What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Julian Shellhammer]

Last Friday it was The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) with top-billed Sydney Greenstreet, along with Zachary Scott, Faye Emerson, Peter Lorre, and a great deal of familiar faces. Taken from a Eric Ambler story, we follow Lorre as a Dutch writer who tracks down the life and crimes of Dimitrios Makropoulos (Scott, in his film debut) from Istanbul (not Constantinople) across the Balkans to Paris. Director Jean Negulesco, whose work intrigues me more and more, deftly incorporates flashbacks as various characters relate their interaction with Dimitrios. Set in 1938, with most of the flashbacks taking place in the 1920s, we see crime, betrayal, treason, and homicide follow in Dimitrios' wake. Being a production code movie, good versus bad means bad gets its comeuppance, but, here, just barely.

Lorre gets to be the good guy, and receives the most screen time, and Greenstreet is Greenstreet, a dominating presence. As a long time film nerd, I noted what seem to be directorial trademarks by Negulesco: an effortlessly gliding camera during exchanges of dialogue, an eye for gripping set ups (wounded bad guy crawling across a floor littered with a million francs), and, his most prominent shot, arms and hands and shoulders and backs right up against the camera, blurring out of focus. It could be said it's sort of like breaking down the fourth wall.

Immediately after the movie ended I subjected the audience to an impromptu mini-lesson by pulling up on YT the Glen Gray Casa Loma Orchestra video directed by Negulesco, pointing out the same danger-close positioning of clarinets, trombones, trumpets, et al, the trick set-ups with the boogie-woogie dancers using mirrors, and the non-linear flow of musicians clustered in one shot, then a completely different arrangement a mere note or two later. Real good stuff.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Also in the mix was an occasional family movie night dedicated to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. We watched the Extended Super Extra Jumbo Mega Ultimate Edition, which takes serious commitment. Just finished the last one, and it was decided to move on to The Hobbit, with which I have reservations, being convinced Peter Jackson took a few too many liberties by stretching out a single book into another trilogy. And yet....and yet... I'll still go full fanboy and watch it all.

 

[Fading Fast]

Gambit from 1966 with Michael Caine, Shirley MacLaine, Herbert Lom and John Abbott


Gambit slots into the heist-romcom niche subgenre of movies that had a brief heyday in the 1960s. These spirited efforts usually centered on a he-she team of smart, well-dressed and polished crooks flirt fighting their way through an elaborate, high-profile heist and into love.

Here, a Brit, played by Michael Caine, in Hong Kong, recruits a Eurasian woman, played by Shirley MacLaine, to aid him in a complicated heist of a priceless ancient Chinese bust held in the private collection of a Middle Eastern multimillionaire, played by Herbert Lom.

Caine and his lowkey partner, played by John Abbott, want MacLaine because she bears a striking resemblance to Lom's much beloved deceased wife - who also bears a striking resemblance to the very valuable bust Caine and Abbott want to steal.

The heist plan is quite complicated, and you'll want to experience it fresh, but it's fun seeing Caine's plan executed, first, as he imagines it: it goes James Bond-like perfect as MacLaine distracts, while Caine suavely infiltrates Lom's penthouse and stealthily makes off with the bust.

We all have our daydreams. When Caine and MacLaine get to the MidEast for real, little goes as planned. Hotel clerks don't bow before Caine's upper-class and condescending persona "Sir Harry Dean," nor does Lom fall madly for MacLaine because she looks like his deceased wife.

You don't watch Gambit for the heist itself, though, you watch it for the wonderful on-screen chemistry Caine and MacLaine have. He starts out cool, cocky, aloof and arrogant, while she's placidly reserved, but quickly, MacLaine irritates him by asking too many questions.

MacLaine, in her innocent "kooky" persona, asks questions that punch hole after hole in Caine's plan, but he's not yet ready to hear that. He's irritated and she's annoyed at being dismissed; however, MacLaine blithely goes along because she doesn't care that much. It's a fun dynamic.

It's MacLaine, though, who proves faster on her feet as she, time and again, saves the scheme, which starts to engender some grudging respect from Caine. You know this dynamic as you've seen it in movies over and over because it's charming when it works.

It works here in spades as director Ronald Neame lets it slowly build. Caine is off-putting at first, but MacLaine isn't bullied as she has her own quietly confident way of looking at things. It takes three quarters of the movie for Caine to "see" her, but when he does, it's a romcom payoff.

Neame also handles the heist itself well as there needs to be real tension and danger for the movie to hold together, which he creates despite the overall mirthful tone of the picture. The other piece of the puzzle that works is Lom's character.

In Caine's plan, Lom falls for MacLaine, which gives Caine the opening to steal the bust. In reality, Lom knows something is afoot with Caine and MacLaine from the start, but he's so intrigued that he lets them play out their game for his amusement and curiosity.

It's not quite a spoof, but it is playful. Caine, though, is serious, yet it's MacLaine and Lom who are smarter and have the most fun. It's a 1960s version of the popular 1930s "screwball society jewel thief" movie, which like Gambit, were often romcoms masquerading as heist tales.

