NFR Project: 'The House I Live In' (1945)

 

NFR Project: “The House I Live In”

Dir: Mervyn LeRoy

Scr: Albert Maltz

Pho: Robert De Grasse

Ed: Philip Martin

Premiere: Nov. 9, 1945

10 min.

First, I can only defer to Art Simon’s masterful essay on the subject, which you can read here.

This short film had a profound impact on people. The title song became a big hit. Frank Sinatra performed it throughout his career. Half of its creators were later blacklisted or surveilled by the government.

The project originated with Sinatra, who pitched it to the successful screenwriter Albert Maltz (“Destination Tokyo,” “Pride of the Marines”) and director Mervyn LeRoy (“Little Caesar,” “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang”). The idea to illuminate the highest ideals of America at a point, immediately after World War II, when it seemed as though we had saved the world, was messianic.

The title song premiered in 1942 in the musical revue Let Freedom Sing. It was the creation of composer Earl Robinson and lyricist Lewis Allan, aka Abel Meeropol, who wrote the classic anti-lynching ballad “Strange Fruit” in 1937.

This is classic early Sinatra. He is as skinny as a toothpick. He is shown in the studio, recording “If You Are But A Dream.” He stops and goes into the alley, for a smoke, of course. Everybody smoked then.

He sees a bunch of kids chasing a little kid, knocking his books out of his hands, treeing him on a pile of garbage. Frankie interposes himself. What’s going on?

The kids all hate the little kid because they don’t like his religion. (It is implied that he is a Jew; the script is not so specific.)

Well, first Frankie tells them they’re a bunch of Nazis. Which the kids don’t like. But then Sinatra launches into an eloquent defense of racial and religious equality. He demonstrates that blood transfusions don’t discriminate. “Religion makes no difference, unless you’re a Nazi or somebody as stupid . . . God created everybody. He didn’t create one people better than another . . . Do you know what this wonderful country is made of? It’s made of 100 different kinds of people, and 100 different ways of talking, and 100 different ways of going to church, but they’re all American ways.”

He tells of them of an interfaith bombing crew that destroyed a Japanese warship. He convinces them that being prejudiced is for dopes. “Don’t let anybody make suckers out of you,” he says. 

He goes to reenter, but the kids stop him and ask him what he does. “I sing,” he replies. “You’re kidding!” they fire back. Frankie launches into the song. There is no montage; the camera stays trained on Sinatra as he puts the tune over, using his impeccable phrasing.

“What is America to me? 

A name, a map, or a flag I see; 

A certain word, democracy.

What is America to me?

 

The house I live in,

A plot of earth, a street,

The grocer and the butcher,

Or the people that I meet;

The children in the playground,

The faces that I see,

All races and religions,

That's America to me.

 

The place I work in,

The worker by my side,

The little town or city

Where my people lived and died.

The howdy and the handshake,

The air of feeling free,

And the right to speak my mind out,

That's America to me.

 

The things I see about me, 

The big things and the small, 

The little corner newsstand,

And the house a mile tall;

The wedding and the churchyard,

The laughter and the tears,

And the dream that's been a growing

For a hundred-fifty years.

 

The town I live in,

The street, the house, the room

The pavement of the city,

And the garden all in bloom;

The church, the school, the clubhouse,

The million lights I see,

But especially the people;

That's America to me.

The kids, all happy now, walk away. One kid helps the picked-on kid down, and off they go, side to side.

Now, there were more lyrics. The studio thought they were too liberal, so they didn’t use them, which incensed lyricist Meeropol. Here they are:

 The house I live in,

My neighbors white and black,

The people who just came here,

Or from generations back;

The town hall and the soapbox,

The torch of liberty,

A home for all God's children;

That's America to me.

 

The words of old Abe Lincoln,

Of Jefferson and Paine,

Of Washington and Jackson

And the tasks that still remain;

The little bridge at Concord,

Where Freedom's fight began,

Our Gettysburg and Midway

And the story of Bataan.

 

The house I live in,

The goodness everywhere,

A land of wealth and beauty,

With enough for all to share;

A house that we call Freedom,

A home of Liberty,

And it belongs to fighting people

That's America to me.

Pretty hopeful words! They are inspirational and aspirational. And hopelessly against the tide of the sentiments of today. Or are they? It’s a propaganda film, sure, but it’s sincere. This articulation of the ideals of equality and enough for all was enough to get you, even then, as a creative person, in big trouble with the powers that be.

