Category Archives: Romance

711 Ocean Drive (1950): Joanne Dru and Edmond O’Brien

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It serves the filmmakers to begin with an opening crawl about how organized crime tried to halt production of the movie, and they would have succeeded too if not for the bravery of the police on set. Whether or not it’s true, it plays as easy publicity for the film to feed off of. Today it feels needlessly trite.

Regardless, there is no movie without Edmond O’Brien. He’s more than up to the task as an electric wiz who works for the local telephone company. Mal Granger is a fairly likable guy; he’s free and easy with his money when a pal needs some help. In fact, he’s maybe a bit too free. His one vice is the horses, and he and his bookie know each other on a first name basis.

It’s Chippy (I wish we had more movies with Sammy White) who gives him big ideas: he can take his know-how and really go places. He’d be in high demand! Soon the connection is made, and he’s doing a lot of electrical work for Vince Wallace. Barry Kelley was made and no doubt typecast for playing seedy, slightly paunchy shysters. In this picture, he has an army of men relaying all the info from the race tracks.

Granger helps amplify their reach as they build a vast network that radiates out across Southern California. As purely a historical lesson, it is intriguing to watch O’Brien as he unfurls the latest technological gadgetry circa 1950.

They get so successful that the gangster’s legitimate business, Liberty Finance, catches the attention of the police. Soon enough one ambitious telephone repairman will be on their radar as well. Because he’s beginning to realize how important he is — he starts getting ideas of his own — he wants his due.

Although he has some faithful stalwarts around him like Chippy and Trudy (Dorothy Parker), it’s not a benevolent business. Because with every stride he makes, there’s always competition. The film’s next invention is an eastern syndicate run by a slyly imperious Otto Kruger. He moves all the chess pieces without taking part in any of the dirty work. He manages it all quite well with Palm Springs business meetings on the West Coast when needed.

For having prominent billing, and why not, Joanne Dru is quite tardy to the picture. We meet her in a nice hotel bar. She’s waiting for her husband (Don Porter), another underling in the syndicate, who has the task of wooing Granger. Their offer to cut him into their operation also comes with a veiled threat.

He’s not dumb, but he also sees the path of least resistance and with it exponential dollar signs. The pretty girl doesn’t hurt his eyes either. It hardly matters to him if she’s married. He starts shouldering in on the territory with his usual tenacity. It’s what sets him apart and simultaneously never leaves him satisfied.

The most sympathetic characters in the movie, Chippie, Trudy, and Gail, all have a threshold for contentment. Mal will never be satiated, and it’s his undoing. I didn’t note the parallel until this very moment, but he’s rather like King David if only for the fact he covets after another man’s wife and looks to end him. There is no going back.

Taking a page from Hitchcock, we are given a climax at a novel location. Granger tries to flee with his woman while the police pin them down near Boulder Dam. It’s a rather run-of-the-mill conclusion with running around, chasing hither and thither, and plenty of gunfire. It’s been done more expressively, but it gets the job done.

More than anything, we can appreciate the movie as a vehicle for O’Brien, as he was always an integral even ubiquitous noir character rather like Richard Conte. Here he’s given a different angle. We see his ambitions, his avarice, and ultimately, the corruption that overtakes him.

He’s still got a geniality about him and Dru surely helps to bring that out. Still, you’ve probably never seen him like this — at least if you were an audience member in the early ’50s. While it’s not top drawer, for those fond of O’Brien and Dru, it’s worth a look. Within the context of a fairly staid framework, you have characterizations drawing out the most enjoyable elements.

3.5/5 Stars

Vincente Minnelli Films (1958-62)

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Gigi (1958)

Lerner & Loewe’s adaptation of Colette’s Gigi is a picture accentuating the France of Hollywood’s most opulent dreams and confections frequented by the consummate French people of the movies: Maurice Chevalier, Leslie Caron, and Louis Jordan.

Whether it’s Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder or Vicente Minnelli, Chevalier doesn’t change much. He’s convivial with the audience existing just on the other side of the camera. He gives off his usual cheeky, harmless charm that doesn’t always play the best seeing as his first tune is about the litters of girls who will grow up to be married and unmarried young women in the future.

Gigi (Caron) is one of their ilk, a carefree gamine who lives under the auspices of her Grandmama’s house, a startling domicile touched by Minnelli’s charmed palette of deep red.

In some manner, Gigi seems to represent the worst of Minnelli. Yes, it was wildly popular in its day, but all of its manicured embellishment and immaculate set dressings feel mostly fatuous and merely for their own sake. While one can easily appreciate the pure spectacle of the thing, the director’s best pictures show a deep affection for characters.

Here all manner of songs and tête-à-têtes are cheery and bright, while never amounting to something more substantive. It’s easy to suggest the movie revels in its own frivolity. Gaston (Jordan) is a ridiculously wealthy young man and Eva Gabor is his companion, though the gossips get ahold of them. They’re not in love.

Another primary reservation with the picture is how Leslie Caron is summarily stripped of most of her powers. At times, dubbing feels like an accepted evil of these studio-era musicals or a stylistic choice of European maestros. However, in Caron’s case, not only is she not allowed to sing, she can’t talk for herself either (dubbed by the cutesy Betty Wand). I might be missing something, but this seems like a grave misfortune.

You can add to this fact the further grievance she never really has a traditional dance routine, and there’s nothing that can be appreciated about the picture in comparison to the crowning achievements of An American in Paris. All that’s left is to admire is her posture and how she traipses across the canvasses Minnelli has devised for the picture. This alone is hers to control, and she just about makes it enough.

My favorite scene was relatively simple. Gigi and Gaston are at the table playing cards, and they exude a free-and-easy camaraderie. If it’s love, then it’s more like brother and sister or fast friends who like to tease one another. It isn’t yet treacly with romance. Instead, they break out into a rousing rendition of “The Night They Invented Champagne,” which distills its point through an exuberant melody.

The lingering power of the film is how it does its work and grows on me over time. It considers this not totally original idea of trying to become who you are not in order to please others. Gigi must learn the breeding and the etiquette, acquire the clothes, and in short, turn herself inside out in order to fit into rarefied society.

Gaston doesn’t want her to be like that, attempting to replace all the elements of her character that make her who she is. This is what he likes about her. If it never turns to eros, then at the very least, it’s shared affection. Caron and Jordan make their auspicious entrance at Maxim’s and, it feels like a precursor to Audrey Hepburn’s introduction in My Fair Lady. It’s not a bad comparison since most of the film is filtered through speak-singing.

Does it have a happy ending? In a word, yes, but Chevalier singing about little girls doesn’t make me any less squeamish the second go around. Thankfully, Minnelli is no less of a technical master with Gigi. Still, film was not meant to live on formalistic techniques alone.

3/5 Stars

Bells Are Ringing (1960)

The title credits are so gay and cheery with so many admirable names flashing by on the screen, it almost negates the sorry realization that this is the last go-around for the famed Arthur Freed Unit at MGM. Pick out any of the names and there’s a history.

Say Adolph Green or Betty Comden for instance; they were the architects of some of the era’s finest. Anyone for Singin’ in the Rain or The Band Wagon? The movie spells the end of the era, though there would be a few later holdouts.

Like It’s Always Fair Weather, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, or Pillow Talk, Bells Are Ringing is well aware of its cultural moment, and so it reminds us about the necessity of telephone answering services. Actually, one in particular called Susanswerphone.

It’s easy to love Judy Holliday from the outset as she’s playing crazy gymnastics on the telephone lines because automation hasn’t been created yet. Originally, she was a comedienne best remembered for a squeaky voice and a ditsy brain. Bells Are Ringing, which she originated on the stage, allows us to see a different contour of her movie personality, one that might as well hewn closer to the real person.

She does her work ably only to suffer through a dinner date from hell (with her real-life boyfriend Gerry Mulligan). However, we couldn’t have a movie without a dramatic situation.

The staff are forewarned never to cross the line to “service” their clients. But she breaks the cardinal rule, overstepping the bounds of a passive telephone operator and becoming invested in the lives of those people she communicates with over the wires. Not least among them, one Jeffrey Moss (Dean Martin).

She’s just about lovesick over his voice. It’s no mistake that she puts on her lipstick before ringing him up to remind him about a pressing engagement, as if he can take in her appearance intravenously. Alexander Graham Bell never quite figured out the science behind that.

It’s not much of a mystery to us what Moss looks like. Because if you read the marquee, you know it’s Dino. But she doesn’t know that and scampers up to his room to save him. Surely there’s a Greek tragedy trapped in here somewhere. If it’s not about falling in love with a reflection or her own work of art, then it’s about the sound of a man’s voice. She wants to help him gain confidence in his own abilities as a writer.

But first please allow me one self-indulgent aside. Dean Martin had a point in unhitching himself from Jerry Lewis. Sure, Lewis had a groundbreaking career as an actor-director, but Dino was so much more than The Rat Pack and his TV program.

The string of movies he took on throughout the 50s and 60s never ceases to intrigue me. He could go from The Young Lions, Some Came Running, and Rio Bravo to pictures like Bells Are Ringing and Kiss Me Stupid. For someone with such a distinct professional image, he managed a steady array of parts.

The number “Just in Time” in the park is made by Holliday in striking red and Dino crooning through the night air. There’s a goofy brand of showmanship between them that we were lucky to see in many of the old MGM pictures. It’s their own rendition to complement Astaire and Charisse from Band Wagon showcasing Minnelli at his best and brightest as we are brought into a moment of fluid inspiration where all facets of the production look to be working on high cylinders.

At the nearby party, Holliday becomes overwhelmed by the Hollywood glamour scene, as all the folks jump out of the woodwork and start smooching as Martin descends down a spiral staircase. This only happens in the movies, and yet it’s a summation of her blatant otherness. She doesn’t fit in this crowd where everyone is on first name basis with the biggest names in the business (“Drop That Name”). It seems like their worlds are slowly drifting apart as her secret life is about to totally unravel.

However, Martin joins forces with a musical dentist and Mr. impressionist himself, Frank Gorshin, who puts on his best Brando impression as they bring the movie to a striking conclusion. The same woman has changed all their lives for the better. Now they want tot return the favor. Moral of the story, get yourself an answering service, especially one with someone who cares like Judy Holliday.

3.5/5 Stars

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)

It might play as unwanted hyperbole, but when I look at Two Weeks in Another Town, it almost feels like a generational predecessor to Heaven’s Gate. Although Vincente Minnelli’s picture is well aware of the old hat and the emerging trends of cinema, it’s raging against the dying of the light, as it were. He subsequently bombed at the box office, and we witnessed the cinematic death knell of an era.

The director makes the transition from b&w to color well enough as you would expect nothing less from him. Kirk Douglas has what feels like a standard-issue role seething with rage thanks to a career hitting the skids. He’s bailed out of his sanitarium by a collaborator from the old days and shipped on-location to Rome.

There we get our first taste of a demonstrative Edward G. Robinson playing the tyrannical old cuss Maurice Kruger. He’s right off the set of the latest Cinecitta Studios big screen epic with George Hamilton, an Italian screen goddess, and Vito Scotti working the action.

But Two Weeks in Another Country is just as much about what is going on behind the scenes of the production. Robinson and Claire Trevor together again have a far from congenial reunion after Key Largo generations before. They’re part of Hollywood’s fading classes, though they’re far from relics.

Minnelli takes the personal nature of the material a step further. In a screening room watching The Bad and The Beautiful, the self-reflexivity has come full tilt as Douglas wrestles with his image onscreen from a decade before.

Meanwhile, Cyd Charisse makes her entrance on a jam-packed road flaunting herself in the traffic. She’s charged with playing Carlotta — Jack’s former wife — she’s bad and if her turn in Singin’ in the Rain is any indication, she’s fairly accomplished in this department. It’s almost a novelty role because she’s rarely the focus of the drama, only a sordid accent.

The pieces are there for a truly enrapturing experience as only the olden days of Hollywood can offer. I’m thinking of the days of Roman Holiday, sword and sandal epics, and La Dolce Vita. The movie is a reaction to all of them in the flourishing TV age with its glossy romance in beautiful cars, glorious rotundas, and luscious beaches.

It’s not bad per se, and yet it seems to reflect the very generational chasm it’s readily trying to comment on. George Hamilton utters the movie’s title and it’s all right there — utterly temporal and disposable in nature.

These moments and themes feel mostly empty and, again, while this might be precisely the point, it goes against our human desires. Either that or the movie is begging the audience to connect the dots. We want the critique wedded with entertainment. Because most of us are not trained to watch movies from a objective distance. Our mental wiring does not work like that especially when it comes to epics.

Jack is taken by a young starlet (Dalia Lavi) he meets by chance, thanks to her proximity to the troubled production. His and Veronica’s relationship becomes one of the focal points and one of the few deeply human connections in the picture.

Later, Jack’s bellicose benefactor, Maurice, falls ill. The added melodrama is to be expected along with raucous slap fights and the scramble to get the picture in under budget before the foreign backers try and pull out. The old has-been comes alive again — momentarily he has a purpose and companionship — until he’s besieged by new pressures.

Although it was purportedly edited down, it’s not too difficult to observe Minnelli doing his own version of Fellini’s earlier movie from 1960 with the dazed-out remnants of an orgy and a young Leslie Uggams singing her torch songs.

The apogee of the entire picture has to be Douglas and Charisse tearing through Rome in a mad fury. It’s the craziest, most chaotic car ride that can only be conceived in Hollywood; it’s so undisciplined and wrenched free of any of the constraints of realism. The back projections up to this point are totally expressionistic.

And as the car lurches and jerks around we realize we are seeing the film crossover: What we see behind the scenes and on the screen are one and the same, merely facades, and little more. It’s the kind of unbridled moment that could easily earn derisive laughter or genuine disbelief. There’s no way to eclipse the moment.

Instead, what follows is a cheery denouement out of a goofball comedy. Jack resolves to put his life back on track opting to leave behind his young leading man on the tarmac with a girl until they meet again. Hollywood, as is, was not totally dead — there was still some light in the tunnel — but if the box office receipts are any indication, tastes were changing.

3/5 Stars

The Reluctant Debutante (1958): Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall Together

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If Royal Wedding started off the decade with the auspicious coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, then The Reluctant Debutante depicts another cultural milestone in its own right: the last “Season” before the newly-instated Queen decided to officially disband the social tradition.

There’s hardly anything pointed about either of these pictures and so historical events serve as only a twee and oh-so-mild evocation of a totally bygone era. It’s a bit refreshing to have them back again even for an hour or so.

Front and center, we must acknowledge Rex Harrison. Harrison comes off as a generally innocuous figure from my childhood with his monologue songs in Doctor Doolittle and My Fair Lady (in that order). He’s mostly amicable if a bit dry and witty.

Personally, his biography is a bit more complicated. When he was a younger man, he was famously attached to blonde bombshell Carole Landis whose career was ended tragically by an untimely death. Harrison’s part in her final days remains mostly obscured. I won’t pretend to know the details.

Then, after their comedic foray in The Constant Husband, Harrison and Kay Kendall got married and made The Reluctant Debutante together portraying husband and wife onscreen. It would be their only film together while they were married and Kendall’s last film, period. She would die at age 32 of Leukemia.

It’s another shocking tragedy and so only some solace can be gained from the frothy goofiness making up Vincente Minnelli’s picture. Because it feels totally antithetical to this entire biography laid out thus far. This is cinema at its most dorky and feel-good.

We must also take a moment to acknowledge Sandra Dee: she was America’s quintessential ingenue for a generation thanks to pictures like this and Gidget. Her persona falls quite easily into a story like this as we are dropped in London, circa 1958 during “The Season.”

There’s a delightfully playful jauntiness to The Reluctant Debutante from the outset, and it comes down to the character types bouncing off one another to great effect. All that’s left to do is watch where they lead us.

Husband and wife rush off to the airport to pick up their daughter. It’s easy enough to explain away the relationship between Jim Broadbent (Harrison) and Jane (Dee) rather quickly with a mention of her American mother back in the States. Kendall is the well-meaning, if a bit ditzy, stepmother, Sheila, and we’re off.

Soon they’re crammed into a taxi with chattering Mabel (Angela Lansbury). She and Kendall form the film’s most antagonistic relationship as dueling mothers trying to set their young daughters up with the finest prospects in well-to-do society.

Because a debutante’s “coming out” is of grave social importance — at least to mothers — it’s not just like breaking a bottle over a ship; this will launch them into the social elite! Sheila’s intent on creating an extravagant charade out of Jane’s coming out ball because she must keep up appearances and outdo Mabel at all costs. This is war and wars require stratagems, if not slings and arrows to do battle with.

Father and daughter couldn’t care less. Sheila’s not interested in any of the prospects, and Mr. Broadbent seems far more interested in the buffet. In fact, it’s the mothers going gaga over the same distinguished young man, David Henner (Peter Meyers). He’s a royal guardsman with quite the handle on diction and London geography.

Kendall whisks Harrison away from the bar and his sardines and potato salad to win an introduction with the fellow. He’s a dutiful husband, but it’s little more. In comparison, he has the most delightful time sharing a moment with the drummer playing with the band; it used to be an aspiration of his as a young man.

This turns out to be a bit of an unexpected but serendipitous rapport because the young Italian-American, David Parkson (John Saxon), will soon be catching his daughter’s eye. For the time, their instrumental rendition of “Rock Around the Clock” has a buoyant joy all but epitomizing the picture at its best. We’re in for some good fun.

The story starts to sing as we get comfortable with the movie’s rhythms with all the pieces in place. Harrison the walking ulcer in evening dress. Lansbury diabolically switches wires with them — giving her “friend” the number of the wrong David on “accident.” Wink, wink.

Harrison and Kendall form the perfectly in-sync comedy duo; they play wonderfully off one another. They’re flying around the ballroom, heads on a swivel going every which way in their evening duds, keeping tabs on Jane’s perfectly innocent activities. It matters to them very deeply which David she fraternizes with. But only one David matters to her.

If it’s not obvious already, Kay Kendall should be lauded as an unsung comedienne because there are unimaginable pleasures in watching her tug everyone around like a dizzying hurricane all out of a place of good-natured maternity. Harrison gets on by pleasing his wife and feigning convention and doing his best to love his daughter in spite of it all.

Heaven forbid Jane go out to the nightclub with the wrong David because she looks all but destined to. It has Sheila in a tizzy. When they finally arrive home, husband and wife hang around trying to spy on them and figure out what they’re doing, but the adults are not very adept at faking a search for lost earrings or fiddling with hot water bottles right within earshot. One can only imagine the obligatory kissing scene. It’s as awkward as one might expect, but also sweet.

It’s in these ways we can see the similarities between Father of the Bride, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, and The Reluctant Debutante. There’s no denying the full-blown comedic elements, and yet Minnelli never lets these totally envelope the interpersonal relationships at the core of his movies. This is to their benefit. We genuinely care about Spencer Tracy & Liz Taylor, Glenn Ford & Ronny Howard, etc.

I might easily attribute it to a quirky mood or a generous spirit, but The Reluctant Debutante caught me on the right day. Minnelli’s forays in comedy usually have a dash of goodwill, but this one struck a chord immediately. Harrison still had some of his most prominent performances ahead as did Sandra Dee. You might come for one of them, but stay for Kay Kendall. We lost her impeccable talents far too soon.

4/5 Stars

Tea and Sympathy (1956): Are You Masculine?

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The 1950s saw director Vincente Minnelli continually evolving from mostly musicals — a pleasing genre he never totally forsook — into a period of his career ripe with luscious Metrocolor dramas.

Movies such as Tea and Sympathy, Some Came Running, and Home from the Hill, don’t get too much coverage in broader circles, especially compared to Oscar darlings like An American in Paris or Gigi. However, in many ways, they’re equally interesting, if not more so.

As the story opens on a  prep school green, it proves the world still had class reunions generations before and if the content was different, the people aren’t all that dissimilar. Tom (John Kerr) is someone we get to know quite well over the next two hours.

However, we are only introduced to him because Minnelli’s camera cycles to him as he traverses his former stomping grounds. While not prototypically Hollywood handsome like John Saxon or George Hamilton, Kerr is incessantly interesting and easier to project our own insecurities onto. He’s a bit severe, more awkward, but able to imply a certain sensitivity.

He ventures into his old dorm and all the memories come flooding back. Minnelli doesn’t go with a dissolve or a fade-out, but he moves his camera through the window down to the grass below as if we are entering into an entirely different world, and in a sense we are.

The space is the same but the years have gone and faded back into the past for us. Deborah Kerr works away cultivating her garden as John Kerr (no relation) eagerly looks to offer her any assistance. It’s plainly apparent he has a major crush on the teacher’s wife.

Those unfamiliar with the play might think they already have an inkling of what this picture is about, young unrequited love, adolescence blooming into adulthood. There are elements of this, but Tea and Sympathy becomes far more groundbreaking and pressing in turns.

Because Tom Robinson Lee is totally ill at ease around girls; he can’t dance, and he’s slated to wear a dress in his school’s latest stage production. Don’t try and explain to his peers what the Greeks and Japanese used to do on stage. He’s a sorry excuse for a man; that’s what he is.

It’s an equally awkward situation when he makes fast friends with the faculty wives — Mrs. Reynolds among them — and she tries to be gentle and kind to him. Because he’s really a decent boy. He gladly shares among this company that he can sew and cook showing them his skills with a needle and thread.

The jocular Mrs. Sears (Jacqueline DeWitt) jokes, “You’ll make some girl a good wife.” These are all tiny barbs of cinematic emasculation that cannot go totally unnoticed. It’s difficult for them not to have a cumulative effect.

Sure enough, he’s found out when some of the boys playing football along the beach see him, and he’s quickly in danger of being labeled. Because Tea and Sympathy is a movie totally immersed in the mores of the 1950s. These are issues of masculinity and gender roles altogether intensified by the furnace of contemporary societal pressure.

Because further down the shoreline, the boys toss around a football, roughhouse, and read off questions in an “Are You Masculine” quiz led by Mrs. Reynolds’s he-man husband (Leif Erickson). The news of Tom spreads like wildfire, and he earns his ignominious name “Sister Boy.” It’s the kind of reputation that does not die easily. His bedroom door is marked and he’s roughed up all in the testosterone-induced fun of boys both raucous and cruel.

