1951 - STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, one of Hitchcock's best films

Saw this at a revival theater the other night, the 35 mm print was in excellent condition. This film is basically review proof.  Strangers on a Train was adapted from the novel by Patricia Highsmith which is even more perverse than Hitchcock's movie.

Robert Walker in the best performance and probably the best role of his career is the obviously gay villain Bruno Anthony who latches on to the unsuspecting Farley Granger and traps him into a murder plot.

 

This film is extremely well written and needless to say well made. This film marked the beginning of Hitchcock's association with Robert Burks the cinematographer who was really responsible for the "Hitchcock look, " for the next fourteen films.  Burks died in a house fire in 1968.  Hitchcock's films never looked so good again, a great loss.

Robert Burks

Hitchcck's daughter Patrica shows up in a featured part along with the actor  Leo G. Carroll best remembered as Mr. Waverly in The Man From Uncle series.  Carroll must have been a favorite of Hitchcock's he appeared in 6 films.

It's well known that Raymond Chandler has a screen writing credit on this film but none of his material was used.  He apparently didn't get along with Hitchcock at all.

 

Hitchcock was unhappy with the actor Farley Granger as Guy Hanes, however he was wrong in this case Granger gives a very good performance. 

 

Again one of Hitchcock's best films, he was about to enter a run of 11 excellent films from 1951-1963.

The writing credits on the film are, Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde, Whitfield Cook and Hitchcok's wife Alma Reville who is uncredited.  The running time is 101 minutes

1951 - WESTWARD THE WOMEN , unusual but good western film

This film is about the 1851 journey of a group of women on a wagon train to meet prospective husbands in California.  The film's original story was written by Frank Capra who at one time wanted to make it.  Fortunately the film ended up with tough guy William "Wild Bill" Wellman directing.  God knows what kind of sentimental mush Capra would have turned it into.

For a film released in the early 1950's it has an unusual feminist slant which for the most part isn't compromised in the story telling.  The film was photographed in Utah on what looks to be like fairly harsh locations.  William C. Mellor was the cinematographer, he was usually associated with George Stevens. but working with Wellman he went for a very harsh look to the photography.

 

Robert Taylor is the lead and he's very good.  In one scene he dishes out some tough justice to a cowboy who has raped one of the women.  Taylor had started his career as a pretty boy at MGM.  As he got older he grew into more interesting roles.  Still the focus of the film is on the women in a series of interesting vignettes.

 

William Wellman was considered a guy's director, but he had a successful collaboration with Barbara Stanwyck and was the director on the first A Star Is Born film.  Wellman was from the John Ford school of film making.  He had a no nonsense visual style and also didn's put up with a lot of nonsense on his set.  Westward The Women is an exccellent film and one of Wellman's best efforts.

The screenplay was by Charles Schnee, the running time is 118 minutes.

1951 - CAPTAIN HORATIO HORNBLOWER, pretty good seafaring flick

This is a film version of C. S. Forrester's Hornblower, series about a man who starts out as a teenager and joins the British Navy circa the 1800's.  The books follow Horatio Hornblower through his navel career which ends up with him becoming an admiral.

 Warner Brothers Studios chose to film a Hornblower story with him as a captain taking on the French and a Latin American dictator who calls himself "El Supremo." There are several exciting navel battles recreated with some impressive models and the director Raoul Walsh does his usual good job moving the story along.

Frankly I had my doubts about this film.  For the most part the cast was made almost entirely of British actors.  The film was shot on location in England and France which gave it a reasonable look of authenticity.  My chief worry about this filming was the casting of the leads  Gregory Peck and even more so Virginia Mayo.  Peck is obviously an American playing a British officer but this is Peck at his best.  He could bring a lot of authority to a performance and he actually pulls off his part acting like a British Navel Captain.

