PAPA'S DELICATE CONDITION (1963)

Orson Welles famously dubbed Jackie Gleason ‘The Great One,’ but not for his comedy. Welles was referring to Gleason as serious actor. Yet finding film evidence to support the claim is tough. The Chaplinesque mime of GIGOT/’62' proves bathetic; the failing, irascible Dad of NOTHING IN COMMON/’86 doesn’t stand a chance under Garry Marshall’s alternately coarse & inept megging. There’s always the cool, grace-under-pressure Minnesota Fats in THE HUSTLER/’61, but where else to look? Television anthology shows? Surely not this lazy piece of soft-soap nostalgia, with vet helmer George Marshall sleeping-walking thru a pastel colored turn-of-the-last-century family drama about an irresponsible, irrepressible soft-hearted daddy with a weakness for the bottle? Glynis Johns & Charles Ruggles, as long-suffering wife & skeptical Father-in-Law, find the dark shadows behind the bonhomie, but no one else, certainly not the two unmemorable daughters, help matters. But it lies in stealth behind every rote comic move Gleason makes in what is more-or-less a reprise of his Tony Award-winning perf as Uncle Sid in TAKE ME ALONG, a 1959 B’way musical of Eugene O’Neill’s AH, WILDERNESS. 

No small figure of the American stage, Uncle Sid. He’s O’Neill’s first sketch for the tortured alcoholic souls of his final masterpieces, the roles long owned by Jason Robards: Hickey in THE ICEMAN COMETH; James in LONG DAY’S JOURNEY and MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN. The connection is particularly noticeable when you hear all the talk about Hickey in ICEMAN before he shows up. Hickey was Sid. Just how Gleason might have gone about playing this guy is pure conjecture. Even Orson Welles couldn’t have found a way to discipline Gleason into getting thru it. But as a second-way of thinking about what may be the greatest roles of the American stage, this film mediocrity is all we’ve got to go on.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: PAPA may have been conceived as a semi-musical, but only a few choruses of ‘Bill Bailey’ and the Oscar-winning original ‘Call Me Irresponsible’ remain. And is Gleason doing it ‘live’ on set? Most unusual for the time.

DOUBLE-BILL: O’Neill’s AH, WILDERNESS comes off wonderfully in its 1935 filming, mercifully trimmed & winningly atmospheric under Clarence Brown’s affectionate helming even if Wallace Beery is over-parted as Uncle Sid. A musical version, SUMMER HOLIDAY/’48 (unrelated to Gleason’s TAKE ME ALONG) has Frank Morgan as a pitch-perfect Sid, but the part is cut to nothing. The film is phenomenally well directed by Rouben Mamoulian, but its raison d’etre, restarting Mickey Rooney’s post-WWII career, sinks everything. And he was so good in the earlier film as the kid brother.

A LIFE OF HER OWN (1950)

Lana Turner & Ray Milland star in this largely forgotten women’s drama that serves up that old standby: the single girl who comes to New York, finds a guy & career, but no happiness because Mr. Right is already married. But in 1950, films were trying to be ‘daring,’ ‘adult,’ so Lana’s character knows from the start that her guy is unavailable, and still gets to play sympathetic lead. Tag on a glamorous occupation (fashion model) and George Cukor’s smooth direction and you’ve got to wonder why this one doesn’t add up. Part of the trouble is that the role is outside Turner’s comfort range, being neither perky nor sultry, and equally outside her physical range. (Short neck, round face: next. Ava Gardner must have been busy elsewhere on the M-G-M lot.) A couple of undeveloped subplots look more promising, like the unexplored rapport between Turner & Louis Calhern who plays pal to everyone. Asexual? Gay? Cukor also gets some riveting tragic vibes out of Margaret Phillips as Milland’s wife & from Ann Dvorak as a model whose future is all used up. All topped off with a fascinating, if inexplicable turn from Barry Sullivan as a snide angel-of-death type. What an odd concoction hides in plain sight here.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Check out Lana’s smooth dancing partner at her birthday party for Milland. It’s Hermes Pan, Fred Astaire’s assistant. The guy who danced as Ginger, Rita or Cyd when those classic routines were being worked up.

BUT NOT FOR ME (1959)

Samson Raphaelson’s sturdy & wise little play, ACCENT ON YOUTH (winningly revived on stage with David Hyde Pierce in ‘09), had its third cinematic outing as a late vehicle for Clark Gable . . . sort of. The original serendipitous May/December romance between boss & secretary still runs the plot, but the leading role has now been split in half with Gable playing hard-nosed B’way producer and Lee J. Cobb, in a pleasingly mild turn, as dipsomaniac playwright. More damaging, the wrap-up all but negates Raphaelson’s lovingly finessed ending. But the package, designed specifically for Gable @ 57 (see ad above), works reasonably well on its own terms, with Gable using his personal life as a guide for rewrite before the obvious chemistry between him and Lilli Palmer, playing his well-balanced ex, helps carry us thru a few too many plot reversals than any film should try. Vet helmer Walter Lang, on a rare loan-out from 20th/Fox, pulls off some believable B’way atmosphere, but Paramount’s backlot Long Island is strictly from Encino.

