tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-384540492024-03-18T02:48:35.834-07:00Apocalypse Later Film ReviewsHal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.comBlogger2584125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-260033942202199532024-02-19T23:39:00.015-07:002024-02-20T02:24:40.436-07:00The Killers (1964)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Donald Siegel<br>
Writer: Gene L. Coon, based on the short story by Ernest Hemingway<br>
Stars: Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes, Clu Gulager, Claude Akins, Norman Fell and Ronald Reagan</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/2024-centennials.html">2024 Centennials</a>.</p>
<p>I was surprised to find that I hadn’t seen <i>The Killers</i>, at least in this incarnation, the 1964 feature by Donald Siegel, not yet to shrink that into Don. It started out as a short story by Ernest Hemingway, originally published in 1927, which was set in Chicago during a peak era for organised crime: prohibition. It’s about a couple of hitmen, Max and Al, who arrive at Henry’s Lunch-Room to murder a Swedish boxer called Ole Anderson, only to find that he isn’t there. It’s an interesting story, because Anderson doesn’t die within it; instead Hemingway focuses on the responses of the various characters to the knowledge that he’s about to. It’s been adapted to screen many times, most notably by Anthony Veiller in 1946 in a <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2007/10/killers-1946-robert-siodmak.html">version that I have seen</a> and rate very highly indeed as one of the best films noir Hollywood ever made. That version is far more cinematic than the painful wait of the story, with the hit happening first and the story behind it unfolding in flashback, giving a debuting Burt Lancaster plenty of screen time as Anderson.</p>
<p>This later version updates that one, keeping the hit at the start and the story behind it in flashback, but with the two hitmen as the reasons why the story is told. In 1946, that was done by Edmund O’Brien as an insurance investigator called Jim Reardon; here, it’s the killers who mount an investigation because one of them is puzzled by why his victim was completely resigned to his imminent demise. As the names have all been changed and the timeframe was updated to the sixties, the killers are now Charlie and Lee and the victim is Jerry Nichols. Charlie recognises him as Johnny North, a former race car champion who supposedly pulled off a heist of a mail truck that netted him a million bucks, so he starts to wonder about why they were paid well above the typical rate for the hit and where that money went, given that whoever hired them didn’t care. Thus the investigation, which unfolds chronologically within the contemporary scenes, while the back story fleshes out through the memories of the characters that they interview.</p>
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<p>The most notable change is that, far from a claustrophobic black and white film noir, this is a bright and brash slab of sixties cool, shot in colour with the two hitmen almost always wearing sunglasses, even inside. It starts tough with a stylish opening sequence that has the credits unfold against static shots of the killers saturated into red and blue and backed by a re-edited take on part of Henry Mancini’s score for Orson Welles’s <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/03/touch-of-evil-1958.html">Touch of Evil</a>. We already know that Charlie and Lee aren’t going to mess around, even if we haven’t learned their names yet. And, sure enough, they don’t, even though the hit takes place at a school for the blind, which is a fascinating touch. The kids are so believably blind that I’m sure they are, though Virginia Christine just as clearly isn’t, acting that she is in the role of the school’s secretary, but it’s still neat to see her read a braille watch. They torment her before shooting Nichols in his classroom upstairs; he’s played by John Cassevetes, whose last words are to dismiss his class.</p>
<p>Framing the whole story from the perspective of two hitmen trying to track down a stolen fortune is a masterful touch. We know that they’re going to be brutal because they have been from the very outset, murdering a man in cold blood while his students, all of them blind, attempt to leave the scene. Charlie is all business, courtesy of our centenarian, Lee Marvin, who received top billing for the very first time on the big screen in a career that dated back to a role as an uncredited radio man in 1951’s <i>You’re in the Navy Now</i>, coincidentally also the uncredited debut of another future action star, Charles Bronson. Marvin was 6’1” and looked taller, so he’s effortlessly dominant here without any scruples to get in the way. His partner here is Clu Gulager, two inches shorter but with a Tom Cruise in asshole mode mindset that makes him look shorter still. His film debut was right here, after a decade on television; he’d played Billy the Kid in seventy-five episodes of <i>The Tall Man</i> and was a year into his new regular show, <i>The Virginians</i>.</p>
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<p>Given that the mystery is all about Johnny North, Cassavetes gets plenty of time in the flashbacks. Charlie and Lee’s first stop is to see his former mechanic, Earl Sylvester, at his “speed headquarters”. That’s Claude Akins and we’re launched into his flashback at the fourteen minute mark, only to return to the present day a full half an hour later, almost halfway through the picture. Marvin’s debut as a leading man—he became one on television in 1957, leading three seasons of the highly successful crime drama <i>M Squad</i>—was tempered by the fact that he’s only actually in half of it. Nonetheless, it made his name to a filmgoing audience, who were thus conditioned to him playing bad guys from the very beginning, even if the following year brought him both an Academy Award and abiding fame for a very different picture indeed, <i>Cat Ballou</i>. Of course, as the film runs on, the flashbacks become shorter and scenes in the present day longer, as the two together slowly combine to explain the mystery behind Johnny North.</p>
<p>So to the back story, without either Marvin or Gulager but with Angie Dickinson. She’s Sheila Farr and she drives into Johnny’s life right as Sylvester starts his story. They’re at the track, with the mechanic clocking his partner on time trials. She watches and then takes over his life, quickly and effectively. He gives her a ride round the track in his Shelby Cobra, which turns her on because she’s she’s all about the danger, and then drives her to lunch in her own car. Beyond the arrival of Sheila, with whom Johnny falls in love just like that, there are two other details to note here, one of which affects how this picture plays today. The one that doesn’t is the car itself, a 1962 Shelby Cobra, only the fifth ever built. After being so prominent on screen, it was sold to the Carroll Shelby School of High Performance Driving, where it was used as a trainer car, driven by students like Steve McQueen and James Garner. The one that does is that Cassavetes couldn’t drive it, so all the driving scenes where he’s clearly identifiable are obvious rear projection.</p>
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<p>Frankly, this is the worst thing about the movie today. Both Steve McQueen and George Peppard were considered as Johnny North, but Cassavetes was cast before Siegel discovered that he couldn’t drive. Now, I haven’t driven for thirty years, though I do have my British license, and I wouldn’t remotely want to find myself thrown into driving fast for a movie. However, I can drive a frickin’ go kart, which Cassevetes apparently couldn’t do here, and putting the pedal down and hitting maybe thirty miles per hour on a short track feels like I’m doing two hundred on a Formula 1 circuit. Because of that, Cassavetes pretending to drive his stationary go kart while Angie Dickinson clearly rides one for real round a track in footage projected behind him is rather offputting and defuses any tension that we might expect to wring out of those scenes. I started to fall out of his story at this point, wondering instead what his problem with driving really was. Trauma, maybe, or a motion issue or some sort of phobia. Oh yeah, there’s a movie on. Let’s see...</p>
<p>Driving aside, Cassavetes is good here, with some excellent dialogue and good backs and forth between him and Akins and between him and Dickinson. However, his happy time is about to come to an end, through the ominous appearance of Ronald Reagan, a face so well-known that we recognise him even while he’s looking at us through binoculars. He’s Jack Browning, who Sheila describes as “an old friend” to Sylvester. He’s obviously far more than that and it doesn’t surprise us when it’s made clear that he’s a crime boss and she’s the eye candy he expects to have at his beck and call. Reagan had already ended his film career, his previous feature film being Hellcats of the Navy seven years earlier, and he would soon regret agreeing to play an outright bad guy because he had already decided to move into politics, with an impactful speech in 1964 on behalf of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. By 1966, he was Governor of California. By 1980, of course, he was President of the United States.</p>
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<p>Noting that Norman Fell is also part of the principal cast, as Browning’s right hand man, it’s fair to say that there are heavyweight actors here, many of whom are more than capable of stealing the show. Cassavetes did that in many movies; Reagan had his entire career behind him to draw on, with the added bonus of playing a bad guy for the first time in his career; and Dickinson benefitted from almost being the only woman in the filmand the one who drives the flashback stories; only two others are credited, with tiny roles as a secretary and a receptionist. However, Marvin and Gulager drive the contemporary story and it’s not tough to see why the former apparently called this his favourite picture when it came out. He wasn’t just the lead in a movie for the first time in an impressive career; he was a ruthless lead willing to do absolutely anything to get what he wants and one with far more depth than Gulager’s psychopathic Lee. Maybe there are other stories in Jack Browning, but I left this wanting to know more about Charlie.</p>
<p>While it’s not likely that we’ll ever learn more about Charlie, we know a lot about the man who played him, Lee Marvin, who would have been a hundred years old today, had he not died in 1987 just down the road from me in Tucson, Arizona. He was born in New York City to an advertising executive and a fashion writer, named after his first cousin, four times removed, Robert E. Lee. Yes, the confederate general. He struggled in school, having both dyslexia and ADHD, but he thrived as a teenager hunting deer and puma in the Everglades, after a family move to Florida. He enlisted in the Marines at eighteen and served in the Pacific as a scout sniper, taking part in twenty-one amphibious assaults on Japanese-held islands and a host of brutal battles that cost the lives of most of his colleagues. He was wounded by machine gun fire and a sniper bullet, leading to a year of medical treatment, PTSD and a medical discharge as a private after demotion from corporal for troublemaking, which had previously got him expelled from multiple schools.</p>
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<p>His entry into acting was far from commonplace. He was working as a plumber’s assistant at a community theatre in upstate New York when an actor fell ill and he was asked to take over the role. He did so, was hired by that company and took advantage of the G.I. Bill to study acting at the American Theatre Wing. Stage roles led to television roles, but his debut on Broadway happened the same year as his debut on film in <i>You’re in the Navy Now</i>. While most of that was shot on board a navy patrol craft, scenes were shot in California too and he stayed there to build his film career, channelling his war experience into assisting others to ensure scenes in war movies were believable. Given his memorable appearance and obvious presence, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that he was kept busy, even if many of his early film roles were uncredited. It’s more surprising that it took a few years for him to be more noticed, but strong supporting roles in films like <i>The Big Heat</i> and <i>The Wild One</i> did that, leading the Beetles gang in the latter.</p>
<p>I’ve seen a lot of his films from the early fifties and he’s always a reliable presence, whether the title is<i> The Caine Mutiny</i>, <i>Bad Day at Black Rock</i> or <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2009/11/violent-saturday-1955.html">Violent Saturday</a>. He had a strong year in 1955, starting with <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2009/11/violent-saturday-1955.html">Violent Saturday</a> and wrapping up with three movies—<i>Pete Kelly’s Blues</i>, <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2019/02/i-died-thousand-times-1955.html">I Died a Thousand Times</a> and <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2009/03/shack-out-on-101-1955-edward-dein.html">Shack Out on 101</a>—that are interesting and flawed but in each of which he’s arguably the best thing; there are even two others in between that I haven’t seen yet! However, while he continued to deliver in a long line of major supporting roles, moving up the credits list as he did so, it took <i>M Squad</i> on television to break him as a leading man, firmly setting him up as not just a tough guy but a memorably violent and deep tough guy. No wonder that his inevitable return to the big screen after three years of <i>M Squad</i> would be in a film as crucial as <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/02/man-who-shot-liberty-valance-1962.html">The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance</a>, playing a memorably violent but deep tough guy, the title character, holding his own against heavyweights of the industry like John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart.</p>
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<p>This film came after a further outing as a double act with Wayne, <i>Donovan’s Reef</i>, and was intended to be a TV movie but was moved to theatres either because it was too entertaining or because it was too violent, depending on which source we choose to trust. I’m pretty sure it’s the latter. It was Marvin’s first lead role on film, but it was <i>Cat Ballou</i> a year later that made him a star, courtesy of a double role, playing both Tim Strawn, the hired killer who’s threatening Cat’s father, and the drunkard Kid Shelleen, who she hires to take him down. It won him an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA, but it also cemented his career as a versatile actor, not just a heavy, a villain and an anti-hero. The future was bright and he lived up to that promise in westerns like <i>The Professionals</i>; war adventures like <i>The Dirty Dozen</i>, reuniting him with John Cassavetes; and tough thrillers like <i>Point Blank</i>; not to forget unusually phrased musicals like <i>Paint Your Wagon</i>, which gave him an unexpected hit in Wand’rin’ Star, three weeks at number one in the UK.</p>
<p>Off screen, he gained much attention for a relationship that wasn’t one of his two marriages. When he made <i>The Killers</i>, he was still in the first, with Betty Ebeling, with whom he had four children, but they would separate in 1965 and divorce in 1967. He married a second time in 1970, to Pamela Feeley, and they remained married until his death in 1987. However, it was the relationship he had in between them that led to a famous court case, Marvin v. Marvin. The other Marvin was a girlfriend, Michelle Triola, rather than a wife, though she changed her name legally to Marvin anyway. She later sued for the compensation that a spouse would get under California’s community property laws, not least because she claimed a trio of pregnancies, one ending in a miscarriage, the others in abortions, which he paid for. This court case became known as the “palimony” case, the term coined by another Marvin, Marvin Mitchelson, Triola’s attorney. She lost, but the case was satirised on <i>Saturday Night Live</i> and <i>The Tonight Show</i>.</p>
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<p>By this point, he was a bona fide star who could pick his own roles, leading to a more versatile output in the seventies and eighties in films as varied as <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2017/01/emperor-of-north-pole-1973.html">Emperor of the North Pole</a>, <i>The Klansman</i> and <i>Gorky Park</i>, though most likely remember him for a couple of traditional tough guy roles. The first came in 1980, with him top billed as the sergeant in Samuel Fuller’s World War II epic <i>The Big Red One</i>; the second in 1986 in his final acting role, alongside Chuck Norris in <i>The Delta Force</i>. There was almost a third, because he was offered the role of Quint in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/03/jaws-1975.html">Jaws</a>, but he turned it down. That role went, of course, to Robert Shaw, with whom he made a thriller in 1979, <i>Avalanche Express</i>, which turned out to be Shaw’s final film because he died of a heart attack during production. In total, Marvin made fifty-seven features over thirty-five years, in addition to a TV movie, <i>The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission</i>, and a long list of television roles leading up to <i>Cat Ballou</i>. As an icon, he remains highly recognisable even to those who were born after he died.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-39383553076961978812024-02-03T23:04:00.002-07:002024-02-03T23:04:52.946-07:00The Marriage Circle (1924)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Ernst Lubitsch<br>
Writer: Paul Bern, based on the play <i>Only a Dream</i> by Lothar Schmidt<br>
Stars: Monte Blue, Florence Vidor, Creighton Hale, Adolphe Menjou, Marie Prevost, harry Myers and Dale Fuller</p>
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<p>There must have been something in the air in early 1924, because two out of the first four films have been outright comedies that verge on the screwball. <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/finances-of-grand-duke-1924.html">Finances of the Grand Duke</a> was directed by an unlikely German, F. W. Murnau, but <i>The Marriage Circle</i> by a far more likely one, Ernst Lubitsch, though this was a Hollywood feature, his second after 1923’s <i>Rosita</i>.</p>
<p>He made that while under contract to Mary Pickford but, while the film was a success with both the critics and the public, they clashed in production enough that he was able to sign to a Warner Brothers contract instead, one that unusually allowed him complete creative and casting control.</p>
<p>Whatever reasons Jack Warner had for that, it worked, because this is a treat of a comedy. Yes, we ache to slap some sense into Dr. Franz Braun for most of the running time, but that’s fine. If he had the requisite amount of sense to begin with, this would be a five minute short.</p>
<p>We’re in Vienna, which an introductory title confidently tells us is “the city of laughter and light romance”. There’s laughter and romance in this film, but not so much as we might think for a comedy about relationships. We’re doing all the laughing while the characters get into more and more outrageous misconceptions.</p>
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<p>It’s the Stocks that we meet first, Prof. Josef Stock and his wife Mitzi. He’s as dapper as you might expect for a young Adolphe Menjou and she’s as beautiful as you might expect for the ascendant Marie Provost. However, the many capable sight gags underline that she’s utterly selfish, so much so that, after being ruthlessly insensitive to him throughout the first scene, she then has the audacity to complain about his cruelty. He hasn’t done a thing except let her shenanigans go uncommented.</p>
<p>They’ve only been in Vienna for a couple of months and the smile we see him raise comes after Mitzi leaves to visit Charlotte. She steals someone else’s reserved taxi but, with Josef at the window watching everything, offers him a lift so she can flirt outrageously with him. The professor assumes an affair for her and maybe an escape for him from their marriage.</p>
<p>Charlotte is an old friend of Mitzi’s who isn’t remotely like her. She’s hurt that Mitzi hasn’t come to see her since arriving in Vienna and she mails her to invite the Stocks to meet the Brauns. If you’re paying attention, yes, she’s the wife of Dr. Franz Braun, who also happens to have just had his taxi stolen.</p>
<p>The shenanigans have begun and they don’t end until the film does and, if there’s ever an opportunity for a character to misconstrue an event, the script leaps at it with wild abandon. Even this taxi ride can’t avoid that. Franz can’t stand Mitzi, so escapes, pretending he’s where he needs to be and entering a building to give that impression legs. Mitzi continues on to see Charlotte, presenting her the bunch of flowers that Franz left behind in the taxi in his quest to escape. Then in waltzes Franz, who knows just where those flowers came from.</p>
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<p>It’s hard not to like Charlotte, at least early on when she’s entirely sympathetic, an honest and loving wife played by Florence Vidor, the separated wife of director King Vidor, whose <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/wild-oranges-1924.html">Wild Oranges</a> had reached theatres a couple of weeks earlier. They finally divorced in 1924.</p>
<p>It’s hard not to like Franz either, in the form of Monte Blue, though the deeper the hole he digs by not telling the wife he adores that her friend is hitting on him, the less sympathy we have. He remains a good guy, but he comes far too close to succumbing to Mitzi’s wiles and a professional doctor who specialises in nervous and hysterical women really ought to be able to match this vamp in a battle of wits. He’s too nice, sure, but that excuse only goes so far.</p>
<p>The fifth wheel in this marriage circle is Dr. Müller, Franz’s business partner, played by the ever-reliable Creighton Hale. He calls to pick up Franz every morning but it’s really just an excuse so he can see Charlotte, for whom he has an intense crush. Another accidental slip with flowers prompts him to believe that she returns his affection and the game is all set.</p>
<p>So, in case you’re not taking notes... Mitzi is married to Josef, who suspects she’s having an affair and wants a divorce, which she doesn’t realise. She has the hots for Franz, married to her friend Charlotte, who doesn’t have a clue. Franz’s business partner, Dr. Müller, aches for Charlotte, while Franz doesn’t suspect a thing. What a tangled web we weave!</p>
<p>And just wait until Franz’s rejection of Mitzi prompts her to escalate things so that she has Charlotte suspect he’s after Pauline Hofer and relies on Mitzi to get between them. I should add that Josef hires a detective to tail Franz in quest of proof of Mitzi’s adultery. Soon, simply calling this web tangled just doesn’t cut it any more and we need entirely new words.</p>
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<p><i>The Marriage Circle</i> was a 1921 play by Lothar Schmidt called <i>Only a Dream</i> that was adapted to the screen by Paul Bern, later to become the right hand man of Irving Thalberg at MGM. He would also be Jean Harlow’s second husband; he supposedly committed suicide two months later but may well have been murdered by his previous partner, sanatorium inmate Dorothy Millette. Tangled webs weren’t only reserved for the movie screen.</p>
<p>I loved this comedy of errors from the early scenes with Menjou doing a great job not only as an actor in a silent film but a mostly silent actor in a silent film. Prevost does all the work but he steals all the moments in subtle facial expressions. He continues to be the happiest character in the film because he believes that he’s about to be able to sue for divorce.</p>
<p>Blue is the unhappiest character in the film, even though he’s happily married to a happily loving wife. Mitzi torments Franz so ruthlessly that he can’t figure out what to do in response and every decision he makes is inevitably the wrong one. My favourite scene is one of his, but it’s with Müller rather than Mitzi, as a few more misconceptions lead to them walking on eggshells around each other for an entire day, each mistakenly expecting the other to think the very worst of them.</p>
<p>Of course, there’s eventually a happy ending and, in fact, quite a few of them, but not one of them is as straightforward as you’re expecting from all this. It’s a funny film built on a funny script and it’s entirely interactive, because we find ourselves shouting at the screen through the vast majority of it.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-23314183889456867592024-01-25T23:21:00.003-07:002024-01-30T00:29:21.456-07:00The Song of Bernadette (1943)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Henry King<br>
Writer: George Seaton, from the novel by Franz Werfel<br>
Stars: William Eythe, Charles Bickford, Vincent Price, Lee J. Cobb, Gladys Cooper and Jennifer Jones</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/the-first-thirty.html">The First Thirty</a>.</p>
<p>After eight pictures in just over three years, Vincent Price took a break from the big screen to bring a play, <i>Gas Light</i>, to Broadway as <i>Angel Street</i>, playing the lead for three years in what was a surprisingly long run for a non-musical.</p>
<p>If not following up with a part in the seven times Oscar nominated American film version in 1944 might seem like a lost opportunity, it’s fair to say that he did pretty well returning in this film, which landed eight nominations and three wins, including Best Actress for a very deserving Jennifer Jones.</p>
<p>It’s another historical film, this one an epic hagiography that lasted two and a half hours, all the better to underline how well Jones was able to endow the lead character with holiness and innocence. It’s very Hollywood innocence, but Jones bolstered the pale and beautiful waif trope with quiet and consistent strength. It’s a bravado performance and it’s easy to buy into what she’s selling.</p>
<p>What she’s selling, of course, is Christianity, in particular, Roman Catholicism, a persistent enemy of Hollywood. The National Legion of Decency, a powerful Catholic lobbyist group, famously warned churchgoers away from long lists of morally depraved films. This is exactly the sort of picture they hoped would be made after the imposition of the Production Code.</p>
<p>It’s the true story of Bernadette Soubirous, the young French peasant girl who saw visions of the Immaculate Conception in the grotto at Massabielle, outside the town of Lourdes, and followed her instructions, one of which was to wash herself in a non-existent spring, which promptly bubbled into existence and proved to have healing powers.</p>
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<p>The picture opens soon before these visions began, so we’re in 1858, around the same time as <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/the-house-of-seven-gables-1940.html">The House of Seven Gables</a> and <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/brigham-young-1940.html">Brigham Young</a>. Bernadette is a poor student, partly due to her suffering from asthma—the film doesn’t touch on her cholera or the fact that she was merely 4’7” tall as a result. She’s studying at a convent school and preparing for her first communion, but apparently doesn’t even know of the Holy Trinity, which prompts Sister Marie-Therese to remove that opportunity.</p>
<p>It’s a stretch, but it does help to make her subsequent stories about the lady she sees at the grotto more believable. She’s simply not a bright enough girl to be able to make up such stories, especially once certain telling details creep in. She also never names the lady, even when pushed to do so to prove blasphemy.</p>
<p>One surprising choice of the filmmakers was to show the lady and on her first appearance too. Throughout the movie, as the audience at Bernadette’s trips to the grotto grows, nobody else sees her, so we would be left to make up our own minds as to what she saw, if anything, except for the fact that the film chooses sides and shows her to us too. That seems to defeat the purpose of the opening line, a quote from the town’s doctor that “For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe in God, no explanation is possible.” Clearly, the film is in the first camp.</p>
<p>Bernadette had fifteen visions and it would be easy for us to expect that the film would be over with the last of them, but instead we find ourselves only at the halfway mark. That gives the film two separate opportunities to explore important subplots that took over for me.</p>
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<p>The first is the reaction of the authorities to these visions, whether those authorities be the civic leaders there in Lourdes or the religious leaders there and further up the chain. While Bernadette wins over the people, especially as the miracles begin, the authorities see her as a clear and present danger, to their town, their way of thinking and their control over others.</p>
<p>Here’s where Vincent Price comes in, as he’s Vital Dutour, the Imperial Prosecutor, one of the most important local authorities. As the railway is coming to Lourdes, he doesn’t want some local peasant girl to throw a spanner in the works. There’s a wonderful verbal chess match of a scene in which he pits experience and education against her innocence and fails.</p>
<p>Mayor Lacade doesn’t fare any better when he tries to outwit Bernadette, though Aubrey Mather plays him as a buffoon in comparison to Price’s cynical and incisive prosecutor. The two plot and scheme and pass the buck and do everything they can, without having any real effect on the people. There’s metaphor there.</p>
