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Post by topbilled on Jul 15, 2023 13:17:17 GMT
Reading your review, I think I saw this film, but I don't remember these being the stars. Was there an earlier or later version? Maybe I saw the film so long ago I forgot who was in it. |
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Post by topbilled on Aug 4, 2023 13:38:17 GMT
This neglected film is from 1940.
Wholesome not too sweet
It is easy to see how much this style of storytelling influenced Hollywood product that came after it in the 1940s and 1950s. It stands in stark contrast to other stories that were being produced before this time. It is somber, meditative. Often, the motion picture industry delivered saccharine entertainment. OUR TOWN is not that sweet. It retains its wholesome value, but does not dress simple Americana up with a festive bow.
A lot of that is due to Thornton Wilder’s original writing, which the filmmakers were wise to honor and not alter too much. The emphasis is on characterization, and we learn quite a bit about the people who inhabit a village called Grover’s Corners. It is not a large community, but its folks are proud to be from there. Sometimes they leave, but Wilder tells us they come back, whether its to reunite with kin or to be buried in the cemetery.
Primarily, there are two main families whose situation is chronicled in Wilder’s simplistic tale of life and love. One family, the Gibbses, is led by a doctor (Thomas Mitchell) and his wife (Fay Bainter). Their children include a teenaged son (William Holden) who wants to be a farmer; and a younger daughter (Ruth Tobey) who just wants a better dress to wear.
The Gibbses’ neighbors, the Webbs, are the other family. They’re led by a local businessman (Guy Kibbee) and his wife (Beulah Bondi). They also have two children, a teenaged daughter (Martha Scott) who is pretty and smart; as well as a younger son (Douglas Gardiner).
It’s interesting to watch the wives interact, since Miss Bainter had previously played Miss Bondi’s daughter in Paramount’s MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937). Bondi was frequently cast in parts older than her actual age, but in OUR TOWN, her character is closer to her real-life age.
The most important story point in the narrative involves the blossoming romance between the two characters portrayed by Holden and Scott. At the beginning of their courtship they are still in high school, and though they become engaged, they do not marry until about three years later. Not long after marrying, they are expecting a baby.
William Holden was 22 at the time of filming and he is more convincing as a teen in the early scenes than Martha Scott who was 28. Scott, however, does a fine job as a newlywed and expectant mom. Miss Scott had earned plaudits for her performance of the role on Broadway back in 1938. She’d receive an Oscar nomination here, and repeat the role in a Broadway revival of Wilder’s play in 1944 opposite Montgomery Clift, who was just making his mark as an actor.
The original Broadway production featured Frank Craven as the anchor character of the Stage Manager. He is also present in the movie, usually breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the camera/audience. Craven receives a co-screenwriter credit for the movie, which was an independent release through United Artists directed by Sam Wood.
To be honest, the story has not aged well. I know that will seem like blasphemy to those who cherish the play and this very first motion picture version. But to be even more honest, I think the story was “old” to begin with...when it was initially staged on Broadway in the late 1930s, it was heavily imbued with nostalgia, set in the early 1900s with characters looking back. It’s a wistful view of how life was then, perhaps simpler and less complicated than life was during a time when the world was about to plunge into a global war.
I wouldn’t say what we see depicted in Grover’s Corners is necessarily naive, but because it’s a memory piece, it is more about specific emotions being evoked than about exact attitudes or politics. So in a way it lacks a social message, unless we say the message is to maintain the most basic values of our greatest American communities. Aaron Copland’s meditative score helps bring this point home.
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Post by topbilled on Aug 25, 2023 14:41:22 GMT
This neglected film is from 1949.
Too late to be remorseful
In this twisted noir, one of the genre’s darkest, Lizabeth Scott delivers one of her most riveting performances as the deadliest of all femme fatales. Put her with Dan Duryea, known for playing some of noir’s most dangerous men, and you have a gripping motion picture. The screenplay is based on a serialized magazine story written by Roy Huggins, who was still cranking out these yarns in the 1970s with The Rockford Files and in the 1980s with Hunter.
