FARROW.

Film Alert 101

Wednesday, 17 November 2021

Sydney Film Festival (inc Streaming) - Barrie Pattison considers JOHN FARROW: HOLLYWOOD'S MAN IN THE SHADOWS (Claude Gonzalez and Frans Vandenburg, Australia, 2021) and retrieves his own thoughts on CALIFORNIA (John Farrow, USA, 1947)

Lana Turner, Lex Barker, John  Farrow, John Wayne on the set of The Sea Chase  (John Farrow, 1955)

The Curious Case of John Farrow.

I remember Ann Roth, Elia Kazan’s costume designer, rounding on Gillian Armstrong in the interview in her Orry-Kelly documentary and telling her that it wasn’t because the subject had done outstanding work on 42nd St., Casablanca and An American in Paris that he was up for consideration - but because he came from Kiama. Armstrong, to her credit, left it in the picture. 

That registered because I once (declaration of interest)  proposed a documentary on John Farrow, the boy from a house in Marrickville not unlike the one I grew up in, who went on to become the busiest Australian director in Hollywood and that wasn’t the half of it. He was awarded a CBE by the Queen and a Knighthood by the Pope, prepared an English-Polynesan-French dictionary, commanded a submarine and mated with Tarzan’s mate, fathering daughter Mia ... and he’d been responsible for my favorite cowboy movie. I wouldn’t want to go all Lord Byron on John Farrow’s case but you could argue he really was someone who’d put his talent into his work and his genius into his life.

My documentary didn’t get any further than budgeting the Hollywood clips but now we do have Claude Gonzalez and Frans Vandenburg’s feature length John Farrow - Hollywood's Man in the Shadows in the re-opened Sydney Film Festival.

It’s nice to see someone tackling the under-documented Farrow, who Paramount’s vigorous re-issue policy had made so prominent in my early film going. However, the film is kind of unsatisfying. 

 

It’s gappy on the unknown pre-Hollywood years. Relatives tell us about him faking a Newington education and being nabbed for coming on in a white coat with a stethoscope round his neck during the Spanish flu epidemic. They have him fighting in exotic revolutions but don’t nail the story of being recruited for a U.S. film being shot in the South Pacific for his maritime skills. 

Sailing for L.A. in 1919 (and jumping ship, giving him later emigration status problems), Farrow turns up as a Hollywood actor and a notable screen writer, represented by some badly reproduced titles for White Gold, though he was credited on Victor Fleming’s Wolf Song, the Schoedsack Four Feathers and the Pabst Don Quixote. Farrow didn’t realise wife to be Maureen O’Sullivan was the star when he dated her on what was then “The Capture of Tarzan.” The interviews suggest Maureen wasn’t big on mothering skills. Her privileged Catholic background generated Farrow's conversion - with a glimpse of his books on the Papacy, Thomas More and Father Damian. 

Full Confession - McLaglan & Calleia

Man in the Shadows curiously omits 1939’s Full Confession, Farrow’s first Catholic movie, though giving us (good quality) footage from its companion piece  Five Came Back - one of the only half dozen films Robert Mitchum would watch. 

However WW2 took up Farrow’s attention with a commission in the Canadian navy from which he was invalided out with Typhus to make The Hitler Gang, one of the few wartime films to put the Fuhrer on screen, and Wake Island netting Farrow a director Oscar nomination.

About there we hear about his long takes, illustrated by  China, with William Bendix, from 1943. Bruce Beresford observes he’s not game to try that and breaks his own material into edits. Farrow’s complex shots, developed in movies like Invisible Menace and  Commandoes Strike at Dawn (not cited - Paul Muni and Lillian Gish in an Irwin Shaw script) may have started the forties vogue for these - see the films of Edmund Goulding and Hitchcock. Technicolor had to build special fourteen-minute magazines to shoot Farrow’s California (his best film and one of the most handsome ever shot in the process) which appeared the year before Hitchcock got attention for long takes in his draggy Rope. 

Outside a couple of shots from California in the montage finale, Hollywood’s Man in the Shadows lets footage from Hondo stand-in for the Farrow westerns (John Wayne’s “There is no word in the Apache language for lie”). They seem determined to sell Farrow as a film noir director, emphasising The Big Clock  and the  Mitchum films. Also, unpardonably, the team beak-up the virtuoso, imperceptibly composited opening of The Big Clock which anticipates films like Gravity and Spectre. 

Four times Farrow leading man Ray Milland liked the way Farrow let him create bits of business as he practiced to become a director himself and mature Daryl Hickman comments favorably on the treatment he got.  Farrow didn’t always go down so well. Howard Keel called him a “rat fink” and son John Charles, the only one of the seven Farrow children who participates, gives a grim picture of his disciplinarian father in describing doing a bit part under his direction on John Paul Jones. 

HUAC arrives post WW2 and leading conservative Farrow’s stand against right-winger De Mille in the Director’s Guild dispute does get favorable mention - though they don’t identify George Marshall as the messenger sent to recruit him. 

The film touches on Farrow’s clandestine second family where the mother was murdered and the son unacknowledged. 

The team are unwilling to describe the quality drop after his stint as Paramount’s go-to director and roll through the final years to his work on the Empire series (dupey clip.) Mike Todd and Farrow clashed on Around the World in 80 Days and our man’s allocation to King of Kings didn’t survive the briefing where Sam Bronson explained that he expected to get away with racy material that would be censored doing any other subject. 