<p>The other important local authority is Abbé Dominique Peyramale, parish priest and dean of the convent school. Initially, he sides with his secular counterparts, but gradually finds himself convinced by Bernadette and presses his bishop to open a commission. He’s subtly played by Charles Bickford, who has the most complex role in the film.</p>
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<p>His only competitor is Sister Marie Therese, in the capable form of Gladys Cooper, who sets up the second subplot. She was a harsh nun in class and is harsher as the mistress of novices at the Sisters of Charity of Nevers convent which Bernadette joins, as someone who saw the Immaculate Conception surely had to do. Eventually we realise that she’s merely jealous that Bernadette got the visions instead of her, who had suffered so much, but the girl has an answer for that too, like everything else.</p>
<p>That’s a less satisfying subplot than the one that has Price, Mather and others consistently fail in their every attempt to stop what they’re convinced is a hoax from spinning wildly out of control, but it’s a worthy one and it’s why a film that could easily have ended after eighty minutes runs on for as many again.</p>
<p>This is what it is. It’s a story about faith but it’s not confident enough to let that suffice. It feels that it has to show us proof, as much by making us see the lady too as through various miracles worked. It’s better at showing us the faith of the various characters, some of whom believe immediately, some are persuaded over time and some which never do.</p>
<p>It’s Jones’s movie, pure and simple. She was relatively new but couldn’t have been better. Bickford and Cooper both deserved their Oscar nods for fulfilling a pair of deep roles, but it’s Price, as a dedicated skeptic, who receives the best final scene, suffering from throat cancer and finding himself at the grotto.</p>
<p>So sure, this is Christian propaganda, but it sits as close to an enjoyable textbook for that as Hollywood has made, whether we buy into the religion or not.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-54724106972012115902024-01-22T23:25:00.001-07:002024-01-24T00:44:15.631-07:00Hudson’s Bay (1940)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Irving Pichel<br>
Writer: Lamar Trotti, based on incidents from the life of Pierre Esprit Radisson<br>
Stars: Paul Muni, Gene Tierney, Laird Cregar, John Sutton, Virginia Field, Vincent Price and Nigel Bruce</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/the-first-thirty.html">The First Thirty</a>.</p>
<p>This is an odd movie because it’s Hollywood tackling history again and it feels every bit as inaccurate as ever, but, for the most part, it’s surprisingly accurate. Now, I never met Pierre Esprit Radisson, who died centuries before I’d even become a gleam in my father’s eye, but it feels like Paul Muni’s portrayal is pure fiction. Apparently, it isn’t, though his interpretation can be debated by the historians.</p>
<p>Maybe one reason why the film feels wrong is because it starts out with <i>O Canada</i>, which is a little out of place, given that it’s 1667 and it’s New France. <i>O Canada</i> was written in 1880 and didn’t become Canada’s national anthem until as late as 1980. OK, let’s let that slide and leap headlong into swashbuckler territory!</p>
<p>And yes, that’s how it feels when Paul Muni, as Radisson, and Laird Cregar, as his brother-in-law, Gooseberry, waltz into the government house in Albany. They’re fur trappers and the French governor doesn’t want to know about their plan to trade with the Native Americans around Hudson’s Bay, so they’re coming south to talk with the British. They have no interest either and promptly lock them up.</p>
<p>However, their outrageous French Canadian accents combine with their carefree attitudes and their quickness with fists to set this up as a belated colonial sequel to <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/03/adventures-of-robin-hood-1938.html">The Adventures of Robin Hood</a>. Gooseberry is very Little John and his purloined jail cell key trick is an animated Disney adaptation special.</p>
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<p>Bizarrely, they’re real, but the key character already in the cell into which they’re thrown, who seems like the most believable anywhere in the film, isn’t. That’s John Sutton, appearing in his fourth Vincent Price movie (it was only Price’s eighth), as Lord Edward Crewe, who fell foul of King Charles II and got himself exiled to a New World. However, he still has enough funds left to finance Radisson’s plans and so, a quick escape later, it’s all in motion.</p>
<p>The history moves along like lightning: we escape the cell, paddle a little in the river and boom, we’re at Hudson’s Bay. We talk to some Native Americans and boom, there’s a serious cargo of furs ready to go. They celebrate but a greedy New France governor confiscates their furs—licenses, you see, and fines, based on the laws he passed that morning—but boom, we’re off to London and knocking on Prince Rupert’s door in a flash. Talk about hopping the pond.</p>
<p>Just as we get used to Nigel Bruce playing a cousin to the king of England, we’re shown in to see that very king, Charles II, who’s dancing with his mistress, Nell Gwyn, at a lively revel.</p>
<p>Vincent Price makes for a superb Charles II, highlighting yet again why the studios kept on throwing him into historical roles. He doesn’t sound English but we don’t care. He sounds as if he’s a king, utterly in control of everything but matter of factly rather than arrogantly.</p>
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<p>Virginia Field makes for a decent Nell Gwyn too, I guess, but she has almost nothing to do except whisper in Price’s ear when needed. It’s ridiculous to see her name listed in front of his on the poster, just as it’s ridiculous to see Gene Tierney listed second, as if she’s the romantic lead to Paul Muni. She plays Lady Barbara, the fiancée of Lord Crewe, but she stays behind in England whenever he goes back west, so she’s hardly in the movie.</p>
<p>To be fair, she’s there as often as Price, Field and Bruce, but they’re fairly listed after those actors who actually tell the story. That’s Muni, Cregar and Sutton, all of whom turn into old friends by the time the picture wraps.</p>
<p>I’ve always liked Paul Muni’s versatile work and he would be a great choice for a later First Thirty if only he’d made that many films. This was new to me but I’ve seen seventeen of only twenty-two and I believe that a couple of the others are lost. He was a chameleon and, if I didn’t buy his over the top French Canadian accent, oui oui, I thoroughly enjoyed his role. He plays Radisson as a backwoods genius, not remotely cultured and obviously out of place in society or the boardroom, but still shrewd, incisive and notably forward-looking. He owns this film, pure and simple.</p>
<p>Cregar is a lot of fun as Gooseberry, but he doesn’t have the depth that Radisson has, just the big fists and the huge heart. Sutton has the elegance, but also sells how much he grows in the wilds. He never quite loses his Britishness and his privilege as a lord but he comes close and he’s aided by the introduction of a similar character who fails to lose either.</p>
<p>That’s Gerald Hall, Lady Barbara’s brother, who gets talked into going back with Radisson and the others, with the unspoken assumption that he’s a pain in the ass who needs to learn how to be a real man. Spoiler: he doesn’t.</p>
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<p>It’s fair to say that Morton Lowry is exactly what Gerald Hall needs to be, even if we want to punch him in the face in almost every scene he’s in. That’s much of the point and we cheer when he gets his just desserts. However, we’re also very aware that he has more to do in this film than anyone except the three real leads— Muni, Cregar and Sutton—but doesn’t even get his name onto the poster, while Gene Tierney gets pride of place for a couple of whispers.</p>
<p>The other thing not on the poster that any viewer in 2024 will immediately notice is the preponderence of inappropriate Indian jokes. Sure, this was the late 17th century and we’re dealing with colonialists, with all the privilege that suggests up front and personal, but there are a couple of points where it doesn’t seem to end. To give some credit where it’s due, there is a real Native American, Chief John Big Tree, playing a Native American, which really didn’t happen a lot back in 1940. He was one of three men who posed for James Earle Fraser when he carved the “Indian head” onto what would become known as the “Indian head nickel”.</p>
<p>So there are reasons not to watch this, but there are plenty of reasons to watch it too. It’s a surprising amount of fun, for a start. It keeps moving and never gets boring. It’s not comedy but it’s light-hearted and often raises a smile or a laugh. Muni is fantastic, even with a poor accent. Cregar and Sutton are solid. Price is a wonderful Charles II, stealing a few scenes off Muni but then vanishing from the film again.</p>
<p>And then there’s how much we laugh at the ridiculous history only to read up and find it’s mostly true. Sure, Lord Crewe didn’t exist but Radisson and Gooseberry did and it’s possible that they were every bit as legendary as they are in this picture.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-4323096566596989182024-01-20T23:14:00.001-07:002024-01-21T00:20:47.266-07:00Wild Oranges (1924)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: King Vidor<br>
Writer: King Vidor, based on a story by Joseph Hergesheimer, with titles by Tom Miranda<br>
Stars: Frank Mayo, Virginia Valli, Ford Sterling and Nigel deBrulier</p>
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<p>In 1922, a poll of Literary Digest critics had the “most important American writer” be one Joseph Hergesheimer. Hollywood leapt at his work, this following <i>Java Head</i> and <i>The Bright Shawl</i> in 1923. However, he was known for his descriptive writing rather than plotting and that doesn’t make him an easy writer to adapt.</p>
<p>I’m eager to dive into his descriptions for <i>Wild Oranges</i>, set by a dilapidated plantation house somewhere on the Georgia coast where one scared man and his granddaughter live, plagued by a huge man-child. This is a glorious location to set a descriptive novella, but it’s a difficult job to turn into production design.</p>
<p>However, there’s little else here. Outside of a brief prologue, we spend our entire time at this house or in the water around it to watch only five characters play their parts in a story that we could have written ourselves from the five minute mark.</p>
<p>That’s excluding John Woolfolk’s bride in a brief prologue. These newlyweds are driving a horse-drawn carriage into the new world of married bliss when a newspaper blows across the road and panics the horses. The unnamed Mrs. Woolfolk is thrown from the carriage at a corner and dies immediately. So distraught is her husband that he aims to forget the world by sailing it on his yacht with Paul Halvard, a cook and sailor his only companion. The pulpy title cards by Tom Miranda call it “a haven of solitude upon the vast wastes of the sea.”</p>
<p>We find that out as they’re dropping anchor in this inlet on the Georgian coast, but it looks more like the Island of Dr. Moreau because an array of scared people with faces designed for the movies see them and stare in horror.</p>
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<p>Explanations as to why are sparing. Old man Litchfield Stope, was stricken with fear in the Civil War but we’re given no details, so have to assume whatever PTSD was called back then. His granddaughter Millie is afraid by heredity, clearly ridiculous, especially as her fear comes and goes with the breeze. Iscah Nicholas, that huge man-child who can only make their lives even more fearful, wants Millie and fears any man who might possibly take her away from him. Enter John Woolfolk.</p>
<p>He rows ashore to seek water but eats wild oranges and so meets Millie. They’re likely the title because their immediate bitterness turns into a never-to-be-forgotten flavour, which is clearly meant to fit Millie Stope too. However, the language of the day has changed, thus explaining why Joseph Hergesheimer isn’t a big name today. The title card suggests that wild oranges are pungent, a rather awkward way to describe a new romance.</p>
<p>I didn’t like John Woolfolk much. Sure, he’s a sturdy heroic type, capably played by Frank Mayo, who was much more agreeable in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2023/03/souls-for-sale-1923.html">Souls for Sale</a> the previous year, but he doesn’t want to know about Millie because he only cares to mourn his dead wife. At one point Millie, who fell for him immediately, has the insight to compare him to a cast iron dog that she used to talk to on the lawn but “it just rusted away—cold and indifferent to the last”. It’s also far from easy to sympathise with a man who can afford to sail round the world to hide from it.</p>
<p>He has as little character as Millie and even less growth. OK, they both eventually lose the fear that’s been driving them, but it’s a bigger deal for her. She was born in the house, maybe by immaculate conception because we never see or hear anything about her parents, and has never been anywhere else except on maps in her granddad’s books. Virginia Valli does a fair job, but it’s nothing on her success a year later in Alfred Hitchcock’s debut feature, <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2013/01/the-pleasure-garden-1925.html">The Pleasure Garden</a>, where she was excellent.</p>
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<p>Talking of granddad, Nigel de Brulier, who I note played Shazam in a 1941 Republic serial, <i>Adventures of Captain Marvel</i>, looks amazing in this film, haunted by everything that he sees, but he has almost nothing to do, as he hides from the plot as much as anything else.</p>
<p>It’s the other two actors who steal this film, because they’re both excellent but in utterly different ways.</p>
<p>Ford Sterling is Paul Halvard, who ought to be nothing more than Woolfolk’s servant, who takes care of whatever business he doesn’t do himself, but he does a lot more. Sterling was a comedian, whom I know well from his work at Keystone Studios, where he was the original leader of the Keystone Kops and the star who Charlie Chaplin was hired to replace in 1914.</p>
<p>It shouldn’t shock that there’s occasionally slapstick in what he does, even though this is a drama rather than a comedy. He’s happy to be a little relief from that and the film is better for it. Drama was a big shift for him but it’s hard not to still see him as a comedian, even in serious moments, because every movement he makes hits its mark, as if punchlines would be added in post.</p>
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<p>And, talking of post, Charles A. Post is very good indeed as Iscah Nicholas, who may seem to be a throwaway villain but really has depth when no other character does. He’s a big man, used to getting his way, as we learn when his past is finally revealed, but his confidence is a lot lower than his power. He’s a bully and he’s thrived easily at this house, with the only two people there scared of their own shadows. All he has to say is “Don’t get me started” and the battle is already won, which makes him rather confused when it fails to work on Woolfolk. He actually cries at his own cowardice after that.</p>
<p>It has to be mentioned here that a title card says that he “forced himself” onto the Stopes, which suggests a lot more than we see. We just see him force a peck on the cheek out of Millie by carrying her into the swamp and planting her on a tree stump so the alligators can fight over her while he roars with laughter.</p>
<p>So there’s a lot to Nicholas and he’s half of the best scene in the movie, a shockingly long and brutal fight scene with Woolfolk late in the film. They trade blows like they’re being paid per punch, and grapple, bite and wield illegal foreign objects wherever they can find them, stirring up dust all over the place. They also both look thoroughly beaten by the time the fight ends, though interestingly neither of them technically wins.</p>
<p>And talking of winning, my schedule for this project in 2024 starts out like it’s Germany vs. Hollywood, with four pictures from the former against three from the latter, one directed by a German visitor. Thus far, Germany’s on top by one goal to nil. Let’s see if they improve on that score with <i>Helen of Troy</i> tomorrow.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-80148893096415179372024-01-19T23:18:00.004-07:002024-01-20T14:53:58.673-07:00Brigham Young (1940)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz<br>
Writer: Michael Wilson, from the book by L. C. Moyzisch<br>
Stars: James Mason, Danielle Darrieux and Michael Rennie</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="http://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/04/2017-centennials.html">2017 Centennials</a>.</p>
<p>At what point, I wonder, do spoilers come into play when covering a film based on historical fact? Well, my mindset these days was forged by a theatrical viewing of <a href="http://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2009/06/public-enemies-2009-michael-mann.html">Public Enemies</a>, at which I was shocked at the audible shock of one audience member when Johnny Depp’s character was killed. Yes, that’s public enemy number one John Dillinger, who was shot and killed by special agents in 1934. If American audience members can be blissfully unaware of such a historic American event, are they likely to know much about, say, espionage in Turkey during World War II? Probably not, so I’ll be careful here, though I have to highlight that this film, while based on a memoir, isn’t remotely as true as the ballsy opening scene might suggest. Rather than merely plaster the usual ‘this is a true story’ onto the screen, we’re also placed inside the House of Commons, as an MP asks if the book, <i>Operation Cicero</i>, is factual. The reply? ‘It must be regretfully admitted that, in substance, the story to which the honourable member refers is a true one.’</p>
<p>In a nutshell, this story involved a man selling a substantial amount of British secrets to the Nazis for cash. In reality, his name was Elyesa Bazna, a Turkish man of Albanian descent, who worked as valet to Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the British Ambassador to Turkey. The latter had a habit of taking secret documents home, in a dispatch box, and Bazna’s locksmithing skills allowed him to open this and photograph them. In late 1943, he contacted L. C. Moyzisch at the German Embassy in Ankara, and sold him a first batch of pictures. Given the codename of Cicero, he continued to do this for some months. Eventually the British discovered the leak and investigated, even mounting a sting operation that failed. However, the pressure was mounting and Cicero decided that it was time to quit. He stopped selling information in February 1944 and left the embassy in April. What’s wild is that the Nazis failed to act on any of this important information, not trusting it, and the British failed to catch Bazna.</p>
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<p>In this screen adaptation, written by Michael Wilson, who had won an Oscar a year earlier for co-writing <i>A Place in the Sun</i>, much is kept factual but much is either changed or completely made up. The general result is to take a spy story, steeped in testosterone and greed, and craft from it an elegant tale of espionage, with a stirring Bernard Herrmann score. Generally, the Germans are real, starting with Moyzisch, who wrote <i>Operation Cicero</i> as a memoir of the affair. During World War II, his official position in Ankara, the capital of neutral Turkey, was a ‘commercial attaché’, though it was a cover for his real job as head of the SD, the intelligence agency of the SS and a sister organisation to the Gestapo. That doesn’t gel with this take on the character, delivered by an Austrian actor called Oskar Karlweis, who plays him as a nervous type seemingly incapable of doing what we know he did. This was only his second English language film, his strong career twenty years earlier ended by Nazi occupation. He’s great but he’s not real.</p>
<p>With Moyzisch oddly weak, we clearly need another Nazi to help this story remain believable. It turns out to be Franz von Papen, another real historical figure and a huge one. A favourite of Paul von Hindenburg, the German president during the later years of the Weimar Republic, he served as Chancellor of Germany in 1932 and Vice-Chancellor under Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1934. The Night of the Long Knives, which purged Hitler’s chief political opponents left Papen alive, though he left the government and was sidelined into lesser ambassadorial appointments. At the time of this story, he served as German Ambassador to Turkey. Frankly, I adored the performance of John Wengraf, another Austrian actor forced to flee his homeland after the rise of the Nazis only to be tasked in Hollywood with playing characters he despised the most, such as Nazis. Wengraf plays Papen as the subtle and incisive brain of the German Embassy in Ankara though, in reality, he was an autocratic noble with catastrophic decision making skills.</p>
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<p>If the Nazis are mostly fictionalised versions of real people, massaged into the new story, the British are a step further away from reality. Papen’s opposite number, the British Ambassador to Ankara, is Sir Frederic Taylor, surely much easier to pronounce than Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen. In the hands of Walter Hampden, he’s a decent chap, perhaps a little trusting but far from inept. Everything about dispatch boxes is excised, thus polarising him into the good guy and his valet into the bad guy. That valet has a new name too, Ulysses Diello, and he’s brought to magnificent life by James Mason, who endows him with a suave, eloquent and ultra-confident persona. Mason is fantastic here, though Diello resembles the real Bazna in no way, shape or form. He dominates poor Moyzisch at their first meeting and continues to dominate everyone at every meeting. He’s so smooth that he almost has us buy into him being the hero he is in his own mind, until we step back and think about who he really is, a cruel, greedy sociopath.</p>
<p>Mason does so much here that I’m sure there are little details that I missed and will pick up on a second viewing. He has a subtle way of showing his arrogance when dealing with those he sees as inferior minds, such as his habit of not looking at people when the crux of the conversation is over, focusing instead on more important tasks like carefully putting on his gloves, re-shaping his hat or counting the money he’s raking in from the Nazis. I’ve never seen someone put on gloves so frequently in a movie! There are other moments too, like when he waits in Moyzisch’s office for him to develop the first reels of film. He looks up at the usual large portrait of the Führer but in such a way that it seems more like he’s looking down on him. Yet, when working as a valet, he demonstrates all the deference that is expected from his betters, playing the part of, as he ably describes it at one point ‘the best gentleman’s gentleman’. There are worlds of difference here between getting someone a drink and asking them to get you one.</p>
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<p>His Achilles’ heel is Countess Anna Staviska, a pivotal character here who is placed in between the two sides as both a motive and an opportunity. This character is entirely fictional and her entire subplot is entirely fictional too, surely with the goal of including a female presence to a story that would be otherwise be notably without one. I believe that the only other female character given dialogue is an unnamed cleaning lady who has two lines in an otherwise silent but critical performance late in the film. Therefore it’s down to Danielle Darrieux to represent the entire female gender, something she does with effortless style. ‘More than anyone I’ve ever known,’ Sir Frederic tells Diello, ‘she symbolised the world in which she lived and which she thought would never end, a world of infinite beauty, luxury and indulgence.’ Diello knows this well, having served as valet to her late husband. Clearly, he’s in love both with her and what she represents. She’s a dream to him, but one which now may be accessible.</p>
<p>There’s a world of depth in the relationship between Diello and the Countess. They play many different roles at different points in the story: man and woman, master and servant, noble and peasant, victim and saviour, traitor and accomplice, hope and salvation. These roles change over time, even within single sentences, and the interplay is fascinating to watch, especially given the incisive dialogue and the textbook delivery of Mason and Darrieux. Even though this is complete departure from historical fact, it’s also an incredibly good way to represent what espionage and counter-espionage really are. Regardless of any emotional investment, each character uses the other and they both know that from the outset. Every word therefore becomes a move in a chess game, with all the power plays, sacrifices and endgames the analogy implies, except that the board and its pieces are visible only in the minds of those playing the game. What can you trust? What can’t you trust? Are you visualising the board correctly?</p>
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<p>Anna is the reason why I’m reviewing <i>5 Fingers</i> today, because she’s played by the elegant Danielle Darrieux, a French actress who celebrated her one hundredth birthday today, 1st May, the first of my subjects this year to reach her centennial. Her career is one of the longest on record, the distance in time between her first feature, <i>Le bal</i>, in 1931 at the slight age of thirteen, and, at present, her most recent, <i>Pièce montée</i>, in 2010, being almost eighty years! If we count a short documentary, <i>Tournons ensemble, Mademoiselle Darrieux</i>, then that increases to an incredible eighty-five! Who knows, maybe she’ll make another film in her second century. Most of her pictures were made in her native France, including <i>Mauvaise graine</i>, the directorial debut of Billy Wilder; two awesome films for Max Ophüls, <a href="http://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2009/09/la-ronde-1950.html">La Ronde</a> and <a href="http://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2009/10/madame-de-1953.html">Madame de...</a>; and the multi-award winning modern François Ozon movie, <i>8 femmes</i>. However, she did make a few pictures abroad too, from 1938’s <i>The Rage of Paris</i>, opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., to 1956’s <i>Alexander the Great</i>.</p>
<p>She’s devastating here from her very first scene, at a reception held by a Turkish minister for the diplomatic corps. With the rest of the attendees suffering through an opera singer mangling Wagner, she sits in a side room eating and Franz von Papen pops in to compliment her. She maintains her poise, even as her acerbic dialogue betrays her current stature, far below where it used to be. Her husband, the Count, has passed away, leaving her a widow. Her estates and possessions in Poland, confiscated by the Nazis, are now occupied by Hermann Göring, whom she loathes. She only eats nowadays when she’s invited to a dinner, such as this one. Her delivery is superb. Papen asks why she left Warsaw. ‘Bombs were falling,’ she replies. ‘I felt I was in the way.’ What about her friends? ‘I have no friends and those who want to be, frankly, cannot afford it.’ As Moyzisch stares at her, after summoning Papen, she comments, ‘Herr Moyzisch, please do not look at me as if you had a source of income other than your salary.’</p>
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<p>It isn’t merely Countess Staviska’s dialogue that is exquisite and it’s hardly surprising to discover that Michael Wilson won both a Golden Globe and an Edgar for his script. He was nominated for an Oscar too, which would have made two in a row, but he lost to Charles Schnee for <i>The Bad and the Beautiful</i>. He would win a second Oscar, for 1958’s <i>The Bridge on the River Kwai</i>, but as he and Carl Foreman, his co-writer, were blacklisted by Hollywood at the time, they didn’t actually receive their awards until 1984. Officially, the award was given to Pierre Boulle, who had written the source novel, even though he spoke no English. This ridiculous state of affairs was routine in the fifties. Dalton Trumbo won twice, for <a href="http://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/04/roman-holiday-1953.html">Roman Holiday</a> and <i>The Brave One</i>, even though he was blacklisted; a front took one award, a pseudonym the other. Nedrick Young, also blacklisted, also won twice, for co-writing <i>The Defiant Ones</i> and <i>Inherit the Wind</i>, each time through a pseudonym. Of course, none of them could attend the ceremony.</p>
<p>There are so many great lines that it’s tough to pick favourites. Anna rumbles an undercover Nazi with a left-handed compliment: ‘How charmingly you Swiss click your heels. An old Swiss custom?’ She may get the most, but others aren’t left out. ‘The source of your money has never concerned you any more than the source of your electric light,’ Diello suggests to her. ‘They only become worrisome when they were shut off.’ Papen often eloquently skewers his Nazi superiors, describing them as ‘half-witted paranoid gangsters’ or ‘a government of juvenile delinquents.’ The Japanese ambassador calls him ‘the only unpredictable German I’ve ever met.’ A British agent describes Istanbul: ‘This city was created by Allah primarily for the concealment of spies.’ Many lines go to a character I haven’t mentioned yet, Colin Travers, who’s sent from London to Ankara to investigate the possibility that a German spy exists within the British Embassy. At one point he mentions that ‘Counter-espionage is the highest form of gossip.’</p>
