The Steel Helmet Directed by Samuel Fuller
1951/USA
Deputy Corporation
First viewing
[box] Sergeant Zack: Look, Lieutenant, you got nuthin’ out there but rice paddies crawlin’ with Commies just waitin’ to slap you between two big hunks of rye bread and wash you down with fish eggs and vodka.[/box]
This Korean War noir is an ultra-low-budget gem from early in writer-director Sam Fuller’s career. I love Fuller’s off-kilter style. This was made in only the sixth month of the conflict.
Sargeant Zack (Gene Evans) is the lone survivor of an attack on his unit. A South Korean youngster unbinds his wrists and tags along and Zack tries to rejoin his regiment. They meet up first with a medic, similarly a lone survivor, and then with a ragtag unit who are headed to set up an observation post at a Buddhist temple. The group trades banter between facing attacks from the North Koreans.
This starts out characteristically odd but it soon turned taut and engrossing. The dialogue is sharp and hard-boiled. I liked Fuller’s commentary on U.S. race relations. Fuller was investigated by the FBI for this film when a critique of the detention of Japanese-Americans in World War II and a scene show
Sylvia Scarlett Directed by George Cukor
1935/USA
Radio Pictures
First viewing
Michael Fane: [speaking to Sylvia dressed as a boy] “I say, uh! I know what it is that gives me a queer feeling when I look at you. There’s something in you to be painted.”
This box-office bomb has everything going for it but a coherent script. Sylvia Scarlett (Katharine Hepburn) has lost her mother and her father (Edmund Gwenn) is an embezzler. They flee France for England, Sylvia disguised as a boy for reasons that are pretty unconvincing. On the crossing, they meet Cockney con artist Monkley (Cary and Grant). After Sylvia/Sylvester repeatedly foils every scam the men try to work in London, the trio hooks up with a singer and decides to work as a traveling theater company touring seaside towns. Sylvia becomes enamoured of artist Michael (Brian Aherne) and reveals her gender but Michael is in love with an unfaithful Russian. After more comedy and drama, everybody pairs off satisfactorily.
This never grabbed me. The dialogue is pretty fey and the story is all over the place. Grant’s Cockney accent is fairly bad but he does a good job as a rogue and it’s interesting to see him not as the love interest for a change. Everybody else tries mightily to overcome their material with varied success. With the cast and personnel it should have been a classic. Too bad.
Gun Crazy Directed by Joseph H. Lewis
1950/USA
King Brothers Productions
Repeat viewing
#216 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
Bluey-Bluey: It’s just that some guys are born smart about women and some guys are born dumb.
Bart: Some guys are born clowns.
Bluey-Bluey: You were born dumb.
The roots of film noir are in low-budget pictures – those shadows and locations disguise shoestring sets. Gun Crazy is one of the classics coming from outside the studio system. It was selected for the National Film Registry in 1998.
Bart Tare has been obsessed with guns since he was a child. The mania extends only to shooting – he cannot kill a living thing. He finally succumbs to the temptation to steal a revolver when he is an adolescent and is caught and put in reform school. After serving a stint in the military as a shooting instructor, Bart returns to his home town. He meets up with his childhood friends – now a reporter and a sheriff – and they go to a carnival where they see a shooting exhibition by the lovely Annie Laurie Starr.
It is love at first sight for Bart and Laurie, who flirt while they compete at target shooting. The couple soon marry and Laurie immediately starts agitating to exploit their expertise in stick-ups. Bart is the more timid of the two but he is hooked on Laurie and afraid to lose her so he agrees. So begins a life of crime reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde. With John Dall as Bart, Peggy Cummins as Laurie, and Russ Tamblyn as the young Bart.
Peggy Cummins is the standout in this movie. She is resembles a wild cat in heat as the femme fatale who tempts Bart to his doom and when she is frightened she is like a caged animal. The visuals, lit by cinematographer Russell Harlan, are gorgeous. So are the compositions director Joseph H. Lewis comes up with. The script is serviceable, if not brilliant or particularly hard-boiled. One of the screenwriters was “Millard Kaufman”, a front for Dalton Trumbo who was a blacklisted member of the Hollywood Ten.
I had not noticed before how often John Dall appears to squint. Odd in a supposed sharp-shooter!
The Set-Up Directed by Robert Wise
1949/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
Repeat viewing
Stoker Thompson: Everybody makes book on something.
