Cry of the City (1948)

I caught Robert Siodmak's Cry of the City this morning, and it's an excellent crime film. It's not shot quite as a noir, really, but it has plenty of wonderful shadows and play with light and dark throughout. It also boasts some excellent performances – Hope Emerson appears in a great small role and there is also a long sequence with a fabulous Shelley Winters. The film's best performance might be by young Tommy Cook who had previously had roles in such inauspicious movies as Adventures of Red Ryder and Jungle Girl.

There are many intriguing things to say about Cry of the City. It is, for one, a great example of a film made under the production code, where we can talk about bullets and fire guns, but we can't actually see anyone get shot. A woman, for example, apparently gets shot through a door, though the door's window doesn't break. A man is also stabbed to death with a switchblade through an office chair. There are two more shootings that happen in the film, neither of which looks even remotely realistic. This tends to leave 1940s writers completely off the hook – we never see where any bullets go in, so does the victim get shot fatally? Well, it's up to the writers! They just choose where they want the story to go.

Even more interesting is the film's own deeply conflicted attitude toward law enforcement and the criminal justice system. It feels very simple, watching the movie from the perspective of 2023, to see that it is actually the police who cause most of the trouble in this movie. As Victor Mature (the cop) lists all of the harm that Richard Conte (the alleged perp) has caused in act three, it's quite clear that in fact that harm has all been caused by the police themselves. All of it! What's even more intriguing is that Conte's character solves a separate crime for the police that they weren't able to solve on their own - one in which a rich old lady was allegedly tortured and killed for her jewel collection. Worse of all, perhaps, is that the lead policeman, at the end of the film, shoots an unarmed man in the back. This Cry of the City seems to present to the audience as justice. It's deeply unsettling, although I'm not sure I understand if Siodmak is as conflicted as I am.

Perhaps the key to all of this is that, according to IMDb, Conte was originally slated to play the cop and Mature the criminal, but Mature had played too many bad guys lately and 20th Century Fox swapped the roles. The criminals and those nominally assigned to catch them produce one another in Cry of the City, and it is this, finally, which makes the film as rich as it is.

1948 Oscar Excursion

I realized a couple of weeks ago that most of the films I had yet to see for Academy Award season 1948 had appeared on YouTube within the last year. Most of these movies are from 20th Century Fox, so perhaps that – and copyright expiration – has something to do with it. I haven't looked into it, so that's just an assumption, but there they were!

By chance I had just seen The Three Musketeers, and then Charles Walters' Easter Parade and Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair appeared on the Criterion Channel. I somehow also managed to watch When My Baby Smiles at Me. It felt like a sign, so I made it a point to see the rest of these 1948 movies. I had, of course, seen the big winners that year a long time ago: those were Hamlet, Johnny Belinda, The Red Shoes, The Snake Pit, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but there was a good chunk still yet to see.

Most of these movies are musicals, actually, which made viewing all that much more silly. Casbah, directed by John Berry, was a musical version of the Pepe le Moko story, in which a well-known and attractive criminal can't leave a particular district in Morocco or he'll be arrested. In this version, Pepe sings. This is pretty silly, but the central song is good, and the film's star, Tony Martin (who I don't think I'd seen before), is pretty great. Pepe le Moko is a melodrama anyway, so making it into a musical doesn't change much. Peter Lorre also stars, and he's delightful and weird as always. 

Yet another musical was Ernst Lubitsch's That Lady in Ermine, a movie that was finished by Otto Preminger. It stars Betty Grable (whose popularity baffles me), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (dreamy), and Cesar Romero (who somehow always plays second banana to the leading man even though he's leading-man handsome). That Lady in Ermine is, frankly, an insane film. It's a musical, of course, and it's one of the weirdest musicals I've seen. It's irrepressibly silly and definitely charming, but it's really wacky. In it, all of the paintings in some castle in Hungary or wherever we are come to life. They're the ancestors of this queen (Grable) and they sing and protect the castle from an invading soldier from next door (Bohemia? Czechia? I've forgotten). The That in the title is really weird, too. I don't think anyone refers to her with this phrase the whole movie. Anyway, this one I don't recommend. 

