Monthly Archives: February 2015

Body and Soul
Directed by Robert Rossen
Written by Abraham Polonsky
1947/USA
Enterprise Productions
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Charlie Davis: What are you gonna do? Kill me? Everybody dies.[/box]

From before the blacklist, when boxing was a stand-in for cut throat capitalism. John Garfield is terrific as a scrapper who almost loses his soul to the game.

Charlie Davis (Garfield) is a talented amateur boxer who lives with his parents above their candy store, dreaming of bigger and better things.  His mother (Anne Revere) wants him to give up the ring and get an education.  His friend Shorty is trying to get him an in with manager Quinn (William Conrad) to turn pro.  Charlie’s father secretly supports Charlie’s boxing ambitions but is killed suddenly when the speakeasy next to the shop is blown up.  For awhile, Charlie stays home to please his mother.  It is then that he meets and falls in love with beautiful immigrant painter Peg (Lilli Palmer).   But he can’t get work and when a welfare worker comes around Charlie defies his mother and starts fighting for Quinn to get money.

Charlie defeats all comers as a pro.  Soon he and Quinn are looking for a championship bout.  Nobody can get one without the backing of ruthless promoter Roberts.  Roberts wants nothing less than half of Charlie.  As he waits for his fight, Quinn and Roberts show Charlie the high life, complete with wine, women and song.  By the time the championship fight is sight, Charlie is thoroughly corrupted and prefers money even at the cost of Peg and Shorty.

Finally Charlie is scheduled for a championship bout with  Ben Chaplin (Canada Lee) who, unbeknownst to him but not to anyone else, is suffering from a life-threatening blood clot in the brain.  A KO in the ring almost takes Ben’s life.  But despite learning that his keepers have set him up for this mockery of a fight, Charlie takes it in stride only hiring Ben as his sparring partner to make up for it.  Charlie gets softer and softer the higher he flies until the time when he must make a final choice between money and integrity.

The film is the prototypical boxing movie in which the hero must prove his mettle when asked to take a dive.  Here though, the moral issues take on a philosophical and political significance thanks to the pointed and pithy dialogue of Abraham Polonski (Force of Evil).  In addition, what sets Body and Soul apart from more pedestrian fare is a the mesmerizing performance by Garfield and the gritty fight sequences, cited by Martin Scorsese as as inspiration for Raging Bull.  Nobody did shiny night streets better than cinematographer James Wong Howe and we get these in abundance here.

Per IMDb, an extremely large number of the cast and crew on the film – writer Abraham Polonsky, actors John Garfield, Anne Revere, Lloyd Gough, Canada Lee, Art Smith, Shimen Ruskin, producer Bob Roberts and, to a lesser extent, cinematographer Howe – found themselves either blacklisted or greylisted during the HUAC witch hunts of the 1950s, while director Robert Rossen only avoided that fate by naming names.

Body and Soul won the Oscar for Best Film Editing.  It was nominated in the categories of Best Actor and Best Writing, Original Screenplay.

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Record of a Tenement Gentleman (“Nagaya shinshiroku”)
Directed by Yasujirô Ozu
Written by Tadao Ikeda and Yasujirô Ozu
1947/Japan
Shôchiku Eiga
First viewing/Hulu Plus

[box] Some mothers are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together. ~Pearl S. Buck[/box]

Ozu sets his first post-War film in a Tokyo where residents live on the margins, scrounging for everyday items like mirrors and garden hoses and waiting for food to become available.

In this atmosphere, a fortune-teller (Chishû Ryô) finds  a lost or abandoned homeless boy who will not stop following him.  He takes him home but his flat mate seems to be beset by romantic difficulties (we overhear this in one of the most bizarre film openings ever) and is unwilling to take the child.  The two dump the boy for “one night” on neighbor Tane (Chôko Iida).  Tane, a childless widow, resists taking the child and is even less impressed when he turns out to be a bedwetter with fleas.

