Change Your Image
richardchatten
1. Some of the movies I see are so obscure it finally dawned upon me that I really ought to describe some of them for the benefit of other researchers.
2. As I approach the age of 60 I can tell that my recall of films I've seen recently is developing a shorter and shorter half-life; and therefore feel that in future it will be wise to start setting down any impressions worth recording fairly promptly.
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The Great Profile (1940)
An Endurance Test
The premise of a seriously-intended turkey becoming an unexpected comic hit succeeded brilliantly as 'The Producers' but over the years has laid several eggs, such as the ghastly 'The Talk of Hollywood', 'Mr Ten Per Cent'... and 'The Great Profile'.
In March 1939 John Barrymore had opened with his fourth and final wife Elaine Barrie in a farce entitled 'My Dear Children', which became a surprise Broadway hit on the strength of the extraordinary spectacle it provided of one of Broadway's leading lights making a drunken spectacle of himself night after night (since he could no longer remember his lines he ad libbed much of the time). After it finished its run in May 1940, Fox cashed in on Barrymore's current notoriety by rushing into production this tasteless quickie with Barrymore reading his lines off cue cards in a role disturbingly close to reality (such as the squabbles with his wife, who abandoned both him and the play before it completed its run).
A good supporting cast founders in badly written parts. Gregory Ratoff as Barrymore's agent manages to make even Barrymore's hamming look like method acting (and just when you think his mugging can't get any worse he shows up in blackface). The rest have little to do. Seventeen-year old Anne Baxter is charming as always as the aspiring playwright, but her character is so boring you even tire of her (John Payne is given more to do as her fiancée, but so towers over her the effect is rather bizarre in their scenes together). Lionel Atwill, although receiving featured billing, has so little screen time one can only assume his role was cut (by bizarre coincidence three years later Atwill himself starred in a short-lived stage production of 'My Dear Children'). Joan Valerie, too, makes quite an impression in a brief scene as the play's understudy, but is thereafter hardly seen again.
It's unlikely that this dreadful script would have been better served had it instead starred Adolphe Menjou (who had done a hilarious parody of Barrymore in 'Gold Diggers of 1935'), since Barrymore hadn't lost the self-mocking good humour that made further stages in his final decline like 'World Premiere' and 'Playmates' tolerable; its just a lousy film.
Black Oxen (1923)
"to think that our Grandmothers, restored to their youth, may become our rivals!"
This film version of 65 year-old feminist writer Gertrude Atherton's controversial 1923 novel based upon her own treatment with an early form of hormone transplantation was on cinema screens by the end of the year and generated a lot of discussion at the height of the flapper era; and it remains topical today with the advent of HRT and current journalistic buzz about Cougars and toy boys.
Aged 45 (but like many matinée idols of the era looking much older), Conway Tearle as eligible bachelor Lee Clavering has the dilemma that dizzy flappers like Janet Ogelthorpe (played by Clara Bow) bore him, yet has "a vague idea that Autumnal love is - is rather indecent". He indeed looks pretty long in the tooth for 28 year-old Corinne Griffith as the mysterious Mary Ogden, referred to in the opening credits simply as "The Woman"; about whom an awful lot of footage is squandered upon speculation as to her true identity until she finally fesses up and confirms that she is really sixty year-old Madame Zatianny. In a flashback in which she is supposed to be in her late fifties, but is made up and shuffles about like an infirm eighty year-old, she is rejuvenated in Austria by a medical procedure that is alluded to only very vaguely.
At this point it gets interesting, as her old friends digest the implications of this revelation; notably Claire McDowell as Agnes Trevor, who bitterly regrets her own lost opportunities to find love when young and thus sorely envies Madame Zatianny the second chance her treatment has gifted her. (McDowell was actually less than six months older than Tearle and would probably have benefited enormously just from a more contemporary makeup and wardrobe like Griffith's.) Unfortunately, with twenty minutes still to go this is the point at which the only currently available version of 'Black Oxen' abruptly ends; but we know from original plot synopses that her old Austrian beau Prince Rohenhauer (played by Alan Hale) shows up, persuades her to act her age and return with him to Austria, leaving Lee to find true happiness with the flapper who had so bored him earlier. (I'd give it a few weeks, if that.)
An epilogue to 'Black Oxen' that proves yet again how much stranger real life can be even than a silent movie came in 1966 (the year that Claire McDowell died at the age of 88) when 72 year-old Griffith divorced her 45 year-old fourth husband of a few days and testified in court (contradicting testimony from Betty Blythe and Claire Windsor, who had both known her during the 1920s) that she was not Corinne Griffith, but her younger sister who had taken her place upon her elder sibling's death.
Cross Country Cruise (1934)
Agreeable Early Road Movie
Movies set almost entirely on trains - like 'The Tall Target' and 'The Narrow Margin' - practically constitute a genre in their own right. The train's humbler cousin, the bus, frequently features in movies too; but the more cramped setting, which forces various varied individuals into close proximity for the duration, combined with the need to occasionally get out and stretch your legs, lends the bus movie a more vivid sense of time and place, be it depression-era America in 'Cross Country Cruise', rural Japan in Hiroshi Shimizu's 'Mr. Thank You' (1936), south of the border in Luis Bunuel's 'Subida al cielo' (1952) or flyover country in countless road movies of the seventies & eighties, which 'Cross Country Cruise' vaguely anticipates.
The cast list in the opening credits of 'Cross Country Cruise' is full of the usual dependable acting talent, and like many classic old movies there are also notable uncredited contributions by the likes of Jane Darwell, Walter Brennan, Ara Haswell, Lee Phelps and Charles C. Wilson, to name just a few. Leading man Lew Ayres grates at first, playing yet another of those millionaire playboys who drop everything to pursue a young woman they've never met before; who in turn is improbably always won over by such a creepy charm offensive. Once these romcom preliminaries are dispensed with, Ayres's character becomes much better company; turning amateur detective to nail who committed the unexpected murder which enlivens the film's final third. (Both the method of the murder itself and of the concealment of the body are worthy of a seventies Italian giallo.)
The Belle of Broadway (1926)
Charming Trifle with Oedipal Implications
The youth culture of the postwar flapper era overlapped during the early 1920s with the possibility raised of artificial rejuvenation after Serge Voronoff transplanted a monkey gland into a human subject on 12 June 1920. Gertrude Atherton's controversial novel 'Black Oxen' (1923) about a woman revitalized by hormone treatments based on Atherton's own experience was filmed the same year that it was published; and 'The Belle of Broadway' rode on the wave of that interest in the possibilities of eternal youth with a nod towards two other means of rejuvenation: plastic surgery and - in a storyline about showbiz that anticipates 'Evergreen' (1934) and 'Fedora' (1978) - impersonation.
This unaffectedly charming trifle benefits from excellent performances from both Betty Compson as the youthful 1890s stage star Madame Adele and her 1920s doppelgänger Marie Duval, and Edith Yorke as Adele at sixty; when Adele ages on screen you still feel as if you're watching the same woman. One of a number of implications that at the time was presented as whimsy but now seems rather titillating is that Compson is supposedly playing a woman in her 60s whose youthful carapace renders her capable of seeking the company of men considerably more youthful than the toothless collection of contemporary admirers who are now plainly far too old for her. The Oedipal implications of the immediate rapport between Adele and her long-lost son Paul (played by Herbert Rawlinson) are headed off by the makeup and costume departments who make Ms Yorke look far older than she really would thirty years later by dressing her like Whistler's Mother. If the older Adele had resembled some of the sexy sexagenarian women who are now such a visible feature of the 2010s, the relationship that developed between them might have been closer than even pre-Code Hollywood could have countenanced.
Studio One: 1984 (1953)
Pretty Good Adaptation of Orwell's Classic Dystopia
As a huge admirer of Orwell's original novel I was pleasantly surprised that although inevitably not in the same league as Nigel Kneale's BBC2 adaptation broadcast the following year, how much of the basic storyline - and more importantly the mood - adaptor William Templeton's distillation managed to get into just 50 minutes (minus commercials) broadcast live on a TV budget.
