Side Street (1949)

Film: Side Street (1949)

Stars: Farley Granger, Cathy O'Donnell, James Craig, Paul Kelly, Jean Hagen, Paul Harvey, Adele Jergens

Director: Anthony Mann

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

Hollywood used to do a better job of pairing actors who were successful together again, not in sequels but in another story.  In a different era, for example, we'd for sure have another film with Sydney Sweeney & Glen Powell in production by now given the surprise success of Anyone But You.  This was the case for 1949's Side Street, which reunited They Live By Night stars Farley Granger & Cathy O'Donnell, though for an odd reason.  They Live By Night is generally considered one of the more important film noirs of the late-1940's, inspiring New Hollywood films like Breathless and Bonnie and Clyde, but it was a flop, one that was only rescued decades later by film critics.  As a result, I'm kind of a surprised that Granger & O'Donnell got brought back together so soon-possibly given that film was released in August of 1948 and today's film, the second (and last) pairing of Granger & O'Donnell was released just the next year, they were too far in to stop production, but honestly for a film noir from MGM, it's unlikely that was the case.  What I will say, though, may surprise you-I wasn't wowed by They Live By Night (you can see my review of it below), but was far more intrigued by Side Street, the lesser-known pairing of the two actors.

(Spoilers Ahead) There's a lot of plot here, but the first thing to know is that Joe Norson (Granger) is not the smartest guy in the room (he's played by Farley Granger, though, so he is the prettiest guy in the room).  He has recently lost his job and during his part-time gig as a mail carrier, he steals what he thinks is $200 from a lawyer's office so that his very pregnant wife Ellen (O'Donnell) can give birth in a private room.  It turns out, though, that he has accidentally stolen $30,000, in this case from a corrupt attorney who is working with organized crime.  This sets off a chase, with Joe trying to outrun not just the attorney, but also several blackmailers, one of whom has been killed, and whomever has the cash, is likely who the police are going to pin the murder upon.

Granger's quite good here.  I think Granger is maybe the hottest guy (give or take Marlon Brando) in classic cinema, but his sexuality is rarely put to good use, with the exception of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Strangers on a Train.  This is mostly the case in Side Street, save for a really remarkable interlude toward the end of the picture.  As part of his plan, he has to seduce a mobster's girlfriend, Harriet Stinton (played by Jean Hagen).  Hagen is amazing in this movie.  For those of you who only know her as Lina Lamont, this is a total 180 from that comic turn, but is truly worthy of such comparisons.  She is clearly heartbroken, desperate for her scumbag of a boyfriend to love her, but really she wants anyone to love her.  In the one moment in the film where he seems to know what to do, Joe flirts with her, using his young guy sex appeal to try to win her trust.  In real life Hagen was just two years older than Granger, but while both are gorgeous here, he looks much younger and it reads as him trying to trick a fading beauty.  Harriet's fate is particularly nasty after she betrays Granger-she gets strangled, mid-embrace, by her crooked boyfriend, literally giving her the kiss of death.

Nothing else in Side Street can compete with this, and honestly nothing else needs to.  O'Donnell is not good (she's too mousy, and Granger isn't dangerous enough to add intrigue to them both in the way Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum might've when paired with such an actress), and the movie has maybe one too many characters to really sell this as a classic.  But see this (and you should) just for the fading glamour of Jean Hagen, playing her tragic femme fatale for every penny this script is worth.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Call Northside 777, Caught, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, The Naked City, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach, A Woman's Secret

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai

Caught (1949)

Film: Caught (1949)

