SWEET ADELINE (1934)

Unfortunate. Two years after ‘torch singer’ Helen Morgan went legit on B’way, breaking out as ‘Julie,’ her featured role in the 1927 musical SHOW BOAT, Oscar Hammerstein & Jerome Kern gave her the lead in a sweetly sentimental turn-of-the-last-century pageant that took her, and three suitors, from German Beer Garden singer to stardom. It’s now forgotten, partly due to this unhappy film adaptation that loses two-thirds of the score while adding risible melodrama, presumably by movie scripter Erwin Gelsey, involving stage sabotage & international espionage by a jealous singer. Yikes! Fortunately, the first half of the film hews closer to the stage show and we get to hear Irene Dunne (Kern’s favorite interpreter) sing the three American Songbook Standards Kern & Hammerstein wrote for the original production: Why Was I Born?; Don’t Ever Leave Me; Here Am I. Sharp eared listeners will also note a brief background music cue to the heavenly ensemble number Some Girl Is On My Mind.* Director Mervyn LeRoy is out of his element on this one, but does let Dance Director Bobby Connolly, fresh from the ZIEGFELD FOLLIES Revival on B’way, make like Busby Berkeley in a big ‘numbo’ near the end. Note that Dunne sings Why Was I Born live, not to a synch track; and that even given woeful material, deadpan comedian Ned Sparks manages to get his laughs.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: In 1936, Morgan joined members of the original or touring companies of SHOW BOAT for a near definitive film adaptation with Dunne playing Magnolia as she had on tour.

LINK: *Conductor John McGlinn chose four numbers from ADELINE for SHOWSTOPPERS, his fine album of B’way rediscoveries. Here’s the original arrangement of ‘Some Girl Is On Your Mind’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8S_1_MPRo4
And here’s Helen Morgan’s 1929 recording of Why Was I Born: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99wYcVEPqW0

STAGE FRIGHT (1950)

Mediocre Alfred Hitchcock, yet quite the contentious film. (A problem only explained with SPOILERS; so, consider yourself warned.) As a story, STAGE FRIGHT is like someone’s idea of a Hitchcock film*, just not Hitchcock’s. Think THE PRIZE/’63 rather than NORTH BY NORTHWEST/’59; the ingredients all there, but the measurements off. The basic idea sounds like classic Hitchcock: Innocent Man on the run; Girl Sidekick as helper & love interest; but twisted with the man’s innocence in question and the sidekick’s affections unstable, moving from the panicky suspect & toward the dapper police investigator tracking him. And that polarizing contentious factor? It comes right at the start with a long explanatory flashback as Richard Todd’s man-on-the-run misleads button-nosed Jane Wyman about a murder he’s accused of. In his visualization, inamorata Marlene Dietrich is the guilty party, killing her husband and letting him take the fall. So, is a false flashback a sin against film etiquette? A breach of audience trust? Here it’s the cleverest thing in the pic. (And note how Dietrich's acting goes subtly ‘off’ in these brief scenes.) No, the real problem is sloppy plotting, easy connect-the-dots deduction, and a general lack of suspense. Jane Wyman, a little slow on the uptake, is the acting student who finagles her way into Dietrich’s employ as assistant, hoping to tease out a breakdown or confession. Michael Wilding is amused & amusing as the charming detective, his best scenes with Wyman’s eccentric parents, Sybil Thorndike & Alastair Sim, both fun if hardly passable as Wyman’s parents. Maybe she was adopted. Maybe the film was adopted.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Among mature Hitchcock projects, only TOPAZ /’69 equals this in coming across as somebody else’s idea of echt Hitchcock. That one was largely made as a personal favor by Hitch to Universal honcho Lew Wasserman who’d spent a boodle on the Leon Uris bestseller. And Hitch was in a bad position, hard up for a project after MARNIE thunderously tanked and TORN CURTAIN disappointed. No such explanation for STAGE FRIGHT. Perhaps a simple loss of confidence, with Hitch keeping his head above water after PARADINE CASE, ROPE and UNDER CAPRICORN all underperformed. This made it four in a row.

DOUBLE-BILL: Hitch immediately returned to form (and then some!) in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN/’51.

AN IDEAL HUSBAND (1947)

The Oscar Wilde play most admired by G.B. Shaw gets a near ideal stage-to-screen transfer in this superbly cast Alexander Korda production. As a director, Korda was . . . a great producer. But here, it all comes together, starting with Lajos Biró’s neatly trimmed, well-spotted script. Every location a revelation. Korda, famously impatient on set (his producer was always looking over his shoulder!) revels in a cast unfazed by his clipped shooting habits. And he’s well partnered by Georges Périnal’s beautifully balanced TechniColor compositions, Vincent Korda’s decor and Cecil Beaton’s jaw-dropping costumes. As Wilde adaptations go, it’s second only to Ernst Lubitsch’s LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN/’25.* On stage in London (as was THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST) just as Wilde was being denounced as a ‘sodomite,’ the blackmail letters that figure in HUSBAND’s plot seem unusually personal for a Wilde play, striking tragic notes between the cascades of witty lines and peer-to-peer socializing. The story arrives like courses at a formal dinner; wraps off for full display before setting up relationships between Paulette Goddard’s wicked widowed adventuress and the posh London gentry she doesn’t quite belong to. Thanks to a past financial indiscretion, and a letter to prove it, Goddard holds the upper hand against Cabinet Member Hugh Williams who’s bound to be ruined if gadfly bachelor Michael Wilding (in his best role) can’t find a way to get around this dangerous lady. Meanwhile, a swirl of social & marital issues are discussed, debated, dissected and generally bandied about to general delight, with Wilde finding just the right dramatic twists to make everything come out right in the end. Something he wasn’t able to do in real life.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Lubitsch had the paradoxical advantage of making a silent film of Wilde’s aphoristic play.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: The society portrayed here can be seen in endless detail in Anthony Trollope’s PALLISER series. Especially its penultimate novel, THE PRIME MINISTER.

