[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]
A Letter for Evie (dir. Jules Dassin, 1946). It’s a poignant premise: secretaries at a uniform manufacturer tuck “Dear soldier” letters into outgoing shirts. When Evie O’Connor (Marsha Hunt) tucks her letter into a shirt with a 16½″ neck, she ends up corresponding not with the shirt’s hunky recipient, “Wolf” Larson (John Carroll), but with meek and mild Johnny McPherson (Hume Cronyn), who picks up Evie’s discarded letter and writes back. A Cyrano-like story of mistaken identities develops, with wonderful comic performances from Cronyn and Hunt. I knew from Pride and Prejudice that Hunt could be funny, but I didn’t know that Cronyn and Norman Lloyd (here, a prissy exec) were was a skilled comic actors. ★★★★ (TCM)
[As Matt Thomas has reminded me, Hume Cronyn has a fine comic role in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt.]
*
Whiplash (dir. Lewis Seiler, 1948). Improbable and really good: Dane Clark plays Michael Gordon, a painter smitten with Laurie Durant (Alexis Smith), a nightclub singer married to Rex Durant (Zachary Scott), a no-good nightclub owner and former boxer. Laurie sticks with Rex because of a botched operation by her brother, which left Rex paralyzed and using a wheelchair. Rex’s scheme to turn Michael into a boxer — Mike Angelo (get it?) — is in truth a scheme to get him killed and out of the way. Strong script, strong performances, lots of ambience, but a ridiculous number of punches. ★★★ (TCM)
*
The Postman Always Rings Twice (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1981). “Why remake a perfect movie?” Elaine asked. Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange turn Frank Chambers and Cora Papadakis into a feral pair. The sex scenes, which might have shocked some moviegoers in 1981, look farcical — nasty and brutish, though not short enough. And granted, the movie already runs over two hours, but the oddly truncated ending leaves Frank’s fate and the meaning of the title somewhere offscreen. ★★ (TCM)
[Here’s Lana Turner’s hilarious comment on this remake, which she admits she didn’t watch.]
*
The Postman Always Rings Twice (dir. Tay Garnett, 1946). We watched to be reminded how great this one is. John Garfield’s boyish energy (him with his itchy feet); Lana Turner’s iciness and reluctant vulnerability, Cecil Kellaway’s authority and cluelessness; Hume Cronyn’s sleaziness; Alan Reed’s (the voice of Fred Flinstone!) thugishness: everyone here is perfect. The best shots: the lipstick rolling along a floor — twice. What I’d like to see now is a movie about Cora’s life before the Twin Oaks. ★★★★ (YT)
*
From the Criterion Channel’s Pre-Code Horror feature
Thirteen Women (dir. George Archainbaud, 1932). Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy star in a bizarre story of one woman’s murderous revenge on thirteen sorority sisters. Occult themes dominate at first (with a swami who does horoscopes); racism emerges as a significant element later in the story. Trains and a trapeze act are among the settings for vengeance. It’s startling to see Myrna Loy as a persuasive vamp. ★★★★
Murders in the Rue Morgue (dir. Robert Florey, 1932). Greil Marcus speaks of the old, weird America; I think of movies such as this one as glimpses of an old, weird (imaginary) Europe — a world of castles, mad scientists, and damsels in distress. The mad scientist is Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi), who kidnaps women to use in his efforts to meld human blood and ape blood; the damsel is Camille (Sidney Fox), who attracts the interest of both Mirakle and his ape Erik. Lurid in the extreme, with some ghastly violence. Viewers who grew up with What’s My Line? might be startled to see Arlene Francis in her first movie role as “Woman of the Streets,” writhing on a cross in Mirakle’s laboratory. ★★★★
Murders in the Zoo (dir. A. Edward Sutherland, 1933). Lionel Atwill, looking like a crazed, waxen-faced Charles Boyer, plays a zoologist who’ll stop at nothing — nothing! — to keep rivals away from his wife (Kathleen Burke). This movie is a bizarre mix of corny comedy (from Charlie Ruggles as the zoo’s press agent) and unnerving violence: think alligators, snakes, and sutures. And when the cages open, things really get out of control. With Randolph Scott as the zoo’s resident scientist. ★★★★
[The other movies in this feature: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Svengali, Doctor X, Freaks, Island of Lost Souls, The Most Dangerous Game, The Old Dark House, Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Black Cat, The Raven. I’ve seen and can recommend them all with varying degrees of enthusiasm.]
