Another Old Movie Blog

On Running Boards

2012-01-26T07:46:00.000-05:00

Oh, running boards, how wonderful they were. How stylish, and yet functional. The above photo is not from a movie, but is a publicity shot. Can you name the actress?

And while we're at it, name the following actors and actresses, and films, in which these famous running boards appear. There are so many things you can do on a running board....

Proposing marriage on dual running boards. Is there anything in the world so romantic?

You can have your pals help you take off your sweater while you are sitting on a running board.

You can express consternation and your profound disillusionment with life while sitting on a running board.

Or, you can just milk a cow.

Truly, the possibilities are endless.

More Than a Secretary - 1936

2012-01-23T07:52:00.000-05:00

“More Than a Secretary” (1936) is like a time travel adventure. It is impossible to watch this movie about the editor of a fitness magazine without being reminded of the all-pervasive diet industry and social consciousness about health today. The setting is1930s screwball patter, and man-crazy dumb blondes who connive to marry (or be kept by) their bosses. We travel back and forth through time in every scene, reevaluating our perspective, old and new.

Today’s post is part of the Comedy Classics Blogathon sponsored by the Classic Movie Blog Association. Have a look here for a schedule of the other participating blogs.

January, typically a month for resolutions about changing one’s life, and being deluged with diet and fitness ads and infomercials, is an especially fitting time to watch Jean Arthur try to change herself. She runs up against the extremely high standards of George Brent.

Mr. Brent plays the editor of “Body and Brain” magazine, who runs his office and his personal life with the discipline of a professional health guru. In 1936, however, when this movie was made, he is seen as a freak. Much of the comedy is derived by sensible Jean Arthur’s bewildered reactions to his diet and exercise regimen. He pulls raw carrots out of his desk drawer and chomps on them like Bugs Bunny.

Jean is the co-owner (along with reliable sidekick Ruth Donnelly) of a secretarial school. We first see them in their classrooms droning repetitious typing dictation for their students, who pound away at clunky black manual typewriters the size of Buicks. I must confess, I view this scene with some fondness. It is how I learned to type. That quick brown fox and lazy dog are old pals of mine.

In fact, considering how much I type and have typed through the decades since, that one semester of Typing 101 in high school was probably the most beneficial and practical class I ever took.

And working for so many years (ago) on a manual typewriter, I have fingers like Hercules. I continually wear out flimsy plastic computer keyboards. I run through them like Kleenex. I could crush you like a bug.

But Jean’s and Ruth’s students, or at least some of them, do not envision decades of typing, or any career at all. They are there to learn the skills that will get them jobs as executive secretaries to rich businessmen, and then marry them. Or be kept as mistresses.

This is student Dorothea Kent’s objective.

Dorothea Kent comes pretty close to stealing this movie.

She had a less than stellar career in B-movies as the dumb friend, but here her “Maisie” character, despite the high-pitched whine and clueless attitude, is really quite street-smart and self-sufficient. She knows what she wants, and she goes out and gets it. Also, coloring her dumb blonde act is a biting nastiness that makes her fascinating, even as you want to club her for her blatant rudeness to Jean. Her supposedly obtuse double entendres are perfectly executed. She blithely but with a spin of sophistication talks of the corporate head to whom she finally becomes…indispensible. “You’ll never know how he leans on me.”

Charles Halton plays the head man who eventually gets Miss Kent on a rent-to-own basis. He had a long career on screen as a fussy, humorless, officious type, but he began on the New York stage and had trained at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Ruth Donnelly, too, had spent her earlier years on Broadway, but came west as did so many when the Depression hit and movies became less demeaning to those on the “legitimate” stage. The two of them would spend their careers as bit players in a studio system which would guarantee them work as “types” but rarely challenge them.

For Jean Arthur, 1936 was a busy year. In this one year she did five movies. Along with this one there was “The Plainsman” (see our previous post here), “The Ex-Mrs. Bradford”, “Adventure in Manhattan” and “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town”. Each role was different, and we see that though the studio system could be something like a conveyor belt of sameness in roles for many actors and actresses, Jean refused to cooperate with studio head Harry Cohn enough times to forge her own mark on her career.

Here her portrayal is of the career businesswoman who falls for the boss -- exactly what she cautions her students against, preferring that they take the honorable tack of learning proper business skills. She seems a more somber character than what we are used to seeing in her screwball roles.

It is as if she is still working through the transition of so many earlier roles where she played the sad but forthright heroine seeking love (“Danger Signals” 1930) or justice (“Party Wire” - 1935) to the working girl whose delightful sense of irony is her self-preservation (“Public Hero #1” - 1935) and (“If You Could Only Cook” - 1935).

The further along in her career she got, the more of the world’s troubles she took on her shoulders and she became the moral compass of screwball comedies. “Mr. Deeds” and “Mr. Smith” were ahead of her, but by then she would be ready for them.

Here she has George Brent, who might not seem like the answer to this frustrated businesswoman’s prayers. We last saw Mr. Brent here in "My Reputation". I think I really prefer him in light comedy to drama. He has nice touch with slightly absurd characters. Here, his delightfully serious naiveté, despite the science of his health beliefs, both maddens and appeals to her.

She visits his office because he has fired so many of her graduates. He is very demanding. He is pleased by her business suit and spectacles, thinking she is brainy and serious. People who wear glasses are usually very brainy and also quite glamorous.

What was I talking about? Oh, yeah. George. Jean. He mistakes her for another applicant, and brusquely runs her through a quick job interview. Intrigued, she decides to play along and take the job, and see what this weirdo is all about.

Much to the consternation of her business partner, Ruth Donnelly, who wonders why she would leave her business to take a lousy $25 a week job.

We see, before Ruth does, before Jean does, that she is smitten with George Brent.

He has a good role here, and plays it most charmingly. He is intelligent and disciplined, two qualities which Jean admires, being both herself, but he is also a little out of touch with the real world, and this is what mystifies and intrigues her. Soon, he grows dependent on her capability in the office, which compliments his own need for order. It is not until very late in the movie that he realizes he loves her.

Jean has to jump through a lot of hoops before that happens. First, there is his confounding health regimen which he imposes on his staff. His right-hand man, Lionel Stander, a body builder straight from the gym, puts the office workers through morning calisthenics. Brent opens the windows and breathes deeply, ordering Jean to follow along with deep knee bends and provocative lunges.

He treats to her a lunch of a bran muffin, and a vegetarian supper. I think my favorite line is when, half-starved she buys groceries on the way home and, tired about hearing how her regular diet is bad for her, plucks an enormous raw steak out of her shopping bag. Just before dropping it in the frying pan, gives it an enthusiastic kiss,

“Steak, come kill mama!”

Much of George Brent’s health regimen is used for comic effect, too ridiculous in 1936 to be taken seriously. Today, in a US where obesity has become common, many people watching this film now probably are on diet restrictions for various medical concerns. What was once freakish became fad, and now has become a matter of life or death for a lot of people.

Another facet of George Brent’s rigid outlook is his refusal to use images in his magazine that are sexual. He is a proponent of bodily grace and physical perfection, but the idea of using cheesecake to illustrate his articles is abhorrent to him. Jean has to turn him around on this one and convince him that a little glamour will sell more magazines.

Today, our magazines images (as well as articles) are examples as to how sex sells. Poor George would be aghast.

But George’s modern ideas on health and Victorian ideas on how to sell it are only the least of Jean’s problems. Dorothea Kent comes back into her life with a vengeance.

Her boss, whose wife is returning from Europe, must get rid of her for a while, and palms her off on the unwitting George Brent. Mr. Brent hasn’t the sophistication to deal with so avid a man-chaser and so inept a secretary as our Dorothea. He is overwhelmed by her, and hasn’t the mettle to send her packing.

He succumbs to her…charms.

He makes Jean his assistant editor to keep both ladies happy, and Jean makes good at this new challenge, but is crushed that he now spends his days, and nights, with Dorothea. Dorothea has another good scene where she insults Jean through the sheerest gauze of innocence, “And you actually thinking you had a chance with him,” she laughs. You want to sock her.

Jean is more angry at herself for not being able to compete with such fluff. In her way, she is very much like George Brent, a lover of order and routine, a hard worker, and a social misfit. She quits, and there are layers to her disgusted remark to Brent, “You’re such a fool.”

Here George finally figures out he loves her and wants her back. He pushes the ambitious Dorothea Kent onto the big boss, Charles Halton.

A couple of fun period items in this movie - Brent’s Art Deco office furniture, and the trailer or “land yacht” Jean and Ruth buy to travel and start over.

Ruth exclaims, “If I’d known how much fun it was to quick work, I wouldn’t have slaved the last 18 years without a vacation.”

Jean shows us how not to park a car with a land yacht attached to the back of it.

I love George Brent’s look when Dorothea Kent returns unexpectedly just as Jean is about to come back into his life. It is a priceless expression of horror and dread. All he needs is one of Curly’s “Nyah, Nyah, Nyah” groans of anxiety to complete it.

The scene where, brooking no more nonsense, Jean (“The time has come.”) spanks Dorothea like the naughty child she is, and tells her that, “I can’t bear looking at you!” -- is a resounding moment of screwball retribution.

A cute ending, and one in which Jean finally gets to shed her somber mood, is when she’s about to explode and cut into Brent, but the morning calisthenics interrupt her. Like the other office automatons, when given the order by Lionel Stander to inhale and begin the stretching exercises, she unthinkingly extends her arms. Brent grabs her in a cuddle, and her “exhale” position is to wrap her arms around him.

See? Exercise is good for you. It makes you feel better.

Don’t forget to check out the other great posts in the Comedy Classics Blogathon.

Off Topic - Book Sale

2012-01-21T08:15:00.000-05:00

This is to announce that TODAY and TOMORROW only, my time-travel adventure novel MYTHS OF THE MODERN MAN will be FREE exclusively on Amazon.com. This is an ebook, which can be downloaded to your Kindle or your computer via Kindle PC software (which is also free from Amazon). Read a couple reviews here at the Library Thing website.

Comedy Classics Blogathon

2012-01-19T07:42:00.000-05:00

This is to announce next week's "comedy classics" blogathon, sponsored by the Classic Movie Blog Association.

On Monday, we're going to take on "More Than a Secretary" (1936) with Jean Arthur, George Brent, Ruth Donnelly, Dorothea Kent, and Lionel Stander. Jean plays the owner of a secretarial school who becomes the secretary of the editor of a health magazine. It's typical 1930s screwball, and yet curiously far-seeing when we get a load of editor George Brent's healthy lifestyle.

Visit the Classic Movie Blog Association website here for a list of the other participating blogs.

Two-Gun Man from Harlem - 1938

2012-01-16T07:38:00.000-05:00

“Two-Gun Man from Harlem” (1938) creates a world for us that is both strange and familiar, an image placed over another image. We see a separate world, but it is our world and we are at home here, even if we are not cowboys, even if we are not black, even if we are not white.

This movie is one of a handful of B-westerns starring Herb Jeffries, and the first of a series of three featuring him playing the cowboy called Bob Blake. We discussed Mr. Jeffries in this previous post, how his stature as The Bronze Buckaroo, the Singing Cowboy of the Black Cinema in the 1930s put him on par with the likes of Gene Autry and a posse of others who were all white and all more famous.

The Bronze Buckaroo traveled in somewhat different circles. He rode the range in movie houses that played to African-American audiences. General audiences, i.e. theaters where patrons were either mostly white, or, as in the South, all white, were not shown these films.

They missed out on something big, those white patrons. A simple message a lot of them would have to wait another 20 or 30 years to hear, and under much more turbulent circumstances. If they had only seen Herb Jeffries riding into town on his white horse to save the day, heard him sing “I’m a Happy Cowboy”, one wonders if the battles for social justice fought in the streets and on the back of the bus, and at the lunch counter would have been necessary.

Not that “Two-Gun Man from Harlem” was the greatest movie in the world. It wasn’t even the greatest movie in the small neighborhood movie houses where it played. It was typical B-western.

That is its charm, and the very magic of its power.

Herb Jeffries is the hero. We know that because he’s jaw-droppingly handsome, he’s taller than everybody else, and he wears a white hat. He’s no great actor - none of the singing cowboys were, although in this movie he gets to play a dual role. As the gunfighter “The Deacon” he looks like he’s having a blast.

Manton Moreland is his shorter, funnier brother. He is sly and loyal, and a lot smarter than most cowboy sidekicks. He tells a story to divert the bad guys, about Lot’s wife. Only in his rambling version, Salt Lake City is the result of the biblical curse.

Mae Turner is the ranch owner’s wife, who is unfaithful and tries to lure our Herb. Failing that, she frames him for murder. Unlike most of the other awkward and wooden performances here, Miss Turner had stage training at the University of California, and played Lady Macbeth among her professional roles. She knew how to do evil ladies.

Spencer Williams, who would go on to write and produce in Black Cinema, played Butch, the bad guy who did the bidding, for a hefty fee, of Clarence Brooks. He gives a quite natural performance and has great screen presence.

Mr. Brooks played the head bad guy, a man of means and just plain mean. He tries to buy the love of the beautiful young ingénue, played by Marguerite Whitten. He is as oily as Snidely Whiplash.

Miss Whitten is the guardian of her younger brother, Matthew “Stymie” Beard, who you’ll recognize as one of the Little Rascals. Here, he’s a funny, talkative, know-it-all kid who hero-worships Herb Jeffries.

And who wouldn’t?

That’s all pretty standard for a B-western. The writing is stilted and corny. The acting isn’t the best. The production values are distinctly low budget. Even the fight scenes are funny because they lack proper choreography, and the sound effect of the punching sounds a lot somebody slapping a tennis ball against a garage wall.

But look again. Jess “Jesse” Lee Brooks, one of the finest actors and singers of his generation (see this previous post with a clip of his “Let My People Go” in “Sullivan’s Travels”), plays the sheriff.

He is a man of authority, no-nonsense, steely-eyed, but fair. You can put your life in his hands. He always gets his man.

Films exhibited for “general” audiences did not show dark-skinned sheriffs. Nor dark-skinned rapacious landowners paying off henchmen. Nor dark-skinned cowboy heroes.

Which is why when offered a chance to “pass” in the movies, light-skinned Herb Jeffries, who was of mixed African and European heritage on his father’s side, and Irish on his mother’s side, refused. He did one better and wore darker makeup on screen. Mr. Jeffries reasoning was:

"In those days, my driving force was being a hero to children who didn't have any heroes to identify with," Jeffries says in a quote from his website. "I felt that dark-skinned children could identify with me and, in The Bronze Buckaroo they could have a hero. Many people don't realize (to this very day) that in the Old West, one out of every three cowboys was a Black... and there were many Mexican cowboys, too."

The familiar image of the B-western types: the hero, the villain, the pretty girl, the hero-worshiping little boy, and the loyal sidekick, they are all played out here by black people. African-American audiences could enjoy the same storybook sagebrush fare as the “general” audiences without fear of being demeaned or stereotyped, this time.

White audiences, however, missed out on a revelation. The hero, the villain, the pretty girl, the hero-worshiping little boy were all people they knew very well. They saw them all the time at the movies. The only difference -- the only difference -- was skin color.

About ten minutes into the movie, one sees that is no difference at all.

Powerful stuff, and not what some people wanted to hear.

For more on Herb Jeffries, have a look at his website.

Wishing you a meaningful Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

California Conquest - 1952

2012-01-12T06:12:00.000-05:00

“California Conquest” (1952) features Teresa Wright as a pants-wearing, deadeye shot in the days before California’s annexation to the U.S. This may be the movie’s chief delight as the delicately feminine heroine of 1940s Hollywood took that precarious turn into 1950s longsuffering wife/neurotic spinster roles. Here, as an interlude between those eras in her career, she rides, shoots, and saves Cornel Wilde from whipping by shooting dead the bad guy.

This is nothing if not refreshing.

Most of the movie, however, belongs to Cornel Wilde as the dashing nobleman of Mexican heritage who runs guns and organizes a movement for California to become part of the U.S. The people of Mexican ancestry are all called Californians here, to distinguish them from Mexicans who live below the Rio Grande, the part of Mexico we didn’t snatch in the Mexican War. Teresa Wright is called an American here. She is not a Californian, though she lives here with her gunsmith father, who sells guns to Cornel Wilde’s political movement.

The “good” Californians want to be Americans. The “bad” ones want to stay part of Mexico, or, failing that, to become part of the territorial designs of Imperial Russia, which also has settlements here. Got that, class?

John Dehner plays the head bad guy, a bad Californian who wants his brother to be Governor. Graft is so much easier when you’ve got a relative in power.

The two lead “Californians” then are played by Wilde and Dehner, neither of which in real life are of Spanish/Mexican heritage. A large cast of Spanish-speaking actors play minor, mostly nameless characters, with the exception of Alfonso Bedoya, who plays Jose Martinez, the head goon of John Dehner.

Hollywood casted movies by its own caste system. We’ve seen it before. In one scene, Teresa Wright watches a street fight, standing behind two stoic Indians, also watching. Were they Modocs or Washoes? Shoshonis or Yokuts? Who knows, they are not considered Californians, either.

The movie attempts to be a lot of things: a swashbuckling adventure, an historical picture, and to be sure, gets off on the right foot with the title exposed by a man’s hand swiping a glittering blanket of gold coins off the table. A vivid storybook-ish image. In parts, the movie has all the panache of a Saturday kiddie matinee adventure flick.

But we’ve got a lead actress of Teresa Wright’s caliber, so she can’t just sit around twisting a hanky in her hands. This film, to its credit, give her lots of action, too. When her gunsmith father is murdered, she joins Wilde to go after the killer. Wilde is distressed at her men’s attire, which he calls “horrible”, but seems to be unruffled by her gun fighting skills, which seem to be better than his.

The villains are one-dimensional, and the interesting story of the rivalry of three powers - US, Russian, and Mexican all converging in this rich land is pretty much lost in characters spitting out simplistic facts as plot exposition at convenient moments. Maybe the movie attempts too much, or maybe not enough.

Teresa Wright says to Wilde, “I wonder if we Americans will ever understand you people.” To which Wilde replies, “You don’t have to. It’s more important that we understand you.”

Placards of official dogma make for an easy, and lazy, explanation of why the characters are going from point A to point B, but they do nothing to flesh out even the characters’ motivations, let alone the complexities of political reality.

It is easier to focus on the beautiful rugged terrain, which we see much of behind swarms of hard-riding Californians chasing each other on horseback. We see the elaborate Spanish dress of the nobles at the ball, where a specialty act performs a beautiful, passionate dance.

Mantillas and ruffled shirts, and sword fighting out on the red-tiled patio among the potted yucca plants. The guy in tight burgundy pants slays the guy in tight purple pants. No blood. Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn did it better.

The ball brings Mr. Wilde and Miss Wright together again, and he marvels with relief that she looks more like a girl in her virginal white ball dress. There’s no romance yet; that doesn’t happen until they’ve been on the trail a few days, looking for the bad guys, and stop to rest in a hayloft. She’s back to a skirt for this scene, and well, there’s just something about haylofts. Instantly they are in love and planning a future life together.

But first, they trick the gang of bandits into leading them to the stolen guns, and John Dehner, and a Russian Count and Princess who are agents of the Czar. When the Princess balks at this pants-wearing female pointing a gun at her, Miss Wright, with absolutely no vestige of Peggy Stephenson left in her, remarks: “Lady, this gun will shoot anybody. It’s not particular.”

I love that line and her world-weary delivery.

Wilde is an almost too-cheerful hero, as if he is Robin Hood instead of a revolutionary, but since this movie drifts along on the mood of a kiddie matinee, his happy bravado is suitable, and the stereotype villains are serviceable, and the action is all we need to kill time.

It’s Teresa Wright who doesn’t quite fit, and not because she wears pants and a gun holster (which was probably a selling point for her to take this role). She’s too troubled for these shallow types around her, on a higher plane (and not the hayloft), where the deeper issues of California’s annexation await her consideration, figuring out what all this really means for her. She’s far too intelligent an actress to be stuck in this pop-up book.

Explorer John Fremont, the only real historical figure, shows up at the ball, despite the bandits that overturn his stagecoach, and tells the “good” Californians that the US will not annex California because Mexico is a neighbor and friend.

The Mexican War, from which we snagged a good chunk of Mexico, including California, would seem to contradict his assertion. Did anybody at the kiddie matinee catch that? Or did the kids in their red felt cowboy hats just knock back another handful of jujubes and cheer for the hard riding “good” Californians who, like they in school, pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and dreamed of cementing their heroism by pointing a gun in a haughty Russian’s face? Ah, 1952. Gotta love it.

The Chicago Theatre

2012-01-09T07:46:00.000-05:00

The Chicago Theatre, so grand and magnificent a building it was dubbed “the Wonder Theatre of the World” at its opening in 1921. The first of its kind, it became a prototype for a generation of “movie palace” theater construction. It stands today as a reminder of that era of remarkably beautiful buildings.

French Baroque, the theater features murals, a replica of the Arc de Triomphe sculpted on its State Street side. The grand lobby, five stories high, is modeled after the Royal Chapel at Versailles. The grand staircase is reminiscent of the Paris Opera House. One wonders if anything on stage could be half so diverting as the venue?

Movies were the order of the day, and “The Sign on the Door” was the debut flicker with Norma Talmadge on October 26, 1921, accompanied by a 50-piece orchestra in the pit, and a thundering Wurlitzer pipe organ.

A showcase not just for movies, live entertainment shared the auditorium with bands such as Duke Ellington’s and Benny Goodman’s.

Then, as we have noted with so many of these theater histories, the 1970s came. Then the 1980s. They brought disuse, decay, but this theater managed to escape the third D - demolition. The Chicago Theatre was restored and reopened in 1986. Frank Sinatra performed at the gala reopening, and the future for this theater finally seemed as bright as its past.

For more on the Chicago Theatre, including detail and photos on its spectacular interior, have a look at this website.

Meet Me in Las Vegas - 1956

2012-01-05T07:46:00.000-05:00

“Meet Me in Las Vegas” (1956) is a fun and frothy pastiche uniting the two themes upon which the reputation of that town is built: gambling, and nightclub acts. We get a little of the first, and a lot of the second.

Today we wrap up a two-post trip to Las Vegas. Have a look here at Monday’s post on “Las Vegas Story” (1952). From that black and white crime story we move on to color, lots and lots of colors.

Dan Dailey is a happy-go-lucky rancher who drives his coral convertible, with the matching horse trailer, to visit the casinos. Where he is not lucky at all. He is well known and well liked for being a good loser, and only a loser. But a swell guy.

His career in big movie musicals of the 1940s and 1950s puts Dan Dailey somewhere in the same universe, though in a lesser orbit, as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. I don’t know where his dancing puts him against those gentlemen; I think he’s a swell hoofer, and I particularly like the “Gal with the Yaller Shoes” number in this movie where he performs with Cyd Charisse and the male ensemble to Hermes Pan’s vigorous and playful choreography.

But what sets Mr. Dailey apart is not his dancing; it’s his screen personality. Astaire and Kelly were both famous for playing confident wise guys who turned out to be nice underneath the wisecracking. Dan Dailey always seemed more sensitive, even troubled, a guy who really wasn’t that confident, but whose tenderness was never hidden. He is never a card sharp or gamester on the make in this movie. He’s a frequently obtuse stumblebum, something Astaire and Kelly never played.

Cyd Charisse is a ballerina appearing at the casino where Mr. Dailey is losing his money. She’s a fish out of water here, just trying to make some dough herself in a world about which she knows nothing. She has several opportunities to dance in this movie, ballet, a jazzy “Frankie and Johnny” routine (narrated and sung by Sammy Davis, Jr.), and a very funny impromptu venture into burlesque. Having had too much to drink, she invades a parade of lady hoofers dressed in gaudy costumes representing “lucky charms”.

The plot is about as simple as they get. Dan Dailey, who believes in luck even though he doesn’t have any, grabs the hands of passing ladies, in lieu of a rabbit’s foot, while the roulette wheel spins. The only time it works is when he lunges for the hand of a passing Cyd Charisse. He insists she is his lucky charm.

She thinks he’s loony and angrily tries to discourage him, but when she relents to give the experiment a try, they discover that, yes, every time at any game he plays, if he’s holding her hand, he wins.

They start winning all over the place, up and down The Strip. Miss Charisse, at first attracted by the money, is secondly attracted by this new world she’s discovering outside the rehearsal hall. Her life thus far has been very disciplined, with no time for play. Now she sees how the other half lives, and she likes it. I like her line when, seated in a restaurant with him, a couple of huge steaks in front of them, she’s too excited to eat, even though as a dancer on a perpetual diet, she marvels, “I’ve been hungry for ten years.”

She is thirdly attracted by Dan Dailey, and it is to get his attention that she joins the burlesque kick line. His drooling over Cara Williams makes her jealous. Miss Williams belts out “I Refuse to Rock and Roll” (which was just beginning to beat down the drawbridge of popular music and storm the castle).

Sultry Lena Horne also sings, as does Frankie Laine. One of the fun things about the movie is the shameless name dropping. The Four Aces start the movie. We have cameos by Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, Vic Damone, Peter Lorre, Tony Martin (Cyd Charisse’s husband).

Paul Henried also has a minor role, and Jim Backus as the hotel manager gets to briefly bluster, and Jerry Colonna rips his otherworldly tenor on "Lucky Charm".

The marquees on the casinos -- many of the same ones we mentioned in Monday’s post on “Las Vegas Story”, give us a snapshot of the big names of the 1950s: Louis Prima and Keely Smith, Marge and Gower Champion, Danny Thomas, the Mills Brothers, Johnnie Ray, Donald O’Connor.

Dan Dailey finally notices more than just Cyd’s hand, particularly after a brief ballet (which features a game of volleyball in the middle of it), “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

He takes her home to his ranch to meet Mother, who is played by Agnes Moorehead. It’s always good see her in any movie, though there’s not much for her to do here. She’s feisty, opinionated, and likes the cut of Cyd’s jib because Cyd is a career woman with no intention of giving up her career.

I found myself distracted by Miss Moorehead’s hair color, a cross between tomato soup and the fires of hell. I guess when you use Technicolor, you have to shoot the works. Might explain the coral-colored convertible, too. Most of the film is painted in a rainbow of soft, lush colors.

The lucky couple’s luck continues at the ranch, where as they stroll around holding hands, the barren chickens lay eggs, and the cow gives birth, and a new oil well gushes forth black gold.

But we know the old axiom “lucky at cards, unlucky at love”. So, too here. When they fall in love, their luck at gambling leaves them. Will they stay together anyway? You can probably figure that out yourself. It’s refreshing that they compromise to spend six months in her world of dance and six months on the ranch.

Except for a couple of numbers, most of the songs performed in this movie are staged as nightclub acts, so there isn’t that jolting of reality for people who dislike musicals for that reason.

But I’ve never quite understood that. “People don’t burst into song in real life,” the movie musical curmudgeon might complain.

Sure they do. They’re called entertainers.

Las Vegas Story - 1952

2012-01-02T08:24:00.000-05:00

“Las Vegas Story” (1952) is like the seductively slow Mona Lisa smile of its star, Jane Russell: both sly and simple, secretive and open. It’s a noir that loses a lot of its noir shadows in the bleached, unblinking sunshine of the desert. Like the city for which it’s named, this movie does its own thing in its own way.

This week we adventure in Las Vegas -- with Jane Russell and Victor Mature today, and on Thursday we’ll have Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse in “Meet Me in Las Vegas” (1956). I hope it proves to be a lucky start to a lucky year. By the way, we once featured publicity for this movie at this previous post.

“Las Vegas Story” is a crime drama. Jane Russell is the wife of Vincent Price, a suave, well-heeled businessman from the east out here on a pleasure trip to try his luck. The couple are followed by a very handsome pest played by Brad Dexter, who though obviously attracted to Miss Russell, is even more attracted to the gaudy diamond necklace she wears.

The necklace will figure prominently in a murder.

There are a few subplots to the story that keep us entertained while we’re waiting for the crime to happen. So entertained that, in fact, the crime story seems almost like an afterthought. First, there is the back story about Jane Russell, who during the War was a singer in one of the casinos here. She’s here not to gamble, but to come to grips with her past.

“I have a feeling I interrupted a conversation between you and the desert,” Vincent Price tells her in what I think might be my favorite line from the movie. Perhaps it’s just his charming, sensitive delivery. He has broken away from the gaming tables briefly to notice she has wandered off by herself, alone outside on the terrace. They appear to have a comfortable, affectionate relationship, but something is nagging each of them that has nothing to do with the other.

Vincent Price, too focused on gambling to pay much attention to her anyway, indulgently allows her to sort out a few old ghosts, and suggests she go off on her own to explore the Strip.

“Go ahead. Get it out of your system,” he tells her.

She heads for her old hangout, a casino called The Last Chance. There’s Hoagy Carmichael at the piano, playing “I Get Along Without You Very Well.” I love when Hoagy’s at the piano when we walk in the door.

This is an exquisite scene. Jane Russell stands some distance away from where Hoagy is seated at his piano. He doesn't know she's there. At once we see she is remembering days gone by. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a flashback done with such sensitivity and such style. In a close-up on her face, we see her eyes wander around the room and then lock on a small table with an empty chair. From the chair, we go back to a close-up of her face, and her eyes gently move to something beyond the piano. We hear the echo of a woman’s voice singing. In another moment the camera shows us…

…she is watching herself. A younger, happier woman, with longer 1940s style hair. The room is full of GIs, and a large flag hangs on a back wall. Victor Mature is seated at the empty chair, dressed in an Army uniform, adoring her.

We go back to Jane’s expression as she remembers. Her face registers the wonder of recognition, the co-mingling pleasure and pain of memory. Usually in a flashback scene, we are dropped into the past, and when the scene is over, we get wrenched back to the present. Here, the camera keeps shifting from the scene to her face watching it. We never completely enter the flashback; we always have one foot in the present, just as she is firmly rooted in the present but cannot let go of the past. She is stuck between two worlds emotionally, and in this scene, literally. This marvelous tactic makes the memory seem like real-time.

What Jane Russell does just with her eyes, and with the slightest flicker of sublte expression is so impressive. This scene is a skillful union between a starlet who rose to fame on her voluptuous figure but who clearly really could act, and a director, Robert Stevenson, who with admirable delicacy, pays more attention to her face than her chest.

The movie was produced by Howard Hughes, second to none for his famous appreciation and promotion of her décolleté. While we have the obligatory costuming and camera angles that showcase Miss Russell’s physical attributes (including a gratuitous shower scene, and the demonstration that she wears nothing but heavy makeup to bed), there is still more even more here about her broken heart.

Victor Mature, and his perpetual grimace, is the tough police detective whose beat is the Strip. We gather Jane was supposed to wait for him until he came back from the War, but didn’t. They are equally delighted and distressed to see each other again, and Mature becomes particularly bitter. He also reflects on his former self:

“That guy was a chump. He believed that if he left his hat or his girl at a table they’d be there when he got back.”

A couple of subplots on Mr. Mature’s side include the teenaged would-be bride and groom he has to hold in detention until the parents show up to stop the quickie wedding. There is also the playful antagonism with his boss, the sheriff played as his comic foil by Jay C. Flippen.

The Last Chance, where Jane used to sing during the War also keeps a couple of side stories on the back burner for us: Hoagy and his pal, played by Will Wright. Mr. Wright, the hangdog proprietor/house detective of other movies here plays a floorwalker who used own The Last Chance, but lost it in a bad business move. The stern new owner, played by Robert J. Wilke, comes down hard on his staff. Hoagy hates him, and Wright chokes on his humiliation.

Which is something we have to consider when this same new owner ends up dead.

Vincent Price has the most dramatic reason to kill him. Mr. Price is an embezzler, wanted back east, and takes his wife’s necklace to buy himself credit at the gaming tables. When he loses big at The Last Chance, Mr. Wilke takes no pity on him.

But what of Brad Dexter, perpetually tailing Miss Russell in and out of cocktail lounges and swimming pools? He turns out to be an insurance investigator, and maybe Jane and Vincent have something cooking between them to scam The City of Second Chances?

Lots of suspects, and an unresolved love story in the middle of them.

The movie is capped by a nifty chase scene between an old woody station wagon and a helicopter.

The car is not unlike the old woody rumbling through the Nevada desert in “Split Second” (1953) seen in this post, and another reminder of that film is the abandoned military installation where the final confrontation between helicopter and car occurs. I don’t know if any atomic testing went on here, too, but it’s deadly eerie.

Victor Mature is in the helicopter, which buzzes the car and follows it right through an empty hangar. The murderer has taken a hostage, and tries to escape in a cat and mouse game with the dogged Mr. Mature, in an abandoned wooden control tower. There is no dialogue in this exciting scene, just the sound of footsteps, gunfire, and the howling wind from the desert. A tumbleweed rudely bounces off the head of a slain figure in the dust.

The crime story may have not a lot of depth to it, but at times this is a visually stunning film. Along with the desert, and miles of footage of Jane Russell, we get the obligatory shots of the neon casino signs embroidering the night sky: The Golden Nugget, The Pioneer Club, a montage of all the old casinos and hotels. The Thunderbird, the Flamingo. The sign at the Union Pacific station where Jane Russell and Vincent Price arrive in town, not to be outdone, tells us Las Vegas is the “streamlined city of the west.”

The movie ends on an upbeat note with another of Hoagy’s songs. Not very noir, but Vegas makes its own rules.

Come back for more Vegas and more songs on Thursday in “Meet Me in Las Vegas” with Dan Dailey as a most unlucky gambler, until he grasps the delicate hand of dancer Cyd Charisse.

Happy New Year

2011-12-26T07:42:00.000-05:00

I hope the holidays are going well for one and all, and I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you a Happy New Year, as I won't be posting the rest of this week. Thank you most sincerely for the pleasure of your company this year.

We'll start the new year off next week with a visit to Las Vegas, with two very different movies: "Las Vegas Story" (1952) a crime drama featuring Jane Russell, Victor Mature, and Vincent Price. Then we'll take it on the lighter side with the musical "Meet Me in Las Vegas" (1956) with Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse. I hope you can join us. I'll meet you by the slot machines.

For now, a final holiday offering from a very jazzy cartoon Ella Fitzgerald. Remember to scroll down to the bottom of the page to mute the Christmas music so you can hear the video.

See you next week.

Remember the Night - 1940

2011-12-22T07:47:00.000-05:00

“Remember the Night” (1940) is a polar opposite to “My Reputation” (1946), covered here in Monday’s post. The latter film feels darker in tone and in cinematography. It featured flashes of noir. The characters were well-to-do upper crust. It was wartime. Conversely, “Remember the Night” brings us out of the Depression, among simpler, homespun people. It is screwball comedy when it’s not frankly sentimental, and is a much lighter film in tone as well as on the set. The linchpin between the two movies is Barbara Stanwyck, who with ease can be either a shy upper class widow, or a petty thief from the streets.

There’s a lot to recommend the film, the Preston Sturges script with its absurdities, Fred MacMurray’s average-joe-as-hero, and especially Beulah Bondi. She played mothers most often, and she had a transcendent quality on screen, at the same time utterly realistic. She had this in common with Barbara Stanwyck. The emotional electricity each was able to bring to her work is even greater in their scenes together.

Because Miss Bondi played mothers so often, and was so recognizable a character actress, and had that trademark quiver to her voice, it might be easy to dismiss her, unless you watch her carefully. Especially those large, expressive eyes. Her years of stage work (she came to the movies in her early 40s) shows in her ability to play off her scene partner rather than the camera -- which is what a lot of movie stars did who did not have theater experience. Spring Byington, who also had a career of playing mothers, had a lighter, more comic touch, and she could be accused of sometimes playing a stereotype. That’s because comedy is often born of parody.

But Beulah Bondi is entirely genuine. You see her in this film and recognize the mother she is supposed to be, fluttering in the kitchen and fussing over her son. She is a woman of hard work, restlessness, tension. She snaps at the hired boy. She bends over backwards to make the stranger Barbara Stanwyck welcome in her home, and when her son Fred MacMurray plays the piano and sings the wrong line in “Suwannee River”, she mouths the correct word and shakes her head with disapproval, not angry, but embarrassed that her boy and his $14.00 worth of piano lessons has let her down in front of company, all the while adoring him at the same time.

You have the sense that she has lived a very hard life, but managed to keep a good outlook in spite of it.

Preston Sturges reportedly was not entirely happy with the film. He felt that his screwball comedy was turned into sentimental schmaltz, and at times it was. But “Remember the Night” has become for us, in a more cynical era, a wonderful holiday tradition. It could not be so without the sentiment. That it is equal parts screwball only makes it better.

