A STOLEN FACE (1952)

This little thriller from HAMMER FILMS, made in the years before their signature horror pics, has lots of good ideas in it . . . all easily found in better movies. The main lift is from A WOMAN’S FACE/’41, a Joan Crawford remake of a Swedish Ingrid Bergman film, the one about a badly scarred woman whose criminal life is tied to her maimed features. Might a spot of plastic surgery ‘cure’ her inside and out? Here, Paul Henreid plays the doctor and Lizabeth Scott’s the bad-seed character. That is, it’s Lizabeth Scott in the part after the surgery. That’s because Henreid falls hard for the real Lizabeth Scott character, a concert pianist he can’t have since she’s already engaged. And when you can’t possess the woman you love, you surgically alter a prison patient to look just like her. Of course! Too bad she’s the same bad seed under that new face. He’ll just have to teach this lowlife criminal how to act like a lady. That’s when the original Scott returns on the scene, having dumped her fiancé! What’s a successful plastic surgeon to do? Murder his failed experiment? I count major plot borrowings from A STOLEN LIFE/’46, VERTIGO/’58, EYES WITHOUT A FACE/’60; PYGMALION/’38 and AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY/’31; in addition to A WOMAN’S FACE. Some of these films were already made, some hadn’t yet been thought of, but all are improvements. Too bad the script is so clumsy & silly since director Terence Fisher manages a pretty slick look under the circumstances and the actors aren’t phoning it in. Noir babe Lizabeth Scott even looks fresh & happy, quite a change from her steamy/recently-abused default mode.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: All the pics referenced above are well worth watching. Try AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, Josef von Sternberg’s lesser-known take on the Dreiser classic that also became George Steven’s A PLACE IN THE SUN/’51.

SAMSON AND DELILAH (1949)

Cecil B. DeMille ended the 1940s, his most ludicrous decade, with this ridiculously popular, not to say ridiculous, Biblical number. Shot largely on airless soundstage sets, to match the clunky airless dialogue, the film spends most of its energy trying to redeem Hedy Lamarr’s Delilah from deepest villainy. But in the recent, whoppingly bright DVD restoration, Hedy looks so damn pleased to be back on an A-list movie project, the real redemption isn’t for her character, but for her career. (She’s like a slightly less deluded Norma Desmond in a return to the limelight nearly as brief.) Victor Mature’s Samson, as beefy & thick of neck as a linebacker in the off-season, got scant help from his director after he nixed wrestling with a live lion. The stuffed replacement DeMille gave him is infamous in Hollywood, but then, the rest of the action staging is just as weak. Flat as this all is, and with acting straight out of a local bible pageant, DeMille’s storytelling instincts remain in place and he manages to carry you along, even if you giggle on the way there. Things liven up for the third act, with a couple of darkly lit scenes for a blinded Samson at the grindstone to add some much needed vivant to the tableaux before we head off for that big temple finish. It’s all something of a trial run for THE TEN COMMANDMENTS/’56, with many a similar role & situation, except everyone keeps saying ‘Oh, Samson, Samson’ instead of ‘Oh, Moses, Moses.'

DOUBLE-BILL: As the Saran of Gaza, a King who can never possess Delilah’s love as Samson does, George Sanders has the role Yul Brynner would get in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS/’56. But Sanders, who’s the best thing in here, would reprise nearly the same role in IVANHOE/’52, now pining for a young Elizabeth Taylor.

NO (2012)

Pablo Larrian’s all but irresistible film, from Antonio Skármeta’s play, tells the unlikely, fact-inspired story of how a young advertising executive (an indispensable Gael García Bernal) crafted slogans & an upbeat commercial campaign to win the 1988 plebiscite, ending the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. With its light, populist touch & forward-thinking message (‘Happiness Is Coming!), the campaign’s biggest obstacle may have been the clueless coalition of Leftist political parties who brought Bernal in as consultant. Fortunately for Chile, the Right was even more humorless and out of touch with the fast-changing South American Zeitgeist. More a great subject than a great film, Larrain tries to liven up a story we’re two-steps ahead of by using a period-based Cinema Verité visual style with a near Academy Ratio frame, lots of ‘hot’ light camera diffusion and haloed color registration artifacts. It helps him incorporate archival footage (make that ‘archival video’), but too often the events play out on the surface, artful applique that avoids as much as it reveals. Even the threats by thuggish authority figures & corrupt police, accurate though they undoubted are, don’t vibrate with the lasting effects they must have had at the time. And while enough comes thru to make for a satisfying story arc, it leaves the relationship between Bernal’s left-leaning creative idealist and Alfredo Castro as his right-leaning realist boss as the only fully fleshed out relationship in the film.

