Author: Keith Humphreys

Categories
Action/Adventure Horror/Suspense Mystery/Noir

Kiss Me Deadly

They? A wonderful word. And who are they? They’re the nameless ones who kill people for the Great Whatsit. Does it exist? Who cares? Everyone everywhere is so involved in the fruitless search for what?

In 1955, detective film noirs were nearing the end of their magnificent cycle, with seemingly little fresh to say. But just before the lights went out, Director Robert Aldrich and Screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides went for broke with a brutal pulp masterpiece which blended crime drama with 1950s political paranoia and some science fiction to boot: Kiss Me Deadly.

Ostensibly based on one of Mickey Spillane’s wildly popular Mike Hammer novels, Kiss Me Deadly (which Spillane hated) mocks the genre as much as embodies it, amping up the main character’s sliminess, cruelty and misogyny to absurd levels — and Hammer’s ostensibly the hero! From its arresting opening shot of Cloris Leachman desperately running barefoot down a highway, followed by a perversely upside down credit sequence, this is a movie of extremes in every respect, right up to its atomic conclusion.

Ralph Meeker, in the most memorable film work of his career, is aces as a cold, scheming and domineering Mike Hammer. It’s a fine example of how an actor and director can make a fairly unlikable character magnetic on screen, which is one of a number of ways this movie recalls another film I recommended, Pickup on South Street.

Most American critics considered Kiss Me Deadly a seamy low-budget piece of trash when it was released, and moralists condemned it outright for allegedly corrupting the nation’s youth. But it found a following in France and eventually among some American directors as well, who cherished the brash artistry and attitude the film exudes. Decades later, Kiss Me Deadly became fully respectable, being selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry as an utterly original American classic.

p.s. In the decades between my first and second viewing of Kiss Me Deadly, the original ending was discovered. When the film was originally released, some audiences saw the intended ending and some saw a mutilated version which only slightly shortens the film but does alter its meaning. If you want to know more about this unusual piece of film history after you’ve seen the film, check out this fascinating article.

Categories
Drama

Patterns

The popular and critically-lauded Mad Men demonstrated that television is becoming the new American cinema for mature viewers now that movies in the theater are pitched more towards teenagers and young adults, particularly those in other countries who are not fluent in English (i.e., explosions and CGI are in, character development and dialogue are out). This is actually a return to the norms of the early years of television in which TV owners were more educated and urban than Americans as a whole, and thirsted for the high-quality productions that appeared (sometimes live, sometimes taped) on anthology shows like Playhouse 90 and Hallmark Hall of Fame. Many of the primarily New York-based actors on these programs went on to become national stars, and many of the writers did as well, including the magnificent Rod Serling. In 1955, Serling and Director Fielder Cook staged a live performance of a Man Men-style drama (which the creator of Mad Men saw and was inspired by) on Kraft Television Theater that generated such an enormous audience reaction that they re-broadcast it on television (again, live) and then turned it the following year into a theatrical release: Patterns.

The plot: Junior executive Fred Staples (Van Heflin) has arrived in New York City at the behest of tyrannical CEO Walter Ramsey (Everett Sloane). Staples is mentored by Bill Briggs (Ed Begley), the last of the old guard who founded the company along with Ramsey’s now deceased father. Briggs believes in putting people above profit; Ramsey regards this as sentimental twaddle and repeatedly humiliates Briggs accordingly. Staples learns that the company never fires executives explicitly, only bullies them into resigning after their replacements have been hired…and he is the kindly Briggs’ replacement-to-be. Compelling office drama ensues.

Cook and his cast deserve roses for the electrifying acting in this film, which brings alive what could have been an overly cerebral or stagy production. This is probably the only significant movie role that stage and TV actor Sloane played outside of his collaborations with Orson Welles (Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai), and he makes film lovers feel the loss with a powerhouse portrayal of a hard-nosed man with significant flaws and a few offsetting virtues as well. Begley, a treasure among character actors, draws pity but also respect from the audience in a finely tuned performance. Heflin, who was not in the television version, gives an anguished performance as Staples, and Beatrice Straight is equally strong as his perceptive wife. The rest of the cast is also terrific in parts large and small.

Cinematographer Boris Kaufman faced the challenge of how to avoid a television or play-like look in the theatrical version, and he hit it for six. He employs a number of low-angles that accentuate the height of the offices and buildings and the relative smallness of most of the drones who toil there. Because I don’t want to spoil the climactic moment, I will be vague about its details other than saying the decision by Cook and Kaufman to use a point of view shot was truly inspired.

