7 Men from Now (1956)

Film: 7 Men from Now (1956)

Stars: Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, Lee Marvin, Walter Reed

Director: Budd Boetticher

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Randolph Scott: click here to learn more about Mr. Scott (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I mentioned in the kickoff to this month, we're going to be doing something unusual this month for Randolph Scott's career.  While normally we would watch a movie to match the era that we're discussing, with Randolph Scott, we're actually going to focus our viewings on a specific era, with three of the seven films that he made with Budd Boetticher, generally considered to be the most important films of his career.  We are going to discuss that partnership more in-depth in the third week of this month, but today, we'll kick off and discuss Scott's career from its beginning.  Scott got his start doing stage work at the Pasadena Playhouse, which led to a long-term star contract with Paramount.  Tall & handsome, he was made for the movies, and westerns quickly became his calling.  The earliest part of Scott's career was actually focusing on the novels of Zane Grey, who in the early 1900's was one of the bestselling novelists, and along with Louis L'Amour, was one of the most important western novelists of the 20th Century.  At the time, Scott made ten Zane Grey adaptations in short order for Paramount, and while these didn't get him into A-List stardom (he'll hit that next weekend), they did make him a notable in Hollywood.

(Spoilers Ahead) We're now going to shift over to 7 Men from Now, which was the first film that Boetticher & Scott made together, and they only did so because John Wayne was busy.  The movie is about Ben Stride (Scott), the former sheriff of a western town called Silver Springs, who comes across a young couple named John & Anne Greer (Reed & Russell) who are stuck in the mud.  After he pulls them out, they insist he join them along the trail, as they head to a town called Flora Vista, which we soon learn is where a group of men are holed up after a Wells Fargo robbery.  It turns out that these men killed Ben Stride's wife, where she worked as a clerk to make money after Stride refused to become a deputy after he lost the sheriff's election.  Along the way, the three meet up with Bill Masters (Marvin), an old nemesis of Stride's from Silver Springs, who has his eye set on both the Wells Fargo box and Anne Greer.  As the film progresses, in a surprisingly good twist for a western of this era (I didn't see it coming), John Greer turns out to be an unknowing accomplice of the "7 men" having the Wells Fargo box in his wagon the whole time.  This sets up a showdown, one from which only Stride & Anne are left standing.

The movie, as I mentioned, was originally intended for John Wayne (who was busy making The Searchers), and as a result Wayne recommended Scott, his costar from The Spoilers which we talked about last month.  Wayne is a much better actor than Scott, who even in his best films rarely equalled his more magnetic costars, and this is true in 7 Men from Now, where Lee Marvin knocks Scott off of the screen every time he enters as a dastardly, lusty villain.  But what makes Boetticher's film work with Scott is that he really employs that stoicism.  If you have an actor who isn't expressive, make that part of the script, and here Scott plays this dignified relic of the west, someone who is already part of the myth, who doesn't need to prove himself because everyone else stands back in awe.  As a result, the two-dimensional approach Scott frequently made to his films becomes an asset to the picture itself.  We'll cover two more Boetticher collaborations between the two, and I'm curious if this will continue into those movies.

The film, though it's made on-the-cheap, has some great technical aspects as well.  William Clothier, who would eventually get a pair of Oscar nominations for Best Cinematography in the 1960's for some of the late-era westerns, uses a variety of inventive camera angles to make the film look like it's more expensive than it is, such creative care you wouldn't normally expect from a low-grade 1950's western.  And Henry Vars' music is wonderful.  I have a soft spot for the western dirge's that frequently opened movies like this in the 1950's, and the title song is appropriately solemn and over-the-top, but the music throughout really rings well.  Combine that with Marvin's excellent work as the villain, and you've got a strong picture, one that audiences at the time didn't really subscribe toward, but I'm glad critics eventually rescued.

Our Miss Brooks (1956)

Film: Our Miss Brooks (1956)

Stars: Eve Arden, Gale Gordon, Don Porter, Robert Rockwell, Jane Morgan, Richard Crenna, Nick Adams

Director: Al Lewis

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Eve Arden: click here to learn more about Ms. Arden (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I am going to attempt something that I don't entirely know if I'll be able to pull off today with another Saturdays with the Stars double-feature (it's entirely possible that this becomes briefly into Sunday).  The copy of the movie that I wanted to watch later today for a double feature (I'm aware we missed last week) isn't great, but I'm going to hunt for a better copy later today or I'm going to find a different movie as I don't like leaving Eve Arden totally in the lurch with only three films for the month (she's such a good & varied actress, I want at least one of her post-Our Miss Brooks films to be watched).  So for now, with hope in my eyes, we're going to start out with Our Miss Brooks the big-screen adaptation, and hopefully we'll finish off her month later today or early tomorrow (and in April, we get back to once a week...that's more me begging the universe to calm down after an unmanageable March).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Connie Brooks (Arden), an English teacher who has recently moved to town and gotten a job at a local school.  It's there that she meets the biology teacher Mr. Boynton (Rockwell), whom she becomes enamored with who largely is oblivious to her romantic pursuits of him.  Meanwhile, Connie is asked to tutor Gary Nolan (Adams), the son of the richest man in town Lawrence Nolan (Porter), who also takes a shine to Connie.  A side plot involves Connie's boss Mr. Conklin (Gordon) trying to run for school superintendent, in hopes of gaining more power over his situation.  These two worlds collide when Connie becomes his campaign manager after Conklin promises Boynton a promotion...and a salary that would grant her an engagement ring.  In the end, while Conklin doesn't get that job (he quits after he realizes it won't pay well enough), Connie still gets her man (even if her engagement ring is stolen by a chimpanzee at the zoo).

We're used to the concept of big-screen continuations of television series today, with shows like Sex and the City and The Simpsons pulling their universe onto the big-screen and using that as a new launchpad for the future of the show, but that's not really what Our Miss Brooks is.  While much of the original show's cast (including Arden, Gordon, Rockwell, Morgan, & Crenna) were brought in for this, it was a reboot.  After all, the original series (which had gone off of the air in 1956, when this was released) had ended with Connie marrying Mr. Boynton as well, so this was duplicative of the show, and basically started it from the beginning again.

As a result, the movie, while charming, plays as a stretched out episode of a sitcom more than a film, and doesn't quite work.  It's easy to see why this was a successful sitcom through this lens, of course-Arden is funny, making every lusty side eye from Connie pull off beautifully, and she & Gordon are quite fun together as adversaries turned reluctant partners.  But the movie repeats itself & the comedic bits feel too sitcom-y to work in the confines of a larger movie...it isn't really adapted for the big screen in this sense.  I liked it for what it was, but the seams are showing.  As a result, I leave a bit mixed on the idea of this, but like that Arden had success, and get why this was the role that would win her an Emmy Award.

Forever, Darling (1956)

Film: Forever, Darling (1956)

Stars: Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, James Mason, Louis Calhern, Natalie Schafer

Director: Alexander Hall

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Lucille Ball click here to learn more about Ms. Ball (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We last left Lucille Ball in 1942, when her contract with RKO was expiring and she was signing with MGM.  It is entirely possible that Lucille Ball's career might've ended roughly at that time, a lot of promise but only a few brief years of stardom.  Ball's time at MGM wasn't particularly successful-she led a few movies, but she stayed in her genre of forgettable B-Movies, and by the end of the decade she was floating from studio-to-studio.  It was about that time, though, that fate intervened and Ball was hired on the radio show My Favorite Husband, which became a hit.  This led CBS to hire Lucille Ball for a TV show.  Ball had one major demand when she agreed to sign, though-that her husband Desi Arnaz would be her fictional husband on the show.  CBS, desperate to get a name as big as Ball's, agreed, and Ball (largely doing this to save her struggling marriage), signed on to make I Love Lucy.

