1949 - COME TO THE STABLE, a film with Nuns in it.

A couple of very pushy nuns arrive in New England with plans to build a hospital.  During World War II their hospital in France was saved by the American Army although many soldiers died defending it. To atone for that tragedy they are now committed to building a hospital in a small New England town.  The trouble is that the land that they want is owned by a godless songwriter who would prefer the nuns would just go away.  So begins a battle of wills.

Come to the Stable could have been one sentimental mess of religious garbage but the writers and the director of this film seemed to have enough self control to spare the viewer from the worst.

 

Let's take a quick look at the cast.  Actor Loretta Young a "super catholic" in real life plays one of the nuns.  Young had an affair with Clark Gable on the set of The Call of the Wild which resulted in her giving birth to Gable's child.  Young had the baby placed in an orphanage and later adopted the baby even though she was the birth mother. Yes this is one of the subplots in the Coen Brothers film Hail Caesar

Celeste Holm plays the other nun, scene stealer Elsa Lancester is a painter of religious pictures and character actor Thomas Gomez is the bookie who helps Young raise the money to build the hospital, it's a decent cast.

Also in the film is Hugh Marlowe as the godless songwriter.  Marlowe was one of those working actors who turned up in a lot of films and TV shows.  I'm most familiar with Marlowe as  Dr. Russell Marvin the scientist who battles the space aliens in Ray Harryhausen's science fiction classic Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers.  A final casting note is the appearance of Dooley Wilson in a not insubstantial part.  Wilson is best known as Sam the pianist in Casablanca. 

 

 The director Henry Koster was an expert at this family entertainment stuff for most of his career. At the end of his career, he directed The Singing Nun, but that Nun movie turned out to be pretty terrible.

This film runs 94 and although I enjoyed it for the most part I certainly didn't want it to be a minute longer.  Come to the Stable was written by Oscar Millard and Sally Benson.

1949 - STRAY DOG, very good crime thriller from Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa is a year away from releasing Rashomon which will put him on the map as one of Japan's most important directors.  A year before Rashomon, Stray Dog was released and it's a superior crime thriller.  The film is set in post World War II Japan and has lots of on location filming around Tokyo. The film stars Toshiro Mifune who was becoming one of Kurosawa's most important collaborators and Takashi Shimura who was the leader of The Seven Samurai in Kurosawa's film. In the West he is probably best remembered as Dr. Yamane from the first Godzilla film.

The plot of the film has Mifune as a rookie detective whose gun is stolen.  He spends the film attempting to locate the thief while the gun is being used to commit armed robberies. Shimura is the veteran police detective who helps the young detective solve the crime.  The film is set in Tokyo during a hot summer and  it does an excellent job of creating an oppressive atmosphere of heat and humidity.

 

Kurosawa tells an exciting story within the confines of the urban police procedural. Watching this film there is no question that he was entering an important part of his career.  According to the supplemental features on the Criterion disc Kurosawa was a big fan of detective novels which had a major influence on Stray Dog.  This film is also a good look at post war Tokyo as it recovered from World War II. 

The film was written by Akira Kurosawa and Ryūzō Kikushima who worked on some of Kurosawa's best films.  The running time is 122 minutes.

1949 - THE THIRD MAN, still one of the best thrillers

For a film that is almost 75 years old, The Third Man is still one of the best thrillers ever made.  This film benefited from a creative group of talents that came together.  The director was Carol Reed. Graham Greene wrote an original script. Robert Krasker was responsible for the excellent black and white photography and of course the film's musical score played only with a zither by Anton Karas contributed to the overall atmosphere of the film.

The cast was one of the best assembled for a film.  Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee and Orson Welles.  When not directing himself Welles was generally considered kind of a monster to deal with on other people's films.  In this instance Welles apparently behaved himself and responded positively to the direction of Carol Reed who was a rare filmmaker who actually enjoyed working with challenging  actors.

There isn't much more to write about this film.  I've seen it many times on the big screen and on television and it still holds up very well.  The British producer Alexander Korda was an important figure in the history of British cinema and a man of taste.  The American producer was David O Selznick who always tried to overwhelm any production he was involved in with his personality.  In this case Graham Greene and Carol Reed essentially ignored all of Selnick's attempts to influence The Third Man.