This superbly acted and utterly grim boxing film is a noir classic of the genre. The movie is one of the few to be told in real time. The action encompasses the 73 minutes it takes to tell the tale.
Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan) is a washed-up fighter taking matches at the bottom of bills in regional clubs. His manager has so little faith in him that he takes a bribe for Stoker to throw a fight without bothering to tell his man. Stoker’s wife Julie (Audrey Totter) pleads with Stoker to give up the game and refuses to attend this night’s fight because she doesn’t want to see him beat up. Her absence eats away at Stoker and makes him more determined than ever to win his bout. Most of the last two-thirds of the film takes place either in the ring or in the dressing-room.
I think Robert Ryan is one of the great actors of the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and he is phenomenal in this movie. He tells more with his eyes in a single close up than most actors can with pages of dialogue. Audrey Totter did not have a big career but is also excellent as are the supporting players. Both these actors may be better known for playing heavies but handle these sympathetic roles well.
The great noir cinematography is by Milton Krasner who won an award for his work here at Cannes. Robert Wise keeps everything flowing brilliantly. I especially liked the use of the bloodthirsty fans in the crowd, who are almost like a Greek chorus. Not an uplifting experience but highly recommended.
The Littlest Rebel Directed by David Butler
1935/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing?
Virginia ‘Virgie’ Cary: You’re nice enough to be a Confederate!
Poor Shirley, her parents die off at such an alarming rate… In this one, Virgie Cary is a little Southern belle when the Civil War breaks out and her Daddy goes off to the army. Virgie and her mother bravely face the hardships of war. Finally, their plantation is burned down by the Yankees and they have to go live in the slave quarters. Mother catches pneumonia. Father comes home and mother dies. The Yankees are looking for Daddy who is a Confederate spy. But when they are about to catch him, Virgie charms a Yankee colonel into giving him a pass and Union uniform so he can take Virgie to an aunt in Richmond. While the two are going through a Union camp, Daddy is captured and he and the colonel are sentenced to death. Can Virgie save the day? With John Boles as Daddy, Karen Morely as mother, and Bill Robinson as Uncle Billy, the faithful slave.
As with The Little Colonel, Bill Robinson’s dancing is the main reason to watch this film. Shirley keeps up with him nicely. Otherwise, it is business as usual.
Mildred Pierce Directed by Michael Curtiz
1945/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing
#176 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
[box] Ida: Personally, Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.[/box]
To start off the film noir fest with a bang, here is a studio big-budget effort that garnered Joan Crawford a long-awaited Best Actress Oscar, along with six other Academy Award nominations. In 1996, the film was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry.
The story is based on James M. Cain’s novel of the same name. There are some key differences from the book. Mildred Pierce is a middle-class housewife who makes money on the side baking cakes and pies. She lives for her two daughters Veda and Kay and tries especially hard to placate her difficult, grasping elder daughter Veda. Mildred and her husband Bert separate amicably after arguing about his visits to a lady friend and Mildred’s child-rearing style.
Mildred finds work as a waitress and struggles to satisfy the increasingly spoiled Veda’s demands for the finer things in life by selling pies. When Veda finds her mother’s waitress uniform and accuses her of being a peasant, Mildred decides she must have more money and opens a restaurant, with the help of perpetual suitor Wally. Along the way, she meets the equally entitled shiftless socialite Monte and it looks like she will be burdened by two ungrateful whiners for life. A darker fate perhaps awaits … With Joan Crawford as Mildred, Ann Blyth as Veda, Jack Carson as Wally, Zachary Scott as Monte and Eve Arden as Mildred’s wise-cracking friend Ida.
I thought this was pretty terrific. A little bit of Joan Crawford goes a long way with me but here she was remarkably restrained with the old eyebrows. It may be her best performance. Ernest Haller’s cinematography is beautiful, particularly the night scenes. The script is tight and it moves right along. I love Eve Arden and was delighted to see her at her best here, in an Oscar-nominated performance. Of the men, I was most impressed with Jack Carson.
This is not quite what I think of as noir. There is a lot of high key lighting, glamour, and a lack of grim city streets. However, it does have that expressionist lighting. My definition of noir for this exercise is basically any film that is included in Michael F. Keaney’s Film Noir Guide. Keaney came up with 745 films from the period 1940-1959 made in the “noir style” in any of several different genres, including melodrama. Keaney sees the “noir themes” in Mildred Pierce as betrayal, obsession, and greed.
