THE DAWN PATROL (1938)

Edmund Goulding’s remake of Howard Hawks’ Early Talkie still finds those WWI British flyboys facing impossible odds against German aces. And still sends them out, over & over again, with ever younger replacements showing up as fodder for death’s maw, a burden that eats away at their guilt-weary commander. As you’d expect, the later pic is smoother and more polished, but also showing less welcome signs of the homogenized tone of late ‘30s studio house-style, missing the immediacy & bitter tone of Hawks’ original beauty. The acting is largely better in '38, Errol Flynn, as the top flyer, has a verbal fluency Richard Barthelmess never quite mastered, while Basil Rathbone’s C.O. shows a nuance & natural command that make Neil Hamilton’s one-note delivery look a bit hysterical. (Team 1930 does win out with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as the post’s dashing scapegrace pilot. It’s probably his best perf, edging out in cocky glamor & spirit David Niven’s excellent work.) There’s a fair amount of rewriting here, so the film no longer jumps awkwardly between cracking air fights in the sky and male bonding right out of the famous play JOURNEY’S END on the ground. (END was also filmed in 1930 by James Whale. Not seen here.*) The flying scenes are generally better in the earlier work, with less process work, though the big climatic munitions-dump run, heavily borrowed here, has the most dated F/X in the film. Hawks’ film remains a significant achievement, particularly as his first in sound, but this slighter work has a charge all its own and is no knock-off.

DOUBLE-BILL: Hawks’ original (once called FLIGHT COMMANDER) is now available on V.O.D. from Warners Archive. (*And those with a tolerance for murky prints in low-resolution might want to check out Whale’s film of R. C. Sherriff’s JOURNEY’S END here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvqDPt-KGcs

THE DEVIL'S NEEDLE (1916)

When THE DEVIL’S NEEDLE was originally released, a review in VARIETY complained that the market was already flooded with drug-addiction themed pics. In 1916! Who’da thunk? Now, this is one of the few to survive, most likely due to a 1923 re-release cashing in on the recent drug-related death of film star Wallace Reid, as well as the cresting popularity of its now forgotten star, Norma Talmadge. It’s still pretty fascinating, in spite of serious nitrate deterioration and by-the-numbers helming from debuting director Chester Withey. Norma Talmadge, 22 when she made this, and less the grand lady than she’d become, plays an artist’s model who takes the occasional shot of cocaine to ease boredom & the blues. But when her painter proposes to a society dame, Norma’s hopes are dashed and her casual habit grows. It isn’t long before the painter (Tully Marshall) starts nicking her stash, hoping for some quick inspiration. (Watch for an irresistible title card where Norma notes the lack of depth to his drug-aided work.) Soon, Marshall is even trying to force the needle on his new bride! Everybody kicks the habit in act three, but the film loads on a faintly ridiculous gangster kidnapping plot for a ginned-up ride-to-the-rescue finish. It may be dramatic hokum, but this part of the story does give us a chance to see some long gone L.A. slum neighborhoods.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Kevin Brownlow’s typically fine BEHIND THE MASK OF INNOCENCE shows just how much ‘untouchable’ subject matter got ‘touched’ in the silent era.

HELL'S HOUSE (1932)

Bette Davis & Pat O’Brien co-star in this early ‘30s muckraker about an innocent kid who lands in an abusive Juvie Jail. One of those ripped-from-the-headlines Warner Bros. pics? Nope, the stars weren’t on that lot yet. Instead, it’s a little indie production, not bad of its type, though somewhat held back by Early Talkie technique, with writer/director Howard Higgins mixing in a few stylish set-ups between the stage-bound dialogue stuff. As it turns out, Davis & O’Brien essentially play supporting roles to Junior Durkin, a 14 yr-old rural rube who gets caught baby-sitting O’Brien’s stash of bootleg hooch. When he refuses to squeal on his mentor, he gets tossed in the kiddie clink where he buds up with Junior #2, Junior Coghlan, a prison vet with a bum ticker. No doubt, you’ll guess the rest, but no harm there. There’s a pretty decent cast for one of these micro-budgeted affairs, and, thanks to Ms. Davis, a damn fine print that lets the film speak for itself once you get past a damaged first reel. Naive and corny in parts, but still effective in the clinches.

DOUBLE-BILL: See how Warners vivified this sort of thing in WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD/’33.

