Crossroads (1942)

Directed by Jack Conway; produced by Edwin Knopf

David Talbot (William Powell) is a rising star of the French Foreign Ministry, whom talk has marked as the next ambassador to Brazil. Newly married to a beautiful woman (Hedy Lamarr), well-to-do and respected, Talbot is shocked to receive a vague demand for blackmail money. He contacts the police and the extortionist is swiftly arrested. Soon, though, it seems that Talbot is the one on trial, as his antecedents are questioned, and it is alleged that he is a fugitive murderer. The man’s once-promising future is in jeopardy as the past - and the present - close in around him.

The setting of the story in 1935 France made for some interest. Aside from it being, originally, a French movie, it is historically apt. In the 1930s, France was rocked by a number of political, social and financial scandals, which played their part in the disastrous level of morale that would greet the German invasion in 1940. What threatens Talbot fits in this context.

It may explain, as well, why Powell, fifty years old when the movie was made, was cast as a civil servant on his way up (a role better suited for a younger man), rather than a politician already near the top. French politicians were, in the year this film was produced, blighted both by the scandals of the ‘30s, and their capitulation to Germany in the first year of the war.

This is the second movie in which Powell plays an amnesiac. The first, I Love You Again, was a comedy; Crossroads, a drama, isn’t as successful in its genre as the earlier film is in its, but it does well enough. The title, which suggests a self-conscious coming-of-age film from the 1980s, or perhaps the story of a newly divorced single mother moving to a new town, may be ignored. The plot is a decent one, though not as much a mystery as it would like to be. It’s one of those films which provides many questions, then answers them all with an acceptable though mundane and not unexpected solution. As well, the clue that clears the way for the truth is withheld from the audience, though it could have easily been sneaked in to the script early on.

Nonetheless, the story keeps one involved, even if it is not as suspenseful as its writers hoped. What really makes the movie, though, are the actors and their performances. In comparing Crossroads to I Love You Again, it can be seen how well Powell handles both drama and comedy. His character is, in reality, written as an American would be, but Powell effortlessly slips into the role of Frenchman. His stylishness suits any nationality. Lamarr’s role doesn’t demand anything great of her talents, but she convincingly portrays Madame Talbot, her husband’s greatest support.

Basil Rathbone also demonstrates that he can manage opposite parts, villain and hero; he was playing Sherlock Holmes in a movie series at the same time. Claire Trevor puts the viewer in doubt as to her character’s intentions for much of the movie. And Margaret Wycherly, though seeming always to play a variety of matriarch, is also no stranger to switching sides in film roles, and has a good bit here.

Certainly, Crossroads could have been better. But for an entertaining time, and for Powell fans, it’s worth its eighty-three minutes.

Hangover Square (1945)

Directed by John Brahm; produced by Robert Bassler

George Harvey Bone (Laird Cregar) is a young and promising composer in 1903 London. One night, a decision to unwind at a ‘smoking concert’ leads to an infatuation with Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell), a moderately talented singer of dubious morals. His anguished relationship with the woman accentuates his growing problem with black-outs, a series of psychotic breaks, his actions during which he can’t recall, and which are becoming more violent. His determination to have Netta, as well as professional success, push Bone to the edge of sanity.

Hangover Square is derived from the novel of the same name, but with substantial changes to the story and characters. The time period is re-set, Bone is made a musician and, bizarrely, the title is made a real address. In the book, it refers more to a state of mind, and reflects Bone’s alcoholism (with which he is not afflicted in the film), and is a word-play on Hanover Square, a genuine London address. I can’t think of any town or city in the English-speaking world that would willingly possess a location actually called Hangover Square.

In any case, though the story is greatly altered, it is a good one, if not original: Bone’s relationship with Netta has elements of other narratives such as Of Human Bondage, while his murderous black-outs have been used in half a dozen thrillers. But they are well-utilised here, and lead more or less reasonably to their conclusion. Hangover Square is not a horror movie, not even quite a thriller, though it has tension. It is a psychological drama with some affecting scenes. That in which a corpse is disposed of is dreadful and ironic, and the climax is exciting and highly dramatic.

