The Big Knife (1955)

Film: The Big Knife (1955)

Stars: Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Everett Sloane

Director: Robert Aldrich

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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.

Film noir in the mid-to-late 1950's, in my opinion, gets a bum rap.  Yes, at this point we are seeing less of the biggest names in show business doing the genre (not like in the 1940's when stars like Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, & Barbara Stanwyck were regularly appearing in the genre), but you still get really good movies like Odds Against Tomorrow, The Wrong Man, and perhaps the greatest film noir of them all (my opinion changes depending on the day on who deserves that title) Touch of Evil.  In 1955, Robert Aldrich, most well-known today as the guy who dealt with Bette Davis & Joan Crawford on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (if you watched Feud's first season, he's played by Alfred Molina) made two of the most-revered film noirs of the era.  The first, Kiss Me Deadly, we profiled in a previous season (check out the review at the bottom of this page), but is a proper masterpiece (if you haven't seen it, you must, and also put down your damn phone during it as it's the kind of movie you need to immerse yourself into), but his second was far more infamous at the time it was made, and while it's not as good, that doesn't mean it's not a very strong follow-up picture from Aldrich.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place largely in one house (other than a cutaway to a party, I don't recall a scene that doesn't take place in the main character's home...which is how you can tell it was adapted from a play by Clifford Odets).  Charlie Castle (Palance) is a leading man living in a mansion, and is about to sign a contract with his studio to continue to make movies, even though he's not interested in such a contract because he keeps getting saddled with commercial garbage from the studio.  He's also worried about the impact it'll have on his marriage to wife Marion (Lupino), who is separated from him and seeing another man.  Things to come to a head when the studio chief Shriner Hoff (Steiger) basically blackmails Charlie into signing the deal, as he has knowledge of a vehicular homicide that Charlie caused that ultimately his friend Buddy went to jail for.  Charlie signs it, and in the wake sleeps with Buddy's wife (Hagen), but there's a problem-a woman was there the night Charlie had his hit-and-run, a struggling starlet named Dixie Evans (Winters), and she's threatening to go to a gossip columnist (clearly modeled after Hedda Hopper) to destroy Charlie's career.

The movie continues on, but we'll stop here for an intermission.  The Big Knife is one of several films that happened in the wake of the success of Sunset Boulevard that showed the uglier side of Hollywood.  We saw more of this with pictures like In a Lonely Place and The Bad and the Beautiful, but The Big Knife is one of the nastiest in this subgenre.  First off, it's at least somewhat based on a true story, and even more so off of a famous Hollywood legend.  In the early 1930's, John Huston was arrested (though ultimately absolved) of a hit-and-run involving a dancer who ran in front of his car.  Huston, unlike the character in the movie, was the actual person behind the wheel and unlike Charlie, wasn't drunk when it happened.  The legend involving Huston's accident is that he took the blame for Clark Gable, even in 1933 a major star for the studio and more valuable than Huston, and whose career couldn't handle the scandal (this is rebutted by pretty much everyone in retrospect as untrue as Gable was nowhere near the accident, but it's become enmeshed in both the Huston story and in the making of The Big Knife).

Then again, no one gets away scot-free here.  Rod Steiger is really good as Hoff, playing him as a malevolent monster, willing to destroy Charlie's life if it helps his bottom line.  It's also a clear homage to Harry Cohn, then the head of Columbia, who was furious when he saw the film.  In fact, despite a starry cast (Palance & Hagen had recently gotten Oscar nominations, Lupino & Steiger were still pretty big names) no studio would touch this film other than United Artists.  That was largely to do with the film's subject matter (tearing apart the star system), but also could've done with the film's bleak ending.  Winters' character dies (Winters, for the record, aces this part, which feels written for her as she gets to be drunk, lascivious, & downtrodden, which are all onscreen skills she perfected in the wake of A Place in the Sun), not from murder (as some expected), but getting hit by a bus.  Charlie, at that point, could find reprieve...but when his wife finds out about his affair with Jean Hagen's Connie, he can't take it.  He has no control in his life, and he kills himself offscreen.  

This is when maybe the most dastardly thing in the movie happens.  Ida Lupino wails in sorrow, and the camera zooms out, showing us first the apartment, and then the sides of a screen, implying (in a Twilight Zone-style twist) that we've been watching a fictional movie-within-a-movie.  The end credits roll before they do much with it, but it's a bitter note to end the picture on, with Aldrich/Odets commentating on us enjoying the sorrows of these beautiful people as entertainment in a meta way.  The film is sometimes a bit too heavy-handed, but the performances from Lupino, Steiger, & Winters are so strong (Palance is fine, but maybe a tad miscast...William Holden or Kirk Douglas would've been a better choice here since they were more convincing leading men) you won't care.  And of course, as is evidenced by this month, I love me a ruthless film noir, which this is.

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, Side Street, 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, Kansas City Confidential, 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, Whirlpool

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

The Man from Laramie (1955)

Film: The Man from Laramie (1955)

Stars: James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Crisp, Cathy O'Donnell, Alex Nicol

