CROSSROADS (1942)

A typical example of an M-G-M mid-list feature, script not-quite camera-ready, but keeping the studio wheels in motion, the plant humming at near capacity and contract players & staff working; no more, no less.  Well . . . maybe a bit less in this case.  You can almost hear top execs giving out the assignment: ‘Nothing personal, Bill, it’s just business.’   Set back to 1937 France (avoiding war complications), rising French diplomat William Powell is accused out-of-the-blue of hiding an old murder charge under a second identity.  He pleads amnesia, a train accident 20 years back that left him with permanent memory loss, recalling nothing before he was 22.  So . . . maybe the charge is true?   He simply doesn’t know.  Yikes!  With supposed ‘ex’ Claire Trevor testifying in court against him; Basil Rathbone making a surprise appearance that gets him off the hook (then coming back for blackmail cash); and only loyal wife Hedy Lamarr (purely decorative here) steadfast.  Plenty silly; plenty talky; but reasonable fun parsing truth from fiction in the first two acts (are they ‘Gaslighting him or telling the truth?*), the film falls apart from a cascade of third act revelations and Jack Conway’s typically insensitive direction* with everyone going thru the motions, and only Margaret Wycherly’s pathetic putative Maman pulling past the comfort zone.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Hedy, just off a rare good M-G-M role in TORTILLA FLAT/’41, ankled the studio two films later only to find equally slim pickings elsewhere.  Even C.B. DeMille’s hit SAMSON AND DELILAH no help in the long run.  Instead, she and composer George Antheil invented ‘frequency hopping,’ used to control torpedoes in WWII and still being used in your SmartPhone.  No kiddin’!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Note: with director Conway’s idea of French style, other than in courtroom scenes, we might be visiting some Beverly Hills/Bel-Air suburban home monstrosity.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Speaking of 'gaslighting,' two years previously, a fine British film of GASLIGHT, later retitled ANGEL STREET when M-G-M made an even finer 1944 version under the original title for Ingrid Bergman; Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotten & Angela Lansbury; George Cukor directing.

TENKI NO KO / WEATHERING WITH YOU (2019)

After his rapturously received YOUR NAME/’16, this much anticipated next film from Anime-tor Makoto Shinkai is another visual dazzler.  (Those lateral cityscape tracking shots!)  This one about a runaway teen coming upon the bright lights and high costs of Tokyo where the good-natured boy first falls in with a pair of counter-culture publishers; then falls for a ‘sunshine girl’ with a rare, inexplicable gift for sweeping aside Tokyo’s perpetual rainy gloom to literally let the sun shine in as weather turns Biblically bad.  But it's a supernatural talent that comes at a terrible personal cost.  It proves a tricky mix to pull off, with Shinkai’s storytelling abilities unable to rise to the occasion.  (Where’s Richard Wagner and his sacrificial dames when you need him?)  Construction a mess, with blocks of narrative moving forward only by happenstance & coincidence; too many close-call escapes for any one teen protagonist to have; and odd, arbitrary choices on what to explain and what to leave as a mysterious, metaphysic blank.  Shinkai’s favored time shifting stratagems (love and time in conflict thru jumps or generational gaps) replaced and less gripping as a technological cautionary tale for the world.  (Because it's less personal?)  Thoughtful, but unsatisfying, in spite of many felicitous beauties, including a fine score with good Pop tunes from Radwimps.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Runaway boy Hodaka always keeping his copy of CATCHER IN THE RYE nearby.  No wonder he’s annoying as Holden Caulfield.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Perhaps writer/director Shinkai would benefit from less autonomy.  Meanwhile, YOUR NAME.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/kimi-no-na-wa-your-name-2016.html

THE MYSTERY OF MR. X (1934)

M-G-M stuck Robert Montgomery into five films in ‘34, all sounding pretty dreary, including RIPTIDE, a prestige item with Norma Shearer.  But surely this little thriller was the most unnecessary.  A final Hollywood credit for accomplished B’way producer/ director Edgar Selwyn, his eighth since called to the coast in 1929 to make those newfangled Talkies, he never did get the hang of the medium.  On the other hand, hard to imagine anyone doing much with this.*  It starts with a decent enough twist as Montgomery is nearly trapped while stealing a valuable jewel just as a serial killer is offing a London ‘bobby’ right under his nose.  He’s officially in the clear, but even without evidence he’s detective Lewis Stone’s number one suspect.  A situation that makes his new romance with Elizabeth Allan, the already engaged daughter of Scotland Yard man Henry Stephenson, somewhat awkward!  Sure, you could run with that plot, but under Selwyn, not a spark of life in it.  Even cinematographer Oliver T. Marsh, putting out nice atmospheric work on exterior sets, is trapped by Selwyn’s laisser-faire point-and-shoot drawing room interiors.  Desperate to show some range beyond tuxedo’d pleasantries, Montgomery would campaign for a year to play the charming sociopath in Emlyn Waugh’s shocker NIGHT MUST FALL/’37.  Try that, or . . . 

