“You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!   And that’s how you get Capone.”-Sean Connery to Kevin Costner

Sean Connery.  Kevin Costner.  Brian De Palma.  Ennio Morricone.  Could it be possible that each of these artists—two actors, a director and a film composer—did their best work in The Untouchables?  It’s possible.  Not likely. Still——

The opportunity to judge for yourself is now at hand in some bang-up new Blu-ray releases from Warner Bros., officially available May 21, two volumes in the “Ultimate Gangster Collection.”  One set, the “Classic Collection,” represents, some might say, the cream of black-and-white in this genre, from 1931 to 1949, climaxed by James Cagney’s White Heat.  The other set which includes three other films, The Petrified Forest, Little Caesar and The Public Enemy arrives under the “Contemporaty” moniker.  Both are available on Blu-ray 5/21. Thanks to Warner Brothers for the review copy provided.

The second set, the “Contemporary Collection,” is just as “creamy,” albeit much, much bloodier, thanks to the vivid color and the immense “progress” made in the name of realism.  These five gangster movies were made between 1973 and 1995.  In order of creation, they are Mean Streets,The Untouchables, GoodFellas, Heat and The Departed.  Were it not that all but two of the films are directed by Martin Scorsese and all but one stars Robert De Niro, this could be regarded as a first-rate tribute to these two men.  Rather than to any individuals, this set is a first-class tribute to the gangster films of this later period of Hollywood history.

The great wonder of both DVD sets is not, as is usually the case, that the buyer, to use an appropriate metaphor, inherits a dubious gun case with only one or two loaded guns.  Congratulations to Warner Bros.!  There are no blanks in either of these sets.  All are at least three-star films, most of them four, four being tops.

As to that question regarding the convergence of such outstanding talent in The Untouchables, the movie which is the specific interest here, Sean Connery, Brian De Palma and Ennio Morricone were never better.  Oscars are sometimes ill-placed, and governed by all sorts of non-acting criteria, but Connery’s Best Supporting Actor award is clearly deserved, even if it were a belated award for accumulative work, which fortunately it is not.  That that category was not especially strong in 1987 should not diminish his Oscar.  The acting is, indeed, the best of his career.

Kevin Costner was in the middle of his ripest period, with the luck to fall into a cluster of good films, making each role his own.  His success had officially begun a few years earlier, in 1985, with Silverado. The Untouchables was immediately followed by No Way Out—a slick thriller, however preposterous the about-face ending—and then, often one after the other, such right-on targets as Bill Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, JFK and Wyatt Earp

Despite the sometimes lack of the most nuanced of performances, his acceptance from the first has been largely due to his wholesome, boyish appearance and likable personality, a kind of James Stewart successor. Like Stewart, he mostly plays, and is most comfortable as, an easy-going good guy, one of the few exceptions being the serial killer role in Mr. Brooks.

Not that The Untouchables contains Costner’s greatest performance.  It doesn’t.  The competition, too, is rather tight.  He is obviously out shown by Connery, an indomitable presence and a born scene-stealer in any case.  Even Charles Martin Smith holds his own and gains sympathy as another nice “good guy,” so much so that the seasoned filmgoer will instinctively sense, “Yep, he’s gonna die before this flick is over.”

As for Robert De Niro, his always larger-than-life acting well suits this larger-than-life movie.  He is variously gripping as the evil Al Capone, from violently malicious when his power is threatened to tearfully sentimental during a performance of “Vesti la giubba” from Pagliacci.  His method acting seems to pay off remarkably well here—critics must not be against “the method” when it works!—especially during the “baseball bat” luncheon and his staircase confrontation with Ness, this Federal agent nemesis: “I want him DEAD!  I want his family DEAD!  I want his house burned to the GROUND!”  Since De Niro never has a scene with Connery, the one actor in this flick strong enough to challenge him, the results of that comparison must remain forever inconclusive.  For me, however, it’s the Scotsman all the way.

Andy Garcia as another Federal agent, the smallest role of the top five actors, often fades into the background and seems unduly stoic, which, oddly, is a criticism sometimes leveled at Costner’s performance.

DePalma, like his Scottish friend Connery, although more so, turned out a plague of inferior films, in fact a larger percentage of duds than many other directors, say, Billy Wilder, John Ford, William Wyler, Alfred Hitchcock or DePalma’s fellow champion in the gangster/crime genre, Martin Scorsese.  Yes, that selective citing of names is a bit unfair: these are, after all, master film directors, the best of the best.  Belonging to a lower directorial echelon, DePalma often prefers to copy his fellows rather than originate ideas, most frequently Hitch.

All that aside, The Untouchables is a brilliant aberration, one of De Palma’s finest efforts, supported by the talents of those already mentioned, and, too, by a blending of many other ingredients beyond the director, the stars and the composer.  There are, for starters, the superb work of screenwriter David Mamet, cinematographer Stephen H. Burum, film editors Gerald B. Greenbergand Bill Pankow and a trio of art/set designers (Oscar-nominated) headed by Patrizia von Brandenstein, who won her only Oscar two years earlier for Amadeus.

Ennio Morricone, who first gained fame in the 1960s as a composer of so-called “spaghetti Westerns”for Clint Eastwood, has become the most prolific composer in movie history, far more so than his contemporary John Williams, who, really, has no pretensions to the title.  Morricone as well has turned out more scores per year—if that proves anything—than the possible previous champ, Max Steiner, though, admitted, many of the Golden Age composer’s early scores were simple main and end titles.  By the laws of artistic creation—and the rule sometimes applies even to some works of a genius like Mozart—such over abundance results in a dilution of substance and quality, as is entirely true of much of the Italian composer’s work.  However, as Carl Sandburg wrote about Chicago, where The Untouchables takes places, the score is as “big-shouldered” as the rest of the film.

Simply put—hard for this writer; we’ll see—the plot of the movie is this:

A naïve Bureau of Prohibition agent, Eliot Ness (Costner), arrives in Chicago in 1929 to see what he and his Federal agents can do about the gangster and bootlegger king, Al Capone (De Niro), who seems to be running the city and its government, including the police.  Killings, corruption and liquor smuggling are rampant. In his first “surprise” raid, Ness finds, not illegal Canadian booze, but oriental parasols. Someone tipped off Capone!

By accident, Ness meets an honest Irish-American policeman, Jim Malone (Connery), on his beat and Ness asks for his help.  They meet in a church—one of the few places safe from eavesdroppers—and Ness agrees to do whatever it takes, to go all the way, to get Capone.  When Ness wonders where they will ever find any reliable men to join them, Malone, in one of his succinct quips, says, “If you’re afraid of getting a rotten apple, don’t go to the barrel, get if off the tree.” The two men recruit an Italian-American police trainee, George Stone (Garcia), and, needing one more gun, Malone drafts an unwary but instantly fervent accountant, Oscar Wallace (Smith), who has found Capone is four years delinquent on his income tax.  Together, the four men become friends and “The Untouchables” as well—incorruptable, totally dedicated to their job.

At the U.S.-Canadian border, Ness and his three men, assisted by Canadian authorities, successfully intercept a caravan of illegal liquor—in one of the action high points of the film, and in Morricone’s music. In the best way he knows, to coerce a captured Capone bookkeeper (Brad Sullivan) into translating the codes in his ledger, Malone presses up against a window the dead bootlegger Ness had already shot, threatens the man, then “kills” him.  The bookkeeper becomes instantly cooperative!

One of Capone’s hit men, Frank Nitti (Billy Drago), infiltrates the police station and kills the bookkeeper and Wallace.  While Ness persuades the district attorney not to close the case against Capone for income tax evasion, Malone threatens the police chief (Richard Bradford), a Capone mole, and learns that another gangster accountant (Jack Kehoe) is departing Chicago by train to avoid a subpoena.  A knife-wielding hood sneaks into Malone’s street corner apartment.  “Isn’t that just like a wop?” Malone says.  “Brings a knife to a gunfight.”

But the intruder is only a decoy, and is easily run off.  When Malone steps into his hall—too late!  He is shot in the chest at least twenty or thirty times with a Tommy gun by Nitti from across the alley.  It’s a little more than implausible that, hit so many times, Malone could live as long as he does and, to boot, crawl across his apartment!—and still be alive when Ness and Stone arrive and longer still to show them which train the second bookkeeper will take.  He then struggles to clasp his Saint Jude’s medallion.  Regardless, it’s a good death scene and Connery, of course, does it in grand style.

In capturing the bookkeeper at Union Station, Ness and Stone have a spectacular, surreal gunfight with Capone’s henchmen, choreographed like a ballet and done in stylized slow motion.  In a graceful sprint, Stone tosses Ness a much-needed revolver.  The idea of the baby carriage bouncing down the staircase, here with a totally unruffled, smiling baby, was lifted from the “Odessa Steps” sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 The Battleship Potemkin.  The line of rigid soldiers marching down the steps would reappear in 1934, only now in Nazi uniforms, in Triumph of the Will by Hitler’s favorite photographer, Leni Riefenstahl.

During Capone’s trial for income tax fraud, with the bookkeeper testifying, Ness realizes that Nitti is obviously carrying a gun and escorts him from the courtroom. Ness sees Malone’s address in the inside cover of Nitti’s matchbook and realizes he is Malone’s killer.  Trapped, Nitti shoots the bailiff and Ness chases him across the rooftop (reminiscent of In the Line of Fire, Clint Eastwood’s pursuit of John Malkovich) and pushes the killer off the roof when the thug boasts that he is beyond the law.

Stone shows Ness a list of names from Nitti’s pocket: the jury has been bribed.  When Ness threatens the judge (Anthony Mockus, Sr.), implying he also is on the list, the judge switches his jury with the one next door.  Capone is convicted and sentenced to eleven years in prison.

Preparing to leave his office, Ness gives the Saint Jude medallion to Stone.  The strong bond that had made friends of the four men is somehow commemorated, certainly remembered by the two survivors.

As for Morricone’s score, 1987 was yet another year of blockbusters—Empire of the Sun, The Last Emperor, Lionheart, Robocop and, of course, The Untouchables.  But it was a weak year for film scores.  The most familiar composers of two of these films, John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, were experiencing a bit of a slump.  Morricone, by far, turned out the best score for The Untouchables, not by default but because it was excellent music and perfectly complemented the film.  That it was nominated was fruitless against the tidal wave of Oscars for The Last Emperor.

The Last Emperor, the walk-away winner in nine categories, won Best Original Score, a collaboration of a Japanese, a Chinese and an American.  It wasn’t the first, or the last, time a weak score, and, more specifically, one written by a committee, would undeservedly win the Oscar. It happened in 1939 when a group of composers won for a pastiche of American songs for Stagecoach. It could have happened again—remember?—in 2003 when another troupe struggled to assemble music for Master and Commander, though, in this case, fortunately, the score was not even nominated.

