Movie: Suddenly

Suddenly

1954 / B & W / 75 minutes

Tagline: A cold-blooded thriller!

A young widow lives with her eight-year-old son and her father-in-law in the sleepy SoCal burg of Suddenly. Because she lost her husband in the Korean conflict, she forbids her son from playing with toy guns and joining the Cub Scouts. Her father-in-law, an ex-Secret Service operative, speaks out against over-protecting the boy, arguing that if he doesn’t develop strength of mind, he will be unable to take his turn in fighting cruelty, hatred, and tyranny and contribute to making the Declaration of Independence stick. The village sheriff has romantic designs on the widow, but hurts his case when he buys the boy a cap pistol. A crisis occurs that tests the mettle of all the characters.

The script is just okay, setting up the paper-thin characters. Frank Sinatra puts in a convincing performance, here just as suitably larger than life as his Maggio in From Here to Eternity. He plays a detestable killer who learns to like killing during WWII. Nancy Gates, who appeared with Sinatra in Some Came Running, is okay as the pacifist widow.  The sheriff is played by hard-nosed Sterling Hayden, best remembered as the mad general in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and the hard-bitten copper Michael Corleone shot in the restaurant with Solozzo. Also good was James Gleason as the father-in-law, mainly because he gets off cool Americanisms like, “shucks to you,” “tan your hide,” and “hurt like blazes.”

I suppose a viewer could label this movie a late 1950s artifact and make the expected allowances. We could identify themes of defending the country against domestic terrorists, the motivations of betrayal and violence, the different ways that wars influence individual personalities, the importance in family values, and realistic men controlling idealistic females. We could also see the movie as simply a concise thriller that compresses four hours of action into a tight 75-minute film.

Movie: The Red House

The Red House

100 minutes / B & W / 1947

When The Red House was released in 1947, critics called it the “sleeper hit” of the year. The excellent casting makes the movie worth seeing. Edward G. Robinson plays a farmer, which is long way from the urban crooks and canny investigators he often had to play. GI pin-up girl Julie London plays to perfection the little town flirt who tantalizes both the good boy, Lon McCallister, and bad boy, Rory Calhoun. Calhoun’s looks – dark Irish meets Cherokee – fit the part of woodsman who dabbles in trouble. Allene Roberts, with her sensitive eyes, slender build, and gentle manner, plays the troubled orphan. Judith Anderson puts in a believable performance as the farmer’s too devoted sister.

Things change on an isolated farm when Robinson’s disabled farmer hires McCallister as a hand.  Robinson warns the nice boy and vulnerable orphan to stay out of the woods and the tumble-down red house it surrounds.  But the teenagers naturally ignore the warning. Although the bad boy guards the woods with a gun – we wonder if moonshining is going on – the boy, the orphan, and the flirt explore the mystery of the woods.

Gradually revealed is a grisly family secret. The movie handles smoothly the theme of the outcomes of violence and the hold guilt and secrecy exert. Edward G. Robinson gives a restrained performance as a man with a burden. His high level of acting is approached by the three younger actors. McCallister, a kid actor, was a seasoned vet, but Allene Roberts and Julie London are good beyond their age and experience. 

The DVD I saw this movie had lousy sound. But it’s not every day we can enjoy the unusual genre of “country noir.”

Monster Movie

The Monster Walks
63 minutes / B & W / 1932

Upon the death of her father, Ruth must return to the old homestead for the reading of the will. She brings her fiancée, a doctor, to meet her uncle, who is confined to a wheelchair. We soon understand why she fears returning home. Her father died of no apparent causes. Although the housekeeper is nice if morose as she sneaks around the house, her son gives off an unstable vibe. Worst of all, kept in the basement is an ape (in fact, it’s a chimp – it’s a low budget movie) that detests Ruth out of jealousy. The ape, it seems, was the subject in medical research experiments conducted by the late father.

They are driven to the creepy manse by the comic relief Exodus, whose real name per the credits is Sleep N Eat (sic) who was black comedian Willie Best. In one scene, Exodus reports a resemblance between his relative and the movie’s chimpanzee. How sensibilities change!

The prejudice mars what’s otherwise a tolerable movie for such a shoestring budget. Mischa Auer plays the son in a myriad of creepy ways. Thousand yard stare. Odd teeth. Lumbering gait. Furious, vengeance-filled vibes. Big hands. Playing on the violin out of tune lullabyes. He's much better than the rest of the movie. The other actors deliver the dialogue in a stiff, mock portentous way that brings to mind the stage – the high school play stage. At only an hour long, it was just as entertaining as a couple of installments of One Step Beyond.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

1946 / B & W / 116 minutes

Tagline: Fate drew them together... and only murder could part them!

On  December 13, TCM screened, yet again, an interesting example of big budget film noir. It blends the right amounts of guess work, women’s movie romance and nice clothes, and hard-boiled notions about the wicked ways of life in seemingly ideal communities.

Much of the suspense hangs on characters who act on mistaken assumptions and oblivious characters who don’t know they lack crucial information. I won’t discuss plot and incident because an account would dilute the suspense that every movie watcher has the right to savor on her own.  Because the movie takes a little too long for characters to tumble to facts, I will reveal to a world dying to know that my butt started to go numb at about the 95-minute mark of this two-hour movie.

Barbara Stanwyck plays the femme fatale as she did in Double Indemnity. She is hard and ruthless, but vulnerable and liable to a pitiful but frightening instability. She’s acted on impulse that caused others pain, cost two unfortunates their lives, and blighted her own life in the process. Violence and the prospect of cruelty excite her.

The other female lead, Lizabeth Scott, brings to mind Lauren Bacall, with her husky sultry voice and unique but not pretty face. But in only her second screen appearance, Scott gives the character a convincing broken manner. Like a hunted animal, she’s always looking over her shoulder, wincing in expectation from the next blow from a drunken parent, a violent sib, or a sadistic prison guard with a billy club. Born to be victimized, she isn’t close to clever and knows it. She needs somebody to take care of her.

The male leads are cast against type. To me, Van Heflin always seemed genial, harmless and Pillsbury Doughboy-soft. Here he plays a supposedly tough veteran of Anzio and a canny product of circus life and rambling gambler. In his screen debut, Kirk Douglas plays a drunken milktoast who is also a conniving, ethics-free DA who coerces small time crooks into bad funny business and sends innocent men to the gallows. This is noir, remember, so human failings cause trouble and suffering. Douglas pulls off playing a dynamic weakling, persuading us that his character has complexity – gutless, devious, dangerous, untrustworthy, volatile, but a husband totally in love with his wife.

Film noir tends to be cynical about appearances. Near the beginning of a movie is a wonderfully awful example of creepy decoration. A rich woman’s mansion has furnishings that look Late 19^th Century Western Frontier Genteel though the scene is set the late 1920s. Naturally, the fancy decorations hide the inner rot of the semi-monsters that have to inhabit the house. Later in the movie the mansion is inhabited by Babs the Adultress who rubs her extramarital affairs with personal trainers in her alcoholic husband’s face. Hubby the DA takes his anger out on the petty crooks at work. He fixes problems for his friends and hires plug-uglies to usher drifters out of town.

The mid-sized factory town looks safe and prosperous enough. But it is run by a cabal of the spoiled rich and their corrupt lickspittles. The ordinary citizens are cranky toadies who accept their subordination as part of the natural order. In short, the town is the sweltering hell that Republicans think of when they think of the Good Old Days.  The arrival of the stranger Van Heflin uncovers the rot inside civic life.  The good citizens sure don’t like him being so rebellious.

Because of the big budget and requirements of The Code, the ending is not nearly as fatalistic and dark as film noir endings usually are. Despite the happy ending, enjoy.

Perry Mason Movies

Turner Classic Movies showed Perry Mason movies from the mid-Thirties on March 26. Naturally I watched as many of them as I could, even playing hooky to do so.

It wasn’t worth it.

The Case of the Lucky Legs, 1935

The first Mason movie is really bad. Taking a cue from The Thin Man, Perry Mason is made into a Nick Charles- type bon-vivant. Mason’s secretary is the typical gal Friday, snappy, sassy, and serenely never taking the males around her seriously. Also popular at the time were screwball comedies, but the rough mixture of murder story and laughs doesn’t work at all. Spudsy (not Paul) Drake does slapstick annoyingly. Many so-called comedic scenes turn on booze-hound Mason’s futile efforts to stay on the wagon. The only bright spot is Barton Maclane, playing his hard-nosed copper in a couple of scenes.

The Case of Velvet Claws, 1936

Nothing works in this movie except the stylish sets, cars, and clothes. Again Mason as the man about town and his sidekick Spudsy as bozo are not funny in any sense. Perry and Della get married but their honeymoon is delayed. A running joke is that Perry passes on a case of influenza to everybody that he comes into contact with.But somehow everybody‘s sneezing, coughing, waving handkerchiefs around is not funny.

The Case of the  Stuttering Bishop, 1937

This is more like it. A different actor was cast as Perry Mason. He brings more gravitas to the role. He even paces like Perry does in the novels. Ann Dvorak, the foxiest Hungarian-American in Hollywood before Mariska Hargitay, was a lively Della Street, if mouthy. The actor cast for Paul Drake was older, but more plausible in the part. Just like the novels, the plot is complicated and a moment’s lack of attention will result in getting lost. I think fans of the novels will like this one the most. However, it is a film that sunk the franchise, just going to show that being faithful to the book is not enough for a movie to come off well enough to be popular.

I seem to remember reading someplace that the creator of Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner, was not happy in his dealings with Hollywood. After 1937, he did not return the character the tender mercies of Hollywood until 1957. For the TV series, Fred MacMurray was going to be Perry Mason, but when Gardner saw Raymond Burr at an audition for the part of DA Hamilton Burger, he jumped up and yelled, “That’s Perry Mason!”

Mystic Circle Murder aka Religious Racketeers

Mystic Circle Murder aka Religious Racketeers
1938 / B & W / 68 minutes

The magician and escape artist Harry Houdini dedicated himself to efforts against spiritualists and mediums who bilked gullible people out of their money. His widow carried on this work. She appears near the beginning of this movie to warn people away from charlatans who claimed they could communicate with the dead. Skeptics who are interested in the topic of fraudulent mediums and their gullible clients may enjoy this odd period piece. The general public, maybe not so much.

The purpose of this movie is support Mrs. Houdini in her efforts to educate the public. A wealthy steel heiress is prime pickings for a phony medium because she’s dogged with guilt that she was not with her mother when she passed. Helene LeBerthron was a good choice for this part. One of those blue-eyed brunettes with pale skin, she looks young, vulnerable, and hopeful enough to make a con man lick his chops and make us in the audience yell, “Would you please listen to your skeptical journalist boyfriend, already?”

The medium, The Great La Gagge, explains to his greedy partner how to reel in suckers. He says that people want to believe in the uncanny and that they have to be gently prodded to persuade themselves that communication with the dead in indeed possible. The greedy partner works the sound board and the strings that produce the spirit manifestations. Doing so, he always has a coffin nail hanging from his mouth. The constant smoking somehow underlines that exploiting guilt and grief is all in a day’s work for these heartless cheats.

The movie also touches on the psychological manipulation that fakers employ to awe the mark. Like drill sergeants instilling obedience, they have the mark repeat simple phrases of affirmation. Like cult masters, they take marks out of familiar environments and surround them with strange new sights and sounds. They replace the belief systems of marks with esoteric philosophies and mumbo-jumbo. They cynically use distress, loneliness and sexual attraction against the mark.

As I hinted above, this is a movie best for movie fans that have a prior interest in the psychology of persuasion, such as why people believe weird things and how the yearning for the impossible makes people vulnerable to bunco artists. Although the actors do the best they can, more than a little dialogue involves the characters telling each other information they already know in order to bring the audience up to speed. The writing and acting, then, are so-so but, at only 68 minutes in the Alpha Video version, the pace is brisk and everybody keeps their dignity intact.

Swell Night for a Murder

One Frightened Night
1935 / B&W / 66 minutes

A comically irascible millionaire would prefer to leave his fortune to his long-lost grand-daughter. After fruitless searches for the girl, the old buzzard opts to split his dough among types that we are happy to find in a B-movie mystery-comedy. A niece married to a husband with a gambling jones. A ne’er-do-well nephew. A pompous attorney. A staid doctor. A silently disapproving housekeeper. The coot tells them he will allocate a million to each, but his plans and their hopes are derailed when two different women show up and claim to be the missing grand-daughter. Everybody has a motive for the murder that ensues.

The well-differentiated characters are larger than life. Charley Grapewin does a great grouch, gleefully telling home truths; he is best-remembered as Uncle Henry in Wizard of Oz. So does Regis Toomey as the jaunty womanizer who revels in trouble and upset. Hedda Hopper plays the niece, curious since I never knew she acted. Wallace Ford, a magician, gets in good lines and sight gags, but he wearied me with his boisterousness.

Strange that the actors had a hard time placing the word stress in easy words like “tin cup,” “left-handed,” and “imposter.” But they had no trouble with really hard words like “unsullied,” “prestidigitator,” and “legerdemain.”Also curious was when the character wanted to say that the lawyer was just talking in platitudes. Nowadays we would say, “Next he’ll praise apple pie and mother.” Then, it was said, “When is he going to bring in Lincoln and Gettysburg.” Other good lines: “Stick around this morgue long enough and they'll be saying goodbye to you with flowers,” and “Don’t be a bigger idiot than you can help,” and “It looked like something the Devil let loose,” not to mention the deplorable male chauvinism of “A remarkable women. She won’t talk.”

The lighting provides curious shadows. The camera presents tracking shots. The set of the mansion is large and mildly creepy. The pace is enjoyably brisk. The credits are creatively presented on window shades being pulled down. All in all, a clever movie to spend a cheerful hour with.