NFR Project: 'The Maltese Falcon' (1941)

 

NFR Project: “The Maltese Falcon”

Dir: John Huston

Scr: John Huston

Pho: Arthur Edeson

Ed: Thomas Richards

Premiere: Oct. 18, 1941

101 min.

The list of directors that have made perfect feature films on their first try is short. It is even rarer for these wunderkinds to continue to create engaging work. Well, writer/director John Huston did it with his first film, The Maltese Falcon, and kept making fascinating films, 36 more, over the next 46 years.

The story was adapted from Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel of the same name – two films prior to this tried to adapt it, with indifferent success. Huston was by this time a go-to screenwriter in Hollywood. He relished the opportunity to make the film he wrote as he saw it in his mind. He studiously planned out the entire film, creating storyboards for every scene. He worked carefully with his cast, shooting almost entirely in sequence. This kept the players on the same page, and added immensely to the suspense inherent in the screenplay.

This definitive film noir gives us a world in which everyone is suspect. “Everyone has something to conceal,” says the protagonist, private detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart). Huston’s selection of Bogart was inspired – after years of knocking around as a supporting player, Bogie finally fell into the persona that would carry him through the rest of his career. The smart, cynical, world-weary professional, Sam Spade is the archetypical gumshoe – a man who has seen everything and has a low estimation of the integrity of his fellow human beings. He is rarely disappointed. He seems to subsist on cigarettes and whiskey. He is a dark knight who slickly navigates the slimy contours of the urban jungle. He discovers hidden truths and makes wrongs right. Thanks to this film, Bogie became a hard-bitten movie hero.

The story is as convoluted as you might expect a mystery film to be. Spade takes on the case of a woman, Miss Wonderly (Mary Astor) searching for her sister. Spade’s partner Archer (Jerome Cowan) goes out to help the lady, and gets murdered for his pains. Now Spade is determined to find out the truth from the lady, who turns out to be Brigid O’Shaughnessy. She is after a “black bird” – the fabled Maltese Falcon, a statuette encrusted with jewels, crafted in centuries past.

Her opponents include the Fat Man, Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet, marvelously malevolent in his first film) and Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), an effeminate schemer. They are assisted by the psychotic young gunman Wilmer (Elisha Cook, Jr.). Together, this quartet bedevils Spade as they all seek to deceive each other and get ot the Falcon first.

The Falcon’s atmosphere is gloomy – everything is shot indoors or at night. Huston plays fair with the story – we rarely know more than Spade does at any given moment, and we are kept guessing as to the outcome until literally the final five minutes. Spade is tempted, time and again, to make a crooked choice, but each time he manages to walk a straight line without getting himself killed. Spade has a perverse integrity that means he lives by his own code, come what may. He is in society but not of it – his bleak take on humanity isolates him from his fellow man, making him an outlier. In this world, Spades are necessary and expendable at the same time. By film’s end, however, only Spade is standing. His caution and intelligence preclude him from being caught up in the greed and need for manipulation that infects the others onscreen.

Falcon boasts ingenious plotting, exquisite dialogue, and inspired performances. It has something more than this, however. There is something melancholy and affecting about the proceedings. Huston has captured a vibe that will resonate through countless succeeding examples of the film noir genre. This is simultaneously the starting point and most perfect example of the noir sensibility.

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

NFR Project: 'The Lady Eve' (1941)

 

NFR Project: “The Lady Eve”

Dir: Preston Sturges

Scr: Preston Sturges

Pho: Victor Milner

Ed: Stuart Gilmore

Premiere: Feb. 25, 1941

94 min.

It’s tremendously filthy and tremendously heartfelt at the same time. Preston Sturges was at the height of his powers when he made this movie, an outrageous, improbable farce that plays with the ideas of real and ideal. It’s a perfect little movie.

Sturges’ screenplays are essays on morals and manners, universals that everyone could appreciate. He made highbrow comedies for middle-class audiences. And he still believed in love.

In this film, the putative Adam, destined to fall, in this case from ignorance and prejudice, for his Eve is Charles “Hopsie” Pike, scion of an ale fortune (“Pike’s Ale – The Ale That Won for Yale.”). He’s a quiet young chap who’s just spent a year up the Amazon studying snakes. Henry Fonda is oddly quiet as the seemingly impassive Hopsie, who’s hornswoggled at every turn.

His Eve is Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck), a professional gambler, a card shark who’s working the cruise ship he finds himself on with her father, the “Colonel” (an affecting Charles Coburn) and their manservant/accomplice Gerald (Melville Cooper). Hopsie and Jean fall in love, but then his zealous and cynical aide de camp/bodyguard Muggsy (a hilarious William Demarest) tells him the truth about her. He turns on Jean, and spurns her.

She vows revenge. With her pal, scammer Sir Alfred (Eric Blore, perfect) she infiltrates high society as the Lady Eve Sidwich, and artfully seduces the awkward Hopsie. Despite Muggsy’s protests that “it’s the same dame,” the two get married. Then, as their train hurtles through the night of their honeymoon, “Eve” confesses a multitude of previous couplings, until Hopsie is forced out into the rain and the mud.

Sturges gives us a universe peopled with distinct characters. The Lady Eve sports dozens of characters, each of whom possesses a personality, many of whom worked for Sturges as a kind of stock company through many of his films.

Early in the film, someone holding a blurry, absurd object crosses Fonda on the boat deck. Fonda shoots him a look. Minutes later, Fonda is in the same position, and the same guy crosses again, holding something different. “Good morning,” he says. We never see him again. Sturges plants jokes everywhere, if you look sharp.

His sharp writing, combined with his expertly chosen casts and venturesome story-telling – we follow a running conversation that moves along the deck of the ship in an elegant tracing shot; the climax of Jean’s seduction of Hopsie comes in a ridiculously prolonged close-up of the two, entwined on her cabin floor.

The gap between the ideal and the real is apparent from the beginning. Hopise is leaving the Amazon, bearing a rare reptile; his servant Muggsy turns to a native girl and says, “So long, Lulu. I’ll send you a postcard.” Sturges deflates Freudian conceits throughout, emphasizing snakes and giving us a sexual confession in a train roaring through a tunnel. Young Pike is smug, entitled, isolated; as in all screwball comedies; he needs an active heroine who will step in and change his life, usually through the strategy of chaos. Jean, the knowing and intelligently manipulative leading lady, is impersonated perfectly by Stanwyck. Her frequently passionate musings are delectably delivered.

Jean/Eve refuses to consent to a divorce. Hopsie boards another cruise ship. Jean and company follow him. Overjoyed to see Jean again, he races with her to her cabin.

“And I have no right to be in your cabin. I’m married,” Hopsie says.

She replies, “But so am I, darling. So am I.”

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

NFR Project: 'Kannapolis, N.C.' (1941)

 

NFR Project: ‘Kannapolis, N.C.”

Dir: H. Lee Waters

Premiere: 1941

137 min.

Between 1936 and 1942, the enterprising director H. Lee Waters made a series of films he called Movies of Local People. He went to at least 117 towns in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia and filmed anyone he could get in front of a camera. Then he developed the results and displayed them at the local theater before the feature film, for a cut of the ticket sales.

