Category Archives: 1951

On Dangerous Ground
Directed by Nicholas Ray
Written by A.I. Bezzerides and Nicholas Ray from the novel “Mad With Much Heart” by Gerald Butler
1951/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
Repeat viewing/Film Noir Classic Collection Volume 3

[box] Jim Wilson: Why do you make me do it? You know you’re gonna talk! I’m gonna make you talk! I always make you punks talk! Why do you do it? Why?[/box]

Nicholas Ray combines gritty noir with tender romance and it all comes out quite well, thanks to Robert Ryan’s subtly effective performance.

Gung-ho detective Jim Wilson (Ryan) is being eaten up inside.  He spends his off-hours brooding in his seedy bachelor pad and his working shifts dealing with “garbage”, as he calls the people he runs into on his beat.  Wilson has a terrible temper and is quick to use his fists when his first requests for information are met with resistance.  Neither his colleagues nor his boss are able to get through the wall he has built around himself. Finally, his tactics land a suspect in the hospital and his superior sends him off to “Siberia” in the countryside to help with a murder investigation.

The case involves the murder of a young girl.  The girl’s father Walter Brent (Ward Bond) has no time for cops or investigations and is tracking the killer with a rifle in his hands prepared to shoot first and ask questions later.  Now it is Wilson who must be the voice of restraint.  He accompanies Brent on his chase, which leads the men to a remote farmhouse.  They burst in on Marie (Ida Lupino), the suspect’s sister.  She is clearly not revealing everything she knowns about her brother’s whereabouts.  Brent gets very heavy handed with her before the men realize she is blind.

While Brent searches the grounds, Wilson talks to Marie.  She gradually decides she can trust him to capture her brother without hurting him and take him to an institution, where he should have been admitted long ago.  She also quicklly spots Jim’s loneliness.  The rest of the movie deals with blossoming relationship between Wilson and Marie and the men’s different efforts to capture the brother.  With Ed Begley as the police captain.

This is one of Robert Ryan’s best roles.  He does more acting with his jaw and eyes than many stars do with their whole bodies and voices.  So naturally I love this film.  All the others are good and Ida Lupino gets a chance to be less tough than she usually is.  The cinematography and staging are first-rate.  Bernard Herrmann provided the beautiful score.

The Warner DVD has a good commentary track detailing the usual fraught production history that a film produced at RKO went through during the Howard Hughes years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoM7poqiHck

Trailer

People Will Talk
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz from a play by Curt Goetz
1951/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Doctor Noah Praetorius: Professor Elwell, you are the only man I know who can say ‘malignant’ the way other people say ‘Bingo!’.[/box]

This is a delightful, if uncharacteristic, comedy from Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

Noah Praetorius (Cary Grant) is a rich, famous and beloved OB/GYN who is currently teaching at a medical school.  His is an unorthodox approach which focuses on the whole patient and relies as much on psychology as medicine or surgery.  He is accompanied everywhere he goes by the hulking, silent Shunderson (Finlay Currie) who appears to be totally devoted to him.  As the movie begins, Prof. Rodney Elwell (Hume Cronyn) is frantically digging up dirt on Praetorius in an effort to discredit him.  Elwell drags in the doctor’s former housekeeper (Margaret Hamilton) and hires a private detective to investigate the myserious Shunderson.

One day, a student faints during Praetorius’s anatomy class.  She is Deborah Higgins (Jeanne Crain) and Praetarius soon informs her that she is pregnant.  This is a problem as Deborah is not married and furthermore believes that news of this would kill her father. She attempts suicide and while she is recovering from surgery for her wound, Praetorius tells her that there was a mix-up in the laboratory samples and she is not, in fact, pregnant.

Praetorius then takes off with Shunderson to the farm where Deborah lives with her father and greedy tax-evading uncle.  The idea is to break the news of Deborah’s pregnancy to her father and pave the way for Deborah’s acceptance of her condition.  But Deborah’s father (Sidney Blackmer) has been so thoroughly ground down by life and his horrible brother that he believes himself to be a total failure.  He says the only bright spot in his life is Deborah and Noah does not have the heart to tell him anything.

I won’t go farther into the plot which has a number of remarkable twist and turns and culminates in the dramatic reveal of Shunderson’s past.  With Walter Slezak as Praetorius’s friend.

