Month: October 2019

Back when I did I Know Where I’m Going!, I mentioned that I’d been expecting something different from it and been pleasantly surprised. What I was expecting was one of those low-key comedies about eccentric people and wacky hijinks in a small twee town; it’s a genre that the UK and Ireland seems to do a lot, with (just off the top of my head) Waking Ned Devine, The Full Monty, Calendar Girls, Brassed Off, Kinky Boots, Saving Grace, Millions, The Matchmaker, and The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain all being more recent examples.  You know the kind – it’s usually set in a small town, often an economically depressed one, but one where everyone knows each other and has patience with each others’ eccentricities, especially when someone comes up with a Wacky Scheme that will improve their finances.  Usually there is a stuck-up resident who tuts a lot because they Do Not Approve and are determined to Put A Stop To This Sort Of Thing.  Often there is a government authority of some sort who is coming to Investigate The Goings-On and the whole town conspires to keep them in the dark; or, the main character is a person from the city who’s trying to settle in and Discovers Themselves.  Whisky Galore is one such comedy; and it reinforced for me that I’m getting kinda sick of such comedies.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly inoffensive and cute.  In this case the town is an island –  Todday, a tiny speck of land just off the northern coast of Scotland. There is little to do on Todday except work, chat, and have a drink at the pub – so there is great consternation when wartime rationing puts an end to Todday’s whisky supply.  But after a few weeks, a freighter runs aground off the coast of Todday.  The town rescues the crew, who mention in passing that the freighter – which they’ve abandoned on a sandbar – had nearly 50,000 cases of whiskey in the hold. And soon the whole town moves on from rescuing the crew to rescuing the cargo.

Of course, there are those who don’t approve. Captain Waggett (Basil Radford), the stuffy English expat who’s the head of Todday’s Home Guard, considers raiding the freighter to be looting, and is determined to Put A Stop To It.  The Ultra-Religious widow Mrs. Campbell (Jean Cadell) is also unimpressed, as she doesn’t approve of drink.  But Waggett and Mrs. Campbell each have their sabateurs; Mrs. Campbell’s son George (Gordon Jackson), the town schoolteacher, is hoping to marry the lovely Catriona (Gabrielle Blunt), daughter of the local postmaster Mr. MacRoon (Wylie Watson). And one of Waggett’s underlings, the more relaxed Sergeant Odd (Bruce Seton), has his eye on Catriona’s sister Peggy (Joan Greenwood).  When both come to ask Mr. MacRoon for his daughters’ hands, MacRoon mentions that gee, there really should be a traditional Scottish betrothal party, and gosh, we’d really need whisky for that…

The plot is hatched, the authorities are thwarted, the hijinks commence, the women are wooed, the day is saved, yadda yadda yadda.

I know I sound like a miserable cynic there; but I’ve just seen so many of these kinds of comedies by now that it’s starting to get stale for me.  And the hell of it is that I liked them at first; I saw Waking Ned Devine in the theater, as well as Saving Grace (that one was even as a date).  One of my favorite television shows is Northern Exposure, arguably an American version of this kind of story.  But after having seen so many, I’ve learned to recognize the formula, and it just puts me off – even with one of the films that has ostensibly set the formula.

One of the elements that makes me roll my eyes, too, is when the films lean into the eccentricity.  There’s often a bit of point-and-laugh-at-the-kooky-country-people going on, particularly if the film is set in rural communities in Scotland or Ireland. While it’s not meant as offense, it can sometimes feel a bit like mockery of cultures that are still just a tiny bit “foreign” even within the United Kingdom.  It may be my Irish roots coming out, but a lot of the “kooky stuff” we’re being encouraged to find eccentric is more of a legitimate cultural difference, so I can get a little cranky.

I grumbled about all this to the roommate, and when he asked, I admitted that no, the film itself hadn’t done enough to overcome that with me.  But when he asked if it was just plain bad, I had to admit that no, it wasn’t.  It was perfectly cute and pleasant. The biggest nit I can find to pick about this film concerns Cadell and Greenwood’s accents – I don’t know what accent the MacRoon sisters were using, but that sure as heck wasn’t Scottish.  Greenwood, in particular, was sounding distinctly un-Hebridean, and talked more like she was trying to do a Marilyn Monroe imitation. But everything else was perfectly charming and quaint and twee and cute, and it’s possible that that’s exactly why I ultimately sighed heavily and resisted.