It isn’t that Miss Scott’s character isn’t soft or feminine. But she’s become so corrupted and lost any sense of decency that anyone who gets in her way had better watch out. In previous noir pictures Scott was a touch more delicate and vulnerable, especially in the 1948 offering PITFALL. However, she has shed any of the sympathetic traits she might exhibit for this role. Ultimately, we have a hard woman whose actions are so vile at times, the only way the production code will be satisfied is for her to suffer a horrible death at the end. Before she dies, she does a lot of harm to the ones closest to her.
The plot hinges mostly on a bag of cash, which functions more like a MacGuffin. We don’t really care about the amount of money or why the money’s in the bag, and whom it was originally intended for. Instead, we are focused on Scott coming upon the money, coveting it and scheming to hold on to it.
This leads to her killing her husband (Arthur Kennedy) when he opts to turn the dough into the police. After that, we see her become involved with a blackmailer (Duryea) who has a connection to the money. He’s a guy with crooked ideas of his own.
Into the mix there is a kind-hearted sister-in-law (Kristine Miller) who is interested in finding out what happened to her brother (Kennedy). And there is a mysterious man (Don DeFore) who seems to be investigating another killing, concerning the death of a man from Scott’s past. It’s a rather intricate web as far as these things go. And of course, Scott’s tour-de-force acting is what holds it all together.
One thing I especially like about TOO LATE FOR TEARS, which I think gets overlooked by almost everyone who watches the film and comments on it, is how there is actually a double plot. The second arc involves the love story that develops between DeFore and Miller. This enables a very dark film noir to ironically have a happy ending. It’s a rare instance where the supporting characters eventually become the main characters at the end.
About midway through the pic’s running time, we start rooting for DeFore and Miller as a couple. We know Scott and Duryea will get what’s coming to them, but we also want the couple in love to get what they deserve, and that’s a future with each other. So on two very different levels, this independent production from Hunt Stromberg and director Byron Haskin delivers the goods.
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Post by Fading Fast on Aug 25, 2023 15:18:52 GMT
I wrote these comments over three years ago and didn't note the second plot that Topbilled rightly pointed out in his comments above.
Too Late for Tears from 1949 with Lizabeth Scott, Arthur Kennedy, Dan Duryea and Dom DeFore
There are the great noirs - The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past and others - but there are also a lot of really good noirs like Too Late for Tears.
A middle-class couple, stopped for a moment on the side of a highway one night, have a bag full of money, literally, tossed into their open-topped car from a passing vehicle (it's rationally explained much later), setting off a series of, well, disasters.
The husband, played by Arthur Kennedy, is content with their life and wants to turn the money over to the police; the wife, played by Lizabeth Scott, is not content (at all) and wants to keep it. He sees their middle-class life as successful and fortunate; she - openly showing contempt for him - expresses disgust at their "meager" existence as she wants more - more money, things, status.
After contentiously agreeing to keep, but not touch, the money for a week, Kennedy trots off to work while Scott stays home losing her mind thinking about all that money. From here, the movie is about one thing: Scott's all-consuming passion to get the money (presently, in a train-station locker with the claim check in her husband's coat - she thinks) as one obstacle after another pops up between her and the bag 'o cash.
First up is Scott's sister-in-law who quickly sees that Scott is up to no good, but being a normal human being, she doesn't have the capacity to quickly jump to the conclusion that Scott would commit murder (more in a moment) for money. Instead, she shadows Scott, stumbles upon clues and makes Scott squirm.
At one point, I thought Scott would shoot the sister-in-law just to shut her up, despite the sister-in-law not being close to figuring things out. Even though the sister-in-law was in the right, she was so annoying about it, I almost wanted Scott to shoot her.
Next up, and much more effective in his pursuit of Scott, is a man, played by Dan Duryea, the intended recipient of the tossed bag of money, which was the product of an insurance fraud Duryea stumbled upon and cut himself in on.
He and Scott engage in a wonderful game of cat-and-mouse as they vie for the money and the upper hand against an ever shifting dynamic of "we need each other, but can't trust each other one bit" (think The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but in '49 LA). Even when they have sex - oh yeah, they flirt, they hate, they sleep together - you know each one is half plotting to kill the other. It's a good, healthy noir relationship.
(Minor spoiler alert as it comes along pretty early on) Scott and Duryea kill Scott's husband as the husband's moral stance - the money should go to the police - is untenable to Scott or Duryea. Scott's husband seemed like a good guy, but he did not understand, one bit, the woman he married.