Director: Anthony Mann

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

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

We've jumped about a bit with Stewart, last week discussing some of the films he made in the late-1950's with Alfred Hitchcock, attempting to escape in some respects the persona with which he'd long been associated.  This week, we're still in the mid-1950's, but I want to discuss a bit what happened in the latter half of Stewart's career.  Today's film was his last movie with Anthony Mann, but it was hardly his final western.  In the decades that followed, that was mostly what Stewart would make, but with less assured results.  The actor worked steadily throughout the 1960's & 1970's, but usually in cameos that traded on his star power.  More so, he appeared in flops, including an ill-fated eponymous television show (did you know there was a Jimmy Stewart sitcom in the 1970's?!?).  He made only two classics during this period, both of which starred John Wayne, both of which were westerns, and one of which is a personal favorite (hence why we aren't ending with it): The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Shootist.  Today, though, we're going to discuss Stewart's eighth and final film with Anthony Mann, The Man from Laramie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie follows Will Lockhart (Stewart), who is delivering supplies from Laramie to Coronado, a desolate western town, while also trying to find the man who led to Apaches killing his brother by selling them guns.  Concurrently, we have a wealthy landowner named Alec Waggoman (Crisp) who is haunted by the thought that someone is going to kill his ne'er-do-well son Dave (Nicol), whom he loves but cannot control.  Dave after shooting many of Will's mules after he mistakenly takes salt from one of Alec's lakes, gets into a fist fight with him, and while most of the town wants Will to leave, he wants to find the gun runner who led to his brother's death.  He ends up in a course collision with much of the Waggoman family, including their attractive niece Barbara (O'Donnell) and a hired hand Vic Hansbro (Kennedy) who is jealous of Dave since Vic has been truly loyal to Alec.  As we continue, it becomes clear that Dave & Vic were the reasons for Will's brother dying, and both end up dead before the credits roll, though neither by the hand of Will Lockhart, who doesn't have the stomach for cold-blooded murder.

The movie is glorious, and that starts with the cinematography.  Shot by 18-time Oscar nominee Charles Lang, this was one of the first westerns shot on CinemaScope, the film is beautiful, desert shots (such as the gorgeous final shootout between Stewart & Kennedy), the movie looks sensational, and is a fitting end to Mann & Stewart's partnership.  Stewart is once again excellent in this mold, learning a bit from his previous iterations as a cowboy by leaning into the "last ride of a legend" motif.  You know from the opening scenes that he's going to end this standing tall, but also that he will never rest, a wandering spirit of the west.  The film suffers in its supporting actors, particularly with a miscast O'Donnell & Crisp, but Stewart's performance and all of the technical aspects are first rate, and I loved the title track.

Jimmy Stewart, as I mentioned above, continued making movies, some of them successfully, well into the late 1980's, though he worked sparingly.  The only really important movie of his post-1960 era was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which is his best western and brought him face-to-face with John Wayne.  I wrote about this the first time I saw it ten years ago, and it's only grown in my estimation since then as one of the great movies of the year, and one of the bitterest endings in all of Classical Hollywood.  Next month, we're going to talk about another actor whose modern mythos is associated with a gentle, kind figure, one that Oscar also noticed, but whose fame throughout the 1950's came from wearing a cowboy hat.

OVP: Mister Roberts (1955)

Film: Mister Roberts (1955)

Stars: Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell, Jack Lemmon, Betsy Palmer, Ward Bond

Director: John Ford & Mervyn LeRoy

Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Supporting Actor-Jack Lemmon*, Sound Recording)

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

Ward Bond is unusual, as we've mentioned throughout this month, because he was a true character actor, and someone who, unlike say Thelma Ritter or Walter Brennan, he didn't get semi-lead roles and never was nominated for an Academy Award.  This makes him unusual because Ward Bond holds the distinction of starring in the most Best Picture nominees of any credited actor in the history of the Academy, more than even Jack Nicholson or Robert de Niro or Meryl Streep, with thirteen nominees ranging from Arrowsmith all the way back in 1931-32 to today's film, Mister Roberts, which was the final Best Picture nominee that Bond would appear in in his career.  Mister Roberts was famously a troubled shoot (John Ford fought with both James Cagney & Henry Fonda), one that involved not just two credited directors (Ford & Mervyn LeRoy), but Joshua Logan was uncredited, making Mister Roberts one of the only movies (outside Gone with the Wind) to be helmed by three different Oscar nominees.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in the waning days of World War II, with a bunch of sailors stuck aboard a cargo ship called the Reluctant, where they are under the tyrannical rule of Captain Morton (Cagney).  Morton is frequently at odds with Mr. Roberts (Fonda), a lieutenant on the ship who is desperate to get off this ship, which is safely in a harbor but is not going to see battle, and join the front.  Roberts is frequently fighting on behalf of the men, who are desperate to get shore leave after a year at sea, but Morton wants to keep Roberts under his thumb, primarily because he knows what a bad commanding officer he has been & he doesn't want him to leak that to the brass.  Joined by his pals Doc (Powell) & Pulver (Lemmon), Roberts continues to hatch plans to get under Morton's skin and specifically to get a letter requesting his transfer as well as to get the men shore leave.  He initially has to sacrifice the former to get the latter, but once the men hear about it, the men risk court martial to get Roberts transferred.  The film ends on a bitter note, with Roberts dying in action, and Pulver (until that point something of a coward) standing up to Morton and assuming the antagonistic role that Roberts had played in his life, defending the men.

The movie was an "ehh" for me.  I get what's happening here & I understand why this was a successful play given its mix of tone, but the stage is a different beast and you don't have to feed off of an audience's energy in the same way.  As a result, the mixture of slapstick farce alongside a very serious story feels very off, and the tenor of the picture doesn't quite work.  The cast is a mixed bag-Fonda is good as a revered rule-breaker, even if the script demands nothing from him, but Cagney is actively bad here, not knowing how to play his villain as anything but a hammy Mickey Rooney-level joke.  Jack Lemmon, of course, won an Oscar for this role (his first of eight nominations), and while I get it (seeing Lemmon's signature ability with comedy for the first time had to have been undeniable), it feels weird that he won for something so dismissible, as this is hardly what he'd end up being capable of as he moved to being a leading man.

