WHILE Hollywood, after all, still makes the best motion films, its 1952 products make me want to give Los Angeles back to the Conquistadores. Bad films have piled up faster than they can be reviewed, and the good ones (Don’t Bother to Knock, Something to Live For, The Lusty Men, My Son John, The Turning Point, Clash by Night) succeed only as pale reminders of a rougher era that pretty well ended with the 1930’s. The people who yell murder at the whole Hollywood business will blame the current blight on censorship, the star system, regimentation, the cloak-and-suit types who run the industry, the dependence of script-writers on a small group of myths, TV, the hounding of the Un-American Activities Committee, and what I shall laughingly call montageless editing.
There is plenty of justification for trying to find what is causing this plague, and I point my thumb accusingly at the audience, the worst in history. The present crowd of movie-goers, particularly the long-haired and intellectual brethren, is a negative one, lacking a workable set of values or a sense of the basic character of the medium, so that it would surprise me if any honest talent in Hollywood had the heart to make good pictures for it.
Their taste for preciously styled, upper-case effects and brittle sophistication has encouraged Hollywood to turn out some of the most smartly tooled art works of the times—films like Sunset Boulevard and The Bad and the Beautiful, stunning mixtures of mannerism, smooth construction, and cleverly camouflaged hot air. While I find these royal creations pretty good entertainment, I keep telling myself that the audiences craving for costly illusion (overacting, overscoring, overlighting, overmoralizing) may produce total confusion in Hollywood. The industry is still turning out movies that are supposed to be moderately naturalistic, but it must grow puzzled by having to make plain simple facts appear as special and delectable as the audience demands. So what we have to deal with now is a spectator who has Tiffany-styled esthetics and tastes in craftsmanship, and whose idea of good movies is based on an assortment of swell attitudes.
If some stern yearner makes a movie full of bias for the underdog, or a clever actor crowds his role with affectations picked out of real life, or the script-writer sets up innumerable situations wherein the camera can ponder over clocks, discarded cigar bands, and assorted bric-a-brac, the audience responds as though it were in the climate of high art.
Faced with such an audience—half tory and half culture bug—Griffith, with his practical genius, or Sennett, with his uninhibited improvising talents, would probably have passed up moviemaking for something more virile and exciting.
The reason movies are bad lies is this audience’s failure to appreciate, much less fight for, films like the unspectacular, unpolished “B,” worked out by a few people with belief and skill in their art, who capture the unworked-over immediacy of life before it has been cooled by “Art.” These artists are liberated from such burdens as having to recoup a large investment, or keeping a star’s personality intact before the public; they can experiment with inventive new ideas instead of hewing to the old sure-fire box-office formula.
Such pictures are often made in “sleeper” conditions (sometimes even the studio hotshots didn’t know they were being made), and depend, for their box-office success, on word-of-mouth approval instead of “colossal” ads. But since there is no longer an audience response to fresh filmic trends, this type of movie is being replaced, by most of the big Hollywood factories, with low budget jobs that emulate prodigious spectacles, foreign-film sentiments, or best-seller novels, until you can no longer tell the “B” from an “A”.
In the past, when the audience made underground hits of modest “B” films, Val Lewton would take a group of young newcomers who delighted in being creative without being fashionably intellectual, put them to work on a pulp story of voodooists or grave robbers and they would turn $214,000 into warm charm and interesting technique that got seen because people, rather than press agents, built its reputation. After 1940, a Lewton, Preston Sturges, Sam Fuller, Allan Dwan, or Budd Boetticher finds his best stride in a culture-free atmosphere that allows a director to waste his and the audience’s time, and then loses himself in the culture-conscious conditions of large-scale work.
The low budget appears to economize the mind of a director, forcing him into a nice balance between language and what is seen. Given more money and reputation actors, Sam Fuller’s episodic, spastically slow and fast film would probably dissolve into mouthy arrogance where characters would be constantly defining and apologizing for the class separation that obsesses Fuller and burying in words the skepticism and energy which he locates in his 1949–52 low budgets. The structure that Fuller invented in I Shot Jesse James depends on close-ups of large faces and gestures, combustive characters in close face-to-face confrontations where they seem bewitched with each other but where each one is actually in a private, lightly witty rumination about the wondrous information that springs up from being professionals pursuing highly perfected skills. In Steel Helmet, the weight of too many explanations about race-class-position seems to leaden Fuller’s work, drives him into a pretentious strain that is not apparent in the totally silent Jesse James opening.
Sturges’s turning point occurs in Hail the Conquering Hero, when he begins patronizing, caricaturing his small towners with patriotic sentimentality. The Eddie Bracken hero—no energy, desiring isolation, trying to free himself of responsibility—is a depressing symbol suggesting the spiritual difficulties Sturges must have been under, trying to psych himself into doing culture-conscious work. The last good Sturges occurs in Sullivan’s Travels, which is not low budget, but its best sections—the hobo material, rudimentary slapstick, an expensive cross-country bus trying to stay with a kid’s homemade motor tank, Veronica Lake’s alertness within leisure—are elemental “B” handling.
In 1943, William Castle, the director of the Monogram melodrama When Strangers Marry, could experiment with a couple of amateurs (Robert Mitchum and Kim Hunter), try out a then new Hollywood idea of shooting without studio lights in the sort of off-Broadway rented room where time seems to stand still for years and the only city sounds come through a postage stamp opening on the air well. The movie was a hit with perceptive moviegoers, made a fair profit, and prepared audiences for two new stars and some of the uninvented-looking cinema later made famous in Open City. All this was possible because Castle wasn’t driven to cater to cliché tastes.
Once, intellectual moviegoers performed their function as press-agents for movies that came from the Hollywood underground. But, somewhere along the line, the audience got on the wrong track. The greatest contributing cause was that their tastes had been nurtured by a kind of snobbism on the part of most of the leading film reviewers. Critics hold an eminent position, which permits control of movie practice in one period by what they discerned, concealed, praised, or kicked around in the preceding semester of moviemaking. I suggest that the best way to improve the audiences’ notion of good movies would be for these critics to stop leading them to believe there is a new “classic” to be discovered every three weeks among vast-scaled “prestige” productions. And, when they spot a good “B,” to stop writing as though they’d found a “freak” product.
December 19, 1952
I DON’T understand the belt people get out of overwrought, feminine pictures, but “My Cousin Rachel” must be regarded as a skilful blend of suspense, romantic acting, and infallible middle-brow direction. The first hour of the picture—which recalls “Rebecca,” which in turn recalls “Jane Eyre”—tells us that a naturally sulky boy could be upset by a woman who seems to have poisoned the boy’s beloved guardian after driving him crazy, spending his money, and carrying on with an Italian lawyer. After that, the boy falls in love with the Wicked Woman, and the second hour finds him living through a small-scale hell. The picture happens to be a mystery, but because it is tied to the wispy conventions of romantic fiction, it never gets on the road. There is a reliance on candlelit scenes which probably made for thrilling literary descriptions, but it means that the actor has to wade through a choppy filigree of lights and shadows before he can steal a crucial letter or jealously peer up at a boudoir window. The situations are of a type that could be rehearsed in chairs, the few active ones having a tendency to seem silly in a medium that depends so heavily on authenticity. For instance, the meatiest romantic sequence shows the hero climbing to a balcony at midnight, throwing a ton of the family jewels at the siren’s feet, and then kissing her with such force that the camera lens begins to perspire and the scene fades off into a blur. Richard Burton, in the anguished hero’s role, has an active grace, and can do anything Montgomery Clift invented—looking and listening with the wide-awake surprise of a woodpecker who has just happened into an oil field—with more style and masculinity. Olivia de Havilland does not seem either charming or wicked, but now that she has been through Shaw-Shakespeare, she can musicalize every sentence, without seeming to know what she is saying, and move with the firm, cold conviction of an actress who has finally overcome an inferiority complex.
“Above and Beyond” stalks a real-life hero named Paul W. Tibbetts, Jr., in a picture that is interesting despite its lack of filmic virtues. The history it simplifies begins at the atom-bomb proving ground and goes on to Hiroshima, and I suppose part of the entertainment lies in watching M-G-M make a valiant attempt to dodge the reverential clichés of shrines-to-the-living. At the start Tibbetts’s wife is worrying over whether her marriage is on the rocks, and then via a two-hour-six-minute flashback we see her husband tangle with the big brass, B-29’s, and security agents, acquire a reputation as a swelled-up perfectionist disciplinarian, neglect his marriage, and generally worry-frown his way through the difficulties of running the bomb tests at Wendover, Utah. Robert Taylor ushers in the atomic age with a good, negative performance that consists of trying not to look too communicative, handsome, or triumphant.
At no point does the camera tell the story; the film is done in clear, sunny shots with the main fact always anchored firmly in the center of the screen. Anyone who remembers early air films like “Only Angels Have Wings” is bound to miss the loose-jointed animation of a Grant or Cagney, the climactic excitement of watching a box-kite plane take off in a storm from a postage-stamp air-field, such visual inventions as a hawk smashing through the glass of a plane, and the unforgettable tempo of the crash ending in “Ceiling Zero.” This script is on the mild side all the way (“Dimples eight two from north Tinian tower”); when the first shock wave from the bomb hits the Enola Gay, a white light fills the plane—the camera seems to have snapped suddenly—and then the movie settles back into its precise treading of general facts. It might have been more interesting if someone had been more faithful to trivia—like showing the human side of the fateful crew that started chomping on ham sandwiches and no doubt wondered whether radioactivity would make them sterile. But the script skips from the newsreel record of Hiroshima back to Tinian, where you see Tibbetts walking toward a four-star general and another decoration. Also, there is a remarkable reluctance by M-G-M to credit anyone (Truman, Stimson) but Mr. Tibbetts for the terrible decision of killing so many Japs with one efficient maneuver.
