A STUDY IN TERROR (1965)

Jack the Ripper is loose in London, and who better to go after him than Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson? Though there have been other imaginings of this dream-team scenario (most notably 1978's MURDER BY DECREE), this was the first, as far as I know, in book or film. It is also, according to other sources, the first work to posit that the Ripper may have been a highborn aristocrat. Though not really a horror movie, the amount of blood splattered throughout makes this a good segue into my upcoming October reviews (all horror and sci-fi). Things start right off with a brutal murder, a prostitute knifed through the neck, followed fairly quickly by another prostitute knifed and drowned in bloody water. Several "red herring" scenes follow with menacing hands and knives and jolting musical cues before the next murder, and by then, Holmes is on the case, his only clue a box of medical instruments sent anonymously; since the police are convinced that the killer has surgical talents, Holmes assumes the box is a clue and he's right. It belonged to an aristocratic young man who married a whore, vanished, and is now presumed dead. The wife is alive but her whereabouts are unknown. Suffice to say that both will crop up before the climax, set against a raging fire in a bedroom.

John Neville (Terry Gilliam's Baron Munchausen and The X-Files' Well-Manicured Man) is quite good as Holmes, falling somewhere between Basil Rathbone and TV's Jeremy Brett. Anthony Quayle as a doctor and Frank Finlay as Inspector Lestrade are good; Donald Houston is an OK Watson, serviceable but not memorable, and the same goes for most of the rest of the cast which includes the handsome John Fraser as the suspect’s aristocratic brother, and a young Judi Dench (pictured above with Fraser and Neville) as one of the few female characters who isn’t a whore and/or doesn't wind up dead. Robert Morley shows up for a blustery cameo as Holmes' brother Mycroft. The color design is garish in that 60's way, and the music is far too loud and shrill. Still, it's worth a viewing, and it makes me sorry that Neville never donned the deerstalker hat again. [DVD]

BLIND ALLEY (1939)

Psychology professor Ralph Bellamy is hosting a houseful of friends for a weekend at his lake house when escaped killer Chester Morris breaks in and holds them all hostage while he waits for the arrival of an escape boat for him, his moll (Ann Dvorak) and his thugs. We see Morris kill twice in cold blood, so there is a sense of real danger here for the innocent folks, including a child, trapped in the house. While Morris naps, Dvorak asks Bellamy to help Morris get rid of a recurring nightmare which troubles his sleep, involving trying desperately to avoid the rain with an umbrella which holds itself up but has a rip in it; it has actually led Morris to be afraid of rain. Bellamy eventually engages Morris in a brief Freudian analysis session, showing him that the dream is masking a repressed memory that Morris needs to dredge up. He does, but with the cops hot on Morris's trail, he doesn't get much time to enjoy his new peace of mind.

This stagy melodrama must have been one of Hollywood's earliest attempts to deal with psychoanalysis. At just 70 minutes, this B-movie is quite watchable; Bellamy is cast nicely against type as a serious, non-bumbling fellow, and Morris does a fine job as the troubled killer. The dream scene is presented in negative, and the repressed memory is shot in a German expressionistic style. There are two subplots which aren't handled very well: one, involving a grad student protégé of Bellamy's, goes nowhere and can't really even be called a subplot; the other involves a couple (Melville Cooper and Joan Perry) with marital problems, and the passive man (John Eldredge) with whom Perry flirts. This plot feels like it lost something in the editing. Nevertheless, Bellamy and Morris (and the interesting if simplified ideas of dream interpretation) make this worth seeing. It was remade a few years later with William Holden as THE DARK PAST. [TCM]

MR. DISTRICT ATTORNEY (1941)

Rich guy Prince Cadwallader Jones gets a job in the District Attorney's office through his connections, but he bungles his first case and gets known as the "Socialite DA" in the newspapers. His boss gives him a relatively unimportant cold case to work on: the disappearance years ago of a counterfeiter named Hyde, presumed dead. However, when some of Hyde's bills start turning up in circulation, the DA takes the case away from Jones. Luckily, Jones and his girl reporter pal Terry Parker stumble on an assault case involving showgirl Betty Paradise and bank clerk Herman Winkle which leads them to a concrete lead in the Hyde case. Winkle is found dead, supposedly a suicide, but an autopsy finds it was murder. Jones suspects big shot lawyer Barret, who is after the DA job, is in cahoots with Hyde somehow and Jones plots to frame Barret. We know that Barret is indeed guilty and that Hyde is indeed back among the living, but will Jones and Parker live long enough to prove it?