In his updated take, Neame gives the movie a very 1960s stylish period look - mod clothing, a jazzy soundtrack, and an insouciant attitude - that adds to its charm. This aesthetic makes Gambit visually appealing, complementing its clever plot and spirited performances.

There are, though, a few too many twists and coincidences, plus the final wrap up, which brings Caine's partner Abbott back into the picture, is preposterous. Yet it's easy to forgive Gambit its flaws if you take it in its intended lighthearted manner. Plus the acting is just that good.

Caine, about to burst into megastardom, is outstanding as the smart guy who tries too hard to be a criminal mastermind. He does, though, wonderfully let his character be brought down a few pegs. MacLaine, at the peak of her stardom, is a master of brilliantly underplaying a scene.

Other than a shared vignette in one other movie, these two, unfortunately, never worked together again. Like Peter O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal a Million, in Gambit, they made a "caper" movie that is silly, fun and dated, and yet, still enjoyable as all heck today.

 

[Fading Fast]

Monte Carlo from 1930 with Jeanette MacDonald, Jack Buchanan and Zasu Pitts


Monte Carlo is a musical impressively ahead of its time, but with a story and pacing that will try your patience, and characters that you'll often find irritating. The result is this Ernst Lubitsch-directed effort is more of a historical curio than an enjoyable movie.

Jeanette MacDonald plays an impulsive and penniless noblewoman who loves money but not enough to marry the goofy, yet very wealthy Duke who has asked for her hand. At the movie's opening, MacDonald jilts the Duke and bolts to Monte Carlo.

With little money, but with her loyal maid, played by Zasu Pitts, in tow, MacDonald's "plan" is to win big at the casinos to pay her bills. That plan works about as well as it always does, so MacDonald finds herself running up a hotel bill she can't afford.

A wealthy Count, played by Jack Buchanan, who falls in love with MacDonald on sight, pretends to be a hairdresser to get close to her: it's that kind of movie. MacDonald comes to sort of love Buchanan, but she won't marry a poor "nobody" hairdresser.

While there are many bumps along the way - MacDonald's ex-fiancé the Duke shows up, she chases Buchanan away and then can't find him, and the hotel is about to evict her - the only "conflict” is when and how MacDonald will learn the truth about Buchanan.

In the climax, no spoilers coming, Lubitsch cleverly parallels MacDonald and Buchanan's hairdresser/count/noblewoman story with the plot of an opera, Monsieur Beaucaire, that MacDonald and Buchanan are attending, so that they see their conundrum playing out on stage.

Throughout the movie, in a modern Broadway musical way, MacDonald and Buchanan break into song, with movements and dialogue integrated into the action. Most musicals at this time, more or less, just plopped some songs into the picture where they "fit" a bit.

In Monte Carlo, the songs advance the story, plus the scenes are often quite creative, even incorporating the sounds and motion of the train into the score of one of the numbers.

While some of the songs are very dated in style, a few might appeal to fans of show tunes today, as some sound like modern Broadway musical numbers. For students of musicals, one assumes this is an important film from a historical perspective.

The problem is one doesn't enjoy a picture for its historical importance, one enjoys it for its characters and story. Here, Monte Carlo struggles. While MacDonald is super cute and talented, her character is often annoying and obnoxious.

We don't know her entire background, but we see she just takes for granted that she should live the life of a noblewoman, so she arrogantly spends beyond her means and is regularly condescending to anyone not of her class.

She even runs hot and cold in her attitude toward her maid, Pitts, who is her only real friend and confidant. Pitt's acting brand was playing the weary, put-upon servant with a heart under all her kvetching, but here you wish she'd pop MacDonald one in a few scenes.

Buchanan isn't much better as he comes across as creepy and lecherous in his scenes playing the hairdresser. Our standards are different today, but even by 1930 standards, he often feels more like a sexual predator than a gentleman in love.

What you're left with in Monte Carlo is a creative early musical with a silly Lubitsch plot and some unappealing characters. Still, there are moments when MacDonald is engaging as her talent and cuteness are undeniable. Plus, Pitts is fun as always.

The movie will only be worth watching if you are a big fan of musicals, old movies, and zany Lubitsch plots, and if you don't mind some irritating lead characters. If you can check all those boxes, you'll probably enjoy Monte Carlo.

 

[Fading Fast]

Brief Moment from 1933 with Carole Lombard and Gene Raymond


Hollywood, in the early 1930s, spat out a lot of short morality tales about the classes knocking into each other. In Brief Moment, society playboy Gene Raymond marries lounge singer Carole Lombard, but things eventually go wrong for a surprising reason.

Raymond's "proper" banker family treats Lombard like something the cat dragged in, but Dad keeps sending Raymond his huge monthly allowance check, so he and Lombard have plenty of money.

At first, their marriage goes well as they are in love, live in a fancy apartment and go out playing and partying with Raymond's rich friends every night and day. But Lombard's made of sturdier stuff, so after a few months of "fun," she's had enough and wants to start living a normal life.

