Whistle Stop (1946)

Whistle Stop is a 1946 film noir starring George Raft and Ava Gardner.

Mary (Ava Gardner) arrives back in her home town. Ashbury is a small town with the railway station being its only valid reason for existence. Throughout the movie we hear train whistles in the background. Trains play a vital part in the story. This is not a train thriller in the sense of taking place on a train but the railroad is always a presence.

Mary had gone to Chicago in search of glamour, excitement and money. She found those things and she found disillusionment.

She has returned to see Kenny (George Raft). Kenny is a rudderless loser but she has always loved him. Kenny has never been motivated to find a job although he can always summon up the motivation to find a card game or a beer joint. Maybe he wouldn’t have turned out to be such a loser if Mary had stayed. Or maybe he would have. Maybe Mary just couldn’t see a future with him.

There’s a complication, in the person of Lew Lentz (Tom Conway). Lew is a rich businessman. He’s not a mobster but we get the impression that his business methods are ruthless and may be at times just a tad ethically slippery. Lew has always wanted Mary. Given that Kenny and Lew both love Mary it’s hardly surprising that the two men are at daggers drawn.

Another complication is Gitlo (Victor McLaglen). He’s Kenny’s buddy but he works for Lew. Lew knows something about Gitlo which gives him a hold over the man. Gitlo hates and resents Lew, but he grovels to him.

Kenny is convinced that Mary would choose him over Lew if only he had lots of money. Lew has lots of money. He carries large amounts of money on the train to Detroit. It would not be difficult to rob him. Kenny is a loser but he’s not a criminal. But he is tempted. He wants Mary so badly.

So we have a classic film noir setup, with Kenny as the potentially easily manipulated schmuck, the typical noir protagonist. And with Mary as the classic femme fatale.

And that’s why so many people misunderstand this movie and are unable to appreciate it. They want to view it through a noir lens. They forget that nobody in Hollywood in 1946 had the remotest idea what film noir was so they were not conscious of the need to follow the conventions of a genre that did not exist. The makers of this movie were making a movie that combines crime thriller and melodrama elements. The fact that it happens to contain so many of what are now seen as essential noir ingredients does not imply that is is is film noir. It can be seen as conforming to some of the modern expectations of noir, but not all of them. It also conforms to some of the conventions of melodrama.

Director Léonide Moguy and screenwriter Philip Yordan knew what they were doing, but what they were trying to do was not necessarily what modern critics would have liked them to do.

Every online review I’ve read complains that Mary’s motivations for leaving Chicago remain unexplained. I can only assume that these reviewers are used to modern Hollywood spoon-feeding them. They need everything explained in detail, with diagrams. Her reasons are obvious, and are made obvious. She had been a kept woman, and she grew tired of feeling like a whore.

The same reviewers complain that Lew’s motivations for hating Kenny are unclear. They are perfectly clear. He wants Mary. He knows that Mary feels an incredibly strong sexual attraction to Kenny. Lew might be able to buy Mary but she will never want him with that aching desperate sexual need she feels for Kenny. That’s a blindingly obvious motivation.

I’m a huge George Raft fan and he is excellent here. It’s a typical effective low-key George Raft performance. There’s some self-pity in Kenny, some bitterness and plenty of jealousy. But he has settled into a loser pattern of life.

Tom Conway as Lew is fine. He makes Lew sinister but without making him a straightforward villain. Victor McLaglen is quite effective in getting across Gitlo’s simmering resentment, the resentment of a coward.

Ava Gardner gives the standout performance. Mary is a complex woman. She seems to be a femme fatale but we can’t be sure.

Raft and Gardner have no trouble convincing us that for all their doubts and hesitations and conflicts Kenny and Mary just can’t stop wanting each other.

You can see early on where the story is going, but that isn’t where it’s really going. You can see early on what the character arcs are going to be for all the players in this dramas, but the script has some surprises for us.

I liked Whistle Stop a lot. Just try to approach it without getting too locked-in to genre expectations. Highly recommended.

55 Days at Peking (1963)

For a short period Samuel Bronston was the king of the epic movie. He built a formidable movie-making empire in Spain, only to see it all collapse within a few years. The problem was that Bronston had ambition and vision but his judgment was not always all that it might have been and his business methods were, to put it charitably, unconventional and insanely risky. He did however manage to produce one of the finest epics ever made, El Cid, in 1961. El Cid had a great story, an intelligent script, a charismatic star (Charlton Heston) and in the person of Anthony Mann a director who understood the epic genre. 55 Days at Peking, released two years later, has the same charismatic star but unfortunately it lacks the other qualities that made El Cid such a superb film. Having said that, it still offers considerable entertainment value.

