Director: Charles Crichton
Stars: John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline and Michael Palin
Having not seen A Fish Called Wanda probably since I taped it off British TV, I was utterly surprised to find it was made in a 1.37 aspect ratio: usually known as full screen. I can't think of another film of this era and this prominence that was made in full screen. Perhaps this was due to Charles Crichton, veteran English director of comedies, who hadn't made a feature film for the big screen since He Who Rides a Tiger in 1965. I'd be interested to find out the real reason if that isn't it. Perhaps it was intended to be a TV movie but became something so much more.
It has a dream cast for a 1988 comedy, reminiscent of the sort of dream casts Crichton used to deal with back in his Ealing days when he could juggle people like Alec Guinness, Alastair Sim, Stanley Holloway, Peter Sellers and Sid James. Here he gets a couple of Pythons: John Cleese and Michael Palin, showing that they are still on top of their games fourteen years after the series ended and five years after the last Python film. If that wasn't enough, he also gets Jamie Lee Curtis in the period when she looked most utterly gorgeous and Kevin Kline in full on psycho nutjob mode.
Like many classic English comedies, it's a caper film. Georges Thomason is the leader of a gang of thieves who plan and successfully execute a jewel robbery for millions of pounds worth of loot. Their downfall is greed because everyone's in it for themselves while putting on whatever best front seems appropriate at any particular point in time, only Ken Pile and his powerful stutter are loyal to the boss. Ken is played by Michael Palin, who based the stutter on his father and ended up founding the London Centre for Stammering Children. He's tasked with rubbing out an old lady who is the only witness in the case, but instead gradually tortures himself, both physically and mentally, because he only seems to rub out her dogs instead, one by one. I should add that he's a huge animal lover, which fact gives us our title, and he's truly abused in the name of cinematic art.
Chief amongst those trying to rip him off for everything they can get is his right hand woman and girlfriend Wanda Gershwitz, as played magnificently by Jamie Lee Curtis, who has never looked better, not even in True Lies, perhaps Arnie couldn't speak the foreign languages that drve her wild here. Her real boyfriend here is Otto, who she passes off as her brother and brings into the gang as the resident psychopath with a weapon fetish. Beyond teaming up to screw over Georges, they are just as willing to screw over each other.
And if everyone else is here is awesome, I'm not sure how to describe Kevin Kline who manages to go to the level above awesome, whatever that happens to be. His Academy Award win in the Best Supporting Actor slot was well deserved, beating Alec Guinness no less. The cast are quite possibly so natural in their roles because they were too busy trying not to burst into stitches at Kline's antics, many of which were obviously improvised. Apparently during their sex scene, Jamie Lee Curtis had to bury her face in the pillows because she was laughing so much at what he was doing with his face. He spends the entire film doing stupid things, especially when people call him stupid. Don't call him stupid.
That leaves John Cleese, who plays a barrister called Archie Leach (yep, Cary Grant's real name), who is assigned to defend Georges. He's critical to Wanda and Otto because after they turn Georges into the cops, they discover that he's already moved the loot and he threatens to hand it over to the cops if his gang don't get him out. So Wanda has to seduce yet another character in order to find out where the jewels are, but this time she really falls for him. This is definitely an unconventional romance but it works well because of the chemistry. All these characters obviously loved working with each other, so it's no wonder they all returned for a second film together, Fierce Creatures. The only surprise is how long it took: nine years.
This is a real gem of a movie, the best work writer John Cleese has done since Fawlty Towers, and very possibly the funniest and most consistent comedy of the eighties, with the possible exception of This is Spinal Tap, and one made on what most people would call a shoestring budget. It cost an estimated $7.5m but it pulled in many times that, becoming a sleeper hit that took the record of how long a film could take to reach the top spot at the box office. Writing in an era when the new blockbuster hits number one on week one of release and disappears after a month, it's hard to imagine how this one took over two months to reach the top of the chart.
Utterly English, and thus massively self deprecating, it does branch out to embrace the other side of the pond in spirit. Beyond featuring Curtis and Kline heavily as half of the principal cast, there's a good deal of back and forth between the characters hurling nationalist abuse at each other in the most hilarious ways. Perhaps this is why Americans took this film to heart, even though they tended to cut one of the key scenes out entirely for TV broadcast because of idiotic political correctness. This is not a politically correct film, make no mistake about that, and it's all the better for it. I won't go another decade without seeing it again and that's a promise to myself.
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Sunday, 12 July 2009
High Society (1956)
Director: Charles Walters
Stars: Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra
Anyone who's paid any attention to this blog over the last few years must have realised that I have a real problem with musicals. I love some of them, but I hate a lot more and those that I hate are often the ones that people rave about the most. Partly this has to be because the songs from the classic era of Hollywood musicals tend to be utterly not what I'd choose to listen to at home. Mostly though it's because I always find that the songs detract from the plot. Often they do so much that there isn't a plot left because the songs are all there is. And when I don't like the songs that doesn't leave me anything to enjoy.
Luckily this one begins with Louis Armstrong and his band singing the theme tune in the back of a Greyhound bus. And in case we didn't know that this was a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, this theme tune tells us the whole plot. Tracy Lord is getting married for the second time, to a man called George Kittredge, but her first husband wants her back. He's C K Dexter-Haven and he has the assistance of Tracy's younger sister, Carolyn. Into the mix come a journalist and photographer to confuse everything.
By the time Satchmo tells us that the song's over and the story can begin, we've already heard the story and now only have to watch it unfold a little slower with actors and dialogue and all that jazz. And of course there are some seriously large shoes to fill: The Philadelphia Story was a huge success, starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart. Not only did it win two Oscars, but it marked the official comeback from box office poison for Kate, playing a part that was written specifically for her and which she backed financially in return for a share of the profits. There were a lot of profits.
Luckily for this musical version, made fourteen years after the original, MGM landed possibly the biggest musical names of the era. To take on Jimmy Stewart's Oscar-winning role as journalist Macaulay Connor, they hired no less a name than Frank Sinatra. To attempt Cary Grant's memorable portrayal of C K Dexter-Haven, they cast Bing Crosby and gave him top billing. Most appropriately of all, to play Tracy Lord they cast Grace Kelly in her last role before she'd head off to join high society herself as Princess Grace of Monaco.
OK, they slipped up on the horrendous brown trouser suit we first see her in, but they made up for it with the white bathing suit. Only then does she become her regal self. The brown trouser suit may be the worst thing about the film, but it has other faults too, and not just the inevitably poor rear projection work. The sets are undeniably lavish but they feel anodyne and sterile, so empty that they could be miniatures. We never feel like we're in undeniably lavish houses, we feel like we're in undeniably lavish sets.
While they're hardly my thing, the songs by Cole Porter don't seem to engage until late in the film when Crosby sings with Louis Armstrong and his band. Even True Love didn't engage me, though it sold a million copies. The best song by far is the duet between Sinatra and Crosby which must have had audiences of the time dreaming of more. Unfortunately this song, Well, Did You Evah! wasn't even written for this film but was recycled from a previous Cole Porter musical, DuBarry Was a Lady.
Most obviously the cast just aren't up to snuff. They may be huge names they just don't have the acting chops and can't generate the chemistry of those who went before them. I was surprised to find that Bing Crosby was the best of them, making a decent attempt at aping Cary Grant's charisma. Sinatra is just wrong for his part and is notably outperformed by Celeste Holm as his photographer, who has far too little to do. Where Jimmy Stewart won an Oscar, Sinatra is just in the movie and we often wonder why.
Even Grace Kelly has trouble finding the feel for her role. Her magic is there on occasion: by the pool floating the boat, flouncing through her bachelor party, listening to Sinatra in Uncle Willie's bar, but generally she's going through the motions. Maybe she just couldn't wait to get to Monaco, given that she became Princess Grace three months before the official release of this film. It doesn't help that in the tradition of classic Hollywood musicals, she's by far too young a romantic interest for her male leads. She was 26, less than half of Bing Crosby's 53. Ol' Blue Eyes was a mere 40.
So this may light up the lives of classic musical fans, but it isn't a patch on the non-musical original. The Philadelphia Story is a classic of the cinema, High Society isn't. It even failed on a far lesser point that most people would have ignored entirely. Tracy Lord has a little sister, Dinah in the original but Caroline here, and she's a little scene stealer of a character. Virginia Weidler did that scene stealing in the original and Lydia Reed does her level best to live up to that here, but the film doesn't let her. She gets a couple of great early scenes along with a sappy one where Bing sings to her and that's it. In precisely the same way that the film lets Lydia Reed down, it lets The Philadelphia Story down too.
Stars: Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra
Anyone who's paid any attention to this blog over the last few years must have realised that I have a real problem with musicals. I love some of them, but I hate a lot more and those that I hate are often the ones that people rave about the most. Partly this has to be because the songs from the classic era of Hollywood musicals tend to be utterly not what I'd choose to listen to at home. Mostly though it's because I always find that the songs detract from the plot. Often they do so much that there isn't a plot left because the songs are all there is. And when I don't like the songs that doesn't leave me anything to enjoy.
Luckily this one begins with Louis Armstrong and his band singing the theme tune in the back of a Greyhound bus. And in case we didn't know that this was a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, this theme tune tells us the whole plot. Tracy Lord is getting married for the second time, to a man called George Kittredge, but her first husband wants her back. He's C K Dexter-Haven and he has the assistance of Tracy's younger sister, Carolyn. Into the mix come a journalist and photographer to confuse everything.
By the time Satchmo tells us that the song's over and the story can begin, we've already heard the story and now only have to watch it unfold a little slower with actors and dialogue and all that jazz. And of course there are some seriously large shoes to fill: The Philadelphia Story was a huge success, starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart. Not only did it win two Oscars, but it marked the official comeback from box office poison for Kate, playing a part that was written specifically for her and which she backed financially in return for a share of the profits. There were a lot of profits.
Luckily for this musical version, made fourteen years after the original, MGM landed possibly the biggest musical names of the era. To take on Jimmy Stewart's Oscar-winning role as journalist Macaulay Connor, they hired no less a name than Frank Sinatra. To attempt Cary Grant's memorable portrayal of C K Dexter-Haven, they cast Bing Crosby and gave him top billing. Most appropriately of all, to play Tracy Lord they cast Grace Kelly in her last role before she'd head off to join high society herself as Princess Grace of Monaco.
