A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948)

Watched 10/5/2018

Phoebe Frost: Jean Arthur
Erika von Schluetow: Marlene Dietrich
Capt. John Pringle: John Lund
Col. Rufus J. Plummer: Millard Mitchell
Hans Otto Birgel: Peter von Zerneck
Mike: Stanley Prager
Joe: William Murphy

Director: Billy Wilder
Screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Richard L. Breen, Robert Harari
Based on a story by David Shaw
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Walter H. Tyler
Film editing: Doane Harrison
Music: Friedrich Hollaender

It occurs to me that it might be interesting to watch Roberto Rossellini's neorealistic drama Germany Year Zero (1948) back-to-back with Billy Wilder's satiric romantic comedy A Foreign Affair, if only to illuminate the respective visions of the two directors. Both are set in the ruins of postwar, pre-wall Berlin, using the ruins of the city as a correlative for the evil of Nazism. But for Rossellini, that evil is persistent, a lurking danger. For Wilder it's something that may persist but also something that can be overcome by good will and humor. A Foreign Affair is sometimes accused of a nasty cynicism about politics, and certainly its embodiment of American democracy, the congressional fact-finding delegation, is seen as rather clueless and superficial. But for Wilder, a good joke is our best defense against even such evils as Nazism, just as it was for Charles Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940) and Ernst Lubitsch in To Be or Not to Be (1942) -- and later for Mel Brooks in his 1983 remake of the Lubitsch film and his own The Producers (1967).

Phoenix (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1947)

Kinuyo Tanaka in Phoenix

Sayoko Aihara: Kinuyo Tanaka
Shinichi Yasaka: Keiji Sada
Naoya Yasaka: Isamu Kosugi
Moto Yasaka: Toyo Takahashi
Yuji Yasaka: Akira Yamanouchi
Hiroshi Aihara: Tamotsu Kawasaki
Housekeeper: Eiko Takamatsu

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Yoshiro Kawazu
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Production design: Motoji Kojima
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's Phoenix probably had much more resonance for the Japanese audiences who saw it in 1947 than it does for us today, when it can easily be dismissed as a tearjerking love story. For those first audiences, the heroine, Sayoko, a war widow with a three-year-old child, could easily be seen as emblematic of the hopes of the Japanese people -- hence the film's title. We see much of Sayoko's story in flashback: her first encounter with Shinichi, the man with whom she falls in love; her rejection by his stern, conservative father; her own family's attempt to force her into an arranged marriage that would cement a business deal with a weapons manufacturer; her lonely life with her brother, who is dying of tuberculosis; the capitulation of Shinichi's father, who agrees to let them be married during Shinichi's brief furlough before he returns to the war in which he's killed. After all this, Sayoko lives with her late husband's family, essentially a factotum, tasked with keeping the large Yasaka family on point and occasionally getting scolded by her father-in-law. But she tells her brother-in-law that she's happy, pinning her hopes on her small child and on her plans one day to open a shop as a seamstress. Kinoshita is often a shameless sentimentalist, but here he has first-rate actors, Kinuyo Tanaka and Keiji Sada, as the ill-fated couple. They have real chemistry together, even though Tanaka was 16 years older than Sada.

Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948)

Lizabeth Scott and Dick Powell in Pitfall

John Forbes: Dick Powell
Mona Stevens: Lizabeth Scott
Sue Forbes: Jane Wyatt
J.B. MacDonald: Raymond Burr
Bill Smiley: Byron Barr
District Attorney: John Litel
Tommy Forbes: Jimmy Hunt
Ed Brawley: Selmer Jackson

Director: André De Toth
Screenplay: Karl Kamb
Based on a novel by Jay Dratler
Cinematography: Harry J. Wild
Art direction: Arthur Lonergan
Film editing: Walter Thompson
Music: Louis Forbes

André De Toth's Pitfall is a noir-tinged cautionary fable about midlife ennui. Married to his childhood sweetheart, Sue, John Forbes is bored with his job at an insurance company and with his suburban life in general. But then he gets a case involving the recovery of the assets of Bill Smiley, who is doing time for embezzlement. The sleazy private eye Forbes has hired, J.B. MacDonald, has tracked down some of the loot to Smiley's mistress, Mona Stevens. Forbes decides to pay her a visit, but not before MacDonald, with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, urges him to put in a good word with Mona about him. Forbes's visit to Mona will turn into an affair that earns the enmity of not only MacDonald, who is obsessed with her, but also Smiley, whose jail term is almost up. The whole thing ends with a couple of corpses and a badly damaged marriage. De Toth handles it with a minimum of sugarcoating on the life of the Forbeses, even though they have a cute little boy named Tommy, and with a great deal of suspense as the hulking MacDonald, well-played by Raymond Burr in his heaviest heavy mode, gets Forbes more deeply involved in his relationship with Mona -- despite the best efforts of both Forbes and Mona to put an end to it.

Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947)

Houseley Stevenson and Tom D'Andrea in Dark Passage

Vincent Parry: Humphrey Bogart
Irene Jansen: Lauren Bacall
Madge Rapf: Agnes Moorehead
Bob: Bruce Bennett
Sam: Tom D'Andrea
Dr. Walter Coley: Houseley Stevenson
Baker: Clifton Young
George Fellsinger: Rory Mallinson

Director: Delmer Daves
Screenplay: Delmer Daves
Based on a novel by David Goodis
Cinematography: Sidney Hickox
Art direction: Charles H. Clarke
Film editing: David Weisbart
Music: Franz Waxman

Time doesn't just heal wounds, it also makes bad movies into interesting ones. Dark Passage is, on the face of it, a bad movie, a silly thriller whose plot depends on a series of absurd coincidences. But it has survived and achieved almost cult status because of several things: the eternal chemistry of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and its wonderful views of San Francisco in the late 1940s among them. And, I think, because writer-director Delmer Daves knew enough to take its absurdities with a straight face, keeping his tongue only slightly in his cheek as he unspools the story of convicted wife-murderer Vincent Parry, who manages to escape from San Quentin in an open barrel precariously perched on the back of a truck, to survive a barrel roll from the truck on Highway 1, to be picked up first by a guy we later learn is an ex-con who had done time in San Quentin and then by Irene Jansen, who is convinced that Parry is innocent. She takes him to her handsome apartment -- an Art Deco building at 1360 Montgomery St. that still attracts movie-loving tourists -- and gives him shelter, even though she's also friends with Madge Rapf, who testified against Parry at the trial. Leaving the safety of Irene's apartment, he hails a cabbie named Sam, who recognizes him but believes he's innocent, and who takes him to a back-alley plastic surgeon who -- for $200! -- gives him a new face. And so on. Much of the first part of the film is done with a subjective camera, giving us Parry's view of things, including the film's best -- that is, funniest -- scene: the doctor explaining the procedure as Sam kibitzes over his shoulder. His face bandaged, Parry returns to Irene, who nurses him until the bandages come off and we see Bogart's face for the first time -- though even with bandages on, he's identifiably Bogart. And so on as Parry gathers evidence that proves the real murderer was Madge, who inconveniently takes a header through a plate-glass window, robbing him of his proof. Pauline Kael was representative of the earlier response to the movie, calling it "miserably plotted" and "an almost total drag," but if you have an easily willing suspension of disbelief, a taste for old-style star chemistry, and an interest in seeing the Golden Gate Bridge without bumper-to-bumper traffic, Dark Passage can be a lot of fun.

Pygmalion (Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard, 1938)

Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard in Pygmalion

Henry Higgins: Leslie Howard
Eliza Doolittle: Wendy Hiller
Alfred Doolittle: Wilfrid Lawson
Mrs. Higgins: Marie Lohr
Col. Pickering: Scott Sunderland
Mrs. Pearce: Jean Cadell
Freddy Eynsford Hill: David Tree

Director: Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard
Screenplay: George Bernard Shaw, W.P. Lipscomb, Cecil Lewis
Based on a play by George Bernard Shaw
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Art direction: John Bryan
Film editing: David Lean
Music: Arthur Honegger

The perfect antidote for those who think Rex Harrison is the only Henry Higgins, as well as for those, like me, who usually find Leslie Howard a bland and uninteresting actor. He's wonderful in this film, and he's beautifully matched by Wendy Hiller as Eliza. Unlike other Elizas one has seen, Hiller does the flower girl Eliza without coyness or the sense that she has been coached to speak cockney as thoroughly as Eliza is coached by Higgins to speak "proper." It does seem to me that the cockney dialect in the film has been smoothed out a bit more than necessary -- even more than in My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964) -- for the sake of American audiences. I'm also struck by the fact that the word "damn" remains so prominent in Pygmalion when it caused such a flap with the censors only a year later in Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), and that the reference to the fact that Alfred Doolittle never married Eliza's mother wasn't removed. Did the Production Code administration not have to approve this import?