TWILIGHT OF HONOR (1963)

Trying to boost DR. KILDARE tv sensation Richard Chamberlain into full-fledged movie stardom on the cheap, M-G-M skimped in making this low-rent ANATOMY OF A MURDER/’59 courtroom drama ripoff. Nothing wrong using small screen pros below the line/behind the camera (lenser Philip Lathrop had largely transitioned to features), but this has the feel of secondhand goods. Nick Adams & Joey Heatherton (aping Ben Gazzara & Lee Remick in AoaM) play troubled soldier boy & slutty wife in another murder trial; Chamberlain’s the tyro lawyer assigned to defend, with ailing sly puss/mentor Claude Rains as sounding board and his daughter (low-wattage Joan Blackman) as assistant/love interest. Supposedly set in New Mexico, everyone whoops it up with Alabama accents, occasionally stopping to shock us with envelop-pushing sex references. Impotence! Orgasm! Chamberlain, who deserved better, never did breakthru as an A-list movie star, but had better luck as second lead villains, before scoring big time, again and again, in major tv mini-series.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Otto Preminger’s ANATOMY OF A MURDER, with a great star turn from James Stewart, completely outclasses this.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Infinitely better title on our French poster: MOTEL CRIME!

UMI YORI MO MADA FUKAKU / AFTER THE STORM (2016)

Typically well-observed family drama from writer/director/editor Hirokazu Kore-eda, but smaller-scaled and a bit thinner textured, without the cross-hatched storylines of some of his other projects. Working Yasujirô Ozu territory, but very much his own man, here Kore-eda highlights lost ideals & missed opportunities as once promising novelist Hiroshi Abe goes thru the motions as an investigator at a private detective agency. Research for a new novel, he tells himself. Divorced, but still fixed on his ex, behind on child support; he’s apt to visit Mom for a quick loan, but can’t ask when his disapproving sister is around. The film, made in near DOGMA conditions (and none the worse for it, Kore-eda doesn’t let æsthetic rules weigh on him), gives the situations time to naturally come to a (slow) boil while a storm threatens to blow into the city. A typhoon to clear away false hopes and misunderstandings, even if happiness remains hard to come by in the calm after the storm. Wonderful stuff, but some patience required . . . and rewarded. Special kudos to the late Kirin Kiki, a Kore-eda favorite as the commonsensical mother.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Kore-eda won last year’s Cannes Film Fest with SHOPLIFTERS/’18 (not seen here), with Kirin Kiki in one of her last roles. For now, STILL WALKING/’08 (also with Kiki) is probably the best introduction.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/04/aruitemo-aruitemo-still-walking-2008.html

MURDER IN THE PRIVATE CAR (1934)

Harmless little programmer, one of those comic-laced thrillers so popular at the time, most of them now looking awfully short on laughs & mystery. The silly tale sees Mary Carlisle’s pretty switchboard operator discover she’s an heiress, the long lost daughter of a railroad tycoon. Taking a private train car to meet 'Dad,' along with office pal Una Merkel, Charles Ruggles’ nosey private investigator from the floor above, and her boyfriend, they’re soon dodging bullets, knives and dangerous runaway circus animals! Wha? Fading journeyman director Harry Beaumont follows a beat or two behind the action, while top-billed Ruggles struggles to put over bad puns & spoonerisms. Spoonerisms! (And if you think ‘Snowflake’ as the train’s black porter doesn’t get spooked by a ghostly white bed sheet, you got another think coming.) But then, suddenly, the mad avenger behind all the danger uncouples the private car, turning it into runaway death trap! This finale, a one-reel set piece, a veritable compendium of every optical & process film trick available at the time. Designed and edited for maximum effect, still packing a wallop. So, who the heck is responsible for this bit of filmic legerdemain? Surely not director Beaumont, a placid fellow at best; and the two second-unit M-G-M directors have mighty thin credits. The only possibility is uncredited set designer Fred Gabourie, famous for working with Buster Keaton on most of the great comedian’s shorts & features right up to Buster’s superb M-G-M debut with THE CAMERAMAN/’28.* If only M-G-M had kept him on Buster’s film team, those Early Talkies might have been less dire affairs.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Take a trip with Gabourie back to Buster’s independent beginnings on one of his best shorts, ONE WEEK/’20, featuring loads of Gabourie engineered stunts including a famous (uproarious) smash train finale. Though, of course, this being a Buster Keaton production, no camera fakery whatsoever.

UNDER TWO FLAGS (1936)

Director Frank Lloyd segued directly from the ocean waters of MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY/’35 to the oceans of sand in this less acclaimed, but zippy French Foreign Legion nonsense. Ronald Colman (whose BEAU GESTE/’26 remains best of all Desert Fortress adventures*) once again hides an English gentry past under dashing uniform, now entangled not by brotherly love, but by an old-fashioned love rectangle. His new commander, Major Victor McLaglen, only has eyes for Claudette Colbert’s local café gal ‘Cigarette’*, but once she lays eyes on Colman, all bets are off. He likes the attention, but class will tell when he meets uppercrust Rosalind Russell back at the fort. If only he weren’t a wanted man back in England. Meanwhile, Arabs are massing for an attack, and Colman is sent to certain death by a jealous McLaglen only to survive! And just as the dust starts to settle, they’re surrounded by the enemy and nothing but spectacular heroism by Colman & Colbert can save the day . . . but at a sacrifice. Probably the biggest release on the first year schedule of the newly combined 20th/Fox, the film now survives only in a truncated re-release. But with Lloyd, who tended to land on the prestigious/stodgy side of things, a couple of lost reels maybe isn’t such a bad thing. While those big battle scenes and hordes of horsemen loom even larger, and look perfectly splendid. Along with some unusually inventive studio fakery, this is loads of fun, with star power galore from team Colbert/Colman.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Currently, no good editions of Colman’s silent BEAU GESTE available. (A real loss; Colman's personal favorite; with excellent elements for a proper restoration out there.) Bill Wellman’s 1939 BEAU GESTE remake is fine (if you haven’t seen the original), but his other 1939 film, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED, which also features Colman riding into battle, is better.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Born in Paris, Colbert’s French came in handy when Simone Simon was fired from what was planned as a splashy Hollywood debut. And you can bet it cost producer Darryl F. Zanuck a pretty penny to borrow Paramount’s top star for the part as a last minute replacement.

