Crack Up (1946)

While casting Crack Up, the filmmakers must have made a clerical error. How else to explain Pat O'Brien playing an art critic and Herbert Marshall a cop? Still, it works because Pat O'Brien is pretty bad ass: he makes art criticism seem like a gritty profession. As usual, he drags me, kicking and screaming into liking him. Herbert Marshall is pretty urbane for a cop, but he is supposed to be an undercover agent from Scotland Yard. I guess that makes a difference.

Despite the weird casting, Irving Reis' highly competent direction ended up selling me on this film noir. Reis seamlessly strings together the various set pieces, including, my favorite sequence: O'Brien on the run from the law in a penny arcade. Deft camera movement and clever editing work together to turn a guy standing around pretending to play a video into edge-of-your-seat action.

The script is less good--at times, not even up to the level of a decently written teleplay. An overly enthusiastic writer gives Marshall a rant about how Americans don't appreciate their law enforcement, thus ruining the surprise revelation of Marshall's cop identity. At least the writers do manage to keep track of the plot twists. I like film noir best when it's not so grand at the expense of logic. If I get to the end of the movie and feel that I've learned something about the nature of good and evil but still don't know who dunnit, I get a little peevish. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Big Sleep! No, of course, I'm not saying that Crack Up is better than The Big Sleep--just that it annoyed me less.

O'Brien plays George Steele, whom we first meet in the throes of an alcoholic bender and apparent mental breakdown. In typically circuitous noir style, we soon learn that he began his evening aboard a train that crashed. The problem? The cops have no record of a train wreck. Even in 1946, they kept track of that kind of stuff. So it's not looking good for our hero's sanity. One of his museum colleagues (Claire Trevor) agrees to help him clear his name. He retraces his steps, beginning with another ride on the same train that made him loopy. So far it's a little Lady Vanishes with a some Spellbound tossed in for good measure.

I'm fine with derivative filmmaking, but in those particular Hitchcock films, it’s the romance that keeps me coming back. Here, Claire Trevor manages to play both gal Friday and mysterious dame. Her friendship with O’Brien teeters on the edge of romance and, although it's not a huge surprise when they hook up, it's satisfying. Marshall provides the third side of the triangle, but that plot element doesn't really work. He and Trevor have no chemistry, and in one scene she admits that he makes her miserable. If it weren't for Marshall’s sudden uptick in energy at the end of the movie, I would want to give him B-12 shots. Eventually, however, he solves the crime with panache and starts to seem like an actor who might be worthy of a detective series of his own.

Speaking of detective series, I let out an internal "squee" every time someone in the movie called O'Brien "Mr. Steele." I can't help but wonder if the creators of my all-time favorite TV show, Remington Steele, weren't referencing Crack Up. If you gave Pat O'Brien's wardrobe to a woman, turned the urbane undercover cop into an urbane undercover con man, kept the references to art theft and forgery, squinted and stood back twenty paces, you might have Remington Steele. 


Thanks to the epic series The 100 Greatest Posters of Noir, I will never take movie advertisements at face value again. This poster is terrible. If Where Danger Lives did a 100 Worst, this might well make the list. The title is too small and the tagline is too big. The cracked font is an obvious concept carried out in a half-assed fashion, and, combined with the green, the whole thing reminds me of a turtle. Claire Trevor looks nothing like the poor woman on the poster, who appears to have a painfully broken leg. Pat O'Brien’s portrait does him no favors, either. Herbert Marshall gets third billing, but his portrait dominates the poster. Maybe the artist was a secret Herbert Marshall fan? Nah: no one with such good taste could turn out this little fiasco.

Gentleman Jim (1942)

Before I saw this movie, my knowledge of Gentleman Jim Corbett had been limited to a particularly audacious Bob Dylan rhyme in the song "Hurricane." (We're gonna put his ass in the stir/we're gonna pin this triple mur/der on him. He ain't no Gentleman Jim.) Nevertheless, I was quickly absorbed in this biopic chronicling the life of the famous 19th Century boxer. For those who need more to entrance them than Errol Flynn's near-constant shirtlessness, this tightly plotted film has plenty of action. Director Raoul Walsh (White Heat, High Sierra) keeps things moving along briskly, with fight scenes peppered liberally throughout the script.

Flynn plays a boxer so cocky and self-absorbed that in the climactic championship bout his main concern is that his hair not get mussed. In addition to fame and fortune, Corbett is also pursuing wealthy boxing patron Victoria Ware (Alexis Smith), who keeps promoting the up-and-coming fighter in hopes that he will get his ass kicked and learn his place already. He keeps winning, and eventually Ware realizes that Corbett differs from his nouveau riche "betters," a bunch of dirt prospectors and miners who got lucky in the Gold Rush, only in being a few decades more nouveau.

The Not So Quiet Man

In the meantime co-stars Alan Hale and Ward Bond steal all their scenes as, respectively, Corbett's scrappy Irish father and larger- than-life Irish rival, John L. Sullivan. Bond is particularly fun to watch; this character stands alongside his hilarious turn as a gambling, boxing-enthusiast priest in The Quiet Man as outstanding examples of his supporting work. Also in the mix is another The Quiet Man alum, Arthur Shields, who plays a gambling, boxing-enthusiast priest. Like The Quiet Man, this movie is funny, sentimental and wildly entertaining. What the later, better-known film has--and Gentleman Jim lacks is the romance. Flynn and Smith have nice-ish chemistry but their constant arguing is shrill and annoying. There's a fine line with these things, and usually it is the script that makes the difference. Give squabbling people amusing things to say, and you've got a Noel Coward play. Give them the script to Gentleman Jim and you're eavesdropping on the dysfunctional couple upstairs. But Smith and Flynn are so gosh-darned pretty that this shortcoming doesn't sink the film. Feel free to use the mute button, is my motto. The movie works as light entertainment and solid proof, if you needed any more, that Raoul Walsh could direct the heck out of an action scene.


The only thing I really learned about 19th Century prize fighting from Gentleman Jim, was that boxers favored sweaters over robes at one point in history. Several scenes show meaty, sweaty boxers with sweaters tied around their necks like 1980s yuppies.

Cinema OCD Valentines

Once again, I make Valentines out of random photos I've collected this past year. Print these out and give them to your would-be Valentine or anyone else you want to deeply confuse. (Click on the image to see print-ready version. )

Best. Screencap. Ever.

Note: pixelated refers to the movie dialog, not to the fact that my thumbnails look like crap!

Forgive me, but I could see no other way to get this on to my blog.

Valentines + sarcasm= a winning combination.

Nora, this one's for you!

Scotland: Land of Heroes

On my first trip to Scotland, upon the recommendation of my Scottish mother-in-law, we stopped at a gas station/gift shop called The Canny Scot where you could choose between canned and frozen haggis, sample the delight known as tablet and get a bargain price on smoked fish. For me, the biggest lure of the Canny Scot was their incredible collection of cheesy t-shirts. I settled on one emblazoned with pictures of Mel Gibson as Braveheart and Liam Neeson as Rob Roy and that read "Scotland: Land of Heroes." (The wonderful irony of this is that Mel Gibson is Australian and Liam Neeson is Irish.) As it is Burns Night this evening, I thought I would round up some of my favorites from Scotland: Land of Heroes.

I Know Where I'm Going: Best movie about Scotland, ever. A romantic comedy set in the Scottish Hebrides starring Roger Livesey and Wendy Hiller. Of course, Scotland itself is a character and film-makers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's cinematography is hauntingly beautiful. The tone of the film is quiet and the humor subdued. Best of all no one gets drawn and quartered.

Local Hero: This 1983 film by Scottsih director, Bill Forsyth, was seen by few people, except for the producers of Northern Exposure who completely ripped it off for the series. The story is about an oil man (Peter Reigert) who comes to a remote Scottish village to purchase the town and finds one lone hermit who refuses to sell up. As in I Know Where I'm Going, one of the highlights of the film is a ceilidh, or a Scottish country dance.

The Ghost Goes West/The 39 Steps: I'm always up for a Robert Donat double feature. While the former features Donat in a kilt, sporting a somewhat outrageous accent, the latter has Hitchcock using Scotland as a dramatic background for some of his most intense chase scenes.

My Life So Far: I admit that I stumbled on this movie during my time as a Colin Firth completionist. (As if I'm over my Colin Firth phase!). It's difficult to tease out my feelings for the film's leading actor, but I quite liked the between the wars, coming of age story on its own merit. The Scottish castle and setting are beautifully filmed and the whole thing is quirky and pleasant if not deeply profound.

Rob Roy: Longing to be a rip-roaring swashbuckling adventure movie, this film is ultimately too heavy to really do the genre properly. Liam Neeson and Jessica Lang are really pretty wonderful in the romantic parts of the film, and if you are into broad swords, then the ending of the film is a must see. Tim Roth and John Hurt round out the cast as vile villainous villains. Roth especially stands out as the loathsome Archibald Cunningham an evil and stylish man, the likes of which we haven't seen on screen since the days of Basil Rathbone.

Mary of Scotland: Hollywood knows how to do spectacle and this costume drama from Warner Brothers has plenty of pipers on castle ramparts. Katharine Hepburn and Frederich March play Mary Queen of Scots and James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, lovers enmeshed in court politics. Donald Crisp, John Carradine and Douglas Walton round out the excellent cast.

Brigadoon: Ok, take what I said in my write-up of Mary of Scotland and multiply it by ten. This is what happens when the big studio glamor machine goes bonkers on a meme. In this case, the idea that Scottish people wear as much plaid as possible, tams on their heads and like to dance a reel. Filmed on a sound stage it lacks the authenticity of the other films in this list, but with a blazing, bright technicolor widescreen transfer, it's difficult to say no to Gene Kelly, Sid Charisse and Vincente Minnelli production values.

Highlander: I'm kind of amazed that this movie didn't make the Canny Scot's t-shirt of Scottish heroes played by foreign actors. Perhaps they feared that people would confuse Christopher Lambert with Mel Gibson as they are difficult to tell apart when they are all done up in their highlander garb. (Hint: Mel has the blue face.) The story of an immortal Scottish warrior (Christopher Lambert) and his Spanish fight trainer (Sean Connery with a pearl earring) and their adventure across time to defeat fellow immortal and vile villainous villain, the Kergan (Clancy Brown.) In many ways, this is the movie that Rob Roy wanted to be, but couldn't because it had to stick to some semblance of historical accuracy. It's shamelessly entertaining, surprisingly original and will have you shouting, "there can only be one" in your next outing involving swordplay.

Braveheart: My least favorite of the films on this list, though it does contain a bravura performance from one of my favorite obscure actors, David O'Hara who plays Stephen the Mad Irishman. (O'Hara, ironically was one of the few native Scottish actors with a speaking part in the film). Action film lovers can look to the film's influential battle scenes whose up-close, visceral style became the standard for this sort of thing. It's a bit like watching the Lord of the Rings, actually: a lot of guys with long, dirty hair, giving rousing speeches, head-butting each other. At least there's lots of kilts.

I have not been kidnapped

To all my faithful friends who have patiently waited for a new blog post, I'm sorry. I really have no excuse other than I needed a little break.

A few things that have ruled my world during hiatus:

1) Tired Old Queen at the Movies. If you haven't seen him, check him out. No one could get me to watch as many 1950s films as he has. Also, you gotta love (and perhaps fear slightly) a guy who collects Barbie doll outfits from classic films.

2) The 100 Greatest Posters of Noir. I'm not even a noir fan and I've been loving this series in an obsessive way. This makes me want to go back to school and take a class from Mr. Fertig. He obviously knows his stuff.

3) Classic Film Scans. Kate from Silents and Talkies lovingly scans pictures of classic film stars and posts them in all their high-res glory. She has wonderfully broad taste and that means that lots of actors like Robert Donat and Herbert Marshall who usually get the short shrift in the world of high res scans get space. I dare you not to spend the rest of the day at this site. I dares ya.

4) Netflix instant. I can't stop watching TV shows this way. Entire seasons of Doctor Who, Slings and Arrows, MI-5 and No Reservations have been gobbled up. A few classic movies might have slipped in as well, like Damn the Defiant and The Girl Rush. Stupid TV. Be less good so I can go back to watching classic movies. Lord help me if they ever get Mad Men.

5) Facebook. Like a massive ven diagram of my life, Facebook allows me to spend untold hours cross pollinating my various obsessions among groups of my friends and family. Most of my online film friends are on here so if you are one of them, get on here already. Together we can and will remain staggeringly unproductive!

An extra big shout-out to all the friends of the blog who continued to e-mail, send goodies by mail and just generally be the most supportive and awesome people ever. You know who you are! Kisses!

Quality Street (1937)

A few years ago I was up in Duluth, Minnesota looking for someplace quiet, to grab a bite when we suddenly the perfect place: a small restaurant, with a kitschy, pseudo Russian theme that served custom-made burritos named after Rasputin and the like. It was as if the universe had reached into my brain and conjured up exactly what I needed to make me perfectly happy. I've treasured that memory, odd as it may seem, because I felt like it was evidence that of the interconnectedness of all things.

I was content to live my life with just that one instance of planetary alignment, but the other day it happened again. I was home sick, feeling very much in need of a cinematic pick-me-up, something light and frothy with just a touch of screwball. I needed one of those rare tonic films. To complicate matters, I was also feeling very Jane Austen-y since watching The Young Mr. Pitt had reminded me of the early 19th century and, inevitably, of Austen. I picked disconsolately through my Austen DVDs. Sense and Sensibility was too sad. (I always, always cry like a baby when Marianne almost dies). Pride and Prejudice was just too long, Emma was not quite right and Bridget Jones was definitely not on the bill. I scanned my Tivo and alighted randomly on the description of Quality Street: a young woman (Katharine Hepburn) becomes an old maid waiting for a young man (Franchot Tone) to return from the Napoleonic Wars. OK, Kate Hepburn and Franchot Tone--I'm there already. Throw in Napoleonic Wars and you've definitely got me intrigued. And doesn't this outline sound just a little bit like...PERSUASION?! Oh, Universe, you've done it again. You've reached into my brain and provided me with exactly what I wanted, when I wanted it.

What a fun discovery this movie was. It IS a screwball version of Persuasion. Take out Louisa's head injury and add in Anne Elliott posing as her own coquettish, young niece, and you more or less have Quality Street. This film has all the tea-swilling, pelisse-wearing, repressed-sexual-smoldering of a Jane Austen adaptation and all the chaotic misunderstandings and physical gags of 1930s RKO comedies. The story is based a play by Edwardian playwright, James M. Barrie, best known for his novel Peter Pan. The ever-competent George Stevens directs.

Franchot Tone, whom I've liked ever since he took my attention, however briefly, away from Cary Grant in Suzy, is really great here. I've rarely seen him in comedies, and he definitely shines in the part of the cocky young man who is humbled when he actually has to pursue a woman. Even while he chases "niece" Olivia, hoping to reign her in as a favor to spinster aunt Phoebe, he tips his hand in just the right places to show the audience that it's Phoebe he really loves. Hepburn, is excellent as well, belying the old story that she learned everything she knew about comic timing from Walter Catlett in Bringing Up Baby (1938).

If it's so great, why doesn't Quality Street top the list of Hepburn films from this her infamous "box office poison" period---a list that includes such gems as Sylvia Scarlet, Stage Door and Bringing Up Baby? Maybe it's the 19th century setting that puts people off. We think of Hepburn as a modern actress and prefer her comedies edgy and hip. There's nothing particularly edgy about Quality Street,--none of the cross-dressing deviance of Scarlet, or the risque undercurrents to Baby's fast-moving mayhem. (My bone! It's rare! It's precious!) Quality Street has remained quietly buried, dug up once a year when TCM does a Katharine Hepburn tribute; I captured it only through exhaustive Tivo-ing. But if you have any interest in Katharine Hepburn, Franchot Tone, 1930s comedy, or Jane Austen, I'd say you definitely want to make the effort to watch this one.

Young Mr. Pitt (1942)

Certain Robert Donat films so deserve a DVD release that I feel compelled to do some kind of civil disobedience on their behalf. That's it: I'm going to lie down in the middle of the street until The Young Mr. Pitt comes out on DVD. Not only is it one of Donat's most important performances, it's directed by Carol Reed for Pete's Sake. Carol Reed! You've heard of the The Third Man, right?

I apologize for the poor quality of the screencaps and their limited number. The DVD I obtained was a bootleg made when the movie was shown on TV in England. My computer didn't like this particular DVD very much so I only have captions from the first 40 minutes of the film. Grrrr. But yeah, we really need a DVD of this wonderful film.

Robert Donat plays Pitt the Younger, an obscure, idealist, reform-minded MP in late 18th century England who is suddenly thrust into the premiership as part of a complicated back room deal between the outgoing government and the King. William Pitt was the youngest Prime Minister in British history and his administration was dubbed the "mince pie government" because everyone assumed it would be over by the end of the Christmas season. Of course, if the guy is a subject of a biopic he must have lasted longer than that. He sees Britain through the dark early days of the Napoleonic Wars promoting a then-obscure young seaman named Horatio Nelson to leader of the navy. Nelson's triumph over the French fleet in Egypt suddenly turns the tide of the war and Pitt's popularity skyrockets. All this from a man who promised his father that he'd never seek fame in war.

The ever-fickle public call for peace, though Pitt is sure that Napoleon has no plans to retire anytime soon. He is sure they will be called to defend themselves and their allies again and again. Pitt is in love with the daughter (Phyllis Calvert) of one of his powerful constituents and they become secretly engaged, which was quite the scandalous thing back in the day. His health is wavering as well, so he plans to step down as Prime Minister as soon as he can groom a successor. It looks like the anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce would be the perfect candidate. Fate begs to differ, Pitt is trapped at the helm and money troubles eventually force him to relinquish his dream of marrying.

Donat is very good here, doing his usual schtick of playing a character from late twenties into middle age. Early in the film he plays Pitt the Elder as well. I guess Old Mr. Pitt isn't as good a movie title. It's pretty remarkable that he does manage the young part so well, and I love that he allows his middle-aged face to show through when appropriate. I think that in real life, Donat felt fairly older than his years, so I guess it's not a surprise that he plays a tired, middle-aged man with such delicate poignancy.

My favorite scene in the film involves Donat joining in a pillow fight with a bunch of little kids while Calvert looks on lovingly. His hair gets mussed up. It's all good. Of course, none of this is remotely historically accurate. In real life, Pitt was never romantically linked to any one. The filmmakers did a good job of sneaking the romance in at the edges of Pitt's life and of making the inevitable break-up reasonably believable. Of course in real-life Regency England it would have been perfectly acceptable for a Prime Minister, no matter how beleaguered by bills, to marry a rich young woman. But no matter--it all makes for some lovely angst on Donat's part.

Worth mentioning are the excellent supporting players. Robert Morley is brilliant as Pitt's rival, Charles James Fox and Raymond Lovell makes a hilarious, bumbling King George III. I think it was actually a fairly bold wartime an English monarch as so utterly incompetent. Here, the king is more concerned with his latest turnip crop than with affairs of state. Since the real King George was declared mad only a few years later, it's not such a stretch although it was his grandfather, though who was turnip-obsessed.

Parts of the film are unintentionally funny. As a Big, Important sweeping biopic it keeps reminding us of the march of history in corny ways. As Pitt the Elder watches his son sleep, the screen goes fuzzy at the edges and we cut across the Channel to baby's baptism. "Congratulations Mrs. Bonaparte," an off-screen voice intones. Later we check in on young Napoleon pwning his examination at military school. I guess this is what Robert Donat's biographer, J.C. Trewin meant when he called The Young Mr. Pitt "dated." But what does it really mean to say an old movie is dated? To me, it means that the values it espouses are irrelevant or antithetical to the modern viewer. Gone with the Wind is dated in its portrayal of happy-go-lucky slaves, for example. Still a great film, though, no? The Young Mr. Pitt must have seemed a bit fusty in 1968 when Trewin wrote Donat's biography. Give it another forty years or so and it's just fine: a nice example of British war-time filmmaking that managed to get its message across without beating you over the head with it. There is a whole sub-genre of war films that use past conflicts to make a point about the current political situation. In this case, the Napoleon=Hitler analogy works alright if you don't think about it too much. The point is that having a politician, not a king or a strongman at the wheel is bound to be complicated, but preferable to the alternatives. Some politicians, like the corrupt Fox will be a hawk or a dove depending on the prevailing winds. Actually trying to lead from one's principals is far more difficult. It's Mr. Pitt goes to Whitehall with a downer ending.