BACKGROUND TO DANGER (1943)

George Raft’s career @ Warners, as told in three Raoul Walsh films.  1940/THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT: Raft top-billed against fourth-billed Humphrey Bogart in a first-rate, hard-driving truck melodrama.  1941/HIGH SIERRA: Raft nixes on its classic ‘good’ bad guy lead, letting Bogie step in and reset his career.  1943/BACKGROUND TO DANGER: After CASABLANCA catapulted Bogart to the top-tier*, Raft finishes up his Warners contract on this copycat wannabe, a near programmer Walsh walks thru.  Not a terrible WWII entry, mind you, something about Sydney Greenstreet trying to cause an incident that will drive neutral Turkey into siding with the Axis Powers; and undercover U.S. agent Raft bumping into various Russian types (if they are Ruskies!), all playing tag with compromising documents proving . . . er, something or other.  Many spies, including Brenda Marshall (also on her way off the lot) & brother Peter Lorre.  Nice shadowy work from lenser Tony Gaudio (the only guy who seems to be trying) and a lot of seriously unconvincing (if fun!) toy trains, tracks & fit-to-scale scenery.  Just about everyone ready to move on from this one.

WATCH THIS NOT THAT: Raft’s best @ Warners came first, William Keighley’s knock-out prison meller EACH DAWN I DIE/’39, with top-billed James Cagney graciously ceding the glory spot to Raft.

ATTTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Many Hollywood history books list Raft as first choice for CASABLANCA, but he was never a serious contender, merely an early casting idea jotted down on a studio memo.  Also, most sources have Raft ankling HIGH SIERRA, but writer John Huston says it was Paul Muni who passed with Raft turning down his directing debut, THE MALTESE FALCON.

THE BODY (2001)

Long in development, abandoned on release; perhaps for its purposefully controversial plotline: young, beautiful, widowed Israeli archeologist Olivia Williams finds a burial chamber at her ‘dig’ in the heart of Jerusalem with the remains of a crucified 2000-yr-old man. Guess who. (Hey, it ain’t Mel Brooks!) Well, maybe it is . . . maybe it isn’t. But a lot of important folk need to know. And that includes The Vatican, who send faith-driven, non-specialist priest Antonio Banderas to investigate. Political, religious, territorial and ethical warfare threaten to combust in already volatile territory. Not enough? Our pretty archeologist has a couple of kidnapable school kids. So what could go wrong? As a film, just about everything. Jonas McCord, who hasn’t had a released writing or directing credit since, flunks on suspense, sense & scenery (a triple-threat guy), while Banderas & Williams rate zero in personal chemistry. Suggested subtitle: Polite Priest and Agnostic Archeologist Meet The Body Of Christ. Apparently the studio was worried about giving offense to Jews, Christians, Palestinians, Politicians and The Vatican. If only.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Five years on, Dan Brown’s THE DA VINCI CODE (not seen here) would be a smash in the genre.

LINK/READ ALL ABOUT IT: The political/religious/territorial ramifications of such a discovery are not so far-fetched. See this recent New Yorker article about Biblical relics of the ‘real’ King David. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/29/in-search-of-king-davids-lost-empire

THE WHOLE TOWN'S TALKING (1935)

Milquetoast clerk, with an office crush on a lively co-worker, gets into a doppelgänger of a mess when a tough gangster breaks out of prison and gets his (or is it ‘their’?) picture on the front page. With Eddie G. Robinson playing the lookalike pair, Jean Arthur breaking out as a major star as 'the crush,' along with tightly constructed farce plotting from Frank Capra go-to scripters Jo Swerling & Robert Riskin, tasty supporting players (plenty of John Ford Stock Company regulars giving out with the cop & newspaper lingo), joined to some neat special effects to double Eddie G.* (check out the cross-overs and cigar smoke that seems to drift past the double-exposure line), you’re all but assured of some high level comedy. What you’d never expect is to see the tidy package was directed by John Ford. And what a swell ‘job of work’ he makes of it. Easing thru the opening scenes before lifting off with near Screwball energy. Fun (and instructive) to see what a sharp, productive studio contract man Ford could have been. Of course, his work took a more personal turn with Americana, Westerns, progressive politics, race issues. But seeing this well-handled formulaic crime-comedy reminds you that he roamed far in a thematically peripatetic career. His outliers just never get written up since they don’t fit into anyone’s pet Ford theory. Yet, he was turning them out as late as MOGAMBO/’53, one of his biggest hits. And nearly as enjoyable as this one.

DOUBLE-BILL: Jean Arthur’s only other Ford pic was her debut, a bit in CAMEO KIRBY/’23 with John Gilbert as a Southern card sharp wrongly accused of murder. (Available on line, but in a lousy print.) It took three decades and a Spencer Tracy heart-attack to get Robinson & Ford back together for CHEYENNE AUTUMN/’64. (Probably not worth the wait.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Perhaps because he’s playing two roles, Robinson makes this mobster exceptionally nasty, a real brute compared to some of his other bad guys.  No need to balance character with a more human side, that’s covered in the nice guy he’s also playing.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Hedging their bets, Columbia’s publicity department initially sold this as a straight mobster pic.  (see poster)  Once it hit, newspaper ads leaned on the comedy angle showing Eddie G. with a big goofy smile on his face.

ANYTHING GOES (1956)

What did Hollywood have against Cole Porter B’way musicals?* They bought ‘em, then removed the tunes before filming. FIFTY MILLION FRENCHMAN (no songs left), THE GAY DIVORCEE (kept one); his throwaway entertainments of the ‘30s & ‘40 (big hits for Ethel Merman, Jimmy Durante, Danny Kaye, Mary Martin, Bert Lahr), trashed in spite of decent star turns from Ann Southern, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Betty Hutton. His great ‘integrated book’ shows of the ‘50s, KISS ME KATE and CAN-CAN? Bowdlerized duds even if you only know the shows from the Original Cast Album. Then there’s ANYTHING GOES, the earliest B’way musical comedy (other than SHOW BOAT) strong enough to be regularly revived. Buried by Paramount in ‘36 (with Bing Crosby & Merman), at least they kept the general plotline and four songs. Now they return to finish it off; along with Crosby’s Paramount contract, Donald O’Connor musicals, debuting director Robert Lewis and Zizi Jeanmarie’s Hollywood career. What the hell happened? Two years back, a proffered third Crosby/Astaire vehicle, WHITE CHRISTMAS, became the year’s top-grosser. Not with Astaire, he opted out; not with O’Connor, he took sick, but with Danny Kaye stepping in to save the day. (And make a shitload of cash with an unheard of gross participation contract.) Why not try again, now with the far less expensive O’Connor in the same spot on a similar role & story: two pals/two gals; a professional mix-up for Jeanmarie & Mitzi Gaynor, a big final number as a quartet. With five Porter songs intact from the show (and an extra Porter from another show), along with three new ones by Jimmy Van Heusen & Sammy Cahn. How could it miss? It missed, the dodo bird of musicals.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Cole Porter’s SILK STOCKINGS/’57 the exception that proves the rule, thanks to Arthur Freed; Rouben Mamoulian; Fred Astaire; Cyd Charisse; and the best musical charts ever put up for one of these things.  On the other hand, two dud bio-pics: NIGHT AND DAY/46; DE-LOVELY/’04.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Crosby & Gaynor redeemed themselves in their next Cole Porter offerings, original musicals over at M-G-M. Crosby with HIGH SOCIETY/’56, a just good enough remake-with-songs of THE PHILADELPHIA STORY; and Mitzi Gaynor, usually too cute for words, locating a bit of Cole Porter sophistication under George Cukor's direction for LES GIRLS/’57.  A happy surprise with Gene Kelly, Taina Elg and a divinely louche Kay Kendall.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Crosby tries for loose, comes up lazy. Perhaps missing the star wattage of a Hope, an Astaire, Kaye or Sinatra pushing back to keep him engaged/in line. O’Connor, in peak form at 31 is the best thing in here, but not in the same star league.