I take a break from the regularly scheduled programming to enjoy 30 days watching and reviewing little else but film noir beginning today. I will be going on vacation from June 7 to 15 and won’t be able to post. I’ll wrap up around July 7. I’ll review the very few films I have left from 1935 in the next few days and will continue to review the weekly selections from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die Blog Club.
I’m pretty excited about this and hope you will join me.
What is film noir? Clip from the documentary Visions of Light
The Devil Is a Woman Directed by Josef von Sternberg
1935/USA
Paramount Pictures
First viewing
Tagline: Kiss me … and I’ll break your heart!
The film opens with a carnival in turn-of-the-century Spain, all the revelers are masked. Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero), a fugitive revolutionary, spies the beautiful Concha (Marlene Dietrich) and they make a date for a rendezvous. Before the appointed time he has a chance meeting with his friend Don Pasquale (Lionel Atwill) and tells him about the mysterious beauty. Don Pasquale tells him his long, sad history with this duplicitous vixen to warn Antonio away from her. Alas, Concha’s attractions are too strong for any man to resist … With Edward Everett Horton hiding behind a beard as the governor of the town.
Although Dietrich said this was her favorite picture, I thought it was pretty bad and did her no favors. Although she drives multiple men to their ruin, most of the time she acts like a petulant little girl, stamping her foot when she doesn’t get her way. This is not the aloof Dietrich I love from the earlier films. Her costumes are also very unflattering as far as I am concerned. To add to that Lionel Atwill just wasn’t cut out to be a thwarted lover and Edward Everett Horton is wasted in a part that requires him to be an autocratic bully.
The Spanish government threatened to bar all Paramount films from Spain and its territories unless the film was withdrawn from worldwide circulation. Paramount destroyed the original print after the initial run. New prints were struck after many years from a print Dietrich kept in a bank vault.
Scrooge Directed by Henry Edwards
1935/UK
Twickenham Film Studios
First viewing
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!” ― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
This was the first sound film adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Miserly Ebenezer Scrooge (Seymour Hicks) is all business and thinks Christmas is a humbug. His deceased business partner Jacob Marley has learned differently and sends the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future to teach Scrooge a lesson in what Christmas is all about.
It would take a lot to top the 1951 Alistair Sim version of this story in my estimation and this film does not have what it takes. That said, Seymour Hicks makes a very credible Scrooge and this is a pleasant enough entertainment. It does suffer from a bit of over-earnestness in what is already a pretty melodramatic story. It also spends a puzzling amount of time in a 75 minute movie dwelling on atmospheric Christmas scenes that have nothing to do with the story. Not a must but also not unworthy of a viewing.
Werewolf of London Directed by Stuart Walker
1935/USA
Universal Pictures
First viewing
Dr. Yogami: Good day. But remember this Dr. Glendon, the werewolf instinctively seeks to kill the thing it loves best.
The first mainstream Hollywood werewolf movie is pretty good. Botanist Dr. Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) is searching for a rare flower that blooms only by moonlight in Tibet when he is attacked by a mysterious beast. He manages to return to England with a specimen and devotes himself single-mindedly to experimenting with the plant, thereby further estranging his wife (Valerie Hobson). The mysterious Dr. Yogami (Warner Oland) visits Wilfred and tells him that the flower is the only cure for werewolfery and that there are two werewolves in London. Sure enough, on the first night of the full moon, Wilfred begins to grow hairy palms and discovers that both of his Tibetan flower blossoms have been stolen from his laboratory …
The Wolf Man has never been my favorite Universal monster, largely because of Lon Chaney, Jr’s curious miscasting as an English lord’s son. Henry Hull is much more convincing, as the tormented half-beast. The make-up and transformations, however, are far less impressive than in the 1941 film.
I’ve been a classic movie fan for many years. My original mission was to see as many movies as I could get my hands on for every year from 1929 to 1970. I have completed that mission.
I then carried on with my chronological journey and and stopped midway through 1978. You can find my reviews of 1934-1978 films and “Top 10” lists for the 1929-1936 and 1944-77 films I saw here. For the past several months I have circled back to view the pre-Code films that were never reviewed here.
I’m a retired Foreign Service Officer living in Indio, California. When I’m not watching movies, I’m probably traveling, watching birds, knitting, or reading.
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