Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/24/23

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

Sunday, December 24, 2023

I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (William Nigh, 1948)

Elyse Knox in I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes

Cast: Don Castle, Elyse Knox, Regis Toomey, Charles D. Brown, Rory Mallinson, Robert Lowell, Bill Kennedy. Screenplay: Steve Fisher, based on a story by Cornell Wooolrich. Cinematography: Mack Stengler. Art direction: Dave Milton. Film editing: Roy V. Livingston, Otho Lovering.

I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes is a tidy, by-the-numbers Wrong Man thriller with an eleventh-hour climax -- in short, the kind of drama that would become standard on television a few years after it was released. Tom (Don Castle) and Ann (Elyse Knox) are a young dance team getting by between bookings on Ann's pay (and tips) as an instructor in a dance hall. One night, Tom flings his shoes out the window at a yowling cat. That same night, an elderly miser in their neighborhood is murdered and robbed. Tom's shoes become an important clue in the search for the killer, leading to his conviction for murder and imprisonment on Death Row. His only hope lies in Ann's attempt to persuade the police detective, Clint Judd (Regis Toomey), with whom she has flirted at the dance hall, to find the real killer. The movie was made by Poverty Row studio Monogram, so there's nothing fancy about it. The stars are low-wattage: Castle had been a bit player at Paramount before World War II, and had trouble restarting his career after being drafted and serving in the Army Air Force. Knox was a former model whose career never quite took off before she was signed by Monogram to play the girlfriend of Joe Palooka in a series of movies based on the comic strip hero; she married football player Tom Harmon and became the mother of Mark Harmon. Regis Toomey was probably the best-known member of the cast, with an IMDb list of 273 credits, stretching from 1929 to 1985, mostly in character roles. Director William Nigh started as an actor, but turned director in 1914, working steadily for B-movie factories like Monogram. I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes was his next-to-last feature. Mostly a straightforward movie, it does try a little too hard in a montage in which Tom, counting the hours until he goes to the chair, is haunted by echoes of the word "shoes." It comes off, unfortunately, as a little silly. Otherwise, it's solid, unpretentious and modestly entertaining.