Dr. Metablog

Amnesia on Film: Crossroads (1942)

 

Just when you think that the repository of amnesia films has been drained dry, along comes this entertaining oddity from 1942. In Crossroads (1942), French diplomat David Talbot, played by William Powell with William Powell's unvarying mustache and accent, contracts a very bad case of movie amnesia. "Retrograde amnesia," it's denominated. He can't remember anything that happened before his years-ago accident, and although he seems to have lived an exemplary life since, he's subject to a vicious blackmail attempt by a trio of blackguards who try to convince him that in his earlier life he was a career criminal. After many a twist and turn, all is revealed and set right; however, Talbot never regains his memory but goes blithely along with his personal history obliterated. This lack of resolution is unusual and perhaps unique for amnesia movies but the filmmakers seem unconcerned about the psychological effects that the huge gap in Talbot's self-knowledge ought rightly to afflict him. Once again, movie amnesia is unmoored from any remote approximation to real life.

 

Powell's principal antagonist is played by Basil Rathbone. My favorite scene in the movie is one in which Powell and Rathbone are pictured profile-to-profile. Both actors have truly outstanding, near cyranoesque noses and I am sure that the director framed the scene to emphasize their nasal symmetry. Powell and Rathbone go nose-to-nose for a few long and very amusing moments. I can't find a proper picture but this one is close (that's glorious Hedy Lamarr between the two olfactory eminences):

Othello (1604), Nora Prentiss (1947), Date Night (2011)

Many years ago, in what sometimes seems like an earlier life, I taught Shakespeare courses to both young and "mature" students. When we reached Othello, halfway through the semester, I would, of course, point out that the play did not take the traditional form of tragedy-- of a great man or king gone awry as in the case of Macbeth or Richard III. Othello instead introduced a formula that was innovative for its time but which has become commonplace in ours. Othello is a domestic drama in which a marriage falls all to pieces. I liked to tell my captive audience, only slightly facetiously, that the whole of life is divided into two parts: the comic, which begins with birth and ends with marriage, and the tragic, which begins with marriage and proceeds to death. A statement which is a kind of shorthand, simplified version of a cliche of criticism. Like many such abbreviations, this formula contains a dollop of truth. Othello in fact begins with a marriage -- or more accurately a defiant elopement -- and comes to conclusion with Desdemona strangled in her bed and her husband the Moor a suicide. It's the sole play of Shakespeare's that follows the strict marriage-to-death path, although Romeo and Juliet is comic until the secret wedding but becomes tragic afterwards, while the wondrous Winter's Tale begins with Leontes and Hermione already married and pushes through some desperate circumstances only to come to a miraculous comic climax with the restoration of a woman presumed dead and a glorious second-generation wedding. Both RJ and WT sometimes seem like two different and opposite kinds of plays condensed into one -- and yet are all the more triumphant for being so.

These musings were precipitated by the film that we watched a couple of nights ago -- Nora Prentiss (1947), which Wikipedia characterizes as a film noir, but which is better thought of as two films in one -- a film that starts as an instance of domestic drama or "bourgeois realism" or even soap opera and doesn't become a murder mystery until two-thirds along the way. In a limited sense, it's not unlike Shakespeare's hybrids, but alas does not successfully yoke or blend its disparate plots. As a result, the last section of Nora Prentiss, I'm sorry to say, becomes not intriguing but unbelievable and ludicrous. It's an odd and interesting film, although not a good one, but it's worth watching for aficionados of TCM not only for its manipulation of genre expectations but also because it is one of a large group of films that are so very common and ordinary in twentieth-century America where such enormous value is attached to a happy and fulfilling marriage -- and to the disappointment that arises when the marriage comes a-cropper. In Nora Prentiss, a midlife couple with a pair of kids, who live in an orderly picket-fence house, ought to be living a happy life, but, by golly, both husband and wife are discontented and bored. They are afflicted with the whole package of suburban anxieties. It's Cheever-land or Updyke-land: demanding children and divorcing friends, the stultifying daily routine, the unsatisfying jobs, the dull obligatory social events, and especially the lack of sexual excitement which is signified in these Code-burdened movies by the gulf between the twin beds and the sterile head-to-toe sleepwear and also by that pathetic chaste kiss before husband and wife turn away from each other as they extinguish the cute matching bedside table lamps. Gosh, it's a scenario that is familiar from dozens and perhaps scores of postwar (and later) films. 

Melodramatic Nora Prentiss follows the fortunes of steady-Eddie Dr. Richard Talbot, enacted by Kent Smith, who meets nightclub chantoosie Nora, played by Anne Sheridan. Flirtation turns into an affair, and the affair evolves into true love or at least into genuine sexual passion. But all goes from bad to worse when Talbot, instead of seeking a divorce from his stern unlovely wife, concocts a dumb whopper of a plot that makes Friar Lawrence's harebrained sleeping-dram waking-up-in-the-tomb plan seem brilliant in comparison. Talbot fakes his own death and disappears -- causing the film to turn police-procedural. And then, through a series of hard-to-credit mischances and gimmicks, Talbot finds himself in his newly assumed fake guise indicted for murdering -- oh no yes indeed! -- his very own self. Nora Prentiss by this time has metamorphosed into a film that by rights should be renamed City of Naked Death or Shadow of Evil Night. Even so, the film might have been salvaged had not so much depended on the acting skill of Kent Smith, who is perfectly fine in the first part of the film, but incapable of managing the switch from reliable doc to nervous fugitive. It's not entirely his fault: the role puts too much pressure on the actor. I doubt whether such a transition could have been handled by Roscius or Burbage or Garrick or Sir Laurence Olivier himself.

Here is a picture of Ann Sheridan and Kent Smith. Sheridan wisely holds on to her hat; Smith's chapeau dominates the scene; very 1940s. 

Here's another still. I am in utter disagreement with Kent Smith's pencil mustache. It's a mistake. He wears it when he's a straight suburbanite and shaves it off when he goes underground -- an infranasal situation highly out of synch with the psychological trajectory of the film; by rights, he should have been clean-shaven when he was domestic and hirsute when he was a criminal.

 

 

Just to bring these ramblings to conclusion, I should add that the evening after we watched Nora Prentiss, we gambled on a newish HBO film called Date Night (2011) only to experience a moment of extreme cultural convergence. Once again, a suburban couple (this time Steve Carell and Tina Fey) are stuck in a boring suburban marriage --  same sheaf of symptoms as in Nora P. They jointly decide to liven things up and before push comes to shove, they find themselves in a big city world of traditional noir tropes: mistaken identity, guns and gangsters, police on the take, a corrupt mayor, deserted dark buildings, death threats. Date Night even flirts with old archetypes: in order to renew themselves, the couple must pass through an underworld (not Hades this time, but the criminal underworld) where Acheron is played by a lake in Manhattan's Central Park). It's not credible, of course, but then, it's not meant to be so.

 

 

No mustaches this time, I'm glad to say. But just like RJ and WT, two films in one.

 

Amnesia on Film: Black Angel

[Warning, metablogians: do not read the following paragraphs if you're planning to see Black Angel, a curious, interesting 1946 noir. Your viewing pleasure will be ruined by the following "all spoiler" entry.] 

