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In the title I accidentally typed “Frank Zappa” at first. Usually my sympathies lie more with Zappa than Capra, but I liked this one a lot. The version of the play that we did in high school did not give the male lead a homicidal maniac of a brother with a mad doctor and a dead body in tow. I remember it being all around more gentle. The play was a huge hit when this movie was shot, and the playwright permitted the film under two conditions: that Boris Karloff wouldn’t be allowed to participate (all the jokes about the brother looking like Karloff depended on him, but instead of changing the line for the film, they made Raymond Massey up to look like Karloff) and the movie couldn’t be released until the play closed. So it was shown to troops overseas, but didn’t make it into theaters until 1944, some six Cary Grant movies later.

Grant wasn’t wild about this movie – I thought he used his surprised screwball expression too many times but is otherwise just fine. He is to marry Priscilla Lane (of The Roaring Twenties and Saboteur), takes her home to meet his sweet old aunts but discovers that they’ve been murdering lonely men and having Cary’s insane Teddy Roosevelt-impersonating brother bury them in the basement. Then the other brother (Raymond Massey of a couple Powell and Pressburger films) with doctor Peter Lorre show up, and hijinks just never stop ensuing. In fact, the comedy and suspense don’t even let up long enough for Capra to inject any long, boring speeches espousing his patriotism or morals. Hooray for that! E. Everett Horton was in there as well, but I’ve already forgotten where.

by ·Comments Off on Hail the Conquering Hero (1944, Preston Sturges)

This was the Sturges movie I’d watched long ago and was starting to forget. Our latest screening was accompanied by squeals of delight whenever we noticed a Sturges regular, or someone from Sullivan’s Travels anyway. The butlers and Snowflake were disappointingly absent, but we got Jimmy Conlin (little guy, glasses) as a judge, the vaguely-familiar Harry Hayden (I thought for a minute that he was Charles Coburn) as an upright politician, TWO women from Remember the Night playing best friends, and the vertically-stretched Franklin Pangborn as a fussy master of ceremonies. But best of all, this movie features St. Paul’s own William Muggsy Bildocker Ale-and-Quail Kockenlocker Demarest in his largest role yet, as the Marine sergeant who helps our hapless hero concoct his big lie.

foreground L-R: Sarge, Woodrow, Woodrow’s mother, a mother-obsessed marine:

And oh, just thinking of Franklin Pangborn’s attempt to control four different brass bands for Eddie Bracken’s homecoming ceremony reminds me, this is certainly Sturges’s loudest-ever film, as talky and noisy and shouty as they come. All the excitement gets poor Eddie so nervous – and he’s so good at acting nervous – I kept wanting to comment that he’s seeing THE SPOTS, but Katy doesn’t remember The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek well enough to get the reference. Even if we didn’t see the spots, the movie makes a more direct reference by outright showing us the poster for Morgan’s Creek as the Marines’ train pulls away during the final scene.

L-R: Mayor Noble, his wife, Libby, and Forrest (Bill Edwards):

The Mayor is Raymond Walburn – see also his Christmas In July screenshot standing alongside Franklin Pangborn, whose character in this movie wouldn’t settle down long enough for me to snap a picture of him – with wife Esther Howard (also wife to the Weenie King). Lead girl Ella Raines (no relation to Claude) seemed like a big nobody – but she starred in Siodmak’s Phantom Lady and appeared in Dassin’s Brute Force, so I guess she’s somebody. Edwards was cast because he’s a stiff, uninteresting fellow, something that didn’t help his film career elsewhere.

Eddie Bracken’s Woodrow has a family history in the Marines but was personally discharged for having hay fever (a less funny premise than THE SPOTS), so he’s sulking in a bar, too ashamed to come home, when he buys Sgt. Muggsy’s group some drinks and they coerce him into returning to his home town as a war hero. It all gets immediately out of hand, and a few days later Woodrow is about to be elected mayor – and about to be exposed as a fraud by his opponent – when he confesses all to the townsfolk… and… gets elected mayor anyway! I would elect Eddie Bracken mayor, no question. Also Woodrow’s girl before the war is now the fiancee of the new mayor’s son Forrest, but she delays telling Woodrow for so long that she finally just leaves Forrest.

