Monthly Archives: June 2015

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

East Side, West Side
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy
Written by Isobel Lennart from a novel by Marcia Davenport
1949/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Brandon Bourne: [Desparately] Jess, can’t you understand what this is for me. I’m like a drunk who knows liquor will wreck him. He hates it. He hides from it. He… he tries!

Jessie Bourne: What are you asking for? Permission?[/box]

This “woman’s picture” has some nice performances but the story was a little too pat for my taste.

As the film opens, attorney Brandon Bourne (James Mason) and his wife Jessie (Barbara Stanwyck) are dining with her mother (Gale Sondergaard) and mom’s publisher husband, They have evidently weathered some blow to their happy marriage and appear to be very much in love.  He is called to meet with a client but they agree that she will wait for him to come home for a “bedtime snack”.

Brandon has the spine of an earthworm.  Since it is still “early” when he finishes with the client, he decides to stop by a nightclub for a drink.  There he is soon spotted by his ex-paramour Isabel Lorrison (Ava Gardner).  She is with another man but very, very interested in picking up with Brandon where they left off.  He tells her no.  He then meets sweet young Italian Rosa Senta (Cyd Charisse) and begins flirting with her.  She reveals she is waiting for her “fella” to come home from Europe.  Then Isabel approaches Brandon again and her escort slugs him in front of reporters.  Rosa takes him home to her mother’s house to save him from the press.  It is thus morning before Brandon comes home to Jesse.

Brandon’s antics and their connection to Isabel have made the morning paper.  Jesse accepts Brandon’s lame explanation of the innocence of the events and they make plans to take a romantic getaway.  But at work, Isabel shows up to reinforce her claim on Brandon.  Since Brandon is an idiot, he goes to Isabel’s apartment to tell her that all is over and she should leave him alone.  It does not take a genius to guess what happens next.

In the meantime, Jessie drives Rosa out to the airport to meet her fella.  This turns out to be Mark Dwyer (Van Heflin), whose book Jessie’s stepfather is publishing.  Mark’s interest in Rosa is brotherly and soon he is in love with Jessie.  He helps her through her marital woes.  Conveniently, he is an ex-cop who can also help in the murder investigation that concludes the film.  With William Frawley as a bartender, William Conrad as a cop, and Beverly Michaels as a shady lady.

With this cast and the MGM treatment, this film just has to be moderately entertaining.  But that’s all really.  It is full of way too many coincidences and convenient fall-backs for our heroine.

Clip

Once a Jolly Swagman (AKA “Maniacs on Wheels”)
Directed by Jack Lee
Written by William Rose and Jack Lee from a novel by Montagu Slater
1949/UK
Wessex Films Productions
First viewing/Amazon Prime

[box] “On my tombstone they will carve, “IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME.” ― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century[/box]

This story of a motorcycle speedway racer in Britain has a lot in common with contemporary American boxing films.  The young Dirk Bogarde was the best thing about the film for me.

In the 1930’s, Bill Fox (Bogarde) is a working-class factory worker with a love for speed and motorbikes.  He spends his free time hanging around the speedway watching his Australian friend and star racer Lag Gibbon.  He starts dating Lag’s sweet sister Pat (Renee Asherson).

Bill is eventually given a chance to ride and steadily progresses up the rankings.  His break-though happens at a race in which Lag is severely injured in a crash.  He expresses his regret but then neglects his friend while he is in the hospital.  Pat cannot forgive him.

Bill becomes a star and acquires a society girlfriend.  She is too headstrong for him, though, and he walks out.  After finally visiting Lag, he eventually reconciles with Pat and they marry.  Bill tries advocating for the rights of the riders vis-a-vis the management, especially with regard to race injuries.  For his pains, he is blackballed from the track.  He decides to go to America to race.  Pat, who hates speedracing and worries constantly about Bill, puts her foot down.  They split up but Hitler’s invasion of Poland precludes Bill’s relocation to the U.S.

We follow the separate lives of Bill and Pat during the war and Bill’s struggles to reestablish himself afterwards.

This is one of those corruption of an honest bloke by success stories that were so popular during this period.  It started out slow for me and improved toward the end as the story focused more on Bill’s inner turmoil.

As far as I can tell, the British title was there more or less as an excuse for the playing of “Waltzing Matilda” in the score throughout.  It makes more sense than the American title, Maniacs on Wheels, however!

