After completely failing to get a decent holiday in the cliched backwoods of rural America in The Millerson Case, the Crime Doctor, Robert Ordway, finds his way to Paris. That's the one in France, not the one in Texas, folks: there's no Nastassja Kinski here. He has lectures to give, such as at the Institution Psycho-Pathologique des Invalides Mentaux, but he seems to escape without even having to answer questions so that his old friend Jacques Morrell, the Prefect de Police, can show him all the experiences of Paris. Needless to say Morrell is quite happy to involve his American buddy in a case.
This one has to do with Henri Jardin, a young man locked away in a mental hospital for murdering his father with a knife on the day of his marriage. Morrell had befriended him some years before in a concentration camp together, and is looking out for him now that he's been released from the hospital as sane and faces trial. By the time Morrell introduces the Crime Doctor to the young man, he's already shown him the act of a professional knife thrower without pointing out that Jardin's wife Mignon is the artiste's assistant and daughter, and that the knife thrower himself objected to her marrying into such a family.
There's depth to this one well beyond its predecessor, though it does cheat somewhat in that the facts aren't laid out for us early on to try to fathom it all ourselves; instead it keeps springing new ones on us throughout to change our perspective. There's fun too, as a few scenes look to have been improvised and carry light yet not out of place moments to us. Warner Baxter is always so serious as Dr Ordway and it's a great relief to see that not only can he be lighthearted but he's actually far more fun when he is. What's most surprising though is the fact that only a couple of the French accents are obviously phony.
Friday, 11 May 2007
Thursday, 10 May 2007
The Millerson Case (1947) George Archainbaud
After a number of years far too busy solving bizarre murder cases for our edification, Dr Robert Ordway, the Crime Doctor, is vacationing in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginny. As you could expect for 1947, the locals are so stereotypical you'd almost expect Laurel & Hardy to stroll on past singing about things. These country folk are as hick as you could possibly imagine, like a Looney Tunes version of The Beverly Hillbillies but a level beyond.
Ordway turns up to do some hunting and fishing just as people start going down with summer complaint, or such is what the local hick doctor calls it, and it's soon announced by the state health board that there's a typhoid epidemic. Ordway gets roped into helping out with the vaccinations and post mortems and such, and soon discovers that while two of the first three deaths were due to typhoid, the third wasn't and it's a pretty clear cut case of murder by poisoning. The victim is the local barber, Ward Beachey, who is precisely what Gregory Peck would be if he couldn't act, and it soon turns out that there are suspects galore.
The most obvious is the local doctor, Sam Millerson, who has held a solid grudge against Beachey for having the audacity to go get some doctorin' at the local hi-falutin' clinic, but then it becomes apparent that Beachey was a rampant womaniser and half the neighbourhood had a good reason to knock him off. The detective work has its points but it's hardly the best in the series. The setting is what brings it really down though.
The script contains almost every possible backwoods buzzword you could think of, from 'crick' to 'pizened' to 'sassifrass'. There's even a catfight and a hoedown and a retarded kid. The only thing left out here someone getting loved up and turned into a horny toad, but then this was half a century before O Brother Where Art Thou? It's well and truly embarrassing and to be brutally honest, it probably was in 1947 too. Even Swing Your Lady was more believable and certainly more fun because that was Humphrey Bogart held down by a girl until he said 'hootie owl' and they didn't have to speed up the film.
Ordway turns up to do some hunting and fishing just as people start going down with summer complaint, or such is what the local hick doctor calls it, and it's soon announced by the state health board that there's a typhoid epidemic. Ordway gets roped into helping out with the vaccinations and post mortems and such, and soon discovers that while two of the first three deaths were due to typhoid, the third wasn't and it's a pretty clear cut case of murder by poisoning. The victim is the local barber, Ward Beachey, who is precisely what Gregory Peck would be if he couldn't act, and it soon turns out that there are suspects galore.
The most obvious is the local doctor, Sam Millerson, who has held a solid grudge against Beachey for having the audacity to go get some doctorin' at the local hi-falutin' clinic, but then it becomes apparent that Beachey was a rampant womaniser and half the neighbourhood had a good reason to knock him off. The detective work has its points but it's hardly the best in the series. The setting is what brings it really down though.
