A Girl & A Gun

The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Alexander Mackendrick

Mackendrick previous films - Man In a White Suit, Lady Killers, hint at the directors capacity for cynicism and tackled immorality humorously. In The Sweet Smell of Success Mackendrick's team, including cinematographer James Wong Howe, writers Cliford Odets and Ernest Lehman, and co-stars and executive producers Tony Curtis and Bert Lancaster scratch the surface of New York-vicious with a razor blade and expose a malignant pit. It's an amazing film which, unsurprisingly, failed to win over mainstream audiences.

The film is a pacey flight through snappy, venomous dialog, New York's terrible beauty, and Lancaster and Curtis at their finest, pitch perfect and lock-jawed in mutual loathing.

JJ Hunseckers (Lancaster) is based on real life celebrity media commentator Walter Winchell, who introduced the world to syndicated gossip and happily used his influence to destroy the careers of people he disliked.  Lancaster's JJ is one of cinemas greatest monsters: sinister and heartless, his only meaningful relationship - with his sister Susan - is controlling and psychologically creepy. Curtis plays toadying PR guy Sidney Falco, who JJ has tasked with breaking up the romance between Susan and Steve Dallas, one of the few nice characters in the film. 

However, the films critical relationship is the blatantly, and often deliciously loathsome one ("Match me, Sidney.") between JJ and Falco. If Falco wasn't so entirely self-centered in his constant stream of kinetic opportunism, and not quite so keen to lick JJ's boots in return for favors, it might be possible to feel sorry for his constant humiliation. As it is, both characters revel in their awfulness.

Three Secrets (1950), Robert Wise

I’m a sucker for old school melodrama, unlike Child, who not cannot get past his astonishment that anyone would waste time watching anything in black and white, and regards the lack of colour as some kind of disease that he might catch.   

Three Secrets is basically a rip off of the previous years A Letter to Three Wives, directed by Mankiewicz. Where that film focused on which one of the three wives had lost her husband to the town hussy, Three Secrets goes a scandalous step further, as three women wait at the scene of a mountain rescue to find out which of them gave plane-crash boy up for adoption five years previously.

As in A Letter we get each of the three protagonists back-story (accompanied by the same underwhelming rippled water effect). Eleanor Parker plays the sweet, now happily married woman who had a foolish war time indiscretion and a scary mom (“I’ve forgiven you Susan, I only hope that God can”)

Ruth Roman plays a woman who's child was taken by the state while she was in prison, Patricia Neal plays a sassy reporter, who obviously isn't allowed to hold down a top-flight career and a husband at the same time.

Patricia Neal, who is excellent in this, also gets to deliver some very saucey 1950s sexual innuendo – I know people used to have adult relations back in the day, but you wouldn’t guess it amounted to anything except violin-backed torrid kissing if you went by most movies of this time.

Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955), Henry Koster

Jennifer Jones, who’s many previous roles had included virgin-vision magnet Bernadette Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette, and Pearl “Lust in the Dust” Chavez, plays the title role as a weird 1950 automaton. Everyone else in the film acts normally around her, which just exaggerates the alienness of Miss Dove’s manipulative steely liberalism. She teaches school in a small stereotypical American town, ruthlessly leading her pupils by example and getting away with outlining peoples shortcomings to their faces, I’m guessing because they’re only pretending to understand what it is she’s saying half the time. Anti-Semitism is addressed, but there seems to be no one who isn’t white in the whole town. Poor boys make good. A woman who has a child out of wedlock is punished, but then rewarded for her kindness. The town criminal is shown to be a cheeky, caring, unable-to-help-himself kind of chap.

When Miss Dove faints in class as a result of a spinal tumour, the whole town turns out to wish her well. Fortunately, she's already managed to inspire one of her ex-pupils to be a great surgeon.

Jennifer Jones puts in the kind of performance that makes you wish she’d been cast as Pris in Blade Runner. Henery Koster directed a ton of other films, all of which are overly sentimental to varying degrees including The Robe and The Bishop's Wife, but probably never bettered his 1950 film Harvey.

The Wrong Man (1956), Hitchcock

Watched this with my mum. Hadn't seen it before - it's from Hitchcock's penultimate decade but has more in common with his earlier films. The camera work is exemplary - totally noir, although the films subject isn't typically that at all. Based on a true story about the devastation of a good family man (Henry Fonda  playing musician Manny Balestrero) following false accusation, Hitchcock sets up Balestrero from the get go - my mum & I both thought that as he left the club where he worked in the opening credits he was going to get beaten senseless by two passing cops. What actually happens to him is a bit worse.   

Anthony Quayle plays Balestrero's lawyer a bit half-heatedly, and not on purpose. His opening speech is pretty poor - shouty but unhelpful. Plus,  anyone with any sense would have been asking why a man who has held up the same insurance firm twice then goes back to get a loan. Mysteriously, not even Henry Fonda's character wonders about this.

One of the most interesting things about the film is how their downfall is predicated on the Balestrero's financial situation. The chain of events starts with the family needing a loan for dental care. The wife's anxiety is shown to be initially directly in relation to their precarious income, later compounded by the events following her husbands arrest.

High Society (1956), Walters

I really don't like Bing Crosby, who as far as I can tell, has only ever played one character - his appeal is something that's totally beyond me. He's just like your dad would be, if you were somehow transported into a 1950s Janet and John story.  He'd ruffle your hair affectionately while sitting in 'dad's' armchair and smoking a pipe. Your mum would be a happy, smiling, apron-wearing robot. I guess he appeals to women who want to marry a wholesome fantasy about their dads, which is pretty chilling. Watching him hang out with Louis Armstrong trying to be cool in this film is like watching Paul McCartney rock out to Reggae. Just not right - and not in a pitiful way, but slightly frightening. Like Crosby must have some real dirt on Armstrong, to make him act like he's Crosby's great friend. 

This was Grace Kelly's last film before she left the industry for good, broken by the humiliation of having to marry Crosby in Technicolor.

If you like musicals, and I don't, this is probably fairly acceptable. Stick with the excellent original - 1940s The Philadelphia Story - better acting, no singing, and no Bing.

Rashômon, Kurosawa (1950)

I've seen this film a few times now, and still love it. Watched this last night with Patrick.

Anyone who has read this blog for a while will know how much I like films about narratives, and films that play with narrative, and Rashômon is surely the mother of them all. The things I like most about this film change every time I see it. Last night it was:

The intensity of the sunlight on the characters faces in the forest.

The characters taking it in turns to deliver the mad laugh.

And how sad the husbands death is, finally, after all the comedy, in the last version of the story of the murder.

The Man with the Golden Arm, Preminger (1955)

Watched this last night on BBC2. This has become a really cool film for lazy people in recent years – Preminger is an intelligent and very European director, Frank Sinatra plays a heroin addict, it features Jazz music – albeit in some kind of alternate reality where Jazz musicians never drink or do drugs, and turn up to work clean shaven and on time. Most importantly of all – Saul Bass’s fantastic title graphics are available as a great poster. I’m always tempted to make something up about this movie when I see that twitching arm on peoples walls.

This being the 1950’s, there is of course a moral to the story – and that moral is never live on the same sound stage as your drug dealer, your illegal-gambling-den-owning boss, your insane wife, the woman you really love, and the chief of police. Excellent advice that I certainly try and live by.

Eleanor Park as Zosch Machine has one of the best names of any movie character and one of the worst hairstyles. It looks like they dyed and permed a random animal beyond all recognition then glued it to the back of her head.

Kim Novak plays sweet Molly-O with her usual flare for expressionless-ness. If Novak did ever actually sweat, it would surely be undiluted Botox.

It's a good film, historically interesting, unintentionally funny, worth watching. By no means one of Preminger's best.

Knights of the Round Table, Thorpe (1953)

Watched this in between naps at Sera’s house yesterday.

Why bother seeing a crappy new film about the Arthurian legends when you can watch a crappy old one?

Arthur, Merlin etc have spawned a million movies but none that I can remember as being even half-way decent.

Anyhow, this is a terrible film, and the wonders of 1950s CinemaScope and Technicolor makes it even harder going with a hangover. Ava Gardner is the most beautiful of all the Guineveres, but it’s an irritatingly Christian and chaste version of the story.

The Ladykillers, Mackendrick (1955)

Watched this yesterday afternoon on Channel 4. This was the second broadcast of national importance to the English and our sense of identity this week – the other being of course Thursdays assault on the psyche that was the England vs. Portugal match. This is a wonderful film that reminds you what’s great about being English - our sick, understated sense of humour and our ability to revel in misfortune as if it were a bacchanalian feast.

If you haven’t seen this yet – please do before you go check out the Cohn’s remake. Alec Guinness was one of our best actors and Professor Marcus is his best performance. The whole cast is outstanding. Katie Johnson (born in 1878) is wonderful as the archetypical sweet old lady, Louisa Wilberforce (“Mrs. W”).