The Dam Busters

My husband maintains that this movie plays continuously on Saturday afternoons back in the old country (The United Kingdom) and that watching it one should imagine you are without the myriad of tivo, cable and download options you have and just pretend that it's either this, cricket or a Welsh language documentary about cheese production. If you can pull this off then The Dam Busters is jolly enjoyable. If not, you can always focus on counting the number of pointless procedural meetings that are "dramatized" and form the bulk of the "suspense" in the first half of the movie. I found myself thinking of Lawrence of Arabia quite a bit during Dam Busters because in that movie these sorts of scenes are actually entertaining. Remember the scene where he goes before General Allengate and Allengate says, "I know you're well educated Lawrence, it says so in your dosier." At this point my husband wondered why I was chuckling to myself when nothing funny was happening on screen. On screen Michael Redgrave was explaining something complicated about physics to a room full of people who were pretending to care.

Another faintly amusing way to pass the time during Dam Busters is to drink every time Richard Todd says the name of his dog in the film. The name of his dog is the n-word. Yeah, I know. Is that really necessary for historical accuracy? Can't they dub that out now? It's one of those occasions where you drink to forget as much as play the game.

I recorded this movie because it has Michael Redgrave in it. He gives a decent performance as the engineer who invented the bombing technique which ultimately destroyed the critical German dams. To be honest, he doesn't have much to do as an actor. Mostly it amounts to him standing around in meetings looking anxious.

Umm, I have no idea who this actor is.

The dam busting scenes use some innovative in-camera special effects. Some of these look pretty badly dated, but I found the effects a welcome relief from the scenes of the interiors of the bombers since these are all exactly the same. The problem is that for historical accuracy all the actors have to wear full face oxygen masks. It's kinda hard to communicate complex emotion when you don't know who is talking and all the actors are limited to using only the upper third of their faces. I guess it works well enough because all they have to communicate will be repeated via telegraph back to the war room where it will be reacted to by the generals and poor Michael Redgrave who is really giving his anxious face a work out.

I'm sure there are people out there who love Dam Busters and will find my review hateful. That's probably fair enough since I do think the movie does a good job of telling the story that it is trying to tell and making a complex topic and a big cast of characters into something that can be followed. Of course, a straight forward documentary (in English please, no Welsh) would probably do just as well and all those tedious meeting scenes could be summarized quickly instead of playing out in real-time.

Bhowani Junction (1956)

I was going to a full blog post about this, but I just can't. It's pretty awful. The script is very complex and full of historical detail which would be fine except that it is written in a way that every piece of dialog is telling you some important piece of background or plot exposition. Add to that, an intrusive voice-over soundtrack just in case you didn't understand what was just said in dialog. This isn't a movie it's a treatise.

The movie follows the events around a rail station in India during the period of transition when the British were leaving India. It deals with non-violence, terrorism, racism, romance, date rape and about ten other things I've probably forgotten already.

Stewart Granger and Ava Gardner have both been better. Granger seems a bit out of his depth and Gardner is just too one note throughout the whole thing. I loved her in On the Beach. Here, she is just shrill. The issues her supposedly bi-racial character faces, are complex but her reaction is to get mad and shout at everyone all the time. My son came in when I was watching this movie and he sad, "lady is angry" and left. That pretty well sums up Ava's acting in this one.

The direction is quite good as one would expect from Cukor. The location shooting is nice and in that respect the movie feels quite far ahead of its time. It doesn't have that 1950s travelogue feel to it. It feels more like a David Lean picture, except that the script is so bad. Recommended mostly for Cukor or Garner completists.

Dangerous Men: Pre-code Hollywood and the Birth of Modern Man

Mick LaSalle's excellent follow-up to Complicated Women is as much about evangelizing on behalf of his favorite actors as it is about proving his theme. Just as Complicated Women sung the praises of Norma Shearer, Ann Harding, Miriam Hopkins and other lesser known actresses of the pre-code era, so Dangerous Men delves into the work of Richard Barthelemess, William Warren and Lee Tracy. Of course, LaSalle must deal with Frederick March, Clark Gable, Edward G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney just as he had to talk about Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich in his first book. One gets the sense that his real joy is bringing people to these lesser-known actors and their films. His opinions and analysis of Frederick March's films have made me want to go back and look again at several of his movies, such as Merrily We Go to Hell and The Eagle and the Hawk. I'd watched both of these films once years ago because Cary Grant has small parts in them. I seem to remember that I though both movies were good, but since Cary's parts were so small, I really didn't ever bother to think of them again.

As in his first book, Dangerous Men does an excellent job of setting the historical and cinematic backdrop for the pre-code era. This is where his book is probably most valuable for someone of our era, trying to understand these movies. Yet, the author is certainly at his most entertaining when he is letting his critic's wit loose on some of the lesser movies of this era. His writing on The Devil and the Deep had me laughing out loud and wishing I'd thought of half the pity comments he made on the film. Though I wish he liked Gary Cooper more or had anything to say about Cary Grant or William Powell in this period, I can't help but love a writer who is so completely unafraid of holding an unpopular opinion about such an American Institution as Gary Cooper. (In a recent podcast, he drew the wrath of his core audience and co-host when he said that watching Judy Garland was "torture" and that Top Hat was superior to Singin' in the Rain.)

I'm looking forward to working my way through the films he discusses in his book, even though they will certainly add to my already over-burdened Tivo.

Ever in My Heart (1933)

Ever in My Heart is the story of Anne Archer (Barbara Stanwyck) a wealthy young woman who falls in love with Hugo, a young German professor (Otto Krueger) who arrives in tow with her fiancee Jeff (Ralph Bellamy) when he returns from a long trip abroad. Poor Ralph. Always the fiancee, never the groom. Anne and Hugo take one long look at each other and next thing we know she's sitting on the floor while he sings love songs to her in German. Ever the good sport, Jeff, steps aside and the couple are married. Things go well and the couple are truly happy as they proudly refuse any money from Anne's family. Then in one of those Mad Max turnabouts everything goes very wrong very quickly: their child dies of a fever, their dog gets killed by a gang of ruffians, Hugo is driven out of his job by anti-German sentiment as the U.S. enters WWI and the couple are literally starving. Rather than changing his name and accepting a job from his in-laws, Hugo abandons Anne and goes back to Germany. At this point, it seems like this is a typical anti-war movie of the period, sending the message that as Hitler stirred Germany, America should stay out of European wars. But Ever in My Heart, though sometimes trite and manipulative, is at least layered enough to make things not that straightforward. Anne and Jeff join the war effort and Anne becomes, quite gung ho, though she nevers buys into to Anti-German propaganda the way those around her do. This part of the movie reminded me a lot of the typical World War II movie where a woman joins the WACS, except for the ending. When she inevitably meets up with Hugo again it is under surprising circumstances. Stanwyck and Krueger are really excellent throughout and especially in the end. They really sell the films conclusion, and I was pleasantly surprised that I could not guess the ending at all.

Ten Cents a Dance (1931)

The story of a "taxi dancer" named Barbara (Stanwyck) who meets rich Mr. Carlton (Ricardo Cortez) at her job and has to choose between his "friendship" and marriage to a well-educated looser, Eddie (Monroe Owesley). She goes the good girl route and lives to regret it as her husband turns out to be a cheat, a liar and a thief and just all around jerk face. Eddie's an interesting villain in that he presents himself as being a well-mannered gentle sort of fellow but behind the scenes he's as manipulative as they come. And yet he's also sincere. He actually believes all the hard luck stories he gives people. The idea that Barbara Stanwyck could fall in love with such a guy, even if he presents the appearance of the opposite of the sort of guy she meets at work, is just really hard to swallow. Even harder to believe is that she sticks with him as long as she does. She soldiers through and he gets worse and worse and the audience waits impatiently for inevitable melt-down. When it comes, it's a doozy, though somehow not quite enough. By that point I was really hoping she'd actually belt him as she threatens to do earlier in the film. It doesn't help much that Owesley is probably the least attractive of all the fairly unattractive leading men in this run of pre-code Stanwyck films. Had Eddie an ounce of charm than I could see her falling for him and the story about her struggle to help support their income with part-time work might be more compelling. At the very least the movie makes a strong case for women being able to work in more respectable jobs. Though Barbara escapes the degradation of her job by marrying Carlton at the end, it's very clear that women didn't have a lot of legitimate options when once or twice in the story prostitution is hinted at and one of Barbara's co-workers reminds her that working for a dime a dance is at least legal. Ten Cents a Dance also points out how unfair it is for society to dictate that men be the sole breadwinners by showing just how helpless women who don't work outside the home are when dealing with a spendthrift, good for nothing like Eddie.

The Locked Door (1929)

Barabara Stanwyck's first talkie is mostly of interest because it was Barbara Stanwyck's first talkie. Rod La Roque, who played opposite to Norma Shearer in Let Us Be Gay, is also present this time as the villain. La Roque is far better in this capacity and although his speech is still somewhat affected, his timing is better as the smarmy wolf, Devereaux. The Locked Door is particularly dated because it takes a mini history lesson to understand a big chunk of the plot. Filmed before the end of prohibition when ships moored off the coastlines of major cities were convenient ways to skirt the drinking laws and where nice girls didn't go with strange men. For once Barbara plays a naive young lady who trustingly accompanies her boss's son on one such a notorious cruise. Her virtue is only just saved by a raid as Devereaux traps her in a private dining room and presents her with the first of several locked doors. Later after she is happily married to her new boss Lawrence Regan, (William Boyd) Devereaux turns up on the arm of her new sister in law. ZaSu Pitts makes a fairly unfunny attempt at comic relief about midway through the action which becomes increasingly melodramatic till its conclusion. I think the Locked Door is mainly of interest to Stanwyck fans and though she was not proud of her work in it, she stands out of the crowd anyway.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen

The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) is a bizarre, exotic adventure set in Shanghai, which gave Frank Capra chance to dress his star, Barbara Stanwyck, up in amazing Mandarin Fashions and look seductive. It is often compared to Marlene Dietrich's The Lady from Shanghai. Though Babs plays a missionary in this one and Dietrich's Shanghai Lily couldn't be further from that profession. Megan Davis gets kidnapped on her wedding night by a Chinese warlord, General Yen (Nils Asther, a Dane in unconvincing make-up) after she and her husband try to rescue a trainload of orphans. At first Megan resists General Yen, but after a dream in which she imagines him by turns in Western clothes and sensitively sophisiticated and by others as as a monstrous charicature, she begins to soften to his charm. She interferes when he plans to have one of his concubines executed for disloyalty and he challenges her faith by telling her he will let the woman live, but take Megan's life instead if there is another betrayal. In true pre-code fashion the worst of humanity is confirmed and romantic love triumphs in spirit at the conclusion of the film. Stanwyck is a bit out of place in the settings and if feels wrong to have her sitting around looking glamorous all the time. Even further from home, is Frank Capra. With no humor and no uplifiting statement about humanity in crisis, I can't imagine what he was thinking.