What classics did you see last week ? (10 Nov - 16Nov 2019)

I love 'The Big Picture'!

The Pirates of Blood River (1962) < Look Movie.

teleadm

I love Seabiscuit

Randon B movies from the so called NOIR canon, again..they become addictive and seem to exist in a world outside the conventions and expectations of mainstream Hollywood movies. No stand outs, but 2 or 3 close enough.

viewing, top to toe.

worthwhile..
jeopardy (1953)
crack-up (1946)
night editor (1946)
wicked woman (1953)
plunder road (1957)

ok...
railroaded! (1947)

ho hum..
where danger lives (1950)
jennifer (1953)
dark mountain (1944)

mikef6

railroaded & where danger lives are well shot, but dullish screenplays. The former may look like noir..but it didn't feel like it, and Mitchum in the latter was pretty average as a confused concussed fugitive...almost irritatingly so. Low interest, I thought, except for photography.

plunder road can be seen on youtube.

A Philip Marlowe Double Feature.

The Big Sleep / Howard Hawks (1946). Warner Bros. Cinematographer Sidney Hickox (To Have and Have Not, White Heat). One of the biggest hits of 1946, “The Big Sleep” remains a fan favorite in spite of – or maybe because of – its convoluted plot and one of the most famous Loose Ends in film history. The film also benefits mightily from the almost tangible chemistry and electricity between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in their second film together. The film is based on Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel of the same name and the first featuring Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe (Bogart). Marlowe is hired by the rich General Sternwood to deal with a blackmailer who claims that the General’s youngest daughter Carmen (Martha Vickers) owes gambling debts. The General also mentions an employee and friend, Shawn Regan, who left suddenly without a word. Before leaving the house, Marlowe encounters flirtatious Carmen (“She tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up”) and Carmen’s older sister, Vivian (Bacall) who tries to discourage Marlowe’s investigation. This is just the start. Along the way we encounter a bookstore with a sideline in blackmail fronted by the sarcastic Agnes (Sonia Darrin, wonderful but, incredibly, not credited). Marlowe: “You do sell books, don’t you?” Agnes: “What do these look like, grapefruit?” After the bookstore owner is murdered, Marlowe follows a trail to low-life Joe Brodie (Louis Jean Heydt) who is associated with mobster Eddie Mars (John Ridgely) whose main enforcer is Canino (Bob Steele) who kills a harmless hustler (Elisha Cook, Jr.) which makes Marlowe mad and…anyway, all this whizzes by at about 90-miles an hour so don’t try to figure things out until your third or fourth viewing.
Although ‘40s audiences swooned over the Bogart/Bacall romance, “The Big Sleep” actually falls third among the four films they made together (there was a fifth – 1946’s “Two Guys From Milwaukee) – where they appear together in a cameo in the final seconds of the film. I place it below my #1 Choice: Key Largo (1948) which is a tense, tight, well-controlled thriller with a great script, fine ensemble acting from a great cast of co-stars, an Oscar winning performance, and a big emotional punch. In my #2 spot is “To Have and Have Not” (1946). They met on that shoot, sparks flew, and it all seen on screen. That’s not to say that “The Big Sleep” nor their final collaboration, “Dark Passage” (1947) are not worthy or should not be seen. On the contrary, see them all at your earliest possible convenience.



Elisha Cook, Jr and Bob Steele as the deadly Canino


This chart even misses some connections


Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall


Philip Marlowe takes a taxi ride in a 1936 DeSoto Airstream. The woman cabbie gives him her card and says “Call me any time, day or night.”



