NFR Project: 'Helen Keller in Her Story' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “Helen Keller in Her Story”

Dir: Nancy Hamilton

Scr: Nancy Hamilton, James L. Shute

Ed: James L. Shute

Premiere: June 15, 1954

55 min.

This documentary outlines the life and achievements of Helen Keller (1880-1968). Keller was struck deaf and blind by illness when she was two years old. Cut off from humanity, she lived a savage-like existence for several years, her family at a loss as to how to reach her, much less socialize her.

Then a remarkable teacher, Annie Sullivan, came to work with her in 1887. (This is documented in the play and film The Miracle Worker.) After months of training, spelling words into her hand, Sullivan finally got the concept of language across to Helen – and her rise from helplessness to leadership began.

Keller attended school and went on to college, becoming the first blind-deaf person to earn a college degree. Keller was quite intelligent and eloquent, and soon she was writing about her experiences, inspiring others who felt imprisoned by their disabilities. She became an icon, an extraordinary woman who overcame her limitations.

This documentary summarizes Keller’s life, even as it delineates her typical day at home. Keller is remarkably self-sufficient, and undertakes quite a lot of activity on behalf of the disabled, traveling extensively, meeting the famous, and busily running her own life (with the help of a companion: first Sullivan, then Polly Thomson, then Willie Corbally). Keller speaks, somewhat distinctly; her words are often repeated by her companion.

A particularly joyous moment is documented when she goes to bed. Her companion bids her good night, and puts the Braille book she has been reading on the nightstand. She turns out the light. After she leaves, Keller picks up the book again and reads it happily in the dark.

Keller’s extraordinary existence remains an inspiration.

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

NFR Project: 'White Christmas' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “White Christmas”

Dir: Michael Curtiz

Scr: Norman Krasna, Norman Panama, Melvin Frank

Pho: Loyal Griggs

Ed: Frank Bracht

Premiere: Oct. 14, 1954

120 min.

I hate this movie. HATE it. Yet I watched it again, hoping to be fair and give it another chance before I wrote you. I took the hit for you. Because I love you.

I still hate this movie.

First of all, it’s a lackluster mutation of a much better film idea, which was Mark Sandrich’s 1942 Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire and featuring the words and music of Irving Berlin. This was the movie that introduced the song “White Christmas” to the world, and it’s done beautifully.

That movie is quite enjoyable, as it’s a romantic triangle backgrounded by an inn/nightclub only open on holidays (which gave Berlin a chance to lump all his holiday-related songs into one picture). That film is also marred by a blackface number, which pretty much disqualifies it from being shown today. It’s not incidental. It’s a plot point. It’s too bad that this number stops the movie cold, as the song it illustrates, “Abraham,” celebrating Lincoln’s Birthday, is not racist and is in fact quite catchy.

So, they decided to remake it in color. Minus Lincoln. They sent Fred Astaire a new script; he turned them down. Bing was in; they enlisted Danny Kaye to co-star. Crosby and Kaye don’t have that spark that Crosby and Astaire had. They completely rewrote the story, making it at once much more sentimental and more patriotic. Bing and Danny are pals from WWII, who served under a beloved general (Dean Jagger). They are a big hit as a song and dance team in the postwar world.

Alas, their general owns the financially distressed inn, and Bing and Danny pitch in and put on a show for him there, saving his bacon. In amongst all this they woo performing sisters Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen. Bing and Rosemary sing together; Vera-Ellen dances. Danny Kaye does his best.

And it’s just awful. This is the whitest film ever made. It was made by white people, for white people. It is the Caucasian experience personified. It is utterly generic and bland, lurching from one number to another in an overlit, garishly colorful sense-fest that bowls the viewer over. It is a surfeit of whipped cream.

Director Michael Curitz, a remarkably versatile talent, seems to phone it in here. He was possibly thrown by the new widescreen technique that Paramount developed and displayed here for the first time, called VistaVision, that called for a different compositional skill. Everything that needs to be visible in a scene, is visible, jumbled across the screen like a handful of nursery toys.

To top it all off, the Technicolor intensity of the hues is almost hallucinatory. It is loud. Art-directed to within an inch of its life, this feature shot obviously and entirely in studio lacks the breeziness and gusto of its predecessor. Still, we still get a lot of great Irving Berlin songs (the title card reads “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas.”) There are “Sisters” and “Count Your Blessings (Instead of Sheep)”. Those are great.

But there is yet another problem. They perform a minstrel show. However, they do not wear blackface; you have a bunch of white people shucking and jiving, inexplicably. Aggressively storming the camera. It’s disconcerting. 

The designated singers are talented, of course; Clooney is still, I think, underestimated as a singer. Vera-Ellen is an amazing dancer. Kaye seems dimmed, not allowed to assume his trademark manic, surreal persona until he does a spoof of Martha Graham dance in “Choreography.”

 Of course, it’s a classic. What do I know? Bah humbug.

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

NFR Project: 'The Tell-Tale Heart' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “The Tell-Tale Heart”

Dir: Ted Parmelee

Scr: Bill Scott, Fred Grable

Premiere: Dec. 17, 1953

7:24

This splendid animation comes from UPA – the United Productions of America, a scrappy and independent rival to Disney in the animation field, started in 1941. It was founded by former Disney employees.

We have already encountered their 1950 Gerald McBoing-Boing on the National Film Registry list. This is a much more mature work – a little classic of horror based on the 1843 fiction of that master of terror, Edgar Allan Poe. Its dark and terrifying ambiance makes it an odd choice for a supposedly juvenile audience. This is cartooning for adults.

This genuinely creepy animation is much more like a montage of paintings, moving in jarring succession. The narrator (a sublime James Mason) seems perfectly sane at the beginning of this short, and rapidly erodes into a raving maniac. It stays very close to the original story, which you can read here.

For those unaware, the narrator lodges with a nice old man who happens to have one milky-white eye. The narrator becomes obsessed with it, and determines the old man must die. He kills him and buries him under the floorboards. The police come. He invites them in. Not needing to, he prolongs their conversation. Slowly he begins to hear the beating of the old man’s heart. Finally, he shrieks, ““Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! — tear up the planks! — here, here! — it is the beating of his hideous heart!”

The cartoon adds a postlude. “True, I am nervous. Very, very dreadfully nervous. But why would you say that I am mad?” he says as we look through his cell window at the corridor beyond.

The animation moves only when necessary, preferring to plan across an illustration or make a smash cut, punctuated artfully by composer Boris Kremenliev. It was nominated for Best Animated Short at the Oscars. And it was the first cartoon to be rated “X” in Britain.

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

NFR Project: 'The War of the Worlds' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “The War of the Worlds”

Dir: Byron Haskin

Scr: Barre Lyndon

Pho: George Barnes

Ed: Everett Douglas

Premiere: Aug. 13, 1953

85 min.

One of the most innovative and accomplished science-fiction films of the 1950s, The War of the Worlds is the finest achievement of the collaboration between director Byron Haskin and producer George Pal.

George Pal (1908-1980) was born Gyorgy Pal Marczincsak in Hungary. He rapidly became an expert in the art of replacement animation – that is, using a different puppet in each frame of the animation, producing a whimsical effect that would become known in America as Puppetoons. He emigrated to the United States in 1940, and created 40 Puppetoon films between 1941 and 1947. He received a special Oscar for his efforts in 1943.

He then moved on to feature films: his love of special effects and camera magic influenced his choice of projects. He produced several films, four with director Haskin at the helm, and the works of the science-fiction great  H.G. Wells seemed a natural challenge to put before an audience. (Pal would go on to produce and direct Wells’ The Time Machine in 1960).

