Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

Witness to Murder (dir. Roy Rowland, 1954). This film beat Rear Window to the punch, with an apartment dweller unable to convince the authorities about what’s happened across the way. The apartment dweller here is Barbara Stanwyck, a career woman (interior decorator) who cannot get the patriarchy (Gary Merrill) to take her seriously. George Sanders is the neighbor across the way, an exceedingly sinister neighbor whom the authorities should be taking a lot more seriously. The real star: John Alton’s cinematography, making everything inky black or brilliantly luminous. ★★★★

*

84 Charing Cross Road (dir. David Jones, 1987). A sweet movie, made from the correspondence between Manhattanite Helene Hanff and Marks & Co., an antiquarian London bookshop. The correspondence (collected in Hanff’s book 84, Charing Cross Road ), begins with a brief inquiry about buying books (Hanff is a writer without much money) and turns into a twenty-year relationship founded on good humor and generosity. With Anne Bancroft as Hanff and Anthony Hopkins as Marks employee Frank Doel. And if you’re wondering why Hanff never took advantage of Manhattan’s many used-book stores: she was an Anglophile. ★★★★

*

Quiet Please, Murder (dir. John Larkin, 1942). George Sanders plays a book thief and forger whose efforts pull him into ever more dangerous territory. Gail Patrick is his sales rep, so to speak. Almost all of the movie’s seventy minutes are set in a public library, at or after closing time, with lots of running around in the dark and a short explanation of the Dewey Decimal System. What this movie needs is much less of run-of-the-mill detective Hal McByrne (Richard Denning) and much more of Sanders, psychobabbling about masochism and the need to take risks and be punished. ★★

*

The Killer That Stalked New York (dir. Earl McEvoy, 1950). I wrote a post about what this movie shows us of a city’s response to the threat of pandemic. Here I’ll concentrate on the movie as a movie. I’m predisposed to like any semi-documentary, so I may be giving the movie more credit (i.e., stars) than it deserves. But it’s filled with Manhattan flavor and recognizable faces (Lola Albright, Jim Backus, Whit Bissell, Evelyn Keyes, Charles Korvin, Dorothy Malone, Art Smith). My favorite scene: the flophouse, with its brother and sister reunion. ★★★

*

Death of a Scoundrel (dir. Charles Martin, 1956). George Sanders as Clementi Sabourin, a Czech immigrant to the United States who builds a financial empire on the livelihoods and lives of those who stand in his way — and those who had no idea that they did. Yvonne De Carlo, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Coleen Gray provide excellent support as (just) three of the women in Sabourin’s life. My favorite moment: Sabourin’s sigh after a strenuous moment feigning remorse. I’d call Sabourin Trumpian, but Donald Trump** doesn’t even feign remorse. ★★★★

*

Man in the Dark (dir. Lew Landers, 1953). Edmond O’Brien as a criminal who undergoes brain surgery, removing his criminality and his memory, including his memory of where he stashed the $130,000 his cronies would like their share of. Aside from a strange episode at Santa Monica’s long-defunct Ocean Park Pier, the movie is inert, with cronies playing cards or administering beatings, and O’Brien failing to remember, followed by more cards, beatings, and memory failure. Fun to see Audrey Totter and — a surprise — Horace McMahon, later of Naked City, here on the wrong side of the law. Filmed with a 3-D Monster Chiller Horror Theatre gimmick, which explains the odd scenes in which a gun, a fist, a bird, a roller-coaster car move toward the viewer. ★★

*

Where Danger Lives (dir. John Farrow, 1950). One difficulty: accepting blasé Robert Mitchum as Dr. Jeff Cameron, or any doctor. A second: imagining that he’d ditch everything (and everyone) to run off with Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue). The picaresque misadventures that ensue help offset the lack of plausibility, as does Nicholas Musuraca’s cinematography. A good double-bill: this movie and They Live by Night (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1948). ★★★

*

A Life of Her Own (dir. George Cukor, 1950). Lily James (Lana Turner) leaves small-town Kansas for Manhattan, determined to make good as a model, and she does, and things get complicated. Fine performances from Louis Calhern, Tom Ewell, Ray Milland, and, just briefly, Ann Dvorak, as an older model whose career has ended: “Nobody can help anybody.” Bronislaw Kaper’s music, as Elaine pointed out, adds a Proustian element to the film. Strong stuff here: aging, disability, infidelity, suicide, and renunciation, with one moment of flinching at the end. ★★★★

*

The Raging Tide (dir. George Sherman, 1951). A strange premise: with all exits from San Francisco blocked, a gangster (Richard Conte) hides out after a murder by stowing away on a fishing boat, where he changes the lives of father and son fishermen (Charles Bickford and Alex Nicol). Shelly Winters has top billing in a fairly minor role as a gangster’s girlfriend; John McIntire is the liveliest presence on screen, as a grizzled recovering alcoholic. Some exciting if predictable moments during a storm at sea, but the human relationships here are just flat, and the ending improbable. Most inert moment: tea and fortune cookies. ★★

*

The Woman on the Beach (dir. Jean Renoir, 1947). Like The Guilt of Janet Ames (also from 1947), another story, at least in part, of war trauma and redemption. Robert Ryan is an everyman Coast Guard lieutenant, tormented by nightmares of shipwreck, looking forward to marrying the manager of a boatyard (Nan Leslie). Joan Bennett is a mystery woman who collects firewood from the scene of a shipwreck and invites the lieutenant in for tea. But surprise: she’s a partner in a hard-drinking, violent marriage to a painter (Charles Bickford) who has lost his sight — or has he? My favorite line: “I finally realized: you’re sick.” ★★★

*

Private Hell 36 (dir. Don Siegel, 1954). From Ida Lupino and Collier Young’s The Filmmakers: a super-stylish, low-budget story of murder and counterfeit money. Lupino is a singer in a bar; Steve Cochran and Howard Duff are cops. “Just like some cheap murder mystery,” says one character: no, not at all. You won’t make sense of the title into well into the story. ★★★★

*

Tomorrow Is Another Day (dir. Felix E. Feist, 1951). Steve Cochran’s finest hour, I’d say: he plays Bill Clark, a man just out of prison (he went in at the age of thirteen and is out after eighteen years) who meets up with taxi dancer Cathy Higgins (Ruth Roman). Complications ensue, and when the two go on the lam, the movie turns into a noirish The Grapes of Wrath. The chemistry between the leads, born of his desperation and her wary affection, offsets the improbable ending. Like They Live by Night and Where Danger Lives, this one is available in the “Lovers on the Run” collection at the Criterion Channel. ★★★★

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All OCA film posts (Pinboard)