THE BIG HEAT (1953)

After a half decade of uneven work, Fritz Lang regained his form one last time on this classic film noir. Basically a police procedural, it loosens up the usual structure by forcing Glenn Ford to work outside the system as an ex-detective. And it may be Ford’s position as rogue cop that allows the film to go as far it does, with meticulous set pieces from Lang that still resonate with violent shocks. Ford, an honest cop in a town drowning in systemic graft, is given a personal reason to bring down the corruption, but he still must put a measure of trust in Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin’s amoral moll, if he wants to pull it off. As Mr Big, the smoothy pulling the strings, Alexander Scourby is no DR. MABUSE, Lang’s infamous über-villain from his UFA glory days. But with the focus on Ford’s avenging good guy, the film successfully drops Lang’s German-Expressionist-in-Exile mode for something closer to Hollywood norm. Not only in the rhythm and editing, but in iconic perfs from Ford, Grahame, Marvin . . . and a pot of boiling coffee.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: So, why wasn’t Lang able to repeat this success? His next film, again with Ford & Grahame, HUMAN DESIRE/’54, is a pale redo of Jean Renoir’s LE BÊTE HUMAINE/’38. Literally so, as Columbia Pictures had started compressing their b&w grey scale. (Marty Scorsese opines that tv production standards had a lot to do with this, but the subject hasn’t been properly investigated.) Then came the WideScreen revolution & CinemaScope, a frame ratio Lang thought fit only for snakes. Even Patrick McGilligan, in his fine bio, FRITZ LANG: THE NATURE OF THE BEAST, has trouble figuring this out.

BUREAU OF MISSING PERSONS (1933)

Top-billed Bette Davis can’t do much to fix this little programmer from Warners, the plot grows progressively nutty, but she seems to be having a darn good time under Roy Del Ruth’s spirited helming. Lewis Stone, on an inexplicable loan-out from M-G-M, is the calming head of NYC’s Missing Persons’ Bureau, a wise old hand happy to bend ethics into a pretzel to rejoin families & locate bodies. And there’s an office full of eccentrics to help him out, Allen Jenkins, Ruth Donnelly, Hugh Herbert, all good company. If only Pat O’Brien, a brawler fresh from Robbery, would get with the program. Enter Bette Davis. She says she’s hunting her missing hubby, but events prove otherwise . . .to put it mildly. Her story may be one whopper after another, but O’Brien’s gone love blind and falls for every one of them. Even when Davis suddenly goes from blonde to brunette in a matter of minutes for the last scene.

DOUBLE-BILL: With a few cast holdovers (Davis, Jenkins, Alan Dinehart) and similar story elements, Warners brought in their A-Team (James Cagney, director Michael Curtiz) for another whack at this idea. Transformed into JIMMY THE GENT/’34, it’s a near classic.

THE ROAD TO GLORY (1936)

You don’t expect a big WWI film from a pantheon director like Howard Hawks to go missing. At least, not without good reason . . . like maybe it’s a stinker. Turns out, this is no stinker, but it does have plenty of reasons to have gone missing. Apparently, Darryl Zanuck @ 20th/Fox got Stateside distribution/remake rights to Raymond Bernard’s French WWI epic, WOODEN CROSSES/’31*, but mainly for it’s striking war footage. Enter Howard Hawks, charged with finding a story to match the cannibalized action stuff. Obviously, the general idea of men funneled to the front stayed in place, along with a magnificent set piece about the Germans laying a mine by tunneling under the French trenches. But the basic plot elements were pinched from two earlier Hawks war films: THE DAWN PATROL/’30 (flight commander must send waves of replacement off to die) and TODAY WE LIVE/’33 (girl makes rivals out of two war buds). It’s a handsome production, well structured and excitingly paced, even without any background music till the (literal) melodramatic finale. Yet the thing just sits there, refusing to come to life. Love interest June Lang is part of the problem, a sad-eyed nurse who likes Warner Baxter’s Captain, but loves Fredric March’s Lieutenant, she barely registers. But it’d still work if only the men in the case, Baxter & March (both excellent in their way), got their ‘bromance’ off the ground. The classic Hawks love story between two men (the phrase is his) always carried a homoerotic tinge. It’s perfectly balanced between John Wayne & Monty Clift in RED RIVER/’48; uncomfortably overheated between Dewey Martin & Kirk Douglas in THE BIG SKY/’52; and just plain missing between Baxter & March on this one. Only Gregory Ratoff, as the pipe-smoking Sergeant, captures the distinctive Hawksian tone . . . and he’s the comic relief!