This movie is based loosely on a popular radio program of the time, and the handsome and likable Dennis O'Keefe, who plays Jones, is the film's main asset. He and Florence Rice (as the reporter), both pictured above, have an easy rapport; she looks and acts like a B-movie Jean Arthur. Peter Lorre has a relatively small role but he makes the most of it in that naturally sinister way of his. Much of the movie is light in tone--the comedy highlight is a scene of brawling Santa Clauses brought before a judge--but three main characters wind up dead before the finale, which is a slapstick car chase with guns. This is included in a VCI DVD set called Forgotten Noir & Crime Collection 4, and it is an enjoyable little film, but don't be fooled--it's definitely not a film noir. It is, however, a product of rough-and-tumble Republic Pictures, though it has the look of a glossier B-film from Warners or RKO. [DVD]

HEAT WAVE (1954)

A British B-movie DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Alex Nicol (at right) is an American novelist living in England. Rather like Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, he is summering across the bay from a wealthy businessman (Sid James) and his sexy wife (Hilary Brooke) who throw ostentatious parties. Nicol, struggling with writer's block, sits in his lonely bungalow and watches the parties until one night when he is called upon to ferry some guests over when James' launch quits working. Though he takes a liking to the husband, he also becomes smitten with the wife, who is having an affair with a pianist (Paul Carpenter) but soon shows signs that she might like to canoodle with Nicol. When Nicol's latest chapters are rejected by his publisher and his agent drops him, he goes to borrow some money from James but instead has drinks with Brooke and one thing leads to another. After some folderol involving James' weak heart and a will he wants to change, the three of them wind up on a boating excursion in the fog; when James falls and is injured, Brooke tosses him overboard and Nicol agrees to go along with her story that James fell out of the boat and drowned. James' daughter, who never liked her stepmother, thinks that story is fishy and a cop starts to do some snooping. In grand noir fashion, it's all downhill from there for the femme fatale and the misguided anti-hero.

Though the plot elements are right out of noir, the visual style is not, but it still remains worth seeing for fans of the genre. One of the things I liked best is how the two main characters are not prettified: Nicol looks and acts washed-up, and Brooke looks and acts like a restless middle-aged woman. James is the most likable character so his death, though predictable, packs a punch (not so with the unlikable husbands in DOUBLE INDEMNITY and BODY HEAT, for example). All three give solid performances. This is available as part of a Hammer Film Noir boxed set from VCI. [DVD]

WAGON MASTER (1950)

In the old West, Ben Johnson and his young blond sidekick Harry Carey Jr. are horse traders, not above using a little orneriness and chicanery to get by. While biding time in a small frontier town, they decide to accept an offer from a Mormon elder (Ward Bond) to lead a group of Mormon families, who are being run out of town, on a wagon train to Utah. Along the way, they pick up the members of a stranded medicine show (including Joanne Dru, who slowly becomes Johnson's love interest), run across some Navajos (who think they remember being cheated by Johnson some time back), and are forced to help a small band of outlaws whose leader (Charles Kemper) is seriously wounded. This episodic western is predictable and a little light in the plotting department, but has some good acting, especially from Johnson and Bond, and is beautifully shot in Monument Valley in Utah. Good support comes from Alan Mowbray as the stiff-upper-lip Brit who runs the medicine show and Jane Darwell as a likable Mormon matriarch. A somewhat lesser entry in John Ford's career, but enjoyable. (Pictured are, from left to right, Johnson, Bond, and Carey.) [DVD]

THE SHOUT (1978)

John Hurt, a musician and sound engineer, lives in a small English village with his wife (Susannah York). One day while they are relaxing on a deserted beach, York has an unsettling vision of an Australian aborigine holding a bone in his hand. Later that day, Hurt meets up with Alan Bates (pictured), a scruffy wanderer who hasn't eaten in days. Hurt takes Bates home where the stranger regales the pair with odd stories of his recent past living among the Australian aborigines; he claims to practice a voodoo-ish magic, can kill with a powerful shout, and came home and killed his children according to aboriginal tradition. The couple are both repelled and fascinated by Bates and he winds up staying in their home where he uses his magic to seduce York. It's unclear how seriously we're supposed to take his magic powers (after all, Bates also has intense charm and physicality on his side in his seduction efforts) but when Hurt asks to see a demonstration of his killing shout, Bates obliges in an extremely effective scene which results in the death of seabirds, sheep, and a shepherd (though Hurt, having worn earplugs, collapses in a daze but recovers).

Now here's where things get really tricky. The story has been related as a flashback by Bates, now a resident in the village asylum, to Tim Curry, a scorekeeper at a cricket match between the villagers and the asylum inmates. As Bates' story builds to a climax, with police closing in on Bates to arrest him for the murder of his children, the frame story also climaxes with a thunderstorm which unsettles some of the inmates. Curry, the stand-in for the audience, isn't sure how much of the story is true; Hurt is present at the game, and York is a nurse at the asylum, so is Bates' narrative real or is he a totally unreliable narrator like Kevin Spacey in THE USUAL SUSPECTS or, more appropriately, the narrator of CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI? The last shot manages to have it both ways in an open-ended but still satisfying conclusion. Hurt is fine as a confused man who doesn't know how to fight off the intruder who has stolen his wife, and York is even better (very sexy in an almost oblique way), but Bates steals the show with his memorable (whether magical or just crazy) character. There is good cinematography and an interesting score, sometimes consisting of amplified electronic effects in scenes in which Hurt is experimenting with the distortion of everyday sounds in his studio. The shout scene, which occurs halfway through the film, is in some ways the climax, though it's to the film’s credit that we remain interested in the rest of the plot. [TCM]

SONG OF INDIA (1949)