As she explains to a pleasantly bemused Raymond, who thinks their life is fine as it is, she wants him to go to work so that he has some purpose in life - so that he has goals and accomplishments that are his own.

The writers and Raymond understand the material and avoid the trap of having Raymond starting out as a completely dissolute and rowdy playboy.

While he has lived the easy life of a rich man's son, all along there is a quiet and thoughtful element to Raymond where you feel even he sees there's something off in his lifestyle. It's just been too easy for him to bother to think about it.

With Lombard pushing him, Raymond asks his dad for a job, but in a moment of bravado, Raymond tells dad he wants to start at the bottom and work his way up.

For a guy who's never done anything harder than lift a cocktail glass, the drudgery of long hours, day after day, of ledger checking is too much for him, so he quits, lies to Lombard and goes to the racetrack when he's supposed to be at work.

When it inevitably all comes out, Lombard leaves him in disgust and disappointment, allowing Raymond to slip comfortably back into his old lifestyle. But after a little time, and missing Lombard, Raymond finally sees what she had been saying. Now he's ready to really look for honest work.

Will he find work not using his family's name? Will he be able to stick it out? Will Lombard care as she's returned to her old job?

Brief Moment rises above its humble B movie status because of the nuance of the story. The family initially thinks she's a golddigger after their son's money, but she really wants to turn him into the decent young man they all want him to be.

Lombard, despite being rejected by his family, sees the family honestly and without rancor for the decent rich people, with some class prejudice, but no evil intent, that they are.

She understands that a proud banking family wouldn't immediately embrace a lounge singer as a daughter-in-law. That's so much better than her shrieking in anger at every slight.

She also sees that their good intentions toward her husband have damaged him, but she understands that his very busy dad thought, as long as he was sending his son money, everything was alright. You can see there being a day when Lombard and the family embrace each other.

Raymond too, as noted, doesn't play the spoiled rich kid as an obnoxious stereotype, but instead, as a passive guy who took the easy way when it was handed to him. It makes his late-in-the-movie attempted transition believable because you felt it lurking there all along.

Depression Era America must have loved these stories about the rich and not-rich marrying as Hollywood churned a ton of them out. Brief Moment is a bit better than average because of the acting talents of Lombard and Raymond and because the story chooses complex characters and nuance over easy stereotypes and simplistic good-versus-evil morality.

 

[Trenchfriend]

But as a German, you must watch 1984 (1984) in original tone! The german synchro "doesn't fit right", very meh...

 

[Fading Fast]

But as a German, you must watch 1984 (1984) in original tone! The german synchro "doesn't fit right", very meh...

Subtitles don't bother me one bit, but an out-of-synch soundtrack is unbearable.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Subtitles don't bother me one bit, but an out-of-synch soundtrack is unbearable.

I didn't mean out-of-synch, but the german synchro simply doesn't match with the atmosphere of this masterpiece.

Alien (1979) is for example the total opposite, where I LOVE the haunting german synchro.

 

[Fading Fast]

Armored Car Robbery from 1950 with Charles McGraw, William Talman and Adele Jergens


Armored Car Robbery is a frills-free B-movie crime drama from RKO Radio Pictures and director Richard Fleischer that starts as a heist movie, but then becomes a classic "cop avenging his dead partner" tale. Along the way, it sneaks in a touch of noir here and there.

At the opening, we see a crook meticulously planning a heist of an armored car outside of Los Angeles' old Wrigley Field (a minor league ballpark). William Talman plays this thinking man's criminal who has never been arrested, so he has no police record.

Talman even anonymously reports a fictitious crime at the stadium to learn the police's response time. He then assembles a team of hoods, one of whose estranged wife, played by long-legged, full-bodied Adele Jergens, Talman himself is sleeping with. Even criminals have messy love lives.

The heist, as always, has a hiccup: a police car happens to be in the neighborhood, which brings a police lieutenant, played by Charles McGraw, and his partner quickly to the scene. A gun battle ensues; McGraw's friend and longtime partner is killed and the revenge match is on.

Talman has the heist money, but one gang member is wounded and the police have set up roadblocks. In a tense scene - one seen in a lot of crime dramas from this era - Talman and crew just manage to bluff their way through one of the checkpoints.

Armored Car Robbery kicks into full crime drama now as the police marshall impressive resources, including a dragnet well coordinated with radio communication and forensics that help identify gang members. Diligent, old-fashioned legwork also plays a big part in the effort.

While the police do their professional thing, Talman puts his intellect to work. He is still on the run, but he has an edge since the police don't know anything about him. Then through luck and strategy, he ditches or kills the rest of the gang to hide out with the money in a motel by himself.

As the French would say, cherchez la femme, with Jergens being the only woman involved as the wife of one of the dead gang members. Talman has the money, and he has conveniently killed Jergens' husband, but he also wants Jergens for himself.

Now we get to Thomas Jefferson, yes, one of the Founding Fathers, who is often credited (perhaps apocryphally so) with saying, "I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."

McGraw, on a personal vendetta mission, leads the police through an extensive and exhausting search for Talman, but it takes a little luck to break the case open. Still, the police were only in the position to benefit from the luck because of all the hard work they did beforehand.

It's the 1950s, so Talman isn't going to get away - the Motion Picture Production Code would never allow it - leaving the ending certain, but still well done, including a tiny foreshadowing of the popular noir The Killing. The spark in this one, though, is the McGraw-Talman dynamic.

McGraw is good playing a rough-edged Dick Tracy, who turns the hunt for Talman into a personal mission. While not quite an A-list leading man, McGraw is perfect playing a laconic, angry cop, a role he'd perfect a few years later in the outstanding noir The Narrow Margin.

Talman is an excellent foil for McGraw as his mien says both smart and a bit off, like most intelligent criminals are. He and McGraw are able to convey a lot of thought and emotion with their God-given and somewhat tortured facial expressions.

This mano-a-mano drama also benefits from its shot-on-location LA backdrop, which brings a realism that studio sets never can. With most of the action happening in the day and only a touch of noir style, the movie mainly has a crime-drama-documentary feel.

The other fun thing here is Ms. Jergens as a greedy, philandering, blonde burlesque dancer who switches her allegiances to the more successful hood. She is not really a femme fatale, but more of a gunmoll with a mid-century-style bombshell body and no conscience.

Armored Car Robbery works because it stays in its lane. It's a simple heist movie that seamlessly transitions into a manhunt with a police revenge angle that creates compelling tension and personal drama throughout.

This type of story has been done many times before and since, but Armored Car Robbery stands out for its raw human emotion and unadorned execution, making it a memorable, albeit not groundbreaking, entry in the genre.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Three Came Home, produced in 1949 from a 1947 book, but released in 1950. Starring Claudette Colbert as the American wife of English husband Patric Knowles, who are working and living in pre-WW2 north Borneo, then a British colony. The Japanese invade and most of the film deals with the separation of wife and child from husband and father, who are in separate prison camps. Based on true experiences, we see troubling harshness and deprivation, softened by the humane oversight of Sessue Hayakawa, the commander of the camp; he had spent four years at the University of Washington and knew of Colbert's character from her books.
Even toned-down by Hollywood, parts are rough to watch. The Missus and I talked briefly about reading the book, but she said there would probably be more detail than the film and wouldn't want to know even more about how bad it was.

 

[Monte]

Chinatown, Roman Polanski w Jack Nicholson 'n' Faye Dunaway. Great wardrobe so far. His suits are fantastic.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Yesterday, it was Ma and Pa Kettle (1949), with Majorie Main and Percy Kilbride in the title roles. Fun fluff. The first in their own series, which saw the release of a new entry about once a year.
Sometime last week it was The Killers (1946) starring Burt Lancaster (in his film debut), Ava Gardner, and Edmund O'Brien, directed by Curt Siodmak. Wowsers, what a movie. All the elements of noir- high contrast lighting, extensive interior scenes, sequences at night, doomed protagonist, femme fatale, all delivered without a lag in the story. Noir icon Charles McGraw and radio legend Robert Conrad are a pair of Mutt and Jeff hitmen, both of whom are severely troubled. Sam Levene is the police lieutenant who works with insurance investigator O'Brien to track down the story of Lancaster's character's death. Stay to the end to get the tangled denouement.

 

[Fading Fast]

Yesterday, it was Ma and Pa Kettle (1949), with Majorie Main and Percy Kilbride in the title roles. Fun fluff. The first in their own series, which saw the release of a new entry about once a year.
Sometime last week it was The Killers (1946) starring Burt Lancaster (in his film debut), Ava Gardner, and Edmund O'Brien, directed by Curt Siodmak. Wowsers, what a movie. All the elements of noir- high contrast lighting, extensive interior scenes, sequences at night, doomed protagonist, femme fatale, all delivered without a lag in the story. Noir icon Charles McGraw and radio legend Robert Conrad are a pair of Mutt and Jeff hitmen, both of whom are severely troubled. Sam Levene is the police lieutenant who works with insurance investigator O'Brien to track down the story of Lancaster's character's death. Stay to the end to get the tangled denouement.

Great comments on "The Killers." I could not agree more. My comments on it here: #30,304

 

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Woman on Pier 13 from 1949 with Robert Ryan, Laraine Day, Thomas Gomez, Janice Carter, John Agar and William Talman


Those looking for an anti-communism/film-noir mashup have come to the right movie in Woman on Pier 13. The propaganda works about as well as all heavy-handed propaganda works, but the film-noir aspects are pretty good, helped along by a talented cast.

With Washington and Hollywood in the grips of anti-communist fever back then - a fact well documented and covered incessantly, to this day, by commentators of classic Hollywood - there were plenty of movies metaphorically lamenting the fate of those caught in the witch hunt.

There were also a few at that time, like RKO studio head Howard Hughes, who tried to make movies supporting the anti-communist efforts. Hughes, though, always his own worst enemy, tinkered so much with his picture that the result is a politically stultifying but still okay movie.

Kicking it off, Robert Ryan plays a successful manager of a shipping company who has been chosen by the other shippers to represent them at the ongoing labor negotiations with the dockworkers' union, which we will soon learn is covertly controlled by the Communist Party.

