LET Stevens or Kazan win their Oscars; The Nation’s Emanuel—a life-size drip-celluloid statue of Kirk Douglas, ranting and disintegrating in the vengeful throes of death—goes to the man or men responsible for each of the following unheralded productions of 1951.
Little Big Horn. A low-budget western, directed by Charles Marquis Warren, starring John Ireland and Lloyd Bridges. This tough-minded, unconventional, persuasive look-in on a Seventh Cavalry patrol riding inexorably through hostile territory to warn Custer about the trap Sitting Bull had set for him, was almost as good in its unpolished handling of the regular-army soldier as James Jones’s big novel. For once, the men appear as individuals, rather than types—grousing, ornery, uprooted, complicated individuals, riding off to glory against their will and better judgment; working together as a team (for all their individualism) in a genuinely loose, efficient, unfriendly American style. The only naturalistic photography of the year; perhaps the best acting of the year in Ireland’s graceful, somber portrait of a warm-hearted but completely disillusioned lieutenant, who may or may not have philandered with his captain’s wife.
Fixed Bayonets. Sam Fuller’s jagged, suspenseful, off-beat variant of the Mauldin cartoon, expanded into a full-length Korean battle movie without benefit of the usual newsreel clips. Funny, morbid—the best war film since Bataan. I wouldn’t mind seeing it seven times.
His Kind of Woman. Good coarse romantic-adventure nonsense, exploiting the expressive dead-pans of Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, a young man and a young woman who would probably enjoy doing in real life what they have to do here for RKO. Vincent Price is superb in his one right role—that of a ham actor thrown suddenly into a situation calling for high melodramatic courage. Russell’s petulant, toneless rendition of “Five Little Miles from San Berdoo” is high art of a sort.
The Thing. Howard Hawks’s science-fiction quickie directed by Christian Nyby; fast, crisp, and cheap, without any progressive-minded gospel-reading about neighborliness in the atomic age; good airplane take-offs and landings; wonderful shock effects (the plants that cry for human blood as human babies cry for milk); Kenneth Tobey’s fine, unpolished performance as a nice, clean, lecherous American air-force officer; well-cast story, as raw and ferocious as Hawks’s Scarface, about a battle of wits near the North Pole between a screaming banshee of a vegetable and an air-force crew that jabbers away as sharply and sporadically as Jimmy Cagney moves.
The Prowler. A tabloid melodrama of sex and avarice in suburbia, out of Cain by Joe Losey, featuring almost perfect acting by Evelyn Keyes as a hot, dumb, average American babe who, finding the attentions of her disc-jockey husband beginning to pall, takes up with an amoral rookie cop (nicely hammed up by Van Heflin). Sociologically sharp on stray and hitherto untouched items like motels, athletic nostalgia, the impact of nouveau riche furnishings on an ambitious ne’er-do-well, the potentially explosive boredom of the childless, uneducated, well-to-do housewife with too much time on her hands.
The People Against O’Hara. An adroit, scholarly example of sound story-telling that every Message Boy should be made to study as an example of how good you can get when you neither slant nor oversimplify. Also highly enjoyable for its concern about a “static” subject—the legal profession as such—and the complete authority with which it handles soft-pedaled insights into things like the structure and routine of law offices; the politics of conviviality between cops, DA’s, judges, attorneys; the influence of bar associations; the solemn manner of memorializing the wrench caused by the death of a colleague; the painful “homework” of committing to memory the endless ramifications of your case, as well as the words you are going to feed the jury in the morning.
The Day the Earth Stood Still. Science-fiction again, this time with ideals; a buoyant, imaginative filtering around in Washington, D.C., upon the arrival of a high-minded interplanetary federalist from Mars, or somewhere; matter-of-fact statements about white-collar shabby gentility in boarding houses, offices, and the like; imaginative interpretation of a rocket ship and its robot crew; good fun, for a minute, when the visitor turns off all the electricity in the world; Pat Neal good, as usual, as a young mother who believes in progressive education.
