BIG JIM McLAIN: Big John kicks some commie butt!

John Wayne was never shy about wearing his heart on his sleeve. He was never going to be mistaken for one of those liberal lefty Hollywood types who dared to question the motives and morals of the American Way. But rarely did he display his politics quite as nakedly as in 1952's BIG JIM McLAIN. Here he doesn't just wear his heart on his sleeve - his heart is the sleeve and most of the rest of the shirt as well!

Big Jim (Wayne) is an investigator for HUAC - the House UnAmerican Activtities Committee. HUAC had come into it's own in the second half of the 1940s as the US Congress' primary tool in rooting out American born communist subversives who were working on behalf of Moscow to bring about the downfall of capitalism. Often confused with Senator Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunt of the early 1950s, HUAC actually got there before him, and the committee's probing of communists in Hollywood in the latter 40s started rolling the bandwagon which McCarthy jumped aboard in 1950 and then hijacked to whip-up anti-communist hysteria in the USA with wild claims of Reds under almost every bed.
There's no room for baseless accusations or irrational hysteria in Big Jim's world. He and fellow investigator Mal Baxter (James Arness) remain scrupulously law-abiding and polite, even as the stinkin' pinko university professors they know beyond a doubt are redder than a red rose walk free after invoking their fifth amendment right against self incrimination while testifying before the heroic HUAC committee members (woodenly playing themselves). 
But things start turning ever so slightly dirty when Jim and Mal are sent to Hawaii to investigate a commie spy ring. Big Jim's forced to take time out from romancing a doctor's receptionist (Nancy Olson) to punch one of the conspirators on the nose after he insults a lady of dubious morals, who is nonetheless worthy of protection because she's red white and blue through and through.
The whole film is an unashamedly simplistic exercise in flagwaving which bears only the slightest relationship to the reality of HUAC's work. But it's also a fascinating artifact of a time not so long ago when the nation which prides itself on being the personification of freedom and democracy allowed itself to be plunged into a nightmare of fear, betrayal and ruined careers by the increasingly ludicrous claims of McCarthy and his HUAC associates.  BIG JIM McLAIN plays now as a far-fetched yarn but back in 1952 Wayne and Warner Bros were deadly serious about alerting Americans to the threat posed by the supposed traitors in their midst.
Even without the right wing politics BIG JIM McLAIN is far from Wayne's finest cinematic moment. There's really not enough storyline to fill the 90 minute running time so it's padded out with a couple of excruciatingly unfunny and pointless comic scenes, some excruciatingly bad acting by the real life Police Chief of Honolulu, and same painfully sappy mugging by Wayne attempting to portray bashfulness in his courtship of Nancy. 
Genuine modesty was never his strong point.

MONSIEUR VERDOUX: the Little Tramp speaks - and murders!

I've never been a fan of Charlie Chaplin's work. It's an opinion based on copious exposure to the Great Man's work. When I was growing up my memory is that the BBC screened his silent movies relentlessly. Being a film fan I watched them, but they never made me laugh.

So I was interested to see MONSIEUR VERDOUX because it marked such a big departure from his earlier work. Originally released in 1947, twenty years after the introduction of sound, this was - amazingly - Chaplin's first proper 'talkie.' It was also a considerable change in style for him.  His Little Tramp character was replaced by a semi-suave, grey-haired ladykiller, the Monsieur Verdoux of the title, who literally killed a series of ladies in 1930s France after marrying them for their money.
A few minutes into the film I realised that this was the first time I had ever heard Chaplin speak in a movie. It was a rather weird experience seeing this star who had become etched in my memory as the baggy black suited, bowler hatted tramp with the cane and Hitler mustache, pantomiming through numerous comic adventures, looking much older, sporting a pencil mustache and speaking in perfect - very British accented - English.
It was fortunate that I had this transformation to fixate on as the plot moved at the speed of an arthritic donkey. I felt as if I was watching a very creaky stage drama. The acting, the pacing and the sets all seemed very old fashioned, even for 1947. The pace does pick up a little as the story unfolds but it remained too leisurely to hold my undivided attention. Verdoux's constant shuttling between his different wives and lovers became rather repetitive when it should have been engaging.
Chaplin hasn't entirely abandoned his past. There's moments of humour - this is a black comedy after all - with routines reminiscent of his silent work, and glimpses of the Little Tramp, mostly in the expressions which flit across Verdoux's face. Chaplin works best when paired with Martha Raye as Verdoux's loud, crass, seemingly unkillable American wife, but otherwise he's in a different league to the rest of the cast. They're playing rather stiff drama while Chaplin's got a loose, go-with-the-flow attitude, although it's considerably easier when you're the film's writer-director-producer-star and - therefore - creator of the flow.
Unfortunately this dominant position also allows Chaplin to indulge himself in the last reel at the film's expense, getting onto his soapbox and going off on a preachy tangent about the evils of society, which is just boring and - well - preachy.
Unsurprisingly the film bombed on its release in 1947 although Chaplin reportedly regarded it as "the cleverest and most brilliant film of my career." I'd say "The Great Dictator", "Modern Times" and "City Lights" all have a greater claim to that description than MONSIEUR VERDOUX which could, more fittingly, be labeled an interesting oddity. 

AUTUMN LEAVES: Mommy Dearest the magnificent

A young man with a mommy fixation really couldn't do better or worse than focusing their attention on the biggest mother of them all - Joan Crawford. Here was a woman who presented herself to the world as an adoring, hands-on mother but who, if her ungrateful adopted daughter Christina is to be believed, was a sadistic monster.
A very young Cliff Robertson as Burt Hanson becomes enamoured of a considerably older Joan Crawford in AUTUMN LEAVES and won't take no for an answer. His relentless pursuit of Millicent Wetherby, a  lonely, middle-aged work from home typist for hire is disturbingly creepy; so creepy that even Millicent tries to push him away until that moment when Burt first locks lips and the floodgates of her long hibernated passion are thrown asunder.
Millicent Wetherby is the archetypal Crawford character of her1950s career. Every facet of Joan's film persona is on show here - the working class woman who's buried herself in work to forget her loneliness; who's hard as nails on the outside and rather masculine in appearance, but who's crying inside from the lack of male attention; who only ever attracts attention from the wrong kind of man, but takes it because deep down she believes that's all she deserves; and who's eyes can brim with tears at the drop of a hat and a moment later flash with barely suppressed fury.
There's no better Joan Crawford impersonator than Crawford herself.
What makes her performance in AUTUMN LEAVES even more rewarding is the knowledge that she'd fought tooth and nail to win this part, refusing to relinquish her leading lady status at an age when Hollywood consigned her type to character parts because, conventional wisdom had it, they were too old to be alluring anymore. Who's gonna pay to watch a 51 year old woman make out with a leading man young enough to be her son?
Crawford was either brave or desperate in taking on a part which required her to make numerous references to the fact that she was "too old" for her toyboy suitor, and to function as his mother as much as his lover. I imagine she was willing to accept any number of indignities if it meant she retained her leading lady status and kept her name above the title.
And she was right to do so. AUTUMN LEAVES is a 100 per cent Crawford star vehicle. That she's playing a character named Millicent Wetherby is irrelevant really. She's playing herself and doing so magnificently. 
If you want to understand what it really means to be an old school film star you need look no further than AUTUMN LEAVES.

ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW: simply brilliant cinema

I'm going to say this only once because I need to get it off my chest, then I promise I won’t mention it again.

I cannot understand those people who insist they will not watch a film if it's made in black and white. It doesn’t matter what it’s about or who’s in it – if it’s in black and white they are just not interested.

This inability to get past the lack of colour effectively closes them off to ninety five per cent of Hollywood’s output before 1960, including many of the all-time greats. “Citizen Kane”, “Casablanca”, and “On the Waterfront” all feature in the American Film Institute’s all-time top ten.

Black and white is not simply the absence of colour. In the hands of talented directors and cinematographers it’s an art form in its own right, using light and shade to create stunning compositions.

And among the thousands of films which would not be half as effective had they been shot in colour is a 1959 film noir drama called ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW.

I first saw this many years ago on late night tv, and it's stuck in my memory not only because of the gripping story and superb star performances, but also because of its' visuals. The combination of creative camerawork and stark black and white images are crucial to the film’s impact.

Ostensibly, the story is about a small town bank heist but the real focus is on two ill-matched members of the gang who are unable to get past their hatred for each other to work together effectively.

Robert Ryan is Earl Slater, a racist aging ex-con with a hair-trigger temper and a lifetime of bitterness over bad breaks etched into his face. “No one’s going to junk me like an old car” he snarls when his equally aging girlfriend Lorry (played by Shelley Winters) tries to talk him out of taking the job.

Harry Belafonte is Johnny Ingram, a musician and a drifter with a gambling habit and an ex-wife and young daughter. Unable to break his addiction to the horses, he’s deeply in debt to gangsters who are now threatening the lives of his estranged family.

