Tag: Gene Evans

Shock Corridor (1963, Samuel Fuller)

Writer, director, and producer Fuller ends Shock Corridor’s main plot so quickly, it’s like he’s in a hurry to get to the epilogues. Except the epilogues are where Corridor falls flat and doesn’t have the time to get back up. As the film progresses, Fuller makes some significant achievements and builds up such an incredible momentum it seems impossible he’ll run out of speed.

Sadly, he does. Shock Corridor pulls Fuller in just too many directions and he goes with a genre standard. Or at least a genre reliable. Corridor—at the start, anyway—is a film noir. Lead Peter Breck narrates the opening in the past tense; later, he’ll narrate in the present. It doesn’t really matter; the narration’s not successful, but Fuller proves it necessary, so it’s then becomes more tolerable. There is a move Fuller misses for the narration, which is a bummer because it literally would tie the movie together.

The first thirty or so minutes is about reporter Breck trying to convince girlfriend Constance Towers to go along with his scheme to get himself committed to the state mental hospital so he can catch a murderer and win the Pulitzer Prize. He forgets to mention he’s not going to just any state mental hospital, but the one with the celebrity patients. There’s some talk about how well Breck has researched the people he needs to interview inside the hospital, but they turn out to be so famous they’d have been on a magazine cover.

Towers thinks it’s too dangerous, not to mention illegal. Not to mention gross. Breck, his boss Bill Zuckert, and Zuckert’s war buddy turned psychiatrist whistleblower Philip Ahn want Towers to pretend she and Breck are siblings and he’s been coming on to her for years. When she’s finally had enough, she’ll report him, he’ll get hauled off to the mental hospital because it’s 1963, and even though everyone acknowledges men are dangerous to women… sometimes the ladies are really asking for it.

Ew. Also, that detail should come up in the plot and doesn’t, which is a big problem with the film heading into the third act. So when Fuller’s able to right the ship, it’s magnificent. He paces it just right, leverages Breck just right—despite Brock’s sometimes omnipresent narration, he’s far better at the brooding physical stuff—and we’re almost home.

Then wipeout when Fuller dumps treating Towers like a real character. At least she’d been the de facto protagonist for the first act, some of the second. Doing right by her would’ve made up for her always getting the shit end of the stick in Corridor. When she balks at going through with the plan, Breck reminds her she works in a strip club, and so she can’t talk. We then see Towers’s performance, which is a torch singer nightclub number, while she strips off pieces of her skimpy outfit and undulates absurdly. Once hospitalized, Towers in the skimpy outfit will become the angel (and devil) on his shoulder, superimposed, imagined, objectified. Meanwhile, the real Towers is trying to convince newspaper editor Zuckert to pull Breck out, especially after his doctor—an unfortunately middling John Matthews—calls Towers to interview her about her and Breck’s fake family relationship.

All while Towers is going to visit Breck, and they paw each other.

It’s a mess.

But it’s near perfection when Fuller gets going with the procedural—well into the second act. Fuller hammers in big ideas, does fantastic callbacks, and all while basically presenting a jingoistic patriarchal worldview with some very problematic beliefs about mental health. Because Shock Corridor isn’t about Breck’s Pulitzer dreams or Towers’s skimpy outfits (though it is, obviously, it very much is about her skimpy outfits; Fuller worked hard to make up reasons for her to be in them). Anyway. It’s about these three patients and how they’ve been experiencing modern life.

First is James Best. He’s the only one we meet in the first act. The other two actors were busy when they were shooting those crowd shots and what not. Best initially presents as a Southerner who can’t get over the Civil War (shocker), but then it turns out he’s a Korean War vet who defected to the Soviets. See, his parents had raised him to be a racist Southern shit, but then something happened in the war, and he realized it was bullshit and he was being patriotic wrong, so he became a defector. And a worldwide celebrity.

Until he meets Lee Marvin from The Big Red One. Kind of seriously. There’s not not a Sam Fuller connected universe.

Best’s low okay. Until Hari Rhodes shows up, Corridor’s acting peaks aren’t particularly considerable, so low okay isn’t bad. It also gives Breck one of his first good brooding scenes when he’s got to listen but not narrate. Since we get so little about Breck’s state of mind—the question from scene one is will Breck go insane after being institutionalized—scenes where he’s got to reflect are great. And too rare, especially since he’s got a tedious “cat got your tongue” subplot in the third act to delay things for dramatic purposes.

But even with Best just being better than expected, the content’s unexpected. Shock Corridor spends the first act trying to be lurid without being too lewd. The second act is about white racists coming to terms with imperialism (sort of), followed by a Black man (Rhodes) driven insane due to the pressure of being the only Black student at a hostile Southern university, then a nuclear physicist who knows all the times we’ve averted nuclear destruction.

Gene Evans plays the physicist and ends up being Corridor’s biggest successful swing, which is something because the way Rhodes’s mental illness presents is he thinks he’s a white Klan member who wants to lynch Black people. The staff at the integrated hospital know Rhodes is a threat to the other patients but only acknowledge it after Rhodes has attacked someone. It’s a big logic hole.

Rhodes is also absolutely spellbindingly phenomenal. Even when Fuller’s script sends him a particular curveball. Usually, within a couple of lines, Rhodes has made the outlier seem foundational to his character. He consumes it. Rhodes raises Corridor to another level. With this performance in this part, it’s clear Fuller’s more ambitious.

And he makes the Evans thing work.

And action finale.

He totally fumbles the finish. The last story to tell would be Towers’s. And then Fuller takes then that acknowledgment away while leaving another thread visibly untied.

But Corridor’s often a glorious success.

Rhodes is the hands-down best, followed by Evans, then Towers. Zuckert’s good but barely in it. Larry Tucker’s great as another patient.

Great black and white photography from Stanley Cortez throughout. Jerome Thoms’s editing is less consistent, usually thanks to Fuller’s lack of coverage. It gets really good for much of the second act, then also takes a hit for the conclusion.

Shock Corridor’s outstanding. Disappointing as all hell but outstanding.

Park Row (1952, Samuel Fuller)

Writer, director, and producer Fuller is very committed to the bit with Park Row. He almost pulls the film out of its spiraling third act with an audacious epilogue, which ties back into the opening, with its (uncredited) narration setting the scene. The year is 1886, the place is New York City, and there live the finest men in the world—the American Newspaperman. Emphasis on man. Row’s going to have some very interesting misogyny, but it always comes with enough to qualify it down to class commentary. Fuller never lets the film be too mean to leading lady Mary Welch because she’s the love interest too.

Plus, imagine if a dynamic, self-made man competed with Welch in business and ideology and eventually won her over to his side. Fuller gets away with a lot in Park Row and it’s always because he’s got the right lead—Gene Evans. Fuller takes almost twenty minutes to give Evans his first close-up, even though the movie’s narration hands the action over to him. He’s just a newspaperman, after all, he’s not the one making the story, just the one telling it. Except he disagrees with his paper swaying a murder trial against the defendant, putting Evans in paper owner Welch’s sights. The film doesn’t precisely explain Welch’s backstory, but it plays like she’s inherited the paper from a dead father and has been smartly trying to make money with the paper instead of reporting the news like an American Newspaperman.

There’s one scene where kindly old reporter Herbert Heyes gives Welch a startling dressing down, weaponizing the cultural misogyny against her. It’s intense and, like one of the love scenes, impressive what Fuller can accomplish given the constraints. He’s doing a costume drama about a newspaper, only he’s doing it as an action buddy picture. It’s not a Western; it’s a North-Eastern. Or something.

At one point, Evans drags a guy through the streets and beats the shit out of him against a Ben Franklin statue because Evans is righteous. He’s surrounded by an entourage who eagerly acknowledge he’s the next great American Newspaperman. But Fuller never lets Evans grandstand; instead, he focuses on Evans’s quiet idealism. Given Evans spends the first ten minutes of the film mostly just mulling over the chatter around him, the quiet bit works. Much better than when Evans starts talking to his newspaper.

