THE death of Val (Vladimir) Lewton, Hollywood’s top producer of B movies, occurred during the final voting on the year’s outstanding film contributors. The proximity of these two events underlines the significant fact that Lewton’s horror productions (Ghost Ship, The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead), which always conveyed a very visual, unorthodox artistry, were never recognized as “Oscar” worthy. On the other hand, in acclaiming people like Ferrer, Mankiewicz, and Holliday, the industry has indicated its esteem for bombshells who disorganize the proceedings on the screen with their flamboyant eccentricities and relegate the camera to the role of passive bit player.
Lewton always seemed a weirdly misplaced figure in Hollywood. He specialized in gentle, scholarly, well-wrought productions that were as modest in their effects as his estimate of himself. Said he: “Years ago I wrote novels for a living, and when RKO was looking for producers, someone told them I had written horrible novels. They misunderstood the word horrible for horror and I got the job.” Having taken on the production of low-cost thrillers (budgeted under $500,000) about pretty girls who turn into man-eating cats or believe in zombies, Lewton started proving his odd idea, for a celluloid entertainer, that “a picture can never be too good for the public.” This notion did not spring from a desire to turn out original, noncommercial films, for Lewton never possessed that kind of brilliance or ambition; it came instead from a pretty reasonable understanding of his own limitations. Unlike the majority of Hollywood craftsmen, he was so bad at supplying the kind of “punch” familiar to American films that the little mayhem he did manage was crude, poorly motivated, and as incredible as the Music Hall make-up on his Indians in Apache Drums—the last and least of his works. He also seemed to have a psychological fear of creating expensive effects, so that his stock in trade became the imparting of much of the story through such low-cost suggestions as frightening shadows. His talents were those of a mild bibliophile whose idea of “good” cinema had too much to do with using quotes from Shakespeare or Donne, bridging scenes with a rare folk song, capturing climate with a description of a West Indian dish, and, in the pensive sequences, making sure a bit player wore a period mouth instead of a modern lipsticky one. Lewton’s efforts not infrequently suggested a minor approximation of Jane Eyre.
The critics who called Lewton the “Sultan of Shudders” and “Chill-master” missed the deliberate quality of his insipidly normal characters, who reminded one of the actors used in small-town movie ads for the local grocery or shoe store. Lewton and his script-writers collaborated on sincere, adult pulp stories, which gave sound bits of knowledge on subjects like zoanthropia or early English asylums while steering almost clear of formula horror.
The Curse of the Cat People, for instance, was simply for the overconscientious parent of a problem child. The film concerns a child (Ann Carter) who worries or antagonizes the people around her with her daydreaming; the more they caution and reprimand, the more she withdraws to the people of her fantasies for “friends.” When she finds an old photograph of her father’s deceased, psychopathic first wife (Simone Simon, the cat woman of an earlier film), she sees her as one of her imagined playmates; the father fears his daughter has become mentally ill and is under a curse. His insistence that she stop daydreaming brings about the climax, and the film’s conclusion is that he should have more trust and faith in his daughter and her visions. Innocuous plots such as these were fashioned with peculiar ingredients that gave them an air of genteel sensitivity and enchantment; there was the dry documenting of a bookworm, an almost delicate distrust of excitement, economical camera and sound effects, as well as fairy-tale titles and machinations. The chilling factor came from the perverse process of injecting tepid thrills with an eyedropper into a respectable story, a technique Lewton and his favorite scriptwriter, Donald Henderson Clarke, picked up during long careers writing sex shockers for drugstore book racks. While skittering daintily away from concrete evidences of cat women or brutality, they would concentrate with the fascination of a voyeur on unimportant bric-a-brac, reflections, domestic animals, so that the camera would take on the faintly unhealthy eye of a fetishist. The morbidity came from the obsessive preoccupation with which writers and cameramen brought out the voluptuous reality of things, such as a dangerously swinging ship’s hook, which was inconspicuously knocking men overboard like tenpins.
Lewton’s most accomplished maneuver was making the audience think much more about his material than it warranted. Some of his devices were the usual ones of hiding information, having his people murdered offstage, or cutting into a murderous moment in a gloomy barn with a shot of a horse whinnying. He, however, hid much more of his story than any other filmmaker, and forced his crew to create drama almost abstractly with symbolic sounds, textures, and the like, which made the audience hyperconscious of sensitive craftsmanship. He imperiled his characters in situations that didn’t call for outsized melodrama and permitted the use of a journalistic camera—for example, a sailor trying to make himself heard over the din of a heavy chain that is burying him inside a ship’s locker. He would use a spray-shot technique that usually consisted of oozing suggestive shadows across a wall, or watching the heroine’s terror on a lonely walk, and then add a homey wind-up of the cat woman trying to clean her conscience in a bathtub decorated with cat paws. This shorthand method allowed Lewton to ditch the laughable aspects of improbable events and give the remaining bits of material the strange authenticity of a daguerrotype.
The Leopard Man is a cleaner and much less sentimental Lewton, sticking much more to the suspense element and misdirection, using some of his favorite images, people moving in a penitential, sleep-walking manner, episodes threaded together with a dramatic sound. This fairly early peak example of his talent is a nerve-twitching whodunit giving the creepy impression that human beings and “things” are interchangeable and almost synonymous and that both are pawns of a bizarre and terrible destiny. A lot of surrealists like Cocteau have tried for the same supernatural effects, but, while their scenes still seem like portraits in motion, Val Lewton’s film shows a way to tell a story about people that isn’t dominated by the activity, weight, size, and pace of the human figure. In one segment of the film, a small frightened señorita walks beyond the edge of the border town and then back again, while her feelings and imagination keep shifting with the camera into sagebrush, the darkness of an arroyo, crackling pebbles underfoot, and so on, until you see her thick dark blood oozing under the front door of her house. All the psychological effects—fear and so on—were transformed by Tourneur into nonhuman components of the picture as the girl waited for some noncorporeal manifestation of nature, culture, or history to gobble her up. But, more important in terms of movie invention, Lewton’s use of multiple focus (characters are dropped or picked up as if by chance, while the movie goes off on odd tacks trying to locate a sound or a suspicion) and his lighter-than-air sense of pace created a terrifically plastic camera style. It put the camera eye on a curiously delicate wave length that responds to scenery as quickly as the mind, and gets inside of people instead of reacting only to surface qualities. This film still seems to be one of Hollywood’s original gems—nothing impure in terms of cinema, nothing imitative about its style, and little that misses fire through a lack of craft.