THE NARROW MARGIN (1952)

Smart and economical, this taut film noir is a classic example of the form.  Boasting a gloss & technical finish beyond its modest budget, it brings out tour de force work from Richard Fleischer, Earl Felton & George Diskant, helming, scripting & lensing with imagination & daring.  The plot mechanics are pretty straightforward; tough-guy detective Charles McGraw has to deliver mob widow Marie Windsor to L.A., by train from Chicago, to testify before a Grand Jury . . . and see that they don’t get rubbed out first.   But when hit men finger the wrong lady on the train, a well-scrubbed innocent (Jacqueline White) traveling with her kid, McGraw’s suddenly got two dames to protect.   Fleischer was probably at his best on smaller pics, willing to try an odd lens (look at an intimate little scene at a station stop midway thru), nifty hand-held stuff down train corridors, even shifting POV action shots in a close-up fight.   (Hey! I just got kicked by a guy’s shoe . . . and I’m sitting in the audience!)   And there’s swell use of window-framed shots that either double the action on a second plane or use the glass surface as revealing ad-hoc mirrors.  All done on the run, embedded in the action without making a big artistic fuss over it. Plus, one of the great ‘reveals’ in film history.  And we get out in a quick 72 minutes.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Auteur-in-his-own-mind Peter Hyams added stars (Gene Hackman, Anne Archer) and half an hour’s running time in a 1990 remake that has its fans.  (Not seen here.)

KAGIRINAKI HODO / STREET WITHOUT END (1934)

HE waits anxiously at a prearranged location. (He’s going to propose.) SHE is rushing to meet him. (And planning to say yes.) But she’s hit by a car on the way there and whisked off to hospital. Leo McCarey’s LOVE AFFAIR/’39, or his redo AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER/’57? Nope, it’s a late silent from Japanese director Mikio Naruse; and the missed rendezvous isn’t the climax of Act Two, but a stepping off point for the main plot which winds up being more of a Douglas Sirk melodramatic tragedy than comic-tinged romance. Here, the girl’s a waitress in a pancake joint, and the initial boyfriend drifts off from the story after he’s stood up, replaced by the careless driver who turns out to be the rich scion of a well-placed family. He falls for the quiet, charmer he injured, but Mom & his horrid sister refuse to accept this working class girl who doesn’t know how to how to treat the house servants or even how to dress. Naruse probably over-stuffs his film with sub-plots, some quite fun like the starving artist neighbor, others puerile women’s magazine fodder like a proffered movie contract, a dramatic digression that goes nowhere. But the film quickly hooks you, in spite of some missing footage, wrapping up with fatalistic grace stunningly handled by Naruse with some unexpected vigorous editing. A rare treat, one of a Criterion trio of silent era Naruse.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: In Japan, silent films were often shown with a live narrator/storyteller, a Benshi, many popular enough to have their own following. (Akira Kurosawa’s brother was a well-known one.) And it must have figured into why silent film lasted a few extra years over there. (Why hasn't some company tried to recreate the practice on a DVD's alternate audio track?) But note that when Naruse sends his lovers to the movies, they go to see Lubitsch’s wonderful early Talkie Musical THE SMILING LIEUTENANT/’31, presumably with sound.

DOUBLE-BILL: F. W. Murnau’s unfathomably great, unaccountably forgotten CITY GIRL/’30, another late silent, also takes a coffee shop girl (and what a coffee shop!) away from the workplace with an unexpected marriage, but to a farm boy. (Avoid all Public Domain prints; look for the MURNAU @ FOX box set.)

NEW ORLEANS UNCENSORED

Before earning cult notoriety for horror/exploitation pics like MACABRE/’58 and THE TINGLER/’59, William Castle ground out programmers like this pseudo ripped-from-the-headlines drama, released thru Columbia Pictures. Here, he fritters away some decent dramatic possibilities in setting (New Orleans warehouse district & docks) & subject matter (waterfront corruption) borrowed from a couple of famous Elia Kazan pics (PANIC IN THE STREETS/’50; ON THE WATERFRONT/’54). Castle megs in a flat visual style, but tries to compensate by letting his cast ham things up, the worst of both worlds. Rarely have emotion & plot twists been quite so baldly ‘indicated.’ (Actually, the best acting comes from some stiff, real-life city officials, stunt cast for verisimilitude; along with background extras seen in a few ‘stolen’ pick-up shots.) The basic plot & structure are perfectly workable (out-of-towner exposes dockside pilfering at his own risk after a fast rise inside the union), and there’s even a romantic misstep by the lead that raises some interesting possibilities. Not that anyone bothers to follow up on them. After a while, assuming you’re still watching, you can amuse yourself imagining what some B-list ace like Phil Karlson or Don Siegel, both gigging @ Columbia around this time, might have done with this set up and a chance to shoot some action scenes in real New Orleans locations.*

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *As comparison, check out what Karlson does with Reno, Nevada even in a punk film like 5 AGAINST THE HOUSE/’55, or Siegel working the streets of San Francisco and already showing stellar form in THE LINEUP/’58.

DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012)

Quentin Tarantino’s tricked-up interracial buddy pic splits unevenly into two halves. First up is a neatly trimmed one-hour pre-Civil War fable about a ruthless, if cultivated bounty-hunter (Christopher Waltz) who frees black slave Jamie Foxx to help him track his latest quarry. And while the levels of violence & gore now hit modern ‘R-Rated’ limits, the b&w buddy/buddy Zeitgeist bar has seen little movement since the days of Burt Lancaster & Ossie Davis in THE SCALPHUNTERS/’68. And it’s still audience pleasing stuff. But once Leonardo DiCaprio shows up as a sadistic ‘mandingo’ plantation owner in Part Two, the fable curdles into pastiche Spaghetti Western. (It's also twice as long.) As Foxx & Waltz head South to rescue Foxx’s wife, splattery violence, circumlocutionary flurries of non-dazzling dialogue & badass behavior take the place of real story-telling, a big comedown from the narrative force Tarantino once flaunted in PULP FICTION/’94 and JACKIE BROWN/’97. (Or does more credit belong with Roger Avary & Elmore Leonard on those?) Samuel L. Jackson, as DiCaprio’s wicked house slavey, does himself proud in old-age make-up swiped from Woody Strode in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY/’62, but Waltz pretty much steals the pic. This must have come as quite a surprise to Foxx, usually the center of attention, but here unable to even get anything going with mate Kerry Washington. (So little, you wonder how Jackson figures out their backstory.) Maybe it’s time for Tarantino to stop working up his own stories magpie-style and try another adaptation.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: While many anachronisms are in here on purpose, surely someone could have told QT that ‘panache,’ as Waltz uses it, didn’t acquire its modern meaning of ‘dashing style’ & ‘pizzazz’ until Edmond Rostand recoined it for CYRANO DE BERGERAC in 1897.

STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT (1944)

Anthony Mann spent his galley years helming a lot of low-budget noirs, but this early effort from his start at little Republic Pictures is more mini-California Gothic, with nods toward REBECCA/’40, SUSPICION and a premonition of LAURA/’44, out two months later. William Terry (one of those faceless leads who faded away once the war ended and the boys came home) plays a wounded vet on his way to meet his girl, a pen pal he’s never seen. On the train home, he meets-cute during a train derailment (!) with a very young, very pretty, very female doctor. Then, when he goes to meet his putative girlfriend at her cliff-side mansion, he only finds an over-possessive mother, a timid live-in companion, and a grand portrait of the girl he’d been dreaming of during his recovery. No doubt, you’ve guessed the rest. But while the structure is largely telegraphed in the first two reels, the triple denouement is considerably weirder then expected. Virginia Grey makes brisk work of the good doctor while Helene Thimig &, especially, Edith Barrett, as Mom & servile companion, work up a disturbing vibe of destructive co-dependency. The film is just a programmer, but lenser Reggie Lanning manages a plush look inside the big creepy house, and Mann gets us out in just under an hour. Too bad the music department keeps tossing in comic music cues that kill the mood.

DOUBLE-BILL: Mann’s great unheralded ‘B’ pic is THE TALL TARGET/’51 about a plot to kill Lincoln as he travels to Washington for his inauguration. Why no one has tried for an upgraded remake is a mystery.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: All you IMDb mavens beware!, the little story summary on this title is a big spoiler.

HARLAN: IN THE SHADOW OF JEW SUSS (2008)

Veit Harlan, one of top German directors during WWII, specialized in large-scale historicals with big patriotic themes. His final wartime spectacular, KOLBERG/’45, a Napoleonic-era drama of German sacrifice, was even given precedent over the military during production, with thousands of Nazi soldiers brought in from the front to fill in the ranks for Harlan’s film. (Clips seen here, in restored AGFA-Color, look damn impressive, in an impersonal way.) But this film, along with Harlan’s output before, during & after the war, is rarely shown because of his most (in)famous film, JUD SÜß/’40, a prime example of Nazi cinema anti-Semitism. (The story had actually been filmed in England a few years previously, with Conrad Veidt in a sympathetic portrayal.) Certainly, the clips shown in this documentary look appalling, but who knows how the film would play in hindsight. As it is, Felix Moeller’s documentary is as frustrating as it is fascinating. Harlan, married three times, has a lot of kids & grandkids with contradictory ideas on the man, many coming up with what you might call the Alec Guinness defense, in that Harlan, like Guinness in BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI/’57, may have been forced to make these films (well, that film), but couldn’t help but make a good job of it. The film goes over this idea in laborious detail, but it winds up holding your attention, often thanks to the film clips. And then, one of Harlan’s daughters turns out to be Stanley Kubrick’s widow! She tells us about the film Kubrick contemplated making about what it must have been like to work under the Third Reich.* But what we really need to see are the films. How else to understand the man, his era and his choices?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *There’s always a strong emphasis on the patriotic & propagandistic films made in German during the Nazi-era, but sheer escapism was what the public clamored for. Why not a documentary on these films? Could anything be more naturally Brechtian, more clear on the ‘banality of evil,’ then detailing a hard day carrying out crimes against humanity before having a relaxing evening at the Bijou laughing at a silly/romantic operetta? Maybe that was the film idea Kubrick had in mind?