The Man Who Cheated Himself. A lightweight, O’Henry-type story about a cop who hoists himself on his own petard; heavyweight acting by Jane Wyatt and Lee J. Cobb; as a consequence, the only film this year to take a moderate, morally fair stand on moderately suave and immoral Americans, aged about forty. An effortlessly paced story, impressionistically coated with San Francisco’s oatmeal-gray atmosphere; at the end, it wanders into an abandoned fort or prison and shows Hitchcock and Carol Reed how to sidestep hokum in a corny architectural monstrosity. Cobb packs more psychological truths about joyless American promiscuity into one ironic stare, one drag on a cigarette, or one uninterested kiss than all the Mankiewicz heroes put together.
Appointment with Danger. Tough, perceptive commercial job glorifying the P-men (Post-Office sleuths), set in an authentically desolate wasteland around Gary, Indiana, crawling with pessimistic mail-robbers who act as though they’d seen too many movies like Asphalt Jungle. Tight plotting, good casting, and sinuously droopy acting by Jan Sterling, as an easily had broad who only really gets excited about—and understands—waxed bop. Interesting for Morgan-Webb bit playing, such sidelights as the semi-demi-hemiquaver of romantic attachment between the head P-man and a beautiful nun.
And, for want of further space, six-inch Emanuels to the following also rans: The Tall Target, Against the Gun, No Highway in the Sky, Happiest Days of Your Life, Rawhide, Skelton’s Excuse My Dust, The Enforcer, Force of Arms, The Wooden Horse, Night Into Morning, Payment on Demand, Cry Danger, and a Chuck Jones animated cartoon—the name escapes me—about a crass, earnest, herky-jerky dog that knocks its brains out trying to win a job in a Pisa pizza joint.
January 5, 1952
“Miracle in Milan.” A sententious documentary fable about loving that neighbor, set in a hobo jungle beside the Milan railroad tracks; a grubby, inventive “My Man Godfrey” that came to America late in the year but walked away with most of the best-foreign-film awards and will doubtless delight every filmgoer who seriously believes he loves his fellow-men. It is a De Sica treatment of a Zavattini novel, featuring Francesco Golisano—a grinning, bull-like mixture of Burt Lancaster and Mussolini—as a naive orphan who turns his shanty town into a haven of fine emotions, simple pleasures, and modest comforts. Highly unenjoyable for its moronically oversimplified pantomime and symbolism, its fragmented and ragged structure, its exhaustive sentimentality: to wit, the forlorn thread of a dirt road (loneliness); marble-walled interiors (the idle rich); fried eggs (what the poor dream about); the falsetto operatic voice (art is pompous and pansy-like); high hats and mink coats; little capitalists being chased down the street by angry mobs; buttocks-rich shots of pseudo-Grecian statues; bums kissing bums; people counting (charmingly) on their fingers; white flags of surrender; sunsets; parades; angels. Though it has been called “the freshest movie in years”—by those who very likely applied the same phrase twenty years ago to the René Clair films which served as prototype (in the matter of high hats being blown across a lot, for instance)—“Milan” really burglarizes the repertoire of those suave, altruistic C-men (Cartier-Bresson, Chaplin, Clair, Capra) who treat the spectator as a child to be guided, taught, and disciplined.
“Rashomon.” A torpid, stylish Japanese study in human frailty, like nothing so much as a tiny aquarium in which a few fish and a lot of plants have delicately been tinkered with by someone raised in Western art-cinema theaters and art galleries. Five characters, two unfrequented real-life sets—a ruined temple and a forest—and a script which is probably the first to describe a highly contrived sword-fight-and-seduction through the biased eyes of four different people. The villain is a conceited, slothful, bug-ridden bandit (Toshiro Mifune)—a type now familiar in Hollywood adventure-comedies about Mexico—who has a hard time pulling himself away from a good nap to ravish the wife of a traveling samurai. Makes its play for posterity with such carefully engineered actions as one in which the dozing barbarian scratches his crotch while the sword across his knees somehow rises (Maya Deren-fashion) as though it had just had a big meal of sex hormones. “Rashomon” is supposed to get down to the bedrock of such emotions as lust, fear, and selfishness, but actually it is a smooth and somewhat empty film whose most tiresome aspect is the slow, complacent, Louvre-conscious, waiting-for-prizes attitude of everyone who worked on it.
