously need to find out and the American spy service, the OSS, enlists the help of a mild-mannered nuclear physicist working at a quiet midwestern university. But while Professor Alvah Jesper (Gary Cooper) might indeed be mild-mannered, in fact almost the archetypal slightly dotty and very unworldly scientists with his head in the clouds, he’s actually working on the Manhattan Project, helping to develop the American atomic bomb. He hates the very idea of such a weapon, but he consoles himself with the thought that if such a weapon is to exist it had better be developed by the Allies rather than the Axis powers.

Now he finds himself with even more important work to do. A leading German physicist, Katerin Loder, has defected to Switzerland. Jesper is persuaded to join the OSS and to make contact with her, to discover how close the Germans are to success and if possible to find a way to get her out of Switzerland.

It all goes horribly and tragically wrong. The inexperienced Jesper makes some basic errors in spycraft and falls for the charms of a beautiful expatriate American who is in fact a Gestapo agent. Jesper learns his lesson and finds within himself a determination he had not realised he possessed. Without being conscious of the fact he has become a quiet unassuming hero. He comes up with a new plan, to contact a brilliant Italian physicist who is working on the German A-bomb. He gambles that Professor Polda is almost certainly doing this work against his will, which turns out to be quite true. Polda’s daughter is being held as a hostage to ensure his coöperation. Al Jesper now conceives an even more daring plan - to get both Polda and his daughter safely to England.

Among the Italian partisan fighters with whom he works to achieve his aim is the beautiful Gina (Lilli Palmer). The main action now breaks off while the focus shifts to the blossoming romance between Al Jesper and Gina but this is not merely a romantic interlude inserted to provide some sort of obligatory love interest for the hero. This episode is crucial to the film. Gina is brave and resourceful but her dangerous work has left her emotionally scarred. She has nightmares, she is developing symptoms of paranoia, she is becoming cynical and embittered and she is starting to forget that people can be kind and decent and that tenderness and love still exist.

Lang handles this romance with both sensitivity and economy. A stray cat and a child’s carousel provide poignant and effective symbols of the growing understanding between these two characters.

When we get back to the main espionage narrative we see once more heroism mingled with tragedy. The original ending was apparently changed by the studio but the existing ending works extremely well. Lang intended to strengthen the message about the dangers of atomic weapons but that original ending might have somewhat dated the film. The ending as it stands is ambiguously hopeful, certainly not a simplistic happy ending. The message is that the good guys can win but they pay a high price for doing so. Love might triumph as well, but there are no guarantees. Fate could still step in, the world is still a dangerous place and the triumph of love is fragile.

Gary Cooper isn’t everyone’s favourite actor but he’s really quite superb here. He has the difficult task of convincing us that he’s both a nuclear physicist and a heroic spy, and at the same time a very ordinary man who wants nothing more than a quiet life. Cooper carries this off with ease and grace. A very underrated and surprising versatile actor who is ideal for Lang’s purposes in this movie. Lilli Palmer is excellent as well. There’s no sizzling sexual chemistry between these two but there’s a very real and much deeper emotional chemistry.

Lang is in complete control in this film. While admitting the brilliance of his early German movies it has to be said that Lang’s Hollywood movies are much more disciplined. There are no wasted scenes. Lang makes his points about the dangers of nuclear weaponry and the evil of totalitarianism while still managing to make a very effective and very tense commercial spy thriller and at the same time making a movie that is very much a Fritz Lang movie. These are compromises certainly, but Lang demonstrates his ability to make intelligent and thoughtful compromises and that;s what the movie business is all about.

There are two scenes that deserve special mention. There’s a clever reference to Lang’s German masterpiece M in a scene where we see a child’s toy ball bouncing down a staircase to land at the feet of a dead Italian secret policeman, and this immediately follows the graphic and brutal fight scene in which Al Jesper kills the policeman, a scene in which he discovers that killing a man is messy, difficult and extremely unpleasant, a scene that clearly influenced a similar scene in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain.

