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My September movie-watching (NOT a 10 best list) part I (pre-1970)Oct 02 '06 (Updated Sep 10 '07) Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line Part One (from which, check out "Goyokin" and "Lady of Burlesque," as well as the revered "Sherlock, Jr.") was, I thought, long on Japanese movies, but looking at it, it was even longer on noirs, quasi-noirs, and neo-noirs, though not entirely lacking in comedies (more than one a week). As in months past, they are listed in chronological order, with comments more than a paragraph long set off by dashes. Sherlock, Jr. (1924, starring and directed by Buster Keaton, 4.6 stars) is one of the greatest (and most postmodernist... or Pirandellian) silent comedies. The opening is conventional and a bit doltish. The brilliance is when the movie theater projectionist (Keaton) falls asleep and climbs into the movie, where he puts to work what he has been reading in How to be a Detective. As often, the romance is of Victorian propriety. The screen Keaton often ends up with the girl (young woman) he adores, but it's difficult to imagine how he could live with someone on such a tall pedestal. (There is one where he has a nagging wife, I seem to recall, but, in general, the young women are unreal—and slow to recognize that he is their champion. Lady of Burlesque (1942, directed by William Wellman, 3.5 stars). Based on The G-String Murders by burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, the complicated murder mystery mixed with a lot of comedy, provided Barbara Stanwyck an opportunity to show that she really could do everything, including sing and dance. She excelled as a burlesque dancer in Howard Hawks's (1941) "Ball of Fire," but did not have to show that she was one there. In Lady of Burlesque, she had to, and did so. (Her main song is "Take It Off the E-String and Play It On the G-String." The milieu and a primarily female cast are surprises in a movie from "Wild Bill" Wellman, who directed such hard-boiled, almost-all-male-fare as "Public Enemy," "The Story of G. I. Joe," The Ox-Bow Incident," and "Yellow Sky"; but, then, he did direct the 1937 "A Star is Born" with Janet Gaynor playing Mrs. Norman Maine.) --- Robert Wise (1914-2005) developed the craft that he later applied to most every genre of films, by directing low-budget psychological terror movies for Val Lewton, starting with the much admired "Curse of the Cat People" in 1944. In 1945 he directed a rather slack adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher" involving securing (and eventually manufacturing) corpses for teaching Edinburgh medical students. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi had seen better days (they had been 1930s horror icons). In "The Body Snatcher" they served the always cold-blooded Henry Daniell's Dr. "Toddy" MacFarlane. Karloff played the main corpse supplier and Russell Wade the idealistic and admiring medical student Donald Fettes, who becomes MacFarlane's assistant. Is it a triumph of doing much with little? Not for me. Stevenson's story is economical and better achieved. For me, historical interest in Wise (or in Karloff and Lugosi being in the same movie) and knowing that the budget was small and the shooting schedule brief does not provide sufficient motivation for sitting through even 73 minutes 60 years later. I'm not sure that developing the two main female roles would have helped. Karloff was menacing and Daniell arrogant and frustrated, while Wade was a void. The use of shadows was cliched even then, though the movie uses sounds with notable creativity. (The clip-clop of horses is important in a sideplot.) I prefer "The Doctor and the Devils" from Dylan Thomas's novel about the same phenomenon (though the book is better for that, too). And Wise's great psychological "horror film" was the 1963 "The Haunting." 