NERUDA (2016)

Pablo Larrain’s frustratingly opaque film, from a screenplay by Guillermo Calderón, flirts with a classic Hunter & the Hunted story as renowned Chilean poet & Senator, Pablo Neruda, is faced with arrest or self-exile during a Communist crackdown by the newly installed Government. Between failed border crossings, Neruda indulges in bad behavior & bacchanals (brothels over bride), while waiting in various hiding places for the next organized attempt to sneak him out of the country makes its way down ‘the Party Line.’ Neruda, a loyal Stalinist to the end. (Ironic when you compare Right-Wing Chile’s political oppression & deadly purges to Stalin’s.) But the key to the film isn’t Luis Gnecco’s indulgent, implacable Neruda but Gael Garcia Bernal’s police inspector, obsessive & cunning in pursuit, showing the twisted principles of LES MISÉRABLES’ Inspector Jarvert and even developing some of the personality transference Hugo gave his detective, trudging ever onwards, past the limits of his own conflicted makeup. But Larrain sees that his fictionalized, compressed conceit isn’t adding up, and literally starts obfuscating; fogging up city atmosphere, pointlessly circling subjects with his camera, and only achieving visual clarity once Neruda reaches the final leg of his journey on the snowy Andes; Bernal in cold pursuit. A little bit of Neruda poetry is thrown in along the way, but not enough to hurt anyone.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Neruda seems more interesting seen from the side as a supporting character in the witty, sentimental romance of IL POSTINO/’94. With Philippe Noiret wryly turning a Nobel Prize winning poet into a self-help love guru.

HEAT LIGHTNING (1934)

Back when the E.R.A. amendment was making the rounds, and ‘Women’s Studies’ were new on campus curriculums, this sharp little programmer, a sort of proto-feminist (Not So) Grand Rural Hotel, was being rediscovered. Time to rediscover it again. Taken from a George Abbott/Leon Abrams one-month B’way flop, it’s directed by Mervyn LeRoy in his best early ‘tossaway’ style, with Aline MacMahon & kid sis Ann Dvorak running a shabby desert oasis garage/lodge/café in the middle of nowhere. MacMahon, who’s also the mechanic and dresses for the job, has ‘had it’ with men; while Dvorak, desperate for a date & a dance, is hungry for any man. Into this set up come an unmatched set of well off triple divorcées & chauffeur; local guys interested in Ann & Aline; a bickering couple with car trouble; and a pair of big time thieves on the run after a botched robbery led to murder. Those two, nervous Lyle Talbot and charmer Preston Foster, smell a quick score in those yammering rich divorcées, but any move complicated by a past association between Foster & MacMahon back in the day. He pretends to still be interested; she pretends not to be. By the third act, half the cast is shacked up with the other half; a robbery goes wrong; there’s gunplay & someone gets off scot-free. Pre-Code heaven!; with barely three months to spare before the start of strict enforcement. The cast is pretty much all supporting players, all at their best; with great comeback lines that are howling funny or gasp-worthy dramatic, between frank take-it-or-leave-it sexual attitudes. MacMahon rarely got to show her full range or her surprisingly sexy Earth Mother figure. She’d soon grow matronly, but check her out here, a big-boned beauty and a simply magnificent actress. The whole film a treat, with loads of location work for that real desert atmosphere. Heat so dry, it doesn’t even leave a sweat stain. Essential viewing, and at just over an hour.

DOUBLE-BILL: Two years on, Warners made the somewhat similar PETRIFIED FOREST/’36, far more prestigious, far more successful, far more studio-bound; this unknown gem far better. OR: Try the indifferently received remake, HIGHWAY WEST/’41 (not seen here) with Brenda Marshall & Arthur Kennedy.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Typically, in his auto-bio (TAKE ONE), the ever unreflective Mervyn LeRoy only notes the harsh shooting conditions and the film’s big commercial loss.

MATEWAN (1987)

The years have taken a toll on this powerfully somber story of West Virginia coal miners (circa 1920) fighting mine owners and a rigged system. The film looks ‘curated’ rather than lived in (so too Haskell Wexler’s acclaimed, smoke-cured lensing), with writer/director John Sayles mistakenly trying to rise above the naturally melodramatic situations: overheard conversations; parallel edited nick-of-time rescues; even a Sam Peckinpah shoot-out finale. Since the Labor/Capital issues are so clear-cut, Sayles focuses his first half on the violent rivalries between the three mining communities (locals; immigrant ‘Eye-talians’ from the North; more experienced Black miners up from the South), prodded rather easily past their prejudices by Union Organizer Chris Cooper who makes them see common cause and a common enemy in the Owners & Operators. Lots of good acting in here, especially the men (Cooper & local lawman David Strathairn both exceptional), but oddly little payoff even out of Sayles’ better scenes; like a church sermon parable used as a coded warning. It barely registers. Or attempts at comic relief/character building as when the women in the tent camp argue the merits of corn bread vs. polenta. (No one in W.Va. heard of Corn Meal Mush?) It‘s still affecting on some level. But somewhere along the rail lines, the rhythm of life goes missing.

DOUBLE-BILL: To find that rhythm of life in similar circumstances, Mario Monicelli’s masterly THE ORGANIZER/’63, especially for period detail/atmosphere/manners, and the astonishing complexity of Marcello Mastroianni’s union provocateur. (see below)

SONG OF THE SOUTH (1948)

