Category Archives: 1947

The Long Night
Directed by Anatole Litvak
Written by Jacques Viot and John Wesley
1947/USA
Select Productions
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Maximilian: You know, it’s not too easy to kill a man. I ought to know.[/box]

Despite the unfortunate Hollywood ending, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked this remake of Le Jour se leve (1939).

The film begins with the sound of a shot and a man falling down the stairs dead.  It sets up the character of Joe Adams (Henry Fonda) barricaded in his apartment with no means of escape and contemplating how he got himself in this mess.  The story then segues into flashback.

Joe is an ordinary working class guy who returned from the war to take up his old job as a welder.  He meets young, naive Jo Ann (Barbara Bel Geddes) who comes to his workshop to deliver flowers.  The two are taken by how much they have in common, starting with their first names.  In addition, they were both raised in the same orphanage and seem to share a fundamental loneliness.  It is love at first sight for Joe.  The two start seeing each other.

Unfortunately, magician Maximilian the Great (Vincent Price) has already set his sights on the gullible girl.  He is the worst kind of cad  as is well known by his former mistress and assistant Charlene (Ann Dvorak).  Charlene ends the relationship and tries flirting with Joe but he only has eyes for Jo Ann.  Maximillian remains intent on getting into the pants of his victim and resorts to increasingly desperate lies and intimidation.  The rest of the story focuses on Joe’s disillusionment and rage.  With Elisha Cook Jr. as a blind man.

This film gets kind of mixed reviews but I really enjoyed it despite the corny Hollywood ending that undercuts the tragic tale told in the original.  I really like Fonda when his character is at war with the world and he is excellent here.  It was a treat to see Ann Dvorak back on screen after too long.  I didn’t even recognize her until I saw her name in the credits.  Price is suitably smarmy and despicable.  Added to all these pleasures is some gorgeous noir cinematography by Sol Polito and excellent staging by Anatole Litvak.

Clip -near the conclusion

Daisy Kenyon
Directed by Otto Preminger
Written by David Hertz from a novel by Elizabeth Janeway
1947/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Mary Angelus: Want to tell me where you’re going, so I’ll have something to lie about?[/box]

I like Joan Crawford least when she is playing the most desirable thing on wheels.  Here she is all that and too old for the part to boot.

Career girl Daisy Kenryon (Crawford) has been having an affair with hot-shot attorney Dan O’Mara (Dana Andrews) for some time.  O’Mara is saddled with a neurotic wife (Ruth Warrick) and two children and with the extremely irritating habit of calling everybody of whatever gender or age “honeybunch”.  Daisy is conflicted about the relationship but doesn’t do anything to end it until she meets returning serviceman Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda).  Lapham is suffering from the after-effects of combat and the sudden death of his wife in an accident.

Despite little encouragement, Lapham falls madly in love with Daisy.  They marry and Daisy gradually warms to him.  Then O’Mara is caught trying to patch things up with his former mistress and his wife asks for a divorce.  Daisy must now decide between her two loves. That is basically the whole story.  Any one aware of the requirements of the Hayes Code will be in no doubt as to the outcome.

This is a very well-made product of the studio system with the class one would expect from director Otto Preminger, cinematographer Leon Shamroy, and composer David Raskin.  Your reaction will depend on your feelings about Crawford and the subject matter.  I was not keen on either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1dRwiSNpJM

Trailer

Johnny O’Clock
Directed by Robert Rossen
Written by Robert Rossen; original story by Milton Holmes
1947/USA
J.E.M. Productions
First viewing/YouTube

[box] Chuck Blayden: You get in my way and I’ll kill you.

Johnny O’Clock: You took the words right out of my mouth.[/box]

You can’t go too far wrong with a title like Johnny O’Clock.

Johnny O’Clock (Dick Powell) is an elegantly-dressed, tough gangster who has managed to keep his nose clean for years.  He is a partner in an illegal gambling operation with muscle man Guido Marchettis (Thomas Gomez).  Although he has nothing on Johnny, Police Inspector Koch (Lee J. Cobb) keeps hounding him for the whereabouts of crooked cop Chuck Blaydon who is taking pay-outs from the mob.

