Reviews

None of the other reviews have mentioned that SPAWN OF THE NORTH is in fact a remake of THE VIRGINIAN, with a change in locale from Wyoming to Alaska. There is also one other notable change. While Akim Tamiroff is Trampas and Henry Fonda steps into Gary Cooper's boots as The Virginian, the emphasis has been shifted to the likable but shady Steve character (Richard Arlen in the '29 talkie, George Raft here). SPAWN OF THE NORTH would itself be remade in 1954 as ALASKA SEAS, with a nice cast including Robert Ryan, Brian Keith, and Gene Barry in the roles played by Raft, Fonda, and Tamiroff respectively. On its own terms SPAWN OF THE NORTH is very effective entertainment, thanks to the guiding hand of director Henry Hathaway as well as its cast, not only the aforementioned stars but also experienced scene-stealers John Barrymore and Lynne Overman in support.

Watched this yesterday on TCM. I had seen this 1958 adaptation of Erskine Calwell's controversial 1933 novel (he was actually arrested and tried for obscenity) many years ago when I was a young teenager, and not cared for it. Part of my distaste was undoubtedly due to my being a Southerner annoyed by the sexed-up Li'l Abner stereotypes.

But watching it again after all these years, and in a different frame of mind, it strikes me as almost a minor classic, for all its many flaws. This can be credited to the direction from -- of all people -- Anthony Mann (surely this is the odd-man-out in his filmography) and photography by Ernest Haller. Despite the rural setting, most of the film takes place at night, with key scenes in a deserted cotton mill and on the street outside a honky-tonk beer joint during a trip to the "big city" (Augusta Georgia).

This gives the film a noirish look that is superficially at odds with its Beverly Hillbillies characters, and adds to its unique ambiance. Because instead of noir cool we get raucous black comedy and wildly over-the-top caricatures. In fact, GLA is so flamboyantly larger than life that it comes across as a musical that has had all its songs cut.

(Idea for you theatrical types. Get the musical rights to GLA. It seems to be crying out for an adaptation).

Some of the casting is unsurprising: Jack Lord (in his butch leading man phase) and an already paunchy Aldo Ray as the hunks, Vic Morrow as Lord's loyal puppydog little brother (ironic since Morrow despised Lord -- allegedly they even got into a fistfight on the set).

Tina Louise plays the supposed sexpot that the various males fight over. Since Louise never did anything for me (I was always a Mary-Ann man) she not only looks wrong but seems almost schoolmarmish in her repressed manner. Fay Spain is a lot more fun as the nymphomaniacal sister.

Buddy Hackett plays a spoof of the fat redneck sheriff cliché. Rex Ingram is a friendly black sharecropper, Michael Landon has a small role as an albino (!!) and one Lance Fuller plays the rich brother from Augusta. He's the one cast member who makes no impact at all.

The central role, Ty Ty the obsessed farmer, is played by the surprisingly cast Robert Ryan. Ryan is expert as psychos and villains, but he's not the first actor you'd think of for this kind of larger-than-life "fool" role, one that might suit Burt Lancaster or Jimmy Cagney better. However, he's generally quite effective, making up in gravitas what he might lack in esprit.

The script by the blacklisted Ben Maddow (although credited to perennial front Phillip Yordan) has some exposition and other problems. One example. The film is more than half over when Ty Ty needs money and decides to borrow it from his son in Augusta -- a son we've never heard mentioned before. His existence should have been worked into dialogue earlier.

Maddow's script seems divided in theatrical style scenes, often separated by fades to black. This may have been necessitated by heavy editing (censorship?). Scenes that you expect to see are curiously missing. DLA is essentially two plots fused together: Ty Ty desperately searching for gold on his farm, and Will Thompson (Ray) desperately trying to open the cotton mill that supports the town's workers.

This latter, proletarian storyline seems added-on, a leftover from the novel's original publication in 1933. It ensures GLA a place in that group of films (A Place In The Sun, Lonelyhearts, The Film Flam Man, Fitzwilly) that are set in contemporary times but really should take place in the 1930s.

