Flickers in Time

Three Strangers
Directed by Jean Negulesco
John Huston and Howard Koch
1946/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] David Shackleford: [to Crystal] You only want what you can’t have as long as you can’t have it.[/box]

This is a fun John Huston-penned thriller about his favorite topic, greed.  It contains dynamite performances by Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.

Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald, also fantastic) is in the possession of the idol of Chinese goddess Kwan Yin.  She believes that the goddess will grant one wish by three strangers at midnight on Chinese New Year.  So Crystal picks up lawyer Jerome Arbuthny (Greenstreet) and dipso Johnny West (Lorre) on the street, being careful not to learn their names, and takes them home.  Johnny is intrigued but Arbuthny scoffs at the whole project.  The three have different problems but money will help solve all of them and Crystal gets the men to agree to wish that an Irish Sweepstakes ticket will win and to pledge not to sell the ticket before the race.

After making the wish at midnight, the three exchange names and go on their merry way. We learn that the truly wicked Crystal’s real wish is to get her estranged husband back, apparently so she can make him suffer some more.  Arbuthny’s wish is to be admitted into a select lawyer’s club but he has been speculating with a client’s trust fund money and fears for his reputation if found out.  Johnny, besides drinking himself to death, has been an unwitting dupe in a robbery that ended in murder.  He is hiding out with his girlfriend Icey (Joan Lorring) and a gangster during the trial of the actual murderer.  Then the murderer decides to admit to the robbery and finger his associates for the murder and Johnny is in real trouble.

I won’t spoil the next developments.  Anyone who has seen Treasure of the Sierra Madre and can transpose the situation into this kind of story will have a pretty good guess.

Where to start?  Lorre is really the the hero if this film has one.  It’s so nice to see him without the usual tics and with a girlfriend who adores him.  You just have to love him. Greenstreet gets to shine in the third act with a truly manic and scary turn.  The multiple subplots did not detract from the story arc.  It’s amazing what strong writing can do.  Recommended.

Trailer

Morning for the Osone Family (Ôsone-ke no ashita)
Directed by Keisuke Kinoshita
Written by Eijirô Hisaita
1946/Japan
Shochiku Company
First viewing/Hulu Plus

[box] Taiji Osone: ‘Bushido is the way of dying.” I wish things were that simple.[/box]

Director Kinoshita moves seamlessly from pro-war propaganda to anti-war propoganda. Fortunately, he is also an artist and this is a very moving film with a wonderful central performance by Haruko Sugimura, who later played the selfish daughter in Tokyo Story.

The story follows the Osone family from 1943 to 1945.  We know it is Westernized when we see the family celebrating Christmas by singing “Silent Night” while mother accompanies on the piano.  The father, a professor, is deceased and a picture of grandfather in his military uniform hangs on the wall.  The Osone’s celebration is marred by the fact that they are also bidding Yukie’s fiance farewell as he goes off to join the army. Things get worse when eldest son Ichiru is picked up by the police for writing an article critiquing the war.  He remains a political prisoner until war’s end.

Unfortunately, the nominal head of the family is “Uncle”, the father’s brother, who is a fat cat colonel at Japanese military headquarters.  He immediately breaks off Yukie’s engagement since he can’t allow the fiance’s family to dishonorably unite itself with the sister of a “subversive”.  Afterwards, Uncle and his wife move in with the family when their house is damaged by bombing.  Uncle gets the best of everything and manages to wangle Yukie a job in the accounting department instead of going on to war factory work as ordered.

Mrs. Osone (Sugimura) is throughly intiminated by Uncle,  Middle son Taiji, a painter, is drafted.  He needs to get drunk to work up the courage to go.  Finally, in the darkest days of the war, the youngest son, a junior in high school enlists with the encouragement of Uncle.  Mrs. Osone is drafted into hard labor digging an air raid shelter but collapses due to malnutrition.  She develops some backbone after the surrender but by this time in looks like she may have literally or figuratively have lost all her children in the process.

Although this movie is obviously a propaganda effort to show the Japanese public the error of their government’s militaristic ways, more broadly its theme is the post-war dissolution of the Japanese family, a subject which Ozu would explore in many of his less broadly melodramatic masterpieces.  Despite all this, I was genuinely touched by the story.  It was effective propaganda, I think.  By the end I wanted the authorities to round up Uncle and try him as a war criminal.  Even better would have been if someone had just slapped him hard.  Recommended.

Clip – I saw a very interesting connection to The Best Years of Our Lives here – remember the Japanese flag taken from the body of a dead soldier that Al tries to give his son?  Here we see one of the children writing a message on a flag that a soldier will take off to war.

The Locket
Directed by John Brahm
Written by Sheridan Gibney
1946/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
First viewing/Warner Archive DVD

[box] Norman Clyde: I really didn’t mean to be offensive.