Unfortunately, his directors (he discovered Robson and Wise in the cutting department) become so delirious about scenic camera work that they used little imagination on the acting. But the sterile performances were partly due to Lewton’s unexciting idea that characters should always be sweet, “like the people who go to the movies”—a notion that slightly improved such veteran creeps as Karloff, but stopped the more pedantic actors (Kent Smith, Daniell) dead in their tracks. Lewton’s distinction always came from his sense of the soundly constructed novel; his $200,000 jobs are so skillfully engineered in pace, action, atmosphere that they have lost little of the haunting effect they had when released years ago.
April 14, 1951, and September 27, 1952
“The Thing (from Another World)” is a slick item thriftily combining a heavy science story with a pure adventure yarn for better than ordinary entertainment. This story of an intellectual carrot who delivers a flying saucer from Mars might have taken years and millions to make; instead, the problem was solved by setting the film at the uncomplicated North Pole, hiding the saucer under ice, and keeping the ferocious vegetable for an hour from the audience’s eyes. Before its appearance there is little more than imaginative science talk and off-screen howling from the Thing, but the dialogue is a flashy, interesting, erratic jumble reminiscent of disc-jockey chatter. Despite its indulgence in the cliché of the Mad Scientist—a vaguely Russian-type “Nobel Prize winner”—and the final letdown when the Thing turns out to be merely the familiar Frankenstein monster fines herbes, the film almost convinces you that its imaginative predictions may some day all come true.
“The Brave Bulls”—concerning a frightened torero who mysteriously loses his fear in the last five minutes—is an exercise in powerful photography if not in lucid story-telling. Its first scenes in the Plaza Mexico—an ancient paso doble blasted forth out of battered trumpets—provide the year’s most spine-tingling footage. The rest is an arty, confused attempt to show what’s so special about “da bools, da muzik, da beeg crowds in da hot afternoon.” Robert Rossen, its producer-director, is an ex-pugilist with proletarian proclivities who uses newsreel and editing devices with a pummeling effect. Rossen breaks his story into three plots so that he can admire the quaint nobility of small-town Mexican breeders, impresarios, and other walk-on figures. Somehow, the incidental crowd has always had a great importance for Rossen, and in this film he has loaded his stations, streets, and patios with the same “little people” who jittered in the foreground and background of “All the King’s Men”—only now they are paisanos. For all this, “The Brave Bulls” turns up an endless thread of visual treats, and it is probably less un-Mexican than some of its lines.
The under-dogs have their day again in “The Scarf,” a disjointed, monstrously affected psycho-mystery freak show. This time the producer-directors are Dupont and Goldsmith, two European aesthetes who have been snarling at the rich and drooling over the poor ever since the days of Emil Jannings. Here they glamorize a singing waitress, a turkey-raising hermit, a jaundiced metaphysical barkeep, and a morose amnesiac fugitive from a desert asylum. These types are set up against a Berlin’s-eye-view of the American scene: Greyhound buses, hitchhikers, cactus, flourishing analysts, prison breaks. Dupont and Goldsmith turn their tinny proletarians into sententious talkers, dubbing them with names like “Level Louie” and “Cash-and-Carry Connie” and having them oscillate their eyeballs in a sophisticated version of Griffith’s pantomime. It sounds awful but it’s kind of interesting.
Back to bulls. “The Bullfighter and the Lady” is produced by actor John Wayne and suggests his own personality and career by its simplicity, its spaciousness, its complacent trust in cagy brawn. A Yankee skeet-shooter (Robert Stack) quickly learns the matador’s trade—faena, veronica, et al.—from Mexico’s head bull-slayer, thus reminding us of Wayne’s quick rise to stardom after a mediocre discus-throwing career at the University of Southern California and his close student-master relationship with John Ford. Ford’s inclination to glorify rugged masculine fellowship also comes through—but in a surprising and sticky way. The audience is besieged with handsome male anatomy—nearly nude matadors flexing their muscles in a steam room, matadors bulging out of their skin-tight pants, endless close shots of Stack’s platinum curls and toothy grin. However, Wayne makes bullfighting clearer than Rossen does.
“Appointment with Danger” is a fascinating textbook on the Average American Flop—his speech, mien, sage misanthropy, doubt. It is also a well-done report on the geography of Gary, Indiana, a place that seems crowded with failures. There are only two really weak actors in it: Alan Ladd and his co-star, Phyllis Calvert, who like many English players always looks ready to keel over from lack of orange juice, exercise, and sunshine. Still, it’s about time the critics stopped jumping on Ladd. This emotionless splinter has one real virtue: his incessant numb bravery often inspires the rest of the cast to outdo themselves in the opposite direction. So in this mail-robbery movie, the more Ladd outguns and outslugs a gang of white-collar thugs—most of whom seem instinctively sure their fool-proof scheme will backfire—the more Henry Morgan, Jack Webb, and the other thieves inject subtle trouble into their traditionally tough characterizations. These understated shades of dejection are so perfectly articulated that Ladd fans are growing restive—not from the monotony of his heroics but from seeing their own pessimism revealed in grainy, gloomy honesty.
May 26, 1951
IN “A Place in the Sun”—the latest and glummest re-re-remake of “An American Tragedy”—there is enough gimmicky, pretentious footage to keep one’s eyes glued to the screen while one’s common sense and muscles beg for respite. For all its flash, occasional power, and streaks of frighteningly natural acting, this extra-earnest Paramount production is one long, slow, hyperbolic attack on ordinary American existence—an attack whose renewal in one recent film after another is obviously part of Hollywood’s strategy to jerk its audience back from the ingenuous attractions of television.
We are given, for instance, the oh-so-languid rich; the pious, magisterial M. D.; billboards that out-Petty Petty; distant sirens playing a counterpoint of doom to ordinary phone calls; the beefy, hysterically shrill D. A.; a thick undergrowth of portable radios everywhere the camera goes; juke-box joints sprawling with drunks. And I am getting very tired of stock shot 32-B, which feeds us the myth that all the windows in depressed urban areas face out on huge, blinking neon symbols of wealth and achievement.
The script by Harry Brown is remarkably faithful to the plot of Dreiser’s bleak novel: the complicated love life of a not quite bright social climber (Montgomery Clift) puts him finally in the electric chair. But Brown’s dialogue is so stylish and unalive (“You seem so strange, so deep, so far away”) that it appears to drift out of the walls and furniture rather than the twisted, jittery, or guppy-like mouths of Clift and his two ladies—Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters. An even more troubling factor is Brown’s determination to modernize a tale that is hopelessly geared to an outdated morality and a vanished social set-up. (“An American Tragedy,” published in 1925, was based on the Chester Gillette case of 1906. By its contortionist avoidance of the verboten subject of abortion—or less drastic alternatives—and its black-white demarcation of the worlds of luxury and drudgery, this “modern” version cuts the ground from under its own feet.)
But Producer-Director George Stevens turned Brown’s arty, static nonsense into something almost as visually interesting and emotionally complex as “Sunset Boulevard” or “The Asphalt Jungle”—one more key example of Hollywood’s recent desperate commitment to misanthropic expression via elegant, controlled, mismated power effects. Ordinarily a soft-hearted poetic realist, Stevens is particularly good at getting natural performances out of his actors and at putting across the gauzy, sentimental Gestalt of a popular song, a kiss, an important dance, a ritualized seduction. Here he has blown such elements larger than life—building them into slow, parabolic choreographies of action and camera movement in which you are more dazzled by the incredible control and purposefulness than repulsed by the schmalz of the whole thing. The Clift-Taylor kiss—repeated in three double exposures—is a huge, intimate, extended business that practically hammers an erotic nail into your skull. It is preceded by Taylor’s curious Tin Pan Alley line: “Tell Mama—tell Mama all!”
Stevens squeezes so much of their “real” personalities out of his actors that the story is congested with discordances. Most of the honors go to Miss Winters, who at long last gets to show that she can do a Mildred—just like Bette Davis; but a far more complex one-man show is that of the non-aging late adolescent, Montgomery Clift. To some spectators his performance expresses the entire catalogue of GreenwichVillage effeminacy—slim, disdainful, active shoulders; the withdrawals, silent hatreds, petty aversions; the aloof, offhand voice strained to the breaking point. To others he is a sensitive personification of all those who knock themselves out against the brick wall of success. Clift can stare at a Packard convertible or slump down on his spine with fatigue and by simply not acting make you aware of every dejected, mumbling success-seeker on a big city street. Finally, for the more perceptive he is a childish charade on all the fashionably tough, capable outcasts who clutter up “hard-boiled” fiction: cigarette dangling from mouth, billiard cue carelessly angled behind his back, Clift makes a four-cushion shot look preposterously phony.
The exploitation of a talent like this goes far to prove that ace directors no longer make movies as much as tight-knit, multi-faceted Freud-Marx epics which hold attention but discourage understanding in a way that justifies Winchell’s name for their makers—“cinemagicians.”
June 30, 1951
“The Frogmen,” in which Richard Widmark wins the latter part of World War II under water, is a new type of movie experience roughly equivalent to reading “Tom Swift” in Braille at the bottom of a well. While examining the strokes, breathing apparatus, and demolition tactics of the navy’s warfaring bathing beauties, it unwinds a boyishly heroic tale beneath the Pacific-in-middle-distance shots that make the story as hard to see as a recent dillie called “The Long Dark Hall,” which was shot without electric lights in a dark walnut courtroom. One virtue of 20th-Century-Fox films is that they are cast with manly males of the advertising-executive type who reject the kind of pansy-brained, masochistic, floor-walker’s poetic technique that has become a lauded acting style in most Hollywood films.
“Ace in the Hole”—an ex-G. I., crazy for Indian relics, is pinned down in a cave fall-in, with sand dribbling in his face, while a sensationalist reporter keeps him there for the sake of a gaudy news story—is built chiefly round the acting of a tough, corrupt newshound by Kirk Douglas. Douglas plays it in the worst style of the Yiddish theater, bursting with self-pity, slowing everything with a muscular, tensed-up technique, and ranting as though he were trying to break the hearts of people blocks away from the theater. His conceited hamming is pretty typical of the whole show, in spite of a well-cast Albuquerque contractor, a reasonably well-cast floozy (Jan Sterling) who makes a nice nasty thing of riffling some currency in Douglas’s face, a few beautiful long shots of the carnival that blossoms at the scene of the tragedy. These last make up in very small part for Producer Wilder’s dreadful, misanthropic, corny depiction of the rubber-neckers gathered for the kill and of “hicks” whose provincialism consists of not being hep to chopped liver or Yogi Berra.
Joseph Losey, the left-wing naturalistic director of two excitingly candid films, “M” and “The Prowler,” is an ambivalent citizen who loathes the cupidity, sadism, and prejudices of his fellow-men, and lovingly borrows the best things they have done with a camera. In his remake of “M” the discriminating Losey makes good use of, among other things, Lang’s morose camera set-ups and lighting, the architectonic design and subjects of Walker Evans’s photographs, and the eerie handling of carnival freaks, last seen in a good “B” called “Woman in Hiding.” “M” provides a sensitive if unimaginative evening, whose major asset is David Wayne’s somewhat over-harassed acting of an elegantly hysterical psychopath. However, in “The Prowler,” which catalogues a cop’s hot pursuit of a frightened wife and his disposal of her disc-jockey husband, Losey has perfected his taut, dry naturalism to the point where he has turned out a near “sleeper” held down only by its mimicries, all less snappy than the models from “Double Indemnity,” “Greed,” and so on.
“He Ran All the Way” is an old-fashioned gangster film (no message or Freudian overtones; fairly intense and exciting) about an inept hooligan (Garfield) who shacks up, unwanted, with a tenement family. This family, generalized with dull virtues, never tries to find out what makes the gangster tick but just stands around scared to death. The locale, dialects, architecture are a puzzling mish-mash of Bronx, Venice, Cal., and Group Theater. The film takes place entirely in a railroad flat, where, despite the fact that the ceilings seem to have been removed and the doors left off all rooms so as to allow for camera movement, the energy comes entirely from emotionally congested acting which appears to have worked its way down through a hundred plays and movies from “Awake and Sing,” an earlier and better Garfield show.
