A Song Is Born (Howard Hawks, 1948)

Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo in A Song Is Born

Prof. Hobart Frisbee: Danny Kaye
Honey Swanson: Virginia Mayo
Prof. Magenbruch: Benny Goodman
Prof. Twingle: Hugh Herbert
Tony Crow: Steve Cochran
Dr. Elfini: J. Edward Bromberg
Prof. Gerkikoff: Felix Bressart
Prof. Traumer: Ludwig Stössel
Prof. Oddly: O.Z. Whitehead
Miss Bragg: Esther Dale
Miss Totten: Mary Field
Buck: Ford Washington Lee
Bubbles: John William Sublett

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Harry Tugend, Helen McSweeney
Based on a story and screenplay by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Thomas Monroe
Cinematography: Gregg Toland
Art direction: Perry Ferguson, George Jenkins
Film editing: Daniel Mandell
Music: Hugo Friedhofer, Emil Newman

If you've seen Howard Hawks's Ball of Fire (1941), there's really only one reason to see Hawks's A Song Is Born, a musical version of the earlier film that retains its rather silly plot and a large part of the dialogue. But that one reason is a good one: the music is provided by the likes of Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, and a host of other stars of the big band swing era. Otherwise, Hawks's direction is mostly a carbon copy of the first film, except that instead of Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, he's working with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo, neither of whom Hawks liked. I happen to like Mayo, but I have a low tolerance for Kaye's shtick, his mugging and his patter songs. Fortunately, he's more subdued than usual in A Song Is Born, reportedly because he was going through marital problems and was under heavy psychoanalysis. Still, to hear Kaye repeating some of the dialogue carried over word for word from A Song Is Born makes me appreciate how good Cooper was in screwball comedy. The chief switch in the plot is that the encyclopedia Kaye's Prof. Frisbee is working on with six other professors has become a musical one, so that instead of rushing to compile a volume on slang, as Cooper's Prof. Potts was tasked to do, Prof. Frisbee has to cobble up a volume on jazz -- of which he has somehow remained ignorant. There is less emphasis on the other cute little professors in A Song Is Born than there is in Ball of Fire, which was inspired in part by Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). One of them, however, is played rather amusingly by Benny Goodman, who is invited by the other musicians to join in a jam session and of course distinguishes himself. The gangster plot, featuring Steve Cochran in the role played by Dana Andrews in the earlier film, is also trimmed down. Mayo's singing voice was dubbed by Jeri Sullavan.

White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)

James Cagney and Margaret Wycherly in White Heat

Cody Jarrett: James Cagney
Verna Jarrett: Virginia Mayo
Hank Fallon aka Vic Pardo: Edmond O'Brien
Ma Jarrett: Margaret Wycherly
Big Ed Somers: Steve Cochran
Philip Evans: John Archer
Cotton Valletti: Wally Cassell
Trader Winston: Fred Clark

Director: Raoul Walsh
Screenplay: Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts
Based on a story by Virginia Kellogg
Cinematography: Sidney Hickox
Film Editing: Owen Marks
Music: Max Steiner

It still baffles me that Raoul Walsh's terrific crime thriller White Heat received only one Oscar nomination, and that one for the scenario devised by Virginia Kellogg, which was notoriously revised not only by Kellogg but also by the credited screenwriters Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts with much uncredited help from James Cagney and his friends Humphrey Bogart and Frank McHugh. Where were the nominations for Walsh's no-nonsense direction, Cagney's superbly over-the-top performance (especially the scene in which Cody Jarrett goes berserk on learning of his dear old mother's death), Margaret Wycherly's tiger mom, or even Virginia Mayo's tough broad? Mayo was one of the more underrated blond bombshells of the era. She could have been a rival to Dorothy Malone and Gloria Grahame for tough-girl roles, but under contract to Samuel Goldwyn, she got stuck in forgettable musicals and comedies in which she played the foil to fellow Goldwyn contract player Danny Kaye. The good reviews she got for playing Dana Andrews's cheating wife in William Wyler's 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives showed that she had more acting talent than Goldwyn had revealed, but with a few exceptions -- White Heat being the most notable -- she got stuck in movies that played off her beauty more than her acting ability. Edmond O'Brien also shines in the part of the undercover detective who buddies up to Cody, and a good deal of the suspense of the film hinges on his hair-breadth avoidance of having his cover blown. It's to the credit of Walsh, the supporting players, and the fleet of screenwriters that although Cagney's performance fires the film, it never completely burns it up -- there's always someone or something else to watch.

Il Grido (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1957)

Il Grido is Michelangelo Antonioni's last venture into something like neorealism before he moved away from conventional narrative film into the great trilogy of  L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962) that enthralled critics and tantalized audiences with their emotionally numb protagonists, unresolved stories, and symbolic use of the urban environment as a correlative for the alienation of the characters. Which is not to say that Antonioni doesn't make powerful symbolic use of the environment in which the events of Il Grido take place. It's set in the Po Valley near Ferrara, where Antonioni grew up. It's a flat, muddy, marshy, malarial environment for a story about Aldo (Steve Cochran), who has suddenly had all of his ideas about what it means to be a man thrown into question. For seven years, he has lived with Irma (Alida Valli), working as a mechanic in a sugar refinery and helping raise their daughter, Rosina (Mirna Girardi). Irma's husband left her to seek work in Australia, and when word comes that he has died, Aldo suggests that they legitimize their relationship. But Irma wants to move on, and when she tells Aldo that she's found someone else, he beats her in the public streets, then quits his job, takes Rosina, and goes on the road in search of work. His odyssey puts him in contact with three other women, all of whom turn out to be stronger than the burly, macho Aldo. He goes to see an old girlfriend, Elvia (Betsy Blair), who still loves him but quickly discovers that she's better off without him around. He and Rosina hitch a ride on a petroleum tanker that drops him off at a filling station run by Virginia (Dorian Gray), with whom he begins an affair that makes him realize Rosina would be better off with her mother. But after sending her home, he decides he's unhappy being a kept man and sets off in search of work. He takes up for a while with Andreina (Lyn Shaw), a prostitute, but finally, depressed at being unemployed, returns to the town where he lived with Irma and finds her nursing a new baby, the refinery shut down, and the town being threatened with demolition to build an airfield for a military installation. When Irma learns of his return, she goes in search of him and finds him at the refinery, where he climbs to the top of a tower and falls to his death -- whether suicide or the consequence of the fatigue and weakness he exhibits, we're left to decide. Cochran never became the Hollywood leading man he sought to be, mostly finding tough-guy supporting roles in films like The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946) and White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949), but he gives an intensely physical performance in Il Grido. He's dubbed, of course, as is Blair, but post-synchronized dialogue was common in Italy at the time, and even Dorian Gray, who was Italian, was dubbed in Il Grido by no less than Monica Vitti, Antonioni's muse-to-be. Il Grido can be faulted as melodramatic, which the piano score by Giovanni Fusco tends to emphasize, but its compensatory strengths lie in Cochran's performance and in the use of the bleak, muddy landscape by Antonioni and cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo.