This was called Cold Water and it was another one that was totally ludicrous, involving things that don't happen to characters who behave crazily who we don't care anything about.
It seemed that Eve Myles was the only one who had been told she was in a black comedy - only it isn't, as far as I could ascertain. Andrew Lincoln, Indira Varma and Ewen Bremner are the other main participants.
Fabulously directed take on Conrad's 'The Secret Agent', adapted by key Hitch collaborator of the era Charles Bennett - sadly still relevant in topicality. Good performances from Sylvia Sidney and Oscar Homolka, and Desmond Tester as young master Stevie; John Loder less successful as detective - who should have been played by Robert Donat, had not bronchitis intervened. William Dewhurst notable as the bomb maker; Charles Hawtrey visible in very early bit part, Peter Bull, Aubrey Mather as greengrocer.
Hitch admitted to Truffaut that he probably shouldn't have killed the boy (and the dog) - would have worked better if Verloc had directly killed him (but why would he? and indirectly he does kill him) - but I'm not sure - it still gives Sidney the motivation to get her own back in the brilliantly staged and edited murder scene (particularly loved her then going to sit down in long shot with the feet of the corpse still visible in the foreground) - also it fits in to the oeuvre of the man who brought us Psycho.
Photographed by Bernard Knowles, edited by Charles Frend.
Hitch is apparently visible outside the cinema when the lights go back on.
When Melvyn Douglas is masquerading as the 'gardener' and he keeps whistling and whistling.. we could both have killed him. Then it's all the more satisfying when Irene Dunne 'twists the tables' (to use my Q's phrase) on him and forces him into the public eye and shameful divorce. So it's a slightly irritating set-up with a most satisfying resolution, written by Sidney Buchman from a story by Mary McCarthy.
With Billy Benedict, uncredited, in the newspaper office - in hundreds of bit parts well into the eighties. Plus a good part for Robert Greig - known to us as Preston Sturges' butler types - as the wicked uncle.
Shimmeringly photographed by Joe Walker, produced by Everett (brother of Robert) Riskin.
Both Jack and Blake were drinking too much at the time. I can quite imagine, and without irony, audiences walking out of that film in 1963 with 'Phew - I need a drink after that!' Jack Lemmon is absolutely unforgettable as the awful alcoholic - scene in the drunk tank in straitjacket unforgettable. (He narrowly lost out on the Oscar to Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird - hmm - a difficult call. I would have gone with Lemmon, myself.) And where he destroys the greenhouse looking for that last bottle - I read somewhere he did it perfectly, with incredible emotion.. then the next day he got to the set and no one could look him in the eye... Where did I read this? It's not in 'Some Like It Cool'? And there was a technical problem with the take and he had to do it again.
And Lee Remick is also great as his even worse partner-in-crime, particularly in motel room scene. Their foolish antics when drunk seem absurd and not at all funny - like one reviewer put it, when you're the only sober person at a party. Makes me think even my most bibulous moments make me look sober in comparison.
Jack Warner only agreed to the film if it had a happy ending - he found out too late - ha!
Jack Klugman we know from - what? I've never seen the TV Odd Couple. 12 Angry Men? And Charles Bickford.
Music by Henry Mancini, photographed by Philip Lathrop, edited by Patrick McCormack.
Very good, very adult and powerful film from that era, I guess Leaving Las Vegas the closest comparable thing of late.
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| The Psycho moment. |
Emilia Clarke (surely in real life quite like this character?) cheers up quadriplegic Sam Claflin before he decides to end it all. Jojo Moyes' novel (and screenplay) was based on a true life rugby player's similar quandary.
That was Vanessa Kirby as the unapologetic ex. Diane Morgan has a cameo.
The Restaurant Paul is a real bistro in the Place Dauphin in the 3eme. Bumble bee tights just visible.
So let's examine the beginning - a man and his college 'BFF' go to a clinic where she is taking 'the test' to find her perfect compatible other. This could have been any other relationship drama without this perverse and maddening opening note, which really isn't clever or thought-provoking or funny - was it supposed to be funny? I don't think so, as nothing else in the film is.