Meanwhile, Johnny has befriended Blaydon’s pathetic girlfriend Harriet Hobson (Nina Foch).  She wants to make up with her man but he is having none of it.  Johnny is also being pursued by Marchettis’s wife Nelle (Ellen Drew), with whom he previously had a relationship.  He now wants nothing to do with the married woman but she won’t leave him alone.

The plot is fairly Byzantine from here on out.  The next major development is that Harriet is found as a presumed suicide.  This sparks a visit from her sister Nancy (Evelyn Keyes). Nancy and Johnny quickly become an item.  A bunch more stuff happens but this is more enjoyable for the dialogue than for the plot.

I’m a Dick Powell fan, especially in his noir incarnation and this did not disappoint.  He might rank next to Bogie in his ability to utter stylized hard-boiled dialogue with just the right mixture of deadpan and humor.  The ladies don’t quite match his aplomb.  It’s an entertaining outing though.

Trailer

Desperate
Directed by Anthony Mann
Written by Harry Essex and Martin Rackin; story by Anthony Mann and Dorothy Atlas
1947/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
First viewing; Warner Film Noir Classics Vol. 5 DVD

[box]Walt Radak: [ironically as he waits for midnight] Who was it said, “Time flies.”[/box]

1947 was Anthony Mann’s break-out year for film noir.  He would improve but this one is quite OK with some classic use of the style.

Steve Randall (Steve Brodie) is a happy newly wed who is about to celebrate his four-month anniversary with wife Anne (Audrey Long).  She has confided in a neighbor that she will announce her pregnancy at dinner that night.  Then Steve gets a call from a “friend” offering him a trucking job at a wage he can’t refuse.  When he gets to the location he finds out that the job is as getaway driver for a heist being organized by tough guy Walt Radak (Raymond Burr).  Radak’s little brother Al begs to go along for the first time.  Steve attempts to alert the police and Al kills a policeman during a scuffle.  He is hauled off to jail.

Walt threatens Steve with harm to Anne if Steve does not turn himself into the police for the murder.  Instead, Steve takes Anne on the lam.  Al is eventually sentenced to the death penalty.

When Steve gets Anne settled with her relatives in the country, he finally does report his involvement to police inspector Louis Ferrari (Jason Robards Sr.), who does not believe his tale.  He lets Steve go anyway in hopes he will lead him to ringleader Radak.  Now Steve and Anne find themselves relentlessly pursued by both the police and the bad guys.

The movie is only 75-minutes long but manages to lose steam between its dynamic opening and tense closing.  As usual the best thing about it is Raymond Burr’s intensely menacing villain.  Robards Senior is also very good as the sarcastic cop.  There are some really masterful flourishes in the camerawork.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3wfy8ociHU

Clip – check out that swinging lightbulb.  You don’t get much more classic noir than this.

Angel and the Badman
Directed by James Edward Grant
Written by James Edward Grant
1947/USA
John Wayne Productions/Patnel Productions
First viewing/Netflix Rental

[box] Territorial Marshal Wistful McClintock: You know, Quirt, I always figured on using a new rope when hangin’ you… because I kind of respected ya. You never took the best of things and all your men went down looking at ya.[/box]

Sometimes a rather corny old-time Western is just what the doctor ordered.

The wonderfully named Quirt Evans (John Wayne) is a famous gunslinger.  He gets wounded in a showdown and is rescued by the Worths, a Quaker family, who take him home and nurse him back to health.  The Penelope (Gail Russell), the daughter of the house, instantly falls in love with her patient and frankly tells him so the minute he is back on his feet.  Quirt has been a hard-drinking hard-loving rapscallion but the simple, loving ways of the family begin to win him over.

At the same time, Quirt is under threat from his long-time enemy Laredo Stevens (Bruce Cabot).  The local marshall (Harry Carey) is always hanging around predicting that Laredo will end up shot dead and Quirt will end up hanged or vice versa.  The local doctor keeps warning the family that Quirt is bad news.  But Penelope persists.  Can she reform her wild man?

This is just a nice, romantic Western to watch on a Saturday afternoon.  Some of the screenwriting is a tad overdone but nothing terrible.  All the performances are good.  I especially liked Harry Carey as the Marshall of Doom.