Ryan, a former stevedore, is thought to be the perfect choice because labor and management both respect him. But newly married Ryan has a secret in his past: in his youth, he was a member of the Communist Party, while he also dated another party member, played by Janis Carter.

Ryan's innocent new wife, played by Laraine Day, who married Ryan after a whirlwind two-week romance, knows none of this. Life hack: Don't marry someone you have known for only two weeks.

The local Communist Party head, played by Thomas Gomez, can't believe his good luck, as the key negotiator for management, Ryan, is someone he can easily blackmail by threatening to expose his Communist past.

The movie is now a swirl of threats and intrigue. Gomez and Carter - she's still smarting over being dumped by Ryan years ago - pressure Ryan to follow "the Party's" orders. Ryan, though, tries to break free of the Party without having his Red past exposed to his new wife or others.

Thrown into the mix is Carter seducing Day's innocent younger brother, played by John Agar, as she tries to turn him Commie, which would toss a heavy piece of metal into Ryan's new marriage. Also, stirring things up is William Talman playing a paid-for-hire thug for Gomez.

Gomez plays the Communist Party boss like a smart, unemotional 1940s American mob boss. But like all good Communists, he justifies every evil thing he does as being good for the Party, which by proxy, he avers, is good for the worker, so every immoral thing he does is really moral.

It's the same twisted tautology that has the Party care greatly about "the people," in theory, but in practice, no individual life really matters and can be sacrificed for the good of the state, which, abracadabra, then flows back to the good of the individual. Uh-huh.

While all that communist ideology is being argued about, a decent film noir is in progress as Ryan fights hard to break the Party's hold on him, while Gomez and Carter try to squeeze harder to get Ryan to do the union's/Party's bidding.

One thing Hughes did capture is how Communism - the workers' party ideology - was in vogue in elite saloons, back then, full of well-dressed and pretentious intellectuals eating hors d'oeuvres and drinking champagne, while expressing words of solidarity with the working man.

The surprise in all this is pretty Day, who has no real idea what is going on. She can see, though, that her husband and brother are in trouble, so she refuses to be quiet. She forces a final confrontation between everyone in an over-the-top but very-of-the-era film-noir gunfight climax.

Despite its clumsy politics, Ryan, Carter, Day and Gomez are pros who turn this often muddled script into an okay noir. Unusual for noir at this time, Carter and Day really drive the picture, with Carter being a smart femme fatale Commie and Day a strong, brave woman fighting for her family.

With some on-location shooting in Los Angeles and San Francisco, black-and-white cinematography, plenty of dark scenes at night, on the docks and in menacing warehouses, and a careless disregard of life, the movie looks, feels and says film noir.

Just a little tweaking could have turned this into a very good noir that subtly made the point that the Communist Party had infiltrated the dockworkers' union. But Hughes, in his enthusiasm and micromanagement, made his anti-communist message turgid and too blatant to be effective.

Woman on Pier 13, today, works as an okay noir with a talent-heavy cast that also stands as a mid-century curio left over from the Cold War Communist fear that gripped America for over a decade.


N.B. Woman on Pier 13 was initially released under the awful title I Married a Communist, but when it bombed, Howard Hughes re-released it under its new and innocuously noirish title.

 

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The Razor's Edge from 1946 with Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, Anne Baxter, Clifton Webb and Herbert Marshall


On one end of the spectrum, you have a man searching for true meaning in life, a man looking to connect on a deep and sincere level with his fellow man, and on the other end, you have a woman who knows exactly what she wants in life - money, status and security.

These are two people who should not meet. But in The Razor's Edge, these are the exact two people who meet, and who want to rip each other's clothes off. But they believe they need to marry first, so life gets bumpy, in particular, for the woman who won't compromise on anything.

Tyrone Power plays the man searching for some greater meaning out of life than just following the traditional path of building a career, marrying and raising a family. His portrayal of someone looking for a spiritual purpose and connection in the universe is wonderful.

Gene Tierney plays the woman who has always known what she wants, the aforementioned money, status and security. But Tierney has a problem: The man she wants, Power, doesn't want those things, so she tries to pound a square peg into a round hole the entire movie.

Power wants Tierney to accompany him on his journey, but when she says no, he, like her, won't compromise his vision of life for the other person. These young lovers are at a standstill.

All would have been fine had they gone their separate paths leaving their love behind as a poignant memory. This is what Power effectively does, but Tierney is not a woman to give up easily on what she wants.

Worse, as we'll see time and again, she'll lie and viciously manipulate others to get what she wants. In the end, Tierney leaves several wrecked lives in the wake of her years-long quest to bend Power to her will.

While Tierney is scheming and Power is finding himself, part of the thoughtful subtlety in The Razor's Edge lies in the several foils Maugham creates for Tierney and Power to highlight their central conflict.

Tierney's uncle, played by Clifton Webb with his usual irascible, haughty demeanor, is Tierney complete. Webb only values money and social status, as he fully realizes those principles in his gaudy, shallow life.