The heroine’s aunt, Elizabeth Patterson below at right, appeared in Remember The Night, also as a kindly aunt. The hero’s mother, Georgia Caine below at left, also appeared in Remember the Night – but as Stanwyck’s bitter, terrible mother.

by ·Comments Off on Rome, Open City (1945, Roberto Rossellini)

I get conflicting messages on Rossellini: either he can do no wrong or he did only wrong, either his early stuff was groundbreaking then he dried up or he did his best work late in his career, either he told the ultimate truths in cinema or he was a deceitful opportunist. Fortunately, the exhaustive Criterion box of his early “war trilogy” went on sale, so now I shall see for myself. I watched Germany Year Zero on Turner Classic a decade ago, and it stands out as one of the most affecting (depressing) movies I have ever seen, so I’m inclined to think I’ll like the trilogy – and so far, so good.

Not an incredibly “neorealistic” movie – as the DVD commentary ceaselessly points out, it’s “far closer to the traditional melodrama or suspense film than to any realistic documentary.” But RR shot (partially) on the streets and at real locations, with (some) non-actors, using borrowed and stolen film stock for a (somewhat) newsreel-like texture, and so a movement was born. Visconti’s Ossessione was shot earlier, but wasn’t distributed outside Italy and its story didn’t have Open City’s sense of post-war rebirth.

Pina (the great Anna Magnani of The Golden Coach) is to marry Francesco. After F’s friend Manfredi goes on the run, the resistance descends on Pina’s apartment. The sympathetic, somewhat comic priest who is to marry her, Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi, later in Flowers of St. Francis) volunteers to help. But the nazis are hot on Manfredi’s trail, with help from his poorly-chosen girlfriend, a drug-addicted dancer named Marina who betrays him. They round up Francesco before his wedding, leading to the famous scene where Magnani is gunned down chasing after the truck that holds him.

I’ve seen that scene a bunch of times out of context, never realized it’s not the end of the movie, just of the first half. In the second half, Francesco is immediately freed from the prison truck by resistance fighters (making his fiancee’s death that much more pointless, as the commentary points out), but in a subsequent raid the priest and Manfredi are arrested, along with an Austrian deserter who Don Pietro was helping. There’s some scripty business among the nazis to point out the general weakness of their cause. After the deserter kills himself in his cell and Manfredi dies under torture, having never revealed the resistance secrets, Don Pietro is shot in front of the children he used to play with, little resistance fighters themselves, who will survive the nazi occupation that had just barely ended when this movie went into production.

When the movie’s lead nazis invite the weak, drugged-up Marina to their palace, show off her tortured-to-death boyfriend then steal back the fur coat they’d given for her cooperation, I realized the nazis’ names are Ingrid and Bergman – crazy, since a few years later Rossellini would fall for Ingrid Bergman. Bergman (stage actor Harry Feist) is effeminate and Ingrid (Giovanna Galletti, later in Last Tango in Paris) is butch, lounging on a sofa with Marina in a sinful opium haze, say the commentary, “underline how closely audiences of Rossellini’s time associated sexual deviancy with evildoing.”

Bergman:

Written with veteran screenwriter Sergio Amidei and young Federico Fellini, this wasn’t Rossellini’s first movie, just the earliest one that anyone pays attention to. Earlier he’d worked directly with Vittorio Mussolini, son of the country’s dictator, who describes Rossellini in the DVD extras (he lived through the 1990’s) as neither fascist nor anti-fascist at the time, just an energetic filmmaker.

The commentary by Peter Bondanella spends much of its time explaining why the movie shouldn’t count as “realism” at all, and does not make a sharp break with fascist cinema styles. But while downplaying the movie’s groundbreaking status, he also praises its story and technique endlessly:
“Much of the dramatic force of Open City resides in the lessons of humanity the main characters learn from each other. As Manfredi the Marxist revolutionary discovers, a priest is not so different from a worker, or even a partisan leader. In Open City we are asked to examine the common humanity that always transcends idiological or confessional labels.”

Don Pietro:

RR: “I’ve always advocated finding this ease of expression and demythologizing the camera and filmmaking, tackling it in a much simpler way, without worrying too much about perfect shots and images. The important thing was to get your point across.”

