Come Back, Little Sheba (Daniel Mann, 1952)

Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster in Come Back, Little Sheba

Cast: Shirley Booth, Burt Lancaster, Terry Moore, Richard Jaeckel, Philip Ober, Edwin Max, Lisa Golm, Walter Kelley. Screenplay: Ketti Frings, based on a play by William Inge. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Henry Bumstead, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Franz Waxman.

Shirley Booth won an Oscar for her portrayal of Lola Delaney, a middle-aged frump married to an alcoholic chiropractor (Burt Lancaster) she calls "Daddy" or "Doc." We first see Lola coming downstairs in a ratty chenille robe to answer the doorbell; it's Marie Buckholder (Terry Moore), a college student answering an ad for a room Lola has for rent. Marie takes a look at the room and tells her she'll think it over. When Doc finds out that Lola has decided to take in a roomer, he's angry and forbids it. But when Marie returns to say she wants to rent the room, only Doc is home -- Lola has gone out to buy some orange juice for his breakfast -- and when he gets a look at the nubile Marie, he agrees to rent it, along with another downstairs room that Lola calls her "sewing room," though there's no evidence that Lola ever uses it for that. And so begins the film version of the first of William Inge's plays about sexual frustration. The movie would have us believe that Marie rouses a repressed desire in Doc and also makes him want to protect her, as if she were the child he and Lola lost, but as with most of the works by the closeted playwright, it has a strong gay subtext. When Marie, an art student, brings home a classmate, a young athlete named Turk (Richard Jaeckel), to pose for a poster she's creating, Doc is shocked to find the well-built Turk, in a track suit that shows off his muscles, in his living room. He immediately begins professing his concern for Marie's honor, her supposed virginity, but we can sense that he's more than a little aroused by Turk. We learn, too, that Doc was an only child, coddled by his mother and always shy around women, and that it was only because Lola was more than a little sexually forward that he got her pregnant and had to marry her. The real disappointment in the movie is the radical miscasting of Lancaster as Doc. He was 15 years younger than Booth, and no amount of gray at his temples can cover up his athletic vitality and make us believe that the two are supposed to be the same age. Still, despite the screenplay's disingenuousness about sexuality and the stagebound character of its action and dialogue, Booth's performance is worth savoring and there are moments of genuine feeling in the film.

When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Maté, 1951)

Richard Derr and Barbara Rush in When Worlds Collide

Cast: Richard Derr, Barbara Rush, Peter Hansen, John Hoyt, Larry Keating, Rachel Ames, Stephen Chase, Frank Cady, Hayden Rorke, Sandro Giglio. Screenplay: Sidney Boehm, based on a novel by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie. Cinematography: W. Howard Greene, John F. Seitz. Art direction: Albert Nozaki, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Arthur P. Schmidt. Music: Leith Stevens.

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but with a bunch of white folks rocketing off to another planet that looks like it was painted by Chesley Bonestell. Well, that's the way it ended in 1951. Today, one hopes that the survivors would be a good deal more diverse and the preparations for their flight a good deal better organized. (Actually, today it looks like it will end with a lot of coughing and political posturing.) When Worlds Collide is very much of its era, sacrificing plausibility for sentiment (small boys and puppies) and romance (tinged with much self-sacrifice). It's a movie that can't be taken seriously for a minute, which is part of its enduring charm for many people. I find that, after many years of serious science fiction, the charm has worn thin. I hunger for some serious treatment of science and for some semblance of actual human behavior. Even though I was 11 years old in 1951, I can't believe that we were dumb enough to swallow what the movie gives us.

Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963)

Cast: Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal, Brandon De Wilde, Whit Bissell, Crahan Denton, John Ashley, Val Avery, George Petrie. Screenplay: Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr., based on a novel by Larry McMurtry. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Tambi Larsen, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Frank Bracht. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Hud and Mud as back-to-back blog entries: Purely accidental, but I rather like it. It set me to thinking that if Hud were ever (god forbid!) remade, Matthew McConaughey would be a good substitute for Paul Newman. Or rather, would have been, since McConaughey is 50, where Newman was exactly the right age when he played Hud. But both actors have that innate charisma blended with a soupçon of something not quite trustworthy that makes them such fun to watch. And fun to watch is what Hud is, despite the title character's anti-heroicness and the story's serious overtones about the passing of a way of life. On the latter count, think of the hopefulness of the cattle drivers in Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) as compared with the sour fate of the Bannons in Hud. The mantra of Red River was Dunson's "Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make 'em strong, make 'em grow." In Hud it might be Homer Bannon's "It don't take long to kill things, not like it does to grow." But mostly the pleasures of Hud are in the performances: Newman's obviously, and Patricia Neal's as Alma, but most especially Melvyn Douglas's as Homer, when you remember Douglas as the actor who wooed Irene Dunne in Theodora Goes Wild (Richard Boleslawski, 1936), Marlene Dietrich in Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937), and Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (Lubitsch, 1939). The movie won Oscars for Neal and Douglas, as it should have. Only Brandon De Wilde's performance didn't quite work for me: He seems a little too soft and well-scrubbed for someone who grew up in a landscape as lean and hard as the one James Wong Howe's (also Oscar-winning) images display. We have to think of the randy teenagers in The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971), also based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, to see what the character might really have been -- a young Jeff Bridges would have been wonderful as Lonnie Bannon. Hud is still hamstrung a little by the moribund Production Code: Characters in it say things like "crap" and "crud" instead of "shit." Like a lot of very good pictures, Hud sometimes has the feeling of having been made at the wrong time in film history.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Byron Haskin, 1964)

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Byron Haskin, 1964)

Cast: Paul Mantell, Victor Lundin, Adam West. Screenplay: Ib Melchior, John C. Higgins, based on a story by Daniel Defoe. Cinematography: Winton C. Hoch. Art direction: Arthur Lonergan, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Terry O. Morse. Music: Van Cleave.

The average third-grader today can spot the scientific inaccuracies of Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Who doesn't cringe when Christopher Draper (Paul Mantell) tries to start a fire by feeding the flames with the oxygen from his supply tank, an attempt most likely to send him up in a large fireball? The special effects, too, are primitive: The attacking spaceships are two-dimensional, paintings on a black backdrop. But does any of this really matter? With older films, even science fiction, datedness often counts for less than style and substance. Byron Haskin's movie has both, largely because it's derived from a classic source, Daniel Defoe's 1719 tale of solitude and companionship. It plays on the primal fear of loneliness that makes solitary confinement the worst of punishments and is the backbone of many classic adventure stories, including such other great sci-fi films as 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) and The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015). Even though Draper has a companion on Mars, a small monkey, his inability to converse with another human drives him near to madness -- a hallucination of his dead companion, Col. McReady (Adam West) -- before he finally encounters his Friday (Victor Lundin). Even then the breakthrough is slow to come: The alien humanoid at first refuses to speak, causing Draper to fume that he's "an idiot" and "retarded." But finally the alien trusts Draper enough to speak and the rapport blooms into a kind of interplanetary bromance as they learn each other's language and culture. (The master-servant Crusoe-Friday relationship remains, however: Draper expects his Friday to learn English first. Colonialism dies hard.) So forget everything we've learned from the various NASA probes about Martian terrain -- the absence of flaming volcanoes or of anything resembling "canals," let alone abundance of water and subaqueous plant life -- and accept the movie's vision for what it is: more a fable about long-ingrained human character than about what the future may be like. Byron Haskin's direction keeps the action crisp and steady, and while the studio sets have a certain cheesy quality, the footage shot at Death Valley's Zabriskie Point is often strikingly real.

Houseboat (Melville Shavelson, 1958)

Houseboat (Melville Shavelson, 1958)

Cast: Cary Grant, Sophia Loren, Martha Hyer, Harry Guardino, Eduardo Ciannelli, Mimi Gibson, Paul Petersen, Charles Herbert, Murray Hamilton. Screenplay: Melville Shavelson, Jack Rose. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: John B. Goodman, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Frank Bracht. Music: George Duning.

