Grand Old Movies

Our new Grand Old Movies post is up, and, contrary to our title, it’s not about avant-garde cinema. It’s about a more conventional film, the 1942 comedy-mystery, A Night to Remember, whose plot concerns a mystery writer and his wife encountering a real murder. However, even conventional films have their charms, which is largely supplied in this film by its stars, Loretta Young and, especially, Brian Aherne, two attractive masters of cinematic ease and grace. The film may be fluffy, but it has its delights, and delight is a rare quality in any film, or, indeed, in any kind of entertainment.

And as for the cinematic underground? That refers to the film’s setting, in a Greenwich Village basement apartment. Since we once lived in several basement apartments, the film evokes some nostalgic recollections for us. You might even call our post Notes From The Underground. Click here to read what those notes are; and mind the steps on the way down. 

Our second essay in our two-part look at women and beach movies is now up at our Grand Old Movies Wordpress blog: 1955’s Joan Crawford starrer, Female on the Beach. As we note in our post, Joan’s presence pretty much tells you everything you need to know about this film. She is the Star, the focus, the reason for its being. And she’s damn fine in the film, both tough and tremulous, as well as looking utterly fabulous in her tailored wardrobe. She also gets to show lots of leg, and Joan has legs that are always worth a look.

What’s fascinating about Female on the Beach is how, for its time period, it’s daringly open about its subject matter: Wealthy, widowed, middle-aged women (such as Crawford’s character, Lynn Markham) buy the favors of a sleazy beach hustler named Drummy (Jeff Chandler), who’s being pimped by a card-sharping couple, the Sorensens (Cecil Kellaway and Natalie Schaefer), who then fleece the hustler’s conquests in card games. The trio have a very interesting relationship: The Sorensens give the hustler room and board and treat him like a spoiled son; in exchange, Drummy is expected to pay the bills (“We do have a fiscal problem, darling,” coos Schaefer, “anything would be appreciated”). Yet Drummy feels a peculiar gratitude towards them. “I owe ‘em a lot,” he explains to Lynn, “and I like to pay my debts.” It’s a gratitude that Crawford’s Lynn can understand. She herself entered a loveless marriage for money and to escape a career as a “specialty dancer.” As a seaside real-estate agent (Jan Sterling) remarks, “Around here, love has a very low cash surrender value.”

We’d also call Female on the Beach a proto-feminist film; it revolves around issues of female space and sexual desire. Lynn sees wealth and her spacious beach house not as luxury goods but as a way to gain privacy. As she explains to a detective (investigating the suspicious death of one of Drummy’s ‘clients’), she grew up with two sisters in “a very small room,” and only wants “to be alone, all by myself in a great big house just like this one.” When Drummy flirts with her in an effort to win her attention (financial and otherwise), we can feel Lynn’s annoyance, her sense of being invaded and manipulated. “You’re about as friendly as a suction pump,” she snaps at him when he tries massaging her leg. But Lynn’s not immune to the hustler’s dubious charms; she ends up visiting him on his docked boat at night and waiting desperately for his phone calls during the day. In examining the pair’s relationship, the film plays provokingly with gender roles, with Lynn frequently the aggressor (she orders Drummy not to move his boat from her pier), and her hunger for him is conveyed with straightforward ardor on Crawford’s part.

At this point in her career Crawford seems to have been seeking roles that allowed her such fluidity in expressions of gender. The year before saw her as the pants-wearing Vienna in Johnny Guitar, in which she similarly pursued Sterling Hayden with a sexual frankness that seems startling in the staid ’50s era. Her following film would find her as the emasculating Queen Bee, bullying a Southern household through force of personality alone. In tracing Crawford’s career, you can see why she lasted so long and why she’s still popular today; she both anticipated trends and resisted typecasting, always surprising us in her screen incarnations.

And perhaps not since the 1953 Torch Song was Crawford’s diva persona so completely incarnated than in Female on the Beach. The film’s reputation today is as a camp classic (and it has more of its share of outrageous lines and situations to earn it that status). It’s certainly campy fun to watch, while at the same time it confirms Crawford as the Prima Donna of the Silver Screen. She dominates this film by her characteristic, burning intensity—what Michael Redgrave is said to have called her ability to outstare the rest of us. We certainly agree. Please click here to read our blog post. And save a space in the beach house for us.

There’s more to the beach movie than Beach Blanket Bingo. It’s also the site of noir, as our current Grand Old Movies post demonstrates: The Woman on the Beach, directed by Jean Renoir during his Hollywood exile and released in 1947, looks at a noirish attempt at murder. Coast Guard lieutenant Scott Burkett (Robert Ryan) tries to bump off Peg Butler’s (Joan Bennett) husband Tod (Charles Bickford), who’s determined to keep her for himself. However, the murder is really of secondary interest in the film. The story focuses more on the miserable marriage between Tod and Peg, who live in their own kind of exile, isolated in a small beach house where they snarl and lash out at each other like caged cats. What exacerbates their animosity is that Tod is blind and Peg is the cause. She turns to Scott for surcease from her misery, but, this being noir, relief is not an option.

The Woman on the Beach was not a success on its release. Re-cut and partially re-shot by RKO execs after a disastrous preview (and also censorship problems), it feels somewhat disjointed, with the murder attempt (usually the core of a noir film) almost half-hearted in its doing. Yet you can sense Renoir’s signature here, especially in the outdoor scenes on the beach, in which the flow of water and the motions of animal life (birds in flight, a horse galloping on the sand) engage you in the ebb and flow of nature. Renoir sets up a contrast between the constant rhythm of the sea and the small, fragmented lives of the unhappy humans who live near its edge and who cannot find peace. This is particularly so for Bickford’s character, a former painter who, now sightless, can only thrash in thwarted rage, like an animal in a trap. The desperation of the frustrated, crippled artist is the film’s one great theme; that it didn’t fully develop or comprehend it was, for us, a major disappointment about the film.

However, there is much to recommend in The Woman on the Beach, including its gorgeous cinematography by Leo Tover and Harry Wild, an eerily filmed nightmare sequence that weaves together images of sex and death, and excellent performances by three noir regulars: Robert Ryan, Joan Bennett, and Charles Bickford. Click here to read our full post. This article is part one in what’s to be a two-part series on women and beach movies (our next post will look at Joan Crawford’s 1955 noir of lust in the surf, Female on the Beach).

In the 1954 B-noir Highway Dragnet, Mary Beth Hughes appears in literally only the first four and a half minutes of the story, but she steals the film. She’s the blowsy blonde whom protagonist Richard Conte picks up at a casino bar in Las Vegas. He asks if the bar stool next to her is taken; “Reserved,” she answers, her slight emphasis on the last syllable—teeth meeting lower lip in a pronounced ‘fh’ sound—letting us know she’s well on the way to intoxication. “For whom?” Conte asks. She finally turns to look at him. “The guy who smiles,” she replies. Her response is a challenge, which Conte takes up; he grins comically at her. At that, Hughes smiles herself, a shrug audible in her voice. “Well, it’s a long time between smiles,” she says.

It may have seemed a long time between smiles in Hughes’ career at this point. A curvaceous platinum blonde, with saucer eyes and overripe lips, Hughes was a baby-faced sex bomb in the 1940s; she looks like Shirley Temple on hormones. She began as a contract starlet first at MGM (she has a small role in 1939’s The Women), then moved on to 20th-Century Fox, where she appeared in such high-B films as Orchestra Wives, the Charlie Chan series, and the Michael Shayne mysteries. 

