Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/01/24

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

Tuesday, October 1, 2024

His Kind of Woman (John Farrow, 1951)

Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in His Kind of Woman

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, Vincent Price, Tim Holt, Charles McGraw, Marjorie Reynolds, Raymond Burr, Leslye Banning, Jim Backus, Philip Van Zandt, John Mylong, Carleton G. Young. Screenplay: Frank Fenton, Jack Leonard. Cinematography: Harry J. Wild. Production design: J. McMillan Johnson. Film editing: Frederic Knudtson, Eda Warren. Music: Leigh Harline.

His Kind of Woman starts out as a tough-talking film noir and ends up as a knockabout action comedy. The credit or blame for that belongs to Howard Hughes, the RKO studio head and executive producer, who waited until John Farrow had finished the movie and then had Richard Fleischer re-shoot it, even recasting the villain, originally played by Lee Van Cleef, with Raymond Burr. The New York Times reviewer hated it, partly because of the shift in tone, but most people like it. Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell were never going to outdo Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in dialogue like "They tell me you killed Ferraro. How did it feel?" "He didn't say." But they're good enough at it that they give the movie a core that the flurry of oddball characters and the loony setup for the plot needs. Vincent Price is wonderful as an Errol Flynnish movie star who spouts tags from Shakespeare as he joins Mitchum in taking on the bad guys. Hughes made sure that Russell's gowns, designed by Howard Greer, were as revealing as possible, and Mitchum spends a lot of the film without his shirt, looking a little thick in the waist to contemporary viewers used to gym-toned physiques. The end product probably wasn't worth the money Hughes lost on it, but it's still fun.