By Scott Ross
January 2022
Charade (1963) Peter Stone’s deliciously intricate (and wholly improbable) comic/romantic thriller paired the two most charming actors in American movies for a romp that turned out to be one of the best entertainments of its age and which remains completely entrancing today. Audrey Hepburn is the bright, and resolutely un-hysterical, damsel in distress and Cary Grant is her knight and protector… or is he? Although the May-September pairing here replicates the perennial problem Hepburn had in being so poised and mature in her person that only older men seemed right for her, she and Grant were the reigning charmers of their time, so their meeting on the screen was probably inevitable. Fortunately that event was cocooned in a witty script by Stone, stylish direction by Stanley Donen, a prototypically snazzy Henry Mancini score with dark undertones and a plangent theme song containing a set of lyrics by Johnny Mercer which reflect his increasingly searching outlook during the period; all of his and Mancini’s important songs — “Moon River,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “Charade,” “Whistling in the Dark” — convey a misty philosophical yearning, wedded to exquisite metaphor. Although the violence (and when not seen, its aftermath) is occasionally grisly, especially for the early ’60s, it’s offset by the taut thriller elements, like the nerve-wracking climax at the Paris Opéra. There’s also a superbly staged, photographed and edited fight on a slanted Parisian rooftop between Grant and a one-armed, lethal hook-wielding George Kennedy as the most frightening of the men seeking a stolen treasure. (The others are James Coburn, Ned Glass and, if you’ll forgive me giving a bit of the game away, Walter Matthau.)
Although Charade premiered just four years after North by Northwest, Cary Grant had aged perceptively in the interim: The distinctive jawline isn’t quite as firmly sculpted, and the hair is noticeably grayer. Despite the encroachments of the years, however, he remained the finest light comedian American movies ever produced, and one of its sexiest men. His lithe, feline physicality would be the envy of many males half his age, and his pleasing screen persona was entirely undiminished. When Hepburn asks, “Do you know what’s wrong with you?” and, smiling, answers her own question with a breathless, “Nothing,” it’s almost impossible to disagree.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) Although at 68 he was still in full command of his material, John Ford faced studio cost-cutting on this picture which forced him to shoot on Paramount backlots, and in black-and-white. These limitations, added to his stars (John Wayne and James Stewart) being decades too old for their roles, impose an artificiality that this otherwise great, sad autumnal work has to struggle mightily to overcome. (Lee Van Cleef, who appears as one of Lee Marvin’s minions, claims that Paramount also imposed Wayne on Ford as box-office insurance, and that, probably as a result, Ford was even more cruel than usual toward his favorite star. Well, Stewart was still too old.) That it succeeds so well in spite of these compromises says something about Ford, about those two actors, and about the durability of the narrative. Based by the screenwriters James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck on Dorothy M. Johnson’s terse, downbeat short story, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is very much a John Ford movie, concerned this time with truth vs illusion and meditating on the wounds of impossible love. It’s a beautifully observed picture, wonderfully acted and if we ache to see what Ford and his gifted director of photography William H. Clothier might have achieved in real locations, its themes are perfectly plain. Anyone who thinks Ford is endorsing the “Print the legend” philosophy spoken by the Western editor at the end misses the point: Stewart comes clean about his own (in the literal sense) legendary past, and people would rather believe the lie than accept the heartbreakingly ironic truth. You’ve only to open a newspaper today to see how much Americans still need to believe in mythology.
Despite his superannuated appearance, Stewart gives his customary rich performance, and Vera Miles, as the young woman of interest to both men, is exquisite. She was obviously growing as an actress; why the hell did her subsequent career not reflect how good she’d become? It’s bracing to see the usually triumphant John Wayne playing, not a loser exactly but a man who loses what he loves through an act designed to bring happiness to the object of his desire, and he does it with an almost shocking bitterness. Lee Marvin, as Valance, unleashes a psychotic energy that, when it breaks, is terrifying. Edmund O’Brien, as the newspaper publisher Peabody, is delicious, and that genial tub of guts Andy Devine provides comic relief as a cowardly schnorrer of a marshal. Among the generally splendid cast are the almost impossibly pulchritudinous Woody Strode, Jeanette Nolan, John Qualen, John Carradine, Carleton Young and Denver Pyle. The only jarring notes come from the usually reliable Strother Martin, who giggles with insane (and patently forced) glee every time Liberty Valance turns his violence on another innocent. Since Valance himself is a psychopath, why did either he or the movie require another sadistic wacko as a useless hanger-on? Cyril Mockridge’s score is effective, although it’s undercut by Ford’s use of Alfred Newman’s plangent theme for Ann Rutlege from Young Mr. Lincoln. Although I normally deplore interpolations of music from one picture to another, that theme is so moving it transcends its source and proves quietly, devastatingly right here. Its very rightness, and beauty, however, obliterate the more prosaic themes Mockridge came up with.
Ride the Pink Horse (1947) As with the half-baked In a Lonely Place of 1951, this is yet another cinematic adaptation of a superb Dorothy B. Hughes novel that flattens the source. Although it’s more faithful generally than the Nicholas Ray picture, it suffers from either Production Code interference or the timidity of the people involved (who include, as scenarists, the redoubtable Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer) in pushing the story to what should have been its grim conclusion. The studio-bound look of it doesn’t help much either; what should be by turns oppressive and banal becomes merely a prettified simulacrum of Hughes’ nightmare fiesta world. Even the motivations of the would-be blackmailer played by the director, Robert Montgomery, have been sweetened: Instead of intending to bleed a Senator who’s killed his wife — a woman, moreover, with whom the blackmailer was involved — Montgomery’s character is avenging a dead friend. To make us like him? Similarly, the children’s carousel run by the expansive Mexican who befriends the blackmailer has been altered; instead of being run entirely on the man’s physical labor, it’s mechanized. There’s a metaphor in that.
The maddening thing about all this is that Hughes’ specialized gift for depicting rot in the everyday should have been a perfect match for the makers of what would later be called film noir. Yet they kept softening her stories, or twisting them out of recognizable shape. Ride the Pink Horse is one of those pictures, like L.A. Confidential, that only those who have never read their source novels can love. What’s best about the movie is its supporting cast: Fred Clark as the mercurial, half-deaf Senator; Art Smith as a tough, weary and wonderfully expressive FBI agent; Wanda Hendrix as the solemn young Mexican girl who attaches herself to Montgomery; and Thomas Gomez as the loyal, utterly unimpeachable carousel operator. Gomez’s performance dances on the knife-edge of ethnic parody (it’s the same in the book.) Yet the character is so richly portrayed, and so ingratiating, that even as you may be thinking it’s too much you’re overwhelmed with affection for the man, and for the actor playing him.
Holiday (1938) The wonderful adaptation of Philip Barry’s comedy, beautifully directed by George Cukor and acted with feeling and aplomb by Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Lew Ayres.
Click on the link above for a fuller review.
The Quiet Man (1952) John Ford’s rhapsodic comedy; his most mature depiction of romantic love, and his sexiest work.
Click on the link above for a fuller review.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) The second of John Ford’s post-war “Cavalry Trilogy,” and in many ways the best although it’s marred by some heavy-handed comedy relief.
Click on the link above for a fuller review.
February 2022
An American in Paris (1951) While flawed, this movie musical not only continues to look good; it looks better with every passing year.
Click on the link above for a fuller review.
Harold & Maude (1971) On the commentary for the Paramount Blu-ray of Colin Higgins’… is “offbeat” the word I am seeking?… comic romance the writer-director Cameron Crowe, who was in early adolescence when the picture was released, says he felt on seeing it that the movie was like a society he had not been asked to join. Even on multiple viewings, it’s still possible to feel that way about Harold & Maude, even as you’re enjoying the performances in it and the contours of Hal Ashby’s nearly perfect direction and editing of it. The picture can be a test of your tolerance for Ruth Gordon, who, like Maude herself, frequently teeters on the precipice of the deeply precious and some of the humor is strained — Harold’s one-armed military uncle comes to mind as an example of that — but much of the movie is winning, especially Cat Stevens’ songs and Harold’s hilarious fake suicides.
Although neither Harold nor Maude is fully explicable, Bud Cort as Harold acts as if they were. (He’s said to have announced to Ashby during his audition that he was Harold.) Cort was hard to place an actor; typecast as social misfits he seemed ephemeral, and at times looked like an owl that had been starved and stretched on a rack. There are however moments in Harold & Maude when he seems ethereally beautiful and suggests, as the movie itself does, that there may be more here than meets the eye. (Then again, there may not.) Higgins initially wrote the screenplay as his master’s thesis; it’s probably the most famous post-graduate work in modern American movies, and has a grad student’s stretching for profundity that never quite makes it. Ashby’s direction is droll, and somewhat distanced, but you feel his heart was with the picture’s leads. This was one of the key cult movies of my youth, and it has a timelessness that is quite remarkable, especially in John Alonzo’s marvelous photography.
