What classics did you see last week ? (7 Jul - 13 Jul 2019)

The Face Behind The Mask / Robert Florey (1941). Columbia Pictures. Cinematographer Franz Planer (Cyrano de Bergerac, Death Of A Salesman, Roman Holiday, The Caine Mutiny). Wow, what a find I made this week – a tough early noir with another fine performance from Peter Lorre. In the opening scenes, watchmaker and woodworker Janos Szabo (Lorre) is an eager immigrant from Hungary, ready to go to work, earn money, and send for his fiancé. But, like many noir leads, circumstances beyond his control derail his dreams. A tenement fire horribly disfigures his face. No one will hire him. No one will look at him. No one will talk to him. He is going to kill himself. But one person does look at him and talk to him. A petty thief named Dinky (George E. Stone) accepts him as he is. Dinky introduces him to crime. Janos’ delicate hands and build make him a perfect burglar and thief – that we don’t actually see any of the crimes committed indicates the budget level the film makers were working with. He quickly rises to head of the crime gang, now wearing a full head mask that resembles his former face. Then his life changes again when he meets a sweet blind woman named Helen (Evelyn Keyes) who thinks of him as a good man. This is a pretty hard-hitting little film that pulls few punches. Peter Lorre rules. Highly recommended.



Shadows On The Stairs / D. Ross Lederman (1941). Warner Bros-First National. This pleasant 63-minute murder mystery was based on a stage play that had a short run (45 performances) on Broadway in 1929 under the title “Murder On The Second Floor.” There had been a previous film version in 1932 (unseen by me). The setting is a London boarding house filled with suspicious characters. About the first third of the movies is just differing members of the cast discussing matters between themselves that we the audience does not yet know the whole story. One of tenants, Joseph Reynolds (Paul Cavanagh) seems to be in some sort of criminal enterprise with another roomer, Ram Singh (Turhan Bey). The innocent young couple look to be the struggling playwright Hugh Bromilow (Bruce Lester) and Sylvia (Heather Angel), the daughter of the landlady. One night around midnight, just about everyone in the house is creeping down hallways and in and out of doors. The next morning, one of them is found murdered. There is a double twist ending. NOTE: Laurence Olivier’s American stage debut was as the male ingénue Hugh Bromilow during the play’s brief time in 1929.




Passage to Marseille / Michael Curtiz (1944). Warner Bros-First National. The plan was to reunite as many cast members as Warner Bros could round up from their recent hit “Casablanca.” Humphrey Bogart was to star while being supported by Claude Rains, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and director Michael Curtiz. It almost didn’t happen because Bogie got into it with Jack Warner over an assigned script that he hated and refused to have any thing to with (that movie, later called “Conflict,” was eventually made with a re-written screenplay). Warner tried to get Jean Gabin to play Bogart’s character, but Gabin wasn’t interested so “…Marseille” went ahead as planned. The movie opens in England late in World War II at a secret air base where strikes against Nazi Germany are launched. A noted war correspondent is allowed a rare look at the place. He interviews Capt. Freycinet who tells him that many of the pilots and support are from the Free French Air Force. One man the reporter notices in particular is an sever looking bomber crew member, Jean Matrac (Bogart). Over dinner, Freycinet tells the reporter the story of the men he has seen while the movie goes into flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks – which go on way too long pushing the runtime to just about two hours, just about my only major problem with the film. The main group of men – Bogart, Lorre, Philip Dorn, Helmut Dantine, and George Tobias – were all prisoners on Devil’s Island. All were indeed criminals except Matrac who - as we see in another lengthy flashback – was a crusading journalist against Nazi appeasement who was framed. All of the men – except, again, Matrac – have a wish to return to France and redeem themselves by fighting for their country. Matrac only wants to get back to his wife and son. Sidney Greenstreet plays a high-ranking French military officer who supports the Vichy government. He is a passenger on board a freighter bound for Marseille which picks up the escapees in open sea. This voyage ends in a really great action sequence in which Matrac shows what he is really made of. Wonderful direction, editing, and cinematography from the masterful James Wong Howe. “Passage to Marseille” misses greatness by that much but is a very worthy film and a Bogart “must.”



The Lady Confesses / Sam Newfield (1945). Alexander-Stern Productions / Producers Releasing Corp. (PRC). PRC is often thought of as the lowest of the low Gower Gulch/Poverty Row studios. And I guess they were. Their films – like this one – were shot on the cheap on crowded and cramped sound stages. Yet, in the days before television in every house, films like this were a perfect evening’s entertainment. Vicki McGuire (Mary Beth Hughes) has just talked on the phone with her fiancé Larry Craig (Hugh Beaumont) when her doorbell rings. The caller is Craig’s wife, Norma (Barbara Slater), who had disappeared seven years earlier but now returns. Norma informs Vicki that there will be no marriage to Larry now or ever. Of course Norma later turns up dead, murdered. While Vicki and Larry are the natural suspects, dogged police inspector Capt. Brown (Emmett Vogan) finds plenty of other suspects from Norma’s past. The ending, knowing what we know now, is pretty scary, shocking – and funny.




House Of Wax / André de Toth (1953). Warner Bros. The early 1950s saw the first era of 3D movies. The first release that required wearing the uncomfortable cardboard 3D glasses was “Bwana Devil” a poor quality African adventure (based on the same true story as the later “The Ghost and the Darkness” from 1996) that promised “a lion in your lap” but just resulted in yawns. Most of the 3D releases were low budget losers. I remember seeing, in addition to “Bwana Devil,” “Fort Ti” and “Inferno,” this last one – with Robert Ryan stranded in the desert - is actually a pretty good movie. For “House Of Wax,” Warner Bros. spared no expense in the opulence of its set design nor its promotion, making this probably the major production of the 3D films released during this approximately 2 year period. Story-wise, “House Of Wax” is a redo of Warner’s previous “Mystery Of The Wax Museum” (1933, Michael Curtiz). Master wax sculptor Prof. Jerrod (Vincent Price) refuses to sculpt a chamber of horrors to attract customers so his partner sets fire to the museum. Jerrod is assumed to have been killed in the fire. But Jerrod soon resurfaces as does a deformed killer with a badly scared face who spirits away the bodies of his victims. Phyllis Kirk is the damsel in distress who resembles Jerrod’s former wax figure of Marie Antoinette. Instead of the feisty Glenda Farrell who was the action hero of the pre-code film version, we get a couple of plodding police officers played by Frank Lovejoy and Dabbs Greer. Carolyn Jones, Roy Roberts, and Paul Picerni co-star. Charles Bronson (billed as Charles Buchinsky, his birth name) plays Jerrod’s mute assistant named Igor (no kidding). I suppose that with the sumptuous Warner Color and detailed set designs, this makes a passing entertainment (and began Vincent Price’s career in horror), but see the early one if you need to make a choice between them.



Dude with a couple of paddle ball toys stops the movie cold to demonstrate 3D



The Train / John Frankenheimer (1964). United Artists. It’s saying something when Train Magazine picks “The Train” as the best train movie ever. But what a decade of the 1960s John Frankenheimer had! In addition to “The Train” he helmed The Fixer, Seconds, Seven Days In May, The Manchurian Candidate, and Birdman Of Alcatraz. Arthur Penn was the first director but his script was more of a pensive philosophical study of the madness and contradictions of war. Star and executive producer Burt Lancaster, however, wanted action and more action. So a week after filming began, Penn was out and Burt’s old friend John Frankenheimer was in – and Frankenheimer delivered on the promised action. It is France near the end of World War II. The Allied forces are mere days away the occupying Nazis are preparing a hasty retreat. Colonel Franz Von Waldheim (Paul Scofield) has raided Paris museums of hundreds of art treasures that he hopes to transport to Berlin to help finance the war. He becomes obsessed will getting the art on a train and will bully and threaten any and all – even disobey his own orders – to get this done. A museum curator contacts an underground resistance group led by railway station supervisor Paul Labiche (Burt Lancaster) to ask help in thwarting Von Waldheim’s plan. At first reluctant to risk lives for paintings, Labiche himself finally becomes as obsessed with stopping the shipment as Von Waldheim is with succeeding. But the question remains: how many lives are worth trading for art, however irreplaceable and culturally important they may be? “The Train” is an important film as well as being an exciting action adventure.