Palladium’s all-region PAL DVD release is acceptable enough and relatively inexpensive but it highlights the need for Lang’s American movies to get the special edition treatment on DVD or Blu-Ray. It’s appalling that such excellent movies by such an important film-maker are only available in at best adequate DVD releases.

King Solomon's Mines (1937)

2011-10-14T16:51:00.003+11:00

H. Rider Haggard’s wonderful Victorian tales of adventure have been adapted often for film, but the adaptations have been invariably fairly loose. The 1937 British movie version of King Solomon's Mines by Gaumont British Pictures is no exception.

The movie introduces us to two characters who don’t appear in the book, a feckless Irishman named Patrick O’Brien and his beautiful and very feisty daughter. They have been drawn to South Africa in the 1880s by the lure of the diamond fields, but their quest for easy riches has been conspicuously unsuccessful. The daughter, Kathy (played by Anna Lee), has decided on a desperate expedient - she intends to head for the coast in search of honest work. In order to get there they manage to prevail upon the famous big-game hunter Allan Quatermain (Cedric Hardwicke) to give them a lift in his wagon. Quatermain is engaged to take two Englishmen up-country. They are the young and handsome Sir Henry Curtis (John Loder) and a retired naval officer, Commander John Good (Roland Young).

Destiny now steps in. They encounter another wagon, and two strangers who will have a fateful influence on all their lives - an insane English explorer and his African companion, Umbopa (Paul Robeson). The explorer dies almost immediately, but he has a map with him, a map that falls into the possession of Patrick O’Brien. The map is the key to the fables mines of King Solomon and their fabulous riches in diamonds. O’Brien sets off into the desert alone, heading towards King Solomon’s Mountains. The lure of King Solomon's Mines is too strong for him to resist.

Kathy now announces her intention to set off in pursuit of her father. The hard-headed and rather gruff Quatermain assures her it’s madness and informs her he wants no part of it. Sir Henry and Commander Good are however both suckers for an attractive young woman in distress. They agree to accompany her. Quatermain still thinks it’s insanity but despite his gruffness he’s an honourable man. He agrees to go along as well.

Their guide is the mysterious Umbopa. Whoever he is he’s no servant. He carries himself as if he were royalty. Our travellers will discover that there is a reason for this. They will find King Solomon's Mines, and rather more adventure than they bargained for as they are caught up in a power struggle in a remote African kingdom.

There’s some great location photography in this film, along with other scenes that are clearly shot in a studio. While it has little in common with Haggard’s novel it’s undeniably strong on adventure. Paul Robeson gets top billing, surely the first time a black actor achieved this in a major studio production. He displays a distressing tendency to sing at the slightest provocation but that was expected of any movie in which he appeared. As an actor he’s reasonably good.

Sir Cedric Hardwicke is too stuffy to make a convincing Allan Quatermain. Roland Young provides comic relief, and he actually is quite amusing. John Loder is an adequate if not terribly exciting romantic hero. Anna Lee effortlessly steals the picture as Kathy.

The Region 4 DVD release is barebones but quite acceptable as far as picture quality is concerned.

So far I don’t think there’s been a truly great adaptation of a Rider Haggard novel. This one is OK. Worth a look if you can pick up it up cheaply enough.

Lured (1947)

2011-10-12T17:45:00.001+11:00

Lured was directed by Douglas Sirk in 1947 but if you’re expecting to see signs of the Sirk style of the 50s then I’m afraid you won’t find much of it in this movie. And if you’re expecting a film noir (and it’s labelled as such on both wikipedia and IMDb) then you’re going to be similarly disappointed.

It’s a straight mystery/suspense thriller. The good news is that while it’s no masterpiece it’s still worth seeing.

Sandra Carpenter (Lucille Ball) is an American working as a taxi dancer in London. A serial killer has been at work in London, finding his victims by placing ads in the personal columns. When he kills he sends Scotland Yard a poem describing his latest murder. His latest victim happens to be Sandra’s best friend.