Vivian Pickles gives a superbly tailored comic performance as Harold’s unflappable mother; G. Wood and Eric Christmas provide perfect gems as, respectively, his psychiatrist (note the way when they are together Harold is always dressed identically to his doctor) and his priest; Ellen Geer, Judy Engles and Shari Summers are splendid as the computer dates Mother arranges for Harold; and Tom Skerritt (appearing as “M. Borman”) gives a very funny account of a frustrated martinet of a CHiPS officer.
American: The Bill Hicks Story (2009) The unquestioning adulation, since his obscenely early death, of Bill Hicks has often seemed to me emblematic of how American stand-up comedy has faltered and fizzled out since the 1970s. It isn’t just that almost no one is funny any longer, it’s that the few who are amusing are lionized to such a degree that they become gods, their status untouchable and inviolate. Hicks could occasionally be inspired, and his comic approach was clearly developing as he aged. But nothing either in his recorded work or in this hagiographic documentary persuades me that with his death America lost a comic genius on the order of a Richard Pryor or a George Carlin. (Or even a Bill Cosby who, whatever you think of him as a man, was often screamingly funny as a comedian.) Worse, the movie is put together in the most annoyingly trendy manner possible, with too much money and attention going to cute graphics and pointless animation and not enough to its thesis. We hear, repeatedly, that Bill Hicks was the comedians’ comedian, the ne plus ultra of the stand-up set, yet almost nothing he says or does in the source footage supports the contention. When someone tells me I have to take the genius of another on faith, that is when I politely ask the way to the exit.
A Night at the Opera (1935) Groucho Marx always maintained that this was the best of the Marx Bros. movies. It would be nice to agree with him, but I have long thought his preference was based more on box office returns than creative merit. The Paramount movies are almost infinitely funnier, especially Animal Crackers and Horsefeathers, and in neither of those do we have to put up with the insipid (and un-ignorable, since they sing) lovers Irving Thalberg imposed on Groucho, Harpo and Chico in their MGM pictures and that others at the studio persisted on foisting on them after his death. A Night at the Opera has more laughs in it than Duck Soup, though, and the funny stuff in it is extremely funny: Groucho’s wooing of Margaret Dumont (and his aside to us, “If she figures that out, she’s good!”); the stateroom scene; Groucho and Chico debating the sanity clause; the detective’s search of the hotel suite; Groucho saying, “Boojie boojie boojie”; Harpo’s gookie; and the literal wreck of Il trovatore. I could do without the tenor villain whipping Harpo every chance he gets, but at least Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle don’t sing as often as they threaten to, and when they do, sing well.
Thalberg was right from a money standpoint (although Opera cost so much to produce its take wasn’t what it might have been) but wrong from a comedic. No Marx Bros. fan wants to watch their heroes play Cupid to young lovers, even if they can sing Verdi.
The Moon-Spinners (1964) A pleasant mis-adaptation in the Disney mode of the engaging Mary Stewart novel of intrigue on Crete. Too much of the plot was simplified or changed to make it as good as it might have been, but while her character has no antecedent in the book, the silent star Pola Negri was persuaded to come out of retirement for it by Walt Disney, and she’s fascinating to watch. If the novel has a flaw it’s that it’s told in first-person, so however threatening the clouds we are never really in doubt as to who will be standing after the storm. But since this feminine lead is played by the always-interesting Haley Mills, Joan Greenwood is along as her aunt, Eli Wallach is on board as the chief villain, Peter McEnery makes a dashing young hero and the supporting cast includes John Le Mesurier as a shady diplomat and Sheila Hancock as his dipsomaniac wife, the remarkable Irene Papas and the engaging young Michael Davis, it all goes down as smoothly as Greek yoghurt, if without the nutritional value.
Oliver! (1968) The composer/lyricist/librettist Lionel Bart’s wildly successful West End and Broadway musical adaptation of Dickens’ Oliver Twist was, in the period when American studios were grasping with increasing desperation for a Sound of Music-style hit, probably a natural even if its origins were British. Yet whereas this overblown, over-produced musical or that (Camelot, Doctor Dolittle, Paint Your Wagon, Star!) continued to bomb, Oliver! was a substantial hit: Over $77 million profit on a $10 million layout. (Not that it matters, but Oliver! also won the Best Picture Academy Award that year, which no American musical would until the mangled yet inexplicably popular adaptation of Chicago in 2002.) Perhaps it helped that the movie was directed by a great filmmaker (Carol Reed) with three consecutive masterpieces to his credit,* shot by a genius cinematographer (Oswald Morris), designed and costumed by masters (Jon Box, Terence Marsh, Phyllis Dalton), beautifully cast (Ron Moody as Fagin, Oliver Reed as Sikes, Harry Secombe as the Beadle, Shani Wallis as Nancy, Leonard Rossiter as Sowerberry, Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger, Mark Lester as Oliver), wonderfully scored (Johnny Green) and, with one glaring exception, delightfully choreographed (by Onna White.) That exception is the genuinely stupid “Consider Yourself” production number. Since this is a movie, not a stage show, there is absolutely no reason for anyone other than Oliver and the Dodger to be singing, much less dancing, yet the number goes on and on, taking in everything from surly butchers to boy chimneysweeps with the seats of their pants comically on fire. The situation of children forced to labor cleaning out those dangerous chimneys was hardly something to joke about, but the sheer scale of the damn thing is dumbfounding. (It took three weeks to film.) It could have been elided over without lowering the entertainment value of Oliver! in the slightest; in fact, excising “Consider Yourself” would have improved the entire picture immensely.
I’m not wildly enthusiastic about Bart’s songs for the show generally, although I do admire little Oliver’s song of yearning “Where is Love?” Bart had a tendency toward things like (in Fagin’s “Reviewing the Situation”) anachronistic references to Dale Carnegie, and the show’s big ballad, “As Long as He Needs Me” sits uncomfortably within the tradition of American “He beats me but I love him” numbers. The songs are a bit sunny, considering the time and the setting, but because the movie was made with such obvious love and integrity, the numbers matter less than the songs in more accomplished shows like Fiddler on the Roof do, and whether they land or not becomes less important than the quality of the performances. Oliver! sinks or swims, not on Fagin, which has since 1960 been considered the star part, but on Oliver Twist, and the movie’s Oliver is its anchor. Young Mark Lester, one of the most attractive children to star in a movie since Jackie Coogan in The Kid, has a sweet smile, limpid, expressive eyes and nothing he says or does is studied, or disingenuous. When he slaps Bill Sikes in frustrated rage it’s as if every insupportable event Oliver been forced to shoulder bursts forth in a single gesture, and it’s as shocking to him as it is to everyone else. I don’t know if that’s writing (it’s been too long since I read the Dickens novel), direction, innate inspiration or a combination of all three, but it’s certainly impressive. In addition, Lester’s singing voice is the furthest thing from that of a trained stage performer pouring out his heart in song to the cheap seats; it’s soft and delicate, seemingly wrapped in fleece — exactly the sort of voice that battered yet hopeful boy should have.
Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross
*Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949). And if there is nothing in Oliver! to match, for sheer terror, the murder of Nancy in the David Lean Oliver Twist (1948) Reed’s picture at least undoes the anti-Semitism of which, typically, everyone involved in the Lean movie expressed surprise that others were offended by. To have rendered Alec Guinness’ Fagin with the single largest “Jew” nose in British cinema history after the revelations of the Holocaust sure spoke to something.
So few critics, so many poets 
Wonderful insights into Liberty Valence. I want to bring up something about that film, often missed: the sheer heartlessness and sense of superiority and cruelty of Ransom Stoddard. We see this when he deliberately shatters Hallie’s joy over her cactus rose by asking if she’s ever seen a “real” rose. To me, that’s the core of his character. He can zero in on the ONE way to hurt a person and that means he’s an ideal politician; seeming to care, but zinging a person exactly where it hurts most. And she’s attracted to him! Any thoughts?
Thanks, Eliot – I can only add that I wish I’d written that! (I actually did mean to comment on some of the unpleasant qualities in Stoddard but forgot when I finally got around to writing the capsule. That’s what happens when I put things off…) Stoddard is book-educated, and thinks that makes him superior to everyone. Your insights are a prefect commentary on the character.