The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

Anthony Hope’s 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda is one of the classics of adventure fiction. And the 1937 film adaptation is one of the classic adventure films.

An Englishman. Major Rudolf Rasendyll, on a fishing holiday in the (imaginary) central European nation of Ruritania is puzzled by the strange looks he keeps getting from the locals. An encounter in the woods provides him with the explanation. He is the spitting image of King Rudolf. It turns out to be less of a coincidence than it first appeared - the Englishman and the king of Ruritania are distant cousins.

Rassendyll is thereupon invited by the king to a drinking party (this being the king’s favourite occupation). The king has not yet been crowned and his evil brother Duke Michael (Black Michael) is determined this will never take place. He has the king drugged, the idea being that when the king fails to appears at his own coronation he will be discredited in the eyes of the people and Michael will be acclaimed as the new king.

With the king unconscious (or more unconscious than usual) his advisers are distraught. The coronation is to take place the next day. A desperate plan is hatched. The Englishman will be passed off as the king and crowned in his stead.

It’s not quite that simple however. The impostor will also have to convince the king’s intended bride, the Crown Princess Flavia. The marriage is vital. The princess has a stronger claim to the throne than any of the male claimants. Only by marrying her can they be sure of being accepted as the legitimate king.

This is an adventure movie with more emphasis on romance and intrigue than on action. It’s none the worse for that. Being a David O. Selznick production you’d expect it to look lavish and it does. The supporting cast is very strong. Raymond Massey makes a splendid bad guy as Duke Michael. Madekeine Carroll is charming as the crown princes. Mary Astor and David Niven make the most of their fairly minor roles. C. Aubrey Smith’s natural pomposity serves him well as the king’s chief counsellor.

Ronald Colman is excellent in the dual roles of King Rudolf and Major Rodolf Rassendyll. But it’s Douglas Fairbanks Jr who steals the picture. He’s Rupert of Hentzau, Duke Michael’s chief henchman. He’s handsome, charming, utterly ruthless and entirely lacking in any morals whatsoever. He’s also witty and thoroughly likeable in a delightfully villainous way. The younger Fairbanks has the time of his life with this role.

The interesting twist to the plot is that King Rudolf is a lousy king. He’s perpetually drunk, he’s lazy, selfish and cynical and his main reason for not simply allowing Michael to have the throne is that he knows that Michael is too thorough and too well-organised to leave any loose ends behind him, such as a living rival king. The English impostor is in fact a far better king, but the king’s advisors are adamant that the rightful king must reign. And Michael would in all probability be worse, being bitter, vicious and spiteful.

John Cromwell was a solid reliable director and with a great cast and a fine literate script The Prisoner of Zenda is superb entertainment.

Darling Lili (1970)

Darling Lili represented an early attempt by Julie Andrews to escape the saccharine-drenched virginally pure image that had haunted her since Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. In Darling Lili she got to pay a bad girl. A rather sweet and likeable bad girl, but a bad girl nonetheless. The movie also has the distinction of having contributed considerably to the death of the traditional big-budget Hollywood musical, and its spectacular commercial failure took Paramount to the brink of bankruptcy.

Julie Andrews is Lili Smith, a beloved music hall singer who also happens to be a spy for the Germans. Her latest target is Major Bill Larrabee, famed air ace and commander of the eilte Eagle Squadron. The German spymaster von Ruger (who is also Lili’s lover) wants information on Allied air tactics and other military secrets to which Larrabee has access. Lili sets out to seduce the major, which turns out to be very easy indeed. But this is the movies, so of course she begins to fall in love with him. He situation becomes more difficult when she learns that French Military Intelligence have discovered that Bill is the source of recent very damaging security leaks and they are fairly sure he is passing secrets to a woman working for the German intelligence service.

In retrospect it’s very easy to see why this film bombed at the box office in 1970. Casting Julie Andrews as a German spy was bad enough, but casting her as a German spy who uses sex to obtain military secrets was too much for audiences at the time. And to compound the sin, she’s presented as a very sympathetic spy who is totally unrepentant. And the idea of Mary Poppins having sex, and even doing a strip-tease!