Elmer Bernstein's score, full of pastoral horns and strings, is very good, even if it is the most blatant imitation of Aaron Copland I've ever heard. In fact it's so similar Copland fans may want to track it down for comparison purposes. The title song is an interesting gospel pastiche, although the use of an all-too-obviously lily-white chorus blunts its impact.

I don't know where the auteurists rank GLA in the Anthony Mann canon, but it definitely deserves a look.

The songs are mostly mediocre: "Mama Look Sharp" is cringeworthy, while "Does Anybody Care" and "He Plays the Violin" are almost as embarrassing. "Dear Mr Adams" has the best lyrics of the score, with some amusing if elementary rhymes (and one embarrassing moment of choreography). The intended showstopper "Molasses To Rum To Slaves" isn't too bad either.

The TCM broadcast included the number "Cool, Considerate Men" which had been cut from the 1972 release (allegedly b/c Nixon wanted it (?)... Did he really think a movie song might cost him votes? He must've thought the movie would be a big hit rather than the box office flop it was). Like "Molasses". "Cool" is better musically than lyrically, but it is interestingly choreographed and the closest thing in the film to actual CINEMATIC film-making (most of the direction is awful, though I'll admit there is a perverse pleasure in counting examples of inept direction ["Look! There's William Daniels sitting stiffly on the table, just as he must have done on Broadway in order to break up the staging! Look, there's the messenger delivering the messages with the exact expression on his face each time!"]).

However, "Cool" is very disingenuous in attempting to link the anti- rebellion group with contemporary conservatives. This analogy doesn't hold -- Alexander Hamilton was as pro-independence as anyone, yet he was more "conservative" than most of the English nobles he was fighting.

The saving graces of 1776 remains screenwriter Peter Stone's witty repartee and the brilliant cinematography of Harry Stradling Jr.

Sheriff Who? (1967) -- The rather whacked-out premise was -- get this: Evil Roy Slade, the meanest outlaw in the west, rules over a small western town. Every week some passerby gets suckered into taming the town and bringing Roy to justice -- and every week Roy runs him out of town.

This is what I call a "3 AM idea" -- it sounds brilliant after a long night of writing, but when you wake up the next day you realize it's unworkable.

It's hard to believe this premise even got to the writing-the-pilot stage. Even in a zany sitcom, I can't see it working. It's a bit like making Siegfried the star of a sitcom called "KAOS!" and having him kill a new Control agent every week.

The closest equivalent I can think of in a series would be Police Squad always killing off their "Special Guest Star" in the credits. But that was irrelevant to the plot, and we all know how long PS lasted anyway.

The thing is, those fortunate few who saw Sheriff Who? in its only airing on September 5, 1967 claim it is one of the funniest half-hours of all time. Dick Shawn plays Crawford Offwhite, "The fastest interior decorator in the West", who is conned into becoming sheriff. John Astin is Evil Roy Slade and the script is by Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson.

Marshall and Belson would try again a few years later, making two hour long pilots with Astin as Evil Roy Slade. Shawn is back but plays a different character, sort of a combination of Roy Rogers and Paladin. These pilots were edited into a two hour movie and aired in 1972. This version is now available on DVD. It has some classic gags and Shawn is hilarious.

There are some slow spots (inevitable given its editing) and frankly, I would've preferred casting a real western villain as Slade rather than Astin. Perhaps Neville Brand. Still, there are enough great moments to make it must viewing for comedy fans.

And maybe, just maybe, we will someday get the chance to see "Sheriff Who?"

The only reason I watched this super-obscure 1957 oater (allegedly shot in seven days) is because Philip Hardy, in his 1980s encyclopedia of westerns, called it a "masterpiece" (his word).