Right after the murder, another obstacle comes along: a putative old war buddy, played by Dom DeFore, of Scott's husband, apparently, just in town for a short visit. DeFore plays the innocent good guy only trying to help, but he is better than the sister-in-law at connecting dots and seeing Scott for who she is.
As if this wasn't enough, Scott has to report her murdered husband to the police as missing. The sister-in-law would have gotten even more suspicious if Scott just went about her day (hunting feverishly for the now missing claim-check ticket) without even showing a thought for her husband who, in theory, just disappeared.
So, for those keeping score, standing between Scott and the money are the missing claim-check ticket, the guy who originally stole the money (whom she's having hate-sex with), her murdered husband's sister-in-law, her murdered husband's supposed old war buddy and the police (oddly, the least of her worries). But a woman after money's gotta do what a woman after money's gotta do.
To avoid giving the rest away (you really want to see it), Scott tries to plow through one obstacle after another and does an admirable job even getting a brief moment in the sun to luxuriate with her ill-gotten dough. But this is noir and this is Hollywood under the code, so you know how it's going to end. And credit to the writers for tying a lot of loose ends together in the climactic scene.
The funny thing is that, while this is Scott's movie - she's an obsessed ball of 5'3" blonde greed - her acting is sometimes wooden in this one (she's better in some other movies). However, she's gorgeous in a cold, aloof, calculating way that works so well for the character that she carries the movie despite her stolid performance. And being short helps as, if she was a tall gorgeous blonde, you'd be like, "come on" she already has everything she needs. But, here, her shortness seems to fit her psychotic obsessing and pathetic social bounding.
It's not up there with the great noirs, but it's a fine workingman's noir with a lot of good stuff going on, especially Lizabeth Scott as the lost-her-mind-over-a-bag-of-money femme fatale who smashes up everybody in her orbit, including herself.
Ms. "I want the bag 'o money" femme fatale.
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Post by topbilled on Sept 1, 2023 13:30:35 GMT
This neglected film is from 1956.
According to a specific schedule
TIME TABLE, with a copyright of 1955 but not released until Feburary ’56, was the second film that actor Mark Stevens directed. Stevens had made a name for himself in film noir during the second half of the 1940s as a contract player at 20th Century Fox. By the early ’50s, he had left his home studio and started freelancing in a series of westerns and action adventure flicks, most of them cheaply produced B films that didn’t do his career as a leading man any favors.
By this point Stevens also was starring on radio and in a weekly television series. One guesses that he reinvested his earnings from those jobs into this independently made suspense thriller that returned him to the noir genre, doing what he did best– playing morally ambiguous characters that became caught up in circumstances beyond his control.
As the film’s story gets underway, we see a disgraced former doctor (Wesley Addy) who has hit the skids due to alcoholism and had his license revoked. Unable to reclaim his old life and the material wealth he had as a physician, he carries out a caper with the help of a few men that takes place on board a train speeding through Arizona one night.
The film starts with the heist, which initially is quite successful. Of course, the insurance company wants to reclaim the valuable loot that was taken during the crime, and this is where Stevens’ character comes in…he’s a claims investigator.
One thing that makes what would otherwise be a routine crime yarn so interesting is the fact that as the plot continues, we learn things are not as simple as they might have originally seemed. It turns out that Addy is working for Stevens, and Stevens had previously investigated Addy before. They devised the caper together and are in cahoots. As if that were not enough, there is the additional twist of Stevens having an affair with Addy’s wife behind Addy’s back.
The adulterous wife is played by Felicia Farr in one of her earliest screen roles. Of course, the affair will make Stevens vulnerable, especially when Addy finds out he is being double crossed. We know that Stevens and Farr won’t get away with their elaborate scheme to use Addy, do away with him, and escape to Mexico with all the valuables. However, the fun is in watching how Stevens’ carefully determined time table falls apart. One slight mistake and the so-called perfect heist is no longer perfect, and everything comes crashing down.
Mark Stevens would go on to direct and star in other films during the late 1950s and 1960s. None of them were going to make him the next John Cassavetes. But in terms of durable entertainment, his output is still highly watchable and I don’t think anyone who spends 80 minutes watching TIME TABLE will be thoroughly disappointed. On the contrary, the viewer may find it all most enjoyable.
