NFR Project: 'Ace in the Hole' (1951)

 

NFR Project: “Ace in the Hole”

Dir: Billy Wilder

Scr: Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels, Walter Newman

Pho: Charles Lang

Ed: Doane Harrison, Arthur P. Schmidt

Premiere: June 14, 1951

111 min.

In 1949, director/screenwriter Billy Wilder’s long and highly successful collaboration with screenwriter Charles Brackett ended. Together, they created classics such Ninotchka, Ball of Fire, The Lost Weekend, and Sunset Boulevard. His first project after the end of their partnership was this film, a corrosive and cynical examination of the American way of life. It failed at the box office; however, it stands up today as a great film – albeit one that’s relentlessly downbeat.

The film’s premise is based on the famous 1925 incident of Floyd Collins, whose fatal entrapment in a Kentucky cave prompted a media frenzy and won the reporter covering the event a Pulitzer Prize. Here the setting is New Mexico, and the reporter in question is Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), a cynical and opportunistic newsman who’s been fired from 11 different papers and finds himself washed up with a job at the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin.

Tatum prays for a story that will send him back into the limelight. He gets his prayer answered when pothunter Leo Minosa gets trapped in a cave-in at the site of an ancient cliff dwelling. Tatum sees the value in exploiting the story immediately. He befriends Leo, makes a deal with the crooked sheriff to cement a monopoly on the story, and begins to pump out copy.

Soon thousands of the curious are drawn to the site. Tatum deliberately delays the rescue operations so that he can make more of the story. He convinces Leo’s slatternly wife (Jan Sterling) to play the part of the bereaved spouse. Soon Leo’s roadside cantina and store starts raking in the bucks. Admission is charged to visit the site. A carnival sets up. Musicians make up songs about Leo, and people flock to buy the sheet music. The out-of-town papers struggle to get the story, but Tatum has a lock on it, quitting the Sun-Bulletin and making $1,000 a day. Everyone around poor Leo is on the take; Tatum is the ringleader. It is implied that he sleeps with Leo’s wife.

But then Leo sickens. The delayed rescue operation won’t get to him in time to save his life. Tatum gets into a fight with Leo’s wife, who stabs him with a pair of scissors. Tatum, wounded, fetches a priest, who administers the last rites to Leo. Tatum lets the story go and Leo dies. Everyone else gets the scoop but Tatum, and he is fired. The crowd disperses; all that is left is a trash-strewn roadside. Tatum goes back to the Sun-Bulletin, where collapses and dies.

Wilder’s take on American society is blatantly caustic. Everyone is out for their own interests. Death and danger are merely ways to attract the gruesome public’s disgusting, vulturous attention. Everything is reduced to the simple equation – what will sell the most newspapers? Douglas is ruthlessly energetic as Tatum. Character actor Porter Hall has his greatest role as the publisher with a conscience.

Nobody liked Wilder’s blunt assessment of the behavior of the masses and the news game. Later decades would bring a reevaluation of the work, acknowledging it as an unvarnished pan of American culture.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The African Queen.

NFR Project: 'Strangers on a Train' (1951)

 

NFR Project: “Strangers on a Train”

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock

Scr: Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde

Pho: Robert Burks

Ed: William Ziegler

Premiere: June 30, 1951

101 min.

Director Alfred Hitchcock continued his run as the Master of Suspense with this film, one of his most efficient entries in the genre.

The movie is adapted from the great crime writer Patricia Highsmith’s first novel of the same name. The idea is perfect: what if two individuals “traded” murders?

Tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) is on a train where he randomly meets an attentive stranger, Bruno Antony (Robert Walker). Bruno, who gradually reveals himself to be mentally disturbed, eventually gets around to theorizing that two people could get away with murder if they each kill the other’s intended victim – giving both an alibi and no link to the commission of the crimes.

As Guy wants to be rid of his promiscuous wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers) in order to be with his beloved, senator’s daughter Anne (Ruth Roman), and Bruno wants to kill his hated father, Bruno thinks they should do each other’s dirty work. “Your wife. My father. Criss-cross!” he exclaims.

Guy nervously turns him down, thinking he is joking. He meets Miriam, who reveals she is pregnant by someone else. Guy wants a divorce, but Miriam won’t cooperate. In fact, she intends to claim that the baby is Guy’s.

Bruno then stalks Miriam at an amusement park and kills her –strangling her in a scene reflected dimly in Miriam’s shattered glasses on the ground – a difficult and masterful shot.

Guy immediately comes under suspicion, as he cannot prove his whereabouts at the time of the murder. Bruno then tries to blackmail Guy into killing Bruno’s father, using his possession of a distinctive lighter of Guy’s as evidence.

Bruno stalks Guy, crashing Anne’s father’s party. While there, he chats gaily about the best way to murder someone. Catching sight of Anne’s sister Barbara (Patricia Hitchcock, the director’s daughter), who resembles Miriam, he gets carried away and squeezes the neck of one of the guests until she cries out.

Bruno sends Guy a map of his house, a key, and a gun. Guy goes along, hoping to alert Bruno’s father about his intentions. However, Bruno is in his father’s bed, waiting for him. Bruno vows that he will make Guy fulfill his part of their supposed bargain.

Guy is trapped. Anne suspects the truth, and gets Guy to confess it to her. She tries warning Bruno’s mother about his insanity, to no avail. Bruno catches up with Anne and tells her that he intends to plant Guy’s lighter at the scene of the crime.

Now the race is on. Guy must compete in a championship tennis match before he can go to the amusement park to stop Bruno. Meanwhile, Bruno is busy getting to the scene first. Guy’s match goes long; he struggles for point after point as the clock ticks on. At the same time, Bruno loses the lighter down a grating and hysterically struggles to reach through it and grasp the incriminating object.