The world portrayed here — all white male boardroom members with female secretaries in the office and wives at home in suburbia — may put some people off, but I take the success of Mad Men as a sign that most viewers can appreciate crackling drama even if it takes place amidst social arrangements that are today seen as retrograde. No matter what world it’s set in, Patterns is a first-rate movie that holds up beautifully a half century after its release.

p.s. Serling’s pungent script catapulted him deservedly to the status of hot new thing in screenwriting. He followed up Patterns immediately with another brilliant televised play, Requiem for a Heavyweight, which you can watch here. A few years later of course, he attained television immortality with The Twilight Zone.

Categories
Comedy Documentaries and Books

Three Oscar Snubs

Rather than focus on a single film, I am going to commend to you to three fine movies that the Motion Picture Academy snubbed by failing to recognize Oscar-worthy work.

Comic performances are massively undervalued by Oscar voters, who just don’t seem to appreciate what the legendary English actor Edmund Kean allegedly said when terminally ill: “Dying is easy; comedy is hard”. Exhibit A this week is Steve Martin’s brilliant performance in All of Me, in which he plays a man whose body is partially taken over by the spirit of deceased harridan (a quite funny Lily Tomlin). Martin’s matchless comic gifts make this movie a joy to watch. This clip is one of the highlights because it lets Martin demonstrate his flair for hilarious physical comedy. It’s appalling that he didn’t even garner a Best Actor Oscar Nomination. Shame on you, Academy philistines!

The next snub comes from another funny Steve Martin movie, Bowfinger, but this time it’s Eddie Murphy who was robbed at Oscar time. Murphy plays both an arrogant, psychologically unstable movie star (first clip) and his meek, errand boy brother (second clip). Hang your head Oscar, this was a Peter Sellers-like multi-character tour de force and you didn’t even nominate Murphy for his comic genius.

In addition to comic performances, the Oscars also have a blind spot regarding movies about African-Americans. Perhaps the most inexcusable snub in Oscar history is that the powerful, moving documentary Hoop Dreams not only didn’t get nominated for Best Picture — it wasn’t even nominated for best documentary! The entire nomination committee should have publicly committed seppuku to atone for their sins. My review of this magnificent film is right here.

Categories
British Horror/Suspense Mystery/Noir

The Lodger **Double Feature**

I had long wanted to experience Alfred Hitchcock’s first foray into suspense, 1927’s The Lodger (sometimes subtitled “A Story of the London Fog”), but could never get through the film because the available prints were so beat up as to make it virtually unwatchable. To the rescue came British Film Institute, which despite the lack of the negative managed to restore the movie beautifully using a tinted print that had been maintained in excellent condition. Hitchcock’s version of the Belloc Lowndes tale as well as the best of the many subsequent efforts to remake it constitute my double feature film recommendation.

The story is set during a series of Jack the Ripper-like murders in London. One of the respectable families in the neighborhood takes in a mysterious lodger played evocatively in the 1927 version by early 20th century entertainment superstar Ivor Novello. His manner is strange, his habits are out of the common and he always seems to be out in the fog when the murders happen. Both the police and the family hosting him begin to suspect that a wolf has found its way into the fold. Hitchcockian magic ensues.

I embed here the restored version, which looks marvelous (Though BFI earns only an A minus because of a bone-headed decision to insert some jarring pop love songs in at particular moments of the new score). But the real attraction here is Hitchcock, who even this early in his career shows how he will come to define with unbounded creativity the suspense film genre. His origins in the silent era no doubt helped him develop his “pure cinema” style of storytelling because of course without sound it’s all about shots, images and editing. What can also be seen in The Lodger is his impish ability to break tension with humorous moments. He and Eliot Stannard also changed the original story in a way that increases tension up to the very end. All in all, the movie serves both as entertainment and an education in the early years of The Master.

Novello went to Hollywood in 1934 and made an ill-fated talkie version of the same film without Hitchcock, but the story was taken up again to much better effect by a different group of filmmakers in 1944, and I recommend it as the second half of a double feature with the 1927 version.

This version keeps closer to the original story, making it as much a character study as a mystery/thriller. This provides a chance for the sadly short-lived Laird Cregar to showcase his considerable talents as an actor. He’s near-perfect as a man whose proper British exterior hides a roiling mass of emotion and need. The rest of the cast is also strong, particularly Sara Allgood as the woman of the house and George Sanders as a police detective. The production values are first rate, with much of the budget apparently spent by respected costumer designer Rene Hubert on a series of flouncy outfits for the bewitching Merle Oberon (More information about her career is in my recommendation of The Scarlet Pimpernel). The result is a movie that if not at the level of Hitchcock’s work is still a handsome and gripping piece of cinema.

p.s. The same story was made again in 1953 as The Man in the Attic and yet again in 2009 as The Lodger. As the man once said, “In Hollywood they don’t make movies, they re-make them”.

p.p.s. In Robert Altman’s fine film Gosford Park, Ivor Novello was portrayed by Jeremy Northam.