Mister Roberts was a big film for most of the cast.  Henry Fonda hadn't made a movie in eight years before this (he'd been on stage), and was not favored by Warner Brothers.  This movie was a huge hit, though, and its success brought Fonda back to Hollywood, and two years later he'd be making one of the most important movies of his career, 12 Angry Men.  James Cagney would never make another movie for Warner after this (his home for almost three decades) and William Powell wouldn't make another movie, period, even though he'd live another thirty years.  Ward Bond, of course, would continue to make movies and we'll talk about the most important one of his as an actor next week, but this week I'll admit that I continue to strike out.  While Bond is in this movie, he has a very small part, and so it's hard to really assess his talents as an actor with such a small role.

The Big Combo (1955)

Film: The Big Combo (1955)

Stars: Cornel Wilde, Richard Conte, Brian Donlevy, Jean Wallace, Helen Walker

Director: Joseph H. Lewis

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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.

We've revamped the below list of film noirs to include not just marathon entries, but also other films we've reviewed on the blog that fit this description (if you find any more on the blog that aren't listed, let me know in the comments!).  The reason I did this is both because I'm a completist AND because it illustrates how different noir was treated in the 1940's vs. the 1950's.  While in the 1940's it was a major get, with movies like Laura, Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, and Leave Her to Heaven featuring the biggest stars on the lot, winning Oscar nominations & making millions, by the mid-1950's the genre was still pumping out titles, but it had fallen on hard times.  The films of this era were not starring the big stars, but instead faded ones or B-movie stars while the biggest names were in Technicolor extravaganzas and musicals.  Stripped of their budgets, the lasting titles of this era were reliant upon pure talent to make that work (if they worked).  I was curious given the lack of major names (other than Cornel Wilde, and he's hardly a bright light star) if this was going to be the case for The Big Combo, generally considered to be one of the best film noir movies of this era.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about two men: Lt. Leonard Diamond (Wilde) and Mr. Brown (Conte), the former a hardboiled police detective and the latter a crime boss.  The two men are squaring off partially due to a woman, the suicidal Susan (Wallace), who is dating Mr. Brown but Diamond is falling in love with her (and she might reciprocate).  Diamond is investigating the disappearance of a woman named Alicia (Walker) who we soon learn is Diamond's estranged wife, initially assumed to be dead but soon we find out she's a recluse and a bit emotionally damaged.  The two men square off repeatedly, with both sides (Diamond's friend-with-benefit Rita, several of Brown's associates) ending up dead in the process.

The film ends with a standoff between Diamond & Brown, where Brown is upended by his girlfriend Susan as she flashes a headlight into his eyes repeatedly, meaning he can't see the bullets he's shooting and his gun runs out.  This leads to what is the most famous clip in The Big Combo-a gorgeous shot of Diamond & Susan standing near each other in the fog, just their perfect, shadowy silhouettes taking up the screen (I had to pick it for the photo of this article even though it's literally the final scene in the movie).  I learned afterward that this is what the movie was known for, and while the entire picture has solid cinematography, this was truly something special to the point where I actually paused it and texted a friend of mine "what a sexy shot."  It's instantly iconic, and totally encapsulates the genre.

The movie never approaches the magnificence of this final scene.  It doesn't help that Wilde isn't a magnetic actor, certainly not compared to Richard Conte (whom you all know as Don Barzini in The Godfather) even if the former is the Oscar nominee.  Conte's so magnetic while Wilde is devoid of personality (in what is an interesting part, given that Diamond is kind of a lech, totally manipulating Susan into being with him) that it throws the film off, and there's not enough of Helen Walker (so superb in Nightmare Alley a few years earlier) to make up for it.  Walker would never make another movie, and so it'd be better if her part (the best part in the movie) had been given more time to breath.  But I'm still going three stars as this is a great bare bones noir when it's working, and that final scene is appropriately epic.

Previous Film Noir on The Many Rantings of John: 

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, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, 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 Heat, The Blue Gardenia,The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, 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, Nightcrawler

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Film: Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Stars: Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Juano Hernandez, Wesley Addy, Maxine Cooper, Cloris Leachman, Gaby Rodgers

Director: Robert Aldrich

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 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 things that's inevitable with a series like this is that, as we go into deeper and deeper cuts for film noir, we will find that not every film is a treasure.  I always have a blast seeing a movie for the first time (particularly in theaters) because it's a new experience, and who can dislike such a joy?  But we have yet this month to run into a film noir that was really earth-shattering, one that I'd consider a peak, "best of" the genre like we did a few years ago when we last did this marathon and caught film noir classics like Ride the Pink Horse and Body Heat for the first time (reviews of both at the bottom of the page).  Today, though, we're going to get to such a film, possibly a movie that's (dare I say it) better than even those deep cut classics.  I didn't know what to expect when watching Kiss Me Deadly in sweltering, near-100 degree heat in Minnesota (I'm camped out in my basement in a form of reverse hibernation).  What I got was a movie I knew would instantly be revisited and soon adorn my own collection (oh Criterion, you wise sage, you've already got one ready for me!).

(Spoilers Ahead, and I mean it-this is a really good movie so don't just skip ahead, rent it & bookmark to read later if you haven't watched yet!) The movie opens with Mike Hammer (Meeker), driving along a nighttime route when he comes across Christina Bailey (Leachman) a beautiful woman who has escaped from a nearby asylum and is totally nude under a trench coat.  The two are run off the road, and when Mike awakens, he's in a hospital bed while Christina is dead.  Mike's girlfriend Velda (Cooper), with whom he performs penny-ante divorce cases, is there, and they decide to investigate Christina's death, getting them sucked into what initially feels like a standard-issue criminal investigation, but as the movie continues it becomes clearer that there's something alien, almost otherworldly about this investigation that could end with Mike's death.

Kiss Me Deadly is adapted from the bestselling Mickey Spillane novels, so an audience in 1955 likely would've known that Mike Hammer was going to live through this.  I, on the other hand, knew of Spillane only tangentially (I'm more inclined to an Agatha Christie mystery, though I'd be open to investigating Spillane after this movie), and the ending is petrifying to know if Mike (who is played by Meeker less as an honorable Bogart or Dick Powell detective whose goodness will shine through and more as a guy determined to get out alive, even if it means most of those around him will falter) will survive.  He does, but in a horrifying fashion.