The government didn’t respond well. The Second Red Scare was soon to encroach on the body politic. Sinatra was untouched, but screenwriter Maltz was later blacklisted for his leftist stances; composer Earl Robinson was blacklisted as well. Lyricist Meeropol was scrutinized by the government; he famously adopted the orphaned sons of the executed Rosenbergs.

This is Hollywood liberalism at its finest. It articulated desires that have been crushed by reality. Can America live up to the words in this song? We shall see.

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

NFR Project: 'Detour' (1945)

 

NFR Project: “Detour”

Dir: Edgar G. Ulmer

Scr: Martin Goldsmith

Pho: Benjamin H. Kline

Ed: George McGuire

Premiere: Nov. 15, 1945

68 min.

Edgar Ulmer was a great director who made the most out of pitiful resources. Nowhere is this more evident than in Detour.

Ulmer got his early training in Germany, working at the state production house, the mighty UFA. He came to America and started plying his trade at the major studios. It was then he made his beautiful and transgressive horror masterwork, The Black Cat (1934). It was a big success; it looked like Ulmer had nowhere to go but up.

However, he fell in love with the wrong woman. He began an affair with the wife of a producer who happened to be the nephew of Carl Laemmle, Universal studio head. She divorced her husband and married Ulmer. Ulmer got blackballed from the major studios.

He didn’t give up. He cranked out cheap potboilers for Poverty Row studios, giving his efforts a finish and a depth that they probably didn’t deserve. Detour was just another one of those assignments. Shot in only six days, it’s a marvel of inventiveness. Using studio fog, lighting tricks, props heavy with symbolism, and haunting voiceovers, Ulmer crafted a claustrophobic nightmare of a story, a noir that works despite its spareness.

 It all takes place in the mind of Al, a hapless piano player played by Tom Neal. Neal couldn’t really act; however, he was good at looking glum and confused. That’s the mode he’s in for much of the movie. He starts out in New York, where his girlfriend decides to try her luck in Hollywood. After a while, Al decides to follow her there. With no money to speak of, he sets off hitchhiking across the country.

(Note: in the New York scenes, Al appears to be a genius pianist -- we are treated to some shots of his hands, supposedly, working the keyboard in a flashy, expert manner. But is Al really a prodigy, or does he THINK he's a prodigy? It's impossible to tell.)

Al happens to be the unluckiest person in the world, and one of the dumbest. He gets a ride from a bookie, Haskell, who inconveniently dies en route. Does Al call the cops? No. He dumps the body in the desert, steals his clothes, money, and car, thinking this is the best path forward. THEN he picks up the world’s worst hitchhiker, who turns out to be a psychotic bitch from hell named Vera (Ann Savage). It turns out she knows that he’s not Haskell, and she blackmails him into doing her bidding, which becomes more and more delusional.

It is fascinating to watch the almost somnolent acting style of Neal contrasted with the bold overacting of Savage. In an improbable turn, he ACCIDENTALLY strangles her with a phone cord. Now completely without hope, he gives up on the idea of getting together with his girlfriend and starts hitchhiking again, drifting across the dark landscape. In the end, he’s picked up by a prowl car, and it looks like he’s going to pay for his . . . crimes? His bad luck? His sheer stupidity? It’s all of the above, frankly.

This sad-sack tale is classic noir. The hero is doomed by the actions of a femme fatale. He makes bad choices that box in him further and further, until the only safe place for him is the hoosegow. The bitter despair of the story is something that never would have flown in mainstream Hollywood. Here, Ulmer sneaks a gloomy, nutty story into the cinemas, and does a bang-up job of it.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: ‘The House I Live In.’

NFR Project: 'The Battle of San Pietro' (1945)

 

NFR Project: “The Battle of San Pietro”

Dir: John Huston

Scr: John Huston

Pho: Jules Buck

Ed: John Huston

Premiere: May 3, 1945

32 min.

This World War II documentary ruffled a lot of feathers. It’s a very honest account of a bitter battle on the Allies’ road to Rome in 1943. It got its creator, the great John Huston, in trouble – and out of trouble again.

Huston joined the Army and was assigned to make documentary films. This project was initially thought to follow the progress of Allied armies from their landings on the Italian coast to the capture of Rome. However, fate intervened. The campaign against the Germans bogged down; very little progress was made as American soldiers died by the score.

Huston decided to film the truth of the matter. His film describes the objective and the plans to take it; then moves to the depiction of actual combat (although scholars deduced that none of the footage was taken during the fighting). The scenes are raw, relentless – soldiers crouch down close to the earth, enduring artillery fire, then leap up to shoot and toss grenades in the Germans’ direction. Assaults are repulsed. Huston doesn’t shy away from showing us the faces of the dead soldiers, and showing corpses being loaded into trucks. He finishes the movie by showing the aftermath of the battle, as Italian civilians return to their shattered town to rebuild their lives.

