NIGHT MOVES- 1975 Dir. Arthur Penn

What I remember:

I saw this in the theater when it came out, and was a little befuddled. This was not your standard whodunit for certain. Arthur Penn, who had helped foment the New Hollywood revolution with his unforgettable “Bonnie and Clyde”, and, in my mind at least, cemented his role as a great auteur with one of my favorite films then and now, “Little Big Man”, would not be interested in making a standard private dick flick. Here was one of Hollywood’s guiding lights, directing one of filmdom’s hottest stars in Gene Hackman. It would seem to be a very easy sell to the moguls. Penn had been hot during the intervening period (spanning 1968-1974); “Alice’s Restaurant” was a charmer based on the Arlo Guthrie counter-culture anthem, and “Little Big Man” was a big hit with the hippies and a breakthrough in its depiction of the Native American.

Hackman was coming off a great run including his brilliant turn as Jimmy Doyle in both “French Connection” movies, his signature role as Harry Caul in the Coppola’s masterpiece “The Conversation”, and his great actor pair with Al Pacino in “Scarecrow”.

So what could possibly go wrong here? Penn was famous for being an autocrat both on the shoot and behind the scenes. I recall that I needed to see “Night Moves” a second time before I could really follow the story and understand the characters. Blame it on my youth, blame it on whatever 1975 had me indulging in. Possibly blame it on the film and it’s convoluted narrative line. I remember that the supporting cast was a tad weak, and there was a laugh-out-loud absurdist line when out of nowhere, Paula, Hackman’s love interest in the movie, blurts out, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” Hackman replies, “Which Kennedy?”

Now you’re asking, why did you choose this movie for your blog? I guess it comes under the heading, “It’s so weird that it’s cool, maybe even great”. There was a lot of detective genre deconstruction in the ‘70’s. Heading the list was “Chinatown”, but there were also “The Long Goodbye”, “Klute”, “The Late Show”, and you could even include “Shaft” on this list. With “Night Moves”, I think the genre was imploded. Plus, the most deconstructed detective film of all time, “The Big Lebowski” references “Night Moves” in many ways. Let’s give it a chance, shall we?

After re-watching:

“Who’s winning?”
“Noone. One team’s losing slower than the other”. Ellen and Harry Moseby
PLOT SUMMARY

Ex NFL defensive back Harry Moseby is a private investigator who is called in to trace the runaway daughter of an aging ex Hollywood starlet. The runaway is well known for her promiscuity, as is the mother. The starlet needs her child back so that she can collect a trust owed her from her first husband. Otherwise, the two want nothing to do with each other. At the same time Moseby discovers his wife is having an affair. He runs from the emotional conflict headlong into his investigation, which takes him into the world of stuntmen, charter boating and eventually pre-Columbian artifact smuggling.

STORY/THEME

There’s a joke that goes;

A couple are lying in bed after sex. The girl turns to the guy and asks, “Does having sex with me make you a pedophile?” The guy responds, “Pedophile. Isn’t that a big word for an 8-year-old?”

Yeah, that’s pretty creepy, but damn funny too. Watching a supposedly 17-year-old Melanie Griffith get in and out of clothes for the better part of two hours makes you feel a little bit creepy, a little bit tingly (Hey, wasn’t that an Osmonds’ song title?). “Night Moves” overcomes this most prurient of situations 10-fold, with a densely plotted mystery and a very well developed character study of it’s protagonist. It’s not so much a “noir deconstruction”, as a rethinking of the classic Private Dick character, giving him a rounder, more corruptible and more faceted personality. At one point, the man Harry’s wife is having an affair with says, “C'mon take a swing at me Harry, the way Sam Spade would!” It’s a great moment, when you realize that this is the 70’s, not the 40’s, and things are not going to progress the way the standard detective fare would go. There is another fight later in the film, where Harry and the girl’s Step-father are in a tussle, all the while, Paula (Jennifer Warren), the woman both have slept with, is yelling at them about how stupid they are acting, how childish. In a Marlowe or Spade story, the girl would just be screaming her head off.

Harry is a new kind of person for the movies, the intellectual jock. He’s way too smart to be a head-banging NFL pro. He plays chess (hence the title; Night Moves= Knight Moves). He has a tortured childhood, which from of all people, you learn by dialogue given the wife’s lover. In fact, all the exposition in “Night Moves” comes from strange sources; the back-story of Delly the runaway and her mother is revealed on tape while Harry is driving around LA. Who supplied the info, we never know. Every time Harry tries to get back-story from the characters it is obscured; when supplied it’s surrounded by action (a bar fight or a stunt shot), and when it is withheld, it is done in the most arcane manor, especially in Paula’s non-sequitors (refer to the “Kennedy shot” question).

In fact, the red herrings in our mystery all equal the plot itself. What does that mean? Shit, I don’t know really. Where were YOU when Kennedy was shot? Did you know sharks have to keep swimming because they have no flotation sacs? I guess what I am getting at is, the story of why Delly eventually dies, and what the main stunt guy, Joey Ziegler (character actor Edward Binns) has to do with it, what her death has to do with this artifact smuggling, and how the step-father, stunt man, and even possibly the guy who first connected Harry in on the case are all tied together is never suitably explained.

When I first saw this movie, I was totally flummoxed, expecting a denouement wherein all this would be wrapped up in a nice little package, with Melanie Griffith’s oft-shedded halter-top as the bow.
NOW, I get it. I mean I really get it! Near the climax, Paula tells Harry that he’s asking the wrong questions. He isn’t of course, if he wants to figure out the mystery. But he is, if he wants to understand why he is forced to get to the WHY of everything. Paula says that Harry should be content, that he has solved the case. But surely he is not content. He needs to know “why”. He needs to know why his wife had an affair. Dammit, it’s not enough for a person to know where they are and what they are doing. We need to know why.

Not really a spoiler, but the film ends with Harry having made one more discovery in the case- not one that wraps it all up by a long shot, but another reveal. He is shot in the leg, and unable to control the boat he is on, which begins going in circles- and we cut to an overhead shot of this. Cue credits. That ending was probably enough to kill any chance this movie had of becoming a classic. I absolutely love it, and now think it is the best possible ending for this unique genre piece.

FILMMAKING

For a very theatrical director, Arthur Penn has always had an eye for the memorable image. There is a striking visual in “Left Handed Gun”, when the gang decides that Deputy Moon is their next target, and they shoot their guns at a reflection of the moon in a pond, scrambling the reflection with the pond’s ripples. The climactic massacre in “Bonnie and Clyde” is a sequence that could have no theatrical peer, as is the Chief’s death scene in “Little Big Man”. For some reason, “Night Moves” doesn’t have a visual lynchpin. Possibly the final shot of the boat circling, or the discovery of the corpse in the submerged plane, but as a rule, it is not a source of the great filmic moment.

However, there is one very unique stylistic element to the movie. There is no use of visual transition language separating scenes. No use of dissolves, no fade to black, no clue that we are now in another place or time. I am sure that this is by design. The resultant effect is one of temporary confusion and disorientation. It’s not unpleasant by any means, but it is unsettling as each new scene takes a few seconds to register. Since Harry is in virtually every sequence of the film, you can’t use his presence or lack thereof as an anchor. What is Penn trying to accomplish with this stylistic trope? Beats the hell out of me.
At about the same time, one of my personal loves in cinema history, “The Last Detail” came out. A much simpler film, to be sure, but Ashby’s beautiful little masterpiece has it’s own revolutionary play on film language; Ashby uses dissolves in a scene on a train, when two Navy non-coms are arguing about how to deal with their current predicament- how to handle a kleptomaniacal shlemiel they are escorting to the brig. The dissolves are used even though there is no time passing, no scene changing. It is very effective in showing the disconnect between the two sailors during that particular sequence. I think Penn was trying for something similar with his lack of transitional devices, but instead it just makes the film a bit more angular than necessary.

PERFORMANCES

Gene Hackman is a national treasure as far as I’m concerned. If you can show me a bad performance by him, I’ll buy you a steak dinner. It’s a good thing for “Night Moves” that he is in every scene. The supporting cast is not anywhere nearly as good, although the underused Jennifer Warren does a nice and memorable job with the part of Paula. She makes a pretty hard to believe character somewhat credible. She’s not terribly sexy, but you can see why Moseby likes her. Susan Clark as Harry’s wife Ellen, has her moments, especially during the couple’s confrontational scenes. You can tell her problem with Harry is a lack of emotional connection predicated by Harry’s obsession with “why”. Oh…and James Woods is in the movie! This is one of his earliest feature roles, pre-dating his breakthroughs in the TV mini-series “Holocaust” and the films “Choirboys” and “The Onion Field”. He plays one of the many tools who have had relations with Delly. He also spends a lot of time getting beat up in the movie. One performance that is shockingly bad is by Anthony Costello as stuntman Marv Ellman, who slept with both Delly and her mom Arlene. It’s laughably bad, and it’s not something you’d expect to see in an Arthur Penn film. Arlene, as played by Janet Ward, is a poorly drawn, single faceted character not worthy of the rest of the ensemble. The boozy, slutty, aging starlet has been done far better turns by the likes of Shelly Winters and Harvey Fierstein.

That’s a joke.

ON SECOND LOOK

Well, in this case it’s third, and I think I like “Night Moves” even more this time than the time I re-watched it back in the ‘80’s. Sure it’s complex, muddled and unresolved. To quote Cheech Marin after an incredibly cacophonous guitar solo, “What, you didn’t like that?” I think it tackles very interesting subject matter. What compels a man to find out the reason for everything? Does the world need to be explained? Should we destroy ourselves and all that surrounds us just to figure out the meaning of life, the universe and everything? Just as Harry shouldn’t destroy himself to find out whodunit and why, we shouldn’t kill ourselves trying to unravel the puzzle of life. Zen, baby. Chill, baby. It’s the ‘70’s

Oh yeah....to answer the question, on a short bus going home from school, somewhere on 2nd Avenue in Spanish Harlem.

1st Look-★★★ 2nd Look-★★★1/2

“THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING”- 1975 Dir- John Huston

What I Remember:

From the ad campaign, the posters, the star power, this movie looked like everything I used to hate. A couple of Brits have a wild adventure in the sub-continent, carousing and fighting and living it up, little brown ignorant men get slain by the hundreds, etc., etc. Yet, you had to notice the director. Here was a man responsible for 3 of my favorite films; “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, “Freud, The Secret Passion” (and WHY is this film not available ANYWHERE?), and “The Asphalt Jungle”. He also had just come off an unforgettable acting turn in “Chinatown”. Regardless, I was in film school at the time, and pretty much saw everything that came through.

How much did I underestimate this film? Memory holds this to be a masterpiece, an utter gem. Superficially it is an action picture, and also a progenitor of the then budding genre, the “buddy film”. Nowadays the term used is “bromance”, but it will always be “buddy” for me. At any rate, when you scratch the surface of “TMWWBK” (another long title I refuse to enter time and again), you end up with a story that is so much deeper. It’s a tale of arrogance, a tale of self-deception. It’s a fable about the corrupting force of absolute power. It’s an allegory of colonial conceit.

I also remember that my impressions of both stars, Michael Caine and Sean Connery, were changed forever in a positive manner. Don’t get me wrong, I had seen and liked both actors in previous films, yet I had never seen them so believable and so far out of their respective wheelhouses. This was no James Bond or Harry Palmer. Daniel and Peachy are two very unforgettable characters, and they owe that to Mr. Huston.

After re-watching:

“If we're going to make it stick that I'm a god, you ought to bow when you pass in front of me like everybody else.” – Daniel Dravot

PLOT SUMMARY

Peachy and Daniel, a pair of scoundrel ex-members of the British Army, are living in India and running a) various scams, b) guns and c) from the authorities. Peachy Carnahan (Michael Caine) runs into the Northern Star’s chief Indian correspondant, Rudyard Kipling (Christopher Plummer) in a train station. Peachy lifts Kiplings’ gold watch, and to his chagrin sees a Freemason medallion attached to the chain. Since Peachy is also a Freemason, he attempts to follow Kipling onto the train to return the watch. He then uses his Masonic connection to convince Kipling to pass a message to his comrade, Daniel Dravot. They plan a blackmail scheme that is thwarted by Kipling when they tell him that they will pose as correspondants for HIS paper! They then decide on their next scheme; go to remote Kafiristan and become Kings by using their British street smarts. After a grueling journey, they make it to Kafiristan, wherein Dravot is mistaken for the long lost son of Alexander the Great, and they discover riches beyond their wildest dreams.

STORY/THEME

I feel like this was a film that I really had right. There were few surprises, and many scenes were stuck in my brain with crystal clarity. It is a tribute to just how visually stunning “TMWWBK” is. Much of the location shooting was in Morocco, but some of the winter Himalayan scenes were shot in the French Alps. The stunning landscapes are a result of the “David Lean” effect- a large scale adventure or historical film made after 1965 needed to have the sweeping landscapes that equal “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Dr. Zhivago” in scope. Could the film have been as effective without this imagery? Maybe, but I think you get the idea that these men, while absolutely reprehensible in character, also possess a super-human amount of courage and bravado. Traversing the Himalayas seems impossible, and one of the best sequences comes when they are stuck at a crevasse, with no way to cross. Knowing that they are done for, they begin to recount their memories, and begin laughing loud and heartily. The laughter starts an avalanche, and soon the crevasse is filled.

