Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, TCM, YouTube.]

Hi-Jacked (dir. Sam Newfield, 1950). A truckdriver on parole finds himself under suspicion when his cargo of mink coats is hijacked. As trucker Joe Harper, Jim Davis (later of Dallas) looks like a cross between Burt Lancaster and Elvis Presley, but he unmemorable on the screen. Sid Melton provides odd comic moments in a movie that ends up with four or five people dead. What keeps this movie from a one-star rating: diner scenes with Iris Adrian as a waitress with an endless supply of snappy patter. ★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Method Acting feature

The Pawnbroker (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1964). “Sol Nazerman, the walking dead,” shouts a fellow Holocaust survivor. Nazerman lost his wife, his children, his friends, and his ability to feel for anyone, as his management of his East Harlem pawnshop makes clear. His life in the present is mostly a matter of his dealings with a lone employee (Jaime Sánchez), who sees him as a mentor, and a crime king (Brock Peters), who uses the pawnshop for money laundering. Into this present comes the insistent intrusion of the past, in brief or not-so-brief flashes on the screen, all of which make me think that post-traumatic stress is never truly post. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Strongroom (dir. Vernon Sewell, 1962). Relatively short and totally gripping: three aspiring young criminals lock over a just-closed bank and lock the manager and secretary into a strongroom. One of the robbers is supposed to leave the keys in a phone booth and notify the police, but something goes wrong, leaving the victims to be found — somehow — or else die a slow death over a holiday weekend. There’s meaningful dialogue between manager and secretary (the locked-in-a-room trope), but the real story here is that of the keys, with strong elements of due diligence and devotion to duty. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Outside the Wall (dir. Crane Wilbur, 1950). Richard Basehart is an interesting player in the world of noir: he didn’t have the looks for it, and here, as in Tension (1949), he plays something of a sad sack who rises to the noirish occasion. As Larry Nelson, he’s a man of thirty, pardoned after fifteen years in prison, inexperienced in all ways of the world outside prison. He seeks tranquility in a low-paying job at a sanitarium but finds himself in complicated trouble with vicious gangsters (Harry Morgan, for one) and beautiful nurses (Dorothy Hart and Marilyn Maxwell). Some great on-location footage makes the movie, here and there, a Philadelphia version of The Naked City. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Sin of Nora Moran (dir. Phil Goldstone, 1933). Pre-Code in its frankness, but postmodern in its structure. Nora (Zita Johann) is sentenced to be executed for a murder she did not commit. The interest here comes from the narrative, which presents the movie’s story via montages and flashbacks that make it difficult to know what has happened when. This obscure (I think) movie deserves to be better known. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Blind Date, aka Chance Meeting (dir. Joseph Losey, 1959). An affair between a young painter (Hardy Krüger) and an older married woman (Micheline Presle) goes wrong, and the painter finds himself the prime suspect in a murder. If it had been made a steamy quarter-century later, it might have been an erotic thriller. But it’s just fine as is, though a bit slow-moving. There’s a Hitchcock connection, a strong one, but I can’t name the movie without giving everything away. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Unseen (dir. Lewis Allen, 1945). What a difference a year makes: this movie is a sequel of sorts to Allen’s The Uninvited, but it’s not nearly as good. Here we have a young governess (Gail Russell of The Uninvited) caring for the young children of a grumpy windower (Joel McCrea) in a big old house right next to a big old closed-up house with mysterious goings-on. I appreciated the overtones of The Turn of the Screw, but there are zero chills, zero thrills, and the story is painfully implausible. ★★ (YT)

*

Circle of Danger (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1951). This movie would seem to have every advantage: a great director, fine writing and cinematography (Philip MacDonald, Oswald Morris), a capable cast, led by Ray Milland, and a title that promises (à la Ministry of Fear) some satisfying noir. But where is the danger? The story is reminiscent of The Third Man: an American (Milland) comes to post-war England to find out the truth about what happened to his brother, a volunteer with British forces who was shot in the head, apparently by one of his fellow soldiers. On the way to the quick, anti-climactic ending, too much time is devoted to a baffling courtship that pairs Milland and a writer of children’s books (Patricia Roc) who’s always put out about his showing up late and who really needs to get over herself. ★★ (YT)

*

The Seventh Veil (dir. Compton Bennett, 1945). First there was The Seventh Victim (1943), then The Seventh Cross (1944). This film is far less compelling, the story of a concert pianist, Francesca (Ann Todd) controlled by her second cousin, Nicholas (James Mason). When Francesca attempts suicide, a psychiatrist (Herbert Lom) steps in to plumb her past with the aid of narcosis and remove the veils that hide the secrets of the mind. Some great concert scenes (I watched always afraid that something would go wrong), but the pace is slow and the movie doesn’t even try to justify its ending — an ending that made us yell at the TV. ★★ (YT)

*

Spy Hunt (dr. George Sherman, 1950). A crazy premise: a vital piece of microfilm is hidden in the collar of one of two black panthers on a train traveling from from Milan to Paris. When the train is sabotaged and the freight car derails in the Alps, the panthers escape, the hunt is on, and a small group gathers in an Alpine inn run by a kindly doctor (Walter Slezak): the animals’ handler (Howard Duff), a journalist who wants a story (Märta Torén), a big-game hunter, an artist who wants to sketch the panthers, and another journalist. But how many of these folks are enemy agents? Torén’s coolness under pressure, Irving Glassberg’s cinematography, two truly menacing beasts, and a suspenseful scene with gunpowder make for a superior film. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Catered Affair (dir. Richard Brooks, 1956). It’s a Marty world, with a family living in a Bronx apartment: a cabdriver father (Tom Hurley), his wife Aggie (Bette Davis), children Jane and Eddie (Debbie Reynolds, Ray Stricklyn), and Aggie’s brother Uncle Jack (Barry Fitzgerald). The problem at hand: Jane is marrying a fellow (Rod Taylor) from a family a greater means, and the young people want a simple wedding, but Aggie is determined that it be a grand affair. I wanted to like this movie much more than I did: Borgnine, Davis, and Reynolds are fine (even if Reynolds makes an improbable daughter), but Gore Vidal’s screenplay (from Paddy Chayefsky’s play) is condescendin’, Barry Fitzgerald’s Irish shtick is insufferable, and the saccharine ending makes me squirm. ★★ (TCM)

*

One Way Street (dir. Hugo Fregonese, 1950). The film begins with lines from an unidentified “Song of a Fatalist”:

Waste no moment, nor a single breath
In fearful flight from Death;
For no matter the tears that may be wept,
The appointment will be kept.

The plot is simple and compelling: a doctor (James Mason) serving a crime boss (Dan Duryea) and his henchmen makes off with the boss’s girlfriend (Märta Torén) and loot. The couple flee to rural Mexico and make a new life, with the doctor as a venerated healer of humans and horses — but there’ll be trouble ahead, or behind. Overtones of “The Appointment in Samarra,” Out of the Past, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre run through the story. ★★★★ (YT)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)