Monthly Archives: February 2016

Love Me or Leave Me
Directed by Charles Vidor
Written by Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart, story by Fuchs
1955/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Martin Snyder: [Indignantly to Ruth] Now look here, you stupid little broad, do you know who I am? Do you think I let dames talk to me that way?[/box]

Strong performances by James Cagney and Doris Day raise this musical biopic above the average.

It is the Roaring Twenties.  Marty (‘The Gimp’) Snyder (Cagney) runs a laundry to restaurants and clubs in Chicago that mainly functions as a protection racket.  Ruth Etting (Day) is working as a dancer in one of the clubs he “services”, a job at which she has no talent.  Marty spots her in the line and decides she will make a great next girlfriend.  The feisty Ruth gives him the brush off until he figures out what she really wants – to be a singer.  With his contacts in the city, he offers to get her work.  Ruth needs the help but resists Martin’s sexual advances. Pianist Johnny Alderman (Cameron Mitchell), who is sweet on Ruth, warns her against getting trapped by Marty.

Marty is surprised to discover that his protege has real talent.  Once she has a venue, she is a big hit.  Foolishly, however, Ruth continues to rely on Marty’s management.  Eventually, he gives her no choice but to take their relationship to the next step.  They marry soon after.

Once Ruth hits the big time, Marty changes from an asset to a liability.  He cannot break the habit of getting what he wants with his fists.  She is totally miserable in the marriage but retains a kind of loyalty to the man, partly based on fear.  Can she free herself before succumbing to despair and alcohol?  With Robert Keith as Ruth’s agent and friend.

James Cagney is excellent in this movie.  He brings a lot of humanity to his very unsympathetic character.  Day is very good as well and sings a series of standards from the era.  I enjoyed it a lot.

Love Me or Leave Me won an Academy Award in the category of Best Writing, Motion Picture Story.  It was nominated in the categories of Best Actor; Best Writing, Screenplay; Best Sound, Recording; Best Music, Original Song (“I’ll Never Stop Loving You”); and Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture.

Trailer

The Trouble with Harry
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by John Michael Hayes based on a novel by Jack Trevor Story
1955/USA
Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Jennifer Rogers: He looked exactly the same when he was alive, only he was vertical.[/box]

If nothing else, this movie gave us Shirley MacLaine.  But it’s light and amusing as well.

Harry makes a highly inconvenient corpse but is mourned by nobody.  In fact, everybody thinks they may have killed him.  Captain Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) stumbles upon the body while he is out rabbit hunting and thinks a stray bullet has killed Harry.  He doesn’t have a chance to hide the body because a succession of people come out of nowhere to discover it.  Finally, he comes clean with local spinster Ivy Gravely (Mildred Natwick) and she invites him for coffee and muffins.

Along the way we discover that Harry is the unlamented late husband of Jennifer Rogers (MacLaine).  She beaned him when he came to reunite with her.  The murder brings Jennifer together with painter Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe).  The witnesses/murderers all team up to help each other while burying and unburying the body over and over as new clues develop.

This is super slight and purely fanciful.  It’s a pleasant watch but nothing more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Msuulg7IB5s

Trailer

The Seven Year Itch
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Billy Wilder and George Axelrod from Axelrod’s play
1955/USA
Charles K. Feldman Group/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

Richard Sherman: Miss Morris, I’m perfectly capable of fixing my own breakfast. As a matter of fact, I had a peanut butter sandwich and two whiskey sours.

This is not one of Billy Wilder’s most highly rated films but I think it’s one of his funniest.

Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) is a man with a vivid imagination who is a bit of a Walter Mitty.  He sends his wife (Evelyn Keyes) and son off to Maine for the summer while he toils at a pulp fiction publisher in hot, humid Manhattan.  He has strict instructions from his wife and his doctor not to smoke or drink.  Naturally, his resolve withers the minute he is on his own.  Then it crumbles completely when confronted with his new upstairs neighbor  played by a luscious Marilyn Monroe and named in the credits only as The Girl.

The Girl’s apartment has no air conditioning and she is suffering mightily from the heat. Richard’s has air conditioning in every room.  Even Richard’s wildest dreams could not have come up with the situation that falls into his lap.  With Sonny Tufts as an imaginary rival, Oskar Homolka as a psychiatrist, and Robert Strauss as a randy building superintendent.

The title refers to that stage in a marriage when the parties’ attentions supposedly start to wander.  Monroe reveals herself to be an expert comedienne as the temptation in question but your reaction to the movie will probably depend on your views on Tom Ewell’s performance.  I think it is absolutely hilarious.  He’s so lame and full of himself all at the same time.  Recommended.

Trailer

This Island Earth
Directed by Joseph Newman
Written by Franklin Coen and George Callahan; story by Raymond F. Jones
1955/USA
Universal International Pictures
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Dr. Ruth Adams: My mind is my own, and nobody’s going to change it! I’m not going into that room![/box]

Some interesting special effects accompany a plodding and puzzling screenplay.

