Grand Old Movies

The first hint of alarm given in the 1951 thriller Cause for Alarm! (the exclamation point is part of the title) comes right at the start, when the camera tracks in toward a beautifully kept suburban home, complete with white picket fence—only to halt at a “Quiet” sign tacked onto that very fence, which warns that illness is contained within. In one image are we given the underlying theme of this movie—that a deep sickness might lie hidden in the heart of what is considered the American dream. It may have been sold to us as an aspiring ideal, but Life in the Suburbs ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The film follows through on that premise, its story presenting “the most terrifying day” experienced by the film’s fragile heroine, Ellen Jones (Loretta Young), a “girl” (as the poster indicates) who’s “in trouble!” In less than seven hours she must deal with a dead husband, an annoying kid, an accusation of murder, a snooping relative, a nosy neighbor, an intrusive salesman, and the maddening regulations of the United States Postal Service. Ellen is definitely having a bad day. After her bedridden, paranoid spouse with a heart condition (Barry Sullivan) informs her that he’s just posted a letter to the District Attorney charging his wife and his physician with plotting his demise, he obligingly keels over due to his bum ticker, leaving Ellen with no convincing alibi. She must then spend a good portion of her time trying to retrieve that implicating letter from a teeth-grindingly obstinate mailman (Irving Bacon), whose strict observation of post office rules (he has to deliver a letter once it’s been submitted for mailing) leads to Ellen next confronting an obtuse post office supervisor (Art Baker) who won’t release the epistle until he’s received the (now-deceased) husband’s OK. This results in a scene of Ellen wigging out in the supervisor’s office, an incident that will not look good in court.

The movie is an unusual combination of film noir and woman’s film, in that its events happen not down dark city streets or in dingy dives, but in a sun-soaked California suburb filled with tricycling children and gardening women, and where tree-lined avenues are flanked by rows of monotonously lovely homes. Much of the action takes place inside Ellen’s meticulously clean house; we first see her vacuuming the living room rug, dressed in a frilly, puff-sleeved blouse and a bell-shaped skirt, giving her more the look of a carefree teenager than a busy housewife. But ‘Housewife’ is the key to Ellen’s identity. She even introduces herself in a voiceover as “I’m a housewife,” placing her in the post-World-War-Two context of American women who returned, willingly or not, to the domestic hearth after serving in the work force during wartime. Ellen’s own reaction to this shrinkage of her horizons may be reflected in the house’s geography: Its cramped rooms and over-furnished interiors swallow up space, while its twisting staircase, leading up to the cheerless bedroom, stands as a kind of objective correlative to Ellen’s own feelings of helpless entrapment. What was promoted as a familial paradise is instead both madhouse and prison.

Nor do the outside scenes provide relief. In director Tay Garnett’s earlier noir, the 1946 The Postman Always Rings Twice, he used an atypical lighting scheme, such as Lana Tuner’s blindingly white costumes, to suggest menace displayed right out in the open; and here he uses bright light and the clean, spacious suburban streets to convey Ellen’s isolation and danger. The emptiness surrounding Ellen offers her no hope of succor; and the hot sun perpetually beating down becomes an oppressive, claustrophobic force. Throughout the film Young is photographed in a sheen of sweat, her hair curling in tight little tendrils, her face drained of energy; she’s like a dying flower. Her performance is an accretion of small, frightened gestures that build up, as protective distraction, against giving way to hysteria. Ellen forces herself to keep busy with household tasks—stacking groceries, stripping beds, even washing stains off an aunt’s skirt (while the aunt is still wearing it)—as she keeps up an interior monologue on how she must behave: Taking up her husband’s lunch, she tells herself to be “pleasant and cheerful as if nothing happened.” The horror, for Ellen, is that activities that should be “nothing”—that should be mundane, normal, inconsequential, such as preparing lunch—assume a grotesque significance under the flaming eyes of George, her enraged, taunting, and pathologically jealous spouse.

