Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954)

Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford in Human Desire

Cast: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford, Edgar Buchanan, Kathleen Case, Peggy Maley, Diane DeLare, Grandon Rhodes. Screenplay: Alfred Hayes, based on a novel by Émile Zola. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Robert Peterson. Film editing: Aaron Stell. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof.

Glenn Ford's boyish nice-guy looks and personality always seemed to me to make him an odd choice for tough-guy roles like the ones he played in Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) and The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953). Lang apparently didn't have a problem with that disjunction: Having cast Ford opposite Gloria Grahame in Human Desire, he reteamed them in the latter film, with good effect. Still, Ford's limitations are apparent when you compare him with Jean Gabin, who played much the same role, a railroad engineer caught up in seamy doings, in Jean Renoir's earlier version of the Émile Zola novel, La Bête Humaine (1938). Gabin had a solidity that Ford lacks. Human Desire is, for the most part, a good contribution to the film noir genre, especially Burnett Guffey's cinematography, which uses the railway yard shadows to good effect. The screenplay has a few good lines -- "All women are alike. They just got different faces so the men can tell them apart." -- but it cheats with a happy ending for Ford's character that's at odds with the spirit of both Zola's novel and Renoir's version of it. Daniele Amfitheatrof's score is laid on too heavily, as if the filmmakers didn't trust the actors or the screenplay to carry the burden of what's being done and said.

Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941)

Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941)

Cast: Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Beulah Bondi, Edgar Buchanan, Ann Doran, Eva Lee Kuney, Leonard Willey, Wallis Clark, Walter Soderling, Jane Biffey. Screenplay: Morrie Ryskind, based on a story by Martha Cheavens. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Otto Meyer. Music: W. Franke Harling.

Penny Serenade was released in April 1941, which explains the cozy, rosy japonaiserie of the scenes set in the country that would be vilified by Americans after Pearl Harbor, only eight months later. The idyllic sojourn of the Adamses in Japan would be brief, however, cut short by an earthquake that brings on Julie Adams's miscarriage, complications of which leave her unable to bear the children she so longs for. But that's only the beginning of their misfortunes, which left many moviegoers holding soggy handkerchiefs. The phrase "they don't make 'em like this anymore" comes to mind, except that they do: Millions of people tune in every week to follow the fortunes of the Pearson family on This Is Us. It's easy to dismiss this kind of cathartic cinema and its TV descendants, but it serves a need that shouldn't be dismissed cynically. We may prefer the Irene Dunne and Cary Grant of The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) and My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940), but their starry presence helps lift Penny Serenade out of the vale of tears. Grant earned one of his two Oscar nominations -- the other was for None But the Lonely Heart (Clifford Odets, 1944) -- for this film. The Academy always prefers acting that shows over acting that naturally arises out of a performer's established persona, and while his performance is by no means one of Grant's best -- there are dozens more that could be cited as essential for their Cary-Grantness -- it does make Penny Serenade more watchable than it might be today. Dunne is less challenged by her role: Noble suffering was her forte in most of her films; comic giddiness was the exception. But she doesn't overdo it here. Everything else, however, is overdone: the chubby moppets who play the Adamses' adopted daughter at different ages; the motherly rule-bending adoption agency head played by Beulah Bondi; the gruff but tender chum known as Applejack and played by Edgar Buchanan; the sentimental old songs that key each flashback. It comes as a shock to learn that so much of this tearjerking was done by screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, who got his start writing gags for the Marx Brothers and was the screenwriter for Gregory La Cava on the screwball My Man Godfrey (1936) and the acerbic Stage Door (1937).

Shane (George Stevens, 1953)

I had forgotten how important the sexual tension between Shane (Alan Ladd) and Marian Starrett (Jean Arthur) is to the texture and motivation of the film. It's obvious from the moment when she watches him, shirtless and glistening with sweat, help her rather dull (and fully clad) husband, Joe (Van Helflin), uproot a tree stump, and it plays like a low bass note throughout the film, until it becomes the main reason why Shane feels he has to move on at the end. After all, he has just humiliated Joe by knocking him unconscious and taking on the role Joe assumes is his rightful duty, thereby reducing him in the eyes of his wife and son, Joey (Brandon De Wilde). It also doesn't escape the notice of the bad guys, one of whom taunts Shane with the fact that Joe has a pretty wife. (The filters used on some of Arthur's closeups are a giveaway: She was 50 when she made Shane, her last film, but she's plausible as a character 10 or 15 years younger.) It's to George Stevens's credit that he plays all of this as low-key as he does. It would have been much too easy to move the eternal triangle to the center of the film's structure. Shane is an intelligent film, though to my mind it gets a little heavy-handed with the introduction of the black-hatted Wilson (Jack Palance) as the potential nemesis to the knight errant Shane. As fine as Palance's performance is, I wish his character had been given a more complex backstory than just "hired gun out of Cheyenne." Otherwise, the screenplay by A.B. Guthrie Jr. does a fair job of not making its villains too deep-dyed: The chief tormenter of the sodbusters, the cattleman Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer), is given a speech justifying himself as having gotten there first and settled the land -- we haven't yet reached the point in historical consciousness where the claims of the Native Americans are taken seriously. And Shane's first opponent, Chris Calloway (Ben Johnson), eventually has a change of heart -- not an entirely convincing one to my mind, considering Calloway's behavior in his first encounter with Shane -- and warns Shane that Joe's appointment with Ryker is a trap. Stevens uses Jackson Hole, Wyoming, almost as effectively as John Ford used Monument Valley, and Loyal Griggs won a well-deserved Oscar for his cinematography, even if Paramount's decision to trim the original images at top and bottom to make the film appear to have been shot in a widescreen process resulted in some oddly cropped compositions. Shane is undeniably a classic, but I think it takes itself a little too seriously: The great Western directors, like Ford and Howard Hawks, knew the value of a little comic relief, but in Shane even Edgar Buchanan plays it straight.