1945 - A GAME OF DEATH, decent remake of "The Most Dangerous Game."

A Game of Death is a remake of The 1932 film The Most Dangerous Game which was in turn based on a short story by the author Richard Connell.  The story is a very entertaining melodrama about a famous hunter Don Rainsford stranded on a remote island who becomes they prey of a nutcase hunter Erich Kreiger who is bored with killing animals and has resorted to stalking and killing humans instead.  So the chase is on in this fast paced film.

Robert Wise directed this version after working with producer Val Lewton on his legendary series of horror films.  It's competent and decently made but I miss the flamboyance of the earlier film with it's over the top Max Steiner film music and it's really fast paced structure.  It's now a film making legend that The Most Dangerous Game was simultaneously filmed on the same jungle sets as King Kong with several of the King Kong actors primarily Faye Wray and Robert Armstrong in roles. English actor Leslie Banks in a very flamboyant performance was the crazy hunter who in this film is called Count Zaroff.  It's a very fun 1930's film.

 

The remake is not without it's merits, John Loder plays Rainsford and he gives a good competent performance.  Playing the madman hunter Erich Kreiger is the actor Edgar Barrier who was a member of Orson Welles' Mercury theater.  He may not have been as over the top as Leslie Banks but he gets the job done as a creepy menacing character.

 

This man hunting man plot has been so durable that it's been filmed many times.  I originally read this story in high school although I suppose it's not exactly a  P.C. kind of story anymore.

 The screenplay was by Norman Houston, the running time is an efficient 72 minutes.

1945 - CHILDREN OF PARADISE, classic French film on the big screen

Children of Paradise considered the greatest French film ever made is on some sort of 80th anniversary tour courtesy of Criterion.  I viewed it at a revival theater on a large screen with an almost full house.

The film is a favorite of serious film scholars and buffs.  It was filmed in what was then called the classic French film tradition none of this new wave jump cut stuff.  Directed by Marcel Carne and just as importantly written by Jacques Prévert a poet and screenwriter who at this time was a major collaborator with Carne.

This film was a large scale production which was amazingly filmed over a two year period during the German occupation of France during World War II.  

 

The story is a simple one, four men love an enigmatic woman in the 1800's. Set in the world of theater with most of the focus on a performance artist who is a talented and popular mime.  In fact there are two extended sequences where he does his prancing mime thing.

Children of Paradise is considered the pinnacle of "romantic fatalism."  The performances are at a high caliber and the dialog certainly has a very poetic quality to it even after being translated with subtitles. 

The running time is an epic 190 minutes.

1945 - ISLE OF THE DEAD, horror film from producer Val Lewton

The producer Val Lewton known for his atmospheric "B" horror films for RKO studios in the 1940's was coming towards the end of his run.  Lewton was an extremely creative producer who when stuck with small budgets and at times lurid titles forced upon him from the studio, could turn something into nothing with clever writing and atmospheric noirish photography.  Lewton was responsible for giving talented but relatively unknown filmmakers like Jacques Tourneur,  Robert Wise and Mark Robson opportunities to direct which helped launch their careers.

Boris Karloff who was basically stuck in the horror genre had good parts in Lewton's pictures with The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam.  Lewton was a very influential figure in the horror genre and his influence can still be found on many horror films produced today.

Isle of the Dead concerns a group of people stuck on an island during the plague.  One of the group begins to believe that they are being haunted by a spirit called the "Vrykolakas." an undead creature. The film focuses on the interactions of this group while balancing the expected scary stuff the studio was looking for.  Lewton and his writer Ardel Wray mostly focused on character development which was rather unusual for these types of films.  A good film.

 

The film runs a compact 72 minutes.

1945 - A WALK IN THE SUN, quiet war film,

 As the Second World War began to wind down, filmmakers started to tell war stories that were more accessible to the general public instead of the usual propaganda  formula that Hollywood churned out during the beginning and peak of the war.  One of these more intimate war films was Lewis Milestone's A Walk In The Sun which focuses on a platoon of soldiers during the invasion of Salerno Italy who are responsible for taking a farmhouse which contains a German machine gun nest.

 

The soldiers are a cross section of "average American Joes."  As the men march towards the farmhouse the screenplay focuses in on their personalities and at times isn't afraid to show the fear that some of the men develop worrying that they might be shot and killed.

 

The film has an excellent cast beginning with the underrated Dana Andrews as Sergent Tyne who  by default ends up leading the mission.  Norman Lloyd is a grumpy private, John Ireland is a minister's son and Sterling Hayden usually associated with comedic roles is the platoon medic.  Burgess Meredith narrates the film, and a ballad is performed throughout the film that counterpoints the action.

 

The film was made on a tight budget, but Milestone's skill still shines through.  When he was at the peak of his ability, Milestone was one of Hollywood's best directors.

The screenplay was by Robert Rossen who went on to become a distinguished director himself.  The running time is 117 minutes

1945 - HANGOVER SQUARE, efficent film noir

The old mad killer driven insane by voices in his head is given the 20th Century Fox treatment.  Hangover Square features Laird Cregar as a composer trying to finish his concerto before he goes completely "nuts".

 Laird Cregar went on a diet for this film.  He usually played corpulent bad guys but he got himself in shape to perform love scenes with Linda Darnell who plays a conniving music hall singer exploiting Cregar for his talent.  George Sanders is his usual reliable self playing a doctor trying to figure out what is going through Cregar's head.  He's an early version of Lt Colombo I guess.

 

For a modest film Fox had a lot of behind the camera talent involved.  The excellent black and white photography was by Joseph LaShelle who had filmed Laura and Marty to name just a few.  Probably the most important contribution was from the composer Bernard Herrmann.  Herrmann wrote what is now known as the "Concerto Macabre for Piano and Orchestra".  The  Concerto is performed at the end of the film with the director John Brahm filming the scene with all the stops pulled out.

 

Written by Barré Lyndon, the running time is 78 minutes.

1945 - DILLINGER a film starring a real life bad guy

B studio, Monogram pictures put together this mostly fictional account of the life of John Dillinger the notorious 1930's gangster.  They hired an actor who was practically a gangster himself, Lawrence Tierney.

Lawrence Tierney was a real piece of work.  Arrested many times for assault and being drunk and disorderly,  he was a handful for most directors to work with.  Towards the end of his career he worked with Quentin Tarantino on Reservoir Dogs who didn't have a lot of good things to say about him. Watching this film is like watching a real train wreck of an actor in action.

 The film has a dream cast of bad guys, Edmund Lowe, Marc Lawrence, and Elisha Cook Jr.

 The film was written early in his career by Philip Yordan and the music score was by Dimitri Tiomkin also at the beginning of his career. It runs 70 minutes.

1945 - STATE FAIR, lesser Rogers and Hammerstein musical

An original musical from Rodgers and Hammerstein.  But really not much of a musical. The plot what there is of it, involves a family traveling to the Iowa state fair to compete in the best hog and pickle contests.  The brother and sister fall in love at the fair.  The mother and father fret over their canned pickles and the big fat hog they are about to enter into competition.  Incidentally, the hog falls in love with another hog.  And that's about it for plot.

For a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical this film has about 2 decent songs and one song in particular, "It Might As Well Be Spring," is sung over and over.  Most of the cast is dubbed during the musical numbers, I think there are two actual singers in the film.

The emphasis in this film is on wholesomeness.  The film is set in Iowa and it's probably the cleanest state fair I have ever seen.  No garbage or drunks or crappy food vendors.  

This film is just so much "nothing" that I could barely remember it after it was over.  State Fair was filmed in very gaudy technicolor to put it mildly.

100 minutes.

