1047 - BORN TO KIll, film noir with one fascinating performance

A lot of critics and film buffs are fascinated with this rather violent noir film.  It is an unusual film for gentleman director Robert Wise and looking over his filmography it does stick out as something different in his career. 

However for this viewer I found the film's plot ridiculous and the dialog rather stilted. Wise's direction isn't much to behold except for a couple of murder scenes when he rises to the occasion otherwise it's point and shoot for the most part.  Only in these kiling scenes does Wise show much enthusiasm for what he's doing and it could be argued that they are are very influenced by his former producer, Val Lewton.

Let's get to the cast, Claire Trevor is once again the femme fatale scheming to steal her step sister's inheritance.  Her step sister has married Lawrence Tierney who is a very bad guy to put it mildly, he kills a couple of people at the beginning of the film almost as a whim.  The great character actor Elisha Cook Jr shows up and you know he's gonna be toast.  There is a private detective played by Walter Slezak running around blackmailing everyone.  Slezak gives the best performance in the film.

 

I honestly don't think this is a very good film but it what it has going for him it is the performance of Lawrence Tierney who is as scary on the screen as he was in real life.  The guy is simply compelling to watch and considering his violent off screen shenanigans you almost expect him to attack and kill the cast and for that matter the production crew.  His performance alone in Born to Kill makes it worth having a look at.

 

The film was written by Eve Greene and Richard Macaulay, the running time is 92 minutes.

1947 - RAILROADED, early Anthony Mann film

 An early film made near the start of Anthony Mann's career.  The film was shot at the PRC studios (Producers Releasing Corporation), one of the cheap-o studios in the Hollywood that churned out second feature films.

 

Railroaded is apparently based on the same story that was filmed in 1948 as Call Northside 777 at 20th Century Fox.  The film has a very small budget but a fairly decent cast.  John Ireland is the unredeemable bad guy who robs a bookmaking operation and frames an innocent man for the crime.  

Hugh Beaumont is the cop on the case.  Beaumont didn't really gain popularity in the entertainment business until television took over as the public's major outlet for entertainment. Beaumont was chiefly remembered for playing the father, Ward Cleaver on the Leave It To Beaver series.  

  

Anyway Anthony Mann directed and if you are looking for some signs of his talent as a filmmaker you will have to look real hard.  The film isn't anything special and Mann probably had his hands full just getting the scenes filmed considering the next to nothing production budget.

The film was written by John C. Higgins and Gertrude Walker, the running time is a quick 72 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.

1947 - A DOUBLE LIFE, the kind of stuff they give awards out for.

A famous actor goes nuts while appearing in Othello and can't separate reality from his performance in the play.

Ronald Coleman a popular actor during the 1930's and 40's with a melodious voice is the actor.  The script was by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin so the theatrical backgrounds are well established.  The film was well directed by George Cukor who was known for getting good performances out of actors. 

The problem with this film is that it is just plain dumb. Coleman rolls his eyes and breaks out into a sweat as he descends into madness.  The fact that no one seems to notice he is off his rocker until about the last 20 minutes of the film.

This is the kind of stuff people win Academy Awards for.  Lots of hysterics from the leading man.  A musical score that borders on the melodramatic from Miklos Rosza and of course a death scene to make sure everyone in the audience knows what great acting they are watching.

104 minutes.

1947 - FOREVER AMBER, some sort of English soap opera

A trashy novel about an English slut dressed up with lots of 20th Century Fox production money and filmed in 1940's technicolor.  

Clearly the idea was to do a version of Gone With The Wind set in 17th century England.  The audience is supposed to be interested in the social climbing adventures of one Amber St. Clair a woman who sleeps her way up to social status and power.  However since this was filmed in the 1940's all that sex stuff was pretty much implied

What you get in this picture is American actress Linda Darnell playing an English woman.  Darnell doesn't even attempt an accent.  Come to think of it the cast, a mixture of British and American actors and the director Otto Preminger didn't seem to sweat all of that dialect stuff.

This is the kind of film where the men run around in those goofy 17th century wigs and looking like a bunch of fops as they say.  The women heave their bosoms and Amber gets her comeuppance for being a naughty girl.  The whole thing is watchable only for the sets and a decent music score from David Raskin.

138 minutes, written by Philip Dunne and Ring Lardner Jr.

1947 - THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, very disappointing Orson Welles film.

The story goes that Orson Welles ran out of money during the production of some Broadway musical he was directing.  He persuaded Columbia Pictures President Harry Cohn to send him the money and in exchange he would write and direct a noir film with his wife, sexy Rita Hayworth.