Categories
Comedy Horror/Suspense

House on Haunted Hill

Producer/director William Castle was part film maker and part carnival barker, being famous for gimmicks such as placing nurses in theater lobbies ostensibly to aid any viewers who were overcome with fright, wiring seats to give mild shocks when a monstrous “Tingler” came on the screen, and, for this week’s film, pioneering “Emergo” technology which released a skeleton on a wire to sail over the audience. In 1959, he made what I consider his best film as a director: House on Haunted Hill.

Set at the historic Ennis House in Los Angeles, the film’s agreeably silly plot features menacing millionaire Frederick Loren (Vincent Price) who has offered a disparate cast of characters $10,000 to spend one night surrounded by ghosties and ghoulies. The event is allegedly a party for his current, faithless, wife Annabelle (Carol Ohlmart), who herself fears sharing the fate of her mysteriously deceased predecessors. The guests are a mousy secretary in Loren’s company (Carolyn Craig), a handsome test pilot (Richard Long), a stuffy psychiatrist (Alan Marshal), a money-hungry newspaper columnist (Julie Mitchum, sister of the more famous Robert) and the alcoholic survivor of some of the people who have been murdered in the house (Elisha Cook Jr.). The closing credits also include another cast member, in typical Castle tongue-in-cheek style: a skeleton appearing as “himself”.

I first saw this film on television when I was about 5 years old, and it gave me nightmares for months. I could not appreciate then what I can now, namely that Castle always served his horror with side dishes of corn and ham. There are certainly creepy moments and shocks in the film, but there is also campy fun, much of it courtesy of old hands Price and Cook. It’s also progressively amusing over the course of the film that the majority of Carolyn Craig’s dialogue becomes “Eeeeeeeekkkk!!!!!!!”.

House on Haunted Hill is spooky fun in the best Castle tradition. I recommend it for strong entertainment value and as the high point of the movies Castle made himself.

I say “by himself” because Castle was later associated with one of the greatest horror films in Hollywood history, albeit with an assist. Not long before he died, Castle purchased the rights to Rosemary’s Baby and brought the project to Robert Evans at Paramount. Evans wisely agreed to let Castle produce the film only if Roman Polanski helmed the project, and a classic film was born.

p.s. In case you are wondering, here is the fun-loving Castle’s “Emergo” gimmick in action.

Categories
Foreign Language Horror/Suspense Mystery/Noir

The Hands of Orlac

The idea that a possession or even more creepily a body part of a dead person can take over the life of its living owner has appeared in fairy tales and ghost stories for centuries. In cinema, the touchstone story of this sort is Maurice Renard’s 1920 novel Les Mains d’Orlac, which has been adapted to the screen many times, including in both films I am recommending: The 1924 Austrian and 1935 US version of The Hands of Orlac (The latter is sometimes titled Mad Love).

The story concerns gifted pianist and composer Paul Orlac, whose hands are severely damaged in an accident. He survives his injuries, but the surgeon must replace his hands with those of a recently executed murderer. As Orlac and his devoted lady love Yvonne attempt to put their lives back together, the murders start again, and Orlac begins to suspect that his new hands are driving him to commit horrible crimes.

The 1924 version is a silent film directed by Robert Wiene and starring Conrad Veidt, who will be familiar as principals of the all-time cinema classic Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which I recommended here. Like that famous film, the Hands of Orlac is skillfully made in the expressionist style and is anchored by striking visuals and Veidt’s uncanny ability to convey emotion without dialogue. The film was recently restored with a newly composed soundtrack and became deservedly popular on the classic film festival circuit.

The 1935 version is a talkie that changes the story substantially in an effective way. Here, the surgeon is the central character and is driven by his lust for Orlac’s wife rather than any desire to help the composer. This was Peter Lorre’s first American film and he’s magnetic as a villain who is loathsome in some ways and pitiable in others. I like this version even better than the original because of Lorre’s strong performance, director Karl Freund’s visual sensibilities and the tighter pacing.

Here is a short promotional film made for the US release of the 1935 version. It’s more than a traditional trailer because while Lorre was a big star in Germany, Hollywood had to introduce him to American audiences.

