Stage Struck (1958, Sidney Lumet)

Conservatively, Stage Struck has six endings. They start about fifty-eight minutes into the film, which runs ninety-five minutes. Actually, wait, there are probably—conservatively—seven. I forgot how many there are mid-third act before the actual (ending-laden) finale.

For a while, the false endings add to the film’s charm. Maybe if the third act hadn’t reduced lead Susan Strasberg to a glorified cameo… but by the end, Struck’s already had all its problems. It’s got a doozy—Strasberg’s in a love triangle with Broadway producer Henry Fonda and playwright Christopher Plummer. Strasberg was twenty at the time, Plummer twenty-nine, and Fonda was fifty-three. For context, Strasberg’s real-life dad was only three years older than Fonda. Strasberg’s character is eighteen-ish. They establish she left her hometown in Vermont, where she was in all her (now dead) uncle’s plays. Fonda presumably reminds her of her uncle (ick). She fawns over him, wanting him to Svengali her, and he can’t help but fall for her. It doesn’t hurt his regular girlfriend, younger but not “I’m only a few years shy of being old enough to be your grandpa” territory Joan Greenwood, likes to punish him for slights by withholding physical affections.

So, yeah. For a while, it seems like Struck’s going to be all about Fonda and Strasberg getting together. It’s not, thank goodness, and any threats to revisit the topic end up just being threats, which also get contextualized for Fonda’s character–rich white guys never have to grow up and think about things if they stay rich and white enough—it doesn’t ever stop being creepy (especially since Strasberg looks like a kid kid), but… I don’t know; it makes “sense.” And Fonda’s really good at playing this old creeper who does try to act responsibly. Somewhat.

Stage Struck is a remake of Morning Glory, which is based on an unproduced stage play. And Struck filmed entirely on location in New York City, as the opening title promises. Director Lumet and cinematographers Morris Hartzband and Franz Planer have some trouble with the location shooting, but Lumey’s instincts are all good, and when the shots look good, they look great. There’s an exterior location scene between Strasberg and Plummer—if it weren’t a late fifties studio remake of an early thirties studio picture—it’d be exceptional. Lumet and his photographers foreshadow seventies Hollywood New York movies by over a decade.

And there are some exceptional moments in the film. It’s all about Strasberg wanting to make it on Broadway but not wanting to go the regular route. She was in a play club in her hometown; she knows all the Shakespeare by heart, why should she go to the Actor’s Studio (did they consider having her real dad—Actors Studio coach Lee Strasberg—cameo); she wants to be a star now. It doesn’t work out for her in act one, but when she’s back in act two, she has this line about having to prove herself. Strasberg’s got to prove to the Broadway people in the movie she can be a major stage actor, which means she’s also got to prove it to Struck’s audience.

She does. It’s incredible. At first, it seems like Lumet doesn’t have the scene, then he does, while Strasberg keeps delivering great moment after the great moment, Lumet holding the shots. It echoes in the third act. It’s so good.

Sadly, it’s also when Fonda sees something he likes.

But it’s more Plummer’s movie than anyone else. He’s the new playwright who throws in with commercial success Fonda. The film starts with them going into production on one play and ends with their production on the next. Lumet and screenwriters Ruth and Augustus Gortz do a fine job opening the film up enough it never feels too stagy—Lumet loves the theater so much he bakes in acknowledging the stage—but none of these people exist outside their professions. Even when we see Fonda at home, it’s in the context of Broadway producer.

Lots of great acting. Strasberg has an unsteady first act, a knockout second then is missing from most of the third. Intentionally, which is a bad choice. Plummer’s great, and Fonda’s outstanding. Herbert Marshall is an older actor who thinks Strasberg’s swell, but since he’s in his sixties, he doesn’t have to be a pervert about it. Greenwood’s good, even though she’s reduced to foil. Nice small work from Daniel Ocko and John Fiedler. Struck’s got a lot of fine performances; given the subject, it’s got to have them.

The film’s a little too experimental for its own good (with the location shooting), and the third act’s a mess, but Stage Struck’s pretty darn good. A tad too pervy, even if muted, but it’s not a factually inaccurate representation of how Broadway producers behave… and the acting’s superb. Strasberg’s a marvel, and Plummer’s a great lead (in his first theatrical film).