In this, as with the De Mille incident, there is a welcome glimpse of John Farrow as someone of undaunted principle but Man in the Shadows offers a rather glum protagonist. I’d just as soon hear about his out there sense of humor - complying with the requirements of his new religion by making confession at the remote Spanish quarter chapel where the priest didn’t understand a word of English.

Susan Lumsdon’s locating material in Australia and L.A. is striking but extends what is a rather long movie. The piece includes comments from Charles Higham, David & Margaret, Scott Murray, David Thomson, Bertrand Tavernier, Philippe Mora, Terry Moore & Todd McCarthy among many.  Mia Farrow figures in an appearance on Letterman and a glimpse of grandson Ronan at the podium is there to promote significance.

...   and here is a program note I prepared for a screening of Farrow’s 1947 California.

Though less celebrated, California is a  companion to the big costume films of the forties - Les enfants du paradis in France, Romanze in molle in Germany and David Lean’s Dickens films, sharing a common, highly studio-art directed, national aesthetic. 

Came the end of WW2 and Paramount’s house leading man Ray Milland carried off the then even-more valued best actor Academy Award for Lost Weekend. The studio might have been expected to showcase Milland’s talents in another gritty drama of the streets. However Hollywood was embracing post war Technicolor and Paramount, since the phenomenal silent era success of James Cruze’s 1923 The Covered Wagon, had a confidence in large scale westerns as part of its corporate culture. These all came together as the big budget 1947 production California.

And who was there to put at the helm of this prestige undertaking but their returned war hero and Oscar nominated (Wake Island) film director Sir Neville John Villiers Farrow C.B.E. 

Though he’s not credited on the script, none of his other films carries so much of the Farrow imprint. His background as historian ran to having Edith Head copy museum costumes and to designer Hans Dreier reconstructing the 1848 Colton Hall in Monterey where the California Assembly voted to join The Union. Farrow’s Naval interests contributed villains who had worked the slave trade, placing it with the director’s Two Years Before the Mast, The Sea Chase, Submarine Command, John Paul Jones or Botany Bay and there’s the shadow of his Prominent Catholic status.

The film goes explicitly Old Testament in the opening Earl (Walk in the Sun) Robinson vocals comparing California to the promised land and we have the emphasis Barbara Stanwyck places on marriage and the sub-plot of George Coulouris locking pious Argentina Brunetti out of Eduardo Cianneli’s Hacienda chapel, violating its sanctity to store guns for the planned insurrection. 

California recalls The Covered Wagon with plows to break the plains, the dividing wagon train and a military renegade wagon master, though Milland’s Trumbo doesn’t steal cattle to feed starving troops. He had to desert or shoot the husband, in the back story we are fed in installments (Frank Ferguson on patrol, the question of whether it was the woman’s fault, Commander Roman Bohnen’s scene). Halfway they switch to the secessionist movement plot line of  the later Cruze Pony Express silent. The writers even borrow the opening of  Stagecoach.

Milland is in his element, delivering the artificial language effectively and authentic looking, in twenty four hour’s growth of beard and grubby leathers. He tells Stanwyck not to waste two days' ration of water washing her hair. “Stay dirty like the rest of us.” We even get to see a tide mark on his neck, in one of the detail touches that occasionally lift the film - the antique card game that Stanwyck loses, real life California Congressman Albert Dekker caught still reloading a period firearm, meaning that he has to fight with a knife. Before I used to notice such things, the knife fight stuck in my memory and now I realise that it’s different to similar scenes because, like most of the dialogue, it’s done by the actual actors without edits. 

The way California is made is remarkable. It’s full of six and eight minute takes and anticipates Rope by eighteen months, without anyone noticing. It works a lot better here too. The film is however also well served by montage sequences in the Earl Robinson material and the card game.

Milland recalled that the long takes made the performers really nervous. If they got something wrong in one of these complex shots, everyone would have to do it all over again. Barry Fitzgerald misread his line about the grape cuttings on the end of a take and they had to do that reel’s worth three times. Is that the take of the slapping scene where Milland actually knocked out Barbara Stanwyck?

They didn’t scrimp on the cast. Heroine Stanwyck and Barry Fitzgerald also had fresh Oscars. George Coulouris (who Farrow detested) had been Anthony in Welles’ Mercury Players “Julius Caesar” and this carries right down to celebrity bit parts - Frank Faylen,  Gavin Muir, Julia Faye, Anthony Quinn. The standard of performance is remarkably high.  

The crew are also top rank technicians at the peak of their skills. Cameraman Ray (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Lady in the Dark) Rennahan, pioneer of the Technicolor process, does some of his best work. Editor Eda Warren was a regular Farrow collaborator. Not only is costumier Edith Head in full cry and but ex-Ernst Lubitsch associate, Art Department Head Hans Dreier furnished twenty seven locations, notably the near mile long, a one hundred and four wagon train mobilised (in Arizona) with army surplus walkie-talkies in exteriors and its studio reconstruction for the night scenes. Throw in the arrival in Pharoah Town's bustling night time street and the handsome saloon and Spanish Hacienda. Celebrity composer Victor Young’s score, complete with choral interludes, is uneven - bits of it coming from other hands. There’s enough music to qualify as an operetta with the distinctive Earl Robinson song interludes and Barbara Stanwyck’s numbers - she does her own vocals. 

In the best western movie tradition, the action scenes are highlights. The riders sweeping through the vineyards (four tons of off season grapes kept in cold storage) is particularly well staged, followed by Dekker’s men wheeling back (through gates later re-cycled for Jamaica Run) when they see Milland at the head of miners, riding up for the battle. There must be an awful lot of Richard Farnsworth stunt work but Milland is actually in the shot with what looks like a real explosion. 