As an adventure fable, it is amongst the best. Where it also succeeds is as allegory to the hubris of the British empire. Daniel and Peachy, though obviously of the lower rungs of British society, feel that they are so much smarter and civilized than the Kafiris, that they underestimate the people and their society. They cringe at the thought of the Kafiris playing polo with a dead man’s head in a sack as the ball, yet have no sense of guilt after throwing a perfectly nice Indian man from a moving train. The history of British Colonial rule has always been one of hypocrisies like these.

Interestingly enough, the film I believe “TMWWBK” resembles the most is Huston’s own “Treasure of the Sierra Madre”. Greed, of course is the motivational factor, but there is also the juxtaposition of cultures, and the Caucasian feeling of superiority and entitlement that is their undoing. I believe that Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo” also play into this theme. Adding the buddy film into this brew causes an interesting dichotomy; on one hand you are rooting for these bastards because they are so endearing, and obviously care for each other. On the other, you have to hate how completely awful they are to the Kafiris, Afghans and Indians.
Daniel’s and Peachy’s success in Kafiristan is sheer luck; an arrow hits Daniel in the heart, but actually gets stuck in his bandolier. This is how Daniel becomes God-like to the Kafiris. Then, when the high priest is about to shoot an arrow point blank at him to prove his immortality, Daniel’s exposed chest reveals the Masonic medallion Kipling gave him for good luck. It turns out that Alexander the Great used the same emblem, and for the holy men, that is enough to prove Daniel’s connection to the Gods. As always, luck runs out, as it must for our “heroes”. When it does, you realize that it’s not their superior intellect or cleverness that has been keeping them alive, but the acts of a bemused deity, simply waiting for the proper moment to knock them off their perch.

FILMMAKING

The story is beautifully told, both in imagery and in pacing. Visuals from the Khyber Pass and the Himalayas scenes are indelible, as are the initial shots of Zigandergul, or whatever it is they call the holy city. The matte paintings are amongst the most gorgeous I have ever seen, and they are utilized perfectly. There are lots of street market scenes early on in the movie, giving a sense of place and time. Huston always took great care with that part of his works. Placing a fable such as this in the most real of atmospheres can cause a disconnect, but not here. It gives you the feeling of veracity, and it helps you become invested in these characters and their less than believable exploits. The two British soldiers going into battle in their Beefeater red, leading a ragtag group of Kafiris also provides an image that is almost shocking. It reminded me of that great scene in “Interiors” when Maureen Stapleton enters a dining room in a bright red dress, where everyone else is in muted tans and grays.

Visuals aside, Huston works the pace of this film artfully. The story unfolds just right, and you are sucked in early. It’s an exciting world that these people populate, yet your seat in the theater is about as close as you’d ever want to get.

PERFORMANCES

As I stated above, both leads step out of their carefully developed images for this movie. Huston originally conceived this as a vehicle for Gable and Bogart in the ‘50’s, and how different a film this would have been with Americans in those parts? He later envisioned Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the lead roles, the two actors who invented the buddy film with “Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid”, and perfected it with “The Sting”. Again, I feel using American actors in these roles would have ruined the film. Caine was known for playing the humanistic spy Harry Palmer, and the cad Alfie, had never really played up his Cockney as much as he got to in this film. His take on Peachy is a bullseye. Connery also gets his Scotsman just right, and you get the sense that these performances were based on childhood memories of folks or relatives that they knew well. No American actor could possibly pull this off, just as a Brit could never really do a Woody Allen neurotic Jew (See Kenneth Branagh in “Celebrity”) or a Police chief in the deep south like Rod Steiger’s award winning turn as Gillespie in “In The Heat of the Night”.

Caine’s wife, Shakira, plays the part of Roxanne, whom Daniel attempts to marry in the film. She has no lines, but her beauty is incomparable. Christopher Plummer as Kipling does a very standard job, but this is what the film calls for. If he emoted in this role the way he does in some later performances, it would have been entirely out of place. Almost every other part except that of Billy Fish, the Indian translator, is played by locals and extras, again adding to the sense of realty in which Huston envelops the movie. The faces are striking, especially those of the high priest and the warlord they encounter early on in Kafiristan.

ON SECOND LOOK

If I had to sell this film with a Hollywood agent, it’d go like this: “Gunga Din” meets “Fitzcarraldo”, or…. Howard Hawks directs “A Passage to India”.
OK, now I’m just free-associating.

This film is every bit as good as I thought it was. It’s huge and sprawling, it’s visually without peer, it’s quite well acted, it’s comic and tragic, it’s enthralling and disturbing. I love it.

1st Look- ★★★★ 2nd Look-★★★★

"LONG GONE" 1987 Dir. Martin Davidson

What I remember:

This was a made for HBO movie, back when that didn’t carry as much weight as it does now. In those days, “made for pay TV” was much like our “straight to DVD” is now. In other words, it’s not good enough or it doesn’t have enough star power to be in theatrical release. Was it really originally made for HBO, or was it picked up by them as a movie too good to be shelved? IMDB says it was an HBO production, so one must assume it truly was made for TV. IMDB also says that the film’s lead, William Peterson, turned down the Tom Berenger role in “Platoon” to be in “Long Gone”. Hmmm. Would he have done that for a film that he knew was only going to play on Pay TV?

Whatever the case, it would have been a success in theaters, I believe. It predates “Bull Durham”, and memory tells me that it was just about as good. I remember some great touches, like the casting of Teller (from Penn and Teller) as Henry Gibson’s son. It’s supposed to be the ‘50’s in the south, and they get a lot of the atmosphere right. It was very funny, with lots of well played baseball scenes, a blisteringly hot Virginia Madsen (as one of the best named characters in film history, Dixie Lee Boxx), Dermit Mulroney’s first major role, and Larry Riley playing the power hitting black player they try to pawn off as Latino. To this date, when listing our favorite baseball movies, both my wife and I have “Long Gone” in our top 3. We are both quite keen to watch it again.

After re-watching:

“Tell him this ain’t New York, Daddy. Tell him we got the Klan here, in case he ain’t noticed” – Hale Buchman Jr.

“Only words djoo got know een Beisbol: ‘Hamborger’, ‘I got it’, ‘Poossy’, ‘No Comprendo’ ”. – Paco Izquierdo
PLOT SUMMARY

It’s 1957, and the Tampico Stogies are a terrible low A level team, that may or may not be affiliated with a Major League franchise. Their player/manager is Stud Cantrell (William Peterson), who is a typical hard drinking, hard playing, hard loving man’s man. He meets an extremely hot to trot young woman, whom he intends to love and leave, but she becomes a bit more than he bargained for. He signs up two prospects, one an innocent rookie with a vacuum cleaner glove, and the other a black power hitter from the Josh Gibson mold. Together the three spearhead a revival of the perennial losing franchise, and guide them toward a league championship.


Q- Was my memory accurate?

STORY/THEME

Is it a baseball movie, or is it a movie about racism in the south? Is it a romantic comedy, or is it a period piece? Maybe it’s a coming of age movie. Or is it a Faustian fable? All of the above or none?

Well hell’s bells, boys, is all I gotta say. It’s a got-damn movie so just sit back and enjoy, you naval-staring Yankees!

What it really is, is the first movie about the Minor Leagues. The Minors have been a major part of my family’s life for the past 20 plus years, so I know a dadgum thing or two about them. When I first saw “Long Gone”, I had little to no knowledge of the Minor Leagues. Those 20 years have certainly put a spin on my perception of the film. “Long Gone” is definitely a fantasy. It was not trying for authenticity the way “Bull Durham” did. In fact, the film has more similarities to “Slap Shot” than it does to the great Ron Shelton work. For example, there is one plot device that is outright stolen from “Slap Shot”. Dusty Hoolihan is the Ogie Ogilthorpe of this movie, so if you’re an acolyte of that great hockey satire, that should give you enough to go on.

Primarily, “Long Gone” is an enjoyable romp that tries to be all things to all people. Maybe if it had focused a bit more on one of the factors dealt with, the film would be considered far better. Unfortunately, it is quite scatter-shot. The most compelling part of the film is the story of Joe Louis Brown, ex-Negro Leaguer without a job, who tries to get his career back by taking on with the Stogies. The fact that teams in the ‘50’s South were still segregated, is circumvented by having the announcer call him Jose Brown from Venezuela. One of the best moments in the film comes when Brown hits a pinch-hit walk-off homerun in his first at bat for Tampico. The team is still celebrating in the locker room when Brown approaches the showers, and quickly the room grows silent. As soon as he realizes what’s happening, he shouts, “I don’t want to shower with no white boys anyway!”

The two main relationships, Cantrell and Dixie, and the young, slick-fielding Jamie Weeks and his ultra-Christian girlfriend, Esther, are not the deepest of character studies. As a romantic comedy it falls a bit short. While no actual playing of baseball is quite as embarrassingly bad as Tim Robbins’ attempt at a fastball delivery in “Bull Durham”, the game itself is very trivial to the movie. As a baseball action (oxymoron?) movie it also falls quite short.

As for plot and character development, all three lead male roles are put to the test, Cantrell and Brown to the “temptation of greed test”, Weeks to the “maturity/responsibility” test. However these tests come almost at the end of the movie, so your motivational obstacles are quite diminished by the amount of time they are given.

FILMMAKING

Martin Davidson, I knew Sergei Eisenstein, and you sir…..

Let’s not be harsh, here. In other hands, this could have been a much better watch, no question. However, the comedy is quite well done here. The entire movie has a kind of soft-focus glow, like an ‘80’s SkinaMax soft-core, or a Breck ad from the ‘70’s. The feeling of being hot and sweaty runs through the entire proceedings, and most of the guys walk around in unbuttoned shirts and rolled up sleeves. The camera is certainly not the star, but when it focuses on a young Virginia Madsen, well, it becomes everybody’s friend. She is positively luminous throughout, and embodies the idea of a movie star.

There are no real standout visuals, nothing too interesting done sound or set-wise. It’s pretty much run–of-the-mill filmmaking on a limited budget. The soundtrack is nice with a lot of classic R&B and some old time Rock and Roll. There is also a great scene on the team bus, with Joe Louis Brown singing and playing on the harmonica an improvised song for the Stogies that endears him to the team.

PERFORMANCES

William Peterson does a fine job with his charming, folksy and charismatic part; his smile lights up the screen, and his befuddlement when cornered by Dixie is believable.
Larry Riley as Brown has a convincing power swing, and he captures the fun-loving but world-weariness of the persecuted black man pre-Civil Rights Movement. Riley was also the big power hitter in “A Soldier’s Story”, the excellent baseball/military/whodunit of the ‘90’s. Sadly, Riley’s career was cut short by AIDS.

Ms. Madsen was so undeniably gorgeous at this time, that she could have stuttered like King Bertie through the whole film and nobody would have cared. It happens that she is quite good with her less than meaty role. She has a couple of scenes where she gets to emote, and handles them well. Dermit Mulroney looks the part of a young phenom, and he is pretty solid. His opposite number, Katy Boyer is entirely forgettable as the Christian girl succumbing to her lust. One imagines a young Meg Ryan in the same role doing a much more humorous turn. Much of the funniest bits are Henry Gibson and Teller as the clone-ish father and son, Hale Buchman Sr. and Jr. Junior is always either telling his father to say things directly, or whispering the ideas to him. Senior subsequently repeats these things as if they were his own idea. Teller is sufficiently evil as Junior, and therefore very funny.

ON SECOND LOOK

You must remember that “Long Gone” was made in 1987, two years before “Bull Durham”. Is it better than Shelton’s masterpiece? Of course not. Does it deserve to be a top 3 baseball film? Maybe not. It’s damn funny, and I think if it had had a bit more focus, could have been really great. I will say this- the combination of comedy, irreverence, atmosphere and Ms. Madsen’s smokin’ hot face and body were enough to keep it in my mind for 24 years. There’s something to be said for that!

1st Look- ★★★★ 2nd Look-★★★

GREEN FOR DANGER: 1946 Dir. Sidney Gilliat

What I remember:

Precious little, apparently. The years, they do take their toll. I have wracked my memory to recall the tiniest facts. This is what comes up. Alastair Sim plays an Inspector who is called in to investigate the accidental death of someone on the operating table. I believe this is a wartime O.R., and there are some nurses and surgeons having affaiars when they are not patching up the wounded. How very M*A*S*H- like! One of these nurses accuses someone, I don’t know, another nurse, a doctor, somebody-- of committing murder by purposefully not doing their job correctly. The Inspector comes to investigate, and he is a hoot! Sim, famous for his great portrayal of Scrooge in the best version of “A Christmas Carol”, made the film special, as I recall. The whole thing is like an Agatha Christie whodunit, but with a lot of humor and a really original construct.

After re-watching:

“In view of my failure - correction, comparative failure - I feel that I have no alternative but to offer you, sir, my resignation, in the sincere hope that you will not accept it”- Inspector Cockrill
PLOT SUMMARY

It is England in 1944. A small surgical operating theatre is busy with home-front casualties due to the incessant bombing raids of the Axis. The latest injury is a few broken bones suffered by a Postman in a bombed house. He is told by all that his surgery is routine, and yet he dies on the operating table due to asphyxiation from gaseous anesthetics. The investigation stays internal, until an obviously perturbed nurse interrupts a dance by announcing that she knows it was murder, and she knows where the evidence is. When she is killed herself, Scotland Yard steps in and begins their own inquest. All the while, a love triangle complicates the situation. The Inspector has figured that there are 5 people who could have been involved with both murders; the surgeon Mr. Eden (Leo Genn), the anesthetist Dr. Barnes (Trevor Howard), Nurse Linley (Sally Gray), Nurse Woods (Megs Jenkins) and Nurse Sanson (Rosamund John). Eden, Barnes and Linley are the points of the triangle.
Q- Was my memory accurate?