I certainly wouldn't go that far, but the direction (Gerd Oswald) and camera-work (Joseph LaShelle, who IIRC shot Laura) are definitely eye- catching. Many angles include ceilings, and there are a number of striking shots of actor(s) in extreme FG with other(s) in extreme BG. Oswald and LaShelle even use the film noir technique of lining up actors in dialogue scenes at various depths so they can all be in the shot without cutting (or having to re-set up the camera).

This second feature programmer is in fact far more interestingly made than A Kiss Before Dying, Oswald's A picture of the year before. Why Oswald went from that well-publicized production of a bestseller to this B- drive-in special is unknown to me. Too bad he didn't show the same level of creativity on that clever Ira Levin mystery that he does on this horse opera, which is quite routinely scripted aside from a few minor curiosities, such as Nick Adams homoerotically caressing the unconscious face of his big brother John Derek.

A very pleasant romantic comedy (and a rare one about marriage -- most Hollywood comedies about marriage are "domestic", a different subgenre than "romantic"). Its shift in tone to drama in the second half was surprisingly successful, even the (in)famous -- and oft-criticized -- plot twist at the end of act two. The nightmare scene may be the most cinematic sequence George Cukor ever directed.

It should be noted that I am far from world's greatest Judy Holliday fan (didn't care for Born Yesterday at all). IMHO the film belongs to Aldo Ray, then at the beginning of his brief star push by Columbia (he even gets a special "Introducing" card after the end credits). Ray had not been acting long and it shows -- he has a tendency to rush his lines, even with Cukor directing. But for all his gaucheness -- perhaps, because of it -- Ray has a natural quality that is appealing.

Those who know Ray only from his later appearances will be surprised by how SKINNY he looks here! lol

As I said, Ray's star push by Columbia was brief. I don't know specifically why it ended, though I would guess it had something to do with the studio's signing of Jack Lemmon the next year. Ray was actually the better dramatic actor, but when you've got one of the very greatest light comedians of all time on your payroll, I guess you don't need to keep Aldo around as Judy Holliday's leading man.

Ray went on to 1) put on a few pounds, and 2) become essentially a character actor in leading roles -- his finest hour coming as the sergeant in the classic Men In War (1957). Ray was probably the greatest movie sergeant ever -- he seemed to possess an instinctive understanding of that character type. It's not widely known but Ray came very close to playing role of Prewitt in From Here To Eternity -- which would've been a dreadful miscasting. He was far better suited to the role of Sgt. Warden, where inherent cynicism comes into conflict with the need for idealism -- a description that could apply to any of Ray's best performances.

By the time of Men In War, Ray began to look very heavy, and much older on screen than he was in reality, which one presumes was due to his hitting the sauce away from the studio. By the time he was 40 he was pretty much washed up.

I won't go into the unfortunate circumstances of Ray's later life -- but I do hope that someday he gets the respect from film historians that he deserves.

Seeing this for the first time I was surprised to discover it is actually set in 1947, making it a piece about Austerity rather than Angry Young Men. While Laurence Harvey is convincing as a scheming hustler, he never strikes me as a northerner, and not just because his Yorkshire accent comes and goes (sometimes he sounds like he's auditioning for Jud in Oklahoma -- are Yorkshire and Texas/Southern accents that closely linked?). Harvey is more like a penniless Russian nobleman eager to make his fortune by marrying BENEATH him, not ABOVE him like Joe Lampton here. Interesting that Harvey and Richard Burton, who both came from impoverished backgrounds, both had trouble playing working class characters.

"We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground..."

I first heard of this 1947 British film in one of Leslie Halliwell's books. Written by Eric Ambler and directed by Roy Baker, it's kind of a British answer to Hollywod's noir, essentially a reworking of Grahame Greene's Ministry Of Fear. Chemist (and I do mean "chemist", not pharmacist or apothecary) John Mills blames himself for the death a friend's daughter in a bus crash, which also gives Mills a concussion and tendencies towards blackouts and amnesia. Quicker than you can say "Alfred Hitchcock" Mills is accused of murdering a fellow resident of his boarding house, and poor old John can't remember if he did it or not. What's most fascinating to me is the subtext -- Mills is clearly supposed to represent returning war veterans, but the film's makers were too afraid to have war wounds be the source of his blackouts (even though H'wood had already done it in The Blue Dahlia) and instead resorted to the bus crash contrivance. There is effective direction by Baker (who went to H'wood and made the classic 3D "depthie" Inferno, later returning to England to do A Night To Remember) and Ambler's script is good, with a few surprise scattered throughout.

