In DR STRANGELOVE, Peter Sellers is getting at least some of his vocal inflections from Kubrick when he plays Merkin Muffley, and in TOM THUMB he’s doing George Pal. The third in the trinity of directorial impersonations is AFTER THE FOX, where he reportedly patterned his performance as Italian master criminal Aldo “the Fox” Vanucci on Vittorio De Sica, who he’d already acted alongside in THE MILLIONAIRESS.
It makes sense, when cast as an Italian, to have an actual Italian as model, especially if that Italian is going to be close at hand. And especially since your character masquerades as a great Italian film director. But the movie’s self-referencing doesn’t end there. Vanucci plans to smuggle stolen gold into Italy under cover of a fake film shoot — a film about smuggling gold into Italy — so he enlists real movie star Victor Mature, playing fictional movie star Tony Powell (but with a clip of Mature in Jacques Tourneur’s EASY LIVING to illustrate his career). Mature, who had been semi-retired from the screen, evidently found the experience as invigorating as his character does. It’s quite an early case of an actor sending themselves up with vicious glee, and Mature is not only a good sport but a proficient farceur.
Oh, the title of the fake movie (below) is a broad reference to an earlier, real De Sica film.
And here’s De Sica as himself, directing a movie. Rather excellent gag where a fake sandstorm is produced for the scene, and when the storm dies down, all the equipment has been stolen. This fake movie the real director is making stars another real director, John Huston, but confusingly/hilariously, he’s not played by John Huston. Maybe they’d assumed that Huston, like De Sica a serious gambler, would need the money and agree to play himself playing Moses. Bizarrely, he eventually did play a different Lawgiver in BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES.
And is it a reference to Italian movie dubbing when Akim Tamiroff (whose presence in caper movies seemed to be de rigeur — OCEAN’S ELEVEN, TOPKAPI) is lip-synched by Maria Grazia Buccella? It’s quite funny, anyway.
Neil Simon, who scripted, reckoned that the film was only fair, and that there was more funny stuff on a cutting room floor in Rome somewhere (including Sellers disguised as a Beatle). But, going into it with low expectations — I’d seen it once, years ago, and hadn’t laughed much, and we watched the other De Sica-Sellers collaboration, WOMAN TIMES SEVEN, and didn’t laugh at all — we actually found it very enjoyable indeed. It doesn’t really have a second act, just a bunch of stuff, but it has one of the best closing lines in history.
OK, maybe not top ten best end lines, but top hundred. I like it because it destroys the reality of what we’ve been watching, it FORCES THE FILM TO STOP.
AFTER THE FOX stars Pearly Gates; Samson; Goodnight; Det. Milton Arbogast; ‘Uncle’ Joe Grandi; Pope Alexander III; Nero Wolfe; Lucrezia Borgia; Professor Henry Harrington; Kreacher; Baron Fabrizio Donati; Sgt. ‘Muscles’ Dunn; Capannelle; and Fran Garland (archive footage).
SADIE MCKEE is MGM and 1934 — right on the join between pre-code and post-code. So Joan Crawford can sleep with a man out of wedlock, marry another man for money, divorce him, and still end up alive at the end, ready to win the man she always wanted (Franchot Tone, art doing its best to imitate life, life not being quite up to the challenge).
Still, MGM’s class-consciousness is apparent. Like Joanie’s early soundies and talkies (OUR BLUSHING BRIDES, OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS), the movie is indecently obsessed with analysing the right and wrong way to marry money. Sadie is the daughter of a cook who ends up a rich lady, and in the end she has her mum come and live with her — as cook. And her best friend, the inestimable Jean Dixon, clearly coded as a prostitute, is now the maid. That’s kind of odd.
That aside, what a terrific film. Clarence Brown was one of MGM’s finest directors, and though somewhat known as a woman’s director (which at MGM meant Joanie and Garbo) works wonders with the leading men. Franchot is always pretty good, of course, though he always looks like some kind of reptile — a gecko or a turtle perhaps. Mellifluous voice. By playing a blue-blood blue-nose stiff-necked moralist who’s wrong on all counts he allows the film to shake loose at least some of its Metro dignity.
Gene Raymond as a louse helps some more — great musical moments, singing “All I Do Is Dream of You.” A love rat who’s convincingly romantic, until Esther Ralston, channelling Mae West, steals him off. He’s even better than Franchot.
I like the first version best, but the second one has the marvelous DRAWER FULL OF CHORINES that slides out from the stage, like something from the morgue at the Copacobana. You didn’t know they had one there, did you? But of course they do — gotta keep the customers on ice until they can figure out Who shot who?