Another film that was new to me, but that I already knew all about by way of reputation.  And I’m sure you have as well, or at least seen one of the gabillion works that it has overtly or subtly influenced over the years – any movie or show you’ve ever seen where you get to see two or more different versions play out for “how an event happened”, that’s Rashomon. 

Usually the what of “what happened” is pretty clear, as it is in this film – somewhere in the woods in medieval Japan, a bandit (Toshiro Mifune) ran into a samurai (Masayuki Mori) and his wife (Machiko Kyō). The bandit ended up raping the woman, and the samurai got killed.  A woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) found the body and reported the crime, and the bandit captured soon after. The woman was found a bit later in a fugue state, and brought to testify at the bandit’s trial.

Those are the facts; but each witness has a different story as to how those facts manifested.  The bandit says the woman gave in, and that he and the husband had a daring duel for her continued affections. But the woman says it was rape, and that her husband still rejected her; and that she killed him.  The judge even calls in a medium to try to contact the ghost of the samurai for his testimony; his story is completely different from the bandit’s and his wife’s, including the identity of the killer.  We even get the woodcutter’s perspective; he saw a little more of the incident than he originally let on, but his own account varies from the others’ tales.

Now, that bit I knew – that we’d get to see four different takes on a specific incident, all of which varied from each other.  What I didn’t know is that we wouldn’t ever get to see which version was “correct”. In fact, the film muddies things even further with a framing story, with the woodcutter and a monk telling the whole story to a third man, a traveler who runs into them as they wait out a thunderstorm.  And towards the end, the traveler figures out a reason to suspect that the woodcutter is fudging the facts on his own story – which casts doubt on all the other stories not only because each teller may have been lying, but also because now we can’t trust the second-hand reporting on their testimonies in the first place.

And ultimately, I learned that that’s what this film is “about”. There is no one right answer or correct version of events; we will never know, because every person telling their perspective is doing so through a skewed filter, one which may be muddied through distraction, or self-interest, or fear.  The monk in the framing story frets a few times about how the whole mess has convinced him that mankind is ultimately too flawed, and the world is ultimately too corrupt; it’s bad enough that the woman was raped and the samurai murdered, but with everyone telling half-truths about it, we can’t even agree on why it happened.  There is a small moment of goodness that redeems things for the monk towards the end, fortunately; but ultimately, this is more of a philosophical meditation on “what is real” than it is a fact-finding investigation.

In a way, I’ve been set up to like those kinds of questions. My father has always enjoyed playing devil’s advocate in discussions, as a way to explore either the topic of discussion itself, or to examine how other people construct their own arguments. He’s taken this kind of Socratic approach to discussions about the death penalty, taxation, foreign policy questions, religious dogma – I even saw him once draw my entire 20-member extended family into a spirited debate on government food purity standards during one unusually memorable Thanksgiving.  Dad’s ultimate point is that different people have different perspectives on the same thing whether because of their backgrounds or just where they happen to be standing, and they are usually just as valid as anyone else’s.  Kurosawa’s film has a bit of a bleaker perspective on this paradox, but it’s similar, and it lead my brain down some interesting paths.

There are those who get put off by the acting in this.  Director Akira Kurosawa was heavily influenced by silent film, and encouraged his cast to go a little broad; Toshiro Mifune can come across as especially hammy, since throughout the bandit’s tale he frequently stops to cackle evilly.  But the four different accounts of the same incident also lead to four different chances for the actors to change up their performances, and that can be an interesting exercise in comparison.  Two of the stories feature a “duel” between the bandit and the samurai, and while the bandit’s version features a full-on swashbuckling showy fight, the woodcutter’s version of their duel is a more panicked, inexpert scuffle, with both parties visibly terrified.

Kurosawa is a director I’ve wanted to examine more for a while, so I was looking forward to this as well.

I used to write for a now-defunct theater review blog. One show I covered was part of a new-musical festival; I began my review by saying that “There are musicals, and then there are musicals.  ….And then sometimes, there are MUSICALS!!!!”  On The Town, quite simply, is a MUSICAL!!!!  As the roommate put it, “Jazz hands…..So many jazz hands….”

