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About 4 Star Films

I am a film critic and historian preserving a love of good movies. Check out my blog, 4 Star Films, and follow me on Twitter @FourStarFilmFan or Letterboxd. Thank you for reading!

James Whale: The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933)

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The Old Dark House (1932)

The Old Dark House has a disarming levity that broadsided me at first. James Whale, the man who famously gave us Frankenstein, has all of his notable features with the tinges of horror on hand for another ghastly delight, and then he goes and pokes fun at the whole setup. Raymond Massey is instantly pegged as a slightly stuffy husband. His wife, dazzling Gloria Stuart, a young ingenue has signed up for more than she bargained for with the outrageous downpour dousing them in the dead of night.

Then, there’s old reliable Melvyn Douglas playing his quintessential character type, always good for a wisecrack, with his feet kicked up, and his pipe tucked in his mouth as they proceed to get hopelessly lost. And of course, he can’t help but whistle a few fractured bars of “Singing in the Rain” when their waterlogged buggy has no recourse but become semi-amphibious.

Oftentimes bathos is used as a kind of criticism — this idea of anticlimax or a break of the mood — because it’s too jokey and therefore undermines all the groundwork put down before it. However, Whale seems to be doing something different.

At any rate, it’s not an out-and-out drama and so while somehow deconstructing his tropes and suggesting to his audience he knows precisely what he’s doing, we reap the benefit of the humor and the chills in ample measure. This is the underlying success of the film in a nutshell. It carries off both and becomes invariably more intriguing in the process.

Because The Old Dark House fits seamlessly into the tradition of Cat and the Canary, Hold That Ghost, House on Haunted Hill et al. A dark and stormy night is a genre given, but the abode itself must bring with it the unnerving idiosyncrasies to make the audience ill at ease. Rest assured. It does.

The proprietors include a white-haired gentleman trembling with timidity and his eternally deaf and priggish sister who condemns all blasphemers en masse. Their valet (Boris Karloff) might as well be a grunting prototype for the wolf man. All of this doesn’t quite suggest a warm and amicable atmosphere. It screams something else. But that’s just the beginning of the festivities…

If I’m to be terribly honest, it seems like an utter waste of Karloff’s talents, especially because I was barely aware he was playing the part. He gets partially overshadowed by the more verbal characters. Charles Laughton, for one, comes tottering through the front door soaked through as gregarious Sir William accompanied by his playful and rather giddy companion (Lilian Bond). Her lithe spirit mirrors Douglas, and they gel nicely. The night quickly turns them into an item. In fact, all the guests hang together.

One could wager it comes out of necessity. It’s a ghoulish space filled with funhouse angles and other parlor tricks. Locked upstairs is a decrepit patriarch and behind another closed door is crazy Saul, who makes a cameo appearance spouting the story of King Saul and David. You know the one, where malevolence came over Saul and he proceeded to spear the other man to death.

He finds a knife and brandishes it with a kind of giddy insanity we don’t know how to respond to. He could do anything. Douglas, the picture of casual confidence and charm for most of the picture, finds his own veneer unseated filling in for David. It’s these kinds of digressions that we never expected, and somehow they make the picture by leaving the audience totally nonplussed.

By the time The Old Dark House is wrapped up, it feels like the gold standard of this brand of haunted house movie because it’s just as much about being a mood piece — finding humor in these outlandish scenarios — and Whale does all of the above with assured aplomb.

4/5 Stars

The Invisible Man (1933)

I always thought about The Invisible Man as a scientific marvel, but now I understand how he’s firmly planted in the realm of horror with added superhuman abilities. There’s something that feels somehow modern about Claude Rains’ portrayal of the eponymous character. It’s almost as if he’s the precursor to some enigmatic alien creature from Star Wars.

He’s unique and out of step with this more traditional setting of a bar and lowly establishment as local folks chew the fat and the incomparable Una O’Connor runs the place. One feels quintessentially British, albeit through the prism of the Hollywood dream factory. Rains is totally a movie machination born of smoke, mirrors, and special effects.

But it’s also as if this camouflage provided Rains the means to give one of his most ballistic and volatile performances. It’s not that he couldn’t play, wry, sly, or even bad-tempered, but his typical onscreen disposition was one of regality. He commands the room but in a very different way.

He’s seething one moment and then hysterical the next. The local constable rightly asserts, “He’s invisible. He gets those clothes off and we’ll never catch him for a thousand years!” It makes the stakes obvious. Soon thereafter the maniacal doctor commences a reign of terror making good on his threats by committing murders and diverting trains off their rails. He makes it clear he has the power to make the world grovel at his feet.

If it’s not obvious already, he’s taken on the mantle of a violent “Superman” cut out of the cloth of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. What’s worse, there seems to be no one capable of stopping him.

What’s most fascinating is how the film builds the legitimacy of the Invisible Man. It’s not merely a sitcom-like trope where the invisible are given the freedom to pull practical jokes or take on a Groundhog Day-type disregard of worldly conventions. This is part of it, yes, until it becomes something more.

It turns into a story of fear and broader social implications broadcasted over the news and through every small town by word of mouth. He’s continually left unchecked and the drug he’s taking pumps him full of delusions of grandeur. It’s a drug and addiction of a different sort. Not even the affection of his former girlfriend (Gloria Stuart) can change his mind. He’s too far gone.

The special effects and the choreography get better and better as a crowd of bobbies forms a human dragnet to converge on him in the dead of night. He skips away with a policeman’s trousers sowing chaos and discord wherever he goes. But before anyone gets the idea The Invisible Man is a mere lark, we’re quickly shocked back to reality.

It has a jagged edge of vindictiveness which the production codes would make sure soon enough would never see the light of day (at least for a good many years). For now, it feels like a chilling, compact drama chock full of ideas, invention, and not a wasted minute of running time. It’s also without a doubt Rains’ finest entrance in a movie: It happens in the final frame.

4.5/5 Stars

Reviews: The Mummy, Island of Lost Souls, The Black Cat

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The Mummy (1932)

There’s something deeply prescient about The Mummy beginning with an archeological expedition for The British Museum. If it’s not evident from the outset, the film is firmly planted in the reality of 1922 when Howard Carter famously discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun. This is only one historical example, but even I remember hearing about the exploits of this modern discovery.

Now we live in a world in dialogue with the history of colonialism from the cultural tension over the Elgin Marbles to the very idea of ancient antiquities being housed in museums themselves. Even if it’s mostly to capitalize on something the contemporary audience might be aware of, The Mummy makes it plain, this kind of potential cultural desecration is not a totally new idea from our “enlightened” age. It has deeply entrenched traditions.

The British expeditioners come from two different camps, and they must mediate the pull between doing their methodical work of cataloging and then following the finds that will gain the most press. Those who are fully committed know they are working for the cause of science and not for loot.

It begins with a young man who will not heed the terrible curse on a casket, and he awakens a creature from eons before. It is Imhotep (Boris Karloff), who enters back into the world fully prepared to take back what is rightfully his and reunite himself with his long-lost love by any means at his disposal.

The Mummy starts out promising, but it never quite nails down the extent of its mythology and everything feels far too convenient with the re-animated mummy capable of doing anything he pleases to serve his purposes (and the plot). He’s well-versed in mind control, he has what looks like a shortwave television, and he’s all but indestructible to human hands.

The flashback sequences of Egypt hearken back to the expressionistic imagery of silent cinema and here is where our director, Karl Freund, seems to show his origins as the fantastic cinematographer for revered works like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

The film’s other compelling theme involves a woman of Egyptian blood (Zita Johann), who almost functions as a doppelganger through time. One man falls in love with her in the present (David Manners) and another man loved her in the past. She’s effectively trapped between two worlds — one distantly remembered — and yet now dwelling in the body of a young woman, breathing and alive.

She is not prepared to make the kind of sacrifice asked of her and only the supernatural can save her. Karloff is expectedly chilling, but the pieces around him aren’t quite as enjoyable as his greatest monster movies.

3.5/5 Stars

Island of Lost Souls (1932)

“Mr. Parker, do you know what it means to feel like god?” – Dr. Moreau

Island of Lost Souls is the kind of movie that all but disappeared with the more stringent implementation of the production codes in 1934. It begins with an uneasy mood as a castaway is rescued by a not-too-genial sea captain, who’s anxious about dumping him at the first sign of land.

This is how our protagonist Richard Parker (Edward Arlen) catches a ride to shore on the Island of Dr. Moreau. There’s something rather uneasy about the whole setup and the movie frequents a landscape and a world not so foreign from The Most Dangerous Game. It’s as if an island conveniently eschews all traditional rules of law and order.

While the earlier film is harrowing, subjecting Joel McCrea and Fay Wray to a grueling game of high-stakes cat and mouse, this one is more thematically rich. This might be entirely thanks to H.G. Wells. He is the man who originally conceived of Dr. Moreau. However, something else must be attributed to Charles Laughton.

There’s a level of devilish forethought to Laughton’s performance. Although he’s not an entirely imposing figure, there’s something mischievous about him. Sometimes he comes off gleefully boyish even as he takes on these calculated and totally premeditated social experiments on his self-made ecosystem.

Parker knows nothing about the world he’s wandered into, but he is our stand-in representing everything inherently decent about humanity. And there is something deeper to this since he is white in the age of colonialism. While he might not necessarily bear the “white man’s burden,” certainly he’s aware of his place in the social hierarchy. He’s a benevolent figure. Dr. Moreau is this privileged mentality gone astray.

Judeo-Christian society would look back to Genesis, and the parallel imagery is made plain fairly quickly. There’s a specific order to the world, a created dichotomy between humans and beasts. Because Moreau has installed himself as god on his own private world. However, he has somehow perverted what is good in strange and troubling ways.

These themes get murkier when you start considering ideas of eugenics and even how the aforementioned production codes forbade the outright depiction of miscegenation or the mixing of races in romance. These are not synonymous terms when it comes to humans and beasts living on the island, but it’s hard not to see how predominantly white audiences at the time might conflate the two.

Because Moreau’s rudimentary imitation of creation has elements to mirror what we already know intuitively. His creatures live by basic laws shouted out by their de facto leader (Bela Lugosi), and they realize through roundabout means certain tenets. He has taught them what pain is, and he’s molded some like his prized creation Lota (Kathleen Burke) into his own human image.

If the Christian origin story hinges on a Fall from grace where Adam and Eve were deceived by the serpent and ate from the forbidden tree of knowledge of good and evil, then Island of Lost Souls has its own paradigm. Suddenly, these indigenous monstrosities of his realize their creator is mortal or at the very least they can rebel against him. The law is no more and it’s been disproven. There is no longer anyone willing to uphold or live by it. Namely, because they realize it’s fallacious.

Parker is mostly uninteresting as we watch his repugnance grow, and he looks to be reunited with his innocent love (Gloria Stuart). Meanwhile, the doctor toys with him and tries to set him up with Lota. Lota fits crucially into this deeply human narrative because there’s a suggestion of her “evolution” within the arc of the film even if it’s not in purely Darwinian terms. Because she has come to understand what sacrificial love is: laying one’s life down for one’s friends.

If nothing else, surely this shows her not to be a creature without reason or logic but predetermined with something deeper and more primal inside of her. I find it impressive how something that feels deeply exploitive could still come down on some deeply philosophical ideas without ever forfeiting its obligation to a paying audience. It’s the kind of genre film capable of triggering all sorts of ancillary conversations, and I’m all the more curious to return to Wells’s source work.

4/5 Stars

The Black Cat (1934)

Each lineage of horror movies must have its own in-house aesthetic and stable of performers matched with specific technicians who come to exemplify a studio and their body of work. The Black Cat brings together much of what made Universal Pictures horror so lucrative from the studio, and it gathers together two of their most iconic stars: Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.

Although we’re not in Transylvania, the story picks up aboard a train traveling through Hungary, a typically foreign locale for a hometown audience. We meet a newlywed couple (David Manners and Julie Bishop) on their honeymoon only to have their compartment’s marital bliss disrupted by Lugosi’s Dr. Vitus Werdegast. He looks nice enough, but there’s always something menacing behind his eyes (even when he’s playing pleasant).

