Battleground State

I came to Edward Dmytryk’s TILL THE END OF TIME via Bernard Dick’s Radical Innocence book on the Hollywood Ten, which spoke highly of it. I slightly disagree with the author when he says that Wyler’s THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES has become a classroom text on deep focus and can no longer be enjoyed as a film (paraphrasing — maybe he doesn’t quite say that). No doubt it’s true for him, but I came to the film late, never saw it in a class (at “film school” we saw very few films in class), and the superb (and strange) Gregg Toland photography is only one aspect of what I enjoy in it.

Anyway, Dick says that Dmytryk’s more modest film is more human, and therefore a greater success. The comparison is certainly apt as both films follow three soldiers returning to civilian life, dealing with problems of adjustment, and suffering from injuries both physical and mental.

The Dmytryk trio are Guy Madison (handsome, a tad bland), Robert Mitchum, and Bill Williams as the amputee — Wyler scores far above this film by casting a genuine amputee (I wonder if poor Harold Russell was subjected to the usual infinite series of Wyler takes — I somehow suspect he wasn’t, as he would have actorly tricks to strip away). Dmytryk writes that Williams couldn’t act at all, had to be told exactly what to do — “It made me feel rather Teutonic but not particularly comfortable.” But the results are just fine. Perhaps Williams’ slowness is why the personable lead’s career never caught fire, though.

Since this one ISN’T three hours long, it focuses more on one vet than the others, and unfortunately the one it chooses is Madison. In fact, he’s fine, I wouldn’t normally mind spending time with him, but when the way-more-interesting Mitch is lurking offscreen somewhere one gets antsy.

Also along is Dorothy McGuire, who as Dick notes is an unusual character for this time period — a war widow who hasn’t necessarily been faithful to her late husband’s memory, may have been playing the field (the film throws up this suspicion only to deny it — we aren’t wholly convinced by the denial, though). So she’s a maybe-loose woman who’s still alive and relatively happy at the end of the movie, an unusual proposition for the forties.

The other main girl is the second Mrs Dmytryk, Jean Porter, a little firecracker who looks about twelve but is meant to be perhaps nearly eighteen? When she started jitterbugging I suddenly recognized her from Esther Williams musicals where she also pops out of the chorus, a magnetic solar presence.

Like the heroes of IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER the war-damaged protags finally resolve their troubles with a massive Fordian donnybrook. What makes it OK is they’re fighting fascists. I’m dubious about the healing power of violence but anything where fascists get punched has appeal. I guess this is another example of Dmytryk’s leftism creeping in, but as with the Wyler film the movie is deep-down patriotic, more so if anything. We’re regularly reminded that help is available for American casualties of conflict.

Video link

The most cinematically radical scene occurs early on — as the men go through the demob process, Dmytryk’s camera (cinematographer Harry J. Wild — I’m Wild about Harry) first rushes down a line of men as they give their names, then, far more unusually, swishpans between interviews, filming each with a curving dolly shot that circles the interviewer then pans onto the interviewee, still rotating, then ZZZIP off to the net pair. Very exciting stuff.

I asked myself WHY this was being done, beautiful as it is. I guess to make a dry bureaucratic process seem exciting (OK, we meet some personable folks, but it’s PROCESSING…) — but whose excitement is this? Not the men’s — presumably for them it’s fairly boring, with a slight perking-up when they reach the head of the queue. No, the thrill must be the army’s, we’re experiencing the joy of a machine, not the slomo trudge of the participants but the well-oiled ball-bearing smoothness of a system where everything may be subjectively slow to the men but it’s as fast as it can be made to go, which registers as top speed to the army.

So it’s pro-America propaganda, without a trace of subversion. America DOES seem to look after its injured better than other countries. It just isn’t enough — how could it ever be?

Log Line

Louis B Mayer supposedly begged King Vidor not to chop John Gilbert’s leg off in THE BIG PARADE, fearing it would damage the star’s romantic image, even though he would magically have the leg back in his next role. The film was a great success and Mayer obviously noted his error because he makes sure Van Johnson loses a leg in THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO, Mervyn LeRoy’s thoughtful epic flag-waver.

The scene is quite something.

Now flash back many years to screenwriter Allan Sharp’s appearance at the Edinburgh Film Festival. He told us that the ending of NIGHT MOVES which we see is not what he wrote. He was going to have Gene Hackman shot in the leg and dream about someone sawing a log and wake up minus a leg. He told us that he’d stolen the idea, but I didn’t recognise the film he named as his source and I forgot it.

Finally, I know where he wanted to steal his leg-log from!

Van spends the scene talking on the phone to his wife, it’s Christmas and they’re apart. So the heartstrings are being played with a rusty saw, then the tree comes down, Van reacts, and everything goes out of focus and we’re back to grim reality…

I’m assuming the scene is part of Dalton Trumbo’s contribution to the script, since he’s the author of Johnny Got His Gun. He even has Van say something about “Wouldn’t it be funny if a girl married a guy and he had all his arms, and his legs, and then when he came back he didn’t have any…”

Amazing film from all manner of angles. Visual effects, politics, human emotion, early star turns by Bobs Walker and Mitchum. Worth your time.

Florida Man

I first read John D. MacDonald’s stuff in short story form in the pages of those neat paperbacks “edited” by Alfred Hitchcock, culled from his Mystery Magazine (I’d love it if such publications were widespread and cheap today). He wrote great little minimalist Marlowe knock-offs. Now I’ve started on his Travis McGee novels, of which there are plenty. They’re all very short, very snappy, very loosely plotted (MacDonald seems to embody the same traits Donald Westlake found in Jim Thompson: his novels, Westlake said, have moments when you sense he needed to go back and fix something to make it all come out right, but he didn’t have time. The first four McGees came out in 1964, and MacDonald was writing other stuff too).

I only realised later that MacDonald also wrote The Executioners, which became CAPE FEAR, twice.

All the McGee novels have colour-coded titles, many of them absurd: Bright Orange for the Shroud features a villain transparently a version of CAPE FEAR’s Max Cady, ported in, renamed, and described as having a Robert Mitchum quality.

McGee is a beach bum who lives on a houseboat won in a card game, and specialises in “salvage” — getting things back for people who’ve been robbed. His fee is half of whatever it is. It’s a clever variant on the private eye set-up, and an added wrinkle is that often the victim/client has been robbed in a way that’s basically legal, and McGee extracts reparations in a way that isn’t.

Given the Floridian setting I was on the alert for signs of wingnut tendencies in the author and his character. McGee is a self-aware white knight, an anachronistic romantic, and that probably chimes nicely with how right-wingers see themselves. Lefties of the modern era are perhaps less likely to see themselves as romantic heroes. In fact, MacD and McGee sometimes speak, with their one voice, about the harm done to Florida by crazy rightwingers, but on the other hand there’s an unpleasant vein of homophobia that surfaces only occasionally but enough to creep me out. And he one time refers to “the war between the states” which is a big red flag (with a blue X and white stars).

This bigotry dates the books more than any other aspect — the attitude to women isn’t too far off-base, racial questions are curiously absent so far (itself a faint warning sign?). McGee usually gets laid at least once, but he’s nearly always in love with the girl; some contrivance will prevent him “getting” her in a permanent way at the novel’s end. And he unfailingly gets horribly injured once per book. There’s a format, but the variations MacDonald executes are impressive.

Another amusing aspect is most apparent in Nightmare in Pink: MacDonald was writing science-fiction stories for the pulps, like Westlake, at the same time as his early thrillers, and the SF bent of his mind comes through in unexpected places. In this one, McGee, in New York to help a friend’s sister, finds himself musing on the city and his thoughts are more those of a science-fictioneer than of a “salvage specialist” — he regards the hostility New York’s citizenry and speculates that “New York is where it is going to begin, I think,” running a scenario in his head that plays like a zombie apocalypse fuelled by anomie. Relaxing in his soulless modern hotel room he imagines the room piping happiness directly into the guests’ brains in the not-so-distant future. Best of all is this bit about poodles:

“You could almost hear the dogs sigh as they reached the handiest pole. There was a preponderance of poodles.

“This is the most desperate breed there is. They are just a little too bright for the servile role of dogdom. So their loneliness is a little too excruciating, their welcomes more frantic, their desire to please a little more intense. They seem to think that if they could just do everything right, they wouldn’t have to be locked up in the silence — pacing, sleeping, brooding, enduring the swollen bladder. That’s what they try to talk about. One day there will appear a super-poodle, one almost as bright as the most stupid alley cat, and he will figure it out. He will suddenly realize that his loneliness is merely a by-product of his being used to ease the loneliness of his Owner. He’ll tell the others. He’ll leave messages. And some dark night they’ll all start chewing throats.”

Nightmare in Pink‘s plot hinges on psychiatric abuses involving LSD, and this was written in 1964 (the year Trav first appeared in print), which suggests MacDonald was pretty switched on. His anxiety about social change, undoubtedly tinged with conservatism, also seems genuinely alert — The Quick RedFox, which was the first TM I read, plays like countercultural 1968, but was published in ’66.

If you’re looking for 270-page potboilers, I recommend John and Travis. I haven’t seen the TV movie with Sam Elliott but the feature film with Rod Taylor, DARKER THAN AMBER, is impressively vicious, although it does FEEL like an installment in something, rather than a standalone film. Which is a drawback, and probably what stopped it becoming a bigger hit, and thus a series. Perhaps they should have started with the first book. James Bond is the only movie franchise to get away with starting on the wrong book, isn’t it?