John DiLeo's Blog, page 5

House of Bamboo (1955)

Set in 1954 Japan, director Sam Fuller’s House of Bamboo belongs to a rare sub-genre:  the color noir.  That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it accurately describes a select club of movies that also includes Violent Saturday (1955), Slightly Scarlet (1956), and The River’s Edge (1957).  These films use vibrant colors to play on our senses in much the same way that light and shadow are used for effect in the more typical black-and-white examples of film noir.  You certainly don’t want your “noir” in Technicolor all the time, but a color noir can revitalize a tried-and-true crime story and endow it with a newly bracing and refreshed charge.

House of Bamboo has a fairly routine set-up:  Robert Stack stars as a U.S. army sergeant who goes undercover to infiltrate the mob of kingpin Robert Ryan.  What elevates the film above its business-as-usual plotting are the Tokyo locations, the wide-screen compositions, and, yes, the rapturous use of color.  Fuller’s direction is visually superb; this is masterly, painstakingly crafted moviemaking.  Japan comes to vivid life as a place of sensual power and delicate beauty.  (The movie makes sumptuous, and sometimes exciting, use of Japanese screens.)  There’s a seemingly authentic feel for Japanese culture, resulting in a more than usually credible culture clash with the Americans.

Fuller’s control of the plot and his cast is far less secure.  The beautiful images distract viewers from the hollower aspects of the story and its characters.  Stack is mostly one-note, humorless enough to be appearing in a spoof (gearing up for Airplane!).  At first he’s playing a tough hood, and then it’s revealed that he’s an investigator putting on an act.  Yet there’s no difference in him, no new depths, after we discover that there’s more to him than first suspected.  He’s relentlessly stoic and tense, very black and white (despite the color).  His romance with lovely Shirley Yamaguchi humanizes him somewhat, but barely.

As for Ryan, his role is pretty standard mob-leader stuff.  However, you could make a case (and some have) that his character is gay.  When the very good-looking Stack arrives, Ryan clearly notices, decisively shifting his attention to him and away from Cameron Mitchell, who up until then was Ryan’s very definite “favorite” crew member.  Despite the gay twist, Mitchell’s tossed-aside role also feels like a stock character.

And so it’s Joe MacDonald, the cinematographer, who is the movie’s real star, not just for his saturated colors but for the thrilling mobility of his camera.  Kudos as well to the art directors responsible for those breathtaking colors in the sets, just waiting to be enhanced by MacDonald’s camera.  With style to burn, the movie climaxes in a great amusement-park sequence, second only to the one at the end of Strangers on a Train (1951).  There’s also a memorable scene when Ryan shoots a man in a bath barrel, with water pouring out of its bullet holes.

A pulsating mix of beauty and violence, a triumph of style over content, House of Bamboo makes something indeed special out of something potentially ordinary.   

Berlin Express (1948)

As film noir was emerging in the mid-to-late 1940s, an interesting hybrid was developing right alongside it:  the docudrama noir.  The bad guys in these movies are embroiled in noir-ish crime stories filmed in stunning shadows, while the good guys are bent on displaying the inner workings of U.S. law enforcement institutions:  T-Men (1947) deals with the Treasury Department battling counterfeiters; The Street with No Name (1948) is all about the FBI; and Border Incident (1949) follows an undercover immigration inspector who joins forces with a Mexican agent to expose a crooked operation.  Like these examples, Berlin Express is a deft blend of grimy realism and artful artifice, another socially conscious film noir.  But it also stakes out different territory as a docu-noir set in Europe, adding international intrigue to the mix.  Like Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, which it beat into theatres, Berlin Express offers a rare feature-film look at the ruins of post-war Germany.  But whereas Wilder’s film is a comedy, Berlin Express ties its worries concerning Germany’s future to a popcorn-style thriller plot.  Despite the air of post-war seriousness and its overriding message of hope, Berlin Express plays more like cloak-and-dagger fluff than history lesson.  And it’s also a nifty train thriller, at least at its beginning and at its climax.

The director, Jacques Tourneur, had recently helmed Out of the Past (1947), perhaps the quintessential example of pure film noir.  On Berlin Express, he worked with the great cinematographer Lucien Ballard, and these two artists created a film that seems rather comfortable accommodating both a nightmarish, nocturnal world of glamorous intrigue and the stark, devastated reality of on-location Frankfurt and Berlin.  Well done and satisfying as it is, there’s no denying that its plotting is awfully farfetched and implausibly fast-paced.

The plot hinges on the protection of a German doctor, a man who recently led a fact-finding commission regarding the reunification of Germany.  He hopes that his work will keep the Americans, the French, the English, and the Russians, each currently occupying a German zone, will remain on friendly terms.  The doctor is on his way from Paris to Berlin to present his findings to the Allies.  Meanwhile, an evil German underground is bent on killing the doctor and promoting unrest, hoping for an end to all prospects for a peaceful post-Nazi future.  Just what this doctor has to tell the Allies is never made clear, so you just have to accept the fact that it’s “important” and that his work is for the good of all (whatever it may be).  I hesitate in telling you who plays the doctor because that’s one of the film’s enjoyable twists.