We are coming out of the Depression in 1940. The war is going on in Europe and Asia, but you’d never know it from this movie. When Stanwyck and MacMurray travel cross-country by car, they encounter a WPA sign announcing yet another road construction project -- that never seems to be completed. But it was such projects that helped to drag us out of the depths of the Depression some seven years earlier.

Barbara Stanwyck has her own way of dealing with hard times. She’s a thief, and has walked out of a jewelry store with a diamond bracelet on her arm. She’s caught, and Fred MacMurray is the prosecutor in court.

Her defense attorney, played by Willard Robertson (who had really been a lawyer in younger days), engages in some magnificent and utterly pompous courtroom theatrics, which much have been a blast for him. He contends she was hypnotized by the sparkle in the jewels and forgot what she was doing, which in modern medical terms is called schizophrenia. Yeah, sure it is. He makes P.T. Barnum look like a Presbyterian minister.

The case, which is tried on Christmas Eve, is postponed until early January. Since she has no money and can’t raise bail, she’s doomed to spend Christmas in the hoosegow. Good guy Fred feels bad, and pays Fat Mike the bail bondsmen to get her out for the holiday.

He thinks his good Samaritan deed ends there, but it does not. Oh, but it’s a tricky world full of people with dirty minds. Such is the case with Fat Mike, who thinks Fred wanted Miss Stanwyck free so he can receive sexual favors. (“He’s got a mind like a sewer,” Fred says.) When Fat Mike drags her to Fred’s apartment, she thinks the same.

Fred “Snowflake” Toones is Mr. MacMurray’s dimwitted houseman, not a great role but unfortunately typical leavings for Snowflake. His role as a cowboy in Gene Autry’s “The Singing Cowboy” discussed here was better.

Snowflake’s packing up Fred’s stuff and trying to hustle him out of the apartment because Fred’s supposed to drive to Indiana to visit his mother for Christmas. Stumped with what to do with Stanwyck, who is more amused than relieved that he has no designs on her, Fred takes her to a supper club for a bite to eat while they figure out where she can go.

He requests the orchestra play “Back Home Again in Indiana” and she and Fred dance to the really lovely rendition by a female vocalist unknown to me, backed by a male quartet. Stanwyck is also from Indiana, and the thought that she might be lying when she announces this is quickly dismissed by her excitement. Barbara Stanwyck really owned a scene and could make you believe anything.

It has been years since she’s seen her mother -- she ran away when a teen -- and Fred suggests he drop her off at her mother’s house for the holiday and pick her up on the drive back. She’s flustered by the idea, and there is a wondrous expression, anxiety mixed with longing, in her dark eyes.

I guess songs about our home states do that to us. Look how Jean Arthur completely lost it during her tipsy rendition of “The Iowa Corn Song” in “A Foreign Affair”, discussed here.

Doah! You can just sense a future trivia post about state songs in the movies, can’t you? This stream of consciousness writing is going to be the end of me one of these days.

I’m pretty sure “All Hail to Massachusetts” has never been in a movie.

Mr. MacMurray and Miss Stanwyck take the car across a handful of states without any national highway system at all -- that didn’t come until the 1950s -- and study the paper map when they get lost. See how much fun life was before GPS? I admit, I’m still a map person. I got a kick out of the scene where they have to pull up to a general store/post office to read the name of the town on the building so they can find out where they are.

I was on a train once, traveling through a dark upper New York State night, when, half asleep in my berth, I felt the train stop. I looked out the window to read the name off the train depot to see where we were, but we had not stopped at a depot. All was dark. All except a distant enormous red KODAK in block letters. Ah, I thought to myself. Rochester.

GPS? I spit on your GPS.

However, much as I admire the freewheeling adventure of our two travelers, I am invariably made freezing when I watch this movie because they travel for hundreds of miles in the winter with their car windows rolled down. Now, I know this was filmed on a nice toasty Hollywood soundstage, but jeez-louise. I have driven short distances with no heat and it’s a challenge to the soul. Several hundred miles would be a feat, I fear, beyond my endurance. You see, we here in the northern climes do not go to the trouble and expense of heating our homes for the ambience. We do it to keep from dying. Hypothermia also occurs in cars driving 700-plus miles in freezing temperatures with the windows open.

Especially when they get lost, tired, and decide to sleep in the car. With the windows open.

It’s a cozy shot as they wake up to a cow’s big old face in their faces. At least the cow had a nice warm barn full of other cows in which to spend the night.

The farmer hauls them before the local judge for trespassing and destruction of property, and when they flee justice and become fugitives, MacMurray gets a taste of what life has been like for Stanwyck -- always ducking, living by her wits, and even enjoying the taste of rebellion

The visit at Stanwyck’s mother’s house brings the merriment to a screeching halt and explains why she came to a wayward end. It’s a good set-up scene where she and MacMurray stand on the steps of the home of her mother and stepfather. They rap at the door and hear dogs barking, and then a light goes on. We see her mother only as an eerie dark figure, lit from behind. When we first see her stony face, we can appreciate Stanwyck’s nervousness.

Her mother, a cold, hard woman, well played by Georgia Caine, revives old complaints and resentments against her daughter, who never measured up to her rigid standards. Fred gets Barbara out of there in a most gallant way, and takes her to spend Christmas with his family.

It’s a different story at his mom’s house. Here the idealized home and hearth kicks any rebellion out of Stanwyck and she is transformed by the kindness shown her, and by the gentleness of these country kinfolk. Along with Mother Bondi, Elizabeth Patterson (another stage-trained actress you might remember as Mrs. Trumbull on “I Love Lucy”) plays Fred’s spinster aunt.

The mop-haired Sterling Holloway plays the dimwitted hired boy, Willie. You may still think of the voice of Winnie the Pooh when you hear him. We get to hear his mellow tenor on the old chestnut, “A Perfect Day”.

They do all the things Stanwyck would roll her eyes over and ridicule with a cutting remark if she were telling the story, but she’s not telling it. She’s living it, and we see her shy disbelief, almost as if she senses she’s entered a happy Twilight Zone. When Fred plays the piano, we see Stanwyck sitting very still, but rolling her eyes over Fred, and the room where the ladies and Willie are an audience as they string a popcorn chain for the tree. Stanwyck is drinking in the scene around her, like a person removed from it, but astounded to discover she is really part of it.

This still, silent, powerful acting is reprised when she is taken to her room. After Miss Bondi has left her alone, Stanwyck leans over her suitcase on the bed and sinks her chin into her shoulder, looking all around the room pensively, curiously, with almost a note of humor we think, until we see there are tears in her eyes.

Fred, being a square shooter, tells his mother what kind of person Stanwyck really is, and Beulah Bondi, the forgiving type, makes being extra nice to Barbara her new project. This includes gift giving the next morning around the tree. Stanwyck is part of the family by the end of the week.

A cute scene that again, turns unexpectedly tender, when Aunt Elizabeth Patterson hog-ties Stanwyck into a corset (having fun with the Scarlett O’Hara scene of a year before?), and lets her wear a long gown of what was supposed to be part of her own wedding trousseau. We see a stack of letters tied with a ribbon packed away with the dress, and we see that the spinster aunt has been disappointed in love.

Barbara spent New Year’s Eve in a fancy big city hotel ballroom in “My Reputation”. Here it’s a barn dance, and when the band leader/square dance caller checks his pocket watch and sees that it’s midnight, the fiddlers and such launch into “Auld Lang Syne” with the best of them, and paper streamers float down from the hayloft.

I love how Sterling Holloway leaps into the arms of a very tall girl to get his kiss.

Mother Bondi sees the attraction between her boy and the petty thief houseguest, whose romance is egged on by her Cupid-playing sister. She tries to gently put a stop to what might be the end of her good boy’s career if he gets tangled up with a bad girl.

It’s a good scene when she levels with Stanwyck. Barbara is first embarrassed that Beulah Bondi knows the truth about her. Stanwyck, always on the ball, gets the message and reassures Miss Bondi. Look at the shot where Bondi stands behind Stanwyck, who stands at her mirror. Stanwyck conveys with a comb touched, as if frozen there, to her cheek, her awkwardness, her shame, and her sorrow to find that she really has no future. Not with Fred, not with any nice guy. Bondi leans over her with a hug, equally agonized.

One the ride home they drive through Canada.

I know they joked about not wanting to drive through Pennsylvania again because that’s where they took it on the lam from the farmer with the shotgun and the judge, but really? That’s a heck of a detour to make. Through a much colder country. Lake-effect snow. With the car windows rolled down.

Nice shot of them by icy Niagara Falls though. We talked about Niagara Falls in the movies in this previous post. And a lovely ambiguous remark by Stanwyck when MacMurray, who wants to marry her says he’ll take her to Niagara Falls on their honeymoon.

“But we’re there now, Darling.”

Fade to black. Quick, before the censors find out what she means.

Of course, another reason for Canada is that Fred suggests since they are out of the US, she could jump bail and he practically invites her to become a fugitive. She wants to go back and face the music. Then when the trial resumes, he tries to throw it, but she won’t let him to that, either. She pleads guilty.

We don’t know what her sentence is going to be, but they’re both pretty sure they won’t be seeing each other for a while. We’re also pretty sure Fred will wait for her.

“Will you stand beside me and hold my hand when they sentence me?” Barbara asks, and again, it is a kind of Christmas miracle that we believe her helpless anxiety, this woman who could be so tough in other movies.

Christmas is a lovely illusion, and is probably best appreciated when we let it be. Reality is for January.

Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Beulah Bondi, and Sterling Holloway reprised their roles in the Lux Radio Theater presentation of this movie March 25, 1940. Have a listen here at the Internet Archive, now in public domain, or download it free to your computer. Scroll down to “Remember the Night”.

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and may the peace of the season be yours.

My Reputation - 1946

2011-12-19T06:05:00.001-05:00

This week we have A Barbara Stanwyck Christmas with “My Reputation” (1946) and “Remember the Night” (1940). When you count in “Christmas in Connecticut” (1945), which we previously covered here, it seems Miss Stanwyck became one of the leaders in the Christmas movie genre.

A young relative of mine, 10 years old to be exact, in between mouthfuls of chocolate cake, informed me quite solemnly that new Christmas movies were not as good as “classic movies”. She was so firm in her opinion I could not help but agree (she doesn’t know anything about this blog), pleased with the flourish in her use of the word “classic.” She is as familiar with “It’s a Wonderful Life” as any old movie buff.

She could not, however, precisely tell me why old Christmas movies are better, though in time she will likely come up with several reasons. She’s a rather analytical type of person. Don’t know where she gets it.

For my part, I think one of the chief reasons “classic” Christmas movies are so powerful is that, ironically, they are not all about Christmas. Christmas is only the backdrop to a collage of story lines, subplots, and images, sometimes only a scene or two in a movie that otherwise deals with non-holiday drama.

To be sure, Christmas comes with its own drama, which is why many people are stressed out this time of year. It is a checklist of tasks we must accomplish. It is a recurring nightmare of family feuds. Annually, we seem to fail to measure up to a goal of spiritual, and temporal completeness.

I think modern Christmas movies, TV-movies, etc. are less powerful and satisfying than classic films because they tend to put this holiday frenzy as the crux of the story, instead of allowing it to be the backdrop. As every classic film fan can tell you, we notice the backdrops. We study them. They are important just where they are. Bedford Falls is the backdrop; James Stewart and his stupendous meltdown and the reasons for it are the story. But through the telling, we know all about Bedford Falls, and it becomes a character in the movie. The Christmas climax is fitting because Christmas is not the nightmare; it’s just the time the nightmare occurs.

Another way to look at it: let’s say Christmas is the painted backdrop of a stage set. The actors perform in front of it. However, if you make Christmas the focus of the story, i.e., it’s like moving the backdrop downstage closer to the audience. The actors are now performing behind it and we never see them.

By keeping Christmas in the background, the classic Christmas movie becomes so much more meaningful than the trite “finding the true meaning of Christmas” or having “the best Christmas ever” stories we have today. The classic Christmas film is about life and death, prison and sickness, lies and deceit, and never getting what you really want. Then the Christmas scene -- like the thunderous ringing of church bells or the clash of symbols that accompany it, makes us feel triumphant in a colossal way, because we have discovered again we are human and survived being human, and have forgiven others for being human.

Christmas movies made during the early 1940s have a special tension to them. World War II was, shall we say, a rather bigger impediment to holiday serenity than standing in a long checkout line. We know, just as the characters know, this may be their last Christmas together. Ever. Or, maybe not. Depending on the role of the dice. There is no way for us to replicate that dramatic tension today.

I guess it’s about time I got to the movie.

“My Reputation” deals with a woman’s adjustment to widowhood and then opening herself up to a new romantic relationship. Christmas slides in at the end of the movie like a runner rounding third base and stealing home.

Barbara Stanwyck plays a new widow with two sons, ages 12 and 14, played by Scotty Beckett with his customary easy charm, and Billy Cooper. Cooper made only a handful of films, but his portrayal of the sensitive older son is quite nice. The boys have little idea of the horrors of their father’s longtime illness or their mother’s devoted care giving. They will be equally ignorant of how lonely she is, and how lost she is now that her social position seems to have changed with her husband’s passing.

Her mother hammers this home to her. Played with her usual frank, thoroughness of character, Lucille Watson is the dragon lady, Miss Stanwyck’s upper crust mother to whom duty and honor are substitutes for joy and happiness. She has been a professional widow for 25 years, and has worn black every day like a uniform. She expects Barbara to do the same now.

Note the hanky Miss Watson sniffles into. Even that is edged in black.

Miss Watson gets a wry, comic scene where she describes a friend’s fight with the local ration board about getting a larger gasoline allotment because her luxury car only gets 9 miles to the gallon. Her indignant friend, another woman from “good society” complains, “They’re just doing everything they can to break our spirits. It’s pure class prejudice.”

Ah, the rich resenting calls for equity put on them by a democratic society in wartime, calling it class prejudice. Sound familiar?

“Stick to your rights,” Lucille Watson tells her, “This is still America.” Yes, but whose?

Another footnote to the war is the scene where Stanwyck shops at the local market with her ration book. In this post last year about “Love Letters” (1945), we noted that not a lot of wartime movies showed the omnipresent ration books, but here we get to see Stanwyck flipping through hers. $1.38 for a pound of bologna, plus 24 points. You could have all the money in the world, but if you didn’t have 24 points, either in the form of stamps or little round fiber-celluloid tokens (like game pieces, red for meat and fats, blue for processed foods), you went home empty. (Note, this movie was made during the war, but not released until 1946.)

Stanwyck shrinks from the horror of her bossy mother’s code of behavior. With her sons about to leave for boarding school, she suffers from the anxiety of being nobody’s wife, nobody’s mother, with her only role left of being her mother’s dutiful, and dutifully spiritless, daughter.

Barbara Stanwyck plays, or rather underplays, this woman with impressive sensitivity. Her long career showcased the enormous range of her talent, but strong women became her forte. When she had to, she could chew scenery with the best of them. This role required a different tone, and she demonstrates her intelligent reading of a character, her tasteful delineation of what is appropriate.

She gently plays a gentle woman, and hits all the right notes. A scene early in the film where she reads a letter written to her by her deceased husband is particularly moving. She exhibits a lot of control in her shaky voice, as well as through the movie when she has moments of nearly breaking down. It is never forced, it is always genuine.

Luckily for her, Eve Arden is her pal. She tries to buck her up and encourages her to stand up to her mother, but it’s a long, slow learning curve for the emotionally brittle Stanwyck. Miss Arden provides her customary sensible support, but there’s not a lot of wisecracking for her in the film.

Jerome Cowan, however, who we saw in “Beloved Enemy” here, leaps off the screen in a small role as the husband of a friend who makes passes at Stanwyck. He’s the smarmy fellow who can’t keep his hands off her when his wife isn’t looking, and when he offers to drive her home, we can foresee better than Stanwyck does that he means her no good. A brief tussle in the front seat, she gets away from him, but there’s no comeuppance for this creep. Cowan plays him with the right sort of grinning lust and self confidence.

Thoroughly shaken, Miss Stanwyck is more upset by the prospect of being alone than being assaulted by a friend because she is now “a woman on the loose.” Soon, she will have a new worry: how to be open to a new love when he shows up.

This turns out to be George Brent, who meets her on the ski slope. Eve Arden and her husband have taken Stanwyck to Lake Tahoe. The foursome get along swell, but the twosome is harder to evolve. Stanwyck is reticent to take up so soon with another man, despite her loneliness, and Brent is too much of a free-spirited bachelor to want to be tied to anyone, especially a woman who requires such deft wooing. Wooing is not Mr. Brent’s forte. He comes from the grab-them-and-plant-a-forceful-kiss school of romance. And if she is so insulting as to struggle, ridicule her for her childishness.

Some have criticized Brent for being wooden, not just in this role but period. I can’t really fault him for this performance, though, because we don’t get too much of his side of the story of this relationship. The movie isn’t really about them, it’s about her. At the end of the film, when Brent decides he wants to make a commitment, he’s not really believable. It seems too sudden a transformation. I don’t think Brent can be entirely blamed for a script that doesn’t let us see his struggle.

One scene between them doesn’t work at all. They have known each other for a while, and she comes to visit him in the apartment he is using while a friend is away. They sit on the couch and he attempts to seduce her with an unwanted martini and Jerome Cowan’s patented pawing technique. This does nothing for Brent’s role as the designated hero in this film.

Contrast it with the famous and astounding erotic scene between Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur in “The More the Merrier”, discussed here. He has his hands all over her, but she is not unwilling as Stanwyck is in this scene; rather she is only awkward. She is a reserved and prudish woman awakening to the wonderful world of sexual arousal, and McCrea’s perseverance is softened by the comedy accompanying the wooing. In the scene between Brent and Stanwyck, we have none of that, and it’s a shame, because Stanwyck had a similar quality to Miss Arthur’s ability to play both drama and comedy at the very same time.

A funny note about Eve Arden’s relationship with her husband, however -- I think this is the only time I can remember seeing a man and woman lying prone in bed together in a film of this era. Granted, she’s bundled up because of the freezing cold of their mountain cabin, and he is reading and giving her only minimal attention. Also, he calls her “my pet”, which is about as romantic a term of endearment as calling her “you pinhead”, in my book. Still, there are four legs in that bed, not one of them on the floor. Chalk that up to some kind of record.

The climax of the movie comes at Christmastime, when our everyday lives become suddenly more intense due to the enormity of tradition, and the ties that bind.