The script contains almost every possible backwoods buzzword you could think of, from 'crick' to 'pizened' to 'sassifrass'. There's even a catfight and a hoedown and a retarded kid. The only thing left out here someone getting loved up and turned into a horny toad, but then this was half a century before O Brother Where Art Thou? It's well and truly embarrassing and to be brutally honest, it probably was in 1947 too. Even Swing Your Lady was more believable and certainly more fun because that was Humphrey Bogart held down by a girl until he said 'hootie owl' and they didn't have to speed up the film.
A Woman Rebels (1936) Mark Sandrich
In late Victorian England women very much had their place, but anyone played by Katharine Hepburn isn't likely to pay much attention to that sort of nonsense. She's Pamela Thistlewaite, known as Pam, and she's the daughter of Judge Byron Thistlewaite, played by no less a martinet than Donald Crisp. She doesn't buy into all the nonsense written down in Mrs Ellis's Daughters of England that describes everything that women should be, and prefers to sneak down the library at night to read and learn.
Her sister Flora is far more traditional in her beliefs and happily falls in love with someone suitable to her father, even though he's played by David Manners five years after Dracula and in his last film to boot. While the Judge tries to marry Pam off too, she won't even think of it and enjoys liaisons with a young gentleman of her own choice at Madame Tussaud's, who of course happens to be as much of a black sheep as she is. He's Van Heflin, playing the future Lord Gerald Waring Gaythorne, who apparently married some woman in Paris on a drunken spree and hadn't told her about it.
I'm sure that in 1936 this felt much more appropriate than it does today. After all women's suffrage had become a serious issue to consider and women were, shock horror, starting to make all sorts of decisions for themselves. In the 21st century, such things thankfully aren't even an issue any more and Mrs Ellis is completely forgotten. Unfortunately it also means that films like this don't have a lot of relevance because the story is complete melodrama and serves only to tell us a message that's seventy years out of date.
We should be shocked yet quietly led to thought by the story. Flora falls down a staircase and dies, while heavily pregnant, after hearing of the death of her husband. The baby survives and Pamela brings her up, completely logical yet horrendously unthinkable. She plans to live alone and work and all sorts of bizarre concepts, but of course having a girl as a secretary would make a company a laughing stock and a girl as a sales assistant in a shop would alienate the customers.
She does impress Thomas Lane though, a member of the diplomatic service played by Herbert Marshall, who thinks she's 'honest, forthright, independent', hardly womanly virtues in the 1880s. He's forthright and independent enough himself to be interested, but just as she finds herself a position, at a magazine called the Women's Weekly Companion, even though it's a dangerous precedent, he's posted back to Rome.
It's about at this point that everything completely loses its way. Up until now it's been a solid film with promise, but the script falls apart rapidly. We leap forward twenty years, so young Flora grows up but Pamela doesn't age, resulting in a niece who looks older than her aunt; we're given a revelation about Pamela that in one fell swoop makes her character entirely contradictory and strips away all the power it's been given; Herbert Marshall, while excellent, is granted precisely nothing to do so that he's completely wasted; the plot ignores where it had got to and becomes purely a soap opera; after the opening scenes, Pamela's father doesn't return until the end and proves that he hasn't learned a thing except to lose his nerve; and the finale is a complete joke.
None of this is the fault of the actors, who do their best with the material, and I don't think it's the fault of director Mark Sandrich, however much he's known for more fluffy material (this one came in between four Astaire/Rogers musicals, following Top Hat and Follow the Fleet and preceding Shall We Dance and Carefree). It's surely the fault of the people behind the story, though which carry the blame I have no clue. It was originally a novel, Portrait of a Rebel, by Netta Syrett; and it was turned into a screenplay by Anthony Veiller and Ernest Vajda.
Her sister Flora is far more traditional in her beliefs and happily falls in love with someone suitable to her father, even though he's played by David Manners five years after Dracula and in his last film to boot. While the Judge tries to marry Pam off too, she won't even think of it and enjoys liaisons with a young gentleman of her own choice at Madame Tussaud's, who of course happens to be as much of a black sheep as she is. He's Van Heflin, playing the future Lord Gerald Waring Gaythorne, who apparently married some woman in Paris on a drunken spree and hadn't told her about it.
I'm sure that in 1936 this felt much more appropriate than it does today. After all women's suffrage had become a serious issue to consider and women were, shock horror, starting to make all sorts of decisions for themselves. In the 21st century, such things thankfully aren't even an issue any more and Mrs Ellis is completely forgotten. Unfortunately it also means that films like this don't have a lot of relevance because the story is complete melodrama and serves only to tell us a message that's seventy years out of date.