OK, they slipped up on the horrendous brown trouser suit we first see her in, but they made up for it with the white bathing suit. Only then does she become her regal self. The brown trouser suit may be the worst thing about the film, but it has other faults too, and not just the inevitably poor rear projection work. The sets are undeniably lavish but they feel anodyne and sterile, so empty that they could be miniatures. We never feel like we're in undeniably lavish houses, we feel like we're in undeniably lavish sets.
While they're hardly my thing, the songs by Cole Porter don't seem to engage until late in the film when Crosby sings with Louis Armstrong and his band. Even True Love didn't engage me, though it sold a million copies. The best song by far is the duet between Sinatra and Crosby which must have had audiences of the time dreaming of more. Unfortunately this song, Well, Did You Evah! wasn't even written for this film but was recycled from a previous Cole Porter musical, DuBarry Was a Lady.
Most obviously the cast just aren't up to snuff. They may be huge names they just don't have the acting chops and can't generate the chemistry of those who went before them. I was surprised to find that Bing Crosby was the best of them, making a decent attempt at aping Cary Grant's charisma. Sinatra is just wrong for his part and is notably outperformed by Celeste Holm as his photographer, who has far too little to do. Where Jimmy Stewart won an Oscar, Sinatra is just in the movie and we often wonder why.
Even Grace Kelly has trouble finding the feel for her role. Her magic is there on occasion: by the pool floating the boat, flouncing through her bachelor party, listening to Sinatra in Uncle Willie's bar, but generally she's going through the motions. Maybe she just couldn't wait to get to Monaco, given that she became Princess Grace three months before the official release of this film. It doesn't help that in the tradition of classic Hollywood musicals, she's by far too young a romantic interest for her male leads. She was 26, less than half of Bing Crosby's 53. Ol' Blue Eyes was a mere 40.
So this may light up the lives of classic musical fans, but it isn't a patch on the non-musical original. The Philadelphia Story is a classic of the cinema, High Society isn't. It even failed on a far lesser point that most people would have ignored entirely. Tracy Lord has a little sister, Dinah in the original but Caroline here, and she's a little scene stealer of a character. Virginia Weidler did that scene stealing in the original and Lydia Reed does her level best to live up to that here, but the film doesn't let her. She gets a couple of great early scenes along with a sappy one where Bing sings to her and that's it. In precisely the same way that the film lets Lydia Reed down, it lets The Philadelphia Story down too.
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981)
Director: Karel Reisz
Stars: Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons
I haven't read the source novel by John Fowles but I understand it's a particularly complex work, the sort of thing that leads people to suggest that it's not filmable. Usually what that really means is that it's not filmable by most. Other unfilmable books have actually come out pretty well on screen when the right director signs up: Terry Gilliam for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, David Cronenberg for The Naked Lunch or even Zack Snyder for Watchmen. None of these are perfect but they're highly impressive and prompt the viewer to go find the original.
Here the director is Karel Reisz, Czech born but one of those angry young men of British cinema in the fifties, best known as a director for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and as a producer of This Sporting Life. The writer is no less a name than Harold Pinter, a playwright whose work garnered him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. With that in hand, I'm sure he's a little less fussed about not landing an Academy Award. This adaptation proved to be his first of two nominations, the second coming two years later for the semi-autobiographical Betrayal.
Beyond The French Lieutenant's Woman being our film, it's also a film within our film and these two levels tell pretty much the same story. In the film within a film, we're in Victorian England, watching Charles Henry Smithson. He's a scientist from London, a paleontologist who has come to Dorset to study rocks, but who in doing so has fallen in love with a young lady called Ernestina Freeman. Ernestina is a very proper young lady who follows all the social dictates of the day and is transparently decent.
Enter the French lieutenant's woman of the title, a mysterious young woman called Sarah Woodruff who rebels against such transparent decency. She captures Smithson's attention in no uncertain manner and draws him into her story, something she has refused to let anyone else do. She's an intelligent and educated woman, but one eaten up by a misery that she has become comfortable with, remaining by the Lyme coast watching for her lover who she knows will never return. Her fellow townsfolk look down on her as a whore or a tragedy, but really she's the subject of a mental illness that she holds dear and refuses to even attempt to cure.
And so this mild costume drama continually slips into a deliciously melancholy gothic tale. Out go the bitter and twisted old ladies of respectability, such as Mrs Poulteney, definitively portrayed by Patience Collier, who hires Sarah as a companion; and in their stead come the smothering gothic trifecta of destiny, darkness and lunacy. Out go the staid and proper mores and manners, where the appearance of decency rules everything; and in come passions roiling beyond anyone's control. The whole film palpably changes pace and texture as we switch between these two competing styles.
And there's yet a third style to compete, because thus far I've only talked about the film within a film. In the modern day we see Mike and Anna, the actors who play Charles and Sarah, run through a story with notable similarities to that of the characters they play. Mike is married rather than engaged, with kids to boot, and Anna has herself a Frenchman of her own, named David. Mike and Anna are in bed together the first time we see them, but the implication is that the connection is merely one of casual carnality. However the longer the film goes on, the more it turns into obsession that grows in parallel to the obsession of the characters they play.
This is known as a Meryl Streep film, hardly surprising as she plays the title character but for deeper reasons too. This was still early in her career and it helped to cement her stature as the leading actress of the day. Her previous film, Kramer vs Kramer two years earlier, had landed her an Academy Award, but only for a supporting role. Here she's very much a lead and the focus of the film, in a dual role no less, in which she has to switch between a Victorian Englishwoman and a modern American actress. She does a great job and the attention lavished on her is hardly surprising.
She wasn't the only point of attention, plenty rightly being given to director Karel Reisz, writer Harold Pinter, cinematographer Freddie Francis and a whole slew of people involved with the sets and the costumes. However Jeremy Irons seems to have been rather unfairly overlooked, with only a single nomination at the BAFTAs. Inevitably, Meryl Streep won. I felt Irons gave a stunning performance also, playing a double role of his own, and while Streep was only appearing in her sixth film, Irons was only appearing in his second.
At the end of the day, though, such a complex story has to be evaluated on its own merits, beyond the way it was acted or directed or lavishly built. And I'm intrigued enough here to want to read the book to find out what the original point was. This was a novel, by John Fowles, hardly a minor name himself, but a work of literature not of cinema. What I read into the story as portrayed on screen was not just a tale of obsession but a tale of artistry digging too deeply into role. As is made very clear by the last word of the film, we watch an actor becoming his character and that can be very dangerous indeed.
Charles isn't even a true method actor, but this feels like a story about the danger of being a method actor. I can't help but remember an odd one out on Have I Got News for You where Angus Deayton talks about how Robert de Niro spent three months working as a taxi driver to prepare for his role in the film of that name, and how it was a good thing he wasn't playing Driller Killer. That was a joke, of course, but it's the same point that The French Lieutenant's Woman seems to be making. It's a valid one and I wonder how the book raised it.
Stars: Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons
I haven't read the source novel by John Fowles but I understand it's a particularly complex work, the sort of thing that leads people to suggest that it's not filmable. Usually what that really means is that it's not filmable by most. Other unfilmable books have actually come out pretty well on screen when the right director signs up: Terry Gilliam for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, David Cronenberg for The Naked Lunch or even Zack Snyder for Watchmen. None of these are perfect but they're highly impressive and prompt the viewer to go find the original.
Here the director is Karel Reisz, Czech born but one of those angry young men of British cinema in the fifties, best known as a director for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and as a producer of This Sporting Life. The writer is no less a name than Harold Pinter, a playwright whose work garnered him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. With that in hand, I'm sure he's a little less fussed about not landing an Academy Award. This adaptation proved to be his first of two nominations, the second coming two years later for the semi-autobiographical Betrayal.
Beyond The French Lieutenant's Woman being our film, it's also a film within our film and these two levels tell pretty much the same story. In the film within a film, we're in Victorian England, watching Charles Henry Smithson. He's a scientist from London, a paleontologist who has come to Dorset to study rocks, but who in doing so has fallen in love with a young lady called Ernestina Freeman. Ernestina is a very proper young lady who follows all the social dictates of the day and is transparently decent.
Enter the French lieutenant's woman of the title, a mysterious young woman called Sarah Woodruff who rebels against such transparent decency. She captures Smithson's attention in no uncertain manner and draws him into her story, something she has refused to let anyone else do. She's an intelligent and educated woman, but one eaten up by a misery that she has become comfortable with, remaining by the Lyme coast watching for her lover who she knows will never return. Her fellow townsfolk look down on her as a whore or a tragedy, but really she's the subject of a mental illness that she holds dear and refuses to even attempt to cure.
And so this mild costume drama continually slips into a deliciously melancholy gothic tale. Out go the bitter and twisted old ladies of respectability, such as Mrs Poulteney, definitively portrayed by Patience Collier, who hires Sarah as a companion; and in their stead come the smothering gothic trifecta of destiny, darkness and lunacy. Out go the staid and proper mores and manners, where the appearance of decency rules everything; and in come passions roiling beyond anyone's control. The whole film palpably changes pace and texture as we switch between these two competing styles.
And there's yet a third style to compete, because thus far I've only talked about the film within a film. In the modern day we see Mike and Anna, the actors who play Charles and Sarah, run through a story with notable similarities to that of the characters they play. Mike is married rather than engaged, with kids to boot, and Anna has herself a Frenchman of her own, named David. Mike and Anna are in bed together the first time we see them, but the implication is that the connection is merely one of casual carnality. However the longer the film goes on, the more it turns into obsession that grows in parallel to the obsession of the characters they play.
This is known as a Meryl Streep film, hardly surprising as she plays the title character but for deeper reasons too. This was still early in her career and it helped to cement her stature as the leading actress of the day. Her previous film, Kramer vs Kramer two years earlier, had landed her an Academy Award, but only for a supporting role. Here she's very much a lead and the focus of the film, in a dual role no less, in which she has to switch between a Victorian Englishwoman and a modern American actress. She does a great job and the attention lavished on her is hardly surprising.