After reading the plot synopsis of this one, I was really leery going in and wound up totally charmed by it.  Mankiewicz gets in numerous digs at the medical profession but the tone is more whimsical than satirical.  The fine cast handles the wonderful dialogue admirably. They are all great but I totally fell in love with Finlay Currie.  Recommended.

Trailer

The Mating Season
Directed by Mitchell Leisen
Written by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Richard L. Breen from the play Maggie by Caesar Dunn
1951/USA
Paramount Pictures
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Maggie Carleton: I married a stranger!

Val McNulty: Everybody marries a stranger.[/box]

This pleasant, if predictable, comedy features an Oscar-nominated performance by the great Thelma Ritter.

This is one of those 50’s films beginning with a peppy theme song sung by a chorus over the credits.  Ellen McNulty (Ritter) runs a hamburger stand in New Jersey.  As the movie opens, she lets the bank repossess it as she has no chance of making any part of the back payments.  She’s not worried.  She will go to California to live with her successful son.

In the meantime,  son Val (John Lund) is working his way up the corporate ladder. Currently, he has a proposal in the works that he hope will make his future.  He seems oblivious to the adoring glances from his secretary, Betsy (Jan Sterling).  Unfortunately, he works for stinker/drunkard George Kalinger, Jr., son of the owner of the company.

Val goes to retrieve a car abandoned by George in a drunken stupor.  It turns out his girlfriend  Maggie Carleton (Gene Tierney) is still in the car which is perched precariously on top of a cliff.  The two meet cute while Val rescues her and before we know it wedding bells are ringing.  Maggie was brought up as an ambassador’s daughter and her snobbish mother (Miriam Hopkins) wastes no words in telling her she is marrying beneath her.

Ellen turns up on the day of the wedding.  When she sees the style and class of the people involved she hightails it out of there without meeting Maggie.  After Ellen saves up enough money from odd jobs to buy herself an expensive dress and hat, she again presents herself at her son’s doorstep.  But Maggie mistakes her for hired help and Ellen starts pitching in in the kitchen.  She refuses to let Val reveal her real identity.  Shortly thereafter, Maggie’s mother moves in and makes everybody’s life miserable.

I won’t reveal anymore of the plot.  It is safe to say that if you have watched enough of these things every last detail of the plot’s resolution will have been telegraphed to you well before the end.

Ritter is just as good as usual in this movie and I can’t see how anyone would have thought she was supporting here.  She is definitely in more scenes than Tierney.  I appreciate Jan Sterling more every time I see her on the screen.  Here she has a tiny part but is very natural in it.  Otherwise I didn’t laugh out loud once and the lack of surprises kind of got to me.  My husband liked this more than I did.

Thelma Ritter was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

Clip

Summer Interlude (Sommarlek)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Written by Ingmar Bergman and Herbert Grevenius
1951/USA
Svensk Filmindustri
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Marie: Let me mourn my youth alone.[/box]

I wonder how Bergman got to understand women so well.  This is the best of the early films of his I have seen so far.

Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson) is a 28-year-old prima ballerina.  One night as she is preparing to go on stage she receives an old diary by post.  The past comes flooding back in and she is now deeply sad.  Marie starts to reflect the summer thirteen years before when she first fell in love.  During the course of the movie she will also revisit the idyllic setting of her youthful romance.

In flashback we follow an innocent summer love affair as the inexperienced Marie meets, flirts with, and comes to love Henrik, a boy of about her age.  We find out why Marie has not been able to open up to another love, including her current journalist boyfriend, since that time.  With memory comes a form of catharsis.

This movie has a very simple but moving plot.  We are left a lot of space to enjoy the glorious photography of the ballet and a carefree, sunlit summer in Sweden.  It’s a visually gorgeous film and leaves the audience with a sense of hope for a change.

Trailer/montage of clips set to ballet music – SPOILER

The Thing from Another World
Directed by Christian Nyby
Written by Charles Lederer from the story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr.
1951/USA
RKO Radio Pictures/Winchester Pictures Corporation
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

Dr. Arthur Carrington: [about the carrot] Its development was not handicapped by emotional or sexual factors.

This early sci-fi classic is a hell of a lot of fun.

Captain Healy and his crew are called to an Arctic research station to investigate a plane crash.   Healy is also able to use the opportunity to get reacquainted with sparring partner and love interest Nikki, a research assistant at the station.