He is hilariously self-absorbed and horribly insecure: The scene when he argues with his tailor about the placement of his "crest" on his shorts is his character in full. Yet he's engaging in the way a wobbly tire catches your attention: it's broken and all but useless, but you notice it.

Anne Baxter, in an Oscar-winning performance, is another foil as she plays Tierney's young married friend, whose husband doesn't make a lot of money. They, though, are incredibly happy. She's what Tierney could have been had she truly loved Power.

Later, though, after losing her husband and baby in a car crash, Baxter puts her life back together with Power's kind help. You'll want to see how Tierney responds when Baxter, her "unimportant" friend, threatens Tierney's, by now, psychotic fixation on Power.

Herbert Marshall, playing Maugham himself, is the third foil as he, like Power, wanders through life finding meaning in his books and other people's lives, while his own personal life seems undeveloped. He is a subtle warning to Power about the risk of always searching.

It's hard to mention one performance here without noting all of them. Still, Baxter's incredible portrayal of a woman whose life was ripped from her will stay with you, as will Tierney's frightening portrayal of a soulless woman capable of doing great evil for her own ends.

The movie's powerful climax (no spoilers coming) smashes all these ideas and characters together as several lives shatter. We know and believe by now, though, that the most grounded characters have the moral compass to see their way through.

The final beautiful scene of Power, once again, working on a tramp steamer is the embodiment of Fitzgerald's famous quote at the end of The Great Gatsby, "So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past."

It is through those types of unhurried scenes that Director Edmund Goulding brings Maugham's story to us. He thoughtfully blends long camera angles, which give the picture an epic feel, with close-ups that help capture not only the nuances of the story, but the beauty of his two leads.

Combined with the sharp black-and-white cinematography and the opulent sets and wardrobes, Twentieth Century Fox, in The Razor's Edge, made a movie worthy of the philosophical breadth and depth of Maugham's timeless story of how a classic attraction of two opposites leads to heartbreak and chaos.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Did someone already post about The Lost Moment ? If they did, I beg your indulgence. From 1947, director Martin Gabel presents Robert Cummings, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, John Archer and Eduardo Ciannelli in a difficult-to-explain story about an American publisher who wants to obtain a set of love letters, legendary in the book world, written between an enchanting beauty and a rising painter, which painter disappeared without a trace in something like 1840. Set in Venice, in an undisclosed era, Moorehead in dense make-up is 105 year-old Juliana Bordereau, said enchanting beauty, Hayward is her niece Tina, Cummings the publisher, and Archer is on the make for some of the potential profits if the love letters ever get published. Ciannelli is a Venetian Catholic priest who counsels Cummings about not digging too deep into Juliana's and Tina's cloistered mysterious life.

Without giving away anything, the plot drifts along, aided by Gabel's drifting camera, actors delivering lines in almost slow-motion cadence, in dark gothic kluge-y interiors, with Cummings ingratiating himself for a chance to heist the letters, and Hayward cold, aloof, stand-offish, until one night Cummings hears captivating piano music, and ambling through the old house, discovers ----- well, that would spoil it. Suffice it to say Hayward gets to play two different personas of one character, influenced by the love letters, with Cummings accommodating each persona in an attempt to get those letters. The Missus and I don't know what to think - a lot of the weirdness is left out in this telling, and after so much of the movie moves at a stroll, the ending is quite melodramatic and sort of like having a whale sneak up under your la-z-boy then suddenly let fly with his blowhole. I think we'll take a dose of Armored Car Robbery to balance things out.

 

[Fading Fast]

Up the Down Staircase from 1967 with Sandy Dennis, Patrick Bedford, Eileen Heckart and Roy Poole


You can pull some "timeless lessons" out of Up the Down Staircase, if you really try hard, but it is easier to just see it as a well-acted relic of late 1960s idealism meets reality in an "inner city" school. Think of it as America's To Sir, with Love.

Despite some hackneyed writing and cliches, there is a sincerity in the effort here to portray a breaking school, in a breaking neighborhood that still, somehow, has a thread or two of hope left. Almost all of that hope, though, rests on the tiny shoulders of lead actress Sandy Dennis.

Dennis was well cast as she looks more like a cute school teacher than a movie star. In this setting, she really looks like Bambi entering a hunters' ambush as she is a fresh out of a prissy college idealist young teacher full of hopes and dreams about "enriching young minds."

Those hopes and dreams smash into a harsh reality as the school is a rundown, bureaucratic monolith of conflicting rules and endless forms to fill out, but few supplies. Bells ring randomly and the obvious titular metaphor shows kids and teachers ignoring staircase directions.

Worse for Dennis is that her job is less about teaching than just controlling her classroom packed with the era's student cliches: a kid who sleeps through class because he works at night, a lonely girl, a shy boy, a tough "hood," an angry young black student, and on and on.

You know the basic arc from almost the first scene. Dennis will slowly have her enthusiasm sapped as the social problems of her students, their unruliness and the limited resources of the school overwhelm her good intentions.