Clearly destined for one another Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots - yet she ends up with the chosen 'other' - a non-character, really, whilst they have an affair prolonged over many years. Which finally ends.
Bridges likes long, semi-improvised takes - maybe giving 'our' editor Vic Boydell many choices - she certainly does a great montage scene.
With Zawe Ashton, Steven Cree and, briefly, Jenna Coleman.
Alexander Armstrong just walks out on Caroline Quentin without any warning or discussion, leaving her to fend for two kids. Then he starts a new relationship with a woman he works with. What a bastard!
I seem to remember that Mike Bullen himself was divorced and remarried but don't quote me on that.
The 'style' is over-editing, with its 'trademark' device of showing one sequence from three different points of view rapidly cut together. And I don't mean something significant, I mean like someone getting out of bed.
Supporting cast: Claire Skinner, Anne Reid, Frank Finlay, Stuart McQuarrie, Danny Webb, Elliot Henderson-Boyle & Ace Ryan (the kids). Neighbour Elle Haddington and daughter Abby Ford. At travel agency: Paul Thornley, Chloe Howman, Sarah Okeze, Michelle Holmes.
By season three, Webb, Haddington and Ford have been jettisoned in favour of new neighbours, swingers Alexandra Gilbraith and Matthew Cottle, but the new house still only has one bathroom - what dumbasses. Their kids and unstably married friends are all having problems, and Armstrong is still grappling with what it takes to simply be a good husband... but it all ends up quite satisfactorily. A good diversion.
Six- eight part series for ITV, solidly held together by Quentin.
In many ways, a perfect Saturday night movie, full of Hitch's suspense and wit. Note scene where fugitive from justice Derrick De Marney encourages innocent runaway to take the left fork, to get him to his mysterious murder link. As it happens the right fork is closed for roadworks. 'I was going to go left anyway,' she says. Do we believe her? Anyway, she turns left, and the road crew unblock the right fork anyway, work is finished... Just as much a Hitchcock touch as any of the more celebrated examples -- one of course being the incredible crane shot right into close on the twitching drummer's eyes.
Much amusement and interesting filming of e.g. Pilbeam's meals with family at home.
Confusing beginning - in a welter of edits (Andrew Buckland, Michael McClusker) we experience alcoholic Emily Blunt's strange life, obsessed with the ex and their new baby and with the babysitter, who seems to live next door to the couple - still not sure in my geography. Was initially somewhat confused by the two blondes also.
Still, everything becomes clear with plot twist voiced by Lisa Kudrow - on a train.
The three women - Emily Blunt (fantastic performance), Haley Bennett, Rebecca Ferguson - all seem quite messed up, but so too is a most inappropriate therapist (Edgar Ramirez) and a violent husband (Luke Evans). Justin Theroux is the ex. Allison Janney investigates.
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| Rules Don't Apply, A Kind of Murder, Music and Lyrics, Marley and Me |
Nicely photographed by Charlotte Bruus Christensen. Music by Danny Elfman.
Erin Cressida Wilson adapted Paula Hawkins' novel. Too many red herrings, even for a Manx fisherman, one might argue.
An original screenplay by Neil Paterson depicts orphaned boys being relocated to the wilds of Newfoundland under the care of ultra-strict Scots grandfather Duncan Macrae, grandmother Jean Anderson and aunt Adrienne Corri. The boys are Jon Whiteley (also The Spanish Gardener, Moonfleet) and Vincent Winter (who became an assistant director). Eagle-eyed Q spotted Upstairs Downstairs' Christopher Beeny immediately. With Theodore Bikel as the nice doctor (with rough collie).
The drama evolves when the boys discover a baby.
An unusual film, its lack of sentimentality much in its favour. Filmed on location and at Pinewood by Eric Cross, with Bruce Montgomery providing the music.
Misguided fools - you can eat dog!
Well, no - not at all - suspense is not the name of this game. Peter Reynolds had murdered blackmailer Norman Rodway, shacks up with his bird Noelle Middleton, who's suspicious.
Cheap, unimaginative, bland, boring but mercifully short. An Irish production, filmed there, released through Columbia.
