Monthly Report: January 2024

By Scott Ross

As ever, click on the highlighted links for complete reviews (&cet.)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) I began the new year on a hopeful note, watching the excellent 4K UHD edition of what in 1977 was the single most entrancing movie I’d ever seen and which still exerts a beautiful spell over me.

I would like to think my other hopes for 2024 will not be betrayed, but short of worldwide revolution I suspect they will. As Tom Woods once noted (Woods’ Law #3): “No matter who you vote for, you always wind up getting John McCain.”

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From Here to Eternity (1953) James Jones’ enormous (860 pages) 1951 novel, beautifully adapted by Daniel Taradash and directed with sensitivity and grace by the splendid Fred Zinnemann. Set in and around Pearl Harbor in the months leading up to the Japanese attack and, essentially, ending on it, the picture is (presumably like its source) remarkably and unusually adult in erotic/romantic content* and, to use a word I normally avoid due to its extreme overuse, powerful in its imagery. Example: The famous love scene on the shore between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, kissing passionately as the waves break over them. That Kerr’s character is a married woman and her affair with Lancaster’s career soldier illicit (her husband, his commanding officer, is a serially unfaithful pig) added to the heat the sequence generated, yet few seem to remember how bitterly the scene ends, with Lancaster humiliating Kerr and impugning her virtue.

From Here to Eternity, even more than A Place in the Sun, showcases Montgomery Clift’s gifts as an actor although his character is, at least to me, inexplicable: A young man planning on a career as a soldier who claims to love the Army yet who makes a habit of rebelling against his superior officers. Still, Prewitt is perhaps the Clift character who displays the greatest range of emotions, from the riant to the deeply sorrowful, and I defy you to remain unmoved when, with tears streaming down his cheeks, he plays “Taps” in honor of his murdered friend. As that friend, Private Maggio, Frank Sinatra is superb. Forget the Mario Puzo version of his casting†; Sinatra knew the role reflected his image of himself, and he gave himself over to it entirely, perhaps reminding those who know such things that a great ballad singer is also, perforce, a great actor. Lancaster too gives a fine account of the First Sergeant with no desire for promotion and the central women — Kerr and Donna Reed — are equally fine, Kerr even producing a more than creditable American accent and Reed giving a performance no one expected her capable of, including Zinnemann, who had accepted her casting with reservations.

Although the movie pushed at the edges of the Production Code in regard to sexual relations there was some inevitable bowdlerization: Thus, the brothel Reed’s character works in was changed to a dance-hall, yet I doubt many people who saw the picture in 1953 had any difficulty figuring out that the girl was a whore. In exchange for being permitted to shoot at Schofield Barracks, however, the filmmakers had to compromise on some of Jones’ harsher material, especially in the matter of Maggio’s “treatment” at the hands of the sadistic stockade commander “Fatso” Judson (Ernest Borgnine). In the event, Zinnemann’s being made to eschew depicting the violence against Maggio may be in the movie’s favor, since we’re forced to imagine what’s been done to him, making his death scene after he escapes all the more poignant; Fatso’s own violent death is depicted aslant, making us wonder at the outcome of his fight with Prewitt until the latter emerges from the shadows. Taradash’s screenplay is marked by its intelligence, and the black-and-white cinematography, the work of Burnett Guffey, is exemplary. The head of Columbia, the monstrous Harry Cohn, initially insisted on color but Zinnemann prevailed, and the movie benefits from this, the monochrome images shimmering on the screen. (Among other pictures, Guffey, who had been in movies since 1928, later shot Bonnie and Clyde. That should give you an idea of how good he was.) The fine supporting cast includes Philip Ober as Kerr’s philandering martinet of a husband, Mickey Shaughnessy, Jack Warden, Merle Travis as a blues-singing Private, Claude Akins as one of the bullies who tries to break Clift and, in an uncredited role, the future screenwriter Alvin Sargent, who endures a shocking death by Japanese tracer-fire.

There was, by the way, a hilarious spoof of From Here to Eternity on “Your Show of Shows,” in which the Lancaster and Clift characters were more or less combined, as were Kerr’s and Young’s. The beach scene was brilliantly parodied, with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca getting periodically doused with what are pretty obviously buckets of water thrown at them from unseen stagehands. It gets funnier and funnier. It even got to Coca, who seldom cracked on camera but who pretty much loses it here, turning her head and burying her face on Caesar’s shoulder to hide her hysteria from the audience.

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^{Come on, shake your depression/And let’s have a yam session…}

Carefree (1938) The seventh teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is the slightest of their RKO musicals, the first to lose money, and the one with the least dancing. Another of those pictures whose complicated screenwriting credits betray a certain amount of panic (the script was by Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano from an “original idea” by Marian Ainslee and Guy Endore, its “story and adaptation” by the redoubtable Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, credited that same year with Bringing Up Baby) the picture casts Astaire as a dancing psychoanalyst trying to break through Rogers’ resistance to marrying Ralph Bellamy (it takes a shrink to figure that out?) and in the process falling for her himself. There are some good lines and funny situations, as when Ginger, a radio singer, wrecks her own live show under hypnosis, but there are also items that make you squirm, such as the way, again having been hypnotized, she hunts Astaire down with a shotgun, repeatedly proclaiming that “men like him should be shot down like dogs.” Fun-nee!

Adding to the troubles are an ill-conceived dream sequence set to one of Irving Berlin’s less interesting tunes, which by its conception demanded to be filmed in color but which RKO refused to do, making a hash of a song Berlin pointedly called “I Used to Be Color Blind.” (It also contains a slow-motion dance, a device I resist on principle, and a prolonged kiss between Fred and Ginger, which is just plain objectionable.) There’s an extended New Dance Sensation called “The Yam,” whose melody Berlin later adapted for his war-time anthem “Any Bonds Today?” and which illustrates that a certain degree of democratization in the Astaire and Rogers universe is unwelcome; instead of those gleaming, absurd but oddly endearing white Art Deco sets complete with extras in evening dress that were the series’ mainstay from Flying Down to Rio through Swing Time we’re in a woodsy country club with patrons joining in the dance, and who wants that? Fortunately, Fred and Ginger get a good Berlin ballad (“Change Partners”) and subsequent dance routine in which he uses his big, expressive hands in an attempt to re-hypnotize her. Even better, Astaire has a jaw-dropping bit, set to a wordless tune (“Since They Turned ‘Loch Lomond’ into Swing”) in which he rhythmically hits one golf ball after another, sending every one of them soaring in perfect arcs, the entire routine performed in long, sustained camera shots. Was there nothing the man couldn’t do?

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^{Laughter among the ruins: Olivier, Hepburn and Cukor share a moment of levity during the filming.}

Love Among the Ruins (1975) This charming, witty period comedy by James Costigan, although admired, was, somewhat surprisingly, not a ratings success. (I was watching the filmed version of George Furth’s play Twigs starring Carol Burnett that night, and I remember that deciding which to see between these two nearly engendered the 14-year-old’s equivalent of a nervous breakdown.) Despite its low viewer rating, the picture won multiple Emmys, losing only in the “Outstanding Special” category, to a TV-movie starring Judd Hirsch called “The Law,” which seems to have vanished into obscurity. I don’t know whether its author originally intended it as a play — Costigan proposed it as a 1960s television project for Lunt and Fontanne, who apparently objected to being likened to ruins and withdrew — but it feels like a stage comedy, with few scenes occurring on the London streets and most set in drawing rooms, the Old Bailey or the Inns of Court and the action rising as it might in a boulevard comedy. In any case, the dialogue sparkles with graceful aperçus, in a fashion that recalls the stage plays of Wilde and Coward and S.N. Behrman, and the stars, Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn, parry and thrust with their lines like the expert verbal and dramatic fencers they were.

Olivier was so often touted, in those years, as The World’s Greatest Actor, and accepted in that designation by people who had never seen him, that it was perhaps easy to forget what a superb comedian he was (although his performance opposite Michael Caine in the 1972 two-hander Sleuth should have reminded audiences of that). He’s especially funny in outrage, to which Hepburn’s maddening character repeatedly drives him; when he opens his eyes wide or screws up his face in disbelief as his voice rises to a sort of half-strangled masculine screech and his word pile up in a heated rush, he’s one of the premiere screen comedians of his age and weight. Hepburn’s role is perhaps less showy, but because we know what she refuses to reveal, until the climax anyway, her characterization becomes fascinating, an onion that resolutely refuses to be peeled. There are two wonderful supporting turns, by Colin Blakely as Olivier’s courtroom rival and Richard Pearson as Hepburn’s solicitor, and the director, Hepburn’s old friend and crony George Cukor, keeps the pace and the performances clicking along brightly. Douglas Slocombe’s photography, like John Barry’s delightful score, is exactly what is required, although you will undoubtedly notice how assiduously he protected the aging Hepburn, who seems shot not just through gauze but gauze, Vaseline and perhaps lace curtains as well.

