A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1935)

The best adaptation of Charles Dickens’ French Revolution story was David O Selznick’s final M-G-M production before he started up his own company. Big & handsome, it moves along with unimaginative efficiency under Jack Conway’s hand (Val Lewton & Jacques Tourneur did imposing work on the big action sequences), but there’s little of the special Dickensian flavor that Selznick & George Cukor got out of DAVID COPPERFIELD earlier that year.* But 23 minutes in, Ronald Colman shows up as Sydney Carton, and any shortcomings pale next to his inspired characterization. The wistful, fading vocal cadence; the ruined sense of purpose reflected in his ‘sadder-but-wiser’ eyes; the glamor of a failed romantic who finds redemption in one glorious gesture; all realized without physical strain or overstatement. Colman seems timeless and intriguingly modern, especially amid the trappings of mid-30s studio formulae. Yet, how can even adventurous filmgoers get to know the man? Silent beauties like STELLA DALLAS/’25 and BEAU GESTE/’26 may have limited takers, but what’s holding back mainstream releases like IF I WERE KING/’38 and THE LIGHT THAT FAILED/’39?*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Selznick’s three other films from 1935 starred Helen Hayes, Jean Harlow & Greta Garbo.  At M-G-M, it was good to be the son-in-law of. L.B. Mayer.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *These titles now all easily available on various platforms.  Hurrah!

HAMMETT (1983)

You only get fleeting glimpses of the pastiche detective film Wim Wenders was attempting here since exec producer Francis Coppola put the film on hold and (apparently) reshot much of it after the colossal failure of ONE FROM THE HEART/’82 threatened to sink his dream project, Zoetrope Studios. (It sunk, anyway.) The resulting film is a mess, but not an unpleasant one. The nifty idea pulls Dashiell Hammett (author of THE MALTESE FALCON & THE THIN MAN) back from his writing desk and into a San Francisco-Chinatown mystery with enough bodies, crooked cops & capitalists, sexy dames, noir atmosphere and double-dealing partners to confound any gumshoe. Marilu Henner is pretty awful as Hammett’s sexy gal-pal/neighbor, but everyone else gets into the spirit of the thing. Stick with it and you will, too. Look sharp for cult director Sam Fuller. Maybe that’s who should have helmed this one.

36 HOURS (1964)

After his atypically stylish work on THE COUNTERFEIT TRAITOR/’62, writer/director George Seaton returned to WWII with this jerry-built espionage tale. Unfortunately, it also returned Seaton to his typically flat dramatic & visual style. (No doubt, shooting TRAITOR in Europe with lenser Jean Bourgoin shook Seaton out of his usual form.) James Garner is awfully subdued as a kidnapped American spy who is tricked into believing that he’s got a bad case of amnesia & the war is long over. Why not chat with his doctor (Rod Taylor) and tell him everything he knows about D-Day and the Normandy invasion? The idea is too goofy to take seriously, but under Seaton’s tired hand, there’s not much tension and not much fun to be had. Patient viewers can relish a lively turn from the great Sig Rumann who shows up as a delightfully venal border patrolman toward the end, and also scratch their collective heads when composer Dmitri Tiomkin rolls out a faux-Rachmaninoff piano concerto as background score.

DECEPTION (1946)

Bette Davis effectively ended her contiguous run as Hollywood’s greatest leading lady (going back to '37) on this pic, reunited with Paul Henreid, Claude Rains & Irving Rapper, the co-stars & helmer of NOW, VOYAGER/’42. And if DECEPTION is hardly great drama (or even great melodrama, with its goofy OTT theatrics and shopworn manner), it does make for a smash-up finale. In the magnificently realized opening (Anton Grot’s set design & Ernest Haller’s lensing are spectacular thru-out), Henreid shows up in NYC after the war, alive, if not particularly well. That’s where Davis, his old flame, catches him mid-cadenza in the Haydn concerto. (Erich Wolfgang Korngold wrote that cadenza as well as the bravura cello piece featured in the climax.*) These two soon wed, much to the annoyance of Claude Rains, the brilliant, if caustically arrogant composer who has ‘kept’ Davis (in no small way) during the war years. Rains is amusing, willfully cruel & eccentric as the vain composer, but he never feels threatening in a role that calls for the sexual attraction & sadism of a James Mason. While Henreid, who now & then looks like the young Herbert von Karajan, lacks the weakened constitution & mental imbalance of a neurasthenic wreck. Gérard Philipe would have been perfect, or perhaps Jean-Pierre Aumont who was working in Hollywood at the time. Then again, with proper casting, the whole improbable scenario might well have collapsed. This way, with Eleanor Aller dubbing the cello for Henreid and Shura Cherkassky doing Beethoven’s Appassionata under Davis’s fingers, we believe just as much as we need to . . . no more. Davis would take a year off before finishing her Warners contract and then make a spectacular comeback in ALL ABOUT EVE/’50. But that’s another story.

