Flickers in Time

A Streetcar Named Desire
Directed by Elia Kazan
Written by Oscar Saul and Tennessee Williams from the play by Williams
1951/USA
Chales K. Feldman Group/Warner Bros.
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
#245 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Blanche DuBois: I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.[/box]

This is a practically perfect adaptation of a powerful and poetic masterpiece.  Only freedom from Hayes Code restrictions could possibly have made it better.

Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) has come to the end of her rope.  Having burned all her bridges behind her, she arrives tin New Orleans o seek safe haven with her younger sister, Stella (Kim Hunter).  Stella is used to Blanche’s demands and airs and, although pregnant, welcomes her extended stay.  Unfortunately for Blanche, Stella is married to and passionately in love with Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando).  Stanley is the diametric opposite of Blanche.  He is brutally honest, confrontational and uneducated while Blanche is trying desperately to preserve the illusion of some imagined past as a Southern belle and quotes from the great works of literature.

Things do not work out well in the cramped Kowalski flat to say the least.  Blanche is constantly putting Stanley down while he spends all his time seeking to strip her bare of her pretensions.  It is obvious that her current situation is untenable so Blanche sets out to win Mitch (Karl Malden), the most civilized of Stanley’s poker buddies.  In the meantime, Blanche’s presence has strained Stella and Stanley’s relationship and Stanley becomes more and more determined to rid himself of an unwanted houseguest.

What can one say about this classic?  The acting could not be bettered.  I don’t know if Leigh gets enough credit for her performance of a very difficult part.  It’s easy to overlook when she shares the screen with the volcano that was young Brando. One of his triumphs was the humanity he brought to what could have been the part of a mere bully.   I could not have lived with Blanche for ten minutes but Tennessee Williams makes her fate stand in for all the pain of a hard and heartless world.  Most highly recommended.

A Streetcar Named Desire won Academy Awards in the categories of: Best Actress (Leigh); Best Supporting Actor (Malden); Best Supporting Actress (Hunter); and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black–and-White.  It was nominated in the categories of Best Picture; Best Actor (Brando); Best Director; Best Writing, Screenplay; Best Cinematography, Black-and-White; Best Costume Design; Black-and-White; Best Sound, Recording; and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.

Trailer

A Place in the Sun
Directed by George Stevens
Written by Harry Brown and Michael Wilson from a play by Patrick Kearney and the novel An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
1951/USA
Paramount Pictures
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
#249 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Angela: Did you promise to be a good boy? Not to waste your time on girls?
George Eastman: I don’t waste my time.

Such a sad and beautiful movie.

This is a much more romantic version of the Dreiser novel.  George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) was raising singing on street corners by his very religious missionary parents.  His mother’s brother, on the other hand, is enormously wealthy and the owner of Eastman Industries.  George shows up at the factory one day looking for work.  He is hired as a lowly shipping clerk and basically forgotten about. Although fraternization is strictly forbidden by company rules, he takes up with a fellow shipping department employee, Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters).  Before long, they are lovers.

Then his uncle spots George in the shipping department and decides an Eastman should be doing something better.  He asks George to a party at his home to discuss the matter.  There George meets the simply ravishing Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor).  It is love at first sight and soon Angela and George are an item.

In the meantime, Alice has discovered she is pregnant.  She is unable to find a doctor to help her out of her predicament and demands that George marry her.  Her demands become most insistent at the very moment when it looks like George has or will soon be accepted as a full-fledged member of the Eastman family and a suitable marriage partner for Angela.

On the day they were to have been married, George takes Alice out for a ride in a row boat.  The boat capsizes and she drowns.  The rest of the movie follows George’s travails up to and including his murder trial.  With Anne Revere, in her last role before her blacklisting, as George’s mother and Raymond Burr as the District Attorney.

This film is the point at which the studio system met method acting.  It deserved all the accolades it received.  The acting is brilliant and the production from the cinematography to the music is stunning.  There may never have been more glorious love scenes than those between Clift and Taylor in this movie.  I felt sorry for every single person in the story by the end.  Recommended.