Like most such shows and films, this has a paper-thin plot – three sailors have 24 hours of shore leave in the city during Fleet Week.  They want to see all the sights – but more importantly, they want to pick up girls.  And most of the women they meet are more than happy to be wooed- starting with Clare (Ann Miller), an armchair anthropologist they meet at the Museum of Natural History who notes that sailor Ozzie (Jules Munshin) resembles her favorite caveman statue, and falls for him instantly. Cabbie Hildy (Betty Garrett) sets her sights on Chip (Frank Sinatra), declaring herself the group’s personal cabbie just so she can try to lure him away from his sightseeing and upstairs to her place.  Sailor Gabey (Gene Kelly) is a little more fussy – sort of.  He spots a subway ad early on declaring that the MTA has declared a young miss named Ivy (Vera-Ellen) is that month’s “Miss Turnstiles”, and he is determined to find her, even if it takes him all day.

And…well, it’s a musical. There are cute love songs, there are comic misunderstandings, there are kooky adventures, there is singing and dancing and hijinks and a wistfully happy ending when the three sailors bid adieu to their ladies and return to their ship.  The plot in such films takes a back seat to the production numbers.  At least the dancing is top-notch, with Gene Kelly taking on the bulk of the dancing (he also choreographed and directed the film).  This is the first time I’ve ever really paid attention to Kelly’s work; I’ve heard others describe his style as “athletic,” and there is something to that.  He’s not as suavely elegant as Fred Astaire; he’s more like a lively Golden Retriever in style. Different, but still fun to watch.  Similarly, we have Sinatra on hand for a couple of showier solo songs, which he delivers with aplomb.

Speaking of Sinatra – his involvement may have lead to some headaches for the producers.  The studio boasted that this was one of the first movie musicals to film on location in New York City; while really it looks like most of the scenes were on a stage set, the opening number sees our sailors cavorting around various local landmarks while singing (“New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town…”), and these were indeed filmed close to me (in one case, very close to me – the sailors’ ship is docked in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, and I live about five blocks away).  Apparently word got out that Sinatra would be filming in the city, and his fans turned up to gawk – in a scene when the three sailors are admiring the Prometheus statue in Rockefeller Center, you can see a huge crowd lined up just behind it, admiring him.

Some of the bits have not aged all that well.  Ann Miller’s number, “Prehistoric Man,” is an ode to dating old-fashioned men – really old-fashioned ones, that is; she is looking for a big burly caveman type. And since the cast is ostensibly in the Museum of Natural History, there is much cavorting around with “primitive” artifacts – elaborate headdresses, ceremonial drums, spears, and the like.  There’s also a subplot with Hildy offering her nerdy roommate Lucy (Alice Pearce) as Plan-B option for Gabey when Ivy has to drop out, and she’s clearly meant to be the awkward comic relief.

And yet…somewhere towards the end there are also some small lovely moments. In one scene, when the sailors are trying to grab a table at a swanky club, using Ivy’s status as “Miss Turnstiles” as currency, Clare quietly steps aside and corners the manager, bribing him to get them a table and to make a fuss over Ivy.  And as for Gabey and Lucy – even though she knows she’s his Plan B, when Gabey sees her home, he gives her a sincere apology for not being very good company and wishes her well.  It was a surprisingly sweet twist.  I was also expecting there to be some kind of lengthier farewell between the sailors and the ladies; fervent promises to stay in touch, a sudden proposal, something like that.  But no – the ladies just follow the sailors back to the ship and stand ashore waving goodbye, as the next round of sailors up for shore leave start flooding ashore and singing “New York, New York” again.

So despite myself, I ended up pondering my own Fleet Week memories (you can’t help but have a couple after living here as long as I have).  The exuberance of the opening number reminded me of a moment waiting to cross a street, with a knot of sailors beside me. And suddenly, one of them started completely freaking out and exclaiming to his companions: “Guys!  Guys!  It just hit me!  We’re in New York!  I’m in New York, and you’re in New York, and we are in New York!!!”  The light changed then and I crossed the street, but his enthusiasm was touching and stayed with me.