When the doctor is kidnapped, his French secretary (Merle Oberon) leads a rescue mission through ravaged Frankfurt.  Helping her are four representatives, each from one of the Allied countries, each in Germany for his specific talent.  The American, Robert Ryan, is there because he’s an agricultural expert.  The others are Frenchman Charles Korvin, British Robert Coote, and Russian Roman Toporow.  Another good twist is that one of these men is the would-be assassin, waiting for his chance.

A major flaw is the ease with which clues fall into the path of this quintet, and the ridiculously short amount of time it takes to find the doctor.  Just how small a town is Frankfurt?  But, along the way, there are some visual dazzlers:  a shootout in an old brewery; a brawl in a water tank; and a climax in which the killer is caught because of a reflection from a train window.  Then it’s goodbye at the Brandenburg Gate, with the especially hopeful coming together of the American and the Russian, so touchingly oblivious to decades of Cold War ahead.

Ms. Oberon was married to cinematographer Ballard at the time this film was made.  Was naming her character “Lucienne” a little nod to hubby Lucien?  Her French accent is dreadful, and she’s easily outacted by the gentlemen surrounding her.  Ryan is his solid self, comfortably representing all that is strong, smart, and good in America.  The film is a bit too reliant on its narration by actor Paul Stewart, though it’s his job to set up the documentary feeling with which the film begins.  Once the plot gets rolling, you can feel Hollywood’s unwillingness to let go of Germans as the screen’s prime villains.  Like the great Notorious (1946), it makes gripping use of the possibility that the defeated Nazis are still plotting as we speak.  That paranoia is admittedly dramatically juicy, or was, at least, in those earliest post-war years.

Tourneur left film noir behind with two of my favorite Joel McCrea movies—Star in My Crown (1950) and Wichita (1955)—but, from the days of his horror classics—Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943)—through to Out of the Past and Berlin Express, Tourneur was a master of noir, whether in its purest form or in its variations.

The Four Days of Naples (1962)

The early 1960s was one of Italian cinema’s heydays, the years that gave us, among others, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women (1961), Pier-Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962), Pietro Germi’s Divorce, Italian Style (1962), Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963), and Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963).  To this list of acclaimed and beloved films I’d like to add The Four Days of Naples, a masterpiece that no one ever talks about anymore (at least not in America).  It was nominated for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar of 1962, then, a year later, in the Best Story and Screenplay category, which included a nomination for the film’s director, Nanni Loy, as one of its five writers.  If Loy had become more of a name in America, with subsequent films that garnered Oscar attention, then maybe this film would continue to be in people’s consciousness.  After all, it’s a great movie on any terms, but it also happens to be one of the finest and most convincingly realistic films ever made about World War II.

This is a phenomenally ambitious account of those four days in September of 1943 when the Italians, having made peace with Eisenhower, must fight the Germans while waiting for the Americans to get to Naples.  Even though they know the tide has turned, the Germans continue their fight to hold on to Italy.  Four Days is not a documentary but it comes extremely close to looking like one, so unforced is its staging of its episodes, so consistent is its authenticity.  Shot in black and white with amazingly fluid camerawork, and technically wondrous in its use of sound and in its editing, the film has the immediacy and spontaneity of footage captured on the run.  It looks like the neo-realist films of the 1940s, specifically the very war-torn Open City (1945).

Four Days follows dozens of individual characters from among its cast of hundreds.  It’s astonishing how we get to know so many of them, and how so many of their stories become gripping.  Here are just a few of the characters with whom we become involved:  a mother who must separate from some of her children; the escaped reform-school boys who fight for the city that incarcerated them; a married woman and her lover who fight among the rebels; an Italian captain leading rebel forces.  And all the story threads are interwoven beautifully, seamlessly.  I can’t imagine the logistics of a movie that attempts to tell the story of an entire city fighting a war.  It’s an enormous undertaking, and the result is an enormous achievement.

The Germans round up all the men they can find and hold them hostage in a stadium, which incites the women, the children, and, of course, the rebels to fight back.  There’s a great scene when upper-floor residents throw furniture, even toilets, out their windows and onto German soldiers down below, and an especially powerful sequence in which some rebels ride around in a taxi with two dead Italian boys atop it, a way to rouse fellow citizens to enter the fight.  But there’s humor, too:  consider the veteran who hasn’t slept in three days and is immediately taken hostage when he finally crawls into his own bed.

The Four Days of Naples is a forgotten knockout, and a must for anyone interested in WWII.  It is what is known as a tribute to the little people, but there’s nothing condescending or phony or gooey about it.  There may be occasional sentimental flourishes, but there is so much going on, so much to savor, that any flaws are easily forgiven or even ignored.  At the end, you’ll mostly just feel grateful to have survived.

Night Song (1947)

With the screwiest plot since Random Harvest (1942), Night Song is an enjoyably absurd romantic melodrama, a compulsively watchable soap opera with one of those high-minded serious-music backgrounds so prevalent in the 1940s, in movies like The Constant Nymph (1943), Deception (1946), and Humoresque (1946).  In Random Harvest, amnesia victim Ronald Colman is tangled between his former great love and his current wife of convenience, both played by Greer Garson.  The kicker is that Garson is not playing a dual role:  the great love and the wife of convenience, unbeknownst to memory-rattled Colman, are the same person!  Well, in Night Song, blind pianist/composer Dana Andrews is romantically torn between Merle Oberon and—you guessed it—Merle Oberon, and, yep, he doesn’t know they’re the same girl.  Just replace amnesia with blindness and Night Song almost qualifies as a Random Harvest remake, even though it was given a post-war context with Andrews playing a veteran.  It’s an early surprise that his blindness is not combat-related, having happened after his return home, when a drunk driver smashed through the plate-glass window of a drugstore, rendering Andrews not only blind but bitter, angry, and rude.  Oberon is a wealthy San Franscisco socialite who, while slumming in a dive, becomes haunted by his music when she hears him at the piano.  She pretends to be a blind girl so she can better inspire him to finish his concerto, even moving into a small flat to be especially convincing.  And we’re off!

