Dead Men Tell (1941)

Dead Men Tell is a 1941 20th Century-Fox Charlie Chan mystery starring my favourite screen Chan, Sidney Toler.

Dead Men Tell has a contemporary setting but the opening scenes take place on a sailing ship that looks like it’s right out of a pirate movie. And the ship is about to take part in a treasure. With a treasure map. And the captain’s cabin is filled with pirate memorabilia. OK, this movie has grabbed my attention right away.

Most of the action in fact takes place aboard this sailing ship. An eccentric old lady, Miss Nodbury (Ethel Griffies), has a map showing the location of treasure buried by notorious pirate Blackhook. He was one of her ancestors, which explains her obsession with pirates.

She has organised an expedition. She has torn the map into half a dozen pieces. Each member of the expedition has one piece. Miss Nodbury is a very suspicious old bird. She trusts nobody.

Of course you know that someone will commit murder to get hold of that map. The murder occurs, by one of those amazing detective story coincidences, while Charlie Chan and Number Two Son Jimmy Chan (Victor Sen Yung) are aboard.

Number Two Son has witnessed something important but he doesn’t recognise its significance and Charlie is always inclined to be sceptical when Number Two Son claims to have uncovered vital evidence.

There is indeed a murder. And it won’t be the last.

There are plenty of shady characters about - treasure hunts don’t end to attract reliable responsible citizens. The treasure hunters are not necessarily quite the people they claim to be.

And something happened in the past that could have a bearing on the current situation.

And that notorious pirate Blackhook will exert a certain influence on events.

I like Sidney Toler as Chan because he gives the character a very slight edge. Charlie’s a really nice guy but he is a cop. You don’t become a high-ranking police detective without a certain toughness.

Number Two Son is of course basically a comic relief character but Victor Sen Yung can be genuinely amusing and he’s not excessively irritating. And the character does get to do a few relatively important things. The supporting cast is solid.

Being a B-movie made by a major studio Dead Men Tell is a polished professional production. A B-movie shooting schedule didn’t allow for anything too fancy but it’s clear that director Harry Lachman and DP Charles G. Clarke are at least making an effort to create some atmosphere and to add a bit of visual interest. Although it never leaves port the sailing ship provides an excellent setting.

Dead Men Tell is a fine entry in the Fox Chan cycle. That cycle was drawing to a close by this time (although Charlie and Sidney Toler would find a new home at Monogram) but the quality remained high. Dead Men Tell is highly recommended.

This movie is included in Fox’s Charlie Chan Collection Volume 5 DVD boxed set. The transfer is very nice indeed.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of the Sidney Toler Chan movies - Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise (1940), Charlie Chan in Panama (1940), Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum (1940) and Murder Over New York (1940). They’re all excellent B-movies.

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

I avoided Saturday Night Fever for years, assuming it was going to be a syrupy teen musical. That turned out to be a spectacularly wrong assumption. Saturday Night Fever is so far removed from that that it’s in a whole other galaxy. This is a grim, gritty, deeply pessimistic deep dive into despair, futility, alienation and nihilism.

Tony Manero (John Travolta) works in a hardware store. On weekends he goes to the 2001 disco. He’s the king of the dance floor there. But 2001 isn’t a glamorous night spot where you’ll run into A-list celebrities. It’s a third-rate dive in Brooklyn. It’s cheap and it’s tacky.

And Tony doesn’t have dreams of using his dancing as a gateway to fame and fortune. He doesn’t have the imagination for that. He’s a loser.

He hangs out with his buddies. They’re all losers.

He lives with his folks. His dad is a chronically unemployed construction worker. His mom prays all the time. Her only consolation is that Tony’s brother Frank is a priest. He’s almost a god to her.

Tony is hoping to win the dance competition at 2001. This is not exactly a big deal. The prize is a lousy five hundred bucks but that’s the total extent of Tony’s dreams.

He has a dancing partner, Annette (Donna Pescow). She’s madly in love with him. Tony dumps her when he sees Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) dancing at 2001. He persuades Stephanie to be his new dancing partner.

Tony thinks Stephanie has class. He thinks that because he’s never met a woman with actual class. Stephanie does at least have ambitions but she’s as working class as Tony. Her middle-class affectations are merely absurd and tragic.

Stephanie dreams of success in Manhattan, perhaps in public relations. She probably won’t make it. She didn’t go to the right school, she didn’t go to college, she doesn’t have the right accent. She’s Brooklyn. She will always be Brooklyn. Maybe she will make an OK life for herself but she’s never going to have a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. Maybe she needs to set her sights a bit lower.

Maybe Tony needs to set his sights a bit higher.

The most powerful moment in the movie and the moment when Travolta really nails it is when Tony comes face to face with reality. He works in a hardware store. He’s a moderately good dancer. His chances of making it as a big-time dancer are zero. He’s just not good enough.