Inspector Harley Temple (Charles Coburn) is increasingly desperate to find some lead. When he brings Sandra in for questioning he realises immediately he’s dealing with a smart level-headed woman. Just the kind of woman Scotland Yard needs. Sandra Carpenter finds herself on the payroll of the Metropolitan Police, working a very dangerous assignment indeed - she is going to be used as bait to catch the poet killer.

Inspector Temple picks likely looking personal ads for her to answer, bringing her into contact with an assortment of men all of whom are sufficiently suspicious that any one of them could conceivably be the killer.

Sandra hasn’t yet found the murderer, but she has found love, with one of the suspects. Robert Fleming (George Sanders) runs a very up-market night-club. It’s a profitable business but one suspects that his motivation for running a night-club has as much to do with meeting attractive young women as it has to do with making money. He’s a self-confessed cad, but does that make him a killer?

Another suspect is his business partner Julian Wilde (Cedric Hardwicke). There’s also a sleazy butler who recruits parlour maids for a white slavery ring. And an equally sleazy South American businessman who runs the white slavery ring. And there’s a slightly deranged dress designer (Boris Karloff) who uses the personal column to find young ladies to model his dresses for him, in private. They all seem like plausible suspects.

Of course it’s inevitable that the killer will choose Sandra as his next victim, and he taunts Inspector temple by sending him the death poem before he does the killing. Now Scotland Yard must find the killer before he gets to Sandra.

For 1947 the movie does have a rather decadent, even slightly perverse, feel. Apart from the white slavery angle there’s also the fact that the killer bases his death poems on the poems of Baudelaire.

Lucille Ball is surprisingly good. She plays it straight. There is mercifully no trace of the Lucy of her later comedy TV series. She’s feisty and likeable. George Sanders is of course delightful. Charles Coburn seems to be in every old movie I see these days, playing either loveable rogues or, as in this case, loveable police detectives. Boris Karloff is creepy and sympathetic, as only Karloff could be. As an added bonus you get George Zucco - as a heroic Scotland Yard cop.

This was apparently a remake of a 1939 Robert Siodmak movie, Pièges. The Blackhorse Entertainment Region 2 DVD doesn’t have any extras but picture quality is very acceptable. If you can find this one for a reasonable price it’s worth grabbing. As I said at the beginning it’s no masterpiece but it’s solid entertainment.

Follow the Fleet (1936)

2011-10-11T18:29:00.001+11:00

Follow the Fleet came about halfway through the cycle of RKO Fred and Ginger musicals. I’ve now seen five of these movies and this one is, so far, my least favourite.

Bake Baker (Fred Astaire) and Sherry Martin (Ginger Rigers) had been a successful dance partnership, until Bake made the mistake of asking Sherry to marry him. Her refusal brought about the break-up of their professional relationship and Bake was so cut up he ran away to sea and joined the navy. Now the fleet is back in port and Bake is trying to rekindle the old partnership.

Sherry has a sister named Connie (Harriet Hilliard). When Sherry headed off to the big city to find fame, fortune, fun and romance Connie stayed home in the Midwest. Now Connie has decided she’d like some of that glamour and excitement herself. The trouble is, she looks like a prim and proper school teacher. Sherry assures her this is no problem, and gives her friend Kitty Collins (Lucille Ball) the task of doing a makeover on Connie.

This is the first of the movie’s problems. Post-makeover Connie certainly looks glamorous enough but this can’t disguise the fact that Harriet Hilliard has zero screen charisma. This wouldn’t be a problem except that Connie is not a minor character. The subplot involving her attempted romance with Bake’s shipmate Bilge Smith (Randolph Scott) takes up a considerable portion of the movie.

Connie decides that the best way to win a sailor’s heart is by giving him a ship. She just happens to have one. It was her father’s. It’s currently at the bottom of the sea but it’s salvageable and she intends to salvage it and refurbish it and then Bilge will just have to marry her.

Meanwhile Bake’s efforts to further Sherry’s career are coming close to ruining it instead. To save her career and to save Connie’s ship he realises there’s only one thing to do - to put on a show! That’s about it as far as plot goes.