(The year 1939 was another year of a muddled distinction between “Best Music, Scoring,” which Stagecoach did win, and “Best Original Score,” which The Wizard of Oz won.  But remember, Stagecoach, not an original score, won over Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Elizabeth and Essex, Aaron Copland’s Of Mine and Men and other original scores which should have been in the category with Oz!  Was all that clear?!  To make this jumble more ridiculous, between the two categories, there were twenty-five nominees!  And then there was the song category . . . )

The entire Untouchables score is permeated with Morricone’s own special flavorings, here adjusted to reflect the era of the’20s and ’30s, Chicago and the types of characters involved, good and bad—a ragtime-like piano, a wailing solo melodica (known under several names, including a key flute), teasing trumpets, sad saxophones and a suave use of strings and percussion.

The music inhabits, generally, three varying sound worlds. One is heard when Ness and Malone enter the bank for a raid with that crane shot of the bustling Chicago street and still later for the fight at the border.  The sound suggests the robust romanticism of Korngold and Franz Waxman, of nineteenth-century opulence, though Morricone’s internal style and orchestration, which he does himself (good for him), is quite different.

In a characteristic Morriconian contrast, a second kind of sound is one of nostalgia and guarded sadness, a tune in strings and saxophone to represent the friendship of the four “Untouchables,” still, though, with a link to romanticism and comeliness of melody. The theme is also used for the intimate scenes with Ness and his family, his wife (Patricia Clarkson’s début) and daughter (Kaitlin Montgomery).

That third sound, which conceivably makes the greatest impression because it vividly epitomizes the Morricone style, makes up the rhythms and riffs that support the action sequences, most notably the rooftop chase, the theme for Al Capone, parts of the border music and Malone’s death.

The main title contains such music, and instantly conveys this film is no comedy or musical.  This music is saying, “Heads up!  Something is about to happen!”  After a single jab from the timpani, a regular incessant rhythm is established, to which is added the clanging raps of that piano, followed by an equally jagged ostinato rhythm.  It’s all like some kind of wild jazz fugue, with growing complexity and ever-changing variety.

“If you’re not committed to anything, you’re just taking up space.”— Gregory Peck to Kevin McCarthy in the climax of Mirage

Should a latecomer arrive after the main title credits of Mirage, he might easily think he is watching a Hitchcock suspenser, the film is that good in doing what it sets out to do. The main theme of the movie, amnesia, is what haunts the same actor, Gregory Peck, in Hitch’s Spellbound. Walter Abel’s fall from a high office building recalls Norman Lloyd’s plunge from the Statue of Liberty in Hitch’s Saboteur, and any number of the director’s films, either fatal falls or otherwise—in Blackmail, Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest and many others.

Peck as the innocent man-on-the-run is, in fact, Hitch’s most recurring theme—in The 39 Steps, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt (not so innocent here!), Strangers on a Train, The Man Who Knew Too Much (both versions) and epitomized in North by Northwest. Diane Baker, the desirable, enigmatic woman who haunts Peck’s every step, though not here the director’s preferred blond, evokes any number of Hitch actresses and their wiles on screen. Baker, never quite convincing as a femme fatale, here suggests a cross between a concerned sister and an instructor, frightened herself, on how Peck can stay alive.

Certainly stairs occur in Mirage, though only secondarily, conceivably a metaphor for a loss of sanity—well, memory, anyway. Hitch’s staircases—in Rebecca, Saboteur, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, The Paradine Case, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Psycho and so many others—represent a character’s confusion, malice, vulnerability, almost always a change in fortune.

There are two strong, more specific similarities in Mirage with another, if not a Hitchcock film, then a Hitch-like one, Charade, directed by Stanley Donen a few years before Mirage. In Mirage, a man is bludgeoned with the butt of a pistol and tossed in a bathtub; the counterpart in Charade, where George Kennedy, also another nasty character in Mirage, is drowned in one. In another parallel, a detective in Mirage and a phony CIA man in Charade both occupy an office “while the secretary is out to lunch.” The actor in both cases is Walter Matthau.

These similarities shouldn’t be surprising. Peter Stone, who scripted Charade, also wrote the screenplay for Mirage, based on the novel by Howard Fast, pseudonym in the credits for Walter Ericson. Mirage is directed by veteran Edward Dmytryk, a director of such diverse films as Hitler’s Children, Murder, My Sweet, The Caine Mutiny and Raintree County.

Despite an absence of the requisite shadowy lighting and a less than dark score by Quincy Jones, Mirage could, in one strong aspect, pass for a film noir. Peck is certainly in a “noir” situation, that is, his life is at stake, and he is pursued by numerous unsavory characters. A whole gang, in fact, is out to get him. Exactly why he is a target is the key to the film’s suspense, and considerable suspense there is. And related to this, what Hitchcock would call the “MacGuffin,” what is it that everybody is after? Further connected, what is it Peck can’t remember? He doesn’t know, he says. Or does he? . . .

And if the people after him are the cause of his dilemma, just as many others are unsympathetic to his plight—a bartender, a doorman, a desk sergeant and, most insensitive, a psychiatrist. Even this woman, played by Baker, seems basically indifferent and, yes, that word again, “shady.” She is the unknown factor in it all. She seems to be on both sides, for and against the man she seems to be following.

But the audience might change its mind about Baker when another quality emerges during a little girl’s (Eileen Baral) tea party. Only the drink is coffee, the “coffee” poured from an empty pot by the child who is home alone, re-enacting a grownup’s life. Baker’s character reveals a tender interaction with the little girl—a sign she would make a good wife?—and when Peck reaches in his pocket to shell out a tip, she suggests that a simple “thank you” is all that is necessary.

And after giving up trying to explain to an insensitive policeman and an arrogant psychiatrist that someone is trying to kill him, the one stranger who becomes a friend, a laid-back private detective he hires, ends up murdered, making Peck as much alone as he was at the start of his nightmare.

But to begin . . . at the beginning, here is a highly condensed synopsis:

Mirage opens in the dark, on the twenty-seventh floor of an office tower in New York City. The first Hitchcock film that comes to mind that so opens is Suspicion, Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine’s train coming out of a tunnel. David Stillwell (Peck), a cost accountant, or so he says, meets Shela (Baker) in a stairwell during a power outage. That she remembers him and he not her, that she speaks of an unknown “Major,” are the first clues that something is amiss with his memory, possibly his mind.

Leaving the building, he walks past a man, dead on the sidewalk, who has fallen from one of the high office windows, and on a subway ride he reads the headline on a commuter’s newspaper that the victim was Charles Calvin (Abel), a famous humanitarian. (My, that news was reported, printed and distributed almost instantaneously, even for a time when late editions were common!)

At his apartment, Stillwell is confronted by a congenial, talkative man with a gun, Lester (Jack Weston), who says “the Major” wants to see him. Stillwell subdues the intruder, but, alarmingly, finds that his refrigerator and briefcase are empty. He receives a phone call from Josephson (Kevin McCarthy), referring to some trip to Barbados; moments before, Stillwell had tried unsuccessfully to call Josephson, using an area code that had been changed two years ago.

Fearful for his life, Stillwell consults a desk sergeant (Hari Rhodes) who trivializes the idea that someone is trying to kill him. “Forget it!” Stillwell says. Next, from a skeptical psychiatrist (Robert H. Harris) he learns that the two-year memory loss he describes, which suggests unconscious amnesia, can last no more than two days, at the most. “To hell with you, doctor!”

Stillwell next resorts to a private detective, Ted Caselle (Matthau). Turns out, he has no secretary (the one “out to lunch”), no partner and this is his first case. “Terrific!” Caselle suggests they retrace his client’s steps. At Stillwell’s apartment, the refrigerator is now stuffed with food, the briefcase full of papers and Lester’s hat and gun Stillwell had put in the closet—gone.

The entry door to his supposed office, Garrison Limited, is now a solid wall. And descending to the lowest level of the building, the two men find that the subbasements Stillwell had seen before have vanished. While there, they are attacked by, but are able to subdue, a “maintenance man” (Kennedy as Willard). In the lobby, Stillwell discovers that doorman Joe Turtle (Neil Fitzgerald) is now someone else.

In a lead provided by Shela, who turns up frequently in Stillwell’s nightmare, he discovers Turtle in his apartment all right—in the bathtub, his head bashed in. And returning to Caselle’s office, Stillwell finds the detective strangled with the telephone cord.

In the film’s climax, this helpless and bewildered man-on-the-run confronts his adversaries—Josephson, Willard and the seemingly fence-straddling Shela (Lester has been killed by Willard). He meets, finally, “the Major,” actual name Crawford (Leif Erickson), a retired Army officer and Calvin’s deputy.

Having reclaimed bits of memory earlier, Stillwell now fits together the final pieces of his identify and past, even as Willard is slugging him. He is not a cost accountant, but a physical chemist, and what Crawford has been after is his formula for neutralizing atomic bomb radiation, to make a “safe” bomb. And Calvin’s death? Stillwell was burning the only existing copy of the formula when Calvin grabbed for it and fell out the window. (Speaking of movie similarities, Abel’s earlier speech about the “little ants” below on the pavement recalls Orson Welles’ to Joseph Cotton on the Ferris wheel in Citizen Kane.) Calvin’s fall, then, generated Stillwell’s amnesia—and his subsequent guilt that he was responsible for the death.

In a game of Russian roulette, Crawford tries to persuade Stillwell to write down the formula. So far, so good: the first two “clicks” are impotent, but the game is interrupted by a fight. When Josephson inadvertently retrieves the dropped gun, Stillwell reminds him that he, now, has the power, control of the situation. “If you’re not committed to anything,” Stillwell says, “you’re just taking up space,” and convinces him to call the police. Stillwell and Shela embrace on the balcony as the police work in the background. Fade out.

For the sake of economy in that synopsis, many of the examples of Stillwell’s amnesia were deleted, as were some of the encounters with his adversaries, including a chase through New York City’s Central Park. Removed, too, were at least two love scenes and that tender interlude of the “tea” party referred to earlier, all which some will see as unnecessary digressions from the mystery. That long scene of dénouement with “the Major” is a bit protracted, however well crafted the suspense and the cascading revelations.

The plot of Mirage is complicated, and for most of the time the audience may be as confused as Stillwell. Maybe that’s the intent of the film, for viewer and actor, both, to discover what’s happening. In any case, Mirage should be seen several times to be fully appreciated.

The numerous memory flashbacks—two men under a tree, a man falling, memory-jogging lines from previous scenes—must have been a nightmare in a different way for film editor Ted J. Kent—The Bride of Frankenstein, My Man Godfrey (1936), The Wolf Man. Cinematography is by Joseph MacDonald, whose own credits include My Darling Clementine, The Young Lions, The Sand Pebbles and The List of Adrian Messenger, a sentimental favorite of this writer.

For Quincy Jones, who had scored The Pawnbroker the year before, the music is only sometimes noticeable, the perfect illustration, for those who believe such, that a good score is an unnoticed score. Even when the music is forward enough to become a true part of the movie, it is not always suspense-appropriate or otherwise effective. Jones would also score the weak, even more confusing remake of Mirage in 1968. In Jigsaw, with Bradford Dillman in the Peck role, the score does little to help the already script-muddled film.

Finally—and a welcomed contrast to what is, after all, a very dark film—the exchanges between Peck and Matthau are the best, most humorous parts of the film. Simply put, Matthau steals the show, hands down. The most sprightly repartee occurs during Caselle’s first visit to Stillwell’s apartment, illustrated in this excerpt from their dialogue, beginning with the detective:

“I’ll tell you one thing, it’s kind of scary.”

“You don’t even talk like a detective.”

“ . . . What if someone wants you playing this thing all alone, without any help? What if I’m supposed to write you off as a nut and walk away?”

“What if I am a nut?”

“I don’t think you’re nuts enough to imagine that big fellow that’s been following us since we left the bank.”

“I didn’t see any one.”

“You’re not being paid to.”

“Wouldn’t it be hilarious if you did know what you’re doing?”

“Then how come I don’t know what to do next?”

“Pretend you’re James Bond. He always knows what to do.”

“A little girl in a cage, waiting for someone to come along and let her out.”—— Walter O’Neil to his wife, Martha

In any academic overview, it could be assumed that war movies, usually aimed at boosting Allied propaganda, were the most prolific film genre during the first half of the 1940 decade. Most abundant, yes, but, although there were any number of masterpieces, others—it’s tempting to say the greater majority—were forgettable, seen in retrospect and in saner times as biased and, worse, now embarrassingly racist.

Whatever due they deserve, war films have been far eclipsed by the most lasting and influential genre of their time, the whole decade of the ’40s, and that is film noir. These films concern, in the briefest summary, desperate people in desperate situations, photographed in a gloomy atmosphere and in black-and-white.

In more comprehensive terms, the individuals are usually—almost necessarily—among the lower rungs of society, the down-and-outers, if not criminals of some sort, then nearly so, caught up in some malice beyond their control. And whether guilty or not of what threatens them, they are the clear-cut victims. Even the wealthy and well-positioned are subject to this cruel intrigue, for their status is corrupted by their faults and flaws, just as often by the evil of others. If they escape at the end of the last reel, they escape forever scarred.

The scholars have so decreed—and it seems a convenient peg to hang the obvious—that all this angst in film noir developed out of any number of world-wide crises, mainly during and just before the ’40s, as early as World War I, if one cares to backtrack that far for symptoms. Subsequent to that tragedy came the Great Depression of the ’30s; then another global war, only worse than the one before; after a supposed victory, a Cold War and the terror of possible nuclear annihilation; in the mid-’50s, the McCarthy communist witch-hunt; and even now, for the terror never abates, only erupts in different guises, a new confection of calamities. From an unwanted—would it be perverse to say “rich”?—source, the noir filmmakers, like their fellow artists, the playwrights, novelists, even opera composers, made their creations a subtext against the infringement of liberties and the abuse of government power.

Today film noir continues in a fashion, more often now, though always less dynamic, a further dilution of the genre, in color. For some inexplicable reason, against all artistic and dramatic logic, nobody wants to watch B&W films, and just about as large a majority of Hollywood powers-that-be disdain making non-color films, mainly because they reduce attendance.

The oppressive, claustrophobic nihilism of film noir began, some would like to think, with a convenient milestone in the detective genre, The Maltese Falcon of 1941. Although its director, John Huston, would guide two other notable gangster noir films, Key Largo and The Asphalt Jungle, it was the Austrian Fritz Lang who came to be especially associated with the genre, even three exceptional films that predate Falcon—M (in Germany) in 1931, Fury in 1936 and You Only Live Once in 1937. He held his own in the field throughout the ’40s and ’50s, and toward the end of his career, in 1956, turned out one of the best noirs, While the City Sleeps. Even the title is great!

So, with all this as way of introduction, comes, in 1946, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, directed by Lewis Milestone. Though not remembered for film noir, but better known for All Quiet on the Western Front and, some say, the “notorious” 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, the director made Ivers as representative and as crafty a movie of the type as did most other directors—and they all seemed to try their hand with at least one of these dark films.

Although not here connected with Warner Brothers where he did his finest work, producer Hal B. Wallis in Ivers (distributed by Paramount) delivers his reliable stamp of quality and studio sheen. Cinematographer Victor Milner, adept in both B&W and color, captures the milieu of dark mansions, seedy hotel rooms, the abundant rainy exteriors, nightclub table talk, dark alleys, bus stations and lonely highways—all standard settings for film noir.

Not one of his best scores, Miklós Rózsa does, nevertheless, reinforce the shadows, the slugfests, the seemingly perpetual rain, the intrigues and, above all, that peculiar love of Martha Ivers. Like other composers who specialized—Max Steiner in Bette Davis melodramas, Erich Wolfgang Korngold in swashbucklers, Dimitri Tiomkin in Westerns—Rózsa best demonstrates his gifts, the biblical epics aside, in film noir. In fact, he scored many of Hollywood’s greatest films in the genre: Double Indemnity, The Red House, The Lost Weekend, Lady on a Train and, yes, Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, and, not to be forgotten, the trilogy produced by Mark Hellinger: Brute Force, The Killers and The Naked City.

Unlike a number of Rózsa’s scores, in Ivers there is no set piece or big tune to grab the ear of the movie-goer. There is, for example, the cello melody for Mouche (Anne Baxter) in Five Graves to Cairo, the waltz in Madame Bovary, all those marches in Quo Vadis? and Ben-Hur, the voyage music in Plymouth Adventure and the piano solos in Lydia. Speaking of the piano, in the so-called “concerto” connection with Hitchcock’s Spellbound, that instrument was only used in a special synthesis of the score arranged by the composer apart from the film.

The musical signature of Ivers is a typical Rózsa trademark, a motif driving the tension and passion throughout much of the movie, either in the forefront to sharpen the action or beneath dialogue to emphasize the menacing duplicity. These few notes, endlessly repeated with shifting emphasis, represent this “strange love of Martha Ivers.”

But for whom is her love extended, anyway? No one is sure. Is it a shield against her being hurt, or called up at will for her own selfish protection? Her husband she obviously doesn’t love. Toward the stranger she once knew as a teenager, who returns eighteen years later as an adult, she gives the initial impression that he was her true love, that she still loves him. But like a double-edged sword, this “love” turns to thoughts of murder when her power, reputation and life are threatened. But this is touching upon the plot. . . .

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers begins in 1928—in the rain. (Rain here is as much a presence as any of the human characters.) A defiant, runaway teenager, Martha Ivers (stiffly played by Janis Wilson), having been caught once again by the police, is reprimanded by her domineering aunt (Judith Anderson). Her young friend, Sam Masterson (Darryl Hickman), who had shared the escape attempt with her but had eluded the police, returns and crawls in through a window out of the rain.

When the aunt strikes Martha’s pet cat with her cane, Martha grabs the stick and hits her, sending her rolling down a winding staircase, dead. Walter O’Neil (Mickey Kuhn), another young friend, is witness to the act and corroborates her lie that the assailant was a man she said ran out the front door. Walter’s father (Roman Bohnen, also Dana Andrews’ father in The Best Years of Our Lives), obviously doubting her, instructs the two children to stick to Martha’s story when the police come. He has his own ulterior motives, to protect his interests in the Ivers family, which owns the mill and runs the community, so much so that it’s named Iverstown. As the result of Martha’s testimony at the trial, an innocent man is hanged.

The crux of the tale, and what motivates Martha and Walter in the years to come, is the belief that Sam was a witness to the murder. In truth, he had left before the incident, to board an outbound circus train.

In the next scene, it is 1946. Sam Masterson (now Van Heflin), an itinerant gambler, passing near Iverstown for the first time in eighteen years, is forced to stay over because of a car accident. (The uncredited actor who slept through the mishap is Blake Edwards.) Sam discovers from the garage manager (Walter Baldwin) that Martha (Barbara Stanwyck) and Walter (Kirk Douglas) have united in a joyless marriage. Martha runs mill and town, and Walter is the district attorney, a weakling and a drunk, the pawn of his wife.

While his car is being repaired, Sam meets Toni (Lizabeth Scott), who was waiting for a bus out of town. Recently released from jail, she easily qualifies as a noir resident. The two begin a relationship, sharing the bathroom between their two hotel rooms—this is Production Code days! In one of the signal images of ’40s films, they do a lot of shared smoking, lighting and passing cigarettes to one another, in all places, especially cars.

From all appearances, Martha and Sam are warmly reunited in Walter’s office. Sam’s effusion is sincere; beneath her guarded exterior is that erroneous assumption that he knows about the murder. Husband and wife are immediately wary. Why would Sam return to Iverstown, they decide, unless to blackmail them? Walter sends some thugs to encourage Masterson’s departure. Sam’s own suspicions are aroused and he visits the local newspaper office, learns about the murder, puts two and two together.

There have been earlier clues that Sam has a shady past of his own. For one, it’s his gambler’s lifestyle, the way he talks; for another, he is pursued by the police because of an earlier self-defense death. What certifies Sam as a member of this noir tale is that, realizing Martha had murdered her aunt, he threatens blackmail—fifty per cent of her company. Martha plays up to her possible partner, proposing that they kill Walter. To his credit, Sam balks at sinking this low.

After a fight with Walter, Sam leaves the mansion. Looking back, he sees the couple in an upstairs window. Inside, Walter has turned the gun on Martha. She puts her finger on his trigger finger and presses. She dies and Walter turns the gun on himself—all a required dictum of the ever-watchful Production Code and a variation on the outcome of any number of film noirs.

Sam and Toni leave Iverstown. For better or worse? Who knows. Their lives scarred certainly, their future together uncertain.

This was Kirk Douglas’ first film. Despite the role of a weakling and otherwise unlikable character, he is able to convey an almost hidden, protected love for his horrid wife and receive more than a bit of sympathy from the audience. In holding the screen, he in no respect comes up short against his two co-starring veterans, Stanwyck and Heflin. Speaking of film noir, his next picture, Out of the Past, with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, proved to be one of the most satisfying films of the genre. In another film of the type, I Walk Alone (1948), Douglas would be reunited with producer Wallis and actress Scott, here playing a more positive character as a nightclub singer.

Barbara Stanwyck had made a tentative star breakthrough in Stella Dallas in 1937 and two indisputable ones in Double Indemnity in 1944 and Sorry, Wrong Number in 1948. In comparison with the former, in Ivers she is equally despicable, but now exhibiting greater range and nuance, her mood swings—I love you, I love you not—bordering on the schizophrenic. The predator here, only two years later she would become the prey of a killer husband in the overblown The Two Mrs. Carrolls with Humphrey Bogart.

This was Van Heflin’s first film after war service in the U. S. Air Force, and he commands the screen as if he had never left Hollywood. His performance, in fact, is perhaps the most fascinating of the four major roles, clearly the one with the most humor. He interacts with practically every character in the film, including, especially, his almost exclusive partner, Scott. He, too, would appear in another later film noir, Possessed with Joan Crawford, another screen femme fatale, though less versatile than Stanwyck.

And as for Lizabeth Scott, for someone who made so few movies, she made enough film noirs to become, now, an unofficial female symbol of the genre, and one of the few survivors of the ’40s and ’50s era. As a possible male counterpart who made his share of film noirs, though none as her co-star, Dana Andrews conveys the same kind of cold honesty, even in his dishonesty. They both had the stoic look and low-key acting style that befit these kinds of films, the film noir that helped make going to the movies such a memorable experience in the middle of the twentieth century.