July 14, 1951
“A STATE of uncertainty, generally accompanied by a feeling of anxiety or fear; indetermination; indecision.” This, according to Webster, is the meaning of suspense—probably the best single theme for movies in an anxious era like this, when we are all sweating out something—from A-bombs, bullets, or furloughs to pregnancies, ironclad marriages, or high prices. But this theme has been misconstrued and bastardized by both Hollywood and its critics. One director in particular has made his living by subjecting the movie audience to a series of cheap, glossy, mechanically perfect shocks, and for this he has been hailed as the High Boojum of Suspense. The name of this artist is, of course, Alfred Hitchcock—who has gone farther on fewer brains than any director since Griffith, while cleverly masking his deficiency, and his underlying petty and pointless sadism, with a honey-smooth patina of “sophistication,” irony, and general glitter.
Having vented this long-pent-up gripe, I hasten to add that Hitchcock’s latest film, “Strangers on a Train,” is fun to watch if you check your intelligence at the box office. It is too bad that this director, who has the observing eyes of a Dos Passos and the facility of a Maupassant, does himself the disservice of intercutting rather good naturalistic scenes with so much old hoke. His forte is the half-minute visual uncertainty—a murderer’s hand straining through a sewer grating for a symbolically decorated cigarette lighter. Hitch not only shows the fingers straining forward with slow, animal cunning but throws a white, metallic light over them, thus turning a dirty black hole into Grauman’s Chinese on opening night. The whole thing is done in a boxed close-up, so that one can’t help feeling the camera man could have cut the nonsense short by handing the Ronson up to the villain. The late-twenties Hitchcock, devoted to the fairly credible style of John Buchan and Belloc Lowndes, would have rejected all such intrusive, romantic, metronome-timed schmalz and no doubt fired the script writer for lifting the gesture and locale from a film—“The Third Man”—made by his former shadow, Carol Reed. However, like so many transplanted foreign aces who consider American audiences more childish, gullible, and slow-witted than those in the Marshall Plan countries, Hitchcock has gone so soft that he makes even the average uninspired native director look comparatively non-commercial. His only really punchy Hollywood job was “Lifeboat.” “Strangers on a Train” ranks somewhere between that effort and mushy gab-fests like “Sabotage,” “Under Capricorn,” “Spellbound,” and—though it had its merits—“Rope.”
Because chases and homicides and Pearl White escapes clutter his pictures, no one notices the general emasculation Hitchcock has perpetrated on the thriller. Brittle, soft-cheeked, petulant pretty boys (Dick, Dall, Todd, Donat, Cummings, Granger) are projected into high melodrama. These characters seem to disappear like clothes dummies within their tweedy, carefully unpressed Brooks Brothers jackets and slacks, thanks to a director who impregnates costume and décor with so much crackling luster, so much tension and latent evil, that the spectator expects a stair corner or tie clasp to start murdering everyone in sight. Hitchcock did a lot of harm to movies by setting off a trend toward investing backgrounds, architecture, and things like cigar bands with deep meaning. Finally, he takes all the bite out of his stories by whipping quickly but delicately down various “artistic” détours. In “Strangers on a Train” he cuts away from a brutally believable strangulation to the concave image cast up by the lens of the victim’s fallen spectacles. At once the onlooker loses interest in the murder as such because he is so entranced with the lush, shadowy choreographic lyricism with which Hitchcock shows the life being squeezed, fraction by fraction, out of a shallow, hateful nymphomaniac.
The movie, by the way, is built around the travestied homosexuality of the murderer. Robert Walker provides the role with a meatier, more introverted, unhealthier savor than the stars usually give a Hollywood production. This is partly the result of Hitchcock’s mechanical and spurious use of the new close-up style of camera work, which is evidently aimed at fetishists who like to study pores. Here he has given Walker an oily, puffy face and made him skitter his tiny eyes back and forth horizontally until it appears that the actor looks at everybody as if he were reading a book. But somewhere in the past two years Walker has picked up an aggressive jump style of acting; so that he seems to bull his way through the action—even when quietly waiting around a carnival for the sun to go down—like a thoughtless, savage two-hundred-pounder about to plunge for a touchdown. The heavy blanket of twisted melancholia which Walker spreads over this film is beautifully counterpointed by the work of Laura Elliott in the role of the victim. She seems to swish up into the picture like a sexy bespectacled baby whale. All the best things in “Strangers” have to do with the playing of these two.
July 28, 1951
USING the Time cover-story technique of puffing and petrifying an unlikable individual, “Bright Victory” shows a gabby, over-eager, self-satisfied young Floridian winning his soul—and a pretty workin’ girl, a better job, a home in the North—by losing his eyesight in the North African campaign, then his passion for the security represented by a semi-pretty lifelong sweetheart, and finally—ten seconds before the movie ends—his addiction to the epithet “nigger.” (Negro here, as in “Home of the Brave,” “Steel Helmet,” and who knows how many films to come, means willowy, highstrung James Edwards.) Racing out one lunch hour to string some wire in the busiest patch of terrain east of Bizerte, the eager-beaver infantryman (Arthur Kennedy) gets clipped alongside his right eyeball by a sniper’s bullet. From there on Kennedy contributes a solid, feverish, consistent characterization full of incredibly shrewd perceptions about both Southerners and the sightless.
Aside from his performance, this mixture of “The Best Years of Our Lives” and “The Men” is so unimaginatively perfect and so well-barbered by its cutters that it is a little like being caught on a fast assembly line. And wherever it takes a chance on real pathos or ugliness, it goes far enough overboard to be deeply offensive: by suggesting, for instance, that those with eyes are so stupid as to hand a blinded vet six lit matches as soon as he pulls out a cigarette.
