OVP: The Glenn Miller Story (1954)

Film: The Glenn Miller Story (1954)

Stars: James Stewart, June Allyson, Harry Morgan, Charles Drake, George Tobias

Director: Anthony Mann

Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Original Screenplay, Sound*, Scoring)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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.

In 1953, coming off of Remains to Be Seen, a crime musical that flopped badly at the box office, June Allyson was dropped from her contract with MGM.  This wasn't the end of June's career, though.  Allyson smartly made her first post-contract movie with her costar in the MGM hit The Stratton Story Jimmy Stewart in The Glenn Miller Story, which was a critical & commercial success (and our film today).  Allyson would reteam successfully with Stewart the following year in Strategic Air Command, and Alan Ladd in The McConnell Story (another war picture) the same year.  She'd even return to MGM for one last musical at the studio in The Opposite Sex (a musical remake of The Women that also has Joan Collins & Ann Sheridan) in 1956, but that would bomb badly, and by 1957 she'd be ready for a new chapter, which we'll get into next week.  But first, let's talk about one of the films that helped keep Allyson a leading woman throughout her late thirties, The Glenn Miller Story.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a (somewhat) accurate depiction of the life of Glenn Miller.  Miller might not be super well-known to the general public today, but in 1954 if you asked "who is Glenn Miller?" they would've looked like you in the same way  people would look at you today if you asked "who is Rihanna?"  Miller was a wildly successful big band leader in the 1930 & 40's, and we see that in this film as Jimmy Stewart plays him from his unsuccessful beginnings, including his unusual courtship of his wife Helen (Allyson), to eventual success, recording such standards as "Moonlight Serenade" and "Chattanooga Choo Choo" which would become the first-ever certified gold record.  The film ends where Glenn Miller's life did, with his plane going down during World War II into the English Channel, his final resting place still unknown to this day.

The movie is a part of my least-favorite subgenre, the musician biopic, one that has been pounded into the ground in recent years thanks to the success of the film Bohemian Rhapsody (we've got an upcoming one about Amy Winehouse while a Bob Marley biopic is still playing in most theaters).  So color me as surprised that I loved this movie.  It helps that Glenn Miller is one of my favorite recording artists.  My friend Drew, after I told him I was cooking while listening to Glenn Miller the other day said "how old are you???" but there's something about Miller's orchestrations that feed my soul.  Every moment of actual music in this picture is heaven.

But it's honestly the film itself that makes it work (I didn't like Respect with Aretha Franklin and I love Aretha's music).  I think it's primarily because of the way the film is constructed.  We don't need Miller to struggle with fame or a drug addiction-his story feels refreshing, particularly since it's unique (how many music superstars have died for their country?), and because Stewart & Allyson have a lot of fun with it.  Their courtship is silly & delightful, even if they're both too old for these parts, and as the film progresses, they do a really good job of showing us how bittersweet this love story's ending is going to be, knowing that it will end too soon, but that Miller's music will live on with countless lovers in the decades that follow.  Stewart is excellent (I love the way he conducts, showing that he loves Helen in a way that's different than being in love with music, but when they connect, it fills his heart), but Allyson is strong too.  Allyson didn't get enough credit as an actress during her career, but she's very good here, and the last few minutes, when she goes on a facial journey listening to her husband's arrangements, a special song just for her (for the last time), is beautiful.  Really well done on her part.

The film won three Oscar nominations, and two of them are impossible to argue with; I wasn't as enamored with the screenplay just because it was sometimes confusing at the beginning as to what Helen exactly saw in Glenn, but that's only a quibble because there's an Oscar at stake as it's otherwise solid.  But the scoring is divine-all of the Glenn Miller musical choices, particularly "Moonlight Serenade" and the way they show its evolution, are spectacular.  And the sound...I honestly was surprised how well this went.  I'm not one of those "it's a musical-it must have good sound!" people primarily because it downplays how great it can sound when you get it right-the sound here is rich, full, and captures all of the melancholy grandeur of Miller's music.  The scene where he plays while the enemy planes are dropping bombs near a still-enraptured audience...death be damned if the music is that enchanting.  What a terrific choice for an Oscar win.

Vera Cruz (1954)

Film: Vera Cruz (1954)

Stars: Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, Denise Darcel, Cesar Romero, Sara Montiel

Director: Robert Aldrich

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 Gary Cooper: click here to learn more about Mr. Cooper (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I promised last week that I would talk this week about the personal relationships of Gary Cooper's life.  Cooper's personal life at this point has taken on a persona of its own.  Before his marriage in 1933 to actress Veronica Balfe (whom he would remain married to until his death in 1961), Cooper famously bedded half of Hollywood, including (allegedly) actresses Clara Bow, Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, and most critically, actress Lupe Velez.  Velez, who at one point was the rare Latina leading lady of the Classical Hollywood Era, who killed herself after her career waned and she became pregnant while unmarried, is the source of the infamous (and cruel) urban legend that she died vomiting on a toilet.  In the decades since, there have been rumors that a rekindled romance with Cooper was the source of the baby, and his refusal to leave his wife & marry the devoutly Catholic Velez (who refused to get an abortion) was the reason that she killed herself.  Weirdly Velez isn't the only woman who has had her suicide associated with Cooper-costume designer Irene killed herself a year after Cooper's death, purportedly out of grief as the two had been having an affair.

A more substantiated Hollywood legend, and one that is associated bleakly with Cooper's memory, is his relationship with actress Patricia Neal.  While Cooper had (alleged) affairs throughout his marriage with actresses ranging from Ingrid Bergman to Grace Kelly, Neal publicly discussed the relationship, including the abortion that Cooper pressured her to have, and which she would later deeply regret, becoming an ardent supporter of the "Pro-Life" movement.  Another rumor about Cooper's personal life was that he was secretly bisexual, and his connection with actor Anderson Lawler, who was gay, is the name most frequently associated with these rumors.

(Spoilers Ahead) All of this is far more interesting than the movie we're discussing today, the 1954 western Vera Cruz, which happened in the wake of Cooper's second Oscar win for the western classic High Noon.  That film largely serves as a bookend to the success that the actor had had for 20+ years to that date, and also moved him into an era of diminishing returns as a star.  Vera Cruz is emblematic of the types of roles he would take during this time frame, frequently playing an older man competing with a younger figure or trying to rely upon his long-time reputation for "one last ride."  Here he is Ben Trane, who joins forces with the wily young gunslinger Joe Erin (Lancaster) to escort a countess (Darcel) to the city of Veracruz, Mexico, but along the way they realize they're also transporting $3 million in gold.  The film then proceeds to comic lengths to show how Joe & Ben will go about trying to backstab each other, with the more noble Ben winning out of the two.

The movie doesn't work for a couple of reasons.  For one, it's supposed to be funny, but it doesn't have enough jokes.  It's clear this was an early predecessor to the Spaghetti westerns of the late 1960's (which is one of my favorite eras in Hollywood, which made my antipathy toward this film disappointing), but it doesn't have the melodrama & stakes of those films.  Lancaster & Cooper also don't work together.  Neither of these two are actors I love, but together they don't balance at all-Lancaster has a tendency to overact in movies like this, while Cooper was usually dry, and needed costars who would let that shine through.  Together, Lancaster totally overpowers Cooper to the point where it feels like he's not in the movie, which is a problem since he's the hero.  Pairing Lancaster with someone with more charisma (like Clark Gable) or Cooper with someone more introspective (like Montgomery Clift) would've been better...or you could just watch Gable & Clift in The Misfits, a much better movie.

