REACH FOR GLORY (1962)

William Golding’s LORD OF THE FLIES meets Ferenc Molnár’s THE PAUL STREET BOYS in this Little League anti-war cautionary tale.* Eager for battle, but too young to enlist, a gang of displaced schoolboys, sent for safety from the big city to a coastal town, play out turf battles in a mock war until real tragedy strikes. A workable idea, but Philip Leacock’s film starts on the wrong foot (and stays there) as our brutish boys take to their bikes on a metaphorical ‘fox hunt,’ chasing a cat right over a cliff. This action entirely unconvincing, but then the rest of the film is equally pre-deterministic, chucking believability overboard to score easy pacifist points. Nicely cast though, with a rough amateur edge to most of the teenage sociopaths giving the film whatever verisimilitude it has, even as action/character/plot fail to add up. No one in town notices something’s amiss? And just where are these maladjusted delinquents living? Disappointing.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *Peter Brook’s lumpy film of LORD OF THE FLIES/’63 once held a stellar rep, but Frank Borzage’s NO GREATER GLORY/’34, his version of Molnár’s THE PAUL STREET BOYS, remains a heartbreaking war allegory.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/02/no-greater-glory-1934.html

THE GILDED LILY (1935)

Coming off her 1934 annus mirabilis (FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE; CLEOPATRA - DeMille; Capra’s Oscar-winning IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT; racially-charged melodrama in John M. Stahl’s IMITATION OF LIFE), Claudette Colbert found lower stakes choosing between ‘regular newsguy’ Fred MacMurray and identity-masked British Lord Ray Milland (his first Hollywood role of note). It starts off well, as Colbert & MacMurray, in the first of seven pairings, shoot the breeze of a Thursday evening; him seeing stars/her hoping for fireworks. An explosion that spontaneously occurs when she bumps into Ray Milland on a subway platform. But tru-love takes a detour when MacMurray, on a work assignment, spots Milland boarding a British-bound ship as the fancy English Lord in town incognito and Colbert, after she sees the story in print, assumes she’s been taken for a ride. And that’s when the film goes off the tracks as MacMurray plays up the busted relationship as a publicity gag with Colbert, the injured party, rechristened ‘The girl who said NO!.’ Milking this misunderstanding as meal ticket, MacMurray comes across as a real crumb bum, costing Colbert her job and setting her up for even more humiliation as a flash-in-the-pan nightclub celeb. Then the film tries to have it both ways, letting Colbert succeed thru honest lack of talent, along with another go at Milland before everybody figures things out. Worse, Milland is so darn young, handsome & charming, he comes off as the natural match for Colbert, who dazzles in Victor Milner’s lens. No doubt this played differently for audiences at the time, all these mid-range Colbert rom-coms were big hits. (In spite of, or because of faceless helmers like Wesley Ruggles?) But after the first act, this one now works mostly as ‘30s artifact.

DOUBLE-BILL: DeMille’s FOUR FRIGHTENED FRIENDS (with a deglamorized Colbert) is an odd duck of a film, but the other three from ‘34 are classics. OR: See Ben Hecht juggle similar elements to better effect in NOTHING SACRED with Carole Lombard & Fredric March. (Look for the restored edition from KINO. Many Public Domain dupes out there.)

SCHLUßAKKORD / THE FINAL CHORD (1936)

Typically sudsy, romantic melodrama from Douglas Sirk (Detlef Sierck at the time) has all the expected ingredients for three-hankie nirvana: runaway mom returning from America to seek the baby boy she left behind; rich adoptive parents unknowingly hiring her as nanny; their crumbling marriage (she: hot for a seductive astrologist/he: finding a soul-mate in the pretty young nanny); an overly possessive housekeeper with a yen for her mistress; murder thru medical overdose; the works, yet it never quite emulsifies into a storyline you can buy into, bumping along point-by-point and shot-by-shot. A classical music backdrop adds interest, with Lil Dagover’s older wife reveling in empty high society & gossip, while husband/conductor Willy Birgel yearns for spiritual fulfillment thru Beethoven's Ninth with nanny/birth mother Mária Tasnádi Fekete. There’s a neat opening montage, a jazz party back in America that might have come from Ernst Lubitch’s SO THIS IS PARIS/’26, but much feels unpolished for Sirk, with far too many narrative shortcuts. Even in Nazi Germany both parents had to at least meet the child before adoption, ya? And Mária’s sponsors setting her up as nanny to her own son? Really? With Sirk at his best, the sense of personal identification can become overwhelming in even the most unlikely scenarios; here it’s just unlikely.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The remarkable Lil Dagover, tearing into her villainy with an appetite Bette Davis might envy, also led the way for older woman holding on to their sexual allure; she’s 49 pushing 50, not that you’d know it.

