Canyon Passage
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Written by Ernest Pascal from the novel by Ernest Haycox
1946/USA
Universal Pictures
First viewing/Netflix video

Logan Stuart: A man can choose his own gods, Cornelius. What are your gods?

I was expecting a bit more from this Jacques Tourneur-helmed Western. It’s perfectly serviceable, though.

Logan Stuart (Dana Andrews) is a business man in frontier Oregon.  His loyalty to friend George Camrose (Brian Donlevy) seemingly knows no bounds.  It extends even to covering the compulsive gambler’s debts for him.  It is obvious that Camrose’s girlfriend Lucy (Susan Hayward) is actually carrying a torch for Logan.  Logan, however, opts to propose to another, more conventional, farm girl.

The story is composed of elements that did not exactly hang together well for me.  Along with the love triangle, we get an epic brawl with bad guy Honey Bragg (Ward Bond), an Indian attack, and a lynch mob organized by townsman Johnny Steele (Lloyd Bridges) against George Camrose.  With Hoagy Carmichael providing homespun wisdom and a song or two.

I don’t have much to say about this movie.  It was nothing remarkable but Western lovers could certainly do much worse.

Hoagy Carmichael and Jack Brooks were nominated for Best Music, Original Song for “Ole Buttermilk Sky”.

Clip – Final scene with “Ole Buttermilk Sky”

The Stranger
Directed by Orson Welles
Written by Anthony Veiller, Victor Trevas, and Decla Dunning
1946/USA
International Pictures/The Hague Corporation
Repeat viewing/Amazon Instant Video

[box] Mr. Wilson: Well, who but a Nazi would deny that Karl Marx was a German because he was a Jew?[/box]

Orson Welles showed he still had what it took, particularly in those clock scenes.

Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) has a mission in life – to apprehend and punish Nazi war criminals.  He has one released from prison, though, to entrap a bigger fish, one Franz Kindler (Orson Welles).

Wilson follows the released man to Harper, Connecticut, where Kindler is hiding out as Professor Charles Rankin.  “Rankin” is to marry Mary (Loretta Young), daughter of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.  By chance, Mary is in Rankin’s house hanging curtains when the ex-Nazi comes calling.  Rankin manages to take care of the man that very day amid the festivities leaving Mary the only witness who could tie him to his victim.

It doesn’t take the canny Wilson long to see through Rankin.  More difficult is to get Mary to believe that the man she loves could be such a monster.  Mary seems to be headed for a nervous breakdown protecting her husband and Rankin won’t risk his cover for anybody.

Edward G. Robinson is absolutely fantastic in this film.  I put his performance up there with his portrayal of Keyes in Double Indemnity. Loretta Young is very good as the torn Mary. I wonder why I have stopped seeing much of her during my journey through the 40’s.  I like Welles in this, too, though nobody could possibly believe his Rankin had ever been to Germany.  A lot of the film is fairly straight forward but Welles gets some beautiful flourishes in in some menacing scenes in a clock tower.

Victor Trivas was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Story.

Trailer

Gates of the Night (“Les portes de la nuit”)
Directed by Marcel Carné
Written by Jacques Prévert
1946/France
Société Nouvelle Pathé Cinéma
First viewing/Hulu Plus

[box] Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny. — Bob Marley[/box]

Carné returns to the dark side in his follow up to Children of Paradise. As a film noir this is just odd. We do get to witness Yves Montand’s film debut, however, and that is a good thing.

The action takes place on one night in Paris after the liberation of the city but before the end of WWII.  We are introduced first to a street musician whose role will be to play “Autumn Leaves” at key points and to represent Destiny.  The coincidences will flow fast and furious.

Jean Diego (Montand) arrives at a Paris tenement to tell the lady of the Lécuyer household that his friend, her husband, was killed in a reprisal on resistance workers.  It turns out that Raymond is alive and back at work after some torture.  At the same time we meet the Lecuyer’s grasping neighbor, whose son Guy is off being a “war hero”, and Monsieur Quinquina (Carrette) and his brood of 15 children.

Jean and his friends go to dinner at a nearby cafe to celebrate.  There, Destiny tells Jean he will meet a beautiful woman, predicts the drowning death of an inebriated gypsy, and plays “Autumn Leaves”.  Jean finally remembers that he heard the song once in 1939 while he was in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Sure enough, we are introduced to the beautiful Malou and her husband, a war profiteer (Pierre Brasseur). Malou has apparently been attempting to leave her possessive spouse for some time.  She breaks free and returns to her childhood home.  Guess what?  Yes, she is the neighbor’s long lost daughter!  Jean and she are linked by the song she sang on the radio and by some overlapping time on Easter Island.  They fall in love.

Then the “war hero” comes home.  I won’t spoil this further but the coincidences just don’t stop coming.  Despite Destiny’s many warnings to all concerned, tragedy is inevitable.

Carne and Prevert probably intended a grand allegory on post-War retribution on collaborators but it just felt very forced to me.  One of the problems is that the realism of the style does not fit the abstraction of the concept.  No denying that there are some very beautiful shots in the film, though.

Yves Montand got his big break when Jean Gabin and Marlene Dietrich, who were to have starred, pulled out of the picture.

