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Post by topbilled on Oct 26, 2022 17:47:30 GMT
Reviews for Columbia films will be placed here.
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Post by topbilled on Oct 28, 2022 14:55:23 GMT
This neglected film is from 1932.
Passion and politics
 Without her work in this film, Barbara Stanwyck might not have been cast in STELLA DALLAS a few years later. The two stories are thematically similar, about a mother who sacrifices everything to give her daughter a better life. You might say Stanwyck’s role in FORBIDDEN was a warm-up for her subsequent role in Sam Goldwyn’s picture.
FORBIDDEN is a great precode-sounding title, with devious connotations. It was inspired by BACK STREET, which Universal had made just a year before with Irene Dunne. I guess Depression era moviegoers liked to see women sin, and more importantly, they liked to see these sinners suffer. And Stanwyck’s character really does suffer here, after she falls for a married man (Adolphe Menjou).
In charge of the narrative is Columbia’s ace in-house director Frank Capra. Mr. Capra and Miss Stanwyck would collaborate several times, and this picture was made after THE MIRACLE WOMAN and just before THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN. In all these assignments with Capra, Stanwyck portrays women who struggle to live a good life but often have trouble succeeding.
The crux of the drama involves Stanwyck’s need to keep her young daughter’s parentage a secret…mostly to prevent a scandal that would occur if people found out Menjou had fathered a kid with her while still married to an invalid (Dorothy Peterson). Menjou advances from well-heeled attorney to powerful politician. On his way to the governor’s mansion, he of course still loves Stanwyck.
In a poignant scene, he has a tender reconciliation with her and their child. However, he cannot leave his wife. For a time, Stanwyck and the little girl go to stay with him and his wife, with Stanwyck posing as a nanny while Menjou and Peterson adopt the tyke. Eventually this becomes too much for Stanwyck to bear, since she cannot properly be little Roberta’s mother.
The middle portion of the film has Stanwyck at a crossroads, reinventing herself. She takes a job working for a newspaper reporter turned editor (Ralph Bellamy), who just so happens to be Menjou’s sworn enemy. When Menjou comes sniffing around Stanwyck again, she gives him his marching orders and commits herself to a life with Bellamy.
I’m always a bit amused at how Bellamy never gets the gal in these movies from the 1930s and 1940s. He made a career of playing third wheels. Only Gig Young ever gave him a run for his money in this department. And it’s not as if Mr. Bellamy is a frog. I am sure a lot of women might consider him a catch.
Though Stanwyck and Bellamy hit it off in the beginning, things go sour when he becomes obsessed with using her and her secret connection to Menjou to destroy Menjou’s political momentum. Wanting to protect Menjou, who is the love of her life, as well as their innocent daughter, Stanwyck does a complete 180 on Bellamy…and shoots him! After his death, she is arrested and jailed. But since the film must have a happy ending, Menjou as the state’s newly elected governor, pardons her. Yes, it all about who you know.
FORBIDDEN is a compelling yet somewhat contrived motion picture about a lost love and a supreme sacrifice. It is engrossing trash bolstered by the fine performance of its lead actress.
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Post by Fading Fast on Oct 28, 2022 16:24:29 GMT
Forbidden from 1932 with Barbara Stanwyck, Adolphe Menjou and Ralph Bellamy
Director Frank Capra, who loves showing people making major life-long sacrifices, pours on the melodrama in Forbidden, a pre-code soap opera on steroids that is successfully carried over the finish line by a strong cast.
Barbara Stanwyck plays a mousy librarian in a small town who, frustrated that life is passing her by, draws out her savings for a luxurious vacation in, then, glamourous Havana. There, she meets a handsome and exciting man, played by Adolphe Menjou. He's a successful lawyer with a bright political future. Their romance continues when they return home.
Stanwyck is now working for a big city paper (we just have to go with it) where a smarmy, rising editor, played by Ralph Bellamy, takes a liking to her, but she's in love with Menjou.
Stanwyck and Menjou have strong on-screen chemistry, which helps us believe these two would stay together even after Stanwyck learns that the reason Menjou hasn't asked her to marry him is because he's already married.
The real soap suds come, though, when he tells Stanwyck his wife is a kind and good woman he can't leave because she is an "invalid" owing to a car crash that happened when Menjou was driving. Dear Lord.