The Army was mighty displeased with Huston’s finished product. It was cut from 50 minutes to 38, then to 32. The brass accused Huston of making an anti-war film. Huston replied, “If I ever make anything other than an anti-war film, I hope you take me out and shoot me.” Then General George C. Marshall saw the film and thought its seriousness and honesty would be better for the troops to see than a gung-ho, upbeat propaganda film. The film got released, and Huston was promoted to Major.

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

NFR Project: 'A Walk in the Sun' (1945)

 

NFR Project: “A Walk in the Sun”

Dir: Lewis Milestone

Scr: Robert Rossen

Pho: Russell Harlan

Ed: W. Duncan Mansfield

Premiere: Dec. 3, 1945

117 min.

Innovative in its time, A Walk in the Sun pales now in comparison to more realistic efforts of the era such as William Wellman’s two World War II epics, The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) and Battleground (1949). However, this film gives us a soldier’s-eye view of a few momentous hours in the life of an Army combat platoon. Milestone had famously made the Oscar-winning World War I drama All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), so he was a natural pick to helm this film.

The place is Salerno, Italy. It is 1943. Men of the Texas Division are landing at dawn to attack and oppose the German army. Their objective is to take a farmhouse inland and blow up a nearby bridge. We follow them as they make their way across the hot Italian sunscape (the 20^th Century Fox ranch).

We are privileged to hear their thoughts, and their dialogue with each other quickly sketches character and attitude. The back-and-forth is a little stiff; the film has a “literary” feel to it that is hard to shake. Milestone keeps his camera on the ground and in the faces of the men, relentlessly focusing on their inner struggles as they march into a deadly encounter.

The platoon loses its lieutenant before it even hits the beach; its platoon sergeant is killed as well. That leaves the execution of the plan to Sergeant Porter (Herbert Rudley), backed up by Sergeants Tyne (Dana Andrews) and Ward (Lloyd Bridges). Other soldiers include Privates Archimbeau (Norman Lloyd), Craven (John Ireland), and McWilliams (Sterling Holloway).

Porter soon cracks up, and Tyne takes over. The men destroy a German half-track. They get strafed. They get to the farmhouse, and find it stanchly defended. They wind up implementing a feint around the farmhouse, followed by a frontal assault. With great loss of life, they take the objective.

We are given insight into the panic and uncertainty accompanying every step along the way. The nervous banter between the men is standard WWII-type dialogue, along with the insertion of the word “loving” for the f-word. “Loving” is used a lot.

The film is epitome of the all-American (and all-white) Army comradeship films. Men get close to each other with wisecracks and obscenity. They muddle through, they improvise. They get the job done.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: ‘The Ballad of San Pietro.’

NFR Project: 'Leave Her to Heaven' (1945)

 

NFR Project: “Leave Her to Heaven”

Dir: John M. Stahl

Scr: Jo Swerling

Pho: Leon Shamroy

Ed: James B. Clark

Premiere: Dec. 20, 1945

110 min.

It’s just the most delicious of film noirs – and it happens in broad daylight.

This film launched a subset of “Technicolor noirs” that sprouted in mainstream cinema through 1959. It starts here, and this inaugural effort is unsurpassed. Drawn from the 1944 novel by Ben Ames Williams, Leave Her to Heaven inverts the usual role of the femme fatale in noir film. Usually, the female villain is after money, or other usually cynical and illegal means of escaping her circumstances. In this case, however, the villainess’s problem is that she “loves too much.”

The decision to shoot in color leads to a lurid sheen to the proceedings, a kind of unreality in reality that filmgoers would later see in Douglas Sirk movies. The heightened and intense color schemes in the film almost tell the story themselves, such is the judiciousness with which they are selected. Above all, the horrors we witness are shot in the harsh, plain light of day, as if unashamed of themselves.

The story is that of a writer (of course), Dick (Cornel Wilde in tormented hero mode). The femme in question is Ellen. Gene Tierney gets the role of her life and plays it expertly here. You see, Ellen is straight-up crazy – manipulative, obsessed, and dangerous. Lethal.

The dependable Ray Collins, as Dick’s lawyer, narrates the story. Dick meets Ellen on a train to New Mexico, where Ellen is going to spread the ashes of her father, or whom she was inordinately fond, to say the least. She is beautiful and rich. She immediately fixates on Dick, whom she and everyone else declare to be the spitting image of her father. Yikes! Daddy issues, anyone?