Special effects are the key to this film’s success. Using many models, and an extensive bundle of cinematic tricks Haskin and Pal capture the overwhelming experience of seeing the Earth get destroyed by Martian spaceships. This was cutting-edge technology in its day, akin to the advances seen in 2001 and Star Wars. Looking at it today, it is easy to see its techniques in play. There are wires; there are seams. But Haskin and Pal create absorbing scenes that trot slowly at first, then snowball into landscapes of hell-bent destruction. The film won a Special Achievement Award at the Oscars, for Visual Effects.

Sadly, the rest of the film is rather perfunctory. The plot consists of scientist Gene Barry and his partner in danger Ann Robinson fleeing from the Martians. The visitors like blowing up stuff and killing people. This happens at scenic locations worldwide. Ann can scream real good. Ann’s uncle, a minister, walks into the maw of the aliens, chanting verse. He is quickly reduced to a scorch mark on the ground. People behave badly.

That’s pretty much it. The great Les Tremayne plays a consternated general; Sir Cedric Hardwicke is the narrator, who explains the plot admirably before and after, saving the filmmakers thousands in special-effects sequences. The immortal Ned Glass gets one line.

For you see, ‘twas not technology (they even try an atomic bomb! nothing works) that slayed the invaders, ‘twas germs. And just as the white man killed off the Native Americans by infecting them with new, untested diseases, so do the Martians fall to what to you or me would be nothing more serious than a hangover.

Everybody sings a hymn. (Gene Barry has been going from church to church in search of his lady love.) It is all pretty much taken as being a divinely imposed fate. Now to rebuild, etc.

Another distinguishing feature of this film is the name of its hero – Clayton Forrester. This moniker was later adopted by a character on TV’s bad-movie-mocking Mystery Science Theater 3000.

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

NFR Project: 'Shane' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “Shane”

Dir: George Stevens

Scr: A.B. Guthrie, Jr., Jack Sher

Pho: Loyal Griggs

Ed: William Hornbeck, Tom McAdoo

Premiere: April 23, 1953

118 min.

It’s the archetypal Western. It takes all the elements of the genre and typifies them. If you had to show someone what a Western was, you would show them this film.

It’s shot primarily on location, in widescreen and glorious Technicolor. Its gorgeous look gives it an epic feel, far beyond that indicated by the simplicity of its plot. Director George Stevens was at his best telling a rollicking adventure tale, and this is one of them.

It’s set in Wyoming territory in 1889. Settlers are beginning to encroach on the open range. A cattle baron, Ryker, is set on expelling the “sodbusters” who just want to make lives for themselves on the edge of the wilderness. Joe (Van Heflin), Marian (Jean Arthur), and their son Joey (the peculiar-looking, cross-eyed Brandon deWilde) are homesteaders. Joe is the leader of the farmers, and finds himself in the crosshairs of harassment from Ryker, who wants them off what he considers to be his land.

Into the valley rides Shane (Alan Ladd), a mysterious and soft-spoken man who’s handy with a gun. (He nervously reaches for his revolver when he hears a loud sound.) He accepts Joe’s hospitality, and offers to work for him, taking off his buckskin outfit and gun and donning work clothes. He seems to be putting his past behind him.

Shane goes into town to pick up supplies, and a soda pop for Joey. When he goes into the bar to get one, he is tormented by one of Ryker’s men (an untypically evil Ben Johnson). The settlers decide to all go into town together for safety’s sake next time; there, Shane and Joe fight the whole Ryker gang and gain a temporary victory. Ryker decides to up the ante by hiring a gunfighter to clean out the emigrants.

The gunfighter, Wilson (a thoroughly evil Jack Palance) comes to town and picks a fight with an ornery Southern settler, Torrey (Elisha Cook, Jr.). Torrey draws his gun and Wilson shoots him down, brutally. His friends bury him, and contemplate leaving, but then change their minds when they see Ryker’s men trying to burn out another farm.

Ryker finally determines that Joe is the settlers’ ringleader, and he asks him to come see him at the bar in town. Shane realizes that Ryker intends to kill Joe. Shane knocks Joe unconscious, dons his traveling buckskins and gun, and rides into town. Joey follows him. Shane stands up to Wilson, Ryker, and Ryker’s brother, killing all of them. He then tells Joey he must move on, and leaves the valley, wounded, with Joey’s cry ringing in his ears – “Come back, Shane!”

It takes violence to make the West safe for settling – but the very act of taking lives disqualifies Shane from sharing in the new order. “A man has to be what he is, Joey. Can’t break the mould. I tried it and it didn’t work for me . . . There’s no living with a killing.” Shane, who yearns for a normal life (and obviously yearns for a woman like Marian), must exile himself from the very order his lawlessness has created.

The magisterial approach to the film gives it a mythic feel. The characters are at once individuated and symbolic. When Shane leaves the screen, the sense that a page in the history book has been turned is prevalent.

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

NFR Project: 'Roman Holiday' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “Roman Holiday”

Dir: William Wyler

Scr: Dalton Trumbo, Ian McLellan Hunter, John Dighton

Pho: Henri Alekan, Franz Planer

Ed: Robert Swink

Premiere: Aug. 20, 1953

118 min.

It’s a wonderful little romance, and the American screen debut of Audrey Hepburn – which won her an Oscar for Best Actress – and an Oscar for its blacklisted author.

This charming idea was the brain-product of Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976), a prominent and excellent American writer and screenwriter who was blacklisted for his leftist views during the Second Red Scare of 1947-1957. He was one of the infamous Hollywood Ten who refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. To survive, he was forced to submit his work under a pseudonym – and won an Oscar for this screenplay, which he was unable to accept as he was officially a “non-person” due to the right’s witch hunts. The screenwriter was named as the imaginary “Robert Rich.”

It makes central its location. The city of Rome is canvassed, is used to maximum effect, due to a cute plot about a reluctant princess and an earnest reporter. Gregory Peck is Joe Bradley, a journalist in the Holy City who’s anticipating an interview with Crown Princess Ann. Ann – the radiant Audrey Hepburn, 24 -- resents her endless list of meetings, openings, interviews, and profiles that fills her relentless days of duty. She rebels. Her handlers drug her.

Alone, she changes and goes out, escapes.  Increasingly stupefied, she falls asleep on top of a wall. Joe finds her and takes her in, letting her sleep on his couch. The word goes out that the princess is missing. He goes to work and sees that the sleeping girl at his place is the princess. He gets his editor to pledge him $5,000 for his exclusive story about her – and bets him $500 to boot. She promptly gets her long hair lopped off and shaped into a pixie cut: a style which would be imitated by a generation of women that included my mother.

He returns to Ann, who calls herself Anya and pretends to be playing hooky from school. Joe contrives a meeting with her, and then the two run around Rome all day. Joe claims to be a fertilizer salesman. (Joe gets his buddy, a young, bearded Eddie Albert, to secretly take photos of their antics.) Meanwhile, the officials of Ann’s (unnamed) country send out a small army of agents to track her down. Joe and Ann, of course, fall for each other in the course of a day. They end up fighting the agents at a dance party on the Tiber, get soaked and kiss - and get arrested.

Joe springs them by using his press pass, claiming they were on their way to be married. They dry off, she makes him drive her to the palace, they kiss again, and she runs around the corner and out of sight.

Princess Ann returns to her place in the hierarchy, but famously says, "Were I not completely aware of my duty to my family and my country, I would not have come back tonight . . . or indeed ever again." Joe tells his editor he doesn’t have a story, forfeiting the $5,000 and the $500 to boot. He goes to her press conference the next day. She recognizes him and his pal, who slips her the photos he took. She says goodbye to Joe indirectly, and avers that Rome was her favorite city on her tour.

She glides away offstage. The numerous reporters file out. Joe is last, as he ruminatively meanders toward the camera.

Peck is fine as Joe: really too nice an actor to play an crass, opportunistic journalist. But the revelation is Hepburn. She is charming, transparent, and sensitive. She transmits states of mind with seeming effortlessness. Waif-thin, big-eyed, she created a new ideal of beauty, androgynous and soulful. She is endlessly fascinating to watch. The closer you get, the better she looks. She does a lot here with a thin character. She communicates the joy of simply being alive.

Her adventures can never lead to her and Joe getting together. They create closure for each other, and move on, as grownups do.

If Roman Holiday has any political message, it is merely that it elevates the personal above the political. Do our roles in life dictate who we are? Wouldn’t we do as Ann, a slumming princess who becomes a reverse Cinderella, did? Isn’t the minutiae of life what creates its meaning? The bountiful joy of Hepburn, unleashed from an oppressive fate, if only for a day, is stunning. Director Wyler, always good with actors, strikes gold with Hepburn. He just steps back and shoots her. She’s a natural film actress.

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

 

 

NFR Project: 'The Naked Spur' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “The Naked Spur”

Dir: Anthony Mann

Scr: Sam Rolfe, Harold Jack Bloom

Pho: William C. Mellor

Ed: George White

Premiere: Feb. 1, 1953

91 min.

It’s not only one of the great Westerns, it’s flat-out one of the best films made. It also marks the apogee of the collaboration between director Anthony Mann and actor Jimmy Stewart. It’s a tale about greed, vengeance, and the nature of evil.

We are in the (ironically) beautiful and picturesque Rocky Mountains, near Durango, in 1868. Stewart plays Kemp, a bounty hunter determined to capture and bring back badman Vandergroat (Robert Ryan) for the large reward placed on his head. He enlists the help of a prospector, Tate (Millard Mitchell), and an ex-serviceman, Anderson (Ralph Meeker). Kemp’s motivation is disguised at the beginning; we only learn that he is not a lawman and that he is after the reward when Vandergroat, captured, tells the others.

Vandergroat is a role made for actor Robert Ryan, who built a career out of playing movie villains and tough cops. Here he is evil itself, working constantly after being caught to divide his captors, sabotaging their efforts and casting doubt about the others’ ability to share the reward money. He is accompanied by Lina (Janet Leigh), a young girl whose father was friends with Vandergroat. She’s on his side, but finds herself attracted to Stewart’s character.

A group of Native Americans soon confront them on the trail. It turns out that Anderson was discharged from the Army for raping a chief’s daughter. The Indians want him dead. Kemp tells Anderson to ride on and keep the rest out of danger, but Anderson shoots the chief from ambush. A fight breaks out, and all the Indians are killed. Kemp gets a bullet in the leg. There is a rueful moment when Kemp surveys the peaceful forest littered with the bodies of the dead.

Kemp survives his wound, but becomes delirious. It turns out that he signed over his ranch to his sweetheart when he went off to fight in the Civil War; while he was gone, she sold the ranch and ran off with another man. Kemp is determined to buy his ranch back with the reward money. Only problem: if he has to share it with Tate and Anderson, he won’t have enough to cover the purchase. The men fight over Vandergroat. “He’s not a man; he’s a sack of money!” shouts Anderson, who’d just as soon kill him as let him live (the wanted poster says “Dead or Alive”).

Kemp, stiff and wounded, endures more setbacks as he struggles to take Vandergroat to the authorities. He overcomes a nasty fall and a rockfall in a cave. Enraged, he dares Vandergroat to draw on him, but Vandergroat refuses.

Now the group must cross a Spring-flooded, rushing river. Vandergroat convinces Tate that he has knowledge of a gold mine that he will trade to Tate in exchange for his freedom. It’s a trick, and Vandergroat shoots Tate down in cold blood. He leaves his body out in the open so that he can ambush Kemp and Anderson.

I will not reveal the film’s climax; it deserves to be experienced as the director intended. Suffice it to say that Mann makes a statement about the commodification of human life and the emptiness or revenge.

The film is achingly beautiful, shot in the clear Colorado air. Bronislaw Kaper's score is top-notch. The script, by Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom, is magnificent. Every line relates to the underlying themes, and the tension between the characters is a constantly shifting nightmare. It is not altogether clear that Vandergroat will be brought to justice. Everyone has pecuniary motivations that muddy their moral statures. This is a post-modern Western that deals in adult themes.

Stewart plays his typical Mann Western character – a man obsessed and in torment, working against his better nature. This darker, rougher side to Stewart’s acting would be epitomized in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

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

NFR Project: 'The Living Desert' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “The Living Desert”

Dir: James Algar

Scr: James Algar, Winston Hibler

Pho: Robert H. Crandall, N. Paul Kenworthy

Ed: Norman R. Palmer

Premiere: Nov. 9, 1953

69 min.

Oh my God! Disney makes another film that I hate.

OK. A graduate student made a film of two insects fighting. He showed the footage to Walt Disney. Disney came up with idea of making a feature-length documentary about the lives of desert animals. The result is this, a jokey tour through the American desert environment and a profile of its denizens.

As is usual, Disney anthropomorphizes everything, even mud. The filmmakers built glass cases and put various natural enemies together in these environments, and filmed the conflicts. Thus the film is something of a series of cage matches engineered to provide exciting if not accurate footage. A cute musical soundtrack garnishes the film, cueing the audience as to how to respond to the film. Condescending. All the animals are cute and quirky, even the snakes and the spiders. The film is almost redeemed at the end by showing us a montage of time-lapse blooming desert flowers.

This film would prove to be a template for the hundreds of Disney nature films to follow – cutesy-poo writing, jocular narration, and contrived footage. This slap-happy approach to nature film would poison the genre for decades.

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

NFR Project: 'Little Fugitive' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “Little Fugitive”

Dir: Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin

Scr: Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin

Pho: Morris Engel

Ed: Ruth Orkin, Lester Troob

Premiere: Oct. 6, 1953

80 min.

This film is revolutionary. It flies in the face of feature-film values as codified and exercised by the major film studios of the time. It is a hand-crafted, naturalistic little masterpiece.

Morris Engel was the prime mover of this project, an experienced photojournalist who wanted to make a film in a new way. Redesigning a hand-held movie camera created to be used in combat conditions, Engel wound up with an unobtrusive recording device that was shoulder-mounted, held at the waist, with a viewfinder that one looked down into. This allowed footage to be captured on the sly, without anyone noticing. This means that, in a film filled with milling crowds, every action and reaction of the bystanders was spontaneous and unrehearsed. (He shot in black-and-white, and silent; all the dialogue and sound effects was dubbed in post-production.)

Engel, Ashley, and Orkin came up with a simple story to tell. In Brooklyn, seven-year-old Joey lives with his 12-year-old brother Lennie and his widowed mother in a cramped lower-income apartment. The mother has to go and care for her own sick mother, so she leaves Lennie in charge of Joey for a day. Lennie resents this, and decides to play a prank on Joey. He and his friends convince Joey that he has shot and killed his brother; they tell him to go and hide himself.

Joey takes this very seriously. He goes home and grabs the six dollars his mother had left out for groceries and, avoiding all the policemen he sees, gets on the subway. It takes him to the boardwalk and amusements of Coney Island. There he actually thrives, happily riding rides and eating junk food. Joey is obsessed with horses, and when he finds a pony ride, he yearns to go on it – but he has spent all his money. He learns from another kid the trick of picking up and returning empty glass soda bottles on the beach for money. This he does, and rides over and over, until the pony-ride man asks him who he’s there with.

Joey gets scared and runs away, and ends up sleeping out in the open under the boardwalk. His brother, meanwhile, is frantic. He repents tricking his brother and searches for him fruitlessly.

The next morning, Joey wakes and returns to the pony ride. Finally, the pony-ride man tricks Joey into giving him his name and address. He looks up Joey’s phone number and calls his home. Lennie answers, and begs the man to hang on to Joey until he gets there. However, Joey sees the man talk to a policeman, and he takes off again. Now Lennie searches among the crowds at the beach. He spots Joey but then loses him. It’s only when it starts to rain that Lennie finds Joey all by himself, still picking up empty bottles. He tenderly brings him home again.

They get to the house and arrange themselves in front of the TV. Their mother returns minutes later. She thinks they have spent the entire day indoors and promises them that, on the weekend, she will take them to Coney Island as a treat. The brothers look at each other ruefully.

All of the actors Engel and company used were amateurs. There is definitely a script, but the filming is so low-key and natural that the drama appears to be improvised. Engel was a masterful photographer, and the visuals in the film – the gritty streets of Brooklyn, the fanciful confines of Coney Island, the play of the waves on the shore, are all rendered exquisitely. The images are sharp and gorgeous.

The filmmakers easily take us into the mind of the child at the center of the film. He is wracked by guilt, afraid of the cops, but then is easily distracted by pleasures the amusement park affords. In making a movie about ordinary life, the filmmakers seem to have taken a page from the Italian neorealists, who filmed stories about the lower classes and the poor on location with amateur actors. In turn, this film is said to have influenced the directors of French New Wave cinema.

At any rate, the key here is that, with no money, few resources, and a cast and crew of volunteers, Engel, Ashley, and Orkin created a compelling and coherent fiction film – one that can stand up against anything put out by Hollywood. American filmmaking of the time was studio-centered. The idea that you could use film to create your own unique, home-grown stories would lay dormant in the U.S. until the advent of the independent productions, so-called “personal” films, helmed by director/writer/actor John Cassavetes in the late 1950s.

Another of the filmmakers’ great achievements is capturing the look and feel of a certain place and a certain time. It’s New York City on a summer’s day in the early 1950s. The clothes, the manners, the surroundings are all preserved forever. It’s a specificity that generates universal understanding, a sympathy for the kids and the helpful adults who come together to tell this charming little tale.

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

NFR Project: 'House of Wax' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “House of Wax”

Dir: Andre de Toth

Scr: Crane Wilbur

Pho: Bert Glennon, Peverell Marley

Ed: Rudi Fehr

Premiere: April 25, 1953

88 min.

“I’m going to give the people what they want – sensation, horror, shock. Send them out into the streets to tell their friends how wonderful it is to be scared to death.”

Thus sayeth Vincent Price as Professor Henry Jarrod, a sculptor who specializes in creating wax works in the images of the famous – and infamous – dead. House of Wax is the film that establishes actor Price as the modern Master of the Macabre.

He had played sinister characters in film before. He essayed a Gothic antihero to perfection in Dragonwyck (1946); he appeared as Cardinal Richelieu in Gene Kelly’s Three Musketeers in 1948. True, he was the Invisible Man in The Invisible Man Returns (1940), but Jarrod is his first monster.

In this case, the film is a lavish recreation of an older horror hit. Universal turned The Phantom of the Opera (1925) into a musical extravaganza in Technicolor in 1943; this was Warner Brothers’ version of that. They took the visually innovative Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) – one of the last of the two-strip color features – and made it in color, 3D, and stereophonic sound. It was derived from the 1932 work by Charles S. Belden, who had made a play of it as well as an unpublished short story. That movie featured the inimitable Lionel Atwill as the accursed sculptor.

It is set in New York at the turn of the 20^th Century. Jarrod (Price) runs a “respectable” wax works, but his business partner wants out of the not-so-profitable venture. He proposes burning down the building and taking the insurance money. Jarrod violently disagrees, calling the wax figures his children. The partner sets fire to the place, and after an epic battle Jarrod vanishes into the flames.

The partner gets all the insurance money. A disfigured monstrosity clad in black strangles him and makes his death look like a suicide. He then murders a young woman (Carolyn Jones) and steals her body. The victim’s friend, Sue Ellen, interrupts the murder and becomes the maniac’s target.

Jarrod reappears, wheelchair-bound, hands crippled by the fire. He is determined to reopen his wax museum, but he time he intends to fill it with bone-chilling recreations of famous crimes. He has two assistants (one of them, a deaf-mute, played by Charles Businski, soon to be Charles Bronson) who prepare the, uh, bodies for display. The museum opens, and we are shown a rendering of Joan of Arc that looks exactly like her dead friend.

Suspicious, Sue Ellen breaks into the museum – and discovers that her friend’s corpse is under the coat of wax. Jarrod suddenly appears, able to walk after all. Jarrod has been killing people and turning them into wax figures. Sue Ellen pounds at his face – which shatters, being a wax mask that shows the monster underneath. He subdues her and prepares her to be turned into a statue, his Marie Anntoinette. The police break in and save her and Jarrod falls to his death in a vat of boiling wax.

The film works, although it has a gimmicky aspect that greatly influenced its reception. It’s the first 3D feature film released by a major studio (Bwana Devil [1952] was first). It boasts a gorgeous if garish Technicolor look, and boasts stereophonic sound. All these innovations were designed to woo viewers away from their television sets – TV being the cutting-edge technology of the day. You couldn’t get 3D thrills at home!

The director, Andre de Toth, only had one eye – which rendered him unable to judge 3D effects. They are confined to bodies falling into the screen, a ludicrous demonstration of paddle-ball skill, and the display of ladies’ limbs as they dance the cancan. Still, the novelty sold tickets, and House of Wax came in second at the box office that year.

Ultimately, it is Price’s movie. He was at his best playing men “besieged by fate and out for revenge,” as he put it. Here he plays the erudite artist and the ravening monster beneath it with inestimable skill.

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

NFR Project: 'The Hitch-Hiker' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “The Hitch-Hiker”

Dir: Ida Lupino

Scr: Ida Lupino, Collier Young

Pho: Nicholas Musuraca

Ed: Douglas Stewart

Premiere: March 21, 1953

71 min.

Ida Lupino was a remarkable filmmaker. For a long time, she was the only female director in Hollywood.

She came from a long line of performers famous in England as the Lupinos – comprising actors, song-and-dance men, and even circus clowns. She started out in British film, and came to America in 1933. After extensive experience, she started to make her mark as an actress in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), and moved on to leading roles in They Drive by Night (1940), High Sierra and The Sea Wolf (both 1941).

But she wanted to do more. Frequently in dispute with her studio, she found herself suspended often. She didn’t want to just appear in films, she wanted to make them. While on suspension, she decided to form her own production company -- and direct and write socially conscious, realistic films such as Never Fear (1940) and Outrage (1950). Her uncompromising chutzpah led to the creation of a body of work that deserves closer examination.

The Hitch-Hiker is not a social problem film. It’s a straight-up film noir, based on the crimes of serial killer Billy Cook. Using only three actors – Edmond O’Brien, Frank Lovejoy, and William Tallman – she creates an atmosphere of menace and suspense. Filmed in the desert locations south of Los Angeles, this spare thriller keeps the audience hostage just as the two protagonists are held prisoner by a psychotic gunman (Tallman is great in this role). Will they escape before the killer executes them? The tension is maintained until the last minute.

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

NFR Project: 'From Here to Eternity' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “From Here to Eternity”

Dir: Fred Zinneman

Scr: Daniel Taradash

Pho: Burnett Guffey

Ed: William A. Lyon

Premiere: Aug. 5, 1953

118 min.

For once, they made a great movie out of a great novel.