HOLD BACK THE DAWN (1941)

Under Warners contract (‘35 thru early ‘40s), Olivia de Havilland often felt little more than ornamental prop to Errol Flynn and others. (But what an ornament!) But this Paramount gig really gives her something to chew on*, resulting in her first Leading Actress noms: Oscar & NY Film Critics. Suggested by the real coming-to-America romance of Kurt & Ketti Frings, the Billy Wilder/Charles Brackett script, largely original in character & plot, picks up Roumanian gigolo/club dancer Charles Boyer (from Wilder’s own backstory?), as he tries to get out of a Mexican border town and permanently into the U.S.; something his fellow Euro-guests at a not-so-Grand Hotel are also aiming at. Enter a pair of lovely possibilities, Paulette Goddard, former dance partner who wedded (briefly) for better/for worse/mostly for a visa; and de Havilland’s marriagable schoolmarm, easy pickin’s for Continental wooing by a master with a cashmere voice & moist brown eyes you could dive into. With its exceptionally well constructed storyline and far less cynicism than the norm from this writing team, it’s also strongly directed by Wilder nemesis Mitchell Leisen, unafraid of its emotional content. (Leisen rarely gets the credit he occasionally deserved, especially from Wilder & Preston Sturges, who wrote his best stuff.) The film may be less sensational than some of Wilder’s tougher, better known titles, but it’s satisfying as any. A gem.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *At a low point, before he figures out a plan of action, Wilder had written a soliloquy for Boyer comparing his hopeless position to that of a cockroach he watches crawling up his hotel room wall. But Boyer ix-nayed the speech (‘Me, talk to a cockroach?’), and a furious Wilder supposedly tilted the rest of the pic toward de Havilland. (BTW, the speech never would have stayed in as Paramount was already having trouble getting grungy border town elements past Mexican authorities. (That’s why the excitable car mechanic is ‘mad’ Russian rather than excitable Mexican. A cockroach in a border hotel would never have made the cut.)

DOUBLE-BILL: Frustrated with Leisen’s handling of this film, and the previous Brackett/Wilder (ARISE, MY LOVE/’40), Wilder vowed to start directing his own work. (Brackett would produce.) But first they wrote BALL OF FIRE/’41 for Howard Hawks, with Wilder contractually insisting on set visitation rights to give himself a directing tutorial by watching Hawks work up close.

ASHANTI (1979)

Before churning thru a spate of ‘paycheck projects’ in the ‘90s, Michael Caine consistently awarded his personal booby prize to this far-fetched tale of modern slavery. A ‘deal memo’ more than a film, Caine just manages to keep a straight face as he chases Peter Ustinov’s slimy slave dealer thru Africa & the MidEast when beautiful doctor wife Beverly Johnson (enjoying a cooling solo skinny-dip after immunizing a native tribe with husband Caine) is mistaken for a local and kidnapped for sale across the border. Yikes! With marque names to entice international pre-sales, William Holden, Rex Harrison & Omar Sharif phone it in while guying the material, though less than Ustinov does. No wonder Caine was unhappy; he’s the only straight man to these comics. Even at that, he’s one-upped by Indian leading man Kabir Bedi playing a tough guy. Richard Fleischer, whose talent ebbed in reverse proportion to his budget, lets the guest stars do as they please. (Was the mocking tone in Stephen Geller’s script? He didn’t get another credit for 13 years.) More weird than terrible (see Caine & Sylvester Stallone in John Huston’s VICTORY/’81 for that), ASHANTI is as much head-scratcher as disgrace.

DOUBLE-BILL: More pointless work for Caine was up next in BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE/’79. As for Africa, he had better luck with the earnest, if mediocre WILBY CONSPIRACY/’75, even more on his sixth-billed breakthru in ZULU/’64.

CRIME ET CHÂTIMENT / CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (1935)

It was the best of CRIMES, it was the worst of CRIMES. The year was 1935, two tries at the Dostoevsky classic: near total miss from Columbia Pictures, with director Josef von Sternberg & producer B.P. Schulberg licking their wounds after ankling Paramount, and miscast leads Peter Lorre, Edward Arnold & Marian Marsh vs. this remarkably fine French iteration, as close as the screen has come to justifying the attempt. In their sensible reduction, director Pierre Chenal and scripter Marcel Aymé emphasize chilling action, largely sticking with the novel’s ideas, ideals and relationships, strongly played out in lightly stylized sets that mirror the grandiose delusions of self-rationalizing killer Raskolnikov. That’s Pierre Blanchar as the impoverished sometime student, his handsome features almost burnt away thru untethered intellectual passion. Here, Raskolnikov seems less determined to give himself away right from the start which gives Inspector Porfiry more opportunity to trip up his suspect. Not that the great Harry Baur needs the help, carrying off the movie as soon as he shows up. (And looking like Vincent Gardenia of all people!) Of the three leads, only Madeleine Ozeray’s self-sacrificing Sonya feels seriously underdeveloped, too unmotivated, too abrupt in sympathizing with Raskolnikov. But the feel of the book survives, even some of its offbeat humor, which is more than can be said of other versions, like the prestigiously inert Soviet package (all four hours of it) from 1970.

SHADOWLANDS (1985)

Writer William Nicholson (who’d go on to GLADIATOR/’00, LES MIZ/’12, currently THIRTEEN LIVES, about the boys soccer club rescued from a cave in Thailand) got his start triple-dipping into the unlikely, intensely moving love story of Oxford don C.S. Lewis (of NARNIA fame) and passionate American correspondent Joy Davidman (minor poet with two young sons). First seen as this tv film (for Joss Ackland & Claire Bloom); then as a play (on B’way with Nigel Hawthorne & Jane Alexander); finally as a well received film (Anthony Hopkins & Debra Winger; Richard Attenborough’s best work as director). And while Nicholson only came up with a perfect last line in the film rewrite (a real heart-stopper), all told, this modest tv film best gets to the core of Lewis’s Christian belief and the crisis of his initial happiness (with a lapsed Jew, of all people), discovering an unimagined aptitude for depth of love he never expected; and then its tragic loss. Ackland rarely got a shot at such a well-rounded, sympathetic role, warmth invading this crotchety, confirmed bachelor; while Bloom, whose work is far less an ethnic ‘character’ than Winger’s Davidman, matching Lewis in values, ideas & burgeoning affection. The pair obviously pleased at the reactions they arouse amongst his clubby fellows. Lovely work from the two boys (for some reason reduced to one in Attenborough’s film along with most of Lewis’s internal Christian reflection). And an infinitely touching display of moral & physical support from David Waller as Lewis’s sedentary brother Warnie, subtle to the point of near invisibility, but very much there. Like the film as a whole.