Literary Postscript.
Apropos to this discussion of film noir and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Applause Theatre & Cinema Books has generously sent our website a copy of their 2013 publication of David J. Hogan’s Film Noir FAQ. It has the somewhat convoluted subtitle, All That’s Left to Know About Hollywood’s Golden Age of Dames, Detectives, and Danger. Although the publishers seem to concentrate on rock and heavy metal groups—The Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen—there is TV and movie fare on such diverse topics as Lucille Ball, Doctor Who, James Bond and Star Trek.

The Film Noir FAQ author, who also has an FAQ book on the Three Stooges (quite a leap from film noir!), writes in a serviceable style, with a flare for the occasional unique expression and deft turn of phrase. In discussing the movies, his broad film knowledge is a plus in intertwining references to, say, screenwriters and cinematographers with other related films and artists, tie-ins that make the reading all the more enjoyable.

The somewhat unusual layout of the book may seem awkward at first, but once the plan is understood, things will come together more coherently. The chapters are headed with such titles as “The Private Dick” and “Victims of Circumstance,” with discussions of individual films—mainly plot summaries and historical backgrounds—taken in chronological order within each chapter. The individual movie studies, however, are headed by catch phrases—for example, the film The Unsuspected is under “Technology That Kills” and The Woman in the Window under “Old Enough to Know Better.” This way, it’s less easy to find a looked-for movie and an index search for a specific title is often necessary.

Interspersed within this text are what the author calls “case files,” thumbnail portraits of stars, directors, screenwriters and cinematographers (no composers!) mentioned in the adjacent discussion. The two writings are set in different fonts, though about the same size type, and separated by gray bars; if the case files had been in boldface, or in a box, there would have been a better contrast. This juxtaposition may be a dilemma for some readers: do they stop reading the main text to peruse the thumbnail or come back when they have finished the text? These sketches are always embedded within the text, never at the end. An enlightening feature, though.

To those who feel the score is an essential part of film noir’s dark milieu, the book falls short of its subtitle claim of “all that’s left to know.” Hogan hardly ever mentions the music supporting the drama on screen. How can any one write about film noir, purporting an encompassing authority, and ignore the scores of Steiner, Waxman, Rózsa, Deutsch and all the others that have, through the years, reinforced the weight, and horror!, of the noir experience? Why, there’s not one index reference to Rózsa! And Roy Webb, who scored even more of the genre, has one meager comment, that regarding Murder, My Sweet, however true: “ . . . a splendid score by the perennially underrated composer Roy Webb . . . ” What about his scores for Notorious, The Window, Out of the Past and all the other movies the author discusses, sans the music?

Another writer on movies once responded to another censure for ignoring the contribution of music, this time that for Errol Flynn swashbucklers, films like Dodge City and The Sea Hawk, by confessing “general ignorance,” that the field of music was better left to other, more qualified writers. Hogan covers the impact of the cinematographer, the director, the art director, certainly the actor. Why omit the contribution of the film composer? Does a writer cover his subject, or doesn’t he? ——

This failing aside, Film Noir FAQ remains an excellent introduction to the genre for the novice, and a source of what will be much fresh information to many a connoisseur. Included are some seventy-five stills and posters.

Hogan rightfully concentrates on the noirs of the ’40s and ’50s, with a nod to those of the ’30s. “The classic era of film noir,” he writes, “ends with Psycho (1960).” His afterword of only ten pages briefly summarizes, dismissing as “superfluous,” the post-1960s films, what he calls—what is—neo-noir. As he had written in the previous chapter, “After Psycho, traditional noir had nowhere left to go. The genre had been exploded. After 1960, filmmakers who wanted to recreate noir looked to pictures made before Psycho, because that was where noir tradition lay.”

BOND IS BACK – Sean Connery is BOND

It may be blasphemy to say, but perhaps everyone’s ideal James Bond- Sean Connery- should have stayed away after You Only Live Twice. He’d made it perfectly clear during the filming of that picture that he was done with Bond and had no interest in carrying on in the role.

So Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli went out and got themselves a new James Bond. George Lazenby to be exact. But many, especially American audiences, found Lazenby not up to the challenge and stayed away from his only Bond, 1969′s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Although the picture did well enough elsewhere, it was clear that Lazenby wasn’t the answer.

Eon Productions had a problem. They had a Bond who didn’t really work. Could they afford to relaunch Bond with yet another new actor, or could they continue with Lazenby. Or, perhaps, could Connery- Sean Connery, be cajoled to return?

They went with the third option and for a huge payday Sean agreed to return, for one last fling as Bond- at least in the official series. Part of the reason Diamonds is such a weak film is that so much was invested financially in Connery that most everything else had to be scaled back. It is so prevelant that you can see it onscreen.  It is also the first Bond picture set predominantly in the United States, one of many concessions to try to regain the American market.

Production brough back many of Connery’s old colleagues from You Only Live Twice and other previous Bond pictures, most notably director Guy Hamilton. Shirley Bassey returns for the second of her three Bond title tracks, the most for any performer. The title track is, sadly, one of the better facets of the film.

The end result that was released in theaters is in many ways a Roger Moore Bond without Moore. In some cases it lacks even the admittedly fleeting charms Moore brought to many of his pictures. (Though not to be a complete detractor of Roger Moore in the role, a few of his are damned good.) Diamonds has some of the most coarse and campy humor of the entire series.  Only in Diamonds do you have the rather creepy line, “You’ve caught me with more than my hands up.”

We are presented with a new Blofeld, in the person of Charles Gray, who somehow ends up in drag for one inexplicable scene- one of the few instances of transvestism in the entire series. We also have the pretty much openly homosexual pair of Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint, who bumble their way through things until the very end.  Though most find Kidd and Wint a tremendous negative in the picture I actually think they fit right in and actually help the proceedings a bit.

The plot involves diamond smuggling- or perhaps hoarding, and within a bit centers almost entirely in Las Vegas, though the term Las Vegas is never uttered on screen. Also in play is the mysterious Willard Whyte played by none other than singer Jimmy Dean, with Whyte framed clearly as a stand-in for Howard Hughes. Surprisingly Hughes permitted filming in his hotels and casinos in spite of this.  The plot gets rather convoluted and overly complicated, though one should never put a whole lot of scrutiny on the plots for the Bond series.

During the course of the film, Bond runs from one tepid chase scene to another, but all are pretty lackluster. Sets are weak, which is especially apparent when Bond absconds with a lunar rover of sorts, with Blofeld’s folks in hot pursuit. He gets beat up for the most part by two bikini clad women named Bambi and Thumper, defeating them only by holding them underwater.  The lunar rover chase is comical and rather poorly executed, giving one of the better examples of shoddy props inherent in the picture.  Bond’s trouncing by Bambi and Thumper is just inexplicable.

As referred to above, he does meet Blofeld again, who supposedly murdered his wife (in OHMSS). However, Bond isn’t upset nor does he even mention it. It just doesn’t make sense.

For all the money he was paid, even Connery fails to appear in anything but the flesh. Mentally he seems to be already wondering how to spend the money and which projects he will proceed with next. This older, slightly paunchy and abysmally dressed Bond doesn’t have a chance.

Though some adore this picture, it is one in the Bond arsenal I tend to avoid as there isn’t much to endear one here. Even Jill St. John, the first American Bond girl, doesn’t hold your attention for more than a moment. She’s more helpless and flippant than most Bond girls, and the kaleidescopic attire hasn’t aged well either.

Like most Bonds Diamonds are Forever is easy to find, but look elsewhere in the series for your Bond fix. Its predeliction for America and relatively low production values, coupled with a visibly uninterested Connery, make it a borderline sub-Moore offering.

And that is saying something.

Even today, we still have lots of misconceptions about Africa. Such was even more true in the early 1950s, where most of the public perception of the continent was guided by movies, mostly the very successful series of Tarzan films.

That began to change a bit with the release of King Solomon’s Mines, with Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger. Old King Solomon seemed to open up the gates on the genre and it wasn’t long until more came along. White Witch Doctor is no different. On paper it looks like the release of the year, with Susan Hayward and Robert Mitchum leading the cast, excellent director Henry Hathaway at the helm and even sporting a score by the ephemeral Bernard Herrmann.

Unfortunately the results onscreen make the film merely a strong B picture. The plot is relatively straightforward with Robert Mitchum playing his typical tough guy, with this version being a veteran trapper who, perhaps against his better judgement, agrees to escort a nurse, played by Susan Hayward upriver to rendezvous with the local doctor in residence.

Over the course of their journey they encounter the usual series of torments, ranging from escaped gorillas, unruly native witch doctors, and the like. Though the result is still enjoyable and entertaining, the film doesn’t offer anything in the means of fine entertainment. Thankfully the escaped gorilla attack isn’t the worse onscreen image of “man in ape suit,” but it is darn close. Take it for what it is.

Mitchum has his usual droopy eyed demeanor, and is clearly not overly challenged- nor perhaps even overly interested, in the proceedings. Mitchum, who almost always strikes me as somewhat cynical (perhaps why he is a favorite), is even more so here. The only challenge here is finding where Mitchum ends and the part begins.

Hayward, though most erroneously don’t identify as an “outdoorsy” actress, carries most of the proceedings and does so quite well, thank you very much. She doesn’t come across as the rough and rather ballsy African heroine that Katherine Hepburn would portray in The African Queen but the results are more dramatic, perhaps if only because Mitchum’s character pales to the extreme to Bogart’s Charlie Allnut.

Surprisingly, and unbeknownst to this viewer until this viewing, was a score from perennial favorite Bernard Herrmann. It is a good score, being both deep and rather brooding, with a heavy reliance on the woodwinds which he traditionally used so well- along with some cowbell in the opening title sequence.

Overall the score seems unoriginal, harkening back to 1959′s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Even some of the motifs he uses seem recycled. Hopefully you caught the inaccuracy of the above as White Witch Doctor came out roughly 6 years prior to Journey to the Center of the Earth. So perhaps here is an instance of the imitation garnering more fame than the original, though asuredly that is putting things too far. Sadly, the only issued fragments of recordings are from the classic Charles Gerhardt series of recordings from the early 1970s. It is always nice to see what Herrmann has his orchestra banging on today.

But back to the picture itself, which is enjoyable if light fun. Filmed most likely entirely by the cast in studio, with ample splicing in of stock location footage which gives a good feel for the local ambiance, many have been mislead to believe that the cast actually went to the Congo (then Zaire) for the film. Such wasn’t the case but the ending atmosphere is better and much smoother than John Ford’s similar (but overall much better) Mogambo, in which the stock location footage was obviously just that.

At least here the melding of the two sources flows much better, although those that would place White Witch Doctor in the same league as Mogambo are in error, neither is the smash home run one would expect given the pedigree of the component parts.