The very next day Tane makes the long walk to the neighborhood where the boy last lived with his father.  The father has moved.  Now Tane curses the father and does all in her power to lose the boy.  But no such luck.  So they continue their fretful co-existence until the day Tane wets the bed again and runs away and Tane finds she will search high and low until she finds him.

This film ends on an uncharacteristically dogmatic note with Tane calling for a return to the old ways, before “modern” self-centeredness took hold.  This somewhat mars the proceedings which are basically light and airy.  Ozu had a special way with children and it is totally evident here.  This would also be worth watching just to see Ryô entertain his neighbors with a recitation from his old days with a peep-show.

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Undercurrent
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
Written by Thelma Strabel and Edward Chodorov
1946/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Ann Hamilton: If I relax, I’ll drop dead.[/box]

Imagine a universe where Robert Mitchum and Katharine Hepburn appear together in a film noir directed by Vincente Minnelli.  Sound intriguing?  Unfortunately, all the money, gloss, and star power at MGM’s disposal could not save the train wreck of the story that surrounds this effort.

Confirmed spinster Ann Hamilton (Katharine Hepburn) changes her mind when dashing inventor Alan Garroway (Robert Taylor) comes calling on her scientist father (Edmund Gwenn) and the two soon marry.  Ann is practically giddy with love for the handsome Alan and he responds by dressing her to wow his society friends.  Before too long, some cracks begin to appear in Alan’s facade, however.  He appears to be pathologically jealous of his long-lost brother Michael.  When Ann and Alan visit Alan’s old home in Virginia, Ann has plenty of innocent questions about the family.  He reacts to all of these with cold fury at her “prying”.  She also catches him in a lie about his mother.

Ann being Ann, she cannot resist playing detective.  When Alan leaves her on her own in San Francisco she looks up one of his old friends (Jayne Meadows).  The woman believes that Michael may be dead.  Then Ann pays a visit to Alan’s California ranch and starts pumping the caretaker (Robert Mitchum) for info.  This infuriates Alan to the extent that Ann begins to believe the woman’s story and eventually to fear for her own life.

There is nothing wrong with this movie that a better story and script could not fix. The movie took much too long to get where it was going and I found the Hepburn character’s motivation simply incredible.  The movie also could not quite figure out where it stood on Alan, playing more on Taylor’s good looks than his menace until the final minutes.  This was billed as a film noir in The Film Noir Guide but it would better be described as a romance/thriller/melodrama, unfortunately lacking in thrills for this viewer.

Trailer (spoiler)

The Girl I Loved (“Waga koi seshi otome”)
Directed by Keisuke Kinoshita
Written by Keisuke Kinoshita
1946/Japan
Shôchiku Eiga
First viewing/Hulu Plus

[box] A young black bull said hello to a cute cow/ He couldn’t say anything after that/ That’s why it’s spring in the pasture/ It’s always spring in the pasture (from a folk song used throughout the film)[/box]

It seems I have been soldiering through too many movies that drag lately. Although this simple story spends minutes at a time on scenery and faces, I was captivated the entire time. Shows what a bit of poetry can do.

Baby girl Yoshiko is found abandoned, wrapped in her mother’s dancing dress, by a kindly Japanese ranching family. We watch Yoshiko grow up in montage, always accompanied by her attentive older “brother” Jingo.  Yoshiko grows into womanhood while Jingo is off at war for five years.  When he returns, Jingo’s feeling are more than brotherly and everyone is expecting a match.  But as he works up the courage to propose, Yoshiko is working up her own courage to ask his blessing on her marriage to a lame intellectual evacuee in town.

One of the many charms of this film is its glimpse into rural Japan immediately following World War II.  The life is still traditional in many ways and we see a folk festival along with many scenes of work with cattle and horses – all beautifully shot.  The scene in which the two rivals gain understanding through their war experiences is very moving.  Although there is little action or suspense, I cared so much about the characters that I was with them all the way.