[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]
Inner Sanctum (dir. Lew Landers, 1948). With no obvious relation to the radio drama: it’s a B-movie that starts weird — strangers on a train, one of whom seems to be a seer (Fritz Leiber) — and it gets weirder quickly. A man kills his fiancée, stashes her body on an outgoing train, and takes a room in a boarding house, where he’ll be stuck as long as a nearby river is flooded. Arch heterosexual dialogue, a vague gay subtext, and Billy House as a newspaper reporter, editor, and publisher. The poor prints available on YouTube make it easy to give up on this one, but the twist at the end is worth waiting for. ★★★
*
Slander (dir. Roy Rowland, 1957). Steve Cochran is H.R. Manley, the dapper publisher of the scandal rag Real Truth, “the only magazine that dares to publish all of it!” — which means that the movie should be titled Libel, but no matter. When Manley pressures TV-puppeteer Scott Martin (Van Johnson) to reveal some old dirt about a famed stage actress or face the publication of a scandal from his own past, events begin to move in dark and dangerous directions. Marjorie Rambeau steals the movie as Manley’s agonizing, hard-drinking mother. This modest effort would pair well with the much splashier Sweet Smell of Success. ★★★
*
Libel (dir. Anthony Asquith, 1959). A glimpse of a television in a London bar prompts a WWII veteran (Paul Massie) to investigate the identity of Sir Mark Loddon (Dirk Bogarde), a fellow POW. Is “Sir Mark” an impostor who’s taken a dead man’s place? Brilliant performances from Bogarde (you’ll have to watch to understand), and from Olivia de Havilland as Lady Margaret, Sir Mark’s uncertain wife. The ending is an utter surprise. ★★★★
*
The 13th Letter (dir. Otto Preminger, 1951). In a small Quebec town, a handsome new doctor (Michael Rennie) is receiving threatening letters accusing him of an affair with the young wife (Constance Smith) of an older doctor (Charles Boyer). Other townspeople are receiving threatening letters too. Is a bedridden woman (Linda Darnell) with eyes for the young doctor “the scarlet pen”? A moody, northern noir. ★★★
*
Dangerous Afternoon (dir. Charles Saunders, 1961). Louisa (Nora Nicholson) runs a boarding house for friends who have fallen on hard times: all older women, all criminals. A quirky, funny, not-funny story of blackmail, murder, and family secrets. Louisa’s niece Freda (Joanna Dunham), Freda’s fiancé, the couple’s friends, and a record player give us a glimpse of a non-criminal younger generation. And dig the shopping scenes that begin the movie. ★★★★
*
Scarface (dir. Howard Hawks, 1932). Almost ninety years later, this pre-Code story of bootlegging and unhinged gangland violence remains shocking: it’s not every movie that has thugs with machine guns going from hospital room to hospital room looking for their target. Paul Muni chews up considerable scenery as the Capone-like Tony Camonte, a feral lieutenant who strives and succeeds in becoming the boss of all things Chicago. More compelling performances come from Ann Dvorak as Tony’s young sister Cesca, Karen Morley as Poppy, the object of several criminals’ interest, George Raft as a coin-flipping henchman, and Vince Barnett as an illiterate secretary whose efforts to master the protocol of telephone messages add comedy and pathos to the proceedings. My favorite moment: Ann Dvorak dances, and George Raft — known as a gifted dancer — can’t dance back. ★★★★
*
Midnight (dir. Mitchell Leisen, 1939). A wonderful comedy, with a screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder and a generous application of the Lubitsch touch. Claudette Colbert stars as Eve Peabody, American showgirl, down and out in Paris. Through a series of fortunate events, she assumes the identity of “Baroness Czerny,” a Hungarian noble, and agrees to help John Barrymore break up his wife’s (Mary Astor) affair with a dashing young man (Francis Lederer). Meanwhile, a genuine Hungarian, taxi driver Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche), who fell instantly in love with Eve when he gave her a ride, is searching the city to find her. The funniest scene: breakfast and its complications. ★★★★
*
Strange Impersonation (dir. Anthony Mann, 1946). The director’s name was the lure here. The plot of this B-movie is sheer insanity: a “girl scientist,” as the newspapers call her, at work on a new anesthetic (Brenda Goodrich), a frenemy in the lab (Hillary Brooke), a schlub of a fellow scientist (William Gargan), a sketchy dame seeking payback for a minor traffic accident (Ruth Ford), and, around the edges of things, an ambulance chaser’s ambulance chaser (George Chandler, Uncle Petrie of Lassie). Elements of the story look forward to Dark Passage, but the ending here is a strange disappointment. My favorite scene: the clash of cultures in the apartment above Joe’s Bar and Grill. ★★★
*
Address Unknown (dir. William Cameron Menzies, 1944). Paul Lukas and Morris Carnovksy (eerily resembling Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth) are partners in Schulz–Eisenstein Galleries, San Francisco and Munich. When Martin Schulz (Lukas) moves back to cosmopolitan Munich, he has no idea of the futures that await him, his family, and his partner’s daughter, an aspiring actress (K.T. Stevens). A chilling picture of compromise and resistance as a totalitarian order takes shape, with appropriately stark cinematography by Rudolph Maté. From a short epistolary novel by Katherine Kressmann Taylor that’s now on my to-read list. ★★★★
*
La Cérémonie (dir. Claude Chabrol, 1995). Invite friends to pick a movie from the Criterion Channel, and you never know what you’re going to get. This movie is unsettling from its first minutes, when spooky music accompanies the arrival of a new maid at a remote country manor. At the center of the drama: the maid (Sandrine Bonnaire), the lady of the house (Jacqueline Bisset), and a free-spirited postmistress (Isabelle Huppert). It’s easy to guess one secret early on: others are unfathomable. There’s a final surprise as the credits roll. ★★★★
*
The Arnelo Affair (dir. Arch Oboler, 1947). Further proof that not every movie from this year is a absolute winner. Frances Gifford is a neglected wife with a workaholic-lawyer for a husband (George Murphy); John Hodiak is the vaguely Vincent Price-like nightclub owner who complicates their marriage. It’s a bit like Brief Encounter (retrospective voiceover) with a murder added and most of the passion subtracted. Eve Arden adds comic relief and pizzazz as an arch dress designer: “Just give me a plate of bacon and eggs, a full pocketbook, a chinchilla coat and a man, and I’m happy.” ★★
*
Another Man’s Poison (dir. Irving Rapper, 1951). From a play by Leslie Sands. Bette Davis, playing a mystery novelist living in a great English country house, has problems on her hands: a dead husband to dispose of, a criminal (Gary Merrill) now living with her and posing as her husband, and the impending marriage of her young lover to her secretary. Starts well, with good performances from (the married) Davis and Merrill, but the story becomes mired in contrivance and staginess. It’s the kind of story in which the horse’s name is Fury. ★★
Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)
[Sources: Criterion Channel, TCM, YouTube.]