We should be shocked yet quietly led to thought by the story. Flora falls down a staircase and dies, while heavily pregnant, after hearing of the death of her husband. The baby survives and Pamela brings her up, completely logical yet horrendously unthinkable. She plans to live alone and work and all sorts of bizarre concepts, but of course having a girl as a secretary would make a company a laughing stock and a girl as a sales assistant in a shop would alienate the customers.
She does impress Thomas Lane though, a member of the diplomatic service played by Herbert Marshall, who thinks she's 'honest, forthright, independent', hardly womanly virtues in the 1880s. He's forthright and independent enough himself to be interested, but just as she finds herself a position, at a magazine called the Women's Weekly Companion, even though it's a dangerous precedent, he's posted back to Rome.
It's about at this point that everything completely loses its way. Up until now it's been a solid film with promise, but the script falls apart rapidly. We leap forward twenty years, so young Flora grows up but Pamela doesn't age, resulting in a niece who looks older than her aunt; we're given a revelation about Pamela that in one fell swoop makes her character entirely contradictory and strips away all the power it's been given; Herbert Marshall, while excellent, is granted precisely nothing to do so that he's completely wasted; the plot ignores where it had got to and becomes purely a soap opera; after the opening scenes, Pamela's father doesn't return until the end and proves that he hasn't learned a thing except to lose his nerve; and the finale is a complete joke.
None of this is the fault of the actors, who do their best with the material, and I don't think it's the fault of director Mark Sandrich, however much he's known for more fluffy material (this one came in between four Astaire/Rogers musicals, following Top Hat and Follow the Fleet and preceding Shall We Dance and Carefree). It's surely the fault of the people behind the story, though which carry the blame I have no clue. It was originally a novel, Portrait of a Rebel, by Netta Syrett; and it was turned into a screenplay by Anthony Veiller and Ernest Vajda.
Tuesday, 8 May 2007
The Falcon's Brother (1942) Stanley Logan
When George Sanders started playing the Saint he was still on the up as an actor in Hollywood. The early films of his that I've seen, like Mr Moto's Last Warning or Confessions of a Nazi Spy are often great fun but hardly the peak of Hollywood's output at the time. They tended to be B movies, though often very good examples of such. By the time Leslie Charteris axed the studio's contract prompting the instant replacement of the Saint with a stunningly similar character, the Falcon, he was featuring in A list movies, including Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent for Alfred Hitchcock. The Falcon's Brother is the fourth in the series and you wouldn't tell it from watching but Sanders was getting rapidly tired of the character and was handing over the series to the man most suited to play his screen brother Tom: his real life brother, Tom Conway.
I've seen Conway a number of times before without ever realising who he was. Taking a quick look at his career, he seems to have perennially played the most important and highest credited supporting actor, which generally put him number three on the credits behind the male and female lead, just as his brother did early on. Early on Tom Conway supported the leads in three Val Lewton horror films, including Cat People, and later on supported former stars slumming it in B movies, like Raymond Burr in Bride of the Gorilla and Chester Morris in The She-Creature. As the lead he played the Falcon nine times plus this one, in which he's far more obvious as Tom Lawrence than the real Falcon, Gay Lawrence, who is incapacitated for most of the film through being hit by a car.
There is a story here and it's a pretty good one as B movie series entries go, partly because we don't really have a clue what it's all about and have to follow the characters in their process of discovery. There are holes but they're forgiveable. Suffice it to say that people are being murdered and the Falcon is the chief suspect, but there are much bigger things afoot.
Backing up the Lawrence brothers is a stooge by the name of Lefty, played by Don Barclay because Allen Jenkins had unfortunately left the series. Barclay isn't much fun because he's half Allen Jenkins and half Eugene Pallette and not a patch on either. Tom Conway, I'm happy to say, is far better and I can easily believe that the series is in good hands with him in the lead. Cliff Clark is a fine if completely stereotypical flustered inspector and Edward Gargan is an fine if completely stereotypical dumb detective. Far more fun is Keye Luke, Charlie Chan's number one son, who obviously enjoys switching between perfect English and a far more stereotypical pidgin tongue. There are women in the film too but none of them really do anything, even the most obvious, Jane Randolph as an ambitious fashion reporter called Marcia Brooks.