El Dorado (Howard Hawks, 1967)

James Caan, Robert Mitchum, Arthur Hunnicutt, and John Wayne in El Dorado 

Cole Thornton: John Wayne
J.P. Harrah: Robert Mitchum
Mississippi: James Caan
Bull: Arthur Hunnicutt
Maudie: Charlene Holt
Dr. Miller: Paul Fix
Josephine (Joey) MacDonald: Michele Carey
Bart Jason: Edward Asner
Neise McLeod: Christopher George
Kevin MacDonald: R.G. Armstrong
Luke MacDonald: Johnny Crawford

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Leigh Brackett
Based on a novel by Harry Brown
Cinematography: Harold Rosson
Art direction: Carl Anderson, Hal Pereira
Film editing: John Woodcock
Music: Nelson Riddle

Like his later Rio Lobo (1970), Howard Hawks's El Dorado isn't so much a remake of his Rio Bravo (1959) as a movie built on its template: Gunfighter John Wayne teams up with a drunken sheriff, a greenhorn, and an old coot to stand off an assault by the bad guys, who greatly outnumber them. Wayne retains his earlier role in El Dorado, but here the drunken sheriff is Robert Mitchum, the greenhorn is James Caan, and the old coot is Arthur Hunnicutt, replacing Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, and Walter Brennan, respectively, in the earlier film. Unfortunately, Hawks was unable to find a suitable replacement for Angie Dickinson's Feathers, the "Hawksian woman" in Rio Bravo, and tried without much success to sub in two C-list actresses, Charlene Holt as Maudie, the woman with a past that involves both Wayne and Mitchum, and Michele Carey as the hoydenish Joey. Neither makes the impression that Dickinson made. Leigh Brackett was disappointed to find that Hawks had turned her screenplay into a reworking of Rio Bravo, but she was used to his freewheeling ways by then, having worked for him on The Big Sleep (1946) and Hatari! (1962). There are diminishing returns to any kind of remake, and by the time Hawks made Rio Lobo, the template had worn thin, but El Dorado is solid enough entertainment, especially when Wayne and Mitchum are on screen together, playing off of each other gleefully. Except for the rather hackneyed "El Dorado" theme song over the opening credits, with its by-the-numbers lyrics by John Gabriel, Nelson Riddle's score is a pleasant surprise in its avoidance of Western movie clichés -- no cowboy songs or "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie." The one sour note in the movie comes when Caan puts on a racial-caricature "Chinaman" act to get the jump on a lurking gunman.

Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

An almost perfect movie. Rear Window has a solid framework provided by John Michael Hayes's screenplay, which has wit, sex, and suspense in all the right places and proportions. The action takes place in one of the greatest of all movie sets, designed by J. McMillan Johnson and Hal Pereira and filmed by Alfred Hitchcock's 12-time collaborator, Robert Burks. The jazzy score by Franz Waxman provides the right atmosphere, that of Greenwich Village in the 1950s, along with pop songs like "Mona Lisa" and "That's Amore" that come from other apartments and give a slyly ironic counterpoint to what L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) sees going on in them. It has Stewart doing what he does best: not so much acting as reacting, letting us see on his face what he's thinking and feeling as as he witnesses the goings-on across the courtyard or the advances being made on him by Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) in his own apartment. It's also Kelly's sexiest performance, the one that makes us realize why she was Hitchcock's favorite cool blond. They get peerless support from Thelma Ritter as Jefferies's sardonic nurse, Wendell Corey as the skeptical police detective, and Raymond Burr as the hulking Lars Thorwald, not to mention the various performers whose lives we witness across the courtyard. It's a movie that shows what Hitchcock learned from his apprenticeship in the era of silent film: the ability to show rather than tell. In essence, what Jeffries is watching from his rear window is a set of silent movies. That Hitchcock is a master no one today doubts, but it's worth considering his particular achievement in this film: It contains a murder, two near-rapes, one near-suicide, serious threats to the lives of its protagonists, and the killing of a small dog, and yet it still retains its essential lightness of tone.