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

Posted on April 29, 2023 by 4 Star Films

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

BLOG UPDATE: Cutting Back on Posting

Posted on October 1, 2022 by 4 Star Films

Masculin Féminin (1966)

Hello to everyone who has taken the time to read this film blog!

First off, thank you so much for reading! I’m really bad at self-promotion so the fact that anyone would take time to look over something I’ve written still humbles me. I’ve been amazed to see how this site has grown.

A few months ago, I celebrated 10 years of this blog! I alluded to it then, but writing for this site has been a great rhythm for me. I still love the process, and it brings me great joy to write about films. There is a thrill to it, not just in watching the films, but also getting to articulate how I feel about them.

That being said, although I still have a lot of reviews in the pipeline, I’m probably going to cut back on posting. It will be fun to focus more of my attention on other things. I’m still here, and I’ll still be releasing content every month, but I think I’ll enjoy going at a more languid pace. We’ll see what else happens along the way.

I look forward to keeping the appreciation for classic films going.

Thanks again for reading!

Tynan @ 4 Star Films

Bitter Rice (1949)

Posted on September 23, 2022 by 4 Star Films

Doris Dowling has a name that sticks out in the opening credits for the very reason she was an American actress and she offered up a particularly memorable role as Alan Ladd’s vitriolic wife in The Blue Dahlia. Here she’s an Italian playing the moll of a two-bit hoodlum wanted by the police.

Bitter Rice opens with a curious kind of introduction. A man stares straight at the camera, breaking the unwritten contours of the fourth wall while providing some explanation of how rice harvesting is a bumper crop not only in China and India but in Northern Italy as well. A moment later, the camera pulls away revealing this presentation is all part of Radio Turin and suddenly the circumstances of the film are instantly placed in a palpable setting.

The lithe even upbeat nature of the picture allows us to fall into the world almost immediately. We have a milieu of migrant workers crossed with bustling train stations, lovers, policemen, and wanted fugitives all playing out in front of us as we try to take in the stimuli and come to grips with everything. The wanted man, named Walter (Vittorio Gassman), tries to mask himself by dancing with a pretty young field worker (Silvana Mangano). She gladly flaunts her dancing in exchange for attention as she’s accompanied by her portable gramophone.

In the aftermath of a chase, Francessca (Dowling) disappears into the crowd of workers to lay low with their cache while her boyfriend flees in order to stay out of the clutches of the police. If it’s not apparent already, a passing street vendor lets us know some priceless jewels were stolen from The Grand Hotel.

If it’s not apparent already, this opening gambit has the kind of thrust we might expect from Hollywood, not a backcountry Italian film, and it’s evident Giuseppe De Santis is well aware of the mechanisms of a thriller. However, he also allows his picture to sink back into rhythms that one would feel much more accustomed to with neorealism and a movie set in the province of Vercelli.

Suddenly a tale of illegals and registered workers is given a new context but timeless relevance to this very day. Francesca does not have a license, but she befriends the saucy young dancer, Silvana, who does her best to assuage the foremen and get her new companion on the ever-crucial list of approval. Her chances are tenuous at best, but Francesca, like so many others, has no other choice.

I couldn’t help thinking, with her chewing gum and sizzling hot music, Silvana is bred out of the same world that supplied movie posters of Gilda in Bicycle Thieves. It’s this influx of American product in its many modes — a new form of cultural dominance — steamrolling the former fascism into submission to good ol’ American capitalism.

The way she flaunts herself and becomes the focal point of the picture, I couldn’t help but compare her to Virginia Mayo in some of her saucier roles like Best Years of Our Lives or White Heat — down to the gum chewing. If it were an American film, Bitter Rice would fit somewhere within the landscape of The Grapes of Wrath or maybe Border Incident.

There’s little doubt it has a kind of collective political philosophy to present — its own vein of social commentary — and it delivers it not only through narrative, but visual depictions of the life these people are subjected to.

In one breathless comment, Silvana tells a soldier (Raf Vallone) posted nearby, “In North America everything is electric!” He’s informed enough to know “even the chair is electric…” As a side note, the Italian constitution completely abolished the death penalty for all common and civil crimes starting in 1948. Already it presents a kind of ideological chafing that must be contended with.

