Category Archives: 1949

The Hasty Heart
Directed by Vincent Sherman
Written by Ranald MacDougall from a play by John Patrick
1949/UK
Associated British Picture Corporation (Warner Bros.)
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Sister Parker: He’s a foundling, his father left his mother before he was born. Do you know what that means?
Yank: He sure is!

This is a warm, sentimental film about solidarity in adversity.

The story takes place just after the end of WWII in Burma. The able-bodied are being shipped home in droves but there remain a group of wounded men in the camp hospital. Cpl. Lachlan ‘Lachie’ MacLachlan (Richard Todd) was wounded in one of the last battles. His injured kidney was removed but his remaining kidney is defective and he does not have long to live. MacLachlan is as Scottish as can be and has a very dour disposition and no friends.

Instead of telling Lachie his prognosis, the commanding officer decides to put him in a ward with five recovering men. He and ward nurse Sister Parker encourage the other patients to try to make Lachie’s last day great.

This does not start out well as Lachie does his best to alienate all the other patients. The one he irritates most is “Yank” (Ronald Regan). But everybody softens eventually.

I enjoyed this movie. It contains one of Patricia Neal’s first screen performances. She is good as always but has not developed her distinctive persona yet. Richard Todd earned a well-deserved Best Actor Oscar Nomination.

The Secret Garden
Directed by Fred M. Wilcox
Written by Robert Ardrey from a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett
1949/US
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Mary Lennox: Dickon, I need you. All you have to do is listen. What good is a secret if there’s no one to tell it to?

It is an adaptaion of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s novel and might make good family viewing.

Mary Lennox’s (Margaret O’Brien) parents die of cholera in India and she is sent to live with her Uncle Craven (Herbert Marshall) in his huge creepy mansion. Her crotchety uncle wants to have as little to do with Mary as possible. Mary doesn’t care as she is rude and spoiled herself.

Eventually she locates her uncle’s son (Dean Stockwell) in the vast house and discovers he is very spoiled and manipulates people by feigning illnesses.

Dickon , brother of a housemaid, tells Mary of a secret garden behind a high wall which has no apparent entrance. A sympathetic raven finds the key. The remainder of the film is devoted to the childrens’ adventures, which humanize and humble all concerned. With Elsa Lanchester as a cheeky maid.

I’ve never read the book. Probably would have got more out of the movie if I had. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Margaret O’Brien play a brat but she is really good at it.

It Happens Every Spring
Directed by George Marshall
Written by Valentine Davies from a story by Davies and Shirley W. Smith
1949/US
Twentieth Century Fox
IMDb page
First viewing/Criterion Channe

“The results of scientific research very often force a change in the philosophical view of problems which extend far beyond the restricted domain of science itself.” – Albert Einstein

Far-fetched baseball/romcom is just OK.

Professor Vernon K. Simpson (Ray Milland) is working on a rat repellant when a stray baseball demonstrates that on impact glass is destroyed and wood is repelled. He immediately realizes that this could be the start of a pro pitching career. Vernon is in love with Deborah Greenleaf (Jean Peters) daughter of the university’s President (Ray Collins). He can’t support her on his current salary.

He tries out for Saint Louis. Nobody can get a hit off his pitches. So he is hired in the middle of the season. The whole thing seems very strange and catcher Monk Lanigan (Paul Davis) becomes his roommate with instructions to babysit the rookie and keep him on a very short leash. Vernon is terrified of being seen by his girlfriend and her father so he changes his name to King Kelly.  He learned to pitch on a desert island where there was nothing to do but throw a ball.  (no kidding)

Blah, blah, blah the team wins the Series and Vernon gets the girl.

I wouldn’t call this a screwball comedy. For me those need to have snappy dialogue and a madcap romance. This film has neither. Its watchable but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it. Maybe I have been spoiled by watching so many classic screwball comedies in a row.  On a topical note: The source material for this film was written by the author of The Miracle on 34th Street.

Passport to Pimlico
Directed by Henry Cornelius
Written by T.E.B Clarke
1949/UK
J. Arthur Rank Organization/Ealing Studios
First viewing/YouTube

P.C. Spiller: Blimey, I’m a foreigner.

This is a very funny film.  I’ll bet it was even funnier to weary post-war British audiences.