Later that same week, another group of sailors stopped me to ask directions to McSorley’s Ale House; at that time, it was en route for my commute home, so I suggested they simply follow me. I spent a lively ten minutes playing tour guide on the subway and then on the sidewalk, playfully bantering with six guys in dress whites – and then when we got to McSorley’s, they invited me to join them.  And of course I accepted.  One of the sailors ended up getting especially taken with me – he insisted on walking me the rest of the way home later, with another buddy as chaperone “so you know I won’t try anything”, and then gave me his email address, telling me I was “a fun gal” and asking me to stay in touch.  ….I considered it, but ultimately didn’t, and every now and then I regret that.

There’s so much to think about in The Third Man that it’s taken me nearly 24 hours after watching to realize that we never do find out who the “third man” actually is, or if he even exists.  I promise you it doesn’t matter, though, and nor would you care.

The story takes place in post-war Vienna – still occupied by the four main Allied powers and still sporting plenty of ruined buildings and rubble.  American Holly Martins (John Cotton), author of a series of pulpy Western novellas, has come at the invitation of an old college buddy named Harry, who says he can get Martins a job. But when Martins gets to Harry’s flat, the doorman tells him Harry was killed by a passing truck just that morning.  Well, darn.

Martins attends the funeral, planning to head back to the United States right after. But a conversation with a British army official, Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), changes his mind – Calloway implies that Harry was a racketeer in Vienna’s black market. At first the scandalized Martins intends to stick around and clear Harry’s name. But further conversations with Harry’s other associates – a mean-faced Austrian baron, a shady Romanian thug, a secretive doctor – suggest that not only might Calloway be right, but that Harry’s death also may not have been an accident.  Martins also starts getting to know Harry’s girlfriend Anna (Alida Valli), a Czech actress living in Vienna with a false passport Harry forged for her. Anna was very devoted to Harry and wants to help, but has her own troubles – someone tips the Soviet Army off to her presence and she’s in danger of deportation.  The sympathetic Martins starts trying to help her as well.

And right when Martins is starting to think he’s getting close to figuring out how Harry died – he learns there’s a possibility Harry may not even be dead.

And when it comes to a discussion of the twists and turns of the plot, I am going to stop right there, because everything after what I’ve just told you was a surprise for me and I am going to leave you all to enjoy the the same way.

This came across as a strangely modern take on the film noir.  During the opening credits, I chuckled when I saw that the entire film was being scored by a zither – an instrument I associate with my third grade school music teacher. But it works here – the music manages to be both perky and jaded simultaneously, and perfectly fits with the shabby and down-trodden daytime Vienna.  And for the nighttime shots, where Martins is chasing or being chased by one or another shadowy figure through the streets, the music comes across as an ironic and worldweary counterpoint.

And what shots and what shadows!  The use of light and shadow here is gorgeous – the people Martins talks to are forever stepping into and out of darkness, flitting between shadows and pools of light as he chases them hoping for illumination.  Orson Welles has a smallish role in the film, and over the years some have claimed that he was an unofficial second director alongside the credited Carol Reed.  But that wasn’t the case (even though Welles didn’t try that hard to discourage the rumor); at best, Reed had seen some of Welles’ films previously and may have unconsciously been influenced.  Welles did throw something in, however – during one speech, he speaks about how a country suffering from social upheaval ironically produces amazing art and music at the same time.  Welles came up with an especially pithy, and often-quoted, new ending for his speech:

“You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!”

It’s a punch line that manages to be both amusing and cynical – perfect for the world this film was creating.  Nothing ends perfectly for anyone; no one ends in disaster either, actually, but still no one gets everything they want, and everyone has to settle for “good enough” with a sort of shrug.  In the very last scene – when Martins tries to talk to Anna on the street, and she passes him by without a glance – Martins doesn’t try to follow her, or stop her, or even call after her; he just gives up and watches her go.

The film – rightly so – went on to win an Oscar for cinematography.

I have the strange feeling that comedies from Britain’s Ealing Studios, like this film, are going to give me a better understanding of Monty Python. Kind Hearts and Coronets didn’t have Python’s absurdism, but its dark comedy and spoofing of class and upper-crust manners felt very familiar. As did one instance of drag.

The whole story is framed as a sort of last confessional memoir, written by a young nobleman, Louis D’Ascoyne, the 10^th Duke of Chalfont (Dennis Price), on the eve of his execution.  He’s pretty matter-of-fact about his impending death – and as we soon learn, that’s because he’s been found guilty of murder.

