Followers

Sunday, May 31, 2020

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947)


Directed by Preston Sturges; produced by Howard Hughes and Preston Sturges



A go-getter (Harold Lloyd) who came from behind in college and wowed everyone with his courage and determination is offered a job after graduation. Thinking that, as an ‘ideas man’, he belongs in the company’s advertising department, he is instead made a lowly accounting clerk, where he remains for the next twenty-two years. He is then fired, not just for not making progress but for actually regressing. It’s then that, with the help of a likeable small-time gambler (Jimmy Conlin), a lion (Jackie), a potent alcoholic cocktail and his own salvaged grit, he tries to reclaim the future that should have been his.


Another Sturges comedy (to go with The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, reviewed a couple of weeks ago), The Sin of Harold Diddlebock is remarkable in a number of ways. Firstly, it is a sequel to Lloyd’s classic 1925 silent-film The Freshman; so much so, in fact, that it incorporates the finale of that movie as the first fifteen minutes or so of this newer feature. Sturges wrote the screenplay with the intriguing notion of examining the destiny of the hero from the first movie, but then diverged with Lloyd over the form of the finished product. The result was, in truth, two movies: a longer, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (Lloyd’s preference), and a shorter, called Mad Wednesday (Sturges’s favourite). Not having seen the latter, I can attest only that the former is an enjoyable comedy, fast-paced for the most part, typical of both director and star, with some slower bits that don’t do it any harm.


Lloyd made few movies after the advent of sound, though here he shows himself fully capable of utilizing it for comedy (the scene in which he explains to a young woman how he fell in love, consecutively, with all six of her elder sisters, is an example of his understated use of humour.) Though in his fifties at the time, Lloyd, with the right lighting and behaviour, and a modicum of make-up, convincingly portrays the younger character in a prolongation of the story that takes place in the 1920s. His style of acting adapted very well to the more naturalistic approach of the 1940s and, if that style includes bombast and exaggeration, it’s meant to accompany his exuberant (and, at times, drunk) character.


Another oddity is the leading lady, Frances Ramsden, who was in only three movies (this one being her last (as it was Lloyd’s) and only credited role), yet she handles herself very well and is a good, soft-spoken foil for the leading man. Why she didn't go on to other films, I don't know. The usual cast of Sturges regulars (of whom Conlin is one) are included, while Rudy Vallee, former 1930s musician and crooner turned actor, has a strangely small role, probably reduced in the editing room.


There is less subtle criticism or satire than in other Sturges movies, though there is some pointed commentary on growing old and wasting time. Risqué dialogue is added more than once, but it has to be caught fast.


The Sin of Harold Diddlebock did not do well with audiences (nor did its alter ego Mad Wednesday.) This may have been due to younger audiences preferring the newer comic actors, and Lloyd’s older fans favoring his silent work. Or it may be that I have missed the boat entirely. But this critic thinks that Lloyd’s last movie is a fun farewell from an imaginative and entertaining performer who deserves to be more widely remembered.

Friday, May 22, 2020

Swallows and Amazons (2016)


Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe; produced by Nicholas Barton, Nick O’Hagan, Joe Oppenheimer



The summer holidays of 1929 are special for the Walker children (Dane Hughes, Orla Hill, Teddie-Rose Malleson-Allen, Bobby McCulloch). They are off to the Lake District for months of sailing and camping, and, though they don’t know it yet, a feud and a new friendship with a pair of piratical sisters (Seren Hawkes, Hannah-Jayne Thorp).


The book upon which this movie is based, indeed the series of books that followed, written by Arthur Ransome, were tremendously influential and greatly loved by generations of children. They extolled the virtues of outdoor fun, self-reliance, loyalty and nature, and narrated adventures that were small-scale but nonetheless thrilling and realistic. Ransome had an ear for children’s speech and an eye for their behaviour that were as typical of the inter-war years as Lewis Carroll’s similar knowledge was for the mid-Victorian era.

So much for the successful and superb books. What of the movie? Well, it’s…adequate.


There are, unfortunately, a number of problems with the 2016 film adadptation of Swallows and Amazons (there was a 1974 cinematic version, a 1963 television adaptation, and several radio versions). The book was originally reviewed with terms such as “entirely charming” and “magical”. These terms cannot be used for the movie.


Such qualities are difficult to create or capture; one of the elements required, I think, being a means of involving the viewer in the story, and that doesn’t really happen. A reason for this may be the changes wrought in the tale. The books never have the children mixed up with anything outlandish. There is rivalry between two groups, a misanthropic uncle, a theft (of nothing more valuable than a trunk containing the uncle’s memoirs), a shipwreck (of a sailing dinghy), a storm, and the like.


Here, the misanthropic uncle is an intelligence operator for the Secret Service, being pursued by Russian assassins. Strangely, this is a reflection of author Ransome’s own background. After his death, it was learned that he had been, in fact, a spy, of sorts. While working as a journalist in newly Bolshevik Russia, he provided information to the Secret Service, as did his girlfriend (later wife), who was a secretary of the Communist Party’s Politburo. Ransome even had a code-name (used in the movie as the uncle’s code-name), and British politicians and bureaucrats claimed that Ransome, who was a socialist but a democrat, was a detriment to British interests, and wanted him banned from travelling to Russia; he was protected by his controllers in the Secret Service.


This is an interesting side-light to the movie, but not an interesting part of the movie. Seeing children handle a revolver and threaten to shoot someone is not charming.


Other difficulties include the usual one of twenty-first century writers unable to create convincing characters from another time. At one point, the children’s mother (Kelly Macdonald) states that she is allowing her brood to sail a boat (without life-jackets) and camp (without adult supervision) on a strange island because she didn’t want them “growing up afraid”. This is admirable, but is justification aimed at a modern, adult audience. It is hardly what a 1920s parent would have said. A 1920s parent would have seen no reason for her children to grow up afraid, and needed no justification to let them sail a boat by themselves, or camp in the English countryside; it’s what children then did.


Also, the two sisters the Walker kids meet have working class accents, which the characters in the books would not have. This was no doubt seen as egalitarian by the screenwriters, but is not genuine. It would be like making Alice Liddell a child of the Whitechapel slums, rather than of an Oxford don. The adults in the movie are mostly impolite and unpleasant, which, unless portrayed in a non-threatening or humorous manner, also detracts from a movie’s charm.


The acting is good, especially by the children (Britain produces excellent young actors as often as Hawaii produces pineapples), but all performances are hampered by the spy sub-plot. The uncle (Rafe Spall) is just plain mean much of the time, and his conversion to a fun fellow at the end is unconvincing. (In the book, the uncle is surly because he is obsessed with finishing his autobiography, and children wanting him to play pirate are a bit of a distraction.)


I am coming to believe that of all book adaptations, some of the most difficult must be children’s books. Remaining true to the content and spirit of the work, while simultaneously putting a successful movie together may actually be mutually exclusive activities. In any case, it does not work for Swallows and Amazons. I will re-read the original book instead.

Monday, May 18, 2020

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943)


Directed and produced by Preston Sturges


It’s war-time, and Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) goes to a party for departing soldiers. The party ends up lasting all night long and when Trudy (who “never drinks”) sobers up, she realises that she married one of the soldiers, though she can’t remember his name and has no licence to prove it. It’s a disagreeable circumstance that becomes disastrous when she discovers she’s pregnant. Agreeing to help her is Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), the young man who’s loved her since elementary school. The trouble is, neither has a good solution to the dilemma, and what began as a simple dance becomes an international sensation.


A typically well-written and fast-paced Sturges comedy, this film tackles small-town morality, corrupt politics, single parenthood, friendship and war-time behaviour, all with farce on the surface and not a little cynicism beneath. It’s a gem of a movie and a tribute to what a clever man can get away with under the watchful eye of censorship.


The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek must have made censors nervous with its depiction of a promiscuous girl (albeit accidentally promiscuous, under the influence of alcohol, which itself could not have made everyone comfortable) and soldiers ready for some quick physical fun. But the film is certainly not exploitative, and these elements merely set up the plot. Don’t expect the plot to have too much sense, though: the excellent writing is in the dialogue, not the story-line.


But what writing! Sturges constructs characters that seem shallow (witness Trudy’s initially selfish use of Norval, and William Demarest’s apparent caricature of her father) but are, in fact, deeper than they seem. Trudy evolves into a truly likeable woman, and Bracken portrays Norval as a sap, but a sap with dreams and ambitions, crushed hopes and shattered dreams. Demarest is a single father (a superb counter-point to his child’s impending single motherhood) who masks his fear of parental missteps with bluster and idle threats (imagine a modern father telling a smart-alec 14 year old daughter, “Some day they're just gonna find your hair ribbon and an axe someplace. Nothing else! The Mystery of Morgan's Creek!”)


Behind the writing is a knowledge that when people get into trouble, it may be inadvertent, it may be their own fault, but they are still people in trouble, and spectators may gossip and laugh – as may movie audiences – but those with problems are real, feeling humans.
  

Comedy is not neglected for character and moral. Norval’s periodic panic attacks are hilarious as is the wedding scene and Demarest’s attempts to help a prisoner escape jail. There is much that may be considered slapstick (Demarest must have been a spry 51 year old to take those falls) but most is incorporated into a frantic, frenetic story-line. Strangely, it even makes sense to include Mussolini and Hitler, the latter played by Bobby Watson in one of his many portrayals of the dictator, one of which, in The Hitler Gang, was reviewed in this blog in March. (As a Canadian, I chuckled at how, even then, my countrymen were portrayed as polite: a newspaper headline suggests an indignant but open-minded prime minister.) Also brought in are Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff, repising their characters from Sturges’s earlier The Great McGinty; the facility of their crooked politics provides an excellent framework for the story, as well as a suitably farcical deus ex machina.


The direction is on target, especially in the long tracking shots, featuring lengthy passages of dialogue between Bracken and Hutton as they stroll through the town. Much of the complicated photography was thanks to John Seitz, a veteran cinematographer and inventor, who started in movies in 1916 and continued for 44 years.


Nothing is typical of its time or of films in general in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, yet it was immensely popular when released, and remains so, for those fortunate enough to see it these days. I recommend that you be one of them.

Sunday, May 10, 2020

The Reckless Moment (1949)


Directed by Max Opuls; produced by Walter Wanger


Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) is a middle-aged housewife with a full life caring for her family while her husband is building a bridge overseas. Trouble arises when her daughter, Bea (Geraldine Brooks), becomes involved with ne’er-do-well Tom Darby (Shepperd Strudwick). Lucia attempts to buy off the cad, but he soon visits Bea surreptitiously. The two argue and fight, Bea striking Darby with a flashlight. In the aftermath and left alone, the stunned man stumbles and dies in the fall. The next morning, Lucia discovers the corpse and hides it. Her problem is just beginning, however: a blackmailer (James Mason) arrives with letters Bea had written, and which would implicate her in what the police are treating as a murder.


The Reckless Moment has many of the elements of a successful suspense film – except suspense. This, I think, is the fault principally of the script, but aided by the direction.


The director is better known as Max Ophüls, who has a distinguished reputation, especially in technical expertise. I noted several scenes that were very interesting to watch; in particular, in the snatches of conversation and background images that could be observed, actually irrelevant to the story. But there was little tension or drama, as opposed to melodrama, evident.


The script is mundane. The initial scene with the bounder whose death instigates the blackmail is meant to show that he is open to being bought off by his girlfriend’s mother, but it merely suggests it, and could be seen as the man simply trying to understand how far the woman will go to disrupt his romance. When Darby is with Bea, prior to their fight, he intimates that, while he does need her mother’s money, they could take it and still be together. Though his character is later implied to be base, the audience is not shown enough for them to believe he received his just desserts. (And can he really be so well-known as to have his name given in a newspaper's headline when he is killed?)


On the other hand, Bea, a seventeen year old who thinks she’s far too wise for her mother, smartens up abruptly – too abruptly – during her argument with Darby. Lucia is not made sympathetic enough. This may be the coldness of Bennett’s performance, but is likely a problem with the script, too. Along with suspense being missed, so is a principal character we care about.


Mason does a good job as the reluctant blackmailer – he’s the one who comes across as sympathetic, even noble – but his decision to help Lucia any way he can comes too swiftly, and, after an alleged lifetime of bad deeds, seems too cinematic a change to be realistic.


Later tv stalwart William Schallert appears unbilled as a police detective, and a super-star of the silent-film era, Dorothy Phillips, appears in a tiny part, though I couldn’t tell anyone which.


The Reckless Moment is hampered not by a bad plot or indifferent acting, but by unconcentrated writing, and direction that doesn’t create the right atmosphere or a depth of tension. For a movie founded upon a similar theme but with sympathetic characters, a more intelligent script and a good plot twist or two, see Mr. Denning Drives North, and skip over The Reckless Moment.