Pimlico is a tight-knit London working-class neighborhood.  One day when an unexploded bomb is detonated, Arthur Pemberton falls in the resulting crater.  There he finds a treasure and an old treaty.  A history professor (Margaret Rutherford) is called in to advise and says that the document is proof of a royal grant of the land in perpetuity to the Duke of Burgundy.  Thus, she says, Pimlico is a sovereign country.

The residents gleefully exploit this fact to free themselves from the pub closing laws, rationing restrictions, and other government regulations that have been cutting back on their fun.

Eventually, the modern Duke of Burgundy shows up.  He proves to be an amiable Frenchman who immediately begins courting a local girl.  Whitehall and the Foreign Office do not have the foggiest notion of how to deal with this development.  A ruling looks like it will take months of meetings.

In the meantime, when persuasion fails to work to stop the massive flow of Londoners into the duchy to buy rationed goods, Britain is forced to close its borders.  The Pimlicans retaliate by conducting immigration checks on all modes of transport transiting their country.  Eventually, negotiations between the two sovereigns begin.  With Hermione Baddley as a local shopkeeper and Naughton Wayne and Basil Radford as bureaucrats from the Foreign Office.

This is a barrel of fun with some classic lines.  The state dinner at the end was right on target. How the British of the day must have relished the wicked skewering of all their trials!  Recommended.

The print currently available on YouTube is no great shakes.

Passport to Pimlico was nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay.

Clip

Take Me Out to the Ball Game
Directed by Busby Berkeley
Written by Harry Tugend and George Wells from a story by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
1949/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Eddie O’Brien: Oh, Miss Higgins! You’re the prettiest manager in baseball.

K.C. Higgins: You’re certainly the prettiest shortstop.[/box]

MGM puts two-thirds of the cast of On the Town together with Esther Williams for a mighty derivative musical on the old baseball diamond.

Eddie O’Brien (Gene Kelly), Dennis Ryan ( Frank Sinatra) and Nat Goldberg (Julius Munchen) are players on the Wolves, a turn-of-the-century baseball team.  Eddie and Dennis do a vaudeville act during the off season.  Eddie is a cocky womanizing braggart and Dennis is more the shy retiring type.

During spring training, the team hears the bad news that it has been inherited by K.C. Higgins, who intends to take an active role in management.  Lo and behold, it turns out that her given names are Katherine Catherine Higgins (Esther Williams) and she is a looker (and a dynamite swimmer).  Dennis immediately develops a crush on her but she and Eddie spar.  She gives Eddie a very bad time for breaking training.

In between musical numbers, Shirley Delwyn (Betty Garrett) spots skinny, little Dennis from the stands.  She lustily pursues him for the rest of the picture.  The last act drama comes when Eddie plays hooky to go to rehearsals for a show which, unbeknownst to him, is backed by gamblers who are betting against the team.  With Edward Arnold in a small role.

I was not crazy about On the Town and I liked this one less.  It has less story, more mugging, and the music is not as good.

Can you imagine a time when Sinatra was seen as a loser with the ladies?  It boggles the mind.

Clip – Finale

Thirst (Törst)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Written by Herbert Grevenius based on short stories by Birgit Tengroth
Sweden/1949
Svensk Filmindustri
First viewing/Hulu

[box] “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche[/box]

Man, oh man, this is dark.  Almost 90 minutes of torment and marital discord.  Since it’s Bergman, it has its moments.

Rut and Bertil, a young married couple, are traveling by train to Stockholm after a holiday in Italy.  Rut basically puts all his energy into staying calm and sane while Bertil pours out her misery and berates him.  We flash back to the events that got her to this place.

First, she became pregnant by a man who did not reveal his marriage until their affair had almost reached its natural conclusion.  She wanted the child but was forced to abort it. The abortion left her sterile.  The nurse told her to cheer up as she still had her glamorous career in the ballet but of course her knee gave out and ended that.  She takes all this out on Rut non-stop.  She also continually harps on his earlier failure to end an affair with Viola, a fellow ballerina with a bad heart, soon enough to suit her.