1945 - THE SEVENTH VEIL, incredibly over the top and incredibly entertaining drama

This is a mix of classical music and psychology which would probably give 50 Shades of Grey a run for it's money in the sexual masochism department.  British actor Ann Todd really plays off of her ice princess look is the ward of James Mason her rich benefactor who all but physically tortures her into becoming a famous classical pianist.  When Todd falls in love with an artist, Mason takes his cane and hits Todd's hands with it so she will never be able to perform again.  This is the high point of the film.

Into the mix with Mason and Todd's fun and games is Herbert Lom as the psychiatrist tying to straighten things.  This film would have a viewer believe that one visit to Lom and with a little shot of some kind of narcotic, Todd is running her mouth off to Lom about her strange private life.  Herbert Lom is probably remembered today as Chief Inspector Dreyfuss in the Pink Panther movies.

All this stuff is very entertaining for some reason and this film was a huge hit in England in the 1940's.  Even watching it today it is incredibly easy to get caught up in this story and I'm not actually sure why.  Is it Mason's performance or Todd's porcelain looks?  Do the classical music excerpts that run throughout the film add a layer of class to the film? Finally, is the strange masochist streak that runs through the Mason and Todd relationship some sort of erotic turn on for an audience?

Whatever is going on in this film it's very entertaining and something of a forerunner in the erotic thriller genre.

94 minutes

1945 - SPELLBOUND, another Hitchcock vs Selznick film collaboration

Spellbound made a lot of money for producer David Selznick.  Selznick had the idea of producing a thriller using Freudian psychoanalysis as a background.  Selznick had Alfred Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman under contract and they were both hot proprieties.  Ben Hecht a legendary writer wrote the screenplay (which Selznick probably rewrote).   Since it was a Selznick production everything everything was at a very high caliber.  Watching it this weekend, Spellbound now comes off as a hopeless naive film with lots of unintentional laughs particularly at the expense of psychoanalysis.

  The pictures in this post are from the deleted Salvador Dali dream sequences.

 

Hitchcock had brought in surreal artist Salvador Dali to help visualize the dream sequences but Selznick didn't really understand what Hitchcock and Dali were up to so he had the whole thing modified and re shot.  What's left of these scenes are probably the only interesting parts of the film.

Ingrid Bergman and Salvador Dali chat before filming a dream sequence that was cut by Selznick

It's well know that Hitchcock and Selznick fought throughout production of the film.  Selznick insisted on using his own psychiatrist Dr. May Romm as the technical advisor during the film.  Considering the ridiculous prattle that comes out of the mouth of Ingrid Bergman playing a therapist it's entirely understand that Hitchcock had a lot of concerns about the screenplay.

Spellbound is basically just a murder mystery with a bunch of psychiatric goobly gook double talk.  The film has a few Hitchcock touches but the film is a mess and has a real dated 1940's quality to it.

111 minutes.

1945 - THE HOUSE ON 92ND STREET,

During World War II,  the mysterious Mr. Christopher is the head of a Nazi spy ring located in the United States.  Their job is to get the secret of "process 97," the atom bomb.  Lucky for America the FBI is on the case.

Usually considered a "semi-documentary."  This is a police procedural drama shot on actual locations.  The producer Louis De Rochemont and the director Henry Hathaway copied many of the newsreel techniques De Rochemont had used in his "March of Time" documentaries that played before feature films in the 1940's. 

The approach in this film was to show the FBI using meticulous scientific and investigative techniques to crack the spy ring.  What comes off watching it now is how creepy the whole thing is with the FBI filming every little move the spies make.  The ongoing gathering of every piece of information by the FBI gives the whole thing a "Big Brother" kind of feel throughout the film.

The FBI would not have cooperated with this film unless it showed them in the best possible light and their halos are polished mighty bright.  Still the film does have a little bit of a backbone to it, the Nazi spies are not a bunch of stupid ideologues and there is a fairly clever plot twist at least clever for the 1940's anyway.  

Like a lot of trend setting films, the years have worn away the special qualities of this story.   On location filming is no longer a big deal and police procedural dramas have borrowed so much from  films like The House on 92nd Street, it just doesn't look very special anymore.

The success of this film did help get studio filmmakers out of the back lot and onto real locations.

88 minutes.

1945 - DETOUR, tough cheap little film noir deserves its classic status.

Detour the classic Edgar G Ulmer cheapo is a study in what is called "the hand of fate." 

This film holds up extremely well.  The audience gets to watch the metaphorical noose around the neck of Al the piano player grow tighter and tighter as he attempts to extract himself from a situation that he has almost accidentally stumbled into and has no control over. 

The cast has 40's glamour babe Ann Savage as one tough as nails broad who just happens to be as scary as hell.  It's amazing to see a strong feminist character in a film this old. As for the male protagonist Al played by Tom Neal.  Here is a guy who didn't just play this character he actually lived the role in real life.

Definitely worthy of all the considerable praise heaped on it by film buffs and scholars.  Detour shows what a good director can do with an interesting story regardless of budget or time restraints. 

68 minutes.

1945 - HANGOVER SQUARE, don't mess with a crazy musician

This is a well made thriller with lots of atmosphere.  The director John Brahm, the cinematographer Joseph LaShelle and the composer Bernard Herrmann were really on top of their game in this film. 

Hangover Square has a great cast.  Perennial film villain Laird Cregar plays well another film villain,  a crazy composer who kills people when he experiences "blackouts."  Linda Darnell is the trampy dance hall singer who uses Cregar to write songs for her so she can advance her career, she's just asking for it.  George Sanders is a doctor who specializes in "crimes of the mind."

Another example of Darryl F Zanuck's film smarts, the novel Hangover Square was originally set in the late 1930's.  Zanuck ordered the film set in the early 1900's so he could reuse the sets from a previous film.  That decision adds to the rich Gothic atmosphere of the film.

The composer Bernard Herrmann wrote the concerto that concludes the film which he has cleverly interspersed throughout the film.  Everything leads up to the concerto, where the direction, photography and music combine for a real bravura conclusion to the film. 

Hangover Square is the acknowledged inspiration for Steven Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.

77 minutes.

1945 - BACK TO BATAAN, John Wayne a patriotic kind of guy

During the propaganda rich period of World War II,  Hollywood cranked out a lot of these fight the "Japs" or the "Krauts" pictures for the public.  Sometimes good directors and writers could kind of redeem this genre with a decent film or two.  John Ford filmed the excellent They Were Expendable and Howard Hawks had pretty good luck with Air Force. Then there are the series of propaganda war films John Wayne made, The Fighting Seabees, Flying Tigers and Back to Bataan.  These movies are tagged to appeal to audiences at their most sophomoric level.

Back to Bataan is pretty god awful with the exception of an exciting battle scene towards the end of the picture.  The constant speechifying and the portraits of Japanese soldiers as little killer monsters finally even managed to offend my small town middle class values.

From cute little kids being sadistically tortured by rotten Japanese soldiers, to a good god fearing Christian teacher joining the guerrillas after her school principal is hung by the Japanese for not taking down the American flag, this film has it all.  I know the general public had to be whipped up into a frenzy for the war effort but by 1945, it's hard not to believe that even the most patriotic movie goer must have been getting a little tired of these shows. 

Super patriotic actor John Wayne is good as usual.  Wayne was a guy who actually believed all of this stuff and he does bring an honest conviction to his role.  Wayne does not have any kind of manufactured love interest in the film, he wants to keep the message loud and pure, the American way is the best way and by the way kill lots of "Japs."

Clearly filmed on location at someones ranch in southern California, the movie does have a few good unintentional laughs.  A truck full of very stiff Japanese soldier dummies is sent over a mountain in one scene, and the school teacher walks around the guerrilla camp trying to get injured soldiers to eat her homemade chicken soup.