Annette needs to figure herself out as well. Her one real ambition is to go to bed with Tony.

This is also a gang movie. Tony’s gang is a bunch of losers and low-rent thugs. They get into fight with other gangs, who are losers as well. The other gang members are possibly even dumber than Tony.

There’s not a single characters in the movie who isn’t contemptible.

The guys treat the women with disrespect but they disrespect everybody and most crucially they have no respect for themselves.

There’s a subplot concerning Tony’s brother who has left the priesthood. It’s entirely pointless, it goes nowhere, it slows the movie and really it should have ended up on the cutting room floor. Subplots that go nowhere simply irritate viewers. It may have been included purely as an anti-Catholic element. The hostility to Catholicism here is pretty virulent.

This film is typical of a certain strand in Hollywood filmmaking - movies in which middle-class intellectuals express their seething hatred for America and for ordinary working-class Americans. It’s no coincidence that screenwriter Norman Wexler was Harvard-educated. Wexler also wrote the screenplay for Serpico, my least favourite 1970s Hollywood film.

This is a movie all about social class and the way different social classes inhabit different universes. Manhattan and Brooklyn are two different universes. Travel between those universes is not possible.

This is not a musical. There is dancing. Tony’s obsession with dancing is a major plot point. But it’s not a musical in the usual sense. There are no real big musical production numbers. The dancing sequences are rather unglamorous. Again, this seems to be a deliberate choice. This a story about Tony trying to figure out why his life is going nowhere, why he feels dissatisfied and empty. And trying to figure out if there is something he can do about it. The dancing really is incidental. Tony could have been a tennis player or a guitarist. It wouldn’t have mattered. What matters is that dancing is an escape from reality for him, and perhaps a way out.

What’s fascinating is that this is a visually very unattractive movie and this is clearly deliberate. Everything is grimy and seedy. You can almost smell the garbage rotting in the streets. There’s not a trace of glamour. There’s nothing glamorous about 2001. It’s just a dive. They have dancing and they have strippers as well. You can almost smell the stale liquor, the tobacco smoke, the sweat and the desperation.

This movie is a product of the New American Cinema and it has the miserable feel and scuzzy look often associated with that movement.

Saturday Night Fever is a deeply unpleasant movie about deeply unpleasant people. That was obviously the intention. It’s a good movie but it ain’t a feelgood movie. Recommended, if you know what to expect.

The Blu-Ray release is fine. I suspect this is a movie that was always supposed to look dark and depressing. The audio commentary by director John Badham isn’t really worth bothering with.

Congress Dances (1931)

Congress Dances was released in 1931. German, French and English-language versions were shot. There were some cast differences between the three versions. The recent Kino Classics Blu-Ray offers the German-language version with English subtitles.

The Congress of Vienna which opened in 1814 was a diplomatic conference to establish a new framework of relations between the Great Powers after the defeat of Napoleon. You might not think that it would be the perfect background for a lighthearted goofy comedy romance with songs and a strong fairy tale vibe, but you’d be wrong. This is one of those “this idea is so crazy that it just might work” concepts, and it actually does work.

The prime mover of the Congress was the Austrian Foreign Minister Prince Metternich (played here by Conrad Veidt). His main problem is to keep Tsar Alexander of Russia fully occupied and out of the way. That way Metternech can ensure the result he wants from the Congress. There’s nothing sinister about this. It’s just diplomacy.

What Metternich doesn’t know, what nobody knows, is that the Tsar has a stand-in. An officer named Uralsky, who closely resembles the Tsar, takes the Tsar’s place in dangerous situations where assassination might be a danger. The Tsar also makes use of Uralsky to avoid very unpleasant public duties, such as the performance of the Russian Ballet that Metternech has organised. If there’s one thing Tsar Alexander can’t stand it’s Russian ballet!

Now a pretty young glove-seller enters the picture. Christel (Lilian Harvey) has come up with an ingenious publicity stunt for her glove shop. Vienna is now filled with VIPs. When she sees a foreign head of state she throws him a bouquet of flowers, with an advertisement for her glove shop attached. When she tries the stunt on the Tsar she lands herself in big big trouble. In fact she’s about to have her bottom caned. Luckily the Tsar gets wind of this and rescues her in time from this painful indignity.

The Tsar is charmed by Christel. He thinks she’s the cutest thing he’s ever seen. They spend a delightful afternoon together. She is swept off her feet by the handsome romantic Tsar. She must have had quite an effect on him, since he provides her with a luxurious villa and a carriage. He has clearly decided to make her his mistress. Christel thinks this that this is a most exciting prospect.

It’s interesting that Christel is not the least bit shocked or disconcerted by the prospect of becoming the Tsar’s mistress. And she is not amazed that such an important man would take an interest in her. She has plenty of confidence.

