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

OVP: Joan of Arc (1948)

Film: Joan of Arc (1948)

Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Francis L. Sullivan, J. Carrol Naish, Ward Bond, Shepperd Strudwick, Gene Lockhart, John Emery, Leif Erickson, Cecil Kellaway, Jose Ferrer

Director: Victor Fleming

Oscar History: 7 nominations/2 wins (Best Actress-Ingrid Bergman, Supporting Actor-Jose Ferrer, Costume Design*, Cinematography*, Film Editing, Art Direction, Score...the film also won an Honorary Award for "distinguished service to the industry in adding to its moral statue in the world community," an Oscar producer Walter Wanger refused to pick up in protest of the film missing out in the Best Picture category)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Ingrid Bergman-click here to learn more about Ms. Bergman (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we started our time devoted to Ingrid Bergman with For Whom the Bell Tolls, her first Oscar nomination.  As this series is focused on only films I haven't seen, we're going to skip over some crucial movies in Bergman's filmography today, but I want to give you an idea of where we were at at this point in her career.  By 1948, Bergman was one of the biggest & most celebrated stars in Hollywood.  She'd won her Oscar for 1944's Gaslight, and had massive hits in the form of Spellbound, The Bells of St. Mary's, Saratoga Trunk, and Notorious (two of which were directed by our mascot for the year, Alfred Hitchcock, but we'll talk more about them next week).  Basically, at this point in Bergman's career, she was untouchable-one of the most important stars in Hollywood, and the most beloved.  It made sense, therefore, for her to play a literal saint onscreen in Victor Fleming's Joan of Arc...and it would set up what would become one of the most crushing moments in celebrity worship a few years later when all of this would come crashing down as Bergman endured one of the biggest celebrity scandals of the Golden Age.  We'll get to that in the coming weeks...but first, let's look at Joan of Arc.

(Real Life Doesn't Need Spoiler Alerts) The film is a biopic loosely based on the life of Joan of Arc (Bergman), a teenage girl (Bergman was 33 in the film, playing someone who was 19...and she doesn't look nineteen so this plays as a bit ridiculous, yes) who sees visions of saints that say she must unite France and crown the Dauphin (Ferrer) as the king, uniting him against the British.  She inexplicably does this, using a private conversation with the Dauphin to convince him that he should put his army in her command.  After a series of victories, the Dauphin was crowned King Charles VII of France, but this comes at a price as he begins to argue with Joan, who thinks it is God's will that she unite France & drive the English out of Burgundy.  When she is captured, Charles does little to help her, and she is sentenced to death, burning at the stake.  It's worth noting that the film starts with Joan canonized (so even if you don't know what's coming, you know history celebrates her), which in 1948 was a fairly recent event-Joan of Arc wasn't canonized until the reign of Pope Benedict XV in 1920.

The film itself is kind of a textbook definition of what the Joan of Arc story is-there's not a lot of differentiation from what we know today, and in many ways this might have been one of the main ways the story infiltrated the American subconscious, particularly for non-Catholic viewers.  As a result, it's historically interesting but the plot reads as routine to a modern audience.  It doesn't help that Bergman is once again playing a sainted character with little variation.  Joan is steadfast & devout, which might make for appropriate conversation in a CCD class, but doesn't work in a two-and-a-half-hour movie.  Joan of Arc is proof once again that the Oscars rarely understood what made Bergman so captivating onscreen.  AMPAS regularly skipped over some of Bergman's most interesting work (Casablanca, Notorious) in favor of pious women who make use of Bergman's gorgeous, rich speaking voice but have little to say with it (not just Joan, but also For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Bells of St. Mary's, Anastasia, and Murder on the Orient Express).

The rest of the nominations are a mix.  The Cinematography, Art Direction, & Costuming are all great.  The lighting is good-we see an evolution from what really made Song of Bernadette sing here to have Bergman shot in a near perfect alabaster, as if some scenes are plucked out of an oil painting, and the set decoration is impressive if not quite differentiated enough to be truly mesmerizing (you're not going to be confused into thinking this isn't a soundstage).  The scoring is run-of-the-mill, which might work in a different year but 1948 had a lot of really excellent music so this just sort of sits there (it's hard to remember even moments after you see the picture).  The editing, well, it's long & repetitive, and it doesn't really know what to do with most of its scenes with men-in-power trying to take Joan down, particularly Ferrer's work as the Dauphin.  Ferrer as an actor is the opposite of Bergman-he generally seemed to overplay his hand, but here he might be a bit too subtle to make his king standout, and I left shocked that they noticed him (this was his screen debut).  There's something there, I'm not going to deny it (it's clear that Ferrer has a plan-of-action with his Dauphin, a weak-willed man of privilege who has no concept of how to be a great leader the way that Joan seems to be able to muster with no training), but a solid intuition below the surface cannot overcome that it just doesn't present onscreen.