Once again, it's amnesia, Hollywood style -- an alcoholic blackout that is granted a patina of respectability when a doctor calls it Korsakoff's syndrome. The plot in brief: a whiskey-soaked amnesiac (Martin Blair, played by Cornell's own Dan Duryea) has just plain forgotten that he murdered his bad-girl blackmailing wife.

I must say it's a difficult premise for me to swallow -- but is nevertheless the kind of oddity that's par for the course in the Hammett-Chandler-Woolrich universe.

To add to the complexity, forgetful Martin sets out to find the killer, and is hot on the trail when his memory suddenly returns -- and in a flash he realizes that he himself is the guilty party for whom he's searching. It's a mighty contrived and out-of-left field kind of revelation -- but I must confess that I fell for it. I was deceived by a series of red herrings and was surprised by the film's outcome. I rather doubt that most viewers will be as much a sucker as I was. 

Like many noirs, Black Angel gets off to a very fast start. Scarcely thirty seconds in, Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling) opens a bureau drawer and retrieves her nice ladylike pistol. I respect a movie that's thoroughly and instantaneously loyal to its genre. I wonder, though, whether future generations, studying those many black-and-white crime films of the 1940s and 50s, won't think that every chest of drawers, armoire, lowboy, highboy, tallboy, dresser, and chiffonier in Los Angeles or New York City harbored an easily accessible derringer, rod, gat, or piece.  

 

Shadowlands (1993)

Recently some much-admired old friends recommended a movie called Shadowlands (1993). They pledged that we'd love it. But we didn't. In fact, we regarded it as a film that lacked value and integrity. Of course, we won't mention to our friends that we responded so negatively and that we now question their esthetics. I'm sorry but it makes me uncomfortable to doubt people whom I otherwise respect.

But gosh was this Shadowlands a pretentious stinker! It transformed into pure soap opera the peculiar relationship between novelist and religious apologist C. S. Lewis and his fan/correspondent Joy Davidman. We were not entranced by the "white marriage" of a reserved, asexual Oxford don and a smart down-to-earth Jewish-turned-Christian New Yorker. But the odd couple hardly had time for an idyllic picnic on the banks of a picturesque stream before Joy developed a terminal cancer, at which point the movie transitioned from merely dismal to full bore lugubrious, perhaps because the director relied on the "Pause Meaningful" (also called the "Soulful Two-Shot") for much of his effects. 

Joy Davidman was played by Debra Winger, who had died of cancer ten years before in Terms of Endearment (1983), so she was on familiar ground when pale and wan in a hospital bed. 

With such a story, a director should make every effort to avoid turning his film into a tear-jerker. Not this director, not this movie. Shadowlands ended with a shameless climax in which Lewis (Anthony Hopkins) indulged in prolonged tears, sobs, and theatrical snuffling. The old manipulative formula: if you want to make your audience cry, make your leading man weep. 

Over the course of Shadowlands' static 131 minutes, I found myself longing for old-fashioned movie action. If not a car chase, at least a mad dash --with a couple of fender-benders -- to the hospital. Perhaps Hopkins, excluded by a Nurse Ratchet from Winger's hospital room, might have gained entrance by breaking a window in an adjoining room and tip-toeing across a narrow ledge, twelve stories high.  And instead of yet another tepid scene in the college's common room, how about letting Hopkins punch a fellow don right in the kisser. Anything but another long shot of an o-so-green meadow and purling brook.

What We Read in the Fifties: East Side, West Side, by Marcia Davenport

Two weeks ago, I wrote some admiring remarks  about a little-known post-WWII film called East Side, West Side. I said then that I was sufficiently impressed and intrigued by the film that I intended to read the novel upon which it is based, but that since ES,WS has evaporated into the mists of time, I would have to wait for Interlibrary Loan to dig up a copy for me. Well, the novel has arrived, coming haste-post-haste from Laramie, Wyoming, the flyleaf inscribed, "To Mrs Eccleston, from Anna." Gosh, I'd love to know who Mrs. E and Anna were, and what they (and Laramie) made of this extremely Manhattan-y book. 

East Side, West Side (published in 1947), I can now report, is a big hunking doorstop of a novel. Not a very good one, I'm afraid. It is prosy, untidy, and crammed with too many episodes and too many undifferentiated characters. To transform its meanderings into an economical screenplay required great intelligence and imagination. All praise to the screenwriter, Brooklyn's own Isobel Lennart, who condensed characters, eliminated subplots, rationalized excesses, and to some degree toned down the book's inherent snobbery. 

ES,WS can be described as an old-fashioned "woman's novel," and not in a good way. Its female characters are, almost uniformly passive victims. Plus there's far too much chat about makeup, dinner parties, and "fittings." There's an old --very old-- canard that an erotic novel for women consists of 400 pages of courtship and foreplay  followed by a proposal of marriage. I'm afraid that ES,WS fits this unfortunate formula. Jessie Bourne, wronged and soon-to-be-divorced wife, is wooed by gentlemanly General Mark Dwyer but o so slowly. Sex is teased and deferred for chapter after chapter. In Isobel Lennart's alert and improved script, women are not afraid to take charge. 

There's one episode in the novel that seriously rankled me. There's a murder. The privileged East Side aristocrats do not turn the guilty party over to the police; instead, they suppress evidence and suborn perjury in order to keep the scandal out of the newspapers. They succeed, though their plot couldn't have deceived the dullest precinct flatfoot. In the film, I'm glad to say, a killer is brought to justice.   

Toward the end of the novel, Marcia Davenport introduces a long embarrassing digression in which the General, just returned from the European theater, lectures on the post war situation in Eastern Europe. I'm sorry to say that he praises Soviet aggression in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, etc. I suspect that these tortured apologetics were written before Davenport lived in Prague and was engaged to marry the Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, who in 1948 was thrown out of a window by agents of the KGB.  I hope that Davenport would have changed her position after the defenestration.

Title Your Own Film Noir

Here's a game. I've compiled a list of essential "film noir" nouns and adjectives. Your job is to assemble them into the titles of noir films.

Nouns: city, death, shadow, night, fear, heat, murder, crime, kiss, street, gun, thief, window, sidewalk, body.  Adjectives:  naked, black, evil, strange, wrong, lonely, raw, secret, violent, sudden.

Using an adjective and a noun is good: e.g. Dark Shadow, Strange Gun, Violent Window, Raw Heat.

Three words is better: City of Naked Death, Shadow of Evil Night.

Four words is triumphant: Secret Shadow on Crime Street, Dark Kiss at a Strange Window.

Beware, though. Some of the combinations you assemble might already have been used (Body Heat) -- or previously parodied (Naked Gun).

 

[January 5. Pearl Maneli writes:  Vivian, how could you have forgotten "blood."  Blood on the Sidewalk, Evil Blood; Murder by Blood, etc.]

[February 5.  Elio-Per Limano writes: How about Secret Fear?]

[February 6. Amber Bernstein writes: Crooked? How about crooked?

East Side, West Side (1947)

How should a person who is an enthusiast of classic cinema react when he finds himself loving a film that has been panned, dismissed and ignored for seventy-five years? 

The movie in question is a Manhattan tale called East Side, West Side. It was released in 1947 when I was a mere eight years and has sunk like a stone. It's a domestic drama (or soap opera) for two-thirds of the way and then goes full noir in its last thirty minutes. If East Side, West Side is remembered at all, it's for squandering big-time talent: actors Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason, Ava Gardner, Cyd Charisse and Van Heflin; writer Isobel Lennart and director Mervyn LeRoy. I cannot remember a picture from that era that is studded with more stars.

