Only Angels Have Wings (1939) **1/2

While the great screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938) is my all-time favorite Howard Hawks’ film, I must admit that the director made a number of enjoyable dramatic films, too.  His versatility was what made him one of the best directors of his time.  Yes, his movies often ran over budget and very rarely wrapped on time, but he usually put out quality products.  Such was the case with Only Angels Have Wings (1939), which was hugely successful for Columbia Pictures and was the third highest grossing production of 1939—no small feat in one of the greatest filmmaking years ever.  While it didn’t swallow up a ton of Academy Award nominations like Goodbye Mr. Chips (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), Wuthering Heights (1939), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Stagecoach (1939), Love Affair (1939), and The Wizard of Oz (1939), it was comprised of a gifted cast and some phenomenal aerial cinematography.

Of course any film that had Cary Grant as its male lead was assured of a charismatic hero, thief, cad, or jester.  Grant had screen presence and he always seemed at ease with whatever role he played. Perhaps this is why someone who did so many memorable films was so often overlooked by the Academy—he only earned three nods in his storied career.  His co-star in Only Angels Have Wings had the same problem. 

While her career wasn’t quite as long as Grant’s, Jean Arthur starred in some of the best films of the 1930s and 1940s:  Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Easy Living (1937), You Can’t Take It with You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), The Talk of the Town (1942), The More the Merrier (1943), and A Foreign Affair (1948), and she ended her Hollywood career in one of the most revered westerns ever: Shane (1953). Yet, somehow Arthur only found herself nominated for one Oscar and is virtually forgotten today—except by true classic film fans. 

I wholeheartedly believe the reason Grant’s and Arthur’s acting abilities were often so overlooked—or you might say taken for granted—is because they made it look so easy. Also, they both had the ability to interweave comedy into overall dramatic films, as they did in Only Angels Have Wings, which was a heavy film.  Grant’s Geoff Carter is, to quote Dutchy (Sig Ruman), a hard man who pushes the limits of his pilots to ensure the success of his struggling Barranca Airways.  Arthur’s Bonnie Lee is a sharp-tongued and hot-tempered woman who finds herself unexpectedly involved in a masculine, adrenaline fuelled world she doesn’t understand.  Anytime someone takes to the air it might be the last thing that they do—and if it is, then the others must carry on as if nothing has happened.  With this ever-present fact hanging over their heads, Geoff and Bonnie have to maneuver through a burgeoning love affair which is jeopardized by his love of flying and her fear of his death. It would have been easy for the movie to turn into a heavy-handed melodrama, but the comedic moments between Geoff and Bonnie adds another layer to the film.  Also, who could do sly sexual banter better than Grant and Arthur—perhaps Grant and Irene Dunne, but you get my point. 

Only Angels Have Wings also benefits from good performances by Richard Barthelmess, Rita Hayworth, and Thomas Mitchell.  Barthelmess’s turn as an outcast pilot who takes the most dangerous jobs was probably his best since The Dawn Patrol (1930). Hayworth, who plays Bathelmess’s wife, Judy, turns in a performance that showed she had the chops to finally stop being cast as a lower supporting player.  Yet, it is Thomas Mitchell as Kid, the self-sacrificing almost blind pilot, that is the standout.  Not gifted with the good looks of Grant, Mitchell was a fine actor who found himself in supporting roles. Oh, but what a great supporting actor he was. While he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1939 for Stagecoach, he could just have easily been nominated for his performance in Only Angels Have Wings. While Grant and Arthur were the spine of the movie, Mitchell was the heart of it. 

The two Oscar nominations that Only Angels Have Wings did receive were primarily related to its aerial elements.  Joseph Walker earned a Best Black and White Cinematography nod, and Roy Davidson and Edwin C. Hawn were nominated for Best Special Effects.  The two crash scenes (and one near-miss) in Only Angels Have Wings are expertly filmed and recorded.  I expect it was pretty dangerous to crash a burning plane at such a high speed, and it is quite jarring to watch—especially for anyone who doesn’t like to fly. 

