Stanwyck & Lanfield.

I’d thought the file on Sidney Lanfield had long since closed but he turns up as a reference in Ryan Murphy & Ian Brennan’s scandal raking 2021 Hollywood TV Mini Series and, then on You Tube, I discover a beautiful transfer of his hardly ever shown 1938 Barbara Stanwyck weepy Always Goodbye, which proves surprisingly involving.

Way back when I first started thinking about movies, it seemed the real criteria were not the ones I was hearing - preserving the county’s British heritage or whether they were works of art or artifacts or the contribution they made to the proletarian struggle or the employment they provided the noisy local industry lobby.

What appeared more relevant was that the same names, usually directors, kept on appearing on the films that I liked, not just the Cecil B. De Mille - Alexander Korda - John  Ford heavyweights but people who seemed to have no celebrity status. I didn’t realise it at the time but I was formulating my own crude auteur theory. Remember the auteur theory?

A few years later, I got to discuss this with some of those film makers - Jacques Tourneur, Delmer Daves, Cy Enfield - and I found that some had gone through the same process themselves a generation earlier. Andre de Toth admired Leo McCarey’s brother Ray McCarey. Michael Powell had been a fan of Roy Del Ruth.

My notion, not surprisingly, had drawn ridicule from my contemporaries, the Grierson documentary devotees, to be followed by the Sam Fuller adherents. Fuller himself threw confusion into the assembled French fan pack by stating his respect for Herbert Brennon - “Qu’est-ce que ce Herbert Brennon?”

Lemon Drop Kid - Bob Hope & Lanfield.

To the In-Crowd, one time jazz musician and gag man Sidney Lanfield had been way beyond respectability. I’d be surprised if the more purposeful had seen any of his work but he did the best of Bob Hope’s films. (seems that I and Woddy Allen are the only  admirers of Bob Hope left) I particularly enjoyed a couple of Paramount comedies Lanfield did with Paulette Godard - Standing Room Only and The Lady Has Plans. The university film group had a palace revolution, took my suggestion and slapped on The Lady Has Plans and that one proved a hit with what passed as a sophisticated audience in nineteen fifties Australia, which I felt made a point.

Well that was then and this is now, though Sidney Lanfield’s sustained association with popular entertainment meant he did keep on popping back into view. He did the first Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes and had Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth as leads. Even after he scaled down into series TV, he directed the 1960 The Man in the Pit episode of John Casavetes’ landmark Johnny Staccato, the series where the studio executive prompted “John, John, you don’t get the idea. Your program is just a twenty five minute interval between the commercials.” I handled a copy of Follow the Sun. (Glenn Ford as golfer Ben Hogan) which I’d thought of it as production line entertainment when I’d seen its first run, and was surprised to find how effective it remained.

So I dialed up Always Goodbye, which proved to be a remake of the Fanny (“Back Street”) Hurst story Gregory La Cava did as Gallant Lady with Ann Harding five years earlier - and to anticipate Now Voyager.

It also was unexpectedly touching for something so obviously synthetic. The plot is played out in studio settings that never convince us they are real streets, offices, homes or ocean liner and the support are painstakingly effaced to focus attention on Stanwyck’s noble suffering - which she manages impeccably - her performance is the film and everyone knew it.

Interestingly Cesar Romero and (surprise) Lynn Bari (“Women can’t fool women”) wouldn’t go along with the gag and manage to resist erasure.

Babs is found in the back projected N.Y. street, waiting outside city hall for her husband to be, who is promptly wiped out in an off screen traffic accident. That leaves her with the problem of the baby. Fortunately globe trotting Herbert Marshall happens to be sitting on the pier which she intends throwing herself off and whisks her to a spot in Binnie Barnes’ fashion house - where she thrives.

She has followed developments with adopted out young Johnny Russel (particularly bratty) whose new mum dies (off screen again) leaving new dad Ian Hunter (the men are so nice and so British) to raise the kid.

Always Goodbye - Stanwyck

On assignment in Paris, our heroine meets the boy at the Ritz and immediately signs up to ship on the Normandy on which he’s traveling back to the ‘States with admiring Italian (!) aristocrat Romero pursuing her - comic routines in the ship’s giant no sky pool and him chatting her with “You are more beautiful tonight than you were this afternoon” lines. She reads the kid “Little Black Sambo” which appears to grate with some modern sensibilities.

Marshall has taken a lab technician spot in New York to be near her but Hunter’s ambitious fiancée Bari admits she plans to ship the kid off to military school, making way for a kind of bitter sweet ending. Babs has the stars. Let’s not ask for the moon.

The saccharine material is spaced with passable comedy and lots of good living. Lanfield runs the show deftly even with peculiar touches like Hunter, who was the only one to show up on location, cycling up on back projection before we cut to doubles distant joining his character in his park-like grounds. It's like the two Bette Davises walking side by side on the process stage in Curtis Bernhardt’s 1947 A Stolen Life. It doesn’t convince but we admire the effort that went into that.