A modern viewer will approach this version with scepticism, knowing that it was made at the height of anti-Red hysteria in the United States and of the blacklist. An opening narration underlined by Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony has been added to Orwell's story to convey Soviet-style totalitarianism and stresses that "What happens to the people in this story might happen to us. Might happen to you. If we should ever relax in our fight for freedom, if we should allow any individuals or any group of individuals to reduce our freedom of thought, our freedom of speech, our freedom of religion, then what happens to the people in this story will happen to us." However, the irony implicit in this exhortation forcefully delivered by CBS newscaster Don Hollenbeck in the context of the McCarthyite America of 1953 is probably deliberate; and Hollenbeck himself was hounded into committing suicide the following year by gassing himself by a relentless reactionary campaign of press harassment headed by a Hearst columnist named - I kid you not! - O'Brian. (Hollenbeck is played by Ray Wise in the 2005 film 'Good Night, and Good Luck').
The production looks suitably expressionistic (the bizarre, vaguely abstract portrait of Big Brother somewhat resembling Dr. Mabuse), and although big, strapping Eddie Albert is as miscast as the undernourished, downtrodden Winston Smith as Edmond O'Brien was in the film version three years later, like O'Brien he gives his usual excellent performance. Fans of 'Bonzana' will be surprised to see Lorne Greene as an incisive O'Brien. Norma Crane (little known to film viewers, but memorable as Ellie Martin in 'Tea and Sympathy' and Golde in 'Fiddler on the Roof') is a sassy Julia who I personally found far sexier in her regulation-issue dungarees & blouse and leather greatcoat than the party frock she changes into during her trysts with Winston (in this version of the future it's mainly the women rather than the men who wear ties), and the moment when she undoes and discards her Anti-Sex League sash carries quite an erotic charge.
West of Shanghai (1937)
Way Out East
'West of Shanghai' was the third of four film versions of a play by Porter Emerson Browne (best remembered today for 'A Fool That There Was'), and was the only version not filmed under the play's original title of 'The Bad Man' or in the original Mexican setting. Successfully produced on Broadway in 1920, 'The Bad Man' had originally been a comedy, which explains the beguiling flashes of humour sprinkled throughout Ralph Spence's script; notably in the sassier quips by Lola Galt, and a vaudeville routine in which Fang divests Creed, then Galt, then Dr. Abernathy of $50,000, only for it to eventually end up in Fang's own wallet.
Boris Karloff is obviously enjoying himself as Chinese warlord General Wu Yen Fang ("I am Fang!!"), despite the uncomfortable-looking makeup, which genuinely gave him blurred vision on the set. His opposite number General Chow Fu-Shan is played by Moscow-born Vladimir Sokoloff, while the authentically Chinese-American actor Richard Loo is the only one not required to adopt an accent as Fang's US-raised right-hand man Mr. Cheng. The script does a sort of reverse 'Psycho' by setting up Ricardo Cortez as Gordon Creed as the film's hero, only to switch allegiance to the boring Jim Hallet (played by Gordon Oliver) and casually have Creed killed off, enabling Hallet to ride off with Creed's estranged wife Jane (as if anyone cared). Sheila Bromley is so sassy as Lola Galt and Beverly Roberts such a pudding as Jane Creed the film's switch of emphasis from the former to the latter, and Fang's unlikely preference for Jane to Lola ("Hair like straw, eye like fog; have wide mouth of fish") suggests that the script was insufficiently revised to accommodate the casting.
Photography by L. William O'Connell and direction by John Farrow are both up to their usual standard.
The Single Standard (1929)
One Man Will Always Be First In My Life - and He is My Son
The second of three silent features featuring Garbo released in 1929 while MGM scratched its head pondering how they were to promote her as an attraction in talkies; 'The Single Standard' was also her second feature in a row pairing her with fellow Swede Nils Asther.