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Post by topbilled on Sept 18, 2023 16:35:08 GMT
This neglected film is from 1955.
Loving her just as much as he loves the great outdoors
Andre de Toth is respected for his work directing crime dramas. When he began to make westerns, he brought a noir-ish sensibility to the proceedings, similar to what Jacques Tourneur did. In 1955 and in 1959, de Toth made two westerns that were filmed in Oregon. Oregon is where the director had a home when he wasn’t staying in California. The first one was THE INDIAN FIGHTER, and the second one was DAY OF THE OUTLAW.
Obviously, de Toth loved the Oregon landscapes…he and his cinematographers capture the splendor and beauty of the terrain in a way that is almost poetic. The visuals elevate these stories and make them something an audience would appreciate seeing on a large screen, when westerns were already quite plentiful on television.
The star of THE INDIAN FIGHTER, Kirk Douglas, had just formed his own independent production company, Bryna Productions, with a deal to release films through United Artists. Douglas plays Johnny Hawk who has an emotional, but mostly friendly, relationship with the Sioux. Early on, he is told what may happen between opposing races if whites come into the area looking for gold. Later, Douglas’ character is shown assisting an Oregon bound group of whites…and he must function as negotiator between two cultural worlds.
In some ways it’s a routine western drama– the encroachment of white settlers versus the displacement of natives, resisting of course. We’ve seen similar scenarios in other westerns, most notably in RIDE OUT FOR REVENGE (1957) which stars Rory Calhoun as a white man sympathetic to native customs. In this film we have Kirk Douglas who is also not a bigot and tries to understand the differences between the opposing cultures. This is underscored by the fact that he falls in love with a native woman.
The villains that disrupt the peace are whites. In RIDE OUT FOR REVENGE, Lloyd Bridges is a corrupt sheriff with an unchecked hatred for natives. In THE INDIAN FIGHTER, it’s Walter Matthau who stirs up trouble. Matthau’s character is a loose cannon.
Douglas is quick to gain the upper hand when Matthau starts causing problems. However, Matthau isn’t the only ‘bad white man’ in the story, so there will be more issues as the story continues. Another villainous white guy is portrayed by Lon Chaney Jr., and he is quite vocal in his racism.
Children in the story are depicted as being influenced by prejudice. Douglas is eager to educate a boy named Tommy (Michael Lew Winkelman) in an effort to prevent him from growing up with hatred towards the natives.
This is more than just another tale of westward expansion where whites battle and mistreat natives. At one point, Douglas’s character talks with a photographer (Elisha Cook Jr.) who is in favor of opening the west up to “civilization.” Douglas says he doesn’t want the west changed that way, he likes it the way it is.
In addition to the main clash that occurs between the two different cultural groups, part of the story focuses on the romantic drama between Douglas and a Sioux maiden (Elsa Martinelli). At first, he watches her wash herself in the river then literally grabs her for affection in another scene.
Apparently she likes it enough to accept him as a boyfriend…and they enjoy a romp in the creek. The whole ‘courtship’ between them signals to the audience that Douglas is a potent hot-blooded male.
He is going to tame his woman and love her, the way a man is supposed to (right?)…though she later gets the chance to dominate him in return. An unusual playfulness develops. It’s not quite the Taming of the Shrew, but it is still a taming nonetheless.
He often has to leave, because his work as a scout and peacemaker means he must traverse great distances. They spend this time part, since she cannot leave her tribe’s settlement.
At the same time there is another woman int the story…a domesticated Civil War widow (played by Douglas’ real-life ex-wife Diana Douglas). She desires Douglas, but may have to settle for another man.
Despite obstacles, the bond between Douglas and Martinelli becomes stronger. It may be inferred theirs is a relationship without the benefit of a white man’s marriage. Yet they do enjoy a spiritual union, and Douglas loves her just as much as he loves the great outdoors.
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Post by topbilled on Sept 28, 2023 13:52:37 GMT
This neglected film is from 1934.
Autonomous method to end poverty
King Vidor made OUR DAILY BREAD in 1934 with help from Charlie Chaplin of all people. It is about people working together on a farm without corporate interference. Despite a series of setbacks, their efforts are rewarded at the end.