 

Virginia Mayo was kind of another story.  A stunning looking actor particularly in color with her flaming red hair, she is American through and through and was very good as the gangster girlfriend of James Cagney in White Heat.  Here she is supposed to play the sister of the Duke of Wellington.  Mayo doesn't even attempt a British accent. However for whatever odd reason she's reasonably effective as a British aristocrat.

 

The selling point for this film are the action scenes.  Walsh and his special effects and production team do an excellent job of staging battles between two ships which when you think about it are essentially just a couple of boats shooting cannons at each other.  Walsh is primarily though of as a director good with westerns and gangster movies but apparently he was also something of an Anglophile. 

The film was written by  C. S. Forester, Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts and Aeneas MacKenzie all seasoned Hollywood professionals. The running time is 117 minutes.

1951 - THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE - interesting Civil War film

 This film is probably known more for the book "Picture," which was an account of the making of The Red Badge of Courage a film which got caught up in power struggles between MGM executives.  The director John Huston who also wrote the screenplay had been a veteran of World War II and had produced some interesting documentaries during that war.  He clearly wanted to articulate his very mixed feelings about war and battle.

Probably MGM was not the place to make this film.  By the early 1950's Hollywood was producing more films with serious content however MGM kind of stayed with the tried and true, pumping out musicals and lightweight entertainments.  Not to say that the other studios didn't generate these kinds of films but MGM was always kind of the glossy never land of films that were big on nostalgia for family values and the American way of life.

A strong director like John Huston was invariably going to clash with this type of corporate mentality.   To make a very long story short.  Huston filmed The Red Badge of Courage  and delivered a two hour cut.  After an apparently disastrous preview, MGM recut the film to it's present length of 69 minutes.  Clearly all the nuance of the story had been taken out and what was left were some very good battle scenes.  The motivations of the central character Henry Fleming who goes from coward to hero was probably left on the cutting room floor.  In the film Fleming runs from battle but then goes back to his regiment for the final fight for no apparent reason.

 

The film certainly had an interesting cast, Audie Murphy was cast as Henry Fleming.  Murphy was known as one of America's most decorated war heros.  He killed a lot of men during the war.  Murphy was one of the earliest victims of PTSD long before anyone knew what it was.  Bill Mauldin as Tom Wilson had been a cartoonist during the war for the Army newspaper " Stars and Stripes."  He had no acting experience but he did a good job playing Fleming's friend.  The rest of the cast was made up of character actors.  

 

What's left of the film is entirely watchable Huston and has cameraman Hal Rossen did an excellent job staging the scenes. The movie itself is hardly the disaster that the resulting extreme edit of the film ended up being as it's final form.

1951 - NO HIGHWAY IN THE SKY, an excellent aviation drama

James Stewart is an "absent minded professor" type working at a British aviation company.  He discovers that the company's latest model plane has a tail that will literally fall off of the plane after 1400 hours of flight.   While flying to investigate a plane crash in Labrador, Stewart realizes that the plane they are on is probably close to crashing due to stress and fatigue that flying has placed on the plane's tale.  The film involves Stewart's attempts to avoid disaster.

 No Highway In The Sky with the exception of James Stewart, the producer Lewis Leighton, the director Henry Koster and Marlene Dietrich is basically a British film.  It was shot entirely by British technicians in England and features an outstanding cast of British actors such as Glynis Johns, Kenneth More, Jack Hawkins,  Niall MacGinnis and Felix Aylmer.   James Stewart does his usual "aw shucks" acting thing but even if he's played this type of character before he does it very well.  Stewart had been a pilot during World War II so he definitely knew a thing about airplanes.   

 

The film re teamed Stewart with Marlene Dietrich.  They had first worked together in Destry Rides Again, but this time Dietrich's part as a glamorous Hollywood star seems more a supporting role.  Glynis Johns is really the female lead.

 

This is commercial film making at it's very best.  A good story, a great cast and a top notch production team.

The film was written by three talented writers, R. C. Sherriff, Oscar Millard and Alec Coppel.  The running time is 98 minutes. Again,  an excellent drama.