 

The running time is 104 minutes, the writer Graham Greene has said that Welles was responsible for the famous "cuckoo clock" speech. 

1949 - AFRICA SCREAMS, not a good Abbott and Costello film.

This is not a good Abbott and Costello film.  This was apparently an independent film made by Bud and Lou away from Universal Studios.

 

It seems Bud and Lou are on a diamond hunt in Africa.  They run into lions, cannibals, and a guy in a gorilla costume.  The studio set is the usual phony jungle plants.  The comedic situations are  to put it mildly very lame.  The whole thing just seems tired.

The film runs a long 79 minutes, it was written by Earl Baldwin.

1949 - THE ADVENTURES OF ICHABOD AND MR. TOAD

Is this one of the greatest animated Disney features?  No but it's very good.   These two stories show the skill of the Disney production company and they each run about 30 minutes.

The Wind In The Willows is narrated by Basil Rathbone and is based on the Kenneth Grahame children's book.

The second story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is narrated by Bing Crosby and is based on Washington Irving's "The Sketch Book".

The film runs 68 minutes and doesn't wear out it's welcome.

1949 - SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, on Blu Ray

One of John Ford's most beautiful westerns. Filmed in technicolor by Winton Hoch, one of the top color cameramen in Hollywood.

John Wayne gave one of his best performances in this film.

This Blu Ray looks great.  The on location photography of Monument Valley in Arizona has never looked so stunning.

103 minutes, written by Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings.

1949 - ON THE TOWN, the famous MGM musical.

This was a ground breaking musical.  Gene Kelly had been pushing MGM to expand the boundaries of the musical and actually got the studio to agree to 2 weeks of filming in New York City.

On The Town was adapted from a Broadway musical featuring a Leonard Bernstein score.  In this film version the score barely survived with only 4 songs remaining.  The Jerome Robbins choreography was replaced by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's work,  well that's Hollywood.

Frankly the film was kind of an ordeal to sit through.  On The Town is about 10 minutes too long and has one dance number too many for my taste.  The on location photography, what there is of it was kind of nice.  But overall the film seems very silly, today's film scene has not been kind to old musicals particularly musicals with a lot of dancing in them.

 

98 minutes,  screenplay by Adolph Green and Betty Comden.

1949 - UNDER CAPRICORN, a very odd Hitchcock failure

The dream of many of the major Hollywood film directors after World War II was to set up their own production company and film stories they were interested in.  John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, George Stevens and Alfred Hitchcock took the plunge in the late 1940's.  For a number of reasons these companies failed.  Hitchcock is somewhat typical of what happened to these directors.

For his company "Transatlantic Pictures," Hitchcock chose two films.  Rope and Under Capricorn.
Rope was hardly going to be an "audience pleaser."  A play about homosexual murders filmed in very long takes, the film was a financial failure.  Hitchcock moved on to Under Capricorn.

  

Even with one of Hollywood's biggest stars this film is just a dull mess.  For a director who probably spent more time in the office working on his screenplays it's hard to believe Hitchcock even read this one.  There is just lots and lots of talk.  The story is secondary to this chatter.  Joseph Cotton and Ingrid Bergman live in 1800's Australia.  Cotton is an ex-convict who has built a fortune for himself.  Bergman is his wife who has a mysterious past.  Into this mix comes Michael Wilding as some sort of aristocratic fop who stirs things up.  However I'm not sure of the plot since my eyes glazed over about an hour into this thing with the constant gabbing of the main characters.

Probably the only noteworthy aspect of Under Capricorn is Hitchcock's continued use of the long take.  The camera rolls around flying past doors and walls to what seems little purpose other than to call attention to itself.  It may be an interesting experiment for movie nerds but it seems completely pointless for storytelling.  If fact most of the rolling camera shots were apparently cut from the film because they tended to slow the action down.

It can be appreciated that Hitchcock wanted to get out of the suspense genre occasionally and he did do that with Rebecca.  But in this case it would seem that Under Capricorn was just a completely failure to understand what he was getting into.  This film was just a real ordeal to sit through

117 minutes, written by Hume Cronyn and James Bridie.

1949 - LES SANG DES BETES or BLOOD OF THE BEASTS, a short documentary about a slaughterhouse

Franju's documentary about a couple of slaughterhouses in the suburbs of Paris is oddly intense and poetic.  Franju doesn't look away from the animal killings or the processing of the carcass by the workers in these factories.  The film acknowledges that if the human race wants to eat meat this is the manner in which we will get it, violent, gruesome and very messy.

Sheep are tipped over and placed on a table while workers walk along and slit their throats open one at a time.  The reflexive nerves of their bodies shake while the workers hold these creatures down to finish the job.  Calves get their heads cut off so as not to contaminate the meat with blood for veal. Horses at a rendering plant are stunned to death prior to be skinned and eviscerated.  I might have to rethink this meat eating thing.

I suppose Blood of the Beast could be making some allusions to The Holocaust or the World Wars with their massive destruction of human life, but what I came away with was the almost technical precision that the human race has achieved in killing any living creature.

20 minutes

1949 - MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, or King Kong redux.

A high water mark for special effects in the late 1940's.  In charge of effects for Mighty Joe Young was Willis O'Brien who was responsible for King Kong.  Doing much of the actual stop motion animation of the gorilla was Ray Harryhausen.  These stop motion effects were carefully integrated with optical composting from Linwood Dunn.  

Linwood Dunn was one of the greatest special effects artists in Hollywood.  Dunn contributed special effects to films included, King Kong, Citizen Kane, My Fair Lady, Airport, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and the original Star Trek series, an amazing career.

Merian C Cooper and his partner Ernest B Schoedsack were the producer and director and in this film, John Ford of all people shows up listed in the credits.  Ford always insisted he had nothing to do with this film, but members of his stock company, which included Ben Johnson and Jack Pennick show up in the film.  

Leaving all the business of the optical and animation effects aside Mighty Joe Young is a very entertaining film.  It's amazing how much personality they got into the gorilla puppet.

 94 minutes, written by Ruth Rose.

1949 - THE GREAT GATSBY, interesting 40's adaptation of the famous novel

The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic American novel of the Jazz age that a person can actually read and enjoy for a change.  The films based on the novel have been a compete mess.  The 1974 film was faithful to the novel but really boring.  The current adaptation that is being prepared by ADD director Baz Luhrmann was scheduled for release in 2012 but has been pushed out to 2013, not a good sign.  Let's take a look at the 1949 version.

Faced with translating Fitzgerald's prose about the lives of the rich and wanna be rich, Paramount proceeded to spell out just about every plot point that Fitzgerald had cleverly and subtly written into the story.  At the same time this adaptation kept just enough of the essence of the book to make it kind of an interesting film.

Everything about this production is a little strange.  One of the screenwriters was Richard Maibaum (also the producer)  who was associated with the James Bond series.  The director Elliott Nugent was more of a comedy director who had been worked with James Thurber and Bob Hope.

Odd casting choices run throughout the film.  Alan Ladd was a Paramount star who was known for playing tough guy gangsters and private eyes.  Paramount proceeded to play up this aspect of the Gatsby character by really emphasizing Gatsby's past as a bootlegger complete with Ladd wearing a trench coat.  Ladd even punches a guy out at one point, something Fitzgerald could not have been to happy about.   Actually Alan Ladd is pretty good as Jay Gatsby.  As Gatsby's lover and object of desire, Betty Field was cast.  Field was a fine intelligent actor but hardly the ethereal, beautiful and  shallow Daisy Buchanan of the book the woman was just not that kind of glamour gal.

You can see the heavy hand of the censors running throughout this film.  They want everything spelled out and nice tidy conclusions at the climax.  They even ordered up a happy ending for Nick Carraway and his girlfriend Jordan Baker, showing them married at the end of the film which completely contradicts the melancholic ending of the book.

91 minutes, written by Richard Maibaum and Cyril Hume

1949 - DICK BARTON STRIKES BACK, the very poor man's James Bond

Secret agent Dick Barton is out to stop Family Affair's evil "Mr. French" Sebastian Cabot from destroying England with sound waves.

This so called film was based on a popular cliffhanger radio serial on the BBC and apparently it was  very popular.

The film was shot completely on location so not only is it hard to watch but hard to hear as well.  Dick faces a lot of close calls as takes on the evil enemy spy ring and their giant tuning fork,  a weapon worse "than the atomic bomb." He wraps the case up in about 70 minutes in time to get a pint of bitters at the local pub.

The final fight with the bad guys all filmed on location is pretty well done.  The theme music called "The Devil's Gallop" by Charles Williams is probably the best thing in the film.

73 minutes.

1949 - LE SILENCE DE LA MER, aka The Silence of the Sea

Jean Pierre Melville filmed this World War II drama set during the occupation of France.  A German officer is billeted at the home of a Frenchmen living with his niece.  The film is essentially about the German trying to ingratiate himself into their lives. 

This is an interesting film.  The Frenchman and the niece decide to give the German the silent treatment, they literally do not speak throughout the entire film.   And, for a film set in occupied France the portrait of the German officer is unusually sympathetic.  The German completely believes that the two nations will mutually benefit from the occupation, culturally and socially.  The film is about his slow realization what  the actual effects of the occupation are doing to France.

Le Silence De La Mer is an impressive film from a great filmmaker at the beginning of his career.   The film was essentially shot on location in one room for very little money.    This is a great filmmaker demonstrating how to create a thoughtful and complex film with very limited resources.  Considering the extreme restraints, Melville made it visually and emotionally interesting.

Jean Pierre Melville was a filmmaker who always valued his independence throughout his career.  Melville's style was in the classic Hollywood tradition,  creating well constructed films on very small budgets.

1949 - THE BEAUTIFUL BLONDE FROM BASHFUL BEND, Preston Sturges rides into the sunset

The writer/director Preston Sturges had his run of frantic clever comedies when he worked at Paramount from the early to mid 1940's. By the time he signed with 20th Century Fox his hot streak was pretty much over.

In 1949, he released his western spoof The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend.  The film turned out to be a flop with audiences and critics and was the first flop for Fox's big female star Betty Grable. 

This film has all the usual Sturges stuff, the frantic playing of the slapstick situations, the legendary cast of Sturges character actors going through their goofball antics and the hyper kinetic dialog mostly shouted out by and at the actors.  The garish color in this film makes the studio sets look even more unreal than usual and some of the performances really got on my nerves.  Sterling Holloway, who usually did voice work for Walt Disney cartoons particularly annoys playing some kind of mentally deficient country rube.

Probably the big mistake in this film was casting Betty Grable.  Grable 20th Century Fox's popular female performer known for her all American sexiness was out of her comfort zone.  Grable  an actress with a seriously good figure and a nice pair of legs  usually performed in very inane musicals for Fox.

These silly musicals emphasized her wholesomeness and non threatening sex appeal, the "girl next door" as it were.  In The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend, she played something of a shrewish harpy who was also good with a gun, a major change from her usual bland film roles.  Like Sterling Holloway she also came off equally grating as well and just didn't seem to have any idea how to play this farce.  The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend was just not what the audience expected of their "the girl next door." 

The film  only 77 minutes long  tells me that everyone associated with it must have realized they had a flop on their hands and cut it down to make the film move as fast as possible.  The whole thing comes off as pretty desperate and not funny.

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1949 - THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS David Lean reworks Brief Encounter

One of the few David Lean films that is not especially well known. Lean reworked the script and took over direction from Ronald Neame the future director of The Poseidon Adventure which pretty much finished off their long friendship. 

 

Yes that's David Lean driving the boat.

 

Lean used a complex flashback structure to tell the story of a woman,  Ann Todd who cheats on her husband. The very British actor Ann Todd was a woman Lean eventually left his wife for and had a pretty intense relationship and marriage with.

Ann Todd looks good in any film I've ever seen her in.  But she always acted like she had a corn cob up her butt. Not a lot of fun at a party, much less a woman to have a wild affair with. Claude Rains probably gives the best performance in the film as the pissed off husband, as pissed off as a husband can be in one of these "stiff upper lipped" British dramas.

 

The film is well made and good looking. David Lean always knew how to put a film together, but it's kind of a minor story compared to Great Expectations or Oliver Twist or even In Which We Serve,  Still an excellent example of superior film making from a superior director.

Running time 95 minutes. Written by Eric Ambler, Stanley Haynes, David Lean and H. G, Welles!