Throughout we also witness Viola’s sad story.  At some point she married.  Her husband is now dead and she is totally absorbed by grief.  Her emotional state is not improved by unwanted sexual advances by her obnoxious psychologist and her lesbian former ballerina colleague.  The ending holds out some shred of hope for Rut and Bertil but not so much for poor Viola.

This looks good and the acting is great.  I think the movie suffers from its script. It’s distressing without any pay off.  At least when Bergman writes this sort of thing, he generally has something to say about the human condition that makes the torment worthwhile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWW1a1bZ9Tc

Clip – by this time one’s sympathies are firmly on the side of the husband

The Inspector General
Directed by Henry Koster
Written by Philip Rapp and Harry Kurnitz based on the novel by Nikolai Gogol
1949/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] The Mayor: Your Excellency – he took bribes, he drank all my wine, he-he-he yelled out the windows, he even made love to my wife! How could… How could I doubt that he was an Inspector General?[/box]

Your reaction to this musical comedy will depend almost entirely on your appreciation of the multi-talented Danny Kaye.  I can sort of take him or leave him and overall I enjoyed the film but was not wowed by it.

This is the Gogol novel, for some reason moved from Russia to Hungary.  As the film opens, we attend a town council meeting headed by the mayor (Gene Lockhart).  This gang of crooks is very worried because there is an inspector general prowling around in their district rooting out corruption and punishing it severely.

Georgi (Kaye) is an illiterate stooge in the travelling show of Yakov (Walter Slezak), a gypsy. He is fired for being unable to sell an invalid peasant Yakov’s worthless patent medicine. He wanders, starving, through the country side and is finally unjustly arrested for stealing a horse.  He is carrying a scrap of paper, which he can’t read, that has been signed by Napoleon.  When he is brought in, the council believes he is the inspector general despite his rags.  They dress him in finery and treat him to a lavish banquet.

The rest of the movie is filled with comic incidents as the town attempts to bribe Georgi and later to attempt to assassinate him.  Justice and love triumphs in the end.  With Elsa Lanchester as the Mayor’s seductive wife and Alan Hale as a member of the council.

This has some clever lyrics and dialogue and is entertaining overall.  I’m immune to Kaye’s mugging but his singing and dancing is quite good.  He certainly puts 110% of his energy into everything he does.  The Warner Bros. supporting cast is sterling as always.  My enjoyment was not enhanced by the faded public domain print of the film available from Netflix.

Trailer

Whirlpool
Directed by Otto Preminger
Written by Ben Hecht and Andrew Solt from a novel by Guy Endore
1949/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] David Korvo: You were wise not to tell your husband, Mrs. Sutton. A successful marriage is usually based on what a husband and wife don’t know about each other.[/box]

Otto Preminger reunites with Gene Tierney and David Raskin for an OK psychological drama.  Jose Ferrer is the highlight.

Ann Sutton (Tierney) is to all appearances very happily married to wildly successful society psychiatrist Dr. William Sutton (Richard Conte).  But she has a terrible secret.  Her secret comes out one day when she is caught shoplifting from a department store.  Unfortunately for her, David Korvo (Ferrer) witnesses the apprehension and helps her preserve her secret and her name.

He calls her soon afterwards.  She thinks he is blackmailing her but it turns out he has something far more sinister in mind.  He takes her to a party where he performs instant character analyses on the guests and soon demonstrates his mastery of hypnosis on Ann. His hypnotic technique cures Ann of her chronic insomnia and headaches.  Thereafter she willingly consults him.

Korvo practices his quackery out of his apartment but the virtuous Ann refuses to see him there.  Instead, they consult over drinks in the hotel bar.

It turns out Korvo has a problem too.  He bilked a former lady friend/client into turning over her daughter’s trust fund to him.  The lady has since broken with him and is now seeing Ann’s husband.  She threatens to confess to her daughter and sue him.  When the lady turns up murdered, Ann is found standing over the corpse.  She says she has no idea how she got there.  All the evidence seems to suggest she was having an affair with Korvo. Korvo, himself, is lying in a hospital recovering from gallbladder surgery.

Can Dr. Sutton and Lt. James Colton (Charles Bickford) get to the truth?

Jose Ferrer is fabulous as the wily, sarcastic Korvo.  Raskin’s score is the other standout.  Otherwise, the wildly improbable tale keeps one’s attention if not more.

Trailer