Some of the movies I have seen and enjoyed this month, not including such dubious cotemporary movies as American Sniper and Inherent Vice (seen but not enjoyed), which look as if D.W. Griffith had never lived (though both Eastwood and Anderson have shown some ability in the past). The following films were all broadcast on Turner Classic Movies.
The Face Behind the Mask (Robert Florey, 1941). One of the best of Florey's stylish B pictures. Peter Lorre arrives in the U.S., finds a boarding house, and is disfigured in a fire before he can get started. No one will hire him, though he is skilled with watches, so he turns to a life of crime and gathers a gang. When he falls in love with a blind girl (Evelyn Keyes) he tries to go straight but his gang won't let him and kill Keyes with a car bomb. The gang them flees to Mexico but Lorre quietly takes the role of pilot and lands the whole gang in the middle of the desert, where everyone dies. Veteran cinematographer Franz Planer helps Florey to limn the dark side of the American dream.
Too Late for Tears (Byron Haskin,1949). $60,000 cash is thrown into Lizabeth Scott and Arthur Kennedy's car, by accident, and they keep it while sleazy Dan Duryea tries to get it back. Scott is driven to escape the "middle-class poor" and eventually kills Kennedy and Duryea, fleeing to Mexico with the money, where she dies falling off a balcony. Money is more important than anything to this femme fatale. Director Byron Haskin directed mostly science-fiction but did do one other excellent film noir: I Walk Alone (1948, also with Lizabeth Scott).
The Last Hurrah (John Ford, 1958). A relatively minor Ford film, reflecting his continuing disillusionment with modern America and the diminishing role of the Irish. Spencer Tracy plays a mayor, struggling with a re-election campaign where television is assuming a dominant role. Ford assembled many of his favorite aging actors, from Anna Lee to Donald Crisp, as the defeated mayor walks one way and history. represented by the victory parade of the new mayor, heads in the opposite direction.
The Strip (Leslie Kardos, 1951). One of many comeback attempts by Mickey Rooney, this is something of a musical film noir, with Rooney working as a bookie and a drummer and having his girl stolen by his gangster boss. There is some great music (though not enough) by Louie Armstrong, Earl Hines and Jack Teagarden and a serious role by William Demarest as "Fluff," the owner of a nightclub mourning his lost love. This is an unusual noir in that Rooney plays a Korean War vet. Once the Korean War came along, with all its ambiguities, the mood of the film noir changed considerably.
The Castle of Sand (Yoshito Nomura, 1974) is a beautiful Japanese detective film, directed by the little-known (in the West) Yoshito Nomura. It starts out as a routine policier and then ranges across forty years and all of Japan in an attempt to find the murderer of an unidentified man in Tokyo. Detectives travel across Japan in pursuit of obscure clues, the film ending with a flashback, a lengthy journey many years before by a man with leprosy and his young son through snow and rain, intensely depicted in widescreen color, with a moving score by Yasushi Akutagawa. Also present in the film, in a small but important role, is Chishu Ryu, a regular in Ozu's films.
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