“Salty O’Rourke” is energetic in a heavy commercial way, is interested primarily in gags for people who will laugh at anything, and, without any particular wish to be socially satirical or realistic, kids many of the traditional virtues and glorifies treachery, gunplay, lawlessness, an adolescent gangster, drinking, promiscuity and the self-concerned spirit. The quality of its fun is that of erotic drawings on public signs, done with no eye, experience or talent for aping such art. The two heroes are a forging, cynical racing character (Alan Ladd), in the clutches of a rival gangster (Bruce Cabot), and a jockey, who is the script writer’s darling; he practises every sin and is the kind of adolescent the movies use to illustrate the early youth of a public enemy or the results of parents who smoked opium. The jockey is played by Stanley Clements, who is probably being rewarded with this trashiest of starring roles for his blood-curdling, humorously intended whipping of a little friend in “Going My Way.” He is advertised as “the beloved roughneck.” His Dead End Kid strutting, belligerency and show-off mannerisms seem to me graceless and badly accented. If there were a degree of the brutishness in him of the real-life character he caricatures he would be as terrifying as anything you could see on the screen. Most of the picture has to do with the humor of his drinking, cigar smoking, his making a fool of and his being fawned over by more virtuous people, including a heroine (Gail Russell) who is treated with unusual contempt by everyone from cameraman to actors.
“The Silver Fleet” is an English melodrama that shows more desire for visualizing story and character and for making both look more authentic than any of the other movies mentioned in this review. It uses an actual shipyard town, fairly real-life lighting and fairly non-actorish players, and has many of the advantages that usually go with making a good film at small cost. It has the misfortune to be least convincing at the most crucial moments, and it makes a minimum number of not very original observations on Underground patriots and Nazis. Its main interest in the story of a Dutch shipowner and his work against the Nazis is to impress you with his cunning at the expense of showing you anything at all about the people or the Occupation. Like a number of Underground films, it shows lives being unreservedly given up for the hero or for some hardly mentioned patriotic reason, when it is too obvious that the movie takes their sacrifices for granted and is mainly concerned with getting out a reasonable-enough-looking adventure story and in the romantic work of fashioning heroism. The one Nazi who is at all delineated is given an extremely hoked-up ghoulishness of biting his nails, contorting his tic-ridden face and swilling food that is impressive as ghoulishness but not as being about Nazis. The performance by Ralph Richardson as the shipowner is filled with an unusual amount of somewhat self-congratulatory naturalistic pantomime that makes for a rich characterization.
“Without Love” is worthlessly pleasant until it becomes obvious that its people—a “crazy” scientist who marries a society girl on a loveless basis, an alcoholic playboy, a good-natured gigolo, a selfish, spoiled society girl and a brisk, nice career girl—are the ones you saw all those other times, and that there is going to be no problem. It has some good comedy lines written by Philip Barry and Donald Ogden Stewart and the very neat, efficient, shy comedy style of Keenan Wynn as the playboy which enables him to walk off with the picture—for about the fourth time. Another MGM film, “The Valley of Decision,” only proves that this company will always be willing to spend a fortune on a movie about a great American industrial family, starring Greer Garson.
“Salty O’Rourke” is dime fiction, with the level of insight, knowledge, feeling and wit about as low as you can go; “Without Love” reminds you of Buck Rogers when its characters are at work on their oxygen mask, of a soap opera when they talk about love and withdrawing from life, and of the old Cary Grant–Irene Dunne affairs when it comes to skirting problems and ending the movie. “The Silver Fleet” is no more important than a Nazi v. Underground comic strip; the Greer Garson film is the circulating-library version of the soap opera. There isn’t an original, meant to be deeply affecting, character in them; they are filled with characterizations, like Ladd’s, Clements’, Tracy’s, Hepburn’s, that each has done innumerable times before. The most disturbing element is that in their diluted naturalistic style there is hardly a try at actually affecting the audience emotionally by use of the camera, cutting rhythm, juxtaposition of images, contrast of tone and texture in the photography, or by any other means. Not only is the reality shown weak, untrustworthy or overworked; there is no attempt to make it felt by its audience. Raoul Walsh’s directing of “Salty O’Rourke” is completely uninterested in any cinematic standard; there is a moment in the Hepburn-Tracy movie when a meek attempt is made, during the try-out of a flyer’s oxygen mask, to use sound with emotional effect. The best you can normally expect from a movie today is that some person or persons may attempt to make hopelessly inartistic, innocuous films just a little less so. This fact is apparent in Tay Garnett’s direction of “The Valley of Decision,” in which he manages to get some edge and plainness into characters, life and sets that he will hardly be allowed by MGM standards to probe.
May 7, 1945