When the men get out to the crash site, they discover a large circular object buried in the ice.  When they use Thermite bombs to free it, the craft is completely destroyed by the explosion.  Traces left in the ice convince everyone that this was a flying saucer.  They find the body of one of the crew members encased in a slab of ice and take it back to the station.

Captain Hendry insists that nothing be done with the body until he has authority from headquarters.  But the radio won’t work properly and he gets drawn into a running battle with chief scientist Dr. Carrington who believes that nothing should trump scientific investigation of this superior being.  All Hendry’s caution is for naught when one his guards melts the ice holding the body with an electric blanket.

Then all hell breaks lose.  The men find they are confronting a blood sucking organism that is more vegetable than animal and cannot be harmed by their guns.  Carrington sabotages every move to contain the monster.  Then they discover the thing’s seeds are starting to reproduce.  James Arness played The Thing.

This one contains the snappy banter and overlapping dialogue that characterize producer Howard Hawks’s best work.  His contribution to the actual direction of the film is unknown but his influence is unmistakable.  The movie has a breathless pace uncharacteristic of most such genre films.  It also made me jump more than once, always a good sign. Recommended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5xcVxkTZzM

Trailer

The Idiot (Hakuchi)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Akira Kurosawa and Eijirô Hisaita from the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky
1951/Japan
Shôchiku Eiga
First viewing/Hulu

[box] Mutsuo Kayama, the secretary: What could be so frightening about that idiot?[/box]

This is a beautiful, fantastically acted film.  Unfortunately, it is also 166 minutes long and I don’t feel like I quite got the point.

Kurosawa has transposed the setting of Dostoevsky’s novel from Tsarist Russia to post-war Hokkaido.  The story takes place mostly in severe winter weather.

Kinji Kameda (Masayuki Mori) has just been released from an American military hospital where he had been treated for “epileptic idiocy”.  This condition developed after Kameda was spared at the very last minute from execution after having been erroneously charged with being a war criminal.  As he waited to die, Kameda felt an enormous love for everyone and regret that he had not been kinder or more considerate.

On his train journey back to Sapporo, Kameda is befriended by Denkichi Akama (Toshiro Mifune) who is headed there to reunite with and attempt to marry the woman he loves, Taeku Nasu (Setsuko Hara).  On arrival, the two stop to admire her portrait which is on display at a photographer’s shop.  Kameda immediately feels compassion for Taeku due to the sadness he sees in her eyes.

Taeko was taken as a fourteen-year-old girl to be the mistress of a rich man who apparently forced her into some unspeakable degradation.  The man has now tired of her and has offered Ayako, the son of Ono (Takashi Shimura), 600,000 yen to marry her.  Akama raises a million yen in a bid to marry her himself.  But Kameda quietly tells Taeko shed is not the person her trials have made her and she should not marry.  He offers to take care of her although he has no money.  Then Ono reveals that Kameda is actually the owner of a valuable estate that Ono has appropriated.

But Taeko cannot bear to “ruin” someone as good as Kameda. Although Kameda’s feelings for Taeko are more tender than passionate and despite their real friendship, Kameda and Akama are at odds over her fate for the rest of the film.  In the meantime, Kameda engages in a fairly bizarre courtship with Oda’s daughter.  Tragedy ensues.

Obviously, with this cast the viewer is in store for some tremendous acting.  Masayuki Mori, who played the samurai in Rashomon, is the standout as the “idiot”.  You have to love him.  Mifune and especially Hara were almost unrecognizable to me during the first part of the film and very good.

The film begins with a text saying that Dostoevsky wanted to create a character who was completely good and the only way to do so in this corrupt world was to make him an idiot.  The story is supposed to show the destruction of such a character by life.  I suppose this is true but the message kind of got lost for me in the extremely convoluted plot.

I think this movie could have lost forty-five minutes and been improved.  Be that as it may, the version I watched was already cut from the Kurosawa’s original, which clocked in at 265 minutes and the 180 minute version shown at the film’s premier.  Since I still don’t understand some of the plot points maybe they were left on the cutting room floor.

