Alias Nick Beal (John Farrow, 1949)

Audrey Totter and Ray Milland in Alias Nick Beal

Cast: Ray Milland, Thomas Mitchell, Audrey Totter, George Macready, Fred Clark, Geraldine Wall, Henry O'Neill, Darryl Hickman, Nestor Paiva, King Donovan, Charles Evans. Screenplay: Jonathan Latimer, Mindret Lord. Cinematography: Lionel Lindon. Art direction: Franz Bachelin, Hans Dreier. Film editing: Eda Warren. Music: Franz Waxman. 

An attempt to blend film noir and fantasy, Alias Nick Beal casts Ray Milland as the devil, who leads an honest politician (Thomas Mitchell) astray. Despite good performances and nice atmospheric detail, the film fizzles in a too-pat resolution of the plot. 

So Evil My Love (Lewis Allen, 1948)

Ray Milland and Ann Todd in So Evil My Love

Cast: Ray Milland, Ann Todd, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Leo G. Carroll, Raymond Huntley, Raymond Lovell, Martita Hunt, Moira Lister, Roderick Lovell, Muriel Aked. Screenplay: Ronald Millar, Leonard Spiegelgass, based on a novel by Joseph Shearing. Cinematography: Mutz Greenbaum. Production design: Thomas N. Morahan. Film editing: Vera Campbell. Music: William Alwyn. 

So Evil My Love needs a better actress than the starchy Ann Todd to make its central premise work, that a respectable Victorian widow of an Anglican missionary would fall so hard for a handsome cad that she'd do anything from larceny to murder for him. It could also have used a more charismatic cad than Ray Milland in the role. We meet Olivia Harwood (Todd) on a ship returning to England from Jamaica, where she has buried her husband. When the ship's doctor asks her to help nurse some malaria patients on board, she agrees -- a little reluctantly, which is perhaps a sign that she's not as sweetly complaisant as she might be. One of the patients is traveling under the name Mark Bellis (Milland), which may not be his real name: He's an artist who makes his living by stealing valuable paintings and forging Rembrandts. A spark is lit between them, although we don't really see it because the actors have so little chemistry, and when they get back to London, Bellis makes his way to her doorstep. She owns a small house and lets out rooms, one of which he takes, though under the disapproving eye of her other tenant, the ostentatiously proper Miss Shoebridge (Muriel Aked). When Olivia allows Bellis to paint her, in an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, she relaxes her defenses and passion blossoms -- or what passes for it in the screenplay if not on the screen. Meanwhile, Olivia makes contact with an old school friend, Susan Courtney (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who is unhappily married to the wealthy and domineering Henry Courtney (Raymond Huntley). Susan has confessed her unhappiness, and her love for another man, Sir John Curle (Roderick Lovell), in letters to Olivia. When the affair between Bellis and Olivia develops, he finds the letter and sees the possibility of blackmailing Courtney, who is in line for a peerage that would be derailed by scandal. Under Bellis's spell, Olivia gets deeper and deeper into a plot that turns lethal. There's potential for real heat in the story, but miscast leads and a talky script undo it. 

The River's Edge (Allan Dwan, 1957)

Debra Paget and Anthony Quinn in The River's Edge 

Cast: Ray Milland, Anthony Quinn, Debra Paget, Harry Carey Jr., Chubby Johnson, Byron Foulger, Tom McKee, Frank Gerstle. Screenplay: Harold Jacob Smith, James Leicester, based on a story by Smith. Cinematography: Harold Lipstein. Production design: Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: James Leicester. Music: Louis Forbes. 

I don't know whether it says more about the movie or about me that I didn't realize until well into the story began to unfold that I had seen The River's Edge before, and then only after a couple of moments of déjà vu. At first I shook off the feeling by telling myself there was nothing original about the noirish story being told: a criminal seeking out his old girlfriend and persuading her and her husband to aid him in a new scheme. You'd think that the presence of two Oscar-winning actors and a sexy actress who was one of my boyhood crushes would have kept the movie fresher in my memory. But there's really nothing  memorable enough about the film to have made it stay with me, other than Debra Paget in shorts. Ray Milland and Anthony Quinn are predictably good in their performances, and there's some handsome scenery filmed along the California-Mexico border (sometimes not blending well with the fake outdoor sets shot in the studio). And Allan Dwan always directed as if the material were first-rate. But I have the feeling that I'll forget The River's Edge again, and maybe wind up watching it again some day. 