The other aspect of the movie that undoubtedly alienated contemporary audiences is the bewildering mix of styles and genres. The film is a combination of sophisticated romantic comedy, crude slapstick, wartime adventure, spy thriller, musical, satire and romance, and it switches between genres with alarming rapidity and frequency. Today such blending of genres is commonplace (possibly too commonplace) but in 1970 it must have seemed confused rather than audacious. And to further estrange the movie from audiences there’s a noticeably mocking attitude towards patriotism and the military virtues, which might have appealed to the youth audience but was unlikely to endear itself to the type of people likely to see a Julie Andrews musical.

The very things that led to its being box office poison in 1970 are likely to be the things that a modern audience will enjoy. Once you realise you’re not meant to take any of it seriously, and that the plot is suppose to be ludicrously contrived, there’s much to enjoy. Julie Andrews is funny and charming, and she’s even sexy in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. It’s all gloriously overdone. Everything is too colourful and too shiny. There’s too much of everything. Director Blake Edwards is being too clever and too knowing. Julie Andrews is too self-consciously a star. In other words, we’re talking delicious high camp here. Darling Lili is enormous fun and I enjoyed every minute.

Charlie Chan in Paris (1935)

There have been more than fifty Charlie Chan movies. Charlie Chan in Paris was one of the sixteen made by Fox in the 1930s with Warner Oland playing the great Chinese detective from Hawaii. It’s the second of the Warner Oland films that I’ve seen and confirms my impression that Oland was simply perfect for the role.

Like most of the Charlie Chan movies this one is not based on one of Earl Derr Biggers’ novels (of which he wrote a mere half-dozen). But it does capture the feel of the books pretty well.

Chan is investigating some shady goings-on in a Paris bank. Pretty soon the first murder connected with the case occurs. A female night-club singer is the victim. The crime might not seem directly linked to the bank’s problem but Chan has reason to believe the link is there. A cantakerous war veteran on crutches always seem to be on the scene when something happens and it will take all the famous detective’s skill to sort this one out.

This movie introduced the character of Number One son Lee Chan (played by Keye Luke), a character destined to become a fixture. This version of Charlie Chan (unlike the one played by Sidney Toler in the 1944 Charlie Chan in The Chinese Cat) does not put down his son. In fact he’s brimming with familial pride. While his sons don’t appear in the novels this does bring the character much closer to Earl Derr Biggers’ original conception. Charlie Chan is a man for whom family is everything.

Warner Oland plays Charlie Chan as a kindly, soft-spoken jovial character whose geniality masks a razor-sharp detective’s brain. He’s very much a detective who relies on intellect rather than muscle. He is not a two-fisted action hero. For the purposes of a movie series it can be useful to have some action however. Introducing Lee Chan to the series therefore works out rather well. He can handle the more physical aspects of crime-solving. In this film at least he is certainly not a mere comic relief character.

As in the books racial stereotypes are introduced, but only in order for them to be deftly and wittily mocked.

The likeability of Warner Oland’s performance is the movie’s biggest asset. Oland was bon in Sweden but always claimed to have some Asian blood. More important than that was the fact that he took the role very seriously and immersed himself in it. He became interested in Chinese culture and he was clearly very fond of the character he played. His enthusiasm for the role is always evident.

Apart from that it’s an example of the better kind of 1930s crime B-movie, very well-made and highly entertaining.

Fox’s DVD release includes an informative documentary and with both picture and sound quality being pretty good this one can definitely be recommended.

Charlie Chan in The Chinese Cat (1944)

Charlie Chan in The Chinese Cat was the second of Monogram’s Charlie Chan films (the earlier ones having been made by 20th Century-Fox) and it’s not a particularly memorable effort.

This will be a two-part review of sorts since straight after this I’m going to watch one of the earlier Fox movies with Warner Oland playing the famous Chinese-Hawaiian detective.