Upon their arrival, the rice workers receive a hero’s welcome, and we are reminded this is a yearly ritual with its own unique patterns. There’s something marvelous about taking part in these seemingly familiar habits even as we see them for the first time as an audience.

The packing of mattresses with straw, the throwing of hats to all the field hands who catch them out of the air en masse. It’s strangely riveting. Or there are the mating customs played out year after year with men yelling over the wall to the fair maidens below, searching for former flings and future partners.

We come to realize it’s built on its own kind of ecosystem. You have the foreman’s, the lines of workers bent over in the muck and the mire every which way, and they sing their river ballads to pass news along the line.

With the jewels to get between them, Francesca and Silvana find themselves positioned among the two factions of documented and undocumented workers. It’s not a simple task, and then Walter turns up again. He can only bring trouble.

Like their opening foray, there’s something about the dance scene between Silvana and Walter burning with a palpable sensuality. But what it also does quite effectively is pluck the film out of its neorealist roots and make it even momentarily something more. It’s like a precursor to the passionate sashaying in Picnic. It feels like very much a Hollywood creation and yet it’s simply De Santis’s version of it.

Likewise, the film is not totally averse to forging its own version of a love triangle (or diamond) with Francesca and Silvana finding themselves attracted and repelled by the conman Walter and another character, the soldier Marco. These see-sawing relational dynamics are the fodder for unadulterated melodrama exemplified by violent pursuits in the pouring rain, passionate embraces in mountains of rice, and a great deal more.

While the rest of the harvesters get overtaken with merriment in the wake of a wedding and subsequent beauty contest, there’s something much more catastrophic going on in the background. Silvana becomes the self-destructive queen of it all.

By the end, I stand totally astounded. Bitter Rice jumps off the deep end going from Italian Neorealism toward gut-busting, blistering drama with the dark tinges of noir. This is what it borrows from Hollywood quite effectively, reminiscent of a picture like Border Incident or even Cape Fear. In tight quarters, violence becomes especially animalistic. When a beast feels cornered, he must lash out.

Also, I still am fascinated to know why Doris Dowling was cast in a film that was otherwise completely Italian, and yet there’s something rather ironic and bewitching in her and Magnano becoming cultural foils for one another. It becomes a far more complicated portrait of the corrupting forces of greed and capitalism.

Dowling, as the quintessential, steadfast Italian girl, and the Italian actress as a poisoned vessel of sensual pop culture materialism. What’s more, it leaves a truly incisive impression and that’s most important of all. You won’t soon forget a film like this, and it just might have the power to captivate viewers on both sides of the globe with its pulpy sensibilities.

4.5/5 Stars

Europa ’51 (1952)

Posted on September 15, 2022 by 4 Star Films

Europa ’51 is one of those films butchered by time and yet eventually, it was stitched back together to resemble how it was intended to be viewed by its director. Its serpentine history to restoration hints at its subversive elements, although on the surface, it seems like a fairly common breed of drama about a middle-class family.

It reminds me somewhat of De Sica’s The Children are Watching Us purely because it provides a striking reminder neorealism is not only an exploration of those in abject poverty. It can be about those who have a relational or familial deficit too.

In this case, we begin with the one and only Ingrid Bergman. She returns home to the bustling preparation for a dinner party. A strike is tying up the local roads, and it’s only a minor inconvenience. The same might be said of her misanthropic son.

She hardly has time or patience for his concerns because there’s so much to do. She treats him with the kind of shortness and insensitivity you can hardly begrudge parents. It feels like a momentary lapse in priorities more than a callous act of neglect. Soon enough she’s with her husband and guests — one of them brings the conversation to politics and “leftists” — and it’s easy to leave childish trivialities behind.

Then, a catastrophic event shocks her, and the dormant maternal side reveals itself — one of warmth and affection. She racked with the kind of guilt you can never hope to placate. With the movie being so weepy at such an early juncture, there’s a question of where it might go, but Bergman remains the driving force. She goes searching for something…

On her pilgrimage, one of the people she finds is Giulietta Masina, playing a mother to all with a generous spirit and a heart of gold. She’s taken on far too many children, only some of them her own, but she loves them dearly, fussing over them and getting so much joy in providing for them. There’s a frantic charm to her as she busies herself and makes the household run in spite of her meager means. It’s appealing to Irene.

Meanwhile, her husband (Alexander Knox) remains mostly unfeeling, blowing his top when he perceives another man in her life. He fails to recognize this is the only man who has extended her any human kindness and understanding. For this and other sins, she winds up in a psych ward. Remember, we are trading in melodrama.

Irene comforts her tearful housekeeper with a newfound poise. She receives a visitation from the ward’s priest, and they share their mutual philosophies. Experience has led her to discover her own distinctive on what life is about: Love for ourselves feels too narrow; she feels compelled to reach out to others. Love has no limits. Evil is born from the fact we never give all our love to those who need it most.

Irene avoids questions from the priest about a God and his grace stating we must be filled with love for all so that all might be saved through love. The words ringing with the most resonancy go like this, “I came to earth not to lose sinners but to win them — the miracle of Christianity.”

Suddenly, I liked the movie more and more as Bergman’s developing character is revealed, and I learned Rossellini envisioned her out of the tenets of St. Francis of Assisi.

For the majority of my life, I’ve lived in a western, predominantly Christian society, where these core truths pervade the mindset in thought and word, if not entirely in our deeds. There continues to be a shift; many more people are unaffiliated with organized religion or don’t identify with a specific faith. Much of this makes sense as hypocrisy becomes more and more visible in the social media landscape.

I’m left curious. Instead of being swayed by the political or social movements of the day and age or their specific tribes and subcultures, either to fit in or to rage against the status quo, what if people decided to stand out in a far more radical way?

What if they actually took to heart the teaching to love their neighbors and God with all their heart, mind, and strength. Bergman feels a bit crazy, she is countercultural, and impossible to categorize: an exceptional anomaly.

She would play Joan of Arc later, but this is her first foray into the part of a modern-day saint who eschews and then slides beyond the conventions of her age. These kinds of characters fascinate me namely because they challenge my own convictions and hypocrisies. “How many men condemned by their society and burned at the stake in their day were right?” It’s a sobering question…

3.5/5 Stars

Rain (1932): Joan Crawford and Walter Huston

Posted on July 17, 2021 by 4 Star Films

Rain finds its origins in a short story by W. Somerset Maugham, and it was also preceded by a picture starring Gloria Swanson titled Sadie Thompson. She is indeed the central character of this adaptation as well, although the title of this version focuses in on the dreary poeticism.

It’s true that a kind of rainy exoticism defines the entire mood of Lewis Milestone’s movie as this perpetual gloominess sets the tone for the story at stake. A few years before Safe in Hell, we have another picture set on an island. This one is named Pago Pago, and it serves as a weigh station for passengers during a cholera scare.

Among those laid up are Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Davidson (Walter Huston and Beulah Bondi), a pair of religious reformers, who are intent on completing their voyage so they might begin administering to the nonbelievers. They are reformers who’ll gladly break your back to save your soul.

The good, innocuous Doctor MacPhail (Matt Moore) feels like an author’s creation; he’s a character we can identify with as an audience — a stand-in of sorts — who ably fits into the company of respectable folks but remains an impartial observer.

Then, you have a much different ilk, part of the earthier, more salacious crowd, headed up by the island’s local proprietor (Guy Kibbee) and made a lot more enticing by the one and only Sadie Thompson (Joan Crawford). With her checkered dress and made-up eyes, she falls in with the soldier boys on leave, introduced in saucy fashion through a mixture of appendages and hot jazz. In her own estimation, some lively music and a nip of liquor are what rainy days are for.

The movie itself can easily be summed up by a clash of moral prerogatives; it becomes plainly apparent who’s on each side. Kibbee’s character is especially wary of their latest visitors because it’s crusaders like them who readily sully the last remnants of earthly paradise. This is his picture of Eden — freedom to do whatever he sees fit — although it’s quite different than their conception of it. He’s got a gripe with their kind because they represent the age and the newest commandment, “thou shall not enjoy life.”

Throughout the movie, Milestone’s whips and whirls make the film feel all the more alive even as it rages to burst out of the restraint and aestheticism of its more pious players. This obvious motion accentuates what otherwise feels a bit like an island chamber piece.