Clip

13 Rue Madeleine 
Directed by Henry Hathaway
Written by John Monks Jr. and Sy Bartlett
1947/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Charles Gibson: 22 potential agents. Most of them have a foreign background. All of them can speak French. One of them can speak German.[/box]

An enjoyable Fox film noir in the semi-documentary style about U.S. intelligence efforts in World War II.

A voice-over narrator sets up the process leading to the creation of the OSS and the recruitment and training of its first class of secret agents.  Their instructor is Bob Sharkey (James Cagney) a tough former businessman with years of experience in Berlin.  He is advised that one of his students is a German agent.  His task is to identify the spy, who is then to be unwittingly used to convey false information about American planning for the D-Day invasion back to the Nazis.  Sharkey intuits early on that Bill O’Connell (Richard Conte) is the bad apple based on his unexpected talents at the game.  O’Connell’s roommate is assigned to accompany him on a fake mission into Holland.  Unfortunately, O’Connell spots the ruse.

Now the only man sufficiently trained for the actual mission is Sharkey himself.  He must stay one step ahead of O’Connell and make contact with an elusive French resistance leader.  His life is in danger throughout.  With Annabella as a beautiful OSS communicator and Sam Jaffe as the mayor of a French town.

This is entertaining if not great.  Cagney is good as always and unforgettable in the classic Cagney style at the end.  Conte makes a totally unconvincing German but is so dynamic we don’t mind too much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7yaT7OCwVA

Trailer

Hue and Cry
Directed by Charles Crighton
Written by T.E.B. Clarke
1947/UK
Ealing Studios
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Felix H. Wilkinson: Oh, how I loathe adventurous-minded boys.[/box]

This is said to be the first of the Ealing comedies.  My only real complaint is that my beloved Alistair Sim doesn’t appear in every scene.

A gang of kids spends its days playing at cops and robbers on the rubble of bombed-out post-War London.  They are all addicted to adventure comics, particularly the ones in “Trump” magazine.  One of the older boys is reading the magazine when he spots a car with the same license plate number as in one of the stories.  He thinks the car was used in a crime and reports it.  The policeman says no such number exists but likes the boy and gets him a job working at the Chelsea food market as a porter.

Some other similarities between real life and the comic occur and since no one will believe him, he looks up the comic’s writer, Felix H. Wilkinson (Sim).  It soon develops that someone is changing details in the comic and using it as code for criminal operations.  The boys and girls set to work in foiling the plot.

There are funnier Ealing comedies.  The main reasons to see this one are Alistair Sims’s two very funny scenes and to get a good view of London immediately after the Blitz. It’s also not a bad way to spend an hour and 15 minutes.

Clip

The Red House
Directed by Delmer Daves
Written by Delmer Daves from a novel by George Agnew Chamberlin
1947/USA
Sol Lesser Productions
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Pete Morgan: Don’t put such a high price on courage, it’s an over-rated virtue.[/box]

This one seems to have slipped into the public domain with a corresponding deterioration in print quality. Despite this, Edward G. Robinson’s fantastic performance is easily discernible.

The Morgan farm is hidden away near some woods.  Only a circuitous back road leads there.  The shortest way from town is through the woods but Pete Morgan (Robinson) has made these strictly off-limits to trespassers.  Pete has a wooden leg and is getting on in years so the womenfolk, spinster sister Ellen (Judith Anderson) and adopted daughter Meg, persuade him to hire high schooler Nath Storm to help out.  Meg has a crush on her classmate but he is dating sexpot Tibby (Julie London).

Meg has been forbidden to enter the woods all her life.  On his first day, Nath wants to return home by the shortcut after dark but Pete tells him a tale about screams emanating from a red house in the woods to scare him off.  He is unsuccessful but when Nath is physically attacked there on his way home he must return to the farm to spend the night.

Nath and Meg form a bond while trying to discover the secret of the red house and Meg’s crush develops to full fledged love.  Pete becomes increasingly hostile to the boy and almost insane with anxiety about Meg.  With Rory Calhoun as the town bad boy.

This movie revealed the mystery a bit too early but was so atmospheric and well-acted that I didn’t care. The film really deserves a restoration so that we can all fully appreciate Bert Glennon’s cinematography and Miklos Rosca’s score.  If you are as big a Ronbinson fan as I am, definitely check it out.  It is currently available in multiple versions on YouTube and on Internet Archive.

Clip – opening