And then Edward Arnold, as the drunken millionaire — one of his best turns, encapsulating in quick succession how nice it would be to be drunk all the time and then how horrible it would be to be drunk all the time. Really surprising how brutal they let him get, after considerable screen time spent on establishing him as a sweet-natured souse. The only part that’s unconvincing is his reformation, but I guess they were saddled with that. He also gets a musical bit, snoozing through a great rendition of “After You’ve Gone” performed by Gene Austin and novelty jazz act Coco & Candy.
This bar is one of my favourite places in the film. The sleek Cedric Gibbons automat is pretty amazing too, like a porcelain spaceship, but the bar has Akim Tamiroff as the very enthusiastic manager. When Arnold orders champagne for everyone, Tamiroff has a giggling fit like he’s been pumped full of helium and nitrous oxide. Elated to the point almost of BURSTING. He’s a happy fellow.
Huge swathes of Joanie’s career are unfamiliar to me — one thing I’ll allow the rather shabby Feud — it’s got us watching Joan. Good as her three menfolk are in this, they’re all there to bask in her light.
(Lewis Milestone’s own hand giving an Oscar-worthy performance at the end of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT)
To this ~
Dana Andrews observe’s a dead German’s hand in A WALK IN THE SUN. “Nice ruby. Wonder where he stole it.”
But to begin, here’s a quote from Richard T. Jameson’s fascinating piece on Lewis Milestone from Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary. The subject is Milestone’s Exhibit A claim to greatness, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT ~
One army defends its trenches as another charges across the empty waste of no-man’s-land. The defenders spray the advancing enemy with machine-gun fire, and Milestone’s camera tracks relentlessly across the attackers’ path. As each enemy solider is brought into camera range, he falls: it is as though the camera eye were synchronized with the mechanized pattern of gunfire, meting out death with an awful inevitability. And when, somehow, the attackers succeed in overrunning the trenches, drive out the defenders, and then become defenders themselves, with the first army counter-attacking to regain its own ground, Milestone repeats the visual device: another ‘machine-gunning’ camera chops down the soldiers on that side. The machinery of war devastates both armies with chilling impartiality, and Milestone’s structure eloquently defines the tragic absurdity.
Or would have, if it hadn’t been violated at midpoint. For as the enemy’s second wave reaches the defenders’ trenches, Milestone’s camera performs yet another tracking manoeuvre, this time aiming down into the trenches as it moves along. And as the camera arrives at any given point on its course, so to does another attacker, leaping into the ditch and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with his opposite number. Technically, the device is impressive; conceptually, it is loathsome. Unlike the camera-as-machine-gun, there is no inherent logic in it. The co-ordination of the camera’s arrival with that of an enemy trooper bespeaks no necessity beyond the director’s design. A scene about the impersonal horror of war becomes a balletic speciality number.
I like that Jameson is so passionate about the ethics of technique, and I get what he’s saying. I also think he’s slightly crazy, here. But he has a point, though I might phrase it differently and identify the problem elsewhere. I think I could defend Milestone’s middle shot on the grounds that it shows the men fighting as if they were parts in a machine, their movements stylized and synchronized to dehumanize them. It’s also obvious that part of the sequence’s immense power is its momentum, created by a series of fast-moving shots which often do not follow the moving men but move perpendicular to them, creating an imminent sense of violent convergence. For the battle sequence’s sheer impact, this plan is essential — and impact is something else than merely technique.
The more valid objection might be the wider one that by turning war into a giant choreographed spectacle, by making the audience excited at the action and noise and evoking the surge of adrenalin, Milestone is repackaging armed conflict as entertainment. A Hollywood film, even one as grim and unrelenting as ALL QUIET, is an entertainment of a sort. But can’t he be defended on the grounds that no evocation of warfare, if its goal is to educate those who haven’t had the experience (who are sometimes apt to be over-enthusiastic about something they know nothing about), can ignore the rush, the thrill, the camaraderie or the other aspects that make soldiers enjoy war, which they often do.
If ALL QUIET was Milestone’s only war movie, his reputation would probably be higher. But it isn’t, and perhaps as a result his 1930 film enjoys more respect than he does.
As America entered the war, Milestone put together this documentary with Joris Ivens, using material shot by Russian cameramen at the Eastern front. All part of Milestone’s “premature anti-fascism” which would cause him some trouble later.
Then he embarked on a series of war pictures. THE NORTH STAR and EDGE OF DARKNESS have already been discussed here — they deal with the conflict in Russia (more trouble later) and Norway and are very impressive. It’s immediately troubling that they use many of the same techniques — the lateral tracking shot in particular — as ALL QUIET, and use them to create excitement, celebrating battle and triumph, in scenarios where our reaction to the fighting is an uncomplicated one of cheering on the goodies. Even the deaths of sympathetic characters are swept aside by the overwhelming charge to victory.