Clip – no subtitles but a chance to see a very young Yves Montand and listen to him sing a phrase or two of “Autumn Leaves”

The Harvey Girls
Directed by George Sidney
Written by Edmund Beloin, Nathaniel Curtis et al from a novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams
1946/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] H.H. Hartsey: Now wait a minute Ms. Bradley. I wanna marry ya, I wanna marry ya somethin’ like all get-out. I wanna marry ya somethin’ awful ma’amm. But please ma’am, please say no.[/box]

The best part is in all those clips. Who would not thrill to Judy Garland singing “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” with a cast of thousands? Sadly, the rest of the movie, while pleasant enough, never reaches that height.

An opening title informs us that Fred Harvey and his train station restaurants, with their “Harvey Girl” waitresses, civilized the Wild West.  Our story begins as a bevy of these beauties heads to Sandrock by train to open Harvey’s latest.  Traveling with them is the feisty Susan Bradley (Garland) who is going to Sandrock to become a mail order bride. When she arrives, she discovers that her intended is a middle-aged rube (Chill Wills) whose letters were ghost written by saloon owner Ned Trent (John Hodiak).  Susan gives Ned a piece of her mind and then becomes a Harvey Girl herself.

The Sandrock powers that be have no interest in seeing the town civilized.  In addition, music hall headliner Em (Angela Lansbury) is mighty jealous over any rival for the attentions of her beloved Ned.  Efforts to frighten the girls away are followed by more serious threats. But the girls are up to the the challenge.  With Marjorie Main as a cook, Preston Foster as a baddie, Cyd Charisse as a Harvey Girl and Ray Bolger as the town’s new blacksmith.

This is an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours but the songs, other than the Oscar winner, and laughs are not such as to make it one of the top musicals.  The DVD I rented had a very interesting commentary by director George Sidney.  The story spent many years in pre-production as a straight Western intended for Clark Gable.

Harry Warren and John Mercer won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe”.  The Harvey Girls was nominated for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture.

Trailer

Anna and the King of Siam
Directed by John Cromwell
Written by Talbot Jennings and Sally Benson from the biography by Margaret Landon
1946/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Kralahome: Mem, I cannot promise that it will ever be easy for you. We have proverb here: “Go up by land, and you meet tiger. Go down by water, and you meet crocodile.” But for you, it will be place to put your life.[/box]

I can’t imagine the filmmakers realized just what an effective critique of colonialism they were making. Nonetheless, this is a solid, entertaining telling of Anna Leonowen’s fictionalization of her own life.

The setting is 1862 Bangkok. Anna Owens (Irene Dunne) has been hired to teach English to the many children of King Mongut (Rex Harrison).  On arrival, she asks to be taken to the house the King promised her but  Prime Minister (Lee J. Cobb) informs her she is to live within the palace.  This turns out to be private quarters in the harem. Anna is unable to meet with the King or start teaching for several weeks.  The King continues to refuse her the house.

When Anna finally does begin teaching, she wages all out war via songs and sayings taught to her pupils (“There’s No Place Like Home”, etc.) until she gets her way.  This is not successful until she also begins assisting the King with his correspondence with Westerners.  Having proved her point, she prepares to leave but the Prime Minister persuades her that the King, who is struggling to preserve Siam’s independence, needs her counsel.

Anna becomes the beloved teacher of not only the King’s children but his wives.  She becomes friendly with first wife Lady Tiang (Gale Sondergaard), the mother of Crown Prince Chulalongkorn.  She spars with the feisty Tuptim (Linda Darnell), current favorite of the King’s many wives.  Anna is unaware that Tuptim was ripped from her beloved fiancee as a gift by her father to the King and is miserable.

The highlight of Anna’s career in Siam is her whirlwind success in Europeanizing the court in time for a visit by the British Counsel General from Singapore.  Siam recently lost Cambodia to the French and the King fears losing is whole kingdom to the British unless he can establish he is not a “barbarian”.  She dresses all the wives in the latest fashions, teaches the King to eat with a knife and fork, and convinces him to widen the gathering to include representatives of other European nations.   The event is a smashing success.

But, when Tuptim escapes the harem to join her lover in a monastery, the King meets out the traditional punishment and only a personal tragedy can prevent Anna from fleeing in horror.

In the wake of the devastation following WWII,  Americans were questioning the whole idea of Empire.  The film reflects this in Anna’s many speeches about individual freedom, rule of law, and national independence.  At the same time, however, the story contains all the worst aspects of colonialism.  Anna has picked up the White Man’s Burden of civilizing the ignorant and showing them the light.    She makes little to no effort to understand the Thais ancient culture or beliefs.

That said, I liked the film.  I was a bit worried about Rex Harrison but I needn’t have been.  In a part that so easily could have been a caricature, he never once steps over the line. He and Dunne have excellent chemistry and their scenes sparkle.  Lee J. Cobb is the least likely looking Asian since Walter Connelly in The Good Earth.  Poor Linda Darnell. She was Zanuck’s favorite beauty and kept being cast as ingenues or in sex pot roles that simply do not suit her, ignoring her true flair for comedy and cynical bad girls.

The DVD I rented contained an excellent biographical documentary on Anna Leonowens, a woman who continually reinvented herself to get her gig in Siam and later to sell books.  She was a young widow without family in a man’s world.  You can’t help admiring her pluck, really.

Anna and the King of Siam won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (Arthur C. Miller) and Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White.  It was nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Sondergaard); Best Writing, Screenplay; and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (Bernard Hermann – beautiful evocative score).

Clip