Old Yeller (1957)

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, a rancher struggles to support his wife and two sons. While he is away on a cattle deal, the ranch is visited by a stray yellow (or "yeller") dog. The younger son adopts it and soon it becomes very attached to the family.

A simple story, and yet it feels true-to-life in its evocation of the rural milieu. Not much to say here, except to express my dismay at so much nonsense that has been written about this film. Perhaps urban folks just don't connect (but then I'm urban too, so go figure). One of the things that puzzled me most was a recurring condemnation of the younger boy as an "insufferable" character, this leading, somehow, to a condemnation of the film.

Rating: 51

The Sons of Katie Elder (1965)

Four brothers who were leading separate lives return to their hometown to attend their mother's funeral. They find that their old ranch is no longer theirs, and start investigating possible foul play.

Western which is long in length but short in plausibility (see the New York Times review by Howard Thompson; also the Goofs section on IMDB, under Continuity). The basic point of the film is to get the brothers to finally act as such, no matter how ad hoc the odds they face are. Anyway, it is a watchable film, with a reasonably interesting premise and a reasonably coherent plot.

Watched it in pan-and-scan.

Rating: 46

Secret Beyond the Door... (1947)

Second viewing; first: August 19,1994.

A woman marries and notices some strange quirks of her new husband; also, some rumors about his first wife's death make her even more suspicious.

The copy I saw was one which opens with the Republic Pictures logo. At 1 hour 19 minutes into the film, after the line:
(Mark) "Exhibit A. What can I answer when I'm asked if the murder was premeditated?",
it cuts to:
(Maid) "Oh, Mr Mark, you didn't answer."
In between them, the footage containing the following lines, which I got from a subtitles file available on the Web, was cut:
*begin quote*
01:19:59,098 -- 01:20:02,467
Premeditated? I planned it all my life.
01:20:03,311 -- 01:20:07,889
The record shows that you met your wife only this spring in Mexico.
01:20:08,149 -- 01:20:13,689
Yes. I loved her very much and, somehow...
01:20:14,864 -- 01:20:18,862
I felt as though I had been searching for her all my life.
01:20:19,160 -- 01:20:21,651
- To kill her!
- No, I...
01:20:22,080 -- 01:20:24,286
That... came later.
01:20:25,041 -- 01:20:28,873
There is a rumour that you also killed your first wife, Eleanor.
01:20:31,131 -- 01:20:36,291
No. I blamed myself - that's why I built the room.
01:20:37,470 -- 01:20:43,425
She died because I didn't love her - and maybe, unconsciously,
01:20:43,643 -- 01:20:50,476
I wanted her to die, but no man is responsible for his unconscious thoughts.
01:20:51,651 -- 01:20:54,985
If you aren't responsible for your thoughts, who is?
01:20:55,530 -- 01:21:00,489
A man thinks according to the life he's led. All my life I was dominated by women.
01:21:00,786 -- 01:21:05,946
As a child, by my mother. When she left me - when she died -
01:21:06,375 -- 01:21:08,996
by Caroline and by Eleanor...
01:21:09,378 -- 01:21:11,620
I never lived a life of my own
01:21:12,548 -- 01:21:17,755
and I may have thought of... but you can't try a man for his thoughts!
01:21:18,095 -- 01:21:20,052
- But for the consequences of his thoughts.
01:21:20,973 -- 01:21:23,179
I didn't kill Eleanor.
01:21:23,434 -- 01:21:26,269
But you did kill your wife, Celia.
01:21:31,984 -- 01:21:33,395
I tried not to kill!
01:21:44,038 -- 01:21:50,290
The first time, in Mexico, I ran away from her. The impulse to kill faded.
01:21:50,545 -- 01:21:55,456
I thought I'd dreamed it. Then, when she met me at the station
01:21:55,758 -- 01:22:01,678
at Levender Falls, I felt a deep, gentle kind of love.
01:22:02,932 -- 01:22:08,093
Until... I don't know what it was...
01:22:08,355 -- 01:22:11,973
it swept over me like a haze... she became someone else,
01:22:12,317 -- 01:22:14,025
someone I had to kill.
01:22:15,821 -- 01:22:18,775
I fought it down, over and over again.
01:22:20,242 -- 01:22:24,192
There are dark forces in this world. We're, all of us, children of Cain,
01:22:24,329 -- 01:22:26,571
we've - all of us - once thought of murder.
01:22:29,126 -- 01:22:34,998
I can't help myself. I love her but, so help me God,
01:22:35,340 -- 01:22:38,792
if Celia were here, I'd still have to kill her.
*end quote*

God help us with watching old movies on cable... Anyway, I later watched the missing footage on YouTube. The above sequence features Mark on an imaginary trial where he is the defendant being questioned by a prosecutor who is his double. Now regarding the film: it has some striking imagery, and a nightmarish atmosphere, which sort of make up for the somewhat absurd plot. In the right mood, one could enjoy its extravagant notions (in part derived from Bluebeard), I think (I did, to some extent).

Rating: 51 (down from 57)

The Adventures of Gerard (1970)

Based on the short story collection The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, by Arthur Conan Doyle, first published in 1896.

Set in Spain during the Napoleonic wars, a series of comical adventures involving a vain and not very bright Hussar of the French army. He is assigned with delivering a message to a French officer who is trying to capture a castle, and gets involved with a beautiful Spanish woman.

Farcical comedy. Wikipedia, talking about the literary source, describes the movie well:

"Conan Doyle, in making his hero a vain, and often rather uncomprehending, Frenchman, was able to satirise both the stereotypical English view of the French and – by presenting them from Gerard's baffled point of view – English manners and attitudes."

Too bad it does not work so well in the movie. The humor comes off awkward and unfunny, even though the main actor does what he can to lend some dignity to it.

Rating: 40

La belle et la bête (1946)

ATTENTION! Mean spoiler below!

Second viewing (1st on April 12, 1992).

English title: Beauty and the Beast

Based on the short story by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont (1st pub. 1756), in turn an adaptation of a longer narrative work by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (1st pub. 1740), which in turn was based on a traditional fairy tale.

I must be excused, yet again, for not being able of new insights about this film. Most has already been said, and often brilliantly so. Let me just say that it is a felicitous work, in which nothing seems to go wrong, and some things go very right. There is one thing, however, that bothers, or rather, intrigues me, and that is the ending. I did not read many reviews, therefore I do not know whether anyone had the same reaction as I did. Most of what I did read tended to emphasize the allegorical aspect of the story and thus of the ending. I in turn, while agreeing with this interpretation, cannot avoid looking also to the straight facts that happen, namely that Avenant is killed and robbed of his appearance, a fact that does not make the Beast a model of virtue; the fact that Beauty is OK with this is a bit shocking, and does not make her a paragon of morality either. I guess, as they say, and I have quoted just the other day, all is fair in love and war.

Rating: 73 (up from 70)

Love Before Breakfast (1936)

A woman is in a relationship with an executive, and is coveted by a capitalist; the latter buys the company at which the former works, and assigns him a position in another country.

Minor comedy, which tackles some interesting aspects of the female psyche. In this instance, it is implicitly argued that women resent being the weaker party in a relationship, and therefore crave at the very least the illusion of power. At one point she says that "this isn’t going to be any Taming of the Shrew", yet the film is an update of sorts of that story. The last scene is funny, perhaps enough so to justify a viewing of the film, which is short by our present standards.

Rating: 33

The Absent-Minded Professor (1961)

A college professor is working on a research at his laboratory and forgets about his wedding, which causes his fiancee to break up with him. Nevertheless, his research has not been in vain: he comes up with a revolutionary material which bounces with ever-increasing amplitude.

While the bulk of this film did not really please me a great deal, I found the first act, which one could make to end right after the discovery of flubber on the "morning after" at the lab, very good. The remainder of the movie does not add anything that one cannot see coming, and is at times rather dull. The two complementary thematic threads (considering the film in its entirety) seem to be (1) the revelation of the power of the fiancee's feelings, and (2) the demonstration of the old adage that says all is fair in love and war. Reasoning in evolutionary terms, it may strike one as advantageous that some women are clueless when it comes to science, but tend to show sympathy towards the underdog scientist: the odds are he will become a millionaire. The character who wants to close the college to open a supermarket is an illustration of the old tale about the chicken with golden eggs.

Rating: 51

In Search of the Castaways (1962)

Based on the novel Les enfants du capitaine Grant, by Jules Verne, first published serially between 1865 and 1867.

Captain Grant goes missing at sea, leaving two children in England. An elderly man (IMDB: "a scientist") contacts them saying he has found a message in a bottle with their father's whereabouts, only in a truncated text. With the help of a rich man (IMDB: "a shipping company owner") and his son, they all go on an expedition in search of the missing captain.

This is a fairly absorbing and inventive film, which favors childishness in the form of cartoon-like action sequences, caricature, and songs. Perhaps it would not be too unreasonable to see this as one more instance on the theme of Fatherhood, a recurring one in Western literature and movies until not so long ago.

I may have seen a cut version. The film starts already showing the French guy and the two kids trying to break in at the ship owner's party; an IMDB user says there is a version which includes initial scenes where the scientist finds the bottle and contacts the children.

Rating: 50

Margie (1946)

HUGE spoilers below; if you mind it, go away.

Second viewing; first: September 23, 1990.

The life of an adolescent girl living in a small town in 1928 America. She has a crush on her French teacher and her "bloomers" keep falling.

Very funny, and occasionally lyrical, chronicle of adolescence. Reviewer Andrew Prasagam provides the names of the three short stories on which it was based in his excellent review. The author is My Sister Eileen's sister, whose husband gets credit in the movie as well. Screenwriting was assigned to a then-famous playwright who, in the Internet Movie Database staff's words, was "best known as the creator of the archetypal American teen, Corliss Archer, introduced in his 1943 Broadway play Kiss and Tell" (this probably qualified him for this job better than anyone else). The movie's central motif of underwear trouble is obviously charged with psychoanalytic symbolism. Critic Dale Thomajan, in a very good review named "The Best High School Movie", printed in Film Comment in July 1992 (and excerpted from his book "From Cyd Charisse to Psycho"), which I accessed at a University computer (from a database named ProQuest, it seems), after describing how Margie's teacher retrieves and later returns Margie's fallen underwear, observes: "This, by the way, is all more innocent than it sounds, though perhaps less innocent than it was intended to be." He is right, of course, and I would add that this sentence is perfect to define the film as a whole. The central theme of the movie is the concept of "father figure". Here we have a girl who does not have a mother (and not once seems to miss one), and whose father is not much of a father figure (although she of course craves for as much of him as she can get). Her grandmother, who raised Margie practically on her own, is as masculine a figure as one can expect from a woman; she is, in the words of a character, "outspoken", was a suffragette, and wants Margie to be president of the U.S.A. So Margie is stuck with a feminine man and a masculine woman, neither of whom can provide her with the father figure she needs. Enter her French teacher. Of course, the script makes it clear he is "only a few years older than her", but there is no mistake about his fatherly attitude towards her. The eventual outcome is only logical. I think that if this film seems mildly disturbing today it is because it is hard for us living in our present-day society to believe that once there was one in which the level of trust was so high. This trust had solid foundations which made sure that things would never go outside acceptable standards of behavior. And in 1946, it is plausible that things seemed pretty unchanged in that regard, and yet they were on the brink of falling apart. Of course, in other respects, 1928 was also on the brink of falling apart, as the film ironically implies by making one of the debaters reference American prosperity in an all too confident tone. The film has numerous anthological one-liners, some of which Mr. Thomajan cites in his review. He refrains from printing his favorite one, out of consideration for future viewers. Having forewarned readers on top of this post, I will have no such qualms. Here's Mr. Thomajan favorite spoken line (preceded by some earlier ones on which it depends for context):

(Margie dances with her French teacher)
Girl: Look, Marybelle. Margie is doing all right!
Marybelle: Oh, he's just taking pity on her.
Girl: Wish he'd take pity on me.
(Johnny takes Margie from her French teacher, and starts dancing with her)
Girl (to Marybelle): Isn't that nice? Now Johnny is taking pity on her too.

Mr. Thomajan also expresses his puzzlement at this film's "relative lack of reputation". I think all films dealing with adolescence are viewed as minor. The reasons are not that hard to fathom, though.

Rating: 76 (up from 69)

Paths of Glory (1957)

Second viewing (first: February 21, 1991).

Based on the novel by Humphrey Cobb, first published in 1935.

During World War One, an unfeasible operation ordered by power-greedy generals ends in failure, and to save face a few soldiers are sentenced to death as an example for the others.

Splendid military drama, of topical relevance in this centennial year of the beginning of the First World War. There is a surplus of critical opinion about this movie, which makes my contribution really unnecessary. Perhaps the most interesting analysis is contained in this sentence from Christopher Mulrooney's brief review: "The point, which rather escaped young Truffaut the critic, is that cowardice and contempt and cant sort well together indeed and make a blinding apparatus that is only with difficulty seen through, especially under wartime conditions." Col. Dax stands out as the moral axis of the movie; you can't really argue for or against his plausibility as a character: he serves a dramatic purpose, and that is all. Should the film have Col. Dax accept the promotion in the end, the "blinding apparatus" would have been perfect. But the box office would suffer, perhaps.

Rating: 87 (up from 74)

4 for Texas (1963)

A man who is a sort of protection racketeer in Galveston, Texas, is carrying a bag full of money in a stagecoach, which is chased by bandits and eventually toppled. Another passenger, a gunman, steals the money. The robbed man tries to recover it, but the robber deposits it in a bank and uses it to renovate a riverboat in order to make it into a casino in partnership with a beautiful blonde.

I really cannot vouch for the accuracy of the above synopsis, as the film does not make clarity one of its priorities, and internet accounts vary. At any rate, this is definitely not a good film, although on a scene-by-scene basis it does have a certain amount of entertainment value. The most curious thing about it is the absolutely negative depiction of a banker, and by extension of banking in general, coming from a director (and co-writer) who had relatives in that business, who disinherited him on account of his dropping out of college to pursue his cinematic career.

Rating: 35

Touch of Evil (1958)

Third viewing (first: May 01, 1991; second: May 20, 1996).
First viewing of the restored version.

The murder of a wealthy man and his mistress near the American-Mexican border puts a veteran policeman with little regard for proper incriminating procedure in conflict with a Mexican policeman who happens to be in the neighborhood on his honeymoon.

A superb film, which perhaps, in some indirect manner, is of some topical relevance in view of the present situation at the U.S.A.-Mexico border. Unfortunately for this blog, much has been written about Touch of Evil, ruling out any possibility for a relevant contribution from me. I will only note two things of mostly subjective nature. One: perhaps on account of this being my third viewing (although I could remember very little of it from my previous ones), or as a result of the restauration improvements, in my experience the plot was not hard to follow, nor in any way deliberately confusing. Two: although it is for the most part well filmed, I did get a little (just a little) sick of the tilted-up shots, at some point along the movie. I will leave it at that, and direct you to two pieces of criticism which I liked (not that I have read many others). One is Ebert's intelligent and informative review. The other is anonymous and was written for TV Guide. Although it contains some minor inaccuracies, no other review (Ebert's included) I came across gives as good an idea of what the movie is really like.

Rating: 91 (unchanged)

No Time for Love (1943)

A woman photographer working for a magazine takes an assignment to record the work on a subway tunnel under construction. She gets acquainted with one of the workers and establishes a love-hate relationship with the guy.

Basically a piece of fluff, but boy is it well-made. Everything is impressive in this production, from the polished dialogue to the spectacular studio-made sequences in the underground tunnel. The plot is dismally implausible, what with the blue-collar male protagonist revealing himself as an accomplished engineer. To be fair, it has a healthy take on the psychology of the sexes, something which has become virtually extinct in recent times.

Rating: 38

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982)

Second viewing; I first saw it in 1982 or 1983.

A weekend in the country with three couples, at the house of one of them, in the first or second decade of the 20th century. Andrew, the host, is a financial advisor with a passion for mechanical inventions, who is going through a crisis in his marriage to Adrian. One of the guests is her cousin Leopold, an elderly professor about to get married to a much younger woman, Andrew's former flame Ariel. Andrew's best friend Maxwell, a doctor and a womanizer, comes with Dulcy, a nurse of liberal mores.

Evenly good comedy, which however failed to impress me as much as it did on my first viewing. There isn't anything in particular which I feel deserves to be criticized, I just feel its achievements are of a more modest dimension than I earlier thought. One thing that I might criticize is the excess of dialogue, although I am not sure this is the film's main problem. Also problematic could be the quality of some of the dialogue, which is wit for wit's sake. Maybe the plot's somewhat derivative nature is also a down side. Anyway, while I am trying hard to justify my somewhat diminished enthusiasm, I do not want to obscure the fact that I like the film, which is consistently intelligent and funny, and well acted too. The theme is the finding of love, and the complementary roles of opportunity and individual receptiveness to it, or something like that.

Rating: 68 (down from 73)

Hôtel du Nord (1938)

Based on the novel by Eugène Dabit, first published in 1929.

Two sweethearts without money make a suicide pact. They check in at the titular hotel, where they intend to go through with it. In the dining room the guests are celebrating the first communion of a policeman's daughter. Several characters are introduced; prominent amongst them are a prostitute and her lover; comic relief is provided by a cuckold and his wife. During the night, a shot is heard: it is the suicide couple's plan being put into action. The prostitute's lover rushes to the young sweethearts's room, and breaks in...

This drama is not without interest, mainly for unfolding a possible outcome of a failed suicide pact, which it does with a reasonable amount of intelligence. The way the scope of the film is enlarged to bring in an assortment of characters of variable relevance to the main plot is also intelligently done. But this is not a film which made my heart beat faster; its essential artificiality is seldom dispelled, even when minor characters turn it into a slice-of-life display. The author of the source novel was a short-lived socialist who probably intended to bring into focus some of the working-class and lumpenproletariat's problems and idiosyncrasies. His novel came out the same year of Baum's Grand Hotel, which I imagine is the rich people's counterpart of it.

If you can guess which of the above was in this movie, you win a kiss (from your girlfriend).

Rating: 54

The Delinquents (1957)

A couple of teenage sweethearts get involved with a teenage gang.

Youth drama, very low-budget yet reasonably well-made. It's watchable yet hard to take too seriously. And I have a very bad reaction when I hear the kind of preaching that begins and ends the picture.

Rating: 33

No Way Out (1950)

A black doctor works on two brothers who were injured after an attempted robbery of a gas station, and one of them dies shortly after receiving an injection applied by him. The surviving brother blames the doctor for it.

Interesting, yet endlessly talky, drama. It exemplifies an argument constantly raised by opponents of multiracial societies, that they corrode interpersonal trust. Whether this is a plausible argument or not is another matter, that I will not address here. As for the film, it is quite watchable, despite its already mentioned verbosity. Behind the obvious patient-mistrusts-doctor thematic axis, there is a parallel one, older doctor-mistrusts-younger doctor, which requires a little analysis to disclose, and which I have picked up from reading Christopher Mulrooney's observations. I will quote him in extenso, since it is short:
*quote* The theme is a variant continuing House of Strangers. The young Negro physician is almost a resident, he faces gross opposition.
This is the middle term, the summation is All About Eve.
Latter-day critics describe it as a film noir and disparage its deficiencies in that regard. *unquote*
I couldn't make any connnection to House of Strangers, because I barely remember it. As for All About Eve, after reading Mulrooney's notes I did see a connection, although I am not sure whether it has anything to do with what he talks about. All About Eve is about a renowned actress and an aspiring actress, No Way Out is about a renowned physician and an aspiring physician. In the former film, the younger is a threat to the older, and ends up usurping her place, so to speak. It is not inconceivable that a threat of this kind could be in place between the two doctors of No Way Out. In All About Eve, the older actress is unsuspecting, if I recall correctly (it's been a while since I've seen it). In No Way Out, the explicit occurrences signal a similar lack of suspicion. However, if you are into digging into the subterranean minds of movies (like I did in my previous blog entry), you might smell something funny. For instance, what if the hateful patient is just a projection of some part of the older doctor's mind? In Freudian jargon, he would be his Id. After all, it is conceivable that the older doctor is an ordinary human being who has fears and feels threatened (instead of the saint he outwardly appears to be). His fears might, for all we know, concern the younger doctor's excessive competence.

Rating: 51

Branded (1950)

Second viewing; the first one was on January 6, 2005.

According to IMDB, this film is based on the novel Montana Rides!, by Max Brand (as Evan Evans), first published in 1933. According to Wikipedia, it was based on Montana Rides Again, by the same author, first published in 1934.

A young man known as Choya, approached by an outlaw, agrees to his proposition to impersonate the son of a wealthy farmer, who disappeared when he was a child. The plan is to steal the farmer's fortune, I think, although the exact way they were going to do that is unclear to me right now. A mark is tattooed on Choya's shoulder, identical to the disappeared son's birthmark.

The nominal plot is juvenile-minded, mainly relying on a main character who just does not act like an ordinary person, but rather takes heroic decisions. This may become annoying for an unimaginative viewer (and I like to consider myself one, by temperament and even conviction) who will see in it just the piling up of wishful thinking and ad hoc solutions (in my first viewing I did precisely that). This film, however, makes it easy, even for me, to misread (in the Bloomian sense) the whole thing as an incest fantasy. More than one person have. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, whom I would not consider an imaginative viewer (but I may not know him well enough), has this revealing passage in his review: "But it seems that his [Choya's] purpose is confounded when the rancher's beautiful daughter throws her brand upon his heart, making brotherly deportment toward her clearly impossible." Notice two things: one, instead of "brotherly", an unimaginative viewer would have said "deceitful" or even "criminal"; two, he, perhaps out of wit, sheds some metaphorical light on the movie's title (nobody else I read has). Crowther still didn't like the film, though. Now consider Christopher Mulrooney's take: "Now, it should be clear that Keith and Calleia play the same role, and there is only one son, real or contrived, who has a mark on him." He has gone further than I could, adding a whole structure to the hallucination (note: Keith plays the villain who proposes the scheme to Choya, and Calleia plays a Mexican who has adopted the real son). More recent cinema has played upon these notions in an explicit manner: Performance (1970) has two characters who merge, or exchange places, in a very ambiguous manner. In The Other (1972) there are two characters who are actually one. In Lost Highway (1997) one character is morphed into someone else. In Fight Club (1999) it is the same scheme of The Other, basically.

Rating: 45 (up from 27)