THE last month has turned into a victory parade for distinguished tonnage, a new type of big-studio “Super” that seems conceived at the top of Wall Street by an art board recruited from Time, The New Yorker and Partisan Review, and then baked in a Pittsburgh blast furnace so as to outlast the Easter Island sculptures as monumental art. Hard to pin down by the old critical processes, these new blockbusters are more than massive esthetic complications. With their high-powered craftsmanship, curious efficiency as art and a Genius-bug that insists on making the “listing of credits” more costly than an old-time “B” film, these films demand a far-out criticism that is more like bead-reading than esthetic evaluation. The Diary of Anne Frank, Compulsion and The Five Pennies are throwbacks to early silent film-makers whose idea of a great movie—even in the case of a Chaplin feature—suggested a hulking, solemnly evolved Gothic building rather than a mere “flick.”
However, unlike the big-studio films of yesteryear, which were supervised by romantic dreadnaughts (D. W. Griffith) or Dreiser-type realists (Erich von Stroheim), these new blockbusters are usually steered by a surprisingly hip craftsman. Compulsion lists a directing unknown (Richard Fleischer), who, in comparison to a George Stevens or John Huston, is an ingenious fireball in composing the huge horizontal screen. Fleischer’s miniaturist technique often floods a tapestry-like richness across the Cinemascope surface; at other times, in an intimate change-of-pace, his actors practically walk out of the powerful semi-slick chiaroscuro image.
Room at the Top, an admirable (if not likable) study of a rake’s progress in small-town society, owes its solid, engrossing effect to a director (Jack Clayton) making his first feature film—and it is interesting how well Clayton uses an Old Master (Carol Reed) when he needs a morosely bitter “bourgeois” effect to bring his film down to cinematic earth. Each of the above films presents a garrulous youngster (Dean Stockwell, Laurence Harvey) brilliantly involved in an unrelentingly difficult role. Even the vapid “girl-next-door” role is played with neurotic-toned ambitious cunning: Both Compulsion and Room are helped by ingénues (Diane Varsi, Heather Sears) who, compared to the former habitués of young-love roles, project a disturbingly skillful innocuity.
Compulsion is a smart, terse study of a notorious team of kid killers, but, in choosing to charm its audience in every particular (the various wallpapers in Leopold’s palatial home rank with the sensuous stuff Matisse painted), the producer (Darryl Zanuck’s son) has forfeited every awkward individuality of a dreadful, amateurish crime. The most idiosyncratic things may be the “beauty” of lighting in interior scenes or the irritating high camp style of Bradford Dillman’s Loeb performance.
However, the movie’s star is Richard Murphy, a master of compression, whose screenplays, somewhat like Katherine Hepburn, have a beautifully hinged, lean look, plus a chronic Quakerish decency that forbids any kind of violence or vulgarity. A typical Murphy maneuver presents most of the Bobby Franks murder by indirection: In a country undertaker’s parlor, where, as the camera works in a tight “map” around the shrouded corpse of a 14-year-old schoolboy, finally arriving at a reporter’s nauseated expression as he kneels to pick up “a pair of hornrimmed glasses,” the spectator learns “by intelligence” about the murderer’s strategy and cruelty but hardly anything about the actual homely event. Murphy’s scenes always play with a unique educational vigor (objects, economy, give-and-go action, an undertaker’s flat, business-as-usual voice) but his architectonic story-telling euphemistically masks an inability to handle dirt, cruelty, sensationalism.
After 105 minutes of Murphy’s socio-psychiatric hop-scotch, in scenes that are deeply personal yet social as all outdoors, the “crime of the century” ends up without any feeling of crime (a boy’s head beaten with a chisel), loneliness (an open bit of prairie with a body half-wedged into a culvert’s mouth), sickness (Leopold’s droopingly sad goggle eyes) or punishment. Murphy is finally forced into a messy gimmick: adding an arbitrary scene of cruelty during the listing of credits so as to stamp his script and its thrill-killers with violence.
Despite some trying items such as Dillman’s pronunciation of “Mumsie” and endless patronizing of Clarence Darrow’s famous “summation” (honestly cornballed by Orson Welles), Compulsion has surprising power, the feeling of a new intellectualism being poured into the handsomely mounted “liberal” juggernauts Sam Goldwyn once produced. Most of its whiplash intensity is produced by Dean Stockwell, playing the Leopold role with a style—brusque stylishness, unpredictable bitchiness, sanded-down clarity—that recalls Robert Walker’s last triumphs. Unlike Orson Welles or E. G. Marshall, who turn in static “voice” performances as opposing lawyers, Stockwell is always a mobile Full Figure, whose intelligence, inward bound rather than (as in Dillman’s method-styled, happy-joe acting) following in all directions, makes every scene play three-dimensional, with a neurotically sad honesty.