Hawks had a fascination with airplanes and made a number of other memorable films about aviation: The Air Circus (1928), The Dawn Patrol (1930), Ceiling Zero (1936), and Air Force (1943). Hawks’ love of aviation began during WWI when he learned to fly in the U.S. Army Air Service and continued throughout his life.  It was this love that helped him showcase both the beauty and danger of flight.  No other director defined the genre better, and his depiction of the hero-pilot has been mimicked in countless films up to present day cinema.  It is shocking to me that someone hasn’t put a Blu-ray collection together of his aviation films.

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Wuthering Heights (1939) **1/2

As novel to screen adaptions go, director William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939) is far from a faithful retelling of Emily Bronte’s gothic tale of love, jealousy, and vengeance.  Never mind that the entire second half of the novel is omitted by screenwriters Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht’s Oscar nominated screenplay, it’s the last twenty minutes of the film that will forever cause Bronte to turn in her grave. Yet, I’m not going to discuss how insanely wrong MGM presented the true meaning of Wuthering Heights to countless generations of non-readers in this review. Instead, I want to talk about two things: Greg Toland’s gorgeous black and white cinematography and the romanticization of pathological behavior.

Wuthering Heights was nominated for eight Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Laurence Olivier), Best Supporting Actress (Geraldine Page), Best Art Direction (James Basevi), Best Director (Wyler), Best Original Score (Alfred Newman), Best Screenplay (MacArthur and Hecht), and Best Black and White Cinematography (Toland).  Of these eight nominations, only Toland went home with the gold statue, and only because Gone with the Wind (1939) was in color and thus won Best Color Cinematography.  Perhaps things would have turned out better that award season for Sam Goldwyn had he opted for Vivien Leigh to play Cathy instead of Merle Oberon. I expect his unrelenting statement that Wuthering Heights, a commercial failure until its reissue, was his favorite of all of his productions instead of such superior films as The Best Years of Our Lives (1945) and The Little Foxes (1941) was a direct result of getting trounced by Leigh and Gone with the Wind in 1939. 

Toland described Wuthering Heights as “a soft, diffused picture, a fantasy”.  Through Toland’s lighting and camerawork, Wyler was able to depict four separate thematic moods.  Every last scene in the Earnshaw house (Wuthering Heights) is presented as somber, dark and foreboding.  From the opening scene where Heathcliff (Olivier), Isabella (Fitzgerald), and Ellen (Flora Robson) are sitting around the hearth when Lockwood (Miles Mander) interrupts their constant unhappiness, this house is lensed as a house of doom.  The moors that Cathy (Oberon) and Heathcliff escape to in times of both happiness and despair are depicted in two ways.  While Toland always seemed to capture the windy look of the rugged moors, he also appeared to present them based on the mood of the story.  When the couple experiences happiness the lighting is warm and inviting, but when things are going bad, say when Cathy chases after Heathcliff in a torrential downpour, the sky is dark and menacing.  And, then there is the Linton house, which always seems to be presented as extremely bright and cheerful, but can also be filmed in a way that its brightness also seems overbearing—more on that in a minute.

Known for his penchant for filming scenes in front of mirrors, Toland captured two of the most memorable scenes in Wuthering Heights by employing mirrors. It is not a coincidence that both scenes involved Cathy, since in Bronte’s novel mirrors had the habit of mocking and tormenting Cathy.  One scene occurs after Cathy and Heathcliff have a big fight, in which she treats him like a servant after returning from her first convalescence at the Linton house. Upon returning to her room she gazes at herself, dressed in one of Isabella’s fine dresses, in a full-length mirror. As she grows enraged with herself over how she treated Heathcliff she proceeds to violently rip the dress from her body. The other memorable mirror scene finds Cathy gazing into a mirrored dressing table as she prepares for Edgar Linton’s visit (David Niven). When Heathcliff barges into her room to dissuade her from the meeting, her mood completely changes.  For Cathy, both in the film and in the novel, mirrors represent her two personalities/faces—one is wild, carefree, and in love with the world in which Heathcliff resides, the other face is wanton for fine, pretty, respectable things and maliciously hateful toward Heathcliff’s presence, as it endangers her ability to first obtain and then keep “respectable” things. 

And this brings me to Wyler’s romanticization of pathological behavior in Wuthering Heights.  I’ve heard people say that this is a film about undying love and all of the idiotic things that go along with such a statement. Quite frankly, it is not, even if that is what Goldwyn wanted with his insane demand that the ending, which Wyler refused to shoot, find the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff wandering the moors eternally together. In today’s world, Cathy and Heathcliff’s story would have been one you would see on the nightly news: obsession turns to murder suicide.  Let’s forget that Heathcliff’s true character is bastardized by this movie—he was a horrible, though troubled, man in the novel.  It is Cathy’s behavior that is pathological—she probably would have been diagnosed with some sort of personality disorder if such a diagnosis existed at the time.  She loves Heathcliff but despises him at the same time. She doesn’t want to settle so she marries someone she doesn’t love to achieve the security and respectability that she so desires. Yet, when Heathcliff elopes with Isabella she has a nervous breakdown which causes her health to deteriorate, which causes her premature death. Ick! 

Only the deathbed scene, at least for me, somehow salvages the true nature of this unhealthy relationship.  Perhaps some found it romantic, but for me it was filmed in such a way that it truly represented their relationship.  Usually death scenes are shot in an aura of softness and employ somber lighting, but Cathy’s room of death is filled with bright lighting and so much white that it is sharp to the eye.  Forget Heathcliff’s whimpering and declarations of undying love, this brightly lit room is spotlighting how selfishness, vanity, vengeance, and revenge have no place in the world of love.  Cry Heathcliff for the world of happiness you never had. Feel your pitiful life drain from your listless sick body Cathy as you document the true state of your relationship by saying, “If I could only hold you till we were both dead.” In the end, your depravity not only destroyed both of you but those who made the mistake of loving you.  I expect many will not agree with my interpretation of the ending, but I take solace in the knowledge that Bronte probably would look at it the same as I do. 

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The Lady Vanishes (1938) **1/2

(There may be spoilers in this post.)

I’m not certain what most people see when they watch director Alfred Hitchcock’s, The Lady Vanishes (1938).  To many, it is the most suspenseful and wittiest of his British films.  Perhaps it is the wittiest, but I would dare say that The 39 Steps (1935) is far more suspenseful.  Still, those points aren’t really  what I contemplate when I watch this movie.  What I think about is how politically symbolic it is—perhaps without even trying.

While The Lady Vanishes premiered in London on October 7, 1938, and, thus, could not have been affected by Neville Chamberlain’s idiotic “Peace for Our Time” speech on September 30, 1938, regarding the Munich Agreement, the movie is a reflection of its time.  First, the film begins in the small, fictitious European country of Bandrika, which has just suffered an avalanche that has blocked the railway.  To me, the avalanche is Nazi Germany—which would scoop up the Sudetenland after Chamberlain’s act of appeasement.  As a result of the avalanche, a small group of British citizens find their trip back home delayed and they must lodge overnight in a crowded hotel infested with all sorts of Continentals who don’t speak English and seem unfamiliar with common  British manners. In an uncivilized world (any European country east of France in this case), the British, of course, are overly civilized—which, by the way, was causing them all sorts of trouble with dealing with Hitler.

Then there are the principal leads: Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.  Iris Henderson (Lockwood) is an heiress returning to England to marry a man she obviously doesn’t love because it is time for her to settle down.  Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) is a whimsical musicologist who is researching regional folk music and customs. Together, they are the British Empire: practical observers of the European conundrum—the Nazis. When Iris’ takes a flower pot to the skull, which leads her to blackout on the train, her worldview becomes a bit off-kilter—as had the British mindset during Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria.

When Iris awakes, she is tended to by the kindly Ms. Froy (Dame May Whitty), who unfortunately vanishes (hence the title) soon thereafter.  When Iris attempts to find Ms. Froy she finds herself fighting against two groups of people: the conspirers and the do-nothings.  The conspirers are a mix of Europeans (who seem to speak Italian and German) who work together to trick Iris into believing that her bump on the head is causing her to mistrust them, and that Ms. Froy is not missing.  And, then there are the do-nothings, who all happen to be British.  There are the adulterers (Cecil Parker and Linden Travers), who don’t want to become involved in case of scandal, and then there are Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) and Charters (Basil Radford), two British cricket enthusiasts who would rather stay mum about having seen Ms. Froy than miss an all-important cricket match.  I view this as a statement that scandal leads to confrontation and that it is better to preoccupy oneself with unimportant distractions than seeing what is truly happening around oneself. 

And, then there is the stranded train scene.  By this time, with no help from their fellow British passengers, Iris and Gilbert have recovered Ms. Froy and are trying to convince their fellow travelers that something is amiss in whatever Godforsaken European nation they are stranded in.  It takes a bullet to the hand for Charters to believe that they are in grave danger and Cecil Parker’s character, a pacifist, gets shot down while waving a white handkerchief in the air.  It is not until the British citizens band together against their enemy that they can escape danger.

Oh, and Ms. Froy—why was she “vanished” by the Europeans in the first place?  She was a British spy on her way back to report that two European nations had made a secret pact with one another.  Please pick one: the Non-Aggression Pact between the Soviets and Germany or the Pact of Steel between Italy and Germany, both of which were signed in 1939. 

I expect mine is an unusual viewpoint of The Lady Vanishes.  Perhaps you would rather I discuss how the serenader is killed by an unknown person via shadow or that Hitchcock employs birds and a magician’s disappearing woman cabinet to make a statement?  Or what about the fact that one of the conspirators (Paul Lukas) is a likable villain or that the heroine finds herself in world where reality is pitted against illusion?  All of those common Hitchcockian themes do appear in the movie and work quite well, but as a historian I see an accidentally  politically prophetic film. 

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Peter Ibbetson (1935) **

As a fan of Gary Cooper, I must say that I was sorely disappointed by director Henry Hathaway’s, Peter Ibbetson (1935).  When I think of Cooper I don’t envision a pencil mustache, an five-second British accent, and surrealism.  This is not to say that this is a bad film—it’s just unbelievably weird. 

I’ve never read George du Maurier’s novel, Peter Ibbetson, so I viewed the screen adaptation with fresh eyes.  At first, when two young children (Dickie Moore and Virginia Weidler) are torn apart by fate, I anticipated that they would reunite as adults and live happily ever after once they overcame some Hollywood obstacle.  My goodness, I did not envision a murder conviction, a broken back, and, wait for it, a nighttime dream world where the separated lovers meet each night to skip through fields and dodge falling rocks.  Granted, it wasn’t your usual Hollywood story, so for that it gets originality points, but, oh my, when I try to wrap my mind around dream synchronization it just makes me giggle.

The acting was passable, but nothing to rave about either.  Cooper, who plays Peter Ibbetson, seems a bit uncomfortable in the role—or perhaps I am projecting my unhappiness with his pencil mustache with how I viewed his performance.  Still, he seemed stifled in this and his easy-going naturalistic acting style seemed to be missing.  Ann Harding, who plays Peter’s dream partner Mary, is much better in the first half of the film than in the second—so I guess that means she gave an uneven turn here.  I much preferred her when she played the spunky Duchess of Towers than when she morphed into the Dream Weaver. Again, my dislike of this plot device may have hampered my viewpoint of her second-half performance.  And, then we have a very young Ida Lupino speaking with a sort of Cockney accent as a girl Peter escorts around the French countryside. It was refreshing to hear Lupino use her British accent—as she was English—but I expect she did not speak with a Cockney accent at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, either. 

The most impressive thing about Peter Ibbetson is Charles Lang’s cinematography.  He and director Hathaway obviously wanted to depict two different worlds—reality and dreamland (for lack of a better term, but I suppose you could say fantasy, too).  No surprise here, but Lang’s surreal world is full of silhouettes and expressionistic photography.  I expect the translucent shots of people walking through prison bars was a highlight for many viewers (even if it was 1935 and film had made great strides since Victor Sjostrom’s The Phantom Carriage in 1921).  Even I have to admit that Peter’s dream tower was pretty impressive (kudos to art directors Hans Dreier and Robert Usher)—and fitting, as his lover was the Duchess of Towers.  However, I was not amused with it exploding and raining rocks/debris down on two people who were dreaming. 

Overall, I found Peter Ibbetson to be a unique film (especially for the 1930s), but I wasn’t overly impressed with the overall product. The film is uneven and I just couldn’t allow myself to take the plot seriously.  This may sound strange coming from someone who adores The Wizard of Oz (1939), but there’s a big difference between the two films—Dorothy was the only one dreaming! 

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Limite (1931) :(((

If all you can think about is how much you wish you had a handful of Dramamine and speed while watching a film then you are not having an enjoyable viewing experience.

Director Mario Peixoto’s Limite (1931) is not the worst “art” film I’ve ever seen, but it surely wasn’t good, either.  In general, I don’t like experimental film. This admission capped with the fact that this was also a silent experimental film only seemed to heighten my abhorrence.  And, unlike other avant garde films that I disliked (see L'age d'or and Un Chien Andalou), Limite also had the indecency to be exceedingly long—114 minutes of pain.

In a rowboat to nowhere three nameless people—two women (Olga Breno and Tatiana Rey) and one man (Brutus Pedreira) indefinitely and aimlessly drift at sea.  Some semblance of what led them to this sea of abyss is told via flashbacks—but even those don’t really explain how the hell these people ended up floating in a boat together.  As such, the “story” made absolutely no sense and drug on forever—hence my need for a handful of speed.

And what of my desire for Dramamine?  Spinning, swerving, spiraling, and twirling cameras, surprisingly, capture those types of images. I suppose this is where the experimental comes into play and why this is viewed as a “cult” film, but it just gave me a migraine. 

Overall, I hated it.  The best part of the film was when they showed a clip of an old Little Tramp film.  For one blissful minute in Limite I didn’t want to scream, “Is it over YET?”

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Skyfall (2012) **

Daniel Craig is certainly the best Bond since Sean Connery, and he is most assuredly the best looking Bond ever.  Yet, once I pushed all of that aside and actually watched director Sam Mendes’ Skyfall (2012) I wasn’t all that amused.  Action sequences galore—guns, explosions, runaway trains, speeding cars and motorcycles—and a crazy baddie (played by Javier Bardem) ripe for a visit with Freud just isn’t enough for me.  Of course, I’m not a 007 enthusiast and so the film that celebrates Bond’s 50th Anniversary wasn’t as special for me as it may have been for others.

Skyfall is about resurrection—and I expect continuation of the franchise.  A wild chase through the streets of Istanbul (and the aisles of the Grand Bazaar) finds Bond atop a speeding train trying to recapture a stolen hard drive that contains the names of MI6 agents.  When M (Judi Dench) orders Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) to take out the man with the hard drive (Ola Rapace), she accidentally shoots Bond and he is presumed dead.  When MI6 headquarters are blown up, Bond comes out of hiding. Hooked on booze and pills and out of shape, Bond is asked to hunt down the man behind the assault on the beacon of British intelligence.  He finds a psychopath named Raoul Silva (Bardem), who has it in for M because she once traded him for other agents and cyanide destroyed his teeth. The remainder of the film revolves around some Freudian feud between Silva, M, and Bond, and only the death of one or two of them can bring it to an end.

Like all Bond films, the production was well traveled—Istanbul, Shanghai, Macau, London, and the moors of Scotland all make an appearance.  Roger Deakins’ cinematography is spot on as usual (see Barton Fink, No Country for Old Men, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, among many others) and he does a great job with all of the exterior shots. The shots of the Underground and the underground labyrinth that MI6 relocates to are tightly constructed and do a nice job of showcasing the Old Vic tunnels.  If I had to pick one scene that really stood out, it would be Bond’s waterway entrance into Macau—a dark night and sea illuminated by water lanterns always makes for a dramatic entrance.

And, just as every Bond film must have a crazy villain, Skyfall has Javier Bardem as Silva. Obviously Bardem knows how to play a psychopath (see, again, No Country for Old Men), but this particular psycho was a bit over the top—of course, Bond usually requires an over the top nutter. The biggest irritant was that Bardem was a blonde with orange eyebrows, but his obsession with M was also troubling.  Referring to her as “Mother” and blowing up buildings, the Tube, and a nice Scottish manor house only to ask her to blow out both their brains just seemed counterproductive.

The objectification of women is a Bond staple, but somehow, over the years this has been toned down a tad. Besides having  sex with an unnamed woman whilst on sabbatical and engaging in flirtatious talk with Ms. Moneypenny, there was only Berenice Marlohe to have sex with in a shower before her untimely death.  Of course, with M playing such a pivotal role in Skyfall, I can see why the old female objectification theme had to be somewhat diminished.  We will no doubt see Ms. Moneypenny in the next Bond film and with Ralph Fiennes taking over as M, perhaps we should wait until Bond No. 24 to see if this continues.  Still, it was nice seeing more of Craig’s shapely physique than any would-be Bond Girl.

Overall, Skyfall was your usual action film.  Boom, bang, and pow happened.  Things exploded, people got shot and stabbed, and the good guy won.  I was not compelled by the story or bowled over by anyone’s performance.  There were pretty places and people to look at and a lot of ado about nothing happened.  Quite simple, it was a Bond movie.

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Lawrence of Arabia (1962 ) ***

Director David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) is an epic, three and half hour-plus film about how T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) unwittingly won Saudi Arabia for the British military during World War I.  On the one hand you could say the production was grand and the cast renowned, but on the other hand you could say the film was too long and comprised solely of men—there are only brief sightings of women.  As such, the film often drags and has a primarily testosterone infused plot—even if there are some homoerotic themes to be found.

The film was nominated for a whopping 10 Academy Awards and won seven: Best Picture, Art Direction, Cinematography, Editing, Sound, Original Score, and Best Director.  While it garnered two acting nominations, I must say that I was not overly impressed by anyone in this dream cast other than Alec Guinness and Omar Sharif. For me, O’Toole gets a bit hammy in this and Anthony Quinn’s performance is just the epitome of overacting.  Perhaps Sharif had an advantage on most of the cast, as he was actually from the Middle East (Egypt), but his performance as Sherif Ali is engaging and believable, and he deserved his Best Supporting Actor nomination. While Guinness may not have been from the Middle East, he is particularly memorable as King Faisal. I expect he took great pride in doing so well in a role that was originally supposed to be played by Laurence Olivier.

Whenever I think about Lawrence of Arabia I remember an endless desert, camels, and trains being blown up.  The sheer size of the production is mind-boggling, which is one of the reasons I think it is still so highly regarded by film critics.  Filming with a cast of thousands, comprised of both people and animals, in the desert was a monumental task for Lean.  Of course, Lean was no stranger to large productions (The Bridge on the River Kwai and Oliver Twist), so he knew quite well how to be the ringmaster of such a massive circus.  He benefitted greatly from having one of the greatest British cinematographers, F.A. Young, doing the heavy lifting.  Really, it’s not the story that makes Lawrence of Arabia such a memorable movie—it’s all about the images captured by Young. And, these striking images paired with Maurice Jones’ unforgettable score make the perfect pairing. 

In a post-colonial world, Lawrence of Arabia can be a troubling film.  It was actually banned in many Middle Eastern countries (sans Egypt) because of the way it depicted Arabs. The whole idea that Lawrence was some sort of messianic figure to the Arabs somehow infantilizes them.  Also, the depiction of Arabs as gullible savages did not play well in newly emancipated Arab nations.  While no one should ever condone terrorism, there is a reason many in the Middle East don’t like Westerners—you ask them to help you free themselves from the yolks of the Ottoman Empire with the promise of self-rule and then take them over yourselves to plunder their resources (mainly petroleum and gemstones) and there is bound to be some animosity. 

Overall, Lawrence of Arabia is a masterful work of brilliant cinematography.  The story is somewhat interesting, but if you are a student of history the blatant inaccuracies in the movie can be unpleasant to endure. Fine performances from Sharif and Guinness, at least, temper this unpleasantness. 

 

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