Whirlpool (1950)

Film: Whirlpool (1950)

Stars: Gene Tierney, Richard Conte, Jose Ferrer, Charles Bickford

Director: Otto Preminger

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

Few film noirs are as storied as Laura, perhaps the greatest film noir of all time if we want to get right down to it.  Both director Otto Preminger and star Gene Tierney would go on to make a name for themselves in the genre.  Preminger would have great success the following year with Fallen Angel (review for it at the bottom of this page), the movie that would make Linda Darnell's career (and end Alice Faye's), while Tierney would go on to become one of the few women nominated for an Academy Award for inhabiting a femme fatale role in Leave Her to Heaven, the most financially successful film that Fox made in the 1940's (again, review at the bottom of this page).  By 1950, though, both of them needed some of that Laura magic back.  Preminger had recently made one of the decade's highest-profile flops, Forever Amber, and while his follow-up Daisy Kenyon (for a third time, review at the bottom of the page) was well-regarded, it wasn't as big of a hit as its Joan Crawford/Henry Fonda double-billing would've implied.  Tierney, meanwhile, was in the middle of her messy, multi-year divorce to fashion designer Oleg Cassini, and had also had a brief (and for Tierney, heartbreaking) affair with a young John F. Kennedy years before his time in the White House.  Actress & director reunited in 1950 for not one but two films, and as I've seen Where the Sidewalk Ends before (no review at bottom of the page, you'll have to rely upon my Letterboxd) I figured it made sense to go with my final missing gap in their combined filmography, Whirlpool.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie honestly has a really cool plot, even if it makes no sense when it's being executed.  We have Ann Sutton (Tierney), the wealthy wife of a famous psychoanalyst named Bill (Conte), who has a bit of a problem with kleptomania, and is nearly arrested until a fellow therapist David Korvo (Ferrer) saves her from embarrassment.  He begins to treat her, without her husband knowing, for her issues with insomnia, but in a hypnotic trance, she shows up in the apartment of a dead woman, one who had been threatening her over an implied infatuation she had with Dr. Korvo.  She, in the trance, confesses to the murder, but Bill, along with a detective (Bickford) start to investigate, with Bill convinced that his wife couldn't have been the killer because people who are hypnotized would only do something they'd do in real life.  It turns out he is right (about her innocence at least) as it's Dr. Korvo who was the real killer, and he perishes in the film's closing scene, bleeding to death while professing Ann's innocence.

Whirlpool would make a decent amount for what it was at the box office, and for both of its stars it did allow something of a jump into the next decade.  This sort of "mousy femme fatale" routine would be a big part of Tierney's career for when she'd work the next decade (offscreen she would have more ill-timed romances, including with Aly Khan, and eventually have a suicide attempt before finally getting better outside of the Hollywood glare), while Preminger would go on to make major movies like The Moon is Blue, Carmen Jones, and Anatomy of a Murder, the latter two winning him Oscar nominations.

But it's not very good.  The movie rarely makes sense, and even when it does, it's far too dry.  Tierney, once such a vibrant onscreen performer, really struggled with her offscreen troubles to not bring that to the theatergoers, and not in an interesting way (that sounds gauche...but it's real).  She's too staid in this, and she's honestly offscreen for far too long.  Conte & Bickford are boring, and Ferrer is a bad over-actor.  The script also makes very little sense (Ferrer's approach to psychiatry reads less like genius and more like a voodoo spell you'd find in a Poverty Row film with Bela Lugosi).  The movie is not good, and a personal love of Tierney is the only thing keeping me from going 1-star on this picture.

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, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

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

Brute Force (1947)

Film: Brute Force (1947)

Stars: Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford, Yvonne de Carlo, Ann Blyth, Anita Colby

Director: Jules Dassin

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.

