Category Archives: Movie Reviews

The Clock
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
Written by Robert Nathan and Joseph Schrank from a story by Paul and Pauline Gallico
1945/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Alice Maybery: Sometimes when a girl dates a soldier she isn’t only thinking of herself. She knows he’s alone and far away from home and no one to talk to and… What are you staring at?[/box]

A poem.  Judy Garland never looked more beautiful than in the hands of her husband-to-be and Robert Walker is swooningly tender.  Sort of like a Brief Encounter with hope.

This is the simple story of a boy and girl who meet and fall in love in the big city, made more urgent by the fact that he is a soldier on perhaps his last leave before leaving for the front.  It is Sunday.  Corporal Joe Allen (Walker) is a lonely, small-town boy in New York City for the first time.  While kindly, random strangers are unwilling to chat with him.  Finally, he accidentally trips Alice Maybery and she loses the heel of her shoe.  He helps her to get it repaired and starts to make time.  She is distrustful but agrees to let him accompany her part way home.  The story is full of elisions.  One of my favorites comes here when she says she cannot go with him to Central Park, she absolutely must go home.  Cut to them laughing at seals at the zoo.  Then they go to the museum and stay until closing time.  She has a date that night and they part.  Joe catches up with her bus and she agrees to meet him under the clock at the Astor.

When Alice gets home, it looks like her roommate convinces her that it is insane to go out with a soldier she has essentially picked up in the street when she doesn’t even know his last name.  But the next cut is to the Astor and Alice is only five minutes late for her rendezvous.

The remainder of the film follows the development of their love, a harrowing separation,  and finally their desperate attempt to marry before Joe must catch his train.  With James Gleason as a kindly milkman.

I think this is just about perfect for what it is.  Despite what could seem a contrived plot, the lovers and their emotions seem very really to me.  I absolutely love Walker in this.  The look on his face in the moments up to their first kiss are almost unbearably sincere.  Poor guy was still recovering from David Selznik’s successful blitzkrieg campaign to steal wife Jennifer Jones from him.  Highly recommended.

I think this film got robbed at Oscar time.  I would have given at least nominations for most everything.  The technical aspects are quite beautiful and its New York is awe-inspiring for something filmed strictly on the MGM lot.  Penn Station never looked better.  The score is wonderful.  The National Board of Review did name The Clock one of the top ten films of 1945, however.

Trailer

And Then There Were None
Directed by René Clair
Written by Dudley Nichols from the novel by Agatha Christie
1945/USA
René Clair Productions
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Emily Brent: Very stupid to kill the only servant in the house. Now we don’t even know where to find the marmalade.[/box]

Agatha Christie murder mysteries are the kind of thing that works best on a first viewing. Still with this cast it’s hard to go far wrong.

Mr. U.N. Owen invites eight people, strangers to him and each other, to a weekend houseparty at his mansion on an isolated island.  There they join the married butler and housekeeper who are to tend to their needs.  There is no sign of their host, however.  After establishing that there is no way off the island until the ferry returns in two days and no telephone either, the guests begin speculating. After dinner, the butler plays a gramaphone record recorded by Owen accusing each guest and servant of some unpunished capital crime and vowing justice.  A copy of the song “Ten Little Indians” is prominently placed on the piano.

Guests start dropping by the methods described in the song.  A table centerpiece loses one Indian with each murder.  Things get even more interesting, if possible, when the guests convince themselves that Owen must be one of their number.  With Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, Roland Young, Louis Hayward, Judith Anderson, Mischa Auer, C. Aubrey Smith, and June Duprez.

The solution to the mystery seemed obvious on a second viewing, eliminating all of the suspense that kept me going the first time.  Still, all these fine character actors attack their roles with gusto and Clair films everything like the artist he was.

Trailer

House of Frankenstein
Directed by Erle C. Kenton
Written by Edward T. Lowe Jr. from a story by Curt Siodmak
1944/USA
Universal Pictures
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] [last lines] Dr. Gustav Niemann: Quicksand![/box]

This all-Monster sequel to The Wolf Man Meets Frankenstein was only further proof that Universal had jumped the shark in its horror franchise.

The film more or less takes up with the situation at the Frankenstein castle as at the end of its predecessor.  Criminially insane Dr. Gustav Niemann (Boris Karloff) escapes with his assistant the hunchback Daniel (J. Carroll Naish) following a prison fire.  The doctor, who had been jailed for attempting to put a dog’s brain in the body of a man, is bent on revenge on the village authorities who locked him up.  On the road, the two run into a carny who is exhibiting the skeleton of Dracula.  Knowing that he need only remove the stake to revive the vampire, Niemann has Daniel murder the carny, revives the Count (John Carradine), and takes the show into town.

Niemann is determined to continue his experiments, this time with the brains of the village leaders.  He thinks he will receive instruction from Dr. Frankenstein’s records and goes to the castle to search for them.  There he finds Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) and Frankenstein’s Monster (Glenn Strange) encased in ice.  He revives Talbot, who shows him to the documents in exchange for his promise to free him of the Wolf Man curse.  In the meantime, we get a love triangle between the hunchback, Talbot, and a gypsy girl (shades of The Hunchback of Notre Dame).  Mayhem ensues.  With Lionel Atwill and Sig Rumann in their old roles as village fathers.