In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther, the grand khan of 1940s movie critics, not only hated the film but was driven by it into a kind of moral uproar. "East Side, West Side," he wrote, "just about hits the low-water mark of interest, intelligence and urgency. And certainly nothing accomplished by the writers or the actors of this film does anything to raise it into an even remotely vital realm.... Frankly, we thought that films like this one had been put on the dud-list years ago." Yikes. Even though Crowther almost popped an artery writing his review, he was not explicit about what so offended him. Let me guess: "films like this" focus on frank sexual desire and more specifically with adultery and its consequences.  

East Side West Side has rarely drawn much comment, but in 1991, when other noir-y films of past eras were being re-evaluated and upgraded, this one was still considered "static" and "lurid, unconvincing and artificially chic...." In a word, "uninteresting melodrama trash."

And yet the two of us found it engaging and vital and not in any way lurid.

The plot is loaded with familiar post-War II elements. Brandon Bourne (James Mason) is married to well-to-do Jessie Bourne (Barbara Stanwyck) and has recently ended a too-public affair with ex-waitress Isabel Lorrison (Ava Gardner). Isabel left town and Brandon returned to his forgiving wife, but now the ex-"hash-slinger" is back in town and wants Brandon again. She gets him, way too easily. Jessie puts up with her husband's shenanigans for a while but eventually leaves him. Meanwhile, Mark Dwyer (played by the great underrated actor Van Heflin), who is some sort of spy/journalist/all-around good guy, returns from Europe and immediately falls in love with Jessie. At this point, the movie suddenly veers from its domestic track. Isabel is murdered and Brandon accused of the crime. Dwyer, turned detective, comes to his rescue.

It's an episodic but not unworthy plot. But there's more to the film than this brief summary. Here on Walnut Street, we fans of TCM appreciated elements of the film that Bosley Crowther, and many other viewers, had left curiously unexamined.

ES, WS declares in its title that it's going to explore class tensions and antagonisms. The well-known formula is that dwellers in the east side of Manhattan are patrician, rich, and snotty, while the west side is inhabited by down-to-earth working-class plebeians who are rough but joyful. The film both elucidates and challenges the cliche. Brandon Bourne epitomizes what would now be called "upper class privilege." He's rich (probably inherited money), accustomed to servants and to getting his way. He carries himself as though he was born in tux and tails. He loves his wife Jessie, he repeatedly claims, but there's no warmth or snuggling or flirtation between the two of them, which is the film's way of implying that she's cold and that he's not getting enough at home. (That's the way things are on the Upper East Side, don't you know?) On the other hand, there's ex-waitress Isobel Lorrison, who covets East Side wealth and who is overtly sexual; she's an orgasm waiting to happen. She covets Brandon's life of ease as much or more than he wants her passion. She has no compunction about introducing her eager sexuality into the Bourne household, all the better if it pollutes their establishment complacency and fancy dress.

Even though ES, WS gives us James Mason at his slimiest and Van Heflin at his must buoyant and likable, it is a film that is dominated by its female characters. It offers us five-count'em-five strong women, all of whom exhibit gobs of what has lately come to be called "agency." Jessie (who finds her strength only in the penultimate scene) and Isabel, of course, but also Rosa Senta, played by Cyd Charisse, a young woman who makes a very good decision; Jessie's mother (Gale Sondergaard), who has the best scene in the film, when she tells Brandon to his face that he's a vain and a fraud; and also Felice Backett, played by Beverly Michaels, a dame who is "built like the Empire State Building" and who is not afraid to throw a punch. Some of the best dialog in the film (and there's a lot of good stuff) is between women who are either the closest friends or the most bitter antagonists. There is, for example, a striking confrontation between mistress and wife:

Isabel Lorrison : Sorry I'm not more subtle. But, you must remember, I haven't had your advantages. When your mother was busy being the Great Lady of the theater, mine was in a burlesque show on 14th Street. And when your mother sent you to Miss Cavanaugh's School for nice, young ladies, I was slingin' hash! Oh, you learned how to pour tea properly and how to cross your legs at the ankles only - and that plain pumps make you a lady, but, putting bows on them make you something else. You learned how to make a good marriage. But, like all your kind, you think by marrying a man, you've done enough. Well, there's one thing that Miss Cavanaugh forgot to teach you. Something I learned: how to keep a man. How to keep him wanting you!

Jessie Bourne : My husband doesn't want you. He's finished with you. He told me so last night.

Isabel Lorrison : I'll call him and he'll come running.

That's classy writing. 

The women are not the only vibrant and credible characters. There's also Bourne himself, who is an exemplar of what would now, decades later, be called "sexaholism." He wants to be faithful, or at least says he does, but he can't help himself when Isabel Lorrison/Ava Gardner has a telephone in her hands. Whether he's ill or just weak and pathetic is left to the audience to decide.

And by the way, the film was written by a woman (Isabel Lennart) who adapted it from a novel by Marcia Davenport -- a writer well known in her day but long forgotten. The novel has been out of print for decades, but Interlibrary Loan has located a copy for me. It's now "in transit' and I'm waiting impatiently for it to arrive. 

 

Amnesia on Film: The Majestic (2001)

Alas and alack, I've now known far too many folks who have endured serious memory problems. As a consequence, I seem to have developed an interest in amnesia not only in real life but also in fiction and film. There are many many books on the subject and Wiki offers an astonishing list of 234 Hollywood amnesia films -- some of which, judging by their titles, do not appeal to my mature taste and which I promise never to view -- including such not doubt remarkable productions such as Raft of the Dead, Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City, and A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon.

I sometimes imagine that there are fewer actual cases of loss of memory than there are films on the subject.

Literary amnesia is a recent obsession; while the ancients had their Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, I can't recall amnesiacs wandering lost around Athens or Rome. Shakespeare never wrote an amnesia play, though at one point Lear, who's had a rough go of it, asks "Who is it that can tell me who I am?"

I suppose that we moderns put amnesia front and center because we are concerned with the integrity and the continuity of the self. Loss of memory threatens us; no memory, no identity. But let us not forget that amnesia is a cheap and easy all-purpose convenient and superficial no sweat plot device. The formula: loss of memory = mystery; restoration of memory =  anagnorisis. Very little thinking required.

The Majestic is an eccentric unsatisfying fairy tale that provides the usual car crashes but also lost love, the FBI, HUAC, and an art deco movie theater -- all in the Capraesque context of small-town standards versus big-city corruption. Pete Appleton, played by an uncharacteristically subdued and expressionless Jim Carrey, falls into what is depicted as a total global amnesia. He lacks the least glimmer of his past life. In "real life," any human forced to cope with such an experience would suffer from anxiety, shock, disorientation, fear, and worry -- but not so in this slice of hollywoodiana. Amnesiac Pete is calm and patient, because he is rooted not in our communal vale of woe but in a movie tradition where amnesia is ordinary and effortless. Don't worry, folks, he'll recover his memory by the last reel. No big deal. And he does.

Once again, amnesia is a disease like none other. 

Dodge City Nincompoops

The rip-roaring conclusion to Dodge City (1939), is marvelously dumb. The bad guys, led by really nasty villain Jeff Surrett (Bruce Cabot) have jumped out of the burning railroad car and onto their horses. They are going to make a getaway, we assume. But for some reason, the six schmegeggees don't ride away from the railroad tracks. Instead, they continue exactly parallel to the tracks, allowing Wade Hatton (Errol Flynn) to get out his rifle and pick them off, one after another.