At the end, Lily (Christina's roommate, played by Gaby Rodgers) turns out to be a double-crosser, one who has been playing the victim most of the movie but is in fact something of a sociopath, ready to kill everyone to get what she wants.  She shoots Mickey, and then opens up the mysterious box that everyone has been chasing.  It's heavily assumed to be atomic materials, though the way that it's filmed it feels less like plutonium and more like some sort of lost Ark of the Covenant, as Lily is soon burned alive in an impressive bit of visual effects for 1955.  The scene is beautifully-acted, with Rodgers nailing her part.  The whole film she's been sort of on autopilot, with us assuming she's some dumb, oblivious bystander, but she reveals slyly that part of that is real, part of it an act, and we know that she's more of a Pandora figure, intent on opening the box even if it means the destruction of the world.  I adore when films play around with genre as a surprise, and here we get that, as the closing scenes of Kiss Me Deadly read as something out of a SciFi or Horror film.

Up until this point, though, the film has so artfully shown us Mike slowly-but-steadily drowning that they don't even need to knock it out of the park on the ending (even if they did).  The cinematography is smashing (there's a great scene where we see two mobsters behind Mike but he can't, and the jump scare will genuinely give you a fright).  The film is judiciously paced, with just the right amount of fat on it, and despite having a rather complicated plot, it never feels too expositional or like we're getting too many clues.  It helps that the film is bookended by its best scenes.  The ending is stupendous, yes, but the opening is just as good.  Leachman excels at playing an unknowable woman (in the novel it appears they're more explicit as to Christina's death & why she is killed so soon, but it works better with her hanging as a coda onto the film), and in about ten minutes gives us a fully-fledged character.  It helps the film's legend that she's easily the most famous actress in the cast to modern audiences (that wouldn't be the case in 1955), so it gives something of a Janet Leigh moment that she's there and gone, but damn is she good.  Leachman & Rodgers are the standouts, but everyone's great in this though, honestly.  Meeker is delicious as Hammer, Paul Stewart excels as a mastermind who is also over his head (he just doesn't know it yet), and in a small cameo, Marian Carr plays a sexed up mob mol that basically is throwing herself at Meeker's Mike Hammer...the only problem is you want more & she never returns.  It helps that Meeker, with his piercing eyes & sandy blonde hair, is just as "smashable" as bombshell Carr-you're going to leave this movie slightly horny...in addition to completely impressed.

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, Criss Cross, The Asphalt Jungle, Night and the City, They Live By Night, Gun Crazy, In a Lonely Place, Sweet Smell of Success, The Big Heat, The Hitch-Hiker, Pickup on South Street, House of Bamboo, The Killing, The Long Goodbye, Body Heat

House of Bamboo (1955)

Film: House of Bamboo (1955)

Stars: Robert Ryan, Robert Stack, Shirley Yamaguchi, Cameron Mitchell, Sessue Hayakawa

Director: Samuel Fuller

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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.

Diversity in Hollywood, particularly when it comes to the upper echelons of stardom, has never been equitable.  You could make an argument that this is getting better (it is), but it's also nowhere near equitable.  You might think that diversity, though, is a straight line, that it's always getting better.  That isn't the case, though.  While in the 1970's & 80's, Asian actors were virtually nonexistent in lead roles, in the 1950's and early 1960's, Hollywood made a point of giving lead roles to Asian actors in studio films with some regularity.  Actors like Nancy Kwan & James Shigeta became proper leading stars, getting high-billing starting in the late 1950's and throughout the 1960's, marking the first time that Asian actors had been given this distinction since Anna May Wong & Sessue Hayakawa in the 1930's.  One other star during this era, whose leading lady career just immediately preceded Shigeta & Kwan's, was Shirley Yamaguchi, the star of today's noir House of Bamboo.

(Spoilers Ahead) A few years after World War II, a train guarded by Americans & the Japanese that is carrying a large amount of guns & ammunition is hijacked and an American soldier is killed.  When another soldier is killed with the same gun from the hijacking, police find amongst his possessions a letter from ex-felon Eddie Spanier (Stack), the only clue that the soldier gives as to his killer other than also stating that he's secretly married to a Japanese woman Mariko (Yamaguchi).  Our story then largely shifts to Eddie & Mariko's perspective, with the two united in trying to figure out what happened to Webber, largely through Eddie infiltrating himself into the criminal organization of Sandy Dawson (Ryan), and eventually in a twist revealing himself to not be an ex-con, but instead a member of the US military hired to take down Dawson's operation.

The movie's plot is, like many noirs of this era, probably slightly too decorative-there's too much going on to really work perfectly (noirs got needlessly complicated in the years that followed movies that could play complicated plots like Laura and The Third Man, though Bamboo handles this better than most by having some solid twists), and Stack is not my favorite (he's not remotely the actor that Ryan is, and despite the billing, Stack is decidedly the lead here).  But it's a gorgeously-shot movie, one of the most beautiful color noirs I've ever seen.  It's not only a case where it looks great in sharp Technicolor, but it also employs wide shots in a way that I haven't seen in noir very often.  There's a chase sequence at the end that works perfectly because you don't just see Ryan & Stack standing off in a way only one of them can come back from, but you see the entire standoff from a longshot.  It's creative, and even though this is a good movie once you can get past Stack's charisma deficiency, I'd recommend it much more highly just because of this attribute.