“I Want You.” The Goldwyn stock company (Granger, Andrews, McGuire, Keith, etc.) drafted away from their side of the railroad tracks—the other side from De Sica’s—for the duration of the cold war. Written by New Yorker writers Irwin Shaw and John Cheever. Much too talkative and taken up with the sad departures of drafted men; nothing more momentous in it than Mildred Dunnock sweeping all her pseudo-hero husband’s war mementoes off the wall. Yet good—as all Goldwyn’s soap-operas are—for its sad, cautious desire to get at the haggard side of Americans by being exactly right about the stained wall-paper around picture frames, the sexless bathrobe of Mrs. Suburbia, the sullen pooped-out expression on her face, the chenille His-Her towels in the bathroom, and the fact that most of the conversation consists of tired nothings: “What’ll it be? . . . I want to say hello to George Kress. . . . Why, I’m making you rich; what’re you complaining of? . . . Oh, wait a minute. . . . Why doesn’t Landrum mind his own business? . . . How are things in Washington? Scary.” Not even Goldwyn can keep Farley Granger from his obsequious, frightened, liver-lipped manipulation of a smile or a drag on a cigarette, but the others almost break your heart with their pinched-faced “bravery,” their frozen pantomime, their ability to talk without opening their mouths.
“Behave Yourself.” A tasteless, paceless, surprisingly good farce, spoofing the “Thin Man” idea of having cops, robbers, a dog, a mother-in-law, keep a young married couple (Granger again, with Shelley Winters) from going to bed together. Crammed with ultra-modern buildings, furniture, statues; shot mostly through leaves and incidental bric-a-brac. Cameraman James Wong Howe, usually an earnest documentarist, shoots a crucial murder here as if he’d been bribed by Florence Knoll. The humor is either strictly from Minsky or tied up with the décor, or both (as when the dog finds himself in a jungle of plastic mannikin legs). Best funny moment of many months is provided by the scene in which a silly egg-skulled cockney gangster (with a bullet wound in his forehead that may have been painted by Piero della Francesca) slides down like a well-oiled banana into a colossal bubble-bath.
“The Racket.” This movie had everything—Mitchum, Ryan, and today’s most-talked-of subject matter. But it came out a junky, impossible bore.
“Another Man’s Poison.” The elevation to co-stardom (with wife Bette Davis) of the over-energetic Gary Merrill in a psychotic melodrama that left me limp, incredulous, and baffled.
“Westward the Women.” Two hundred women and Robert Taylor. This is a Western?
January 19, 1952
“My Son John,” the story of a traitor out of Anytown, U.S.A., goes across the screen dodging its point with all the deftness of a suspense yarn. The point was to show you the heart of a home-grown Communist as well as his day-to-day scurryings in the red network, but all you get is generalized bombast in his folks’ idealized democratic household and familiar tear-jerking situations. Plotwise, a bright shy boy goes into government work and, reversing “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” becomes a top Soviet spy. Back home for a rare visit, he mentions a speech he is to make to the graduating class of his old Alma Mater, and the content of that speech gets him into a dozen angry arguments on communism with his folks, who are charter members of the church and the Legion, and inspire each other with lingo from the gridiron (“Take the ball, John!”). An amiable FBI agent keeps poking around the neighborhood, and pretty soon the mother discovers the truth about her favorite son, leading to tear-duct scenes as she teeters on the edge of insanity and soul-stirring shots of the son’s face as he begins to see the democratic light (in one silent stretch, shadows play over the face, changing it back and forth from Judas Iscariot’s to Abe Lincoln’s). The rest is mechanical fireworks: the flight from his co-spies, his bullet-ridden car spinning up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and the tape-recorded recantation of the dead ex-Communist played back to the empty faces of the sweet, innocent graduates.
