Twelve movies

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

Temptation (dir. Irving Pichel, 1946). Haute melodrama and Orientalism. Merle Oberon plays Ruby, a disreputable woman married to egyptologist Nigel Armine (George Brent). An affair with the dashing Mahoud Baroudi (Charles Korvin) makes for great danger for Ruby and her husband. Paul Lukas does well as a doctor and friend to Nigel, and it’s fun to see Charles Korvin (Carlos Sanchez, the mambo dancer in The Honeymooners) in another pre-TV role. ★★★ (YT)

*

Account Rendered (dir. Peter Graham Scott, 1957). Philandering Lucille Ainsworth (Ursula Howells) is found dead, and everyone’s a suspect: her husband, his banker, a would-be suitor, a painter, and a female friend. The movie’s strong point is its plotting: the details pointing to each person’s guilt are carefully chosen and made to count. The acting is sometimes weak, and the scenes between Howells and her painter-lover (John Van Eyssen) are unconvincing.But Honor Blackman shines as Lucille’s friend, a friend with a secret of her own. ★★★ (YT)

*

Manhandled (dir. Lewis R. Foster, 1949). A lurid title for a fine whodunit. Alan Napier (6′6″) is a “British author” who dreams of killing his philandering wife; Harold Vermilyea is the author’s tiny psychiatrist; Dorothy Lamour is the psychiatrist’s secretary; Dan Duryea is an one-man detective and collections agency and the secretary’s boyfriend; Art Smith is the police detective investigating the murder of the philandering wife; Sterling Hayden is an insurance man in search of the wife’s missing jewels. Tightly plotted, with plausible suspects, some clever camera work, and several surprises along the way. A bonus: the squalor of the Duryea apartment/office, with a hamster running on a wheel at all hours. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Immortal Story (dir. Orson Welles, 1968). In Macao, a wealthy merchant, Mr. Clay (Welles), seeks to make real a story he once heard of a wealthy old man who pays a sailor to impregnate the old man’s wife. So the merchant’s bookkeeper (Roger Coggio) is dispatched to find a cast, so to speak: the daughter (Jeanne Moreau) of Clay’s former business partner, and a Danish sailor (Norman Eshley). A surprisingly tender interlude in bed follows. With Clay seated, immobile, in a great chair, I take this short film (from a story by Isak Dinesen) to be an allegory of filmmaking: a director makes words into a picture. ★★★ (CC)

*

Across the Bridge (dir. Ken Annakin, 1957). “I want to tell you something: what you think is the end for me is often only the beginning”: so says Carl Schaffner (Rod Steiger) a German-born British businessman who flees the United States for Mexico after embezzling company funds and switches identities (don’t ask how) with another passenger on a train. But when Schaffner discovers whose passport he now carries, his troubles really begin. From a story by Graham Greene, this movie is a tour de force for Steiger,for a dog aptly named Dolores, and for the city of Lora del Rio, Spain, where the movie’s Mexico scenes were filmed. Is this movie as little known as I think it is? ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Impossible Years (dir. Michael Gordon, 1968). A truly, madly, deeply unfunny sex comedy. David Niven is Jonathan KIngsley, a professor of psychology with a teenaged daughter, Linda (Cristina Ferrare), whose wild behavior threatens his promotion (that behavior amounts to carrying a sign at a campus protest with “Free Speech” on one side and something on the other that we can only guess at, since no one will say it aloud). The movie is both prudish and prurient, with Linda’s virginity or lack thereof a preoccupation of her parents: Prof. Kingsley even checks his daughter’s status with her doctor, who’s played by Ozzie Nelson. As a document of a vanished white middle-American idea of comedy, it’s a valuable document (it was a box-office hit); as a movie, it’s dreadful. ★ (TCM)

*

The Soft Skin (dir. François Truffaut, 1964). An affair and its aftermath: Pierre Lachenay (Jean Desailly) is a public intellectual (writing books, editing a journal, lecturing in sold-out auditoriums), a married man having an affair with Nicole, a flight attendant (the ill-fated Françoise Dorléac). Pierre’s obsession with Nicole (haunting her airport), his professional obligations (dinners, meetings), his insistence on secrecy (this hotel, not that one), Nicole’s landlord, her concierge, her father: all impinge on the affair. And then there’s Pierre’s wife Franca (Nelly Benedetti). The movie maintains a nervous pace with quick cuts as it moves to a satisfying conclusion straight out of the movies. ★★★★ (CC)

[Google’s capsule description: “Heartfelt, sweet, and sentimental.” So much for artificial intelligence.]

*

Undercurrent (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1946). Dowdy Ann Hamilton (Katharine Hepburn), a scientist’s daughter, meets and marries dashing businessman and inventor Alan Garroway (Robert Taylor) and they live happily ever — no, only for a while. Because something’s not right: Alan’s sudden angers and odd lies spell trouble for this marriage. And that’s where Robert Mitchum comes in. A noirish gothic story with overtones of Jane Eyre and Rebecca, and great stuff even if you’re not a Katharine Hepburn fan. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Sky’s the Limit (dir. Edward H. Griffith, 1943). I’d call it a less Art Deco, less glamorous, more “American” vehicle for Fred Astaire, who plays a Flying Tiger pilot who appears to have done some singing and dancing. He meets and woos a newspaper photographer who also sings and dances (Joan Leslie), but he keeps his identity a secret, until — well, until. The musical numbers here (with songs by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer) are few, but they’re great, especially Astaire’s drunken bar-top dance to “One for My Baby.” I have to point out that this movie, as watched by the poet Alice Notley on late-night TV, became the stuff of her husband Ted Berrigan’s last poem, “This Will Be Her Shining Hour,” which may be found online in the November 1983 Poetry Project Newsletter: it’s domestic comedy at 4:00 a.m. ★★★★ (TCM)

[The song “My Shining Hour” runs through the movie.]

*

Undercover Girl (dir. Joseph Pevney, 1950). “I’m not giving up my uniform for an apron”: Alexis Smith is a rookie cop who goes undercover as a drug dealer to find the men who murdered her father, himself a crooked cop. Smith is fine playing two personalities, the rookie Chris Miller and the louche, mink-wearing Sal Willis, and Gladys George has a memorable turn as Chris’s unsuspecting informant Liz Crow, a once-glamorous underworld gal now dying in a hospital bed. The bad guys add value: Gerald Mohr as the cheaply suave kingpin, Edmond Ryan as a doctor (treating “internal diseases of men and women”), Mel Archer as a big silent guy with a neck brace, Royal Dano as a needy, seedy hood with pin-up girls on his ties. Many tense moments as Chris’s cover is nearly blown and, finally, blown. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (dir. Gordon Douglas, 1950). It’s a variation on White Heat, with James Cagney as Ralph Cotter, alias Paul Murphy, a psychopathic gangster whose killing spree begins as he escapes from a prison farm. This movie is full of colorful characters: the sister of a railroaded convict (Barbara Payton), a radio repairman who’s in way over his head (Steve Brodie), a rich girl (Helena Carter) who’s the disciple of a quack metaphysician (Herbert Heyes), and, especially, a dissolute lawyer (Luther Adler) eager to join in any criminal scheme.It’s amusing to see Ward Bond and Barton MacLane, cops in The Maltese Falcon, as cops on the wrong side of the law here. Best moments: Ralph pretending to be normal. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Growing Up Female (dir. Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, 1971). A short documentary with one girl and five women talking about their lives. To watch it is to recognize how far our culture has come and how far back some forces at work in our culture want to take us. A twelve-year-old talks matter-of-factly about how she can run as fast as or faster than some boys; a guidance counselor explains that a wife is responsible for all childcare and housekeeping; a cosmetologist declares that a woman’s needs are to be fulfilled only by her husband. And a mother of young children: “You get so that you think you’re gonna scream if you can’t talk to an adult.” ★★★★ (CC)

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