Flickers in Time

White Mane (Crin blanc: Le cheval sauvage)
Directed by Albert Lamorisse
Written by Albert Lamorisse and Denys Colomb de Daunant; English narration by James Agee
1953/USA
Films Montsouris
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities. — Herman Melville [/box]

If you love horses or beautiful cinematography this short film is a must see.

The film is almost dialogue free with a voice-over narration.  The story is set in Southern France where herds of wild horses still roam.  A beautiful stallion named White Mane is the leader of his particular group.  He does not like people and can get pretty violent in his efforts to escape them.  This only makes a group of local horsemen covet him more. He is also admired by a boy of maybe 10 or 12.  The men finally catch him but he escapes.

The boy lives with his grandfather and small sister.  He fishes in the local marshes.  A flamingo lives with the family and eats out of the boy’s hand.  The boy extracts a promise from the leader of the men that if he can catch White Mane he will be the boy’s.  It isn’t easy but the boy finally captures the horse and makes friends with it.  But that is not the end of the tale.

I love LaMorrisse’s The Red Balloon and this is only more beautiful.  It is a fine way to spend forty minutes and highly recommended.

Montage of clips  – DVD print quality is far superior

Titanic
Directed by Jean Negulesco
Written by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Ricard L. Breen
1953/USA
Twentieth Century Fox
First viewing/Netflix Rental

[box] Annette Sturges: Mama, you should have protested. It’s a really bad table. There’s not a person we know at the end of this room.

Julia Sturges: Be brave Annette. These tragedies happen sometimes in life.[/box]

What’s a film about the Titanic disaster without a little melodrama?

There are several subplots running through the film.  The main one concerns the demise of the marriage of Richard Ward Sturges (Clifton Webb) and his wife Julia (Barbara Stanwyck).  Julia has left Paris for America with their two children Annette (Audrey Dalton), who is in her late teens,  and Norman, who is maybe twelve.  Richard finds out at the last moment and gets on the sold out ship by buying the ticket of the father of a steerage class family.  He promptly moves from steerage to first class and confronts his wife.

The children adore their father and he obviously loves them.  We find out that Julia, a “common” Midwest girl when she married Richard, does not want her children spoiled by the Parisian lifestyle or her husband’s effete manners and class-conscious world view.  It is possibly too late for Annette, who when she finds out that the stay is to be permanent demands to be taken “home” to Paris.  Julia is insistent that Norman is hers to stay however.

In addition to the drama about Richard and Julia we get the shipboard romance between Annette and Purdue man Gifford Rogers (Robert Wagner), a defrocked alcoholic priest (Richard Basehart) and words of homespun wisdom from Maude Young (Thelma Ritter), a standin for the Unsinkable Molly Brown.  We all know how this will end but not necessarily who will rise to the occasion.  With Brian Aherne as Captain Smith.

I was not crazy about the Academy Award winning Screenplay which managed to be both overblown and not dramatic enough somehow to carry us through to the sinking.  Things get relatively exciting when the ship hits the iceberg.  Stanwyck and Webb are both very good.  It was good to see Webb with play a part with some real emotion behind the waspishness.  Robert Wagner is made to sing and dance – a mistake in my opinion.  In sum, this was entertaining enough but nothing great.

The DVD contains two commentaries.  One is by film critic Richard Schickel.  The other one, which I preferred, is by Sylvia Stoddard, a Titanic buff, with a cinematographer and actors Audrey Dalton and Robert Wagner.  The actors made Stanwyck sound like one of the nicest people ever.  I had not known before this that she was able to produce real tears on cue!

Titanic won the Academy Award for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay.  It was nominated for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White.

The Living Desert
Directed by James Algar
Written by James Algar and Winston Hibler
1953/USA
Walt Disney Studio
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] “I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams…” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince[/box]

I believed less than half of what they were trying to teach me but enjoyed looking at the American desert, my current home.

This is a very Disney documentary.  First we get an animated explanation of how the desert is formed by the clouds bumping up against the Sierra Nevada mountains.  The film then focuses mostly on the animal life of the desert.  Several species are covered.  Many of the little stories involve predator-prey behavior.

All the animals are seen through a simplistic human-centric lens.  Their behavior is shown in heavily edited little dramas conforming to what a child might imagine the motivation to be. We don’t really see quite this kind of nature documentary anymore.  Disney captured some nice footage though and the narrative is entertaining.

The Living Desert won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, Features.

Clip

Genevieve
Directed by Henry Cornelius
Written by William Rose
1953/UK
J. Arthur Rank Organization/La Societe de Film Sirius
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Hotel proprietress: Nobody’s ever complained before.
Guest: Are they Americans?[/box]

This is a pretty funny film.  I imagine it would be hilarious if you happened to be a classic car owner or better yet the spouse of one.

Alan McKim (John Gregoson) inherited a 1904 Darracq from his father and with it the tradition of driving in the annual London-Brighton classic car rally.  Alan spends virtually all of his free time tinkering with this car.  His wife Wendy (Dinah Sheridan) is not too thrilled and this particular year she threatens not to accompany Alan to the event.  She eventually relents however.

Ambrose Claverhouse (Kenneth Moore) is a friend of the family who introduced Wendy to Alan.  He owns a 1905 Spyker and  also participates in the yearly event.  Ambrose is a bachelor and this year he has invited the unsuspecting Rosalind (a hilarious Kay Kendall) in hopes of a “really beautiful emotional experience” during the weekend at Brighton.

Alan and Ambrose have a not always friendly rivalry with respect to their cars.  Alan’s car is constantly breaking down but he is certain of its superiority to Ambrose’s.  The movie follows Alan’s mishap-filled journey to Brighton.  After arrival,  Alan becomes jealous of Ambrose’s attentions toward Wendy and makes a bet the couple can scarcely afford to lose.  Against all the rally rules, he says Genevieve can beat the Spyker on the trip back to Westminster Bridge.  One adventure after another confronts the ruthless drivers.

I thought this was amusing.  My favorite part was when Kay Kendall played the trumpet.  If you know someone obsessed with a hobby such as this you might find it even funnier.

Genevieve was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Writing, Story and Screenplay and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.

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Gion Bayashi (A Geisha)
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Written by Matsutarô Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda from Kawaguchi’s novel
1953/Japan
Daiei Studios
First viewing/Hulu

[box] Miyoharu: A geisha’s lie is not a real lie. It’s a cornerstone of our profession. Do we not amuse our clients by agreeing to all their requests?[/box]

Here Mizoguchi offers some small hope for his heroines amid their pain.  I liked this a lot.

Sixteen-year old Eiko is the daughter of a geisha who married one of her customers. Eiko’s mother has died and she is estranged from her pathetic loser father.  She has been living with an uncle who claims she owes him money and demands she sleep with him as repayment.  So Eiko flees to the Gion district of Kyoto and begs her mother’s friend Mioharu to sponsor her for training as a geisha.  Geisha training and outfitting is very expensive and Eiko has no capital nor will her father be her guarantor.  Finally, Mioharu relents and sponsors the girl herself.

Eiko is a diligent student and she is ready for her debut scarcely a year after this.  The kimonos and other gear required are immensely expensive.  So Mioharu goes to “Mother” who runs this particular band of geishas for a 300,000 yen loan.  Mother doesn’t appear to be the world’s most generous person but she agrees.  Eiko makes a very beautiful Geisha.

Things go downhill form here.  Eiko’s father takes to coming around regularly for hand outs.  It turns out that “Mother” did not actually lend Mioharu the money.  Instead the loan came from Kusuda, a 62-year-old wheeler dealer,  in exchange for “Mother’s” promise that he could be the 17-year-old Eiko’s “patron” (aka lover).  Then, Kasuda, who has been spendiing a lot of time and money on wining and dining a Ministry official in pursuit of a big contract, wants Miocharu to sleep with the official.  Neither woman wants to comply.  But “Mother” has even more tricks up her sleeve to get what she wants, not limited to completely barring the geishas from working.  How long can they resist?

