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.