Journey Into Fear (Norman Foster, 1943)

Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles in Journey Into Fear

Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Del Rio, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick, Orson Welles, Agnes Moorehead, Jack Durant, Eustace Wyatt, Frank Readick, Edgar Barrier, Jack Moss, Hans Conried. Screenplay: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, based on a novel by Eric Ambler. Cinematography: Karl Struss. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Mark-Lee Kirk. Film editing: Mark Robson. Music: Roy Webb.

While they were working on The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten used some spare time to rewrite a screenplay by Richard Collins and Ben Hecht for a property owned by RKO, Eric Ambler's spy novel Journey Into Fear. Welles would have directed, but he was still tied up on Ambersons, so he assigned the job to Norman Foster, though he still had time to play the secondary role of Col. Haki, and as producer to see to it that many of the actors he had worked with -- Cotten, Dolores Del Rio, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick, and Agnes Moorehead -- played key roles. The result is a film whose complicated plot never quite resolves itself into clarity, but which abounds in Wellesian moments, such as the desperate struggle on the rainswept ledge of a hotel at the film's climax. Unfortunately, Welles's battle with RKO over the editing of Ambersons resulted in his firing, and the editing of Journey Into Fear was similarly taken out of his hands.

The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli in The Third Man

Holly Martins: Joseph Cotten
Anna Schmidt: Alida Valli
Harry Lime: Orson Welles
Maj. Calloway: Trevor Howard
Sgt. Paine: Bernard Lee
Porter: Paul Hörbiger
Kurtz: Ernst Deutsch
Popescu: Siegfried Breuer
Dr. Winkel: Erich Ponto
Cribbin: Wilfrid Hyde-White
Anna's Landlady: Hedwig Bleibtreu

Director: Carol Reed
Screenplay: Graham Greene
Cinematography: Robert Krasker
Art direction: Vincent Korda
Film editing: Oswald Hafenrichter
Music: Anton Karas

It's my contention that the mark of a great film is the density of its texture, its ability to let you find something new or different, or simply to remember a forgotten moment, each time you watch it. I have to admit that I wasn't much looking forward to rewatching The Third Man, but I felt obliged since I hadn't seen it for some time and I do have it on my list of great movies. I knew what was coming: the great doorway revelation, the ferris wheel conversation, the chase through the sewers, and Anna walking toward and past Holly along an allée of pollarded trees. But Carol Reed's film is full of so many incidentals that bring even familiar scenes to life. For example, when Anna is picked up by the international police -- a force made up of members of each of Vienna's occupying forces -- she's allowed to pack a bag. It's the Frenchman who reminds her that she has forgotten her lipstick. Touches like this, or Anna's landlady protesting in German that needs no subtitles to get its point across, are essential to the film's greatness. I had forgotten the demon child who fingers Holly as a murderer after the porter's death. I hadn't realized how Robert Krasker's expressionistically tilted camera in much of the film is counterpointed by his concluding shot, the long, foursquare, devastatingly symmetrical take of Anna's walk along the allée. To be sure, there are things that don't quite make sense: Why is a man selling balloons at night in the deserted Vienna streets? And the light that reveals Harry Lime in the doorway comes from no plausible source. But these are moments for quibblers, not for those who luxuriate in cinematic poetry.

Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944)

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight

Paula Alquist: Ingrid Bergman
Gregory Anton: Charles Boyer
Brian Cameron: Joseph Cotten
Miss Thwaites: May Whitty
Nancy: Angela Lansbury
Elizabeth: Barbara Everest

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, John L Balderston
Based on a play by Patrick Hamilton
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art direction: William Ferrari, Cedric Gibbons

There is a tendency among critic-historians to prefer the 1940 Thorold Dickinson film of Gaslight to the slicker and more opulent 1944 version directed by George Cukor, partly because MGM attempted to suppress the earlier film -- an absurd and vicious effort that evidently failed. But although I myself went along with that attitude in my entry on the Dickinson version, I have to admit that rewatching Cukor's film has brought me around, partly because Cukor is a director I have more and more come to appreciate for his warm professionalism. He loves actors and showcasing them, which he does to great effect in the 1944 film, winning an Oscar for Ingrid Bergman -- largely, I think, for her wonderful scene in which Paula turns the tables on Anton -- as well as bringing out Charles Boyer's great gift for attractive menace. And perhaps best of all, giving the teenage Angela Lansbury an opportunity to shine -- and to earn the first of her sadly unrewarded Oscar nominations. Lansbury's Nancy is a saucy baggage, and she steals the show from the stars by wielding her sharp little chin like a knife, making Paula's fear of Nancy entirely credible while flirting boldly with Anton. May Whitty as the nosy Miss Thwaites, with her delight in the macabre, provides a needed bit of comic relief, too. Her curtain line, "Well!", when she comes upon Paula with Brian Cameron after Anton's arrest, provides a satisfactory ending, partly because it's delivered in a different tone -- this time one of delight -- than her earlier scandalized "Well!" when she saw Paula and Anton kissing. This is high Hollywood filmmaking at its most satisfying.

Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)

Patricia Collinge, Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten, Henry Travers, Charles Bates, Edna May Wonacott in Shadow of a Doubt

Charlie Newton: Teresa Wright
Charlie Oakley: Joseph Cotten
Jack Graham: Macdonald Carey
Joseph Newton: Henry Travers
Emma Newton: Patricia Collinge
Herbie Hawkins: Hume Cronyn
Louise Finch: Janet Shaw

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, Alma Reville, Gordon McDonell
Cinematography: Joseph A. Valentine
Art direction: John B. Goodman
Film editing: Milton Carruth
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

In high school I appeared in a production of Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, playing three roles: In the first act I was Professor Willard, who comes on stage to bore the audience with facts about the town of Grover's Corners, which, he says, "lies on the old Pleistocene granite of the Appalachian range" and is largely populated by "English brachiocephalic blue-eyed stock." I have no doubt that, as the class nerd, I was chosen for my ability to pronounce "Pleistocene" and "brachiocephalic," but I also played a newsboy tossing imaginary newspapers on imaginary front porches in the second act, and in the third I was the Second Dead Man, who sits in the cemetery waiting to speak his one line: "A star's mighty good company." Our Town has always been a good choice for amateur theatrics because it's inexpensive, designed to be performed with no scenery other than some chairs, a couple of trellises, and a stepladder, but it was especially good for high schools in the 1950s because it was clean. No sexual innuendo, no profanity. Our straitlaced principal, Dr. Brubaker, acted as censor on all of the school plays, and the only thing he found an objection to was the alcoholic choirmaster Simon Stimson, so the director, our English and dramatics teacher Mr. Wilson, had to threaten our Simon, Billy Cavanaugh, every now and then when he started to play drunk. I mention all of this because Wilder's Our Town looms large over Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. Wilder wrote the first draft of the screenplay, based on a story idea by Gordon McDonell. The screenplay was revised and completed by Sally Benson (author of the New Yorker stories that were the basis for Vincente Minnelli's 1944 musical Meet Me in St. Louis) and Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville, after Wilder left for service in World War II, but it's his benign vision of small town life that informs the Santa Rosa of Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock even paid tribute to Wilder with a separate on-screen credit in the film's opening. The premise of Shadow of a Doubt is essentially: What if a serial killer showed up in Grover's Corners? What better place to hide out from the cops than in the bosom of one's own "average American family," as the Newtons of Santa Rosa are said to be? Instead of Hitchcock's frequent "wrong man" plot device, what we have here is the wrong place, the tension being developed from Uncle Charlie's threat to small town tranquility. Hitchcock is often quoted as saying Shadow of a Doubt was one of his favorite films, and there's much to admire in it, especially the performances. As Uncle Charlie, Joseph Cotten, with his quick turns from joviality to menace, is splendid, and Teresa Wright as his namesake niece makes the most of their odd emotional connection: If Uncle Charlie is psychotic, Young Charlie is at least neurotic, especially in her often frantic and edgy attempts to launch her own investigation, either to prove or disprove her uncle's guilt. Patricia Collinge is also superb as the mother who has to be protected from the truth about her brother, lest the whole family structure that depends on her hard work and common sense collapse. Henry Travers as the father and Hume Cronyn as his mama's-boy friend provide the necessary macabre comedy in their schemes to bump each other off. But I think the film is undermined by the unnecessary introduction of a love story between Charlie and the detective Jack Graham. It's inserted into the film too abruptly, almost in a cut between scenes: All of a sudden Charlie has not only figured out that Graham is a detective but she has also fallen for him. A more interesting actor than Macdonald Carey might have made it plausible, but his affable Graham doesn't feel like an appropriate match for the intensity that is Charlie. Grover's Corners was no paradise, as the third act of Our Town demonstrates, and Uncle Charlie is perhaps not the only serpent in Santa Rosa: The scene in which the two Charlies go to a smoky dive and encounter the waitress Louise, a schoolmate of Young Charlie's who has fallen on hard times and looks longingly at the ill-gotten emerald ring her friend is wearing, is an effective counterpoint to the folksiness and bonhomie on the small town surface. I think the film could have benefited from a bit more of the dark underside of Santa Rosa and a bit less of its superficial geniality.