Yamaguchi is also good, giving her role a bit of desperation that I liked-without her husband, she doesn't know whom to trust, but is still a woman with secrets.  It reads a bit like the inverse of a traditional femme fatale-she's still dangerous, but because of those around her, not because she's bringing the danger herself.  This would arguably be the high point in Yamaguchi's Hollywood career.  The actress, who appeared in some Japanese propoganda films during World War II, was nearly killed in China for being a "Chinese National" in the wake of the war (she frequently portrayed a Chinese person in these films, making people think that she was not Japanese and thus a traitor, despite her being Japanese by birth), but her parents' rescued her from firing squad after they produced her birth certificate.  She established herself in Hollywood in the 1950's with House of Bamboo (amongst other films), but retired from film acting in 1958 and eventually became a member of the Japanese parliament.

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, Criss Cross, The Asphalt Jungle, Night and the City, They Live By Night, Gun Crazy, In a Lonely Place, Sweet Smell of Success, The Big Heat, The Hitch-Hiker, Pickup on South Street, The Killing, The Long Goodbye, Body Heat

Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)

Film: Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)

Stars: Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Marie Windsor, Michael Ansara, Eddie Parker

Director: Charles Lamont

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, & Boris Karloff owe their fame almost exclusively to the Universal Monster canon, which the trio built separately (and sometimes together).  This isn't the case for Bud Abbott & Lou Costello, who were already famous before they decided to start making horror comedy spoofs with the original Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.  However, the Universal monsters certainly cemented the legend of Abbott & Costello, and through that 1948 film, caused a massive rebound in their popularity, something they'd ride for nearly the next decade doing films with Lugosi, Chaney, & Karloff.  By 1955, though, both men were starting to see the cracks again in their pairings, and overexposure had made them passé once more.  As a result, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy was the last film they would make featuring the Universal monsters, and was the penultimate film the duo would make together before Costello's death from a heart attack in 1959.

(Spoilers Ahead) Bud & Lou (playing themselves always, but here literally playing themselves as their characters are named Bud & Lou), overhear a plot to steal a treasure from the tomb of a mummy using a sacred medallion.  Bud & Lou want to help escort the mummy back to the United States, but before they can the doctor who is housing the mummy is murdered, and the mummy is stolen.  Through a series of mishaps (always), they find the medallion, though, but Lou accidentally swallows it and so they are kidnapped since it's the only way the grave-robbers are able to keep hold of the medallion.  One-thing-leads to another (a series of comic site gags including a solid one involving Lou & an X-ray), and they all end up at the tomb, with the mummy (Parker) destroyed in an explosion that reveals the treasure, which Lou & Bud use to start a nightclub to honor the memory of Klaris the mummy.

The movie itself is not breaking any new ground.  We are a long way from Frankenstein, where Abbott & Costello not only were introduced to a cavalcade of Universal monsters, but some of the actors who became famous for those parts (Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Wolf Man).  Here we have a Mummy that's not in on the joke, a lifeless corpse just wandering around the stage, and honestly the side villains are so interchangeable you'll have to pay undue attention to ensure you know what's going on.

But I liked it-I am a fan of the Abbott & Costello format.  They have great chemistry, Lou is always a riot, and they also celebrate the monsters while still keeping true to some of the formatting we've come to love.  We have one more Universal Monster movie remaining this month before I call it a day (we've basically hit the entire "canon" of the Universal monster movies, even if we could go forever through horror films of the era), so it's a bit bittersweet but timely that not only are we nearly done with this series, but this was the final film that Abbott & Costello made for Universal Studios.

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

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

Picture: The Trouble with Harry (1955)

Stars: Edmund Gwenn, John Forsythe, Shirley MacLaine, Mildred Natwick, Mildred Dunnock, Jerry Mathers

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: The film received a number of what we'd consider today to be "traditional" precursor citations-MacLaine won a Golden Globe & was nominated for a BAFTA, while Hitchcock was cited for the DGA.  But it didn't get any nominations overall at the Academy Awards.

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 Shirley MacLaine-click here to learn more about Ms. MacLaine (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

With Shirley MacLaine, we begin with Hitchcock, because with Shirley MacLaine, her cinematic journey began with Hitchcock.  As I'll likely bring up in pretty much every review we do this month, Shirley MacLaine is who I consider my favorite actress of all time, but I'd never seen her debut film, which despite the third-billing up top was very much a lead role (she got the "Introducing Shirley MacLaine" title credit, which made me squeal with delight while watching it).  MacLaine had gotten to Hollywood through an unlikely path.  After spending a couple of years on Broadway doing chorus work (MacLaine's first great love was not acting, but dance, something that would feature prominently throughout her career), MacLaine landed the understudy role in The Pajama Game after star Carol Haney injured her ankle (Haney, who won a Tony Award for this part, had a steep career fall after a promising start following this incident, proving that Hollywood cliche "for one star to rise, another must fall").  This led to Hal Wallis seeing her in the role, and signing her to a contract with Paramount, where her first film was The Trouble with Harry.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Trouble with Harry is a comedy, albeit a macabre one (in a strange coincidence, our Sunday Leftovers piece tomorrow is also going to be a comedy from Hitchcock, which was not a genre he frequented).  The movie takes place in Highwater, Vermont, where several residents find a dead body of a man they learned to be named Harry up on a hill.  The question, of course, is how he died, and several people worry as the film progresses that they are the cause.  They include Captain Wiles (Gwenn), who initially believes he shot the man while rabbit-hunting-in order to cover up the accidental crime, so he & local artist Sam Marlowe (Forsythe) bury the man, but it turns out that he had instead actually shot a rabbit.  Both Jennifer Rogers (MacLaine), Harry's estranged wife, and prim Miss Gravely (Natwick) are worried they killed him, both by hitting him with blunt objects, but as we learn by the end of the picture Harry, despite being buried & unburied throughout the entire film by the guilt-ridden quartet, died of natural causes.  The film ends happily, with both Jennifer & Sam and Captain Wiles & Miss Gravely ending up together.