THE NAKED EDGE (1961)

Joseph Stefano, fresh off PSYCHO, riffs on SUSPICION/’41, an earlier Alfred Hitchcock film about a wife who comes to believe her husband is a murderer, yet so in love she’s willing to be his next victim. His script, a workable framework for a suspenser, something of a let down from a far more interesting prologue that sees Gary Cooper testify against a co-worker on a murder/robbery charge, putting the man in jail for life. Five years later, a delayed mail delivery shows up with a letter of blackmail that charges Cooper with the crime, lodging a nagging worm of doubt into wife Deborah Kerr’s head. Coop can’t explain away all the circumstantial evidence; Kerr can’t get past her doubts; and the wrong man may be in jail. If only workaday director Michael Anderson & gifted composer William Alwyn didn’t italicize every small revelation with self-defeating musical shrieks & attention grabbing camera moves. Stefano also overplays, hitting the same notes over & over. Kerr gets the worst of it, she’s either bonkers or auditioning for a remake of SORRY, WRONG NUMBER. Most commentators focus on Cooper, ill at the time in his last film (released after his death), but he’s excellent in a tough role, giving Kerr the benefit of the doubt and then some, with only a shot or two near the end revealing his grave condition. There’s actually too much material in here, enough for two or three films, just not enough for one.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, SUSPICION. OR: If SORRY, WRONG NUMBER interests you, the classic radio broadcast with Agnes Moorehead is a better bet than the disappointing 1948 film w/ Barbara Stanwyck & Burt Lancaster. LINK: Moorehead did eight radio relays, this one from 1945. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r5GZral6zs

THE BEAST OF THE CITY (1932)

Misguided attempt by M-G-M to go topsy-turvy on those celebrated early ‘30s gangster pics (LITTLE CAESAR; PUBLIC ENEMY; SCARFACE), focusing our sympathies on cops rather than robbers. But this try at fair play goes nowhere. (Though a fierce, if ridiculous, gun battle at the very end makes you feel you haven’t totally wasted 86 minutes.) Fast-fading director Charles Brabin* tries for dynamism, but the fancy tech work lags behind other studios while his multi-plane ‘action’ staging is stiff and looks over-planned/under-rehearsed. There’s just no swing to the thing, even with LITTLE CAESAR and SCARFACE’s W.R. Burnett on a story not without promise as Walter Huston’s kick-ass police chief goes after top mob man Jean Hersholt while kid brother Wallace Ford gets involved with mob floozy Jean Harlow unaware he’s being double-crossed. Harlow was the big draw here (note the tie-in book cover) in her first M-G-M feature. (And look for Mickey Rooney, also in a feature debut). Harlow’s acting is already vastly improved from earlier work, but she’d really find her sweet-and-sour self on her next pic, thanks to Anita Loos' naughty script for RED-HEADED WOMAN/’32.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Brabin never fully recovered after being canned in the wake of the aborted Italian shoot of BEN-HUR/’25, but stayed on at M-G-M as a utility man. His best sound film was probably STAGE MOTHER/’33 (with its proto-GYPSY storyline), but he was thru by 1934, a mere 52 yrs-old.

MY COUSIN RACHEL (1952)

From writer Daphne Du Maurier, more ‘near-beer’ Gothic Romance. This one a period piece, yet not too far off her better-known REBECCA/’40 where an admired beauty proves to be a force of evil. Here, our mysterious beauty is presumed a force of evil, perhaps unfairly. Richard Burton, in youthful trim making an effective Hollywood debut, does the presuming, certain his beloved cousin’s death was caused by a fateful wedding to Rachel. That’s Olivia de Havilland in peak loveliness as cousin-by-marriage Rachel, causing this young man’s libido to rage against wary instinct as she serves cup after cup of an Italian herbal tea elixir. Passion potion, palliative or poison? Nunnally Johnson’s succinct script manages to hold an ambiguous tone without turning idiotic, though some of the foreshadowing is on the clumsy side, while a surfacey Gothic style from director Henry Koster and lenser Joseph LaShelle matches the Du Maurier level of invention just right. Any deeper response and the film wouldn’t work at all. Leave it to composer Franz Waxman, just off his masterful A PLACE IN THE SUN score, and the sole holdover from REBECCA, to reach that deeper response without pulling everything down around him.

DOUBLE-BILL: A 2017 remake (not seen here) with Rachel Weicz, from Brit writer/director Roger Michell, attracted little interest.

