Phffft (Mark Robson, 1954)

Cast: Judy Holliday, Jack Lemmon, Jack Carson, Kim Novak, Luella Gear, Donald Randolph, Donald Curtis. Screenplay: George Axelrod. Cinematography: Charles Lang. Art direction: William Flannery. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Friedrich Hollaender. 
 

Pushover (Richard Quine, 1954)

Kim Novak in Pushover

Cast: Fred MacMurray, Kim Novak, Philip Carey, Dorothy Malone, E.G. Marshall, Allen Nourse. Screenplay: Roy Huggins, based on novels by Thomas Walsh and Bill S. Ballinger. Cinematography: Lester White. Art direction: Walter Holscher. Film editing: Jerome Thoms. Music: Arthur Morton.

Pushover is a noirish cops-and-robbers movie that gave Kim Novak her first big role -- the only reason some people remember it. But it's a good deal better than that bit of trivia would suggest -- a well-paced, well-acted film that begins with a skillfully directed bank robbery, played entirely without dialogue. Then it cuts to mink-clad Lona McLane (Novak) coming out of a movie theater -- Pushover was made for Columbia, so the posters and marquee titles are those of 1954 Columbia releases. She finds that her car won't start, but a guy (Fred MacMurray) offers to help, then takes her back to his apartment while it's being repaired. They hit it off immediately and begin an ongoing affair. It turns out that their meeting is a set-up: The guy, Paul Sheridan, is a cop, and Lona is the mistress of one of the bank robbers, Harry Wheeler (Paul Richards), who killed a bank guard making his getaway. Sheridan is part of a team staking out Lona's apartment -- which they can see into from another apartment across a courtyard -- in expectation that she'll make contact with Wheeler. But Sheridan is a bad cop, and he soon enlists Lona in a plot to double-cross Wheeler and take the loot from the robbery. It's this dual role -- cop and robber -- that generates much of the film's suspense, as things go wrong, one by one, with their plans and Sheridan has to keep coming up with alternate plans to foil the cops with whom he is supposed to be working. One of the complications involves the occupant of the apartment next to Lona's, a nurse, Ann Stewart (Dorothy Malone), whom Sheridan's partner, Rick McAllister (Philip Carey), begins watching through his binoculars more avidly than he does the real object of the surveillance. The voyeurism in Pushover is reminiscent of Hitchcock, and though that master might have made a richer film of the material, Richard Quine does a good job of it.

The Man With the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1955)

The Man With the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1955)

Cast: Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, Kim Novak, Arnold Stang, Darren McGavin, John Conte, Doro Merande, George E. Stone, George Matthews, Leonid Kinskey, Emile Meyer. Screenplay: Walter Newman, Lewis Meltzer, based on a novel by Nelson Algren. Cinematography: Sam Leavitt. Production design: Joseph C. Wright. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Under the Production Code, alcohol flowed freely, and drunks were likely to be glamorous like the martini-swigging Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934) or lovable like James Stewart's Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950). But drug use was strictly taboo, even when it was depicted as a road to degradation, until Otto Preminger thumbed his nose at the Code with The Man With the Golden Arm. Preminger's film is very much about the degradation, but he deftly avoided making it into a "problem picture" with a "just say no" moral tacked on, mainly by focusing on the character of Frankie Machine, played superbly by Frank Sinatra. When we first meet Frankie he's just gotten out of prison rehab and is determined to go straight and get a job as a drummer with a band. But he's saddled with a clinging wife called Zosh, played (and sometimes overplayed) by Eleanor Parker. She wants him to resume his old underground life as a card dealer rather than risk it as a musician, and couldn't care less if that life involves resuming the drugs provided by Louie (Darren McGavin). Zosh is, or so it seems, confined to a wheelchair after an auto accident in which Frankie was the driver, and after which he married her out of pity. In fact, she's just milking the supposed disability for all it's worth, and when no one's around she gets out of the chair and walks. The marriage to Zosh also put an end to Frankie's involvement with Molly, a b-girl in a strip club. She's played by Kim Novak, an actress whose beautiful blankness always allows us to project whatever the script wants us to see in her. This doesn't make Novak a bad actress, I think, but simply a limited one who works best in films like Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), in which her role is all about the male gaze and its effects. She's perfectly fine here, though her preternatural beauty seems out of place in the drab urban setting of the film, like an orchid in a junkyard. Anyway, as you can guess, Frankie gets hooked again and has to go cold turkey with Molly's help. The Man With the Golden Arm sometimes feels dated: Sam Leavitt's camerawork is often too bright and flatly lighted, showing up the artificiality of the soundstage sets, and Parker and Novak are too glamorous for their roles. But the film works anyway, thanks to the solid dramatic effect produced by Sinatra's performance and the fine support from McGavin and character actor Arnold Stang, who gives a touching performance as Sparrow, a hanger-on devoted to Frankie. Elmer Bernstein's score is a classic, too, as is the  opening title sequence designed by Saul Bass.

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Yes, Vertigo is a great movie. No, it's not the greatest movie ever made, and to call it that does the film a disservice, inviting skeptics to investigate and overemphasize its flaws. The central flaw is narrative; Vertigo is at heart a preposterous melodrama, and the film raises questions that probably shouldn't be asked: How, for instance, did Scottie (James Stewart) get down from that gutter he was hanging onto after the cop fell to his death? How did Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) arrange to be at the top of that tower with his dead wife at the exact time when Madeleine (Kim Novak) and Scottie were climbing it? Why is the coroner (Henry Jones) so needlessly hostile to Scottie at the inquest? And so on, until the screenplay by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor reveals itself to be a thing of shreds and patches. If it is a great film, it's because it had a great director, and that almost no one will gainsay. Alfred Hitchcock drew a magnificent performance from Novak, an actress everyone else underestimated. (And one that he, initíally, didn't want: He was grooming Vera Miles for the role until she became pregnant.) He helped Stewart to one of the highlight performances of his career. He inspired Bernard Herrmann to compose one of the most powerful and evocative film scores ever written -- one whose expression of erotic longing is surpassed perhaps only by passages in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. He worked with cinematographer Robert Burks to transform San Francisco and environs into one of the great movie sets. And he turned what could have been a routine thriller (which is what many critics thought it was at the time of its release) into one of the most analyzed and commented-upon films ever made. It will never be my favorite Hitchcock film: I place it below Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960) in my personal ranking of his greatest films, and I enjoy rewatching The 39 Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Foreign Correspondent (1940), and Strangers on a Train (1951) more than I do Vertigo. Yet I still yield to its portrayal of passionate obsession and its masterly blend of all the elements of cinema technology into a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk in which the whole transcends the sometimes indifferent parts.

Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958)

Kim Novak was an actress of very narrow range, but in the right role and with a good supporting cast, she made a strong, sexy impact, as she does in Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1955) and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). In Bell, Book and Candle, she is paired again with her Vertigo co-star, James Stewart, and surrounded by a supporting cast full of scene-stealers: Jack Lemmon, Elsa Lanchester, Hermione Gingold, and Ernie Kovacs. The movie is nothing special: a fantasy romantic comedy with Novak as Gillian Holroyd, a witch who runs a primitive-art gallery on the ground floor of the apartment house where Shep Henderson (Stewart), a book publisher, lives. She puts a spell on him; he leaves his fiancée, Merle Kittridge (Janice Rule), for her but breaks it off when he discovers that he's been hexed. And so on. The movie was made after Vertigo, and Novak and Stewart were re-teamed because of a deal Columbia had made when it loaned out Novak to Paramount for the Hitchcock film. It's not the most plausible of pairings: Novak was 25 to Stewart's 50 -- an age difference that was less problematic in the plot of Vertigo, with its theme of erotic obsession. Stewart chose never to play another romantic lead, but Bell, Book and Candle gives him some good moments to show off his exemplary skill at physical comedy, as in the scene in which he's forced to scarf down a nauseating witches' brew concocted by Mrs. De Passe (Gingold). The screenplay by Daniel Taradash opens up a one-set Broadway comedy by John Van Druten that had starred Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer. It was nominated for Oscars for art direction and for Jean Louis's costumes, but lost in both categories to Gigi (Vincente Minnelli). The cinematography is by James Wong Howe.