NFR Project: 'The Phenix City Story' (1955)

 

NFR Project: “The Phenix City Story”

Dir: Phil Karlson

Scr: Daniel Mainwaring, Crane Wilbur

Pho: Harry Neumann

Ed: George White

Premiere: Aug. 14, 1955

100 min.

An interesting low-budget anomaly. This film is an awkward combination of would-be documentary and fictionalized potboiler. It purports to show the events surrounding the uncovering of systemic and pervasive corruption in Phenix City, Alabama in the early 1950s. (In fact, the Columbus, GA Ledger-Enquirer won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for its reporting on Phenix City.)

Phil Karlson (1908-1982) was a maestro of the mediocre. He made his living directing movies for off-brand studios such as Monogram. He was competent and professional, bringing in all his efforts on time and under budget. Name a genre, and he directed a film in it. He was one of a fraternity of lesser-known but steadily working Hollywood directors such as Allan Dwan, Joseph H. Lewis, Edward L. Cahn, Roger Corman, and Edgar Ulmer.

Phenix City is located across the river from Columbus, Georgia, which hosts Fort Benning. The presence of enlisted men led to the creation of a red-light district that gave the town the unofficial title of “Sin City, USA.” In the 1940s and ‘50s, gambling, prostitution, and drug usage there were rampant. The town was run by organized crime, with the full cooperation of the municipal authorities.

Attempts were made at reform that were rebuffed violently. On June 18, 1954, the Alabama attorney general pro tem Albert Patterson, who ran on reform, was shot to death outside his law office in downtown Phenix City. The situation was so out of hand that martial law was declared in the city on July 22.

So this film was made immediately after the fact. Interestingly, it opens with about 20 minutes of interviews between journalist Clete Roberts and some of the citizens who witnessed the actual carnage. It then kicks in to an overview of the sordid conditions in Phenix City. We are taken into the story of John Patterson (Richard Kiely), a lawyer and Korean War vet who goes into practice with his father Albert (John McIntire) in town.

An improvement committee is formed, but there is a spy in its midst. Its efforts are thwarted by the town’s criminals. The committee members are harassed and assaulted; one man’s daughter is murdered and tossed onto John’s lawn.

Albert, initially disinclined to get involved, eventually consents to run for attorney general. As in real life, the character is murdered. Son John flies into enraged action, finding the crime boss (Edward Andrews) responsible and beating him half to death. He is only restrained by Zeke (James Edwards), father of the slain girl, who exhorts, “Thou shalt not kill!”

The movie ends with armed soldiers taking over the district, and destroying its crooked gambling equipment. It is implied that the reign of terror is over. However, Karlson had a pessimistic outlook that runs like a thread through his films. The Phenix City Story is consonant with that perspective.

Those in charge are the bad guys, and violence is their stock in trade. Almost all the citizens have given up, resigning themselves to domination by society’s dark forces. Almost everyone is crooked; almost everyone can be bought. Crime is a major industry, a revenue source for a whole culture. It takes making it personal with a murder, for a man to avenge his father’s death, for anything positive to happen.

The tone is spare, shrouded in night on rain-slicked streets. The actors are a curious combination of polished pros, local amateur actors, and people seemingly drawn in off the street. The result is a documentary-like evocation of the underbelly of the American dream.

And, in real life, unlike the seemingly liberal character in the film, John Patterson went on to be one of the most anti-Black governors of all time.

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

NFR Project: 'The Man with the Golden Arm' (1955)

  

NFR Project: “The Man with the Golden Arm”

Dir: Otto Preminger

Scr: Walter Newman, Lewis Meltzer, Ben Hecht

Pho: Sam Leavitt

Ed: Louis R. Loeffler

Premiere: Dec. 15, 1955

119 min.

Otto Preminger, a dictatorial menace of a director, was noted for his willingness to tackle controversial subjects. He had just addressed premarital sex in The Moon Is Blue (1953). Here he was to turn a great, gritty American novel into a slightly more palatable product starring Frank Sinatra in a role that confirms his ability as an actor. (He lost the Best Actor Oscar to Ernest Borgnine in Marty.)

Nelson Algren (1909-1961) was a novelist and short-story and non-fiction writer out of Chicago. He was a “bard of the down and out,” a chronicler of the American underclass, the folks who lived on the fringes of society. Read him; he’s good. He has a kind of tough-guy poesy that puts him somewhere between Chandler and Bukowski.

He is a resolute pessimist, and this is reflected in the original, National Book Award-winning novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, he wrote in 1949. It took a while for his work to percolate into the mainstream, but when it did it hit hard. Preminger, no stranger to controversy, snapped it up.

The resulting script, originally essayed by Algren, was turned over to Walter Newman. The script made tailor-made as a Best-Actor type of project Frank Sinatra could star in. In the novel, the protagonist kills himself. Obviously, this could not be in mainstream cinema. Therefore, the story was altered to give us an equivocally upbeat ending (that doesn’t work, by the way).

It’s the story of addiction. Frank plays Frankie, a would-be drummer in a studio recreation of a blighted Chicago slum. The feeling is gritty, tense; it does evoke the lives of people on the bottom rung of society, the criminals, prostitutes, drug dealers, gamblers who populate Algren’s world. Preminger gives us a wretched aesthetic that magnifies the emotional content of the brutal narrative. It is not Neorealism, but it is as close as Hollywood would ever come.

There in the depths of degradation and despair Frankie dwells with his wife “Zosh” (Eleanor Parker), who is out of her fricking mind. She sits around all day in a wheelchair, as Frankie had crippled her when he was driving drunk. Except she’s not: she’s faking it to keep Frankie around out of guilt!

He really digs Molly (Kim Novak), who works the door at a strip club. She loves him and believes in him, all the more important for him as he’s just returned from the Narcotic Farm in Kentucky, free from his addiction to what is generally regarded, though never specified, as heroin. (In the novel, pointedly, Frankie gets hooked on morphine due to injury in World War II combat.)

Frankie tries to go straight. He joins the musicians’ union, he goes out on an audition (disastrously). He rubs up against the local gambling shark Schwiefka (Robert Strauss), who gets him to deal illegal poker games for him again – as he is known as a genius with cards, “the man with the golden arm.” Meanwhile, the local pusher Louie (a young Darren McGavin) gets him hooked on the stuff again.

Things go from bad to worse. Frankie’s agony over his relapse manifests itself in Sintra’s sweaty, desperate features, lit grimly in a kind of dour “problem picture” style.

Preminger doesn’t preach; he simply follows the increasingly frantic machinations of the hero, Frankie Machine, as he declines into hopelessness. Frankie gets involved in a violent, crooked card game. Louie gets murdered and everyone thinks Frankie did it. Preminger and Newman give him a kind of ersatz redemption. Frank as Frankie gets to kick heroin in front of our eyes.

Surprisingly, it still works. Sinatra really could act, usually in proportion with the quality of the director he worked with (Zinnemann in Fron Here to Eternity, Frankenheimer in The Manchurian Candidate). He carries the film and makes us root for him.

He is ably assisted by the immortal Arnold Stang as Sparrow, his sidekick, Parker (an uncharacteristic choice) as his wife, and Novak in a star-making turn (with Picnic the same year). 

Frankie gets to walk away in the end . . . but where is he walking to? The ineffectiveness of its contrived ending reduces what came before to mere melodrama. There is no indication that Frankie is on his way to better things, save that he is clean. For now. This provisional view of humanity was about all the censors of the day could stand.

But it was important. It raised an issue that was pernicious and unacknowledged. History has not yet decided whether Preminger was a huckster exploiting the controversies of the day or a sincere pioneer of “problem” cinema in the modern era.

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 Phenix City Story.

NFR Project: 'Lady and the Tramp' (1955)

 

NFR Project: “Lady and the Tramp”

Dir: Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson

Scr: Erdman Penner, Joe Rinaldi, Ralph Wright, Don DaGraadi

Ed: Don Halliday

Premiere: June 22, 1955

76 min.

OK, those of you who read me consistently know that I hate Disney films, the center of my childhood trauma. This particular entry is less offensive than many of Disney’s products, with only a little trauma towards the end when THE RAT TRIES TO EAT THE BABY.

Yep. Nightmare fuel.

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 Man with the Golden Arm.

NFR Project: 'A Time Out of War' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “A Time Out of War”

Dir: Denis Sanders

Premiere: 1954

20 min.

This beautiful little film, barely 20 minutes long, helped to launch two brothers into the business and garnered an Oscar to boot.

Denis and Terry Sanders created this film to serve as Denis’ thesis at UCLA. It is a gentle, elegiac film. Two Union sharpshooters cover a river crossing sometime during the Civil War. A Confederate soldier holds the opposite bank.

The Rebel soldier calls out for an hour truce. The Yanks agree, and the two share the pleasures of the river, and even trade goods by hurling it across the river. One Yankee, determined to fish, finds a body – the remains of a Union cavalryman. The two men dig a grave and bury the body; all three soldiers fire their guns into the sky together in salute. The sun goes down.