The Big Clock (John Farrow, 1948)

The Big Clock (John Farrow, 1948)

Cast: Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Sullivan, George Macready, Rita Johnson, Elsa Lanchester, Harold Vermilyea, Dan Tobin, Harry Morgan. Screenplay: Jonathan Latimer, based on a novel by Kenneth Fearing. Cinematography: Daniel L. Fapp, John F. Seitz. Art direction: Roland Anderson, Hans Dreier, Albert Nozaki. Film editing: LeRoy Stone. Music: Victor Young.

The Big Clock is a satisfying blend of suspense and comedy of the kind often called "Hitchcockian," which usually means it would probably have been even better if Hitchcock had directed it. But since he didn't, it's worth admiring what director John Farrow and screenwriter Jonathan Latimer did with the material provided them by Kenneth Fearing's novel. Fearing had worked at Time magazine when Henry Luce was head of that publishing empire, so it's clear that he had Luce in mind when he created the imperious Earl Janoth, played with mustache-stroking glee by Charles Laughton in the film. So there's a substratum of satire on publishing moguls like Luce -- a breed that still exists in our day, embodied by Rupert Murdoch. (And still attracts satire, viz., HBO's Succession.)  The plot centers on another Hitchcockian trope, the Wrong Man. In this case, the object of suspicion is George Stroud, editor of one of Janoth's properties, a true crime magazine called Crimeways. Ray Milland plays Stroud, a hard-charging journalist who feels trapped in Janoth's empire. Eventually, through a well-set-up series of coincidences, Stroud finds himself investigating a murder in which he becomes the chief suspect, even though it was actually committed by no less than Janoth. There are domestic complications, too, involving Stroud's wife, a thankless role nicely played by Maureen O'Sullivan. The victim is Janoth's mistress, with whom Stroud has become involved because she suggests she has dirt on Janoth that Stroud can use to his advantage. The film handles all of these plot snarls with finesse, one of the rare instances in which knowing whodunit from the outset doesn't detract from the suspense. Censorship blunts some of the edges: In the novel, Stroud's marriage was less happy and his involvement with the victim more intimate. Janoth's bisexuality was also more explicit in the source -- in the film it's suggested when we see Janoth receiving a massage from his bodyguard, played silently by Harry Morgan, who remains a brooding presence in the background of other scenes. The film is enlivened by a gallery of mostly comic secondary characters, including Elsa Lanchester as a giddy artist whose works Stroud for some reason collects.

Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen, 1937)

Easy Living is one of my favorite screwball comedies, but I once had a nightmare that took place in the set designed by Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegté for the film. It was the luxury suite in the Hotel Louis, with its amazingly improbable bathtub/fountain, and I dreamed that we had just bought a place that looked like it and were moving in. I don't remember much else, other than that I was terribly anxious about how we were going to pay for it. Most of my dreams are anxiety dreams, I think, which may be why I love screwball comedies so much: They take our anxieties about money and love and work, like Mary Smith (Jean Arthur) worrying about how she's going to pay the rent and even eat now that she's lost her job, and transform them into dilemmas with comic resolutions. Too bad life isn't like that, we say, but with maybe a kind of glimmer of hope that it will turn out that way after all. Easy Living, with its screenplay by Preston Sturges, is one of the funniest screwball comedies, but it's also, under Mitchell Leisen's direction, one of the most hilarious slapstick comedies. How can you not love a film in which a Wall Street fat cat (Edward Arnold) falls downstairs? Or the celebrated scene in which the little doors in the Automat go haywire, producing food-fight chaos that builds and builds? The fall of the fat cat and the rush on the Automat reveal that Easy Living was a product of the Depression, anxiety made pervasive and world-wide, when we needed hope in the form of comic nonsense to keep us going. This is also an essential film for those of us who love Preston Sturges's movies, for although he didn't direct it, his hand is evident throughout, not only in the dialogue but also in the casting, with character actors who would later form part of Sturges's stock company, Franklin Pangborn, William Demarest, and Robert Greig among them. Ray Milland displays a Cary Grant-like glint of amusement at what's going on, Luis Alberni spouts Sturges's wonderful malapropisms as the hotel owner Louis Louis, and Mary Nash brings the right amount of indignation and humor to her role as Arnold's wife. I only wonder why Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin weren't credited for their title song, which is heard (though without its lyrics), as background music throughout the film.

Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

It's a measure of how little Hollywood understood what kind of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock was that Warner Bros. insisted he make Dial M for Murder in 3-D. The process was nearing the end of its '50s heyday, one of the several attempts by the troubled studios to draw patrons away from their TV sets and into the theaters. The 3-D films of the '50s, like the blockbusters released in the process today, were mostly filled with things being flung, poked, thrust, or shot at the audience. As Hitchcock had a reputation as a "master of suspense," perhaps the studio assumed that he'd use the process to scare people. But he never needed tricks like 3-D for that, being perfectly skilled at pacing and cutting to build tension in the audience. Dial M ended up being shown mostly in 2-D anyway, and only some very peculiar blocking and framing in its images today show the efforts Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks did to accommodate the moribund process: Scenes are often filmed with table lamps prominent in the foreground, for no other reason than to emphasize the action taking place beyond them. The scene in which Swann (Anthony Dawson) attempts to murder Margot (Grace Kelly) is the only bit of action that would have benefited from the process, with Margot's hand desperately reaching toward the audience for the scissors behind her. Dial M is essentially a filmed play -- Frederick Knott adapted his own theatrical hit for the movies -- and as such relies far more on dialogue and spoken exposition for its narrative coherence. It was the first of three movies -- the other two are Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955) -- that Hitchcock made with Kelly, and the one that gives her least to do in the way of characterization: Mostly she just has to be a pawn moved about by her husband (Ray Milland), her lover (Robert Cummings), and the police inspector (John Williams). But she clearly defined Hitchcock's "type," already partly established in his films with Joan Fontaine and Ingrid Bergman: the so-called "cool blond." Eva Marie Saint, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, and Janet Leigh would attempt to fill the role afterward, but never with quite the charisma that Kelly, a limited actress but a definite "presence," achieved for him. Milland is very good as the murderous husband, and Williams is a delight as the inspector who has to puzzle out what's going on with all those door keys. The rather goofy-looking Cummings has never made sense to me as a leading man -- he almost wrecks Saboteur (1942), an otherwise well-made Hitchcock film that might be regarded as one of his best if someone other than Cummings and the bland Priscilla Lane had been cast in the leads. It's not surprising that after his performance in Dial M he went straight into television and his own sitcom.

The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945)

If such a thing as conscience could be ascribed to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it might be said that giving The Lost Weekend and director Billy Wilder the best picture and best director Oscars was an attempt to atone for its failure to honor Wilder's Double Indemnity with those awards the previous year. (The awards went to Leo McCarey and his saccharine Going My Way.) The Lost Weekend is not quite as enduring a film as Double Indemnity: It pulls its punches with a "hopeful" ending, though it should be clear to any intelligent viewer that Ray Milland's Don Birnam is not going to be so easily cured of his alcoholism as he and his girlfriend, Helen St. James (Jane Wyman), seem to think. But the film also lands quite a few of its punches, thanks to Milland's Oscar-winning performance and the intelligent (and also Oscar-winning) adaptation of Charles R. Jackson's novel by Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett. For its day, still under the watchful eyes of the Paramount front office and the Production Code, The Lost Weekend seems almost unnervingly frank about the ravages of alcoholism, then usually treated more as a subject for comedy than for semi-realistic drama. The Code prevented the film from ascribing Birnam's drinking to an attempt to cope with his homosexuality, but in some respects this can be seen today as a good change made for the wrong reason, since the roots of addiction to alcohol are far more complicated than any simplistic explanation such as self-loathing. The Code was also powerless to prevent Wilder and Brackett from finessing the suggestion that the friendly "bar girl" Gloria (Doris Dowling) is anything but an on-call prostitute. Increasingly, post-World War II films would treat audiences like the adults the Code administration wanted to prevent them from being. Wyman's Helen is a bit too noble in her persistent support of Birnam's behavior -- she moves from ignorance to denial to enabling to self-sacrifice far too swiftly and easily. But in general, the supporting cast -- Phillip Terry as Birnam's brother, Howard Da Silva as the bartender, Frank Faylen as the seen-it-all-too-often nurse in the drunk ward -- are excellent. The fine cinematography is by John F. Seitz. The score, which is laid on a bit too heavily, especially in the use of the theremin to suggest Birnam's aching need for a drink, is by Miklós Rózsa.