Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1939, destry rides again, george marshall
Director: George Marshall
In the opening scenes of Destry Rides Again, director George Marshall builds his vision of the old west economically and with great style. The saloon in which much of the film will take place in is seen from overhead. A chaotic crowd assembles around and within it – guns fire in the air, men brawl, a drunken man rides his horse about. Images familiar of the genre. Then, Marshall slowly pans away from the crowd to the upper floor of the building, which is dark and its windows closed. A cut to the interior: a poker game. The men around the table, Marshall makes clear, are those who run the town, and as Brian Donlevy’s Kent, the saloon owner, cheats a patron out of his ranch with the help of his cunning lover, Frenchy, played by Marlene Dietrich, their methods of exploitation are revealed. The power dynamic is further visualized in the next scene as a man walks overhead in the rafters and looks down at the drunken, boisterous party below – an image suggesting a puppet master, or even a dictator. All of this sets the floor for the entrance of James Stewarts’ Thomas Destry, the new, pacifistic sheriff in town, who refuses to humor the patterns of the old west and instead seeks to maintain justice through more honorable means. It is clear by the end, however, that the evils of the town cannot be fought with threats and moral reasoning, and so Destry finally must resort to violence in order to salvage the community. A fitting turn of events as, in the real world, a war loomed near. Though the picture exercises little more than the most basic conventions of the genre, it is exceedingly well-crafted and thoughtful – if not necessarily Ford, it’s only a step or two below.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1939, it's a wonderful world, w.s. van dyke
Director: W.S. Van Dyke
Louis B. Mayer appreciated a director like W.S. Van Dyke, who earned the nickname “One Take Woody” for his famously quick, arguably careless shoots. While Van Dyke’s body-of-work might be scattershot and of little interest in assessing as a whole, he made a few memorable pictures, including The Thin Man, Manhattan Melodrama, and an underrated screwball comedy from the golden year of Hollywood, It’s a Wonderful World. James Stewart, who would fully come in to his own the same year with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, plays a private eye on the run for a crime that he did not commit. He stumbles upon a wayward poetess, played by MGM’s newly acquired starlet Claudette Colbert, and together they work to solve the murder for which Stewart’s client is convicted. Colbert’s character initially isn’t far removed from the women of today’s romantic comedies – she’s obnoxious, over-eager, and gets herself and Stewart into a lot of trouble. She fulfills Stewart’s cynical slandering that, “I never knew a dame that wasn’t dead from the neck up.” How refreshing, then, is it to see that Colbert saves the day in the end using her intelligence, proving Stewart’s assumptions wrong. She’s a far cry away from a proto-feminist comedic lead like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, to be sure, but it’s a nice redemptive arc, and Colbert does a fine job at maintaining the underlying virtues of her character while her actions might suggest that she’s little more than a clown. The picture, written by the great Ben Hecht, unfortunately lacks the verbal sophistication of the best screwball comedies, though it does involve a number of memorable running jokes, such as Colbert’s insistence that she “swears by her eyes.”