If you go into a viewing of White Witch Doctor expecting a classic, full of political commentary and the like, you’ll surely be disappointed. However, if you go into it with the hope of just watching a good yarn and being entertained, you’ll find it a very enjoyable picture. Just remember that on-screen reality wasn’t then what it is now. Overall, this is a pretty fun film.

White Witch Doctor isn’t readily available via any means outside of hoping and praying it appears on TCM, although there is a Region 2 DVD available.

“Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.” — Gold Hat (Alfonso Bedoya) to the prospectors

Unlike some of John Huston‘s films that were done for the money, or as a relaxing diversion or to mark time until something better came along, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was one of those special projects the director had long had in mind. Other similar passions include his first film for Warner Bros., the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon, later Moby Dick and The Man Who Would Be King. Besides fulfilling his predilection for themes on hard-fought battles lost or the disillusion of life, in Treasure he foresaw a great role for his father, Walter, as the toothless, grizzled old prospector.

As so often with Huston, getting started on a film, or even surviving once started, was an ordeal in itself, even when he wasn’t imposing challenges and the nearly impossible on himself. As if, for example, the hostile location of darkest Africa wasn’t enough during The African Queen, he returned a few years later for The Roots of Heaven. “The location,” he wrote in his autobiography, An Open Book, “was one of the most difficult I have ever been on.” Worse than Queen? He knew Katharine Hepburn could vouch for that ordeal; she even wrote a book about it!

There were other similar situations. Desaturating and tinting the color, and otherwise giving the Moulin Rouge a monochromatic hue, prompted Technicolor officials to refute any responsibility for the outcome. For Moby Dick, there were no less than three accursed mechanical whales, one breaking its moorings and becoming a sea hazard; and, according to Huston, he almost lost his lead actor, Gregory Peck, during filming. And then there were the temperamental, mentally unstable and alcoholic stars whom Huston took on knowingly, almost as a challenge: Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Errol Flynn. Huston, who knew Errol was dying from alcohol and drug abuse, wrote that he didn’t regret taking him along on The Roots of Heaven: “[Flynn] said afterward that he’d not had such a good time in years.”

The director, who could be a man of fathomless benevolence—he loved animals, adopted a Mexican orphan—was also a wicked practical joker. When he received his World War II assignment as a documentary film maker, he had almost finished Across the Pacific, about a Japanese plan to attack the Panama Canal—a reuniting of Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor and Sidney Greenstreet from The Maltese Falcon. In the last scene he directed before his departure, he filmed Bogart as a tied up prisoner, guarded by a throng of Japanese soldiers. It was up to his replacement director, Vincent Sherman, to figure how to extricate the hero.

The novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by the mysterious recluse B. Traven, originally published in German in 1927, waited on the shelf until Huston’s return from the war. The screen transfer was the first American film made on location outside of the U.S., if not entirely then in large part, mainly in Tampico and Jungapeo, Mexico. Huston and friend, his occasional producer, Henry Blanke, convinced Warners head, Jack Warner, that the project was viable. The Mexican pre-production work was done with a stand-in for Bogart, followed by location filming with the stars. In between and afterward came the studio work—interiors and campfire scenes, the gunfight with the bandits.

From Traven’s treatise on greed and corruption, Huston in his screenplay eliminated the anti-capitalist, anti-church elements and concentrated on the greed and general foibles of the three main characters. The old prospector, Howard (Walter Huston), understands greed, even predicts inadvertently what will happen to the trio after they form their partnership. “I know,” he says, “what gold does to men’s souls.” Almost as an observant bystander, he finds something more important than gold when saving an unconscious Mexican boy, and is taken into the group as a highly regarded personage.

But Howard, too, is tainted. Though easily the most likeable of the trio—and Walter Huston’s is the most captivating performance—his dark side emerges when he agrees with his partners to kill a stranger (Bruce Bennett) who wanders into the camp and demands a share of their gold. Before that plan can be executed, however, the interloper dies in a gunfight with the bandits who had previously attacked a train. The film’s most famous line occurs just before the showdown: “I don’t have to show you any stinking badges,” spoken by Gold Hat, the leader of the bandits, a popular Mexican actor, Alfonso Bedoya, of the time.

The initially naïve member of the trio is Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), a sentimentalist, it seems, who reminisces about picking peaches and, at film’s end, decides to seek out the stranger’s widow. He also is touched by evil. When the mine caves in on the third partner, Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart), Curtin first rushes toward the entrance. But just when his quiet, passive persona suggests he might be the decent one of the bunch, he stops and turns away, thinking of Dobbs’ share of the gold that might be his. Moments later, however, he turns back to save Dobbs.

Almost from the first, Dobbs has the smell of duplicity, and is slightly unlikable, without conveying any sense as to why. He wanders the streets of Tampico, panhandling. Three times from the same white-suited American (an uncredited John Huston) he receives some pesos, enough to buy a lottery ticket from an urchin (a 15-year-old Robert Blake) and have a shave and haircut.

Soon after Dobbs meets Curtin in a park, the two happen to rent their beds next to Howard in a flophouse. In one of his best scenes, Howard philosophizes about mining for gold. After suggesting going alone as one option, though the loneliness can drive a man crazy, he says, “Going with a partner, too, is dangerous. Murder’s always lurking about, partners accusing each other of all sorts of crimes.”

Later, Dobbs and Curtin are hired by a foreman (Barton MacLane) to build a derrick, with the promise of pay when the job is done. Of course payment never comes. Later Dobbs and Curtin follow him to a bar and take their money, but not before a three-man brawl, one of the most realistic—and bloodiest—ever filmed at the time. Its authentic brutality came from director Huston, who not only had been a member of the Mexican cavalry, a bullfighter and an art student, but also a boxer. Huston even made a film, Fat City in 1972, about two down-and-out warriors of the ring.

The two men seek out Howard, and despite the old man’s earlier warnings, they form a partnership, with Howard as guide for the two novices. By pooling their money—Dobbs conveniently wins the lottery, making up their shortfall—the men buy the necessary equipment and burros, and head up the mountain. Right off, after suffering through a sandstorm, Curtin and Dobbs think they have found gold; it’s pyrite, fool’s gold, Howard says. When his two partners are exhausted and suggest turning back, Walter Huston does his famous little jig, laughing and dancing as he tells them, “You’re so dumb, there’s nothin’ to compare you with. You’re dumber than the dumbest jackass . . . You’re so dumb you don’t even see the riches you’re treading on with your own two feet.”

Before long—there are hints of it from the first—Dobbs’ paranoia becomes obvious, then uncontrollable, this about ninety minutes into the film. While Howard is away one night being honored by the Indians for saving the little boy, his two partners are sitting around the campfire. Dobbs begins rocking back and forth and laughing sinisterly, saying they should steal the old man’s “goods.” When Curtin says he respects Howard’s gold as much as he would respect Dobbs’ if he were away, Dobbs calls him a liar and pulls a gun. He forces Curtin back into the jungle and shoots him.

The Indians find Curtin, wounded but alive. Howard takes care of him and then is off to the Indians again, to enjoy the lavish attention—a permanent siesta in a hammock, endless tequila and lovely señoritas.

Meanwhile, Dobbs, alone, face encrusted with dust and dirt, staggers with the burros to a water hole. In a reflection in the water, he sees a sombreroed face. It’s Gold Hat, malicious and sinister. As Dobbs tries to convince the toothy bandit that his partners are right behind him, the outlaws try on Dobbs’ hat, examine his boots and clothes. Their intent is obvious, and Gold Hat kills Dobbs—discreetly obscured by a burro—with two whacks of his machete.

The bandits rummage through the burros’ saddlebags, spilling the gold, presumably ignorant of its value, which seems a bit implausible. The bandits, one already changed into Dobbs’ clothes, are soon executed in the town when they try to sell the burros.

When Howard and Curtin learn of Dobbs’ death and gallop through another sandstorm to the saddlebags, they discover that all the gold dust has blown away. (In the novel, Traven allows the two men a few surviving bags, but John Huston’s screenplay is less generous.) After Howard starts laughing and Curtin joins in, the old man says, “Ah, laugh, Curtin old boy. It’s a great joke played on us by the Lord, or fate, or nature, whatever you prefer, but whoever, whatever played it certainly had a sense of humor. The gold’s gone back to where we found it.”

The role of Dobbs wasn’t the first negative character Humphrey Bogart had played since he broke free, in The Maltese Falcon, of his old gangster roles. In the recent past, there were the two wife killers in Conflict and The Two Mrs. Carrolls, both films and performances mediocre; and, later, there would be the paranoid Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny and the house invader in The Desperate Hours.

Departing further than ever before from the newly acquired persona of the debonair man, occasionally the romantic lead, Bogart renders a striking portrait in Treasure. Never grimier, never more devious and with the worst haircut of his career, he establishes a crescendo of deteriorating sanity, growing paranoia, hallucinations and menacing accusations. Huston thought it was the best performance of Bogart’s career. That’s the general assessment, but he was not even nominated for an Oscar.

Walter Huston, who had removed his false teeth when his son requested it, received the Supporting Actor Oscar. As the father famously said upon accepting his statuette, “Many, many years ago, I brought up a boy, and I said to him, ‘Son, if you ever become a writer, try to write a good part for your old man sometime.’ Well, by cracky, that’s what he did!” Warners executives, after seeing the rushes, had wired the director to tone down Walter’s performance. John Huston won Oscars for Director and Adapted Screenplay. The movie itself, some have felt since, was unfairly passed over for Best Picture by the “prestige” influences of Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.

An interesting footnote, John Huston films were on something of an Oscar roll. As Treasure was filmed in 1947 and released in January of 1948, he had time to direct another film that year, Key Largo, also with Bogart. The role of an intoxicated, pathetic mob moll won Claire Trevor the Supporting Actress Oscar at the same ceremonies in which Treasure won its three awards.

All that remains to be said—and an absolute necessity—is Max Steiner’s score, which adds a third dimension to the film. The music has been criticized for being Spanish, not Mexican. Small point. Treasure is one of Steiner’s finest scores, and to some degree atypical. True, he continues his tendency to borrow tunes from others, here appropriately using the Mexican folk song “El Desayuno,” among others. As source music, on two occasions at the campsite Howard plays “Those Endearing Young Charms” on his harmonica.

It’s often forgotten, that, like Richard Strauss, Mahler, Respighi and other so-called “serious” composers of the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries, Steiner often scored for a large orchestra. This is especially true in Treasure, where the usual forces are augmented by two pianos, two vibraphones, glockenspiel, celesta, two harps, triangle and various suspended cymbals. Some of these instruments, especially, are used to represent the shimmer of gold, whether pyrite or real. And for that “Mexican” color—however Spanish it might be—Steiner adds guitars, mandolins, marimbas, an accordion and xylophones.

A small point, but it should be mentioned. Steiner was something of a master of choral writing—remember the slow, melancholy rendition of “Dixie” in Gone With the Wind behind “the land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields” frame?—and in Treasure Steiner employs a wordless choir when Howard is treating the little boy.