While one theme of the titles of this year's Film Noir Month is focused on "finishing off filmographies" as we watch movies from actors and directors that I've seen almost all of their film noir pictures (or we're getting much deeper cuts than usual), there are still both important directors that I have seen very few of their movies, as well as actual film noir classics that I've never gotten around to.  Of our English-language titles this year, no film stands out more as an "I can't believe you haven't seen that yet" title than Brute Force, a 1947 drama that generally is considered a standout in the genre.  It's also made by Jules Dassin, who made a number of well-considered film noir movies during this time frame, and I had, before catching Brute Force, only seen one of his pictures (1950's Night and the City).  Dassin grew up in the New York Theater world before moving to Hollywood, getting jobs as a director-for-hire working on projects starring Joan Crawford and Charles Laughton, before in the late 1940's starting to make genuinely good movies like Brute Force.  He was blacklisted in the 1950's, and spent much of the decade making films in Europe, including the two movies he's best-known for today: Rififi and Never on Sunday, the latter of which won him Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay.

(Spoilers Ahead) We will be watching two films from Jules Dassin this month, both noirs made prior to him getting blacklisted, and we're starting, as I said, with Brute Force, which was a vehicle for Burt Lancaster, who at the time was regularly appearing in film noir movies.  This is about a prison break, where Lancaster is portraying Joe Collins, a man stuck in jail as his wife Ruth (Blyth) is dying from a cancer that she won't treat with surgery unless Joe is by her side.  Given that he'll never escape the sadistic Captain Munsey (Cronyn), he coordinates with some of his fellow inmates in the prison to escape, and in the process, they all share what caused them to be in jail, in many cases either wrongful convictions or being born "on the wrong side of the tracks."  The film ends with a bit of a twist for 1947.  The men do get to escape, or at least they come close, but in the process Munsey kills many of them, going mad with power, and in a fight both he and Joe die.  The movie doesn't end there though, but with a soliloquy from character actor Art Smith playing the prison doctor, breaking the fourth wall and talking about the damage of a prison industrial complex where "no one gets out."

I'll be honest-it kind of makes sense that Brute Force is made by an alleged Communist because it's very liberal with its politics.  The movie's attacks on the prison system in America, and the way that it profits off of what is basically slave labor, is really ahead of its time.  Most of Brute Force, in fact, is ahead of its time.  The way that the production design (absolutely wonderfully cavernous prison recreation) feels like we're stuck in this world as an audience (our only looks outside of it come in the memories the men have), and is detailed and rich, and I loved the ending, with it giving us a lot more sour than I was anticipating for a movie about a decent (if embittered) man trying to get home to his dying wife.

The only thing that doesn't work for me is Lancaster.  I have said this many times on this blog before, but Burt Lancaster is not my favorite, and I think that while he doesn't get in the way of the story, he doesn't add enough either-a better actor would've made the main character a bit more two-dimensional.  But there is a fine piece of acting in the movie, and that's Hume Cronyn.  He plays this part ruthlessly, and perhaps crucially, very, very gay.  It's 1947 so the Hayes Code isn't going to allow him to say this, but it's obvious that he is sexually obsessed with controlling Lancaster's sweaty, shirtless Joe, and is using his power as a proxy for getting to well, fuck him.  You think that's me just reading into the movie, but watch it-it's very obviously there, and Cronyn's increasing insanity at not being able to achieve his desires is what makes the ending work.  Really good stuff, and it makes me excited for our next Dassin picture, which we'll get to in a few days.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, 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, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

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

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

OVP: The Big Country (1958)

Film: The Big Country (1958)

Stars: Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Carroll Baker, Charlton Heston, Bul Ives, Charles Bickford

Director: William Wyler

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actor-Burl Ives*, Score)

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

Last week we talked a lot about Gregory Peck's long career in westerns, and how they were a large part of his persona throughout the 1950's.  This week, we're going to end our season with another western (it is our theme for a reason-he made a lot of them), but we're going to talk in terms of Peck's career around how, after a long decade of being leading man in a variety of films, he finally gained his stature as one of the "important" actors of his generation by securing an Academy Award for Best Actor, which to this point had alluded him.  Between 1960-64, Peck appeared in a lot of very big & well-received movies, including The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear, and How the West Was Won, but it was not in a western but as a small-town lawyer that Peck found his signature role.  Playing Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Peck got his Tom Joad, his George Bailey, his Sergeant York role that would define his career, and is usually the performance that he is name-checked with.  Decades later, Atticus would be named by the American Film Institute as the "Greatest Hero in American Film History" and would win him an Oscar in 1962 against the very stiff competition of Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.  As I've seen The Big Country many times before, we are going to focus on the Oscar win of a different actor, Burl Ives, today with our film as we finish up our month devoted to Peck.

