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. 

An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951)

Georges Guétary, Oscar Levant, and Gene Kelly in An American in Paris

Cast: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Georges Guétary, Nina Foch. Screenplay: Alan Jay Lerner. Cinematography: Alfred Gilks, John Alton. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, songs; Conrad Salinger, orchestrator. 

Sure, there are things wrong with An American in Paris. The Oscar-winning screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner relies on clichés like the infatuation at first sight by Jerry (Gene Kelly) with Lise (Leslie Caron) and the threat of the predatory wealthy divorcee played by Nina Foch, and it serves too often as a mechanical way of setting up the musical numbers. Some of the numbers, like Oscar Levant's performance of the third movement of Gershwin's Concerto in F and Georges Guétary's "Stairway to Paradise," are simply shoehorned into the story. And the once-celebrated concluding 17-minute ballet now seems a little overblown and pretentious. Yet I cherish the film for serving up as many Gershwin songs as it does, including some comparative rarities like "By Strauss" and "Tra-la-la (This Time It's Really Love)." I like, too, that Kelly's sometimes overbearing charm offensive is checked by Levant's acerbity and by Guétary's less strenuous effort at being charming. It's not the greatest of MGM musicals, lacking the wit that Betty Comden and Adolph Green infused into their screenplays and the style that Stanley Donen brought to his directing. I sometimes think that Vincente Minnelli was a better director of melodramas like The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Some Came Running (1958), and Home From the Hill (1960) than he was of musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), An American in Paris and Gigi (1958), in which he could let the songs do the work for him. Still, if you've got Gershwin to do the work for you, why not just lean back and let go?

Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956)

Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn in Lust for Life

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, James Donald, Pamela Brown, Everett Sloane, Niall McGinnis, Noel Purcell, Henry Daniell, Madge Kennedy, Jill Bennett, Lionel Jeffries, Laurence Naismith, Jeanette Sterke. Screenplay: Norman Corwin, based on a novel by Irving Stone. Cinematography: Russell Harlan, Freddie Young. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons, Hans Peters. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: Miklós Rózsa.

After watching Julian Schnabel's take on Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity's Gate (2018), I thought it made sense to go back and see Hollywood's portrait of the artist, Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life. Schnabel is himself an artist, of course, so it's not surprising to find his film focused on the aesthetics of madness (along with propounding a theory that Van Gogh didn't commit suicide but was the victim of an accidental gunshot). Minnelli and screenwriter Norman Corwin are less successful in finding a coherent image of Van Gogh than Schnabel and his co-screenwriters Jean-Claude Carrière and Louise Kugelberg were, partly because the latter were working with one of the most insightful actors of our time, Willem Dafoe, while Minnelli's Van Gogh is played by Kirk Douglas, who brings to the role a physical resemblance to the artist but is never quite strong enough to craft an integrated characterization. Lust for Life seems to suggest that Van Gogh's problems stemmed from a lack of reciprocated love -- from his father, the church he tries to serve, the several women in his life, the art-buying public, the citizens of Arles, and his fellow artists -- most notably Paul Gauguin, played (perhaps overplayed) by Anthony Quinn in an Oscar-winning performance. The film is visually stunning, although the transformation of the landscapes that Van Gogh sees into what he painted is handled more subtly and intelligently in Schnabel's film. Minnelli seems content merely to juxtapose place with painting. The sensational events in Van Gogh's life, especially the amputation of an ear, are treated sensationally in Minnelli's film, which only suggests that Van Gogh did it out of frustration with Gauguin, as if pleading for that artist's attention. We also get a sentimental deathbed scene, a kind of reconciliation with Vincent's brother, Theo (James Donald). Lust for Life is a watchable but flawed and inconsistent film -- even the name of the artist gets a variety of pronunciations, from "Van Gokh" to "Van Gog" to "Van Goh."