by ·Comments Off on Othello (1951, Orson Welles)

Blackface Orson stars as a wife-killer, duped by his evil comrade Iago (a stage actor who later played Oscar Wilde on TV). Iago uses the handsome blonde idiot Cassio to achieve his goals, poor lovely Desdemona (Marcel Carné’s Juliette) innocent of all accusations.

I watched the extras until they started to repeat themselves, and after hearing about the whole extended and troubled production, I can forgive the movie’s inconsistent sound. Nobody talks about Iago’s wife Fay Compton (The Haunting) stealing the movie in the last fifteen minutes.

–
Filming Othello (1978)

Such a ponderous intro, it’s ten minutes before he gets into any details beyond the movie’s title, then it gets good as he shows scenes from the feature – photographed by Early Welles and re-edited in the fast Late Welles style. He quotes a critic speaking of the film’s “tortured compositions, grotesque shadows and insane distortions,” tells a hilarious story of winning a prize at Cannes with his “film without a country.”

“The thing to do was somehow to make a movie” – sometimes it feels like an elegy for the studio age. In the second half he stages a long, slightly loopy conversation with Iago and Desdemona’s dad, Welles getting the final word via retakes and overdubs.

Me after ten minutes: “Rosenbaum was making a point about film canons and Welles’s late filmography by putting this minor doc on his top thousand films list.”
Me after an hour: “Rosenbaum was a coward for not putting this great work on his top hundred films list.”

–
Return to Glennascaul (1952, Hilton Edwards)

A short made by the two guys above during an Othello filming break. Narrator and framing story participant Orson picks up Cassio on the road, who tells his spooky story of giving a ride to a couple of Irish women. He drives them to their titular home, they turn out to be ancient ghosts who’ve vanished when he returns to the now-delapidated house a few minutes later. Pretty deliberate and obvious, with some nice photography.

by ·Comments Off on Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)

After the cops nab father Peter Graves (star of Parts: The Clonus Horror), false priest Robert Mitchum moves in and takes care of mother Shelley Winters, then starts working on the kids to reveal their bank robber dad’s missing loot until they escape downriver and find a protector in Lillian Gish. I wasn’t getting the fantasy storybook quality of this movie when I watched it thirty years ago on TCM, just the plot and some odd moments, such as Mitchum popping up like a cartoon to get shot by Gish at the end.

Terrence Rafferty:

[Screenwriter James] Agee was steeped not only in the right kind of southern sensibility but also in the work of the silent-film pioneer D. W. Griffith, which Laughton, with near miraculous intuition, believed should be the touchstone for the telling of the story; Griffith was the master of heightened, poetic melodrama, and that’s what Laughton wanted for The Night of the Hunter. He screened as many of Griffith’s movies as he could dig up at the Museum of Modern Art, and hired the terrific cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who had done brilliantly imaginative work in black and white on Orson Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons. The black-and-white imagery of The Night of the Hunter is in a different, more deliberately archaic style from that of the Welles film, keyed to the basic emotions of love and fear, just as the great silent movies were.

David Ehrenstein:

The Night of the Hunter has the feel and the force of an American folk fable; yet, it’s a curious and highly eccentric sort of folk fable, mixing, as it does, rural humor with gothic humor, biblical quotation and Freudian symbolism, and everyday realities with a near-mythic confrontation between the forces of good and evil. … It may be frightening, but not in the melodramatic manner of a conventional thriller. Its story is told from a child’s viewpoint, yet it has nothing in common with the likes of Disney or Spielberg. Then, there is its style to contend with—an incredible mixture of naturalistic three-dimensional space on view one moment, replaced by theatrical two-dimensional images the next. It is clear what the film is aiming at: images from our nightmares, brought into the lucid light of day.

Only instance in history of an adult in a movie believing a kid over another adult:

Bad shadow:

Good shadow:

by ·Comments Off on The Tarnished Angels (1958, Douglas Sirk)

Sirk with the same great cast as Written on the Wind – inconsistent dubbing, but the greatest widescreen staging and overheated actors. Our doomed lovers are even more inevitably doomed than ever before, since they are daredevil pilots with engine problems.

Inspiration for Slack Bay:

In 1932, after Robert Stack’s own plane crashes he attempts to sell his wife Dorothy Malone to hotheaded businessman Ord in exchange for a new busted plane. Stack’s loyal mechanic Jack Carson gets the Ord plane working, but not well enough to keep it from plowing into the sea. Rock Hudson is an audience-surrogate reporter who becomes obsessed with this group, is fired from his outlet for insisting on covering air shows, then fails to pick up Dorothy after her husband dies.

Yui is the best, despite his allergy to capital letters.

–

Crankin’ Hank, later the villainous foreman of Days of Heaven:

The kid’s a star, also in Hitchcock, Boetticher, and Nick Ray movies:

by ·Comments Off on While the City Sleeps (1956, Fritz Lang)

Kane Kyne Enterprises runs a sensationalist newspaper/TV empire. As is often the case in crime reporting movies, it’s not enough for these guys to cover the big serial killer story, they have to solve it before the cops do, in order to create new stories to cover. Vincent Price is the spoiled kid who just inherited the company, playing power games by creating an executive director position and watching the company leaders fight for it. In the game: big brit George Sanders, big eyebrows Thomas The Kid Mitchell, and small mustache James Craig (Side Street). Free agent Dana Andrews is a TV newsman trying to get away with his fiancee before getting pulled into all this drama. For once the women are just as important in the story. Rhonda Fleming is Price’s hotwife, sleeping with the small mustache guy, which somehow lands him the big job. Ida Lupino is Sanders’ gal, kissing up to Dana to coerce and/or blackmail him into helping. Sally Forrest (star of a couple Lupino-directed dramas) is Dana’s gal, who he puts in danger by trying to bait the killer. All this leads to more and more inter-office drama, the news people caring less about the actual serial killer, who tries to reassert himself with some serial killings, but gets caught in a futile newspaper exclusive. Last-minute scale-tipping rewards the (relatively) virtuous and interferes with an employee’s honeymoon, as was always happening in 1950s workaholic movies.

