NOT AS A STRANGER (1955)

After producing over a dozen films for other directors, all with running times ranging from 80 to 120 minutes, Stanley Kramer allowed a self-indulgent 2 hours 15 minutes for his own directing debut, dropping signature social issues & controversies for glossy medical soap opera. He’d make more than a dozen films over the next three decades, never growing much more proficient behind the camera, while here the pulpy nature of the material, and a lack of Krameresque pretentiousness, make the gaucheries less problematic than on later, more ‘prestigious’ work. (Excluding a rip-snorting visual parallel between rutting horses and manly infidelity. Yikes!) Robert Mitchum is the gifted, but cash poor intern who marries dowdy Olivia de Havilland more for money than for love. She, on the other hand, is head over heels, done up in an unbecoming blonde wig (she’s Swedish don’tcha know) which unfortunately comes off gray in b&w. Frank Sinatra makes do as BFF and mediocre doctor and there’s a big impressive cast trying to turn clichés into characters (Broderick Crawford, Charles Bickford, Lee Marvin, Gloria Grahame, Jesse White, Myron McCormick, Lon Chaney), a typical Kramer all-star gambit. He also leaves his mark by getting a rare forgettable job out of lensing great Franz Planer. Modestly involving in its way, there’s a fun moment with wonderful Henry Morgan stuffing herring into his mouth and the first commercial cinema look at a real live beating human heart! Shot, of course, like a porn director moving us into the action. Oh, Stanley!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Does time stand still in this pic? Early on, Mitchum & de Havilland go to see THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA made the year before in 1954. But there’s at least five years of events still to play out. Have we drifted into the future? Just the sort of SNAFU producer Kramer should have brought to the attention of director Kramer!

THE CINCINNATI KID (1965)

The game is Stud Poker rather than Pool, but in most ways THE CINCINNATI KID is THE HUSTLER-Lite. And maybe all the better for it, dropping the heavy-lifting & gravitas. With Steve McQueen & Edward G. Robinson in for Paul Newman & Jackie Gleason as New Kid on the Block out to beat the Smooth Past-Master, the charisma factor is (if anything) possibly stronger, with a storyline that doesn’t mythologize so strenuously.* Typical of the mid-‘60s, period detail never quite convinces as the 1930s: hair, makeup & attitude the main culprits. But the St. Louis locations & atmosphere are nicely caught by lenser Philip Lathrop, especially exteriors, and it’s very well dialogued & structured by scripters Ring Lardner Jr. & Terry Southern, camouflaging a pretty small story. (Though does Ann-Margret really have to snack on an apple so we know she’s temptation personified? Bad girl to loyal Tuesday Weld.) Most of all, this is the first film where you can feel director Norman Jewison starting to show some real personality along with steady control. So much so that the big climax can still make you jump even if you know what’s coming.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *A third main character, George C. Scott’s controlling manager, is changed into Rip Torn’s far more conventional rich loser out for revenge.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above THE HUSTLER.

MYSTERIOUS INTRUDER (1946)

Richard Dix returns for the fifth in Columbia Picture’s low-budget THE WHISTLER series, derived from the anthology radio show. In this one, he’s a shady Private Investigator and seems to be having a fine old time of it, playing an unexpectedly subversive creep in his usual gentlemanly manner. Neat. Hired by an elderly record shop owner to find a missing young woman, heir to a possible fortune, he’s soon unraveling a couple of murders and on the hunt for the mysterious inheritance. William Castle offers straightforward direction, long before his schlockmeister heyday of horror gimmicks in the ‘50s & ‘60 (THE TINGLER; MR. SARDONICUS), though can’t quite keep the plot revelations from feeling arbitrary. Still, with help from a decent cast for this sort of thing (Regis Toomey; Mike Mazurki; Barton MacLane), Philip Tannura’s through-a-glass-darkly lensing and a no-nonsense one-hour running time, it gets the job done.

