Frank Tuttle's Suspense

 Frank Tuttle was a journeyman director who could make good movies when he had good material (see my post on 1942's This Gun for Hire).  For Suspense he had a good bunch of actors, including ice skater Belita and Barry Sullivan as leads and Eugene Pallette (this is his last film; he had started in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation in 1915), Bonita Granville and Albert Dekker in supporting roles.  The script was an original by Philip Yordan and the cinematographer was Karl Struss, who had photographed Murnau's Sunrise in 1927 and later, in 1952, did Chaplin's Limelight.

Unfortunately this film was produced by the notoriously stingy King Brothers for the even more stingy Monogram studio, although they did make it one of their most prestigious pictures. Belita had a number of skating numbers which were beautifully choregraphed by Nick Castle, though they had little to do with the plot,  Barry Sullivan effectively plays a bum who works his way up from a peanut vendor to ice palace owner Dekker's assistant and falls in love with Belita,  who is married to Dekker.  Dekker disappears and comes after Sullivan, who kills Dekker and then is shot by his former lover Granville, who has the goods on him from his time in New York.

This should have made a pretty good film noir but director Tuttle loses focus and directs rather slackly, probably caught between the demands of the producers and those of the studio.  Thanks to Karl Struss the film is appropriately dark and shadowy, though lacking in fatalism; there is also little suspense, except when Belita skates through a circle of knives. 

Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark

 In the annals of literary Wagnerism, Willa Cather occupies a category all her own.

--Alex Ross. Wagnerism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)  

The summer went well beyond her hopes, however.  She told herself it was the best summer of her life, so far.  Nobody was sick at home, and her lessons were uninterrupted.  Now that she had four pupils of her own and made a dollar a week, her practising was regarded more seriously by her household.  Her mother had always arranged things so that she could have the parlour four hours a day in the summer.

Thea's life at the Ottenberg ranch was simple and full of life, like the days themselves.  She awoke every morning when the first fierce shafts of sunlight darted through the curtainless windows of the room at her ranch-house.  After breakfast she took her lunch-basket and went down to the canyon.  Usually she did not return until sunset.

--Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915)

The Song of the Lark is a beautifully told story of Thea Kronborg's travel from a small town in Colorado to a successful life as an opera singer, especially of Wagner.  She has some good teachers in Moonstone, where she grew up in a Swedish family, and loves the plains as well as the music in the small Mexican community in the town.  From there she is able to go to Chicago to study, then spends time with her boyfriend in Arizona, exploring the cliff dwellings of Native Americans, and eventually to Germany to study before returning to America.  

Cather suggests parallels between the beauty of the American landscape and the power and beauty of Wagner's music, among other important influences on Kronberg's life, with its many sacrifices for her art.  She almost marries, until she discovers that her lover, Fred Ottenberg, is already married and can't escape (though an epilogue suggests that they eventually do marry).  At the end of the novel Kronborg sings Sieglinde in Wagner's Die Walkure and all the important influential figures in her life are there. 

Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (1987)

 Near Dark is the best example of a new approach to the vampire film since George Romero's Martin (1977):  there are no fangs, stakes through the heart, garlic, crosses or empty mirrors in this film of a band of vampires traveling through Oklahoma and Texas, sometime using sexy Mae (Jenny Wright) to "recruit" new members by seducing them and biting them in the neck.  The one thing these vampires, led by Jeese Hooker (the always-creepy Lance Henriksen), are afraid of is the sunlight.  Mae bites young rancher Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) and he joins the group, but never makes his first kill and is rescued by his father when the vampires try to take Caleb's sister Sarah (Marcie Leeds); Caleb's father (Tim Thomerson) transfuses Caleb's blood (a new method of rescuing a vampire, by screenwriters Bigelow and Eric Red) and the Coltons destroy the vampire band by exposing them to sunlight.

Most of Near Dark takes place at night (of course) and the scenes of violence in truck stops and bars are effectively choreographed by Bigelow and slickly shot by cinematographer Adam Greenberg to the sounds of country music and a modern score by Tangerine Dream.  

Alfred Ziesler's Fear (1946)

 Fear is a victim of its own ambitions; director Alfred Ziesler tries to do too much with too little in this low-budget programmer for Poverty Row studio Monogram.  To some extent Ziesler succeeds, with the help of art director Frank Sylvos, who did Phil Karlson's noir 99 River Street, and cinematographer Jackson Rose, who photographed Edward L. Cahn's Destination Murder in 1950 (see my posts on both the Cahn and Karlson films).  The limited sets are simple and gritty, even if everything looks as if it were taking place in a corner somewhere, while the camera often moves effectively to close-ups rather than cutting and Ziesler directs "stars" Peter Cookson, Anne Gwynne and Warren William appropriately in this world of hash houses and rooming houses, students and pawn brokers, based on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Cookson is out of money for food, room and student tuition in his last year of medical school.  He robs and kills a professor who is also a pawnbroker and receives the next day a check for $1000 from "The Periodical Review" for a Nietzschean article about how some people are above the law.  The article is read by detective Warren Willian and a cat-and-mouse game begins, with Cookson so tormented he considers suicide before confessing to his girlfriend Anne Gwynne and then getting killed as he crosses a street against the light; then he wakes up and it's all been a bad dream.  Perhaps Monogram felt it was still too close to the end of the war for a downbeat ending and perhaps Ziesler was influenced by the similar ending of Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window from 1944; American Ziesler had known Lang when Ziesler had worked in Germany, before they both fled the Nazis.

John P. Marquand's Your Turn, Mr. Moto (1935)

 "Yes," Mr. Moto nodded, "yes, I think you do, so I may be correspondingly frank.  A paper, a plan, to be exact, has been abstracted from our naval archives.  It is probably now in the hands of some power.  My government is simply anxious to learn what power.  If you can find out for me that the United States navy is familiar with the plans of a certain new type of Japanese battleship, that is all I wish of you.  Do you understand?"

John P. Marquand, Your Turn, Mr. Moto (1935, republished by Penzler Publishers 2020)

When the author of the Charlie Chan novels, Earl Derr Biggers, died in 1933 The Saturday Evening Post was looking for someone to write similar stories about another Asian and Marquand, known as the author of popular middlebrow novels (his The Late George Apley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938), took the job.  Your Turn, Mr. Moto was serialized first and then published in 1935.  Mr. Moto was a somewhat inscrutable Asian but was not much like Charlie Chan; Moto was a spy for Imperial Japan. His appearances in the novel are rather brief, as he tries to get American aviator Casey Lee to help him by promising him a plane to fly from Japan to the U.S., after the cigarette company who was the original sponsor of the flight canceled it when Casey gave a drunken press conference. Aiding first Moto then Casey is the exotic Russian Sonya Karaloff, who is trying to retrieve a secret formula her late father has hidden in China, something the Chinese wheeler-dealer Wu Lai-fu is also interested in. The story moves swiftly and sometimes violently through Japan and China, as Casey flees for his life though the portholes of ships and the windows of nightclubs.

Mr. Moto, played by Peter Lorre, was in a number of movies after the Charlie Chan movies petered out at poverty row studio Monogram; the best of the Mr. Moto movies were directed by Norman Foster, later an associate of Orson Welles.  The movies were not closely related to the books, with Moto becoming more like Charlie Chan.  The last Mr. Moto movie with Peter Lorre was in 1939; a final one starring Henry Silva was made in 1965.

Ray Milland's A Man Alone 1955

 Ray Milland's first directing effort was an iconic and intelligent Western.  Its title could have been used by many of the great directors of Westerns from whom Milland learned: Hawks, Ford, Anthony Mann, Boetticher, etc.  And the theme of an innocent man accused of murder was something Milland learned from Hitchcock, for whom he worked in both film and television; the sense of fatalism was perhaps learned from Fritz Lang, for whom he also worked.  Milland plays a gunfighter lost in the desert and when he finally gets to a town he is accused of murdering the passengers on a stagecoach, a job actually done by Lee Van Cleef on orders from crooked banker Raymond Burr.  Milland hides out in the cellar of a house where the sheriff (Ward Bond, from John Ford's stock company) is quarantined for yellow fever and nursed by his daughter (Mary Murphy).

A Man Alone was made for ailing Republic Pictures in their color process Trucolor, a process used effectively by Milland, with the help of veteran cinematographer Lionel Linden and art director Walter Keller, with its palette of mostly blue and brown. (John Ford, who made The Quiet Man for Republic in 1952, refused to use Trucolor for that film, possibly because it didn't accurately record green).  The poignant music is by Victor Young and used movingly in private moments, as when Bond explains to Murphy how he had been corrupted by Burr in order to have enough money to raise her after her mother died and their ranch went bust. 

Ward Bond recovers enough to help Milland escape but Milland comes back to town to rescue Bond from a lynching and to prove who was responsible for the stagecoach murders.  Murphy and Milland are in love and decide to stay in the "rotten" town because, as Milland says, "Who knows if this town is any worse than the next one."