This one plays so well I kept on wondering why it was never re-issued. It made me curious about another Lanfield-Stanwyck collaboration which had been on You Tube as long as I can remember without my investigating it - Red Salute /  Her Enlisted Man Her / Her Uncle Sam, from Edward Small (The Donat Count of Monte Cristo, T-Men). This one was on the face of it more promising with its remarkable for 1935 Hollywood premise - General Purnell Pratt’s daughter Stanwyck engaged to Hardie Albright,  a radical on a visitor’s visa (freedom of speech, get it) outraging her dad who ships her South of the border, from which she plots her return to Washington, complicated when the roulette wheel swallows her last five dollars.

Serving soldier Robert Young finds himself involved in her schemes becoming A.W.O.L. when she commandeers Cliff Edwards' over-insured jalopy and trailer and runs the American border.

Best element gets to be Edwards enjoying finding himself in a chase with the border patrol, which provides the excitement he never had in the war and gets him away from wife, surprisingly strident Ruth Donnelly. He gets to sing “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” on back projection at the wheel.

Disappointingly the political content is limited to Babs parroting a few slogans and Bob sorts out the Albright problem by turning the student rally he is addressing into the Forum Scene from “Julius Caesar” for an ending. Hollywood was jittery about depicting left wingers at this stage, though I do like He Stayed for Breakfast, made in 1940 when the political climate had shifted and Loretta Young finds Bolshevik Melvin Douglas in her bedroom, demanding how he got there to be told “I once organised the locksmiths.” The relationship between General Pratt and Young is more interesting, switching mid scene from officer and subordinate to father and potential son in law and back.

It wasn’t till the the nineteen seventies and films like Bound for Glory and Reds that we’d see the 1930s Left treated convincingly.

Red Salute is more an It Happened One Night rip-off than serious argument and the two elements compete unsatisfactorily. Edward Small musters reasonable production values with Lanfield pushing it along relentlessly - going from something moving to something moving on the edits. A comparison with Always Goodbye shows how much Zanuck's massaging the elements before and after shooting determined the quality of Fox product. Sidney Lanfield, who associates dismissed as “a front office director” for calling the bosses for decisions, fitted into that scheme perfectly and they got superior results through collaboration. Few of his contemporaries could do that as well.

This was a model for "The Golden Years" of Hollywood and, while it was rarely going to create masterpieces, it did produce the flow of agreeable entertainment that distinguished the era. Talent more prestigious than Sidney Lanfield often fell below the standard of The Lady Has Plans and Follow the Sun. I'd enjoyed those and still do - but I'm not sure whether the Hollywood series reference was admiration or just picking out a name that was too obscure for anyone to worry about.

Wake Up and Live - Ben Bernie, Lanfield, Walter Winchell & Jack Haley.

 

Barrie Pattison 2022

 

Perverse.

Time was a movie was a story that you saw in a theater for around ninety minutes, made in or for Hollywood with a couple of recognisable stars speaking English. After more than a century, this basic film form has gone away or at least taken refuge on a streaming site - Clint Eastwood and Cry Macho.  It’s become quite a change of pace to watch a new theatrical release. I did two and both turned out to be attacks  on the traditional feature form.

Dominik (Seules les bêtes / Only The Animals) Moll’s new La nuit du 12 / The Night of the 12th. though it has familiar crime movie ingredients - a (grisly) murder followed by a police investigation, forensic examination, interrogation of suspects & disturbing revelations - aims at something more than the grown up variation on the cop movie that it appears to be. As it progresses, it becomes clear that we are  not watching even something like the apparently similar Arnaud Desplechin Roubaix, une lumière / Oh Mercy!

Capt. Bastien Bouillon’s police judiciaire move in, out ranking the small town Grenoble gendarmes, to investigate the night time burning alive of young Lula Cotton-Frapier. Catching sight of her photo with a kitten halts Bouillon in the middle of telling her parents about her death. Examining the girl’s phone and talking with friend Pauline Serieys, to whom she made her last call from the park where she died, leads to stories of promiscuity and sexual violence and tracking down old flames, several of whom end shackled in the interrogation room.

The Squad have problems of their own. They can’t keep the toilet clean and their printer keeps on breaking down. Roughing up suspects doesn’t present the expected outcomes. Bouillon works out his issues cycling on the velodrome track, like a hamster wheel as veteran Bouli Lanners, the film’s most familiar face, prompts and Lanners is sleeping on the lunch room couch after a marital break up.  Their investigations only produce shadowy figures. 

Three years later Judge Anouk Grinberg  (Bertrand Blier’s 1997 Mon homme and still looking good) digs the case out of the file-covered desk she inherited, injecting more funds, but the new stake-outs and hidden camera investigations don’t go as expected. Arab girl recruit Mouna Soualem’s dialogue with Bouillon shows an attitude that his more seasoned colleagues lack - a fascination with piecing together the facts of their investigations, more appealing to her than easy promotion.

La nuit du 12 - Grenoble memorial.

She and Grinberg are, as we might expect, the film’s most sympathetic characters. However this is not a re-run of current bloke bashing, despite indicators - “Most crimes are committed by men and most cops are men”, the squad ridiculing the young member’s belief in romance, Lanner’s disaster marriage or even Judge Grinberg’s dismissal of Bouillon’s jokey move on her - “Ne faites pas des bêtises!”  

Night of the 12th’s interrogations and cop conversations serve to illustrate  Grinberg’s assessment that current society is alarmingly distorting the way men and women relate -  violence endorsing rap songs, a lover who gets the giggles, sado-masochistic couplings and crazy idealisation. Even the loving family failed their daughter. When Grinberg’s character articulates this view, Moll is spelling it out for us - very bluntly German that - though the film is set in remote Grenoble and spoken in French.

Rather alarmingly, the published notices don’t seem to get it and they express dissatisfaction over the police procedural developments which we are shown, with deliberate emphasis, are not the point of the piece, even to the extent of a totally anti cop-movie conclusion.

Production values are modest - austere, effective film making and vivid performances. I’m not sure that Moll and his lot have completely solved the problems of going off tradition but Night of the 12 is still a class act.

The new English See How They Run is also a police investigation piece but it’s on the way to being polar opposite, jokey and with no pretense to realism. However a close reading proves it also is an attack on traditional form.

I homed in on this one because it shows the environment I shipped into. It is set in fifties London, still post war drab, where Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap” is celebrating its hundredth live performance.

While there, I’d been cutting room junior on an Agatha Christie movie.  Writer (the novels that produced the Juliette Greco Whirlpool and the Jack Palance Ten Seconds to Hell) & films (the Dr. Kildares), Laurence P. Bachmann was studio head. He came back from a conference with the author where she had admired the cannon mounts being used as set decoration and asked for one for her garden. Larry Bachman observed “She must be tired of firing from the hip.” I was the only one who laughed.

With See How They Run the indicators are there from the start with a voice-over that uses what sound like one of those terrible American accents, RADA actors were proud of, until we realise it’s Adrian Brody as a blacklisted Hollywood director, nailing the voice perfectly. He’s been hired to adapt the play as a movie, though they can’t go into production till six months after the end of the first theatrical run. Pretty soon we get Haris Dickinson doing a mean take on Richard Attenborough, all chummy seriousness of purpose that doesn’t quite ring true, and Reece Shearsmith as John Wolf. The’re among the murder suspects that returned WW2 veteran Inspector Sam Rockwell and constable Saoirse Ronan (particularly winning at mixing gormless and conscientious) are investigating under the personal supervision of Commissioner Tim Key. Nice to find Shirley Henderson turning up unexpectedly and is that John Cleese unbilled, as one of the on-stage cast?

See How They Run - Rockwell & Ronan.

In with the farcical complications, the film has incidentals that give it surprise conviction. The shadow of WW2 hangs over it. There’s a glimpse of Rockwell as a separated dad hobbyist turning out a home jigsaw for his children. We get plausible period detail helped by shooting in locations like the Savoy and the real theater which were empty under Covid restrictions. This gets to be a distraction - where is that back street Soho pub? How come James Wolf’s office has posters for The African Queen and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman which the real Wolf produced, next to one for the Mankiewicz No Way Out with which he had no known connection. I never met Wolf and have no idea whether he was actually doing his black P.A. but there were only a couple of balcklisted directors working in England at that stage (Edward Dmytrick had purged his guilt and Sam Wanamaker was still acting) and it’s far fetched to imagine serious minded Joe Losey or Cy Enfield showing up with a story board of a car chase and shoot out they proposed to introduce into an adaptation of “The Mousetrap”. As here, Losey did work with a West Indian writer, though.

Brody’s original exposition had him expressing contempt for the Agatha Christie conventions he’s called upon to use, the same ones we see being played out as the film progresses, in all their fake intensity - finding the body, interviewing character actor suspects, the mystery woman in Brody’s little red book, a gathering at the country house with the realisation that suspects are now potential victims.  

I’ve always been uneasy with the notion of Agatha Christie, something that is at once simple minded and deeply perverse, as suitable mass entertainment. René Clair made the only Christie adaptation I enjoy, casting comedians playing the characters straight, which gave And Then There Were None just the right note of artificiality. I don’t think any of the people I was working with had ever seen that one - maybe star, the endearing Margaret Rutherford.

 

The substance of See How They Run is that it is a critique of the Christie industry, which is still with us in the Branagh adaptations, just like The Night of the 12th, hoeing into the policier conventions. I’d like to watch See How They Run double billed with the Michael Apted 1979 Agatha, offering Vanessa Redgrave as an unbalanced version of the writer.  

I'd guess it's no accident that two substantial new theatrical releases feature passages that dismiss the films that precede them - Grinberg's analysis and Brody's voice over. Both films are saying that a twenty First Century audience needs to be fed something more aware.

Barrie Pattison 2022.