1955 - SOLDIER OF FORTUNE, another film in the wonder of Cinemascope

Set in Hong Kong in the 1950's with Communist China hanging over the heads of the British colony.  Soldier of Fortune was based on a book by Ernest K. Gann, who also wrote the screenplay.  The film stars Clark Gable and Susan Hayward.  Hayward's husband played by Gene Barry is a prisoner in Communist China and Gable is the man she turns to for help in an escape attempt.  Naturally Hayward and Gable fall in love before the big escape scene.  This is a very bad movie.

The film was shot in Fox's CinemaScope screen process with the widescreen just constantly full of a lot of pictorial scenery, when the film moves indoors the sets are so full of stuff that it seems like the actors are performing inside a museum gallery.  The director Edward Dmytryk appears to have had his hands full just moving people around the widescreen frame.  

 

But frankly the chief villain of this film is not Communist China but the terrible screenplay from Ernest Gann. Everything about this film just stinks, the colorful characters, the love story, the plot and the lack of action.  It seems like 20th Century Fox took this production and as they say tried to "put lipstick on the pig, " to cover up its deficiencies.

 

This was Clark Gable's first film away from MGM studios.  Working as a freelancer,  his later films kind of lacked the spark he had brought to his early MGM films.  Susan Hayward who apparently was a pretty tough cookie was going through a divorce and refused to travel to Hong Kong for filming.  Any scenes with Gable and Hayward on location are played by a stand-in for Hayward. The rest of her scenes were filmed on sound stages back in Hollywood. 

 The best I can say about this film is that it runs 96 minutes.

1047 - CROSSFIRE, interesting social conscience film noir

Expecting the worse, a 1940's film noir with a lot of touchy feely stuff about antisemitism, Crossfire as it turns out is a pretty good film. The death of a man who is Jewish starts an investigation of some demobilized army soldiers who had some interaction with the man.  The film features a rather preachy detective played by Robert Young who is there as the conscience of the audience.  Surprisingly this actually kind of works as part of the film's plot line.

Robert Mitchum is one of the soldiers helping the police to understand how the murder happened, Robert Ryan in another of his bad guy roles is the bigot who the police focus on.

 

Crossfire is considered a film noir, lots of shadows and expressive lighting. The studio was RKO who was quite good at putting together these types of films.  This time the subject of antisemitism was an interesting approach to what could have been yet another standard film noir. 

 

John Paxton wrote the screenplay from Richard Brook's novel, the running time is an efficient 86 minutes.

1944 - MURDER MY SWEET, first shot at a Chandler mystery

The first shot at translating a Raymond Chandler mystery, in this case the film based on Chandler's  Farewell My Lovely came off fairly well.  The screen writer John Paxton used a framing device of Chandler's private detective Philip Marlow being interrogated by the police.  This allowed the Marlow character to narrate the story in a flashback using a lot of Raymond Chandler's hard boiled dialog.  Probably the only misstep was having to work a last minute love story into the film at the end.

The big news with this film was the transformation of singer Dick Powell from one of Busby Berkley's performing pawns in his extravagant Warner Brother's musicals.  Powell does a very good job playing Marlowe.  He gets able assistance from a decent supporting cast, Mike Mazurki as the dumb brute of a gangster, Moose Malone.  Claire Trevor as Helen Grayle the "femme fatal" and Otto Kruger as some sort of phony psychic healer Jules Amthor.  The actor Anne Shirley, real name Dawn Evelyn Paris is Marlowe's love interest Ann Grayle a rather weak role in the film.

 

Considering how confusing these Raymond Chandler stories can be the director Edward Dmytryk does a pretty good job of keeping the plot straight.  The film has lots of noir touches which actually became murder mystery cliches  copied by other detective films.  However Murder My Sweet used them first.

 

The film runs an entertaining 95 minutes, screenplay by John Paxton.

1952 - THE SNIPER, the psycho killer on the loose 1950's version.

An attempt to dramatize a story about a deeply disturbed Army veteran, The Sniper is finally done in by the conventions of 1950's attitudes about mental illness. 

Arthur Franz is the psycho shooter who has a real hatred of women. In fact he hates them so much he decides to get rid of them.  He's sort of an early version of Norman Bates without the stuffed body in the cellar.  The police have to get Franz before he pops more women which is probably the most interesting aspect of the film.  The on location photography in San Francisco and the police investigation of the killings are also quite interesting.

However the least successful element of the film is the very dated psychoanalysis of the killer's mind by a police psychologist attempting to help the police understand his motives.  At one point the psychologist makes an earnest plea for locking up anyone who even remotely has some kind of deviant thought.  If you think about it, that would be most of the population of this country.

For all the overblown pseudo psychoanalysis, the film actually ends on a tense and understated note.  It's unfortunate that the rest of the film couldn't have been used this approach.

87 minutes.

1964 - THE CARPETBAGGERS, an interesting companion piece to Scorsese's The Aviator

One trashy piece of movie crap. Probably the kind of film that Hollywood does best, create entertaining junk out of a trashy book.

The producer Joesph E. Levine, was famous for foisting garbage on movie audiences like Godzilla and all of those Italian dubbed Hercules movies.  He had a second career making high quality films like The Graduate, Two Women and Contempt.  But he always seemed to be more interested in producing  things like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and Mad Monster Party.

 

The Carpetbaggers was based on a book by Harold Robbins who used the life story of Howard Hughes to drive his plot.  Levine hired screenwriter John Michael Hayes to adapt the book.

John Michael Hayes is an interesting person in Hollywood.  A writer who began his career on the top of the mountain writing for Alfred Hitchcock on films like Rear Window and To Catch a Thief.  He had a fight with Hitchcock and it was all down hill from that point.  Hayes ended up being under contract to Joseph E Levine where he wrote junk like Harlow, Walking Tall and Where Love Has Gone.

John Michael Hayes was a pro.  He was good at characterization and dialog and very good at the pseudo sex talk dialog thing that worked really well on his Hitchcock films.  The Carpetbaggers however was not one of his high points.  In this film all his smutty dialog is pretty bad.  However, it is also very funny.
Levine put together a pretty high class production with a good cast.  George Peppard plays the Howard Hughes part, Carroll Baker is the Jean Harlow character.  1940's star Alan Ladd has second billing in the cast but doesn't have much to do although he does get in a good fight with Peppard towards the end of the film.  

Getting back to the Martin Scorsese connection.  Scorsese also did a film on Howard Hughes, called The Aviator.  But the legendary Marty missed one important detail in his film.  He forgot to make it entertaining.

The life of Howard Hughes, with the airplanes and the films and all the girls was a real life Harold Robbins novel.  Scorsese never figured that out.  Joseph E. Levine did, that's why The Carpetbaggers is a more superior and entertaining film compared to The Aviator.

The film runs 150 minutes.