Dr. Cal Meacham (Rex Reason) is a genius nuclear scientist who also pilots his institute’s private jet.  He is about to make a major breakthrough in harnessing nuclear energy. When he returns from a conference, his plane goes haywire and is finally landed by unknown forces.  Soon enough, he begins getting shipments he hasn’t ordered.  He begins to piece together the parts and finally constructs an “interroceter”.  Unknowingly, he has passed an intelligence test contrived by the planet Metaluna which is looking for nuclear scientists such as himself.  He begins communicating with the alien Exeter (Jeff Morrow) who tells him his plane will be flown to Metaluna at a certain time.  Not one to pass up a challenge, Meacham agrees.

When he arrives on Metaluna, Meacham is met at the airport by Dr. Ruth Adams (Faith Domergue), who he had a fling with at a conference previously.  She denies she ever met him and generally acts very paranoid.  Eventually we find out that Metaluna has gathered many of the earth’s scientists to solve its nuclear energy problems.  The planet has been protected up until now from meteor attacks by an enemy planet by a force field powered by atomic energy.  Its energy reserves are dwindling rapidly.  The rest of the film is occupied with Ruth and Meachum’s adventures and attempts to escape.

For 1955, I thought this had some OK special effects.  It’s fairly talky though and it was never satisfactorily explained why a civilization as superior as Metaluna required Earthlings to solve its problems.    It passes all tests for cheesy late night viewing, however.

Trailer

I’ll Cry Tomorrow
Directed by Daniel Mann
Written by Helen Deutsch and Jay Richard Kennedy from a book by Lillian Roth, Mike Connolly and Gerald Frank
1955/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Lillian Roth: What I’m doing now is ‘wrong’… and I’m *doing* it![/box]

Susan Hayward makes an excellent alcoholic in this inspiring biopic.

Lillian Roth (Hayward) starts life trying to fulfill the dreams of her stage mother (Jo Van Fleet).  She does pretty well as a child act on the vaudeville circuit and then moves on as a teenager to Broadway and even, briefly, to Hollywood.  There she is reunited with childhood sweetheart David.  They defy her mother to become engaged and are on the way to happiness when tragedy strikes.  Lillian goes into a tailspin from which she does not recover for many years.

She is so distraught she is unable to sleep yet insists on performing.  Her nurse gives her her first drink to help her sleep and it is downhill from there.  She breaks with her mother then continues a wild lifestyle until she marries a man she doesn’t love while on a bender.

After that marriage fails she gets even deeper into the sauce.  She thinks salvation may have come when she meets Tony Bardman (Richard Conte), a commanding businessman with a drinking problem of his own.  She marries him thinking that they can help each other break their habits but this marriage is a greater disaster than her first.

The rest of the movie tracks Lillian’s descent to her “bottom” and rebirth to life and love in AA.  With Eddie Albert as Lillian’s sponsor.

I liked this a lot.  It’s one of Hayward’s great roles and not too melodramatic or cliched.  It all rang pretty true to me.  Van Fleet is outstanding in a much more nuanced version of the typical stage mother.  Recommended.

I’ll Cry Tomorrow won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White.  It was nominated in the categories of Best Actress; Best Cinematography, Black-and-White; and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White.

Trailer

She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Nogiku no gotoki kimi nariki)
Directed by Keisuke Kinoshita
Written by Keisuke Kinoshita fram a novel by Sachio Ito
1955/Japan
Shôchiku Eiga
First viewing/Hulu

[box] among my pitifully/ thatched eaves…/ a chrysanthemum — Haiku by Issa[/box]

This is a picturesque rural romance featuring Kinoshita’s standard buckets of tears.

An old man (Chisû Ryô) is being rowed back to the island where he grew up.  As he goes he reflects on the one true love of his life.  We segue into flashback where we spend most of the film.  Masao is a fifteen-year-old who is preparing to go off to the mainland for high school.  Tamiko is his seventeen-year-old cousin.  Masao’s family is better off than Tamiko’s and she  is more or less a servant in Masao’s household.  The two are inseparable.

Tamiko, however, is considered to be of marriageable age and Masao’s mother is determined that her boy will spend the next several years studying and will not be marrying her.  The rest of the family and the townsfolk are downright nasty and malicious in their gossip.  The young couple has a totally chaste relationship but Masao is beginning to develop feelings for Tamiko.  Mother sets out to break off the friendship resulting in the aforementioned tears.

The best part of this film for me was its observation of old-time Japanese rural culture and the beautiful scenery.  The score is also fantastic.  The story did not really grab me but it’s an OK doomed romance if you like that kind of thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW88NAPXnJE

Stills set to the beautiful music of the film