DOUBLE-BILL: Don’t undersell the larger-scaled film version. In slightly more commercial form, it’s excellent; if not without built in showbiz fizz, especially in the culture clash between Winger & Hopkins.

MEN MUST FIGHT (1933)

Of the handful of films Diana Wynyard made in a brief, but intense Hollywood period (‘32 to ‘34, mostly ‘prestige’ productions: RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS; CAVALCADE; REUNION IN VIENNA), this was the outlier. A weirdly prescient mother-love/war story predicting World War in 1940, it plays like the ‘three-hankie’ novel H.G. Wells never wrote. Eye-popping politics meets eyeball rolling dramatics, but it does hold your interest. In a prologue, WWI flier Robert Young is killed on a first run, but not before impregnating nurse Wynyard. Enter older, also-ran suitor Lewis Stone, happy to save Wynyard from disgrace and play father to a dead man’s son. Jumping ahead two decades, Stone is now Secretary of War, trying to stop a new world conflict; wife Wynyard a socially prominent leader of the Pacifist Mothers Society; grown son Phillips Holmes (unaware of his true parentage) is recently engaged and proudly anti-war. But when Stone’s treaty collapses, America is attacked by air and war declared. Parental face-off; boy’s fiancée ashamed of marrying a defeatist, Holmes made aware of his true father . . . everyone conflicted as heck. If only the script, along with occasional film director Edgar Selwyn were up to the task.* Undersung lenser George Folsey helps with some ravishing portraits, and a bombing run on the city is a miniature model pip. Otherwise, dead in the water; with a question mark end that tries to have things both ways.

DOUBLE-BILL: Similar maternal concern over a son going off to war comes up for Irene Dunne in THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER/’44 and Olivia de Havilland on TO EACH HER OWN/’46.

ATTENTION MJUST BE PAID: *Largely a man of the theater, Lewis Selwyn holds a footnote in film history from his partnership with a certain Samuel Goldfish. Combining Goldfish to Selwyn to form The Goldwyn Company, they signed an agreement that kept either party from adopting the company name as their own. Naturally, Samuel Goldfish broke the contract and legally became Samuel Goldwyn. (Though everyone who knew him thought he took the wrong ‘halves’ and should have become Samuel Selfish.)

TRIAL AND ERROR (1962)

Industrious as a baroque composer, and often as facile, prolific writer John Mortimer hit big (in a small way) on his first play, THE DOCK BRIEF, a one-act two-hander about a third-rate barrister for the unrepresented (think Public Defender) chosen by a hapless man who admits to killing his wife after something went wrong between her and their excessively good-humored bachelor tenant. Performed extensively from Brit Fests to San Quentin (and most recently taped for Czech tv), this retitled film adaptation opens up the action in having client & lawyer step physically into scenes only spoken of on stage; a conceit that dilutes stage unity and adds little. Fortunately, interest is sustained thru the opposition of Richard Attenborough’s overcooked naturalism as Mr. Common Man vs. Peter Sellers’ unnaturally stylized comic finesse; boosting the dramatic tension of Mortimer’s tidy drama more than its twist ending does. But the real interest, under James Hill’s tv-ready direction, comes from feeling you’ve been let in on a previously unknown (if failed) first draft of Mortimer’s greatest invention, RUMPOLE OF THE BAILEY. But what a difference was made in having Rumpole smarter than everyone else (if resigned to futility) than as the self-deluded loser Sellers plays.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Ron Grainer’s main theme lifted directly out of Prokofiev’s PETER AND THE WOLF, twenty-five years old at the time and under copyright. Did no one notice?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Start anywhere in RUMPOLE OF THE BAILEY’s seven improving seasons (1978 - ‘92).

THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941)

Set in an international gambling palace, and loaded with sexual perversion, interracial trysts, suicidal debtors and many varieties of love-for-sale, Hollywood had wanted to adapt John Colton’s extravagant melodramatic nonsense since it hit the stage in the mid-‘20s. And while the main storyline isn’t prohibitively objectionable: exotic club-owning madame digs up scandal to blackmail a developer (her former lover!) planning to tear down her business & erect a new city-approved development; the human interest stories swirling about were awash with Production Code no-noes. Too much even for Pre-Code days.  (Today, it's more problematic for the use of YellowFace.) But once screenwriter Jules Furthman (or some collaborator) figured out how to keep what was needed by watering down ‘Mother’ Goddam to ‘Mother’ Gin Sling, the key to bowdlerizing without losing tawdry essence was clear. As the developer's rebellious daughter, top-billed Gene Tierney hasn’t yet got the range for her big outbursts, but looks so young & gorgeous as she loses borrowed booty to Ona Munson’s ‘chinoiserie’ Madame, it hardly matters. And Victor Mature, in his brief dewy period, has a fine time flinging a flowing white cloak around to steal a secret kiss. Everyone else in a decidedly eccentric cast (Walter Huston, Eric Blore, Albert Bassermann, John Abbott, a mute Maria Ouspenskaya, Mike Mazurki with rickshaw, croupier Marcel Dalio) as staff, customers, officials, are all you could wish. And what glam production values for an indie! Producer Arnold Pressburger*, newly exiled in Hollywood, choose well in then out-of-fashion Josef von Sternberg to direct, knowing he’d emphasize surface texture over sense, and got him to keep it all on the move. So switch off the right side of your brain, find a good print to do it justice, and enjoy.

DOUBLE-BILL: *German exile Pressburger used fellow ex-pats on all his subsequent Hollywood pics: Fritz Lang for HANGMEN ALSO DIE!/’43; René Clair on IT HAPPENED TOMORROW/’44; Douglas Sirk’s with A SCANDAL IN PARIS/’46. What a batting average!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Note Sternberg’s directing credit puts A.S.C. (American Society of Cinematographers) on his title card. Presumably to signify equal responsibility with lenser Paul Ivano.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: By one reckoning, this could be considered von Sternberg’s last film. Only a few specialty scenes in DUEL IN THE SUN/’47; demoted by Howard Hughes’ torturous ‘post’ work on JET PILOT (begun ‘49, released ‘57); MACAO/’52, an enjoyable noir, much ‘doctored’ by Nicholas Ray; and the experimental ANATAHAN/’53 would follow.