I've seen Conway a number of times before without ever realising who he was. Taking a quick look at his career, he seems to have perennially played the most important and highest credited supporting actor, which generally put him number three on the credits behind the male and female lead, just as his brother did early on. Early on Tom Conway supported the leads in three Val Lewton horror films, including Cat People, and later on supported former stars slumming it in B movies, like Raymond Burr in Bride of the Gorilla and Chester Morris in The She-Creature. As the lead he played the Falcon nine times plus this one, in which he's far more obvious as Tom Lawrence than the real Falcon, Gay Lawrence, who is incapacitated for most of the film through being hit by a car.
There is a story here and it's a pretty good one as B movie series entries go, partly because we don't really have a clue what it's all about and have to follow the characters in their process of discovery. There are holes but they're forgiveable. Suffice it to say that people are being murdered and the Falcon is the chief suspect, but there are much bigger things afoot.
Backing up the Lawrence brothers is a stooge by the name of Lefty, played by Don Barclay because Allen Jenkins had unfortunately left the series. Barclay isn't much fun because he's half Allen Jenkins and half Eugene Pallette and not a patch on either. Tom Conway, I'm happy to say, is far better and I can easily believe that the series is in good hands with him in the lead. Cliff Clark is a fine if completely stereotypical flustered inspector and Edward Gargan is an fine if completely stereotypical dumb detective. Far more fun is Keye Luke, Charlie Chan's number one son, who obviously enjoys switching between perfect English and a far more stereotypical pidgin tongue. There are women in the film too but none of them really do anything, even the most obvious, Jane Randolph as an ambitious fashion reporter called Marcia Brooks.
Morning Glory (1933) Lowell Sherman
After a successful career as a supporting actor, including films like The Garden of Eden which I saw this morning, Lowell Sherman became a director and while he never broke it big, certainly made a number of important films, not least this one, Katharine Hepburn's third film, the one that broke her as a serious actress and the one that won her Oscar number one of an eventual record breaking four.
Kate plays a young actress called Eva Lovelace from Vermont who plays second fiddle in the opening scene to Ethel Barrymore, Maude Adams, John Drew and Sarah Bernhardt, all portraits on the wall of a building in New York that she finds her way to in order to audition for a new play at the start of her rise to fame. Most of the people already there are far more established than Hepburn was at the time. She takes the elevator up with crusty old C Aubrey Smith, a genuine English actor; the agent doing the casting is Adolphe Menjou; and the playwright (named Joseph Sheridan but not that playwright Joseph Sheridan) is Douglas Fairbanks Jr, looking scarily like Bing Crosby. Maybe it's the casual poses or maybe it's just the pipe. There's also some cheap phony actress in furs, played by Geneva Mitchell, who serves as a great contrast to Kate's quiet honesty.
While Eva Lovelace is trying to find people who believe in her, it's pretty obvious that someone believed in Kate because the part must have been written for her. Eva is nobody at present but she's obviously going to be somebody, she rattles on like nobody's business and really doesn't inhabit the same world as everyone else. She walks her own headstrong but honest road just like Kate did, regardless of what anyone or everyone else thought and blithely insulting and/or upstaging everyone without ever having a clue she's doing it.
Katharine Hepburn is excellent, however much she really should have been, and it's not surprising that she won the Oscar. Adolphe Menjou was best in the precodes because however upstanding his character, he always had a hint of the dark side about him, not evil but corrupt or two faced. C Aubrey is as great as he always was, though he isn't as curmudgeonly for a change and that's where he was best. I've never paid too much attention to Douglas Fairbanks Jr before, because while he was a great swashbuckler, he was never a patch on his dad. Here however he has a very different part to play, something that would have fit Robert Montgomery or Ralph Bellamy. He plays it well, but keeps a little more in the background than I'd have liked. As to the film itself, it was notably melodramatic but played well. The Oscar was well won but the fact that it was the only one was fair too.
Kate plays a young actress called Eva Lovelace from Vermont who plays second fiddle in the opening scene to Ethel Barrymore, Maude Adams, John Drew and Sarah Bernhardt, all portraits on the wall of a building in New York that she finds her way to in order to audition for a new play at the start of her rise to fame. Most of the people already there are far more established than Hepburn was at the time. She takes the elevator up with crusty old C Aubrey Smith, a genuine English actor; the agent doing the casting is Adolphe Menjou; and the playwright (named Joseph Sheridan but not that playwright Joseph Sheridan) is Douglas Fairbanks Jr, looking scarily like Bing Crosby. Maybe it's the casual poses or maybe it's just the pipe. There's also some cheap phony actress in furs, played by Geneva Mitchell, who serves as a great contrast to Kate's quiet honesty.
