Just in time to offer relief from the 100-degree days, the dark cool Guild Cinema just completed its annual 10-day festival of film noir. Here are our samples.
SABOTEUR (1942) (B+) - Robert Cummings, better known as a TV star of the '50s, gets by with a glib and suave presence in one half of the Alfred Hitchcock double feature, as Barry Kane, an innocent man on the lam across the United States during World War II. Cummings -- tall and handsome -- exudes a variation on what we know as that clean-cut Ryan Reynolds charm.
Hitchcock has a ball with this one. A trio of writers that includes Dorothy Parker stuffs the script with juicy dialogue and quick one-liners. The dialogue is overly peppered with patriotic references -- even a group of circus performers' informal poll as to whether to help Kane turns into a civics lesson, and the climax takes place atop the Statue of Liberty -- as if the team, required by a wartime Hollywood dictum, purposely lays the patriotism on think with a wink to the camera. It's a lot of fun.
Cummings is surrounded by memorable performances: Murray Alper as a hilarious chatterbox truck driver who gives the hitchhiker a lift; Otto Kruger hamming it up as the devious head of the racket; the familiar face Ian Wolfe as a little but menacing henchman; and especially Vaughan Glaser as an intuitive blind man who takes Kane in and senses his innocence. Kane's love interest is the model Patricia Martin (Priscilla Lane from "Arsenic and Old Lace"), whose billboards send Kane eerily spot-on messages while he makes his way east.
Cummings' Bob Hope road vibe gives this an airy quality, but the tension never wanes, and Hitchcock is a cool customer as he flashes his distinct visual style of telling a story. The final shot from atop the Statue of Liberty is a master class in suspense.
Spotted: Good ol' Norman Lloyd as the end-of-movie villain, who would memorably portray Dr. Auchslander on TV's "St. Elsewhere" in the 1980s and who lived to the ripe old age of 106 before he died a year ago.
***
I CONFESS (1953) (B) - In the other Hitchcock offering, Montgomery Clift is strong again as a priest caught in a web of love and confession when he gets accused of murdering a local lawyer. This is Hitchcock's palate-cleanser before his memorable three-movie run in the mid-'50s of "Dial M for Murder," "Rear Window" and "To Catch a Thief."
Here, Clift's Father Mike Logan is framed by the rectory's caretaker Otto Keller (O.E. Hasse), who donned a priest's cossack while killing the lawyer. Keller confesses to Logan, who feels sworn to silence. But soon Logan is suspected by Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden) after he was seen outside the crime scene with lovely Ruth Grandfort (a passionate Dorothy Malone), whom he'd a fling with before he went off to war and later became a Catholic priest.
Hitchcock ravels and then unravels this like a soap opera, with Clift stoic throughout and Malone dialing up the swooning to 11. The suspense wavers at times, but strong performances, especially Malden's hard-nosed cop, sweep this along to a dramatic climax. The camerawork is compelling but nothing special here. Because this is based on a Canadian play, it is set in Quebec, which presents some needless confusion amid a melange of accents. Hitchcock had the story rewritten to remove some dark elements and sand away the edges for Hollywood consumption.
Spotted: Hitchcock, himself, of course, walking across a bridge in the opening scene establishing Quebec City.
***
THE BIG NIGHT (B) - A screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr. follows a mouse of a 17-year-old as he sets out to avenge the beating of his bar-owner father by a powerful sports columnist. John Drew Barrymore (John's son, Drew's father) plays George, a wimpy nerd who grows up overnight by putting on his father's sport coat and tossing a gun in his pocket before heading out to hunt down man-about-town Al Judge (Howard St. John).
It'll turn out that Judge has a connection to the woman that George's father had dated for years but recently dumped. George's big night is an odyssey that includes the eccentric bon vivant Lloyd Cooper (Philip Bourneuf) and two sympathetic sisters, who try to rein things in a bit.
Joseph Losey ("The Concrete Jungle") dials up the melodrama, as Barrymore pretty much has only one speed, which is verklempt. It gets exhausting at times as this fresh-faced kid slums in bars and at a boxing match, sometimes on the verge of tears. If not for Bourneuf's humorous, tipsy turn, this one would be a miserable race to justice. The cop-out at the end is actually refreshing.