HOUSE OF CARDS (1968)

The first giveaway is Inger Stevens. Why is she made up as Eva Marie Saint? Then, all those familiar story beats: innocent man on the run for a murder he didn’t commit; picture on the front page; taking a train to escape; blonde in tow/mysterious international conspirators in pursuit; chases, chases, chases; ending with a shootout at a world-famous tourist site. With half its story beats lifted straight from NORTH BY NORTHWEST/’59, Universal Pictures must have been hoping to repeat their luck with CHARADE, a superior Hitchcock wannabe of five years back. But from the opening shot (a dead man’s POV floating down the Seine), director John Guillerman bludgeons rather than finesses the form.* So too our players, especially George Peppard, annoyingly conflating ironic with supercilious as a fading prize-fighter hired by ultra-rich Stevens as tutor (and manly role model) to her lonely, fatherless boy. If only her family weren’t part of a Right Wing French-Algerian paramilitary splinter group working to usurp the government. Say, what? (No wonder married scripters Harriet Frank & Irving Ravetch pseudonym’d up as James P. Bonner.) Thankfully, Orson Welles is around to amuse himself with an untraceable accent as their leader, but really making a pit stop to raise some fast cash for his own projects. And pay off debts from CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT? (That masterpiece of world cinema, made for less than a tenth the budget of this loser.) Orson even thought to bring along Keith Michell (Price Hal to his Falstaff) for a brief gig and a fat paycheck. Ah, the things we do for art!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Guillerman & Peppard are far more suited to the straightforward historical dramatics of THE BLUE MAX/’68. OR: For faux Hitch, CHARADE/’63.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Based on a novel by Stanley Ellin, no surprise to find he had eight previous story credits on tv’s ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS.

CLOUDBURST (1951)

If made in the States, this might have been a smart, brooding, first-rate low-budget film noir. Yet it barely rates a ‘meh’ under British execution. No egregious fails in production, simply a sense of going thru the motions for limited returns. Robert Preston, a Hollywood ‘name’ to help get Stateside distribution, probably needn’t have bothered to make the trip. Not that he’s anything but perfectly fine as a WWII vet, now running a government de-coding office, who loses his pregnant wife (Elizabeth Sellars) to a reckless driver. Calling on old army pals for undercover expertise in fingering driver & passenger, Preston plots his revenge. And, even as Scotland Yard types close in, makes the punishment fit the crime. He’s got nothing to live for anyway. Preston, such a joie de vivre acting presence, had played the bad guy before, but never this downbeat.* He’s good, too. But tepid direction from Frances Searle, along with his unvaried walking pace, keep this from getting up to speed or building much tension. (And an attempt to work Preston's coding job into the story goes nowhere.)   Cinematographer Walter Harvey pulls off some effective shooting when they let him go outside, but drab, evenly lit interiors dominate. Lots of wasted promise on this one.

DOUBLE-BILL: With film work drying up, Preston segued to tv & the stage, eventually leading to his musical reinvention in THE MUSIC MAN and high-profile (if still sporadic) movie leads. *See him play noir villain (against Robert Mitchum) in Robert Wise’s psychological Western BLOOD ON THE MOON/’48.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Second-billed Elizabeth Sellars leaves the scene even earlier than Janet Leigh famously does in PSYCHO/’60.

THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD (1971)

By 1971, good projects were no longer thick on the ground for Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner or Samantha Eggar. And Jules Verne adaptations had slipped from high-end Family Fare like Disney’s 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA/’54 (with Douglas), to low-end Kiddie Matinee day-and-date bookings for A.I.P. schlock like MASTER OF THE WORLD/’61. So this dark, grisly, all but nihilistic Pirate yarn is a triple surprise: first in its lack of compromise on a grim storyline; second in serious below-the-line talent (Nouveau Vague great Henri Decaë to lens; James Bond editor Bert Bates; those big league swindlers the Salkinds to produce); third because it’s pretty good, with a story strong enough director Kevin Billington can get 65% of what’s in the material and still deliver a rattling good adventure. Lighthouse keeper Douglas, living on a small windy isle, can only watch in horror as his two island mates are swiftly dispatched by the sadistic pirates on Yul Brynner’s ship. And they’re all coming ashore to sabotage the torch, counting on plunder from approaching ships sure to wreck & founder on the rocky shore. Quickly sizing up the situation from his lighthouse perch, Douglas dashes off, hiding on the island and soon hunted by the crew. If he can only hold out until his supply ship comes . . . and figure out how to warn them before they land. Eventually, Douglas gets help from two rare wreck survivors, engineer Renato Salvatori and Eggar, a lady’s maid kept safe by Brynner for ‘services.’ Piling on gore and brutality, the film came out before PG-13 existed (it has the old GP rating), but not really for the junior trade. Presumably made for the international market, it was commercially dead in the water Stateside. But now seems worth a look.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: In a humbling career turn, Brynner & Eggar failed to last past 13 episodes in ANNA AND THE KING/’72, a hourly tv series based on Brynner’s signature role. Yul went back to touring the original show on stage (with a break for an unexpected hit, WESTWORLD/’76); Eggar stuck to tv movies and Guest Star spots.

DOUBLE-BILL: Alfred Hitchcock’s JAMAICA INN/’39 and Fritz Lang’s MOONFLEET/’55 have similar plundering storylines. Neither especially satisfying. OR: Roman Polanski’s dismissed pirate disaster, PIRATES/’86, pushing its sadistic tone toward comedy (Walter Matthau its most unlikely star); much better (and infinitely weirder) than it’s given credit for.

HONEYLAND (2019)

From Macedonia, an Old World tale like an Æsop fable, but real & happening now. Tamara Kotevska & Ljubomir Stefanov, in a first feature-length documentary, went to the mountains to find their subject, a tough, solitary female bee-hunter/honey-gatherer, scratching out a living for herself (and invalid mother) practicing an ancient craft in uncovering golden treasure behind decaying stone walls or inside tree stumps. Singing to the bees, they largely leave her alone while she takes half and leaves half so the hives will continue to thrive. But now she has competition, a neighbor with a large family & many mouths to feed. Why observe nature’s delicate balance, a pact that has worked for centuries, when kilos of honey can be quickly brought to market for a quick payoff? Given without a lot of narrative clues or pointers to clear up relationships, the film trusts the viewer to sort things out between awe-inspiring wilderness, local customs and jolting intrusions from the modern world; smart phones, jeans and polyester abound at a local fair. The film can’t help but side with traditional ways in decline, but the neighbor’s family isn’t turned into an unnatural villain. The eldest son, in particular, a teen in rebellion against his authoritarian dad, is a most sympathetic figure, eager to learn what he can of the old ways, even if doomed to be too little/too late. A fascinating, ultimately heartbreaking, physically stunning, appropriately handcrafted work.

DOUBLE-BILL: Of recent documentaries, this matches nicely to a happier story of another singular woman, the gifted Mongolian teen who competes as THE EAGLE HUNTRESS/’16.

THE NUISANCE (1933)

Lee Tracy, the only Hollywood actor to literally piss himself off the A-list (from a Mexico City balcony onto a passing squadron of marching National Cadets*) was riding high in ‘33. Two classics (BOMBSHELL; DINNER AT EIGHT) as part of large starry ensembles, and carrying this lesser beauty alone above the title. It’s a dilly, with Tracy in rare form as Manhattan’s top ambulance chaser, first to arrive at major accidents & fires with a cadre of paid ‘witnesses,’ including ‘flopper’ Charles Butterworth and tippling Dr. Frank Morgan, his in-house specialist in composite X-Ray techniques. But he might be due for a comeuppance from D.A./long-time rival John Miljan who’s setting a trap to stop Tracy once-and-for-all with pretty putative ‘victim’ Madge Evans as bait. Played at full-throttle, with all hands pulling together, its journeymen talent, like director Jack Conway, thriving on congenial material. Very pre-Code, with Tracy offering to spend the night with new lover Evans (her best perf), this is cracking entertainment, given dark glistening luster from lenser Gregg Toland who bucks M-G-M house style by refusing to light all the way into the corners. (M-G-M liked to show off the money they spent on furnishings.) With a script, mostly by Bella & Sam Spewack, that knows how to turn on serious emotions in the third act within going soft & sentimental.

