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Archive for the ‘Ray Milland’ Category

Beau Geste

13 Jun

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 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, however, 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 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 from this plot, we have various young to-be stars trickling through the desert sands, Broderick Crawford, for one. Alfred Dekker, J. Carrol Naish for two more. And for 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 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 the final scene. You keep wondering when something is going to happen as we lumber through the boyhoods of these boys.

Gary Cooper as a child is played by Donald O’Connor, of all people: O’Connor the most spritely, Cooper the least spritely of actors? Is this because Cooper 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 dead, so if he did die how could you tell? He used his inertia to act. He is never one to pick up cues before sucking attention towards himself. Sloth and sluggishness stole whole scenes.

His stardom has always annoyed me. In real life he was shy, elegant of dress, 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 and more masculine, which, with Robert Preston on the screen is proved pure baloney. I knew that when I was six years old and saw this movie when it first came out.

If you can wait for the finale when it comes it’s an entertaining show. And you won’t have wasted your quarter. Or your 17 cents, which is what a matinee cost me in 1939.

 

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.

 

Something To Live For

06 Aug

Something to Live For – produced and directed by George Stevens. Drama. 90 minutes Black And White 1952.

★★★

The Story: An alcoholic actress is rescued by an AA sponsor who falls in love with her.

~

Made between George Stevens’ masterpieces, A Place In The Sun and Shane, this film seems to have no explanation for its existence at all. It is baffling to both to watch it at the time and to contemplate afterwards.

The story destroys it. It was written by Dwight Taylor, an experienced screenwriter, who certainly knew about dipsomania, since alcoholism was rife in his family: his mother was the greatest of all American actresses and alcoholics Laurette Taylor.

The film starts with Ray Milland, an AA doing outreach rescuing (by some inexplicable coincidence) an aspiring actress from a binge. He then 13-Steps her, by falling irrevocably in love with her. She loves acting, but is failing at it. We then learn Milland has a job as an art director in (by some inexplicable coincidence he is failing at it). He also has a pregnant wife and two children (one of whom by inexplicable coincidence turns up at a rendezvous between Milland and the actress). The actress also turns up at a party (by some inexplicable coincidence), which Milland and his wife attend. The wrap-up takes place at the actresses opening night on Broadway to which (by some inexplicable coincidence) his wife at the last minute obtains center-of-the-orchestra tickets. And so it goes.

Perhaps the rockiness of the script defeated George Stevens’ famed treatment and handling, but little of what he does resuscitates the narration. There are his shots through windows and there are his slow fades and there are his usual and unusual angles and set-ups – but none of this can seize the material: it is too slick for talent to grasp.

The problem also lies, as it often did with Stevens, in the casting, about which he could be lackadaisical. The Diary Of Ann Frank is ruined by miscasting the leading role with a teenage fashion model. Max Von Sydow a blue-eyed Swede, good actor though he is, is hardly a Middle-Eastern Jew named Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told. Elizabeth Taylor could never have been a showgirl we are asked to accept her as in The Only Game In Town.

Here we have three Academy Award actors in the major roles, and none of them belong in them. Teresa Wright as the little wife does her plaintive routine in a thankless role. But casting Ray Milland and Joan Fontaine as the art director and the actress smears the material, making it Englishish. Milland had won an Oscar for playing a drunkard in The Lost Weekend, and he is good here as a reformed alcoholic sexually obsessed with the actress, but, through no fault of his own, his particular vocal projection does not belong in this hard-headed New York City material.

And then there is Joan Fontaine, an actor almost always miscast, except as a country mouse. Her vocal projection is strangled. She always plays the flaxen-haired, vapid, flaccid, fair Rowena of Ivanhoe. The part is really meant for an actor who is willing to exploit her mean streak, as Bette Davis did to win an Oscar for doing the part in Dangerous. But Fontaine falls back on pathos, her stock in trade. (Even her hair-do seems miscast.) Stevens used her in a minor role in Gunga Din, where she is fine, and in Damsel In Distress dancing with Fred Astaire, in whose arms she is completely out of place, as here. Why?

Stevens sometimes used actors who just happened to be on the studio roster and lucking-out, as he did with Shane. But here, at Paramount, the skewed casting is exacerbated by the colliding of coincidence and by the forcing of drinks on the two recovering drunkards. Drinks are thrust at them, dangled before them, shoved on them, poured into their water glasses. Alcoholism does not work that way. Alcoholism is an inner mental condition, a lure in the physical system. It exists as a sovereign space in the imagination. Having once succumbed to the salvation of the first drink, the license to continue is unleashed. It is not a moral or ethical defect nor one of want of fiber, but a chronic disease, like diabetes. The script does not grasp this and the rendering of the material by the director does not show he understands it.