After a whirlwind courtship, the two decide to be married – but are confronted by attorney Russell Quinton (Vincent Price, who has several good scenes here), who was until moments ago Ellen’s fiancée. Quinton stalks out in anger.

We of course in the audience are let in to the witnessing of Ellen’s crimes, which are numerous. She is insanely jealous and controlling. She seeks to destroy anyone who comes between her and Dick. “I don’t want anyone else but me to do anything for you!” she exclaims to him.

Tierney’s performance nails Ellen’s uncanny nature. Everything she does that is normative is performative. Her love is false, smothering, insanely deified. Nothing but the incessant satisfaction of being madly in love and center of another’s life will suffice. Tierney, brilliantly, plays it cool and calm, so quiet and reasonable that you’d never guess she was a psycho. She lets her seemed sincerity and her good looks overcome the other person’s sneaking desire to kick her in the teeth when the truth is found out.

Unfortunately, Dick has a little brother Danny (Darryl Hickman), who is disabled with polio. Ellen does not want him around. “After all, he’s a cripple!” she says to a doctor, attempting to get him to recommend that Danny stay in rehab.

At Dick’s remote cabin in the woods, Ellen follows  Danny in a rowboat as he attempts to swim across the lake. He tires, then flounders. Ellen casually dons her sunglasses and stares at him, unhelping. Under a bright blue sky, in a beautiful natural setting, she watches him drown. It’s one of the most chilling sequences in movie history.

It gets worse. Ellen gets knocked up, thinking it will refocus Dick on her. Soon she finds out that she doesn’t want the child. Dick turns her father’s old laboratory into a children’s playroom, and Ellen freaks out. Ellen is terrified that Dick will love the baby more than he loves her. She stages a fall down the stairs, and voila! She loses the baby.

Eventually she confesses to Dick, who walks out on her. It gets worse. Ellen decides to kill herself and put the blame on Ruth (Jeanne Crain), her cousin, of whom of course she is jealous of because of her friendship with Dick. She successfully doses herself with poison, declaring to Dick on her deathbed, “I'll never let you go. Never, never, never.”

And on it goes. She plants incriminating evidence with her former boyfriend Quinton, who is now the D.A. Ruth goes on trial for her murder, and she and Dick are badgered without let or hinder by Price in a series of courtroom scenes that read more as lacerating exercises of the conscience than they do testimony in a murder trial. As can only happen in movies, the two realize that they love each other. On the witness stand.

Ruth is acquitted, but Dick gets two years as an accomplice in Danny’s death (!). Dick’s lawyer rounds out the tale as Dick comes home, and sails away in a canoe to reunite with Ruth. Lesson learned.

By the end of the film, the viewer feels completely beaten up. How could someone be so evil? Tierney’s Ellen is a model of monstrosity, quietly wreaking havoc wherever she goes. Her suicide is reminiscent of Madame Bovary’s, another terminally unhappy and destructive character. Like her, Ellen just loved too much.

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

 

 

 

NFR Project: 'The Negro Soldier' (1944)

 

NFR Project: “The Negro Soldier”

Dir: Stuart Heisler

Scr: Carlton Moss

Pho: Alan Q, Thompson, Horace Woodard, Paul C. Vogel

Ed: Jack Ogilvie

Premiere: 1944

43 min.

It was in response to the inequity and strife caused by racial segregation in the armed services during World War II (it was condoned until 1948) that this film was created.

This film was made by the War Department specifically for showing to African-American troops; its quality and success led to its being required viewing for all troops. It’s a propaganda film, for sure: the need at the time was dire and the government wanted Black men to enlist. To be proud, to join the fight. Producer (and Oscar-winning director) Frank Capra, known for his Why We Fight documentary series, pitched in and created a remarkable film that turned the tide.

The movie takes place in a Black church. Everyone is dressed well and appropriately. No stereotypes are exhibited. The film’s narrator is a preacher in the pulpit. That man is Carlton Moss, the movie’s screenwriter.

Moss was an up-and-coming writer, actor, and director who nailed the script after others more prestigious such as Marc Connelly and Ben Hecht had unsuccessful cracks at it. For once, a Black writer got to see his work on film, not to mention being preserved in performance to boot. It must have been like a dream come true.

Moss tells us, succinctly, why the Nazis are bad and why we have to fight them. He thinks of boxer Joe Louis and his victory over German Max Schmeling in 1938. He likens the present war as another battle in the ring, though at much larger scale and deadlier consequences. He defines the fascist impulse as “We must exterminate everyone who stands against us”. He cites Hitler’s writings against the Black race. Furthermore, he declares “The liberty of the whole Earth depends on the outcome of this contest.”