With Helen Hayes, the late Robert Walker, and director Leo McCarey—the latter a social philosopher who makes platitudes boom like the truth—heavily involved in “My Son John,” no one is going to fall asleep for want of effervescent dramatics. McCarey tries to stop United States youth from falling for the party line with the same formula he used in the past to get the kids off the street and into church—that is, tears, faith, and solid red-blooded Americanism. It is done with such earnestness as to be slow-moving, but the actors are masters of intricate timing and intonation and have the easy spontaneity and control to put across a story that is mostly talk in parlor, bedroom, and bath. Walker, with his unhealthy face and blunt sincerity, plays the traitor in a way that makes you marvel at how much this craggy, solemn-toned actor learned about his business and the people outside it in the last few years of his life. He was, I think, the first great actor to turn up in decades of films, one who reminds me only of silent geniuses like Conrad Veidt, Keaton, or an awkward, sour, dissipated version of Barthelmess. Helen Hayes plays the manic mother with all the eccentric wallop of Eleonora Duse doing a Krafft-Ebing rewrite of “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.” With Frank McHugh making you feel happy that he is back in films and McCarey working powerfully in the new style of close-ups, disembodied faces, and immobilized groupings, the movie is worth seeing, if only to dig Hollywood’s latest political orientation.
Two Works of Art that reek with social therapy and old-fashioned technique—everything from grainy photography to sentimental curlicues—are in the neighborhood, occupying the bottom half of double bills. The quaint adolescent study called “The Big Night” is so slow, murkily lit, and incoherently involved with the meek pantomime of John Barrymore, Jr., that it might make more sense if the reels were run backward. However, “On Dangerous Ground” almost achieves a success in spite of itself. In the first place, it has to worry over the old chestnut about reform of the incorrigible by sweetness and trust—personified this time by a blind, tottering Ida Lupino who inspires cop Robert Ryan to mend his brutal ways. In the second place, it is tied to the idea that anything that moves makes a good motion-picture. The movie is a treadmill of stumbling, fumbling, smooching, hurtling movement, and by the time it reaches the run-down of an adolescent murderer over half the snow-covered hills of northern California, the customer is as fed up with motion as the panting actors. But the story is told with a camera and a rather unorthodox one, though it is often late to the scene and not sure of what is about to happen. Some of the support—Ward Bond and Anthony Ross—is good, but the chief virtue of the film is the fascinating jumble of action that results when two awkward, determined characters (Bond and Ryan) try to outclaw each other at the job of detecting.
March 22, 1952
ALONGSIDE “Boots Malone,” a race-park drama executed in a relaxed and mobile fashion, most of the current films appear to be moving on club feet. The story in capsule form shows a track-struck rich kid being adopted by a jaded jockey’s agent, put through an intensive training, and turned into an expert bug-boy. The necessary problems are provided along the way by a quiet, matter-of-fact, grim syndicate that muscles the agent, who is for a hero surprisingly timorous; also there is a snobbish mother who probably learned her acting trade at the rodeo—she practically throws her eyebrows off her face. It is fashionable these days to show corruption in the United States; so the story has all but one of the jockeys, trainers, and so on merrily finagling with horses and mutuel prices. All this corruption is probably exaggerated but treated with remarkable plausibility: the techniques and documentation obviously derive from a thoroughgoing knowledge of the sport of kings and bookies. The only possible moral is that horse-racing is a fascinating sport but don’t place too much confidence in your scratch sheet.
There has been so much blowing on what is stale in this movie and what is wonderful—paddock lingo and lore—that I won’t swell its volume, except to suggest that kid athletes are not likely to learn their profession via the ABC instruction meted out by the agent to his apprentice rider. I suspect that if basketball coaches told the rookie players to dribble in zigzags, keep their eyes on the basket, or imparted any other kindergarten knowledge, there would be an outbreak of assassinations in American athletics: Ninety-nine per cent of American athletes learn their trade in their own way, and I see no reason why jockeys should depart from the norm. Such instruction (“Cock your knees, grab a handful of mane . . .”) is there to please the critics who like educational movies and the chalk-sniffers who want to peep into the bowels of their favorite sport. As for the authentic racing talk (“fourteen-karat slow-bones,” or “You don’t make a claim on a one-horse owner”), quite a bit of it is sensitive, accurate, and illuminating. I remember with delight a race-track scrounger chortling with glee and using his winning mutuel tickets as blinkers, and the stark sentences: “All horses respect is force. They are mere brutes who have had all the intelligence bred out of them.” And the entire handling of a fat, rich “win-crazy” owner is one of the most accurate examples of greed that I have seen this year. But a good deal of the fancy talk is contrived, and it hangs between people like tiny, misshapen dirigibles.