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

So much has been written about the mishandling and mutilation of Orson Welles's second feature film that it's hard to see the Magnificent Ambersons that we have without pining for the one we lost. What we have is a fine family melodrama with a truncated and sentimental happy ending and an undeveloped and poorly integrated commentary on the effects of industrialization on turn-of-the-20th-century America. We also have some of the best examples of Welles's genius at integrating performances, production design, and cinematography -- all of which Welles supervised to the point of micromanagement. The interior of the Amberson mansion is one of the great sets in Hollywood film: It earned an Oscar nomination for Albert S. D'Agostino, A. Roland Fields, and Darrell Silvera, though the credited set designer, Mark-Lee Kirk, should have been included. Welles used the set as a grand stage, exploiting the three levels of the central staircase memorably with the help of Stanley Cortez's deep-focus camerawork. Welles later told Peter Bogdanovich that Frank Lloyd Wright, who was Anne Baxter's grandfather, visited the set and hated it: It was precisely the kind of domestic architecture that he had spent his career trying to eliminate, which, as Welles said, was "the whole point" of the design. As for the performances, Agnes Moorehead received a supporting actress nomination, the first of four in her career, for playing the spinster aunt, Fanny Minafer. She's superb, especially in the "kitchen scene," a single long take in which her nephew, George (Tim Holt), scarfs down strawberry shortcake as she worms out of him the information that Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten) has renewed his courting of George's widowed mother, Isabel (Dolores Costello), which is especially painful for Fanny, who had hopes of attracting Eugene herself. Holt, an underrated actor, holds his own here and elsewhere -- he is, after all, the central character, the spoiled child whose selfishness ruins the chances for happiness of so many of the film's characters. We can mourn the loss of Welles's cinematic flourishes that were apparently cut from the film, but to my mind the chief loss is the effective integration of the theme initiated when Eugene, who has made his fortune developing the automobile, admits that the industrial progress it represents "may be a step backward in civilization" and that automobiles are "going to alter war and they're going to alter peace." Welles was speaking from his own life, as Patrick McGilligan observes in his book Young Orson. Welles's father, Dick Welles, had been involved in developing automobile headlights -- the very thing in which Fanny invests and loses her inheritance -- and was the proud driver of the first automobile on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, Welles's home town. The Magnificent Ambersons would have been much richer if Welles had been able to make the statement about the automobile that he later told Bogdanovich was central to his concept of the film.

Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953)

Niagara was one of three movies starring Marilyn Monroe that were released in 1953. The other two, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks) and How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco), were hits, confirming what we now know: that Monroe was a peerless comedian, not, as Niagara wants her to be, a film noir siren. She had done earlier turns in legitimate film noir, a small role in The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950), larger ones in Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952) and Don't Bother to Knock (Roy Ward Baker, 1952), so this time 20th Century-Fox decided to go all out in exploiting her as a femme fatale. There are many things wrong with Niagara, one thing being that it can't quite decide whether it's a noir thriller or a Technicolor travelogue about the eponymous falls and their various tourist attractions. But what's most wrong about it is its misuse of Monroe, who is not even the real lead character in the film: Her role is decidedly secondary to that of Jean Peters. And she is grotesquely exploited in her part as Rose Loomis, unhappily married to a mentally unstable man (Joseph Cotten) and plotting to have her lover (Richard Allan) bump him off. The studio can't resist dressing her in skin-tight clothes, with high heels that make it impossible for her to walk without bumps and grinds, and flaming red lipstick that's obviously freshly put on even when she's supposed to be waking up in the morning. A producer less under the control of the studio than Charles Brackett (who also wrote the clunky screenplay with Walter Reisch and Richard L. Breen) might have made Rose into a credible character, but here she's only an adolescent boy's fantasy. But even a misused Marilyn is better than no Marilyn at all, as we find out two-thirds of the way through the movie when the focus shifts to the character played by Peters and her grinning ass of a husband (Max Showalter), and we have nothing to marvel at but the Falls. If the screenplay had fallen into the hands of a Hitchcock, Niagara might have been a success, but Henry Hathaway directs as if he's bored by the whole thing.