*
A Letter to Three Wives (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949). Trouble in suburbia: three women receive a letter from the beautiful (and never seen) Addie Ross, announcing that she’s run away with one of their husbands. Extended flashbacks follow, giving the dynamics of three relationships: newlyweds just out of the Navy (Jeanne Crain and Jeffrey Lynn); a writer of radio serials (Ann Sothern) and a schoolteacher (Kirk Douglas); a woman living right by the railroad tracks (Linda Darnell) and a department-store owner (Paul Douglas). Tensions abound: money and manners (the frumpy, ill-at-ease Crain, her assured, affluent husband), money and culture (the lucrative work of writing popular dreck, the unlucrative work of teaching English), money and sexual ethics (a man who refuses to marry and a woman who refuses to be kept — or played). Commenting on events is catty Addie, voiced by Celeste Holm. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
Deception (dir. Irving Rapper, 1946). The director and the principals of Now, Voyager — Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains — in an ultra-posh post-war noir. Henreid is Karel Novak, a cellist, long thought dead in Europe, newly arrived in the States; Davis is Christine Radcliffe, a pianist and Karel’s one-time lover; Rains is Alexander Hollenius, a petulant composer and Christine’s keeper. When Hollenius writes a cello concerto for Karel to perform, things get complicated. Great sets (rooms as big as houses) and great scenes of performance, with Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s music, Henreid’s torso, and other people’s arms. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
Isle of the Dead (dir. Mark Robson, 1945). The inspiration: a late-nineteenth-century painting by Arnold Böcklin. The premise: during the Balkan Wars a Greek general (Boris Karloff) and an American newspaperman are stranded on an island with an odd assortment of residents and visitors, among them the caregiver (Ellen Drew) to an ill woman. The housekeeper believes that the caregiver is a vorvolaka, a malevolent undead being — and when the island is beset by plague, it begins to look as if she might be right. Next to The Seventh Victim, it’s probably the strangest Val Lewton production I’ve seen. ★★★★
*
The Fake (dir. Godfrey Grayson, 1953). A solid sender, with Dennis O’Keefe as Paul Mitchell, an American charged with protecting Leonardo’s Madonna and Child during its exhibition at the Tate Gallery (which plays itself in several scenes). Mitchell’s work-life balance becomes challenging as he tries to uncover an art-forgery ring while wooing museum employee Mary Mason (Coleen Gray). Strong Hitchcockian overtones, a score derived from Pictures at an Exhibition, and unexpected human-interest scenes — among them a conversation with a sidewalk chalk artist and a visit to a shelter for unhoused men. Eeriest moment: the three panels. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art (dir. Barry Avrich, 2020). A beautifully made documentary about sheer ugliness: the story of a prolific forger, a con artist, an emissary, and the gallery director who marketed the forger’s fakes of Motherwell, Pollock, Rothko, and other Abstract Expressionists (“Ab Ex,” as they say in the movie). Did the gallery director, Ann Freedman of M. Knoedler & Co., know that she was selling fakes? The documentary leaves little doubt that she should have known and did know. A story of art as valuable property, in which the only meaning of “appreciation” is rising prices for what one sells or buys — I mean acquires. ★★★★ (N)
[Anne Freedman is still selling art].
Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)
[“A Woman’s Plea.” Brooklyn Standard Union, November 10, 1923.]