Stanwyck learns this from Menjou just as she was about to tell him she's pregnant at a time when the "right thing to do" was for Menjou to marry her.
Stanwyck doesn't want to wreck Menjou's marriage and career, so she doesn't tell him about the baby and, then, disappears from his life. It's hard, at this point, to see the actors with all the soap suds bubbling up.
A few years later, Menjou is now district attorney. Stanwyck is still working for Bellamy's paper, while raising her baby. Menjou accidentally runs into her and the baby and they resume their affair.
When the press sees Menjou with the baby, he and Stanwyck agree that he will present the young girl as a "gift" he adopted for his invalid wife (the assumption is she can't have children) as a cover story to save his marriage and career. Dear Lord.
Bellamy, meanwhile, becomes Menjou's sworn enemy because he suspects something is phoney about rising-political-star Menjou's adoption and because he suspects Menjou and Stanwyck are having an affair.
We then flash forward about fifteen years where we see that Stanwyck, while still working for Bellamy, has kept a scrapbook of Menjou's career (and, by proxy, her daughter's life) and that she is still his mistress. Stanwyck clearly decided to selflessly devote her life to Menjou.
The climax (no spoilers coming), amazingly, amps up the melodrama as Stanwyck has to make two life-shattering sacrifices for Menjou, but with Bellamy becoming pathological in his drive to bring down Menjou, will it be enough?
Forbidden works because Stanwyck is believable as the woman so in love with Menjou, who is a weak and vain, but not intentionally evil man, that she would, effectively, sacrifice her life and her relationship with her child to save his marriage and career. It has happened in real life, especially back at a time when "taboos" like these were often covered up.
Bellamy, too, keeps this ricocheting story afloat as he is surprisingly good playing a viciously mean man. Normally, in this period of his career, Bellamy didn't get the girl because he was too much of a milquetoast, but here he shows he had plenty of range and bandwidth as an actor.
A few years after its release, with the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code, Forbidden was, well, forbidden from being shown in theaters. Today, it's hard to understand why, as nothing salacious is shown on screen, but the Code wouldn't allow a mistress, who had a baby out of wedlock, to be portrayed in a sympathetic light.
For modern audiences, these pre-code movies reveal that the public back then, as distinct from the motion-picture censors, understood and accepted the messy realities of life. These messy realities were often tucked into the subtext of Code-era movies, but thankfully, owing to pre-codes like Forbidden, for a few years in the early 1930s, movies provided a more-honest look at American society. |
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Post by topbilled on Nov 8, 2022 14:40:02 GMT
This neglected film is from 1952.
Boy comes of age in Canadian family
The film, about a boy coming of age in a French-Canadian family, is based on a popular stage play…itself based on a bestselling novel. The characters are so well-drawn and the performances so engaging that one hardly notices the less cinematic aspects of the picture.
The dialogue allows the use of both the English and French languages to convey the characters’ thoughts and actions. The cast is mostly bilingual, and each performer brings a lively energy to his part. In particular, Charles Boyer shines as a responsible but liberal-minded father.
Louis Jourdan, who plays Boyer’s playboy brother, provides a delightful contrast. His character is much wilder and carefree, which means he cannot be a good example for Boyer’s teenaged son (Bobby Driscoll)…can he?
Still both men do well to anchor the story as Driscoll goes through the customary growing pains, from boyhood to manhood. A highlight of the competing paternal relationship is a scene where Boyer and Jourdan visit Driscoll’s school after the lad has veered from his studies and gotten into trouble. They each have their own approach in dealing with a harsh corporal punishment-minded school official.
Much of the drama is easily solved, and this is, indeed, a happy time, for each of them. Plenty of drinking scenes add to the merriment in case anything ever gets too serious.
Maybe some won’t like the older uncle next door (Kurt Kasznar) whose enjoyment of wine leads to frequent intoxication, but it is all fairly harmless. It would have been nice had there been a sequel, but maybe they were too drunk to make one.
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Post by topbilled on Nov 22, 2022 15:49:28 GMT
This neglected film is from 1948.
All the opium in China
Dick Powell had already reinvented himself as a sardonic detective in RKO’s MURDER MY SWEET (1944). He followed that success with JOHNNY O’ClOCK (1947) and this engaging semi-documentary noir from Columbia. Years of experience in musical comedies at Warner Brothers gave Mr. Powell a sense of perfect timing. His line deliveries, in tense dramatic situations, still manage to convey lightness and irony.