Also in the cast are Hoagy Carmichael, as Andrews’ roommate and bandleader, and Ethel Barrymore, as Oberon’s unmarried aunt.  (Both are in on Oberon’s scheme.)  Carmichael, who had recently appeared with Andrews in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Canyon Passage (1946), is his usual, laconically likable self, while the great Barrymore is at her smuggest, even though her role is essentially comic.

Enough, enough, get back to the juicy plot.  Okay, Oberon arranges a composition contest, which provides Andrews with the $5000 prize money needed for the New York operation that will restore his eyesight.  (Supposedly he wins fair and square because he is so talented.)  The screwiness factor kicks into higher gear once Andrews can see again.  When he opts to remain in New York, Oberon hightails it east.  She “meets” him as the beautiful, rich Merle Oberon he has never seen before.  Speaking to her about the blind girl back home, he says, “Her voice was like yours.”  Yeah, uh, exactly like hers.  And so we’re complicit in Oberon’s hopes that he’ll ultimately reject her for the other her back home, his soulmate.  But can he resist the drop-dead glam Oberon and do the right thing?

By 1947, Oberon was in the waning days of her leading-lady stardom, but she still looks extremely beautiful in black and white, photographed by her husband Lucien Ballard.  Despite her obvious limitations as an actress, she must have been a woman of rare taste and personal style because, no matter the film, she is always costumed exquisitely, always appearing to be in supreme control of how she looks.  This makes her ideal for a picture like Night Song, which requires more in the way of hypnotic romanticism than it does in acting chops.  Oberon has the dreamy eyes, the none-too-deep competence, and the umistakable aura of a movie star, which, for Night Song, is better than having a great actress in her place.

Despite the film’s generally ludicrous nature, Andrews manages to give a restrained performance.  Though he is shamelessly manipulated by the plot, there is nothing shameless about his work, which is further enhanced by his ease at convincing us that he’s blind and that he can play the piano.  This film captures Andrews at his career peak, fresh from his triumph in The Best Years of Our Lives, one of the great American films of the 1940s.  More than anyone else in that classic’s impressive ensemble, Andrews is the film’s emotional anchor, the closest thing it has to a central character.  And he is superb.  It is ironic that its two other main male players, Fredric March and Harold Russell, both won Oscars for their performances, while Andrews, who truly gives the standout performance, wasn’t even nominated.

Night Song was directed by John Cromwell (father of actor James Cromwell), the man who made such memorable and diverse pictures as The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Since You Went Away (1944), Anna and the King of Siam (1946), even Caged (1950).  He also has the distinction of having directed both Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis in movies from 1934, serving Hepburn dreadfully in Spitfire while turning Davis into an acting sensation with Of Human Bondage.  If Night Song isn’t one of his biggies, it is nonetheless a very professional job and an irresistibly fun type of escapist movie-movie.  In its world of elaborately sustained improbabilities, easy fixes, and overall air of kitsch, Night Song may not inspire you to finish that concerto but it’s certainly a cure for the blues. 

The Unfaithful (1947)

W. Somerset Maugham’s play The Letter, a dramatization of one of his short stories, has been good to some big-name actresses:  Gladys Cooper, who originated its leading role, Leslie Crosbie, in London in 1927;  Katharine Cornell, who starred in the play’s Broadway debut, later that year;  Jeanne Eagels, who got a posthumous Oscar nomination after starring in the 1929 talkie version;  and, most enduringly, Bette Davis (also Oscar-nominated) in the classic 1940 version directed by William Wyler.  (Cooper and Davis later were, unforgettably, mother and daughter in Now, Voyager [1942].)  The 1929 film does little service to the legend of Ms. Eagels, a theatrical immortal for her Broadway performance as Sadie Thompson in Rain (1922), another play based on a Maugham short story.  Her Leslie lacks the control central to the character (and the celebrated Davis performance), resulting in a twitchy, artificial, and sometimes laughable performance.  (Eagels was dead by the end of 1929, at age 39, because of her alcohol and drug use.)  Her most spontaneous moment comes when she has clearly forgotten her lines but keeps on going.  In a neat coincidence, Herbert Marshall, who plays Davis’ husband in the 1940 film, plays Eagels’ lover.  Davis’ lover is no more than a prop, just a body to bang six bullets into in the film’s mesmerizing opening.  Having had her stunning breakthrough with the 1934 film version of Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Davis was simply continuing her good streak with his characters.

Following the success and acclaim of their Davis/Wyler version, Warner Brothers wasn’t quite through with the material.  The Unfaithful, directed by Vincent Sherman, is an unofficial and uncredited remake, but it is also unmistakably The Letter, simply transferring its location and reimagining its characters.  No longer dealing with British high society on and around a Singapore rubber plantation, it is now set among the American upper class of Southern California.  This shift allows the film to take The Letter‘s surefire infidelity plot and use it to examine post-war American marriage.