3 stars? --- Based on "Education of the Heart," a short story by Irwin Shaw, Easy Living (1949) is a peculiar mixture of football movie, a noir sexual relationship, and tentative romance. Unfortunately, the main story is the football one, which is the least well-done of the three. When the last of the acting credits read "and the Los Angeles Rams," I was as excited as a jaded critic can get, because I knew that this was the team with two then-future Hall of Fame quarterbacks (Bob Waterfield and Norm van Brocklin, the latter whom I met when he was the first coach of the Minnesota Vikings) and receiver "Crazy Legs" Hirsch. A movie about those Rams passing would be enthralling. Alas, Pete Wilson, the quarterback of the movie's "New York Chiefs" (with Rams helmets) was played by Victor Mature (Kiss of Death, I Wake Up Screaming, The Robe, whom I could not believe as an NFL QB. (Probably, Waterfield and van Brocklin were at least as good actors, too!) And his designated receiver, Tim, was played—with no particular distinction— by Sonny Tufts (The 7-Year Itch). Both are nearing the end of their careers as professional athletes and being considered as replacements for the coach (Everett Glass) at their alma mater. For a number of reasons, Pete is playing badly. The best reason for the viewer is his very ambitious wife, Liza (Lizabeth Scott) who is an interior decorator "with no taste and no talent," but who attracts a powerful patron (one only too pleased to snatch her up before his son does), Howard Vollmer (Art Baker). The pouty, husky-voiced Lizabeth Scott was one of the greatest (and greediest-seeming) noir femme fatales (The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers, I Walk Alone, Dead Reckoning, Pitfall, Too Late for Tears). Apparently the censors cut her part, but there was no doubt in my mind that her success was arranged by Vollmer in return for "sexual favors." The tentative romance is between the administrative assistant who keeps the Chiefs functioning, Anne (Lucille Ball) and its faltering marquee player (Mature). She has been around boy-men forever and can hold her own. That does not mean she knows how to pick 'em, when it comes to men. She is the widow of the team's owner, and apparently had a hellish 3-year marriage before he died. And now she is in love with a married man. After Liza files for a separation and Pete has to be rescued from a bar where he has passed out, she tells him how she feels. Redemption and heroic de facto suicide are among Pete's options. Inadvertently, I've made the movie sound more interesting than it is. I enjoy watching Scott get corrupted (she starts overripe, so going rotten is not a surprise) and Ball being tougher and more sophisticated than in "I Love Lucy," which was soon going to make her America's beloved ditzy housewife (she was similarly resourceful and devoted to one very imperfect man in the noir "The Narrow Corner," and, as the sophisticated friend of Katharine Hepburn, was the best thing about Without Love). Even with support form Lloyd Nolan, Jack Paar, and Jim Backus, the football story is trite and unconvincing. The ending of the movie is gaggingly sweet (though there is a highlight in the tunnel en route to the decisive game). The movie is visually unremarkable. Other than providing a big smooth chest and very oddly shaped eyebrows, Mature contributes nothing. I've already said that I don't believe him as an NFL star quarterback (and particularly of the Rams team that had two great ones!). The Mature/Scott combo may have had the most noticeable eyebrows in Hollywood history, but Jacques Tourneur managed to do little with some talented performers (not least the Rams) and with Mature (and Tufts and most of the other Chiefs). Although it was not yet established, what Mature was best at was being tortured (Samson and Delilah et al.), and a more noirish plot could have managed to have him kidnapped, stripped tot he waist, and mercilessly whipped. Tourneur directed one of the greatest noirs, "Out of the Past," and the stylish low-budget "Cat People" and "I Walked with a Zombie." His output strikes me as an impressive counterexample of "auteur theory." His goody-goody "Stars in His Crown" and other American kitsch movies, including "Easy Living" are saccharine and visually unimpressive. This makes me credit producer Val Lewton for "Cat People" (and what is good in "Zombie" and "The Leopard Man"), Burt Lancaster for the campy swashbuckler, "The Flame and the Arrow," and to consider "Out of the Past" a miracle. "Easy Living" is undistinguished except for Lizabeth Scott's performance and Roy Webb's (I Married a Witch, My Favorite Wife, Out of the Past) achey musical score. 