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH contains quite a bit of dramatic irony. Powell is playing a U.S. government agent on the trail of a deadly narcotics ring. He flies from San Francisco to Shanghai where he meets a mysterious European woman (Signe Hasso).
Powell has gone to China because while he was sailing off the coast of California, he saw a boat in international waters from Shanghai. It was carrying a shipment of opium and had a group of slaves on board who were killed.
In Shanghai Powell learns about more slaves and the processing of poppies that were imported from Egypt. At the same time Miss Hasso is carrying out her late husband’s work, supposedly helping Chinese orphans. She has a young Chinese girl (Maylia) in her care, whom she plans to take to America.
Powell is charmed by both of them, but he becomes suspicious of Hasso. Fueling his suspicions is the fact that Hasso’s dead husband was an engineer who once worked in Cairo. He created an artificial irrigation system to water the poppies. But does Hasso know any of this?
Powell goes to Egypt then Beirut, after learning poppies have been smuggled from the fields in Cairo into the middle east inside the stomachs of camels. The camels are slaughtered once they reach Beirut, so the smugglers can get the drugs out.
Yes, this is all rather graphic in detail. Fortunately, none of the more horrifying aspects of the story are actually depicted on screen due to the constraints of the production code. Powell then travels to Havana, since the narcotics have now been sent from the middle east to Cuba, where they will be taken to Florida for U.S consumption.
In Havana Powell meets up with Hasso again, and the girl accompanying her. Hasso still seems guilty as ever. Only there’s a huge twist on a small boat, where we learn the Chinese girl is no orphan. She’s a 20 year old woman and is the ringleader of the smuggling operation!
Powell gives a tremendously good performance here, and so does Hasso. In fact, I’ve never seen Signe Hasso as anything less than outstanding in all her film and television appearances. She plays the seemingly guilty but really innocent suspect to a tee. I wouldn’t trade all the tea, or opium, in China for this movie.
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Post by Fading Fast on Nov 22, 2022 17:07:30 GMT
I've seen the "title" a bunch, but have somehow never caught the movie, an error I will correct the next time TCM runs it.
I knew I knew the name Signe Hasso, but had to look her up on IMDB to remind myself that I saw her recently in "Heaven Can Wait -" an odd but good movie.
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Post by topbilled on Dec 3, 2022 15:40:32 GMT
This neglected film is from 1935.
Call the morality police
We are told at the beginning of the movie what a party wire is. It’s a telephone line shared by several subscribers, or parties, in the same locality for economic reasons. I did a quick search online about party wires, or party lines as they were called in the rural Wisconsin community where I grew up, and found out they were mostly eliminated by phone companies around the year 2000. At any rate, they were in existence for many decades and certainly audiences in the mid-30s knew what they were.
In our rural area, I don’t recall any scandals ever being overheard on the phone, but what do I know, since I was a small child. We definitely had gossipy types who liked to eavesdrop, but they didn’t always need Alexander Graham Bell’s invention to do that. In this 1935 motion picture from Columbia, a scandal occurs when someone hears something they shouldn’t and spreads the ‘news’ (which they misinterpreted).
The story is set in a place called Rockridge U.S.A. where a rich old bitty (Helen Lowell) has summoned her playboy nephew (Victor Jory) home from Europe. She intends to task him with the responsibility of running the family business, since she has become an invalid. The business is the main source of employment in Rockridge. Since Jory is an eligible bachelor, single women of marrying age are pushed in front of him.
We have to suspend some disbelief since Mr. Jory is no Clark Gable in the looks department. The actor would find his niche in Hollywood playing villains in westerns and crime flicks.
Instead of selecting one of the desperate young maids, someone else even prettier and more self-confident (Jean Arthur) catches Jory’s eye. Miss Arthur is just hitting her stride as a contract player at Columbia, and she is playing a career woman. Her character is an accountant at the local bank, but the production code will ensure that by the end of the film, she leaves all that behind to take on wife and mother duties.
This is where the party wire of the plot comes in. A conversation is overheard, and a busybody (Clara Blandick) misinterprets, assuming Arthur is gasp preggers. Call the morality police.