STORY/THEME

Actually I was pretty much on target. The whole thing plays like the love-child of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Murder She Wrote”. Obviously the tie-in to “M*A*S*H” is unavoidable. Anytime you have war-time surgeons having affairs, then it’s going to evoke that great comedy.
Is that like saying “anytime you have a Swedish Knight playing chess with Death then it’s going to evoke “The Seventh Seal””?

It’s a pretty good whodunit, there are a lot of red herrings slung about, and substituting a hospital for a mansion puts an entirely different spin on things. Primarily, these people’s jobs are about saving lives, not taking them. It seems very unlikely that you would find a murderer amongst these angels of mercy. There are moments where the war is evoked, especially in the ominous drone of planes, the sudden cut of engines signaling that a bomb is being dropped, and then the explosions. One has to think that in 1946 the memory of these horrors must have been quite fresh in the minds of the British audience. Also the sound of the German version of Tokyo Rose, “Germany Calling” is not only heard, but actually a plot device. Nevertheless, the mystery and love intrigue are front and center throughout the film. As earlier stated, the whole thing would be somewhat formulaic if not for the phenomenally drawn character of the Inspector, and the brilliantly comic portrayal by Alastair Sim.

FILMMAKING

There are some visually striking moments throughout this film. Very impressive is the scene in which the accusing nurse attempts to grab the evidence, and is confronted and killed. There are a lot of “Noir” images in this scene, one very memorable shot of the window opening and closing and the intermittent light exposing the murderer. Wilkie Cooper was the cinematographer, and though he is best known for his work with Ray Harryhausen on “Jason and the Argonauts” and “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”, he had a long and varied career shooting in B&W, including “Stage Fright” for Alfred Hitchcock (a movie that also had Alastair Sim in the cast). Director Sidney Gilliat was known much more for his writing; among his credits are the Hitchcock masterpiece “The Lady Vanishes” and Hitch’s lesser known “Jamaica Inn”. Also he scripted the great “Night Train to Munich” by Carol Reed. Gilliat holds his own with this adapted screenplay from a book by Christianna Brand, the creator of Nanny McPhee. How much of the great comedy is Brand’s or Gilliat’s creation, and how much is Sim’s does not take a Scotland Yard Inspector to figure out. When only one character consistently gets you to laugh out loud, then you know it’s not just the script.

PERFORMANCES

What else can I say about Mr. Sim in this movie? The man is pure genius. He is at once disrespectful, self-effacing, witty, caustic and broad. In one great bit of comic timing, he interrupts Mr. Eden and Nurse Linley romancing under the stars. While the surgeon spouts some sappy poetry and the two snuggle up, you are thinking about how cornball it all seems, and in the nick of time, the Inspector continues the poem from where Mr. Eden paused. The romantic moment is ruined, much to Eden’s chagrin, and much to the audience’s delight. Only Groucho could have done it any better. The capper comes, when the Inspector walks away, grinning happily, stops and purposefully pushes aside a bush to expose Dr. Barnes, who has been snooping on his girlfriend and her new interest.

Sim carries the film, and thank heaven. Some of the supporting actors are outright terrible, especially Judy Campbell as Sister Bates. She is the nurse who gets murdered early on, and she spends most of her time on screen doing the Norma Desmond silent screen big eyes. It is a laughably overacted part, not worthy of the rest of the film. The two male leads, Genn and Howard do a creditable job, Genn is a bit smarmy and Howard a bit stodgy, and that’s fine for what the film needs. Sally Gray is very lovely as the desirable Linley, but she looks like she stepped right out of a beauty parlor after almost being gassed to death. Megs Jenkins as Nurse Woods is probably the standout in the supporting cast. She has a nice meaty role, and she does it no disservice. When she confronts Eden to chide him about breaking up Linley and Barnes, it comes across as very real.

ON SECOND LOOK

It’s on Netflix streaming, and is a quick hour and a half of fun diversion. There is no reason not to spend some time with this film. No, it’s not really a classic, but it’s worth watching for one reason in particular: a great comic actor at the very top of his game.

1st Look- ★★★1/2 2nd Look-★★★

“LITTLE MURDERS”- 1971 Dir: Alan Arkin

What I remember

Ahhh, 1971. What a year! Along with a personal milestone of an intimate nature (TMI? My apologies.), I can remember so much of that period in my life. It was my coming of age in so many different ways, but in particular I grew into the fanatical film freak that still revels in his freakitude. The year of great classics like “The French Connection”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “Harold and Maude” and “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” probably helped this happen.

Naturally a small black comedy like “Little Murders” would get swallowed up in this torrent of brilliance. New Hollywood was at warp speed, the sexual revolution was giving us steamy fare like “Carnal Knowledge” and “Maid in Sweden”, the Black power movement was represented by “Shaft” and “Sweet Sweetback”. Who even noticed this gem of modern satire? Well, I did, for one. The great cartoonist Jules Feiffer was responsible for the original play and the screen adaptation. He also wrote the play upon which “Carnal Knowledge” was based. “Little Murders” was not really about sex, or all of the great themes of the era like the women’s movement, civil rights or anti-war. It was about random cruelty, violence, anti-social behavior, passivity, aggression, love, and the general degradation of modern society. It was also about the funniest movie I had ever seen. Director Arkin’s turn as the beleaguered detective and Vincent Gardenia’s New York tough guy Dad stood out in an ensemble of amazing performances. This is a movie that could NEVER be made now, not even by an independent. Today’s Indie films are much like the mainstream of that era, pushing the mainstream of our time into the infantile. “French Connection” won Best Picture? Have you seen THAT lately? The hero is a shoe fetishist? There’s not a note of score during the historic, unbelievably tense car chase scene? Wait…the bad guy gets AWAY? 2011 Indie houses wouldn’t even touch that.

“Little Murders” was so outside the realm of normal filmmaking, as to make it a genre unto itself. A psychological-crime-love-family- absurd-black-comedy. I absoloutely loved this movie, and have seen it about 3 times, but not in many, many years.


AFTER RE-WATCHING

“I want to be married to a big, strong, vital, virile, self-assured man…..that I can protect and take care of!” -Patsy Newquist
PLOT SUMMARY

It’s dystopian New York in the 70’s, aka “Fun City”, where muggings and murders are a daily event, brown-outs are hourly occurrences and the police are outwitted and outnumbered. Hyper-aggressive Patsy Newquist (Marcia Rodd) tries to save Alfred Chamberlain (Elliott Gould, at the height of his popularity) from being mugged by a small group of teens, as she fights them off, he walks away, moving on immediately. She confronts him, and quickly realizes his passivity is monumental. Opposites attract in the strangest way, and the two get engaged. Alfred meets Patsy’s highly eccentric family, and she tries to change Alfred into the man she wants him to be. His nihilism is hard to shake, but eventually she gets through to him. I will leave the plot there, for those who have never seen the film.