Director: Nicholas Ray
Joan Fontaine feared that she was being typecast as a noble, passive heroine in the 1940s, and so to provide her an opportunity to play against type, she purchased the rights Anne Parrish’s nobel All Kneeling, later selling it to RKO under the agreement that she would take on the starring role. Born to Be Bad, however, despite its title, does not play as a remarkable change of pace for Fontaine – her character is not simply a gold-digging vixen, but a woman wrought with her own frailties and emotional complexities, which the actress conveyed magnificently in Rebecca and Letter from an Unknown Woman. Fontaine is so good at making the woman sympathetic, in fact, that the picture lacks an intensity that one might expect from a juicy soap opera of this mold. When she is confronted for her behavior, she is merely pitiable – there’s none of the sense of vindication that audience members might have felt when a woman played by Bette Davis, for example, got put in her place. Surprisingly, the picture ends without any sort of retribution for the home-wrecking Fontaine, and in that sense it feels more akin to some of the pre-Code women’s pictures like Baby Face or Red-Headed Woman. While the film is curiously devoid of the tension it should muster, the work of Fontaine and Robert Ryan, especially, is worth the time investment.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1949, knock on any door, nicholas ray
Director: Nicholas Ray
Before his debut feature, They Live by Night, had been released in theaters, Nicholas Ray was enlisted by Humphrey Bogart to direct a social problem picture for his newly-founded Santana Production company. Bogart himself was cast as a lawyer who must defend a delinquent, played by John Derek, in a murder trial. The film, Knock on Any Door, was based on a novel by Willard Motley, which argued that the slums of America are producing criminals, and that society at large should take responsibility for these cyclical patterns of the impoverished class. While the premise leads to a moving, humanist speech by Bogart in the third act, it is slightly mishandled given that Derek had many opportunities to succeed in his youth – Bogart’s fatherly companionship, his relationship with a social worker, a loving, supporting girlfriend - and he blew each one. While the picture calls for social reform, it conversely suggests that, at a certain point, the damage has been done and that criminals are simply a lost cause. Despite the critical flaw, the picture is handsomely made – in the flashback sequences of Derek’s childhood, characters wear striped shirts that resemble prison garb, and there’s a number of vertical lines both within the set and constructed through shadows that suggest that Derek, like the rest of his friends and family, is literally trapped within his socioeconomic boundaries. Derek wasn’t much of an actor and, indeed, his “pretty boy” monicker in the film reveals just about all that he has going for him, however his scenes are often salvaged by the talented character players around him (a terribly-scarred George Macready as the district attorney is particularly memorable).
Filed under: Uncategorized
Director: Jules Dassin
A modern reworking of Cyrano de Bergerac, A Letter for Evie starts promising and with plenty of charm. The cast – Hume Cronyn as the Cyrano type, John Carroll as his wolfish companion, and Marsha Hunt as the object of their interest – were more than enough to lead a B-picture of this stock, and, in fact, they have considerably more appeal than some of the major stars of the era. Cronyn was a very special performer who, in addition to projecting a level of sensitivity that came naturally to him given his size and unassuming looks, possessed a remarkable intensity. In Brute Force, for example, which was a later collaboration with director Jules Dassin, his prison security chief is a memorable sadist, who delights in punishing the inmates for his own presumably sexual urges. Though his co-star in Evie, John Carroll (who resembles a mix of George Brent and Clark Gable), dwarfs him, Cronyn is never purely a victim and he isn’t afraid to throw a few punches. As game as the cast is, however, Dassin eventually loses the heart of the picture and things topple into a mean-spirited affair. Persistent to a fault, Cronyn goes beyond hopeless romantic and appears fully deranged as he plays drunk, wrecks Hunt’s apartment, and nearly attempts rape. When the film gets over the madcap and attempts to restore order, the sentiment feels unearned and Dassin mishandles key dramatic scenes. Despite the flaws, however, it’s a picture that you can’t help but root for, even when it doesn’t live up to what it could have been.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1942, jules dassin, reunion in france
Director: Jules Dassin
Joan Crawford’s long-standing career at MGM was on the downswing in 1942 as the studio ushered in a new era of stars like Judy Garland and Greer Garson. Her second-to-last picture for Louis B. Mayer was Jules Dassin’s Reunion in France, a tonally confused propaganda effort in which the French Crawford harbors a downed American pilot played by John Wayne. The picture has promising moments early on, including a rapidly-cut montage sequence that mixes newsreel footage with staged elements, before it ultimately sinks with Crawford’s performance. Her scenes with Wayne are good (even if Crawford later joked, “we hit it off like filet mignon and ketchup!”), but as the espionage plot takes over in the third act, she appears to give up entirely. In a car chase, she can’t bring herself to do anything but widen her eyes and clench her jaw. The script is partially to blame, sure, as it reduces the star of the picture to a passive observer, but Crawford doesn’t have it in her to overcome the weakness on the page and maintain her character’s dignity. She later acknowledged the film’s poor quality and admitted that the only reason she made it was in hopes to get budding star Wayne in the sack. That they never hit it off is a tragedy – at least somebody would have gotten something worthwhile out of the picture.