All that the black hats needed to do was to hang a right and ride off into the brush, or just rein up, and let the train go by. The train is on a railroad track.  But no. Not these guys. They keep on riding alongside the train until they're all shot. End of movie, but not the end to my astonishment. I'm baffled that the director, Michael Curtiz of all people, allowed such a brainless ending. 

Also: Errol Flynn, with his anachronistic 1930s mustache and condescending smile, was so goody-goody and upstanding that I felt a strong urge to piss on his leg.

 

Amnesia on Film: Whirlpool (1950)

Just when I was beginning to think that the Hollywood memory-loss well had run dry, along comes Whirlpool and another variant of the world's most flexible mental affliction. This time: loss of memory by hypnosis.  

It could have been a good film: Ben Hecht, Otto Preminger, Gene Tierney, Jose Ferrer. But it's gimmicky and the psychology is vulgar pseudo-Freudianism. 

Malignant David Korvo (Ferrer) hypnotizes poor Ann Sutton (Tierney) into imagining that she's committed a murder. Will she recover her memory in time for the true murderer (Korvo himself) to be discovered? Yes, she will. The film turns into something like a police procedural but might better be called a psychoanalytical procedural. Richard Conte plays the Tierney's husband, and he's the psychoanalyst, but frankly he's so surprisingly dense that he's an embarrassment to his entire profession. The audience is led through a series of melodramatic twists and turns, many requiring wholesale suspension of disbelief, before all turns out well, or pretty well, because poor Ann Sutton (Tierney) is reunited to her doltish husband.  

Here's a picture of Iago-like hypnotist Jose Ferrer staring into the deer-in-the-headlights eyes of luminous Gene Tierney.

 

Amnesia on Film: The Right of Way (1931)

Amnesia is perfunctory in this "pre-Code" melodrama. Comes and goes without much stress.

Rich snotbucket monocle-wearing attorney Charlie "Beauty" Steele is beaten, thrown into a river and presumed dead. He is rescued and wakes up without a glimmer of memory but is otherwise entirely functional. In his new, raccoon-skin-hat personality he falls in love with shopkeeper Rosalie Eventural (played by 18-year-old Loretta Young). Eventually it comes to light that he has left a wife behind. His memory returns in flash and in a flashback, and things go from bad to worse. Bigamy and all that.

The Right of Way has not aged well. It's a silent film with words. Conrad Nagel, acting in a superseded tradition, is all exaggerated gestures, eye rolls, and heavy lipstick. Loretta Young is so young that she hasn't even started to look like Loretta Young.

Astonishing to think that the film is now pushing a hundred years old and that amnesia was there right from the start. Before the start, actually, because there were two silent Right of Ways (or Rights of Way) before this all-talkie version.

Rio Bravo, Total Embarrassment or Great Triumph?

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We watched the 1969 western, Rio Bravo, and were crushed with disappointment. How could a film with such famous actors, directed by Howard Hawks (Red River 1948), amount to such piffle?  We could not restrain ourselves from jeering at its flagrant, grotesque failings. A thin, cliched plot, pieced out with obvious meaningless padding. Incoherent, contradictory notions and "themes." An unconscionable reveling in mass slaughter -- the bodies of Nathan Burdette's gang falling as thickly as the leaves in Vallombrosa. We adjudicated what seemed like a contest: who is a worse actor, Dean Martin or Ricky Nelson?  (Martin plays a drunken former gunfighter (named Dude!!) whose shaky hands can only be stilled when the Mexican band plays his favorite tune!!! Honest to goodness!!) Nelson is a ridiculously young hotshot gunslinger who would have been better off staying home drinking his afternoon milk and cookies under the supervision of Ozzie and Harriet. 

We hooted, I'm sorry to say, when impassive reluctant John Wayne kissed Angie Dickinson with all the passion of a man sucking on moldy lemons. We were offended by the racist caricatures of the Mexican innkeepers. And we guffawed when the film allowed both Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson to burst into song -- utterly violating their screen characters but perhaps throwing a sorry bone to the ticket-buying audience. (Allow me to confess that we fast-forwarded through the musical interlude.) The irrelevant crooning lost the film any remaining pretense or shred of integrity.

In short, here was a film that had no reason for being, or so we thought. A travesty, a mere catchpenny.

Baffled, we turned to the internet for the story. Because there had to be a story. 

And now comes the surprise. Rio Bravo was the second highest ranking western in the 2012 Sight and Sound critics' poll. Robin Wood, a generally trustworthy critic and the man who wrote the book on Howard Hawks, rated it as his top film of all time. What's going on here? We though the film was ludicrous and embarrassing; others think very differently. Are we completely out of touch? Are we nuts, intolerant. Has our taste been vitiated by age and mental decay? Are there beauties hidden the film that are sufficiently subtle that our grosser intellects could not detect them?  Or does this would-be emperor of a film lack clothes and the critics and journals and the tomatoes are all blinded and deceived.

And now comes some more internet info, which may or may not explain the opposing views of us and them. 

"The film was made as a response to High Noon," says Wikipedia. Why? Because High Noon was thought to be a leftist movie, an allegory for Hollywood blacklisting, as well as a critique of McCarthyism. John Wayne called High Noon "un-American." (I've always thought of it as quintessentially American;  what could possibly be more American than a Quaker's turn to violence, as when Amy Kane picks us a rifle and shoots one of Frank MIller's kin. And especially when that turn to violence is portrayed as a step toward a higher morality.

I'm wondering whether the folks who praise Rio Bravo like it not for aesthetic but for political reasons. I'm suspicious.

Next step: get my hands on Robin Wood's book on Howard Hawks. Stay tuned, Metablogians.

Female (1933)

Here's a colorized illustration of Ruth Chatterton as Alison Drake in the "pre code" romance Female (1933).   

 

Although she's surrounded by a bunch of official looking executives, she runs the show. Miss Drake owns and manages factory that manufactures automobiles. She's in a male preserve -- it's not a cosmetic factory or something more traditionally feminine. And she loves the work and the power.

 

The film might have been called Alison Drake but no, it's Female -- and therefore claims to describe not just one individual woman but an entire gender. Does it? At best, the film is mighty confused -- and at worst, reactionary in the extreme.

 

In the first half of the film, Alison Drake is not only an extremely competent executive, but she's also sexually liberated. It's her habit to bring home attractive men, seduce them, and, if they get the least bit soppy, transfer them to the Montreal office. She's one happy --although heartless -- "cougar." Then she meets her match in the person of young handsome (before he grew that silly little mustache) George Brent, who responds to her advances by saying, "I was hired as an engineer, not as a gigolo."  All of a sudden, Miss Drake goes all weak in the knees, falls in love, and decides to marry the man. She puts him in charge of the factory and plans to stay home in order to achieve the apotheosis of femininity by having "nine children."

 

The disappointing ending seems to be pasted on rather than organic. Many a film in the Code era set out to challenge the "tune of the time" but threw in the conventional towel because of the Hays Office. Female is disappointing because it voluntarily chooses to go all squishy when it wasn't necessary.

 

Here is Ruth Chatterton on her submissive and symbolic back.

 

George Raft. Why?

