Monthly Archives: June 2013

Gun Crazy (1950)

Posted on June 3, 2013 | 6 comments

Gun Crazy 
Directed by Joseph H. Lewis
1950/USA
King Brothers Productions
Repeat viewing
#216 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

 

[box] Bluey-Bluey: It’s just that some guys are born smart about women and some guys are born dumb.

Bart: Some guys are born clowns.

Bluey-Bluey: You were born dumb.[/box]

The roots of film noir are in low-budget pictures – those shadows and locations disguise shoestring sets.  Gun Crazy is one of the classics coming from outside the studio system.  It was selected for the National Film Registry in 1998.

Bart Tare has been obsessed with guns since he was a child.  The mania extends only to shooting – he cannot kill a living thing.  He finally succumbs to the temptation to steal a revolver when he is an adolescent and is caught and put in reform school.  After serving a stint in the military as a shooting instructor, Bart returns to his home town.  He meets up with his childhood friends  – now a reporter and a sheriff – and they go to a carnival where they see a shooting exhibition by the lovely Annie Laurie Starr.

It is love at first sight for Bart and Laurie, who flirt while they compete at target shooting. The couple soon marry and Laurie immediately starts agitating to exploit their expertise in stick-ups.  Bart is the more timid of the two but he is hooked on Laurie and afraid to lose her so he agrees.  So begins a life of crime reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde.  With John Dall as Bart, Peggy Cummins as Laurie, and Russ Tamblyn as the young Bart.

Peggy Cummins is the standout in this movie.  She is resembles a wild cat in heat as the femme fatale who tempts Bart to his doom and when she is frightened she is like a caged animal. The visuals, lit by cinematographer Russell Harlan, are gorgeous.  So are the compositions director Joseph H. Lewis comes up with.  The script is serviceable, if not brilliant or particularly hard-boiled.  One of the screenwriters was “Millard Kaufman”, a front for Dalton Trumbo who was a blacklisted member of the Hollywood Ten.

I had not noticed before how often John Dall appears to squint.  Odd in a supposed sharp-shooter!

Clip – “flirting with guns”

 

 

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Posted in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, 1950, Movie Reviews, Noir Month

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The Set-Up (1949)

Posted on June 2, 2013 | 4 comments

The Set-UpThe Set-Up Poster
Directed by Robert Wise
1949/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
Repeat viewing

 

[box] Stoker Thompson: Everybody makes book on something.[/box]

This superbly acted and utterly grim boxing film is a noir classic of the genre.  The movie is one of the few to be told in real time.  The action encompasses the 73 minutes it takes to tell the tale.

Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan) is a washed-up fighter taking matches at the bottom of bills in regional clubs.  His manager has so little faith in him that he takes a bribe for Stoker to throw a fight without bothering to tell his man.  Stoker’s wife Julie (Audrey Totter) pleads with Stoker to give up the game and refuses to attend this night’s fight because she doesn’t want to see him beat up.  Her absence eats away at Stoker and makes him more determined than ever to win his bout.  Most of the last two-thirds of the film takes place either in the ring or in the dressing-room.

The Set-Up 1

I think Robert Ryan is one of the great actors of the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and he is phenomenal in this movie.  He tells more with his eyes in a single close up than most actors can with pages of dialogue.  Audrey Totter did not have a big career but is also excellent as are the supporting players.  Both these actors may be better known for playing heavies but handle these sympathetic roles well.

The great noir cinematography is by Milton Krasner who won an award for his work here at Cannes.  Robert Wise keeps everything flowing brilliantly.  I especially liked the use of the bloodthirsty fans in the crowd, who are almost like a Greek chorus.  Not an uplifting experience but highly recommended.

Clip – Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter

 

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Posted in 1949, Films Noir, Noir Month

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The Littlest Rebel (1935)

Posted on June 1, 2013 | 4 comments

The Littlest Rebel
Directed by David Butler
1935/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing?