If you’re trying to see some kind of commentary here on class it’s important to understand that Christel is not working class. She’s not a penniless waif wandering the streets barefoot depending on charity. She’s a successful prosperous independent businesswoman. It’s implied that she owns her shop. She employs several girls. She does not represent the downtrodden masses. She is solidly middle class.

The affair with the Tsar seems likely to prosper but there is somebody about to throw a spanner in the works - Napoleon. He’s not staying quietly in exile the way he’s supposed to.

The fact that the Tsar has a stand-in naturally leads to lots of romantic complications and lots of humorous complications. There’s more than a touch of farce to this movie.

London-born actress Lilian Harvey was an ideal choice as Christel, being fluent in English, German and French which allowed her to play Christel in all three versions. She’s a delight. Christel is pretty, she’s adorable, she’s lively, she’s sexy in a playful way and she’s a total screwball.

Willy Fritsch makes a charming handsome Tsar. Conrad Veidt played Metternich in the English and German-language versions. He’s excellent. Metternich is not a villain. He’s not even mildly villainous. Veidt plays him as a likeable rogue.

Congress Dances was a UFA production which means this is a big-budget big-studio picture. This is a lavish production. The production design is very impressive.

Congress Dances is zany, offbeat, wildly romantic and charming. It’s also very very German. If you’ve ever seen any of Ernst Lubitsch’s crazy early silent films such as The Wildcat (1921) and The Doll, or early Lubitsch musicals like The Love Parade (1929), or the insanely romantic Sissi (1955), you’ll know what I mean. Whimsical romance with a fairy tale flavour was something for which German filmmakers had a real affinity. Congress Dances is a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

The source material was in bad shape but Kino Classics have come up with a pretty decent Blu-Ray transfer.

Winnetou and the Crossbreed (1966)

Winnetou and the Crossbreed (Winnetou und das Halbblut Apanatschi) is a 1966 sauerkraut western. 

The sauerkraut western is the German equivalent to the spaghetti western. The main difference is that spaghetti westerns were always aiming for an international audience. Sauerkraut westerns were aimed more at the German domestic market, tapping into the immense popularity of the genre in Germany.

That popularity was due to Karl May (1842-1912), a popular German writer who launched a pop culture phenomenon with his novels of the Wild West. His books have sold around 200 million copies and are still in print. May’s novels were written at a time when the Wild West still existed. And at the time he wrote his best-known westerns he had never been anywhere near America. He wrote about the Wild West of his own imagination. And the entire German nation went totally Wild West crazy.

The main heroes of May’s westerns were a German settler nicknamed Old Shatterhand and his best friend, the Apache chief Winnetou. May’s novels were very very sympathetic indeed to the Apaches and this is reflected in the movies.

Between 1962 and 1968 there were seventeen Karl May movies, most of them based on his westerns.

Winnetou and the Crossbreed opens with the 21st birthday of Apanatschi (Uschi Glas). Her father is a European settler, her mother is an Apache. Her father’s birthday present to her is a gold mine. This present turns out to be a very bad idea. Some very unpleasant people find out about it and they’re determined to steal the gold.

A gang of bandits and cutthroats gets involved. There is treachery among the bad guys. Apanatschi and her kid brother are kidnapped.

Fortunately somebody was smart enough to contact Old Shatterhand (Lex Barker). He’s not going to allow this kind of wickedness to go on. And if Old Shatterhand comes to the rescue he’ll have Winnetou beside him.

It ends up in a full-scale war between the good guys and the bad guys, with lots of gunplay and lots of explosions.

The bad guys are holed up in a little town that is almost completely lawless. People are constantly getting shot. Within a few minutes we get every single western cliché you can name. At times it’s almost like parody. It’s a bit like Blazing Saddles, but played straight.

Of course there’s a classic western saloon and there are saloon girls. They’re quite obviously whores, but interestingly they’re very much on the side of the Good Guys.

What’s fascinating is that this movie gives the impression of having been made by people who hadn’t seen any of the great grown-up psychologically complex westerns of the golden age of westerns (from about 1946 to 1962). It’s as if their idea of a western was drawn entirely from the B-westerns of the 1930s. In this movie there are very straightforward Good Guys and Bad Guys.

This is a movie totally imbued with the sensibility of 1960s German pop cinema. Just as the German Edgar Wallace krimis are supposedly set in England but get every single detail delightfully wrong so this movie gets everything about the Wild West delightfully wrong. And as with the Edgar Wallace krimis it’s the fact that everything is slightly wrong that gives this movie such a wonderfully delirious and crazy flavour.

And it really does have that B-movie feel - it’s just pure entertainment packed with action and thrills.

Pierre Brice (a Frenchman) does the noble Apache warrior thing quite well. Lex Barker makes a fine hero. Uschi Glas as Apanatschi is a fine heroine - she’s lively and likeable and she’s as cute as a button. All the bad guys are played with gusto.