Turhan Bey is a modernized Indian prince and Army officer who sets off on a safari into the heart of the forbidden jungle of Combi with the daughter of the Maharajah (Gail Russell). He wants to capture animals to bring back to civilization and she wants to capture their images in photographs. Once they arrive at the village of Combi, the animals sense the presence of the intruders and become uneasy, as does Sabu, a local prince who does not wear the trappings of royalty and seems to live a Tarzan-like existence among the jungle animals. When his attempt to talk Bey out of his mission fails, Sabu goes on a midnight raid to free all the animals, though his favorite tiger friend is wounded while escaping. Sabu hits it off with Russell and eventually takes her deep into the jungle under the pretext of showing her a bejeweled temple in a lost city, while actually holding her hostage until Bey and his men leave the region. This plan backfires when Bey retaliates by holding the entire village hostage and, in a Nazi-like tactic, threatening to execute every third male unless Sabu brings Russell back alive. Russell slowly comes around to Sabu's ways, but Bey is made of harder stuff, and things build to a fisticuffs climax on the treacherous mountainside of the lost city, where the wounded tiger returns to have the final say.

Though this is a grade-B cross between Tarzan and The Jungle Book, it doesn’t look bad (it would have looked much better in color) and it moves along well with little wasted time, although the jungle chase which makes up the last half-hour could have been tightened up a bit. The backlot jungle scenes, with the usual Hollywood mix of tame animals and stock footage, look better than in the average Tarzan film, and the sequence in the lost city, though obviously shot using matte paintings, is very nicely done, a less effective black & white version of what Michael Powell did in the studio in BLACK NARCISSUS. Sad to say, Sabu, only 25, was losing his looks and presence, and the fact that he spends the entire film dressed in baggy diapers (pictured above) doesn't help. He's playing a variation on his Mowgai character from the 1942 JUNGLE BOOK, but what was charming then becomes rather stiff and tedious here. Still, no one watches these films for the acting, and overall it's a more than tolerable Saturday afternoon adventure movie. [TCM]

BOY SLAVES (1939)

This is virtually a remake (unofficially) of WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD, with a slightly different focus. Teenager Jesse lives with his mom and older brother in a ramshackle home. When the brother loses his job, Jesse leaves, going on the road, hoping to make some money. He meets up with a gang of thieving teenage hobos; they beat him up, but he joins up with them anyway. Their leader, Tim, doesn’t quite trust Jesse, thinking he might be a snitch reporting back to the police; he’s not, but still, the cops catch up to them and the boys are sentenced to a labor camp, working at harvesting turpentine from trees. It doesn’t seem so bad at first, and the boys are able to buy things at the company store on credit, but Jesse soon wises up to the fact that they’ll be in debt to the company for years. Things get worse until one of the boys falls out of a tree and has to have an arm amputated. Jesse and Tim try to organize a revolt (Jesse even writes a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt about their conditions), but it fails, their cabin catches fire, and in a truly shocking twist, Jesse is shot dead by a guard. In a rushed ending, similar to that of WILD BOYS, a sympathetic judge sets the boys up in a federal farm camp and sends the head of the turpentine farm to jail.

A couple of things make this interesting. One is the novelty of the camp setting, which allows the boys to be in nature while still penned in by barbed wire fences. The two leads, though they never went on to bigger and better things, give solid performances; Roger Daniel as the somewhat meek but determined Jesse and James McCallion (pictured above) as Tim, the cocky boy with a soft spot inside his rough exterior. Anne Shirley, best known for playing the title role in the first sound version of ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, is good as an enslaved girl who works for the camp owners. Charles Lane, recognizable as any number of cranky old men in movies and TV right up into the 1990s, is the villainous camp owner. It’s also interesting that the rationale for the boys being on the road--to help out their struggling families--is the same as it was six years earlier in WILD BOYS. [TCM]

GIRLS OF THE ROAD (1940)

When the governor orders a panel to study the problem of girl runaways, his own daughter (Ann Dvorak) decides to find out the facts for herself by sneaking away and going on the road "undercover.” She meets up with a group of girls, including snarky Helen Mack (whose favorite expression is a snarling "Fade!" when she wants someone to go away) who takes a liking to Dvorak, butch-looking Lola Lane, and innocent Marjorie Cooley, who is carting around a box with a wedding dress, claiming she's going to be married on Tuesday but didn't have bus fare to get to the wedding--I was never sure whether she really had a wedding to go to or was just delusional. The girls are camped out under a bridge but get arrested and tossed in jail where they start a rowdy food fight and get hosed down by an officer. The lot of them are put on a train to be shipped out of the county, but Mack gets in a fistfight with a cop; he winds up falling of the train (to his death, I believe, though that's left rather ambiguous) and Mack and Dvorak jump off and go on the run. With the last of her money, Dvorak springs for a square meal and motel room for them, and they get some help from a friendly truck driver who transports them to a female hobo camp in the woods where they run into Lane, who tries to boss everyone around. A sickly Cooley shows up, dying soon after, providing a tender moment when the girls hold an impromptu funeral, and the usually rough-and-tough Lane leads the hymn singing. The ending fizzles out a bit with the governor coming to Dvorak's rescue and proposing a series of "girl's castles" to be built to give homeless young women an alternative to the road.