Spotted: No one notable, though Howard Chamberlain, who plays the father's bartender and roommate, almost triggered a Richard Edson alert, bearing a solid resemblance to the "Stranger Than Paradise" favorite.
***
GILDA (1946) (B+) - Rita Hayworth, in all her glory, gets ensnared in a love triangle in Buenos Aires. Her open sexuality had to be downright shocking in postwar America.
Here, she is a kept woman of a sugar daddy, Ballin Mundsen (George Mcready), who owns a casino and who has hired a grifting gambler Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford), as his house manager. Is it a coincidence that Johnny and Gilda have a past together? What could go wrong? Well, it doesn't help that Gilda -- in a win-win scheme that makes both men jealous and angry -- takes up with a different piece of arm-candy every night of the week.
It's no surprise that Mundson is on the take (in bed with Germans!) and that his own scheme will come to a head. Meantime, Johnny and Gilda set the template for every wisecracking will-they-or-won't-they crime-fighting TV couple from the '80s and '90s.
The dialogue has a great deal of zing, but the plot sometimes reels in circles. It takes too long to get the point, and the ending should have come about 15 minutes sooner. But just try to take your eyes off of Hayworth -- she actually fakes the start of a striptease at one point -- during the entire 110 minutes.
Spotted: We were shut out on this one. But props to Bess Flowers, who seemed to make a career of playing a spectator or onlooker in most of her TV and movie credits (she was at the roulette table here); and the elegantly named Symona Boniface (also hanging by the roulette table), who once starred in a musical short titled "Ankles Away."
***
CRIME WAVE (1952) (B) - Sterling Hayden chomps on toothpicks and chews up page after page of script in this tale of a snarling detective trying to solve a fatal gas station robbery by putting the screws to some ex-cons who are trying to go straight but get caught up in the aftermath.
This is one of those classic verite L.A. movies that is street smart and smart-alecky. The cop talk is mostly trite, but Hayden is so committed that you can appreciate the mix of "Dragnet" and "Hill Street Blues." His Det. Sims is mainly focused on handsome Steve Lacey ("Oklahoma!"), whose devoted wife (a compelling Phyllis Kirk) has him on the straight and narrow.
But the gang that knocked off the service station and killed a cop once did time with Lacey, and they turn to him and a veterinarian, Otto Hessler (wonderful character actor Jay Novello), whose got a bottle instead of a woman to rein himself in.
Director Andre De Toth ("House of Wax") captures the grit of Los Angeles, from City Hall to the seedier parts of town. He brings a documentary feel to scenes like the police dispatch center and a getaway driver's route. He wraps this up in a tidy 73 minutes, and Nelson's steely performance of a man desperate to leave his past behind grounds the film, balancing out Hayden. And with L.A. front and center, the cheesy dialogue gets lost in the shuffle.
Spotted: A very young Charles Bronson, billed as Charles Buchinsky, as the gang's buff leather-jacket tough. He is truly menacing throughout.
***
BRIGHTON ROCK (1948) (B-minus) - Maybe American film noir just doesn't translate into proper Brit-speak. This adaptation of a Graham Greene novel has a weak lead and is unable to sustain tension throughout. So it lags during its 92 minutes.
Teenage Pinky Brown (Richard Attenborough) leads a lackadaisical gang who are not the most loyal men after Pinky knocks off a journalist and takes up with a waitress, Rose (a wonderful Carol Marsh), to help cover his tracks. It is difficult to care about what happens the rest of the way. My recollection of the details of the plot are fizzling almost as quickly as I can type.
The side story here is Hermione Baddeley as entertainer Ida Arnold, who gets caught up in the intrigue and starts sleuthing around to try to resolve the murder mystery. Attempts at humor fall flat, and "intrigue" is a generous word here for the needlessly convoluted plot that unfolds in fits and starts. However, this movie has one of the all-time great endings, so it's worth the slog just for that.
Spotted: No luck espying a ringer in this field of Brits. Baddeley would go on to play the replacement maid, Mrs. Naugatuck, on TV's "Maude" in the 1970s.
No comments:
Post a Comment