As problematic as these films are in some respects (only in some, be fair: they’re very good films), they’re easy to take compared to THE PURPLE HEART (1944).
Why is he dressed as a wizard?
I told a friend on Skype I was watching a WWII propaganda movie full of Chinese actors playing Japanese roles (since all the Japanese actors were interned).
“Is Richard Loo in it?”
“He is!”
“[Talk show host] Dick Cavett used to do an impression of him. It wasn’t very good, but he would do it at any opportunity. ‘A chain is only as strong… as its weakest link.'”
“He says that in this movie! This is the movie that’s from!”
Zanuck may be writing the dialogue and the cheques, but Milestone is calling action. On the plus side, the film is at times sincerely emotive, the cause was at least a better one than WWI (can’t accuse a man of hypocrisy for decrying one war and supporting another), and the technique is often impressive. But those Sino-Chinese baddies are nasty pieces of caricature. Since neither the writers nor the directors nor the actors know very much about Japanese culture, and since the intent is melodrama, it’s not surprising that the effect is crude. What’s always disturbing about these films is that the propaganda is delivered on racial rather than strictly political lines. I don’t actually mind the racist terminology of the heroes (“nips,” “monkeys”) since I think it’s realistic. It’s the film’s attitude that counts.
The flick deals with two US air crews shot down and captured by the Japanese and put on trial in a kangaroo court. In this way it combines war film (a little action in flashback) with courtroom thriller. A little extra violence is supplied by the Japanese tendency to commit hara-kiri when things don’t go their way.
As a flagwaver, the film is often a touch embarrassing. But do we like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, or are we happy they were defeated? If so, we presumably recognize the value of propaganda to the Allied cause. But that doesn’t make it good art. Then there’s the film’s racism, exaggerated by Chinese actors playing Japanese characters, and by Darryl Zanuck’s storyline. Ironically, the film’s attempt to portray the Japanese as culturally psychotic is derailed when the American characters choose “a noble death” in a way that seems little different from the honour suicides derided in their enemy captors.
As usual with Milestone the film is extremely well-crafted: the paddy field set at night is striking, and the hexagonal reinforced concrete prison block makes for striking compositions. Milestone has some good actors, and Farley Granger.
A WALK IN THE SUN came after the European conflict was over and it’s a far more nuanced and interesting film. Two of the stars, Dana Andrews (sad iguana stare) and Richard Conte (crocodilian grin) return, along with Norman Lloyd (hooded cobra eyes) and, surprisingly, Sterling Holloway, who would later play an animated snake for Disney but really looks like Tenniel’s Mock Turtle. It’s the most reptilian bunch of grunts you ever saw, and the “plot” has them land in Italy and attempt to walk to a farmhouse to blow up a bridge. Along the way they grouse, bum cigarettes, philosophise and die. Robert Rossen’s poetry-of-the-streets dialogue is really amazing — contrived as heck yet evocative of some kind of life. The underrated Conte is particularly good at snapping it out.
Milestone’s war films suffer when the location material is interrupted by studio stuff or rear projection or stock footage, but that problem is minimized here (and in PURPLE HEART which is all studio save some time-lapse clouds). Russell Harlan’s photography is outstanding (he was making the transition from B pictures to major films for Hawks and Blake Edwards), and Milestone’s knack for filming group shots is fully exploited (he storyboarded everything so he could concentrate on performances on set). There are some interesting narrative devices — a recurring ballad, most effective when it unexpectedly segues into a blues tune for a scene of the men simply waiting for the next life-or-death situation — and a VO read by Burgess Meredith (star of OF MICE AND MEN) which isn’t associated with any one character and sometimes made me think of Malick’s THE THIN RED LINE. I liked the VO better than the ballad but both are useful.
The whole thing is semi-real and semi-mythic. It doesn’t go as far into abstraction and existential angst as Mann’s MEN IN WAR, but it hints in that direction twelve years early. The ending is triumphal again, but in 1945 it was probably always going to be.
Milestone could have left it at that, honour somewhat salvaged, but in 1950 Zanuck had him celebrate the marines with HALLS OF MONTEZUMA. The lateral tracking shots are back, and by now we’re wondering why this inventive filmmaker, who came up with new and inspired stuff on almost every film, insisted on repeating himself so much in his battle scenes.