Much maligned and long suppressed, Walt Disney’s live-action/animated mix of the Joel Chandler Harris Uncle Remus tales is such a joyous celebration of fable & sharp-eared folk wisdom, it’s a shame that the period race elements (Southern Plantation/Reconstruction Era, as seen thru a sentimentalized 1946 white cultural filter) has left the film buried since the mid-‘80s. Or has Stateside, international territories kept it in fitful circulation. (Google around to find it.) Far, far worse examples of racial insensitivity are out there, but a high level of insult & condescension are always in play, the black farm hands all happy-go-lucky types. Still, James Bassett, the first black actor to win an (honorary) Oscar®, has an unusually large and strongly positive role to play for the period (he does some of the animated voices, too). And if his ready chuckle as Uncle Remus now curdles, it’s still an outstanding assumption. (What a surprise to find so much of MARY POPPINS in here: a troubled marriage to be saved; an eccentric outsider who fixes things using teachable moments, magical animation & songs interacting with real world problems; even a sequence built on laughing your way past troubles.) In addition to the story’s landowning whites, Disney was careful to add a ‘white trash’ family to supply both villains and redeeming little girl to pair up with Bobby Driscoll’s poor little rich boy. But what makes the film unmissable are the riotous animation sequences that, like DUMBO/’41, neatly split the difference between lush feature animation and a more vivid ‘cartoony’ look. The ‘Tar Baby’ and ‘Laughing Place’ stories popping right off the screen. The artistic loss of self-censorship considerable.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: The Chandler stories, which he believed brought from Africa by slaves, embellished into a sort of African-American Aesop Fables, are all but unreadable today, phonetically written in an impossibly thick, rich local dialect.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Disney hedged their bets releasing their tie-in set of 78rpm records with a white guy (Johnny Mercer, no less) on the main vocals. Still, a marvelous record collection if you can find it; and with a truly frightening cover picture of Br’er Fox. Yikes! (Bassett is there for some Uncle Remus chuckles and Br’er Fox.)

BACK TO BATAAN (1945)

Still effective WWII combat film, not without its dated or corny moments (as noted by director Edward Dmytryk in his auto-bio*), has the advantage of highlighting local Filipino guerrilla fighters, led by John Wayne’s Colonel, left behind on the island to coordinate resistance action in the wake of General Douglas MacArthur’s evacuation. Less studio-bound than other war films of the day, much of the staging & action punches above its weight, with Wayne really throwing himself into things with his old football moves. And if the villainous ‘Japs’ look like caricatures to modern audiences, be aware that the filmmakers were at pains to tone down atrocities that wouldn’t have passed the censors. The Bataan Death March timidly shown here is a picnic compared to the real thing. And while it’s a nice touch when Dmytryk edits in real survivors marching to freedom after their rescue, the men now look so healthy it undercuts the effect Dmytryk was going for. Also with Anthony Quinn and Vladimir Sokoloff, the only Filipino ‘ringers’ in the cast, far less jolting than tough-guy Lawrence Tierney who shows up briefly with advance military info. Tierney always looks out of place.

DOUBLE-BILL: An unofficial sequel to BATAAN/’43 (Tay Garnett/Robert Taylor), Wayne soon followed with a very different kind of prequel, John Ford’s THEY WERE EXPENDABLE/’45, a war film on an entirely different plane.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: *Dmytryk’s IT’S A HELL OF A LIFE BUT NOT A BAD LIVING quotes the film’s military advisor getting in digs at General MacArthur, including MacArthur’s use of a navy sub to evacuate his furniture on his retreat to Australia. True story? Well, my uncle, a WWII Navy Lt., witnessed MacArthur’s famous ‘Return to the Philippines’ as it was being filmed. In fact, he witnessed it three times until they got it just right for the newsreel cameras.

ROMANCE ON THE HIGH SEAS (1948)

It’s all but impossible not to fall for Doris Day in this spectacularly likeable film debut. Fourth-billed, behind Jack Carson, Janis Paige & Don DeFore, she already gets the most screen time and five of the six solo song numbers. (Plus reprise, while supporting players S.K. Sakall & Oscar Levant get as much footage as the other nominal leads.) The story is plenty silly: jealous spouses DeFore & Paige spy on each other while Day pretends to be Paige on a South American cruise and Private Eye Carson keeps tabs on her, trying not to get involved with his client’s ‘wife.’ Thanks to its Julius & Philip Epstein script, the farcical doings are cleanly diagramed and neatly parsed by director Michael Curtiz who keeps it from turning too stupid. Everything much helped by a wildly stylized look from designers Anton Grot & Howard Winterbottom that inflates curvy late-’40s lines into cartoon glamor, even the furniture has big shoulders. Add on one top drawer tune (‘It’s Magic’), a door slamming Feydeau-like set piece that really works, and a nifty vaudeville routine for Oscar Levant & Carson to drink each other under the table without touching a drop of the stuff, and Jack Warner had a considerable hit on his hands along with a big new star. And check out the WOW TechniColor transfer on the Warner DVD. It’s no M-G-M/Arthur Freed/Vincente Minnelli musical classic, but first-rate product in its way.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL: Billed ahead of Day, Janis Paige is entirely eclipsed. And her next Day encounter was even worse as the sole B’way principal of the hit musical THE PAJAMA GAME not used in the 1957 film. In the biggest disappointment of her career, the starring role went to Doris Day.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Were beefy guys like Carson & DeFore really the best Warners could come up with for Day & Paige?

(Rowan Atkinson as) MAIGRET (2016; ‘17)

George Simenon’s famous unflappable Chief Inspector gets four superior 90-minute mystery adaptations in this recent series for Rowan Atkinson, superbly playing it straight. Somber & consistently involving, the first two are particularly well laid out (MAIGRET SETS A TRAP; MAIGRET’S DEAD MAN) while the third (MAIGRET: NIGHT AT THE CROSSROADS) goes a bit slack (paradoxically, a longer running time might have tighten things up); while a soupçon of comic style is gingerly added to the mix in the last (MAIGRET IN MONTMARTRE).* Filmed in Budapest (with some Paris establishing shots), the ‘50s French atmosphere comes thru strongly, exactly what was missing in the last English-language Simenon/Maigret series with Michael Gambon. These, as flavorful as those were flavorless, should send you back to early film assumptions by Pierre Renoir & Harry Baur in the ‘30s.* So many Maigrets over the years, so many missing the boat, including a pair of Class A screw-ups from Jean Gabin. More from Atkinson, please.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *It’s possible that as Atkinson got more comfortable in the role, he and the writers felt they could add humor without bringing Mr. Bean to mind.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Baur is Maigret in Julien Duvivier’s superb LA TÊTE D'UN HOMME/’33 and Jean Renoir directed older brother Pierre in the rarely shown LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR/’32 (NIGHT AT THE CROSSROADS). See it here: https://rarefilmm.com/2018/06/la-nuit-du-carrefour-1932/

DEATH ON THE DIAMOND (1934)

