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Archive for the ‘Alfred Dekker’ Category

Beau Geste

03 May

Beau Geste – directed by William Wellman. Action adventure. 112 minutes Black And White 1939.

★★★★

The Story: Three orphan boys grow up together, join the French Foreign Legion together, and act nobly together.

~

In a neck-and-neck race with George Steven’s Gunga Din at RKO, Beau Geste is a-scene-by-scene adaptation of the 1926 silent film starring Ronald Colman. As such it is slow going. Until it isn’t.

For nothing happens in the film until the last scenes, in which Brian Donlevy, the nasty sergeant in charge of the garrison, literally mans the battlements by stuffing its crenellations with the corpses the marauding Arabs have made of his men, which scares the Arabs off.

This is a super-duper and justly famous battle scene, worth waiting for. It inspires the star of the picture, Gary Cooper, who hates the sergeant, to admit Donlevy is a great soldier. Donlevy is perhaps ill-cast, for he does not have a mean streak, which is needed, but a wicked sense of humor, which is not. He plays the part well, nonetheless.

It’s all, of course, well directed by William Wellman, who made sure not to leave out his favorite, a rain-scene, even though everyone is indoors. Those indoors enclose the three adopted boys of the lady bountiful of the house, who possesses the famous infamous “blue water” sapphire which figures into a plot that frames the action of the boys once they join the French Foreign Legion. Is that clear?

I hope not, because to distract us we have various young to-be stars trickling through the desert sands, Broderick Crawford, for one. Alfred Dekker, J. Carrol Naish for two. And for yet another, Susan Hayward, the most strictured of all actresses, who is the fond focus of Ray Milland.

Milland is the only one of the three English boys to have an English accent. Gary Cooper, who of course was schooled in England, does not assume one. Wonder why. Nor does Robert Preston as the third of the boys. Preston with his Dennis Quaid grin and zest is the most welcome of energies always, and who could be more convincing than he to save the day at last?

The story is a long-winded set-up for this final scene. You keep wondering when something is going to happen as we lumber through the boyhoods of these boys.

Gary Cooper when little is played by Donald O’Connor, if you can figure: O’Connor the most spritely, Cooper the least spritely of actors. Is this because Cooper was an actor who looked older than he was and O’Connor’s youth was supposed to correct it? Here Cooper is 38, too old for the part of a runaway youth in 1939, the miracle year of American Film. Robert Preston is 21, which is more like it.

Cooper had written into his contracts that he never play a character who dies. Perhaps because as an actor he is already rather dead. If he did die how could you tell? Cooper is an actor who used his inertia to act. He is never one to pick up cues before sucking attention towards him. Cooper’s sluggishness stole scenes.

His stardom has always annoyed me. In real life he was shy and had an enormous penis – an infallible combination for female appeal – but on the screen, I don’t get it. I suppose people felt that a taciturn male must be more profound than a talkative one and more attractive.

I knew, when I was six years old and saw this movie when it first came out, it wasn’t necessarily so.

Still, it’s an entertaining show. And you won’t have wasted your 17 cents, which is what a 1939 matinee cost me.

 

Kiss Me Deadly

14 Nov

Kiss Me Deadly — Directed by Richard Aldrich. Private Eye Flick. An L.A. detective tracks down the killer of a hitchhiker he picked up. 106 minutes Black and White 1955

* *

Howard Hawks should sue for criminal impersonation. Instead of The Big Sleep, Aldrich has made The Big Sleaze.  It is peopled by women who ravage the person of Mike Hammer on sight. They simply will not stop kissing him, and he will not stop discarding them like lint as soon as they do. Hawks’ famous females of sexual insolence are thus degraded to nymphomania, and Mike Hammer would have had to have had the sexual solidity of a pepper mill to respond, but he brooks no distraction, for he is not hot on the tail but hot on the trail. Aldrich seems to be a very bad director, and now that he is dead we can malign him as such with impunity if not with glee. For he makes the mistake which Hawks never made, of very fancy camera angles at every turn. Ernest Laszlo shot every scene from some crazy place, every scene with something jutting in the foreground, every scene as though Max Ophuls were the director. I would like to bet that the result is that it took so long to set up these scenes that the actors had no time to rehearse. The result is that every actor in the cast is absolutely lousy, even the great Cloris Leachman who is out of this farrago early, since she plays the hitchhiker. The one actor who does not suffer is Ralph Meeker who is just dandy as Hammer. Skip it.

 

 
 
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