Because it’s built completely out of the performances. First, it’s Mrs. Davenport (Bondi) denouncing the lady of loose morals dancing on the Lord’s Day — the sabbath — and she wants her husband to put the fear of God into the tramp.

Soon enough, he does just that, confronting Sadie with the fervent belief that it is up to him to save her incorrigible soul. Though he admittedly burns with conviction, it’s his overall demeanor that’s off-putting to the likes of her. She doesn’t take kindly to his Pharisaic demeanor.

Their words, thoughts, and deeds are worlds apart as exemplified in this more understated confrontation. We see them for who they are fundamentally at the core of their beings. He talks of presenting her “a gift.” He’s speaking of eternal things — salvation as Christians think of it — this is her chance to be saved. Meanwhile, she’s thinking about life on this terrestrial rock. Where people get knocked down and beaten up and the like. It’s in this world where she reckons to make out and survive, living her happy-go-lucky kind of life day-to-day.

More than rejecting his religiosity, she rejects his self-righteousness even as his pronouncements come off almost incomprehensible to her. What she does understand is his dismissiveness, his callousness toward her precarious station in life. The doctor, standing by the wayside for most of the picture, finally lets his companion know he thinks the man harsh and tyrannical, although Davenport affirms his heart bleeds for the poor wayward sinner.

The reformer evokes the Lord’s Prayer as Sadie rails into him with her own indignant tirade only for it to evaporate around her. It comes out of a place of fear and dejection. For all her outward confidence, she really doesn’t know what she’s doing. Shell-shocked piety is a strange garment for her to wear if altogether understandable. But others must judge the outcomes for themselves and the same goes for the denouement.

For all its provocative flaunting in the beginning, Rain relies on an ending of inference, happening between the lines. A lot is at play in the final moments on a subtextual level — be it latent desires or closeted hypocrisies. Instead of a hangman’s noose in a discarded field, it’s a cut throat on the shoreline, but the similarities are undeniable.

It sends shockwaves through the population even as it suggests the conflicted nature of humanity. As far as its impact on Sadie, it leaves her much where she began, though now at least she has a man (William Gargan) to take her by the arm.

Rain was not much of a box office attraction in its day and part of this might have to do with the brazen ending. It’s not a straightforward picture, but like Safe in Hell, between loose morals and redemptive religiosity, the picture jockeys for an uneasy equilibrium. If nothing else, Joan Crawford and Walter Huston make it feel like a seismic battle that’s eye-catching in fits and starts.

3.5/5 Stars

Classic Movie Beginner’s Guide: Kim Novak

Posted on May 29, 2021 by 4 Star Films

In our ongoing series of guides for up-and-coming classic movie fans, we turn our attention to one of the most alluring and iconic actresses from the Classic Hollywood period.

Kim Novak, who is still alive and well today, started out in her early 20s as an answer to Marilyn Monroe, while soon developing her own image as a husky-voiced, sultry siren. She played opposite some of the biggest stars of her day. Unfortunately, her own talents are often dismissed in light of her looks, and she eventually left Hollywood to live a far more secluded life.

Picnic (1955)

Kim Novak garnered attention for her self-assured work in the film noir Pushover and a playful bit in Pfft. However, one of her most iconic roles thereafter came with Picnic opposite William Holden. The Kansas heat whips up a passionate romance between a teenage prom queen and an out-of-town drifter. Their dance together to “Moonglow” is one of the movie’s magical moments.

The Man With The Golden Arm (1955)

There’s no doubt this is Frank Sinatra’s picture and a darn good one too as he plays a relapsing druggie struggling to get the monkey off his back. As all the street graft enable him and his disabled wife nags him, it’s the local waitress in Novak who gives him the tough love he genuinely deserves. They would costar again in Pal Joey with more tepid results.

Vertigo (1958)

This is the big one. The one that will cement Kim Novak’s legacy for the ages thanks to Alfred Hitchcock’s obsessive vision and Bernard Hermann’s mesmerizing score, turning her into a spectral beauty haunting the streets of San Francisco. Everything from her wardrobe to her posturing makes her dual role as Madeleine and Judy pitch-perfect. If you want something lighter, try Bell, Book, and Candle from the same year, also starring James Stewart

Middle of The Night (1959)

Kim Novak’s performances are generally overshadowed if not completely neglected. She is, after all, remembered as a glamour girl. However, in a film like Middle of The Night with a heart-wrenching premise and a craftsman like Paddy Chayefsky, she stretches herself opposite Frederic March playing an unorthodox couple trying to weather societal peer pressure. It’s probably her most vulnerable, most devastating performance.

Worth Watching

Strangers When We Meet, Boys Night Out, Kiss Me Stupid, etc.

Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Jim Jarmusch

Posted on May 25, 2021 by 4 Star Films

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One of the most revelatory aspects about becoming more familiar with Jim Jarmusch is how international his films are. At the very least, there’s this sense of them putting a lens to a broader cross-section of society.

He is unequivocally American, but whether it’s because he’s a cineaste or driven to a global perspective through music or other interests, he paints with a canvass broader than simply the American experience. He also seems to understand the American experience is framed and colored by those who come to us. In fact, we are a melting pot, as Alexis de Tocqueville once noted, made up of all nations.

As a storyteller, Jarmusch seems drawn to what I’ve heard termed the “mearcstapa” — the border walkers — people on the outskirts. They could be expatriates, foreigners, or people who simply conceive of the world in a different manner than you and me. Although the term is recontextualized from its Medieval connotations, it does take on renewed meaning. In the case of Stranger Than Paradise, it’s a visitor from Hungary.

But if any of this dialogue runs the risk of making the story sound too rarified, rest assured, it is far from that. It’s a picture content in the simplest of moments. The plot as it were is born out of a statement. Eddie (John Lurie) has a cousin arriving and visiting him from Hungary. That’s it right there.

He feels put upon having her stay with him. He doesn’t show her the town. He doesn’t give her food. He’s the most inhospitable person in the world. But then again look at his life. He subsists off TV dinners and beer.

His only friend is Eddie, a shifty-eyed, flighty fellow who’s half-witted in a lovable kind of way. They spend time watching football, playing cards, drinking beer, or going to the races. That’s just about all they ever do. And it hardly changes with the addition of Eva.

Still, what the movie exudes resolutely is a style and an aesthetic, forming something more substantial than the sum of its modest parts. Because it’s certainly humble, and the antithesis of flamboyant production values, and yet it manages to supersede the simple nature of what is happening onscreen.

Take, for instance, the sequence where Eva is walking down the streets with her suitcases in hand to the tune of “I Put a Spell on You.” Screamin’ Jay Hawkins rumbles across the pavement, and it’s oddly mesmerizing.

Pairing this with the black and white cinematography, dominating the film with a dreary, dilapidatedness leaves a startling impression. It’s both the prevailing sense of the world and somehow complementary to the budget and resources he’s working with.

I am reminded of the early films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder because there is the sense of almost two-dimensional space in many of the scenes — simple but purposefully done. In the case of Jarmusch, there are hardly any cuts, with the shots put end-to-end and void of any other type of true editing. It’s the simplest form, really, cut together by way of black inserted between the sequences.

You could point out Jarmusch is making a kind of glorified short film, and that’s how the narrative began sticking the footage together in three segments. But the black in-between the visuals also function as a kind of ellipsis.

Because pretty soon Willie and Eddy get up and go from Brooklyn and road trip it out to Cleveland. Why? Because Eva’s there. She is a fellow sojourner, and so they take to the road in order to catch up with her. In one of his typically dorky observations, Eddie tells his buddy, “Before I met your cousin, I didn’t know you were from Hungary or Budapest or any of those places. I thought you were an American.”

Pretty soon they’re staying with the Aunt and back to watching TV and playing card games. Shooting the bull and chewing the fat like they always do wherever they go. Even miles away in the icy tundra of the Midwest they realize, “You come someplace new and everything looks the same.” Restless for some meaningful experience, they head off to sun-soaked Florida to seek something else.

Finally, there’s some action, albeit off-screen and pretty much only alluded to. The boys lose all their dough at the dog races. In her own absurd turn of events, Eva winds up with a mother lode in drugs. That could be a whole rabbit hole all to its own. Instead, they take a trip to the airport to set up another adventure…undoubtedly just as absurd as the last.