Garbo is introduced as All American party girl Arden Stuart, presumably loaded, but of whose life and means prior to the wild party in an enormous Art Deco mansion with which the film begins we learn nothing. Despite the provocative title - vaguely advanced at one point as some sort of feminist statement about the social constraints placed upon women - 'The Single Standard' swiftly turns into a standard Garbo vehicle in which after flirting with modernity in the form of motor rides at seventy m.p.h. and a dalliance with pugilist turned artist Asther she ultimately embraces respectability and parenthood with John Mack Brown for the sake of her cute little curly-haired moppet of a son.
The name of director John S. Robertson isn't much recalled today, even by connoisseurs of silent cinema, but he does a good job here with the assistance of high-priced Metro talent like cameraman Oliver Marsh, art director Cedric Gibbons, costume designer Adrian and whoever was responsible for Garbo's various hairstyles which subtly changed as the film ran its course to reflect her developing emotional state.
Senso (1954)
The Lieutenant Only Rings Twice
Visconti's first film in colour and his first with a patrician 19th Century backdrop, 'Senso' is a squalid tale of base animal passion with an epic grandeur bestowed upon it that has seen it raised to the pantheon of Great Screen Romances by courtesy of Visconti having robed it in the trappings of the momentous historical backdrop of the Risorgimento of 1866, Venetian locations, plush interiors, immaculate costumes and Bruckner's Seventh Symphony (which wasn't actually composed until fifteen years later).
The plot actually has marked similarities to Joseph Losey's 'The Sleeping Tiger', made concurrently in drab monochrome in postwar austerity Britain; in which refined Alexis Smith (married to decent but dull Alexander Knox) completely loses her head over delinquent Dirk Bogarde. Ten years earlier, Visconti himself made a much more unadorned treatment of greed and destructive passion with 'Ossessione' (1942) an adaptation of James M. Cain's sweaty tale of blue-collar adultery and murder, 'The Postman Always Rings Twice'.
Maria Callas had been Visconti's first choice for the part of Countess Livia Serpieri - a society wife who becomes infatuated with good-looking creep Lieutenant Franz Mahler (played in a gleaming white uniform by an obviously dubbed Farley Granger) - but had too many theatre commitments (even at the projected three months that the film was expected to take to shoot, which eventually took nine months to complete). Ingrid Bergman was too wrapped up in the career of her husband Roberto Rossellini at the time to take up the offer; and the role eventually went to Alida Valli. Still stunning, but already perceptibly older and more leathery than during her late forties Hollywood sojourn, in the arms of Lt. Mahler Valli discovers an erotic fulfilment entirely new to her; but to Franz she's just another notch on his bedpost who he can sponge off.
Marcella Mariani (who died in a plane crash aged 19, just six weeks after 'Senso's premiere) is rather sweet and vulnerable as the young prostitute Clara who is spitefully exploited by Franz to further rub Livia's nose in his rejection of her. Rina Morelli has an eye-catching cameo flitting about Livia's villa in Aldeno as her maid, who seems to be actively enjoying the thrill of her mistress's affair. But the most blackly comic element in the film is the way that as momentous historical events escalate around them, she and her idealistic cousin Roberto Ussoni (played by Massimo Girotti) are shown to be completely oblivious to what is making the other tick. Under the impression that Franz is waiting for her at an address to which she has been followed by her stuffy husband (Heinz Moog) she melodramatically declares with her back to the door that Yes She Has a Lover!, only to discover the place occupied by Roberto and his revolutionaries eagerly making plans; as oblivious of the turmoil raging inside Livia as she is by now indifferent to their cause. She commits treason by sheltering Franz from the Italians, and then gets even deeper in corruption by helping him to avoid combat by giving money meant for The Cause to him. (One of a number of loose ends in the plot is that we never find out what happens when the absence is discovered of the 200,000 florins she filches from the fund that is supposed to be helping to finance the revolution).
