A RARE type of big-theatre movie is the cheerless British film, “Wanted for Murder,” made on a shoestring by Marcel Hellman and using a great deal of unposed action in London streets, parks and at a fairground. The film doesn’t come off too well—its portrait of a compulsive strangler is thin, and the adaptation from an English play has many static, stereotyped moments—but it has an interesting, home-made newsreelish look that few movies have today. The players move curiously at a quicker, more hectic pace than those in studio films; when a Hyde Park crowd surges against a police line or the villain crosses a street, they seem to hurl forward dangerously in dramatic movement. Shot without artificial lighting, the architecture looks cold, bleak, forbidding, and it accentuates the smallness, forlornness and vulnerability of the people. The trickiest item in a low-cost production is the sound recording, and in this respect “Wanted for Murder” slips up. It is another of those rattling movies in which a weak old mother opens her mouth and lets go a blast that reminds you of a subway train.
Hollywood is queasy about showing any but the most ghoulish gangster as an out-and-out killer, and often makes dangerous criminals softer than they should ever be. There is much less romanticizing of this film’s gentleman-strangler. He is a beefy businessman (Eric Portman) who pretends to befriend pretty working girls and then strangles them in lonely spots in the park. As this worried, introverted, somewhat childish businessman eyes a toothsome girl near a Punch and Judy stand, you get a strong impression of morbid, fear-ridden existence. But you aren’t shown enough of the maniac’s grisly career picking up stray girls, puzzling them with his fancy-pants manner and then snuffing them out.
Portman is particularly effective through his bulkiness and moody, introverted silences, but he goes very blank and amateurish in the scenes that count the most. He is extraordinarily wrong with a meek Cockney girl. As the strangle fever starts possessing him, he looks like a tabloid poet wrestling with a verse about cloudy skies, and you feel his victim probably choked to death watching him mug. It is too bad that this movie, which at its best reminds you of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, fails generally by being so sketchy in its portrait of the murderer.
Even moviegoers who detest Hollywood’s slickness will feel that “Carmen”—an item about Spanish gypsies, played by French actors, using English titles, Italian scenery and Second Avenue hock-shop clothes—could stand some polishing. The editing is so crazy that each time some swooning Spaniard starts the climb to Carmen’s second-floor love nest you can expect the next shot to show him buying bananas in the village square or having a knife fight with a hairy character named Garcia on top of Mt. Etna. The screen is generally half-covered with English titles, but even so the love affair between Carmen and Don Jose is hard to grasp.
If you like to keep warm in your neighborhood theatre these days or have to review movies for a living, you can find something good in any film, and so it is with “Carmen.” It has an unusually eerie dagger fight, a long sequence on bullfighting that is very instructive except that the bull and the toreador slink past each other as though they were imitating Hollywood’s idea of a Negro’s walk.
The movie, essentially a cowboy film in serapes, has to do with the smooth love affair between a gypsy (Viviane Romance, who is too sophisticated and mellow for the part), and a soldier (Jean Marais). To win Carmen’s love, the soldier has only to kill his commanding officer, turn traitor, take up banditry and rub out another of Carmen’s lovers, the most feared of Spanish killers. As soon as he has performed these harrowing feats, she leaves him for the first and worst toreador that whistles at her. This one dies and the unhappy soldier, who seems destined to frustration, must kill her on her orders. This he does in a good smoky scene on top of Mt. Etna, while mission bells clang nearby.
“Till the Clouds Roll By” (which makes a better title for a biography of Jerome Kern than some of his other song titles like “Who” or “Bill” or “Kalua”) is a strange biography that credits much of Kern’s success to a Tin Pan Alley arranger named James Hessler (Van Heflin). As far as I know, this is complete fiction. The movie reproduces the several musical-comedy scenes in which Kern’s songs were first sprung, and the Metro stars who do the singing generally have small voices and go in for excessive mugging to cover up that fact. The good moments turn up when Lucille Bremer sings the exciting “Who” and when Frank Sinatra performs a well phrased job on “Old Man River.”
Flashback.—Despite a hackneyed script, the Italian film “Open City” seems to me the best movie released in 1946. The six I liked next best were “It Happened at the Inn,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Henry V,” “Brief Encounter,” “The Killers” and “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.” Anna Magnani’s performance in “Open City” as the full-blooded, vital Pina, who was so completely the middle-class Italian under the Nazi regime, is the most perfect job by an actress in years and years. Robert Montgomery in “They Were Expendable” is excellent as the efficient, officious naval officer. Robert Le Vigan gives a poignant performance of Toncan in “It Happened at the Inn.”
Best supporting performances: Renee Asherson’s virginal, Dresden-doll princess in “Henry V”; Walter Baldwin in “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Best directing: Roberto Rossellini (“Open City”). Best photography: Ubaldo Arata (“Open City”). Best musical score: Miklos Rozsa (“The Killers”). Best Western: “Canyon Passage.” Best musical: “State Fair.”
Worst Movies: “Undercurrent,” “The Harvey Girls,” “Pardon My Past” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”
December 30, 1946