That rarest of cinematic animals: A Jack Webb comedy...

That is, an INTENTIONAL Jack Webb comedy. In at least one interview Mitchum claimed this was his favorite role, because he "got paid $400,000 in advance". Mitchum plays Archie Hall, a charming con man who's always scamming his army superiors during WW2. Hall was real person, an army buddy of screenwriter William Bowers (played by Webb in his stiffly pseudo-relaxed "Joe Friday takes the weekend off" manner). But Mitchum with his "who gives a damn" attitude isn't really suited to playing a con man -- it's a role that would've suited, say, Tony Curtis better.

The supporting cast of character comics -- Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck (reunited 8 years after Stalag 17) as knucklehead sergeants, plus Louis Nye, Joe Flynn, and Del Moore as Mitchum's patsies in the platoon -- come off best, even if Nye overacts quite a bit. This may be the best part Moore ever had (and don't give me that Nutty Ptofessor crap -- Moore was wasted as Jerry's stooge). Too bad Moore never got a career-boosting TV gig (the way Flynn did with McHale's Navy), he was a very talented farceur.

Advise and Consent -- a conservative novel filmed by liberals, Peter Bogdonavich called A&C "the best political film ever made in America."

What's the competition? Citizen Kane and A Face In The Crowd are about the media, as is The Last Hurrah (at least partly), and All The King's Men (1949, need I add) is about corruption. But A&C isn't dealing with colorful crooks, instead we see sincere politicians doing what they think is right. The details of Senate procedure are bound to be less eye-opening now after a generation of C-SPAN, so the film's lasting value is in the direction of Preminger, and the performances. Top-billed Henry Fonda, as the Adlai Stevensonish nominee (although the confirmation hearing scenes were based on the Hiss case) has little to do but look noble -- he hardly appears in the film's later half.

Charles Laughton steals any scene he's in as a Thurmondesque Southern Senator. This was his last film, and he went out with a definite bang.

George Grizzard is almost as colorful as the villain. Liberals of the time were predictably -- and to a degree, justifiably -- outraged by the Joe McCarthy figure being a radical leftist peacenik. Why didn't Grizzard become a bigger star?

Most of the remaining cast is excellent: Franchot Tone as the Prez, Lew Ayres as veep, Walter Pidgeon (perhaps his best ever part, along w/ Forbidden Planet -- he's really the hero of the piece), Paul Ford, Inga Swenson, Wil Geer, Betty White (as a Senator!!).

But the most fascinating casting was Peter "Brother-In-Lawford" as a horndog New England Senator. How did Preminger get away with this????

I do wish we could have seen more of Edward Andrews as the Dirksenish Orrin Knox. He's a major character in the book, but disappears from the film before the halfway point.

And that brings me to the film's most notorious character, Don Murray's Senator Brig Anderson. Anderson's blackmailing takes over the last third of the film, squeezing out other characters.

Murray is rather dull, and while I realize the point was to make him a bland All-America type, perhaps Preminger could have cast a more dynamic actor -- say Ben Gazzara, whom he'd worked with on Anatomy Of A Murder.

The DVD commentary w/USC prof Drew Casper was interesting in its discussion of Preminger's "objective" style and lack of reaction shots, but otherwise spent too much time on Preminger bio and gossip about the cast (which was frequently misleading and outright wrong anyway).

Those curious about A&C's real-life counterparts should go here: http://home.earthlink.net/~dbratman/drury.html#2