A compelling date for those of us who are ‘into’ numbers; it also marks the beginning of the XXIX (29th) Olympiad, the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China this Friday.  I love the Olympics and (four years ago) it was a quite a challenge to balance my TCM viewing with NBC’s coverage during the 28th Olympiad in Athens, Greece (in case you care, the Winter Olympics have their own numbering scheme, and their 21st event will be held in Vancouver, Canada starting February 12, 2010, or 2/12/10).  Per my movie log, I managed to catch only a handful of classics between August 13th and August 29th, 2004 (ten, to be exact), though I’m sure I TIVOed many more during that second year of TCM’s Summer Under the Stars programming.  I decided that an article about movies which contain stories about Olympic athletes, though timely, would not only be somewhat redundant to an earlier one I’d written, but would also be rather brief if I limited it to films from the classic era (Jim Thorpe – All American (1951), anyone?).

So instead, dovetailing with the channel’s presentation of Asian Images in Film (a topic that seems to have slipped by my fellow Morlocks during my absence) this past June, I thought that focusing on classic movies set in China might be a worthwhile exercise (pun intended).

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“Who can tell me who I am?” – King Lear

I love Westerns. The simple pleasures of seeing the world from the back of a horse, visiting the open sky and plains and possibilities of an adventurous life in a movie is a vicarious joy. Beyond this, some of the best of the genre may alert me to the connections between actions, consequences and our own human limitations.

In the Westerns that Anthony Mann made between 1950-1955 with the squarest of actors, Jimmy Stewart, there’s also an appealing grandeur and all too human unruliness in the movies that appeals to me. Despite a previous acquaintance with the seven other Mann-Stewart collaborations on screen, somehow, I didn’t expect this last film of the duo, The Man From Laramie (1955) to be quite so effective. After all, it’s only a 53 year old cowboy movie. READ MORE

“A life of don’t-care-a-damn in a boarding house is what I have asked for in many a secret prayer.”
- Mark Twain

Last night, as Joshua Logan’s film of Picnic (1955) unraveled the rather desperate lives conceived by playwright William Inge in the Kansas of his imagination on TCM, I found myself once more hoping that maybe this time, Arthur O’Connell would hop that freight with William Holden at the end of the movie. While the aging Holden and Kim Novak made a moving if unlikely couple, it was Arthur and SOTM Rosalind Russell‘s desperate date with destiny that always gives me chills. As Ms. Russell‘s schoolteacher character, who goes around defensively introducing herself as an old maid, experiences a booze-fired catharsis on Labor Day, she steamrolls poor Arthur, her indecisive, hapless suitor into marriage before the guy knows what hit him.

This role is well and vigorously played by Russell, (who should have allowed her name to be submitted for consideration as a Supporting Actress in the Oscar free for all for this film).

Still, I kept wondering, do they really have much more of a chance for happiness than Holden and Novak?

I have my doubts. Even if the pair are older and seemingly more settled, as Russell reflects at one point, she does “get crazier all the time” and O’Connell seems to have a spine of a wet noodle, and neither of those personality traits is likely to be a boon to marital bliss. Reflecting on Inge‘s annoyingly real characters, however, I sometimes wonder if the somewhat over-the-top high school teacher Roz played just wanted to get out of that boarding house she perched in for so long with the Owens family, consisting of abandoned Mom Betty Field and her daughters Kim “What good is it only being pretty?” Novak and college-bound “ugly duckling” Susan Strasberg. Filmed in real homes in Nickerson, Kansas, the modest house, which reflects the genteel poverty of a family that is compelled by economic circumstances to rent a room seems to be a hotbed of female frustration, most loudly, that of Russell‘s increasingly ragged Miss Sydney. (Come to think of it, maybe Betty Field, Kim Novak, Susan Strasberg and Rosalind Russell should’ve been the ones hopping that freight out of their small town. On second thought, perhaps they should ride the rails separately. All of them in one box car together might not hold that much estrogen comfortably). Though I am, as usual, being facetious, I must admit that movies that explore the psycho-social petri dish of the long gone institution of boarding houses do interest me.

