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Post by Fading Fast on May 21, 2023 20:34:16 GMT
Another great choice, Topbilled. I loved it.
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Post by topbilled on May 21, 2023 20:40:11 GMT
Glad you enjoyed it.
I like how classic films benefit from the work of good character actors...in THAT BRENNAN GIRL we have Denny's ma, the priest, the rich couple who were scammed, the taxi driver, the landlady, the old maid sisters in the apartment building, the husband and wife neighbors, the social worker (female police officer), the guy who married Ziggy's mom, etc. They all help bring the story to life with their minor, yet still important, performances.
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Post by Fading Fast on May 21, 2023 20:42:44 GMT
Glad you enjoyed it.
I like how classic films benefit from the work of good character actors...in THAT BRENNAN GIRL we have Denny's ma, the priest, the rich couple who were scammed, the taxi driver, the landlady, the old maid sisters in the apartment building, the husband and wife neighbors, the social worker (female police officer), the guy who married Ziggy's mom, etc. They all help bring the story to life with their minor, yet still important, performances. Great list, they all added something. "The guy who married Ziggy's mom" did an outstanding job. The scene where he brings the telegram to Ziggy was powerful and he was excellent in it.
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Post by Fading Fast on May 22, 2023 13:09:16 GMT
That Brennan Girl from 1946 with Mona Freeman, James Dunn and June Duprez
If Hallmark today had confidence in its audience - and if it had talented writers, directors and actors - it would make movies like That Brennan Girl. It helps that the movie was made back when Hollywood still treated Christianity with respect and not seething contempt.
With elements of both film noir and spiritualism, That Brennan Girl defies easy categorization. Plus, star Mona Freeman doesn't fully convince you with the "bad girl" part of her split personality. Yet still, the result is an enjoyable and uplifting movie.
Mona Freeman plays the wonderfully named Ziggy (a riff on her real name Zenia), whom we meet in a flashback scene when she is fourteen and bringing her mom a Mother's Day flower. But her single mom is a gold digger, scammer and partier and not a "thank you for the flower" type of mother.
Freeman's hope for that mother-daughter moment is completely dashed when Mom, played by June Duprez, tells daughter Freeman to call her "sis," so that Mom can hide her age and increase her desirability to the oleaginous men in her world.
In this flashback, we also see that Freeman's innate decency is being beaten out of her by a mother who encourages her to grift and graft her way through life, especially after she introduces Freeman to a gangster friend of hers, played by James Dunn.
Dunn, himself, is a complex character. He is, yes, a gangster, but also an incredibly loving son (and not in a warped Cagney in White Heat way). He will evolve over time - a stint in jail plays a big role in that - as will his influence on Freeman.
We next flash forward several years to see Freeman is now a partier and low-level crook like her Mom. She then meets a genuinely decent man, a sailor. They quickly get married; he ships out; Freeman learns she is pregnant, but soon after, he gets killed in action.
Freeman's good old Mom, horrified that people might learn she'll soon be a grandmother, kicks Freeman out. Freeman, who never fully bought into the grifter life, tries to make an honest go of it as a single mom with her husband's modest insurance money, but life is tough.
Dunn, now out of jail and apparently reformed, reconnects with Freeman. He encourages her to stay on a straight path as he seems to care about her and her baby. Despite their large age difference, Dunn and Freeman have great screen chemistry.
The movie climaxes when Freeman's dual good-girl/bad-girl personality leads to a crisis where she has to choose one or the other direction in life now that the law and her baby are involved.
A symbolically baptismal-like walking to church in the rain and Dunn's new-found goodness help point the way, but Freeman, whose upbringing gave her a broken moral compass, will have to decide this one on her own.
Freeman is an engaging star and quite believable playing a good girl trying to escape a bad upbringing. Her slips into petty crime and the "nightclub" life, however, feel forced as, in these scenes, she looks more like a decent kid on a rumspringa than a true femme fatale.