The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

Film: The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

Stars: Elizabeth Taylor, Van Johnson, Walter Pidgeon, Donna Reed, Eva Gabor, Roger Moore

Director: Richard Brooks

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 Donna Reed: click here to learn more about Ms. Reed (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are going to conclude our month-long look at the career of Donna Reed with the twilight of her film career.  Reed would stop making theatrical movies by the mid-1950's, when she was essentially shooting bargain basement flicks for Columbia, and one could argue that today's movie The Last Time I Saw Paris was the last really high-budget movie she'd make, though the budget has less to do with her coming off of an Oscar win and more because she was starring opposite one of the biggest emerging stars of the era, Elizabeth Taylor.  Given that motion pictures were doing nothing for her, she decided to move to television, where her long history of big-screen projects and her Oscar win were enough to get her an eponymous TV series called The Donna Reed Show which would run for eight years on ABC.  Initially a flop (Reed was up against Milton Berle & the show was nearly cancelled in its first season), moving the series to Thursday nights earned the show a following, but it also accrued quite a bit of infamy.  We're going to talk about what happened to Reed's show, both during & after its run, in a second, but first I want to make sure we pay attention to the movie at-hand today, The Last Time I Saw Paris.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told in retrospect, and it's got a lot of plot (based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald it also has a lot of booze & tragedy).  Essentially the gist of the movie is that we have Charles Willis (Johnson), a war correspondent who is accosted by a woman on the street that we learn is Helen (Taylor), a carefree younger sister of a woman who has also made Charles' acquaintance Marion (Reed).  Both sisters are obviously in love with Charles, but it's Helen that he prefers, her carefree spirit & more conventional attractiveness making her impossible to deny.  Charles & Marion are a terrible pairing, with the former an unsuccessful writer who is practical, the latter a free spirit who indulges in spending money she doesn't have.  Their lives are torn asunder when the barren oil fields that Charles got as a dowry from his equally cavalier father-in-law (Pidgeon) actually strike oil, making them momentarily rich.  The couple start to grow apart, with them both starting up affairs (with a young Eva Gabor & Roger Moore), hurting their relationship, and leading Charles to become an alcoholic.  One night, Helen tries to return in the rain to their house, but Charles, drunk, cannot get to the door, and so Helen goes to Marion's in the cold...and promptly dies from pneumonia.  Charles cannot forgive himself, and neither can Marion, who holds a grudge for him not choosing her initially, and for a while she keeps his daughter with Helen from her, but in the end they are reunited, trying to live their lives in the wake of Helen's death.

The movie should work but it doesn't.  There's a compelling story, and Taylor is fire here (she looks great).  But the story doesn't really know what to do with the main characters, who don't really have much chemistry with each other or with Gabor/Moore.  Honestly, I always struggle with Van Johnson when he's doing drama...my favorite role for him is the curmudgeon in Brigadoon, but I've never loved him in anything else.  Honestly, Donna Reed is really good here in a role that is vastly underwritten-her late-breaking adoration of Charles is only etched in her eyes, not in the script, and I spent most of the movie wanting to see things from her perspective.  After a month of Reed getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop, at least here she earns the star power she wasn't given in other movies we've profiled.

Reed, as I mentioned, moved to television after this.  The Donna Reed Show was the first major broadcast show in the United States to feature a mother as the most important character in a family sitcom, rather than the father or the children.  The show launched the singing careers of Shelley Fabares ("Johnny Angel") & Paul Petersen ("My Dad"), who played Reed's children.  The show, though, attracted criticism of feminists, who thought the show depicted Reed's character Donna Stone as a submissive housewife who wore ballgowns while washing windows; this would be mocked decades later in a Gilmore Girls episode where Rory would dress as Donna Reed on a date with her boyfriend Dean.  Reed did not take well to her character being criticized by the women's liberation movement of the 1970's, and engaged in public statements against women in film & TV of the era that we would now consider to be "slut shaming" referring to them as "kooky, amoral, & sick."  

Reed's politics were more complicated, though, than you'd think.  While she was a longtime Republican, which leans into much of what we associate with her today as being synonymous with her fictional Donna Stone character, I was surprised to find out in researching her this month that she went from endorsing Barry Goldwater in 1964 to supporting Eugene McCarthy in 1968, a shift driven entirely by her views on Vietnam, which she vehemently opposed.  Reed would rarely work after The Donna Reed Show (though she attempted a comeback in Dallas to replace Barbara bel Geddes that would ultimately result in Reed successfully suing CBS for breach-of-contract when bel Geddes changed her mind and returned to the show).  She died in 1986 at the age of 64 of pancreatic cancer.  Next month, for our last month focused on "Film-to-TV," we are going to talk about an actress who, unlike the eleven figures we profiled before this, was one of the biggest stars of the Classical Hollywood era, not needing to indulge in television as a way to cement her celebrity.  That she did anyway in the 1960's indicated just how important television had become, permanently linked to the Hollywood machinery.

Silver Lode (1954)

Film: Silver Lode (1954)

Stars: John Payne, Lizabeth Scott, Dan Duryea, Dolores Moran

Director: Allan Dwan

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 John Payne: click here to learn more about Mr. Payne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

John Payne left Fox in 1947.  Payne had struggled at the studio, thinking that they hadn't used his talents as well as they should have, and walked away from an extremely lucrative offer since his contract with the studio extended another four years and was worth $670k (worth almost $9 million today).  He worked in noirs for a while, but nothing that was particularly noteworthy, and by the early 1950's he was largely a star for hire in B-and-C Grade westerns for various studios, including some on Poverty Row.  The actor who had been a poor man's Tyrone Power for much of the 1940's was clearly in the waning years of his career when television came with an offer that he couldn't refuse.  Before that, though, we're going to take a look at one of those films, a western Payne made for RKO called Silver Lode.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Dan Ballard (Payne) who on the day of his wedding to Rose Evans (Scott) is charged with murder, in this case the murder of Fred McCarty (Duryea) who also happens to be a marshal that's bringing him in to justice.  While Dan eventually tells Rose he did kill McCarty's brother, he didn't murder him, and didn't shoot him in the back as alleged, and the money that he won off of him was through a bet rather than theft.  The film progresses as the town continues to turn against Dan, particularly after several bodies start to pile up as we learn this is all a ruse-that McCarty is the one wanted for crimes, and in fact it's a case where he's going to kill Dan no matter what happens.  With the help of a local "saloon gal" named Dolly (Moran), Rose & Dan end up clearing his name, and defeating McCarty in a final shootout.

The movie is clearly a ripoff of the successful High Noon from two years previous, except in this movie the entire town turns against Dan rather than just leaving him in the lurch.  The movie is also not subtle about its critiques of the Red Scare, in this case literally calling the main character McCarty (an allusion to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who after years of dominating the press was in 1954 seeing his meteoric rise slip to a point where by the end of 1954, he would be publicly censured by the US Senate).   Unfortunately, though, it's not a particularly good movie, thanks in large part to the actors.  While Duryea is always a treat and I quite liked Moran's sassy hooker routine (even if it's not breaking new ground), Payne & Scott don't work here.  Lizabeth Scott is a star we profiled in our first season of Saturdays with the Stars, and I generally like her even though her highly-stylized method of acting is not something many are a fan of (her critics call her wooden).  But here it doesn't work, and she blends in to the scenery.  The same can be said for Payne, who is not great in the lead even though this might be the best work we got from him this month.  His character has to take a lot of wild swings, and there's not enough emotion in his work to really get that across.  After spending a month with him, I have to side with Fox...he was no Tyrone Power.

Payne's career changed in the coming years to television.  His most significant role was the lead in The Restless Gun, one of the many TV westerns that dominated the ratings in the late 1950's coming off of the success of Gunsmoke.  Payne only lasted two seasons on the show, and never really recovered the momentum he had in the mid-1940's with Sentimental Journey and Miracle on 34th Street.  He was hit by a car in 1961 on Madison Avenue that nearly killed him, and while he made a full recovery, he spent most of the rest of his career doing sporadic work on TV and in movies before dying of heart failure in 1989 at the age of 77.  Next month, we're going to move down the call sheet and talk about a character actor, in this case one who also eventually found his way into TV westerns, but while he never had his name above the title like John Payne, he starred in some of the most important movies Hollywood ever made.