Beautiful Ann Sheridan, an ideally tough yet tender leading lady for James Cagney in movies like Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), and an ace wisecracker in hardboiled melodramas like They Drive By Night (1940), gave her best performance in the period soap Kings Row (1942).  (I included this deeply touching and emotionally vibrant performance in my 2002 book 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember But Probably Don’t.)  Sheridan never again got a part that good, or one that suited her so perfectly (though be on the lookout for Come Next Spring [1956], a real sleeper).  I’d say that The Unfaithful is second only to Kings Row as the best vehicle that Warners gave her in her roughly dozen-year association with the studio.  The always-likable, always-underrated Sheridan died at 51 in 1967.

With The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) focusing on how returning servicemen were handling the delicate transition to civilian life, why couldn’t there be a movie about a woman of the home front and her adjustment to her returning husband?  And wouldn’t this be especially dramatic if the wife was trying to keep secret an affair she had while her husband was away fighting?  This is how The Letter was revamped for 1947, making it an unexpectedly relevant melodrama actually about something, a post-war confrontation with the repercussions of a confusing and lonely wartime at home.  Things appear to be wonderful for Sheridan, with soldier husband Zachary Scott home safely from the war and ambitiously getting his house-building company off the ground.  When a man accosts her in front of her home, just as she’s unlocking her door, she and this assumed stranger soon disappear behind the door.  This is the beginning of the film’s equivalent of Bette Davis and her six gun shots.  The scene is cleverly filmed from outside the house, a violent sequence distressingly viewed only in shadow, further heightened by its unsettling noise.  We learn that Sheridan has stabbed him dead—after all, no one can compare with Bette Davis in the gun-shooting department—and she isn’t about to admit that this guy was her lover.  In this version, she had already ended the affair and felt guilty and regretful about it ever having happened.  Like Davis’ lover, Sheridan’s is essentially faceless and identity-free.

The backstory is that Sheridan and Scott married recklessly during wartime, knowing each other just two weeks.  Sheridan’s affair was with a sculptor.  But there is no letter to incriminate Sheridan.  In its place is an unmistakably identifiable bust of her, for which she posed.  While Cooper, Cornell, Eagels, and Davis all knew they had to retrieve that letter, Sheridan wants to get her bust back.  (Should they have called this movie The Bust?)  It’s most effective to have something as sensual as a piece of sculpture as a lasting representation of Sheridan’s sexual abandon, complete with flowing hair.  It’s much sexier, and more visually striking, than a mere piece of paper.  And, yes, her lover had a wife:  that’s Marta Mitrovich in the Gale Sondergaard role.

Sheridan, who could sometimes seem stiff and sound monotone, comes through with one of her more fluid performances, an honest and smart piece of screen acting.  Zachary Scott, better when playing louses, is dull at first but he becomes more interesting and alert once he learns the truth.  And Lew Ayres is solid in the lawyer role, memorably played by James Stephenson in the Davis version.  But it’s the great Eve Arden, as Scott’s high-living divorced cousin, who really surpasses herself.  She shows what a fine actress she was, not just a gal with an awe-inspiring proficiency with snappy quips.  Here she reveals the humanity beneath the zingers, crafting a character with more depth than at first suspected.  She’s particularly marvelous in a major climactic scene with Scott at her posh apartment (with a large balcony), in which she essentially defends Sheridan (and all wartime wives).  In a more typical role, Arden had appeared with Scott when they both supported Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (1945).

The Unfaithful is superbly shot and designed in black and white, making it a first-rate piece of Hollywood craftsmanship, complete with a throbbing Max Steiner score.  It’s talky in the best sense of the word:  it’s filled with conversations worth listening to.  More adult than the usual so-called “woman’s picture,” as well as an intelligent and worthy remake, the film does become an admittedly preachy anti-divorce plea, fervently hoping (in the words of the Ayres character) that the Sheridan-Scott union can withstand this test and not declare defeat.  (It’s a tricky dilemma for the era’s Production Code, not wanting to “okay” either infidelity or divorce, probably wanting Sheridan to be punished but not wanting Scott to leave her.  We should be grateful that they didn’t just kill her.)  If there’s real hope for Sheridan and Scott, then there’s hope for other post-war couples who also may not have really known each other when they married.  I wonder how many wives saw this movie and were terrified that their wartime dalliances might come back to haunt them.  Not to mention their busts.

The Two Anna Christies

Looking back on it now, it really could have gone either way for Greta Garbo’s talking debut in MGM’s Anna Christie (1930), in terms of it being a big success or a career-stalling failure.  Of course, it was deemed a resounding success and Garbo went on to have a splendid decade ahead of her, notably gracing Grand Hotel (1932), Queen Christina (1933), Camille (1937), and Ninotchka (1939).  And who isn’t grateful for that?  But she really was rather lucky to have squeaked by with Anna Christie.  After all, it’s a creaky, boring movie and Garbo isn’t especially good in it.  How much better could it have looked 83 years ago?  The prestige of Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 play, a Pulitzer Prize winner no less, and the rightness of the casting (with Garbo playing an actual Swede) certainly helped, but let’s face it:  the play is pretty awful.  How can you not cringe every time Anna’s barge-captain father mentions “dat ole devil sea.”  And its drama about a girl with a secret prostitute past feels stale, even for 1930.