Stanwyck invites Brent to her home to meet her boys and share in the festivities, which features Eve Arden and her husband, the sassy housekeeper played by Esther Dale, the family friend and attorney played by Warner Anderson -- who is barracking to be the new man in Stanwyck’s life, and her disapproving mother.

When they gather around the piano to sing carols, George Brent is the odd man out, watching them and not even trying to fit in. More could be done with this scene, but we get the point.

Stanwyck gets serious that whirlwind week between Christmas and New Year’s, but when the boys, home from school, hear gossip about their mother at a party, we see that Lucille Watson’s warnings about her reputation have come back to haunt her. She has a nice scene where she confronts her so-called friends.

Janis Wilson and Ann Todd play friends of the boys. Young Miss Wilson only made a handful of films, but she was terrific in her debut film “Now Voyager”. Young Miss Todd had a longer career, and we saw her in “Roughly Speaking” here. The inevitable Bess Flowers also plays one of the society friends at the party, but then she always shows up everywhere. I think we’ve mentioned before she has the biggest “walk-on” career of just about anybody.

I think I ran into her at the grocery store the other day.

At their own New Year’s Eve party, Stanwyck and Brent get the paper streamer treatment, the conga line, and the champagne, and when he drops the bad news that’s he’s being sent overseas, she wants to follow him to his point of embarkation, New York City, to spend all the time she can with him. Her mother, in a sensible and reconciling gesture, takes responsibility for her sons when they run away because their mother is a floozy, and Stanwyck comes down to earth, content to wave to Brent on the train platform and not go with him.

A nice touch to the end is when the train pulls out and a group of sailors hanging out the train windows whistle at her. It may do more for her morale about getting back in circulation than anything Brent has done the entire movie. She gives them a shy salute. Her sense of humor, and her sense of control, are back now.

Have a look here at Laura’s recent take on this movie at Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings. Come back Thursday for Barbara Stanwyck’s turn as a crook about to be reformed by Fred MacMurray one Christmas week in “Remember the Night.”

Off Topic - Blog Tour

2011-12-18T12:30:00.000-05:00

Update on my blog tour for my novel "Beside the Still Waters" - a few more stops here:

Interview at Blogher here.

Interview at Broowaha here.

Guest blog post - How to Write by the Seat of Your Pants - at AllVoices here.

World Without Blow Dryers - Answers

2011-12-15T07:32:00.000-05:00

The answers to our screen caps in Monday’s post “In a World Without Blow Dryers” -

1. - That’s Cary Grant toweling Rita Hayworth’s tresses in “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939), which we discussed here.

2. That’s Bing Crosby toweling Alexis Smith’s tresses in “Here Comes the Groom” (1951), which we discussed here.

3. That’s Ruth Donnelly (the perennial wisecracking best pal) toweling Jean Arthur’s tresses in “More Than a Secretary” (1936), which I hope to cover sometime in the new year.

4. That Jessica “Jessie” Grayson scrubbing Teresa Wright’s scalp in “The Little Foxes” (1941). I always loved this scene. She does such a mercilessly thorough job. It’s fun to watch. Miss Wright may have been half drowned by the end of it, but she had very clean hair. For the rest of her life, probably.

In a World Without Blow Dryers

2011-12-12T06:14:00.000-05:00

Time for more inane screen cap trivia. Who in these scenes has the wet hair, and who is doing the towel-drying of same? From what movie?

Answers on Thursday. Now go wash your hair and get somebody else to towel dry it for you. It's the movie star way.

Or if you're too lazy to wash it yourself, you can always get somebody to do that, too:

Off Topic - Blog Tour

2011-12-10T08:16:00.000-05:00

This is just a brief update on a blog tour I've undertaken this week for my novel, "Beside the Still Waters."

I have a guest post up here at "All the Days Of" blog.

And interviews here at: Blogcritics,

Review from Here,

And Examiner.com.

The blog tour will continue this coming week.

Also, anyone who signs up for my mailing list this month - see the sidebar - will receive a coupon code for a free copy of my ebook "Myths of the Modern Man" from Smashwords.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

Uneasy Victors PT 4 - "Judgment at Nuremberg" - 1961

2011-12-08T06:32:00.000-05:00

“Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961) is a perfect union of script, stage, and screen. In few other films is dialogue so completely depended upon to move the action, tell the back story, and dramatize the events. That is this is accomplished with such graceful simplicity in this movie is its most astonishing and crowning achievement.

This is our last entry in our series on “Uneasy Victors” in which we examine Hollywood films tackling American involvement, and American mood, in Occupied Germany after World War II. Our intro to this series is here. We discuss “A Foreign Affair” (1948) here, and “The Big Lift” (1950) here. Yesterday, we marked the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which brought our entry into World War II, and our eventual role as uneasy victors.

The startling beginning to this film serves as a metaphor for the movie and our series: the German martial tune “Wenn wir marshieren” is sung by a male chorus, of whom we might imagine to be soldiers. Then the footage showing the concrete swastika on the Nuremberg stadium being exploded to nothing.

But the regime we had defeated, and the people who lived in that world, did not vanish into nothing. They were before us now, real, alive, and carrying more baggage from the recent terrible past than most of them wanted to admit. And we find ourselves at a sudden full stop. The warrior's drive it took to win the war must be muted to a stateman's diplomacy.

As in the two other movies we discussed, rubble plays a big part in our discovery of Occupied Germany. Spencer Tracy’s first line in the movie, as he is being driven through Nuremberg says, “I didn’t know it was so bad.”

Spencer Tracy is a semi-retired American judge from Maine, who is assigned to head the tribunal in the Judges Trial phase of the Nuremberg Trials which served to try and punish Nazi officials. All the big names and the higher-ups have had their day in court, and this new trial before us focuses on lesser figures. They are smaller fish.

The Germans, the Europeans, and the Americans back home are growing weary of the trials and losing interest. There is something at stake, however, we come to understand, in just letting bygones be bygones. As prosecuting attorney Richard Widmark sarcastically retorts to rumblings that he should just drop the case, “What was the war all about?”

There is also a danger in proceeding with this trial. One of the accused men is a famous German judge who worked diligently for democracy in the Weimar Republic before Hitler took power. Played by Burt Lancaster with enigmatic dignity, he has a long career of distinguished and honorable work, and is a hero to his people. It will not be easy to try and convict him.

In the middle of the trial, we hear that the Russians, our allies in World War II, have blockaded Berlin in an attempt to get the allies to relinquish the capitol to their control. The Berlin Airlift is about to begin -- which takes us back to “The Big Lift”. We are undecided as to the wisdom of continuing to punish the Germans -- we may need them in a new war against the Soviet Union.

This movie, then, is about compromise. When do to it. When not to. What are the consequences? There are always consequences.

The ensemble cast is well chosen and effective in every minute detail, right down to Tracy’s household butler and housekeeper, played by Ben Wright and Virginia Christine. They are a husband and wife, humble, slightly nervous about pleasing “Your Honor”, because without this job they would starve. They represent the average German citizen who has lost much in the war, who are not responsible for Nazi atrocities -- but who are not entirely convinced that the atrocities are as bad as everyone says they are.

A young William Shatner plays Tracy’s aide during the trial, who swears in the witnesses. One is struck by his ease and his strong screen presence, even in playing scenes with the magnificent veteran Tracy.

Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift play victims called to give testimony. Both give the performances of their careers.

Marlene Dietrich plays a role completely opposite to the sneering cabaret singer of “A Foreign Affair”. Here she is an aristocrat, proud, dignified, but bitter that she and her kind should be held on the same level as Nazis.

Most especially powerful is the Oscar-winning performance of Maximillian Schell as the defense attorney. He is young, intelligent, impassioned, and desperately tries to save his hero -- Burt Lancaster, from disgrace and dishonor and a prison sentence, in any way he can.

But most evident through this film, though we do not see them, are the director, Stanley Kramer, and the writer, Abby Mann. Mann’s script was originally produced on TV in the acclaimed series “Playhouse 90”, which we discussed in this previous post. “Playhouse 90” also gave us “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and “The Miracle Worker”, and never was television so good.

I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that this film is a union of script and stage, and when I say stage in this case I mean stagecraft. The “Playhouse 90” version (Maximillian Schell and Werner Klemperer reprise their roles here), because of the restrictions of early television was very much like a stage play in the sense that the action was static, one set with simple camera placement.

Though there are some scenes outside the courtroom, the Director Kramer wisely chose to keep this television-style tightness to his movie. It shows up with profound effect even in the smallest scenes. There is a scene where Richard Widmark visits the apartment of Judy Garland and her husband to plead for her to testify. She is reluctant. There are many old ghosts haunting her. As Widmark and Miss Garland -- he in his officer’s uniform and she looking like a bedraggled hausfrau in her bathrobe and unkempt hair -- stand in heated discussion -- in the foreground we have her husband facing us, his back to them. We see his tortured expression. The trio is an artists’ composition for the camera.

What were restrictions on television became style in this movie, and used to extremely dramatic effect. Though most of the action takes place in the courtroom in an exchange of dialogue between the witness and the attorney, the camera is always, always moving. We slide in a slow, graceful dance around the courtroom, as the camera probes the many uniformed personnel. The translators, the guards, the gallery of observers, the stony-faced defendants, and nervous testifiers in the witness stand.

We travel 360 degrees all around the flinching expression of a confused, distressed Montgomery Clift -- who seems like a completely different man to how he appeared in “The Big Lift” 11 years before -- before his disfiguring car accident and years of drug and alcohol abuse. Truly, he was a different man.

We travel all around the chiseled features of Burt Lancaster, moved at last to speak though through much of the trial sits in silent protest. The stage play sets him in his witness box, delivering his lines with his precise speech, but the movie camera compliments the stagecraft and lets us get in really close to see the flashing of his haunted eyes.

It would be a good lesson for young filmmakers who these days seem to have almost uniformly adopted the quick edited, jerky camera habit to see what mature and elegant cinematography looks like.

The most magnificent CGI or special effect is not more dramatic than a slow, intimate close-up on human tears.

We see each person with a headset, all intently listening and pausing before they respond, because we do not understand each other.

There are four defendants in this trial, all German judges who are accused of crimes against humanity. Two particular cases are presented before us: one in which Montgomery Clift was forcibly sterilized in retaliation because his father was a member of the Communist Party and his family did not support Hitler, and his brothers beat up a bunch of Brown Shirts harassing them.

The other case is about Judy Garland’s friendship with an elderly Jewish man, a friend of her family. When she was a girl on her own after her parents died, he continued to visit her and bring her gifts and comfort, and advice. She was sentenced to prison for breaking the law that said a German (Christian) girl could have no intimate relations with a Jewish man. Her defense was that her relations with him were not intimate, and that he was only like a kind uncle to her. The law in Germany at the time stipulated that any contact was forbidden. She was imprisoned, and the Jewish man was executed.

The judge at her trial was Burt Lancaster.

Maximillian Schell’s defense of the accused judges ranges from brutally tearing apart the witnesses’ claims, to an even more insidious tactic -- the time-worn defense of merely following orders. But both these tactics are brilliant and thrust to the heart of the American conscience -- our own uncomfortable conscience at being occupiers.

In the first instance, he demonstrates that Mr. Clift was sterilized not for political reasons, but for medical reasons. He was tested and judged to be mentally incompetent, and for this reason was required to be sterilized for the betterment of the state. Herr Schell points out a very similar stance in American law, in a judgment written by renown United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in an era when eugenics was popular.

The camera pauses to let us see this stick in the throats of Spencer Tracy and Richard Widmark.

In the case of Judy Garland, Schell breaks her down and twists her words to make her and her relationship with her elderly benefactor appear dirty. At this point, we watch Schell raging, barking in profile, while behind him in the shot, an outraged Burt Lancaster can take no more. He jumps to his feet and with all his authority, silences the young protégé with rebuke.

We have already been clued into Lancaster’s moral righteousness. Schell has outlined his exemplary judiciary career. But we get a personal, dramatic taste from Marlene Dietrich.

Spencer Tracy discovers that the mansion in which the US Army has billeted him during this trial was confiscated from Dietrich, the wife of a German general who was previously tried and executed. Having usurped her home, Mr. Tracy feels most intimately the role of the Uneasy Victor.

“There’s one thing about Americans,” Widmark bitterly remarks, “We’re not cut out to be occupiers. We’re new at it, and we’re not very good at it.”

Tracy and Marlene meet socially, and he is intrigued with her soignée class and intelligence. She is an aristocrat, the daughter and the wife of career military men. She invites him to a concert, proud to show another side, a cultured, genteel side of German life. Over the strains of Beethoven, Spencer Tracy looks around at the audience, wondering what is in the hearts and minds of these conquered people so bravely looking beyond their recent past to a future swept clean…by what?

Tracy is a kind of Mark Twain/Abraham Lincoln character in this movie, small town American, homespun horse sense, self deprecating, and a willingness to keep an open mind. When he meets Marlene in a charming tavern -- again, for the third time in this series we are taken out to the cabaret -- she tries harder to impress upon him the respectability of the German people, despite what their own political monsters have done to them.

To this end, she tells a story about Burt Lancaster, who in a social gathering, discovering a smarmy Hitler flirting with his wife, bravely and with disgust bestows upon The Little Corporal a rebuke no less severe than he has given to Maximillian Schell in the courtroom, and no less public.

Marlene then catapults the conversation to the ultimate question at hand and the thing that Tracy really wants to know: Do you really think we knew about the concentration camps and the murder of millions? We didn’t know.

In court, Richard Widmark has finally shown the footage of the concentration camps and what Allied soldiers, like himself, found there when they marched in and liberated them. Widmark, in his crisp, carefully enunciated speech (they had voices then) narrates the movie.

“How DARE they show us those films!” Werner Klemperer, one of the defendants shrieks.

In the tavern, we hear the soft tenor singing, “Du, du liegst mir in Herzen....”

The judges had to make their rulings based upon the laws they were given, which was based on the political influence at the time.

American judges are also influenced by politics, we see, as Tracy’s fellow judge, Ray Teal insists they must be lenient on the Germans because the Soviets are worse. He calls prosecutor Widmark “a radical” and a “protégé of FDR.” Conservatives hated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, vilified him, and their political progeny continue to do the same. Ray Teal wants to know where Tracy stands.

“I’m a rock-ribbed Republican who thought Franklin Roosevelt was a great man.”

“Oh. One of those.”

Marlene sings a verse of “Lili Marleen” as Tracy walks her home, past the ruins, to her apartment. It is not as dilapidated as her flat in “A Foreign Affair”, but we can see the shabbiness in the boarded up windows, where the elegant coffee set seems to cast a refulgent glow, a reminder of the genteel past in a post-War room. Her husband’s distinguished portrait is displayed in pride of place.

“We did not know!” She insists.

Tracy, struggling with his uncertainty replies, “As far as I can make out, no one in this country knew.”

She tells him, “We have to forget if we are to go on living.”

It has been reported that Marlene hated doing this scene, to play the spokeswoman for a regime she personally hated, to the point where it made her physically ill.

“As a German, I feel ashamed that such things could have taken place in my country,” Maximillian Schell, barely containing his anger responds, “But I do think it was wrong, indecent, and terribly unfair of the prosecutor to show such things….”

He pleads with Lancaster to keep silent and not take the stand, “We have to look to the future. We can’t turn back now. Do you want the Americans to stay here forever?” Besides, he says, the Americans do not have the right to judge them, and brings up Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“Is that their superior morality?”

In court, Schell expertly shifts the blame for these trials from Lancaster to the world at large, who let Hitler have his way for so long.

Burt takes the stand and explains in passionate shame how a man, and a country, could use love of country as an excuse to deny rights to the individual. He is the picture of dignified self-loathing, near tears. He describes himself as a man “worse than all of them because he knew what they were and went along with them…made his life excrement because he worked with them.”

Wanting to explain personally to Tracy about the millions who were persecuted, Lancaster tells him, “I never knew it would come to that.”

Tracy replies, “It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”

The German judges are all found guilty, and as Tracy departs the prison after his final visit with Lancaster, we hear the strains of “Wenn wir marschieren” once more, and the silent caption telling us that now, in 1961 at the time this film was made, not one single person imprisoned during the Nuremberg Trials was still serving his sentence. They had all been freed.

Another political compromise?

It’s a cynical ending to an earnest film with a passionate message. The movie had its world premiere in Berlin on December 14, 1961 -- West Berlin now, as four months before, the German Democratic Republic built the Berlin Wall. Doubtless, the audience considered that and may have been distracted by current events from this magnificent movie. Did current events render the film obsolete and irrelevant?

We’ll close this series by giving Marlene Dietrich the last word. In 1960, before this film was made, she took her cabaret act to Berlin for the first time, where she was greeted with a pained mixture of welcome, and furor by those who still resented her for “betraying” her homeland. After this movie came out, she took her act to Israel, which welcomed her as a celebrity who was well known to be anti-Nazi.

However, Marlene was advised not to sing any songs in German, as that language was taboo there at the time. Marlene broke the taboo and sang in German, and was cheered, especially for the song shown below (though this footage is from a later European concert). It is “Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind.” You will recognize it as Pete Seeger’s, “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?”

We may smile at her limited vocal range, and at her studied showmanship, but there is something wonderfully transcendent in this German rendition of an American anti-war song. Especially when it is sung by this German actresss. This American actress.

Don’t forget to scroll down to the bottom of the page and pause the music so you can hear the video.

Uneasy Victors - Pt 3 - "The Big Lift" -1950

2011-12-05T07:43:00.001-05:00

“The Big Lift” (1950) straddles the period of our role as occupiers in Berlin, and as “combatants” in a new kind of war, a Cold War. Geopolitical past and future fused together in the awkward present of 1948 Berlin.

This is our third entry in the series on Uneasy Victors. Have a look at the intro here, and at last week’s post on “A Foreign Affair” (1948) here.

The movie has a documentary feel to it, yet there are elements of humor, adventure, and intrigue. Though the backdrop is highly political, the conflicts faced by the characters are not really political in nature. They are personal.

Montgomery Clift, in his fourth film, (he’d just finished “The Heiress” which we discussed here) is the opened-hearted, open-minded youth, an enlisted man in the Air Force who works as part of the ground crew. We don’t know about his past or if he has plans for the future; he’s very much a here and now kind of guy, living for the moment. His thin, handsome face is a strange cross between rugged and fragile, and we could take that as a metaphor for much in this troubled actor’s life.

Paul Douglas, also in his fourth feature film, but who always seemed to move and sound like a veteran, plays another man in Clift’s outfit, a radar operator. He is older, and wiser in the sense he is more cynical. He has been in the service many years, and we can see he will spend his career here. Both are stationed at Hickham Field in Hawaii.