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: * Not that M-G-M couldn’t put together a light, entertaining murder mystery in ‘34, it’s the year THE THIN MAN came out.

THE BAND WAGON (1953)

There are two kinds of ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood movie buffs, those who think SINGING IN THE RAIN is the greatest film musical, and those who go with THE BAND WAGON.  The choice is stark: Team Gene Kelly or Team Fred Astaire?  A compendium of snappy ‘30s Hollywood tunes by Arthur Freed/Nacio Herb Brown or ‘swellegant’ ‘30s B’way sophistication from WAGON’s Arthur Schwartz/Howard Dietz?*  The jokey elan of co-directors Kelly & a young Stanley Donen or Vincente Minnelli’s swank, seamless elegance?  Thank goodness Cyd Charisse is in both, though only a specialty dancer in RAIN.  Also in common, original book & dialogue from Betty Comden & Adolph Green.  And now we’re getting somewhere since RAIN’s spoofy, tourist’s view on Hollywood, as The Silents became The Talkies, makes for delicious satire and kidding-on-the-square romance, but not the depth of view coming from Comden & Green’s insider status after a decade’s work on B’way musicals.  RAIN is fun; WAGON is fundamental.  Hilarious without kidding or getting the cutes, its satire deepened by nuts-and-bolts knowledge and ‘privileged moments.’  Who else could have written a backer’s audition scene for Jack Buchanan’s all-round theatrical genius as he sells a modern version of the Faust story to fat cat backers?*  And who but Minnelli would have staged & edited it like a cubist deconstruction?  (A two year seminar in mise en scène in two minutes.)  WAGON also the only film from legendary B’way designer Oliver Smith, with a painterly look & trompe l’oeil effects like no other film.  That Paul Klee backdrop for Astaire & Buchanan’s soft shoe!  This song one of the series of back-to-back numbers in the final act that make people recall the film as back-loaded even though it’s not.  (Great stuff all the way thru.)  Ending with Minnelli sending up his own big ballet finish in AN AMERICAN IN PARIS with Michael Kidd choreographing a nightmarishly funny Mickey Spillane like detective story.  (Mock tough guy narration written without credit by Alan Jay Lerner.)  Then an unexpectedly moving little coda to send us home thinking maybe we too could sing & dance.  (Heck, didn't even get to mention ‘Triplets.’)

LINK: Astaire’s original 1931 recording of the beer drinking ‘I Love Louisa’ song comes with unexpurgated lyrics and an all-German second verse.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDjXfFS3CY4

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Ironically, a modern musical version of the Faust story was soon to be a big B’way hit, 1955's DAMN YANKEES where a middle-aged fan sells his soul to the Devil and becomes a young baseball sensation.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: * Both songwriting teams coming up with one new number: RAIN’s ‘Make ‘Em Laugh’ (blatantly lifted from Cole Porter’s ‘Be A Clown’ in THE PIRATE) and WAGON’s ‘That’s Entertainment,’ written to order in less than an hour when producer Arthur Freed (ironically RAIN’s songwriter) asked for something just like Irving Berlin’s ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business.’

THE BLACK ROSE (1950)

Double-dipping on semi-literate historical adventure, Darryl F. Zanuck kept Tyrone Power & Orson Welles working on location in Europe, but switched from b&w for the Renaissance Italy of PRINCE OF FOXES to TechniColor 13th Century England (and the Far East) on ROSE.  The earlier pic, directed by Henry King, used more Hollywood tech & talent, while Henry Hathaway used Brits.  To his advantage in cinematographer Jack Cardiff, lighting with painterly style unusual for 20th/Fox at the time*; less so in Richard Addinsell’s unmemorable score.  ROSE does have the stronger supporting cast (Jack Hawkins, Michael Rennie, Finlay Currie, Robert Blake, James Robertson Justice) while both films strike-out on their respective female leads.  Here, Cécile Aubry (a caravan hostage for Power to save & fall for) is less minx than French chipmunk.  (In her big love confession she suddenly looks like Judy Garland, of all people!  Prominent forehead, wide-spaced puppet-like doe-eyes, thick lower lip for chewing on.)  If only the story were half as involving as FOXES.  Alas, no match for Borgia intrigue here as Power’s near-noble Saxon (he’s illegitimate) leaves Norman England in a huff to seek fortune in far off ‘Cathay,’ making like Marco Polo with Jack Hawkins as sidekick.  Welles, jobbing to raise cash for his stunning version of OTHELLO/'52, has a fine time behind ‘Oriental’ makeup and a more ambivalent role than he had in FOXES, this film's natural DOUBLE-BILL.