Winnetou and the Crossbreed is nothing like a spaghetti western. The violence is never graphic and there’s not a trace of cynicism. It’s family entertainment but it is fun and it’s recommended.

The Treasure of the Silver Lake and Winnetou and the Crossbreed are both included in a German three-movie DVD which offers the movies in both English-dubbed versions and in German with English subtitles. I recommend the German-language version because it gives more of a non-Hollywood feel.

I’ve reviewed the first of Karl May’s Wild West novels, Winnetou I, and I cannot recommend it, except for its considerable historical significance. It’s slow and dull. I’ve also reviewed the first of the Karl May movies, The Treasure of the Silver Lake (1962), and it’s a rollicking tale of adventure in the Old West and it’s huge amounts of fun.

The Bribe (1949)

The Bribe is a 1949 film noir based on a Frederick Nebel story.

Whether The Bribe is true film noir or a noirish melodrama can be debated. It does have major affinities with another genre that flourished in the 40s and early 50s - thrillers in exotic settings with an atmosphere of tropical sin and moral corruption. Movies like Macau, The Shanghai Gesture and Saigon.

This is one of those noirs that doesn’t rely on shadows and darkness in the mean streets of a big city. Instead we get the blazing tropical sun, lots of sweat and an exotic atmosphere in which sin and corruption flourish. Passions get overheated.

Rigby (Robert Taylor) is a G-Man investigating a racket in stolen military aircraft engines. The trail leads to South America. To a place called Carlotta. This is definitely the tropics and presumably it’s the Caribbean. It seemed to be a general belief at that time that when Americans went bad, or finally realised themselves to be irredeemable failures, they always ended up in the tropics.

Soon after arrival Rigby encounters Elizabeth Hintten (Ava Gardner). She’s a sultry night-club singer and she gives off major bad girl vibes. But when he gets to meet her Rigby finds that she’s actually really sweet. She’s a really nice girl. That’s it for Rigby. He’s falling for this girl big time.

Her drunken loser husband Tug (John Hodiak) might be a problem, especially given that he’s a prime suspect in the aero engine racket.

There a couple of other shady characters floating about. THere’s a sleazy old guy named Bealer (Charles Laughton) who just oozes moral corruption. He seems too hopeless to be involved in a major racket but the evidence certainly points that way. And then there’s Carwood (Vincent Price), a businessman Rigby met on the plane to South America. Carwood was headed for Peru. His turning up at Carlotta is quite the coincidence.

Rigby is investigating the case but he’s spending most of his time mooning over Elizabeth. And she’s giving off damsel in distress vibes. The unhappy wife, tied to a loser drunk with whom she is obviously no longer in love. Rigby has definite knight in shining armour tendencies, especially when the damsel in distress is both really sweet and smokin’ hot.

Rigby has always been an honest cop and he’s not the sort of guy who would ever turn crooked through mere greed. But there are other inducements besides money. And Elizabeth is very cute.

This was a significant step in Robert Taylor’s reinvention of himself as a battered world-weary cynical anti-hero filled with self-loathing. No more of the lightweight pretty boy stuff. This reinvention turned out to be a brilliant idea. Few actors could portray cynics more successfully. He’s in top form here.

Charles Laughton is of course great fun. Vincent Price is delightfully oily.

This is a very good role for Ava Gardner. Elizabeth is not a straightforward femme fatale. She may not be a femme fatale. She may be the nice girl she appears to be. Rigby is sure she’s not involved in anything dishonest, but he’s not exactly unbiased. Gardner plays it subtle. Rigby wants to trust her and he’s convinced himself that he can trust her but there’s that tiny seed of doubt. The audience is in the same boat.

The odd thing about Ava Gardner’s career is that she gave some of her very best performances in movies that have been underrated and under-appreciated. Movies like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) and Whistle Stop (1946). She herself was inclined to be dismissive of her acting career, rather unfairly.

There’s a decent crime plot here but this is a character study of a man not just tempted but torn. He doesn’t know which way to jump. He wants to do the right thing but he’s no longer sure what that means.

Robert Z. Leonard is the kind of director usually scornfully dismissed by auteurist critics, and he was certainly no auteur. He was one of those competent craftsmen and there’s nothing wrong with that. Some years earlier he had directed the very underrated pre-code Greta Garbo melodrama Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) and there are some affinities between that film and The Bribe - both deal with moral degradation in exotic settings.

The climactic action sequence really is superbly done.

The Bribe doesn’t tick all the noir boxes but it ticks quite a few of them and whether it’s really noir or not it’s still an excellent movie. Very highly recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD offers a very nice transfer.

Gun for a Coward (1956)

Gun for a Coward is a 1956 Universal-International western. Which means it was shot in colour and in Cinemascope.

The three Keogh brothers run a ranch left to them by their late father. The oldest brother, Will (Fred MacMurray) is in charge and he’s a father figure to the other two. The youngest brother, Hade (Dean Stockwell), is a bit wild but he’s OK. The other brother, Bless (Jeffrey Hunter), is not OK. He’s a coward.

It doesn’t take long for us to realise why he’s a coward. He’s a grown man but his mother treats him like a baby.

And we soon learn that there’s more to it than that. Mrs Keogh despised her late husband. She hates the ranch. She despises ranchers. She hates the West. She always thought she was too good to be a rancher’s wife. She doesn’t want Bless to be a rancher. She wants him to move to the city and become something respectable. A doctor or a lawyer.

And she doesn’t want him to be a man. The masculine world of ranching horrifies her. She despises her other two sons.

Every time Bless tries to be a man his mother undermines him. She humiliates him. She’s controlling and manipulative.

There’s potential for other kinds of trouble as well. It’s understood that Will is going to marry Aud Niven (Janice Rule), the pretty young daughter of a neighbour. They would make a fine couple. The problem is that young Bless is rather sweet on Aud as well. Even worse, she’s rather sweet on him. They really need to tell Will that Aud isn’t going to marry him, but they keep putting it off.

Without fully realising it Will and Hade have become somewhat over-protective of Bless. There’s a confrontation with another rancher. It’s a situation in which Bless desperately needs to fight his own battle for once, but Will and Hade just automatically step in and fight it for him. The sad truth is that even his own brothers don’t think Bless is man enough to fight his own battles.

Naturally Bless keeps getting into situations in which his behaviour looks like cowardice. He’s pretty good at rationalising it away. He thinks he’s being sensible and smart. But then two men are killed in separate incidents and his cowardice seems to have been a contributing factor. The interesting thing is that sometimes his behaviour really is sensible. The trouble is that backing down from a fight is not always the right thing to do.

Fred MacMurray was a very reliable actor and he’s excellent here. Will is a good man but he has a lot to deal with. He makes mistakes but he does his best. He’s an imperfect hero. Jeffrey Hunter does the tortured thing quite well. Dean Stockwell is very good as Hade. Hade is wild, undisciplined, hot-headed and impulsive. He will be OK, if he learns to exercise some judgment.

Janice Rule is OK although I found Aud to be a very unsympathetic heroine. She’s interesting. You expect a female character in a western to be a good girl or a bad girl. Aud is a misguided good girl. She thinks she’s helping Bless but she’s harming him. She thinks she’s trying to avoid hurting Will by not telling him she’s in love with Bless but in fact she’s going to hurt him a whole lot more by keeping it a secret. And she’s unable to recognise that at times her behaviour is simply selfish. She’s a seriously flawed good girl.

The three brothers represent different kinds of masculinity. Will is mature masculinity. He never goes looking for a fight. But if he has to fight he will fight, and he does possess considerable courage. Hade is immature masculinity. He hasn’t learnt that sometimes not backing down is just dumb. A man has to learn to recognise the times when he should fight and the times when he should just walk away. Hade is going to be in trouble unless he starts growing up soon.

Bless is masculinity gone wrong. He can’t accept that if you keep running away then people will keep provoking you because they know you won’t fight back. So rather than avoiding confrontation you’ll end up in more confrontations, and increasingly dangerous confrontations.

This is a movie that some modern viewers will have problems with since they’re not used to seeing subjects like masculinity and courage treated seriously and sympathetically. They might be inclined to sympathise with Aud who lets Bless know that she loves him even though he is a coward. I think Aud is dead wrong. That’s the sort of thing that will make a man hate himself for the rest of his life. She fails to realise that he can never have self-respect unless he overcomes his cowardice. He already has too many people protecting him and coddling him.

On the surface Gun for a Coward is a very routine western but if you dig a bit deeper you find that it has some subtlety and some intelligence. Highly recommended.

Umbrella released this movie on DVD in their excellent Six Shooter Classics series. It’s a very acceptable transfer.

Le Plaisir (1952)

Le Plaisir was the second movie made by Max Ophüls after his return to France in the early 50s.

Max Ophüls had started his filmmaking career in Germany. He made a lot of films in France in the 30s. The next phase of his career took him to Hollywood. In 1950 he returned to France and made four final masterpieces, Madame de…, La Ronde, Lola Montès and Le Plaisir. They are among cinema’s greatest achievements.

It’s not difficult to see why he left Hollywood. He was not going to be able to make the wildly unconventional defiantly non-realistic movies he wanted to make in Hollywood. It’s not that Hollywood doesn’t have its own tradition of non-realist movies. The Busby Berkeley musicals, the Astaire-Rogers musicals, von Sternberg’s movies, all come to mind. But Ophüls had something quite different in mind - something much more European.