It struck me that poor Eiko’s job as a geisha was not all that different from her situation with her uncle.  Her body was still her main commodity.  Only the kimonos were more expensive.  We get lots of scenes where these exquisitely refined and trained women have to be nice, and more, to a bunch of lecherous drunks.  It is truly disgusting.  At least, the ending of this one is not 100% bleak.  This is really well written and acted.  The print available on YouTube didn’t do any favors to the images.  Recommended.

Trailer

I Confess
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by George Tabori and William Archibald from a play by Paul Anthelme
1953/USA
Warner Bros.
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Fr. Michael William Logan: I never thought of the priesthood as offering a hiding place.[/box]

This lesser known Hitchcock film really grew on me.

I’ll try not to spoil it.  The setting is Quebec.  Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) is a parish priest.  Late one night, the church’s German refugee handyman Otto Keller returns in a very agitated state.  He insists that Logan hear his confession.  In it he tells the priest that he murdered lawyer Villette in the course of a bungled burglary attempt.  He was wearing a stolen cassock at the time.

The next morning Keller reports as usual to tend Villette’s garden and “discovers” the corpse.  Father Logan  goes to the scene and is seen to speak with a woman there.  She is Ruth Granfort (Anne Baxter) and appears almost happy about Villette’s death.  Father Logan was spotted the previous night near Villlette’s hoiuse.  Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden) is assigned to the case and follows the clues with dogged persistence.  I will end here.  With Brian Aherne as Ruth’s husband.

The murder takes place right after the credits and we know the culprit within the first 5 or 10 minutes.  The core of the movie is Father Logan’s dilemma between preserving the sanctity of the confessional or his personal reputation and freedom.  Montgomery Clift is expert at playing this kind of torn character and is excellent in this movie.  Anne Baxter overacts a bit but is bearable.  Hitchcock keeps the suspense tightly wound and the whole thing looks great.  I liked this more on my second viewing than my first.

Trailer

Peter Pan
Directed by Clyde Geronomi, Wilfred Jackson, et al
Written by Ted Sears, Erdman Penner et al from a play by J.M. Barrie
1953/USA
Walt Disney Studio
Repeat viewing/Netflix Rental

[box] Peter Pan: Second star to the right and straight on till morning. [/box]

This classic Disney cartoon falls flat in comparison to my beloved Mary Martin TV musical.

Everyone probably knows the story.  Peter Pan is a boy with magical powers largely fueled by pixie dust contributed by his friend Tinkerbell, a fairy.  He regularly visits the children of the Darling family, Wendy, John and Michael.  Wendy regales her brothers about his adventures in the interim.  Wendy managed to steal Peter’s shadow and he arrives to retrieve it.  Wendy’s father has threatened to take her out of the nursery and make her grow up.  So Peter teaches the children to fly and they go off to his home in Neverland.

There the children get involved in all Peter’s battles with the evil pirate Captain Hook.  They also visit an Indian village and a mermaid lagoon.  Peter lives with a number of Lost Boys who want Wendy as their Mother, though this aspect is not stressed much in the cartoon.  Al of Peter’s advenures are complicated by Tinkerbell’s jealousy of Wendy.  With Hans Conreid as the voice of Mr. Darling and Captain Hook.

One of the things that keeps this in the second tier of classic Disney cartoons, in my opinion, is the lack of memorable songs.  I am spoiled by having watched the Mary Martin musical on TV every year during my youth.  That version has great songs.

If you have never read J.M. Barrie’s book I would highly recommend it.  I listened to the audiobook narrated by Tim Curry and it was wonderful. Only an adult could really get all the wry hiumor properly.

Trailer