Q- Was my memory accurate?

STORY/THEME

Oh, this film is edgy all right. Feiffer’s satire of modern life in the ‘70’s still feels very current. Disaffection, cynicism, frustration with social services, random violence—what’s not 21st Century America about THAT? La plus ça change….

Elliott Gould was the driving force behind making the film, and he originally wanted Jean-Luc Godard to direct (!). One can only imagine how a Parisian would have handled these very New York characters and themes. Getting native New Yorker Alan Arkin to direct makes a hell of a lot more sense. Gould was coming off some spectacular successes with “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice”, and “M*A*S*H”, a couple of films that were so huge that they had societal repercussions. He was able to produce the film for about a million dollars, and kept some of the actors who had done the short run on Broadway with him to be in the film, if not in the same roles. I can’t overstate how funny the comedy is in the film; the family scenes in particular are side-splitting, and Arkin’s turn as the psychotic detective Lt. Practice, is a gem of over-the-top insanity. The film has 4 classic monologues: 1) Lew Jacobi doing Judge Stern’s hilarious son of an immigrant rant,

2) Lt. Practice’s paranoid freak-out, 3) Alfred Chamberlain’s tale of how he dismantled a government wog who was reading his mail, and 4) Donald Sutherland as the minister doing the worst ceremony in wedding history. One of my favorite moments happens when the happy couple and Patsy’s family begin to climb the “First Existentialist Church” steps and the church doors open with a huge donnybrook spilling out into the street. At this point you kind of figure things will not be going well for Alfred and Patsy’s nuptials.

Watching “Little Murders”, you can see how the Beatnik ethos transformed into the Hippie ethos. Feiffer was a standard bearer of the former, Gould of the latter. The combination of the two provided searing commentary on the hypocrisy of America in the ‘60’s and the nascent ‘70’s. For my generation, “Little Murders” hit the spot so expertly that it would take 3 decades until at last the Coen Brothers came along to rival that execution.

FILMMAKING

With the exception of “Little Murders”, Alan Arkin has never really directed a great film. His comic and acting chops are superb, of course. His Oscar turn in “Little Miss Sunshine”, his first big role in “The Russians Are Coming” and his amazing job as Freud in “The Seven Percent Solution” are all personal favorites. Arkin’s comic touch is just right for “Little Murders”; everything is over-the-top enough to be uncomfortable but hilarious, yet it never strays into outright slapstick. The great Gordon Willis did cinematography, and the visuals and sets are perfect ‘60’s kitsch.

There are a few moments of weirdness, like the much too lengthy walk in the park by Alfred near the end of the film, where he decides to change his photo subjects from dog poop to people. It has a place in the film symbolically, for sure, but it is way too slow, and there are some very strange encounters with random people, folks whom you have to wonder if they were owed a favor by Arkin, Gould or Feiffer. The scene is mollified by a lovely musical bed, provided by the Modern Jazz Quartet. Some of the scenes during the courtship at the Catskills, wherein Patsy tries to get Alfred to admit he’s having fun, are a little dated stylistically. I guess that’s bound to happen. After all, it’s hard to believe, but the film is 40 years old!

PERFORMANCES

The leads are fine, and Marcia Rodd, who was a complete unknown at the time, does a great job at capturing the stridently positive Patsy. Gould is also quite good, and his monologue stands out as one of the highlights of his career.

These actors are completely overshadowed by the supporting cast, especially the absolutely brilliant job by Elizabeth Wilson as Patsy’s mother, Marge. We all remember Ms. Wilson as Benjamin Braddock’s mother in “The Graduate”, but that only gave a hint of her comic genius in playing the waspy, clueless mom. In “Little Murders” she steals the film with a portrayal that is one for the ages. Not quite as amazing, but still tremendous and hysterical are the rest of the Newquist clan; Vincent Gardenia as the father and Jon Korkes as the brother keep the laughs coming. Korkes physical humor is strong, and Gardenia’s delivery of his mantras, “Sonofabitch refuses to open” and “What’s your pleasure, young man” are so memorable that they became my mantras after seeing this movie the first time.

Veteran character actors John Randolph and Doris Roberts appear as Alfred’s parents, hopelessly intellectual and without a shred of humanity. Randolph played Patsy's father in the play version, but I can’t imagine the casting could be any better that it is in the film. I’ve already discussed how much fun Sutherland, Jacobi and Arkin are in their bits; they round out a supporting cast that is second to none.

ON SECOND LOOK

It’s a classic, I tell you. If you have never seen this film, see it. If you hate it, I understand, but I am really sorry for you. Not only does it hold up after 40 years, but it gets better with age. The older I get, the more it speaks to my sense of the absurd, the hypocritical, the lunatic, but most of all to my sense of humor. If this writing exercise does nothing else for me, at least I can be happy in knowing that it got me to re-watch this movie.

1st Look- ★★★★ 2nd Look-★★★★

Who'll Stop The Rain- 1978 Dir. Karel Reisz

What I remember:

The truth is I remember very little about this film except that I liked it very much. In fact, I had read the novel upon which it was based, “Dog Soldiers” written by ex-Merry Prankster Robert Stone. As a big fan of the novel, I was extremely pleased to see a film adaptation.
Director Reisz had done three other films I was familiar with at the time, “Morgan”, “Isidora” and “The Gambler”. I was unaware of his history as part of the “Angry Young Man” film movement in England. I also remember Nick Nolte being his usual intense self, and thinking that an older Tuesday Weld was MUCH hotter than I remembered from her days as Thalia in “Dobie Gillis”.
My memory was that the adaptation actually equaled, if not surpassed the book, something that rarely happens. The movie was part of a mini-wave of Vietnam Veteran films, which in that year alone included the brilliant “Coming Home” and “The Deer Hunter”. I loved all three films, the other two being considered classics nowadays. Sadly, this one has been forgotten. Let’s see if it deserves its fate.

AFTER RE-WATCHING

“In a world where elephants are pursued by flying men, people are going to naturally want to get high”. John Converse
PLOT SUMMARY

A journalist (John Converse, played by Michael Moriarty) in late ‘60’s Vietnam has seen so much horror, and is so disillusioned, that he decides to cut a heroin deal. A merchant marine friend of his (Ray Hicks, portrayed ny Nick Nolte) will smuggle 2 kilos of pure heroin back to the States, where Converse’s wife will pay off the sailor. Upon arriving in California, the sailor immediately sees that some people are already wise to the deal, and he and the journalist’s wife need to go on the lam with the dope. The members of the other group are either the dirtiest cops ever, or just simply bad guys masquerading as cops. The chase takes our couple from Berkeley to L.A., then to New Mexico, where a stand-off ensues that includes all the major stateside players.

