Vincent Sherman Noir: Nora Prentiss, The Unfaithful, Affair in Trinidad, The Garment Jungle

Posted on by
Reply

I’m not sure how many people end up watching a list of movies by director Vincent Sherman, but here we are!

I tried to watch a handful of his most noirish films that I had not seen before, including a rewatch of Nora Prentiss with Ann Sheridan. Please let me know what you think!

Nora Prentiss (1947)

Ann Sheridan proved on more than one occasion she could play a Frisco dame. One of them was Woman on The Run, and her first head-turning go at it was as Nora Prentiss. The movie is directed by Vincent Sherman with cinematography by the revered James Wong Howe.

It is structured around Dr. Richard Talbott (Kent Smith). He is the conventional family man you could set your clock by, only to become the moth enchanted by a flame. The gravitational pull of the entire picture revolves around Sheridan. It occurs to me that the story goes to great lengths to suggest how his ordinary life is oriented around what the Greeks might call chronos time: The daily rhythms making up life.

However, in this world, kairos, or those propitious moments that break into the everyday, do not seem to exist unless it’s to signal impending doom. Because after a few inopportune moments in time, you could end up in the gutter, hit by a taxi cab, or flailing from a pretty lady’s charms. The movie gets into gear when the dutiful doctor attends to the nightclub singer and his prim manner quickly brushes up against the straightforward charm that’s all Sheridan.

Some of the great femme fatales come off that way because they are ruthless. Others feel like they don’t know the sway that they have over a man. It’s unwitting, but either one can be needlessly destructive.

It is a movie that grieves me in the sense that we watch the dissolution of a family. They’re imperfect, but a family nonetheless, as Richard’s life gets turned upside down, spending his waking hours with this tantalizing woman. It gets to the point where the good doctor must make a choice, but he is too cowardly to choose either until fate drops in his lap and he chooses the most desperate option.

The added length of a new life for him and Nora doesn’t do the story any favors, but we are privy to noirish nightmares played out in a courtroom as Talbott allows himself to get caught up in what feels like a cruel joke.

Smith is not well-remembered (He is also in Cat People), but by the end, it’s his pessimistic nobility that has the final say next to Sheridan. Her name is in the title, rightfully so, but as the everyman, the heart and soul of this picture is found in him.

3.5/5 Stars

The Unfaithful (1947)

The Unfaithful shares some basic DNA with Mildred Pierce as a Warner Bros. vehicle crafted for much of the same female post-war audience (I had even heard a disgruntled Ann Sheridan turned down the role that ultimately won Joan Crawford her Oscar). This time around, Zachary Scott gets the opportunity to play the faithful, jilted husband opposite Sheridan.

Eve Arden turns up early on as a nosy divorcee in the social circles. She also maintains the trademark wit one comes to expect from such a consummate comedienne. Late-period Lew Ayers takes up the distinguished secondary lead of an attorney and family friend quite well by now.

Strains of noir begin to seep in when Sheridan returns home after a party, only to be attacked by a home invader, and the traumatic incident echoes throughout the entire film as her assailant is left dead in the aftermath…

One of the most delectable aspects is how Sheridan is allowed to shape-shift as her life begins to change overnight. She is the devoted, sensible wife of an architect and a man she married before he shipped off to war. Given how sympathetic she is within the community, she’s an obvious victim until it becomes clear she’s not entirely what she seems…

It’s a genuinely intriguing premise from the outset as the story evolves and we predict what it will become. A smarmy art dealer (Steven Geray) tries his hand at blackmail, and a woman comes out of the woodwork. The narrative grows a bit more stale when we recognize what is afoot. It has a slight sense of contemporary topicality, wrapped up in drama. We are dealing with themes of post-war marriage and grounds for divorce playing out like a nightmare.

One of the major delights of the picture comes with getting some definitive views of mid-century Los Angeles, even as there is a passing reference to Laurel Canyon and other places. Purportedly, the picture was inspired by Somerset Maugham’s The Letter, and though it’s been some time since I’ve seen William Wyler’s adaptation,  I’m predisposed to enjoy the modern aspect of this film. It’s purely because it provides an added layer of authentic character to the story. The ending plays as a hopeful referendum on your typical noir doom.

3.5/5 Stars

Affair in Trinidad (1952)

It’s difficult not to see the movie in relation to Gilda as a reunion of Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford in another exotic locale. Although comparison can be the thief of joy and leaves Trinidad seeming unbecoming, once you separate the two, it’s easy enough to enjoy what it has to offer. Namely, the names on the marquee.

Although the parameters of the plot are hardly as interesting, nor are the relations of the characters, in case anyone needed a reminder, Rita Hayworth reminds us why she was a luminous cinema star and a lithe dancer with a killer hair flip.  In these incubated moments of dance, she’s able to bring to mind her work with Fred Astaire as much as Gilda. There’s so much ebullience to be had.

One’s left to wonder how Ford got shoehorned into the picture as a brother-in-law, but if nothing else, it’s an excuse to get the two stars back onscreen together for another round of sizzling antagonism.

It is her husband who is found dead by a local fisherman under dubious circumstances, and he flies in to deal with his brother’s affairs. He’s not looking to make any friends. Steve is accusatory of the vaguely aristocratic Fabian, who has a hand in local business, a sinister edge, and an obvious interest in Chris. She is unattached after all.

We see all throughout the picture how men worship her, and she confesses to her brother-in-law that she can’t help how Fabian looks at her. It feels like it could be a meta-analysis of Hayworth’s relationship with the male audience throughout her entire career.

This is more interesting than anything in the plot, which is layered with more than a few aspects of Notorious. If he is a reliable hand, Vincent Sherman still does not have the same bravura as Hitchcock, and there’s not a lot of elegance to the story.

It’s more about prolonged inscrutability than thrills, though leaning into its pitch-black noir aesthetic certainly does it some favors. At the end of the day, anyone drawn to Rita Hayworth or the reliable mercurial nature of Glenn Ford will find at least some reason to give it a watch. If you come with those expectations and not expectations of Gilda, all the better.

3/5 Stars

The Garment Jungle (1957)

Here is a picture giving off the aura of all things overblown and exploitative, making it more than worthwhile for viewing, replete with costumes by Jean Louis. Although it doesn’t have quite the same ring as The Asphalt Jungle or The Blackboard Jungle, The Garment Jungle does earn its keep when the co-owner of a garment business is killed in a runaway elevator car during the opening minutes of the picture.

It’s not quite on par with the powerful Richard Attenborough film The Angry Silence, but it is a Hollywood version of a union movie, turning the melodrama up a few notches. The dead man’s anti-unionist partner (Lee J. Cobb) is left to pick up the pieces in the aftermath of the tragedy. He’s innocent, even genuinely grief-stricken, but there’s no love lost between him and the faction led by young Robert Loggia, looking to organize his confederates.

The movie seems to be crammed with a varied assortment of available contract players, including Gia Scala and Valerie French.  Another one, Kerwin Matthews, plays Cobb’s son, who’s looking to get into the family trade while lending his dear old dad a lingering conscience in the cutthroat industry.