A Place in the Sun won Academy Awards for Best Director; Best Writing, Screenplay; Best Cinematography, Black-and-White; Best Costume Design, Black-and-White; Best Film Editing; and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.  It was nominated in the categories of Best Actor (Clift) and Best Actress (Winters).

Trailer

The Day the Earth Stood Still
Directed by Robert Wise
Written by Edmund H. North
1951/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
#252 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Helen: Gort! Klaatu barada nikto![/box]

The sleek design of this early sci-fi thriller with a message has held up remarkably well over the years.

America is the the midst of a Red Scare.  So when a flying saucer lands on the Washington DC mall, naturally the aliens are met with tanks and artillery and as soon as one emerges he is shot.  This is Klaatu (Michael Rennie) who has come to deliver a warning to gun-happy earthlings.  Fortunately he heals quickly and is backed up by a gigantic robot named Gort who is capable of vaporizing anything made of metal, including tanks.  Klaatu is taken to the hospital.  Gort remains exactly where he is.  Both the spaceship and the robot are made of a substance which is impervious to all earthly attempts to breach it and cannot be moved.

Klaatu escapes from the hospital and begins to roam the streets clad in clothes belonging to a Major Carpenter.  He has decided to find out what makes these earthlings tick.  He spots a room for rent in a boarding house and rents it on the spot.  There he befriends the open-minded Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) and her little boy Bobby (Billy Gray).  Klaatu has an especially strong bond with young Bobby and babysits for him while Helen goes out with her boring insurance salesman boyfriend Tom (Hugh Marlowe).

Klaatu has been rebuffed in his desire to address the leaders of all the world’s countries so he seeks out noted genius and Einstein stand-in Professor Jacob Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe).  Barnhardt immediately grasps the urgency of the situation and assembles the world’s scientists to listen to Klaatu’s plea.  In the meantime, however, Tom proves to be a snitch and it is up to Helen to keep our alien in one piece long enough to carry out his mission.

This still looks simply stunning with its clean lines and gorgeous cinematography.  The anti-nuclear message moves what could be a simple fantasy up a notch in significance.  The evocative theramin score by Bernard Hermann is practically an additional character.  This film is a real treat.  Highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray DVD looks really beautiful and contains a fantastic commentary by directors Robert Wise and Nicholas Meyer (The Day After).  There’s an additional commentary by some film score experts that I haven’t listened to yet.

Trailer

The Lavender Hill Mob
Directed by Charles Crichton
Written by T.E.B. Clarke
1951/UK
Ealing Studios
Repeat viewing/Amazon Instant
#250 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Turner: The trouble with you, Holland, is that you haven’t enough ambition.[/box]

Was there ever a more versatile actor than Alec Guinness?

The movie begins with “Dutch” Holland (Guinness) recounting his life of crime from a cafe in Rio de Janeiro, where he is evidently the toast of the town and dispenser of goodies to the lovely Audrey Hepburn in her first major film.  It then segues into flashback.

Holland is a seemingly humble and boring bank clerk who oversees the transport of gold bullion from the refinery to the Bank of England.  In reality, he has spent most of his time for years concocting a foolproof plan to steal a gold shipment.  He has everything solved but a way to get the gold out of the country.  His last problem is solved when he meets Mr.  Pendlebury who owns a company which makes “gold” Eiffel Tower paperweights out of molten lead.  Holland as little trouble convincing Pendlebury to make the paperweights out of real gold and send them off to France.

Holland’s scheme is launched a bit prematurely when he is given a promotion at the bank. The two quickly hire a couple of Cockney thieves to assist in the heist.  Despite their careful planning, everything that can go wrong does go wrong.  By some miracle they end up with the gold, however, and the paperweights are shipped off to Paris.  Then six are sold by mistake as souvenirs to some schoolgirls and Holland’s determination to retrieve them causes a whole new comedy of errors.   This was Robert Shaw’s film debut, in a tiny part.

This is a genuinely funny film.  I find the most endearing parts to be the steadfast friendship between Holland and Pendlebury.  Some of the expressions Guinness gets on his face are just priceless!  Recommended.

The Lavender Hill Mob won an Oscar for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story and Screenplay.  Alec Guinness was nominated for Best Actor.