TCM, the indispensable channel, has been delivering us a raft of old George Raft movies. They Drive by Night (1940) of course, but also such unmemorable noirs as Johnny Angel (1945), Race Street (1948), and I'll Get You (1952) as well as a couple of others so unsubstantial that, although viewed during the past month, they've already evaporated from my tired old brain.

This last while, whenever a George Raft picture began, we'd set a challenge: will Mr. Raft's face show an expression? Any expression! Will he smile, smirk, pout? Will he be angry, contemptuous, happy, lustful, disappointed? Anything at all, any human emotion? After painstaking study, I can now report that although we've examined every single frame, slowly and carefully, not once in any of these films has George Raft exhibited the slightest discernible human feeling. Moreover, on even more diligent examination, I can now affirm that he has delivered every single one of his memorized lines without the least variation in speed, volume, pitch, or intensity. Every sentence, no matter its significance, exits his mouth with the exact same cadence. It's all low affect, all the time. 

It's a puzzlement. What was George Raft's appeal? Certainly not his skill as a thespian. Nor his negative charisma. He's not handsome, and because of his oddly short legs, he walks funny (and he walks at exactly the same speed when crossing the nightclub floor to question a "canary" or when prowling a dark alley, gat in hand. 

Even more astonishing -- in a couple of these movies he's cast as a romantic lead who gets the girl in the last scene -- a girl who is younger, prettier, taller, and a much better actor. There's nothing more embarrassing or impossible-to-take-seriously than a George Raft kiss and fade. The End.

George Raft with Ella Raines.  

Amnesia on Film: The Secret Fury (1950)

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There are amnesia movies and there are gaslighting movies. The Secret Fury is both, and, I'm sorry to say, it fails to hit two separate marks.

A bad bad lawyer and cadre of hired subordinates contrive to gaslight rich Ellen Ewing (Claudette Colbert) into believing that, while amnesiac, she killed a man. In any recognizable universe it would be impossible or at least extremely difficult to persuade a sensible, mature woman that she suffers from a loss of memory. Not in NoirThrillerMysteryLand, where amnesia is just about as ordinary as a case of summer sniffles. So Ellen takes the amnesia bait and gets herself consigned to a mental hospital until her boyfriend David McLean (Robert Ryan), who is not the swiftest, finally figures out what's going on, and after a frantic fistfight, rescues and vindicates his lady.

I myself was thoroughly confused by the multitude of loose ends in the plot. Who was it who strangled the hotel maid, played by Ethel Mertz aka Vivian Vance? And why? 

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who hardly liked anything at all, was more-than-usually outraged by this film. He called it "wantonly unintelligible" and "cheap and lurid trash." I rarely agree with BC, but in this case he he went easy on The Secret Fury. I was equally infuriated -- The Secret Fury is a film without a shred of integrity. But what's to be expected when a phony case of false induced amnesia is at the heart of the matter? 

I feel for Philip Ober, who put his heart into playing the villain and was forced to mouth with a straight face some of the most ludicrous dialogue ever composed. I feel also for Jane Cowl, a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School, who played bland Aunt Clara. Jane Cowl had a long career and appeared in many respectable films. This one is an embarrassment.

So is the crowded, unartistic poster.

Deadline at Dawn (1946)

Some very serious contributors to film art created this almost forgotten whodunit. Deadline at Dawn was adapted from a novel by Cornell Woolrich and the screenplay was written by Clifford Odets. Cinematography was by Nicholas Musuraca and direction by Harold Clurman. That's some pretty good bloodlines. Moreover, the principal roles were played by young, sparkling Susan Hayward and by the always reliable Paul Lukas.

 

I found it a fascinating film and, strange to say, quite original. Original?? When almost all the plot elements come directly from the vault of overused noir tropes and cliches? Yes, a murder is perpetrated in the first scene. And guess what? We the spectators are kept in the dark and only see the killer's back and hands. And, oh no, an innocent man is accused of the murder and has only a few hours to prove that he didn't do it. But as luck would have it he falls in with a worldly-wise young lady who undertakes to help him and with whom, you can bet the house, he's soon going to fall in love. There's also a "bad girl" who does a little in the blackmail line. And a tough, excitable gangster who several times pulls a revolver out of the breast pocket of his vividly checked suit jacket. There are not one but two car chases. And a shrink-wrapped pair of deep-dyed red herrings. A pair of not-so-bright police detectives. Believe it or not, the film digs so deep into the treasury of cliches that it brings up a brief episode of -- gasp-- amnesia.

 

Nevertheless, these predictable elements are deployed in genuinely surprising ways. I confess that I was taken by surprise by twists and turns in the plotting and I never had the least clue that the wise old cabbie would play so important a part in resolving the mystery.

 

Deadline at Dawn defies the genre -- a bit. In 1940s murder mysteries, it's taken for granted that American society is massively corrupt and venal to the core. Everyone is on his own and everyone is on the take. But it's not so in this film. The young sailor who is accused of murder is a decent, upstanding patriotic young man. The woman who comes to his aid pretends to cynicism but turns out to be as innately noble as he. The various minor characters whom Alex and June encounter during their hunt for the real killer are uniformly kind. There's a newsstand owner who returns to Alex the wad of cash that falls out of his pocket; a fruit seller who joyfully packs for Alex a bag of bananas; the nervous guy who acts suspiciously but is only worried about his dying cat; the apparent stalker who turns out to be a harmless eccentric; the "super" and his wife sitting on the stoop who appear to be hostile but help June find her way; the policemen who come to the aid of the drunken baseball player; the blind pianist who turns out to be not villainous but just unhappy; and especially, the philosophical taxi-driver who sacrifices himself to help Alex. The blackmail and the murders are overlaid on a culture of decency, so that the upbeat conclusion seems to be organic and natural rather than a mechanically-attached Hollywood ending.

 

I suspect that the supporting cast of thoughtful kind working-class stiffs is the contribution not of Woolrich but of Odets.

 

Who would have thought it?  A noir whodunnit with a heart of gold.

Yellowstone

We watched the first season of Yellowstone (eight episodes, or about 350 full minutes, all told). It's not our usual fare, but because a close relative, an accomplished actor, has just contracted to appear in Season Four, it seemed important to investigate. Yellowstone sustained our interest but in my opinion it's mighty derivative. I think the title should be changed to The Sopranos Go West. The principal character, played by Kevin Costner, isn't precisely a Mafia don, but he's modeled on one. He owns a Rhode-Island-size slice of Montana and he protects his property with gangster tactics. Like Tony Soprano, he fights with his family, feuds with his consigliere, corrupts public officials, strong-arms his enemies, and doesn't hesitate to bribe or ice his opponents. Yellowstone creates a nasty dog-eat-dog Hobbesian universe that offers only an occasional redeeming event and, among a huge cast, only two or three sympathetic characters.

Yellowstone is not at all pastoral. The spectacular western landscape is brimful with events common to gruesome noir and urban crime films. In the episodes we watched, two tourists fell from a cliff and splattered, a woman was impaled by a steel fence post, a teacher who tried to intervene in a playground scuffle was accidentally struck to the ground and developed a brain hemorrhage, a cowboy trying to leave his job was shot in the head and his body dumped in a ravine, a new Yellowstone employee was branded on the chest with a red-hot iron, a woman was crushed to death by a horse, two brothers-in-law were shot and killed in a gunfight, a 10-year-old boy was stranded in a culvert with a rattlesnake twice his size, a real estate developer was kidnapped and hanged, and a meth house blew up and burned its occupant to death. I didn't keep a running tally of the various atrocities so there were probably a few that I've forgotten. 

We're hoping that our relative has a continuing part in the series (he's supposed to play a doctor), but we're fearful that he'll be on screen for a minute and a half before he gets his throat slit or loses a limb or two to an enormous John Deere harvester. We won't know for a year.

Crime of Passion (1957)

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Kathy Ferguson, played by reliable Barbara Stanwyck, starts out as a tough, no nonsense witty newspaper woman not scared to go toe-to-toe with her male superiors. She's a 1930s kind of liberated movie gal who wants a lot more out of life than a husband and kids and an avocado-colored refrigerator. She's on her way -- even managing to finagle an offer from an NYC newspaper. But then she falls in love with Lieutenant Bill Doyle, an LA cop (Sterling Hayden) and her admirable backbone goes all squishy. Now her only ambition is to stay at home, cook and clean, and make her man happy. What a betrayal! How implausible!

 

She lands in a dull 1950s suburb where her circle of female acquaintances talk about their outfits and their clubs. It's Eisenhower-era conformism, caricatured, and Kathy is bored silly.

 

Then the film changes direction once again, and Kathy, channeling, I suppose, her earlier ambition, transforms into a noir-y "bad girl" determined to advance her husband's career by whatever means necessary -- in this case, by means of adultery and murder.

 

Crime of Passion covers a lot of ground both in genre and in human psychology. One critic says "it's both dated and progressive at the same time" -- which is correct and is a lot more polite than describing the film as "confused" or "irresolute." 

 

I myself found Kathy's metamorphosis easier to swallow than her sexual attraction to Sterling Hayden's boss, played by hulking Raymond Burr. 

"Negative Bouyancy"

Mogambo (1953), directed by John Ford, is an eternal-triangle story in which earthy Ava Gardner and prim Grace Kelly compete for white hunter Clark Gable. Unfortunately, it's less engaging as a romance than as a travelogue -- it offers spectacular footage of African megafauna (hippos, giraffes, lions, gorillas, etc.).

Whenever I watch classic films set in "the colonies," I'm fearful that the native people will be exoticized and orientalized and trivialized, but I'm happy to report that Mogambo is less offensively Tarzanish than most -- setting aside a couple of embarrassing "fakelore" episodes. I would have been even happier if the Africans weren't just animated wallpaper -- bearers or rowers or dancers or spear-throwers -- and that they weren't depicted as entirely subservient to their white overlords. Mogambo is based on Victor Fleming's pre-Code Red Dust (1931) -- a much more sensual film than Mogambo and one which allowed Jean Harlow lots of room to wink and flirt. It's most odd that the glamorous sexy hunter in both Red Dust and Mogambo is played by Clark Gable - a rare example of filmic auto-reprising. He's hyper-masculine, at age 30, in Red Dust but in Mogambo it's too too obvious that his hair has been dyed a shiny black. When he pounces on Ava and Grace and mashes their mouths with unpersuasive 50s kisses, it is taken for granted that both ladies will immediately grow weak in the knees. 

I grew even less Gable-dazzled when I discovered a weird anecdote in Donald Sinden's recollection of the filming of Mogambo. (Sinden played the part of Grace Kelly's spineless, intellectual, oblivious husband). Sinden reports that (prepare yourself to be stunned and disillusioned): 

before leaving camp on the first morning [of shooting] I had been told to report to the hair-dressing department's tent, where I found the make-up men armed with electric clippers: 'I have to remove the hair from your chest.' 'Whatever for?' I asked, 'Orders.' It transpired that Clark [Gable], whose chest was completely devoid of hair, had always insisted that no other actor should appear on film exposing a hirsute breast. This included any member of the crew not wearing a shirt as well. He considered it a slight on his masculinity.

Surely, this is one of the most bizarre anecdotes in movie history. The King of Hollywood, the legend whose mere presence famously set roomfuls of maidens all a-quiver, was so sexually insecure that he required mass depilation of cast and crew! Follicular fragility! Big-time nuttiness?   

Question: was it in Clark's contract that he had the right to dictate the degree of chest shagginess of cast and crew -- or was he just throwing his weight around?  Suppose Sinden or some sweaty best boy had refused the electric clippers. Would the production have ground to a halt?   

It's well known that since the time of Samson and probably before, male hair has been associated with strength, but even Delilah didn't set out to defoliate every man in Gaza.

But Clark Gable's chest hair insecurity is only Donald Sinden's second most curious anecdote. Even more astonishing, at least to me, is that Sinden suffered from "negative buoyancy." Negative buoyancy is a condition in which a person is unable to float in water. In Sinden's case, negative buoyancy was discovered, he says, while filming a shipwreck scene in The Cruel Sea (1953). Sinden started to sink and was rescued from drowning by his co-star Jack Hawkins.

Almost all human beings float. Bob like corks. I don't, and neither did my father nor my male descendants. As a family, we're sinkers. I don't know why, except that perhaps we have an eccentric specific gravity or because our swim bladders go on the fritz, like sick fish. We regularly and uniformly plunge to the bottom, like a stone or a heavy lump of lead. 

How wonderful to know that there is a dignified name for our peculiar family trait: "negative buoyancy."

And now we can be consoled that we're not alone. 

There's got to be a support group for the negatively buoyant out there, somewhere.

 

Stranger on the Third Floor (1939)

 

Should I encourage my friends to seek out this film or should I warn them to steer clear?

 

Stranger on the Third Floor is one of many works of art that are more historically important, more influential than they are good or pleasing. With a thin plot, obviously padded, it moves along as slow as molasses. The main character, the focus of much of the action, is played by John McGuire who is so unredeemably incompetent and amateurish that you can't keep your eyes off him. And yet, like it or not, Stranger on the Third Floor is seminal -- acclaimed by knowledgeable folks as the first true noir, the head and font of all those 40s and 50s black-and-white films featuring betrayals, gumshoes, bad girls, corrupt city officials, errant bullets, dream sequences, flashbacks, low angle shots, deep shadows and Elisha Cook Jr.

 

In Stranger, two count-em two different men are accused of murder and are in jeopardy of getting the chair until rescued by the loyal girlfriend.

 

The director, Boris Ingster (Boris Mikhailovich Azar from Riga by way of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre) brought Eisenstein's style and German Impressionism to Hollywood. Peter Lorre (László Lowenstein from Rózsahegy, Hungary and Vienna) brought genuine maniacal creepiness to the part of the villain. 

 

Stranger on the Third Floor is gold for noir enthusiasts -- but dross for the casual film tourist.  

 

Margaret Tallichet is luminous as the girlfriend. What a shame that she retired after making only four film appearances!

"In This Our Life" -- the Novel by Ellen Glasgow

In this Our Life, the novel by Ellen Glasgow is richer, deeper, and less bound by convention than the film.  Film Life follows the inherited story for its first forty-five minutes but then sharply diverges.

In the film version, bad daughter Stanley is less conflicted and complicated a character and eventually devolves into a stereotypical noir "bad girl." Novel Stanley doesn't drive Peter to suicide, nor does she she bring the film to convenient closure by driving her car down a cliff. Novel Craig is far less worthy and more passive than film Craig and doesn't redeem himself by transforming into a sleuth who exonerates Parry.

