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Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Tonight We Raid Calais (1943)

Directed by John Brahm; produced by Andre Daven


In the middle of World War Two, a young British Army officer (John Sutton) is selected to be put ashore in German-occupied France. His goal is to facilitate the destruction by the Royal Air Force of an ordnance factory. To accomplish his mission, he must rely upon the help of members of the Resistance, and keep a disaffected woman (Annabella), grieving over what the war has done to her family, from turning him in to the Nazis.


While the movie’s title gives the impression of a story about commandos, it is actually a tale of cloak and dagger (the latter featuring literally). Unfortunately, it is not an exciting story, nor even that interesting. The lead actors are not the sort to grab one’s attention; there is no presence to them. They are also rather ordinary performers. The subsidiary players are better; they include Lee J Cobb as a French farmer, with Howard Da Silva and Charles McGraw (who seem to be in every second movie I see these days) as German NCOs.


The plot relies too much on most of Sutton’s contacts being in the know, ready to connive at him taking the place of a dead Frenchman. It’s true that Annabella is unwilling to play along, but having everything in place for Sutton’s arrival feels a little too neat. As well, the Germans appear to suspect him of being a British operator almost from the beginning. There is some conflict displayed between French and English (the story took place after Vichy France had sided with Germany and fought the British), rare for the time, and, even rarer, some attempt to show the bitterness of the French in defeat, and in the British decision to carry on. But this is negated by too much speechifying.


There is little action as such, and the story might actually have been successful as a more talky stage-play than an attempt at an action drama - if the script had been refined or conceived by better writers - but that would probably have failed at the box office. In any case, this propaganda piece likely would have faced an uphill battle against the better products coming out at the same time, both from England and Hollywood.


As it is, mediocre acting, bland characters and unrealistic writing sinks Tonight We Raid Calais without any outside competition.

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Tell No Tales (1939)



Directed by Leslie Fenton; produced by Edward Chodorov


The tough but likeable editor (Melvyn Douglas) of a big newspaper is hit with the stunning news that its owner is shutting it down. A stroke of luck brings Douglas a clue in the story currently gripping the city. With less than a day to plumb the depth of the story and save his newspaper, Douglas follows the clue from person to person and crisis to crisis, until he becomes the person in the deadliest crisis of the day.


While not the most original, or realistic, story – a journalist, with much at stake, races to solve a mystery – Tell No Tales is nonetheless a snappy crime drama, thanks to its uncluttered direction, lean editing and lead performance. It’s running time is a mere 69 minutes. I would write that it seems longer but that would imply the film is drawn out, boring, which it is not. Instead, I should write that much is packed into little more than an hour.


Douglas (who bore a strong resemblance to the more rugged Richard Boone of the next generation) is convincing as a man who, while on the one hand, arranges a birthday party for the paper’s longest serving employee, and, on the other, lies to a witness in order to secure her co-operation. He switches identities swiftly, depending on what he needs to be, assisted by the innocent days when someone claiming to be a policeman, or a federal law agent, was believed, even without an identity card. Less compelling is the female lead (Louise Platt), who lacks the personality to match Douglas.


The story is populated with minor characters who come and go and reappear, and most are played by actors who do a fine job with the little they are given. (That’s Ian Wolfe, an actor with a career spanning most of the twentieth century, as Gene Lockhart’s Man Friday.) An interesting aspect is how Douglas’s search affects several of the people and situations he encounters. From a comical attempt to question a prospective bridegroom – already hen-pecked – to a sorrowful wake – the black people depicted here are far from the stereotypes we sometimes see in movies from this era – a few minutes suffice for a whole other tale to be told.


The actual crime at the plot’s centre is called a kidnapping – the “Roberts kidnapping” – and described as “brutal”, the perpetrators, if they are ever caught, likely “going to the chair”. This, and the fact that there is no mention of the victim still being held or missing, suggests the victim was murdered. I drew a parallel to the Lindbergh kidnapping case, though there is nothing more than implication given.


Tell No Tales doesn’t feel its age as it moves along at a good clip, and could show more than one director and screenwriter these days how to take an ordinary tale and make something entertaining. With a short running time and undoubtedly a slim budget, this film deserves a tip of the hat.

Thursday, June 14, 2018

I Capture the Castle (2003)

Directed by Tim Fywell; produced by David Parfitt, Anant Singh and David M Thompson


In the mid-1930s, the Mortmain family is living in a half-ruined castle in Suffolk, existing on the ever-dwindling royalties from the best-seller the father (Bill Nighy) wrote more than a decade before. They are behind on the rent, rarely have meat for dinner, and don’t have a way out of their predicament. Then, the two American brothers (Henry Thomas, Marc Blucas) who own the castle – and seven thousand surrounding acres – arrive to inspect the property, and the two daughters of the family (Rose Byrne, Romola Garai) find their world about to change.


A not-quite-modern Jane Austen-style story, I Capture the Castle is all about relationships and the people involved in them. Everyone’s part is well-written; even characters the viewer thinks may be two-dimensional are given depth and purpose. The main character is the younger daughter, played by Garai in an excellent performance. She is the narrator, and gives the view-point. She is usually clear-sighted, and sees herself as the normal one of the family, but as the story progresses, she realises that emotions can change perceptions, and vice versa.


One review I read called the family ‘eccentric’. It isn’t, thank goodness. Too often, eccentricity in movies is created with a dreadful self-consciousness, as if the characters were the result of a brain-storming session following the writers’ question, ‘how can we make them quirky?’ The worst eccentricity is shown by the step-mother (Tara Fitzgerald) – quite the opposite of the usual wicked step-parent – who likes to strip naked in nature. Coming from a Bohemian background, however, and given what we learn of her fears, shedding her clothes becomes an understandable release. Her husband (Nighy) chose to live in a remote castle to overcome both his past and his stifling writer’s block. The elder daughter, played by Byrne, seems a gold-digger, but her desire to marry into wealth is based on desperation. She sees a rich husband not as her own salvation but her family’s. These are well-conceived characters, not misguided attempts to make memorable and irrelevant personalities.


The story comes from a 1948 novel by Dodie Smith, better known in some circles for her children’s book, The Hundred and One Dalmatians. I’m surprised I Capture the Castle was not made into a cinematic feature before this, though it was produced for British television in the 1950s. The screenplay is smart, and, while not all loose ends are tied up in the finale, they weren’t meant to be, and the conclusion fits with the rest of the tale.


This is one of the few period movies I have seen that does not rely on music to give us a sense of time. There is one song that is characteristic of the era, but it is significant to the characters’ emotions, and not to the setting. As well, period films frequently cite important world events to put the story in a larger context. Again, this is eschewed in I Capture the Castle. Reference in a domestic drama to the remilitarization of the Rhineland, or even to the Great Depression would hardly have seemed natural. We are given a sense of time and place by the clothes worn, the automobiles driven, and the characters’ attitudes – unapologetically different from today’s.


While I Capture the Castle doesn’t have quite the tidiness of a Jane Austen story, there is much to compare the two. Garai’s Cassandra is very like an Austen heroine, observing family and friends, trying to make things better for others while finding her own way. There is a secluded feeling to the Mortmain’s world, one in which London is almost alien, and largely immaterial to their lives. And there is an innocence which, while tested, is never quite shattered.

The makers of I Capture the Castle knew what they wanted to do, and succeeded.

Sunday, June 10, 2018

Bend of the River (1952)

Directed by Anthony Mann; produced by Aaron Rosenberg


Not long after the Civil War in the United States, a wagon train of settlers is being guided to the Oregon Territory by a man (James Stewart) who, scouting ahead, stumbles upon a lynching. Sensing an injustice, he rescues the victim (Arthur Kennedy). The two recognize each other’s name as that of a former outlaw far to the east, in Kansas. They become friends and, between them, shepherd the colonists to Portland. There, enough supplies are purchased to last through the coming winter. But that was before a gold strike turned the district upside-down…


Stewart is often cited as developing harder characters in his movies after the Second World War, tough, often violent characters, with plenty of latent anger. But I have long thought that this was a trait Stewart had shown earlier. Witness his bitter resentfulness in It’s a Wonderful Life, and his hair-trigger temper when made a fool of in Mr Smith Goes to Washington. In Bend of the River, that quality becomes manifest in Stewart’s readiness to use a firearm, and may be heralded in the quiet, subdued manner in which he speaks, at times similar to the silence before a volcano bursts. This creates one of the two intriguing characters in Bend of the River. Kennedy’s is the other, a seemingly easy-going rogue, who does too much good to dislike, and implies too much villainy to trust. How he will ultimately act in the story creates a great deal of suspense.


The supporting cast is good, but largely over-shadowed. Prominent are Rock Hudson (so young his voice sounds like a boy’s) as an amiable gambler who seems to change sides with the turn of a card, and Jay C Flippen as the settler’s patriarch. Howard Petrie has an interesting part as a civic leader whose transformation under gold’s influence makes Jekyll’s switch to Hyde seem ordinary.


Bend of the River is the second of Stewart’s western films directed by Mann, and it’s clear here why the pair eventually made eight movies together. Mann not only brought out the aforementioned menace in Stewart, but excitingly arranged fight scenes, whether with fists or guns. His eye for scenery, aided by the advantageous countryside and the colourful cinematography of 1950s big screen films, makes the movie gorgeous.


Admittedly, the story is almost mundane, but since it features the battling dichotomies in both Stewart and Kennedy, I won’t complain about it, though I did wonder why two men, both trying to escape their unsavoury pasts, didn’t use aliases. In the 19th century, a new identity two thousand miles from one’s notoriety must have been a simple thing to achieve.

In a decade when westerns were produced a hundred a week, Bend of the River is a stand-out, a seemingly run-of-the-mill tale raised above the average in half a dozen ways.

Monday, June 4, 2018

Armed and Dangerous (1986)

Directed by Mark L Lester; produced by Brian Grazer and James Keach


A big-city policeman (John Candy) is framed for theft and dismissed the force. He turns to private security for a job and, partnered with an unsuccessful lawyer (Eugene Levy), finds himself fighting a plot to steal union funds.

Armed and Dangerous is a film the ending of which I had seen a couple of times. Since I like the lead actors, I thought I would give the rest of the film a glance. As it turns out, the ending was the only worthwhile element, and a glance was probably more than the rest deserved.


John Candy was a very talented comic actor, whose skills came to the fore in the Canadian SCTV television series, someone whose off-screen likeability frequently translated to his characters. As with many men and women famous from sketch comedy, however, he often suffered from a translation to movies, and it was a rare film that gave him good writing, direction and production values. In Armed and Dangerous, he is teamed with fellow SCTV member, Levy, who has found success in the cinema and on television to a greater degree latterly than previously. As well, he has won awards for comedic writing, having co-written many fake documentaries (eg. Waiting for Guffman) and has even won a Grammy award (for A Mighty Wind). In this film, the stars are much better than the material, which gives them little reason to shine.


Another SCTV alumnus, Harold Ramis, co-wrote the screenplay for Armed and Dangerous, so the talent was present, though not, apparently, active. The script saddles Candy and Levy with lame situations and unimaginative dialogue. The plot is simple, though the climax is exciting; but the film is one of those in which just delivering a sound thrashing of some sort to the villains solves all the problems, criminal, legal and personal.


Meanwhile, the director’s list of credits appears to boast of nothing better known than this film and Commando, a box-office draw but not one of Schwarzenegger’s higher-rated films. The production values in Armed and Dangerous don’t look as if much was spent on them, all of the money going into crushed automobiles and a couple of explosions at the end.


The movie could have been much better; both Candy and Levy made good, watchable leads. Certainly, I enjoy the genre into which it falls, that of comedy-adventure. But the funniest moment was unintended: at one point, I thought of Martin Short (yet another SCTV veteran), who stated that a ‘buddy-picture’ can usually be determined by the inevitable inclusion of a scene in which the main characters are driving in a car, look at something approaching them at high-speed and scream in unison. When a comment of gentle ridicule makes a viewer laugh more than the target of the comment, that target is not doing well. Armed and Dangerous did not do well.