The beginning of the film features actual soldiers from the Bataan Death March.  Phony Hollywood makeup is used on them to make them look like they are suffering from the effects of Japanese internment.  One can only wonder what must have been going through their minds while they were filming this sequence.  Probably it was something like,  "I get to meet John Wayne."

95 hit me over the head with propaganda minutes.

1945 - THE TRUE GLORY

Garson Kanin and Carol Reed supervised this World War II documentary, which starts with the Normandy invasion by the Allies and ends with the fall of Berlin. 

The documentary takes film footage from combat cameramen and supplements it with voice over narrations from soldiers, sailors, clerks, generals, nurses etc.  The goal was to provide an overview of every aspect of the invasion.

Besides the involvement of Garson Kanin and Carol Reed,  Paddy Chayefsky was one of the writers and Russ Meyer of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Vixen! fame was one of the photographers.

 

The film is only 85 minutes long and in many ways gives the viewer a better sense of World War II then the 14 hour Ken Burns PBS documentary and without the pledge drive breaks.

1945 - STRANGE HOLIDAY, financed and suppressed by General Motors

Arch Obler is either the poor man's Rod Serling or Rod Serling is the poor man's Arch Obler. Obler was a noted radio writer and producer who moved into film with varying degrees of success. During the 1940's Obler was as highly regarded as Orson Welles when it came to radio dramas. He wrote, produced and directed his own films and he also produced and directed one of the first 3D films.

Obler was not unlike Rod Serling in that he had a lot of half assed liberal ideas rolling around in his brain that he wanted to share with the world. The format of his radio dramas allowed him to spew out all his deep thoughts to the American public. Hired by General Motors during World War II to make a morale boosting film for it's employees, Obler presented GM with a Twilight Zone type of story about an every day American who returns from a fishing vacation to find that the United States has been taken over by the Nazis.

Obler delivered his film to GM and was told that General Motors would be withdrawing their support for his film. An angry Obler purchased the film back and along with the actor Claude Rains released it independently. The reasons for General Motors withdrawal from the film are still unclear. Obler claimed that General Motors was continuing to do business with the Nazi's during the war.

Obler may not have been that far from the truth. Apparently into mid 1941, General Motor's Opel division did design and build transport vehicles for the Nazi's.

STRANGE HOLIDAY is mostly a heavy handed propaganda piece of some historical interest. It's not unlike one of the more lame episodes of the TWILIGHT ZONE.

61 minutes.

1945 - THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GREY and 1951 - PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

Viewed a couple of highbrow flicks this week by the Director/Writer, Albert Lewin. How did this guy ever get work? First up, "The Picture of Dorian Grey" the story of a guy who is not nice and never ages. He has a magic painting hidden in his house which reflects all of the corruption and evilness in his nature. This was actually very entertaining for a pseudo highbrow film. Lewin was clever enough to use a lot of the dialog and situations from Oscar Wilde's book. The production had that top MGM sheen which people like to talk about. The painting on the left used in the movie actually hangs in the Chicago Museum of Art much to my surprise when I went there.



 


 Next up, "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Ava Gardner is Pandora Reynolds, a woman so beautiful that a man will kill himself over her (he was drunk after all). Into her life comes the legendary Flying Dutchman, doomed to roam the seven seas in search of true love, etc. Ava just happens to be his reincarnated spouse, although she says that she is just a "singer from Indianapolis". Ava Gardner could never be a "singer from Indianapolis" if her life depended on it and her life does depend on it because if she hooks up with the Dutchman she will die. There is also a jealous bullfighter involved and a race car driver trying to break some sort of beach speed record in some sort of souped up jalopy. The film is narrated by a "Dr Quest" professor type who just assumes that the Flying Dutchman sailing into a party town on the coast of Spain is no big deal. I hope the above description conveys a small taste of the goofiness of this film which I enjoyed a lot.