Reviews

Setting aside all the implausible elements in the story, it's a pretty good, briskly told yarn, made exciting by the way the plot actually becomes more complicated as the film careens wildly to its conclusion. So it's easy to watch, first of all, this garden of unholy criminals in the middle of nowhere working through their mutually broken honor among thieves. Pre-code, you'll find only the hint of a bosom flashing from a very minor female character. Otherwise the sexual innuendos are largely verbal. Like another reviewer, I too appreciated the hotel-in-the-desert ambiance and its effervescent symbolism. And the strangely obsequious Arab natives flitting about never intrude upon the Westerners. Meanwhile Ronald Colman and ever-pleasantly baby-fatty Fay Wray may not be the last word in chemistry, but they do get the job done nicely.

Welcome to 1930. Talkies are one year old and studios are continuing to experiment madly with all kinds of plots, all kinds of screenplays, and all levels of acting competence. In this film we get broad elements of slapstick and mushy love scenes, and, because it's pre-Code, a little skin deliciously displayed (Fay Wray being happy to oblige). You'll see early on that this film turns out to be way too rough-hewn, and its slapdash construction will not be successful: audiences don't want to watch a mess. The only person really trying to make it all work is Ms. Wray; she practically owns the screen every time she appears, even with her awful accent. If you find yourself attracted to her work -- as I have become -- this flick's worth a quick watch.

If you lived through this achingly awful time in our country's history, you will already be familiar with where the battle is joined on many of the issues presented in this film. Personally, I did not find one single thing that was new to me. It seems that, instead of choosing to do a thorough, in-depth analysis of the many things Dick Cheney did and said, the makers of this documentary chose to go the "College Freshman's Introduction to Dick Cheney" route: Keep it simple, keep it matter-of- fact, let the audience connect the dots (if they can), and by all means, don't ruffle any feathers. So many important details were left out, like the remarkable time Mr. Cheney averred that, if America voted for John Kerry for President, that would be a win for Al Qaida -- a completely irresponsible, hugely, gapingly un-American thing for any politician to say. And that's just one of many. And nowhere was the question ever posed, "Do you feel responsible for all those unnecessary deaths of American soldiers in Iraq?" To treat this man as anything other than a murderer gives him a modicum of dignity he doesn't deserve. The producer and director were clearly scared to death to get down to the real nitty-gritty. Don't misunderstand me: There's nothing terribly wrong with this film -- just a failure of nerve.

Goodness, could it get much worse? Every Western cliché intact, tepid, phoned-in performances at best by the leads, a simplistic story the writers couldn't keep in focus, ersatz "Western" music, hollow comedy that's out of step with the plot, costumes from Silly Costumes, Inc., what else? Could Mel Brooks have lifted the dance hall show for his movie "Blazing Saddles"? I thought this might be a celebration of the city of San Antonio, Texas, but it's just garbage, probably none of it filmed in San Antonio anyway. The first hour and a quarter are excruciatingly slow, but when the pace finally picks up, there's really nothing left to watch, except more clichés. A breathtakingly dull film.

The Amendment giving women the right to vote was only nine years old when this movie was made. It sure shows. I'm not a big feminist (is any male, really?), but I was grinding my teeth whenever the question, "Oh, Darling, won't you be mine?" was asked. Today, it's a quaint notion, but at that time, the idea that a man could own a woman was accepted without any raised eyebrows. I found the love affair between the two leads simply not credible; it had no traction. One couldn't imagine happening today what the Shearer character decides with respect to her new lover -- and we're seemingly so much more sophisticated these days. Ah, 'tis a queer, ironic world. A technical note: If the couple was on Lake Michigan when the storm blew up, somebody needed to tell the author that there just ain't that many islands in the lake, and none within an easy row or swim. A little reminiscent of Puccini's opera "Manon Lescaut," the final scene of which takes place in the "Louisiana desert."

What's bad:

Clearly one of the worst re-writes of a Broadway play for the screen. Sherwood would have been better off to have started over or to have left the original alone, one of the two. We wind up with two plays, "Omaha" and "The Alps", grafted onto one another and uneasily co- existing.

Shearer is mostly a bad actress -- and frankly not a terribly pretty one either -- who did some okay work well before this movie. One lives for those moments when she gets a kind of vulnerable smile on her face, at which times she's fairly fetching, but otherwise, ick. In one of her final lines, she extends her arms out and in the air. A good high-school drama coach could have told her that was over-acting and to cut it out.

Gable's character, oblivious to the war and its effects, is an obvious foil to Burgess Meredith's character, a pacifist committed to ending war, but the two never really engage in the urgent dialog, and the audience is left hanging, especially when Meredith's harangue about people watching entertainment while other people die is left unanswered. That's why the point of the film is in tatters.

What's good:

In such an ambitious film, the product can't help but score the occasional point. Did anybody notice the one-legged soldier returning from the World War I in an early scene? It must have given the audiences of the time a little pause., and it does set up the more profound comments about war later in the film. I also loved the way we could look down on the airfield from the hotel, as if the planes were little ants marching along, and people in the hotel were little gods watching them. Point is, everyone will have his own favorite images and moments.

So watch this film if you wish, but just understand its severe limitations.

Personally, I prefer "The Dawn Patrol." In "The Eagle and the Hawk" the acting is less compelling, the dialog is more forced and more melodramatic, the aerial dogfight scenes are less convincingly edited (but there are some dandy shots too). You never know quite when the March character is going to blow up, but you do know it'll be sooner or later. I give Cary Grant's performance higher marks than most of the other reviewers do; his ambiguities feel as if they are sincerely wrought, and he comes and goes like a Bodishatva throughout the film. Carole Lombard is a knockout and the right choice for the Beautiful Lady; I appreciated her efforts to make her minor character a memorable one.

The 1923 "Scaramouche" has all the elements of an epic film saga -- intricate and plausible sets and costumes, clearly drawn characters, ever more intense pacing -- but it just failed to catch fire for me. Maybe it's the way it makes no pretense of being anything but a big bundle of melodramatic clichés wrapped in a too-transparent plot. Too bad; it sure had potential. If you can see the Turner Classic Movie version, with the new score by Jeff Silverman, do so. It's how film scores should be created for silent pictures like these, absolutely in sync with the action but not slavishly commenting on every little detail. Usually it's a backhanded compliment to say that one finds one is losing oneself in the movie and not paying any attention to the score, but in this case, believe me, it's the mark of a resounding success.

Let's face it, as a movie, this is not persuasive. The principles of enunciating for the stage simply overwhelm the intimate sonics that even this incredibly early talkie were capable of producing. Almost immediately, subsequent movie directors understood the difference between stage and screen and made the corrections. Still, it's hard to believe that some of these scenes could not have been re-shot with more natural acting, once they saw the rushes. (I'm thinking they simply didn't think the delivery of lines would be that important in talkies. "Hey, they're talking! Ain't that enough?")

The music is another matter. Yes, this is not jazz as the revisionist historians would have us understand it (i.e., a largely black phenomenon, with only the most perceptive whites getting it). But it's a mere 30 years from the Gay 90s (that's 1890's) song revolution, and the tug of the sentimental ditty still reached out to 1929 the way early rock still has its effect on rock in the new millennium. Don't judge it harshly. Music like this was an important bridge to the wider American public's tolerance, then acceptance, and finally love of what we now think of as a more pure form of jazz.

Marie Dressler, born 5 years after the end of the Civil War, turns in a stunning performance. All the faces she makes while pushing away the maid's efforts to use smelling salts on her -- pure virtuosity, all done in the blink of an eye. But she can't save the movie entirely. All those shots of wooden Rudy and his entourage -- I've seen more life in the Petrified Forest.

Cinemax played this movie on their High Definition channel a while back, and I'm hoping there will be more earlier movies available on High Def channels in the future. Unfortunately, it wasn't the best movie to judge the concept by. "The Fly" comes from a period in Hollywood which, to be kind, was something less than inspiring. They filmed it in color, so guess what, there's lots of gratuitous color in most shots. They overplayed the meager special effects of the "mad scientist" laboratory, showing again and again those jazzy multi-colored neon lights. Most of the dialog will put you in a permanent state of snooze. And its "Leave It To Beaver" family life will have you moaning in disbelief. Montreal? Don't make me laugh. Okay, you made me laugh. Sure it had some scary moments and a few bizarre ones (why do you think I gave it a "four" instead of a "one"?). But nothing really could save it (except perhaps its die-hard fans) from that Great Leveler of the Fifties -- Hollywood production values in all their mediocre glory. High Def couldn't save it, that's for sure.

(1) Execrable acting, so singularly bad at times it is breathtaking. (2) You can never get away from the film's terminal artsiness. That lengthy scene of a joyful procession where the camera jerks from one participant to the next -- self-indulgent hokum. (3) Enough with the ethnic travelogue crap, okay? How about some, I dunno, PLOT maybe instead. I know, I know: It would not be the megalomaniacal Parajanov then... (4) The overuse of the hand-held camera is so -- yesterday. (5) Quick, somebody find an editor! This man gives us every frame of every scene he shoots, good or bad. Visconti in Hell. (6) Ever heard of an interesting camera angle? (Hint: Not front-and-center and dead-on all the time.) (7) If you're going to kill somebody, do it on-screen. If you're going to show two people copulating, do it on-screen. Get HONEST, that's all I ask. (8) At the end of a film, aren't you supposed to care about the protagonist? Not I. (9) Concentrate. Stay focused. What are you trying to say? (10) How do I get my hour and 39 minutes back? Gone forever.

Military medicine -- it's a breed apart from most other medical practice in gore, urgency, and sheer intensity. That's the message this film conveys. That and the need to train up doctors and nurses who are ready, willing, and able to deal with the stress. Do your Harvard doctors train to handle a mass casualty event in the dark of night, under fire? Thought not. As a movie, the documentary succeeds (obviously) in holding your interest throughout. You will find yourself very often having to wipe away tears so you can keep watching. I took one star off because the movie doesn't build to some kind of climactic visionary ending that lifts you out of your seat. But maybe that's the point: These docs perform like this day in and day out, and the only release worth talking about is the release of the wounded soldier back into a society that we only hope will appropriately honor him or her for their sacrifice. Veteran Director Sanders' sure hand in constructing this documentary is evident in every frame.

You know the minute you read the credit that comes all by itself very early in the movie -- "The return to the screen of / Susan Peters" -- that this film will be her de facto magnum opus, her masterwork. You are therefore not surprised when the the camera lingers time and again on Peters, left hand contracting like a sinister claw, facial expressions that keep hovering from neutral to grimly pleased with her own successful manipulations to horrified that plans have gone awry. That's why the other characters can only make so much of an impression. The opening scene of the arrival of the new secretary promises much of that woman, but by the end of the film she is reduced to a blank stare while stroking an errant child's hair. What do you call character development that goes backwards -- deconstruction? Technically too, it seems all the effort went into making the Peters character look striking. Could they really not have bothered to re-record the music of the finale when they surely realized it was too distorted to be pleasant, not to mention effective? Who cares, so long as we get the shots with the lady in the wheelchair right. Rather crudely put, but think about it.

Thanks to Criterion Collection for making a sparkling fresh print of this film available on DVD. Sven Nykvist's cinematography is seen as excellent as ever, especially those brooding cloudy skies. The story moves along nicely, and Bergman's women are clearly their own people (most of the time anyway). The tawdry lives of circus folk is a film cliché, but the characters do live and breathe in this movie rather more completely than we could have hoped. Special attention should be paid to the music of Swedish Modernist composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl. Those punching dissonant chords at the beginning of the film are not unlike much of his music for the outer-space opera he wrote, "Aniara." There is a recording of that work, but it's hard to come by. But you can try to find his Symphony No. 3, "Facetter", and you'll be delighted by how it grows on you. Nevertheless, Bergman pretty much left Blomdahl behind in his subsequent work, and you can see why: Much of it doesn't really fit, which is something you can say about a lot of famous composers who try their hand at film music.

Sorry, I have to align myself with those few other reviewers who found the movie, well, trite. Not that it didn't have its moments -- that particularly riveting scene, for instance, where Norma sits in DeMille's chair and a stagehand acquaintance puts a spotlight on her and people begin crowding around her, how spooky can you get? But by and large, Gloria Swanson hams up her lines to the point where she becomes a TV skit caricature (only this skit goes on way too long), Holden runs his lines off too fast, and von Stroheim mumbles all his lines indifferently (I picture him saying to himself, "Here I am, the genius who directed 'Greed', and what am I doing today??"). Let's face it, folks, this is the kind of claptrap that made the revolution in film-making some 20 years later so necessary, films like "The French Connection" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" sweeping away the cobwebs of crass melodramas like "Sunset Boulevard" and never looking back. Tell me I'm wrong.

I just finished watching the TCM 4-hour version I recorded (via DVR) a while back, and I believe the 2 1/4-hour version is probably superior. Let's face it folks: A bunch of stills added to an otherwise moving picture does not a complete moving picture make (although I did get used to it after an hour or so). Plus the 4-hour version is simply one long slog.

Why is this version -- or ANY version -- so long? Well, I think the director is just in love with himself and can't bear to crop a 10-second shot of McTeague down to 6 seconds. If you do that enough over a period of 9 hours -- if you allow every frame to be retained in the editing process -- you wind up with a movie that is more ego-driven than good-sense driven. How many times do you need to shout at the screen, "Okay, Erich, we GET it!" before you realize that the much-maligned studio executives might just have been right? The exception proves the rule when you do occasionally witness a genuinely well-cut sequence and are understandably riveted by it. Pacing is everything, but in this case even the studio hacks couldn't completely excise the excess baggage.

One positive comment about the TCM 4-hour version: I'm often highly critical of music soundtracks added 75 years later that are pure hokum. This one however, composed by Robert Israel and performed by the Moravian Symphony Orchestra, is mostly excellent, and I'd recommend anyone watch this version just to see how successfully it can be done. It sure made the long hard slog through the picture a whole heck of a lot easier!

By the time King Vidor directed this "Billy the Kid," he already had 36 movies under his belt (most of them silent), so it's weird that the movie seems so arbitrarily thrown together. Brutality and tenderness each try to crowd the other out. Somebody dies, and minutes later everyone's smiling again. I think the Western/Cowboy genre was still developing in Hollywood at the time (even after all those silent Westerns), and the addition of sound just threw another monkey wrench into the works. Nevertheless, you can tick off all the Western conventions and clichés as the film unfolds; they're all there. But it's like they're on steroids or something -- you never know when they're going to take on a life of their own. They just don't add up. I'm tempted to give this movie an "8" rating just for its consummate strangeness, but I think a "6" is probably a fairer assessment.

What makes this movie such a wretched experience to sit through is that the director obviously hates music, or at least hates the musicians and music lovers who people the profession. Why else would he keep interrupting perfectly good musical performances with buzzers, inane, insipid voiceovers, and stupid visuals -- and a plot that moves, well, nowhere? If you happen to like music, as I do, and not just think of it as a background part of your life, you're sure to be thoroughly annoyed by this idiotic outing. There ARE good Canadian movies out there, but this isn't one of them. One of the two stars I've given it is for the interesting use of faux disintegrating film black-and-white images throughout (if it were furniture, we'd called it stressed), but that by no means could save this dud.

The music for "The Plow that Brioke the Plains" was written by Virgil Thompson, who later became a classical music critic (and a very articulate and provocative one) for the New York Herold Tribune in the middle of the 20th Century. The score incorporated popular melodies, cowboy songs (including one that mega-composer Aaron Copland would also use), and what-have-you in a pastiche that somehow works, at least for the film. It's fairly obvious (to anyone who has spent a lot of time listening to American classical music of that time) that Thompson influenced others even as he was influenced by them. It's a peculiarly American style, with a lilt all its own and a humor that can creep up on you.

The rest of the film, unfortunately, hasn't aged all that well. It's a bit like finding, in a musty old library, a promising monograph on the history of a city or a region written by someone in town who thought he had a gift for such things, only to find adolescent, unsupportable, and insufferable platitudes and a dearth of much-needed facts. And zero -- count 'em, zero! -- specific stories that could have warmed up the narrative, even a little bit. Yuck.

As we watch the Twentieth Century disappear in our wake, we're going to find films like this more and more precious. I mean, can you imagine? -- Here's a film that takes the airship absolutely seriously as an equal partner with the airplane. Here's a film that shows you basically how an airship was constructed and what it looked like inside, and all that as part of the plot! And if you're going to interrupt the main plot with a soap opera, who better to put in front of your eyes than the beautiful Fay Wray? And what a great way to get out of the romantic sub-plot's basic dilemma -- nice, clean, and fast. All things considered, a more than satisfying way to spend an evening.

Much like "Striptease" (Demi Moore's film about a pole artist who must hide her true occupation to retain custody after a messy divorce), "Illegal" is about a mother who turns to running a gambling house in order to be able to afford to raise her children properly from a distance. But there are no clear signals from writers or director as to whether this was an ultimately wise choice, and so the moral message -- let alone the underlying sense of the plot -- remains largely ambiguous on the screen. The main character has a heart of gold, so why must she suffer her partial tragedy?

