Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/09/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, October 9, 2020

Crisis (Richard Brooks, 1950)

Ramon Novarro, Cary Grant, Paula Raymond, and Leon Ames in Crisis

Cast: Cary Grant, José Ferrer, Paula Raymond, Signe Hasso, Ramon Novarro, Gilbert Roland, Leon Ames. Screenplay: Richard Brooks, George Tabori. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Robert Kern. Music: Miklós Rózsa.

In Crisis, Cary Grant plays a brain surgeon, which led one critic to snark that he looked like he should be holding a martini glass instead of a scalpel. That only points up the problem of movie star image: We expect Grant to be suave and wisecracking and not hung up on the dilemma of whether to perform an operation on a cruel dictator (José Ferrer) who is trying to fend off a revolution. Naturally, Grant's Dr. Ferguson sticks by the Hippocratic Oath and goes through with the operation. Meantime, unbeknownst to Dr. Ferguson, his wife (Paula Raymond) has been kidnapped and the revolutionaries are threatening to kill her if the dictator lives. Ferguson is unaware of this because the dictator's wife (Signe Hasso) has intercepted the message from the revolutionaries and destroyed it. It's a pretty good thriller premise, but writer-director Richard Brooks doesn't know how to build the suspense it needs. This was Brooks's first feature film as director, so we may want to cut him some slack. After all, he does a few things well, including a demonstration of brain surgery techniques that adds a little documentary realism to the film. To my eyes, Grant's performance is perfectly fine, and Ferrer and Hasso know how to play villains. Raymond is a little bland as the wife, but there are solid supporting performances from Ramon Novarro as a colonel backing up the dictator, Gilbert Roland as a leader of the revolutionaries, and Leon Ames as an oil company executive trying to remain neutral in the political conflict in this unnamed Latin American country so he can build a pipeline. It's the film's own neutrality -- dictators are bad, but revolutionaries can be, too -- that saps a good deal out of the drama.