The idea certainly had potential. In 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion the foreign legations of the great powers in Peking found themselves under siege with only a handful of soldiers  to defend them. The political background to these events is mind-numbingly complex and although the script tries to fill in enough of the backstory to make the tale comprehensible it’s likely that many viewers will still be rather perplexed.

Suffice to say that when it is clear there is going to be major trouble the leader of the British legation, Sir Arthur Robertson (David Niven), persuades the other foreign legations to stand firm and stay put. It’s a courageous decision although whether it’s wise or not may be debated. 

Major Matt Lewis (Charlton Heston) commands the US Marines defending the American legation. For the purposes of the movie Robertson and Lewis became the mainstays of the epic defence.

While trying to fight off massed attacks by Boxers Lewis also has some personal complications to deal with. He falls in love with the Russian Baroness Natalie Ivanoff (Ava Gardner), a woman of great beauty but with a dubious moral reputation. He also has to figure out what to do with Teresa (Lynne Sue Moon), an eleven-year-old half-Chinese girl who is the daughter of one of his Marines.

The love story between Lewis and the Baroness doesn’t really work. Ava Gardner was a talented actress but could be difficult to work with (to put it mildly) and she and Heston did not hit it off.  This may be the reason that the chemistry between them just isn’t there. It’s also fairly clear that while the writers wanted a romance they weren’t really clear how they wanted it to develop and they really had no idea what to do with Gardner’s character.

David Niven wasn’t thrilled by the script either but he does his best in a rather awkward role. Robertson has to be stubborn and stiff-necked, and also brave and noble, and also troubled by self-doubts. It’s to Niven’s credit that his understated and dignified performance works quite well.

The problem for Charlton Heston was, once again, the muddled script. Heston ends up having to rely entirely on charisma, which luckily he has in abundance.

The supporting players are in some ways more fortunate. Their roles being less central to the story meant that writers Philip Yordan and Bernard Gordon had fewer opportunities to mess things up for them. Harry Andrews, one of the great British character actors, has plenty of fun with his role as a resourceful priest. Australian Robert Helpmann always enjoyed himself playing perfidious or sinister characters and he makes Prince Yuan, the man pulling the strings of the Boxers, delightfully sly and malevolent. Flora Robson does fairly well as the dowager empress, a woman who knows her country is in crisis but who also knows that she has few good options.

Nicholas Ray was signed to direct but left the production under something of a cloud. Guy Green took over but soon followed Ray out the door, with Andrew Marton eventually finishing the picture. Given that this was a massive and unwieldy production to start with the constant turnover of directors obviously contributed to the film’s rather ramshackle structuring. Ray was an overrated director with no experience making this sort of picture and was possibly a poor choice in the first place. One can’t help thinking that if only Bronston had been able to persuade Anthony Mann to direct the results might have been much more satisfactory.

Despite these problems 55 Days at Peking does have some major strengths. Bronston built what was at the time the biggest standing set in cinematic history. The money spent on this project was astronomical and it has to be said that it was, from the point of view of spectacle, money well spent. The sets really are magnificent. The costumes are exquisite. Everything looks real because it was real. That was the Samuel Bronston way. He had no interest in trying to achieve spectacle by using matte paintings or miniatures. If he needed a whole city for a movie then he built the city. This approach paid off. Visually this movie is breath-taking.

And even with a creaky script there is still plenty of excitement.

There is no point in trying to impose modern values on a film like this. This is not a politically correct movie, but then history has an annoying habit of not always being politically correct. The characters behave in ways that were consistent with the moral values of their time. You can disagree with their actions but by their own lights they acted with courage and decency. And the movie was made the way movies were made in the early 60s. If you wanted someone to play a Chinese dowager empress you found someone who could handle the role. You didn’t worry about whether she was Chinese or not. That’s the way things were done in 1963.

Anchor Bay’s Region B Blu-Ray is superb. This is a movie that relies entirely on its visual impact and that absolutely has to be seen on Blu-Ray and on the biggest widescreen TV you can find. 

55 Days at Peking truly is the kind of movie they don’t make any more. It’s grandiose and it’s insanely extravagant and it celebrates old-fashioned heroism. With all its faults it’s thoroughly enjoyable. Recommended.

Singapore (1947)

While Singapore aims for the same sort of feel, and the makers of the film were clearly hoping to emulate the success of Casablanca, this is not by any means a retread of the Bogart-Bergman classic. Singapore stands up  perfectly well on its own.