Sullivan is quite good as George, a narcissistic psychopath who suspects his wife of carrying on an affair with the doctor (her former boyfriend) and never lets up on his suspicious. Part of his emotional abuse is to keep her isolated and fixated on his needs only, so that Ellen has nowhere to turn (George “doesn’t believe in neighbors,” she says at one point). He’s the kind of self-regarding Alpha male whom women are always warned against but with whom they continue to fall in love; he makes you wonder why some women make such bad choices. When seen in the flashback sequence (showing how he and Ellen met during the war), George is snarkily charming, strutting his masculinity like a rooster in a barnyard; we see his cold manipulation of Ellen, and yet she still falls for him. Now, as a married man dependent on his wife’s care, his inner misogynistic spoiled brat comes through: When Ellen tries at one point to appease him (most of how she handles him is via a string of attempted appeasements) by pointing out how much time the doctor spends with him, George sarcastically notes, “Maybe that’s because he’s a bachelor—no home life.” The film’s creepiest scene has George sadistically regaling Ellen with a recollection of a childhood incident, in which he had savagely beaten another child for playing with one of his toys. Sullivan plays the scene against expectations, speaking in a soft, coaxing voice and placing his hand gently on Young’s shoulder to pull her down to sit next to him, a gesture whose seeming affection masks seething rage. You can’t help but shudder as you watch him.

The film may have a peculiar resonance today in our post-feminist, post-responsible-man culture, in its depiction of so many childish men with whom Ellen must contend, including her infantile husband and the complaining mailman who delays Ellen with a long-drawn tale of his suffering feet. There’s also a real child, a small boy in a cowboy costume who stops by constantly to mooch cookies from Ellen’s kitchen. He’s the sort of neighbor who might make you think twice about moving to the suburbs; and is just another reason why poor Ellen might be singing those ‘burban blues.

Our new post up at our Grand Old Movies blog site is part of the third annual FOR THE LOVE OF FILM film preservation blogathon, hosted by Ferdy on Films, Self-Styled Siren, and This Island Rod film blogs. This years’s blogathon is to raise funds to enable the National Film Preservation Foundation to webstream for free the 1923 silent film The White Shadow, which happens to be the first film a young Alfred Hitchcock worked on, in the capacity of assistant director and general factotum (the actual director is Graham Cutts, who had a long career in British cinema). In order to make this possible, we’re asking blogathon readers to please donate to the NFPF and support web access to important films. 

In keeping with the Hitchcockian themes, we decided in our own post to look at a favorite actor of ours who does have a link to Alfred Hitchcock — Peter Lorre, who made two films with the Master: the 1934 British version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Secret Agent of 1936, in which he co-starred with John Gielgud and the First of the Hitchcock Blondes, Madeleine Carroll (he also starred in several episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents). Our own take is that Lorre is the First of the great Hitchcock Villains, those suave, cultivated actors, like George Sanders or James Mason, who are so essential to the Hitchcock universe. If you’re defining a Hitchcock actor, Lorre definitely should be included in that group, and we look at his Hitchcock films in the context of What Makes a Hitchcock Actor Hitchcockian. Plus, Lorre happened to be one hell of a great actor in his own right, and he deserves some recognition for that, too.

Click on the poster image above or right here to read our post. And click on the ‘Donate’ logo below to go to the National Film Preservation Foundation donation page and make a gift to support The White Shadow and enabling access to this film. Thanks for your support!

Pity poor Count Zaroff. As the man who has everything, including money, servants, valuable artworks, a pack of skilled hunting dogs, a chateau-like fortress, and his own isolated tropical isle on which to keep them, you think he’d be satisfied. But Zaroff suffers—and how!—from the plight of those with nothing to do and too much time to do it in. He’s bored. Especially with the one thing he’s devoted his life to: big-game hunting. He’s chased after every beast the planet has to offer, but now the thrill is gone; and, like Alexander, he has no more worlds to conquer. That is, until his invention, as he explains with unsavory relish to his (rather unwilling) houseguests, of “a new sensation” for the hunt. Which happens to be his fellow human beings. He’s even set up a secret trophy room to house his collection of prize heads.