The film would actually have been able to get away with some of that nonsense if the third act weren’t such a mess. Fuller douses all his goodwill in gasoline and lights a match in a few seconds. It’s an impressive capitulation; turns out Park Row didn’t have a third act, after all. The first act had Evans setting up the paper with his gang of newspaper and journalism enthusiasts, second act is the rivalry between Evans and Welch (with a great, Statue of Liberty-related subplot), third act is the rushed wrap-up then the film’s Brobdingnagian flexing finale.

Row’s obviously on a budget. They didn’t even have matte painters; instead, the backgrounds down the blocks are barely three-dimensional models. Beautifully made, not particularly realistic. The block and a half set is otherwise exceptional. Fuller and cinematographer John L. Russell frequently weave around the set, into buildings, out of buildings, and they’re having a ball with it. Initially, it plays to the costume picture angle, showcasing the sets and costumes (production design by Theobold Holsopple), then it distinguishes Row from that genre, then it goes all out action when Evans starts kicking ass.

Evans has some incredible dialogue to pass, and he manages it successfully; his performance is spectacular. Shame the part doesn’t keep up. Welch is uneven but rather good at playing sincere and thoughtful, which works to make up for it. She and Evans also have chemistry, even though they really shouldn’t.

In addition to Heyes, Evans’s gang includes Forrest Taylor as his financier, Neyle Morrow as his cartoonist, Dick Elliot as the newsroom editor, Don Orlando as the Italian typesetter who doesn’t read or write English, and Dee Pollock as the swell kid who wants to be an American Newspaperman. They’re delightful together. Oh, and Bela Kovacs. Kovacs is an inventor. Park Row isn’t about a newspaperman striking out on his own and struggling to find the right idea; it’s about the messiah of American Journalism just needing a blank check. The movie and Fuller are rabidly optimistic.

Park Row comes crashing down at the end, but Fuller builds something really impressive right up until then.

The Steel Helmet (1951, Samuel Fuller)

The Steel Helmet is an admirable effort from writer, director, and producer Fuller. However, from the start, it’s clear some of the film’s successes will come with qualifications. Fuller, for example, has a great shot a quarter of the time, a terrible shot a quarter of the time, and okay shots half the time. Lousy shots always come after the good ones to emphasize the downgrade.

Fuller, cinematographer Ernest Miller, and editor Philip Cahn have a terrible time putting sequences together, especially when they’re going from set to location. For example, the climactic action finale looks like it’s reused footage from another war movie; it’s not; it’s Fuller; it just looks nothing like the rest of the film.

It’s not just for the action sequences, either. The problem’s present in the first scene and every one after.

There are unqualified successes, of course. Many performances are fantastic, even when Fuller’s script loses track of his protagonist. The film opens with tough sergeant Gene Evans surviving a North Korean ambush. The bullet went into his steel helmet and looped around, leaving only a minor cut. A South Korean orphan, played by William Chun (as “Short Round,” which is apparently where Spielberg got it from for Temple), finds Evans and frees him. They quickly become pals.

On their trip through Oz, they soon meet medic James Edwards. Edwards is Black, Evans is white, and Chun is Korean. There are scenes between Evans and both new friends about race, with excellent character moments for each of them.

Instead of finding the Cowardly Lion, the trio finds a lost squad. Led by officer Steve Brodie, they’re supposed to set up an observation post in a Buddhist temple nearby. Evans knows Brodie and hates him; Brodie’s a dipshit officer. Evans also knows Brodie’s sergeant, Richard Loo. Loo’s Japanese American; Brodie doesn’t listen to him because he’s not white. Fuller, with a lot of gruff and bravado, drags the racism out of its hold enough to look at it in the light before letting it scurry back in.

He’ll spotlight it later when a North Korean officer (Harold Fong) tries to sway both Edwards and Loo away from the actively racist U.S.A. Both attempts are protracted, and neither comes to a substantial conclusion (outside an awkward scene for the actors); however, it was enough to get the FBI investigating Fuller.