James Jones was a hell of a good writer. Everyone should read his war trilogy – From Here to Eternity (1951), The Thin Red Line (1962), and Whistle (1978). They constitute an epic saga of how war and the military make and unmake people’s souls.

Eternity was a best-seller, and somewhat controversial in its day due to its strong language and some of its subjects – prostitution, venereal disease, homosexuality. It was also thought that the novel was unadaptable to film. The book is brilliant but sprawling, restless in its examination of human behavior, beliefs, and dreams, featuring many interior monologues. Jones wrote a screenplay adaptation, but it was rejected.

Several elements of the book are toned down for the film version. The Production Code had to be followed, and the Army had to sign off on it as well. No more prostitution, venereal disease, or homosexuality. A key character is forced to resign in the film, despite the novel ironically leading him on to bigger and better things. Of course there’s no dirty talk.

However, Daniel Taradash did a brilliant, Oscar-winning job of winnowing down the novel into a streamlined yet detailed and nuanced screenplay, staying as faithful to its source as the times would permit it.

The film is staged at the actual Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. It’s the story of a man who goes against the system that he, ironically, loves. Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) is a gifted but stubborn bugler who transferred from his old outfit because he wasn’t being treated fairly. Unfortunately, he’s wound up in a company run by an untalented, idiotic, and lazy Captain, Holmes (Philip Ober), whose pet project is to win the regiment boxing championship. He has a bunch of noncommissioned officers under his command who are there only so that they can fight.

Holmes wants Prewitt to box. Prewitt won’t – he blinded a man in the ring and afterwards swore it off. Holmes promises him that he will be harassed and punished until he gives in. Prewitt, heroically stubborn, accepts the challenge.

The company is really run by Sergeant Milt Warden (Burt Lancaster), who is incredibly efficient and caring about his men, although he doesn’t put up with any guff. A chance meeting with his Captain’s wife Karen (Deborah Kerr) leads to the two having a passionate affair. Meanwhile, Prewitt goes on one of his rare outings on leave to the town, and in a “social club” where Lorene (Donna Reed) works. They immediately fall in love.

And then there’s Maggio (Frank Sinatra). Maggio is an oddball, loud, obnoxious, rebellious, always joking but a good fella. Maggio crosses paths at the club with the enormous and brutal Sergeant “Fatso” Judson (Ernest Borgnine). Each develops a distinct hatred for each other. Judson runs the stockade.

Prewitt, meanwhile, can’t play his instrument on base, and casually shows off his prowess on it one night in a nightclub. After a second, violent confrontation (Fatso mocks Maggio’s picture of his sister) Judson swears he will give Maggio the business if he ever falls under his command.

Karen and Warden’s affair continues. They sneak around the island together, as getting caught would mean prison for Warden. (On comes the immortal shot of the two of them kissing in the surf under the moon.) Karen reveals her life’s tragedy, and they become even closer. Karen wants Warden to become an officer, so she can divorce Capt. Holmes and marry him. Warden hates officers and does not want to become one.

Prewitt’s hazing continues. Still, he exclaims, “A man loves a thing, that don’t mean it has to love him back.”

Maggio finally gets picked up and court-martialed. He is remanded to the stockade. Fatso is waiting for him.

Prewitt explains that he is a career soldier, a “30-year man.” Lorene (Alma, actually) admits she will not marry Prewitt because she wants a “proper” husband, home, and life. She wants to be respectable. Still, she admits, she needs him.

Prewitt fights one of his tormentors on the base quadrangle. At first he holds back, refusing to hit his opponent in the face. At last he becomes enraged and beats the other guy up. Still, he insists, he won’t box. One night Warden and Prewitt get drunk together. In stumbles a mortally wounded Maggio, who has been taking beatings for months and has just escaped from the stockade. Fatally injured, Maggio dies in Prewitt’s arms.

Prewitt plays Taps that night for his barrack-mates; a slow, achingly beautiful rendition. Prewitt seeks out Fatso and fights him in an alley. Fatso is killed, but he wounds Prewitt badly in the fight. Prewitt staggers to Lorene/Alma’s, hiding out while his wound heals.

You know what happens then? World War II, that’s what happens. It’s Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor is attacked, and so are Amry installations on the island, including Schofield Barracks. Warden and the men fight haphazardly. Prewitt, despite his wound, determines to get back to his unit. Sneaking among sentries that night, he is confronted and runs, leading to him being shot to death.

And that’s it. The last scene shows Karen and Lorene on a ship leaving Hawaii, both without the marriages they expected. Lorene pretends to Karen that her “fiancée” was a bomber pilot killed on the runway on Dec. 7. Karen realizes, from conversations she’s had with Warden, who Prewitt was and that this is untrue. She lets it slide. And the camera pulls in to Lorene’s hand, holding Prewitt’s bugle’s mouthpiece.

It won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Sinatra, in an achievement that reignited his popularity), Best Supporting Actress for Donna Reed, Best Screenplay, Cinematography, and Editing. There is nothing earth-shaking going on stylistically. It’s a human-sized story about grown-up people’s problems, and Zinneman gives his players room to breathe, casting them in ever-changing gradations of black and white.

The source material is searingly honest and well-observed, and the film reflects that rueful cynicism about life that the military breeds. The good guys are the lowly in rank, the working stiffs, the ones who are really dedicated to the ideals what they serve are supposed to stand for. The higher up you go, the more of a jerk you are.

In the end, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. In Prewitt’s case, he bucks the system and pays the price for it. The construct simply won’t accommodate the free-thinking individual. Holmes is forced to resign – a change from the novel, which saw him get promoted. Warden continues on stoically. Who is right? Is anybody redeemed?

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

NFR Project: 'Eaux d'artifice' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “Eaux d’artifice”

Dir: Kenneth Anger

Pho: Kenneth Anger

Ed: Kenneth Anger

Premiere: 1953

12 min.

A lovely little mood piece from filmmaker Kenneth Anger, best known for his filmic explorations of gay identity and sexuality.

Here he shoots a montage centered on a figure in 18^th-Century dress wandering through the gardens and around the water fountains of the Villa d’Este in Italy. The Baroque decorations of the site are highlighted, and the film moves serenely from shot to shot, scored to the music of Vivaldi.

Anger used a little person as his costumed figure, the circus performer Carmilla Salvatorelli. This choice makes the dimensions of the gardens seem larger than they really are. The film is focused on the interplay of light and water; slow-motion cascades sparkle in the sunlight (or is it moonlight?). It’s a meditative visual poem.

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

NFR Project: 'Duck Amuck' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “Duck Amuck”

Dir: Chuck Jones

Scr: Michael Maltese

Premiere: Feb. 28, 1953

6:53

Poor Daffy. Created by Tex Avery and Bob Clampett on April 17, 1937, he was soon to be one of cartoon history’s indelible characters – and perhaps its most unfortunate.

The Warner Brothers’ cartoon studio was by far the most imaginative and captivating of all motion-picture cartoon-crafting outfits of the period, giving us a slew of immortal characters housed in a slapstick paradise, a hilariously visualized space where the gags come thick and fast, where reality is bent, a reality in which heads flatten out and rebound upon being struck, where duck bills are blasted, spinning them to the rear and carefully swivelled back into place. The permissive atmosphere at “Termite Terrace” led to extensive, brilliant, experimental and successful comedies. Their efforts resulted in the creation of a body of animated short subjects that express the unique American comic sensibility.

The sarcastic, egotistical little black duck was born as a zany, anarchic prankster (read my essay on his first film, Porky’s Duck Hunt, here). It was a role he would play, usually with Porky Pig as his innocent foil, until 1940, when Bugs Bunny came along and took over being a witty miscreant in Leon Schlesinger’s Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoon shorts of the era.