Hughes’ apotheosis may have been in William Wellman’s 1943 Western The Ox-Bow Incident, in one of only two female roles in that film. As Rose Mapen, the former prostitute who was Henry Fonda’s love interest, Hughes had one scene (and she’s onscreen for less than five minutes), but her impact is indelible. The episode (which appears in the novel) is like a parodic reversal of the scene in Ford’s Stagecoach, when Claire Trevor’s hooker is run out of town by the respectable ladies. Here, Hughes’ Rose is returning to her home town triumphantly wedded to a well-to-do San Franciscan. Stepping from the coach she and her newly attached spouse are riding in, she slowly smiles at the crowd of gaping cowpokes, delighting that she can still wow the guys. When Fonda rides up, another small, fleeting smile crosses Rose’s face, combining pleasure at seeing him with satisfaction that he now sees her respectably married. As their gazes lock, Hughes looks back at her former paramour unflinchingly, as if daring him to respond. Everything we glean about Rose is through her gaze; how she looks at others is how she defines herself.

It’s that gaze, confident, alluring, and challenging, that may define Hughes in our collective cinema unconscious. And it’s what made her a great femme fatale in film noir. In 1945’s The Great Flamarion, Hughes again defines herself by how she looks at co-star Erich von Stroheim. He’s a vaudeville sharpshooter who, once disappointed in love, can only see women as objects to shoot at onstage; he does not want to look at a woman as a woman. But Hughes, as his onstage assistant, has other plans. Coming to him with a tale of an unhappy marriage to a drunken husband, who also appears in the act (Dan Duryea), she forces von Stroheim to look back at her, to acknowledge her as a sexual presence. A now-smitten Flamarion bumps off the husband during a performance, freeing Hughes to run off with another lover and leave Flamarion flat. When the revenge-driven sharpshooter finally catches up with her, in a flea-bitten theater in Mexico, he shoots out the lights in her dressing room so she can’t see him.

By the late 40s-early 50s, Hughes’ roles were primarily in low-budget territory. She was frequently in B-Westerns, serving mainly as a decorative presence, or in C-movie cheapies such as the now-considered-camp I Accuse My Parents, which bestowed on her a minor cult status. She also had small roles in bigger films (e.g., Young Man With A Horn), and did TV work (the Red Skelton and Abbott and Costello shows, among many others). Given the chance, though, she could still show what she had. 

By the time of Highway Dragnet, Hughes had shed the baby fat but was still lusciously zaftig, with a hard, blonde allure that gives her a look of tawdry glamour. As the drunken floozy, she’s good humored but plastered enough to be volatile; when Conte offers to freshen her drink, she snaps back, “I’m not here for that.” Yet she can’t stay annoyed long. Her look at him is one of a burgeoning interest; she’s sizing him up, but without calculation, it’s more as if she’s becoming aware of his presence.

The usually intense Conte projects a relaxed masculinity with Hughes; he’s interested but is taking his time. When she suddenly flares at him again for another imagined slight, Conte backs off (he’s not looking for trouble); but now Hughes won’t be mollified and tries to slap him. “Stop it, everybody’s looking at you,” he shouts angrily, and grabs her. Hughes then gives Conte the Look: Her eyes stroke his face as she slowly smiles; she again brings her lower lip to meet her teeth, as if anticipating how he would taste. Her kissing him as the scene fades is a moment of pure sensual indulgence; it’s startlingly sexy. But Hughes holds the Look on Conte for several long seconds before embracing him, she lets the audience wait for her reaction. It’s eroticism charged with a subtle power. Her character seem supremely sure of herself; she’s gotten Conte all riled up, but she knows exactly what she’s doing. 

Alas, when the next scene comes up, Conte is being arrested for Hughes’ murder, and she’s out of the picture. The story then tracks Conte’s escape and his picking up two more women (Wanda Hendrix and Joan Bennett) as hostages. The rest of the movie unfortunately doesn’t live up to its opening; the real murderer’s identity is telegraphed long before the ending, and the plot follows the standard noir trajectory of the wrong man clearing his name. It’s not bad, just not very interesting; it’s been done as well or better many other times (though the film’s gritty desert locations add an element of grungy menace). But at least, even if only for four and a half minutes, Mary Beth Hughes has really given us something to look at.

Highway Dragnet can be watched at in its entirety here.

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.

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.