A Girl & A Gun

Laura (1944), Otto Preminger

Gene Tierney isn't one of those names which leaps off the page in quite the same way of many of her contemporaries - Rita Heyworth, Lauren Becall, Ingrid Bergman amongst the most fabulous of them - do. This certainly isn't because she wasn't as good an actress - just check her out as beautiful mentalist in the classic 1945 film Leave Her to Heaven. It may be that her best roles have just been eye-slashingly perverse. Tierney's role in this film is to act as a cypher for most of the other characters desires - she's a big ol beautiful mirror in which they each make an ideal that most suits them from, and so her weird relative anonymity's works completely here.

Dana Andrews plays hardboiled Detective Mark McPherson, investigating the case of Laura Hunt, the now faceless victim of a shotgun murder. Gradually, as he interrogates the singularly immoral suspects, and sits around her flat drinking too much of her whiskey and staring too hard at a massive portrait of Laura, he finds himself falling in love with the dead woman.

Clifton Webb plays the viciously self-obsessed media celebrity Waldo Lydecker, who Laura acts as companion too (and who has secured Laura's career). Vincent Price plays Laura's flakey playboy fiance Shelby Carpenter, and Dorothy Adam's gets to reprieve a little of her obsessive servant former glory.

Perhaps the really perverse twist is the triumph of traditionalism and the re-assertion of traditional gender roles that the film ends on, although there is an interesting theory (echoed by the films obvious influence on David Lynch) that the entire second half of the film can be read as dream sequence.

Keep an eye out too for Laura's disgusting lampshades, without a doubt the most hideous objects in all film history.

Little Women (1949), LeRoy

I've just found out that it wasn't a particularly frumpy looking Judy Garland who plays Jo March as I'd always assumed - it was actually June Allyson. I guess it's the association with Margaret "Tootie" O'Brien who plays Beth March (the one who is too good, then dies). It's not a great film and the sets are pretty cheap looking. Everyone manages to be dull (particularly Janet Leigh who plays oldest sister Meg) apart from Elizabeth Taylor's spoiled, vain Amy - if only the young Taylor had been given a few more evil roles to get her teeth into. She's wasted looking pretty and acting innocent when she would have been a fantastic Estella. No wonder Laurie ends up marrying her - despite her entirely hideous dress sense.

Real Sunday afternoon tosh.

Adam's Rib (1949), Cukor

One of the best Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey films. Adam (Tracy) and Amanda (Hepburn) Bonner are a happily married, modern couple who both work as lawyers. Their relationship faces a crisis when they take opposite sides of the same case - Amanda defending a woman who shot at her husband and mistress.

Amanda's argument rests on the fact that if the gender roles were reversed, the jury would let the wronged wife off - the shooting would be dismissed as an understandable crime of passion. Adam's argument addresses parity between the sexes differently - in either case it would be wrong.

Kip Laurie (played by David Wayne) is just annoying. I guess the fact that Adam tolerates him, his hilariuos witticisms and his explicit and constant flirting with Amanda works as a good indicator of how stable they are and how reasonable Adam is, but I'd kick him out of my flat whether he fancied my partner or not.

   

Double Indemnity (1944), Wilder

I'm not a huge fan of Fred MacMurray (who plays Walter Neff) or Barbara Stanwyck (back when femme fatales could still get away with names like Phyllis), and I don't think the acting or cinematography has anything on the brilliant Ossessione, Visconti's unauthorised take on another Chandler novel, released the year before. But I love film noir and even MacMurray's uncomfortable against type mauling of Neff's worldly-wise-cracking dialogue isn't enough to make this anything except pure, poisonous, proto-noir. This exchange is from their first meeting:

Neff: I wish you'd tell me what's engraved on that anklet.
Phyllis: Just my name.
Neff: As for instance?
Phyllis: Phyllis.
Neff: Phyllis, huh. I think I like that.
Phyllis: But you're not sure.
Neff: I'd have to drive it around the block a couple of times.
Phyllis: Mr. Neff, why don't you drop by tomorrow evening around 8:30? He'll be in then.
Neff: Who?
Phyllis: My husband. You were anxious to talk to him, weren't you?
Neff: Yeah, I was. But I'm sort of getting over the idea, if you know what I mean.
Phyllis: There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff, 45 miles an hour.
Neff: How fast was I going, Officer?
Phyllis: I'd say around 90.
Neff: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.
Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.
Neff: Suppose it doesn't take.
Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.
Neff: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.
Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder.
Neff: That tears it... 8:30 tomorrow evening, then.
Phyllis: That's what I suggested.
Neff: You'll be here too?
Phyllis: I guess so. I usually am.
Neff: Same chair, same perfume, same anklet?
Phyllis: I wonder if I know what you mean.
Neff: I wonder if you wonder.

Great Expectations, Lean (1943)

Watched this on Christmas day, after my dinner & a nap, & with pudding. Also with Sera, Stewart, Mum & Tony.

It's the only film version of Great Expectations worth watching, and it's a real treat.

John Mills and Alec Guinness were actually born old, so it's slightly disconcerting to watch them both playing young men about town. Guinness is especially good though, and transforms Herbert Pocket into a likable and honorable character. More disconcerting is the fact that the beautiful Jean Simmons (who plays the young Estella, excellent in the most suitable role she ever got) gets transformed in to the, ahm, comely, Valerie Hobson. At this point in the film you can imagine the heckling in our enthusiastically interactive Christmas household.

The minor characters are cast and acted with relish and are what makes the film so enjoyable. Martia Hunt's Miss Haversham is obviously wonderful (and her lair sickeningly decrepit), but no more than Freda Jackson's shrewish wife, the aged P., etc. etc.

The last two minutes of the film are painfully rubbish but some people like those kinds of endings. What would be really interesting is the movie of Stella trying to get her life on track after years of warped abuse...

Ossessione, Visconti (1943)

Watched this last night on BBC 4.

I’m really fascinated with everything Visconti so I won’t bore you with superlatives. This was the first movie he directed and it’s amazing, by far the best version of Postman ever filmed. Sensuality, disgust, passion, mistrust, poverty, and ambiguity of all kinds are here in spades. Watching Giovanna (Clara Calamai) having to soak up her enormous husband's sweat with big towels is only one of the many heartbreaking scenes.

On occasion Clara lapses in to silent movie melodrama mode, but not so often that you can’t find it endearingly funny rather than annoying.

Clara lists her age as 28 at the time she made this movie, though to be honest she looks a lot older than Massimo Girotti, who plays her lover and co-conspirator, Gino Costa. Geno is gorgeous, apart from his really poor hairstyle and the excessive hair-wings he has growing out of the top of each shoulder blade. Let’s face it though, John Garfield and Jack Nicholson don’t offer anything in the way of competition.

The supporting cast are incredible – in particular every scene with Elio Marcuzzo as the gay street magician/philosopher/vagabond Lo spagnolo, who wants Gino, and Dhia Cristiani who plays Anita, a woman working as a prostitute who just wants something better than her current life. Or even to just get paid.

Rebecca, Hichcock 1940

I saw Rebecca at home yesterday afternoon.

Joan Fontaine is transported from one kind of obscurity (working as nameless companion to "person of note") to another, when she becomes Mrs. de Winter the second. She won best actress Oscar for her grating portrayal of a lower middle class woman, without means or personality, but possessing the essential qualities of the ideal 1940’s wife: malleability and (at points in this film, excruciating) passivity.

Maximillian de Winter had previously been married Rebecca, the perfect society bride and ace sailor who mysteriously committed suicide at sea.

George Sanders’s role as Jack Favell is notable only because of the fantastic Evil Sanders persona. Unfortunately Jack is not as intelligent as Sanders appears, and not capable of depth of scheming Sanders always suggests. He has only kept one of Rebecca’s not very incriminating letters, and consequently is a rubbish blackmailer.

Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers is fantastic and clearly bonkers from the word go – it’s well worth seeing this film just for her performance.

Laurence Olivier’s Maxim is a self-obsessed control freak.

The post continues with a précis of the story…