These opening moments of the film are evocative of World War II and the place where disaster struck, the bombing of this base and Pearl Harbor, that brought the US into the war. We see a newsreel at the very start that tells us the Russians are blockading Berlin, which was divided among the victorious Allies into the French, British, American, and Russian sectors, from getting supplies overland. All roads, railroads, and canals are blocked, leaving the British, French, and American sectors of the city isolated. The Russians want to force those nations out.

Then the camera pans back and we see we are in a small auditorium where American servicemen are watching the movies. Suddenly a loudspeaker announcement calls a particular unit to report for duty, and Clift and Douglas rise from their seats with a groan.

The map is a little off - Chicopee is not in central Mass.; it's on the Connecticut River in the west.

It’s a fast way to set the story. In a few moments, their unit will be on a cargo plane bound for the mainland. The map takes us across the Pacific, and then across the continent to Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts and Westover Air Force Base. We see a glimpse of the base, the huge runway, the hangars, and a sign in the foreground telling us where we are.

Where we are is the largest air force base on the east coast, which in the new Cold War, became an important point of embarkation, supply line, (and eventual line of first defense in the nuclear age), and the jump-off point to the boys’ final destination -- Berlin. They are going to help ferry food and fuel to the stranded Berliners in a remarkable mission called Operation Vittles, and would be known as the Berlin Air Lift.

Stop by my New England Travels blog tomorrow for a post on a unique side operation of this mission, “Operation Little Vittles” in which Chicopee, Massachusetts packs tons of candy, ties them to handkerchiefs to be used for parachutes, and turns them over to Westover Field so that the men flying these missions can drop candy to the kids in the ruins of Berlin.

The documentary style of the movie is evident in how patient director George Seaton is, letting us experience the mission as it unfolds. The men’s ignorance on what the mission is to be. The long flights. The arrival at Rein-Main field in Germany, and then the final, nerve-wracking hop into Templehof and Berlin. The large transport planes, because of the restriction on fly space the Russians have put on them, have to navigate a very narrow strip, and because the landing field is set in very close proximity to the five-story brick buildings of the neighborhood, the planes must literally skirt the rooftops. In one shot we see a plane land from a side view, and as it dips below the line of roofs, the tail of the plane looks like a shark’s dorsal fin slicing the ocean waves.

“Just like landing in the Rose Bowl.”

The planes land with their cargo, unload, and then take off again every few minutes. It is an exhausting, round-the-clock mission that will last for months. It was our first response to a belligerent Soviet Union testing its influence. It kept the Berliners alive. It was one of the proudest achievements of the United States Air Force.

Just as we saw the American congressmen marvel at the ruins in Berlin as their plane arrives in “A Foreign Affair”, so are Paul Douglas and Montgomery Clift amazed at the devastation.

“Boy, this place sure caught it, didn’t it?” one of the men exclaims.

“Not enough. This is where they should have used the A-bomb,” Paul Douglas says.

This movie takes up where “A Foreign Affair” left off. We are a little farther along in our jobs as occupiers, and there is still the conflict between offering mercy and wanting revenge, between punishing the enemy and building friendships. Paul Douglas acts like the Ugly American, being as rude as he can to the German laborers employed at the landing field. He is dismissive and bullying to the Berliners he meets in town.

“Don’t start feeling sorry for them. They hate our guts. If the situation was reversed, they’d kick your teeth in twice a day.”

Paul Douglas is more than just the voice of vengeance and disgust with the vanquished enemy. He has a deeply personal reason for hating the Germans.

He was once abused as a POW in a German prison camp. While in Berlin, he will discover the prison guard who beat him. In a brutal scene, both men catch up with their destiny.

The movie has a nice mix of comedy that is kind of like blowing off steam at intervals between these dramatic moments. Some of the humor is macabre, like when the men have “fingers crossed” as part of their landing checklist. When Douglas, whose “schatzi”, played by Bruni Löbel (who had a long career in German film and television), wants him to define “democracy” because she is curious, he becomes an irate, frustrated, inarticulate teacher. He has no idea how to explain it, and tells her repeatedly to just shut up.

The best he can come up with is, “It’s a kind of feeling, a way of looking at things.” He explains that America is run by the people, and a light bulb goes on and she thinks it must be like the Soviet Union, which is also said to be run by “the people”. Douglas nearly has a stroke.

Another funny moment is when the men first land and find themselves dragged into a welcoming ceremony. The flight crew is paraded down a long aisle of Berlin guardsmen, under an arch of rifles, to the sound of a band. Montgomery Clift, voice shaking, nervously remarks,

“I feel just as if you and I were getting married, Lieutenant.”

At the welcoming ceremony, an old man, a young boy, and pretty woman who represent grateful citizens of Berlin, present speeches and gifts to the servicemen. They are dignified, proper, speak carefully-intoned English and display the requisite amount of humility for the newsreel cameras. The picture of the defeated enemy as possible friends.

Clift hooks up with the pretty woman, played very naturally by Cornell Borchers (who made only a handful of films in the 1950s, most of them German), and his Berlin romance begins. Her husband was killed in the war by the Russians. Her father stood up against the Nazis. Both tragedies make her a sympathetic heroine and worthy object for Monty’s affections.

He gets a pass and sees her in Berlin. When he gets paint on his uniform and must walk the streets in ragged clothes she has borrowed for him, Clift’s whirlwind escapade among the ruins in Berlin is where Jean Arthur’s ended. In parts it is just as wild and funny, and in parts more insightful and morose. This is a Berlin Americans don’t get to see on the newsreels cameras, the jostling for food, the enforced labor at shoveling rubble, the checkpoints and identity papers, the cold days and colder nights.

Because Clift is without his uniform and his identity card, he is a man without a country, and in danger from all sides, from straying into the Russian Sector, and from his own American MPs. At one point, they duck into a tavern, not too unlike the cabaret we went to in “A Foreign Affair”, where in an effort to escape the MPs, Monty hops on stage and stumbles through “The Chattanooga Choo-Choo” with a German quartet. When they start a verse in German, his panic, and his solution, are very funny.

Clift’s romance with his Berlin girlfriend is progressing. She is very pretty, and quite brave in facing the hardships of the post-war world. She accepts German defeat even though she bears no responsibility for the Nazi regime. When Clift, still without his uniform which is locked up in a tailor’s shop, spends the night, they embrace in a darkened apartment in front of a window. Behind them are the lights of the runway, and a huge transport plane flies right towards them.

The script and direction seem to take turns between using brief but stunning images like this to tell the story through metaphor, and alternatively trying to back it up with a wordy primer on German-American relations. It feels like propaganda at times, but it is probably useful for the American audiences watching the film at the time. For us today, it is a window on an era.

Both men and both girlfriends get together for a gemutlich little party with the neighbors, one of whom once traveled the US as an actor. Today, he is a spy for the Russians, who pay him to count the American planes. He gives them false numbers because they won't believe anything he reports anyway.

Gerde asks him, “What did you like best about America?”

He replies, “The way the Americans didn’t like it.”

Paul Douglas smiles. He directs Gerde with a glance to pay attention. He understands what the actor is trying to say.

“I mean, what they used to say about the government!”

They all laugh, and Gerde tries to understand a puzzling country where criticizing the government is okay.

Gerde works in one of the food service wagons on base. On another day, still brooding over this thing called democracy, she asks Paul Douglas about injustice in America. She points out that she has been reading a book, and by the description of the story, we know she is making a reference to “Gentleman’s Agreement”, which was also made into a movie by the same company, 20th Century Fox, a couple years earlier.

Gerde says that since the Americans were against Hitler for his actions against the Jews, how could it be that “in America Jews are kept out of certain hotels and schools?”

Douglas admits, “It shouldn’t be. It stinks.” And then he asks her where the book came from, and she says the PX. Ah, he says, finding a saving point. Would the Russians put out a book criticizing Russia in their stores? Being open about our prejudice is at least a point of honor, he wants to impress upon her. She is dubious.

Douglas is dubious about Clift’s romance with the Berlin beauty, and investigates her. Her husband was not killed by the Russians. Her father was not anti-Nazi. She seems tarnished now. She is less a heroine and more of Berlin enigma. Clift confronts her and she admits lying.

“When you have to live by the generosity of others, you have to make yourself pitiful and brave.” There is a nice shot of a wall behind her in the distance collapsing and crumbling to rubble, more rubble she will have to shovel.

This film is conscientious about showing us all sides. The United States, with rampant prejudice, is not as free a place as we claim. German gratitude may be false and self-serving. The only thing we can be sure about is the Russians are bad guys, when they are discussed at all. The foolish clowns from “A Foreign Affair” are absent here. The film’s main flaw is that we lose them and the question of who they are now. They have not even been replaced with a stereotype yet; they are shown only as rumor and headlines. In the early 1950s, we will come to choke on our paranoia and let it poison us.

Montgomery Clift struggles with his girlfriend’s duplicity, but decides after all, she was only a girl during the war. She cannot be held responsible for her family's involvement. She is only trying to survive. He wants to marry her. Part of his desire, we may suspect, is the wish to save her.

He goes through the chain of command paperwork to get permission. One of the most interesting things about “The Big Lift” is that in various scenes we see a lot of military personnel. A lot of them. In this entire movie, only Paul Douglas and Montgomery Clift are actors playing Air Force men. Everybody else in uniform is an actual serviceman. This gives the movie that realistic documentary style. You also have to admire the acting ability of some of them. The commanding officer, Major Hetzel, who pushes through Monty’s marriage paperwork is quite funny in his scene after shouting over the phone and losing his voice.

While marriage plans are progressing, Gerde finally gets the lowdown on democracy, but not from Paul Douglas. With his bullying ways, he is a poor teacher. She got herself a government-issued pamphlet and has memorized the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Filled with enough righteous indignation to blow the roof off a New England town meeting, she hollers at Douglas and demands he stop bullying her. She calls him a stormtrooper.

Douglas is impressed, and like all bullies, backs off when she stands up to him. “Don’t let anybody push you around, not even me. That’s democracy!”

Another World War II-era metaphor is complete when she chucks a can of SPAM at him.

I won’t reveal how the relationship develops between Clift and Fraulein Borchers. It’s an 11th hour surprise, and lessons are learned by everyone.

Though the tours of duty are ending and men are being rotated home, Paul Douglas decides to stay in Berlin. He is kinder to the German laborers on the base, and even helps them out by speaking fluent German to them, which he was forced to learn in the POW camp.

“I suppose if we’re going to sell these stoops on a new way of living, you got to be a pretty good salesman.”

Then they hear over the radio that the Russian blockade of Berlin is over. The good guys have won. It is a World War II kind of patriotic moment, but the really impressive ending of the movie is the “curtain call” style end credits where we see the real-life military men who had speaking parts in this movie lined up as if for roll call.

Incidentally, the journalist who interviews Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas when they first arrive in Berlin is Richard O’Malley, an actual journalist for the Associated Press.

Come back Thursday when we finish our series on “Uneasy Victors” with “Judgment at Nuremberg”, which takes us back full circle. The first point of order for the occupier is to establish order and rule of law. The second is to hold the bad guys accountable. But it is a quickly changing world. The political map of Europe is being altered day by day. How do we settle accounts, so to speak, when nobody wants to live in the past anymore? Montgomery Clift and Marlene Dietrich both return for impressive encore performances in very different roles.

Uneasy Victors - PT 2 - "A Foreign Affair" - 1948

2011-12-01T07:39:00.002-05:00

“A Foreign Affair” (1948) is a broad send-up of American moral hypocrisy, but Jean Arthur turns it into a valentine for American sentimentality. The film is a biting accusation of German duplicity, but alluring Marlene Dietrich dares us to judge. Billy Wilder, whose cynical view peppers each scene with bold satire, still finds himself forgiving the weaker morally ambiguous Berliners for allowing the stronger and far more evil Nazis to ruin the place.

It can’t have been easy for him. In his biography of Billy Wilder, “On Sunset Boulevard - The Life and Times of Billy Wilder” (Hyperion, NY, 1998), author Ed Sikov notes that while watching footage of bombed out ruins in Berlin, after someone remarked that he could not help but feel sorry for the Germans, Wilder, “…jumped to his feet and yelled, ‘To hell with those bastards! They burned most of my family in their damned ovens! I hope they burn in hell!” (p. 272).

In our intro to this series on Uneasy Victors, posted here, we outlined the three films we’re tackling to discuss America’s post-World War II involvement in Occupied Germany. Next week we cover “The Big Lift” (1950) and “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961).

I’m going to tread lightly on the plots of these three movies and concentrate on the images used so evocatively. The images and stories were current events when these films were made, no deep explanation was required. For background, one needed only to look at the front page of a newspaper.

“A Foreign Affair” brings prudish congresswoman Jean Arthur to Berlin on a fact-finding mission to investigate the morale of American service troops stationed in Occupied Germany. The end “E” in morale gets dropped and the question for Jean Arthur is reduced to what is “moral”.

She encounters John Lund, an Army captain with working in the de-Nazification office. His job is to examine the credibility of German civilians of being complicit in the former regime that was responsible for starting the war and the murder of millions. He must recommend them for further investigation, punishment, or rehabilitation. On those that are judged to be clean, he gets to stamp an APPROVED on their foreheads, and absolve them of further suspicion. His clients range from the precocious little boy who draws swastikas over everything with a piece of chalk, to Marlene Dietrich. He lets the kid off with a warning to his father. He APPROVES Dietrich in a big way.

John Lund has probably his best role here. He is handsome, worldly and he is a scamp. He carries on an illicit, mutually beneficial relationship with cabaret singer Marlene Dietrich. He brings her stockings and she gives him sex. He trades a birthday cake Jean Arthur ferried across the ocean as a gift from one of his old girlfriends, selling it on the black market to buy a mattress for Marlene. Never was a gift less subtle.

Director Billy Wilder shows his cynicism and his delightfully naughty side in this movie. And it is a marvel he could temper the above noted rage against the German people with an affinity for them. He was, after all, a resident of this city himself at one time back in the ‘20s when it was decadent but entirely free.

So was Dietrich a Berliner. They met here years ago. They knew their own people.

Wilder has been accused at points in his career of being something of a misogynist, showing women in a demeaning light, sexualized or mocked. Some critics took umbrage with “A Foreign Affair” for what they felt was shabby treatment of Jean Arthur, that she was brutalized by being shown in such an unflattering manner. She was dressed and coifed with a severe appearance, and her jingoistic response to how are things back in Iowa, “still 62 percent Republican, thank you” sound as if he is chastising her for being one of the so-called American moral majority and making a fool of her for looking for sin in Berlin.

While I agree that Wilder does his best to show the character of Congresswoman Frost as a comic foil, nevertheless I disagree that he used Jean Arthur in a bad way. You have only to look at Jean Arthur in this movie to see how much fun she’s having.

Just her opening scene when the congressional committee flies over the ruins of Berlin. She is making notes, and when her attention is called by the others to look out the window at their vantage point, she takes her time, meticulous in removing her reading glasses and putting them away. Screwing the cap on her fountain pen and tucking it away. Zipping, snapping, and buckling pockets of courier bag and attache. The suspense of her thorough routine builds and becomes enormously funny, as funny as a Buster Keaton slide down a mountain, but she’s just sitting there putting her stuff away.

This is a lady who knows how to control a scene.

There are many opportunities for her to take the ball and run with it. When she’s picked up by two GIs on a bicycle-built-for-two and turn it into an impromptu bicycle built for three, and most spectacularly when she sings the “Iowa Corn Song” in the cabaret (the scene is below). There is nothing Jean Arthur enjoyed more than absurdity. She saw that in this character and in this movie, and she goes to town. That that town happens to be Berlin is the perfect irony and palette for Wilder’s story.

Marlene Dietrich is a rival romantically, but also politically. Miss Dietrich shines in this role. Her cabaret singer is world-weary, street smart, sexy of course, and most of all a survivor. She needs to be a survivor to live in a nearly demolished Berlin with the old regime gone and the new regime questioning her Nazi past and her licentious present.

We see Dietrich’s run-down bombed-out apartment. When we first see her she is in the most unglamorous position of brushing her teeth. She spits her mouthful at Lund and he grabs her and wipes his face on her hair. We see there is no tenderness to their relationship; that it is all business for her, and that his desire for her is accompanied by his contempt. She plays the role of the kitten as long as she’s getting presents. They are using each other, they both know and are both happy with the arrangement.

At the cabaret Dietrich sings about “the ruins of Berlin” and she is dolled up to the nines looking glamorous and svelte and utterly in command. The smoky room is full of civilians on a night out, American servicemen and jolly Russian servicemen who all mix with equanimity.

This is before the Russian blockade of Berlin and so the Russians are not viewed as the enemy yet. We are in the last days before the Cold War. They are shown, these actual conquerors of Berlin, as silly, playful, childlike comrades who sings songs and in a moment of jubilation grab a person from the crowd and throw him into the air like some college football rally. One Russian soldier is delighted when he is sold a Mickey Mouse watch by an American soldier on the black market. He can barely contain his excitement.

This is counterbalanced by Dietrich’s chilling remark, “What do you think it was like to be a woman in this town when the Russians first swept in?” This is Wilder's restrained reference to the fact that tens of thousands of female Berliners were raped by Soviet soldiers.

And her deft mockery of America's untouchable superiority, “Wash your hands. Wash your lips. You’ve got so much soap in the United States.”

Millard Mitchell is the wry colonel who oversees Jean Arthur’s congressional visit and oversees John Lund’s mission to de-Nazify the Berlin population. But he knows something that John Lund does not. He knows that Marlene Dietrich was the consort of Nazi officials during the war, and moved in high circles. When Lund is eventually shown a newsreel of her partying with Hitler, he is sickened. Millard Mitchell also knows that there is a high-ranking Nazi official, a former lover of Marlene Dietrich, who was in hiding, but can be drawn out into the open by using Dietrich as a decoy.

John Lund is the epitome of the American problems in Berlin, a metaphor for our conflicted attitudes. On the one hand he has a duty to perform. He must stand back objectively and judge these people. On the other hand he wants to let bygones be bygones. And get what he can for himself.

The songs Marlene sings, about “lovely illusions” and the black market, and the ruins of Berlin, are presented like a good stage musical. They are not sung for diversion; rather they further the plot and tell the back story. Never was music employed in a non-musical in such an intelligent fashion. That’s Friedrich Hollaender at the piano, who wrote these songs and was Dietrich’s long-time accompanist and composer.