Milton Holmes, a movie specialist who writes only horse epics, is a born story-teller even if his stuff runs to pulp. His script treats the actuality of working for a living and does it without those short cuts that chop current movies into static fragments. The kid is shown learning how to ride on back-to-back chairs, a bale of hay, a chalk drawing, and finally race horses; this variety of mounts is obviously a gimmick for avoiding monotony, but it makes for a genuine movie atmosphere in which you see figures involved with racing and nothing else from dawn to midnight. This type of continuous and untightened narration gives actors room for small natural movements which never seem to get into a movie like “Detective Story,” where close perspectives and absence of action force the actors into slightly hysterical business with eyes, lips, and hands. Holden, as the tarnished agent, is a dour sort who usually muffs the climactic scenes that demand big emotion (the pocket-picking in the beginning), but he is masterful in these realistic stretches—doing some relaxed coaching in the starting gate or galloping along with the boy telling him how to whip his mount (the best working shots I’ve seen in recent films). Holmes knows and likes the sights of a race track well enough to waste footage on the trip to the diner, motel life near the track, and the unrelated wanderings of a racing troupe stuck on the highway. This last scene, with its credible terrain and each shot connected into a line of actions that lead easily and logically from one thing to another, seems rather wonderful when compared to any of the vulgar settings and crazily viewed scenes of such over-touted masterpieces as “Streetcar” and “A Place in the Sun.” “Boots Malone” is no world-beater, but it does show professional men actually working; the surface of their lives is almost real; and thanks to Holden, the story tells you a good deal about the grace, recessiveness, and quiet discernments of a moderately gifted man going nowhere.
A word or two further about the acting. However he does it, Holden seems in constant motion standing still; his posture, coloring, and disinterested technique are so perfectly adjusted to a natural setting that he appears to be a worn, moving part of the air currents in a scene. Basil Ruysdael’s kindly trainer is so full of lofty spiritual feeling and the visual qualities of a daguerreotype that he could be a farmer who wandered off the set of “Tolable David” into this picture of corruption at the tracks. The rich kid, done in a controlled, over-trained Broadway style by Johnny Stewart, is just this side of revolting.
Also recommended: “Five Fingers,” “The Captive City,” “Los Olvidados.”
April 5, 1952
MY list of top pictures made in the last five years (“Red River,” “He Walked by Night,” “Act of Violence”) has now been expanded to include a titleless documentary of street life in Spanish Harlem, shot entirely with a 16-millimeter sneak camera by Janice Loeb, Helen Levitt, and James Agee. The technique of documenting life in the raw with a concealed camera has often been tried out, in Hollywood and in experimental films, but never with much success until this small masterwork turned up. One problem was finding a camera either small enough to be hidden or made in such a way that it could be focused directly on the scene without being held to the operator’s eye. The “Film Documents” group used an old model Cine-Kodak which records the action at a right angle to the operator who gazes into his scene-finder much as was done with the old-fashioned “Brownie.” The people who wound up in this movie probably thought the camera-wielder was a stray citizen having trouble with the lock of a small black case that could contain anything from a piccolo to a tiny machine gun. For dramatic action, the film deals with one of the toughest slum areas extant: an uptown neighborhood where the adults look like badly repaired Humpty Dumpties who have lived a thousand years in some subway restroom, and where the kids have a wild gypsy charm and evidently spend most of their day savagely spoofing the dress and manners of their elders. The movie, to be shown around the 16-millimeter circuit, has been beautifully edited (by Miss Levitt) into a somber study of the American figure, from childhood to old age, growing stiffer, uglier, and lonelier with the passage of years.