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Being a resident of Chicago, I am well versed in the lore and literature of gangsters and outlaws such as Al Capone and John Dillinger. It is almost a prerequisite for living here. The Biograph Theatre is a Chicago landmark more because of the Dillinger legend than for anything else, and most of us have peaked down the nearby alley where he was shot to look for his ghost, which is said to haunt the area. Long ago in my sordid youth, I worked very briefly for Chicago author and crime buff Jay Robert Nash, who has written two books claiming that Dillinger was not killed at the Biograph on July 22, 1934.

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When most people think of Frank Sinatra, Las Vegas comes to mind—the glory days of the Rat Pack, the Sands Hotel, the original Ocean’s 11. But, with all the attention focused on Old Blue Eyes recently, including Sinatra month on TCM and a new postal stamp issued in his honor, I am reminded of another city that Frank had in the palm of his hand—Miami, Florida.              

      Sinatra made a handful of films that were at least partially shot in Miami, including A Hole in the Head, Tony Rome, and Lady in Cement. Though none of them have the hip cache of Ocean’s 11, each film showcased parts of Miami in a nice blend of material and milieu. The hotel that Sinatra’s can’t-catch-a-break character ran in A Hole in the Head was the little Art Deco gem called the Cardozo along South Beach, an area that at the time had run its course as a vacation escape for East Coast families. Eight years later, his cool-as-ice detective Tony Rome prowled a seedier South Beach, which had become lost in the shadows of the big building boom of the 1950s. Tony Rome has not aged well, and it is not a film considered among Sinatra’s best, but I have fond memories of watching it with my best friend one lonely Thanksgiving in an almost empty theater in Ohio.  It made me want to marry a Miami millionaire, like one of the characters in the film, and get out of the little steel town that I was stuck in. 

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The hallway of every man’s life is paced with pictures; pictures gay and pictures gloomy, all useful, for if we be wise, we can learn from them a richer and braver way to live. ~ O’Casey

The penultimate John Ford feature film, Young Cassidy (1965), completed by master cinematographer and underrated journeyman director Jack Cardiff, airs this coming Monday at 6 PM ET on TCM. It is, appropriately enough, scheduled for St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th. The film, which is not available on vhs or dvd, sank from sight soon after it premiered in March of 1965, but eventually became a vivid part of the annual celebration of that day, thanks in large part to the repetition of this “beautiful failure” on the Million Dollar Movie on New York channel WOR in the sixties and seventies. READ MORE

I grew up on Communism.

No, my parents weren’t Bolsheviks or Troskyites who weaned a “red diaper” baby, they were thoughtful Americans who, after a World War Two marriage, and four kids in almost as many years, simply tried to keep a few American ideals and a sense of humor alive in our household. Consequently, when they discovered us huddled in front of a flickering t.v. image seemingly enthralled with Frank Lovejoy confessing that I Was a Communist For the F.B.I. (1952) or bringing home a now forgotten artifact from our parochial school such as Treasure Chest comic books, (which were chock full of depictions of life under the boot of “godless Communism”), they leavened the heavier fear mongering with large doses of faith in American ideals such as freedom of speech and encouraged us to explore the free marketplace of ideas, where we might hear all sides of every issue.

Still, if you ever took part in a nuclear fallout drill at school, there’s probably at least a shadow on your soul and maybe a bit of skepticism in your outlook on life. Oh, yes, and a certain fascination with an odd group of films that laid claim to at least part of your imagination. When a certain Congressman Nixon exhorted a non-plussed Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer that Hollywood had “a positive duty” to make anti-Communist movies, most moguls, including the fairly liberal minded Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox, took this exhortation to heart.

Though I really don’t have personal memories of the McCarthy era, the sight of a diagram on the front page of our local newspaper showing how easily a nuke could be tossed up to our small town from Cuba is one of my first memories. Even as recently as 1973 the most ludicrously paranoid of all McCarthy era movies, My Son John (1951), which sprang from the fevered brow of formerly light-hearted comic director Leo McCarey, was shown on the American Broadcasting Company as a primetime movie. This now forgotten 1951 paean to panic about the corruption of a fine American youth (Robert Walker, sadly, in his last role) by Communists may have been the most melodramatic example of this type of film, and seems to be locked away in Paramount’s vault, perhaps out of embarrassment. Despite or because of this “larger than life” quality, this and the other films of this period still loomed large in my consciousness as a kid and teenager. The sheer hyperbole of these movies, which, given the revelations of the KGB files that have come to light since the fall of the U.S.S.R., wasn’t all that exaggerated, made them a bit hard to swallow, if strangely entertaining. Maybe as a result of all this, movies about commies continue to fascinate me, even while offering an interesting glimpse at an earlier “long twilight struggle” in our country’s history.

William Wellman, who would probably be the first guy to say that he was “just” a contract director, capable of molding almost any script into an acceptable product, may have looked like a good choice for churning out what is often cited as the very first of a plethora of Cold War movies. Making what appears to be an apparent propaganda picture just a year after the 1947 HUAC hearings that began the blacklist period against those in the entertainment field, Wellman chose a typically circuitous route rather than an obvious road to the right. Unlike many of the later films in this cycle, such as those already mentioned and ones like The Red Menace (1949), which are laughably bad, Wellman tried to keep it real. Reportedly one contract director of a particularly slapdash pot-boiler said that he was assigned to such a picture simply because he was told that “This McCarthy thing seems to be catching on and we need a film quick!”

Yet just when I think I have the films of William Wellman neatly tucked away in a mental safe deposit box, marked “W” for “Wild Bill”, the guy throws me a curve. As demonstrated in a recent TCM tribute to William Wellman, the range of this sometimes overlooked director, and the sheer variety of his films over the decades makes any tidy pigeon-holing of his style nearly impossible. Adventure, war, comedy, and even a musical or two dominated his career. Visually, his films are full of movement and Wellman seems to enjoy taking us on one hell of a ride. Over time, he took his audience from that seat in the cockpit of a fragile World War One biplane in Wings (1927) to that liberating flight of an anonymous farm woman’s life from oppression in So Big (1932), to the upheaval of a teenager’s nightmarish journey on the rails in Wild Boys of the Road (1933) to that most incisive examination of the consequences of a mindless rush to judgment in the brilliant The Ox-Bow Incident (1943).

Still, one of the aspects of his movies that I find most engaging is his ability to remind me that large current events have an impact on individual, highly fallible human beings. This side of Wellman‘s range was illustrated by such brutally realistic movies as the Pre-Code story of a drug addicted veteran (Richard Barthelmess) in Heroes for Sale (1933) and the strange, often amusing yet squirrelly metaphysical mixture of the compelling and the trite in a unique film, The Next Voice You Hear (1950), which attempts to show how “Joe Smith, American” (James Whitmore) reacts to a direct word from God in the midst of his not so quietly desperate life.

One seemingly forgotten Wellman movie, The Iron Curtain(1948), which is not on vhs or dvd, and was not part of the TCM retrospective, is one of those films that takes a break from all this breathless commotion. An odd movie, even for one of the first in that dour, hysterical sub-genre, the Cold War picture, it gains a kind of rough hewn poetic power by stopping to examine the bleak prospects for one man in a gray post-war world. If you expect a rousing adventure tale from Wellman, think again. What made this film quite moving was the director’s refusal to exaggerate the inherent dramatic qualities in the story and kept it on a human scale, not a geopolitical one. He chose to mute the details of what hyperventilating posters screamed was “the most amazing plot in 3300 years of recorded espionage!!”

The Iron Curtain is based on the actual 1945 case of Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko, (Dana Andrews with a brutally short, just-back-from-the-Eastern-Front haircut), who, after careful training, was assigned to the U.S.S.R. Embassy in Ottawa, Canada in the midst of World War II. Eventually, Gouzenko defected with 109 pages of material implicating several high level Canadian officials, outlined the steps taken to secure information about the the details of the nuclear bomb via numerous sleeper cells established throughout North America. The scandal that resulted when details of this case were publicized by American columnist Drew Pearson in early 1946 involved Canada, Britain and the United States. As dramatized by Wellman in this movie, it becomes more than a tense story of international intrigue, but a depiction of a man who may have lost his moorings as well.

From the first words of Reede Hadley‘s sonorous narration we know that we are in semi- documentary territory. This stark landscape is often devoted to examinations of the criminal underbelly of American society, (The Street with No Name-1948) or an exciting rehash of previously classified material about the recent “unpleasantness” in Europe, (13 Rue Madeleine-1947). Teeming with hearty undercover heroes upholding firm values at considerable sacrifice to themselves, their narrative power is rooted, at least in part, in the validity of the institutions that they seek to protect. Interestingly, in the muted Wellman film we are shown a man who embarks on a deliberate, menacing journey from the familiar toward a void of uncertain loyalties. This uneasiness is reinforced in the distinctive black and white cinematography of Charles G. Clarke, whose Ottawa locations are shot in the austere half-light of a Canadian winter.

Casting the leading character with Dana Andrews as Gouzenko was also fortuitous. Initially, he appears to be a finely tuned apparatchik who takes a certain savvy pride in doing his job of deciphering and formulating coded messages in the Ottawa embassy. Arriving at the Canadian embassy in 1943, (when America & the Soviets were united against the Nazis), Andrews is accompanied by the doctrinaire Colonel Trigorin (Frederic Tozere), a true believer in the Soviet way of life, and a cynical, dissolute son of a Soviet hero, Major Kulin (Eduard Franz), who creates an impressive if somewhat unwieldy portrait of a flashy character in only his second film role. Franz is a drunkard and a haunted witness to the ruthless sacrifices of the Soviet people made during the war. His ramblings are indulged because of his connections, but he also is the only character who tells the truth loudly and all the time. As such, Eduard Franz has to voice the film’s indictment of Stalin’s totalitarianism and the repression of Soviet society, but this is surprisingly free of what would seem to be McCarthy-style cant. Because Franz and other characters are presented as human beings, not caricatures spouting simple slogans, the viewer is allowed to recognize their flaws and virtues as similar to our own. By contrast, Andrews‘ character initially appears to be a most efficient bureaucrat.

As we are shown the daily duties of the cipher clerk, and in the process introduced to another cog in the machine, the hulking Cipher Lt. Vinikov (Peter Whitney), he explains that loud music must be played at all times in and out of the immediate vicinity of the deciphering room to prevent eavesdropping by anyone–giving us a blast of Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturyan and Dominik Miskovský–and an opportunity for Dana to show us a hairline crack in his facade by the effort he shows to prevent himself from registering his discomfort on his face. One of the most interesting abilities of Andrews as an actor is his ability to appear almost robotic, yet suggest an underlying unease. As an appreciative observer, film analyst David Thomson, once described, it is as though Dana Andrews “did not quite trust or like himself, and so a faraway bitterness haunted him.” Andrews‘ Grouzenko is a tough customer, not apparently given to introspective brooding about his role in life, but the seams in his spirit do show some strain.

Even when a comely comrade at the embassy, played by June Havoc, who teems with frustration, (most of which I suspect the actress may have channeled from her career path at Fox), lures him to her small apartment in Ottawa away from the pressures of work, he resists her attempts to have him let down his guard. He turns the tables on this blonde babe’s assignment to discover his vulnerabilities, though his interest is definitely piqued by what he seems to regard as a lavishly appointed apartment, which she has–shockingly to him–all to herself.

Andrews‘ character also displays a certain lack of seriousness as he unbends in his new job, eventually even displaying a degree of playfulness as he sloughs off a comrade’s probings by telling him that “I’m a very important person, with all kinds of important secrets. Listen, I’ll tell you one: my wife is very beautiful.” Gradually, as the dehumanizing elements of their jobs take a toll on the penned up embassy workers, the story of some characters unfold. We learn that one reason for Dana Andrews sales resistance to Havoc‘s pitch is that he loves his wife, played by his frequent screen partner and fellow Fox contract player, Gene Tierney. She soon arrives from Moscow, and Tierney, who sometimes seemed overwhelmed by some of her more complex characters, is given a warmhearted, relatively straightforward role to play. Despite his joy in creating a small home in a decent apartment away from the tense embassy in Ottawa with Tierney, Andrews warns her repeatedly against forming any attachments to “others”, i.e. ordinary Canadians. This is particularly true of a neighbor, played with just the right note of easily misinterpreted bustling concern for the couple by Edna Best. As Dana explains to his increasingly westernized spouse, “We’re simple people, Anna, we can’t understand everything, we must have faith in our leaders.”
Soon, Tierney reveals that she is happily pregnant, and, though Andrews is delighted and concerned for her well-being, his compatriots seem to regard it as an inconvenient “intrusion of the personal” on their real purpose in Canada. That purpose, as far as this movie is concerned, is embodied by Berry Kroeger, as the aptly named “Mr. Grubb”. Kroeger, who was discovered on the Broadway stage and cast in this, his first movie, by William Wellman, plays a suave, even smug contact between the embassy personnel and the sleeper cells that have been established throughout Canadian society. As he would in numerous film noirs, Kroeger manages to be one of the most repugnant yet fascinating actors who’ve ever stepped in front of a camera. His character’s intellectual arrogance is matched only by his ruthlessness as becomes clear.

When Andrews’ son is born, and the deepening and dangerous despair of Eduard Franz becomes unmanageable, Gouzenko(Andrews) slowly begins to realize that he’s on the wrong side. This realization is most dramatically evident in the scene when Dana Andrews and his co-workers discuss the power and horror evidenced by the first atom bomb dropped by the U.S. at Hiroshima. Andrews’ superior is riveted by the thought of acquiring such knowledge and power. As a new father and a man whose ties to life have been reawakened, Gouzenko is deeply disturbed. Gradually, he comes to the realization that he and his family will not return to Russia, in part because he does not want his newborn son to grow up to fight in another war, especially one that might possibly fought with nuclear weapons.

When Andrews learns that he will shortly be sent back to Russia, he decides to take an irrevocable step. He steals important documents tracing the ties of his countrymen to the ring of American and Canadian citizens who have provided the Soviets with secrets related to nuclear weaponry. As he becomes more committed to defecting, (despite what will happen to his unseen family back home in the Soviet Union), he develops a rather half-baked idea that handing this vital proof over to the Canadian Justice Department will be easy and earn him a welcome from the Canadians. It becomes a race against time to get the documents into the right hands as well as save his family, even if he can’t save himself. The anxiety and tension that is created by the director as we see the rather naïve Gouzenko traipse from bureaucrat to bureaucrat in Ottawa, trying to convince someone, anyone, of his sincerity and the gravity of the information that he has to give them. With his wife and baby bringing up the rear in much of this segment, there’s something Kafkaesque about Andrews hapless trek around the dingy, snowy streets of Ottawa, (which can’t have looked all that different from Moscow at times). Eventually exhausted, gazing stonily ahead as only Dana “Master-of-the-Thousand-Yard-Stare” Andrews can, afraid to go back to his apartment for fear of interception and knowing that his disappearance has been noted by his colleagues by now, he practically stumbles into the bustling office of The Ottawa Journal newspaper. Just as the viewer assumes that freedom of the press might win the day, (à la the seventies’ Three Days of the Condor), Andrews is given the proverbial bum’s rush by a harried, disinterested night editor. Returning to the family flat, he secretes his wife and baby with the neighbor, and waits alone in the dark for the inevitable knock on the door.
The way that sound is used by the director throughout the movie, with the painfully loud Russian music used to indicate the relentless nature of the state’s control over its subjects at the embassy, and, in this scene in particular, the ominous quality of the somewhat startling knock. Here the director also lets the actor’s ability to register several subtle transient emotions at once on his face express what the perfunctory script does not. As the inevitable strong arm men arrive, when they pound at the door, Andrews shows frozen fear, relief and determination to stand up to them as best he can, until the intervention of one of the R.C.M.P. who, in the uncredited appearance by that all round utility man in forties movies, John Ridgely, arrives in the nick of time to administer some simple justice despite the claims of diplomatic immunity by the embassy goons, confiscating the papers that Gouzenko had risked his life for “until things can be cleared up down at the station.” To this end, Wellman has restrained the drama of the story, making it a singularly effective movie to this day through its straightforward narrative, enhanced by another overlooked performance by the perfect actor for the Age of Anxiety, Dana Andrews.

Long story short, once someone sensibly realizes that Gouzenko‘s evidence proves that Stalin was actively trying to steal nuclear secrets and that previously unpublicized concepts such as “sleeper cells” becomes known, this event helped trigger the Cold War. In reality, these events led to the indictment of a total of 39 suspects, of which 18 were eventually convicted, including the only Communist Member of the Canadian House of Commons and the national organizer of the CP in Canada. The far-reaching leads given the authorities stemming from this case have also been tied to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case in the U.S. and the Cambridge Five (Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross), in the U.K.

An epilogue to all this real life was intrigue was that, according to Henry Luce‘s more conservative Time Magazine lukewarm review of the film (their anonymous reviewer seemed to feel that the movie was not sufficiently melodramatic) in its May 17th, 1948 issue, “Red-front groups did whatever they could to obstruct shooting in Ottawa. Now that the picture is finished, they are voluminously protesting to Hollywood and the press, murmuring of libel suits, threatening to boycott Manhattan’s Roxy Theater for a year if the picture is shown there. But 20th Century-Fox intends to open it simultaneously in 500 U.S. theaters. The film tells much less—in quantity—about Communist spy activities than the daily press has already told. Yet the alarm and breast-beating of the opposition are an understandable tribute to the enormous and unique power of motion picture propaganda in general, and of this film in particular.”

We are still living with the aftermath of this relatively small opening salvo of the Cold War, but, the real Igor Gouzenko, and his wife, Svetlana, (called Anna in the movie), were depicted at the end of the film as living in secrecy in a rural region of Canada under RCMP protection. In another in a sense, Gouzenko a restless man without a country from then on. Living under assumed identities created by the R.C.M.P, the Gouzenkos raised eight children together, (I guess there had a lot of time on their hands in protective custody). Gouzenko, with a flair for the dramatic, managed to keep in the public eye, writing the book that was the basis of this movie, This Was My Choice, and a novel The Fall of a Titan, which met with some success in the fifties. Igor Gouzenko also appeared on Canadian television from time to time, largely to promote his books, but also to air his periodic grievances with the RCMP, which he often complained was not compensating him sufficiently, though his family was supported by the RCMP at least until his death in 1982. Whether needed or not, whenever Gouzenko appeared in public, he always wore a hood over his head.

A movie history addendum: One scholarly examination of the McCarthy era noted that as Hollywood’s explicitly anti-Communist films rose from three in 1948 to thirteen in 1952, Communists “were characterized in the gangster tradition as tough men who rule with an iron hand and use violence as their primary weapon. They were, in effect, B pictures, the successors to Bulldog Drummond and Boston Blackie”…”though conservatives in both Hollywood and Washington believed that a vast public hungered to see anti-Communist movies, none of them made any money”…”perhaps [proving that] the conventional wisdom was right, that nobody wanted message pictures anyway.”

Sources:
Black, J. L. & Rudner, Martin, eds., The Gouzenko Affair,
Penumbra Press, 2006.
Canadian Broadcasting Archives, The Gouzenko Affair, http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-71-72/conflict_war/gouzenko/
Friedrich, Otto, City of Nets, Harper & Row, 1987.
Landon, Philip J., The Films of the Cold War, http://userpages.umbc.edu/~landon
Time Magazine, The New Pictures, May 17, 1948.

It was the voice that first captured my attention. Husky, yes, but distinctively so. Who was that?

Late as usual on a rainy evening, I had dashed into the already darkened auditorium for a rare revival house showing of the ambitious 1936 Alexander Korda film, Rembrandt, featuring Charles Laughton in the lead, (premiering on TCM on October 23rd). I was eager to see this nearly pristine print of the biopic. Already a Laughton fan, my interest had been further piqued by those who had described this movie as one of the better cinematic renderings of an artist’s life.

This evaluation was perhaps ironic, given that few of the master’s paintings are shown during the movie, though the monumental and iconoclastic painting of “The Night Watch” figures prominently in the painterly black and white film, photographed with abundant chiaroscuro. Still, that raspy fellow on the screen with Laughton really seemed familiar. Hustling to get settled without disturbing too many other patrons, I was brought up short by the sound from the screen. Then it hit me!

Unrecognizable beneath a thicket of whiskers as he posed for Rembrandt, I ultimately realized that it was Roger Livesey—a rather young Roger Livesey, but nevertheless, that unique rough velvet voice marks him. READ MORE