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<p>Perhaps my favourite is when Travers, in the recognisable combination of jovial exterior and utterly serious interior that sums up Michael Rennie, lays politely into Diello. ‘You’re the most cold-blooded thief, traitor and criminal I’ve seen in a lifetime of looking at human trash,’ he tells him. ‘What a pity,’ Diello replies. ‘I rather hoped I’d look like a gentleman.’ That’s a great line and a better response, but it also ably sums up their characters. In reality, Elyesa Bazna sold secrets for the basest of motives: money. Diello, his fictional counterpart, is far more complex and so much of what he does boils down to the fact that he loves the Countess, who is of a different class and moving between classes is nigh on impossible. He yearns to be her social equal and that bandying for position is highlighted by who can ask whom to make the drinks at any particular point in time. Diello serves gentlemen as a valet, but his ego is large enough to position himself above them, even as their status makes that unthinkable. Mason enjoys this depth.</p>
<p>It’s a shame that <i>5 Fingers</i> isn’t well known today. Perhaps part of that is the odd title, which is never mentioned anywhere within the film. The memoir upon which it was based was more prosaically named <i>Operation Cicero</i>, but someone saw a reason to change it and I wonder why. The closest explanation we have is exhibited on the movie’s poster, on which each finger on the silhouette of a hand is labelled; these five fingers reveal ‘lust’, ‘greed’, ‘passion’, ‘desire’ and ‘sin’. That’s pretty loose, as explanations go, but it’ll serve, I guess. Perhaps the centennial of Danielle Darrieux, who acted for many great French directors, from Maurice Tourneur to François Ozon via Max Ophüls, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Demy (for whom she was the only actress to sing her own songs), will focus some attention back onto it. After all, she only made a few pictures outside France and this could well be the best of them. It certainly deserves much more attention than any of the others.</p>
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<p>I’ve seen far too few of her French films, but those that I have are fantastic. I particularly enjoyed a pair of features for Ophüls: <a href="http://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2009/09/la-ronde-1950.html">La Ronde</a>, with Anton Walbrook and an opening shot which is a legendary feat of ambitious choreography, and <a href="http://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2009/10/madame-de-1953.html">The Earrings of Madame de...</a>, with Charles Boyer. She also appeared in a third, in one of the three stories on the theme of pleasure in, well, <i>Le plaisir</i>. Even though I’m hardly a fan of musicals, I thoroughly enjoyed Jacques Demy’s <i>The Umbrellas of Cherbourg</i>, so should check out another of his most famous films, <i>The Young Girls of Rochefort</i>, with Darrieux in support of Catherine Deneuve and George Chakiris. Others I feel I should track down include a British film, <i>The Greengage Summer</i>, a mystery surrounding the French Resistance entitled <i>Marie-Octobre</i> and the film that launched her stardom, a period piece called <i>Mayerling</i>, again opposite Charles Boyer. More recently, one film that’s racked up awards is <i>8 Women</i> by François Ozon. French film is a rabbit hole and Darrieux can be found everywhere in it.Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-22037220657008108532024-01-17T23:36:00.002-07:002024-01-19T00:35:26.796-07:00The House of the Seven Gables (1940)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Joe May<br>
Writer: Harold Greene, based on a story by Lester Cole, in turn based on the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne<br>
Stars: George Sanders, Margaret Lindsey, Vincent Price, Dick Foran, Nan Grey, Cecil Kellaway and Alan Napier</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/the-first-thirty.html">The First Thirty</a>.</p>
<p>Universal continued to try out new genres for Vincent Price. From comedy to historical, from sci-fi horror to jungle adventure, here’s a gothic drama loosely based on the classic 1851 novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I’ve seen this before and relatively recently, but I found that I liked it more on a second viewing.</p>
<p>It changes the book, but it’s closer than the average Hollywood adaptation and adheres to its spirit. The two largest changes are a shift from revelatory flashbacks to a chronological approach that fits a ninety minute feature and a new romantic angle between two of the lead characters, which works surprisingly well.</p>
<p>The former means that we learn the history behind the Pyncheons from moment one. Back in the 17th century, Col. Jaffrey Pyncheon, an important colonial government leader, stole the land of Matthew Maule by accusing him of witchcraft. He’s hanged, of course, but curses Pyncheon, who’s found dead in the mansion he builds on Maule’s land, a day after moving in. Maule’s curse continues down the years.</p>
<p>Fast forward to the 19th century and Seven Gables is still in the Pyncheon family. Now it’s the colonel’s great-grandson Gerald who rules the roost, with three more Pyncheons present: his two sons, Jaffrey and Clifford, and a cousin of theirs, Hepzibah.</p>
<p>This new Jaffrey, to whom George Sanders is able to endow a suitably slimy demeanour, is starting his career as a lawyer. Clifford, whom Price initially plays in a very light manner, is a budding composer very much in love with his cousin, who, in the form of Margaret Lindsey, happily returns all his affections. This is a new romantic angle, because Clifford and Hepzibah were brother and sister in the book.</p>
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<p>What really matters in the story is that this family landscape ought to be promising but it isn’t because they cannot forget the past.</p>
<p>Part of that is because legends suggest that Seven Gables holds secrets. Treasure may be hidden within its walls and a land deed signed by Charles II that gifts a large chunk of Maine to the family, may be there too. What’s crucial here is that Jaffrey believes these legends and aches to find these hidden riches. Clifford and Hepzibah don’t and, when it becomes clear to them that Gerald and Jaffrey have lost enough money to make staying there non-viable, they plan to sell the house immediately.</p>
<p>The larger part is the greed of Jaffrey, both the one in the past, which prompted the curse of Matthew Maule, and the one in the present, which sends Clifford to prison.</p>
<p>Oh yeah! Jaffrey is livid about the idea that the house containing a hidden fortune that he can spend might be sold, depriving him of his family’s legacy. So he persuades his father to throw Clifford out. Naturally they argue and in a manner loud enough to prompt attention in the neighbourhood. Which is why, when his father collapses and bashes his head on a desk, dying immediately, and when Jaffrey walks in and cries “Murderer!”, everyone believes that Clifford must have done it. He’s found guilty in a heartbeat. The jury doesn’t even retire.</p>
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<p>And so everything changes. Jaffrey rubs his grubby little hands in glee, but is floored when Mr. Barton, the family lawyer, points out that Hepzibah doesn’t just get an allowance from a good insurance policy but the house too. She’s actually leaving when the news arrives, so she slams the door on Jaffrey’s face and closes the entire house up. For decades.</p>
<p>Fast forward again and everyone’s older but things are about to change once more. A new prisoner is thrown into Clifford’s cell, only for ten days for pushing abolitionism but enough for the two to introduce each other. Hepzibah puts a room to let sign up and that prisoner is the tenant who moves in, using another name. There’s a further change too. A new Pyncheon will be coming to stay: a distant relative called Phoebe whose father has died. Hepzibah opens a cent store downstairs, to which Jaffrey, now a powerful judge, objects vehemently. And...</p>
<p>Well, you’ll need to watch yourself to figure out where we’re going from here, especially as the film doesn’t have quite the same ending as the book, but again it’s close.</p>
<p>I liked this immediately on my first viewing. Having watched Price in a couple of historical dramas set in England, it was refreshing to see him in one set in his own country. Also, after <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/green-hell-1940.html">Green Hell</a>, it was clear that both Sanders and Price benefitted from the period setting. Both their enunciations deserve dialogue like this, even when it uses simple words. “You go too far, sir!” Sanders states. “I’ll go further!” Price responds. Both are delicious and, given their unmistakable voices, you can hear them recite those lines in your heads right now.</p>
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<p>For some reason, I initially felt that the film slowed down when Clifford is sent to prison, a view I didn’t maintain on a second viewing. I’d perhaps responded to the change of mood, the powerfully subdued midsection clashing with the vibrant earlier scenes and indeed vibrant later ones, once Phoebe arrives, in the lovely form of Nan Grey, appearing in her third film in a row alongside Price, after <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/tower-of-london-1939.html">Tower of London</a> and <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/the-invisible-man-returns-1940.html">The Invisible Man Returns</a>. I’m going to miss her in future Price films, but she retired from acting in 1941, even before she settled down in 1950 to be Mrs. Frankie Laine.</p>
<p>The whole cast is impeccable. Sanders has a bluster that works perfectly as Jaffrey. Price is more nuanced as Clifford, moving from a light touch to a heavy one after his conviction. It’s fair to say that Sanders is the star here but it’s Price’s show early on and, when he’s relegated to a cell, it becomes Lindsay’s film, shifting in tone with the picture from carefree to austere, dressed in black rather than white, signalling that we’re unmistakably in a gothic now.</p>
<p>In support, Nan Grey is a breath of fresh air, almost literally given how long Seven Gables has been shuttered; Cecil Kellaway, so good in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/the-invisible-man-returns-1940.html">The Invisible Man Returns</a>, is excellent here too as the family lawyer, Philip Barton. There are few other characters with much screen time because it’s such a focused story, but I’d praise the sets and the writing too. Oddly, it was the score that landed the film’s only Oscar nod, but there were a rather excessive seventeen nominations in 1941. <i>Pinnochio</i> won.</p>
<p>And so Price shone in another genre, but a genre that’s horror adjacent. Surely next...</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-78294856030197737512024-01-16T23:29:00.026-07:002024-01-17T01:18:05.575-07:00The Brute (1953)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Luis Buñuel<br>
Writers: Luis Alcoriza and Luis Buñuel, based on a story by Luis Buñuel<br>
Stars: Pedro Armendáriz, Katy Jurado, Rosita Arenas and Andrés Soler</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/2024-centennials.html">2024 Centennials</a>.</p>
<p>Any opportunity I can get to watch a Luis Buñuel movie I’ll happily take and here’s one from his Mexican period that’s new to me. I know his early work as a surrealist, working with Salvador Dalí on films like <i>Un Chien Andalou</i>—yes, the one with the eyeball slice—and much of his later award-winning work, including <i>The Exterminating Angel</i> which I absolutely adore. However, it’s his mid-period work in Mexico that I tend to appreciate most, especially his exquisitely written melodramas that somehow avoid those scenes we all know were written specifically to win awards for actors. This may not have the depth of <i>Los Olvidados</i>, but it’s a tough story with some highly memorable characters, not only El Bruto himself, played by Pedro Armendáriz, one of the pivotal Latino actors of any country in the forties and fifties; but also Andrés Soler, one of the great Mexican actors from the era; and our first centenarian for 2024, Katy Jurado, who plays a real piece of work here who is responsible for most of what happens in the film.</p>
<p>She may not be responsible for the initial plot device, which is a landlord telling the tenants of a block of flats he owns that they’re all being evicted. He’s Andrés Cabrera, clearly a well off gentleman but one eager to get the 150,000 pesos he’s been offered for the land the flats sit on, which doesn’t make the news any easier for his tenants. Times are hard, not so much that they can’t pay their rent but enough that they struggle to make ends meet otherwise, the diet being whatever they can afford and their health affected by whether they can pay for medicine or not. So they resist, a quartet of brave tenants speaking for them all when they dismiss the eviction notice and say that they’ll fight to stay. Given that the movie is called <i>The Brute</i>, it’s not hard to see that them standing up for their rights or even just what they perceive might be their rights will be dangerous. Señor Cabrera gives them twenty days. It’s pretty clear that they’ll ignore it.</p>
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<p>She’s certainly responsible for what happens next, because she’s the one who suggests a serious response to their effrontery. She’s Paloma, who’s Señor Cabrera’s trophy wife, beautiful and much younger than he is. Katy Jurado was born in 1924, of course, so she was twenty-eight when this was shot in 1952, but Andrés Soler was born in 1898, making him almost twice her age. We first see her taking care of housework and we never see them go anywhere you might expect a husband to take his trophy wife, so it’s not hard to imagine how frustrated she must be with the life she’s married into, however opulent it might seem to the tenants facing being thrown out onto the street. Not only does she raise that serious response, which is a brutal suggestion to come from a wife, but she even phrases it in such a way that personalises it. Who can help him? Surely he knows someone who can deliver a serious response in whatever form her husband might decide upon now that the seed has been planted in his mind.</p>
<p>And, of course, he does. He knows El Bruto, a powerfully built young man who works at a slaughterhouse. We learn later in the film that El Bruto’s real name is Pedro and Cabrera was like a father to him growing up because Pedro’s mother was his maid. However, he clearly sees this young man as a tool to be used rather than a son to be loved. Then again, Pedro has no ambition, content to let life happen to him, which is why he’s living with a girl, inevitably called Maria, and her family of annoying hangers on: her brother is a demanding scrounger, her mother is a demanding hypochondriac and her uncle is a demanding invalid. When Cabrera has him make his eviction problem go away by taking on the four troublemakers, starting with Señor Carmelo, he also tells him to leave his girl to live in a storage room at his butcher’s shop and leave the slaughterhouse too to work in that shop alongside Paloma, who’s a capable trophy wife. And he does, just like that. One chapter in life closed and another opened. No big deal.</p>
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<p>The initial scenes between Armendáriz and Jurado are fantastic, starting the moment she lets him in through the front door. She’s impressed immediately, even before she realises how strong he is and then she’s even more impressed. They’re well matched, both as actors and as characters, Paloma’s acerbic tongue and fearlessness a fair counter to Bruto’s imposing physicality. Naturally, he’s bigger and tougher, but she’s brighter and more strategic. Of course, she’s tough too. Not only does she feel free to speak her mind without filters and constantly belittle him while also flirting outrageously with him, but she escalates that in his room, sniffing her way up his chest and even biting it, only to then reject him when he responds exactly how we might expect. While we would never mess with someone called El Bruto just on principle, we clearly shouldn’t mess with Paloma either, because we’d likely end up in an equally problematic place, merely a different one.</p>
<p>The first man who does mess with one of these two characters is Señor Carmelo, after Bruto tracks him down on the street. He will not be threatened, he says, so Bruto punches him, just once, but that puts him down hard; we soon discover that, when neighbours carry him home, he was vomiting blood and he dies soon afterwards. Pedro also intimidates a lady carrying a baby, threatening to throw it against a wall if she doesn’t leave. Those are powerful messages and that lady promptly packs her bags. This picture isn’t a western, so the poor intimidated locals don’t pool their meagre resources to hire a gunslinger to take care of their battle for them, as we’ve seen a thousand times; they do it themselves by ganging up on Pedro on the street. One of them saw him in the butcher’s shop, so they gather their weapons and follow him and suddenly we’re in a beautifully shot film noir, as Pedro runs through what appears to be a lumber mill, these scenes claustrophobic and cleverly lit.
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<p>There’s one primary character left to introduce and that’s the lady whose back yard he hides in and whose chicken he kills to stop it giving him away. She’s Meche Carmelo, played by a relative newcomer, Rosita Arenas, and that surname means exactly what you think it does. What’s interesting to me is that I know Armendáriz and Jurado, both Mexican actors, for their American pictures, but Arenas, who was Venezuelan, for her Mexican films, albeit for later exploitation movies like the <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2011/03/attack-of-aztec-mummy-1957.html">Aztec Mummy</a> trilogy. She’s a young and beautiful lady here but Meche is also quiet and innocent, not only because she’s mourning her father, so it’s not surprising that Pedro falls in love with her. Given that Paloma has fallen in lust with him, you can absolutely see where we’re going and, yes we do, merely with an agreeable level of viciousness that Katy Jurado was able to utterly nail. I thoroughly appreciated that these two are flipped from our expectations. Bruto is exactly that but he becomes sympathetic. Paloma, for all her beauty, is the real beast here.</p>
<p><i>El bruto</i> is part of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, as indeed was Los Olvidados and many of Buñuel’s other Mexican films, but it’s a late entry. While we might think of Hollywood as a dominant force in cinema across the globe, it’s never had a monopoly and the American film output, especially during the years of the Production Code from 1934 to the late sixties, was notable for restrictions placed upon it. For more substantial films that tackled difficult issues or simply featured, as this did, lead characters who were not clearly good or bad and both won and lost the day, filmgoers needed the cinemas of other countries. Mexico had made substantial films ever since the advent of sound and very possibly before it, but its proximity to Hollywood meant that filmmakers had easy paths to learn and the shift in Europe in the thirties towards a war footing meant that there was a sizeable gap in Spanish language cinema that it could fill and filmmakers like Buñuel looking for a home. And so began its Golden Age in 1936, with <i>Allá en el Rancho Grande</i>.</p>
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<p>Pedro Armendáriz was a good part of that, with a string of movies for director Emilio Fernández, most notably <i>María Candelaria</i> and <i>The Pearl</i>. The former came out in 1943 with Armendáriz and Dolores del Río the leads in the first Mexican picture to be screened at Cannes, where it won a Grand Prix, the award now known as the Palme d’Or. The latter was released in 1947, based on a novella by John Steinbeck and co-produced by RKO, with Armendáriz and María Elena Marqués co-stars in the first Spanish language movie to win a Golden Globe, for cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. By the time he made <i>The Brute</i>, Armendáriz had even crossed the border to appear in Hollywood films, invited by no less a name than John Ford, for whom he made <i>The Fugitive</i>, <i>Fort Apache</i> and <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2007/05/3-godfathers-1948-john-ford.html">3 Godfathers</a>, in the latter as one of the titular characters alongside John Wayne and Harry Carey, Jr. His last role was in <i>From Russia with Love</i>, the James Bond film, but he was so ill that his final scenes saw him doubled by director Terence Young.</p>
<p>Katy Jurado, born a hundred years ago today, was also part of that but less so, because she debuted in 1943 and spent a good part of the golden age in Hollywood. Notably, even though she was the first Latina actress to win a Golden Globe, for 1952’s <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/02/high-noon-1952.html">High Noon</a>, and the first to be nominated for an Oscar, for 1954’s <i>Broken Lance</i>, she refused to sign a long term contract with a Hollywood studio, so that she could continue to make films in Mexico. She foresaw, rather astutely, that any Hollywood career that she could get would likely include plenty of stereotypical roles and she didn’t want to become known for that or indeed for any one thing. So she made films in the States and she made films in Mexico and she’s accordingly remembered today for a dramatic range rather than for any particular type of role, rather unlike her predecessors, Dolores del Río and Lupe Vélez. Of course, she did live up to one stereotype, namely her fiery temper and passion, so she’s also remembered for plenty off screen too.</p>
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<p>She was born María Cristina Estela Marcela Jurado García in Mexico City, though her family always called her Katy, so Katy Jurado was an easy stage name when she took to acting. Her father, Luis Jurado Ochoa, was a lawyer and cattle rancher who owned orange groves. Her mother, Vicenta García, was an opera singer, working for the radio station XEW, the oldest such in Latin America. Her godfather, an important role in Mexican culture, was, drum roll please, Pedro Armendáriz. If that might suggest a comfortable life, it did and I should add that her cousin, Emilio Portes Gil, had been the Mexican President from 1928 to 1930. However, the Mexican Revolution prompted the loss of much of their fortune, so while she started out in life much more fortunate than most characters in <i>El bruto</i>, she still had to work for a living. She planned to study to be a lawyer but accepted an invitation to work in film, against the wishes of her family, by signing her first contract without their authorisation, presumably by forging their signatures.</p>
<p>Her debut was in <i>No matarás</i> in 1943, not as a lead but high up the credits list, and she consolidated on that with sixteen more films in the forties, before expanding her reach in the fifties when Budd Boetticher and John Wayne saw her at a bullfight. I should point out here that, in addition to her prolific screen work, she moonlighted by penning movie columns, reporting on radio and writing critiques of bullfights. Boetticher was a professional bullfighter himself and cast her in his film <i>Bullfighter and the Lady</i>, with Gilbert Roland. As she couldn’t speak English, she learned her lines phonetically, as Peter Lorre had famously done when escaping Europe to work for Hitchcock in England. She clearly did well, because that led her to be cast in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/02/high-noon-1952.html">High Noon</a>, at which point she took lessons. As the saloon owner Helen Ramírez, also a former lover of the film’s hero, Will Kane—allegedly so named because she couldn’t say Will Doane—she had a juicy part and she made the most of it, making a future career in Hollywood secure.</p>
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<p>For a while, Hollywood mostly cast her in westerns—remember what she thought about typecasting?—but they were decent ones. She acted opposite Rod Cameron in <i>San Antone</i>; Charlton Heston in <i>Arrowhead</i>, albeit in redface as a Comanche; and Spencer Tracy in <i>Broken Lance</i>, the film that won her a Golden Globe. However, she also made films in Mexico, including this one, which won her a Silver Ariel Award, the Mexican equivalent to the Oscars; and <i>Tehuantepec</i>, in which she was top billed. I know her mostly from her later westerns, like <i>Man from Del Rio</i>, with Anthony Quinn, who was also Mexican; <i>The Badlanders</i> with Alan Ladd and the man who she married soon afterwards, Ernest Borgnine; and Sam Peckinpah’s <i>Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid</i>. In between was another western I don’t believe I’ve seen but will catch up with in June, when I review <i>One-Eyed Jacks</i> for another 2024 centenarian, one with whom Jurado had affairs during both his and her marriages, Marlon Brando.</p>
<p>And that’s part of why she’s also remembered for her off screen life as much as her on screen work. She married her first husband in 1939 when she was only fifteen. He was an actor, Victor Velázquez, the marriage likely to have been a strategic move worthy of Paloma in <i>El bruto</i>, helping her to evade the restrictions her traditional family had imposed upon her and to help her into film. The marriage was over by the time she made it onto the screen in 1943, at nineteen, but he was the father of her two children. She met Borgnine when he was filming Vera Cruz in Mexico in 1954 and she’s called the five years of their courtship the happiest of her life, but they married in 1959 and it all went horribly wrong, often making newspaper headlines. They divorced in 1963, Jurado citing extreme cruelty. Other men included director Budd Boetticher, actor Tyrone Power and novelist Louis L’Amour, but it was Marlon Brando who was the true connection, from all accounts. Later in life she described their relationship as a “loving friendship”.</p>
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<p>While her life took over from her work more than once and most notably in 1981 when her son, Victor Hugo, died in a car accident near Monterrey, sending her into a deep depression that prompted her to quit acting for some time, she did keep working and her screen presence continued to be felt, especially in Mexico. Her first Ariel was for this picture but she would win three more, two of them competitive, over the next four decades. Her second win came twenty years after her first, for an anthology film, <i>Fe, esperanza y caridad</i>, or <i>Faith, Hope and Charity</i>; her role led the <i>Charity</i> section. After a nomination in 1982 for <i>Seduction</i>, the Academia Mexicana de Cine awarded her a Special Golden Ariel for lifetime achievement, as a Mexican and international actress. That was in 1997, two years before her final win, a Silver Ariel as a supporting actress for <i>El evangelio de las maravillas</i>, or <i>Divine</i>. She was likely already sick at that point and died three years later at 78, at home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, remembered for far more than stereotypical roles.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-80000199977574021292024-01-14T23:26:00.000-07:002024-01-14T23:26:15.986-07:00Green Hell (1940)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: James Whale<br>
Writer: Frances Marion<br>
Stars: Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joan Bennett, John Howard, Alan Hale, George Bancroft, Vincent Price, Gene Garrick and George Sanders</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/the-first-thirty.html">The First Thirty</a>.</p>
<p>I had no idea what <i>Green Hell</i> was going into it, except that I thought it was a war movie. It isn’t. It’s a jungle adventure yarn, set in South America, and the names behind it bode well. It isn’t just the stars, with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. top billed, Joan Bennett as the female lead and George Sanders listed separately. It’s also the crew: James Whale as director, flying solo for the last time; Frances Marion as writer, with a pair of Oscar wins behind her; and Karl Freund as cinematographer, my favourite such from the classic era.</p>
<p>The bad news is that it’s really not the best work of anyone involved. On the other hand, the good news is that it’s not without its joys, especially early on.</p>
<p>Vincent Price actually starts us off, as David Richardson, clad in a white suit and in search of Dr. Loren in a crowded South American bar. That’s Alan Hale and he’s got Forrester there with him too, a total lech in the able form of George Sanders. They’re putting an expedition together to seek Incan treasure in the jungle. Outside, in a vain attempt to fight off flower girls, is expedition leader Keith Brandon, in the able form of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.</p>
<p>It’ll take a year, maybe two, but Richardson says that he has nobody, even if he makes sure to bid someone farewell before leaving, telling them that he loves them. This seems odd but it becomes odder when they start up a river and he asks a colleague if it’s possible to love two women simultaneously, think yourself faithful to each and yet still ache to be free.</p>
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<p>We’ll learn what that’s all about later, after he’s shot by poison-tipped arrows and dies. It isn’t the longest part for Price, but he has a lot to do while it’s there and he does all of it well. Even after he’s gone, his presence hangs on in the form of Joan Bennett, who shows up just a little late to be with him. It’s through her that we learn the rest of his story.</p>