Good citizenship and good box-office sense are for the umpteenth time cheesily mortised together in “The Well,” as are the two hottest themes in cinema today—the Negro problem and the problem of trying to get somebody (and the movie itself) up out of a hole or down from a ledge. This one begins with a spanking-cute Negro tot, her bright, happy eyes glued firmly on the director, zigzagging across a very handsome meadow as if on trolley wires and suddenly plunking down an unseen well—thus probably disappearing from films until the early 1980’s, when she will emerge in “Under the Knife,” the hard-hitting pro-Puerto Rican epic, as the enlightened nurse who finally persuades the chief surgeon of Harlem Hospital (James Edwards) to seat the chief surgeon of Harlem Hospital (James Edwards) to seat the young Puerto Rican interne (José Ferrer, Jr.) at the same table with his duskier colleagues.
The first three-fifths of “The Well” is a discordant symphony of overstated angry banalities: a race riot padded with extra-awful extras who accidentally snatch up clubs all cut to one size by the factory that makes Louisville Sluggers; a thundering Tiomkin piano cascading bass notes into critical moments in case you should miss them; a progressive waitress peppering the salad of a bigot; some elegant but unidentified Negro students sitting around in the high-school library self-consciously chirping civics-course stuff on the ramifications of race prejudice. The last two reels, however—drilling for the imprisoned little bit player—are an extraordinary education in the use of a rotary drill and a night-time camera. Here, in a shimmering, oscillating phantasmagoria of lights, faces, and machinery, all the white supremacists—who have, to a man, abandoned the error of their ways—turn up in key technological roles to dredge the missing waif up out of the ground.
“Take Care of My Little Girl,” clobbering the sorority system with a ton of bobby pins, abuses old Tri U so surrealistically that any freshman with verve would join U3 at the drop of an arch. The inmates, watch-pocket replicas of Phil Spitalny’ s second cellist, dash for the porch to sing a different song every six minutes, drink Kleenex-wrapped cokes all day long, never see a classroom, are always in secret session hashing out the proposed blackball of poor Lynn Heppenstahl. After a semester of this, sister Jeanne Crain hands in a variety of pledge pins and walks off toward the dormitories on the arm of an earnest, leather-jacketed veteran who has wised her up as follows: “I don’t think you’re a heel—but I don’t think you’re Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Another film with a slightly more credible collegiate setting is now sliding imperceptibly through the neighborhood circuits. Not credible, but more credible. This is “Night into Morning,” a very old-fashioned Louis B. Mayer–type movie, without kikes, Negroes, fascists, proletarians, or psychopaths. It is even gently anti-psychiatric, while often poking rather realistically into unimportant corners of California University’s Wheeler Hall and the miseries of a suddenly widowed professor of English (Ray Milland, somewhat miscast). It’s just well-handled soap opera, but compared to “Victory,” “Well,” “Girl,” and dozens of even more pretentious recent films like “The River,” “Ace in the Hole,” “A Walk in the Sun,” it goes down like Flaubert or Fielding.
August 11, 1951
THE grimmest phenomenon since Dagmar has been the fabulous nation-wide success of Jerry Lewis’s sub-adolescent, masochistic mugging. Lewis has parlayed his apish physiognomy, rickety body, frenzied lack of coordination, paralyzing brashness, and limitless capacity for self-degradation into a gold mine for himself and the mannered crooner named Dean Martin who, draped artistically from a mike, serves as his ultra-suave straight man. When Jerry fakes swallowing a distasteful pill, twiddles “timid” fingers, whines, or walks “like Frankenstein,” his sullen narcissistic insistence suggests that he would sandbag anyone who tried to keep him from the limelight. Lewis is a type I hoped to have left behind when I short-sheeted my last cot at Camp Kennekreplach. But today’s bobby-soxers are rendered apoplectic by such Yahoo antics, a fact that can only be depressing for anyone reared on comedians like Valentino, Norma Shearer, Lewis Stone, Gregory Peck, Greer Garson, Elizabeth Taylor, or Vincent Impellitteri.
“That’s My Boy” has to do with the transformation of an inept sissified bookworm (Lewis) into a halfback as sterling as glamour-boy Martin, a man who nonchalantly slaps off tacklers the way most of us shoo away mosquitoes. (For his part, Martin has modeled himself so carefully on Crosby and Como that he seems to jiggle like a mannered skeleton inside his heavily padded suits.) The film is almost saved by Eddie Mayehoff, a lantern-jawed bruiser with practically no mouth and a funny way of overemphasizing his role of an ancient Bronko Nagurski; I figure him for a terrible-tempered tuskless mastodon who never actually went to college but knows enough to despise this puerile TV-style pigskin parody. If I am right, he supports my opinion that the American public is now ready to laugh at lepers and gas-chambers.
Almost every Italian film trickling into the “art” theaters these days has been awarded a prize by a foreign film festival. They also have in common a flux of odd-angled shots of thighs and heaving bosoms; a quantity of daring propaganda against such ogres as warmongers, pimps, non-leftist priests, prison wardens, Lesbians, and petty government officials; and an all-around frenzied unkemptness in cutting, lighting, make-up, and underlying purpose. Such a movie is “Women Without Names,” a detention-camp melodrama which won the Selznick award in Venice and will probably play here to an almost solidly male audience—aesthetic to the core—drawn in by such ads as “women trapped by intrigue . . . and the heartless passion of ruthless men!” Not to mention stills like the one of Simone Simon languishing in bra and shorts on a mattress of hay in order to tease the fat pervert who sits nearby, ogling her in a torment of frustration. With sharp Italian sense of irony and realism, the director has stuck a donkey into one corner of the frame and scoured the brassière industry for a spectacular zebra-striped number—just what you’d expect a prisoner to wear on off-hours in the camp stable. The story behind this sly scene is that a gold-hearted hoyden is trying to seduce a fruity ice-cream vendor into marriage so that she can promote herself and her pal, Valentina Cortese, out of this corral for women without passports. The plan fails; the pal dies in childbirth while the camera, by way of no change, dollies down a line of sulky, dowdy onlookers. In Cortese, my favorite actress of the moment, the film has at least one undebatable asset: no tricks, quiet grace, and a sensitive beauty which must have seen and lived wisely and well.