The script is adequate. The characters, especially Bone’s, are well-written and believable. Details are at times incredible. For instance, it is unlikely that a knighted conductor of music (Alan Napier) and a struggling composer would live in the same square, even if the latter inhabits just a modest basement suite, and even more doubtful that a music-hall performer would also live in there. And we don’t learn the motive for the initial murder.

What makes the movie are the actors and the direction, with able assistance from the musical score. Laird Cregar had a remarkable cinematic career – remarkable and regrettably short – appearing in sixteen films (the first two uncredited) in five years. He almost always portrayed men older than himself (in I Wake Up Screaming, he plays a police inspector with fifteen years experience; Cregar was twenty-seven at the time). Tired of taking character and villain roles, he determined to lose pounds to obtain better leading parts, and dropped a great weight in a short time. This resulted in a heart attack which killed him at the age of thirty-one, just months before Hangover Square was released.

Cregar’s performance in Hangover Square may be his best (it’s hard to choose from a selection of excellent acts). He imbues Bone with a decency and frailty that may be seen in most people. It is not without sympathy that the audience sees his descent into degradation and his attempts to salvage both his dignity and his career. This was his second starring role, after 1944’s The Lodger, and could have given him the more central, leading parts for which he died.

Darnell is also very good as the woman who is, as our ancestors might have said, no better than she ought to be. There are flashes of humanity to be viewed at certain moments, but they pass, and there is no clue in the story as to what made her personality the selfish one it is. That this is the case is no fault of the actress.

George Sanders appears as a ‘Scotland Yard doctor’ – a psychiatrist -  working with Cregar for the third time. (I reviewed their movie The Black Swan not long ago); his brother Tom Conway also played the part of a psychiatrist, in Cat People, reviewed immediately prior to this film. (Alan Napier, Sir Henry Chapman in Hangover Square, was also in Cat People. One wonders just how small the cinematic world of the 1940s was.) Sanders gets to be rather more heroic than in most of his roles.

The direction is impressive. There are large-scale shots that give the feeling of expansiveness to what otherwise could be a stage-drama, and the concert scene features a sequence in which the view starts with the concert’s audience, moves across them, around the musicians and back to Bone at the piano; this must have been one of the earliest uses of a swinging boom-camera. And the climax is one to remember.

Finally, the musical score by Bernard Herrmann must be mentioned. It sets the mood at the very beginning with its heavy discordance, but is later incorporated into the movie as the concerto on which Bone has been labouring. The concert scene is lengthier than most musical pieces in movies (reflecting the real length of many such works) but is not boring, thanks to the direction and the music itself. That the score is a motif for Bone’s psychological condition is important, and profitably brings what is often a background element of cinema to the fore.

Hangover Square did not go where I thought it would and, due to a number of its components, is an improbably successful blend of human drama, crime story and classical tragedy.

Cat People (1942)

Directed by Jacques Tourneur; produced by Val Lewton

Barge-designer Oliver Reed (Kent Smith), passing time at his city’s zoo, meets young Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), a fashion-designer sketching a panther. They strike up a romance, hesitantly on Irena’s part, that quickly leads to marriage. What Reed doesn’t know is that Irena fears an ancestral curse: that she will transform into a large, predatory cat when she and he become intimate. Reed must confront Irena’s beliefs, and hope they are nothing more than superstition.

Cat People seems to be a movie better known for its reputation than for being seen. It certainly has much to recommend it, but also much that detracts from those recommendations. Two of the problems are the lead actors. Smith’s performance is average at best, while Simon, though she manages to convey a waif-like innocence half the time and a rather menacing coyness the other half, both elements needed and effective, her acting seems almost affectatious.

Better work is given by Jane Randolph, as Reed’s friend, and Tom Conway (George Sanders’s look-a-like brother) as Dr Judd, a psychiatrist with dubious ethics.

The characters brought to life by the actors reflect the performances. Reed has to be one of the dimmest bulbs to darken a storyline. He seems lost much of the time as to what to do, or even as to what is occurring; at other times, he is insensitively dismissive. Irena is an appealing girl, but nonetheless does not involve the audience in her plight, and her actions leave viewers wondering if they should sympathise with, or condemn, her actions. Alice Moore (Randolph’s character), on the other hand, is smart, sophisticated and loyal, and Judd is, despite his moral lapses, certainly interesting.

Acting and characters are not the only element of Cat People to have a dual aspect. The script, by DeWitt Bodeen, is similar. The story is an intriguing one, but isn’t developed enough. The background is indefinite. We are told that when Serbia was occupied by the Mamelukes (Turks? The Mamelukes never made it to Europe), Irena’s village turned from God to worship Satan. After “King John” liberated Serbia, he destroyed the village for its wickedness, though some of its inhabitants fled, and these took with them the curse Irena fears.

But is it a curse, or a symptom of their dark religion? If a curse, who placed it upon them, and why that particular affliction? There are clues that it might be hereditary: Irena’s father was reported as killed in the woods (by her cat-creature mother?) before she was born. As well, the final scene leaves some doubt as to the course the curse’s effects take, since the transformation to and from cat seems to be arbitrary at the end.

The direction is very good in parts but, again, sometimes works against itself. The use of light and shadows, the ambivalence of images, is often attributed to Val Lewton, a first-time producer here, who became a great influence in Hollywood, though he died young and most of his work was low-budget. But credit for what is good in Cat People must go, in at least equal parts, to director Tourneur.

There are some excellent scenes in the film, in particular the two instances when Alice is stalked. Vague images are well utilised, as is silence, punctuated by footfalls or screams that are all the more startling for coming amid the quiet.

Yet, later in the film, there is a more obvious threat to Reed and Alice, and, though effective elements of the supernatural appear to be included, the danger is tangible. This is not only less effective than earlier scenes, but works against their implications.

Cat People has come to be seen as influential in its genre, and certainly contains a number of enjoyable elements. It could not be considered a wasted time at the movies. But in its uneven acting, writing and directing, it leaves the viewer thinking it could have been much more.

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

Directed by Preston Sturges; produced by Paul Jones (associate producer)

The king of Hollywood comedies, John Lloyd Sullivan (Joel McCrea) wants to make a movie more meaningful than his usual work. He has, in fact, partially filmed the depressingly meaningful O Brother, Where Art Thou, complete with its discouraging ending, in which Capital and Labour destroy each other. His producers (Robert Warwick, Porter Hall) are aghast. They try to dissuade him; instead, they inadvertently show him that he knows nothing of human misery. As a result, Sullivan decides to impersonate a moneyless tramp and wander the back-roads, in search of truth. His journeys from homeless shelter to chain gang, from strangers to a beautiful girl (Veronica Lake) who won’t go away, bring him more truth than he can manage.

Sullivan’s Travels is probably the best of Preston Sturges’s varied accomplishments. A comedy, it also has a message, expressed not just in the laughs but in the unexpected drama. It cannot be called typical Sturges fare - being his best - nor typical 1940s American film-making, yet it embodies much of what would be found in those categories.

The script, by Sturges, is top-notch. The dialogue moves between fast and furious and slow and muttered, whatever works for a situation. The mood of the story varies just as much: we are treated to screwball-comedy-type word-play and even slapstick - the ‘land-yacht’ chase is hilarious - and to melancholy pathos.

The genius of the writing is that neither extreme is left unflavoured by the other. When Sullivan first tries on his hobo’s clothes, it is played for humour, but not so his butler’s admonition on the evils not only of poverty, but of slumming. There is poignancy in a southern U.S. black congregation offering accommodation to a party of convicts, when the church-goers themselves might have been wearing chains a generation or two previously. Yet even this is leavened by laughter.

Casting could not have been better, with Sturges’s frequent collaborator McCrea as the protagonist. He is one of the 1940s most naturally-acting performers, and the lines he speaks sound as if he is simply contributing to a conversation. But McCrea has the ability to play both funny and serious, which is priceless in a movie such as Sullivan’s Travels.

Veronica Lake, in her first credited part under that name - ironically, her character’s name is never revealed - was but nineteen in 1941, but fulfills the female lead role well. She manages the difficult feat of standing out in a movie that could have been dominated by director, script and star. She provides the foil, in some ways, and not just the love-interest for Sullivan.

A host of familiar faces, a number of them Sturges ‘regulars’ appear, and all provide distinct personalities to their characters, even if they aren’t fully developed. Among those of note are the aforementioned Warwick and Hall, who play Sullivan’s Hollywood colleagues; they are quite sympathetic to our hero, even being rather wiser than he. They are interesting contrasts to the usual treacherous people viewed in movies about movies. One wonders if Sturges’s experiences were different than others in the business.

Sturges has an eye for unusual or particularly expressive faces, especially on the homeless men we see. Some seem to belong to long-time tramps, while others may be the visages of stock-brokers and salesmen who lost their luck. This would be in keeping with an aspect of the film that suggests anyone could fall on hard times, even film-producers.

(And you can see Sturges’s own face, as he puts himself in the background of a scene with Lake.

The direction runs along with the script, sometimes frantic, other times slow and studied. Sturges, as both writer and director, is in a happy position to accommodate himself. But at no time does he limit himself as to the type of movie he is making.

One of the most interesting things about Sullivan’s Travels is that Sturges, who usually has something subtle but acidic to say about aspects of the human existence that reflect poorly on our race - corrupt politics, hero-worship, selfish relationships - says something quite hopeful, in the end. Like the clouds that can’t quite cover the sky even during a storm, the film provides sunshine amid the darkness, and heart among the bile. That is likely its greatest achievement.

(The title of the fictional novel that Sullivan was hoping to adapt was later used for a real movie, which also featured convicts and chain-gangs. It was also the title of a fictional play, described as the ‘worst ever written’, in the tv series Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.)

The Web (1947)

Directed by Michael Gordon; produced by Jerry Bresler

Bob Regan (Edmond O’Brien) is a small-time but conscientious attorney, rather resigned to taking on unambitious cases for poorer people. One brief, however, brings him into contact with the rich and powerful Andrew Colby (Vincent Price), who is in fear of his life. Colby offers Regan a huge sum for an unorthodox task: to be his bodyguard. Admitting that he could use the money - and because the position would bring him closer to Colby’s beautiful secretary, Noel Faraday (Ella Raines) - Regan accepts the offer. Little could he guess that within twelve hours, he would exercise his duties as bodyguard, and be pitched into dangerous waters quite over his head.

The Web provides a pretty good premise, and an adequate plot. What it doesn’t give the audience is a main character that it can care about. This is not because Regan is unlikeable; quite the opposite. He is a decent man who genuinely cares about his clients, little people who can’t get help from any other source. He’s a cocky man with the ladies, but is fully aware that, as Churchill described Attlee, he is a modest man with much to be modest about.

The trouble is two-fold: Regan, despite being a good fellow, isn’t very interesting. Colby, with his machinations, Noel, with her sharp mind and Lieutenant Damico, the cop on the case, involve one more in the story. Secondly, everyone appears smarter than Regan. Colby is the spider at the centre of the web of the movie’s title, while Damico has a magician’s mind behind the face of a pugilist. Noel may not catch on to every ploy her boss uses, but once she does, she’s smarter than Regan in guessing what will happen next. The viewer might express more frustration with Regan than sympathy.

While the script inadvertently damages the main character’s appeal, there is nothing wrong with the performances that bring its words to life. O’Brien is always watchable, whether as a secondary character or a lead; hero or villain.

In films such as this, Price reminds us that he was not always stereotyped in horror movies. Indeed, his height and handsomeness could have steered him into the role of romantic lead, while his charm added a less obvious villainy than could be found in his later parts. Raines usually does well projecting a strong, smart personality.

The surprise is William Bendix as the detective. Not normally playing the brainy type, here he is the antithesis of most of his roles, the policeman who, if only in retrospect, may be seen always to be thinking. He uses his words carefully to goad others when necessary; he spends his evenings in a small restaurant playing chess.

The depiction of Bob Regan was indubitably intended by the writers, meant to show a man whose ambitions, even as limited as they are, could get him into trouble. But if it introduces a unique approach to a rather standard story, it also has its disadvantages. The Web is certainly not a bad movie, but neither is it outstanding in its genre.