DOUBLE-BILL: *The film was VIVA VILLA!/’34, with underwhelming Stuart Erwin rushed in to take over Tracy’s role on this fascinating, troubled, ultimately inadequate film. But try imagining how it all might have worked with the original casting. (see below)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Working on another personal injury case, Tracy’s hefty German bride-to-be client let’s her lawyer know the bridegroom isn’t really injured, ‘There’s nothing wrong with my Willie!’ The film also has surprises with what may be Hollywood’s first mention of new German leader Herr Hitler. A fresh name in ‘33.

OPERATION SECRET (1952)

Generically titled B+ programmer, a post-WWII courtroom drama about a murdered French resistance fighter, apparently killed by displaced person Cornel Wilde during the war, right before he took off with a secret reel of film on the latest manned German rocket ship. (Docu footage of the experimental snub-nosed jet best thing in here.) The story, told in sequential flashbacks by Commie Resistance head Steve Cochran; escapee pal Karl Malden (overacting to beat the band); and fresh from ‘behind the Iron Curtain!,’ resistance spy/undercover nun Phyllis Thaxter (hopelessly girl-next-door American). It all ends with a none too surprising twist implicating followers of The Party Line, proving Wilde’s heroism & innocence. Alas, the film’s already died under Lewis Seiler’s by-the-numbers direction and thru faulty maneuvers in plot & character. Nicely shot by Ted McCord, though. Quite a change of pace for Wilde whose other 1952 release was Oscar winner THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH, third in a series of strictly apolitical Best Pic winners (ALL ABOUT EVE and AN AMERICAN IN PARIS the other two), bookended by three politically engaged (read dangerous) films (ALL THE KING’S HORSES; FROM HERE TO ETERNITY; ON THE WATERFRONT). You really could read Hollywood’s temperature off the Academy Awards back in the day.

DOUBLE-BILL: Wilde’s ‘safe’ 1952 pic, C. B. DeMille’s stupendously corny GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH. OR: For a detailed look at French behavior under Nazi Occupation, try the seven seasons of UN VILLAGE FRANÇAIS; particularly good in charting the absurd zigs & zags of the ever changing, ever expedient Communist ‘Party Line’ Doctrine over the course of the war.

GENEVIEVE (1953)

Pleasant, pretty, basically harmless, at this remove it’s a bit hard to account for the outsized commercial success and subsequent affection for this sweet-natured charmer about two couples (one married/one dating) taking part in the annual London-to-Brighton antique car rally (a real & continuing event, BTW), then betting £100 on a personal race back to the city that plays out like a tortoise & the hare fable. William Rose’s original screenplay, fun rather than funny, is careful not to push the foibles, breakdowns & squabbles too far; Christopher Challis’s lovely TechniColor lensing, an unusual luxury at the time for this type of film in the U.K.; and director Henry Cornelius (another exiled Jew from Max Reinhardt’s Berlin orb*) getting the most out of locations & cast. (With no process shooting on the road and a star-making turn from a piss-elegant Kay Kendall & trumpet). Exemplary. . . in hitting modest marks. What probably did the trick back in ‘53 was catching a beat on a new phase in post-war British recovery: an anti-austerity vibe, and coming out of a growing middle-class that suddenly had time, and just enough expendable income, to revel in a frivolous hobby like the pampered & polished sputtering beauties they transform from ‘flivers’ into beloved, four-wheel family members. Cheaper than the children they seem to substitute for in these motoring circles.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Dying young in 1958 with a mere five directing credits, Cornelius’s most interesting credit might be the British kitchen-sink drama, IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY/’47, which he produced & wrote, but didn’t direct.

BECKY SHARP (1935)

Fresh off three-in-a-row divas, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich & Anna Sten (Sam Goldwyn’s diva manqué), Rouben Mamoulian was the obvious choice to take over Hollywood’s first 3-strip TechniColor feature after initial director Lowell Sherman died. But, perhaps because of the many technical challenges for him, cinematographer Ray Rennahan & legendary stage designer Robert Edmond Jones (his sole feature credit), star Miriam Hopkins (superb under Mamoulian in JEKYLL & HYDE/’31) is untamed in this slimline VANITY FAIR adaptation. For Becky Sharp’s social climbing adventuress (something of a Napoleonic Era Scarlett O’Hara) to come off, she needs to be knowingly deceitful a third of the time; earnest a third of the time; and not sure of her motives a third of the time. But Hopkins, playing at a continuous trot, always seems to be faking it, quickly exhausting our sympathies, with a reverse in fortune every other minute. With only Cedric Hardwicke, an opportunistic Marquis willing to pay for favors, able to arrest her forward momentum, schemes & giggles. Yet the film demands attention anyway after a miraculous restoration (dating back to 1986) rescued its extraordinary look from the mess of inferior reissues (including a 2-tone CineColor degradation) and back to Mamoulian’s dramatically coordinated primary palette. A visual feast right from the start, as pastel gowned ladies enter thru a soft blue curtain, on to an early pictorial climax as a fancy ball sequence filled with gaily-colored gowns undergoes an invasion of swirling red military cloaks when word of Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo spreads past any rules of courtly etiquette. A few bits here & there remain in less than pristine condition, but the lapses only emphasize the shock audiences must have felt at the time. Not all positive BTW; reviewers noted the hot-house look, especially in ladies’ makeup and in flushed skin tones. But oh, those portrait shots! As if each 35mm frame were a fine lithograph. Which, in original TechniColor, they pretty much were.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: See Tom Milne’s short, irreplaceable monograph MAMOULIAN, originally Vol. 13 in IUP’s fine Cinema One Series, for a more positive view of BECKY SHARP’s dramatic angle.