I’m a sucker for old movies that take place in tropical settings and if the movie has a strong dash of film noir that’s even better. And Singapore certainly has more than a hint of film noir.

It’s 1947 and Matt Gordon (Fred MacMurray) has just arrived in Singapore. He’d been there before, in fact had spent quite a colourful and adventurous time there. He hasn’t returned just to rekindle old memories. He has some unfinished business in the city. Old memories are however very much on his mind as well. In fact this movie is all about old memories.

Gordon left Singapore just before the arrival of the invading Japanese. And he left a girl behind. He didn’t intend to leave her but things were rather complicated. She’s dead now but the memories are very much alive.

Gordon had been a pearl smuggler, on a fairly large scale. He had made a very big haul and he had a fortune in pearls hidden in his hotel room. The Japanese invasion made it impossible for him to to retrieve the pearls but there’s no reason to think they aren’t sitting just where he’d left them. The war has made pearls even scarcer so his stash is now worth even more than it had been. Matt Gordon would really like to get those pearls.

The rather sinister Mr Mauribus (Thomas Gomez) also wants the pearls. Mr Mauribus is a dealer in various commodities, but not a very honest one. In truth he’s a gangster. His henchman Sascha (George Lloyd) was supposed to get the pearls back in 1941 but had failed to do so. Now Mr Mauribus and Sascha are confident that Gordon will lead them to the pearls.

Deputy Commissioner Hewitt (Richard Haydn) is also interested in the pearls. Mostly though he wants to arrest Matt Gordon for smuggling. It’s nothing personal but Gordon had been a bit of a thorn in his side and besides Hewitt is the kind of policeman who likes to tidy up loose ends.

Matt Gordon has meanwhile found that old memories can come back to haunt a man in very unexpected ways. The past is not always as dead as one might think. And the past can make the present very complicated indeed.

Michael Van Leyden (Roland Culver) and his wife Anne will also discover just how much impact the past can have on the present.

Singapore is not quite film noir but it utilises classic noir techniques such as flashbacks, and it has an atmosphere that combines elements of the exotic with noir. The real focus though is on the tangled love story.

The film benefits from superb performances from all the supporting players. Thomas Gomez and George Lloyd are wonderfully slimy villains. Richard Haydn is excellent as the dedicated but good-natured policeman. Roland Culver is outstanding. Michael Van Leyden is a man with his own secrets and those secrets involve, like so much in this movie, memories. He’s a complicated man and he gets more complicated as the film progresses.

Ava Gardner is of course the woman at the centre of things and her problems with memories are particularly tricky. She’s not a femme fatale but she’s complicated in her own way. Gardner is an underrated actress and she handles the rôle with skill. 

Fred MacMurray is even more underrated. Anyone who thinks that the stars of the golden age of Hollywood merely recycled the same performance over and over should watch a few of MacMurray’s movies. He could play a slimy and scheming ambitious junior officer in The Caine Mutiny, or a total sleazebag in Double Indemnity. Or, as in Singapore, he could play a very sympathetic and romantic character, albeit a slightly ambiguous character. Matt Gordon is not exactly scrupulously honest but he’s no hoodlum. Even his nemesis, Deputy Commissioner Hewitt, likes him. He’s an irresponsible adventurer who discovers that eventually adventurers have to grow up. MacMuray is superb.

John Brahm directed the movie with considerable panache. While it’s obvious that it was shot in the studio and on the backlot the atmosphere of tropical intrigue is created very convincingly.

The only readily available edition of this movie is an Italian DVD, but don’t despair. It’s an excellent transfer and both the Italian dub and the original English soundtrack (with removable Italian subtitles) are included. 

Singapore is an engaging love story with a bit of film noir-style intrigue and plenty of exotic background, superbly acted and extremely well-crafted. It’s the sort of movie that Hollywood did so very well in the 1940s. Both the movie and the Italian DVD (available from amazon) are very highly recommended.

Mogambo (1953)

John Ford’s 1953 Mogambo combines African adventure with a romantic triangle. It’s a movie that manages to be fun if you don’t take it too seriously.

It’s a remake of the 1932 pe-code classic Red Dust but it’s best not to think about that because a comparison between the two films is not at all favourable to Mogambo. Clark Gable is once more the male in the centre of the romantic triangle, as he was in the earlier film.

The setting has been transposed from South-East Asia to Africa and this time Gable is an animal trapper named Victor Marswell rather than a rubber plantation manager. He collects exotic wildlife for zoos. He enjoys the outdoor life but this idyllic existence is about to be thrown into turmoil by the arrival of two women.