While Eva Lovelace is trying to find people who believe in her, it's pretty obvious that someone believed in Kate because the part must have been written for her. Eva is nobody at present but she's obviously going to be somebody, she rattles on like nobody's business and really doesn't inhabit the same world as everyone else. She walks her own headstrong but honest road just like Kate did, regardless of what anyone or everyone else thought and blithely insulting and/or upstaging everyone without ever having a clue she's doing it.
Katharine Hepburn is excellent, however much she really should have been, and it's not surprising that she won the Oscar. Adolphe Menjou was best in the precodes because however upstanding his character, he always had a hint of the dark side about him, not evil but corrupt or two faced. C Aubrey is as great as he always was, though he isn't as curmudgeonly for a change and that's where he was best. I've never paid too much attention to Douglas Fairbanks Jr before, because while he was a great swashbuckler, he was never a patch on his dad. Here however he has a very different part to play, something that would have fit Robert Montgomery or Ralph Bellamy. He plays it well, but keeps a little more in the background than I'd have liked. As to the film itself, it was notably melodramatic but played well. The Oscar was well won but the fact that it was the only one was fair too.
The Caretaker's Daughter (1925) Leo McCarey
I've always found Charley Chase to be pretty inconsistent as a comedian. He didn't have a definable image like the big three of the silent era, he was far more of an everyman and that doesn't always work well for him. Here it makes him look a lot more believable than prohibition sleuth James Finlayson or caretaker James Parrott, who sport outrageous fake facial hair in the tradition of silent comedy shorts of a decade earlier. Then again facial hair is the key to this one.
Chase plays a character called Charley, as he often did, and he's a husband whose wife, played by Chase regular Katherine Grant, has strong doubts about his faithfulness. Suspicion and its comedic effects are what make this one, which is a decent comedy of errors even if it doesn't always make sense or follow any logical sense of the passing of time. The chief gag is that what seems like half the cast, Chase included, get to don fake moustaches to appear like the caretaker of a cabin where illicit liaisons go on, and that's mostly interesting because the real caretaker is James Parrott, who in real life was Chase's younger brother.
This made me smile but it didn't make me laugh, because it relies on what is such dated material nowadays. I performed this sort of stuff in pantomime and while I'm no talented actor, that really narrows what should be a much wider gap between me and what I'm watching on the screen. In the end, this felt like it would have been a great film in 1915 but not much at all in 1925. In other words it's retro even though it was made 80 years ago! It's more interesting for the Chase/Parrott double act or the fact that it's the debut film of Symona Boniface who went on to become a Three Stooges regular, as did Chase himself though as a director not an actor.
Chase plays a character called Charley, as he often did, and he's a husband whose wife, played by Chase regular Katherine Grant, has strong doubts about his faithfulness. Suspicion and its comedic effects are what make this one, which is a decent comedy of errors even if it doesn't always make sense or follow any logical sense of the passing of time. The chief gag is that what seems like half the cast, Chase included, get to don fake moustaches to appear like the caretaker of a cabin where illicit liaisons go on, and that's mostly interesting because the real caretaker is James Parrott, who in real life was Chase's younger brother.
This made me smile but it didn't make me laugh, because it relies on what is such dated material nowadays. I performed this sort of stuff in pantomime and while I'm no talented actor, that really narrows what should be a much wider gap between me and what I'm watching on the screen. In the end, this felt like it would have been a great film in 1915 but not much at all in 1925. In other words it's retro even though it was made 80 years ago! It's more interesting for the Chase/Parrott double act or the fact that it's the debut film of Symona Boniface who went on to become a Three Stooges regular, as did Chase himself though as a director not an actor.
The Garden of Eden (1928) Lewis Milestone
Back in 1928 the Academy Awards were brand new and the categories kept changing along with the criteria used to qualify for them. Shortly after this film was released, director Lewis Milestone picked up the very first Oscar for Comedy Direction, for the wonderful film Two Arabian Knights, made a year earlier. Being so early on, there were two Best Director awards though, with Comedy Direction being presumably deemed lesser to Director, won by Frank Borzage for Seventh Heaven. Incidentally, while there weren't too many categories in 1927-1928, there were also two separate awards for Best Production or Picture, and Most Unique and Artistic Picture. wings won the former and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans beat out The Crowd and Chang for the latter.