The Emperor Waltz, a second film directed by Billy Wilder this year, is a musical starring Bing Crosby (who plays an American salesman) and Joan Fontaine (who plays a non-singing noblewoman in Austria). Well, weirdly, their dogs also fall in love. This is another very silly musical. It didn't quite work for me, though. Bing croons through the movie, and that's fine and all, but because Joan Fontaine (who I otherwise love) doesn't sing, things feel out of balance. The central couple doesn't feel right for each other, even if the dogs do.

Norman Z. McLeod's The Paleface is a Bob Hope–Jane Russell comedy set in the wild west. It's very stupid. I laughed occasionally, but Jane Russell... kinda sucks? Like, she's supposed to be funny, but she's really not a comedienne (I think I've only seen her in this, so maybe I'm wrong). Also, much of this film's humor hinges on Indians, killing Indians, making fun of Indians, and basic colonial activities. It was really hard to enjoy any of it. Worse still, the song for which this film was nominated and won is the least good of the five nominated songs. It's called "Buttons and Bows" and Hope sings it while accompanying himself on a ukulele. It's so weird that this won.

Robert Z. Leonard's B.F.'s Daughter is a war-melodrama that's really just all about masculinity and money. The basic plot is that a young idealist marries a very, very rich woman, who just basically pays for things. He makes good and starts making his own money, but he begins to resent her wealth, and she doesn't understand why. The basic politics of the film are that class warfare is a terrible idea because rich men can be very good men, too. Wealthy capitalists can also risk their lives to save their country (the U.S., of course), and it's important to be nice and polite, even when the people you're talking to are raising rents and making their money off of the backs of the destitute and exploiting the labor of the working class. So, actually, I hated this movie, despite the fact that it stars Barbar Stanwyck and Van Heflin. 1948 was the first year to have a Costume Design category, and Stanwyck's gowns in this are incredible, so maybe it was worth it for that.

On the vaguely liberal front, Henry Koster's The Luck of the Irish is about a political sellout who, like, learns to come back to his roots and not be a political sellout because of the magic of a – get ready for this – hard-drinking leprechaun played by Cecil Kellaway (who was nominated for best supporting actor). The politics here are not specific at all, so we actually don't know what the main character (Tyrone Power, lovable as always) has sold out about or to what values he returns. Either way, the whole thing is fun and silly, and I enjoyed myself, even though I must confess that half the time I had no fucking idea what that Irish-accented leprechaun was saying.

Charles Vidor's The Loves of Carmen is the Carmen story, starring the gorgeous, fabulous, can't-say-enough-good-things-about-her Rita Hayworth and the oh-so-handsome Glenn Ford. This was what it always is... a tale of jealousy and love where everyone is doomed. The unfortunate part about The Loves of Carmen is that it rather looks as though it was made on the cheap. There aren't enough big, splashy scenes of cities or raids or anything like that, despite the plot rather needing them. We spend too much time in caves hiding out. The Loves of Carmen is, of course, a musical, though all the songs are diegetic. Carmen is a singing and dancing performer, and it's Rita Hayworth, so all of that stuff is wonderful.

But now for some much more interesting/better films:

Deep Waters, directed by Henry King, is a drama about a troubled orphan boy played by Dean Stockwell! This is a movie about lobstermen in Maine or somewhere up in the northeast, and the lobstermen are Dana Andrews and Cesar Romero. The men befriend this boy and let him work as an apprentice, but the government – in the person of the woman who Dana Andrews loves – is afraid of the water, and thinks this is bad for the young boy. So the government disallows this and then he gets in trouble. The whole thing is a little family drama, but it feels innovative and interesting, and the relationship between Dean Stockwell and Dana Andrews and Cesar Romero is fascinatingly sketched. This film also stars an always-wonderful Anne Revere, as a no-nonsense foster mother with a heart of gold. I really enjoyed this and recommend it.