OUR DAILY BREAD was not unique subject matter for Vidor. He examined labor issues in other movies such as AN AMERICAN ROMANCE, about an immigrant who becomes an industrialist; and in THE FOUNTAINHEAD, an adapted story from a bestselling novel by Ayn Rand.
Vidor presents individuals struggling to maintain a strong work ethic as well as their integrity in a financially-motivated world. In some measure, these films are autobiographical, because Vidor himself saw Hollywood as a commercial environment that tended to devalue the spirit of progressive efforts.
The two main characters in OUR DAILY BREAD are recycled from a silent film that Vidor previously directed. The husband and wife at the heart of this story already appeared in MGM’s classic THE CROWD in 1928. A drama about the struggles of a long-suffering couple in an unforgiving capitalistic society, it starred Vidor’s wife Eleanor Boardman alongside James Murray.
The characters of Mary and John Sims were so popular with the moviegoing public and so meaningful to the director that he decided to reuse them in OUR DAILY BREAD six years later. However, this “continuation” was an independent production released through United Artists. Vidor secured funding with the help of Chaplin, one of UA’s founders.
By 1934 Miss Boardman had divorced Vidor and basically retired from acting. Meanwhile, Murray did not transition well to sound and became an alcoholic. Vidor tried to help Murray pull himself together and hire him for this role, but Murray’s drinking led to his death. As a result, the main roles are taken by Karen Morley, an MGM contract player at this time; and Tom Keene, who’s more associated with B westerns.
Miss Morley would be blacklisted in the early 1950s because of her involvement with the communist party. Many actors and directors that were blacklisted in the late 1940s and early 1950s, were part of an intellectual movement that was determined to expose the unfairnesses of the American economic system.
Extreme financial and social conditions during the Depression had affected the way Americans were forced to live. Farmers, especially those that had lost everything in the Dust Bowl, were trying to make sense of a system that had betrayed them and let them down.
Some became transient, traveling the country in search of better opportunities. Their situation still resonates with us today, because many Americans still live at or below the poverty level. The recent Oscar winner for Best Picture, NOMADLAND (2020), illustrates this.
Parts of Vidor’s picture might seem dated today, but it is still a compelling drama with strong central performances. The scene near the end where a collective group of farm laborers develop an irrigation technique is quite memorable. Their work ethnic and community spirit helps them prevail…it helps them create their own autonomous method to blot out the poverty and bleakness they’ve been experiencing.
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Post by Fading Fast on Sept 28, 2023 14:07:32 GMT
Our Daily Bread from 1934 with Karen Morley, Tom Keene, John Qualen and Barbara Pepper
Hollywood did love itself some communism in the 1930s or, at least, some squishy commune-socialist thinking.
In Our Daily Bread, Tom Keene and Karen Morley play a Depression Era married couple about to be tossed out of their apartment as Tom can't find a job. When an uncle offers them some farmland that neither he, nor the bank who now holds the farm's deed, wants, Keene and Morley move there intending to make it a working farm again.
These two city people don't know anything about farming, but then "Swede," played by John Qualen, and his family stumble along - they lost their farm in the Depression - and offer to help Keene and Morley get their farm up and running. That gives Keene his "big idea."
Keene figures he'll ask other unemployed people who know a trade and want to work to join in, share their labor and barter their skills. His sales pitch is the farm will be "a sorta cooperative community where money isn't so important. You help me; I help you."
As their numbers grow and the work begins, the men informally vote Keene as "boss" after they dismiss the idea of having a democracy (paraphrasing) because it's the thing that got them into this mess. Socialism, too, is rejected. The politics is obviously confused, but it seems the men instinctively want some kind of farming commune. For now, they settle on an ad hoc (hopefully) benign communal dictatorship.
From here, the movie has a Capraesque quality of down-and-out men regaining their self respect as they work for the commonweal. The few bad seeds who don't want to work or try to take more for themselves are easily tossed out or made to see the light: no pigs walk on their hind legs on this farm.
The women work hard too, but mainly at "women's work," as everyone pitches in selflessly to make the farm a go.
There's also a distracting side story about a floozy, played with verve by Barbara Pepper, nearly convincing Keene, who's a goofy "aw-shucks" style leader, to run away with her when things get tough on the farm. That seems like a Hollywood executive saying we need some sexual conflict in this one, as in reality, it doesn't fit Keene's character or the narrative flow of the movie at all.