The Trouble with Harry was something of an experiment for Hitchcock-he wanted to see what a film led by character actors and "non-stars" would do at the box office.  MacLaine was doing her first film, Forsythe was relatively early in his career, and Gwenn/Natwick were hardly newcomers, but were well-known as character actors, not headliners.  This ended up being an experiment that would end in failure-The Trouble with Harry was a commercial flop, and critics weren't entirely won over either.  Certainly compared to Hitchcock's massive recent hits with Grace Kelly, the film did not meet expectations and it doesn't feel like a coincidence that his next movie starred established stars Jimmy Stewart & Doris Day.

This is a pity, because there's not any trouble with Harry-it's a delight.  The cinematography is gorgeous (the bright red-and-orange foliage of autumn in Vermont sings in Technicolor), and the Bernard Herrmann score (his first partnership with Hitchcock) is playful & fun.  I loved the entire cast-everyone is hitting a home run of the four main quartet.  Forsythe plays his rugged hipster with a wink, Gwenn & Natwick are grand as a pair of clumsy, unexperienced lovers, and MacLaine starts out her film career totally captivating.  Jennifer is a hard role to play-she's at once alluring, bold, & needs to be absurd without ever feeling like she isn't real.  This would be a recipe that MacLaine would perfect throughout her career, especially the first decade of it, and honestly I'd struggle to think of any other actor of her generation who wouldn't have overplayed the mysterious elements of Jennifer, ruining the comedy, so well done to Paramount for casting her so well so early in her career.

MacLaine is the first of the stars we've profiled this year who not only worked with Hitchcock, but has gone through the modern circuit of talk shows so she's discussed Hitchcock.  She only worked with him the one time (her leading man Forsythe would partner with him a decade later in Topaz), and her comments about him aren't as problematic as some of the other actresses who would work with him during this era, though it's worth noting that in interviews she's clearly aware of his behavior with some of the blonde actresses who would bookend Harry (in an interview for the Hudson Union, MacLaine would say "I was not blonde & ethereal, so he wasn't going to jump at me").  Instead the most common stories MacLaine talks about are his appetite (starving off of years on Broadway, she gained 15 pounds eating with the director during the film until the studio called & demand she stop), and his bizarre directing style (using Cockney riddles to get her to relax on set).  She would later state that he was "colorfully cruel" and that his actors were "insignificant"...neither of which sounds good even if MacLaine tries to make light of them.  All of this is to say as we try to reconcile Hitchcock the man with the movies that we love so much, MacLaine isn't the most damning of the women he'd work with, but she's also far from complimentary.  We'll move beyond Hitchcock, though, in the coming weeks (as MacLaine did), and get to three major gaps I have in MacLaine's extensive filmography.

OVP: East of Eden (1955)

Film: East of Eden (1955)

Stars: Julie Harris, James Dean, Raymond Massey, Richard Davalos, Bul Ives, Jo van Fleet, Lois Smith

Director: Elia Kazan

Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Director, Actor-James Dean, Supporting Actress-Jo van Fleet*, Adapted Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

It is Oscar week, and so I am making a point this week of highlighting five recent films each afternoon that I have seen that were nominated for Academy Awards (we do this most weeks, but I'm making a point of it only being Oscar-nominated films for the next five days).  We're going to start off such a prestigious moment with East of Eden, one of the more important American films that I've ever seen, and the only one of the "James Dean trio" of classics that I've never seen prior to this past weekend (Dean received onscreen credit for only three of his movies).  Going in, I had mixed expectations.  Dean is brilliant as an onscreen performer, sensual & such a rich onscreen presence it's difficult to grasp he only made three movies, and Elia Kazan generally makes stupendous movies.  But I also don't care for John Steinbeck, and after last week's weird date with Tortilla Flat, I don't really know what to think of him onscreen.  As a result, I went into this with mixed expectations, and coming out of it...that's kind of how I felt as well.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is in some parts inspired by the story of Cain-and-Abel, with father Adam Trask (Massey) filling in for God, and his son's Aron (Davalos) and Cal (Dean) playing the parts of Abel & Cain, respectively.  Cal is a sensitive boy, one who hangs around with "bad girls" (puritanical views of sex are rampant in East of Eden), and in the process he discovers that his "dead" mother is not dead at all.  She is instead a prostitute in a neighboring town named Cathy (van Fleet), who refused to marry Adam & lives a "life of sin," something that Aron doesn't know about as he's canonized his mother without one present.  As the film wears on, Aron decides not to enlist in World War I (more on that in a second), and Cal profits off of the war by buying beans early and then selling them for a profit.  Aron on the night of his father's birthday upstages Cal using the bean money to pay back a debt to his father (who took one of Cal's ideas early in the film that failed) by announcing his engagement to Abra (Harris), who at this point is clearly in love with Cal, not Aron.  The film ends with Cal cruelly telling Aron about his mother, and Aron thus running off maniacally into the night, his worldview shattered & his relationship with Abra "taken" from him by Cal.  This causes Adam to have a stroke, and while he's about to die, he forgives his son Cal & shows that he loves him, ending the comparison to Cain-and-Abel.

The movie is gargantuan, a big epic, one of those movies of the mid-1950's that was trying to show the grandeur of movies as a way to compete against the convenience of television (if you wonder why epics became so en vogue during the 1950's compared to the westerns, melodramas & film noir of the 1940's, this was a big part of it-getting people out-of-the-house).  The film, though, doesn't really have enough to say about its plot, and part of that is that it has no confidence in the Aron character.  Unlike Dean, Davalos did not become an icon or even a headliner (this is certainly his best-known role today, and after 1955 it'd be five years before he'd make another picture), and he has no concept of how complicated & vital this character is.  Aron is an unusual Abel, as he's essentially a conscientious objector in World War I (in most films, he'd be labeled a coward & not celebrated at all by his fellow townsmen), but this is only hinted at, and his breakdown after learning of his mother's occupation is left unresolved.  It's hard to look at this part and not wonder what Paul Newman, who was at one point considered for this role, would have done as Aron.  Newman oftentimes played conflicted young men (he'd do so brilliantly two years later in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), and while he might've been too old for the role, he would have gotten through some of the tougher turns of a complicated character that Davalos was incapable of achieving.