Let me say that changing one’s identity and acting like a spy, or a private eye, are more a part of the American make-up than I’d ever imagined before seeing this picture. This not only holds for Levitt, Inc., who had to disguise their role of film-makers to get the naked truth, but also goes for the slum people who are being photographed. The film is mostly concerned with kids who are trying to lose themselves in fake adultness by wearing their parents’ clothes and aping grown-ups’ expressions; even the comparatively few adults (at a war-time bond rally) go in for disguises—Legionnaire uniforms, etc.—and seem afraid to be themselves. The chief sensation is of people zestfully involved in making themselves ugly and surrealistic, as though everything Goya’s lithographs indicated about the human race had come true. This mood is established right off in a wonderful shot of a Negro tot mashing her tongue and face out of shape against a windowpane. This private bit of facemaking is followed soon by a shot of a fat man leaping up and down and chortling with glee at the sight of a neighborhood kid carrying another one on his shoulders, solemnly impersonating a new two-bodied grown-up. And this scene gives way to a macabre game of gypsy kids making like maniacs by clubbing each other with flour-filled stockings swiped from their mudders.
Every Hollywood Hitchcock-type director should study this picture if he wants to see really stealthy, queer-looking, odd-acting, foreboding people. Even the kids, whose antics make their elders look like a lost tribe of frozen zombies, act a bit like spies from the underground. Enigmatic and distrustful, a small boy watches the little colored girl (mentioned above) smear her features on the window; an older smart-alecky one slyly bats a flour stocking against the back of a teen-aged princess—the Mary Pickford of the neighborhood—carefully watching her every move to see if she’s getting erotically excited. It is this very watchfulness which makes one part of the picture so brilliant: these kids must jeweler’s-eye everything, and when the camera man (Agee) reveals himself, the space in front of the camera fills up with every kid in the neighborhood staring at the now bared camera like one Huge Eye.
To see what these kids will be like when they grow up, all we have to do is look at the shots of their parents. The watchfulness of youth has now become a total preoccupation—an evil-faced pimp, a Grant Wood spinster, a blowsy Irish dame picking at her teeth, are all forever staring at the world as though it were a dangerous, puzzling place filled with hidden traps. The great American outdoors, once a wide-open prairie for adventurers, is here, in one shrunken pocket of New York City, a place of possible terror to people who spend their time looking at it with 100-per-cent distrust.
“High Noon.” A deftly fouled-up Western, starring Gary Cooper as a disillusioned marshal enforcing law and order in Hadleyville where everyone else is happily barricaded within his own avarice and cowardice. Carl Foreman’s attempt to do an original cowboy script consists in starting the story at 10:40 a.m., ending it just after noon, and limiting the dramatic action to one situation: Gary Cooper walking silently and alone down the deserted streets looking for volunteer deputies. The contrived result: a movie which does take you into every part of the town and features Cooper’s beautiful rolling gait, but which reveals that someone spent too much time over the drawing board conceiving dramatic camera shots to cover up the lack of story. Moral: the Kramer gang (“Champion,” “The Men”) is making too many films for its own good.
“The Marrying Kind.” The story behind a sad little divorce suit told by the cut-back method, with the director (Cukor) using a sneak camera without putting any heart or belief into it. Cukor is a fine technician who has lately been imagining himself as an American Rossellini. The actors make Anna Magnani seem soft-spoken and even-tempered. Every camera set-up indoors shows you a person in a bathrobe, brassière, or long underwear, poking his or her behind into the camera lens to prove that this is a candid movie. And there is the uncomfortable spectacle of Judy Holliday, a cautious and intelligent highbrow, squeezing herself into the dumb role of a Bronx yenta.
“The Fighter.” Herbert Kline’s romantic fight drama about an unpolished Mexican bolo-puncher, who earns five dollars a day as a sparring partner and works feverishly at night for the revolutionary cause of Zapata and Villa. An inexpert mixture of politics and hokum, set in the Rio Grande towns of 1910, which look as unreal as the backdrops on the old Keith circuit. Conte, the silky Italian star of bare-chest films, is a Mexican fizzle.