Anna arrives on the New York waterfront to stay with her father whom she hasn’t seen for fifteen years.  After she was raped by a cousin, Anna spent the last two years working in a Minnesota brothel.  When she moves onto her father’s coal barge, she finds love with a sailor.  When he proposes marriage, she tells the sailor the truth about herself.  After some high drama, there’s a happy ending.  And that joy extended off the screen, with the critics, the audience, and even the Academy (which awarded Garbo a Best Actress nomination) hailing Garbo’s first talkie a winner.  Today it looks more like they were giving her the benefit of the doubt, not wanting to discourage her or, heaven forbid, send her back to Sweden.  I’m certainly glad it worked out the way it did.  Who wants to imagine 1930s Hollywood movies without Greta Garbo?  Even so, I suspect that I would have greeted this film’s premiere with a reaction similar to the kind that poor John Gilbert was receiving upon the release of his earliest talkies.

On the same sets, and in some of the same costumes, Garbo also starred in another MGM-made film version of the play, but this one in German.  Clarence Brown directed the English-speaking Anna, while Jacques Feyder directed her German counterpart.  Though both films look fairly cheap and static, there’s no question that the German picture is superior, and that Garbo is better in it.  Why is that?  To answer that question fully, I watched both versions back to back, with just a dinner break in between.  The German version is really only marginally better overall, but it’s unquestionably better acted.  Plus, there’s something much easier about reading bad dialogue (in subtitles) than there is in actually having to listen to it.  While Garbo looks astonishingly beautiful (that hair, those hats!) in both versions, she is clearly more at home in the German film, far more comfortable speaking German than English.  But even her body is more relaxed, which allows for emotions that appear to be more organic and spontaneous.  In the German film she is an actress in control, while in the “American” picture her acting is very uneven, marked by awkward, phony gestures and forced emotions, with only rare flashes of her luminous gifts.  She appears to have no technique, nothing to cling to, acting in fits and starts.  And the words don’t come out of her naturally, seeming to belong to someone else, while her body continues to look unsure, sometimes fidgety.  Clarence Brown seems not to have helped her very much, and he definitely didn’t deserve his Oscar nomination.

George F. Marion created the role of Anna’s father, Chris Christopherson, on Broadway and he repeated his role in the English-language film.  He happens to be quite dreadful, not to mention nearly unintelligible with his Swedish accent.  In the German version, Hans Junkermann, certainly a better actor than Marion, plays the part more seriously, without any of the dopey or childlike qualities in Marion’s annoying performance.  The German version doesn’t have much use for comic relief, which is a blessing, but there are plenty of so-called laughs in the English version, thanks mostly to Marie Dressler as Marthy, the father’s drunken bedmate.  Dressler, who was just about to break into major stardom, plays Marthy as the kind of drunk you normally find in a comedy sketch, and her performance amounts to an extended comic drunk scene.  She is over the top as only she could be, yet she can also be amusing, even welcome in such a dreary little drama.  You can never mistake what she’s doing for fine acting, but it’s hard not to like Dressler and smile at her obvious love of performing.  She was, after all, the mistress of mugging!  However, Salka Steuermann (better known as Salka Viertel, five-time screenwriter of Garbo movies) plays the German Marthy as if she were a real human being, not a vaudeville comic.  She plays the role straight, and so she, like the rest in her cast, seems much more like a real and ordinary and sympathetic person.

Character actor Charles Bickford, in much younger days, plays the love interest, the Irish sailor.  Even a very young Bickford seems a ridiculous partner for Garbo; she’d be way out of his league in any possible circumstance.  But his performance is primarily undone by his irritating Irish brogue, which constitutes about ninety-percent of his performance.  (Hurry up, Charles, and become the old-man Bickford of mid-century Hollywood movies!)  In the German version, all references to the character being Irish were removed, which luckily means that the actor, Theo Shall, didn’t have to act in Irish-accented German!  Shall is only slightly more attractive than Bickford, but he definitely makes a better fit with Garbo.

In the English-language movie, a credit reads “Gowns by Adrian.”  Fine, he did some great costumes for Garbo here, but where are the gowns?  I realize that such a prestigious credit was not always meant to be taken literally, but it’s especially odd in a film about an essentially homeless hooker.  Garbo’s entrances into these two movies are notable for their differences in her costumes and makeup.  The English-speaking Anna, intended for the more glamour-loving American audiences, looks pretty chic compared to the more realistically woeful German Anna, who looks much tartier, particularly with that heavy eye makeup.  Helped by these coarser details, Garbo seems much more able to project a hard-knocks dame.  The Germans saw a worn-out whore, while the Americans got a slumming movie star.

One of the reasons the German version is a few minutes shorter is because it doesn’t include the other version’s opening scene on the barge, the first of Dressler’s drunk scenes.  The German version starts with the father and Marthy emerging from the barge (in a long shot in which you can identify that it’s footage of Dressler and Marion).  The other notable absence in the German version is the trimming of the amusement-park scene.  Gone, thankfully, is the game scene in which Bickford tips two scantily clad cuties out of their beds by hitting a target with baseballs.  But the most significant difference between the two films occurs near the end.  In the German version, as in the play, Anna pulls a gun on her sailor when he returns, following his rejection of her.  Why no gun for the English-speaking audience?  At the very least, Anna’s use of the gun provides some suspense, but it also dramatizes her very real fear that he might try to rape her now that he thinks she’s “that kind of woman.”