You would think he could regain some respect out on the tennis court the following day, routing his opponent, but even this is hardly enough to burnish his reputation. It’s made more awkward by a visit from his dad, who can sense that the “regular guys” are against him. Of course, “regular” becomes code for being complicit in this debilitating sense of peer pressure ruling the school and its generational legacies.

Edward Andrews has a kind of easy southern charm both somehow outwardly genial and still riddled with so much dysfunction. He chides Tom that you’re known by the company you keep. He should get a crewcut and take part in the pajama fights which are like a rite of passage. There’s something to be said for conformity — becoming one of the boys as it were.

Still, the town has changed since he was a boy. They sit at the counter of the local watering hole as the long-suffering waitress Ellie is kidded and harassed incessantly as she tries to work the tables. His dad feels some amount of vicarious humiliation seeing how much of a social pariah his son seems to be. It makes him uneasy.

It’s a bit of a visual cheat, but it’s also one of the most effective set-ups in the movie as Mrs. Reynolds goes in to grab the drinks in the kitchen, and she hears the conversation coming quite freely through the window as the two men talk about the young men. Mr. Lee and Mr. Reynolds were mates in the old days and they aren’t above speaking plainly about him — how different he is. It’s obvious their words burden Laura’s heart; we see the empathy building over her face because the men don’t understand.

If it’s not apparent already, the whole system they are devoted to is broken to its core. For this boy sewing is his sin. In retaliation his peers take a stance. Since he’s not one of them, one of their tribe, he must become the scapegoat to reaffirm their shaky position.

Keeping in line with this, faculty wives are supposed to remain bystanders providing only a little tea and sympathy. A giant pyre is lit in the middle of the commons setting the stage for a pajama fight — something that has been passed from generation to generation.

From a cinematic standpoint, there’s this underlining tension to the event reminiscent of the Chickie Run from Rebel Without a Cause. It suggests something fated and inevitable about what they do — what they subject themselves to. Isn’t it in the earlier film where one boy says, “You‘ve gotta do something. Don’t you?” Here it’s institutionalized.

For a time, Al (Daryl Hickman) is Tom’s roommate and his only advocate. Mrs. Reynolds speaks to Al in admiration; he showcases physical vs. moral courage, and yet it’s lonely pushing against the social currents. Even his father admonishes him. He must be a nail hammered back into place — a place of conformity.

Mrs. Reynolds acknowledges to her husband that they don’t seem to touch anymore. There’s a distance between them, and it only grows darker and colder as the picture progresses. As we find out, her first husband died during The War: “In trying to prove himself a man, he died a boy.”

Tom is stricken by the same path. He vows to meet up with Ellie, the town’s tramp to prove his mettle as a misogynistic boy’s boy. Surely this is the only way he can prove himself and meet their standards — the standards of his own father. It’s not worth documenting the whole sorry affair. It’s garish, unseemly, and pitiful. Production Codes or not, Tom wants real love and affection. This isn’t it.

His father shows up again puffed up with pride for the first time in a long while. Because his boy has gone and got himself expelled for being off-campus with an undesirable woman. It’s like a badge of honor — being out of bounds — and showing off the extent of his masculinity, whether real or imagined. It doesn’t matter to Mr. Lee as long as he can imagine his boy being made in his own contorted image.

However, the picture suddenly does something remarkable. It seeks refuge resorting to its only comfort.  The scene where Laura comes upon Tom kicked back, lounging in the forest leaves the scholastic world behind altogether for the ethereal and the sublime.

It loses any semblance of ’50s hothouse and forsakes the visible emotions of Metrocolor for something intimate and serene. Laura’s final charge to the boy is plain — be kind.

I wasn’t sure what I thought about Tea and Sympathy as it dissolved back into the present. Of course, the way the film was structured, it was necessary, and yet it seemed like the import was already made evident in an embrace between two people. What more did we possibly need?

But as Tom finds the letter and reads its contents, what looks to totally ruin the movie with moralism is augmented by two aspects. Minnelli’s camera begins to move, capturing the wind rustling through the trees and floating through the open spaces giving them a sense of pensive reverie of a different kind.

Deborah Kerr’s line reading is spot on. No one else could deliver it in such a way making it bear all the warmth and truth in a manner that feels entirely genuine.

Her character reframes everything we have seen and instead of simply placating the production codes, it feels like she is delivering some sagacious bit of nuance Tom might only understand with the passage of time.

She is so important to this picture, and she blesses it with her usual poise and grace helping to fill the void in a movie lacking a great deal of goodness. She becomes its primary beacon even as she looks for goodness for herself.

Given its themes, it would be easy for the film to become a totally salacious, opportunistic bit of illicit love. But in part thanks to Kerr and Minnelli’s care, it never becomes relegated to such status. It represents something much more.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this idea of moral courage. Tea and Sympathy somehow exhibits how one goes about it. It’s not simply about being counter-cultural or going against the tides of the times or being progressive. There is such a thing as goodness, as kindness, as gentleness — fruit we can see in our lives.

It has nothing to do with signaling our virtues, how positively or negatively others will perceive us, or the identity we look to embody. My hope is that even while our society evolves, growing further enlightened, fickle, and oppressive in various turns, we might learn what it is to have unwavering moral courage.

It’s a struggle, but it’s simply the best way to love others well, providing something more than merely tea and sympathy. Because this is not a healthy formula to help assuage the world’s ills. We require something far better.

4/5 Stars

Brigadoon (1954): Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly

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I have fond memories of traipsing across the Old Course in St. Andrews and attending the Military Tattoo near the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. There’s something untamed about that landscape remaining austere and beautiful, perfectly suited for tartans, bellowing bagpipes, and the rat-ta-tat of drums. The country feels wild and free and still imbued with years of ancient history.

Brigadoon is hardly an authentic look at highland life. It was based on a Broadway play after all. They traded out the actual highlands for a studio backlot to save money. But as such, the world feels like a total Hollywood confection from Vincente Minnelli. I hardly mind just as I barely mind the California heather of National Velvet for a stand-in.

It comes down to representing a place that is more mythic than a concrete place we know firsthand. It exists in our memories and recollections. Now, this is dangerous: It can lead to a myriad of stereotypes and misconstrued truths. I’m not sure how cultural appropriation or even “whitewashing” ties into this tale, but it’s true Hollywood has borrowed from the Scotts and spun their own version.

However, the film itself couldn’t be more pleasant. Gene Kelly and Van Johnson are lost up in the fogs of the highland in the midst of their pheasant hunting expedition. Meanwhile, we get acclimated to the village of Brigadoon. There’s a charming number, “Waiting for My Dearie,” with Cyd Charisse surrounded by all the fair maidens of the town as she dances with a gal with a pot for a helmet and a mustache on her lip. They all prepare for the marriage of Fiona’s sister to a local lad.

Johnson and Kelly are soon integrated into the community through a moment of gaiety as the tune “Bonnie Jean” becomes emblematic of the merry way of life these people live where song and dance are the only conceivable way to express themselves. In this way, it seems to suit the parameters that the musical inherently provides.

However, something else happens: Tommy (Kelly) falls for Fiona (Charisse) almost at first site. What else would you expect because every character he ever played must fall hopelessly in love with the girl. This is what Fred Astaire did a generation before them.