With Aron on the back-burner, it's really all about Dean & van Fleet for me.  James Dean is such a mesmerizing screen presence, and while he doesn't have the raw sensuality that he brought to Rebel, he exudes a draw that makes you understand why the women onscreen feel the need to shelter him, even the characters like Jo Van Fleet's Cathy who shouldn't.  Van Fleet won an Oscar for her work, and it's really solid performing.  She has to play everything below-the-surface, her madame being someone who resents the fact that Cal even exists, but also she morbidly wants to know him more-their scene together where he asks for money, and the later sequence where he brings Aron to her (where she understands the contempt that not only Aron but also Cal hold her in, realizing that she's viewed as a punishment rather than someone to be forgiven) is heartbreaking, gut-wrenching stuff, and she nails the arc.  

But these are not big enough parts of East of Eden to make it deserve its "classic" status.  Julie Harris is miscast (it's so weird to realize she gets top billing instead of Dean) as Abra, both because she's too old for the role and because she doesn't have a natural chemistry with Dean.  Harris' sort of dazed-and-confused presence onscreen (think a dramatic Zoey Deschanel with a 1960's bohemian vibe) is an acquired taste, and one I don't really care for; she's more celebrated as a theater actress than a film star, and that makes sense as her affected speech patterns are a better fit for the stage.  Lois Smith (yes, the Lois Smith) gets one scene with Dean, and her nervous energy as a girl struck by this beautiful young man is a much better fit and I honestly spent most of the movie wishing she'd return.  As a result, we get a sturdy, but frequently misguided, picture from Elia Kazan, made immortal because it's one of only three James Dean ever made.

Cast a Dark Shadow (1955)

Film: Cast a Dark Shadow (1955)

Stars: Dirk Bogarde, Margaret Lockwood, Kay Walsh, Kathleen Harrison, Mona Washbourne

Director: Lewis Gilbert

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 Margaret Lockwood-click here to learn more about Ms. Lockwood (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we talked about The Wicked Lady, which was the biggest success of Margaret Lockwood's career.  The actress, though, would continue to make films regularly for the next decade, albeit with less success.  By the early 1950's, while she was still famous & had had numerous stage successes in recent years, she was essentially considered box office poison when Cast a Dark Shadow came out, to the point where she had to give up top billing to her costar Dirk Bogarde.  This movie was intended to be a comeback vehicle of sorts, but that's not how it would pan out.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film, a pretty dark noir, is about Teddy Bare (Bogarde), a man with a much older, dowdier wife Monica (Washbourne), whom he kills & frames as an accident for her fortune.  Teddy doesn't know that Monica was about to change her will to give him everything, but she hadn't yet, so all of the money has gone to her sister instead.  This leaves Teddy with just the house, but he uses it to lure in a well-off widow named Freda (Lockwood), who is brassy, uncouth, and aware that Teddy is a fortune-hunter, but has no intention of her money going to him, and Teddy can't murder her for it because it would be too suspicious.  When a wealthy woman named Charlotte (Walsh) comes knocking, initially Teddy starts to woo her, making Freda jealous, but it turns out that Charlotte is in fact Monica's sister in disguise, come to figure out how her sister died.  The climax has Teddy nearly getting away with murdering Charlotte, thus inheriting Monica's fortune back, but he doesn't as she is on to his trick, and when he escapes, he uses the car with the cut brake lines (the ones he cut) to escape, sealing his doom.

The noir, clocking in at under 90 minutes, is fast-paced & quite enjoyable.  Some at the time complained about it not having enough actual intrigue, and there are moments where the exposition does more heavy-lifting than it should (some of the last acts seem a bit too out-of-nowhere for me), but I thought it was great.  The performances were good, including Dirk Bogarde (delightful as a too-handsome, possibly gay, definitely unbalanced would-be serial killer), and the script is fun, filled with great speeches & wry chemistry between the two leads.

And as for Margaret Lockwood?  She's once again a home run, totally owning this character.  Gone here are the glamorous, bodice-pushing outfits of her youth.  Nearly forty at this point, she looks older in the movie, eschewing her natural beauty with overdone makeup & a brash accent.  Had she been a bigger star in the United States, this is exactly the sort of role that might have made the Academy take notice.  The film was a success, and Lockwood was even nominated for a BAFTA for the work (a deserved one-she owns the screen), but it wasn't enough to save her career.  While she'd do some television after this movie, her next film wouldn't come out for twenty more years, and she'd enjoy no more chances at a proper comeback.  Margaret Lockwood died in 1990, at the age of 73, of cirrhosis.  Next month, we'll move away from Lockwood, but not too far from her home country, with another actress from the British Isles, but one who would find true fame in Hollywood, as we encounter our first proper cinematic legend of this year's Saturday with the Stars.