It might not seem like much, but that’s the entire charm of Jarmusch’s movie; he’s so very comfortable bending away from Hollywood convention. Where location shooting becomes more of an in-joke than of a particular commodity and characters and story are more likely conduits of style. In fact, to this day, he’s made a career out of it.

Now, Stranger Than Paradise feels a bit like Richard Linklater’s Slacker. They played as important catalysts for subsequent generations of filmmakers because they were unique and of their own time with their own vision. And part of their merit is having done it first — using the world at their disposal and creating something that stays with us however mundane and unadorned.

Part of the paradoxical charm of Stranger Than Paradise is how you could conceivably make a movie like it, and yet you couldn’t ever match its essence because Jim Jarmusch made it just so — distinctly individual and measured to his own personal liking. That’s what it has going for it even to this day. It’s unmistakably him.

3.5/5 Stars

Johnny Eager (1941): Taylor and Turner Spark Dynamite

Posted on May 6, 2021 by 4 Star Films

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“Are you thinking of allowing her to play Roxanne to your Cyrano?” – Van Hefflin to Robert Taylor

Pretty faces don’t always add up to a quality movie and if you want to find where the faults lie, you might look between the players and the script then split the difference. Johnny Eager has all the Classic Hollywood trappings that very well could have made it dead on arrival — especially years later.

Because our protagonist has a name that only exists in the movies (or Hollywood for that matter). He’s a gangster from the old days formerly clad in the finest of threads and raking in the dough. To this day, he’s unrepentant or at least blatantly honest about how he feels; he’s no chump, even despite a stint he did behind bars.

Now he’s on the outside on parole making a go at propriety as a cabby. After this preliminary bit of eye-opening exposition, the story has all but telegraphed its intentions, really no fault of its own. It doesn’t take much imagination to put a reformed Robert Taylor and a curious young sociology debutant like Lana Turner together.

They meet through his parole officer: a white-haired, benevolent picture of authority. He seems to believe every man is capable of reform and human goodness if only given a chance. His secretary, on the other hand, gives Johnny the stink eye. Lisbeth Bard can hardly take her eyes off of him.

Of course, none of this is on the level because Johnny is busy getting into his old rackets, including an ambitious plan to resurrect the Algonquin dog races to make a killing out of it. Simultaneously, he’s double-dealing, getting his sister and bratty niece to masquerade as his alibi. They’re nicely compensated of course to play up a squeaky clean picture of domesticity.

One has to laugh. The authorities must be idiots and Johnny accordingly plays them for fools. He’s a modern-day Machiavelli and this combination of authority, guile, strength, and charm makes Johnny Eager come off a bit more significant than a walking caricature.

It’s true Taylor had caught ahold of something in his career and whether or not he was considered a negligent actor and merely a pretty face, he brings a definite machismo to the screen more than capable of knocking off everyone else around him. He’s without a doubt the center of the action despite the plethora of scene stealers around him.

But one cannot forget the diffident school girl played by Turner, quoting Cyrano de Bergerac and sporting a hat to beat them all. What overtakes her exactly? Is it some compulsion to flirt to convert a wayward soul? Is it simply yearning passion? Whatever the reason, the film is full of “inamorata” — men and women lovers.

Not least among them is Van Heflin who’s quite the educated fellow, quick and rich on the prose, especially when he’s soused with liquor. Jeb is Johnny’s most faithful friend for reasons the movie never puts to words. But whereas everyone else is either a hired ally, a paid stooge, or an easy rival, Jeb stays by him because he has no one else.

The film is at its most engaging tracing the lines and mixing its reference points between literate dames and men pontificating with a grandiloquent verbosity while the thugs rattle off their own barb-wire jargon prickling the ears. They tumble around inside the head as the most unrealistic and simultaneously peculiar cocktail of discordant voices.

Heflin does very little compared to the other forthcoming gruff, garble-mouthed, shifty-eyed types, and yet he doesn’t need to because the words flowing off his lips play like riffs off the rest of the film. He seems to relish every soliloquy he gets to run off, and it definitely leaves an overall impression.