She wasn't the only point of attention, plenty rightly being given to director Karel Reisz, writer Harold Pinter, cinematographer Freddie Francis and a whole slew of people involved with the sets and the costumes. However Jeremy Irons seems to have been rather unfairly overlooked, with only a single nomination at the BAFTAs. Inevitably, Meryl Streep won. I felt Irons gave a stunning performance also, playing a double role of his own, and while Streep was only appearing in her sixth film, Irons was only appearing in his second.
At the end of the day, though, such a complex story has to be evaluated on its own merits, beyond the way it was acted or directed or lavishly built. And I'm intrigued enough here to want to read the book to find out what the original point was. This was a novel, by John Fowles, hardly a minor name himself, but a work of literature not of cinema. What I read into the story as portrayed on screen was not just a tale of obsession but a tale of artistry digging too deeply into role. As is made very clear by the last word of the film, we watch an actor becoming his character and that can be very dangerous indeed.
Charles isn't even a true method actor, but this feels like a story about the danger of being a method actor. I can't help but remember an odd one out on Have I Got News for You where Angus Deayton talks about how Robert de Niro spent three months working as a taxi driver to prepare for his role in the film of that name, and how it was a good thing he wasn't playing Driller Killer. That was a joke, of course, but it's the same point that The French Lieutenant's Woman seems to be making. It's a valid one and I wonder how the book raised it.
Attorney for the Defense (1932)
Director: Irving Cummings
Stars: Edmund Lowe, Evelyn Brent and Constance Cummings
The stars here are Edmund Lowe, Evelyn Brent and Constance Cummings (no relation to the director, Irving Cummings), but I'm not watching for them. Beyond this being a precode, and I'll watch pretty much any precode that I get the opportunity to see, it features a number of actors I watch whenever I get the chance too: Dwight Frye, Nat Pendleton and Clarence Muse, for whom my appreciation is a rare common factor. Frye was the horror icon, best known for his Renfield in the Lugosi version of Dracula; Pendleton the former wrestler who was omnipresent in the old Cagney/Robinson/Bogart Warner Bros gangster films; and Muse the first black actor to star in a film, though one who would unfairly be relegated to bit parts for most of his life.
The first thing we see here is Dwight Frye being convicted for murder in an emotional court room. As James Wallace he gets the electric chair on what is apparently circumstantial evidence, mostly because William J Burton, the district attorney, is very good indeed at his job. Wallace is dragged out of the courtroom in front of his family, screaming his innocence and berating the DA for his ambition. The catch is that he really is innocent, as is discovered a year later after he's been electrocuted, because the real killer confesses. So our ambitious DA, who is that rarest of rarities, an honest lawyer, quits his job and becomes the attorney for the defense of the title.
What's more, he goes to James Wallace's widow to attempt penance, which he gets plenty of opportunity to do. He looks after Mrs Wallace and her son Paul as if they were his own wife and son, putting Paul through law school and bringing him into his firm. Unfortunately for them, there's another episode in Burton's past that will come back to haunt them. While there's unspoken romantic tension throughout between Burton and his secretary, Ruth Barry, his real flame at the beginning of the film is a dangerous young lady called Valesca Lorraine.
Quite why he didn't know better is beyond me, because he trusts her so little that he even hires a private detective to watch her, thus discovering that she's two timing him with a petty crook called Nick Quinn. Naturally he dumps her unceremoniously but ten years later everyone's stories intertwine once more. Nick is now an important figure in the world of crime, Val is his moll and Burton is the man who can put them away. Paul is the obvious candidate to be used to fix that situation.
The story here is pretty predictable but it unfolds quite nicely. Edmund Lowe has too much makeup and has a few wooden scenes but generally carries the part well, even though he turns into Lionel Barrymore for the final court scenes. He must have watched A Free Soul every day for a month to prepare for the part. He'd follow it up duelling with Bela Lugosi in Chandu the Magician and a year later would be the least recognisable of the dream cast of Dinner at Eight. Evelyn Brent is suitably sleazy as Val Lorraine, highly reminiscent of Norma Shearer of all people. Constance Cummings is best of the bunch as the sturdy and reliable secretary, though she doesn't get enough to do.
And as to the names I was watching for, Dwight Frye gets precisely one scene, though admittedly it is the first one. It's a shame he didn't get to play a double role as both James Wallace and his son, but the age progression of the characters was terrible as it was and would have been worse if they'd have added the extra ten years needed for that to happen. Nat Pendleton doesn't get much screen time either, just enough to play a couple of card tricks and get laid out by Edmund Lowe, but he has fun for the time he has. Best of all is Clarence Muse, an elevator boy with the unwieldy monicker of Jefferson Q Leffingwell, who doesn't appear until the film is almost through but makes himself memorable nonetheless.
Stars: Edmund Lowe, Evelyn Brent and Constance Cummings
The stars here are Edmund Lowe, Evelyn Brent and Constance Cummings (no relation to the director, Irving Cummings), but I'm not watching for them. Beyond this being a precode, and I'll watch pretty much any precode that I get the opportunity to see, it features a number of actors I watch whenever I get the chance too: Dwight Frye, Nat Pendleton and Clarence Muse, for whom my appreciation is a rare common factor. Frye was the horror icon, best known for his Renfield in the Lugosi version of Dracula; Pendleton the former wrestler who was omnipresent in the old Cagney/Robinson/Bogart Warner Bros gangster films; and Muse the first black actor to star in a film, though one who would unfairly be relegated to bit parts for most of his life.
The first thing we see here is Dwight Frye being convicted for murder in an emotional court room. As James Wallace he gets the electric chair on what is apparently circumstantial evidence, mostly because William J Burton, the district attorney, is very good indeed at his job. Wallace is dragged out of the courtroom in front of his family, screaming his innocence and berating the DA for his ambition. The catch is that he really is innocent, as is discovered a year later after he's been electrocuted, because the real killer confesses. So our ambitious DA, who is that rarest of rarities, an honest lawyer, quits his job and becomes the attorney for the defense of the title.
What's more, he goes to James Wallace's widow to attempt penance, which he gets plenty of opportunity to do. He looks after Mrs Wallace and her son Paul as if they were his own wife and son, putting Paul through law school and bringing him into his firm. Unfortunately for them, there's another episode in Burton's past that will come back to haunt them. While there's unspoken romantic tension throughout between Burton and his secretary, Ruth Barry, his real flame at the beginning of the film is a dangerous young lady called Valesca Lorraine.
Quite why he didn't know better is beyond me, because he trusts her so little that he even hires a private detective to watch her, thus discovering that she's two timing him with a petty crook called Nick Quinn. Naturally he dumps her unceremoniously but ten years later everyone's stories intertwine once more. Nick is now an important figure in the world of crime, Val is his moll and Burton is the man who can put them away. Paul is the obvious candidate to be used to fix that situation.
The story here is pretty predictable but it unfolds quite nicely. Edmund Lowe has too much makeup and has a few wooden scenes but generally carries the part well, even though he turns into Lionel Barrymore for the final court scenes. He must have watched A Free Soul every day for a month to prepare for the part. He'd follow it up duelling with Bela Lugosi in Chandu the Magician and a year later would be the least recognisable of the dream cast of Dinner at Eight. Evelyn Brent is suitably sleazy as Val Lorraine, highly reminiscent of Norma Shearer of all people. Constance Cummings is best of the bunch as the sturdy and reliable secretary, though she doesn't get enough to do.
And as to the names I was watching for, Dwight Frye gets precisely one scene, though admittedly it is the first one. It's a shame he didn't get to play a double role as both James Wallace and his son, but the age progression of the characters was terrible as it was and would have been worse if they'd have added the extra ten years needed for that to happen. Nat Pendleton doesn't get much screen time either, just enough to play a couple of card tricks and get laid out by Edmund Lowe, but he has fun for the time he has. Best of all is Clarence Muse, an elevator boy with the unwieldy monicker of Jefferson Q Leffingwell, who doesn't appear until the film is almost through but makes himself memorable nonetheless.
Saturday, 11 July 2009
Kramer vs Kramer (1979)
Director: Robert Benton
Star: Dustin Hoffman
As I write this review Meryl Streep has 41 feature films to her credit and she's been nominated for 15 Academy Awards. It only needs basic maths skills to realise that means that she's nominated for one out of every three films, which is pretty astounding. Then again she's often regarded as the best actress working in cinema today, hardly a minor accolade. Kramer vs Kramer was her first win, and her second nomination, after The Deer Hunter a year earlier. Both were as a supporting actress, her first leading nomination being for The French Lieutenant's Woman in 1982.
But while the world didn't really know who Meryl Streep was when this film opened, the film seems to have had a pretty good idea. The first image we see is her face and we stay there for a little while, watching her as she emotes. She's wishing her young son good night and telling him that she loves him, but really she's telling herself, because she knows she's not going to see him in the morning. She's leaving. She's Joanna Kramer, she's leaving her husband Ted and she's leaving her son Billy. Apparently she feels that she's not good for him. It's obviously a huge deal, though we aren't privy to her reasons.
This leaves husband Ted in something of a lurch. He's a businessman, an advertising executive who's just been put in charge of a large contract, and it's the day he brings this news home that his wife leaves him. And just to confuse us, as our sympathies are automatically against Joanna for leaving her young son, Ted does his best to turn us against him too. Everything is patently about him, not just the mug in the kitchen with his name on it, but most obviously in the fact that he doesn't ask why she's leaving, he asks what he did to make her do it.
To give him credit, he takes on the responsibility from moment one and seems to adjust scarily fast. He has to deal all the problems you might expect, so we get the cooking breakfast scene and the dropping off at school scene and the eating dinner scene and the school production scene and all the other scenes you can visualise in your head just from knowing the score. Time passes without any real markers but it seems that he adjusts amazingly well to life as a single parent in an amazingly short time. In fact it would be hard to imagine any self absorbed father who knows nothing about being a parent or even looking after himself adjusting any better to juggling a time intensive job with being a single parent.
And later on we're treated with the numbers. Billy is now seven years old and it's been fifteen months since Joanna walked out, but she's back with a new grip on who she really is and she wants her kid. She's willing to fight and she has a lawyer, but of course so does he. Most importantly of all, it's 22nd December, the Friday before Christmas, and Ted finds himself out of a job. His lawyer naturally tells him that he doesn't have a chance in hell of winning a custody case without a job, and here's where we really begin the story.