Anyway, Lewis Milestone was very much on the up and he'd win again for Best Director this time, only two years later for the more famous All Quiet on the Western Front, and win a nomination in 1930-31 for The Front Page. In short he was a major name, though one that we don't tend to pay much attention to today. He wasn't the only one. Corinne Griffith is the star here and she appears with Lowell Sherman, Louise Dresser and Charles Ray. These were names to wonder at in 1928 but I haven't heard of any of them. Griffith was known as the Orchid Lady of the Screen and was Oscar nominated for The Divine Lady in the second year of the awards. Louise Dresser was nominated for A Ship Comes In in the debut year, when Milestone won.
Sherman I know better as a director, which he became in 1929, acting alongside working with his new found talent. Ray was the country bumpkin of the screen for over a decade, but had become by necessity a little more versatile by this point. The names extend to behind the camera too, as the art direction is by no less a name than William Cameron Menzies, who would become the premier name in his field by the time he won his honorary award for Gone with the Wind. He'd already won his first Oscar back in 1929 for Tempest and The Dove.
Corrine Griffith plays Toni Lebrum, who has completed her training to become a grand opera singer because she wants to do something more than just make pretzels at Bensinger Bakery in Vienna. She leaves her aunt and uncle for an audition in Budapest at the Palais de Paris, which of course isn't what she expects it to be in the slightest. The manager is a woman, Madame Bauer, played excellently by Maude George who amazingly doesn't even get a title card credit. She exudes butch lesbian and hires Toni as an opera singer on the basis of her legs and without hearing her voice, so you can imagine what sort of work she's really got herself into.
The Puritan costume, which of course is see through under the lights, proves a sensation and Lowell Sherman's character, Henri D'Avril, apparently some sort of nobleman, is eager to ply her with drink and take advantage. She escapes with Louise Dresser's assistance. She's Rosa, the seamstress, and she was due to be off on holiday the next day anyway, even before she got fired. Not content with just rescuing her, Rosa takes her to Monte Carlo and the Hotel Eden, which is where the title finally comes into play. It seems that Rosa is really a baroness, working fifty weeks a year and splurging her entire year's pension in style in the remaining two.
I really enjoyed The Garden of Eden, which begins as a very subtle comedy that brings smiles rather than raucous laughter but gradually shifts towards the latter as the film goes on. It has the mastery of the medium that is present in the great films of 1927 and 1928 but was soon lost as the world of sound took over and the focus shifted from artistic use of silent cinematography to forced constraints in order for the sound to work. There are some great shots here, especially one where Toni on stage appears on the glasses of d'Avril's theater binoculars as he adjusts them.
The cast is universally excellent and believable, from Griffith's radiance and expressiveness to Dresser's quiet yet powerful resolve. Sherman is an excellent cad yet one with hidden soul and Ray is believably idle rich, even though he's playing well out of type. The androgynous Maude George deserves more credit than she got, and Robert Israel's superb score for the 2002 rerelease is spot on. Everything goes to back up my growing belief that while I'm searching for good films of any description from 1929 I'm going to be reasonably safe watching anything from 1928.
Monday, 7 May 2007
Man in the Attic (1953) Hugo Fregonese
The streets are cobbled, the air is thick with fog and the London bobbies are on the beat. We're in Whitechapel at the time of Jack the Ripper and he's on the front page with two victims already behind him. The bobbies escort victim number three home, or so they think. She's drunk as a skunk and not wanting to go home in the slightest, but rather than finding another pub she finds the wrong end of Jack's knife. As the victims mount, fingers are pointed everywhere but one believable suspect is the new lodger at the Harley's house. He's a pathologist called Slade and circumstantial evidence adds up quickly.
The film is suitably drenched in the noir essentials, with some camera angles and a solid use of shadow, though not as well as the 1927 original, The Lodger, made by no less a talent than Alfred Hitchcock. The cast are believably English, though only a few actually are. Rhys Williams, who started out on a solid footing in the very Welsh How Green Was My Valley, doesn't try to hide his Welsh heritage, but the rest are solid, even when they're solidly American like Frances Bavier who my wife knows well as Aunt Bee from The Andy Griffith Show. Newcomers Constance Smith and Byron Palmer are Irish and American respectively. Even director Hugo Fregonese is Argentinian. And then there's suitably odd American staple Jack Palance in the lead, still early in his career when his face hadn't found it's real shape yet so that he looks more like Henry Silva, but it's the same year that he rocketed to fame in Shane and his power is already apparent, even when he's just standing still looking suspicious.