Sidney Toler had taken over the role after Oland’s death and in my view he’s a much less satisfactory Charlie Chan. By 1944 he was really too old for the role (the Chan of the books is in his 40s and Toler was 70) and he doesn’t look even remotely Asian.

The relationship between Chan and his Number 3 son Tommy moves the character even further away from the detective of Earl Derr Biggers’ books. The Chan of the books would never have treated his children with such contempt. Tommy Chan is there purely for laughs which means we have two actors rather than one providing the totally unnecessary and extremely annoying comic relief, the other being African-American comic Mantan Moreland as taxi-driver Birmingham Brown. The comic relief really swamps the mystery in this particular production.

The story starts with a locked-room mystery - a wealthy society woman’s husband is murdered and she finds herself the chief suspect. The murder is linked to a major jewellery robbery.

As you’d expect it suffers from much lower production values than the Fox efforts but Phil Rosen’s lively direction makes up for many of these deficiencies. The result is a mildly entertaining B-movie comedy mystery.

I don’t think Sidney Toler’s performance is all that bad but I just didn’t think the character of Charlie Chan came through in this film. The script gave him no help.

MGM have released this one on DVD. The transfer is not fantastic and there are no extras so it’s hard to recommend this one.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

I’m slowly re-evaluating my feelings about Hollywood westerns. After being mightily impressed by John Ford’s The Searchers I thought I’d try another John Ford western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

An ageing US senator, Ransom Stoddart (James Stewart) returns to the western town of Shinbone for the funeral of a old friend, and is prompted by a reporter to tell the true story of the events of thirty years earlier, events that have now become local legend. At that time Ransom Stoddart was a young lawyer setting out for the Wild West under the impression that this was a fabulous land of opportunity. Before even arriving in Shinbone he discovers the dark truth when the stagecoach he’s travelling on is held up by the notorious Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Stoddart is robbed and badly beaten.

In Shinbone there is no law besides the law of the gun. The town marshall is incompetent, weak and cowardly. Liberty Valance does what he pleases. Ransom obviously has a personal grudge against Liberty Valance but more than that he is deeply offended by the lack of respect for the rule of law.

Ransom makes some unlikely friends in Shinbone. There’s Hallie (Vera Miles), a friendly waitress who takes a shine to him. There’s the alcoholic newspaper editor Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brien). And then there’s Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). The friendship between Ransom and Tom is an unlikely one and an uneasy one (they’re both sweet on Hallie). Tom Doniphon is the only man Liberty Valance is afraid of. Tom is the toughest man in Shinbone and would have no hesitation in shooting anyone if he had to but he’s not really a man of violence. He wants to be left alone, to marry Hallie and live in his little cottage.

Stoddart, Doniphon and Peabody find themselves in the position of being political allies in the approaching election of delegates to vote on whether this lawless territory should be admitted to statehood, Ransom Stoddard is passionate about this - to him statehood represents educational opportunities, democracy, law and order and progress.

Statehood is opposed by the cattlemen (who always seem to be the bad guys in westerns) and they are using Liberty Valance and his gang to terrorise the townsfolk into voting their way. A final political showdown is approaching, as is a final personal showdown between Liberty and Ransom.

Unlike the revisionist westerns of the 70s which (with the notable exception of Clint Eastwood’s movies) seem more like anti-westerns Ford’s later westerns don’t seem to me to be hostile towards the genre. I get the impression Ford simply wanted to demonstrate that westerns could not only be complex, they were in fact ideally suited for dealing with big ideas.

Like The Searchers this movie deals with people caught between old ways and new ways. The west is in a process of transition. Liberty Valance represents the old ways - the rule of the gun, violence, lawlessness and anarchy. Ransom Stoddart and Dutton Peabody represents the future - stable government, a free press, prosperity and respect for the law. Tom Doniphon is caught in the middle. He must choose sides, and he unhesitatingly chooses progress. The irony of course is that progress is bringing into existence a world in which there will be no place for rugged individualists like Tom Doniphon.

