Category: 1960

Tormented (1960, Bert I. Gordon)

Tormented is the story of how the world’s greatest jazz pianist (Richard Carlson) lost it all because he wasn’t a forty-eight-year-old virgin. I mean, also because he let his former lover, played by Juli Reding, fall to her death without trying to help her. Good thing they’re on an island where any peculiar death results in a ghost haunting. Hence, Reding can take her vengeance while also revealing Carlson’s skinny moral fiber.

Carlson’s on the island preparing for his big Carnegie Hall debut. At some point, he met and fell in love with local girl Lugene Sanders. She’s from a wealthy family and is “young,” according to Reding. Sanders is actually older than Reding, but… Sanders is virginal, and Reding is in showbiz. They’re a week away from the wedding, so many scenes involve Sanders being interested in the preparation and Carlson not being very interested.

Sanders’s little sister (daughter of director Gordon, Susan Gordon) thinks Carlson’s just the best and wishes he’d marry her but he can’t because she’s only ten. Too bad they don’t live in one of those places where you can get married at twelve. Yow and double yow.

Most of Carlson’s scenes are by himself, looking around for Reding’s ghost, who starts haunting him the day after her death. It takes him a few close encounters to believe it’s real, but then he spends a long stretch trying to ignore the haunting. If it weren’t for meddling water taxi captain Joe Turkel, he’d have gotten away with it, too.

Turkel shows up around halfway through the movie and, poking around, realizes either Carlson has Reding in some pleasure hideaway… or she might just not be anywhere anymore. That kind of information should be worth some money, shouldn’t it? Especially since Sanders’s parents are rich (the actor playing her father, Harry Fleer, is younger than Carlson, but mom Vera Marshe is actually older than Carlson, who’d have thunk).

At a certain point, the blackmail plot takes over from the haunting plot. Island horticulturist Lillian Adams seems to know what’s going on—even threatening Reding’s (unseen) presence—but then immediately disappears from the movie so Turkel can come in. Adams doesn’t even come back for the big wedding scene. The character is a blind person, and Adams does a lot of work for it, but there’s a scene where it’s apparent none of that work includes using the cane. See, Reding fell off a lighthouse, so everyone in the cast has to go to the lighthouse at one point or another.

The special effects are, frankly, too cheesy to be taken seriously, but they’re not poorly done. Some of them are okay. And Tormented’s got great cinematography from Ernest Laszlo. Most of the movie is profile two-shots, but they fine.

The same cannot be said for the music, composed by Albert Glasser. It’s a jazz score, but not a jazz piano score, and it seems like it’s for a beach party spoof version of the film.

Carlson’s not good, but rather convincing as a very bad dude as the film progresses. Gordon gets a bunch, and she’s terrible–though with all of the ten-year-old’s dialogue being upset about not being a sexual object yet, did she have a chance? Yow, yikes, and yuck.

Turkel is awesome. Sometimes, he’s good, and sometimes, he’s as good as the material lets him get, but he’s always awesome.

Tormented’s too long at seventy-five minutes, but the various curiosity factors keep it going until Turkel shows up and takes over.

Devil’s Partner (1960, Charles R. Rondeau)

Devil’s Partner opens with an old man in his shack killing a goat to seal a deal with Old Scratch. The man’s arrangement is simple—his soul for two years.

Wait, two years of what? Shh, watch the movie.

We also never get to see any more of Old Scratch than his hand. It’s effective but given how well the movie does with the makeup—Ed Nelson plays the protagonist, the old man’s nephew, and puts on makeup for the old man part, too–it might’ve been nice to see a more full-bodied cameo.

Anyway.

Cut to nephew Nelson appearing in town, showing up late after his uncle sent him a plea for help. Too late, it turns out. Nelson charms the local lunch counter owner (Claire Carleton, who quickly establishes Partner’s supporting cast is going to put in the acting work) before the sheriff hauls him in. Just to go immediately back on the previous statement—sheriff Spencer Carlisle is pretty bad. Partner’s got some caricature performances, but they’re good ones, and much of the acting is caveat-free solid. But Carlisle’s terrible. He tries, but it doesn’t help.

Carlisle will also have some exceptional leans throughout the film when he plays stoic. While they film something terrible, his ability to lean so hard on air is impressive.

Nelson quickly becomes a trusted neighbor. When service station owner Richard Crane finds himself unable to run the station for a while, Nelson steps up and fills in, mainly as a favor to Crane’s fiancée, Jean Allison, the only person in town Nelson’s uncle liked.

However, as someone points out, Nelson’s dirty old man uncle liked Allison because she’s a comely lass.

We don’t get much insight into the uncle’s character—or lack thereof—but it sure seems like he was an ornery old asshole; no one in town, save Allison, seems to miss him. Not even town doctor Edgar Buchanan, Allison’s dad, who had an arrangement with the old uncle for goats’ milk to alleviate the symptoms of TB patients. It’s kind of wild how unpleasant townsfolk get to one another.

At least before Nelson arrived; he has a way of calming everyone around him, including Allison. Crane’s inability to work and his concerns about some medical issues cause him to retract from Allison, with Nelson awkwardly finding himself filling a similar space in her life as he comforts her. Well, it’s more awkward for Allison because Nelson’s motives are never exactly clear. Occasionally, he’ll have situations where he’s got to take a more active hand, like when town-drunk Byron Foulger (who’s not good so much as delightful) betrays Nelson’s trust, which could potentially lead to trouble with the local constabulary.

It all works out in the end, nice and wrapped up, with Nelson, Allison, and Buchanan giving sturdy and better performances throughout. Crane’s fine at the start, but his arc’s noisy and slight, and Crane’s got no volume control. There’s only so much time the script can give him; maybe it’s more at fault (a lot of his drama occurs off-screen, with Allison recounting it to others).

Other than Crane and Carlisle, all the acting’s fine.

Rondeau’s direction is competent, especially given the budget and limitations. He gives the actors time, but never too much time. Edward Cronjager’s black-and-white photography is gorgeous. It’s a shame Rondeau doesn’t give him anything better to shoot because Cronjager’s clearly on it here. The day for night’s not great, obviously, but when Cronjager gets to really light, he really lights.

Devil’s Partner is a surprisingly competent little horror picture. Nelson and Allison are compelling, sometimes in unison, sometimes at odds, and Rondeau runs it lean.

Elmer Gantry (1960, Richard Brooks)

Elmer Gantry is all about possibilities. Possibilities for the plot, for the performances, for the film. Director (and screenwriter) Brooks watches the film along with the audience, specifically the performances. Everyone’s just waiting to see what Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, and Shirley Jones are going to do next. Sometimes, Brooks emphasizes the performance with quick cuts—the first act has some spectacular sequences, with editor Marjorie Fowler, Brooks, and composer André Previn in divine sync—sometimes, he lets the camera sit. Perfectly lighted scene (courtesy John Alton) and Lancaster or Simmons monologuing.

Though it’s not all monologuing. Gantry’s got some wonderful banter sequences; the film’s practically designed for them.

Set in the 1920s, the film opens with Lancaster amusing a bunch of traveling salesmen. They meet up for Christmas every year because Lancaster knows where to find the best booze (Prohibition-time) and the best women (bored housewives). Lancaster’s holding court, telling dirty jokes, and having a great time; only then the Sisters of Mercy come in asking for a donation, and the heathens are shitty to them. So Lancaster does a sermon, surprising the bar (and helping him seduce a lady) with his seemingly devout religiosity. The scene establishes the character, that duality, and Lancaster’s exceptional way of essaying it.

The film will explore the contradictions in the appropriately lengthy second act, but first, it’s got to get Lancaster to church. Lancaster resists even as he sees posters for traveling tent revivalist Simmons alongside his own sales route. He ends up there one night out of boredom (and a busy housewife) and becomes immediately enraptured by Simmons. But Lancaster’s not her only admirer, though he’s the only one who’s planning to do anything about it. Both Arthur Kennedy and Dean Jagger revere Simmons. Jagger’s her business manager, a good Christian who thinks he’s enabling a prophet. Kennedy’s the atheist newspaperman tagging along with the tour.

Lancaster can’t give Simmons to give him the time of day—he’s too much of a smooth talker—until he seduces her band leader (Patti Page) and weasels his way along with them. But he still can’t convince Simmons he’s godly, except she doesn’t care, it turns out. She’s more than willing to put a smooth-talking bible thumper on stage if it gets butts in seats and pledge cards signed. There’s a business angle to it; after all, local churches pay Simmons and Jagger in advance to bring the revival to town.

