Forbidden Cargo (1954)

Directed by Harold French; produced by Sydney Box

A complaint of naval personnel disturbing nests in a bird sanctuary leads HM Customs and Excise investigator Michael Kenyon (Nigel Patrick) to clear up a simple case of liquor-smuggling. But one of the criminals (Eric Pohlmann) has information that could lead to something bigger: a plot to bring into England an item much deadlier than a few cases of French wines and spirits.

Forbidden Cargo is another of those well-made movies that the British specialised in during the 1940s and ‘50s: realistic crime or war dramas the accurate details of which give them almost a documentary-like style. This sort of film has always appealed to me, and certainly much of Forbidden Cargo did, as well.

Patrick makes an engaging hero, sharing some of James Bonds’s traits without sacrificing realism: good-looking, social, intelligent and with a reputation for the ladies. The viewer can appreciate his expertise in his field but also realises that he doesn’t, indeed can’t, know everything.

His boss is played by the popular actor Jack Warner, who always lends an air of no-nonsense authority to such roles. Elizabeth Sellars, as Rita Compton, the woman who may know nothing of the smuggling, or may know everything, and Terence Morgan, as her too-suave brother, are good additions to the cast. Something should be said of Theodore Bikel, as well. This astonishingly versatile actor (who, I believe, originated the role of Captain von Trapp when The Sound of Music appeared on stage), singer, musician, polyglot, and social-activist is often featured in smaller roles but, as in Forbidden Cargo, comes close to usurping the greater part of the audience’s attention.

The cast, and its performances, cannot be faulted. They make the characters three-dimensional. The settings move from East Anglia to Cannes and back to the riverside of London, variety which helps the story.

And it’s that story which primarily lowers the value of Forbidden Cargo. It is not a poor tale, but neither is it involving. There is no real mystery as to who is behind the smuggling, and the events that unfold are not particularly intriguing. I am not someone who needs every crime story to concern itself with nuclear bombs threatening major cities or deadly plagues about to be unleashed. A ‘small’ felony can be as exciting as any globe-trotting narrative of terrorism and assassination. But it still must be interesting. Forbidden Cargo’s story just qualifies.

The script is better than the story, especially in the relationship of Kenyon and Rita (in which the pair are attracted to each other but don’t fall in love over a couple of dates, as they might in other films), and the direction gives the climax an exciting car-chase through London Dockland’s narrow lanes.

Consequently, I can recommend Forbidden Cargo but cannot place it high in any list of crime dramas; undemanding, likeable but largely unmemorable.

My Favorite Year (1982)

Directed by Richard Benjamin; produced by Michael Gruskoff

In 1954, Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker) is a young but rising writer on tv’s “Comedy Cavalcade”, hosted by the frenetic and frantic ‘King’ Kaiser (Joseph Bologna). Benjy is ecstatic to learn that his movie-idol, Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole) is going to appear on an episode. The trouble is that Swann, a legendary and extremely popular star, is a dissolute inebriate and womaniser, and when he arrives falling-down drunk for a meeting with Kaiser, it is only with difficulty that Benjy manages to retain him on the show. But the young man must keep the actor out of trouble for the week until the broadcast. Will Swann be able to make the show? And will Benjy’s adoration of the older man survive knowing him?

In the immediately previous entry on this blog, I reviewed Wings of Fame, which also starred Peter O’Toole and dealt, unsatisfactorily, with popular renown. Eight years before, O’Toole made this much better movie which, along with providing more insight into fame - and notoriety - was also a lot of fun. I decided to review it, too, to contrast and compare, and to cleanse the palate…

The one good moment in Wings of Fame comes during an interview featuring O’Toole’s character, Cesar Valentin, who relates an incident when he was portraying Othello on stage. The audience applauded as soon as he appeared: they were cheering the actor, not the part or his performance. People cared little for his roles but loved him. Alan Swann’s problem, in My Favorite Year, is the opposite: people love his roles; so much so that they think he is whom he portrays. By this time in his career, Swann is unsure whether he is himself, or his characters, or both.

As you may appreciate, My Favorite Year is a comedy, but goes deeper into people, motives, personality and relationships than Wings of Fame tried to do. Swann is a charming man and generous: there is a scene in which he dances with an elderly fan (Gloria Stuart) to fulfill a dream of hers, putting his own evening on hold. The scene is almost beautiful in its simplicity, but also shows what Swann is made of. Then he is off to get drunk and carry on with another man’s girlfriend, publicly frolicking in a fountain. That’s what he’s made of, too. Swann contrasts his traits with his characters’, and the movie questions what an actor is, what a ‘star’ is, and how much different actors put of themselves into their roles.

Much of My Favorite Year’s appeal comes from the characters, which are well-drawn and involving. Alan Swann is modelled consciously on Errol Flynn; the climax of Swann’s fictional movie Captain from Tortuga is a re-shot version of the finale of Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. Benjy Stone represents Mel Brooks (executive producer of My Favorite Year) and Bologna’s character is patterned after Sid Caesar (Sid Caesar = King Kaiser…) “Comedy Cavalcade” fills in for “Your Show of Shows”, which was a hotbed of later famous comedy writers, including Brooks, Woody Allen and Neil Simon, and was also the model for the series on which Dick Van Dyke’s character worked on his eponymous tv series.

An interesting feature here is that quirky characters comes across successfully. Usually, the very term ‘quirky’ in movies or television series indicates a self-conscious attempt by writers to make memorable personalities; they are rarely natural or real. In My Favorite Year, however, these characters are comics, writers, actors - all people whose affectations and attempts to stand out are sometimes artificial and obvious. Therefore, their oddities (eg. Basil Hoffman as a writer who speaks only in whispers to his confederate (Anne De Salvo)) appear genuine here, within the context of their lives and work. The characters are mostly likeable or benign, which helps.

Richard Benjamin is not among my favourite directors. (He worked in the 1950s at NBC-TV headquarters, where the fictional “Comedy Cavalcade” is produced.) I find most of his comedies heavy-handed and crude (in the sense of being roughly fashioned, unpolished). This was his first feature film behind the camera, and that may have permitted him a lighter touch. The laughs, when not driven by the characters, are not particularly strong, slapstick and physical humour not demanding much from the audience.

What makes My Favorite Year such a winning comedy, though, is the juxtaposition of the serious and Shakespearan-style acting of O’Toole, with amusing situations. Like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie (reviewed on this blog last year), the role needed a dramatic actor, not a comic performer. When O’Toole delivers a punch-line, after a set-up given as if on stage at the Old Vic, it is almost inevitably funny. It may have helped that O’Toole’s sense of humour allowed him to ridicule both his profession and himself.

Add to this a good-to-very good supporting cast, including Lainie Kazan, as Benjy’s mother, and Bologna as the manic Kaiser, and a sure feel for the early days of television, and My Favorite Year is a delight; funny and thoughtful, as many of the best comedies are.

Wings of Fame (1990)

Directed by Otakar Votocek; produced by Laurens Geels and Dick Maas

World-renowned movie actor Cesar Valentin (Peter O’Toole) is murdered by frustrated writer Brian Smith (Colin Firth), who is then accidentally killed, and both end up, in the after-life, at a hotel for famous people. Tied by events both before and subsequent to death, the pair must make sense of their new situation and of each other.

As may be discerned from the brief synopsis above, Wings of Fame brings to the screen an intriguing premise. But that, alas, is all it brings. This is, in fact, what I call a ‘premise movie’, a film the makers of which had a good idea and no notion of what to do with it – but went ahead and made it anyway. Indeed, I strongly suspect that the movie was begun with the hopes of a script following, rather than the achievement of one.

There is a superficial exploration of fame and notoriety: a major aspect of existence in the hotel is that the quality of one’s lodgings and service depends upon how well one is known on Earth. An artist, for instance, is downgraded to a shabby attic room because his paintings are no longer valued, while a poet is re-discovered, and is thus moved to better quarters. As well, Valentin eventually talks about how much he loved being recognised. But the treatment of fame is never more than shallow. A more glaring example of this fleeting investigation of fame is Firth’s character’s name: common, ordinary Smith, though his pen-name is a striking triple-barrelled moniker; it’s all quite obvious.

Even less expansive is the explanation of the after-life, why there is a hotel for famous people and what they are doing there. Smith asks at one point, “Where are the Shakespeares, the Gallileos?” The answer to this is simply, “I don’t know.” Indeed, despicable killers are mixed up with vain writers, pop stars with athletes. What they are to do in their hotel, why they are there, what its purpose is, are questions handled as deeply as those regarding fame, as if the creators of the after-life put as much thought into their work as the creators of the film.

To be fair, cinematic after-life does not always need elucidation. It is often utilized as a background for those present to learn about themselves, to grow in a way they never did on Earth. But the people we meet are just as empty, boring and worthless as they were when alive; one character suggests that the hotel is Hell. Considering the men and women there, I would not dispute the suggestion.

There is little thought given in the script to, well, anything, it seems. One young woman (Marie Trintignant) doesn’t recall her existence on Earth, while everybody else does. She is also the only one who doesn’t believe she is dead, whereas all others instinctively realise it. Why is she different? Sometimes people are returned to Earth to live again; this is done on the basis of a lottery. No reason is given for this addendum to the after-life. The person returned has the right to take someone with him. This rule appears to have been included, self-consciously, in the script to create tension as to who the chosen person will select, when the time comes. If so, it fails in its objective.

Those working at the hotel have powers beyond those of mortals, yet at one point, the manager (Walter Gotell) seems to be a stiffened corpse, only to be re-animated later. What was the point of this? There are attempts at humour, featuring revolutionaries continually trying to blow things up, but these merely serve to bewilder further: can people be killed, hurt, injured, in the after-life? If injured, how badly? There is one man seen continually roller-skating through the corridors. One could almost hear the writers suggesting this as if it would cause uproarious laughter among the audience. It doesn’t.

Even the connection between the two leads is nonsensical. Valentin stole Smith’s unpublished manuscript, and passed it off as his autobiography. You may discern a puzzle here: had Smith written his own life-story, only to have Valentin steal it? It seems unlikely, as Smith is only 29 years old, and could hardly have accumulated the experiences that Valentin could then claim as his own. Smith knew the real events of Valentin’s life, as opposed to what the latter published, so surely any number of those who write about the famous could have shown Valentin’s ‘autobiography’ as false. And how did Valentin get Smith’s book in the first place? Why would Smith send it to a film-actor? Why would a film-actor steal it?

The very title Wings of Fame is confusing. Why ‘wings’, unless to conjure up comparisons with Wim Wenders’s acclaimed Wings of Desire, released three years previous to Wings of Fame? If so, the movies’ relationship would be one of contrasts, rather than comparisons. And such a small thing as placing the opening in 1966 has little point, unless to provide the present as the setting for some characters’ return to Earth.

What possibly could have been an interesting, indeed, thought-provoking film becomes, almost immediately, a disaster, filled with disconnected and addled events, unlikeable people and pointless episodes. Wings of Fame makes the Rambo movies look as complex as Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.

Nobody Lives Forever (1946)

Directed by Jean Negulesco; produced by Robert Buckner

Expert conman Nick Blake (John Garfield), released from the U.S. Army after being badly wounded, returns to New York, looking to pick up where he left off when he went to war. But things are not as he expects: his girlfriend (Faye Emerson) lost in a bad investment the $50,000 he had left with her, and has taken up with a shady nightclub owner. Discouraged, he and a pal (George Tobias) head to California for a change of scenery, and quickly fall into a developing scheme to defraud a wealthy widow (Geraldine Fitzgerald). But Blake’s character has changed as much as his circumstances, and when the situation turns deadly, he isn’t sure where it will end up.

A pretty straightforward story, Nobody Lives Forever is as much character study and romance, as it is crime drama. Only in its first aspect is it above average, and that is due to the actors. The story is unremarkable, and the script, by W R Burnett, is serviceable but no more; he has written more involving stories for movies (eg. High Sierra, Night People). The progress of the movie is predictable, and, though the climax is tense, it is questionable as to what the villains hope to accomplish by forcing the situation in the way they do.

The acting is very good. Garfield once again demonstrates his skill; though his character is the usual tough guy from a lower class background, he makes him almost immediately three-dimensional. There is a telling moment when Blake is confronted with the lies he has told. Garfield’s reaction, before he speaks, lasts less than a second, yet manages to convey several emotions - dismay, doubt, desperation and determination - and shows exactly what his character is thinking. It’s scenes like that that separate excellent actors from the adequate, or even the very good.

Fitzgerald does fine work, as well. Casting someone who, while physically attractive, is not the bombshell who might have been put in her role, was a smart move. Fitzgerald conveys both naivete and intelligence, and also a loneliness that is not desperate. It’s a good performance.

Mention should also be made of George Coulouris, who plays the villain, Doc Ganson. His character is someone who, at least in his own mind, was a big deal in con-games years before, and his overwhelming ambition is to be so again. His resentment, anger and single-minded desire make his behaviour unpredictable; he is always on the edge of an outburst of some sort. This makes for a nervous suspense, which makes for involving scenes.

While its story is rather pedestrian, and its direction little better, Nobody Lives Forever has acting that translates what may have been stock characters into real people. For that, this film is good entertainment.