Twelve movies

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

British Intelligence (dir. Terry Morse, 1940). It’s 1917, and British war plans are repeatedly undermined by a German master spy, identity unknown. The action centers on a cabinet minister’s household, whose residents include a French servant (Boris Karloff) and a British subject who was taken prisoner in Germany (Margaret Lindsay) — each of whom might be a German agent or a British double agent. What makes this movie a delight: the viewer’s sense of who might be what changes with every twist in the plot. My favorite bit: a secretary sending a message by typewriter, tapping out dots and dashes for the ears of an alert listener in an office waiting room. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Gangster (dir. Gordon Wiles, 1947). The plot is negligible: gangster Shubunka (Barry Sullivan) and soda-fountain owner Jammey (Akim Tamiroff) run the numbers on Neptune Beach (a stand-in for Rockaway Beach); rival gangster Cornell (Sheldon Leonard) moves in to take over. Shubunka is a mess: needy, even paranoid, in his relationship with nightclub singer Nancy (Belita), unwilling to listen to reason in his business affairs, and headed, it would appear, for doom. The reasons to watch: the movie’s striking cinematography (Paul Ivano) and over-the-top dialogue (Daniel Fuchs, in a screenplay from his 1937 novel Low Company: “I came up out of a sewer, out of the muck and mud: I came up by myself!”). With a deep cast of supporting players: Elisha Cook Jr., Fifi D’Orsay, Leif Erickson, John Ireland, Joan Lorring, Charles McGraw, Harry Morgan, Shelley Winters, and good old Murray Alper. ★★★★ (TCM)

[Another film from our household’s favorite year in movies.]

*

Cafe Hostess (dir. Sidney Salkow, 1940). Ann Dvorak is Jo, a hostess in Club 46, drinking and dancing and rolling suckers for their money. A visiting sailor instantly falls in love with Jo and wants to take her away from all that, but Jo’s suitor, a creepy house pianist (who looks like a Mark Trail villain), won’t stand for it. The more interesting story here is that of Annie (Wynne Gibson), who left work at the club but, having found her past impossible to escape, comes back. Annie’s story might have made a fine pre-Code picture, but the implausible love story, a strolling police sergeant, and absurd fight scenes dominate the proceedings. ★ (TCM)

*

From Headquarters (dir. William Dieterle, 1933). Aside from the flashback accounts of witnesses and suspects, it’s a murder mystery that takes place entirely at, yes, headquarters. Partly a police procedural, with fingerprints, punch cards, ballistic tests, blood and hair analysis, and an autopsy — called “the carving.” (Yes, it’s pre-Code.) Partly a love story, with George Brent as a police lieutenant and Margaret Lindsay as a love interest and suspect. Inventive camera work by William Rees (here spelled Reese) and the oversized presence of Eugene Pallette add interest. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Young Philadelphians (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1959). Paul Newman called it “just a glorified cosmopolitan soap opera,” but it’s a good one. Newman stars as Tony Judson Lawrence, a young lawyer intent on social and professional climbing, by any means necessary, and finally challenged to do the right thing at great risk to his reputation. Featuring a closeted husband (Adam West), a woman trapped in marriage to a much older husband (Alexis Smith, Otto Kruger), a hapless alcoholic (Robert Vaughn), and a beautiful young socialite (Barbara Rush) who watches Tony’s ascent. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Bewitched (dir. Arch Obler, 1945). Phyllis Thaxter (best known to me as Gil’s mom in The World of Henry Orient) is Joan, a bright, capable young woman, the kind who returns her library books on time. But inside her head there’s a voice — and it belongs to Karen (Audrey Totter), an alter-ego bent on sex and murder. Radioesque (the director was known for radio dramas), claustrophobic, psychologically dubious but nevertheless unnerving, almost David Lynch-like at times. With Edmund Gwenn as a psychiatrist and exorcist of sorts. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Chase a Crooked Shadow (dir. Michael Anderson, 1958). And talk about unnerving: one year after Kimberley Prescott’s (Anne Baxter) brother Ward died in an auto accident, a lookalike (Richard Todd) shows up at her Barcelona villa claiming to be Ward. And everything checks out, as the chief of police (Herbert Lom) confirms. What is Ward 2 after, anyway? Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who produced, appears at the story’s end asking viewers not to give away the plot, and I’m not going to cross Douglas Fairbanks Jr. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Red Shoes (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948). A deliriously beautiful (and beautifully restored) extravaganza in Technicolor. The plot isn’t much: Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) becomes the prima ballerina of The Ballet of the Red Shoes, in a ballet company run by dictatorial, possessive Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who demands that Victoria choose between dance and her husband, composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring). It’s no spoiler to say that the story will not end well. While the surreal Ballet of the Red Shoes is an extraordinary sequence in film, the final moments of its reprise might be even more remarkable. ★★★★ (CC)
*