We start to find out just how much both these people want their son. Ted memorably finds himself a new job within 24 hours to keep his fight alive and we watch Meryl Streep, who has been absent for most of the film up to this point, come back into it and reassert herself as a character with all the powers that she can bring to bear. It can't hurt that the young Meryl Streep reminds of the young Warners-era Bette Davis, but as the cinematic world would begin to realise, she is very good indeed at what she does.
There's a lot of power here, beyond some very powerful acting performances that were very deservedly recognised at the highest level. Justin Henry became, at eight years of age, the youngest actor to be nominated for a competitive Oscar. Jane Alexander was also Oscar nominated, for a part that led her from being Joanna's best friend to Ted's best friend. Her courtroom scenes are very telling. Further down a superb cast, people like George Coe and Howard Duff stamp the word 'definitive' on their respective roles.
The courtroom is where this film really kicks into high gear and it's hardly surprising that it's such a highly renowned film for these scenes, even though technically they take up a surprisingly small amount of the film's running time. This is known as a film about a court battle, because it's so central to the story that it even comprises the title of the piece. It highlighted something that everyone probably knew already but just took for granted unless they were going through a custody battle themselves. Mama gets the kids. That's just how it goes, right? This was the film (and source novel) that asked why.
Hoffman and Streep are both amazing to watch in these scenes because they're not just fighting for what they want, they're cringing internally at the ame time because of the degree that their lawyers are going to town on their opponents. They have to run through a whole slew of emotions all at once and they're both more than up to the task, perhaps partially because they had a lot of real life trauma to help them: Meryl Streep was mourning the death of her lover John Cazale the year before and Dustin Hoffman was going through a messy divorce from his wife of eleven years. Apparently he contributed so much to Robert Benton's script that he was offered a co-writing credit that he declined.
So a whole slew of people got a whole slew of awards for putting this film together and that's fine. Robert Benton, who had signed on to write the screen adaptation, became the director too and so landed two Oscars for the same film (the fifth and last win was for Best Picture, in the year of Apocalypse Now and another Meryl Streep film, Manhattan). What I particularly enjoyed here that didn't win was the cinematography. Unfortunately Néstor Almendros was up against Vittorio Storaro for Apocalypse Now and as impressive as his work is here I'm sure he didn't expect to win either.
His camerawork is great, often through the choice of how he told stories because it isn't always what we see, it's often what we don't see. We see the Kramer house come to life from a camera shot down the hallway, the people We see Ted's boss getting nervous by watching his legs walk up and down past a static shot of Ted on his leather couch. We watch Ted waiting for the results of a job interview by seeing him sit, still and nervous, in the middle of a Christmas party in which not a single other person is remotely serious. We see a repetition of the early breakfast scene much later in the film that tells a powerful story on its own purely by what we see is different.
And at the end of the day, the way this cinematography works is really a parallel to what the film does best. It took an argument so one-sided that nobody really even thought of it as an argument and it showed us the other sides. Why should the mother automatically get the kids in a custody battle? It isn't about her, it's about the father too and most importantly of all, it's about the kids themselves. This film gives us all three sides of the argument, perhaps for the first time, and in doing so it added an important contribution to a changing world.
Star: Dustin Hoffman
As I write this review Meryl Streep has 41 feature films to her credit and she's been nominated for 15 Academy Awards. It only needs basic maths skills to realise that means that she's nominated for one out of every three films, which is pretty astounding. Then again she's often regarded as the best actress working in cinema today, hardly a minor accolade. Kramer vs Kramer was her first win, and her second nomination, after The Deer Hunter a year earlier. Both were as a supporting actress, her first leading nomination being for The French Lieutenant's Woman in 1982.
But while the world didn't really know who Meryl Streep was when this film opened, the film seems to have had a pretty good idea. The first image we see is her face and we stay there for a little while, watching her as she emotes. She's wishing her young son good night and telling him that she loves him, but really she's telling herself, because she knows she's not going to see him in the morning. She's leaving. She's Joanna Kramer, she's leaving her husband Ted and she's leaving her son Billy. Apparently she feels that she's not good for him. It's obviously a huge deal, though we aren't privy to her reasons.
This leaves husband Ted in something of a lurch. He's a businessman, an advertising executive who's just been put in charge of a large contract, and it's the day he brings this news home that his wife leaves him. And just to confuse us, as our sympathies are automatically against Joanna for leaving her young son, Ted does his best to turn us against him too. Everything is patently about him, not just the mug in the kitchen with his name on it, but most obviously in the fact that he doesn't ask why she's leaving, he asks what he did to make her do it.
To give him credit, he takes on the responsibility from moment one and seems to adjust scarily fast. He has to deal all the problems you might expect, so we get the cooking breakfast scene and the dropping off at school scene and the eating dinner scene and the school production scene and all the other scenes you can visualise in your head just from knowing the score. Time passes without any real markers but it seems that he adjusts amazingly well to life as a single parent in an amazingly short time. In fact it would be hard to imagine any self absorbed father who knows nothing about being a parent or even looking after himself adjusting any better to juggling a time intensive job with being a single parent.
And later on we're treated with the numbers. Billy is now seven years old and it's been fifteen months since Joanna walked out, but she's back with a new grip on who she really is and she wants her kid. She's willing to fight and she has a lawyer, but of course so does he. Most importantly of all, it's 22nd December, the Friday before Christmas, and Ted finds himself out of a job. His lawyer naturally tells him that he doesn't have a chance in hell of winning a custody case without a job, and here's where we really begin the story.
We start to find out just how much both these people want their son. Ted memorably finds himself a new job within 24 hours to keep his fight alive and we watch Meryl Streep, who has been absent for most of the film up to this point, come back into it and reassert herself as a character with all the powers that she can bring to bear. It can't hurt that the young Meryl Streep reminds of the young Warners-era Bette Davis, but as the cinematic world would begin to realise, she is very good indeed at what she does.
There's a lot of power here, beyond some very powerful acting performances that were very deservedly recognised at the highest level. Justin Henry became, at eight years of age, the youngest actor to be nominated for a competitive Oscar. Jane Alexander was also Oscar nominated, for a part that led her from being Joanna's best friend to Ted's best friend. Her courtroom scenes are very telling. Further down a superb cast, people like George Coe and Howard Duff stamp the word 'definitive' on their respective roles.
The courtroom is where this film really kicks into high gear and it's hardly surprising that it's such a highly renowned film for these scenes, even though technically they take up a surprisingly small amount of the film's running time. This is known as a film about a court battle, because it's so central to the story that it even comprises the title of the piece. It highlighted something that everyone probably knew already but just took for granted unless they were going through a custody battle themselves. Mama gets the kids. That's just how it goes, right? This was the film (and source novel) that asked why.
Hoffman and Streep are both amazing to watch in these scenes because they're not just fighting for what they want, they're cringing internally at the ame time because of the degree that their lawyers are going to town on their opponents. They have to run through a whole slew of emotions all at once and they're both more than up to the task, perhaps partially because they had a lot of real life trauma to help them: Meryl Streep was mourning the death of her lover John Cazale the year before and Dustin Hoffman was going through a messy divorce from his wife of eleven years. Apparently he contributed so much to Robert Benton's script that he was offered a co-writing credit that he declined.
So a whole slew of people got a whole slew of awards for putting this film together and that's fine. Robert Benton, who had signed on to write the screen adaptation, became the director too and so landed two Oscars for the same film (the fifth and last win was for Best Picture, in the year of Apocalypse Now and another Meryl Streep film, Manhattan). What I particularly enjoyed here that didn't win was the cinematography. Unfortunately Néstor Almendros was up against Vittorio Storaro for Apocalypse Now and as impressive as his work is here I'm sure he didn't expect to win either.
His camerawork is great, often through the choice of how he told stories because it isn't always what we see, it's often what we don't see. We see the Kramer house come to life from a camera shot down the hallway, the people We see Ted's boss getting nervous by watching his legs walk up and down past a static shot of Ted on his leather couch. We watch Ted waiting for the results of a job interview by seeing him sit, still and nervous, in the middle of a Christmas party in which not a single other person is remotely serious. We see a repetition of the early breakfast scene much later in the film that tells a powerful story on its own purely by what we see is different.
And at the end of the day, the way this cinematography works is really a parallel to what the film does best. It took an argument so one-sided that nobody really even thought of it as an argument and it showed us the other sides. Why should the mother automatically get the kids in a custody battle? It isn't about her, it's about the father too and most importantly of all, it's about the kids themselves. This film gives us all three sides of the argument, perhaps for the first time, and in doing so it added an important contribution to a changing world.
The Good Bad Girl (1931)
Director: Roy William Neill
Stars: Mae Clarke, James Hall and Marie Prevost
Marcia Cameron isn't happy so she's leaving. She appreciates everything Dan has done for her, she tells him in a letter, but she just can't stand the racket. Now we know she's not talking about noise, because this is a precode: it means her boyfriend is a gangster, 'Dapper' Dan Tyler. Sure enough, he promptly turns up to render the letter apparently worthless because she can tell him that it's all over in person. What Dan doesn't know is that there's still a really good reason for us seeing the letter: it's the only way we'd ever believe that Dan is a gangster.
'Dapper' Dan is apparently so tough and dangerous a gangster that in the very next scene he bumps off a competitor on his own turf, but even doing that he's utterly unconvincing. He's played by Robert Ellis, who is absolutely wrong for the part. He's slow and sure, like these early scenes, but too slow and too sure. He has perfect diction, careful to enunciate every single syllable, and it's all wrong. This was 1931, the year of Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, when gangsters hijacked over the cinematic world and there's a reason that we all know who Edward G Robinson and James Cagney are but have never heard of Robert Ellis.
To be fair, he's not bad, he's just totally wrong for the role; and Mae Clarke is too slow and sure herself as Marcia. She's trying to be Barbara Stanwyck but she just doesn't have the personality for it. Luckily for us, there's another couple that gets plenty of screen time and while they're not too crucial to the story, they're a joy to see. They're Tony Pagano and his Trixie Barnes who says that she has Tiffany ideas but a Woolworth's papa, all in fun. Trixie is Marie Prevost who was a fast mouthed bundle of fun in whatever part she got and Tony is Paul Porcasi, who also reprised his role in the Spanish language version. This is the most screen time I've ever seen him with and he's a worthy foil for Prevost.