On hiatus...

...but still watching movies:
Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) 10/9/2019
A Woman's Face (Gustaf Molander, 1938) 10/10/2018
Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950) 10/11/2018
Gold Diggers of 1933 (Meryn LeRoy, 1933) 10/12/2018
Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935) 10/13/2018
Advise and Consent (Otto Preminger, 1962) 10/14/2018
Conflict (Curtis Bernhardt, 1945) 10/15/2018
Up to His Ears (Philippe de Broca, 1965) 10/16/2018

The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934)

Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man

Nick Charles: William Powell
Nora Charles: Myrna Loy
Dorothy Wynant: Maureen O'Sullivan
Guild: Nat Pendleton
Mimi Wynant Jorgenson: Minna Gombell
MacCaulay: Porter Hall
Tommy: Henry Wadsworth
Gilbert Wynant: William Henry
Nunheim: Harold Huber
Chris Jorgenson: Cesar Romero
Julia Woolf: Natalie Moorhead
Morelli: Edward Brophy
Claude Wynant: Edward Ellis
Tanner: Cyril Thornton

Director: W.S. Van Dyke
Screenplay: Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich
Based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett
Cinematography: James Wong Howe
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Robert Kern
Music: William Axt

I have seen W.S. Van Dyke's The Thin Man several times before, and I recently read Dashiell Hammett's novel, but I still couldn't remember whodunit. Even now, I'm not sure why and how the killer did things the way they were done. Which is, I think, because it doesn't really matter: The mystery is secondary to the banter of Nick and Nora and the eccentricity of the characters they encounter as her world of privilege marries with his world of cops and lowlifes. Most of the best mysteries, by which I mean those of Hammett and Raymond Chandler, are about atmosphere rather than crime: Those who want to try to solve the mystery along with the detective should read other writers who are more involved with planting clues and red herrings. The Thin Man may have benefited from MGM's lack of interest in the project, which could have been swamped with the kind of second-guessing from the front office that often stifled the studio's films. Instead, it was treated as a routine programmer whose stars, William Powell and Myrna Loy, were second-tier and whose director, known as "One-Take Woody" Van Dyke, was known for getting things done quick and dirty -- filming took only 16 days. But Powell and Loy became first-tier stars, and the movie earned four Oscar nominations (picture, actor, director, and screenplay) and was followed by five sequels. Powell has often struck me as a surprising star, with his big nose and his dubious chin, and I used to have trouble distinguishing him from Melvyn Douglas. Even now, if you asked me to say without hesitating whether it was Powell or Douglas in My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936), or Douglas or Powell in Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939), I might stumble a bit. But he had undeniable chemistry with Loy, so much so that they got re-teamed in movies outside the Thin Man series like The Great Ziegfeld (Robert Z. Leonard, 1936), Libeled Lady (Jack Conway, 1936), and others. The Thin Man also has a little more zip and zest than some of the films made after the Production Code clamped down, though Nick and Nora, like other married couples, were forced into twin beds. They still drink to an unholy excess, of course.

Street Scene (King Vidor, 1931)

Estelle Taylor, Beulah Bondi, and Eleanor Wesselhoeft in Street Scene

Rose Maurrant: Sylvia Sidney
Sam Kaplan: William Collier Jr.
Anna Maurrant: Estelle Taylor
Emma Jones: Beulah Bondi
Frank Maurrant: David Landau
Vincent Jones: Frank McHugh
Steve Sankey: Russell Hopton
Mae Jones: Greta Granstedt
Greta Fiorentino: Eleanor Wesselhoeft
Bert Easter: Walter Miller
Abe Kaplan: Max Montor
Shirley Kaplan: Ann Kostant
Dick McGann: Allen Fox
Karl Olsen: John Qualen
Willie Maurrant: Lambert Rogers
Filippo Fiorentino: George Humbert
Laura Hildebrand: Helen Lovett
Alice Simpson: Nora Cecil

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Elmer Rice
Based on a play by Elmer Rice
Cinematography: George Barnes
Production design: Richard Day
Film editing: Hugh Bennett
Music: Alfred Newman

Eighty-seven years later, King Vidor's Street Scene remains one of the best translations ever made of a stage play into a movie. I think it's largely because Vidor and screenwriter Elmer Rice, adapting his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, avoided the temptation to "open out" the play. The focus of both play and film has to be the façade of the tenement house in which the characters live. Director and writer resist the temptation to go inside, even to show the double murder that forms the climax of the drama. Vidor does give the setting a little more context, with shots of the street and the city rooftops, and there's a scene inside a taxicab arriving at the brownstone, as well as a swish-pan montage of faces popping into windows along the street as people hear the gunshots. But virtually all of the action takes place where it should: on the front steps and in the flanking and upper-story windows of the tenement. What keeps Street Scene from bogging down as one-set films tend to do is the constant mobility of the camera, seeking out a variety of angles on the characters as they come and go. Several of the actors, including Beulah Bondi, John Qualen, Eleanor Wesselhoeft, George Humbert, and Ann Kostant, had performed their roles on Broadway, so they were already keyed into the kind of ensemble playing that Street Scene demands. This was Bondi's film debut, and she's a standout in the key role of the malicious gossip Emma Jones, a hypocrite whose son is a bully and whose daughter behaves like what Emma would call a tramp if she were someone else's daughter. The newcomers to the play also handle themselves admirably, especially Sylvia Sidney and Estelle Taylor as Rose Maurrant and her mother, Anna. The weak link in the cast is William Collier Jr. as Sam Kaplan, who comes across as something of a wuss, unable to defend himself against the bullying Vincent Jones, and a sap in his love scenes with Sidney's Rose, making us wonder what she sees in him. Street Scene also trades a little heavily in stereotypes: the Italians who love music, the Irishman who's a drunk, the Jews who are somewhat isolated from the rest of the tenants, and even the Swede with a comic accent -- one of John Qualen's specialties. Like most of the films produced by Sam Goldwyn, Street Scene has high production values, particularly Richard Day's set, which was modeled on Jo Mielziner's Broadway set; the cinematography by George Barnes with some uncredited assistance from Gregg Toland; and Alfred Newman's score, which features a bluesy Gershwinesque theme that he would re-use in half a dozen other movies even after he left Goldwyn for 20th Century Fox.

I Fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi, 1963)

Anna Canzi and Carlo Cabrini in I Fidanzati

Liliana: Anna Canzi
Giovanni: Carlo Cabrini

Director: Ermanno Olmi
Screenplay: Ermanno Olmi
Cinematography: Lamberto Caimi
Art direction: Ettore Lombardi
Film editing: Carla Colombo
Music: Gianni Ferrio

Ermanno Olmi's I Fidanzati begins with an empty room, a kind of stage if you will, on which the first act of his small romantic drama will be played out. It's a large room, apparently some kind of meeting hall, in which the chairs and tables have been pushed to the sides. People begin to enter, including two men who scatter wax on what will become a dance floor. A pianist and an accordionist take their places on a small stage in a corner, and the tables and chairs along the walls begin to be occupied by people, some couples, some single. They are ordinary looking people, plain and paunchy and many of them middle-aged, but Olmi manages to direct our attention to a younger couple who are somewhat better-looking than most of the others in the room: She's pretty in a fresh, unmade-up way; he's craggily handsome. They are Liliana and Giovanni, the engaged couple of the film's title, but they're also oddly tense with each other, as if they've just had a quarrel. When the musicians strike up a banal foxtrot, people slowly, self-consciously take the floor, starting with a pair of elderly women. Liliana and Giovanni watch the dancers silently until he stands up and invites her to dance with him. She indicates her lack of interest, so he crosses the room and finds another woman to dance with. Liliana and Giovanni have been engaged for a long time, never having quite saved enough money from their jobs to get married and find a place of their own. They are at odds tonight because he has just been offered a job by his company that includes advancement and better pay, but the job is in Sicily, hundreds of miles to the south, and she can't go with him. I Fidanzati, in short, is about the incompatibility of love and work. It's also set in a crucial moment in Italian history, when the postwar industrial and economic boom has begun to transform people's lives. Olmi's film, then, might be compared to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films set in the era of the German Wirtschaftswunder, when prosperity upended people's lives. Nothing so drastic happens to Giovanni as happens to Fassbinder's Ali in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), of course, but when he takes the job in Sicily Giovanni finds himself in much the same position as Ali: a stranger in a strange land, uprooted from all that's familiar, especially his long-term relationship with his fiancée. Fortunately, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and in separation Giovanni and Liliana find their relationship undergoing some kind of renewal. Olmi is not a sentimental sap, however, and he chooses to conclude his film with a thunderstorm that interrupts a telephone call between the fidanzati, which some interpret as a symbol of their ongoing differences. But sometimes a thunderstorm is just a thunderstorm, and what really matters in Olmi's film is the skill with which he establishes the two characters, the deep authenticity of the two hitherto unknown actors who play them, the artful use of flashbacks and narrative disjunctions to create a mood and tone, and a camera that seeks out the beauty amid banality.