Updated Review 7 January 2016:
Most interestingly written noir sounds almost poetic - difficult to describe, like a forerunner of Poliakoff?; with its rhythms and repetitions and poetic imagery. The scenario is the organised numbers rackets with Cain and Abel (directly referenced) theme. 'Adapted from Ira Wolfert's keenly-researched journalistic novel' (Muller). Full of quotable and most interesting lyrics - I mean dialogue - between John Garfield and Thomas Gomez, Marie Windsor (boss's wife), Howland Chamberlain (nervous accountant who just wants out), Roy Roberts, Beatrice Pearson (her first - and almost only - screen appearance), Paul Fox etc. With arresting moments of action such as Chamberlain's murder, conclusion at bridge ("I kept on going down further") just before which there's a very early use of zoom lens, tapped phone.
Evocatively shot by George Barnes - see great compositions above, and who lights one particular staircase scene brilliantly - apparently guided by Polonsky towards Hopper - with distinctive music by David Raksin.
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| Like a perverse twist on the Romeo & Juliet image |
Doom, death, inexorability - loved also the symbolic moment where Garfield leaves Beatrice Pearson on a high-up fireplace. An independent (Enterprise) production, running a concise 80 minutes. Like Garfield, Polonsky was a Jewish New Yorker, who worked with the French underground in WWII, yet still fell foul of HUAC and was blacklisted, not working credited until his screenplay for Madigan (1968) and as director on Tell Them Willy Boy Is Here (1969).
Robert Aldrich is the assistant director.
I like Olivia Cooke (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, The Limehouse Golem, Bates Motel, Slow Horses - Season 1, I'd forgotten these - Thoroughbreds, Pixie, Life Itself, Sound of Metal) but even she wasn't enough to make me watch more than two of this preposterous series. Its opening, a woman swimming in an indoor pool is suddenly jumped on - assaulted / sexually grappled - by her son?? That sets the tone and is enough of a warning right there. But no - we carry on and watch her inveigle her way into rich family's world, knowing she's up to no good.
I'm afraid it's more proof that people - whether wittingly or not - love a load of bollocks. Bollocks served this time by Amazon / MGM. Very annoying soundtrack selection, also.
Huston and Ben Maddow adapted W.R. Burnett's novel in an extremely tight and dramatic.. Hang on - I haven't read W.R. Burnett's novel, so how can I say anything? Also Burnett is a screenwriter too. Huston was a fan and adapted his novel for High Sierra. So that's that sorted out.
It's classic Huston thieves falling apart - you can see it so many of his films from The Maltese Falcon on. The film is made that much more taut by the absence of any music - apart from the opening credits and the very last Kentucky sequence.
Interestingly agent Johnny Hyde features in two stories about this film. Rozsa wrote the (little) music - Huston didn't like his first draft at the prelude and insisted on something quieter and more tense. Hyde represented Rozsa and unknown Marilyn Monroe. Hyde asked Miklos to take her to lunch and see what he thought. The composer found her 'charming and uncomplicated - a normal Hollywood girl who wanted to get into pictures'. Hyde also introduced her to Huston, who sensed she was being set up to go through the casting couch process of getting parts (the odious Sam Spiegel was hovering in the wings), and decided to give her a full, colour screen test and cast her in the fledgling role. He thought she was fine but MGM didn't get it and dropped her. (He much later worked with her again on the tragic The Misfits.)
For me it's Sam Jaffe's picture - he was Oscar nominated and won the Best Actor Prize at Venice (Huston mistakes it for the Cannes award). But all cast good, especially Jean Hagen as the smitten and unloved wannabe girlfriend of Sterling Hayden. With the oily Louis Calhern, James Whitmore, John McIntire (police commissioner, many films including Psycho and Honkytonk Man), Marc Lawrence (This Gun For Hire, The Ox-Bow Incident, Cloak and Dagger, Key Largo, Italian films in the 50s and 60s, then much on TV), Barry Kelley, Anthony Caruso, Brad Dexter.
Oscar nominated photography by Hal Rossen.
The 1930s. Jewish left wing politicist Barbra Streisand falls for high school jock (and writer) Robert Redford (who Q thins looks too old to be at college - and at 36ish at the time, that's hard to argue with).
Redford and mate Bradford Dillman join the Navy and then fall into Hollywood, but the McCarthy witch hunt rears its ugly head and Redford - who's fought enough intellectual battles by this point - declares himself out (despite the presence of a new baby).
All to Marvin Hamlisch's overwrought interpretations of the theme song, endlessly, often over montages that look like they were filmed with dialogue. What is supervising editor Margaret Booth doing? Is she trying to 'save the film'? Did it only do well at the box office on the strength of the Streisand / Redford pairing? (I certainly remember the film magazines I used to see at the time being full of Redford articles, glossy photos and poster pull-outs.)
It can't help feeling that it doesn't really leave much of an impressions. IT's a wee bit exhausting and feels full of nothing. Time Out's reviewer thought that Redford's performance was the more interesting, in its seeds of self-destruction anticipating the not terribly well rated Great Gatsby the following year.
Photographed by Harry Stradling Jr. in Panavision.
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| Redford asleep already and we haven't even made it to the credits scene |
With: Lois Chiles ('other woman'), Patrick O'Neal, Viveca Lindfors (fellow Hollywood radical), Murray Hamilton, Herb Edelman. (Yes, the scenes in the radio station don't really do anything - what's her job?? - except for not writing.)
Part of the nostalgia boom of the 1970s that unwittingly may have come from Peter Bogdanovich's Last Picture Show, which spawned Sommer of 42 and the like - a nostalgia boom that also took in The Godfather, let's not forget, but somehow sat uneasily against America's more progressive films like those of Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson and Marty Scorsese, and the dark political / conspiracy thrillers of the era. Interesting in that there's a very, very long dissolve on Barbra at one point that hadn't been done until Peter did it first in TLPS. And let's not forget that although Peter's film was set in a earlier era, it's distinctively modern.
Talk about one-way relationships! Hopkins does nothing but take, sulk, rage and be petty and childish - no wonder the final toast is just to old 'acquaintances' rather than friends. The daughter is quite nicely written (by John van Druten and Lenore Coffee) as being a bit Hopkins but luckily a lot of Bette.
She, by the way, is Dolores Moran (also To Have and Have Not) - she would only have been about seventeen. Didn't have much of a film career (controlling husband).
Also, what I would really have liked to have known was - how did Kit's play turn out? And her second book? I get why she's sidelined - in career terms she's not nearly as important as Millie - no, of course not. Well, I want to know.
Sol Polito's camerawork is suitably polished and Franz Waxman's score is beautiful.
A silly, enjoyable film, barely written by Drew Pearce, with something of the goofy flavour of The Nice Guys (possibly introduced by Ryan as exec producer).
Enjoyable chase scene intercut with Emily Blunt and Hannah Waddingham - who seem to be improvising, not altogether successfully? - don't really work - also excessive action finale, Blunt beating up alien Gosling.
Overall though fun and wonderful in the light it shines on the stunt professionals (not forgetting canine versions) - nicely caught in end credits scene. And madness of big budget Hollywood bollocks.
Some notable long takes. DP Jonathan Sela, editor Elisabet Ronaldsdóttir.
Finally - David Ward's Oscar winning con game / revenge saga. Newman takes something of a back seat to Redford - who excels. Note how in interrogation scene with the FBI, (Oscar winning) editor William Reynolds leaves Redford in that long shot, silent, looking down, thinking - classy. The twists and turns are so good that you're left right until the very last iris dissolve thinking - shit! Is something bad going to happen. Which is as much a testament to director Hill - who also won Oscar.
Go on then - the others were for Film, Art direction Henry ('Bummy') Bumstead, later Eastwood collaborator - and James Payne, costumes Edith Head, and score Marvin Hamlisch. Robert Surtees (camera) and Redford were nominated. (Redford never won the acting Oscar - his win was for directing Ordinary People.) For some odd reason it didn't win any BAFTAs, through they had awarded the best actor award to Redford in 1971.
Good support from Harold Gould, plus Robert Shaw, Eileen Brennan, Ray Walston, John Heffernan, Dana Elcar (FBI), Dimitra Arliss, Robert Earl Jones (James's dad).
Should be called The NewsreaderS as both Anna Torv and Sam Reid - who are both equally in a mess - serve in that role.
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| Emotional... |
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| ... wired. |
William McInnes plays probably the most vile (fictional) man on TV at the moment. We keep wishing that in one of his volcanic explosions that he'll have a heart attack!
Meanwhile our sports bloke Stephen Peacocke realises he may not be a racist but he's done nothing to stop it either - to the consternation of his Korean wife Michelle Lim Davidson.
Marg Downey continues to be passively-aggressively annoying and her unstable daughter Philippa Northeast is starting an unwise relationship with Reid.
After Reid melts down in public, well - you wouldn't believe where it leaves us...
Let's play 'Who's the author'? The credits say it was based on an idea by Simone Nathan and Karl Kohrab, which was developed by Michael Bennett, Yvonne Donohoe and Anna McPartlin and then written by Bennett and McPartlin.
Whatever, I'd say it was the worst recorded or mixed series I think I've encountered so far. It doesn't help that the accents of Richard Flood (Irish) and Acushla-Tara Kupe (Kiwi) (both unknowns to us) aren't particularly ear-friendly but they just don't come over at all well, making it a struggle to follow the minutiae of the plot, which involves the disappearance of a young couple and their connections to a. an Irish crime family and b. local Maoris.
Also Kupe is struggling with reconciliation with her extended family, uncle Wayne Hapi and aunt Vanessa Rare, who keep lapsing into Maori at the drop of a hat, and the mystery of the disappearance of her mother when she was young.
The identity of the murderer and the raison d'être, are somewhat far-fetched.
In the mix is stubborn Irish journalist Carolyn Bracken, who's initially a pain in the arse, but then stumbles across the Big Secret that leads us into Season Two... And then her disappearance begins Season Two - which gets us closer to the Goat Murderer, but leaves us with a totally unrequired cliff-hanger. Thanks a lot!
I still don't know what the story was - I Presume that Nat Faxon and Jim Rash did the original adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings' novel, then Payne too it over and solely reworked it his way. Despite the often fabulous dialogue / voiceover / monologues - it's a film in which the most delicate and moving things happen in silence - Amara being told her Mum is dying, the goodbyes at her hospital and that last glowing two minute take where the family settle on the sofa...
The use of Hawaiian music throughout is a definite asset.
Begins 1912. Oh Mr Carson, how could you have been in vaudeville! And Lady Mary - entertaining a man in your bed chamber! Giving pantomime baddies Barrow and Mrs Hughes ammunition! (What the hell is their motivation for being so horrible? Is that ever explained?)
I'd quite forgotten Jessica Brown Findlay - the third sister. And that Rose Leslie was in it at the beginning, arousing the ire of the staff by wanting to be a secretary - gasp!
Some of the Season 2 (WWI) plotting's getting a bit far fetched - the chauffeur was going to pour muck over a visiting General? The scarred man claiming he's the cousin? Mrs Bates' murder? (It's like - let's make Anna and John Bates the loveliest couple - and then let's shower them with shit each time they are almost happy.)
Daisy (Sophie McShera) inheriting farm? Unfinished storylines. Barrow vulnerable for a second, sacked without reference - suddenly is the under-butler? What the fuck is going on? He gets cousin in and only starts scheming again. This nastiness seeps through the whole thing. And yes, let's have Anna raped, Bates murderous - for fuck's fuck's sake! Leave them alone. This continues into season six. I'm afraid I don't think it's very good long form writing.
Edith and her baby - never was there are more tortuous storyline (that seems like it belongs in Victorian melodrama). (I feel sorry for Laura Carmichael whose character is always neglected or suffering).
Frenemies Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton good. Lord Grantham and Carson both blow hot and cold - exhausting (Hugh Bonneville and Jim Carter). Grantham scrapping with Richard E Grant in her Lady's bedchamber? What bollocks!
And yet - it was a shame when it was all over! Like an annoying friend who you miss when they leave. It finishes in a shameless glut of feel-goodness.
Robert Redford died yesterday, 16th September, aged 89. Q picked this well, one of his delicate family studies, his third as director, very well acted - some evidence that actors can make great film directors (Eastwood, Allen, Welles). I'm glad to say we'd been on something of a retrospective in the last couple of years, with films like The Horse Whisperer, The Natural, Sneakers, Quiz Show, Barefoot in the Park, Our Souls at Night, The Company You Keep and Ordinary People.
My favourites: Butch Cassidy, Three Days of the Condor, The Horse Whisperer. The one I most want to watch again: The Sting.
Preacher Tom Skerritt brings up sons (one of whom is Joseph Gordon-Leavitt in his debut) sensibly and with an obsession with fly fishing. Benda Blethyn is mom. The boys grow up to be more sensible academic Craig Sheffer and wilder journalist Brad Pitt. The former falls for Emily Lloyd.
The sensational photography by Philippe Rousselot won the Oscar.
Richard Friedenberg adapted Norman Maclean's story.
I remember Redford in interview once saying that a regrettable by-product of being famous was that he could no longer go anywhere in public. He had the consolation of being a nature lover and being able to relax in that environment, but still...
His biggest achievement, though, was almost certainly the Sundance Festival / Institute.
Likely then one of Joan Collins' first American films. Based on the true 1906 White-Thaw murder case, adapted for the screen by Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch for Fox.
Married architect Ray Milland tries but cannot keep his hands off young Collins but eventually sends her away to finishing school, where multi-millionaire psycho Farley Granger moves in and (somehow) sweeps her off her feet - all in Milton Krasner's gloriously unshadowy CinemaScope Technicolor. Then an audacious in cold blood murder, with witnesses aplenty. But then I thought I'd remembered a scene that then wan't in it, of Collins revealing a repressed memory - it was clearly I who had the memory problem - a false memory.
With Glenda Farrell (Collins' mother), Cornelia Otis Skinner, Luther Adler (Granger's defense).
Displays that amusing lack of cutting evident in early CinemaScope pictures. As a film it was only OK.
Based on Anna Ming's own memoir 'For the Love of Julie', which follows her tireless appeals against the man who murdered her daughter, eventually prompting the change in the Double Jeopardy law.
Worthy story, well held together by Sheridan Smith; another in ITV's long line of true crime dramas.
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| Sheridan with the real Anna Ming |
Naunton and Wayne - 1938 - 'England's on the brink' - but they're talking about the cricket! Very prescient joke.
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| A classic screen partnership is born |
One of Hitch's earlier 'living nightmares'. (My term.)
Great late line from Whitty: 'What an unpleasant journey'!
William Hickey (somewhat aged, noted for his acting tuition at the HB Studio in Greenwich Village) then led us to this, which we hadn't seen for so long that the paint had dried. He's the Don of a family that extends to John Randolph and his son hitman Jack Nicholson, and includes Robert Loggia, Lee Richardson and Anjelica Huston.
Q got it absolutely right - Nicholson did a Brando in The Godfather by stuffing tissue into his upper lip, copying the Italians he'd observed who didn't move their upper lips. Though quite frail Huston knew what he was doing, reminding Nicholson that he should be as thick as he seems, and filming very long takes, particularly between him and Kathleen Turner, and directing Anjelica (then dating Jack) to her Oscar. Indeed, Anjelica sets the whole plot into action by pitting her father (Richardson) again Family beloved Nicholson.
Stanley Tucci's in there somewhere.
The story is from Richard (The Manchurian Candidate) Condon, adapted by he and Janet Roach. Alex North provided a suitably Italian score and classic Hollywood Warner Bros.' editor Rudi Fehr (Dial M For Murder, I, Confess, also Huston's Key Largo) came out of retirement - well, he'd already come out of retirement, actually, Mr. McGilligan, for One From the Heart in 1981 - to cut it. Andrej Bartkowiak (Falling Down, A Good Man in Africa, Terms of Endearment, The Verdict) shot it.
It's a class act of gallows' humour with a good dose of Mafia / honor.
The first of six film collaborations between director Quine and star Jack Lemmon at Columbia, ending with the sublime How To Murder Your Wife, begins with an army comedy which has nothing to do with the TV hit show Hogan's Heroes. (The others were My Sister Eileen, It Happened to Jane, The Notorious Landlady and Bell, Book and Candle, three of which also teamed Lemmon with Ernie Kovacs).
Lemmon absolutely fits the bill as the go-to organizer of a dance between soldiers and (female) nurse officers, with his own eye on Kathryn Grant (also Anatomy of a Murder), abetted by Kovacs but ultimately supported by Arthur O'Connell. Mickey Rooney has a fun cameo. With Dick York, James Darren, Jeanne Manet and an uncredited William Hickey.
Written by Arthur Carter (from his unproduced play), Jed Harris and Blake Edwards. Photographed by Charles Lawton, edited by Charles Nelson, music by Charles Durning. It's quietly amusing.
Highly successful, realistic account of life as cowboy, as hotel clerk Jack Lemmon decides to join Glenn Ford on cattle trail. Based on Frank Harris's questionable autobiographical book 'My Reminiscences as a Cowboy', adapted by Edmund H North and (uncredited) Dalton Trumbo. Loved the stuff about the horse 'having a brain the size as a walnut' and not being a cowboy's best friend at all.
Good earlyish (Some Like It Hot was the year after) role for Lemmon as man who becomes tougher over the trail. With Anna Kashfi, Dick York, Brian Donlevy, Richard Jaeckel.
Splendidly photographed (night scenes especially) by Charles Lawton, edited by William Lyon and Al Clark, music by George Duning, for Columbia.
Lots of good background info here. Stewart, in his first film for Hitch, is wonderful, as the teacher who gradually sniffs out what is going on. Hitch preempts Birdman, 1917 and Adolescence with his continuous take film. It's the scenes with props you look out for - opening champagne, lighting candles - if any of these things go wrong you ruin the whole ten minute take. Ten? I thought it was twenty? Clearly some of the cover-ups were subtler than I realised (maybe the one cut - to Stewart - is one of them?) You could watch it for the subtly changing backdrop alone.
John Dall, Farley Granger, Edith Evanson (housekeeper), Douglas Dick, Joan Chandler, Cedric Hardwicke and Constance Collier.
'Mouvement perpetuel' by Poulenc is the slightly maddeningly appropriate piano music which Farley Granger is clearly not playing. I've definitely heard it in a black and white film as well, not so long ago...
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| Not Hitch. His shape appears somewhat enigmatically as a flashing neon sign later?? |
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| Art: Milton Avery 'Girl in White Dress' (1943) |
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| Art: Fidelio Ponce de Léon 'Five Women' (1941) sold from Hitchcock collection at Sotheby's 1991 |
A solid, worthwhile film, for us of most interest for another totally committed performance from Spencer Tracy, who I read performed his final summation in one entire take, running the full length of the ten minute camera reel. He nailed it, from memory, in that first take, to thunderous applause from the cast and crew.
Do I like Kramer? I'm not really sure.
On screen for the most time are Richard Widmark (prosecution) and Maximillian Schell, who won the Oscar for his almost-Nazi performance. Burt Lancaster is the almost sympathetic judge on trial. Good, telling appearances from Montgomery Clift, Marlene Dietrich (who was on set distributing Danishes!) and Judy Garland. Monty was a mess, drinking on set and on dope. Spencer - himself understanding only too well the pernicious effects of alcohol - told him to play his scene to him, and he did. According to Richard Widmark 'He played it to Spence, and it came out great'. And Kramer added 'Spencer was the greatest reactor in the business.'
The Nazis are Torben Mayer, Martin Brandt and Werner Klemperer.
Abby Mann won the writing Oscar, from his own original TV drama in 1959 (in which Schell acted).
Sam Leavitt shot it with smooth operating by Charles Wheeler and good use of a zoom lens working at different speeds.
UA were understandably nervous about it.