It was a gimmick. Presumably, if you were captured for all time on film, you and your family would pay to see yourselves on the local silver screen. Curiosity was the motivator. It was a novelty that pretty much all the small-town, middle-class “representative” citizens could enjoy.

Waters was not a documentary filmmaker. The only examination of the underclass in the films was his documentation of some parts of African-American life in these little places, which are now known as “town portrait” or “town documentary” films. The genre existed from the mid-1910s through the early 1950s, when it is arguable that affordable home-movie equipment took over the market. It’s a weird subset of cinema that simply seeks to get as many people posed or captured on the run, shot with a home-movie level of technical competence.

In color and in black and white, silently, Waters films Kannapolis crowds on the streets, marching bands, schoolchildren, babies, soda jerks, cops, mill workers. “When the Daltons Rode” is on at the local movie theater. A man demonstrates a refrigerator. People smile, people wave, people duck out of the way. Some studiously ignore the goings-on. Hundreds are frozen in time for the brief moments in which they pass by the camera. The editor, impatient, keeps cutting, cutting, cutting, moving without let or hinder on from one face to another, desperately thirsty.

It’s inadvertently valuable for capturing the state of vernacular society at that time and in that place. It’s difficult to estimate how many of these director/entrepreneurs there were. Not much of their output survives. Here’s home movies for the masses, a snapshot of days gone by.

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

 

NFR Project: 'How Green Was My Valley' (1941)

 

NFR Project: ‘How Green Was My Valley”

Dir: John Ford

Scr: Philip Dunne

Pho: Arthur C. Miller

Ed: James B. Clark

Premiere: Oct. 28, 1941

118 min.

Winner of Best Picture, Director, and Cinematography Oscars in 1941, How Green Was My Valley is a moving epic – one of John Ford’s most emotional films.

The film is adapted from the 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn. It’s the story of the Morgan family, Welsh coal miners in the late 19^th century. In their small village, they live and go down to work in the galleries underground. (The entire village and mine were created on 80 acres in a California valley.)

They are a poor, exploited lot, and the story is unremittingly tragic. The narrator (voiced here by the great Irving Pichel) is leaving the valley, and reflects on his childhood there. He is Huw, played by Roddy McDowell in his first He  film, at just the age of 12. He has five older brothers, who all work at the mine, and a sister, Angharad (Maureen O’Hara) who keeps house with their mother (Sara Allgood). The father of the family (Donald Crisp in an Oscar-winning performance) is stern but loving, and rules benevolently over his family.

Tragedies abound. The men go on strike; the father opposes it and the brothers move out. The miners mutter against the father; the mother defiantly addresses a meeting in the winter and falls into a river with Huw; both are severely injured, Huw more seriously. It takes the intervention of the kind minister Mr. Gruffydd (Walter Pidgeon) to inspire Huw to walk again.

Two of the brothers lose their jobs, and move to America. Angharad and Mr. Gruffydd fall in love, but he won’t ask for her hand as he’s too poor. She is soon courted by the mine owner’s son, and reluctantly marries him.

Another brother dies in a mining accident, after which his wife gives birth. Huw is picked on in school, and is taught boxing. He beats his tormentor, which leads his malicious schoolteacher to beat him. It takes the interest of a couple of ne’er-do-wells to stop the schoolmaster from running Huw’s life. Huw declines university and goes to work in the mine, supporting his dead brother’s sister-in-law and infant.

Meanwhile, Angharad returns to the valley alone. Gossips speak of the love between her and Mr. Gurffydd, and finally he is expelled from the post. That same evening, another mine disaster strikes, and Huw’s father is dead. The film ends with Huw clutching his father’s body, covered with soot and despair. (A brief glimpse of all the men in the family meeting in heaven tries to lift the film out of its gloom.)

Ford is unparalleled here in his reliance on close-ups, his camera lingers on the subtle reactions of all the performers. Ford loves to gaze into the souls of the actors, and we watch as the tragedies challenge them, or grind them down. The script masterfully tames the material, and Arthur C. Miller’s cinematographic is luminescent.

A convincing portrayal of a vanished world and life.

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

Lee's 'Highest 2 Lowest' and Kurosawa's 'High and Low'

 

“Highest 2 Lowest”

Dir: Spike Lee

Scr: Alan Fox

Pho: Matthew Libatique

Ed: Barry Alexander Brown, Allyson C. Johnson

Premiere: Aug. 16, 2025

133 min.

 

“Tengoku to jigoku (High and Low)”

Dir: Akira Kurosawa

Scr: Hideo Oguni, Ryuzo Kikushima, Eijiro Hisaita, Akira Kurosawa

Pho: Asakasu Nakai, Takao Saito

Ed: Akira Kurosawa

Premiere: March 1, 1963

143 min.

As a speaker noted at the screening of Highest 2 Lowest, this was a project that had floated around America for 35 years. Evidently Spike Lee picked up this screenplay by Alan Fox prior to COVID liked it, held onto it, and reworked it after he got Denzel Washington to star as the stressed-out music exec threatened by a kidnapper.

Looking at Lee’s vision, it’s interesting to watch him choose to be expansive and inclusive in his approach to the film, crafting many different films in one. (His repertoire of film styles within include homemovies, fanciful wipes, and documentary-like snippets.) Where Kurosawa, austere in black and white, was reductive and quiet in High and Low, Lee makes Highest 2 Lowest open out, awash in color and enchanting images, and makes music a major part of the action, even providing a musical coda that underlines the redemption of the central character, David King (Washington).

The source in both cases is Evan Hunter writing as Ed McBain’s 1959 police thriller, King’s Ransom. For both Kurosawa and Lee, it is a study in character that asks important questions about honor, compassion, and justice. (Kurosawa’s Japanese title is literally Heaven and Hell.)

King lives high in a penthouse looking spectacularly over the Brooklyn Bridge and the approach to Manhattan. He’s a hitmaker, a colossal figure in the music business who’s orchestrating a deal to take over his record company.

Suddenly, a call comes in. His teenage son has been kidnapped. The kidnapper wants $17.5 million in Swiss francs. The Kings, father and mother, go berserk. Then their son appears. It was not he but his best friend, the son of King’s chauffeur, Paul Christopher (a brilliant Jeffrey Wright), who the kidnapper snatched.

The kidnapper calls back. He doesn’t care who he has, he wants the money or the kid will die. Will King give up all his assets for the life of another man’s son?

The same close examination of character takes place in the Kurosawa film. Here, the shoe tycoon Gondo (another great performance from Toshiro Mifune) and company float around their hilltop mansion, pondering and debating what to do about the kidnapped child of his chauffeur. Shooting in 70 millimeter, Kurosawa builds carefully balanced compositions out of the attitudes of the actors present, shifting in patterns and keeping Gondo on the opposite side of the screen from his interlocutors, like some modern-day Job.

The films match each other in a general sense, following the same course of action. Each man is told that he will be reviled personally and professionally if he does not pay up. Mifune and Washington both face their demons. Both performers are quite capable of communicating the moral quandry they find themselves in.

Once Lee’s mogul decides to pay the ransom, the film opens out and becomes a veritable travelogue of New York City. There is even time for the buffoonish police force to get entangled in a concert by the late Eddie Palmieri and his Orchestra. An intricate game of cat and mouse plays out on the city streets, but the bad guys get away.

Then Lee lets the action take another turn. King remembers that the kidnapped young man had heard an incessant rap refrain during his captivity. King matches it with a mix an aspiring rapper sent to him. He and Christopher, ignored by the police, track the suspect down on their own. Now we are in action-film territory. Denzel runs the suspect down, hears his confession (ASAP Rocky plays the strapped, weed-smoking kidnapper), chases him all over town, gets on the subway – hilariously, Lee gives rabid Yankee fans a chance to look into the camera and chant “BOSTON SUCKS!” -- gives him a beat-down, and saves the day.

Kurosawa also gets away from his chamber drama after the ransom is pledged. His film turns into a straight-ahead police prodecural. Gondo makes the drop, and the police force begins a coordinated investigation into the crime, marshaling a large contingent of specialists who analyze the scant information given to them and extrapolate who the kidnapper and killer is. In contrast with Lee’s lone-hero approach, in Kurosawa success is seen as the product of a professional, joint effort.

King’s outcome, redemption and the restoration of his fortune, stands in sharp contrast to Kurosawa’s Gondo, who loses everything. Kurosawa’s villain is a triple murderer; Lee’s villain is a misguided wanna-be. Both stare up at the successful businessmen living high above them; both boil in the summer heat of the slums. Both present themselves as worthy matchers of wits; both are deluded.

“Not all money is good money,” says King. Both Kurosawa’s and Lee’s protagonists realize their true value in the heat of the moment. Though their outcomes differ, their quiet return to life underscores their new state of peace. Gondo’s kidnapper, facing death, breaks into a tortured shriek, and a metal grate comes clanging down, ending the film; Lee’s villain merely curses out the obdurate King. In the compelling dialogues the protagonist has with his opponent, he outlines the difference in their essential characters, the juxtaposition of the older, saner man and the young hothead. Then we get the redemptive ending.

Kurosawa is edgy, unbalanced. Right wins out, but the disturbing and abrupt ending asks questions it has no intention of answering about sanity and morality. It resonates. With Lee, the alert and engaged hero outfoxes and outfights his opponent, and lives to make music another day. It’s an oddly Hollywood ending, but by this time the film had been a lot of things: a moral drama, an epic chase, an action thriller, a musical. Lee makes room for what he wants.

Lee’s is, ultimately, another great New York movie. His love for the city is obvious, and he makes the most of the territory. His performers are expert, his eye unfailing. He gives us a man redeemed. Kurosawa’s is a more tragic classic.

NFR Project: 'Citizen Kane' (1941)

 

NFR Project: ‘Citizen Kane’

Dir: Orson Welles

Scr: Herman J. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles

Pho: Gregg Toland

Ed: Robert Wise

Premiere: May 1, 1941

119 min.

Is Citizen Kane still the greatest American film?

It’s tough for us brought up in the auteur-loving critics’ era of the 1960s and early ‘70s to think otherwise. Kane to them was proof positive that, even entrenched in the studio system, a film could be the creation of one person’s vision, of a single artisan’s, the director’s, will. Orson Welles, the boy genius and later figure of fun, had whipped an imaginary world into shape.

Welles is inescapably at the center of things – he is the film’s director, producer, co-writer and star performer, impersonating a man from youth to death with perfect assurance. It was his first film. He was 26 years old. However, Kane qualifies otherwise as a masterfully coordinated group venture, the expression of many talents all at the top of their game.

Welles’ talent is undeniable. But Herman J. Mankiewicz’s script, assisted by Welles, is a perfect construction. Mankiewicz knew Welles through his writing of scripts for the Mercury Radio Theatre broadcasts (1938). (It is said Mankiewicz took some cues from The Power and the Glory [1933], a vehicle for Spencer Tracy and the first Hollywood script by Preston Sturges, who also and amazingly for the movie business got a percentage of the profits.)

Welles famously watched John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) 40 times in the run-up to Citizen Kane. Something clicked when he saw Bert Glennon’s cinematography for that film. It told him what he wanted. Gregg Toland, an Oscar-winning Ford collaborator, volunteered himself to do Welles’ film, reportedly because he knew that Welles had no preconceptions on how to make a movie – giving him license to attempt – and succeed – at effects no one thought possible.

Toland’s work is incredible – amazing, layered deep compositions, frames within frames, just to start with. Low-angle setups that make the characters into titans, and long shots that make them look puny and alone. Ceilings, for the first time, in Hollywood movies. In only one instance does the camera record a scene conventionally – Kane and Susan’s first meeting.

The story is simple. American tycoon, notorious newspaper baron, Charles Foster Kane is dead. He is epitomized in a newsreel feature that summarizes his life, giving us a public view of a man – cycling us quickly through the elements of his curriculum vitae, giving us the end as the beginning. Reporters stick onto the last recorded word Kane said: “Rosebud.” The quest for Rosebud pulls us through the movie, propelling us from one character to another who remembers key moments of Kane’s life and who relive them via flashback.

Kane is controlling, imposing, spiteful. He’s the pampered son of a newly wealthy Colorado mother, who happens upon the deed to a rich gold mine. She sends him off to the East Coast, to be raised by . . . capitalists, basically. Inculcated with no virtues, he stumbles through colleges and finally achieves his majority at age 25, taking over a failing New York newspaper and building it into a publishing empire.

We see Kane mutate from idealistic youth to corrupt and impotent old man, losing everything and everyone he valued just as he accumulated tons of art objects on his palatial Florida estate, Xanadu. Throughout, his demand for love on his terms alone as the guiding principle of his life, rendering him a tragic figure. It’s a story that is an embodiment the New Testament adage, “For what profiteth a man to gain the whole world, and lose him own soul?” Kane is a victim; Kane is a monster.

The clever device of an intrepid (and faceless) reporter searching out the truth gives them film the forward thrust of the thriller. It tells us who Kane was, and resolutely refuses to answer what “Rosebud” was until the last moment, when it offers us a solution so facile that it confounds everything that went before it. Welles ends the film . . .and keeps the audience’s brains working.

Robert Wise’s editing is superb. He was at the beginning of a long and illustrious career in the movie trade, first as an editor and then, in 1944, becoming, a director (The Body Snatcher, Blood on the Moon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Sound of Music) His ability to maintain clarity while dealing with multiple narratives and shifts in time should not be underestimated.

His cast is full of unknowns. There are 10 actors whose debut on film this is, and they are all members of Welles’ Mercury Players, a theater company founded by Welles in 1937. In other words, he had a resident acting company on his hands, who were attuned to each other, who treated the script as though it was a richly appointed stage drama. Their understated, complex portrayals were miles ahead of their contemporaries in Hollywood.

And let us not forget Bernard Herrmann’s score, his first for a film. Herrmann had collaborated with Welles on several projects: listening to his scores for The Mercury Radio Theater (1938) gives you a glimpse of the solid technique he would bring to film scoring. Here, rather than a through-composed score (Welles tossed out half of it), the judicious application of instrumental support at key moments was another fruitful departure from the Hollywood way of doing things. Hermann is evocative, melodic: his parody of grand opera in a key part of the film is spot-on.

Everyone on the job was inspired and took the proceedings very seriously. Welles’ particular genius at this young age was not in his mellifluous voice; it was in his ability to engage people at the height of their professions and get them to collaborate fruitfully. It’s a gift that would stand him in great stead as his opportunities narrowed as the decades progressed.

Welles had the right of final cut. He had to fight for it ever after.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: How Green Was My Valley.

NFR Project: 'The Blood of Jesus'

 

NFR Project: ‘The Blood of Jesus’

Dir: Spencer Williams

Scr: Spencer Williams

Pho: Jack Whitman

Ed: N/A

Premiere: April 26, 1941

56 min.

The Blood of Jesus is a “race” film, meaning it was made specifically for African American audiences. Its director and screenwriter was Spencer Williams, whose second film this is. It’s a celebration of holiness couched in the shape of a fable about faith and temptation.

It is crudely made, but convincing. The director’s deficiencies can be duly noted, but his knowledge of narrative and film grammar mark him as a prodigious filmmaker.

It’s a pedagogic film, a film that seeks to instruct, in this case morals. It was screened not only in theaters but in churches. It is certainly a film for the faithful.

In the rural South, a young woman named Martha gets baptized in the river. Others note her husband isn’t there. She returns home, and he lies about poaching some of his neighbors’ stoats. His shotgun slips and falls and wounds Martha grievously. In bed, she is prayed over and sung over.

An angel appears and takes her to the crossroads between heaven and hell. There, an emissary of mean old Satan incudes Martha to dress up and go to the club with him. There we see people dance, drink, and watch an acrobat and a singer. Tame stuff now, but the movie looks on it as abhorrent behavior.

The angel appears again, to warn her. Martha escapes, pursued by a mob. She falls at the sign delineating Zion and Hell. There Satan is driving a flatbed truck with a jazz band on it – others mill about, dancing, drinking, fighting. The signpost turns into the crucifix – Christ’s blood drips onto Martha’s face – and she is redeemed and restored to health. What’s more, her husband has gone straight.

The film is steeped in the Puritan hypocrisy. It wants to experience some sinning, but it wants to see it condemned as well. The club footage looks like it was shot one night in a real club; the film is part documentary. Only the framing is evangelical.

But this Pilgrim’s Progress, redemptive and devoted to right living and salvation, hasn’t got a hateful bone in its body. It looks down on sinners but gives hope of everlasting glory for the faithful. It is literally a come-to-Jesus movie.

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

NFR Project: 'Ball of Fire' (1941)

 

NFR Project: ‘Ball of Fire’

Dir: Howard Hawks

Scr: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder

Pho: Gregg Toland

Ed: Daniel Mandell

Premiere: Dec. 2, 1941

111 min.

What do you get when you produce the combined creative efforts of four individuals at the top of their game? You get a Ball of Fire.

Released days before Pearl Harbor, it marks the high water of screwball comedy in American film.

The eminently versatile director, Howard Hawks, had already proved his ability to make screwball comedy with Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and His Girl Friday (1940). Brackett and Wilder had been writing together since 1936, and would continue to do so, through 1950. They had already penned Ninotchka (1939), and had The Lost Weekend (1945) and Sunset Boulevard (1950) ahead of them. Cinematographer Gregg Toland had just won the Oscar for Wuthering Heights (1939) and was also working on a little film called Citizen Kane (1941).

Ball of Fire (aka, in some locations, as The Professor and the Burlesque Queen) is an archetypal screwball comedy – a dynamic dame seduces a strait-laced, oafish but handsome leading man and leads him to a finer appreciation of life. Here the dame is the beautiful and witty Barbara Stanwyck, a tough chick who sings in a joint and is named Sugarpuss O’Shea. She’s the reluctant girlfriend of the mobster Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews).

She’s encountered singing “Drum Boogie” (actually it’s the voice of Martha Tilton) with Gene Krupa and his orchestra. She’s being observed by the mild-mannered Professor Potts (Gary Cooper), who is compiling an encyclopedia entry on slang and has bivouacked in the real, vernacular world to learn all the new expressions.

He resides in an ornate brownstone in mid-town Manhattan with seven other shy and retiring bachelor professors, each played by a consummate character actor (Oskar Homolka! Henry Travers! S.Z. ‘Cuddles’ Sakall!). The supporting cast of academics is clearly patterned on the Seven Dwarves in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). That makes Gary Cooper Snow White and Barbara Stanwyck the handsome prince.

Potts and his septet of colleagues are engaged in creating a reference work in accordance with the dictates of the Daniel S. Totten Foundation. The Foundation has run out of money, and the professors are urged to wrap things up. Potts realizes he is deficient in hipster lingo, and goes out into the big wide world to write it all down.

He is slumming in a nightclub when Sugarpuss O’Shea appears. He asks her to come to the Foundation for research purposes – and she figures it’s a good place to hide out to avoid being forced to testify against Joe Lilac. Lilac wants to marry her so she can’t testify against him.

So, she delivers herself to the professors’ door and makes herself at home. Now SHE is playing Snow White, and she enchants the shy, retiring old men who surround her. She and Potts, or Pottsie, fall in love.

And there’s the rub. Far be it from me to reveal the interesting twists and convergences that flow, symphony-like, straight through the heart of the film. It is all of a piece, directed not obtrusively but in a definitive, convincing manner that sells the absurd premise perfectly. All the actors are skirting around overplaying it, just a bit. Hawks had a way of winding up an actor to make them more vivid.

This is easily the most sentimental of the Brackett and Wilder scripts. It’s simply crisp, wry, a well-made play. (Supposedly, Hawks let Wilder shadow him as he was making the movie, to learn the directing trade. Wilder had impeccable taste.) Sugarpuss and Pottsie’s ill-starred romance is whole-hearted, sincere, and very sweet. You get to watch two people fall in love.

To top it all off, there’s Toland’s cinematography, which ranges from the practical to the dreamy. With precious few setups, he conveys the shimmering loveliness of Stanwyck, the befuddled comedy of Cooper . . . even the goombah toughness of Duke Pastrami, the hood played in what is essentially a gifted cameo by Dan Duryea.

A farce anchored in real feeling, Ball of Fire makes the most of every occasion for humor, wending its way to its improbable but crowd-pleasing finale. It’s a fairy tale with a fairly sexy happy ending for the time. True love, and good  grammar, prevails.

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

NFR Project: 'Dumbo' (1941)

 

NFR Project: ‘Dumbo’

Dir: Ben Sharpsteen, Norman Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson, Bill Roberts, Jack Kinney, Samuel Armstrong

Scr: Joe Grant, Dick Huemer

Premiere: Oct 23, 1941

64 min.

Dumbo derives from a “Roll-a-Book” tale told in 1939 by Helen Aberson-Mayer and Harold Pearl, with illustrations by Helen Durney. It’s a heart-warming tale of a little circus elephant with oversized ears, who is at first rejected but then accepted when it turns out that he can fly.

Disney sought to counter the financial losses incurred by Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia (1940). He deliberately made this a low-budget film, content even have it clock in at a mere 64 minutes. The film profited wonderfully, getting Disney out of debt.

My aversion to Disney fare continues unabated, but not so strongly with Dumbo. Fear not, for it is politically incorrect, traumatizingly surreal, and emotionally manipulative. Beyond, that, it’s a fine entertainment.

Dumbo is a little elephant with big ears. He is, in fact, deformed. This deformed individual is scorned by all and demoted to the bottom level of his society. But then he demonstrates that his deformation is socially utile, and quickly becomes the favorite of all. It’s depressing.

It’s much the same conceit as the plot of the later-penned Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Dumbo’s main problem is the crows. These comic-relief “black” birds are voiced by Black actors, who speak in a real shuck-and-jive kind of Negro slang that’s pretty offensive. Not Song of the South (1946) offensive, but bad enough.

Then there’s “Pink Elephants on Parade.” This drunken hallucination of Dumbo’s is pretty much what I saw when I had my tonsils out at age 5. Pure nightmare fuel. For supposedly sane children, I am sure it’s a delightful romp.

Then there’s “Baby Mine.” Is there anything more heart-rending than Mrs. Jumbo reaching through the bars of her cage to rock little Dumbo for while? No, there is not. I was traumatized for life.

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

NFR Project: 'Tarantella' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘Tarantella’

Made by Mary Ellen Bute

Premiere: 1940

4:41

 

Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983) was a visual artist who became obsessed with sequential art. Naturally she turned with her great strength as an abstract artist to the problem of setting images to music. She’s a pioneer of experimental film. (Read Lauren Rabinovitz's excellent essay here.)

Between 1934 and 1967, she made 17 films, mostly her famous “motion paintings,” which coordinated shapes, squiggles, swathes of color, kinetic explosions of dots and lines, all writhing and intermingling with a recorded soundtrack.

In this case, her pictures, over 7,000 of them, are set to music by pianist and composer Edwin Gerschefski. Her kinetic abstractions throb and hustle, pounding along with the crashing chords. The film declares itself “a swift moving dance presented musically and in linear forms in color.” It needs to be seen to be believed.

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

NFR Project: 'Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse' (Nov. 7, 1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse’

Shot by Barney Elliott and Herbie Monroe, owners, The Camera Shop, Tacoma; Arthur Leach

Filmed November 7, 1940

Various minutes

These films fascinate engineers, physicists, mathematicians – and weirdos like me. This may be the earliest footage placed in the National Film Registry because it looked COOL.

You’ve all seen it – the undulating, mis-engineered bridge, twisting and warping as a sole abandoned car jiggers frantically back and forth at its middle, until finally it oscillates itself out of existence, fracturing and crashing apart, the central span plummeting into the river.

Leon Moisseiff's design was, in a clinical example you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy, faulty.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was opened on July 1, 1940. It crossed the Puget Sound in Washington State, and was the third-longest suspension bridge in the world by main span when it was completed. On Nov. 7, in a high wind of 40 miles per hour, its deck began to oscillate radically and in ever-increasing arcs from side to side, prompting several to flee on foot for their lives. (A three-legged cocker spaniel named Tubby died when the bridge collapsed. You can see three different attempts to go back and get him out of the car in which he was trapped. Read Sara Kay’s story in Grit City Magazine here.)

The mathematics and the physics of the bridge’s self-canceling strategy has fascinated the brainy ever since. Me, I know nothing about it but I am enlightened by the insanely extensive and detailed analysis of what happened on Wikipedia, which you canconsult here. Evidently, the bridge was already known as “Galloping Gertie” by all before the accident happened. We couldn’t see it coming.

Well, one guy did. David B. Steinman, noted bridge engineer. Again in Wikipedia it states that “At the 1938 meeting of the structural division of the American Society of Civil Engineers, during the construction of the bridge, with its designer in the audience, Steinman predicted its failure.”

Elliott, Monroe, and Leach were simply prepared, in the right place at the right time. Their records of the bridge’s aberrant behavior remain a classic and graphic commentary on the best-laid plans of men.

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

NFR Project: 'Siege' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘Siege’

Dir: Julien Bryan

Scr: Julien Bryan

Pho: Julien Bryan

Ed: Frederick Ullman Jr., Frank Donovan

Premiere: 1940

10 min.

This essential viewing is bone-chilling. On September 7, 1939, Julien Hequembourg Bryan was the only neutral photographer to shoot film of the infamous Siege of Warsaw (Sept. 1 – Oct. 1, 1939) by the Nazi regime. This is a compassionate and sorrowful record of the tragedies of war.

He filmed and photographed in central Europe during the years 1935 to 1939. He had previously made the prescient short documentary Inside Nazi Germany, outlining the dangers of Hitler’s regime, in 1938. Bryan arrived in Warsaw on the 7^th, carrying a still camera, a film camera, and 6,000 feet of film. Until September 21 he lived in Warsaw, documenting the brutal facts about the attack of a fascist military machine against a largely defenseless civilian population. He shot 5,000 of it.

He smuggled the photos and pictures out, wrapping some of the film around his torso, on Sept. 12.

The resulting 10-minute grim masterpiece gives us all the consequences of a city’s defense against its attackers. Bryan himself narrates the footage, noting that conditions were far worse than those articulated in the major media at the time. He finds barricades, soldiers in the streets, wholesale destruction of property, breadlines . . . and the bodies of the dead, the faces of the suffering. He tracks refugees, records the incessant air raids. He films blocks of apartments in flame, by night, lighting up the city for another round of bombers.

Bryan’s compassionate gaze surveys the ruins of hospitals, then moves to the plight of women with newborns, and casts lingering looks on a ruined church. This is advocacy journalism, to be sure. It is clear where Bryan’s sentiments lie. He gives us a montage of the despairing faces of the besieged. Bryan concludes his narrative by stating, “May God have mercy on them.”

The film is candid. A viewer is faced with the unpalatable, improbable horrors of war and carnage; Bryan was getting the message out. The film was nominated for an Oscar in 1941. It stands as an indictment of armed aggression.

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

NFR Project: 'The Shop Around the Corner' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Shop Around the Corner’

Dir: Ernst Lubitsch

Scr: Samson Raphaelson, Ben Hecht

Pho: William Daniels

Ed: Gege Ruggiero

Premiere: Jan. 12, 1940

99 min.

Director Ernst Lubitsch is known for his “Lubitsch touch,” a sure sense of sophisticated and understated comedy on film. He spent most of the early sound era creating frothy romantic comedies, usually set in imaginary kingdoms. His sharp observations of the vagaries of human behavior are tempered with affection, always leading to happy endings.

The Shop Around the Corner is another romantic comedy, but this time it is set in the real world of commerce. In Budapest, the leather goods store of Matuschek is inhabited by a squad of employees under Mr. Matuschek himself (a wonderful Frank Morgan). Jimmy Stewart plays Alfred, Mr. Matuschek’s number-one man, and Margaret Sullavan plays Klara, a new employee who fails to hit it off with Alfred. They constantly argue.

However, unbeknownst to them both, they are secretly pen pals who love each other through epistolary channels. The contrast between the love they carry for their unmet correspondents and their fractious real-life relationship forms the core of the movie. We watch as, slowly, Alfred finally understands that Klara is the girl he loves. He begins to think about how to break it to her.

Meanwhile, Mr. Matuschek’s unseen wife is discovered to be having an affair – with another employee of Matuschek, Vadas (Joseph Schildkraut). When Matuschek finds out, he tries to kill himself. He is prevented from doing so by Pepi, the errand boy (William Tracy). Matuschek suffers a nervous breakdown, and Alfred takes over as manager of the shop. Soon the equilibrium of the situation is restored. Matuschek realizes that his employees are his true family, and treats them all to Christmas bonuses. Alfred reveals himself to Klara, and they clinch to close the film.

The film’s pace is steady. Lubitsch carefully gives each character just enough time in front of the camera (Felix Bressart, one of Lubitsch’s regulars, puts in a significant performance as the mild Pirovitch), and the subtleties are communicated with a minimum of fuss. The result is a delightful and warm-hearted look at regular folks in their daily lives.

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

NFR Project: 'Pinocchio' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘Pinocchio’

Dir: Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Norman Ferguson, Jack Kinney, Wilfred Jackson, T. Hee

Scr: Ted Sears, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, William Cottrell, Joseph Sabo, Erdman Penner, Aurelius Battaglia

Pho: N/A                                                             

Ed: N/A

Premiere: Feb. 23, 1940

88 min.

I hate Disney.

I was traumatized for life by the emotional manipulations exercised by Disney in the course of their classic films such as Dumbo, Bambi, and . . . Pinocchio. All of these, for me as a child, were Technicolor nightmare fuel. All of them mixed syrupy, over-the-top cuteness and jokes with a certain doomful certainty that all innocents can DIE, that an extremely prejudiced and exploitative world awaited them, and that a happy ending, indeed their survival, was conditional upon extraordinary behavior.

Think about those classic scenes. Dumbo’s mother goes to jail. Bambi’s mother DIES. That Wicked Witch in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. “Pink Elephants on Parade” reads like a passage from a Burroughs novel. I can’t help it. I’m damaged.

So keep this in mind.

Pinocchio traumatized me too. We all have a sneaking suspicion our parents somehow manufactured us, and that we must be in some fundamental and irrevocable way defective. We can become “real” if we fulfill a list of specifications, but are instantly deflected out of the path of righteousness by smooth-talking sociopaths. The physical and psychological tortures of Pinocchio seem far out of proportion to the sin implied in his native state, that is, one of complete innocence. He is helpless in the face of the world. It's the Rotoscoped Blue Fairy who saves him, again and again.

Pinocchio is brought to life with a gaggle of infectious songs and sure-fire gags. His creator, Geppetto, wishes he would be a real boy. The Blue Fairy comes down and animates the puppet, promising him that he can become real if he show himself full of virtue.

Pinocchio is deflected from going to school by a crafty fox and cat, who inveigle him into joining Stromboli’s puppet theater (Stromboli is an Italian stereotype). Stromboli locks Pinocchio up, but the Blue Fairy frees him.

He then gets tempted to go to Pleasure Island, where all the bad lazy boys go to have fun. One small problem – the misbehaving lads are turned into little donkeys. TERRIFYING! To this day. Pinocchio is partially transformed, escapes, goes to the bottom to find his father in the belly of a whale. He masterminds their escape, is seemingly killed, but then is resurrected as “real.” The End! And Jiminy Cricket is along as his “conscience” for comic relief (Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards voices Jiminy) and sings the hit, “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

This is not to say you won’t like it. It has the assured, precisely machined quality of all the Disney classics of the early years. Many hands make light work, and you can see by the credits that a large number of people worked hard to craft this out of the whole cloth (Collodi’s original is far more cynical). It’s a children’s tale, elegantly told. The animation demonstrates a huge step forward in technique.

But it’s scary. It gives me the willies. It’s not you, I’m sure it’s me.

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

NFR Project: 'The Philadelphia Story' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Philadelphia Story’

Dir: George Cukor

Scr: Donald Ogden Stewart

Pho: Joseph Ruttenberg

Ed: Frank Sullivan

Premiere: Dec. 26, 1940

112 min.

Katherine Hepburn’s career was in trouble. She was labeled “box office poison” due to the string of film flops she had starred in over the course of three years. No one was willing to cast her – in anything.

How did she solve her problem? First, she commissioned playwright Philip Barry to write a romantic comedy for her to star in. The play, The Philadelphia Story, ran for over a year. Her then-boyfriend, millionaire Howard Hughes, bought the film rights to the play and then gave them to her. She then turned around and sold the rights to MGM for $250,000, and insisted on creative control over the project as well.

She selected George Cukor as director. Cukor was by then well known for his comedic skills, as well as his ability to work with female stars. Cary Grant hopped aboard, as did Jimmy Stewart. Soon the film was off to the races – and it is now considered Golden Age Hollywood’s best romantic comedy.

It’s the story of Tracy Lord (Hepburn), a wealthy Philadelphia socialite who’s divorced her first husband, C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant). (Their breakup is summarized in a single, wordless scene that’s a comedy classic.) She’s now ready to wed self-made tycoon George Kittredge (John Howard). Her household is aflutter with preparations for the wedding. Ex-husband Dexter shows up to interfere with the proceedings. The most notable development he instigates is the forced (through blackmail) invitation of tabloid reporter Mike Connor (Jimmy Stewart) and his photographer and paramour Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) to cover the event for their magazine.

Tracy finds herself torn – between affection for George, a sudden interest in the besotted Mike, and the rekindling of a torch for Dexter. The usual complications and mishaps ensue, leading to nothing but chaos and instability. This merry-go-round of possible relationships is dizzying and witty, played with extreme sang-froid by all involved.

The result is an entertaining spin through the relatively innocuous woes of America’s upper class. The film is too controlled to be truly regarded as a screwball comedy. Call it a comedy of manners. This style of narrative is as old as the ancient Greeks, and found its clearest expression in the plays of Moliere, highlighted as a genre in the English theater of the early 18^th century, and persisted to the present day through the work of authors such as Oscr Wilde and Noel Coward.

As with all good comedies of the type, almost everyone gets what they want by the end.

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

NFR Project: 'Men and Dust' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘Men and Dust’

Dir: Lee Dick

Scr: Sheldon Dick

Pho: Sheldon Dick

Ed: Jules Bucher

Premiere: 1940

16 min.

Men and Dust is a short documentary made by the wife-and-husband team of Lee and Sheldon Dick. It focuses on the plight of zinc and lead miners in the tri-state region of Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas.

The documentary is left-leaning, advocating the fair and compassionate treatment of workers, their wives, and children, all who suffer from lung diseases such as silicosis and tuberculosis due to the accumulation of dust – in the mines themselves and the slag piles that dominate the landscape around the mines.

The documentary uses a quartet of narrative voices that outlines the problems the miners face, all while touting the ubiquity of the products that result from their labor. This somewhat sardonic approach sits side by side with frank pictures of ailing people, underlining the relationship between their suffering and the profit made from the mining companies’ products.

The film received viewings, not in theaters, but in town halls, union meetings, and private homes. As a tool of advocacy, it is far ahead of its time.

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

NFR Project: 'Melody Ranch' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘Melody Ranch’

Dir: Joseph Santley

Scr: Jack Moffitt, F. Hugh Herbert, Bradford Ropes, Betty Burbridge

Pho: Joseph H. August

Ed: Lester Orlebeck

Premiere: Nov. 15, 1940

84 min.

Orvon Grover Autry was born in Texas in 1907. Taking on the moniker of Gene, he grew up on the family ranch. After high school, he got work as a telegrapher, and he used to sing and play guitar to while away the time on the job (and got fired for it). He received encouragement from many people who heard him play, most notably Will Rogers. 

He started off singing on the radio in Oklahoma in 1928. In 1929, he landed a recording deal with Columbia Records. He finally scored a hit with “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine,” which he co-wrote. Soon his popularity went through the roof, and he became known as “The Singing Cowboy.”

In 1935, he was cast as the star of The Phantom Empire, a 12-part movie serial that improbably mashed together music, Western drama, and science fiction. He soon was the leading man in low-budget Westerns in which he would sing, fight bad guys, and joke around with his sidekick, Smiley Burnette. He wound up making 96 films in the course of his career, and made an amazing 640 recordings. He was Public Cowboy #1, and inspired a host of imitators.

Autry had a melodious voice, and an easy-going, upbeat persona that appealed to just about everybody. On his horse Champion, he righted wrongs and crooned cowboy ballads. He eventually would branch off into radio and television as well. He is the only person to have five stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for his work in film, radio, TV, recording, and live performance.

It is difficult to gauge now just how popular Autry was. Everyone played his songs, saw his movies, listened to him on the radio, read his comic books, played with toys licensed by his brand. He became a role model for the nation’s youth, and penned a 10-part Cowboy Code that outlined the attributes of an upstanding human being. Kids worshipped him.

Melody Ranch is a typical Autry vehicle. It mixes together a few songs, some rip-roaring Western action, and comedy bits executed by Jimmy Durante and Barbara Jo Allen, better known as her comedic persona Vera Vague. Autry’s love interest in the film is played by the 17-year-old singer and dancer Ann Miller (the film originally had Gene kissing her, but fans complained that this was too “sissy,” and it was edited out). Other notable participants included the venerable old coot George “Gabby” Hayes, bad buy Barton MacLane, and the musical outfit Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.

Gene could sing wonderfully, ride well, act a little, and do a little fighting stunt work as well. He gets to do all this in Melody Ranch, which stands out from his usual films for its budget and its gorgeous visuals filmed by the great cinematographer Joseph H. August. Of course, Gene defeats the villains and gets the girl, ending the film on a warbling note. It’s a fun romp that doesn’t make you think too hard, a perfect escapist Western fantasy that millions loved to watch.

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

NFR Project: 'The Mark of Zorro' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Mark of Zorro’

Dir: Rouben Mamoulian

Scr: John Taintor Foote

Pho: Arthur C. Miller

Ed: Robert Bischoff

Premiere: Nov. 8, 1940

94 min.

How do you remake a classic? If you are director Rouben Mamoulian, you do it by following your own path.

The silent-era Mark of Zorro (1920) starred Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and marked his transition from a comedic character actor to a swashbuckling hero in the movies. The original Zorro is almost all action, in keeping with the robust physicality Fairbanks made a cornerstone of his personal brand.

When 20^th Century Fox decided to remake the film, it emphasized dialogue over action. They selected the well-spoken and dashing Tyrone Power for the Zorro role, and surrounded him with the best supporting actors they could find. Joining Power were such old acting pros as Montagu Love, Eugene Pallette, Gale Sondergaard . . . and especially Basil Rathbone as a ruthless villain.

Mamoulian was known for his direction of opera and musicals – he famously directed the first staging of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. When he moved into film, he directed prestige projects such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Love Me Tonight, and Becky Sharp. Mamoulian gave the impression of speed and movement in this movie by editing the film in a unique way – cutting in the middle of motion onscreen instead of moving from static shot to static shot.

Here, Power is Don Diego Vega, son of a wealthy 19th-Century California landowner, who returns from Spain to discover that his father is no longer the alcalde, or ruling representative of Spain in California. Instead, the area is run by the corrupt Don Luis, who is really the catspaw of the sadistic and braggardly Captain Esteban (Rathbone). The peasants are being taxed to death, and those that resist are tortured.

Don Diego protectively assumes the attitude of an effeminate fop, lulling the villains into treating him with contempt. Meanwhile, Diego dresses in black outfit and mask as Zorro (Spanish for “fox”), and fights the oppressors, soon making the bad guys quiver in their boots. This he does while wooing the innocent niece of Don Luis, Lolita (Linda Darnell at the tender age of 17!).

The plot device of a hero in disguise who pretends to be a sissy in normal life was taken from Orczy’s 1905 novel The Scarlet Pimpernel. Zorro would perpetuate this device; in fact, it is said that Zorro influenced the creators of Batman, Superman, and other heroes in the same manner. By the time we arrive at the blood-pumping finale of a duel between Diego and Esteban, the audience is completely caught up in the story.

Zorro would later be revived as a Disney television series in the late 1950s. To date, all the incarnations of the bold masked vigilante onscreen have been memorable.

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

NFR Project: 'Knute Rockne, All American'

 

NFR Project: ‘Knute Rockne, All American’

Dir: Lloyd Bacon, William K. Howard (uncredited)

Scr: Robert Buckner

Pho: Tony Gaudio

Ed: Ralph Dawson

Premiere: Oct. 4, 1940

98 min.

This film biography outlines the short but busy life of football coach Knute Rockne (1888-1931). He is best known for incorporating the forward pass into the game, and for his successful coaching of the Notre Dame football squad.

The film reads like a marvelous and continuous series of successes that propelled the honored coach to prominence. Rockne is played by Pat O’Brien, an Irish-American actor who specialized in fast-talking tough guys. Rockne was known for his rapid-fire patter, and O’Brien captures that here.

Rockne is treated worshipfully here; he is almost a secular saint, in fact. How accurate is the film? Well, for one, Rockne was never named an All-American player or coach. Most Hollywood biographies were known for their inaccuracy (Yankee Doodle Dandy, They Died with Their Boots On). Movies almost never let the facts get in the way of a good story. His exploits on the field are summarized with great energy. Interestingly, Rockne was a trained chemist, and almost took that career path instead of coaching.

Ronald Reagan is here, playing the doomed freshman halfback George Gipp, who dies at a tragic young age and, on his deathbed, encourages Rockne to, when things looked bleak for the team, to “win one for the Gipper.” This Rockne did years later, when the team was down in a game. His speech inspired the team to make a comeback and win.

Rockne moves from success to success, right up to the time of his untimely death in an air crash at the age of 43. The movie is inspirational; as such it was adored by boys of all ages.

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

NFR Project: 'His Girl Friday' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘His Girl Friday’

Dir: Howard Hawks

Scr: Charles Lederer

Pho: Joseph Walker

Ed: Gene Havlick

Premiere: Jan. 18, 1940

92 min.

His Girl Friday has a lot going for it. It is grounded in the playscript for Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’scomedy The Front Page, which premiered in 1928 and was first adapted for film in 1931. It’s made by the master craftsman, director Howard Hawks. It’s shot with economy and energy, with the sensation of watching the shooting a live play. And its main characters are played by comedy experts Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. They are surrounded by a bevy of great character actors.

It seems that Hawks wanted to remake The Front Page, which had proved so successful. The story of a corrosive friendship between manipulative editor Watler Burns and cheeky, rebellious reporter Hildy Johnson, it was a huge success. In readthroughs for the new adaptation Hawks asked one of his female employees to read Hildy’s lines – and decided he liked the switch from male to female.

He soon got a small succession of writers to turn a withering satire of corruption into a battle of the sexes. The film still takes place in the frenzied, fast-paced setting of daily journalism. Hildy (Russell) was now Walter’s (Grant) ex, and she has quit his newspaper and is off to get married to quiet, loving Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy). Seeking to thwart their impending marriage, Walter resorts to crazier and crazier ploys to keep Hildy on the trail of the hot Earl Williams (John Qualen) execution story.

