[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]
Black Legion (dir. Archie Mayo, 1937). Humphrey Bogart plays a machinist, embittered when a promotion he thinks should be his goes to a “foreigner.” And so he joins up with the hoods and robes of the Black Legion. Based on contemporary events and disturbingly of our own time, with warnings about “anarchists” and cries of “America for Americans.” The supporting cast includes Dick Foran (later a regular on Lassie), Charles Halton, Samuel Hinds, Ann Sheridan, each of whom, I have to say, is a better actor than Bogart. ★★★
*
Fright (dir. W. Lee Wilder, 1956). A chance YouTube find that we had to watch, because Nancy Malone. It’s her first movie role, and she does just fine in a bizarro story of past lives and hypnosis. Other viewers might want to watch to see Eric Fleming, who would soon star in Rawhide. A bonus: fans of The Honeymooners should watch for Frank Marth, branching out to play a serial killer. ★★
*
Night Must Fall (dir. Richard Thorpe, 1937). Look past the staginess (it’s from a play by Emlyn Williams) and you’ll find a deeply suspenseful story of a young psychopath (Robert Montgomery) who ingratiates himself with a wealthy invalid (Dame May Whitty) and her niece (Rosalind Russell). The principals are excellent, and if you know Whitty only as Hitchcock’s Mrs. Froy, you’ll be surprised by her performance here. And speaking of Hitchcock: this film would pair well with Shadow of a Doubt. There’s even a hint of the twinning that unites Uncle Charlie and his niece Charlie. ★★★★
*
[Source: IMDb.]
Devotion (dir. Curtis Bernhardt, 1947). Incredible: a movie about the Brontës that seems not to have mentioned the Brontës in its American advertising. Charlotte (Olivia de Havilland) and Emily (Ida Lupino) form an improbable love triangle with a fusty cleric (Paul Henreid, complete with his accent), as Anne (Nancy Coleman) is kept off to the side, her writing coming in for no attention. Branwell Brontë (Arthur Kennedy) is here in all his dissoluteness, and there’s an inchoate but unmistakable suggestion of incestuous desire at work in this reclusive family. Lupino to my mind is the star (her Emily is the ur emo-kid), but Sydney Greenstreet as William Makepeace Thackeray threatens to steal the show. ★★★
*
Riffraff (dir. J. Walter Ruben, 1936.) Love, labor trouble, and canned fish. Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow play Dutch and Hattie, fisherman and cannery worker. At key points the story requires the suspension of disbelief — painfully so. Joseph Calleia, Una Merkel, and Mickey Rooney provide some comic relief. The best performance by an actor I’d never heard of goes to J. Farrell MacDonald as a wise, compassionate fisherman known, rightly so, as Brains. ★★★
*
A Man Called Adam (dir. Leo Penn, 1966). Sammy Davis Jr. as Adam Johnson, a Miles-like musician (cornet, not trumpet, solos by Nat Adderley) living with a massive burden of grief, guilt, and racism. There’s a fair amount of malarkey here: Louis Armstrong has a small role as a has-been purveyor of “true jazz” who’ll soon be going back to “the rice fields” (what?); Cicely Tyson is a civil rights activist but seems to have nothing to do except hang out with Adam; and Frank Sinatra Jr. is a young wannabe following in Adam’s footsteps. I found more to appreciate in the moments between Adam and his pianist (Johnny Brown). Look too for Ja ’Net DuBois, Lola Falana, and Kai Winding — and Mel Tormé, who gets the last word. ★★★
*
The Devil and Miss Jones (dir. Sam Wood, 1941). A Capraesque fairy tale of happy times for labor and management. Charles Coburn shines as a cranky department-store owner who goes undercover in the shoe department to root out union organizers. Jean Arthur shines as a clerk who takes for him a fellow without money enough to afford lunch. Spring Byington, Bob Cummings, Edmund Gwenn, and S.Z. Sakall shine — and these working folks, they’re not so bad after all, eh, Mr. Capitalist Big Shot? ★★★★
*
Illegal (dir. Lewis Allen, 1955). I’m impressed again and again by Edward G. Robinson’s range as an actor. Here he plays a DA who unknowingly sends an innocent man to the chair, falls apart, quits, and ends up working for the mob, with startling results. Nina Foch plays Robinson’s prosecutorial mentee, in what might be her best role. Television fans will like seeing DeForest Kelley and Edward Platt. ★★★★
*
Fear in the Night (dir. Maxwell Shane, 1947). And speaking of DeForest Kelley, this film is his feature-length debut, with a strong assist from Paul Kelly. The premise: a man dreams he’s committed a murder and wakes up with objects from the scene of the crime in his possession. Two crucial questions: did he really kill someone, and more importantly, had we seen this film before? Alas, the eeriness diminishes as the story develops and we figured out that yes, we’d seen it before. ★★
*
Politics (dir. Charles F. Reiser, 1931). Wives and mothers take action to combat gangsters and bootlegging. I saw a few minutes on TCM and mistook the movie for a variation on Lysistrata, but the women’s strike — an effort to withhold “everything,” meaning “Yes, everything, parlor, bedroom, and bath” — is but a small element in the story. What’s here, really, is a vehicle for two great comediennes I’d never seen before: Marie Dressler as a mayoral candidate, Polly Moran as her pal and supporter. Another welcome presence: Karen Morley, whom I think I know only from King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread. ★★★
*
Mystery House (dir. Noel M. Smith, 1938). Ann Sheridan and William Hopper (Perry Mason’s Paul Drake) brighten this movie, in which one person after another dies in or near a hunting lodge. If you discovered that someone in your company had embezzled a fortune, you’d invite all suspects to a remote gun-filled lodge and promise to reveal the culprit’s identity there, wouldn’t you? What, you think that’s improbable? My favorite element in the film: the eerie motto above the fireplace, which comes from the novel that is film’s source. ★★
[“The End of all Good Hunting is Nearer than you Dream.” Mignon G. Eberhart, The Mystery of Hunting’s End. 1930. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.) William Hopper played clean, well-soaped Lal Killian.]
*
The Haunting (dir. Robert Wise, 1963). Based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, in which a small team of psychic researchers seeks the truth about a haunted house. Julie Harris and Claire Bloom (the latter in a Mary Quant wardrobe) give great performances as young recruits; Russ Tamblyn as heir to the house provides comic relief and a dash of sanity; Richard Johnson as team leader is a bit of a bore with his clipboard and pipe and talk about “man” and his superstitions. Davis Boulton’s cinematography adds all sorts of fear and uncertainty to the proceedings. Here’s a real mystery house, in an ultra-scary film that looks back to Poe and ahead to Stranger Things. ★★★★
Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