Though no one can make a certain kind of tragical-comical-pastoral picture like the French, “Jeux Interdits” is the only one I have liked since “Goupi Mains Rouge.” The story—about the morbid entertainments of a five-year-old girl whose parents have been machine-gunned in an air raid and an eleven-year-old peasant boy who takes her home—has been managed by René Clément in the shocking but convincing style of the “Red Hands” film. The most remarkable performance is that of a peasant father (Lucien Hubert) who seems to be created out of unfertile country earth. His manner—the cigarette that drips off the front of his lip, the way he beats up his kids with a mellow brutality, his way of wasting through the hours between supper and sleep—is achieved with the most frugal type of pantomime. Yet it tells you all that exasperates him about his family and all that he has picked up in wisdom through a lifetime. The homely settings are photographed in crude darks and lights so that the scenes of children fleeing down a country road at night give the scary, bleak, adventuresome feeling of country life to a degree that must be recalled from childhood experience.
Most of my reservations are small: there is a cartoon quality about the farmers’ feud, and at least three of the teen-agers think it is right to play country kids as morons. The only major dislike has to do with Director René Clément’s glibness with difficult effects. As a result the movie goes precious in those places where it should be plainly and simply terrifying, as when the five-year-old starts down a long, completely vertical ladder and later when she reacts to violence with the cheek-clawing hysteria of an over-protected spinster. Nevertheless, his best effects are quite simple and original; these usually have to do with showing the fleeting emotions of small children when their games are a sort of startling mimicry of what is going on in the adult world. The two stars, Brigitte Fossey and Georges Poujouly, manage to be natural, comic, and utterly moving in a hair-raising way without even trying. You should see this film, even at art-theater prices.
December 20, 1952
THE only way to pull the vast sprawl of 1952 films together is to throw most of them in a pile bearing the label “movies that failed through exploiting middle-brow attitudes about what makes a good movie.” This leaves me with the following box-office stepchildren to list as my “ten best” films. It is difficult to say whether I liked or disliked a number of films that will appear on most other lists, since it was usually a case of being impressed with classy craftsmanship and bored by watching it pander to some popular notion about what makes an artistic wow. One such film, “Come Back, Little Sheba,” went all out for sympathizing with underdogs; another, “Member of the Wedding,” stuffed itself with odd “characters” of Dickensian proportions; “Forbidden Games” rubbed amateur acting and untampered rural surroundings in your eyes. In each case, I felt I was supposed to applaud the “crutches” that are currently leaned on in cinema, and that, for me, negated some good things about the films.
“The Strange Ones.” A macabre melodrama about incestuous adolescence; rates top honors in every film department for its tough-minded, unself-consciously clumsy but delicate treatment of a subject a movie crew could easily have murdered. Turns up one fascinatingly grotesque image after another; set in the small, special world of a fantastically disordered bedroom, it works with a sick brother and his sister who wander about in bathrobes seeking some new gadget or ritual for kicks; crowds the whole tremulous desperation of two deeply affectionate, anarchic little beasts into the performances of Stéphane and Dermithe, whose acting of the queer and fantastic should be studied by the overrated Julie Harris–Shirley Booth–Marlon Brando academy of overplaying.
“Oh, Amelia.” A fifty-year-old French bedroom farce refashioned by Claude Autant-Lara with split-second timing, extreme gaiety, and ingenuity in repeatedly compromising a heroine without actually corrupting her; though it may have been slapped together by a group of aloofly amused actors during their lunch hour, it has the ridiculous charm of a Punch and Judy show and the innocent, pell-mell vulgarity of a Sennett comedy.
“The Turning Point.” A tingling, rather moving example of the half-serious gangster film that Hollywood does better than anything else in its repertoire; particularly good for its unsentimental handling of cutthroat competitors in moments of duress, when their ambitious careers are about to crumble around them; also casts a touching spotlight on New York-type friendships: a cop turning virtuous but trying to play fair with his gangster friends; an attorney’s girl friend methodically setting up a romance with his best chum but being very concerned about not losing the attorney’s affections; a triumph of crisp acting (Edmond O’Brien, Tom Tully), vigorous camera work, lean writing.
“Don’t Bother to Knock.” An unpolished, persuasively written little melodrama about a blonde baby sitter drifting in cuckoo-land in a big-city hotel; Richard Widmark’s acting of a grousing, ornery, efficient individual waltzing into a pick-up romance and then finding himself unable to cope with the personality of the girl; Monroe’s amateurish manner and childishly blank expression used without the usual glamour treatment in the character of a paranoiac refugee from a small town; the best naturalistic photography on a drab American hotel since “When Strangers Meet” and a job of direction (Roy Baker) that seems to dig its way into stale hotel atmosphere through room radios, between plastic Venetian blinds, and over ugly ashtrays.
“Something to Live For.” A soap opera that started with a story that was practically nothing and ended up as a strangely disturbing, clean, uncluttered picture of alcoholism; mark up another score for the camera magic of Director George Stevens, the only genuine pioneer working in current films; he evokes a rich lather of romance with his slow, imaginative use of looming close-ups, overlapping dissolves, filtered camera effects, and oddly contrived compositions; story-telling images bring out the inner problems of characters in a purely cinematic way: two members of Alcoholics Anonymous trembling through a party, with the camera insistently hovering over trays of Martinis and highballs; creditable acting by Milland and Fontaine.
“Five Fingers.” In its literate, satirical way, this spy melodrama was the most unusual thriller since Hitchcock’s first low-budget films; almost totally a product of witty scripting, it built up incredible tension and speed with elegantly comicalized dialogue, neatly turned portraits of war-time diplomats with their brains at half-mast, and practically no outward violence; a great job of perfectly controlled, suave acting by James Mason; wonderful bits of unscrupulous carrying-on: the slow awakening of Countess Danielle Darrieux to the possibilities of being a valet’s mistress once she finds out he has a priceless pair of safe-cracking hands.
“Limelight.” A sentiment-ridden tragi-comedy with enough of Chaplin’s grace and absurdity as a funny man, and Raphael-like taste for visual qualities to compensate for the slow, rumpsprung style of story-telling.
“The Sell-Out.” A fast thriller off the top of the news, with perceptive atmospheric bits of barroom drama that fall quietly into place, two plausible performances (Audrey Totter, John Hodiak), and the feeling throughout of something chanced upon rather than confected.
The following also placed: “Room for One More,” “Boots Malone,” “Brandy for the Parson,” “House Across the Street,” “Young Man with Ideas,” “Casque d’Or,” “Scaramouche,” “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie,” “Beauty and the Devil,” “Apache War Smoke,” “Pennywhistle Blues,” “Jour de Fête.”
January 17, 1953
THOUGH “The Member of the Wedding,” Carson McCullers’s prize-winning play about the last days of childhood, betrays its stage origin on the screen, it has been made into a somewhat amusing, and moving, sometimes improbable picture. Stanley Kramer has a trick way of opening his productions with a pastoral scene followed by a sustained shot of the star walking toward the camera: this one starts at a fishing wharf, follows Julie Harris home, and anchors itself in an ugly Southern kitchen where a small social circle—a tomboyish girl, her seven-year-old cousin, and the family cook—is viewed battling loneliness in a way that sometimes harks back to Saroyan or Tarkington types of humor. One of the funnier scenes has to do with a three-handed bridge game; they sit around the table with much concentrated clumsiness and dreamy domestic relaxation, with two of the players moaning about the “rotten hands” until it develops that the solemn little boy cut up the picture cards because they were so “cute.” Eventually, melodramatic things begin to happen—the boy dies, the cook’s nephew is sent to the pen, the girl runs away from home—and then, for no reason at all, the movie ends.
An interesting feature of the film is that it makes use of a television-type shot—the very close close-up of an active breathless face against a blacked-out background such as turns up in Gillette’s prize-fight programs. With intimate, revealing image-maneuvers like this, the movie attempts both to break its bondage to the play and to penetrate a visual sphere new to movies. It starts drifting in a strange sea made up simply of motion and anatomy on a super-realistic level; you are practically on top of the human figure when, trapped in the most intense motion and feeling, it is cut off from the surrounding things that make life seem ordinary and fairly secure. And you are devoured by a rather plain twelve-year-old girl, her bound-in misery, her perspiring intensity, her boniness and impulsive hair cut.
This is a good example of a “director’s picture,” crammed with vivid details none of which falls quietly into place. The main character, the gawky girl, is an unspectacular sort who suffers from every stigma known to childhood, and Director Zinnemann allows Julie Harris to play the role in the manner of a cannibal chewing up a rare hunk of beef. Along with her flexible voice, which blends Baby Snooks with a sour, muted violin, she has an elegantly active pair of hands which clutch, pluck, drum, and posture in a rhythm that is peculiarly out of key with the rest of the acting, talk, and atmosphere. While Miss Harris eats a bit of stew like Marlon Brando playing an eccentric Bennington College student, Zinnemann brings out a small, select group of weird people. Among them are a smooth Harlem-type dresser who doesn’t feel conspicuous carrying an unboxed silver trumpet through a small town and a silly child who minces about the room like the most professional Mae West impersonator.
When the more normal characters encounter abnormal behavior (the girl’s determination to go along on her brother’s honeymoon), they provocatively shift into the unreasonable—that is, the father brutally yanks the girl out of the car and throws her on the sidewalk, where she is stared at unmercifully by queasy neighbors. It is as though Zinnemann, along with a lot of his sensitive colleagues—Kazan, Wilder, et al.—tried to show only the oddest members of the human race.
January 31, 1953
IN “The Little World of Don Camillo” a serious subject—the conflict between Christian principles and Communist dogmas—is treated with a tolerance and whimsy that made my skin crawl. Yet this extended serio-comic brawl between a godless mayor and a militant priest has some qualities that set it off from the French movie franchise—a crisis in the life of a small town which happens to be running over with simple, excellent people and cute situations. It is a surprisingly white film, with hardly a shadow in it; and it features distant views from steeple, sky, and ceiling that make an earthy affair confined to the monumental irritations of two characters into an exceedingly elastic film—a village chronicle that has the open spaciousness of a county. There is also a drugged, novelistic pace that must have been difficult to achieve in a format of sketches each of which has a separate plot, twist, and point.