Rob Garver's What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2019)

 Rob Garver's film tries to salvage what he can of Pauline Kael's writing career, from her mocking of Chaplin's Limelight in 1953 to her comparison of Last Tango in Paris in 1972 to the premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps and her book Raising Kane, which was full of factual errors and uncredited research from UCLA's Howard Suber.  In 1980 Renata Adler skewered Kael's book When the Lights Go Down in the New York Review of Books as "worthless," pointing out her bullying and the use of the totalitarian "we." 

The film is full of talking heads: directors she championed loved her while those she criticized hated her.  She gathered around her a number of acolytes who were called "Paulettes" and if they agreed with her views she would promote them for jobs as film critics.  Her prose style is as dated as the films of the directors she praised when she was a critic at The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991: DePalma, Peckinpah, Scorsese and Coppola. Her knowledge of film history was sketchy at best and she preferred violence and sex to intelligence and perception, though she did occasionally praise Godard, without apparently realizing how indebted he was to directors she intensely disliked, including Hawks, Hitchcock and John Ford.

Brian Kellow's biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (2011; I'm not sure if the irony of the title was intended) captures Kael's life in all its contradictions and conflicts of interest, including her brief, short-lived and disastrous detour to work at filmmaking with Warren Beatty.  If I had to guess why so many people seemed to like her "criticism" I would say it was because she posited herself as the most articulate member of the audience, therefore those who agreed with her had a ready answer if they were asked why they liked a particular film. This is not everyone's idea of what a "critic" should be; my own view is that good criticism enables one to learn and think for oneself.

Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt (2013)

 The furor over Arendt's  Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil has largely diminished, though it is still mentioned occasionally in Commentary and other publications.  The book first appeared in The New Yorker in early 1963 when I was in my first year at Exeter and everyone there was discussing it; it was my initial encounter with The New Yorker and with passionate intellectual arguments after leaving my anti-intellectual town of Hudson, N.Y. and the arid atmosphere of Hudson High. If philosophical arguments interest you at all I would strongly recommend reading Hannah Arendt's book before seeing von Trotta's film.

Barbara Sukowa as Hannah captures all the complex and intricate details of Arendt's life and personality, from her infatuation and affair with her teacher Martin Heidegger -- who became a Nazi sympathizer -- to her escape from Nazi-occupied France and her teaching and writing career in New York.  When her articles about the Eichmann trial first appeared Arendt was accused of attacking "her own people" and her rejection of this accusation (because she pointed out the complicity of some Jewish leaders) emphasized that she didn't love some abstract idea of "people," she loved her friends. Editor William Shawn (Nicholas Woodeson) courageously defends Arendt from attacks by Norman Podhoretz and Lionel Trilling, among others.

Von Trotta's film (cinematography by Caroline Champetier) effectively captures the turmoil of the New York intelligentsia in the 60's, where Arendt and her friend Mary McCarthy fought to establish their intellectual independence. 

Joseph Losey's The Finger of Guilt (1956)

 Losey made The Finger of Guilt (British title: The Intimate Stranger), along with screenwriter Howard Koch, in England after they were both blacklisted in America.  Losey's film is something of an allegory about his own experiences, though like the best allegories it works effectively in a strictly narrative sense.  Reggie Wilson (Richard Basehart) leaves America to make a film in England after a scandal involving a studio head's wife.  Shortly after Wilson starts a new film under producer Ben Case (Roger Livesey, who appeared in films by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) he marries Case's daughter Lesley (Faith Brook).  Wilson starts getting harassing letters from Evelyn Stewart (Mary Murphy); she claims they were lovers and that he convinced her to come to England;  Reggie and Lesley track her down in Newcastle.  Reggie can't remember her at all -- he thinks he is going crazy -- while Lesley is convinced enough to leave Reggie as Ben Case cancels his film, ostensibly for budgetary reason.

A relatively low-budget movie, The Finger of Guilt is shot on location in London and Newcastle in black-and-white by cinematographer Gerald Gibbs and written by Koch (one of the writers for Casablanca in 1942) and reflects their own confusion about having to leave America to work in England, as well as Losey's continued discontents about society reflected in such films as The Prowler (1951) and The Boy with the Green Hair (1948) in America and his later films written by Harold Pinter.

My Friend Maigret by Georges Simenon

 There was such a Sunday atmosphere that it was almost nauseating.  Maigret liked to claim, half serious, half joking, that he always had the ability to sniff out Sundays from the depths of his bed, without even having to open his eyes.

--Georges Simenon, Mon ami Maigret (Penguin, 1949, translated by Shaun Whiteside)

In one of the longer Maigret novels he travels to the island Porquerolles, off the southern coast of France where a man named Marcellin had mentioned Maigret's name shortly before he was killed.  Maigret is accompanied by Inspector Pyke of Scotland Yard, who has come to France to study Maigret's method.  Of course Maigret has no special "method; " he just digs everywhere until he eventually comes up with an answer.  Porquerolles is full of suspects, those who have come by boat from other countries and have ended up staying indefinitely, struck by "polquerollitis," an affliction of the quiet and slow pace of the island.