Louis was the son of a disinherited member of his family; his mother had eloped with an opera singer, living with him in happy poverty until Louis’ birth. But when the family fell on hard times and his mother wrote home asking for help, they turned their backs. Louis tries reaching out when his mother died, hoping to at least have her buried with the rest of her family; they refuse this too.  And that is when Louis concocts his plan. As his mother told him, in their family, the bloodline also runs through the women; so whether the family wanted to admit it or not, he was a valid claimant to the Dukedom.  All that stood in his way of the title were a handful of other family members with closer succession.  Considering this, Louis decides to murder his way to the title.

Most of the film is a chronicle of Louis suavely befriending and then dispatching the various other D’Ascoynes – each in a slightly ridiculous fashion. A doddering priest is poisoned, a pompous general is blown up with a bomb smuggled inside some caviar.  The suffragette is killed during a publicity stunt; she’s commissioned a balloon to carry her over the city so she can drop leaflets, and Louis waits by his window with a bow and arrow for her to sail past.  (The ensuing narration got a chuckle from me: “I shot an arrow in the air, it fell to earth in Berkley Square.”)  Complicating things slightly are Louis’ two romances; first with Sibella (Joan Greenwood), a childhood sweetheart who married someone else for money but then starts canoodling with Louis again, then with the Lady Edith (Valerie Hobson), the genteel widow of one of Louis’ victims.  Louis of course strives to keep his ambitions from them both, and also keep them from each other.  Eventually he’s going to have to choose one as his Duchess; and just as the Dukedom is in his grasp, Sibella threatens him with blackmail in an effort to force his hand.  Is it going to blow the whole plan?

I’ve saved some of the best casting for last, because it really is the standout performance; or, rather, set of performances.  For it is Sir Alec Guinness who plays all nine of the D’Ascoynes that Louis kills off – and manages to pull it off.  To be fair, in some cases the D’Ascoyne in question only enjoys a few seconds of screentime and thus all that distinguishes them is a change of costume or wig. But his take on the playboy Ascone D’Ascoyne is distinct from the banker Lord D’Ascoyne, which is distinct from the priest, which is distinct from the photographer…and even his take on Lady Agatha, the suffragette, manages to avoid verging into camp even though he’s in a frilly hat and a dress with a bustle.  For someone of my generation, for whom the name “Alec Guinness” is synonymous with “Obi-Wan Kenobi” and that’s it, this was a good wake-up call.

Just as Guinness in drag stays clear of camp, the tone of the whole thing also manages to stay clear of farce.  This is a very dry comedy, feeling almost stereotypically what people think of as “English” – genteel, prim, and mannered, with one’s standing and reputation in society being the be-all and end-all.  It’s exactly the kind of tone that would put me off if this were a more serious film, honestly – but in this case it’s used as the filter for someone who is methodically committing fratricide and regicide in one fell swoop.  That kind of disconnect between tone and action is something that the Python team did a lot – they just took it to more absurd lengths.  I’m suspecting that I can see some of the Python DNA in this film, and with some more Ealing comedies ahead of me I suspect I’ll see even more.

The Crash Course syllabus is starting to edge into the 1950s, and after the last few contemporary films it feels almost like a throwback to see a costume drama.  But this was contemporary; The Heiress is based on the play of the same name (itself an adaptation of Henry James’ novel Washington Square), and was one of the hot Broadway tickets of 1948.  Star Olivia de Havilland was one of the celebrities who caught the show, and immediately contacted director William Wyler to suggest it as a potential film.

De Havilland stars as Catherine Sloper, the shy, plain daughter of a wealthy doctor living in New York in the 1840s.  Her father Dr. Austin (Ralph Richardson) was widowed when Catherine was young, and has been in mourning for his lively and delightful wife ever since; and unfortunately, he has been unconsciously comparing Catherine to her memory, and found her wanting. Not for lack of trying – he’s paid for Catherine to have classes in music, cooking, elocution, and the like; but she still is awkward and antisocial, preferring to keep indoors working on her endless embroidery projects and doting on her father.  All Catherine has going for her, really, is her inheritance; a sizeable one from her late mother, and another one she’ll eventually get from her father.