The real conflict comes when it is getting near harvest and a drought hits. The crops start to die, causing the men and women to get angry and depressed, while Keene begins to lose faith. Yet his wife, Karen Morley, bucks him up. Morley has more brains and character in her pinky than her husband does in his entire body, but the movie was too busy fighting the supposed evils of private ownership to take on sexism too.
When all hope is lost, Keene comes up with the idea - an idea planted in his head by his wife that he rejected when she first said it days ago - to build an irrigation ditch from a stream a few miles away (the seed for Chinatown is planted). The inspirational climatic scene is men heroically digging a long ditch in happy unison to bring water to the crop to try to save the farm. But will the ditch get done in time and will it work?
Writer and director King Vidor let his inner communist rip in this one. As with most blatant political movies, then and now, the quality of the work suffers for the message. Keene is a weak leading man who couldn't inspire others to want to go on breathing, let alone do the backbreaking work of farming, especially all for the "common good."
Karen Morley and John Qualen do admirable jobs creating real characters, but the movie's obvious plot and constant messaging will wear most viewers down. With the country suffering through a brutal farm crisis and massive unemployment, many radical ideas were swirling around back then, resulting in clunky movies like Our Daily Bread, which for us today, are just interesting historical curios. |
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Post by topbilled on Oct 6, 2023 7:03:30 GMT
This neglected film is from 1944.
Murky waters
I suppose this isn’t a terrible film. After all, it has a plausible story, convincing atmosphere and capable performances from a skilled cast. But something about it seems cheap, that this was probably a project they all did in between other more important pictures.
Merle Oberon is the damsel in distress, somewhat miscast as a troubled femme whose family hails from the south…form New Orleans to be exact. Her parents recently drowned in a ship wreck, she herself was on that tragic voyage and narrowly escaped with her life. Before the end of this movie, she will almost die again, though the circumstances will be different.
In order to finish her recovery, both physical and psychological, she travels back to the family plantation where an aunt and uncle (Fay Bainter & John Qualen) supposedly reside with a friend of theirs (Thomas Mitchell). On her way to the old homestead, Oberon meets a congenial country doctor, is there any other kind, in the form of Franchot Tone. He takes an immediate liking to her and an interest in her continued recovery.
While settling in at the manse, Oberon meets an assortment of colorful characters. These include Mitchell’s companion (muted gay partner per the production code), played by creepy Elisha Cook. There are also a few African American servants, as well as an ex-caretaker (Rex Ingram) who tries to reclaim his job, but is murdered. As I said, plenty of atmosphere and mystery.
The sets are cheaply constructed and one can’t help but feel how much grander the drama would have come across if this hadn’t been an indy production but a bigger budgeted studio effort. Despite the obvious financial limitations, director Andre de Toth makes expert use of the cast who all do their valiant best, especially Bainter. Even Tone seems to care more about the type of characterization he’s providing than he usually does in his other Hollywood roles.
There are some nice countryside scenes where Tone is courting Oberon, in between her frequent displays of hysteria and paranoia. One particular sequence has him take her to a lively outdoor dance, populated by the locals. We believe she might truly be happy, if those imposters at home weren’t so hellbent on trying to kill her for her money.
The final climactic sequence involves a hostage crisis out on a boat in the bayou. It is there that Mitchell and the extremely deranged Cook attempt to off Tone and Oberon, who both know too much about Mitchell’s plan to seize control of family property. Cook perishes in quicksand, while the others must fend for themselves in the dark murky waters.
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Post by topbilled on Oct 21, 2023 7:00:05 GMT
This neglected film is from 1933.
Fixation with crime
BLOOD MONEY (1933) was made by Darryl Zanuck’s fledgling company 20th Century Pictures and released through United Artists. (20th Century Pictures merged with Fox in 1936.) It marked the feature film debut of Judith Anderson. This would be her only film in the 30s. She was quite busy on Broadway and on the London stage from 1934 to 1939, before returning to films in her most famous role as the housekeeper in REBECCA (1940).
Anderson’s character in BLOOD MONEY, ironically named Ruby Darling, is a vamp as well as a powerful underworld figure. In some ways, this role seemed like something Mae West would have played, except without the cutesy innuendo. Ruby operates her shady business out in the open, as much of it as she wants to be seen, running a nightclub while keeping her criminal brother out of trouble with the law.
