No Way Out (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

Linda Darnell, Sidney Poitier, and Richard Widmark in No Way Out

Cast: Sidney Poitier, Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell, Stephen McNally, Mildred Joanne Smith, Harry Bellaver, Stanley Ridges, Dots Johnson, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Amanda Randolph, Maude Simmons. Screenplay: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Lesser Samuels. Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner. Art direction: George W. Davis, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Barbara McLean. Music: Alfred Newman.

Although its treatment of race relations in America seems naive today, No Way Out stands up as a solid drama about an issue that in the post-war years was finally receiving the attention from Hollywood filmmakers that it had too long deserved. It also launched the career of Sidney Poitier as well as, in smaller roles, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. The plot hinges on the novelty of a Black doctor, Luther Brooks (Poitier), serving as an intern in hospital in a large city. When two brothers, Ray (Richard Widmark) and Johnny Biddle (Dick Paxton) are admitted to the prison ward of the hospital after being shot by the police during a robbery, Brooks notices that Johnny's symptoms are not just that of a leg wound; suspecting some sort of mental impairment, Brooks does a spinal tap, during which Johnny dies. Ray Biddle has already demonstrated his racist animosity toward Brooks, and claims that he killed his brother. An autopsy would confirm Brooks's suspicion that Johnny's death was caused by an undiagnosed brain tumor, but Ray won't allow it, and he's backed up by his brother George (Harry Bellaver) and initially by Johnny's ex-wife, Edie (Linda Darnell). She once had an affair with Ray, but she loathes him and has done what she can to escape the poor-white neighborhood, Beaver Canal, where she grew up and the Biddles still live. Ray spurs the rabble-rousers of Beaver Canal to start a race riot, but they are met with resistance from the Black neighborhoods. The film is a little over-plotted: The crux of the plot, the autopsy, gets resolved in a way that isn't entirely convincing, and the confrontation of Brooks and Ray Biddle arrives in what's almost a coda, as an anti-climax. Widmark is allowed to overact in the role of Ray, and Poitier has yet to acquire the confident presence that made him a star. The best performance in the film comes from a deglamorized Darnell, who gives Edie a real toughness and vulnerability, suggesting that her inclination to do the right thing is at war with her experience growing up in Beaver Canal. The film's portrayal of raw racism still has the power to shock: We rarely hear white actors use the N-word today, even when their roles as bigots might seem to require it, and I flinched when a white woman spat in the face of Poitier's character. It's weaker in the treatment of racial violence: No one on either side seems to have any guns. 

 

Forever Amber (Otto Preminger, 1947)

Linda Darnell and George Sanders in Forever Amber

Cast: Linda Darnell, Cornel Wilde, Richard Greene, George Sanders, Glenn Langan, Richard Haydn, Jessica Tandy, Anne Revere, John Russell, Jane Ball, Robert Coote, Leo G. Carroll, Margaret Wycherly. Screenplay: Philip Dunne, Ring Lardner Jr., Jerome Cady, based on a novel by Kathleen Winsor. Cinematography: Leon Shamroy. Art direction: Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: David Raksin. 

Once a famous "dirty book," Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber wouldn't raise eyebrows or blood pressures in the average book club of today, but it was one of Hollywood's hottest properties in the 1940s. The bidding war was won by 20th Century Fox, which followed the example of Gone With the Wind by announcing a search for the actress who would play the glamorously wicked Amber St. Clair. Though the part originally went to Peggy Cummins, producer Darryl F. Zanuck finally decided that she looked too young to play the mature Amber, and when she was sidelined by illness just as filming began, she was replaced by Linda Darnell. John Stahl, the original director, left the film at the same time, and Otto Preminger stepped in. He disliked the book and asked for a script rewrite, but Preminger also delighted in trying to get things past the censors, who were all over the project. The result is a middling costume drama with too much material from the book to fit comfortably in its two-hour run time. Amber is an ambitious lass raised in a Puritan household who, when Charles II is restored to the throne, latches on to a handsome Cavalier, Bruce Carlton (Cornel Wilde), and heads for London. When Carlton is commissioned as a privateer by the king (George Sanders) and sets sail, Amber, who is pregnant with Carlton's child, is left with a little money that gets swindled away from her and lands in Newgate, the debtors' prison. She gives birth, escapes from prison, makes a living by thievery, goes on stage, attracts the eye of the king, marries an elderly earl, nurses a returned Carlton through the plague, inherits the earl's fortune when he dies during the Great Fire, and becomes the king's mistress. All of this immoral behavior should mean, under the Production Code, that she gets punished accordingly, but somehow the movie manages to finesse that with only a little emotional stress at the end. Forever Amber got condemned by the Catholic church banned in a few places, but it was evidently bowdlerized enough to survive and make money. The truth is, it's a little dull. It comes to life occasionally when Sanders is on screen being royally wicked, but Darnell, with a blonde dye job and wig, never gets a chance to do more than be cautiously wicked and suffer prettily. The Technicolor is also rather dark and muddy, although that may be the result of an aging print. 
 

Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger, 1945)

Linda Darnell, Bruce Cabot, Dana Andrews, and Charles Bickford in Fallen Angel

Cast: Dana Andrews, Alice Faye, Linda Darnell, Charles Bickford, Anne Revere, Bruce Cabot, John Carradine, Percy Kilbride. Screenplay: Harry Kleiner, based on a novel by Marty Holland. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: Leland Fuller, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Harry Reynolds. Music: David Raksin. 

Stuck with the inexpressive Alice Faye as his leading lady, Otto Preminger does wonders with the stranger-comes-to-town noir Fallen Angel. He plays it with only the slightest hint of a tongue in his cheek, taking its otherwise improbable turns of the plot with a straight face. It helps that he has a wicked counterpoint to Faye's blankness: Linda Darnell, as Stella, a waitress in a diner called -- what else? -- Pop's. It helps, too, that the stranger who comes to town is played by Dana Andrews with just enough charm and just enough sleaze to keep you guessing about what his character, Eric Stanton, will do next as the plot unfolds. Stanton arrives in a small coastal California town with not much more than a nickel for a cup of coffee at Pop's, and begins to plot how to con his way into some money. It just so happens that he hits town at the same time as another con man, Professor Madley (John Carradine), a spiritualist-seer. The Professor wants to put on one of his shows but has run into interference from the influential Clara Mills (Anne Revere), the spinster daughter of the late mayor of the town. Stanton wagers that he can win over Clara, which he does by wooing her pretty younger sister, June (Faye). (We have to take it on faith that he succeeds with June because Faye's expression is much the same after he wins her as it was before.) The upshot is that the Professor's show goes on, and Stanton makes enough from the deal to leave town. But he doesn't quite yet, because meanwhile he has hit it off for real with Stella. (Andrews and Darnell have genuine chemistry, which makes the lack of it in his scenes with Faye even more apparent.) And there's also the temptation presented by the fact that June has money and Stella doesn't, so he thinks up a scheme to got his hands on it and then leave town with Stella. No, it doesn't go as planned. In addition to Darnell and Andrews, there's a good performance from Charles Bickford as a retired cop who hangs out at Pop's and takes a key role in the plot when Stanton's scheme doesn't quite work out. Preminger gets fine support from cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, who had just won an Oscar for his work on Preminger's Laura (1944), which had also starred Andrews. Fallen Angel is no Laura, for sure, but it's better than it probably has any right to be.   

Star Dust (Walter Lang, 1940)

John Payne, Linda Darnell, and Jessie Ralph in Star Dust

Cast: Linda Darnell, John Payne, Roland Young, Charlotte Greenwood, William Gargan, Mary Beth Hughes, Mary Healy, Donald Meek, Jessie Ralph. Screenplay: Robert Ellis, Helen Logan, Jesse Malo, Kenneth Earl, Ivan Kahn. Cinematography: J. Peverell Marley. Art direction: Richard Day, Albert Hogsett. Film editing: Robert L. Simpson. Music: David Buttolph. 