Categories
Action/Adventure Horror/Suspense

Tarantula

“Invasion of the Giant-Sized X” films were almost their own genre in the 1950s. Many of them were wretched (Attack of the 50 Foot Woman being generally considered the nadir), but some of them stand the test of time. If forced to choose my favorite giant insect film I would go with Them!, but since spiders are not insects I feel I have the right to also have a favorite giant spider movie: 1955’s Tarantula.

I preface this recommendation by expressing an opinion about B-movies, which is no one should be ashamed of making one as long as they know that is what they are doing. B-movies that pretend to be A-movies are typically an agony to view, but films that use a modest budget to achieve modest ambitions can be highly satisfying for the audience. The Frightened City, which I recommend here, is one such worthy B-movie, and Tarantula is another. The makers’ goal was to tell an entertaining, scary monster story, and they pulled it off.

Like most of the giant critter films, this one begins with science gone awry, in the person of reclusive Professor Gerald Deemer (the wily old pro, Leo J. Carroll). He is concerned about the world’s food supply because he projects that by the year 2000, the Earth’s population will be — wait for it — 3.6 billion! Injections of a radioactive nutrient seem like a sensible alternative to traditional food: just look at how quickly Deemer’s test animals are growing. In the meantime, no one is trying the nutrient on humans, are they?

Continue reading “Tarantula”
Categories
British Drama

The Stars Look Down

The last remaining British coal mine recently closed, bringing a way of life to an end. My Welsh ancestors were among those who worked in this industry, giving movies about life in the pit a special power for me. The movie about British mining towns that Americans are most likely to recall is the John Ford classic How Green Was My Valley, but there’s a film of this sort I appreciate even more: The Stars Look Down.

Fans of my recommended film Night Train to Munich will be justifiably excited to watch The Stars Look Down, which was made immediately before it by the same director (Sir Carol Reed) and stars (Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood). But the two films otherwise could not be more different. The Stars Look Down is a working class drama with fewer light moments and a more downbeat final act than Night Train to Munich, making it a much more weighty work.

The plot: In a grim Northern English town, miners toil in Scupper Flats, seeking to extract the coal from the earth without breaking through to the millions of tons of water that threatens their existence. The Fenwicks are like any other family in town, except that their elder son Davey (Redgrave) has earnt a scholarship. Davey hopes that a proper education will enable him to become an effective political advocate for exploited miners. But he is diverted from his plans by his love of a local lass named Jenny (Lockwood), whose desire to immediately escape the miserable trappings of working class life lead Davey to sacrifice his educational opportunities. Meanwhile, his erstwhile friend and Jenny’s former beau Joe Gowlan (Emlyn Williams) also tries to make his way in the world, but does so by betraying his roots, with disastrous consequences.

Redgrave and Lockwood are both terrific here, playing characters a million miles from the light-hearted lovers of Night Train to Munch (and before that, the charming couple in peril in another of my recommendations, The Lady Vanishes). I was particularly impressed by Atwood’s willingness to break away from being everyone’s sweetheart and instead play a petty, grasping human being who is at the same time sympathetic (after all, she is only what poverty made her). Emlyn Williams, remembered mainly as an author, gives one of his best performances, starting out as somewhat comic and then devolving into unmitigated avarice. Under Reed’s direction, the supporting performances are also strong, most affectingly Nancy Price’s portrayal of Davey’s hard-bitten mother.

A.J. Cronin adapted his own novel to co-write the script with J.B. Williams, and it’s appropriately unromantic about how cruel working class people can be to each other and how ambivalent they sometimes are about one of their own rising to a different class. The only weakness of the script is the opening and closing voiceover narration, something that worked very well in Reed’s best film, The Third Man, but seems heavy-handed here. But it’s an easily ignored flaw in an otherwise dramatic and powerful script.

Last but not least, the special effects and camerawork in the mining scenes are extraordinarily vivid. Reed knew how to draw the audience into the lives of his characters, even when their fear of the horrors of the pit would make them want to pull away. The result is a meaty working class drama with shattering emotional impact.

p.s. One person who experienced that impact was my one-time Reality Based Community co-blogger Michael O’Hare’s mother, the sculptor Berta Margoulies (1907-1996). Her 1942 piece, Mine Disaster, in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, was directly inspired by The Stars Look Down.

Image Courtesy of the Whitney Museum
Categories
Comedy Romance

When Harry Met Sally…

I recommended Steve Martin’s effort to make a Woody Allen movie (L.A. Story); let me now recommend Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron’s attempt to do the same: When Harry Met Sally….