Milestone has an excellent bunch of actors and Robert Wagner. Richard Widmark is at his most attractive as a sergeant who doesn’t plan on surviving. He’s suffering terrible migraines, and has his doc chum (Karl Malden) supplying him with powerful painkillers.
“These aren’t a cure. They’re temporary.”
“So am I.”
We’re in colour this time, bright Pacific colour. The mission is to take an island, capturing Japanese prisoners for information. Korean-American Philip Ahn, a Milestone regular since THE GENERAL DIED AT DAWN, is one of these. The dialogue isn’t as good as Rossen’s but the patriotism is more muted than Zanuck’s. Characters are maimed, killed, driven crazy (somebody always goes crazy in Milestone’s war films, which is something I give him credit for). Jack Webb delivers a rousing, religiose speech at the end and makes everything alright. But there’s some sharp observation of war’s absurdity and despair. Is that cannon fire or the sound of cake being simultaneously eaten and had?
THEY WHO DARE (1954), a British production made during Milestone’s blacklist trouble, is worthless. It doesn’t have the lateral tracking shots, but it doesn’t have any other visual interest either, save for the attractive colour in Wilkie Cooper’s lensing of Greek landscapes. Akim Tamiroff is back — an actor who spans Milestone’s career from ’30s to ’60s. Dirk Bogarde and Denholm Eliot in the same unit, in Greece, seems like an invitation to innuendo, but let’s resist.
The most intriguing bit is a superimposed boulder wobbling in the foreground of a shot, (above, on the left) apparently inserted in post to cover a mistake. It’s enormously distracting, since the shot isn’t quite stable, causing the vast rocky overhang to bobble about as if full of helium and jounced by a breeze. Whatever it’s concealing must have been insanely inappropriate to merit such an extreme and unsuccessful cover-up.
Directorially, the only familiar moment is the director’s fondness for including caricatures of his cast. Here’s a swashbuckling Dirk, as one of his comrades-in-arms pictures him.
PORK CHOP HILL (1959) deals with Korea. In A WALK IN THE SUN, Norman Lloyd is always going on about “the Battle of Tibet” which he predicts will be fought in 1956. He was almost right. The lateral tracking shots are trotted out one more time. The futility of war — symbolized by the taking of one insignificant hill — is undercut by producer Gregory Peck adding a VO at the end to explain the strategic import of the victory. The ching-chong-chinese soundtrack (by Leonard Rosenman! What was he thinking?) is a disastrous miscalculation too, but there are some very good actors, and Gregory Peck.
Under the credits, we see what appear to be negotiations breaking down between the Americans and the Koreans — one has to assume this started life as an actual scene, depicting the causes of war, and that Gregory Peckory decided nobody cared about that stuff and so chose to slaister music all over it, drowning out the dialogue. He could have cut the whole sequence, but waste not want not — better to have it here, serving no coherent purpose, apparently. The whole re-edit job is so clunking and inefficient — a title comes up to identify the location AFTER a whole establishing scene — that it’s easy to see where the interference has happened. Things improve once the action starts, and it never lets up. An American unit has to conquer a completely worthless hill, with none of the promised support, and they’re decimated doing it. The peace talks footage becomes part of a rear-guard action by Peck the producer to prove it was worthwhile.
Some of the stock characters might as well come with targets on their backs, but there are also welcome bursts of interest from a juvenile Harry Dean Stanton, a baby Robert Blake no bigger than a man’s hand, and a daringly cast Woody Strode as a malingering coward (for which read a guy who mainly wants to survive: I was on his side). And he gets whole scenes with the intense Roscoe Lee Browne. That’s right: two black guys talk to each other, and both roles could have gone to white actors. And it’s 1959.
The campaign is a catalogue of blunders by command, and the propaganda broadcast by an oleaginous Chinese Lord Haw Haw (I call him Lord Run Run Haw Haw) figure is notable for the fact that everything said against the war is demonstrated to be true by the action of the film itself. So it’s arguable that Peck’s interference merely imposed inefficient Hollywood bookends on the film, the way so many subversive films from the golden age come packaged in conservative platitudes. The real meat is inside.
Oh, and the photography is rather wonderful at times, with a misty pre-dawn advance and some intense spotlit stuff and a world of dust and death. Sam Leavitt was responsible and his credits are IMPRESSIVE.
This was Milestone’s last statement on war, and it ends with Peck’s stuffy VO: “Because of their sacrifice, millions now live in freedom.” And yet, the true last word is probably still contained in ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, Milestone’s millstone. Let it serve as coda:
“We used to think you knew. The first bombardment taught us better. It’s dirty and painful to die for your country. When it comes to dying for your country it’s better not to die at all! There are millions out there dying for their countries, and what good is it?”
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