Another fascinating 1948 film is documentarian Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story. This is a film set in Cajun country Louisiana, and it's ostensibly about oil drilling there, but it is really about this Cajun boy. We follow him and his pet raccoon around as he confronts and explores this giant piece of machinery that is disrupting his home and life. He fights a gator, he fishes, etc. Much of Louisiana Story has the paternalist gaze that's so easy to see in Flaherty's Nanook of the North, in which we sort of laugh at how charming and child-like this "foreigner" is. But I think this is the tradeoff with Flaherty's movies. His gaze is paternalistic and superior, but what he captures is really special. This movie is free on Amazon Prime, although the print is pretty rough. There were several films from this period that starred small boys in pseudo-documentaries that were actually fiction films – I'm thinking of 1952's Navajo and 1949's The Quiet One. I found all three of these movies worth watching.

I'm saving the best for last: Walter Lang's Sitting Pretty is a domestic comedy set in the suburbs. In it, a harried housewife with three kids is desperately in need of a housekeeper and accidentally hires... a man! He's played by Clifton Webb and his name is Mr. Belvedere, and he's incredible. In any case, Mr. Belvedere turns out to be a great housekeeper. And everyone loves him. I won't spoil any more of this movie, because you should absolutely watch it, and it's on YouTube. It's a delight from start to finish and very, very funny. Clifton Webb was nominated for Best Actor for this movie, too! And here's the real rub: it's very obvious, from the very beginning, that Mr. Belvedere is a gay man. This is not so much coded as it is completely and totally clear. Sitting Pretty would actually make no sense if Mr. Belvedere wasn't gay. There is, for example, an entire silly plot where the man of the house, Robert Young, is totally skeptical of the idea of Mr. Belvedere staying at home in the house with his wife while he travels for a couple of days. The women in the film are in hysterics laughing about this. As if Mr. Belvedere is a sexual threat. It's hilarious! He has to be gay for the entirety of the comedy to work. This film is wonderful, and you should see it.

When My Baby Smiles at Me

If I am honest, I don't really get Betty Grable. She and Dan Dailey made Mother Wore Tights (zzz) and then they made When My Baby Smiles at Me a couple years later, and it's the old burlesque-dancer-loves-burlesque-comic routine, and, y'all, it's old. I get annoyed because this old song and dance is literally a diegetic musical in which we are enjoying old burlesque numbers and laughing at old burlesque jokes (well, supposed to be laughing, anyway), and yet we're also supposed to understand that we should look down on burlesque as a form. These musicals traffic in nostalgia for burlesque, and ask us to enjoy it, while simultaneously insulting it (and insulting our intelligence). 

When My Baby is even worse than this because most of it is unhappy. Dan Dailey is a terrible alcoholic in this one, and Grable sends him off to Broadway to become a star but he has no support system in New York so he drinks himself into a stupor and, star though he is, gets too wasted to keep his job.

But When My Baby's high point is an extraordinary confrontation between Dailey and Grable and a bunch of their friends in which Dailey is absolutely fucking plastered and totally losing his mind about Grable marrying another dude. He's incredible in this sequence, and it's shocking and devastating and really awesome.

Of course, it all ends how you'd expect it to, but When My Baby sure does go to some dark places that I was not expecting.

The 1948 Musketeers

George Sidney's 1948 adaptation of The Three Musketeers is the best one I've seen. It packs the novel's whole plot (including the second half, I mean) into it's 125-minute running time while still managing to pack in lots of farcical comedy with the four musketeers. This does, of course, mean that Queen Anne (Angela Lansbury) doesn't appear in the movie very much, but it means instead that Milady de Winter (Lana Turner) becomes the real focus. And what a focus!! I think Lana Turner looks more gorgeous than anyone I've ever seen in this movie. She appears in the most expensive outfits with her hair covered in jewels. She looks absolutely exquisite. Gene Kelly is way too old to be playing D'Artagnan, but who cares, honestly. His particular style of dance makes his fight scenes even more delightful. Anyway, this is the one. It makes full use of its gorgeous Technicolor photography, has great performances (including a brilliant Van Heflin and a charming Frank Morgan), and a breathtaking Lana Turner.

The Pirate (1948)

I was not into The Pirate. I like the movie's South American–Caribbean setting, of course, and I love pirate movies, but this is no pirate movie. The main character here is a young girl named Manuela (a name everyone in the film annoyingly pronounces as man-you-ELL-a) who has created a set of romantic fantasies about a pirate. This is Judy Garland, who apparently missed much of the filming because of illness. The stuff Garland appears in is pretty great, but the real star – although not top-billed – is Gene Kelly. The trouble is that Kelly's numbers are just... not that good. Cole Porter's score is dumb, and most of the songs are not good.