I can just imagine the story conference at Universal.  Somebody said “why not throw in all our monsters?” We can promise the public five times the thrills!  But it just doesn’t work that way.  Instead we get a incoherent, confusing story with snippets of horror action.  Karloff is always effective but it was a mistake to put the Frankenstein monster in the same movie with his originator.  This just highlights the pathetic lameness of Glenn Strange’s creature.  Fortunately, he is only in the film for a very few minutes at the end.  Still an improvement over Lugosi in the same role in The Wolfman meets Frankenstein.

Trailer

The Keys of the Kingdom
Directed by John M. Stahl
Written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Nunnally Johnson from the novel by A.J. Cronin
1944/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Films Corporation
First viewing/Netflix Instant

Father Francis Chisholm: Dear Lord, let me have patience and forbearance where now I have anger. Give me humility, Lord; after all, it was only thy merciful goodness and thy divine providence that saved the boy… but they *are* ungrateful and You know it!

I’ve been putting this off for awhile. It wasn’t my cup of tea exactly but I needn’t have worried.

Father Francis Chisholm (Gregory Peck) is now an old man trying to enjoy some last peaceful years at the parish of his childhood home in Scotland.  The Bishop, an old childhood friend named Angus Mealey (Vincent Price), has had complaints about the priest due to his unorthodox views and wants him to retire.  He sends an emissary (Sir Cedrick Hardwicke) to assess the situation.  While staying the night, the monsignor chances on Father Chisholm’s diary.  We segue into flashback.

We follow Francis from his youth in a household of a Catholic father and Protestant mother.  The prejudiced townsfolk beat the father mercilessly and both father and mother drown in an accident as she is trying to get him home.  Francis is raised by a Catholic friend of the family.  His adoptive mother’s dearest wish is that Francis become a priest but he is more interested in marrying Nora.  But Nora, despairing that he will really come home to her from university, “goes bad”, becomes an unwed mother and dies before he can return to her.  Francis, who had lately been leaning toward the priesthood any way, is now easily convinced to enter the seminary by his mentor at school Father Hamish MacNabb (Edmund Gwynne).

After his ordination, Father Francis tries his hand as a parish priest but is a “failure”.  His doctrine of universal brotherhood and love is something too unorthodox for local Catholics.  McNabb tells him to never change and sends him to do missionary work in China.

After his arrival at a rural village, Father Francis begins to despair of ever winning converts.  He refuses to supply people with rice in exchange for their conversion. Finally, a Christian Chinese named Joseph (Benson Fong) comes along to help.  The priest’s big break comes when he gets a shipment of medical supplies from his atheist friend Willie Tulloch (Thomas Mitchell) at home.  He cures a local mandarin’s son and, while he refuses to allow the man to convert as a form of thanks, he does accept land and a church building from him.

We follow Father Chisholm’s 40 year stay in China as he builds a congregation and tries to defend it during the Civil War.  A subplot involves the aristocratic and dismissive Mother Superior who heads a group of nuns sent to help in the work.  With James Gleason and Anne Revere as Protestant missionaries.

I have to admit that I am not a big fan of Gregory Peck, unfortunately.  He is less pedantic sounding than usual at this stage of his career, however.  The movie is long but fairly solid. I think viewers will react based on their feelings about the subject matter.  All the Chinese are played by Chinese-American actors instead of in yellow face, thank goodness.

Gregory Peck was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for this, only his second screen appearance.  The Keys of the Kingdom was also nominated for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White; Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White; and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (Alfred Newman).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvX5bETpPTo

Trailer

Torment (Hets)
Directed by Alf Sjöberg
Written by Ingmar Bergman
1944/Sweden
Svensk Filmindustri
First viewing/Hulu Plus

[box] Caligula: Cheating, my good sir, cheating![/box]

Torment is a reminder that Ingmar Bergman was as great a screenwriter as he was a director.  This is his very first time out and it’s impressive.  Certainly not something to watch while depressed though!

All the boys in 4th year Latin hate and fear their sadistic teacher, whom they call “Caligula” behind his back.  Caligula (Stig Järrel) delights in roaming through the class waving his stick around and pouncing on each victim unawares.  He conducts the student’s recitation like a prosecutor cross-examining the defendant in a capital murder trial.  His favorite target seems to be Jan-Erik Widgren, an artistic, sensitive boy who seems remarkably well-prepared with his studies for this treatment.  When he spots some penciled notes in the boy’s text he gives him a demerit for cheating and calls his father.  Unfortunately, Jan’s father seems to share some of Caligula’s characteristics himself.  Jan’s mother dotes on him but is utterly ineffective in dealing with the father.

In the meantime, Jan happens upon a girl he has seen behind the counter at a tobacconist’s shop.  Bertha (Mai Zetterling) is staggering drunk through the streets.  Jan takes her home.  Bertha begs him to stay.  She is scared to death of a man who will not leave her alone, although she has tried to end the relationship.  Despite the idealistic Jan’s previous vow to hold out for love, he does so.  And although Bertha is a “bad girl”, love comes anyway.  But Bertha’s tormenter is still in the picture and Jan’s jealousy gets the better of him.  Then things get much, much worse for everybody concerned.

This movie had me more on edge than any horror film.  I kept waiting for something terrible to happen and then it did.  On the other hand, the acting is superb.  Järrel, in particular, was phenomenal in a role in which he had to be despicable and pathetic all at the same time.  And of course Bergman was a genius at getting at the psychological truths of the human heart.  At least this movie has a somewhat redemptive ending.  It’s a bit more melodramatic than Bergman’s later work but still well worth seeing if you are in the mood for some well-made torment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cch7Z2UIkM

Clip – A hard lesson