Naturally, this causes all kinds of complications. The scandal threatens to derail Arthur’s blossoming romance with Jory. She even gets fired from her job.
Yes, this is as bad as Peyton Place and the Harper Valley P.T.A. Of course, today nothing-shocks-people-anymore, so this is rather tame and almost laughable. But by 1935 standards, it was serious stuff– a young woman supposedly expecting a child out of wedlock. She was certain to be castigated, unless she was the Virgin Mary, then she would have been venerated.
Eventually the misunderstandings are sorted out and the turmoil dies down. Lest there was ever any doubt, our couple in love has their happily ever after restored. I would imagine that soon they were too busy enjoying their honeymoon to worry about answering the phone.
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Post by Fading Fast on Dec 3, 2022 15:52:02 GMT
I was stunned to learn there were still party lines in this country until 2000.
"..a young woman supposedly expecting a child out of wedlock. She was certain to be castigated, unless she was the Virgin Mary, then she would have been venerated." LOL
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Post by topbilled on Dec 10, 2022 14:14:13 GMT
This neglected film is from 1944.
Third pairing for Dunne and Boyer
A lot happens in this farce from Columbia Pictures…a lot of nonsense that is. But with appealing stars like Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, it’s easy to overlook the more inane aspects of the plot and take pleasure in the outcome. Dunne and Boyer had appeared in two earlier films, each one at a different studio. In LOVE AFFAIR, their biggest and most remembered hit, RKO cast them as improbable lovers who met on a cruise ship. In WHEN TOMORROW COMES, they braved a downpour on a flooded soundstage at Universal.
It really didn’t matter what scenario they were given to play, audiences loved to watch them. During the war years, Miss Dunne was touring the country selling bonds and making the occasional morale booster back in Hollywood; while Mr. Boyer was in a series of tearjerkers in support of important female costars like Bette Davis, Margaret Sullavan or Joan Fontaine. But with TOGETHER AGAIN, a marketing ploy re: Harry Cohn’s decision to reunite the stars, they are back on equal footing, doing something lightweight that was meant for audiences to enjoy.
In the story, Dunne plays a widow who has taken on her late husband’s political duties. While functioning as the mayor of a small Vermont town, she is surrounded by an opinionated father-in-law (Charles Coburn) and a trouble-prone stepdaughter (Mona Freeman). One night a storm occurs, and a bolt of lightning slices the head off a statue in the town park– a statue of Dunne’s beloved deceased hubby.
Some of the folks in town are superstitious, including members of her own family, and think this means Dunne must step down from her mayoral post. Of course, a patriarchal viewpoint would cling to the idea that it is bad luck for an independent woman to continue running local affairs, that she possibly couldn’t be happy or fulfilled in any way devoted to career instead of marriage. (Ironically, the screenplay was written by a woman, Virginia Van Upp, who also served as producer.)
Not yet willing to step down, Dunne goes to New York to commission a new sculpture to replace the one destroyed in the storm. She meets and hires a French sculptor (Boyer) and is instantly charmed by him. A few hours later they attend a nightclub together to celebrate the assignment.
But in a chaotic series of mix-ups, Dunne ends up getting arrested as a stripper when police raid the joint. Yes, this is your ordinary visit to the big city, complete with stereotypes galore and a night in jail.
Dunne ends up returning to her berg in Vermont without the statue, concealing the truth behind her recent arrest. Unfortunately for her, a reporter took a picture of her in a state of undress…and a rival (Charles Dingle) who is seeking to remove her from office will have plenty of ammunition to succeed. Complicating matters is the arrival of Boyer who apparently isn’t done with Dunne or the commissioned sculpture.
From here things get progressively more absurd. Stepdaughter Freeman develops a crush on Boyer, pushing her handsome boyfriend (Jerome Courtland) aside. Dunne realizes she wants Boyer for herself and teams up with Courtland to make the others jealous. Despite the lapses in logic, the screenplay does contain some genuinely funny moments. Both Dunne and Boyer are old pros at handling this sort of material, and the results are mostly satisfactory.
After the film was completed, Irene Dunne said it all reminded her of an earlier screwball comedy she made at Columbia, called THEODORA GOES WILD. In both pictures, we have a small town gal who goes to the big city and comes back a changed woman due to a scandal. Of course, she learns how to assert herself in the process and finds happiness.