This social issue B-movie would make a nice second feature to WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD. Though this one is set several years after the height of the Depression, the plotline and context are the same: young women are running away from home, usually because of family money problems, and riding the rails just like runaway boys and hobos. Oddly, despite the potential here for sexual exploitation, there are very few men in this movie and virtually no threats of molestation or physical harm, except from the police. The truck driver (Eddie Laughton) looks like he'll be a threat, but he's actually an unrealistically nice guy. Dvorak, Mack (both pictured above with Bruce Bennett as a cop), and Lane all do nice jobs, especially Mack who makes her character interesting and sympathetic even though we know little about her. The happy ending here, as in WILD BOYS, is improbable, but Hollywood had to have some sunlight break through the gloom. [TCM]

WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD (1933)

This may well be the archetypal example of a pre-Code social melodrama (from Warner Brothers, the studio that specialized in these films), complete with compelling performances, a fast pace, and some government propaganda spooned out at the end. Frankie Darro is a typical middle-class high-school student--a forerunner of Andy Hardy--but it's the Depression, and his father comes home one day out of a job. Darro pitches in by selling his car, but soon he and his buddy Edwin Phillips, whose family is also in bad straits, come to see themselves as burdens and run away, catching a ride hobo-style on a train. Along the way, they meet up with a girl (Dorothy Coonan) dressed as a boy who is on her way to live with an aunt in Chicago. She takes the boys with her, and the aunt is happy to see them, but her apartment is raided just after they arrive (gambling? prostitution?) and the trio wind up on the road again. As they head east, they become part of a large group of "wild" youth in similar circumstances. They’re not bad kids, and they try using the power of numbers to eke out a commune-like living, but the authorities, treating them as squatters, drive them out of a little shantytown they set up in Cleveland. One kid loses his leg to an oncoming train, and Darro gets unwittingly involved in a crime before all three end up in a courtroom where the nice judge treats them fairly and tells everyone that everything will be fine under Roosevelt’s NRA plan.

This William Wellman film is, despite its phony feel-good ending, a fairly bleak look at a real social problem of the time. Yes, the kids are all a bit too good to be true—they all get along, they all have good hearts, etc.—but the feel of the movie is gritty, and the weights these kids carry seem truly felt. In addition to the harrowing leg accident, there is a rape attempt and a brutal fire-hosing of the kids by the police. Darro (at left, above, with Phillips) gives a remarkable performance, a little on the Mickey Rooney side at first, but gaining in dramatic force as the film progresses. Darro, who was 16 at the time, has been good in everything I've seen him in, and it's a shame his relatively small size hurt his career, sticking him in juvenile and jockey roles into adulthood. His performance alone makes the movie worth seeing, but Phillips (who only made one more film) creates a character just as memorable. Grant Mitchell is Darro's dad, and he and Darro have a very well-acted scene when the boy tells him he's sold his beloved car. You may recognize Sterling Holloway and Sidney Miller among the boys, and Ward Bond plays the rapist. Though not filmed on location, much of it does have an authentic feel. This is part of the Forbidden Hollywood Vol. 3 boxed set, composed entirely of Wellman pictures, though it does crop up on TCM frequently. One of the best pre-Code movies I've seen. [DVD]

PANDORA'S BOX (1929)

Louise Brooks is remembered today mostly for this much-admired silent film from Germany, and though it is a well-made film, it remains of interest largely due to Brooks' mesmerizing performance. She is Lulu, a vivacious young woman whom we first see kept in a fancy apartment by her lover, Schön (Fritz Kortner). An older man named Schigolch, a figure from her past, visits her just before Schön comes to tell her that he's getting married; her flippant reply is, "You'll have to kill me to get rid of me." Schön's son Alwa (Francis Lederer) hires her for a musical revue he's producing, and she makes a scene backstage, refusing to go on when Schön arrives with his fiancée. Schön tries to console Lola and ends up making out with her in her dressing room. His son and fiancée discover them, and Schön winds up marrying Lola. On their wedding night, realizing that he will always be jealous, he gives her a gun and tells her to kill herself, but in an ambiguously filmed scene, she kills him, apparently by accident. She goes on trial and is found guilty, but manages to escape the courtroom. Alwa has become obsessed with her and, with the help of an old friend, the Countess Geschwitz, the two run off together; he becomes a gambler, losing lots of money, and she is threatened with blackmail by an old acquaintance who recognizes her. In the end, with Lulu, Alwa, and Schigolch in desperate straits, she turns to prostitution and, on what seems to be Christmas Eve, she picks up a john who turns out to be Jack the Ripper.

The melodramatic plot, with its outrageous twists and turns, is based on two famous plays by Frank Wedekind (who also wrote the play on which the recent Broadway hit "Spring Awakening" was based), and the direction by Georg W. Pabst, keeps lots of details offscreen or deliberately vague. Lulu is clearly a woman who, in the first half, knows how to get what she wants, but most of what develops is about her is ambiguous: Was she a prostitute from the beginning, or just a gold-digger? What exactly is Schigolch's relationship to Lola? He seems to have been a mentor or manager for her when she was a dancer, but he might also be a pimp--later, she says he's her father, though that may be a lie. Did she kill Schön on purpose? Is the Countess Geschwitz one of Lulu's lovers? (Clearly the Countess, who dresses in stereotypically mannish clothes, is hot for Lulu, and the two have a remarkably intimate dancing scene.)