The second big problem with this movie is that the Astaire-Rogers relationship lacks the fire that it has in their best movies.

The third problem is that the musical and dance numbers aren’t quite up to standard. The Let’s Face the Music and Dance number is much-praised, and rightly so, and it’s nice to see Ginger doing a solo dance routine (the only one she does in the entire series) but some of the other dance sequences aren’t as inspired as those in their other movies. There are also a couple of very insipid songs performed rather uninterestingly by Harriet Hilliard. Irving Berlin provided the slightly uneven score.

Yet another problem is that at 110 minutes the movie it a touch too long and the pacing falters at times.

There’s also the slightly questionable decision to take the stars out of their accustomed sophisticated surroundings. Fred Astaire chewing gum just isn’t the real Fred Astaire.

Having said all that, even a subpar Fred and Ginger movie is still a Fred and Ginger movie and there’s still plenty of entertainment value here. It’s still a good movie and a must-see for Fred and Ginger fans (and I certainly include myself among that company). Just don’t expect it to reach the heights of Top Hat or Swing Time or Shall We Dance.

The Warner Home Video DVD release includes a brief documentary featurette.

The Second Woman (1950)

2011-10-09T11:04:00.003+11:00

Ignore the fact that The Second Woman has been claimed by some folks as a film noir. Accept it as a Hitchcockian psychological thriller and you’ll have a reasonably good time with it.

It was made in 1950, when Hitchcock was very hot box office indeed. So this one rips off not one, but no less than three, Hitchcock hits. OK, so it isn’t as good as a genuine Hitchcock movie. Most films aren’t. It’s still fun.

It starts off seeming like an almost direct steal from Rebecca - the voiceover of a woman talking about the past, the ruin of a spectacular house, then the story starts in flashback.

The house in question belongs to Jeff Cohalan, a brooding hero still mourning the tragic death of his bride Vivian a year earlier. We don’t see her, just a painting of her. He finds it painful to talk about her. More shades of Rebecca.

The flashback takes us back to a meeting on a train, where charming but moodily tragic architect Jeff Cohalan (Robert Young) encounters Ellen Foster (Betsy Drake). He’s just been chatting to an old friend of his, a psychiatrist, who is very worried about him. Now we’re starting to get into Spellbound territory. We’re introduced to the idea that Cohalan may be more than just troubled, he may be seriously unstable or even quite mad.

Cohalan and Ellen hit it off pretty well. He even invites her into his house, an event that causes general amazement since he has allowed no-one at all to enter the house since the tragedy a year earlier. Apart from mourning his loss our hero also seems to be somewhat given to self-pity, even possibly just a little paranoid. He believes he is shadowed by bad luck. Everything goes wrong for him. And indeed everything does seem to go wrong for him. His horse has to be destroyed when it breaks its leg in mysterious circumstances. His dog does suddenly. His painting of Vivian is ruined, his roses wither and die. But is this bad luck, or is someone out to get him? Or is he insane and is he doing these things to himself, possibly out of guilt?

We find out more about his past. Vivian had been the daughter of his friend Ben Sheppard. On the eve of the wedding she was killed in a car accident, with Cohalan being the driver at the time.

Cohalan becomes ever moodier while the evidence that he may be suffering from delusions steadily mounts. Now we move into Suspicion territory as the psychiatrist warns Ellen she may be in danger from him. She chooses to continue to believe in him. She believes she can help him to uncover the solution to the mysterious events that have haunted him.

It’s a rather handsome movie with some great location footage of the California coast. Cohalan’s house is an impressive modernist structure in a truly spectacular setting.

Robert Young was surely the most irritating American actor of the 30s. His performance here comes as pleasant surprise - the annoying mannerisms and the tiresome constant jokiness have disappeared and he pulls off the dark suffering hero thing very competently. Betsy Drake is a engaging enough heroine. John Sutton fulfills the sinister, oily cad role extremely well as Keith Ferris, who is another protégé of Ben Sheppard’s.