The movie transitions into a historical montage, Moss providing voiceover, listing for us the names and the faces of key Black soldiers and heroes in American history. Slavery is not touched upon, however; there is but a whisper of a mention of the Civil War. Hmm. We move on to the achievements of such as Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver.

It performs then a parade of exemplary Black individuals from all kinds of occupations and levels of society (not the poor; they do not exist in this movie). The preacher speaks of the tree of Liberty, and that “Men of every faith, color, and tongue have helped to nourish it.” We are reminded of the atrocities of the Nazis, the Fascists, and the Japanese (Dmitri Tiomkin’s score is particularly potent here).

A woman from the congregation stands up and pitches in, She has a letter from her son, who’s just been made an officer. She then reads it to the congregation, and we segue into another sequence featuring the recruitment process and basic training. It is tad odd that Mom serves as the voiceover for this story.

Anyway, life in the armed services isn’t that bad. There are sports, and literature, and women, and Church, and calisthenics. And you get to do cool stuff and kill people.

We are retailed of the various war activities reserved for Black troops. We are shown the Tuskegee airmen, the communications platoon, the quartermaster’s corps. We see a Black anti-aircraft gunner fight stock footage of enemy planes, getting bracketed by machine-gun bullets and wiping out his foe, the burning and crash of whom is enacted on a miniature scale.

Then we are back to the pastor, who declares that “the government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish of the Earth.” And then the choir gets up and everybody sings “Onward Christian Soldiers” (just like in Mrs. Miniver [1942]!) Segue to yet another montage, cued to songs such as “Joshua Fought the Battle” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

The filmmakers were bound and determined to do a thorough job of this film, and the results are reasonable and realistic, if rather rosy about the prospect of being in battle. They visited 19 army bases to get footage. The result is a call to arms, couched in friendly and sanctimonious terms. This is a holy struggle.

But something else is achieved. The demystifying of the African-American “other” in mainstream media really begins here. Here Black people are depicted as real, unaffected human beings.

And everybody in the armed forces had to see it. It must have prompted many a breakthrough in education and perception. It is significant that, after this film, Hollywood moved away from most Black stereotypes to roles for “serious” Black actors such as Sidney Poitier and Ossie Davis.

An interesting and eloquent advertisement for joining the army inadvertently became the foundation of a more enlightened decision to integrate the services four years later – and to energize the quest for equal rights.

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

 

 

NFR Project: 'National Velvet' (1944)

 

NFR Project: “National Velvet”

Dir: Clarence Brown

Scr: Helen Deutsch

Pho: Leonard Smith

Ed: Robert J. Kern

Premiere: Dec. 14, 1944

123 min.

It’s quite simply a well-made movie. Based on the 1935 Enid Bagnold novel, it’s the story of 12-year-old English girl Velvet Brown, who wins a racehorse named The Pie and trains him to compete in the Grand National steeplechase.

It stars Elizabeth Taylor in her first big role, and she absolutely nails it. Her Velvet Brown is crazy about horses, and when she gets the chance to train and ride one, her spirit soars into a kind of mystical ecstasy. When young drifter Mi Taylor (Mickey Rooney) visits her family’s home, he is given a job in her father’s butcher shop and helps her train the Pie. (It turns out that the near-larcenous Mi was a jockey who quit when his actions led to the death of another jockey.)

Velvet insists on entering The Pie in the big race, and her mother (Anne Revere, in an Oscar-winning performance) gives her the entry fee – it’s the prize money she saved that she won when she swam the English Channel (it turns out that Mi’s father was her trainer). Mi almost absconds with it, but stays true to Velvet and enters the horse.

The problem is that the only jockey available to ride The Pie is a cynical fellow, and Mi and Velvet reject him. Mi volunteers to overcome his reluctance and ride The Pie himself, but Velvet has an even more radical idea – she will ride The Pie. Cutting off her hair and pretending to be boy, Velvet rides her horse to victory! However, she faints soon after, and when she is examined, her deception is uncovered and she is disqualified.

Still happy that she won the race, Velvet returns home and casts aside all thoughts of exploiting her victory to make money. This befuddles her father (the dependable Donald Crisp), but he goes along with her wishes. Mi leaves the Browns, but the last shot of the film shows Velvet overtaking him on the road and, perhaps, convincing him to stay.

Leonard Smith’s color cinematography is excellent, and the story flows smoothly to its conclusion. Look for other stalwarts such as Angela Lansbury, Arthur Treacher, and Arthur Shields. This is the very model of a family film.

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