We don’t find out about that side of things until around halfway through, when—thanks to Lancaster’s fire, brimstone, and sexy sermons—the local big city asks Simmons to bring her show to them. The film stays in the big city (Zenith, a recurring fictional city in novel author Sinclair Lewis’s work), which makes sense because it’s where Kennedy’s newspaper is based and Jones lives. Jones is an ex-lover of Lancaster’s with a very big, very sharp, very justified ax to grind. The film introduces her early, as Lancaster and Simmons start making news together, raising expectations for when she’ll figure into the main plot. Jones is exceptional.

So’s Simmons. Somehow, Simmons manages to give just as showy a performance as Lancaster (or Jones), but they’re absurdly extroverted, and she’s reserved. It’s Simmons’s revival, no matter what Lancaster or Jagger thinks. However, Lancaster and Jagger’s prickly relationship turns out to be one of the film’s sharpest, subtlest subplots. So good.

Kennedy’s good, too; he’s just not extraordinary. Lancaster, Simmons, and Jones all give these singular performances, while Jagger and Kennedy excel closer in character parts. Of course, Jagger and Kennedy’s characters are mostly reacting to the others, which also affects how they function and what they can do with the parts. The film’s practically overflowing with great performances; for instance, Page never gets enough.

All the technicals are excellent. Brooks’s direction is patient, enthusiastic, and reserved. He never rushes a scene or a delivery. He gives Lancaster and Simmons time for their preaching; the film’s about these characters’ relationship with religion, internal and external, and Brooks wants to showcase it. Done wrong, it’d be anti-climactic; Gantry doesn’t do it wrong, quite the opposite.

Alton’s photography, Fowler’s cuts, Previn’s music, all superb. Dorothy Jeakins’s costumes too. Lots of character development in the changing outfits, sometimes subtle, sometimes not.

Lancaster and Simmons are the whole show. Brooks and his crew are just trying to create the optimal narrative distance on Lancaster, specifically on his experiences with Simmons. Even when she’s not around, when it’s Lancaster and Jagger, Kennedy, or Jones, Simmons’s presence is always felt. She’s the show; they’re all spectators, except Lancaster wants to be on stage too. Kennedy and Lancaster have a great friendship throughout, two cynics on different paths.

As far as who’s better, Lancaster or Simmons, it depends on the scene. Though we get to know Lancaster better through the film, whereas Simmons gets to keep some secrets, which makes her performance inherently more complicated. They’re both so damn good. And then Jones. So damn good.

The whole picture. So damn good.

Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)

Psycho is a masterpiece of color. After forty joyfully plodding minutes of Janet Leigh going from fetching spinster in a torrid lunch hour romance to grand larcenist in precise black and white (and then another few minute as she moves to close that character arc), director Hitchcock and Psycho put Leigh in the color of an all-white motel bathroom. And all of a sudden the black and white film (gorgeous photography from John L. Russell) is just as colorful as the imagination, albeit in a stark, sterile white bathroom. The mundane soon becomes a nightmare, even as Hitchcock allows for some ogle on Leigh—who’s partially in her current predicament thanks to every man she’s encountered in the film objectifying her in one way or another. The first arc—not act—of Psycho is Hitchcock humanizing Leigh from the opening, which has her dissatisfied with beau John Gavin. He’s a hunk and he’s worth matinees on work days, but he’s unavailable—he’s too broke to marry Leigh—and Leigh’s getting exhausted with her life.

The film’s an entire flex from Hitchcock. There’s not a scene where he’s not showing off. The drab backgrounds of Leigh’s office are going to contrast the white in the bathroom but also the clutter of the eventual locations. Leigh’s office is as flat and bland as the motel where she and Gavin meet. Psycho’s all about motel living for Leigh; she starts in one, she ends in one. In the first she has urban—even if it’s small city Arizona—anonymity, in the second she has none. In the first she’s on an arc to cause (or inflict, but it’s hard to sympathize with the guys she’s ripping off) suffering, in the second she’s brought the situation around and is directing herself now, actively toward gladness. But Psycho is not about the moral tragedy of Leigh’s character, though along the way Hitchcock does sort of decimate the film noir trappings and examine the resulting dust; Psycho is about the unknown and the terror hiding in it.

Because the second motel is where Leigh meets Anthony Perkins and once Perkins arrives, even a nude shower scene isn’t enough to keep the focus on Leigh. It’s all about Perkins. He’s a shy, somewhat awkward, but very charming, handsome young man who manages the roadside motel for his elderly, infirm mother. They live up in a big house behind the motel. Hitchcock’s going to be very, very careful about how he shows that big house. For most of the film there’s only one way to get there; Perkins’s slim figure, always in mostly dark, going up to the house, coming down from the house, is going to become on the film’s most haunting images as the audience learns more and more about him. Psycho’s a mystery. Hitchcock tells the story of that mystery with the film, with his shots—there are always well-placed inserts to make the world tactile to the viewer—with the photography, with George Tomasini’s editing, and obviously Bernard Herrmann’s awesome music. Whoever did the sound design—Tomasini, Hitchcock, some sound recorder—works in such magnificent unison with Herrmann, who’ll go very loud then silent, the silence ratcheting up the terror. Because everyone’s in some kind of danger in Psycho. Always.

The film establishes very early on women are not safe in Psycho. Sure, she’s in the process of committing a felony, but Leigh is in danger every guy she meets and always because she’s a woman. So when her sister, Vera Miles, starts looking for her, not just retracing her journey but continuing on—Leigh’s plan was to steal the money and go rescue Gavin and then disappear (was disappearing on twenty grand possible in 1960)—with Miles making the trip to Gavin and enlisting his help. Miles only puts herself in actual danger in the finale, but until then it’s clear she’s not safe.

Miles and Gavin get a Third Musketeer in Martin Balsam, a private detective out to get the money back before Leigh’s boss, Vaughn Taylor , has to call the cops. Balsam validates a bunch of imagined offscreen events from Leigh’s rationalizing scene—a phenomenal sequence with Leigh in close-up, driving through a thunderstorm, imagining various conversations about her going on, the conversations playing as voiceovers. Again, Hitchcock flexes everywhere he can in Psycho, showing off a variety of distinct devices, only slowing down once the film’s got Perkins established.

While Leigh’s story is Psycho’s more obvious MacGuffin, certain aspects of Perkins’s character and performance are similarly airy as far as the actual narrative’s concerned. Everything’s relevant, but thanks to Russell’s lighting, Hitchcock obscures that relevancy. Psycho always presents Perkins as a sort of sympathetic, even after it’s clear he doesn’t get it by default. He’s less a hen-pecked doting son and more an active participant in his mother’s outbursts, which place terrible burdens on him. The scene where Perkins has got to clean up the bathroom, restoring the pristine whiteness, has all these tactile touchstones so Hitchcock can force the audience into a sympathetic response (we’ve all grabbed a towel, haven’t we), only for Hitchcock to reveal the dangers of such sympathies. You’ve got to be on guard at all times in Psycho.

Of course, there’s an explanation for all the goings on, and it’s a….

It’s a lot. The film weaponizes the inaccurate, bigoted psychology of the era to create a new category of screen villain (or at least new in A tier movies) for an easy reveal, all patriarchally lectured (quite ably from Simon Oakland). It’s sexist, transphobic, ableist; even for the era the film should’ve come with a disclaimer. Psycho is, no doubt, a singular masterpiece; it changed mainstream film thanks to Hitchcock and company’s techniques. And also because of its garbage reveal. That reveal has had a lot of bad consequences. Solely bad consequences, in fact; fruit of a poisonous tree branch. Psycho’s deus ex machina hasn’t so much as aged badly as always been rotten.

It’s also an expertly executed deus ex machina. Hitchcock knows how to present the reveals, then pulls all the threads together for the last few shots; he brings in Perkins for part of the pay-off too, after building big up to his return to the screen even though he’s only been gone a few minutes. It’s incredibly well-done, also bringing back the noir feels.

Psycho’s one of a kind.

Charlotte and Her Lover (1960, Jean-Luc Godard)

Somewhere around minute seven–of an unlucky thirteen–Charlotte and Her Lover's ending started to seem inevitable; predictability makes the last six minutes even more tiresome. Writer, director, and de facto lead Godard (he looped in the ranting monologue for onscreen lead Jean-Paul Belmondo) could have done the whole thing in three minutes and maybe gotten away with it. At thirteen minutes, it's just annoying (though I guess it does move fairly fast).

The short opens with Anne Collette, who's not very good but how could one tell given she mostly just makes cute little noises and has maybe two actual lines before Lover's punchline. She's going to Belmondo's apartment, where he's chewing on a cigar–sometimes a cigar's just a cigar but not here–and being a soulful unpublished novelist. They're former lovers. She left him for a successful movie guy. He rants and raves at her for eleven minutes, saying very little of content. Given Godard then dubbed all the audio, it seems like Lover had an actual script, but… wow, if it did. It's real, real bad. Ad-libbing it maybe you could forgive some. But Godard intentionally writing out the rant for someone to deliver aloud?

Icky bad.

Nothing Belmondo says matters in the end because of the punchline. But it's mostly pseudo-macho blather with some nice passive (and active) misogyny thrown in. Though Godard presents Collette from Belmondo's perspective–she's an adorably dressed nitwit who has what seems to be a clown's theme accompanying her on the soundtrack. Again, if it were ten minutes shorter… might work. Ten minutes shorter with a minute for the opening and closing titles. So two minutes instead of thirteen. At that length, the lack of character for Collette might be all right and Godard's delivery of the monologue might not grate too much.

Alas, it's that thirteen.

Lover doesn't just not have the script going for it–and an entirely dialogue-based short with a lousy script is already circling the bowl–it also doesn't have any visuals going for it. Godard's composition and stage direction aren't any better than his dialogue (or his performance).

Like I said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes it's a metaphor for the short being a turd taking thirteen minutes to finally go down.

Charlotte and Her Lover is risible.

Love Exists (1960, Maurice Pialat)

With a title like Love Exists, it seems reasonable the short might turn around and stop being so intensely depressing, but no. The film, written and directed by Pialat with narration by Jean-Loup Reynold, starts with people leaving the city (Paris) proper for their night in the suburbs. It’s not clear yet what the narrator’s take on the workers’ commute is going to be but there’s some definition foreshadowing. Pialat does some visual foreshadowing throughout, but never as much as at the beginning.

Once the film arrives in the suburbs, the narrator talks about growing up there and how it used to be. Pialat juxtaposes the contemporary with the memories, using the sound effects to bind the two. Sound is very important in Love Exists, especially in the first half, as Pialat and Reynold take us through these neighborhoods, introduce us to the people living there. The mostly poor, the mostly uneducated, the workers. They spend their lives on the commute, hoping to survive to retirement age, their lives as unchanging as their ancestors, the fourteenth century farmers.

Contrasted with the plight of the working class is the build-up of Paris. The build-up of some suburbs. Next to the brutal new housing structures, where the children play amongst the concrete and steel, on their way to becoming good worker drones too, are the shanty towns. The debris isn’t from the war, it’s from the constructed. It’s not from the past, it’s from the future, which leaves out the workers.

Just when you think Pialat can’t get any more depressing, he looks at the situation of the older adults, the workers who made it to retirement, who exist in homes. Casted off once they’ve survived. The last moment manages to be even more devastating.

And Pialat and Reynold get to that devastation with the melancholic Georges Delerue score, which ought to work against Exists, but doesn’t. The music never overpowers the narration, the narration never overpowers the sound design. Nothing can approach Pialat and cinematographer Gilbert Sarthre’s shots either. Early on, it seems like the world can only exist in the black and white of the short, but by the end it’s hard to imagine the world actually existing in color.

Great editing from Kenout Peltier.

Love Exists is an extraordinary, rending twenty minutes.

3/3Highly Recommended

CREDITS

Written and directed by Maurice Pialat; director of photography, Gilbert Sarthre; edited by Kenout Peltier; music by Georges Delerue; produced by Pierre Braunberger for Les Films de la Pléiade.

Narrated by Jean-Loup Reynold.

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The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder)

The Apartment does whatever it can to remain a dramatic comedy when it shouldn’t be anymore. And sort of isn’t. When the film shifts into real drama, there’s no going back. Director Wilder gets it too. The film has a good comedy opening, a breathtaking dramatic middle, and a decent comedy end. The comedy in the opening and the end is very different. The opening comedy is sort of bemused–oh, isn’t it funny how office drone Jack Lemmon gets into management because he lends out his apartment to company managers to use with their girlfriends. You know, away from the wives.