It's hard to grasp exactly how big I Love Lucy was in its day, particularly in an era where TV hits are less about universality and more about streaming revenues.  But when I say pretty much every person in America watched I Love Lucy, I mean everyone watched it.  44 million people watched Lucille Ball give birth, roughly 14.4 million homes watching it.  To put that into perspective, nearly 74% of all American homes with TV sets watched Lucy Ricardo give birth (for comparison's sake, the Super Bowl, the quintessential American television get-together got barely half that last year).  Ball & Arnaz, through talent, smarts, & a bit of luck, had gone from being a B-Grade movie star and a night club act (respectively) to being two of the most famous people in the country.  And so it obviously made sense that when they asked MGM to sign a two-picture deal, the studio jumped at the opportunity.

(Spoilers Ahead) Forever, Darling features Arnaz & Ball in familiar roles, playing husband-and-wife.  Lorenzo Vega (Arnaz) is a chemical engineer working on creating a new type of insect repellent who marries a socialite named Susan (Ball).  The two have an idyllic marriage at first, but as time goes on they grow to like each other less-and-less, with Susan wanting a grander life with her high society friends, while Vega dislikes this and wants a simpler life with his wife, focusing on his research.  Things come to a head when Susan's Guardian Angel (Mason), shows up, telling her that she needs to look after her marriage & try harder to become interested in her husband before the union eventually falls apart.  Hijinks ensue, with Susan initially having moments where the Guardian Angel (invisible to all but her) causes many around her to think she's gone mad, but eventually she takes his advice, and goes with Lorenzo on a work trip.  While they have some calamities (it wouldn't be Lucy & Desi without some physical comedy bits, including a particularly funny one with a sinking boat), they end up making up & going back to their true romance.

Forever, Darling is not a great movie, and it wasn't a hit in 1956.  Part of the problem for audiences at the time was that everyone wanted Lucille Ball to just be Lucy Ricardo; this was, in fact a problem that she'd endure her whole life, though we'll get to that a bit more next week.  Forever, Darling is not the happy-go-lucky Ricardos though...if anything, it was more what Arnaz & Ball's marriage was like in real life, as Arnaz's alcoholism, gambling, & infidelity (not to mention both of their tempers) regularly put their successful professional partnership at risk.  No one wanted to see Lucy & Ricky unhappy, and the two-picture deal with MGM dissolved.

I don't have as much problem with seeing Ball, a talented actress, do something other than Lucy Ricardo (as we've seen throughout this month, she was a pretty versatile performer).  But Forever, Darling is too long & too boring to be of much interest beyond being a curiosity.  Ball & Arnaz, probably aware that the public didn't want to see them too unhappy onscreen (I Love Lucy was still on the air and they would continue working together until their divorce in 1960), can't fully commit to the rougher patches of the movie, and so a modern viewer feels like they are getting whiplash.  This would end up being the third and final theatrically-released movie to feature Arnaz & Ball.  Next week, as we close out our month with Ball, we will take a peak beyond I Love Lucy, and the decades that Ball would continue to work in, with many hits (and two notorious bombs).

The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)

Film: The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)

Stars: Jeff Morrow, Rex Reason, Leigh Snowden, Gregg Palmer, Maurice Manson, Ricou Browning

Director: John Sherwood

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

We are officially on the last of the thirty Universal Monster Movies today with The Creature Walks Among Us.  I will be launching a list of all of the films on my Letterboxd (follow me here) at some point in the next week, so watch out for that, but today we're going to be focusing on The Creature Walks Among Us, not only the last film I've needed to see to complete my set, but generally considered to be the last film, period, of the original run of the Universal Classic Monster movies.  The film, the third of the Creature from the Black Lagoon series, was one I was intrigued by.  I thought the first Creature film was truly wonderful, a spellbinding, excellent horror film.  I thought Revenge of the Creature, though, was a gigantic dud coming off of the first one, totally mindless in its approach.  The Creature Walks Among Us therefore posed a question-was it more Column A or Column B when it came to what I thought of this monster's finale?

(Spoilers Ahead) We start in the Everglades, where the Gill-Man (Browning) has taken up residence.  A team of scientists, including lothario Jud (Palmer), beautiful Marcia (Snowden), and her mad, jealous husband Dr. William Barton (Morrow) are all trying to find the Gill-Man, though for different reasons.  When they find the Gill-Man, it becomes clear that Barton wants to manipulate it, to make it more like man, and use the surgeries he's performing to find a way to make it so that humans can live in space (honestly, the reasoning here is pretty sloppy even for a 1956 B-horror sequel, but let's just give a pass on this one since it's not all-that-crucial to the story).  In doing so, he makes it so that the creature cannot breathe underwater but instead uses his lungs.  This makes him start to become more "human," but the problem is that the men around him are not acting in such a way.  Barton, in particular, after he is driven mad by jealousy against Jud hitting on his wife, murders Jud, and in the process the Gill-Man kills him, escaping but with a different, more human attitude, back to the sea, though we do not yet know if he can reclaim it.

The Creature Walks Among Us is, for me, an improvement over the second film, though it's not in the same vein of the larger Universal Monster movies.  For starters, it feels more like a 1950's film than almost any picture we've seen, with a focus on nuclear war & an altered humanity that wasn't present even in the most political of the previous decade's horror films.  This has diminishing returns not just because it makes the plot mildly nonsensical, but it also shifts a lot of the focus away from the Gill-Man, who is a decidedly smaller role here than in the previous two films.  This isn't bad, exactly, but it's not what I was expecting.

And with that, we're saying adieu to the Universal Monster movies.  There are reviews for all of the previous 29 films listed below (along with a host of other horror films from previous seasons of this series).  We aren't done with the month yet (we have two more horror films before we close out this season), but I feel both a sense of accomplishment and sadness at hitting this milestone.  I started this project in part because I had never seen Dracula somehow, and thought it was time I got that off the list, and so fell in love with the cheesy motif of the picture that I couldn't stop watching.  While there are certainly other horror films from this era, it's bittersweet to hit the end-of-the-line for the original thirty Universal Monster flicks.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Mummy's Ghost, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, She-Wolf of London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Revenge of the Creature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob, The Masque of the Red Death

The Swan (1956)

Film: The Swan (1956)

Stars: Grace Kelly, Alec Guinness, Louis Jourdan, Agnes Moorehead, Jessie Royce Landis

Director: Charles Vidor

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Grace Kelly-click here to learn more about Ms. Kelly (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In April of 1955, Grace Kelly headed to Cannes as part of the US delegation for that year's festivities.  While she was there, there was an arranged meeting with Prince Rainier of nearby Monaco, which led to a courtship, which led to one of the most spectacular moments in movie history when Grace Kelly, movie star extraordinaire, became a literal Hollywood princess.  As we'll discuss below, this is where Grace Kelly's acting career ended-just weeks after winning an Oscar, the highest honor for an actress, she was basically on her way out of the industry, as Kelly would never work again as an actress in films after going royal.  She had two movies in the can before she left Hollywood which came out after she was a princess.  One was High Society, which I've seen (and which pales in comparison to the original Philadelphia Story).  The other was one I hadn't, and so I saw The Swan for this project, and as luck would have it (for both me and for MGM's publicity department) the film stars Kelly...playing a princess.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Princess Alexandra (Kelly) who is a relatively low-ranking royal living her years out with her mother Princess Beatrix (Landis), after the announcement that Crown Prince Albert (Guinness) will be visiting.  Beatrix is insistent that this is the opportunity they've been waiting for to get back their stature, marrying the Crown Prince & making Alexandra a queen.  The only problem is that Alexandra is a bit of a bore, and Albert is far more interested in music & other nerdy endeavors to give Alexandra much heed.  Beatrix comes up with a plan to have her sons' handsome tutor Nicholas (Jourdan) try to woo Alexandra in hopes of making Albert jealous, but the plan backfires spectacular when it turns out that Nicholas is already in love with Alexandra...and quickly she is in love with him.  When the Queen (Moorehead) comes to town, everything comes to a head as the love triangle must find one side to stand on.