DOUBLE-BILL: Next up for Mamoulian, Gershwin’s PORGY AND BESS on B’way, then back to Hollywood for the eccentric & funny THE GAY DESPERADO/’36, a rarely seen delight about a Mexican Bandito inspired by Hollywood gangster films. With a priceless turn from Mischa Auer under an enormous sombrero.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (2018 / 1970 - '75)

In a story he tells on himself, Peter Bogdanovich recalls going with Orson Welles to see his adaptation of Franz Kafka’s THE TRIAL/’62, a film Bogdanovich had never warmed up to, only to be taken aback hearing Welles roar with laughter at its tragic absurdity. And so it goes again with Bogdanovich, who took key position in finishing this long aborning late Welles opus, wrapping ‘post’ five decades after filming to a duly respectful critical reception and shocking near indifference away from the film fest circuit. Talked up as Orson’s final testament, his ultimate word on sex, death & betrayal (in ascending order of importance), like that screening of THE TRIAL, they’ve all missed the point. WIND turns out to be a fun, even jolly, film about sex, death & betrayal, like a Hollywood RULES OF THE GAME, a country party, here with an unfinished art film as the entertainment (plus hope of gaining buzz & finishing money). A game that goes on till someone dies. Not without a melancholy edge, not without accounts settled, but also not without zest. Fortunately, if Bogdanovich & crew can’t see what they’ve wrought, they’ve gotten close enough to let us see it. The crazy film is tremendous stuff, charting the last day of Welles alter ego John Huston, a fading Falstaff figure, against Peter Bogdanovich’s fast-rising young Prince Hal of a director. The party-goers a riotous gang, shot & zap edited from many angles (easy to follow, BTW), with a mock-Antonioni 35mm pastiche (Antonioni a particular bête noire of Welles), as the film-within-the-film he needs to wrap up. Welles being Welles, even as he sends up art film æsthetics, he can’t help startling us; including a remarkable ‘bi-rigged’ sex sequence unlike anything he ever tried. (Not revolutionary like his CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT battle, but pretty amazing in its own way.) The screening of this rough-edit constantly interrupted, like a meal in a Buñuel film. But not to worry since loyal aide de camp Norman Foster, stealing the film in the Sancho Panza spot Welles often returned to (Everett Sloan in CITIZEN KANE; Joseph Calleia in TOUCH OF EVIL; Akim Tamiroff in the aborted DON QUIXOTE; inverted as Iago in OTHELLO) is always able to pick up the pieces. How did all the publicity hacks miss conveying what fun the film is? Maybe they needed to hear Welles in the background, roaring at the way life’s tragedies play for laughs, even the melancholy parts.

DOUBLE-BILL: Best bet, first watch the ‘Making Of’ documentary, THEY’LL LOVE ME WHEN I’M DEAD/’18. It gives away little of the plot and will make you gasp at the audacity of how Welles (and latter-day hands) put it all together.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Just as Antonioni cast ill-fated Mark Frechette in ZABRISKIE POINT/’70 for that androgynous Jim Morrison/THE DOORS vibe, so Welles cast less unfortunate/slightly more talented Robert Random. It’s all in the cheek bones, baby.

THE BELLS (1926)

Sir Henry Irving, first knighted actor (at the turn-of-the-last-century), had two signature roles, his game-changing sympathetic interpretation of Shylock in MERCHANT OF VENICE and, paradoxically, the guilt-plagued murderer of THE POLISH JEW in a version of that international stage success he called THE BELLS.* The story, no more than an excuse to let Irving lose his mind in front of the footlights, has him die of terror after his debt-ridden Innkeeper/Burgomeister kills a traveling Jewish merchant for his money, dissolving the body in a lime pit while he sets up his marriageable daughter and pays off creditors. The eponymous tinkling? Ringing bells of the dead man’s sleigh which Irving can’t stop from jangling inside his head. Nor can he not see Banquo-like apparitions of his victim and creditors. Alas, our Innkeeper is no MacBeth. Even so, an enormous hit for Irving who brought the play from London to B’way in 1989, 1900 & 1901. And it should have made a grand Grand Guignol of a silent pic, here with Lionel Barrymore in a role Lon Chaney might have played.* Even a youngish Boris Karloff as a SideShow ‘mesmerist’ who leads to Barrymore’s confession. With lux production values, straightforward, if effective direction by James Young (though very little camera movement for 1926), and fistfuls of accomplished ghostly double-exposures (even better glowing light effects), the film would be twice as satisfying if it didn’t end so abruptly. Did they run out of cash? And a near mint print in the KINO restoration.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Even a French Opera Comique as ‘Le Juif Polonais’ in 1900, with no less than Verdi’s original Iago and Falstaff, Victor Maurel, as the murderer.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Lon Chaney director Tod Browning gave Barrymore two roles Chaney surely would have done had he lived in THE MARK OF THE VAMPIRE/’35 and THE DEVIL DOLL/’36.

J'ACCUSE / AN OFFICER AND A SPY (2019)

Roman Polanski is radically unradical in this highly traditional historical drama, letting his inner Fred Zinnemann out (or is it William Wyler?) in another retelling of The Dreyfus Affair. Old-fashioned in the best sense of seamless Hollywood filmmaking, with pacing that takes the long view, allowing tension to build thru carefully measured doses of information and subtle changes in character, without avoiding the thousand shocks, suspenseful set pieces & courtroom drama (military & civilian) that flesh is heir to. If not for cinematographer Pawel Edelman’s modern underlit interiors* and some non-linear time-lapse ellipses, the film might pass for a near-classic from fifty years or so back. (That ‘near’ qualifier for the occasional feeling that Polanski errs on the side of ‘good taste,’ a bit more Eugène Delacroix composition overstatement and a bit less Jacques-Louis David gloss might have done the trick. But this is nitpicking. With unerring casting and meticulous period detail, the film is a paradigm of a type of undervalued (uncool) prestige middlebrow cinema now rarely seen.

DOUBLE-BILL: William Dieterle’s LIFE OF EMLE ZOLA/’37, like his other bio-pics with Paul Muni (and his makeup box) has fallen out of favor. But on their own terms, they remain largely effective, particularly ZOLA in its Dreyfus-centered second half.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *These interiors might have benefitted from film, rather than digital capture.

THE LAST OF MRS. CHEYNEY (1937)

Credit probably goes to producer Lawrence Weingarten for noting the striking similarities of playwright Frederick Lonsdale’s mid-‘20s hit about a pair of con artists moving in on a string of pearls (B’way with Ina Claire; Norma Shearer’s second Talkie in ‘29) with Ernst Lubitsch’s TROUBLE IN PARADISE/’32, and getting it’s author, Samson Raphaelson, for this update. Though the plot goes its own way, the real difference is a gender swap as con artists Joan Crawford & William Powell (Miriam Hopkins & Herbert Marshall in TROUBLE), out to fleece a rich grande dame, tap titled Brit Robert Montgomery (in the Kay Francis spot) to unknowingly get them in the door. Montgomery the ‘mark’ that morphs into love; threatening scam and relationships. Smart and clever at moments, but spotty; generally not as good as it might have been. And for a host of reasons, starting with a ship-set prologue overloaded with forced romantic interplay, Crawford’s heavy tread as high society fraud, and Production Code restrictions Lubitsch didn’t have to deal with in 1932. Happily, and in spite of the mid-shoot death of director Richard Boleslawski, plot & performers start to strike on all cylinders (well, five out of six) once we hit dry land and Crawford must decide whether to follow old or new instincts: the call of larceny or call of the heart. And while Powell gets the short end of stick dramatically, he’s still (as usual) the best thing in here.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, the nearly perfect TROUBLE IN PARADISE.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: In passing remarks as they cross stage, Nigel Bruce mentions an affair he had with a girl whose skin was ‘a lovely nut brown.’ An inter-racial allusion that has Frank Morgan do a disapproving double-take. And it is startling to hear in 1937. How’d it get past the Production Code office?

