Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. One slight spoiler for Morocco, but only if you have no idea how movies work.]

Dark City (dir. William Dieterle, 1950). A group of gamblers — Charlton Heston, Ed Begley, Jack Webb (and Harry Morgan as a go-fer) — take a gullible businessman (Don DeFore) for all he has, and catastrophe ensues, for the businessman and nearly everyone else. Some great camerawork (Victor Milner) during the poker scenes, which feel like they’re from a different movie. Far too much time goes to Lizabeth Scott’s singing. That and a ditzy ending mar what might have been a superior B noir. ★★

*

Of Human Bondage (dir. John Cromwell, 1934). A congenital disorder (a club foot), self-abasement, and the prospect of emotional freedom. Bette Davis steals the picture as Mildred Rogers, a cruel waitress who becomes the object of medical student Philip Carey’s (Leslie Howard) obsession. All these years later, Mildred’s descent into poverty and tuberculosis is still shocking to behold. You’ll have to watch to see if Philip can break free. ★★★★

[Bette Davis as Mildred. Click for a larger view.]

*

Our Town (dir. Sam Wood, 1940). I’ve never seen or read Thornton Wilder’s play, and I was not sure what to expect: I knew Grover’s Corners, stage manager, life and death, coffee, and that was about all. This adaptation, with a great cast, led by William Holden and Martha Scott, and a score by Aaron Copland, departs significantly from the play (as I now know), but it’s still enough to undo an audience. I’d think of it as a Norman Rockwell Christmas Carol. Daily life in a New Hampshire town, set against a backdrop of eternity. ★★★★

*

Our Very Own (dir. David Miller, 1950). Ann Blyth plays Gail Macaulay, a high-school senior with everything — doting parents (Donald Cook and Jane Wyatt, the latter of whom already seems to be in Father Knows Best), a sweet kid sister (Natalie Wood), a television-installing boyfriend Chuck (Farley Granger), and a best friend (Phyllis Kirk) with her own Cadillac convertible. But Gail also has a jealous sister (Joan Evans) who’s shameless in her plays for Chuck, and who discovers and reveals the truth about Gail’s identity: she’s adopted. That revelation takes Gail on a journey to the wrong side of the tracks (literally) to meet her birth mother Gert (Ann Dvorak). This movie is as much about the American caste system as it about adoption, and the brave line-crossing we see in, say, The Best Years of Our Lives (ex-soda jerk Fred and banker’s daughter Peggy) is not to be found here. ★★★

*

Morocco (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1930). It’s the one in which Marlene Dietrich wears top hat, white tie, and tails, and kisses a woman. When loutish Foreign Legionnaire Gary Cooper tries on that top hat, is he cross-cross-dressing? Either way, it’s dapper Adolphe Menjou who ends up humiliated at the edge of the desert. I can admire the lavish interiors and the lengthy tracking shots, and I like the bizarre ending, but the erotica and exotica — no pun intended — drag. ★★★

*

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (dir. Travis Wilkerson, 2017). A white filmmaker explores a piece of his family’s history: his great-grandfather’s point-blank and unpunished murder of a Black man in Dothan, Alabama in 1946, an incident that opens onto a larger narrative of racial, sexual, and domestic violence. In the hands of, say, PBS’s Frontline, this story would make for compelling storytelling. But this documentary is disappointing, with a ponderous, repetitive, whispered narration; odd, intrusive effects (a backwards recording of Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit,” solarized (?) footage from To Kill a Mockingbird, noises that the subtitles call “ominous clacking”); and digressions that seem designed as padding. I think this is the first documentary I’ve seen whose style has been influenced by true-crime podcasts — and not for the better. ★★

*

The Sandpiper (dir. Vincent Minnelli, 1965). Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton star: she as Laura Reynolds, a painter and non-believer living with her young son in Big Sur; he as Dr. Edward Hewitt, prim priest and headmaster of the Episcopalian boarding school for boys to which a judge sends Laura’s wild child. The suggestions of beat culture (galleries, guitars, Chianti) are amusing; the conversations between Laura and Edward may have once struck an audience as deep. Charles Bronson as a Kerouac type, Robert Webber as a jilted lover of Laura’s, Eva Marie Saint as Edward’s prim wife, and Big Sur as itself add some interest. My favorite line: “We made love, even in motels, God help me.” ★★

*

Children of Paradise (dir. Marcel Carné, 1945). Paris in the 1830s: one woman, Garance (Arletty), a courtesan and actress, and four men who love her: a mime, Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault); a dramatic actor, Frédérick (Pierre Brasseur); a criminal and playwright, Pierre-François (Marcel Herrand); and a noble, Édouard (Louis Salou). So it’s a story of loves and losses, set in a world of performance, spoken and silent, with the line between art and life breaking on more than one occasion. The greatest moments: Baptiste, Baptiste, Baptiste. With a screenplay by Jacques Prévert. ★★★★

[Jean-Louis Barrault as Baptiste. Click for a larger view.]

*

Once Upon a Time: Children of Paradise (dir. Julie Bonan, 2009). A short documentary with archival interviews and commentary from film historians. Of particular interest to me: sketches for the movie’s sets. The backstory — of a movie made during the Nazi occupation, and meant to be the first post-occupation hit — is at many points plainly bizarre. I don’t like faulting a film on technical grounds, but this one needs more legible subtitles and more frequent captions to identify speakers. ★★★

*

Caught (dir. Max Ophuls, 1949). Robert Ryan plays Smith Ohlrig, a maniacal tycoon (draw your own comparisons) whose wife Leonora, an aspiring model (Barbara Bel Geddes), has become an isolated prisoner in his Long Island mansion. When Leonora leaves and applies for a job as a receptionist on the Lower East Side, she meets Dr. Larry Quinada (James Mason) and finds new possibilities of self-determination. Excellent performances all around: Ryan (a most gentle man in real life) as a brutal spouse; Bel Geddes as a naïve young woman enamored of wealth; Mason as a decidedly awkward lover. An unexpectedly appropriate movie to see after reading Proust’s The Prisoner and The Fugitive. ★★★★

*

The Men (dir. Fred Zinneman, 1950). Marlon Brando and Teresa Wright star: he’s a paraplegic veteran struggling to come to terms with his disability; she’s the patient woman who hopes, still, that they’ll marry. Wright is one of my favorite actors, but she and Brando have little chemistry; Eva Marie Saint would have done far better in this role. The most compelling performance is by Everett Sloane as a hospital doctor who treats his patients and their disabilities with tough honesty. Watch for Arthur Jurado (a paraplegic veteran himself) as a son determined to get a house for his mother and siblings, and Jack Webb as an intellectual whose dim sense of his own worth leads him to take up with a dim carhop. ★★★★

*

The Library: A Family Affair (dir. Thomas Gilbert Brown, 1952). Bop records, dress patterns, magic tricks, government pamphlets, telephone directories, “books of all kinds,” and the Remington Rand Photocharger: the Brooklyn Public Library has them all. Watch as Mr. Green finally learns what the rest of his family knows: that a public library is a cultural treasure. As the poem “In Brooklyn Everybody Reads” puts it, “With reading for pleasure and reading for profit, / How can the people of Brooklyn lay off it?” It amazes me to see how much this Brooklyn looks like the Brooklyn of my early childhood a decade later, with kids dressed like little ladies and gentlemen and wearing winter hats with earflaps. ★★★★

[Sources: the Criterion Channel, TCM, and YouTube.]

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All OCA film posts (Pinboard)