Oddly, Jack the Ripper (not named specifically in the movie, though the credits give his name as Jack), who is only in the film for the last 15 minutes, is one of the most interesting and charismatic characters in the film. Played by the handsome Gustav Diessl (at right), he is troubled, even tortured, by his obsession to kill, but for a moment, it seems as if he will make a real connection with Lola; on the stairs outside her apartment, he throws away his knife, and inside, he dangles mistletoe (which he got from the Salvation Army) over her head before kissing her. Unfortunately, the allure of a kitchen knife on a nearby table is too strong for him. It is interesting that both of the murders in the film are shot obliquely--so much of the movie's appeal is in its ambiguity. Lederer, Korner, and Diessl are all excellent, but Brooks wipes everyone else off the screen: she is erotic, playful, mysterious, full of life, drop-dead beautiful, and feels quite modern. Certainly her appearance in this film, with her bob cut and bangs, has become iconic, and must have influenced Liza Minnelli's look as a similar, though less rawly manipulative, figure of Weimer Germany in CABARET. One of the last great films of the silent era. [DVD]

I WAS A COMMUNIST FOR THE FBI (1951)

Frank Lovejoy works at a Pittsburgh steel factory and is a card-carrying Communist who uses his clout to get his comrades hired there. It seems to be common knowledge that he is a Party member--his brothers despise him for it--but his high school-age son (Ron Hagerthy, pictured with Lovejoy) only hears rumors from other schoolboys, whom he then beats up. When Lovejoy admits to his son that it's true, the boy is properly horrified. The truth about Lovejoy's situation, as the title of the film makes clear, is that Lovejoy has worked as a "mole" for the FBI for nine years. He has tried to be stoic about the whole thing, but after his mother dies and his brother (Paul Pircini) tries to beat him up at her funeral, Lovejoy asks the FBI to be released and cleared publicly. They convince him to stay on to wrap up one last case involving a strike at his factory, a Russian bigwig, and some goons who have been shipped in from New York to "break some skulls" to give the official union a bad name. On top of all this, his son's teacher (Dorothy Hart) "comes out" to Lovejoy as a fellow Communist; they start dating until she soon finds evidence that he's an FBI spy. Rather than turn him, however, she confides in him that she is upset at the direction in which the Party is going (using blacks and Jews as fall guys). She tries to "defect," so to speak, and Lovejoy protects her, leading to a couple of exciting chase scenes, some murders, and a climax at a HUAC hearing where Lovejoy hopes to clear his name.

This movie is considered a film noir by many critics, but a noir style is evident only in the last half hour, mostly in the nighttime chase scenes, one of which, along a railroad track, is quite well done. Based on a series of articles written by a real FBI agent, the movie is more indebted to the documentary-style crime thrillers of the era, with some off-screen narration and attempts at real-looking location shots (in this case, newsreel footage of riots). Lovejoy gives a subtle but single-note performance; his face when he's anguished over what his son thinks of him is no different than his face when he's casually talking over the facts of his case with his FBI handlers. The supporting cast provides a bit more color, including Richard Webb and Phillip Carey as Feds, and James Millicam and Edward Norris as Commies, though at times I must admit I got all the tall white men in suits and hats confused. The finale is perhaps the only movie scene ever in which House Un-American Activities Committee congressmen are seen as the good guys. [TCM]

HOT SATURDAY (1932)

A pre-Code romantic melodrama which plays out like Reefer Madness, except about the dangers of gossip. There are four central characters: Nancy Carroll is an average small-town girl who works as a bank secretary and still lives with her parents; Cary Grant is a playboy known for carrying on a string of affairs; Edward Woods is a bank clerk with the hots for Carroll; and Randolph Scott is a geologist and friend of the Carroll family who comes to visit for a few days. One Saturday, Carroll's gang gets invited to Grant's place for a party; when Grant and Carroll vanish together for the afternoon, Woods gets jealous. That night, when the party has moved to a lakeside nightclub, Woods takes Carroll out for a motorboat ride which ends badly when he tries to "press his advantage," as they say. She leaves the boat on the other side of the lake and trudges to Grant's place. Woods drives around to pick her up but she refuses to go with him, instead having Grant's driver take her home at 2 in the morning. The next day, gossip spreads about her until half the town hears that she spent the night at Grant's, leading to her getting fired for her loose morals. In the meantime, the shy Scott starts wooing Carroll, eventually proposing to her, but next Saturday, at another "hot" party, he hears the gossip about her and when he sees her dancing with Grant, assumes the gossip is true.