DOUBLE-BILL: Kim Novak & Fredric March also played May/December that year in MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT/’59, an unsung reunion for ‘Team MARTY/’55' (Delbert Mann/Paddy Chayefsky) convincingly set about ten blocks south of the Theater District in the NYC rag trade.

A BLUEPRINT FOR MURDER (1953)

Most of writer/director Andrew Stone’s work, even the pics released by the major studios, play like B+ indies. There’s a awkward homemade quality in the overall look, as well as in the acting, even from Hollywood vets. Call the result ‘heightened flatness.’ Evolving methods in film production allowed Stone to cut his costs by shooting in real locations, but any gains from quasi-documentary techniques just clashed all the more strongly against cheap studio sets. Add in a tendency to telegraph action & motivation and it’s no wonder to find his characters looking a tad slow on the uptake. That’s certainly the case here, yet it paradoxically adds an intriguing ‘off’ tone to an otherwise obvious murder case that sees doting uncle Joseph Cotten numbly resisting any suggestion that sister-in-law Jean Peters might be thinking of poisoning his adorable niece & nephew. Egged on to think the worst by family friends Gary Merrill & Catherine McLeod, Cotten does a full reverse, only to be held in check by the cops, the D.A. and a judge who all let him know that poisoning is a tough charge to prove. Ploughing ahead, Stone builds some real cumulative creepiness with dogged tread and a fresh bottle of poison, but it's not quite enough.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Peters & Cotten spent a lot of ‘53 working thru murder angles. Try them in Henry Hathaway’s excellent, TechniColored fever-dream, NIAGARA/’53, with Marilyn Monroe in good early form.

THE GOLDEN ARROW (1936)

The one-two punch of this piddling Screwball Romance followed by SATAN MET A LADY/’36, a lame comedy-slanted remake of THE MALTESE FALCON/’31, finally drove Bette Davis to the London courts where she tried (but failed) to break her contract with Warner Bros. She should have just shown this film, lousy enough to break any contract!* Bette’s a phony heiress, hired on the QT by a cosmetics firm as a publicity dodge. But she’s grown tired of the society circuit and the constant glam life. A mistaken-identity meet-cute on her yacht with regular guy reporter George Brent offers her a way out. He seems a nice enough guy, why not try a marriage of convenience? Brent gets six months to finish his novel; Bette gets a ‘cover’ while she scans about for a decent spouse? Not such an awful an idea for a gagged-up comedy pic, but everyone working on this one (scripter, lenser, actors, director, studio) feels completely out of their fach. Maybe over at Paramount . . . with a rewrite . . . and Claudette Colbert. Maybe.**

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Of course, if Davis had won the case, she’d have missed her legendary run @ Warners, and a decade of top-notch pics.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: **Paramount did make something like this in ‘36, but with Carole Lombard, THE PRINCESS COMES ACROSS. Goodish film . . . great title!

DEUX HOMMES DANS MANHATTAN / TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN (1959)

Before Jean-Pierre Melville started making those influential ‘60s pics about impossibly cool thieves & assassins, he made an NYC pit stop (his promised land) to write, direct & even play one of the leads in this noir-infatuated pic. Melville plays a reporter for a foreign news agency* who teams with Pierre Grasset, an all but amoral, opportunistic photog for ‘Paris Match,’ on a dusk-to-dawn hunt thru the city for a missing United Nations delegate. Their nighttime hunt centers on three shady ladies, ‘friends’ of the missing man, each only too happy to misdirect them. We tag along on this Gotham underbelly tour, mostly Manhattan with a touch of Brooklyn thrown in, a strip club and a great all-night Kosher diner. (Gefilte Fish........50¢) Budget constraints forced Melville into using a few unconvincing mock-up sets to finish the shooting back in France (mostly interiors with the shades drawn to hide any phony views), but the grubby tone rings true all the way down the line; and the last few twists memorably handled.

DOUBLE-BILL: Two years before, Alexander Mackendrick’s SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS/’57 also nailed that overnight sewer’s-eye-view of Manhattan. Born in Boston, but entirely Scottish raised, his film was also a first Stateside project. Guess it helps to have an outsiders POV.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The sublime bas-relief of journalistic activity briefly seen right below the French News Bureau office window early in the film remains just as it's seen here in Rockefeller Center, due north of the Skating Ring, a dynamic Art Deco homage to the Associated Press.