Inconsequential, but generally fun little baseball programmer (any better and it wouldn’t work at all), finds Robert Young’s ace pitcher coming on board the struggling Cardinals to help win the pennant and save the team for owner/ manager David Landau and pretty daughter/ office manager Madge Evans. Only problem, a big-time betting syndicate is trying to fix the games for an easy payoff. And when bribes don’t work, they hire a sniper to take out star players right on the field. Yikes! Fear not, the games go on (public safety be damned!), but we do lose the vaudeville-like comedy routines that stud the first half. Meanwhile, the teams chase the pennant and the inept police chase the killer hiding in the stands. Journeyman director Edward Sedgwick, best known for embalming comic greats in unworthy vehicles, proves as unimaginative as a Minor League catcher at calling shots (Milton Krasner lensing in an early credit), with lots of alarmingly poor process work on what must have been M-G-M’s B-unit back-projection stage. On the plus side, the killer reveal is a peach, unexpected and making sense for a change.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Robert Young, who got his first Top-Billing as Leading Man in 1932, then hit a new level of stardom on tv, was still top-billed in his final role in 1988. A record 56 year run.

COMRADE X (1940)

After co-scripting NINOTCHKA, Walter Reisch double-dipped on comic Russians, working up a story for this predictably lousy farce, an exercise in face-planting from director King Vidor (working out of his comfort zone) as well as scripters Ben Hecht & Charles Lederer (who just should have known better).* Clark Gable, wiseguy Moscow reporter working around strict censorship under the byline Comrade X, is being blackmailed by hotel valet Felix Bressart, worried about daughter Hedy Lamarr, too pure a communist to survive long in today’s Russia. Gable’s secret will be safe only if he takes her to America, not that she wants to go. Comic mayhem ensues. That’s the idea, but so poorly planned, paced & peddled, the film mostly stupefies. (You know you’re in trouble when Eve Arden & Sig Ruman can’t buy a laugh.) At least, Hedy looks gorgeous, aping Greta Garbo’s amusing flat vocal deliver from NINOCHTKA, even showing some rare comic energy in a fight with Gable. And Hecht & Lederer show what this might have been with some neat paradoxical speeches early in the third act for rival Soviet apparatchicks Oskar Homolka & Vladimir Sokoloff . Too little, too late.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Stick with Lubitsch & Garbo in NINOCHTKA/’39.

EMMA (1932)

Shortly before screenwriter Frances Marion resurrected Marie Dressler’s career, the old gal, once the comedic toast of stage & screen, had hit rock bottom, holding on to a good address by living in a glorified laundry closet at a lux NYC hotel, waiting for offers to act, scanning the want ads for a housekeeping job. Less than five years later, Marion’s scripts & support had made her old friend the unlikeliest Hollywood star in the early Depression years. A perfect moment to use that housekeeping idea in this slightly ludicrous, largely irresistible sentimental nonsense, one of the year’s top grossers, with Marie as the Mother Courage of all domestics, martyr to a passel of ungrateful brats she herself raised after Mom died in childbirth just as their newly widowed father hit the jackpot with his scientific inventions. Whew! Now living like nouveaux riche royalty, Dressler’s still nanny, cook, housekeeper, advisor, nurse . . . and twenty years overdue for a vacation. But when Pop (Jean Hersholt) spontaneously comes along on the trip and proposes, the older kids go into snobbish shock. Only Richard Cromwell, scapegrace of the litter who truly loves Dressler, cheers her on. But then Dad dies, leaving everything to Marie (not that she wants it!) and the ingrates concoct a murder plot with circumstantial evidence against Marie. Yikes! Silly doings not for the fainthearted. Yet there really was no one like Marie Dressler, with her empathetic genius at cutting directly to people’s funnybones & emotions, fussy manner giving way to stillness at crisis points. (The mother’s childbirth death done with shocking, matter-of-fact bluntness.) Fun to see Myrna Loy as a rotter, one of the ghastly children, and the underrated Cromwell, very engaging as the one nice kid. Director Clarence Brown keeps everyone on their feet and above water, barely, but a couple of overhead model plane shots, showing Cromwell flying home thru a rainstorm, are something to see.

DOUBLE-BILL: Best entry point for Dressler is George Cukor’s all-star DINNER AT EIGHT/’33. (see below)

NOTORIOUS (1946)

Terrific Alfred Hitchcock/Ben Hecht suspenser about Ingrid Bergman, wanton daughter of a convicted Nazi War Criminal, picked up by Cary Grant’s C.I.A. man who offers a kind of redemption in a secret mission to Brazil. A ring of Nazi ex-pats are up to . . . well, what are they up to? That’s the mission, and Bergman’s past relationship with one of them, Claude Rains, gives her an ‘in’ with the group. Trouble is, Rains falls in love with her and wants to get married while her controller, Grant, can’t admit that he’s also fallen hard. Pimping her as part of his assignment, he turns bitter and she turns to drink. At least, the info comes in hard & fast, until the facades start to crumble. Hecht outdoes himself in dialogue (on point or suggestive) and perfect story structure. Though unusually for Hitchcock, no comic relief at all in here, all passion, romance, missed connections and the nearest of escapes. While Hitch runs a masterclass on Subjective/Objective/Mixed POV, with every showy shot closely tied to narrative purpose. You can really feel a post-WWII climate shift in this one; Hollywood suddenly grown up. And the cast is something of a miracle. (Where did Hitchcock find Leopoldine Konstantin, Rains’ devious, challenging mother? Off screen for a decade, it’s her only English-language feature.) In the classic HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT interview book, Truffaut picks NOTORIOUS as his favorite of the b&w films. Hitch’s choice is SHADOW OF A DOUBT/’43. Today’s digital viewers are lucky, they don’t have to choose.

DOUBLE-BILL: Hecht’s other film with Hitchcock, the one producer David O. Selzncik kept under his own banner while selling NOTORIOUS as a package to R.K.O., was SPELLBOUND/’45. Both hits, but where SPELLBOUND got three times the Oscar noms. and far more coin, time has wisely corrected the respective reps of the two films.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Book 5 in Philip Kerr’s addictive series about Nazi Era Berlin private detective Bernie Gunther (A QUIET FLAME) lands in 1950 Peron Argentina rather than Brazil, but its cast of immigrant Nazi War Criminals might be straight out of NOTORIOUS.