What struck us in our recent re-viewing of RKO’s 1932 classic film The Most Dangerous Game was how much of a post-Great War/Depression-era/class allegory can be read into its bizarre goings-on. In Richard Connell’s famous short story, from which the film was adapted, and to which it hews closely in plot, Zaroff is a Russian military officer who combines blood sport with upper-class tastes (humming a bit of Madama Butterfly while tracking his prey). The movie ups Zaroff’s status to the nobility, making him an aristocratic refugee from the Russian Revolution who still affects patrician hauteur; he enters the film faultlessly clad in white tie and tails, one hand balancing a six-inch-long cigarette like a martini glass. He could just as easily be a refugee from a Noel Coward play, or maybe P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle, ready for a brace of cocktails and some bracing repartee. Instead, Zaroff amuses himself with the finer details of his ghoulish hobby: having set up a deliberately misguided buoy system on his island’s shores, he waits for the shipwrecks and an opportunity to “stock,” as he puts it, his game supply, consisting mainly of sailors and other lower-class riff-raff. When one drunken guest (Robert Armstrong) behaves in too proletarian a fashion for the Count’s refined sensibilities, the unfortunate fellow also becomes fair game, in more ways than one.

As embodied in Leslie Banks’ amazing performance, Zaroff is an effete savage. Banks alternates between exhausted ennui, sadistic teasing of his guests to guess what his “new animal” is (“You found one?” asks a visitor; “Yea-ya-sss,” Banks replies, dragging the word out to several syllables’ length and trailing it off in a hiss), and bug-eyed mania when hot on the chase. But he also endows the Count with a touch of womanish hysteria; in moments of intense excitement he’ll pass a febrile hand over a forehead scar, like a panicked hostess whose nervous tic of smoothing down that unruly curl surfaces whenever faced with social stress. Banks was a British stage actor who saw action in the First World War; a bad injury left his face partially paralyzed, and the filmmakers—Ernest B. Schoedsack, Irving Pichel, and Merian C. Cooper—take advantage of this disfigurement, often shadowing the paralyzed side so as to split the Count’s face between the benign and the sinister. The effect is like one of those photographic images that present two different views of one picture, depending on how you angle it; it only needs a tilt of the frame to see the brutish Darwinian ancestor behind the cultured descendant.

Opposing the Count and his macabre pastime is Joel McCrae’s Bob Rainsford, a fellow big-game hunter forced into playing Zaroff’s game Zaroff’s way. Against Banks’ aristocratic thug McCrae comes across like an old-fashioned college football hero: a healthy, fresh-thinking innocent, with a gee-whiz outlook on life—his shipwrecked comrades were “the swellest crowd on earth,” he says—and with no idea, at first, of what nasty pleasures the Count keeps hinting at. He also doesn’t recognize class distinctions; covering a trench with leaves and branches to trap his foe, he notes that “when Mister Zaroff falls down there, he’ll be all through hunting.” The film pits post-War good, clean all-American muscle against 1920s Euro-trash decadence, as seen in the climactic hand-to-hand battle between a grimly vengeful Rainsford clad in torn shirt and khakis and the Count wrapped in a silk dressing gown. It’s the New World versus the Old, with the victory not in doubt.

Upping the ante is the presence of Fay Wray as Eve, another shipwreck survivor who becomes the contested prize between the two men. Wray’s character was not in the original Connell story; but her addition sharpens the testosterone-fueled clash: “Hunt first the enemy, then the woman,” Zaroff declares, salaciously adding “kill, then love—when you have known that, then you have known ecstasy.” Wray does more than provide the requisite romance for McCrae; she also grounds the plot in real feeling. Connell’s story clinically describes a competition between matched combantants (both men are expert hunters). But now our interest in whether Rainsford wins or loses is bound up with a gut-twisting dread of what’s in store for the fragile Eve should the Count kill Rainsford. Her possible fate is foreshadowed in the huge tapestry that hangs on the chateau’s wall above a sweeping staircase, depicting the mythological battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs, its imagery dominated by a figure of a lust-ridden centaur carrying off a helpless female. The Old World represented by the Count is very old indeed. 