As happened throughout most of Double Indemnity and those parts of Sunset Boulevard which carried a corrupt scriptwriter away from his cracked, aged legacy, Billy Wilder’s cold Some Like It Hot is successful only where there is no official middlebrow viewpoint—usually when Wilder is working with the trashy realism that makes the worst pocketbooks tick. His slapstick comedy picks up warmth and dramatic interest when its jazz pair try for a job in the cut-throat atmosphere of a booking office, and later in a Pullman washroom, where Marilyn Monroe (employing a poor-folks schlump she seldom allows herself) describes the life and times of a mediocre torch singer.
As the two musicians (Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon) don female costumes (evidently using Maggie of the “Bringing Up Father” comic strip as a model) and head for Florida, the movie flattens out into a stiff vulgarization of Hollywood fame and fortune—stretching from the cabin-jamming scene in a Marx Brothers movie to Preston Sturges-type millionaires and the mirthless face-stretching of Joe E. Brown.
While the female impersonations have a meager, cartoon-y interest (particularly Curtis’ spinster, whose mouth and nasal voice seem spiked by lemon juice), the Lemmon-Curtis musicianship is terrible and the odd characters met in Florida are worse. For instance, Lemmon’s drunken antic with Latin music is a mercilessly repeated irritation, but, as a movie toothache, it is often surpassed by Wilder’s tasteless parodies on famous movie gangsters. To flesh out these impoverished conceptions (mostly gimmicks: coin-flipping, hearing aid, spats) Wilder brings back some revered hobgoblins from Chicago films (Pat O’Brien, Mike Mazurki, George Raft, George E. Stone, plus familiar plug-ugly bit players)—but, unlike Sturges’ loving reincarnation of old acting shoes, Wilder murders his repertory group.
Some Like It Hot is a real weirdie: Wilder gets no laughs at all out of his sizzling, fast wedding of female impersonation to 1929 thrills, but, from a non-entertainment angle, his movie has a not-quite-real surface that is worth examining. Wilder’s surface (hard, tense, straightforward, like those in Stuart Davis’ equally jazzy abstract paintings) is as hard to shrug off as it is to enjoy. Endless leg shots that seem cut with a razor, transitions that move on a fast Mack Sennett line via bicycle-motorboat-wheelchair, lewd dialogue in which the key vulgarities are spiked to the spectator’s attention, a Model-T flivver flipped around by a gangster’s careening car—all these skins of objectivity have a brazen electricity, a staccato truth and sharpness that is one of the unlikable achievements in Hollywood motion pictures.
Unfortunately, this frenetic surface is allied, as in all of Wilder’s cold showers, with a tragic obeisance to the crowd’s opinion. Most of Wilder’s impressions of the ’20s are up-dated to sit well with the middle audience, and, worse, his use of Marilyn Monroe shows a decided fear of mobilizing her new pudginess. As the dumb blonde center of Wilder’s film, Miss Monroe is stiffly posed, long-shot, blacked out, all but rubbed out, to uphold the popular conception of a movie doll’s dimensions.
In contrast to the over-cautious cunning that inches a spotlight up and down Miss Monroe’s bosom during a night club act, Room at the Top is a British blizzard of improvisation, in which Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches story of an aggressive social climber is played backwards with chic bitterness. From the opening on a handsome young clerk (Harvey) fondling his one elegance, a pair of shoes, to the closing shot of his honeymoon car traveling the same wistful avenue that finished The Third Man, Room has a tricked-up impressiveness that holds the spectator’s mind long after the movie’s windup.
Actually, the movie is closer to The Best Years of Our Lives than to upside-down Alger, an ironic, more literary British cousin to Goldwyn’s slightly sour sweetness and light. In the film, the ex-flyer from a factory slum has his married woman, tangles with small town mores, wins the daughter of the town’s richest man—but loses all along the line. Despite the basic shallowness of the plot, there are endless consolations in dialogue (wonderfully natural, foul-mouthed, etc.), acting (Signoret’s performance of an unhappy married woman on her last affair) and directorial magic (particularly in off-moments when the story is in the streets, or fastened on clerk friends of the infamous hero).
Watching this slow, interesting film in which endless, corny literary dodges (the jilted woman driving to her death, her mean-spirited lover drowning his guilt in a bar-room floozie) are saved by a felicitous “shot-in-the-dark,” the spectator has to cast a tear for the solemnity that makes so much of Hollywood’s recent masterpieces seem “canned.” Even a schmaltzy jazz delight like Danny Kaye’s hot cornet film, The Five Pennies, has a solidity and thoroughness that belongs in an Encyclopedia Britannica discussion of post-Dixieland music.
May 18, 1959