Ophüls steadfastly refused to film in colour until his final movie, Lola Montès. It’s easy to see why. Ophüls had a vision for cinema that could only work in black-and-white and in his 1950s movies he wanted to pursue that vision obsessively. In movies like La Ronde and Le Plaisir he created movies that made zero concessions to realism. These were uncompromisingly artificial movies but they were artificial in a cinematic rather than a stagey way. They are gorgeous movies. They have that particular glamour that can only be achieved in black-and-white.

In Le Plaisir (as La Ronde) we enter a slightly different world. It’s not quite a fairy tale world but it’s not the real world. It’s a world where charming amusing things can happen and the rules of everyday reality can be bent a little, or even ignored.

One of the other reasons Ophüls needed to lave Hollywood is that the movies he wanted to make were movies for grown-ups. Hollywood in the 50s was not ready for such movies.

Le Plaisir is a portmanteau film. It presents adaptations of three stories by Guy de Maupassant, all dealing in some manner with pleasure.

The first story, Le Masque, is very simple but with a slight off-kilter touch. The setting is an expensive, sophisticated and slightly naughty dance hall. An odd young man turns up. He is dressed as a dandy but he dances in a slightly clumsy manner and collapses. It is discovered that he is not a young man at all, but an old man. An old man determined not to renounce the pleasures of youth.

The second story, La Maison Tellier, takes place in a brothel. A very civilised well-run brothel. The madam, Madame Tellier, fusses over her girls like a mother hen. As becomes obvious when it closes for a day it is in fact the most vital social institution in the town. Without it there would be no social harmony.

It closes for a day so that the girls can attend the First Communion of Madame Tellier’s niece. For the girls it’s a holiday in the country. They have a lovely time in the sleepy little rural village but they’re happy to be back at work next day. They love working in the brothel.

You might think this story is going to contrast Sin and Innocence but the whores are as innocent and virtuous as the most innocent lass in the little rural village.

Le Modèle concerns an artist who discovers a new model. She inspires him. His career takes off. They fall in love. But the love affair does not prosper. There’s an interesting twist at the end.

Another reason Ophüls had to make these movies in France is that they have no single strong straightforward linear narrative. La Ronde has a circular narrative. The three stories in Le Plaisir are almost plotless. They evoke mood, they display the director’s mastery of gorgeous cinematic style, they offer some witty observations on life, love and pleasure.

There’s a bitter-sweet tone to all three stories. They don’t exactly have happy endings but they don’t have unhappy endings. Life goes. Like Ophüls’ camera, life just keeps moving. Ophüls isn’t cynical or moralistic. He is perhaps gently amused by human foibles. Even the old man in the first story isn’t seen as merely ridiculous or pathetic. He will keep pursuing pleasure until he finally drops dead. Perhaps that is not so very bad. Just as being a prostitute is not so very bad for the girls in the second story. Madame Tellier treats them with kindness and indulgence. Their customers are a good-natured lot. Perhaps one day they will decide to get married, but in the meantime they’re having a lot of fun.

Ophüls indulges himself in some of his favourite techiques. He loved shooting through windows and he loved tracking shots, and staircases and scenes that take place on two levels - that begin upstairs and then move downstairs. It’s a stunning virtuoso display.

An odd but entrancing movie. Highly recommended.

I've also reviewed Ophüls' La Ronde (1950) and Lola Montès (1955).

Gunsmoke (1953)

Gunsmoke is a 1953 Universal-International western directed by Nathan Juran. It certainly hits the ground running.

We get an action scene right at the start. We meet the hero Reb Kittredge (Audie Murphy). He’s a very likeable guy but a few minutes into the movie we know he has a Shady Past. We was, and maybe still is, a hired gun.

We’re introduced to rancher Dan Saxon (Paul Kelly). He’s in danger of losing his ranch. He has a beautiful daughter, Rita (Susan Cabot), who’s engaged to be married to Saxon’s foreman Curly (Jack Kelly). But Reb has already taken a shine to Rita. And Saxon is sure that Reb has been sent to kill him. That turns out to be not quite the case.

This is all within the first few minutes but already we know we have a classic setup for a western with lots of potential for tangled relationships between the main characters. And we’re not sure about the hero. Is he still a killer? This is how you make a western!

Reb is soon in for a surprise. He finds himself owning a ranch, the Square S ranch. It was Dan Saxon’s ranch. They made a deal, of a kind. It’s not all good news. He owns the debts attached to it as well. But he if can drive the herd to the railroad company he’ll have enough money to pay the debts.

There is of course a sinister figure pulling strings in the background. Matt Telford (Donald Randolph) aims to own every ranch in the valley. Including the Square S. He’ll stop at nothing, including hiring gunslinger Johnny Lake (Charles Drake) to kill Reb.

There’s high drama as Reb tries to drive his herd to market, in the face of all kinds of nefarious plots.