Billy Wilder walks a fine line in this movie and walks it very well. There is much cynicism, much political and social accusation against American hypocrisy, and in fact this movie was condemned on the floor the House of Representatives for its satirical treatment of Congress. The military complained because it showed them in a less than flattering light. But it is satire and is meant to hold a mirror up to ourselves.

We can tell who the liberals are among the congressmen and who are the conservatives: debate on the plane about giving the starving a loaf of bread, “that’s democracy”, but if you leave the wrapper on - i.e., let them know it’s from the Good Old USA - “that’s imperialism.” We have discussion of “dollar diplomacy”, about labor versus industry that still resonates today. We are about to leave a decade-long military involvement in Iraq, with reductions of troops as well in Afghanistan. These issues raised in Occupied Germany are still with us.

Congresswoman Jean Arthur icily rebukes Dietrich: “We increased our national debt by some 350 billion dollars to win this war. I would regard it as a waste of money if we didn’t eliminate types like you.”

How timely is that? We Americans have always demanded a return on our investment.

Conversely, we are reminded of the horrific regime that ruled here when Millard Mitchell takes the congressional committee, and us, on a Jeep ride with rear-screen projection of the Reichstag, and the Brandenburg Gate, and always sobering devastation of the ruins.

Dietrich tells Arthur, “Let’s go to my apartment. It’s only a few ruins away from here.”

Wilder softened the political edge by adding silly comedy that also works as a wonderful metaphor in this movie.

Both Wilder and Dietrich were hard, cynical people who came of age in a hard and cynical Berlin. They came to America and made their careers in a United States that was and always probably will be remain unabashedly sentimental. We are a nation addicted to happy endings. Neither Wilder nor Dietrich seemed entirely comfortable with wide-eyed optimism.

Millard Mitchell brings the congressional committee to watch German kids playing sandlot baseball taught to them by American soldiers. Mitchell remarks that a local family “has already christened a kid DiMaggio Schultz. That’s when I started believing we really won the war.”

Mitchell is a kind of narrator, a Greek chorus to the story, reminding us of American good intentions that must certainly soften things for Wilder if not for the message of the movie:

“When we moved into Berlin, we found open graves and closed hearts.”

“We’ve tried to make them free men and give them some dignity.”

Added to the soup is the ingredient of American sentimentality, and that is Jean Arthur who does it better than anybody else. Yes, she is foolish. But she is also resilient and strong and brings a sense of hope to the proceedings. She is the American that the Europeans love to mock, but whom they inevitably look to as an example of success. They see her derisively, and enviously, as being in her own protective little world and nothing can really hurt her. Almost nothing.

When John Lund, trying to throw her off her investigation, begins to woo her as a diversion, she falls for him. Jean Arthur has several excellent scenes. First there is a scene in the file room where she talks about a former beau, a fellow member of Congress from the South, and when she talks about her memory of him, her chirpy voice becomes slow and soft and gentle almost with a slight hint of the southern accent. There is a sad, lovely wistfulness to her behind the officious façade she presents.

But the façade is riot. She tells fellow Iowan John Lund news from back home, “We had the lowest juvenile delinquency rate in the country until two months ago. A little boy in Des Moines took a blow torch to his grandmother…We fell clear down to 16th place. It was humiliating.”

And she notes that Main Street had its name changed to Iwo Jima Boulevard -- the kind of memorializing that happened all over the US, which Wilder mocks with his crisp script and Miss Arthur’s incomparable delivery.

“You’re so naïve, you Americans,” Marlene teases John Lund.

“So we are. What of it?”

Lund, despite himself, begins to have feelings for Jean Arthur. He doesn’t fall head over heels - such violent passion might be too much for Wilder - but he grows protective of her. There is the sweet scene when she comes down a long staircase in a too large dress she bought on the black market, (Et tu, Congresswoman Frost?), when he is to take her out on a date.

“I look just awful. It’s like a circus tent in mourning for an elephant that died.” Her trademark running a fine line between humor and pathos. Nobody does it better.

Lund fixes the dress for her, adjusting the bodice and pinning it in the back with expert fashion sense, and then wipes the excess lipstick from her mouth with his handkerchief, and then swipes an ornate table covering for her shawl. He’s like all the mice in Cinderella helping her to get ready for her night on the town.

And what a night it is.

Her political sparring with Marlene is matched by her becoming a romantic rival for John Lund’s affections. Dietrich is wonderfully bold with Jean Arthur, caging the hostility she feels for this sanctimonious American with sleek, sophisticated sarcasm. She criticizes Arthur’s appearance, and with audacity at their first meeting, notes, “Perhaps if you would change the line of your eyebrows a bit,” as she slowly swipes her door key she has tossed out into the street for Lund, as a pointer, tracing Arthur’s brow with it. The gesture is sultry and brazen.

Later, she will attempt to humiliate Jean Arthur by encouraging her to sing in front of the cabaret audience. Arthur is reticent, but she’s also a bit tipsy, and belts out her old campaign song, the “Iowa Corn Song”.

I think it was Katharine Hepburn who was said that acting is like standing up naked and turning around very slowly.

Jean Arthur’s “Iowa Corn Song” rendition is like naked comedy.

She is pathetically awful, disarmingly hilarious, and ultimately endearing. She really gives it the old college try like nobody’s business. Have a look at the scene here, beginning at 8:06. Please remember to scroll down to the bottom of the page first and mute the music so you can hear the video.

There is no reason, ever, to doubt Jean Arthur’s superior acting ability, but if you did, just compare this performance with her next film role, “Shane” which we discussed here. Night and day. You wouldn’t know it was the same woman. She really had remarkable range.

This goofy gal changes yet again later on in the evening to a bitter, and emotionally violated woman. Dietrich, who first does her a favor by getting her out of trouble when the cabaret is raided by police, mercilessly sets her up, letting Jean observe from the shadows Dietrich’s true relationship with Lund.

Dietrich’s triumph over Jean is complete. “Four hours ago you were in a position to have him court martialed and send me to a labor camp. Not now. Not anymore. You’re one of us, now.”

The hostility between Marlene Dietrich’s and Jean Arthur’s characters is a driving force in this movie. The magnetism of these two actresses makes their face-offs fascinating and almost sensual, where in the hands of two other actresses the scenes might only be shrill and without depth. There is great power to their scenes together, and I think this is due more to their unique talents as actresses, rather than the fact that they disliked each other in real life.

Which they did.

Jean Arthur’s famous insecurity made working with Dietrich, who could be openly derisive to others and had industrial-strength self confidence, a nightmare. According to author Kevin Lally, Dietrich called Arthur, "That ugly woman with that terrible twang." Dietrich also disliked John Lund. She got along with Wilder, with whom she shared many conversations in her dressing room in German about the Berlin of the old days, but even Wilder got on her bad side when he insisted she perform the scene where she parties with the Hitler look-alike.

Dietrich was openly anti-Nazi, and had won America’s Medal of Freedom for her efforts entertaining the troops during World War II. She may have reveled playing a hardened chanteuse, but being seen hanging on “Hitler’s” arm was too much for her. Both Berliner and naturalized American, she may be the ultimate metaphor in this film for the conflicted emotions of the uneasy victor.

Jean Arthur was almost paranoid in her jealousy of Wilder’s attention to Dietrich, and perhaps in a moment of one-upmanship, insisted that she perform her own stunt when Congresswoman Frost is shown to be tossed into the air by the jolly, drunken Russian soldiers after her song at the cabaret. That’s really Jean Arthur you see getting chucked into the air.

According to the biography on Billy Wilder, “Wilder Times - The Life of Billy Wilder” (Henry Holt and Company, NY, 1996), author Kevin Lally notes that after the take was shot, “Arthur threw back her head and gave the director a piercing look. ‘What will you require next from me, Mr. Wilder?’” The crew and extras applauded her.

For his part, Billy Wilder was exasperated with one actress who constantly looked at herself in the mirror - Dietrich, and one who self-consciously refused to look in a mirror at all - Arthur.

It is interesting to compare the two women in real life. They were born about a year apart, and died about a year apart. Arthur hated stardom and avoided it. Dietrich craved stardom and worked harder on her screen image than her acting. Just before this film was made, Jean Arthur was attending college in the Midwest. She had left Hollywood after her Oscar-nominated role in “The More the Merrier” which we discussed here, to pursue university studies. I can’t think of any other actress, particularly at the top of her game and earning power, who would do this.

But she left school to do this film which she must have realized was a golden opportunity and possibly one of her last, to do screwball comedy.

Dietrich was fighting time as well. She had just become a grandmother, which according to her daughter, she did not like at all. She turned her career to real-life cabaret work and was a success, the irony being she really did not sing well. Jean Arthur, for all her foolishness during the “Iowa Corn Song” routine, had no less singing range than Dietrich.

But Dietrich had that powerful stage personality she created from girlhood, it was her bastion, and bread and butter.

Until old age took it from her. In their senior years, Jean Arthur returned to college, this time to teach. Dietrich’s health began to fail, and her glamour waned, and she shut herself up in her Paris apartment, bedridden, a recluse who allowed only a very few to visit.

Jean, who was reclusive her entire life to varying degrees, enjoyed a pleasanter old age in the company of a small group of friends, young and old, her pets, and her house by the Pacific Ocean. They both lived to be 90 years old.

Dietrich, who had been eschewed by Berlin for her pro-American stance in the war, is buried in Berlin, and much of her belongings have been bought by Berlin for a museum collection.

The film “A Foreign Affair” was not seen in Germany until 1977, (in West Germany), when at last, it was appreciated by a German audience. That it took so long to be seen there may be testament to the power of Billy Wilder’s biting political mockery. Comedy can be a dangerous thing.

Come back next Monday for our next in this series on Uneasy Victors when we stay in Berlin to tackle, “The Big Lift” (1950) with Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas.

Uneasy Victors - Intro

2011-11-28T06:11:00.001-05:00

The above two photos are from footage a second before and a second after the Nazi emblem atop Nuremberg's Zepplin Stadium was exploded by the US armed forces April 25, 1945.

For the next two weeks, we’re going to discuss three films that examine the allied occupation of post-War Germany. Specifically, what happens when military, judicial, congressional representatives, and by way of the audience -- civilians -- of the United States deal with a hated and now vanquished enemy. We became the leading military and economic power after World War II, but our traditionally isolationist and inward-looking mentality did not prepare us to be our enemies’ judge and jury. Our wealth, and our ethnic ties to other lands where most of our families originated, however, made us extremely sympathetic and generous to that outside world we so often distrusted. We were uneasy victors.

The three films are: “A Foreign Affair” (1948), “The Big Lift” (1950), and “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961).

With these three films we experience a pattern of links that bring us full circle. “A Foreign Affair” is set in 1947, when a group of neophyte congressmen, and one delightfully prudish congresswoman played by Jean Arthur, investigate US military morale in the moral morass that is post-War Berlin. This film was released in August, 1948.

Two months before this film came out, the Berlin Airlift began, which, for the next year, ferried fuel and food to a stranded, captive western Berlin in the allied occupied zones when the Soviet Union, attempting to force the allies out of territory they wanted, enforced a blockade on the citizens. In response, the western allies, led by the US, undertook repeated, dangerous flights in a narrow flight path to feed the Berliners, a daring operation many feared would lead to war.

“The Big Lift” is about the Berlin Airlift through the eyes of one Air Force enlisted man, played by Montgomery Clift. He gets more lessons on international intrigue than he bargained for when he falls in love with a German woman in Berlin. Paul Douglas is his cynical pal, who hates the Germans and is not shy about showing it.

This movie was shot in Berlin in 1949, and released in April, 1950, after the Berlin Airlift had ended. In two more months, we would become involved in the Korean War, and leave Occupied Germany behind -- at least in our thoughts. In 1949, The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany was created, severing the country for the next 41 years.

“Judgment at Nuremberg” explores the Nuremberg Trials which investigated and tried Nazi officials for war crimes. There were actually several sets of trials over a three-year period. First the most notorious Nazi generals and political figures were tried from November 1945 to October 1946. “Judgment at Nuremberg” is set at the Judges Trial that ran from March to December 1947. So, this movie is set about the same time that the comedy “A Foreign Affair” is set, though that takes place in Berlin, and the trial is in Nuremberg in southern Germany. In one scene, we see two US military officers worrying about the trial because it might alienate the German civilians against us, and we need them now -- because the Russians have just blockaded Berlin.

Dovetailing us back to “The Big Lift”.

The movie, however, being made in 1961, has a gloss to it that the earlier movies do not. Partly because it is a drama and a truly superior film in every way, but mainly because so much time has passed. When we have digested an era, we are more introspective. “Judgment at Nuremberg” is achingly introspective.

The two earlier films share with us the excitement of the moment, when we really don’t know how the political events depicted are going to turn out in real life.

Our casts also dovetail a bit. Marlene Dietrich is Jean Arthur’s rival in “A Foreign Affair”. She plays a former Nazi collaborator.

She returns in “Judgment at Nuremberg” -- as the wife of a former general in the Nazi army. How telling is it that Marlene Dietrich, who in real life refused to return to Nazi Germany, became a US citizen, entertained soldiers in the USO, and was awarded the US Medal of Freedom in 1947, and the Légion d'honneur by the French government -- came to play Nazis? There were other big-name stars that could have been cast, but she was German-born, so apparently she was made for the role. Like the character played by Paul Douglas in “The Big Lift”, we seemed to paint all Germans with the same brush.

Montgomery Clift also makes a dual appearance, first in the “The Big Lift”, and like Dietrich, he returns in “Judgment at Nuremberg” in a riveting performance as pathetic, mentally challenged victim of the Nazi regime.

The one thing all three films have in common is the ruins.

Marlene even sings a song called “The Ruins of Berlin” in “A Foreign Affair”. She and Jean Arthur stroll among the rubble-strewn streets.

Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas walk down city streets that are banked by ruins. Both they and Jean Arthur have already seen what they look like from the air when their planes fly over the bombed city.

Spencer Tracy, a judge in the Nuremberg Trials rides by the ruins when he arrives in Nuremberg. They are his first introduction to Germany.

We start this series on a light note - but not without controversy. “A Foreign Affair”, one of Billy Wilder’s most clever black comedies, drew the ire of the U.S. Congress, and our military. Both were seen in a less than flattering light in this movie, in an era where many felt that as the victors, we deserved to reap the benefits of triumph -- one of which was the assumption of moral superiority.

But that is no trick when you’re dealing with Nazis. Of course almost anybody is going to be morally superior to Hitler and his goon squads. But what about the average German citizen? The ones who were complicit in an evil regime, and the ones who were not? At what point did we discover they were human, just like us?

The discovery is always a shock and an embarrassment to the victor.

Come back Thursday for the comedy, “A Foreign Affair”, when Congresswoman Jean Arthur hunts for immorality among the GIs in a smoky Berlin cabaret.

Curly Stuffs a Turkey

2011-11-24T07:21:00.000-05:00

On this festive Thanksgiving Day here in the US, we at Another Old Movie Blog, as a public service, are providing an instructional video on how to stuff a turkey. Here is our own Curly showing you in quick, easy steps how it's done. Please pay attention, and take notes. This scene is part of "An Ache in Every Stake" which we previously discussed here. Good luck, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Please remember to scroll down to the bottom of the page and pause the music so you can hear the video.

A Movie and a Serving Platter

2011-11-21T07:54:00.000-05:00

Company coming for Thanksgiving? Dragging out the "good" service for eight? Don't have a "good" service for eight? This theater is offering "Vermillion Rose Dinnerware for the Ladies". It's 1943, and they hadn't yet started calling these "dish night" items "Depression glass".

Jane Withers is on the bill in "Johnny Doughboy" with Henry Wilcoxon and William Demarest, with "Let's Have Fun" with Margaret Lindsay and John Beal as the second feature.

Better get down there and get your free butter dish. Or, maybe it's a serving platter this week. In six months, you'll have that service for eight.

For more on Depression Glass, have a look at this previous post.

The Sleeping Tiger - 1954

2011-11-17T06:29:00.001-05:00

“The Sleeping Tiger” (1954) is a little like a Rorschach test -- an ink blot image whose design can be interpreted in different ways, but for which there is no "right" answer, or at least no conclusive answer.

All movies are subject to interpretation. This movie, either by intention, or the serendipitous marriage between a dynamic director and a quirky script, invites us, teases us to interpret whole scenes and even small gestures -- but never to be too sure about our conclusions. Our conclusions change, sometimes minute by minute, depending on how we hold up the inkblot.

This story embodies the personality of Alexander Knox, who plays the unflappable psychiatrist putting his wife and his patient through an emotional and psychological obstacle course.

His habit is to usually answer a question put to him, no matter how ordinary or innocuous, with another question (re: "Do you want some coffee?" -- "Is there any reason why you think I should want coffee?")...in the probing manner of a psychoanalyst. So does the director of this movie. You want to slap both of them after a while. We are never really given conclusions, only more questions, and sometimes this works to make the film fascinating, and sometimes it makes us frankly annoyed and impatient for a simple answer.

The director is Joseph Losey, who also gave us “The Prowler” (1951), which we discussed here. In this film’s credits he is listed as Victor Hanbury. He left the US in the early 1950s to escape the House Un-American Activities witch hunt, and worked for a time, as did many blacklisted filmmakers, under a pseudonym.

By the way, this post is going to be one long SPOILER. If you don’t want to know anything, then go into the kitchen and make me a cup of tea. Do the dishes while you’re out there. And see if the mail came.

It’s also going to be an excruciatingly long post. Yeah, big surprise.

The setting is England in the mid 1950s, still wearing its post-War bleakness. We haven’t got to Swinging London yet, that’s for later on in the Cold War. The script is taut, and often a curious mixture of intelligent lines, but hard-to-swallow plot turns. We are prodded to question our assumptions -- at the same time we are told to accept what seems improbable.

We start with improbability. Dirk Bogarde is a thief in his early 20s, a former juvenile delinquent now settling satisfactorily into a life of unending crime and violence. He attempts to mug Alexander Knox on a dark street, but the good Doctor had hand-to-hand combat training in the late war. Knox also collects psychological guinea pigs the way Dr. Frankenstein collects brains. He fights him off and convinces Bogarde to stay in his home for a six-month psychotherapy experiment. Bogarde agrees to avoid going to jail.

Alexis Smith is Knox’s wife, just returning from a trip alone to Paris and finding a sneering Bogarde in her living room. Cool, with the appearance of a somewhat bored sophisticate (how many times has she played that part?), she is amazingly far less perturbed about a street criminal staying as a guest in her home than is their shrill, opinionated maid, played by Patricia McCarron.