There is a story in here. Marcia gets rid of Dan and leaves the gangster's life behind, marrying a man who knows absolutely nothing about her. She doesn't know anything about him either, though he proves to be a rich heir, Bob Henderson by name. And sure enough, being a precode, her past comes back to haunt her and the family drum her out so she has to survive on her own, bringing up the son that they don't know about. And if you're well versed in precodes, you'll be able to write much of the rest of the story too. It's not unpredictable, that's for sure, except that there's a real copout of a happy ending.
I don't think the story is really the problem, not that it would sparkle too brightly even if someone injected the pure essence of life into its veins, which patently nobody did. Beyond Marie Prevost and Paul Porcasi, who are blissfully alive, there's not a lot of life here: James Hall isn't bad as Bob Henderson and Nance O'Neil is fine as his mother, but I'd be stretching a long way to mention anyone else. I'm stretching a little to get that far, to be honest, as this is a wooden affair throughout.
I wonder what made this wooden. I don't think anyone's claiming that Roy William Neill was a genius director but he was turned out solid material for a long while, often without an appropriate budget. Jo Swerling, who adapted Winifred Van Duzer's novel, was a highly capable screenwriter, writing The Pride of the Yankees, The Westerner, even Guys and Dolls. And Mae Clarke was was not a bad actress, though she does suggest it here, failing utterly to lead the cast.
Perhaps it's the casting that's really at fault. Robert Ellis shouldn't have landed this part and realistically neither should Clarke. Mae Clarke had a powerful knack of being overshadowed, however important her roles were, and that's not good when she's supposed to be the focus of the plot. To highlight this, I'm sure you've seen her before, but do you remember her? I've seen her in a number of films, even a number of films made in 1931, and to my recollection she's been fine in all of them, but every one of them I remember for reasons other than her.
Her closest claim to immortality probably still lies in one uncredited scene in The Public Enemy where, as Jimmy Cagney's girlfriend, she gets a grapefruit in the kisser. To be brutally honest it's Cagney and the grapefruit we're remembering, not Mae Clarke. The same year she was Colin Clive's wife in Frankenstein but when we think of that film we probably remember Karloff, Frye and Clive, in that order. The best I've seen her has to be as Molly Malloy in The Front Page, also 1931, but that was a film with a dream cast, all of whom screamed out to be remembered. That means three good parts in three classic films in one year but not much to stand out.
Perhaps the most telling example came a year later when she even attempted a solid role in Penguin Pool Murder, a film starring Edna May Oliver, making the attempt as close to deliberately trying to be overshadowed as you could possibly manage. Luckily TCM showed this film amongst a slew of Mae Clarke movies, all precodes, so I'll shortly have more opportunity to try to find a role that she can make her own.
Stars: Mae Clarke, James Hall and Marie Prevost
Marcia Cameron isn't happy so she's leaving. She appreciates everything Dan has done for her, she tells him in a letter, but she just can't stand the racket. Now we know she's not talking about noise, because this is a precode: it means her boyfriend is a gangster, 'Dapper' Dan Tyler. Sure enough, he promptly turns up to render the letter apparently worthless because she can tell him that it's all over in person. What Dan doesn't know is that there's still a really good reason for us seeing the letter: it's the only way we'd ever believe that Dan is a gangster.
'Dapper' Dan is apparently so tough and dangerous a gangster that in the very next scene he bumps off a competitor on his own turf, but even doing that he's utterly unconvincing. He's played by Robert Ellis, who is absolutely wrong for the part. He's slow and sure, like these early scenes, but too slow and too sure. He has perfect diction, careful to enunciate every single syllable, and it's all wrong. This was 1931, the year of Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, when gangsters hijacked over the cinematic world and there's a reason that we all know who Edward G Robinson and James Cagney are but have never heard of Robert Ellis.
To be fair, he's not bad, he's just totally wrong for the role; and Mae Clarke is too slow and sure herself as Marcia. She's trying to be Barbara Stanwyck but she just doesn't have the personality for it. Luckily for us, there's another couple that gets plenty of screen time and while they're not too crucial to the story, they're a joy to see. They're Tony Pagano and his Trixie Barnes who says that she has Tiffany ideas but a Woolworth's papa, all in fun. Trixie is Marie Prevost who was a fast mouthed bundle of fun in whatever part she got and Tony is Paul Porcasi, who also reprised his role in the Spanish language version. This is the most screen time I've ever seen him with and he's a worthy foil for Prevost.
There is a story in here. Marcia gets rid of Dan and leaves the gangster's life behind, marrying a man who knows absolutely nothing about her. She doesn't know anything about him either, though he proves to be a rich heir, Bob Henderson by name. And sure enough, being a precode, her past comes back to haunt her and the family drum her out so she has to survive on her own, bringing up the son that they don't know about. And if you're well versed in precodes, you'll be able to write much of the rest of the story too. It's not unpredictable, that's for sure, except that there's a real copout of a happy ending.
I don't think the story is really the problem, not that it would sparkle too brightly even if someone injected the pure essence of life into its veins, which patently nobody did. Beyond Marie Prevost and Paul Porcasi, who are blissfully alive, there's not a lot of life here: James Hall isn't bad as Bob Henderson and Nance O'Neil is fine as his mother, but I'd be stretching a long way to mention anyone else. I'm stretching a little to get that far, to be honest, as this is a wooden affair throughout.
I wonder what made this wooden. I don't think anyone's claiming that Roy William Neill was a genius director but he was turned out solid material for a long while, often without an appropriate budget. Jo Swerling, who adapted Winifred Van Duzer's novel, was a highly capable screenwriter, writing The Pride of the Yankees, The Westerner, even Guys and Dolls. And Mae Clarke was was not a bad actress, though she does suggest it here, failing utterly to lead the cast.
Perhaps it's the casting that's really at fault. Robert Ellis shouldn't have landed this part and realistically neither should Clarke. Mae Clarke had a powerful knack of being overshadowed, however important her roles were, and that's not good when she's supposed to be the focus of the plot. To highlight this, I'm sure you've seen her before, but do you remember her? I've seen her in a number of films, even a number of films made in 1931, and to my recollection she's been fine in all of them, but every one of them I remember for reasons other than her.
Her closest claim to immortality probably still lies in one uncredited scene in The Public Enemy where, as Jimmy Cagney's girlfriend, she gets a grapefruit in the kisser. To be brutally honest it's Cagney and the grapefruit we're remembering, not Mae Clarke. The same year she was Colin Clive's wife in Frankenstein but when we think of that film we probably remember Karloff, Frye and Clive, in that order. The best I've seen her has to be as Molly Malloy in The Front Page, also 1931, but that was a film with a dream cast, all of whom screamed out to be remembered. That means three good parts in three classic films in one year but not much to stand out.
Perhaps the most telling example came a year later when she even attempted a solid role in Penguin Pool Murder, a film starring Edna May Oliver, making the attempt as close to deliberately trying to be overshadowed as you could possibly manage. Luckily TCM showed this film amongst a slew of Mae Clarke movies, all precodes, so I'll shortly have more opportunity to try to find a role that she can make her own.
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Crazed Fruit (1956)
Director: Ko Nakahira
Stars: Masahiko Tsugawa, Yujiro Ishihara and Mie Kitahara
In this early Japanese youth culture film from the fifties, we focus on two young brothers, Natsuhisa and Haruji Takishima. The first time we meet them, they're in so much of a rush that they run onto the train at Kamakura Station without even buying tickets. Of course they're not just eager for catching trains. At this point it's water skiing on their brains but usually it's girls. What else would young men be thinking about all the time? Well this is what made films like this revolutionary in Japan in the mid fifties. At that point, Japanese kids did precisely what they were told, because the culture was all about respecting those older than yourself.
Natsuhisa is the cool one of the pair, a confident girl chaser who smokes, plays the ukelele and sings in a powerful voice that all the girls can't help falling for. He's played by Yujiro Ishihara, the real life brother of the man who wrote the script, Shintaro Ishihari, so presumably utterly in tune with the intent of the film. While Haruji is definitely the innocent younger brother, played by sixteen year old Masahiko Tsugawa, that doesn't mean he isn't interested or even able to find a girl of his own.
And so he does, by accident when he loses his hat at Kamakura Station. He's instantly smitten with the girl who picks it up for him, but he has no clue who she is. Luckily for Haru, he finds her again later in the day, out on the water where she's swimming a long way out. They give her a lift in the boat and sure enough, she oh so accidentally leaves her bathing cap behind and appears on the station the next day so he can give it back. So Haru has himself a girl to take out in the boat and make out with.
It's good timing too because there's a party coming up soon at Frank Hirosawa's house. Frank is the leader of their particular clique, the band of older friends that their parents disapprove of. He looks too tall, probably because of actor Masumi Okada's mixed heritage (his father is Japanese but his mother is Danish), but he has the utter confidence to make him the coolest one of the bunch, very Rat Pack in his demeanour. Of course his house and car and boat can't hurt in the slightest as focal points for this youth culture. His party is a sort of competition, where all these young men have to bring the most and the most beautiful girls with them. Innocent young Haru wins that contest with his Eri.
Unfortunately Eri isn't what she seems. While she honestly falls for young Haru, she has a husband already, a much older American husband to boot. What she's experiencing with Haru is the youthful freedom that she never got round to before she got married. And while this is obviously not a good situation, Haru falling deeper in love with her as time goes by, there's a further spanner in the works. Natsu falls for her too, in his own less innocent and more deliberate way. After all if she's going to cheat on her husband, why can't she do it with him too? And so the coil tightens.
This is a tight and tense little film, acted well by its youthful cast. Masahiko Tsugawa is amazing for a sixteen year old, while Yujiro Ishihara was 22 and Mie Kitahara, who plays Eri the older woman Eri, was still only 23. Ishihara and Kitahara apparently became married after this film, but I don't know how soon. Together they portray something new in Japanese cinema, part of what became known as taiyozoku or 'sun tribe', affluent youths who can spend their time boating and driving and doing nothing except enjoying themselves. In an early rapid fire discussion, they joke that they make boredom their credo, simply because they can.