KOKURIKO-ZAZA KARA / FROM UP ON POPPY HILL (2011)

Co-written by anime great Hayao Miyazaki; lovingly helmed by his son, Goro; featuring an all-star voice cast on its English track; you’ve got to figure this animated film from Studio Ghibli, a big hit back in Japan, was originally headed for a major Stateside Disney release that never happened. Was the story too domestic, too small & intimate, too unmagically quotidian? So, distribution fell to little ‘Gkid,’ who barely got it in the marketplace. But don’t let that stop you from watching this total charmer, a star-crossed high school romance that turns out all right in the end. Recent efforts from Ghibli have felt over-stuffed with busyness, metaphor & grisly conflict, hardly the case here. Instead, we get a neat dose of ‘63 Japanese nostalgia, just before the 1964 Olympics certified their post-war comeback. And with the usual ‘more innocent times’ clichés replaced with sharp recollections of a time that felt loaded with real possibility. (In the States, Kennedy called it the New Frontier.) And this attitude helps a bantam-weight story about two high school kids who discover a block to their budding relationship gain a real emotional kick. There’s also a pitch perfect subplot about fixing up a dilapidated, but comfy-cozy Student Union building that neatly binds contemporary social issues into the story. And if some of the characterizations come off a bit flat, a fault less noticeable on the Japanese track, the basic story quickly pulls you in.

DAY OF THE FALCON (aka BLACK GOLD) (2011)

This big budget BIRTH OF AN (unnamed) ARAB NATION story raised about €40 mill to hire some major international talents, but it still feels like a vanity project. (Did it even get a Stateside theatrical release?) With a paint-by-the-numbers plot to match its literal paint-by-the-numbers CGI effects, it’s a slick, barely felt, techno-update of old Hollywood epic tropes. The sort of thing Darryl F. Zanuck would ‘personally produce’ in his Fox heyday. As we open, two Arab Princes take opposite sides on the idea of Western investment & oil production: stick with a closed society and traditional religious values or leap into the modern world of Global Commerce and all the goodies money can buy? Zanuck would have put Tyrone Power in as the princely son (by blood and by adoption) of the two old leaders, the young man destined to unite Old & New! Don Ameche gets stuck playing martyr as the comically frustrated half-brother. Loretta Young’s the good girl Ty can only dream about while Annabella’s the tomboy who really deserves him. Wait, that’s SUEZ/’38, but with Joseph Schildkraut in the usual Ameche spot. Oh well, once we get to the desert battles, helmer Jean-Jacques Annaud gets to play war with camels, horses, single-prop planes and all those acres of CGI-friendly, obstacle-free desert. At least, Antonio Banderas gets off a great line when he discovers that the newly acclaimed ‘Mahdi’ is his bespectacled adopted son. Too bad Tahar Rahim who plays the part, so fascinating & unreadable as the mobster-in-training in A PROPHET/’09, can’t get worked up to do anything but pout ten different ways all thru the pic.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Once he announces a prince’s death midway thru the pic, our eponymous bird is seen no more. How’d he keep top billing? (See alternate title on our poster.)

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: What an odd career Annaud has had. Major technical chops, yet barely a dozen pics over four decades. Try his intense Siege-of-Stalingrad epic, ENEMY AT THE GATES/’01 which seemed to have slipped past most viewers.

BETRAYED (1954)

Clark Gable ended three decades @ M-G-M with this unsatisfying, though not uninteresting WWII love triangle/espionage drama. Rescued from the Nazis by Victor Mature’s free-lance resistance outfit, he’s whisked to London where he recruits Lana Turner as a lookalike spy to plant back in Denmark. Shot largely in England where M-G-M had a lot of money parked, Gottfried Reinhardt helms with clarity but little distinction while the subfusc DVD transfer from Warners Archive does no favors to Freddie Young’s rich location lensing. It all sounds pretty dire, yet the film picks up interest when Turner & Mature start a relationship. What? Gable cuckolded? That’s when internal leaks start to expose the secret anti-Nazi missions. Mature & Wilfred Hyde-White, Gable’s British boss, give almost alarmingly eccentric perfs that unexpectedly pay off while Gable & Turner, in their fourth & final teaming over a bit more than a decade both seem much the worse for wear. The weight of mortality adds something grim to Gable, while Turner responds by slightly lightening her brunette bob halfway in.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: As noted, the DVD transfer is less than stellar, but don’t be put off by the squarish 1.33:1 frame aspect ratio. Yes, our poster says MetroScope, but the original suggested projection ratio of 1.66:1 isn't particularly WideScreen anyway. Chances are the image was simply cropped down from the Academy Ratio format seen here.