<p>Of course, they found the Incan ruins long before Richardson dies, though we have little idea of how long it took because the passage of time is difficult to track here. We can see what Marion, one of the most important writers of her day, could do everywhere, in themes and setups and characters like Richardson, but it’s also obvious that she’s having to shoehorn her talents into a pretty clichéd adventure story.</p>
<p>So we meet the good natives, one of whom is a friend who speaks broken English, Gracco, played by Francis McDonald, native of Bowling Green, Kentucky, who was fortunately always reliable even when tasked with an idiotic job like trying to be believable as a topless Incan guide with bones round his neck. And we meet the bad natives, who are headhunters.</p>
<p>We also spend time in the Incan ruins with lots of cool architecture, statues and carvings. And secret subterranean passages. And, if the place delivers, a burial chamber full of gold as well. Oh, and there’s an evil spirit haunting the temple too, which may or may not account for the natives gradually vanishing.</p>
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<p>And we get a love triangle so complex that it warrants an entirely new name. That kicks off as soon as Joan Bennett, sister of Constance Bennett from <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/service-de-luxe-1938.html">Service de Luxe</a>, arrives in camp. She’s Mrs. Richardson, but Mr. Richardson is at death’s door and doesn’t last much longer.</p>
<p>Even if he had, Forrester would still have been pursuing her with abandon, if he could keep finding new orchids to give her, though maybe the more morally conscious expedition leader wouldn’t. Stephanie Richardson had to have felt like the rope in a tug of war, with the other sex-starved men present ready to throw themselves at her too if only she would flutter her eyelashes their way.</p>
<p>We even get a finalé that features a storm, a gunfight and a gunfight in a storm. Every film made by classic era Hollywood either featured a storm in its finalé or got by ignoring a studio executive who thought that it should.</p>
<p>What’s odd, given how good all these actors are, is that Price, who gets less time than most of them, ended up with the deepest role. David Richardson is the first character we see and he gets the most complex setup, with a real sense of mystery about who he is, what drives him and who might fall out of his history.</p>
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<p>I wonder what was going through the mind of the studio casting department. They clearly hadn’t worked out how to cast Price in 1940, as they’d made him a romantic lead in a comedy, shifted him into historical drama, moved that into horror and tried out pulp adventure here. Next up would be a gothic, then more history and eventually a huge film noir.</p>
I don’t want to spoil where his First Thirty takes him, because I haven’t seen every one of these films before and I’m eager to see how he grows through it, but <p>I simply can’t forget that he’s rightfully best known as a horror icon and that didn’t truly get acknowledged until <i>House of Wax</i> in 1953, too late to fit in his First Thirty.</p>
<p>While <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/tower-of-london-1939.html">Tower of London</a> was arguably a horror movie, he didn’t have a horror part in it, and I guess we could look at <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/the-invisible-man-returns-1940.html">The Invisible Man Returns</a> as much as science fiction as horror, but he’d flirted with the genre. He was just too good in everything else as well for the studio to know that was where they should have taken him, I guess. What a tough problem to have!</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-63748723433374654542024-01-11T23:31:00.001-07:002024-01-11T23:31:47.951-07:00The Invisible Man Returns (1940)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Joe May<br>
Writers: Lester Cole and Kurt Siodmak, from a story by Joe May and Kurt Siodmak, a sequel to <i>The Invisible Man</i> by H. G. Wells<br>
Stars: Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Vincent Price, Nan Grey, John Sutton, Cecil Kellaway and John Napier</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/the-first-thirty.html">The First Thirty</a>.</p>
<p>I thought I’d seen all the original Universal horror movies, but this may be an exception. It’s also a lot better than I expected it to be, in most part due to an intelligent script by Curt Siodmak, going by Kurt here. He had written a number of scripts back in Germany, including Menschen am Sonntag, but would become more known for his horror movies, such as <i>The Wolf Man</i>, <i>I Walked with a Zombie</i> and <i>Donovan’s Brain</i>, the latter of which was based on his novel.</p>
<p>For a start, he didn’t let us see the Invisible Man too quickly. And yes, that’s a pun. It’s not the only one you’ll read because the picture is full of them. But we hear much about Geoffrey Radcliffe before he shows up.</p>
<p>Initially, he’s on death row, two hours away from being executed for murder. He’s visited by Dr. Frank Griffin, brother to Claude Rains’s character in <i>The Invisible Man</i>, here named as John Griffin. And, when the officials come for him, he’s gone. There were two guards in the room and Geoffrey talked with them after the doctor had left. Then he walked round the cell and disappeared. His clothes are right there on the floor.</p>
<p>Of course, we know what happened, so we’ll not be shocked when we see the effects of an invisible man walking into the woods to dress from a deliberately placed suitcase. We know his presence by now.</p>
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<p>Crucially, though, we’re not alone. Inspector Sampson of Scotland Yard also knows exactly what happened, because he has John Griffin’s file. He knows about the invisibility serum, its effects and the fact that it sent the man mad. Surely, he thinks, in nine years (even though the original film came seven years earlier), his brother must have perfected it and addressed the insanity aspect. And, critically, he knows even at this point that Geoffrey will become visible in smoke or rain.</p>
<p>Nobody else has a clue, so they’ll just shoot him on sight. Ha! See what I mean about puns?</p>
<p>Geoffrey shows up in the form we expect at the sixteen and a half minute mark, wrapped in bandages and wearing heavy glasses. That’s Vincent Price’s memorable voice though. He’s not much to look at anyway, he tells Helen.</p>
<p>And here I’ll introduce you to the cast with whom we’ve spent quite some time already. A bunch are immediately recognisable from the few films Price had done already, so narrowly did Universal cast at this point.</p>
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<p>Nan Grey, who had played Lady Alice Barton in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/tower-of-london-1939.html">Tower of London</a> is Helen Manson, Geoffrey’s fiancée. She’s even lovelier here, even if she’s given a little less to do. She’d be back for <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i> later in 1940.</p>
<p>John Sutton, her wannabe fiancée in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/tower-of-london-1939.html">Tower of London</a>, John Wyatt, and also Capt. Armand in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2007/08/private-lives-of-elizabeth-and-essex.html">The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex</a>, is back again as Dr. Frank Griffin. He’s a crucial part of this story, but he underplays it where he could be accused of overdoing it last time out.</p>
<p>There are two prominent new faces. There’s Cecil Kellaway, who would also be back for <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i>, as Insp. Sampson. He’s a gem here: very knowledgeable, very patient and very careful. There’s Sir Cedric Hardwicke too, as the other guy, so making the eventual revelation of the villain moot, given that he’s the only viable possibility. He’s Richard Cobb and he’s very attentive to young Helen.</p>
<p>Price handles this role well, confident that, even this early in his career, his fans will know who he is from his voice, so he resists pulling a Stallone by showing his face, at least until the very end of the film when it’s appropriate.</p>
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<p>Of course, we recognise his voice too, but he doesn’t seem to have quite as much relish in delivery as he would come to have. Except he does as the film builds. An hour in when he’s arguing with Griffin, there’s all the relish. It’s a solid indicator of how insane he’s getting.</p>
<p>And he worries about this, even as it comes to pass. Griffin’s brother went famously mad when he was an invisible man and Geoffrey doesn’t want to follow suit. He even has Griffin swear that he will stop him if he starts to show signs of madness, not that he accepts it when it happens, of course.</p>
<p>All this helps make him a very sympathetic character, as indeed does the belief of most of those who work at his colliery that he wasn’t guilty of the crime of which he was accused. The only notable exception is Alan Napier as Willie Spears, a lazy night watchman.</p>
<p>Of course, you want to know about special effects. They were pioneering in <i>The Invisible Man</i> in 1933, but they’re better still here, as of course they should have been. John P. Fulton earned an Academy Award nomination, which oddly included his colleagues for sound, as did the thirteen other nominees. They all lost to Lawrence W. Butler for <i>The Thief of Bagdad</i> (and its sound guys).</p>
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<p>We don’t just see the effects with Geoffrey—yes, of course, there’s a scene in which he has to take off his clothes, at which Helen faints— because the filmmakers were confident in the work Fulton was doing. Griffin has a number of invisible guinea pigs; when he injects one, it comes back to visibility, skeletal system first, but then dies. There’s an excellent scene with Griffin injecting the invisible Geoffrey. There’s another when Sampson raids where Geoffrey is staying; it’s raining and he his men are in gas masks spraying fog, each approach making him just visible enough for these men to shoot at an outline.</p>
<p>After Price, Kellaway and the special effects, it’s always the script that shines brightest. There are puns—“I’ll have to see him before I believe he’s invisible!” The potential madness angle is handled with style. Insp. Sampson’s grounded belief in what the invisible man can do is even better.</p>
<p>And then there’s a vicious conundrum late in the film. Geoffrey has been shot. He’s alive but he’s bleeding internally and there are men volunteering their blood for a transfusion. Dr. Griffin has all the skill to operate, but he can’t because he can’t see his patient. The only way he can save his life is by attempting the latest iteration of his antidote but it’s likely to either kill him or send him raving mad. That’s tough!</p>
<p>I won’t spoil how it plays out, but it’s fair to say that we eventually get to see Price, who’s spent the entire picture without a moustache. And we never even noticed!</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-78513281906282864782024-01-08T23:58:00.000-07:002024-01-08T23:58:24.559-07:00Tower of London (1939)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Rowland V. Lee<br>
Writer: Robert N. Lee<br>
Stars: Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff, Barbara O'Neil, Ian Hunter, Vincent Price, Nan Grey and Ernest Cossart</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/the-first-thirty.html">The First Thirty</a>.</p>
<p>I should be worried that Vincent Price went from one historical drama to another, but I’ve seen both before and they’re very different. It can’t be said that this is any more historically accurate than <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/the-private-lives-of-elizabeth-and.html">The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex</a>, but it doesn’t seem to matter as much.</p>
<p>Part of that is that it’s older history that we don’t remember as well, the Henry Tudor who wins a decisive battle at the end of the picture to become Henry VII, being the grandfather of Elizabeth I. We’re within the Wars of the Roses and they’re not even well remembered in the two counties who bluster at each other still.</p>
<p>However, part of it is also that, while Basil Rathbone is officially the lead here, as Richard, Duke of Gloucester, before, during and after he serves as Richard III, King of England, it has to be said that Boris Karloff seriously challenges him for the lead because he doesn’t think he’s even in a historical drama. He’s obviously in a horror film and, if we think about it, Richard is sometimes too. We could fairly read this as a slasher movie with Richard the big bad and Karloff, as Mord, his favourite weapon.</p>
<p>We begin in 1471 when the monarch wasn’t clear. The young Edward IV is king, because he deposed Henry VI, who is confined within the Tower of London, but Paper Crown Henry is a madman and thinks he’s still king, as he was a short time earlier for almost four decades. It’s a fascinating time in history, and it’s clear that Robert N. Lee, writer of this script, was on the opposite team to George R. R. Martin. Lee has the House of Lancaster the honourable, decent and rightful monarchs but the House of York a bunch of bloodthirsty scheming bastards who murder their way to the throne.</p>
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<p>Anyway, Richard is the king’s brother and a seriously good swordsman, as we might expect given that he’s played by Rathbone. The first thing we see, after bald and clubfooted Karloff sharpening an axe in the torture chamber he’s running for Richard, while a raven is perched on his shoulder—can that be more horror?—is Richard battling the king in a ring, both clad in full armour and wielding pikes. Outside the ring, moaning about how close a swing came to his head, is a third brother, the Duke of Clarence, played by Vincent Price.</p>
<p>Hey, at least he has lines early in this movie, but he’s a wuss here, petulant and whiny and rather fond of the bottle, his personal tipple of choice being malmsey, which I really ought to try. Once more, he does an excellent job, but he’s always the other brother. The king is the king and, in the form of Ian Hunter, he seems worthy to be king, even if he happened to win it by conquest. Richard is intelligent, strategic and vicious, so the very last person you want around you if you’re king. Clarence is... well, he’s the other one who is generally ignored or manoeuvred around.</p>
<p>I’m not going to talk much more about the game of thrones that the houses of Lancaster and York are playing, because it’s complicated stuff and not particularly important to know. What is important to know is that, like Dennis Price in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/04/kind-hearts-and-coronets-1949.html">Kind Hearts and Coronets</a>, Richard is not next in the line of succession and he wants to be, very much. He even has a dollhouse, with a doll of each character ahead of him in line and he takes great pleasure, after each successful manoeuevre, in burning the doll(s) of whoever he’s just eliminated. Like I said, this is an early slasher movie.</p>
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<p>Of course, his brother, Edward IV, is already king, so he has to be disposed of. Then there’s the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Clarence and the two young princes, Edward and Richard, whose fate we remember from school, or least as far as anyone knows. They’re the princes in the tower, who simply disappeared never to be found, but were likely murdered. History is bloody! Oh, and he has a doll for Paper Crown Henry too, because the former king still has a fair claim that many might get behind.</p>
<p>And so this is about Richard, but his weapon of choice is Mord, who didn’t exist in history at all but quite frankly should have done. He’s an avid follower of Richard, worshipping him as a god, a role that Gloucester is more than happy to fill. In turn he calls them Crookback and Dragfoot, which sounds like a cheesy cop show from the seventies.</p>
<p>I liked Rathbone here, though Richard is the villain of the piece and nobody should like him at all. I liked Karloff even more, because he’s a capable and eager murderer, playing up a real fondness for killing by pleading for Richard to let him go to the next battle, pretty please, so he can kill someone who’s actively attempting to kill him right back, but he’s also inherently a victim, and that makes him far deeper than he has any right to be in this role.</p>
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<p>Price can’t compete with either, though his character does mount an attempted coup that fails quickly. However, he gets opportunities to shine, most obviously one in which Richard challenges him to a duel, with Clarence able to choose weapons, including wine. That’s only the beginning of Clarence laughing his ass off, as he could drink for England and Richard isn’t a lush. He giggles throughout this duel, which he wins. However, Richard cheats and Mord is happy to stab Clarence and throw him into a vat of wine, just as Shakespeare wrote.</p>
<p>Like <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/the-private-lives-of-elizabeth-and.html">Elizabeth and Essex</a>, this is poor history that gets poorer as it goes, played up in good old Hollywood style as melodrama. There’s a good guy who stands on his principles and so gets tortured by Mord. There’s a lady love who masquerades as a chimney sweep in order to rescue him. There are battles, both in the ring between two opponents and on the field with two armies. There’s cold blooded murder and ruthless betrayal and honour and passion and all the things you expect in vast quantities.</p>
<p>Unlike <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/the-private-lives-of-elizabeth-and.html">Elizabeth and Essex</a>, I don’t really care about accuracy, because I saw this less as the historical drama it presents itself as and more as a horror movie set in the 15th century. And, hey, Rathbone, Karloff and Price on the same roster simply wasn’t ever going to fail. These three are wonderful, even with Price a pouty baby of a duke who’s easily overshadowed.</p>
<p>And that’s fair. This is an early film for him, made while he was still paying his dues and he was easily the least well regarded of the three. However, a quarter of a century later, when the three reunited for <i>The Comedy of Terrors</i> in 1963, he was the star of the show.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-66197121219255403332024-01-07T23:58:00.000-07:002024-01-07T23:58:24.880-07:00Finances of the Grand Duke (1924)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: F. W. Murnau<br>
Writer: Thea von Harbou, based on the novel by Frank Heller<br>
Stars: Harry Liedtke, Mady Christians and Alfred Abel</p>
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<p>This film is a heck of a way to kick off a new year, because, its boring title notwithstanding, it’s a screwball comedy directed, of all people, by F. W. Murnau. It could have gone horribly wrong or wonderfully right but it surely had to be something to see and I’m very happy I’ve now got to see it. I had an absolute blast.</p>
<p>It’s worth mentioning here that Hollywood was dominant in world cinema in 1924 but the Germans were nipping at its heels. This is the first of two pictures Murnau would deliver in 1924 and I’ll be covering two others by Fritz Lang and more by Robert Wiene, Paul Leni and Carl Theodor Dreyer, just to highlight a few.</p>
<p>This is a great start, because there are a lot of pivotal names involved and all of them do a wonderful job.</p>
<p>Murnau is the first, important for directing <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/05/nosferatu-symphony-of-terror-1922.html">Nosferatu</a> two years earlier, but he’s not alone. The script, adapted from the Swedish novel by Frank Heller, is by Thea von Harbou, Mrs. Fritz Lang, who would write <i>Metropolis</i> three years later. The impeccable cinematography is by Karl Freund, who had shot <i>Der Golem</i> and a few earlier Murnau films but would also go on to <i>Metropolis</i> and <i>Dracula</i> as cinematographer and <i>The Mummy</i> and <i>Mad Love</i> as director. I’m told that the production design is Edgar G. Ulmer’s and he also shot second unit. He would go on to become the king of doing very much with very little, directing low budget gems for PRC like <i>Detour</i> and <i>The Strange Woman</i>.</p>
<p>The names we see on screen aren’t as well known today but they also do excellent work and I’d love to follow some of them into other pictures. I only knew a few of them, including Ilka Grüning, a cook here, so memorable a year earlier in G. W. Pabst’s <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2023/02/the-treasure-1923.html">The Treasure</a>.</p>
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<p>The Grand Duke of the title, whose name is Don Ramon XXII, rules a small Mediterranean island nation called Abacco and is played by a major actor of the day, Harry Lietdke, who had debuted on film in 1912 and was a favourite of Ernst Lubitsch. Even with his finances a major MacGuffin, the Grand Duke seems a happy and sometimes carefree gentleman.</p>
<p>Most of the debt is owed to Herr Marcowitz, the Minister of Finance, and Guido Herzfeld is suitably beady eyed in the role. He wants full payment in only three days or all Abacco will be forfeit to him.</p>
<p>One option that literally walks in from the blue is Herr Bekker, who appears to our 2024 eyes as a quintessential rich American tourist, even if he’s played by Hermann Vallentin, who was a German. He wants to give Ramon ten million francs for Punta Hermosa, a grotto-like part of the island on which he has discovered sulphur deposits. Fearing that his subjects will suffer working for this man, the Grand Duke literally throws him out.</p>
<p>Fortunately another option literally falls out of the sky, a second deliberate convenience to be played up for comedic effort. This is a letter from Olga, Crown Princess of Russia, who is all for becoming the Grand Duchess of Abacco. It doesn’t matter to her that he’s broke, because she’s absolutely rolling in dough.</p>
<p>And here’s where the intrigue begins, which is plentiful enough to fill a movie twice as long as the mere eighty minutes this one runs. We definitely need to pay attention to keep up, as new characters are introduced and, in the true tradition of screwball comedy, everyone gets shuffled around, bumping into everyone else and often while incognito or in disguise.</p>
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<p>The most prominent new character still to arrive is Philipp Collin, “a gentleman of ever-changing names and professions”. He’s played by Alfred Abel, big in 1924 after strong roles in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2007/03/phantom-1922-f-w-murnau.html">Phantom</a> for Murnau, <i>Dr. Mabuse the Gambler</i> for Lang and <i>The Flame</i> for Lubitsch, and he’s a joy to watch here too. We first meet him running a dog race through his mansion and he’s never flustered by anything, always gloriously alive in the moment, even if he’s climbing out of a chimney in order to steal letters back from a blackmailer for a job.</p>
<p>Collin arrives in chapter two of six and Olga, in the lovely form of Mady Christians, in three, though he calls himself Professor Pelotard for much of the movie and she remains unnamed until the finalé. The key is that we know who they are, even if those around them don’t.</p>
<p>Almost everything here is impeccably done, from the very outset. Freund was on top form, throwing light skilfully, the impressionism we expect from the Germans far more realistic in this film but just as effective.</p>
<p>There’s a great shot on the beach of the first of a group of conspirators whistling to the rest who pop up magically from behind a boat. One is Max Schreck, who had played <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/05/nosferatu-symphony-of-terror-1922.html">Nosferatu</a> two years earlier for Murnau, even though rumour at the time suggested that he didn’t exist and it was actually Alfred Abel in that make-up.</p>
<p>There’s a great shot of Punta Hermosa with the ocean visible only through an eye of rock. And there’s a great shot of Ramon imagining boys before and after exploitation of sulphur from it, which reminds of attempts fifty years later by Ridley Scott to make cinema look like paintings by old masters. I tend to judge every magnificent shot in a silent movie now by how Freund would have done it at the time.</p>
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<p>I don’t know if the quirky humour is due to the original novel, to von Harbou’s adaptation or Murnau’s vision, but there are wonderful moments that made me laugh aloud. Most are left for Philipp Collin but not all, one gem with a blackmailer being grabbed into a building by a gorilla and threatened by a lion, only for us to learn that he’s inside Boston & Klix, Animal Impersonators.</p>
<p>There’s so much to praise, I can’t even begin to cram it all into two pages, from the physical agility of Hans Hermann as a hunchback to an impressive entrance by Olga, who jumps out of a moving car and, a few steps later, collapses into a chair at Philipp Collin’s café table.</p>
<p>There’s much less to call out on the flipside, the conspicuous lack of extras in many scenes pretty much it. Who else lives in Abacco? We only get to see the skeleton staff at the palace and a handful of boys who dive off the cliffs to swim in the Mediterranean. Some city scenes feel exquisitely empty too, but that’s about it.</p>
<p>And all I can say to wrap up is that everyone gets fooled by someone but everything turns out well. It’s a shame this is the only comedy that Murnau made, but he died so young, in 1931 at only 42 after his valet swerved to avoid a truck on the Pacific Coast Highway. Maybe, had he lived, he’d have made more.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-84453504157827218712024-01-04T23:50:00.000-07:002024-01-05T00:05:07.000-07:00The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Michael Curtiz<br>
Writers: Norman Reilly Raine and Æneas MacKenzie, based on the play <i>Elizabeth the Queen</i> by Maxwell Anderson<br>
Stars: Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Donald Crisp, Alan Hale, Vincent Price and Henry Stephenson</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/the-first-thirty.html">The First Thirty</a>.</p>
<p>After starting out as a leading man in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2024/01/service-de-luxe-1938.html">Service de Luxe</a>, Vincent Price settled for a prominent supporting slot in this second picture for him, playing British war hero Walter Raleigh. It’s a much bigger film though, a movie full of stars that cost a million bucks to make back in 1939. I don’t know what Service de Luxe cost but not remotely that much.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the role wasn’t as prominent as it could have been, because Raleigh doesn’t get a lot to do in this story, based on a play by Maxwell Anderson that had opened in 1930. It was called <i>Elizabeth the Queen</i> and this version would have followed suit but Errol Flynn felt that it marginalised his role. Warner Brothers met that need by retitling it to <i>The Knight and the Lady</i>, but Bette Davis correctly suggested it could be seen as his film rather than hers, and so they tapped into a British format used on historical dramas like <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2008/10/private-life-of-henry-viii-1933.html">The Private Life of Henry VIII</a> and <i>The Private Life of Don Juan</i>.</p>
<p>It’s an appropriate title because it really is about both Elizabeth I, Queen of England, and Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex. Davis was only a year older than Flynn but Elizabeth was thirty-two years Essex’s senior, so Davis wears a great deal of aging make-up. That’s the first and last nod to historical accuracy, because it plays fast and loose with history otherwise.</p>
<p>We’re in London in 1596 and Devereux has defeated the Spanish forces at Cadiz so is now on his way to see his Queen. There’s pageantry and extras galore and it’s all aching for some sort of widescreen presentation, which it does not get.</p>
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<p>Everything’s about him. The public see him as a hero. Olivia de Havilland as Lady Penelope Gray thinks he’s rather cute. Henry Daniell as Sir Robert Cecil thinks he’s getting too big for his britches so wants something that will lose him favour. Elizabeth loves him, but refuses to let her personal feelings get in the way of her duties as a queen. So she chastises him for not bringing back the Spanish treasure to refill the coffers of England and promotes some others over him.</p>
<p>One of those is Raleigh, who walks in with Essex, thus giving Price some early scenes but little to do in them. That trend continues. The vast majority of his screen time involves him being overshadowed by Errol Flynn and that’s mostly not a good thing. The exception is one scene where Essex one-ups Raleigh’s infamous silver armour, where Flynn nails it and Price is stuck with no viable response.</p>
<p>Mostly, Flynn underplays Essex, but Davis vibrates with energy as Elizabeth. She’s superb and consistently the best thing about the film because she’s volatile and unpredictable. She’s giving an award-worthy acting performance, while Flynn is giving a star turn. There’s a big difference between those two approaches and, while Flynn’s approach was popular with the public, Davis’s stands up to posterity. Had she got her way and had Laurence Olivier get the role of Essex, then an unknown actor poorly handled in an initial attempt to break America in 1931 and 1932, she might not have been so dominant. He made <i>Wuthering Heights</i> in 1939 instead and the rest is history. Ha.</p>
<p>Of course, Elizabeth’s approach doesn’t pay off. She pisses off Essex, so he pisses her off in return and so we have a movie. As he’s quickly described, he’s “a man not easily governed”.</p>
