NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957)

(aka CURSE OF THE DEMON.)  Director Jacques Tourneur returns (with a less poetic/more concrete manner) to the suggestive horror films he’d made in the ‘40s for low-budget R.K.O. producer Val Lewton (CAT PEOPLE, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, THE LEOPARD MAN).  Proving maybe you can go home again if it's Elstree Studios England. Note top below-the-line talent in lenser Ted Scaife & designer Ken Adams.  Dana Andrews effectively stars (slurry diction under control) as a supernatural phenomenon debunker, in London to give a lecture, who comes up against his specialty.  But how to fight something you don't believe exists?  And with only three days before Demon-enabler Niall MacGinnis has foretold your death by a ‘force’ he only partially controls.  Peggy Cummings shows neat ambivalence as a newly hired assistant to a colleague of Andrews who dies mysteriously, and there’s a smash perf from Athene Seyler as MacGinnis’s worried, unloyal mother who prefers psychic mediums to demon romancers.   Add in unexpectedly sympathetic Scotland Yard types and simple, if alarming, F/X* (with an hallucinatory/infrared quality to some of the night shots) and you’ve got something pretty special.  Tourneur’s lack of quality follow up offers to direct a mystery.

AMBP: *The physically realized Demon Monster was added post-production against Tourneur’s wishes.  Also: the original Stateside release, CURSE OF THE DEMON, lost 12 minutes.  The complete cut should run 95".

DB: While best known for classic horror (as mentioned above) and noir, let Tourneur surprise you with the deeply felt religious-themed Americana of STARS IN MY CROWN/’50.  (Many of these covered below, simply go to the main web page and type Tourneur in the upper left hand corner Search Box to bring them up.)

THE INCIDENT (1990)

Superior tv movie from the days when Broadcast TV Movie was something of a pejorative.  Not a lot of surprises, but quality that shows above & below the line, with an exceptional lineup of senior character actors digging into their parts rather than coasting on past charm.  Walter Matthau plays it straight & true as a past-his-prime small town Colorado lawyer in WWII, forced to pull a John Adams and defend the enemy when ordered to handle the case of a German prisoner-of-war (Peter Firth) accused of murdering camp doctor Bernard Hughes, a personal friend of Matthau’s.  Harry Morgan (particularly fine) is the Fed judge bought in to run things as efficiently as possible (with a predetermined end); Robert Carradine as a sharpie prosecuting attorney; William Schallert the fair-minded local sheriff with some inconvenient questions on what ought to be an open-and-shut case.  With at-home complications from Matthau’s daughter-in-law & grandkid (Susan Blakely; Ariana Richards) and naturally a beloved son serving overseas to multiply Matthau’s discomfort level as the riled town questions his motives.  Joseph Sargent, a top director of tv & the occasional film (he & Matthau scored on THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE/’74 - https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/taking-of-pelham-one-two-three-1974.html), gives unusual attention to period detail (the vintage cars look a bit too ready for the Labor Day parade, but those old actors sure know how to pull off a ‘40s wardrobe), and lets big scenes have a quiet finish to them that’s very effective.  Watch Matthau get the bad news you know is coming.  Good work all ‘round on this one.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL: An underlying twist here (a personal fave) gives Matthau the case not on belated recognition of ability, but because he’s pegged as a second-rater and a bit of a lush.  He’s supposed to lose, but surprises everyone, including himself, by finding his form after all.  A popular, much used character trope, it had just propped up Paul Newman in THE VERDICT/’82, with Sidney Lumet ponderously directing & David Mamet pretentiously scribbling.  OR: See Matthau & Morgan retained in two sequels: AGAINST HER WILL: AN INCIDENT IN BALTIMORE/’92 and INCIDENT IN A SMALL TOWN/’94.  But with Matthau now hired for competence rather than presumed incompetence, neither gives off quite the same kick.