Slade is an obvious suspect because he's completely out of place. The only thing more completely out of place are the musical numbers which are fine but inadequate as tension relievers. They distract us from it, which is presumably the point, but they do so far too much so that they fail to relieve and merely make us wonder what should have been there in their place. The ending is disappointing too, bringing it down another notch in my book.
The film is suitably drenched in the noir essentials, with some camera angles and a solid use of shadow, though not as well as the 1927 original, The Lodger, made by no less a talent than Alfred Hitchcock. The cast are believably English, though only a few actually are. Rhys Williams, who started out on a solid footing in the very Welsh How Green Was My Valley, doesn't try to hide his Welsh heritage, but the rest are solid, even when they're solidly American like Frances Bavier who my wife knows well as Aunt Bee from The Andy Griffith Show. Newcomers Constance Smith and Byron Palmer are Irish and American respectively. Even director Hugo Fregonese is Argentinian. And then there's suitably odd American staple Jack Palance in the lead, still early in his career when his face hadn't found it's real shape yet so that he looks more like Henry Silva, but it's the same year that he rocketed to fame in Shane and his power is already apparent, even when he's just standing still looking suspicious.
Slade is an obvious suspect because he's completely out of place. The only thing more completely out of place are the musical numbers which are fine but inadequate as tension relievers. They distract us from it, which is presumably the point, but they do so far too much so that they fail to relieve and merely make us wonder what should have been there in their place. The ending is disappointing too, bringing it down another notch in my book.
Sunday, 6 May 2007
Marlowe (1969) Paul Bogart
Philip Marlowe is one of the most iconic of all screen detectives but this was a strange way to reincarnate him after many years away. He's not played by Humphrey Bogart this time, so the only Bogart involved is director Paul. It's actually James Garner, of all people, who is an intriguing choice because he's at once a believable detective and yet completely unlike Bogart, even when speaking lines that I hear with Bogie's voice. He's also inhabiting a very sixties world, starting off in a hotel full of hippies and peace symbols, which doesn't seem particularly noir, and how could Philip Marlowe ever not be noir?
He's trying to find Orrin Quest, at the behest of his tearful little sister, Orfamay, and indeed that's the title of the source novel by Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister. The plot got changed more than a little though, from the film world to the television world as presumably badmouthing your own industry was a step too far. Someone else is looking for Orrin as well, as just talking to Marlowe seems to be a death sentence for some people. There are leads, of course, and Marlowe runs them down with all the style and dedication you'd expect. He just gets to do it in three way split screen style, hardly anything Bogie ever got up to.
Bogie also never faced Bruce Lee, which Garner has to do here. Fortunately for him, he gets beaten up by other people and Bruce Lee's character, Winslow Wong, only beats up his office. When Winslow comes back to redress his error Marlowe calls him gay and causes his death by misadventure. They didn't know it at the time but that really doesn't help us buy into the story. James Garner vs Bruce Lee. Let me think about this a moment. Nah, that's not a very believable outcome.
There are other actors here who get more screen time than the immortal Bruce and who help to bring a little realism back to the situation. The strange thing is that even though the film doesn't have anything good to say about television, Bruce is about the only one who managed to outgrow his own TV work on The Green Hornet to even greater success in the world of film. James Garner is still best known for The Rockford Files or Maverick, depending on how old you are. Many know William Daniels from St Elsewhere or Boy Meets World but I know him best as the voice of KITT in Knight Rider, outacting David Hasselhoff even though he never appeared on screen. The police lieutenant is Carroll O'Connor who even I know as Archie Bunker even though I didn't watch All in the Family, I watched the original Till Death Us Do Part and the sequel In Sickness and in Health. There's even Jackie Coogan, who everyone remembers most as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family even if they've seen his outstanding performance opposite Chaplin in The Kid.
The leading lady is nominally Gayle Hunnicutt but it's really Rita Moreno. I don't know either at all but Moreno did 780 episodes of The Electric Company, with such luminaries as Morgan Freeman and Mel Brooks, so my wife knows her well. She's really the main reason to watch this, though Garner isn't bad. He just has too big a pair of boots to fill. O'Connor is excellent but underused. Bruce Lee's role is entirely one of interest to fans.