Most French comedies are filled out with the personal traits of townsfolk, but this one impresses you with the degree of it rounded characterization. The priest is an ordinary fellow who far outshines the crooning, ball-playing priest in “Going My Way.” Along with his piety and good humor he has an addiction to carrying a tommy-gun, and on occasion he is capable of lying, poaching, attempted bribery, fist-fighting, and scoring the best mark in the carnival games testing physical prowess. Fernandel gives the priest another talent—a clever ability to make oily self-satisfied faces that put across a point with exquisite timing. “Don Camillo” has already taken Europe by storm, but unless you are amused by apple-polishing in place of sharp realism and enjoy the idea of a statue of Christ saying, “You’re telling me!” you can postpone seeing this one.
On their visit to the Falls the “Niagara” movie crew must have got into difficulties not usually associated with the manufacture of action-thrillers. Between stereotyped chases up dizzy heights and shots of Marilyn Monroe tossing in bed, the movie breaks up into a choppy assemblage of fragments that just barely tell the bickering, homicidal story of a trampish blonde and her deranged husband. Director Hathaway, the Richard Halliburton of the Fox directing stable, is not one to lose his thrills in complications of the terrain, but he seems to have been overpowered by this locale—to such a degree that he settled for telescopic shots of a body being fished out of the water, a chase on the sightseeing stairs that is almost obliterated by spray, and scenes that have nothing more momentous than a technicolored rainbow. Usually you see Joe Cotten, wedded as always to a hangdog expression, at about six in the morning, when no one was around to trouble the camera crew, worrying, plotting against his wife, or trying to stash a damned corpse in the roaring vicinity of the falls. It is my impression that Miss Monroe has now arrived at a style of breathy mumbling, sloppy posture, and physical self-consciousness that is boring as well as silly.
“Taxi” is a slender, highly unlikely comedy that you might catch on an off night. The film cruises for fourteen hours through New York’s boroughs while a taxicab driver (Dan Dailey) makes deprecating remarks, argues, and tries to disillusion a genteel, pretty colleen who has one day in which to find her long-missing husband. The story is too sweet for my taste, but it is one of those infrequent occasions on which Danny Fuchs, one of Hollywood’s more gifted penmen, gets a chance to display his ear for Brooklyn speech. Dailey anchors the vanity-sized sentimental comedy in some sufficient kind of reality with an unbuoyant walk, a blatant voice, and an uncomprehending, almost goofy expression. But despite the contributions of the two Dannys, you see less New York life in “Taxi” than the subject offers. For instance, the cab moves easily through parkways, tunnels, and streets, as if Manhattan weren’t the bent-fender city, and Dailey’s supporting cast of traffic cops and fellow-cabbies generally turn out to be decent, lovable hams like Wallace Beery.
Though it is on the jerry-built side, “Curtain Up” is the kind of movie the ads call a “murderously funny” example of high British comedy. Those highly stylized comedians Robert Morley and Margaret Rutherford weave a web of frustration and cheerful irresponsibility around a morning’s theatrical rehearsal, but the action generally drags so badly that it elicits no more than three audible laughs. Director Ralph Smart has managed to get some fun into the film with fresh stuff about flubbing of lines, ham acting, and stale writing in a provincial repertory theater. It starts out leisurely and wastefully: the ingenue taking a nap backstage, a harried producer trying to find the plot in a new script, someone else unsuccessfully rallying the group on stage. Then, as the rehearsal turns into a nightmare, the people work up the energy of hungry tigers. You don’t see such amiable, unglamorous faces on the screen every day; and quite outside the hackneyed sub-plots (a faded character actress ruminating over a brief early London success; a stage-struck ingenue having to be fired) there is a certain know-how in the central matter of showing the ambivalent pleasure (confusion, mock anger, hysterical displays of ego) that can be worked into a trivial situation by little people with time on their hands.
February 14, 1953
HUSTON’s “Moulin Rouge” is packed with crunchy songs, French taste in clothes, and picturesque people, but the quality of its color is its most striking attribute. The dramatic use of filtered camera effects and off-key tonalities re-creates on film the heated, hazy quality of French Impressionist painting. When the dwarf Toulouse-Lautrec painfully picks his way out of a Montmartre bistro, the scene is the studied abyss of a blue-green interior, with hot accents (geranium red, acid yellow) in the foreground and scrub-women carefully spotted for a dash of human content. In some instances actual paintings are “staged,” reproducing everything but the vein of casual objectivity that lay at the core of Lautrec’s work. Other shots capitalize on canvas-worthy things like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s spun-glass skin next to the starchy texture of her white and orange costume, the paint-spattered derby Lautrec wore while painting, the ambling grace of a Negro dancer who seems to move on nothing more solid than space, and the can-can girls who dance with their whole bodies instead of just their legs. In this fascinating visual arena the heavily blurred atmosphere seems to have drained the characters of realistic personalities, leaving the decorative details of the composition to compete for interest. In fact, Huston has crowded such an attractive world around the subject of this biography—such surging impressions of Parisian activities—that you never get a good line on the artist himself.
Mainly, this is the fault of an unworkable script in which the double dose of romance given Lautrec fails to become credible before reaching a sudden and definitive conclusion. It fumbles past its hero as a real figure to feed him such explicit literary dialogue as “The streets of Paris have taught you to strike fast and draw blood first,” and moralizes on the topics of love, alcoholism, and appreciation of art.
Lautrec was a wealthy nobleman, grotesquely misshapen and a chronic drunkard. After his first affair with a prostitute (Colette Marchand) who is too warped to value Lautrec’s love but who wields a devastating power over him, the crippled count takes up with a virtuous dress model (chinless beauty Suzanne Flon). You see them sightseeing in Parisian settings until, incomprehensibly, she decides the smitten Lautrec will never love her and leaves him with a torch to carry the rest of his days. Meanwhile, the picture of Lautrec as an artist has been built up by such disintegrated maneuvers as having the camera travel down to his flying pencil on a cafe’s tablecloth, dance over the paintings that cover his studio walls, document the production of a poster, dart about kiosks, and peer over shoulders at his vernissage.
Lautrec’s personal drama might have been more absorbing if Ferrer had not been incarcerated in his make-up, which involved the binding of his legs to make him as short as the four-foot-eight painter, as well as elaborate facial changes. On those occasions when the camera digs into his face it unearths nothing more informative than a highly inscrutable expression. Certainly Huston as director and co-author compensated for the fact that his main character couldn’t zip around on his stunted legs with avid camera movement and prodigious exuberance on the part of the other performers. Marchand, for instance, literally dances through her role—jerking, slouching, making eccentric patterns with her arms as though she were playing to a spastic nickelodeon piano. As for Miss Flon, I’ve seldom seen an actress with greater presence or stature in a role remarkable for its unimportant activity.
The big bone I pick with all this entertainment is that it attempts to idealize Lautrec for his deficiencies and to simplify the tale of the artist by implying that genius in painting is a by-product of painful experience. And despite the iron discipline of Huston’s direction, it frequently becomes too brightly emphatic; one feels that the charming groups of blondes and redheads who bounce about with such hilarious gaiety are afraid to relax for fear the movie will run down like a clock that needs winding.
February 28, 1953
THE directors of two new films—“The Naked Spur” and “Jeopardy”—having worked on a number of low-budget thrillers, claim space this week for a notation of their talents. John Sturges, director of “Jeopardy,” is a deft mechanic who has turned out such pictures as “Mystery Street” and “The People Against O’Hara.” He has almost Defoe’s talent for creating circumstantial detail, along with the ability to make hard-to-do things seem easy. Interested in the problem of how “people like you and me” express ourselves at work, Sturges steers his films away from melodrama into literate, semi-documentary studies of such subjects as law-office routine or sleuthing in a college laboratory. He has a restrained hand with actors, a moderately realistic camera style, and a remarkable talent for letting us know what goes on in the minds of people faced with a scientific or mechanical problem.
Only as individual a director as Sturges could have concocted anything worth seeing out of “Jeopardy,” with its picture-postcard settings, ragged dialogue, and Pearl White-type thrills that have been guidebooked by a dozen other hair-raising films. The story, which could have been worked out for a radio play, has Barry Sullivan trapped under a jetty, with only his wife (chief desperate star Stanwyck) to save him from drowning in the incoming tide. The help she finally gets turns out to be a sex-starved killer (Ralph Meeker) who commandeers her car to escape from his crime. Some of the dialogue sounds as if it came from a Collier’s gangster: “Is there anything your husband has that I could use?” leers Meeker. However, Sturges has lowered the temperature of this frantic story by turning it into a kind of examination of wild landscape, car problems, and how one can outwit nature on a holiday trip along the coast of Lower California. By searching with the lens into every corner of a late-model Ford convertible and creating interest in such things as lug-wrenches, spinning wheels, and raising a car without a jack, Sturges made a fine study in car mania, one that speeds along at a fast clip and would be clear and suspenseful even to a deaf person.
Anthony Mann, director of “The Naked Spur,” is good at making action films come to life after the sun sets, when in delicately underlighted episodes he demonstrates that nothing is more fascinating than an objective study of nihilistic evil, death, and destruction. The Marquis de Sade of the Metro directing crew, Mann not only gives genuine form and style to his cruel-toned works but has almost vindicated Hollywood’s technique with mountain slides, Indian fights, and shooting matches by showing how a deluge of violent scenes can create striking visual rhythms that are like powerful if devastating music. Mann did a careful and artful job with the ingredients of “The Naked Spur,” but he got some of his material—the theme of human greed—distinctly third-hand via the Huston “Sierra Madre” epic. Just five people—a cagy desperado, a merciless pursuer, an old prospector, a dishonorable cavalryman, and an attractive blonde—go along on the hoked-up ride through the rocky hills of Colorado.
Each of the roles, except Millard Mitchell’s slow-witted prospector, is played as if the actor thought he could do this job blindfolded at the bottom of a well. For a while Robert Ryan and his companion in flight, Janet Leigh, are as mean a couple of coyotes as you will find in a Western, but then Leigh casts off her unglamorous disguise, and Ryan starts in with his oily Iago-type expressions of self-assured evil. Perhaps there is too much predictable plot complication here to please old Anthony Mann fans, but his particular gifts are evident anyway: the unique love scene that is cut in against the eerie patter of rain on outdoor eating utensils; the three-way shooting match around a rocky cliff that builds up a frightening chorus with the ping of bullets on rocks. A laudable achievement, too, is the way all that Technicolor landscape is kept under control, seeming to be as plain and solid around the cowboys as in any good black-and-white horse opry.