Secret of the Incas (1954)

Film: Secret of the Incas (1954)

Stars: Charlton Heston, Robert Young, Nicole Maurey, Thomas Mitchell

Director: Jerry Hopper

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 Robert Young: click here to learn more about Mr. Young (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we discussed They Won't Believe Me, which was made during Robert Young's time as a freelance artist after his contract with MGM expired.  This was the best and most interesting time of Young's career as a leading man, making movies like The Enchanted Cottage and Crossfire which won acclaim (and Oscar nominations, though never for Young).  But in the early 1950's, Young's career started to falter badly.  Without a studio contract he didn't get steady work, and couldn't guarantee a substantial part even if he could get decent billing.  By 1954, when he made today's film (his last film) he hadn't worked in a major movie in two years (and his last film had been a generic western from RKO called The Half-Breed).  Secret of the Incas didn't even have him as the star-Charlton Heston, who was having a bit of a hot streak coming off of The Greatest Show on Earth (and 16 years Robert Young's junior) got the leading man role while Young was decidedly supporting.  This could've been the end of Young's career...but his luck was about to change.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is focused on Harry Steele (Heston) who is a tour guide in Peru (the film was actually shot at Machu Picchu, a first for a Hollywood movie).  He is in search of a rare Sunburst (a gold & jeweled plate), and has a map of where it is but has no means of getting there.  He works with a double-crossing associate named Ed (Mitchell), who frequently tries to kill him.  Enter a woman, Elena (Maurey), who is beautiful but doesn't have money...and is trying to find a way to America.  Harry makes an exception to his "only for money" tours, and helps her, but uses her to to get to Machu Picchu, therefore getting him a shot at the treasure.  When he gets there he meets Dr. Stanley Moorehead (Young), who is also in search of the Sunburst, but doesn't have the coordinates like Harry does (Stanley also falls for Elena, but you'll be forgiven for ignoring this plot as Elena sure does).  Harry eventually steals the Sunburst, having to fight off Ed to get it (Ed dies, falling down a cliff to his doom), but returns the Sunburst to the Incan people, realizing he loved the chase (and Elena) more than the treasure itself.

If you're having a sense of deja vu reading that, you're not alone.  Secret of the Incas was a hit in 1954, but it's not a particularly good movie.  Heston is not quite sexy enough to pull off an adventurous role like this (he was better suited for the stoic biblical epics that would become his bread-and-butter), and Young is banal in his supporting part.  But Secret of the Incas is noted for being the clear inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it's staggering watching this that Spielberg doesn't owe the writers money.  Not only do they completely crib Heston's look for Harrison Ford in the movies, but they actually steal scenes from this movie to put in Raiders.  The famous scene where they discover the location of the grail through light-and-mirrors...that scene actually happens in Secret of the Incas as Heston finds the Sunburst.  So if you're an Indiana Jones fanatic, you need to see this even if it's not great, simply to marvel in what was clearly an inspiration for the movie.

As I mentioned above, this was Robert Young's last movie, but Young would quickly transition to massive success on television.  For years Young had been doing a radio program called Father Knows Best, which in 1954 became a TV show which he made with Jane Wyatt.  He'd follow that a decade later with a second hit, Marcus Welby, MD.  Both series won Young Emmy Awards, making him the first actor to ever win Emmy Awards for both comedy and drama (actors like Edie Falco, Carroll O'Connor, & Ed Asner would eventually follow).  Young would continue to make reunion films & specials for both series (as well as being the spokesman for Sanka for years), but would largely retire after Marcus Welby, dying in 1998 from respiratory failure at the age of 91.

OVP: The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954)

Film: The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954)

Stars: William Holden, Grace Kelly, Fredric March, Mickey Rooney, Earl Holliman

Director: Mark Robson

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Film Editing, Best Special Effects*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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.

As we mentioned earlier this month in our introduction about Grace Kelly, the actress-turned-princess didn't make a lot of movies (a total of 11 narrative films in her career), and almost half of those movies were made in 1954, so it makes sense that we would get a second film in the span of Kelly's career from that year.  Last week we talked about Kelly's relationship with Alfred Hitchcock, which frequently bordered on (or, let's be real, crossed into) the abusive, and an indication of the problematic troubles the director would get into with many of his upcoming leading ladies during what is considered his peak creative period (ranging from the early 1950's to the early 1960's).  This week, we're going to talk about The Bridges of Toko-Ri, but we're also going to talk about the other major moment in Grace Kelly's 1954-the Oscar win that still strikes passion in the hearts of filmgoers everywhere considering whom she beat to get that trophy.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Bridges at Toko-Ri is about Harry Brubaker (Holden), a reluctant naval officer in the middle of the Korean War.  Brubaker is not exactly a pacifist, but he also cannot relate to his fellow man, and feels like he's in a war that the American public doesn't entirely understand nor do they care about in the same way they did World War II.  He is mentored by Rear Admiral Tarrant (March), who sees a lot in Brubaker that reminds him of his late son, who was killed in World War II (and Tarrant has not been able to emotionally reckon with the death of his child).  Brubaker's wife Nancy (Kelly) shows up unexpectedly for Brubaker's leave, though their romantic rendezvous is interrupted when Brubaker's hotheaded friend Mike (Rooney) gets into a fight with a guy who has run off with Mike's "girl" (it's clear as the film goes on that she was using him for money & had no romantic inclinations to him).  While away, Tarrant tells Nancy about the horrors of war, and that her husband (whom she is angry about helping Mike rather than staying with her) might not come back.  In fact, this is the case as (I told you there was a spoiler alert here), both Holden's & Rooney's characters do die during a reconnaissance mission, making all of the prophecy about Brubaker's potential death come to pass.

Bridges at Toko-Ri could be a great movie.  The special effects are impressive (that Oscar win feels legitimate considering the combination of real-world and scale model effects during the battle sequence, which feel pretty seamless onscreen & probably why it was also cited for editing), and the story of the film is quite fascinating, and somewhat ahead-of-its-time.  World War II was the last war (to date) that was fought to any degree on American soil, and as a result all of the American wars since have been in another country's backyard, making patriotism more symbolic than something that is part of day-to-day fear.  That conversation, which runs heavily through the movie, is a conversation worth having, and it's particularly striking in 1954, when a war movie of this nature wouldn't usually be so introspective.

But the movie doesn't rely upon that narration, and the effects are secondary to the plot.  Holden doesn't give us much beyond the surface-level as Brubaker, and Kelly is bland as his wife, in a limited role considering her billing where she has little to say other than to try & be an audience surrogate (she is gone during long stretches of the movie-this is a supporting part).  March, the best actor in the cast, is also the best in show but he's not really central to the plot, and lord help me, Mickey Rooney is actively bad in this movie.  Rooney is one of my least favorite actors of the Classical Hollywood (he might honestly be the least amongst the major stars of the era), and he plays hotheaded, entitled Mike with the grace of a bulldog, totally clomping over the more delicate aspects of the story.

As I mentioned above, Kelly didn't win an Oscar for this, but she would win for The Country Girl, a movie I have seen before which is why we aren't featuring it this month for Saturdays with the Stars.  Kelly is okay in The Country Girl (I generally rag on this performance, but looking back on my notes about it at the time, I'm more middling than actively against it), but it's the sort of performance that makes sense for a win.  She'd made five films that year, was a beautiful young woman making her mark in Hollywood, and for the most part her competition was not the kind that would win: you had two recent winners in Jane Wyman & Audrey Hepburn, and Dorothy Dandridge was making history as the first Black actress to be nominated for Lead Actress, but 1954 Hollywood wasn't progressive enough to give her the trophy.  But the fifth nominee was Judy Garland in A Star is Born, generally considered to be one of the best performances in Hollywood history.  Garland is spectacular in the part, and was not only enjoying the kind of comeback only a true legend could pull off (years of drug & alcohol abuse had made the early parts of the 1950's a question mark if she could do a role like this again, or honestly if she'd even live to make it to 1954), but she had just given birth to her son Joey two days before the ceremony, which would have added a great bit of heartwarming drama to the ceremony.  Kelly's win was rough on Garland, who clearly expected the win, and perhaps knew on some level she'd never get another chance like this (despite a future nomination in 1961, she'd have been right-Judy Garland would never win a competitive Oscar).  Next week, we're going to talk about one of the last films that Grace Kelly would ever make, and how, less than two years after she was crowned the toast of Hollywood, she would leave it forever.