Another DOUBLE-BILL: Director Hathaway playfully sends up the whole genre in PRINCE VALIANT/’54.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Color & crispness spectacularly raised in HD remastering.

KNIGHT WITHOUT ARMOR (1937)

Taking second-position to Marlene Dietrich (top-billed even in ‘box-office poison’ days*), Robert Donat is chivalric charm itself as an undercover British agent who worms his way into the nascent Red Army only to fall hard for Dietrich’s Old Guard Countess, helping her to reach ‘the Whites’ (and temporary safety) during the murderously chaotic Civil War days of the Russian Revolution.  But between close calls from mass execution on both sides, and skin-of-their-teeth escapes, the constantly changing political terrain (Red to White/White to Red) find the pair in and out of deathly dangers when not completely losing touch with each other.  Can they survive long enough to reach the border?  Atmospherically designed for romance & adventure, with Jacques Feyder helming a rare English-language pic*, the big, handsome production cost Alexander Korda plenty (did it ever make its money back?).  It's also fabulously shot by Harry Stradling with dappled lighting & a stylized studio look that lets Dietrich’s equally stylized glamor shine without looking out of place.  Especially so when she dresses down for getaways.  Silly stuff in its way, the James Hilton novel has nothing of the restrained stiff-upper-lip emotion Donat would mine two years on in GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS, here its all romantic dash & life-or-death decisions for our leads on the lam.  Stoppered sentimental longing left to John Clements in a brief star-making/scene-stealing turn as a soft-hearted revolutionary playing a deadly game of no-way-out with his life while trying to help these sympathetic lovers.  All handled in two intense, memorable scenes.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Dietrich, who repaired her Hollywood bona fides roughhousing in DESTRY RIDES AGAIN/’39, made some swell films while out-of-favor, including the film that came between KNIGHT and DESTRY, Ernst Lubitsch’s much underrated ANGEL/’37.

DOUBLE-BILL: For a serious/absurd look at this period, Miklós Jancsó’s nihilistic war film CSILLAGOSOK, KATONAK / THE RED AND THE WHITE  (1968).  (see below)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Feyder also responsible for insisting that Korda hire composer Miklós Rósza (his first film score) after seeing a ballet in Paris with Rósza’s music.

TOGO (2019)

Grandly played, fact-inspired adventure as a ‘musher’ races his sled dog team thru Alaskan wilds & weather to get diphtheria serum home to Nome during a 1925 outbreak.  Cleverly put together & emotionally effective (even the hokey moments of manipulative comic tropes & heart-tugging puppy flashbacks work like a charm), it also serves as corrective to accepted legend on the dog sled teams who braved blizzards, mountains & half-frozen water to reach a hospital full of sick kids in the nick of time.  Credit went to ‘Balto,’ lead dog of the final leg, whereas the lion’s share of this incomprehensively dangerous journey (with ten-fold the distance of any other team) belonged to dog-of-the-century Togo (old for the job at 12) and team, mushed by strong, weather-beaten Willem Dafoe as the trainer.  The film seems to have skipped regular cinemas for streaming services, a pity as it’s quite spectacular even on the small screen.  Imagine on IMAX.  With director/cinematographer Ericson Core smoothly blending real location footage (and real dogs) with CGI sweetening.  (Only over-playing digital potential during the break-up of a semi-frozen lake.*)  All told, a family film to give family films a good name.

DOUBLE-BILL/INK: The story of BALTO, the dog who got all the credit, was animated in 1995.  (Not seen here.)  For more real dog action, both original & terrifying, try FEHÉR ISTEN (WHITE GOD)/’14 from Hungary.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/12/feher-isten-white-god-2014.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Did Core know this wouldn’t be shown on the big screen?  A third feature after the tepidly received INVINCIBLE/’06 and his rethink fiasco on cult pic POINT BREAK/’15, TOGO seemed designed to lift him past earlier work as A-list action fare cinematographer.  But who got to see it properly?