Ransom! (dir. Alex Segal, 1956). When the eight-year-old son of wealthy David and Edith Stannard (Glenn Ford and Donna Reed) is kidnapped, David decides not to pay the ransom, a dangerous even if logical gamble. When he announces his decision on local television, angry crowds gather outside the Stannard house (there’s even an ice-cream truck) as members of the press try to push their way in. Ford is fine as a man in desperate circumstances, but Reed has little to do, spending much of the movie under enforced sedation (I’m reminded of how Athena puts Penelope is put to sleep while Odysseus disposes of the suitors). The larger problem with the movie is that there’s never any doubt that a happy ending is in the offing. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Art Spiegelman: Disaster in My Muse (dir. Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, 2024). A portrait of the artist, with copious examples of his work (hit Pause), from teenage comics to college-newspaper cartoons to Wacky Packages to underground comix to Maus and beyond. Disaster is indeed a thread that runs through Spiegelman’s work, from the Holocaust to September 11 (a famed New Yorker cover) to Gaza, the subject of a recent three-pager with Joe Sacco. Maus looms over everything, a monument that Spiegelman says he long tried to evade but now embraces as a warning in a time of renewed fascism. With R. Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Bill Griffith, Françoise Mouly (Spiegelman’s wife), and other artists. ★★★★ (PBS)

*

… One Third of a Nation (dir. Dudley Murphy, 1939). The title comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second inaugural address: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” The movie, adapted from Arthur Arent’s 1938 Federal Theatre Project play, begins as a grim depiction of tenement conditions, with bodies lining a street after a rickety building goes up in flames. An ambiguous love triangle takes shape, with a remarkably benevolent slumlord (Leif Erickson), a lovely tenement dweller (Sylvia Sidney), and a “kind of left” fellow (Myron McCormick) who serves as an cultural/economic conscience as the story develops. As in any number of pre-Code movies, there’s the possibility that someone will cross class lines, but you’ll have to watch to see whether that happens. ★★★ (TCM)

[When I watched, I thought of my paternal great-grandfather, who died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven: that was tenement life in the nineteenth century.]

*

Strange Interlude (dir. Robert Z. Leonard, 1932). An unusual pre-Code effort, a condensed and sanitized version of Eugene O’Neill’s play, with characters’ thoughts presented via voiceovers. The story is soap-operatic on a grand scale: Nina (Norma Shearer), who has lost her fiancé Gordon in the Great War, marries his earnest friend Sam (Earle Larimore) before learning that, unbeknownst to him, insanity runs in Sam’s family. Terrified of having a child with her husband, she turns to a dashing doctor (Clark Gable), and they (of course) fall in love. And lurking about at all times is Charlie (Ralph Morgan), another war vet who’s long pined for Nina. The play, in nine acts, ran five to six hours; the film runs a more kindly 1:49. ★★★ (TCM)

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

[Anyone who watches Strange Interlude thereby earns the right to watch Groucho Marx having a strange interlude in Animal Crackers.]