As her grip on sanity loosens, Livia's wardrobe (the work of Marcel Escoffier & Piero Tosi) becomes more and more buttoned down and severe, the black dress she wears in her final scenes making her resemble some large, ferocious bird of prey. The distinguished Italian cameraman G.R.Aldo was killed in a car crash during the filming of this, his first colour production; and the opening scene in Venice's Fenice Theatre is the work of his successor Robert Krasker, who himself walked out on the production after falling out with Visconti, leaving the film to be completed by Giuseppe Rotunno. Whoever shot the amazing close-ups of Valli - her eyes wildly darting from side to side as she becomes more and more unhinged - merits particular kudos. During the final confrontation in the hotel you're expecting her to produce a gun and shoot Franz; but she achieves the same end by more deliciously vindictive means, and he ends up in front of a firing squad assembled at remarkably short notice while she careens into the night to a very uncertain fate.
Having ended with a bang, the final credits still have one more surprise to serve up when the first two names we see after Visconti's turn out to be those of the future directors (on this occasion humble assistants), Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli.
'Senso' was shot in English, and there are a couple of excerpts on YouTube from the truncated 94 minute English-language version, 'The Wanton Countess' which enable you to hear Granger in his own voice speaking dialogue written by no less than Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles (thus confirming suspicions that we are witnessing a Venetian variation on 'A Streetcar Named Desire'). By the 1970s Visconti could finally make a film truer to his own inclinations in 'Death in Venice' (1971), with Dirk Bogarde - once the object of infatuation himself in 'The Sleeping Tiger', but now the one smitten - in a production again dressed up to the nines, handsomely set in period, again using beautiful Venetian locations and this time almost entirely dispensing with dialogue in favour of Mahler, his favourite composer; whose name he had co-opted for the young officer in 'Senso' (who had been called Remigio Ruz in Camillo Boito's original novella).
Fair Wind to Java (1953)
Trucolored Hokum Which Builds Up to a Volcanic Climax
Barnstorming South Seas hokum in chewy Trucolor of the type Republic Picture was churning out by the yard at this time, full of plot elements that had earlier done service in their westerns & serials, such as diamonds being sought by a plummy-voiced villain in a carnival mask, endless fisticuffs, and of course Vera Hruba Ralston, wife of the president of Republic, Herbert J.Yates. On this occasion she pays Kim Kim, a dusky Eurasion exotic dancer with extraordinary eyebrows whose mere presence aboard McMurray's rigger the 'Gerrymander' soon has men fighting over her, and is later flogged to reveal the location of the diamonds. The phoniness of the studio scenes on board the deck of the 'Gerrymander' is complimented by the usual overacting by Republic stalwarts Victor McLaglen and Paul Fix; in marked contrast to superb model work by the Lydecker brothers depicting the 'Gerrymander' battling pirates at sea and climaxing in the 1883 eruption of the volcano Krakatau and the resulting tidal wave.
Missione speciale Lady Chaplin (1966)
Ho Hum...
As one who loves to watch chicks kick ass, I've wanted to see this movie ever since as a teenager I came across a picture of Daniela Bianchi in what looks like some sort of animal-skin jumpsuit dangling from a parachute brandishing a machine gun. But experience has taught me not to get my hopes up too high; and sure enough the film itself proved the usual let-down.
Even though the movie is actually named after her character - and begins with a promising pre-credits sequence with Miss Bianchi in a nun's habit (under which she's wearing a bathing suit) packing a machine gun - most of the action is thereafter hogged by Ken Scott making his third and final appearance as Agent 077, Dick Malloy. Bianchi, alas, doesn't get her hands on a firearm again until the afore-mentioned scene just ten minutes from the end of the movie; when after finally getting a crack at Zoltan's turtle-neck wearing goons (to whom Malloy has been laying waste for the past ninety minutes), she runs out of bullets after barely ninety seconds and is hardly given time to reload before that big killjoy Clark barges in and lays her out with a punch while mouthing that groan-inducing old macho chestnut: "I'm sorry, Arabella, you're going to have to sit this one out". And yet another opportunity to treat us to a truly badass female lead has been lost!