So what’s a duck to do? Daffy turned into a much more complex character, an anti-hero usually hoisted by his own petard, a greedy, cynical coward – who regularly played Bugs’ nemesis in battles of wits staged in front of a befuddled Elmer Fudd. Bugs was cool, a consummate trickster. Daffy was an insecure, vain mess.

We watched it all, growing up, fixated on the adventures of Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Elmer and the rest. Their restless, intense artistry was engraved on our little skulls. We were children of Daffy.

The anything-goes vividness of this attack on Daffy bears the fingerprints of the immortal animator Chuck Jones, who wielded the director’s mace in most of Warner Brothers’ best cartoons. Jones was capable of pushing and crystallizing his characters’ ethos, resulting in gems such as The Rabbit of Seville, The Scarlet Pumpernickel, Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½ Century, and One Froggy Evening. This film stands as a classic beside them.

The movie is a tantalizing thought-product spawned by writer Michael Maltese, expressing a kind of existential despair about the certainties of reality. First Daffy dashes out in front of the camera, clad as a musketeer. The background disappears. Daffy appeals to us, as the acknowledged creator of the film, to put in some scenery. The artist obliges, brushing on a rural scene instead of a Gothic one. “Stand back, Musketeers, they shall sample . . . my . . . blade?” Daffy exclaims. He re-costumes himself. He is switched then to the Arctic, the tropics . . .. and back to nothingness. He complains, and is erased.

He is brought back as a cowboy singer – but there is no sound. Soon mismatched sounds come out of Daffy’s guitar and out of his mouth, culminating in him raving, “And I’ve never been so humiliated in all my life!” He begs the animators to quit kidding around. And is transformed into a misshapen creature. Then he is redrawn as himself, in a sailor suit. And let fall into the sea. He suffers from long shots and close-ups.

Finally, the darkness of the frame-edge above him droops and sags, descending like goo. Daffy fights it, goes berserk, tears it to shreds. He is doubled, and fights himself. He is given a plane to fly, and a mountain to fly into. He bails out of the plane, and is given an anvil for a parachute. Dazed and woozy in front of an abstract background, he hammers the anvil, chanting Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith.” The animator erases the anvil, replacing it with a bomb. Daffy strikes it until it explodes. Singed, he raves at the cartoon’s creator. “Who are you?” he screams. A door is drawn and closed upon him, and camera pulls out. The animator is Bugs. “Ain’t I a stinker?” he confides.

Daffy learns that he’s at the mercy of the animator – incapable of doing anything but rapidly adapt to the prevailing conditions. In that, he becomes an enraged existential hero. Daffy’s predicament is descended from Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) dream sequence, in which Buster enters the film and flails about in the rapid and seemingly spiteful changes of scene. But Duck Amuck can go further into the absurdity, pulling aside the curtain and showing the mechanics of making a cartoon come to life – a self-referential folly that illuminates the fragility of our assumptions about reality. We all get the rug pulled out from beneath us, repeatedly, hilariously.

Duck Amuck is the ultimate expression of the rivalry between Bugs and Daffy, and Bugs is again the easy winner. His magical qualities let him transcend the cartoon page and have agency in our reality. Daffy, no matter how hard he tries, will always be the victim of fate or of himself. Jones comes close here to being the cartoon equivalent of Samuel Beckett. Identity and reality are up for grabs, and the choices are not our own. A pretty gritty statement, truth be told.

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

NFR Project: 'The Big Heat' (1953)

 NFR Project: “The Big Heat”

Dir: Fritz Lang

Scr: Sydney Boehm

Pho: Charles Lang

Ed: Charles Nelson

Premiere: Oct. 14, 1953

90 min.

Fritz Lang was a master at depicting the darkness of humanity. One of his earliest efforts, the film serial The Spiders (1919-1920) – possibly inspired by Feulliade’s Fantomas (1913) -- dealt with a crime syndicate. He directed a four-and-a-half hour film about the doings of Dr. Mabuse, a criminal mastermind (1922). He made Spies in 1928. He tracked a serial killer in M in 1931.

He fled Germany to avoid Nazi persecution. Once he came to Hollywood, he specialized in genre films. He engaged with crime in Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), The Woman in the Window (1944), and Scarlet Street (1945). The Big Heat is an off-beat noir, the culmination of his tough crime pictures, and their attendant attitudes about humanity.

The story is told in complete deadpan, with very few stylistic flourishes. Lang is subverting the perverse content of the film by rendering it in a naturalistic manner. People do bad things; life goes on.

Here, Glenn Ford is Dave Bannion, a police sergeant trying to find out why a veteran cop killed himself. He talks to the lying widow (Jeanette Nolan), who is blackmailing the crime syndicate that had the officer in its pocket. He finds the cop’s girlfriend, who talks. She is soon found dead, having been tortured and murdered.

Bannion is ordered off the case, but he keeps probing. Ultimately, his wife is killed is their driveway by a car bomb meant for Dave. Bannion then accuses his higher-ups of corruption, and is suspended. He vows to keep searching for his wife’s killers.

Debby (Gloria Grahame), girlfriend of volatile, sadistic mob killer Vince Stone (Lee Marvin), grows to trust Dave and gives him information. When Vince finds out about her talking to the ex-cop, he brutally throws a pot of boiling coffee in her face. Scarred horribly, she goes to Bannion and fingers the man behind the car bombing. He is roughed up by Bannion and spills the beans, dooming him to an ugly fate as a snitch.

Bannion tails Stone. Debby goes to the policeman’s widow. If she dies, the damaging evidence her husband had on the mob will be revealed. Debby shoots her to death. She then lies in wait for Stone at his apartment. She throws hot coffee in his face, scalding him. He shoots her to death. Bannion rushes in and captures Stone. The corrupt police commissioner and the crime boss are indicted.

In Lang’s world, the bad do whatever they like, and the powers that be are paid off. Bannion is an ordinary, nice guy, but after his wife’s murder and expulsion from the force, he comes an avenging angel, grimly threatening to kill those he can’t squeeze information out of. Extrajudicial violence is the price the honest cop has to pay to see justice done.

Notably, all the women in the film with speaking parts get killed. It’s a reverse of the usual pattern of the noir protagonist being destroyed by a femme fatale. Here, the females are just collateral damage.

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

NFR Project: 'The Band Wagon' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “The Band Wagon”

Dir: Vincente Minnelli

Scr: Betty Comden, Adolf Green

Pho: Harry Jackson

Ed: Albert Akst

Premiere: July 9, 1953

111 min.

Which movie musical is the better? Singin’ in the Rain or this?

It depends on whether you are a Gene Kelly fan or a Fred Astaire man. I’m an Astaire guy. Kelly was athletic, surprising, gung-ho . . . but dancer/singer/actor Astaire was magic. He would gently weave his spells of reassuring motion, always alive on camera, precise, smooth, demanding perfection from himself in the dance and delivering like a pro every time. He could convey feelings as few could merely by moving.

Known first for his on-screen collaborations with Ginger Rogers (1933-1949), he moved on to other partners, such as Judy Garland, Jane Powell, and here Cyd Charisse, the most talented female dancer of her day. (And she could act!) In all of his later film incarnations, Astaire remained committed to the bit. He made his partners look good, and successfully played the love interest far into middle age. He later made a dance partner out of a coat rack.

Listen to some of his studio recordings. His voice is thin and of limited range. Yet he understands rhythms so well that he talk/sings his way, very evocatively, through the material. He had a jazzy sensibility. He grew up in shows by Gershwin and Irving Berlin. He had a cool which, coupled with his relaxed thereness in a scene, caused him to compel your attention.

Here he is yoked to the genius of director Vincente Minnelli. Minnelli’s musicals (Meet Me in St. Louis, ‘Til the Clouds Roll By, The Pirate) were top-notch; He here gets to embody the vibrant, Technicolor-soaked Minnelli-esque take on theatrical life through the contrivance of the backstage musical story. Betty Comden and Adolf Green, the iconic writing duo that gave us On the Town (1944) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952) here concoct the classic plot of “let’s put on a show” and turns it into a wicked satire of aesthetic pretentiousness.

Astaire plays his familiar persona, a song-and-dance man named Tony Hunter. At the show’s beginning, his Broadway memorabilia is being auctioned off – and there are no takers. Tony is seemingly a has-been which is unfortunate as he is a nice guy, wise to himself and high-spirited despite his problems. His pals Lily (Nanette Fabray) and Lester (Oscar Levant) Marton have written a killer new musical for him to star in, enabling him to make a comeback.

Unfortunately they are hot on a new theatrical wunderkind, the great impresario and writer/producer/director Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan), who is currently wowing them in Oedipus Rex. They tell him about their idea. Immediately he fixates on the idea that the show should take the shape of a Faustian fable, dark and anxious in nature. Jeffrey is an immense ham, of course, and is very sure of himself. (He is supposedly based on Jose Ferrer.)

Tony’s leading lady is famous ballerina Gabrielle Gerard (Charisse). At first, the two misunderstand each other and are hostile, but as they spend time together through the chaotic, ever-changing rehearsals, they fall in love. In one magical sequence, they duet in Central Park, under a lamplight, moving together perfectly to “Dancing in the Dark." It’s as direct, classic expression of male/female interaction in the art form. (The great Michael Kidd did the choreography.)

The show bombs out of town. Everyone has a beer, and Tony leads them in deciding to put on the show – but to go back to the original freewheeling script.

Another key to the success of this movie is that all the songs were written by the great team of Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz. We move on to a classic montage of musical bits, unrelated yet all standouts – “New Sun in the Sky,” “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan,” “Louisiana Hayride,”  “Triplets,” and the crowning, fabulously inventive “Girl Hunt Ballet.” It's a hit -- and Gaby's in love with him.

The show is, in a way, a rebuke to the book musical epitomized by Oklahoma! and South Pacific. The eponymous show-within-the-show finally works when it goes back to the approach of making a musical out of a bunch of unrelated bits and numbers, as was the fashion prior to the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution. Tony is a humble hoofer who succeeds by deflating the pretentious and bringing them down to his level – and to the good, old-fashioned way of doing things.

Tony is magic. His exuberant ode “Shine on Your Shoes” early in the film encapsulates everything we like about Astaire – he’s quirky, he has great reactions, he’s just in love with moving. Charisse, alone and with Astaire, shows off her incredible strength, smoothness, and precision, just as demanding as Astaire, going full out in an exemplary performance. She is both Astaire's and Kelly's ideal dance partner.

Buchanan is fine as the ham Cordova; Fabray and Levant are talented second bananas. Every little detail is perfect. Minnelli crowds the film with motion and color, speeding the satire along merrily as he stops everything periodically to give the cast a chance ato entertain us. It’s unfailingly cheerful and still so, so very good.

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

NFR Project: 'All My Babies: A Midwife's Own Story' (1953)

NFR Project: “All My Babies: A Midwife’s Own Story”

Dir: George C. Stoney

Scr: George C. Stoney

Premiere: 1953

An extraordinary film. Read Joshua Glick’s excellent article on it here. He gives us a keen biography of writer/director George C. Stoney as well as a thorough analysis of the film.

Educational films were a category unto themselves. Shorn of the production values of commercial films, they were practical in nature, seeking to delineate procedures legibly and to transmit information effectively. This Stoney does; but he also shows us a time and place unimaginable now, a place of primitive conditions and wound up in the profound distrust of white officials.

What’s so special about this film is the empowerment it gives to its subjects. George Stoney worked with his central figure, veteran midwife Mary Francis Hill Coley, on the creation of the movie. She collaborated on the sequences to be filmed, if not the method with which they are recorded. In a time when Black people were treated on film at best condescendingly, this deep respect for the people it profiles makes All My Babies a landmark of compassionate cinema.

The story follows Coley as she goes about doing the duties of midwifery. (At the time of filming, Coley had performed more than 1,400 deliveries.) The emphasis on coming under a doctor’s care when pregnant is strong but friendly. White people are not to be feared – at least the ones who want to be helpful. Coley is profiled as she goes about her business; she even narrates the film. The film covers two pregnancies, a textbook case in one instance and a difficult and emotionally fraught delivery as well.

The film is not shy about showing us the process of birth. Let the squeamish be warned. In spite of its graphic nature, there is something wholesome about it. This basic human mechanism, long bound up in myth and conjecture, is revealed as a natural process that requires the assistance of an experienced obstetric figure.

In this case, the traditional midwife is addressed directly by the film. Sanitation is emphasized. Preparation and procedure are outlined, and we get a bit of a profile of the prospective couples as well. (Some of these parts are performances.) There is the accompaniment of a gospel choir as well, singing passages written by Louis Applebaum. The result is an effective examination of the process and conditions of medical treatment in the rural South at the dawn of the Civil Rights era.

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

NFR Project: 'Pickup on South Street' (1953)

 

NFR Project: “Pickup on South Street”

Dir: Samuel Fuller

Scr: Samuel Fuller

Pho: Joseph MacDonald

Ed: Nick DeMaggio

Premiere: May 27, 1953

80 min.

Sam Fuller was a guerilla filmmaker. He was always on the outside, on the margins, creating what were at the time deemed “B” movies. He worked in genre films – war, noir, Westerns.

But there was something about his work. Compared to the efforts of most Hollywood directors, his were lean and mean, with a sensibility born on the streets. He chronicled the existence of outsiders, villains, freaks, and losers. It wasn’t until 30 years after his most fertile period that he began to be recognized as a director with a distinct vision, and lauded as a brave filmmaker.

Fuller began work at age 12, serving as a newspaper copyboy. He graduated to the role of crime reporter at 17. He then began to crank out pulp novels, and finally screenplays. In World War II, he served as an infantryman and saw combat in most of the non-Pacific battlegrounds – Africa, Sicily, France, and Czechoslovakia. He witnessed the liberation of a concentration camp.

He came home and resumed writing. Finally, in 1949 he got to direct one of his scripts, I Shot Jesse James, in exchange for getting no money for it. Thus began his rise in Hollywood.

Pickup on South Street is representative Fuller. In it, a professional crook gets involved in stymieing a Communist conspiracy to steal state secrets. It is not unusual that Fuller’s protagonists are streetwise, shady individuals. It is unusual that Fuller lets them triumph over the far better organized and legitimate forces arrayed against them.

Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark, in his accustomed antihero mode) is a pickpocket working the subways of New York. He pilfers from the purse of Candy (Jean Peters), the moll of Communist agent Joey (Richard Kiley). It turns out he has stolen some valuable microfilm containing formulae the Russians want.

Federal agents and the local police are tracking him, however. A police informer, Moe (the great Thelma Ritter), fingers Skip. (This is one of Ritter's six Oscar-nominated Supporting Actress performances -- she never did win!) They demand the film; Skip denies having it. Now Candy comes to him to try to get the film back. They begin to fall for each other, but Skip ultimately spurns her, demanding $25,000 for the film.

The Commies are after him too. Joey tracks down Moe, and tries to get Skip’s address out of her. She refuses, and is shot dead. Skip recovers her body from the boat taking it to a potters’ field, and gives her what she always wanted – a decent burial. Candy comes to Skip again, clonks him over the head, and takes the film to the cops. They in turn ask her to give the film to Joey, so they can trail him and capture the man to whom he is supposed to give the film. Candy hands over the film, but Joey finds it is incomplete (Skip held back one frame). Joey beats Candy and shoots her. Skip visits her in the hospital, and determines to get Joey and his fellow conspirators.

