STRANGE CARGO (1940)

Though in many respects this is a typical Escape From Devil’s Island sort of pic, the cons in the getaway boat are far more motley than usual. There’s a couple of gorgeously deglamorized stars (Clark Gable & Joan Crawford); a Nietzschean superman (Paul Lukas giving the film’s best perf and even getting a final God-defying Don Giovanni moment); a nascent gay couple (Albert Dekker & John Arledge, these two woo & serenade each other!); a couple of easy victims to feed the sharks; and, by-golly, Jesus Christ, hisself! Well, in the form of Ian Hunter who was more effectively incognito as Richard-the-Lionhearted in ROBIN HOOD/’38. Peter Lorre hangs around this odd fraternity (natch), not in the boat, alas, but waiting on shore. Of course, helmer Frank Borzage was a very religious fellow, which may explain this assignment, but a deeper mystery is how quickly his great talent petered out after his next pic, the sublime THE MORTAL STORM/'40.

SCREWY THOUGH OF THE DAY: How’d this ever get by the Production Code? Even the Legion of Decency condemned it. Not because Paul Lukas walks off sans punishment, not because of the gay couple, but probably because Crawford & Gable (in their eighth & final co-starring vehicle) kiss away without any pancake make-up coming between them. And they look like they mean it.

THE SILVER CHALICE (1954)

Paul Newman apologized in print for his debut in this biblical epic. And he is plenty bad. But the film is more odd than awful. With THE ROBE still coining dough in all its CinemaScopic grandeur, why not make . . . err, THE CUP! Okay, okay, bad title. How ‘bout THE SILVER CHALICE? Newman plays a disinherited adoptee who’s torn between a pagan blond (the slightly worn Virginia Mayo) and a Christian brunette (perky Italian-accented Pier Angeli) and on the run from a magician with a messiah complex (Jack Palance). The plot completely falls apart in the third act (where’s the cup?), but the look of the film is a knock-out. Victor Saville, winding up a long career as producer/director, seems to have left the actors to their own devices, but he & lenser William Skall gave the production an artsy abstract look completely at odds with the then current ultra-realistic Hollywood style. It’s more Robert Edmund Jones or Euro-Fest Opera than Hollywood kitsch. And with Franx Waxman’s palpitating score, it sounds like an opera, too. Waxman’s a naughty boy here, giving the chalice a leitmotif right out of Wagner’s PARSIFAL. Holy Grail, Batman!

UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE (1967)

A funny thing happened to this new-teacher-in-a-tough-school tale, it improved with age. Perhaps it’s the verisimilitude of mid-60s NYC (for ‘67, the jumps in ambient sound are as unusual as the roughness in Joseph Coffey ‘s spirited lensing). Perhaps it’s because Sandy Dennis, as the newbie teacher, had yet to hit the tipping point in tics & mannerisms that would scuttle so much of her work. Perhaps it’s getting to see an entire cast made up from the NYC/B’way acting pool, especially a fascinating perf from Patrick Bedford (straight from Brian Friel’s PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME) as a cold-blooded intellectual English teacher. Perhaps it’s the sheer modesty of the story’s conclusion, Dennis simply decides to stick out the year. Whatever. Somehow the partnership of helmer-Robert Mulligan & producer Alan Pakula honor a nearly formless quality far removed from the expected naïf teacher/tough kids/life’s lesson tropes of so many similar pics. Check out TO SIR WITH LOVE, a much bigger hit from the same year, to see how differently films can age.

BARNUM (1986)

Very few of these BBC live stage-to-video musical transfers work as well as this. This is basically Joe Layton’s original B’way staging which re-imagines the life of Phineas Barnum as a one-ring perpetual motion circus. The lead role needs an astonishingly gifted performer and Michael Crawford fills the bill down to his toes. While he misses some of the dark corners Jim Dale brought to his B’way assumption, Crawford is a far better vocalist and his sunnier ‘take’ perfectly fits his lanky form & sandy-haired coloring. It’s one of the greatest perfs ever caught on tape and fully worthy of the marvelous Cy Coleman/Michael Stewart score which sounds wonderful in Hershy Kay’s faux circus band colorings. The show is even better than you may recall, with a first act finale (a gasp-inducing live tight-rope walk from Crawford) and an immensely touching farewell from Barnum’s wife that are paradigmatic examples of just what magic B’way musicals are capable of. Terry Hughes' video direction is barely adequate and the video transfer (from a PAL source?) needs an upgrade, but don’t let that stop you. This one’s a gem. Cameron Macintosh is trying to get a new London staging up. What a role this would be for Hugh Jackman.

NOTE: So, ten days after posting this, Hugh Jackman is announced as signing up to play P.T. Barnum in an original Fox musical. Presumably the Coleman/Stewart score is tied up elsewhere. What a sad waste. By the way, they are also trying for Anne Hathaway to play Jenny Lind when she's perfect for Charity, Barnum's staid wife. Ah, Hollywood. Even when they get it right, they get it wrong.

THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND (1936)

The first film John Ford made at 20th/Fox with new studio head Darryl F. Zanuck as his official producer was this solid bio-pic from a tight Nunnally Johnson script about Sam Mudd, the country doctor who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after the Lincoln assassination. Any historical doubts are ignored to focus on the harrowing military trial & incarceration of the good doctor. And accordingly, Ford’s work is less personally distinctive and more ‘well-made’ than usual, which explains why this finely realized work is less celebrated than it deserves. Warren Baxter is unexpectedly effective as the victimized doc, though his on-and-off Southern accent caused an early rift between Ford & Zanuck. The film now has its own historical interest in the racial attitudes on display which run the gamut from enlightened to cringe-inducing.* But this bleak look at the dangers of rushing to justice and the balance of political expediency versus the power of the truth would be treated with more complexity (and finesse) by Ford in his post-WWII films.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Speaking of cringe-inducing, this film gives a good idea of Zanuck’s horrible taste in film scores before he got wise and hired Alfred Newman to run all things musical @ Fox. (The old Hollywood scuttlebutt was that Zanuck got his musical advice from his barber while getting shaved.) Even so, someone could have mentioned that the film’s theme song "Oh, Maryland, My Maryland’ might be mistaken for ‘O, Tannebaum.’

FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966)

Baby boomers have an inexplicable soft-spot* for this slow moving adventure yarn about a motley mix of doctors & military types who shrink all the way down to the size of a microbe (along with a submarine) so they can be injected into the blood stream of a comatose VIP. It was dopey but fun back when . . . now, it’s just dopey. They’re remaking it with lots of CGI and (hopefully) 3-D effects and you’d have to be pretty hardcore to mind much. Amuse yourself trying to guess which actor ‘went up’ the most in each scene (I vote for Edmund O’Brien, even when he’s not in the scene you can feel him supressing his giggles) and be appalled at the approving mention of intelligent design creationism. So much for all that scientific mumbo-jumbo. *Okay, okay, I know. Maybe it's young & yummy Raquel Welch.

LEATHERHEADS (2008)

The rise of professional football from its rag-tag beginnings is a natural for the movies. But George Clooney, who megs & mugs this misfire, leaves football behind for yet one more failed attempt at reviving screwball comedy. With its girl-reporter who finds herself squeezed between a tough old pro & a handsome young striver, this is Frank Capra/Howard Hawks territory (think, MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN/’36 and HIS GIRL FRIDAY/’‘40), but Clooney is (ahem) no Hawks or Capra. (People routinely say that comedy is so much harder than drama, but do they really believe it? Just compare Clooney’s decent work on GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK/’05 with this mess to see how true it is.) Renée Zellweger & John Krasinski don’t come off too well, either; and as for football . . . it's an after-thought, brought back for the slapstick climax. Who approved this script? The whole thing feels like a vanity project for Clooney and something of an anti-vanity project for Ms. Zellweger who has become all but impossible to photograph.

THE MAN FROM THE ALAMO (1953)

This early Budd Boetticher ‘Oater’ may lack the distinctive tone & look he’d develop in the chamber Westerns he'd soon make with Randolph Scott, but it’s very good on its own terms. Glenn Ford is near his best as a taciturn Texan who’s been branded a coward for running away from a martyr’s death at The Alamo. The truth is he left honorably to check on the threatened families of his unit, but he’d just as soon die as explain himself. He purposefully falls in with the gang that killed his family and manages to save a whole town and destroy the gang with the help of his surrogate son, a loyal Mexican boy from his homestead. The action sequences are remarkably clear, the acting restrained but forceful (though all the women are Max Factor’d to death) and Boetticher keeps us off balance by making the good townspeople the scariest gang in the story, a lynch mob eager for victims guilty or no.

THE TEXANS (1938)

This Paramount Western mixes Civil War Reconstruction politics with buffo cattle drive theatrics in a theoretically intriguing manner, but under James Hogan (a ‘B’ list megger working with a big budget), it never reaches its potential to excite or unsettle. All the acting feels slightly off-key, including leads Joan Bennett as a hot-headed Dixiecrat with dreams of rebooting the Civil War & Randolph Scott as a forward-thinking ex-Reb who wants to make up with the new USA. Bonus points to Robert Cummings who's pricelessly awful playing a third-wheel Southern gent who's also a never-say-die Confederate. The excesses of Yankee carpetbaggers gets worked pretty hard to make our sympathies drift to the defeated South. But then, the whole narrative leaves a nasty taste in your mouth . . . which is largely what makes the story line hold our attention. If only the execution of the film were on par with Theodore Sparkuhl whose lensing runs the gamut from Golden-Age Hollywood portraiture through muddy realism decades ahead of its time. There’s definitely something going on in here, but you’ll have to work it out for yourself.