The German version justifies Garbo’s emerging status as a major star of the new medium.  Yes, her opening hat is better in the English-language film, but her German Anna is the far more accomplished and promising performance.

Mitchell Leisen’s Cradle Song (1933)

I have been singing the praises of director Mitchell Leisen at least since 2002, when I included four Leisen-directed performances in my book 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember But Probably Don’t:  Carole Lombard in Hands Across the Table (1935), Claudette Colbert in Midnight (1939), Barbara Stanwyck in Remember the Night (1940), and Charles Boyer in Hold Back the Dawn (1941).  I love each of those movies, and I also like his Easy Living (1937), Kitty (1945), To Each His Own (1946), and No Man of Her Own (1950).  Leisen was a Golden Age filmmaker deserving of greater recognition today, no longer to be regarded as the poor man’s George Cukor.  (Like Cukor, Leisen was a gay artist with a flair for sophisticated comedies and female-driven dramas, plus a special talent for combining comedy with drama, as well as a knack for getting career-best performances from his stars.)  A noted set and costume designer of films in the 1920s and early ’30s (sometimes for Cecil B. DeMille), Leisen got his first official directorial credit with Cradle Song, a screen adaptation of a play.  A few weeks ago, I grabbed an incredibly rare chance to see this movie at New York’s Film Forum.  It was being screened in their extensive series on the films of 1933.

Cradle Song stars Swiss-born Dorothea Wieck who had recently garnered international attention for her work in the German drama Maedchen in Uniform (1931), noted for its groundbreaking handling of lesbianism.  The film’s success brought Wieck to Hollywood.  Like countless European actresses, Wieck was to find out that she was not, according to Hollywood and the American public, another Garbo or Dietrich.  And this doesn’t seem to have happened unfairly.  Though Wieck is clearly a skilled player, she seems (and sounds) more like Luise Rainer than Garbo or Dietrich, which is not a compliment.  Like Rainer, Wieck is rather obvious in her effects, too self-conscious when dipping into her apparent bag of tricks.  Though the film unsurprisingly did not launch Wieck, it is nonetheless worth a look (if it ever rolls around again).

In many ways Cradle Song is a typical motherlove tearjerker, but it does have a twist:  the “mother” is a nun.  No, she’s not the biological mother, but she is essentially the mother of the piece.  Cradle Song actually plays like The Sound of Music in reverse:  Wieck, an adopted orphan now grown, has been playing mother/governess to the five brothers and sisters she has ostensibly raised, but she has decided to leave them and enter a cloistered order of nuns.  (Wieck plays a German girl who was orphaned in Spain, the film’s location.)  So, the film begins more like The Nun’s Story than The Sound of Music, with Wieck saying goodbye and entering her new world (though clearly smuggling a lifetime supply of lip gloss for her isolated existence).  Wieck is soon able to indulge her continuing maternal instincts when a foundling is left on the convent’s doorstep.  It is agreed that the nuns (but mostly Wieck) will raise the little girl.  She grows up to be Evelyn Venable, and it’s Wieck’s hope that Venable will join the order and remain with her.  But, of course, Venable, able to go out into the world, falls in love.

The character actresses playing the nuns are not unlike those assembled for movies set in theatrical boardinghouses or women’s prisons.  Warm, kindly Louise Dresser is the Mother Prioress, and crusty Georgia Caine is the sourpuss with a heart of gold.  Then there’s glam Gail Patrick, comical Nydia Westman, and likable pal Gertrude Michael.  Young Miss Venable is a fresh and attractive ingenue, very convincing at playing the pangs of first love (with bland Kent Taylor).  It’s soon apparent that the movie’s chief asset is Leisen’s specialty, which he clearly had control of at the outset of his directing career:  his ability to go beyond melodrama and locate a delicacy of feeling, a depth of character.  He allows his actresses to have their moments, always stressing individual characters over the mechanics of the plot.  And so we feel things, things that may have just zipped by in the hands of a less sensitive director.  There may not ever be any doubt about where the story is going, with Wieck learning that she must let Venable go, but Leisen lets it unfold as a lovely, small-scale female drama defined by his tender care.

As in all of Leisen’s films, the sets and the photography are beyond first-rate.  There is a rapturously beautiful image of Venable trying on her wedding veil.  And you know it’s a pre-Code movie because of the scene in which the baby girl is being breast-fed by a wet nurse.

As I watched Wieck find the strength to sacrifice Venable to the world and see her go off with her husband-to-be, I realized that the movie, thanks to Leisen, was better than it had a right to be.  What could have been maudlin and creaky is ultimately touching and restrained, perhaps most of all in the scene when Mr. Taylor, outside their window, asks the nuns to show him their faces so he can know who it was who raised his beloved bride and, therefore, remember them with due gratitude.