by ·Comments Off on Try and Get Me (1950, Cy Endfield)

Ultimately a sappy social-issues message movie, worse than My Son John, ending up with an angry mob of college hunks assaulting the precinct. Everyone in this town should be in jail. But it had a promising enough beginning, when broke idiot Frank Lovejoy (played cops in House of Wax and In a Lonely Place) meets high-pantsed wealthy showoff Lloyd Bridges at a bowling alley and gets hired to drive for robberies.

Robberies are working out fine, so they try kidnapping a kid with a rich dad, but Lloyd kills the hostage. Of course Frank has been lying to the wife (Kathleen Ryan, still attracted to heist men after Odd Man Out), but he starts drinking heavily to kill his conscience, the movie blurring accordingly, then drunkenly gives up the plot to his new girlfriend. Per Rosenbaum, the last of Cy Endfield’s movies to be released before he fled the country because of the anti-commie goon squad.

by ·Comments Off on Panic in the Streets (1950, Elia Kazan)

Another 1950s movie about an underpaid, overworked guy who neglects his wife in favor of his job. This time instead of a newspaper man, he’s a US health guy trying to save the country from a deadly outbreak, slightly more excusable. Our guy is Richard Widmark (same year as Night and the City and No Way Out) and the wife is Midge from Vertigo… he’s neglecting Midge! So, it’s back to being inexcusable.

Murderer Jack Palance (in his sharp-faced debut) isn’t about to let himself get caught, and he’ll throw any obstacle or friend under the bus to escape from the cops assisting the health guy, not realizing (or giving two shits) that the immigrant he knocked off was patient zero. I’m surprised his whiney friend Zero Mostel makes it all the way to the end. Their other friend Tommy Cook (American Guerrilla in the Philippines the same year), sick on a stretcher, gets hurled down the stairs as a diversion. Meanwhile, Widmark tries to convince any of the locals to help but everyone is uncooperative.

In the end, Jack Palance is defeated by a baffle on a rope, exactly the same way I stop squirrels from getting to my bird feeder.

My main takeaway is that I don’t see Richard Widmark often enough, and I could easily program a Richard Widmonth with ten good movies I haven’t seen before:
1947 Kiss of Death
1948 Road House
1948 Street With No Name
1950 No Way Out
1952 Don’t Bother to Knock
1955 The Cobweb
1961 Two Rode Together
1961 Judgement at Nuremberg
1964 Cheyenne Autumn
1968 Madigan

by ·Comments Off on The Barefoot Contessa (1954, Joseph Mankiewicz)

Four years after Sunset Boulevard, a movie that opens with the death of someone in the movie business then rewinds to show us the backstory. Our tragic contessa is Spanish Ava Gardner, last seen in the similarly-technicolored Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. It’s not a deal killer for a Hollywood movie but her Spanish is not good – what’s more important is she can speak English with a Spanish accent.

The guy who pulled Ava from her unhappy home (her father later murders her abusive mother) is filmmaker Humphrey Bogart, who then introduces us to his gang: rich bully Kirk (Forbidden Planet), lady Myrna (Summertime), and PR guy Fats Murdoch. These movie business guys talk about the movie business too much – so much dialogue and narration in this movie it’s like an audiobook. Fats won an oscar because all the guys from On The Waterfront split the vote, and the writing won an oscar because there’s so very much of it.

Looking good, Bogart:

Bogart and Ava get involved in different romances (not with each other). She finally finds true love with an Italian guy, but after they marry he gives her an army document explaining that his dick was blown off in WWII. She thinks it will be a wonderful surprise to her tormented husband if she gets pregnant by another guy, instead he shoots her dead.

by ·Comments Off on The Steel Helmet (1951, Samuel Fuller)

Fuller’s first great war movie. Fellow WWII vet Gene Evans plays a cigar-chompin’ slang-throwin’ tough guy, picking up a South Korean kid and a stray medic before linking up with a troop with an undercooked commanding officer. The men die off one at a time to traps and snipers and spies, then they die all at once during an all-out shooting battle at the temple where they’re camping.

Medic James Edwards is resourceful:

Our tough guy, through the clearing smoke:

Survivors:

by ·Comments Off on The Phenix City Story (1955, Phil Karlson)

Opens with convincingly real and unrehearsed news interviews, which they empasize are real and unrehearsed, but is the interview guy not aware that he’ll be in a movie? Why’s he gotta be so dry? From this drab beginning, the movie gets increasingly brutal, as the local casino runs a terror campaign against the voters, press, and church.

Edwards stops John from killing a casino boss, too bad:

John (Pickup on South Street) comes home to Phenix with his girl, has been there a half hour before running into gang violence and police corruption. He and some others who are sick of the casino’s shit team up, and mostly get killed. RIP John’s lawyer dad, their casino worker mole friend Kathryn Grant (Anatomy of a Murder’s star witness), some do-gooder named Fred, and the innocent daughter of The Steel Helmet‘s James Edwards. The girl is Black so doesn’t even warrant a trial, but Fred’s killer is acquitted, leading to further escalations, until John calls in the national guard to shut the whole thing down. Arguably the Fort Benning army shitheads across the bridge funded all the murders and paid no consequences.

Witness:

What witnesses get: