The People Against The Thing From Another World

Called to the bar.

Casting Spencer Tracy as an alcoholic is a bit nervy… a scene showing him engaging in a sketchy interaction with Eduardo Ciannelli in the men’s room may be dicier still. THE PEOPLE AGAINST O’HARA (1951) has moments of subversion and dissonance unusual in an MGM picture.

Tracy plays a retired criminal lawyer and reformed boozer driven back to the bottle by his struggle to win the case of a young man (James Arness, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD himself) accused of murder. John Sturges directs — his early thrillers aren’t as noirish as Anthony Mann’s, but he does have cinematographer John “single-source” Alton on his side so the movie is beautiful.

I must have looked away during the credits because I missed Alton’s name, but the suspicion gradually donned on me as the film went on that I was seeing his work. One of the few DoP’s with such a distinctive style.

This is the shot that made me first glimmer and glom.

“Spencer Tracy’s always good as a lawyer. He’s so solid,” said Fiona. “He’s an immovable force.”

“I think you can have an immovable object or an unstoppable force…” I suggest, but then come to think she’s right. Spence is an immovable force. Or possibly an unstoppable object.

The film is very well cast — Diana Lynn has one terrific scene, John Hodiak is fine in his natural environment as third lead, Pat O’Brien fades into the furniture, Ciannelli and William Campbell are great nasties, and if you enjoy the look, sound and feel of Emile Meyer as much as I do, you will enjoy seeing, hearing and touching him here.

This is sort of a noir — there is some surprising stuff, including the ending. But the ultimate message of just about any MGM film is that the system works, so you don’t get a real sense of subversion and malaise, but then, maybe you already have enough of that in your life.

THE PEOPLE AGAINST O’HARA stars Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Hildy Johnson; Emmy Kockenlocker; John Kovac; Dr. Satan; the Thing from Another World; Cimmaron Rose; Walking Coyote; Concho; Chief Quinn; Reverend Cyril Playfair; Mrs. Carol Stark; Lt. Harry Kello; Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls; Paul Kersey; Molly Molloy; Mr. Rafferty; and the voice of Colossus.

Godliness not Gorillas

INHERIT THE WIND shows director Stanley Kramer at his best and worst. He’s Mr. Inextricable.

There are some lovely jam-packed compositions, and the elegantly designed title sequence is framed like a proto-Leone western. Welles seems to be in the mix of influences. Exciting to think that Welles may have fed into Leone, indirectly or directly.

There’s one really tasty transition —

Even some of Kramer’s more hamfisted bits of commentary have an impressive shamelessness, like his use of the “justice is blind” motif. But I like the one above best. Since we have a director who can’t stop editorializing, who won’t let story and performances speak for themselves even when they’re very broadly didactic, a moment like the above is helpful precisely because I don’t know exactly what it means. The praying priest’s hands are associated with hellfire because he’s a bigot, I guess. But it’s a little unclear, and a lack of clarity in this hectoring film is like a breath of cool air in a heatwave.

But there’s the problem: neither Kramer nor his scenarists can let the story tell itself, they have to toss in their own marginalia, using, for instance, performance — Fredric March telegraphs blustering foolishness with every hufflepuff — was Erskine Sanford unavailable? Or using Gene Kelly to interject little put-downs in case the creationists managed to sound momentarily coherent or respectable, and then having March huff and puff in response to them.

So, March scowls and beams from under a bald cap and Tracy outacts him at every turn with his elaborate performance of the state of relaxedness. Best perf might be Harry Morgan, purely because he’s not embodying one characteristic. The judge her plays is kind of a heavy in this story, but evidently they didn’t feel comfortable having him be fully corrupt, so he plays it sort of on the fence. Ambiguity in a Kramer film!

It’s a really gripping situation, and we can forgive some of the dramatist’s distortions, though perhaps not his stealing his best lines from the true story and then changing the names to protect… who? Himself?

Sociopolitically, nothing has really changed, has it?

INHERIT THE WIND stars Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde; Don Lockwood; Darrin Stephens; Col. Potter; General Aldo; Buster McGee; and Elizabeth Tudor.

The Pros

Once again, Claire and Glenn Kenny anticipate me on PAT AND MIKE with an excellent piece I’m not even going to try to compete with. But it inspired me to watch the film for the first time, an easy sell for Fiona on account of the stars, particularly Aldo Ray. Come for Aldo Ray, stay to see Kate Hepburn beat up Charles Bronson.

This one also has William Ching in the schnook role as Pat/Kate’s betrothed, and a good central conceit — his presence “frazzles” Hepburn when she does sports — she’s a superhuman who can excel at anything, but not if he’s watching. There’s a great hallucinatory tennis match in which Kate’s racket shrinks and detumesces while her opponent’s (an intriguing Betty Page type in a satin costume) grows Brobdingnagian. Ching keeps turning up even though he’s not wanted — “I have never hated a man so much!” declared Fiona. And so the movie becomes an attractively progressive story, in which the initially exploitative Tracy character, her shady promoter, become a nurturing partner, highly preferable to the stifling stiff she started out with.

Watched this to get deeper into Cukor for a quick project I’m hopefully finishing today.

Cukor on Tracy/Hepburn: “Chemically they’re so funny together because they should have no rapport at all.” Accentuated here because Tracy isn’t playing a patriarchal authority figure, it’s a welcome return to his shady pre-code scoundrels.

But, aside from the Hepburn-Bronson fight scene, Aldo gets the biggest laughs as a dim boxer (a pure character role, a surprising transition from his introductory perf in THE MARRYING KIND). As when Tracy upends a card table to stop an after-hours poker game. A loud, plaintive and exquisitely drawn-out lament of “Now we’ll never know!” It takes about five seconds for this tiny sentence to be expressed, and it’s somehow touching and hilarious just because “Davie Hucko” thinks it’s an actual observation, something nobody would realise if he didn’t utter it.

Beautiful dialogue by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, who have a way of garbling the language that’s semi-naturalistic, believable enough, but still stylised — every grammatical atrocity has its own demented poetry. Amid the real locations, with the real sports stars with their real human faces, the words are the most artificial element. A better film than ADAM’S RIB, we agreed, once you get past the weirdly huge amount of golf at the start.