Can you have a werewolf movie without a werewolf? Is there even such a thing as a werewolf movie? Our newest post up at our Grand Old Movies blog examines the curious case of a movie about a werewolf that …. doesn’t have a werewolf. She-Wolf of London (1946) was a late entry in Universal studios’ 1940s cycle of horror films, which is often said to have begun with 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, and finished with (or maybe came to a crashing stop, depending on your personal view) with the Abbott & Costello 1948 comedy A&C Meet Frankenstein. As probably happens when a genre cycle seems to peter out, She-Wolf is not what might be thought of as a pure horror film, in the sense of such earlier classics as Frankenstein or Dracula; but it’s an interesting combination of horror, Gothic, and melodramatic woman’s film, with the emphasis shifting between genres, according to what is, or is not, happening in its rather confused plot. Still, any movie that borrows from such sources as The Wolf Man, Rebecca (particularly that unsettingly creepy character, Mrs. Danvers), film noir, and the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale is worth a look-see. You can read our post at our blog at http://grandoldmovies.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/a-grimm-tale-she-wolf-of-london-and-the-absent-wolf/ or you can click on the above poster image to be taken directly to our link.

THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1924)

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW (1929)

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THE MARK OF ZORRO (1920)

THE BLACK PIRATE (1926)

ROBIN HOOD (1922)

A 1933 pre-Code shocker from Paramount, Murders in the Zoo stars the great Lionel Atwill, one of the unsung horror icons of Hollywood’s golden age. His role in this film, that of a wealthy big-game hunter who indulges in a bit of human homicide on the side, allows him to indulge in all sorts of gleefully sadistic mayhem, including sewing a man’s lips shut and tossing his unfaithful wife to the alligators. How to draw an audience to such a tale? Below are seen the efforts of three differently designed posters to lure viewers into the theater.

1) The poster below, by its use of an emphatic typeface and a striking contrast of black, yellow, and red, immediately grabs our attention, and underlines the lurid nature of its subject matter. Central to its design is Atwill’s satanically leering face, which is grouped with several snarling animal heads (big cats and big monkeys seem to be favored), as if equating his perverse passions with those of the more savage members of the animal kingdom. Cowering beneath Lionel’s demonic grin are, presumably, two of his victims, their isolation within a red circle highlighting their helplessness and terror.

2) In this poster, Lionel’s grinning face is again displayed (and again grouped with animal heads), and is even shown behind zoo bars, as if to emphasize the danger of his beast-like nature. More focus is also given to the film’s other stars: Charlie Ruggles, who plays a dipso public-relations agent for the zoo; Kathleen Burke as Atwill’s menaced wife, whom he discovers is cheating on him; and John Lodge as her lover and another target of Atwill’s wrath (although Lodge’s name does not appear on the poster’s cast list). Again note the bold use of color to define what might be called the planes of action, between Lionel’s glaring face in the black background, and the two men and woman in garish red and gold in the foreground. What’s odd about the three people in front is that, while appearing to look threatened, they seem to be gazing in the wrong direction for the source of their peril.

3) This remarkable French movie poster doesn’t display Lionel at all. Instead, it gives us an art-deco stylized Kathleen Burke (who had previously starred as Lota the Panther Woman in Paramount’s The Island of Lost Souls) strongly highlighted in black and white. Slinking behind her is a large mamba snake, an important character in the film. Although the mamba in the story happens to be Lionel’s pet, the poster’s design seems to equate the woman with the snake; it almost seems to emanate from her body, giving her a sinister, lamia-like appearance—a subtle indication of how Burke’s character drives Lionel to commit his nasty deeds.

You can read more on Atwill and Murders in the Zoo at our blog post here.

A typical film noir opening: a guy going nowhere gets off anywhere and then something starts up.  In the 1945 20th-Century Fox film noir Fallen Angel, the nowhere-man is noir icon Dana Andrews, whose bus ticket has run out of places to go—thus he ends up at one of those lifeless midwestern towns that exist only to be gotten out of.  

This one-horse burg, however, happens to contain something that persuades Andrews to stay: gorgeous Linda Darnell as Stella, a waitress at a rundown truck-stop diner. One of the great beauties of golden-age Hollywood, Darnell, with her round eyes and plump, pouty lips, had a lusciously overripe brunette allure; she’s like a peach ready for bruising. And her sexually knowing performance as the hard-boiled hash-slinger makes this film. Every movement, every inflection, from her opening scene, where she collapses in a chair and yanks off her shoes, is telling; she reveals a superb instinct for this kind of character. Note her entrance as she stands, her legs splayed, her weight skewed over her hips, as if her pelvis held a sack of potatoes about to spill open. We know everything about this character right there. She’s a dame who’s been everywhere and seen it all, and by now it’s gotten under her skin. Something will definitely start up with her.  