Though critics tended to ignore these new Technicolor A feature westerns, they became a dominant element of the next decades of Hollywood film making. California was in constant re-issue for twenty years, proving to have been a test case to be followed by the studio’s excellent new version of Whispering Smith with Alan Ladd and Farrow and Milland making Copper Canyon, before it all edged into B productions.

It’s hard to imagine something so impressive not attracting attention.

California -Stanwyck in hoop skirt & Milland. Notice the individual Edith Head outfits given the bit players.

Posted by Film Alert 101 at 14:55

The Return of Feng Xiaogang

 

Well, it looks like Feng Xiaogang is back. Following his excellent 2025 Xiang yang: Hua/Two Girls, his Zhua Te Wu /I Know Who You Are has had a modest success in its home market. Feng appears to be the most interesting Chinese language film director since the great days of Hong Kong nurturing Jackie Chan and the Shaw Brothers. He did the first Chinese IMAX movie, the remarkable 2010 Tang shan da di zhen/Aftershock, and in the peak days of DVD, his were the over-stocked titles filling up Chinese Video store sale baskets. Well, after some erratic career moves - TV series, sequels, a glossy, made-in-New Zealand feature and playing the lead in Mr. Six, - all looking suspiciously like the consequence of official displeasure with his politically explicit I Am Not Madam Bovary, Feng is doing what he does best, even though, like Madam Bovary and Two Girls, this one again shows evidence of tampering.

I Know Who You Are is a long, ambitious - and in its central passages - imposing account of the Chinese scene from 1949 when the Maoists drove the Nationalist forces to withdraw to (then) Formosa. Departing Spymaster Hewei Yu recruits school teacher Ge Hu (Nanfang chezhan de juhui/Wild Goose Lake) to go underground, charged with sending information on a concealed shortwave radio to the new offshore headquarters. We watch Hu diligently transmitting market vegetable prices while appearing, to casual observers, to be listening to his Bakelite portable. The local police have their suspicions, allocating officer Jiayin Lei to investigate the teacher and the constable makes it his life’s work, moving into the empty ground floor flat in the spy master’s former home, where his target now lives, peering through the windows hoping to catch him in acts of subversion and forever frustrated by his quarry's ability to take on the color of a text book Marxist, with borrowed slogans and stock responses to meet every situation. Hu even recruits the suspicious policeman-neighbor to act as his matchmaker with Zhang Yao as the plain and uneducated maid from the disbanded whore house, who matches the description of a model socialist oppressed woman. That one must have been a casting challenge.

Ge Hu

Hu makes a great show of home renovations, revealing the incriminating radio he says must have been concealed by the departed spy. However, his signed commission as a KMT officer is still concealed in his boot or behind a framed picture. I did enjoy Hu reprimanding his slovenly wife for throwing the wash water off the balcony, where it drenches the eavesdropping cop not able to complain, and furtively congratulating her when they are out of earshot.  

 

 This material is presented as broad comedy and is not particularly funny. That’s not the plan. The deceit is shown quietly destroying the lives of both families. The teacher-spy’s unloved and unskilled wife tries to leave him and comes back rather than have their daughter starve. She finds the hidden commission and keeps sullen silence to protect the girl. Hu has met the school principal’s daughter, who is attractive and cultured and they go rowing together, attraction strong (one of the film’s weakest elements recalling Feng’s feeble 2019 Only Cloud Knows, made during his New Zealand exile) but any romance could jeopardise his secret life.  All this is being played out against the dramatically changing face of China. As the Cultural Revolution is denounced, officer Lei’s fanaticism gets him put on trial with ridicule and contempt, while Hu’s fake over-achieving, as with creating a bicycle-powered system for the (useless but they don’t say that) local pig-iron smelter, has won him honors and approval. This central portion of the film is the thing which makes it a stand-out -  the drunken self-rejection where Hu cuts his face, draining two liquor glasses at once, or the constable’s unhappy uniformed son finding himself conscripted not into police work but distant coal mining.   

I know Who You Are has striking visuals with a more sophisticated look than Feng Xiaogang’s already impressive early two-thousand hits like Aftershock or If I Were the One.  There is a scene where dialogue is conducted through a bead curtain, reduced in the close-ups to a shimmering, defocused foreground haze. Telling details mark the passage of time as much as the date captions -  the woman crier walking with her rattle, chanting the day’s news, consumerism hitting the community where Western brand names now letter shop fronts, China’s Olympics broadcasts.

 

The film’s foreign references are unexpected. “Pictures at an Exhibition" plays on the track as a plot point, along with offering sleeper agents as found in Telefon & Le Carre. The obvious “Les Misérables” similarities recall the 1936 Lang tao sha /Waves Washing the Sand made by Yonggang Wu immediately following his success with Shen nu/The Goddess, still the most admired early Chinese film. Also a particularly interesting comparison is Lucian Pitile’s 2003 Romanian Niki Ardelean, colonel în rezervaas/ Nikki & Flo, with its prospering Capitalist taunting the failed Communist neighbour. 

This all makes I Know Who You Are superior viewing, even if I’m less likely to include it among the year’s best, as I did Two Girls. However, whatever its qualities as art or entertainment may be, the film is going to be considered primarily as a cultural artefact. It has an obviously tacked-on (after captions) ending, with a ceremony honoring the policeman for his long dedication.