I did turn a corner with the film near the halfway mark when Vincente Minelli moved into his full fantasy sequence mode. Kelly does a great pirate dance in a fantasy number wearing tiny black shorts and an open shirt. He looks incredible, and the sequence is very fun. Because it's one of those Minelli's fantasy numbers for which he will become so well known, the whole thing just works so much better than the dumb plot that the musical is so tied to. It's almost as if musicals really aren't integrated.

The movie's final number and reprise, "Be a Clown", are also great. In the first version Kelly and the Nicholas Brothers do some great spins and leaps and turns. The Nicholas Brothers are not really restrained, and Kelly really keeps up with them! It's a fun, acrobatic number. The second version is Kelly and Garland as hobo clowns doing a series of bits and yukking it up as the finale. It's a delightful number and the dancing and comedy are great.

On the whole, though, this is rather a flawed mess, and one wishes "Be a Clown" fit nicely in some other show.

Green Grass of Wyoming (1948)

Green Grass of Wyoming... is dumb. It's so strange to watch yet another movie about animals that is somehow about heteronormativity, and the animals, like, are in love and are parents and shit. What the hell is going on? 

This one also features two or three songs by Burl Ives that about two hundred teenagers seem to be loving. I've never met such teenagers in my life. Some of the photography in this movie is cool, and the horses are pretty, but this doesn't have much going for it once they track down the white stallion. Act three involves three races that are all the same, and we are supposed to care just as deeply about each one. I am not sure why this sequence needed to be repeated twice.

This is apparently the third book in a series called My Friend Flicka, about which I know nothing. The cast in this film, however, has been completely changed from the first two films.

Romance on the High Seas (1948)

Romance on the High Seas was Doris Day's first film, and she is billed fourth. Someone made a mistake; she would become a huge star – much bigger than everyone else who is billed higher than her here. She is incredible in this, and frankly the whole thing is quite fun. Day and Oscar Levant, especially, are hilarious.

Moonrise (1948)

Moonrise is a pretty extraordinary film. We follow a young man whose father has been hanged for murder. He grows up really damaged and angry. Dane Clark is excellent, and Frank Borzage's direction is spot on. Even more importantly, John L. Russell's cinematography is astounding. It's amazing, wonderful work. I really, really liked this.

This movie was leaving the Criterion Channel this month, so I made a point to watch it and I'm so happy I did.

Portrait of Jennie (1948)

This Italian poster for Portrait of Jennie is so much prettier than the U.S. poster. This movie is super weird – but then turns out to be a sort of typical romantic fantasy. It's interested in time and long life and haunting, like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir from the year before but without the humor and charm of the earlier film. Still, there's something that gets under your skin about Portrait of Jennie. And in many ways the film is this odd portrait of a sad young woman who never found what she was looking for. The more I think about it the more I like it.

Adventures of Don Juan (1948)

Adventures of Don Juan is the best Errol Flynn movie I've seen. One of the reasons for this is Viveca Lindfors, who holds her own with Flynn in a way that Olivia De Havilland never did. Lindfors is fabulous.

The swashbuckling is also so extra in Adventures of Don Juan. There is way more swordfighting than I've ever even seen in any movie, really. It's just chock-full of these sequences. It's great. 

I think, though, that the real appeal here is the costumes. They're breathtaking. Truly extraordinary. Flynn never wears pants the entire movie... just different colored tights and then gorgeously embroidered and decorated jerkins on top. And the dresses they put Lindfors in truly are jaw-dropping. Each one more gorgeous than the last. And there must be at least a dozen. And that's not all. Her hair is always covered in pearls or rubies. It's just the most fabulous thing. Marjorie Best and her team really outdid themselves.

Women of the Night (1948)

Mizoguchi's Women of the Night (夜の女たち) is a cautionary moral tale, but it is also a story of postwar Japan and the way that the state abandoned wives, mothers, and children of soldiers and forced them to fend for themselves. Mizoguchi's film is in bad shape – even on the Criterion channel where I watched it – but it's still finely realized and emotionally affecting.