The Sanders approach is simplicity itself. There are no directorial flourishes; the camera tells the tale as though it were true. The film’s black-and-white cinematography is stunning; it makes full use of the evening’s “golden hour.”

This low-key, assured short showed Hollywood that students ould craft excellent films as well – nd at that teaching cinema could lead to commercially viable careers for its students.

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

NFR Project: 'A Star Is Born' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “A Star is Born”

Dir: George Cukor

Scr: Moss Hart

Pho: Sam Leavitt

Ed: Folmar Blangsted

Premiere: Sept. 12, 1954

182/154/178 min.

This film is all about the wonder that is Judy Garland.

The childhood star of The Wizard of Oz was afflicted with illness and substance abuse problems as her career progressed at MGM. She was universally popular, but she was manipulated and abused by those in charge of her career. Gradually, she became incapable of performing. In 1950, her contract with MGM was suspended.

After some rehab and a return to live performance, she and her then-husband and -manager Sid Luft came up with the idea to remake William Wellman’s 1937 melodrama A Star Is Born as a vehicle for her comeback.

This time, the plot of the movie was augmented with a number of musical performances by Garland. This hybrid of musical theater and melodrama proved to be a winner.

Garland plays Esther Blodgett, a struggling performer in L.A. trying to get noticed. She meets Norman Maine (James Mason), a matinee idol with a severe drinking problem. He falls for her and helps her break into the big time. She becomes a big star, with a new name, Vicki Lester – but at the same time, Norman’s career goes to hell in a handbasket. After an attempt at rehab, he finally gives up and kills himself, walking into the ocean. Vicky/Esther appears at a benefit immediately after, proudly identifying herself s “Mrs. Norman Maine.”

Garland suffers exquisitely throughout the film. She loves Norman, but his self-destructive behavior drives her to distraction. Judy does the best acting of her career in the offstage portions of the film, and dazzles during the musical sequences. (Her big number, the “Born In a Trunk” sequence, was filmed after Cukor left the production, and was inserted to beef up her screen time.)

The initial cut of the film was 182 minutes, but the studio cut it down by a half-hour in order to accommodate more showings in theaters. Decades later, much of the footage was restored, giving us a much better sense of story than the original commercial release.

Cukor’s ability to capture the feelings of women onscreen was unmatched, and his visual sense is impeccable. Working in Technicolor and CinemaScope for the first time, he makes it look easy. This is still the definitive version of this classic show-biz story.

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

NFR Project: 'Seven Brides for Seven Brothers' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”

Dir: Stanley Donen

Scr: Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich, Dorothy Kingsley

Pho: George Folsey

Ed: Ralph E. Winters

Premiere: Dec. 20, 1954

102 min.

Ho boy. All right, kids, read Liz Gloyn’s hilarious and accurate assessment of this film at the National Film Registry. It’s right on target.

This film is problematic to say the least. It endorses abduction and (near) statutory rape. It proclaims Man as the Unmoved Mover and Woman as the clay upon which he works. It reinforces every white heterosexual norm in existence. This is an all-white musical for an all-white audience.

The reason it made it onto the Registry is its astonishing dance sequences. The brilliant Stanley Donen, fully primed to film dance after making movies with Gene Kelly, directed the film with largely studio-bound perfection. As no one ever had tried before, he supported the performers with an understanding of how they fit the film space. That, and he was shooting in CinemaScope. He utilizes his expanded canvas to its uttermost, creating lovingly staged ensemble pieces and exuberant solos.

The story is regressive. It is derived from Stephen Vincent Benet’s 1938 short story, “The Sobbin’ Women.” This car-crash musical is set in Oregon in 1850. There are seven Pontipee brothers living in the wilderness together, all with flaming red hair. Their eldest brother Adam (Howard Keel) goes to town to “get” a wife. He finds Milly (Jane Powell) and proposes. That day. She accepts, of course, and back they go to their backwoods home.

There she discovers Adam’s six other brothers. She civilizes them, and brings them to a barn raising. The brothers, providentially, discover six eligible young women who, appropriately pair off with each brother. This enrages the townsfolk, who drive the Pontipees out.

Winter comes, and the men pine for their women. Adam reads to them one of Milly’s books, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. He comes across the story of the Rape of the Sabine Women by the Romans. The seven decide to sneak into town and kidnap all their special ladies! Like the Romans! Yeah!

So they do. They trigger an avalanche, separating the townsmen from them for the time being. But oh golly! They forgot to kidnap the preacher! The men go live in the barn, the women take the house. Adam goes away to a trapping cabin. Milly finds she is pregnant. She has her and Adam’s child. Adam returns; he and Milly make up. The angry townsfolk arrive. Every girl claims the baby is hers. Everyone gets married immediately. The End.

It’s ridiculous. The misogyny is palpable. And it is executed in the highest MGM tradition, lavishly staged, costumed to a T, overflowing with talent, lit and shot with meticulous care.

The barn-raising sequence is one of the most captivating dance numbers ever filmed. Choreographer Michael Kidd was a genius, and this is his finest work. The brothers, clad in primary colors, woo the girls who are bust dancing with the men of the town. As the music plays, the women are traded back and forth by their opposing partners, in a delirious display of timing and agility. The men compete, bouncing on suspended wooden boards and performing all manner of astonishing feats. Donen keeps the camera low the more to admire the incredible moves of Kidd’s dancers.

Shortly after this, the brothers and the townsmen compete in raising a barn. This leads to an all-out brawl that ends with the complete collapse of the building’s frame as the brothers stand triumphant, untouched, in the center, surrounded by their prone foes. It’s a manly musical. The fight is shot perfectly, quietly escalating in intensity until the screen explodes with flying fists and bodies. It’s aestheticized violence, a comedy of mayhem.

And then there’s axe dance in the snow. The men (or their overdubbers) sing “Lonesome Polecat” while wielding sharp tools. It’s inventive, but it’s kitschy beyond belief, seeing these men cavorting in slow motion in a studio blizzard. Plus they sing, “But a man can’t sleep/When he sleeps with sheep.” Yeah.

So there you have it. Something really strange from the past that wouldn’t fly today. But as a film musical, it’s a dance-lover’s dream.

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

NFR Project: 'Salt of the Earth' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “Salt of the Earth”

Dir: Herbert J. Biberman

Scr: Michael Wilson

Pho: Stanley Meredith, Leonard Stark

Ed: Joan Laird, Ed Spiegel

Premiere: March 14, 1954

94 min.

It’s an extraordinary film, still ahead of its time.

First, read the splendid essay by Stacie Seifrit-Griffin at the National Film Registry. It covers all the points I was to address: therefore, I can only add my impressions to the conversation.

Salt of the Earth is radical in every way. It’s a how-to for strikers. It outlines the challenges and roadblocks that ordinary workers have to face when they want to better their lot collectively. It advocates for women and minorities. It offers the hope of eventual triumph over the negative forces of unrestrained capitalism. And it does so while remaining viable as a film. A project like this could easily become pedantic and lecturing. 

It was the creation of a group of exiled artists. Several people involved in this film were blacklisted as a result of their refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, including the director, the screenwriter, and several of the actors. They gathered in New Mexico to shoot the story of a miners’ strike, a topic no right-thinking mainstream movie studio would ever think of tackling. It would be one of the few films to be made outside of Hollywood during this period. It was the first and only film to be blacklisted.

In the film, the men who work in the mines strike for better conditions. They are harassed by the police, who are in the pay of the rich industrialist who owns the mine. After they are forbidden to picket the mine’s entrance, their women step in and march for them. The women and children are hauled off to jail, but eventually released.

While the women are organizing, the men are relegated to doing housework, which they find as onerous as mining for zinc. The women declare that they seek liberation and equality.

The emotional center of the film is the new mother Esperanza (Rosaura Revueltas), whose husband (Juan Chacon) is beaten and jailed early on in the strike. She is transformed from a beaten-down housewife into a dynamic labor leader in the course of the film.

Finally, the company evicts Esperanza and her family from their home. From all around come men and women determined to stop the eviction from taking place. The company finally capitulates and decides to settle. The strike is a success.

The film is shot in plain, neorealist style. The actors, most of whom are non-professional, are convincing. No one would repeat this experiment in filmmaking. The principals were harassed for making this film. Their careers went nowhere. They paid the price for speaking truth to power.

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

NFR Project: 'Sabrina' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “Sabrina”

Dir: Billy Wilder

Scr: Billy Wilder, Samuel Taylor, Ernest Lehman

Pho: Charles Lang Jr.

Ed: Arthur Schmidt

Premiere: Sept. 23, 1954

113 min.

A lovely little fantasy from the usually irascible Billy Wilder.

Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn) is the daughter of the chauffeur for the wealthy Larrabee family. She is infatuated with the irresponsible younger scion of the family, David (William Holden, playing a carefree dimwit). His older brother Linus (Humphrey Bogart) is dour and practical.

Sabrina loves David, who is in line to marry his fourth wife, the daughter of another business tycoon. In order to preserve the merger of the two families, Linus is set to distract Sabrina. He wines and dines her . . . and the two fall in love.

That’s pretty much it. It’s a romance, and is concerned with the pleasantries of affection.

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

NFR Project: 'Rear Window' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “Rear Window”

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock

Scr: John Michael Hayes

Pho: Robert Burks

Ed: George Tomasini

Premiere: Sept. 1, 1954

112 min.

First, read here John Belton’s superior analysis of this film at the National Film Registry. I have not much to add! It’s quite comprehensive.

To wit I would only note:

This is another example of Hitchcock’s matchless ability to formulate a conceit and stage it impeccably. Here he takes a screenplay derived from a 1944 Cornell Woolrich short story. Woolrich (1903-1968) was a prolific and talented American crime writer, one of the best of his era. His idea of an idle apartment-dweller believing he sees the commission of a murder across the way is brilliant, and John Michael Hayes’ screenplay adaptation is taut, intelligent, and captivating. It would be the first of four straight Hitchcock films for which Hayes would write the screenplay.

In this case, Hitchcock deliberately traps himself as a filmmaker in the protagonist’s environment. He sets himself visual limitations, then transcends them. It’s an elegant game of a movie.

He doesn’t give himself much to work with. We as the audience are confined to the view of Jeff’s apartment, what’s visible out his back window, and what he sees through binoculars or a telephoto lens. We know only what Jeff knows. We are mercilessly left to draw our own conclusions as the film progresses.

Dashing Greenwich Village photojournalist Jeff Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) is recovering from a broken leg that was gotten while filming an auto race. Also, he is grumpy. He is tended by a faithful, acerbic nurse (Thelma Ritter) and his faithful, voluptuous, intelligent, stylish, and beautiful girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly). Bored as hell in recuperation, he gazes out on the courtyard and the surrounding apartments and ruminates on the lives those within.

Lisa wants him to commit. He’s leery of doing so, and complains about women and marriage throughout most of the film. Instead, he operates as a voyeur, which his nurse and Lia comment on and discourage.

Until it seems that someone across the way has murdered his wife. Jeff makes a conjecture as to what happened to Mrs. Thorwald – he sees her nagging her husband (Raymond Burr as the literal heavy), then she seems to disappear.

Jeff sees Thorwald carrying a suitcase out into the rain, three times in one night. Jeff sees him wrap up a saw and a butcher knife. He infers that Mrs. Thorwald is dead, and that Thorwald is the murderer. He alerts his war buddy, a police lieutenant (Wendell Corey). The detective checks out what evidence he can, but he ends up discounting Jeff’s warnings and tells him to lay off.

The suspicions continue to breed. Lisa becomes convinced as well. Jeff lures Thorwald out of the apartment with a phone call, and Lisa breaks in. Thorwald catches her. The police get involved. Thorwald realizes he is being watched by Jeff. Lisa gets arrested. Now Thorwald goes into Jeff’s apartment and confronts him. He advances ominously as Jeff tries to blind him with flashbulbs. Thorwald throws Jeff out of the window, and the cops and Lisa bust in and capture him.

In the coda, Jeff is now propped up with TWO broken legs and Lisa watching over him. He was right.

This is one movie you can have a lot of fun interpreting. Is Thorwald’s brutal killing a literal projection of Jeff’s hidden desires?

Is Jeff “broken” sexually? Does Lisa represent an unreal female ideal? One that’s openly soliciting sex with the hero?

The movie gives us extensive glimpses of the lives of many ordinary citizens, seen through their windows. All varieties of living situations, all ages of life, live on top of each and beside other, their windows opened to Jeff’s observation and judgement (and ours – for we are voyeurs, just like Jeff). It’s an opportunity to comment on the society of the day. Each individual within Jeff’s range of vision is pantomiming their inner lives for us. It is painful and compelling at once.

Stewart is great, having fun playing a “darker” character. Stewart abandoned his good-guy persona after World War II, initially in the Westerns he made with Anthony Mann (you can read my essays on their work together Winchester ’73 [1950] and The Naked Spur [1953] by clicking on the titles). His Jeff Jeffries is, frankly, a pain in the ass. He is bitter and at times abusive. He is sick of being laid up and he takes it out on the women around him. He is not whole. (Stewart would later play some of Hitchcock's most conflicted and tortured heroes.)

Lisa seemingly only becomes real to him when he sees her across the way, trapped in Thorwald’s apartment. His near-death at the hands of Thorwald punishes him for his voyeurism, and now he’s completely immobilized and under the control of his woman. The adventurer is literally disabled, so that he becomes a suitable mate. Jeff is, presumably, tamed.

