June-July 2018

CONFLICT (1945) and PITFALL (1948)

    I don't believe I've ever written about Turner Classic Movies, but it remains the best channel on television for anyone who loves motion pictures. Though I've seen 80 percent of its collection, each month there at least a few pictures I want to see that aren't among its Top 100 rotation.

    But even when they are showing "Gunga Din" or "Double Indemnity" for the thousandth time, the hosts (and unsung writers) bring something interesting to the show.

    Robert Osborne, who died last year, was an engaging host who brought a personal touch to the station's classic movie library. And his sit-downs with celebrities co-hosts on "The Essentials," especially the insightful and knowledgeable Alec Baldwin, were thoroughly entertaining.

      Ben Mankiewicz, grandson of screenwriting legend Herman Mankiewicz, has turned out to be the perfect heir to Osborne's throne.

      But the segment that has become must-see TV for movie fans is the Saturday night segment, "Noir Alley," featuring Eddie Muller, the charismatic film historian of 1940s and '50s crime films, who introduces an offbeat noir, often featuring a recently restored print.

     Muller goes beyond the usual pre-movie chatter and digs deep into the production, director and actors involved in the film. And, unlike most TCM hosts, he offers strong opinions, promoting unsung filmmakers and giving spot-on appraisals of performances.

        Not that all his opinions line up with mine. Thought I've recently become an admirer of director Andre de Toth, I was disappointed with "Pitfall," despite Muller's high praise. The stoic Dick Powell plays Forbes, an insurance investigator who is bored with his family, his job, his future. And then he meets Mona (the sultry Lizabeth Scott) whose boyfriend sits in jail for robbery and the insurance company wants the fruits of the crime (her furs, her jewelry, their boat).

    Forbes quickly falls into an affair with Mona, but not before a creepier investigator, played by the always menacing Raymond Burr (at least until he became Perry Mason).

    The film plays out at a snail's pace and isn't helped by Powell's lethargic performance. (Though when he hauls off and punches Burr it's a helluva shock.) Powell isn't up to the task of depicting depression, without being dull.

    Typical of de Toth films, "Pitfall" doesn't shy away from adult issues minus the usual Hollywood candy coating, but that doesn't make it a good movie. I kept imagining Humphrey Bogart or Robert Ryan or Sterling Hayden in the lead.

     "Conflict," that actually does star Bogart, was the rare film by the legendary actor that had somehow eluded me for the past 40 years. Though it wasn't released until 1945, it was the first film he made after "Casablanca."

    He plays an unhappy married man who is in love with his wife's sister (Alexis Smith). No, this isn't a heartbreaking story of unrequited love; it's about a psychopathic stalker--a bit of a change from the noble Rick from "Casablanca."

    But putting bad casting aside, Bogie never finds the right tone for this snide, slippery character who plots the murder of his wife and then pretends to investigate her disappearance while pursing the object of his desire.

     Nothing is the film is very believable, especially the philosophical discussions between Bogart's Mason and Sidney Greenstreet's psychologist, who is mixed up in the case because he's a family friend. But even with its rather ludicrous plot, it's pretty entertaining; that's the greatness of Bogart.

    Afterwards, Muller educated the viewers on the film's director, Curtis Bernhard; its similarity to "The Two Mrs. Carrolls" (1947), also starring Bogart and Smith; and how much Bogie hated during the film.

    I have no idea what movie is scheduled for Saturday on Noir Alley, but that hardly matters--I'm watching.

AMERICAN ANIMALS (2018)

     Remember those laughable scandal recreation shows that were popular in the 1990s, when reality TV was just emerging? They were car-accident bad, with soap-opera style acting dramatizing the worst moments in the lives of famous people.  

        Writer-director Bart Layton, a British documentarian who mostly works in television, has taken that idea to a new level, combining a documentary on the 2004 attempted theft of Audubon's "Birds of America" from a college library with a fictional telling of the shaggy-dog story.

     Barry Keoghan plays Spencer, a bored college freshman at Transylvania University in Kentucky, who seeks tragedy (or some kind of pain) in his life as a means to become a great painter. Who hasn't felt, especially in early adulthood, the stifling reality of an easy or boring life? Yet committing a crime just might be taking it a bit too far.

    After seeing the infamous "Birds of America" under glass in the library's special volumes room--the 1838 collection of watercolors that has long been among the world's most valuable books--he imagines, with the help of his nihilistic buddy Warren (Evan Peters), snatching it and selling it for millions.

    When Chas and Eric join the team, plans for the amateurish heist begin in earnest.

    Layton plays with the slippery idea of truth by offering alternative versions of what actually happened, while focusing on the darkly comic screwball aspects of the events. Even with the often self-serving interviews of the real guys intercut with the drama, you never feel these are anything other than self-centered idiots who deserve their inevitable downfall.

   Though at first I was resistant to the meshing of fact and fiction (remember New Journalism?) but "American Animals" works as an interesting hybrid, propelling by the performances of Peters (Quicksilver in the "X-Men" series) and Keoghan (who played the boat pilot's son in "Dunkirk") along with their real-life counterparts, who can't help "acting" for the camera.

    I'm not sure Layton had this in mind, but, for me, the film begs the question of what constitutes reality in a world where millions obsess over staged reality and perform for the camera (the curse of social media) every chance they get. Everyone wants to be a star in their own little world.

WON'T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR? (2018)

        As a kid growing up in Western Pennsylvania, I was a bit frightened by the puppet King Friday and his kingdom and never really appreciated "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood." In fact, it wasn't until Eddie Murphy offered up his perfectly executed satire on "Saturday Night Live" in the early 1980s of the sweater-wearing children's show host that I recognized that Fred was more than a Pittsburgh celebrity.

   What this documentary does best is reveal what an island of calm, love and thoughtfulness Fred Rogers and his landmark show provided as the coarsening of TV programming, even for children, took place in the 1970s. The film shows Rogers as both innovator and traditionalist in a time when the educational values of television were being drained.

  Filled with clips of the show and interviews with those who worked on the show along with Rogers' widow and sons, the documentary, directed by Morgan Neville, Oscar winner for "20 Feet From Stardom," makes the point that gentle friendship and a kind word goes a long way to making children feel safe and special.

    What the film can't deliver, despite extensive interviews, is an real insight into Rogers beyond his career arc. His dedication to the show and bringing a sense of self-worth to children was obviously central to his being, but Neville never finds the man beneath the saint. Rogers died in 2003. 

     Yet even as someone who grew up near Pittsburgh, where Fred is revered on the same level as sports heroes like Roberto Clemente, Joe Greene and Mario Lemieux, this film gave me a greater appreciation of how special this seemingly simple, kids-show host was.

AND SO IT GOES (2014) and BOOK CLUB (2018)

    Diane Keaton, an actress who made the most of her quirky, stumbling mannerisms and eccentric fashion sense, seemed destined to fade with her youthful exuberance. Even for a major star, hitting 50, let alone 70, usually signals the slow career fade-out for actresses. Yet she's outlasted nearly everyone.

     While she's not getting Oscar-bait Meryl Streep roles, she has cornered the market on the few films where the role of wife (or widow) is equal to the male role.

    The turning point for Keaton came with her Oscar-nominated performance as the repressed writer who inexplicably falls for a lifelong playboy (Jack Nicholson) in "Something's Gotta Give" (2003). But more recently, she's played wife to  Kevin Kline ("Darling Compansion") and Morgan Freeman ("5 Flights Up") and romantic interest to Brendan Gleeson ("Hampstead"), Michael Douglas ("And So It Goes") and Andy Garcia ("Book Club").

  "And So It Goes," plays like a follow-up to "Something's Gotta Give"--minus the retired Nicholson-- with Douglas as Orin, the grumpy, ridiculously wealthy widower, who rents a summer cabin next door to Keaton's Leah.

     Orin, who conveniently owns the complex, gripes about the tenants, their children, their dogs and just about everything else in his sightline. Then, like a plot turn out of a Lifetime movie, his son, on his way to prison, drops off his young daughter.

    Meanwhile, Leah, also widowed, is trying to carve out a career as a lounge singer (a nod to her "Annie Hall" role?) with the film's director Rob Reiner, sporting a hilarious hairpiece, as her pianist-manager. Together, Leah and Orin care for the little girl and, of course, romance blooms.   

     Written by Marc Andrus, who mined this territory before in "As Good As It Gets," (even the titles all mesh together) and directed by romcom veteran Reiner, the picture does a good job of a creating a pair of interesting characters, but the plot development is as stale as a TV sitcom.

    "Book Club" is another set of wealthy Americans trying to find meaning in old age (has Hollywood lost interest in the working class?). Four women, played by Keaton, Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen, are spurred to reconnect with their sex lives when they read "50 Shades of Grey" (and its sequels) as part of their book club.

   Writer-producer Bill Holderman ("Walk in the Woods"), making his directing debut--how'd you like that cast for your first picture?--does his best to appeal to both the older crowd, with real senior issues, while offering a non-stop string of sex jokes required of contemporary comedies. While the film doesn't hold together, the actresses all get a chance to shine and, for those of us of a certain age, that's more than you expect from a 2018 comedy.   

     While I've seen Fonda, Keaton and Bergen in many films in the past 20 years, seeing them all together in "Book Club" was a bit startling. Where have the years gone? Is it really possible that these sex symbols from my youth are very senior citizens (Jane is 80!)? While they all look great for their age (though Fonda may have gone a bit far in trying to retain her youth), it's just not something I ever imagined back in the 1960s and 70s when they were the epitome of youth.  

    For Keaton, the last 15 years has been the best period of her career since her six-year peak in the late 70s and early 80s. Back then, she took home the best actress Oscar for "Annie Hall" (1977), the followed with "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," "Interiors," "Manhattan," "Reds" and "Shoot the Moon," each a brilliant and very different performance.

     As one of the industry's most notable bachelorettes, with high profile romances with Woody Allen, Warren Beatty and Al Pacino, and a fashion icon even at 70, Keaton doesn't rely on hit films to be a marquee name.

     But I think she's long been underrated as an actress; she's an American original who brings her distinctive screen personality to each role, making even mediocre films entertaining, almost always molding her character into someone seeking the truth about themselves. Keaton ranks with Myrna Loy, Carol Lombard and Jean Arthur as the great comic actresses of the American cinema and, 48 years after her film debut, she's still going strong.

SILVER LODE (1954)

   I had never heard of this low-budget Western until I recently read that it was an anti-McCarthyism picture. Adding to my interest, it was directed by Allan Dwan, a film industry legend who started his career in 1911.

     From his debut until he started making features in 1917, he directed literally hundreds of shorts, and famously aided D.W. Griffith on both "Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance." Dwan was instrumental in the early careers of  Douglas Fairbanks and Gloria Swanson, directing many of their silents, but when sound arrived he was mostly relegated to B-movies. The exceptions were a few Shirley Temple vehicles and later, the 1949 John Wayne World War II epic, "Sands of Iwo Jima."

    But he clearly never lost his craftsmanship. "Silver Lode" is a brisk, tough-minded picture, more compelling than many films with larger budgets and bigger stars from the era.

     Rife with symbolism, the film opens with an obviously dangerous McCarty (Dan Duryea) riding into town with three gunmen in search of Dan Ballard (John Payne), just as the small town prepares for a Fourth of July celebration. Turns out that Ballard, a beloved citizen of Silver Lode, who's about to marry the daughter (Lizabeth Scott) of the town's richest rancher, is wanted for murder in California. Or is he?

     McCarty (the name says it all), claiming to be a federal marshal, is actually seeking revenge for his brother, who was shot and killed by Ballard in a poker game dispute. But Ballard realizes immediately that this shady group of "lawmen" are not going to take him back alive.

     When he plots to avoid being arrested by McCarty, the town turns against him, blaming him for the shooting of the local sheriff and generally questioning his honor--all based on the word of a man who just arrived into town.

    Payne, hardly anyone's idea of a good actor, offers a surprisingly grim, existential performance as the man who is falsely accused. From the moment he sees McCarty, he knows he's in a fight for his life.

  It's hard to miss the Red Scare connections as McCarty easily manipulates the town's citizens to assume the worst about Ballard.

   The key to the integrity and message of the film is that Ballard never pleads his case--he knows his not guilty and that should be enough for his friends.

     Old pro Dwan, then 70, and the great cameraman John Alton ("He Walked by Night," "The Big Combo"), a master of shadows and light, artfully move the camera along the streets, inside barns and houses to capture the cat-and-mouse chase between Payne and Duryea.

       There's a very flashy (almost Wellesian) sequence in which Payne's Ballard runs from one side of the town to the other, exchanging gunfire with former friends, while the camera captures the action in long shot, a one-minute uncut take.

   This isn't a great Western, but it's an intense, energetic and extremely well made--jam packed with action and thoughtful commentary in just 80 minutes.

THE LOVE PARADE (1929)

    Ernst Lubitsch arrived in Hollywood in late 1922 as the most famous, and first, filmmaker to escape the emerging nationalism in postwar Germany.

    "Madame DuBarry" (1919) and "The Loves of Pharaoh" (1922), among many others, had established Lubitsch as a master director comparable to Americans Griffith and De Mille. He had learned his trade in the company of German theater impresario Max Reinhardt, quickly moving from acting to directing. His first American picture featured Hollywood's biggest star, Mary Pickford, in one of her first "adult" roles, in "Rosita" (1923).

    By the end of the 1920s, he was matching his German output with such hits as "The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg" (1927) and "The Patriot" (1928), a spectacular production about czarist Russia starring German acting legend Emil Jannings. At the time it was compared to "The Birth of a Nation," but no prints of the film have survived.

     At the end of the 1920s, unlike so many of the silent filmmakers, Lubitsch embraced the new world of sound cinema.

      Lubitsch's 1929 musical, "The Love Parade," stands up better than most early sound efforts because it successfully uses singing and production numbers to break up the static dialogue scenes. Those early sound scenes with the actors standing or sitting in the middle of a set, with no ambient sounds around them, usually come off like an over-rehearsed stage play.

    It doesn't hurt that Lubitsch tapped French vaudeville star Maurice Chevalier to play Count Renard, a military attaché stationed in Paris, who is asked to leave his post  because of the many scandals he's stirred up by his affairs with married women. Lubitsch seemed to understand that in sound films, personality counted for more than acting skills.

      The sly, subtle sexual humor the director brought to his silent pictures, known as the "Lubitsch touch," finds its way into the sound "Love Parade" through  screenwriters Ernest Vajda and Guy Bolton's script (from a Hungarian play) and Chevalier's winking performance.

    When Renard returns to his homeland, the fictional Sylvania, he meets with Queen Louise (the operatic singer and Broadway star Jeanette MacDonald,) who takes an instant interest in the dashing flirt.

    Lubitsch skills are best exemplified by the initial dinner between the queen and Renard, which the director never shows directly. Instead, three groups of observers--the ladies in waiting, watching through a keyhole; the royal advisers, spying from the across the courtyard; and Jacques (the amusing Lupino Lane) and Lulu (Broadway star Lillian Roth), personal servants of the stars, keep watch from the garden while carrying on their own flirtation--offer a play by play of the pair's romantic breakthrough.

    Chevalier is the romantic version of Groucho Marx; he's always playing himself and looking out to the audience for reaction, but he does it with such grace that it usually works. In most cases, his co-stars are just there for him to react to and MacDonald worked well in that role (they co-starred in three more films). But her operatic singing, more than any other aspect of the film, makes it feel dated. 

    But like so many of the pre-code Hollywood pictures (before about 1934), actual adult themes were addressed--even in a romantic musical. "The Love Parade" addresses the shifting place of women in society while reminding audiences that the only good marriage is one where the husband is clearly in charge (even if she's the country's queen). Setting the tone for Hollywood films over the next 30 years, the film presents a woman in power as a negative for both her and her partner.

     The film also was influential in its use of music (by Victor Schertzinger and Clifford Grey) that actually connects to the plot, a shift that was just taking place on Broadway. The picture is far superior to the lumbering "The Broadway Melody" that won the 1928-29 Oscar for best picture, but in the 1929-30 competition ("Love Parade" was a best picture nominee) it ran into the first great American sound film, "All Quiet on the Western Front."

       As Scott Eyman writes in "Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise," "With one film, Lubitsch changed all that, lifting the musical to a much higher level...For one brief moment, it seemed that there would not have to be an impregnable, massive wall between the visual grace of silent films and an equivalent dynamism of sound."

      Lubitsch only got better, with "Trouble in Paradise" (1932), "Ninotchka" (1939), "The Shop Around the Corner" (1940) and "To Be or Not to Be" (1942), all among the best films of the era. But his career was cut short by a heart condition that killed him when he was just 55.