It’s easy to rue the fact that Robert Aldrich was not allowed to see the picture to completion. It’s still tough, even brutal around the edges, thanks to the likes of the ever-reliable heavy Richard Boone.

Cobb is actually sympathetic, playing a refraction of On The Waterfront, but it does feel like Sherman’s version of the story, at the behest of Harry Cohn, is a bit more traditional. And that’s saying something in a movie where at least two central characters die. The tumultuous production cannot strip the movie of some of its grittiest inclinations, and that’s worth something.

3/5 Stars

The Terminal (2004)

Posted on by
Reply

“Do you ever feel like you’re living in an airport?” – The Man shaving next to Viktor

I’ve been fascinated by transitory spaces like train stations and airports as physical manifestations of the in-between, bridging places, cultures, and all sorts of people.

I just recently returned from a trip myself. Airports are never a favorite — they feel like a necessary evil on the way to the destination. But they’re very much suspended in time as you hurry and then wait and wait some more. Still, in these moments you often have space to people-watch and observe the world around you. It’s a small joy of airports — how many folks are thrown together and you can only imagine their lives and experiences.

If we can come to The Terminal with any kind of high-minded perspective, this might be it. Steven Spielberg’s subsequent film with Tom Hanks after Saving Private Ryan and Catch Me If You Can is a very different animal.

It’s inspired by the real-life existence of one Mehran Karimi Nasseri, a man who actually lived in the departure lounge of Charles De Gaulle Airport for years, as someone caught in between. He was not allowed to legally enter the country but couldn’t ship back home either. He was stuck in a perpetual state of limbo or, if you want to get more philosophical, purgatory. Even when he was finally offered stays in several countries, he chose to remain in the airport. One can imagine the reasons for this, but the most obvious one is familiarity.

This is much of what happens the longer we sit with the movie; its characters and the world grow in familiarity. At first I was wondering how they could sustain such a story for over 2 hours. Surely the premise would run dry about an hour in.

Tom Hanks is much like Jimmy Stewart for subsequent generations. Still, sometimes when I see him I see the beloved Tom Hanks and not a character. It works best when the part calls for his attributes as an everyman hero. Here he is an Eastern European man, named Viktor Navorski, who has fallen through a similar bureaucratic crack.

He can barely even string a sentence together in English for the first half of the film. It doesn’t help that one can easily draw comparisons to the works of Jacques Tati, like his expansive visual comedy Playtime, featuring Monsieur Hulot, a beloved film for many. Spielberg himself cited it as an inspiration, and ironically he was forced to build a full-fledged airport set because no location was willing to let him film there. In this way, the films have a genuine scope.

Still, if we think of Viktor in the world of the likes of Forrest Gump or Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey, we’re in business. Because he’s a kind of fated, sainted movie character. There’s also a bit of Elf in the movie, not so much because of the characterization but the environments of the “real” city and the camaraderie it builds among the forgotten ranks of humanity. It is a love letter to such people. Men like Viktor (or Buddy) can become unwitting totems and folk heroes for us all. We want to celebrate them.

The Terminal is another time capsule. It’s a post-9/11 world, so we’re not as naive and nostalgic as the 90s, and yet we can still hold onto mores of an earlier time. Whether it’s the TV adverts, the cost of Burger King, the sound of pagers, or the fact that Borders still exists. It takes us back somewhere that no longer exists, even if it’s only on videotape or in our memories.

Acting Commissioner Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci) oversees the airport’s daily operations, and he’s the one who initially strands Viktor. Before the power goes to his head, the part comes off quite well thanks to Tucci’s inherent charm. We appreciate what he’s trying to accomplish within a system where Viktor has all the markings of a loose end who won’t go away. Loose ends can come back to get you.

Catherine Zeta-Jones plays the aptly named airline stewardess Amelia, who drifts in and out of the movie, crossing paths with Viktor in the terminal. Her life mirrors his in some ways but is also vastly different. He’s constantly stranded, she’s constantly on the move, and they always meet in the middle. Still, everybody’s waiting…just for different things.

Although she represents the continental and high-flying lifestyle, because of her candor — these starry-eyed movie moments — there’s some element of a You’ve Got Mail romanticism about her. We feel it the most when she and Hanks meet in one of their serendipitous encounters and wind up talking about Napoleon in Borders. It’s the kind of interaction that has a tinge of romance but, more so, lights us up because it is a meaningful connection made between two people.

The movie also has some wonderful supporting roles. These include Diego Luna long before he blew up, Zoe Saldana as an immigration officer/Trekkie, and Kumar Pallana, most well-remembered for featuring in Wes Anderson’s films. They are all part of the inner workings of the airport, and eventually, after he’s been there long enough, Viktor builds a rapport and becomes integrated into the behind-the-scenes network that keeps the place running. The movie is at its best when Hanks has joined the fraternity of workers at the airport like a budding found family.

They’re all culturally different and still united. One of their shared points of interest is helping Viktor get to know Amelia by putting together a private dinner for them, with all their lovable faux pas on display. But it’s an act of gratitude because Viktor helped his friend in his own romantic endeavors. He even joins them in their poker nights over unclaimed belongings.

The core of the whole movie — the film’s Rosebud, if you will — comes in the peanut can Viktor clutches to his chest. Without getting too detailed, we learn of Viktor’s connection to the famed jazz portrait A Great Day in Harlem, and it’s a stirring reminder of how music has the capacity to traverse cultures and move us with emotion like few things. There’s nothing more evident in my own life. I know it to be true, and an appearance by Benny Golson of the Jazz Messengers is such a satisfying evocation.

In the end, the movie is probably too long, or more specifically, it goes to too many places and takes too many swings when something pithy might have sufficed. There is the prolonged wait for the war back home to end. Vitkor aims to finally set foot in New York to keep a promise. What will happen to him and Amelia? Then, Dixon becomes more megalomaniacal. It’s a lot. But there are so many ideas and moments to love here. The fact they’re given to us by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg is no less remarkable.

Humanity is not usually good at waiting, but we are destined for it, and it becomes imperative what we do with the time. Elwood P. Dowd, Viktor, Buddy the Elf, even Mr. Hulot  — these are characters to acknowledge. People are drawn to them for very good reasons, and in their quiet, solitary moments, they often bring beauty into the world. Viktor goes so far as to plaster deteriorating walls and later craft a magnificent fountain.

I look at a character like him and recognize he is not like us, and yet in another way there’s something true in him. Sometimes we feel like we live in an airport — we don’t know where we belong, we don’t have a home — and we must figure out where we fit, whether it’s a different place or a different world altogether. Sometimes we must aim to make a home out of the here and now until that day comes.

3.5/5 Stars

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Posted on by
Reply

John Carpenter is one of the most impressive multi-hyphenates, not only directing and writing but also scoring his work, and this level of auteurship results in a punchy and effective thriller.

He introduces Assault on Precinct 13 not with a lot of needless exposition, but by throwing us directly into a world and giving us the most salient details to figure it out for ourselves. It becomes apparent that a large cache of high-powered weapons has been stolen by a local gang.

The police react with swift retribution against several members of the gang, and in its wake, some of the gang leaders enact a gruesome blood oath. They vow vengeance against the police department if it’s the last thing they do.

Against this ticking time bomb, Carpenter creates a tableau that belies his low budget. There’s a wide-ranging sense of the city grabbing hold of multiple points of view. The first of our four threads involves a carload of gang members out to avenge the deaths of 6 of their own.

The next centers on a newly installed policeman, Lt. Bishop (Austin Stoker), who’s expecting a quiet evening seeing out a defunct police precinct that’s all but packed up and moved to another location. Then, there’s a caravan of prisoners being carted off and transported to their new holding facility — one of them being the irreverent Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston).

Perhaps the most curious of all of them involves a father and his little girl purportedly on a mission of mercy to get their nanny to move out of her rough neighborhood. They slowly navigate the unfamiliar streets of the poor side of town.

Time stamps orient us to when and where we are, lending a procedural type aspect to the proceedings. There’s also something agreeable about featuring all no-name actors because we have no prior history to imprint on them, and somehow it lends itself to this idea of L.A. realism. These are everyday people. Creative necessity becomes an asset even as we know full well that we’re watching a movie.

What struck me about Assault on Precinct 13 is the level of economy paired with this unsentimental sense of brutality, making it feel reminiscent of something like Targets. This goes down to young men with their gunsights pointed at innocent passersby. It gives me the shivers because Carpenter triggers us to recognize the sheer fragility of human life. It’s so easy to become collateral damage.

One lynchpin scene involves an ice cream truck driver. He knows these streets better than this little girl who only has eyes for an ice cream cone — it means he always keeps a pistol close at hand — but he also signals the danger at hand. The gang thugs stalk the streets in their black ride with the predatory intent of Spielberg’s shark.

The true ingenuity of the story comes with building out a broader world that subsequently services a smaller story scaled to Carpenter’s budget. So, with the resources at his disposal, he’s able to tell something gripping that has a full-bodied immersion to it without getting too ambitious.

The bus must make an unexpected pit stop at the nearest station because one of their prisoners is especially sick. The special agent wants to stash him away in a holding cell for the time being. He has no concern about when the precinct is closing.

But the level of conflict is ratcheted even more so by the father intent on avenging his little girl. He ultimately stumbles into the station, catatonic and stricken with fear because he knows the silent killers are on the doorstep ready to get him. Thus, all our storylines are brought together, and we can distill the premise down to one of Carpenter’s purported inspirations.

He wanted to craft his version of the prototypical Howard Hawks westerns — the westerns written by Leigh Brackett and coming in the forms of Rio Bravo, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo respectively. Obviously, the context is different — contemporary gang wars cost less than period western wear — but the sense of morality is easy enough to approximate.

The “sheriff,”  Lt. Bishop, must shore up the outpost and deal with an incoming onslaught, outgunned and outmanned with no clear communication to the outside world. The stakes are evident, and we must sit back and wait to see what goes down as the entire gang mobilizes around the precinct, ready to ambush all its inhabitants.

Carpenter takes his time to absolutely obliterate the police station set. Obviously, this amount of firepower is absurd to consider. It does little and acts as nothing more than an intimidation tactic, but it’s another way Carpenter gives us spectacle or the illusion of spectacle without having to involve his actors. It’s all wonderful reaction and demolition work that’s impact is felt all the way around.

When our remaining heroes pull themselves up off the floorboards, we scarcely want them to show their faces, knowing they could just as easily be blown away in a shower of bullets and shattered glass.

The writer-director flips the script by allowing the Black man, two women, and a couple of prisoners left over to be the ones to live and carry the movie. It’s a quietly radical creative decision and gives us something generally uncommon in a ’70s action flick. Carpenter’s able to do it purely because he’s not working in the mainstream, though he still must make a conscious choice.

Although the ties to Hawks are unmistakable, including the inclusion of the unflappable secretary “Leigh” (Laurie Zimmer), by the end it’s hard not to see the specter of George Romero’s Night of The Living Dead over this one. It comes with a faceless foe who might as well be zombies as they climb through windows and doorways, falling back, only for a new barrage of marauders to take their place. It’s endless, almost mind-numbing.

What’s most rewarding about Assault on Precinct 13 is how it delivers on its premise. It’s not polished or pristine, and yet it’s a full-bodied story with a tenacity and a sense of ingenuity. Most important of all, you feel the menace throughout the picture as the adrenaline pumps. It doesn’t pull its punches and Carpenter more than rewards his audience for their attention. He proved himself to be a filmmaker to watch. Love it or hate it, you know when you’re watching a Carpenter film.

4/5 Stars

Robin and Marian (1976)

Posted on by
Reply

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been captivated by the legends of Robin Hood. There are many reasons. I got to visit Sherwood at a young age, and it no doubt sprouted a plethora of adventures in my boyish imagination. He was a roguish, if good-natured, hero who faced off against the malevolent forces of the aristocracy with his friends and fought for the little guy. I’ve never tired of it.

Richard Lester has given us a great deal as moviegoers, and one of his most interesting forays was his string of Three Musketeers films during the 1970s. He continued in this trend with Robin and Marian. However, what’s immediately apparent is how it’s set apart from its Lincoln Green-clad brethren.

This tale is far more grounded in reality, and I must admit it initially made me uncomfortable. If you’ll pardon me, I felt the very same way with The Last Jedi and its tearing down of Star Wars’ accepted mythos. This iteration demystified the material and felt a bit unfamiliar compared to what I come to expect out of the milieu from Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner, or even Disney.

It’s as if this new decade has given the license for a more tangible world away from the annals of folklore. There’s the grime and the dirt you might find in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, much less in an opulent Technicolor confection of yore.

Sean Connery comes back from the Crusades as a much more mature and jaded Robin Hood in the service of an especially ornery King Richard (Richard Harris). He’s gray and balding, the shadow of the great hero we read about in our storybooks. But then again, perhaps those were all tall tales to begin with. It makes sense, but such a pragmatic thought rarely crosses our minds in youth.

Still, faithful Little John (Nicol Williamson) looks like a normal man, not some stout yeoman, and Will Scarlett, well, he’s portrayed by Denholm Elliot, hardly a strapping young buck. Of course, we realize that, and yet part of the allure of these stories is that we can watch them being lived out in front of us as fact.  Over time, as I came to accept what this movie was doing, a new kind of appreciation arose because there is a fresh vision at work.

Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn are introduced together on screen as the titular couple. She accepted his prolonged absence and took up a role as a woman of a cloth. When he returns with his regrets, she doesn’t feel the need to take him back because she’s moved on. She hasn’t been waiting around for her knight in shining armor. That is the stuff of fairy tales.

Robert Shaw more than fits the narrative as a surprisingly aloof Sheriff of Nottingham who seems content and resigned to the way things are. There are young upstarts in his service who want to eradicate the returning Robin Hood, but he knows all too well how such an undertaking will end.

He also knows that if he brings his regiments to the edge of Sherwood, Robin will feel compelled to meet them. He’s not one to resist such an invitation. They know each other well. You get a sense that if times were different, the two men could sit down together and share an ale to talk about all their war stories. Alas, King Richard is gone, and his brother Prince John (Ian Holm) is in power. He’s as impudent and awful as you remember him, though we only get a sniff.

Robin and the Sheriff face off not as bitter adversaries but as tacit opponents on opposite sides. They feel compelled to certain codes of conduct with a kind of grim inevitability. They hack away at each other in the ugliest duel you can imagine where the swords and chainmail feel authentically heavy, and the blood coagulates in ghastly wounds. It’s a David and Goliath battle, but not in the way you might expect. Instead, whoever wins between the two of them will win the war for their sides. Nothing more.

It’s not some grand adventure, and instead we watch our ailing protagonist take stock of his life and try to reinvigorate the lost love he regrets most of all. If there was nothing else to take away from the picture, we must at the very least dwell on the chemistry of the two stars. This alone is able to cover up any perceived reservations with the movie.

What we get is ultimately a tragic love story taking some creative license with one of Robin Hood’s final myths. Somehow it sears through us and still stays in line with everything propagated by the movie thus far. Don’t expect a rousing denouement but a resolution staying in line with the somber regret and self-reflection coursing through the entire picture. Part of me rails against this literalization of my folk heroes even as it provides a reality check and a way to reinterpret the tall tales. For me, the picture’s saving grace must be Audrey Hepburn and Sean Connery in that order.

She was absent from films for almost 10 years on her own terms, taking care of her family. And yet she returned in this picture with the same radiance, regal strength, and geniality that captured all our imaginations. I would say that time has been kinder to Robin and Marian than most, with the way it chooses to capture the Robin Hood archetype, and its cast is superb.

3.5/5 Stars

The Big Trail (1930)

Posted on by
Reply

It’s remarkable how a pristine print of an old film makes it come alive before your eyes, and I feel this way most ardently with The Big Trail, an early widescreen beauty directed by Raoul Walsh. With all the grit and grime removed, it’s almost like we can reach out and touch it in front of us.

There’s a certain amount of folklore about how the movie didn’t turn a profit, and it put John Wayne through 9 more years of purgatory before John Ford threw him a bone with another leading role in Stagecoach. And maybe now we attach it to the legacy of all the ensuing pictures that came in its wake, but there’s still something agreeable about it on its own terms.

I think of something like Red River, where the images overflow with all sorts of people—the world feels lived in and raw—where so much is possible. There’s an excitement in the prospect even as danger isn’t far off. And the environment itself hardly feels like it’s been faked; everything feels like living, breathing terrain full of character, hardly for the faint of heart. It’s also ripe with treachery.

The Big Trail exhibits the life of mountain men, mercantile stores laden with goods, log cabins, wagons, mud, and strapping heroes like John Wayne. Even if he is a bit more wiry and his voice an octave higher than most of us remember, his unmistakable DNA is right there in front of us. 

Veteran Tully Marshall plays the loyal Zeke with a congenial old-timey register in the vein of Walter Huston. Tyrone Power Sr. has what purportedly was his only talkie role as the wagon train’s gruff leader. He’s also one of the most obvious human antagonists if the natural elements weren’t enough already.

Ward Bond, another western mainstay, is plainly visible too, although he speaks only a few lines near the beginning. Meanwhile, the Swedish jokes courtesy of El Brendel make me consider how our noses turn up at the portrayal of certain minorities (it seems like we can throw Swedish people in with them).

From the very first frame, The Big Trail is playing on the American mythos of the west settled by plucky pioneers as eastern civilization continues its slow march to all regions of the austere United States. We understand now that this grand story is in part a convenient myth or at least a sliver of the story, but alongside some of the works of John Ford or even something like The Virginian, we see the syntax around the western genre being solidified to great effect.

There’s also a continued codification of the typical hierarchy: Understandably, it’s a masculine world where women are mostly subordinate, and Indians are to be feared. However, even this element is made slightly more nuanced by Wayne’s character, who respects and keeps company with some Native Americans.

We watch a Pilgrim prostrate with his community, his head raised as he entreats his God for travel mercies on the road ahead. Its imagery presages movies like Our Daily Bread or, most obviously, John Ford’s Wagon Master (1950).

The story is grand and sweeping at this point; we hardly need the details, just the sense of the trail evoked in the title, and the movie gives us that. There are threats from belligerent Natives that lead to a circling of the wagons to take up a defensive stand. Then there’s a seismic thunderstorm unleashing nature’s fury on finite human beings. They feel so puny in comparison, and it evokes the magisterial scenes on the plain John Ford captured in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon a generation later.

Though the scoring doesn’t do the final moment of reunification between Wayne and his girl (Marguerite Churchill) any favors, the images are capable of doing most of the heavy lifting. Because so much is accomplished with two people being set off against the natural landscape in a way that feels full and alive.

It seems pragmatic to say John Wayne was probably unfairly vilified for making a giant picture like The Big Trail a box office flop. The massive budget and pioneering presentation aspects of the feature didn’t do it any favors when the bottom line was concerned.

Thankfully, almost a century later we can concern ourselves more with aesthetic decisions, and it has many of note. Walsh’s movie is a startling, expansive undertaking. At times it lumbers along, but sometimes in that scope and the sense of the images, there are these utterly spectacular moments of visual shorthand. It feels like we’re being treated to a singular experience with grand ambitions in depicting the march of pioneers across the prairies. The battle of man vs. nature has an elemental gravity to it that we so often take for granted now.

And Marion Morrison didn’t do too badly for himself. Wayne became arguably one of the most prolific and fiercely admired personas of all time. It’s instructive to get a firsthand look at his beginnings because, love him or hate ’em, his career gives us a view into the progression of not only the Western genre but Hollywood on the whole.

4/5 Stars

3 Bad Men (1926)

Posted on by
Reply

At the outset, 3 Bad Men feels like a pile of tropes. We get a sense of the sprawling West: There are wagons crossing the prairie, a lust for gold, outlaws, and intrepid heroes.

George O’Brien embodies an early Irish portrait from John Ford; he’s strapping and jocund with a giant harmonica and a song in his heart. Olive Borden has a certain Clara Bow aura as a screen beauty, though far more aloof. She has taken to the trail with her father as they look to seek their fortunes.

However, they feel out of their depth in an austere terrain full of natural danger and deceitful characters. Dan’s a friendly face and more than willing to oblige with his services, especially with a pretty girl like Lee nearby.

A little over 15 minutes in, we get our first sense of something truly intriguing for upending the typical conventions you’d expect in a silent picture. It shouldn’t be a total surprise because Ford has titled his movie 3 Bad Men.

It feels like a precursor to Bicycle Thieves in that the title has a kind of ambiguous meaning. It takes something dubious and reclaims it as first Carlton and then the audience put their trust in these three grizzled vagabonds.

They begin as “Wanted” outlaws who spy some thoroughbreds on their way toward the gold rush in the Dakotas, and they’re prepared to raid them, only to become the indignant defenders against another attack.

It becomes a muddying of morality in a world where reputation comes to mean so much even as action tells a very different story about these people. These men have a price on their heads in multiple states and countries, and yet in this moment of need, they become heroic benefactors of a woman he doesn’t have anywhere else to turn.

The primary antagonist is a white-teethed sheriff, Layne Hunter, who’s more despot and renegade than he is an emblem of the law in the booming gold town of Custer. The irony is difficult to miss.

A sad-eyed, wispy-haired Minister arrives and doesn’t represent goodness to the local populace as much as he does a certain utility. With a minister, a woman can be married. Eventually he will have to beseech the sheriff to take action; whether or not it will do any good is another matter.

Bull, Mike, and Spade acknowledge they are three old terrapins not fit to take care of her, and they vow to become her matchmakers to find her a suitable husband. At times, the more comic scenarios feel like two-reeler-type gags from looking for husband material in the saloon. It gives the material an agreeable sense of levity.

There’s a quick, easy camaraderie between the most obvious male leads, O’Brien and Bull, when it would be so easy to turn them against one another for ready-made drama. When they join a saloon brawl together, it galvanizes them, and all future conflicts come from outside forces. They have nothing but goodness and chivalry to offer.

What’s easy to appreciate about the film is how it has many of the archetypes and elements of the early Western, but there’s an intricacy to the character dynamic that makes it more compelling than run-of-the-mill sagebrush fare. It’s not just about a rudimentary plot that we’ve seen umpteen times before.

And though Ford can never be called one of the most urbane comedic directors, one of the joys of 3 Bad Men is how it blends goofy antics and the toils of romantic comedy against the underlying drama of the West. It gives it a depth and a breadth so many of its contemporaries lack when viewed from the present. Ford offers us more to enjoy than just superficial pleasures.

The sides are drawn up with a burning wagon sent hurtling toward the church as a harbinger of the chaos to come in the fight for control of the community. What was striking to me in hindsight was how the imagery of Hunter’s mob felt so very much like what I’m accustomed to seeing of the KKK, from burning crosses to fear and intimidation tactics.

There are also Ford landscapes and stunning set pieces like the race to lay down their claims, but even at this early juncture in his career, he never lets the scale get in the way or neutralize the centrality of the character moments that give the film its meaning.

Like watching three men walking across the ridge of the prairie, it suggests something profound. Ford knew how to shoot an ending, and it presages something like The Searchers, where the image feels quintessential to the western milieu, as if walking into the sunset offers a kind of finality. Though it’s just the beginning for some who must keep on wandering.

There are a handful of directors who had the good fortune and skill to have longevity in Hollywood. I think of the likes of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, but before them there was John Ford. There’s little doubt we see a master craftsman being formed in the teens and 20s, and he would continue to exhibit his talents well into the 60s.

We usually look at directors like Ford or some of his contemporaries in their fully formed state with many films under their belts, but it’s equally instructive to look at how they honed their skills early on before they had legendary acclaim. 3 Bad Men is a surprising and unmitigated delight, developing the western genre from the ground up.

4.5/5 Stars

Princess Mononoke (1997)

Posted on by
Reply

“The Forest Spirit gives life and takes life away. Life and death are his alone.”

One of the most beautiful things about Princess Mononoke is the magnitude of the world, and it’s not merely in terms of how director Hayao Miyazaki brings his resplendent hand-drawn landscapes to life.

There’s a level of complexity to the ecosystem that knows few equals, allowing the movie to feel not just like a story but a genuine world we are being immersed in. We begin to experience a grand scope and mythology with so many familiar archetypes woven together for our benefit. Somehow, they manage to transcend any differences in culture or belief.

The Princess in the title doesn’t actually show up for some time. Instead, we meet Ashitaka. He is the protector of his village, and he faces off against a demon-possessed warthog. Immediately, I thought of Legion, a spirit Jesus allows to possess a host of pigs before running them into the gully. In that story, the villagers ask Jesus to leave because they recognize some power is at work. Ironically, there is much the same belief here, although they are far from the Judeo-Christian point of view.

It makes for gripping storytelling when you start from a place of belief and awe. Skepticism never enters the equation, and there is evil in the world just as there is good. Their local oracle pays homage to the great unknown god in a show of deference unwittingly similar to the people of Athens. She knows there are forces she does not understand acting upon the world, and she reveres them.

Ashitaka’s arm is left stricken with a curse even as he defends his town selflessly. This propels him on a journey to seek out a forest spirit in the form of a deer who might be able to bestow his life back to him.

Princess Mononoke is a feudal Miyazaki film and the closest inheritor of Akira Kurosawa’s cinema; it’s darker and bloodier than some of the Ghibli maestro’s movies for a youthful audience, and yet these attributes simply make it feel like an epic adventure in the grandest sense of the word. There is danger and blood and evil, just as there are heroes and grand acts of sacrifice.

I was recently reinvigorated reading C.S. Lewis on his thoughts on Fairy Tales and writing for children. He says:

“Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. Nor do most of us find that violence and bloodshed, in a story, produce any haunting dread in the minds of children. As far as that goes, I side impenitently with the human race against the modern reformer. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book.”

I’ve heard Miyazaki compared with Lewis’s compatriot J.R.R. Tolkien, and the differences are so vast as to almost dismiss comment altogether. However, in the broadest strokes, I can see it with Mononoke. A mythic hero like Ashitaka or Strider who gleams with attributes almost preordained to make them heroes. There is treachery as much as supernatural impositions. The struggle between civilization vs. nature–technology allowing for a kind of perversion of the natural world, even as the beasts are prone to violence as they feel humanity encroaching on their forest home.

Tolkien represents it with orcs in their mines, building weapons of destruction. Here, there is Lady Eboshi, a regal leader who leads an outpost of ironworkers. However, far from being a tyrant, she has a degree of tenacity in defending their position and extending compassion toward a grateful troupe of freed women and the ostracized sick. Meanwhile, they’re prepared to use their flintlocks to tame the wild around them and obliterate any human enemies who descend on them.

The story is full of conflicts of interest, and every character desires something different. We are told this is how great stories are made, but Mononoke shows us what it looks like in action with compelling acuity.

The emperor desires for the lady to hunt down the aforementioned deer god, sending some of his best trackers and hunters to bring him the mythic beast’s head. Meanwhile, an unseen warlord, Asano, has been terrorizing the countryside and continues to extort the ironworks before deciding to ambush them at their most vulnerable.

These are mere human concerns. It would be drama enough, and yet Miyazaki’s story is equally concerned with the natural world and the original inhabitants of the land. There are giant wolves, warthogs, apes, and every other creature imaginable.

Ashitaka gets the opportunity to be a mediator between all sides with a kind of stoic clarity that feels almost supernatural. He comes in contact with the wolf girl San, who has turned her back on the human culture and runs with the wolves as one of their own. They both act as these borderstalkers existing between cultural spaces based on blood or allegiance. First, contentious and then drawn together by a mission bigger than either of them.

Princess Mononoke is not just a feast of images but of sound design and scoring. I noticed one dialogue scene where Ashitaka rests in a cave at night, sharing a conversation with a fellow travel companion; there’s the underscoring of Joe Hisaishi, of course, but also the faint sounds of cicadas and birds chirping. Easy to miss but hardly immaterial. It’s this layering that feels so extraordinary in its attention to the full breath of the soundscape. It mirrors the forethought in every frame of the narrative.

Miyazaki and his team have an almost inexhaustible fount of creative imagination. Consider the human toadstool-like creatures twirling and clicking in the forest depths — a cross between mechanized toy soldiers and playful apparitions. There’s the molasses-like ooze of the demonic, a startling visual manifestation of this cankerous evil familiar across the director’s oeuvre. Or the curious nightwalker, which goes from a translucent Godzilla tramping around the forest depths to a transfigured creature of great repute.

We also witness the saving power of water and a rebirth and rejuvenation scene with plants sprouting up again. There were even a few solitary moments, whether it was the deer god appearing or the growth in his wake, reminding me of some of the more delightfully psychedelic faces and foliage in the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine movie. Perhaps it sounds like an almost crass comparison, but I don’t mean it to be. Because there is something so striking and singular about it; magic is in the air, and it affects us profoundly.

The wolves want to eat Ashitaka’s faithful elk Yakul in an early scene. By the end, the world has been remade, and the lion has laid down with the lamb, as it were. It feels like an immaculate portrait of new beginnings and a new creation, even as Ashitaka is reunited with his love as they vow to live on the fringes.

It’s as if Miyazaki knows a world such as this cries out for a happy ending. What makes it resonate is the height and depth of the evil and the disrepair the world was saddled with, as embodied by Ashitaka’s wound. It’s these very realities making the denouement that much more extraordinary. We crave stories with the level of gravitas and satisfaction that the likes of Tolkien and Miyazaki build. When you’re given something such as this, so many other tales pale in comparison. Because they fail to do justice to our deepest human longings — longings not dictated solely by culture, creed, or even faith. If these stories ring true, they run deeper still.

5/5 Stars

The Odyssey (2026)

Posted on by
Reply

Like many, I read the Odyssey as part of my high school education, but what remains are bits and pieces of iconography passed down through popular culture as much as the text itself. To state the obvious, Christopher Nolan’s latest film is an adaptation, and it makes creative choices that a myriad of voices have said yay or nay to for any number of reasons. But choices are necessary for any adaptation, or else it wouldn’t be worth making in the first place.

It took me some minutes to grow accustomed to the story and settle myself. Nolan lays the groundwork of a wife and mother, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), waiting for her husband’s triumphant return from the Trojan Wars. It’s been years, and she still hasn’t given up hope, even as a host of suitors, led by the duplicitous snake Antinous (Robert Pattinson), squat in her dining hall. They have designs on winning her hand in marriage once she acquiesces. To them, her husband is as good as dead, and her son (Tom Holland) is barely a threat to their ambitions. Meanwhile, the master’s most faithful servant is a blind herdsman named Eumaeus (John Leguizamo).

The movie trades in colloquialisms and a moral parlance of Zeus’s law, a simplified expression for what the Greeks would call xenia. In Judeo-Christian teaching, this might be analogous to the exhortation in Hebrews not to forget to show hospitality to strangers, because some have welcomed angels unawares. In the Greek empire of Nolan, there’s a decidedly treacherous bent to it; one must maintain honor at all costs and not give your enemy a reason to undermine you…

It truly hits its stride when Nolan’s penchant for visual ingenuity and grand spectacle is allowed to take over. We have enough exposition to be sent off on an epic adventure as Odysseus (Matt Damon) makes his journey home through fragments of flashback recounted to a surprisingly affable Calypso (Charlize Theron).

The director takes a setpiece most of us are familiar with and grounds it not simply in myth but in a reality we can understand. The horse is buried in the sand as a discarded offering, the men inside betting their lives on their foes letting their guard down. It’s a tense bit of dramatic irony as they slink down into the bowels of Troy, woozy-legged but fit enough to free their compatriots and subdue the frantic enemy at nightfall.

Another indelible image injecting the movie with visual adrenaline centers on the cyclops, a lumbering creature who is both terrifying and oddly sympathetic. A beast injured by these marauders who wander into his home. What makes these moments satisfying is not simply because they involve action; the action defines the attributes of this character and the world around him. It also becomes evident each scenario represents a perversion of the attributes at the center of the movie’s moral framework.

Nolan does his best to make deified gods and supernatural powers into phenomena moderns can understand. However, there are still monsters, an island of malevolent giants, and the enchantress Circe (Samantha Morton in arguably the most unnerving performance in the film). They take our breath away while reminding us of the durable bravery and continual hubris which are two sides of Homer’s protagonist.

Likewise, a detour to the pits of Hades and the underworld has a sense of enchantment we cannot hope to fully comprehend as mere mortals. James Remar is unidentifiable as Tiresias, a soothsayer spitting omens about their fate. The Sirens, Charybdis, and Scylla are present but feel like less of a focal point because, as entities, they no longer feel anthropomorphized in the same way.

But the serpentine scope of the journey must lead to only one place. Eventually Odysseus appears as a hooded beggar to his faithful servant, who never wavered. Then he appears to his son, who failed to find him, and finally Penelope, who struggled so mightily in his absence. Anne Hathaway plays the double edge of strength and grief with a moving aplomb. There is a magnitude and a cost to the choices a world away. They actually mean something with reverberations through time.

The archetype of the returning protagonist offers us the promise of narrative fulfillment. This is the return of the king, the arrival of Robin Hood, Luke Skywalker, or any hero you want humbling themselves and putting on the garments of the lowest to enter the mouth of the lion for a final stand. Catching their antagonist unawares.

We yearn for him to come in and bring justice — to show himself and take back what is rightfully his. Penelope puts herself on the line, offering her hand to any man who can complete her husband’s feat. And of course only one man can master it: Stringing his bow and shooting the arrow pure and true through a line of axes.

It’s an annunciation to go with the music struck with his bowstring, courtesy of Ludwig Goransson. One clear, bold note, but it’s the kind of rousing return the movie has been calling for, and the hard yards pay off as they lock down the weapons in the armory, and the father and husband looks to avenge what is rightfully his.

Perhaps it took the years away and the wisdom gained from his own transgressions to recognize what he must do. It’s true the movie offers a recognition of a breach of Zeus’s law but also atonement — giving up what is most painful and bearing the greatest sacrifice. Odysseus burned the city of Troy and desecrated the altar of Athena. There must be penance. He welcomes self-exile, vowing to ride the high seas with his reunited bride to honor his fallen men while leaving the throne to his rightful unblemished heir.

It’s no revelation, but Nolan has followed up one man who would be a god thanks to the atomic bomb with another who seemingly courted the gods, even if he did not always orient his life around their powers. There’s also a residual cost to war and a complicated relationship with decisions that cannot be retracted.

The sheer scope and scale never ceases to amaze. Nolan’s continued prerogative involves always pushing the cast and himself in the execution of these gargantuan stories. It’s the on-location environs, and the blending of technological expertise with an appreciation for practical effects. Giant IMAX cameras juxtaposed with intimate castle tete-a-tetes.

One does wonder if there will continue to be diminishing returns and where else the man can go in an attempt at larger scale and greater ambitions. Will the man who gave us Memento or The Prestige ever be content making a movie of that size that nevertheless pushes the medium in terms of narrative or performance?

I hope so because Nolan still brings people out to the cinema, and he maintains a faithful following who have come to appreciate his tentpole movies with a touch of the cerebral. He can stretch himself in other ways, and many of us will look on with anticipation. 

For our sakes, I’m thankful he’s making films, whether or not he believes in the gods. Some might observe a chasm between deifying gods and defying them. However, within this universe, perhaps it’s only a matter of perception.

It strikes me how one offers a standard outside ourselves, and the other is so often made in our own image. That hasn’t changed much in a couple thousand years, even as our cultures have. It also fundamentally impacts what it looks like to love our neighbor, thereby treating them as we desire to be treated.

4/5 Stars

Crawford and Borzage Films: Sadie McKee (1934), Mannequin (1937), Strange Cargo (1940)

Posted on by
2

I’ve been dipping back into the work of Joan Crawford and director Frank Borzage, so here are some capsule reviews of some of their films:

Sadie McKee (1934) – Dir. Clarence Brown

Sadie returns home to the playful shenanigans of her former compatriot (Franchot Tone). Her mother is the long-time cook of a well-to-do family, and he is the privileged son. But class need not be a dividing line, at least initially.

There are so many wonderful evolving supporting players in Sadie McKee, with Crawford, the effervescent working girl with a chip on her shoulder, remaining the constant focal point.

She leaves behind her mother to chase after her crush (Gene Raymond) even as (Tone) openly criticizes his instability. She doesn’t care. It’s all the more reason to prove him wrong. On her journey, she’s befriended by the worldly-wise Opal (Jean Dixon). Meanwhile, Akim Tamiroff and Leo G. Carroll show up in adroit side parts as a giddy waiter and a stuffy valet. The movie is stuffed full of such roles.

Edward Arnold might actually be the most delightful of the litter as a gregarious millionaire. It’s a far cry from the corrupt business tycoons he was often remembered for, and he proves himself more than game for a little comedy. He and Crawford have a grand ol’ time playing drunk together as Tone looks on with a level of disdain.

Because his boss takes a shine to Crawford, and why not? But surely she only gravitates toward him for his money? It’s a great convenience after a lifetime where she’s had to scrimp and save every day.

Between moments verging on the social strata absurdity of screwball comedy blended with a couple of show tunes like “All I Do Is Dream of You” and “Old Pal,” there’s a lot of good fun to be had to stave off the Depression blues.

To its credit, the story fits the schema of a conniving melodrama about a gold digger, only to break out on its own. If memory serves, Crawford knew how to play such characters. And yet here, despite what circumstances might suggest, she’s a more complex, even sincere individual. She falls into things and can’t help feeling what she does, regardless of what others say, namely Tone.

Crawford forcefully tears through the formalities of the upstairs-downstairs drama. She has the upbringing and the gumption to push through the door to the kitchen. What first looks to be a standoff, even an insurrection from the bottom up (led by the manservant Carroll), becomes a meeting of the minds and a pact to keep their boozy proprietor alive. She vows to keep her job as a wife, so she doesn’t look like the vamp, and the backroom staff want to keep their jobs as well.

The resolution is conventional stuff, but then again, the road to get there is quite charming. An added undercurrent is the real-life relationship between Crawford and Tone at the time. It can’t help but color the entire storyline from front to back.

3.5/5 Stars

Mannequin (1937) – Dir. Frank Borzage

Once again, Joan Crawford is the quintessential working-class hero, doing anything she can to beat the dregs of a life she has. By day, Jessie’s working in a factory. By night, she’s helping her mother with dinner as they dote over a deadbeat Irish father and an ungrateful kid brother (Leo Gorcey). Her only solace comes with escaping to spend time with her boyfriend, Eddie (Alan Curtis).

She wants him to marry her and take her away from the dead-end life in the family’s abode on the Lower East Side. And with some further cajoling, he does, and they prepare for a delirious life together as newlyweds.

If you read the names on the marquee, you know Spencer Tracy must show up eventually, and he does as shipping magnate John L. Hennessey. He’s a self-made man who’s worked hard for every penny he has, and his workers respect him for his candor.

He spies the new husband and wife celebrating their matrimony. Obviously, Crawford is radiant and eye-catching, but he seems genuinely happy for them, having the waiter bring them champagne and his compliments.

Although it’s not quite as good as Tracy and Young in Borzage’s Man’s Castle, there’s still something electric in seeing two stars together at an early juncture in their career ascendancy as studio contractors.

At first, there was something uneven about Curtis being placed onscreen between them, and how are they ever to get together? It becomes apparent in due time. He’s an idea man, always coming up with something new and never following through on any of it. His wife constantly bails him out. But it’s a thankless place to be in, and the promise of marriage continues to sour.

The final scene is an impeccable bit of dramatic irony — embodying the conceit underpinning the whole story. Because Eddie sees how smitten John is with his wife. He’s not above suggesting they get divorced so she can marry the other man and give Eddie a cut of her newfound wealth. It’s a horrible insinuation. Her eyes are finally opened, and she leaves.

The fates develop the story exactly as Eddie might have orchestrated it, but the motives are important. Jessie winds up marrying John because something real blooms between them. He’s deliriously happy until doubt creeps in.

In the end, his business ventures are sunk, but it means nothing to him compared to potentially getting stabbed in the back by Jessie. He doesn’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. And here they reunite in his office for one final time…

He’s got no money, but she doesn’t know that. She vows to leave him nobly so her ex can’t gouge him further. They both have the wrong idea about the other, and somehow it all turns into a right. Love covers a multitude, and so it is here again. It’s romance in the Borzage mode.

3.5/5 Stars

Strange Cargo (1940) – Dir. Frank Borzage

“So God created man in his own image…Look at me. Do I look like a God to you?”

I have to admit I do miss adventure pictures like these. They take place in a vaguely distant place conjured up on the Hollywood movie screen courtesy of a studio lot. It feels like we don’t have a license to make pictures like this anymore for various reasons. Some understandable and a few regrettable.

Right now, Clark Gable is still an MGM stalwart. Joan Crawford really has some feisty barb to her. You have to be tough in an environment like this. I lost track of what number this is in their ongoing onscreen partnership. All you need to know is he’s a prisoner in an island penal colony, and she’s a local dance hall girl trying to pay her way to the mainland. Her animosity and his cocksure attitude are the perfect tinder to set their chemistry ablaze yet again.

You know he’s going to take it upon himself to escape, and she’s going to get caught up in it. Given the amalgamation of all the different genre elements, it’s difficult to categorize Strange Cargo, although it was adapted from the debut novel of author Richard Sale.

Among the contingent of fugitives is the Christ-like Cambreau, who plays almost like a precursor to the remake of Magnificent Obsession with its brand of cinematic mysticism. He rises up as a quietly providential force among the worldly cynics, the bible-thumpers spewing fire and brimstone, and the He-Man self-assurance of Gable.

The clash of tonalities is perfectly embodied by the Red Dust energy as Crawford goes trampling through the jungle in her high heels with Gable yanking her along. Then, in another moment, they’re warming themselves by the fire as he reads her some love poetry out of Song of Solomon. Look in her eyes, and it would seem like no one ever shared such affirmations, even if it’s done facetiously.

For such a glamour queen at MGM, Crawford shows a willingness to go unadorned as much as the studio system allowed. It’s easy to gain a new kind of respect for her because it feels like new terrain as she’s left adrift with the rest of the men and identifies with this man fighting for her companionship under the bleak circumstances.

The other difficult balance is indeed the spiritual timbre of the film with the very physical nature of Gable, the generation’s idea of a Greek Adonis with his big, broad shoulders functioning as his temple. In many ways, the movie pits the movie star as this kind of temporal image-god against the transcendent message of this Messianic figure.

Borzage’s Catholic sympathies are overt in this one, and it makes for a fascinating exploration. The fact that it was based on a contemporary piece of fiction seems to suggest an openness to these spiritual, albeit unorthodox themes.

However, in some ways, I was intrigued to read that the Catholic Legion of Decency gave the film a “condemned” rating. It does feel like a potential precursor to the criticisms aimed at Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. In personalizing the God-Man, they almost made him too human for the audience.

One could see how the church gatekeepers were left queasy by a film that’s hardly a hallowed depiction of conventional saints. However, any complaints about the depiction of lust feel slightly ironic given the inclusion of Song of Songs love poetry directly from the Biblical text. Still, Gable and Crawford are fiery enough to make the remonstrations understandable, given social mores at the time.

3.5/5 Stars

Libeled Lady (1936)

Posted on by
Reply

The topical sweet spot of screwball comedy, journalism, and ocean-liner romances makes Libeled Lady feel like a quintessential 1930s movie. Trusted studio director Jack Conway and the stars peg it as prime MGM.

Spencer Tracy is Warren Haggerty, the managing editor of the New York Evening Star. He’s pulled away from the altar because the paper has made a major boo-boo. In his absence, they erroneously published a story about aristocrat Connie Allenbury. Before they can quash the story, her influential father James (Walter B. Connolly) gets a copy and prepares to slam them with a libel suit.

There’s only one man who can save the paper from utter ruin, and so they go tracking down a real firecracker named Bill Chandler (William Powell) all across the country and all over the world. Of course, he’s right under their noses all the time, barely able to pay his hotel bill.

The two men converge on one another, looking to feel each other out because they both have something they need. It makes for great comedy because this situational irony underpins every proceeding action. Likewise, Tracy and Powell taking stabs at each other is one of the great cinematic pleasures in life because they both have a knack for it. Ultimately, Chandler leverages his position and agrees to bail them out for a small fee.

It calls for him to “marry” Haggerty’s girl. The peeved bride-to-be is Jean Harlow, who makes the part something because she’s a girl who can give it as well as she takes it. Gladys is conscripted into their ploy, and it’s the absurdity that such a picture thrives on. Once Chandler has “married” Gladys, he will woo Ms. Allenbury, and then the Evening Star will either retroactively have proof for their baseless story or, better yet, new fodder will be whipped up. The loopier the better, and they make it stick.

Harlow’s character is indignant and also proves her to be one of the great comediennes, schmoozing with her faux husband and hamming it up with the boys. The intertextual relations between Powell and Harlow certainly help matters, because you can read their real relationship into the convoluted pseudo-couplings of the film, all played for comedy.

Bill gets to work meeting the jovial Mr. Allenbury and his far more guarded daughter. As part of the game, he coaches himself on all types of fishing, including anglers because his mark is an avid fisherman; Loy’s quick to pick up that Mr. Chandler is quite the “angler” himself. He even has a fishing instructor sent to their honeymoon suite to learn how to hook curtains and lampshades (if not fish).

Of course, Loy and Powell prove themselves to be another cinematic dream team. My wires probably got crossed somewhere, but to my mind, they’re one of the most prolific screen couples ever. Libeled Lady is another ticklish feather in their cap.

Their excursion out on the stream bed devolves into a wonderfully goofy corralling of a fabled trout as Powell goes splashing and stumbling through the frigid waters. What’s most curious about the moment is how it’s not drummed up with a lot of score, but we just have the sound of the water as Powell struggles hook, line, and sinker like any of us would. He’s an amiable hero, and though it’s funny, it’s a turning point: the moment Loy likes him for real. Perhaps he realizes too that if he tries to be something different, it’s really possible to change (Maybe it’s just a good joke).

But he and Loy have some wonderful moments of more sentimental chemistry. It makes the relationship feel less like the required beats of a plot we know must end badly when he’s caught in a lie. If you’re like me, you like them together, and you have goodwill from the movies they made previously. We want the best for them no matter the screwball antics at the film’s disposal.

These moments are suspended in time. And what’s more, for these isolated instances with Harlow and Tracy out of the frame, they nearly steal away the picture and make it their own like so many others. It’s a credit to the strength of the ensemble that you’re never going to forget their other scene partners completely. They’re too shrewd and incomparable as performers in their own right.

Tracy throws out the middle man, and Conway forgoes any kind of interstitial exposition, allowing the newspaperman to cut straight to the chase with Mrs. Allenbury, reasoning with her to drop the libel suit. The fact he’s cut out all the fancy stratagems shows his genuine desperation. Part of it is Chandler.

Haggerty has the feeling the man he’s hired might have been working on the wrong girl — his girl — though it’s exactly the opposite. He was working so well on the right girl that it affected him, and he found himself changed. He’s falling in love.

The two men have a pointed conversation of innuendo as Myrna Loy looks on without the foggiest notion, or maybe she just doesn’t care. Instantly, the ball is in Tracy’s court; he seems to hold the power because he knows the other man’s secret. He’s caught him in something.

However, soon after, Tracy stands astounded at his news desk as his nemesis waltzes in with his fiancée. They just went dancing, and she’s not going to oust him as they had planned. There’s nothing particularly elegant about the blocking because there doesn’t need to be. This time Harlow’s in the middle of the frame, though favoring her “husband,” and we have quite a different dynamic. This round goes to Powell.

For all his grousing, we begin to feel a little sorry for Tracy. If this keeps up, he’s going to be jobless and girless. A lovely bit of narrative verve and confluence brings them together in one space to have it out as we always imagined they would. We go ping-ponging with every imaginable plot twist one could imagine, and we would expect nothing less for such a screwy story. But the joy is watching everyone end up where they need to be, and the cockeyed journey to get there is just about as fun courtesy of our stars.

MGM was always hailed as the studio with more stars than there are in the heavens. I take this to be attributed mostly to prestige pictures and early Oscar bait. However, Libeled Lady is a reminder that screwball comedies are no less indebted to the studio system. Very rarely have we seen a picture hum with stars of this caliber.

4/5 Stars