If not unique among Steiner’s scores, it certainly is a rarity that the main title of Treasure opens without the trademark fanfare that usually accompanies the Warner Bros. shield. Instead, the three-note “Mountain” motif, in a belligerent forte, immediately grabs the listener’s attention. The “Trek” theme, subject to many variations and key changes, plays a large part in the score. Its longest stretch, brilliantly orchestrated by Murray Cutter from Steiner’s detailed instructions, occurs when the prospectors begin their journey, with Howard leading the way through undergrowth and over rocks. This is when Dobbs observes how the old man seems to go without water, how he can climb, that he must be part camel, part goat.

For those who have and enjoy the Warners two-disc set of the film, which includes an extensive and well produced documentary on John Huston, the Naxos complete soundtrack CD is essential, well played by William Stromberg and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.

Treasure was certainly an unexpected film. Some would say it was an anomaly in the waning years of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Others would say that that age had already ended, some optimists that it had a few years to go, still others that it lingered in spurts, a picture here, a picture there, the isolated spasms of a dying era.

John Huston had created not only one of the great films of any time, but one of the most disturbing studies of greed, how the malady grows within what seems like normal individuals—whatever “normal” may be—how it possesses its owner, how it can even prove fatal, as it did for Fred C. Dobbs. More vivid, more encompassing, somehow more contagious than even Erich von Stroheim’s 1925 silent film Greed, the Huston movie is amazingly undated and especially pertinent in our time, the last decades of the twentieth century and, now, well into the twenty-first, possibly the supreme age of greed, with no signs of abating.

They’re Strong For Wine, Women and Song!

Tortilla Flat is one of the few John Steinbeck novels I didn’t have to read in either high school or college, so I am unfamiliar with it- and had never ventured into watching the 1942 film adaptation directed by Red Dust, Gone with the Wind, and Wizard of Oz veteran Victor Fleming.

The cast is a strong one, with Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr, Frank Morgan, and John Garfield leading the way in this tale of Mexican-Americans in the environs of Monterrey, California. Don’t expect much in terms of ethnic accuracy here as with the exception of Lamarr as none of the key players come close to attempting any demographic accuracy here- though both Tracy and Garfield do imitate previous accents to varying degree. Tracy’s sounds very similar to that he used in Captain’s Courageous in 1937.

Spencer Tracy is Pilon, the leader of a group of friends who seem to do little but drink and sleep under the stars. In fact, avoiding any gainful employment is an active goal for the entire group. Pilon is a rather endearing sort of chap, but only as long as you don’t dive too deep into what he is actually saying. Perhaps he could be described as merely a good salesman, but he definitely works for himself.

That changes when Danny (Garfield) inherits two houses from his grandfather. From my perspective Pilon is self centered and deceitful in achieving his own goals. After they befriend a man (perhaps a “dog-whisperer”) known only as Pirate (Frank Morgan) and bring him into the house with them, they learn that he has stashed away almost a thousand dollars. He’s promised the money to St. Francis in return for healing one of his dogs. Of course Pilon plots to relieve Pirate of the burden of this money.

Pirate is himself probably the one only truly good character in the story, as most have their own demons and character flaws. In fact, he nearly steals the show with his sincere comraderie with his little pack of dogs and his trusting nature.

Running along with this plotline is a budding romance between Garfield and Lamarr. Danny (Garfield) evidently isn’t overly bright as he buys Lamarr an electric vacuum cleaner. We learn later that her home isn’t even wired for electricity. But it is the thought that counts, I would suppose. Neither actor seems to play a large enough role here, and especially Lamarr seems to be stuck in purely reactive mode. Both could have done more to make it a stronger picture but were dwarfed by Tracy’ star.

Pilon sees Danny’s dalliance as a distraction and worries that Lamarr may be able to pull Garfield completely away from his group of lazy drifters. So he mucks that up for Danny too. But enough spoilers.

Tortilla Flat isn’t a particularly well known film, and it deserves better than it has gotten. After its relative failure at the box office, MGM for the most part gave up on Hedy Lamarr, as if they blamed her for the results. She did go on to make a few more pictures under her contract with MGM, but never again did her pictures aspire to greatness.

The film sports a score by Franz Waxman, though to be honest outside of some arrangements of traditional songs there isn’t much to note in this arena.

Although Monterrey isn’t that far from Hollywood, it is pretty clear that most, if not all of the picture was filmed on set. Many of the scenes are obviously set pieces, and the use of rear projection (especially in scenes at the cannery) is fairly strong and more distracting than you’d expect. It is very hard at times to displace the tangible cheapness that the preponderance of these factors gives to the resulting picture as they intrude anough to detract from the performances of the cast.

No matter for the most part as the story of friendship – ultimately and challenging though it may be to attain and preserve- manages to shine through.

Many have found Tortilla Flat to be stereotypical and trite. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a great film, replete with strong casting and a deep and sometimes humorous story.

An hilarious study in the gentle art of murder.

The British, God bless ’em, are known for their wit, a distorted and sometimes droll wit to many Americans, who don’t always appreciate the extremes of their brand of humor, from subtle double-entendre to farcical broadness.

In the late 1950s, early ’60s, there were the Hoffnung Concerts in which highbrow composers and performers caricatured their own classical music—for example, Malcolm Arnold’s Concerto for Three Vacuum Cleaners and a Floor Polisher.  At about the same time the wacky world of Beyond the Fringe erupted to hilarious acclaim in London’s West End and spread to the U.S.  All the satire and lampooning of, especially, the arts was thanks to a quartet of comic masters known as Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook.  And then, on BBC TV and later in the movies, there was Monty Python, where comedy became surreal, preposterous, cruel and, yes, sometimes offensive.  In this troupe were more than four players, but the best-remembered, the most enduring, are John Cleese and Eric Idle.

For those who would belittle British humor, forget not that many of the most famous of so-called “American” comics and teams—some of them institutions—were wholly, or partly, British: Bob Hope, Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin.

As America’s Hollywood once held sway, say, in the detective and horror movies, so the British are still masters of the comedy, and turn out more of that genre than their cousins across the Atlantic.  Foremost was the “Carry On” series, over thirty low-budget films released between 1958 and 1992, an enterprise dealing in parody, sexual innuendo and the ridicule of the British establishment.  The three stars who appeared most frequently throughout the years—Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims and Charles Hawtrey—also performed in conceivably the epitome of the series, Carry On Doctor, with another regular, Barbara Windsor, in another of the scantily-clad roles she made all her own.  In this sense, too, the British seemed far ahead of the Americans during the ’50s and ’60s in “coming out” roles for young actresses!

Some British comedies that would be better known to Americans, along with at least one well known star, include The Ghost Goes West (Robert Donat), The Ladykillers (Alec Guinness), A Mouse on the Moon (Margaret Rutherford), Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (Terry-Thomas) and A Fish Called Wanda (Cleese).  In more recent releases, the diversity of British humor is further illustrated in Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Full Monty and Chicken Run.

To mention for the first time the intent of all this, there was Kind Hearts and Coronets in 1949, a little masterpiece all its own, a one of a kind.  Here, droll humor is at its height, an analytical but comic approach to one of the darker of man’s sins, murder.  Even as a school child (Jeremy Spenser), the “hero” and narrator of the story was early on made aware, specifically, of two of the Ten Commandments, two that just happen to be adjacent, the one about not killing, the other about not committing adultery.  With already an eye for the little girl next to him, he commented that, at least, he didn’t foresee that he would ever have to worry about the first! A small matter, perhaps.

There is little in American letters to compare with the often tongue-in-cheek wit, the polished absurdities, of King Hearts and Coronets, certainly not in Poe, whose tales are devoid of humor, nor in the disguised social commentary of Twain’s most famous novels.  Rather, the delightful adaptation of Roy Horniman’s novel by screenwriters Robert Hamer (also the director) and John Dighton owes, logically enough, much to one cherished niche of the British literary tradition—the drawing room drama, specifically the writings of Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and P. G. Woodhouse.  Although the link of murder is there, the formula mysteries of Christie are not an influence; they, too, are usually bereft of humor.

On to the plot of Kind Hearts and Coronets——

In a prison in Edwardian England, a hangman (Miles Malleson, playing another of his befuddled roles, jowls quivering) arrives to visit what Americans would call the warden (Clive Morton) to see if everything is ready for tomorrow, and to ascertain how to address properly the condemned at the scaffold ceremonies. “Your grace,” he decides, is correct.  Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price), if for only the briefest time the Duke of Chalfont, is waiting to be hanged.  In the meantime he’s writing his memoirs. 

As he writes in his cell, clad in evening jacket, his previous life unfolds in flashback, accompanied by his calm, orderly and dispassionate narration, complete with axioms and genteel social observations.  Seems the real source of his predicament began when his mother eloped with an Italian opera singer (also played by Price), and thus a bit of an aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.  For marrying beneath her station, she is subsequently disowned by her aristocratic family, the D’Ascoynes.

For this insult to his mother, Mazzini vows revenge on the D’Ascoynes, to eliminate, one by one, the eight individuals who stand between him and the dukedom.  He keeps a tally of his victims on the family tree, glued to the back of a landscape painting.

While Mazzini is reduced to being a draper’s assistant, he by chance waits on the snotty Ascoyne D’Ascoyne (Alec Guinness).  To begin what today would be called the crimes of a serial killer, Louis swims the river to a little rowboat where D’Ascoyne and his mistress are enjoying a tryst and unties the mooring line.  The boat gently floats away and, far downstream, stern up, drops off a waterfall.

The second victim is Henry D’Ascoyne (Guinness again), an amateur photographer.  While Mazzini easily shares tea in the garden with Henry’s wife, Edith (Valerie Hobson), the photographer is off developing his latest film.  The night before Mazzini had replaced one of the developing chemicals with petrol.  During a shot of Mazzini, an explosion is heard off camera.  He comprehends the sound but remains calmly attentive to Edith.  With the change to a shot of just her, a haze of smoke appears above a wall in the distance. At first neither notices the dark plume, which grows gradually larger as they talk idly.

When Mazzini does see the smoke—she  hasn’t yet—he continues sipping his tea, and after Edith asks him how he could help broaden her husband’s limited activities, Mazzini’s voice-over narration drolls: “I could hardly point out that Henry and I had no time left for any kind of activity, so I continued to discuss his future.”  This is one of the funniest moments in the film, perhaps because the explosion is heard and not seen, the smoke is so obvious to the viewer and, at the same time, so unnoticed and ignored by the two blasé characters, plus the equally indifference of the music track—there is no music.

Attending Henry’s funeral, Louis has the chance to view all the D’Ascoyne family, his six future victims: the vicar, “talking interminable nonsense” from the pulpit; Lady Agatha, a suffragette; a bald-headed, dozing general; an admiral, first name Horatio, of course; Ethelred, the hunter of the family; and his lordship, a banker—all played, as has been implied earlier, by Guinness.  During the camera pan from one character to another, especially when on the general and the admiral, the score suggests a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song, say, from The Pirates of Penzance. This bit of music will be expanded in the end cast.

Two of Mazzini’s potential victims—the admiral, who fortuitously drowns in a naval accident, and the banker, who dies of a stroke—escape any premeditated death.  But ironically Louis has landed in prison for a murder he did not commit, that of Lionel Holland (John Penrose), who had married Mazzini’s paramour, Sibella (the ebony-voiced Joan Greenwood, never lovelier).