1951 - FIXED BAYONETS, back to the Korean War.

Now working for 20th Century Fox and Darryl Zanuck,  Sam Fuller is getting bigger budgets for his films.  Although shot on a sound stage on the Fox lot, the film is a fairly gripping war film.

The story is about an American platoon left behind to fight a "rear guard" as the main division retreats.  The film in many ways covers the same territory as John Ford's The Lost Patrol as one by one the soldiers get picked off by the Chinese Army.

 

The film has an interesting cast starting with Richard Basehart as a corporal who has an aversion to killing the enemy.  There are the usual army soldier stereotypes, the know-it-all, the southerner, the green lieutenant etc.  Of course it wouldn't be a Sam Fuller war film without the appearance of Gene Evans playing tough guy NCO Sergeant Rock.

 

A good war film without the usual rah rah stuff these 50's war films usually contain.

Written by Fuller, the running time is 92 minutes 

1951 - HALLS OF MONTEZUMA, a World War II film with a rather odd antiwar subtext

This film is supposed to be a tribute to the fighting spirit of the United States Marines during World War II. It has the usual rah rah action and flag waving stuff but there is a strange subtext to the film involving the lives of the marines in a platoon trying to take a Japanese controlled island.

For a film about the tough guy marines there certainly seem to be a lot of emotional problems among this group.  Richard Widmark is the squad leader who is taking pills because he is suffering from "psychological migraines."  The company corporal is a coward, one marine loses his eyesight, another is a gun nut who goes out of control and tries to murder some Japanese prisoners.  This bunch is hardly the pride of the marines.  One wonders in the Pentagon actually read this script before agreeing to provide technical support to the production.

 

The film was directed by Lewis Milestone who was probably past his prime as an important director but is still professionally assembled by him.  As I said an odd bird of a gung ho fighting movie.

Written by Michael  Blankfort, running time 113 minutes.

1951 - OPERATION PACIFIC, a typical John Wayne war movie

 It's World War II, we are in the Pacific theater of action and big John Wayne is commandeering a submarine and taking on the Japanese navy when he's not rescuing nuns and orphans off of some Pacific Ocean island.

Wayne's love interest is Patrica Neal one of the few female performers who could stand up to him on screen.  Ward Bond, Wayne's drinking buddy has a big part and movie buff favorite Jack Pennick is the crew chief.  

 This film is pretty standard war movie stuff but Wayne as usual seems to be able to pull this kind of story off.  It is sort of entertaining in a crazy way.

 

 

George Waggner directed and wrote the screenplay.  Waggner also directed the nutty Pentagon anti commie film Red Nightmare.  But make no mistake Duke was the guy in charge on this film.

111 minutes.

1951 - SHOWBOAT, MGM updates an old musical

In 1936, Universal Studios made a version of Showboat that was directed by James Whale.  This version apparently follows the stage musical fairly closely.  MGM remade and updated it in the 1950's with some significant changes.  

The screenwriter an old Hollywood veteran named John Lee Mahin changed almost all of the dialog and condensed the action to have the lovers reunited while they are young instead of 40 years later.  MGM filmed Showboat in Technicolor and clearly poured a lot of money into the production.  They kept the Jerome Kern songs and hired Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson to belt out the score with their  bombastic singing styles.

If you are looking for a version of Showboat as the ground breaking musical theater that it was in the 1920's this isn't it.  The racial issues that production addressed have been played down quite a bit and Julie the mixed racial tragic heroine is played by the very glamorous and very caucasian Ava Gardner,

Still the music is good, the film looks great and the score is well sung.  The dancing in the film is from the then husband and wife team Marge and Gower Champion.  Overall this is a slick piece of MGM film making.

107 minutes.

1951 - THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, a little dated but still very good.