Character actors gave a lot of energy to Hollywood movies of the '30s and '40s; they were depended on to bring a little of the pleasure of recognition to audiences who were familiar with their more or less established characteristics. So it's interesting to see two of the best cast against type in Star Dust, a fair-to-middling comic romance, designed around the up-and-coming Linda Darnell, whose ascent to stardom it's very loosely based on. Donald Meek, for example, had been typed from the beginning by his own surname, playing mousy, subservient types like the whiskey salesman whose sample case gets plundered in Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939). In Star Dust he's a casting director at a Hollywood studio, still subservient to the studio head played by William Gargan, but also conniving to advance the career of starlet June Lawrence (Mary Beth Hughes), with whom, if you know how to decode Breen Office censorship, it's suggested that he's been sleeping -- or at least plans to. Also cast against type is Roland Young, who often played underdogs with an edge, like the schemingly humble Uriah Heep in David Copperfield (George Cukor, 1935) or the henpecked Topper in a series of movies starting with Topper (Norman Z. McLeod, 1937). In Star Dust he's Thomas Brooke, a former silent movie star who now works as a talent scout for Amalgamated Pictures. On a scouting trip he discovers Carolyn Sayers (Darnell) in a small Arkansas town, but decides not to bring her to Hollywood because she's only 16. He returns to Hollywood with two discoveries: a football player, Bud Borden (John Payne), and a singer, Mary Andrews (Mary Healy). To Brooke's surprise, Carolyn turns up too, having forged a letter under his name recommending her to the studio. He overlooks this misdemeanor and decides to promote her anyway. The rest of the plot is the usual now they've got it, now they don't stuff about breaking into the movies. Mary Healy gets to sing the title song, the Hoagy Carmichael standard; she does it well enough, though nobody ever sang it better than Hoagy himself. Charlotte Greenwood, a celebrated comic actress on the stage, makes one of her few memorable movie appearances as an acting coach. Darnell is quite fresh and lovely, though the scene that provides her break into the movies displays her limitations as an actress even though it wows the audience in the film. Payne is likable as the handsome football player who keeps getting his nose broken before he's supposed to make a crucial screen test. 

Unfaithfully Yours (Preston Sturges, 1948)

Kurt Kreuger, Linda Darnell, and Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours

Cast: Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallee, Barbara Lawrence, Kurt Kreuger, Lionel Stander, Edgar Kennedy, Al Bridge, Julius Tannen, Torben Meyer, Robert Greig. Screenplay: Preston Sturges. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Lyle R. Wheeler, Joseph C. Wright. Film editing: Robert Finch, Stuart Gilmore. Musical director: Alfred Newman. 

Preston Sturges's familiar "stock company" of character actors like William Demarest, Jimmy Conlin, Julius Tannen, Robert Greig, and others served an important role in creating a context in which otherwise straight leading actor types like Joel McCrea, Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert, and Barbara Stanwyck could let themselves go and behave in ways that they normally wouldn't on screen. No film demonstrates this function better than Unfaithfully Yours, in which the silliness of performers like Lionel Stander, Edgar Kennedy, and others let Rex Harrison and Linda Darnell loosen up and go a little bit crazy -- or in Harrison's case, quite a bit more than crazy. Psychotic, to be blunt about it. This was Sturges's least successful with audiences of his major comic films of the 1940s, and it marked the start of the  decline of his career. It may be that postwar audiences were not ready to laugh at the kind of mayhem that Unfaithfully Yours contains -- after all, a man brutally slashing his wife with a freshly sharpened razor is not an image that normally elicits laughs. There's a failure of tone in the way Sturges writes and stages the scene, which takes place only in the mind of Harrison's character, Sir Alfred De Carter, as he conducts a symphony orchestra in a performance of Rossini's Overture to Semiramide (somewhat padded out with a Rossiniesque pastiche by music director Alfred Newman). It's all a setup, of course, for the slapstick sequence in which Sir Alfred tries to follow through on the imagined murder, only to screw things up monumentally and hilariously. But the premise is sour to start with. It encourages us to believe that Sir Alfred is the kind of man who would not only imagine killing his wife but also follow through on the idea persistently, like Wile E. Coyote attempting to off the Road Runner. The film may end with the restoration of order, and the De Carters cozily snuggling up to each other, but it's hard to resist the thought that something else could happen to make him snap tomorrow. Still, that's the major blemish on what is, if you don't think too closely about it, a very funny movie with one of Harrison's best performances, and a lot of sublime comic bits supplied by the stock company players. Sturges's dialogue, as usual, is mile-a-minute laugh lines, going by so fast that the captioners have trouble keeping up with them. It would be pure giddy fun, if the plot weren't intrinsically so dark. 

Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945)

Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945)

Cast: Laird Cregar, Linda Darnell, George Sanders, Glenn Langan, Faye Marlowe, Alan Napier. Screenplay: Barré Lyndon, based on a novel by Patrick Hamilton. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: Maurice Ransford, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Harry Reynolds. Music: Bernard Herrmann.

Hangover Square is a standard costume melodrama made memorable by Laird Cregar's performance and Bernard Herrmann's score. It was Cregar's last film: He died at the age of 31 before it was released. Wanting to escape the typecasting that had made him one of the movies' go-to villains, he set out to turn himself into a leading man, dieting down from his usual 300 pounds with the aid of amphetamines and thereby damaging his heart. In Hangover Square he is almost handsome, or at least hard to recognize as the hulking villain who menaced Victor Mature in I Wake Up Screaming (H. Bruce Humberstone, 1941) and Tyrone Power in The Black Swan (Henry King, 1942). He plays George Harvey Bone, a composer working on a piano concerto, which was actually composed by Herrmann and has subsequently been performed and recorded as Concerto Macabre. But Bone is mentally ill, subject to blackouts during which he resorts to acts of violence that the otherwise mild-mannered Bone can't remember after they've passed. The illness also leads him into two clashing worlds: the genteel one of classical music, where he woos Barbara Chapman (Faye Marlowe), daughter of the eminent conductor who plans to introduce his concerto to the world, and the louche one of the music halls, where he falls for the ambitious singer Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell), who wants him to write songs for her that will propel her to stardom. The psychology of the film is hokum, of course, owing a heavy debt to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but Cregar's ability to switch from vulnerability to violence in an instant gives the character credibility. The fiery climax of the film is particularly well-staged.

My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)

Made in the twilight of the classic Western, there's something a little decadent about this West-as-it-never-was movie. In a few years, conventional Westerns would be all over TV, and Hollywood filmmakers would start turning out so-called "adult Westerns," films that did what they could to question the values and stereotypes that had been prevalent in the genre. Films like High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) and Shane (George Stevens, 1953) would be lauded by intellectuals who would never have been caught dead at conventional Westerns. And even Ford would present a darker vision of the West's racism and brutality in The Searchers (1956). On the surface, My Darling Clementine looks like a fairy-tale version of the Old West, with its blithe disregard for actual geography: Tombstone, Ariz., and Monument Valley, Utah, are more than 350 miles apart, but Ford's movie puts the jagged buttes of the valley in every Tombstone back yard. The familiar tale of the shootout at the OK Corral has been turned into a clash of good (the Earps) vs. evil (the Clantons), in which the virtues of the former clan have been greatly exaggerated. There are some of the usual stereotypes: a drunken Indian and a Mexican (?) spitfire named Chihuahua (Linda Darnell). There's a virtuous young woman (Cathy Downs) from back east who tracks her man all the way west and when he's killed settles down to be the town schoolmarm. And yet, My Darling Clementine is one of the great Western movies in large part because Ford and screenwriters Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller are so insouciant about their patent mythmaking. Henry Fonda is a tower of virtue as Wyatt Earp, infusing some of the integrity of his previous characters, Abraham Lincoln and Tom Joad, into the portrayal. Burly Victor Mature, though seemingly miscast as the consumptive Doc Holliday, gives a surprisingly good performance. And there's fine support from such Western standbys as Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, Tim Holt, and John Ireland. The black-and-white cinematography of Joseph MacDonald only seems to emphasize the good vs. evil fable, bringing something of the film noir to the Wild West.