When her brother (Chick Chandler) robs another bank and faces life in prison, she enlists the aid of her on again-off again lover, a corrupt bail bondsman named Bill Bailey (George Bancroft, the star of the picture). This relationship is complicated by the fact that Bill has become smitten with a society girl (Frances Dee) who is anything but wholesome. The girl ends up jilting Bill and marrying Ruby’s brother, which adds another layer of complex emotions to the proceedings.
What I like about this film is how deceptively simple it starts, then we become more and more engrossed in the deeper layers of corruption in which these people exist. We root for Ruby and Bill to get back together at the end, even though neither one is probably worth rooting for individually. But they do make a dynamic couple, with Ruby calling the shots.
Frances Dee’s character Elaine Talbart really goes to the dark side and has an unhealthy fixation with crime. A story like this could not have been filmed a year later after the production code was firmly in place!
There’s a great line of dialogue where Bill says, ‘The only difference between a liberal and a conservative is that a liberal recognizes the existence of vice and controls it, while a conservative turns their back like it doesn’t exist.’ In this regard, Ruby is the ultimate liberal because she has all the bad boys under her control. Elaine, who comes from a proper upper class family, is rebelling because men treat her as if she is unimportant.
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Post by topbilled on Nov 2, 2023 15:11:05 GMT
This neglected film is from 1944.
Love and pathos in the time of the Nazis
This is a poverty row production that was made by PRC and distributed by United Artists. Although it might have received the benefit of an increased marketing budget with UA pushing it towards an Oscar nomination for its scoring, that still does not mean it is anything more than what it really is: a low-budget affair. It starts with a good idea but lacks the overall polish required to draw us in and keep us fully engaged.
The biggest issue I have with VOICE IN THE WIND is the belabored pacing, and the fact that it is all so grimly forced. There is not one humorous supporting character, unless you call the operator of a murder boat (Alexander Granach) funny when he slaps a woman around on the dock. He implies he’s striking her the way he would imagine sharks might attack her if he tossed her into the water. Such treatment pales in comparison to the brutality suffered by the main character (Francis Lederer) at the hands of Nazis back in native Czechoslovakia.
Lederer is a pianist who ran afoul of the Third Reich when he performed a forbidden piece of music at a public concert. He was separated from his wife (Sigrid Gurie), then interrogated and beaten. On his way to a concentration camp which we never see because there wasn’t enough money to build such a set, he goes crazy and attacks the Nazi guards riding with him on a train. This somehow leads to his escaping with amnesia and winding up in Portugal.
We are not shown how he reached Lisbon since the story quickly jumps ahead. The focus abruptly shifts to Granach’s character, whose job it is with his brother (J. Carrol Naish) to smuggle refugees from Europe to the Caribbean island of Guadalupe where they’ll wait for a way to get into the U.S. Granach and Naish are extremely dangerous men, and Lederer’s fate is sealed when he travels to Guadalupe with them.
Meanwhile, Gurie has also fled to Guadalupe– great coincidence there– with a couple of friends (J. Edward Bromberg & Olga Fabian). She has no idea her amnesiac husband is just down the street at a bar playing piano. She hears a haunting tune, and it causes her to think of him. For his part, Lederer still has no idea what his own identity might be or that the wife he had been separated from is only a block away.
The sets are sparsely furnished, and we are supposed to realize how poor and desperate people in Guadalupe are. The stark environment is contrasted with flashbacks where we see Lederer & Gurie’s earlier married life in Prague, when they were more affluent.
There is so much cutting back and forth between the past and the present that if one is not paying close attention, it might get rather confusing. The filmmakers make the mistake of ending a flashback and returning to the present with a different character than the one remembering what had happened, which is ridiculous. Adding to the uneven nature of the film is the overuse of pathos in a story that could have been told with a tiny bit of hope.
The music and the acting is as somber as it gets. And of course, Gurie is dying of pneumonia to up the drama, and when she goes out in search of the hombre playing the music, she cannot cross a street without collapsing. Then Lederer comes along and before he can help her, he gets distracted by Naish who stabs him. This leads to the unhappy couple dying on the same bed together. It’s too much. But hey, at least they had Prague and delightful days on a park bench.