He's trying to find Orrin Quest, at the behest of his tearful little sister, Orfamay, and indeed that's the title of the source novel by Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister. The plot got changed more than a little though, from the film world to the television world as presumably badmouthing your own industry was a step too far. Someone else is looking for Orrin as well, as just talking to Marlowe seems to be a death sentence for some people. There are leads, of course, and Marlowe runs them down with all the style and dedication you'd expect. He just gets to do it in three way split screen style, hardly anything Bogie ever got up to.
Bogie also never faced Bruce Lee, which Garner has to do here. Fortunately for him, he gets beaten up by other people and Bruce Lee's character, Winslow Wong, only beats up his office. When Winslow comes back to redress his error Marlowe calls him gay and causes his death by misadventure. They didn't know it at the time but that really doesn't help us buy into the story. James Garner vs Bruce Lee. Let me think about this a moment. Nah, that's not a very believable outcome.
There are other actors here who get more screen time than the immortal Bruce and who help to bring a little realism back to the situation. The strange thing is that even though the film doesn't have anything good to say about television, Bruce is about the only one who managed to outgrow his own TV work on The Green Hornet to even greater success in the world of film. James Garner is still best known for The Rockford Files or Maverick, depending on how old you are. Many know William Daniels from St Elsewhere or Boy Meets World but I know him best as the voice of KITT in Knight Rider, outacting David Hasselhoff even though he never appeared on screen. The police lieutenant is Carroll O'Connor who even I know as Archie Bunker even though I didn't watch All in the Family, I watched the original Till Death Us Do Part and the sequel In Sickness and in Health. There's even Jackie Coogan, who everyone remembers most as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family even if they've seen his outstanding performance opposite Chaplin in The Kid.
The leading lady is nominally Gayle Hunnicutt but it's really Rita Moreno. I don't know either at all but Moreno did 780 episodes of The Electric Company, with such luminaries as Morgan Freeman and Mel Brooks, so my wife knows her well. She's really the main reason to watch this, though Garner isn't bad. He just has too big a pair of boots to fill. O'Connor is excellent but underused. Bruce Lee's role is entirely one of interest to fans.
The Men (1950) Fred Zinnemann
Fresh from the stage for his first screen part, his impact in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway gave Marlon Brando the lead in his debut, The Men, a war film without a war because, opening footage notwithstanding, the soldiers we see have already come home and are trying to adjust to modern life with the knowledge and memory of what they had been through. There are major names here, well beyond Brando's which was nothing at the time to the movie watching world. The director is Fred Zinnemann, who was already established though his greatest work, such as From Here to Eternity, High Noon or A Man for All Seasons was still come to come. The producer is Stanley Kramer, who was reasonably new and who had some major moments ahead, with films like On the Beach, Judgment at Nuremberg and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. There are name actors backing up Brando, from Teresa Wright to Everett Sloane to Jack Webb. Most notably, there are 45 men from the Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital, which along with everything else suggests that this would have been a prime candidate to be a Sam Fuller movie.
Sloane dominates early on as a doctor specialising in paralysis who is open and honest to an audience of women whose boyfriends and husbands are patients. Soon he's dealing with the patients themselves and he's similar yet not quite the same to them. How powerful this was in 1950 I can't ever know but from a 2007 viewpoint it's tame compared to films focusing on similar issues a war or two later such as Coming Home. I wonder all the more what Sam Fuller would have done with it. He'd have used Everett Sloane too, I would think, one of Orson Welles's Mercury Players who got a great turn in Citizen Kane and went onward and upward from there.
Brando plays Lt Kenneth 'Bud' Wilcheck, who, as you'd expect from a character played by Brando, isn't as happy or at least adjusted as the rest of his fellow patients. He gets to exude angst and pain and he does a pretty good job in his debut. No wonder he went through life never playing anything but the lead, even when he was only in a scene or two like Superman or Apocalypse Now. He does his thing here, dominating scenes even when he isn't actually doing anything which is a serious talent for sure, but I had far more fun enjoying Everett Sloane's performance. I merely often had to wait a while for him to come back.
Teresa Wright gets overshadowed, but it's almost logical that she got to be in a film about disabled men given that four years earlier she'd played a major role in The Best Years of Our Lives, which very notably featured a disabled man who got to become the one and only actor to ever win two Academy Awards for the same role. Jack Webb, almost entirely known nowadays for his long running role as Joe Friday in Dragnet, shows that he has versatility beyond what anyone would expect knowing only that character. In fact everyone here keeps the side up, but to my mind it's Everett Sloane's show, not Brando's.
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