*Sadly, the concerto is heavily abridged in the film, but there must be half a dozen modern recordings of it currently available.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD (2006)

For most of its 3-hr running time, you can’t be sure if CIA operations or Robert De Niro’s megging will end up looking more inept.  (The story is presumably a fictionalized version of James Jesus Angleton’s disastrous pilgrim’s progress inside the walls of the agency.)  Why did De Niro, who could barely handle the rigors of a modest family drama on his last directing gig (A BRONX TALE/’93) think he’d be able to handle this epic tale?  His idea of pacing stumbles from one quietly somber, under-lit scene to the next, never quite making contact with the plot element needn’t to vivify Eric Roth’s ultra-suave script.  Compared to this, John Le Carré plots like Agatha Christie.  De Niro must have really called in the favors to land so many fine actors in roles so ill-suited or under-written. Joe Pesci, Tim Hutton, Keir Dullea are window dressing, while poor Billy Crudup embarrasses himself with a Looney Tunes British accent.  ‘Pip, pip, cheerio, my good man.’  Oy!  Only the great Michael Gambon, playing a professor with a yen for poesy, spying & handsome juniors, earns points (the man is indestructible).  As for the leads, Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, John Turturro & Alec Baldwin have rarely been less effective while William Hurt has.  De Niro gives himself a plum little part so he can dress himself up as . . . Marty Scorsese!  How this vanity project received decent reviews is something of a mystery.  Maybe the CIA should look into it?

GREENWICH VILLAGE (1944)

Brazilian Bombshell Carmen Miranda was top-billed in this Fox musical, but she’s still peripheral to the plot. It’s the old wheeze about a classical composer whose music is mangled into pop tunes for a big revue featuring the girl he’s just fallen in love with. But nobody’s told him they’re using his music!. It sounds pretty grim, but it’s neither as dumb, nor as dreary as expected as the cast (Don Ameche, William Bendix, Vivian Blaine) show more sense & sass than you expect, and there are some tasty specialty acts along the way. Watch for a great all-Black number featuring ‘The Step Brothers,’ and look sharp to catch a glimpse ‘The Revuers’ (Betty Comden, Adolph Green & Judy Holliday). Walter Lang moves things along in a garish NeverLand version of 1922 Greenwich Village, but it’s dance director Seymore Felix who deserves kudos for staging a phenomenal final numbo for Miranda.

WHERE DANGER LIVES (1950)

Tight RKO film noir is helmed by John Farrow who brings out an abstract detachment that nicely serves the film’s remarkably unsympathetic leading characters and its logic-defying twists. It doesn’t plumb the existential depths like Edgar Ulmer’s Grade Z classic DETOUR/’45, but it’s pretty far out there. Particularly the lensing from Nicholas Musuraca which all but drowns us in oblique angles, severe contrast lighting & daringly long takes. Robert Mitchum plays the chump doctor who falls hard for his suicidal patient (Faith Domergue), unaware that she’s the wife and not the daughter of rich, old Claude Rains. Before you can blink, there’s a murder and the lovers are on the lam. Mitchum (typically superb) is wounded & weak, but that’s the least of his problems. Domergue is little remembered & wasn’t much of an actress, but she was Howard Hughes’ latest, so she got the showcase part. Well, she looks alright holding a gun which is half the battle in these things.

CONTEST: Scripter Charles Bennett did a lot of writing for Alfred Hitchcock and this film contains two striking prefigurations of story elements later found in PSYCHO/’60. Name them and win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of the NetFlix DVD of your choice.

TENSION (1949)

With his small frame & fine features, Richard Basehart is just right as a Milquetoast husband who plots a ‘perfect murder’ for the burly lover who’s taken his wife. Then again, since the wife is Audrey Totter, the supreme sultry slattern of Grade B noirs, you might think he’d be grateful. Sure enough, just when he’s about to kill the guy, he sees the light. But this is film noir, so the guy turns up dead anyway and now Basehart’s clever plan leads the cops right back to him. It’s a neat set-up for classic noir, but M-G-M was the wrong studio for such nasty doings so we get corny narrative hints from the investigating cop (Barry Sullivan) and even Cyd Charisse, in a rare non-musical role, loyal & loving as the good girl. At least, megger John Berry moves things along and there’s a jazzy score from a 20 yr old Andre Previn, but you can make a better noir in your head as you watch this one. (How ‘bout we start the film when the cops arrest Basehart and then go to flashback. Hey, what’s a noir without a flashback?) Try CRIME WAVE/’54 to see how much more you can get out of this sort of thing.

CHARLIE CHAN IN SHANGHAI (1936)

This entry in the long-running series gets bonus points for getting Warner Oland’s Charlie Chan to sing a traditional diatonic Chinese tune (w/ English lyrics) and even to speak a bit of Mandarin. Add in a murder mystery that’s twistier than usual (diplomats, opium smuggling, crooked cops) and some physical action for Lee Chan (the endearing & spirited Key Luke as Chan’s #1 Son) and you should have the makings for top-tier Chan. Alas, under the inert megging of James Tinling who’s also responsible for the sole weak link in the superior MR. MOTO series, the story never kicks into gear. Even solid supporting players like Halliwell Hobbes & Russell Hicks just walk thru their parts as if they were still rehearsing. But check out a true oddity on the DVD’s Extras: A handsome print of a recast Spanish language version of the long lost CHARLIE CHAN CARRIES ON/’31; Spanish title-ERAN TRECE. Chan shows up very late in this one, so you may want to zoom ahead just to see how the great detective fares in Spanish.