A LIFE AT STAKE (1955)

At large after leaving M-G-M in ‘53, Angela Lansbury spent a few years taking on just about anything offered.  Mostly tv & indies like this cut-rate variation on DOUBLE INDEMNITY/’44 with Lansbury, surprisingly dishy at 30, married to older moneybags Douglas Dumbrille, but eyeing younger hunk Keith Andes, the old man’s new business partner, with lust & murder on her mind.  But whose murder?  Angela may be out to screw the guy she’s screwing, not her husband.  And, in an extra turn of the screw, Angela’s perky kid sister Claudia Barrett is also hot for Andes when not busy overhearing secrets.  A fine setup for a film noir, if only the script laid things out more clearly & irregular helmer Paul Guilfoyle knew how to squeeze a tight budget or stage action.*  (One nighttime sequence with tipsy Andes getting in jams is so much better you wonder who made it.)  But more than enough oddities to engage, especially in first meetings between the four main characters that play like sexual pickups: Dumbrille ogling a provocatively half-nude Andes just out of bed, a grown-up boy toy in ‘50s gay-coded clingy white pants; Lansbury offering her bod horizontally in a low-cut/strapless one-piece bathing suit to Andes; kid sister Barrett coming on too strong for comfort.  The plot has them buy & sell real estate and houses, but what else is being bought and sold?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Guilfoyle, who mostly acted, no relation to the Paul Guilfoyle who plays boss on the CSI tv series.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned, Billy Wilder’s DOUBLE INDEMNITY with Stanwyck, MacMurray and a phenomenal Edward G. Robinson.

THE LIGHTHOUSE BY THE SEA (1924)

One of the few surviving silent features from the Warner Brothers heyday of RIN TIN TIN, the ‘Wonder Dog’ who saved the studio from early bankruptcy.  That it exists is no thanks to Warners, the source element comes from KodaScope Libraries, a non-theatrical operation for home & school rentals, slightly cut/16mm.  And while not in great physical shape (all Public Domain editions seem to come with crap generic scores), the handsome look and ocean locations still register well enough on this big hit.  Rin Tin Tin's FIND YOUR MAN earlier this year had the same director & writer in Mal St. Clair (who’d go on to become a sort of second-tier Ernst Lubitstch) and rising scenarist Darryl F. Zanuck (who’d go on to become a top-tier Darryl F. Zanuck*).  Fright-faced comedian Louise Fazenda (a Lily Tomlin lookalike who’d soon retire to marry producer Hal B. Wallis) has a rare ingenue part as the spunky daughter of a secretly blind lighthouse keeper.*  Lucky for her, she lands a pair of helpmates when a capsized boat deposits plucky William Collier Jr. and loyal pooch Rin Tin Tin on her ocean front doorstep.  Unlucky for her, a cutthroat gang of rum-runners plan to switch off the lighthouse beam so they can unload a boatload of illegal hooch.  Neatly put together, this fun charmer still comes across with that WWI pup now grown into a great movie dog.  Multiple German Shepards expand trick possibilities (one fella actually relights the lighthouse lamp!), but the secret to Rinty’s popularity was less athleticism & stunts than acting.  Six years old at the time, Rinty was a phenomenal dog actor whose every thought & emotion registered right thru the camera lens.   The loss of over a score of features a mystery and a shame.

ATTENTIONB MUST BE PAID: *Braille had become standard for the blind by 1924, but the girl’s father uses an earlier system of raised letters on the page.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Fine, slightly eccentric bio from Susan Orlean: RIN TIN TIN: The Life and the Legend.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *These RIN TIN TIN pics made Zanuck, which didn’t stop him from writing a memo in early Talkie days suggesting no future for Rin Tin Tin ‘since the dog can’t talk.’

IN THIS WORLD (2002)

Unusually successful alternating between serious & silly projects, here Michael Winterbottom tackles a particularly tough subject using documentary technique to chart a fictional, if likely, illegal journey of a couple of Afghan teens, refugees stuck among thousands in a Pakistan holding camp, fighting impossible odds to hopefully reach London.  Cousins Jamal and the slightly older Enayatullah are the very essence of resilience as they blindly shuttle thru country after country (Iran, Turkey, Italy, France, England) without documents and a bare smattering of local language skills, depending on the kindness of helpful paid (or bribed) strangers.  With just enough cash reserves from relatives back at the camp to get by, they go from one arranged meeting to the next, hidden behind produce or livestock in the back of trucks as they sneak past borders, moving from dirt-poor villages to major cities via commercial bus, even on foot.  Winterbottom gets amazing portraits from his non-pro cast of helpers and asylum seekers from different countries.  Discovering even the luckless can run out of luck.  Playing his moves very close to the vest, Winterbottom often leaves us as much in the dark as the boys are.  Who is this stranger guiding us to the next point?  Jumping ahead of himself before we get our bearings.  The idea to make us sympathetic participants in the journey.  But there’s a cost in losing informed involvement, the tactic reducing the horror of tragedy when it inevitably arrives.  Even so, moving and unsentimental; avoiding easy answers to intransigent problems.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  A similar tale from a century back in Elia Kazan’s AMERICA AMERICA/’63.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/12/america-america-1963.html