Both men succeed. Bruno gets there first, and is recognized by a witness to the murder. He leaps aboard a carousel; Guy follows him. A policeman shoots at Bruno, but kills the carousel operator instead, who falls onto the controls. The ride whirligigs out of control; the passengers scream (save for one delighted boy) as Bruno and Guy fight it out.

The carousel smashes up; Guy is flung free, but Bruno is crushed. Guy tries to get Bruno to confess before he dies, but Bruno refuses. As he dies, his clenched fist relaxes – and there is Guy’s lighter. Guy is exonerated.

Hitchcock has a marvelous time making this film. Bruno is Guy’s doppelganger, his shadow self. Guy wants to kill his wife – at one point, he cries out, “I could strangle her!” – but his civilized impulses restrain him. Not so for Bruno, a spoiled rich kid with a mother fixation and a father complex. Guy talks; Bruno, darkly, acts.

Everything is doubled in the film – the main characters, the glasses, the party guests, the detectives trailing Guy. The director keeps things bright around Guy, while Bruno operates in darkness. Hitchcock works his accustomed magic – ratcheting up the suspense as Guy toils to finish off his court opponent in tense silence, while simultaneously Bruno gropes for the lighter which could hang him.

Hitchcock was shortly to begin making color feature films. Strangers on a Train shows off his marvelous black-and-white technique, aided here ably by cinematographer Robert Burks.

In the novel, Guy commits the reciprocal murder. Hitchcock changes that to make it yet another one of his stories, like The 39 Steps and Saboteur, about an innocent man dragged into a disoriented world where death and calamity reign. Once again, Hitchcock’s hero stares into the abyss.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Ace in the Hole.

NFR Project: 'Winchester '73' (1950)

 

NFR Project: “Winchester ‘73”

Dir: Anthony Mann

Scr: Borden Chase, Robert L. Richards

Pho: William H. Daniels

Ed: Edward Curtiss

Premiere: July 12, 1950

92 min.

Anthony Mann (1906-1967) was a genius.

Although he is best known today for his extensive work with Jimmy Stewart, with whom he made eight films, five of which were Westerns, Mann worked his way up from nothing. He started his career as a stage actor, and worked his way up to the position of director.

In 1937, he went to Hollywood and again, working from the bottom up, graduated into the role of director. He was versatile, but he became first known for his film noirs – T-Men, Strange Impersonation, Railroaded!, and Raw Deal. When a deal to make this movie with director Fritz Lang fell through, Jimmy Stewart picked Mann to helm the film. Mann rewrote the script with Borden Chase, and Winchester ’73 was born. It was the first of his Western collaborations with Stewart.

The idea of the “adult” Western was new. John Ford had always presented Westerns as adult dramas, but by and large Westerns for decades were kid stuff – featuring a white-hatted hero, a dastardly villain, and a damsel in distress. Chases, fistfights, and shootouts were crammed onto the screen.

Then, in 1947, Raoul Walsh made what is considered the first “noir” Western, Pursued. Dark, forbidding, and full of psychological torment, it heralded a shift in the way Westerns were made. Suddenly, the genre could accommodate complexity and ambiguity, and began to address real-life issues.

Winchester ’73 is firmly in this new tradition. Here, Stewart plays Lin McAdam, a sharpshooter in pursuit of the villainous Dutch Henry Brown, for reasons we are not privy to. He and his saddle pal High-Spade (Millard Mitchell) ride into Dodge City, Kansas. Lin finds his prey but can’t shoot him, as all guns in town are confiscated on entry by the sheriff. Both men enter a shooting contest to win a “One in a Thousand” Winchester 1873 rifle. Lin wins, but Dutch Henry ambushes him and steals his new rifle. He and his gang flee town without their guns.

Now the film takes us on an odyssey. The gun is a fetish; it imbues those who possess it with distinction and dominance. For a while. The rifle changes hands many times, and it brings bad luck and destruction to all who come across it. First, a sharpie, Lamont, (John McIntire) wins the gun a card game. He goes to sell arms to the Indians. There, the chief (a young Rock Hudson) decides he wants the rifle, and casually kills Lamont for it.

The tribe then attacks a troop of soldiers, and the chief is slain. A young trooper (Tony Curtis!) then gives the rifle to another man, who is promptly killed for it by Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea, playing his usual film role of creep, only in Western wear). Johnny hooks up with Dutch, who takes the rifle back from him. Seeking to thwart another robbery by the gang, Lin kills Johnny.

Finally, Lin pursues Dutch into the bare and rocky landscape – and it is revealed that they are brothers. Dutch killed their father by shooting him in the back. A brief but exciting gun duel follows, with the brothers trying to kill each other with ricocheted bullets. Finally, Lin takes aim and nails Dutch, who falls to his death. The rifle has returned to Lin’s possession.

Stewart was playing a new kind of Western hero – a man haunted by past trouble, out for revenge. Stewart’s happy, lovable persona was replaced by something deeper. Lin is bitter, untrusting, obsessed. He refuses to share his problem with others, moving sternly forward in his quest for retribution. In a scene with Dan Duryea, Stewart snaps and dashes Duryea’s head on a bar, twisting his arm and demanding to know where Dutch is. There’s a wild gleam of rage in Stewart’s eye, and we feel how close he is to being overwhelmed by his violent instincts.

Mann’s West is markedly different from the usual setup. It’s dusty, dirty, crowded with characters following their own selfish agendas. Tragic blindness takes a front seat in Mann’s Westerns. Additionally, Mann upped the ante by shooting on location – the players are let loose in the vast empty space of the frontier, where their battles play out on an epic canvas.

Mann took the Western and moved it into new territory.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Strangers on a Train.