Q- Was my memory accurate?

STORY/THEME

Does war turn you into a person without morals? Does it make you lose your ability to reason? Does it take a normal civilized person and turn him into a killer? Does it make a man question authority?

Well, duh. I mean, haven’t you watched any war movies since “The Green Berets”? The main theme of “Who’ll Stop The..…..Lord, I am going to need a shortened name for this movie. That is WAY too much typing to reenter again and again. Let’s just go with WSTR. Thanks. The main theme of WSTR is disillusionment. It’s kind of the asexual version of “Boogie Nights”. By that, I mean that it is all about how happy hippies become badass drug dealers, all because they and their buddies saw some nightmare in the shit. I am not trying to belittle this theme, even if it sounds that way. When WSTR was made, this was a fairly fresh concept in the movies. It spread like napalm fire, and soon, every film about the Vietnam War was alike in message. Even films about other wars had some form of this “end of civilization” leitmotif (see my On Second Look entry on “Breaker Morant”).

What is it that separates WSTR from some of these other movies? Robert Stone helped with the screenplay adaptation of his own novel, and the dialogue is priceless from the outset. Many of the lines sound like something from a James M. Cain hard-boiled novel of the 40’s. There is a real toughness in the fabric of these characters. Even Margie Converse (as played by Tuesday Weld) goes from bookstore clerk to drug dealer on the run with a sudden streak of courage and edge that reminds one of Vivien Rutledge from “The Big Sleep”. Ray’s own disillusionment differs from John’s; he is disillusioned with incompetent authority, and it’s a very concrete focus. John is simply done with life. Michael Moriarty plays John as if he were already dead, just ghosting around all these events with no real concern for his friend, or his wife and child, or even his money. Ray’s problem with the guys in charge doesn’t stop him from having morals; he is loyal to the Converses to a fault. He doesn’t want them getting screwed over, and takes as much umbrage as if he were the victim. Ray is like the child who realizes that his parents aren’t always right, and decides that the only people he can trust are his friends. Why he trusts a friend who talked him into this life-threatening pursuit for a measly grand, I can’t explain.

FILMMAKING

Karel Reisz was rescued from the holocaust in one of the kindertransports of the ‘30’s, and virtually raised British. He did lose both parents to the camps. In England he became part of the new cinema of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s with filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, making the classic “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” starring Albert Finney. Whether a man of this background can have insight into the beat/hippie movement of ‘60’s America is moot. Robert Stone’s imprimatur is all over this picture, and I am sure he was an integral part of the filming. Much of the style is reminiscent of ‘70’s made for TV films. There’s somebody watching our hero from a distance…quick! Zoom in from behind our hero to see the guy up in the hills behind a bush. All we need is some blaring trumpets and a fuzzy guitar. Flashbacks to Converse’s trauma in Nam are clumsily handled and too brief to have impact. Hicks apparently travels on a ship with no crew or other passengers from Vietnam to Oakland.

Reisz is able to generate a lot of tension, however, and some scenes are quite memorable, particularly the final sequence and the standoff. What really makes the movie click is the great characters and dialogue. There are more than a few Tarantino type exchanges, which gives the script a very contemporary feel.

PERFORMANCES

Remember how I said Tuesday Weld was hot in this? Sorry, but this film has about as much sexuality as an episode of “Lassie”. She is neither hot, nor alluring. I have no clue where I got that notion. Nolte exposes more skin in 5 minutes of this movie than Weld does in the entire film. She spends most of her time doing her best Mia Farrow, which is actually quite appropriate for the role. If you want to see a hot, older Weld, check out her masochistic sexpot in “Once Upon a Time in America”. There is one scene in WSTR where she goes from strung out to high on heroin that is one of the most impressive bits of acting you’ll ever see. I mean, she physically changes; it is quite remarkable to watch. Nolte, who ironically 1st appears playing football--his next role will be as a wide receiver in the superb “North Dallas 40”—is a force to be reckoned with. His character was loosely based on beat writer Neal Cassady. He does not come across as an intellectual in any way, but that’s fine. We get the idea that he is a man-child, a free spirit. When they reach a place in the New Mexico mountains that is clearly based on Ken Kesey’s LSD commune, he bubbles over with the memories of the good times, recreational drugs and extended adolescence of the now abandoned retreat.

The bad guys are also quite unusual for the period. Richard Mazur (veteran character actor, known for “The Thing” and “Risky Business”) and Ray Sharkey (star of “Willie and Phil”, Mazursky’s awful take on “Jules and Jim”) play thugs who would have been just as at home in “Home Alone”. Mazur’s character is obviously Jewish, Sharkey’s is Italian. The two torture Converse, argue with each other and generally bumble about in a startling combination of terror and comedy. Anthony Zerbe, veteran TV and film bad guy, is the head of the fed/not fed group. His performance is pretty much one-note. There is also a great turn by Charles Haid (Renko from TV’s “Hill St. Blues”) as a Hollywood drug dealer, done with just the right amount of sinister smarminess. I’ve already discussed Michael Moriraty’s take on John Converse, it is a thankless role, but he pulls it off well.

ON SECOND LOOK

I’m not going to say that WSTR holds up, because there are ways in which it’s dated style and misused soundtrack really do not. Was it so important to use Creedence that they even renamed the film for one of their songs? Nowadays, the film would seem more relevant had they just kept with “Dog Soldiers” as the title, and used music by Hendrix or The Grateful Dead, music that represents that period better to our perspective in the 21st Century. The film still has a lot of power, and one must remember that it was part of a ground-breaking wave of post-war Vietnam themed movies. It should be watched for that, and it should be treasured for it’s brilliantly acerbic and humorous dialogue.

1st Look-★★★1/2 2nd Look-★★★1/2

"Ministry of Fear"- 1944 Dir. Fritz Lang

What I remember:

This was a film I saw in college, I believe in one of my classes. 1944 was a year chock full of the earliest Film Noir offerings. Along with “Ministry of Fear”, two other favorites of mine that came out that year were Wilder’s classic “Double Indemnity”, and “Murder, My Sweet”, Edward Dmytryk’s poorly renamed yet stylish take on the Chandler masterpiece “Farewell, My Lovely” (I’ll be re-watching this film soon). Lang, who virtually invented Noir with the iconic “M”, was surely in his comfort zone in the nascent genre.

The Austrian born Lang emigrated to England, then to the USA before the war, and avoided Nazi persecution. He was eugenically Jewish, though his mother had converted long before Nazism and raised him as Roman Catholic. Supposedly Lang left Germany the day that Goebbels offered him a job as head of the German studio UFA. This film was shot in California, but takes place in England.