SLAVE SHIP (1937)

Fascinating and appalling, this little known film* about a ‘cursed’ ship running human cargo in the fast declining slave trade of 1860 is essential, if unsettling viewing.  Upturning a long held belief that Hollywood always romanticized Southern slavery, even when trying to be truthful/sympathetic to the victims of ‘that peculiar institution,’ this outlier film offers nothing but horror upon horror in the bowels of a slave ship packed to the gills with product, the seething mass under constant lash by the ship’s repellent crew.  Warner Baxter, the not particularly reluctant captain, finally seeing the error of his ways when he falls for Elizabeth Allan once back home.  The abrupt switch to cooing meet-cute romance disastrous to the drama, totally unconnected in tone to the opening scenes, the schizophrenic storyline credited to William Faulkner (!) of all people, though obviously much rewritten by Darryl F. Zanuck favorite, Lamar Trotti and comedy tweaker Sam Hellman.  (Someone must have written the drunken ship’s cook gags for Francis Ford.)  Back on board with his new wife, Baxter finds first-mate Wallace Beery ignored his orders and kept the old crew who are now forcing him to make a dangerous (if highly profitable) final slave run; even cabin boy Mickey Rooney on the wrong side of things.  It’s all mouth-gaping situations from then on out, as Baxter is left to die at the slave exchange, a fresh containment of slaves is shuttled aboard, and Baxter escapes to climb back on his ship and save the day.  And if some slaves wind up not getting drowned in the process, all the better!  Why this film, distasteful as it is, isn’t on the radar of current Black Studies is a mystery.  Perhaps the All White Man’s perspective is simply too much to swallow even with historical/period blinders on.  Not a single slave gets individual treatment.  But it seems too important a moment in popular culture to ignore . . . for those who can handle it.

DOUBLE-BILL: Baxter had just gone thru the Civil War as Dr. Sam Mudd, the man who unknowingly set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after the Lincoln assassination, in John Ford’s THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND/’36.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Was it withdrawn from circulation?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Very odd background score from Alfred Newman only occasionally matching up with events on screen.  ALSO: Keep an eye out for Mickey Rooney taking it on the chin, but for real, from Beery who was told off in no uncertain terms by director Tay Garnett who knew Beery’s nasty ways from helming him in CHINA SEAS/’35.

THE CONQUERING POWER (1921)

Quick to ride the backdraft on FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE’s phenomenal success, most of that film’s principal talent repeats only six months later for another literary adaptation (Honoré Balzac doing the honors) to merely respectable results.  But as the talents in question are director Rex Ingram, scripter June Mathis, Rudolph Valentino, Alice Terry (Mrs. Ingram), Ralph Lewis in a career best and cinematographer John Seitz*, ‘respectable results’ ain’t nothing to sneeze at.  Perhaps suffering from a rushed production schedule, the film doesn’t look forward as APOCALYPSE did, Mathis relying too heavily on title cards and letters (epistolatory cinema?), Ingram letting his cast get away with pretty old-fashioned indicative gestural acting for 1921 and too often resting on his tableau vivant staging laurels.  All the same, involving stuff, with Parisian dandy Valentino (unaware he’s suddenly penniless) visiting rich country cousin Terry, a much courted beauty suffering under the over-controlling hand of miserly father Ralph Lewis.  And if her local suitors think only of her gold & riches, Rudy’s heart beats with true love even after he goes overseas to run gold mining excavations.  (Looking quite rough & manly in the process).  But with Papa Lewis making sure these two lovebirds lose touch, they each end up assuming the other has moved on and married.  It’s only after Dad goes mad and dies, that things can be righted.  And this late story arc is where the film suddenly comes into its own, becoming worthy of Ingram’s pictorial gifts.  Especially in a hallucination sequence with Lewis accidentally imprisoned, locked in his gold counting room, attacked by phantoms of his own imagination.  A highlight rich enough to make any film.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Seitz’s cinematographic enthusiasm & visual panache would later make real movie directors out of word-oriented writer/directors Preston Sturges & Billy Wilder.

DOUBLE-BILL: As Lewis’s gold fever takes its fatal turn, Ingram seems to be looking back to D.W. Griffith’s great one-reeler A CORNER IN WHEAT/’09 and forward to Erich von Stroheim’s obsessive GREED/’24, a film von Stroheim hoped Ingram could edit down to a releasable length.  He did, from Stroheim’s 42 reels down to 18 (about three hours).  Both cuts destroyed in favor of M-G-M's official 10 reel version.

DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST / ARANYER DIN RATRI (1970)

Four long time pals, on a 30-something break before life & adult responsibilities kick in for keeps, go off on a countryside retreat in this Satyajit Ray classic.  Like other aging-past-their-Golden-Youth film stories, it’s heavily influenced by Federico Fellini’s I VITELLONI/’53 though here only echoing the contours of the earlier film.  Personalized by their different humours, a color film might have  coordinated tints for their outfits, they range from immature to class clown, from commitment phobic to utterly sincere.  This last, Ashim by name, wonderfully played by Ray alter-ego Soumitra Chatterjee who died last week, still best known internationally as grown Apu in the last of The Apu Trilogy, and about the most sincere actor ever captured on film.  He positively radiates the stuff.  Their journey opens with characteristic squabbles between the young men before they pick up a local guide and bribe their way into an unauthorized bungalow.  But a touristy tone of cultural clashes, joshing & drinks shifts to something more serious and to romantic possibilities once they meet some lovely locals.  Each of the young men responding with varying levels of interest, barely acknowledging the possibility of trouble coming from their (mis)adventures/(mis)behavior.  Epiphanies small & large, with only Chatterjee having the full life-changing lovestruck experience, brilliantly organized by Ray in a simple party game involving famous names.  The mood compounded in the following fair sequence with emotion & character revealed to magical effect using the simplest of means; the emotional pivot coming so fast, you may not notice it at first.  Intensely moving without seeming to work at it, it’s another masterpiece from one of the most sophisticated minds (and deceptively simple techniques) ever to make film.

 DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned, I VITELLONI.

CONFIRM OR DENY (1941)

The dichotomy of a lux physical production with top below-the-line names (Richard Day design; Leon Shamroy cinematography) and a suspiciously short running time (73") is a dead giveaway that this up-to-the-minute WWII drama (out only days after the Pearl Harbor attack) was downgraded mid-production.  Meant to follow up on MAN HUNT/’41, Fritz Lang’s putative let’s-assassinate-Hitler thriller, we’re now in London during ‘the Blitz’ as dynamic American news editor Don Ameche begs for exclusive communication lines (cables, pigeons) to beat the competition.  But when the scoop of the war comes his way (Hitler’s invading England!), he’s forcibly kept from getting the word out by his own teletype operator (and love interest) Joan Bennett who insists he go by the book and run it by the war censor (John Loder in a nothing role).  A zippy piece of early war melodrama (story by Sam Fuller*), it starts well, with loads of turns for various character actors and a young Roddy McDowall, fresh off HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, in harm’s way as rooftop pigeon lookout.  Lang found the whole thing too phony, knew the end was a mess and found Ameche miscast and pushing too hard to be Clark Gable.  Happy to ankle the pic when he got sick, vet megger Archie Mayo took over and he makes a good show of it, keeping up pace & stylish effects.  But he also got stung by the same two problems Lang couldn’t fix.  Pretty good all the same, with Bennett in her prime, more devastating than any Nazi bomb.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Great meet-cute for Bennett & Ameche during one of those London wartime BlackOuts.  Who but Sam Fuller would come up with love at first sight . . . in the dark.

NAZARIN (1959)

Acclaimed and depressive, this Luis Buñuel film from his Mexican period is a rare example of the great man begging for admiration.  Not that NAZARIN doesn’t earn it, just surprising to see him ask.  Taken from a Benito Pérez Galdós novel about a wandering priest (leading man handsome Francisco Rabal) who serves the poor thru his own suffering & denial, the character is as close to Cervantes/Don Quixote as to the Gospel’s Jesus, and living proof that no good deed goes unpunished.  It’s not even clear if his actions help more than they hurt once he leaves his city hovel (where everything he possesses is either given away or taken) to roam the countryside begging for sustenance and helping out when he can.  And such a host of problems he finds!; painted prostitutes needing guidance, plague sufferers needing comfort, dying children needing his blessing.  At one stop, he seems to facilitate a miraculous cure, at another he gets into trouble with military officers.  Accompanied against his will by a pair of reformed tarts, would-be acolytes who follow his every footstep, as well as a dwarf who’s following one of the tarts, he’s soon arrested by soldiers who march him off to . . . where?  He’s ultimately given a pineapple by a passing peasant which he cradles like a child.  Shot in the most straightforward manner imaginable, this tale of appallingly wasted religious nobility is undoubtedly essential Buñuel, but without much straw in the loam.

DOUBLE-BILL: Buñuel feels more fully himself in the saintly absurdity that is SIMON OF DESERT/’65.