Needless to say, the novel offers no Hollywood ending; in strong contrast, novel Roy rejects Craig's offer of marriage because she knows that Craig is still carrying the torch for Stanley. Instead, she tries desperately to leave town and start life anew -- but it's not clear whether or not she will make a clean getaway. We hope that she will.

The most extensive revision is to the character of the sisters' father, Asa Timberlake. In the film, he's a uxorious martyred browbeaten milquetoast who is the long-suffering caretaker of his hypochondriacal bedridden wife. In Ellen Glasgow's novel, much of which is seen through his eyes, Asa loathes his wife, knows that he's wasted his life, craves affection, and even admits to himself that he wants her dead so that he can be free. It's Asa, not Craig, who unravels the mystery of the automobile accident. Moreover, glory be to the proper gods, Asa has a secret lady friend, a widow/farmer a dozen years his junior, whom he visits on his occasional day off. And he nurtures an escapist fantasy that keeps him sane -- he wants to end his life as a simple farm laborer. He doesn't quite get there at the novel's end, but there's hope. Kaye, his very healthy, very appropriate mistress (we think sexual partner, though Glasgow hedges) assures him that she will always have an opening for a hired hand. 

Pitfall (1948)

Pitfall is just shy of sensational. Error and evil intrude into a normal postwar American suburban family. Jay Dratler and Andre de Toth, writer and director, hit all the necessary film noir notes but without descending to cliche. The beautiful blonde, is, for once, neither a temptress nor a gold-digger, but a decent, troubled young lady; the private eye is not a lonely warrior for justice but a brutal stalker; the police are not jerks; the wronged housewife is not simple and materialistic but strong and resilient. Moreover, the plot is not predictable and its ending neither pollyanna-ish nor disastrous, but balanced, credible and inconclusive. There are no car chases. 

Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, and Raymond Burr are terrific; Dick Powell is, alas, Dick Powell. 

Amnesia on Film: The Third Day (1965)

I don't know why, but It's mandatory, in movieworld, that if a man stumbles away from an automobile accident, he must suffer from amnesia and he must suspect that he's murdered someone.  On top of that, it's required that it will take the full ninety minutes to prove his innocence. The Third Day splits all these notes right down the middle. But it's not just an amnesia/murder mystery/police procedural. It's also a soap opera/marriage on the rocks movie; it's a save-the-small-town-factory from corporate raiders story. And it's a maniac-on-the-loose horror film. The Third Day is a crowded conflation of genres which doesn't quite succeed in finding a concord to all that discord.

The first ten minutes are the best. Steve Mallory, played by George Peppard, returns to pre-amnesia life only to discover, and be dismayed, that he's a lout, barroom brawler, a drunk, and a womanizer. Peppard is perfectly cast because "baffled" is his default expression. It's his gift.

Sally Kellerman, later Hot Lips Houlihan, is the vamp. Arte Johnson, later Laugh-In's Wolfgang is the maniac. Herbert Marshall has the worst role of his career, but if there were a lifetime achievement award for finger-acting, he would win it. Robert Webber is the detective hot to prove that Steve Mallory is guilty, but he should have been more empathetic because earlier that same year he had himself suffered a full ninety minutes of amnesia in Hysteria (1965).

I could almost bring myself to admire this picture. It's well-paced, well-directed, beautifully photographed, mysterious in parts; a couple of luminous supporting roles. It flagged somewhere half way through. So did I. 

Amnesia on Film: Hysteria (1965)

Another automobile accident and another hospitalized amnesiac. Once again, the poor guy might have committed a murder, but he's not sure. And once again, there's a loyal young woman (Gina McConnell, played by Jennifer Jayne) to help him reconstruct his past. As well as a beguiling dangerous femme fatale and a double-dealing psychiatrist. Knockout drops, hallucinations, an escape through a window, a clever detective, a disappearing corpse, multiple flashbacks. The usual stuff.

The gimmick this time: Chris Smith (Robert Webber) has recovered his memory but keeps up the pretense so he can solve the murder. Everyone is kept in the dark, including the befuddled audience. It's a tricky move and highly unpersuasive. The last line of the Wiki plot summary tells you all you need to know in the way of cliche: "Chris is reunited with Gina." 

Amnesias on Films: Two in the Dark (1936) and Two O-Clock Courage (1945)

I've now reported on thirty-two separate amnesia movies and there are surely many more out there to which I am oblivious. Why so many? How come Shakespeare didn't write an amnesia play? Why are there no classic novels about amnesia? Didn't unsuspecting folks get themselves bopped on the head in previous centuries? Didn't knights ever fall off their stallions and thwack their helms and beavers?

Here's an obvious answer to the gimmick's popularity: amnesia provides three of the major elements of all story-telling: Mystery, Quest, and Identity (or as King Lear puts it, "Who is it that can tell me who I am?") But why is it repeated so obsessively in film?

Today a twofer, bringing the grand total to thirty-four. In Two in the Dark (1936), an amnesiac (Walter Abel) comes to awareness on a street corner and suspects that he has committed a murder. Rest easy; he didn't do any such thing. But he needs the help of a good-looking out-of-work actress (Margot Grahame) to establish his innocence. His amnesia is garden variety, "bang-bang". One blow to the old bean and he forgets who he is; later a second  whomp and it all comes back in a flash (in the form of a flashback). Very convenient, very tidy, but not very imaginative. The film is languidly paced, almost slow-motion.

Curiously, Two in the Dark was remade nine years afterward as Two O-Clock Courage with the director of the earlier film serving as the producer of the later. It was a good idea to try again, because the later film was directed by Anthony Mann, who keeps things brisk. Although the plot and a great deal of the dialog was copied wholesale, it's a much better and different film, mostly because the amnesiac's fellow investigator is now a wise-cracking female taxi-driver -- a character straight out of the screwball comedies. When she's on screen, the film becomes a feast of badinage. Tom Conway as the amnesiac is dignified and expressionless, but Ann Rutherford steals the show as the fast-talking cabbie. 

"Bang-bang" or "thwack-thwack" amnesia arrives and departs easily. It comes with an on-off switch. Contrary to human psychological experience, it leaves no residue except for a couple of neat Band-Aids -- one on each side of the head.

 

 

Ann Rutherford and Tom Conway.

Ten Things I Dislike about Films

I'm a movie lover, but I'm not indiscriminate. Here follows a list of common movie occurrences that compel me to return to nineteenth-century novels or force me to bury my head under the blankets. 

1. Cute puppies, especially when the boy and the girl kiss for the first time, and the director, unfazed by cliche or rank sentimentality, cuts to the pooch's just darling head-tilt. Even worse when the doggie covers his cute eyes with his cute paw. Aaargh.

2. Child actors, with rare exceptions. Some few gifted children know how to be natural, but most just make me cringe. 

3. Gratuitous killing of "redskins," especially when aestheticized. How gracefully, when shot by the cavalry marksmen, do the Comanches plummet from the face of the cliff or tumble down the scree. In Western after Western, they take huge losses -- presenting themselves as targets while they ride crazily around the circled wagons -- a strategy that is cinematic but nonsensical. And also: all the retrogressive, antediluvian blackface and yellowface stereotypes that make us gasp with horror at our racist forebears.

4. Those far too frequent scenes, where the guy, pursued either by the police or the husband, goes out the 16th story window of his hotel and works his way across a narrow ledge to another window (always unlocked). Such scenes give me the willies.