March 23, 1953
IN earlier days Director Robert Wise revealed an interesting talent for working with dispiriting situations, keeping the story of their progress mounting to a maddening climax. He made a number of “sleepers” in this vein, so called because they had somehow turned out to be believable, skilful feature films, though made on little more than it now costs to feed the lions in “The Greatest Show on Earth.” These films are evidence that it is quite possible to make movies on less money and more skill. Wise learned movie-making by working in various jobs on the lot, he edited some Lewton-produced horror films and directed “The Set-Up.” So it is somewhat disturbing to find that he, like some other artists who started out on good “sleepers,” has progressed to making rather pointless “A” pictures.
His new film, “Destination Gobi,” is such a step in the wrong direction. But while it is not first class, it is a workman-like job of film-making that flows like sand in an eggtimer and has some funny situations and adequate settings. It is an adventure story with Richard Widmark, in a customary frenzied role, establishing a weather station in the Gobi Desert. Its best quality is its rugged visualization of an eight-hundred-mile trek through enemy soldiers and suspicious Mongols, to the accompaniment of thirst, hunger, and all the usual trappings of a “never say die” movie. Well composed out of a succession of panoramic shots and fast action scenes, the film suffers from Wise’s loss of contact with realism in acting. The characters of the weather observers are bombastic or comic swaggerers, and the Mongolian horsemen act like Western movie regulars.
Another director who has overreached his earlier talents is Alfred Hitchcock. As a movie pioneer, Hitchcock introduced imaginative sounds, fine character effects, and fleet economy. He brought you an everyday world that was as real as it was ominous (“The 39 Steps”). However, Hitchcock’s new melodrama, “I Confess,” has negated the realism to settle for the “effects.” His mystery story is peopled with familiar suspense-film types—a sadistic detective, a suave prosecutor, an amoral scoundrel with a tidy but vapid wife—and laid among the crooked, elevated streets of Quebec. It does get a certain dramatic punch through the sensitive underplaying of Montgomery Clift as a young priest who, learning the identity of a murderer in the confessional booth, plays the remainder of the picture with sad compassion and locked lips. With a line like “We can do nothing,” he spreads his hands with a quiet weariness that expresses the feeling of people caught in a rotten jam. For the most part, “I Confess” is a problemless piece of stagecraft in which the suspense, except for a quick twist at the end, is just so much decoration.
In the American spectacle class, frontiers division, “The President’s Lady” is a studiously dull picture about wild young Andrew Jackson and the trouble he had with the divorce laws of his time. It is a triumph of histrionics over history, starring Charlton Heston and Susan Hayward. The only real contributions were made by an over-particular set designer, and by Leo Tover, director of photography.
Howard Hughes’s “Angel Face” is a congested thriller that kills off all its actors with modern sports cars. Unlike many of Hughes’s hard-working murder films, this one is too often verbal instead of visual, with a lot of time spent in a dimly lit boudoir where Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons mutter forlornly and wear dressing gowns.
April 11, 1953
“Off Limits” has Bob Hope horsing and miming like a Mack Sennett employee. The story casts him as a prize-fight manager in the army who smart-talks the most inept pug (Mickey Rooney) into winning the lightweight title. The part disproves the idea that Hope’s comedy lies mainly in his fast verbal satire, for here he creates a many-faceted character who is as boastful as Falstaff, as unmanly as Lloyd Hamilton, and as good-humored, in a misanthropic way, as Bugs Bunny.
An example of Hope’s flexible characterization is in the scene where he cons his fighter at a 200-word-a-minute speed, and while the terms “Hook him,” etc., seem apt for the situation, they are delivered with a dreaming fool’s mien and mismated connections that hint the manager is not only contemptuous of both battlers but not even watching. Sometimes Hope gets feelings of deep distaste, disdain, into a single keen-eyed stare, a haughty quiver of his body, or a jutting of his leaden underslung jaw a fraction of an inch in the direction of his victim. But always his malevolence is so mixed either with comic self-debasement or utter selflessness as to make him seem precariously vulnerable.
Although the audience is treated to the entire range of great silent comedies—violence, exchange of insults, intense humiliation and embarrassed apology, ludicrous mix-ups, and Don Juan love-making—somehow Hope never creates the laugh that kills. It is not that he refuses to milk or build a gag but possibly that he just looks too normal and prosperous to evoke the delighted rush of relief—“Gee whiz, that guy’s worse off than I am”—that the pathos of Chaplin, Keaton, and Langdon achieved. Or possibly Hope’s style, which combines precision of timing with intellectual suppleness and finesse, puts too fine an edge on all this sort of foolishness.
In one sequence from the dark ages of situation comedy he scratches and paints a general’s mile-long black sedan, believing it belongs to a loathed gangster. For ten minutes of screen time he gets your thoughts away from the ancient heaviness of the gag by doing an elf-child’s display of grace and roguish self-delight. He paints fetching abstract patterns with broad calcimine strokes, while giving you the footwork of a sissified Nijinsky. It is really swell, but you are reacting not to humor but to cleverness.
In the hands of director George Marshall, a sort of Studs Lonigan distant cousin of Sennett, the film emerges as an uneven work that often hugs bad gags and zooms past promising situations. Marshall has an uncommonly good eye for hard-boiled harried types; he turns Marilyn Maxwell into a classic figure of brassiness. The list of assistant laugh getters—Rooney, Stanley Clements, Eddie Mayehoff—promises more than it achieves. Making brief personal appearances are some muscular fellows—Dempsey, Tommy Harmon, Art Aragon—who seem almost gentle in the midst of the pratfalls and mad activity.
April 25, 1953
IN a seventy-minute feature called “Bright Road,” M-G-M has refashioned the story of “The Quiet One,” a Levitt-Loeb prize-winning documentary that dealt with the rescue of a blocked, bewildered colored boy, new methods of education, and common-sense therapy. Here, in Emmett Lavery’s script, a pretty Alabama school teacher—demure, devoted, glowing with Christian endeavor—breaks through the shell of a perverse juvenile named P. T. (“It don’t stand for nothing”), the shame of Vinedale school.
While the tale leans rather heavily on the idea that all becomes well when the wand of modern psychology is waved, and the view of boyhood is forcibly patterned to make this outcome possible, the movie has a surprise gift of humor and humanity. Negro actors, not unlike others, have too frequently fitted themselves into a stereotype that makes them either caricature or figures of sentimentally sterling worth. The newcomers in “Bright Road”—a dozen kids plus two adults (one of them Harry Belafonte)—cause one to be more acutely aware of the burdened propagandist portrayals of Canada Lee, the exquisite clichés of Ethel Waters, the oversensitivity of James Edwards, and the servility of Hattie McDaniels. What I’m trying to say is that this all-colored cast does not accommodate itself to an audience’s ready-made ideas and so brings to the screen a fresh spontaneous life.
Some artful scenes reveal the boys’ classroom behavior, a mixture of swagger and glee. A small spectacled kid stalls on the trip from blackboard to seat to run his hand across each student as though he were a slat in a picket fence. A born cynic throws tipster comments at a chum having trouble with long division. Another shrugs through a ridiculous description of his vacation experience. This is all enacted with an air of special and private knowhow about humor and an easy grace that make the teacher’s correct manners and speech seem hopelessly wrong.
But for the rest, too much of the film is idealized out of reality. The teachers are up on all the latest trends in child psychology and dish it out in globs. The songs are done in the calculatedly intimate, mink-soft voices used by so many popular singers; the delicately chiseled profiles seem too universal. The only apparent sufferer is the new teacher, Dorothy Dandridge, who goes in for worried pantomime and mumbles such things as “Oh Lord, let me say the right words for once.” Since Miss Dandridge offscreen is one of those quick bright songstresses who rely less on voice than on an ability to tell a story with a sensitive and emotional face, this is rather nice to watch.
May 30, 1953
IT is a custom among professional pipe smokers to offer romantic estimations of American moviegoers. The latest evaluation appeared in the New Leader—a tongue-in-cheek description of the action-movie fans who attend shabby theaters west of Times Square. It was a classic case of what happens when a critic turns sociologist. Mr. Markfield found that the largely male audience for action and horror pictures was made up of a desperate crew—perverts, adolescent hoodlums, chronic unemployeds, and far-gone neurotics—who possessed an impeccable taste in good, unpretentious off-beat films. These moviegoers shuddered or tittered, snored or shrieked obscenities. But somehow, while unable to control their bodies and emotions in the slightest degree, they were movie critics who simply couldn’t be fooled by the expensive or pretentious. “Marvelous” was the word used to describe the infallible instinct of this Lumpenproletariat which causes Hollywood to shake in its assorted beach sandals.
It is a dangerous thing to lump a whole audience under general labels. The writers who did this in the twenties—during the era of Griffith, Sennett, and other silent-film “greats”—convinced a world-wide reading public that American moviegoers had low standards of appreciation and were to be treated like unintelligent children. Today, it has become fashionable for intellectuals to pretend to the same level of responses as the average member of the average audience. Every day another intellectual goes “popular” with a poetic, gaga dissertation on Mickey Spillane, “Moon Mullins,” Ray Robinson, or Teresa Brewer. People everywhere are now encouraged to consider the audience for pop-artists infested by aesthetes looking like roughnecks and behaving like slobs.
As a steady customer in male-audience houses, I’ve never seen anything odd or outstanding in the clientele. Finding interest and excitement in almost any type of film filled with brawny men, destruction, and fights, a steady procession of people fill most of the seats from mid-morning until almost dawn, lapping up the bad with the good, the merely pretentious with the unheralded realistic gems. My reason for citing a difference with Mr. Markfield’s illusions is to encourage moviegoers to look at the screen instead of trying to find a freak show in the audience.