Oh, the Alex North music.

It’s a tad much; chalk it in the experimental column, especially when it plays over the actors.

This post is part of the Charismatic Christopher Plummer Blogathon hosted by Gabriela of Pale Writer and Gill of Realweegiemidget Reviews.

The Moon and Sixpence (1942, Albert Lewin)

The Moon and Sixpence has a number of serious problems, all of them the fault of director and screenwriter Lewin. As a director, while never spectacular, Lewin manages some competence and ambition. He tells Moon and Sixpence in a series of summarized flashbacks. Those flashbacks, narratively and budgetarily effective, end up being the film’s undoing.

The film opens with a text scroll informing the viewer it is about a famous painter, Charles Strickland. Charles Strickland, however, is not a real painter. He’s fictionalization of Gauguin. The source novel is first person, from the perspective of that novel’s author, W. Somerset Maugham. Herbert Marshall plays that “character,” only he’s not playing Maugham, he’s got a different name. So it was always supposed to be about a fictionalized version of real person, told by a fictionalized version of an author, but Lewin’s adaptation presents the fictional painter as a real person and the real author as a fictional one.

George Sanders plays the painter, Herbert Marshall plays the author. Even though the film starts with Marshall directly addressing the viewer about his plans to write a history of Sanders, Lewin eventually abandons Marshall entirely. It’s a problem since it’s supposed to be him telling the story… and it gets even worse when there’s an end text scroll to wrap things up. Why’d we need Marshall?

Well, Marshall’s needed because someone needs to do the acting. Sanders is good, but he’s barely in the film. He’s the subject of it, after all, and it’s structured as Marshall’s pursuit of him. There are only a handful of bad performances–but two of them, Doris Dudley and Molly Lamont, are extremely important because they’re the women in Sanders’s life. Lewin’s not a good director of actors; he tries to avoid them with the summarized flashbacks. Lots of voiceovers from Marshall, which eventually give way to voiceovers from people telling their story to Marshall.

A flashback in a flashback in a flashback.

Most of the film relies on Marshall, with occasional bursts of energy from Sanders. Maybe more than an hour of it (Moon and Sixpence runs ninety minutes). There are significant supporting cast members–Dudley and Steven Geray–but Marshall and Sanders are the salient points. Geray’s a caricature. Dudley doesn’t even get to be a caricature (similar to Lewin’s handling of Lamont). It should all be about Sanders, except since Lewin’s not adept at directing performances–not even good ones–Marshall ends up carrying the picture. He’s around the most.

Until the end. In the end, when the action moves to Tahiti, both Sanders and Marshall become detached thanks to the flashback structure. Instead of Marshall telling Sanders’s story, Marshall is telling his own story of hearing about Sanders. Maybe if Albert Bassermann and Florence Bates were better–both are mostly fine, Bates is even fun, but the parts are way too thin–their narratives would be more effective. Or maybe Lewin’s finally just ran out of rope as he lengthens the narrative distance more and more from Sanders.

Either way, just when Lewin needs to build something up for Sanders, he cuts and runs. Moon and Sixpence comes up short.

Eric Blore’s got an amusing, if pointless small part. Elena Verdugo is almost good as another woman in Sanders’s life. She’s certainly better than Dudley and Lamont; maybe she just ignored Lewin’s direction.

John F. Seitz’s photography is fine (he does well with the many projection shots neccesarily to put the cast in Paris and Tahiti). Dimitri Tiomkin’s music is a little much. Maybe if the film were more effective, the music would match, but the film’s ineffective and the music just draws attention to its failings.

The garrish Richard L. Van Enger editing doesn’t help things either.

The Moon and Sixpence seems like it should’ve given Sanders and Marshall great roles, but it doesn’t. Lewin inartfully treats Marshall like a narrative device and Sanders like a guest star. It especially disappoints with the failed conclusion, just because the film had been successfully coasting on its leads for so long, all Lewin needed to do was not botch the third act too much.

But he does botch it too much. Way too much.

The Little Foxes (1941, William Wyler)

The most impressive things about The Little Foxes are, in no particular order, Bette Davis’s performance (specifically her micro expressions), Patricia Collinge’s supporting performance, director Wyler’s composition, director Wyler’s staging of the narrative (adapted by Lillian Hellman from her play and set in a constrained area but a living one), Herbert Marshall’s performance, and Gregg Toland’s photography. Actors Teresa Wright and Charles Dingle almost make the top list. They make up the second tier. Then you get into the other great supporting performances and things like Daniel Mandell’s editing or the set decoration and it goes on and on.