(Spoilers Ahead) A giant, nearly three-hour western from director William Wyler, The Big Country is an adaptation of a series of Saturday Evening Post stories by novelist Donald Hamilton.  This is a big movie, so I'll try to summarize enough to keep us grounded.  To start we have James McKay (Peck), a docile sea captain who is in the West to meet his spirited fiancee Patricia (Baker), whose father the Major (Bickford) owns much of the land in the area.  His rival, and by proxy Patricia's rival, is Rufus Hannassey (Ives), with whom he has a long-standing feud that we initially read as being Rufus's fault (after all, his daughter is engaged to our leading man), but as we continue we begin to understand that this is a complicated, shades-of-grey western where Rufus is just trying to get access to a water reservoir that is owned by Julie Maragon (Simmons), a kindly schoolteacher who is best friends with Patricia.  After a standoff between the Major & Rufus at Patricia & McKay's engagement reception, things escalate, with all sides starting to show their true colors.  Patricia, not liking McKay's more gentlemanly attitude, particularly after ranch-hand Steve Leech (Heston, in a rare for this era supporting role) insults him, calls off the engagement, and the film ends with the Major & Rufus killing each other in a standoff, with McKay & Julie ending up together and riding off to their own ranch & life in the west.

I really liked The Big Country, much more than I expected for a western that rarely makes it onto the pantheon of great movie western lists.  I thought the cinematography was astounding.  The fistfight scene between Peck & Heston, shot much in the dark, is glorious, and there's a clear love of the countryside that encapsulates the best of western photography.  The movie needed a bit more focus (there's maybe one too many plotlines keeping it away from being an all-timer), but I think the strangest thing for me was how good Ives was.  Ives' win here is generally considered by most Oscar historians to be something of a proxy win for his more notable work in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that year, which he'd been campaigned as lead for by MGM, but he's superb here as a man who understands the value of everything around him, and is much smarter and even mildly sympathetic compared to what you'd find for a traditional western villain of this era.  His views on honor, and the way he handles his whimpering son (loving him, but also not respecting him) is really smartly played, and adds levels to a movie that could've been paint-by-numbers.  It's a cool win, something I honestly didn't anticipate going into this movie given other reviews I've read of this picture.

Coming out of To Kill a Mockingbird, it's clear that Peck was ready to move onto a different chapter of his career, his time in Hollywood cemented by the city's highest honor.  While he'd make other movies, including roles in MacArthur and The Boys from Brazil, as well as in smaller parts in remakes of his films Cape Fear and Moby Dick, he'd never be in a movie as big as the ones from his 1940's to early 1960's heyday.  He would go on to a number of leadership roles in the industry, including as AMPAS President and Chairman of the American Film Institute.  He would become involved with politics, being a critic of the Vietnam War, and would campaign for a number of Democratic politicians, including US Senator Donald Stewart and Peck's own son Carey who ran for Congress in California in the late 1970's.  He even did voiceover work in the (successful) commercials made to stop the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987.  Peck died of pneumonia in 2003 at the age of 87.

Next month, we're going to take a step back and take a look at an actress whose career started before Peck's and the one woman we're going to profile this year for Saturdays with the Stars, a performer who for a time in the 1930's & 40's would find success in the most unlikely genre imaginable given how her career started: the western.

OVP: Duel in the Sun (1946)

Film: Duel in the Sun (1946)

Stars: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Lionel Barrymore, Herbert Marshall, Lillian Gish, Walter Huston, Charles Bickford, Harry Carey, Butterfly McQueen

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Jennifer Jones, Supporting Actress-Lillian Gish)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

As we discussed last week, Gregory Peck's initial career took off like a rocket, with huge hits such as The Yearling, Spellbound, and The Valley of Decision making him a household name pretty much overnight.  The late-1940's, though, were something of a disappointment.  He starred in another Hitchcock film, The Paradine Case, which was a big flop, as well as the western Yellow Sky and the romance The Great Sinner, neither of which set the box office on fire.  While Twelve O'Clock High and The Gunfighter would bring life back to his career, during this time frame he only had two really notable films.  The first was Gentleman's Agreement, which won the Best Picture Oscar (and got Peck his third nomination) and was a massive success, but one that I've seen before so it wasn't eligible for this series.  The second was one I had heard legend of after reading about movies for 25+ years, but somehow had avoided actually watching: David O. Selznick's infamous follow-up to Gone with the Wind, the soap opera western Duel in the Sun, our movie for today.

