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.