John Garfield: Body and Soul

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of John Garfield.  Though he died from a heart attack at only 39 in 1952, his impact as an actor is still being felt.  After all, there really couldn’t have been Marlon Brando if there hadn’t been Garfield before him.  In the late 1930s, specifically with his Oscar-nominated work in Four Daughters (1938), Garfield brought a new kind of brooding realism to the screen.  He combined cynicism with vulnerability, employing a style of simplicity and economy that has kept his work looking very modern.  In my book Tennessee Williams and Company, I say that Garfield was “the transitional link between the Cagney-Robinson-Bogart trio of tough-guy actors to the Brando-Clift-Dean trio of rebel actors,” at ease in both worlds.  Garfield is the only 1930s screen actor who can reasonably be imagined in the roles that Brando played in the 1950s.  He was, as they say, ahead of his time.  How ironic that, by turning down the role of Stanley Kowalski on Broadway in 1947, Garfield accelerated Brando’s rise, passing the baton to him sooner than later.  And how sad that Garfield was dead just months after the film of A Streetcar Named Desire made Brando the newest sensation of the movies.

In my book 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember But Probably Don’t, I included Garfield for what I believe to be his greatest performance, in The Breaking Point (1950) opposite Patricia Neal.  He is also remembered, if not by enough people, for The Sea Wolf (1941), Pride of the Marines (1945), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Humoresque (1946), and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947).  But if there’s a quintessential Garfield movie it would have to be Body and Soul (1947), for which he received his second Oscar nomination (and his only one for leading actor).  His performance, as rising boxer Charley Davis, illustrates my point about Garfield stylistically belonging to both the ’30s and the ’50s:  his acting combines the gumption of deprived but driven Depression-era heroes with the tortured angst and introspection of the more emotionally complicated male characters of the Eisenhower years.  While seemingly looking both backward and forward, Garfield feels utterly contemporary.

Superbly photographed in black and white by the great James Wong Howe, and edited to Oscar-winning impact by Robert Parrish, Body and Soul was directed by Robert Rossen (The Hustler).  Though very well made and consistently compelling, Rossen’s film is marred by its inability to balance Abraham Polonsky’s somewhat heavy-handed, Clifford Odets-type “realistic” screenplay with the stylized and more movie-ish trappings of 1940s film noir, resulting in an incompatible mix.  While Garfield is eminently comfortable throughout, whether providing acting chops or star presence, the film itself has a much more uneven sense of tone.

Though his part lacks the layered depths of his role in The Breaking Point, Garfield fills in the outline of Charley, making him seem richer and fuller than he is on the page.  As his love interest, lovely Lilli Palmer is an unexpected choice because of her lilting Central European accent and obvious sophistication, yet she and Garfield connect quite intimately and memorably.  She plays a Greenwich Village painter, which explains a good bit of her definite distance from the film’s main milieu.  She’s also a bit too good to be true, which is one of the key problems with the script.  Everyone, aside from Garfield, is either too bad or too good.  Garfield resides in the middle, corrupted, yes, but with enough decency to feel frustrated and guilty over it.  In one corner you have Palmer, plus Anne Revere as Garfield’s tiresomely wise mother, and Joseph Pevney as Garfield’s devoted pal, each of whom gets to make speeches at Garfield regarding his eroding behavior.  In the other corner, you have villain Lloyd Gough, so much the melodramatic B-movie hood that he almost seems a spoof.  Then there’s luscious yet hard Hazel Brooks, the film’s greedy femme fatale.       

It’s rare and refreshing to see a 1940s film with a central Jewish character and family, aside from a biopic like The Jolson Story (1946).  It’s also rare and refreshing to see Canada Lee, a black actor, have a shot at a real acting role, as a boxer with an unfortunate fate.  Despite the smug, labored moralizing and its too-easy ending, Body and Soul is a moody, sometimes hypnotic work with a satisfying flashback structure and a terrific “big fight” climax.  Throughout the movie, as it pushes and pulls, wanting to be both a good old-fashioned movie-movie and a thought-provoking indictment of greed, there’s Garfield at the center, rising from the mean streets and supremely at home all along the way.  He grounds the movie, sanding its rougher edges and making it the classic boxing film it has been since its initial release.

The Morning After

So, last night’s Oscar telecast clocked in at around three-and-a-half hours.  What’s funny is that no matter how many things they cut from the broadcast (the presentation of the honorary Oscars, the singing of all five nominated songs), they still manage to bloat the show into a marathon affair.  It’s just the nature of the beast.  And no one is able, or really wants, to stop it.  No matter what they say.

It wasn’t one of the better Oscar shows but it was also far from being one of the worst.  Seth MacFarlane is a unique showbiz figure, part Harry Connick Jr., part crude comic.  It’s a strange mix, with his Harry Connick half better suited to hosting the Oscars.  MacFarlane was often quite charming and attractive, mostly when singing and smiling.  The jokes were more hit-or-miss, though my favorite was his intro for Christopher Plummer’s delayed entrance, a re-enactment of the disappearance of the Von Trapp Family Singers in The Sound of Music, complete with a Nazi soldier announcing, “They’re gone!”  And MacFarlane also scored with his swoony rendition of “The Way You Look Tonight,” which was considerably enhanced by the luscious Charlize Theron playing Ginger to Channing Tatum’s Fred.  It was an unexpectedly glamorous, even magical moment.