Trailer

Strangers on a Train
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde and Whitfield Cook from a novel by Patricia Highsmith
1951/USA
Warner Bros.
Repeat viewing/My DVD Collection
#244 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Bruno Anthony: I have a theory that you should do everything before you die.

The bravura direction and Robert Walker’s fantastic performance are enough to overcome the very bland Farley Granger and Ruth Roman acting and make this one of my favorite Hitchcock films.

Tennis player Guy Haines (Granger) has the misfortune to meet fan Bruno Antony (Walker) on a train journey to talk to his wife about speeding up their divorce proceedings.  Bruno  already knows all about Guy’s marital woes and about his romance with a U.S. Senator’s pretty daughter (Roman).  Bruno has a unique plan for the perfect murder.  He volunteers to murder Guy’s wife Miriam in exchange for Guy killing his much hated father.

Guy, of course, rebuffs this proposition, but Bruno continues to go on and on about it. When he leaves the train, Guy sort of nods at Bruno more to humor him than anything else.  He then visits his wife who informs him that she now has no intention of divorcing him, despite the fact she is carrying another man’s child.  She is looking forward to living the high life in Washington.

Bruno catches up with Miriam at a carnival she is attending with a couple of male admirers.  Guy’s problem has been solved.  Now Bruno wants him to fulfill his side of the “bargain”.  As time goes on Bruno becomes more insistent and it is ever more clear that he is completely insane.  When it is clear Guy has no intention of murdering the father, Bruno sets out to frame him for the murder of his wife.  Since Guy was the party with the motive, this shouldn’t be too difficult, no?  With Leo J. Carroll as the Senator and Patricia Hitchcock as the Senator’s other daughter.

I just love the set pieces from this movie.   The meeting of the two strangers, Miriam’s murder, and the tennis game are masterfully done.  Walker is wonderfully effective as an effeminate psychopath in a role very different from the juveniles he previously specialized in.  It’s really sad we lost him the year of this film’s release.  Roman and Granger are pretty bad and the concluding merry-go-round scene might go a bit over the top but, for me, the movie’s other pleasures make it something I can watch again and again.  Recommended.

Strangers on a Train was nominated for an Oscar for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White.

Trailer

Ace in the Hole (AKA The Big Carnival)
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels, and Walter Newman
1951/USA
Paramount Pictures
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
#243 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Lorraine: I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.[/box]

Billy Wilder concocts the original media circus and Kirk Douglas gives us perhaps his most vile heel ever.

Chuck Tatum (Douglas) is a hard-drinking wise-guy newspaper reporter who has been fired by several big city newspapers.  He shows up at an Albuquerque paper and offers his services as a “$200 a day” reporter who will work for cheap.  Despite rubbing the editor (Porter Hall) the wrong way, he gets the job.  After a year, he is still being sent to cover rattlesnake festivals.

On the way to one such event,  he and his photographer stop to get gas at a roadside cafe and souvenir shop.  They learn from the owner’s wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) that her husband has been trapped in an old Indian tomb where he was searching for artifacts.  Chuck goes to investigate and discovers that the trapped man, Leo, believes that he may be the victim of an Indian curse punishing those who desecrate their grave sites.  Chuck smells a good story and a possible Pulitzer prize.

When Chuck learns that the contractors he brought in to rescue the man believe they can get him out in 24 hours he encourages them to do it the hard way by drilling down from the top.  He wants to milk the story for at least a week and is supported in this aim by the crooked local sheriff who is looking for publicity for his re-election campaign. Meanwhile the trapped man and his parents believe Chuck is actually his friend.  Lorraine knows differently but is all cooperation when she sees how much money can be made by the gawkers who now flood the site.

Chuck wangles an exclusive deal for the coverage and alienates all his fellow journalists in the process.  He even manages to get his job back at a New York paper.  Will Chuck get the comeuppance he so richly deserves?

This movie is powerful and well-made in every respect.  It is also the most cynical and misanthropic of all Wilder’s films.  There is an uncharacteristic meanness and lack of leavening humor that makes it hard for me to really love.  It really should be seen though.

Ace in the Hole was nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay.

Trailer