Stars: James Mason, Barbara bel Geddes, Robert Ryan

Director: Max Ophuls

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

Max Ophuls is one of those really great directors who sometimes gets lost in conversations about great directors because his filmography is so eclectic.  Working in German films in the early 1930's, the Jewish director ended up fleeing Germany at just the right time (and there after, fleeing France at the right time), where he briefly worked in Hollywood.  During this time he made one of the great masterpieces of the post-war era (Letter from an Unknown Woman) and several film noir pictures before returning back to Europe in 1950 when the war was over, then making some truly classic pictures like Le Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de....  In a season we're completing filmographies, this is the last of Ophuls' studio film noirs, and yet another noir featuring Robert Ryan, a longtime actor in the genre...but it's also a famous clapback of a different, more notorious movie that Ophuls made, as you'll soon find out.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a pretty young woman named Leonora Eames (Bel Geddes), who has put her way through charm school in an attempt to marry a wealthy man and live a life outside of the poverty she's spent her whole existence pushing through.  The problem for Leonora, though, is she finds that man: Smith Ohlrig (Ryan), a spoiled & cruel heir to a large fortune, who has turned that fortune into an even vaster & more impressive one through directing movies.  Smith is a celebrity of sorts, but on a whim decides to marry Leonora, who regrets it pretty much instantly.  Leonora thinks she's in love with Smith, but he is so distant and abusive he doesn't think she can love anything but his money.  She ends up leaving him (but not divorcing him), running to work for a pediatrician Dr. Quinada (Mason), with whom she starts to develop actual romantic feelings.  After a brief reconciliation with Smith, where she ends up becoming pregnant, she is blackmailed into staying with Smith, as he says he'll take their baby if she leaves him.  When Smith has an attack of angina, Leonora refuses to help him, and leaves him to presumably die.  He doesn't, but the months of torturing her and the stress of his abuse causes Leonora to give birth prematurely, and the baby dies in the process.  At this point, Leonora can finally leave Smith and marry Dr. Quinada.

The film is fine, let's get that out of the way right now.  I think Bel Geddes' performance grows on you.  I initially wasn't impressed with it, but sitting with it for a day, I realize that what she was doing was kind of shrewd, giving us a woman who honestly doesn't know what she wants, and keeps doing what people tell her she wants, which is an ingenious approach for a female lead in this era.  But the rest of the cast and the script don't work.  Despite being billed as such, this isn't really a film noir-it's a melodrama, and the thing with melodramas is that the heroes are usually quite dull, which is the case with James Mason's do-gooder doctor.  Robert Ryan should be able to save the film, but he seems held back a bit, and isn't in it enough for my taste.

Part of this might be that he's clearly playing Howard Hughes in this movie.  When Ophuls came to Hollywood, he was first hired to make a film for Hughes called Vendetta, which starred his then obsession Faith Domergue.  But that production was troubled, and Ophuls was eventually fired from the film (in total Vendetta would have six directors before it was done even though only one was actually credited on the picture).  This was his retaliation, making a movie where Hughes was basically the villain.  Hughes, to his credit, didn't try to shut down the picture, though he did watch dailies of it and make some suggestions (specifically that Ryan shouldn't wear tennis shoes because "then everyone will know it's me").

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Call Northside 777, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, The Naked City, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach, A Woman's Secret

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai

A Woman's Secret (1949)

Film: A Woman's Secret (1949)

Stars: Maureen O'Hara, Melvyn Douglas, Gloria Grahame, Bill Williams, Mary Philips, Jay C. Flippen

Director: Nicholas Ray

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

One of the tangential themes of this month that we're encountering is a "filling in the gaps" with my filmographies, particularly of some of my favorite actors of the film noir genre, and few figures fit that bill quite the same as Gloria Grahame.  Grahame, an Oscar-winning actress with an honestly salacious & tragic life (she would be married to both her director of this film, Nicholas Ray, and his son Anthony), would star in a number of film noir classics, including In a Lonely Place and The Big Heat.  Our film today is one of her lesser-known works, and weirdly doesn't star Grahame, who spent much of her career alternating between lead & supporting parts in her movies.  Instead, it stars one of the most unlikely film noir femme fatales imaginable: Maureen O'Hara, in one of only two film noir roles the prolific actress would have in her career.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is largely told in flashback, after an opening scene where it looks like Marian (O'Hara) has shot Susan (Grahame), potentially to her death.  We learn a bit of their backstory, about how Marian once had it all-a promising career as a singer, all the while she was clearly in love with her pianist Luke (Douglas).  But when she loses her voice from an illness, she becomes involved with an aspiring young singer (Susan), and through her starts to live her failed dreams, becoming maddened by it, even as Susan wants to quit the industry after some success.  The film eventually ends with us realizing that Susan was attempting to kill herself, and in the scuffle she shot herself.  Marian, torn up by her selfishness over making Susan stay in the industry, takes the blame and would've gone to jail had Susan not been revived and confessed what really happened.

