Day 41: "Nothing Sacred"

Director: William Wellman 1937
Classic screwball comedy with Carole Lombard playing Hazel Flagg, a young Vermont woman dying of radium poisoning, or so she initially believes. Enter Fredric March as a bigtime New York reporter (are there any other kind?) who wants to make Lombard the toast of the Big Apple, as long as his paper gets all the exclusives. There's only one problem: Lombard has been misdiagnosed and she knows it. Still, she pretends she's sick and goes to New York. Complications, of course, ensue. Written by Ben Hecht (see Day 40: "Angels Over Broadway") with cynical digs at smalltown life, big city journalism and what was to become known as the Culture of Celebrity. Lombard is wonderful. March is a good-natured foil. Shot in early Technicolor, which may explain the sometimes static camerawork. A delightful film.
Remade in 1954 as "Living It Up" with Jerry Lewis playing Homer Flagg, Dean Martin his doctor and Janet Leigh the reporter.

Day 40: "Angels Over Broadway"

Directors: Ben Hecht, Lee Garmes 1940
The great Pauline Kael once said that about half of the most entertaining movies to come out of Hollywood were written by Ben Hecht. Here's a sample: "Scarface" (the original with Paul Muni), "Barbary Coast," "Viva Villa," "Wuthering Heights," "Kiss of Death" (the original--the one where Richard Widmark shoves an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs), "Spellbound," and one of Hitchcock's masterpieces, "Notorious." That's just a sprinkling of his credited work. But consider movies he worked uncredited: "Angels With Dirty Faces," "Gilda," "The Thing" (again, the original, the one that Howard Hawks directed but also didn't take credit), "Strangers on a Train," "The Shop Around the Corner," "Lifeboat," "Gilda" and a little number called "Gone With the Wind." The man was a writing machine--and let's not forget that he and Charles MacArthur wrote the play "The Front Page," which has been made into a movie at least four times (notably with a sex change for the lead in "His Girl Friday").
Hecht also directed seven films (four with MacArthur, two with Garmes). "Angels Over Broadway" is the only one I've seen; it's a strange film, nicely shot by co-director Garmes, with some memorable dialogue that at times borders on the purple. The characters are losers: a down-on-his-heels con man (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) , a lovely hoofer who can't find work (Rita Hayworth), a failed playwright (Thomas Mitchell) and a mousy embezzler (John Qualen). Their lives intersect for just one night; by dawn, they've learned a thing or two about themselves and humanity. Far from a masterpiece, there is something about this movie that stays with you, and it certainly intrigued me enough to search out Hecht's other directing efforts.
Reading recommendations: Hecht's autiobiography, "A Child of the Century" (in which, I suspect, he never lets the facts get in the way of a good story), and his last novel, also autobiographical, "Gaily, Gaily"--all about his roistering days as a young reporter in the wild era of Chicago journalism.

Day 39: "Bunny Lake Is Missing"

Director: Otto Preminger 1965
Two of my favorite movies are Preminger's "Laura" and "Anatomy of a Murder," and several others are first-rate entertainments ("Advise and Consent," "In Harm's Way"). Sadly, "Bunny Lake" should remain among the missing. An intriguing premise--a young American woman in London drops her four-year-old daughter off on her first day at pre-school, only to return a few hours later to discover no one ever saw the child. Carol Lynley plays the mom, Keir Dullea her brother, and Laurence Olivier a police inspector who suspects the child never existed. The movie seems to drift along. Olivier is wasted. Noel Coward plays a pervy landlord who claims to own the Marquis de Sade's whip. And Dullea appears catatonic at times. The ending is preposterous and a major letdown.
Andrew Sarris considers "Bunny Lake" one of Preminger's "four masterpieces of ambiguity and objectivity" (the others: "Laura," "Bonjour Tristesse" and "Advise and Consent"). I have the highest regard for Mr. Sarris, but if you're not in the mood for ambiguity and objectivity--if perhaps you just want to watch a good movie--"Bunny Lake" is not for you.
According to the IMDB, "Bunny Lake" may be remade with Reese Witherspoon. Why?