There is also a rather flawed construction in the execution of the film: The last three or four scenes are perfunctory to the point of denying a proper catharsis with the characters, for whom you wouldn't mind rooting a bit more. One is left with the impression, for instance, that the younger daughter's relationship with the gentleman is nothing more than a piece of good luck. The concluding scene, while perfectly satisfactory in its own way, could have been enhanced with more searching, meaning-of-life-type dialog.

In sum, a promising story, but too summarily dispatched.

Kudos to writers Gordon Wellesley and Brock Williams for supplying director Walter Forde with an unusually good comic screenplay. Yes, that's right -- I liked it. It reminded me of the Mozartean comic operas that go round and round in circles like a dog chasing its tail. After awhile you simply can't keep up with the implications of each of the plot's many twists and turns. But that's the verdict of the lazy spoon-fed audiences of today. The sharper audiences of Mozart's time had no trouble keeping up. What a refreshing bit of fun it was! The suave robber (in this case played scintillatingly by Oliver Wakefield) may be the cliché of clichés, but it's always a good time. The married woman (Anne Crawford) who gets caught up in the intrigue and displays second thoughts about her husband (the character goes back at least as far as Mrs. Ford in Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor") is here bestowed a decently delicious amount of ambiguity. Only the husband (Donald Stewart) seems a bit wooden. And the second tier characters are also as masterfully drawn as many in Shakespeare.

There are more famous Hollywood comedies of this type that get far more attention and aren't half as good as this little gem. My humble suggestion: Sit back and enjoy it!

Responding to Alison's request for the name of the Shostakovich piece played, it is his Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Opus 67. It's Shostakovich in rare "Jewish" mode (he was not Jewish, but when he used Jewish idioms it was usually to commemorate a Jewish friend). I have a recording of it played by the Beaux Arts Trio, and it's very fine. And it's 24 minutes long, not the 2 minute excerpt played in the Radio France concert in the movie. Sadly, and for no reason I can detect, the composer of the film's incidental music found it necessary to intrude and impose his "talents" on this and other established classics, rendering the effect of the Bach, Schubert, and Shostakovich pieces fairly impotent. Not this guy's finest hour, by any means.

Oh, and the equally brief excerpt of a Schubert Piano Trio played for the American in the movie -- that's one of two he wrote in his maturity, and the two are easily found recorded by many artists. Two recommended recordings are the Stern-Rose-Istomin Trio and again the Beaux Arts Trio.

Although a bad page turner can be deadly during a concert, the performer really ought to know the piece well enough to be able to play through a page break up to the next opportunity to turn the page oneself. That is the central disconnect with real life that this movie displays. And if the pianist is so shell-shocked from her accident that she gets stage fright so easily, she really would not be able to last very long on the concert circuit in any event. In that respect, Melanie actually did Ariane a big favor by doing what she did. So there's lots to puzzle about in this movie, things that strike directly at the heart of characters' motivations and so weaken the story.

Robert Osborne, in introducing this movie to the Turner Classic Movie audience for the first time tonight, says that Columbia had to sit on the movie for about 6 months in order to let the similarly-plotted "Panic in the Streets" play out and leave the theaters. What we have then is a gritty, somewhat newsreel sounding (and looking) film whose narrator walks us through all the ironies of modern urban epidemiology. Worth noting, though, are the few scenes out in the street where the tragic couple lives. There's just enough street noise and confusion to make the scenes as claustrophobic as possible, while still being somehow life-affirming. Otherwise, it's a fine B noir plot with a lot of character and muscle, and cinematography to take off your hat to. Not to mention that hot kid sister -- hubba, hubba!

If you're looking for directorial distinctiveness (because the film was directed by the great Michael Powell), you'll be hard pressed to find much of it in this movie. Powell simply moves the story along deftly, managing the many dead ends and fresh starts in the plot so that they all seem quite natural. The plot itself is tepid by today's standards (and possibly also by the standards of the time). Certainly the shock value of a woman's role in the death of a moneylender is minimal. Some of the acting is a bit over-the-top, but when the characters appear at their most natural in their day-to-day working-stiff lives, they shine the most. Overall, as satisfying as the experience was, I couldn't give this film more than six stars.