February and March 1945. Overseas, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin meet for the Yalta Conference, where they plot not just peace but how to carve up the world to best satisfy their respective empires once the war ends. On his return, Roosevelt addresses Congress for what will be his last time. The Battle of Iwo Jima rages across five weeks, while the Battle of Manila lasts exactly one month and ends in liberation for the Philippines' capital. Secret negotiations between the SS and the CIA for the surrender of Axis areas begin. Tokyo is devastated in a two-day bombing raid that kills 100,000 citizens, the most destructive air attack of the War.
And back in Hollywood? Well, in March, the 17th Academy Awards are held, resulting in Going My Way winning Best Picture (and more, as you know). March also saw the feature film debut of Elia Kazan.
Kazan was no stranger to Hollywood, he already had at least two films under his belt, including Blues in the Night...but as an actor. That's what he studied at Yale, and that's what he pursued when he joined the Group Theatre in 1932 - he continued in that vocation even as he began his career as a stage director. After appearing in the film Blues in the Night in 1941, he directed the legendary original production of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, starring Tallulah Bankhead and Fredric March. So, he becomes a greater director than actor, and takes the Hollywood job that still keeps him close to the spirit of New York, even if it's filmed on the Fox soundstages: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. His first film, and it wins an Oscar. But we'll get into that later this month.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn came out amid a Disney anthology, a "prestige horror" production, and Universal programmers for Abbott & Costello and Holmes & Watson. See for yourself:
Hangover Square
release: February
dir: John Brahm
pr: Robert Bassler
scr: Barré Lyndon, from the novel by Patrick Hamilton
cin: Joseph LaShelle
Cashing in on the success of the previous year's The Lodger, that film's director and two of its actors return for another horror tale of London gaslight and fog. This time, Laird Cregar is a composer who suffers from blackouts, blackouts that coincide with a spate of murders and fire - and it's no mystery, we watch him commit these crimes, but with wide-eyed, animalistic desperation. The best sequence sees him committing a murder on Guy Fawkes' Night and hiding the body in plain sight: wrapped up among bundles to be burnt in a big bonfire in the square. Gruesome stuff, great stuff, immolation as cleansing, as destruction, as Hell on Earth, as the fiery inner passions of Cregar made physical. Bernard Herrmann did the score, it's appropriately unsettling.
Here Come the Co-eds
release: February
dir: Jean Yarborough
pr: John Grant
scr: Arthur T. Horman and John Grant, story by Edmund L. Hartmann
cin: George Robinson
Abbott and Costello become caretakers at a girls' college. Lon Chaney, Jr., hates them, gets a great wrestling scene with Costello. Peggy Ryan and Costello have a romance that is sometimes cute and sometimes makes you go, "How old is this guy?" Climaxes with a plot-important basketball game on a slapstick level with Flubber or The Absent-Minded Professor, of course, complete with the opposing team hiring Amazonian ringers, and a halftime show made up of fifty girls, half of them tap-dancing, the other half big band-ing.
Objective, Burma!
release: February 17
nominations: Best Original Story, Best Score (Franz Waxman), Best Film Editing (George Amy)
dir: Raoul Walsh
pr: Jerry Wald
scr: Ranald MacDougall & Lester Cole, original story by Alvah Bessie
cin: James Wong Howe
Errol Flynn leads a platoon of paratroopers into Burma to destroy a Japanese radar station - but getting out proves the real challenge! Love the look of it, oppressive sunlight suffocating you in the heat, well-staged action. There's a nighttime climax that I have to believe at least partially inspired Oliver Stone's own in Platoon.
Murder, My Sweet
release: February 22
dir: Edward Dmytryk
pr: Adrian Scott
scr: John Paxton, from the novel by Raymond Chandler
cin: Harry J. Wild
Philip Marlowe is hired by a recently-released ex-con to find his girlfriend and, would you believe?, things are more complicated than they seem. The appraisal I've seen online lately praising an against-type Dick Powell as "the best Marlowe" is overstated, I think, though that's not much to do with the qualities of the movie, to be fair. Powell's very solid, in fact, and he's great with the one-liners. The two performances that stand out to me are Mike Mazurki as the menacing, single-minded ex-con and Esther Howard as a middle-aged boozy floozy - a role for which Sylvia Miles was nominated when they remade this using the novel's original title, Farewell, My Lovely. I love the look of downtown LA it offers.
The Three Caballeros
release: February 22
nominations: Best Musical Score (Edward H. Plumb / Paul J. Smith / Charles Wolcott), Best Sound (C.O. Slyfield)
dir: Norman Ferguson / Clyde Geronimi / Jack Kinney / Bill Roberts / Harold Young
pr: Walt Disney
scr: Homer Brightman & Ernest Terrazas & Ted Sears & Bill Peet & Ralph Wright & Elmer Plummer & Roy Williams & William Cottrell & Del Connell & James Bodrero
cin: Ray Rennahan
Donald Duck gets birthday gifts from Brazil's Jose Carioca and Mexico's Panchito, the gifts serving as an excuse to show a series of shorts about South America and Mexico. Produced by Disney as part of the "Good Neighbor" policy. Many anthology films go back and forth in quality; this one stays strongest longest, though the strongest sequences are "Bahia" and the animation-live action blend "You Belong to My Heart".
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
release: March
wins: Best Supporting Actor (James Dunn)
nominations: Best Screenplay
dir: Elia Kazan
pr: Louis D. Lighton
scr: Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis, from the novel by Betty Smith
cin: Leon Shamroy
Coming-of-age story about a girl and her near-poverty family in early-1900s Brooklyn. A tearjerker, a heartbreaker, every scene is tragedy and triumph, a child’s burgeoning view of the world side-by-side with the stark realities of adulthood. Do the parents love each other? Yes, but it’s difficult, and love alone doesn’t feed the children or keep a roof over everyone’s heads - and sometimes those struggles can make a person bitter. The second half is a killer, and if you feel the tears are too easily wrung from you, well, too bad, empathy won’t kill you. Doesn’t feel like a debut. The sets were not nominated, a travesty!
The Picture of Dorian Gray
release: March 3
wins: Best Cinematography - Black-and-White
nominations: Best Supporting Actress (Angela Lansbury), Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration - Black-and-White (Cedric Gibbons / Hans Peters / Edwin B. Willis / John Bonar / Hugh Hunt)
dir: Albert Lewin
pr: Pandro S. Berman
scr: Albert Lewin, from the novel by Oscar Wilde
cin: Harry Stradling
The old tale of a man who never ages but his portrait not only does, it takes on his sins. Sets, costumes, makeup, and the cinematography - mostly in black-and-white but in color for all the inserts of the titular picture, for maximum awe - all point to a film whose mounting was taken seriously, a grand production of a great work. It is very handsome, I grant you, but - and I’ve seen this enough times over the years to confirm - it is a very tedious film, given to voiceover either to preserve the language of the novel or, I think just as likely, to cover a waxen lead who just doesn’t have it. Angela Lansbury, in her second film role as a good-hearted amateur singer in love with Dorian, commands your attention, the film just isn’t the same once her character leaves. Overall a technical triumph but little more.
The Man Who Walked Alone
release: March 15
nominations: Best Score (Karl Hajos)
dir: Christy Cabanne
pr: Leon Fromkess
scr: Robert Lee Johnson, story by Christy Cabanne
cin: James S. Brown, Jr.
Such a somber title for such a lark of a film! Recently (honorably) discharged soldier hitchhikes to his late platoonmate's hometown, meets an heiress who's running away from it all, and shenanigans ensue. A little bit of It Happened One Night, some family members trucked in from The Philadelphia Story, contemporary wartime issues, and there you go: 1940s screwball.
The House of Fear
release: March 16
dir/pr: Roy William Neill
scr: Roy Chanslor, from "The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
cin: Virgil Miller
Holmes investigates a strange case of a group of men who've all retired together (?!) to a seaside castle...and appear to be getting offed, one by one. This one's fun if just for the work from the ensemble, which includes Harry Cording, who was Bela Lugosi's valet/bodyguard in The Black Cat. Real gory sights are described, but it's all in good, macabre fun. Very fun entry!
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
release: March 29
dir/pr/scr: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
cin: Georges Perinal
I don't know if the American cut is even available anymore, I watched the restored British version. Roger Livesey plays a career soldier from his youthful days celebrating victory in the Second Boer War to the avuncular retiree looking aghast at the world 40 years later. He's a "gentleman soldier," meaning no "dirty" fighting, no surprise attacks, and being able to befriend your enemy when not in direct combat - an outlook that is probably easier to maintain when you're a world power who kills people overseas, a different kettle of fish altogether when up against the Nazi war machine and the Blitz. There is no Colonel Blimp in this film - that's a reference to a then-popular British cartoon character, so I have to imagine that the title refers to Britain's ideas of military tradition and its place in the world. Executed with the lavish attention to color and detail, the tightrope walk of drama and satire that you can only get from a Powell & Pressburger film.
The Clock
release: March 30
dir: Vincente Minnelli
pr: Arthur Freed
scr: Robert Nathan and Joseph Schrank, from a short story by Paul Gallico & Pauline Gallico
cin: George J. Folsey
A soldier falls in love while on a 48-hour pass. What can one say, except that it's a lovely picture and that, wow, everything sure requires a lot of paperwork, and, gosh, NYC has always been crowded, huh? Judy Garland is a treasure, of course, and she's reuniting with the same creative team from Meet Me in St. Louis, just without the songs or the color. As the soldier, this is the best Robert Walker's ever been; James Gleason's a delight, too, as a milkman who befriends the couple while making his rounds. It's a simple premise well told and performed, a human story about taking chances because, hey, why not live while you're still alive? Ends on just the perfect note, too, bittersweet but full of possibility.
Tomorrow: the mob movie featuring a real mobster.
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