Also we don’t know if there are other filmmakers mounting these critiques of Chinese society among the six hundred titles China now produces each year but, if there are, China Lion is not showing them here - even in the ethnic circuit’s old two language subtitle format (or in this case three, with calligraphy song lyrics vertical at frame edge). I Know Who You Are arrives at the same time as Christian Mungiu's Norwegian Fjord, two superior new films about the destructive effects of dogma. In a time of Woke Ideologues facing off with White Supremacists, that can't be a bad thing.

 

Critics have made Jafar Panahi’s Iranian Yek tasadof-e sadeh/It Was Just an Accident an arthouse hit while Feng Xioagang remains a blank spot in their frame of reference. Is this because Feng achieved without the support of festivals and foreign reviewers and was seen as someone from popular entertainment rather than an artist? We could place him in an impressive list of leading filmmakers in uneasy relationships with their political masters. Lev Panfilov in the Soviets or Helmut Käutner and the Nazis had films banned or tampered. We are not all that far from Sidney Lumet's critical legal and military subjects, though they fared better relying on market forces. These filmmakers all survived on their popular following. 

  A World Without Thieves

 

Always an admirer of Feng’s work, seeing the new film motivated me to dust off my twenty-year-old Tian xia wu zei /World Without Thieves DVD. This one came when he was already a heavy hitter in the Chinese film scene, though his best were still to come - Aftershock, I Am Not Madam Bovary and the rest - but he’d already made Big Shot’s Funeral with a visiting Donald Sutherland and was sufficiently established to snare his industry’s New Year best opening time slot. 

In World Without Thieves, attractive Rene Liu, already well into her thirty year and counting career, is training chubby manager Biao Fu to speak English. He gets grabby when the wife is not looking, only to find Rene’s boyfriend, Hong Kong star survivor Andy Lau has got it on video and it’s going to cost the businessman his BMW to stop the recording going public. Rene is, for reasons we will discover, getting uneasy with their line of work.

These opening scenes seem divorced from the body of the film but as well as making things scenic, the couple joining devotees at a temple significantly introduces the notion of karma. In the train station crowd on the way back from their Temple visit, Baoqiang Wang (Detective Chinatown) is telling his fellow monastery carpenters that he will carry his life savings with him, rather than cable the money to the home village, where he is headed to marry and buy a house. Baoqiang  has already consulted with a wild wolf pack that howls at the moon and reassures his associates that he feels safe knowing that people must be better than wolves. Andy’s attention is immediately focused, as is it turns out, that of other con man, regular Feng lead You Ge (the If I Were for Real series), whose old man disguise Andy immediately sees through. 

World Without Thieves - Yong You, You Ge, Ka-Tung Lam.

The carpenter’s wax paper bundle of money moves among the characters, with Andy determined to hold off the other wolves eyeing his lamb and Rene is equally anxious to protect the simple-minded villager’s faith in human nature. Throw in masked train robbers and another set of those upright and skilled Security division policemen who inhabit Chinese movies. Did I mention cutting off the fingers of insubordinate henchmen? 

We get the impression that the team wanted to compete with classic pre-war train films like the Russian Goluboy Ekspress/Blue Express, the German Fluchtlinge, the American The General Died at Dawn or the British The Lady Vanishes, even successors like Sammo Hung's Hong Kong Millionaires’ Express and the US Gene Hackman Narrow Margin and Denzel Washington Unstoppable, with their giant Diesels.

As a train movie, A World Without Thieves fails to meet these ambitions, the soundtrack neglected, no hint that the action is happening in swaying corridors and the leads riding on the carriage roof into a menacing tunnel as an implausible action climax. They do get the actors to emerge through the ceiling trap door in what looks like a real moving carriage at one point but most of the action has a sound stage feel. Particularly, that citation of Karma fails to motivate the changes of heart. Introducing an Asian Mystic concept is there to provide something more substantial than the traditional con man comedies. It  however proves too big an ask, something they never really sell and a limitation of the film. It is plausible to see the lack of conviction here as influencing the shift to the later, better, experience-based Chinese films, of which Feng Xiaogang was a major architect.

  World Without Thieves -Rene Liu, Andy Lau

In the context of the lacklustre Chinese productions after moving the heart of their industry from Hong Kong to Beijing, A World Without Thieves is passable. 

Money has been spent on decoration, extras, effects and costumes but we get the muddy brown colour of the day. The film is too long, even after footage has been deleted from the still redundant robbery sequence, with largely extraneous elements like the near miss driving on the highway, Andy’s sleight of hand disappearing the egg last seen abandoned on the tracks or the effect with the ice cube tossed and caught by lively young Bingbing Li, who vanishes from the intrigue. Events are finally orchestrated by the cops, who abruptly turn out to have had things in hand all along.

We do get the director's interest in European music, with the use of "La Vie en rose."

Feng Xiaogang has since shown himself able to deal with treacherous environments - critical indifference and shifting ideologies. It would be satisfying to see these achievements now getting recognition. However, I Know Who You Are closed in downtown Sydney after a week - five people at the last city performance, gone before IMDB put up an unhelpful page on it. I have yet to find any comment in local media, while  Gei A Ma de Qing Shu/Dear You was still going strong after a month in subtitled Teochew at the multiplexes. 

 

 

Barrie Pattison - 2026

Warners -The Talkies, Dwan & Wellman.

Among vintage films now surfacing, I'm enjoying the early Warners talkies. The talents they recruited, the running start they made with Vitaphone, Producer in Chief Daryl Zanuck's taste for newsy subjects, and their being in my first language all contribute. They did go on making powdered wig melodramas, silly ass comedies and Broadway chorus musicals but even these carry realist traces of their celebrated "Social Dramas," outclassing the efforts of their Hollywood contemporaries.

Warners' Man to Man of 1930 is less than great but still an interesting add-on to the the uneven filmography of Alan Dwan, one of the renowmed second wave pioneer film directors, men (they were pretty much all men) mainly small time actors who saw the potential of the first movies being made by early 20th. Century camera owners and inventors and contributed their own stage experience  - David Wark Griffith, Maurice Tourneur, Raoul Walsh, Wiliam S. Hart, Maurice Elvey or Tiensuke Kinugase.

Dwan's 1930 Man to Man starts off with young Phillip Holmes as a track & field star triumphing in the inter-collegiate stadium. Back in the frat house, where they cheer a film record of Holmes' success, fellow undergrad Sumner Gretchell lets slip that Holmes’ dad was sent to the joint for murder. (This echoes plot elements of Dwan’s silent Black Sheep) It doesn’t go down too well with Holmes’ squeeze Barbara Weeks, who is to be last seen with Gretchell in his open-top roadster as the train taking Holmes back to his rural small town runs distant through the background - one of the striking scenics which often punctuate even Dwan’s most pedestrian work. 

Back home, Phillip is welcomed on all sides by townsmen who consider his dad taking down the local heavy to be heroic. We hear the details of their main street shoot-out -  rather than see it. Our hero is immediately offered a job in the local bank, which brings him into contact with the banker’s so charming daughter Lucille Powers, and makes his fellow bank teller a rival. The courtship is one of the best elements. 

Grant Mitchell, the father, is released (why?) and resumes his spot as the town barber but is concerned to find his son unresponsive. Then money disappears from the bank. Suspicion of bad blood is voiced - The Stain? However, it is plucky Lucille who sorts matters out rather than our wimpy leading man. 

Holmes is the son of actor Taylor Holmes (the 1920 Nothing But the Truth & the 1947 Nightmare Alley). Phillip must be Hollywood's most forgotten leading man from this period (up against Robert Ames for that title). He loses Mary Brian to Gary Cooper in Only the Brave and Loretta Young to Charles Boyer in Carnival but he scored a genuine triumph in Tay Garnet's riotous Her Man (also 1930) showing a flair for comedy that was rarely exploited. Instead he became a prototype Montgomery Clift. Both actors played Theodore Dreiser's doomed George Eastman in the films of  "An American Tragedy."

Man to Man - Marion jnr., Mitchell, Holmes, Powers & Larkin in the shop.

A lot of the staging is routine, with the cast ranged across the frame delivering the unremarkable dialogue. However Man to Man has a couple of aspects that do appeal. It is steeped in the U.S. small  Southern town atmosphere that you get in John Ford’s Judge Priest films. Black actor John Larkin is treated sympathetically but also made a figure of fun. There are no white pillared mansions framed by ghost moss-draped willows here but we do get the timber main street buildings and particularly Powers’ porch with its house plants and swing. There is unusually no designer credit on this one, though it is logical to have had Anton Grot, the head of Warners’ art department, contributing.

Powers, Frye, O'Connor, Simpson, Marion.

The other interesting feature is the appearance of an exceptional support cast of the character actors who will enliven the Golden Years films to come, all at the start of their sound careers - Otis Harlan (Reginald Denny’s former sidekick), Russell Simpson (Santa Fe Trail’s Shubel Morgan), George F. Marion jnr. (Garbo’s dad in Anna Christie) Robert Emmet O’Connor (a cop in both The Big House and Night at the Opera) and particularly Dwight Frye (about to become a fixture in the Universal horror cycle). Reliable Grant Mitchell even gets top billing in some of the publicity.  He is beginning a sound career that will make him a familiar face from often notable films including Laura & The Life of Emile Zola. 

Man to Man is limited by origins in a story by Ben Ames Williams, whose work was the basis of the three times filmed All the Brothers Were Valiant and the dreadful Leave Her to Heaven. The film remains minor but agreeable, a welcome glimpse of 1930 Hollywood production and the recovery of its understanding of filmmaking after sound. For anyone with an interest in film history, it is a treat.

More substantial, William Wellman's 1933 Heroes for Sale brings back the buzz that discovering vintage Hollywood used to be - the films that we thought were gone forever when the original theatrical copies wore out, returned in the hundreds bought for late-arriving Australian TV, vanishing again into Cinémathèques, only to burst out one more time for home video and streaming. 

Before I ever discovered film study, I was enthralled with Wellman's Cary Cooper version of Beau Geste - went back to see it again the next day. Turned out director Wellman was a WWI flier drawn to the movies and getting to show his talent just as the silents were making their last great showing. His Wings got the first Best Movie Oscar. The combined assault of a new technology and the Great Depression clipped Hollywood's wings but, like Michael Curtiz and Lewis Milestone, Wellman had already asserted himself.  Reduced to making the modest budget production-line features that kept the theatres open, he still managed conspicuous The Public Enemy, powered by Jimmy Cagney, who its director promoted to the lead. Heroes for Sale is even better.

It opens in the WW1 front line, soaked with Wellman's trademark belting rain. Among the Doughboys selected for a suicide mission (exhausted Captain Arthur Vinton, can only afford to lose twelve men), we spot a familiar face. Richard Barthelmess, once co-star with Lillian Gish in Griffith's celebrated Broken Blossoms and Way Down East, is not getting featured treatment. However, he is the one who heroically completes their assignment, the bodies of his fellow soldiers falling across him, grenading a German machine gun nest and taking prisoner an enemy officer, while companion Gordon Westcott cringes in the trench. Wounded, Barthelmess is left for dead and it is Wescott who is lauded and decorated as a hero.

Recovered with agonising metal splinter fragments in his spine, our hero is treated with morphine in a German hospital. This, rather than heroin, used to be the horror drug in films - think Kings Row. Repatriated with Wescott to their once again familiar rural American home town, it is easier to let the record stand and Barthlemess becomes a teller in another local bank, here run by Berton Churchill, Wescott’s dad and, as in Stagecoach, all-purpose movie nasty of the day. Wracked by his Habit, our hero can’t make the numbers total and desperately needs to buy a fix. Another familiar Wellman device is showing local pusher, Tammany Young, part obscured - here behind a neighboring shop window case. "You work in a bank, don't you?" Dick is tempted to lift a C. note from the Treasury delivery but puts the money back, only to be fired by Churchill, unmoved when he is told the truth about the wartime exploit his son now denies.

The pacing characteristic of these Warner melodramas shows Barthlemess’ hospital cure as taking a system card out of its drawer and stamping it.

Moving on to the city, he sees Charley Grapewin's personal Soup Kitchen, the faces of desperates, for whom there is no more charity food, peer through the window. It is run by daughter Aline MacMahon, making her transition from glamorous Gold-digger to character actress and, more than a decade later, to again impress in Fred Zinnemann’s The Search and Anthony Mann’s Cimarron. She shows Barthlemess a stark room they are letting. “Any bugs?” “Not unless you brought them with you.” He meets fellow tenant (Russian?) inventor Robert Barrat who, in the film’s most questionable choice, is played as farce. MacMahon's sister Lorreta Young, enjoying a great run of these “problem” pictures, shows up in her Earl Luick fashion outfit. 

Hired as a driver at the back-projected laundry, where we get Grant Richards coming up again as manager.  Barthlemess is apprehensive when called into the office, only to find that his delivery run is the only one that has grown while the others are declining. Turns out he’s introduced a bonus scheme, which he more than pays for out of his increased commissions. Rather than fire him, Richards makes him supervisor. He can’t wait to get back to the flop house to tell the sisters and offers to take them to dinner. Aline is about to join them in her best dress, when she opens her door to see Dick with his arm about her sibling and backs off.

Barrat’s new laundry machine, which Dick bankrolled, actually works and, with funds invested by his fellow workers, he installs it on Mitchell’s expanded shop floor, improving productivity despite a no-layoff agreement. However, Warner resident heavies Edwin Maxwell and Douglas Dumbrille (in their one scene) see the profit in further automation and firing the workers whose contributions made their success possible. There follows the film’s labor riot, especially impressive for a modest budget production. Dick tries to deter the leaders and, rushing to his side, Loretta is trampled. We should have guessed that this one was getting too cheery for their Book of Job plot.

MacMahon, Ronnie Colby, Barthelmess.

Sent to the pen as an agitator, our hero is unable to see his son grow in Aline's care.  However, Barrat now in full Capitalist mode, visits him to tell him that their laundry patent is coining it and he’s opened a bank account in Dick’s name. Released with ageing makeup, our hero meets his son, raised by Aline to revere his accomplishments. She's still running her charity to which he donates his royalties.

Meanwhile “the Red Squad” of the Sacco & Vanzetti era is dragging any foreign-looking types from their diner tables along with their friends (sound familiar?) and running them out of town. On the hobo (“we’re veterans!”) train in the company of Ward Bond, Dick finds Gordon, whose dad defrauded clients and offed himself rather than face the consequences. Moved on again by the bulls from towns who put up signs saying they can’t provide for their own, he delivers the film's best line: “At least it’s stopped raining.”

Heroes for Sale’s analysis of labor relations may be no more insightful than Metropolis but it is Hollywood’s most determined effort. They actually use the word “Communist,” unique in an American film of the day - that is outside Wellman’s 1934 The President Vanishes, in which a number of faces familiar from this one may be spotted. The thought content reflects incompletely considered politics of the day, managing to jam in pacifism, breadlines, returned soldiers, miscarriage of justice,  xenophobia, and exploitative capitalism with ruthless bankers. Wellman's more widely cited “Social” film Wild Boys of the Road doesn’t try for as many hot-potato topics.  It is uncomfortable to notice that it is Hollywood filmmakers who flirted with the left-wing issues of the thirties, that would make the Anti-Communist movies of the sixties - Wellman’s The Iron Curtain, Mervyn LeRoy’s The Green Berets or Raul Walsh’s Marines Let’s Go.

Barthlemess, his popularity undermined by unsuitable vehicles and alcoholism, still managed to get himself into serious items like Cabin in the Cotton 1932, A Modern Hero & Massacre both 1934 - even 1929's Weary River. With Wellman again, he did Central Airport, a nice programner -  great rain storm.

If the ideas were suspect, the filmmaking was state of the art and then some. Wellman drives this one at a speed that enables him to slip in enough story content to serve five films. It is interesting to compare his compression of the rambling Edna Ferber So Big. He made more substantial films. Wings, A Star Is Born and The Oxbow Incident are accomplished. However, nothing matches the energy of this one, still today. Watching it again is a great reminder of the satisfactions of a lifetime of movie-going.

I'm told Heroes for Sale is on the Russian ru.ok site. My Scooter Movies DVD is quite acceptable quality. Man to Man is in a good transfer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCW81JP0bQs&t=33s

Barrie Pattison - 2026

Sydney Film Fest. 2026

 

Time was that the Sydney Film Festival was the high point of a local movie freak's year. Now it's in there with Vivid, the footy, David Jones' windows at Xmas and all the other things that flutter on lamp posts, to remind us we're still living in Sydney. I cherry-picked the festival, which is not the best use of it. Their most valuable offerings have usually been surprises. I was looking at the few efforts of familiar names. It may be that a new generation of Akira Kurosawas, Andrej Wadjas and Helmut Käutners are being revealed in these hundreds of movies playing in sixteen venues but I haven't found them and the thought of the cost and effort involved in checking has sent me scurrying back to S.B.S., foreign streaming services, and the local national events, which appear to have a higher strike rate. 

Remake takes us back into the life of documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee fifteen years after we last heard from him.  We feel we know McElwee from his autobiographical movies, which first reached The Sydney Film Festival with the jokey 1985 Sherman’s March, where Mc Elwee had parlayed his short film experience into making an educational feature about the U.S. Civil war General and his notorious March to the Sea campaign. Making that production strayed into McElwee’s family, friends, love interests and a joke rivalry with Burt Reynolds (and an imitator) all presenting McElwee as an innocent lost in a sea of Marxist documentarians, who made him feel like Ferdinand the Bull (“He never learned how to fight”).

This bait and switch method continued with his 2003 Bright Leaves charting McElwee’s family’s history in the Tobacco industry, diverting into an examination of Michael Curtiz’s 1950 tobacco themed Bright Leaf, complete with an interview with star Patricia Neal, where McElwee wanted to see his grandfather represented as the Gary Cooper character as but is faced with the daunting discovery that he is closer to villain Donald Crisp. In the new film, we continue with an exposition declaring that a Hollywood producer with an eight-sheet poster of Kitten With a Whip (Ann-Margaret prominent) on his office wall, wants to do a dramatised  Sherman’s March, a project which, during this new documentay, will metamorphose into a TV series and an opera, with performers live lip-syncing projected clips of McElwee’s friends and family in song. We get clips of his 2011 In Paraguay about the delay in his adopting his foreign daughter (compare Tavernier’s Holy Lola) and 2008 Photographic Memory with arguments about the ascent of video with his by then fellow-filmmaker son Adrian, whose impressive snow sport material is glimpsed.

 But now, unlike his other films, real life obliterates this jokey material. McElwee’s marriage has disintegrated and he’s paired with another filmmaker, who won’t let him put her in his movies, raising the question of the effect on their real lives of public show. Overshadowing this and any other questions (familiar long-time mentor and subject Charleen Swansea has now died, with memory loss of her participations) is Adrian’s substance abuse. 

You can feel the audience suddenly go quiet when we become aware of his unfolding tragedy. We see OxyContin leading to Heroin and finally fatal use of Fentanyl. The younger McElee’s description of the allure and destructive effect of drug use is one of the most disturbing accounts we have, made even more stark against his jokey demonstration of vaping.

 

Remake -McElwee, father& son.

Mc Elwee, who we saw as belonging to the tradition of Woody Allen, suddenly becomes a tragic figure trying to use his craft to exorcise personal pain. Whether this is a subject for public entertainment becomes questionable. That is, I guess, the point of the film and something McElwee is trying to work out by its production. These are not scripted characters and those of us who have followed them down the years, even at this distance, cannot be unmoved.

Michael (A Quiet Place:Day One) Sarnovski’s The Death of Robin Hood is one of those current, grubby interrogations of traditional British culture, along with Mirrah Foulkes’ Judy and Punch and (better) Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet.  We’ve been over this ground before. Another batch of British self rejections - Room at the Top, This Sporting Life, It Happened Here I'll Never Forget Whats'isname & If - contained Robin and Marian but a weathered Sean Connery seemed positively amiable by comparison to Hugh Jackman submerged in matted grey hair and Pamela S. Westmore’s prosthetics. He’s first seen cutting the throat of a teenage girl, after telling her Marian only existed in the stories and giving pointers for her stalking him.

Plot has Bill Skarsgård’s Little John, now gone all Martin Guerre, taking over the life of a dead farmer and needing Robin’s aid in defending it from the man’s family. “We can best them.” This is one of those period pieces where the big action set piece is at the start. Jackman emerges barely alive, with young Faith Delaney. Ah, but there is an island of compassion in all this brutality. Abbess Jodie Comer runs an isolated hill-top Priory on a Druid site and, given sanctuary there, he slowly recovers. The sun even comes out. Delaney watches his foraging skills and he shows her how to fashion a bow out of a tree trunk. There’s even such a nice leper looking after them. Happiness and redemption lie outside the murky scheme of this film but there is space for revenge, as Jackman warns recovering Noah Jupe, after rowing him out of earshot. Soon, the carved face at the bottom of the sculpted flask is obscured, as it fills with human blood.

            The Death ofRobin Hood - Jodie Comer, Faith Delaney & Hugh Jackman.

The menacing imagery is convincing, the playing is superior and the writing defeats anticipation but you have to demand whether something so grim is viable popular entertainment. It has already opened theatrically and we can only think that it was in a film festival in the of hope of an endorsement as art.  As for the admirable Jodie Comer, she’s already done two of these and if she doesn’t get herself into one about singing and dancing Chelsea debs. fast, she’s going to have a fan base that expects to see a lovable bunny rabbit quivering as the lead stomps it, every picture.

Clara Law arrived at the end of the years of prominence for Hong Hong Kong cinema, making a few quirky main stream features -  1989’s Pan Jin Lian zhi qian shi jin sheng/ The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus, the 1990 Farewell China / Ai zai bie xiang de ji jie (particularly interesting) & 1993’s You Seng/Temptation for a Monk with the memorable scene of shaving Joan Shen’s head, all before the take-over sent Law and long time writer partner Eddie Fong fleeing not to the U.S. with Chau Yun Fat, Sammo Hung and Tsui Hark but to throw in her lot with the Australian film industry - always a suspect move - though she did manage to get off a few nonconformist features here. She was always an outlier, not that Chinese women movie directors were ever thick on the ground,

 Ripples in the Mist - Law

Interesting to find the pair still active in 2026 with her new Ripples in the Mist in the Film Festival, and her clutching one of the film’s balloon-folder elephants in place of a bouquet.

They described this one as their “D.I.Y.” feature. Dissatisfied with the previous constraints of producer control, they put the film together with their own resources and the contributions of well-wishers. “We did not expect to get any money back.”

I’d offer a synopsis but I found it too hard to follow to try that. The action moves between Australia and Taiwan, as a Chinese student tries to trace her friend who fled the territory after the crackdown. Simultaneous with her questioning people they had known, we get her studies of contemporary ballet (an imposing single take coverage with the camera in among the dancers) and Buddhists, like the Australian employer who was determined to treat the temporary visa holders he was giving jobs fairly, where they were often exploited by others. A single mother Canadian artist, who knew the friend, offers our heroine shelter in her country studio.

This fragmentary coverage sketches topics we don’t often see -   the Chinese diaspora, Australia as a not always welcoming destination, Hong Kong violence against protesters. One of the most striking passages is one girl describing not being able to run fast enough to get away from troops and finding herself completely blue after being sprayed with riot control foam. The unfamiliar players are effective and individual. Placing them in recognisably Australian settings gives the film an unfamiliar conviction.

The imagery and performance can not be faulted but the sequence of events and the part the actors play in them, I repeatedly found confusing. I spent too much of my time trying to figure that out to absorb this one’s many qualities. It is a serious attempt by the makers to give responsible use to their skills and it deserves respect for that. It will be interesting to see how far it gets.

By contrast, both conventional and surprising, Nika & Madison, the Canadian Scope medium budgeter delivers its activist material in the shape of a manhunt action melodrama. This one is more mainstream than the other titles I caught.

We start off with Ellyn Jade/Nika on the Lone Spruce reservation, taking a bead on an appealing deer (cruelty to animals is big this year) Cut to her dressing the hide. Driving past, friend Dylan Cook asks “Did you shoot that?” and gets told, “No, I ordered it from Amazon.” Already, they have our attention.

Her more animated cousin, Star Slade/Madison is studying in Toronto. They used to be close but drifted apart. When Slade is partying in a city bar and moves on a drinker, his lady friend gets agro and David Reale, the cop who is called to stop their fight, has Slade sit in the back of the police van - to take her home.  Jade, who has been alerted to the fact that her cousin is in trouble, tracks her mobile phone. About now, we get the alarming stats on indigenous incarceration.

 When Slade wants to pee in a deserted warehouse area, Reale turns rapist and is only halted when Jade takes him down with a shovel. The girls make off after calling in the injury on his radio. Billy Merasty/their Uncle George, imposing with traditional Indian plats, is the one nervously keeping his head and, when they learn that the cop is in hospital and the force is looking for the girls, he stops Jade from taking her rifle when she decides to head off into the bush. “You know how to trap and forage. I want to keep guns out of this.”

In town, newly arrived detective Amanda Brugel is cautioned by partner Shawn Doyle that the officer in hospital is a good guy with a family and she should remember that people in the force have long memories. One of the film’s best scenes comes where the Toronto cops are denied entry to the Reservation by the Indigenous Police, who have set up a roadblock to catch drug dealers operating there, both groups uneasy about asserting their authority.

Meanwhile, the girls have made themselves at home in a caravan trailer abandoned in remote bush, which Jade has made into her favourite place. We learn about the childhood molestation which has turned her into a recluse, while the other girl has embraced the city, scornful of her friend getting no further than suburban Brampton. Jade arrives with a fish impaled on a twig to go with wild mushrooms, (twentyfive dollars a kilo in the supermarket) for their breakfast. This is all a bit too schematic, complete with balancing bush and urban montages.

However Reale has come out of his coma and accused the girls and Brugel, tamping down her hostile partner, has gone back to the reservation, assuring the locals that they only want to talk to people there. They are not doing too well till mean neighbor Pamela Matthews identifies the ‘phonecam. image of Slade and indicates the direction she saw the girls leave. It’s time to go in with tracker dog and a helicopter. The cousins recognise that the jig is up and resolve to turn themselves in - but only after a night on the town in Slade’s party outfits. They also drop by the hospital to intimidate Reale. Everybody gets lawyered up and the film is none too sympathetic to the Police Union rep. 

The likeable leads, unfamiliar setting and smooth, conventional filming all make this OK viewing. It will be interesting to see what these people do next.

 

 That lot is not bad going, even at those prices - along with a Brazilian retro. which Kleber Mendonça Filho brought in person. I plan including that in a longer Brazilian piece. 

Barrie Pattison 2026