(Spoilers Ahead) Based on the novel by Niven Busch, Duel in the Sun is the story of a young biracial woman named Pearl Chavez (played by the very much not biracial Jennifer Jones), the daughter of a white father and a Mexican mother.  After her father (Marshall) kills her mother for having an affair, she's sent to live with his childhood sweetheart (and second cousin) Laura Belle (Gish) on a giant ranch she lives on with her husband Senator Jackson McCanless (Barrymore) and their two sons the proper Jesse (Cotten) and the lascivious Lewt (Peck).  This sets up an inevitable love triangle between the two men and Pearl, with her drawn to Jesse's decency, but clearly there is a hormonal attraction between she & Lewt that cannot be denied in the Texas heat.  Along the way, she tries to find ways of escaping Lewt, including marrying Sam Pierce (Bickford), but Lewt kills Sam, making him a fugitive from the law, but still Pearl can't stop her desire for him.  When it becomes clear that Jesse can save her, even after he's shot by Lewt trying, Pearl understands that the only way that she'll break free of Lewt is to kill him, which she does...but in the process, she also ends up in his arms, their desire in life to be together impossible to deny, even as they're literally murdering each other.

Duel in the Sun was not, it has to be said, Gone with the Wind.  Selznick's obsession with equalling his previous film's success, particularly with the woman he was obsessed with & having an affair with at the time, Jennifer Jones, is kind of the stuff of Hollywood legend.  This was a deeply troubled shoot, and cost nearly $8 million to make & promote, which was basically unheard of at the time, and so despite a solid box office, it barely broke even.  The problem, of course, was that it wasn't Gone with the Wind (nothing is, quite frankly, though Titanic probably comes close enough to earn comparison)-chasing that dragon is the stuff of heartache, even for the man who initially produced it.  The film is tackier, it's less enthralling, and no aspect of the production quite lives up to that film.

If you get past that comparison, though, it's not a bad movie even if it's clearly a "bad" movie.  The film rarely makes a lot of sense, but it goes off of impulse, all id and no ego.  But it's entertaining throughout.  The score is fun, the cinematography is really horny but it works (the cameramen are obsessed with the gorgeous Jones & Peck in all of their carnal lust).  The acting is bizarre, but not boring.  Jennifer Jones, whom I've seen enough of at this point to be able to say she wasn't a very good actress, makes so many choices, swinging for the fences in every scene, but it kind of works with the unbalanced nature of the script.  Save for Beat the Devil, this is undoubtedly Jones' most intriguing performance (at least of what I've seen), and while she's not Oscar-worthy, she certainly is something.  Lillian Gish is a bit bland in the only film that she'd be nominated for an Oscar for (it's a pity it wasn't for The Wind or The Night of the Hunter instead), likely getting it with one deathbed confessional, but overall playing a kindly matron in one of Oscar's worst Supporting Actress lineups.  Butterfly McQueen is playing basically the exact same character she got in Gone with the Wind, channeling Prissy as if that will get Selznick literally back to his original movie (she's the only principle actor to appear in both films).

And as for Gregory Peck?  His casting is...a choice.  I've talked about this a bit, but it's strange that Peck would become most associated with To Kill a Mockingbird, a film where he exudes absolute no sex appeal, because his exaggerated face (big eyes, pouty lips) and lanky frame were used to make audiences thirsty in the mid-1940's, and that's definitely the case here.  He looks hot in Duel in the Sun.  The only problem here is that Peck is not meant to be playing a "sexy math teacher" vibes like he'd play in most of his films of this era, but instead is supposed to be a dangerous "bad boy you make out with under the bleachers" sort of vibes, a forbidden sexiness that you know is wrong but you can't help it.  Peck, though, is not good at this-he's too inherently decent, and playing a villain here who also has to turn you on...it just doesn't work.

The Woman on the Beach (1947)

Film: The Woman on the Beach (1947)

Stars: Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan, Charles Bickford, Nan Leslie, Irene Ryan

Director: Jean Renoir

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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.

As I mentioned last week, we were not done with Joan Bennett in our month-long tribute to film noir.  Bennett, along with actresses like Lizabeth Scott, Lana Turner, Gene Tierney, & Rita Hayworth, derived much of her fame from in the 1940's specifically from this genre.  Bennett had spent the 1930's being overshadowed by her sister Constance, who was briefly a big name in movies (you'll notice if you look at the bottom of this review they share a "Bennett Sisters" tag on TMROJ), and by the 1940's Joan felt like she was on the way out as a star until The Woman in the Window brought her a big comeback.  That movie changed everything, and suddenly the actress had capital.  By 1947, so important was Bennett to the studio that she actually had some creative control on the movie The Woman on the Beach, where she got to select the film's director, and she went with Jean Renoir, who was struggling to make his identity in American pictures after crafting two of the most celebrated films of all-time in his native France (Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game).  As we'll discuss today, though, Bennett's ability to have this level of control quickly faded as a result of The Woman on the Beach, even though Bennett's celebrity would have a bizarre third act...but first, the movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Scott (Ryan), a Coast Guard officer who is having nightmares that feature a woman that looks a lot like his girlfriend Eve (Leslie) dying tragically.  Scott initially thinks that marrying her right away will do the trick, but they decide to wait on the engagement a few weeks rather than elope so that Eve can settle her business affairs.  In the meantime, Scott meets Peggy (Bennett), a beautiful woman whom he finds is in a loveless marriage to a blind man named Tod Butler (Bickford) who used to be a genius painter but has since spent his years torturing Peggy in their isolation.  Peggy eventually confesses that in a drunken rage she was the one who blinded Tod, but Scott is not so sure.  He believes that Tod is pretending, and as he has fallen in love with Peggy (casually breaking off his engagement to Eve), he tries to prove it, which leads to him taking Tod to a far away beach, but even when Tod falls off of a cliff, proving he is blind, Scott continues to plot against him, trying to free Peggy so he can have her himself.  The film's showdown is the two men going out on a boat, with Scott intent on killing them both if that's what it takes to free Peggy, but they both live...just long enough for Tod to burn all his paintings, worth a fortune, "freeing" Peggy to leave him because she doesn't have the money he's held as blackmail against her all of these years.  Tod & Peggy, codependent to a fault, embrace, and Scott leaves alone, realizing that it was Tod she loved all along.

The Woman on the Beach is a notable film because it basically ended Jean Renoir's domestic career.  The son of the famed impressionist painter was too ahead-of-his-time for the conventions of American cinema in the 1940's, and when The Woman on the Beach was run by test audiences, they hated its moody looks at loneliness, isolation, and mental health.  Instead, they wanted something sexy & dangerous like what Bennett had been doing the previous years with more traditional film noir like The Woman in the Window.  The film was heavily edited (it's only 71 minutes long), and even with these cuts it was a box office disaster.  Renoir would live another thirty years but would never make another American film for the rest of his career.  Bennett was also reaching the tail end of her film noir career at this point.  Though she'd make a couple more pictures, the most interesting part of her creative career was waning, and she'd eventually find a third act in the early 1950's as the mom in the Father of the Bride movies.  This would end with Bennett's real life turning into a proper noir (her husband would shoot her lover in broad daylight, nearly killing him), but that's a story for another day.

This is all a pity, because The Woman on the Beach is a great movie.  Renoir's moodiness, which in 1947 was too avant-garde for film fans, plays much better in retrospect.  The film plays off of the claustrophobia of Peggy's world, where she is less interested in Scott as a person, and more as a means of escape.  Bennett was really good at these types of characters-playing women that were "unlikeable" to use problematic modern parlance, but the audience could quickly relate to-of course she's going to use Scott, he's her only way out of this personal hell.  Combined with the ugliness of Tod-and-Peggy's relationship with each other, the film talks about how obsession consumes, and the ending, while "happy" in some regards is pretty bleak.  Tod and Peggy are together, but they're now penniless, with their entire fortune (the paintings) burnt to the ground...it's hard to imagine that this ends well for the two of them.  It's a bit hard to judge a movie that clearly had more to say (at least twenty minutes was trimmed from the film), and it's not all good (the Eve subplot could be lifted out without issue), but this was definitely one of my favorite new discoveries of this month's marathon.