He’s pleased to find it is the younger Campbell lass who is getting married and not the elder. “The Heather on The Hill” feels like the lynchpin number. We saw something similar in “Dancing in The Dark” with Astaire playing opposite Charisse in The Band Wagon. Because this is the moment where all other distractions momentarily subside, and we are able to distill this movie down to its core relationship. What other emotion could dance hope to convey but the rapturous, ineffable palpations of romantic joy.

It’s enchanting to watch their forms move so fluidly through the space where they become an extension of the world around them. Where a limb of a tree or a basket is part of their movements and the dance that they are undertaking together. It says all the things they feel for one another not in word but in deed and action, and it feels all the more evocative for this very reason.

It occurs to me that dance often comes in two distinct forms: there’s the utterly communal and then the strikingly intimate. They bring people together, reflect their woes, and put a voice to their romantic elation. Sometimes they’re even comic. Johnson more than provides his share of sardonic wisecracks, and he’s quite good in the role.

However, my main qualm with the picture is in the story department. Now the film is based on a stage production, and that’s where the initial weakness lies. Because this is yet another tale of transcendent love. We learn something telling about Brigadoon midway through the movie, which would have been helpful for setting the stakes early on.

It’s hardly an “I See Dead People” revelation, but it tries to give some context to why these folks live so isolated from mankind — all but forgotten — and so Fiona takes them to the village schoolmaster to tell the tale. Salient or not, the movie slows down to explain itself and thus loses some of its luster in the process. They don’t even try and use song and dance to save it from the horrors of over-exposition.

Likewise, the ending feels all crammed together and while we have the tent pole moments one might expect from a Golden-era MGM musical, the narrative cohesion simply is not simpatico. The two travelers leave Brigadoon behind for the urban hysteria back in New York. The juxtaposition is obvious and Tommy’s having none of it; he vows to return to the one place he’s ever truly been happy.

It’s dubious that a wise guide in one moment can explain the mysterious nature of Brigadoon, and then still later can announce with a grin how grand romance can supersede all manner of hindrances between two lovers. It’s like the most convenient cop-out explanation — the path of least resistance.

There’s the expected reunion. It’s what the story is meant to build up to — there’s this sense of appreciation, after all, Gene and Cyd are back together as they should be. But something else nags at us. It feels hollow because the story doesn’t gel — it doesn’t feel earned — and we wanted this reunification more than anything. It’s a shame because otherwise I’m a big fan of what Brigadoon represents and no matter its flaws, it still remains an underrated musical.

I’m not surprised Charisse voiced it as her favorite picture with Gene Kelly. Their scene together in Singin in Rain is a provocative showstopper, and It’s Always Fair Weather blooms with a melancholy and timeliness in the television age. In Brigadoon, you could easily argue they share some of their finest individual moments together regardless of your verdict of the overall film.

3.5/5 Stars

Vincente Minnelli’s Films (1946-1955)

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Undercurrent (1946)

Undercurrent hardly holds a substantial place in any noir conversations partially because Vincente Minnelli’s reputation in part seems antithetical to the dark style born out of chiaroscuro and German Expressionism. His background was squarely in luscious art design and stage productions.

Likewise, the combo of Katharine Hepburn and the two Roberts: Taylor and Mitchum, is not one that quickly springs to mind. However, there are some merits to it simply for the sake of it being different; not dramatically, these types of psychological women’s pictures were very much en vogue during the ’40s.

It’s the pieces assembled that feel unique if somewhat ill-suited. Still, the curious hybrid of tones and talents certainly is a historical curio more than intriguing to the invested party.

I almost have trouble buying Hepburn as a reticent, uncomfortable outsider among the D.C. elite her new husband Alan (Taylor) knows, a woman holding drinks in hand just waiting for someone to talk to. But if I don’t completely believe it, she does earn my empathy.

Mitchum, the legendary mule of RKO was simultaneously earmarked for 3 or 4 pictures at the time, and so he doesn’t show up in Undercurrent until much later. Still, he has the benefit of casting a Rebecca-like influence over the picture.

After an hour of building him up, we finally get sight of Mitchum, and we know where this story is going. Because he’s a real human being and fairly innocuous to the eye. As the presence of Mitchum begins to exert itself on the picture, the marital bliss of newlyweds grows more and more harrowing by the minute. We have a picture in the same vein as Suspicion and House on Telegraph Hill.

Despite choosing the part, the constraints of the role don’t feel totally in line with Hepburn’s talents. She isn’t a shrinking violet or the kind of timorous beauty befitting Joan Fontaine or even Ingrid Bergman. Robert Taylor is mostly adequate in the vengeful husband part. He flip-flops efficiently between these stints of gracious charm — a perfect husband and lover — then, becomes clouded by these perverse streaks of jealousy and rage.

3/5 Stars

The Pirate (1948)

It’s plain that The Pirate is born out of the traditions of the 1940s Hollywood lineage like Blood and Sand or Black Swan, even Gene Kelly’s own Three Musketeers. However, between the bright evocative staging of Vicente Minnelli and the instant performance-driven rapport of Garland and Kelly, it works quite splendidly with what it has to offer.

Today it doesn’t hold much of a reputation, and I would stop short of saying it’s a minor masterpiece. What we do have is a picture banking on the charisma of its leads and a certain pictorial opulence supplied by its primary mastermind.

Kelly, taking all the niñas of the town by storm, is full of allure and his usual magnetism as he twirls, leaps, and bounds between all the pretty girls. It’s all about the patter between the stars as he plays the foxy street performer, and Garland is the put-upon maiden who is betrothed to another man. His vocation gives the director license to use these elements of theatricality and faux drama to tell the story.

What do I mean? It could be a story of tragic, unrequited love. It might just as well be a tale of marauding pirates, and yet somehow, between the song and dance, it becomes a kind of tongue-in-cheek comedy of two lovers perfectly suited for one another being thrown together.

There are moments where Garland and Kelly seem to be playing in a separate movie, or at least they are in on the joke with the rest of us, even as they mess with each other. Trashing his apartment feels like the highest form of romantic tension only for the drama to become slightly heady again: Kelly is set to be hung as the dreaded pirate Macoco. Is it a first to have a musical number performed under a hangman’s noose? I’m not sure.

Thankfully, he gets some stellar support. While I’ll be the first to admit “Be a Clown” feels like a less funny prototype for “Make em Laugh,” if you’ve never seen the Nicholas Brothers, it’s a small recompense to see them join Gene Kelly and get some commendation in the spotlight as his momentary equals. It feels like a flawed but heartfelt apex to a picture that could be described in much the same terms.

3/5 Stars

Madame Bovary (1949)

Madame Bovary is the kind of trenchant literary work the Production Codes would go to all costs to declaw. In one manner, it’s somewhat remedied by James Mason’s framing by providing a mostly blase narrative device to enter the story.

Even as something leaner in budgeted black & white (one could hardly confuse The Pirate with Madame Bovary), it’s still the same Minnelli. The ball sequence spelling the ascension of Emma (Jennifer Jones) as a society darling, while somewhat compact, exudes an impressive opulence.

The director makes sure to follow Jones’s incandescent form as she prances and waltzes her way across the dance floor with great distinction. Her gown alone is enough to make the upper classes stand up and take note. The dashing Louis Jourdan is certainly more than aware of her. It’s totally taken up by the kind of swirling euphoria also holding a place in the oeuvre of Marcel Ophuls — Letter from an Unknown Woman and Earrings of Madame De…spring instantly to mind.

It becomes more and more of a gothic drama as things progress, overtaken by gales of wind, thunder, lightning, and an incessant downpour of rains to go with the equally tumultuous score of Miklos Roza.

However, more importantly, Emma becomes possessed by all of her own ambitions and preoccupations. She is emotionally distant from her husband (Van Heflin), absent from her child, and totally involved with other men. She entreats them to take her away from such a dreary life, constantly prone to these histrionic gestures of love and loss at the hands of her suitors and husband. They hardly know how to respond to her.

If the terminology was present at the time, she is cut out of the cloth of some kind of femme fatale, albeit born out of the annals of classic literature. Moreover, she is a woman who never seems to know what she truly wants. She sends out an array of mixed signals — living a life made up of so many contours and emotions — and never settling on anything honest.

It’s as if she’s fashioned a kind of fantasy life for herself woven out of her own personal whims though she remains self-destructive to the very last iota of her being. There’s something unnerving about her and Jones plays her as such; it’s easy to understand how society was scandalized by her because she does not live by societal norms. Mason’s concessions for her character aren’t enough to totally wipe out the harrowing impact of the performance.

3.5/5 Stars

The Cobweb (1955)

“What happens if you go into town to the movies? You start screaming or something? They’d think you’re a critic, that’s all.” – John Kerr as Steven

If it’s true you can make a screwball comedy like Easy Living (1937) about a fur coat falling from the sky, then it’s equally possible to make a portrait of psychological horror about drapes. The Cobweb busies itself with the vast array of interpersonal relationships taking place on the grounds of a psych ward. Richard Widmark does his best to aid his patients in their recoveries as he juggles familial and boardroom responsibilities. It’s no easy balancing act.

For a film that is mostly disregarded, it’s easy to clump it together with something like Executive Suite (also produced by John Houseman) with one of the most phenomenal assortments of players one could hope to cobble together during the golden era of Hollywood.

Lilian Gish is at her most ornery but lest we forget, she truly is the queen of the movies. Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall are equally crucial touchstones of film history, playing two respective love interests as Widmark struggles to connect with his wife, Gloria Grahame. Even ’30s scream queen, Fay Wray, has a brief appearance in a picture that boasts Oscar Levant and then the up-and-coming talents of John Kerr and Susan Strasberg.

In one scene with all the various folks blocked throughout the room, it’s almost difficult to distinguish who’s a patient and who’s not, but if we are to appreciate this drama, it doesn’t half matter. Widmark falls for another woman. Grahame flaunts her charms and goes looking for love from Boyer, who is now mentally compromised. Gish is incensed about having her opinions disregarded. Some of them are petty and others are stricken with loneliness and actual psychoses.

The palette becomes such an evocative way to color the emotional undercurrent and elements of suburban life, not unlike some of Nicholas Ray‘s work or something like Strangers When We Meet. The visual world is beautiful; still, it lets loose an environment full of pain and inner turmoil. Although Minnelli handles his characters deftly, there’s no place for the film to go but toward a hysterical fever pitch.

3.5/5 Stars

Past Lives (2023)

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A version of this review was published on Film Inquiry.

I’ll admit that in our modern world and hyperactive lifestyles full of constant distractions and competing spectacles, I’m thankful I was able to watch Past Lives the old-fashioned way. I sat there in the dark with other strangers uninterrupted by the chaos of the day. It was an uneventful weekday after work with no baggage or preconceptions. And I sat there prepared to imbibe what it had to offer.

The movie is the epitome of contemplative, meditative cinema. In a different context, under different circumstances, I can see the spell of the movie being neutralized and the surrounding chaos. As is, I was met head-on by what it had to offer.

The opening scene almost feels like a mini Godfather moment a la Gordon Willis. The golden hue of the lighting, the camera slowly moving toward a subject in the foreground as voices offscreen speak so we can hear them. It’s a brilliant device to set up the scenario. A male and a female voice chat back and forth. They’re people watching from the opposite side of a bar as a Korean man, a Korean woman, and another white man sit together in quiet conversation. What a strange trio they make.

It’s true that in such moments there are so many stories you could draw up to try and justify the scenario. Celine Song takes an entire movie to explain it to us. The heart of her story opens with two young kids in South Korea. They’re competitive when it comes to their grades, always dueling between being 1st and 2nd in their class. Hae Sung makes Na Young cry by beating her out one day, but regardless, they always walk from school together. They haven’t quite figured out what romance is, but there’s a closeness between them. They’re fast friends.

However, when her dad decides to immigrate overseas, “Nora” must relinquish this friendship for whatever the future holds. In camera, we watch their diverging paths as they trudge their separate ways. She will go first to Canada, and then America to seek out her dream of winning the Nobel Prize. He will stay behind in Korea.

Song’s use of time is self-assured and brazen. She’s loose and elastic with it bravely allowing her story to cut 24 years into the past before fast-forwarding 12 years and then 12 years again. But these jumps in time feel subtle and right with the perfectly applied sense of space and context. We never feel like we’re being rushed. The elliptical nature of a single cut is imbued with so much power.

They reconnect by chance 12 years later, thanks to Facebook, and rekindle a friendship over Skype. This specific moment in time feels intentional. Long-distance friendships or even relationships are hampered by the shoddy technology. What we have now cannot totally replace in-person interaction — we all know that — but it’s lightyears ahead of what we had even 10 years ago.

Nora’s life is taking her into the literature circles of New York including a writer’s retreat for up-and-coming talent. He is attending a good school in Korea. They’re amazed to see each other: they’re changed and yet nothing has changed. If you’ve ever had a similar experience you know this paradox to be true.

Song conjures up this idea of In-Yun or destiny which infuses Korean culture and implies something between people in their past lives together. In modernity, it might only be utilized as a pickup line, but for sincere, starry-eyed lovers it might just carry some weight and lend a sense of comfort. Any interpersonal connection may apply.

There is a sense that Hae Sung and Nora are in their very specific orbits and they are not prepared to fight the inertia around them. Nora takes the first step and asks to stop their online rendezvous. It’s too painful to live in the uncertainty with little hope of change. She takes a leap of faith in her career meeting fellow writers with similar ambitions. One of them is named Arthur (John Magaro). Their orbits are leading them in the same direction and so eventually they get married.

Lying in bed together having one of those late-night conversations on the edge of consciousness Arthur asks her one of those what-if questions about where she ended up. She responds matter-of-factly, “This is my life.” She seems satisfied with that. Her husband admits something else to her. Sometimes he hears her talk in Korean while she’s sleeping. It’s heartbreaking to hear him admit that she dreams in a language he can’t understand…It’s not wrong nor does it mean they can’t make their way together, but it matters to him. Because he wants to know her intimately. It’s important to him.

I have issues with Lost in Translation, but there is something about that film that sticks with me — the loneliness and malaise — as much as the Tokyo streets I dearly love. As best as I can describe it Past Lives, is born out of this same tradition. There’s a delicacy and dignity to these people. It could bend so many directions — choose so many roads — and in the end, somehow it chooses the bravest one.

In another film, in another world, maybe in a past life, there could be a passionate love affair between two people who seemed to be destined to be together. These are the stories our culture seems to eat up because they make us feel good and vindicate our desires to live out our best lives — the lives that make us feel the most validated regardless of others. Or it could be a sordid melodrama where the Korean couple cross time and space and the white spouse is cast off like the cultural patriarchy readily pulling them apart. The movie wryly acknowledges this narrative trope. Of course, none of this is true.

Past Lives foregoes all of these ideas while simultaneously tapping into the longings many of us have deep in our hearts and still allowing them to play out in meaningful reality. It feels true and right, like things are meant to be. We can see this story occurring naturally with genuine people. And the emotions engendered feel beautiful.