When I think of “Ministry of Fear”, two other films spring immediately to mind. The first is Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps”, obviously a huge influence on Lang. The plots are similar; wrongly accused men are fleeing authorities and running up against international spy rings. Of course the stakes are far higher with a wartime film, and Hitchcock’s movie was made in 1935. The other connection I make is with the Coen Brothers 1st feature, “Blood Simple”. At the end of this movie, the brothers steal a climactic image from Lang, gun shots through a wall into a darkened room, exposing shafts of light. Geek that I am, I literally jumped out of my seat and yelled “Ministry of Fear” in the theater, to which my date responded “Shut up!” I was very proud of myself, regardless, for catching this visual quote.
My memory of the film was that it was tense, funny and very stylized. I thought the leads were a bit thinly drawn, but when you are channeling Hitch, you don’t really spend too much time on character depth.

AFTER RE-WATCHING

“You wouldn’t kill your own brother, Karla?”-Willi Hilfe

PLOT SUMMARY:

A man (Stephen Neale, played by Ray Milland) is released from captivity in a mental asylum in Lembridge, England. As he waits for his train to London, he goes to a small fund-raising fair and innocently gets steered into winning a cake by guessing it’s weight. On his way to London, a man posing as blind knocks him out, steals the cake and subsequently gets blown up in an air raid. Once in London, our curious hero begins to ask about the organization that ran the fair, to find out what was so special about the cake. He meets a brother and sister pair of Austrian refugees who are running the organization, and begins to see that it is a cover for an international spy ring, whose tendrils reach into the Ministry of Home Security itself. He falls in love with the sister, and we find out that he was in the asylum for euthanizing his 1st wife, who was in great pain from an end stage fatal illness. Neale’s inquiries take him to a séance, where a man gets shot and killed, and Neale is the fall guy. Eventually Scotland Yard gets involved, and we find out that our cake/McGuffin had microfilm with pictures of sensitive war plans. The issue that remains is whether our Austrian siblings are involved or innocent.

Q- Was my memory accurate?

STORY/THEME

The story was adapted from a novel by the great Graham Greene, and it is right up Hitchcock’s alley. Seton I. Miler, a writer known for swashbucklers like “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “The Sea Hawk” did the adaptation. I wonder if Hitch was offered the chance to film this, and either turned it down or was beaten out by Miller, Lang and company. There are so many elements from the Hitchcock oeuvre that it’s hard to tally, but of course I will attempt; bumbling gumshoes, a false accusation, scary cops, a McGuffin, friendly evildoers, and some great imagery. Motivation is a big problem with this film. Stephen Neale chases after the blind man who stole his cake, but it’s not clear why he cares. One feels that he must know there is evil afoot, but is it really the business of a man who has been told to keep his nose clean and stay as far from police involvement as possible? Richard Hannay in “The 39 Steps” is literally running for his life, but Neale has no reason to get involved. He could have just as easily continued to London, living his life as normal. Instead, he constantly puts himself in danger by confronting the very people that would do him harm. I guess in a wartime film, people had no problem with courage being a part of everyday life. It seems a bit far-fetched from this perspective.

FILMMAKING

There really are only a few visual moments that hail straight from the film noir genre. The séance features a beautiful head shot of the medium, played by Hillary Brooke (veteran of a number of Sherlock Holmes movies). In a darkened room, the circle of participants becomes illuminated by a globe, and her face has a haunting and sculpted look to it. As so often happens in film séances, a shot is fired after the lights go out, and someone is killed.

Dude, don’t EVER go to a movie séance!

Anyway, the best noir imagery is saved for the climax. Besides the aforementioned bullet hole in the door, there is also a stunning shootout on a rainy rooftop. This scene ends with a glorious moment when the bad guys, who are firing from a darkened stairwell, suddenly see the light turn back on, turn away and start firing below them instead of at our heroes. The silhouette of the once menacing Scotland Yard Inspector then comes out of the stairwell, and we know our heroes are safe.
Another fine moment straight out of the Hitchcock songbook comes when Neale confronts the man he supposedly killed at the séance. Dan Duryea plays Travers the Tailor, who was referred to as Cost earlier. Travers acts like he never saw Neale before in his life, then stops to make a phone call. He dials the phone with the biggest, sharpest scissors you will ever see. They almost resemble a prop from “Get Smart”. The suspense is powerful during this scene, and you know whoever is on the other line of that phone is a bad guy. Neale memorizes the number, and redials, and the sister answers!

I really enjoyed the air raid shelter scene; when the alarm sounds people go to the Underground in their pajamas, children bring their pets in baby-doll strollers, and it is all so very British and charming.

That’s the good stuff. There is a lot of bad stuff, too, unfortunately. The plot is extremely heavy when you think about it, and the film could have been very dark, indeed. But this element is kept at arm’s length throughout. A baboon’s arm! All emotions are ratcheted down so drastically, as to make you wonder whether the entire cast was on some early form of Ritalin. When it is clear that the sister (Karla, played by the gorgeous Marjorie Reynolds of “Holiday Inn” fame) is falling in love with our hero, her bubbly personality lightens up the obviously heavy situation that she might be infatuated with a killer. And when Neale confesses to Karla about the mercy-killing of his 1st wife, the lack of intensity is stunning.

There is also the issue of budget. Many of the sets look like they were barely decorated. I am sure wartime funds were thin as can be, but somehow other movies of the time look pretty well decked out. Certainly “Double Indemnity” had no problems with bare bones sets and costumes.

PERFORMANCES

This seems like a good time to discuss just how bland the acting is in “Ministry of Fear”. I really can’t think of a single performance in the film that stands out. Carl Esmond plays the brother Willi, and his is a one-note song of grinning ingenuousness. His delivery of the challenging line quoted above is almost comical.

The meatiest supporting parts could have been the Inspector, played by Percy Waram, or the gumshoe, played by Erskine Sanford (Mr. Carter in “Citizen Kane”- the bumbling Chronicle Editor). Waram is simply expressionless, there’s no “there” there. Sanford does bumbling very well, however his attempt at an English accent is laughable. As for Ray Milland, we all know the man can act. “Lost Weekend” and “The Uninvited” proved that. Of course he did also do “The Thing With Two Heads”, with Milland and Rosey Grier sharing a neck. In “Ministry of Fear”, Milland appears to be determined and a bit careless. Why women throw themselves at him is unclear. He doesn’t really exude charm, and as previously stated, his big emotional scene lacks any charge at all.

ON SECOND LOOK: “Ministry of Fear” is not considered a classic because it doesn’t deserve to be. It has some terrific, memorable shots and moments, but it cannot be compared to Lang’s great work in Germany, and it really does fade next to the brilliant Hitchcock works it resembles. It is too light-hearted and would have been much better if Lang had given it the same intensity and true noir feel of his masterpiece, “M.”

My guess is that he wanted to, but the studio heads at Paramount were afraid of terrorizing an already anxious American public, only a couple of months before D Day.

1st Look- ★★★1/2 2nd Look-★★1/2