George Stevens was a director with flawless consideration for his audience and what they could do and were very willing to do. I would love to understand why he thought he could do anything for an audience with this cast in this material at all. But it is interesting how each work of a master is not necessarily a masterpiece. For, as W. Somerset Maugham pointed out, only the mediocre achieve a level.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Major And The Minor

02 Jul

The Major And The Minor – Directed by Billy Wilder — Comedy. A military man meets a hometown girl posing, unbeknownst to him, as a twelve-year old, and takes her to the boys school where he teaches. 100 minutes Black and White 1942.

* * * *

Delightful improbability. Why do we accept it? Why don’t we just say, ‘Oh, it’s too improbable,” and turn it off? Why doesn’t delightful improbability turn us off? We accept Ginger Rogers at the railway station at the end, even though it would have taken her too long to get out of the previous rig, pack, make up, secure that hat on her head, and get to the platform. Because? Because delight sheds a smile’s light around the matter, and in that light the improbability is enjoyed as such. And that smile? It does not come from belly laughs. In this film there are none of them. Or from wit or from jokes. In this film there are few of them. It comes from the sense of humor of the director, and maybe one of the actors. In this case Billy Wilder, whose first Hollywood direction this was, and from Ray Milland, whose happy innocence spreads forgiveness for any possible flaw. He’s so lively and good and good looking. He has such a sunny smile. And he is completely convinced of the script as offered. Which is that he recognizes that Rogers is  11 years old. Rogers was at the peak of her powers at this time, and took Wilder aside for an hour to see if she believed he could direct this. She loved his and Charles Brackett’s script, and she was one of the few big stars in Hollywood who would agree to looking quite foolish on screen, so she is in Dorothy pigtails for a lot of it. And she’s an ace actress. She plays opposite Rita Johnson, so watch how Johnson throws a bucket of acid when she speaks when all she need do is flick a drop, while, in their confrontation scene after the ball, with Rogers a drop devastates. And take in the lighting and filming of that scene by Leo Tover. Beautiful. Take a look also at Rogers’ trim figure, so like those of the women actresses of her day, Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Wyman, Dorothy McGuire, Claudette Colbert. Joan Crawford, all narrow hipped and slender. The film endures its longeurs when our Ginger has to endure the dating of the cadets, but it comes alive whenever Diana Lynn is on screen with her, and also when that famous stage mother, Lela Rogers appears in this her first film, as Rogers’ mother. Built just like her daughter and looks like her too. A delightful improbability in a picture of delightful improbabilities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Favorite Blond/Star Spangled Rhythm

23 Jan

My Favorite Blond/Star Spangled Rhythm —  director Sidney Lanfield/George Marshall – Mystery Farce in which a coward gets involved with a WWII spy ring. And A Hollywood WWII effort Variety Show.  Black and white 1942.

* * * * *

The Ghostbusters is a better Hope film of this era, but this one has its moments, as a mock spy caper, with Madeleine Carroll as The Hitchcock blonde she was. Star Spangled Rhythm is a Paramount varsity show and far more fun, with Hope as a cameo, spouting in-jokes about Crosby who is also in it. In a huge cast of Paramount superstars, the main attraction is Betty Hutton. You might say, if fact you would have to say, she “propels” the plot, for she had pop-eyes in every cell of her body. Here she throws herself into each scene as though onto a trampoline. This was her way, and if you can stand it, you can stand anything. But boy do you have to give her credit for total engagement, and she is superb in one scene with two men attached by the hands, trying to get over a wall. It’s a very funny scene, brilliantly played by her and by the other two, who were avid contortionists. Ray Milland, Franchot Tone, and Fred MacMurray are amusing as three men playing bridge like three women, a sketch written by George S. Kaufman. And there is Rochester doing a superb zoot-suit number with Katherine Dunham, young and great. Boy, do they rock! George Balanchine’s choreography of a jazz ballet with Vera Zorina is fascinating, not least because of Zorina’s amazing figure — yikes! Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer wrote the music for the film, and the score includes That Old Black Magic and Dick Powell and Mary Martin singing Hit The Road to Dreamland, the latter of which is taken over by a quartet of black male singers who are just wonderful! So there is really a lot of jam on the thin piece of toast this picture is, which was a War-effort effort. The toast may be stale by now, but the jam — especially as regards the black singers and dancers — is still fresher than fresh!

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