Sloper enlists Catherine’s aunt Lavinia Penniman (Miriam Hopkins) for help; Lavinia has recently been widowed and she’s more outgoing, and Catherine seems to like her company.  Maybe she can help get Catherine out of her shell, he thinks.  And sure enough, at the first party Lavinia drags Catherine to, she meets dashing Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), who seems quite taken with Catherine.  Over the next several days, Morris woos Catherine, completely sweeping her off her feet.  However – Dr. Sloper has been making some discreet inquiries about Morris, and suspects that the only thing that Morris really sees in Catherine is a bank account.  Even though Lavinia begs him to keep mum (who cares why Morris wants to marry Catherine, because hell, at least someone does) Dr. Sloper still confronts Morris with his suspicions, and then – uncomfortably – Catherine.  Catherine is of course horrified at Dr. Sloper’s mistrust, and begs Morris to elope with her.  Sssssssure, Morris says, he’ll just go pack and be back in just a minute….

The story goes on a little from there, of course, but that painful scene – where Catherine finally gets her eyes opened about both her sweetheart and her father – is really the heart of the film, and my hunch is it’s what spurred De Havilland into opting the play.  Catherine is a very, very different character at the end of the play than in the beginning, and it’s a plum of a role for an actress.  For any actress – I saw the 1995 revival of the play with Cherry Jones, and it’s the production that deservedly made Cherry Jones a household name in the New York theater world.  The screen adaptation changes very little; the original playwrights, Ruth and Augustus Goetz, were asked only to make Morris a little more sympathetic, so that the studio could better push Montgomery Clift as a romantic lead.  But his character is oily and duplicitous enough still that you are never quite certain whether to really buy his excuses for his spending habits.

The film also wisely keeps a lot of the action inside the Sloper’s home.  There’s always the temptation to throw in a bunch more sets when you’re adapting a play for the screen, and the production could have gone nuts and thrown in scenes with Catherine attending church, a ladies’ club, going shopping, etc., to amp up the Costume Drama Spectacle of it all.  But that would have been all wrong for the shy Catherine, and things are kept largely to a few rooms and a courtyard in the Sloper’s house, and that one fateful ball; and one very brief scene with Catherine sitting in the park across the street from the house. (It’s a spoiler for me to elaborate on why, but it’s a heck of a moment.)

I’m still personally making up my mind whether I prefer Cherry Jones or Olivia de Havilland’s take on the role.  But absolutely agree that de Havilland shines; the role earned de Havilland her second Oscar.

Now I know that my opinion of Jimmy Cagney has been forever changed since seeing him in Yankee Doodle Dandy; he was the best bit of this film for me.  …Unfortunately, in this case that’s a bit of damning with faint praise.

This was a return to form for Cagney; he was a bit low in cash, and knew the public liked seeing him play gangsters, so he shrugged and went back to doing a gangster film.  In this case, he’s “Cody Jarrett”, the head of a criminal outfit based in southern California, exerting ruthless power over his underlings and answering only to his doting mother. One of their raids goes a bit pear-shaped and the police start closing in; after Jarrett wounds one of the federal officers during a getaway, he decides to use an escape plan he’s always had in his back pocket – sneak up to Chicago and confess to a smaller crime there.  The Chicago crime will carry a lighter sentence, and will also be a convenient alibi for the California job.

The Chicago police are dubious, of course, as are the feds; so they concoct their own counter plan, sending an undercover agent Hank Fallon (Edmond O’Brien) to serve as Jarrett’s cellmate and gain his trust.  Maybe he’ll brag about the California job, the feds figure.  While Fallon does win Jarrett over, he takes Fallon into confidence on something entirely different – an escape attempt.  Jarrett trusts Fallon so much, in fact, that he asks Fallon to escape with him and join his gang, giving Fallon a front-row seat to a huge job – robbing the payroll safe at a chemical plant outside Los Angeles. Now all Fallon needs to do is figure out how to get word to his boss…

…So, Cagney’s great in this. And the tapdancing Fallon is doing to keep up his cover while winning Jarrett over is great fun to watch as well.  But that doesn’t even start until about a half hour into the film, and the whole first act felt like it was getting bogged down with a lot of procedural busy-ness – both from Jarrett’s gang and from the police.  There’s a sequence where the feds have spotted Jarrett’s mother in a grocery store and round up a squad to tail her in hopes she’ll lead them to Jarrett.  But the sequence is prefaced with a couple minutes’ worth of the officers discussing the exact procedural strategy they’ll be using, and there’s a good deal of back-and-forth discussion between them during their chase as well, and I found it….pretty dull.  There’s something to be said for verisimilitude, but your average audience doesn’t watch a car chase scene to learn police tactics, they watch a car chase scene to…watch a car chase scene, you know?