Now, there’s drama of some kind forecast in the opening comedy. The comedy, drama, and comedy split doesn’t exactly fit the three acts. But is sort of shoe-horned to fit. Anyway. There’s some inevitable character drama forecast during the comedy. Lemmon’s got a crush on elevator girl and confirmed non-dater Shirley MacLaine. Turns out she’s not a non-dater, she’s just more discreet than the rest of the office staff. And by office staff, there are thousands of employees. An absurd number of them, actually, for the space. Because before The Apartment becomes a romantic pursuit comedy, it’s a modern office comedy.

Writers Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond do pretty well at the modern office comedy. It all hinges on Lemmon, who’s really got to do everything for twenty-five minutes. It’s a two-hour and change film. So the first fifth is all Lemmon and the modern office comedy involving his apartment. MacLaine shows up, but she’s just another piece of the office comedy.

It’s when Lemmon finally gets busted and big boss Fred MacMurray demands use of The Apartment does the film start moving. All the setup is Lemmon–quite spectacularly–spinning his wheels. There’s no narrative drive to Lemmon’s promotion goals because it’s unclear they’re goals. Certainly why they’d be goals. Lemmon’s character is the force of his personality and performance. It isn’t until the scene with MacMurray Lemmon has to do anything different. That scene changes the whole movie.

Then there’s sort of this mini-first act to the dramatic material, moving the film away from the comedy, bringing in MacLaine’s story. Told in exposition. There’s a lot of character revelations through exposition in The Apartment and they’re often spectacular, but never explored. Lemmon and MacLaine never get to develop in their scenes together. They spend most of the dramatic middle together. The middle of The Apartment is this short film within the film, where the direction changes, the script changes, the performances change.

And the middle is wonderful. Both Lemmon and MacLaine are fantastic. They have this parallel development arc. Lemmon’s falling for MacLaine, MacLaine’s getting back together with MacMurray. There are dramatic stakes involved; the film doesn’t prepare for them. Wilder and Diamond have some absurdism at the beginning, then they’ve got some shock value. But all very mild. The script relies on these sturdy narrative devices, but always carefully; making sure they never creak.

Wilder’s direction is outstanding. He, cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, and editor Daniel Mandell create a seamless visual experience. So seamless when it detaches from Lemmon and MacLaine in the last third, the second comedy section, it does so ahead of the story. The filmmaking and the writing are both phenomenal. Even when The Apartment is skipping character development for these short, tragic, cynically comedic set pieces in the last third. Wilder and Diamond make the film into a drama–almost entirely straight drama–in the middle, then try to avoid having to do a dramatic finish.

Because they want to do the romantic comedy, which is cute–Lemmon and MacLaine are cute, MacMurray’s great as the sleazebag boss–but they haven’t really set up. There are some big Lemmon revelations in the finale and they don’t fit with the rest of the character. Not how Wilder and Diamond handled him in the opening. The script also has a problem with MacLaine’s naiveté. Sometimes she has so much she couldn’t have gotten to where she’s gotten. She also gets some big revelations, but in the middle dramatic area–so not played for comedy like Lemmon’s later revelations–and they scuff with some of the earlier character development; the finale could fix it. But doesn’t. Because as much as the final third distances itself from Lemmon, it abandons MacLaine.

And when she is in it, Wilder and Diamond keep her as flat as possible. It’s very strange. The finale just feels perfunctory. Technically inspired, beautifully written, but perfunctory. The film stops worrying about its characters and concentrates on the most efficient way to finish things up.

The acting’s all great. Lemmon, MacLaine, MacMurray (whose paper thin character never gets any thicker). David Lewis and Ray Walston are awesome as a couple of Lemmon’s apartment leches. Jack Kruschen and Naomi Stevens are Lemmon’s neighbors, who think he’s a sex addict with all the activity in his apartment; they play a big part in the middle. They go from being bit comedy background to this spectacular dramatic support.

Hope Holiday is hilarious. It’s kind of an extended cameo; the part’s beautifully written and Holiday’s fantastic. The other thing about The Apartment is how little Wilder and Diamond try in the final section. They employ these particular, different, precise narrative devices–always beautifully executed–and then they give up on trying for new ones in the finale.

Edie Adams is good as MacMurray’s secretary. She too goes from background to… well, not support, but also not background. The way the script makes room for bigger parts for the characters is another phenomenal quality of it. And another one the finale ignores.

The Apartment is rather frustrating. It’s spectacular film. Masterfully, exquisitely produced. But still disappointing. It pulls off this great transition from comedy to drama and then shrugs at the transition back. It never runs out of enthusiasm just ambition.