I think the ending is quite satisfactory. We know there’s going to be a showdown but we can’t figure out how Reb is going to manage this since he’s injured his right arm - his shooting arm. That problem is solved neatly.

This is Audie Murphy doing what he did so well, playing a really likeable guy who manages to give the impression that he could be very dangerous indeed. Reb is likeable and he’s also ambitious with a streak of ruthlessness. He has the ranch. Now he wants Dan Saxon’s daughter. She belongs to Curly. Reb will just have to take her away from Curly.

The supporting players are all perfectly adequate. Susan Cabot is fine as the prickly Rita and Mary Castle is very good as bad girl dancehall singer/dancer Cora Dufrayne.

This is not one of the great westerns and Nathan Juran is not one of the great directors He is however a skilled professional. He understands that pacing is everything. Keep the action moving along and nobody will notice any deficiencies in the script. That’s what he does here.

The movie was shot in Technicolor in the Academy ratio. Visually it’s impressive, which you expect from a 50s Universal-International western. The location shooting is very good.

The action scenes are handled well.

Not every movie has to be ground-breaking. Not every movie has to redefine the genre. This is not The Searchers or Rio Bravo. But there’s nothing wrong with well-crafted movies that meet our genre expectations and deliver solid entertainment. And Gunsmoke does that. Highly recommended.

I don’t think Gunsmoke is available on Blu-Ray but it looks quite OK on DVD.

The Last Picture Show (1971)

The Last Picture Show was Peter Bogdanovich’s second feature film and it launched him, briefly, as a superstar director.

This is a coming-of-age movie set in a tiny rapidly declining Texas town named Anarene. It begins in 1951.

Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges) are about to graduate from high school, along with Sonny’s girl Charlene and Duane’s girl Jacy (Cybill Shepherd). Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson) owns the pool hall, the cafe and movie theatre. There’s nothing else in Anarene worth owning. He’s a kind of mentor to Sonny and Duane.

In Anarene once you graduate from high school life is over. Duane eventually gets a job on an oil rig. That’s the most any male in Anarene can aspire to - well-paid manual labour. The girls have no aspirations. They will drift into marriage with losers.

Except Jacy. She at least has some dim notion that getting the hell out of Anarene would be a good idea. She knows that all she has going for her is that she’s pretty and men want to get into her pants. She’s a wannabe femme fatale but she doesn’t have the imagination to set her sights high enough and she isn’t smart enough and devious enough. She’s aiming to land a guy from Wichita Falls. To Jacy Wichita Falls is the Big City of a girl’s dreams, but the rich folks from Wichita Falls are only marginally less hopeless than the folks of Anarene.

Sonny dumps Charlene because after a year of going steady she won’t even let him put his hand up her skirt. He drifts into a futile affair with the middle-aged (Ruth Popper), the wife of the high school’s football coach. Nothing works out for any of the characters and they all end up more miserable than they were at the start. That’s the movie.

I can see what Bogdanovich is trying to do - showing us the futile squalid lives of losers in a loser town. He certainly succeeds. At times I do however get the feeling that this is one of those movies in which urban intellectuals express their fear and loathing of rural America. I definitely get the feeling that Bogdanovich despises his characters. Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps he was aiming for Tragedy. This could have been a good setup for a film noir but that’s not what Bogdanovich is shooting for. My suspicion is that he’s aiming for an art film.

Bogdanovich has made some aesthetic choices that are clearly very deliberate. It’s not just that the movie is shot in black-and-white. It’s shot in such a way as to drain the life out of everything. The landscape looks like a post nuclear apocalyptic wasteland. Robert Surtees was a great cinematographer so the lifeless feel was obviously not a mistake - it was deliberate.

The town looks like it’s waiting to die. The pool hall, cafe and movie theatre are the social and cultural hubs of the town. There’s nothing else. The pool hall looks completely derelict. The cafe and movie theatre look semi-derelict. The hero drives an ancient beat-up pickup truck.

The boys dress like losers.

The women are all dowdy. Not because they’re unattractive but because they have allowed themselves to look dowdy. They look defeated. Even Jacy, the closest thing the town has to a glamour babe, is totally lacking in glamour. This was Cybill Shepherd at the peak of her hotness. Jacy is a very pretty girl but she has no idea how to make the most of herself. She doesn’t know how to do her hair or makeup. She doesn’t know how to dress. And this is 1951, a time when women’s fashions were very glamorous.

It has a similar feel to those British kitchen sink dramas of the early 60s in which the working class protagonists learn that there is no hope and nothing to look forward to. There’s no point in thinking about sex - that will just lead to degradation and misery. No point thinking about love - the only person likely to fall in love with you is another loser. The best thing you can do is just throw yourself under a bus and get it over with. This movie takes the same approach to small town America. The luckiest character in the movie is the guy who gets squashed by a cattle truck. His suffering is at least over.