The plot here is nothing special, except for the ending [SPOILER!] in which Carroll, rejected by Scott, runs off with Grant (theoretically to be married, though given his reputation, which we have seen to be true, we wonder...), not caring what her parents or friends or Scott think. Grant and Scott, both handsome and full of charisma, steal every scene they're in--this was the first time Grant had lead billing, though he would not become a bankable star for another few years. Scott is particularly appealing: hunky and youthful, he does a nice job playing a guy who is supposedly shy around women but doesn't come off as a yokel or a doofus (that part is taken by the chubby Grady Sutton who, though a doofus and a little on the femme side, still manages to get his share of make-out action). Carroll is OK, though it's difficult to see why the men make such a fuss about her; her friend Eva (Lilian Bond) and younger sister (Rose Coghlan) are both more attractive and have at least as much personality as she. No kissing or petting is shown, but there are a couple of racy moments: at Grant's party, a chanteuse runs her hands up and down her body while she sings "I’m Burning for You"; sample lyrics: "Call the fire engine/And the whole darn crew/Tell 'em all to hurry/'Cause I’m burning for you" and "When you say no, I'm a volcano." In one bizarre scene played for laughs, Carroll yanks her sister's underwear off of her. On the Universal Pre-Code Hollywood Collection. (Image above from carygrant.net) [DVD]

CONFIRM OR DENY (1941)

Don Ameche, an American correspondent in London during the Blitz, flirts in the dark (during a blackout) with Joan Bennett, a teletype operator for the government; though she says she's married, that doesn't deter him. When an air raid is called, they spend the night together, platonically but cutely, in a crowded subway station. Next morning, when he finds out that his Consolidated Press building was destroyed in the bombing, he sets up a temporary HQ in a hotel basement and gets the government to loan Bennett to his company. From here, there are two plotlines related to Ameche’s belief that Germany is on the verge of invading England: 1) he tries to lease radio wire in Penzance so he'll be among the first to get the news out; 2) he's also trying to sneak word of the possible invasion into his news reports in defiance of the military censor (John Loder). Other characters of interest include a young lad (Roddy McDowall) who stays behind at the old press building to watch for incoming messenger pigeons for news of the invasion, an older blind typist (Arthur Shields), the hotel manager (Eric Blore), and Ameche's boss in New York (Raymond Walburn). But the romance between Bennett (who isn't actually married) and Ameche carries the movie to its climax, with the two trapped in the hotel basement by rubble, with a ticking bomb in the room.

This unsung and largely unseen film, shot and released before America entered the war, is actually a very good wartime drama. The romance is intertwined nicely with the dramatic stories, which eventually lead to a dramatization of issues of journalistic ethics in wartime. Ameche is successful at sneaking his news past the censor, but a tragic occurrence changes his mind about doing so. Ameche's character is an interesting departure from the usual Hollywood idea of a reporter; for a change, he's not a cardboard obnoxious lout but a fleshed-out likable guy; even his early aggressive flirting doesn't come off as offensive, and his performance is solid. He and Bennett have good chemistry, McDowell is fine in what turns out to be a crucial role, and Eric Blore gets to stretch a bit beyond his usual crisp sarcastic fussbudget-type, though his role is fairly small. Though the film is a drama, a light touch abounds until the climax. Watch for this one; maybe soon Fox will give Don Ameche his own boxed set. [FMC]

HITLER (1962)

When I saw that top billing in this movie was given to Richard Basehart (Admiral Nelson on TV's "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea") as Hitler followed by two German starlets playing the women in his life, I figured it was ludicrous over-the-top B-movie junk. Well, it is a B-movie (from Allied Artists, mostly known for sci-fi flicks), but surprisingly, it's not quite junk. Instead, it's a movie that's torn between wanting to be exploitation and wanting to be taken a little more seriously. A more appropriate title (and a more marketable one) might be The Private Life of Adolph Hitler, since the film focuses on his sex life--or lack thereof--and how it affected his personality and his drive for power, almost completely ignoring his political beliefs and his genocidal state machinery. The film begins in 1924 with Hitler writing "Mein Kampf" while in prison, and this short scene is all we get of his hateful philosophizing, except for a line later when he declares, "One is either a German or a Christian." The story then jumps ahead to show him falling in love with his niece Geli at his mountain retreat. Nothing physical transpires between them; apparently he is rendered impotent because Geli reminds him of his late mother, so he loves her but cannot make love to her. The appearance of incest bothers Hitler's followers (such as Goebbels and Strasser), but Hitler rants that their "petty-bourgeois morality" means nothing to him. Nevertheless, when Geli insults him by calling him "less than a man," Hitler has his thugs murder her and report her death as a suicide. He seeks help from a therapist, even though he considers psychiatry "Jew science." Soon he is attracted to Eva Braun, who looks like Geli, and hence, like his mother. It does seem as if, at some point, he is able to function sexually with Braun, although at the end, when they get married in the bunker and she calls herself "Frau Hitler," he screams that no one has the right to use that name except his mother. The Final Solution and the war itself are glossed over, though we do see low-budget recreations of events such as the Reichstag fire, the Night of the Long Knives (in which Ernst Rohm and his SA men are slaughtered), and the bungled assassination attempt. Some newsreel footage is used here and there but the movie can't overcome its cheap look. Still, Basehart is surprisingly good, mostly underplaying the role, and Cordula Trantow is excellent (and beautiful) as Geli. Martin Kosleck, who had been playing evil Nazis since the early 40's--is fine as Goebbles, and John Banner (later to find fame as Sgt. Schulz in Hogan's Heroes) is equally good as Strasser. [TCM]

JOAN OF ARC (1948)