Murder My. Sweet / Edward Dmytryk (1944). RKO. Cinematographer Harry J. Wild (Pitfall, His Kind Of Woman). Based on Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell My Lovely,” the second novel (of seven) about Private Eye Philip Marlowe. Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell in a famous performance that changed his screen persona overnight) is hired by the mountain of a man with enormous strength Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki). He wants Marlowe to locate his former girlfriend Velma Valento who he hadn’t seen for 8 years due to Moose’s prison sentence. Marlowe, almost under compulsion for having his neck squeezed, agrees. He starts the investigation that night. The next morning he gets another client, Lindsay Marriott (Douglas Walton) who is coded gay by 1940s standards (uses rosewater and is dressed in a sort of pajama looking suit). Marriott wants Marlowe to accompany him that night to buy back from thieves some jewelry that had been stolen. Things go wrong. Marriott is killed and Marlowe hit in the head with a sap (“A black hole opened up at my feet. I dived in. There was no bottom”). A woman reporter shows up the next day asking about the jade he was supposed to have recovered. Since he had never heard of the jade, he exposes the lady as Ann Grayle (Anne Shirley), daughter of the wealthy but elderly Leuwen Grayle (Miles Mander), owner of the stolen jade necklace, and step-daughter to Grayle’s young wife Helen (Claire Trevor). At Grayle’s mansion estate (“You would need a compass to go to the mailbox”), Marlowe also meets shady con-man and blackmailer Jules Amthor. The connections between all of these people are not as complicated as in “The Big Sleep,” but the novel and script (John Paxton-Crossfire, The Wild One, On The Beach) aspire to that level. My Lovely Wife and I had seen this film many years. She commented when it was over that she had forgotten everything but the ending and Moose. It is a great memorable performance by Mike Mazurki and maybe his most well-known. Even when Moose is out of control and throwing people across a room or how scary he is when he says, “You shouldn’t have done that,” to someone, ya gotta love the guy. Co-star Ann Shirley left show business early when her career didn’t develop. At one point she was engaged to Victor Mature, but looking back and learning that Mature was married five (and divorced four) times, she may have dodged a bullet there. The director and cinematographer fill most every scene with darkness and shadows. The danger is real. Every character (except Ann but including our hero) is cynical and looking for – and finding – the worst in everybody. A true film noir that will satisfy even the purest of noir purists.



Dick Powell and Ann Shirley


Claire Trevor with Powell



The Killer That Stalked New York / Earl McEvoy (1950). Columbia Pictures. Cinematography by Joseph F. Biroc (“Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte”). This is a much better movie than it has any right to be. Combining docu-drama narration with its usual tribute to federal law enforcement together with an investigative procedural with noir elements, we get a suspense drama that carries a sense of unease all the way through. In spite of the misleading title, this is not a slasher or serial killer movie. It starts with narrator Reed Hadley describing what we are seeing on-screen. Sheila Bennet (Evelyn Keyes) arrives in New York City after a trip to Cuba. She is smuggling diamonds but being trailed by a Customs agent. Ducking into a phone booth, she calls her husband Matt Crane (Charles Korvin) who, we see as he answers the call, is having an affair with Sheila Bennet’s sister Frankie (Lola Albright) with whom he plans to leave with after the diamonds arrive. He tells Sheila to check into a hotel for two days. But Sheila is not feeling too well. Ducking her tail, she visits a medical clinic run by Dr. Ben Wood (William Bishop) with his nurse assistant, Alice (Dorothy Malone). Malone, a constant presence in the film but without much dialog, demonstrates her screen presence quite vividly. Dr. Wood fails to recognize Sheila’s symptoms. She has smallpox, something Wood could never guess because of its rarity. The structure of the script is also interesting as both the medical establishment and the Customs bureau conduct independent searches for Sheila as more and more people come down with the disease. Wondering when the two will meet gives us another level of anxiety. Set in 1947 (NYC had a smallpox outbreak in ’46), some of the movie plays out like a public service announcement with dialog that conveys information to the movie audience (“There was an outbreak in South America that killed a thousand people” and “It is absolutely necessary that everyone be vaccinated”), Evelyn Keyes is outstanding as the smallpox victim inadvertently infecting people as she tries to avoid the law. At the end, her face looks on fire as fever is burning her up from inside but she keeps moving looking for revenge from her husband. William Bishop makes a good, concerned doctor. Jim Backus and an excellent Whit Bissel show up in smaller roles.





Evelyn Keyes


Dorothy Malone


Trollflöjten (The Magic Flute) / Ingmar Bergman (1975). Sweden. The great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman isn’t exactly known for uplifting and inspiring films, but here, in one of his last films (he is not credited on screen), he gives us a wonderful film of one of the world’s great delights and works of art – Mozart’s 1791 singspiel, The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte, in German) – a step-out-of-character perhaps analogous with David Lynch’s sweet and emotional The Straight Story (1999). Bergman had constructed on a sound stage a replica of an actual historical theater with its proscenium stage. It looks at first that this will be a photographed live performance. Yet his fluid camera and the editing “opens up” the story to a certain extent with shots that go beyond a stage play (quick cuts to sets not on stage, close-ups of portraits in someone’s hand), yet not all the way into the Real World. Also shots of individuals in the audience give us a sense of a theatrical experience but only close-ups are shown. A wide shot of the auditorium is never given and the orchestra is never seen. We are quickly emerged in a fairy tale world and never leave it (except for a few backstage shots as a singer rushes to get ready for his cue and the cast mills around during intermission). It is sung in Swedish with English subtitles which, to add to the fun, are singable – that is, the syllables in the English words match the musical rhythm that sets the Swedish words. I saw this movie in ’75 or ‘76 not long after I had an operatic “born again” experience. I had watched the very first Live From The Met broadcast on PBS, in, I think, 1975 and became an overnight fanatic. Bergman’s film was, early in my learning and listening curve, my very first encounter with The Magic Flute and was almost as transformative a happening as the PBS show. It was great seeing this again.