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Post by topbilled on Dec 23, 2022 14:35:38 GMT
This neglected film is from 1951.
True-to-life types of people
On the IMDb rating system, I give this solid Columbia noir a score of 9 out of 10. Originally I had given it an 8 but recently upgraded the rating after a repeat viewing. It’s a very slick crime film with actors who specialize in the genre. Their performances put it over, even if some of the plot devices are hackneyed.
The dialogue might seem familiar in THE MOB, probably because it was copied later by other writers. I found a lot of the wisecracks to be expertly delivered, especially by star Broderick Crawford. I love the running joke of him playing a guy from New Orleans (while undercover) who has to continually drink a mixture of beer and wine, something his character doesn’t really enjoy.
The weakest part of the story is omitting how his girlfriend (Betty Buehler) gets picked up by the gang he’s trying to infiltrate. We should have seen how they nabbed her. But I guess we were supposed to be surprised, when he learned that she’d been captured. Still I would like it it if some of these off-screen developments had been explained. If we are brought up to speed on how she was kidnapped, it gives us more of an idea just how ruthless they are, and what Crawford’s character is up against.
I especially enjoyed the hospital sequence at the end. I thought it was particularly suspenseful, notably the part where the leader of the gang entered the room and it looked like he was going to kill them both.
The first time I watched that climactic scene, I had no idea the nurse who came into the room was an undercover cop. I liked how the bad guy was ultimately gunned down by a cop shooting him from an upper window in a nearby building. The ending is explosive and quick…which makes it better, since there really is no need to drag out the kingpin’s demise.
In addition to the tidy plot, there are some memorable turns by the supporting cast. Jay Adler plays the owner of the fleabag motel where Crawford spends much of his time undercover. Adler is a great character actor, and he has another good role in 99 RIVER STREET, a noir made shortly afterward.
The character of Crawford’s girlfriend was the only significant film role for actress Betty Buehler. She has just two credits on the IMDb, which leads me to believe she was either a stage actress or had acted under another name in other roles. I did find a nice write-up about her, after her death in 2012. It wasn’t an obituary really, more an appreciation by someone in her hometown who knew her family. According to that column, she appeared in some 1950s TV anthology programs. But none of that is listed on the IMDb.
Miss Buehler has excellent chemistry with Mr. Crawford, and as it has been indicated elsewhere, we don’t need a glamorous young couple cast as the leads. This film has more true-to-life types of people, and that’s one reason why I like it so much.
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Post by Fading Fast on Dec 23, 2022 16:40:25 GMT
The Mob from 1951 with Broderick Crawford, Ernest Borgnine, Jean Alexander and Neville Brand
It's tough to be a 1950s movie about mob corruption on New York City's docks, but not to be the classic movie On the Waterfront. The Mob, though, is an engaging crime-drama noir with a tight script, solid acting and plenty of 1950s mob argot and heavies.
One of Hollywood's least-likely leading men, bulldog-faced Broderick Crawford plays a cop who goes undercover to find the leader of the waterfront mob. Whereas On the Waterfront draws a wide circle to look at many of the elements of waterfront mob corruption, The Mob uses Crawford like a one-man wrecking ball smashing into everything as he tries to make a beeline to the big guy behind the rackets.
With a cover as an "up from New Orleans after a little trouble" union man, Crawford pushes his way into New York's waterfront with an aggressive attitude backed up by his brute size. He's loud and cocky, which draws the attention he wants as he keeps pushing to get in on the real action - the rackets that control the unions and skim money off of everything.
The story is good yet generic, but where The Mob shines is watching Crawford effortlessly shift from blustering stevedore to quick-witted undercover cop time and again as he balances a ridiculous number of relationships and tense situations trying to dig out information without blowing his cover.
There's a good supporting cast with Otto Hulett as Crawford's no-nonsense lieutenant, Ernest Borgnine as a mid-level mob boss and Neville Brand as a psychotic mob thug (a role genetics forced on him), but this is Crawford's movie.
Lacking a real femme fatale, The Mob does have blonde Jean Alexander playing a street-smart cookie comfortable moving amongst the cops, thugs and workers of the waterfront. Along with Crawford's fiance, played by Betty Buehler, who gets unwillingly pulled into the action, that's pretty much it for the woman's angle in The Mob.
After Crawford knocks around the waterfront for awhile, beats up a few guys and gets beat up himself a few times, the story speeds to a climax that includes state-of-the-art surveillance, a crime boss' fancy hidden apartment (a thing back then), a mobster's surprise double identity, Crawford being exposed, Buehler held hostage, a gun fight and, finally, a James Bond-like last-minute twist.
The Mob's fast-moving eighty-seven minutes proves that a leading man doesn't always need leading-man good looks as Broderick Crawford drives this effort with a force of personality and massive physicality.
The Mob is a very good movie that would probably be more well known today if not for On The Waterfront, but it still deserves a watch for its engaging and different look at mob corruption on the docks. |
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Post by topbilled on Dec 24, 2022 1:42:46 GMT
The Mob from 1951 with Broderick Crawford, Ernest Borgnine, Jean Alexander and Neville Brand
It's tough to be a 1950s movie about mob corruption on New York City's docks, but not to be the classic movie On the Waterfront. The Mob, though, is an engaging crime-drama noir with a tight script, solid acting and plenty of 1950s mob argot and heavies.
One of Hollywood's least-likely leading men, bulldog-faced Broderick Crawford plays a cop who goes undercover to find the leader of the waterfront mob. Whereas On the Waterfront draws a wide circle to look at many of the elements of waterfront mob corruption, The Mob uses Crawford like a one-man wrecking ball smashing into everything as he tries to make a beeline to the big guy behind the rackets.
With a cover as an "up from New Orleans after a little trouble" union man, Crawford pushes his way into New York's waterfront with an aggressive attitude backed up by his brute size. He's loud and cocky, which draws the attention he wants as he keeps pushing to get in on the real action - the rackets that control the unions and skim money off of everything.
The story is good yet generic, but where The Mob shines is watching Crawford effortlessly shift from blustering stevedore to quick-witted undercover cop time and again as he balances a ridiculous number of relationships and tense situations trying to dig out information without blowing his cover.
There's a good supporting cast with Otto Hulett as Crawford's no-nonsense lieutenant, Ernest Borgnine as a mid-level mob boss and Neville Brand as a psychotic mob thug (a role genetics forced on him), but this is Crawford's movie.
Lacking a real femme fatale, The Mob does have blonde Jean Alexander playing a street-smart cookie comfortable moving amongst the cops, thugs and workers of the waterfront. Along with Crawford's fiance, played by Betty Buehler, who gets unwillingly pulled into the action, that's pretty much it for the woman's angle in The Mob.
After Crawford knocks around the waterfront for awhile, beats up a few guys and gets beat up himself a few times, the story speeds to a climax that includes state-of-the-art surveillance, a crime boss' fancy hidden apartment (a thing back then), a mobster's surprise double identity, Crawford being exposed, Buehler held hostage, a gun fight and, finally, a James Bond-like last-minute twist.
The Mob's fast-moving eighty-seven minutes proves that a leading man doesn't always need leading-man good looks as Broderick Crawford drives this effort with a force of personality and massive physicality.
The Mob is a very good movie that would probably be more well known today if not for On The Waterfront, but it still deserves a watch for its engaging and different look at mob corruption on the docks.
I got the feeling the sets for this movie, which came first, were reused for ON THE WATERFRONT, since both pictures were made by Columbia. |
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Post by topbilled on Jan 1, 2023 17:18:43 GMT
This neglected film is from 1953.
Western warfare
Broderick Crawford had just won the Oscar for ALL THE KING’S MEN (1949). Columbia Pictures’ boss Harry Cohn was keen to star Crawford in more character-driven films. Scripts that were handed to the actor typically had him playing tough-minded men. And as others found out in these movies, nobody was allowed to mess with Crawford…especially in the old west!
LAST OF THE COMANCHES is a remake of SAHARA (1943) with Crawford taking Humphrey Bogart’s old role, except the action has now been re-set along the American frontier. There is a standoff with a bunch of natives in the middle of the desert, where water is scarce and everyone’s on tenterhooks. Though the story had been done previously as a war flick, it works perfectly as a western.
They’ve added a strong woman’s role for Barbara Hale. In the early to mid-1950s, Miss Hale did her share of parts in this genre, before she became more famous for her work on television. She’s gorgeous on screen, filmed in Technicolor on location in Yuma.