DAWSON CITY : FROZEN TIME

A treat for historically-minded film Geeks/probably a bit of a bore for non-believers.  This enchanted documentary tells a double story, largely thru found footage, of the life and times of Dawson City, a boom-to-bust Alaska Gold Rush town big enough at its peak to support three cinemas between the prospectors and service community of the early 1900s.  So while we concentrate on fortune’s folly in the first half, the second picks up on what got left behind.  Specifically, hundreds of damaged cans of silent nitrate film (many fragments of ‘lost’ features) used as landfill, then, decades later, accidentally recovered.  Told by Bill Morrison in an elegiac tone of mournful uplift, it’s elegantly constructed out of excerpts from fictional silent film that match moments of Gold Rush days, historical still photos (many from original glass negatives), along with home movies of the town over the years, a few modern interviews with the celluloid rescue heroes, and tantalizing resurrections of surviving reels from the pits.  Not just feature film, but surprises like news footage of the infamous Chicago Black Sox.  It all happened because Dawson City was an end-of-the-line distribution stop.  Why return commercially exhausted product?  It certainly burns easily enough for quick disposal.  (Nitrate film will continue to burn under water.)  Much was destroyed that way, more simply dumped into rivers.  But hundreds of reels became landfill, a sleeping repository for pieces of time, cinematic history.  Much is irreparably damaged, much still gravely beautiful.  With even the film grain telling part of the story.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: A late silent epic, THE TRAIL OF ‘98, gets a fair amount of play since it’s all about a town like Dawson.  Never lost, it happily survives in fine shape.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-trail-of-98-1928.html

THIS HAPPY BREED (1944)

Noël Coward wrote and starred in two hit plays in 1939: PRESENT LAUGHTER, an autobiographically inclined sex farce about the literary elite; and this follow-up to the UPSTAIRS/DOWNSTAIRS dramatics of CAVALCADE/’33, now covering the years 1919 to 1939, but from a middle-class family house POV.  LAUGHTER hit B’way six times (Clifton Webb; Coward; George C. Scott*; Frank Langella; Victor Garber; Kevin Kline), BREED never.  Too topical, too local, it fell out of favor like so much Coward post-war (tagged patronizing/ condescending), its rep never quite joining in the Coward mid-‘60s revival.  A particular loss for this superb film which neatly trims some of the Father Knows Best bromides that hold down the play.  David Lean, in his first solo directing credit, brilliantly works inside tight rooms & passageways (note future directors Ronald Neame & Guy Green on staff*), smartly opening up the play with historical markers to ring in the passing years, highlighting incidents small as buttering a cat’s paws, large as a tragic car accident (stunningly realized not simply off-screen but doubly off-screen).  Coward particularly strong with wounding family squabbles that feel (and probably were) firsthand memory.  And with an all but flawless cast.  Holding back on his florid style, Robert Newton is excellent as the father (though Robert Donat, who turned it down would have been even better), yet can’t truly match the level of identification Celia Johnson gets as his wife and Stanley Holloway as the best-of-all-possible neighbors.*  With Kay Walsh’s prodigal daughter and John Mills' lovestruck boy-next-door not far behind.  All in a gorgeous, somberly refined TechniColor production, the film often intensely moving.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Johnson played on stage with Coward who needed little convincing he couldn’t pull off this character on film in spite of his own actual lower middle-class background.  And, yes, George C. Scott is the outlier in that PRESENT LAUGHTER list, excellent on stage in the Coward role with a great bit of repeated comic business, habitually turning straight at the audience as if he were passing a mirror, unable to not take an admiring glance.  Get a taste of this playful side of Scott in Paddy Chayesky’s THE HOSPITAL/’71.

CONTEST: *Uncredited (even on IMDb), but that’s yet another future director doing the brief opening narration.  Better known for acting, name him to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choosing.

THE NIGHT RIDERS (1939)