Day 38: "Major Dundee"

Director: Sam Peckinpah 1965
The day "The Wild Bunch" opened in 1969, a friend and I drove into The City (as we in Queens called Manhattan) to see it. This was before movies debuted in 2,500 theaters, before the homogenization of the multiplex. It was exciting to see a movie in The City, something that lifted us out of the mundane routine of life in Flushing. I remember heading into The City to see "Operation Petticoat" (at Radio City Music Hall, no less), "The Guns of Navarone," "Judgment at Nuremberg," "Goldfinger," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Ice Station Zebra" (hey, no one said they were all classics). The "Wild Bunch" review in that morning's New York Times described a movie I had to see right away. Maybe it's because I'm 54, but I just don't experience the same rush with movies today. Do I really need to see a three-hour video-game version of "King Kong" when the original remains a spectacular achievement that can still bring a tear to my eye?
"The Wild Bunch" didn't make me cry, but it stunned me. A brilliant film. If you've never seen it, please do so (you might want to wait post holidays. "It's a Wonderful Life" it's not). I've seen many Peckinpah films since, but never "Major Dundee," a movie Peckinpah disowned when released because of studio interference. This new DVD is an extended version with a much-needed new score and restored scenes. It's as close to Peckinpah's vision as we'll ever get.
"Dundee" may not be a classic, but it's now a fine movie. It's easy to forget how good Charlton Heston could be--and how often he was willing to play angry, flawed men (only Kirk Douglas comes to mind as an actor more willing to appear unsympathetic). Richard Harris is terrific as a Confederate officer--and former friend of Dundee--who serves with his fellow POWs under the Union flag as Dundee obsessively tracks Apaches. Peckinpah's command of the wide screen is in full evidence here, and there are many incredible shots. Plus a fine Peckinpahian supporting cast that includes two true greats: James Coburn and Warren Oates.

Day 37: "Black Angel"

Director: Roy William Neil 1946
My man Dan Duryea (see Day 24: "Winchester '73") in a modest noir based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich ("Rear Window"). For once, Duryea gets to play a decent guy, a boozy songwriter whose estranged wife has been murdered. A blackmail victim is convicted of the crime but his wife enlists Duryea to help her find the real killer. He falls in love with her, of course. Solid supporting cast: Peter Lorre, June Vincent, Broderick Crawford. Duryea's performance is strong, although the film doesn't take advantage of some of its more suspenseful set-ups. Still, it got me thinking about programming a mini-Duryea film festival. He was that good.

Day 36: "I Know Where I'm Going!"

Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger 1945
A wonderful movie, beautifully acted, written, directed, photographed and edited. Wendy Hiller plays a chic young woman engaged to one of the wealthiest men in the UK. She's to be married on an island off the Scottish coast where the older mogul has rented the laird's home. He's already ensconced on the island, and all she has to do is rendezvous with him there. But these are the Hebrides, and Hiller finds herself stranded on another island, unable to get to her destination because of a ferocious gale. She meets an array of eccentric-but-decent people, including a young man on leave from the Navy who happens to be laird of the island rented by Hiller's fiance. She falls in love with him, although she tries desperately to get away. Afterall, she knows where she's going--or does she?
Powell and Pressburger are responsible for some great films, their most famous collaboration "The Red Shoes." My favorite: "Black Narcissus," a gripping story set in a convent high in the Himalayas where some of the nuns are going insane. See it on a double bill with "I Know Where I'm Going!"

Day 35: "Closely Watched Trains"

Director: Jiri Menzel 1966
A tragi-comedy set in a Czech backwater during the waning days of WW ll. The main character is a young man apprenticing to become a platform guard at the local train station. His goals: do as little as possible and lose his virginity (not so easy since he has a problem with premature ejaculation). Although there are sightings of tired German soldiers and lectures from a minor Nazi bureaucrat, the war doesn't seem to be on anybody's mind--until the end. The film has a gentle touch as it focuses on sex, love, work--and one's duty during wartime.