Just in case you’ve run out of sodium amytal for the week-end, here are a few substitutes with which I’ve just caught up. They’ve been floating around for some time. “Fabiola”: Christian tribulations in the time of Constantine. A two-hour chaos of disconnected sequences snipped more or less at random from a much longer French production. English dubbed in; livestock by Barnum; male and female costumes by Claire McCardell; lighting by Mr. Moon. “Tony Draws a Horse”: Cecil Parker and all the gang in a sophisticated British psycho-comedy. Very intelligent movie in which the heroine swaths her head in a bandana, pulls her dress over her head, and then takes the bandana off. Perhaps, this is the English way of distracting your attention from obvious cheesecake. “The Secret of Convict Lake”: Battle between the sexes, somewhere north of Carson City in 1871. Five escaped convicts drop in on eight temporarily unattached lady pioneers of the sort you might meet in Lord and Taylor’s any day now: Gene Tierney, Ethel Barrymore, Richard Hylton. A grotesquely overcivilized Western larded with small talk about decency and indecency, peace of mind, kindness.
“Force of Arms,” the only likable film I saw last week, deserves a longer review than I can give it here.
September 1, 1951
THE design of “Force of Arms” is rather simple-minded. This World War II tear-jerker starts off with Bill Holden fighting in the trenches behind some lush mountains, and then, with hardly more than a transitional line of dialogue, comes to a loquacious love scene between Sergeant Holden and WAC Lieutenant Nancy Olson, the girl he bumps into one midnight during a jaunt through a military cemetery. Thereafter, this structure repeats and repeats—a bit of war, a bit of love—to form the checkerboard cast up by script-writer Orin Jannings, whose cinematic naiveté is matched only by his idealism. In his version of the Italian campaign, there is a jeep waiting within elbow-reach of any infantryman worth his fighting weight; and beatific romance, Errol Flynn heroics, and brotherly affection geyser up like Old Faithful.
The sergeant-hero is a sensitive, moody, kindly one-man army who does the thinking for his platoon, writes letters to the parents of deceased buddies, plays poppa to the drunks, throws strikes with hand grenades, and looks frequently off into the cloudcast mountains while murmuring that it’s going to be tough tonight for some poor doggies somewhere. (There are some very frightening battlefront clips from Huston’s San Pietro, sandwiched in with pictures that always seem to be slanted to give a glamorous impression of combat. When a soldier is hit, he always goes into a graceful half gainer; slotted carefully into every composition is a glistening olive tree freshly dipped in black syrup for poetic imagery.) Holden’s sweetheart is even more noble, highminded, wholesome, and intellectual, although she does seem singularly addicted to battlefront romances. When the sergeant first meets her, in the potter’s field of a Flanders Field designed by some Grant Wood disciple, she is laying a wreath on the grave of her last boy-friend. She rejects Holden’s first rather interestingly truculent advances in a manner becoming to an officer and gentlewoman—an obstacle the film expediently and disappointingly hurdles in the very next sequence by having Holden hustled off to see General Mark Clark and receive a battlefield promotion to second looie. (Nice shot of Clark; ingenious montage trick by the special-effects people.) All succeeding problems are handled in the same nimble fashion, which means you can stop worrying about the plot and concentrate on the items of greater interest: the flashy, schmaltzy vigor injected by Director Michael Curtiz, who showed in “Casablanca” that he knew a movie had to move and that its players should bounce against each other democratically; the Cézanne-like sculptural realism of cameraman Ted McCord, an artist whose atmospherically accurate work I am forced to admire in spite of my distaste for the self-conscious; and especially the gifted acting of the team of Holden and Olson.
This ladies’ magazine facsimile of “Farewell to Arms” is really a startling, intimate show-window displaying the talents of two unheralded young dramatic dynamos: the girl with more subtleties than Hollywood has seen in several decades and the guy with more controlled and potent American grace than it may have ever seen before. Miss Olson fills the slightest requirement for a change of mood with a compacted intensity of technical razzle-dazzle and the astuteness of an actress who is about 150 points smarter on the Binet scale than the 4-H character she is portraying. One begins to realize presently that she is editing the role as she goes along—and the idea also begins to dawn on you that this flat-eyed starlet is a diamond-hard sophisticate, full of hidden crossness, the icy ambition of a Hepburn, and the determination to play a traditionally pure and lofty role in such a way as to reveal the sterility, stubbornness, and rigidity of the middle-class American heroine. Her most powerful weapon here is her voice—a flexible carillon that pierces into a scene like a knife and cuts it into a frame for her words. Like that vocal magician, Mercedes McCambridge—who came up the hard way, through radio—Olson can wind her voice into an ambiguous composition of ferocious, haunting, demanding elements that captures the ear and refuses to relinquish it until the moment has been milked dry. Holden does the same thing in a different manner—disclosing the self-righteous stupidity of the awkward, charming Jimmy Stewart type of hero, but doing it less intricately, less pretentiously than his co-star. He’s at his best when laying it on thickest, as when he asks a sentry the way to town, takes in the answer, and then spins off in the opposite direction. Or when he pouts viciously because his light o’ love has caught him with his defenses down.
There are other ingratiating or interesting things: a good, driving trio playing “Ain’t She Sweet?” in the Mamma Mia dive; a pragmatic WAC major, so obviously intended as the one ugly note in an otherwise optimistic film that she stands out like a Turpin fan on Lenox Avenue; the two usual Bronx-Brooklyn comic riflemen who this time put across a certain smutty aroma of both homosexuality and the real thing; and a furloughed officer (Frank Lovejoy) who, having picked up a girl without much front, darts a hopeful backward glance at her behind. But there’s also a tidal wave of tedious bright talk, including all sorts of visually unproved references to the beggared peasantry, Hershey-bar prostitution, and the glories of Italian architecture. “Can you hear my heart beat?” Olson asks during one typically gabby embrace, and Holden, who is forever answering such difficult questions, replies: “I thought it was mine.”