OVP: The Swarm (1978)

Film: The Swarm (1978)
Stars: Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, Lee Grant, Jose Ferrer, Patty Duke, Slim Pickens, Fred MacMurray, Henry Fonda
Director: Irwin Allen
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume Design)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Typing up the call sheet for The Swarm, you're right initially to be perplexed by this film's reputation.  There are, in fact, seven Oscar winners in The Swarm, seven, making it one of the most decorated casts in the history of Hollywood (seriously-aside from stunt films like The Player or Around the World in 80 Days, you only really have the late-stage Marvel movies like Avengers: Endgame that can come close to a movie like The Swarm).  So seven winners, and that doesn't even count the nominated Katharine Ross & Richard Widmark and screen legend Fred MacMurray in his final role.  So, why exactly is it that The Swarm is considered by so many people to be one of the worst movies ever made?  And how exactly did it get nominated for an Oscar?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a group of killer African bees invading Texas.  That's the plot in one sentence, but if you want an expanded one, while the killer bees are invading Texas, initially focusing on one small town and then moving on to Houston, we have two men Dr. Bradford Crane (Caine), assisted by Dr. Walter Krim (Fonda), in a turf battle with a military commander General Slater (Widmark).  Dr. Helena Anderson (Ross) is also there, but naturally becomes nothing more than the romantic interest for Crane, and then we frequently cut to the town, which is focused on a senior citizen love triangle (between de Havilland, MacMurray, & Johnson), and Rita (Duke), who is having a baby.  Almost every one of these characters ends up dying, but in the end Crane (with his new girlfriend by his side) burns all of the bees in the Gulf of Mexico by using their mating call against them.

If you can't tell, this movie is kind of hilariously bad.  The plot is absurd, even in an era where murder hornets feel like they're about to add a true level of ridiculous onto 2020.  Forgetting for a second the sexist treatment of Ross' character, the loopholes and twists in the movie are bizarrely unsatisfying.  The movie has no sense of how a plot is supposed to work, and frequently introduces tension that would normally trigger to an audience "okay, this is something I should be emotionally invested in" without any sort of resolution.

Take, for example, the skepticism of Caine's character coming out of nowhere at the beginning of the picture.  Widmark is suspicious of him, and the ominous Jerry Goldsmith score agrees, but not only does he end being the good guy, we never have a moment where there is a bad guy-it just sort of skates into "we're all in this together" mode without any sort of friction between Caine & Widmark that doesn't last longer than three lines.  De Havilland's character is met with a love triangle, but unlike any other movie, all three characters die before she chooses or even tips her hat to which man she might marry.  And Patty Duke's pregnant mother just sort of shows up, has a baby, and then is never heard from again-what was the point of this character?!?

The movie won one Oscar nomination, and it's not, as you might expect, Visual Effects, but instead Costume Design.  I just don't get why.  The only costumes of any note in this movie are the hazmat suits that seem to be crossed with a beekeeper costume, but there's nothing special about this, and the action happens all in one day, to the point where most characters are wearing maybe 2-3 costumes at most (de Havilland probably has the most costume changes at I think three).  I don't have a problem with Oscar going subtle, but there is almost no precedent for a costuming choice this mundane getting an Oscar nomination, and there were certainly other options that would have been showier (California Suite, The Brink's Job, The Boys from Brazil, The Deer Hunter) and were in films that were Oscar-nominated already.  That The Swarm got in instead is kind of hilarious, but just another confusing aspect to this movie's tale.

OVP: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Film: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Stars: Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Arthur Kennedy
Director: David Lean
Oscar History: 10 nods/7 wins (Best Picture*, Director*, Actor-Peter O'Toole, Supporting Actor-Omar Sharif, Adapted Screenplay*, Original Score*, Cinematography*, Art Direction*, Film Editing*, Sound)
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