Day 34: "Sabata"

Director: Frank Kramer (Gianfranco Parolini) 1969
Skip this if you have no interest in spaghetti westerns. But I've liked them since I saw the first Sergio Leone-Clint Eastwood collaboration, "A Fistful of Dollars." Just as there are wonderful samurai films not directed by Kurosawa, so are there terrific spaghetti westerns not directed by Leone (since we're on the topic, remember that "A Fistful of Dollars" is a rip-off of Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," which was inspired by Dashiell Hammett's great novel, "Red Harvest").
I enjoy lots of things about spaghettis: the nihilistic violence, the operatic dramaturgy, the bad dubbing, the vast Spanish vistas, and the often none-too-subtle critique of capitalism dished up by Marxist screenwriters. My favorite non-Leone is "The Big Gundown," a 1966 film starring Lee Van Cleef which sadly is not available on DVD. Mostly, though, I like them because they can be so entertaining--and so odd.
"Sabata" is a thoroughly enjoyable spaghetti. Van Cleef plays a gunfighter up against a band of thieves who stole $100,000. He quickly kills the robbers, then sets about blackmailing the businessman ringleader. There are acrobats, a man who plays a banjo that doubles as a rifle, and lots of guns going off with the ear-blasting cacophony of a Howitzer.
"Sabata" was the first of a trilogy, although the second fim, "Adios, Sabata," starred Yul Brynner, looking a lot like his character from "The Maganificent Seven," which as we all know was an American version of Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai." You gotta love pop culture.

Day 33: "The Browning Version"

Director: Anthony Asquith 1951
You could call this film "Good Riddance, Mr. Chips"--at least until the final scenes. Michael Redgrave is superb as the aloof, demanding classical scholar who is leaving a distinguished British boarding school after 18 years of teaching. His heart is weak, his wife unfaithful, and his colleagues refer to him as the "Himmler of the fifth level." But he cares about his students, no matter how much they revile him. Terrence Rattigan adapted his play. The movie is old-fashioned in the best sense of the term. The structure is tight, the characters clear, the dialogue true. Asquith's direction is crisp. There is nothing sentimental about the story. Watch Redgrave’s reaction to a gift from a student (it's the Robert Browning prose adaptation of "The Agamemnon"--hence the title). He is overwhelmed, yet fights to control his emotions. Then watch as his shrewish wife tells him the gift means nothing, that the boy is just brown-nosing. It's a lie yet it produces the pain she wishes to inflict. The supporting cast is terrific. And "The Browning Version" is a fine film.
Remade in 1994 with Albert Finney.

Day 32: "Detour"

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer 1945
Some people fondly recall the libraries of their youth, those majestic palaces groaning with great books and staffed by friendly, knowledgeable librarians who would let a special kid take out a literary (grown-up) novel now and then. Well, I wish that was part of my childhood, but it just wasn't so. What I had was Jack's candy store in the shadows of the Auburndale Long Island Rail Road station in Queens.
For those too young to imagine a candy store not selling boxes of fancy chocolates, let me describe Jack's: upfront were newspapers (at least nine dailies in the early 60s), magazines, comic books, candy (Hershey not Godiva), cigarettes. Beyond was a long counter where Jack would pour Cokes, egg creams, ice cream sodas, malteds. And opposite the counter were the paperbacks, most in metal racks that squeaked accusingly when you turned them to get a better look at a particularly racy cover. Still going strong were Gold Medal books, mostly original novels, most with suspense-mystery themes and all sporting variations of the same cover: scantily clad female and tough-looking male, smoldering glances, perhaps a smoking gun. Some fine writers made decent dough writing for Gold Medal (John D. MacDonald, Donald Hamilton, David Goodis, Peter Rabe--even Gore Vidal, using the pseudonym Cameron Kay). For me, the Gold Medals and other paperbacks represented a mysterious, dangerous, adult world of sin and betrayal (pretty accurate come to think of it).
So why this trip down memory lane? For starters, it's fun--at least for me. And I was reminded of those paperbacks when I watched "Detour."
Shot in six days on a sub-Poverty Row budget, this is one nasty film. Tom Neal plays a moody New York piano player of limited success who hitchhikes his way to LA to reunite with his girlfriend. Somewhere in Arizona a man picks him up, treats him to dinner--then dies inexplicably while Neal is driving. What's a guy to do? In a movie like this, you ditch the body and assume the man's identity. Then--again inexplicably--you pick up a hitchiker named Vera (Ann Savage) and your life goes completely to hell, for Vera is one of the meanest, coldest, most merciless femme-fatales ever portrayed in the movies. If you thought Barbara Stanwyck was a piece of work in "Double Indemnity," check out Savage's Vera.
You can't escape fate, the movie says. The main characters in "Detour" are doomed by fate, although they seem to embrace their destiny, to revel in their bad luck. "Detour" is like an old paperback original come to life. I loved every pulpy 68 minutes of it so much I'm cracking open my tattered Gold Medals this afternoon.

Day 31: "Sanjuro"

Director: Akira Kurosawa 1962
A sequel of sorts to "Yojimbo" with Toshiro Mifune playing the same raggedy, cunning, wandering samurai. This time he befriends a group of young, naive, would-be warriors. Kurosawa is clearly in a playful mood in some scenes, but quickly moves to deadly seriousness when Mifune starts carving up the opposition. The final scene--a literal showdown between Mifune and an equally experienced samurai--remains shocking in its violence. Not as great as "The Seven Samurai" or "Yojimbo," but, hey, it's still Kurosawa and Mifune and flashing swords. What's not to like?

Day 30: “Smiles of a Summer Night”

Director: Ingmar Bergman 1955
A wonderful film: witty, wise, lusty, sophisticated and beautifully human in its view of love and sex. Made 50 years ago, when Hollywood films still had to show husbands and wives sleeping in separate beds, this is a delightful, turn-of-the-century (20th that is) romp involving myriad couples—some married, some not—who flit from one to the other until all is resolved over the course of a long, magical, sunny Swedish night. Fittingly, the women are far smarter and stronger than the men, who come off as rascally poseurs. Inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Bergman’s film was the basis of Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” and the obvious inspiration for Woody Allen’s “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” (1982). Watch the Bergman.

A Break: "Reilly: Ace of Spies"

Directors: Martin Campbell, Jim Goddard 1983
Confession: I didn't watch this in the hyperbaric chamber, and I'd seen it when first shown on PBS some 20 years ago. It had impressed me then--and it bowled me over this week when I watched all 12 episodes. Probably the best mini-series ever produced, "Reilly: Ace of Spies" follows the fascinating life of Sidney Reilly, the Russian-born British agent who virtually invented modern espionage. Sam Neill is a perfect Reilly--mysterious, cold-blooded, amoral. Starting around 1900, "Reilly" is rich in history: the Japanese attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, World War l, the Russian Revolution and its subsequent years of struggle and slaughter. The period flavor is rich, and the large British cast impeccable. Along the way there are many startling scenes, the most memorable the execution of four anti-Bolshevik women in the courtyard of the dreaded Lubyanka Prison. Television doesn't get more powerful than this.

Day 29: "Ashes and Diamonds"

Director: Andrzej Wajda 1958
Set in a Polish town on the day (and night) that World War ll ended in Europe, Wajda's film follows a young Resistance fighter ordered to assassinate a Communist minister (the Polish Resistance had fought the Germans, then turned its attention to the approaching Russian occupation). Brilliantly photographed in black-and-white, this is a fascinating film; it's also remarkable that Wajda was able to get it made and distributed, for the movie focuses on the Resistance fighter and not the Communist bureaucrat. Definitely not what the censors were expecting. The Resistance fighter is played by the magnetic Zbigniew Cybulski, whose James Deanish performance may seem at first anachronistic given the film's 1945 setting. But Cybulski's approach works; it's as if Wajda wanted to attract a young audience and encourage it to think thoughts of a revolution--a revolution which eventually emerged and triumphed.

Day 28: "Northwest Passage"

Director: King Vidor 1940
A rugged, exhausting movie that follows the exploits of Rogers' Rangers in 1759 as they fight the French (and the Native Americans allied with the French). Spencer Tracy is Major Rogers, and there are great scenes of his men pulling their longboats up a mountain to avoid detection, then having to create a human chain to get across a roiling river. Tracy even kills a barking dog (off camera) as they creep into an Indian village. Along the way, they have to abandon injured men--and other Rangers go crazy under the physical ordeal. Based on Kenneth Roberts' epic novel, the Northwest Passage has nothing to do with this movie; a sequel was planned in which the Rangers seek the Passage, but the film was never produced. One of the earliest movies shot in Technicolor. With Robert Young, Walter Brennan and a fine cast of character actors from the MGM repertory company.