 

[box] Virginia ‘Virgie’ Cary: You’re nice enough to be a Confederate![/box]

Poor Shirley, her parents die off at such an alarming rate…  In this one, Virgie Cary is a little Southern belle when the Civil War breaks out and her Daddy goes off to the army.  Virgie and her mother bravely face the hardships of war.  Finally, their plantation is burned down by the Yankees and they have to go live in the slave quarters.  Mother catches pneumonia.  Father comes home and mother dies.  The Yankees are looking for Daddy who is a Confederate spy.  But when they are about to catch him, Virgie charms a Yankee colonel into giving him a pass and Union uniform so he can take Virgie to an aunt in Richmond.  While the two are going through a Union camp, Daddy is captured and he and the colonel are sentenced to death.  Can Virgie save the day?  With John Boles as Daddy, Karen Morely as mother, and Bill Robinson as Uncle Billy, the faithful slave.

As with The Little Colonel, Bill Robinson’s dancing is the main reason to watch this film.  Shirley keeps up with him nicely.  Otherwise, it is business as usual.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBG7P7ChRGk

Tap dance with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson

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Posted in Movie Reviews

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Posted on June 1, 2013 | 3 comments

Mildred PierceMildred Pierce Poster
Directed by Michael Curtiz
1945/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing
#176 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Ida: Personally, Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.[/box]

To start off the film noir fest with a bang, here is a studio big-budget effort that garnered Joan Crawford a long-awaited Best Actress Oscar, along with six other Academy Award nominations.  In 1996, the film was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry.

The story is based on James M. Cain’s novel of the same name.  There are some key differences from the book.  Mildred Pierce is a middle-class housewife who makes money on the side baking cakes and pies.  She lives for her two daughters Veda and Kay and tries especially hard to placate her difficult, grasping elder daughter Veda.  Mildred and her husband Bert separate amicably after arguing about his visits to a lady friend and Mildred’s child-rearing style.

Mildred Pierce 2

Mildred finds work as a waitress and struggles to satisfy the increasingly spoiled Veda’s demands for the finer things in life by selling pies.  When Veda finds her mother’s waitress uniform and accuses her of being a peasant, Mildred decides she must have more money and opens a restaurant, with the help of perpetual suitor Wally.  Along the way, she meets the equally entitled shiftless socialite Monte and it looks like she will be burdened by two ungrateful whiners for life.  A darker fate perhaps awaits …  With Joan Crawford as Mildred, Ann Blyth as Veda, Jack Carson as Wally, Zachary Scott as Monte and Eve Arden as Mildred’s wise-cracking friend Ida.

 

Mildred Pierce 1

I thought this was pretty terrific.  A little bit of Joan Crawford goes a long way with me but here she was remarkably restrained with the old eyebrows.  It may be her best performance.  Ernest Haller’s cinematography is beautiful, particularly the night scenes.  The script is tight and it moves right along.  I love Eve Arden and was delighted to see her at her best here, in an Oscar-nominated performance.  Of the men, I was most impressed with Jack Carson.

This is not quite what I think of as noir.  There is a lot of high key lighting, glamour, and a lack of grim city streets.  However, it does have that expressionist lighting.  My definition of noir for this exercise is basically any film that is included in Michael F. Keaney’s Film Noir Guide.  Keaney came up with 745 films from the period 1940-1959 made in the “noir style” in any of several different genres, including melodrama.  Keaney sees the “noir themes” in Mildred Pierce as betrayal, obsession, and greed.

Trailer

 

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Posted in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, 1945, Noir Month

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30 Days of Film Noir

Posted on June 1, 2013 | 7 comments

I take a break from the regularly scheduled programming to enjoy 30 days watching and reviewing little else but film noir beginning today.  I will be going on vacation from June 7 to 15 and won’t be able to post.  I’ll wrap up around July 7.  I’ll review the very few films I have left from 1935 in the next few days and will continue to review the weekly selections from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die Blog Club.

I’m pretty excited about this and hope you will join me.

 

What is film noir?  Clip from the documentary Visions of Light

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Posted in Movie Reviews