RSS
 

Archive for the ‘George Raft’ Category

They Drive By Night

15 Mar

They Drive By Night — directed by Raoul Walsh. Drama. Two truck driver brothers shoot for independence hauling fruit until two women try to put the brakes on them. 97 minutes Black and White 1940.

★★★★★

Raoul Walsh would rehearse the scene, set up the camera, call “Action,” and walk away and not look at the shoot at all. People wondered why he did this, but it’s real simple. George S. Kaufman did the same thing directing Broadway hits. He would go to the back row of the theatre and close his eyes. He knew and Walsh knew that if the thing sounded true it was true. The balance and breath and rhythm of a scene was all calculable aurally, once he had blocked it. Any corrections needed, and reshoots, could be made perfectly by an ear undistracted by the actors’ appearance or behavior or by his own hopes for it. This is George Raft’s best performance in film. He benefits enormously by the film being shot in sequence. He’s a tough guy but not a gangster, and his inner response to the adventure he is on is the liaison between the halves of the picture. For the picture is really two stories Siamesed together. The focus of the first one is Ann Sheridan. Now, Ann Sheridan is an actress I cannot take my eyes off. Unlike the female stars of today, Ann Sheridan actually was a woman. She has a luscious mouth, beautiful hair, searching eyes, a low voice, an excellent thing in woman. She is in full charge of her femininity and vulnerable and truly smart. Films were seldom built around her but she is always good humored about her role and in her role. To see her at her best see I Was A Male War Bride opposite Cary Grant. She was “everything,” said Howard Hawks its director. Here she is fast-talking, stoic, and wise. Her acting method sets her as a first class exemplar of 30s/40s female style. It isn’t method but it fits and it registers perfectly. The film itself is sharply written, with the snappy repartee of the era that is still so entertaining to see and fun to act. Allan Hale is always attributing this wit to his wife Ida Lupino, who never actually says a witty thing and who is a focus of the second half of the story. She is playing a role Bette Davis played in an earlier Paul Muni version, Bordertown; when Davis was asked if it bothered her, she said “No.” That’s because Lupino on screen is never not neurotic; those big desperate eyes are always in the madhouse; Davis, however neurotic her eyes were, could have other things in them. Without being a great actress, Lupino is a very effective one: see her at her brilliant best in Roadhouse. She’s very good here, and you must not complete your days without seeing her famous courtroom scene and her committing a murder in a floor length ermine trench coat. She is always costumed predaciously in furs or silky as a reptile or both. Raft is a very balanced and steady instrument, while Humphrey Bogart, a more volatile and sensitive instrument, was not a star at this point. He was a middle-aged actor who for ten years had been playing dispensable second leads. His next film with Walsh, High Sierra changed all that forever. The film is a perfect example of Walsh’s strengths as a director. Action/Adventure was his specialty, but the films were always about a man striving toward a woman. As here. Arthur Edeson shot it, Milo Anderson did the gowns, Adolph Deutsch did the score: top Warner Brothers talent all around. It was a big hit, and it still is.

 

Whistle Stop

06 Mar

Whistle Stop — directed by Léonide Moguy. Drama. A femme fatale returns to the small town she came from and plots gather around her. 85 minutes Black and White 1946.

★★★★

George Raft was the stupidest person ever to become a movie star. Here he is again with his mausoleum eyes, mask of monotone, and tie-tucked-into-the-belt paunch. His constant implacability made him a star. Here he plays a small town moocher whose girlfriend returns from the big-time and he finds he still can’t live up to her. But who in the world ever could? She is Ava Gardner after all. Ava knew she could not act, and I imagine she was seldom wrong about anything. She wants the big time, and, goodness knows, a girl like that deserves it, indeed can hardly avoid it. Gardner is very well cast. There is often a girl in every generation or so in every small town, who drives men crazy with lust. She can’t help it; she was born that way. I won’t name the one who was mine, but I would offer her my hand to this day. Such was Ava Gardner and such does she play, and not play badly either. Granted you can see her pause to remember her lines, but then so does George Raft. And it is true that they goddess her up with smashing clothes, which she wears like a dream. They alone are worth the ticket of entry. Victor McLaglen plays Raft’s dumb buddy and he has sensational scenes, which I won’t spoil for you by previewing. He had already won an Oscar for The Informer, and looking at him you wonder that he is an actor at all, but he is, let us say, a type of actor. A thing. Wallace Beery’s follow-up. We have Charles Drake and also Carmel Meyers, famous silent film vamp, excellent as the madam. The picture also gives us Florence Bates in a homey mother role, and it’s nice to see her out of the tiaras of society dowagers and in an apron making stew. She’s very good. Tom Conway is the villain with the mustache and that killer look of destruction in his lower eyelid, possessed also by his brother George Sanders; he is Raft’s vile competition for the favors of Gardner. And, well, it’s all a stretch, as you can see, but absolutely watchable. It was a B-film, but her presence in it led immediately to The Killers, which made Gardner a superstar. Before that she had tiny parts or walk-ons from 1942 on. The fact was that once on the screen, here, in a great big part with her hair like that, there was no watching anyone else whatsoever, bad actress or not. It was clear that with Ava Gardner acting was immaterial. Even trivial. And, ah, she is 23! She was just starting. Looking at the woman, you knew right then she was never never going to play mothers. When her career was over 45 years later she said she had never done anything in film to be proud of. Too bad. In that she was wrong. For she was, if ever there was, the very thing we always wanted from someone: The Proud Beauty, her chin lifting just so as she enters a room with an expectation for delight as she crosses it. Someone we can admire from afar; someone who was made for that.

 

Scarface

18 Oct

Scarface — Directed by Howard Hawks. Gangland Drama. A homicidal punk rises through the ranks to a gilded gutter. 93 minutes Black and White 1931.

* * * *

The rhythm of screen acting is not yet implanted in Paul Muni, here in practically his first film, until a reel or so elapses. Hawks cast virtual unknowns, Ann Dvorak, Boris Karloff, and George Raft whose first film this also almost was. And Muni was an actor from the Yiddish theater in New York and remained a big Broadway star. Because I never liked him in film I never went to see him on the stage. I should have. (I remember having coffee with Billie Dee Williams when he was understudying and him telling me how kind and helpful Muni was to him.) Muni is never believable as Italian-American, and there are times when you feel he thinks he is slumming, but there are other times when his willingness to expose the character supersedes any cavil one may harbor about his technique, which is the surface technique serviceable for the stage. Muni went on to play many “disguise” roles in film, an actor like Olivier, but he’s not my sort of an actor. The film is beautifully shot by Lee Garmes and edited by Edward Curtiss and Lewis Milestone (Hawks was never interested in editing his own films). The picture is A Gangster Is Born about a hood who takes over from his boss, here played by Osgood Perkins, who is more at home in front of the camera than Muni, and who resembles his more famous son, Anthony Perkins, in his mein and something about the eyes. Beautiful Karen Morley is sensational as the kept woman; Ann Dvorak (one of the few female actors Hawks used more than once) is excellent as the incested sister, and George Raft plays the manikin he played forever after. The minor actors tend to be stagey. But the best parts of the film are the automobile scenes in cars of the period, which seem flimsy and rattletrap and all the more vulnerable. These sequences were shot by L. William O’Connell and directed by Richard Rosson (who did the same for many of Hawks’ pictures) and are the most exciting of their kind ever filmed. Those were days when they used real bullets in movies, so the shoot-em-ups are startling. (One man was actually killed by them.) Sometimes there’s a certain clunkiness about Hawks’ direction, but this may be a function of early sound, for all the scenes are beautifully lit. This one of the Ur-Gangster pictures; Robinson’s and Cagney’s were first appearing at this moment. The film had huge problems with the New York Censors and The Film Review Board, but Howard Hughes finally said To hell with it; I won’t release in New York, and opening it where there were no censors, and was a big hit. It still is.

[ad#300×250]

 
 
Rss Feed Tweeter button Facebook button Technorati button Reddit button Myspace button Linkedin button Webonews button Delicious button Digg button Flickr button Stumbleupon button Newsvine button