humoresque: the place is haunted

*SPOILER ALERT*

(1946. dir: Jean Negulesco) Neither Joan Crawford nor Clifford Odets has ever been better. Crawford had just won her Oscar for Mildred Pierce and her role in this one subsequently unfolded from a compact point into a broad canvas. The story is a John Garfield vehicle, heavy melodrama about a young musician and his older patroness, but the script is so vivacious that the thing rarely drags. Odets' humor is as dark here as it ever gets, dark and fast and fizzy, a cynical champagne of a screenplay, and the only times it starts to lag are in the "happy part of the love story" times, because the happy part of a love affair is the hard part to communicate. Plus, Odets doesn't believe in love, which further hampers his course.

The movie's true passion for classical music is fully apparent, and sometimes hypnotic. When Crawford pulls her Anna Karenina at the end, it's set to such a gorgeous piece and so beautifully photographed that you let the Wagnerian Soap Opera angle of it slide.

The other interesting thing (in these Hays Code times) is the despair which Crawford's character feels towards marriage. She's a dame who's been around the block a time or two and knows for a solid fact that Happily Ever After doesn't come after you say "I do", but also knows she's mad for this boy and wants to believe in it, the possibility of building happiness with him. It's that knowledge, that street wisdom, the inability to sustain the necessary illusion, which spells her doom. "Here's to love," she toasts, at the end, quietly, drunkenly, to herself, "and here's to the time we were little girls and no one asked us to marry." She's a nearsighted drunk who goes into physical ecstasy at the sound of Garfield playing his violin, and yet resents the music as the mistress who will always rule first in his heart. It doesn't scan, it's hard to buy, but everything looks and sounds so great, and Garfield and Crawford throw themselves so wholly into it, that you buy it anyway, without carping over the price-tag.

What a fantastic screenplay. Garfield, after the tragedy, is walking on the beach with his piano player. He's weary and wounded, and what momentous thought does Odets give him? "I have to shave. Why do I have to shave every day?" It's so real it hurts.

The Crawford character tells us she spends most of her time doing penance for things she does wrong every day. In one particularly good drunken scene in the bar she frequents, she keeps repeating, "No offence," to everyone, then, when the barman puts his hands on Garfield who's trying to drag her out and she tells him to back off, the guy says, "No offence," and Crawford, with that confused recognition drunkards get, says, "No offence? That's my line, no offence." Almost as good is her line when Garfield walks in to claim her: "Well, what do you know? The place is haunted."

And in his opening speech, Garfield gives us what might as well be the summation of every part he ever played: "All my life I wanted to do the right thing, but it never worked out. I'm outside, always looking in, and feeling all the time that I'm far away from home and where home is I don't know."

He is strangely at his ease as the violin virtuoso ascended to fame and fortune from poor roots. People will tell you that the movie doesn't really start until Crawford shows up, but that's hogwash. It's every bit as easy to lose yourself in Garfield as in Crawford; they're both superstars. This whole movie, in a nutshell, is better than you think it's going to be.

a revenant scarecrow, a sadistic nazi, and a fraught western triangle

*SPOILER ALERT*

the Dark Night of the Scarecrow: (1981. dir: Frank De Felitta) Television movies were on the whole pretty bad back in the seventies, but there's an infamous handful which transcended their designated medium entirely. The Elizabeth Montgomery Legend of Lizzie Borden is an obvious one, and there's a thing called Bad Ronald which is spoken of with fervor; I never saw it, but from what I can glean, it's about a boy who moves about inside the walls of a house.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow is another such: not a great movie, but one which transcends its budget, trappings, and expectation. It's a revenant vendetta film in which an innocent is wrongly executed, then returns for dark vengeance, generally using farm equipment. Frank De Felitta, who wrote the madly popular blockbuster Audrey Rose, directs. The script is oddly good, and the acting is exemplary, with Larry Drake as the backward victim, and Charles Durning, Lane Smith (one of those guys you'd know if you saw him, and go, "oh, THAT guy,"), Claude Earl Jones and Robert Lyons as the doomed malefactors.

The build-up is gripping, the pay-off is pretty good, and I learned a few things. Like, when you know you're being hunted with murderous intent and you hear someone in the loft of your barn, don't go up there. A few corollaries: don't get your courage out of a bottle, and be careful where you store your wood-chipper. Here's another: when there's heavy machinery bearing down on you in the middle of the night in an abandoned field, don't try and reason with the driver. If he were a reasonable human, he'd be at home asleep, or out having a beer. Just run, alright? One thing about farm equipment is that it doesn't move so quickly. You have a fighting chance, but not if you stand there like an asshole.

Anyway, scarecrows have a high creep factor. I recommend it as a low-key, unpretentious pleasure.

the Fallen Sparrow: (1943. dir: Richard Wallace) A truly dark, claustrophobic and unsettling just-pre-war noir based on a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, one of the greats of pulp (In a Lonely Place is hers, and, good as the movie is, I prefer the book). We catch up with John Garfield just as he's recovering from having been captured while fighting in the Spanish Civil War and tortured for some time by a sadistic Nazi. He's been in Arizona recuperating, and now he's on his way back to the Big Apple to figure out why his good friend, the man who saved him from his ordeal, has mysteriously died.

The plot points don't quite hang together, and you have to stretch your credulity some. Also, Maureen O'Hara, lovely femme as she is, is just too damn nice and earnest to be the necessary fatale. (In her defense, since this was made while the war was underway, had her character been seen as in league with the Nazis, it would not have played well, and it was probably a directorial decision to strip her character of her traditional fatale-propulsion.) Aside from those quibbles, though, Garfield is completely believable, indeed, mesmerizing, as a tough guy who's been broken by torture then cobbled back together again through sheer moxie and will power, and the lighting is creepy-dark and creepy-good.

Three Violent People: (1956. dir: Rudolph Mate) Well, it's a Western, so there's some violence, yes. I suppose they're including Anne Baxter in the "violent" titular trio along with southern gunslinging brothers Charlton Heston and Tom Tryon, but it's the fifties, so she's not allowed to be truly fierce, except maybe in her love for her man and her baby, and even then she has to exercise some decorum.

It starts out with a John Ford sort of absurdity: the kind of courtship that only happens in an old Hollywood movie, with no dynamic except histrionics and power-struggle, a ridiculous courtship, an impossible courtship. Once that's done, though, we can get on to the real plot, which involves carpetbaggers up against proud, Texan landholders. One of the great weaknesses of the film is that Tryon, although pleasant enough company, is no match for Heston (or, for that matter, for Baxter); the part really called for a Richard Widmark or a Kirk Douglas or, hey, how about a Paul Newman? Tryon's got a sort of Ricky Nelson haircut and this was the age of Elvis, so I'm guessing that's the fan-base they were going for.

One of the best parts is Gilbert Roland, dignified and elegant despite a role in which he must say "chihuahua" over and over. He has a passel of sons, including Robert Blake and (I'm not making this up) Jamie Farr. Elaine Stritch is very good, too, as the madam who spells it right out for Baxter at the beginning, before the wedding, what's going to happen when her man finds out her wicked pre-marital secret, and damned if the madam isn't spot-on correct. It's the fifties, so there's a sudden baby without any sign of pregnancy to disfigure Baxter's tiny little waist, a baby who comes into the world without causing pain or even mussage of hair or makeup, a very polite baby.

You get the idea. There's good stuff here, shuffled in with fifties Hollywood absurdity. Unlike so many other Westerns from the time, though, it manages to triumph over its many flaws.

five unusual movies: three pretty good, two not so much

Casa de mi Padre: (2012. dir: Matt Piedmont) You gotta love Will Ferrell, even if you don't like Will Ferrell, for his bottomless well of shamelessness and enthusiasm. Even if, like me, you have had minimal exposure to the Mex-ploitation film industry he's sending up, this is still an enjoyable romp. Entirely in Spanish with subtitles, you get everything you'd expect: the asshole yankee DEA agent (Nick Offerman of Parks and Recreation, BRILLIANT), the flamboyant drug-lord and his newly-encroaching rival (Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, both having way too much fun), along with very funny pokes at magical realism (if nothing else, you have to see the Ferrell character's power animal) and filled to busting with continuity errors, bad timing, film glitches, buckets of blood splashed over slow-motion massacre scenes, subtitles which don't quite match the spoken words, even a scrolling apology from the second-camera assistant about why they couldn't use the fierce coyote-v-jaguar fight footage.

I laughed out loud twice, I think, but the rest of the time I was pleasantly amused.

Afraid of the Dark: (1991. dir: Mark Peploe) This is a low-key but truly harrowing double-story: about a boy going blind while trying to keep a grip on his life, and the same boy sighted but surrounded by blind people. The possibility of bloodshed lies around every corner, and the characters, having been well-written as normal, everyday people, seem terribly vulnerable and trusting. Utterly unconventional without descending into cleverness, chilling without sacrificing heart, and peopled by an astonishingly good cast (James Fox, Fanny Ardant, Paul McGann, Clare Holman, Susan Wooldridge, Robert Stephens, David Thewlis) speaking refreshingly good dialogue, it kept me on the edge of my seat right up to the end.

Deserter: (2002. dir: Martin Huberty) You watch it for Tom Hardy, sure, but it's also an interesting subject: a young Englishman of Romantic sensibilities (Paul Fox who, amazingly, seems NOT to have been spawned by the James/Edward Fox dynastical empire of acting talent) deals with a broken heart by running away to join the French Foreign Legion (La Legion Estrangere. Isn't that gorgeous?) only to find it a gruelling and decidedly unromantic row to hoe. The movie is lit, however, so that everything, --the desert, the medina in Algiers, the barracks, --everything looks beautiful, which you'd think would negate the point a bit, since the point (you'd think) would be the ugliness of reality. That's a red herring, though: really, this is a Hallmark-Movie-of-the-Week thing, designed ultimately to warm the cockles of your heart, convince you that the world is at last safe and warm and that destiny is in your corner, rooting for both your comfort and ultimate joy. That, in the end, all this which looks, at first glance, like chaos actually makes all kinds of sense, the fairy-tale, happily-ever-after, soul-mates-will-find-each-other and God-is-in-His-Heaven kind of sense.

I had hoped to learn some about the Algerian War of Independence, but this is all so simple-minded as to be a little insulting to everyone involved. (I did learn that when De Gaulle announced France would be pulling out and leaving the country to its own devices, the French Foreign Legion took over the airport and was on the verge of instigating a coup, which is interesting.) The worst of it is that there is a late, climactic moment between two great friends, a moment which ought to have been quite devastatingly effective, particularly since Tom Hardy was involved (and he is, as always, lovely in this). But because we are being led delicately by the hand as if children through a war-torn landscape bearing only the vaguest resemblance to anything in the real world, the moment passes without conjuring emotion. Or, anyway, conjuring something so small and un-upsetting that it bears only the vaguest resemblance to true emotion.

Recommended for Hardy completists only.

North Fork: (2003. dir: Michael Polish) An American town in the fifties is about to be drowned beneath a man-made lake. Pairs of men in identical gray business suits are dispersed to disearth the stubborn stragglers to higher ground. Simultaneously, a dying boy dreams his death-hallucination which brings the objects on his night-table to life.

An interesting monochromatic landscape, good cinematography, and a pace set at a daring but exact amble using a veritable battalion of very good actors cannot combat the boatload of whimsy involved, so particularly contrived as to be downright leaden, sinking the movie straight to the bottom where it thumps along, occasionally managing a raised flipper, but never rising into any true sign of life. Too bad. It was an interesting notion.

the Adjustment Bureau: (2011. dir: George Nolfi) A nice love story, care of Philip K Dick. Actually, I suspect much of the Philip K Dick has been filtered out, because it's a little too nice, a little too simple, but you can feel the author's sensibility still honored.

Pretty-boy Congressman David Norris is in the end-run for his Senate bid, and looking like a shoe-in when a frat-boy prank scandal threatens to end his political career for good. I should point out that this early part of the film, an accelerated, bullet-points-only view of his campaign, is masterfully done, giving us just enough to care about the guy, at the same time not hiding his insincere, politician side. (His campaign manager, wonderfully, is Michael Kelly, whom you'll recognize as Doug Stamper from House of Cards.) At this point we are introduced to a team of suited, tied, and hatted Men in Grey who are unknown to our characters but obviously pulling strings to move history in whichever direction suits them, including introducing Norris by apparent accident to Elise, who inspires him to give the speech of his life which puts him back on track to public office.

That's as much plot as I feel comfortable revealing. Suffice to say that Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are a good-time couple to hang out with; I've never enjoyed Damon's company so much. True, they do spend too much time running up endless staircases and opening doors onto terraces they just left, -- call it Philip K Dick, Escher-like, labyrinthine padding, --and the ending is far too tidy. Still, speaking as (on the whole) not-a-fan of romantic movies, this was my favorite in a long time.

destination tokyo: yanks in wartime

(1943. dir: Delmer Daves) It's a top-secret, ridiculously dangerous submarine mission which will take our heroes right into the heart of Tokyo Bay, running reconnaissance for what we now call the Doolittle Raid. The sub itself seems strangely roomy, and the men on it are largely good-hearted rascals mixed in with sober, milk-fed Kansas boys still learning what they're capable of. Cary Grant is the well-loved, stalwart captain. He tells stories not about courage under fire but about taking his little boy in for his first haircut and how he met his beloved wife on a blind date. John Garfield carries around a dame-shaped doll and tells endless tall tales about his adventures picking up gorgeous gals while on furlough.

There's a prolonged depth-charge attack, a "Nip" carrier cut in two by torpedoes bearing cheeky Yank graffiti, an emergency appendectomy performed with kitchen utensils by a kid who's taken a few pharmacology classes, a beloved crew-member treacherously knifed in the back while rescuing the pilot of a fallen Zero. This last affords Cary Grant with an opportunity to hold forth on how while good Americans give our five-year-olds roller-skates to play with, the Japanese give lethal weapons to boys of the same age, whole generations being raised for nothing but warfare and hatred. The speech is startling to hear today; substitute the word "Islamist" for "Jap" and history looks like a neverending circle.

Because it was made while the war was still on, there's no self-knowing slyness, no doubt about God or democracy that is not firmly and readily quashed. The jokes are corny and you're fair certain even in the worst darkness of explosions and spraying water that all will come out well in the end for our intrepid man-boys, but it's Delmer Daves' premier foray at the helm, he has something to prove, and, all in all, does so.

I love John Garfield best when his eyes are darkening with the realization of betrayal, his face relaxing into the "you got me again" sardonic smile, and there's none of that here. He is what he is: he knows he's been chosen for the most dangerous mission because he's got "a strong back, strong arms, and a weak head." He and Grant both take some borderline unbearable lines and make, if not real gemstones, then a fair facsimile of enthusiastic zircon out of them, and that makes this movie worthwhile. Just know what you're getting into: not only is it not for the post-modern, blase and jaded mindset, it is also absolutely incompatible with modern-day political correctness.