In fact, during the flashbacks Mazzini carries on with both Sibella and Edith.  As he observes, “For, while I never admired Edith as much as when I was with Sibella, I never longed for Sibella as much as when I was with Edith.”  Some of Price’s love scenes with Greenwood were quite sensational for their time.  The cause for any concern at all is quite inexplicable by today’s standards, because, for one, they were both fully clothed.  For another, the elegant Edwardian dresses covered, from head to toe, even arms most of the time, any possibly provocative flesh!

At the last minute, Lionel’s suicide note is discovered.  Sibella, who had withheld it, produced the evidence once Mazzini had agreed to get rid of Edith, who, in the course of things, he had married.  So, is he off, scot-free?  What of his memoirs detailing his activities against the D’Ascoyne family?  Where are they?  Has he remembered them?  Therein lies a twist in this little tale’s ending, the one thing, perhaps, not to be revealed here.

Unlike Ernest Irving’s rather sporadic score, Douglas Slocombe’s cinematography gives the picture an extra touch of sophistication and elegance that seems to soften, even make funnier by contrast, the film’s subject matter.  One example is Mazzini and Edith’s scene in the spacious salon soon after Henry’s funeral, when Mazzini proposes to her, at first in vain.  Much of the scene is done in one take, even when she rises from the sofa and walks away in a long shot and returns to sit down.  Many scenes are handled in this way, the cutting throughout reduced to a minimum.

A favorite photographer of Steven Spielberg and cameraman for John Huston’s Freud and Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter, Slocombe did, however, have to contend with some poor rear projection and some tacky sets, including a street scene for the arrest of dear old Agatha.  The little ship models in a tank of water, preceding the demise of Admiral D’Ascoyne, are the crudest imaginable.

The deaths of four victims transpire fairly quickly—the admiral in a ship collision, the general from an exploding jar of caviar, the banker from a stroke and Agatha in a plummeting hot air balloon.  As for the last, Mazzini said, “I shot an arrow in the air./She fell to earth in Berkeley Square.”

By contrast, the demise of the vicar and, as already related, the photographer are lingered over with British relish.  My favorite of Guinness’ roles is that of the vicar.  In a long and wonderfully unhurried scene, Mazzini has disguised himself as a visiting colonial bishop who has to endure the clergyman’s tedious tour of the church before poisoning his port at dinner.  Mazzini even has to produce, on the vicar’s insistence, an example of the dialect of the Metabealliac tribe which Mazzini unwisely fabricates to make his character more convincing.  The resulting grunts, burps and gurgles leave the vicar perplexed—and sorry he insisted.

Giving perhaps his best performance in Kind Hearts and Coronets, Dennis Price had a long and varied career, entering television as early as the mid-’50s.  TV was due not so much to any “specializing” as it was to being “reduced” to it.  Unfortunately, the actor had many personal problems—alcoholism, drug abuse, gambling and homosexuality, although he fathered two children during an eleven-year marriage and had affairs with his leading ladies.  For much of his career, then, he played in a multitude of horror films and many “B” films, often in cameo roles.  He possibly had cirrhosis of the liver when he died in 1973, ostensibly from a heart attack following a hip fracture, the result of a fall in his home in the Channel Islands.

Although Price dominates the movie with his cold yet urbane acting and narration—the narration is a key part of his, and the movie’s, appeal—it is Alec Guinness who is the most fascinating, who keeps the viewer on alert, perhaps even distracting him. Where will Alec turn up next, and how will he appear?  Guinness, who tackled the film enthusiastically, was first offered four of the D’Ascoyne roles but insisted on playing all eight.

As Ascoyne D’Ascoyne, the photographer and the hunter, who, of course, dies in a tragic shotgun “accident,” Guinness is easily recognizable.  But as the general, demonstrating his greatest victory on a restaurant table, he wears a skull cap and speaks in a raspy, nasal voice.  As the admiral, crying “bring her to port” when his first mate asks, “Don’t you mean ‘starboard,’ sir?,” he’s all hair and beard.  In drag as Agatha, the actor disappears in make-up and dress.  And as the elderly clergyman, Guinness dons a white wig, a stoop, an unsteady gait, quivering hands and a crackly voice.

In filming two of the characters, he came close to disaster.  As the admiral, saluting as the churning water rises above his head and floats away his cap, his feet were secured to the bottom of the water tank set.  Only after the scene was filmed did someone remember the actor hadn’t been untied and was freed just in time.  As Agatha, Guinness refused to go up in the hot air balloon, feeling the insurance coverage wasn’t enough.  Another man assumed Agatha’s disguise and boarded the balloon, only to be whisked away in a sudden breeze, some fifty miles, and dumped in a river.  This is the accepted account, but from what is seen on screen, there’s little evidence that the balloon rose very high or even left the set.

The two-disc Criterion Collection features both versions of Kind Hearts and Coronets.  Two versions?  Yes, the original British and the American.  Back when, that Hollywood custodian of morality, the Hays Office, censored some of the scenes between Price and Greenwood to soften the adultery, deleted the “n” word in the “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” children’s rhyme and “clarified” the ending to make it clear Mazzini did pay for his crimes.  Also, the British version and the American alternative ending have been released in Britain on Blu-ray by StudioCanal UK.

And the title of the movie?  It comes from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, Lady Clara Vere de Vere (1833):

Howe’er it be, it seems to me,
’Tis only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.

Perhaps the movie audiences have come to accept, if only subliminally, that Louis Mazzini is the calmest, most stylish of murderers, and, so, a last word from him: “The next morning I went out shooting with Ethelred, or, rather, to watch Ethelred shooting, for my principles will not allow me to take a direct part in blood sports.”

“Tell me corporal. Which is more important, a corporal or a general?” — General Tanz

Despite being less than a top-notch film, The Night of the Generals is one of my guilty pleasures. I wallow in the enjoyment of it when, true, I could be watching a better movie.

The 1967 film borders on mediocrity, close to a cinematic blunder, in fact. The sad paradox lies in what might have been, all that potential when its creators had that first spark of inspiration. With a better handling of the camera, a tightening of the script, more attention to German military echelon and uniforms and, somehow, a kindling of real enthusiasm from both director Anatole Litvak and his actors, this “night” of a movie, as it were, might have made a craftily interesting World War II yarn.

Seems like a lot was against it.

Essentially a murder mystery during the Nazi occupation of Europe, the plot includes an uptight psychopathic general, a decent and tenacious military detective, a love story involving neither of them and a plot to kill Adolf Hitler. The plot was not one fabricated in the script, nor even one of the numerous minor assassination attempts against the Führer, but the most famous one—and the most disastrous for the almost 5,000 who were executed—the plot of July 20, 1944, led by Claus von Stauffenberg.

In at least one plus, the film is generally faithful to its source, Hans Hellmut Kirst’s 1965 novel, Die Nacht der Generale, translated into English as The Night of the Generals. The multiple layers of plot that are handled so well in the novel—Kirst (1914-1989) is always chillingly vivid in writing about the Third Reich and WWII—emerge, in the movie, as protracted, stodgy and confusing.

Maurice Jarre writes a deliberately jarring, one might say even ugly, main title, with a disjointed introduction of drums and cymbals, followed by the repeated five-note “insanity” motif that will underline the psychological, even psychopathological, overtones of the film. This motif is mingled with a fragmentary, goose-stepping march and the equally vague suggestions of a waltz.

The film opens in 1942, in the dark and narrow staircase of a Warsaw hotel. The absence of music in the first scene is doubly effective. All that is heard are the heavy footsteps, intentionally amplified, of a hotel clerk. The man hears a commotion—a woman’s scream, a door close, hurried footsteps—and, knowing to be prudent in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, hides in a water closet. Through a hole in the door he can see only the lower half of the man who descends the stairs—and the familiar uniform of a German officer, trousers distinguished by a red stripe.

A German military investigator, Major Grau (Omar Sharif), arrives to find the grisly sex murder of a prostitute, who also happens to be a German agent. He is an idealist, a seeker of justice, whoever the murderer. When the Polish police inspector, Liesowski (Yves Brainville), who summoned Grau to the scene asks if justice also applies to Germans, Grau replies, “If the general is responsible, I shall have to hang him.” Hearing the clerk’s description of the trousers, Grau knows that only German generals’ uniforms have the red stripe.

The film switches briefly to 1965. Liesowski is reminiscing with Paris police inspector, Morand (Philippe Noiret)—nobody has first names here. Morand fought for the French Resistance during the war but became friends with Grau. The two exchanged favors, the Frenchman providing information about Nazi generals, the German facilitating the release of Resistance fighters. Liesowski recalls that of the generals in Warsaw in 1942 on the night of the murder, three were without alibis.

Back to Warsaw, 1942. Two of the generals are invited to a soirée hosted by the third, General von Seidlitz-Gabler (Charles Gray), and his abrasive wife (Coral Browne). The other two generals are Kahlenberge (Donald Pleasence, who would play another Nazi, Heinrich Himmler, in a better film, The Eagle Has Landed, in 1976) and Tanz (Peter O’Toole), the arrogant commander of the Nibelungen panzer division and a fanatical germaphobe.

At the beginning of the party, any original Jarre music is put aside for “Entry of the Guests” from Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser.

At the soirée is a young, unambitious corporal, Hartmann (Tom Courtenay), who had rather remain a corporal than become an officer. He has been recruited by General Kahlenberge to play the piano, though, strange, at the party no piano is heard, only band music. “Too skinny” and not especially attractive but with a strange fascination for women, as Hartmann’s cousin, Otto (Nigel Stock), observes, the corporal meets and quickly beds Ulrike (Joanna Pettet), Seidlitz-Gabler’s daughter. He confides to her that he is a coward, that he really didn’t kill those forty Russians for which he received the Iron Cross. (A good portion of their sex scene was deleted, thanks to the current Production Code.)

About this time, Grau is promoted to lieutenant colonel and reassigned to Paris on the recommendation of Kahlenberge. This is one of several possible red herrings strung throughout the film, including General Seidlitz-Gabler’s wife finding a “red stain” on his uniform. For that matter, after receiving dossiers on all three generals from Inspector Morand, Grau deduces about Tanz: “He revels in death, which is why, in a curious way, I don’t think he’s the man I’m looking for. Any one who has the power to destroy a city whenever he chooses doesn’t need such minor sport as killing a girl. I could be wrong, of course.”

A shift now to 1944. All three generals are in Paris. When Tanz’s driver is ousted for improperly cleaning the general’s shoes, Hartmann assumes the position at the request of Kahlenberge, who orders him to give Tanz a tour of Paris, mainly to keep the “Butcher of the Eastern Front” occupied, as Kahlenberge is involved in the plot to kill Hitler at Rastenburg. Several times Kahlenberge pressures Seidlitz-Gabler to join the conspiracy, but he prefers to wait before committing himself.

When Kahlenberge asks Hartmann if he knows some nightclubs or girls for Tanz’s pleasure, Hartmann says he doesn’t really know the general’s tastes. Then Kahlenberge delivers one of the best lines in the film—there aren’t many: “Let us hope that whatever it is, it isn’t you, corporal. However, if it should be you, remember that you’re serving the fatherland.”