Likable Dunn, too, is more believable as a reformed man than criminal. Be prepared, though, for director Alfred Santell laying it on a bit thick showing Dunn's devotion to his cliched-to-the-max Irish immigrant mom who is always stuffing her son full of corned beef and cabbage.
Despite its drawbacks, That Brennan Girl gives you the one thing almost all successful movies have, a character or two to root for as you can't help wanting good things to happen to Freeman and Dunn.
It helps, too, that Santell's directing keeps the action moving along at a good pace with smooth transitions. Almost all movies have bumpy elements to their stories, but as seen here, talented directing and acting can shepherd the picture over them.
Modern movies with an overlay of Christian spirituality are usually poorly produced efforts shuffled off to low-budget cable TV channels because, today, Hollywood is too cynical and "sophisticated" to believe in personal redemption through faith and individual effort.
That Brennan Girl shows that Golden Era Hollywood, though, could make these uplifting morality-tale movies inspiring but not embarrassing because it had the confidence in its audience to put in some real grit and struggle, one of the elements lacking in modern efforts.
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Post by topbilled on May 22, 2023 14:14:29 GMT
Excellent review Fading Fast. It's interesting that Dunn's performance reminded you a bit of Cagney, since I also thought about Cagney watching THAT BRENNAN GIRL and wondered how he might have played Denny Regan.
This line made me smile, I love how you phrased it:
"...her single mom is a gold digger, scammer and partier and not a "thank you for the flower" type of mother."
I read somewhere that Santell had a huge quarrel with Republic boss Herbert Yates about the construction of the tenement set. Yates wanted to save money and just build a lower level and an upper floor. He argued that when Freeman dropped the flower in the beginning, it would have the same impact falling down one flight as it would falling down multiple flights. But Santell was a stickler for detail and he insisted that no tenement building had just two stories, most had three or four stories. Santell ended up winning that argument. And in fact, his fluid camera use in that scene is highly lauded, as well as the later scene where the sailor witnesses the mother's behavior, when she comes in down below, while he and Freeman watch from the shadows above.
Another example of Santell's attention to detail: when Freeman needs to make a call at the night club and steps over to the phone booths and first meets the sailor, the writing on the glass panels of the phone booths is in both English and Chinese, suggesting the establishment is in the Chinatown area.
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Post by Fading Fast on May 22, 2023 14:39:48 GMT
Excellent review Fading Fast. It's interesting that Dunn's performance reminded you a bit of Cagney, since I also thought about Cagney watching THAT BRENNAN GIRL and wondered how he might have played Denny Regan.
This line made me smile, I love how you phrased it:
"...her single mom is a gold digger, scammer and partier and not a "thank you for the flower" type of mother."
I read somewhere that Santell had a huge quarrel with Republic boss Herbert Yates about the construction of the tenement set. Yates wanted to save money and just build a lower level and an upper floor. He argued that when Freeman dropped the flower in the beginning, it would have the same impact falling down one flight as it would falling down multiple flights. But Santell was a stickler for detail and he insisted that no tenement building had just two stories, most had three or four stories. Santell ended up winning that argument. And in fact, his fluid camera use in that scene is highly lauded, as well as the later scene where the sailor witnesses the mother's behavior, when she comes in down below, while he and Freeman watch from the shadows above.
Another example of Santell's attention to detail: when Freeman needs to make a call at the night club and steps over to the phone booths and first meets the sailor, the writing on the glass panels of the phone booths is in both English and Chinese, suggesting the establishment is in the Chinatown area. Thank you.
Those details, as you note, are critical to making a picture better. Some of them, especially on your first viewing, you only take in subconsciously, but they give you a richer experience that feels so much more real and rounded.
Santell is spot on about those buildings as, those are the buildings that kids just out of college with low-paying jobs like me lived in, in the '80s, as they had the most affordable apartments. Most of them are six stories high as that was the maximum height allowed for non-elevator buildings and, in NYC, with real estate always expensive, developers almost always build up as high as allowed.
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