Of course, 12 years after they broke off their internet relationship Hae Sung finally comes to the U.S. — to New York. Ostensibly it’s for some rest and relaxation, but everyone knows his only reason for being there is to see Na Young again. Their reunion is pregnant with all sorts of import, and they visit the Statue of Liberty together surrounded by a sea of couples. Just imagine how it is when he finally meets the man Greta ended up marrying. Uncomfortable doesn’t even begin to describe it. There’s so much more here.

I could write a whole exploration of code-switching and cross-cultural communication, international dialogue, and subtitles in film. However, I will only say Past Lives replicates the joys and genuine struggles of existing in this world in-between cultures and languages.

Greta Lee is such a phenomenal conduit of this drama, and she takes every scene with a self-assured composure full of warmth and feeling. Teo Yoo has a forthright candor morphing from a boyish heartthrob to a man still grappling with unresolved feelings.

John Magaro could easily be a whiny-voiced annoyance — the white evil of the movie — and yet it’s a credit to his humanity that we like him and even empathize with him (especially if we don’t speak Korean like this viewer). It’s almost like we’re there sitting at the bar in what feels like a private conversation that we don’t understand. It feels a bit awkward, but there can also be a connection there. If you will, it’s in-yun.

Nora cries at the end of the movie. Her husband takes her in his arms as they walk back up the steps to their apartment. The perceptiveness of this moment cannot be simply attributed or articulated. I don’t have the capacity to totally explain what emotions have come to the fore. All I know is that they are there. It’s perplexing, but in the way I like my movies to be.

In Lost in Translation, I’ll never know what Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johannson. Here we’ll never know what could have happened or why she’s crying exactly. Maybe she doesn’t even know herself. But living out that ambiguity feels key and ultimately true to the human experience.

We’re always looking to discern what our future will be. Religious people question God’s plan for their lives. And often we have the nagging thoughts of what-ifs and how things could have been. Perhaps I’m the only one who thinks like this. But Past Lives seems to suggest this is not the case. I’m still mulling over the movie, but I’m glad I saw it. Hopefully, you will be too.

4.5/5 Stars

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Nevers, and Casablanca

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“Like you I know what it is to forget.”

Recently I’ve been meditating a lot on the impact of the atomic bombs in part because of the resurgence of the life and work of Robert Oppenheimer; he will be inextricably tied to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for posterity’s sake. Thanks to Alain Resnais’s film, Hiroshima and Nevers will always have a connection in the minds of cinephiles everywhere. 

Although I have walked the streets of Nagasaki and been to the memorial museum there, most of what I know of Hiroshima is gleaned from John Hersey’s journalistic account. The documentary footage from this film never ceases to scald my senses. I have to avert my gaze when the images grow harsher than any horror film imaginable. 

Hiroshima, Mon Amour gets much of its thematic resonance out of filming in Hiroshima itself because it comes with an abundance of inbred meaning; it will be ground zero of devastation and a beacon of peace for perpetuity now, ever since that day on August 6, 1945. 

This lays the groundwork for the film’s first half as we consider Hiroshima – the images primarily being juxtaposed with two bear bodies of a couple intertwined. 

It slaloms so effortlessly through time and space like few films before or after. Although as it progresses, the way the film and its characters are set adrift by the editing is increasingly unnerving. This in itself feels honest to where our characters find themselves. 

There’s something rhythmic, repetitive, and still poetic about their questions and responses conjured up by the voiceover penned by Marguerite Duras. It builds this contrast between the French actress filming an international movie in Hiroshima and the Japanese Architect that she’s having an affair with on-location. They only have one day together before time and space will pull them apart, potentially forever. 

In truth, once you know a little bit more about Resnais, it gets harder and harder to separate his film from this kind of relativism of the age where truth seems to be subjective and everything we seemed to take for granted before, from absolute truths to morals, seem to have totally eroded around us. 

Even with this perplexing development denoted by Resnais’s fairly oblique style, brought to even greater fruition in Last Year at Marienbad, it’s hard to discount the swaths of beauty in his film. And if it is mostly an agnostic film, one cannot totally dismiss this point of view in a world coming to terms with carnage and the brutality of the atomic bomb. Because this disillusionment does have an amount of warrant, arguably more than any other time in modern history. 

The movie becomes this roving portrait involving a want of intimacy and closeness in a world ravaged by so much pain and suffering. Is it any wonder that in the post-war years plagued with the atomic threat, the world hit its baby boom. Couples coming together to start their nuclear families as a balm to the hysteria in the world at home and abroad. 

They both say they are a happily married man and a happily married woman, but even this I read almost ironically seeing the connection they form. If they are culturally worlds apart, somehow they share in the same traumas of a post-war, post-atomic generation coming to terms with all that entails. 

He has the specter of Hiroshima to contend with and she was castigated for loving the enemy during wartime: imprisoned, her head shaved, while also seeing her lover die in her arms. They’re different experiences and still share something endemic to both their realities. Thus, they gladly share a real-world romance on the edge of the apocalypse as time is slipping away from them. For now, they have tangible passion and meaning that they can caress in their arms. 

There is a passage in the movie that felt reminiscent of the jaded pessimism of the ancient wisdom literature of Ecclesiastes: 

He: Maybe it’s possible for you to stay.
She: You know it’s not. Still more impossible than to leave.
He: A week
She: No.
He: Three days.
She: Time enough for what? To live from it? To die from it?
He: Time enough to know which.
She: That doesn’t exist. Neither time enough to live from it. Nor time enough to die from it. So I don’t give a damn.

There’s a fluidity to the night and their relationship as the clock ticks and they know they will be pulled apart. Eventually, they make their way to a late-night cafe called Casablanca. The name carries with it all these connotations: Rick & Illsa, “As Times Goes By,” “La Marseillaise,” and even bits of your favorite dialogue.

Of course, one of the finest remembrances is “We’ll always have Paris.” Nothing can strip these memories away from the Casablanca couple regardless of sacrifice. Somehow there’s something honest about Hiroshima, Mon Amour in that it recognizes all these things are transient – these memories of love will pass away. They are already dissipating, and not as eternal as we would like to believe. 

More and more I see the shared vision of Agnes Varda’s La Pointe Courte and Hiroshima, Mon Amour – finding their form as part documentary, part romantic treatise. It’s the blending of the two giving them body and making them sublime. 

Here the performers also work wonders. Emmanuelle Riva has the most vibrant eyes in the cinema. They are a delight to look at in the light of the camera both glassy and at times equally melancholy. It’s her film debut and you would never know it. She’s youthful and lithe, yes, but there is so much depth to her. Call it self-confidence with the prerequisite vulnerability. 

Eiji Okada seems ruggedly handsome, but not without the capacity for gentleness. It feels as if he’s experienced an entire lifetime during the war years which in part was true. The only reason he foregoes the horrors of Hiroshima is that he was off fighting in the war with the Imperial Army. 

I read that all his French dialogue was memorized phonetically and if that is the case, although I don’t always have an ear, it came together splendidly, never pulling me out of the story. It felt real and believable to have these two people relate in such a way. 

What’s more, as someone who grew up in a culturally mixed environment, Hiroshima, Mon Amour stands as a groundbreaking depiction of a couple who plow through the societal conventions of the times.

When I watch this film it’s about so much more than the bomb. On the surface, it’s about an illicit affair that cannot be, it’s about two people coping with the fallout of war, and one woman’s struggle to hold onto her memories and cling to the love that’s still there in her life before it evaporates before her. How she cannot forget this man in Hiroshima or that man in Nevers because they are tied to emotions and specific moments in time – times when she felt something.  

