Monthly Archives: June 2015

Caged
Directed by John Cromwell
Written by Virginia Kellogg from the story “Women Without Men” by Kellogg and Bernard C. Schoenfeld
1950/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Evelyn Harper: Line up, you tramps. This ain’t no upstairs delicatessen.[/box]

Here is another 1950 film packed with meaty female parts.  It’s a bit cliched but entertaining.

Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker) has been sentenced to one to 15 years in prison as an accessory to a gas station hold-up in which her husband was killed.  As the film begins, it is her first day in the pen.  She is greeted with a physical exam in which it is discovered that she is pregnant.  She is greeted by the reform-minded warden Ruth Benton (Agnes Moorehead), told to keep on the straight and narrow, and assigned light duties in the laundry due to her pregnancy.

Then prison life comes down on her like a ton of bricks.  She is under the charge of matron Evelyn Harper (Hope Emerson) who at first offers to do her numerous favors then loses interest when she discovers Marie has no money and comes from a poor family.  She immediately orders Marie to begin scrubbing floors.  The pretty nineteen-year old also attracts the attention of a tough murderess who tries to lure her into her shoplifting gang by saying she can arrange an early parole.  Marie resists these and other temptations.

Things begin to go to hell when the rough treatment causes Marie to go into premature labor.  The baby is born in appalling conditions but survives.  Then Marie’s mother, whom she had counted on, cannot take the baby.  It is put up for adoption.  After this, Marie loses her sweet innocence.  She is denied parole and goes crazy.  Things get worse from there and Marie becomes tougher and tougher until she is a thoroughly hardened criminal on release.  With Ellen Corby, Jan Sterling, and Lee Patrick as inmates and Jane Darwell as a matron.

This has many of the standard tropes of a women’s prison picture including psycho prisoners, lesbian overtones, and the sadistic and corrupt matron.  This might even be the origin of what later became cliché.  The acting is all very good.  I just loved Hope Emerson’s performance.  She extracted every bit of juice from her villain.  Eleanor Parker was appropriately pathetic.

Caged was nominated for Academy Awards the in categories of Best Actress (Parker); Best Supporting Actress (Emerson); and Best Writing, Story and Screenplay.

Trailer

The Gunfighter
Directed by Henry King
Written by William Bowers and William Sellers; story by Bowers and André de Toth
1950/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Jimmy Ringo: How come I’ve got to run into a squirt like you nearly every place I go these days? What are you trying to do? Show off for your friends?[/box]

This is a very solid Western character study of a gunman who can’t seem to put down his guns.

When Jimmy Ringo (Gregory Peck) rides into a town, people come from miles around just for a peek at the notorious gun slinger.  He can’t even have a drink without some young runt who wants get famous needling him to provoke a fight.  When he kills the latest one in self-defense, he is forced to hit the trail again.  Now the brothers of the dead man are after him.  He manages to buy some time by leaving them stranded without horses.

Ringo’s next stop is the town of Cayenne where his wife, from whom he has been separated for many years, is living incognito as a schoolteacher.  Unbeknownst to him, Mark Strett (Millard Mitchell), an old friend, is the town’s mayor.  Mark has managed to go straight after being the same band of outlaws as Ringo in his younger days.  

Ringo’s appearance causes the same commotion in Cayenne as elsewhere.  All the young boys, including Ringo’s own son, play hooky from school and settle down outside the barroom door where Ringo waits.  His wife refuses to see him.  Another young punk is after him.  Marshall Mark does his best to keep law and order.

Eventually, the wife succumbs and there is a brief reunion.  Ringo wants to take his family somewhere far away where he is not known and live a normal life.  His wife thinks there is no such place and she may be right.  In the meantime, the brothers are closing in on Cayenne.

Fans of Gregory Peck should love this thoughtful Western.  The original story was written with John Wayne in mind and I think he would have been great in it.  Peck is good, mustache and all, though, and the film has a nice melancholy feel to it.

My husband and I are having a disagreement about who is riding off into the sunset at the end of the story.  Does anybody other than my husband think it was Ringo?

The Gunfighter was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z6Obp0rcuo

Clip

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