THE GO-BETWEEN (1971)

Third and final collaboration for director Joseph Losey and playwright Harold Pinter (not counting uncredited work on Losey’s MODESTY BLAISE/’66) drops the swinish modern characters of THE SERVANT/’63 and ACCIDENT/’67 for upper-crust period snobs from L.P. Hartley’s novel. (With its famous opening line about ‘the past being a foreign country,’ it’s a more conventional adaptation than earlier Pinter/Losey films.) So exquisitely situated, dressed & groomed, we forgive (or is it revel in) the class entitlement that runs narrative & ruins lives. On the surface, everything well mannered, perfectly maintained, endless lawns & farm fields of the Maudsley estate, perfectly caught in Gerry Fisher’s sun-dappled cinematography and Michel Legrand’s ear-lapping score. But all may not be quite as it appears. And the catalyst to family fissure turns out to be a 13-yr-old lower-middle-class friend of a Maudsley boy, guest for the summer break who falls hard for beautiful older sister Julie Christie, all but engaged to Boar War hero Edward Fox, but just as engaged in a passionate affair with musky tenant farmer Alan Bates. And that’s how our outlier guest lands in-over-his-head, carrying notes between secret lovers, unaware he’s setting up indiscreet meetings. Is he corrupted or wised up? Beautifully orchestrated by Pinter & Losey, it’s hard to imagine another filmmaker molding this material in such a chilly manner; with its class implications leading to a Palme d’Or at Cannes. Hartley gave it a Junior Edition BRIDESHEAD REVISITED vibe: in characters, wealth, envy, sexual tensions, flashback structure, but at least managed to keep Catholicism off the buffet. Not that it stopped Margaret Leighton, Maudsley materfamilias and rarely so comfortable in film, from making an award-winning meal of it.

DOUBLE-BILL: Julie Christie’s acting was still a work in progress, but she & Bates make an unbeatable pair (once Peter Finch & Terence Stamp get out of the way) in John Schlesinger’s rhapsodic version of FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD/’67.

THE SEVENTH CROSS (1944)

After a score of short subjects and two crime-busting programmers, Fred Zinnemann got unexpectedly boosted to this A-list project by M-G-M producer Pandro S. Berman (with star Spencer Tracy seconding). A strong pre-war suspenser (1936 Germany), it opens as seven prisoners escape from a Concentration Camp, only to be quickly hunted down, returned to hang on Seven Crosses. Only Tracy’s cross, the seventh, remains waiting, largely because he has friends in a nearby town. But who to trust? How to connect? What of the danger he’s putting them in? Some of the conventions of studio lot filmmaking, especially under wartime restrictions with repurposed sets, accentuate a canned quality. Still, much holds up remarkably well. The opening a stunner, with a strong UFA/German expressionist feel to it. F.W. Murnau cameraman Karl Freund capturing misty fog & marshlands of the escape as if just off THE LAST LAUGH/’24.* (An artistic atmosphere Zinnemann can’t maintain in town scenes.) Structured as a series of dangerous encounters for Tracy as he tries to contact the local resistance network to help get him out of the country (does it even exist?), there really are no dead spots; though scripter Helen Deutsch’s use of a deceased escapee as narrator isn’t her best idea. But a lot of good actors in here, with Hume Cronyn, as an ambiguous ‘Good German’ pal, and debuting Jessica Tandy as his sympathetic wife, particularly fine. Plenty of honest suspense, even if composer Roy Webb (presumably on loan from R.K.O.) needlessly juices up the melodrama. And Tracy is very much at his best, looking haggard & haunted, especially in the opening, his underplaying rarely more affecting. And so it continues, right up to a surprisingly unforced, clear-eyed ending.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *But was it Karl Freund? Zinnemann, no fan of Freund’s officious manner, made quick use of the far more congenial Robert Surtees in the three weeks Freund was out sick.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Zinnemann’s own thoughts: ‘The picture was not as good as it should have been. But it was nothing to be ashamed of and in due course it led to THE SEARCH.’ A good thing to lead to! A still underseen, underappreciated 1948 beauty, helped by location shooting in post-war Berlin and the fresh, open-faced appeal of debuting Montgomery Clift.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-search-1948.html

PHANTOM SHIP (aka THE MYSTERY OF THE MARY CELESTE) 1935

The second release from an early incarnation of Hammer Films is something of a precursor to their TechniColored horror relaunches of FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA in the late ‘50s.* This one's speculative fiction on a never-solved sea mystery: the legend of The Mary Celeste, a small freighter found off coast, perfectly intact, utterly crewless. The film theorizes a killer on board, methodically bumping off mates (and in this telling the captain’s wife) with bodies turning up regularly (Agatha Christie style) amid blasts of disorienting sea storms. The real mystery is how well-made & effective it is. Bitty-budgeted British indies (often ‘quota quickies’ to meet official demands for British-made product) aren’t exactly loaded with spit, polish & style. Yet here, silent film journeyman Denison Clift, who hadn’t directed in years (and never would again), manages tone, character, action, story arc, pacing . . . the works. Of course, the main reason you’re here is for Stateside ‘ringer’ Bela Lugosi, cast to help sell U.S. distribution rights, fitting this in between the usual Hollywood drek he grabbed when Universal wasn’t calling on his services. He’s good, too, playing a broken ‘tar,’ eager for any job on any ship, then finding himself in the midst of a death voyage. But victim or perpetrator? Exclude his surprisingly good supporting role for Ernst Lubitsch in NINOTCHKA, and this must be the best work Lugosi did away from Universal.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The original British cut (now lost?) apparently used a courtroom framing device to surround the main action. Look for the hour-long Stateside cut under the title PHANTOM SHIP, all over the internet. Just beware of subfusc copies; decent prints posted if you look around. *Why Denison Clift never got another shot at helming is just one more mystery.

DOUBLE-BILL: *It also compares nicely with a Val Lewton film like THE GHOST SHIP/’43.

PICNIC (1955)

Playwright William Inge, with a rep that waxes & wanes (currently waxing) as MidWest cousin to Tennessee Williams, tends to show his limitations in characters that often feel like Tennessee Williams rejects. Here, families in a ‘typical’ all-white MidWest town, but from different sides of the track (literally and figuratively), scratch the usual itches over a long, hot Labor Day celebration (sunup to sundown; plus tomorrow morn) as hunky William Holden’s out-of-town-stranger (college pal of local scion Cliff Robertson) bums his way up everyone’s gonads with manly testosterone dew. Debuting director Joshua Logan, who’d done the play on B’way (with Ralph Meeker &, Paul Newman) and previously only dabbled in film, has his cast playing to the balcony, even when whispering. Rosalind Russell’s sexually frustrated spinster teacher gets the worst of it, metaphorically ‘raping’ Holden when not ‘indicating’ her every desire. As sisters, Kim Novak (the looker) & Susan Strasberg (the brain) demonstrate the difference in film & stage acting, but do get Inge’s main point across: above the neck or below, sex rules the senses. Holden tried shaving a few years off his chest to finish his Columbia contract with a part he knew he’d outgrown. More worrisome, he’d have to dance. Logan took care of that by shooting his dance of seduction with Novak entirely from the waist up. They sway. But in general, Logan stiffens whenever three or more characters share the screen. So explain the super effective coverage of picnic gambols & fairground larking, some of the best work of his career? Credit cinematographer James Wong Howe who (according to assistant Haskell Wexler) all but co-directed much of the pic.* Visually, Logan never did anything to match this first outing.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *And Logan knew it, writing to Howe: ‘Jimmie, if I have been a successful director in this picture, it is enormously due to the encouragement, ideas and editing that you gave to me so generously . . . Very few times in my life have I worked with as fine an artist as you.’ Later, Logan would be particularly insensitive, even jarring, in blithely cutting between location & studio work.