3.5/4★★★½

CREDITS

Produced and directed by Billy Wilder; written by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond; director of photography, Joseph LaShelle; edited by Daniel Mandell; music by Adolph Deutsch; released by United Artists.

Starring Jack Lemmon (C.C. Baxter), Shirley MacLaine (Fran Kubelik), Fred MacMurray (Jeff D. Sheldrake), Jack Kruschen (Dr. Dreyfuss), Edie Adams (Miss Olsen), Naomi Stevens (Mrs. Mildred Dreyfuss), Ray Walston (Joe Dobisch), David Lewis (Al Kirkeby), Johnny Seven (Karl Matuschka), and Hope Holiday (Mrs. Margie MacDougall).


THIS POST IS PART OF THE GREATEST FILM I'VE NEVER SEEN BLOGATHON HOSTED BY DEBBIE OF MOON IN GEMINI.

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Inherit the Wind (1960, Stanley Kramer)

A lot of Inherit the Wind is about ideas and not small ones, but big ones. Director Kramer is careful with how big he lets the film get with these ideas, because even though Inherit the Wind is about Darwin vs. the Bible as its biggest idea, the smaller ideas are the more significant ones. And when Kramer’s got Fredric March in a bombastic performance on the side of the Bible, Kramer’s careful to put him in front of those smaller, more important ideas.

The film’s impeccably acted, not just by March or Spencer Tracy as his pseudo-alter ego, but also Gene Kelly as a newspaperman and Florence Eldridge as March’s wife. Amid all these big ideas and small ideas and top-billed stars are Dick York (the small-town teacher teaching Darwin) and his fiancée Donna Anderson (who’s the preacher’s daughter).

Inherit the Wind has something of an anti-climatic finish, just because Kramer and the screenwriters want to let the viewer figure it out. Kramer sets up the film larger than life then, gently, reveals the film’s never larger than life, just the viewers’ expectation of it. There’s depth to the grandiosity and everyone should have been paying attention.

A great deal of the film is listening and watching people listen. Almost all of Harry Morgan’s time is spent listening (as the judge). It’s all important. Kramer’s trying to figure out how to make this too big story work. And he does. Mostly.

Great Ernest Laszlo photography.

Wild River (1960, Elia Kazan)

Director Kazan opens Wild River with newsreel footage of the Tennessee River at flood. The film is set in the 1930s, something else the newsreel footage establishes. Kazan and screenwriter Paul Osborn spend the least amount of time possible setting up the film. The newsreel takes care of setting, when lead Montgomery Clift starts his new job, he talks to his secretary, taking care of ground situation. River’s quick start lets Kazan fill every minute of the film.

The Tennessee River floods and the dam Clift’s federal employee is in town to build are barely subplots by the end of the film. They’re details, because it turns out–even though the ground situation’s established–River is more about what happens after Clift decides to poke around in it (since he’s new). That poking around leads to Clift meeting Lee Remick and Wild River is really their relationship and how it affects, and is affected, by the events occurring around them.

There are subplots with Remick and Jo Van Fleet (as her grandmother, who won’t leave her land), Van Fleet and Clift and then Clift and his forced desegregation of the town. Osborn and Kazan never force anything dramatically; the film has a very specific setting, geographic and in time. What could be melodramatic shortcuts are instead sublime, sometimes painful details.

The acting’s amazing–Clift, Remick, Van Fleet. Remick’s probably the best.

Ellsworth Fredericks’s photography and Kenyon Hopkins’s music also exceptional. And Kazan nails every shot.

Wild River is superior.

The Twilight Zone (1959) s01e14 – Third from the Sun

Third from the Sun suffers from a far too obvious ending. The episode forecasts it a few minutes early and then it all falls into line. However, it’s an obvious twist ending and it is a “Twilight Zone” after all, so who knows if it’s just predictable now because of the series having such an impact.

Mostly the episode is Fritz Weaver freaking out about coming nuclear war and having to convince his family they need to escape. Weaver does really well during his paranoia scenes, even though he eventually has to start sharing the episode.

Joe Maross and Edward Andrews show up about the same time. Well, Andrews has a long bit at the beginning too; he’s the villain. Maross is Weaver’s sidekick. Once the paranoia ends for Weaver, both Maross and Andrews have a lot more to do.

Bare shoots everything tilted (more obvious foreshadowing), but it’s good.