But the real fire is between Taylor and Turner for as long as they get on screen together. Aside from Johnny’s clandestine activity, Lisbeth Bard’s step-father happens to be a crucial man. Edward Arnold aptly plays the domineering and vengeful district attorney, who just so happens to be situated in the most convenient place in the movie. He helped put Eager away in the penitentiary as a service to the public. Now Johnny’s looking to stick it to him with Lisbeth implicated in his own crimes.

Could it be he never loved her at all? It always functioned as business over love? Regardless of his motives, enemies become accomplices as he leverages his new position to open up the long-dormant dog racing track. Everyone across the board has got an angle. What sets Johnny apart is his self-serving shrewdness, never blinded by sentimentalities such as sacrificial love, grace, or a guilty conscience.

Meanwhile, Lisabeth is overtaken by mental frailty and paranoia. She’s not bred for the cutthroat gangster’s life like Johnny. Her tragic hysteria forces him into a type of hero’s choice. It’s what all Hollywood movies ask of their protagonists. Something is required of them in the end.

In its day, Johnny Eager was a stirling success, and if history is any indication, it might have one of the most tragic days in American history to thank. It premiered in Los Angeles on December 9th, 1941. For those keeping tabs, this is two days after Pearl Harbor.

It heightens the dramatics just enough to bring out of the realm of reality and into the spaces of escapism. Where illicit romance can shoot off like fireworks on the screen between two scintillating specimens like Taylor and Turner. They were TNT as the contemporary advertisements so aptly framed it. They were the eye candy; they were the distraction to take the masses away from the tragedy right outside those cinema doors.

In a short time, the movies would be acting as a comment on the world at-large and the war at-large with propaganda machines spinning on all cylinders. For now, they still act as a counterpoint saying something about the state of a nation by not saying anything at all.

The story ends in a somewhat comforting manner, ultimately capping off with a Hollywood moralism that made sense, creating heroes out of gangsters far away from the chaos of sneak attacks and brazen days of infamy. It just goes to show life is more ambiguous and thus more complex than a movie.

3.5/5 Stars

Merrily We Go to Hell (1932): Directed by Dorothy Arzner

Posted on December 15, 2020 by 4 Star Films

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Bubbly is flowing and the gaiety abounds. Alcohol is not an evil, just a tonic to loosen morals, tongues, and dour countenances. When Joan Prentice encounters Jerry Corbett for the first time at a party, she’s immediately taken with him. He’s a few drinks in and has let the merriment overtake him. It comes off charming if a bit dopey.

Merrily We Go to Hell feels like a provocative title, and it’s true this alcohol-drenched drama is a predecessor to the likes of The Lost Weekend and Days of Wine and Roses.

Sylvia Sidney is about as winsomely sweet as she ever was and ever could be playing a socialite at a party. Frederic March has momentary glimpses of warmth and allure, though it’s hardly his finest hour on the screen. However, it is a testament to how phenomenal his career was at points, and even a picture like this seems to suggest how often he is an underappreciated star of Classic Holldywood.

There’s also a third far more surprising presence in the movie filling what might be considered a minor bit part. Cary Grant is all there, but it’s a bit like seeing John Wayne in Baby Face or James Stewart in Wife vs. Secretary. We’re there but not quite there when it comes to their career trajectory. He still needed to meet Mae West and then Leo McCarey to really get the wheels rolling, thus entering the stratosphere of quintessential screwball suavity.

As it settles in, Dorothy Arzner’s picture is all for hitting the journalistic beats contemporary to the day and age. It’s a perfect arena for modern, capitalistic America. An arena of vocation, class, and in this case, alcohol. One easily recalls Platinum Blonde though March, despite all his able acting prowess somehow cannot muster the same fitting charisma Robert Williams managed as a newshound. The former performer lent almost a screwball sensibility to Frank Capra’s picture.

It’s the same kind of affable charm that made Jack Lemmon so effective even as he dipped into similar depths of hell in Days of Wine and Roses. But back to Platinum Blonde. It’s hard not to see the earlier movie’s imprint being reworked within this material (even unconsciously) with less handsome results. Because some of the same dynamics are present. We have a lead infatuated by a platinum blonde (Adrienne Allen) and then opposite him is the endearing “other girl” we know full well will actually win out his heart. At least, in theory.

And if that isn’t enough, both newsmen dabble in playwriting, suggesting the menial pavement-pounding, all for the sake of making a buck, giving way to a higher calling of art and patronage. It handily reflects rungs in the social ladder to mirror contemporary society, as the film’s of the Depression-era all have a habit of doing. Obviously, they can’t help it. This is their world.

However, in Merrily We Go To Hell, playwriting holds a more substantial role aside from being a narrative device for the sake of parallelism. It brings Jerry Corbett the highs and lows of such a career while throwing him back together with his former flame, the glamorous thespian Claire Hempstead. The scenario feels rudimentary and mediocre going through these typical dramatic progressions.

Before it becomes complicated, the film is a basic love story of the lowly working stiff smitten with the heiress, although not for money’s sake. As it predictably dips into drunken stupors, strained relations, and infidelity, the film actually loses some ground. Corbett rounds up his chums, partakes of some merriment, and resigns himself to the platinum blonde rival. In an act of preservation more than rebellion, his wife deflects by digging up her own beau (hence Cary Grant) in an attempt to be equally “modern.”

What resonates most fundamentally are some of the more curious shot selections by Arzner. She certainly manipulates the camera and the images in such a way we are aware of them as an audience, whether through early forms of product placement or a curious rear-view of two men sauntering through a mansion. It feels sporadically alive with invention and a very particular vision, even as it spirals toward an unimaginative soap opera denouement. The accompanying Pre-Code elements are there, but the picture doesn’t entirely douse itself and drown in the melodrama.

This proves to be a key because any such digression could have been its final death. Instead, the sense of restraint and understatement proves a far more powerful tool of storytelling. It subtly undermines stock Pre-Code sordidness for something nominally more intriguing. This nor the actors, totally save the movie, but they keep it from completely sinking. More people are finally starting to talk about Arzner, and Merry We Go to Hell feels like a worthy touchstone in her career.

3/5 Stars

Classic Movie Beginner’s Guide: 60s Spy Spoofs

Posted on October 10, 2020 by 4 Star Films

As part of our efforts to cater to up-and-coming classic movie fans, here’s our latest installment to our classic movie beginner’s guides.

In appreciation of the James Bond franchise and the newest installment that will hopefully still be released early next year, we thought it would be fitting to highlight four spy spoofs that had as much fun with the genre as their inspiration, if not more so!

While we’re partial to Don Adams’ Get Smart on the small screen (or The Man from U.N.C.L.E), here are four franchises to consider if you’re interested in the spy fad of the 1960s. Here we go!

Fantomas (1964)

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France’s answer to the Bond craze came with retrofitting a national comic book hero and supervillain for the ’60s. The blue-faced mastermind Fantomas (Jean Marais) is constantly avoiding capture by the bumbling Inspector (played by comedy’s best-kept secret Louis De Funes). Thankfully, he has the help of an intrepid journalist (also played by Marais). Two more installments would follow.

Our Man Flint (1966)

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Not to be outdone by his compatriots, James Coburn also got his chance to be a top-class secret agent named Derek Flint, who fits all the parameters of a world-renowned spy, including playmates, gadgetry, and continual globetrotting. His travels bring him in contact with a deadly adversary (Gila Golan) and the nefarious Galaxy! One more Flint film with Coburn would follow.

The Silencers (1966)

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Dean Martin is no one’s idea of a James Bond (a drunk one maybe), but his good-natured persona and womanizing ways make him the best off-beat answer to Bond as impregnable agent Matt Helm, also based off some serialized literature. It’s campy, low-grade spy spoofing at its best (or worst?). A bevy of sequels came out in rapid succession.

Casino Royale (1967)

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Definitely not to be confused with Eva Green and Daniel Craig’s iteration, this is the most unwieldy and extravagant of all the spoofs. The cast is absolutely stuffed with big names, and it really is an excuse to roll out the talent. Everyone from David Niven, Peter Sellers, and Ursula Andress masquerade as the incomparable Bond. The best thing to come out of the movie might be “The Look of Love,” but there are lots of memorable cameos.