According to what I've read, the producers of The Swan (based on a play by Molnar) considered changing the traditional ending of the film, which ends with Alexandra & Nicholas apart because she cannot marry a commoner.  However, after Princess Margaret declined to marry Peter Townsend, they decided the ending should stand, and so the movie ends with Alexandra likely to marry either no one or (more probably) Albert, knowing that neither will be particularly happy together but they've fulfilled their duty to their country.  It might be this reason why I like it.  The Swan is not a particularly good movie (even if the sets are really fun & the supporting cast is decent), but I enjoyed it.  It's the kind of turn-off-your-brain romantic drama that you can sometimes get sucked into on a rainy afternoon, and that was the mood I was in for the picture.

Kelly is a dud in the movie, pretty blasé (though it is fun to see her acting with a leading man who is actually her age after she wooed men 10+ years older than her the rest of the month) and more ornamental.  Watching Kelly this month (and I've now seen virtually every film she ever made), I'm struck by how Hitchcock is the only director who ever really got her as a performer.  She is so much better-suited for his work, and she fits in some ways with actresses like Lizabeth Scott or January Jones, who were really good at one specific thing, but otherwise fell flat.

Her life would look like a storybook, but wouldn't exactly be one.  Reports of the marriage run from it being a good one with some problems to one that felt isolating for Kelly.  She would give Rainer an heir (and two spares), continuing on the line of the Monaco royal family, but she had to give up acting, despite attempts to get back in roles in Marnie and The Turning Point.  Kelly's life was cut short in 1982 when she suffered a stroke while driving with her daughter Stephanie-Stephanie was fine, but Kelly died due to injuries to her brain and chest at the age of just 52.  Next month we're going to take a look at an actress who was one Kelly's contemporaries, one who like Kelly would work with Alfred Hitchcock early on in her career, but while Kelly's film career was defined by Hitchcock, this actress would make him a rather dismissible chapter in an otherwise other-worldly career.

Trapeze (1956)

Film: Trapeze (1956)
Stars: Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Gina Lollobrigida, Kay Jurado, Thomas Gomez
Director: Carol Reed
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Gina Lollobrigida-click here to learn more about Ms. Lollobrigida (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

One of the reasons that Sophia Loren translated a few years after Gina Lollobrigida in a way that the latter never did (though she enjoyed immense international stardom) might have had something to do with Howard Hughes, and it would be irresponsible to not at least mention Lollobrigida's complicated relationship with Hughes in one of these articles so we're going to do that today.  Hughes met Lollobrigida early in her career, and despite her being married, tried (unsuccessfully) to sleep with her.  Hughes did, however, successfully get Lollobrigida into a contract, that he maintained for seven years, from the early 1950's until 1959, which made it impossible for Lollobrigida to make films in the United States during that time frame unless Hughes approved (which he never did-Hughes was famous for signing actresses to contracts and then never having projects for them).  As a result, all of Lollobrigida's major English-language successes that decade had to be filmed in Europe, rather than Loren, who was able to make movies like Houseboat domestically.  Despite this limitation, Lollobrigida did have some big hits during the heyday of her career, and one of the highest-flying (pun intended) was the United Artists smash Trapeze, filmed in Paris.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place at a circus, where Mike Ribble (Lancaster) once was the main attraction, able to execute a triple somersault mid-air.  Ribble, however, injured and nearly killed himself doing this, and hasn't been doing trapeze since because he's now unable to be the main attraction rather than the "tosser."  A brash young newcomer with real talent, Tino Orsini (Curtis) comes trying to learn from Ribble, and while Ribble doesn't want to teach him, he sees Orsini's talent and reluctantly accepts.  While they are making strong progress, they are interrupted by a beautiful woman who wants stardom, and sees an opportunity to get it, Lola (Lollobrigida), who is obviously in love with Ribble, but knows that she must romance Orsini to get into the act as Ribble sees through her seduction.  As the film progresses, the two men are at odds, as neither wants to give in with Lola, as it's clear Ribble's initial ability to seduce Lola has turned into love on his side as well.  In the end, the two men are able to execute the triple, but not maintain the partnership as Orsini becomes a star, and Ribble goes back into retirement, likely to romance the other woman who has been pining for him from the start, Katy Jurado's Rosa.

The movie's lack of Oscar nominations kind of confuses me.  This isn't a great movie, but it's not a bad one, and it made a fortune for United Artists, so you'd think there would have been at least some push to get it nominated for the one asset it clearly has a full deck on-the cinematography.  Robert Krasker had won an Oscar just a few years earlier for working with Carol Reed on the masterpiece The Third Man, and here shows that his technical skill didn't diminish in color.  The movie is beautifully shot, with great aerial swings from Lancaster (a former circus performer) and the stunt team, and Lollobrigida looks hauntingly beautiful in scenes where you can just see her magnetic eyes flashing at the camera.  It's the biggest triumph of the film, which like I said is a solid movie, but one that falls into repetitive trappings with the love story.

As for Lollobrigida, she's good but the script doesn't entirely know what to do with her.  This may be because the book that it's adapted from has a very dark ending, and one that wouldn't have been suitable for 1956, though it'd be intriguing now (essentially we find that Ribble was in love with Orsini, and murdered the Lola character in hopes of being with him, but the plan backfires when Orsini is executed for the crime instead).  As a result, we don't always know when Lola is acting, as the only time she seems to be telling the truth is to Thomas Gomez's circus owner, and their scenes aren't plentiful in the back-half of the movie.  As a result, what could have been a truly intriguing ending, with Ribble getting his chance at glory (even if it's given to someone else) gets confused by an over-complicated love triangle.

OVP: Bus Stop (1956)

Film: Bus Stop (1956)
Stars: Marilyn Monroe, Don Murray, Arthur O'Connell, Betty Field, Eileen Heckart, Hope Lange
Director: Joshua Logan
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actor-Don Murray)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Marilyn Monroe-click here to learn more about Ms. Monroe (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

After Monroe's massive success with The Seven Year Itch, she started a very public feud with her studio, Fox, publicly trying to demand more power and money in exchange for the clear value she was bringing to the studio.  Though initially rebuffed by the press, Monroe won the standoff, and was one of the key contributors to taking down the studio system with a then unheard-of deal: Monroe signed a seven-year contract with Fox, and would through that only make four films for the studio, with near complete creative control (she'd get to pick the projects, directors, and cinematographers).  More groundbreaking was the fact that she would get to make movies not at Fox of her own choosing, and would get to produce them as well.  Fox did this because they were in need of Monroe-with the decline of Betty Grable a few years earlier, she was by-far the most important actress on the lot, and was too valuable to deny, even if her demands were high.  Monroe's first film for Fox after the standoff was a bit risky on-paper: a drama, albeit a lighter one, which would be the most challenging acting role of her career to-date.  However, as we'll see, Bus Stop benefited both Monroe and the studio in 1956.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Beau (Murray), a young man from the backwoods of Montana, who is an excellent cowboy, but has no social graces, and has no experience with girls (it is heavily underlined throughout the film that he is a virgin).  He and his father-figure friend Virgil (O'Connell) go down to Phoenix for a rodeo, and once there, they meet Cherie (Monroe), a girl who sings (badly) at a saloon, and is basically there to swindle men into buying her drinks.  Beau doesn't see Cherie the way that the rest of the world does, thinking her an "angel" rather than a washed-up saloon girl who has had "experience" with other men.  He proclaims they are going to get married, to her chagrin, and we proceed to see his courtship of her.  Eventually, he learns he cannot take her by force, and that it's time for him to grow up, but at that exact moment, Cherie has a change-of-heart, and ends up going off into Montana with him, with Virgil abandoning the two of them, knowing that his time as caretaker for his friend is done.