The first to arrive is Ava Gardner. She plays Eloise Kelly, known to her friends as Honey Bear. She is the equivalent of the Jean Harlow character in Red Dust but while Harlow’s character was clearly a whore (and delightfully unembarrassed about it) Honey Bear’s occupation is more ambiguous, this being the 50s rather than the pre-code era. She’s obviously a good-time girl and she’s obviously going to be a somewhat disturbing influence. Marswell grumbles about the annoyance of having women on safari but the more he grumbles the more Honey Bear falls for his manly charms.

Things get more awkward when the second female arrives on the scene. This is Linda Nordley (Grace Kelly). The awkwardness comes from the fact that she arrives compete with husband but it’s clear that she’s just as susceptible to Gable’s manliness. And even worse, he’s equally vulnerable to her feminine charms.



Linda’s husband immediately falls ill with fever. She devotedly nurses him through it but she’s becoming more and more obsessed by the grizzled big game hunter Gable.

The problems with Mogambo have nothing to do with the cast. Gable might have been 52 when the picture was made but he’s still Clark Gable and it’s not the least bit difficult to understand why these two gorgeous women fall for him.



Ava Gardner is superb as the free-spirited but very likable Honey Bear. She wisely doesn’t try to emulate Jean Harlow’s performance. Grace Kelly has the most difficult of the three roles. Linda is repressed, awkward and shy and very uncomfortable about her sexual feelings for Marswell. With Gable and Gardner both playing larger-than-life characters and having a very good time doing so the danger is that Kelly will be overlooked. In fact she does a pretty good job.

The real problem seems to be that Ford wasn’t sure whether to put the focus on the adventure or on the romance and the steamy romantic triangle isn’t quite steamy enough. There’s also the problem that Gardner (who could certainly supply all the steaminess anyone could reasonably demand) is left on the sidelines of the action too much of the time. Whenever she’s allowed to take centre stage the movie gets a lot more interesting.



There’s some reasonably nice location shooting but it’s mixed with stock footage and studio shots. This could be seen as a weakness but actually it moves the movie a fun 50s feel. Ford’s slightly breathless travelogue approach to the material is also quite amusing.

I saw this one one on TCM but I believe it’s available on DVD. It’s the sort of movie you’d have expected to be in Cinemascope and had it been made a year or so later it almost certainly would have been. Not a great movie but still very enjoyable. Worth seeing just for Ava Gardner.

Bhowani Junction (1956)

Bhowani Junction is a good example of classical Hollywood film-making in the declining days of the studio system, and a reminder that Hollywood in the 50s could still deliver the goods.

George Cukor directed this film about fractured identities and divided loyalties in India in the last days of the British Raj. The stars, Stewart Granger and Ava Gardner, both felt (with some justification) that MGM failed to take them seriously enough as actors and failed to give them opportunities to show what they could do. Bhowani Junction gives them the chance to do some real acting and they acquit themselves well.

Granger is Colonel Rodney Savage, a career British army officer struggling to do his duty without betraying his humanity. His assignment is a thankless one but he’s the kind of man who is always inclined to make the best of a bad job.



Gardner is Victoria Jones. She is also a British army officer, but her situation is very different. Her father was British, her mother Indian. The prospect of independence for India was a frightening one for Anglo-Indians who found themselves belonging nowhere and wanted by no-one. To the British they were an embarrassment while to many Indians they were an object of hatred.

Having always thought of herself as being essentially British she now tries to re-invent herself as an Indian. She had been expected to marry another Anglo-Indian, ambitious young railway official Patrick Taylor (Bill Travers) but now she is persuaded she should marry an Indian. That’s only one of many difficulties she faces. When a sleazy British officer tries to rape her she kills him, and agrees that the body should be hidden.



Colonel Savage is fully involved trying to keep the railways running and at the same time battling against both the moderate Congress Party who seek independence through passive resistance and communist terrorists who seek to achieve the same goal through violence. And at the same time he finds himself drawn to Victoria Jones. It takes him a while to admit to himself that his feelings for her go behind mere concern for a subordinate who has got herself into trouble. Without their really realising what is happening an emotional bond is forming that will develop into love. But can they possibly have any future together?

Almost all the characters in the movie are caught in some way. A situation is developing where the pressure to take sides is becoming inexorable but for many there is no easy choice. And almost all the characters in the movie are also being forced to examine their true identities, and again there is often no straightforward answer.