Even after STAGECOACH lifted John Wayne to A-list status in Hollywood, he still had quite a few Western programmers in the pipe line and contracted in his future.  This one is on the low end of its type.  A late entry in Wayne’s popular ‘3 Mesquiteers’ series from Republic, it holds two standout features: One helpful/One disqualifying.  The helpful one is Jack Marta’s striking nighttime cinematography (really red-filtered daytime lensing) still showing its original luminescent glow thanks to pristine source elements.  And, ironically, that pristine preservation undoubtedly due to the film’s disqualifying factor.  But first, a brief plot precis: Riverboat card sharp & a forger use phony documents to claim huge territorial land rights.  Enter the 3 Mesquiteers disguised as a trio of Robin Hood/Zorro types fighting back for the little people.  The problematic/disqualifying part?  Someone thought white Ku Klux Klan robes would be just the thing for them to wear as cover when they ride around dispensing justice.  Yikes!  No wonder the negative & prints are in such good shape.  Who’d show this thing?  No doubt an informal ban has kept this safely hidden away for decades.  (By comparison, STAGECOACH no longer has an original negative to work from.)  Too bad this isn’t one of the better entries in the series.  Not even the bizarre puppetry of Mesquiteer Max Terhune helps much.  (His wooden dummy barely gets an appearance.)  And the climax, a fake-out firing squad, must have given kiddie matinee audiences nightmares for weeks.  George Sherman  haphazardly directs an original story that lifts its one big twist (President Garfield’s promise to help out is stopped by assassination!) from another recent pic.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Listen close to hear Hank Worden’s distinctive voice get a line in when the ranchers complain about the unbearable rents from the new land owner.  And look fast to see cute kid Sammy McKim give Wayne a sucker punch right in the kisser.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For a better-than-average 3 MESQUITEERS oater, try SANTA FE STAMPEDE/’38.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/02/santa-fe-stampede-1938.html

THE THIRD DAY (1965)

You can almost hear the old studio system collapsing around you in this inert melodrama.  Not only in its soapy plot (amnesiac can’t explain the car crash that killed his mistress while he attempts to save his marriage and the family business before his frail father-in-law dies), but also in the way the old story beats & tropes had the rug pulled out from under them when studio artifice, backlots and the comfort of monochrome were exchanged for the vagaries of life in the real world and color.  What once had been phony (at worst) but at best artistically abstracted into all-of-a-piece drama is now only phony.  Certainly so with styleless hack Jack Smight producing/directing.*  With Percy Faith’s wretched musical exclamations.  In set decoration that puts Mona Washbourne, that embodiment of lower-middle-class British acquiescence, inside a tastelessly overstuffed estate as doyen to old-money power & wealth.  (Greer Garson too busy?)  Sally Kellerman debuts as wanton mistress; a pre-LAUGH-IN Arte Johnson sounds just like Mel Tormé as the piano-playing cuckold; Roddy McDowall, Robert Webber, Arthur O’Connell, Vincent Gardenia also on hand, while poor Herbert Marshall ends his film career with less than a whimper, ‘speaking’ with a finger tap.  All so Elizabeth Ashley & George Peppard can rekindle their relationship from ground zero.  Amnesia, the ultimate reboot opportunity.

ATTTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *An early scene for Peppard & Ashley (as disagreement tilts to bedside seduction) could serve as a Film School 101 lesson in bad editing and where not to put the camera.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The arrogant prick element that always came to the surface in George Peppard made for a good fit in his next (and probably best) perf, THE BLUE MAX/’66.

CESAR ET ROSALIE (1972)

It's Yves Montand who makes this menage à trois story ‘pop.’ He plays a self-made millionaire who has be #1 at all he tries: at business, at a party, at family gatherings, at being a guy’s guy at his weekly poker game (the smoke is positively alarming in this scene) and especially at being a great & caring lover to his beautiful young mistress Romy Schneider. But his edifice comes crumbling down when Sami Frey, a youthful former lover of Schneider, returns to the scene. Montand can’t seem to stop his inner Stanley Kowalski from crashing through the sophisticated surface he’s cultivated. And director Claude Sautet does a fabulous job not only letting him show himself at his worst, but in showing how both Schneider & Frey are alternately appalled and attracted by his violent fits & grand gestures of apology. The sexual politics of the time dates some things (Schneider makes an awful lot of coffee for the boys), but the story arc holds up beautifully. By the end of the film, these three seem ready to tackle a French edition of DESIGN FOR LIVING, gay sub-text and all. Too bad the currently available DVD (WellSpring) is such a smeary looking transfer, but it will serve till something better shows up.

IT HAPPENED TOMORROW (1944)

While fellow exiled-directors Jean Renoir & Max Ophuls struggled in WWII Hollywood, René Clair made a remarkably smooth transition. And if the passing years have reversed critical opinions on their American films (especially for Ophuls who batted out masterpieces wherever he landed), this gentle farce retains its charm & freshness. Set in the late 1800s (like Clair’s best film, THE ITALIAN STRAW HAT/’28), it’s the story of a young reporter who mysteriously receives a copy of tomorrow’s newspaper today. The obvious advantages of getting a really Early Edition help him find fame, fortune & tru-love. But what to do when your own obit shows up on tomorrow’s front page? Fight it? Go fatalistic? Dick Powell is a bit long in the tooth for a cub reporter, but he helps the much younger Linda Darnell loosen up. Clair downplays her statuesque quality simply by accentuating how much taller Powell is. Clever. Dudley Nichols interlocks his plot without making dumb choices (not so easy in a Hollywood farce) and Clair delights us (and no doubt himself) casting veteran comics in supporting roles (Jack Oakie, Edgar Kennedy, Sig Rumann, & Edward Brophy) somewhat like Preston Sturges, whose CHRISTMAS IN JULY/’40 (our DOUBLE-BILL, also starring Powell) has a similar light, winning tone.