Skip tracks Joey into the subway where the handoff is supposed to take place. He busts up the transfer, knocks out the Communist kingpin, and pursues Joey onto the tracks, beating him unmercifully. The spy ring is broken up, and Skip and Candy go off together.

Being a self-taught filmmaker, Fuller ignores most of the “rules” of Hollywood filmmaking. He captures his players in sweaty close-ups. His camera moves along with the characters, drawing the audience in with kinetic action sequences.

Politically, Fuller voices a cynical philosophy through the persona of Skip. He doesn’t care about political ideology or patriotism – but he does care about the fellow inhabitants of his shadowy world, and is spurred to action when they are harmed. It’s the human connection Fuller cares about. Personal loyalty trumps ideology. Sure, the bad guys are defeated, but there is no sense of triumph over it, only relief that Skip and Candy can now get on with their lives together. At film’s end, we don’t even know if Skip will give up his criminal ways. In Fuller’s world, only the toughest survive.

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

NFR Project: 'Invaders from Mars' (1953)

NFR Project: “Invaders from Mars”

Dir: William Cameron Menzies

Scr: Richard Blake

Pho: John F. Seitz

Ed: Arthur Roberts

Premiere: April 9, 1953

80 min.

This film represents the work of one of the original geniuses of American cinema, William Cameron Menzies.

Menzies invented the role of production designer on films. No one person had been assigned to creating the look of a film before he began to do it, in a career that stretched from 1917 to 1956. In that time, he won two Oscars – one a special award for his work on Gone With the Wind. He primarily occupied himself with production design, although he did direct occasionally as well, most notably the 1935 sci-fi epic Things to Come.

Invaders from Mars was an opportunity for Menzies to create a unifying mise-en-scene. First, he used SuperCinecolor for this film, which resulted in deep, vibrant, saturated color that gave the film a distinctive look. Then he designed all his sets with a spare, clean minimalism that gives the movie a dreamlike, hallucinatory feel. In Menzies’ film world, only significant elements are included in the frame and everything extraneous is taken out.

The story begins with a boy, David, seeing a flying saucer land near his home in the middle of the night. He tries to alert his parents, who disbelieve him. His father goes to investigate – and comes back from the site a different person, cold, suspicious, and hostile. David notices he has a peculiar puncture on the back of his neck. Two police officers and a neighbor girl are also affected. The puncture is the only sign of a mind-control device implanted in the heads of the aliens’ victims.

David goes to the police, but they only lock him up (the police chief has been taken over as well). A health department doctor interviews him, and he convinces her that his story is true. The two of them consult local astronomer Dr. Kelston, who theorizes that everything that has happened presages an invasion of the Earth from Mars. He contacts the Army, who surround the landing site.

What follows is a standard back-and-forth battle between the Army and the Martians, which culminates in the explosive destruction of the saucer. David then wakes up – it was all a dream! He reports it to his parents, who send him back to bed. He looks out of his window . . . and sees the saucer landing again . . .The End.

The movie plays well as an allegory of people’s fear of being conquered by an enemy force (remember, the Soviet Russians were our enemies at the time), and the film makes the viewer suitably paranoid. Additionally, there is the idea of one’s parents turning into cold, hostile creatures that do not have one’s best interests at heart. David loses his parents to the Martians, but he gains an idealized pair of parents in the form of the doctor and the astronomer, who are the only ones to believe him at first. This kind of wish fulfillment works well in the context of this fantasy.

Invaders from Mars would prove to be a template for the alien-invasion films to come.

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

NFR Project: 'This Is Cinerama' (1952)

 

NFR Project: “This is Cinerama”

Dir: Mike Todd, Michael Todd, Jr., Walter A. Thompson, Fred Rickey

Pho: Harry Squire

Ed: William Henry, Milton Shifman

Premiere: Sept. 30, 1952

115 min.

It’s a gimmick. It’s a gag.

I thoroughly agree with and endorse Kyle Westphal’s essay on this film at the National Film Registry. Read it! He captures the sheer daffiness of it.

After World War II, television made major inroads on America’s movie-going public. The big studios were worried. Hollywood was looking to provide something television could not. It started casting about for various new ways to attract viewers. First was an increase in “road show” screenings. These were prestigious showings of big-budget, epic, full-color films that featured reserved seats, an overture, and an intermission. Then there were first-generation 3-D films, for which viewers donned special red/green glasses – offerings such as Bwana Devil, House of Wax, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Then there was Cinerama. This was a special wide-screen mode of movie projection invented by Fred Waller, consisting of three projectors strapped together side by side, providing an exceptionally wide field of vision as it is projected on a wide, special curved screen. The result was supposed to engage the viewer’s peripheral vision and provide an overwhelming visual experience.

This Is Cinerama purported to sell this dynamic concept. The journalist and broadcaster Lowell Thomas was an investor in this new process, and he served as producer on this film as well as its on-screen narrator. This Is Cinerama is a sales pitch, really – a demonstration of the possibilities of the medium.

The film opens with a brief sequence summarizing the history of film, from prehistoric times to the present. This is shown in the 4:3 ratio, in black and white. Suddenly the screen expands, bursts into color, and we are in the front car of a roller coaster in New York. This leads to a series of sequences filmed at various places. We see the Temple Dance from Verdi’s Aida, shots of Niagara Falls from the air, a church choir, and the Vienna Boys’ Choir (Cinerama also pushed the advent of the new “stereophonic sound”).

The rest of the film is pretty much a glorified travelogue. We go to Venice, Edinburgh,  a bullfight in Spain, the performers at the now-defunct Cypress Gardens in Florida. We end with an aerial flyover of many national monuments, all while the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang hymns and patriotic songs.

The travelogue aspect of the full-length feature film is remindful of the travel films created during the early Silent Era. Back then, it was remarkable to see something you’d only read about; with Cinerama, you see familiar landmarks in a brand new way.

But was it worth it? What do you gain when you have wide-screen? What do you lose?

On the positive side, it is impressive. I was lucky enough to see the Cinerama project How the West Was Won (1962) on a Cinerama screen in Denver – at the late, lamented Cooper Theater. You feel like you are inside the movie – it’s uncanny and affecting, an overwhelming sensual experience.

But there were problems. First, to make three screens’ worth of images, you needed to yoke three cameras together when filming. Thus, the cameras couldn’t really move. They were usually bolted down to something, so that their three screens’ worth of images would later align accurately. Scenes were static.

Then there’s the problem of composition. Instead of a screen aspect ratio of 4:3, as most classic-period American films had, Cinerama had a ratio of 2.65:1! This elongated kind of view demanded an entirely different aesthetic, in the attempt to fill the screen, as well as to balance compositions.

Thirdly, you needed a special screen on which to view it. Thus the creation of the Cinerama theater, which needed the special Cinerama film to display. This required more projectionists and  special equipment. It was not cost-effective.

Despite initial enthusiasm for the new technology, Cinerama never took off. A number of epic films were made in Cinerama – It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), The Battle of the Bulge (1965), Ice Station Zebra (1968). But it wasn’t enough. Additionally, other film studios developed rival widescreen processes that did not require special theaters or retooling. These included VistaVision, CinemaScope, and Ultra Panavision. By the early 1970s, Cinerama was dead.

Today only three Cinerama theaters remain in the United States – in Seattle, Providence RI, and San Diego. Widescreen projection has now become the norm, and is even being supplanted for epic films by the immersive IMAX projection system.

Cinerama was a noble, failed experiment.

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