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<p>Initially, Davis’s stunning performance does the job and we wallow in it as well as the sets and the other stars backing her up in court. If Olivia de Havilland is her closest confidante, as Lady Penelope is one of her ladies in waiting, even playing a game of chess with her that’s as blatantly a metaphor as I’ve seen, Donald Crisp is her official equivalent, as Sir Francis Bacon is a capable go between who knows everyone and every manoeuvre. Also in court are Henry Stephenson and even Leo G. Carroll.</p>
<p>However, as the film runs on, it ceases to be enough, eventually weighed down by painful Hollywood romantic melodrama. Davis keeps on dominating every scene with Flynn almost breezing through the film without a care, even though he’s constantly shifting in and out of favour with a woman who loves him but could easily have him executed. Which, if you know your history, eventually happens. C’mon, it’s been well over four hundred years; it can’t be seen as a spoiler!</p>
<p>While Davis was always going to be the best thing about the film and probably the next ten or twelve, there’s plenty of bad to counter her. The mangling of history is one, but that’s par for the course for Hollywood. It’s no worse as a guide to real events than any other Hollywood historical drama and, as bad as it gets, it’s still more accurate than <i>Braveheart</i>.</p>
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<p>Another is how little Price gets to do as Sir Walter Raleigh, a big figure in British history. While he’s given silent moments in a few early scenes, he doesn’t get a line until thirty-five minutes in and that’s Flynn’s best scene of the movie, his grand up-staging of a colleague and rival. None of it is Price’s fault; he does a good deal with what he’s given. It merely isn’t his film and being billed sixth is very misleading. Henry Daniell gets far more to do two credits down from him.</p>
<p>The battle scenes in Ireland, when Essex is manipulated into volunteering to go there to crush the Earl of Tyrone, look poor to me too. Sure, Alan Hale has a lot of fun as Tyrone and delivers one of the better accents in the film, but they’re stagebound and awkward scenes, with an array of costumes that feel left over from <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/03/adventures-of-robin-hood-1938.html">The Adventures of Robin Hood</a> in 1938, even if they weren’t.</p>
<p>Worst of all, there’s that melodrama, which gets progressively worse as the film runs on. It culminates in the final scenes, in which Essex, the biggest egotist in the movie, actually hints that they should abolish the monarchy so he could be elected to power in a democracy. My eyes rolled so hard at that, I had to reset them.</p>
<p>To be fair, there are some wonderful visuals at this point. There’s a shot of a large room in the Tower of London, with Elizabeth seated in the distance and Essex walking away from her towards us, down through stone steps in the floor, which fold over to hide him. It’s the best shot in the movie and it’s right at the end. Unfortunately everything around it is wildest, sappiest, romantic nonsense. Sigh.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-703940217392140072024-01-01T22:46:00.000-07:002024-01-01T22:46:20.358-07:00Service de Luxe (1938)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Rowland V. Lee<br>
Writers: Gertrude Purcell and Leonard Spigelgass, based on a story by Vera Caspery and Bruce Manning<br>
Stars: Constance Bennett, Vincent Price, Charles Ruggles, Helen Broderick, Mischa Auer and Joy Hodges</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/the-first-thirty.html">The First Thirty</a>.</p>
<p>There’s a lot of irony in play with this film, none of which would have been obvious back in 1938. Most obviously, it’s a comedy, though many know Vincent Price primarily for horror movies. However, he’s also the leading man, albeit as a love interest for Constance Bennett rather than the other way around, though he would move after this to supporting roles. He finds himself dismissed by a cook suggesting “You’re not an epicure!” even though Price is now well known as a gourmet chef.</p>
<p>And he’s a rampant sexist here, even if we remember him as a quintessential gentleman, even when playing outright villains. But that’s because of how the film is set up, because the traditional roles of men and women are what the comedy is sourced from.</p>
<p>Bennett, fresh from success in the first two <i>Topper</i> movies and with memory of being the highest paid actress in Hollywood, plays Helen Murphy, though that’s not what most people know her as, because she’s much more widely known as Dorothy Madison 1. That’s because she’s a businesswoman, the founder of a wildly successful service called Dorothy Madison that effectively runs the lives of a lot of powerful men. Every one of her girls answers the phone as Dorothy Madison, including her.</p>
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<p>It’s almost like a live action Google, which is clearly needed in 1938 because the men who run the world are idiots and they couldn’t do so without Dorothy Madison advising them on every little detail. In that way, this is notably ahead of its time, or maybe a throwback to the precodes from only a few years earlier when women were allowed to be capable.</p>
<p>However, Murph is fed up of men who need her and her service to run their lives. In fact, she aches for a man who knows what he wants and takes it, so she can passively let him. That is precisely where Robert Wade comes in, as a man who’s fed up of being coddled by his five aunts and has decided to stop being bossed by women. Naturally, they soon meet.</p>
<p>The setup is this. Robert Wade Sr. subscribes to the Dorothy Madison service and he wants them to persuade his nephew, who’s bound for New York with designs for a three way tractor, whatever that is, to go back home. He doesn’t want to see him. Because Wade’s a high profile subscriber, Murph takes the job herself and, through the magic of comedy, persuades the wrong man to go home. Then she falls for the tall dark stranger who accidentally knocks her hat into the river and, when she calls him on it, throws his own in to make it even. Guess who he might be.</p>
<p>I get the setup and I fully acknowledge that it might have been funny in 1938 but it’s dated now, enough so that that the fun nowadays is mostly watching Price play against the type he hadn’t established yet to be condescending to Bennett. He thinks she’s little and helpless. He can just tell she’s not bossy or a career girl. So he sends her off to bed: “Run along now!” And she adores him for it. “Was I slapped down and did I love it?” she tells her colleagues the next day. And then she learns who he is and we can write the rest of the script ourselves.</p>
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<p>Everyone has done their job thus far. Price is consistently charming even when trying not to be. Anyone else would slap him but Murph, because of her secret career, just falls harder for him with every outrageous line. Bennett is good at being sappy but also good at being the professional woman, Fortunately she doesn’t turn into a ditzy blonde, just a secretive one.</p>
<p>I should also call out Charlie Ruggles, who plays a friend of Robert Wade Sr. called Scott Robinson. Wade persuades him to sign up for the Dorothy Malone service too and he quickly comes to rely on it. While he’s supposed to be a famous engineer and bridge builder, he only wants to learn how to cook, so asks the service to provide him with a chef. And they provide Mischa Auer, who promptly attempts to steal the show with abandon as flamboyant Russian cook Serge Bibenko.</p>
<p>I’ve always liked Auer, in whatever I see him in, but this has to be the most substantial part I’ve seen thus far, with the greatest number of opportunities to just take over the picture. He and Ruggles work well as a double act and that escalates when Robinson buys Wade’s tractor and he starts to build it in a workshop under Robinson’s busy kitchen. And it only escalates further when Audrey, Scott’s daughter, wild as the ocean and shallow as a pan, builds quite the obsession over the young engineer.</p>
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<p>All this underlines just how deep the talent pool was at Universal in 1938. Bennett was the biggest star at the time and she does exactly what she needs to do here, but the newcomer, Vincent Price, is a strong foil. Auer steals more and more scenes as the movie runs on, though Ruggles steals one as well when delivering an engagement speech. Helen Broderick is utterly reliable as Pearl, or Dorothy Madison 2, as she tends to be known. Halliwell Hobbes is strong support as ever, as a butler. Even Chester Clute gets opportunity to shine as a bridegroom at the very beginning of the picture, even though it moves quickly away from him.</p>
<p>What shines brightest though is the script, which plays alternately as far ahead of its time and wildly dated. Interestingly, it was written by both a woman and a man, Gertrude Purcell, a playwright who would find a huge success a year later with <i>Destry Rides Again</i>, and Leonard Spigelgass, who would land an Oscar nod in 1951 for <i>Mystery Street</i>. And they based their script on a story also written by a man and a woman, both novelists, Bruce Manning and Vera Caspary. Notably, the latter wrote the novel <i>Laura</i> that would become one of Price’s breakthrough pictures only six years later.</p>
<p>I have a fondness for screwball comedy and, while this isn’t quite as screwball as the genre got, or indeed as successful, it’s still a wild ride and I laughed often, even at some of the more dated parts. Yes, the surprise ending wouldn’t surprise anyone, but it’s still fun to see these actors work their way to the inevitable finalé.</p>
<p>And it’s great to see Vincent Price debuting on film. Sadly, this was it for leading roles for him for quite some time, even as he moved into larger scale productions. On the basis of this film, he deserved better.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-87934965736149726782023-12-21T22:14:00.004-07:002023-12-23T22:39:36.000-07:00The Ten Commandments (1923)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Cecil B. DeMille<br>
Writer: Jeanie Macpherson<br>
Stars: Theodore Roberts, Richard Dix, Rod La Rocque, Charles de Roche, Robert Edeson, Leatrice Joy, Nita Naldi, Estelle Taylor, Edythe Chapman and Julia Faye</p>
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<p>My final review of a 1923 film turns out to be the big one, the highest grossing picture of the year at the American box office. It’s also an unusual movie in a few ways.</p>
<p>For one, it was the product of a contest, in which the public suggested ideas for the next Cecil B. DeMille film. F. C. Nelson of Lansing, Michigan won with “You cannot break the Ten Commandments—they will break you.”</p>
<p>For another, it isn’t one story but two, told in uneven, almost jarring fashion, which is the reason why I’d actually forgotten what it was all about. I remembered the prologue, which is about three quarters of an hour long and was bulked up to become DeMille’s own remake in 1956. That’s the story we expect, of Moses and the exodus of the Jews from Egypt.</p>
<p>However, that surprisingly transforms into a contemporary melodrama for the remaining eighty minutes, as the four core characters, all of whom belong to a single family, see the Ten Commandments from different angles and so live their lives in very different ways.</p>
<p>Needless to say, the prologue is what counts here. It’s everything that we expect from Cecil B. DeMille, even if it feels a little compressed. It looks huge from the outset, with vast sets in Egypt which dwarf mere human beings, but it must be said that there aren’t many of them, just the Pharaoh’s palace and a growing line of sphinxes leading away from it.</p>
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<p>It’s also overplayed, with vicious Egyptians whipping pitiful Israelites as they struggle to move the latest sphinx, with outrageous levels of cruelty.</p>
<p>Charles de Rochefort looks suitably regal as the Pharaoh, even when faced with the direst predictions of Aaron, Moses’s brother and the leader of the Israelites. Nine plagues are done and we’re just in time for Aaron to predict the tenth, namely the death of every firstborn son in Egypt. When this happens at midnight, the Pharaoh finally relents and lets the Israelites go. It only took the murder of a bunch of kids, just like the origin story of Darth Vader.</p>
<p>Except, of course, the Pharaoh changes his mind in the morning when his own god fails to resurrect his son, and so gives chase, his army of chariots reaching the Jews by the shores of the Red Sea. And here’s where the effects start to shine, because we know what’s coming: a wall of flame rising from the sand, the parting of the Red Sea and the crushing of the army of the Egyptians when Moses closes his hands.</p>
<p>It’s all highly effective stuff, even though it does feel rather extreme. It didn’t take all that overt cruelty for us to realise that the Jewish slaves are the good guys and the Egyptians the bad guys, but it doesn’t seem to be quite that simple. What shocked me is how selfish every character but Moses is, other Jews included.</p>
<p>There are a lot of stories that deal with faith and they work best when God stays stubbornly absent. It’s easy to see the Jews losing faith as an enslaved race by the Egyptians, ignored by their god. It’s harder to buy into that when He works miracles in front of their eyes. At every point, a Jew is keen to point out how God has betrayed them, even when the proof that He hasn’t is literally all around them.</p>
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<p>That’s doubled when Moses spends too long up a mountain. Forty days in and Aaron makes a golden calf for everyone to worship because they’ve apparently forgotten everything that happened on the way to the Sinai wilderness. No wonder Moses is pissed when he gets back down and sees such blasphemous debauchery.</p>
<p>So, for all that this is the greatest story ever told, it’s overblown and hard to get behind. It falls to the production design and effects work to sell us and those are amazing. The Red Sea parting is impressive but it was the explosions in the sky that worked best for me, the point at which God provides Moses with the titular commandments, each emerging from chaos in huge fiery letters to light up the sky. It’s pure cinema and it’s literally awesome stuff.</p>
<p>And, three quarters of an hour, that’s done with because we leap forward to the 1920s to spend time with the McTavish family and this doesn’t hold a candle to what went before.</p>
<p>Initially, we meet a trio, a pair of brothers and their mother, who has been reading them all this from the Bible. She’s Martha McTavish and she’s an old school religious despot, keen for her sons to fear God and adhere firmly to all the Ten Commandments, just as she does.</p>
<p>John obviously respects the commandments but he doesn’t outwardly seem to be religious. He’s New Testament to her Old Testament, an honest and decent man who’s more about love than fear. Dan, on the other hand, has no time for God at all and gleefully plans on breaking every last one of the commandments, which is a little bit overkill, given what number six is.</p>
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<p>The fourth character is Mary Leigh, who is a homeless girl (I think) who steals a sandwich from Dan and ends up hiding in their house. John asks her to stay, both the boys fall for her and, the next thing we know, she’s married to Dan. She’s the agnostic of the bunch, ignoring the Commandments as no longer relevant, but she goes along with her husband readily.</p>
<p>Dan’s now a powerful architect supervising the construction of a church, skimping every possible way he can for profit. John is a simple carpenter—you know, like Jesus—but Dan has him work on the church too. Mum, well, Mum shows up right as John figures out what Dan’s up to and just in time to be under a wall that collapses because of its subpar concrete.</p>
<p>There’s more here than my brief synopsis, so we get the smuggling of jute and stowaways from leper colonies and Sally Lung, a beautiful Eurasian woman. All of this is worthy flavour. However, none of it is memorable in the way that pivotal scenes in the prologue were.</p>
<p>Richard Dix is decent as John McTavish and Rod La Rocque is suitably decadent as Dan, but this was never going to be about acting. It’s all about spectacular effects work, even given the inherent problems that fire and water cannot be made small; excellent cinematography and majestic sets. And those things, however much money this film made at the box office, is how it’ll be remembered.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-77304622916679693402023-12-02T22:00:00.003-07:002023-12-23T22:14:29.742-07:00Tiger Rose (1923)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Sidney A. Franklin<br>
Writer: David Belasco, based on the play by Willard Mack<br>
Stars: Lenore Ulric, Forrest Stanley and Theodore von Eltz</p>
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<p>Exotic lands back in 1923 weren’t only those far to the east, as the Canadian northwest also counted, with a whole slew of adventure yarns and romances set in those distant woods. Here is another one, based on a 1917 play by Willard Mack and starring its star, Lenore Ulric, as the titular character. Rose is French Canadian and fond of dark make-up, so Ulric comes across as a sort of local Pola Negri.</p>
<p>We’re in Wutchi Wyum, the northernmost trading post in the Loon River Valley, north of Edmonton, then in the Northwest Territories, and Rose is brought into town by Sgt. Michael Devlin of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, who found her in a river and had to dive in off a cliff to rescue her. They always get their man or, indeed, their woman, the two hitting it off wonderfully once she comes to.</p>
<p>Well, not always, as we’ll quickly learn when Bruce Norton shows up. Up until now, this has been a romance with a sense of adventure, as Rose and Michael look set for a happy life with plenty of background texture delivered by the supporting cast, like Fr. Thibault and Hector MacCollins, the latter of whom is so obviously Scottish that we can practically hear his broad accent even in a silent movie.</p>
<p>It’s an idyllic frontier landscape and all that we’re missing is a third wheel for an inevitable love triangle. Enter Bruce Norton, an engineer for the Canadian Northwest Railroad, which is coming through. Rose sees him surveying with his transit, which I now know is not the same thing as a theodolite—not a lesson I expected to learn watching <i>Tiger Rose</i>—and we think we know where we’re going next.</p>
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<p>Instead, there’s another detail that we have to discover. Norton receives a letter that tells him that Lantry, that dog, will be in the camp that evening, hiding behind the fake name of Dr. Glendinning. It seems that Bruce has been searching for him for a long while.</p>
<p>We naturally assume that the bearded man who watches him with such overt suspicion is Lantry/Glendinning, but he isn’t. It’s another man entirely. “Helen—was my sister,” Norton tells him and they scramble for a gun. He gets the shot off, killing his nemesis, and hightails it out of there while the rest of the camp looks at the corpse, including the bearded man, who is the only one of them to recognise the doctor as Lantry. He’s sad. Clearly he wanted to kill him too and Norton stole his thunder.</p>
<p>And so, while Rose still believes that she’s in a romance, all dressed up and waiting for her beau, Bruce, so they can tell the factor of their love and intentions, the film has turned into a thriller. Norton’s on the run with Devlin on his tail and everyone else ready to take a pot shot at the murderer. So much for a love triangle.</p>
<p>While this is thoroughly generic, it’s rather fun, albeit possibly because its rapid pace may not be real. My copy runs sixty-one minutes and seems to be consistently fast paced, even including the intertitles. Records suggest that the film actually ran eighty and I wonder if my copy is the entire eighty minutes sped up.</p>
<p>Given that the bearded man is still without a name and he does everything deliberately and in sinister fashion, even with everything else a little faster than it should be, we surely must accept him as the hidden villain of the movie. He certainly knows things that he’s not telling and we ache to find out what they are.</p>
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<p>We do find out eventually, though I have no interest of spoiling the revelations. I’ll merely highlight that they and what happens because of them was clearly designed for a stage, with all the subsequent entrances and exits of key characters, not to forget neat ways for Norton to hide believably on stage without characters realising it. It becomes a choreography game and anyone who’s worked amateur dramatics will see this in a very particular way.</p>
<p>I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy this, but it does precisely nothing that hasn’t been done before many, many times, even factoring in that it’s a hundred years old.</p>
<p>There are positives. Ulric certainly does her job as Rose, who doesn’t acquire the Tiger for much of the movie. Forrest Stanley is a decent Sgt. Devlin, which works because Sgt. Devlin is a decent man, right down to that cliff dive that we see in longshot. Theodore von Eltz gets the most opportunity as Bruce Norton and he does well with it, but he can’t bring the same level of character to his role as a fugitive that David Janssen did, let alone Harrison Ford. There’s a Native American servant who actually appears to be played by a Native American actress, one annoyingly uncredited though.</p>
<p>Behind them is wonderful scenery, even if it often seems painted, and it’s given a boost by excellent cinematography by Charles Rosher, one of the fifteen co-founders of the American Society of Cinematographers. Mary Pickford especially liked his work, so he shot all of her silent films from 1918 to 1927, the latter also the year in which he, with Karl Struss, moved the art forward in F. W. Murnau’s <i>Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans</i>, which won them a well-deserved Academy Award for cinematography each, the first two to be given out.</p>
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<p>There are negatives too. Some of it is much too clichéd, even for its time. Of course, one of the locals manages to wing Norton, so he’s not just on the run, he’s on the run while injured. There’s a convenient storm that even distracts the searchers at exactly the most pivotal time for Norton to avoid discovery, using that time honoured tree branch bursting through the window in the next room ploy.</p>
<p>It’s also not unashamed to get melodramatic and desperate and sentimental, all to play on our emotions, and every moment of it is much too deliberate for us to truly fall for, at least with a century of hindsight. I have a feeling it wouldn’t have persuaded a lot of moviegoers back in the day either but maybe we’re a more cynical bunch nowadays.</p>
<p>Mostly, it sits in between those extremes, as a thoroughly capable but also thoroughly run of the mill movie that would have worked well as just another film on the schedule. It doesn’t try to be anything it isn’t and doesn’t manifest any delusions of grandeur. It’s entertainment, pure and simple, almost the definition of what we might call a popcorn flick today.</p>
<p>It would be hard for audiences not to enjoy it, but it would be hard for them to remember it too over however many other films they saw in 1923. Frankly, that holds just as true now as it did a century ago.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-18764921714264706292023-12-01T22:19:00.002-07:002023-12-04T02:11:44.975-07:00The Wizard of Baghdad (1960)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: George Sherman<br>
Writers: Jesse L. Lasky Jr. and Pat Silver, based on a story by Samuel Newman<br>
Stars: Dick Shawn, Diane Baker and Barry Coe</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/2023-centennials.html">2023 Centennials</a>.</p>
<p>I’ve been lucky with my last few centennial reviews. I’d seen <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2023/11/the-return-of-living-dead-1985.html">The Return of the Living Dead</a> before and I was looking forward to seeing it afresh, but it was research that led me to <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2023/11/the-man-in-glass-booth-1975.html">The Man in the Glass Booth</a> and <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2023/11/the-glass-wall-1953.html">The Glass Wall</a>, two impactful features with impeccable lead performances that resonate through the years to be as important today as they were so long ago. Even <i>The Siege of Sidney Street</i> and <i>Cell 2455, Death Row</i>, which, to be fair, aren’t in the same league, are still fascinating. <i>The Wizard of Baghdad</i>, on the other hand, well, it isn’t any of those things. It probably wasn’t very good when it came out and it’s very much a product of its time. However, it’s also a glimpse at a new star in the making, who strides through the picture with such utter confidence that it’s easy to believe that he felt that he was about to be the biggest name in Hollywood. That star is Dick Shawn, who didn’t become the biggest name in Hollywood, but did foster a habit of stealing scenes from pretty much anyone, even in a film as star-studded as <i>It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World</i>.</p>
<p>This wasn’t his first picture—he’d cameod in <i>The Opposite Sex</i> in 1956 and then co-starred with Ernie Kovacs in <i>Wake Me When It’s Over</i>—but it was his first stab at a lead role and he embraced it with abandon. The opening scene, against which the credits roll, is almost an audition to the audience. It’s Shawn in a genie outfit, down to the dinky gold slippers, flying through a sky murkier than Mumbai in pollution season, singing a song called <i>Eni Menie Geni</i>, which thanks to Steve Martin in <i>Only Murders in the Building</i>, I now know is a patter song, because it’s a tongue twister of a song with fast paced rhythmic rhymes and plenty of alliteration. It takes a singer with impeccable enunciation to deliver a song like this and Shawn nails it what feels like a single take, though there is one cut to a close-up, so it could be two. It may not be quite as challenging as <i>Pickwick Triplets</i> or the most famous example of the form, namely Gilbert and Sullivan’s <i>I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General</i> from <i>The Pirates of Penzance</i>, but it’s highly impressive nonetheless.</p>
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<p>Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there because, while Shawn does indeed play a genie, Ali Mahmud, which practically seems like typecasting for him before he’d built a career, he’s a very bad genie. In fact, he’s about to get demoted, by Asmodeus, King of Genies, on the basis that he’s the only genie under his rule not to obtain promotion in half a millennium. He has a pair of major weaknesses: wine and women, which naturally combine to screw up pretty much everything he tries to do. So Asmodeus gives him a last chance to do his job, sending him back to Earth to become the Wizard of Baghdad. You see, the Caliph Raschid has many wives but no heirs. He’s old and remains undecided about who his successor might be (or pretty much everything else). Gossip suggests that it’ll be his two wazirs, Norodeen and Shamadin, but <i>The Book of Books</i> states that it will be their children, Prince Husan and Princess Yasmin, who seem to be getting on swimmingly in genie vision. Asmodeus merely tasks Ali Mahmud with making it so.</p>
<p>Take a wild stab at how well that goes, given that Ali Mahmud’s immediate response is, “Hey chief, how about a peek at the harem?” Well, it goes pretty poorly, given that the palace is promptly stormed, Caliph Raschid is killed and Sultan Jullnar seizes the throne, all while Ali Mahmud is passed out drunk. Now Prince Husan has been banished and Princess Yasmin is betrothed to Jullnar, though he’ll have to wait seven years to actually marry her, on account of her youth. The only reason he’s doing it is that Shamadin shows him a decree that Husan and Yasmin are the legal successors to the Caliph, so marriage to the girl will give Jullnar legitimacy on top of the power he’s already taken. Needless to say, Asmodeus is pissed. “Turn in your turban! You’re fired!” he tells Ali Mahmud, then strips his genie powers away and sends him back to fix everything without them. The only assistance he’ll have is from his horse, a far more subtle actor than either Shawn or William Edmonson, who plays Asmodeus, even though he talks, if only to Ali Mahmud.</p>
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<p>This isn’t much of a story to hang a feature on, but I have to be generous and assume that this was meant as satire, partly general in nature but partly of the many fantasy movies that Hollywood turned out in the fifties. After all, most of them didn’t have much plot to speak of either and this plays into all their flaws too. For instance, all these Iraqis, or Mesopotamians as they probably were back then, as Baghdad was becoming a world power, are obviously American actors speaking in the American slang of the time and using then current American humour, i.e. watered down Road movies. None of the inevitably flowery language makes any real sense and the acting, as we move into more dramatic sections, is universally basic. It’s not bad, per se, but it’s certainly not good either. It fits the material, which is like a TV show with slightly better production values. I say slightly, because we can literally see all the strings above Ali Mahmud’s flying carpet and Asmodeus looks like a demon from <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2007/04/hxan-1922-benjamin-christensen.html">Häxan</a> that the studio ordered on Wish.</p>