The Racket
Directed by John Cromwell
Written by William Wister Haines and W.R. Burnett from a play by Bartlett Cormack
1951/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Booking Sgt. Sullivan: [booking Joe Scanlon, then examining the gun he was caught with] Receipt for your toy, sonny. My granddaughter could use that for a paperweight – in her kindergarden.[/box]

Despite the presence of my two favorite Roberts (Ryan and Mitchum), I thought the most interesting thing about this film noir was the commentary track.

Through some heavy exposition we learn that organized crime, lead by a mysterious boss called “the old man”, has taken over a city and is now fielding its own candidates for public office.  Working for the syndicate is Nick Scanlon (Ryan) a run-of-the-mill old time hoodlum.  Scanlon is accustomed to wipe out anyone who crosses him.  The old man does not approve of such crude tactics.

Honest cop Captain Thomas McQuigg (Mitchum) is sent in to clean up.  He has a committed assistant in true blue officer Bob Johnson (William Talman).  McQuigg begins his assignment by going to Scanlon and warning him to stay out of his district.  He and Scanlon evidently are old acquaintances and Scanlon spends most of the visit complaining about his spoiled brother who has taken up with nightclub “canary” Irene Hayes (Lizbeth Scott).

McQuigg decides to get to Scanlon through his brother and to his brother through Irene. Somehow an intrepid but green reporter gets involved and falls for Irene.  Scanlon has a few cards up his sleeve in the form of the D.A. (Ray Collins), who is the syndicate’s candidate for a judgeship.  The battle of good versus evil continues on for the rest of the film.  With William Conrad as one of the old man’s associates.

I thought this movie was just OK.  It was a remake of a silent film of the same name, also produced by Howard Hughes, from 1928.  Commentator Eddie Muller makes it clear that he prefers the earlier version, which was nominated as Best Picture in the very first Academy Award year.  He details the fraught production history in which no less than three directors worked on the movie.  Muller said that Hughes rejected Samuel Fuller’s original script for this version.  He could not live with the police corruption included by Fuller in the plot.  Fuller’s version probably would have made a more dynamic film.

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Quo Vadis  
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy
Written by John Lee Mahin, S.N. Behrman, and Sonya Levien from the novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz
1951/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Emperor Nero: [none of his closest men will die for him in light of the mob’s anger over Rome’s burning] I’m surrounded by eunuchs![/box]

Objectively, this is worth seeing for Ustinov’s performance, the spectacle, and the music. Subjectively, it is just the kind of bloated epic I can’t stand.

The setting is Rome during the reign of the emperor Nero (Ustinov).  Marcus Vinicius (Robert Taylor) has returned to the city after emerging victorious over the Britons.  Instead of being received immediately in triumph, he is asked to cool his heels at the home of retired general Plautius.  He is immediately attracted to Lygia (Deborah Kerr), Plautius’s adopted daughter who was taken as a hostage from her father, the king of the Lygians.  It soon becomes clear to the audience, if not to Vincinius, that the entire Plautius household is made up of Christians.  Lygia is smitten with Vincinius but rejects his crude advances.

Soon enough, Vincinius is received in Rome in a triumphal procession.  He has had Lygia summoned by the emperor.  Nero is attracted to the comely lass but is persuaded by Petronius, Vincinius’s uncle and Nero’s right hand man, that the girl is not worthy of him. Vincinius claims her as his prize, angering Nero’s harlot wife Poppaea who has the hots for Vincinius herself.  Lygia flees,  When Vincinius finally catches up with her something makes him set her free.

Meanwhile, Nero’s artistic ambitions are getting out of control.  Not content with composing bad poetry, the fey demigod decides to rebuild Rome.  He will need to clear the area and decides the quickest way is to set the whole thing on fire.  He is stunned when the masses do not appreciate the gesture.  Poppaea, secretly striking back at Vincinius and Lygea, suggests the best way to deflect blame would be to blame the conflagration on the Christians.  The move concludes with the Christians going smilingly to their fate in the Coliseum and Nero’s end.  With Finlay Currie as Saint Peter.

Something about these things strikes me as so phony that I can’t stomach them.  It is as if the filmmakers neither knew nor cared about history, Rome, or Christianity.  It is 100% bombast and spectacle.  That said, the Technicolor really worked its magic on the Blu-Ray DVD I watched.  Taylor seemed a bit too old and stuffy for his role and this might be the worst performance I have ever seen from Kerr, which doesn’t mean it was actually bad. Ustinov veers between delicious camp and beastliness just as any Nero should and Genn is wry as his bored advisor.