DOUBLE-BILL: *Raymond Bernard is known Stateside largely for his 5-hour LES MISÉRABLES/’33, but WOODEN CROSSES/’31 is the better work. Both are out on Criterion DVD.

HOUSEBOAT (1958)

This painfully formulaic domestic comedy stars Cary Grant as an absentee widower trying to reconnect with his three kids and Sophia Loren as the directionless daughter of a famous Italian conductor who accidentally falls into his life incognito as a housekeeper/nanny who makes everything better. (What is this, MARY POPPINS/’64?) Writer/director Melville Shavelson, a Bob Hope/Danny Kaye specialist who really should have known better, is unable to move things along without making everyone behave in an idiotic manner we’re supposed to find both hilarious & adorable. (Perhaps they did at the time. The film was very successful and even got an Oscar® nom. for best Original Story.) Visually, things are just as bad with huge chunks of exposition played in front of dead process shots and on airless soundstages. Grant, who’d just lost Loren to her future husband Carlo Ponti, seems less out-of-touch dad than bewildered discard. And Loren, who’s does well with the kiddies, looks unaccountably drab, made up as she were still lip-synching to Renata Tebaldi’s voice in AIDA/’53. (Someone must have noticed since she was given an entirely new, lighter look for the big climatic dance sequence where she suddenly looks like her fabulous self.) Grant happily returned to form on his next, NORTH BY NORTHWEST/’59 while Loren continued her up & down ways with English language pics, though never again let a cinematographer mismanage her look as the usually gifted Ray June did in what turned out to be his final film.

DOUBLE-BILL: Shavelson & Loren reunited, with Clark Gable in for Grant, to somewhat better effect on IT STARTED IN NAPLES/’60.

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE (1969)

Muriel Sparks’ fictionalized personal history about a memorably eccentric middle-school teacher at a conservative all-girls school in Scotland was tidied-up into a well-made-up play by Jay Presson Allen, then pressed like a flower in Ronald Neame’s careful film adaptation. Even ‘opened up’ for the camera, the first half can’t slough off the play’s predigested tone of over-simplified psychological motivations, but about an hour in, the sheer level of acting rises to such heights it easily blots out all reservations. Particularly so when Maggie Smith’s Brodie flares up in self-defense against Celia Johnson’s antagonistic superintendent. Smith really pulls out the stops, refusing to play down dangerous/unattractive elements in a character all too easily sentimentalized & glamorized into a sort of cuddly Auntie Mame positive life force. It’s a tremendous gift for the rest of the cast who may not win our sympathy or pull out a droll comeback line, but who do get a chance to hold their own against the fascinating character tsunami of Smith’s Brodie.

DOUBLE-BILL/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Robert Stevens, married to Maggie Smith at the time, gives a swaggering perf as the school’s randy art teacher. He looked headed for a major film career after this, but his follow up, Billy Wilder’s resounding flop THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES/’70, put a quick kabosh on international stardom. It also gave us a Holmes for the ages.

CLOUD ATLAS (2012)

The ‘fanboys’ who got hooked on THE MATRIX Trilogy/’99;’03 stayed away in droves from this meta-physical mash-up. It’s a love-and-war-thru-the-ages saga, with multiple, rhyming story lines scrambled up mix-master fashion. The obvious reference points are D. W. Griffith’s INTOLERANCE/’16 and Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS/’27*, but Andy & Lana Wachowski, along with collaborator Tom Tykwer, cast a very wide net. The basic idea dumps Tom Hanks ‘out of the cradle, endlessly rocking’ and into six fables that span the ages (but who’s counting?), hiding him in plain sight behind make-up, prosthetics & funny accents, likely discards from Tim Conway’s wardrobe on the old Carol Burnett Show. The big, big cast all chime in, playing recognizably in a main role, then heavily-disguised for cameos. (Susan Sarandon gets the best nose, a real whopper.) The hop, skip & jump narrative lines in the first half are pretty much impossible to navigate without a scorecard or multiple viewings (for the masochist crowd), all as joyless, crude & indecipherable as the Second & Third parts of THE MATRIX. Those who hang in here are rewarded with a visual fugue of cross-cutting ride-to-the-rescue finales (truly right out of INTOLERANCE), fun in a corny sort of way whether comic, tragic, sacrificial or heroic. But no amount of CGI can camouflage the lousy action staging or give Jim Sturgess the Martial Arts grace Keanu Reeves mustered up to sell this stuff back in his MATRIX days.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: *Might as well take the bait and grab INTOLERANCE (a superb new Blu-Ray from Cohen Media will hopefully show on DVD) and the much discussed, ‘truly complete’ METROPOLIS, out on KINO. Both run a bit shy of 3 hours . . . just like CLOUD ATLAS. Both were major flops in their day . . . just like CLOUD ATLAS. Both found their reps steadily growing to classic status over the decades . . . just like . . . er . .  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/intolerance-loves-struggle-through-ages.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/02/metropolis-1927.html