In one of the signature romantic comedies of the 1980s, college students Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) meet not-so-cute on a long drive east. He is slovenly, self-involved and a bit of a sexist pig. She is uptight, judgmental and a million miles from being in touch with her feelings. They grate on each other during the road trip and forget about each afterwards, until a chance meeting some years later. Harry, chastened by a messy divorce, has become less smug and more likable to Sally. Sally in contrast thinks she has found enduring love with Joe (Steven Ford), making romance with Harry out of the question. With the possibility of a sexual relationship out of the way (or is it?), they can develop (or can they?) something neither of them has had before: A platonic, intimate friendship with a member of the opposite sex.

The extremely positive audience reaction to this funny, warm film was a surprise to its makers in 1989, but When Harry Met Sally is now widely considered a treasure of the genre. The leads create appealing, funny characters (much on set ad libbing helped enormously, making an amusing script even moreso). Strong supporting work by the two best friend foil characters is another asset (Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher), not least because Ephron’s script is perceptive and honest about how men and women talk about each other when the other sex isn’t around.

As a director, Reiner — on whose dating experiences this film is partly based — wisely puts significant faith in his actors, which is richly rewarded. In preparing for the film he interviewed long-standing couples about their marriages, and adapted these stories into charming inserts in which the mysteries of love are explained by those for whom it all worked out in the end.

This film mirrors Woody Allen’s magnificent Annie Hall so closely in plot, location, themes – even the opening credits and music – that it’s hard not to compare the two films. Annie Hall has more big laughs and although Crystal and Ryan are good they are simply not performers at the level of Allen and Keaton. As for comedic tone, Annie Hall has some bite whereas When Harry Met Sally — consistent with the dominant style of its era — is punch-pulling fluff; viewer preferences for style of humor will make one or the other movie a more rewarding experience, and de gustibus non est disputandum.

But in one respect, the more recent film leaves Annie Hall in the dust. Allen’s film is made entirely from his male point of view, but the Ephron-scripted When Harry Met Sally is more gender-balanced in its take on heterosexual romance and also develops its female characters more fully. The result is a winning date movie, whether it’s a first date or a 30th anniversary.

Categories
Action/Adventure Drama Romance

To Have and Have Not

Star Wars: The Force Awakens was a good example of how recycling characters and plot from a wildly popular movie can led to tedious viewing. An infinitely more successful effort to rip-off a prior cinema classic is Howard Hawk’s To Have and Have Not.

Perhaps the greatest film ever produced via the old Hollywood studio system — Casablanca — was still playing in a few theaters when production began on To Have and Have Not. Although putatively based on a Hemingway novel, To Have and Have Not recycles Casablanca’s characters, plot, style and indeed some of its cast to tremendous effect. In the Ingrid Bergman role of a resourceful, beautiful woman with a past, the incomparable Lauren Bacall became an instant star as well as Bogart’s real-life bride.

The plot: Humphrey Bogart again plays an outwardly cynical man of the world who doesn’t want to get involved in World War II intrigue, despite the pleas of the idealists around him. But the better angels of his nature and an alluring stranger (Bacall) pull him into the fight on behalf of the Free French versus the hateful, corrupt Vichy regime that oversees the Island of Martinique. Nearly peerless entertainment ensues.

The movie has exciting moments of high tension as well as some laughs, but what positively sizzles here is the interaction between “Bogie and Baby”, who were soon to become an enduring Hollywood power couple beloved by millions. May-December romance in the movies can be unrealistic and even downright gross, but here it’s so deeply felt that it works. The two stars were in each other’s thrall, which puts spark and wit into their scenes together. Some immortal lines in the script (“You know how to whistle don’t you?”) enliven their exchanges, which is a credit to Jules Furthman and William Faulkner (Since the average Faulkner sentence runs about 50 pages, I lean towards crediting Furthman with the best one-liners).

The film also features one of Walter Brennan’s many memorable supporting actor turns, this time as Bogie’s alcoholic friend Eddie (See Carl Rollyson’s thoughtful take on Eddie here). Also on hand is the appealing actor-musician Hoagy Carmichael (for another fine Hoagy performance see my recommendation of Canyon Passage). He’s well-cast as the piano player at Rick’s Cafe, um, I mean, Frenchy’s bar. In one of the movie’s highlights, Hoagy and his band back up Bacall as she gives a sultry rendition of his song “How Little We Know”. The studio has originally planned to dub her, but she pulled off the musical number on her own.

I first saw To Have and Have Not as a teenager, and immediately fell in love with Lauren Bacall. I suppose it may reflect a lack of emotional development on my part that I am still just as enchanted by her four decades later…but what can you do?.

p.s. The film might have been the only high point in Lauren Bacall’s career if not for some luck and favorable Hollywood politics surrounding The Big Sleep.

p.p.s. Hollywood did eventually make a more faithful adaptation of Hemingway’s book under the title The Breaking Point.