“The Moon Is Blue” is a small comedy that seems to sparkle, sound monotonous, look machine-made, and appear smartly guided at the same moment. For a while it merely irritated me. A blatantly calculated actress named Maggie McNamara trades jokes with a miscast William Holden in the observation tower of the Empire State Building. The girl is supposedly a wittily open-minded ingenue actress being picked up by a “terribly sweet” and personable young architect. They both talk in empty little sentences that suggest only the pseudo-teen-age characters in popular magazine romances. After hearing innocuous things like “Oh, this is terrific” or “You’re nice, I like you” in an observation tower that has been used to death by movie-makers there seems little reason to expect anything daring or smart from “The Moon Is Blue.” Nevertheless, when the pair shift to the young man’s bachelor apartment, the dialogue shifts to a steady drumbeat of better-than-average epigrams, and though people come through doors and answer phones as constantly as in television comedy, the movie seems to get more flexible and interesting. How this happens is a little intangible, but it may be because Miss McNamara looks natural acting a proper little pop-off and because the director, Otto Preminger, can set up a modern apartment scene that seems as shrill and phony as Broadway living actually is.
While its sex is strictly antiseptic, this Preminger project has been tagged as too “blue” in story, action, and dialogue by Joe Breen’s industry-censorship department. Everybody remains idyllically pure, but the risqué lines caused the Breen office to condemn the picture. It will therefore be kept out of several thousand theaters.
July 4, 1953
“Stalag 17” is a crude, cliché-ridden glimpse of a Nazi prison camp that I hated to see end. Rather than a story, this version of the Broadway hit comedy is a loosely linked succession of spots featuring amusing ideas picked up from a hundred different sources. The film gets under way through the clumsy device of a recollection by an American airman who, stuttering for movie realism, has a story to tell about his years as a war prisoner in a squalid camp. According to the narrator, there was a mysterious stoolie sneaking information about secret tunnels, hidden radios, and Allied troop placements to the Nazi commandant.
The story has to do with the unmasking of this informer. Thanks to one sharp, informative portrait—a Sammy Glick type of enterprising heel played by Bill Holden—the yarn has some suspense. And the various bits of Broadwayish entertainment—the character who skulks around like an exile from Hoff’s union-suit cartoons, a human bulletin board with a high electric-saw voice (“all men from Texas will meet behind the north latrine”), a wonderful gag about the you-won’t-believe-this letter-writer—are exploded with skill and humor. The camera work is bold. The direction gets an enormous amount of detail and vitality into the crowded hut, which may remind you of a static New York subway car. Though it tells you little about prison camps, Nazis, or American fliers, the film gives you your money’s worth of entertainment.
Billy (“Sunset Boulevard”) Wilder directed, and as usual he plays high, wide, but not very handsomely with the realism of the picture. Sometimes, as in the exchanges between the camp’s “operator” (Holden) and a millionaire flying hero from Southampton (Don Taylor), Wilder can make the talk caustic and real. Most of the time he is simply clowning around with the truth. The gross ape from Brooklyn who creates most of the laughs because he is supposed to be an ugly near-illiterate happens to move in the graceful patter steps that have been around vaudeville for years. In fact, most of the disheveled, quarreling prisoners act like night-club entertainers. One of them does a Jimmy Cagney impersonation; another looks very smooth strumming a primitive one-string instrument; even the barracks’ “crazy Joey” acts demented in perfect rhythm.
According to “Stalag,” the prison camps were run by petty, ambitious fools and inhabited by American prisoners who were almost all glib, tough city boys. This is a typical Wilder view of the human race. While he has a reputation for making “downbeat” movies, he impresses more with his knack for getting a quality of “plenty” into everything. Taking a crass character like the one Holden plays, Wilder builds him up in all directions. The fellow has a little clock in his head which tells him just how tough he can act without getting into a fight. He refuses to be insulted and can be pushed around indefinitely. When Wilder shows you something about this opportunist, you always recognize it as something you’ve seen or heard. It doesn’t seem important that in this picture Holden has a long skeletal head and does a lot of oily talking with his hands. But Wilder presses these details into your consciousness. By rounding out a character here and a gag there he ends by giving you the feeling of having participated in an unusual amount of disreputable, noisy movie life.
Except for a few grainy, wintery shots of the prison compound, the photography is all close focus. Usually you are looking over someone’s shoulder into a tight little clump of prisoners, the camera acting like a kibitzer nosing himself through a crowd into the center of every event. In one telling picture the lens is practically up against a soldier’s lips as he kisses a pin-up of Betty Grable. Another shot that stuck out reminded me of Mantegna’s foreshortened painting of Christ—the beat-up figure of the supposed stoolie, Holden, glimpsed from around his shoes as he convalesces in bed. In other words, Wilder keeps the pressure on with a camera that is hard up against the actors.
The current movie scene includes these pictures:
“Shane”: an incredibly slow Western with a Paul Bunyan type of hero, a pro-homesteaders theme, and the silliest of all child characters.
“Julius Caesar”: an overrated play about political assassins, helped no end by James Mason’s poetically human rendering of Brutus and Greer Garson’s effective performance as a conqueror’s wife.
“The Desert Rats”: an intelligently handled film about the Tobruk siege, injured somewhat by the fact that there is more noise than warfare in the battle scenes.
“Crash of Silence”: an unheralded British film that takes a realistic journey into the brain and feelings of a deaf child; a good, shocking film.
“Scared Stiff”: a haunted-house comedy which has some fair nimble-grotesque dancing by Jerry Lewis and nothing else.
“Rome 11 O’Clock”: a multi-plotted handling of an actual newspaper headline, one want ad that drew an enormous number of applicants, a building crash, and the feeling of being jammed-up in a city are well captured with a documentary technique.
July 25, 1953
IT would be silly to underrate Hollywood’s current battle with stereoscopic film technique. The conversion to 3-D or its alternative, the wide screen, is not any overnight occurrence dreamed up as a counter-attack against television. Hollywood’s move toward “giant screen” effects and a three-dimensional look about the actors has been going on in earnest since the period of “The Best Years of Our Lives.” In fact, it has been the chief drive in the work of every important American director except De Mille, who never changes, and Huston. The basic objective in “new vision” films seems to be the same as that of “flat” films—a more accurate and natural image.
What you usually see on the new aluminized screen is a picture in which the actors’ contours are extremely sharp and there is little building up of the figure with dramatic light effects. The 3-D director, in order to make you aware of the depth factor in a scene, tries to lead your eye quickly past the actors. Along with sharpening the outline of bodies, there is an effort to clarify the “feeling” of negative spaces—the spaces in a composition that are more or less unfilled. One of the most overworked images in the new 3-D’s is a view through a frame made of an animal’s legs, the boughs of a tree, or the opening between the wheels of a wagon. The frame intensifies the feeling of space behind it, making a sort of hole between the front plane of the screen and whatever is seen in the background.
The result of this three-dimensionalism is a more exact impression of masses. Flat cinema tended to put so many pounds on the actors that the rarest sight in a Hollywood film was a small wiry figure. Now for the first time a lot of lean or close-knit shapes are showing up in films—such as those of Guy Madison and Frank Lovejoy in “Feather River”—and some actors who were getting too bulky for the screen, like Mitchum, seem to have suddenly shrunk.
Unfortunately, working in a 3-D film does not seem to improve the acting of stars. “Second Chance,” the first 3-D with stars in the leading roles, amounts to a sort of hurried tour through Cuernavaca and Taxco. The characters are all chasing one another and fleeing from some dreadful thing in the United States. Jack Palance, an incredibly hardbreathing gunman, is trying to get as far from a crime investigation as possible, Linda Darnell is trying to shake Palance along with her past as a famous gun moll, and Bob Mitchum, also pursuing Darnell, is a prize-fighter drifting down hill from a fight in which he killed an opponent. These unhappy expatriates are not far from the characters in any Hemingway short story, but the actors, except Palance in his familiar “burning coal” performance, drift through the story as if it were a bad dream. Darnell’s one effective scene is the product of a carefully planned shock—after thirty minutes of being clothed to the neck in black she is suddenly sprung on the audience in a gay, low-cut job. The three-dimensional expanse of Technicolored flesh is all but dazzling. Mitchum always shows good sense in his self-consciously indolent portrayals. He acts unpretentious as a celebrity in a Mexican town, is frankly lascivious the moment he sees Darnell, and manages to look agile and crafty in the prize ring. But that prize-fight scene is the only one in which he seems to be awake.
The actors apparently lose heart when they are shrouded in bad to fair photographic effects. Every actor before he operates must be placed in an awkward composition that carefully defines the front, middle, and back planes of the picture. The shot that made the greatest impression on me was the very first—the back of Palance’s head coldly cutting into the bottom of the screen while one of his gangster enemies parades unknowingly before him in the foyer of a hotel. This rigid composition repeats itself almost as often as the “trick” shots—the gun blasting straight at your eyes, the rocket showering sparks on your head, Mitchum dangling Jack Pickford-fashion from a rope attached to a busted cable-car.
Something should be said about the dark, confining spectacles one wears at 3-D films, the multiple sound tracks that give the impression of voices coming from the side of the screen, and the wide screen with all the compositions “masked” top and bottom to fit. However, movies like “Charge at Feather River,” “Arena,” and “Second Chance” are mainly notable for their simple-minded stories in which there is always a chase after some prize, quarry, or goal as though movement—almost any kind of movement—were the key to depth.
“The Band Wagon” is a unique musical that takes place mostly backstage and shows how a sagging revue was “saved” by a fading star dancer. Nanette Fabray steals a picture that runs through enormous amounts of scenery, as only Director Minnelli can make it do.
“Night Without Stars” is a nicely handled story of Riviera intrigue dealing with a nearly blind English lawyer and a power-crazed French lawyer. It has no substance whatsoever.
“From Here to Eternity” is a somewhat truncated and not very bold version of the famous Pearl Harbor novel: intelligent and enjoyable but with too many schmaltzy touches like Clift’s beautiful trumpeting on just a bugle’s mouthpiece. Except for Sinatra’s angry, precocious Italian, the soldiers remind you of Hollywood stars. The girls—Kerr and Donna Reed—are realistic, worn-out, and quite disturbing. More later about this one.