Dennis gives it a good fight, though. She bends over backwards to help a smart but disaffected "hood." She reaches out to a painfully shy and lonely young girl. She even, surprisingly, gets the class to see the significance of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities to their own lives.

That latter is one of the movie's uplifting moments. The class is rowdy as all heck, but because the kids are engaged with the idea of "two cities/societies" existing side by side in one. Usually the class is rowdy to be disrupted, but here it's rowdy because everyone wants to participate.

Each victory, however, is met with some painful defeats as a student attempts suicide at the school, another abuses Dennis' trust and her classroom, overall, often descends into chaos.

The suicide is a chilling scene. You are going along seeing kids getting involved or kids emotionally checking out, but when one throws herself out of a high-floor window, the fragility of these children's lives is laid bare.

The other teachers are a mixed bag as well. Some, like the one played by Eileen Heckart, are middle aged and still trying to be good teachers. Others, like one played by Roy Poole, see the kids as an invading army to be contained at best.

Worse, some are working out their own personal demons like the English teacher played by Patrick Bedford. He is a frustrated failed novelist who often bullies his students over grammatical errors to feel better about himself.

There are a lot of good vignettes of students arguing with each other or with the teachers, or of the teachers arguing with each other or the administrators. There are also a few upbeat vignettes of the teachers, students and even administrators rowing in the same directions.

Since movies need a climax, you get the exact one you expect when Dennis tries to resign, but first has trouble getting the bureaucracy to find the resignation form for her. Will a student telling Dennis that she made a difference in her life be enough to change Dennis' mind?

The acting is uniformly good, but this is Dennis' movie and she carries it with her unique blend of innocence, bird-like nervousness and plucky gumption that has you believing this fragile-looking young woman can survive and maybe even thrive in this Thunderdome highschool.

Today, the movie's restored and cool color stock, shot on locations around Manhattan, is a wonderful time capsule of New York City back when the chaos on the streets - drugs, crime, garbage, graffiti and a dispiriting cynicism - seeped into the schools.

Inner city schools have been a challenge for well over half a century now. Most are better funded today, but the social ills of the communities and the large cultural issues of society are still buffeting attempts to educate the kids in these difficult neighborhoods.

None of this was new even in 1967. Over ten years earlier, movies like Blackboard Jungle trod similar ground. Still, Up the Down Staircase is a respectable addition to the troubled-school subgenre of movies.

For us today, it's also a great visual trip back to the late 1960s, serving as a poignant reflection of that era's challenges and hopes.

 

[Martinezine]

Dark Waters 2019

Fabulous movie. Somehow I had missed this Mark Ruffalo film when it premiered. Great supporting cast, Tim Robbins, Anne Hathaway, with a riveting storyline, and a personal favorite detail, based on a true story.

 

[Fading Fast]

Street Scene from 1931 with Sylvia Sidney, David Landau, Beulah Bondi and William Collier Jr.


Director King Vidor, working from a screenplay based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play by Elmer Rice, captured a realistic portrayal of life that is rarely seen on screen. It's not perfect, but it is a darn good look at a slice of immigrant life in a tenement building in early 1930s New York City.

Set on the stoop of a tenement building in Manhattan's working-class Hell's Kitchen during a broiling few summer days, the beauty in Street Scene is in the showing. The heat causes many of the tenants to sit or pause on the stoop as their apartments swelter in those pre-air-conditioning days.

A snide tenant, played by Beulah Bondi, stirs the pot with her nasty gossip delivered with a sanctimonious attitude. There's plenty to gossip about, too, with the big story being a married woman and tenant, played by Estelle Taylor, having an affair with the milk collector.

Taylor's husband, played by David Landau, is a cold and somewhat bullying man who is never happy with his wife, son or daughter, the latter and star of the movie is played by Sylvia Sidney. Sidney, like her mother, is too sensitive for the almost-always angry Landau.

It's hot and people are bored and uncomfortable, so gossip like, "did you hear who's having an affair?" takes off like wildfire. It also shows how there was no way to have a secret in a building like that, with everyone's windows opened and plenty of tenants alway milling out front.

The affair story frames the plot, but the beauty in the movie is simply in the seeing. It's seeing the older Jewish socialist spout anti-capitalist diatribes out of his first-floor window, as his embarrassed adult daughter tries to rein him in.

That man's son, played by William Collier Jr., meanwhile tries to turn his friendship with Sidney into something more. It's openly acknowledged in a very-of-the-era, matter-of-fact way that his being Jewish and her not is a big deal, which everyone but the two "kids" seems to care about.

Shocking for us today, and sadly true color of the era, you'll see how the derisive term "yid" is casually tossed around. The building's bully, played by Matt McHugh, also taunts, with vicious antisemitism, Collier Jr. to belittle him in front of Sidney. It isn't pretty, but it feels real.

In the building, there's also a nice Italian couple whose husband buys ice-cream for everyone. They are a sad couple, though, because they can't have children, a sadness emphasized by the nervous young father from upstairs who runs to get a doctor for his pregnant wife.