The Second Woman was made by Cardinal Pictures, an outfit responsible for several good noirish thrillers around this time including D.O.A. and Impact. It’s in the public domain. My copy came from one of Mill Creek’s budget mystery movie boxed sets. The print is a bit washed out but it’s generally quite acceptable. This is by no means a great movie but it’s solid entertainment.

Love Before Breakfast (1936)

2011-10-07T21:50:00.001+11:00

Love Before Breakfast is not one of Carole Lombard’s better films, but even a second-rank Carole Lombard film is worth seeing.

Lombard plays Kay Colby, and she has two men wanting to marry her. She’s more or less engaged to Bill Wadsworth (Cesar Romero) but she doesn’t seem entirely sure she wants to marry him. The very rich Scott Miler (Preston Foster) is Wadsworth’s romantic rival, and MIller is so determined to get her he buys the company Wadsworth works for just so he can send his rival to Japan to get him out of the way.

Miller then sets to work wooing Kay. Which is not an easy task. Kay thinks she hates Miller but it seems she might simply be trying to persuade herself she’s still in love with Bill. When Scott finally decides that maybe it’s futile pursuing her Kay panics. She’s done everything possible to discourage him but when he actually becomes discouraged she’s devastated.

No matter how talented they might be a romantic comedy star needs a co-star they can strikes sparks off and this was perhaps particularly true of Lombard. In My Man Godfrey and Twentieth Century she found co-stars who were worthy of her in the persons of William Powell (to whom she had been married) and John Barrymore. But in Hands Across the Table she found her ideal co-star in the perhaps slightly surprising person of Fed MacMurray. Lombard and MacMurray had a magical chemistry and were to be teamed again in The Princess Comes Across and the delightful True Confession

That kind of chemistry is sadly lacking in Love Before Breakfast. Cesar Romero as Bill and Preston Foster as Scott just don’t have the necessary charisma to convince the audience that a woman like Carole Lombard would be interested in them.

The other problem is that Lombard’s talents, although impressive, were rather specialised. In a conventional romantic comedy she wasn’t really at her best. It was in the screwball comedy that she really bloomed, and in that particular style of movie she had no equal. Other actresses made one or two great screwball comedies (such as Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby) but Lombard was the queen of the screwball comedy. She needed to play a character with the madcap quality of the screwball comedy heroine and she needed a script with plenty of zaniness. Love Before Breakfast is just a tiny bit too conventional to unleash the full Lombard potential.

Despite all these caveats Love Before Breakfast is still an entertaining and likeable movie, and Lombard puts everything she has into the performance. Just don’t expect the kind of sublime movie magic she and Fred MacMurray delivered in Hands Across the Table.

The movie is included in the superb Carole Lombard Glamour Collection DVD set, which is most definitely worth buying.

Impact (1949)

2011-10-05T13:37:00.001+11:00

Impact is a 1949 film noir that is not quite a neglected masterpiece but is still better than its fairly modest reputation would suggest.

Walter Williams (Brian Donlevy) seems to have it all. He has worked his way up from the shop floor to his current position as head of a major car manufacturer. He has a beautiful young wife. His marriage appears to be perfect. And to top it all off, he’s basically a decent likeable guy and he’s well-respected and generally well thought of. Although he’s a tough businessman who has the sense to realise that success serves no purpose unless you’re prepared to give yourself a break now and then to enjoy the fruits of that success.

Of course in film noir appearances can be deceptive. In fact his lovely young wife Irene (Helen Walker) has a lover and the two of them are plotting to murder him.

There are major surprises in store for all of them as the murder attempt on a lonely country road goes badly awry. Williams survives while the lover dies in the wreck of Williams’ car. Williams, suffering from a mild concussion, wanders off in a daze and then grabs a ride on a passing furniture van. He ends up in a little town called Larkspur. The following morning he picks up a copy of the newspaper and discovers that he is officially dead. The body in the car had been burned beyond recognition and the police made the natural assumption that it was him.

By this time he has figured out that his wife wanted him dead. Angry and disillusioned, he has no desire to return to his home in San Francisco. And Larkspur seems like a nice little town. It seems even nicer when he meets Marsha Peters (Ella Raines). Her husband had been killed in the war and now she’s trying to run their gas station on her own. Unfortunately she’s not the world’s greatest mechanic, although it has to be admitted that she looks quite amazingly cute in her mechanic’s garb.

Walter Williams on the other hand is very very good indeed at fixing cars - it’s how he started his career. She discovers this by accident. She has no idea who he really is but she needs a good mechanic desperately and she offers him a job. Right now working in a gas station seems a lot more attractive to him than returning to his murderous wife so he accepts. Pretty soon he and his new boss are going out together and well on the way to falling in love.

While Walter slowly regains his trust in life and love things have been happening in San Francisco. The police have put the pieces of the puzzle together but without realising there are pieces missing. As a result they have come up with the wrong picture, but what they do know is that the car wreck was no accident, it was murder. And Irene Williams looks like a very plausible suspect.

There are plenty of plot twists after this including some original and unexpected ones. The pieces of this jigsaw puzzle can be fitted together to make a whole succession of different pictures. It’s really a pretty nifty little plot.

There’s a quite impressive and interesting array of talent behind this movie, including Oscar-winning cinematographer Ernest Laszlo. Even more interesting is Dorothy Davenport who co-wrote the screenplay. She directed several movies including a great little early 30s exploitation shocker, The Road to Ruin.

The movie benefits from a very strong cast. Brian Donlevy and Ella Raines are extremely good while Helen Walker is a deliciously evil femme fatale. Charles Coburn is the loveable Irish cop in charge of the case. While his performance is fine the character is perhaps a bit too loveable and this weakens the dramatic tension in the later stages of the film.
It’s sad to see Anna May Wong reduced by this time to minor parts - she plays the WIlliams’ maid.

Visually there’s not too much noir style in evidence but the attempted murder scene on a mountain road is absolutely dripping with ominous atmosphere.

This one’s in the public domain but there are apparently a couple of pretty decent DVD editions. My copy was included in one of the Mill Creek public domain boxed sets and it’s a surprisingly serviceable print.

Not quite in the first rank perhaps, but a very good second-rank noir and definitely worth catching.

Jezebel (1938)

2011-10-03T13:05:00.004+11:00

The popular legend regarding Jezebel is that Bette Davis got the part as a consolation prize for missing out on the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. As a result it’s usually dismissed as a poor man’s Gone With the Wind.

In fact Jezebel was released first, but that was because the production of Gone With the Wind dragged on for so long. Warner Brothers therefore managed to bear Selznick to the punch with their own southern epic. Jezebel earned Bette Davis her second Oscar, and was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between the star and director William Wyler. So even if the popular legend is true the movie ended up being a major step forward in Davis’s career.

The superficial similarities between the two stories are best ignored. Although they both feature a strong-willed southern belle Jezebel is quite capable of standing on its own merits.

Davis is Julie Marsden, and to describe her as strong-willed would be woefully inadequate. She’s determined to have her own way, not only at the risk of destroying others but even at the risk of destroying herself. She simply can never back down. She is going to be married to be married to handsome young banker Preston “Pres” Dillard (Henry Fonda) but she is not satisfied that she has him sufficiently broken to the saddle yet. She intends to make sure the job is done properly before the marriage takes place. Early in the movie we see her dealing with a badly behaved colt and it’s clear that as far as Julie is concerned the only difference between training a horse and training a man is that men take just a little longer.

Unfortunately she makes one disastrous miscalculation in training Pres. She loses him, and losing something that she wants is something that has never happened to her. She doesn’t like it. She intends to do something about it. The price will be terrible, but that doesn’t make her hesitate for a moment. Her instrument will be a former beau of hers, Buck Cantrell (George Brent). The drama will be played out against the background of the disastrous yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans in 1853.

