King Solomon's Mines (1950)

A while back I did a couple of posts, Swoon-worthy Actors and Phonebook Actresses. Two stars that I neglected to put on either list out of sheer stupidity were Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr. I've always loved Granger ever since I saw Young Bess, years ago. I even did a tribute to his legs a while back. How could I forget him? And Kerr is such a solid actress. I love her in comedy (the two she made with Cary Grant are slight , but entertaining) and drama (From Here to Eternity, Night of the Iguana) which is a rarity. I adore her in Vacation from Marriage and Affair to Remember where she gets to do a bit of both. So to make up for this oversight, I'm posting on yet another fifties movie, King Solomon's Mines, which stars Granger and Kerr.

This is a straight-forward action picture with a bit of romance. The story follows an English woman (Kerr) who hires hunter, Alan Quartermain(Granger) to find her treasure hunting husband who has gone AWOL in Africa. I watched this with my husband and the boy and they both loved it, too. At one point my husband went upstairs to check on the roast and came back ten minutes later. It took me a couple of minutes to summarize all the plot points he'd missed. With such a busy script this could have easily been a confused, over-blown mess. Yet, the basic journey motif keeps it all hanging together. Do characters drop in and out? Why, yes. Character development? Hardly any, unless you count Deborah Kerr cutting her hair. There are countless scenes of Granger rescuing Kerr from danger to be followed by an awkward moment when they seem like they might kiss. It's not so much a romance as a series of awkward moments.



























I don't really mind these flaws though. This is a piece of spectacle and it excels at that. It is a big budget, highly proficient film made about an Africa that simply doesn't exist anymore, and probably never did anyway. The movie opens with Quatermain hunting elephants with a bunch of spoiled rich people. If there were any pro-Elephant hunting people left in the world, this movie would change their minds. The access to animals on the scale shown in this movie is pretty much never going to happen again. There is a long sequence of a stampede that had the intended effect of bowling me over. The native people in the film are presented in a way which was fairly unoffensive even today. Native actors Kimursi and Siriaque are especially memorable. Their tribes are shown with at least a minimal attempt at accuracy. I'm not going to go so far as to say they weren't exploited for the film , because I don't know but none of the usual savage stereotypes that plagued 1930s films of this genre are present. The worst you can say is that the film focuses too much on the white people. It plays like a technicolor, live action National Geographic photo essay. It's not exactly anthropology and it's not exactly high art, but it has an edutainment value.

I've often seen this film listed as among the inspirations for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The emphasis is on travelogue, not treasure hunting. When they are in the mines and there is a booby trap with at least one big, round obviously fake bolder. I could also see Quartermaine as a forerunner to Indiana Jones. He has a trademark hat and he wears khaki pants. He hates dragging women along but that is Victorian chauvenism. Indy doesn't like to bring women along because he such a commitment-phobe that it might seem like going steady with a gal if he talks to her more than twice. On second thought, maybe those are both the exact same reason!

One final note, for those playing along at home, Stewart Granger's legs do make an appearance in the film, but just barely. Thanks to all those jungle thorns his pants eventually get completely torn to shreds leaving just strips that occasionally offer a peek at those Granger Gams. Hooray! Sorry I couldn't make screen caps. You'll just have to trust me on this one, people. Speaking of legs, Deborah Kerr gets to wear gauchos in this movie. Kerr's gauchos are not quite in the same class as Susan Hayward's in Garden of Evil, but they'll do.

The war made us really hot: Vacation from Marriage (1946)

Deborah Kerr and Robert Donat look amazing in their naval uniforms.

One thing you can say about the second world war, it really did wonders for the sex lives of the English. For some reason the line from Hope and Glory, comes to mind, "Thank you, Adolf."

In Vacation from Marriage (or Perfect Strangers as it was billed in England) the Wilsons are a nice quiet couple who are feeling middle age closing in fast while they are stuck in a cramped flat with no view and the prospect of another day of uninspiring work ahead of them. Kathy Wilson (Deborah Kerr) has a perpetual head cold and an even more perpetual look of glazed dispair. She eschews dancing and makeup to humor her stuffy, mustachioed husband (Robert Donat) who is a clerk in some sort of soul-crushing British business enterprise. Even their vacations at the requisite Clacton-on-sea have grown stale. You could set a watch by their movements until Mr. Wilson is sent off to the war in the service of the Navy. His wife, bored keeping up with her taxing nose-blowing and clock winding duties joins the The Wrens, a female service corps of the Navy. Their physical health improves with regular exercise and their personalities are spruced up a bit with danger, independence and a change of scene. Kerr especially blossoms before the camera, moving from an almost flat blank face to the pin up girl with a brain we see her as at the end of the film. She pilots a boat up the Themes in an air raid, and I would say it worth the danger for the effect that it has on her hairdo and the amazingly cute sailor's uniform she gets to wear. I would have joined the Wrens just for the duds!

Both of the Wilsons have wartime romances with partners far more dashing than the spouses they left behind, meanwhile they describe the other to their friends in a mixture of affection and loathing that is really unique to the film. The war scenes are short, but well-filmed and effective. There is a feeling of genuine danger, perhaps owing to the fact that they were filmed in authentically blitzkreiged London. After three years apart, the couple are reunited on a ten day leave. Each plans to ask the other for a divorce. What I expected was a quick denoument, the equivalent of the Pina Colada Song with air raid helmets, but the actual ending was more fulfilling than that. After fighting all night long, the couple who never had so much as a harsh word before the war, are reunited as the sun comes up and it is suddenly clear that German bombs have taken out the high wall that encloses their suburban neighborhood from a spectacular view of the city below.

Though the film is billed as a comedy it is pretty short on laughs. Vacation from Marriage is still an absorbing romance with excellent acting and production values. Director Alexander Korda makes war-torn London seem beautiful and exotic.

Horror movies for non-horror fans

Happy Halloween! To celebrate the day I've put together a list of scary movies (one per decade) that may appeal to those of you,who, like me, would rather watch ten obscure pre-code films than one horror movie.

Well how about starting it off then with an obscure pre-code horror movie? The Old Dark House (1932) starring Charles Laughton, Melvyn Douglas, Boris Karloff, Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart and Lilian Bond and directed by James Whale is a good old-fashioned things that go bump in the night kind of movie. This film doesn't use a lot of fancy effects or make-up to create horror. It uses the darkness, tension and the sound of wind on a stormy night in Wales to create the atmosphere. Because it's pre-code, there's a bit of raciness in that Lilian Bond plays a show-girl whose shacked up with Charles Laughton but falls in love with a traveling stranger played by Melvyn Douglas. They manage to sneak in a rather sweet romance in between screams.

The Uninvited (1944) is another things that go bump in the night movie about a couple that rent a haunted house on the English Coast. It stars Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey and Donald Crisp. The ghost is kind of annoying rather than scary. I enjoyed this movie priamarily because I love Ruth Hussey and it was great to see her in a such a big part even if she only plays the hero's sister.

Eye Without a Face (1959) This French film is creepy in the extreme while making a really powerful statement about the beauty culture in which we live. Pierre Brasseur plays a mad scientist trying to restore his daughter's face which was horribly disfigured in a car accident. He keeps her prisoner while he kidnaps women, and attempts to remove their faces and surgically transplant them onto hers. All this goes down rather poorly with daughter and her fiancee who thought she died in the accident.

The Innocents (1961) starring Deborah Kerr is a brilliant adaptation of Henry James' novel "The Turn of the Screw." This is agreat ghost story whose techniques of filming have been borrowed so frequently since that it doesn't quite seem as pioneering as it probably did in the early sixties. This movie relies almost entirely on tension, lighting and music to convey the horror. The creepiest scene in the movie takes place in broad daylight. Kerr is always wonderful, but here she is at her best conveying the sense of rising terror and panic that may or may not be her own hysteria.

The Wicker Man (1973) is another movie that is almost all atmosphere and tension. Edward Woodward plays a police detective sent to a remote island in the Hebrides to investigate a missing child. The great horror veteran Chirstopher Lee plays Lord Summerisle, Woodward's adversary. One unnerving and unsettling event after another happens leading the audience down the garden path to the film's surreal and horrible conclusion.

The Changeling (1980) Looking back on my list, there is a predominance of haunted house movies, but this is probably the scariest of the lot. The contemporary Japanese horror film Ringu and it's American re-make, The Ring, borrowed heavily from this tale of lonely man (George C. Scott) in haunted house trying to solve the mystery of its former occupants. In most haunted house movies you wonder why the occupants don't just leave after the first incident, but the Changeling offers the explanation that this man would really rather have a ghost as his companion than no companion at all.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) If you can take all the cursing and the horrible hand-held camera work, this is possibly the scariest movie of all time. Relying on pyscological tension and a few well placed gimmicks, the story follows three film students who get lost in the woods. The innovative techniques used to make this film on a miniscule budget make it legendary. No film in my recollection has caused such a polarized reaction. Peoople either bought into and thought it was scary as all get out as I did, or they were bored silly. I saw this film in the theater when it first opened and my friend and I literally clinged to one another through the second half of the movie. I happeneded to be scheduled to go on a ten day camping trip right afterward. Just hearing the sound effects in the trailer is enough to get my heart rate up to this day. This movie has been parodied enlessly, but that is only a reaction to the complete hold it had on pop culture one summer.