Revenge of the Creature (1955)

Film: Revenge of the Creature (1955)

Stars: John Agar, Lori Nelson, John Bromfield, Ricou Browning

Director: Jack Arnold

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

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

You can see the review below, but my first outing with the Creature from the Black Lagoon was a home-run.  I genuinely liked the movie, not just as a horror fan, but also as cinephile.  The claustrophobia of the lagoon combined with the brilliant underwater cinematography-the movie is a hit, and there's a reason that this movie gets to be housed alongside such monsters as classic as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf-Man.  As a result, I also had high expectations for the film's sequel-after all, Frankenstein had an even better movie the second time around, so what would be true of the Gill-Man, who had two sequels before ending the original run of the Universal Monsters?  Today we'll get to that film (two more movies left in our Month of Horror, though both will be outside of our Universal Monsters canon focus), called Revenge of the Creature.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie starts with the Gill-Man (Browning) being captured from the Lagoon, having lived through the original film despite being shot up by the survivors from the last film.  He is brought to an aquarium where he is studied by psychologist Clete (Agar), and a young scientist named Helen Nelson).  The two fall in love, to the chagrin of both the Gill-Man's keeper Joe (Bromfield) and the Gill-Man himself, both of whom are also in love with Helen.  As part of his escape, the Gill-Man kills Joe, and runs amuck in the city, killing people after being horribly mistreated in the aquarium, and in the process starting to stalk Helen & Clete.  The film hits its climax when the Gill-Man kidnaps Helen, but before he can take her back to the Lagoon, he is found, and shot up by humans as Clete & Helen look on...until, presumably the eventual sequel.

The movie could've been interesting.  Helen's character is sympathetic to the creature, seeing that it is really trapped here, away from its natural habitat, and that sympathy might have been something that would've expanded the film in the way we saw some humanity brought to the Frankenstein creature in Bride of Frankenstein.  It also features the first screen appearance of Clint Eastwood, in an uncredited role as a lab technician (how weird is it that Clint Eastwood's first role was in a random monster movie sequel?).

But Revenge of the Creature is a total failure.  Helen quickly just becomes a beautiful damsel, forsaking anything interesting about her character, and the rest of the men are so boring as to be interchangeable.  The film took the best parts of Creature (the claustrophobia the lagoon, the fear of the water), and totally destroyed it by having humans swim with the Gill-Man unafraid, and by going to the mainland with the creature rather than staying in the forbidding lagoon.  The movie doesn't dwarf my original love (I'm still such a fan of the first movie), but it is a sign that the filmmakers had no idea how gemlike that first film was, and just decided to cash in on the menacing fish face.

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

OVP: Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

Film: Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
Stars: Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin
Director: John Sturges
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Director, Actor-Spencer Tracy, Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

We are continuing on our look at the Best Actor field this week with a trip somewhere between Babes in Arms and Saturday Night Fever, to the mid-1950's.  The Academy Awards generally gets a crush on an actor and then it dissipates.  Even with legends like Olivia de Havilland or Barbara Stanwyck who continued working for decades, their nominations usually happened within a ten-year time frame.  But there are a couple of actors who just kept getting nominated for decades, and one of those performers was Spencer Tracy.  Tracy, one of the biggest stars on the MGM lot during the 1940's, kept getting prestige projects right up until his death (he was nominated for his final film role in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner).  When an actor does something like this, there are the legendary performances (Boys Town, Woman of the Year, Guess Who's...) and then there are nominations where it feels like they probably just skated into the nominations field, and that's what I've always considered Bad Day at Black Rock, arguably the least discussed of Tracy's nominations today (this despite it being nominated in three pretty big-tier categories at the time).  Today, though, it will take center stage as we look at Tracy's fifth Oscar nomination.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is really short (it's only 81 minutes long, which is weird for a Best Actor nominee post, say, the early 1930's).  It is about John Macready (Tracy), who has just come back from World War II in 1945 in a western desert town called Black Rock.  They make a point of acknowledging that the train has not stopped there in four years, and thus his entry into the town is surprising.  The town is very reluctant to welcome him, and are actively hostile despite him seeming pretty innocuous at first.  Of particular note is Smith (Ryan), who openly wants to kill Macready once he realizes that Macready is there to give the father of one of his fellow soldiers, a man named Komoko (a Japanese-American) a medal since Komoko's son saved Macready's life.  The only people who attempt to help Macready are Doc (Brennan) and a beautiful young girl named Liz (Francis), who quickly regrets the decision.

The film does a pretty good job of addressing the hatred that was inflicted on Japanese-Americans after the bombing in Pearl Harbor.  As the film continues, we learn that Komoko was burned in his house by Smith, who leased him a piece of land he knew to be barren...only to have Komoko find water on it & thus be able to farm it.  They murder him for his success, first by burning down his house (with him inside), and then shooting him when he escapes.  Smith has so many accomplices that inevitably one will crack, but Macready manages to stop him before he kills too many of them (except Liz), and get the man arrested.

The film isn't bad, though it's not great.  You're not going to hear this complaint from me very often, but the movie is too short.  The animosity that Robert Ryan's character instantly shares toward Tracy's Macready feels weird-like they've spent years expecting to get caught, and are just way too suspicious about a dormant murder.  It also doesn't allow us to really differentiate between a pretty stellar supporting cast (Borgnine, Jagger, Marvin), with only Walter Brennan (as always, playing Water Brennan) seeming to stand out.  I kept thinking weirdly of a rather obscure Hungarian film called 1945, which has a similar idea behind it (a town that has a terrible war crime secret), but it unfolds so much better, and thus proves that Bad Day could be a true classic (see 1945 immediately if you haven't as it's unbelievable).

The film's three nominations therefore are a bit misguided if not unwarranted.  The best of the bunch is Director, as it's taut-this is a movie with no fat, even if it could use some for flavor, but the camerawork is excellent, and I loved the showdown scene & use of the expansive outdoors to give us a sense of isolation.  Tracy's performance is sturdy but dull-if you've read this blog for a while you know that Tracy's not an actor I really enjoy, and this is a good example why-there's nothing other than "silent hero" in his Macready, and compared with an actor who adds so much flavor to his performances like Ryan (or a scene-stealer such as Brennan), I have to assume this was a default nomination even if you enjoy Tracy as a rule.  The script is the least of the three, because it's too short-there's too much exposition to try to make up for the lack of time, and it suffers with so many of the townspeople feeling interchangeable.