Dial M for Murder (1954)

Film: Dial M for Murder (1954)

Stars: Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, Robert Cummings, John Williams

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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.

Alfred Hitchcock, our mascot of this year's Saturday with the Stars, once called Grace Kelly his favorite leading woman, and indeed she appeared in three of his most iconic movies: Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief, the former of which I saw for the first time for this series (the other two I've seen previously, in Rear Window's case, multiple times).  We've talked multiple times about Hitchcock's obsession with his leading ladies & cruelty to them, and while that had happened before Kelly (he was vicious to Ruth Roman during Strangers on a Train's shoot, Joan Fontaine basically got gaslighted by Hitchcock throughout the production of Rebecca), she became a template for most of Hitchcock's future stars.

It's hard to grasp by modern standards how to treat Kelly's relationship with Hitchcock.  It seemed to be one of some respect-she worked with him three times, and even after she became a princess she actively considered taking the offer to be his leading lady in Marnie.  But Hitchcock became obsessed with Kelly, trying to control everything about her, a trait he'd bring to his relationship with multiple women in the following pictures, which we'll talk about a bit in the coming months.  While he liked her, he also messed with her head, and like he would with several of his later leading ladies (and like he did with Madeleine Carroll in Secret Agent), Hitchcock inflicted bodily harm on Kelly during the course of shooting.  In the famous attack scene in Dial M for Murder, Kelly shot the sequence for five days straight in order to get it exactly right for the 3-D technology...by Day 4, she was covered in bruises.  Kelly's treatment by Hitchcock is one of the many factors that have tarnished his legacy, a brilliant man (we're getting there in a second, but this is a very good movie) who tore up the boundaries of common decency in his quest to finish his movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) So let's discuss the movie at hand.  Dial M for Murder is about Tony Wendice (Milland), a former tennis ace who is well past his prime and is married to the wealthy Margot (Kelly), who is having an affair with Mark (Cummings), and will likely soon leave her for him.  Tony blackmails his old friend into murdering Margot, thereby getting her inheritance, but the plan goes awry when during the attack Margot kills the would-be assassin.  The film takes a turn for the twisted when afterward, Chief Inspector Hubbard (Williams) begins to suspect that Margot killed the assassin on-purpose, rather than in self-defense, as a result of him blackmailing her about the affair (which it turns out Tony had also done to get money from Margot).  This leads to Margot's arrest, and near execution, before Inspector Hubbard, with the help of Mark, finally cracks the case and the film ends with Mark & Margot together, Tony realizing the gig is up & that he will soon go to jail.

I said at the beginning of this month that Grace Kelly is a weird actress for me because despite seeing virtually all of her movies (I'll have maybe 1-2 that I haven't seen by the end of this month, but the rest I'll have seen), the only ones that I enjoy are Hitchcock's...but I genuinely enjoy her in those movies.  That still holds true after seeing her third collaboration with the director.  Dial M for Murder, is a smart, cheeky murder mystery that unfolds with us knowing the killer the whole time, but being genuinely perplexed as to how he'll be convicted (it's 1954-there's no way he's getting away with this), and Grace Kelly is good in it.  She brings a sort of misguided confidence to the role-she's a wealthy, beautiful woman, who has no real concept of the world around her being anything other than on a platter, and as that starts to crumble, she can't really handle it.  Some criticized this role for being a bit too thin at the time, but I don't buy that-I think Kelly is servicing the character well by having her play not just a blank slate for the audience, but also someone who has never really considered the consequences of her actions before (she is, after all, having an affair from the beginning of the picture).

But the men dominate this film.  This is the most fun I've ever had with Ray Milland, an actor I usually find bland but who sinks his teeth into the vain, erudite killer.  Even better is John Williams as the wily detective, getting his best Columbo quirks on in this picture.  This is not, for the record, famed composer John Williams, but instead you'd probably know him best as Audrey Hepburn's dad in Sabrina-Hitchcock always takes such good care of his supporting characters, giving them plum parts, and this is a doozy of one, as he lights up the second half of the movie, trying (in vain) to prove that there's clearly something wrong with this case.

Journey to Italy (1954)

Film: Journey to Italy (1954)

Stars: Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 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 Ingrid Bergman-click here to learn more about Ms. Bergman (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week, we took a look at Ingrid Bergman's career headed in 1949, when she made Under Capricorn, her final film with Alfred Hitchcock, and I talked about a major change that was about to happen in Ingrid Bergman's career.  This week, we're going to head straight into that moment, and with it one of the biggest scandals of Hollywood's Golden Era.  Ingrid Bergman had been married to Dr. Peter Lindstrom for 13 years in 1950, and while they lived somewhat distanced lives, he was the first husband of a movie star whose public image had become synonymous with virtue.  This all changed when Bergman had an affair with Roberto Rosselini on the set of their film Stromboli together, and became pregnant with his child, despite still being married to Lindstrom at the time.  This entire story was broken by Louella Parsons in an unusual betrayal of the Hollywood system (keep in mind, at the time, that Bergman was one of the most important stars in Hollywood & Parsons was famous for minding what was best for the industry, which in this case would've been just letting Bergman claim the child was Lindstrom's), and it made Bergman a pariah.  You'd have to go back to the Silent Era to find a star of Bergman's stature who was put in this kind of scandal, and at the hands of one of the industry's most ardent supporters.  Suffice it to say, it temporarily destroyed Bergman's career, and even led Sen. Edwin Johnson of Colorado to publicly push for a ban of Bergman's film, calling her a "powerful influence of evil."  As a result of the scandal, the only director who was willing to work with Bergman was her new husband, Rossellini, and for the next six years she stayed off of a major studio set, until she returned triumphantly in Anastasia (we'll talk about that next week when we conclude our look at Bergman).

But before we get to the remainder of Bergman's career, we're going to look at the films she made with Rossellini, oftentimes overlooked because they are atypical to her screen presence, but generally celebrated by cinephiles.  She made five feature-length movies with him (none of which I've seen), and I selected Journey to Italy which is considered by many to be both the best of the five films they made together, and possibly the greatest of Rossellini's movies, period.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Alex (Sanders) and Katherine Joyce (Bergman), a couple who are visiting an Italian villa that Katherine recently inherited from her Uncle Homer.  The two were married hastily, have no children, and are clearly going through a bit of a rough patch in their union-Alex is callous & catty, not caring to the sensitive Katherine, who has unresolved feelings for a deceased poet friend.  As the movie goes on, we see the two of them start to drift apart, becoming much crueler to each other as they separate during their "vacation" in Italy, with Alex enjoying the company of multiple women, and Katherine going sightseeing throughout a 1950's Italy.  As the movie goes, they hastily decide that they want to divorce, but Katherine begins to have doubts after seeing an excavation of Pompeii and a religious parade.  In a moment of quick about-face (perhaps a miracle in the face of the religious figures in the parade), they agree that they love each other, and the film spins on a dime toward a happy, manufactured ending.

Journey to Italy is difficult to describe mostly because it's very subtle (it was a clear influence on the French New Wave), but it's really compelling.  I adore movies that are seemingly about nothing, and then as the movie progresses you begin to understand it's about everything.  The film is sly in the way that it lets Alex & Katherine's petty jealousies and competitions start to underscore the serious damage in their relationship, and I admired the way that one of them realized it before the other (but not in a cute way).  Katherine suddenly realizing that she's about to lose the man she loves (despite his faults), and it might be over something silly, is so real.  How often have we looked back on relationships & realized that a fight was about nothing, but the damage it did was colossal?  Rossellini picks up on this, and while the ending feels a bit too much (I don't know if I didn't think they should end up together, but I do think the epiphany of the moment feels a bit cloying for the cynical Alex), that's the only thing I disliked.  I found Journey to Italy mesmerizing.

Some of the best attributes of the film are in the cinematography, and the way that Rossellini shows (without saying it too loudly) what a post-WWII Italy is like.  Filmed less than a decade after the death of Mussolini, we see the ravages of the war, particularly in a galling scene with a series of skulls out in the open.  Though they are from centuries before, death & the way that it continually invites itself back (not just with the skulls, but also with the unearthed remains in Pompeii) show us the ghosts of WWII, and the thousands of young Italian men who didn't come back home, and are lost even as Italy moves forward (there's a sequence where Bergman sees a cavalcade of pregnant women, all there ready to replace & move on from the men that they had just lost).  Filmed with crystal-clear photography & a very mobile camera (the final scene of the picture is shot from a rising crane), it's these kinds of insights littering the background that inform the main storyline, about two people fighting over nothing, while we're constantly reminded of the lessons of "past battles."

Both of the leads are terrific.  Sanders brings the perfect streak of cruelty (he always played the same version of the same sarcastic British snob) to his Alex, someone who is more willing to move on than Katherine, even if he clearly loves her on some level.  Bergman gets the harder part, since she has to shift gradually without it feeling too sudden when she has her epiphany, and she nails it.  While the film wasn't a hit at the time, it's easy to see why cinephiles (such as Martin Scorsese) would later pick this film up as a favorite-there's so much grace & pain in the way she moves around, suddenly watching these relics and understanding that she'll someday be one of them...and that risking a relationship with the man she loved wouldn't be worth it, even if it came with some personal cost.  This, of course, was a lesson that Bergman had already learned in real life.  Next week, we'll finish our look at our Star with one last iconic performance from an actress who would continue to dominate the cinematic landscape for decades after a scandal that seemed certain to kill her career.

OVP: Broken Lance (1954)

Film: Broken Lance (1954)
Stars: Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Jean Peters, Richad Widmark, Katy Jurado
Director: Edward Dmytryk
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actress-Katy Jurado, Motion Picture Story*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We shall continue on our look at the writing categories at the Oscars with Broken Lance.  The Best Motion Picture Story category would disappear in the mid-1950's, but not before it gave a few nominations to some movies that are largely forgotten now, one of which is today's picture.  Broken Lance was a remake of the 1949 film House of Strangers, which starred Edward G. Robinson & Susan Hayward, but in some ways it's more a reimagining of King Lear.  The film features a then-ascendant Robert Wagner, who was in the early throes of movie stardom, and Spencer Tracy, who at the time was at the tail-end of his lucrative years at MGM (this film was a loan to Fox, and Tracy would be an independent player within two years of this movie's release despite at one point being the most valuable man on the lot).  Let's give it a look, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Matthew Devereaux (Tracy) and his four sons, three of whom are from his first marriage, including the most prominent of the three Ben (Widmark), and a fourth Joe (Wagner) is from his second marriage to Senora Devereaux (Jurado, and no she doesn't get a real name).  The three brothers from the first marriage are tired of living under their father's tyrannical control, and want access to his money & cattle ranch, particularly to modernize it.  Joe, his favorite, is the only one who still sees his father with respect, and so when his father leads a raid on the mine offices that are poisoning his river & killing his cattle, Joe takes the fall knowing it'll kill his father to be in prison.  While Joe's away, Ben & the brothers begin to out-maneuver & rebel against their father, causing their father to have a fatal stroke.  In the end, Joe, who wants nothing to do with the ranch, is nearly killed by Ben who doesn't believe that his younger brother has no designs on the family fortune, and in the process Ben dies, with Joe thus taking up his father's place, ending the feud within the family.

The movie is heavy-handed, and too short, a complaint I don't often give, especially to movies I didn't particularly like.  The flick glosses past some of the relationship between Joe and the rest of the family-there's too few scenes establishing his animosity with both the brothers and with the community at-large, who view him with suspicion because he is biracial (Jurado, his mother in the film, is Mexican in real-life but is playing a Native American, cause, you know, the 1950's in Hollywood).  They also rush through the cattle raid portion of the film, which is a fatal error in the plotting of the movie as it's so central to the back-half of the picture.  This is a rare case where the one Oscar win that the movie got arguably was in its least successful element.

The movie's other Oscar nomination was for actress Katy Jurado, the only one in her career. Jurado was the rare woman-of-color in the 1950's to have sustained success, and one could make an argument that her nomination here was a "makeup award" for her iconic turn in High Noon (which won her a Golden Globe, but somehow left her out of the Best Supporting Actress race with AMPAS).  Here, though, she does nothing with the role.  The part is basically just there for her to dote on Spencer Tracy, and repeatedly tell him to be easier on his three elder sons.  She's in only a few scenes of the film, and there's nothing there other than long-suffering wife.  The writers don't give her anything to do, and the director doesn't have time to let her establish a stereotypical role.  As a result, this is a wasted nomination on an actress who deserved a better role to be highlighted by the Academy.

OVP: Brigadoon (1954)

Film: Brigadoon (1954)
Stars: Gene Kelly, Van Johnson, Cyd Charisse, Elaine Stewart, Barry Jones, Hugh Laing
Director: Vincente Minnelli
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Art Direction, Costume, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 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 Cyd Charisse-click here to learn more about Ms. Charisse (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

There are four quintessential Cyd Charisse films that I have never seen, and am excited to say that (provided Netflix delivers the final one), we'll get through all of them in the next few weeks for this project.  Brigadoon, however, was the one I was looking forward to the least of the bunch.  Easily maligned in pop culture, even in references I'd never known were paying tribute (the famed "Donny Most" sequence on Family Guy is a direct homage to the picture), I kind of figured this would be one of those musicals that's too silly for modern audiences to take seriously.  Well...I was wrong.  I loved Brigadoon.  The costuming, the dancing, the incredibly romantic lighting (where the hell was that Cinematography nomination for Joseph Ruttenberg?!?) all completely worked for me.  Silly or not (and it is indeed a little silly), this is one of the best films so far in the Saturdays with the Stars list, one that I will surely revisit in the future.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers around two men Tommy (Kelly) and Jeff (Johnson) who chance upon a small Scottish town while grouse-hunting.  The village is odd, but lovely, and very excited about a wedding that is taking place between two of the citizens.  While there, Tommy falls in love with the bride's sister Fiona (Charisse), but learns that Brigadoon only exists as a result of a miracle; the town, thanks to the sacrifice of a priest, appears in the mists only once every 100 years, unspoiled by the world around it.  As a result, Tommy must choose whether he will stay with Fiona and become a citizen of Brigadoon, forever giving up a traditional existence, or whether he will leave without her, potentially giving up the great love of his life.  Initially Tommy leaves, unhappy that he made the wrong decision and returning to his old life, but then a miracle happens where Brigadoon briefly returns again, just so that Tommy & Fiona can be reunited before the city slips into the mists, to return 100 years later.

That plot sounds silly, and it admittedly is, but it's also so sweet and wonderful, and thanks to this being the 1950's, it's played straight-we don't get the sorts of winks a modern audience would require that would make the picture less earnest.  As a result, you get a genuinely moving love story.  I adored the charming side characters int the film, particularly Barry Jones's Mr. Lundie, whose lilting Scottish accent was heaven, and he lands his Friar Laurence-like character with great fervency.  Best of the bunch, though, is weirdly Van Johnson's Jeff, a drunken louse who is pretty much miserable the whole film but also hilarious; Johnson was famously closeted and ill-tempered in real life-as a result this character may be the closest you'd find to the former leading man playing himself onscreen but I've never seen him be better.

Our leading lady of the month is fine, though never more than that when it comes to her acting.  Charisse is going to be an odd conundrum for me-Brigadoon is the third of her films that I've seen for the project this month (I had to catch one of out order because Netflix has been jumpy lately), and I've genuinely liked all of the movies so far, but she's not a particularly compelling actress.  A brilliant dancer, and she surely gets moments for that (I adored her scene collecting heather for the wedding), but between her not doing the singing and her rather stiff approach to the conversational scenes, it's hard to get into her performance.  Kelly, who was always reliant upon his costar's to spring his chemistry (unlike Fred Astaire, who seemed to have chemistry with literally anyone), suffers as a result, coming across as too ardent.  It feels weird to love a movie so much without really adoring the leads (except for when they're going full-tilt into the romance), but that's Brigadoon for me, I guess.

The movie received three Oscar nominations, and all are well-earned.  Though it would have been lovelier in Scotland, the MGM sound lot still makes the set design look expansive and lush.  The sound work is divine, with the great "voices from the mist" being a highlight, as well as all of the well-staged musical numbers.  Best of all are the costumes, ornate and with just a few touches of the modern to remind you that it's the 1950's-Cyd Charisse's simple dress adorned by a Scottish tartan is a big highlight.  I probably would have made room for at least three more nominations for Supporting Actor, Cinematography, and Scoring (I haven't seen all of the major films from the year, but these will be high on my list if someone wants to knock them off), as all-in-all Brigadoon was a delight.

OVP: The Silver Chalice (1954)

Film: The Silver Chalice (1954)
Stars: Virginia Mayo, Pier Angeli, Jack Palance, Paul Newman
Director: Victor Saville
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Cinematography, Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 Virginia Mayo-click here to learn more about Ms. Mayo (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

It seems cruel to end Virginia Mayo's run as Star of the Month on such a low note, but, well, it's kind of where her career ended, and where oddly enough the career of another, much more famous star's began.  The Silver Chalice, a gigantic flop for Warner Brothers in the mid-50's (they lost over $1 million on the biblical epic), is most remembered today for being the screen debut of Paul Newman, then just a spry 29-year-old making his big-screen debut.  Newman famously hated the film, and once took out ads in the trades when it was going to air on television urging people not to see it (which of course had the opposite affect).  But it also marked the last film that Mayo did as a contract player at Warner Brothers, and really the last signficant film of her career.  While she'd get leading roles opposite Robert Ryan and Alan Ladd in the years after this, there would never again be a film of note in Mayo's career, even if that note was notorious, and she'd soon be following the lead of many other leading ladies of her era by doing guest work in television as the 1960's approached.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows a boy by the name of Basil, who is the gifted sculptor of a poor man who is adopted by a wealthy benefactor to be his son and heir to his fortune.  In the house, he continues to sculpt, and befriends a beautiful young girl who runs away but says she'll never forget him named Helena (as a child, played by a blonde Natalie Wood).  When the old man dies, Basil, now an adult (Newman), is denied his inheritance by his cruel uncle, and eventually is tracked to a house where he is a slave, and would have died except he is kidnapped and brought to Joseph of Arimathea, who wants him to create a silver chalice that will be modeled after the Holy Grail and feature the photos of the disciples and Jesus.  While he's there, he is torn between the adult Helena (Mayo), whom he loves and is having an affair with, and the saintly granddaughter of Joseph named Deborra (Angeli), who is a devout Christian and tries to win Basil to her side.  All-the-while, Helena's other lover Simon (Palance) has started to develop a cult-like status for his magic, and begins to think of himself as a god, as do the people of his city.  The film eventually culminates in Rome, where under Nero's Court Basil meets St. Peter (played by Lorne Greene of all people), finishes the chalice, and marries Deborra, while Simon goes mad (and essentially jumps off of a tower convinced he's able to fly), with Helena eventually being sacrificed by Nero as someone who must also jump to her doom.

The film sounds better than it is.  If you're hoping for a sudsy biblical soap opera, as that paragraph seems to have drawn, you'll find that it's more bloated than indulgent, with no one properly appreciating the camp of the film save for Mayo.  Newman, angel-faced and looking like an adonis, surely would be better in later pictures, but here is dull and listless in the lead, never entirely getting to the depth of the character he's playing; when the best thing you can say about a Paul Newman performance is that he looks good, you know it's a bust.  The same can be said for Angeli's whiny Deborra, and it's hard to tell what was going on with Jack Palance's Simon.  It's such a weird departure for the Hollywood tough man to be playing a slightly effeminate conjurer of tricks (he's straight, but you get a whisper of something else from what Palance is projecting, that perhaps he'd be willing to give it a try with Basil if the opportunity presented itself), and he can't handle it.  The last few moments where he throws himself to his doom are truly horrendous scenes from an actor who should have known better.

I have a soft spot for biblical epics, but this one falls flat.  It received two citations for Cinematography and Score, but neither of these components are all that remarkable.  There's some great shots during Simon's death scene that are interesting (the climbing up of the stairs is cool), but the blank sets, especially compared to Ben-Hur just five years later, feel pretty wooden by comparison.  The music is fine, if predictable work from Franz Waxman-there's nothing particularly melodic or individual about his work here that would make the film stand apart, and one wonders if he made it on name alone.

Arguably the best part of the film, and that's not saying as much as it should, is Mayo.  She plays Helena as a gal-about-town, the sort of creation that surely wouldn't have existed during Nero's reign, more Mae West than Mary Magdalene.  It was hard to watch this and not think of Anne Baxter two years later as the lusty Nefertari in The Ten Commandments, as clearly Baxter had to have seen Mayo in her work here as she heavily borrows from it.  Helena's defiance at the end, where she will die but with her head-held-high shows the makings of a better picture, one from her point-of-view (she's clearly power-hungry for Simon and lusts for Basil, and I love that that's not hidden in a film of 1954).  Because of her horniness she can't get through the film unscathed (it is the 1950's, after all), but there's a better picture in her work here, and it's a pity that this was, for all-intents-and-purposes, the final significant movie of Mayo's career.

Friday we'll investigate a different actress, one more known for her work in musical comedies than the dramas that featured through Mayo's work, but before we go, please share your thoughts on our Star of the Month-do you have a favorite Virginia Mayo performance?

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Film: Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
Stars: Richard Carlson, Julie Adams, Richard Denning, Antonio Moreno, Nestor Palva
Director: Jack Arnold
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

We continue on our month of classic horror movies with 1954's Creature from the Black Lagoon.  While I anticipate we'll return to some of the 1930's horror classics in a few days (in fact I guarantee it as I caught one of those pictures last night), we're now making a detour into the world of 1950's horror with this film, with arguably the final great Universal Studios' monster.  Black Lagoon, though it doesn't have the literary roots of something like a Frankenstein or Dracula, still seems to fall under the realm of the misunderstood monster, even if the "Gill-Man" as he's frequently referred to, is a bit more violent than some of his predecessors were (also the guy underneath the mask, Ricou Browning, was a snack, and is the last living original actor to play a Universal Monster).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is relatively slight when it comes to plot, clocking in at a mere 79 minutes long.  The movie starts with Dr. Maia (Moreno) discovering a fossilized hand of an unknown creature deep in the Amazon.  Off-screen, we see a living creature lurking with the same hand.  We are then jettisoned to what looks like sunny Miami where Dr. Maia shows the fossil to Dr. David Reed (Carlson) and his girlfriend/colleague Kay Lawrence (Adams, who I recognized about an hour into the film as Eve Simpson from Murder, She Wrote).  Along with their greedy benefactor Dr. Mark Williams (Denning), they set out on an expedition of the Amazon.  They accidentally come across the creature, and in a series of struggles, eventually leave him to his doom at the shadowy depths of the lagoon, not quite dead and therefore more than capable to come back for a sequel or two.

The movie's most iconic strength, other than the fish-like creature itself at the center, is in the way that the movie films underwater.  Browning was a superb swimmer, and eventually helped coordinate the Oscar-winning underwater effects in Thunderball.  The photography shots are superb by 1950's-standards, and are still quiet beautiful today.  Reliant heavily on jump scares throughout the picture (which doesn't feel as strong today where horror has found the jump scare almost passé), the underwater frights are almost certainly the best parts of the movie, gorgeously-lensed and showing the claustrophobia of being that close to a monster who is picking off the crew one-by-one.

Claustrophobia is central to the Creature from the Black Lagoon.  The Creature, like Frankenstein, is slow moving out of water, but his terror is in the way that he traps you in the lagoon, and the laborious risks you take in having to deal with him.  It's hard not to imagine that Steven Spielberg had this film in mind when he crafted Jaws-there's a great scene late in the film where they have to remove a log blocking the boat from leaving the Lagoon, a seemingly mundane task, but one that is consistently rendered asunder by the Creature killing all of the boat's passengers as they enter the water.  While the acting is hammy and the script seemingly predictable by today's standards, there's enough interesting light in this film and well-constructed horror to make it stand the test of time as you watch it, making it one of the better horror films I've seen in this month's marathon.

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

OVP: Executive Suite (1954)

Film: Executive Suite (1954)
Stars: William Holden, June Allyson, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Walter Pidgeon, Paul Douglas, Shelley Winters, Louis Calhern, Dean Jagger, Nina Foch
Director: Robert Wise
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Supporting Actress-Nina Foch, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

There is no genre harder to gage in how it will age than straight-dramas.  For any classic film fan, there's really few joys greater than investigating a classic movie for the first time, but I have to say that dramas always have their own risks.  Westerns, whether comedy or drama, you know what you're getting into; same with action-adventures, love stories, horrors, noir, but straight dramas run multiple different pitfalls.  The issues that are being discussed (because almost every drama has an issue at its core) may no longer be applicable, or applicable in the same way.  What might have seemed important at the time could, in fact, be unimportant now, and societal norms may shift to make the film much more dated than you'd hope.  As a result, I headed into Executive Suite (as part of Operation Clean My DVR), not knowing what I was in store for, and actually ended up pleasantly surprised.  The film, with an inexplicably gigantic cast of stars, works despite on-paper seeming like something that might not.

(Spoilers Ahead) Executive Suite uses the ticking clock aspect of storytelling well-while the film isn't quite in real time, it's only the course of about a 24-hour period, where an unseen man, a wealthy and controlling titan of industry, has died, leaving a gaping hole over who will be his successor at a successful furniture manufacturing company.  In the 24-hour period, we see multiple different men jostling with each other and other members of the board trying to figure out who will end up being the CEO, though the chief protagonists in that regard are Don (Holden), the young upstart with a lot of big ideals for the company, and Shaw (March), a practical man who lives mostly by the adoration of the shareholders.

I'll give you one guess over who wins (let's not forget this was made in 1954), but the film actually rises above its predictable nature in that regard.  We're well aware that Holden is the one in command here, and will eventually become the successor, but the film is still pretty riveting nonetheless.  It helps that Robert Wise hired a slate full of movie stars to fill up his picture; it was reported years later that they made this film, similar to the Grand Hotel-style all-star casts of the early 1930's, to compete with television, and while not all of the acting is on the same level, everyone is very watchable and knows how to command a scene when they're expected to do so.  I particularly liked Shelley Winters as a secretary having an affair with her boss, and Fredric March is commendable at making his mustache-twisting villain into a real human being (March is such a fine actor-the fact that he largely made pictures like these without any sort of genre hooks is the only explanation why he isn't still just as famous with casual moviegoers).  Nina Foch won the film's sole acting citation, and she's good, but it's the sort of good you only notice when someone else points it out to you-her character is mysterious, and rises above what could have been completely stock work (think of that scene where she's opposite of March and telling him off as carefully as she can, knowing he's likely to be her next boss), but I'll admit that I wouldn't have paid her much heed had I not been looking for the OVP.

The film's other three nominations are about on the same page-they're all good, though one wonders if they were listed simply because the movie is actually quite good and these were easy categories.  Art Direction is solid-I loved the C-Suite hallway stairs (it's such a nice, elegant touch, the sort that would happen dozens of stories above the earth), though the rest of the film (especially the homes and the other offices), don't have this level of inventive detail.  The costumes are all very appropriately tailored to this level of importance (one wonders if the Mad Men costume designers looked at a film like this for inspiration), and again there's the great touch of Nina Foch's pencil necklace, but overall I was less impressed with other parts, such as the men's suits which felt completely interchangeable.  And finally, the cinematography has a gimmick (never properly seeing the face of the dead CEO, and a first-person camera early on in the picture), which was catnip at the time to that particular AMPAS branch, but again (aside from those great C-Suite hallway shots), there's not a lot to recommend this nomination.

Stil, even if it didn't quite deserve all of its Oscar accolades, I can't help but be fascinated by this movie.  It's wildly watchable, particularly Winters and March, and the sort of film that's less about the acting or visual elements and more about the sum of its parts.  Think of something like Argo where nothing specifically is singled out as "the best" but it's damn fine entertainment.  At least those were my thoughts-how about yours?  Have any of you seen Executive Suite, and if so, what are your thoughts?  If not, share some favorite straight dramas that have stood the test of time in the comments!

OVP: Susan Slept Here (1954)

Film: Susan Slept Here (1954)
Stars: Dick Powell, Debbie Reynolds, Anne Francis, Alvy Moore, Glenda Farrell
Director: Frank Tashlin
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Original Song-"Hold My Hand" and Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Occasionally you have to sort of do a mental check when you see an older movie.  You see the film and think, "different place, different time."  There's a film, in fact, that we'll be reviewing tomorrow that basically falls into this exact camp and you have to sort through the troubling aspects of the film to find what was considered great about it in the first place.  However, there's also a time when you realize a film was probably creepy to begin with, and that everyone should have recognized that pretty instantaneously.  That's the case with the dated, laughless, and occasionally disgusting Susan Slept Here.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about a struggling writer Mark Christopher (Powell) who has had writer's block and can't find his muse anymore after winning an Academy Award (in the one trope I actually quite enjoyed, even with all of its silliness, the Oscar actually narrates the film).  He had been planning on writing a script about a juvenile delinquent, and so a sergeant friend of his decides to bring a 17-year-old girl named Susan (Reynolds) to spend the night with him (platonically, or at least that's what he instructs) so that he can learn more about juvenile delinquents.

In a modern movie comedy, this would be the end of it.  Mark would teach Susan the error of her ways and she'd straighten up, while he'd learn to appreciate life more and not be so cynical.  But for Susan Slept Here, this is apparently the recipe for romance.  Mark decides to, in order to keep Susan out of a juvenile detention facility, marry the young girl despite the age difference, and in the process Susan falls madly in love with him.  The film continues on with Susan being encouraged by grown adults like Mark's housekeeper Maude (Farrell) and best friend Virgil (Moore) to go after their forlorn friend, and in the end Mark realizes that he's in love with Susan.

There are a lot of things not to like here, but let's start with the obvious.  I'm aware of the "different era" aspect of the script, particularly since my grandparents had a fifteen year age gap in their marriage relatively similar to the one between Reynolds and Moore in this film, but the film's preoccupation with her age makes me think less about "different era" and more on the constant stress that she's a kid.  It doesn't help that Powell is playing a character who is supposed to be 35 but he looks closer to 60 (he was in fact thirty years older than Reynolds, not fifteen).  This was his last onscreen appearance (he'd make the worst mistake of any filmmaker's career, ever, two years later when he decided to direct The Conqueror, a film where nearly half of the crew ended up getting cancer because it was filmed near a nuclear testing site in Nevada), and you can tell that his age was not matching up with the frothy musical comedies of his youth.

It also doesn't help that the film is constantly shoving Reynolds' youth and inexperience down our throats, but when she dresses up and plays house it's suddenly okay for Powell to fall in love with her.  Reynolds gives this her all, but she's way too sweet and perky to be believable as a juvenile delinquent, and while there's no explaining attraction, this relationship enters the territory of paraphilia, or at least skirts around it.

The film received two Oscar nominations, including one for Best Song, though oddly not for the much more prominent title song, but instead for the Don Cornell number "Hold My Hand," which plays over the record player on several key occasions during the film.  The song is fine, but its prominence in the film is overstated-it's essentially random background music and feels too generic to actually include as a choice of excellence by the Academy.  The same could be said for the Sound-the film does play around a little bit with different volumes, but as a rule it's pretty standard, and probably the only reason it got the nomination was for the bizarre (and wholly unnecessary) ballet dream sequence toward the end of the film, which again seems to trade a lot on Reynolds' sex appeal and is squelched by Powell being way too old for this part (he looks ridiculous in that sailor costume).

Those are my thoughts on this creepy, dated, and unfunny film.  Quite a number of people swear they love this movie-are you one of them?  If so, could you explain your rationale (I'd genuinely love to hear it)?  And what do you think of the film's two Oscar nominations?  Share in the comments!

OVP: Them! (1954)

Film: Them! (1954)
Stars: James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness
Director: Gordon Douglas
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Special Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

In the 1950's, monster insect pictures became a staple for the movie-going public, principally because of the success of Them!.  While Tarantula, The Black Scorpion, and Monster from Green Hell (yes, take a second to start filling up your Netflix queues) would all follow, the craze seemed to get off correctly with the best of the films.  Them! is a higher quality film that you'd expect, considering its place in film history as a Grade-Z horror film, but it's actually pretty aware of the Cold War world surrounding it, and has a strong cast of solid actors (including an Oscar winner and Oscar nominee in Edmund Gwenn and James Whitmore, respectively) that gives it some needed gravitas.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film starts on an absolutely chilling desert scene where a young girl is found wandering the desert, vacant-eyed but clearly fearful of what she had just seen.  Honestly, it's the sort of beginning to a film you'd expect from The Twilight Zone (I would imagine that Rod Serling LOVED this movie), and since one of the men is James Whitmore and the other man is a random character actor, you know exactly where this scene is headed.  We see the random dude (Sheena, Queen of the Jungle's Chris Drake) go off into the night, hear a strange pulsing sound, and then he screams, and the body count begins.

The film proceeds fairly typically, with us eventually learning that the ants are gigantic and irradiated as a result of nuclear explosions nearby, and have started to spread and colonize.  We go on a bit of a giant goose chase until we learn that the last living queen ant is residing in the sewers of of Los Angeles, ready to pounce on the city which is largely defenseless to stop the ants if they continue to multiply.

Thankfully for the planet, though not before James Whitmore's Peterson dies in an ant attack, they get there just in time and stop more queens from creating colonies.  The film ends with a warning from Edmund Gwenn's Dr. Medford, "when man entered the Atomic Age, he opened the door to a new world.  What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict."  Only in the movies can you be so poetic while in an LA sewer drain.

It's the sort of heavy-handed ending you'd expect from such a picture, but it's worth noting a few things about the film.  For starters, there is a bizarrely grand tradition in blockbuster films like Them! to say something meaningful to your enormous audience (this was Warner Brothers biggest hit of 1954).  This film, clearly a commentary on the dangers of the Cold War (critical of nuclear attacks not just because it could cause our imminent destruction through obvious means, but through ways we may not fully understand yet), is succeeded by films that worry about everything from absolute power (Star Wars) to climate change (Avatar) to the need for further exploration (Gravity, Life of Pi).  I love the idea that cinema is trying to teach us a lesson, while still being vastly entertaining.

I also think that this film creates a real sense of urgency and tension that several films of this era lack. The opening few scenes are excellent, recalling something like King Kong in many aspects in the way that they tease the ants (visually), and then eventually give them to us full throttle.  If you're worried about an effects film not feeling modern enough, trust that if Them! were made today they would have used most of the first thirty minutes of the picture.

The film received one Oscar nomination, for Best Special Effects, and while we've got to judge on a bit of a curve (almost all effects from this era look cheesy in hindsight), I have to admit that I enjoyed them, though they don't quite have the same "wow" that some other movies of this era (like Forbidden Planet, for example) have on me.  Still, though, the scenes where the ants aren't with the people (and the initial scene where Joan Weldon actually sees the ants) are really good, and I quite enjoyed them.

Those were my thoughts on this Sci Fi classic-what about you?  Have you seen Them, and if not, what are you waiting for?  Which giant bug movie should I catch next?  And should it have won the Best Special Effects Oscar?  Share in the comments!

OVP: It Should Happen to You (1954)

Film: It Should Happen to You (1954)
Stars: Judy Holliday, Jack Lemmon, Peter Lawford, Michael O'Shea
Director: George Cukor
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

I know what you're thinking.  You're looking at that title and thinking, "Wait, 1954?  Did he get this wrong?  Isn't this the name of that romantic comedy with Bridget Fonda from the 90's?" and you'd be close, cause that was what I initially thought, but there's a big difference between should and could in this case.  Instead, here we have what may be one of the most prescient films I've ever seen from the 1950's.  The film, about a woman who simply wants her names in lights and to be well-known, even if there's no actual reason for her new-found fame, is wildly predictive of the advent of reality television and "famous for the sake of being famous" in a way few films ever prove to be so prophetic.  While the film itself is pretty run-of-the-mill (though anchored by strong work from Judy Holliday, the film's plot is almost eerie in the way that it predicts our current Kardashian-obsessed present.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place in Manhattan, circa the 1950's, when a young woman, down-on-her-luck Gladys Glover (Holliday) decides to impetuously buy a billboard for $630 with her name splashed across it over Columbus Circle.  Nothing more than just her name, but it starts to garnish some attention.  She's pursued by a perplexed documentary filmmaker named Pete (Lemmon) who is infatuated by her but cannot get over her utter fascination with publicity and fame, instead thinking that she should crave privacy and thinking she's a bit vain for all of this.  Gladys continues to stumble toward fame when a wealthy executive named Evan Adams III (Lawford) decides he wants her billboard, and as a result offers her six huge signs throughout New York City that state her name (and of course, being that this is a romantic comedy and we need a caddish foil, Lawford also starts to fall for Holliday).

This creates a swirl surrounding Gladys, and soon everyone in New York wants to know who the girl with the billboards is, and soon she becomes well-known, appearing on television, primarily as the object of ridicule, though initially she doesn't seem to know or care.  After a while she becomes a household name, appearing in advertisements as the "All-American Girl" but after Evan makes a pass at her, she decides that this life isn't quite for her, and that she would prefer life with Pete.  A couple of bits of chasing her fella (including an air-writer with a message "Pete Call Gladys Please") leaves Holliday in Lemmon's arms, and us with our happily ever after.

I have a few things to say about this film before we get to the costumes.  One, I'm in love with how much this mirrors the future careers of women like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian (minus the sex tapes).  There is absolutely no reason for Gladys's fame.  She's not a singer or a dancer or an actress-there's nothing interesting about her except that she's attractive and that she was clever enough to put her name on a billboard.  While the idea of "famous for the sake of famous" wasn't an alien concept in 1954 (women like Zsa Zsa Gabor and Brenda Frazier had managed to make names for themselves in this way), this mirrored the rise of the Kardashians far more than either of those two earlier women.

The second thing is that I have now watched three films (the others are here and here) where a woman is celebrated for giving up her career for the happiness of a man.  I'd say that celebrating this has changed, but this film is brand new and does the same thing.  This is something I hadn't noticed very often before, but with three films where it becomes a key plot point, I realize that this is a depressingly common trope across all of cinema (everything from Notting Hill to Titanic to Roman Holiday involves a woman trying to deplete herself to let a man enter her world).  Someone should really find a way to make a film where a man has to change for a woman and give up part of his happiness for hers pretty soon to start to balance a century's worth of cinema.

The movie's sole Oscar nomination was for Best Costume design, and it was probably due in part to the incredible reputation of the designer, Jean Louis, than for anything else.  Louis would create iconic looks for Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, and his eventual wife Loretta Young, and here is working with the woman who got him his first Oscar nomination in Born Yesterday (Louis would win only one Oscar, also for working with Holliday in The Solid Gold Cadillac).  The looks of Holliday are immaculate if a little bit blase by the standards we usually hold Oscar too.  I love the way that she is always so fashionable, even in the opening scenes-a girl who wants her name on a billboard is going to be looking perfect to begin with, and everything seems to be a cavalcade of the chic and modern.   The men and basically all other characters in the film aren't what you'd consider interesting, but Holliday looks terrific.

Those are my thoughts on the charming if simple movie-what about you?  Do you ever watch movies from the 40's and 50's and think "how did they know?!?"?  Are you as equally disturbed by the "woman gives up her career" trope within nearly all of romantic cinema?  And what did you think of Jean Louis' costumes?  Share in the comments!