Everything in taiyozoku seems to stem from Shintaro Ishihara, the godfather of the tribe. Initially it was his 1955 novel, Season of the Sun, but then cinema took over. Season of the Sun was adapted into a film in 1956, as was another Ishihara novel, Punishment Room, making this film with its original Ishihara screenplay the third of three important Ishihara films that year. I haven't read or seen the other two, but this film would appear to reference them in more than just theme: the Takishima's motorboat being called Sun-Season, a name that is prominently displayed on screen throughout the movie.
It's tame by today's standards, of course, but it would appear to be compare well to the similar work sprouting up elsewhere, notably France and the US. The Wild One was three years old at this time and didn't touch on anywhere near as much as this film. Rebel Without a Cause was only a year old and I really need to get round to seeing it. The real marker for 1956 in the US is probably Rock Around the Clock, which highlights how edgy this one really was. It predates the French New Wave wouldn't arrive for another couple of years, Breathless in particular in 1960.
The music is mild jazz, which is as dated as the poor rear screen projection work. Technically this really doesn't meet the imagination of the filmmakers: while static scenes look very nice indeed, with more than a few beautifully framed shots, many of the motion shots are jumpy and often obviously against a rear projection. It's what the film says that matters, along with how the actors manage to make it believable. This was something new, something as un-Japanese as Matsu's Hawaiian shirts and Eri's older husband, both American influences on Japan that the film looks down upon.
When Matsu and Haru's parents badmouth Frank and his friends, they're effectively acting as surrogates for the Japanese establishment, the respected elder generations, who would no doubt badmouth this film and other taiyozoku films in much the same way. That's the point here. Japan was changing in a major way and it was stories like this one that told it how it was. How much of that we care about today is a whole new question, but I feel that as tame as much of this has become, it's still pretty interesting stuff and it's a lot less tame than many of the American films of the same era that tried to be as edgy at the time.
Stars: Masahiko Tsugawa, Yujiro Ishihara and Mie Kitahara
In this early Japanese youth culture film from the fifties, we focus on two young brothers, Natsuhisa and Haruji Takishima. The first time we meet them, they're in so much of a rush that they run onto the train at Kamakura Station without even buying tickets. Of course they're not just eager for catching trains. At this point it's water skiing on their brains but usually it's girls. What else would young men be thinking about all the time? Well this is what made films like this revolutionary in Japan in the mid fifties. At that point, Japanese kids did precisely what they were told, because the culture was all about respecting those older than yourself.
Natsuhisa is the cool one of the pair, a confident girl chaser who smokes, plays the ukelele and sings in a powerful voice that all the girls can't help falling for. He's played by Yujiro Ishihara, the real life brother of the man who wrote the script, Shintaro Ishihari, so presumably utterly in tune with the intent of the film. While Haruji is definitely the innocent younger brother, played by sixteen year old Masahiko Tsugawa, that doesn't mean he isn't interested or even able to find a girl of his own.
And so he does, by accident when he loses his hat at Kamakura Station. He's instantly smitten with the girl who picks it up for him, but he has no clue who she is. Luckily for Haru, he finds her again later in the day, out on the water where she's swimming a long way out. They give her a lift in the boat and sure enough, she oh so accidentally leaves her bathing cap behind and appears on the station the next day so he can give it back. So Haru has himself a girl to take out in the boat and make out with.
It's good timing too because there's a party coming up soon at Frank Hirosawa's house. Frank is the leader of their particular clique, the band of older friends that their parents disapprove of. He looks too tall, probably because of actor Masumi Okada's mixed heritage (his father is Japanese but his mother is Danish), but he has the utter confidence to make him the coolest one of the bunch, very Rat Pack in his demeanour. Of course his house and car and boat can't hurt in the slightest as focal points for this youth culture. His party is a sort of competition, where all these young men have to bring the most and the most beautiful girls with them. Innocent young Haru wins that contest with his Eri.
Unfortunately Eri isn't what she seems. While she honestly falls for young Haru, she has a husband already, a much older American husband to boot. What she's experiencing with Haru is the youthful freedom that she never got round to before she got married. And while this is obviously not a good situation, Haru falling deeper in love with her as time goes by, there's a further spanner in the works. Natsu falls for her too, in his own less innocent and more deliberate way. After all if she's going to cheat on her husband, why can't she do it with him too? And so the coil tightens.
This is a tight and tense little film, acted well by its youthful cast. Masahiko Tsugawa is amazing for a sixteen year old, while Yujiro Ishihara was 22 and Mie Kitahara, who plays Eri the older woman Eri, was still only 23. Ishihara and Kitahara apparently became married after this film, but I don't know how soon. Together they portray something new in Japanese cinema, part of what became known as taiyozoku or 'sun tribe', affluent youths who can spend their time boating and driving and doing nothing except enjoying themselves. In an early rapid fire discussion, they joke that they make boredom their credo, simply because they can.
Everything in taiyozoku seems to stem from Shintaro Ishihara, the godfather of the tribe. Initially it was his 1955 novel, Season of the Sun, but then cinema took over. Season of the Sun was adapted into a film in 1956, as was another Ishihara novel, Punishment Room, making this film with its original Ishihara screenplay the third of three important Ishihara films that year. I haven't read or seen the other two, but this film would appear to reference them in more than just theme: the Takishima's motorboat being called Sun-Season, a name that is prominently displayed on screen throughout the movie.
It's tame by today's standards, of course, but it would appear to be compare well to the similar work sprouting up elsewhere, notably France and the US. The Wild One was three years old at this time and didn't touch on anywhere near as much as this film. Rebel Without a Cause was only a year old and I really need to get round to seeing it. The real marker for 1956 in the US is probably Rock Around the Clock, which highlights how edgy this one really was. It predates the French New Wave wouldn't arrive for another couple of years, Breathless in particular in 1960.
The music is mild jazz, which is as dated as the poor rear screen projection work. Technically this really doesn't meet the imagination of the filmmakers: while static scenes look very nice indeed, with more than a few beautifully framed shots, many of the motion shots are jumpy and often obviously against a rear projection. It's what the film says that matters, along with how the actors manage to make it believable. This was something new, something as un-Japanese as Matsu's Hawaiian shirts and Eri's older husband, both American influences on Japan that the film looks down upon.
When Matsu and Haru's parents badmouth Frank and his friends, they're effectively acting as surrogates for the Japanese establishment, the respected elder generations, who would no doubt badmouth this film and other taiyozoku films in much the same way. That's the point here. Japan was changing in a major way and it was stories like this one that told it how it was. How much of that we care about today is a whole new question, but I feel that as tame as much of this has become, it's still pretty interesting stuff and it's a lot less tame than many of the American films of the same era that tried to be as edgy at the time.
Tuesday, 7 July 2009
The Steel Helmet (1951)
Director: Samuel Fuller
Star: Gene Evans
Dedicated with its very first words to the US infantry, this was Sam Fuller's third film as a director and and one that he quite a lot about as he'd served in the infantry himself in the Second World War. This one's a Korean War film, made just as it was beginning, and beyond drawing on his own experiences for this film, he cast another veteran infantryman in the lead role because he looked precisely like a war weary GI. He's Gene Evans, playing Sgt Zack, and we meet him pretty quickly in a very neat way indeed.
The credits roll over a steel helmet, sitting behind them with only a bullet hole to distinguish it. In a very neat move, the moment the credits finish, the soldier wearing it hauls himself over a ridge and past a number of his dead colleagues. He's Sgt Zack, not having an easy time of it as he's been shot in the leg and his hands are tied behind his back, but at least he's alive, unlike the rest of his outfit. He's also aware enough to pretend he's dead when he hears a Korean coming.
Luckily for him it's a South Korean boy, one of the good guys, and sure enough he cuts him loose. In a refreshing change from the normal American war film, our soldier asks the kid if he's a dog face or a gook but isn't actually a racist. It's just how it is and he can say such things while holding some respect for the culture of the country he's in. He adopts the kid and names him Short Round, because he's a big fan of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Well actually Steven Spielberg is a big fan of this film and Sam Fuller too, I wouldn't doubt. This Short Round doesn't get to do quite as much as his later version but what he does is pretty much the same sort of thing.
The Steel Helmet is one of the truest war films I've ever seen. It has no stars, so we have no expectation of who's going to do and when. It has no grand message to rally behind or argue about. It's not pro-war or anti-war. It has no real focus in the conflict of choice. It's not telling us how great the Americans are or how evil they are. It's not spouting patriotic propaganda or decrying it. It's not even illustrating that war is Hell or that it's the means of salvation. It simply tells it how it is, without an underlying point of view beyond truth and reality.
War is simply there because it's there and if you have to be in it, here's how you need to do things if you want to survive. Sgt Zack is the last of his outfit, so a proven survivor, though his survival had a lot to do with luck. He meets up with Cpl Thompson, a medic in the same situation, so again a survivor. Short Round is a survivor too, his parents having gone to Buddha. And this trio run into Lt Driscoll's outfit, who are so green that they haven't yet had much of an opportunity to survive anything. Not all of them make it because they don't have the skills needed.
As they learn from grizzled veterans like Sgts Zack and Tanaka, surviving in a warzone has nothing to do with the human side of things or the standard processes that the green recruits think by. Survival is something reserved for those characters who play the game by its own rules. Your best friends are your boots, your helmet and your gun. You don't stop to get dog tags off corpses because they may be booby trapped. You shoot through doors before you go through them. You don't carry things you don't need because it's just added weight. You drop the moment you hear gunfire. You may follow orders from superiors, but you listen to the voice of experience, wherever it comes from. And even then you may get the wrong answer.
The only real commentary here comes in the details. Some of it speaks to friendship, some to expectation. Some of it speaks to preparedness, or the utter lack of it. The more obvious comments speak to racism, something that Sam Fuller would return to again and again, in films like Shock Corridor and White Dog. Here it's wide ranging. At one point our soldiers capture an enemy, a North Korean Communist major, who tries to fathom what makes the Americans tick, especially when talking to two soldiers from minorities.
Cpl Thompson is black, so can only eat with his colleagues when there's a war on. Back home he would have to sit on the back of the bus, so why would he fight with people who would otherwise treat him in such a prejudiced manner? Well, you can't rush these things, he says. Fifty years before he wouldn't even have been able to get on the bus, so maybe fifty years later he'll be able to sit in the front. I'm sure he'd have been happy to find that not much over fifty years later there's a black president in the White House.