In the 15th century, during the Hundred Years' War between England and France, Joan, a rural French teenager, is tormented by the voices of saints who tell her she should lead French armies into battle against the English. She cuts her hair, dresses like a boy, and makes her way to see the Dauphin, heir to the throne of France whose claim is cast in doubt when his own mother insists he is a bastard. As a prank, an impostor presents himself to Joan as the Dauphin, but she, apparently guided by her voices, finds the real Dauphin in the crowd. Despite having no military experience, Joan is allowed to lead the armies as a kind of figurehead; at the besieged town of Orleans, Joan is wounded but the army is successful. After more victories, Joan is present at the coronation of the Dauphin as King Charles VI, but he seems visibly upset by the kind of adoration Joan receives from the crowds. Joan wants to continue fighting to free Paris from the Burgundians, but feels betrayed when the King signs a treaty instead. She is captured by the English, and Charles refuses to ransom her. She is put on trial by an ecclesiastical court for heresy and ex-communicated, but refuses to accept the judgment, and is eventually burned at the stake.

I’ve never completely understood the appeal of the story of Joan of Arc. Though she is credited as a staunch nationalist, and she was obviously a victim of political chicanery, she was also pretty clearly a nutcase, and whenever I see a version of her story, I find it hard to be completely sympathetic to her. This film, the last one directed by Victor Fleming (GONE WITH THE WIND, WIZARD OF OZ), was a box-office flop, partly due to Bergman being on the outs with the American public because of her adulterous behavior. The movie, in Technicolor, looks ravishing, but its attempt at being a big epic adventure is hurt by very stagy sets, some ponderous dialogue, skimpy-looking battle scenes, and, of course, the fact that this is largely a personal story of religious faith (or delusion). Bergman (in her 30s playing 18) is actually quite good, and the large supporting cast is fun for a game of "spot the character actor": Ward Bond, J. Carroll Naish, Gene Lockhart, Shepperd Strudwick, Cecil Kellaway, and Robert Barrat among others. Unfortunately, at 145 minutes, the pace is too leisurely and the narrative too unfocused to be very compelling. [DVD]

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (1935)

Years ago, I tried reading Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" without the benefit of a teacher or a classroom of students to give me the impetus to finish--I didn't finish it. I imagine that this relatively short Hollywood film doesn't really do the huge book justice; nevertheless, on its own terms, this is a well-done B-thriller with strong performances and good atmosphere courtesy director Josef von Sternberg. Peter Lorre is Raskolnikov, a student who graduates with honors; months later, he has a promising article on criminology published, though anonymously at the insistence of his editor, and lives in dirt poor conditions. The contents of the article are never made clear, but Roskolnikov believes that actions of superior people should be above the law, and he puts this theory into practice when he kills a nasty pawnbroker who is, in his eyes, the scum of the earth, for doing dirt not just to him but to lovely young Sonya (Marian Marsh), a whore with a heart of gold. There is a plotline involving his mother and sister, both of whom he believes are at the mercy of an obnoxious man (Gene Lockhart), but the focus here is on the cat-and-mouse game that develops between Roskolnikov and Inspector Porfiry (Edward Arnold). Lorre and Arnold play off each other very well, and Marsh is beautiful and almost believable in the stock role of the bad girl who is actually too good to be true. Mrs. Patrick Campbell, a legendary stage actress, has one of her very few film roles as the horrid pawnbroker, who does indeed seem to deserve a bad fate, if not perhaps death. Douglass Dumbrille has a small but important role as a figure from Roskolnikov's sister's past who shows up near the end. Discussions of the nature of mankind, religion, atheism, and crime, which most likely take up many pages in the novel, frequently seem on the verge of breaking out here, but never really happen. Still, a much better movie, in acting and in visual style, than I would have expected. [TCM]

IF YOU COULD ONLY COOK (1935)

Herbert Marshall, head honcho at an auto company, is about to marry a woman of good breeding who only wants him for his money. Frustrated with his board of directors who don’t like his new car designs, he leaves a meeting in a huff and winds up sitting on a park bench with Jean Arthur who is down on her luck. They look through the want-ads together and she, thinking he's also out of work, suggests the two of them pose as a married couple and apply for a butler/maid position. He agrees to meet her the next day to do so, leading to an amusing scene in with Marshall gets some career tips from his butler. They're hired by Leo Carrillo, a cultured gangster; he winds up loving Arthur's cooking and, when he suspects something’s up because Marshall sleeps on the balcony rather than with his "wife," he starts flirting with her. There are rather tortured plot complications involving Marshall stealing his own car designs out of the company’s safe, he and Arthur "breaking up" even though they've developed feelings for each other, and Carrillo's thugs showing up at Marshall's wedding to rub him out, though they actually wind up getting Marshall and Arthur together.