Hmm, neorealism was said to be a “reaction to the films of the Fascist era dominated by ‘white telephone’ films, which depicted ladies of leisure lounging on satin sofas, telephoning their lovers.” But isn’t that a precise description of Cocteau’s Human Voice, filmed by Rossellini four years later?

Francois Truffaut: “Rohmer once said that Rossellini’s genius lay in his lack of imagination, and it’s true. He didn’t like fabrication or artifice, or flashbacks or any kind of clever trick. He left behind the personal and specific to move ever toward the general. His first postwar film is Rome Open City, about a city. The next is Paisan – six stories about Italy from south to north. After that comes Germany Year Zero and then Europa 51 – at that point he needed an entire continent. … He was a very intelligent man. I’m not saying filmmaking is for idiots, but fiction requires a certain naivete that he didn’t have, so he worked with larger concepts.”

by ·Comments Off on The Small Back Room (1949, Powell & Pressburger)

I watched this shortly before Trash Humpers, and judging from my notes, I’d already had more gin than I realized at the time. In place of the usual plot points and character names, I wrote down phrases that make me laugh, like “Bob’s your uncle” and when a young soldier is called “old man.” So feel free to blame the gin when I say this wasn’t one of my favorite Powell/Pressburger joints.

Weapons testing at Stonehenge:

I remember people mentioning this one when The Hurt Locker was out, both being about a damaged bomb defuser during wartime. Jeremy Renner was more psychologically damaged than this movie’s David Farrar (also of Gone to Earth), who is physically damaged, with a humiliating false foot (never seen by the audience, unlike Capt. John’s leg in Renoir’s The River). There’s a big solo bomb-defusal scene at the end with clamps and “reaching rods” – a low-key replacement for the awesome bomb suits in Hurt Locker, not that those suits helped much when bombs exploded. But most of the movie is a quiet, simmering backstage drama behind the war effort, with the munitions people trying to sell an idiotic government minister on some shoddy weaponry until Farrar finally exposes the whole thing – shadows of the Colonel Blimp theme of doing what’s right for the war effort versus what’s traditionally expected.

Our three heroes, conveniently in the same camera shot:

Of course there’s a girl – Kathleen Byron of Black Narcissus – a coworker who likes our bomb man, as well as a kind older professor (Milton Rosmer of The Lion Has Wings), a young specialist (Cyril Cusack of The Fighting Pimpernel) and an upright captain (Michael Gough, lumpy guy in The Horror of Dracula) who enlists the research unit to solve the mystery of booby-trapped cylinders the Germans have been dropping out of planes (he gets blown up at the end before Farrar takes the stage). My favorite character was a celebratory bottle of whiskey that hovers in forced perspective, always haunting the alcoholic Farrar with temptation.

A tough year to be nominated for best British film – if Kind Hearts and Coronets doesn’t beat you, The Third Man will.

N. James for Criterion:

The Small Back Room presents the relationship between Sammy and Susan in fairly realistic terms. In the novel the two live together; this could not be shown in British cinema of the period. Kathleen Byron claims the credit for the elegant solution of having the two live across the hall from each other. … The Small Back Room grapples with the sticky, intractable problems of a live-in relationship … Its depiction of companionship and care on the brink of catastrophe conceals a deeper undertow of romantic commitment to risk.

by ·Comments Off on Remember the Night (1940, Mitchell Leisen)

Our second Barbara Stanwyck Christmas movie, and an improvement on Christmas in Connecticut. Moves along like a typical Hollywood holiday romance, but with some interesting twists from writer Preston Sturges (a few months before his directorial debut), which I’m surprised weren’t softened by rewrites. Even if the original script has actually been tamed down, you’ve still got romantic lead Barbara Stanwyck headed to prison at the end of the picture. It’s the morally upright ending, and I suppose the production code insists that she can’t get away with crime just because she’s in love.

Stanwyck is a thief, who steals because she wasn’t loved enough as a child and Fred MacMurray is the prosecuting attorney who schemes to delay her trial until after the holidays so the jury’s Christmastime sympathy doesn’t interfere with his case. But that leaves the sad, pretty girl in jail for Christmas, so Fred pays her bail for the week, but ends up with the girl in his apartment since the dirty-minded bailsman assumed that was Fred’s intent. And since she’s got no place to go, he takes her along home, getting in trouble with a rural farmer (John Wray) and getting frowned at by Stanwyck’s chilly mother (Georgia Caine, later a Sturges regular) at stops along the way. Inevitably they fall in love, then back at the trial she sees that he’s sneakily trying to get her acquitted so she pleads guilty, insisting that she serve her penance rather than turn them both into crooks.

Leisen is the filmmaker who frustrated Billy Wilder (Midnight) and Preston Sturges (Easy Living) into directing their own scripts. I still don’t have any problem with him. Maybe Sturges wanted a lighter touch or a snappier pace. Surely he could’ve done more with the comic cow-milking scene than Leisen did, but it’s a solid movie. Aha, from Wikipedia:

Director Mitchell Leisen, a rare director to come out of costume design and art direction, is reported to have shortened Sturges’ script considerably, both before and during shooting, something which generally annoyed Sturges. Leisen’s alterations to the script changed the focus of the film from MacMurray’s character to Stanwyck’s. Sturges summarized the film by saying “Love reformed her and corrupted him.”

Film Forum calls it a screwball comedy, but I don’t think you can just slap that term onto anything with Sturges’s name on it. In his 50’s, wholesome-looking MacMurray starred in three live-action Disney films, beloved to Katy but which I never watched. Must see him in The Egg and I with Claudette Colbert and There’s Always Tomorrow with Stanwyck sometime.

At Fred’s house: Sterling Holloway, a Disney voice actor, most notably as Winnie the Pooh. Not sure if that’s his voice singing the solemn “End of a Perfect Day” while Stanwyck plays piano, but it’s the most surprising moment in the movie:

MacMurray with the vaguely recognizable Beulah Bondi at left – mother in Track of the Cat, the wife’s tutor in Baron of Arizona, Stewart’s mom in It’s a Wonderful Life – and Elizabeth Patterson standing up – an aunt-type who also played aunts in Love Me Tonight, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, The Cat and the Canary and Hail the Conquering Hero.

by ·Comments Off on My Darling Clementine (1946, John Ford)

A very good Wyatt Earp/Doc Holiday movie. Earp (Henry Fonda) is retired from the legendary fastest-gun-in-the-west lawman business, running cattle with his brothers, until his cattle is stolen and his youngest brother killed near Tombstone. Forms a tentative partnership with sickly, drunken badass Doc (Victor Mature) to take out the Clanton clan run by Walter Brennan (a real asshole, far from his lovable drunk character in To Have and Have Not). Schoolteacher Clementine comes to town looking for old flame Doc but finds him a changed man shacking up with his new love Chihuahua (my favorite character: Linda Darnell, conductor’s wife in Unfaithfully Yours) and while she’s hanging around town, Earp falls for her. Leads inexorably to a gunfight at the OK Corral, Doc and all the Clantons getting shot down. Much, much better than I’d expected from the title. I’m getting to like this John Ford fellow. Katy liked it, too.

by ·Comments Off on Force of Evil (1948, Abraham Polonsky)

Noir about a sleazy lawyer in the illegal gambling “numbers” racket who tries to get rich, tries to help out unlucky small-time older brother Leo, and fails miserably at both. At least he gets the girl, but at the end he’s turning himself in, disgusted that his buddies murdered his brother. The girl (stage actress Beatrice Pearson, only in one other film) is Doris, who is like a daughter to Leo and therefore as distrustful of Garfield as Leo is, but she comes around after Garfield keeps bailing her out of jail and incessantly harassing her. That’s how love worked in the 40’s.

Doesn’t look like the movie had much of a budget, but director Polonsky and D.P. George Barnes (who shot Rebecca and Spellbound for Hitchcock) made it look marvelous. Polonsky was an up and coming talent, oscar-nominated for his debut the year before, but blacklisted soon after this movie failed to make a huge impact. John Garfield was very good in this, even though I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup of greasy dark-haired white guys an hour later. He was oscar-nominated the same year for Body and Soul, died a few years later of heart problems. Older brother Thomas Gomez (The Furies, Key Largo) lived long enough to appear in Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

by ·Comments Off on The Thief of Bagdad (1940, Alexander Korda)

Watched again with Katy, three years after buying the DVD intending to show it to her – and she liked it! Watched by myself April 2006, and wrote as my fifth entry for this blog: “Total children’s fantasy with brilliant colors except for the occasional harsh violence (beheading talk, arrows shot into the bad guys’ skulls). Nice to see a British/American movie set in Iraq with good guys named Ahmad and Abu who praise Allah every few scenes. Of course the effects are great and of course the princess falls in love way too easily. Our hero was sorta goofy, but Abu the thief is wonderful. Neat how it begins in the middle (blind Ahmad) then hits the full backstory before proceeding.”