The roommate didn’t mind the procedural bits that much; but when we discussed that after the film, his examples of moments he liked all seemed to come after Fallon had entered the story.  Everything before Jarrett’s escape to Chicago felt drawn-out, like the writers felt they needed a detailed excuse just to get Jarrett and Fallon into the same room.  I’ve since read that the original screenwriters were an especially meticulous pair who felt that they had to very carefully plot each and every beat of action and line of dialogue, and that when Cagney’s friends read it they tried talking him into dropping out.  But Cagney was determined to do something with it, enlisting some of those very friends into helping him with rewrites (none other than Humphrey Bogart is supposed to have weighed in on some bits).

So on the whole this was just kind of….fine.  Cagney does get a dramatic final scene – maniacally laughing as he stands atop an exploding tower and hollering “Top of the world, ma!” – but I just wish the rest of the film had matched that mania with more consistency.

When producer Walter Wanger pitched this film to studios, he described it as “Mrs. Miniver meets Brief Encounter“. Mrs. Miniver I can see, but I’d have gone with Mildred Pierce instead, for the fierceness with which a mother tries to protect her family.  Either way, I still dug it.

It’s that mother, Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett), who carries the film.  She’s mother to two teens – collegiate daughter Bea (Geraldine Brooks) and a younger son David – and currently trying to keep their suburban California house together while her husband’s on a business trip in Germany.  At the start of the film, “keeping the house together” involves her making a secret solo trip to Los Angeles to tell a sleezeball named Darby that he’d better break up with Bea, or else.  Darby says he’ll only do so for cash; and Lucia walks out, thinking that surely all she’ll have to do is tell Bea about that and she’ll see sense.  The besotted Bea secretly meets with Darby in the family boathouse that night, hoping to clear things up; but when Darby confirms what he said, Bea is angry enough to wallop him with the flashlight she’s carrying before running into the house and into Lucia’s arms, begging forgiveness and promising it’s over.  Yay, crisis averted!

Except – when Lucia takes an early walk on the beach, she finds Darby’s corpse. It seems that while he was staggering around after his clonk on the head, Darby fell off the boathouse balcony, landing directly on the anchor from brother David’s motorboat.  In a panic, Lucia loads the body into the motorboat and dumps both body and anchor in a nearby swamp.  Yay, crisis averted again!….Except a day or so later, the police find the body.  And that evening, a stranger named Donnelly (James Mason) turns up with a bundle of letters that Bea had written to Darby, threatening to turn them over to the police unless Lucia pays up.

I thought Bennett’s take on Lucia was strangely cold at first; all she says in the face of Bea’s sobbing apology is a brusque “it’s all over now” and urging her to go get some sleep, with just a little pat on the shoulder instead of a comforting mom-hug.  She’s something of a nag to son David, and just seemed strangely brittle.  But as the film went on, I realized that what I was taking for coldness was actually a 1950s housewife grit-teeth determination that “I HAVE EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL AND THINGS ARE JUST FINE.”  She’s not cold, she’s just overwhelmed, and at the same time she is determined to pretend that everything’s fine and to try to handle everything herself.  Even in the few times she speaks with her husband she keeps things from him – in an early scene when she is writing to him, she starts to complain that she misses having him on hand as a source of advice, but then crumples up that entire page of the letter and writes a more generic “I miss you, darling” missive.  The two times her husband calls home, the biggest crisis she shares with him is a difference of opinion about the family Christmas tree.  She will handle everything else on her own, dammit.

That also informs a lot of her meetings with Donnelly.  As the film goes on, Donnelly develops a sweet spot for Lucia, gradually thinking of bigger and bigger ideas to spare her from blackmail and protect her family. Lucia also softens towards Donnelly a bit over time.  It’s clear that Donnelly is developing a crush (the one thing in the film I didn’t buy), but while other critics see Lucia as reciprocating that crush, I think it’s more gratitude; Lucia wants to protect her family, and if being nice to Donnelly will help, then so be it. And Donnelly is helping, at a time when she most needs help.  And thank God, he’s also being discreet about everything!