A BLACK VEIL FOR LISA (1968)

Workhorse Brit Sir John Mills isn’t a name you expect to encounter in Italian ‘giallo,’ those lurid, highly colored, violent, sex & gore thrillers. Yet, here he is, under cinematographer-turned-director Massimo Dallamano, as a top Interpol Narcotics Agent, trying to shut down a Hamburg-based drug organization before his latest informer gets bumped off. Is the hitman reading his mind, or is there a inside leak at the agency? It’s a fairly standard set up for a policier, but neatly handled in the early goings. With pace, local color and a few agogic shock cuts that put a sting in the violent action. Nice looking print, too, on Olive Films' DVD. But it soon falls apart when we see that Mills has gone love blind (thick-as-a-brick to keep the plot wheels turning) on his two-timing wife (hazel-eyed Luciana Paluzzi), cheating on him romantically and professionally. Soon enough, both at the same time with Robert Hoffmann’s thick-haired/thick-headed hitman. So a reasonably promising cop thriller dies from a bad case of narrative stupidity, saved here & there by bits of startling color. Check out that yellow phone booth. Better yet, don't bother.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The usual Italian post-production synch-sound is better than average with Mills doing his own vocals. And isn’t that Paul Frees (Rocky & Bullwinkle’s Boris Badenov) doing half the other voices?

WATCH THIS NOT THAT: Dallamano is better remembered as Sergio Leone’s cinematographer in those two founding Spaghetti Westerns, FISTFUL OF DOLLARS/’64 and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE/’65.

THE RIDER (2017)

Hardluck heartbreaker about Brady Blackburn, a once-rising ‘small pond’ rodeo cowboy now in fitful recovery from a traumatic skull injury that’s left him unable to ride without risking catastrophic re-injury. Played by broncho-buster/ horse trainer Brady Jandreau, whose real life spills & rehab suggested the slightly fictionalized storyline to writer/director Chloé Zhao, it’s less DocuDrama than American West Neo-realism: spare, elegantly realized, intensely moving. Shot in generous takes in the South Dakota Badlands, it reveals a life & culture that works around limited expectations, with damaged bodies & souls on every corner. Brady’s family is typical, a distant father unable to communicate his concerns, an autistic kid sister with special needs, a mother who died years back, a BFF living with permanent mental & physical trauma from rodeo falls, even the horses Brady keeps to train or as free-roving pets never truly out of danger. Yet the film comes across without self-pity, but with expectations of joy; unmet, but always on the back burner. Here & there, especially with the small ‘wolf pack’ of buds he hangs with*, Zhao overloads with a self-conscious behavioral quality that can feel calculated, but most of the film lives up to high expectations, offering a new world to think about.

DOUBLE-BILL: Three great rodeo films: Nicholas Ray/THE LUSTY MEN/’52; Sam Peckinpah/JUNIOR BONNER/’72; Carroll Ballard/RODEO/’69, a documentary included on most BLACK STALLION DVDs. (see below)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Guitar-playing Cat Clifford a standout.

OLD IRONSIDES (1926)

Just in time for the 1776 Independence Sesquicentennial, this seafaring pageant takes on the Barbary Pirates off ‘the shores of Tripoli’ in America’s first international engagement. James Cruze, hoping to repeat his phenomenal success with THE COVERED WAGON/’23, got the prestige assignment from Paramount, spent enormously (2 mill.), lost a caboodle, then his A-list standing as director. Likely as not, the ‘Roaring ‘Twenties’ Zeitgeist done him in; too stolid, too patriotic, too corny for Flaming Youth flappers. But this handsome, big-boned production deserved better. Charles Farrell, picturesquely handsome with his hair pulled back in a Revolutionary ponytail, nabbed his first leading role (stardom came next year in 7th HEAVEN/’27) as a farm boy off to join the crew of THE CONSTITUTION when he’s shanghai’d by Wallace Berry, ‘Bos’n’ of THE ESTHER, a commercial vessel. George Bancroft (in pageboy & earrings) and Esther Ralston are also on board for a first half that’s enjoyable if slightly pokey, showing young Farrell’s none too sentimental seaman’s education. But the film steps up for its second half, once they’re captured by the pirates and in the thrilling sea battle rescue that follows when THE CONSTITUTION makes port. It’s dandy stuff, much of it accomplished using real frigates sent thru their paces, masts & sails stretched to the sky. The model effects, fine for the period, are almost insulting next to so much of the real thing.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: In a great piece of stunt casting, heavyweight champ George Godfrey, the only black guy on the boat, plays the cook. No surprise there. But once they’re captured (and now figuratively all in the same boat), he shows real leadership qualities, planning & leading the escape, giving orders to the other leading players (all white) who’ve joined him. Pretty unusual for the period.

DOUBLE-BILL: D.W. Griffith also flopped with a Revolutionary War epic, AMERICA/’24. (In his case, deservedly so.) Together, these two films gave rise to Hollywood’s long standing aversion (even now) to films where men write with quill pens & wear powdered wigs.

MACAO (1952)

Except for easy-going traveling salesman William Bendix (if he is a salesman), the level of insolence hits the roof in this entertaining slice of intrigue & nonsense, Josef von Sternberg’s last commercial work.* Jane Russell (with her wide-set eyes & narrow nose) meets-cute with a hunky Robert Mitchum on a slow boat away from China, sailing toward shady Brad Dexter’s nightclub. Everybody’s got a past they're avoiding in this one (other than Dexter gal Gloria Grahame, she just wanted to avoid making the pic!), but they’re safe as long as they stay inside Macao’s 3-Mile sovereignty limit. Von Sternberg piles on artificial atmosphere, revisiting visual ideas from the glory days of SHANGHAI EXPRESS/’32, though Russell is no objet d’art Marlene Dietrich type. And exactly how much of the film was his remains under debate. Sternberg writes the film off in FUN IN A CHINESE LAUNDRY, his autobio, and Grahame’s then-husband Nicholas Ray apparently did quite a few scenes. But it mostly looks like Sternberg. All those nets! And what it is misses in narrative cohesion, it makes up in bravura composition and spark-laden relationships. Fun!