Quo Vadis was nominated for Academy Awards in the following categories:  Best Picture; Best Supporting Actor (Ustinov); Best Supporting Actor (Genn); Best Cinematography, Color; Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color; Best Costume Design, Color; Best Film Editing; and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.

Trailer

The House on Telegraph Hill
Directed by Robert Wise
Written by Elick Moll and Frank Partos from a novel by Dana Lyon
1951/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Alan Spender: [to Victoria/Karin] The trouble with you is you really don’t know how to relax.[/box]

I enjoyed this noirish woman-in-peril thriller.

Karin Dernakova and Victoria Kowelska (Valentina Cortese) are helping each other survive a concentration camp.  Victoria has lost her entire family and home in the war.  Karin was able to send her infant son Chris off to stay with her rich aunt Sophie in San Francisco before war broke out.  Karin dreams being of reunited with the boy after the war is over and plans to take Victoria with her.  When Karin dies before liberation, Victoria decides to borrow her identity in hopes of a better life in America.  In the relocation camp, she attempts to make contact with the aunt and discovers she has died.

When she gets to New York, Victoria/Karin meets with some lawyers who advise that Aunt Sophie left her entire fortune to Chris.  A distant relative by marriage, Alan Spender, was named the boy’s guardian and since has adopted him.  Victoria protests but the problem seems to be solved when she and Alan fall in love and marry.

Victoria and Alan set up housekeeping in the aunt’s mansion on Telegraph Hill.  It turns out that the house comes with Chris’s governess Margaret.  Victoria quickly forms a real bond with the boy and is met with jealousy and resistance from Margaret.  For some reason, she also takes up residence in a guest room.  Then a series of events make her believe that Alan is trying to kill her …  With William Lundigan as Alan’s friend and Victoria’s admirer.

I thought this was a solid, entertaining little picture.  I liked that it did not go the direction I thought it was headed.  The leads were all very good in their roles and Wise, while no Hitchcock, handles suspense well.

Basehart and Cortese met during the shooting of this film and were married shortly thereafter.

Trailer – massive spoilers included

Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N.  
Directed by Raoul Walsh
Written by Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts, and Aeneas MacKenzie; adopted for the screen by C.S. Forester from his novels
UK/1951
Warner Bros.
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Lt. Crystal: Signal from the lookout, sir. Natividad’s gone about – one more tack and she’ll be at the harbor mouth.

Capt. Horatio Hornblower, R.N: Very good, Mr. Crystal. Well, gentlemen, that leaves time for a rubber of whist.[/box]

This sea adventure makes a good popcorn movie.

The story is set during the Napoleonic Wars. The HMS Lydia is sailing in Southern waterns on a secret mission known only to its master, Captain Horatio Hornblower (Gregory Peck). As the story begins, the ship is becalmed and food and water are running short.  Sailors are beginning to die of scurvy.  The ship is saved from mutiny when Hornblower correctly predicts that the wind will pick up and the ship will reach land within 24 hours.

The ship’s mission was to reach a Caribbean island and join forces with a rebel in an effort to oust France’s Spanish ally from the a America’s.  The idea was to keep Spain occupied so occupied in defending its colonies that it would have no time to aid France.  The Lydia sets out at once and, after a battle,  captures a Spanish galleon.  Suddenly, the news arrives that Spain has switched sides and is now England’s ally.  Hornblower must free the ship.  In the process, he finds he must take Lady Barbara (Virgina Mayo), sister of the Duke of Wellington, on board.  She had been fleeing a yellow fever outbreak in Panama.

In due course, Hornblower and Lady Barbara fall in love.  But Hornblower is married and Lady Barbara is engaged to an admiral so this love is of the tortured variety.  Most of the rest of the film, however, is devoted to sea battles and Hornblower’s daring escape with a couple of his men from French captivity.

When Raoul Walsh helms an adventure story like this, you are almost guaranteed an entertaining couple of hours.  Gregory Peck made a speciality of this kind of manly but humane hero and does well here.  Mayo (The Best Years of Our Lives, White Heat) is almost unrecognizable as the kind and pure Lady Barbara. so different from her usual slutty roles.  There is a stirring score by Robert Farnon.

Trailer