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Missing (1982) The exceptional adaptation by Costa-Gavras and Donald E. Stewart of Thomas Hauser’s book on the political arrest, torture and murder of a young American in Chile for the crime of told told too much, superbly acted by Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. The talented cast also includes Melanie Mayron, John Shea (as Charles “Charlie” Horman, the murdered man), Charles Cioffi as a creepy Naval Captain, David Clennon, Richard Venture (as the thinly-disguised Ambassador Nathanial Davis), Joe Regalbuto (as another murdered American), Keith Szarabajka and Janice Rule, as a reporter helpful to both the victim and his survivors… imagine.

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The Cameraman (1928) A very funny Buster Keaton feature, his last under a new contract with MGM in which he had any level of autonomy. Although the picture was popular, the studio was determined to clamp down on Keaton’s independence; he later called his signing with Metro “the worst mistake of my life.” Buster, who also produced, stars as a New York City tintype portrait photographer who realizes (in 1928!) that the motion-picture camera is making his profession obsolete. Some of the movie’s brightest moments have little or nothing to do with the plot, such as Keaton’s impromptu pantomime of a baseball game, his riding on the outside of an omnibus and his experience at a communal swimming pool, although I don’t find the sequence in which he has to share a tiny dressing space with an overbearing Edward Brophy funny because I am constitutionally incapable of laughing at bullies, or at the trouble they cause their victims. (Maybe that’s why I’ve always been uneasy about Donald Duck?) Edward Sedgwick was the director, and the story is credited to Clyde Bruckman and Lew Lipton, but on a Keaton picture that doesn’t mean much. (The story was his and, I assume, most of the gags.) Marceline Day is charming as Buster’s inamorata, and the simian “Josephine” is wonderful as the monkey he inadvertently picks up while filming a violent tong war in an otherwise remarkably non-stereotyped Chinatown.

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One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) A nearly perfect Disney feature, at the time the most modern full-length cartoon the studio had ever released and among the six or seven best hand-drawn movies Walt’s animators produced in his lifetime.

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The Third Man (1949) In the interviews that make up their book This is Orson Welles, Welles defined Harry Lime as a great “star part,” comparing it to a 1913 stage play called Mr. Wu in which Wu (whom Welles claimed he once played in the theatre) is discussed by the other characters for an entire act. Just before intermission a figure enters and intones, “I am Mr. Wu…”, leading the audience, buzzing between the acts, to marvel at that wonderful actor who plays Mr. Wu! Harry is discussed by everyone in The Third Man for over 50 minutes before Welles’ famous entrance in the dark of the Vienna night, supposedly revealed by a single light from a window across the street — it must have been the Luxor Lamp of post-war lightbulbs — during which he smiles wryly at getting caught, seemingly abashed by his own irresistible theatricality. Graham Greene’s divided-city mystery/thriller, his most famous “entertainment,” was wonderfully (if somewhat floridly) directed by Carol Reed and contained more memorable moments in its 104 minutes than any comparable popular movie since Casablanca, another romantic melodrama set in a turbulent time and place.

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How to Murder Your Wife (1965) George Axelrod’s black comedy of misogyny divided a lot of opinion in 1965 and it’s impossible to imagine anyone making it today, or even thinking about doing so, even if it does wind up by endorsing marriage and women equally. Jack Lemmon plays the confirmed bachelor unexpectedly wed, after a drunken debauch, to the former inhabitant of a bachelor-party cake (Virna Lisi) who cannot speak a word of English. Although Lemmon responds all too enthusiastically to the more sybaritic aspects of marital life, the whole business quickly palls and he begins to fantasize a way out, at least for his successful spy comic-strip star Brash Brannigan, whom he has also married off. The picture is broad and, when Lemmon is put on trial for murder at the climax, just plain silly (no one thinks to look for Lisi’s body?) It’s also, despite the odds, very funny. Richard Quine directed with good pace, Harry Stradling’s color cinematography is mouth-watering, and in his infectious musical score Neal Hefti develops at least six distinct, complete melodies. Eddie Mayehoff gives his standard hilarious characterization as Lemmon’s lawyer, Claire Trevor is surprisingly arch as his wife, and Terry-Thomas is a wonder as Lemmon’s butler. Among the rich supporting cast: Sidney Blackmer, Jack Albertson (“Brrrrtt! Right up the wall!”), Max Showalter, Alan Hewitt, Mary Wickes, Howard Wendell and Khigh Dhiegh. Actually, I don’t think the movie is misogynist as much as it is anti-marriage, or at any rate, anti-wife. Does that make it any less offensive to women? Probably not, but it still makes me laugh.