Williams escapes. Hildy hides him in a roll-top desk in the courthouse’s press room. Burns struggles to get the story and get Hildy back at the same time. The pace is frenetic throughout, with people talking over each other – very unlike the Hollywood style of dialogue. Hawks encouraged the speed of delivery and manipulated the studio microphones to cover the action, resulting in an intrivate sound plot.

The basic premise of most screwball comedies is the eventual get-together of a man snd a woman who completely misunderstand each other at the beginning. The woman is usually the catalyst of the change.With movies such as It Happened One Night, 20^th Century, Bringing Up Baby, and all of Preston Sturges’s work, from 1933 to 1942, this short-lived genre captivated audiences.

However, in The Front Page, it is Hildy who changes – back to her old self. Walter, at best an indifferent husband when his mind is set on business, merely reiterates the love of the chase the two of them share, and convinces Hildy to dump Bruce and get married to him – again. A rather facile ending, and the last we see of Hildy she is trailing Walter, lugging a suitcase. There is likely to be no more consideration for her than in the past, and she’s fine with that.

There is a slew of great character actors here, too, including Gene Lockhart, Cliff “Ukulele” Ike Edwards, Roscoe Karns; Abner Biberman, and Billy Gilbert. The movie is a fast-paced pleasure, and deserves the high esteem in which it is held.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Knute Rockne, All American.

 

NFR Project: 'The Great Dictator' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Great Dictator’

Dir: Charles Chaplin

Scr: Charles Chaplin

Pho: Karl Struss, Roland Totheroh

Ed: Willard Nico

Premiere: Oct. 15, 1940

125 min.

The Great Dictator gives us Charlie Chaplin at his most pungent politically. His first sound film, it pulls no punches when making fun of the powerful . . . and then finishes with a heartfelt cry for peace and justice.

The idea that he should make fun of Hitler was prompted by Hitler’s Chaplin moustache, a defining part of his image. Chaplin no doubt thought this an excellent excuse to tweak the noses of the German Fuhrer and his ilk, exposing their intolerance and insatiable ambition to rule the world.

This he did by creating a Prince and the Pauper-like tale of two men, identical but diametrically opposed – the dictator of the tile, Adenoid Hynkel of the imaginary country of Tomania (highly similar to the Germany of his day), and a nameless, helpless little Jewish barber. Chaplin bounces back and forth between the two, giving us a look at the mad ecstasies indulged in by Hynkel and the simple impetus to survive on the part of the barber.

Chaplin’s purely visual jokes come off as a bit dated and strained – it is his dissection of Hynkel that is truly innovative. No one had ever made such fun of the country’s leader before (the film was banned in occupied Europe), and it hurt. It remains the first and foremost example of satire in a motion picture, something unprecedented at the time and rarely attempted even today.

The true heart of the film is revealed at the end, when Chaplin drops all pretense and speaks directly to the audience. Hynkel is arrested by those who think he is the barber, and the barber is mistaken for Hynkel. As such, he is transported to a microphone and given the opportunity to make a speech. Finally able to speak, Chaplin makes the most of his chance to speak as he really feels, espousing a humanistic credo that embraces the world. It is worth setting down his sentiments here, as they are still quite relevant today:

“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone - if possible - Jew, Gentile - black man - white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” - not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power - the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then - in the name of democracy - let us use that power - let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world - a decent world that will give men a chance to work - that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world - to do away with national barriers - to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!”

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

NFR Project: 'The Grapes of Wrath' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Grapes of Wrath’

Dir: John Ford

Scr: Nunnally Johnson

Pho: Gregg Toland

Ed: Robert L. Simpson

Premiere: Jan. 24, 1940

129 min.

It’s one of the greatest films of all time. Adapted from John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer-winning 1939 novel, this movie embodies the spirit of it, when it is not amplifying and transcending it. It was the great fortune of the director John Ford, who won the Oscar for Best Director for this film, that he obtained everyone involved in the production; for all were at the top of their game.

It’s an epic saga married to a keenly felt family drama, and is almost Biblical in tone. The Joads, sharecroppers of Oklahoma, are forced to migrate to California when the Great Depression causes them to lose their farm.

Henry Fonda is at his best as the recently paroled Tom Joad, who goes home but finds only the ex-preacher Casy (John Carridine in his definitive, Messianic performance) and Old Muley (John Qualen), who inhabits the abandoned buildings of the area like a ghost.

Cinematographer Gregg Toland, only a year from lensing Citizen Kane, captures many scenes with a single light source, emulating Rembrandt in a bravura display of conveying mood and emotion solely with light. The sinister shadows are palpable, and the faces on screen fight out of them to come into view.

The script is exemplary – every scene is absolutely necessary, and accurately conveys Steinbeck’s “leftist” sentiments. Ford is masterful in his depictions of sorrow and regret. When Ma Joad goes through her box of keepsakes, feeding memories into the fire, Jane Darwell gets a lovely and measured scene that’s simply a recording of behavior . . . as if not nearly acting at all. The deeply felt, strongly conveyed emotions of these stoic people counterbalances the sections of the film that are exposes of capitalism that the film so forthrightly lays out.

Nearly everyone in the film is ripe for exploitation, and there’s not much anybody can do about it. The Joads are in the hell of poverty, reduced to near beggary by an uncaring economy. Tom reunites with his family, and they set out in an overloaded truck to supposed jobs in California.

They quickly find out that the job offer is not what it seems, and hear a heartbreaking tale of woe. They press on, enduring the deaths of both grandparents en route, finally to make it to the green fields of their destination. But even there is exploitation, with owners and managers proposing absurdly low wages for laborers, keeping them on the edge of starvation as they move from harvesting job to harvesting job.

Tom finds Casey again, and helps him stop a trouper from killing an innocent man who is speaking his mind. Casy takes the rap.

Later, Tom finds Casy a third time, and this time Casy is agitating for the union. Lit from above, he looks almost Christlike, glaring down with wide eyes at his interlocutor. The union’s HQ is raided, and a man stoves Casy’s head in with a pickaxe. Tom, in turn, kills him. Tom is wounded on the face, and must be hidden from those in charge, and the law.

The family escapes to a well-run government camp in which migrants are treated kindly and with respect. Tom realizes he has to go, and says goodbye to his mother in the dead of night with one of the greatest monologues on film.

Here the movie deviates from the more melancholy original. Here, the rest of the family moves on together, and Best Supporting Actress Jane Darwell as Ma gets to deliver a gung-ho speech: “Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep a'comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out; they can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people.”

This upbeat ending seems tacked to a saga of distress and humiliation. The novel derived from Steinbeck’s notes as a journalist, covering the plight of the migrant work in California. Steinbeck’s humanist values are at the forefront here – he identifies with the least powerful people in the world. And they, he reminds us, are our neighbors.

Every frame is precisely imagined, from extreme close-up to a long shot of a character running away from the camera, receding into ever-shrinking panels of light. Ford renders it as a penitential journey, filled with temptation and despair, a secular Stations of the Cross. In that way, it’s his most Catholic film next to The Fugitive (1947), also with Fonda.

Watching the film is life-changing. It teaches compassion, one of our rarest resources.

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