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 appealing 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 for this one. 

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