(9/4/01)
Pursued is another of those films that I didn't like very much at the beginning, but which grew on me as it went along.
One reason why I didn't like it at first was that it had a very abrupt beginning. Or so it seemed to me. My impression was that we weren't properly introduced to the characters. And it took me a while to settle into it.
Pursued tells a strange and intense story. A young boy is taken from a scene of violence by a widow with two children. It is clear that there is a history of violence between his family and the widow's family. There is a man who is intent on destroying him. But no one ever tells the boy just what it's all about. He is hated and hunted down without ever knowing why.
There is a tension between the boy and the widow, played by Judith Anderson, who simply tells him not to ask questions. And there is tension between him and the son of the family. And then he falls in love with the daughter of the family, movingly played by Teresa Wright.
It's like a Romeo and Juliet story, but it is more painful because the lovers do not understand the forces which are determined to keep them apart. This is compensated for by the fact that the lovers prevail.
Robert Mitchum is fine as the bewildered, tortured soul. I had a little difficulty accepting him in this part because I am most familiar with his more sinister roles--Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear. Those are the only two other Robert Mitchum films that I can think of. It took me some time to adjust.
Teresa Wright and Judith Anderson both contribute a lot to this film. I think that Anderson's best moment comes after the inquest, when Mitchum has been exonerated of the killing of her son. He approaches her as she and Wright are preparing to leave in their wagon and Anderson tells him to never come near her again.
I also liked the scene when Wright attempts to murder Mitchum but can't. She married him planning to kill him, but what is fascinating is that he knew what she was planning to do, but also knew that she wouldn't be able to do it. He knew her that well. That was a surprising and gratifying moment.
I very much liked the photography of the scene where they buried Prentice, the young man who was manipulated into picking a fight with Mitchum. That scene had an eerie quality which impressed me.
I never did figure out just what happened when the hero was a little boy. The explanations either came out too quickly at the end or else the "restored" sound quality was so poor that I couldn't make them out. It didn't really matter, anyway. What mattered was the story of this man, caught up in an impossible, bewildering situation and how he dealt with it.
Showing posts with label Raoul Walsh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Raoul Walsh. Show all posts
Friday, January 28, 2011
Objective, Burma! 1945. Directed by Raoul Walsh.
(8/30/01-9/1/01)
I generally don't like war films. I can't get interested in them and in consequence found Objective, Burma! hard to follow. But I do admire it for its raw, unvarnished look--it seems like a newsreel or documentary--and for Errol Flynn's performance.
Flynn portrays the hero, but without the poetry, the pagentry or the romance. We get right down to the bare bones--the essence--of his hero characterization and he shows us that it's more than just the trappings. Flynn is noble and courageous even without the swords, the cape--or Olivia de Havilland. There is not a single female character in Objective, Burma!
One thing I like very much about the picture is the way the characters become progressively more dishevelled. They really look as if the war is taking its toll on them. The faces become sweatier and lined with stress. Stubble appears on their faces. The film has a very down-to-earth look about it.
Not too much happens in the first part (first half?) of the picture. The men are dropped into Burma to blow up a radio station. It is a straightforward account of how they do this and I didn't find it all that interesting. It is when the plane can't land to pick them up and they become stranded that things become exciting. They are given up for dead by their superiors at one point.
There is a fascinating scene where the men come upon a Buddhist temple where a massacre has taken place. A place of peace has become a place of violence. And the final battle was certainly exciting enough. Objective, Burma! builds into a rousing war film.
George Tobias provides some appropriate comic accents. I'm not going to comment on the portrayal of the Japanese as all brutes because this was, after all, a patriotic war film made during World War II. "Consider the source."
I generally don't like war films. I can't get interested in them and in consequence found Objective, Burma! hard to follow. But I do admire it for its raw, unvarnished look--it seems like a newsreel or documentary--and for Errol Flynn's performance.
Flynn portrays the hero, but without the poetry, the pagentry or the romance. We get right down to the bare bones--the essence--of his hero characterization and he shows us that it's more than just the trappings. Flynn is noble and courageous even without the swords, the cape--or Olivia de Havilland. There is not a single female character in Objective, Burma!
One thing I like very much about the picture is the way the characters become progressively more dishevelled. They really look as if the war is taking its toll on them. The faces become sweatier and lined with stress. Stubble appears on their faces. The film has a very down-to-earth look about it.
Not too much happens in the first part (first half?) of the picture. The men are dropped into Burma to blow up a radio station. It is a straightforward account of how they do this and I didn't find it all that interesting. It is when the plane can't land to pick them up and they become stranded that things become exciting. They are given up for dead by their superiors at one point.
There is a fascinating scene where the men come upon a Buddhist temple where a massacre has taken place. A place of peace has become a place of violence. And the final battle was certainly exciting enough. Objective, Burma! builds into a rousing war film.
George Tobias provides some appropriate comic accents. I'm not going to comment on the portrayal of the Japanese as all brutes because this was, after all, a patriotic war film made during World War II. "Consider the source."
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Hello, Sister! 1933. Directed by Edwin Burke and Alfred Werker (and Erich von Stroheim and Raoul Walsh, uncredited.)
(8/20/01)
Hello, Sister!, on the surface of it, has the look of an unpretentious, low-budget production. Yet, it is both intense and startling. It is certainly startling for its candor which is totally unexpected in a Hollywood movie of 1933.
Two young women decide to go for a stroll on Broadway one evening in hopes of meeting some nice young men. They get picked up and one is sexually aggressive in a way that is uncomfortable to watch. When they take the girls home he bluntly offers her a supposedly expensive ring for her favors. Upon being rebuffed he turns his attentions on a neighbor who is happy to oblige. But the ring turns out to be a fake.
The woman who did the rebuffing takes up with the other of the two men. They begin seeing each other. But then she goes to a doctor who tells her that she is expecting.
All of this is quite startling to find in an American film of the 1930s. But it is all very Erich von Stroheim and this is another film that was taken away from Stroheim and reworked by others.
A dog is hit by a car. As the couple walk over planks Zasu Pitts falls into an open sewer. Very von Stroheim. And the situation between the young man and the young woman (having been lied to by others, he has come to distrust her) is resolved by a building catching on fire, which recalls the climax of Foolish Wives.
It is all very adult fare and it is gripping. This film certainly has something to say about how loneliness in the big city makes women vulnerable. In fact, the whole picture struck me as a savage criticism of modern urban society.
Zasu Pitts is the only name in the cast that I'm familiar with. She plays the part of a spinsterish woman with a lot of repressed anger that comes out in one fabulous scene. She asserts that she has had lots of boyfriends and then lies about her friend Peggy's behavior towards her boyfriend which leads to him temporarily backing out of the marriage. (And Peggy is pregnant.) That scene is true, real, and painfully human.
Hello, Sister! stands up, in its present form, as a fine little film. I suppose one can wonder what it was like at the first preview before it was virtually remade, but I don't.
Hello, Sister!, on the surface of it, has the look of an unpretentious, low-budget production. Yet, it is both intense and startling. It is certainly startling for its candor which is totally unexpected in a Hollywood movie of 1933.
Two young women decide to go for a stroll on Broadway one evening in hopes of meeting some nice young men. They get picked up and one is sexually aggressive in a way that is uncomfortable to watch. When they take the girls home he bluntly offers her a supposedly expensive ring for her favors. Upon being rebuffed he turns his attentions on a neighbor who is happy to oblige. But the ring turns out to be a fake.
The woman who did the rebuffing takes up with the other of the two men. They begin seeing each other. But then she goes to a doctor who tells her that she is expecting.
All of this is quite startling to find in an American film of the 1930s. But it is all very Erich von Stroheim and this is another film that was taken away from Stroheim and reworked by others.
A dog is hit by a car. As the couple walk over planks Zasu Pitts falls into an open sewer. Very von Stroheim. And the situation between the young man and the young woman (having been lied to by others, he has come to distrust her) is resolved by a building catching on fire, which recalls the climax of Foolish Wives.
It is all very adult fare and it is gripping. This film certainly has something to say about how loneliness in the big city makes women vulnerable. In fact, the whole picture struck me as a savage criticism of modern urban society.
Zasu Pitts is the only name in the cast that I'm familiar with. She plays the part of a spinsterish woman with a lot of repressed anger that comes out in one fabulous scene. She asserts that she has had lots of boyfriends and then lies about her friend Peggy's behavior towards her boyfriend which leads to him temporarily backing out of the marriage. (And Peggy is pregnant.) That scene is true, real, and painfully human.
Hello, Sister! stands up, in its present form, as a fine little film. I suppose one can wonder what it was like at the first preview before it was virtually remade, but I don't.
Friday, October 2, 2009
The Big Trail. 1930. Directed by Raould Walsh.
(2/5/00)
The first thing one notices about The Big Trail is that it is in wide screen which was unusual for 1930. And it is a film which really filled that wide screen with detail. Many of the shots are like panoramic landscape paintings carefully composed with regards to foreground, middleground and background.
I was unfortunately very tired during this film and couldn't really enjoy it. It is also unfortunate that I wasn't able to hear the primitive soundtrack very well and consequently unable to follow a lot of it.
It was a very unusual experience to see such a young John Wayne, as he didn't really resurface until 1939. He is a lot different from the Wayne we know. He still has a fine presence and is surprisingly romantic in his scenes with Marguerite Churchill. I really liked the speech about how you can get used to someone not liking you andthen when they're gone you can miss them not likingyou. Churchill is very endearing as the reluctant love interest who eventually comes round.
The ending ws really poignant. Wayne has gone away to take care of his mission of administering justice to the villains. Churchill fears that he won't come back.. Zeke (don't know the actor's name) hears him call in the woods and tells Churchill about a present Wayne supposedly left for her which is in the hollow of a redwood tree. Sending her off for it is his way of ensuring that she and Wayne can have some privacy when they meet. She sees him on the trail, far off, and stops because she is so surprised. Their meeting takes place without words.
I did feel that The Big Trail went on for too long, but that might have been due to the fact that I was tired and couldn't hear a lot of it.
(2/8/00)
As an epic of westward migration it wasn't quite as inspiring as The Covered Wagon, but the scene in which the pioneers lower the wagon over the cliffs was an amazing thing to see.
I found comedian El Brendel tiresome. His humor is one aspct of this film which doesn't wear well.
The first thing one notices about The Big Trail is that it is in wide screen which was unusual for 1930. And it is a film which really filled that wide screen with detail. Many of the shots are like panoramic landscape paintings carefully composed with regards to foreground, middleground and background.
I was unfortunately very tired during this film and couldn't really enjoy it. It is also unfortunate that I wasn't able to hear the primitive soundtrack very well and consequently unable to follow a lot of it.
It was a very unusual experience to see such a young John Wayne, as he didn't really resurface until 1939. He is a lot different from the Wayne we know. He still has a fine presence and is surprisingly romantic in his scenes with Marguerite Churchill. I really liked the speech about how you can get used to someone not liking you andthen when they're gone you can miss them not likingyou. Churchill is very endearing as the reluctant love interest who eventually comes round.
The ending ws really poignant. Wayne has gone away to take care of his mission of administering justice to the villains. Churchill fears that he won't come back.. Zeke (don't know the actor's name) hears him call in the woods and tells Churchill about a present Wayne supposedly left for her which is in the hollow of a redwood tree. Sending her off for it is his way of ensuring that she and Wayne can have some privacy when they meet. She sees him on the trail, far off, and stops because she is so surprised. Their meeting takes place without words.
I did feel that The Big Trail went on for too long, but that might have been due to the fact that I was tired and couldn't hear a lot of it.
(2/8/00)
As an epic of westward migration it wasn't quite as inspiring as The Covered Wagon, but the scene in which the pioneers lower the wagon over the cliffs was an amazing thing to see.
I found comedian El Brendel tiresome. His humor is one aspct of this film which doesn't wear well.
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