The problem with most of the writing on this movie is that it obsesses over Davis’s character and her performance and on trying to give a feminist interpretation of the movie’s treatment of Julie. While Julie is certainly central to the film this blinds many people to the possibility that there may be more going on in this film. In fact in some ways this is an even more interesting examination of the culture of the Old South than Gone With the Wind.

The real theme of the movie is the reckless violence that is the inevitable by-product of the southern obsession with honour, and the stiff-necked and unthinking pride that motivates this obsession. The men slaughter each other in duels with no more thought than they would put into the question of whether to go to the theatre tonight or not.

It’s surprising this theme has been overlooked, because it’s actually stated quite explicitly several times, especially just before the duel that will have such devastating repercussions. Julie’s mother remarks that it’s easy for southern women to start the southern men quarreling but it’s impossible to stop them. Julie also makes some bitingly ironic remarks about the realities of southern chivalry, and about the southern determination to cling to their customs.

In this movie we see that this fatal pride is not confined to the men. Julie displays the same insanely exaggerated pride, the same unwillingness to back down, the same terrifying recklessness. It’s this proud self-destructiveness that is the cause of every disaster in the story, even including the yellow fever epidemic (since the city authorities have been repeatedly warned of the vital necessity of draining the swamps near the city but have contemptuously rejected the warnings). And of course lurking in the background is the coming war, and again at several points in the film we see the stubborn refusal on the part of southerners to accept the possibility that a war might end with their own defeat. Just as Julie refuses to accept the idea of defeat.

Which is not to say that the movie is unsympathetic to its characters. Their excessive pride is intimately bound up with a deep and abiding love for the land that has nourished them. Julie tries to explain this to Pres after he returns from a period in the North filled with scorn for the ideals and the culture of his own land. There’s a tragic inevitability to events, as people do things that will lead them to disaster because they are simply unable to imagine any other way of behaving.

For Julie the crucial event is her humiliation at the ball, a humiliation which is entirely self-inflicted. This ballroom scene is Wyler’s masterstroke. Bette Davis of course was always inclined to take her performances to emotional extremes but Wyler keeps this tendency in check so that when the moments of emotional overload come they are all the more effective.

George Brent is the surprise packet in this movie - he’s very very good indeed. As for Henry Fonda, while I’m always of the opinion that any movie could only be improved by replacing him with another actor, any other actor, in this movie he is at least adequate.

While it’s true that it lacks the scope of Gone With the Wind, and while it’s equally true that Julie is a less complex character than Scarlett O’Hara it’s also true that if you can such comparisons aside there is much to ponder and much to enjoy in Jezebel.

This Woman Is Dangerous (1952)

2011-10-01T15:15:00.001+10:00

Joan Crawford apparently considered This Woman Is Dangerous to be her worst movie. Despite this it’s not entirely without interest.

This was her last movie under her contract with Warner Brothers. It had been a very successful seven years but by 1952 when This Woman Is Dangerous was made Crawford felt it was time to move on. Her next movie, Sudden Fear, was an RKO release and it garnered her an Academy Award nomination so perhaps she had a point.

Crawford plays Beth Austin, a successful gang leader. Before this she had certainly played women who were involved with mobsters (as in the excellent The Damned Don't Cry in 1950) but this time she’s a fully fledged gangster.

She’s the brains of the outfit. The Jackson brothers provide the muscle. Matt Jackson is Beth’s boyfriend and he’s a loose cannon to say the least. His brother Will is more vicious but more stable while Will’s wife Ann is the other permanent member of the gang. Other crooks seem to be recruited as needed.

Their specialty is daring robberies and their method makes use of Beth’s veneer of classiness. She is able to appear right at home in expensive hotels and casinos and she can coordinate the robberies from the inside. How an ex-con like Beth came by this veneer of class is never explained.

Now Beth has a major problem. She is going blind. An operation will be required to save her sight and the only surgeon capable of doing it is in Indiana. She sets off for Indiana leaving instructions for the rest of the gang to lie low after their latest heist. As might have been predicted the hot-headed Matt’s idea of lying low involves shooting cops so no the heat is really on.

Matt is insanely jealous. Mostly his jealousy is unjustified and unreasonable but this time he really does have something to be jealous about. Beth has become more than a little friendly with her handsome charming eye surgeon, Dr Ben Halleck (Dennis Morgan). He has real class and makes Matt look like the loser he is. Romance is blossoming.

Unfortunately this romance faces other obstacles apart from Beth’s psychotic criminal boyfriend. The FBI is on her trail and they’re on the trail of the rest of her gang as well.

Where this movie goes wrong is with Joan Crawford’s character. She’s too classy and too much the lady to be convincing as an ex-con and mobster, at least without some kind of backstory which the movie fails to provide. Crawford is watchable, as always, but the script gives her little to work with. Dennis Morgan as the eye surgeon is a bit too bland and too nice to be the sort of man that a dangerous female mobster would fall for. David Brian as the out-of-control trigger-happy boyfriend is great fun.

The plot is difficult to take seriously but despite its flaws This Woman Is Dangerous is still enjoyable silliness with a definite camp edge to it.

You can get it on DVD-R in the Warner Archive Collection.

The Lady Eve (1941)

2011-09-29T22:47:00.002+10:00

The Lady Eve is a 1941 comedy from writer-director Preston Sturges. I have mixed feelings about his work although I am slowly warming to him. While I don’t think this movie is quite as good as Palm Beach Story it’s still pretty entertaining.

Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) is the heir to a brewing fortune, but his real passion is snakes. He’s just been on an expedition to the Amazon in search of reptilian marvels and now he’s on his way home on an ocean liner. Unfortunately every female on the liner knows he’s fabulously wealthy and unmarried, and they’re all determined to make a play for him. But none of them stand a chance with Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) on board.

It’s not just that Jean has beauty and style. She also has focus. And what she’s focused on is money. And she knows how to translate her considerable sex appeal into cash.

She’s traveling with her father, the Colonel. Not that he’s a real colonel. In fact the Colonel and his daughter are crooks. If there’s a dishonest way to make a living, they’ve done it. Their specialty is card sharping, but they’re not looking for just one quick swindle. With mark as rich and as innocent as Charles Pike they want to establish a real relationship with him, so they can fleece him thoroughly.

And Charles is very innocent indeed when it comes to cards and women. Especially women. This looks like it’s going to be easy work for Jean, but a complication develops. Charles is so helpless that she can’t help liking him. And he’s kind of cute. And he’s a nice guy. And he really likes her. Pretty soon Jean has suffered the ultimate catastrophe - she’s fallen in love with a mark. And despite her cynical exterior Jean is the kind of girl who, when she falls in love, falls in love in a big way.

Jean intends to come clean about her criminal past. It would of course be very awkward indeed if Charles were to find out the truth before she has a chance to tell him, and of course that’s exactly what happens. That unfortunate circumstance seems to put an end to their wedding plans but there are more plot twists to come. Jean can’t bring herself to write this whole affair off to experience and hatches an unlikely plan to pose as an English noblewoman to get her revenge for being jilted.

The first half of the film is dazzling screwball comedy; the second half is not quite so strong. There’s also a tendency at times for the comedy to veer a bit too close to slapstick for my liking. Of course if you don’t share my aversion for slapstick you will find this to be less of a problem.

The support cast is generally good with Charles Coburn as the phony colonel being a standout. More problematic is the casting of Henry Fonda as the male lead. He’s an actor I’ve always disliked although he’s more successful in this role than I’d have expected, and even at times almost likeable. His performance still doesn’t erase my doubts about his suitability for screwball comedy.

There are no such problems with Barbara Stanwyck’s performance. She’s terrific although perhaps more convincing in the first half of the movie as the delightfully immoral confidence trickster than as the bogus noblewoman. There’s some remarkably risque dialogue in this movie which she delivers with a good deal of relish.

Despite some minor weaknesses this is mostly enormous fun. Umbrella Entertainment have done a reasonable job with the region 4 DVD release.