Because The Little Foxes is an expertly made film. The script is strong, Wyler’s got Gregg Toland shooting this thing, Wright’s character got hidden range (too hidden), and Davis can do this role. Davis and Wyler didn’t get along but the conflict never comes through because Davis’s character is supposed to be so against the grain. Bickering with the director through your performance is a great way to generate grain to move against.

Even though Wyler does a great job translating a play to the screen, the film skips a little too much. Wyler and Toland have this great foreground and background action thing going so they can get multiple things done at once (occasionally with middle ground action too). But it’s a device to keep Little Foxes lean. The first thirty-six minutes, taking place over a day, sings. Wyler gets done with it and it’s like the film is just starting. He’s introduced the cast, he’s introduced the setting. It’s laying the ground situation in action. It’s awesome.

And for a while it pays off and just keeps getting better. Little Foxes is about the machinations of a nouveau riche Southern family in 1900. Well, not quite riche enough but almost. Davis and brothers Dingle and Carl Benton Reid (in a sturdy but inglorious performance) have a plan, they just need Marshall–as Davis’s convalescing husband–to get on board. Only maybe Marshall thinks the family is awful. Foxes has some peculiar politics, with Marshall and Richard Carlson as progressives (and the only decent white men in the picture).

Collinge’s part in the film, reductively, is to forecast the possibilities for Wright’s future. Collinge does a great job with it and the scenes are beautifully written–her relationship with Wright in the first act is a standout both for acting and cinematic brevity–but she disappears in the third act. She’s got no place in the story, which is kind of a problem because the story was the family and then it just turns into this business deal thing.

It’s too abrupt, but Wyler’s able to make it at least flow a little thanks to Toland and Mandell’s contributions. There’s a throwaway scene in the third act where Carlson gets to slap around porto-bro Dan Duryea. Not to fault Duryea with that description, he’s awesome in the part. Lovably dopey and still somewhat dangerous. So Wyler gives the audience a reward for sticking through the mussed third act.

Even though the grand finale is part of that mussing, Davis and Wright really bring it together and make it work long enough for Wyler and Toland to finish the movie. Dingle and Marshall also go far in making it happen, but it’s Davis and Wright. It’s got to be the mother and daughter showdown, even though the film never exactly promised such a thing. And you get to see Wright develop her character without an inch from Davis. Is it an inch in character or out? Doesn’t matter, makes their scenes beyond tense. Maybe because Davis wasn’t in the second act much. The Little Foxes, with Marshall, Wright, Carlson, Collinge, and Jessica Grayson just sitting around enjoying each other’s company in one scene, becomes almost genial. Wyler doesn’t promise happiness, but he does acknowledge people actually enjoy life.

Davis has to come back with a vengeance to remind the audience there is no happiness, no enjoyment. Because the world’s a bad place. It’s actually a really downbeat ending even though everyone kind of gets a happy ending. Characters win, humanity loses.

Foxes has got some problems–it’s too short as it turns out–but Wyler and company turn in an excellent picture. Confident, beautifully shot, beautifully acted, well-paced. But in that confidence is a lot of safety. Wyler’s most ambitious with his composition, not the film overall.

This post is part of the Second Annual Bette Davis Blogathon hosted by Crystal of In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.

Trouble in Paradise (1932, Ernst Lubitsch)

Trouble in Paradise features some great filmmaking. Here, Lubitsch runs wild with the passage of time–there’s a great sequence with various clocks marking the minutes, but there’s a lot of carefully orchestrated fades as well. The film opens with an excellent mixed shot–again, careful fading–moving from one side of a hotel to another. It goes from actors to a model to actors. It’s exquisite.

I almost forgot Lubitsch’s transition between the first and second acts–he goes to a radio advertisement (seeing the announcer deliver it into the microphone), then does an actual advertisement for the product, then transition to the makers of the product–all before revealing if it has any bearing on the story. It’s a gleeful move. These techniques make it almost impossible to recognize Trouble in Paradise‘s origin as a play.