Even if you don’t read anything into it, it’s still a classic thriller. Is Jeff nuts? Did we see what we thought we saw? The movie puts us on the edge of our seats.

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

NFR Project: 'On the Waterfront' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “On the Waterfront”

Dir: Elia Kazan

Scr: Budd Schulberg

Pho: Boris Kaufman

Ed: Gene Milford

Premiere: July 28, 1954

108 min.

"Chère mademoiselle, you have chosen the wrong metteur en scène, because Elia Kazan is a traitor. He is a man who sold to McCarthy all his companions at a time when he could continue to work in New York at high salary, and having sold all his people to McCarthy, he then made a film called On the Waterfront which was a celebration of the informer. I have to add that he is a very good director.” – Orson Welles, 1982

How do you separate the artist from the all-too-human being who inhabits the same body? There are many examples of honored creatives who were hideous people, down to our own time. Elia Kazan is justly revered as one of the great directors. He also ratted out his friends.

How do you praise a movie on the side of a squealer?

In April 1952 Kazan was called on by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was on the hunt for Communist sympathizers in the Second Red Scare. The Cold War was on. People’s loyalties to their country were questioned. If you were tainted with the allegation you were a Red, you lost your job. You were shunned. You were out of luck.

Kazan named eight of his artistic colleagues as Communist sympathizers. He took out an ad in the New York Times justifying his actions. (For the record, screenwriter Budd Shulberg and actor Lee J. Cobb named names as well.) He destroyed many relationships but not, seemingly, his professional opportunities. He was soon making On the Waterfront, a film that does make a hero of an informant. In fact, this is the inverse of John Ford’s 1935 The Informer. Here, betrayal leads to a Christlike redemption.

That being said, Kazan is a masterful director, particularly in his work with actors. He somehow gets them to trust him. He gets physically closer to his people than many directors do; in close-ups and two-shots the story plays out, intimately. He films on location, he keeps it authentic. He frames illuminating, beautiful compositions. He knows how to move the film along, he knows how can he can go.

For this is the offspring of Italy’s Neorealism. It’s American Social Realism, which is also a descendant of the “social problem” and “message” films of the 1930s and 1940s. It’s a story from the streets. It’s gritty. It poses a problem, delineates its outlines. It tracks the progress of a noble young man who decides to do what is unpopular but right.

This directing style was receptive to the advances of the Method approach in acting, which called for the summoning of sense memory and emotional truth to embody a character. This revolutionary system, derived from the work of Russian great Constantin Stanislavsky and his American disciple Lee Strasberg, meant that people were emoting and pondering onscreen, looking for something “real” to enact. Kazan’s troupe was the vanguard of the Method’s inroads into the film acting approach of American performers. It feels real.

The script’s skeleton was constructed by famous playwright Arthur Miller, who wrote the first version of the script. The studio wanted him to make the corrupt union members who play the villains into Communists. Miller declined. In fact, Miller was so pissed off at Kazan that he bailed. He was replaced by Budd Schulberg. The end result is a taut yet insightful look at the underside of racketeering in America.

It’s taken as a given. Corruption riddles the industry. Goons run the union and exploit their workers. They kill people who threaten to rat them out.

Kazan got the best for his cast. Marlon Brando is still astonishing as Terry Molloy, the conscience-stricken longshoreman who used to be a “contender,” a prizefighter with possibilities who threw a fight for his brother, corrupt union hireling Charley the Gent (Rod Steiger) and ruined his career. He’s privy to the union officials’ execution of a potential government witness, Joey Doyle.

Brando is at the top of his game – he’s fully alive in every scene, he’s spontaneous, he’s irresistible. He won the Best Actor Oscar for this performance – back when he was still accepting them.

Steiger is amazing as Terry’s savvy older brother, and their interplay, especially in their iconic taxi scene, is intense. Eva Marie Saint won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for this, her first film, as Joey’s sister Edie. Karl Malden is equally brilliant as the waterfront priest. Lee J. Cobb is the classic bad man, “Johnny Friendly,” who dominates and makes his money off the labor of his union members. BOOO!

Terry is drawn to Edie, who’s out to find the killer of her brother. She and Terry fall in love with each other, but when he confesses his role to her, she runs away from him.

Charley has to convince Terry to take a job with the organization – or he has to take him to his death. Terry refuses. Charley gives him a gun and tells him to run. Charley is murdered. 

Terry testifies. He later goes to the docks and exclaims that he was glad he testified, and calls Johnny out. The two battle, then Friendly’s goons rush in and almost beat Terry to death. The dockworkers won’t go to work unless Terry leads them. He struggles painfully to his feet and enters the warehouse. They follow. The warehouse door swings down.

It’s classic, and deeply moving. It features an excellent score by Leonard Bernstein. It won Best Picture. It won Best Director. It won for Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Editing. It features a lot of soon-to-be-known actors. There ‘s Martin Balsam! There’s Pat Hingle! There’s Fred Gwynne! There’s Nehemiah Persoff!

It’s a fascinating, compelling film. The performances are legendary.

Kazan won a honorary Oscar in 1999. Many present there sat on their hands rather than applaud his achievement.

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

NFR Project: 'Johnny Guitar' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “Johnny Guitar”

Dir: Nicholas Ray

Scr: Philip Yordan, Den Maddow

Pho: Harry Stradling

Ed: Richard L. Van Enger

Premiere: May 5, 1954

110 min.

Should you be wary of a Western loved by French film critics?

Both Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut praised this film when it came out. It is a peculiar genre film, one that plays with the hallmarks of the type, turning them inside out and upside down. It is another remarkably idiosyncratic film by Nicholas Ray, who specialized in making movies his own particular way.

The film features two strong female leads, a real departure for the Western. Joan Crawford plays Vienna, a former prostitute who now owns a saloon and gambling house near a small Arizona frontier town. She forgoes frills and lace, and dresses like a man – and a gunfighter at that. Her stern, unmoving features make her a tight-jawed, thin-lipped protagonist.

She supports the incursion of the railroad to the area, setting her against the sentiments of the local cattle ranchers and the sheriff, led by McIvers (Ward Bond). In particular opposition to Vienna is Emma Small (Mercedes McCambriddge), who wants her dead and her saloon destroyed. Into this situation rides Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), a former gunfighter and former lover of Vienna. Bittersweet is their reunion, but he decides to help her out.

Emma blames Vienna’s current lover, the Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), for a stagecoach robbery that resulted in the death of her brother. (Supposedly, Emma resents the Kid’s relationship with Vienna as well.) Finally, the townfolk give Vienna, and the Kid and his gang, 24 hours to get out of town.

Vienna goes to the bank to withdraw all her money the next day, planning to leave. The Kid and his gang, frustrated, angry, and broke, rob the town bank while Vienna is there. An enraged Emma, fresh from her brother’s funeral, blames Vienna and leads a posse of men dressed in mourning clothes to kill Vienna, Johnny, and the Kid and his gang. They capture one of the Kid’s men and hang him, and almost hang Vienna, who is saved by Johnny. Emma and her men burn down Vienna’s place.

By hook and crook, the posse finds the gang’s hideout behind a waterfall. They attack, and most of the gang is killed. Emma herself guns down the Kid. Vienna kills Emma. She and Johnny leave town.

Placing women in leading roles subverts the usual horse-opera dynamics. Vienna stands for integrity and reason; Emma is a vengeful Fury, out to destroy anyone who stands in her way. Later film critics have outlined the film’s lesbian subtext – Vienna is a butch hero and Emma, sexually frustrated by her inability to accept her own attraction to Vienna, wants to blot out the object of her affection.

The film sports many of the hallmark names of Western film – Ernest Borgnine, Royal Dano, John Carradine, Denver Pyle, and Sheb Wooley. The shifting psychosexual terrain makes this an oddball kind of feature, one in which the passions and actions are in the purview of the ladies.

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

NFR Project: 'The House in the Middle' (1954)

NFR Project: “The House in the Middle”

Premiere: 1954

13 min.

Oh my God! First, read Kelly Chisholm’s brilliant and funny explanatoryessay at the National Film Registry. It covers all the points I was going to cover! And more!

This is a civil defense film, much like Duck and Cover, which I covered previously and which you can read here. It comes from the birth of the Atomic Era, which affected me personally – I grew up downwind of a nuclear weapons plant, and had an atomic bomb shelter in our basement. You can read that story here.

This is yet another attempt by the U.S. government to instruct and inspire the public by making it seem believable to be able to survive a nuclear attack. In this film (sponsored by commercial interests – the National Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association), we are told that keeping your yard and home tidy (and painting it with the sponsor’s product) increases your chances of surviving an atomic blast.

We are shown three miniature houses in the American desert, set up for a nuclear weapons test. The explosion damages all the properties, to some extent. However, the tidy house of the title does not immediately catch fire. Ergo . . .

The 1950s had its own vibe. So many created perfect little lives economically; yet paranoia thrived and ambiguity about America’s dropping of the Bomb plagued us. We had to imagine it as just another weapon – the indefensibility of the act was not yet prevalent. (I had an uncle, stationed in the Philippines, who would have been part of the infantry force attacking the Japanese mainland. He was very happy about the Bomb.)

The Cold War made us go mad. Those “Commie bastards” had the Bomb too, and the freedom of the world was threatened. We stockpiled nuclear weapons and built rockets to deliver them. Fighting Communism was the rallying cry for nationalists, a cry that still echoes today.

The film’s transparent attempt to calm public fears by urging it to conform its appearance and behavior to certain norms is sadly hilarious now. Keep a tidy home and avert annihilation? Such magic feathers we clutched to ourselves at the time.

They monetized the existential despair at the prospect of obliteration.

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

NFR Project: 'Carmen Jones' (1954)

 

NFR Project: “Carmen Jones”

Dir: Otto Preminger

Scr: Harry Kleiner

Pho: Sam Leavitt

Ed: Louis R. Loeffler

Premiere: Oct. 28, 1954

105 min.

This film is a real problem. Is it progressive or retrogressive?

Time has not been kind to Carmen Jones. It all started with famous lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II’s desire to modernize Bizet’s famous 1875 opera Carmen. (The opera was itself derived from Prosper Merimee’s 1845 novel.) It was Hammerstein’s desire to indicate a contemporary, English-language equivalent of the supposed “hot-blooded” sentiments of the soldiers and the bandits in the old Spain of the opera’s story.

That he did so using Black America is today unforgivable. Mark you, the Broadway show ran for 502 performances. Carmen is probably the most popular and often-performed opera. It seemed like a great idea at the time. This film made money. Dorothy Dandridge was nominated for a Best Actress award at the Oscars – the first time a Black woman had won such a nomination.

It must have seemed like affirmative action to Hammerstein, Preminger, and the rest. To make a feature film in color! In widescreen! With an all-Black cast!

But it’s patronizing. It assumes the Black response to life is fundamentally emotional and unpractical. Every character in this film (except the always-great Pearl Bailey, who, significantly, sings in her own voice) is just a slave to their passions. Which is congruent with Bizet’s Carmen, but here seems to be an excuse for viewing Black people as exotic, untamed, fundamentally alien people.

The movie follows the opera in a contemporary setting. Harry Belafonte is Joe, an Air Force cadet who dumps his earnest, moral girlfriend from back home (Olga James) for the hot-blooded, fiery Carmen (Dandridge). She gets him in trouble; he still loves her. She ruins his life. They intersect with a prizefighter named Husky Miller. He abandons everything for her, then she dumps him for Miller. So he kills her.

The music is Bizet’s, or it is Bizet-adjacent. Dandridge and Belafonte were noted singers: still, they were overdubbed by Marilyn Horne (white) and LeVern Hutcherson (black). The arias that remain are the familiar ones; they are set to lyrics that are overwrought and ineffectual. There is such a desperate attempt here to make "art" here.

The absence of a white person in the film is glaring; the reviewer for the Los Angeles Times wrote, “This glared like chauvinism in reverse.” You have a gaggle of white people who construct a vernacular for Black people, and then fail to inhabit it. To what? To not “break the spell” of this precocious fantasy? It dies of its intentions. It is exploitative. Would it have been made with a white cast?

Andrew Pulver of the Guardian wrote, in 2007, that the film was “a relic from the gruesome social straitjacket that was segregation; every frame, you feel, is freighted with the tension imposed by the never-appearing white folks.”

One writer, notably, encountered the film on the page. James Baldwin’s “Carmen Jones: The Light Is Dark Enough” from his Notes of Native Son is a masterful deconstruction of the film. You can read it here.

Baldwin tags the movie as “a wedding of the blank, lofty solemnity with which Hollywood so often approaches ‘works of art’ and the really quite helpless condescension with which Hollywood has always handled Negroes.”

He continues, “ . . . it is important that the movie always be able to repudiate any suggestion that Negroes are amoral—which it can only do, considering the role of the Negro in the national psyche, by repudiating any suggestion that Negroes are not white.”

He describes the absence of white people thusly: “This seals the action off, as it were, in a vacuum in which the spectacle of color is divested of its danger.”

“One is not watching either tenderness or love, and one is certainly not watching the complex and consuming passion which leads to life or death—one is watching a timorous and vulgar misrepresentation of these things.”

“One wonders, it is true, if Negroes are really going to become the ciphers this movie makes them out to be; but, since they have until now survived public images even more appalling, one is encouraged to hope, for their sake and the sake of the Republic, that they will continue to prove themselves incorrigible.”

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 House in the Middle.

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.