Director Max Ophüls uses a lot of long, sweeping tracking shots to follow Lucia as she scurries around trying to juggle everything; trying to keep David tucked in his room and her live-in father-in-law stowed in the den while she speaks to Donnelly in the kitchen, or running out of change during a call at a payphone and having to run out to Donnelly to bum a quarter.  It’s like watching a juggler with a bunch of spinning plates or watching a rat trying to navigate a maze, and just emphasizes that Lucia’s insistence that things are fine is all a performative front.

Apparently this had a bit of a 2001 remake with Tilda Swinton; both this film and 2001’s The Deep End draw from the same source novel.

As the roommate observed when I was midway through this film – “if a film is called something like Gun Crazy and you’re still falling asleep in the middle of it, that’s telling.”

In the film’s defense, I’ve had a few rough nights’ sleep. But this also seemed to be a weirdly bloodless noir, in the way that things can sometimes feel if they try a little too hard and fall short.  In this case there is a lot of emphasis put on how the main character Bart (John Dall) is a good guy, really.  We open with a longish courtroom scene with Bart as a kid, where he’s on trial for trying to steal a gun out of a sports goods shop window. But the scene is meant to underscore Bart’s inherent goodness – family and friends all serve as character witnesses with tales about how Bart may be really into guns, but he shies away from using them to kill anything.  Nevertheless, the judge still sends him off to reform school, pointing out that Bart is still a little overly-obsessed with guns.

The grown Bart is still a gun fan as an adult, and is still just as committed to non-violence. He’d been in the Army for a while, but it didn’t take; he didn’t want to kill anyone, and teaching other guys to shoot got dull.  So he came home, hoping to spin his marksmanship into a career; maybe as a tester or a salesman for Remington rifle company or something. By chance he ends up at a carnival sideshow with a lady marksman, Annie (Peggy Cummins), and Bart takes the ringmaster up on a challenge to try out-shooting her.  Of course he wins, earning a job with the carnival and the attention of the pretty Annie.

But it’s not until the jealous ringmaster fires them both a couple weeks later that Bart learns that Annie may share his skill as a marksman – but not his moral compass.  “I want things,” Annie complains.  “A lot of things, big things. I don’t want to be afraid of life or anything else. I want a guy with spirit and guts!” And the way to get these things, Annie argues, is through theft – holding up small banks and drug stores and living on the run.  Bart reluctantly goes along, telling himself he can keep Annie from killing anyone in the process.  They tire of their spree after only a few months and agree to one last big heist before retiring to Mexico – but Annie shoots a couple bystanders, adding murder to their docket and sending them both on a run for their lives.

I’ve read that the scriptwriters behind Bonnie and Clyde watched this for research. It’ll be interesting to compare to that film down the road; right now, though, it felt a little closer to the camp anti-drug film Reefer Madness (the judge in the early courtroom speech in particular had a “guns are bad, m’kay?” vibe).  I also didn’t really see any of the luridly sexual tone that other reviews swear this film has – possibly because others say that it’s Peggy who’s bringing the sex appeal, and she’s not my flavor of eye candy to begin with.  Bart, meanwhile, is presented as super-squeaky-clean almost to the point of absurdity – the catalyst they show for his non-violence is a moment from when he was just a little boy fooling around with a BB Gun and accidentally killed a wee fuzzy chick in his family’s henhouse.  (There are a few shots of the dead chick lying on the ground, fair warning; interspersed with the boy version of Bart crying bitterly.)  The subtext for the film isn’t that guns ruined Bart’s life – it’s sex. And I’m not that crazy about that.

One scene in particular stands out for its technique. About midway through the film, there is a scene where we watch Bart and Annie drive to a bank, and then Annie watches the car while Bart heads inside to pull off a heist; when he’s done, they make their escape.  The whole thing is filmed as one single unbroken shot – and the director had the idea to somehow try to film this as if the camera were in the back seat.  Today that’s not an unusual shot – but it was somewhat new territory for 1949.  The only way they could figure out how to do it was to get a stretch limousine and remove all of the seats except for the two front seats, and then stick a cameraman in the car behind the actors.  It was a simple solution which worked surprisingly well.  …However, they also chose to have Cummins and Dall improvise all their dialogue in the scene – and most of it was a pretty mundane discussion about street directions and parking, which ended up detracting from the novelty for me.