LUMIERE D'ETE (1943)

Working with a handful of top directors in France, scripter Jacques Prévert all but invented the ‘30s style of French romantic fatalism known as Poetic Realism. This film, made during the German Occupation, pushes the concept even farther, call it Poetic Melodrama. It’s one of those pressure-cooker set ups where a handful of friends, lovers & ‘exes’ are stuck in a confined space, here an isolated high-altitude glass hotel where you’d expect to find a recovering TB case or two. Not so here, everyone’s almost too healthy, variously panting for the wrong partner while all around them, the mountains literally erupt with dynamite. It proves too much for director Jean Gremillon to handle. A cult figure in France, his best known work was done during the Occupation, but he comes across as more film theorist than natural filmmaker, never getting much of a rhythm going. Rather than capitulate to the excess of passion, we never get past all the illogical, self-destructive behavior, noting how ridiculously everyone has to behave just to keep the plot moving. The two young lovers, Madeleine Robinson & Georges Marchal (wildly handsome @ 23), come off best; everyone else overacts like mad. None more so than Pierre Brasseur. Best known Stateside as the Shakespearean actor in Prévert’s LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS/’45, Gremillon lets him get away with an alarmingly hammy perf as an artist manqué, cured & pickled beyond salvage. It makes our young ingenue look faintly idiotic for ever falling for him. Shot by shot, the film looks swell (fabulous Art Direction by Léon Barsacq), but the pieces never come together. After a while, you start looking for some allegorical explanation. After all, the film did get censored by the Nazi authorities. But none of the three or four endings in the film offer much of a clue. Surely, there’s more to Gremillon and his reputation than this.

ZERO DARK THIRTY (2012)

It took only a few months for the shocks & controversies in Kathryn Bigelow's GET OSAMA pic to melt away. 'Picture of the Year' when it opened; blanked by Oscar® time, other than a lonely award for Sound Editing. Whatever happened? It now plays like an unusually lux cable movie, and with cable-ready acting by all concerned to go with it. Jessica Chastain is a special disappointment as the dogged C.I.A investigator and her adversarial pal, Jennifer Ehle, even worse. But then, it’s hard to think of any memorable female perfs in a Bigelow pic. The men are reasonably better, but it’s all impulsive action film stuff, hitting its nadir in a near parody of a Half-Time locker-room tough-talk rally by a frustrated C.I.A. boss to his staff. Fortunately, the last act comes briskly to life when James Gandolfini makes a surprise appearance as the new C.I.A. Director and pulls everyone up to his level. (It’s remarkable to watch the other actors rise to the challenge.) Then when the Navy SEAL operation finally commences, it seems to come out of a different/better film. Filmed largely in semi-darkness and with night-vision equipment, it plays like a Black Light fever dream. (SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Imagine Carl Dreyer’s VAMPYR/’32 as an action film.) So dark, you’re not always sure what’s going on. Which feels just right . . . at last.

UN CONDAMNE A MORT S'EST ECHAPPE / A MAN ESCAPED (1956)

At times, the great French filmmaker Robert Bresson approached his work with such an austere hand, he wound up making some of the greatest films you ever slept thru. But toward the middle of his sparse output came two miracles; this fiercely observed prison break WWII story , followed by PICKPOCKET/’59, his lean, modern take on CRIME & PUNISHMENT. Shot with one of his typical non-pro casts, ÉCHAPPÉ is terse and meticulous, an all but flawless philosophical/intellectual thriller, even the poster is perfect. Often called minimalist, Bresson’s style is anything but. Rigorous gets closer to his sinewy technique, with his customary narrowed focus, used here to build tension without puffing things up in the modern manner of flashy camera moves, unnecessary cutting & Pavlovian music cues. (The only music in the film comes from snatches of Mozart’s Mass in C.) François Leterrier, as fat-free as the script and looking a bit like a young Alan Alda, is totally convincing as the prisoner with patience and a plan. And the teenaged Charles Le Clainche, a River Phoenix type, is equally fine as the kid who shows up in his cell at just the wrong time. Like the rest of the cast and crew, they seem unable to put a foot wrong, allowing Bresson to detonate his considerable technique whenever he needs it, constantly tightening the suspense screws with each accumulated detail. The film is a lesson in the beauty of functionality and the thrill of expectations met.

DOUBLE-BILL: Jean-Pierre Melville’s ARMY OF SHADOWS/’69 shows what the French resistance was doing on the outside, and what they were up against.

EN KONGELIG AFFAERE / A ROYAL AFFAIR (2012)

Nikolaj Arcel’s large-scaled Danish Historical about the attempt of ‘mad’ King Christian to embrace Enlightenment principles for his country in the late 1700s is undoubtedly well made, but so tidy & conventional in form & content it doesn’t make much of a mark. You approve of it, but barely feel it. The structure of its story, as the film itself notes, is much like the tale of King Arthur, Guinevere & Launcelot where an illicit love affair between a Queen and a King’s best friend (in this case Mads Mikkelsen as the unbalanced King’s physician) destroys lots of good intentions. (Giuseppe Verdi’s DON CARLO and A MASKED BALL also come to mind, distractingly so, since their passion & intelligence only point up what’s missing here.) Perhaps the film doesn’t quite come off because the villains of the piece, the conservative voices of the Dowager Queen & the religious zealots, aren’t given their due as true believers. Or maybe the love affair isn’t convincing enough to explain the pointlessly reckless behavior and the unacknowledged blind ambition.