Once again John Wayne plays a complex, contradictory and somewhat tragic character. Tom is a good man but he’s by nature a loner and cannot adapt to a changing world. It’s another superb performance by this underrated actor.

James Stewart’s character is equally interesting. Ransom is adamant that the rule of law must displace the rule of the gun but it’s one of the many paradoxes of the film that lawlessness and violence as represented by Liberty Valance can ultimately only be defeated by violence. The rule of law, in the final analysis, has to be backed up by force. it’s a paradox that Ransom Stoddart never quite manages to unravel or to reconcile himself to.

The supporting performances are entertaining. Lee Marvin, as you’d expect, chews the scenery outrageously. Edmond O’Brien is equally over-the-top.

Like The Searchers this is a fairly dark film in its own way. It’s driven by ideas and by character rather than by action. Right and wrong are not straightforward choices. Moral compromises have to be made and the consequences have to be lived with. Legends grow up around actions that were in reality rather murky. A very impressive film.

The Searchers (1956)

I’ve always been a little dubious of John Ford’s reputation as one of the great film-makers. I’ve rarely dislike a movie as much as I disliked his The Grapes of Wrath. If any movie was going to overcome this scepticism I thought perhaps it might be The Searchers. It’s probably his most admired film and it is after all a western, the genre with which he’s most closely associated.

A classic western starts with a mysterious stranger riding into town. In this case there’s no town, just an isolated homestead, and Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) isn’t quite a stranger. He’s the brother of the homesteader, Aaron Edwards. He is however very much an outsider, and there’s plenty of mystery to him. He’d gone off to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War, but the war has been over for three years. He doesn’t say where he’s been since then, or explain why he still has his sabre (which should have been given up at the surrender). There’s a suggestion that there’s a cloud over him, that there may be something dishonourable or questionable in his past.

Not long after his arrival he sets off with the Texas Rangers to find some cattle rustlers but the cattle thefts were a ruse, and he returns to find that a Comanche war party has slaughtered his brother’s family and a neighbouring family as well. All except two girls who are carried off as prisoners. Ethan Edwards and Martin Pawley, a part-Cherokee orphan who had been adopted by the Edwards family, set out to find the two girls. One of the girls, Lucy, is soon found, raped and killed by the Comanches. But Ethan and Martin are determined to find Ethan’s niece Debbie, who would now be fifteen.

It’s an epic search. Five years later they finally come across a good lead and believe they may be close to finding her. But the nature of their search has changed, or at least it has changed for Ethan. They have reason to think that Debbie has been married off to a Comanche brave. Martin still wants to bring her home, but Ethan’s objective is now to kill her. His motives are mixed - partly a horror of the girl’s being tainted by marriage to a Comanche, partly a belief that Debbie would be better off dead than living with the Comanches. It seem likely that when they do find her one of them will have to kill the other.

The movie has some definite flaws. There’s some cringe-inducing comic relief and a length and apparently irrelevant romantic sub-plot involving Martin Pawley and the daughter of a Swedish homesteader.

These flaws pale into insignificance compared to the film’s strengths.

First of all it’s visually magnificent, and this is not merely spectacle for spectacle’s sake but serves to emphasise the epic scale of the quest, and the epic scale of Ethan’s obsession.

It’s a morally and psychologically complex film. There are atrocities committed by both sides, and when Ethan tracks down the Comanche chief who kidnapped Debbie he finds a man who is a mirror image of himself, consumed by an obsessive desire for revenge and warped by fear and hatred. Ethan hates the Comanches but he knows a good deal about their culture and speaks their language fluently. He has clearly had a good deal to do with the Comanches in the past.

Modern audiences brought up in an atmosphere of political correctness may be inclined to see Ethan as a villain but that would be a misunderstanding of his character. While his intention to kill Debbie may be shocking and deeply misguided he genuinely believes it’s his duty to do so, that it’s a necessary act of compassion. And his quest for revenge can hardly be said to be unprovoked violence on his part, given that he’s seen almost his entire family butchered.