In college, I majored in Film History, and in order to graduate with honors, I had to do a thesis paper that literally constituted one year of my life focused on the transition period from Classical Hollywood to New Hollywood cinema.  While I saw dozens of films for the project (in fact, that's the reason I started to subscribe to Netflix in the first place), the central thesis of the paper was focused on four movies: The Graduate, Bonnie & Clyde, The Manchurian Candidate and (in particular) Lawrence of Arabia.  I'm not going to get into the why's and how's of what I argued about these films (if you're curious, go into the comments or slip into my Twitter DM's and I'll share), but suffice it to say I know these movies very, very well, and Lawrence has remained a part of my life ever since in large part because I spent a year focusing on every minute detail of the film, because while I compared the 1962 classic to the three other pictures, it was Lawrence that was the guts of my argument.  So engrained is the film into my psyche, that when I made my bucket list at the age of 25, I only included one "see X film on the big screen" as a requisite for the list, and that was the tale of a complicated World War I colonel.  Thanks to TCM, I got to make this dream a reality last Sunday, and while I've written literally 100 pages worth of thoughts on the film, I haven't shared any of them on this blog, so let's get a review out there for posterity, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead...though seriously-you've never seen Lawrence of Arabia?) The film is 220 minutes long, so trying to summarize it into one paragraph as explanation feels to do it a disservice.  Suffice it to say the film is told in flashback (though it's one extended flashback, so you'd be forgiven for forgetting such a framing device) as we see in the opening moments that a seemingly ordinary man on a morning drive on his motorcycle has been killed, and then suddenly we're at St. Paul's Cathedral, where the man is storied enough to have a bust of him in a place where he literally sits on the ashes of kings.  We learn that Lawrence was a complicated man, as even those who knew him don't really have a way to explain him, and then we are transported into the life of TE Lawrence, as played by a young, beautiful Peter O'Toole.

The film is considered one of the quintessential, undisputed classics of Hollywood cinema for a reason-literally everything works in Lawrence of Arabia, and particularly on the big screen (just an FYI-you can totally see this on Wednesday still in select theaters, and while this isn't a paid plug at all, here's a Fathom Events link if you're interested as I am always willing to shill for a movie this good). The score, sets, cinematography-it's all marvelous.  Freddie Young won one of his three Oscars for lensing this movie, and it shows in the care he brings to the big screen.  The deserts look scorched, blistering in the sun, and he has a remarkable expertise not only with a wide shot, but with the occasional closeup of O'Toole or Omar Sharif's Ali.  The editing is flawless-Anne Coates (who recently died) finds little New Hollywood touches to put into a classic film like Lawrence; look at the way that instead of having an Old Hollywood dissolve between scenes she copies the French New Wave with quick, abrasive cuts between critical scenes, underlining the continued madness of Lawrence, especially in the second half of the film where he's forced to confront his narcissism, latent homosexuality, and bloodlust to varying degrees of failure.  From a sheer craft perspective, the movie rivals pictures like Gone with the Wind and Titanic in getting everything right-few films look as good on all cylinders as Lawrence of Arabia; it's not often that a movie gets ten Oscar nominations and you argue it's too few, but Lawrence gets there (it easily could have gotten an 11th nomination, but if legend is to be believed Phyllis Dalton wasn't submitted by the studio for Costume, and therefore missed out on a certain Oscar).

When an epic is this hot, it's easy to forget the acting, but that would be an insult.  The cast list (all men-Lawrence famously doesn't have any speaking parts for women, who only show up in the occasional crowd scene), reads like a who's who of character actors of the era.  Sharif was the one who won the Oscar nomination for Supporting Actor, and if they were only going to go with one that's probably the right call (Sharif is breathtakingly noble, striking & debonair but never someone who isn't believable as Lawrence's struggling conscience), but you have a smorgasbord of other great turns here.  There's Alec Guinness (in problematic brown face, so the fact that he wasn't cited might be for the best), charming as ever as Prince Faisal, or Anthony Quinn's proud Auda, struggling with modernity.  Even small parts like Jack Hawkins' General Allenby, Jose Ferrer's predatory Turkish Bey, and Claude Rains' glib Mr. Dryden make the film work-this is an epic movie with the casting care of a stage play, every part meticulously fitting to its inhabitant.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the onscreen marvel of Peter O'Toole's Lawrence.  O'Toole is one of the great actors of his generation, but he was never better than in his breakout role.  He instills layers of the character with the mannered walk and sky-blue eyes (you don't need to stretch the imagination to realize that this man was both gay and probably into some kinky shit, as is evidenced by real-life...even though in 1962 showing such a thing would've been impossible onscreen).  There's a madness that sets into his eyes, and a lesser actor wouldn't have been able to use sentences like "I'm extraordinary" without some sort of wink to the audience to show he's in on the joke.  The fact that O'Toole doesn't do that puts this up there with George C. Scott in Patton as a look at what war and death does to a man's sole, and how absolute power can corrupt even the most well-intentioned of leaders.  Lawrence is perfect, but Lawrence himself is a man of great fault, a person who has earned the title of hero, but also of the modern-day reality that comes with such a distinction.