Monthly Archives: September 2014

Hangmen Also Die!
Directed by Fritz Lang
Written by Fritz Lang, Berthold Brecht, and John Wexley
1943/USA
Arnold Pressburger Films
Repeat viewing/Amazon Instant Video

[box] Czech Patriot: Your mothers were slimy rats! Their milk was sewer water![/box]

Lang and Brecht bring their special understanding of and hatred for Nazis and their genius to this exciting thriller about the Czech resistance.  Although the story kind of gets away from them in the last act, this is a compelling and beautifully shot movie.

The story is a fictional account of the real-life assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich by Czech resistance fighters.

Masha Novotny (Anna Lee) is quietly buying some turnips when she sees a man scurrying through the street.  Some Gestapo officers question her and she points them in the wrong direction.  So begins a nightmare for her entire family and the city of Prague.  The man, who calls himself Karel Vanek, (Brian Donlevy) has just assassinated Heydrich, better known to the Czech populace as The Hangman.  “Vanek”, who has nowhere else to hide, makes his way to Masha’s apartment with roses saying he met Masha at the symphony.  It is turning curfew and, being careful not to ask any questions, Masha’s father Stephen (Walter Brennan), a prominent history scholar, invites Vanek to stay the night.

The next day, the Gestapo rounds up 400 hostages, saying that it will execute ten per day until the assassin is caught.  Stephen is caught up in this net.  Masha puts some remarks Vanek made together and locates him in his real identity, Dr. Franticheck Svoboda, a surgeon at the hospital.  She castigates him for not giving himself up.  She is so outraged that she goes to the Gestapo to try to get her father out of jail by revealing Svoboda as the assassin.  The things she witnesses at Gestapo Headquarters, however, cause her to make a vain attempt to flee.  Now she is well and truly in the soup as crafty Gestapo investigator Gruber gradually begins suspecting her and her family’s connection with the case.

Patriotism wins out and Masha starts assisting Svoboda in his cat and mouse game with the authorities.  In the meantime, we get a subplot about the Czech resistance cell Svoboda works with and Gestapo informer Emil Czaka (Gene Lockart).  The third act deals with an elaborate resistance plot to eliminate Czaka and free the hostages in one masterful stroke.  With Dennis O’Keefe as Masha’s fiancé and a score of fantastic character actors, many of them foreign born.

Lang’s Nazis are anything but stupid, a refreshing change from other patriotic movies of the period.  They are piggish, thuggish, and merciless, though.  They don’t even have to talk. The way Lang shoots them tells the whole story.  The plot, which unfortunately gets more and more incredible toward the end, never stops being suspenseful.  The tension in the first part gets almost unbearable in places.   The performances are all top-notch.  Donlevy is wonderful and the supporting players are even better.  Walter Brennan plays his part without tics and lends a quiet dignity to the proceedings.  The look of film is enhanced by the beautiful lighting of James Wong Howe.  Highly recommended.

Some might say that this is “propaganda”.  Given the life-and-death struggle for survival that was going on at the time, I am prepared to cut the patriotic impulses of filmmakers a lot of slack.  The recently restored print looks fantastic.

Hangmen Also Die! was nominated for Oscars in the categories of Best Sound, Recording and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (Hanns Eisler)

Trailer

Old Acquaintance
Directed by Vincent Sherman
Written by John Van Druten and Lenore J. Coffee from a play by Van Druten
1943/USA
Warner Bros
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Kit Marlowe: It’s late, and I’m very, very tired of youth and love and self-sacrifice.[/box]

Compared to Miriam Hopkins, Bette Davis looks like a method actress.

Kit Marlow (Davis) and Millie Drake (Hopkins) have been best friends since childhood, though one would be hard pressed to explain why.  As the movie opens, Kit, a young “literary” novelist, visits the newly married Millie.  We find out that Millie is also expecting a baby.  Millie swiftly shows off her personality by throwing tantrums whenever she doesn’t get her way.  Kit, who knows her well, can make the tears go away merely by saying she envies her something.  Millie’s hen-pecked husband Preston (John Loder) takes a liking to Kit right away.  Millie gives Kit her first manuscript, a romance novel, to read.  As the story proceeds, we will see that Kit will get the critical acclaim but Millie will be the one who gets rich from her writing.

The years pass.  Kit becomes a friend and companion to Millie’s daughter Deirdre, whose mother has no time for her.  Preston falls in love with Kit and she with him but she is too loyal a friend to even listen to Preston’s declarations.  Preston gets enough of catering to Millie’s self-centered lifestyle and leaves her.

More years pass.  Kit is having a romance with a younger man (Gig Young).  Diedre is interested in him too.  I think most readers will see where this is going.

It is worth seeing this movie just to witness the much-anthologized clip of Davis shaking Hopkins in its proper context.   It is really satisfying to see this after spending most of the story wanting to shake, or slap, Hopkins oneself.  Millie is supposed to be a self-dramatizing, skittish, bigger-than-life character and Hopkins milks every last bit of juice out of it, bordering on camp.  Davis on the other hand is in her self-sacrificing career-girl mode, and quite natural for her.  It is fascinating to see her change as her character ages throughout the movie.

The Warner Home Video DVD I watched had an excellent commentary by director Vincent Sherman and a Davis biographer.  It was fun to listen to Sherman’s war stories about shooting this film and his saga with the lovelorn Davis, which he takes almost, but not quite, to what happened after he took her home from dinner.

The revenge of Bette Davis

Le Corbeau (The Raven)
Directed by Georges-Henri Clouzot
Written by Louis Chavance and Georges-Henri Clouzot
1943/France
Continental Films
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Dr. Vorzet: You think that people are all good or all bad. You think that good means light and bad means night? But where does night end and light begin? Where is the borderline? Do you even know which side you belong on? [/box]

This brilliant thriller managed to make all sides mad in Occupied France.

Dr. Remy Germain (Pierre Fresnay) came not so long ago to practice in a small French town and specializes in difficult deliveries.  He has performed a few where he saved the mother at the cost of the baby, not always the orthodox outcome.  He is also very friendly with the elderly local psychiatrist’s young wife, a friendship which her sister roundly disapproves.

People start recieving ugly poison pen letters signed by “The Raven”.  They start out as a campaign against Germain, calling him an abortionist and adulterer.  The letters build to the point where all the dirty secrets of the townspeople are revealed, escalating to a climax when a patient at the hospital is told by The Raven he has terminal cancer and commits suicide.  The town is driven to a kind of mass hysteria.  The investigation, led by the psychiatrist who is also a handwriting expert, turns up many suspects.  Is it the psychiatrist’s sister-in-law, a cold Puritanical nurse?  Is it the young postal clerk who regularly dips into the till?  How about the crippled woman Germain has a one-night stand with?  Clouzot keeps you guessing until the final five minutes of the story.

Clouzot is a genius at portraying the dark underbelly of life.  It’s just a marvel to watch how he can take a simple prop and make it look completely sinister.  Although I thought the film dragged a bit in parts, it remained suspenseful.  I love Fresnay and all the other performances are appropriately menacing.

According to Wikipedia, Le Corbeau generated controversy from the right-wing Vichy regime, the left-wing Resistance press and the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church considered the film “painful and hard, constantly morbid in its complexity”.  The Vichy press dubbed it the antithesis of the Révolution nationale and demanded it be banned due to its immoral values. The anti-Nazi resistance press considered it Nazi propaganda because of its negative portrayal of the French populace. Two days before the release of Le Corbeau, the German-owned Continental films fired Clouzot.

Personally, I consider this film less an allegory than entirely consistent with the tenor of misanthropy present in all of Clouzot’s work. Somehow that misanthropy only adds to the delicious thrills delivered by the European Master of Suspense.  Recommended.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Five Graves to Cairo
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett based on the Lajos Biró play Hotel Imperial
1943/USA
Paramount Pictures
Repeat viewing/TCM DVD

[box] Lt. Schwegler: Our complaints are brief. We make them against the nearest wall.[/box]

[box] On the first day that director Billy Wilder’s hero, Erich von Stroheim arrived on set, Wilder ran to the wardrobe department to welcome him. He said: “This is a very big moment in my life . . . that I should now be directing the great Stroheim. Your problem, I guess, was that you were ten years ahead of your time.” Von Stroheim replied: “Twenty.” — from the IMDb trivia[/box]

Billy Wilder’s second directorial effort has little of his characteristic humor or cynicism.  It is, however, a very well-made and entertaining spy story, light on the propaganda for its period.