Being Lubitsch, his direction of his actors is, no shock, perfect. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Herbert Marshall give a better performance. He and Miriam Hopkins have a half dozen fantastic scenes together. They even make the final scene work, even though it really shouldn’t. But the film has three leads–Kay Francis is the third–and Hopkins gets the boot for much of the second act. It’s impossible to forget her, but the film practically begs for the viewer to do it. Trouble in Paradise‘s trouble is its genre–it’s an infidelity comedy. Unlike the more sophisticated members of this genre, Trouble leaves Hopkins in something of a lurch. Worse, it never corrects its perspective. Hopkins is always the primary female protagonist, which makes Marshall into a heel. Even worse, it never gives much room for Francis to make an honest impression. She goes from being the mark to being the other woman with a nicely edited sequence involving the butler never being able to figure out if she’s in her room or in Marshall’s.

The film’s third act is something of a narrative disaster. The film’s been building to it all through the second act, but since the script doesn’t love triangle… it seems possible it will be avoided. There are countless opportunities for it to go the other way (I’m not really sure where it would go, but it’d have been somewhere creative, I’m sure) and as they all fall away, it gets kind of tedious. The film doesn’t turn out the way I expected, but only because the third act’s constant oscillation confused the hell out of me.

In the end, Trouble in Paradise is almost a better viewing experience than a finished product. It’s fantastic throughout, only to fail to deliver in the last quarter. It’s got the great Marshall and Hopkins performances. Francis is quite good, even if her character is poorly written. Charles Ruggles and Edward Everett Horton–and Robert Greig as the butler–are excellent in supporting roles. The script’s approach to Horton in the late second act, however, serves as ominous foreshadowing of the problems to follow. C. Aubrey Smith has a smaller role and is solid, but much like Francis, there isn’t a character.

I was thinking my high expectations for the film might have lead to undue harshness, but then I realized the film raised those expectations… I don’t even think I properly conveyed my disappointment.

3/4 ★★★

CREDITS

Produced and directed by Ernst Lubitsch; screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, based on an adaption by Grover Jones of a play by Aladar Laszlo; director of photography, Victor Milner; released by Paramount Pictures.

Starring Miriam Hopkins (Lily), Kay Francis (Mariette Colet), Herbert Marshall (Gaston Monescu), Charles Ruggles (The Major), Edward Everett Horton (François Filiba), C. Aubrey Smith (Adolph J. Giron) and Robert Greig (Jacques the Butler).


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The Razor’s Edge (1946, Edmund Goulding)

While home video did wonders for increasing film appreciation, I have to wonder if MGM’s embracing of the format for their old catalogue didn’t greatly hinder young people in the 1980s from learning about film. As a child, I had seen MGM, I had seen RKO, I had seen Warner Bros. But I never saw any Columbia (that I remember) and I’m pretty sure I never saw any 20th Century Fox films, because when I did start seeing them in the mid-1990s (on AMC), I was surprised. I had no idea they’d been around and done so much. It’s a laziness, I suppose, but film interest tends to start as a hobby. I guess it got better with cable (my AMC experience) and today, with DVD, it’s probably about even… Fox does have a good classics series, though their box set is rather crappy and doesn’t inspire much interest (just like their VHS box art). Fox didn’t originally release their VHS titles–they licensed them through Key Video–so each title was doubly selected for profitability.

The Razor’s Edge fell through the cracks. It won Anne Baxter an Academy Award (she’s great, but certainly not the best performance in the film, which has five excellent performances), and lost to The Best Years of Our Lives, which is fine. But, it was a big hit. It was Fox’s biggest hit… and it disappeared. I’d never heard of it when I first saw it in 1997 or 1998–and I had worked at a video store with a significant classics section. Watching it today, I’m upset the film doesn’t have the level of respect it deserves. It’s an amazing film; it runs 145 minutes and never feels like it, compressing 9 years into the first hour, then exploring the effects of those nine years in the second. There’s another bit of compression in there too, but the characters manage to grow beautifully over this time. The make-up crew “de-aged” the cast (particularly Clifton Webb), then gradually caught them up and beyond. The make-up and the handling of the timeline work beautifully. I can’t think of a better handling of such a long stretch than in this film.