One Wonderful Sunday (Akira Kurosawa, 1947)

Isao Numasaki and Chieko Nakakita in One Wonderful Sunday

Yuzo: Isao Numasaki
Masako: Chieko Nakakita
Yamamoto: Atsushi Watanabe
Dessert Shop Owner: Zeko Nakamura
Yamiya: Ichiro Sugai
Dance Hall Manager: Masao Shimizu
Waif: Shiro Mizutani
Sono: Midori Ariyama
Apartment Superintendent: Toshi Mori

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Keinosuke Uekusa
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai
Production design: Kazuo Kubo
Music: Tadashi Hattori

Akira Kurosawa's One Wonderful Sunday brings to mind two near-contemporary films: Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). In its own odd way, Kurosawa's film blends a bit of the fantasy of the Capra film with the neorealism of the De Sica, though it doesn't quite succeed in the attempt. All three are products of the postwar world. The Americans, having won the war, naturally put the stress on optimism; the Italians and the Japanese, having lost, and having been sunk in the economic crisis caused by losing, naturally put the stress on endurance, on clinging to shreds of hope. Kurosawa's protagonists are a young couple, Yuzo and Masako, who can't afford to get married, but pool their resources, a meager 35 yen, to try to enjoy a Sunday together. Yuzo's depression shadows the outing, but Masako is determined to cheer him up. She's a little bit bossy, however -- when they first get together at the train station, he has just picked up a half-smoked cigarette from the pavement, hoping to smoke it later, but she strikes it out of his hand. Then she drags him into a model home in a new housing development, even though it's well beyond their means and is, he notes, shoddily built. Their housing plight -- he lives with a friend, she with her sister's family -- is emphasized when they visit a place that has a room to rent, only to discover that it's only minimally livable and that they can't afford even that. But Yuzo manages to climb out of his depression when he finds a bunch of kids playing baseball in the street and joins their game. And so it goes through the day as they oscillate between depression and hope. A visit to what remains of the city's zoo confronts them with some sad-looking animals. A large, fat pig slumbers in a cage that used to belong to a lion, causing Yuzo to remark, "The world is run by pigs." And then it starts to rain. Yuzo suggests that they go to his place -- his roommate will be out until late, he says -- but Masako resists, angering him. Then she notices a poster for a concert featuring Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. They can afford the 10-yen tickets, so they run through the rain to the concert hall. But scalpers have bought up all the 10-yen tickets and are selling them for 15 yen, and when Yuzo protests, they beat him up. When they go to Yuzo's room after all, where Masako treats his wounds, he tries to persuade her to sleep with him and she leaves. More depressed than ever -- even the roof is leaking -- Yuzo broods until Masako returns, contrite, but her sobs make any further sexual moves impossible, so they decide to spend the last of their money in a coffee shop. Even there, they are stymied: The coffee shop bills them for café au lait, instead of the regular coffee they thought they ordered, so Yuzo leaves his overcoat, saying he'll return the next day to make good on the bill. Now penniless, they begin to live in their dreams. They pretend that the ruins of a house are the coffee shop they want to open some day and, discovering an old band shell, try to pretend that Yuzo is conducting the performance of Schubert's Unfinished that they missed. At this point, Kurosawa departs from neorealism and has Masako address the movie audience directly: If they'll applaud for all the sad, impoverished lovers in the world, then she and Yuzo will be able to hear the music he's pretending to conduct. It works, and they hear the music. They part as the film ends, promising each other to meet again next Sunday. In fact, Kurosawa's borrowing from Peter Pan and asking for the audience's applause didn't work in Japan, where audiences were simply puzzled, though when the film was shown in France years later, French audiences responded enthusiastically. The sentimentality of One Wonderful Sunday is hardly characteristic of Kurosawa, but it's tempered by some masterly use of locations -- blended with more stylized studio sets -- and good performances by the leads: Isao Numasaki, in fact, does manage to evoke both James Stewart in Capra's film and Lamberto Maggiorani in De Sica's, even though he couldn't have seen the latter and probably didn't see the former. There are moments when Kurosawa prolongs the depression of Yuzo and Masako a bit too much, and the film seems a little overextended for the slightness of its narrative, but it's clearly a formative work for a master director, as well as a heartfelt depiction of the plight of his country.