DOUBLE-BILL: Sofia Coppola’s MARIE ANTOINETTE/’06, with its ironic post-modern flourishes, makes even the mustiest parts of AFFAIR seem like a breath of fresh air. (Or vice versa for Coppola fanciers.)

LOST BOUNDARIES (1949)

After producing MARCH OF TIME newsreels and docu-dramas ‘made on the actual locations’ for 20th/Fox (i.e. BOOMERANG/’47), Louis De Rochemont kept to his news-worthy ways with this fact-inspired low-budget indie. Newlyweds Mel Ferrer & Beatrice Pearson are light-skinned, Caucasian-featured Negroes ‘passing for White’ in a small New England town after he’s been consistently rejected for hospital internships down South as too White, and deemed equally unacceptable for practice up North as a Black man. And so, for 20 years, they’ve fit into their tidy community, but as counterfeit Whites. And so smoothly, they never found the right moment to tell anyone the truth, not even their own two kids. But the situation starts to crack when their son brings a Black friend home from college for the wknd, then completely crumbles when Ferrer volunteers for Naval service as a WWII ship’s doctor. An unusual subject for the time*, and neatly served by helmer Alfred Werker shooting on real locations and even using real interiors. (Note the variable sound quality.) The budget hampers any chance for period flavor in the first half, but the film is effective on its limited terms. Of course, the cheat here is that the town ends up welcoming ‘Black Folk’ who look just like every other White person on the block. But don’t knock a rare chance to see Canada Lee, stealing a scene as a NYC cop; and there’s an endearing debut from Carleton Carpenter, soon to be seen wooing a young Debbie Reynolds @ M-G-M, delightful here as the musically unprejudiced beau of Ferrer’s daughter.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Something must have been in the air in 1949 with both this film and the glossy commercial hit PINKY tackling similar race issues. PINKY was made at De Rochemont’s old studio, but with studio chief Darryl Zanuck personally producing it as a prestige item with Elia Kazan helming after John Ford bailed.

VIVA ZAPATA (1952)

This Elia Kazan/John Steinbeck film about the Mexican Peasant-Revolutionary of the 1910s fights itself to a draw. Unlike earlier Mexican historicals, say VIVA VILLA!/’34 or JUAREZ/’39 which function as pure Hollywood product (regardless of their success), changing tastes in the ‘50s left this with one foot stuck in studio conventions and the other gingerly stepping toward a grittier realism. And it’s a hard turn to make when you’re being lit like a religious icon; except for Anthony Quinn, commandingly comfortable as Zapata’s ‘id’ addled brother. Everyone else overcompensates, aware they're out of their element. Steinbeck can’t keep himself from speechifying on noble causes, trying to adopt the indigenous peoples as part of his Joad family. Even writing a final arioso for Marlon Brando’s Zapata to recite a la Tom Joad. (That comes after Brando fights a losing battle against the Quinn testosterone level, retaliating with more shirtless scenes than ever before.) The rest of the cast are right out of Group Theatre, especially Joseph Wiseman doing an Angel-of-Death routine. But Kazan, who always claimed to have learned the most about directing from John Ford, flexes some new muscles. True, he often strains for effect, but some of the troop movements along the river, and a couple of long fixed shots of battle-ready fields really do have a Fordian flavor. Come to think of it, Ford’s big Mexican drama, THE FUGITIVE/’47, is even more self-consciously artsy than Kazan’s.

DOUBLE-BILL: The natural partner should be M-G-M’s VIVA VILLA! about Zapata’s fighting ally up north. But its legendary production troubles left it untethered, even with a fascinating Ben Hecht script largely about PR and journalism.  OR: You could go authentic with an actual Mexican product, Fernando de Fuentes’ 'Revolutionary Trilogy' from the ‘30s. Hard to find and uneven, these early sound films, barely a generation removed from the events, are truly historic. OR: Then again, why not program like the ancient Greeks with a comic chaser to tragedy? Rouben Mamoulian’s gorgeous & larky Mexican farce THE GAY DESPERADO/’36, about a Mexican bandito who yearns to be just like the American gangsters he sees on the screen and dear Mischa Auer hiding under the world’s largest Mexican sombrero.