August 8, 1953
“From Here to Eternity” must have seemed like a chore to its director, Fred Zinnemann. He is inspired by experimental films in which the actors are new to movies and the story has an amateurish ring, while this picture is based on a best-selling novel and carries a load of famous “name” players and a budget, $3,000,000, that has to make the final product look slick. It held my interest until the final reel, when the bombing of Pearl Harbor suddenly turned up, but I don’t think its success is due either to Zinnemann, who sentimentalized a lot of James Jones’s story, or to Taradash, whose adaptation moves too quickly through the various love affairs, feuds, drinking bouts.
The laurel wreaths should be handed out to an actor who isn’t even in the picture, Marlon Brando, and to an unknown person who first decided to use Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed in the unsweetened roles of Maggio, a tough little Italian American soldier, and Lorene, a prostitute at the “New Congress” who dreams of returning to respectability in the states. Sinatra plays the wild drunken Maggio in the manner of an energetic vaudevillian. In certain scenes—doing duty in the mess hall, reacting to some foul piano playing—he shows a marvelous capacity for phrasing plus a calm expression that is almost unique in Hollywood films. Miss Reed may mangle some lines (“you certainly are a funny one”) with her attempts at a flat Midwestern accent, but she is an interesting actress whenever Cameraman Burnett Guffey uses a hard light on her somewhat bitter features. Brando must have been the inspiration for Clift’s ability to make certain key lines (“I can soldier with any man,” or “No more’n ordinary right cross”) stick out and seem the most authentic examples of American speech to be heard in films.
The story is supposed to give you the lowdown on the professional soldier—it is about the thirty-year men in Company G at Schofield Barracks, Honolulu. Taradash juggles a number of plot threads—a clandestine romance between a smart top sergeant and the captain’s sexy wife, the brutal treatment of a new transfer who refuses to box on the company team, the feud between Maggio and a sadistic captain who operates in the “stockade”—in such a concise way that they seem to be bouncing off one another. In one crucial section a love affair on a lonely beach and another in a crowded brothel are wound together like the strands of a rope. The shift from one to the other is somewhat too abrupt, but it is a minor defect in a highly professional job of writing.
What you are supposed to get is a sour, violent, sometimes funny portrait of the character who makes soldiering his business. It was my impression that the performances were often too fancy and the camera work too arty for a convincing study of tough Americans. The “big” performance is turned in as usual by Clift, as Private Prewitt, a character who has every talent (boxing, bugling, soldiering) except an ability to conform to army pattern. He does an ingenious job of acting a plain, slow-thinking individualist, but he is often working with an actor like Lancaster who does everything with a glib, showy Tarzanism. Then there are Deborah Kerr, a fluent actress who never lets you forget she is acting, and a number of supporting players like Ernest Borgnine, whose sadism has a Broadway glitter.
“From Here to Eternity” happens to be fourteen-carat entertainment. The main trouble is that it is too entertaining for a film in which love affairs flounder, one sweet guy is beaten to death, and a man of high principles is mistaken for a saboteur and killed on a golf course. When the soldiers get drunk, the scene is treated in a funny, unbelievable way. When Clift blows his bugle, it is done with a hammy intensity that tries to mimic Louis Armstrong at his showiest. When Lancaster and Kerr are being passionate on the beach, it is done in patterned action that reeks with a phony Hollywood glamour. The result is a gripping movie that often makes you wish its director, Zinnemann, knew as much about American life as he does about the art of telling a story with a camera.
Eric Ambler had the almost hopeless task of adapting “The Cruel Sea,” a long novel made up of clichés taken from English war movies. His solution was to drop most of the corny plots that told of various sailor lives ashore and to insert in their place a record number of camera shots of the sea and close-ups of sailors reacting to a torpedoing. The movie version of Monsarrat’s 500-page book seems, curiously, hardly to move, though it is based on the history of a corvette’s crew which is moving almost from the moment you see it on its first trip through U-boat-infested waters. On the other hand neither the sea nor the turmoil of abandoning ship has ever before been rendered with such meticulous camera realism. And I doubt whether any other actor has equaled the realistic suffering, fatigue, and nervous strain of Jack Hawkins in the only role that matters to the film—a captain who molds a green crew of lawyers, reporters, bank clerks into first-class seamen.
August 29, 1953
THE Paramount crew that worked on “Roman Holiday” reminded me of expert marksmen who had made “charm” their target and seldom if ever missed it. The ancient buildings and streets of Rome are used as an unobtrusive backdrop, and I doubt whether architecture and sculpture have ever been tied in so tenderly and humorously with what the characters are doing at the moment. In the leading role of a bored princess who steals away from dull court routine for a day of street adventures with an American newspaperman, Audrey Hepburn has enough poise and looks for seven princesses. She also has an affected tom-boyish delivery. But Gregory Peck, Hollywood’s master of all shades of the thoughtful expression, manages by his varied throw-away movements to keep the film from stopping on Miss Hepburn’s affectations. While “Roman Holiday” is too succulent for my taste, I enjoyed Wyler’s switch to romantic comedy more than the heavier art style he used in directing “Carrie,” “Detective Story,” and “The Heiress.”
Wyler sometimes seems to be operating here with one eye on “The Bicycle Thief.” He is moving a well-scrubbed new movie face—Hepburn’s—against the worn face of the Eternal City, and doing a lot of other photogenic things borrowed from De Sica. When his princess is pacified with a drug by the royal doctor, both the camera and Miss Hepburn start acting in an innocent-dreamy De Sica-ish way. When the heroine leaves the palazzo in the back of a laundry truck, the palace gates float up and away as though Lewis Carroll had given them life. Instead of simply crossing the street, Miss Hepburn walks into and out of a carriage and then dreamily down the street—in what Variety would call a boff bit of business.
If I enjoyed Wyler’s new work more than De Sica’s famous comedy-drama, it is simply because Wyler is a sharp-shooting technical wizard compared to the Italian neo-realist. Wyler is working strictly in the magically postured and timed idiom of Chaplin comedies when he starts Peck homeward with the doped Hepburn tagging behind. The main gag in this stretch is funny enough—Hepburn circling the winding stairway while Peck ascends it—but the wonderful things are the small bits of ballet work engineered by Peck and Hepburn. Peck’s movement with his arm leading the sleepy girl back to the stairway is a masterful piece of grace-note acting.
Wyler does noble work getting his princess away from the inhibiting palace and into the reporter’s bohemian quarters, but the adventures he arranges for the pair during the day are neither natural nor amusing. She gets a haircut, which is all to the good because of Paolo Carlini’s oily-gigolo acting of the barber. After that she takes a wild motor-scooter ride, gets arrested, and escapes from a dozen plain-clothes detectives—and nothing works because it is all stock movie zaniness.
Unfortunately, the entertainment values of the picture make you constantly aware of someone’s maneuverings. Miss Hepburn often startles you with perfect impressions of England’s Princess Margaret Rose, even in her slow way of giving forth with a toothy, uncomplicated smile and that pale little hand wave to the crowd. You are always conscious of Wyler’s cleverness—the way he times his jokes, puts sentiment into the laughs, or points up a silent stretch of story-telling with a funny photographic trick. Though I suspect the movie is aimed at an extremely gentle audience, it strikes me as a welcome, if eclectic, throwback to the beautifully acted, suavely directed comedies turned out in 1935 by Cary Grant and his zany tribe.
Laurence Olivier acts the role of an amorous, fast-moving bad man with a sort of smoldering, stuffy distinction, but otherwise Warner’s has a loser in “The Beggar’s Opera.” Most of the bows for the artistic failure should be taken by the technical advisers. The technicolor is made up largely of hot emerald, scarlet, and a surprising amount of black to keep the film as indistinct as possible. The story consists of a few basic items from Nelson Eddy-type operetta—a dashing highwayman having fun holding up stagecoaches, escaping from jail, falling in love—raced through in stagy, skittery fashion. Besides Olivier’s swashbuckling, there are two interesting crowd scenes and some half-intelligible lyrics that sound talented and racy.
September 12, 1953
“Martin Luther” is a nice, well-behaved little movie about a religious thunderbolt. The title role is played by an Irish actor named Niall MacGinnis. While he seldom suggests the phenomenal force of the Reformation leader, MacGinnis makes the most of a pugnacious face and a clever, if somewhat fancy, theatrical voice. Occasionally his eyes bulge too much and he tries to make his tones too clear and firm—as in that fateful speech which starts “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scripture”; but otherwise he seems a good modest version of Luther. The rest of the movie, a Louis de Rochemont production, is interesting, since it is possibly the first religious movie to sidestep sensational violence of any kind and concern itself with items that might be used by a debating professor. The closest de Rochemont comes to conventional movie fury are a few rocks heaved through a church window and a Wittenberg bonfire scene which must be a pale duplicate of that famous incendiary attack on the papacy.
The “plot” takes the practical reformer through his decisive years, from his unexpected entrance into a monastery at Erfurt to a happier moment when the German princes have been won over to his cause and a former Bernardine nun has wooed him into marriage—according to the film Luther was the pursued. The script, by Lothar Wolff and Allan Sloane, is constructed in the bric-a-brac manner of art films like “The Titan.” On a screen that often goes in for odd-angled camera shots and dark-toned compositions you are given a cultural grab-bag of everything from an etching of St. Peter’s before the dome had been built to a view of the actual castle where Luther translated the Bible. When you aren’t looking at lithographs, old books, the Medici coat of arms, the film offers brief reenactments of famous Lutherian moments. The whole thing is unfolded somewhat stiffly and in the manner of a packet of attached photographs.
An army of commentators—sounding like pupils of Laurence Olivier—supply the cement that holds these fragments together. When the pictures are generalized and close to cliché—two monks trudging in silhouette over rolling hills—the commentator fills in with information on, say, walking trips to Rome. When the camera man goes off on an arty excursion—a totally obscured view through foliage of the heads of some horsemen—the commentator lets you know that a friendly kidnapping is taking place in the Thuringian Forest.
In scenes emphasizing character Luther is shown as a brooding, melancholy figure struggling to find a “gracious rather than a punitive God,” a practical reformer who finally arrives at the notion that ecclesiastical vestments, pilgrimages, mortifications, and so on are of no avail to the soul. Ex-Professor Pichel, the director, opens up Luther’s arguments in a clear, entertaining way and works in nice touches having to do with the dialectical skill, unruffled temper, and phenomenal memory of good disputants. A typical bit of professorial humor makes an illiterate loafer the key figure in that famous moment when Luther nails the Theses to the church door.
Any similarity between “Luther” and the religious works made by De Mille, Dieterle, Dreyer, or D. W. Griffith seems to be confined to the fact that the producer’s name has the same first initial. While de Rochemont’s film may be somewhat tepid as biography and motionless as a movie, it is unique in its class in that it makes its play more to the mind than to the eye.
“Island in the Sky” is a heavy John Wayne drama revolving around an A.T C. plane crash in the Labrador wastes. Aerial photography in shivery weather provides some thrills but not enough to make up for Wayne’s dreary monologues addressed to himself, the faulty use of stereophonic sound, and the waste of some good actors like Lloyd Nolan and Bob Steele.
“99 River Street” is another energetic, semi-realistic gangster film by the group that made “Kansas City Confidential.” The plot is routine, but the direction, which seems to dislike anything that smacks of the phrase “don’t get excited,” makes the picture worth seeing. Its worst feature is Evelyn Keyes over-emoting; its best, the opening prize fight that exhibits the dexterity of actor John Payne.
September 26, 1953
THIS is the age of elephantine, humorless films that show little if any artistic endeavor. The latest example of gigantism, “The Robe,” deals with a Roman counterpart of Lanny Budd who gets around to all the important Biblical events. The story, however, is less important than the fact that it is presented on the new CinemaScope screen, probably the widest and largest in existence. The screen is exploited here chiefly for spectacular mural-type photographs in which every detail is clearly defined: the movement of the camera lens is usually a slow sideways one, giving you the impression of looking at the world through a slot-in-the-wall.
These overpowering views have been colored and composed with some of the skill that went into “Moulin Rouge,” but they exist as great static blocks of scenery, with the characters—from Lloyd C. Douglas’s enormously popular book—squeezed in between in an unintentionally funny way: the camera seems to bump into a leading character standing in the middle of a street, open plain, or mountain top with nothing to do but gaze off into the distance. If he is played by a hammy actor like Mature, the fellow’s face can be seen moving like mammoth plates of steel. But no matter who the actor, the character is usually a forlorn figure who looks as if he had stumbled into the center of a Music Hall set on the wrong cue.
“The Robe” tells the story of a young tribune (Richard Burton) who annoys an evil, effeminate prince regent to the point where he is sent into the worst spot of the Roman Empire. In Jerusalem he starts out as indolent playboy, falls under the spell of the new religion, and eventually operates like Douglas Fairbanks spreading the gospel in Rome itself. There has been so much effort on Twentieth Century–Fox’s part to put this first CinemaScope production over that about all you notice is the dull competence strewn into a hundred and one corners of the film. Only a few actors really individualize their roles. Someone named Jay Robinson enacts the petulant prince regent with a weird wobbling walk in which he invariably teeters off to the side before moving forward—he reminded me of both Leon Errol and an untalented Charles Laughton. On the credit side there are Frank Pulaski, Jr., as a tough, taunting Roman commander, as hard as anyone I’ve seen in movies, and a humanized bit by Richard Boone, who as Pontius Pilate has only to wash his hands in a distracted way.
Director Henry Koster and script writer Philip Dunne may have tried to spark up the movie by making the non-believers more manly and the Christians less obviously saintly than is usual in Hollywood journeys through the Bible. In the case of the Cana Christians—Dean Jagger as Justus and Michael Rennie as Peter—the characterizations come out insipid anyway. Jagger talks and acts as if he were a colored preacher in a 1930 Hollywood musical, and Rennie just moves around making you conscious of the shoulder padding under his toga. The other actors—most of them British (Burton, Simmons, Thatcher)—are adequate in a one-dimensional way. Burton plays the proud, hot-tempered, somewhat cocky hero with an angry set to his mouth and an impetuous way of moving and talking.
Some of the usual faults of Biblical melodramas have been avoided in “The Robe.” There is less sadism and sex of the glamorous, freely brushed-in type that De Mille has used so often, but what there is, is definitely corny. In a clanking sword fight around the dusty main street of Cana the sound-effects crew steals the show with its phony noise-making while the swordsmen slice away in rhythmic patterns. The thrills are mild and invariably the product of the spectacle scenes. One of the best of these, Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem a week before the Crucifixion, handles a swirling line of marchers in deep space with the skill of an old master. But the whole intent in such scenes—to produce static pictures that are breathtakingly big and colorful—seems as philistine as anything I’ve seen recently, reminding me of nothing so much as the worst examples of calendar art.
October 17, 1953
HOLLYWOOD, often scolded by the critics for exploiting a child’s cuteness until the spectators are ill from sugar-poisoning, has seldom gone so far as the “amateur” film “Little Fugitive.” The movie sends a seven-year-old (Richie Andrusco) “on the lam” via BMT to Coney Island’s amusement park, the victim of a practical joke which made him think he had murdered his older brother. At the end of the subway line he suddenly doffs his dependent character and becomes a pocket-sized version of Robinson Crusoe operating on a crowded beach—calmly and ingeniously carving out a new life for himself, making a living off soda-pop-bottle deposits, and sleeping wherever his tired body slumps. The film pleased me for about five minutes, even though the plot seemed manufactured to permit yet another documentarist to shoot his favorite run-down American environment, then it disintegrated into a compromise with the truth about the world of a small-fry Brooklynite.
The producing team (Orkin-Engel-Ashley) obviously feel Andrusco is an acting fire-ball, a kid Brando, but they are probably wrong. His chief traits are provoking enough—a phlegm-inclosed Brooklyn dialect that makes him sound as if he were talking through a tin can, a purposeful expression achieved by searching eyes and sullen mouth, and a style limited to those childish mannerisms that make fatuous mothers squeal with pleasure. Moreover, his personality seems to lack a core: the more the camera searches for a miniature Chaplin, the more vague and boring Andrusco becomes. He is best as a sort of incidental figure—playing with a pail and shovel, drifting out of the subway with a crowd of adults.
“Little Fugitive” has been a money-maker on the art-theater circuit. It pleases the people who go for “Rashomon,” Rossellini, and Cocteau because it offers a modern view of a child’s psyche, plus the preciously naturalistic technique of a European film. This camera man is too skilful and sincere to be branded a mere eclectic, but his contribution is unhealthily close to what is generally popular in avant-garde films. The camera work on Andrusco is always “significant” and “creative” in that it is constantly telling a story of New York at the same time that it fastens on the drooping lines of the boy’s face or the lonely wiggle of his walk. The view of his ball game in the street is “canyonized” by an angle shot from the roof top; his lonelier moments on the beach are played against patterns that shriek Big City—the cracks of the boardwalk, the wired garbage cans on the empty beach, lovers’ silhouettes on the sand.
The film’s idea is to show how easily a child throws off the emotions of a tragic situation, and how he out-adults adults in a new and trying experience. This point, along with the ultra-sensitive photography, makes the film seem too refined and optimistic for the subject it deals with. The consistently fortunate turn of events makes life around Brooklyn unrecognizable, particularly, no doubt, to the kids who live there.
October 31, 1953
THE last few years in Hollywood have been a sort of mopping-up act on the assembly lines. Some six or seven directors the public recognizes as artistic have been reworking old skills perfected long before the onslaught of wide screens and 3-D glasses. Big pictures like “Roman Holiday” (which I liked) and “Mogambo” (which wasn’t good enough to dislike) are typical examples of rehashings on the part of a couple of old masters, Ford and Wyler, who have been temporarily frozen into academic entertainers by the TV threat. A step down from the big pictures and the big-name people, we find that the honest low-budget film has been eliminated from Hollywood’s output. The sensitive, unadorned actors—Widmark, Dan Dailey, Basehart, Wendell Corey, Glenn Ford, Ireland—are either drifting away from Hollywood or being wasted in the rankest pot-boilers. One reason for considering the following movie odds and ends is that they give an immediate picture of the entire recapitulation period.
“The Joe Louis Story.” A slow, plodding journey back through the ex-champ’s career. For a while it captures the simple, good-hearted quality of the younger Louis but then turns into a shapeless, predictable glad-handing of the hero and everyone connected with him—Marva, Chappie, Roxborough, Jacobs, et al. Coley Wallace, performing as the Brown Bomber, tries to be smooth and nonchalant but his slow, unassuming walk and business of switching from dead pan to face-covering grin become tiresome. The real villain of the production—it is hard to believe anyone directed it—is the Daily News columnist whose screen play seems determined that the colored hero is a touchy subject and therefore should be “sold” as a sort of saint who did nothing worse than play hooky from his violin lessons and eat too much cake before the Schmeling upset.
“The Big Heat.” A compelling crime show. Sydney Boehm’s story contains unexpected explosions of sadism at the end of long, tightly constructed dialogue sessions but manages to give off sparks even though it is based on nothing more substantial than several dozen cops-and-robbers films. A crime syndicate, which has half the city on its pay roll and is operated by a sex maniac (Lee Marvin) and an oily, Seagram’s-ad type (Alexander Scourby), is broken up by an ex-cop (Glenn Ford) and a few of his war buddies who turn up to help him in crucial moments. The characters seem to be wrapped thinly around steaming amounts of vengeance, avarice, or cruelty, but Marvin and Ford make it a well-acted movie that offers interesting impressions of how a practical-minded American male operates in crises—marring a girl’s face with scalding coffee, pulling a woman’s body out of a bombed automobile.
“Mogambo.” A half-interesting safari adventure, meant as a sequel to “King Solomon’s Mines.” It is inflated with at least one authentic thrill (a gorilla family charging the camera of an annoying anthropologist), a few tastelessly staged excitements (Ava Gardner playfully loving up a baby elephant), and some dated romancing. It suffers less from its silly dialogue than from the fact that the stars (Gable, Gardner, Grace Kelly) have large blank features and a dull spot in the center of their personalities. Because of Ford’s genius for mobilizing the screen with off-the-cuff notions of glamour, Gardner acts for the first time as if she were half-interested in the film, and the African terrain—a big-game hunter’s sprawling animal farm, the lush landscape as it is crossed by a line of marchers—seems as authentic as in the jungle films of the Merion C. Cooper era.
“The All-American.” Tony Curtis as a halfback from the wrong side of town at a snob college is as convincing as a line plunger as Joe Palooka is as a heavyweight boxer.
“From Mainstreet to Broadway.” It took a rare amount of greed and insensitiveness to entice so many Broadway celebrities into such a slipshod tribute to “today’s American theater.” Lester Cowan managed the feat in a Samuel French-type production that has to do with the troubles of a callow playwright who has written a first play called “Calico and Lust.”
“The Actress.” M-G-M in a mellow mood, which means the folksy acting by Tracy-Simmons-Wright is full of mugging and around-the-home comedy. Its main trouble is that it underrates the intelligence and talents of the rather impoverished New England family: the seventeen-year-old stage-struck girl moons over the performance of an absurdly stereotyped road-company queen; father tries to put on a nice comedy act but fails because he loses his pants.
November 21, 1953
“The Living Desert” is a full-length color film on locales familiar to cowboy and foreign-legion films; only here treatment of them has been refreshingly reversed. All these places—Death Valley, Monument Valley, Salton Sea, Yuma’s sand dunes—have usually been pictured as uninhabited, quiet regions that run to sandy tints and encourage peaceful contemplation. Disney’s desert is a wild, forbidding land swarming with antagonistic animals, violent loves, seductive dances, oddly matched fights, weird victory celebrations, and enough terror stuff to unnerve any city-bred animal lover. The unusual thing about Disney’s photography is that it is so close to the various creatures that you get, in clear jewel-like tones, the incredible ugliness of animal parts—a thin, hairy rat’s leg, the pugnacious and grotesquely shaped head of a wild pig, the worm-like contour of a centipede’s body.
This documentary drama fascinates but at the same time arouses suspicion. It is hard to believe in some of the shots. In one episode the camera is somehow wheeled into the network of underground tunnels built by a kangaroo rat, where it watches a mother rat struggle to save her offspring from a visiting snake. The camera must have been pulled through those tiny passages with a sewing thread. Most of the episodes are put together with bits and pieces of photography in which the character of the lighting changes enough to make you wonder about the consecutiveness of the action, and there are so many varying shots within each episode that you can almost hear the echo of the editor’s scissors.
In all, Disney’s picture has its thrilling moments—as when it shows a tortoise moving like a bulging, clanking intruder from medieval times—but it tends to repeat itself in savagery and reveal too many animals who move around in the sentimental dance rhythms of a Hollywood musical.
The second Cinemascope production, “How to Marry a Millionaire,” is a mildly amusing comedy about three girls using an elaborate Sutton Place trap to catch millionaires. The very wide screen in Cinemascope may prove to be a death-trap for Hollywood stars, since it brings out every physical and personality trait. In this case it emphasizes some unmanly aspects of the leading male actor, shows up the excessive make-up on Miss Monroe, and makes it clear that Grable hated the picture. The wide screen also encourages Hollywood directors to traffic in panoramic shots. The film has more stock shots of highways, bridges, and mountain landscapes than intimate shots of the stars. And unlike Cinerama, the new Zanuck technique adds little if any three-dimensional excitement to the vast shots of terrain; so that this film amounts to one well-acted gag (Marilyn Monroe’s near blindness) and a few bright lines surrounded by dead landscapes and uninteresting masses of interior decoration.
“The Man Between” is a classroom example of suspenseful British movie-making, replete with fuzzy, smog-colored photography, actors who look as if they could use a more robust way of life, and a choppy story line. Carol Reed’s man hunt in post-war Berlin is more entertaining than any other current film, but it seems a case of a good director standing still, relying a bit too much on clichés. The scratchy photography of wintry European streets has become an accepted synonym for good naturalistic lens work.
Reed saves his melodrama with innumerable tricks that give “The Man Between” a certain amount of sentiment, humor, and photographic interest. Mason’s thin body and dental work are made into touching items, as though they were brought on by impoverishing war conditions. His brief affair with Miss Bloom, carried on over rooftops, in fleeing automobiles, and up and down a ragged-looking construction job, is constantly turned away from the mechanics of a chase melodrama into something more tender and interesting. It is done with techniques that remind you of “The African Queen.” All the missmatching qualities in Bloom and Mason are emphasized in ways that add schmaltz and a bit of truth to their love affair. Where Bogart was forever being comically expert with his broken-down steamboat, Mason shows off in various ways as a Berlin gadabout. To the long-winded conversations that recall Huston’s film Reed adds his own pattern-happy talent with a camera and a light comic touch that he has not used since his low-budget days. All in all, an ingratiating movie.
December 26, 1953
THE past movie year will probably be generally remembered as the one in which three-dimensional gimmicks—multiple sound tracks, polaroid glasses, masking, wide curved screens, and other flashes in the panoramic craze—just about displaced the importance of content and quality. For me 1953 was the year in which Hollywood almost lost me as an irritable non-paying customer. The simple reason for my disaffection with H-movies—I ceased to be a foreign-movie fan when foreign films became so pretentiously unpretentious—is that there were few pictures last year in which the “human element” wasn’t swallowed up by production values. In this era of hard, tight semi-documentaries embroidered with fancying-up touches that seem controlled almost to rigidity, only an occasional “Roman Holiday” turns up with enough individual flourish to make one interested in any craftsmen but the lead actors.
Wherever you look today, you find the movie artist subordinating himself in order to glorify a mechanical process. There was the wildly energetic dance scene in “Moulin Rouge” in which the speed, grouping, and rhythm of the dancers seemed indebted to the piston and lever. Even in “Shane” you found gimmicky stuff going on in every frame: the hero’s name was repeated so often in affected voices that it was like listening to a bird in a clock which instead of saying “Cuck-oo” gave out with a metallic nasal “Shane!” In Disney’s “Living Desert” actual mud puddles in the Salton Sea were made to burp, writhe, turn themselves inside out, and even spit in time to classical music by means of mechanical tricks.
Mechanization of the artist has become the rage in other arts besides movies. In juke-box ballad-singing tiny voices like those of Como and Joni James are stretched, made earthy, sometimes even doubled and tripled, by the use of sound boxes and tape recorders. The most talked-of realistic painter—Wyeth—does a surrealistically touched-up imitation of the camera image. Most of the important American abstractionists drip, scrub, or bleed paint on to canvas with an impersonal skill that makes it hard to believe human hands had anything to do with the painting. But it is particularly irritating to find movie artists over-indulging in mechanical tricks because the medium is so dependent on the immediate kinship set up between spectator and characters. How do you connect with the people in a movie like “From Here to Eternity” if their very brains and emotions seem ensnared in the delicate camera contortions that fuzz up the surface of a Zinnemann-directed film?
This department saw nothing last year that deserved a Best Film award. Here, but not in any preferential order, are the seven films that gave me the most pleasure.
First there was Alfred Hitchcock’s “I Confess,” a suspense yarn with too much talk and some polished semi-documentary photography (by Robert Burks) that was too obviously chopped up with symbols and oddly arranged angles for my taste. However, it had the most interesting acting of the year—by Anne Baxter, Roger Dann, and particularly Clift, involved in a methodically directed murder story in which the chief suspect is a young priest. Clift won the year’s acting award for his ability to project states of mind and feeling with a kind of repressed toughness that became too obvious in the “Eternity” film. The movie was also noteworthy for the skill with which Hitchcock exposed the raveling out of a romance without wasting a motion, moving from the most romantic movie styling to the uncolored quality of a police report.
Next there was “The Young Wives’ Tale,” a domestic comedy that seemed to have a screw loose and featured Joan Greenwood, the woman with a fog-horn voice and the manner of a slightly drowsy, kittenish narcissist. It was a fresh little British movie that gave you the sense of all hell breaking loose in a two-family house, while Miss Greenwood, a rather gawky Audrey Hepburn, and some others had fun in the manner of unregulated acting virtuosos.
The next three spots go to three substanceless Hollywood movies—“I Love Melvin,” “Inferno,” and “The Big Heat”—that seemed to be perfect second features on neighborhood double bills. “Melvin” was the only musical I saw that had any genuine liveliness or youthfulness in its choreography; “Inferno” used the Robinson Crusoe technique of dreaming up realistic details to draw you along on a fantastic journey and was more fun to watch than any of the American comedies. “The Big Heat” was excitingly acted by Glenn Ford and Lee Marvin—in spite of the lush décor and sentimental writing.
Sixth, George Stevens’s “Shane,” though it often seemed ridiculously arty and slow as its precise director attempted to give ballad-like stature to the ordinary ingredients of a cowboy story. But it is a movie that takes its own measured, deliberate time finding ways to increase your pleasure. Its key method was to provide an endless number of visual treats through the color photography of Loyal Griggs, who seems to have a genius for dramatizing moody stuff like the approaching shadow of a rain storm or the eerie night light on a porch. Unfortunately the spectator had to put up with some unbelievable fights, the overaged-child acting of Brandon de Wilde, Palance’s phony cowboy costume, and the nasal delivery of Jean Arthur.
Seventh, William Wyler’s “Roman Holiday,” a completely pleasing comic travelogue that seemed close to the first Garson Kanin comedies in its ability to inject heart and zip into zany human situations. It starred a rather cold and facile actress who turns on charm with a kind of trade-marked affectation. On the credit side it sported a clever rebelling-princess script, the tough stooge acting of Eddie Albert, good Cary Grant-type mugging by Gregory Peck, and direction that was masterful in its ability to manufacture small humorous details to delay the cliché twist in each segment of the story.
My honorable-mention list includes “The Man Between,” “The Naked Spur,” “Jeopardy” (for the tension-heightening direction of John Sturges), “Stalag 17,” “Bellissima” (Magnani was the year’s best actress), Martin and Lewis’s “The Stooge,” “Blowing Wild,” “The Moon Is Blue,” “Split Second” (an unusually good performance by Stephen McNally), and “Sky Full of Moon.” In the worst-film category, “I, the Jury,” “From Mainstreet to Broadway,” and “Return to Paradise” were tied.
January 9, 1954