Holy cow. Shot over two years. Remake of a Fairbanks movie. Shot like a silent film, conceptualized as a musical, and directed by six different people. Interrupted by the war, so it was put on hold to make propaganda piece The Lion Has Wings. Constant script revisions. Whole segments excised a few weeks before release. Early scenes with Sabu unusable because he grew so much during the hiatus. Shot in two countries with a relatively new color process and an unprecedented array of special effects. Could have ended up an unsalvagable mess instead of the beautiful-looking smoothly-edited story it is.

I love this giant foot. Of the stars, Sabu was Indian and genie Rex Ingram was black, “born on a riverboat on the Mississippi River,” making this an unusually multicultural film for 1940 Britain.

Young Sabu never gets to be a romantic hero, but the romantic hero is boring. Sabu shoots the villain in the forehead with a crossbow (Jaffar’s mechanical horse then falls to pieces mid-air, a startling scene) and escapes his appointed pink-clothed life as John Justin’s vizier, flying away on the magic carpet in search of adventure.

Princess June Duprez was in other Korda pictures The Four Feathers and The Lion Has Wings, and a Rene Clair movie.

Jaffar was Conrad Veidt. Good at playing a villain, he’d portray the chief nazi in Casablanca the year before he died, and in the silent era he starred in The Hands of Orlac and Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (as the somnambulist). Miles Malleson, the old toy-obsessed Sultan, wasn’t really so old – he acted for the next 25 years, including in Kind Hearts and Coronets, Stage Fright and Hammer’s Hound of the Baskervilles. Cheese-headed stage actor (obviously) John Justin became a Ken Russell regular in the 70’s.

by ·Comments Off on To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch)

I guess this movie gets lots of credit for being a Hollywood anti-nazi resistance comedy released soon after U.S. entry into the war. Not a lot of funny Hitler movies going around back then, and reportedly it pissed off some audiences that German-born Lubitsch would try bringing his trademark lightness to such a heavy situation. But if anything, today it suffers from being not enough of a comedy. I couldn’t watch half the scenes without flashing back to The Great Dictator or Inglorious Basterds. Not that it has to go as far as Basterds, letting a couple of Jews machine-gun Hitler at close range as the whole theater explodes, but it came off closer in tone to 49th Parallel than Great Dictator.

One of the things that stood out about Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant a decade earlier was its pre-censors sexual frankness, and now this one gets away with having Carole Lombard (Twentieth Century star in her final role – she died in a plane crash) cheat on her husband with young bomber flyer Robert Stack (House of Bamboo, Written on the Wind – very early in his career) and get away with it.

Jack Benny (about to ditch the movies for a long TV career) leads an acting troupe along with wife Lombard and also Felix Bressart (Shop Around the Corner), Lionel Atwill (lots of Frankenstein movies) and Tom Dugan (bit player who averaged a movie per month in the 40’s). The play they’ve been rehearsing is censored by the nazis on the eve of its opening, so they go back to performing Hamlet, during which Robert Stack keeps leaving the audience at the start of Benny’s big soliloquy, brushing past everyone in the second row to meet Lombard backstage (why doesn’t he get an aisle seat?). Later at the height of the war, the theater troupe has joined the Polish resistance and Stack is fighting in the UK when a spy (Stanley Ridges of Canyon Passage, heh) with critical information about the resistance makes it into Poland and wants to meet with Lombard to inquire about the “code” he’s been given for her, “to be or not to be”. Stack flies into Poland and fills everyone in, so now the actors have to do their best impressions of nazi officials (Benny: “So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?”) to get back the secret papers.

The premise got away from me towards the end, when I thought Benny and his gang, having Hitler and a thousand nazis rounded up in a theater, aimed to do some damage. But of course, that’s Basterds talking again – I think they were just trying to get away from occupied Poland by stealing Hitler’s personal plane. Remade in the 80’s with Mel Brooks, Anne Bancroft and Christopher Lloyd for some weird reason.