Sgt Tanaka has Japanese heritage, so during the last war he and his family would have been rounded up and thrown into a concentration camp. But he sees himself as American rather than Japanese and had no sympathy for the enemy in that war, let alone this one. He's no angel either, having been a con man, but he points out how many Japanese-Americans won purple hearts fighting for their country.
I could talk about the cast but it wouldn't really say much. The major names are Gene Evans, Robert Hutton, Steve Brodie and James Edwards, but only Evans could really be called a leading man. It's an ensemble performance of coarse acting that nobody lets down, not even William Chun as Short Round, a twelve year old actor who only made two films, this being the first. The point is that it isn't about these people, at least not individually. It's about the story, this grand unfocused thing that merely says that war happens and here's how it works on the ground. And in that, it's the most honest war film I think I've ever seen.
Star: Gene Evans
Dedicated with its very first words to the US infantry, this was Sam Fuller's third film as a director and and one that he quite a lot about as he'd served in the infantry himself in the Second World War. This one's a Korean War film, made just as it was beginning, and beyond drawing on his own experiences for this film, he cast another veteran infantryman in the lead role because he looked precisely like a war weary GI. He's Gene Evans, playing Sgt Zack, and we meet him pretty quickly in a very neat way indeed.
The credits roll over a steel helmet, sitting behind them with only a bullet hole to distinguish it. In a very neat move, the moment the credits finish, the soldier wearing it hauls himself over a ridge and past a number of his dead colleagues. He's Sgt Zack, not having an easy time of it as he's been shot in the leg and his hands are tied behind his back, but at least he's alive, unlike the rest of his outfit. He's also aware enough to pretend he's dead when he hears a Korean coming.
Luckily for him it's a South Korean boy, one of the good guys, and sure enough he cuts him loose. In a refreshing change from the normal American war film, our soldier asks the kid if he's a dog face or a gook but isn't actually a racist. It's just how it is and he can say such things while holding some respect for the culture of the country he's in. He adopts the kid and names him Short Round, because he's a big fan of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Well actually Steven Spielberg is a big fan of this film and Sam Fuller too, I wouldn't doubt. This Short Round doesn't get to do quite as much as his later version but what he does is pretty much the same sort of thing.
The Steel Helmet is one of the truest war films I've ever seen. It has no stars, so we have no expectation of who's going to do and when. It has no grand message to rally behind or argue about. It's not pro-war or anti-war. It has no real focus in the conflict of choice. It's not telling us how great the Americans are or how evil they are. It's not spouting patriotic propaganda or decrying it. It's not even illustrating that war is Hell or that it's the means of salvation. It simply tells it how it is, without an underlying point of view beyond truth and reality.
War is simply there because it's there and if you have to be in it, here's how you need to do things if you want to survive. Sgt Zack is the last of his outfit, so a proven survivor, though his survival had a lot to do with luck. He meets up with Cpl Thompson, a medic in the same situation, so again a survivor. Short Round is a survivor too, his parents having gone to Buddha. And this trio run into Lt Driscoll's outfit, who are so green that they haven't yet had much of an opportunity to survive anything. Not all of them make it because they don't have the skills needed.
As they learn from grizzled veterans like Sgts Zack and Tanaka, surviving in a warzone has nothing to do with the human side of things or the standard processes that the green recruits think by. Survival is something reserved for those characters who play the game by its own rules. Your best friends are your boots, your helmet and your gun. You don't stop to get dog tags off corpses because they may be booby trapped. You shoot through doors before you go through them. You don't carry things you don't need because it's just added weight. You drop the moment you hear gunfire. You may follow orders from superiors, but you listen to the voice of experience, wherever it comes from. And even then you may get the wrong answer.
The only real commentary here comes in the details. Some of it speaks to friendship, some to expectation. Some of it speaks to preparedness, or the utter lack of it. The more obvious comments speak to racism, something that Sam Fuller would return to again and again, in films like Shock Corridor and White Dog. Here it's wide ranging. At one point our soldiers capture an enemy, a North Korean Communist major, who tries to fathom what makes the Americans tick, especially when talking to two soldiers from minorities.
Cpl Thompson is black, so can only eat with his colleagues when there's a war on. Back home he would have to sit on the back of the bus, so why would he fight with people who would otherwise treat him in such a prejudiced manner? Well, you can't rush these things, he says. Fifty years before he wouldn't even have been able to get on the bus, so maybe fifty years later he'll be able to sit in the front. I'm sure he'd have been happy to find that not much over fifty years later there's a black president in the White House.
Sgt Tanaka has Japanese heritage, so during the last war he and his family would have been rounded up and thrown into a concentration camp. But he sees himself as American rather than Japanese and had no sympathy for the enemy in that war, let alone this one. He's no angel either, having been a con man, but he points out how many Japanese-Americans won purple hearts fighting for their country.
I could talk about the cast but it wouldn't really say much. The major names are Gene Evans, Robert Hutton, Steve Brodie and James Edwards, but only Evans could really be called a leading man. It's an ensemble performance of coarse acting that nobody lets down, not even William Chun as Short Round, a twelve year old actor who only made two films, this being the first. The point is that it isn't about these people, at least not individually. It's about the story, this grand unfocused thing that merely says that war happens and here's how it works on the ground. And in that, it's the most honest war film I think I've ever seen.
Monday, 6 July 2009
Mockery (1927)
Director: Benjamin Christensen
Stars: Lon Chaney and Ricardo Cortez
Highly forgotten today, this is a silent film featuring a few major names, not least Lon Chaney himself, one of the biggest stars of the entire silent era. This one comes between two of his more famous films: a wonderful Tod Browning film called The Unknown and what is likely to be a far less wonderful Tod Browning film called London After Midnight, judging from the reconstruction I've seen of it. It's a lost film, one of the most sought after lost films of them all, not far behind F W Murnau's 4 Devils and the full version of Greed.
Here Chaney surprisingly plays only one role, that of a unibrowed Russian halfwit called Sergei, and he looks more like Paul Muni than Lon Chaney. Then again he never looked the same from one film to the next, so such a look is hardly surprising. We're in Siberia during the Russian Revolution and a beautiful young woman appears to him in the forest and asks him to guide her to Novokursk. I wonder why that never happen to me. Anyway, he takes very good care of her, protecting her in every way possible, even suffering defiantly through a whipping by the enemy without giving her up.
Of course she's not just some random beautiful young woman. She's the Countess Alexandrova, on an important mission to deliver orders to the army at Novokursk. Sergei doesn't realise this, of course, doing his job purely out of devotion and her promise to be his friend, and neither does a Russian soldier called Dimitri who is sent to escort her from the hospital to the army HQ. He takes her for a peasant and tries on the sort of arrogant charm you might expect given that he's played by Ricardo Cortez, riding high himself in 1927 after playing opposite Greta Garbo in one of her best films, 1926's Torrent.
So while Dimitri romances the Countess and gets her avid kisses in return, our dim witted Sergei only gets jealous because she appears to be going back on her promise to be his friend. She does ensure he's fed and given employment at the house of a nouveau riche war profiteer called Gaidaroff, a character played by someone as utterly un-Russian as you could get: the Mack Sennett regular Mack Swain, a regular foil to Fatty Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin. Such was the universal appeal of silent movies that he can play Gaidaroff without anyone having to complain about his accent.
Sergei is given work with the Gaidaroff's gatekeeper, Ivan. Now Ivan doesn't just have notably scary teeth, he also has notably subversive ideas that he is just itching to try out on dim witted Sergei, who eats it all up. After all, if every man is rendered equal then the Countess must surely accept his kisses instead of Dimitri's. How could anyone resist a unibrowed peasant when his only competition is Ricardo Cortez? Well, he is a halfwit, after all, and he gets his chance when the army rushes out to save Vladisk from the Cossacks and the reds seize the opportunity.
The cast are decent but don't get much opportunity. Barbara Bedford is an agreeable Countess, whose eyes widen and nostril flare accordingly, but she sinks a little too often into the damsel in distress mode that doesn't quite fit with her obvious capabilities. She's a forgotten name of the silent era, having risen as high as playing opposite Wallace Beery in The Last of the Mohicans, William S Hart in Tumbleweeds and Lon Chaney here, only to drop down the credit list as the sound era took over, from initially higher slots in films like Tol'able David and The Lash down to uncredited roles as the thirties ran on. I don't remember her voice from the sound films I've seen her in but I presume that must have had a lot to do with it.
In support, Ricardo Cortez has next to nothing to do, not even as much as Mack Swain and Emily Fitzroy, playing his screen wife. Future western leading man Johnny Mack Brown was on his second credit and so only gets a couple of lines. It would be another year before his star would rise in Garbo movies like The Divine Woman and A Woman of Affairs, as well as through being Joan Crawford's leading man in Our Dancing Daughters. But Brown was no name here.
The real name everyone paid to see was Chaney's but there's another one that warrants mention too: that of the director, Benjamin Christensen. This Danish director had rocketed to fame with his third film, Häxan, later mangled into an American version under the title Witchcraft Through the Ages. This is only the second of his films that I've seen, though he had done some work on the Lionel Barrymore version of The Mysterious Island, and it looks very good indeed. It ends up as an unremarkable historical melodrama with an inevitable Chaney ending, but that's not the fault of Christensen or the cast.
Stars: Lon Chaney and Ricardo Cortez
Highly forgotten today, this is a silent film featuring a few major names, not least Lon Chaney himself, one of the biggest stars of the entire silent era. This one comes between two of his more famous films: a wonderful Tod Browning film called The Unknown and what is likely to be a far less wonderful Tod Browning film called London After Midnight, judging from the reconstruction I've seen of it. It's a lost film, one of the most sought after lost films of them all, not far behind F W Murnau's 4 Devils and the full version of Greed.
Here Chaney surprisingly plays only one role, that of a unibrowed Russian halfwit called Sergei, and he looks more like Paul Muni than Lon Chaney. Then again he never looked the same from one film to the next, so such a look is hardly surprising. We're in Siberia during the Russian Revolution and a beautiful young woman appears to him in the forest and asks him to guide her to Novokursk. I wonder why that never happen to me. Anyway, he takes very good care of her, protecting her in every way possible, even suffering defiantly through a whipping by the enemy without giving her up.
Of course she's not just some random beautiful young woman. She's the Countess Alexandrova, on an important mission to deliver orders to the army at Novokursk. Sergei doesn't realise this, of course, doing his job purely out of devotion and her promise to be his friend, and neither does a Russian soldier called Dimitri who is sent to escort her from the hospital to the army HQ. He takes her for a peasant and tries on the sort of arrogant charm you might expect given that he's played by Ricardo Cortez, riding high himself in 1927 after playing opposite Greta Garbo in one of her best films, 1926's Torrent.
So while Dimitri romances the Countess and gets her avid kisses in return, our dim witted Sergei only gets jealous because she appears to be going back on her promise to be his friend. She does ensure he's fed and given employment at the house of a nouveau riche war profiteer called Gaidaroff, a character played by someone as utterly un-Russian as you could get: the Mack Sennett regular Mack Swain, a regular foil to Fatty Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin. Such was the universal appeal of silent movies that he can play Gaidaroff without anyone having to complain about his accent.
Sergei is given work with the Gaidaroff's gatekeeper, Ivan. Now Ivan doesn't just have notably scary teeth, he also has notably subversive ideas that he is just itching to try out on dim witted Sergei, who eats it all up. After all, if every man is rendered equal then the Countess must surely accept his kisses instead of Dimitri's. How could anyone resist a unibrowed peasant when his only competition is Ricardo Cortez? Well, he is a halfwit, after all, and he gets his chance when the army rushes out to save Vladisk from the Cossacks and the reds seize the opportunity.
The cast are decent but don't get much opportunity. Barbara Bedford is an agreeable Countess, whose eyes widen and nostril flare accordingly, but she sinks a little too often into the damsel in distress mode that doesn't quite fit with her obvious capabilities. She's a forgotten name of the silent era, having risen as high as playing opposite Wallace Beery in The Last of the Mohicans, William S Hart in Tumbleweeds and Lon Chaney here, only to drop down the credit list as the sound era took over, from initially higher slots in films like Tol'able David and The Lash down to uncredited roles as the thirties ran on. I don't remember her voice from the sound films I've seen her in but I presume that must have had a lot to do with it.
In support, Ricardo Cortez has next to nothing to do, not even as much as Mack Swain and Emily Fitzroy, playing his screen wife. Future western leading man Johnny Mack Brown was on his second credit and so only gets a couple of lines. It would be another year before his star would rise in Garbo movies like The Divine Woman and A Woman of Affairs, as well as through being Joan Crawford's leading man in Our Dancing Daughters. But Brown was no name here.
The real name everyone paid to see was Chaney's but there's another one that warrants mention too: that of the director, Benjamin Christensen. This Danish director had rocketed to fame with his third film, Häxan, later mangled into an American version under the title Witchcraft Through the Ages. This is only the second of his films that I've seen, though he had done some work on the Lionel Barrymore version of The Mysterious Island, and it looks very good indeed. It ends up as an unremarkable historical melodrama with an inevitable Chaney ending, but that's not the fault of Christensen or the cast.
Sunday, 5 July 2009
Air Force (1943)
Directory: Howard Hawks
Stars: Gig Young, Harry Carey and John Garfield
Howard Hawks served in the First Great War in the Signal Corps and the Army Air Corps, and there are a number of notable air related movies in his filmography. I haven't yet caught Ceiling Zero, which is a notable gap in my James Cagney filmography, but I've seen the others, at least those that still exist. The Dawn Patrol, written by aviation film mainstay John Monk Saunders, was a definitive picture that everything else copied for quite some time. Only Angels Have Wings is one of the most underrated aviation pictures out there, possibly because it got lost in the mix in Hollywood's greatest year.
This one was made during the war, late on when the Americans had decided to turn up, and in fact it focuses on the reason why they chose to do so. The star isn't Gig Young, Arthur Kennedy, or John Garfield, or Harry Carey, Moroni Olsen or Edward Brophy. It's a plane, a B-17 called Mary Ann, so important here that we even get treated to her number: she's plane no 05664. She's part of a training flight with a pretty green crew but it's 6 Dec 1941 and this training flight is taking her to Honolulu.
That's only a day away from a date that lives on in infamy and sure enough, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor while they're en route. They pick up the enemy's attack on the radio as it's happening, so divert to an emergency field in Maui, damaging their landing gear in the process on a field that wasn't designed for a B-17. Before long though she's back in the air though because they're being sniped at and they all get a great view of the wreckage of Pearl Harbor from the air before they head off for Manila. As this was released in late March 1943, the history we're watching was less than a year and a half old at the time it hit theatres, making it even more poignant than it is today. This is so close that they had to shoot the scenes with Japanese planes in Texas and Florida because the west coast was so wary of invasion.
The story isn't really the point here. It's a morale booster aimed at reinforcing why the Americans were fighting and why they needed to keep on doing so. The cinemas were filled with them in 1943 as Hollywood did its bit for the war effort, giving us the sort of examples we see here. This one has a bomber crew doing what everyone else thinks is impossible and throws out patriotic lines like 'Uncle Sam is a pretty tough old gentleman. Wait till he gets mad.' It has gun battles and explosions, and all of them mean something. What else this film has that most its fellows didn't is the reality of life on a B-17, which is what shines out in and amongst the melodrama. The down side is that there's plenty of that too.
There's a girl in Honolulu injured in the attack who is of particular interest to three members of the crew of the Mary Ann. One's her brother, another her boyfriend; the third is an officer who was driving the car she was shot in. The other two berate him for it, but he's the only who's actually been up shooting down Zeros, and naturally he's the passenger they end up taking . The crew chief, played by Harry Carey, has a son who's working up the ranks in Manila. He knows he's going to stay a sergeant but he has hopes for his son to end up a brigadier. Most obviously there's John Garfield's character who is bitter about being drummed out of flight school. Now he's an aerial gunner, but only till he leaves the forces. It takes Pearl Harbor to get rid of his bitterness and bring him back to being one of the team.
The quality of the actors involved, especially Harry Carey, makes these scenes better than they should be, but most of them are full of throwaway stuff. The real value is in the details of the day to day running of the Mary Ann, watching rookies learn the ropes and become veterans in the hardest of situations. There's a slow but sure transition from training flight to war footing. Some of the best scenes are in the perspectives of these characters, especially the pursuit pilot that they transport to Manila. There's a lot of friendly banter between the pursuit pilot and the guys running the bomber that's a joy to hear.
And there are those explosions, lots of explosions. For a while this feels like a Michael Bay movie, merely shot in black and white with some real actors and no CGI. It comes through as an action film but it has real power too and there's one further impact that it has that should be mentioned. Sadly while many of the actors in this film had long careers, the Mary Ann was lost in the Pacific after completing this film and returning to combat duty.
Stars: Gig Young, Harry Carey and John Garfield
Howard Hawks served in the First Great War in the Signal Corps and the Army Air Corps, and there are a number of notable air related movies in his filmography. I haven't yet caught Ceiling Zero, which is a notable gap in my James Cagney filmography, but I've seen the others, at least those that still exist. The Dawn Patrol, written by aviation film mainstay John Monk Saunders, was a definitive picture that everything else copied for quite some time. Only Angels Have Wings is one of the most underrated aviation pictures out there, possibly because it got lost in the mix in Hollywood's greatest year.
This one was made during the war, late on when the Americans had decided to turn up, and in fact it focuses on the reason why they chose to do so. The star isn't Gig Young, Arthur Kennedy, or John Garfield, or Harry Carey, Moroni Olsen or Edward Brophy. It's a plane, a B-17 called Mary Ann, so important here that we even get treated to her number: she's plane no 05664. She's part of a training flight with a pretty green crew but it's 6 Dec 1941 and this training flight is taking her to Honolulu.
That's only a day away from a date that lives on in infamy and sure enough, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor while they're en route. They pick up the enemy's attack on the radio as it's happening, so divert to an emergency field in Maui, damaging their landing gear in the process on a field that wasn't designed for a B-17. Before long though she's back in the air though because they're being sniped at and they all get a great view of the wreckage of Pearl Harbor from the air before they head off for Manila. As this was released in late March 1943, the history we're watching was less than a year and a half old at the time it hit theatres, making it even more poignant than it is today. This is so close that they had to shoot the scenes with Japanese planes in Texas and Florida because the west coast was so wary of invasion.
The story isn't really the point here. It's a morale booster aimed at reinforcing why the Americans were fighting and why they needed to keep on doing so. The cinemas were filled with them in 1943 as Hollywood did its bit for the war effort, giving us the sort of examples we see here. This one has a bomber crew doing what everyone else thinks is impossible and throws out patriotic lines like 'Uncle Sam is a pretty tough old gentleman. Wait till he gets mad.' It has gun battles and explosions, and all of them mean something. What else this film has that most its fellows didn't is the reality of life on a B-17, which is what shines out in and amongst the melodrama. The down side is that there's plenty of that too.
There's a girl in Honolulu injured in the attack who is of particular interest to three members of the crew of the Mary Ann. One's her brother, another her boyfriend; the third is an officer who was driving the car she was shot in. The other two berate him for it, but he's the only who's actually been up shooting down Zeros, and naturally he's the passenger they end up taking . The crew chief, played by Harry Carey, has a son who's working up the ranks in Manila. He knows he's going to stay a sergeant but he has hopes for his son to end up a brigadier. Most obviously there's John Garfield's character who is bitter about being drummed out of flight school. Now he's an aerial gunner, but only till he leaves the forces. It takes Pearl Harbor to get rid of his bitterness and bring him back to being one of the team.
The quality of the actors involved, especially Harry Carey, makes these scenes better than they should be, but most of them are full of throwaway stuff. The real value is in the details of the day to day running of the Mary Ann, watching rookies learn the ropes and become veterans in the hardest of situations. There's a slow but sure transition from training flight to war footing. Some of the best scenes are in the perspectives of these characters, especially the pursuit pilot that they transport to Manila. There's a lot of friendly banter between the pursuit pilot and the guys running the bomber that's a joy to hear.
And there are those explosions, lots of explosions. For a while this feels like a Michael Bay movie, merely shot in black and white with some real actors and no CGI. It comes through as an action film but it has real power too and there's one further impact that it has that should be mentioned. Sadly while many of the actors in this film had long careers, the Mary Ann was lost in the Pacific after completing this film and returning to combat duty.
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