At one point she gets to use a rifle. I found her just as convincing with a firearm as I would have if this character had been played by another Barbara– Stanwyck.
What I like about this portrayal is that our leading lady goes from glamorous at the beginning, boarding a stagecoach with the other passengers, to someone who is forced to drop the frilly act and look more natural as the journey progresses. They are fighting for their lives in the middle of nowhere, and she no longer has time to worry about her hair and makeup.
One of the supporting male characters is played by Lloyd Bridges, who had been cast in a similar role in SAHARA. He may have been the only person who transferred over from the original production. He’s a pro as always, and he works well with Crawford, Hale and the rest of the gang.
The last ten to fifteen minutes of LAST OF THE COMANCHES is quite violent, but in a way I applaud that for this type of story. I don’t think it would have been realistic if most of them survived with just a few bruises and scratches. They were thrust into bloody warfare, and the outcome was going to be deadly for some of them.
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Post by topbilled on Jan 10, 2023 14:24:53 GMT
This neglected film is from 1952.
Columbia noir at its finest
Fans of Edward Dmytryk’s CROSSFIRE will find THE SNIPER just as fascinating to watch. Again Dmytryk helms a gritty noir about a killer sought by the law. Given his mastery of the genre, there’s no better person to film the story, something that factored into producer Stanley Kramer’s decision to hire the blacklisted director. This was Dmytryk’s first Hollywood movie after a short period of political exile in Britain where he made two other bleak crime pictures (OBSESSION and GIVE US THIS DAY).
Adolphe Menjou is cast as an aging police detective in San Francisco, and he turns in a credible performance. But Arthur Franz, as a parolee who takes his hatred out on women by randomly murdering them, makes a greater impression. Franz and Menjou share top billing, but since Franz receives more screen time and has the more compelling role, it feels like his story from start to finish.
Columbia provided Kramer and Dmytryk with enough money to take the cast and crew to northern California, so there are quite a few outdoor scenes filmed in San Francisco. Long tracking shots add extra realism. Plus we have plenty of tense close-ups where Franz’s character aims his rifle and readies to bring down another unsuspecting victim.
There are scenes where Menjou and his officers consult a psychologist (Richard Kiley) after lineups fail to net any results. In their meetings they try to understand the mind of an assailant. They gather what evidence they have and attempt to determine his next move, as impossible as it may seem.
Kiley has the most important speeches in the movie, about the definition of legally sane versus legally insane, and he facilitates a discussion about how to cure repeat offenders. Mixed into the debate are comments from Menjou’s superiors on allocating tax dollars for more law enforcement, as well as jabs made at the media for exploiting the hysteria. Despite the occasional preachiness of the script, Dmytryk is still able to keep the action sequences a priority.
All the killings are memorable. When a piano bar singer (Marie Windsor) is slain, she dies in front of her poster outside the club where she works. She is brushing dust off the poster when she is shot. In another scene a floozie hands Franz her phone number and address (dumb thing to do) then is shot through the window of her apartment as she prepares herself for bed. That time we know the murder is coming because Franz sent a warning to the cops.
Later a tower painter sees Franz on a rooftop about to shoot some women below. He tries to warn them, but takes a bullet and falls to his death. This leads to an exciting conclusion, with Franz running up a long hill, followed by Menjou and his men in pursuit. They will bring him to justice if it’s the last thing they do. When the cops finally corner him in a boarding house, we get the film’s most memorable image– a sad man holding on to something that will soon be taken away from him.
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Post by jamesjazzguitar on Jan 12, 2023 1:31:38 GMT
I have seen The Sniper a lot since MOVIES-TV features the film as part of Noir Thursday and Sunday at least once a month. Solid noir.
The only scene I don't really like is the one with Carl Benton Reid (who surprisingly was uncredited); Yea, I get the overall politics involved but there was so many illogical statements I find the overall scene over the top; E.g. Ok, the city is in fear and the police have to catch the guy, but what actual advise does Reid have to find the killer? None.
But yea " Despite the occasional preachiness of the script, Dmytryk is still able to keep the action sequences a priority".
I have no issue with the occasional preachiness from Kiley's character, but the complaining and nagging from Reid was a little too much.
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