Despite their mutual dislike both men see the bank raid as a final chance to find, in Slater’s words, the “hole in the fence” that everyone is looking for in life – the chance to change the course of fate.

Their lives are played out against the backdrop of an eerily bleak and silent New York City. Shot in the depths of winter Manhattan appears almost frozen, with the skyscrapers rising like giant tombstones in an enormous graveyard. There are cars and people on the streets but no sense of life. The air is so cold one can almost see it on the screen.

Robert Ryan is simply magnificent. Because he never made a fuss about his work and rarely gave interviews he is often overlooked but the fact is that he’s one of the finest actors ever to grace the big screen. His success here is in making the nakedly hateful Slater such a compelling character.

It says much about Harry Belafonte’s talent as an actor that he is able to hold his own against such powerful competition. Like Elvis, he had also found initial success as a singer before making the transition to films but unlike Presley he retained control of his career.

This allowed him to choose projects which required more than simply singing. Watching this film (which Belafonte’s company produced) with no prior knowledge of the man one would think he's an actor who could also sing when required.

ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW is film noir at its finest; its sense of impending doom so palpable it almost takes solid form alongside Slater and Ingram as the walking dead, their futures predetermined by their inability to seize control of their life in any positive way.

Powerful, haunting and a great example of black and white cinema at its best ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW is an essential part of any serious dvd collection. You can pick it up brand new for much less than $10. So buy it!

PRECIOUS: Oscar-worthy or overblown?

The most cringe-making aspect of the entertainment media's patronising fawning over Gabourey Sidibe in the run-up to this year's Oscars was the oft-repeated question "You're such a happy person and your character's in such a depressing place. How did you manage to deal with that?"
Hello! Last time I looked it was called acting.
It's what people who act in films do for a living.
They're called actors.
Gabourey Sidibe is an actor and when she played Precious she was acting. There is no requirement that an actor have personal experience of a character's lifestyle in order to play them.
Nobody asked Jeff Bridges how come he managed to be so good at portraying an alcoholic ex-country music star in "Crazy Heart" when he'd never been an alcoholic or a singing star.
Jeeeez! 

Of course the unspoken subtext here is how could a totally inexperienced, grossly overweight, not conventionally attractive young woman deliver such a powerful performance in her debut movie, as if this kind of achievement is normally reserved for slim, attractive, lighter skinned actresses with several years worth of movie roles already under their belt?
Sidibe's performance is undeniably impressive and assured. The effectiveness of the story being told depends entirely on her ability to make us believe in Precious as a real, three dimensional person, and she more than meets the challenge.
What has, however, been overlooked in the rush to heap praise on her, is the fact that Precious is a character who reacts to events and people around more than she initiates actions. Other than a handful of fantasy sequences which allow Sidibe to intentionally overact, she's not required to express a wide range of emotions or make the kind of grand statements or gestures  that might be a stretch for someone so inexperienced. We understand how Precious is feeling less from her facial expression (which rarely changes) and more from the information provided in her voice-over narration.
It's left to the more experienced Mo'Nique as Mary, Precious' sadistic monster of a mother, to act out the emotions of a woman pouring all her bitterness and anger into a relentless physical and emotional assault on her daughter. Mary is a truly terrifying character and the scenes of Precious' home life are genuinely disturbing, resembling nothing less than a real-life horror soap opera.
It's to the immense credit of producer-director Lee Daniels that he not only gets the most out of his cast but also keeps the story from tipping over into soap opera. While there is seemingly no end to the miseries piled onto Precious, the manipulation of our emotions is tempered by some creative camerawork, reminding us that PRECIOUS is something more than just another Film of the Week on the Hallmark Channel.
The film is powerful, bleak and hardhitting, but does it deserve all the Oscar attention? I got more out of PRECIOUS than I expected. I think the interpretation of the subject matter by Sidibe, Mo'Nique and director Daniels elevates the film to a status it might not otherwise have attained. In lesser hands this could easily have been overblown melodrama. 
Mo'Nique's performance is absolutely Best Supporting Actress Oscar-worthy and, in a year when Sandra Bullock took home the Best Actress statuette, it's difficult to argue that Sidibe was any less deserving. I think the Academy also made the right decision in nominating but not awarding Daniels for best director and PRECIOUS for best film. 
They're good but they're not the best of the best.
   

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE: too theatrical to make it real

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE disguises it's theatrical origins pretty well right up until the grand climax when the schoolteacher protagonist and her young Judas start hurling lines of dialogue at each other such as are heard only in overheated climax scenes played out on stage.
The bitter home truths and angry indignations that spew forth sound like nothing that real people would utter and completely like observations carefully crafted by a playwright or screenwriter intent on using his characters to pass deep and meaningful comment on human nature.
It's totally theatrical and uttery false.

In truth Maggie Smith's entire performance in the title role is theatrical but she's so good at breathing life into Miss Jean Brodie that it's easy to forgive her somewhat larger than life portrayal, right up until the point when the aforementioned contrived denouement exposes the artifice.
Smith's performance takes no prisoners. She literally stormed her way to the Best Actress Oscar in 1969, forcing her co-stars to hang on to her for dear life or face being thrown aside. Robert Stephens plays it broad and manic as the art teacher, married with six kids and obsessed with Miss Brodie, Gordon Jackson stands around open-mouthed too much of the time waiting for his fellow actors to finish their line so he can say his, while Pamela Franklin is implausibly old beyond her years as one of Miss Brodie's "creme de la creme" who curdles.
Despite the blatant theatricality of it all, there's enough nuance in Smith's performance to divide viewers on the goodness or badness of Miss Brodie's intentions. Misguided idealist or sinister manipulator of young minds? - you decide.   

GRAN TORINO: Clint plunders his own past

It would be fascinating to learn what a space alien would make of GRAN TORINO.
An intelligent life form from another planet is the only being that could come to this film with no preconceptions about Clint Eastwood. My bet is they'd describe his performance as “interesting but uneven.”
For us earthbound humans it’s impossible to view GRAN TORINO without making connections to Eastwood’s cinematic history and, in particular his spaghetti westerns and ‘Dirty Harry’ films.

Now imagine the Eastwood character from these movies forty years later, retired and living in a rundown suburb of Detroit. Instead of being called The Man with No Name or Harry Callahan, he's Walt Kowalski. His working life has been spent not as a cop or vigilante but on the production line at a Ford factory. Before that he served in the US Army in Korea where he saw and did things that have haunted him ever since.
As the film opens Walt is burying his wife, and this is where the unevenness first creeps in because it’s impossible to imagine him living with anyone for forty years. He’s a buttoned-down, cranky, misanthropic loner, “a relic from the 1950s” as one of his sons describes him, with a face frozen into a permanent expression of disgust.
Contempt dripping with sarcasm is the only emotion he’s able to express. It’s quickly obvious that this is not just a reaction to the loss of his wife; this is a lifelong condition.
He’s had a problem with Asians ever since the Korean War which makes him a less than ideal neighbour for the Hmong family who move in next door. His prejudice boils over when he catches their teenage son, Thao (Bee Vang) trying to steal his prized 1972 Gran Torino as a gang initiation rite, but it also forces him – very reluctantly – to confront his racism as the family insist on befriending him while making amends for Thao’s transgression.
As Walt learns more about the family and the Hmong way of life he also finds himself drawn into a conflict which can only end in violence.
It gives little away to reveal that, having become involved in the conflict, Walt believes he has no choice but to take the law into his own hands and this is where the weight of Eastwood’s cinematic past crushes our ability to see Kowalski as a three dimensional character in his own right.
I half expected him to utter the iconic question “do you feel lucky punk?” with a cheroot clenched between his teeth and a poncho over his shoulders. Not only does Walt Kowalski channel Blondie, Mongo, and Harry Callahan but also Clint Eastwood doing an impression of himself.
There’s a surprising amount of laughter in GRAN TORINO and much of it derives from Eastwood appearing to send up his own screen image. The humour, although genuinely funny, sits a little uneasily alongside the serious drama.
The result is unsettling because it makes Kowalski less of a credible character and more an amalgam of everyone Eastwood has previously played on screen.
But before I can come to a definitive decision on my reaction to GRAN TORINO I think I need to watch it again to get past the constant distraction of Eastwood’s apparent plundering of his back catalogue of characters.

THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS: caution - may cause drowsiness

Make that definitely will induce a deep slumber reminiscent of hibernation.
1972's THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS is the most boring film I've seen in a long time. This tale of two mismatched brothers meanders along for what seems like an eternity until one of the characters finally flips out and grabs a gun. A moment longer and I'd have beaten her to it.
Jack Nicholson is David, the depressed brother, and Bruce  Dern is Jason, the deluded one who draws his brother into his latest pie in the sky scheme to get rich quick. What's so frustrating is that David knows exactly what his brother's like and he still goes along with him.

The message here would appear to be that blood is thicker than water, although the real thickness is to be found in the skulls of these two men. It's difficult to generate much sympathy for two such obviously stupid people and impossible to believe that a character as passive as David could ever have carved out a successful career for himself as a teller of tall tales on late night radio.
Nicholson is positively catatonic in his portrayal of David. It's left to Dern and a wildly overacting Ellen Burstyn in particular, as an unstable, over-the-hill showgirl to provide the histrionics.
This movie's one saving grace is it's setting. Much of the action takes place around the boardwalk and decayed glamor of a pre-casino, out-of-season Atlantic City. With it's decrepid clientele shuffling along the seafront and through the lobbies of the monstrously unattractive hotels the resort resembles God's waiting room.
But atmosphere alone is not enough to sustain the interest for an hour and forty five minutes. As a sedative THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS is an award winner, but as a piece of entertainment it's a dead loss.

ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II: what the f***?!!

This can't have seemed like a good idea even at the time.
Patch together a montage of film and newsreel clips charting the history of the Second World War and set it all to music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney performed by other artists.
The result almost defies description. 
Almost.
Thankfully the English language includes the word dreadful, and that's what this fiasco is.
Whoever it was who dreamed up the idea of turning World War Two into an eighty four minute music video had to have been under the influence of something that should have been banned or available only on prescription.
How else to account for Helen Reddy trilling "The Fool on the Hill" over images of Hitler looking dictatorial, or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to the tune of "I am the walrus" by Leo Sayer?
Some of the song-image match ups sort of make sense - "Here comes the sun" for Japan's preparations for war, and "Nowhere Man" for Mussolini, but what the heck does "Hey Jude" by The Brothers Johnson have to do with the Russians, or the battle for Guadalcanal with "I am the walrus" (again)?
Released in 1976, ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II was not the only occasion during the 70s when Hollywood turned to The Beatles looking for inspiration and wound up doing grievous bodily harm to some of the finest pop music of all time. Two years later, George Burns, The Bee Gees and Frankie Howerd did their best to beat the Fab Four's finest work to a bloody pulp with the excruciatingly bad "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." 
While both films bombed at the box office and rapidly sank from view, the music has endured, which proves Lennon and McCartney not only wrote classics but bombproof classics to boot.

BIGGER THAN LIFE: exploding the myth of the nuclear family

BIGGER THAN LIFE is a brutal full-frontal assault on Eisenhower-era American family life.
Director Nicholas Ray exposes a reality distinctly at odds with the cosy paternalism of the nuclear family depicted in so many movies and tv shows of the time.

James Mason is schoolteacher Ed Avery, a man with a perfect wife, Lou (Barbara Rush) and a tousle-haired son (Richie). They live in a spacious, well furnished home in an unnamed New England town and life appears, on the surface, to be good.
But Ed's hiding a secret from his family. Several afternoons a week after school he heads to a second job, working as a dispatcher for a cab company. He's doing it for the money but he doesn't think his wife would approve.
But that's just a tiny crack in the facade of perfection compared to the enormous fissure that opens up when Ed's diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease and starts abusing Cortisone, the brand new miracle drug he's prescribed to keep him alive and healthy. He becomes psychotic. What starts out as a surfeit of physical energy escalates into rampant obsession, egotism, authoritarianism and talk of murder.
While it's slightly disconcerting to watch Mason play an American schoolteacher with no explanation offered for his obvious Britishness, he does a good job of portraying Ed's descent into psychosis. By the time his illness reaches it's final stages he is a genuinely terrifying figure, capable of doing absolutely anything including ritually sacrificing his own son.
It's Barbara Rush, though who has the toughest part to play. For the story to work she has to be convincing in her reluctance to call in outside assistance, even though her husband's behaviour is threatening to destroy everything that they have. Given her obvious intelligence and instinct to protect her son it would not have been plausible for her to simply have folded under the pressure and acquiesced to Ed's deluded ranting. 
Her success in portraying Lou's conflicted loyalties allows us to believe in the story. My one reservation is that it all happens too fast. The film's ninety five minute running time is not enough to allow events to unfold in what should feel like real time. Ed goes from normal to crazy in 45 minutes and the pace feels forced. In retrospect, I should have realised that the unseemly speed with which the opening titles were flashed on the screen was a subtle indicator of the pace of the storytelling ahead.   
The Criterion label, which is releasing BIGGER THAN LIFE on DVD later this month, describes it as "one of the great American films of the 1950s." That's an exaggeration, but it is an interesting film. I wouldn't recommend buying it, but it's definitely worth renting.