Ethan is a tragic figure, a man who is alone and seems destined to remain forever an outsider. And this makes the apparently irrelevant comic relief and romantic sub-plots suddenly make sense. There’s a world in which life goes on, people continue to have fun, fall in love and raise families, and Ethan is forever shut out of this world of light, condemned to live as an outsider and pursued by his personal demons.

The movie’s biggest single strength is John Wayne’s performance. It’s a subtle and moving performance. He personally regarded it as his greatest role.

It’s a disturbing movie, and whatever your feelings about the issues involved, wherever you may happen to be on the political spectrum, you’ll still find it disturbing. There are no easy simplistic answers offered here. It truly is a great movie.

And the final shot in the movie is surely one of the greatest endings in movie history.

A Kiss Before Dying (1956)

A Kiss Before Dying is yet another example of the dangers of taking seriously lists of supposed film noirs. This one is more of an attempt at a Hitchcockian thriller, and it’s a mixed bag.

Based on Ira Levin’s novel it boasts a plot that includes everything required to make a top-notch psychological suspense thriller. Bud Corliss (Robert Wagner) is regarded as a bit of a boy genius at his university. At least he and his mother think he’s a boy genius. He certainly has the requisite ambition. His girlfriend Dorothy Kingship (Joanne Woodward) is the daughter of mining magnate Leo Kingship (George Macready) and Bud has a carefully worked-out plan to become the next chief of the Kingship mining empire. It’s going to take some fancy footwork though - the elder Kingship is a suspicious control freak - but Bud is very good at fancy footwork.

Bud’s plans are threatened with disaster when Dorothy falls pregnant. Old man Kingship is not going to be pleased with that little development and Bud has had no time to ingratiate himself with the tycoon. Now they’re going to have to get marred immediately and if, as expected, Dorothy’s father cuts her off without a penny he’ll be forced to get a real job, something unworthy of a boy genius. The marriage no longer fits in with Bud’s strategy for success. If only there was a way of avoiding it. If only an accident could occur to remove this inconvenient obstacle (Dorothy) from his life. If you want an accident there’s no point just sitting around waiting for one. You have to make it happen. This is the sort of thing Bud is good at and fortunately he’s not troubled by inconveniences like a conscience.

Soon Bud is back on course. Dorothy had a sister, Ellen (Virginia Leith), and one sister is as good as another.

The movie follows the standard Hitchcock formula for suspense, with the audience knowing more or less everything and the suspense coming from the fact that the characters lack this vital information.

Director Gerd Oswald figures if you’re going to attempt a Hitchcock-style thriller you’re going to need some impressive visual set-pieces, and he provides them. The rooftop scene between Bud and Dorothy is superb. Oswald worked almost entirely in B-movies and television but he displays a sure touch here that suggests he was worthy of bigger things.

What lets the film down is the acting, particularly from the supporting players. Virginia Leith is too distant. Jeffrey Hunter as the bookish amateur detective fails to come to terms with his character at all. Mary Astor is OK as Bud’s mother, but Joanne Woodward is truly atrocious, and incredibly annoying with it. She went on to become a fine actress but there is no sign here of the talent she displayed in later films. The problem is that these supporting characters are important. We need to care about them and believe in them and it doesn’t happen.

George Macready does slightly better, adding at least some subtlety to his Father From Hell performance.

The movie sounds like it’s heading for disaster but luckily Robert Wagner is on hand to save the day. Wagner is generally regarded as a bit of a lightweight but he’s genuinely chilling here, and he provides the fascination that the other actors are unable to give us. Making what is basically a pure psychopath interesting isn’t easy but he manages it with aplomb. He has to carry the movie more or less single-handedly and he pulls it off.

A flawed film, but worth catching for some stylish visuals and for Wagner’s career-best acting performance.