DOUBLE-BILL: The success of HIS KIND OF WOMAN/’52, with Russell & Mitchum going thru similar, if less anarchic, motions in Mexico (watching as Vincent Price steals the pic), led to this second helping of empty calories.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *JvS made one more film (the little seen/experimental ANATAHAN/’53) while JET PILOT, shot in ‘49, got held back till 1957.

MEN IN WHITE (1934)

Fitfully remembered for DEAD END (filmed in ’37) and not much else, is it possible that Sidney Kingsley is America’s most influential playwright? Well, maybe . . . in a way. MEN IN WHITE, his Pulitzer Prize winning debut, turns out to be the template for decades of radio & tv medical drama. (With minimal changes you could film this script for a fresh episode of THE GOOD DOCTOR tomorrow.) And about a decade later, Kingsley did similar service for serial cop shows with DETECTIVE STORY (filmed in 1951 by William Wyler, who’d also done DEAD END). The surprise is that after decades of trope abuse & repetition in thousands of prime time hours, this fast, glitzy reduction of the hit Group Theater B’way production (still running when the film opened*) comes across with its emotions fresh, its comic relief sharp and its human complications raw. Clark Gable steps past his manly brute characters to play a striving young interne hoping to fulfill his potential with further study in Vienna and more years mentored by brilliant surgeon Jean Hersholt. But can High Society fiancée Myrna Loy stand the wait? Especially after lonely nurse Elizabeth Allan takes a fall with Gable one exhausted night. Loaded with little dramas as staff & patients dash around a stupendous Art Deco hospital design, underrated director Richard Boleslawski ignores M-G-M house style with dynamic pacing, showy camera moves (George Folsey lensed), even touches of Soviet style film editing. It’s some show, even if a few clunker lines betray its age. And worth a look simply to see how they finesse a botched abortion into the narrative only months before the Hollywood Production Code came down hard.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Film reviewers complained that the play was fileted down from ensemble piece to Clark Gable vehicle. (On stage, the biggest star was the realistic operating room & surgery sequence.) But what an ensemble The Group Theatre gave stage director Lee Strasberg: Sanford Meisner, Clifford Odets, Luther Adler, Robert Lewis, Morris Carnovsky, Elia Kazan among its cast of 27. (And probably Sidney Lumet if he hadn’t quit The Group in disgust at the crap version of the Stanislawski/Method that held sway under Strasberg. Something he could have discussed with this film’s director as Boleslawski came to the States as part of Stanislawski’s legendary Moscow Art Theatre Company.)

SINK THE BISMARCK! (1960)

Starting with that self-explanatory title, this well liked WWII battle pic, British Navy division, is so all-of-a-piece the sum seems greater than the parts. Stiff upper lip filmmaking for stiff upper lip Navy Brass, an emotionally reserved group playing real war with toy model ships and ocean charts in a secure underground station. Showing only the tiniest of emotional stress fractures, they piece together scraps of secret war info trying to outwit the eponymous Nazi battleship menacing their best ships. With Kenneth More & Dana Wynter manning the table charts and slowly warming to each other thru clipped backstories, this part of the film is irreproachable and a little hackneyed . . . but in a good way. Out at sea, the ship are still models, much bigger models, sometimes superbly effective/sometimes not so much. But never getting in the way of our response to dutiful sailors doing the right thing, even when orders from that underground backroom send them terribly wrong. The only true villain on either side is the hubristic Bismarck Commander, a vainglorious old school German still hungry for proper recognition on his accomplishments in the last war. In a straightforward, rah-rah way, this is all neatly handled, a war pic for the YA crowd. But there’s an honorable place for such an approach. The film was a big break for director Lewis Gilbert who’d soon show style as well as craftsmanship in ALFIE/’66, before going on to helm some of the snazzier James Bond pics for Sean Connery & Roger Moore.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Possibly the best in this cycle of British WWII navy pics: THE CRUEL SEA/’53.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-cruel-sea-1953.html

DÉSIRÉE (1954)

Least revived film of Marlon Brando’s prime (it comes between ON THE WATERFRONT & GUYS AND DOLLS) and you’ll see why. Brando’s Napoleon Bonaparte actually takes backseat to Jean Simmons’ Désirée Clary, the minx from Marseilles he jilts to gain upward mobility with Merle Oberon’s Josephine. Désirée ‘settles’ for Michael Rennie’s Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, and is eventually crowned Queen when he’s plucked for royalty, no longer Bonaparte’s military & romantic rival, but Charles XIV of Sweden! All more or less true, though you’d never think it so from this flavorless production utterly bereft of French style in looks & cast with painfully American actors like Cameron Mitchell, John Hoyt & Richard Deacon (!) in court dress, alongside Brits like Rennie, Oberon, Simmons and even Brando who uses that tight Mid-Atlantic/British accent he favored for many Continental roles. Fresh off THE ROBE/’53, director Henry Koster still gingerly handles CinemaScope’s peculiarities with wide angle proscenium staging, effective for copying Jacques-Louis David’s famous Coronation painting if not much else. More typical, a disastrous last set, a visually inert, dead-centered formal garden stairway where Nappy & Désirée play out their talky adieu.

DOUBLE-BILL: Marlon refused to play in THE EGYPTIAN for this. (Simmons in that one, too; as well as co-starring in his next, GUYS AND DOLLS.) EGYPTIAN has its own dramatic problems, but the story (Physician Goes Monotheistic!) and its physical production have, at the least, more interest theoretically.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: In the film’s big romantic gesture, Désirée teaches Napoleon to waltz two decades before the dance was invented! Maybe they overheard playback coming from a neighboring 20th/Fox lot where THE KING AND I was currently shooting ‘Shall We Dance?,’ which is a polka!