<p>Really, the only good aspect at this point is Dick Shawn and that’s debatable. He’s certainly natural here, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Is he so natural in front of the camera that he can effortlessly make the best of bad material? Or is he just natural for a bad movie? I do tend to lean towards the former, but he has a subversive streak in him that surely came from comedy and that isn’t as desirable in the lead as it is in a supporting actor. I could appreciate what Shawn was doing but wonder if it would have been more enjoyable had he the benefit of a reliable straight man to bounce off. Maybe viewers in 1960 enjoyed what he does but I doubt many of them sympathised with Ali Mahmud, who’s a born loser of his own making. I was certainly on Asmodeus’s side and wondered why it had taken him five hundred years to kick this particular genie to the kerb. He deserved it and I never found a way to sympathise with him, even as he started to try to do the right thing, but I did keep watching Dick Shawn. That’s something.</p>
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<p>There are a few other little details that shine, but they’re rare indeed. I liked the cameos, not for stars but for characters from fairy tales. Bill Mumy, who wouldn’t join the cast of <i>Lost in Space</i> for another five years, makes his feature debut here as Aladdin in a brief scene as Ali Mahmud arrives in Baghdad. Later, there are similar cameos for Sinbad and Scheherezade. Each is only there for a joke, but it’s welcome. There are plenty of jokes here that don’t hit, but a few do, even if they’re hardly sophisticated. I laughed when it’s fragrant bath time with that special essence from Egypt: Nile No. 5. There’s a decent pun in the Jerry Lewis style in “You’ll become the ex-checker for the Exchequer.” There’s also a scene that benefits from reminding us of a much later scene in a much later film, so wouldn’t have worked as well in 1960. Husan and Jasmin are back together but the latter doesn’t realise who the new captain of the guard to whom she’s so attracted actually is. So she picks on him, he pouts at her and we wonder when he’ll say “As you wish.”</p>
<p>Much of the rest you can write yourself. Of course, we fast forward seven years so Husan and Jasmin can grow up instantly. They do more than that, because Diane Baker was twenty-two and looked older, while Barry Coe was twenty-six; I think they’re supposed to be playing sixteen. Of course, Husan manages to grow up with the Desert Hawk, Chieftain Meroki, who opposes the Sultan; they get hold of Norodeen too in one of their forays. Of course, they build a substantial resistance movement, which promptly fails during a single scene, while Ali Mahmud is passed out again. And, of course, there are happy endings and they’re exactly the ones that you’ll be expecting. Then again, that was written in <i>The Book of Books</i>, right? How much did Ali Mahmud really have to do with it? Not as much as he’d likely claim to his peers, if any of them actually talk to him. To be fair, he does get a joyous scene winding up a couple of Baghdad guards while benefitting from the power of invisibility. He’s a much better trickster god than a regular genie.</p>
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<p>And so that’s <i>The Wizard of Baghdad</i>. I’d guess that, if you’ve seen it, you’ve probably forgotten it, and, if you choose to see it because I wrote about it, then I’m sorry. However, it does hold merit as the debut lead performance for our centenarian, Dick Shawn, who is a force of nature throughout the entire movie. If a scene wasn’t playing his way, he practically ordered it to roll over and beg and it did exactly what he wanted. It’s probably not unfair to suggest that that’s something he applied to the rest of his career, whether he was acting, usually in prominent supporting roles, or performing, as he did on so many television game shows. I grew up in the U.K., so don’t have the memories of <i>The Hollywood Squares</i> or <i>The $10,000 Pyramid</i> that my better half has, but I know what they are and the idea that Dick Shawn would appear on eighteen episodes of the latter makes perfect sense to me. I know him more from films, such <i>The Producers</i>, <i>Water</i> and, much later, <i>Evil Roy Slade</i>.</p>
<p>He was born Richard Schulefand in Buffalo, New York but grew up in the nearby steel town of Lackawanna, sharing a single room at the back of his father’s clothing store with his parents and his brother. He wanted to play professional baseball and actually landed a contract with the Chicago White Sox, but he was drafted a couple of days later and that proved to be a better career choice, as the USO shows, performed by the United Service Organizations to those serving in the military and their families, constantly required a steady flow of new faces. “I could always make people laugh,” he later explained, and so, after attending the University of Miami for a short time for much the same reasons that Ali Mahmud might, he became a standup comedian. His career took a little while to get going, but get going it did and he was able to make eight appearances on <i>The Ed Sullivan Show</i> before moving to Las Vegas, where he performed in Marlene Dietrich’s showroom troupe and replaced Zero Mostel in <i>A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum</i>.</p>
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<p>Stage work led to work on both the big screen and the small one in front rooms across America, but he never truly left the stage and, eventually, he literally died on it, with a sense of impeccable irony, but more about that shortly. He laughed off the notion that “I never got the Joseph Cotten parts. No—for me, they saved the strange ones” and he was absolutely right. Most famously, he was a scene-stealing hippie actor, Lorenzo St. DuBois, or L.S.D., in Mel Brooks’s debut feature, <i>The Producers</i>, a barely coherent drug addict whom the heroes cast as the lead in their guaranteed to fail production of <i>Springtime for Hitler</i>. Before that, he’d become memorable as the obsessive surfer anti-hero, Sylvester Marcus, in <i>It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World</i>, which I really need to rewatch. However, that only scrapes the bottom of the strange parts he found. He also played an amorous psychiatrist in <i>Penelope</i>, a heroic Hollywood drag performer in <i>Angel</i> and an egotistical hack of an American actor relegated to working commercials in <i>Water</i>.</p>
<p>But back to his death, which I should preface by talking about his one man stage show, <i>The (2nd) Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World</i>, which he performed on and off over decades. The <i>L.A. Times</i> ably described a “dark underside of apocalyptic ruin, with Shawn emerging like a sleeping vagrant from beneath a decorative mound of crumpled newspapers to spout stream-of-subconsciousness monologues—a tenuously linked garland of lines, bits of thought and perceptions”. They added that he also often lay on the stage in an apparent coma during intermissions, rising to continue the show when it was time. That’s important context because it makes a lot of sense that audiences at the University of California, San Diego in 1987 would have believed that his lying down on the stage at a random point in the show was part of it. It wasn’t. After five minutes of the audience shouting callbacks like “Take his wallet!”, a doctor examined him and found that he had had a massive heart attack. He died in hospital within the hour. What a way to go.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-16295981078139350362023-11-29T21:47:00.001-07:002023-12-23T22:00:36.554-07:00Die Straße (1923)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Karl Grune<br>
Writers: Karl Grune and Julius Urgiß<br>
Stars: Eugen Klöpfer, Lucie Höflich, Anton Edthofer, Aud Egende-Nissen, Max Schreck and Leonhard Haskel</p>
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<p>Long before <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/05/la-strada-1954.html">La Strada</a>, there was another big foreign language film called <i>The Street</i>, namely <i>Die Straße</i>, though “foreign language” might be a little misleading because it’s a notably silent silent film, with almost no intertitles, meaning that the storytelling is even more visual than would normally be the case in 1923.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, there don’t appear to be any restored versions of the film out there, so I’ve had to struggle through a terrible quality print that is, at least, ninety minutes long. Versions of higher quality run only seventy-four, which I believe is the American cut.</p>
<p>Whichever version we watch, there’s highly expressionistic shadowplay, with a fascinating use of light and images distorted like funhouse mirrors. It’s visually striking even before the story starts to focus. There’s even a wonderful shot of a man peeking round a corner at a lady whose face suddenly turns into a skull; when he leaves, it goes back to normal.</p>
<p>None of the characters are named but we do gradually figure out who we’re watching.</p>
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<p>One man looks out at the street of the title with an obvious longing. He sees life: a clown, a carnival, a young lady, firework displays, a man playing a music box. His wife only sees a street. And so, as she sits down to dinner, he runs out of there.</p>
<p>Another man leaves another house, behind an old man who’s apparently blind and a girl, who helps him get ready. We gradually realise that he’s a pimp and the others are his father and his daughter.</p>
<p>His girl, who is presumably also his hooker, finds the first man, who is eying his wage with intent. She tries to con him, because she’s lost all her money, but backs out of that when he takes her to the police station.</p>
<p>The little girl chases after a dog, so ends up stuck in the middle of the road while her blind granddad searches for her in vain. The street is crazy busy and eventually a policeman helps her across so she can hang out with other cops at the station. She has a grand old time. They even give her chocolate.</p>
<p>Her granddad trips over the kerb but finds a saviour, who helps him up and along, if not to find his granddaughter.</p>
<p>So far, there’s no story to focus on and we start to wonder if the lead character is the street itself, which serves as an able backdrop to the many smaller stories. Certainly, it tries to live up to its titular billing, especially when we follow an animated neon arrow built into the street to reach a club. There’s another great moment when a sign depicting a pair of eyeglasses blinks at us.</p>
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<p>It’s here that a coherent story starts to show itself, because a collection of characters find it and start to interact: the first man looking for fun, the second man pimping out his girl and a new older man who seems highly interested in her services too, ones he can clearly afford.</p>
<p>This story grows until it bursts beyond the club and trawls in all those other characters: the girl, the blind man and, tellingly, the cops. At this point, we know exactly what’s going on and who’s doing what to who and why.</p>
<p>I enjoyed <i>Die Straße</i> far more than I thought I would, given its premise. I appreciated how it kept everything as anonymous as possible, the reasons why characters are how they are seen as far more important than mere names. I also appreciated how entire story arcs rose and fell in a single night, making this quite a snapshot of life on this particular street. What’s more, I appreciated how visual it all was, reducing the usual use of intertitles to the bare minimum.</p>
<p>No wonder it was highly influential, kicking off a little-known genre called street films that flourished in Germany during the second half of the twenties, with notable followers such as <i>The Joyless Street</i> and <i>Asphalt</i>. I look forward to seeing its influences as I continue this project over the years.</p>
<p>The restless first man, clearly going through quite the midlife crisis over that single night, is played by Eugen Klöpfer, who would remain in Germany during the Nazi’s era in power, as an increasingly important name. Working for Josef Goebbels led him to be appointed as Vice President of the Ministry of Arts and he even took a primary role in notorious propaganda movie <i>Jud Süß</i>. Ironically, given all that, it’s not him who has lasted best to posterity. The blind man is played by Max Schreck, who was riding high after his performance the year before as Nosferatu, one of the best and most recognised performances in all of German silent cinema.</p>
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<p>At the end of the day, this isn’t about actors at all though. It was always going to be about moments and there are plenty of those. Those signs and the skull shot are frequently cited as important moments, as is the moment in the club when the first man looks down from the balcony of the club and experiences vertigo, a feeling emulated by a rotating camera, but the picture contains memorable moments dotted all the way through and each viewer is likely to leave with a different set ingrained in mind as their favourites.</p>
<p>Many will remember the card scene, which does not go entirely the way we expect. Others will remember the moment that the girl finds herself detached from her grandfather’s hand and stuck in the middle of the bustling street. There are surely scenes late in the picture that I won’t spoil that stick in mind, easily the most impactful. There’s one in the apartment of the hooker and another in a jail cell, but arguably half a dozen in between.</p>
<p>To me, it’s the bookending scenes with the first man and his wife, for different reasons. At the beginning of the film, it’s all contrast, the different results of each looking at the street through their window merely the most overt. She goes about her business, doing housework or serving up dinner. He’s detached from that reality, choosing to ache instead for the street. At the end of the film, nothing’s changed for the wife but everything’s changed for the man and there’s serious emotional resonance in the routine she continues and the penance he has to pay. He clearly doesn’t deserve her.</p>
<p>I can see why many viewers wouldn’t get or even like this film. To properly work, it needs input from the viewer, not all of whom would be willing to put in that effort. If we do, then it will stay with us as a serious impression.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-28243332165221045242023-11-28T23:12:00.014-07:002023-12-01T01:05:54.284-07:00The Return of the Living Dead (1985)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Dan O’Bannon<br>
Writer: Dan O’Bannon, based on a story by Rudy Ricci, John Russo and Russell Streiner<br>
Stars: Clu Gulager, James Karen, Don Calfa, Thom Mathews, Miguel Nunez, Brian Peck, John Philbin, Linnea Quigley, Beverly Randolph, Jewel Shepard and Mark Venturini</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/2023-centennials.html">2023 Centennials</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2023/11/the-glass-wall-1953.html">The Glass Wall</a> isn’t the only picture featuring someone born on 28th November, 1923, but <i>The Return of the Living Dead</i> must be about as different a feature as is comfortably imaginable. It was released over thirty years later, in 1985, and everyone and everything in it is apparently true. Well, that’s what it says on screen, so it must be real, right? Of course, it isn’t, but it does have plenty of fun with the conceit that the events that took place in George A. Romero’s pioneering 1968 zombie movie, <i>Night of the Living Dead</i>, were based on real life events. There was a chemical spill at the VA hospital in Pittsburgh that released 2-4-5-Trioxin and it made corpses jump as if they were alive. Somehow Romero got wind of the story and built a script around it. Meanwhile, those corpses, stored carefully in barrels, made their way, through typical military transportation screw up, to the Uneeda Medical Supply warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky, where they’ve been stored in a basement because nobody bothered to call the military phone number on the barrels.</p>
<p>Now, there is another important connection to <i>Night of the Living Dead</i>, namely writer John Russo, who co-wrote both films. The first was with Romero, with whom he had an agreement that they could both effectively continue it into a series. Russo had the rights to the Living Dead part of the title ongoing, but Romero could make his own sequels to the story. So, while the latter went on to direct <i>Dawn of the Dead</i>, <i>Day of the Dead</i> and so on, Russo wrote a novelisation of <i>Night of the Living Dead</i> and then a sequel novel, <i>Return of the Living Dead</i>, upon which this was only theoretically based. It was enough for him to get a credit for original story, alongside Russell Streiner and Rudy Ricci, but the screenplay was written by Dan O’Bannon, who had also written <i>Dark Star</i> and <i>Alien</i> and was directing a movie for the first time, later suggesting that “I spent 37 years of my life not even being alive. Now I’m fulfilled.” Hilariously, when he did so, it was Russo who wrote the novelisation, meaning that he wrote two completely different books both called <i>Return of the Living Dead</i>.</p>
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<p>While the credited star is Clu Gulager and fans tend to remember Linnea Quigley most because of the famous scene where she strips naked and dances on a tomb, our centenarian feels like the lead during the opening scenes. That’s James Karen as Frank, who works at Uneeda, where we first meet him teaching Freddy how to pack up skeletons. He’s fun to watch, not only because he winds Freddy up something rotten. All those skeletons are sourced from a skeleton farm in India, he says. They aren’t, but it’s a cool place with an impressive stock. Want to buy a split dog for your veterinarian school? Uneeda’s your go to place. They also sell real cadavers, both to medical schools for study and the military for ballistic testing. It’s also Frank who provides that background about the zombies in Night of the Living Dead being both real and in the basement, actually taking Freddy down to see them. To prove that they don’t leak, Frank bangs one of the drums and, of course, it leaks, promptly knocking them both out and spreading throughout the building.</p>
<p>Take a wild stab in the dark what happens next! If you guessed that everything dead in the warehouse promptly comes alive, you’re spot on. That means the cadavers in the cold room, which are still hanging on hooks. It means the split dogs that are mounted onto stands, so can’t do anything except fall over; Frank is so horrified that he beats one into oblivion with a crutch. And it even means the butterflies, pinned to boards, that are now fluttering their wings in a vain attempt to fly and be free. And, of course, the corpse secreted away in the drum that Frank thumped emerges to terrorise anyone who happens to find their way to the basement. Quite unsurprisingly, this tarman zombie claims the first kill, but surprisingly not until forty-six minutes into the picture. In doing so, he also cements into place one of the infamous tropes of zombie cinema, namely the living dead’s thirst for human brains, something that simply wasn’t in place in Night of the Living Dead. It’s in place here and it’s riffed on throughout the film with glorious effect.</p>
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<p>You might be wondering how we get to Linnea Quigley dancing naked on a tomb. Well, there’s a second plot strand featuring a host of friends of Freddy, who show up at Uneeda to pick him up but arrive two hours early, so they hang out instead at the Resurrection Cemetery conveniently located next door. The toxic gas that Frank has inadvertently released hasn’t escaped the warehouse yet, so they aren’t in danger of anything except being arrested for being eighties stereotypes. They’re very clean stereotypes too, each one representing another subculture to be shoehorned into the mix, most of them wearing some sort of pastels. Everything you want in a bunch of eighties lowlife kids is here: punks, new wavers, mohawks, chains, the inevitable boom box. They’re also multi-racial and representative of both genders, so there’s a black dude, a preppy chick, even an anomalous yuppie. The leader of the gang is Suicide and, while Freddy’s girlfriend is simply named Tina, many have outrageous street names, like Spider, Scuz and Trash.</p>
<p>They’re all a little annoying until Trash strips completely naked, because that’s who Quigley is. She asks Spider if he wonders about different ways of dying horribly. The most horrible way for her would be “for a bunch of old men to get around me and start biting and eating me alive.” Now, I don’t to give much away here but this may well be the most blatant foreshadowing in movie history. At this point, however, she can strip off all her clothes, except a pair of legwarmers, and dance, thus cementing her place in the horror hall of fame just as surely as the tarman zombie who wants to eat your brains. Meanwhile, back at Uneeda, Frank and Freddy have a shot at killing the reanimated cadaver but fail, turning it instead into a whole collection of reanimated body parts. It seems that the zombies in this picture don’t die if you destroy their brains, as they find out when Frank and Freddy hold it down so their boss, Burt Wilson, can put a pickaxe through it. It doesn’t work. “It worked in the movie!” says Frank. “You mean the movie lied?” asks Freddy.</p>
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<p>While he never gets to have fun in the Resurrection Cemetery, Frank gets many of the best moments and the best lines in the early parts of the movie, Trash’s spotlight moment excluded, but there’s another gem of a character still to introduce. That’s Ernie, who runs the conveniently located morgue over the street, and he’s played by Don Calfa, who had been a respected actor for close to two decades before he landed screen immortality here, embalming a body while listening to German opera and smoking a pipe. I utterly adore the scene in which Burt, with Frank and Freddy in tow, ask for his help in disposing of what they say are really sacks of rabid weasels in his crematorium. “At least let me kill them first,” suggests Ernie. “Well, I don’t think that would work,” states Burt. And so they burn up all the sacks in the fire. Out goes the smoke. Down comes the rain. And up come the corpses of all the bodies in the suddenly very aptly named Resurrection Cemetery to hunger for brains and to make Trash’s dreams come true.</p>
<p>It has to be said that <i>Night of the Living Dead</i> is a bona fide classic and not just of the horror genre either, because there’s much social commentary to examine that lasts all the way to its final moments, filling it with dramatic substance. <i>The Return of the Living Dead</i> is not even in the same league in quality but it’s a heck of a lot more fun and the cast, to varying degrees, all know that. Clu Gulager is delightfully underplayed as Burt, always trying to do what’s best for his business even at the expense of everyone else. James Karen is the bedrock of the film as Frank, highly experienced but not especially bright during the early scenes. After he triggers the leak of resurrection gas, he and Thom Mathews as Freddy become infected and so gradually turn into zombies, even if nobody killed them first. Mathews is fun but he’s playing a young adult moron in a horror comedy, while Karen is working capably through a story arc. Don Calfa and his expressive eyes are all joyous and the kids in the cemetery serve as interesting fodder for the zombies.</p>
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<p>The true nature of the film comes in small moments though. The tarman zombie hungering for brains and Trash’s naked dance on a tomb may be the most abiding, but there are a whole bunch more. There’s Ernie being chased by a resurrected little person. Trash’s memorable demise counts, as does the fact that she doesn’t get the opportunity to put clothes back on when they all have to escape the rise of the living dead, so sits in a leaky and immobile car naked among all her clothed friends. After she’s zombified, she gets an impeccable scene where she walks out of the smoke to eat a homeless guy’s brains. Talking of brains, Freddy trying in vain to break through a trapdoor because he can smell his girlfriend’s brains is another great example. My favourite has to be the running joke, of all things, that’s begun when zombies eat a couple of paramedics and one of them asks medical dispatch over the intercom to send more. Later, a different zombie repeats that scene but with police officers on the menu. “Send. More. Cops.”</p>
<p>There’s social commentary in the ending too, which also capably sets up the potential for a sequel, and there’s more buried within details. 2-4-5-Trioxin, made by the Darrow Chemical Company, is a nerdy chemistry reference, because 2-4-5-T Dioxin, made by the Dow Chemical Company, is far better known as Agent Orange, the infamous defoliant that ended up backfiring on the U.S. military. However, I’m not reviewing <i>The Return of the Living Dead</i> for its thoughts on military missteps; I’m reviewing it because James Karen would have been a hundred years old today and I feel that his part in this movie is highly underrated, even if it landed him a Saturn award nomination. His death scene would have helped that and he largely wrote it himself. It’s a highly emotional scene, perfect for an actor who started out understudying Karl Malden in the original Broadway production of <i>A Streetcar Named Desire</i>. Apparently, he simply didn’t want to be a “rain-drenched zombie”. Instead he kisses his wedding ring and climbs into Ernie’s crematory furnace.</p>
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<p>Born Jacob Karnofsky in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to Russian born Jews, he probably caught the acting bug from his uncle, Morris Carnovsky, who was a prolific performer on stage and in film until he was blacklisted in the McCarthy witchhunts. He also got much encouragement from a U.S. Congressman, Daniel J. Flood, who was educated in Wilkes-Barre, where he studied acting, and, after his admission to the bar, hung out his shingle there as an attorney, before entering politics. Even though Karen’s screen debut was back in 1948, it was on television rather than film, in an unknown role in <i>A Christmas Carol</i>, a live play on The Philco Television Playhouse. He worked steadily for seven decades, on stage, on television and in film, his first feature being <i>Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster</i> in 1965, not a great start but arguably a better one than his next feature, <i>Hercules in New York</i>. However, he’d landed a recurring role on soap opera <i>As the World Turns</i> in 1967 and played Dr. Burke for four years, also becoming the first Lincoln Tyler on <i>All My Children</i>.</p>
<p>Perhaps his best known role began in the sixties too, but only to a select audience, namely television viewers in the northeast, even though he moved to the west coast in the mid seventies to capitalise on regular television work. That’s because he was well known as “the Pathmark Man” or simply “Mr. Pathmark”, spokesman in hundreds of commercials for the Pathmark supermarket chain. It was a job that took him into the eighties, with twenty-eight years of flying to New York every couple of weeks to record a score of thirty second commercials at a time. “This is the best job an actor can have,” he claimed in a 1984 interview. “It pays very well, and it’s steady.” They even made him a vice president of the company. The only catch was that, when he played a memorable villainous role in the <i>Little House on the Prairie</i> finale, the TV movie <i>Little House: The Last Farewell</i>, as a real estate developer plotting to take over Walnut Grove, hundreds of letters flooded into Pathmark headquarters asking them to do something about him, as if they had a say.</p>
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<p>He was a versatile actor who appeared as both heroes and villains in both leads and supporting roles across the genre spectrum and on both television and film. Memorable roles on the latter included a lawyer on <i>All the President’s Men</i>, the vice president in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2009/07/capricorn-one-1978-peter-hyams.html">Capricorn One</a>, a TV station boss in <i>The China Syndrome</i> and a sales manager in <i>Wall Street</i>, but he had a knack for landing pivotal roles in horror movies. While he was great in <i>The Return of the Living Dead</i> in a less flamboyant role and he returned to this series for its first of four sequels, even though he played a completely different part, that of graverobber Ed, rather than conjure up an unwieldy explanation of how Frank made it out of the crematorium, he was already well known within the genre for what could be considered a still more famous precursor to his Little House part, playing another ruthless real estate developer, the one who built his planned community of Cuesta Verde on top of an Indian burial ground in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2007/02/poltergeist-1982-tobe-hooper.html">Poltergeist</a>.</p>