“How are his manners?” Alexis asks her husband, as if she were a school matron taking on a new charge. When one has a criminal under one’s roof, manners should be the least concern, but this is a clue to her personality. Even the most evil intent can be hidden with charming manners. Alexis does not like to look below the surface, unlike her husband. She is unsettled by what she may find there in others -- and in herself. She leaves probing under layers to the Doc.

Rounding out the family circle is Maxine Audley, who plays Knox’s lab assistant. She is perhaps the biggest question mark of the bunch. Always present with the Doc in his office, always seated at the dining room table where they have dressed for dinner and trade pleasantries over wine, always following the Doc out the door when he leaves for one of his many nightly lectures or board meetings. We are told very little about her, and so of course we wonder. It isn’t until well into the film we discover Alexis wonders as well.

It’s a low-budget film, you can see that from the start. A few shots of dark village streets under dim streetlamps, most of the film shot in the claustrophobic confines of their home. And it’s a public domain film, so of course the print could be better.

Dirk Bogarde’s manners, to begin with, are terrible. He is snide, rude, and quite mean to the maid when nobody is looking. He bullies her because he cannot bully Alexis or the Doc. He is immature, sullen, and resentful. He chafes under Doc’s grilling of his childhood memories.

These sessions take place in Knox’s office, which is in the home. His office is a stark contrast to the rest of the house, which appears cozy-cluttered, with dark wainscoting and bowls of flowers. And several photographs of Alexis.

His lair is spare, walls painted white, a set of narrow frosted windows placed high on the wall reminding one of an institutional infirmary, with modern furniture, peg-legged, Scandinavian design, utilitarian and not a bit cozy or ornamental.

There is a piece of modern art on the wall which the police inspector, played by Hugh Griffith, scrutinizes in frank puzzlement. This is the room of a man of unsentimental intellect and bold drive to expose naked the emotions and psyches of those who enter it. Curiously, he keeps his own emotions well hidden, or controlled, or perhaps he hasn’t any.

But Alexander Knox plays the man with such a pleasant, easygoing, almost guileless devotion to the truth. He is honorable, and we trust him. He does not appear cold or indifferent, though his actions reflect an ironic insensitivity. On a mission to tackle the obsessions of others, he does not realize how obsessed he is with his work.

The Doc keeps a loaded revolver in his desk which we see from time to time, and one wonders at the lack of prudence, but we always seem to find loaded guns, and open checkbooks, in desk drawers in the old movies, don’t we? I think they are a more common plot contrivance than boy-meets-girl.

However, we also have boy-meets-girl. Alexis, who spends several hours almost every day horseback riding (she seems to have very little else to do), is urged by her husband to take Bogarde along. She’s not happy about babysitting his patient, but they ride together and over a montage of scenes we see they share a similar restlessness that is relieved by the freedom of galloping fast. They both want to escape. He gets a little too familiar with the Doc’s lady, but she is more than capable of verbally slapping him down, back to his place as a street thug and object of charity.

“I despise hoodlums of any kind…they’re just stupid little animals asking for cages.”

They are left alone in each other’s company when the Doc goes out with his lab assistant -- a restful evening listening to oddly cacophonous symphonic music from the radio, fortified by cigarettes, brandy snifters, and the thrust and parry of quiet conversation. Ah, those days when we could amuse ourselves at home without 500 cable channels or 500 text messages.

Alexis is not afraid to be alone with Bogarde. She seems to want him to know this. She wears the protective armor of her own superiority.

All three principals have great roles in this movie, and they perform very well. Mr. Knox plays that fine line of unwitting cruelty in a mask of cultured academia. Dirk Bogarde, though in real life the same age as Alexis Smith, convincingly plays a younger man just clawing his way out of boyhood. He flip-flops in his manners and attitudes so smoothly that we don’t always know when he is putting someone on, including his seduction of Alexis Smith.

Miss Smith reportedly once remarked in an interview that in many films she did not wear shoes on set, to make her appear less tall against shorter actors. It might have been done in this shot, as she was actually a wee bit taller than Dirk Bogarde. More on the tall girl’s career in this previous post.

Alexis, bewitching in this dark role, starts the movie as a cool customer, classy and almost as self contained as the Doc, but by the end she downward spirals helplessly into an emotional train wreck. It was one of her last starring film roles and she must have savored the challenge.

We gradually learn all about Dirk Bogarde through his sessions with the Doc, because he tells us about his past, even when he lies about it. We do not have this open conduit to the other characters. Alexis reveals only briefly to Bogarde, meant as a put-down on his bad behavior, that she had an unhappy childhood, came from a broken home, and that her mother hated her.

“I made a life for myself just the same,” she slams him, not allowing him the convenient excuse of a bad childhood to entitle him to bad behavior as an adult. But Bogarde, bored with being the Doc’s guinea pig decides to get one for himself. Her. He astutely accuses her:

“You’re a phoney…inside you’ve got nothing. You’re empty. You’re hungry….You’re a tight wire and it wouldn’t take very much to break you.”

The thing is, he’s right. There’s a volcano under that black cocktail dress with the pearl choker. What was she like before her marriage with the Doc? How much did Knox do to hammer down her insecurities, or bolster her sense of self worth, or suppress her desires to make her the intelligent but bloodless Galatea she seems at the beginning of the movie? He took away the taint of her bad childhood with the prize of a secure marriage to an intellectual giant. But what did he give her?

The Doc clearly has regard for his wife. He talks shop with her constantly, interested in her opinion. They are equals. But there is nothing more than a chaste peck on the cheek between them, even when she has returned from a vacation she took by herself. He constantly apologizes for putting his work ahead of her, but one senses he is not deeply troubled by it.

His wife and his lab assistant are like a platonic harem over which he is lord. His manner of being completely unaware of this, and what seems his earnest desire to help Dirk Bogarde makes Knox a still likeable character, fascinating for his contradictions. I love the contrast between his short military haircut and Bogarde's abundant pompadour.

Hugh Griffith comes around snooping for dirt on Mr. Bogarde, whom he is tracking like Inspector Javert. The Doc keeps covering for, even at some points, lying for Bogarde, putting himself and his professional reputation on the line in an extraordinary way.

And he persists in peeling away Bogarde’s protective lies about himself. Knox wants to know if he liked his stepmother.

Bogarde relents and describes her, “Tall, blonde, very smart. All ice on the outside and rotten inside.” He hated her. Is he describing Alexis, too?

In a later scene, rolling around on the ground cuddling together (“Follies” fans - “Could I bury my rage/With a boy half your age/In the grass? Bet your ass!”) -- he lays his head on her chest a moment and they appear that instant almost as a son taking comfort in his mother.

He gets back at the Doc by sneaking out to commit robberies. He gets back at Alexis by probing her emotional hunger and suppressed desire.

At one point, she catches him bullying the maid, and she is furious. She wants to deck him (why do directors of old movies insist women fight with polished claws extended. Like tigers? If I wanted to deck somebody for being nasty to the maid, I’d make a fist and fire off a haymaker at the cad), but he grabs her, and forces a kiss under which Alexis struggles, and then accepts, and then wants more. As he predicted, it doesn’t take much to break her. The more he breaks her down, the more she opens up.

“Don’t pretend you don’t like winding people up like little toys,” Alexis says in a rare moment of sniping at Knox. We see that she is more aware of things under the surface than she may have previously wanted to admit. Little by little she’s losing her protective reserve and finding the courage to look.

Left alone with Bogarde on another night, they prepare to go the movies together. He knots his tie at his mirror -- where another photo of Alexis has found a place on his dresser. She’s at her own mirror, excited, fingertips dabbing perfume behind her ears. They are Tony and Maria getting ready for date. Tonight…tonight…

But there’s no good movie, so she dares him to take her to his favorite hangout, a dingy club where 20-somethings writhe to bebop played by an African-American jazz combo. The musicians are cool, tight, and it sounds almost like the birthing pains of rock n’ roll.

Look at the guy perspiring as he plays his trumpet, cigarette burning in his free fingers. He’s in his own little world, in the throes of his passion, but free of everything else. His torment and his escape from it are the same. They are Americans, outsiders here and appreciated for being outsiders and being authentic musicians.

Interestingly, Alexis is an American, as Bogarde notes. I don’t know why she would not have been English, since she was able to do accents perfectly well, but being American also makes her an outsider, a stranger in a strange land. There the discussion of her origins ends. Too bad, we want more back story on her.

The other distinctive music in the film is the bluesy saxophone we hear whenever Alexis and Bogarde are together.

She is amused at slumming here, and teasingly tries to emulate the kids who cling to each other in couples by pressing herself against Bogarde. He verbally smacks her down, as well as with a cruel grip on her neck, just as she has discouraged him previously, and she is humiliated at being rejected. Like the horses they ride, he has learned when to give her her head, and when to rein her in.

At the same time, parallel to the development of their relationship, Doc has made progress in his therapy with Bogarde. They are forming a father-son union, something Bogarde is just beginning to realize he craves. Doc also wants to pursue the playacting of a father figure, but not to fulfill any emotional needs of his own -- he hasn’t any. It’s merely fascinating research. Bogarde is a specimen in a jar.

One day he catches Bogarde playfully pestering Alexis in the kitchen, trying to steal a kiss. Alexis is rattled at their being caught by her husband, and feigns the act of a virtuous wife on whom liberties have been taken. She demands an apology, and Bogarde plays along, apologizing. The scene gets more interesting when Bogarde leaves and Knox wants to know what brought the incident about, and Alexis fibs that Bogarde insinuated there is something romantic between Knox and his lab assistant. “He implied that you were neglecting me.” She does have not have the courage to confront the Doc herself, but we see this has been on her mind for some time.

The Doc does not deny it; the accusation is barely noticed by him, except with what appears to be faint amusement. Would Lab Assistant be amused at his amusement? I wonder. Instead he vacillates on whether to kick Bogarde out of their home now that he appears to be a danger to his wife, but the experiment is just too interesting to him. Perhaps if Alexis insisted he leave? She does not.

On another evening alone with Bogarde, they go to the jazz club again, and she’s having a blast. He is the responsible one, taking control, reminding her it’s time to leave. She doesn’t want to, and he daringly asserts that he’s “ready for a showdown” with her husband anytime she says.

His remark rebuffs her like a girl, but at the same time challenges her to be a big girl and decide what she wants. She can’t yet. A sudden, surprising fit of hysteria and she nearly knocks out the window of the car with a block of wood because she can’t open the door with her key. She drives like a maniac through winding country lanes, and then pulls over into a wooded copse to avoid the cops and let loose a crying jag, conflicted by her feelings and terrified at what is happening to her. Bogarde’s painful manner of closing his eyes when she wails, part concern, part relief, and part disgust, is one of his most eloquent actions. He’s creating a monster. He is just beginning to feel the consequences of it.

Meanwhile, the Doc, covering up for Bogarde again, pontificates, “All of us are capable of anything given the right provocation…in the dark forest of every human there’s a tiger -- a sleeping tiger.”

Tonight, it’s his wife.

While she’s beginning her downward spiral, Bogarde is being tamed by the Doc. In a climactic scene, the Doc finally penetrates Bogarde’s childhood torment over a father who abused him, and whose sudden death haunts him. Bogarde has a good scene here, breaking down and sobbing the story of his life. He feels comfortable at last to tell Knox because Knox has defended him time and again to the police and come to his rescue, supporting and nurturing him in a way his father never did. In case we miss that message, there is a melodramatic ending to scene where Bogarde swoons from the emotional effort and faints on the floor.

Alexis is surprised to see the Doc emerge from his office carrying Bogarde in his arms, taking him to his bedroom upstairs. The picture of father and son, or Pygmalion with a new Galatea.

We know from the fact of his subduing Dirk Bogarde at the beginning of the movie, which happens off camera, that Knox is a physically powerful man. Bogarde still bears the bruise on his twisted wrist. His first chastisement from Papa. When we see Knox carry Bogarde, it strikes us that not once in this movie has Knox ever taken Alexis in his arms.

We see there is a triangle here, not with the lab assistant, though she’s still in the ballgame. Alexis has lost her lover to her husband. They spend father-son fishing trips from which she is excluded.

She anticipates their homecoming excitedly, but only Doc comes home, and only because he remembered he has a paper to write. He did not come home to be with her, and Bogarde is distancing himself because he now thinks the Doc is a swell guy, and he feels guilty about luring his wife into cheating on him. She is more lonely now than she ever was before Bogarde came into their lives.

The Doc just gets more and more interesting. How much does he really know about their relationship? He declares Bogarde is cured. He confesses how hard his job has been, that as a therapist he is not supposed to show fear, dislike, or jealousy.

“Jealousy?” Alexis asks. Is she flattered that he might be jealous of Bogarde’s time with her? Or is she worried that he knows about her passion for Bogarde?

He suggests that he and Alexis should go on a vacation together. Earlier she would have jumped at the chance, but now she doesn’t want to leave Bogarde and she can’t tell the Doc that. What power over her does he have that she simply cannot ask him for a divorce? She becomes secretive and paranoid. She finds Bogarde at the inn where he is staying now and begs him to come back. “You’ve never seen me really angry. I warn you, you don’t know what I’m capable of.” It’s not a threat, it’s an intriguing, whimpered confession and is one of those elements in the script that gets dropped in but never explained.

But Bogarde is firm in breaking up with her because he just can’t hurt the Doc anymore. When he returns to their house to pack up his things, she finally rages at the humiliation to which he’s subjected her.

“You’re not going to give me notice like a waitress.” In her torment she has bit the back of her hand until it bleeds, finds the blood on her mouth. She’s gone over the edge. She staggers to the Doc, inferring that Bogarde became violent. Goads him into doing something about it, demanding some emotional response from him. Doc goes for his handy dandy handgun in the desk drawer to avenge his wife.

Lab assistant tries to stop him (my heavens, this woman is always skulking around), but we hear the sound of a shot, and Alexis, shattered,

“You killed him?” she asks when Doc emerges from Bogarde’s room.

“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” The man of science. We see that it’s a trick. He never shot Bogarde. He wanted to jolt Alexis into confessing her feelings for him. How long has he suspected? This man never lets a chance pass to do an experiment, to “wind up people like little toys.” What must it be like to live with a man who turns every encounter with his wife into a psychotherapy session?

When Bogarde swooned to the floor, Knox cradled him in his arms. When his wife crumples to the floor in a sobbing, confused mess, he stands over her with probing questions and a shining light in his narrow eyes in what is probably the most cruel scene in the movie. Doc is not a fiend, but his relentless clinical approach to everything has cruel repercussions. They are both tragic.

Alexis bolts out of the house, now that she knows Bogarde has gone and there still might be a chance for her to catch him.

Finally…finally, we get some plot exposition from the lab assistant, who tries to keep Doc from going after her, “Let her go. It’s been wrong between you for years. You’ll never put it right.”

Whoa, about time, lady. Where were you in the first reel?

But what exactly do you mean? Riddles are pointless without solutions.

There’s a bit of a chase scene here, and the upshot is Alexis drives through what appears to be a circus billboard with a lunging tiger painted on it. She dies. Did I mention there would be spoilers?

I have a problem with the protagonist dying at the end of movies like this. Wages of sin and all, I know, but still, it smacks of laziness and the writer’s inability to find a resolution so it’s just more convenient to kill the character off.

We have no resolution for anybody, except that Bogarde intends to give himself up to Hugh Griffith to set things straight. But Doc expresses no emotion at the physical wreckage of his wife anymore than he did her emotional wreckage. Lab assistant, always prepared, remembers to grab his coat as they leave together for the chase scene. What is her story?

This is a film where the set decoration tells us much (or at least is supposed to) about the story and characters. We see that Alexis and Doc have twin beds in their room, but whenever she is in a bedroom with Bogarde it’s on a double bed. We get the message about Doc’s personality from his office. But the photos of Alexis all over the house are put there for what message?

In classic films I think we tend to know little about set designers, at least not as much as we know of costumers or cinematographers. In theatre they are immensely important because when it comes to deciphering a set, theatre audiences tend to be more sophisticated than film audiences. They know that everything on the set is there for a specific reason. The stage director hasn’t the luxury of a film director of soaking up a variety of images just by panning the camera. All he has to work with is this space.

Among classic film directors, I think Alfred Hitchcock was the most cognizant about this, the most theatrical, and obviously left his mark on every frame. You just know everything’s in the shot for a reason. Joseph Losey gives us as much as he can with “The Sleeping Tiger” in terms of imagery (including a couple of interesting mirror shots) -- again, which sometimes provoke more questions than answers, but some answers can only be provided in the script. And they aren’t there. We come to know all we need to about Dirk Bogarde, but the others in the original triangle -- Doc, Wife, and Lab Assistant -- are still beyond our reach.

The movie is one of a string of films made in this period about the mysteries of psychoanalysis, movies often lurid and fantastic, but in this case it’s interesting that psychology is used as the basis of a love triangle, and for manipulation. What Doc does is on purpose. What Bogarde does is on purpose. Only Alexis seems powerless, losing her grip on her emotions and on her thinking bit by bit until she destroys herself with her obsession.

As mentioned in Monday’s post, this movie is on YouTube here in a single file. Please go have a look, and when you’ve seen it, come back and tell me what you think. For once, we can all watch the same movie together. Pass the popcorn. And, as The Muppets say, no singing opera during the movie.

This and That...

2011-11-14T07:33:00.000-05:00

A few things to clear off the desk today. First, to answer to what I’m sure is your burning curiosity about the screen caps I used for my post to illustrate the first chapter of my cozy mystery “Cadmium Yellow, Blood Red”. This was a lot like playing with paper dolls, or those Colorforms things when we were kids. They are in order:

“The Turning Point” (1952). My lead character female character is played by Alexis Smith.

An actual Hampden Ale advertisement.

“Vertigo” (1958) - car traffic.

“The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) - apartment building and lobby.

“The Sleeping Tiger” (1954) - female lead still played by Alexis here. Dirk Bogarde was in the mirror reflection, but I erased him. Don’t you wish you could to that with more people?

By the way, try finding a shot of nekkid people copulating on the floor of a swanky apartment in an old movie. I wasted some of the Best Years of My Life looking. Imagine my disappointment. I settled for….

“All About Eve” (1950) - apartment interior and stairs

Actual photo of the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.

“Vertigo” again, this time the lady in the museum.

“The Sleeping Tiger” again - shot of modern art.

