Noir Watch: Tension (1949)

Watched:  04/26/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  lol

Director:  John Berry

Whoops, I watched Tension (1949) again.

In my defense, it stars both Audrey Totter and Cyd Charisse and I really had no choice.

Noir Watch: The Set-Up (1949)

we always stan Totter and Ryan

Watched:  04/21/2025

Format:  Noir Alley on TCM

Viewing:  fourth?  fifth?

Director:  Robert Wise

It's been years since I watched The Set-Up (1949), and while reading Eddie Muller's new book, an updated Dark City Dames - a collection of bios of several stars of the noir movement, I was pondering rewatching it when TCM's Noir Alley showcase went ahead and programmed the film for last weekend.  

It's no secret we're fans of stars Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter, or director Robert Wise.  But because Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter aren't really household names, and it's a grimy boxing picture of its surface, I'm not shocked if you haven't heard of or seen this one.  

The film comes in at a taught, trim 73 minutes.  And, novel for its era, the movie unspools in an approximation of real-time - taking place in one night of crisis for an aging boxer and his wife, who can't take watching him get beaten every night.  Not anymore.

Horror Watch: I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

Watched:  04/21/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jacques Tourneur

I Walked With a Zombie (1943) is @#$%ing *great*.  Holy cats.  I'm mad at myself I took so long to see it.

Fun fact:  apparently I finished watching this movie on the 82nd anniversary of the film's release.  How about that?

More than a decade after White Zombie - an okay movie that I think drags - RKO put this one out.  It's considered part of a retrospective high point for RKO as Val Lewton was producing cheap and effective thrillers.  

Apparently the title is lifted from an article by journalist Inez Wallace who spent time in Haiti and met people who were basically without will thanks to drugs.  It also borrows a bit from Jane Eyre, one of my favorite reads from college days.

The movie is a Gothic mystery set on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian.  The beautiful wife of a sugar plantation owner has fallen into an odd stupor, able to be given commands, but she's otherwise lifeless, emotionless... mostly still unless directed to move around.  Frances Dee plays a nurse brought from Canada to care for her - and expects she's being asked to live in paradise, but like a character from Bronte, Byron or Poe - the husband of the "zombie" sees only death on the island. 

There's a riddle for what really happened.  Two brothers at war.  A mother who is remote from them.  

The location of the plantation leans into the history of the cruelty of slavery and the family's part in what happened, keeping the haunting figurehead from one of their slaveships on the premises, a tortured man impaled with arrows - a reminder of what they did.  Pretty wild as elected leaders are, in 2025, trying to erase slavery of all things from our history books.  The family has tried to make amends now in the mid-20th Century, seeing themselves as stewards of the history and the people here, not interfering, but making sure people are healthy and the plantation provides an economy.

Horror Watch: The Body Snatcher (1945)

Watched:  04/12/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Robert Wise

So.  I love Universal Horror.  This is where we get Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, et al.  But, gosh darn it - those RKO horror films are good.  I was basking in how well done I found The Body Snatcher (1945) when I realized it was directed by Robert Wise, who I consider one of the best directors ever produced in the US, but who doesn't ever seem to get named among the greats.  But this is my blog, and here - Robert Wise reigns supreme.*

RKO's horror flicks are more "creepy tales" than relying on monsters and Jack Pierce make-up.   There's nothing supernatural here, no super science bringing beings to life.  It's more about the darkness in people, and that's where I think this movie works astoundingly well.

Anyway - I also learned some interesting history!  So, for twenty years or so, I've been aware that back in the day, it was hard to come by cadavers for medical schools, and so they'd, uhm....  pay dudes to steal bodies.  If you were near a medical school, there was an absolute chance that you were going to be dug up and dissected.  What I found out thanks to this movie is that ground zero for this practice getting particularly grim was in Edinburgh, Scotland.  Look up the Burke and Hare murders.  This shit is wild, yo.

But it turns out that if your business is selling bodies for fun and profit, it's easy to turn living people into bodies.

Anyhoo...  our movie finds a promising young medical student about to drop out of school as he can't afford it anymore  At the same time, a(n attractive) woman and her daughter come to see the school's headmaster to see if he'll perform surgery to help the daughter walk again.  The cab that is taking them there is driven by our man, Boris Karloff, who also happens to go dig up corpses by night and sell them to the school's headmaster.

What spins out is not a monster movie, but more the horror of the young doctor-to-be realizing what is going on, and his own complicity in the practice, while Boris Karloff and the head doctor reveal how they've been entwined for decades in this foul business of grave robbing, and what sort of man is happy to make money doing it, and why doctors are desperate for it.

The movie also co-stars Bela Lugosi as a servant who wants to get cut in on the body business.  

There are some truly great scenes and ideas in this movie - some from the source material, a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson, and others made up for the film.  It's wonderfully shot by Robert De Grasse - and one of those things RKO always seemed to know to invest in to make their movies look phenomenal.  RKO was no poverty row studio, but they knew where to spend money (until Hughes took over).

All of the stuff with the singing girl is great horror movie work.  Hats off to Wise.

Karloff and Lugosi are rock solid in the movie, but I also really liked Edith Atwater as Meg - the head doctor's maid and mistress.  A complicated role that has to emote and thread the story together, she nails it.  She looked super familiar and I figured out that 24 years later, she was the inn-keeper in True Grit.  

Anyway - I really don't care to spoil the movie, just add it to the list.  There's also some more Val Lewton produced movies from this era I need to get into. Karloff followed these with Isle of the Dead and Bedlam, both of which are held in high esteem, but I've not yet seen.

*Dude never made a bad movie.  Maybe instead of watching every Chabert movie, I could have made a point by watching every Wise movie, but here we are.

Noir Watch: The Window (1949)

Watched:  04/02/2025

Format:  TCM on DVR

Viewing:  First

Director:  Ted Tetzlaff

Noir meets The Boy Who Cried Wolf when a 10 year old kid, sleeping on a balcony in a NYC tenement, sees his neighbors murder a guy through a crack in the blind.  

It's a simple premise, but with the age of the protagonist - ably played by Disney star* Bobby Driscoll - the set up is deeply effective.  The carefree/ consequence-free world of childhood collides headlong into the powerlessness of childhood when everyone wants to explain away what you saw with your own eyes, and your own past misdeeds are coming home to roost as your parents think they're enforcing tough love after your newest lie/ story.

The parents are played by Arthur Kennedy, who was no slouch of an actor (you likely saw him in Lawrence of Arabia and other films), and Barbara Hale, who would go on to household-name fame as Della Street on Perry Mason.   Our killers are the dead-eyed "that guy" actor Paul Stewart (good in so many things, here's his IMDB) and Signal Watch fave, Ruth Roman.  And if Ruth Roman killed someone, I'm sure it's not that wrong.  

It's a tight, short movie, moving through some predictable beats - including what's an effective final chase sequence through darkened, abandoned tenements.

It's kind of amazing how many movies used to be based on the idea of living on top of each other in apartment situations, or had major plotpoints that require people live in multi-family set-ups, and it's just kind of gone away. But certainly the cramped quarters of New York City and what your neighbors could be up to was part of more than one decent movie over the years.

I think it's gutsy they did this with a kid, and I wonder what it would look like in a modern context.  This is 1949, so this movie relies on the standard "mom and dad are busy, go play in abandoned buildings" living that hasn't seen the light of day in this century.  But even back in the 1940's, I'm not sure any studio but RKO is putting this movie out. 

This one has aired a few times, and I've avoided it as I often roll my eyes at things kids do in movies that are otherwise grounded, but this one feels buyable.  Our lead kid isn't a super detective or genius - he's mostly relying on adrenaline and the fact he knows the buildings.  

I see why this one gets brought up, which it does, because it's well-directed, edited and shot, and the story is lean and clean.  It's maybe not my favorite, but it gets the job done.

*and cautionary tale

Musical Watch: Ziegfeld Girl (1941)

Watched:  04/01/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Directors:  Robert Z. Leonard, Busby Berkeley

Increasingly lost to time is the impact Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. had on American culture of the 20th century.  A showman, theatrical empresario, producer, promoter and more, Ziegfeld is most famous for his Ziegfeld Follies, a series of extravagant Broadway shows that ran from around 1907 to his death in the 1930's.  Much of what we thought of as a stage full of beautiful young women that flooded musicals in the 1930's and 1940's and gave Busby Berkeley (credited here) a career was Hollywood tinkering with the shows Ziegfeld had staged, based on French revues.   He managed to employ folks like Irving Berlin, WC Fields, Will Rogers and many, many more.

Had Ziegfeld not passed when he did, it's likely he would have expanded into Hollywood in a more serious manner (he was already there and died in Hollywood in 1932), bringing his sensibilities to the big screen.

He was credited with creating "The Glorification of the American Girl", both featuring and populating shows with large choruses of female performers.  But he featured acts of all kinds, and shows to this day are based within the Ziegfeld Follies (see the currently running Funny Girl).  He was also not afraid to push into the risque, and folks knew what they were getting.  You can find all sorts of interesting photos online looking for Ziegfeld girls.

In what is a star-studded flick - the movie follows three girls/ women who enter into the Follies.  Like the Schwab's Pharmacy story, Ziegfeld - never seen in this movie!  And treated a bit like that Wizard Judy Garland had previously tangled with - would pluck girls out of their mundane lives by finding them behind perfume counters, working in elevators, etc...   A bit of instant wish-fulfillment if you caught the right guy's eye (which is kind of a nightmare, but in an era in which women's career options were limited, and many Ziegfeld girls married well, it's not nothing).

Western Watch: Red River (1948)

Watched:  03/26/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Howard Hawks

Who knew the highly regarded American Classic film would be pretty good?

