Monthly Archives: October 2014

The North Star (AKA Armored Attack)
Directed by Lewis Milestone
Written by Lillian Hellman
1943/USA
The Samuel Goldwyn Company
First viewing/Amazon Prime Instant Video

Lakin, bearded schoolmaster: It is not my custom to start your vacation with a lecture, but this is the summer of 1941 – a solemn time. No one of us knows what will happen. I don’t have to remind you that we are people with a noble history. You are expected to carry on that history with complete devotion and self-sacrifice. I think you’ll do that. And now, have a happy summer.

If you can set aside any knowledge of Ukrainian or Soviet history, this odd mixture of folk musical and Nazi-resistance drama is not half bad.

In the folk musical portion of the film, we are introduced to the happy villagers of North Star, a collective farm near the border.  They sing and dance the hours away in happy teasing families.  Dr. Kurin (Walter Huston) is the head of the Pavlov family comprised of his daughter (Ann Harding) and son-in-law (Dean Jagger) and grandchildren Marina (Ann Baxter), Claudia (Jane Withers) and a couple of younger ones.  The Simonov clan is headed by Boris, a commune leader.  His children include Kolya (Dana Andrews), a bombardier in the Soviet Air Force who is on leave and Damion (an impossibly young Farley Granger in his screen debut).  Damion Simonov and Marina Pavlov are in love.  Old Karp (Walter Brennan) is the repository of tradition, who fought in the “last war” (presumably the Soviet civil war) which made the village “free”.   It is the end of the school year and, led by Kolya, the teenagers are thrilled to be making a walking tour to the big city of Kiev.

As the young people are on their blissful walking trip, they run into Karp who is driving a wagon and offers to give them a ride for part of the way.  After they get into the cart, the Nazi bombers start to stream in and the cart caravan carrying the teenagers is hit.   Simultaneously, bombs rain down on the village.  The villagers decide to send the able-bodied men into the forest to fight as guerrillas and to set their houses, crops, etc. on fire at the first sight of Nazi occupying troops.  Boris Simonov goes off to get guns and ammunition for the fighters.  His cart is bombed on the way back with the guns.  The young people discover Boris on the road and take over the dangerous task of taking the guns back to the village along back roads, aided by the wiley and experienced Karp.  Kolya rejoins his unit.

In the meantime, Nazi troops start heading for the village.  Their plan is to turn the local hospital into a regional field hospital for German soldiers.  Dr. von Harden (Erich von Stroheim in one of his trademark “good Nazi” roles) heads up the German medical team.  It turns out that he is familiar with the work of Dr. Kurin and respects him.  The other doctors are not such “good” Nazis.  They turn to the children of the village for blood to transfuse into German wounded soldiers.  Many other barbarities and heroism by the villagers and teenagers on the road ensue.

With this cast, you know the film has to have its high points.  One of them for me is a pretty glorious stand off between Walter Huston and Erich von Stroheim.  Jane Withers is another delight as the plump, clumsy, and romantic Claudia.  Andrews is quite good as the cocky, rather arrogant Kolya. The action scenes are exciting and well staged, as one should expect from Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front).

One of the problem areas of the film is its inconsistent tone.  The first thirty or forty minutes are devoted to patriotic and traditional singing composed by Aaron Copeland with lyrics by Ira Gershwin.  It strains credulity that these Ukrainians are so darned happy to have been “freed” from their farms by the efforts of Stalin (unnamed in the film) to live in this collective paradise.  But this is a screenplay by Lillian Hellman who must actually have believed this stuff at the time.  The film also ignores the fact that the the “border” regions of The Ukraine had only become part of the Soviet Union following that country’s invasion of Poland in 1939. If you imagine that this film takes place in an alternative universe, however, lots of it works quite well.

Clip – singing at the beginning of the walking vacation

Mexicanos al grito de guerra
Directed by Álvaro Gálvez y Fuentes and Ismael Rodríguez
Written by Álvaro Gálvez y Fuentes, Joselito Rodríguez and Elvira de la Mora
1943/Mexico
Producciones Rodríguez Hermanos
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Mexicans, at the cry of war,/ make ready the steel and the bridle,/ and may the Earth tremble at its centers/ at the resounding roar of the cannon! — Mexican National Anthem [/box]

Made at the height of Mexican cinema’s Golden Age, this is a nice telling of the origin of the country’s national anthem during its fight against France to keep its independence.

Lt. Luis Sandoval (Mexican heartthrob Pedro Infante) is a patriot and student of Jaime Nunó, who in a burst of inspiration writes a poem for a competition to come up with a national anthem.  Later a composer puts the words to music.  The song wins the competition but is almost totally ignored, its premier being snubbed by corrupt President Santa Anna.  Later the common people bring the song to national hero Benito Juarez, who embraces it.  When the French take the advantage of Mexico’s inability to pay off its huge foreign debt to install Emperor Maximilian, Juarez and his supporters go into battle against them and the song rallies his troops to victory.

Running parallel to this story is Luis’s choice of his country over his father, a supporter of the French, and his love for the niece of the French Amassador.

The film is full of pride and sentiment and is very competently made.  The battle sequence at the end is stirring and Infante is appealing and convincing. It made a nice companion piece to Warner Brother’s film Juarez (1939), starring Paul Muni, Bette Davis, and Brian Ahern.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1esOZqQmHpw

The Mexican Army takes up their national anthem at the Battle of Pueblo (no subtitles but this is almost entirely action)

Air Force
Directed by Howard Hawks
Written by Dudley Nichols
1943/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing/Amazon Instant Video

[box] Sgt. Joe Winocki: [overhearing the Pearl Harbor attack on the radio] Hey, Peterson, who you got tuned in, Orson Welles?[/box]

Air Force is a solid piece of wartime propaganda, this time in the air.

An air crew comprised of the usual assortment of Hollywood types has been assigned to deliver a new bomber, the “Mary Ann”, to Pearl Harbor.  They happen to leave the West Coast on the December 6, 1941.  The men include the co-captain (Gig Young), who is love with the sister of the bomber (Arthur Kennedy), a disgruntled gunner who is looking forward to leaving the army in three weeks (John Garfield), a grizzled veteran of the last war who is the crew leader (Harry Carry), a New Yorker (George Tobias), a couple of rookies, etc.

The crew witnesses the wreckage of the attack on Pearl Harbor from the air and are told o divert to the nearest airfield.  This is in Maui where they are shot at by Japanese snipers. (We are also told that Japanese-Americans destroyed planes at Hickham Field in trucks disguised as delivering produce. This is total fiction.)  The plane is forced back to Pearl Harbor.  The men go to visit the bomber’s sister who was wounded in the attack.  They repair damage to their plane and are sent on to the Philippines.  The attack has converted the gunner from a cynic to a patriot and he bravely shoots down some fighters en route to Wake Island for refueling.

By the time the bomber gets to Wake Island, it has been severely damaged in the aerial combat.  The men, against orders, scavenge spare parts from other planes to repair the Mary Ann.  They pick up some bombs and head out to the Philippines.  More adventures ensue.

This is quite OK for what it is, a kind of survey of the beginning of the war when things were pretty bleak showing American determination to fight back no matter what the cost.

Air Force won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing.  It was nominated in the categories of:  Best Writing, Original Screenplay; Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (James Wong Howe, Elmer Dyer, and Charles A. Marshall); and Best Effects, Special Effects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akV4zfX_E0Y

Trailer

Carnival of Sinners (La main du diable)
Directed by Maurice Tourneur
Written by Jean-Paul de Chanois from a novel by Gérard de Neval
1943/France
Continental Films
First viewing/Hulu Plus

[box] “Son, the greatest trick the Devil pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.” ― David Wong, John Dies at the End[/box]

The highlight of this supernatural tale is Pierre Fresnay’s performance.

A group of travelers is trapped in an Alpine inn by an avalanche.  Into their midst runs a clearly terrified stranger, Roland Brissot (Fresnay), carrying a mysterious parcel.  He panics even more when the parcel is stolen during a power outage.  Then he figures he has nothing to lose by relating his sad history.

A little over a year ago, Brissot was a painter with big ideas (like painting the scent of flowers) but no talent.  His girlfriend and muse had grown disgusted with him.  She walks out on him before their food can even be served at a restaurant.  Despondent, he begins to drink with the chef.  The chef takes the opportunity to tell him about a talisman he has that will grant Brissot all the fame, fortune, and love he could ever want.  In an upstairs room, he shows him the secret – a severed human hand in a casket shaped box.  Although the chef tells him frankly that owning the talisman means forfeiting one’s soul to the devil unless one can sell it at a loss to someone else, Brissot, an unbeliever, agrees to buy it.

The talisman works by giving Brissot a new left hand which paints very strange pictures that are praised by the critics and sell for a fortune.  His girlfriend becomes his adoring wife.  But the Devil, a polite little man dressed in black, comes to claim his due.  Brissot finally grows desperate to rid himself of the hand and the Devil tortures him by offering to take it back for a penny, a price that doubles each day the artist does not and, finally, cannot, come up with the cash.

The film was made by the 70-year-old elder Tourneur in the twilight of his career.  The storytelling is a little creaky and drags at points but nevertheless, has a certain fascination and a fine central performance.  Fresnay ably gives us all the nuances of a pretentious callow youth, a sophisticated artist, and a man on the run from fate.

Clip (no subtitles)