As written, Stella is a character of contradictions: She’s a slut who’s holding out for the ring, who has no compunction stealing a dollar from her employer but who refuses to cheat on a date. Darnell captures all these facets brilliantly; she lets you see that this is a woman with one unifying goal—she wants respectability, which means marriage, a house, kids, and money in the bank; and she’ll only take a man who can give it to her. Darnell plays it like a breeder judging bulls on the auction block, always sizing up her suitors, particularly Andrews, whose character is quickly smitten with her. She’s got moxie and she doesn’t care who knows it.

Although Darnell had been in films since 1939, 1945 seems to have been her breakout year. Just previous to Fallen Angel, she had made Hangover Square, in which her beguilingly witchy café singer/femme fatale understandably drives hapless Laird Cregar into madness and murder.

Surprisingly, before these two movies Darnell had been playing ingénues or virtuous young wives, in such films as Day-Time Wife and The Mark of Zorro (she even had an uncredited stint as the Virgin Mary in The Song of Bernadette). Even more surprising, she was only about 21 at the time of Fallen Angel. Yet she acts her role like Mae West, without the laughs. Every man Stella meets goes wild over her, even poor little Percy Kilbride as the diner owner foolishly in love with his own employee. Stella barely notices him enough to give him the time of day; she has enough confidence in her own looks to treat all these panting males like dirt. In her scenes with Andrews, Darnell glowers at him as if he were the incarnation of a bad smell; it’s like a curled lip done with the eyes. But Andrews keeps coming back for more.

Andrews was making his second film for director Otto Preminger, after Laura, and he plays a similar kind of obsessive here as he did in the earlier film. His infatuated drifter is willing to do anything to get money in order to get Stella, even marry another woman, the film’s “good girl” (Alice Faye), in order to wrap his sweaty hands around his bride’s dough. Andrews can barely keep those same sticky hands off Darnell; in a clinch on a garbage-strewn beach, he noticeably feels up her backside.

Preminger inscribes Andrews’ fixation in his cinematography: The camera swirls round and moves in on Darnell as if stalking her. Its most startling move is during a dance at a restaurant, in which it swiftly dollies in, like a zoom, to a close-up on Darnell and Andrews’ profiles, isolating them within the surrounding hubbub. When, in true noir style, the waitress turns up dead about half-way through the story, Andrews is the logical suspect.

Unfortunately, after Stella’s demise, the film focuses on Alice Faye. A huge star in Fox musicals, Faye was returning to movies after an absence during which she had married and given birth to two daughters. In accordance with her status, Faye was allowed her pick of scripts, and Fallen Angel was her own choice. One wonders why. Her character is meant to be sexually repressed, under the dominance of a severe older sister (Anne Revere), but roiling with a burgeoning desire for independence; her marriage to the drifter is her chance to break away. But Faye, an actress of placid temperament, is a zero in the role (Dorothy McGuire or Jeanne Crain would have been a better choice). She looks too plump and matronly for the part, and she slumps through the film with basically one facial expression. And she strikes no sparks with co-star Andrews; what’s supposed to be the big steamy scene, the sexual consummation in a sleazy hotel room, falls flat. Reportedly Faye was upset over producer Darryl Zanuck’s fussing over Darnell, and maybe that dissatisfaction came through in her performance. Fallen Angel would be her last film for over two decades.  

Still, Preminger manages to ladle on the noir set pieces: He gives us scenes of a sadistic cop (Charles Bickford) beating up a suspect (Bruce Cabot) for the hell of it; a fake psychic (John Carradine) bamboozling the dupes; and Andrews abandoning Faye on their wedding night to yearn ‘neath Darnell’s window. And then there’s Darnell herself; whenever she’s on, the film really heats up. What more can you ask for? Required viewing.