September 15, 1951
THOUGH “People Will Talk” is basically only a Dr. Kildare story about “good” medicine and “bad,” it has been precociously adult-erated into the toniest film of the year. It tells the tale of a miraculous gynecologist (Cary Grant) who embodies all the fortunate attributes of the well-analyzed, well-to-do, liberal know-it-all, and may very likely speak symbolically in defense of well-analyzed Hollywood millionaire-liberals like Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed the movie for Darryl F. Zanuck. We meet this Hippodemocratic whiz-bang at a stormy moment in his career, when he is being attacked by a jealous pip-squeak professor of anatomy (Hume Cronyn) who, driven by resentment, accuses the great Dr. Praetorious of resorting to unorthodox methods of therapy—methods which are never clearly defined to any greater extent than that they include a chummy, considerate attitude toward patients. Working on the broad-minded doctor from another quarter at this particular instant is the pregnant but unmarried Miss Higgins (Jeanne Crain), a fainting, crying, fearful, charming drifter. After missing herself at zero range with a pearl-handled one-shooter, she seduces Dr. P. into an elegant marriage.
The spectator learns a lot of highfalutin nothings about these troubled characters, and even less about the practice of medicine, eccentric or otherwise, since never more than for the briefest moment does the camera quit the lips of the protagonists in order to examine the real business of doctoring. There are, however, a good many daring cracks about such things as illegitimacy, impotence, infantile toilet habits; as a result, the naive and impressionable may be led to believe that this daredevil, Mankiewicz, is raking the medical profession—and certain other American institutions—over the coals. Well, I have no doubt that such was the intention, for “People,” like so many other films in the past six years, contains that disguised, free-wheeling leftist attack on American manners and morals that Senators are always looking for but wouldn’t recognize if it bit them.
The good doctor is presented by Mankiewicz as a new faith healer surrounded by all those small-minded, cantankerous, inefficient little cogs who make our boring capitalist system run. An eminently successful man who does nothing according to Hoyle, he moves pompously and talkatively through the world, finding something wrong with everything and everyone and showing us, with tired but unflagging urbanity, the way of the truth and the light. He scolds a heartless nurse (“Don’t ever let me hear you say that about a patient again!”), looks down his nose at over-conscientious note-takers in anatomy class, makes epigrams about our obsession for packaged foods, twitches all over when he visits a prosperous farmer who has a fondness for television and chicken every Sunday. (Mankiewicz has outdone Wilder and Stevens at creating nasty caricatures of minor “representative Americans.”) Meanwhile, he takes in Miss Higgins, her misfit poet father (Sidney Blackmer), and a slow-witted giant of a murderer (Finlay Currie), who in gratitude becomes the hero’s constant companion and valet. These adoptees, unequal to the demands of our vicious competitive society, find a cosy paradise with Praetorious, his Brahms records, and his Lionel electric trains—so help me. Out of this holocaust of black-white contrasts, overstatements, and simple blind misstatements comes the message—stylistically bootlegged from Wilde, Shaw, F.D.R., anybody—that until we begin living in some mysteriously friendly, understanding, noble relationship with one another, we’re pretty far up the creek.
A movie made with considerable more insight and cinematic know-how about its subject matter—though no less biased—is “Saturday’s Hero”; putting the blast on college football with all the subtlety and flexibility of Fordham’s Seven Blocks of Granite, it sees greedy sadists everywhere except among the gentle, brotherly workers in coal mines and dyeworks. The Millard Lampell story shows a scrapping scatback (John Derek) from the New Jersey proletariat being pursued, landed, and then manhandled by an obsessive coach, a big-wheel alumnus (Blackmer again), and one particular All-American end whose apology to the injured Derek goes like this: “I’m sorry, Novak, I really needed the dough, the $150 they offered me if I could put you out of the game.” Lampell has constructed his script in brief, active scenes which jolt past the eye like telephone poles seen from a Pullman window. For instance, about five minutes of his script parlays the following shots: Derek’s “I love you” to Donna Reed over milk shakes, picture of speeding train, newspaper shot of alumni banquet in Norfolk, spread on Novak in national magazine, speeding train, letter from home (“Poppa not feeling so hot”), close-up of forever troubled Novak, speeding train, distant view of football practice in Jackson Stadium. The more extended scenes are also pretty unimportant. They spit out shots of Donna Reed, a hollow actress with jittery, camera-shy eyes, and of Derek faking most of his acting by a facial expression fraught with intensity because the script-writer apparently forgot to write any dialogue for him.
But this gridiron exposé is probably the toughest sports film since “The Set-up.” Someone in the crew was hep to certain football types: the rangy, shy, and almost moronically incurious end; the lanky frosh coach, full of pepper, who is himself a perennial freshman; and the ex-paratrooper fullback who has about ten years in toughness and worldliness on his mates. Having done a good job of casting the team around Novak, the director quietly keeps you aware of each player in the scrimmaging without establishing a special little scene of comedy or glory to make him memorable. The football action approximates the appalling speed and business-machine efficiency of the modern game, while an electrically precise camera man (Lee Garmes) manages to make Derek into a fairly credible pigskin ace. Garmes button-hooks his camera at a swift speed from the forward-passing Derek to a point just behind the receiver, an often-repeated tactic that immeasurably speeds up the play and allows some unlisted Otto Graham to throw the bullet pass for Derek. The movie is spotted with things as nostalgically barren in design as the freshman rooms and as nearly right in poignance as the distant view of a blanketed halfback hobbling forlornly down the sidelines to the dressing room. But all in all the film thrusts so much message and quick fame at its audience that you can almost hear the high-school spectators drooling about all those dollars that are within tackling distance of their ham-sized hands.
September 29, 1951
EVERYTHING that kept the Broadway “Streetcar” from spinning off into ridiculous melodrama—everything thoughtful, muted, three-dimensional—has been raped, along with poor Blanche Dubois, in the Hollywood version, so that the drama takes place completely in the foreground—all clamor, climax, and Kazan. The movie opens characteristically with cabs zooming in an arc toward the camera and then cutting sharply into the New Orleans depot. With “impact” thus established, Warner Brothers takes us into the station for an artistic tip-off on what’s to follow: a herd of crinolined bridesmaids jounce gaily off the Seaboard Limited while away to the side the shabby-genteel figure of Blanche (Vivien Leigh) emerges through a cloud of engine steam. A chirpy sailor interrupts his whistling long enough to give Miss Dubois directions to her sister’s house. A streetcar named DESIRE, in white block letters a mile high, lunges in another vicious arc before our eyes, and there we are in Stanley Kowalski’s serene, sexful, squalid little flat in the French Quarter. From here on, the story proceeds as Tennessee Williams first wrote it, except that all the frankest—and most crucial—dialogue has been excised and the last scene has been churned disastrously to satisfy the Johnson office but confound the spectator. These changes bothered me less than the fact that screen writer Williams thought he could turn his play into a movie by merely running the cast “outdoors” to a bowling alley or waterfront cafe whenever the dramatic structure of the original work permitted such a maneuver.
