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. 

 

Thirteen Women (George Archainbaud, 1932)

Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy in Thirteen Women

Cast: Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Ricardo Cortez, Jill Esmond, Mary Duncan, Kay Johnson, Florence Eldridge, C. Henry Gordon, Peg Entwistle, Harriet Hagman, Edward Pawley, Blanche Friderici, Wally Albright. Screenplay: Bartlett Cormack, Samuel Ornitz, based on a novel by Tiffany Thayer. Cinematography: Leo Tover. Art direction: Carroll Clark. Film editing: Charles L. Kimball. Music: Max Steiner. 

Myrna Loy was born Myrna Williams in Helena, Montana, but you wouldn't know it from the way Hollywood often cast her at the start of her career in the '20s and '30s. Her role in Thirteen Women is probably the purest example of her work as the stereotypical sinister Eurasian. She plays Ursula Georgi, whom the cop played by Ricardo Cortez scorns as "Half-breed type. Half Hindu, half Javanese, I don't know." (Actually, Cortez himself knew something about crossing ethnic lines: He was born Jacob Krantz in New York, but Hollywood changed his name to capitalize on the vogue for Latin lovers like Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro, and later claimed first that he was French and later that he was born in Vienna.) Ursula seeks revenge on the women who belonged to a sorority at a girls' college and blackballed her when she sought admission. She seeks out a phony seer known as Swami Yogadachi (C. Henry Gordon), whose horoscope readings the girls sought out, and hypnotizes him into sending them poison-pen readings that predict dire events. Two of the girls, the sisters June (Mary Duncan) and May Raskob (Harriet Hagman), have become trapeze artists, and June is so unnerved by the fake reading that she lets May fall to her death during a stunt and goes mad as a consequence. As others fall prey to Ursula's schemes, some of the survivors gather at the home of Laura Stanhope (Irene Dunne), who thinks that their hysteria over the deaths is absurd. Laura is the single mother of a son, Bobby (Wally Albright), who is one of those cloyingly cute movie children -- he calls her "Mumsy." But even Laura's calm vanishes when Ursula makes Bobby her next target. In addition to being stupidly racist, the movie is sheer hokum, a cockamamie blend of revenge thriller and police procedural, and it was not much of a success at the box office, even after RKO cut 14 minutes from it after test screenings -- one of the reasons why we learn the fates of only 10 of the 13 women. One of the performances cut to only four minutes was that of Peg Entwistle, who played Hazel, the one who kills her husband and goes to prison. Entwistle was reportedly so despondent about her movie career that she climbed to the top of one of the letters on the Hollywood sign (reports vary on whether it was the H or the D) and jumped to her death. As for Loy, this was her last outing as a Eurasian vamp: The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934) changed her screen image to that of the witty and soignée wife, most often of William Powell.    

The Devil, Probably (Robert Bresson, 1977)

Antoine Monnier in The Devil, Probably

Cast: Antoine Monnier, Tina Irrisari, Henri de Maublanc, Laetitia Carcano, Nicolas Deguy, Régis Hanrion, Geoffroy Gaussen, Roger Honorat. Screenplay: Robert Bresson. Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis. Production design: Eric Simon. Film editing: Germaine Artus. Music: Philippe Sarde. 

I admire Robert Bresson's films. How can one not? But his next-to-last, The Devil, Probably, tried my patience. The unrelieved inexpressiveness of his characters becomes monotonous to the verge of seeming like a parody of a film about people suffering from existential depression. We are shown the causes of their malaise in footage of environmental devastation ranging from images of the victims of mercury poisoning in Minimata, Japan, to the clubbing of baby seals, to tests of nuclear bombs. But we have all seen and reacted to those images ourselves, and somehow manage not to walk around without at least the occasional smile or laugh. Does Bresson mean to suggest that we are somehow at fault in not becoming suicidal, like his protagonist, Charles (Antoine Monnier)? The film is an implied response to the familiar statement by Camus: "There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." Charles can find no reason to continue living in a world that disgusts him. Intellectually, the film is a work of real brilliance, but it fails to communicate its ideas in a way that engages me dramatically and emotionally. We suspect from the beginning, when we see newspaper headlines about a young man who is first thought to have committed suicide but later to have been murdered, that they're about one of the characters in the film, and we soon realize that it's Charles. So the only dramatic tension in the film centers on the specific way in which this foreknowledge will manifest itself. And so I'm torn. The Devil, Probably is a work I can admire on an intellectual level, but despite some remarkable sections, like Charles's visit to a psychoanalyst, or a scene on a bus that not only tantalizes by what happens in it but also provides the title of the film, it seems to me to fall short as a work of cinematic art. That said, just thinking about it makes me eager to see it again.    

Body Parts (Eric Red, 1991)

Lindsay Duncan, Jeff Fahey, and Kim Delaney in Body Parts

Cast: Jeff Fahey, Lindsay Duncan, Kim Delaney, Zakes Mokae, Brad Dourif, John Walsh, Paul Ben-Victor, Peter Murnik. Screenplay: Patricia Herskovic, Joyce Taylor, Eric Red, Norman Snider, based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Cinematography: Theo van de Sande. Production design: Bill Brodie. Editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Loek Dikker. 

How can a movie with a car chase, a fight in a barroom, and an abundance of gore turn out so dull? Body Parts is based on an old trope, that of severed members taking on a life of their own. Adaptations of W.W. Jacobs's 1902 story "The Monkey's Paw" are so numerous they have a Wikipedia page of their own and Maurice Renard's 1920 novel Les Mains d'Orlac, about a concert pianist who receives the transplanted hands of a murderer, has been filmed several times, including Robert Wiene's 1924 silent The Hands of Orlac and Karl Freund's 1935 Mad Love, starring Peter Lorre. The many adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein also play on the notion of reanimated body parts. But it's not that the idea behind Eric Red's movie has been done to death, so to speak, it's that Eric Red and the various screenwriters who worked on the movie find so little new and interesting to do with it. It's adapted from a 1965 novel, Choice Cuts, by the writing team known as Boileau-Narcejac, who provided the source material for some much better movies: Diabolique (aka Les Diaboliques, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). The acting isn't bad. As Bill Chrushank, a psychiatrist who receives the arm of a murderer after losing his own in an auto accident, Jeff Fahey does a solid job of suggesting the ways the transplant brings out the worst in what may have been his own latent tendencies to violence. Lindsay Duncan plays the surgeon who does the transplant as a cold-blooded scientist with just a touch of hauteur that turns malevolent when her breakthrough technique is threatened. Brad Dourif overacts a little as the artist who receives the other arm and finds that it actually feeds his imagination and produces darkly disturbing paintings that sell. And Kim Delaney does what she can with the role of Chrushank's wife, who bears the brunt of his emotional transformation. But Red's direction never builds suspense, giving us time to anticipate the shocks we expect the material to provide. There's also a completely unearned "happy ending" that saps any lingering tension from what has gone before. 

Station West (Sidney Lanfield, 1948)

Dick Powell and Jane Greer in Station West

Cast: Dick Powell, Jane Greer, Agnes Moorehead, Tom Powers, Gordon Oliver, Steve Brodie, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, Raymond Burr, Regis Toomey, Burl Ives. Screenplay: Frank Fenton, Winston Miller, based on a novel by Luke Short. Cinematography: Harry J. Wild. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Feild M. Gray. Film editing: Frederic Knudtson. Music: Heinz Roemheld. 

Station West is an odd duck of a Western. Oh, there's the usual stagecoach and saloon stuff, some gunplay, and a big fistfight. But it also has the kind of snappy dialogue you associate with film noir, and nobody is exactly what they seem. It's also threaded through with songs performed by an uncredited Burl Ives, who plays a hotel owner who's also a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on the action with his ballads. One of the refrains of his songs, "A man can't grow old where there's women and gold," is sung often enough that we get the point. The women are played by Jane Greer and Agnes Moorehead, and they give no quarter. Greer is Charlene, known as Charlie, and she owns most of the business in the town, but not the gold mine, which belongs to Mrs. Caslon, played by Moorehead. And then a stranger named Haven (Dick Powell) comes to town. He's really an undercover agent from military intelligence investigating the deaths of two soldiers who were guarding a shipment of gold from Mrs. Caslon's mine that got hijacked. Powell's character is a boots-and-sixguns variation on his Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), quick with a quip, catnip to the women, able to take a licking and keep on sleuthing. Somehow this mash-up of film noir and horse opera works. There's nice camera work, too, from Harry J. Wild, who knows how to use shadows effectively.    

Arrebato (Iván Zulueta, 1979)

Will More in Arrebato

Cast: Eusebio Poncela, Cecilia Roth, Will More, Marta Fernández Muro, Helena Fernán-Gómez, Carmen Giralt, Max Madera. Screenplay: Iván Zulueta. Cinematography: Ángel Luis Fernández. Film editing: José Luis Peláez. Music: Negativo. 

Pedro Almodóvar became the face of post-Franco Spanish filmmaking in the United States, where we often overlook the powerful influences on his work by other Spanish directors. He was, for example, a great admirer of Iván Zulueta's Arrebato, for which he dubbed the voice for Helena Fernán-Gómez's character, Gloria, and he later cast its lead actor, Eusebio Poncela, in his films Matador (1986) and Law of Desire (1987). Certainly it's possible to see how the uncompromising work of Zulueta in Arrebato, his second and last feature-length movie, may have liberated the imaginations of Almodóvar and his fellow Spanish filmmakers after the death of Franco in 1975. It's a movie about the intoxication of making movies, and about intoxication and its consequences. Zulueta, who was a heroin addict, gives us a film about a similarly addicted filmmaker, José Sirgado (Poncela), who just after finishing the production of a horror movie receives a package in the mail from Pedro (Will More), a man he has met only twice before. It contains an audio tape, a reel of Super 8 film, and a key to Pedro's apartment. And so begins a complex tale in which José becomes entwined in Pedro's very odd life and obsessions, at the end of which José becomes obsessed himself, absorbed into the strange experiences that Pedro has documented on film. Arrebato (which means "rapture") is an often muddled and maddening film, but muddle and madness are what it's about. It flopped commercially, but gathered a following at midnight movie screenings in Madrid, which eventually led to its video release and a wider audience.  

The Cheat (George Abbott, 1931)

Tallulah Bankhead in The Cheat

Cast: Tallulah Bankhead, Harvey Stephens, Irving Pichel, Jay Fassett, Ann Andrews, William Ingersoll, Hanaki Yoshiwara, Willard Dashiell, Edward Keane, Robert Strange. Screenplay: Harry Hervey, based on a silent film scenario by Hector Turnbull. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Film editing: Emma Hill. 

Tallulah Bankhead is the only reason to see the cornball and somewhat racist The Cheat today. Bankhead made only a handful of films, and only one or two of them -- chiefly Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) -- are any good. The Cheat was an old Paramount property, originally directed by Cecil B. DeMille in 1915, that was dragged out of mothballs to be remade for Bankhead. She plays Elsa Carlyle, happily married to the broker Jeffrey Carlyle (Harvey Stephens), but given to spending and gambling beyond their means. Faced with a debt she can't pay, she turns to a wealthy socialite just returned from spending time in "the Orient," Hardy Livingstone (Irving Pichel). Livingstone has picked up all sorts of sinister Asian artifacts and manners, and keeps dolls representing his sexual conquests in a cabinet. He brands the dolls with his own insignia. It soon becomes clear that he plans to add an effigy of Elsa to his collection, and when she spurns his advances he brands her, too, with a hot iron applied just above her breast. (Some production stills and posters show Bankhead baring a shoulder instead of her chest.) She shoots Livingstone, but only wounds him, and when Carlyle arrives, followed by the police, he claims to have fired the pistol. A trial ensues. Even contemporary reviewers found the movie old-fashioned and noted that the audiences laughed in all the wrong places. There's some impressive camerawork directed by George J. Folsey, but also a rather kitschy Thai-Balinese dance number choreographed by Ruth St. Denis. Bankhead does what she can with the material, which isn't enough, and she and director George Abbott returned to Broadway, where they had more success. 

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. 
 

Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr., 1989)

Wendell B. Harris Jr. in Chameleon Street

Cast: Wendell B. Harris Jr., Timothy Alvaro, William Ballenger, Thomas Bashaw, Alfred Bruce Bradley, Margaret Branch, Rick Davenport, Amina Fakir, Anita Gordon, Gary Irwin, Jeff Lamb, Angela Leslie, Bruce Seyburn, Jennifer Turner. Screenplay: Wendell B. Harris Jr. Cinematography: Daniel S. Noga. Art direction: Timothy Alvaro. Film editing: Matthew Mallinson. Music: Peter S. Moore.

 An altogether astonishing movie, Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street is raw, clumsy, funny, mordant, and almost as interesting for what happened to the movie itself as for anything that happens on the screen. It was born of its writer-producer-director-star's fascination with a real life con man, William Douglas Street Jr., who managed to pass himself off as a reporter, a doctor, a lawyer, an athlete, and a Yale student. Only once did Street try to make real money with this talent; the rest of the time he did it because he could, which ultimately wound up sending him to prison. Harris's exploration of Street's career is a kind of docudrama, and it won him the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. What it didn't win him was fame as a filmmaker, which Sundance had done for directors like Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Steven Soderbergh, among others. Hollywood showed its interest only in buying the rights to remake the movie, but not to distribute it. At the Sundance festival, Chameleon Street's chief competitor for the award was To Sleep With Anger, a film by another Black director, Charles Burnett, that was picked up for distribution by the Samuel Goldwyn Company. It's a more conventional movie, featuring stars like Danny Glover, while Harris's film is largely performed by non-professional actors. After three decades of underground circulation, Chameleon Street was restored in 2021, distributed and released on video. It can now be seen as a pointed look at the Black experience and as a commentary on the quest for identity and status, not only within the film but in the film's history. 

Blood for Dracula (Paul Morrissey, 1974)

Udo Kier in Blood for Dracula

Cast: Udo Kier, Joe Dallesandro, Arno Jürging, Vittorio De Sica, Maxime McKendry, Milena Vukotic, Dominique Darel, Stefania Casini, Silvia Dionisio. Screenplay: Paul Morrissey. Cinematography: Luigi Kuveiller. Production design: Enrico Job. Film editing: Jed Johnson, Franca Silvi. Music: Claudio Gizzi. 

The great Vittorio De Sica had a career that extended from the sublime -- directing Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1954), acting in Madame De ... (Max Ophus, 1953) -- to the ridiculous -- appearing in Paul Morrissey's Blood for Dracula. De Sica plays the Marchese Di Fiore, an Italian aristocrat in financial straits who lives in a decaying mansion with his wife (Maxime McKendry) and four daughters. He has been forced to dismiss all of his servants except one, the surly Mario Balato (Joe Dallesandro), a Marxist who eagerly anticipates a revolution like the one that has just taken place in Russia. Di Fiore's only hope is to marry off one of his daughters to a wealthy suitor. The oldest, Esmeralda (Milena Vukotic), and the youngest, Perla (Silivia Dionisio), are considered not suitable, but the two middle girls, Saphiria (Dominique Darel) and Rubinia (Stefania Casini) are prime marriage material. So who should arrive in their village but a well-to-do Romanian count named Dracula (Udo Kier). In this version of the Dracula story, the count can drink only the blood of virgins. The villagers back in Romania have gotten wise to this fact, and no women go near his castle. So he figures that the Italians, being devout Roman Catholics, will have seen to it that virginity prevails, so he journeys there with his assistant, Anton (Arno Jürging), in search of a bride. He's delighted to learn of Di Fiore's marriageable daughters, so he makes a play for the girls, only to discover that neither is a virgin -- Mario has seen to that. Sampling his would-be brides makes the count violently ill, giving Kier an opportunity to go over the top in portraying Dracula's reaction. The film is about what you'd expect if you've seen its companion piece, Morrissey's Flesh for Frankenstein (1973): a good deal of nudity on the part of the actresses and Dallesandro, some bloody deaths, a lot of barely acceptable acting, and a wide variety of accents: Italian, German, French, British, and Brooklyn. De Sica, who wrote his own dialogue, makes his character one of the saving graces of the movie, along with cinematography, settings, and a score that are better than it deserves.