CONQUEST (1937)

M-G-M tossed writers and cash with abandon at this Greta Garbo vehicle, trying to get it into shape. But no one could fix the story structure as Charles Boyer’s Napoleon Bonaparte and Garbo’s Polish mistress Marie Walewska conduct a love affair in the downtime between war campaigns. (So many ‘Two Years Later’ title cards!) Clarence Brown directs a vigorous Attack of the Cossacks opening, but soon turns quiescent as Marie alternates between love & hate watching Nappy tumble from liberator to tyrant. You can see the possibilities, but the film either skimps or skips past action to chart anguished sighs and witless wordplay. (Reginald Owen as Tallyrand getting the worst of it.) Yet the film rewards in other ways, mainly for Boyer, a perfect match as Napoleon. So good, you wonder why this guy looks so much like Charles Boyer! And what an unusually good/subtle job of aging for a 1930s pic: sunken eyes, vest tugging like an overstuffed sausage, thickened voice. Garbo must have noticed too since she presses, an unheard of tactic for her. She holds her own fascination anyway, particularly in a rare chance to see her thru the eyes of a cinematographer other than William Daniels, German UFA legend Karl Freund. Under Karl’s eye, Garbo looks considerably older, more sculpted, possibly even more magnificent. But the film, Garbo's one major flop, is no match for these two.

DOUBLE-BILL: Garbo’s previous two (Brown’s ANNA KARENINA/’35; Cukor’s CAMILLE/’36) and her next (Lubitsch’s NINOTCHKA/’39) all great, all big hits.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: As M-G-M’s most distinguished player, Greta Garbo usually got M-G-M’s most distinguished composer, Herbert Stothart. A pity since he was undoubtedly the least gifted of Hollywood’s major musical players. And tended to save his worst for Garbo. His ‘original’ theme for CAMILLE sounds exactly like ‘Making Whoopee’ played at half speed. Here, when not quoting Tchaikovsky, he’s merely unmemorable.

THE DEVIL AND MISS JONES (1941)

Another Populist-leaning/labor vs. management romantic-comedy, this one blessed with a sharp, funny, beautifully structured script by Norman Krasna that earns its happy ending without having to cheat too much. Charles Coburn is a sort of J. P. Morgan/Richest Man in the World who goes undercover at the Manhattan department store he barely knows he owns to investigate labor organizing. (At 38th St., which makes it the recently shuttered Lord & Taylor’s.) Assigned to ‘Shoes,’ he meets fellow workers Jean Arthur, Spring Byington & Robert Cummings (all nice, even Bob who’s something of a union radical), as well as petty tyrant section manager Edmund Gwenn. Everyone assumes he’s some down-on-his-luck nobody, and Coburn plays along to learn what he can about the agitators, only to wind up sympathizing with labor against his policies, his execs & himself. But while the general thrust of the story is a given, everyone plays so well (Gwenn & Coburn adversarial delights, even bland Cummings a treat) and the situations so cleverly handled, the film is about as good as these things get. Sam Wood could be a nondescript director, but not when Production Designer William Cameron Menzies was on hand to lend compositional flair. This thing is really built. (And note how much of the film gets along without any background score to lean on.) A particular triumph for Jean Arthur in her first film after her long run at Columbia, now with husband Frank Ross as producer.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Made at R.K.O., there’s unusually strong support even in the smallest roles (S.Z. Sakall, William Demarest, Montagu Love, Regis Toomey, Florence Bates). No doubt, producer Ross calling in favors.

DOUBLE-BILL: Arthur & Coburn reunited for George Stevens’ even more popular THE MORE THE MERRIER/’43. It has the better rep (and Arthur makes magic with Joel McCrea), but often feels uncomfortably forced compared to DEVIL. (see below)

ME AND THE COLONEL (1958)

Franz Werfel’s Odd Couple play (‘Jacobowsky and the Colonel’) about two Polish exiles trying to get out of WWII France, adapted for B’way and film by S.N. Behrman, got a big dramatic boost on stage as ‘current events’ in the 1940s. An advantage lost when this less effective film version came out over a decade after the war. Still, enough charm & irony come thru, with Danny Kaye, superb in a largely dramatic turn, as the resourceful, gentlemanly Jew trying to keep one step ahead of the Nazis, and Curd Jürgens’ Polish aristocrat, overbearing & anti-Semitic, finally finding the Colonel’s character when the film turns more serious late in the game. (His hoarse comic act in the first half holds the film down, particularly when aide de camp Akim Tamiroff is standing right next to him giving lessons in perfect comic inflection, technique & timing.) As the French mistress who loves Jürgens in spite of his stubborn, boorish ways, and who grows equally fond of Kaye as they travel across the country, Nicole Maurey is so good you wonder why Hollywood didn’t scoop her up. Director Peter Glenville, in the second of only seven films, is typically pedestrian, but at least doesn’t push the delicate play too hard. A tight budget shows in some technical work and stingy interiors (who designed that castle floor?), but the film is rather special and earns its graceful finale.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Louis Calhern must have been funnier & more subtle as the Colonel on B’way under director Elia Kazan. Tyrone Power’s gorgeous wife Annabella made her B’way debut as the girlfriend and exiled Austrian actor Oscar Karlweis, in Danny Kaye’s role, gave what Kazan called the most charming performance he had ever seen. Precisely the quality missing when Joel Grey did Jerry Herman’s flop musicalization THE GRAND TOUR in ‘78. (Both Calhern & Karlweis died early in ‘56.)

NOAH'S ARK (1928)

Trying to ‘out De Mille De Mille,’ specifically THE TEN COMMANDMENTS/’23*, young Warners exec Darryl F. Zanuck tethered Old Testament Noah to a modern WWI story. But where C.B. front-loaded his Biblical story against a modern tale of architect brothers, Zanuck opens with WWI, then goes back to The Flood. Showmanship! Originality! (Even a tie-in novelization - see poster.) And for good measure, steals iconic bits from Moses & Samson to beef up the narrative. Then sound came in and Zanuck added a few awkward Talkie sequences to stay au courant. (A brief speaking appearance from a remarkably assured Myrna Loy; cataclysmic sound effects; mix-and-match classical music score.) Luckily, this unpalatable hodgepodge gets lux treatment from supercharged director Michael Curtiz, his fourth film with Dolores Costello, German love interest to American soldier boy George O’Brien in WWI/Noah’s daughter-in-law married to O’Brien in the second half. It’s all pretty ludicrous, pure Hollywood hubris, and a great flop at the time. Yet unmissable when seen in the UCLA 2006 restoration out on Warners Archive.

DOUBLE-BILL: *De Mille’s concurrent biblical pageant, KING OF KINGS/’27, skips the modern parallel storyline. Stick with Zanuck’s template, De Mille's 1923 TEN COMMANDMENTS, with C.B. near his best.