Before the tour, Tanz’s aide warns Hartmann to avoid cemeteries, tombs and any mention of death; he does pretty well until he alludes to the beheadings of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as they pass the Place de la Concorde. Drinking and smoking in the back seat, seemingly in a half-stupor, his left eye twitching, Tanz seems not to notice.

Hartmann fares less well in guiding his charge through the Jeu de Paume museum. Entering a room of Nazi so-called “decadent” art, so decadent it is reserved for Reichsmarschall Göring, no doubt for his Karinhall castle, the pair pass paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Gauguin, Degas—— Tanz freezes before one painting and Hartmann reads from the guide book: “Vincent van Gogh. Self-portrait, Vincent in Flames. Painted while in an insane asylum.” Tanz seems to go into a trace. He sweats, he shakes, his left eye twitches. He extends a trembling, fumbling left hand—always gloved—as if to steady himself. Hartmann takes his arm. Tanz pulls back and shouts, “How dare you touch me! Never do that again!”

That night in a nightclub, Tanz meets a prostitute, returns to the car and asks Hartmann to invite her to join him. He takes her to her apartment while his driver waits at the car. Tanz calls him up and shows him the sexually mutilated body. By asking Hartmann to pick up the woman, placing his identity discs (dog tags) near the body and getting the corporal’s fingerprints on a wine glass, he has successfully framed him. Tanz points his gun at him, gives him some money and orders him to desert, or be killed. Hartmann flees.

“The body lay in the middle of the room between the table and the bed. Anyone looking at it from the door would have mistaken if for a bulging sack. It lay huddled up, face buried in the carpet.” —— the opening of Hans Hellmut Kirst’s The Night of the Generals.

In the meantime, the plot to kill Hitler during a staff meeting at his East Prussian headquarters at Rastenburg has failed. A recent recruit in the conspiracy, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Christopher Plummer in a single-scene, throw-away role) is seriously injured when a British plane strafes his staff car. The fate of Rommel, who eventually recovered from those injuries, is well known, but that of the movie plotters is left unexplained. In fact, the leader (in the film) of the conspirators, General von Stülpnagel (played by Harry Andrews), a real person, was hanged for this singular disrespect toward his Führer.

Ironically, at the moment Grau deduces that General Tanz, after all, is the murderer he is seeking and confronts him at his headquarters, the survival of Hitler is announced on the radio and Tanz shoots the colonel at point-blank range, proclaiming him to be one of the conspirators.

The film returns to 1965, now at the Hamburg international airport. General Kahlenberge, who has obviously survived the war but prefers his civilian title, arrives for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the creation of the Nibelungen division (a real unit, actually created in the last months of the war). Why Kahlenberge would wish to attend is a bit implausible, as he hated Tanz, who is the guest of honor at the celebration.

Inspector Morand meets Kahlenberge and asks if he remembers corporal Hartmann of years ago. Yes, he remembers him—and Grau. “When the whole world was tumbling about our ears,” he says, “there was Colonel Grau, mad as a hatter, trying to solve his little murders.”

There has been another grisly murder of a prostitute, now in Hamburg.

Morand is able to locate Ulrike through her father. She had married Hartmann, who is now a farmer, living under the name of Lutner.

As the old soldiers file in for the Nibelungen festivities, Carl Tieke’s march Alte Komeraden (Old Comrades) is played. Tanz is called from the stage and confronted by Morand, who provides, as the general scorns, only circumstantial evidence about the murders of three prostitutes—in Warsaw in 1942, in Paris in 1944 and now in Hamburg. Morand continues, announcing that to the killing in Paris there was a witness. Hartmann steps forward. “Perhaps you should have killed me, general,” he says.

Jarre’s music—this is not one of his better scores—comes to the fore as Tanz, once again in his dazed mode, staggers and steadies himself against the wall after Hartmann’s appearance. The music is now dark and disorganized, and the viewer who has been paying attention is waiting, waiting for that often-heard five-note “insanity” motif to emerge from the orchestral muddle. And, sure enough, it comes, changed now, less distinct, more disjointed—panicky, like the general’s own panic.

Cornered, Tanz asks for a revolver and does the right thing, as all Nazis do, as readily as lighting a cigarette or combing their hair, when they know the jig is up.

What a story, right? More accurately, what a story it might have been. At the foundations lie good ideas, with all sorts of possibilities, but Kirst’s tale is told unevenly, a bit incoherently; much is left to the imagination or to conjecture. The time changes between 1942 or 1944 and the then present of 1965 are often abrupt, not always clear.

The movement of players before the camera is sometimes unimaginative—actors strung in a line across the wide Panavision screen. This is not, after all, 1954, and by 1967 the use of the wide screen process had been refined, even, some feel, perfected within the inherent limitations of its aspect ratio. Many directors, to this day, abhor the format. The film’s French cinematographer, Henri Decaë, also shot at least three other English-language films on similar subjects, The Boys from Brazil, Castle Keep and a D-Day documentary.

Especially annoying is the sloppy dubbing, particularly disconcerting when the lips are out of sync or when an acoustic anomaly betrays a different time and location of a later re-recording, most common in long shots, say, when actors are walking down a hall. Even dialogue recorded at the time of filming is sometimes delivered in a matter-of-fact manner—that need for some enthusiasm from the players, as mentioned before.

The infamous salute “Heil Hitler!” is never rendered among the German officers until well into the film, and then only sporadically. When Grau enters the Warsaw hotel in the beginning, he and the guard at the entrance exchange traditional military salutes; the guard should have properly rendered the “Heil Hitler!,” Grau being an officer, for one.

The intended Waffen SS ranks shown are actually Wehrmacht ranks. On several occasions—for one, when Hartmann is driving Tanz around Paris—the swastika on flags and banners is backwards. Some of the shots of Paris during this drive are in black-and-white! The sloppy research in this Franco-British co-production is further evident in the German’s use of right-hand drive cars, including those for Tanz and Rommel.

Many scenes are unnecessary or protracted. The return to the tryst between Hartmann and Ulrike reveals nothing new, much like her nightclub meeting with a previous Hartmann girlfriend, unless as an excuse for some action in the brief Nazi raid. Tanz’s tanks destroying an old part of Warsaw, while Grau waits to speak to him, goes on far too long under the guise of “action,” though its valid purpose is to show the general’s cruelty. Tanz’s second visit to the museum, to stare and tremble once again before the van Gogh, is a long way around to prove, if that was its purpose, that the general had forgotten he had been there before.

A bad memory was not General Tanz’s problem.

“Ladies and gentlemen, either you are closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of a pool table in your community!” — “Professor” Harold Hill

Aside from all those Hollywood musicals of the early 1930s, particularly those by George and Ira Gershwin after they left Broadway, the 1960s was the greatest decade for the movie musical. Mary Poppins and Funny Girl were two of many, and four were Oscar-winners as Best Picture of their years: The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Oliver! and My Fair Lady. Also from the same decade, The Music Man rated a Best Picture nominee—and possessed a novelty. Among other things, unlike most musicals, the book, music and lyrics were all written by the same man, Meredith Willson.

Set in the summer of 1912 in fictional River City, Iowa, the musical, and now its movie version released as part of a Warner Brothers twenty-title box set, is as full of tuneful songs, exuberant shenanigans, wild humor, preposterous situations and vibrant performances as one could wish. If you like musicals, and feel the need to escape the troubles of this twenty-first century, if only for two hours and a half, this is the musical for you. This is the escape for you!

In the role that moved his fame to the movie screen, Robert Preston reprises his Broadway stint as “Professor” Harold Hill. The quotes are necessary because he isn’t really a professor—or a graduate of “Gary Conservatory, gold medal, class of nought five,” as discovered by that lovely but suspicious lady librarian, Marian (Shirley Jones). He is not, then, a band instrument salesman? Indeed not. On the train arriving at River City, a fellow passenger asks him his destination. “Wherever the people are as green as the money,” Hill replies.

With the trusted silence of a friend (Buddy Hackett), now living in the town, who knows all about him, Hill sets out to convince the children’s parents that, to eliminate “corruption” among the young folks—rebuckling knickerbockers below the knee, dime novels in the corncrib, index fingers stained with nicotine, the use of such words as “swell”—they need to fork over money for band instruments and uniforms.

Of course, he knows nothing about music—can’t play an instrument—but that doesn’t matter as long as he can hornswoggle and distract the townspeople. Just long enough to get his money and then, as he says, “I’ve got it timed down to the last wave of the brakeman’s hand on the last train outta town.” Whenever the school board (The Buffalo Bills, a famous barbershop quartet of stage and TV at the time) ask for Hill’s credentials, he slyly cues them for a song, and while they croon a Gay Nineties-style ditty, “Goodnight, My Ladies” or “Lida Rose,” he slips away.

Hill, however, ends up seriously distracted himself by that lady librarian. After winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as a prostitute in Elmer Gantry in 1960, Shirley Jones revisited in The Music Man the sweet, girl-next-door image that had launched her career with Oklahoma! and Carousel. Her voice is likewise sweet, pure and always note-perfect.

Meredith Willson’s songs certainly approach being unique. It is doubtful that any art is ever “unique,” as there is always something else, somewhere, that proves similar, a precursor. But, in contrast with, say, the straightforward, always traditional, pristine style of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Willson can sometimes create unusual sound imitations, half-spoken dialogue, physical action or something simply riotous.

The best example of this originality is “Ya Got Trouble,” where Preston disrupts his singing with extravagant spoken dialogue and rushes about waving his arms and addressing individuals in a crowd. Another “physical” song, with an added play on words, involves the mayor’s wife (Hermione Gingold) leading a group of ladies down a sidewalk. All with bobbing feather hats, they sing in a staccato rhythm, “Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little. Cheep, cheep, cheep. Talk a lot, pick a little more.” Their whole chorus, of course, gives the impression, as intended, of parading barnyard hens.

Ron Howard, then eight years old and starring in The Andy Griffith Show, has his big vocal moment in “The Wells Fargo Wagon.” He plays shy Winthrop, Marian’s young brother who has a speech problem and a watery lisp, all comically displayed when he sings, “O-ho the Wellth Fargo Wagon ith a-comin’ now . . . ”

Willson took piano lessons as a youngster, and he incorporates its memory in “Piano Lesson,” which uses a simple scale and, as well, a fragment of the third movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-Flat, Op. 110. Beethoven’s music is used as source music when Hill instructs the band to “think” the Minuet in G as a way of playing it.

Shirley Jones could have easily closed the show with her two romantic songs, wonderfully rendered, “Goodnight, My Someone” and “Till There Was You.” Closed it, yes, were it not for the film’s now famous signature piece. All the citizens of River City march through town to their new band playing “Seventy-Six Trombones.” The band has its new instruments and bright uniforms—and, thanks to Professor Harold Hill, they play beautifully.

By all means, start any review of WB’s box set of musicals with The Music Man.

Thanks as always to Warner Brothers for the review copy.