April 26, 1952
HOLLYWOOD films were once in the hands of non-intellectuals who achieved, at best, the truth of American life and the excitement of American movement in simple-minded action stories. Around 1940 a swarm of bright locusts from the Broadway theaters and radio stations descended on the studios and won Hollywood away from the innocent, rough-and-ready directors of action films. The big thing that happened was that a sort of intellectual whose eyes had been trained on the crowded, bound-in terrain of Times Square and whose brain had been sharpened on left-wing letters of the thirties, swerved Hollywood story-telling toward fragmented, symbol-charged drama, closely viewed, erratically acted, and deviously given to sniping at their own society. What Welles, Kanin, Sturges, and Huston did to the American film is evident in the screen version of Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie,” which is less important for its story than for the grim social comment underscoring every shot.
You first see Carrie Meeber, rural and naive (Jennifer Jones), rushing to get off a daycoach while a drummer tells her she is making a mistake: “South Chicago? That’s the slums.” The remark, which makes a 1909 masher sound like a 1952 social worker, is full of meanings that the movie audience by now is wise to, and the writers need only touch on Carrie’s first threadbare months in the city. The next few scenes are also immersed in social significance and accomplish the same kind of half-implied story-telling. One of them shows a crabby foreman driving Carrie so relentlessly that she runs a needle through her finger and loses her job as a shoe-stitcher. Since the foreman is played by a spidery bit player always type-cast as a mean “pinch-penny,” and since his dialogue runs to sentences like “Here’s a dollar, a whole day’s pay,” the spectator has picked up a quick course in non-union labor in no more than two minutes of screen time.
The most important aspect of all this social significance is its prejudice against Americans, who are being ridiculed in films as completely as they were in the writings of Mencken. In this movie, the bias is managed, Mencken fashion, by treating people as “national” or “local” types rather than ordinary figures, and then casting the roles with actors who love to over-act uncharming traits. Carrie’s first amour is played by Eddie Albert, whose portrayal of an American “go-getter” consists of flashing a big, lopsided grin, twirling a heavy gold watch and using his voice like a loud musical instrument. Somehow the heroine, whose strong point is her essential gentleness, puts up with this caricature who opens every conversation with either a belch or a couplet: “Charley’s the name, charm’s the game!” When Carrie and her second lover, the sleek restaurant owner Hurstwood, skip to New York with his partner’s money, they are tracked down by a detective from the Western Bonding Company. The acting of this leering, gum-chewing slob is rendered by Ray Teal, who has a penchant for using one eye as though it belonged to a cruel pig and working a rich, sneering sound into his voice. Hurstwood’s decline takes him into a Third Avenue hash house run by the sort of confident, ruthless Irishman Barry Kelley has been enacting since he entered films. The cameraman helps Kelley to look repugnant and slovenly with floor-shots that exaggerate his huge belly and the lazy, tyrannical way in which he lolls in a chair. And finally, Hurstwood’s wife, rich shrew that she is, turns up near the end to trade him a divorce for the rights to their Chicago home. Miriam Hopkins plays the scene by holding her mouth in a single grim line and keeping a rigid, buzzard-like look in her eyes.
One of the cardinal elements of the Times Square technique introduced in the era of “McGinty,” “Citizen Kane,” “A Man to Remember,” and “The Maltese Falcon” was the use of very close, snarling presentation which put the actors practically in a nose-to-nose relationship with the movie spectator. The entire production of “Carrie” is thrown at you in shallow scenes, the actors arranged parallel-fashion and statically on the front plane of the scene so that their physical presence is overpowering. The film was fortunate in having Laurence Olivier as the high-powered Hurstwood, all delicacy, intelligence, and high style up to his last weakened whispers on the Bowery. But after an hour of close views Olivier becomes less a figure than a formidable mustache, a mouth that has a tendency to flap, and poignant hands that sometimes mimic the gestures of madonnas in medieval painting. In one of the last views of the pitiable Hurstwood his ravaged face is exposed to Carrie as she turns a lamp on it. The fact that Hurstwood is ashamed to show himself seems next to ludicrous after an hour spent watching his face disintegrate over most of the screen.