Clip

I Shot Jesse James
Directed by Samuel Fuller
Written by Samuel Fuller from an article by Homer Croy
1949/USA
Lippert Pictures
First viewing/Hulu Plus

[box] Harry Kane: Gold is nothing but that last corruption of degenerate man. But to be a little corrupt for the sake of art, that I wouldn’t mind.[/box]

Sam Fuller’s directorial debut is a solid piece of work although lacking the off-kilter edge that would later distinguish him.

Robert Ford (John Ireland) is hiding out with bosom buddy Jesse James at the farm where James is holed up incognito.  Ford has been in love with Cynthy since childhood and the stage singer loves him too.  He pines to marry her and to stop living as a wanted fugitive.  When he hears about the reward and amnesty the Governor is offering for the capture of Jesse James, Ford has his way out.  After a couple of instances of cold feet about killing the man who treats him like a brother, Ford shoots James in the back.

He shows up to tell Cynthy the good news but she is appalled.  She tells him off for his treachery.  But now she is afraid of him.  She is also being courted by silver-prospector Kelley (Preston Foster).

When Ford goes to collect the $10,000 reward money, he is given only $500 dollars since the reward was for the apprehension and conviction of James, not his murder.  He is treated with contempt wherever he goes and would-be gun-slingers are all looking for an opportunity to shoot him down.  So he takes off for Colorado where there is a silver boom and tells Cynthy he will send for her if he strikes it rich.  Kelley has already headed off in the same direction …  With J. Edward Bromberg as the manager of the company in which Cynthy works.

This is nothing special but well-done and pleasant enough.  There are some nice touches and Fuller showed some obvious talent right out of the box.

Clip

Border Incident
Directed by Anthony Mann
Written by John C. Higgins from a story by John C. Higgins and George Zuckerman
1949/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Film Noir Classics Vol. 3 DVD

[box] Zopilote: What is cheaper than time, senor? Everybody has the same amount.[/box]

Anthony Mann and John Alton make an unbeatable team and this violent noir/police procedural is one of their very best collaborations.

The story is framed, with voice over narration, as a police procedural. It’s unusual in that it is a collaboration between the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Mexican police.  The agencies are working together to uncover a vicious gang that has been exploiting Mexicans entering the country illegally to work as farm laborers in the Imperial Valley.  The narration stresses that farmers, and thus consumers, rely on Mexican labor, the bulk of which is entering the country legally under the Bracero Program.

We are introduced to agents Jack Bearnes (George Murphy) and Pablo Rodriguez (Ricardo Montalban) who will work undercover to get close to the bad guys.  Pablo poses as a bracero. His chance comes when he befriends Juan Garcia, a humble Mexican who has been patiently waiting for days for his turn to enter legally.  Pablo persuades Juan to show him how to jump the queue by paying an alien smuggler.  Juan decides to join Pablo on the dangerous journey.

Pablo gets spotted early on for his “soft” hands but manages to convince the smugglers that he is a fugitive from justice.  He witnesses first hand the brutality of the smugglers who think nothing of murdering any Mexican who becomes an “inconvenience” in any way.

In the meantime, Jack is posing as a man offering some stolen immigration papers for sale.  He has not counted on the greed of the smugglers who immediately send a bunch of thugs (headed by Alfonso Bedoya, Gold Hat in Treasure of the Sierra Madre) to see if they can get the papers the easy way.  Fortunately, he does not have the papers with him and he eventually lead across the border to Owen Parkson (Howard DaSilva), the American connection for the operation.  Pablo and Juan happen to be located at the same place.  Both Jack and Pablo will be in desperate danger for the remainder of the film.  With Charles McGraw as one of Parkson’s goons.

I loved this.  Most of it takes place at night and Alton’s cinematography is just stunning. He is not afraid to cloak many of his shots in blackness leaving only the faces to be picked out by the light.  The acting is uniformly good.  For me, the standouts were Da Silva’s calm business-like monster and Alfonso Bedoya, who must be the world’s scariest Mexican.  Mann keeps the pace measured, which only heightens the sudden brutality of the action sequences.  Highly recommended.

Much of the film was made on location not far from where I live.  My town is mentioned by name.

Trailer

John Sayles talks about the film – Trailers from Hell