5. Car chases. Boring, boring, boring. I've discussed this in the past.

6. Montage dating scenes: boy and girl meet cute. After the mandatory misunderstanding, they reconcile, and then we see five seconds of them sitting in a restaurant, smiling; next they're rowing in a boat in the park; then they're on a ferry, or at a picnic etc. etc. From this we are supposed to deduce that they're in love. Predictable cut to the predictable soft-focus bedroom. Romance, which ought to be thrilling, becomes, through repetition and want of originality, almost as boring as a car chase.

7. Funny drunks. They're not funny. Alcoholism is a destructive disease. 

8. The scene in which the stoic hero has taken a bullet in the shoulder and it's going to be extracted by an amateur. No anesthetics. "Here, bite on this." Even worse, if possible, when it's not a bullet but an arrow.

9. Background music that dictates the emotions we are supposed to feel. Worse still, the background noise that is currently so fashionable. Not music, just a loud drone, which sometimes drowns out the dialogue.

10. Zachary Scott

Also, movies adapted from cartoons: Batman, Superman, etc. Horror films, designed to scare the pants off you. I can't bear to watch them (I've never recovered from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein [1948]). Action films, especially ones in which a retired CIA agent or detective or whatever is called back to duty for one last assignment. And finally, anything with zombies, cyborgs, extraterrestrials, robots, demonic children who vomit blood, or tentacles.

Amnesia on Film: The Unsuspected (1947)

This time, amnesia minus the amnesia. Heiress Matilda Frazier, presumed to have perished in a shipboard fire, returns home where she's met by Steven Howard who claims to be her recently-wedded husband. She fails to remember him for the good reason that she's never met him and hasn't lost her memory. It's a case of "attributed amnesia." Not a disease at all -- merely a handy plot device, credible in black-and-white 40s murder mysteries where amnesia is as common as a slight cold. Matilda is temporarily deceived by Mr.Howard. So are the spectators.

Terrific direction by Michael Curtiz, fine performance by luminous Joan Caulfield, reliable work by steady Fred Clark, effortful ventriloquism by Constance Bennett in a part originally written for Eve Arden.

The Unsuspected borrows much too much from Laura (1944). In addition to the prominently-displayed portrait, there's Claude Rains channeling Clifton Webb. Plus the heroine's return from presumed death, the curious sexless relationship between an older man (the murderer) and a much younger woman. A smitten investigator. Good thing there's a dollop of fake amnesia to help differentiate the two films.

Amnesia on Film: The Vow (2012)

Amnesia movies are not absolutely fettered to reality, nor should they be. Hollywood amnesia, as has been frequently noted, is the most flexible and variable of illnesses. Nevertheless, The Vow (2012) breaks new ground in want of integrity. One reviewer called it a "heartless, soulless jumble," but that's letting it off easy.

A young woman, played by perky Rachel McAdams, suffers an automobile accident and forgets the five years of her marriage to a young man, played by wooden mumbling Channing Tatum. The couple stumbles around for ninety bumbling minutes but eventually he wins her back in cliche date-movie, rom-com tearjerk fashion. Loss of memory, which in any close-to-reality situation would be psychologically troublesome if not utterly disabling, proves to be of no more consequence than the loss of a pair of shoes or eyeglasses. Simplistic, superficial, offensive.

The film advertises itself as based on real events. Loosely based, I'd say, because in actual fact, there was an accident and she suffered loss of memory, but he had an affair, the marriage crumbled, and they divorced. But that was in another country, one in which real human beings might dwell.

"No redeeming characteristics" says another reviewer. The film is especially not redeemed by expressionless Channing Tatum, who fumbles and garbles a higher percentage of his dialog than any actor in the history of Hollywood.

Dreaming Noirly

I must be watching too many 1940-50s film noirs. They're infiltrating my dreams. 

Last night, in my very own bedroom, I hosted a noir festival. Fragments of a more intricate dream are all I can remember now, but the bits my memory retained were mighty vivid. The dream featured an attractive young couple. He's handsome in a Barry Sullivan way but unidentifiable; she's delicate, like Coleen Gray in Kiss of Death (1947) or possibly like fragile young Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil (1957). Some "mugs" want these young folks iced (the dream didn't say why) and they want it done in the most painful possible manner. The scene then cut to a rickety wood-framed house which replicated the building in the dude ranch run by Mercedes McCambridge in Lightning Strikes Twice (1951).The goons break in and sadistically slash the guy's throat and handcuff the girl to a post, then set the house on fire (which copied the ending of Kiss Me, Deadly [1955]). Next thing I knew, the young lady was alive (the dream didn't say how she escaped the flames) and was being recruited and disguised by a trio of FBI or police officers. Not plastic surgery, just makeup and a change of costume. The plan was for her to go underground to identify and expose the hoodlums (a plot device common to numberless noirs).

When I awoke, I was impressed by the imaginative work of my dreamatorium. "Not a bad plot," I said to myself. "Not brilliant, but original enough to serve. Add a car chase, a blonde songstress, a natty but corrupt district attorney, a crusading newspaperman, some heavies (Moroni Olsen and Mike Mazurki, perhaps), a heist gone bad, a skinny stoolie with a toothpick in his mouth, and a little amnesia, and you've got yourself a movie."

I should add that this dream came to me in high contrast black-and-white. Excellent camera work. Well-directed. Think Phil Karlson or Ida Lupino. With gowns by Orry-Kelly.

'Hang there like fruit"

Last night we watched "The Man Who Cheated Himself"(1950), a B+ noir/murder mystery/police procedural with Lee J. Cobb as a detective who falls for a rich homicidal dame and gets himself into a lot of predictable hot water. In the film, Cobb has a younger brother, a straight-arrow, played by John Dall, an actor well-remembered for his leading role in Hitchcock's creepy "Rope"(1948).

 

 

That's John Dall on the right with a young Lee J. Cobb romancing Jane Wyatt in the foreground.

 

Afterward, we looked up John Dall in Wik and with mouths agape learned (verbatim quotation coming up here) that Dall "liked to be tied upside down to trees in Laurel Canyon in the middle of the night. He liked to hang upside down naked until morning. Once a week, he wanted this." Improbable, yes, but probably true, because it's beyond ordinary human imagination to invent such a thing. 

 

As far as I'm concerned and naif as I may be to "alternative sexual practices," it's one thing to fantasize about hanging naked tied to a tree upside down until dawn in Laurel Canyon (I'm sure we've all done so), but to move from theory to practice  -- now that is a challenge.

 

Serious questions: Did Dall like to hang from a branch of a tree, or did he like to be tied to the trunk of a tree? In either case, he'd require assistance -- at least two strong men, I'd imagine. Did they wait, motor running in the taxi, while he hung, or did they hang out at some all night coffee spot and then come back at dawn to untie him. And another question -- what kind of tree?  Much of Laurel Canyon is merely sage or chaparral, but there are trees on the lower riparian slopes. What's the best tree to hang from until dawn? Willows, unless they're black willows, are too flimsy, but live oak, California sycamore, and Fremont's cottonwood might be hefty enough to bear the load. Did John Dall have a favorite tree to whom he was loyal, or was he arboreally promiscuous?

 

And also -- is once a week too many, or too few, or just the right number of times to hang upside-down naked from a tree through the night?