Nancy Monks Blair Patton: That hardly seems possible.[/box]

Laraine Day makes for an overly wholesome femme fatale in this film noir but Robert Mitchum and Brian Aherne are sufficiently doomed to make up for it.

This film uses the flashback within a flashback within a flashback technique.  It is less confusing than it sounds.

The story begins on the day Nancy (Day) is to wed John Willis (Gene Raymond). Psychiatrist Dr. Blair (Aherne) asks for a rush audience with the groom right before the ceremony.  Blair tells Willis that his intended has already wrecked the lives of at least three men until now.  Blair says he should know because he was one of them, having been married to Nancy for five years.  This is the first that Willis has heard of Nancy’s marital history.  He has a hard time believing his ever-smiling bride-to-be could lie to him.

Blair begins to tell the whole story.  Here we flashback into Blair’s meeting with Nancy’s ex-boyfriend Norman Clyde (Mitchum).  As Clyde tells Blair his own sad story, we segue into another flashback with voice-over narration by Clyde.  It seems that he caught Nancy with a very valuable diamond necklace in her handbag after a party during which the jewels went missing.  Nancy admits to stealing the gems and begins to explain the roots of her kleptomaniac tendencies to Clyde.

Segue into still another flashback.  As a child, Nancy lived in a wealthy household where her mother was housekeeper.  She became friends with the daughter of the family.  On the daughters birthday, she gave little Nancy her own gift, a locket,  in compensation for being left out of the girl’s  party.  The girl’s mother abruptly snatches the locket, a valuable family heirloom, back.  Nancy reacts badly to losing her prize to say the least.  Then the locket goes missing.  Nancy is the prime suspect.  Even though Nancy’s mother eventually finds the locket in the folds of the daughter’s dress, her boss forces Nancy to confess to stealing it.  Clyde buys this tale of childhood trauma, mails the necklace Nancy took back and says no more about it.

There is another jewel theft at a party Nancy attends, this time under circumstances Clyde cannot so easily overlook.  Nancy cannot deal with Clyde’s suspicions and the pair breaks up.  Blair, who buys the childhood trauma story hook line and sinker, refuses to believe his wife erred a second time.  I will spoil no more.  Suffice it to say that Nancy eventually drags Blair through hell.  With Lillian Fontaine, mother of Joan Fontaine and Olivia DeHavilland, as a British countess.

It would be hard for anyone not to be fooled by Day’s all-American good looks and Junior League manners.  In that regard, I suppose she suited the part nicely.  I would have liked a few glimpses of evil in her personality along with her wicked actions, however.  Everybody else in the film is just fine and it is an entertaining mystery.  RKO’s resident noir greats Nicholas Musuraca and Roy Webb did the cinematography and music.

Clip

Black Angel
Directed by Roy William Neill
Written by Roy Chanslor from a novel by Cornell Woolrich
1946/USA
Universal Pictures
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] All that anyone needs to imitate me is two soft-boiled eggs and a bedroom voice. — Peter Lorre[/box]

This solid little noir was the last film made by Sherlock Holmes series director Neill before his death.  The otherwise sterling cast is let down by a too-earnest performance by the heroine.

Mavis Marlow dresses to meet a mystery man as the movie opens.  Kirk Bennett discovers the body, wearing a heart-shaped ruby brooch.  Before he can call the cops, the brooch disappears.   The song “Heartbreak” is playing on the record player. Since Bennett was the lady’s blackmail victim and ex-paramour, he is the most likely suspect and is arrested and sentenced to death.

Despite Kirk’s adultery, his wife Catherine (June Vincent) makes it her mission to exonerate him.  Her investigations eventually lead her to Mavis’s rummy ex-husband Martin Blair (Dan Duryea), composer of “Heartbreak”. Martin tells June that it was he that sent Catherine the brooch. They decide to combine forces.

Martin falls in love with the good and beautiful Catherine and stops drinking.  A clue leads the pair to a nightclub owned by Marko (Peter Lorre).  Martin remembers seeing him outside Mavis’ apartment on the night of the murder.  Martin and Catherine, an ex-singer, put together a nightclub act to get closer to Marko.  Then Catherine resorts to using her favors to get closer still …  With Broderick Crawford as a homicide detective and Wallace Ford as Martin’s friend.

It’s nice to see Duryea in a sympathetic role for a change and he makes a good drunk. Lorre is more restrained than usual and the better for it.  Whether it was the writing or her acting, June Vincent milks her role for every last bit of pathos.  Her performance weakened the picture for me and the ending didn’t do it any favors either.  That said, this is worth viewing for Duryea, Lorre, and Crawford and kept my interest throughout.

Trailer – not a good representation of the movie