<p>Even though he appeared in many features, including 21st century titles like <i>Mulholland Drive</i>, <i>The Pursuit of Happyness</i> and <i>Superman Returns</i>, though his scenes in the latter were cut, he remained well known on television too, racking up parts in over a hundred and thirty different shows and TV movies. That fresh work in the mid-seventies started with shows such as <i>Starsky and Hutch</i>, <i>The Bionic Woman</i> and <i>The Streets of San Francisco</i>, but only in individual episodes. He would find regular slots on <i>The Powers of Matthew Star</i>, <i>First Monday</i> and <i>Ned and Stacey</i>, but his most famous TV role is arguably Dick van Patten’s boss, Eliot Randolph, on <i>Eight is Enough</i>. He got a huge mention in 1986, though, when George Clooney accepted his AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, recalling James Karen asking him to write his obituary. After he didn’t die soon, Clooney rang Karen’s wife, who explained, “Jimmy’s doing fine. He just wanted to know what everybody thought about him while he was still around.” He lasted thirty-two more years, dying in 2018 at 94.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-22272425451178484032023-11-28T15:37:00.002-07:002023-11-29T00:51:29.646-07:00The Glass Wall (1953)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Maxwell Shane<br>
Writers: Ivan Tors and Maxwell Shane<br>
Stars: Vittorio Gassman, Gloria Grahame, with Alan Robinson, Douglas Spencer, Robin Raymond, Jerry Paris, featuring Jack Teagarden and Shorty Rogers and His Band</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/2023-centennials.html">2023 Centennials</a>.</p>
<p>I had plenty of choices to watch in honour of Gloria Grahame’s centennial, given that she was a pivotal actress in film noir, but I’m rather happy that I plucked this one out of the blue instead of any of the more famous films I’d already seen. That’s because classic film, so often fascinating for cinematic reasons, can be a real window onto a time and sometimes the light through that window is commentary on our own time. I wonder how <i>The Glass Wall</i> would be received were it to be made today. It seems to me that it could prompt calls for its cancellation from the sort of people who tend to rail against cancelling their particular brand of culture. That’s because it’s fundamentally about refugees, a big issue in 1953 with so many Jews and other oppressed minorities in Europe moving to the United States during and after World War II to claim refugee status. Somehow it’s only become a bigger issue in the decades since and almost everything that happens here seventy years ago could easily happen today.</p>
<p>The refugee at the heart of the story is Peter Kuban, who’s on board a ship sailing past the Statue of Liberty into the United States as the film begins. There are 1,322 other displaced persons on board, each rescued by the International Refugee Organisation of the United Nations. “Welcome to America!” say the other boats in New York Harbor in yet another reminder that times have changed. The catch is that, while Kuban is absolutely a displaced person, he’s also a stowaway. That means that, while the rest of the people seeking asylum, who have escaped war and concentration camps to start a new life in the New World, are processed and admitted, Kuban is interviewed, but he’ll be sent home again because he can’t back up anything with evidence. He was born in Hungary, but that doesn’t exist any more. He spent ten years in concentration camps, where he learned English from other prisoners. His family perished in the gas chambers. He’s missing a number of fingernails from Nazi torture. Crucially, he can’t tell them where Tom is.</p>
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<p>And Tom is so important to this story that he’s almost a MacGuffin. He was an American paratrooper in Europe who Kuban helped to hide from the Nazis during the war, well enough that he got out of Europe and back home to the States. He also knows that there is an exception in what I presume is the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, a Harry Truman-era law that provided permanent residence in the U.S. to 200,000 refugees, to let in those displaced persons who contributed to the war effort by assisting Allied soldiers during wartime, which is exactly what he did. Tom can vouch for him, he says. He merely can’t provide Tom’s last name. Or his address. Or anything else at all, beyond the fact that he’s a musician who used to play a clarinet in a band in Times Square. That’s not enough to persuade the immigration officials, some of whom clearly believe that he made Tom up on the spot. He’s kept on the ship, confined, ready to return to Europe when it sails at seven the next morning. That’s tough, but it is what it is.</p>
<p>Well, Kuban isn’t willing to accept that, so he escapes and jumps overboard, given that the ship is docked, grabs the back of a truck and suddenly he’s in the Big Apple. He’s hurt in the process, because the authorities are giving chase and they’re armed, but he will be able to find Tom, he thinks, and clear the whole thing up in no time. Of course, he hasn’t been to Times Square before. He hasn’t even visited a city before, so he’s swamped by the enormity of the place and, while he quickly realises that his search isn’t going to be remotely as quick and easy as he thought, especially given that he only has eight bucks in his pocket, he refuses to give up. After all, if he didn’t give up hope in the concentration camps, why would he give up hope when he’s so close to a new life? So onward he goes. The actor tasked with playing Kuban is Vittorio Gassman, one of the great Italian actors who had also married Shelley Winters a year earlier. He does a magnificent job in Times Square, simultaneously lost and amazed, disheartened and yet still optimistic.</p>
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<p>In fact, he does a magnificent job throughout the movie, so sincere that it’s almost hard to believe that even professionally cynical immigration officials might not buy into his story. It doesn’t matter that it’s also true, it’s told with such sincerity that we can’t not be affected by his performance. Maybe he overplays some scenes late in the picture, once he gets to the Glass Wall of the title, but it has to be said that those scenes are so inherently emotional that we buy into everything he does anyway. That Glass Wall, I should add, is a famous feature of the architecture of the United Nations building in New York, which Kuban attempts to reach after failing to find Tom. Maybe he can claim asylum there or plead his case to someone higher up the chain. It’s worth a try, especially since he is being sought not only by Immigration at this point but New York’s finest too. Surely the most emotional scene is the one when he soliloquises to a vast empty room used by the Commission on Human Rights, but there are many others to choose from.</p>
<p>That’s not really a spoiler, by the way, because the only thing that matters from the moment that Kuban jumps ship is whether he’ll find Tom, who we firmly believe will be able to vouch for him to the authorities. He doesn’t, but we do because the script intends us to be in no doubt about whether he truly exists or not. He’s at the Musician’s Club when his fiancée Nancy brings word that he’s got a shot in Jack Teagarden’s band. He’s very real and findable. However, it also doesn’t want Kuban to find him, just like that, because there are eighty minutes of feature to fill. Therefore it has Kuban work his way through the city, checking out all the clarinetists in all the clubs, always failing to find the one he needs, until his injury becomes too much for him to ignore. That’s where a succession of supporting characters come in, each of them adding another level to this look at humanity in the largest city in the country, with some of them restoring our faith in it and some threatening to take it away again.</p>
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<p>The first and most important of those is Maggie Summers, played by our centenarian, Gloria Grahame. He sees her when he stops to eat at a diner, as her actions are notable. She carefully sits at a table where she can finish up someone else’s food and dunk a tea bag she brought with her into a cup of hot water, before leaving with Kathleen Freeman’s coat. We recognise that yell easily enough! It prompts her to be chased by the authorities but Peter follows and helps her escape. He’s had plenty of experience with that during wartime, so he’s able to get them safely back to her place, where his sincerity and her cynicism clash. Maggie has a fire in her, much of it controlled anger but tempered with fear and the knowledge of how low she’s fallen in the world. Kuban notices that too as the landlady arrives for overdue rent, so he gives her his last seven bucks, even though it’ll only make a dent in the thirty she owes. It’s enough, at least, to keep her from being evicted. As he leaves, he collapses, and she sees a paper with his story on the front page.</p>
<p>If the most obvious parallel across seventy years of history is how we see refugees, there are others. We might think that the nation has moved forward in that time but the way this picture looks at concerns that were topical seven decades ago and remain so today, we might be persuaded otherwise. There are plenty of questions here about the land of the free and the home of the brave. Maggie, for example, used to work for a living by putting tips on shoelaces, dealing with routine sexual harassment as she did so. However, a ruptured appendix meant a gap in wages and the cost of her treatment meant she couldn’t cover rent and suddenly she’s struggling to avoid eviction. And the refugee who’s already given her the last of his meagre supply of cash tells her, entirely sincerely, “When I get work, I will help you.” Goddamn. This is the sort of film that could make any viewer tear up, not merely watching it but thinking back on scenes like this too, not only for their sheer power but for how applicable they remain today. What's changed?</p>
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<p>Maggie isn’t the only supporting character of note, but she’s the first and the impact that Peter had on her in that scene means that she remains part of the story even after he moves on. She thinks that she’s fallen about as low as she can go, so talks down her room as crummy. Kuban thinks it’s a very good room and she’s able to live there all by herself too. “If I had a room like this, I’d think I was rich,” he tells her and that perspective, delivered as sincerely as everything else he says in this film, shakes her. No wonder she feels the need to play her part as far as she can to help him out. Tom, not that Peter knows it, does too. He’s cleaning up in the bathroom when someone tells him about this refugee in the news, but no names are mentioned. He almost doesn’t see the paper but, when he does, he recognises Peter immediately, and tells his fiancée that he has to go down to the immigration office to help him. Nancy, on the other hand, wants him to take his audition with Jack Teagarden and he does, but it’s only a temporary obstacle to his help.</p>
<p>The other important supporting character is a burlesque dancer called Tanya, who finds him sleeping in her taxi. She doesn’t wake him because she recognises him from the paper, but she does go to the 54th Street police station to get the truth before taking him to her place. She’s really Bella Zakoyla, a fellow Hungarian, and she wants to help. Her two bit brother doesn’t and proclaims that he wants “the lousy foreigner” gone. That gets him slapped by his sister and their mother, but Peter overhears and takes off. It’s telling that all the people who want to help are traditionally looked down on: poor people stealing to keep warm, showgirls working a late shift and musicians eager for a gig. Maggie’s landlady and her lech of a son, on the other hand, might seem more respectable from a traditional standpoint but they have no honour, the latter forcing himself on Maggie and the former lying to the police after he’s knocked out by Peter, doing the gentlemanly thing. The same goes for officials, whether they’re wearing blue or not.</p>
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<p>It doesn’t hurt that the cast is impeccable. Gassman is perfectly cast as Peter Kuban, able to bring serious depth to what could easily have been an overly sentimental role. Jerry Paris, who plays Tom, can’t bring the same depth but does bring honesty and goodness. If he was playing that clarinet for real, he could have had a career in jazz. Instead he went on to direct <i>Police Academy 2</i> and <i>3</i> and an abiding guilty pleasure of mine, <i>Evil Roy Slade</i>. Tanya is played by Robin Raymond, who shows how much she could do with a role in one of the rare occasions where she was given one of this substance. Her jackass of a brother is a very young Joe Turkel, so young that I didn’t immediately recognise him as Dr. Eldon Tyrell in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/05/blade-runner-1982.html">Blade Runner</a> and Lloyd, the ghost bartender, in <i>The Shining</i>. The bands we see so often in montages are real, with jazz musicians of the calibre of trombonist Jack Teagarden and trumpeter Shorty Rogers appearing as themselves. And then there’s Gloria Grahame, who had won an Academy Award a year earlier.</p>
<p>Given how controversies in her personal life stole attention away from her career, it’s easy to forget how good she was and just how quickly she rose to her peak. She was born Gloria Grahame Hallward in Los Angeles, but her parents were British. Her father was an English architect and her mother a Scottish stage actress, Jeanne McDougall, who performed as Jean Grahame, so providing Gloria’s middle name. It was her mother who taught her acting and she began her career on the stage, but soon graduated to film, debuting in <i>Blonde Fever</i> in 1944. Two years later, she made a big splash as Violet Bick in <i>It’s a Wonderful Life</i>, demonstrating precisely what she could do if she were cast in a film noir. She promptly was only a year later and <i>Crossfire</i> landed her an Oscar nod as Best Supporting Actress. Only ten films into her screen career and she was the leading lady in a Humphrey Bogart picture, <a href="http://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2007/01/in-lonely-place-1950-nicholas-ray.html">In a Lonely Place</a>, although she was married to its director, Nicholas Ray, at the time, her second of four marriages.</p>
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<p>She continued to go from strength to strength, making four films in 1952, one of which won the Oscar for Best Picture, <i>The Greatest Show on Earth</i>, and another of which won her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, <i>The Bad and the Beautiful</i>, even though it marked the shortest performance of any winner that far at only nine minutes. That record stood until 1976 when Beatrice Straight won for a five minute performance in <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/04/network-1976.html">Network</a>. She was always at her best in film noir, because she was a natural in that genre, delivering an array of gritty performances in films noir like <i>Sudden Fear</i>, <i>The Big Heat</i> and <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2009/06/human-desire-1954-fritz-lang.html">Human Desire</a>. Almost typecast at this point as a scheming femme fatale, she tried to diversify her roles but met with resistance from the public, especially when playing in a romantic musical comedy like <i>Oklahoma!</i> That meant a shift back to theatre and to television, where she served as the guest star on a host of episodes of major shows, like <i>Mannix</i>, <i>Burke’s Law</i> and <i>The Fugitive</i>, botched plastic surgery on her lips also affecting her looks and delivery.</p>
<p>While her final screen performance came as late as an episode of <i>Tales of the Unexpected</i> in 1984, four years after her death, her life had taken all the attention away from her work. It wasn’t that she had been married four times, none of the first three lasting over four years—to actor Stanley Clements, director Nicholas Ray and producer Cy Howard—it was that the fourth was to Anthony Ray, her former stepson. In a 2011 biography of Grahame, Nicholas Ray claimed that their marriage ended in 1950 because he found his wife in bed with his then thirteen year old son. While there’s no proof of that; later partner Peter Turner, who wrote a book about their time together, called it fiction; and they remained married for fourteen years; the optics weren’t good. Neither was her third husband’s long custody battle for their daughter, nor her subsequent nervous breakdown. She died in 1980, after the breast cancer she had survived in 1974 returned. Her career was overshadowed then but deserves revisiting now, especially her films noir.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-39378817350887348882023-11-25T23:48:00.001-07:002023-11-27T00:16:55.558-07:00Anna Christie (1923)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: John Griffith Wray under the personal supervision of Thomas H. Ince<br>
Writer: Bradley King, based on the play by Eugene O’Neill<br>
Stars: Blanche Sweet, William Russell, George F. Marion and Eugenie Besserer</p>
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<p>In 1921, an original play called <i>Anna Christie</i> debuted on Broadway to much acclaim and, in 1922, it won Eugene O’Neill his second Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He still holds the record with four wins. In 1930, it became a sensation in the cinema, marketed as “Garbo Talks!” because it introduced the world to Greta Garbo’s voice.</p>
<p>However, it had been filmed before, in 1923, with Blanche Sweet as the title character, and it seems rather strange right now that I prefer it to its far more famous successor.</p>
<p>To be fair, it’s been a while since I watched all of Garbo’s sound films, but <i>Anna Christie</i> was easily my least favourite two of them, with the German language version faring a little better than the English one. I didn’t particularly like this either, but it was stunningly average for the time rather than annoyingly poor. Maybe I should revisit the Garbo versions.</p>
<p>What struck me watching this, so soon after Our Hospitality, is how fresh the Keaton picture is a century on while this feels utterly dated. It’s precisely the sort of silent melodrama that naysayers cite as the primary reason why they don’t like silent movies, with its exaggerated facial expressions, overt gesturing and drawn out scenes of overplayed drama.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the initial culprit for all those is George F. Marion, given that he doesn’t just play Chris Christopherson here, but originated the role on Broadway and reprised it in 1930, albeit only in the English version.</p>
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<p>Christopherson is a Swedish sailor who has become doomed to never return to his family, a wife and five year old daughter, because he earns so little and spends so much on drink. It isn’t endearing and neither is the fact he keeps blaming it all on “that old devil sea” instead of taking any personal responsibility whatsoever.</p>
<p>Fast forward fifteen years and he’s captain of a coal barge in New York, spending his time hanging out with Marthy, “a lady of the port”, and drinking at Johnny the Priest’s bar. It’s at Johnny’s that he receives a letter from Anna, his daughter, to tell him that she’s on her way.</p>
<p>A century ago is long enough that bars like Johnny’s boasted separate rooms for men and women. That’s how Chris can leave without letting Marthy know and that’s how Anna can arrive to meet Marthy before her father. And that’s how we find out how much fun her past fifteen years haven’t been in Minnesota.</p>
<p>Blanche Sweet was a big name in 1923, as a leading lady for both D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, though she hasn’t been remembered the way that Garbo has. She does an excellent job and helps to ground the picture after the scenes with Marion and Eugénie Besserer, who played Marthy.</p>
<p>To be fair, Besserer does better when acting opposite Sweet than opposite Marion, even if we could be forgiven for believing that her part was written for Marie Dressler, who took it in 1930. She improves with the film.</p>
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<p>I appreciated when she laughs at how Anna is a long way from what her father expects. Anna doesn’t have the famous Garbo dialogue: “Gimme a whisky, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, baby!” She merely asks for a whisky and lights up a cigarette, but she sells the role with both the sleaziness of the life she had in Minnesota and the hope that she’ll be able to change in New York. Marthy trashes that hope but restores it again, giving Sweet opportunity to demonstrate her range.</p>
<p>The good news is that, while Eugene O’Neill initially wrote <i>Chris Christopherson</i>, he changed it to <i>Anna Christie</i> and that means that Sweet is the star of this show, even if she moves onto her father’s coal barge.</p>
<p>The bad news is that we’re building towards that silent era melodrama, because a tug gets hit by a liner and the survivor, Mat Burke, has the good luck to be picked up and dropped off at the nearest vessel, namely Chris’s barge. He finds himself immediately smitten by Anna, to a degree that only works because he’s a simple man who can focus utterly on one thing until he gets bored with it and moves on.</p>
<p>Burke is played by William Russell, who had quite the history. He was on the stage at eight, earning fifty bucks a week in <i>Chimmie Fadden</i>, a huge sum in the late nineteenth century. He went on to appear alongside Ethel Barrymore in <i>Cousin Kate</i>, among many other major stars. He studied law at Harvard and hung out his shingle, but also taught boxing. He found his way to film in 1910, making over two hundred silent films as an actor, in addition to a few as a director and/or producer, but died in 1929 of pneumonia, just as the sound era was starting.</p>
<p>He’s a force of nature in this film, able and willing to manhandle anyone and continuing to singlemindedly pursue Anna, clashing with her father all the way. Chris has little power over her destiny but he refuses to let her fall for a sailor and so be caught up by “that old devil sea” like he was. Mat has other ideas.</p>
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<p>The worst scenes in the film come late on, as Chris and Mat spar, physically and verbally, at great length, only to hide their antagonism when Anna comes in. These scenes run on and on. One starts with a knife fight between them and shifts into a proposal, a return declaration of love, a goodbye kiss, forcefulness, violence and the truth about her background. It’s much too much and it’s only when Anna steps up to give them a piece of her mind that it becomes bearable. Of course, it merely prompts more of the same and eventually escalates into more sheer melodrama.</p>
<p>Given how poorly this started, even if it had some excellent cinematography to counter the acting a little, I wasn’t particularly hopeful for much. It gets better once Anna arrives and the rest of the cast calms down a little around her. For a while, I got onboard with where it was going, only to regret that when it descended back into cliché.</p>
<p>Until I revisit the Garbo version, which does have a stellar cast, Charles Bickford and Marie Dressler joining Garbo and Marion, I guess I’ll have to think of this as the better film, based on my ratings. Certainly Eugene O’Neill felt it was superior, but then his source story may be the biggest part of the problem for me.</p>
<p>Blanche Sweet is a good part of the solution but she can only go so far. While this will hold an important place as a prominent adaptation, producer Thomas Ince paying a large amount for the screen rights, it was overshadowed by the 1930 version and Garbo’s voice. Even if it’s a better film, it’s not better enough to matter.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-69081820471018829402023-11-23T22:48:00.001-07:002023-11-25T00:01:10.826-07:00The Faithful Heart (1923)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Jean Epstein<br>
Writer: Jean and Marie Epstein<br>
Stars: Léon Mathot and Gina Manès<br>
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<p>A fresh face to French audiences in 1923 but known to them from a couple of books on film, Jean Epstein quickly directed three features: <i>Pasteur</i>, with Jean Benoît-Lévy, in celebration of the scientist’s centennial; <i>The Red Inn</i>, from the Honore de Balzac story; and <i>The Faithful Heart</i>, from an original script by Epstein and his sister Marie. This is the most noteworthy, because it’s the most ambitious, albeit only in one particular direction.</p>
<p>Those books were about film theory and it’s no shock to see Epstein trying out some of his ideas. The early scenes involve some rapid-fire editing, contrasting lingering shots of what a girl is doing with briefer shots of her face. This is montage work and it feels advanced, beyond the technology of the time to render as clean as he or we would like.</p>
<p>The girl is Marie, a foundling who’s taken in by a couple, M. and Mme Hochon, who run the tavern at which she works. Why Hochon, I’m not sure. It appears to mean “Nod” in French but “Compensation” in Japanese and the pair of meanings combine rather appropriately.</p>
<p>She works hard but the hardest part of her job is dealing with the unwanted attentions of Petit Paul, a shifty two bit crook who clearly scares her but seems to be on the right side of her parents, who almost throw her at him. She dreams instead of a dockworker called Jean, whom she sneaks out to meet. And...</p>
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<p>And that’s pretty much the story, because the script basically sets up a love triangle and runs with it for an hour and a half. Sure, there are details. Marie is effectively married off to Petit Paul and they have a kid but that’s hardly unexpected. Jean goes to jail for an incident in which he confronts Petit Paul, but he gets out and comes back and... well, you know exactly how this is going to go from the outset.</p>
<p>Frankly, if you’re watching this for a story, you’re going to be disappointed. Even with an underpinning of gritty social realism, this was a long way from original even in 1923. What’s more, most earlier versions wrapped it up in a couple of reels rather than stretching it out to feature length.</p>
<p>Fortunately, I don’t think too many people in 1923 were truly watching for the story.</p>
<p>What matters here is invention. Epstein had a threadbare script but he wanted to make this picture as memorable as possible by throwing his ideas onto the screen and he did that a lot. Every positive note I took had to do with what he was doing despite this clichéd story rather than because of it.</p>
<p>There are interesting shots even before we meet the love interests. Epstein shoots smoke, debris floating on water, Marie framed neatly in a crappy mirror. There are lots of fades and lots of filters, even if we can see them slipped on and off the camera. There are many stylish framing shots and more of that montage work conjured up through good editing.</p>
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<p>Gina Manès is playing much younger than her actual thirty but mopes appropriately. She doesn’t have a lot of emotional range between scared and blissful, but Epstein finds a way to make her look good. He also tells her story as much as possible through visuals, suggesting that he knows full well how little actual story he has to play with.</p>
<p>Léon Mathot isn’t much better as Jean, with a penchant for overacting. Having already met with the Hochons to state his case, he leaves and actually expects Marie to show up for the usual rendezvous. His despair when she fails to show is wildly overdone, but Epstein saves the day in post, with a neat double exposure.</p>
<p>This sort of thing happens all the time. For instance, Marie doesn’t meet Jean due to Petit Paul taking her to the carnival to get married on the wooden horses. I’m not sure if it’s legal because I never saw a priest, but Epstein takes everything up a notch with cinematography and editing. There are strong impressionistic shots and strong motion shots too, not merely of things moving but on things moving and of the ground below what’s moving too.</p>
<p>There are long sections without intertitles, as Marie looks so despondent she might never speak again and Jean searches for her. It’s all done through impressions, the sort of cinema that Chaplin was so known for but even more simplistic and more grounded in realism.</p>
<p>Jean searches for her a lot, initially because he wants to find her before she gets married, but then again after he gets out of prison. The result is the same both times: he’s too late, but maybe he can make a difference second time around, if only due to the help of my favourite character in the entire movie.</p>
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<p>And yes, that’s neither Marie nor Jean and it certainly isn’t Petit Paul. It’s Marie Epstein as a young lady credited only as Crippled Woman, meaning that she has a club foot. She lives in the same building as married Marie with a kid and she’s the only one who cares. All the other women, of which there are many, are gossips who like nothing better than to cause trouble, which they promptly do with abandon.</p>
<p>This is the same Marie Epstein, by the way, who co-wrote the script with her brother Jean, but her acting is far more sophisticated than her writing. I had a little sympathy for Marie, because she was dealt a bad hand, but it was only a little because she accepted her fate far too easily. I had a heck of a lot more sympathy for Crippled Woman, not because of her foot but because she did everything she needed to anyway, not only for herself but for Marie too.</p>
<p>I might remember Crippled Woman but I’m mostly going to remember <i>The Faithful Heart</i> for its cinematic invention, especially during its impressionistic first half. It’s not difficult to imagine this as being an early movie by a new filmmaker, because his ideas were ahead of his abilities at the time but he gave it a solid shot and I’m sure he improved with future films.</p>
<p>Were I watching this feature back in 1923, I would probably be just as disappointed in its skimpy story as I am today. However, I’d also be seeking out this new filmmaker’s other two films from that year and keeping my eye on a release schedule for whatever he might come up with next, just to see what he would do in them, because the sky was the limit.</p>
<p>Of course, I’m really watching in 2023 with a hundred years of hindsight, so I know what he went on to do and this was a necessary step on the road to his 1928 version of <i>The Fall of the House of Usher</i>, which is much better than this.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-1381083554554764092023-11-22T23:28:00.017-07:002023-12-01T01:07:44.826-07:00The Man in the Glass Booth (1975)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Arthur Hiller<br>
Writer: Edward Anhalt<br>
Stars: Maximilian Schell, Lois Nettleton, Lawrence Pressman and Luther Adler</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/2023-centennials.html">2023 Centennials</a>.</p>
<p>It feels a little strange that I’m reviewing this picture to celebrate its director, Arthur Hiller, on his centennial, because it isn’t flash in any of the ways we might expect from an important director. Hiller made a lot of great decisions when making it but they were a lot more about not doing things than actually doing them; it was notable in 1975 for its script and its lead performance. Maximilian Schell is utterly spellbinding as Arthur Goldman, who may or may not be Arthur Goldman, and was fairly nominated for an Oscar in a tough year; he lost to Jack Nicholson for <i>One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest</i> and Al Pacino was also unrewarded for <i>Dog Day Afternoon</i>. On the writing front, Edward Anhalt got all the credit, because Robert Shaw (yes, the actor), who wrote the source novel and play, had his name removed because he disagreed with Hiller’s choice to make the movie more emotional. After he actually saw it, he was so happy with the results that he asked for his name to be restored, but the prints had been completed so it was too late.</p>
<p>Arthur Goldman is a fascinating character today, though he would have been seen through a different lens in 1975. He’s clearly very rich, given that he lives in a penthouse overlooking Central Park in New York and keeps two million dollars in a box. He’s connected socially, given that he’s scheduled to escort the duchess tonight, though I don’t believe that we’re privy to which or where. He’s also a Jew and a survivor of the concentration camps, an indelible experience that he can’t escape even three decades on. His father was murdered at Auschwitz but he sees him through a telescope pushing a pretzel cart on 5th Avenue; when he looks afresh, it’s now in the hands of a Nazi officer in full uniform. In Schell’s hands, Goldman is initially hard to take. The people who work for him, such as Charlie and Jack, are played by actors who appear to be acting in a movie, as we might expect. Schell, however, performs like he’s in a play, monologuing to the cheap seats with theatrical abandon. He’s not used to conversation. He’s used to being listened to.</p>
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<p>We learn a lot about Goldman as the film runs on and, for the longest time, we learn it in his penthouse because, credit or no credit, this was quite obviously based on a play. We don’t leave the penthouse for half the movie and the only people we see for much of it are the three characters I’ve already mentioned, Goldman and his two closest employees, though he does host a dinner party too. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to picture these early scenes on the stage, just as it doesn’t take much to similarly picture the later ones, in a second and final location, albeit with a much more sprawling supporting cast. For now, though, it’s all about Goldman and what’s going on in his head. He likes to talk and always about himself, so he gives us plenty of information to digest, looking back at his life and experiences. He’s also wildly spontaneous, leaping in different directions at the drop of a hat and expecting whoever’s in his presence to keep up with him. They don’t, because they’re obviously as confused as we are, but it starts to come clear.</p>
<p>As an old and rich Jew, it shouldn’t be surprising that so much of that information is about Jews and being Jewish, though he seems to identify closely with Jesus at one point. What’s far more surprising is that so much of it is about Nazis. It’s not just that he spent a considerable time under their oppressive regime and that naturally flavoured his background, it’s about specific details that start to become worrying. He sings in German. He gestures with a Nazi salute. He even bursts out with a repeated “Arbeit macht frei” in the presence of others, that, of course, being the famous motto on the gates of Auschwitz: work sets you free. He also brings up Col. Karl Adolf Dorff frequently, the Nazi who murdered his father, but not always as another person. He leaves that dinner party unusually, throws his shoes off the parapet of the building, stabs his foot repeatedly onto his wife’s memorial until it bleeds and then sprinkles her ashes over his head. Dorff mugged him, he claims. Dorff wants to be him.</p>
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<p>And, if the point is that we’re supposed to gradually come around to the idea that Arthur Goldman isn’t really Arthur Goldman after all, because he’s really Karl Adolf Dorff wearing Jewish disguise, then that point is hammered home to us at the halfway mark when Mossad agents kidnap him so that he can stand trial in Jerusalem for crimes against humanity. They certainly believe that he’s Dorff and they have the X-rays to prove it. The rest of the film takes place at that trial where, for his own protection, he’s secreted within the bulletproof glass booth of the title, which would have seemed highly familiar to many audience members in 1975 because that’s precisely what happened with Adolf Eichmann. He was one of the key architects of the Final Solution, in charge of the logistics that delivered millions to their deaths, but he escaped American custody after the war and found his way to Buenos Aires, where Mossad agents kidnapped him in 1960 so he could stand trial, which he did in a bulletproof glass booth.</p>
<p>Given that overt comparison to historic events, relatively fresh in the minds of movie audiences in 1975 because that operation was a world controversy and had many knock-on effects in international law, we might expect that this movie would follow the history to the unsurprising conclusion that the Nazi is found guilty on all charges and hanged, as Eichmann was in 1962. However, this has no interest in doing that and I’ll let you find out what it does instead by watching the film yourself. This isn’t either a documentary or a dramatisation of historical events. It’s a drama that asks questions, even if it doesn’t ask quite as many as Shaw’s original novel and play, which were written in 1967 and 1968 respectively, with Adolf Eichmann fresh in mind. Shaw wondered, controversially, if Jews could behave like Nazis, Goldman playing up the personality cult that surrounded Hitler and suggesting that, had he happened to lead the Jews rather than the Germans, they would also have lived and died at his command. This isn’t played up in the movie.</p>
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<p>One question that is brought up is why the Jews didn’t attempt to stop the Nazis when it became clear what was actually happening. How could twenty guards successfully round up twenty thousand Jews without being rushed? The answer given is that they still felt hope. They didn’t know for sure what was happening and maybe there was a way out without rushing en masse towards an array of machine guns. Another is why the Germans followed Hitler. What hold did he have over them? The answer that Goldman gives here is that they loved him. He taught them what to fear and how to address it. A final question is whether any of these answers feel true to us, because we should also ask our own questions. That’s emphasised by some excellent supporting performances, including one by Leonardo Cimino, whom I remember as the old Jew in the mini-series of V, the one who made me cry at the age of twelve, telling his family that “They have to stay. Or else, we haven’t learned a thing!” He came close here with me over fifty.</p>
<p>Just as Schell started the film like a performance, not having Goldman speak so much as deliver lines to his audience of employees, he starts the trial like a performance too. Goldman is now performing to the judges, others present in the courtroom and, while we don’t see them, the Jewish people of Israel and the rest of the world. Anhalt writes him monologues that resonate, some because we agree with them, others because we absolutely don’t, but they’re always impactful and Schell nails every last one of them. It’s clear why he’s in a glass booth, pun not intended. He needs to be, because he’s never silenced by testimony and always brutally callous in response. As with any discussion of the Holocaust, we’re aware going in just how horrendous it was but somehow we still come out shocked by what we’ve heard. Hiller could have done so many things to play this up but he doesn’t and that’s genius, right down to his choice to let the end credits unfold without a musical accompaniment. That hits very hard indeed.</p>
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<p>I struggled with this film early on, because it made for uncomfortable viewing, not because of the subject matter but because it was hard to figure out what Maximilian Schell was doing. He immediately invites us to examine Arthur Goldman to see what makes him tick. Is he mad? Is he senile? Is he eccentric? Is he just so used to everything being about him that every word becomes performance and every response is simply ignored? He could be any or all of the above, but we can’t stop watching, because Goldman is magnetic and we must find the answer to why. As his paranoia grows, he dips more and more into German and we start to learn things about him that even Charlie and Jack have no idea about, that name of Karl Adolf Dorff starts to become a mantra and there’s a whole new question to answer: is Arthur Goldman really Arthur Goldman? Mossad promptly answer that question for us but we’re never quite satisfied. It can’t be an easy part to play but Schell is never less than captivating. It’s a tour de force performance.</p>
<p>And here’s where Arthur Hiller comes in, because, while he didn’t write this film and he didn’t act in it, he fostered quite a habit of directing films that were highly regarded for their writing and acting, especially in the early seventies. Part of this may be because of his background in plays, so often driven by dialogue, but he was also massively influenced by Roberto Rossellini’s <i>Rome, Open City</i>, telling Robert K. Elder in an interview for <i>The Film That Changed My Life</i> that it generated “the strongest emotional feelings”. In order to emulate that in his own work, he always sought out the best writers he could, working with Paddy Chayefksy and Neil Simon on multiple films and keeping them in check with his lean directorial style. The former won an Oscar for writing <i>The Hospital</i> for Hiller in 1971, their second film together. Hiller’s best known and most successful movie is probably 1970’s <i>Love Story</i>, and there he chose to have Erich Segal adapt his own novel. It was always about the writing.</p>
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<p>For someone who directed so many American classics, Hiller was actually Canadian, born in Edmonton, Alberta to a family of Jews who had emigrated from Poland in 1912, so his background with discrimination is notably different to so many others, for reasons covered in this film. His father Harry sold second hand musical instruments and was much loved by the black community because, against the norm of the time, he treated them just like everyone else. It was his parents who set him on his eventual career path by starting up a Yiddish theater when he was still a child. He was helping to build sets at seven or eight and he debuted on stage at the tender of age of eleven in the role of an old man. He was eighteen when he finished school and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, serving as a navigator on bombing runs over Nazi territory. When Israel became a state in 1948, he attempted to join its army, but was unsuccessful because he was married. Instead he finished up his degree in psychology and took a job on Canadian radio.</p>
<p>His directorial career began on CBC in Canada but he was soon headhunted by CBS in the States and started to rack up credits on an array of TV shows, mostly dramas, including live TV plays, but including a number of western standards too. He directed seventeen episodes of <i>Alfred Hitchcock Presents</i> and a dozen for <i>Route 66</i>. His first feature was 1957’s <i>The Careless Years</i>, a drama for United Artists about an odd couple of young lovers eloping to Mexico, but he wouldn’t get another shot until 1963’s <i>Miracle of the White Stallions</i> for Disney. He quickly graduated from TV to feature films as the sixties progressed, with both <i>The Americanization of Emily</i> and <i>Tobruk</i> up for Academy Awards. Having successfully moved from drama to comedy to action, Hiller had become a hot property and his heyday can be fairly defined as the early seventies, starting with <i>The Out-of-Towners</i> and continuing through <i>Love Story</i>, <i>The Hospital</i> and <i>Man of La Mancha</i> to <i>The Man in the Glass Booth</i>, <i>Silver Streak</i> and <i>The In-Laws</i>, seven very different but highly successful movies.</p>
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<p>It’s probably fair to suggest that the rest of his career was a gradual downward slide in quality, but the key word there is gradual. He directed many hits in the eighties, especially <i>Outrageous Fortune</i> and <i>See No Evil, Hear No Evil</i>, but he stretched his boundaries too with films like <i>Making Love</i> about a married man accepting that he’s gay. It was the nineties when things started to go horribly wrong, the nadir of his career not being his final picture, <i>National Lampoon’s Pucked</i>, starring Jon Bon Jovi, which really isn’t a good way to end a stellar career, but the ironic disaster known as <i>An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn</i>. Alan Smithee is the name used by directors who disown their own films, given that someone has to be credited, and this film was about a director called Alan Smithee stealing his own film and eventually destroying it. Ironically Hiller ended up disowning it because of how its writer, Joe Eszterhas, edited it, so Alan Smithee ended up credited as the director of a film about Alan Smithee directing a film. It won five Razzies.</p>
<p>Outside the director’s chair, Hiller was much loved in the industry, and served terms as president of the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He was a founding member of the National Film Preservation Board and put in sixteen important years securing it vital funding. He never won a competitive Oscar, <i>Love Story</i> being his only nomination, but he was given the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 2002 for his philanthropic work, not only to film preservation but to civil rights and educational organisations. A beacon of stability in a notoriously unstable business, he apparently proposed to Gwen Pechet at the age of eight when they were schoolmates. They didn’t marry until 1948, after the war, but remained married for sixty-eight years. She was ten days older than he was and died in June 2016 at ninety-two. He followed suit two months later, leaving two children, five grandchildren and a memorable back catalogue of films and TV episodes.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-11630542525911764022023-11-19T23:02:00.000-07:002023-11-26T20:45:27.310-07:00Our Hospitality (1923)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Directors: Buster Keaton and Jack Blystone<br>
Writers: Jean Havez, Joe Mitchell and Clyde Bruckman<br>
Stars: Buster Keaton and Natalie Talmadge</p>
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<p>Buster Keaton’s second feature for 1923 was a very different film to the first. <i>Three Ages</i> was close to being a themed compilation of three comedy shorts, which merely happened to be new. <i>Our Hospitality</i>, however, is a fully fledged feature film, with a single coherent story and an elegant weaving of comedy into drama.</p>
<p>Keaton’s character even gets a name, that of Willie McKay, and, echoing his family’s former vaudeville act, the Three Keatons, this picture features Four Keatons, not only Buster as the lead character but his father, Joseph Keaton; his wife of two years, Natalie Talmadge; and their fourteen month old son, Buster Keaton, Jr., in his only film appearance. Technically, a fifth was present but not yet born.</p>
<p>Junior actually appears first as a baby Willie McKay, in a prologue that ably sets the stage for what’s to come, which is a time honoured feud. Remember the Hatfields and McCoys? Well, here are the Canfields and McKays.</p>
<p>It’s around 1810 when John McKay arrives home looking like Indiana Jones. Jim Canfield comes visiting as soon as he finds out McKay is back and they kill each other in a storm. Mrs. McKay is now a widow, little Willie is now the last living male in the McKay clan and Joseph Canfield, Jim’s brother, who tried to talk him out of it, now swears to continue the feud and teach his own sons accordingly.</p>
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<p>Then we fast forward a generation, because Mrs. McKay was bright enough to get the heck out of whatever Appalachian town this is and take her son to her sister’s house in New York. She dies soon after, so he grows up blissfully ignorant of the feud, until he receives a letter asking him to come and claim his inheritance, at which point his aunt explains everything.</p>
<p>Keaton looks like Keaton but in a big hat—he switches it out for his traditional pork pie partway—and a decent suit, because he’s not wanting, even if he’s not rich. He’s perpetually worried, of course, because it’s Keaton.</p>
<p>He rides a bicycle without pedals, known as a dandy horse, even though it was slightly out of time. This prompts the first stuntwork of the film in scenes around his neighbourhood of Broadway & 5th St. This was the sticks in 1830, but times were changing. “This is gettin’ to be a dangerous crossing,” says a policeman as he directs no fewer than three cars away from each other. Can you imagine?</p>
<p>And so Willie heads back to his roots, sitting in a literal carriage pulled by Stephenson’s Rocket, his only companion “a fair visitor on her way back home”. Now, for this script to work, they don’t learn each other’s names, but we know exactly who she is—Virginia Canfield—so here’s where I would normally suggest that you could all write the rest of the script yourself. On that front, I would be right, but there’s so much more here that none of us would do it justice.</p>
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<p>For instance, we spend quite a while on the actual journey, which offers much comedy as there are plenty of obstacles to be overcome with imagination. When a donkey won’t move off the track, they move the track. When they encounter an old timer throwing rocks at the engineer, the engineer throws wood back and we discover it’s a scam. That old timer doesn’t have to cut his own firewood!</p>
<p>This is much more gentle comedy than the slapstick of the day. It would be easy to watch it without any background and believe it to be a drama, at least until we realise how often we burst into laughter. For every comedy scene, like someone switching the points so the train ends up on a different track to the carriages, arriving in town the wrong way round, there’s drama underneath it, Willie reunited with his dog, who ran all the way under the carriages without him even noticing his presence.</p>
<p>And, of course, the feud kicks back off when Willie arrives because the stranger he asks to guide him to the McKay estate is a Canfield, a son of Joseph Canfield who stops everywhere on the way to borrow a gun to shoot his foe. He continually fails but young Virginia also has the courtesy to ask her fellow passenger to dinner, thus prompting the title. “Splendid,” says pa, at the news. “He’ll never forget our hospitality!”</p>
<p>The other crucial detail you should know is that, as bloodthirsty as the Canfields are to be finally avenged for whatever it was that began the feud, they adhere to a code of honour that prevents them from killing their enemy while he’s a guest in their house. Willie figures it out while he’s there and so attempts to stay, in the politest fashion possible, of course.</p>
<p>There are so many good scenes here that it’s hard to pick a favourite. I could go for the one where a Canfield son waits around a corner to shoot Willie but his gun won’t fire, so the ever unsuspecting Willie fixes it for him and walks on. Another, in which Willie “loses” his hat so he can’t leave, only for his dog to continually bring it back like a game of indoor fetch, is joyous. However, I might have to plump for the grace scene, in which half the table opens an eye to keep on the others.</p>
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<p>The showstoppers arrive late in the picture, because Willie has to escape the house at some point and the chase is on. As a Buster Keaton film, there’s stuntwork and it’s thrilling stuff as the chase escalates from foot to horseback, from train to boat, from cliffside to rapids.</p>
<p>The pinnacle has to be the pair of stunts at the top of a waterfall. Willie hanging over the huge cascade is impressive enough but then he saves Virginia by swinging to catch her as she falls over it. To be fair, it wasn’t quite as dangerous as it looked, as it was shot on a set with miniatures, but there was lots of danger during the shoot. Keaton nearly drowned in one rapids scene when a wire broke and he fell into the Truckee river. The crew found him ten minutes later face down on a riverbank.</p>
<p>Our Hospitality has been described by TCM as a “silent film for which no apologies need be made to modern viewers” and that’s accurate. There are conceits that date it a little, such as how Joseph Canfield is a quintessential silent movie character, tall and fat with a prominent moustache, but Joe Roberts doesn’t chew the scenery like he’s in an old Keystone short. This was his last picture, as he had a stroke during the shoot, came back to work to finish up the film but died of a second stroke soon after.</p>
<p>While this isn’t Keaton’s greatest film with a train, it’s still an utter gem. At this point, the future was still very bright indeed for him.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38454049.post-9148691711771218142023-06-29T23:46:00.001-07:002023-09-19T00:00:41.152-07:00Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)<style type="text/css">.nobr br { display: none }</style>
<p>Director: Pete Hewitt<br>
Writer: Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon<br>
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, William Sadler, Joss Ackland, Pam Grier and George Carlin</p>
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<p>Index: <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2000/05/the-first-thirty.html">The First Thirty</a>.</p>
<p><i>Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure</i> is one of my favourite movies. It holds an underlying truth even though it’s utterly ridiculous throughout and it’s pure unadulterated fun. I’ve gone back to it often since the eighties and it always hits the spot for me.</p>
<p>When I put together the list of Pam Grier’s First Thirty, I was surprised to find that a) she was even in that film’s sequel, <i>Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey</i>, as I had zero recollection of her in it and b) that I haven’t gone back to it once since it came out. I was suddenly very worried about how it would hold up, not least because the much delayed third film in the series, <i>Bill & Ted Face the Music</i>, is truly awful, however amazing Brigette Lundy-Paine was as Ted’s daughter.</p>
<p>What I found was that it’s very much stuck between the two, not a patch on the original but much better than the third. It’s a triumph of the imagination, with most praise going to the writers, Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon, as they deconstruct and reconstruct not just the Bill & Ted mythos but cinematic history with <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/05/seventh-seal-1957.html">The Seventh Seal</a> a particularly key template.</p>
<p>They ratchet up the silliness even further and most of the best bits work simply because they went there, wherever there is from a list of “wouldn’t it be cool if” moments that I’d be shocked weren’t generated using recreational drugs. Eventually, however, the sheer weight of its cleverness prompts it to collapse in on itself, so I’m unlikely to go back to it again any time soon, but I’m happy to have acquired fresh memories of this bit and that one and especially the other bit over there.</p>
<p>For anyone who doesn’t know this trilogy, the idea is that the music of a pair of slacker nobodies in San Dimas, California, namely Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, is destined to turn the world into a utopia. The catch is that their band, Wyld Stallyns, sucks, because neither of them know how to play and they can’t be bothered to learn. So how does a band save the world with that attitude?</p>
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<p>Film one saw a positive interruption to their lives when Rufus arrives in his phone box time machine to help them pass a history class. The ramifications of failure to them just mean Ted being sent to military school but to Rufus the eradication of his utopian future. So they whiz through time collecting historical figures for their class presentation, from Socrates to Joan of Arc via Genghis Khan.</p>
<p>Film two sees a negative interruption, with a future terrorist, Chuck De Nomolos stealing a phone box time machine to send evil robot replicas of Bill & Ted back to San Dimas to kill the real ones and purge his future of what he sees as needless frivolity. The first neat touch of many is that they quickly succeed.
First, however, we meet Pam Grier, as Ms. Wardroe, the organiser of a Battle of the Bands at the San Dimas Civic Auditorium. She allows Wyld Stallyns to compete even though they’re awful. “Prepare a little,” she suggests and then vanishes from the movie until the finalé.</p>
<p>The point, of course, is that this is another crucial moment in time. Wyld Stallyns have to win this Battle of the Bands, but everything is against them, from their lack of discipline and talent to Evil Bill & Ted literally hurling them off a cliff to their deaths twenty-five minutes into the film.</p>
<p>It’s here that the real imagination kicks in, because of course the movie doesn’t end then. They wake up dead to be faced with the Grim Reaper, but escape by giving him a wedgie. “I can’t believe we just melvined Death!”</p>
<p>However, they’re sucked down to their own personal Hells until they realise that the only way to end it is to play Death at a game. Even if you haven’t seen <a href="https://www.apocalypselaterfilm.com/2010/05/seventh-seal-1957.html">The Seventh Seal</a> (in which case, remedy that as soon as possible), you’re aware of the knight playing chess with Death to stay alive. Now apply that to Bill & Ted and we find our heroes triumphant over the Grim Reaper at Battleships, Clue and Twister. And so they will live again.</p>
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<p>However, they still need help, so the Grim Reaper takes them to Heaven, where we spend more time recognising background characters than following the plot. It was at this point that I realised how much I was enjoying this but also how problematic it all was.</p>
<p>So many of the moments are wonderful and I adored that they just kept on happening in ways that most filmmakers wouldn’t have the balls to do, something that extends to how the film was cast. Placing Jim Martin of Faith No More alongside Johann Sebastian Bach is just genius, as is having Taj Mahal play St. Peter.</p>
<p>However, the broader story linking all those moments is skimpy and stupid and missing all the charm that saved the first picture. In that film, it was all about Bill & Ted. In this one, too much of it isn’t and every scene without them suffers for it. In that film, we were with them all the way. In this one, maybe not so much. In that film, the pivotal moment had some scary ramifications, because we didn’t want Ted to be sent to military school. In this one, losing at a Battle of the Bands doesn’t compare. Sure, it would have the same negative effect on future civilisation but that’s not personal for us.</p>
<p>And so this feels clever and innovative and daring and so many moments are glorious, but it fails quickly and consistently to emulate the success of the first movie. No wonder it failed at the box office. No wonder it became a cult hit. No wonder they eventually made the third film and we quickly wished they hadn’t.</p>
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<p>But hey, this is Pam Grier’s First Thirty. I’m not talking much about her at all because, as was generally the case in the eighties, she had a small supporting part. However, as was also generally the case in the eighties, it’s a pivotal one, as we eventually discover when it turns out that she’s actually Rufus in disguise.</p>
<p>Does that explain the huge wig that makes her look far more like Tina Turner than Pam Grier? Probably not, but that does explain why I forgot she was in the movie. She looks great but she doesn’t look like her.</p>
<p>And so that’s it for Pam Grier’s First Thirty. She rocked the seventies, not always landing lead roles but often doing so and making a serious impact even if not. However, she was left behind by the eighties, unfairly relegated to supporting roles, only occasionally with an opportunity to truly shine.</p>
<p>Arguably, that wouldn’t change until <i>Jackie Brown</i>, film #39, which was still seven years away.</p>Hal C. F. Astellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807389103456317098noreply@blogger.com0