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The Yakuza (1974) An interesting exercise in East-West tensions refracted through the traditional Japanese yakuza gangland thriller. The picture suffers from too much exposition, badly handled both by the writers (Paul Schrader and Robert Towne,‡ from a story by Leonard Schrader) and the director (Sydney Pollack), and Pollack’s refusal to use English subtitles renders long dialogue sequences featuring Ken Takakura utterly incomprehensible to a non-Japanese speaker. (To see what you’re missing, turn on the Blu-ray’s subtitle feature.) Yet it’s fascinating to watch, particularly with Robert Mitchum in the American lead. Mitchum plays a man in love with Japan, whose post-war experience during the American occupation — which of course has never ended — left him bereft of the love of his life when he crossed her brother (Takakura). It’s a stylish movie, beautifully shot in widescreen by Kozo Okazaki, which despite my reservations about Pollack as a filmmaker I must admit he was highly skilled in framing.§ Dave Grusin provided a fine, atmospheric musical score and the cast contains riches: Takakura, at once stoic and almost shockingly adept with a sword; Herb Edelman as Mitchum’s old pal, an American who put down roots in Tokyo; Keiko Kishi as Mitchum’s great love; and Brian Keith as his employer, who is not as trustworthy a crook as he wishes his compatriots to believe. As Mitchum’s bodyguard, Richard Jordan gives the sort of total performance that causes you to wonder how a young man that handsome, and that accomplished, never became an important actor in American movies. James Shigeta, who improved every picture he was in just by showing up, plays Takakura’s sage, and quietly dangerous, older brother. What stays with you about The Yakuza is its expression of psychic pain; nearly every character in it is in some kind of agony, and they keep visiting it on each other without meaning to, which in turn makes that pain equally unbearable to the one who causes it.

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The Dark Horse (1932) A very amusing political satire, something American movies used to turn out on a regular basis but which the toxic partisanship of modern life has rendered entirely off-limits. (You can still write a satire, but if it doesn’t target Republicans, leftists or the non-aligned, good luck getting it produced.) Warren William plays what we would now call a political consultant, a fast-talking con artist who is let loose on a corrupt gubernatorial campaign and catapults a complete nonentity into the governor’s mansion. My revealing the ending will in no way mitigate your enjoyment of this sharp, cynical exercise which features the young Bette Davis as Williams’ inamorata, Vivienne Osborne as an ex-wife with the soul of an adding machine, Frank McHugh as an eager political operative and the genial Guy Kibbee as the unlikely candidate, of whom William memorably observes, “He’s the dumbest human being I ever saw. Every time he opens his mouth he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.”

That line sounds like the work of Wilson Mizner, who wrote the screenplay with Joseph Jackson. Wilson and his brother Addison were the subject of an aborted Irving Berlin musical in the 1950s and, many decades later, emerged on the stage in Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s later project, which went under several titles over a number of years (Wise Guys, Gold!, Bounce and, finally, Road Show). The director of The Dark Horse, Alfred E. Green, began in pictures in 1916, eventually guiding Colleen Moore in eight of her vehicles including Sally (1925), Irene and Ella Cinders (both 1926). He also made three with George Arliss including Disraeli (1929) and The Green Goddess (1930); the somewhat notorious Baby Face (1933) starring Barbara Stanwyck; Dangerous (1935), which won Davis an apology Oscar; the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musical Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937); and The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939), a Philo Vance vehicle also starring Warren William. His work on The Dark Horse is fast and clean, and the sharp black-and-white cinematography was by Sam Polito. For those interested in trivia, the Blackfoot Chief who gives Kibbee a ceremonial headdress is played by Jim Thorpe.

Thanks once again to my perspicacious friend Eliot M. Camarena for the recommendation!

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*I understand that Jones’ editors or publisher demanded he remove some homosexual content from the original manuscript of his novel, which his heirs returned to a recent edition. Not having read the novel I have no idea what this may entail, although the author was allegedly (i.e., according to a Wikipedia entry) open about his own sexual experiences in that area.

†The truth of Sinatra’s casting was less dramatic, but nearly as grubby: he was pestering his wife Ava Gardner on the African location of John Ford’s Mogambo, and to get him out of her hair (and to allow her to philander in peace) she allegedly insisted that Cohn use him as Maggio.

‡If Towne is present, can Edward Taylor be far behind?

§On the Yakuza commentary Pollack says he gave up shooting in widescreen, which he loved, once he realized how badly his pictures were being cropped, and panned-and-scanned, for home video. He wasn’t alone.

Text copyright 2024 by Scott Ross