With the perspective of hindsight, Bus Stop is, well, an odd movie.  Monroe is a weird fit for straight drama, and as a result the film doesn't always play as seriously as it should have (it was even submitted at the Golden Globes as a comedy).  Some have said that Monroe borrowed her accent and line readings from watching Kim Stanley originate the role of Cherie on Broadway, but if that's the case than Stanley also had an odd inflection, because while the accent work is fine, it's hard to tell what Cherie is thinking most of the movie.  She wanders back-and-forth between being curious about Beau and then repulsed by him, but there's no indication as to why she loves him.  In the hands of a different actress (say, Elizabeth Taylor), she might have underscored the reason that she finds him attractive is that he wants to see the real girl everyone else assumes isn't there, but that's not what Monroe gives us, and it's not really what's coming from Murray, either.  Murray is undoubtedly a lead performer here, and does a better job in finding consistency to his Beau, but without a better script, Murray as written is such a louse you don't want him to end up with Marilyn.  He's devastatingly handsome (one of the rare times that Monroe was cast opposite someone that might conceivably rival her own sex appeal), but Beau is a one-note jerk, someone who gets by because he's too stupid and too naive to be mad at for long, as he basically kidnaps Cherie two-thirds of the way through the movie, and doesn't nearly pay for it enough.  Murray's performance works in parts because he so fully-commits, but neither he nor the script can figure out exactly why Cherie is better off with Beau or why Beau should be rooted for by the audience other than "it's better than keeping her in the saloon," and, well, that's kind of a terrible answer.

But that didn't matter for Monroe.  This film gave her serious acclaim in a way that she'd never experienced before, and to some degree, would never experience again.  She was nominated for a Golden Globe award for the film, and though she didn't get an Oscar nomination, Murray did and Logan was cited by the DGA.  Bus Stop proved to critics that Monroe might be a serious actress to consider (my opinion was in the minority that she feels a bit over-her-head), and it also came with a massive pile of cash.  The movie was a huge hit for Fox, proving that the studio had been correct to sign Monroe to such an unusual contract, and it proved that Monroe understood her fans enough to take a risk that would pay off.

OVP: Anastasia (1956)

Film: Anastasia (1956)
Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Yul Brynner, Helen Hayes, Akim Tamiroff
Director: Anatole Litvak
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Actress-Ingrid Bergman*, Score)
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

As y'all know, I've been doing a bit of cleaning out of my DVR in recent weeks, and I decided on Thursday & Friday evenings that I was in the mood to both clean out the DVR and to watch something familiar to me, so I watched a trio of movies that we'll get to this week that are going to get the rare "Not So" in front of the Snap Judgment Ranking.  This is normally reserved for when I decide to re-watch a movie and put my thoughts for posterity on this blog, and more often it's for movies I've seen a dozen times.  This isn't the case for the films this week.  While I have seen Anastasia, I haven't seen it more than once, and it's been maybe 20 years since I last watched the picture, so while certain scenes of it are firmly in my memory, there are other sequences where I completely had forgotten they'd even existed.  Eventually we'll get to the 1956 OVP, and the main reason I wanted to re-watch this is the odd juxtaposition of my love for Ingrid Bergman (one of my all-time favorite actresses) and the fact that so many of her Oscar-winning roles are "meh" in my memory.  Anastasia was her second trophy, and one that came after a huge hibernation period (where, arguably, she had her most creative acting starring in five films with her then-husband Roberto Rossellini).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a highly fictionalized look at the life of Anna Anderson (here called Anna Koreff, but it's impossible to not see this clearly being about Anderson herself).  Anna (Bergman) is a woman who has been in-and-out of mental hospitals, and remembers little about her childhood.  She bares something of a resemblance to what the Grand Duchess Anastasia might have looked like in adulthood, and General Bounine (Brynner) smells an opportunity.  Along with his associate Boris (Tamiroff), they set about to train Anna to become the Grand Duchess, grilling her with facts, but as they continue they start to question if, in fact, she is the Grand Duchess, as she continues to know things that make them question whether or not she's real.  In the end, Anna never truly proves herself to be who she claims she is, but she convinces the Dowager Empress (Hayes), the Grand Duchess's grandmother, that she is her granddaughter, only to then leave her behind, realizing that she's in love with Bounine, and the two run off together, the Dowager Empress content in the knowledge that at least one member of her family is still alive, and now happy.

There's a weird sort of conundrum here.  The mystery of what happened to the Romanovs, and if in fact the youngest princess did escape and survive the Revolution, was one of the great unsolved mysteries of the 20th Century, something we assumed would never be conclusively proven.  This was certainly the case the first time that I saw this movie in the mid-90's.  However, in 2007, DNA testing was done that proved conclusively that the Czar, his wife, and their five children had all died (they found the body of what was assumed to be Anastasia and her brother Alexei, the final missing two, though it's possible that the other body was of Anastasia's sister Maria) were found and proved that this mystery had a rather sad, humdrum ending; there was not, in fact, a little girl out there who was actually a princess & didn't know it, but instead that little girl died during the Russian Revolution.

In some ways this diminishes this film and some of its grandeur.  We know that Anna Anderson wasn't Anastasia, and while you can suspend belief in the film, it takes something away from Bergman's work if you try to keep this grounded in historical accuracy at all.  The performance isn't great-my memory was correct.  She's fine, and regal, and looks great in a dress, and the one scene between she and Hayes where she has to convinced the Grand Duchess that she could in fact be her granddaughter is the best in the movie (random aside, but it's weird that Bergman won here when Hayes, who is better in the movie, didn't even get nominated considering she was staging something of a comeback at the time on the big screen).  But there's not enough beneath the eyes of this character-there's no sense of what Anna actually believes, which feels off to me.  The score, the only other nomination (again-where were the Costume nominations for this movie?!?) is much better, and thankfully doesn't just rely upon Russian cliches to fill out the music.

OVP: Around the World in 80 Days (1956)

Film: Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
Stars: Cantinflas, David Niven, Shirley MacLaine, Robert Newton
Director: Michael Anderson
Oscar History: 8 nominations/5 wins (Best Picture*, Director, Cinematography*, Film Editing*, Score*, Adapted Screenplay*, Costume Design, Art Direction)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

As I start to work my way through my "Quarantine To Do List," one of the tasks I'm working on is finally starting to make my DVR manageable again.  Right now, if I had to guess, there have to be at least 70 Oscar Viewing Project films on that thing (not to mention three episodes of Westworld, which I tend to stockpile as I genuinely like the show, but it can be convoluted if you don't have a few in a row to watch), and I keep putting more random films on there, so it's high-time I start conquering it (like many of you, I suspect, I'm working on a lot of projects that I've put off for a while, and this is a big one for me).  We're going to kick off this clean-up (expect a few truly random movies to be headed your way in the next couple of months) with a bit of a bang-the rare (for me) unseen Best Picture winner, Around the World in 80 Days.

(Spoilers Ahead) When I mentioned that I was seeing Around the World in 80 Days to a friend yesterday, their reaction was one of "eek!" more than anything else, as the Jules Verne adaptation is notoriously one of Oscar's least-celebrated top prize recipients.  The film itself is, in fact, very long, which is rarely a good sign for a movie that enjoys a bad reputation.  Essentially, for those who didn't read the book as a kid, the story is about Phileas Fogg (Niven), a punctual English gentlemen with something of a stubborn streak, and his manservant Passepartout (Cantinflas), whom he hires for an expedition around the world.  Fogg has made a bet with men at his club that he can circumnavigate the globe in under 80 days, and as he continues all of the United Kingdom begin tracking his expeditions.  Along the way he and Passepartout get into a series of adventures, including bullfighting, riding an elephant, and a train robbery.  They are accompanied for much of the trip by Princess Aouda (MacLaine, in an unfortunate case of brown-face from my favorite actress) and Inspector Fix (Newton), who is determined to prove that Phileas Fogg has robbed the Bank of England, but is continually thwarted in his efforts to arrest him.

Around the World in 80 Days isn't as bad as its reputation, but it's not a good movie & it's laughable in the same year as The Searchers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Written on the Wind, The Wrong Man, The Ten Commandments, and Giant that the Academy chose this of all movies to be its standard-bearer.  It's fun to watch, even if it's not funny at all, and I think it's meant to be.  At the time Cantinflas (who would get a Golden Globe win but no Oscar nomination, a rarity for a Best Picture winner) was a huge star in Mexican cinema, and was enjoying here his breakthrough into mainstream American film, but so much of his humor is based on either physical tricks that aren't particularly funny in hindsight (mistreatment of animals is a bigger part of this movie than you'd think, and it feels kind of icky in hindsight) or trading on racial humor.  I get what he's trying to do here, but it doesn't work sixty years after the fact, and no one else in the movie, not even Niven or MacLaine (both very good actors with the right material), are able to make much of the film.

The enjoyment in hindsight are the cameos and the sets.  Producer Mike Todd filmed a lot of the movie on-location, so you literally see scenes across the world that are actually quite wonderful.  Despite the story being a snore, the set designs are fun (especially in Spain & Japan), and the cinematography is expansive & lovely; I rarely have this complaint, but the only thing you can really fault the cinematography for is a lack of closeups.  It explores expansive vistas & makes sure that Todd got his money's worth.  The other Oscar nominations are less inviting.  Costumes are fine, but repetitive & not breaking new ground, while the editing is lacking (three hours without enough laughs is a struggle).  And the score is reliant on too many stereotypes and cliches when it comes to the music of the country they're in to really be interesting.

But the movie is nearly saved by the sheer volume of cameos.  This was one of the first films to employ a plethora of "guest appearances" from major stars of the era, and it keeps the otherwise humdrum plot ticking as you play "I Spy."  Some of these figures aren't as famous today, so it's a bit of a guessing game, but if you know even the remotest bit about classic Hollywood, you'll recognize a few figures.  Chief among my favorites were Marlene Dietrich as a saloon girl, Frank Sinatra as a piano player, Buster Keaton playing a train conductor, and John Carradine as an easily-vexed colonel, but there's enough here to keep you intrigued even while the movie slogs.  The film was a massive hit, proved Mike Todd a boy wonder (who was cut down in his prime), but it's really only the cameos and the location shooting that should be celebrated here.  After a long wait, I can confirm this is no "best" picture.

While the City Sleeps (1956)

Film: While the City Sleeps (1956)
Stars: Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Howard Duff, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, Sally Forrest, John Drew Barrymore, James Craig, Ida Lupino
Director: Fritz Lang
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Rhonda Fleming-click here to learn more about Ms. Fleming (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We continue on with our look at the career of Rhonda Fleming with a second noir film for RKO.  By this point in her career, Fleming's fame had largely passed, or at least was nearing its tail-end.  She'd continue to headline films for the rest of the 1950's, and we'll get to one of the final films that she starred in next week, but after several years as the Queen of 3-D, she was no longer at Paramount and RKO wasn't putting her in gigantic epics.  You can see that here when, rather than being the main character (or at least his love interest, as the billing order suggests), she's largely sixth or seventh in terms of actual screen credit, and doesn't even share the screen with the film's proper star, Dana Andrews.  Still, though, While the City Sleeps is an impressive and rather frank look at serial killers in the 1950's, focusing on a fictionalized version of the real "Lipstick Killer" William Heirens.

(Spoilers Ahead) After the death of his father, spoiled media heir Walter Kyne (Price) is pitting three key figures in his dad's news organization (Jon Day Griffith (Mitchell), Mark Loving (Sanders), & Harry Kritzer (Craig)) against each other for essentially the job of "CEO" of the organization while Kyne enjoys all of the wealth and privilege of being the titular head of the conglomerate.  Essentially he's using a recent string of murders of young women perpetrated by an unknown assailant (whom the audience knows from witnessing one of the crimes in the opening scene to be Barrymore's Robert Manners) as a proxy fight to see who is worthy enough of snagging the story and getting Kyne more sales.  Each of these men have a key asset in their fight: Griffith has Edward Mobley (Andrews), a savvy former crime beat journalist who now hosts an Edward R. Murrow-style nightly news program and recently has become engaged to Nancy (Forrest), Loving has Mildred Donner (Lupino) a lascivious and ambitious newspaper columnist, and Kritzer has Kyne's own wife Dorothy (Fleming) with whom he's having an affair.

The film progresses with each of these men and their allies duking it out, all-the-while trying to suss out Barrymore's killer.  The film is very much an ensemble piece (though Andrews is decidedly the lead), and this makes it easy to compare and contrast the different performances.  By far the best one is Lupino, playing up her sexuality to the hilt (she flirts with anyone that moves, particularly Mobley, getting him to kiss her while he's engaged to Nancy), and getting all of the best lines.  Barrymore is, well, not great as a mama's boy killer who seems to have no real reason other than his own adoption to hate the world and the women in it.  But the film keeps humming with us genuinely guessing who might end up on top in the newspaper fight, and watching Thomas Mitchell of all people try (unsuccessfully) to be corrupt when he's really just a good guy (as are all of Mitchell's characters).

Fleming's role is small (she's in more of the back half than the front half, but regardless she's got a relatively small part, especially compared to Forrest or Lupino).  She's good in it though-Fleming got her start as a character actress, and makes the most of the work she does here.  There's that great scene where she instinctively puts on her sunglasses to not give away any tells that she's lying, or the way that she speaks to Lupino's Mildred with the confidence of a woman who knows she'll never really be caught as long as she's beautiful.  It's not really a lead performance at all, but it's solid work, and she does a great job in the ensemble, even if Lupino is the one stealing the film.

Slightly Scarlet (1956)

Film: Slightly Scarlet (1956)
Stars: John Payne, Rhonda Fleming, Arlene Dahl, Kent Taylor, Ted de Corsia
Director: Allan Dwan
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Rhonda Fleming-click here to learn more about Ms. Fleming (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In the 1950's, there were essentially three women who could claim the title of "Queen of Technicolor" as the brief romance with that particular color motion process hit its heyday during that decade (despite being a part of cinema for some twenty years prior).  These three women claimed that by virtue of their red hair, and despite being major stars, none of them were nominated for Academy Awards.  Maureen O'Hara was one, but as I've seen most of O'Hara's chief work (thanks to having a mother and grandfather who were both fans of hers), so she wasn't part of this series.  Rhonda Fleming, one of the holders of this title, was another, but there was a third I toyed with adding to this series, potentially as a replacement for Fleming: Arlene Dahl.  Like Fleming, Dahl was a spellbinding redhead who was briefly a leading woman in the 1950's, noted more for her beauty and dazzling hair color than for her acting ability.  Both women were tabloid fixtures, going through husbands at a speed that Zsa Zsa Gabor would envy (Dahl is also from my home state of Minnesota), and both are still alive as of this publication.  This film, where the two sometime rivals teamed up, felt like a way to acknowledge Dahl in this series, while also of course continuing our look at the woman I chose to be our star of the month, Rhonda Fleming.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on two sisters June (Fleming) and Dorothy (Dahl), the former a good girl who works as a secretary for a mayoral candidate (Taylor) who is hopelessly in love with her (though the movie makes a concerted point to show that they haven't had sex yet) while the latter is a horny kleptomaniac.  The two both become involved with Ben Grace (Payne) a seemingly honorable man who makes his money on the wrong side of the law, working for a crime boss named Caspar (de Corsia) whom he runs out of town after the reforming candidate gets elected.  The problem is both that he continues to profit from Caspar's syndicate, and that both June & Dorothy are falling for him.  Dorothy gets herself into trouble with the law again, stealing a pearl necklace, but June uses the new mayor's connections to get her out, causing a friction in their relationship.  The movie ends with a shootout, as Dorothy has sex with Caspar, who then threatens to kill her sister (they've had a fight where they admitted their jealousies and frustrations with each other), and weirdly it's Ben, not Dorothy, who tries to save June, and in the process he's shot.  The film ends with us not knowing Ben's fate, and with June abandoning the mayor and her sister to be with him.

Slightly Scarlet is an unusual film right out the gate because it is clearly intended to be a film noir, but it's the rare one that's shot not just in color, but a really sophisticated Technicolor.  Legendary cinematographer John Alton (who won an Oscar for An American in Paris) plays with not only the beauty of his two leading ladies, but also with shadow, costume, and the elaborate set designs to create a really remarkable picture.  The oranges and pinks pop in your face, and I don't know that I've seen Fleming ever look so ravishing, with the shadow work highlighting her expressive face.  This is almost entirely the reason that this movie is remembered today, as otherwise it's a bit of a silly affair.  Jean-Luc Godard was a fan of the picture, proclaiming it one of the best films of 1956, but I feel like this is him indulging more in Alton's cinematography than trying to rescue a genre picture.  John Payne is a bit underwhelming in the lead, and the script is disjointed & usually more fun if you take the film as camp rather than a more grounded melodrama.

The two leading ladies achieve differing results.  The main reason that I picked Fleming as one of the 12 Stars of the Month this year (rather than someone like Dahl), was that she showed such promise in supporting parts, but largely dismissed her work as a leading woman, and critics did too.  There are no major scholarly articles about either of these women, but Fleming was more famous and worked with better directors so I figured she'd be the more interesting of the two to investigate.  I was right.  While she doesn't get as juicy of a part, she finds things to say about June that the script doesn't.  There's a pain in her eyes when she looks at the sister she has versus the one she knows she deserves, and you understand the betrayal of her sister better as the movie wears on.  Fleming was so good in short performances like Spellbound and Out of the Past, but she's also the best part of Slightly Scarlet, bringing a restrained glamour to June, someone who clearly never had to work for much in her life (men are going to hand it to her), but also grounded her decisions in a morality that feels innate, and not just a plot device.

Dahl, on the other hand, is kind of terrible, and only frequently in a fun way.  She plays Dorothy as an over-the-top vixen, unable to really contain herself, and her only really good acting opposite of Fleming in their big fight scene.  Dahl's career petered out almost completely after this, as she'd soon be suing Columbia for how she was depicted in 1956's Wicked as They Come (she'd have a second career act as a beauty guru years later), and I realized I'd only seen her in one other movie, 1964's Kisses for My President, where she was also laughably awful.  Dahl later bemoaned her career, but it's hard to blame Slightly Scarlet on a bad script alone-she's not adding anything of value to this movie other than glamour, and since she gets the most interesting character, it's hard to not fault her a bit for where the movie fails.  We'll continue on with Fleming next week, but I do want to acknowledge in the comments-if you have a favorite performance of Arlene Dahl's that could save my opinion of her, I'm all ears.

The Killing (1956)

Film: The Killing (1956)
Stars: Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen, Elisha Cook, Jr., Marie Windsor
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.

Some of the films in this series are on here because they were massive hits in their era, quickly becoming classics in their genre.  The Killing, on the other hand, was decidedly not a hit in its era-it barely even got released.  A low-budget film of the mid-1950's, it was paired as the second feature to Bandido!, a forgettable Robert Mitchum western from United Artists.  One could argue that only Hayden & Gray are even remotely known today on the cast list, and even then only for supporting parts in classic films, not as leads (Gray is John Wayne's love interest in Red River, Hayden was the corrupt police officer in The Godfather).  But the movie had an enormous impact after the film was made, and you can probably guess that considering who is listed above not as a star of the film, but as its director-this was one of the first movies that Stanley Kubrick, one of the cinema's greatest masters, ever made.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is really interesting in the way that it's set up, so the plot is going to sound a bit more mundane than it actually is.  The film is about a heist at a horse track, where a group of men led by Johnny Clay (Hayden) are pulling off an intricate robbery that will happen when one of the horses in the race is shot, and then another man breaks out into a fight to distract the guards long enough for Johnny to steal all of the money that has been bet on the races that day.  The plan goes awry when one of the men's (George, played by Cook) wife Sherry (Windsor) tells her lover Val (Edwards) about the robbery, and tries to pull a double cross on George and the other men by stealing the money after it's stolen.  This ends with all of the men dead save for Johnny and George, and George is gravely injured, going back to his home to kill Sherry, who thinks she's about to be rich with her handsome boyfriend (and potentially with a dead husband to boot).  Johnny and his girlfriend Fay (Gray) try to flee, but their airline won't let them carry on the bag that has all of the cash (it's too large), so they check it, and then watch as a loose dog distracts the luggage carrier's driver, causing the suitcase to fall on the runway and let the entire $2 million get sucked up in a whirl.  Johnny & Fay begin to run, but a despondent Johnny basically gives himself up to the police, proclaiming "what's the difference?" in the process.

The most striking thing about the picture is that it's told out-of-sequence.  While the final moments with Johnny are truly the last moments chronologically in the film, we continually see certain scenes from different angles.  For example, the death of the horse is told through the lens of Johnny, as well as the person who shoots the horse, as well as the man who starts the robbery, with the track announcer serving as a reminder of where we are at during the heist.  This works spectacularly well, and might be the first time I can remember seeing such a narrative device in a Hollywood picture.  It then gives us explanations as to why something odd might be happening in one scene (for example, why is meticulous Johnny running late and not in the room when Val & George shoot up the hideaway?), and for a movie that is focused entirely on a heist itself, it shows all of the ways the crime can go right (and ultimately wrong) despite the best intentions of those involved.  The movie has been stated as an inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, but honestly it's hard not to see Pulp Fiction in the way that the movie unfolds as well.  The film was little seen at the time, but one of the people that did see it was Dore Schary, who hired Kubrick to direct Paths of Glory, which led to Spartacus, which led to Kubrick being a household name.

The movie's acting is quite interesting.  The movie uses a large cast, many of the actors bit players from other noir films (Cook, for example, has a small part in The Maltese Falcon and Gray was in Nightmare Alley which we investigated earlier this month).  One could argue that no one is giving a standout performance (Cook & Windsor get the best parts, though), but all of the work feels very much in service to the director, frequently giving standard, boilerplate roles more meaning in the small ways that the characters skew from our standard understanding of noir.  Look at the way that Gray, whose character is a saint, is ultimately the person who is trying to keep Johnny on the run in the final moments of the film, making you wonder for a second just how they ended up together, and exactly how innocent her character is.  These slight deviations in what could (and likely would have been without this particular director) have been a forgettable noir give a nod to what eventually would be auteur theory in Hollywood movies, something that Kubrick more than almost anyone else would exemplify.  Of course, this was strangely the last film that Kubrick ever filmed entirely in the United States, but that's a story for another day.

Previous Films in the Series: The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, Gun Crazy, Night and the City, In a Lonely Place, They Live By Night, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Killers, The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep

The Searchers (1956)

Film: The Searchers (1956)
Stars: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood
Director: John Ford
Oscar History: I don't know how, but somehow in the year Around the World in 80 Days was deemed the best movie of the year, The Searchers wasn't good enough to be nominated in one single category (though weirdly Patrick Wayne's pipsqueak of a cavalryman managed to win the Best Newcomer Golden Globe)
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

As some of you who follow this blog are aware, 2018 was the year I got into "retro screenings" of classic films, pictures that play as retrospectives at actual movie theaters.  In 2018, I caught On the Waterfront, one of my all-time favorite movies, at a "secret movie night" (where you don't know what movie you're buying the ticket for until it starts), and I didn't think I'd luck out by having a movie I somehow loved even more come up in 2019, but first screening out the gate, I saw the title cards to The Searchers scroll across the screen and I think I might have squealed to my friend sitting next to me "this is one of my favorite movies!"  The Searchers, the finest hour of both John Ford and his longtime muse John Wayne, is a spellbinding western, frequently playing with the cinematic trope that these two men invented, inserting realism and pessimism into the western story, making way for a new series of films in the genre (it's impossible to imagine movies like Once Upon a Time in the West or Unforgiven existing were it not for The Searchers).

(Spoilers Ahead...but, come on, you've never seen The Searchers?!?  Get on it!) The movie takes place in Texas (but is clearly filmed in Arizona & Utah), starting in 1868, and follows Ethan Edwards (Wayne), a confederate soldier who is returning home from the war to his brother and sister-in-law's house.  It's obvious he has at least some criminal background, and from the opening scenes is hostile to the adopted son of the couple, Martin Pawley (Hunter), who is part Cherokee Indian.  Chasing after Native Americans who have taken some of the cattle from a neighboring farm, Ethan & Martin trek off after the cows, not realizing that this is a trap, and soon we learn that the Native Americans have killed Ethan's brother and sister-in-law, and kidnapped their two daughters.

The film follows Ethan and Martin as they track these girls seemingly for years, first one of them dying (and the film, as heavily as can be indicated in 1956, saying she was raped by her captors) but the other, younger daughter Debbie (played as a teenager by Wood), still being in the Native American camp.  As the years go by, we come to realize that Ethan has less interest in saving Debbie and is more intent on killing her as retribution for the Native Americans kidnapping her, his blind racism no longer seeing his niece but instead just another Indian woman.

It's this observation that gives The Searchers almost all of its power, even when it strays into more traditional western territory for the 1950's.  The film is littered with the occasional comic set pieces that so frequently adorned Wayne's movies.  We see Hunter having a comedic fistfight with someone who is pursuing his on-again-off-again girlfriend Laurie (Miles), as well as a recurring gag about how Martin accidentally marries an Indian woman who follows he and Wayne around for a while, but Ford has something to say here that would be absent from a lot of his pictures with the Duke, and somehow picks one of the most by-the-book stars in film history to do so.

Wayne has never been better (and Hunter more beautiful) than in The Searchers.  Passionately lit by Winton C. Hoch (who would win Oscars for the Wayne pictures She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Quiet Man), Ethan Edwards is the best thing that Wayne ever did, bringing a humanity to a largely inhuman person.  His Ethan is a cruel, racist, but all-too-real man whose bigotry overshadows any humanity that might lie underneath, a fact we see as he abandons his quest for rescue for one of revenge.  Westerns at their very best show men who are so towering, but incomplete that they can rough it through even the harshest of existences, detached from life due to the impossible hardness that life in a perilous country requires; they are not heroes, but simply people put in impossible times.  Ethan Edwards is arguably the quintessential example of a fearless man who was needed to venture into the west, but then must disappear in order for civilization to have a chance.  The final scenes of the picture encapsulate this ethos, with Laurie, Martin, and Debbie all going back into the house, but in a scene shot through a doorway, we see John Wayne saunter back into the wild, likely never to be seen by any of these people again.  It's a bittersweet ending that would be echoed six years later in Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance-the hero who must live on past his purpose, forever a ghost of what he used to be.

Ride away, ride away...

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Film: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Stars: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, King Donovan, Carolyn Jones
Director: Don Siegel
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Today we end our look at the pre-1970 era horror films with arguably one of the best of the era.  I toyed with finishing with a different picture, but ultimately didn't have the time to get there so we'll do that next year as I suspect a sequel is coming (as is the wont of the horror genre).  Until then, though, it felt right to end with arguably the most-praised movie of the films we are seeing this month: Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Though it was largely dismissed as a trifle when it first came out, the picture has since been rescued by critics and film historians, and has since appeared on lists of the "best movies" from outlets such as Entertainment Weekly, Time Magazine, and the American Film Institute.  As a result, I was thrilled to finally get to this movie, and even more excited to find out: it's really good, and genuinely terrifying.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers around Dr. Miles Bennell (McCarthy), a seemingly average town doctor who is in love with a woman named Becky (Wynter) who recently came back to town.  Miles is curious as to why people continue scheduling appointments with him then cancelling, and finds it bizarre that random people around town keep claiming that their loved ones are not actually their loved ones, that they have been "replaced."  After finding a dead body at their friend Jack (Donovan) and Teddy's (Jones) that looks remarkably like Jack, they start to band together, suddenly realizing that most of the town is filled with these "replaced" people that they learn at the film's climactic moment are actually being hatched out of large pods (this is the source of the phrase "pod people").  Soon Becky and Miles are the only two left standing, fighting against the pod people, and even Becky eventually succumbs to them, leaving Miles ranting like a madman toward the end of the film, eventually being taken seriously by a psychiatrist after a random anecdote from a passing hospital employee reveals that he's not making things up.

The film, it has to be said, is really good, mostly because some sixty years later it's still genuinely frightening, by far the scariest movie we saw this month.  In many ways a predecessor to The Twilight Zone (some claimed this was a metaphor for Communism, which neither director Siegel nor producer Walter Mirisch ever intended), it's frightening to watch Becky and Miles backed into an impossible corner, likely to never escape as the scariest thing about the pod people is that they're basically unbeatable.  We don't know of a weakness toward the end like would become so important in future Sci Fi films (sound, light, viruses, etc, that would wound the creatures), and as a result it's just trying to contain the damage that the human race will do for their own future, a bleak one that wouldn't be possible without Miles.

The film's original ending was better.  It involved Miles on a highway, screaming "stop" to dozens of trucks carrying around more and more pods, the world soon to be doomed because no one would believe him.  Initial studio feedback was that this was too bleak, but to modern audiences it'd be pretty much perfect and going with the theme of despair.  Still, it's a terrific movie even with this blemish on the beginning/end (the film is told entirely through flashback), brought forward by sharp writing, clever direction, and good performances from both of the leads.  McCarthy at this point in his career was already an Oscar-nominated actor (1951's Death of a Salesman), though outside of Body Snatchers he's most well-known today for his years in anthology television.  He brings a cocky every-man appeal to Miles, watching the quintessential boy-next-door descend into chaos.  Wynter is also interesting, especially with her critical scene where she gives in to the pod people; despite starring opposite Rock Hudson, James Cagney, Danny Kaye, and George C. Scott in random movies, she never achieved much fame apart from this hit film, which is a pity as she has a screen presence that's undeniable and I'd like to see more (anyone have any recommendations?).

All in all, this is arguably the best film we caught this entire event, and our first 5-star movie.  If you liked these reviews, share in the comments, particularly if there are pre-1970 horror movies that you'd recommend for next year.  I'll be focusing on a lot of FilmStruck and 2018 Oscar movies for the remainder of the year, but we'll do another theme month in January as I liked tackling this project.

This Month We Are Seeing As Many Classic Horror Movies from the Pre-1970 Era as Possible.  If you want to check out some of our past reviews, here they are:

Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, Mad Love, Son of Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Mummy, Freaks, The Ghost of Frankenstein, It Came from Outer Space, The House of Frankenstein, The Phantom of the Opera, The Masque of the Red Death

Carousel (1956)

Film: Carousel (1956)
Stars: Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Cameron Mitchell, Barbara Ruick, Claramae Turner, Susan Luckey
Director: Henry King
Oscar History: Strangely, this is the only major Rodgers & Hammerstein musical to make it to the big screen that didn't score a single Oscar nomination.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I have started to be better about getting ahead of any movies that I want to see on Netflix or FilmStruck before they are unceremoniously struck out of the queue by the fate of copyright negotiations, which meant that I recently caught Carousel for the first time.  I hadn't realized that this was the only major Rodgers & Hammerstein musical to never score an Oscar nod, though I am such a completist I doubt I would have cared that I wasn't looking in on the OVP front, as I grew up watching Rodgers & Hammerstein classics at my grandparents' house.  Still, I'd heard so many odd things about Carousel through the years, and how it as a much heavier and stranger musical than you'd expect, so I was eager to check it out.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film starts with Gordon MacRae as Billy Bigelow who is, well, dead, which was a shock to me as I genuinely didn't know enough about the story to know this was told as a guardian angel looking down on your life kind of trope.  We learn of Billy's life as a guy from the wrong side of the tracks, who falls in love with a girl named Julie (Jones) who is a "good girl" who becomes enamored with his bad boy exterior and marries him.  Soon, he wants to go back to his ways of carousing with a married woman, but Julie becomes pregnant and he decides he needs to go straight once and for all, but first will pull off a heist to try and get money to provide for his child.  During the heist, he is killed in a fight, and Julie doesn't get to know if he truly loved her or confess that she truly loved him.  The film then jumps 15 years into the future, with his daughter a troubled young girl, and he gets permission to go down from heaven for one day to set things straight, with his daughter and wife realizing through his actions that he did love them, and that they will be all right.

The movie sounds schmaltzy and it is.  It's not a particularly great movie, if I'm being honest. It's wildly predictable, and the leads were both better when they were in Oklahoma.  I've never thought much of Frank Sinatra as an actor, but it would have been fascinating if he had stuck with the role of Billy Bigelow as I think his persona fits the part like a glove (he was supposed to be in the picture, but according to Hollywood legend his wife Ava Gardner demanded that he either come stay with her on the set of her movie or she was going to have an affair with Clark Gable...an anecdote far more interesting than anything that actually happens in Carousel).  Either way, while the music is lovely, there's not much there in terms of actual plot, and MacRae isn't a good enough actor to elevate such a crucial role.

That is, except for the famed "Louise's Ballet" sequence in the center of the movie, which is spectacular.  Susan Luckey performs a largely wordless dance sequence as the movie shifts from its first to second half, and it's a glorious moment of cinema.  I don't know that you'd quite get the grandeur of it without the confines of the movie, so I can't say that you should just go find the clip on YouTube, but the combination of the great outdoor shots (filmed in Maine, the movie's best attribute might be the fresh ways it finds beauty outside of a Hollywood backlot) and the splendid, heartbreaking dancing (where we learn so much about why she's a troubled youth) is really A+ movie-making.  Had everything in the film been this good, we'd have a movie classic.  As it stands, though, we end up with a really cool musical number situated in a humdrum film.

Those are my thoughts on Carousel-how about yours?  I know that there are a lot of ardent fans of this movie (Richard Rodgers counted it amongst his favorites), so I want to hear if anyone has any defenses?  And is this the best ballet sequence in a movie you've seen?  I'm partial to An American in Paris, but this comes close!  Share below!

OVP: The Power and the Prize (1956)

Film: The Power and the Prize (1956)

Stars: Robert Taylor, Elisabeth Muller, Burl Ives, Mary Astor, Cedric Hardwicke, Charles Coburn

Director: Henry Koster

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume Design)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I frequently talk about how the worst movies are films that are clearly going to age poorly because of content.  Hairstyles and slang and visual effects will all shift and move, but the reality is that you can handle these changes because they come across as retro.  No, the bigger issue is when social mores and half-truths about human nature mar the film...that's when you get into trouble from an historical standpoint (it's why something like Boyhood will be seen decades from now as a triumph while The Imitation Game will be as relevant as a 1950's issue film).

(Spoilers Ahead) This is the case with Henry Koster's The Power and the Prize, one of the Oscar-nominated directors lesser-known works.  The film is about Cliff Barton (Taylor), a man up-and-coming in the world of business who goes to London to cook a crooked business deal to help out his future uncle-in-law (played with a frank villainy by Burl Ives).  While in London he manages to fall for a refugee named Miriam (Muller).

The film unfolds in an extremely traditional fashion, with people reacting poorly to Muller, who is essentially a madame (though the film goes to painstakingly clumsy lengths to try and prove her specific virtues), and many trying to break up their impending marriage, as well as watching as Burl Ives tries to throw Cliff under the bus in a mustache-twirling turn that eventually results in him nearly killing himself with stress (his wife, high-strung Mary Astor, may give the film's only decent performance, though I may have been distracted by the wonderfully haughty histrionics), and to Taylor and Muller getting their romantic moment-in-the-sun.

The film is bad on so many different levels, I don't really know where to begin, so let's start with the acting since I've already invited that into the picture.  Ives and Astor at least are overacting in their roles, which is less than I can say for Robert Taylor, who is about as bland as I've ever seen him (Taylor, for those who aren't super familiar, had screen charisma out the hilt with earlier roles in films like Johnny Eager and my beloved Waterloo Bridge).  Here it's almost like you're watching a different actor (his physical appearance did change pretty dramatically as he got older), as he's too staid and too unconvincing in his complete shift in adoration for Miriam.

Taylor's not the worst part of the film, though-that would be poor Elisabeth Muller.  I'll forgive her a bit for English not being her first language (she was Swiss-born), but my god this is terrible, terrible acting.  Really one of the worst performances I've seen in a while.  It's almost as if she read the script notes such as angrily and adoringly and had to remember to do them onscreen, with her shifts in speaking and personality so abrupt.  There's really no reason why she loves Cliff, and there's no reason other than her beauty that he loves her-this is partially due to Taylor's lack of interest in his performance, but it's also because Muller simply cannot convey any sort of strength or personality into her Miriam.

The script itself is appallingly simple and noble.  The movie has few shades of grey for a film that really is trying hard to give them to the audience.  We're treated to people stating that Miriam shouldn't be judged by her past, but then they go through arduous pages of script to try and make her look like a chaste prostitute, and we get no such consideration for Burl Ives, who may be a villain but he's a common-sense, practical villain that thirty years later would look more like the norm in films about business (hell, he might even be the hero in the age of Jordan Belfort as a leading man).

The movie's sole Oscar nomination was for Helen Rose's costume work, but I have to say I felt underwhelmed.  There's no real personality here, and it really just looks like she spent an afternoon shopping at Bloomingdale's rather than adding personality to go with the characters onscreen.  Rose was a costuming god at the Oscars (ten nominations and two wins), so this feels less like it was earned and more like a filler nomination (this is a warning as to why filler nominations are a terrible idea-it gives tripe like this the Oscar-nominated tag for no good reason).

Those are my thoughts on this dull, pointless movie-what are yours (if you're fool enough to have seen it)?  Are you as shocked as I that Robert Taylor lacks so much charisma?  How did Elisabeth Muller have a career as an actor?  And where do Helen Rose's designs stack against other films of this year?  Share your thoughts in the comments!