Inclement weather leads to a devasting crash and the couple and their newest acquaintance show up on the doorstep of one of his old friends, although I use the word friend loosely. Hjalmar Poe is a famed Austrian architect, and his abode lives up to his reputation. We must expect nothing less as we are welcomed into the home of the always foreboding Karloff.

For the rest of the picture, The Black Cat feels like an oblique tour throughout the art deco space with a subtle game of death going on between Karloff and Lugosi. Because instead of bringing two unsuspecting victims into their lair, this is much more a grudge match with two unsuspecting parties caught in the middle.

It becomes a world modulating between the polls of the supernatural and baloney. With a rogue gallery of Lugosi and Karloff, we know better, and as the good doctor demures, “There are many things under the sun.” His evocation of Ecliasstes has very ominous underpinnings.

But that’s not the only source of disquiet. The way the two actors lurk around the corridors, the very way they interact around the woman is unnerving. Karloff always seems to be leering and ogling even if that’s how his face is predisposed. Then, moments later, he’s caressing a chess piece in a disturbing manner. Or is it only our imaginations playing tricks on us?

There were lulls that I wouldn’t mistake for tension, and yet there is so much to be said about the architecture of that house even when the architecture of the film seems to fail. Because this aspect of the mise en scene embodies something that fits so perfectly with the personas of Karloff and Lugosi. Somehow always incongruous and ill at ease.

And the film never feels pulse-pounding; it’s outrageous, yes, but it also builds to these harrowing moments. They’re sinister and escalate into a final descent into the pit of Hades further accentuated by the lines of the architecture.

The ending nearly balks on the entire movie. It’s a wink and a joke that dares us to tell others about what we just saw. They’d never believe it because this is the apex of outlandish storytelling. The Black Cat‘s not great, nor is it mediocre; instead, it feels deeply alive with something probably more indebted to Edgar G. Ulmer than Allan Poe.

3.5/5 Stars

Freaks (1932): We’re All Sideshow Attractions

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One of the personal details of Tod Browning’s life was his adolescence spent working in the circus. This gives him an accessibility to the material that some other less-attuned director might have lacked. And yet there’s little denying Freaks is a genuine showpiece when it comes to turning heads. It still bristles with controversy and outlandishness 90 years later.

The movie itself is presented as such to the audience. If you are familiar with any of these carnival entries from Browning’s own The Unknown or later works like Nightmare Alley or The Greatest Show on Earth, you have an immediate comprehension of the milieu.

The people we are about to witness are presented as “living, breathing monstrosities” and “accidents of birth” to the audience. If not outright reviled, they should be reeled at with horror and maybe a dash of pity. These opening moments make it evident the whole movie is quite literally a sideshow exhibition.

But somehow as the movie builds, it both feels exploitative and strangely sympathetic. This seemingly conflicting observation deserves to be broken down. And for this, we must start with the characters and their world.

One of them is the gorgeous trapeze artist, Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), who is obviously aware of her own attractiveness and uses it to woo those around her. Because perceived ugliness or otherness has a habit of making the vein feel that they themselves are even more superior. Never once does she have a genuine ounce of care for the other performers. They are more like playthings than real people.

Front and center is the dwarf Hans (Harry Earles). Although he already has a girl, he becomes increasingly smitten with the gorgeous blonde and she gladly strokes his ego — fawning over him — she thinks she’s giving him the thrill of his life. When she finds out he’s come into a decent sum of money, that’s even better, and one day they are wed. The fact she is colluding with the local strong man remains to be brought to light.

But this is only one facet — one individual storyline in the world — since Freaks intersperses a lot of narratives throughout highlighting numerous real-life people who existed as sideshow attractions.

A single line of dialogue that might resonate with others goes like this, “God looks after all his children.” The implication is that there are no exceptions or omissions. These people are ostracized simply for the way they look or act, and while they might be different than the norms of their contemporary society, it in no way makes them sub-human. They are worthy and deserving of the same human dignity as everyone else.

Even as Freaks has been hailed as a horror film of the macabre — and there is some truth in this given the way Browning presents the material — he also normalizes the experience of these outcasts. Mind you, this is back in the 1930s. People were more than prepared to gawk at conjoined twins, bearded ladies, a human caterpillar, etc. But we’re not totally enlightened people now by any means. I admit my own shortcomings; some of these characters unnerve me but that is only based on outward appearance. We supposedly learn this in childhood, but how wrong it is to judge people by outward appearance alone.

We need to know their character before we dare to make such rash judgments. In many ways, while Leila Hyams and Wallace Ford are “normal” able-bodied folks, they are also allies and open our own eyes to these characters.

The production was turbulent with footage being heavily cut and talents like Victor McLaglen and Myrna Loy balking at the material. We cannot fully know their reasoning, whether it involved subject matter, money, or costars. Hopefully, we have the opportunity to appreciate Freaks more now because whatever the underlying reasons, Hollywood gave performers on the fringes the spotlight.

As we sink deeper into the bowels of the movie, we are privy to a wedding feast. All the outcasts sitting there, and Hans feels so ashamed as his new wife berates him and his “deformed” friends. It’s so pernicious and ghoulish all at the same time.

My mind could only drift off to what a wedding feast is meant to be. It’s a celebration, it’s a community, it’s a reminder of all the blessings we have been afforded in our lives; it points to a hopeful future of what is yet to come, and it is a capstone of mutual commitment. It’s open to all and everyone who is willing to accept it and be made new. Alas, we live in a broken, befouled world.

Given its shared setting and tortured themes, Freaks plays as a fine companion piece with Browning’s earlier silent feature The Unknown. In fact, it features a finale, equally evocative and terrifying, if not more so. Because a plot to kill Hans is enacted, but he catches wind of it, and they strike in the dead of night as their carnival show moves on amid a downpour.

In some alternative universe, this might be some misshapen, ill-formed hell as Cleopatra is chased off into the darkness by the “Freaks,” who take vengeance upon her. In a moment of self-reflection, the horror is not so much about our own ugliness; maybe it’s more so about how we belittle and dismiss other people. Are we also deserving of such a grisly fate?

Tarred and feathered and paraded in front of everyone as a sideshow attraction to stew in our ignominy for a lifetime. It’s a hellacious image but also a striking warning call. Judge lest you be judged. But enough with the moralizing. If you let it, Freaks still has the power to shock your sensibilities.