Apparently what Harry Cohn got for his money was a talky and confusing mess of a film.  Welles even dared to change Hayworth's look, cutting her her and coloring it blonde. much to Cohn's displeasure.  Cohn demanded lots of cuts and reshooting of scenes but the film never came together.

The Fun House and Hall of Mirrors sequences are brilliant pieces of film making but they occur towards the end of the film and both sequences together are about 10 minutes long hardly worth sitting through this turkey.  You can probably find them on YouTube and save yourself some time.

Considering the mess this film is it would appear that Welles just had no interest in this film.  The Lady From Shanghai is not recommended viewing.

87 minutes

1947 - UNCONQUERED, Another DeMille epic impressive and ridiculous.

Here he goes again.  DeMille films another historical epic where he uses American history to warp and shape it to his needs.  In this case it's the Pontiac Rebellion of 1763.  Or it's Gary Cooper and Paulette Goddard vs white villain Howard De Silva who is selling what else, guns to the Indians.

All of the interesting DeMille stuff is here the methodical staging of scenes that are reminiscent of tableau's, the odd use of back project during the epic action scenes and most interestingly the manipulation of Paulette Goddard in some sort of sexual torture fetish scene.

As typical with DeMille, the actors are directed to play it very broad.  Since this is a larger than life story Gary Cooper can pull it off.  The underrated Paulette Goddard is the chief female that everyone slobbers over.  Goddard plays a slave so she is subject to all sorts of  the usual DeMille perversions.

Well how to rate this film?  The 40's technicolor is gorgeous, the mishmash of historical figures (oh look it's George Washington) is as wacky as usual.  The plot, overlong and convoluted as usual.  A typical late 40's DeMille film.

146 minutes, written by Charles Bennett, Fredric M. Frank, Jesse Louis Lasky Jr. and Jeanie MacPherson.

1947 - MONSIEUR VERDOUX, Chaplin's legendary black comedy is a pretty poor film

I would have to give Charles Chaplin credit for trying to pull off something like this especially during the late 1940's.  A black comedy about a serial murderer was certainly an audacious idea for a film.  However, the execution of this idea is mediocre at best and just plain bad at several points in the film.

The two biggest problems in Monsieur Verdoux are the production and the direction by Chaplin.  The whole film just looks cheap.  Crappy painted backgrounds, sets that look like sets.  The film has a cramped studio look to it and I'm not talking a major studio like MGM or Warner Brothers.  As for Chaplin the director, Monsieur Verdoux is almost painful to watch.  It's essentially a film made with an outdated silent film technique which makes it one of the most old fashioned films I've seen from the 1940's.  Chaplin was a pioneer filmmaker in the early days of Hollywood but it seems like his directing style hadn't evolved much past the 1920's.

In every Charles Chaplin film the star is Chaplin himself and is he ever the star.  Every scene is about him.  He has a weird effeminate acting style and nonstop hamming technique for the camera.  No other actor even gets a remote shot at creating a character in this film since the whole thing is all about Chaplin all the time.

Finally, the whole film is kind of distasteful.  Since Chaplin is playing a serial killer of women every woman he kills seems to deserve it.  It's as if he is doing the world a favor getting rid of these shrews.
Towards the end of the film Chaplin makes a speech where he compares war to his murder sprees as if to justify his actions this seems like the height of hypocrisy since you could probably make the case that however awful these women were they certain deserved every right to live even if they weren't the moral and intellectual equal of Chaplin's character.

Unsurprisingly this film was not successful in the United States.  Between the subject matter and Chaplin's communist politics this was a further alienation of an audience that had worshiped him during the silent film phase of his career.

124 minutes.

1947 - 13 RUE MADELINE, good and exciting World War II spy thriller.

James Cagney is the head of a World War II espionage group tracking down the location of  V2 rocket launchers while simultaneously dealing with a clever Nazi double agent.

Henry Hathaway one of Fox's best in house directors filmed in the same semi documentary style that he used for The House on 92nd Street which means lots of on location filming.  Hathaway had the benefit of having Cagney a powerful actor to really whip the story into shape.

This is old style Hollywood storytelling of the highest order, with clever plotting and exciting action sequences.  Although the on location filming isn't probably as fresh as it was back in the 1940's, it does give the film a lot of verisimilitude.

13 Rue Madeline is a film that isn't afraid to embrace it's realistic and downbeat ending something you don't see in a lot of films today.

95 minutes.

1947 - THE PARADINE CASE, Hitchcock's least favorite film

Alfred Hitchcock vs. his producer David O Selznick.

 

Hitchcock had been brought over by Selznick in 1939 to direct Rebecca.  Hitchcock already had a considerable reputation with his British films, particularly The 39 Steps and The Man Who Knew Too Much.  By the late 1930's Hitchcock was well on the way to developing his unique visual and storytelling style as can be seen in his film Saboteur.

David O. Selznick was Hollywood's leading independent producer of very classy motion pictures.  He had also established a considerable reputation of adapting novels into successful films.  This was to climax with his super production of Gone With The Wind.  Selznick was a very hands on detail oriented producer, who felt it was his job to be involved in every aspect of his film productions from the script to casting to the final editing.  This was not the Hitchcock way of doing things.

Hoping to recapture the success of Rebecca. Selznick had Hitchcock under contract for one more film.

Selznick chose a British courtroom mystery novel called The Paradine Case, and assigned Hitchcock to direct it.  The story was about an upper class English woman accused of murdering her rich husband and the criminal defense lawyer who takes her case and falls in love with her during the murder trial.

Things went wrong almost immediately.  Selznick had commissioned a number of scripts which he was unsatisfied with, so Hitchcock's wife Alma Reville a script editor,  attempted to put some structure and order into what was apparently a small mountain of scripts.  While filming Selznick would review each day's results and then rewrite the script to his satisfaction and have Hitchock reshoot the same scene the following day, this apparently went on for six long months.

Selznick also had strong input on the casting of the film, Hitchcock had hoped to use British actors for what was essentially a British story.  Selznick instead insisted on Gregory Peck who he had under contract who gave his usual competent but dull performance.

Finally, Selznick the control freak, insisted on approving all of Hitchock's camera and lighting setups before each scene was shot.  Hitchcock became so frustrated with the situation that he frequently took naps on the set in front of the cast and crew.

Hitchcock walked away from this train wreck of a movie and left Selznick to edit it into a three hour courtroom drama.  The movie was poorly received by the critics and the public when it was released, Selznick ended up re-cutting the film to under two hours.  The result of Selznick's obsessive screwing around was a movie that cost more than four million dollars and made about half of that.

Watching The Paradine Case is a major undertaking.

A good looking and expensive production, Selznick's dialog and the stiff acting by most of the cast make the movie a real effort to sit through at under two hours.  One can only shutter thinking about what the three hour version of this very very boring movie would have been like.

If you have a need to see all of Hitchcock's films I suppose you can sit through this, but keep in mind that Alfred Hitchcock didn't consider it worth the money, time and effort spent on it.

2006 - THE HOLIDAY, 1947 - LADY IN THE LAKE, 1951 - QUO VADIS...Three on the weekend

THE HOLIDAY-My wife and I took a road trip down to scenic south eastern Minnesota this Saturday. When we got back we were tired and vegged out in front of the tube that night. We ended up watching The Holiday on TBS. The plot is actually two stories. In the first story, the viewer has to decide who is prettier, Cameron Diaz or Jude Law. In the second story the viewer is forced to watch in horror as Jack Black is cast as the the romantic lead to Kate Winslet. Throw in a couple of cute kids and a colorful old geezer for no particular reason to make the movie drag on even more. This movie is full of tiresome inside movie jokes, no sale.

 136 minutes.


I had started Lady In The Lake a couple of weeks ago, so I finished it off on Sunday morning. This was one weird film. It's a movie made in 1947 by the actor Robert Montgomery using the camera as the main character. I guess they call it the subjective camera technique, as they said in the advertising "you are one of the characters". This movie was based on a Raymond Chandler story, and with all Raymond Chandler stories the mystery is so impossible to follow that by the end of the film I wasn't sure who had killed who and why they were killing anyone at all. This was an interesting failure but no sale.

 105 minutes

 

Finished off Sunday night with Quo Vadis a MGM spectacular. The odd thing about this movie was that it wasn't filmed in a wide screen process, so the movie looked great on our TV instead of the usual postage stamp size that you get with letterboxing. This is one of those ancient Romans persecute the Christians things. I enjoyed it a lot. The romantic leads Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr were a couple of stiffs but I doubt they could have done anything with these characters anyway. However Peter Ustinov is great hamming it up as Nero and Leo Glenn is also pretty darn great as Petronius, the author of the Satyricon. His death scene is pretty darn great as well. You also get to watch the burning of Rome, Christians getting eaten by lions, Christians burned at the stake and a "cast of thousands" enjoying it all in the Coliseum you gotta love all that debauchery. Highly recommended.

 171 minutes.