Cpl. John Bramble (Franchot Tone) has fallen behind the retreating British Army in his tank. He is the sole survivor and manages to stagger to The Empress of Britain hotel in the Egyptian Desert.  The last occupants of this hotel are its Egyptian owner Farid (Akim Tamiroff) and French chambermaid Mouche (Anne Baxter).  Everyone else has either fled or been killed in a recent German bombing raid.  Farid takes pity on the soon unconscious Bramble over the strong objection of Mouche, who resents the British for  “leaving behind French soldiers when they evacuated Dunkirk.” Then the German army arrives escorting Field Marshall Rommel (Eric von Stroheim) whose men commandeer the hotel as a headquarters.  They are well-informed on the staff of the hotel.

Bramble manages to hide himself.  Then, somewhat miraculously (given his strong American accent), he manages to convince the Germans that he is the Alsatian waiter Davos.  Davos just so happened to have been a German spy, now laying under a ton of rubble in the cellar, and is accepted by the High Command with open arms.

More Germans arrive with some British POWs, including high officers.  A la von Rauffenstein in Grand Illusion, Rommel dines with his prisoners and goads them with lots of information about his strategy.  Bramble has previously overheard talk about the five graves to Cairo.  He had planned to assassinate Rommel with a stolen gun but the British tell him that dead men have no secrets and he should try to ascertain the German battle plan instead.

So begins Bramble’s dangerous quest for the story of the five graves.  In the meantime, Mouche is trying to get her wounded younger brother out of a German POW camp. Rommel refuses her but his lying, idealogue aide-de-camp promises to try to help her in exchange for her favors.  While there is any chance that her wish be granted, Mouche is decidedly unhelpful to Bramble.

Despite the fact that the story relies heavily on the naiveté of the Germans and some incredible coincidences, it is exciting and enjoyable.  The stand-out performance is given by the fiery Baxter, who manages to maintain her French accent admirably unlike the other actors who either don’t try (Tone) or try and fail (von Stroheim).  I always like to watch Tamiroff.  I think by the time he was through he portrayed every nationality possible. The production is top-notch with beautiful low-key lighting.  The Germans, especially Rommel, are extremely reasonable for a movie of this era though we do get some patriotic, morale-boosting speeches out of Bramble by the end.

Five Graves to Cairo was nominated for Academy Awards in three categories:  Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (John F. Seitz); Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White; and Best Film Editing.

Trailer

The More the Merrier
Directed by George Stevens
Written by Robert Russell, Frank Ross, Richard Flournoy, and Lewis R. Foster
1943/USA
Columbia Pictures Corporation
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

Benjamin Dingle: [singing] In love or war, with people like us, we’ve got to work fast or we’ll miss the bus. If you straddle a fence and you sit and wait, you get too little and you get it too late./ What’ll you say if we see it through, you stick by me and I’ll stick by you. And our 18 children will be glad we said… / “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead./ And our 18 children will be glad we said, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

Any film in which my heartthrob Joel McCrea either takes off his shirt or is in love is going to get my vote.  This one has that and much, much more.

The war has created a huge housing shortage in Washington, DC.  Connie Milligan (Jean Arthur) feels it is her duty to rent out a room in her apartment.  At the same time, wealthy Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn) has arrived in the city to discuss his plans to build additional housing units.  He gets there two days before his hotel reservation and is without a place to stay – until he sees Connie’s ad in the paper.  Although there is a crowd of applicants waiting on the doorstep for Connie’s return from work and although Connie had firmly decided on a female roommate, the crafty Dingle manages to muscle his way into her apartment for a week.  He promptly decides she need a clean-cut top-drawer young man and is unimpressed with Connie’s description of her middle-aged bureaucrat fiancé.

So when Sgt. Joe Carter (McCrea) shows up with the for-rent ad in his hands, Dingle rents half of his room to him.  After meeting Connie’s stuffy fiance, and despite the fact that Joe has orders to leave for Africa in two days, Dingle uses his “damn the torpedos” attitude to get him together with Connie.  It doesn’t hurt that the two are clearly ga-ga for each other.

The kissing scene in this movie cemented my love affair with Joel McCrea.  It is remarkably sexual for something from the Code years.  The way Coburn manages to make a basically pushy and obnoxious character endearing is marvelous.  Added to that is a very witty screenplay and Steven’s characteristic skill in humanizing a story.  So what that people are falling in love at the drop of a hat.  I’m completely ready to suspend my disbelief for this one.  Highly recommended.

Charles Coburn won the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for his wonderful performance in this film.  The More the Merrier was nominated for five additional Oscars:  Best Picture; Best Director; Best Actress; Best Writing, Original Story; and Best Writing, Screenplay.

Clip – Connie’s system breaks down