4/5 Stars

Dracula (1931): Starring Bela Lugosi

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As the story behind Universal’s Dracula unfolds, it’s a joy to pinpoint all the elements helping to intensify the dread and solidify it among the studio’s emerging array of horror classics.

There has to be a kind of mythology and lore that the scares can be built out of. The protection of the cross is that of a powerful talisman capable of warding off evil.  Superstition and religion intermingle seamlessly like many of the horror films of the day.

Likewise, there must be a visual palette to help the world manifest Bram Stoker’s famed character. He already received a dose of notoriety in F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation, but now Nosferatu returns in the guise of Bela Lugosi’s now-paradigmatic Dracula. He definitively ate up and defined all future tropes for years to come.

The tale opens in a carriage when a callow young man named Renfield (Dwight Frye) disregards the warnings of the local population and ventures to the castle of Count Dracula on some proposed business. I watch Dracula and I’m immediately taken by the gaunt Transylvanian atmosphere.

Far from feeling corny, there’s an eerie spareness that’s to the credit of the picture introduced in the bleakness of night. The count’s ominous castle proves itself to be both a foreboding space and one falling apart with decay. Working with director Tod Browning, the incomparable Karl Freund translates his cinematography from Europe to become the epitome of Hollywood genre filmmaking at its finest.

The second portion of the story is born when a schooner, the Vesta, is found drifting into Whitby harbor with all the crew having perished aside from one raving madman. He’s put under lock in key in Seward Sanitarium, all but prepared to do his master’s bidding. Because of course, Renfield is now beholden to his master Dracula — by his blood.

In this new locale, Dracula borrows liberally not only from the traditions of Bram Stoker but the menacing Jack the Ripper, Jekyll & Hyde-type atmosphere of foggy London streets weighed down with gloom. It’s in this milieu one evening that Count Dracula makes the acquaintance of Doctor Seward (Herbert Bunston) as well as his daughter Mina. They are perfectly oblivious to who he really is. But, of course, he’s hardly looking for a romantic partner. Rather, he’s on the prowl for another unsuspecting human to provide him their life’s blood.

Meanwhile, a Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) takes a particular interest in Renfield’s peculiar tendencies. When he starts making claims about the undead, Nosferatu, and vampires, this is yet another dose of necessary logos to explain the movie’s scares. Wolfbane is another tried and true vanguard against this unknowable evil.

As such, even as others remain skeptical, Professor Van Helsing becomes the film’s main advocate and certainly fits the mantle of a detective, prepared to deduce the answers and go head-to-head with Count Dracula. The man has no reflection and when he’s found out, he gets desperate like a caged beast.

The Professor and The Count have a standoff in the study — a literal crossing of wills — although Dracula manages to get to Mina and fuse with her blood. It remains to be seen if she (or Renfield) can be saved from their sorrowful fate.

Most of the movie’s horrific power is born in the face of Lugosi — how he is lit, the fire in his eyes — it’s indelible imagery. The rest is illusion borne in the space between what we see on the screen and the cut away. This is what makes it quite effective even generations later. Because it’s not about hokey gore or any such dated method of special effects.

It relies on us and the frights we can conjure up within our own imaginations. The movie supplies the building blocks of terror, but we must put them together for ourselves. Even 90 years later there’s something deeply powerful in this cumulative effect.

This might be an unpopular observation, but somehow, having a movie unaccompanied by music somehow augments this sense of piercing dread. There’s something direct and unembellished about it — it’s starkly beautiful — and yet it pierces like a stake through the heart.

The story is expeditious, but these quick strokes are so heartily effective until the very last heartbeat. Dracula does everything we should require from a horror movie, and it remains a timelessly perturbing experience.

Like so many of the horror greats, Bela Lugosi would forever be typecast by the part. It’s the curse of an actor but the glory of a screen icon. He’s unforgettable and people never have forgotten him even those who have never seen the movie. He lives on purely through our cultural consciousness.

4/5 Stars

CMBA Blogathon: Classic Hollywood Stars on The Dick Cavett Show

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This is my entry in The CMBA Spring Blogathon: Big Stars on the Small Screen

There are several more recent late-night hosts like Stephen Colbert or Conan O’Brien who have managed to use the truncated form (and podcasts) to try and go deeper with guests beyond surface-level pleasantries. Colbert even had Dick Cavett on his show, and I’m sure he’s not the only one.

However, as I’ve pored over more and more of his interviews over on Youtube, it feels like Dick Cavett was often the gold standard for lengthier, in-depth discussions will all sorts of talents and luminaries. He had several Beatles on his show, boxing champions, prominent thinkers, along with plenty of Classic Hollywood talent. And his show in its various forms acted as a representation of the dying art of the extended interview.

Cavett’s gift seemed to be his capacity to somehow straddle two worlds. He was an intellectual with a dry comic wit, but also a midwesterner who dressed mostly innocuously and came off unassuming. He looked establishment and yet crammed his shows full of personalities like Janis Joplin and Muhammad Ali.

Often the pairing of his guests seems downright peculiar (ie. Joplin and Raquel Welch for one). However, when he was given the opportunity to sit down with one individual and have a conversation, there were often some wonderful tidbits that came out in the process. And he has a non-grating style of asking the questions we want to know without making them sound totally asinine. He also normally took time to listen.

It does feel like he sits down, not for an interview, but for a chat with a friend. And in some cases, people like Groucho and Brando became his friends in real life even as he did his best to coax answers out of the most reticent guests by making them feel comfortable.

I could spend a significant amount of time just discussing some of the directors he had on his show like Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, even Frank Capra, but I thought I would focus on a handful of the stars. Here we go:

Groucho Marx (1969 and 71):

Cavett was quick to praise Groucho as one of his heroes, and it’s fun to watch them together full of laughter but also genuine affection. You can tell the appreciation is mutual between them and it makes the discussions lively.

One anecdote involves Groucho’s encounter with Greta Garbo in the elevator. Not seeing who it was, he pulled her hat brim way down over her head, and when she gave him a withering look, he apologized and said, “I’m terribly sorry, I thought you were a fellow I knew in Kansas City.” That’s Groucho to a tee.

In one candid moment, Groucho says he doesn’t read the news anymore before bed because it’s just a remake of what he’s been hearing all day. It goes to show there’s nothing new under the sun or in the news cycle.

Fred Astaire (1970 and 71):

This is a lovely set of interviews. Astaire is quick to deflect praise and mentions how he doesn’t like watching his old movies because he’s always thinking about how he could do it better. He also provides some insight on a few of his numbers from films like Funny Face. It turns out he’s still got it and besides dancing with Dick, he does a seated rendition of “A Fine Romance” much to the audience’s jubilation.

It turns out his grandson likes the Beatles, and Astaire even owns some of their records himself. On top of his career as a dancer (or “hoofer”), he wrote quite a few songs of his own. I recall seeing him do a rendition of his composition “City of the Angels,” but I could not find it anywhere online.

Robert Mitchum (1971)

Mitchum is an actor I’ve grown to admire over the years, and Cavett makes a point of acknowledging he was known in Hollywood as a tough interview. However, he’s surprisingly forthcoming. He talks about his school years, his time in a southern chain gang, his famous drug bust, and also insomnia.

He recounts sitting in on a Hopalong Cassidy movie with his wife early in his career and eavesdropping on a lady saying, “That is the most immoral face I’ve ever seen!” He made a career out of it starting as a “mule” for RKO as he called it. Since the air date is around Ryan’s Daughter’s release, he also mentions an experience when he was in Ireland with Richard Harris, and he got in an altercation with a local who mistook Mitchum for Kirk Douglas! Otherwise, I’m impressed by his use of words like convivial and peregrination.

Bette Davis (1971)

Bette Davis is such a vibrant personality, and she regales the audience with her early career, her battles with Warner Bros, and how she ties into Gone With The Wind lore. She calls Eroll Flynn the most beautiful man to ever live, and the most charming, but in her estimation, he could not have played Rhett Butler.

She also shares how she perceives Now, Voyager would have developed after the credits, in that her protagonist would have ultimately ended up with Claud Rains’ character because he had a strength perhaps missing from Paul Heinreid. Davis talks more about her friendship with Rains — a man she called “witty, amusing, and beautiful.” She even takes time to mention her most repulsive screen kiss with an actor who (in 1971) was still alive and therefore left nameless. Although she is quick to praise some English actors including Richard Harris and Dirk Bogarde.

Marlon Brando (1973)

Marlon Brando feels like another person who was notoriously difficult to pin down. Here he’s quite candid about his thoughts on racism against minorities and, at the time, the quite controversial boycott of the Academy Awards.

When Cavett tries to talk about acting style, Brando makes the case that all human beings are acting all the time in life just to survive. Cavett’s trying to get at how what Brando does is far and away from what anybody else can manage, but perhaps it’s semantics.

Brando goes on to say that acting is a good business — a worthy craft — but he doesn’t think of it in terms of art like other people. It’s intriguing since many would laud him for being a part of some of the most artistic production of the 20th century. (Side note: Brando uses the word “inured” which I thought was pretty impressive).

Katharine Hepburn (1973)

Like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepurn was considered for Gone With The Wind as she had working relationships with the producer David O. Selznick and the original director George Cukor. She and Cavett also spend some time talking about Humphrey Bogart, and Hepburn says he was a gent with good manners and completely different than his persona. She said Spencer Tracy always seemed a bit uncomfortable as a man being a professional actor, but Bogey seemed to love it and be proud of his job.

She calls the movie business thrilling, but she had no interest in immortality or people remembering her in the year 2050. As we’re now only a couple decades away, I can say that people certainly will remember stars such as her, and we’re thankful for their movies and interviews like these to help keep their stories alive for ensuing generations. I count myself among this lucky group who can reap the benefit of this readily available visual history both on the big and small screen.

For fun, I wanted to make a list of their films including my personal favorites. In no particular order off the top of my head these were my choices:

–Duck Soup (1933)
–Night at The Opera (1935)
–Swing Time (1936)
–The Band Wagon (1953)
-Out of The Past (1947)
-Night of The Hunter (1955)
-The Little Foxes (1941)
–All About Eve (1950)
–The Godfather (1972)
–On The Waterfront (1954)
–Philadelphia Story (1940)
–The African Queen (1951)

Hour of The Gun (1967): James Garner and Jason Robards

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The story is as old as the mythology of the West. You cannot avoid tales of Tombstone, Arizona on October 26, 1881 and the famed Gunfight at The O.K. Corral. John Ford covered the events most famously in My Darling Clementine headlined by Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, and Walter Brennan in the title roles.

A generation later, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas teamed up to do their version. And the lineage runs a lot wider and deeper than this. It leaves one to wonder how many ways you can retell the same story with the same central characters.

Director John Sturges answers the question almost immediately by doing away with the one scene that this whole mythology effectively hinges on. The movie opens with the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which feels more like a glorified street fight, done in seconds, with Clanton standing by and unharmed by the events at hand. Whether it plays more to the timber of actual history or not, it sets a precedent and recontextualizes everything we must relearn about these legendary figures of the West.

The men who play them are more than up to the task because of what they bring to the characterizations. Their names should be familiar. James Garner. Jason Robards. Robert Ryan. They are featured prominently in the title credits like figures on the marquee.

There might be some questions of where the movie might possibly go from here because it quickly disposes of its most “climactic moment,” underwhelming or not. Still, there manages to be a story built off the foundations of this inciting incident.

It becomes part courtroom drama momentarily, then it’s a town-wide conspiracy against the Earp brothers, and it finally turns deadly when they are ambushed with shotguns in the dead of night. The bloody gunfights and surreptitious ambushes are quickly deliberated over in the very same courtroom. There’s a kind of legal impasse.

Ryan always managed to be a fine villain, and it’s no different here. He plays Clanton as a shrewd businessman with most of the town on his payroll including sheriffs, public prosecutors, and a bevy of wanted gunmen (including a young Jon Voight). Though he never pulls the trigger himself, he has many minions in his pocket prepared to do his bidding. It’s a lot more convenient since he has the money to spend.

Hour of the Gun also feels like a western straddling two generations. Garner and Robards represent it well. Garner’s Maverick and to some extent his Local Sheriff put a different spin on the western genre as a kind of anti-western star, at least compared to the James Arness or Chuck Connors archetypes.

And Jason Robards, who only a year later would find his way into Sergio Leone’s epic spaghetti opera Once Upon a Time in The West, is equally adept in such an environment. He can be rugged and tough but not without a kind of wry sense of humor and intuition. We like them both for who they are. First, as performers and then as two of the West’s most prominent figures: Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday respectively.

Lucien Ballard was a Hollywood veteran with saddlebags full of movie credits including many entries shooting his wife and leading lady Merle Oberon. Jerry Goldsmith takes on scoring duties with work that observes the purview of the West while reminding us of his crucial role in future New Hollywood and blockbuster hits.

It’s curious how the movie hews closer to history, and it looks to dispel myth and tell a version of the tale that feels more like a procedural. In some ways, it is a more modern expression of the western, though John Sturges is not in the Eastwood, Peckinpah, or even Leone school.

He was actually the very same man who helmed The Gunfight at The O.K. Corral with Lancaster and Douglas. But this is hardly a reworking in the way Howard Hawks remade Rio Bravo multiple times. Rather it feels like Sturges is intent on telling the tale with different terms more to his liking.

Initially, it builds off the legacy of The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape where there’s something honest and sure about its telling, but it’s not gun shy. There’s still a sense of violence and ambiguity in other ways. Because hypocrisy exists in a world where as long as men have warrants and badges or they are fighting wars, killing is legalized. In all other contexts, it’s not permissible.

It becomes so easy to bend the rules either in service of good and often in the service of evil. Hour of The Gun ultimately is quick to distance itself from the comfortable morality of earlier westerns. This too is a bridge to its future brethren in the genre.

Doc is the man who ultimately assembles the troops; it’s a sequence we know well and somehow Sturges’s best films always captured this brand of male camaraderie — the kind of scenes that little boys of a certain generation aspired to. Getting together with their friends to fight the baddies. There’s still a sense of good fun and the kind of innocent naivete the western used to breed. Though it never amounts to anything.

It all comes down to Wyatt Earp and his personal vendettas. Garner shows a ferocity and a simmering rage that’s rare in him or at least he hides it well often through down-home charm or a coward’s prerogative. Here he’s driven by a sense of justice for the deaths of his brothers. He’s not squeamish when it comes to searching it out either.

The ending could not be a further departure from its predecessors. It feels like the dilapidated, windswept ruins and facades in pictures like Vera Cruz or Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid where the classic western modality goes to die in some sense.

Wyatt finally completes his search for Clayton and comes face-to-face with the man who was so very hard to find. Doc and some bandits stand by testily as Earp flips his badge to his friend, signaling this is a personal action not enacted under the letter of the law.

It’s a quick, unsentimental climax, but it stays true to the opening depiction of the O.K. Corral. I would not hasten to say it’s realistic as much as it gives a more murky and unembellished version of the story. Still, whether he meant to or not, Sturges effectively revises one of the most quoted American myths adding yet another complicating footnote to how we come to understand it. All other things considered, from the imagery to this commitment to a raw account of history, Garner and Robards are still the ones who make the picture.

3.5/5 Stars

The Tall Men (1955)

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We open in Montana 1866 with the Allison brothers (Clark Gable and Cameron Mitchell), two former Confederate soldiers, leaving behind the “heartbreak memory of Gettysburg” for the promise of wealth in California. But first they must traverse frostbitten exteriors.

It’s no picnic as they join forces with Robert Ryan and face a treacherous trail overtaken by blizzard conditions. It chills your bones just watching them wade through the snow, fighting against the icy landscape.

When Jane Russel gets into the picture, the story and the dialogue start to pick up. She always had a way with words — and meeting in a snowstorm has a way of bringing folks together — she’s quickly trading repartee with first Gable and then Mitchell. Ryan just sits by and lets them have at it.

Gable and Russell end up in a cabin together out of the cold. It’s not quite the “Walls of Jericho,” but as Gable cooks up some meat over the fire, and she warms her feet on his back with a few playful kicks, the moment becomes the highlight of the picture thus far. We understand and appreciate the human connection unfolding before us going beyond dialogue or plot points even the nature outside. It’s about two people connecting with one another in a movie but also as individual performers.

In fact, I liked it all very much until I realized I was being imposed upon by a story and a plot. The characters are forced apart and spend the night pouting in their separate corners. It feels like a cheap rom-com ploy in a movie that might have been about something far more gripping and substantive. Instead, it becomes a feeble excuse to inject some amount of tension into the picture.

Sadly, it’s never able to reignite the same alluring lightheartedness of their opening introduction. They’re too busy trying to be distraught with one another to make time for much fun. In this way, Raoul Walsh is not Howard Hawks.

Ryan is frankly subdued if fairly determined with what he wants, be it cattle driving, making money, or charming the women he keeps company with. In his own quiet, self-assured way, he’s out for status and remains the envy of every other man. He can never be mistaken for a villain or even a real rival for Gable. They never play it that way. Even when his hot-headed brother, played by Mitchell gets belligerent, Gable’s quick to defuse the situation.

There’s also little push or purpose to the ensuing cattle drive as it is more of a conduit for the romantic tension, and it hardly seems to be enough to carry the weight of such a lengthy picture. Jane Russell is given ample opportunity to sing, bathe herself, and remove her stockings for the camera. Whatever the contemporary audience might have clamored for, it’s a sorry use for her talents and adds very little to the film.

They do indeed run tall in this movie. What the title fails to mention is how each man is pretty old, past the prime of a cowboy, and so we’re asked to let it slide. It’s almost laughable that Cameron Mitchell is meant to be a youthful hothead. Instead, it feels like he’s caught in a state of arrested development. It could be worse.

So while there’s a desire to see the mythos of the West played out in front of us on a grandiose scale, the movie never quite manages the whole package. Walsh is a consummate professional, and he makes the images as grand and as resplendent as he knows how with all the resources availed him. And yet the narrative itself — the sinew that makes up the story — never hits a lasting resonance. One exception might be a thrilling standoff with some Kansas extortionists.

Alas, there isn’t very much more to appreciate on the journey. It does feel like a sizeable waste of talent even as the film itself has vistas well worth our time.  It is a pity because I couldn’t think of a better way to draw up a western than enlisting the help of Clark Gable, Jane Russell, and Robert Ryan at the height (or even the trough) of their powers. Surely they were deserving of a bit more consideration.

3/5 Stars

The Law and Jake Wade (1958): Robert Taylor and Richard Widmark

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It’s initially intriguing to have a western pairing of Robert Taylor and Richard Widmark, rather like what we get out of Warlock from Henry Fonda and Widmark the year after. My estimation of the dashing ’30s matinee idol has refined over time as he matured into such worthwhile westerns as The Devil’s Doorway, Westward The Women, and even Saddle the Wind.

Here again, Taylor holds the mantle as the inscrutable, no-nonsense lead and Widmark falls back into his role as a merciless reprobate, prone to all sorts of aggression. What’s more, there’s something delightfully skeezy about his voice. He slips into it so seamlessly playing a kindred of Tommy Udo or any of his more reprehensible characters.

The premise is set up immediately with a brazen jailbreak — one man comes in for his pal — and then they shoot their way out of town toward freedom. However, it quickly becomes more complicated. Jake Wade (Taylor) and Clint Hollister (Widmark) are not so much friends as former acquaintances.

This is merely an act of reciprocation because when they raided the Yankees during the Civil War, they formed an uneasy alliance, out of necessity, before eventually parting ways. If they don’t entirely hate each other’s guts, then at the very least they’re deeply mistrustful.

It’s even more curious when Jake returns to his current life. He’s a town’s marshall. How do you make sense of him? In one moment he commits a brazen act of jailbreak, and yet in another, he sits behind a desk in a decent, sleepy town holding a position of repute. Here the noir element is made evident — the way a dark past always comes back to haunt the protagonist and the life he’s tried to make for himself.

In the meantime, the imagery and more specifically the snow-covered mountains are an awesome backdrop and something only the western landscape affords. Jake also is keeping company with a pretty gal. Patricia Owens reminds me a bit of Julie London, mousier but deeply sensible. Her requests make sense, but her man can’t tell her his misgivings without dredging up unwanted memories.

Because Widmark is the force out of his past he can never totally get rid of. We wonder why he pulled him out of prison. It might come down to some moral prerogative, but it feels a lot like letting the monkey out of the cage so it can end up on your back again.

The old gang moves in and Taylor is taken prisoner with the sole purpose of leading them back to a cache of gold pieces he buried in some forsaken town years before. The journey is long and arduous and the callous Clint makes his old partner do it with his hands tied behind his back. He’ll give him a horse, but he doesn’t trust him with more. If you give him an inch, there’s no telling what will happen.

Deforrest Kelly never quite does it for me as one of the heavies — though he’s quite a psychotic hulk in Warlock. Of all the sidekicks, Henry Silva has real umbrage and a chip on his shoulder, coming off smug and vaguely dangerous.

However, in its best moments, it really becomes a fitting inverse of The Naked Spur held aloft by the two central performances dueling it out. The bad guy is the one holding the reins and dictating the story while our hero and his girlfriend are under his watchful eye as they go on the hunt for the buried treasure. The tension rides with them every moment of their trek.

When Widmark skirts off to catch the Native scouts that bode trouble, there’s a fear something will be lost in the movie. We stay back with the others as they wait it out in the ghost town, and it feels mostly stagnant. The dynamic brought by Taylor opposite Widmark is momentarily relinquished.

In its wake, there’s a run-of-the-mill shoot ’em-up Indian barrage. I couldn’t help but compare it with the shootout in Man of the West also preoccupied with a ghost town. However, whereas that film has Gary Cooper and a mythos about it like a knowing predecessor to Sergio Leone’s stylized showdowns, Jake Wade feels mostly unspectacular. It’s a shame because the film packages together a handful of worthwhile performances and tangible menace in fits and starts.

3/5 Stars

Time Limit (1957) Directed by Karl Malden

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Time Limit sounds like it should be the title of a syndicated TV program or at least a game show in the heyday of family entertainment. It is not. The themes are heavy, and there’s a weight behind the picture that means something. And in spite of the clunky title, it bears testament to the main players both behind and in front of the camera.

Like his acting compatriot, Marlon Brando, Karl Malden only ever directed one full feature-length picture. Here it is before us, and you can see his sensibilities in it if only because it does stand for something. There is a purpose to it.

Although we never even see the inside of the courtroom, it still reminded me nominally of Man in The Middle with Robert Mitchum solely due to the scale. They both seem to rely on performance and actors who are up to the task.

Time Limit hones in on an investigation into a potential court-martial of a major who looks to have caved to Communist ideology and committed acts of treason against his men and his country in a North Korean POW camp.

Richard Widmark, as the producer and one of the primary architects, is the anchor of the movie as the primary officer — a clear-minded Colonel — called upon to compile the details of the case.

But it is really Richard Basehart with the most complicated, ever-shifting role. It’s easy to sleep on him because of his stint in Europe, and he was never intent on being a movie star. And yet over a serpentine career, he left a trail of memorable noir (He Walked by Night, Tension), arthouse classics (La Strada), and mostly forgotten dramas like Reign of Terror or Fourteen Hours.

Because Time Limit functions mostly as a character piece albeit laced with flashbacks and ratcheted with tension. The ensemble itself is made up of a handful of others. General Connors is the Colonel’s immediate superior, and he’s pushing for a quick court-martial. He doesn’t want the boys to suffer through any more trauma. Although he’s not a totally unlikeable fellow, he does have a very concrete way of thinking. It’s abrasive, to say the least.

If you’ve read me before, you know I have a soft spot for Martin Basalm, and it started with movies like 12 Angry Men and Psycho and steadily built over time. He’s just so versatile while never losing his personal DNA as a performer.

Time Limit finds him on the more irksome spectrum as a busybody rat fink, who always has a way of divulging information to interested parties, much to Widmark’s displeasure. But for every tattletale by Sergeant Baker, there’s a supreme act of loyalty by the faithful and whipsmart corporal Jean Evans (Dolores Michaels). If we were to codify the movie purely between good and bad, she is one of the movie’s unsung heroes.

But they must also have witnesses — people with first-hand knowledge of the case — both personal and otherwise. An almost unrecognizable Rip Torn is a clean-cut, fresh-faced member of the unit who was there in the POW camp when the Major turned. Mrs. Cargil (June Lockhart) has a much different point of view because she still can’t believe the debilitating change that has come over her husband. It’s not like him. Something else is going on under the surface.

The score rages too much for my liking, but for what it is Time Limit plays quite well. The General starts breathing down Edwards’ neck — with personal interest invested — his son was one of those killed in the camp. It certainly cannot be discounted. Then, there are these very particular repetitions in the many testimonies (describing factors like acute dysentery). Something does not add up because everything lines up almost too perfectly.

More than anything, it does feel like Malden makes his actors look good. I’m thinking of a particular scene where Widmark is absent. Balsam leads Basehart into the office to wait but then prepares to ambush him and give him a piece of his mind. Michaels makes sure she is present to moderate, but first Balsam leans over his superior in his chair. Then, the close-ups cut back and forth between him and Ms. Evans as they have at it.

The tension in the sequence is palpable because the scene is blocked and covered in such a way that we feel the entire essence of what is going on. The visuals not only augment the performances but also the emotions underlying the sequence.

Winston Churchill is cited as saying, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. Widmark turns these words on their head because he says, “Truth can be more rotten, more vicious, and destructive than any lie.” Within the context of this move, he’s right.

Like Act of Violence, it becomes a film of making sense of a clouded past under circumstances the offenders are not proud of. The General invokes an unbreakable code for all his men — even his son — a code that must be adhered to with unswerving resolve. It’s a graceless proposition that no one can stand up to. Because for the hundreds of days men are heroes, there’s always going to be a few where they falter.

The question remains how do we canonize others? Is it at their most cowardly and despicable or at their very best? For those paying attention, the irony in the General’s final convictions should not be lost on us, “The Code is our Bible, and I thank God for it.”

If you’ll allow me one final digression, a book that’s pierced me to the core is Silence by Shusaku Endo. It is about Catholic priests, not soldiers, but they face a similar conundrum: the desire to attain some sort of martyrdom. However, what if someone is forced to face the ultimate ignominy instead? Each must struggle and make peace with a world that will openly disdain them, and that is a tough pill to take for any person.

3.5/5 Stars

Backlash (1956): Donna Reed and Richard Widmark

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Only in a western could we meet our protagonists in a sand trap known as Gila Valley. It says everything you need to know about the Arizona landscape, and then the sweeping Technicolor tones say a bit more.

Richard Widmark is easy enough to place as an enigmatic figure. There’s a glint in his eyes, and we know from his pedigree he’s capable of playing shifty. The true pleasure is watching Donna Reed — because she becomes very much his equal — another sturdy customer with her own personal agenda.

It feels so very unaccustomed for the woman who played Mary Bailey and anchored her own family comedy. Then, again, the edges of From Here to Eternity are not too far in the past. It’s hard to forget what she did there across from Monty Clift.

The movie gets its legs when a man takes a shot at Jim Slater (Widmark) from the rocky crags above. He thinks he’s been a mark. The woman, Karyl Orton, was trying to play him, and he nearly fell for it. Leaving her behind, he scurries to the rockface to have it out with his enemy on the high ground.

Backlash is a constant exhibition in deciphering characters’ intentions. Because as an audience we are thrown into the action and asked to follow what’s going on. She’s searching for some gold, and he asks us to believe his interests are purely in his father who disappeared in the territory.

Although it’s adapted from source material, it does feel reminiscent of some of Borden Chase’s other patented efforts with a craggy showdown reminiscent of Winchester 73′ (1950). Thematically, John Sturges’s turn as director also proves a decent facsimile of some of Mann’s best westerns where the blending of psychological duress, perturbing imagery, and in-your-face action strings out the story into a taut state of tension.

It’s easy to become genuinely immersed in the first act with a fleeing stagecoach looking to cut across the open plains with Indians in hot pursuit. As they fall back, they’re forced to hold down an isolated trading post against the onslaught of marauders.

Unfortunately, all this buildup feels a bit too convenient. Because Slater searches for a seasoned soldier named Lake (Barton MacLane), who was a part of the detail that found the dead bodies that were left behind in an earlier massacre. In serendipitous Hollywood fashion, the old man keels over from a battle wound, just before divulging the remnants of what he remembers of a “6th man.” Surely he is the key to the movie, and Slater has been propelled forward.

If we can stop for a moment to acknowledge them, Backlash has a couple doozy bits of casting with the normally maniacal heavy Jack Lambert playing a sniveling Indian trader. Then, Harry Morgan, in a role reversal, takes on the role of a squat, no-nonsense heavy out to hunt Slater with his big brother. Because Slater killed their sibling.

But if there was any doubt in the red-hot chemistry of our primary stars, it sizzles while Reed brandishes a knife to cauterize the gunman’s most recent injury. It is a movie moment made for the big screen audience if there ever was such a thing. This smoldering passion and growing relationship are nearly enough to salvage the picture in its slower ebbs as they continue their search for answers.

In the end, they split the thread pretty thin between the two of them. It can only go one of two ways. Either the man he’s looking to find is her long-lost husband, a corrupt man, or it’s his own father — a man he’s never known a thing about. We must wait to discover the answer.

But the factions in the buildup are interesting. Our protagonists meet a man named Major Carson (Roy Roberts), who runs a local ranch. He seems like a pragmatic, sensible sort of fellow, and he’s got a range war on his hands thanks to a man named Bonniwell (John Mcintire).

One hotheaded sharpshooter (William Campbell) goes turncoat, and there are still thugs looking for Slater to gun him down in an act of retribution. The local sheriff (Robert Foulk) aims to remain impartial in all of this while still maintaining some manner of civility. He’s not concerned with private vendettas, only some semblance of local law and order. Widmark quickly gets tossed into the jailhouse, effectively sidelining him and leaving him incapable of exerting any influence on either side.

I won’t spell out the final act because that’s part of the fun of the picture, watching it unfold. There’s a dog-eat-dog mentality; it’s about family, but it never stops being a picture founded on Richard Widmark and Donna Reed. If you’re curious about seeing them together, that’s a good enough reason as any to invest in this western from an often underrated craftsman.

3.5/5 Stars