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

OVP: Anna Christie (1930)

Film: Anna Christie (1930)
Stars: Greta Garbo, Charles Bickford, George F. Marion, Marie Dressler
Director: Clarence Brown
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Director, Actress-Greta Garbo, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

And we will see this to completion!  All week, in honor of us finally reaching the 2016 Best Actress OVP Ballot, I have decided to declare this week "Best Actress Week" on the blog, and have been reviewing daily a different Oscar Best Actress nominee that I saw for the first time during quarantine.  While we've been kind of all-over-the-board with nominations from melodramas to epic romances to action-adventures to silent war movies, today we're going to stay pretty close to yesterday's The Divine Lady in terms of timeline (just one year after), but unlike Corinne Griffith, today's star did not stay just in the Silent Era, but instead transitioned quite well into sound (in fact she did so with this film), and became a legend rather than an Oscar curiosity.  Greta Garbo was one of the last major players at MGM to transition to talkies in part because they worried about her thick accent being untenable in movies.  Garbo would prove them wrong, and would be a major star for the entirety of the decade, in part due to this film, Anna Christie, which was a big hit in 1930.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is focused on Anna (Garbo), the daughter of a Swedish sailor (Marion) who is returning home to New York after a terrible childhood spent with relatives in St. Paul, Minnesota.  She was sent there by her father who couldn't take care of her, and while there she was raped by her cousin, and eventually found herself working at a brothel.  She comes to New York in hopes of finding a new life, and falls in love with a rough-and-tumble sailor named Matt (Bickford), who wants to marry her, but she's afraid of her past coming out & him not loving her.  In a climactic scene, Anna does tell Matt that she was the victim of assault, and because she had no money, went into prostitution to survive.  Matt rejects her at first, but in the film's final scenes, they unite, realizing that their love will conquer all.

It's a short film, based on a play written by Eugene O'Neill.  The film, I'll be honest, kind of drags.  The movie's plot is pretty thin, even if we adjust for differing sexual politics about assault and prostitution ninety years after the fact-the first twenty minutes of the film have Marion, Garbo, and Marie Dressler (as an alcoholic who has also dabbled in prostitution), drunk out-of-their-minds, saying the same sort of dialogue over-and-over.  It picks up a little bit in the boat scenes, but really the whole movie's point is the climax, where we have Garbo confessing not only to Bickford, but also to her father the disappointments of her youth, and the hatred she has projected on men since they have betrayed her all her life.

This scene basically makes the whole movie worth it, and surely was the reason Garbo got an Oscar nomination.  It's rough to watch-this is pre-Code and while there are certain things that wouldn't have been able to be said in 1930, this is not 1940 where Garbo would have used veiled euphemisms to tell what happened to her, and it's interesting to watch how her character reserves more of her hate for the way that Matt & her father react to her rape & the prostitution that followed, rather than to the actions themselves, giving an understanding to the character that might have been lacking in a less gifted actress.  The ending is sugary and unrealistic, and really other than that one scene Anna Christie fails to intrigue, but as anyone who loves live theater can tell you, one great monologue can wash away a lot of flaws, and that's what happens in Anna Christie.

Fallen Angel (1945)

Film: Fallen Angel (1945)
Stars: Alice Faye, Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell, Charles Bickford, Anne Revere, John Carradine, Percy Kilbride
Director: Otto Preminger
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 Alice Faye-click here to learn more about Ms. Faye (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

And so we conclude our short time with Alice Faye as our Star of the Month, largely where Ms. Faye herself ended her career.  We profiled a bit in our overview of Alice Faye's career (see the link above) why Fallen Angel was such a big moment in her career, and largely ended it (long story short-Faye caught on to Darryl Zanuck trying to screw her over to give a better part to Linda Darnell, and she wasn't having it so she left show business, leaving Zanuck without one of his biggest stars).  Faye would work again decades later, most notably in 1962's State Fair (where she had to play second fiddle to Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, & Ann-Margret, a new generation of musical stars), but this was it for her time as a headliner.  Considering the director here is better than any we've profiled so far in Faye's career (real talk-Otto Preminger may be the finest director we've hit for any Saturday with the Stars articles, give or take Vincente Minnelli), I was curious if Faye had overreacted, or if she indeed gets screwed over by Zanuck.  What I found was that Faye, if she had assumed she'd get the better part, was justified in her storm off, but neither actress is saving a particularly strong picture with Fallen Angel.

(Spoilers Ahead) Fallen Angel is about a love triangle in a small town between a conman of sorts Eric Stanton (Andrews), a "loose" waitress at a local diner Stella (Darnell), and the prim organist who happens to be a wealthy heiress June Mills (Faye).  Eric is intent on marrying Stella by any means necessary, but she won't go with him unless he has some money, so he tries to steal it from June, first by tricking her into giving it to him and then by marrying her to get to hers and her sister Clara's (Revere) inheritance.  This doesn't entirely work, though, because June is genuinely in love with Eric and Stella soon finds herself dead, with us assuming Eric didn't do it, but we aren't entirely sure who did.  The movie follows with Eric confessing to being a cad and then slowly falling for June (for real this time), trying to prove his innocence.  At the end of the movie, yet another guy obsessed with Stella, the detective investigating her murder (Bickford), turns out to be the killer, with Eric & June going off into the sunset together.


The film has a lot of great makings of a movie, including reuniting Andrews & Preminger, who just a year earlier had made the cinematic masterpiece Laura, which this film was clearly trying to duplicate both creatively and financially.  While it was a modest hit, it never really approaches Laura in terms of its quality.  Everyone was right to single out Darnell's Stella, who is given less screen time than I would've assumed considering her billing and star status at the time, but she's the best part about the movie.  Her Stella is dangerous, nasty, and clearly the sort of film noir character that, nowadays, would be having sex with guys just to mess with them.  She works every guy in the film, either to get what she wants or occasionally just to screw up their lives, and she looks great doing it.  The movie's best parts are all Darnell, and it falls to pieces in the back half when she disappears, and we're left with a relatively lousy mystery.  Even with a really great supporting cast (John Carradine as a conman medium! Anne Revere as an enigmatic spinster! Percy Kilbride as a lovelorn cook!) giving solid work, its script just isn't that good, and feels hollow when you compare it to the heights that Laura achieved.

Faye, for the first time this month, feels out of her element.  I wonder what the additional scenes would have been like, if they would have added some depth to her work or if this wasn't a genre that she could pull off, but she feels too mousy to be interesting compared to the stellar work that Darnell is playing.  We're meant to root for June, but what is there to root for other than she seems like a nice girl?  Her previous iterations were so compelling because they took seemingly "gold-hearted gals" and made them interesting.  Here, though, she's left with little to do other than be upstaged, and though it's a bummer that she didn't make any major movies again, perhaps the lesson of Alice Faye is that she was never given a proper shake to begin with.  Despite clear talent, beauty, and incredible star charisma, none of her movies that we profiled this month ever felt worthy of her.  One has to wonder what, a decade later, someone like Gene Kelly or Stanley Donen could have made of such a rare talent.  At the very least, while she didn't get the decades of star legend that some of her peers would get, she did seem to have a genuinely happy life with her husband Phil Harris for the next fifty years.  Unfortunately, as you'll soon see, our May Star of the Month wasn't so lucky.

OVP: Johnny Belinda (1948)

Film: Johnny Belinda (1948)
Stars: Jane Wyman, Lew Ayres, Charles Bickford, Agnes Moorehead, Stephen McNally, Jan Sterling
Director: Jean Negulesco
Oscar History: 12 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Director, Actor-Lew Ayres, Actress-Jane Wyman*, Supporting Actor-Charles Bickford, Supporting Actress-Agnes Moorehead, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Cinematography, Original Score, Film Editing, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

