Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/14/24

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

Saturday, December 14, 2024

The Sniper (Edward Dmytryk, 1952)

Arthur Franz in The Sniper

Cast: Arthur Franz, Adolphe Menjou, Gerald Mohr, Marie Windsor, Frank Faylen, Richard Kiley, Mabel Paige, Marlo Dwyer, Geraldine Carr. Screenplay: Harry Brown, Edna Anhalt. Edward Anhalt. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Production design: Rudolph Sternad. Film editing: Aaron Stell. Music: George Antheil.

Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper is a solid manhunt thriller that maybe gets a little heavy-handed in its promotion of treatment over incarceration for sex offenders, but also contains a few nice surprises. One of them is cinematographer Burnett Guffey's location shooting in San Francisco (except for an amusement park scene filmed in Long Beach), providing a nice record of how the city looked in 1952. Another is an almost unrecognizable Adolphe Menjou, who shaved his mustache to play the police detective in charge of capturing Edward Miller (Arthur Franz), who is gunning down women, driven by some undocumented childhood trauma. Menjou typically played well-groomed upper-middle-class types who looked like they were born wearing three-piece suits -- he was repeatedly voted one of America's best-dressed men -- but in The Sniper he manages to look rumpled for once. Menjou was an outspoken right-wing Republican who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hollywood was full of communists, making his appearance in The Sniper surprising, given that Dmytrk was one of the "Hollywood Ten," who had been blacklisted after refusing to testify before HUAC. Dmytryk recanted and in 1951 named names before the committee, which presumably put him back in Menjou's good graces. The film was produced by Stanley Kramer, and the speech written by his co-producers Edna and Edward Anhalt, and delivered by Richard Kiley, about the need for preventive treatment for potential criminals is characteristic of Kramer's fondness for message movies. The Sniper has a low-key ending, another surprise for a film whose genre typically provides an audience-pleasing catharsis.