Director: Tay Garnett
This highly unusual curiosity from producer Walter Wanger has some notoriety as the picture that turned Joan Bennett into a brunette, an image change that would bring her great success as a noir femme fatale in the 1940s. But its real interest is the huge number of process shots–in a thriller/romance that travels around the world, the talented cast performs much of the material in front of projections. If the ambition is laudable, it feels cheap and poorly accomplished, ridding the rear projection technique of its charm. Part of the problem is that the picture has some interest in being ethnographic in the way it details other cultures and their people, which is an insurmountable objective when confined to a studio. Also working to the film’s detriment is the clunky tonal shifts. In the first act, Bennett shoots a man who led her sister to suicide before faking her own death. Naturally, what follows is the hijinx of a womanizing private eye (Fredric March), a dopey detective (Ralph Bellamy), and the developing romances involved. Bellamy is a highpoint, but the film is stolen by Ann Sothern, who at the time had failed to connect at either Colombia or RKO. Reportedly, this film brought Sothern to MGM’s attention, which would lead to her casting in the Maisie series.
Director: Tay Garnett
Towards the end of Loretta Young’s long career in film (she would soon be transitioning to roles on television), she starred in this small-scale thriller that displaces film noir elements from the expected urban setting into an idealized vision of suburbia. She plays a woman who is oblivious to the fact that her invalid husband (Barry Sullivan) has slowly been going mad, and in her absence he’s been theorizing that she and an old army friend (Bruce Cowling) are plotting to kill him. Intercepting a letter that would damn her becomes the central focus of the plot, and as with the best work of Hitchcock the premise turns something completely ordinary into the object of tension and dread. Similarly, maintaining a performance as a happy housewife is the concern of much of the tension, with voiceover narration discussing Young’s fear of being mistaken by her neighbors or the post office superintendent as anything but an average, well-mannered woman. Young is quite good in a slowly unraveling performance as the film progresses, and cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg contributes some interesting play in the contrast between the genre and setting (there is a chilling use of simple bedroom mirrors in one particular scene).
Director: Tay Garnett
When Hollywood made the transition from silent to sound in the late 1920s, one of the biggest casualties was the mobile camera. There were some exceptions–director Rouben Mamoulian pushed the limits with innovations that allowed the camera to move both freely and silently–but many early talking pictures are relatively staid in form. This is not at all so with Prestige, which filmed in 1931 is just about as radical as it gets. From the very first scene, director Tay Garnett reveals his incredible preoccupation with camera movement. In a few instances, actions are meticulously blocked out so that the camera can move from character to character or room to room while keeping the actors audible and in frame (Garnett showed a similar interest in movement in the same year’s One Way Passage, which includes a similarly impressive long take). Nothing that Prestige has to offer holds a candle to the stylistic interests–it’s a dated colonialist melodrama, with a dutiful but schizophrenic performance by Melvyn Douglas as a drunk. The reliable Ann Harding is luminous and is given an empowered role, but the dialogue leaves much to be desired. Despite these limitations, however, Garnett’s experimentation with movement is essential viewing with anyone interested in the filmmaking of the era.
Director: Tay Garnett
In their sixth pairing, Kay Francis and William Powell play doomed lovers on a ship set for San Francisco. She is terminally ill and he is a fugitive facing execution in San Quentin, though neither are aware of the others’ secret. What is most striking about the piece is Robert Kurrle’s cinematography – his camera is in constant motion from the first shot, an impressively choreographed long take. Kurrle shot Jewel Robbery, another Francis and Powelll collaboration released the same year, and the aesthetic here differs significantly – perhaps the sophistication of the camerawork can be attributed to the influence of director Tay Garnett. In the early years of sound, only a few filmmakers – Rouben Mamoulian being a prime example – had the ambition to use such elaborate tracking shots. Visuals aside, the picture doesn’t completely hold together, though it does have some lovely redeeming moments. It takes too long before the romance between the leads feels settled in, and in the first half of the picture, especially, Garnett emphasizes the subplots more than he does the relationship between the central characters. In fact, it is the courtship between a police sergeant and a con artist posing as a courtesan that often steals the show.
Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 1946, tay garnett, the postman always rings twice
Director: Tay Garnett
This 1946 adaptation of James Cain’s novel features one of the most memorable entrances in all of cinema. A lipstick case comes rolling into a diner followed by a pair of long legs. Cut to a close-up of John Garfield, whose lips split as his breath is quite literally taken away. Cut to a full shot of Lana Turner, who has never looked more desirable. That’s just the beginning – the entire film is smoldering with such sexual tension, some of which is so overt that it is absolutely stunning that the film was released while the Production Code under Joseph I. Breen was in full effect. The ending features an unfortunately tacked-on, moralizing sermon, but the rest of the film is coolly dark and menacing. The cast is uniformly excellent, particularly Hume Cronyn, who makes a habit out of stealing every scene he’s in. It’s hard to believe that material this dark was distributed by MGM, who was known for their glossy pictures – it has the feeling of a gritty Warner Brothers noir.
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