Somehow it parallels what the film itself represents. Because it is a document as much as a piece of art. It came out about 14 years after the bombs were dropped. Somehow still fresh and a minor lifetime away from the fallout. These people have living memories to contend with. 

Someone like me does not and so the film is as much about these character’s memories as it is the visual representation of the film itself so we might never forget what those places represent in the cry for universal peace. 

Watching it in a theater I could sense a level of perplexity in the air. It’s not an easy film. Not everything makes sense, and there’s some troubling conclusions that you can come to. Also, one earth-shattering slap in a cafe is hard to deal with. Still, in the wake of all of this, it’s hard to reject the moments of beauty present here. I don’t think this is a mere justification. 

Rather I watch a movie like Hiroshima, Mon Amour where not everything is summed up or painted in full. We must leave with the impressions, the maddening anti-literalism of the piece that has no point-for-point attributions we can easily plug in. Nothing comes out in a nice bow nor do we get a true emotional resolution. It just kind of hangs in the air for us to consider in full.

But sometimes this hard work when something is perplexing feels all the more worthwhile because it provides something worth going back to so we might cull for something new. I’m never going to understand every grain of this film, and that’s okay. 

The distinction is having something to fall back on. When memories fade and we forget and the world seems to be fragmenting around us, it helps to have some standard or reference point outside ourselves to mediate the chaos. 

Otherwise, what’s the point if there’s no time to live and no time to die? What hope is left in such a debilitating landscape? On top of that, there’s a bomb that might just easily blow us all to smithereens. We require something more. 

4.5/5 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

Colbert and MacMurray: Gilded Lily, Take a Letter Darling, Egg and I

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One of my latest ventures was to view a handful of romantic comedies of the ’30s and ’40s, many with screwball elements, and you could not broach this territory without eventually crossing paths with Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. They starred in 7 films together throughout the decade and also paired opposite some of the most prominent stars of the era (including Clark Gable and Carole Lombard).

Here are three of their movies, two that star both of them, and one with Fred MacMurray in the lead with another worthy romantic partner:

The Gilded Lily (1935)

It opens on a park bench with MacMurray and Colbert chewing the fat as they share a bag of popcorn. What it does is create this instant familiarity going far beyond the bounds of the film as we’re thrown into their relationship that feels more platonic than romantic.

Thus, it’s not so much about the build-up to a prototypical relationship but the chafing that comes with their differing feelings. He has the hots for her. She loves him as a friend but still seems to be looking for her prince charming.

Prince Charming comes in the form of Ray Milland, a rich British aristocrat who’s come to America incognito. You can immediately imagine the complications arising from the fact Peter (MacMurray) is a nosy newshound and the other man has a secret to hide. They’re still to be cast as true romantic rivals and there’s already a tense undercurrent between them.

Meanwhile, Marilyn finds herself having to choose between two men as Lord Charles (Milland) promises a life of cultured sophistication. But Peter is always there, her ever-faithful confidante, and he’s also not going down without a fight.

He churns up the news mills to turn her into a household celebrity and the whole world seems to know her name. Even Charles is tickled by her world-class notoriety, but this is only a paltry imitation. If it’s not evident already, she needs a man who wisecracks, buys her popcorn, and wants to love all of her, whether she’s a big shot or not.

I’m still a bit smitten by the movie’s public bench premise because it allows our stars to do what they do best: laugh at the world together. No one can break their bond, and it teases out new contours to the Colbert-MacMurray partnership.

3.5/5 Stars

Take a Letter Darling (1942)

Although he does have a devoted following, Mitchell Leisen still does feel like a mostly unheralded director in broader circles. Take a Letter Darling is another modest feather in his cap, and it has numerous charms.

The gender norm-bending premise was actually quite intriguing for the era and MacMurray and Russell are more than up to the task of sparring in and out of the office. She’s a high-powered businesswoman who enlists a male secretary who can help her land her deals. He has a very important job: keeping jealous wives satisfied as she trades shop talk with their husbands.

There’s an obvious level of emasculation to the part, and MacMurray is more than game for it as he becomes the laughingstock of the secretarial peanut gallery. You see, he’s MacGregor’s fourth man and she’s running out of options. Still, it’s a lucrative way to bankroll his true passion: painting.

If Claudette Colbert was in fact originally earmarked for the part, I think I’m still partial to Russell in this particular role. I just find her brand of delivery perfectly metered for any kind of antagonistic comedy. And there’s a sense it builds on the kind of workplace dynamics she stirred up with such legendary fervor with Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, between quizzical glances and whipsmart repartee.

I will admit that Take a Letter Darling loses some of its comic edge when it turns saccharine, and the inevitable romance materializes. Until this point, the movie uses its premise to mine a plethora of laughs only to peter out as it makes Russell shed her authoritative business acumen for warm, fuzzy feelings.

However, while the final act can’t quite maintain the same level of comic tenacity, it also doesn’t whimper out as much as I was expecting. Yes, MacGregor wants her man back, but in typical Russell fashion, she crosses paths with him out on the road and comes armed with pebbles. She’s not going down without a fight, and she won’t totally acquiesce. It’s against her nature.

I feel like womanhood, especially in the ’50s, is glazed with this perceived antiquated patina, but watching the likes of Russell, Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, or even Irene Dunne during the ’30s and ’40s, provides a more nuanced landscape. It wasn’t all marriage and motherhood. They managed to grapple with the lives of modern working women in numerous ways. While Take A Letter Darling is no unsung masterpiece, it’s still easy enough to extend the recommendation.

3.5/5 Stars

Egg and I (1947)

Egg and I is based on a popular real-life memoir by Betty MacDonald, but for anyone who doesn’t remember it, it’s easy to pitch it as the original Green Acres — a Hollywoodized version of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. The fact it began with source material explains Claudette Colbert’s conspicuous introduction to the audience.

Otherwise, much of the movie is forged through comedy of the situation much like the wacky ’60s comedy with mostly mild and goofy trifles to contend with. The long-standing screen chemistry of Fred MacMurray and Colbert anchors the movie as its most imperative asset.

They’ve bought themselves a dilapidated house that’s riddled with leaks during the first rain. And once they’ve hunkered into their new home, next come the daily rituals that come with tending to a farm, and its livestock. They have lots to get used to. However, there’s also the local anthropological element.

Before the “Rural Purge” in the early ’70s, in deference to more urban entertainment, Hollywood has long mined comedy out of eccentric country bumpkins. Egg and I was no different introducing audiences to the first incarnation of Ma and Pa Kettle who became a bit of a low-budget institution in their own right with Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbridge.

One of the representative moments involves the local hoedown where men of all shapes, sizes, and dancing styles whirl Colbert around the dance floor, leaving her feet sore and her ears talked off. However, her greatest concerns are the advances of a local beauty (Louis Albritton), who her husband must do business with. She’s worried it’s a bit more than business, but if you watch him look at her, it does feel a bit silly.

I found the movie to be a bit too long and a tad more twee than it was gripping. Especially because Green Acres had numerous episodes and seasons to engage with analogous themes and character tropes to greater effect.

However, there are a few rewarding moments. It’s easy to recall the almost deceptively moving solidarity when the whole town bands together to loan the couple resources after a devastating fire obliterates their livelihood. For all their flaws, it’s a reminder of the close ties of small communities, and it makes Egg and I easy to root for even if it is mostly light-hearted recreation.

3/5 Stars