DOUBLE-BILL: A great silent star (THE TEN COMMANDMENTS/’23; REDSKIN/’29), Dix rarely found his old form in sound films. Probably best in THE LOST SQUADRON/’32. (see all three below)

THE NORTH STAR (1943)

Even as setup for the tragic events to come, Lillian Hellman’s it-takes-a-Ukrainian-village drama, made at the height of WWII cooperation between Allied Forces & ‘Uncle’ Joe Stalin’s Russia lays on the Happy Valley ideal of rural Soviet life, where children grow up straight & the songs are diatonic, impasto thick. Off for a summer hike all the way to Kiev, a group of high school students suddenly find themselves in the thick of the first wave of Nazi invaders by land and air. They need to either get back home or help a truckload of munitions reach partisans in the woods, awaiting their chance to attack. Political melodrama, with speeches embroidered with glorious patriotic drivel, but the drive & horror of wartime emergency comes thru in up-front acting (Anne Baxter, Farley Granger, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston), and in alarming turns from Erich von Stroheim’s civilized blood-draining vampire doctor and Walter Brennan (later an enthusiastic John Bircher) as a cuddly Communist local character. Lots of fodder for later Commie Witch Hunts in here, yet the film was reedited down in ‘57 to become the generic Anti-Communist war film ARMORED ATTACK!

DOUBLE-BILL: Lillian Hellman offered a more characteristic (and personal) response to the war effort in her play WATCH ON THE RHINE, also filmed in 1943, awkwardly directed, but often very effective; while this film’s director Lewis Milestone covered similar events to better fashion in EDGE OF DARKNESS, also out in ‘43. (both covered below)

THE PHANTOM PRESIDENT (1932)

After a recent series of B’way flops in various capacities (author/producer/director/ star), Hollywood finally enticed a demoralized, if never humbled, George M. Cohan into his Talkie debut. It also flopped (and a low budget indie two years later was apparently destroyed on Cohan’s instructions), but for anyone looking for clues to the charm & dynamism of James Cagney’s YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, this is all we have of this American institution. It’s both indispensable and a major disappointment. Cohan doubles as a dull businessman put up for president by a quartet of plutocrats, and as charismatic lookalike Medicine Show barker (WARNING: BlackFace Alert!!) paid hush-money to secretly front for him, stumping the hustings before bowing out at the White House doors. With Claudette Colbert as confused girlfriend and Jimmy Durante making a pest of himself as his confused tent show partner. You can see how this might have worked in a political convention sequence, a sung-through affair by Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart (loathing their first go as Hollywood tunesmiths), with Hawaiian natives ‘Aloha-ing’; a top-hatted All-Black New York delegation; coal miners from Pennsylvania, et al.); plus Cohan delivering promises in song-and-dance. Little else lands as intended. Short & peculiar, the film may not bore, but consistently misses the easy political target it aims at.

DOUBLE-BILL/READ ALL ABOUT IT: Cohan, who never had another success on his own stuff, returned to form as actor in Eugene O’Neill’s AH, WILDERNESS (filmed 1935 by Clarence Brown with Lionel Barrymore in Cohan’s spot) and in Rodgers & Hart’s FDR satire I’D RATHER BE RIGHT. (Cohan's intro number from it opens YANKEE DOODLE DANDY.) Rodgers tells the unhappy tale of working (twice) with Cohan in his auto-bio MUSICAL STAGES.

THE MUDLARK (1950)

Hollywood Anglophilia runs alarming high in this wee bit of fancy about a guttersnipe of an orphan boy, a Thames river-rat scavenger, who takes it into his head to go off to visit the Queen. Victoria that is, wallowing in Windsor Castle 15 years after Prince Albert’s death. Made in England with Hollywood talent on top (scripter, star & director/Nunnally Johnson, Irene Dunne, Jean Negulesco), it grows on you as it goes along, largely because of Alec Guinness’s remarkable Benjamin Disraeli, by turns warm, deferent & acerbic. Dunning Dunne’s Victoria to rejoin the living, he tops all other Disraelis on film from George Arliss to John Gielgud (and Ian McShane on video tape). Climaxing in a speech to Parliament on a progressive program Victoria herself has championed, pulled off in an astonishing uninterrupted half-reel single shot that Negulesco managed to keep 20th/Fox chief Darryl Zanuck & his editors from disrupting with reaction shot inserts. Dunne is an unlikely Queen, but you adjust; Finlay Currie a rather massive Mr. John Brown, the other motivator in getting the Queen back to her self*; and Andrew Ray a pleasingly unpolished juvenile playing out borrowed bits from OLIVER TWIST and PYGMALION. A castle romance between classes (soldier & Lady’s maid) lets Johnson tweak British snobbery for Stateside audiences, but a celebratory tone largely rules the waves in this one. An indulgence, but a good one, handsomely shot by Georges Périnal and neatly scored in Elgarian fashion by William Alwyn.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Judy Dench & Billy Connolly cover similar ground from an entirely different angle in MRS. BROWN/’97.