THE CAPTAIN HATES THE SEA (1934)

A pretty good idea and a pretty good cast can’t float this comic riff on GRAND HOTEL, even on a cruise ship.*  Wallace Smith’s script sets up the expected multiple storylines (a lush, a dick, some hidden securities, senior sexpot, even a captain who hates the sea!), but they don’t so much intersect as occasionally bump into each other.  Meanwhile, director Lewis Milestone (not known for a light touch in spite of winning the one-and-only Oscar ever given for Comedy Director on TWO ARABIAN KNIGHTS/’27 and his excellent early Talkie THE FRONT PAGE/’31) never finds a proper comic rhythm.  Yet, weak as it is, still an enjoyable watch thanks to some gorgeous lighting from lenser Joseph August and as sad swansong for the unfortunate John Gilbert.  Fourth-billed in spite of having the largest role, he’d recently bid adieu to his long M-G-M contract playing second fiddle to ex-amour Greta Garbo in QUEEN CHRISTINA.  Looking a bit frail and lightheartedly drinking himself to death (on and off screen, dead in just over a year at 38), he’s rather charming within the role’s limits.  (It’s as close to Ronald Colman as he ever got.)  Victor McLaglen’s a tough cop gone P.I.; Walter Catlett a sympathetic bartender; Wynne Gibson an ex tart trying to be the good wife; and Walter Connolly as a captain amused at the foibles of his passengers.  Tame stuff, but watch Milestone hit form in the film’s one serious sequence with Akim Tamiroff’s rebel leader arrested and summarily executed after getting off at a port city where he expected to lead a revolution.  Suddenly, everybody seems to know what to do, particularly Milestone, in his element, if only for five minutes.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Next year, M-G-M made their own ocean-bound GRAND HOTEL in CHINA SEAS/’35.  Expert entertainment with Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Rosalind Russell & Wallace Berry, dir. Tay Garnett.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *And speaking of M-G-M: Buster Keaton got nowhere with production head Irving Thalberg pitching a comic riff on GRAND HOTEL for himself & Marie Dressler.  (Buster as the slow dying Lionel Barrymore; Dressler to play Garbo’s balletic swan.)  Keaton biographers have for some reason poo-pooed this as a tired idea from a played out Buster in decline, ignoring the constant delights of THREE AGES/’23 which took off on D.W. Griffith’s INTOLERANCE in much the same way.

THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY (1947)

In the struggle that was British cinema in the late ‘40s/early ‘50s, a Golden Age of Dickens adaptations: David Lean astonishments GREAT EXPECTATIONS/’46 and OLIVER TWIST/’48; the Christmas Carol in SCROOGE/’51; and a darn good shot at THE PICKWICK PAPERS/’52.  Plus, from little Ealing Studios, this overlooked NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.  With a discursive storyline better served by mini-series (and there’ve since been many), this stripped to the bones version is brisk & bracing, even a bit brusque; but in a good way that doesn’t misrepresent this early novel.  (PICKWICK hardly a novel at all, which makes NICKLEBY second only to OLIVER TWIST.)  Unfortunately, lanky Derek Bond misses star quality as Nickleby, lad of little fortune & many a short term job; but every other piece of the casting puzzle spot on.  Particularly the men, glowering Cedric Hardwicke’s saturnine Uncle/’Protector’; Bernard Miles as his revenge-minded clerk; Alfred Drayton’s terrifying Squeers with his sadistic private school and pudgy horror of a son; Stanley Holloway’s hammy theatrical benefactor (just not enough of him); not a weak link in here.  And trimming the plot certainly helps tamp down any false sentimentality (Aubrey Woods’ tortured Smike less physically challenged than in other versions), though at this length, Dickens’ ‘rhymed’ plot devices & coincidences do topple onto each other.  Still, this is the version to go for after you’ve read the book.*

DOUBLE-BILL: Beautifully designed by Michael Relph just before he became an Ealing producer, it’s stylishly directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, who gets the most out of his small budget following his legendary contribution to DEAD OF NIGHT/’45 with Michael Redgrave’s ventriloquist losing himself to his ‘dummy.’  OR: Any of the Dickens films mentioned above.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Now at least partially displaced as first choice by the fine 2001 mini-series 3'20") with James D’Arcy fully capturing Nicholas’s grace and handsome soul.