“Carrie” is also fortunate in having a handsome production all around, but in the deliberate and magnified style to which Hollywood has turned, lightness of touch is impossible. When the camera dollies slowly over the cubicles of a flop-house (the big “art” scene) one has the feeling that the director is working with material that is as heavy and dignified as a Steinway grand inlaid with precious stones.
“Outcast of the Islands.” A lesser Conrad story, showing the evil consequences of a tropical environment on a chivalrous, well-meaning leech. Starring Trevor Howard, who is surprisingly credible as a feverishly bored ne’er-do-well getting hot over a native girl who confines all her acting to moving her eyes. Despite some bad casting (Robert Morley and his daughter), Director Carol Reed has created an exceptional film that entangles the spectator in tropical textures and worries him with the shame and guilt of a hero who betrays only his friends. Alongside Reed’s film, “African Queen” looks as if it had been shot in Palm Beach.
May 17, 1952
“The Sniper”—the story of a sweet-faced laundry driver who compulsively murders pretty brunettes because “someone did something mean to him when he was a kid”—is a smooth, technically astute, 100 per cent dull melodrama. It was made by a progressive producer, Stanley Kramer, whose films often fight prejudice with all the usual antiquated prejudices. For example, he has gone to unusual lengths to build sympathy for the underdogs of society—the oppressed Negro, mother-fixated tenement kid, or paraplegic—while sniping at publishers, business men, government officials, etc. Here, he has cast the role of a sex offender with an actor (Arthur Franz) whose nice manners and muffled personality make him appear to be the movie’s most wholesome American. The only thing interesting about the figure is that he is so unlikely as a “maniac.” He has a neat way with guns, cars, baseballs, and laundry deliveries. When he spots a likely victim, he picks himself out a rooftop, calmly removes a telescopic carbine from a briefcase, efficiently puts it together, and puts one bullet cleanly through the girl’s temple. Then he goes home, locks the carbine in the top bureau drawer, and writes a note to the police begging them to capture him (“Stop me—Find me and stop me—I’m going to do it again.”). Aside from the fact that Franz is an expert driver and takes his laundry truck into picturesque San Francisco locales, his behavior is pretty colorless in a movie where the more normal citizens knock themselves out acting angry, cocky, pompous, or mean.
Though Kramer never tires of exposing ugliness in society, his movies are peculiar for an absurdly well-organized look: they move well, have a laundered kind of slate-toned photography, and never get tangled up in any event. It is typical of his Business Machine style that when the boy is finally spotted by a painter working a block away on the top of a factory chimney, the kid brings him down with a single bullet (the body slides down so photogenically on a pulley contraption that it must have been engineered by a Phi Beta Kappa in movie stunt shots). Another interesting example of Kramer’s efficiency is the way his females act when the bullets hit them. They go into a cyclonic version of Leon Errol’s rubber-legged walk before smashing into a brick wall or table; this is a difficult thing to do, but it is managed with fascinating skill by otherwise wooden females. Finally, there are the scenes between aroused civic leaders and police officials, in which “liberal” and “anti-social” remarks turn up with perfect timing and placement. A newspaper publisher, played by a stock Republican type, says some asinine thing (“We want this fellow caught, and punished, punished, punished.”), and is immediately put in his place with a remark that sounds like it hurried in from a Barry Gray disc-jockey show (“Your paper slants the news, exploits killings.”). Because of his spic-’n-span technique and the predictable left-wing slanting of characterization, “The Sniper” is a movie that you’ll have to fight to enjoy.
“The Pride of St. Louis,” another ultra-civic-minded work, manages to kill the idea of baseball as the national pastime. The script-writer (H. Mankiewicz) decided that Dizzy Dean is a democratic Ozark peasant, more important for his clean habits and civic behavior than for his fast ball. He has confined the movie to shots of Dizzy (Dan Dailey) glad-handing customers and developing, via talk, into a good citizen, while his career is described by radio announcers and newspaper headlines. When the movie occasionally gets around to baseball, it shows Dailey doing a hammed-up burlesque of pitching—so intricate that he doesn’t seem to be throwing the ball. Odd note: Dailey, in certain profile shots with his hair dry and bushy, looks a bit like Dean’s old-time rival, Carl Hubbell.
May 31, 1952