One of the better films in the science fiction film crazy of the 1950's. 20th Century Fox under the control of Daryl F. Zanuck paid attention to story and didn't go overboard with the special effects.  Studio director Robert Wise kept things moving along.  Wise had been a top editor at RKO and brought brisk pacing to a tightly constructed plot.  Bernard Herrmann was hired to compose the groundbreaking and unusual score which was a key component in the success of this film.

The film was well cast with character actor Michael Rennie as the spaceman Klaatu and a memorable robot called Gort.

The Day the Earth Stood Still with it's message of world peace and nuclear disarmament still holds up very well.  Probably the most dated aspect of the film is Klaatu's suggestion that earth adopt a Robot police force to monitor and stop the violent tendencies of human beings.  Somehow a robot police force consisting of lots of scary robots like Gort does not exactly sound like the best idea to promote world peace.

Still, this is one of the best science fiction films Hollywood ever produced.

92 minutes, written by Edmund H. North.

1951 - ACE IN THE HOLE, Wilder's tribute to the worst in mankind.

Finally got around to watching this film.  Billy Wilder's very cynical take on just about everything is still really tough stuff even now.  It's kind of amazing this film even got made.  Didn't the studio read the script and realize that the film has almost no redeeming characters in it.  Wilder somehow must have had enough clout to get this film made.  However just watching Ace In The Hole you can't help but realize that it's commercial prospects were going to be very dim.

 

Wilder cast Kirk Douglas as the reporter Chuck Tatum.  Douglas plays him as a clever guy with a nasty sense of humor.  Throughout the film Douglas exploits the situation of the man trapped in a cave to rebuild his career as a reporter and Douglas plays him as a guy with almost next to no problem caring about the situation he has created.  It's a very tough tricky performance.  There clearly was no room for a William Holden or Jack Lemmon type in this Wilder film.

What you really come away with in Ace in the Hole are the crowd scenes and carnival atmosphere that arises as one man's personal tragedy is exploited by just about everyone.  Watching the masses of people get off the train and the line of cars driving to the cave in to be a part of the action is kind of intense.  Did Wilder really think Americans were that horrible?  Apparently so.

Billy Wilder had made some tough films before Ace in the Hole, like Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend. This film actually did serious harm to his career.  Wilder pivoted over mostly to comedies for the remainder of this career and never made another film like this.

111 minutes, written by Billy Wilder, Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels.

1951 - APACHE DRUMS, producer Val Lewton's final film

The producer Val Lewton, had a lot of trouble restarting his career after he left RKO.  Lewton finally ended up at Universal Studios in charge of the kind of "B" movie that he knew how to make.  Apache Drums is a decent little western which has a number of Val Lewton's famous RKO horror film touches. 

The film is fairly standard Indians vs the settlers stuff, with lots of interesting things going on.  The main lead Steven McNally was not an "A" list actor and is probably chiefly remembered for playing the bad guy in Winchester 73 and the rapist in Johnny Belinda.  Coleen Gray's career never really took off after Red River, as you can see we were not dealing with some stellar leads but journeyman actors.

As for the Val Lewton touches, well the actual beating of the drums in Apache Drums reminded me of Lewton's classic horror film I Walked With A Zombie.  The final siege inside the town church at night is full of Lewton's trademarked shadows and sound effects. 

A fairly good western film from one of Hollywood's most influential producers.

75 minutes.

1951 - SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN, or another hour out of my life I won't get back.

Had about an hour to kill and thought I would revisit an episode of the old Superman TV series that frightened me as a kid.  Superman and the Mole Men was a warm up for the old TV series.  The producer Robert Lippert made pictures cheap and fast so I kind of knew what to expect for production values.  Even taking that into consideration, this was pretty bad. 

Some oil company has drilled the deepest hole ever looking for oil and has accidentally opened up an underground world inhabited by little guys (the mole men)  who climb up out of the well hole and scare the crap out of everyone in a small town.  Superman conveniently shows up to sort this situation out.

I can't believe these mole men goofballs scared me as a kid particularity with their over sized ray gun which doesn't actually seem to do anything to anyone.  In fact it looks like they can barely hold this contraption up much less use it against the small town lynch mob trying to kill them. 

About the only thing this film has going for it is George Reeves.  He is about the only one who attempts to bring some depth to this silly film.  Reeves plays Clark Kent and he is hardly "mild mannered" in his secret identity.  His Superman also has a little spine to him and is not the overbearing goody two shoes that this super hero usually ends up sinking into.

Still Reeves is not a reason to watch this.

58 minutes.

1951 - THE MAN FROM PLANET X, decent low budget science fiction

For a film knocked out in 5 days, The Man from Planet X looks and plays pretty good.  Probably making the most of what he had the director Edgar G. Ulmer managed to create an eerie atmosphere and get some decent performances out of the cast.

Ulmer had a long career making something out of next to nothing when it came to shooting film.  If the space man from Planet X looks phoney at least he's lighted cleverly.  The script isn't exactly Hamlet, but it is interesting.  The photography is by John Russell who shot Psycho for Hitchcock.

The Man from Planet X is also nice and short coming in at just over an hour.  Watching these kinds of films is almost a picnic at that length.

70 minutes.

1951 - THREE GUYS NAMED MIKE, the enjoyable blandness of nothing films

This is a nothing of a romantic comedy.  Jane Wyman is the aspiring stewardess working for American Airlines.  She is very perky and a regular little chatterbox.  Jane is always in trouble with management because of her mild but wacky airplane shenanigans.  She meets up with three nice guys who want to marry her.  They are all named Mike, hence the title. 

Charles Walters was the director and it looks like he phoned this one in.  Walters may not have been the greatest stylist in the world but he did direct some successful films for MGM like, Good News, Lili, Easter Parade and High Society.  However you would be hard pressed to find anything that resembles a cinematic flourish in Three Guys Named Mike.  This is strictly a point the camera in the direction of the actors and shoot movie.

The real auteur of this film is the writer Sidney Sheldon.  Sheldon had a long career as a provider of light weight comedies.  Sheldon is probably best know as the writer and creator of the I Dream of Jeannie television series.  Towards the end of his career he pumped out semi racy novels like The Other Side of Midnight and Bloodline.

 Three Guys Named Mike is a Sidney Sheldon story all they way.  You know where it's going from the moment it starts till it's final scene but you still sit there watching to see how the damn thing is going to get to where it's going because it's so comforting in it's predictability kind of like every episode of I Dream of Jeannie.

90 minutes.

1951 - THE STEEL HELMET, interesting 50's look at the Korean War

Sam Fuller's take on the infantry soldier and the Korean War, has lots of supposedly tough realistic military stuff going on but it mostly is stuck in the obligatory rah rah we are here fighting to stop the spread of godless communism. 

Fuller worked on a very low budget and short production schedule supposedly shooting about 10 days.  The cast was mostly unknown actors who actually looked like soldiers. 

The platoon of American G.I.'s is the usual cross section of the country, one guy is black, another a conscious objector still another is a veteran of the D-Day landing etc.  They capture a North Korean soldier who attempts to spread dissension in the platoon but whatever else these dog faces might be they are still patriotic Americans. 

As usual the attraction with any Sam Fuller film is his blunt in your face style of film making.  The dialog and situations were a little tougher than the usual war movie cliches.  Audiences hadn't seen these kind of characters before, The Steel Helmet was a big hit. 

85 minutes.

1951 - ALICE IN WONDERLAND, The Walt Disney version

 

 

Walt Disney took a shot at the Lewis Carroll books and put out a version of Alice In Wonderland in 1951.  The film is seventy six minutes long and has some of the best animation that I've seen in a Disney film.  The film is sort of a hit and miss deal.  

 

A lot of the film seems like an early tryout for a Monty Python series.  Each scene has an absurdist quality to it, but there is really no story to hang it on which kind of makes it hard to sit through the entire film.  Alice wanders from one sequence to another and doesn't seem to have much to do, she's a very boring character who's just there to watch another wild and wacky animation sequence. 