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Post by sagebrush on Nov 3, 2023 10:58:37 GMT
I agree that this film is a little "too much", but, darn it, I just love Francis Lederer!
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Post by topbilled on Nov 3, 2023 16:47:05 GMT
I agree that this film is a little "too much", but, darn it, I just love Francis Lederer! |
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Post by Fading Fast on Nov 15, 2023 14:34:43 GMT
(Note, Topbilled will be posting his review of I Cover the Waterfront later.)
I Cover the Waterfront from 1933 with Ben Lyon, Claudette Colbert, Ernest Torrence and Hobart Cavanaugh
The storytelling is a bit choppy in I Cover the Waterfront, but with only seventy-two minutes of runtime, it's not shy in its scope nor in its willingness to show the seedy elements of the tough docksides of San Diego.
Ben Lyon plays a cynical investigative reporter whose beat is the waterfront where he's always looking for a salacious angle or a corruption story. Working one night, he spies a nude swimmer, which turns into an opportunity to have a meet cute with a young girl.
The young girl, played by Claudette Colbert, is the daughter of one of the waterfront's big fishermen, played by Ernest Torrence. Being a precode, Lyon's interest in Colbert is for sex not love, but he disingenuously plays the part of the well-intentioned suitor in his quest.
Unknown at first to Lyon is that Colbert is Torrence's daughter. Lyon's been investigating Torrence for some time as he suspects him of being a smuggler. This makes the setup Lyon trying to canoodle the daughter of the man he's trying to expose as a criminal.
I Cover the Waterfront quickly, though, becomes a brutally graphic movie. We learn Torrence is smuggling illegal Chinese immigrants when he weighs one down with chains and throws him overboard to hide the evidence from an approaching Coast Guard boat. Jesus!
Later there is a fishing scene (see N.B. section below) that could give the most brutal scenes from Jaws a run for their money. If that isn't enough, there is a palliated bondage scene where Lyon shackles Cobert's hands and neck. It's is done playfully, but still.
The plot isn't complicated as we know, early on, Lyon will eventually really fall for Colbert, and that he's also going to expose her corrupt - outright evil - father. How the chips fall from that confrontation is, no spoilers coming, the climax of the movie.
Along for the ride is character actor Hobart Cavanaugh as Lyon's sort of sidekick. He goads Lyon along in his relationship with Colbert as he knows Lyon is falling in love before Lyon does. He also simply brings some much needed comic relief to this intense picture.
Lyon is good as the edgy reporter, but at times he plays it too brash. That was, though, the style of the era as actors like Lee Tracy and Pat O'Brien set the standard for the on-screen, fast-talking "I don't care about anything" cynical reporter.
Torrence is outstanding portraying the corrupt, tough, hard-drinking and hard-whoring (yup, and it's not hidden) captain with a, surprisingly, genuine soft spot for his daughter. He's Quint from Jaws without the buried compassion for most other human beings.
Colbert looks great as she's less stylized here than in most of her movies, but is still a bit miscast as she has too much innate sweetness to be a waterfront-rat kid who's now a young woman. Harlow or Ann Dvorak had the natural street cred for the role.
Visually, I Cover the Waterfront adumbrates film noir with its gritty scenes of crime and human depravity, hard drinking and blatant prostitution. Plus, the foggy waterfront sequences feel, at times, like a 1950s Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame effort.
Precode movies have a reputation for sexual salaciousness and there's plenty of that here (little shown, much alluded to). But as opposed to today's pictures, there's restraint, which forces the movie to be more than just a dressed-up soft porn film.
The true value of precodes, like I Cover the Waterfront, is their raw display of real life - corruption, drinking, sex, violence, heartbreak, murder - that would soon be tamped down in movies once the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced after 1934.
N.B. There is a shark-hunting scene in I Cover the Waterfront that is hard to believe didn't inspire Spielberg when he made Jaws. The shark attacking the boat, a futile firing of a gun at the shark and a desperate attempt to cut the harpoon ropes so that the shark doesn't pull the boat under, are all here as they are in Jaws.
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Post by topbilled on Nov 17, 2023 19:12:21 GMT
Thanks to Fading Fast for keeping things going, while I was a bit under the weather this week.
My review follows...
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