Thrown into the mix on the stoop is a dour Scandinavian couple - the husband is the building's super - a social worker who is condescending to a mother of two children about to get evicted (her husband left them flat), and an alcoholic tenant who's always off to the bar.

In the fiery climax (no spoilers), Landau comes home to find his wife and the milk collector together and not settling the family's milk bill. It's a good story arc, with the ramifications allowing for some sort of "wrap up," but the plot is the movie's least important aspect.

What is important is the depiction of this moment in America. Sure there's a lot of stereotyping, but stereotyping exists because it's a shorthand that captures commonalities. Not all Jews were socialist, nor were all Scandinavians dour, but they were reasonable oversimplifications.

If you read the newspapers from the era, Street Scene will look very familiar to you as tenement life in the papers was very much like the movie: affairs leading to violent outcomes, evictions of abandoned families and ethnicities mixing, often in genial ways, was all there.

Vidor draws you into the individual dramas early by keeping the camera narrowly focused on the tenement's front stoop. Later in, he pulls the camera back to remind you that this tenement, with all its drama, is just one of many in the massive city. It is an incredibly effective framing.

The acting too, despite sometimes feeling stagey, is impressive as Sidney, Landau, Bondi, Collier Jr., and others comfortably embody their characters' personas. Sidney is every enthusiastic teenage girl who wants to break out of her depressing surroundings.

Once the Motion Picture Production Code was fully enforced by the end of 1934, movies like this wouldn't get made, not because of their sex or violence - little is shown and it's not at all gratuitous - but because of their honest portrayal and discussion of sex, violence and the city's many ethnic groups.

The movie's stereotypes, which today we might find offensive, have an honesty and broadness to them that would morph into the code-approved "genial Italian, "plodding Scandinavian," "hard-working Jew," etc., that dominated the screen for the next several decades.

Street Scene is a gem that reasonably honestly captures the texture and nuances of New York City's bustling, striving and, sometimes, combustible immigrant life in the early 1930s. It serves today as an incredible time capsule of one type of the American immigrant experience.


N.B. For fans of @LizzieMaine's outstanding thread "The Era - Day By Day" in "The Golden Era" section of the Forum, you will see a lot of the stories, drama and human emotions that we read about in those newspapers captured in this reasonably realistic portrayal of tenement life.

 

[Fading Fast]

Guilty as Hell from 1932 with Edmund Lowe, Victor McLaglen, Henry Stephenson, Adrienne Ames, Noel Francis, Claire Dodd and Richard Arlen


Guilty as Hell is a good murder-investigation movie where we know who did it from the first scene, but today, its two drawbacks are some clunky inchoate "talkies" filmmaking and all the better versions of this story that have come since.

If you can understand the limits of technology back then and appreciate an early version of a story that's been reused and expanded on for over ninety years, Guilty as Hell is a quick, fun precode with an enjoyable cast.

At the open, a doctor, played by Henry Stephenson, strangles his wife. He has thoughtfully planned it all, including planting incriminating evidence pointing to her lover (yup) and giving himself an alibi helped by the slow-to-start-up vacuum tubes used in radios of that era.

With the doctor seemingly in the clear, the lead detective, played by Victor McLaglen, and his buddy and antagonist (it's that type of relationship), a star reporter played by Edmund Lowe, conduct a bumpy investigation where each does some smart and some stupid things.

McLaglen falls pretty much for the doctor's entire story as does Lowe, until Lowe meets the adorable sister, played by Adrienne Ames, of the falsely accused man, played by Richard Arlen, who was the doctor's young wife's lover. A pretty face can do a lot to a man.

Now the movie is McLaglen and Stephenson driving for a conviction of Arlen, while Lowe and Ames look at every clue from sixty different angles as they try to find anything to exculpate Arlen. Despite their efforts, Arlen is found guilty, as the doctor did a very good job framing him.

As has been the wont of these stories ever since, it all comes down to a desperate last-second call to the governor for a stay of execution as the intrepid Lowe and Ames never stop examining everything over and over again.

McLaglen and Lowe, who were a "buddy team" in other movies, at this time, have good but not great chemistry. Lowe comes off as too cocky and even nasty to be likable. His conversion to crusader for justice is so obviously motivated just to get the pretty girl that he looks like a jerk.

Ames is cute and loyal, but the woman to watch is Noel Francis as the wife of the man whom Stephenson paid to help with the false evidence. When things go horribly wrong for her husband, Francis earns her precode girl-power bona fides with a display of raw revenge-driven passion.

Director Erle C. Kenton, working within the limits of the technology back then, keeps his movie speeding along, but there is a lot of bumpiness to the transitions, plus scenes often feel stagy. In only a few years, Hollywood would work most of these kinks out of the "talkies."

The reason this story is still told today is because it is good drama. A smart man commits a murder and frames another man so well that even experienced detectives and lawyers are fooled enough that the framed man is convicted of murder and scheduled to be executed.

Guilty as Hell, a perfect precode title - movies wouldn't see titles like that for several decades once the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced after 1934 - is an okay movie whose value today is its early look at a plot that is so good Hollywood has been recycling it ever since.