There is much drinking of wine and beer as Maigret gradually interrogates all of Marcellin's friends and is fortunate enough to talk to Algae, the woman who runs the post office where everyone on the island goes to make phone calls.  Algae listens to most of the phone calls and is able to give Maigret enough information about them to help him track down the killers. Maigret even rediscovers Ginette, who was Marcellin's girlfriend whom Maigret had helped get into rehab, and they become friends.  

Maigret and Mr. Pyke took the Comoran at five o'clock and Ginette was on it, as well as Charlot and his dancer, and all the tourists who had spent the day on the beaches of the island.

Hollywood Double Agent: The True Tale of Boris Morros, Film Producer Turned Cold War Spy by Jonathan Gill

 As a classical musician, Boris had wanted to get to Carnegie Hall since childhood, and if practice wouldn't take him there, the movies now would.

--Jonathan Gill, Hollywood Double Agent (Abrams, 2020).

We may consider Carnegie Hall a happy-ending sequel to Detour.

--Noah Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (University of California Press, 2014) 

Reading Jonathan Gill's account of Morros's production of Carnegie Hall (1947) I noticed something missing, namely, the director Edward G. Ulmer.  I wrote about Isenberg's book on Ulmer back on Oct. 1, 2014, in which he puts Carnegie Hall in the center of Ulmer's career, one of his more personal and larger-budget films, in which Ulmer shows his knowledge and love of both classical music and jazz, with performers from Arthur Rubinstein to Harry James. Isenberg mentions Morros as producer but otherwise gives him no credit for the film.  This difference of approaches to the film demonstrates a continuing gap in film writing as to who gets credit for a film, the director ("when William Wyler made Wuthering Heights ...") to the producer (Samuel Goldwyn:  "William Wyler didn't make Wuthering Heights, I did.  Wyler only directed it") and attempts to determine who gets credit for what in such a collaborative medium continues.

Morros produced five movies after he left his job as music director at Paramount in 1940.  He had left Russia after the revolution, made his way to Turkey and then in 1922 to America.  He was a trained classical musician and gradually found work in Hollywood, where the studios were run by people like him, emigre Jews. Morros struggled as an independent producer and then ran a successful record business, all the time working for the Soviet Union.  Morros became a spy unwillingly, in order to protect his parents and his siblings still in Russia.  Mostly he hired Soviet operatives to work for his companies as cover; whether he actually gave the Soviet Union anything of value is questionable.  When his Soviet handlers refused to finance his record company and his attempts to establish himself in television he went to the FBI in 1947 and became a double agent, receiving significant payments from the FBI for his work.  By 1957 the Soviet Union knew what he was doing and he just barely escaped a kidnapping that would have brought him to trial in Russia.  From then until his death in 1962 Morros testified before Congressional committees and helped the FBI track down spies.

Gill's book is full of details about Hollywood during WWII and the Cold War.  Morros was often homesick for Russia but subscribed to no ideology other than making money and living well under capitalism. 

Turner Classic Movies Nov. 2020

 A pretty good month for Hitchcock and Hawks, as well as leftovers from Halloween and some pre-code gems.

Nov. 4th has Margarette Von Trotta's fascinating film Hannah Arendt (2013) and Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941), a gangster movie that made Bogart a star.

Nov. 5 has Joseph Losey's Finger of Guilt (1956) and two movies with superb Bernard Herrmann scores:  Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and Joseph Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947).

Nov. 6:  Chaplin's The Circus (1928)

Nov. 7:  John Ford's Civil War film The Horse Soldiers (1959)

Nov. 9:  Frank Borzage's romantic The Circle (1925) and two rare films from Julien Duvivier: La Tette d'un Home (1933) and Un Carnet du Bal (1937)

Nov. 12:  Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men (1952)

Nov. 14:     Nicholas Ray's film noir In a Lonely Place (1952) and Howard Hawks's Ball of Fire (1942)

Nov. 16:  Andrei Tarkovsky's mysterious and beautiful Solaris (1972) and Robert Wise's downbeat Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

Nov. 18: Otto Preminger's beautiful musical Carmen Jones (1954)

Nov. 22: Robert Aldrich's corrosive Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Mark Sandrich's Rogers/Astaire musical The Gay Divorcee (1934)

Nov. 23: Howard Hawks's Western Red River

Nov. 30: Raoul Walsh's intense gangster film White Heat (1949)