The Sisters Brothers / Jacques Audiard (2018). This western is the first English language film from director Audiard. It is shot in the style of some European film makers (I was thinking the Dardenne Bros all the while watching then saw in the end titles that they were co-producers). The early portion of the story is told in short scenes, vignettes, where we learn that Eli and Charlie Sisters (John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix) are accomplished mid-19th century (set in Oregon and northern California in 1851) gunmen and assassins who work for a rich business man known only as the Commodore. Their current job is to track down a man (Riz Ahmed) who has developed a chemical formula that will make gold prospecting in rivers an easy task. A private investigator (Jake Gyllenhaal) has found the chemist and is supposed to then turn him over to the Sisters who will extract the formula from him. But the private eye decides to partner with his quarry. The point of the story, as we are told several times in dialog, is how people can change and be better, yet what the characters go through – and what they cause others to go through – is a very unpleasant experience. Not recommended.

Among the MGM postwar musical biopics, Three Little Words is the one I revisit most often. Departing from the studio's more standard formula of overwrought drama in the hands of second-tier players like Van Heflin and Robert Walker or Tom Drake and Mickey Rooney (in a slump by 1948's Words and Music) in a gift wrapping of "guest star" appearances by the likes of Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne and June Allyson performing most of the musical duties, this one delivers double-barreled star power with Fred Astaire and Red Skelton, who remain at the center of everything throughout the picture, and all of which - even the falling-out - is handled with a light touch befitting its lead players.

The more compelling attraction is the perhaps unexpected onscreen chemistry of Astaire and Skelton themselves. Fred was no stranger to playing relative straight man to expert comic foils like Edward Everett Horton, Victor Moore, Robert Benchley or George Burns and Gracie Allen, but he and Red seem to bring out the best in each other. Skelton's more manic tendencies are tempered; in turn, it's as though he unleashes a more relaxed and unrestrained Astaire, and their comic bickering gives the impression of a well-practiced team. Even their singing voices are harmoniously complimentary. I'd have liked to see them in one or two other such pairings.

Other highlights come in the form of the irrepressible Gale Robbins, who always made the most of relatively small roles, delivering two entirely different interpretations of "All Alone Monday," Gloria DeHaven, playing her own mother Mrs. Carter DeHaven, looking and sounding ravishing while crooning "Who's Sorry Now" (pity MGM never figured out how to best exhibit this multi-talented performer) and a sublime adagio by Astaire and Vera-Ellen to the equally sublime "Thinking Of You."

As a cinematic document of the real-life association of Kalmar and Ruby, Three Little Words may be Hollywood bunk, but it more than fills the bill as solid musical-comedy entertainment.      









       

Tess (Roman Polanski, 1979) – 8.5

I've wanted to see this since it came out, in part because my gf back then looked a bit like Nastassja Kinski and had the somber demeanor of the title character. Well, lo and behold, I relinked with her a couple years ago after a 37-year break and we watched it tonight. We both loved it.

Wonderful sets, costumes, and cinematography make Thomas Hardy's famed tragedy come across well. (As did Schlesinger with Far From The Madding Crowd.) We don't see a lot of character development in Tess but that's Hardy's fault, not Polanski's or Kinski's. She's excellent at portraying brooding endurance but she's not called upon to do anything else.

I want to write a book about a waif-like young woman who falls in with a group of people who support the president which leads to a tragic end. The title is Tess of the Deplorabilles.

Knocked off a fair few last week, some new viewing, some forgotten repeats.

☆☆1/2 (5/10) = worth a look

april love (1957) ☆☆
l'atalante (1934-fr) ☆☆☆☆
autumn leaves (1956) ☆☆☆
bloodlust! (1961) ☆1/2
colossus: the forbin project (1970) ☆☆1/2
cooley high (1975) ☆☆
drums across the river (1954) ☆☆
gun fury (1953) ☆☆
gunman's walk (1958) ☆☆1/2
the halliday brand (1957) ☆☆☆
the hospital (1971) ☆☆1/2
how to steal a million (1966) ☆☆1/2
the lavender hill mob (1951-uk) ☆☆☆
ordet (1955-den) ☆☆☆1/2
the pearl of death (1944) ☆☆1/2
the quick gun (1964) ☆1/2
ramrod (1947) ☆☆1/2
7th cavalry (1956) ☆☆
the spider woman (1943) ☆☆1/2
the stranger wore a gun (1953) ☆☆
young and innocent (1938) ☆☆1/2

This Week: Animation Domination

morrisondylanfan
It lies somewhere between 👍 and 💩
The animation is good and there are talented people involved, but it seems like a lame corporate idea without much soul.