However, if the author surrendered without firing a shot, the actors and directors certainly did not. Marlon Brando, who on the stage gave a revolutionary head-on portrait of the rough-and-ready, second-generation American Joe, has upped the voltage of every eccentricity by several thousand watts. The performance is now more cinematic and flexible, but the addition of a lush physicality and a show-off’s flamboyance to the character of Stanley makes him seem like a muscular version of a petulant, crazily egotistical homosexual. Brando, having fallen hard for the critics’ idea that Stanley is simply animal and slob, now screams and postures and sweeps plates off the table with an ape-like emphasis that unfortunately becomes predictable.
As the ex-school-teacher-harlot-belle in this study of social-sexual disintegration, Miss Leigh injects a bitter-sweet fragrance and acrobatic excitement into the role, but the effects are freakish, too ambitious and endless. All this inchoate electricity helps sustain Kazan’s record of directing nothing that is boring or insipid. The morning bed scene with wholesome Mrs. Kowalski (Kim Hunter) shows her as smug and contented as movie wives usually are in that situation. But Kazan gives the audience a rough shove with his candid view of the lady’s legs widely spread under a disheveled sheet that never saw the inside of a laundry. Still, by activating all the characters to a pitch where they seem one comic-opera step away from lunacy Kazan has obliterated Williams’s more delicate gradual revelation of the fact that Blanche is a rotten old Dixie apple fated for squashing by that raw, instinctual, 100 per cent industrial American, Stanley Kowalski.
Among the less arty but more enjoyable movies I have seen are “The People Against O’Hara,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and “The Red Badge of Courage.”
October 20, 1951
THOUGH “The Red Badge of Courage” is a thin study, overdirected and underwritten, about the havoc war plays in the souls of common citizens, it is also the most sharply focused view of soldiering yet presented by Hollywood, and, in the pure sense, one of the most uncompromisingly artistic films ever made in this country. (In my opinion, this is not especially to its credit.) Writer-director John Huston tells his story of the great death as it appears to an average American farm boy, suddenly plucked out of his peaceful Ohio adolescence and thrown into the terrible annealing-vat of battle against the Johnny Rebs. This soldier-hero (Audie Murphy), who is worried sick over the prospect of not being as brave as he wants to be, is tossed up and down like a cork during his first skirmish near the Rappahannock, the main part of which is actually fought and won far from the picture-postcard grazing-land where the boy evolves through much pain and humiliation into a ferocious, inspiring, foolhardy warrior. Murphy’s infantryman is a more worrisome, innocent version of the deft, resilient handyman-hero of all the earlier Huston films. Like his forerunners (Spade, Dobbs, “Dix”), the young soldier is an emotionally snarled man of action, the bitter, confident pessimist, who was first revealed in “The Maltese Falcon” and has since virtually splashed the chaotic diary of his inner life all over the American screen. Murphy, the genuine article as men of action go—he won a carload of medals in the war—is hardly the type to project so much hot, florid perplexity and despair at what the world is doing to him. Neither is his cinematic comrade in arms, Bill Mauldin. Both of these baby-faced veterans are obviously suited to getting things done in life without fuss or feathers, and their agitated quiverings in “Red Badge” make you feel that here, more than in any previous Huston film, the actors have been harried and pushed into great, baroque, disproportionate demonstrations of feeling.
But if Huston torments his actors as one might torment a fly with a pin, he still knows the ways of self-conscious, thoughtful, hard-rock individualists better than anyone else in movies; and this shows through in his casting, which is invariably precise and subtle: discounting the emotional ejaculation they have to go through, Murphy and Mauldin are right out of Stephen Crane’s cold furious brain; the boyishly shy, pristine, elegant Douglas Dick is even more accurate as an earnest, romantic, somewhat effeminate lieutenant; the quiet, huge-boned John Dierkes—a man you will be seeing more of—exactly portrays the tall farmer-soldier whose death is as awesome as that of a falling oak tree; while for bit players, Huston has somehow derricked from central casting a whole regiment of men who might well be the uncouth, unaware recruits from the Ohio villages of 1862. A past master at working a performer away from any pet manner of acting, Huston has done such things in this film as make Dick abandon the deadening, inflexible seriousness with which he always in the past tried to counteract his all too apparent effeminacy; here Dick is merely a tender, perplexed, surprised boy to whom things happen in unexpected violent ways. And then, surrounded by his men in the smoking battle area, he shows the toughening effects of combat in one split-second look of unbelieving astonishment, the same look seen on the faces of halfbacks or steelworkers who have come through what seemed like a hopeless, endless orgy of hard work.
In spite of virtues like this, “Red Badge” is one of the least warlike films ever made. The chief trouble seems to be that it was put together by a director and a photographer (Hal Rosson) less impelled and excited by Crane’s story of war than by the untouched natural setting they found to shoot it in—a low, flowing, pastoral plot of ground that inspired them to make one of those stylish, Renoir-ish studies, all delicacy, poetry, beauty, trees, bark, sunlight, euphoria. The terrain, in fact, is the true hero of this production, which is proved in a number of Steinbeckian scenes, including the falling-oak business and a wonderful sequence in which a dying Confederate flag-bearer squirms up a little hillock like a broken-down ant. Every composition seems cast in the character of the land, which in real life forms part of Huston’s ranch; the result is to make the soldiers, their drums, flags, muskets into little more than handsome adjuncts of nature. There is something wrong with any picture that must rely for climax on straight-up views of sun-drenched foliage; and in this particular case, the fancy camera work seems far out of line with the essential drama of small-time figures caught on the darkening plain of battle.
November 10, 1951