The film has some very good stuff.   The sequence with the Queen of Hearts and her card soldiers is extremely well done and somewhat reminiscent of the "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence from Dumbo.  The beginning of the film with Alice laying in a flower field singing "In a World of my Own" is also very nice. 

Then the hyper animation action kicks in.  

The Tweedledee and Tweedledum sequence is probably completely unnecessary to the film.  The Mad Hatter tea party has a lot of frenzied animation action going on which is probably a little over the top and got on my nerves. Yes, the caterpillar sequence does have a "getting high" vibe to it.    It's all kind of exhausting to watch after a while.

Alice in Wonderland was apparently not a film that was loved by the critics.  The British critics in particular seemed to hate the film because it didn't follow the two Alice books.  This seems to be an unfair criticism of the film.   I've tried to read the Alice books and they always struck me as very dry, slow and plotless.  The book,  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, contains jokes about mathematics and has caricatures of 1800's British politicians and friends of the author. 

It seems extremely unfair to blame Disney for trying to make the movie accessible to the general public.   I really doubt an audience would be entertained with a film that contains references to positional numeral sequences and inverse mathematical relationships.

Alice in Wonderland is a well made but mediocre film.

1951 - THE ENFORCER, good Bogart crime drama

Pretty good and short Bogart film about a gang of professional killers.  Bogart plays the District Attorney trying to bring them to justice.

The Enforcer, has some interesting things going on in it.  The cast with the exception of Bogart is  unknown character actors. The cops and crooks actually look like the real thing for a change.  The photography is by Robert Burks.  Burks was Hitchcock's longtime photographer on most of his greatest films.  He gives the film a nice noirish look.

The film is blessed with no love interest for any of the characters.  There is none of that "honey don't go out and fight crime stuff" to deal with that always slows the story down.  The action is subtle and nasty which is not an easy combination to achieve.

The screenplay is composed of a series of flashbacks within flashbacks, but somehow that narrative  structure works without become confusing.  There is a rather stupid plot device to build up some suspense towards the end of the film that is pretty contrived.  But the film wraps things up with an exciting conclusion.

By this time in his career, Humphrey Bogart had been acting long enough that he could do a part like this without breaking a sweat.   Bogart always was a pretty commanding presence in a film and he was probably one of the few actors who could spew out this kind of "tough guy" dialog without sounding silly.

Television has beaten this type of crime story to death, but The Enforcer  still does a very good job telling an exciting and interesting story.

87 minutes, the film was written by Martin Rackin and directed by Bretaigne Windust with uncredited help from Raoul Walsh.

1951 - Budd Boetticher's BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY Extended Director's cut?

John Wayne produced Budd Boetticher's story about a young American played by Robert Stack who is taught "the ways of the bullfighter" by Gilbert Roland playing the old bullfighter pro. Stack falls in love with a Mexican senorita but violates her code of honor and has to redeem himself. You can pretty much write this story. This film has lots of entertaining macho bullshit about what it means to be a man, learning the code of the bullfighter and junk like that.

Boetticher delivered a 2 hour film which John Wayne thought was to long. Duke called in his old drinking buddy John Ford, who proceeded to help cut about 40 minutes out of it. The cuts were made with Boetticher's approval in order to increase the commercial viability of the film. The film has been restored to it's original length. It looks like most of the stuff that got cut out were the scenes involving the testing of the young bulls to see if they would be suitable for fighting. Interesting stuff but a little repetitive after a while.

The acting is pretty good, Robert Stack is Mr. Intense throughout the film and actually performs some of his own bullfighting stunts. In repeated scenes he gets knocked over a lot by some young but mean bulls. A lot of the film appears to have been photographed on location in Mexico and there is a genuine atmosphere of sleaziness throughout the film.

The movie reminds me of Hemingway's bullfighting book Death in the Afternoon.

 124 minutes.