Journey for Margaret (1942)--I was expecting a sentimental weepfest centering on Margaret O'Brien's character, but this was so much more. Robert Young is wonderfully moving as a war correspondent traveling through Europe with his pregnant wife (Laraine Day).  In order to avoid the bombings of major European cities, he sends his wife to what they assume is the relative safety of London; she is wounded in yet another bombing and loses the unborn baby, as well as any possibility for future pregnancies. The wife, now emotionally as well as physically wounded, returns to the U.S. as Young continues his work in the UK, fearing that he's becoming numbed to the plight of traumatized civilians. Becoming attached to two young orphans, he considers adopting them and bringing them to the US, but it's not an easy task. Instead of the usual patriotic rallying cries of other Hollywood war movies of the time, this one
has an uncertain, somber feel to it--made at the beginning of the U.S. involvement in the war, it doesn't deny that things are going to get a lot worse before (or if) they get better. O'Brien is touching, but Young is also moving as the reporter who prays for his anger to return, to keep himself from becoming dehumanized by the constant witnessing of suffering.


Bert Rigby, You're a Fool (1989)--British actor Robert Lindsay debuted in the US on Broadway in the mid-'80s in the old-fashioned musical Me and My Girl; Carl Reiner, apparently in the throes of a man-crush, wrote and directed this showcase for Lindsay as a coal miner obsessed with old-fashioned movie musicals and old-fashioned silent film comedians. The only problem is that the nostalgia craze of the late 1960s-early '70s was long gone by 1989, and, as one of the characters in this film remarks, Rigby's act seems to be out of a time warp. The film seems like an anachronistic version of a 1940s B-movie musical, and it wasn't very successful when released. Robert Lindsay tries his best, and if you like some lighthearted, corny fluff, it's worth a look.

One True Thing (1998)--Somber family drama with Renee Zellweger as a put-upon daughter who puts her career and private life on hold in order to care for her dying mother (Meryl Streep), while her egotistical father (William Hurt) busies himself with other activities. Zellweger is touching and sympathy-evoking;
William Hurt is adept at playing his usual supercilious jerk; but the best performance is from Streep, who forgoes her usual listen-to-me-do-this-cool-accent shtick and emphasizes emotions instead. She makes her character gut-wrenchingly real (whether you completely agree with her or not) in one of her best performances (I'm not one of her biggest fans, but she was wonderful in this). The sequences of Zellweger being questioned by the district attorney after her mother's death which are interspersed throughout the movie (most of which is told in flashback) don't seem to work, IMO, but the rest of the film is 
moving and honest in its depiction of a situation with no easy resolution.

The Lion King (2019)--I'm not a big Disney fan, and I'm probably one of the few people on the planet who has never seen the animated version of this story. So I can't compare it, positively or negatively, to the original. From what I've learned from the IMDb reviews (many of which tend to be angrily negative), this follows pretty much the same story. The CGI is beautiful; the animals look and move realistically. But the talking animal concept just doesn't work here, as it doesn't in most talking animal films. (Babe and Eddie Murphy's Doctor Doolittle are exceptions, since the former has a half-real/half-storybook aura to it, while the latter is a goofy comedy with a comedian interacting with wisecracking animals). The lions discussing their relationships while they stand still and stare at each other just seems awkward and a bit boring. The running time is nearly two hours, rather long for a children's film, especially when the animals are so busy conversing that they don't move the story along quickly, and there's not much humor, either.
My favorite scene in the movie--a wordless scene in which a tuft of hair from Simba's mane is blown into a river and picked up by a bird who weaves it into its nest on a tree branch, where it's swallowed by a giraffe licking the branches, until it reappears in the giraffe's dung, rolled up into a ball by a dung beetle. Great performance by a dung beetle! Kids might better enjoy watching one of those PBS nature documentaries with real animals; real animal behavior without the constant conversation. Watch if you're curious, but it's kind of a slog.