The second act is the squad hanging out at the temple, with Evans as the de facto lead, but the focus widened more towards an ensemble piece. Besides Brodie, whose inevitable “dipshit officer redeems himself at the end” arc doesn’t take up a lot of them, there’s also Robert Hutton, Sid Melton, Richard Monahan, and Neyle Morrow in the squad.

Hutton gets the most to do, though Melton’s the most memorable.

Everything’s generally fine until the third act when Fuller tries taking the focus away from Evans and spreading it out. Then, just when he seemingly manages to widen it, he tightens back in on Evans for a lackluster postscript.

Great performances from Evans, Edwards, Brodie, and Loo. Fong’s a little much—Fuller’s script walks a fine line of anti-Communism, anti-officer, pro-infantry, pro-progressive but armed U.S.A.—and Fong gets the worst of it. The mumbo jumbo also screws up Evans’s performance a little, leaving him in limbo as far as his character development.

Still, it’s impressive as all hell, with a great score from Paul Dunlap, and when Fuller hits, he hits. It’s even more impressive given the meager budget; Fuller knows what he’s doing, but there’s just not enough money to realize it.

Fixed Bayonets! (1951, Samuel Fuller)

About two minutes after I had the thought, “Oh, no, what if the morale of Fixed Bayonets! is ‘it isn’t the generals who are the heroes but the men,’” the film reveals the morale to be it isn’t the generals who are the heroes but the men.

The film opens with a title card establishing the setting and the direct involvement of the U.S. Armed Forces. The first scene has two enlisted guys waxing poetic about how generals are super cool and they could never be generals because generals are super cool. Stuart Randall plays the general. He’s terrible. For his entire scene, it’s pins and needles whether the rest of the film is going to have such atrocious acting. And ham-fisted exposition. There’s going to be exposition later, but it thankfully won’t be ham-fisted. In fact, the opening scene is such an outlier to the rest of the film for a while in the second act it seems like Bayonets is going to end up a dark, satirical tragedy.

It has all the pieces. Leave out some of the patriotic music, get rid of the voices lead Richard Basehart hears (even the good ones), and without making any changes to the edit, Bayonets would be very different. The patriotic music and Basehart’s reassuring voices turn it into wartime propaganda. It assures the homefront the fellas are a-okay, even if it’s more a war than a “police action.” Heck, even the screwups get another chance over there. So it does end up being a tragedy, just not in a good way.

Because the second act of Fixed Bayonets! is phenomenal. Director Fuller is always ambitious with the action. The film mostly takes place at this pass Basehart and his platoon are defending; they’re the rear guard, trying to fake out the Chinese they’re actually the advance because everyone else has pulled back. There’s a big set of the pass, which lets Fuller and cinematographer Lucien Ballard do a bunch of great crane shots while things explode. It’s technically solid—particularly the photography—but it’s dramatically inert. Good pyrotechnics, but a string of booms, nothing else.

So when Fuller all of a sudden starts doing these amazing sequences in act two, after one of the squads has taken shelter in a very convenient cave, it’s a bit of a surprise. And then when it just keeps getting better and better, including the exterior sequences with the fighting and not just the pre and post-fighting scenes where the soldiers humanize… Fixed Bayonets gets really good, really fast, and for a significant portion of its runtime. If it weren’t for the finale, you could almost convince yourself the studio took the picture away from Fuller and tacked on the pro-Army intro. Especially since it would mean Fuller’s not responsible for Randall.

It also helps the acting is best in the second act. There’s no Randall, but there’s also a lot less Craig Hill. Hill’s the lieutenant. He’s not just bad, he’s annoying at it. Fuller gives him a bunch to do and Hill can’t do any of it. He’s mostly in the first act, immediately after Randall’s scene, so Bayonets isn’t off to a good start with its actors. Second act, focusing on Gene Evans’s squad in the cave, is when the acting gets better; the actors aren’t just better, they also have a lot better material from Fuller (who also scripted). Second act is when Fuller starts caring about the performances—and he cares a lot, but that first act is rough and not easily forgotten or forgiven. But they do it. Fuller, Evans, Basehart, Ballard, and especially editor Nick DeMaggio (after a routinely edited first act, Fuller goes on to almost entirely rely on it to create suspense and drama, something DeMaggio excels at executing). They get Bayonets to a great place and then the third act hits and it slides down into the muck. It’s not even jingoistic muck, it’s very specifically redemption through Armed Forces service muck. It doesn’t help Basehart’s performance goes to pot either. Evans tempers Basehart but when they need to do things separately, Basehart can’t hack it.

Some of it’s the part, some of it’s Fuller… actually, Basehart might be off the hook. There’s really no better way to play the recruitment ad portion of the film.

Evans is great. You know what, actually, no, Basehart’s not off the hook. He definitely should’ve incorporated some of sergeant Evans’s Obi-Waning.

But Evans is great.

Michael O’Shea’s decent as one of the other sergeants—uncredited Henry Kulky is hilarious as the third and final sergeant; otherwise the supporting cast is mostly indistinct. You can spot James Dean really easily if you keep your eye out.

The middle of Fixed Bayonets! is a beautifully made film, combining various techniques to slow down and inspect the emotions of its characters during moments of crisis and tension. There’s a very clear change in the film’s tone when it starts, very clear change when it stops. It’s not quite foreshadowing but it does involve the same character. It’s really unfortunate the third act is such a disaster. Even without the aspirational, jingoist finish, the action in the third act is mostly bad too. I guess it’d be worse if the first act were better, because then it’d seem like a nosedive instead of a return to original form.

But when Fuller excels, it’s something very special; thanks, obviously, in no small part to Evans, Ballard, and DeMaggio.

Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959, Eugène Lourié)

I’m not sure the British are really suited for giant monster movies. No offense to the Brits, but watching a bunch of folks stand around and keep the stiff upper lip while radioactive monsters from the deep attack London isn’t too much fun. Behemoth might be unique in the giant monster genre in that respect–it’s more interesting before the giant monster shows up. Once the monster shows up, the film slows down to a crawl–the last ten minutes are grueling. Before, during the investigation, Behemoth at least entertains and the director, Eugène Lourié, has some good composition in the British seaside town and particularly during exposition scenes.

Besides starring Gene Evans, more on him in a second, Behemoth has the distinction of being a complete rip-off of the original Godzilla. I didn’t think the British ripped it off until Gorgo, a few years later, but I stand corrected. Behemoth, the monster, comes from the sea, is a dinosaur, has been effected by radiation, and has fire-breath. Even the fishermen angle resembles Godzilla (Godzilla, however, got that aspect of the story from an actual incident). Behemoth doesn’t follow Godzilla’s story structure, nor does it stick with the one it has in the beginning, following two or three characters, characters who disappear as the monster starts showing up.

Gene Evans was a favorite of Sam Fuller and seeing him play a marine biologist would be fun enough, but seeing him play a marine biologist who’s sure of a giant radioactive monster is even better. André Morell plays Evans’s British counterpart–and, if one wants to read enough into a scene, his lover–and Morell gives Behemoth a certain bit of credibility, but it might just be the accent.

I watched Behemoth because it’s one of King Kong special effects producer Willis H. O’Brien’s last films. The stop-motion work isn’t too good, however, and the best special effects in Behemoth are a couple of the rear screen projection shots. They perfectly mix the foreground and background. Maybe it’s the black and white. The film doesn’t handle the special effects well in its structure either. After it ended, I realized Evans never even sees the monster. At least it’s got me curious again about O’Brien’s work, because it certainly hasn’t gotten me wanting to see anymore of Lourié’s.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Eugène Lourié; screenplay by Lourie and Daniel James, from a story by Robert Abel and Alan J. Adler; directors of photography, Desmond Davis and Ken Hodges; edited by Lee Doig; music by Edwin Astley; production designer, Lourie; produced by David Diamond and Ted Lloyd; released by Eros Films Ltd.

Starring Gene Evans (Steve Karnes), André Morell (Professor James Bickford), John Turner (John), Leigh Madison (Jean Trevethan) and Jack MacGowran (Dr. Sampson).

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