Director: Robert Bresson
Made with utter precision and wasting not a single shot, A Man Escaped is, formally, a perfect movie. Like the protagonist, it is deeply focused on its objective, stripping away every superfluous distraction that has no relevance to the destination. There is never a question about what the next task is – carve through this plank; cover the hole so as not to be discovered; deliver a letter; retrieve a spoon – and each progression is an opera of suspense, with the length of each cut, the inhibited visual perspective from within the cell, and the sounds that ring from outside banding together in cinematic synergy. It is storytelling in its purest form, and as such it may be director Robert Bresson at his most accessible, catering to both those academically curious and those looking for a thrill. Bresson, it is known, spent a year and a half as a prisoner of war in a German prison, and as such it is plausible to suggest that the film is at least loosely autobiographical. The film wastes no time to show the hero with his head in his hands and feeling defeated – wallowing in misery is the last thing on the mind of the prisoner, rather he obsesses diligently about the prospect of escaping, envisioning circumstance after circumstance that could lead to his salvation. To quote Bresson, “When one is in prison, the most important thing is the door.”
Director: Robert Bresson
Often spoken of as one of Robert Bresson’s best, Mouchette is among the bleakest and most cynical films that this reviewer has ever seen. Over the course of the picture, the young girl of the title is humiliated, bullied, raped, and, in the end, finally succumbs to suicide. That the film is bleak is not an issue – after all, both Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc and Au Hasard Balthazar present similarly cruel worlds that thoroughly victimize the protagonist – but Mouchette‘s moral failing is that the abuse doesn’t serve any other means, whereas Joan’s faith was the subject of her film, and Balthazar serves as a subject of allegory. Misery is not an invalid curiosity, certainly, but for a narrative to read as identifiably human, one must acknowledge the capacity within man for compassion, for instance. The first third of Mouchtte is so relentless in its torture of the girl that it rings as false – one feels so pummeled by the time that she is beaten after her only moment of happiness that all that is left to do as an audience member is laugh in submission. It is a well-made picture, certainly, however Au Hasard Balthazar is a far superior film about the same subject, one that presents a bleak portrait of humanity whilst allowing its characters their dignity and the courtesy of being loved.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1971, four nights of a dreamer, robert bresson
Director: Robert Bresson
His second film in color, Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer is an adaptation of the Fyodor Dostoevsky novella White Nights. The plot is simple: Jacques, a young artist and the titular dreamer, encounters the beautiful Marthe as she readies herself to commit suicide, having been neglected by the man whom she had intended to marry. Both are swept away by romantic delusions – while Marthe is fixated on the lodger that she had lost her virginity to, Jacques attention is erratic, and, as the number of unfinished paintings in his flat suggests, is unlikely to see anything through to the end. The apparent budding romance between them (at least as he visualizes it) is embodied in Paris itself, here an almost utopian setting in which, uncharacteristically, Bresson glamorizes through the hypnotic tonality of North and South American folk music and a dreamlike glimpse of a luxury liner floating down the Seine. In one of the film’s most revealing and sublime images – of which there are many – Jacques and Marthe stand shoulder-to-shoulder, with Jacques’ eyes positioned stubbornly towards the sky and Marthe’s focused street-level at the arrival of her lover, perfectly economizing the nature of both characters within a single frame. The film is tragically unavailable for home viewing in acceptable quality, however it is not to be mistaken as lesser Bresson – it is a masterpiece.
Director: James Whale
After director James Whale had a fall out with the post-Laemmle management at Universal in 1936, he temporarily divorced himself from the studio that he had helped brand in the thirties with his horror pictures. The Great Garrick, a comedy produced for Warner Brothers, was a box office flop, despite critical respect and admirable charm. Brian Aherne plays David Garrick, a real-life English actor widely regarded as one of the best to ever take the stage, who is invited to work at the Comédie-Française in Paris. A rumor spreads that Garrick condescendingly suggested that he would teach the Parisians how to act, and therefore the proud French actors begin an elaborate stunt that involves them taking over the inn that Garrick will be staying at with the intentions of startling and embarrassing him. Garrick figures out the game, although he wrongfully assumes that a beautiful wayward countess, played by Olivia de Havilland, is part of the rouse. The film has its share of laughs – many of them from the great Edward Everett Horton, most known for his character work in the Astaire and Rogers musicals – and, while it would be excessive to call a picture as safe as this edgy, Whale does bring a level of sexuality that was nearly absent from, for example, his 1934 effort One More River. In one romantic scene, Aherne and de Havilland exchange dialogue while a bed is framed between them in the background.