It’d be easy credit the book the whole way, but Lamar Trotti does an incredible job adapting it, focusing it–The Razor’s Edge features its author, W. Somerset Maugham, in an instrumental role. I can’t believe Herbert Marshall didn’t get nominated for it (I’m looking at Edge’s Oscar competition right now at IMDb), but neither did Trotti so I guess I should. Not even Edmund Goulding got a nomination for directing and he’s fantastic. He’s got these long sweeps of the camera, beautiful movement, but my favorite is his lack of reaction shots. Someone will talk, as familiar viewers, we expect a reaction–we get none. Instead, we get the actor continuing, not breaking. It adds an particular realism–in this hugely produced film–a kind not many films have. It involves the viewer in the situation, which spans ten years and three or four continents.

Obviously (I already said it), all the acting is great. Tyrone Power is great in this incredibly difficult role–the film is somewhat from Maugham’s perspective, but also from Maugham’s reader’s perspective–so Power is the protagonist, but also the subject and it never separates that duality. For the first twenty minutes, it’s Gene Tierney’s movie, it’s not Power’s. It appear it ever will be Power’s movie. It’s an odd situation–there are other examples (Barry Lyndon, I suppose), but no one else has ever done such a good job I don’t think. As for Tierney, someone else who is overlooked for her acting ability… Tierney turns an amazing performance. I was going to say exactly what’s so amazing about it, but that description would spoil the film if one didn’t know the story. She’s fantastic. I already mentioned how good Baxter is in the film (Tierney’s better–Baxter has a few scenes, Tierney has ninety-five minutes) and Marshall, but Clifton Webb is great too. The film has incredibly complicated characters–so incredibly complicated it’s impossible to judge any of them, even at the end. Maugham–the writer, not the character–was quite good at delaying the readers judgement and I assume, in The Razor’s Edge, it’s just faithful adaptation, because studio films with big stars were never about reserving judgement.

Not since… well, last week, I watch a lot of movies, you know… This film’s level of excellence is rare. Even more, the lack of recognition for this film’s excellence is an unbelievable blemish to film history.

Foreign Correspondent (1940, Alfred Hitchcock)

Well shit, I was wrong. I thought Foreign Correspondent was pre-Rebecca and I am incorrect.

I suppose the confusion has to do with the way Hitchcock made Correspondent. It’s very much in the style of his 1930s British films (I’m thinking primarily of The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes), while Rebecca was not. Rebecca was about people, Correspondent is about events. Not that I have a problem with Hitchcock making movies about events (though Saboteur is something awful, as is The Birds). Correspondent is a damn good film. I’ve only seen it once before and the same thing happened today that happened six or seven years ago. I looked at the clock about forty minutes in and wondered how it could have gotten there. The first forty minutes of this film moves faster than any other I’ve seen. The rest moves too, but those first forty feel like eleven.

This film is a propaganda piece. But only sort of. It’s got some incredibly beautiful moments in it, moments I’m not used to in film, particularly not thrillers. In the midst of a plane crash, two characters are none-the-less affected by a death. It’s thirty seconds, probably less, but it really sets Correspondent apart. There’s also some wonderful character relationships in the film that the last hour takes the time to explore. Even the amusing scenes of a man and his assassin-to-be. The romance is exceptionally hurried, but there’s this scene on a boat that makes it all worth it. This film comes together in beautiful ways, works in beautiful ways.

It’s not a well-known Hitchcock. A quick Google search just revealed it to be “little known.” One of the reasons for the lack of notoriety is probably that Warner Bros. didn’t whore it on VHS like Universal did their Hitchcock titles. Another reason is probably Joel McCrea. Even though I saw The Most Dangerous Game at some point growing up, I had no idea who McCrea was until I started looking into film myself. This inquiry happened to coincide with AMC being great–long time ago–so I got a lot of McCrea in there. Foreign Correspondent popped up at some point during that period….

It’s not as deep as Hitchcock could get. Hitchcock did have some deeper films–Rebecca for example–but Foreign Correspondent is probably the best example of Hitchcock’s filmmaking skills. He uses methods and devices in this film that appear in everything. Whether or not these subsequent filmmakers picked it up from Correspondent, I doubt, given the quality of some of them. Watching early, raw Hitchcock is an exciting experience and Correspondent is one of the two best of these raw films (the other is The Lady Vanishes).