Ang Lee has now won two Best Director Oscars without having directed an actual Best Picture Oscar winner.  But this is not a first.  Frank Borzage did the same thing (in 1927-28 and 1931-32), as did George Stevens (in 1951 and 1956).  Lee was far from being my choice this year, and he was no doubt the second choice of most Academy members (who wanted to vote for un-nominated Ben Affleck), but his win had a certain poetic justice:  the Oscar Mr. Lee was holding last night seemed to be the one that should have been awarded to his Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture, seven years late but finally finding its rightful owner.

Christoph Waltz becomes the seventh man to win two Oscars as Best Supporting Actor, joining Walter Brennan (who eventually won three), Anthony Quinn, Peter Ustinov, Jason Robards, Melvyn Douglas, and Michael Caine.

Perhaps the most disappointing section of the evening was the so-called tribute to 50 years of James Bond movies.  Yes, it was great to see Shirley Bassey belting out “Goldfin-gah,” but the film montage was unforgivably sloppy, chaotic, and unmemorable.  It was a mindless speed-through.  And where were the James Bonds themselves?  Couldn’t they have rounded up a few of them?

I liked the Les Miz reunion singalong much better than the movie itself.

And you really can’t complain that “nobody does Hollywood glamour anymore,” not with the likes of Ms. Theron, Nicole Kidman, Halle Berry, Jennifer Lawrence, Jane Fonda (wow!), and, for my money, the winner:  Jessica Chastain.

I enjoyed the surprise of Michelle Obama announcing Best Picture, introduced by Jack Nicholson who now looks like everybody’s crazy old uncle.

And can George Clooney get any cooler?  There he is, winning a Best Picture Oscar, content to let his two co-producers do all the talking, securing his stature as the least needy-looking celebrity on a night devoted to applause, attention, and unabashed self-congratulation.

The Cobweb (1955)

The recent death of actor John Kerr, at 81 on February 2nd, got me thinking about the film in which he made his screen debut, soon after he had made his Broadway splash in Tea and Sympathy (directed by Elia Kazan) for which he won the 1954 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play.  Directed by Vincente Minnelli, The Cobweb belongs to the director’s group of color, wide-screen contemporary melodramas of the 1950s and ’60s, and, no, it is not one of the best (those would be Some Came Running and Home from the Hill).  But it certainly is memorable, what you might call a one-of-a-kind (thank God) curiosity.

The Cobweb is a movie about drapes, perhaps the only movie about drapes.  The drapes are those in the library of a swell psychiatric clinic; the drama derives from who gets to pick the new ones.  Yes, the conflict over the drapes represents all the power struggles and inner demons of those concerned, patients and staff and spouses alike, but everyone surely does talk an awful lot about those drapes.  Minnelli is the likeliest director of a movie about curtains:  who loved screen decor more than he did?  What other director was as likely to obsess over drapes as much as these characters?  But the drama remains on the surface of the fabrics involved, never coming off as anything more than overwrought and absurd.  Clearly the intent was to create a fascinating, complicated drama unleashed by the seemingly harmless need for new drapes.  The result is garish camp.  But with an all-star cast.

Central in the war of the drapes are Lillian Gish, the institution’s bitter, old-maidish administrator, and Gloria Grahame, the bratty wife of the joint’s progressive analyst (Richard Widmark).  The dull leads are Widmark and sweet art-therapist Lauren Bacall.  (As in the next year’s Written on the Wind, in which Dorothy Malone got all the fun stuff to do, Bacall plays a blah second-fiddle to supposedly supporting player Grahame.)  It’s the rare bad performance from Gish (in the same year she was so indelibly great in The Night of the Hunter), distressingly caricatured and over the top.  Grahame is impossibly phony, reteamed with Minnelli after her Oscar-winning work in his far, far superior The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), in which she was every bit as superficial.  Charles Boyer, as a psychiatrist, acts as if he knows he’s in a bomb.  (Boyer had starred in this movie’s granddaddy, the early psychiatric drama Private Worlds [1935].)

Among the patients are Oscar Levant (his usual self), Susan Strasberg, and Mr. Kerr (who receives “introducing” billing).  In the kind of role that might have been played by James Dean, Kerr proved to be no James Dean.  (The Cobweb was released the same year as East of Eden and Rebel without a Cause, the year in which Dean died.)  With his lack of sex appeal and his flat voice, Kerr is no breakout star, though his performance is one of the film’s least offensive.  The presence of James Dean might have helped this picture considerably, given it a genuine jolt or two.

The Cobweb confuses whining with depth, and hysterics with drama.  It’s both trashy and boring; it’s over two hours of people behaving stupidly.  Despite Minnelli’s deservedly high reputation for his stunning use of color and inventive way with the wide screen, The Cobweb fails on both scores:  it’s a brownish, static movie.

In 1956, Minnelli directed Kerr in the big-screen version of Tea and Sympathy, complete with Deborah Kerr, the play’s other star (and no relation to John).  It was a big fat prestige project despite the expectedly ruinous influence of censorship on the final product, including an atrocious framing story that punished Deborah for her so-called sex therapy.  It never was great material to begin with, and its “daring” treatment of sexuality is now extremely dated and offensive (just because John is sensitive doesn’t mean he’s, heaven forbid, “that way”).  It’s as obvious and laughable in its way as The Cobweb is.  Minnelli’s pair of films with John Kerr are visually disappointing and dramatically embarrassing low points in the career of a very great director.  And the drapes are much better in his Madame Bovary (1949).