“Executive Suite” (1954) - Since Alexis wanted too much money, I put her on suspension and continued the movie with Nina Foch. From the back, who can tell?

“Executive Suite” again - desk blotter.

“Make Haste to Live” (1954) - Nina Foch started making too many demands, like only blue M&Ms in her trailer, so I put her on suspension and hired Dorothy McGuire to finish the film. It was dark in this scene. Who’s going to know? When are these actresses going to learn that it’s my studio and I call the shots? Seven-year contract means shut up and do what I tell you.

“Make Haste to Live” again.

“Make Haste to Live” again. You don’t really get too many dramatic scenes around an office desk, which in my mundane world I think is the most exciting place in the world. The male lead is played by Stephen McNally.

“Vertigo” again - painting.

“How to Steal a Million” (1966) - the lead male is taken over by Peter O’Toole. Stephen McNally complained too much about the script. Since we never see either of their faces, I’m thinking of not giving them screen credit.

Next on the things to do list: Announce that this coming Thursday I’m giving a talk on Melzar Mosman, one of the foremost American craftsmen in the casting of bronze statuary of the 19th century, and a sculptor as well, at the Chicopee Public Library in Chicopee, Massachusetts. If any of you are in northern Connecticut or western Massachusetts and you are fascinated by 19th century bronze sculpture (and let’s face it, aren’t we all?) then do please drop by, I’d love to meet you. I’m showing slides.

Hey, I don’t make fun of your work.

Next on the list is a preview of Thursday’s post. I recently recommended the movie “The Sleeping Tiger” to someone (see screen capture reference above) at the YouTube link below, where it is posted in a single file. Then it later occurred to me that this would be a pretty nice opportunity for us to discuss a movie that we all have access to at the same time. Usually when we classic film bloggers post reviews, our readers inevitably have either never seen the movie, or saw it a long time ago and passion for it has waned. Or we were too young to get it. Or too old to remember it.

Here is the link on YouTube for “The Sleeping Tiger” starring Alexis Smith, Dirk Bogarde, Alexander Knox and Hugh Griffith. It’s a dark, psychological suspense story that takes place in England and was filmed there. I’ll be talking about it on Thursday, and there will, of course, be spoilers. Enough to choke a horse. So, watch the film first and then go back to my post when you can and do please let us know your opinions. My favorite thing about this blog is reading the comments. I learn new facts, I gain insight with the fresh perspective you give me and we give each other.

Think of it like a book club, where we’re all reading the same book so we can talk about it.

See you Thursday.

And Now For Something Completely Different...

2011-11-03T06:21:00.001-04:00

No, not a Monty Python sketch. But almost. What follows below, just for a lark, is the first chapter of “Cadmium Yellow, Blood Red” - my post-World War II “cozy” mystery about a museum heist, a missing child, a murder, a recent ex-con and an even more recent widow, presented as a noir pastiche. See how many films you recognize from the screen caps. The actors were all sent over by Central Casting this morning. They agreed to work for scale, since most of them haven't worked in a long time.

Think of it as a literary "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid".

The story: In Hartford, Connecticut, 1949, Juliet Van Allen, a museum administrator, discovers that her artist husband is having an affair with another woman. Elmer Vartanian, recently released from prison for a museum robbery, is coerced into helping scout the museum for a heist by a gang that has kidnapped his daughter. When Juliet's husband is murdered, she is the chief suspect and Elmer signs on as her alibi in exchange for something he wants. Together, dogged by the scandal-monger newsman, the shrewd police detective, and scrutinized by the even more judgmental eye of Hartford’s elite, the rich widow and the ex-con try to outrun them all in a 1948 Lincoln Cosmopolitan, in world where Modern Art meets old-fashioned murder.

Chapter 1

“The last spring of the 1940s.”

Juliet said it out loud this time, with equal parts anticipation and regret. Drumming slender white-gloved fingers on the steering wheel as she waited for the light to turn green, giving it her warmest smile as a thank you, she made a left-hand turn onto Asylum Street.

Past the fashionable Bond Hotel, she stomped her brake hard, with heart-pounding, if momentary, panic on discovering the large and dirty tailgate of the Hampden Ale truck in front of her. “You Get More Out of Hampden”.

Stopping just in time, nearly getting more out of Hampden than she wanted, she chuckled a mea culpa at the motto when the flow of traffic resumed, and she was given a reprieve by still being alive.

Juliet sometimes looked for signposts in her life, more supernatural than what was normally found on beer truck advertising or cooperative traffic lights, and invented them when they were not really there. Only dimly aware of this trait, she would have balked had someone accused her of needing some existential hand-holding. Proud and somewhat vain about her independent streak, nevertheless a vague sense of being imprisoned gnawed at her lately.

Perhaps it was her approaching thirtieth birthday, though Juliet told herself she did not care.

Making love on her free afternoon was all she cared about right now.

She left the car for the parking attendant and shot a glance at the upper floor of the apartment building. Kurt was not expecting her, but she knew he preferred surprises.

Hartford, Connecticut breathed easy, in its own self-superior way, and the sun-warmed sidewalk flecked with the reddish droppings of buds from the maple trees, with their tentative crop of tiny new leaves seemed to indicate that the winter landscape had all been a mirage.

The trees in front of their apartment house were something that she would have painted. But, Kurt would dismiss the idea, with derisive laughter, as a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover, and move onto deeper subjects in his conversation and in his art.

Juliet entered the apartment house lobby. Mr. Percy, the desk manager with the paunch and the jet-black dyed fringe of hair around his bald head said good afternoon. She would have painted Mr. Percy, too, if only for the novelty of his dyed fringe of hair. When she joked about it to Kurt, he suggested with his own peculiar effortless sarcasm that she ask Mr. Percy to model for her nude.

Mr. Percy looked up at her smiling, as if pleasantly surprised, on cue. Juliet stifled a chuckle, invariably reminded of Kurt’s nude remark, which is all she thought of now whenever she saw Mr. Percy.

The officious desk manager, unaware of her comic fantasies, certainly was surprised, for she usually worked until at least six, sometimes later. It was only four o'clock. Juliet considered announcing she had come home early to make love with her husband, but Mr. Percy was just too easy to fluster. She wondered, with what Kurt might say was disingenuous flippancy, if it mightn’t kill him.

Juliet took the elevator to the fourth floor apartment. The elevator operator, a tall, thin, young black man about twenty named Tommy also gave her a somewhat smile of unexpected pleasure. She wondered if this was indicative of a very well-trained and polite staff or if she really had been so hidebound in her habits. And, if anybody, actually, could be that pleased to see her. She hoped Kurt would be.

“Did you take your car off the blocks, yet, Tommy?”

He caught her eye with a conspirator’s look.

“This weekend. I can’t wait.”

“I’m surprised you’ve been stalling. Winter’s got to be over by now.”

“You can stop teasing me. I needed a tire.”

Tommy brought her to her floor. When the doors opened, he wished her a good afternoon.

“Thank you, Tommy.” Her footsteps echoed in the empty hall, and she touched the key to the keyhole.

She opened the door quietly, with no shouts of greeting. Surprising him was one thing, disturbing his work was another.

Juliet hoped that Kurt was continuing with the series on the Modern Woman. She put her keys in her purse and placed her purse down on the credenza against the wall, above which there was a mirror here in the alcove before the living room. A half wall with a wrought iron railing, which always made the person looking through the balusters seem as if he were in prison, separated the alcove from the living room. She turned and looked into the mirror to remove her hat, a soft, small peach-colored cap that matched her suit and clung to the crown of her light brown hair. She lifted her arms to reach for the hatpin with her right hand and hold her hat with her left, when her eyes were diverted by the flickered reflection of activity in the living room behind her.

She became only then just aware of a low muffled voice or more like a series of human noises. Lowering her arms slowly, pivoting with a gracefulness as if it had been rehearsed, Juliet looked through the thin, ironwork balustrade into the living room.

She noticed for the first time that the furniture was pushed aside. The two couches were pulled away from each other and the coffee table had been moved against one of them, leaving a large clear area in front of the fireplace. She gripped the wrought iron bars like a prisoner in jail, stood on tiptoe and pulled herself up a couple inches and looked down over one of the couches. Of the two naked people vigorously making love on a blanket on the living room floor, she could recognize Kurt, but not the woman whose face was hidden.

Juliet lowered herself to her heels again. Her heart leaped into second gear, her breathing shot in gasps all the more painful from trying to stifle them. Her throat began to ache. She knew what it was she was seeing, but a fog of more than shock; of resolute stupidity fell over her. She felt that she needed to look again, really look to make sure she understood the situation.

Juliet stepped quietly around the half wall and almost into the living room. She could make herself look no longer than a moment; it was enough, and too much.

Juliet turned quickly, her head snapping in a jerking movement, an involuntary reaction common to horror, great mirth, and being shot, and stepped back to the door. With a shaking hand, she picked up her purse. Shock and humiliation grabbed her by either arm and escorted her out the door, without even really knowing what she was doing. She only knew where, automatically, to retreat.

Back to her office.

Juliet took the stairs down to the street. She did not want to meet Tommy again. She could not return his smile, or greet him, a friend, without an explanation.

The stairwell behind steel fire doors revealed a quiet refuge, echoing cool solitude down four flights. She shattered the silence with the staccato sound of her heels clicking on the all steps, all the way down to the street. Tingling with cold perspiration, slightly lightheaded as if in the middle of a panic attack, she panted like a runner. Once outside again, she met the spring air, a cool lilac-scented breeze, which, after she had retrieved her car, was the only thing she could remember about the drive back to work. It was like a bookmark, between the awful incident and the quiet limbo of her office.

Juliet worked as an assistant director of marketing at the Wadsworth Atheneum, one of the crown jewels of Hartford history. The oldest public art museum in the United States, it had in the 1930s and 1940s begun to shrug off the somewhat stodgy attitude, if not quite all of its reverence for the Hudson River painters, and moved boldly forward to exhibit the works of modern paintings under the direction of its dynamic former curator Chick Austin.

Austin brought Italian Baroque, and theater, to the museum, and dance under Balanchine, and created a wing in the modern international style, the first seen in America. Modern Art, Cubism, Surrealism, the works of people like her husband Kurt, perhaps reflective of a parade of modern talent that led right to Kurt.

The scene she had witnessed on her living room floor might have been realistic, but it seemed very, very surreal to her.

Henry, the security guard looked up at her in surprise when she reentered the building. It was not a look of pleasant surprise, the way Tommy did, the way Mr. Percy did, with solicitude and deference. Just blank surprise. But, he gave her an awkward nod, touched his cap.

“Forgot something,” she said, though, she did not owe him an explanation and he nodded this time with a smile as if, for no reason, he were relieved.

She closed the door to her office and sat there in silence. Only the singular glare from the 60 watt light bulb on her iron desk lamp lit the room, as if she were in a police interrogation office, interrogating herself.

In a way she was, asking the same questions of how could he? Why?

How long she had sat at her desk quietly crying, staring off to a shadowy wall as if she might find answers there was actually about five hours, a little after nine o'clock. A strange muffled sound roused her from misery. She became conscious after a moment that it came from the ceiling above her. In another moment, she saw the ventilation grate in the ceiling tremble. From inside what she supposed was an air duct, the grate shifted from within the ceiling, revealing a dark hole. Then the worn brown shoes of a man slipped through.

Wrinkled brown socks slipped down to reveal two white, rather hairy ankles, wrinkled brown trousers smeared gray with dust slipped down from the open hole in the ceiling.

The stupor that had overtaken Juliet these last few hours evaporated. She snapped suddenly alert and aware again. Sometime in the past few hours she had taken off her white gloves. They were bunched in her hand, twisted, wrinkled and damp from wiping her tears with them.

Could she alert Henry?

She looked at her delicate gold wristwatch. Nine o'clock. Had she been here so long? Kurt will be worried.

Kurt would be worried? Yes, Kurt would be so worried he might need to go out and get another date. She cursed his immortal soul and wondered if anyone else was working late. Chauncey, would he still be here? No. Chauncey always took a moment to look in on her. She had an idea that Chauncey liked her, maybe more than he should. She tried not to encourage him, but she tried not to discourage him either, because after all he was her boss.

Karen was not here either, the secretary she shared with Chauncey. All the office staff would have long gone home by now. There would only be Henry the night watchman and his two assistants.

The trouser legs became a jacket of a slightly different shade of brown, and likewise streaked gray with dust. Then the man lowered himself, very gently, like an acrobat, and dropped himself with only the slightest noise to the floor.

Too late for her to turn off the desk lamp. He noticed his own shadow on the wall, and turned to face Juliet. She attempted to hide under her desk. But, it was too late.

He saw her. She gasped, drawing her arms close to her chest as if protecting herself, clutching her crumpled gloves. He quickly touched his finger to his lips, the sign to hush.

Then he held both his hands up, palms facing outward as if he were surrendering to her, and he touched his finger to his lips again imploring her to be quiet. He called in a whispered stage voice up to the hole in the ceiling.

“We have to go back. I made a mistake.”

Juliet heard a body shift and some muffled reply in the air shaft somewhere deep behind the ceiling panels above her in an otherworld of ceiling infrastructure. The man took the chair for visitors and brought it to the hole in the ceiling and stood upon it, and called softly into his hole again.

“This office, it’s been made over into a supply closet, door’s locked from the outside. We have to go back and try the other way.”

Another muffled reply in the air shaft.

“I'm not playing games,” he said. “I'm coming back up.”

He looked down at Juliet and touched his finger to his lips again. He called again into the air shaft.

“Someone's coming! Go back! I’ll hide here.”

In another moment, they heard a muffled movement from the ceiling that became more and more faint.

They both knew they were alone. He stared at her intently through the dim glare of the single 60 watt bulb from black iron gooseneck desk lamp, as if he were deciding what to do. Then he replaced the ceiling panel, and stepped down from the chair, never taking his eyes off hers.

“I won't hurt you. Just don't scream, or we’ll both be in for it.” He said it in a slow, calm, deliberate way, as if he were talking to a small fretful child, or training a dog. He kept doing that same gesture with his hands. Both slightly raised, as if he were surrendering, palms facing outward to her, patting the air in front of him gently. She finally began to feel her heartbeat slowing, as if his hand motion was making her slow down. She managed a few deep breaths.

“There's going to be a heist pulled on this museum in two or three days. A week. I don't know yet. I'm not involved in it. I mean, I am, but I'm not a crook. Until about a month ago I was in prison, but I never stole anything or hurt anybody. These guys, they've got me over a barrel. They've got my kid. And if I don't help them pull off their job, they won't tell me where she is. They might even hurt her.

“I want to set them up, so they get caught. I want to fix it so that the cops or your security staff knows when it’s going to happen. But, I don’t want to be here. I don't want them ever to know that I squealed. Do you understand?”

He waited what seemed like weeks for her to nod.

“As soon as I find out what's really happening and when it's going down, I'll contact you. Don't tell them that you found out through me. Just an anonymous tip. Okay?”

“I don't believe any of this.” Juliet finally said, in a faint, shaky voice, the first thing she had said in hours and it was true, and she meant more than just the strange man falling out of the ceiling, or the museum going to be robbed. She meant Kurt McLeod, that miserable lying cheating pig of a husband, whose superior artistic talent was surpassed only by his lust, and perhaps by his arrogance.

“I swear it's true. I want to stop these guys and I don't want to get involved. I got out of prison a month ago. I want to start my life over.”

“What were you in prison for?”

“Breaking into a museum, so some guys could rob it.”

Oh, swell.

Juliet had been gripping the armrests of her office chair. She pulled her white-knuckled grip off the chair, put her hands in her lap and began to rub them, leaving her white cotton gloves in knotted ball on the desk. Her wedding ring lay on the desk blotter by the gloves. She had wriggled it off hours ago. Rose gold with three diamonds. Kurt bought it with his separation pay from the Army. Or, he said he did. Suddenly her entire history with him was a question mark.

She looked up at the man, noticing that he saw the ring.

“You can have it, the ring…and here, my watch, if you just leave me alone.”

“I don’t want them. I swear, lady, I’m not going to hurt you.”

“I'm not alone. I could scream, or call and get help very quickly.”

“There's a security guard on the outside of the building and one on the inside on the first floor. You're alone and there's no one to hear you.”

She swallowed audibly and her heart began to pound again, hammering blood to her temples. Again he lifted his hands.

“I don't say that to scare you. I know the routines of your schedule and others. You sure weren’t supposed to be here tonight.

“But, I'm not here to hurt you. We’re going to walk out of here, you and I, right through the lobby where the security guy is sitting alone. When we pass him, I’m going to look right at him, so that he knows my face. When the cops get involved, he’ll be able to identify me later on if he has to. When we’re out of the building, I’ll leave you. And we won't see each other anymore, but I will contact you when I know what the plans are for the break-in so you can alert your staff.

“I’ll even tell you my name, but I’d rather you not tell it to anybody, not yet. But, if you need to tell the cops who I am, eventually, my name is Elmer Vartanian. I’ll trust you, if you trust me.”

The name meant nothing to her. She'd never heard it before. Her first thought was that it was a made-up name. It sounded silly enough to be a made-up name.

“Well, Miss Van Allen? Do we have an agreement?”

“You know my name?”

“It's painted there on the glass of your office door, Miss Van Allen, Associate Director, Marketing.” They both looked at the glass and read it, backwards.

“You want me to wait for your call to tell me when the break-in is going to occur and to alert my security staff to catch them. But, you don't want me to mention your name to the police. Is that it?”

“Yes. That way, I don't get in trouble with these people. And I get my daughter back, and you don't get your museum robbed. Is it a deal?”

“What are these people supposed to be stealing?”

“You’ve got a collection of gold on the first floor, plates and cups and things on loan from the Southwest Museum.”

“It's an Aztec collection.”

“They don't care about that. They expect to get a fortune when it’s fenced.”

“Lord.”

“Do we have a deal?”

“I want something else, too.”

“What?” He frowned, hesitating.

“I want you to destroy some paintings.”

He look of incredulity encouraged her. She explained quickly, with a sense of sureness that had finally returned to her after the last miserable hours.

“There are seven paintings in the third floor gallery, a collection of modern art by Kurt McLeod. I want them destroyed.”

If you haven't figured it out already, this is an insidious publicity ploy. For those of you brave enough to continue the story without screen caps, the novel is available as an ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Sony, Kobo, and Diesel.

I won't be posting next week as I have some other fish to fry, but I'll be back with a new post on Monday, November 14th.