DARE MO SHIRANAI / NOBODY KNOWS (2004)

Japanese writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda goes for High Concept ideas, even at the risk of putting himself in a dramatic straitjacket. His latest (LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON/’13) uses that oldest of standbys: Switched-at-Birth Infants while this earlier film extrapolates from a tru-life tale of four young siblings living secretly on their own after Mom splits for good. The story hints at prostitution as the cause of Mom’s departure, but all we know for sure is that the landlord doesn’t know about the three younger kids; financial resources are dwindling, no one’s in school; and the oldest of the bunch, at 12, is losing his sense of responsibility to fast creeping rebellious puberty. At almost 2 and half hours, Kore-eda gives us too much time to think things thru, so as the tiny social order starts breaking down and the kids begin to stick their noses out of the apartment and bring in friends, the situation stops adding up. And when events take a tragic turn, sense & sympathy pull us out of the emotional involvement he wants to ‘double-down’ on. There’s lots of fine observational stuff in here, and an enchanting perf from Yûya Yagira as the oldest boy. But a couple of last act fumbles (the glowing warmth of camaraderie at a baseball game and a still-frame non-resolution) play with little conviction, as if even writer/director Kore-eda had stopped believing in his script.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Yûya Yagira won Best Actor @ Cannes for this. He’s great, but there’s something not right about giving young kids big acting awards, non?

COMMANDOS STRIKE AT DAWN (1942)

While you can still feel how the rush to get this topical wartime pic into movies houses left it with some unresolved story construction problems and pinch-penny production issues, any loss in polish is easily made up for in urgency. With John Farrow’s straight-forward helming & Irwin Shaw’s plain-spoken script, Paul Muni radiates calm decency & resolve as a Norwegian widower watching in quiet despair as his small fishing town is first occupied, then brutalized by the Nazis. On the run after organizing the local resistance, Muni stumbles upon a secret airbase nearing completion and is forced to risk sailing past the Nazi guns to reach contacts in Britain. There would be many films like this made as the war progressed (even more after it ended), but this early entry remains effective & moving, largely because its random casualties prove unwilling to cheat death.

DOUBLE-BILL: Warner Bros. brought a more stylized, elaborate, even fantastic note, plus an all-star cast (Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Walter Huston, Judith Anderson), to a similar Norwegian resistance story in EDGE OF DARKNESS/’43 with Lewis Milestone helming.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Listen up for an early bit from Lloyd Bridges as a lost (and unlucky) Nazi driver. And keep your eyes open to see Lillian Gish in her modest return to Hollywood after a decade on the B'way stage.

KAWAITA HANA / PALE FLOWER (1964)

Masahiro Shinoda’s quotidian yakuza story is an uncompromised beauty. Ryô Ikebe, stoic perfection as a mid-level gangster, comes out of prison to find his old gang has merged with their long time rival. So, what was the point of the murder he got sent up for? And how long before a new rival organization will have to be dealt with? No wonder he’s in an existential funk, drinking, gambling and pushing his loyal girlfriend into marriage with a respectable office worker. Besides, he’s too busy obsessing over a high-priced call girl he’s run into at the illegal gambling dens. With the measured hauteur of a fashion model, this beauty lives without a past or a future, sampling whatever thrills she can find thru wild gambling binges, fast cars, drugs and, when suggested by Ikebe, riding shotgun for a kingpin’s assassination. Shinoda brings a combination of restraint, control and fitful excitement to his gorgeous b&w CinemaSc0pe frame, and there’s a fine dissonant score by the great Tôru Takemitsu that switches to Bach (sung in English, possibly by Janet Baker) for the yakuza’s final hit. Inexplicably unknown Stateside, the film is a nihilistic near masterpiece.

DOUBLE-BILL: Stateside, Shinoda’s best known film is probably the arrestingly titled, highly stylized DOUBLE SUICIDE/’69, but PALE FLOWER makes a far better introduction.