MISSING WITNESSES (1937)

This Warner Bros. programmer, from ‘King of the Bs’ producer Bryan Foy, gets off to a good start (snappy direction from William Clemens, Sid Hickox’s stylish lensing and newspaper headlines doing half the storytelling*) as a protection racket roughs up a restaurateur & his establishment just as Detective Dick Purcell walks by. But a clean arrest goes for nought when the owner clams up in court, afraid to testify against the thugs, no doubt threatened by some unknown Mr. Big. Enter John Litel, commissioned by the Governor to get to the bottom of things by discovering who’s on top, and hiring Purcell as one of his agents. It’s all downhill from there, as Purcell’s tough guy cop, more moxie than brains, hasn’t the charm or charisma to pull off his minor-league James Cagney routine and Litel is no Edward G. Robinson as flinty fatherly mentor. The girl in the case, debuting Virginia Dale, a secretary with inside info on Mr. Big and Purcell’s on/off romantic interest, shows promise, but her part is so inconsistently written, she can’t always connect. And the film peters out in a series of quick/confused explanations and dud comic beats.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: *Foy might just as well have been called ‘King of Newspaper Headlines’ as his reliance on them for narrative shorthand was something of an inside Hollywood joke. See Rudy Behlmer’s book of studio memos INSIDE WARNER BROTHERS for details.

THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER (1938)

Independent producer David O. Selznick must have been using this Mark Twain adaptation as run-up to next year’s GONE WITH THE WIND mega-pic: similar era, TechniColor; Max Steiner score; antebellum South atmosphere; and nearly the same production staff, including über designer William Cameron Menzies, stretching artistic muscle on the impressive Cave Sequence. Considering its disappointing cast of kids (Tommy Kelly’s Tom Sawyer particularly weak), there’s really not much wrong with it. Yet it’s almost entirely unsatisfying, missing the rhythm of life on the Mississippi and substituting Hollywood whimsy for Twain’s tone of naughty delight when things go wrong only to turn out right; with the famous incidents tucked in rather than developed. Not that other attempts have fared much better, including one from 1930 quickly followed by the same cast’s HUCKLEBERRY FINN/’31 under this film’s director Norman Taurog. (Something of a kid specialist, his big hit this year was M-G-M’s maudlin BOYS TOWN.) But what makes this still worth a look is the delicate use of early TechniColor by cinematographer James Wong Howe, taking advantage of a production fluke that had him filming on sets designed for a scuttled b&w shoot, lending an earth-toned backdrop to the colorful costumes while he darkened coverage as much as possible, especially in the truly frightening cave sequence. (So good, even the acting improves.) Stellar work that naturally led to Howe being blackballed by TechniColor for over a decade.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The restored picture element in the Kino Lorber edition remains uneven, with too many out-of-register 3-Strip TechniColor shots creating a halo-effect. But when it’s good (and thankfully most of it is), it’s very good.

JAMAICA INN (1939)

With a break between his last British Gaumont pic (THE LADY VANISHES/’38) and his first for David O. Selznick in Hollywood (REBECCA/’40), Alfred Hitchcock signed on to this Erich Pommer/ Charles Laughton production, his last job as hired-hand, and instantly regretted it. A big period piece about cutthroat ‘shipwreckers’ and their secret Lord Advisor/Protector (Laughton in a role beefed up from the Daphne Du Maurier novel), the intractable script was rewritten, but hardly fixed. Laughton, after much trouble, came up with a lulu of a makeup & character, looking like a grounded Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon, he paws debuting co-star Maureen O’Hara and ogles undercover law officer Robert Newton, out to smash the gang of profiteers (Emlyn Williams; Leslie Banks). Loaded with inanities & absurdities, the tone feels ‘off’ right from the start. Yet, the film catches on as it goes along, with special effect miniatures & trick camera shots that are fun to watch in spite of (or because?) looking like the toys they are, lending the production the kick of a jolly puppet show. Characterizations out of a puppet show, too. After decades of subfusc editions, it looks incredibly handsome (Harry Stradling lensed) in a restoration out on Cohen Media that lets you revel in the ludicrous doings.

DOUBLE-BILL: Laughton & O’Hara made good later that year in Hollywood, sumptuous & superb in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME.