Le Samouraï (1967)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.