MANBIKI KAZOKU / SHOPLIFTERS (2018)

Superbly original filmmaking from writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda, again focusing on a family unit, but here one of choice rather than simple blood-ties. Indeed, nothing simple about this story even after the third act explanations show up. Something that makes for a tricky write up without spoilers. What can be said is that Kore-eda is following a tradition going back to works by Dickens & Chaplin, who also found children in the trash, only to ‘adopt’ & raise them for their use as criminal accomplices. Here, it’s shoplifting. And not only ‘goods,’ but shoplifted lives, relationships & souls. And maybe not for the worse in a tight nuclear family of small-time con artists. Mom, Dad, Grandma, Older Sister, Rambunctious Boy & Newly Acquired Sad Little Sister, but with ‘quotes’ around each family position and pasts chasing them. Maybe there are advantages in day-to-day scrounging for food, clothing, housewares, squatter’s housing and gaming the welfare system. Kore-eda plays his fable very close to the vest, with immaculate compositions telling us no more than exactly what we need to know; withholding much we’d like to. And when he does fill in lacunae, everything clicks into place without a single disappointing answer. Something of a miracle, with outcomes ranging from bittersweet to softly tragic. Plus a cast that couldn’t be bettered, and in young Jyo Kairi, a worthy successor to little Jackie Coogan of Chaplin’s THE KID/’20. The film is a masterpiece.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Few Cannes’ Palme d’Or winners are as easy to get behind.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, Chaplin’s THE KID/’21. OR: For more Kore-eda, try STILL WALKING/’08, an earlier masterpiece.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Brandon Tartikoff, Chairman of Paramount when the first ADDAMS FAMILY movie came out, completely missed the point (and the underlying joke of the whole series) when he described them as the ultimate dysfunctional family. Kore-eda would have known better. Maybe he could be coaxed into an Addams Family reboot?

I WAS A SPY (1933)

Playing catch-up to Greta Garbo in MATA HARI & Marlene Dietrich in DISHONORED, British beauty Madeleine Carroll entered the WWI spy racket as a brave Belgian nurse, charged with delivering messages hidden in cabbages & apple cores, wrapped under bandages or written on cigarette paper, when not openly whispering them in cafés. Under the cover of a hospital job that has her tending all sides & nationalities, Carroll is romanced by German Kommandant Conrad Veidt, keeping her above suspicion & beyond curfew laws. Secretly, she’s in cahoots with dashing doctor/fellow spy Herbert Marshall, for some reason, two stone heavier than he was back in Hollywood. (Too many meat pies?) With nice production value and an exceptional supporting cast (Edmund Gwenn, Nigel Bruce, Martita Hunt), Victor Saville’s direction still can’t rise much beyond a mezza-mezza script that cuts too many corners. Or rather, can’t until a stunningly handled coda signifying the end of the conflict in four static shots, done entirely without dialogue and ending on striking portrait shot of a deglamorized, yet utterly beautiful, close-up of Carroll. If only the rest of the film lived up to the tag end!

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, MATA HARI/’31, pretty ridiculous but it does include this priceless exchange between Garbo spy & Ramon Novarro target: RN: I love you as one adores sacred things. GG: What sacred things? RN: God; Country; Honor; YOU. GG: I come last? OR the generally under-rated DISHONORED (look for the superb UCLA restoration), better in almost every way from the stiff Garbo pic though mainly famous for Josef von Sternberg’s shockingly interrupted execution scene and Dietrich’s final lip-gloss touch-up.

HOPE AND GLORY (1987)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, . . . but mostly the best of times. John Boorman’s counter-intuitive memoir of a suburban London childhood over the darkest days of WWII, emphasizes the horror, wonder, unanswerable questions and infinite excitement of a never-forgotten experience. With a uniquely playful tone emphasizing not the usual sacrifice & uplift, but positive outcomes landing almost by chance within one rather eccentric nuclear family amid the panic & localized deaths. Sarah Miles, making up for a lot of over-wrought dramatics, makes the most practical of moms, keeping a semblance of order with a husband off to war (for a bit), an old suitor she might have married, a newly sexually active 16-yr-old daughter, a girl about five and, in the middle, Bill, a roustabout boy and Boorman’s 10-yr-old alter ego who gives the film its main P.O.V. as he turns all but the very worst of events into occasions of adventuresome joy. Never more then when he’s suffering from Ian Bannen’s reprobate Granddad with his alarming freethinking ways. The stories, appalling & hilarious at the same time, hit one comic peak after another: A found tin of enemy jam; An unusually successful fishing excursion; A surprising schoolyard celebration (many more); OTT and completely believable. Not just youthful resilience, but national resilience; gilded with Boorman’s palpable love for his characters, giving the film unexpected warmth, depth, and the lived-in nap of history.

DOUBLE-BILL: Three decades later, Boorman made a coming-of-age followup taking ‘Bill’ thru compulsory military service in the pleasing, if not especially memorable QUEEN & COUNTRY/’14. It proved too little, too late, though not a bad sign-off for this great director.