DOUBLE-BILL: Logan double-dipped on Inge in a far stagier follow-up: BUS STOP/’56, with Betty Field & Arthur O’Connell, holdovers from this film, plus Eileen Heckart who did the Roz Russell PICNIC role on B’way, and acclaimed, if overripe turns from a debuting Don Murray and Marilyn Monroe in her ‘serious’ acting mode.

GENTLEMAN'S FATE (1931)

Legend has it that M-G-M all but dumped pricey silent-film star John Gilbert after his first two Talkies tanked. Maybe. Yet they certainly seem to be trying to revive their waning romantic idol here. (Alas in another misbegotten vehicle.) Why else borrow hot young helmer Mervyn LeRoy, fresh off LITTLE CAESAR/’30, and starting his best period with FIVE STAR FINAL and I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG over the next year. Why else bother with a showcase vehicle for Gilbert, offering three distinct personalities for him to try on: Act One: rich, parentless society playboy, afinacéd to wealthy beauty; Act Two: reluctant bootlegger with a family he never knew he had in dying Old World Italian father and unlikely brother (pug-ugly Louis Wolheim); Act Three: hard-driving mob man, getting out of the biz to marry a good-hearted moll. Pretty hard to swallow melodrama (with missing story beats and not enough action), but the real problem is that it never gets a move on. A far cry from the energy LeRoy* would have given this at the time at home studio Warners. Only Wolheim shows spark, his noseless concave face like a matching jigsaw puzzle piece to Gilbert’s convex profile with generous snoot. And Gilbert's acting? He's fine, if a bit lost, only really connecting in a brief heart-to-heart with Wolheim after a 10-day stint in prison. Looking a tad disheveled, his hair less than perfectly groomed, he comes across in a more modern fashion . . . if only for a moment.  Someone to hold in reserve if Ronald Colman weren’t available.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *LeRoy, in TAKE ONE, his under-researched auto-bio, claims this as Gilbert’s only Talkie box-office success. Not so, though it did have an encouraging preview . . . then died. But Gilbert was hardly the only fast fader in here: Wolheim died the next year; while comic relief moll Marie Prevost, serious love interest moll Anita Page and shallow society fiancée Leila Hyams were all pretty much out of the biz by the mid-‘30s. Gilbert’s career collapse not the exception, but the rule.

WARLOCK (1959)

Though his biggest commercial hits came from A-list films in the second half of his career (i.e. THE CAINE MUTINY/’54; THE CARPETBAGGERS/’64), Edward Dmytryk was a far more interesting filmmaker in his scrappy, modestly budgeted early days (see CORNERED/’45; CROSSFIRE/’47).* But there were exceptions; like this unusual/unusually thoughtful Western with big names above the title (Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn, Dorothy Malone) and worthy old-timers alongside up-and-comers below (Wallace Ford, Tom Drake, Richard Arlen, DeForest Kelley, Regis Toomey, Whit Bissell, even Frank Gorshin as Widmark’s kid brother!). There’s probably too much plot in Oakley Hall’s novel, but Robert Alan Authur’s script details some pretty ‘out there’ relationships when outsiders Fonda & Quinn claim dictatorial powers (and the town's gambling concession) as part of their deal to clean up Warlock, hired Fascist gunmen with a municipal stamp of approval. Fonda quickly sidles up to a standoffish belle, but the script is more interested in bromantic displays of affection, especially from Quinn’s crippled sharpshooter, playing the submissive half in a mariage blanc to Fonda. Hired to put down a gang of ‘regulators’ terrorizing the town, and use any means to get the job done after legit lawmen failed, they soon find themselves seconded and opposed by Widmark, an ex-regulator coming on strong as the new town deputy, trying to wake up citizens to community responsibilities and not give in to strongman shortcuts. 'Deputy Widmark!, we’re surrounded by Allegorical Punditry!' Yet the film never plays like a Stanley Kramer civics lesson, thanks to superior acting, spasms of ‘70s-style violence, and Dmytryk’s WideScreen action chops. A big step up from his earlier CinemaScope work. Studded with dandy narrative twists, this should be much better known.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Dmytryk’s career also readily splits into before & after his jail stint as one of the 'Hollywood Ten.'

HOTEL DU NORD (1938)

Working without usual scenarist Jacques Prévert, but very much with regular production designer Alexandre Trauner (on rare form even for him), Marcel Carné came whisker close to perfection in this classic example of French Poetic Realism, that stylistic precursor to Hollywood film noir. The clever portmanteau narrative structure has every room at the Hôtel du Nord hold a discrete story that leaks into the one next door, malleable love affairs between an underworld snitch (criminal justice in hot pursuit); seen-it-all prostitute; suicidal young lovers*, gay confectioner, wife with a wandering eye for that smooth talking delivery man while her ‘constant husband’ earns pocket money selling his own blood. Each one (and others in parabolic orbit), also part of a single synchronized organism, spinning in dramatic alignment that might seem contrived, but comes off as inevitable. How otherwise with Arletty, Louis Jouvet (his greatest perf?), Bernard Blier & others, all in peak form? Now a pleasure to watch in a fabulous restoration out on MK2 Blu-Ray. (Available on various internet platforms.) The film is unlikely to displace CHILDREN OF PARADISE/’46 as Carné’s ‘go to’ film title, but it may be his best. A must.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Unable to find work (hence the suicide pact), Annabella & Jean-Pierre Aumont are such a stunningly beautiful pair of lovers, they could solve their financial problems posing for high end advertisements.

CATCH US IF YOU CAN / HAVING A WILD WEEKEND (1965)

Dismissed at the time as A HARD DAY’S NIGHT/’64 wannabe, with The DAVE CLARK FIVE in for THE BEATLES, this loosely structured romp & roll begins with the expected New British Cinema vibe, but soon goes its own disruptive way. Or tries to; never quite getting anywhere. We MEET THE FIVE in a converted church, living communal romper-room style. And unlike those Liverpool Lads, always rushing toward, rather than away from crowds. The plot, such as it is, has headman Dave Clark (least photogenic of the bunch) take off with ‘The Meat Girl,’ blonde star of an extravagant commercial the boys are taking part in as backup butchers. She and Dave leave between ‘takes,’ hunting up a magical island that proves illusory. Reported as a kidnapping, they soon have police, production assistants and the rest of the band in hot pursuit. Unaware of the commotion, they stop here and there for snacks, socially adrift squatters and a lot of muddy lanes their car can’t get thru. An odd mix of a movie, but not an unpleasant one, this first feature from director John Boorman and writer Peter Nichols might work better if only the boys had a playlist to match Lennon/McCartney. (And good luck with that!) But after those two title tracks (the film was renamed Stateside), not an earworm in the bunch.

DOUBLE-BILL: Separately, Boorman, with POINT BLANK/’67, and Nichols, with GEORGY GIRL/’66, made their rep on second features.