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

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Showing posts with label Frank Lovejoy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Frank Lovejoy. Show all posts

Saturday, April 20, 2024

Try and Get Me! (aka The Sound of Fury) (Cy Endfield, 1950)

Lloyd Bridges and Frank Lovejoy in Try and Get Me! 

Cast: Frank Lovejoy, Kathleen Ryan, Lloyd Bridges, Richard Carlson, Katherine Locke, Adele Jergens, Art Smith, Renzo Cesano, Irene Vernon, Cliff Clark, Harry Shannon, Donald Doss, Joe E. Ross. Screenplay: Jo Pagano, based on his novel. Cinematography: Guy Roe. Production design: Perry Ferguson. Film editing: George Amy. Music: Hugo Friedhofer. 

Climaxing in a vividly filmed and edited scene of a mob storming a city jail, Try and Get Me! is the second film based on a lynching that took place in San Jose in 1933. The first, Fritz Lang's Fury (1936), starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney, is better-known and better acted, but Cy Enfield's version of the story, scripted by Jo Pagano from his fictionalized account of the incident, is equally gripping. What it lacks in its cast, it makes up for in sheer momentum. Frank Lovejoy plays Howard Tyler, an out-of-work man with a wife and child, whose desperation at providing for his family causes him to fall for the blandishments of Jerry Slocum, a sleazy thief played (not to say overplayed) by Lloyd Bridges. When Jerry murders a rich man's son during a kidnapping plot, Howard is trapped in a situation beyond his control. Public opinion is stirred up by newspaper columnist Gil Stanton (the bland and miscast Richard Carlson), who succumbs to his editor's sensationalism. The movie is mostly uncompromising in its hard-nosed treatment of the story, with only a few lapses into sentimentality in its portrayal of Howard's wife and son. Under the original title, The Sound of Fury (a probably intentional echo of Lang's film as well as William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury), it was a box office failure, leading producer Robert Stillman to re-release it under the title Try and Get Me! But it failed to find an audience until it was restored by the Film Noir Foundation in 2020.

Saturday, December 28, 2019

The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953)


The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953)

Cast: Edmond O'Brien, Frank Lovejoy, William Talman, José Torvay, Sam Hayes, Wendell Niles, Jean Del Val, Clark Howat, Natividad Vacío. Screenplay: Collier Young, Ida Lupino, Robert L. Joseph, Daniel Mainwaring. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Walter E. Keller. Film editing: Douglas Stewart. Music: Leith Stevens.

The thing I admire most about The Hitch-Hiker is its economy. It doesn't waste time giving us, for example, the backstory of Roy Collins and Gilbert Bowen, the two guys played by Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy. Lesser films would have given us scenes in which they bid farewell to their wives and children, trying to establish them as good guys in the hands of a psychopath -- we catch on to that fast enough without sentimental ties back home. Ida Lupino doesn't need to mess around with unnecessary sympathy for them. In fact, we're aware that they're not entirely paragons of virtue: They bicker, for example, about where they're going to spend their little time away from their wives, and there's a suggestion that they're glad to get away from home and family -- it looks like they want a little more action than just fishing. Later, after they've been trapped by Emmett Myers (a wonderfully scary performance by William Talman that makes me regret he got forever stuck as Hamilton Burger, the loser D.A. on the Perry Mason TV series), they quarrel about how they might escape from his clutches -- at one point Bowen even slugs Collins, who is on the verge of hysterics. There are some flaws: It's never really clear why Myers doesn't just shoot at least one of them -- he doesn't really need both to complete his journey to Santa Rosalía. And I do think the film falls a little flat at the end when Myers is so easily captured, but not enough to mar the gritty whole of the movie. Lupino and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca use the desert landscape to great effect: It provides both isolation and exposure. The Hitch-Hiker deserves its reputation well beyond its historical distinction as a film noir with an all-male cast directed by a (gasp!) woman.

Sunday, December 20, 2015

In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)

The "lonely place" is Hollywood, where Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) is a screenwriter with a barely held-in-check violent streak. This celebrated movie contains one of Bogart's best performances, though it looks and feels like the low-budget production it was. Bogart's own company, Santana, produced it for release through Columbia, instead of Bogart's employer, Warner Bros., which may explain why, apart from Bogart and Gloria Grahame, the supporting cast is so unfamiliar: The best-known face among them is Frank Lovejoy, who plays Bogart's old army buddy, now a police detective. In a Lonely Place seems to be set in a different Hollywood from the one seen in the year's other great noir melodrama, Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. There are no movie star cameos and glitzy settings in the Bogart film. What this one has going for it, however, is a haunting, off-beat quality, along with some surprising heat generated between Bogart and Grahame, who plays Laurel Gray, a would-be movie actress with an intriguing, only partly glimpsed past. She has, for example, a rather bullying masseuse (Ruth Gillette), who seems to be a figure out of this past. In fact, the whole film is made up of enigmatic figures, including Steele's closest friends, his agent, Mel Lippman (Art Smith), and an aging alcoholic actor, Charlie Waterman (Robert Warwick). Both of them stick with Steele despite his tendency to fly off the handle: He insults and at one point even slugs the agent, while at another he defends the actor with his fists against an insult. Though the central plot has to do with Steele's being suspected of murdering a hat-check girl (Martha Stewart) he brought to his apartment to tell him the plot of a novel he's supposed to adapt, the film is less a murder mystery than a study of a damaged man and his inability to overcome whatever made him that way. And despite the usual tendency of Hollywood films to end with a resolution by tying up loose ends, In a Lonely Place leaves its characters as tensely enigmatic as they were at the start -- perhaps even more so. The screenplay by Andrew Solt reworked Edmund H. North's adaptation of a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, with much help from director Ray.