Not a single character in this movie gets even the smallest amount of joy from sex.

I strongly suspect that this movie was a box office hit because it quickly gained the reputation of being a dirty movie. Cybill Shepherd cavorting nude in a swimming pool! I also suspect that that’s why critics doted on it. They approved of its open treatment of sex. It made critics feel like they were watching a European at film (you know, those subtitled movies where the actresses take their clothes off). At the time American movies were very tentatively exploring the possibility of dealing with sex in a grown-up way.

And The Last Picture Show was definitely raunchy by 1971 standards - lots of nudity, frontal nudity, sex scenes, open discussion of sex. It’s interesting to compare it to Klute, a Hollywood movie released in the very same year that also deals with subject matter. Klute seems very tame by comparison. A brief blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of Jane Fonda’s nipples and that’s about it. So it’s easy to see why The Last Picture Show attracted interest from the public and from critics.

Timothy Bottoms gives the dullest performance in the history of cinema. The other cast members do their best. Cybill Shepherd is by far the best thing in the movie.

I find it difficult to stay interested in a movie that includes not a single characters I can care about. I can be captivated by a movie featuring only unsympathetic characters if they’re rotten in interesting ways.

I can see why critics adored this movie. It’s miserable, nihilistic and filled with loathing for small town America. Critics like that kind of thing. In 1971 it was just what they had been hoping for. This is Serious Filmmaking. I intensely disliked every minute of it.

The Trouble with Harry (1955) - Hitchcock Friday #13

The Trouble with Harry, released in 1955, was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and scripted by John Michael Hayes.

It can be seen as one of Hitchcock’s experiments. This is not an experiment in technique nor an experiment with narrative. This is an experiment in tone. This is full-blown black comedy, but of a kind that was totally new in mainstream American cinema.

The comedy-mystery (as distinct from out-and-out spoofs of the mystery genre) was an established genre but in such movies the murder is always seen as a terrible crime the perpetrator of which had to be brought to justice. There could be amusing hijinks along the way but murder itself could not be treated as a joke. But in The Trouble with Harry the murder actually is treated as an hilarious joke. Poor Harry is dead but nobody cares except for the fact that the existence of his corpse is rather inconvenient.

As in Shadow of a Doubt Hitchcock makes great use of small-town America as a setting but his purposes here are very different.

This is a gorgeous movie. This is a picture postcard world. A world so beautiful and idyllic that a corpse seems rather out of place.

You might think I’m weird but this movie seems to me to have a similar feel to the opening sequences of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. This is small town America at its most perfect, but it’s a bit too perfect. It’s so perfect it’s slightly disturbing. And while the people in this tiny burg are all very very nice people they regard poor Harry’s murder with total indifference. That’s the weird element that makes this movie so startling. And that makes it such an outrageous black comedy. The audience is not expected to feel the slightest concern about the fact that a man has been killed.

Which of course explains why this movie was initially a box-office flop (although it was re-released and eventually ended up in the black). Mainstream American audiences had never been exposed to such an oddly off-kilter movie. And they had never seen small town America subjected to such gleeful (albeit good-natured) mockery. It also explains why the movie was a hit in France. French audiences would not have been shocked in the least.

The other thing counting against this movie was its complete lack of star power. John Forsythe is well cast and he’s very good but he was never a big star and his name on the marquee was not going to sell tickets. Shirley MacLaine would become a star but at this stage she was a complete unknown and this was her first movie. Edmund Gwenn was the kind of character actor people would recognise without remembering his name. Big name stars might have made the movie easier to promote but as a star vehicle it would have been a different movie. It’s an ensemble piece and as such it works.

John Forsythe really is good. Shirley MacLaine was a nobody. She was just an understudy in a play when she was spotted. But she had the kooky quality Hitchcock wanted and he recognised her star quality immediately. She’s delightful here.

The plot is simple. A dead body turns up. His wallet identifies him as Harry. Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn), out hunting rabbits, assumes he shot poor Harry accidentally. And maybe he did. As the movie progresses other possibilities emerge. The one thing that is clear is that nobody cares that Harry is dead but his corpse is very inconvenient. The mystery doesn’t really matter. There’s no suspense. This is a comedy. A zany twisted deliciously black comedy. Black comedy was something Hitchcock did very very well. It was the kind of humour he loved.

The location shooting in Vermont is gorgeous, except that a lot of the time it’s not Vermont, it’s a Hollywood sound stage. The trees had already dropped their leaves, but Hitch wanted those lovely autumn leaves. So the crew collected the leaves, they were taken back to Hollywood and pinned onto fake trees on a sound stage. And it works. This is the magic of movies!

The Trouble with Harry is quirky and offbeat but delightful and charming. And it really is funny. It wasn’t what audiences and critics were expecting from Hitchcock but it’s great fun. Highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray looks exquisite and there’s a reasonably informative featurette.