THE DOORWAY TO HELL (1930)

Hard to mourn the mostly lost Early Talkies (1928 - 1930) of Archie Mayo, about the dullest Warner Bros. A-list megger.*  But you never can tell, as becomes clear watching the fluid, muscular, visually imaginative direction of this early gangster pic.  Sharp thru-out in film terms, its more advanced techniques probably stemming from cinematographer Barney McGill (backed by producer Darryl F. Zanuck?) rather than Mayo.  Talkie innovations & silent-era reclamations galore: low-angle camera set-ups; frame busting close-ups & two-shots; design-aided claustrophobic settings (no credit given, but Anton Grot?); crepuscular lighting for street scenes in warehouse & tenement districts (on fabulous backlot sets); the remarkably stylish work still feeling fresh.  Even the gangster storyline, anything but fresh, giving off the spark of a first telling.  Gentle Lew Ayres, fresh off ALL QUIET OF THE WESTERN FRONT/’30, cast wildly against type as a protection-racket beer hustler, grabs control of warring illegal distributors in prohibition-era New York, forcing them to tend their separate territories while uniting as a syndicate to benefit all.  But once Ayres has it all up & running, he tries to walk away from the life with a new wife (unaware she’s diddling second-in-command James Cagney on the side*).  Profits plunge; rivalries heat up.  Desperate to get Ayres back in the city, the mobsters kidnap his teenage brother out of military academy and hold him as ransom.  (Odd plot turn, no?)  But the nab goes wrong, the kid dies, and when Ayres returns to town, it’s purely for revenge.  Very little needs excusing on this one, with an exceptional final arc that starts with a prison escape and ends in a fatalistic denouement that plays just off screen to great effect.  And while the film won’t alter the triumvirate of early ‘30s gangster classics (LITTLE CAESAR, THE PUBLIC ENEMY, SCARFACE), it stands nicely just to the side as precursor.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Most wanted among the Mayo missing, MY MAN/’28, Fanny Brice’s (apparently) unhappy film debut which survives only as a soundtrack on VitaPhone sound disks.

DOUBLE-BILL: Of that threesome, THE PUBLIC ENEMY/’31, which famously swapped male leads after filming began, Cagney moving up to lead.  Something that could have happened here where Cagney receives fifth-billing for the second largest part.  (Same as Clark Gable in THE SECRET SIX/’31 where M-G-M had him billed seventh.)

RED LINE 7000 (1965)

After a film or two every year back to 1926 (and one of the best commercial success rates in the biz*), Howard Hawks took four years off to figure out what went wrong when he face-planted on his first WideScreen epic, 1955's Ancient Egypt LAND OF THE PHARAOHS.  The problem?  Dialogue!  Not knowing how ancient people spoke, thought Hawks, kept him from finding the right words to move his characters beyond empty spectacle.  But while this might have explained the pitfalls of PHARAOHS, it does little to explain what the heck went so risibly wrong with the dialogue for the contemporary characters of RED LINE 7000, three young race car drivers (The Natural; The Hothead; The Star) and the girls they love.  Probably a moot point.  With acting this bad, any dialogue would sound like Egyptian doggerel.  (The film generally considered Hawks’ nadir, though RIO LOBO, a misbegotten rehash/last-gasp Western for John Wayne, with a good prologue directed by the second unit, also in the running.)  There is some impressive (real) crash footage in 7000, but poorly wedged in visually or plotwise.  And while James Caan got a chance to redeem himself in Hawks’ surprising rebound (EL DORADO/’67), the other two drivers offer zero screen  presence (one never worked again); while the three all but undifferentiated girls (‘sexy’ French accent included) suffocate & suffer on airless soundstage sets behind lacquered mid-60s Playboy Pin-Up facials.  Strict Hawksians comfort themselves picking up on signature themes, but they’re not doing Hawks, his fans or newcomers to his work any favors.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Hawks critical standing lagging far behind box-office, ironically coming on strong with the French New Wave reevaluation just as he started to slip commercially.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The four films that top Hawks’ IMDb page are RED RIVER; RIO BRAVO; HATARI; and RED LINE 7000.  So much for classics with Bogart, Grant & Cooper.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: While not without its own major dramatic liabilities, the technical leap from 7000 to John Frankenheimer’s GRAND PRIX/’66 is like Outer Space’s leap in 2001.  (The movie, not the year.)