2.7 stars. --- Gun Crazy (1949, directed by Joseph H. Lewis, 3.4 stars) is a lovers-on-the-run pic (like You Only Live Once, High Sierra, They Live by Night, Badlands, Bonnie and Clyde). Some (not much) occurs in cities, and almost all of it is shot by daylit (though it has some fog to provide noirish effects). Like Lewis's later "The Big Combo," "Gun Crazy" opens with a bravura (night-time) sequence, has a not very interesting plot, and a showy finale. At some point, the total misogyny of the plot was in the title: "Deadly Is the Female." The commentary track quotes someone calling Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) as "a cross between Annie Oakley and Lady Macbeth." I guess that makes Bart (John Dall) a cross between "Buffalo Bill" Cody and Macbeth. After the adolescent Russ (billed as "Rusty") Tamblyn is replaced (after 4 years of reform school and two in the Army), the two are show biz sharp-shooters. She is being blackmailed by the crooked carnival's owner, Packy (Berry Kroeger) until she persuades Bart to become a stick-up man to get her the kind of dough they could never earn. For reasons explained in an early flashback, he does not shoot to kill, but she more than makes up for this, being eager to kill. There is a ray of redemption at the end for him, none for her--and no explanation for the obsession with owning guns of the child Bart. I was bored in the middle, though there were some interesting bits. Fourteen Hours (1951, directed by Henry Hathaway, 3.8 stars) is another Fox noir that is not even arguably a noir, but is a fairly good problem about post-WWII angst (Richard Basehart's) with heavy dollops of neo-Freudianism, plus all-American goodness represented by Paul Douglas and Barbara Bel Geddes. The Big Combo (1955, directed by Joseph H. Lewis, 3.3 stars) begins and ends with bravura noir scenes shot by John Alton. In between is a fairly standard tale ( following "The Street with No Name," "The Big Heat," etc.) of a cop, Lt. Diamond, (Cornell Wilde) obsessed with nailing a mob boss, Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) who is careful to ensure that there is no evidence of his involvement to crimes, and is completely ruthless (("First is first and second is nobody," he snarls to the police lieutenant who is out to get him, and who is, IMO, even more ruthless and monomaniacal). His main muscle is provided by Fante and Mingo, a young Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman. They are constantly together. Brown's troubled moll (formerly training to be a concert pianist, no less) is tremulously played by Jean Wallace (who was married to Wilde, 1951-1981). Conte is most of the show after the opening scene (except for a small part as a burlesque dancer played by Helene Stanton). Without Alton's visual style, the movie would be long forgotten. --- Point of Order (1963), culled by Emile de Antonio from live television broadcasts of the 1954 McCarthy hearings, has to be difficult to follow for anyone without familiarity with the milieu and the case (Senator McCarthy and his main attack dog underling Roy Cohn demanding a commission and special treatment for their staff member (and, love object?) David Schine after he was drafted and counterclaims that Schine was being "held hostage" to prevent investigation of communists in the US Army). It shows Cohn realizing that McCarthy's demagoguery was looking more and more ridiculous and has one of the greatest moments of live television drama when chief Army counsel Robert N. Welch (an esteemed trial lawyer whom Otto Preminger later tapped to play the judge in "Anatomy of a Murder") sadly challenges McCarthy with "Have you no decency?" McCarthy fulminates some more, fumbles through papers, and Welch demands that he listen with both ears, and then forswears forgiveness in this world for what was a quite typical (and quite spurious) McCarthy smear. This is electrifying however many times one sees it (and I first saw it as a 4-year-old, according to my mother, who wondered what I could possibly understand of the arcane proceedings on our new, first television set). There is also droll comedy of Welch interrogating Cohn about a cropped photo and "cold smiles." And Robert Kennedy is frequently on display sitting behind Democratic senators John McClelland and Stuart Symington. Including only footage from the 36 days of hearings without providing background and postground (it seems that there should be a contrast other than "foreground") makes the film puzzling. The movie offers hope that after considerable carnage, demagogues may flame out (as McCarthy also did on CBS with Edward R. Murrow), though I have to wonder if McCarthy would have fallen had he not extended his witch-hunt to the army (and more or less called into question the patriotism of the president of his own party, Dwight David Eisenhower). 