This confession is the best part of the movie not because of Grahame or O'Hara, but because of a pip of a performance from Mary Philips.  Philips, best-known today as Humphrey Bogart's second wife, was a character actress during the time and aces her role as a busybody amateur detective, whose husband (played by Jay C. Flippen) is the actual inspector on the case.  In a different era, this would've made a fantastic idea for a TV procedural, as the two have solid chemistry, and Philips steals every scene of the movie she's in as a Jessica Fletcher-type.  One of those little performances that shows up in the sides of film noirs that you can't help but admire.

If only Philips was adding to a better movie.  A Woman's Secret doesn't work, primarily because O'Hara is miscast.  O'Hara was not a poor actress, but she was occasionally a limited one, and it shows here as she really should've gotten the part given to Grahame, as she'd be better as the put-upon sainted character while Grahame would've sunk her teeth into the role of a woman driven mad with jealousy by giving another woman her dreams after they are stolen from her.  O'Hara, though, was the bigger star of the two at the time, and the studio never would've let them swap, so we get a promising concept (doesn't that plot sound good?), without enough execution.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Call Northside 777, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, The Naked City, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai

OVP: The Stratton Story (1949)

Film: The Stratton Story (1949)

Stars: James Stewart, June Allyson, Frank Morgan, Agnes Moorehead

Director: Sam Wood

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Motion Picture Story*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on June Allyson: click here to learn more about Ms. Allyson (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We don't really think about this anymore, but one of the best aspects of the Classical Hollywood era was that, while they weren't really big on sequels (they had them, mind you, but the concept of a tentpole wasn't a thing), they did tend to milk cinematic pairings until they were no longer adored by the public.  Had Barbie been as big of a hit in 1949 as it was in 2023, the studios would've basically forced Margot Robbie & Ryan Gosling into another 3-4 more movies, knowing that the public would show up to cheer them on.  This is something that happened to June Allyson a lot, and honestly I wish studios would do more of now (I like capitalizing on movie stars more than I like capitalizing on franchises).  We talked about this initially with Van Johnson in Two Girls and a Sailor, but this week (and next week) we're going to focus on maybe the most-remembered of her pairings.  Even though she would ultimately make more movies with Johnson or Peter Lawford, June Allyson's most beloved pairing to modern audiences is probably with Jimmy Stewart.  The two made a trio of movies together, all of them big hits, and in the case of The Stratton Story, Allyson's favorite picture from her whole career.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie talks about now largely-forgotten baseball player Monty Stratton (Stewart), at one point a promising pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, who would end up sidelined during his prime after a freak accident where he accidentally shot himself in the right leg, forcing it to be amputated.  The film focuses on his career from the beginning to end, including being raised by a thorny mother (Moorehead) and being recruited by a sweet baseball scout (Morgan).  Along the way, he marries the love of his life Ethel (Allyson).  The movie spends a long time on his recovery, which is less physical and more emotional, until Monty decides to take his glove back to the baseball field, and remarkably stages a (true-to-real-life) minor league comeback, even as an amputee.

The movie won an Academy Award for Best Motion Picture Story, a category that's a little hard-to-understand to modern audiences, but essentially boils down to "best idea for a movie" and in that way, it generally works.  This is a movie film, one that tells the story of a hero who overcame the odds, and it does the best thing that biopics can do-it tells you a new tale of a person you didn't know about.  But it also doesn't really work.  The first hour of the film is a snore, giving us virtually nothing but repetition and basically feels like it's explaining the concept of baseball, which (I'm sorry) in 1949 was not something America needed a lesson upon.  So I'm in the middle on that statue, even if I understand why it happened.

The film's back half is much better, and easily to invest upon.  A broken man overcoming the odds is the subject of a lot of Jimmy Stewart's best films, and he definitely nails this part.  His boy-next-door charm plays well with Allyson's girl-next-door pluck, and I get why the studio saw not just the dollar signs at the box office, but also them playing off of one another and understood this was a formula worth repeating.  I just wish that they were in a stronger movie, especially in the first half.

OVP: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

Film: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

Stars: John Wayne, Joanne Dru, John Agar, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey, Jr., Mildred Natwick

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Cinematography*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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 John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

John Wayne's career is legendary for a variety of reasons.  Obviously, the guy made a lot of classic films, which helps.  Perhaps more importantly, especially in establishing his legacy, was that he made so many films.  Because Wayne was the kind of actor who needed to be famous, maybe because he spent nine years after The Big Trail getting bit work, he didn't want to waste his stardom.  From 1939 until the 1970's, Wayne was the lead in at least one movie every year, in most cases multiple films, which is basically unheard of for an actor of his celebrity, and why your dad can watch so many John Wayne movies (which is usually the claim when people talk about Wayne today, that he's someone whom "your dad/grandpa" watched a lot of his movies).  A big part of that run was films he made with John Ford, one of the biggest directors of the era, and the guy who gave Wayne his second big break (the one that stuck) in Stagecoach in 1939.  All told, the two men made 14 films together, spanning from Stagecoach until 1963's Donovan's Reef.  Many of these were westerns, and while a lot of them I'd seen before (and loved), so they weren't eligible for this series (The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance at the top of the list), I couldn't ignore this partnership in a month filled with John Wayne, so we are going to feature today She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, a massive hit the two men achieved for RKO in 1949.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Nathan Brittles (Wayne), who is about to retire from his post in the Frontier Army, but before he does he has to deal with a reservation breakout of the Cheyenne & Arapaho tribes following Custer's defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn (they want to prevent a war).  He also is tasked with bringing his commanding officer's wife (Natwick) and niece Olivia (Dru) to a stage going east.  Olivia, beautiful and headstrong, is being bartered over by several of the men in the company as they try to woo her.  The film itself continues with both missions seemingly lost (it appears as if Brittles will not be able to get the women to their destination, and war is inevitable), but with the help of his men, he manages to trick the Native Americans by stealing their horses, and forcing them to return to the reservation.  In the end, Brittles doesn't retire, instead getting a promotion, and continues on in the army.

The movie itself is somewhat lacking.  This doesn't have the finesse in its screenplay that some of Ford's later partnerships with Wayne would elicit, giving us a pessimistic look at what the Frontier could give (this is very much still in the post-WWII drive of patriotism above all else).  Wayne is playing a man twenty-years his senior quite believably, but most of the rest of the cast isn't as impressive.  Dru is in a side love triangle so ancillary you'll be forgiven for not being able to tell her beau's apart, and if she ended up with the right guy.

Where the film gains all of its glory is in its cinematography.  I recently went to Monument Valley on a vacation, and it really is one of the most beautiful places on earth.  I understand why westerns (and Ford in particular) used it as a filming location, and they called out repeatedly on my tour that this is one of the movies that best shows the land.  It really is glorious.  There's a scene in the rain that is actually rain that kind of has to be seen to be believed, and it's not just pretty pictures.  There's a moment where a stationary camera watches as a charge of horses spring across a shallow river that is magnificent, giving us actual build-up until the moment where the horses are so close, you feel like you have to give the audience a rain poncho.  This is one of those times Oscar got it exactly right.

The Reckless Moment (1949)

Film: The Reckless Moment (1949)

Stars: James Mason, Joan Bennett, Geraldine Brooks, Henry O'Neil, Shepperd Strudwick

Director: Max Opuls

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

One of my favorite actresses to talk about on this blog when it comes to film noir is Joan Bennett, who has been a regular feature in this series since its inception.  Bennett, one of the famed acting Bennett sisters, is a strange actress because her career is sorted into three chapters.  The first, when she was a blonde & in the shadow of her older sister Constance.  In the third, she took on matronly roles in movies like Father of the Bride (and in her most famous role, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard in the TV soap opera Dark Shadows).  But it's the second phase that's the most interesting.  Bennett, more than almost any actress save for Lizabeth Scott, was known exclusively during the height of her fame for the film noir genre specifically.  Throughout the 1940's and into the 1950's, she made eight film noirs, most of them classics of the genre, including the prototypical The Woman in the Window (links for a review of that, as well as a number of other Bennett films, at the bottom of the article).  Today we're going to to with a movie of Bennett's that was initially dismissed by audiences, but since has been rescued by critics.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Lucia Harper (Bennett) a conventional suburban housewife disturbed that her 17-year-old daughter is seeing a man named Darby (Strudwick) who is 13 years her senior.  Lucia initially plans on bribing Darby to stop seeing her daughter, but when he's clearly willing to take the bribe, she assumes this will be a way to get her daughter to stop seeing him.  However, when her daughter Bea (Brooks) goes to confront Darby, she attacks him, and while she doesn't realize this, eventually we see that, in a daze from her striking him on the head, he falls off of a balcony and dies, essentially causing Bea to be guilty of manslaughter.  Lucia wants to keep her daughter safe, but there's a catch-two men have the love letters that Bea sent to Darby, one of them being Martin Donnelly (Mason), who is blackmailing her to keep Bea's name out of the paper (and out of the police's clutches).  This sets off a desperate dance between Lucia and the blackmailers, with one of them (Martin) slowly falling in love with her in the process.

If some of this sounds familiar, it's because this is not the only big-screen adaptation of this story, called "The Blank Wall" by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding.  This was made in 2001 with Tilda Swinton & Josh Lucas in a movie called The Deep End, and in that movie it's Swinton's son who is being seduced by Lucas's Darby (and in a memorable scene, it's clear that they are doing more than just necking).  It's fascinating because this movie honestly plays Darby a little bit queer-coded too, so the Lucas interpretation might make more sense than the original by Ophuls.

In terms of this being a rediscovered classic, it's definitely good, but I don't know that it's great.  Bennett is a bit too matronly for my taste (I like it when she's got more fatale in her film noir leading ladies), and Mason is weirdly out-of-step with the character (not just the accent work, but also it's not totally clear why he has fallen in love with Lucia other than her beauty).  The direction is the best part.  Max Ophuls had just made the film masterpiece Letter from an Unknown Woman a year before, and is very good at having multiple actions onscreen at once with his direction, making sure there's little exposition, which is hard in a plot-heavy film.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, Nightcrawler

Act of Violence (1949)

Film: Act of Violence (1949)

Stars: Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, Mary Astor, Phyllis Thaxter

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

One of the holdups with classic noir is that they almost always have to follow formula, and not just in the sense that they're in the same genre.  Detective literature of the 1940's broke barriers, but film noir had to stay within the confines of the Hays Code.  This meant that the good guys, while they could be rough-and-tumble, were required to be good at the end of the day.  Humphrey Bogart & John Garfield were figures that your dad might not approve of, but they were the kinds of guys that he'd secretly respect.  Act of Violence, a late-1940's film noir from Fred Zinnemann kind of upends that idea, giving us one of the more complicated protagonists I've seen in a film noir, one who definitely skirts the line between honor and betrayal.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Frank Enley (Heflin), who is a WWII veteran who lives with his wife Edna (Leigh) in suburban California.  They live a life of secret, but when one of Frank's fellow soldiers, Joe Parkson (Ryan) shows up at their doorstep, it becomes clear that there's more to Frank than he's letting on.  The movie continues with Joe essentially trying to kill Frank, and we soon learn he does so with good reason.  During the war, while they were both in a POW camp, Frank played informant to Nazis about a planned prison riot, and in the process all of his fellow countrymen were killed save for Joe, who played dead.  Now Joe is running after him to enact revenge.  Eventually Frank leaves his wife, and works with Pat (Mary Astor as probably a prostitute, but it's not entirely clear as, again, the Hays Code) to set him up to die...only at the last minute Frank comes in and saves Joe's life, finally finding retribution for his behavior during the war.

The movie is solid, but it easily could've been better, and a big part of that was the Hays Code.  In the end of the movie, we're essentially led to believe that Robert Ryan was our hero and Van Heflin an antihero, but come on-it would've been far more interesting had Heflin just been the villain.  The movie is talking about PTSD behind-the-scenes, a thin metaphor for the emotional wounds that soldiers carried coming back from the Front, and making a veteran be totally bad would've been a nightmare for MGM if they'd tried it, but it'd make a better movie if Frank never repented, or better yet, got away with it, using the guise of his uniform & status as a veteran to start over again, his sins buried in a German grave.

That said, it's still a good movie.  In a cast of strong actors, Mary Astor stands apart as the best performance, perhaps because she encapsulates the promise of the film better than anyone.  For much of the film, she's basically throwing herself at another man's husband (sweet, innocent Janet Leigh), obviously in love with him (and let's be honest, they're having sex even if they won't say it in the movie), and playing her character as a strange combination of world-weary and naive, the sort of woman who didn't want this life for herself, but still got it anyway.  It's a solid bit of acting from Astor, who rarely got to play such seedy parts after her legendary turn in The Maltese Falcon, in an era where she was usually a wife or mother.

1940's: The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, Nightcrawler

OVP: The Fallen Idol (1948)

Film: The Fallen Idol (1948)

Stars: Ralph Richardson, Michele Morgan, Sonia Dresdel, Bobby Henrey, Denis O'Dea

Director: Carol Reed

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Director, Adapted Screenplay...despite a 1948 release date internationally, these nominations are for the 1949 Oscars, hence the tag at the bottom)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

One of the few directors to receive multiple Oscar nominations for film noir was Carol Reed.  Reed, a failed British actor who became a successful director-for-hire during World War II blossomed in the years after the war with a trio of film classics.  Two of them I've seen before, and are favorites of mine: the James Mason man-on-the-run flick Odd Man Out, and the Joseph Cotten-led The Third Man, which is the greatest film noir of all time (imho).  I had never seen, though, the middle film of the trio.  Reed was cited for an Academy Award for directing The Fallen Idol, which was honestly all I knew headed into this movie.  What I found out was that the film stretches the barometers of film noir (though it's oftentimes labeled as such), but is a thrilling, quite captivating tale of adultery, misunderstanding, and shocking death.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told largely from the perspective of a young boy named Philippe (Henrey), whose parents are out-of-town (as they are wont to be most of the time, given his father is an ambassador).  He is largely raised by the Baines' family, which includes kindly Mr. Baines (Richardson), the family's majordomo, and Mrs. Baines (Dresdel), his cruel wife who is the domineering housekeeper of the family.  Baines is having an affair with Julie (Morgan) someone he met at the embassy his employer works at, but his wife won't grant him a divorce, and is intent of proving he is having an affair.  Philippe is aware of Julie, but not of the affair, and accidentally lets slip that Julie is not a figment of Mrs. Baines delusions.  Mrs. Baines pretends to leave to visit her sick aunt, so Baines, Julie, & Philippe get to spend the day together in the open, but when Mrs. Baines returns, trying to catch him in the act, she accidentally falls from a ledge-less balcony to her death.  This sets off a series of misunderstandings over whether or not Baines killed his wife (he did not), largely driven by Philippe's misunderstandings of what was and wasn't true.

As a rule, I generally find Classical Hollywood films about children to be dull.  Movies that are meant for children in this era make the kids too saintly, and movies that aren't (like The Fallen Idol) usually make the kids annoying.  This movie doesn't entirely get there-Henrey's performance is sometimes too cloying, and it makes large stretches of the film a bit silly.  It also means the ending of the film doesn't land.  The movie ends with Philippe actually telling the truth, not realizing that by doing so he might convict his idol Baines of a crime he didn't commit, but the policeman assumes he's lying.  That would be a cute ending, but it doesn't work properly because it's not where it ends-it ends with him looking at his parents, whom he clearly doesn't love or really know, with antipathy, understanding that he's about to go back to being lonely again (and may well have lost his friendship with Baines).  This isn't what the movie in front of it was about, though, and it honestly invites you to ponder what would've happened if this had been able to operate outside the Hays Code.

That said, the direction here is solid.  We get to see a lot of tension, particularly the murder of Mrs. Baines, with clever camerawork (her death, which the audience is going to relish on some level given how vicious she's been, is played for both horror and comedy in one full swoop as she dies doing something she scolded Philippe over just hours earlier).  The performance from Dredsel is also strong.  This movie isn't really a film noir (though it has elements of it, given we get a detective, a beautiful woman, and the less-commented-on-but-frequent-trope of an evil older woman who gets her comeuppance), but Dresdel is so nasty in the part, making sure to add a level of paranoia to her character that is very welcome, that I get why this is oftentimes mislabeled as noir rather than just a more standard thriller.

1940's: The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, Nightcrawler

OVP: Mother is a Freshman (1949)

Film: Mother is a Freshman (1949)

Stars: Loretta Young, Van Johnson, Rudy Vallee, Barbara Lawrence, Betty Lynn

Director: Lloyd Bacon

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume Design)

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 Loretta Young: click here to learn more about Ms. Young (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

When I first started this season, I talked about how I wanted to look at Loretta Young's career in part because I felt like I'd shortchanged her in terms of my opinion.  Young has always been name-checked (by me) as one of my least favorite Golden Age stars, mostly because I associate her with milquetoast roles.  As we've seen throughout this month, though, she also had room for great acting ability (The Stranger) could play ballsy roles (Midnight Mary), and had a complicated offscreen life that is still debated to this day (Call of the Wild).  Certainly, I will admit that my opinion of Young has changed...but not entirely.  We are now entering the tale-end of Young's film career, a time that was arguably her most successful.  She won an Oscar for The Farmer's Daughter in one of the biggest upsets in Academy history to that point (the smart money was on Rosalind Russell to win), and got a second nomination for Come to the Stable.  She also starred in what might be her best-remembered film, The Bishop's Wife, which became a holiday classic of the era.  But Young plays all of these parts too simply, and none of them deserved the praise for her that they got (save for The Bishop's Wife, honestly none of them are good movies).  I couldn't ignore this era even though I'm trying to rebrand Young a bit, and so from this peak period where she was making a lot of money in some of her least interesting work, I chose the romantic-comedy Mother is a Freshman, another hit starring Van Johnson.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie's premise reads less like a Classic Hollywood film and more like something out of a 1980's sophomoric comedy.  Abby Abbott (Young) lives with her teenage daughter Susan (Lynn) in a posh New York apartment.  She's raising her on her own because her husband died, and she suddenly realizes that she's broke, and while she has a trust fund that will pay out, it will only pay out once a year, and so she has months to live in destitution.  A weird clause at a local university, though, allows her to use a scholarship named after her grandmother if she attends the school, and so she enrolls as a freshman at the same school as her daughter.  Things become complicated when we learn that Abby is crushing on one of her professors, Richard Michaels (Johnson), but Richard has the hots for the new freshman Abby, and he doesn't know that she's Susan's mother.  Hijinks ensue before everyone ends up where they're meant to be, particularly a hapless Rudy Vallee as a lecherous lawyer named John Heaslip who is also lusting after Abby as well.

The film is harmless, but also charmless.  Young doesn't really have the verve to make this work, and this is what I was dreading in doing a month devoted to her-that I'd get a month of surface-level films about a beautiful woman played in an uncomplicated manner (thankfully, up until now not the case).  She has no chemistry with Johnson (though he's superb in Brigadoon, not one of my favorites overall from this era), and Vallee, the first pop heartthrob of modern music, is completely unnecessary to keep the plot rolling.  This is not a good movie, and it's sad that this is the type of film that Young would long be associated with by film fans.

The movie got a nomination for Best Costume Design, which might be a surprise if you didn't know going into it.  I assume that the thrill here was seeing Young, known for period pieces and at this point nearly forty, wearing the fashions of the modern youth at the time, but save for one gorgeous hot pink gown (that she wears before her "transformation" and honestly it's barely photographed head-to-toe) there's nothing memorable in this picture, and it feels like a weird nomination, even if it's always nice to see the Academy honoring contemporary design, even if that "contemporary" design is 35 years older than me.

Criss Cross (1949)

Film: Criss Cross (1949)

Stars: Burt Lancaster, Yvonne de Carlo, Dan Duryea

Director: Robert Siodmak

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

One of the unique things, and perhaps one of the reasons I'm so drawn to the genre, about film noir is that I generally like the mainstay actors involved.  This isn't the case for westerns, which is my other favorite genre of the 1940's & 50's.  I would rarely name-check actors like John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Gene Autry, & Roy Rogers as amongst my favorites, but with noir you get Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart...these are actors that I love.  But every exception has a rule, and one of the big ones for me is Burt Lancaster.  Lancaster has his fans, and he certainly can find a role or two where his appeal is obvious (Sweet Smell of Success being the one where even I am giving the thumbs up), but he isn't for me & he is in a lot of noted film noirs.  He's too bombastic, too over-the-top, and rarely matches the tone of his picture.  This is clear in Criss Cross, a classic film largely due to its unusually-filmed ending, but one that gets lost far before that ingenuity will pay off.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is strangely-structured, not because it is told in flashback (this is a common trope of film noir), but because it is paced oddly when it gets to the flashback.  We see maybe 10-15 minutes of the present day, then go back to the original story of how Steve Thompson (Lancaster), a hood who was madly in love with a woman named Anna (de Carlo) ended up losing her to his rival Slim Dundee (Duryea), a ruthless criminal whom we see him fighting with in the film's opening scenes.  The two team up on a robbery, but it is bungled badly when Slim double-crosses him and leaves Steve clearly carrying the bag for the crime.  The film's final third is Steve seeking out Anna, wanting to run away with her after he escapes from the hospital that he's in (and it's clear he's about to be jailed).  But it's Anna who is actually doing the titular "criss cross," deciding to run away without the injured Steve and using the money to start her own life free of both men.  Before she can do this, though, Slim comes in and kills them both, with Thompson holding the woman he loved as they both perish...knowing she never truly loved him the way he loved her.

The plot sounds good, right?  Revenge, lust, betrayal...all the cornerstones of a great film noir.  But it doesn't work that way in practice.  The flashbacks last too long, and are honestly a bit confusing.  I get the point of Anna not really loving any man (she is more in it for self-preservation), but they telegraph that poorly, making it seem just that Anna is confused.  De Carlo, who would eventually be famous for her work on The Munsters and in the original cast of Follies (she was the original vocalist for the Sondheim classic "I'm Still Here,") was at this point best known for her scandalous performance in the film Salome.  A great beauty, she was not a particularly good actress in her youth, and it shows in the way she can't handle this part, frequently making it seem like she's "trying again" on Anna every time she is in a new scene...Ava Gardner or Lana Turner would've been better.

But it's not de Carlo who is totally to blame here.  Lancaster is scenery-chewing in every corner of the screen, and Duryea (who is the best actor of the three, and always a welcome addition), isn't in enough of the movie to lift from the sidelines.  The movie isn't all bad-I loved the cinematography, which feels amateurish in the best way as the characters are almost begging the audience in a fourth-wall break they're so often looking at the camera-but this should've been better given its reputation & solid story idea.

Previous Films in the Series: Murder My Sweet, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, The Killers, The Big Sleep, Daisy Kenyon, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Woman on the Beach, Brighton Rock, Night and the City, They Live By Night, Gun Crazy, In a Lonely Place, Sweet Smell of Success, The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, The Killing, The Long Goodbye, Body Heat