Though this film is part of Columbia’s Icons of Screwball Comedy DVD set, it's a weak example of the genre. It's amusing and moves quickly, but one of the keys to a truly successful screwball comedy is that you can use adjectives like "fizzy" and "sparkling" to describe them, and I can’t with this one. The main obstacle to fizziness is the lack of chemistry between Marshall and Arthur, almost all of it due to the drab, tired Marshall, who looks he should be on his third marriage, not his first. He's fine in his comedic scenes, but falls flat in portraying any romantic interest in Arthur. That said, Arthur and the supporting players, including Carillo, Lionel Stander, and Frieda Inescourt, make the film enjoyable enough. Good line: Marshall, to his butler, "Do you think I’m out of my mind?" Butler: "I’m hoping for the best, sir." [DVD]

TRANSATLANTIC TUNNEL (1935)

Set in the futuristic 1940's after the building of a tunnel under the English Channel (which in reality took another 50 years to come to fruition), the film is the story of an engineer (Richard Dix) who is obsessed with building an undersea tunnel from England to America. This dream is viewed with skepticism by many, but others believe it would somehow contribute to a lasting world peace--though how is never explained. Dix gets a team of engineers and workers going on the project, but the funding remains a constant problem; some of his backers have their own agendas and don't care much about Dix's dreams or world peace. Dix's obsession causes family problems; his neglected wife (Madge Evans) takes a job as a tunnel nurse but gets infected with "tunnel sickness" and goes blind. Without telling him what's happened, she leaves him, letting him think it's because of his neglect, rather than have him feel guilty over her illness. Dix eventually comes to think that his best friend and co-leader of the project (Leslie Banks) is having an affair with her, causing a temporary rupture between the two. Years later, as the British workers are about to complete the tunnel by connecting up with the Americans, Dix's grown son (Jimmy Hanley) joins the workers just in time to get caught in a tunnel cave-in caused by an undersea volcano, a tragedy which threatens to bring the whole project to a halt.

There's a lot going on here: explosions, crowds, a love triangle, a murder (by poisoned cigarette, I think), videophones, and the cool special effect of a huge "Radium Drill" the men use under the sea floor, but still the movie manages to be more interesting than engrossing. The narrative is an uneasy mix of SF speculation, romance, and melodrama, all in the service of expressing a kind of Ayn Randian philosophy of monomaniacal obsession. A huge chunk of Dix's life winds up being devoted to this goal which he never gives up on, even though we're given only nebulous reasons as to why it's worth doing. Dix, often a stodgy, wooden actor, is good here, as is Banks, whom I'm more familiar with as a villain (THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME). Evans can't do much with the pining wife role, though Helen Vinson is her usual interesting self as the American heiress who falls in love with Dix and isn't above literally selling herself to a slimy financier in order to assure continued support for the tunnel. The effects are fine given the era, but the make-up winds up being a problem; none of the adults age a bit over the 15-20 year span of the narrative. Walter Huston and George Arliss have very small cameos as the American President and the British Prime Minster. [TCM]

THE VALLEY (OBSCURED BY CLOUDS) (1972)

Viviane is the upper-class wife of a French diplomat who is in New Guinea looking for some rare bird-of-paradise feathers to sell at Paris boutiques. She's obnoxious, self-centered, and used to getting her own way. At a trading post, she runs into Olivier, a relatively handsome thin blond hippie-type who is traveling with a group of other relatively good-looking hippie-types in search of an unexplored valley in the middle of the island (the most recent map of the area is simply blank with the words "obscured by clouds"), hoping to find a literal paradise; they believe that other explorers who have gone in but never returned have stayed by choice because it's such a wonderful place. She decides to go with them hoping to find more feathers. Her inhibitions soon begin dropping away, first when she sleeps with Olivier, and later when she is influenced by the attitudes of her companions, especially Gaetan, the leader, who is involved with the other two women in the group (there's also a young boy who might be Gaetan's son, though his character is almost completely ignored). More sexual escapades and drug experiences follow until the group meets up with a tribe who live near the valley. They are welcomed as guests at a huge festival at which some of the group "go native," applying face paint and realizing that the trappings of civilization as they knew it have fallen away. Viviane tells Olivier that they have found "the truth," but he tells her that the opposite has happened, that they remain merely tourists; as they try to tear down social restrictions, the tribe understands the importance of strict rules and taboos. Even the natives won't head over the hills to the valley, so our group continues, despite having little food or water. Eventually, in the final shot, they do reach the "heart of darkness," so to speak, or maybe "heart of lightness," depending on your viewpoint.

This little-seen film from director Barbet Schroeder has a reputation as a hippie-dippie psychedelic flick, largely because the soundtrack was by Pink Floyd, but this is anything but trippy. There are no light-show visual effects, and the music is limited to instrumental backgrounds at the beginning and ending (and a handful of Floyd songs which play over the radio in a couple of scenes); frankly I think the movie would have benefited from more use of Pink Floyd's ominous theme. If the movie is like anything, it's like Apocalypse Now (hence my "heart of darkness" reference), and like that movie, the cinematography and the settings are its main strengths--the film was shot on location, and though I know nothing about the circumstances of the filming, it feels like it was an arduous experience, so much so that I was occasionally taken out of the film by thinking about how they got certain shots. The most startling moment involves the natives beating to death some pigs who will be served as food at the festival. The killings are obviously real and for that reason, you stop thinking about the film and start thinking about the filming. The movie lags at times, partly due to thoroughly average acting and writing. It’s essentially a three-actor movie, with Bulle Ogier as Vivien, Michael Gothard as Olivier, and Jean-Pierre Kalfon as Gaetan, and only Kalfon really makes an impression. Best quote, even if it is a tad on the pretentious side: "Paradise is a place with many exits but no entrance," meaning I assume that you can be born into a paradise, but you can never really find one. [DVD]