The movie tries to take a fairly even-handed approach. Some of the British are vicious and stupid while others are intelligent and compassionate. Some of the Indians are violent and ignorant while others are courageous and determined. Some of the Anglo-Indians are hopelessly deluded while others are doing their best to face the future. This even-handedness might annoy modern audiences who are accustomed to movies that show Europeans as always automatically in the wrong but Bhowani Junction is too intelligent a movie to make such simplistic judgments.

Stewart Granger gives a fine understated performance. He’s not a story-book noble hero but Colonel Savage is fundamentally a decent man doing his best. Victoria Jones however is the key character. Ava Gardner’s performance is crucial, and she does a superb job. Bil Travers is the weak link, tending to be rather too histrionic.



This was a big production for MGM with plenty of location shooting but it’s by no means movie that relies purely on spectacle. The writing, the directing and the acting of the two leads are all thoughtful and subtle. I caught this one on TCM but I’m tempted to grab it on DVD.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)

Every now and than an executive from a major movie studio has a moment of temporary insanity and gives the go-ahead for a movie like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, a movie that is going to cost the studio a lot of money but has no chance of mainstream success. We should be grateful for those moments of temporary insanity, because otherwise we would never get odd, quirky and rather magical movies like this one.

I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Ava Gardner’s performance as Pandora, which leavers me mystified. I think she’s perfectly cast, and I think her performance is spot on. She’s not supposed to be an ordinary everyday person. She’s the sort of woman who can turn down a marriage proposal by telling the man that she’s already in love, but she can’t tell him who the man is that she’s in love with because she hasn’t met him yet.

This is not a realist movie about real people, it’s a piece of story-telling, it’s a legend, and she’s a woman of legend. Early on she asks Stephen, who loves her, to push his car over a cliff to prove his love. This is a car he’s built himself and devoted several years of his life to, a car in which he hopes to break the Land Speed Record. Gardner has established Pandora’s character so well that you know she really does intend to let him do it. If you want to win a woman like Pandora you have to be prepared to pay a price. In fact you have to be prepared to pay any price she asks.

I had no difficulty in accepting that she would ask something like that. And I had no difficulty in believing that the price was worthwhile. Reggie, who also loves her, pays an even higher price, a much higher price.

The movie is told in flashback, which enhances the feeling that this is a tale we’re being told, and whether we believe it to be true or not is up to us. A Dutchman (played by James Mason) arrives at a Spanish seaport in the 1920s. Geoffrey, an antiquarian who tells the story, comes to believe that this Dutchman is in fact the Flying Dutchman, condemned to wander the oceans of the world for all eternity, and who can be released from his curse only if he can find a woman willing to die for him.

It’s gorgeously photographed by master cinematographer Jack Cardiff. I loved the statuary on the beach, and they’re used to great effect to achieve the feeling of the mundane world intersecting with the world of myth and legend. It’s also an incredibly romantic film – it’s all about love, and the price we’re willing to pay for it. It’s an unusual movie, but if you accept it on its own terms it really is a magical one. I loved it.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchmanis available on DVD, and is about to be released on Blu-Ray (if you don’t mind paying the extortionate prices being asked by Kino).

The Night of the Iguana (1964)

The Night of the Iguana, based on Tennessee Williams’ play, was directed by John Huston and released in 1964.

It’s the story of drunkard defrocked clergyman Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon (played by Richard Burton) who works as a tour guide in Mexico. His life reaches a crisis as he’s escorting a busload of female Southern Baptist school-teachers. Unfortunately for Shannon one of the teachers is chaperoning Charlotte, an under-age girl who has even more unfortunately decided that she’s madly in love with the reverend. And more unfortunately still the teacher who is chaperoning Charlotte already hates Shannon and is determined to see him fired from his job, and preferably gaoled for sexual misconduct with a minor.

He finds refuge in a seedy hotel run by an old friend of his, the colourful Maxine Faulk (Ava Gardner). Maxine has problems of her own to grapple with, most notably her severe and chronic lack of a bed partner after a sexless marriage. At this point Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) and her elderly grandfather, who eke out a living giving poetry recitations and doing sketches, arrive. Hannah Maxine has the opposite problem to Maxine – she’s severely sexually repressed.

So what we have are exactly the sort of characters we expect from Tennessee Williams, and an ideal line-up of actors to play them.

Deborah Kerr is terrific as always. Sue Lyon is unexpectedly impressive as Charlotte. For Richard Burton it’s an ideal role, the kind of thing that gives him the opportunity to overact outrageously but effectively, and he makes the most of it.

But it’s Ava Gardner who steals the picture, giving the performance of her career.

The end result is a very fine movie. In fact it’s the best ever movie adaptation of a Tennessee Williams work, and one of Huston’s two or three best pictures.