Red River (1948) is a Howard Hawks post-war epic, one of a dozen John Wayne classics, and features a good number of the A-list supporting players of the era who show up again and again in different configurations through the 1960's.  

The film is also curiously myth-building for Texas history, and it's curious to see a movie made about it 80 years after the fact, rather than the additional near-80 that have since passed.  John Wayne plays a gunman who joins a wagon train in the years just prior to the Civil War going southwest out of St. Louis.  Somewhere in what would become the Oklahoma Indian Territory, Wayne decides to peel off and head South, crossing the Red River into Texas.  There a girl who begs to go with him (Coleen Gray*) but he says he'll send for her.  He's heading out into hard land with his pal, Groot (Western staple Walter Brennan).  

Pirate Watch: The Spanish Main (1945)

Watched:  03/18/2025

Format:  TCM on the ol' DVR

Viewing:  First

Director:  Frank Borzage

I like a good pirate picture.  It's always going to end in flashing swords, some jerk getting his comeuppance, and a good chance there's Maureen O'Hara in amazing gowns.  And this movie is that.

Apparently it's the passion project of Paul Henreid, the movie's star, who plays a Dutch sea captain who crashes in the Spanish West Indies.  The Governor of the territory (a villainous Walter Selzak) condemns him to death, but he and his pals escape.  Years later, Henreid has taken on the pirate-y name of The Barracuda and takes the ship carrying Maureen O'Hara - Spanish nobility sent to the Governor to be married.  

To spare the lives of a second ship, O'Hara offers herself up to Henreid as his bride.  The two marry, but it's a farce, intended to drive the Governor insane on Henreid's part.  Of course, they're two good looking people, and figure out they actually like this idea.  However, the Pirate Brotherhood/ Grand Council/ Whatever decides that she's too much of a risk, and they kidnap her and deliver her to the Governor.  By-the-by, one of the pirates is Anne Bonny, played here by Binnie Barnes, who its suggested, has been Henreid's lady-friend.

Anyway, piratey shenanigans commence and O'Hara brings a musket to a sabre fight, and its awesome.

We've kind of lost sight of the rollicking adventure in modern action movies.  This is certainly that.  Henreid is having a blast not playing the debonair gentleman lover, and O'Hara is why they paid O'Hara piles of money to be in movies.  

Yes, there's a scene casually thrown in where Henreid half-seriously threatens O'Hara with a deeply problematic fate worse than death, and that's a big mark against the movie.  Not very heroic, Paul.

But overall, it's a good, pirates as anti-fascists sort of romp.  And makes you, as always, very glad you weren't on a boat during this particular era in history, because, man.  As much fun as a pirate bar seems, everything else seems designed to kill you.

Ms. O'Hara's would really like to speak with the manager

 

Lupino Noir Watch: They Drive By Night (1940)

Watched:  02/06/2025

Format:  DVD

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Raoul Walsh

I watched They Drive By Night (1940) about ten years ago now, and had only vague memories of the film.  My write up of it is so brief, it did not help when it came to trying to remember more than a few snips of it.

But somewhere on the internet I saw someone mention it starred Bogart, Ann Sheridan and Ida Lupino in one movie, and that seemed like a darn good reason to watch it again as I've certainly become more familiar with all of their work in the ensuing years.  The film stars George Raft, and, to be honest, George Raft is not my cup of tea.  I think this movie was, even 10 years ago, when I decided "I just don't think that guy is much of an actor".

The movie is almost two separate movies - the first half being about the dangers of being a truck driver pre-WWII America, driving produce from Northern California to LA.  There's lousy management that will try not to pay you, guys trying to seize your truck because that manager won't pay you, and the less than stellar pre-Eisenhower road system.  And so being married seems like a dumb thing to do, because you're never home.  

Hitchcock Watch: Saboteur (1942)

Watched:  12/28/2024

Format:  4K Disc

Viewing:  First, as it turns out

Director:  Alfred Hitchcock

For Christmas, K and Dug got me a set of Hitchcock movies, and I am pretty jazzed.  I hadn't seen latter-era Hitchcock, but was under the impression I had seen this movie, but... as I found out two minutes in, I had never seen Saboteur (1942).  So, all the better.

My Hitchcock era was, like most 90's film school kids, in the 1990's, and I haven't gone back a lot, which seems... dumb.  I loved Vertigo and North By Northwest back in the day.  So to have a chance to fill in some blanks and refire my interest in Hitch is a great opportunity.

Firstly - there's some amazing stuff in this film, which should be obvious, I guess, Hitchcock being Hitchcock.  But the visuals of the sabotage and conflagration that follows in the film are remarkable.  I suppose I should know the name Joseph A. Valentine, but it's one I'll now know as the eye behind the camera here, bringing us visuals like the wall of white with black smoke drifting in, the desperate reach for Frank Fry off the hand of the Statue of Liberty, the barren plains of the desert southwest, and the train car full of circus-folk by night.

Noir-adjacent Watch: Hangover Square (1945)

Watched:  11/25/2024

Format:  Kino BluRay

Viewing:  Second?

Director:  John Brahm

We previously watched this movie.

If I were going to program a series of movies and those movies were *about* (at least in part) music, I'd feel compelled to include Hangover Square (1945).  And I think I'd really manage to freak out the squares with this oddball character study/ thriller.  

Apparently the movie had a long road from book to screenplay to how it was finally shot and made.  It was also the final movie of Laird Cregar, one of the most promising actors of the 1940's, who died before this movie was released - a heart-attack brought on from a speed-fueled crash diet, intestinal issues from his attempts to lose weight, and other factors.  He was only 31.

Along the way, the book - which took place in modern London - was changed into a gaslight-era story about a composer, and almost nothing of the source material remained except the title.  Part of me is horrified for the original author, part of me knows this is basic studio mechanics, and part of me quite likes the final result.  So....

It's a bit of an odd movie because I'm not sure it has a "hero".  It has a protagonist you follow, but out of morbid curiosity.  After all, we know he is a killer in the first 30 seconds of the film - it's that no one else knows or wants to believe it.  So what happens when he's left free?  And gets cross-wise with a conniving songbird who is a walking red flag in the shape of Linda Darnell?

The score of the film is phenomenal, culminating in a diegetic performance of the concerto Cregar's character has been working on since before the film's start, The Concerto Macabre.  

The concerto is worked into the film throughout, as is the use of fire, pits, and other signs of Cregar's character's madness.  I really don't know how to talk about Bernard Hermann's work without gushing, or this one in particular.

And Cregar, himself is pretty terrific.  This may be his finest role in a very brief, very impressive slate before his untimely death.  He's sympathetic, even while you're screaming at the other characters to knock it off or stop him.  

I also think Darnell is at the height of her powers here.  Gorgeous, crafty, acting for the benefit of other characters while the audience knows what's up, and not making it cheesy...    And, ultimately, iron willed about what she wants and how to get it...  

oh no.  I've accidentally posted a pic of Linda Darnell.

Anyway - it's a dated portrait of mental illness that treats it a bit like a magical curse, but is pretty good nonetheless.  And manages two of the best scenes I've seen in a movie in recent years, with the Guy Fawkes sequence, and the finale, which I think is how real filmmakers should end a movie (more fire, you cowards).

At a tight 77 minutes, it's a complete story that rides like a roller coaster, ending in a huge twist and turnover at the end.  

I guess my pitch is this:  If the factors in a movie are imagery, sound and performances - they surely line up incredibly well in this movie.  That it stars two actors who died young and tragically, and that this likely got lost a bit in the shuffle as the war wrapped up may be why it's chattered about with a subset of film nerds, but not more in the conversation.  It was also not universally beloved when it came out - so maybe it just hits my sensibilities particularly well.

Noirvember Watch: Desert Fury (1947)

Watched:  11/1/2024

Format:  Criterion

Viewing:  First

Director:  Lewis Allen

Well, I'm not sure I started Noirvember 2024 with a bang, but I did finally check this one off the list.

First - yes, this thing is in color, and maybe worth seeing a 1947 crime film shot in vivid, even lurid, color.  See Lizabeth Scott's golden locks!  Marvel at the color of Mary Astor's pants!  (No, really, it's a pretty movie and maybe worth a watch just for that.)  But the minute people start talking in what is supposed to be snappy crime-drama dialog, you kind of know you're in trouble.  It's mostly non-sequiturs and stern declarations.

To me, Desert Fury (1947) is a bit of a melodramatic slog, and hinges on a protagonist hurling herself into bad ideas so often, while offering no sympathetic or redeeming qualities (other than a stellar wardrobe), it's hard to get, here in 2024, what we're supposed to like about her.  The motivation of the criminals in the movie is murky - and why they're even in the little desert oasis just feels like incompetence on someone's part.  

The set-up is that a clearly mid-20's Lizabeth Scott (playing 19 here and looking 32) returns home from quitting another finishing school.*  She wants to come work at her mother's casino so she can make a ton of cash and lord it over the judgey people of her hometown.  Not a bad plan.  On the way into town, she comes across John Hodiak and Wendell Corey, a pair of crooks.  A very young Burt Lancaster plays the town Deputy and soda bottle seller?  I never figured out what was happening.

Mary Astor, who looks like an older cousin to Scott (only 15 years older but looking maybe 7), plays her mother.  She's obviously the best actor in this by a country mile, playing a tough-girl from a rough background who made it big out west.  They live in an amazing mansion.  But Mary Astor basically wants for Scott to marry a nice-boy and join polite society and get away from her frankly very awesome-looking life of running a casino.

Hodiak and Corey have returned to the small town to sort of lay low and do some gambling at Mary Astor's casino.  Why?  It's unclear.  Hodiak is still recovering from the death of his wife that occurred in this one-horse-town.  So why they came back is anyone's guess.

Scott falls for Hodiak for absolutely no reason other than everyone tells her not to.  Just as she does everything just because someone told her not to - no matter how stupid that thing appears to be.  Men fall for her because she's the only sexually available woman in the movie, so Lancaster thinks she's swell, and Hodiak hurls himself at her.

Very, very clearly Hodiak and Corey are supposed to be in a gay relationship, and we learn that Hodiak was previously married to a woman - Scott's doppelganger - who wound up dead under mysterious circumstances.  And STILL Scott is like "I don't care!  I love his tiny mustache!".  

Things come to a head because everyone in this is kind of dumb, and the movie ends as you'd expect.

I'm just not a Lizabeth Scott fan.  She's fine.  She's not annoying when playing a well-written character.  But in an era littered with other actors I like, she doesn't move the needle for me as a plus for watching a film.  My understanding is that producer Hal B. Wallis was deeply in love with her, it ended up destroying him, and there's probably an interesting movie in there.

The movie was... okay.  From a "what's actually happening versus what we got past the censors" this movie is pretty amazing.  From a "do I like these characters or care about what's happening?" the movie was a bust for me.  I can take convoluted plots and characters making mistakes, even walking right into a bad idea for money or sex, but I'm not sure this one pulls it off enough that I care.  

*I finally read up on what finishing school was, and the past is a fascinating and foreign land

Citizen Kane Watch: Citizen Kane (1941)

Watched:  09/04/2024

Format:  Criterion Disc

Viewing:  Third?  Fourth?

Director:  Orson Welles

It's an absolute crime that Orson Welles got so screwed by the studio, the cowardly Academy and Hearst.  At age 26, he makes the most groundbreaking mainstream cinema we've seen since The Great Train Robbery, that changes things forever, rewrites the rulebook, brings some of the finest new actors America will see to Hollywood, all while giving the middle finger to the Jeff Bezos/ Elon Musk of his day - and everyone was too nervous to give the guy his flowers.

Oh, to be young and fearless and brilliant but not realize the very movie you're making will cause you so much grief.

We put on the movie because Jamie reminded me, here as we approach our 29th dating anniversary, that she'd never seen it.  And I don't think I'd watched it since we lived in Phoenix, so 2006 at the most recent.  So it was time.  I do own the 4K set from Criterion, but the 4K disc had issues, and we swapped out for BluRay for the second half.  To be honest - the movie's 4K glow-up looked weird and I likely won't watch that disc again as it looked *too* clean, like they removed the film grain.

There's nothing else like Citizen Kane (1941).  Even The Magnificent Ambersons got taken away and cut up into a studio melodrama - and it's still great, just not Kane.  It's a two-hour montage of technique, breathtaking visuals, stunning performances, cultural criticism, and hurling a spear at the heart of the American myth.  And in 2024, a reminder that nothing is ever new.  We are not living in unprecedented times.

In 1940, movies in the US were already undergoing some interesting changes.  We'd had movies like Fantasia in 1940, Walt taking his stab at *art*, but even the good ones were working with the language of stage.  Citizen Kane starts with a curiously framed scene and goes into a full newsreel announcing the death of Charles Foster Kane, laying the groundwork for what's coming.  Linear time be damned, the film is going to start at the end and work in flashback, trying to understand our central character.  Yes, a thousand films would borrow from this novelistic conceit.  

The look is as shocking as German Expressionism, taking cues more from European works that American film.  Not that there wasn't lovely stuff in the US at the time, but the camera thrown at odd angles, the curious lighting, the massive, cavernous sets- it all says "Fritz Lang with a budget" more than it says RKO movie.  And people have borrowed from this movie endlessly, but they never quite commit to the look and feel in the same way that Welles did.  Noir would look at this movie and say "thanks!  Don't mind if I do!" The characters in the film borrow from archetypes and made new ones.  Joseph Cottens' moralistically gray best-friend/ observer of the Great Man's downfall.  The business partner with the big heart who remembers what could have been, if only...  Hell, my girl Jean Hagen borrowed Dorothy Comingore's accent and persona for Singin In The Rain.  

For folks in 2024, seeing what was possible, cinematically, at the time might be a shock.  Or seeing the Mercury Theater players rolled out to the public for the first time, showing movie-goers how it's done.  But, more than that, it's both history lesson and demonstration that time is a flat circle.  You're going to want to cry seeing the thinly-veiled real history repeating itself with a Great Man propelling it - and these days, we see so many pro "Great Man" movies about people doing shit like designing a marginally better car.

There's no real reason to discuss Citizen Kane here at The Signal Watch.  It's *the* movie.  It's the Citizen Kane of movies. You either stop here or we'd all be in for a TLDR post that covers well-documented territory.

What I would recommend is setting aside two hours and watching it.  It's way shorter than an Avengers movie.   

If Hollywood hadn't gotten so weird on Welles, we wouldn't have probably had Lady From Shanghai, and that would have been a bummer.  But who knows what we would have had?  In the meantime, we can watch film chase this one til the end of time.

 

Noir Watch: Lured (1947)

Watched:  08/27/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Douglas Sirk

Well, this was my second viewing, and my opinion on this movie did not change one iota.  It's a good one.  And I think my prior write-up handles my stance pretty darn well.  I am now more familiar with Sanders and Coburn, and recognize Calleia from other movies.  But, yeah - same is same.

In the comments on the first viewing post, Jamie said she'd watch it with me, and:  mission accomplished.

Still wrestling with Sexy Lucy.

Horsey Watch: National Velvet (1944)

Watched:  07/08/2024

Format:  Max

Viewing:  First

Director:  Clarence Brown

Selection:  Jamie

It's unlikely I would have picked National Velvet (1944) for myself.  It's a movie about a 12 year old girl who loves horses.  But, Jamie mentioned it a while back, and she's sick right now, and when you're sick in our house, you get to pick the movie/ show/ etc...  Plus, it *is* a bonafide classic, and I had not seen any of Elizabeth Taylor's work from when she was a kid.*

It's good!  This is a solid, fun, sweet movie.  The cast is terrific, the sets and matte paintings and locations all very pretty.  We get Angela Lansbury as a teen, Liz as a pre-teen, Mickey Rooney in his 20's, Juanita Quigley (one of the Our Gang kids), Donald Crisp as the father and Anne Revere is phenomenal as Liz's mother.

Liz plays a girl, one Velvet Brown, in that horse-crazy phase who stumbles upon two things at the same time - a hard-travelling Mickey Rooney and a lovely new horse one of her neighbors has purchased, but can't tame.  She loves the horse immediately.  

Her family definitely has echoes of the Smiths in Meet Me In St. Louis, which has to be a coincidence given their production schedules and years of release, but one also can guess the studios were providing scenes of domesticity during pre-war years to give their war-time audiences something to remind them of normalcy.   Velvet's elder sister is boy-crazy, her younger sister a bit of a scold, her baby brother, an absolute weirdo.  And mom understands and dad does not.  

Also, it turns out that Mom once swum the English Channel for a cash prize (which was not accomplished til 1926, about when this movie occurs.  However, the film Million Dollar Mermaid is about Annette Kellerman, who tried in 1905).  

Through a series of hi-jinks, the horse, named The Pie or Pie comes into Velvet's possession, and she and Mickey Rooney work to get the horse into England's premier horse race, the Grand National Sweepstakes, which is five miles of obstacles/ jumps.  

Along the way, Mickey Rooney must determine what sort of fellow he is, the family has to come to believe in Velvet's dream and Velvet embraces what it means to take that one big shot in life.

By the time this movie was shot, Mickey Rooney was a very established star and about to ship out for war.  And Taylor was becoming established as a young star - and it's clear to see how very good she was going to be, even here.  Her role could have been saccharine or twee, but somehow she manages to make it sympathetic - helped along by the ensemble.  And, yes, Angela Lansbury is terrific, too.

I dunno.  I liked it.  There's few surprises.  And it's funny to see Rooney play another former jockey in 1979's Black Stallion (I genuinely looked up if that movie is an unofficial sequel and I just missed something.  It's not.).   But the movie is sweet, hits all the right notes for a wartime family melodrama, and takes the feelings of the young characters seriously (except for bug-collecting Donald).  

If you've got kids, I think they'd dig it.  But I'm a 49 year old dude, and I was a fan.

*I know!  You'd think I'd have watched some Lassie movies.

Noir Watch: Violence (1947)

Watched:  04/10/2024

Format:  TCM Noir Alley

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jack Bernhard

Selection:  me

This was definitely a low-budget, poverty row B-movie, but:

• It felt weirdly timely in regards to the nonsense politics and politicians backed by big business, appealing to people's worst instincts to get them to work against themselves
• It has a full amnesia plot that involved getting bonked on the head to restore memories
• Star Nancy Coleman is cute as a button
• That Guy! actor Sheldon Leonard is pretty solid as the heavy behind the politician
• Perry White (John Hamilton) himself is in this for a minute as a doctor
• I think Michael O'Shea is a good actor who was terribly miscast here
• I confess to being disappointed no one texted or called to ask what I was doing while watching to the film so I could say "watching Violence".

Maybe the most interesting thing about the film is the conflict external to that of our leads, and that's the state of living soldiers were asked to return to after 4 years in the Pacific and Europe, and the expectation that they'd just slot back in like good boys (and girls).  A movie doesn't need to be a message movie to convey the spirit of the moment, but movies can reflect what is going on at the time to illuminate what was taken for granted or being discussed in every day life.  And certainly the desire of veterans to have a better life than what they left upon their return is something we can still understand.

I didn't hate it, but it's definitely not a slick 1940's or 50's big studio picture.  But it's also not so far down in poverty row that you're worried the walls of the sets might fall over.

Noir Lupino Watch: Road House (1948)

Watched:  03/07/2024

Format:  BluRay

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Jean Negulesco

Selection:  Me

I'd seen this movie before, about seven years ago now.  

All I remembered from the movie was Lupino bowling and Widmark cackling, that they had a really good exterior set for the hotel where Lupino is staying, ad that the back half got real, real dark.  All of these things were correct/ memorable.

Re-reading my original post, I could easily echo back pretty much the whole thing here again, but I won't, so go read it before continuing on here.

New items:

• Lupino gets top billing.  I don't really have a feel for Lupino's overall popularity, but she was riding pretty high in '48.  I feel like she's had a resurgence in popularity with noir and classic film buffs, in part because we know her career arc, but also because she translates very well to our sensibilities for what good acting looks like now.
• There's a throughline that Lupino's character used to have a good voice, but she lost it, and is doing the best she can.  She really sounds like a 3-pack-a-day smoker through the whole movie, and her (actually Lupino's!) singing voice is better than expected, and she's got charisma to spare.  She does smoke like a chimney through the movie and I wonder if she did off camera as well to get that sound.
• I think we're supposed to make something of the Madama Butterfly reference, but I would need to do logic pretzels to figure out what that is, other than perhaps Jefty's regressive attitudes about marriage?
• Widmark's character is named "Jefty", which is supposed to be a clever take on the fact his name is Jefferson T. Robbins.  You will hear the name "Jefty" approximately every 20 seconds during the runtime of this film.
• This movie led to some speculation at our house about whether people just bowled more in the 1940's so they knew they could get the shots they needed at the bowling alley (you could film me all day and I'm not sure you'd see a strike.  I suck.)
• The drunken shooting stuff at the end of the film is unhinged.  Just terrifying.
• In some ways this movie is about a guy who is driven to insanity by Ida Lupino existing in his orbit and one could write a thesis based on the gender roles in this movie, expectations, and class systems, and how that makes Jefty snap (and use his power to manipulate everyone).  There's a lot to dig into here.
• I'll argue that the right thing to do at the end of the movie is for Pete, Susie and Lily to form a throuple.  Susie seems game for just about anything.

I like this movie, as simple and straightforward and with at least two major plotholes as it is.  I would have liked more papering over the flimsiness of the case presented against Pete, but I do like the execution of where the movie is headed after.  

A fun, dark romp that feels like a melodrama and then gets real weird, real fast.  Plus, Lupino in gowns, singing is not horrible.

Christmas Watch: Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Watched:  12/23/2023

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  George Seaton

We watch this movie pretty much every year, and I wasn't feeling great yesterday, so I put it on as something I could kind of half-watch.  

I hope you've seen the movie, and if you haven't, I recommend you do watch it.  It's a lovely bit of Christmas Magic in convenient movie form that doesn't rely on mid-life crises or devastating the audience in order to work, Frank Capra.  

But because the movie is so well known and I've written it up before here and here and here, that's not going to be what I write up here.  Instead, we're going to get weird.

Holiday Watch: It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Watched:  12/21/2023

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Frank Capra

A few years ago, we covered this movie on the podcast.  I think Nathan and I did a lovely job of discussing the impact of the film on us as viewers and why it works.

Re-watching the film this year, I'm once again amazed at how well so much information - both plot and emotional - is conveyed in the movie and it never feels rushed or crammed.  It's only after you've seen the movie multiple times that you really process "wow, George had a whole lot happen to him on very specific days of his life", but that's also part of what makes it work.  Getting married during the week of October 28, 1929 was just a horrible time for someone in the building and loan business to have such a big event, for example.

And we aren't given a St. George for our George Bailey.  He's a normal guy with dreams that he can't pursue, and the only thing keeping him sane is probably Mary.  He's holding a lot in and holding a lot back every minute of every day, which all comes spilling out when Uncle Billy loses the money.  "Why do we have to have all these kids?" is maybe the craziest line in the movie.  But he's also already had it with Billy 15 years ago - he should have been at college if the guy could have taken over for his father.  And so-on-and-so-forth.  

It's the rare movie that acknowledges that people can break from giving up their dreams - or that they'd be put in an awful place for doing what seems right.  Hallmark movies have made a mint off selling the idea of giving up your dreams for small town domesticity - or at least shifting the dream that way.  And it's even less so that a movie allows a male character to snap after landing the house, wife and kids, especially in this era.*  This was post-war America, and we were winners!  

But I think George Bailey is all of us on some level.  Unless you're, like, Madonna, and only *think* giving your servants a second thought is magnanimous.**  There's a lot more George Baileys walking around out there than those who made it where they'd hoped, who gave up who they thought they were and dreams of where they'd be than any rando living at the top.  Even George's little corner of the living room, which goes unmentioned, where he's plugging away at drawings of bridges and buildings, still wanting to be an architect...  it's just kind of funny and sad.  And, God, that's too real.  It's no shock that he smashes it.

But at the end of the day, the movie works because the real message is just, if not *more* true - that all that matters, really, are the folks in your life and how you can help them.  It's not to say your dreams don't matter - but we also have to appreciate what we do have, and the people around us, and know that we matter to them, just as much as they matter to us.  And believing that we're not replaceable cogs is a very hard thing to process.  I imagine it was even more so in 1946, when you saw your friends drafted and shipped off.

Ironically, Stewart was a war hero, but wouldn't ever discuss it or use it in promotion.  He'd been drafted well before Pearl Harbor and exited the service as a Brigadier General.  During the war, he piloted 20 missions I believe flying B-24's.  But he also served as in command, and would remain in reserve until 1959.  He was as much Harry Bailey as George Bailey.

*I know - controversial!

**But Madonna gets a pass for whatever she's up to, here at The Signal Watch

Holiday Classic Watch: Holiday Inn (1942)

Watched:  12/04/2023

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Mark Sadnrich

My understanding is that this movie, released in August of 1942, landed hard with Americans as we were facing the reality of what was going to be a long and deadly war on two fronts.  More specifically, this movie features the screen debut of "White Christmas" (he's sung it on the radio post-Pearl Harbor in 1941), which Bing Crosby would turn into the best selling single of all time with 50 million copies ringing up the tils as it became a sort of anthem for wishing for a return to normalcy.  

Holiday Inn (1942) is a story about a musical trio breaking up as the singer (Crosby) and the girl are breaking off to start a new life running a farm in Connecticut when the girl runs off with the dancer (Fred Astaire) to pursue dreams of stage glory.  Crosby eventually turns the farm into an inn where he can put on shows, just on holidays, trading the dream of stardom in exchange for just having a bit of fun every once in a while.  

Along comes a new girl, and a series of shows for every holiday starting with New Year (after introducing "White Christmas" during the meet-cute).  Meanwhile, Astaire is dumped and returns to the Inn, and begins pursuing the new girl whom Crosby has fallen hard for.

Anyway, the story is just a framework for Bing Crosby to dooby-doo his way through songs and Astaire to knock your socks off.  Unfortunately, I don't think it leaves you feeling particularly great about a single person on screen except for Crosby's chef, played by Louise Beavers.  

There is mention of the war during the WWII sequence as the movie pauses to reflect on what we're fighting for in song, and shows film of our militarization and FDR at the mic.  While the film exists as light entertainment, its hard to imagine what July 4, 1942 was actually like as the country leaned into what was clearly going to be a multi-year effort in which we'd lose countless servicemen and women.  But what is apparently true is that Pearl Harbor occurred during filming and they decided to really step up the July 4th sequence.

It is likely you've heard several songs from this movie over the years.  "Easter Parade" gets trotted out.  And it's worth mentioning Crosby would team with Danny Kaye for the 1954 classic White Christmas while Astaire would beat him to the punch with 1948's Easter Parade.

I was surprised to see the version on Amazon Prime retains the blackface number (Lincoln's Birthday).  Though I remember seeing it on my TV Christmas of 1994 when I first watched the movie, basic cable cut the number decades ago.  And, yes, it is that bad.  It's also a plot point, so the movie can be marginally confusing without the number, but to keep it in...   Look, I am not going to tell you what should or should not offend you or what criteria should be used to play or not play a film.  I am fine with cable cutting the sequence to keep the film out there, and from an historical perspective, the movie is a reflection of the time in which it was made.  As film fan and historian, yes, keep it in.  As a person who knows this is f'd up, and always was - you can skip the movie altogether if you like.  There are clips of not-offensive scenes on YouTube.  Or, jump over the scene whilst watching.  You do what works for you.

We chose to ffwd through the sequence once we realized it was there.  I've seen it, don't need to see it again.  

There's a whole discussion to be had about how it seems the younger generation wants to deal with older media, and that's to stuff it down the memory hole.  And I'll argue some film historians are currently trying to make it seem that very-mainstream-Hollywood was out of step with the general attitudes of the public at the time of a film's release, something I think there's more than ample evidence to suggest is not true.  We can discuss at some point, but that's a lot to hash out.*

What it does mean is that Holiday Inn is a fascinating bit of history in a single Christmas movie.  The film spun off multiple hit singles we still know, it sold people on the idea of secular Christmas songs, it does some crazy stuff where part of the illusion in the film's final minutes is *showing* the pulleys and levers of the illusion right out in the open to create a secondary illusion (and showing how films were made in 1942).  It shows some really depressing racism, sexism, etc... and it's a time capsule containing war propaganda. 

Plus, two of the biggest stars of the era.  Happy Holidays, film lovers.

*this is 78 years after *slavery*, and 6 after Gone With the Wind.  It's not just your elderly relatives that were just wildly racist.