4 stars --- I thought that perhaps Sanbiki no samurai" (Three Outlaw Samurai, 1964, 4.1 stars), the movie directorial debut of Gosha Hideo (Sword of the Beast)) might be 3/7ths as good as "Seven Samurai." That hope was about right. It is like "Seven Samurai" in that some ronin ((masterless samurai) decide to help some peasants, though in "3" the peasants are seeking relief from a callous, dishonest official, rather than a band of bandits. The set-up takes too long, but the last hour is impressive, both visually credit cinematographer Sasskai Tadashiand) and in satisfying plot development(s). Tanba Tetsuro is very good in the central role. Onibaba (sometimes known as "Devil Woman," 1964, written and directed by Shindo Kaneto, 3.6 stars). If there could be a rural, medieval film noir, this is it! The characters are below the underworld (but above a pit). I think the film is too long, with too many scenes of the younger woman running through the tall susuki grass at night, though the grass is nearly a character, moving at different amplitudes in different scenes. Life is war-plagued 14th-century Japan is portrayed (accurately, I don't doubt) as nasty, brutish, and generally short. The Naked Kiss(1964, written and directed by Sam Fuller) is at times very arresting (not least in the first scene), at others (the middle) not just slack but inept. The dialogue is frequently stilted or worse, there are many things that are just too cute, and some typically Fuller wild excesses. But I wouldn't want to have missed Constance Towers's turn from prostitution to sainthood, or the very Hitchcockian wrong man plot that has a very Hitchcock-looking icy blonde (Tower) playing the wrong man (and wronged woman; for a time it looks like none of her good deeds will go unpunished). I find the ending even scarier than the beginning. Much of it is below average (downright clunky), but Constance Towers('s punishment-inflictions) and Michael Dante and some of the compositions (by Stanley Cortez) are notable in good ways. To paraphrase Dolly Parton, much of it is wrong, but it's alright. (Towers played a stripper in Fuller's even more over-the-top "Shock Corridor" the year before. That is the name of the movie on the marquee in the upright town where Towers attempts to go straight.) 4 stars Fighting Elegy is an obscure title for a perplexing, autobiographical movie that was intended to be a satire of 1930s incipient fascism, Kenka erejii" (1966, Suzuki Seijun, ? stars) . Brilliantovaya ruka (Diamond Arm, 1968, directed by Leonid Gaidai, 3.1 stars) is a Soviet farce about smugglers, recalling "Beat the Devil" and, from the start of the Soviet era, The Twelve Chairs, not least in centering on hidden jewels. Semyon Gorbunkov, as the good citizen tourist with the jewels looked somewhat like Jose Ferrer and had the resiliency of the woman "The Ladykillers" could not slay. It has some funny moments, but is not a "comedy classic" IMO. Goyokin (1969, directed by Gosha Hideo, 4.5 stars) had Nakadai Tatsuya taking some brutal treatment to stand up for right (and to protect some civilians), culminating in a very imaginative, beautifully photographed finale in the snow of the Shimokita Peninsula (lensed by Okazaki Kozo). Tamba's Rokugo played the "do anything to retain power" official. --- In Jigokuhen (Portrait of Hell, 1969 directed by Toyoda Shiro, 3.4 stars), the ever-intense Nakadai Tatsuya played Yoshihide, a court painter in the Heian period (794-1185) a millennium ago in a very fraught relationship with the de facto ruler of Japan, Lord Hosokawa (Nakamura Kinnosuke, (Goyokin) with a diabolical Vincent Price laugh), who says things like "We're so powerful, we don't need allies" and "I rule the world as I see fit," but who recognized Yoshihide's genius and that the glory of his court was enhanced by having a great painter in it. Hosokawa allowed the painter to say things no one else was allowed to or would dare to say. In effect, the painter had the truth-telling role of court jesters in later European courts. Speaking truth to power is a central concern of the movie, but it shows that someone doing so can be as monomaniacal and as indifferent to suffering as he pursues his own quests (for truth and for art) as the cynical lord is. To put it mildly, Yoshihide has no sense of humor. But when Nakadai was called on to show grief, his eyes were astounding! Burning and very large, they were central to his being able to convey much without moving a muscle. ------ I didn't watch any movies from the 1970s. The list continues from 1980 here. © 2006, Stephen O. Murray  |
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