It has sat for years (alongside Becket) as the most Oscar-nominated film I'd never seen, and this morning, while deciding what to do with my life (a conversation I have daily with myself these days-I've been a bit adrift for months now), I decided that perhaps tackling a film perched on my DVR that for some reason I'd never gotten around to was a wonderful suggestion, so after years of wondering what exactly the title even meant, I figure it was time to investigate Johnny Belinda and the dozen Oscar nominations that come with it.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is perched in that period of the 1940's when Oscar seemed to only like issue films, and as a history lesson to modern AMPAS (which also occasionally gravitates into that direction), issue films are my least favorite types of movies because they rarely age well.  The best kinds of issue films are ones that are either extremely honest (Do the Right Thing) or don't have the issue at the centerpiece of the movie and rely on something more traditional to sell the picture (Brokeback Mountain).  Johnny Belinda at least starts off in the latter's direction, since the film wants to desperately push a love story.  The movie is about a woman named Belinda (Wyman), who is a deaf-mute frequently referred to by the villagers and even her own father (Bickford) and Aunt Aggie (Moorehead) as "Dummy."  A kindly doctor in the village named Robert (Ayres) befriends her and begins to teach her sign language, which she picks up ridiculously quickly.  The film follows as she is assaulted by a local drunk, whose girlfriend and eventual wife Stella (Sterling) is smitten with Dr. Robert.  The film goes on with Belinda getting pregnant, her father is killed by her rapist, and eventually the town tries to take away her baby in hopes of giving it a "respectable" home.  A trial after Belinda kills her rapist (who is trying to steal her child) ends quickly with everyone realizing the truth.

The film has to be considered somewhat groundbreaking if only because it's the first major motion picture to deal with the subject of rape.  The film doesn't shy away from the subject (it's very clear that it doesn't condone the action and doesn't pretend that the baby was of an immaculate conception), though the word is never actually uttered.  The film grapples with the concept of shaming Belinda (everyone in town just assumes she is loose, and blames the doctor for sleeping with her and getting her impregnated), but like all issue films the entire situation surrounding the subject ages badly, with most of the cast drawn in relatively two-dimensional lines and the treatment of Belinda as bright, but also at the same time simple, would eventually be countered in films like The Miracle Worker 14 years later.  Still, the film is heavier than you'd expect, and while the villains are all very broadly drawn, the heroes get some levels of grey, particularly Belinda's father, who is both spiteful to her for causing him so much hardship and also enamored with her, particularly as she continues to learn how to communicate with her.

The movie's twelve Oscar nominations aren't shocking, though I'd argue none of them are exactly outstanding.  The cinematography is lovely, trying to paint a Nova Scotia vastness even if it was entirely filmed in California, and the editing is strong, particularly in a fight scene (though you can clearly see that it's a dummy and not Charles Bickford falling down that cliff).  The acting is not great, to be honest.  I think Bickford, broadly drawn but felt quite sturdy in the role, is probably my favorite.  He's an actor that I always forget what he looks like (he never really had that distinctive role or movie that made him stand out in a major way other than he got relatively high-billing in most of his pictures), but he makes an impression and is missed once he's gone in the movie.  Moorehead is always wonderful to behold, but this is a role that she could do in her sleep; honestly, she overplays too much of her hand and it's a small miracle that Orson Welles managed such brilliant work from her in her two most iconic dramatic roles, since she always relies heavily on her strength-of-persona and rarely on any sort of internal mechanics happening for her onscreen character.

As for the two main actors, I am usually pretty "ehh" about both of them in general, and that didn't change with this picture.  The movie is not bad, by any stretch of the imagination (I liked the structure, it was well-timed, and it never drags), but the two leads could not be more bland if you try.  It's like watching a slice of Wonder Bread fall in love with another slice of Wonder Bread.  There's something to be said for the physicality of learning how to sign and be deaf, but a one-trick is not going to help Wyman make her character anything more than what the script acts, and frequently she goes for less-she makes her Belinda something to pity rather than someone worth fighting for, and Lew Ayres' as her smitten but personality-free paramour is hardly any more interesting.  The love story feels hopelessly underwritten, and part of me wanted a Heathcliff/Catherine style moment for the two of them just to live up to that soaring Max Steiner score (there's a cliff right there, after all), just to get swept into some sort of movie star glamour.  As it is, it's a finely told story that may feel a bit dated but isn't in the same league as something like Gentleman's Agreement in that regard, and surely would have made a much stronger play.

Those are my thoughts on this classic film-as it's long been celebrated, I'm hoping you have some thoughts-won't you share?  How many of the twelve nominations did the film actually deserve (I'm guessing about 4-5, though I'm not super well-versed in 1948 quite yet), and should it have received more wins?  What are your thoughts on Wyman and Ayres in general, and do you think I'll ever find a film that causes me to feel the love?  Click below to start a dialogue!