Guilty Bystander (1950)

It seems like most of the reviews on Letterboxd and other places say that Guilty Bystander is middling or disappointing. I feel precisely the opposite about Joseph Lerner's weird little film noir. In fact, it fairly blew me away. I don't think I've seen a noir quite this seedy before. The only thing I can compare it to for nihilism is Blast of Silence and that's from 1961 not 1950. The flophouses, the warehouses, and the bars in this are frankly disgusting. Even the bannisters are covered in some kind of muck, as we learn in one of the film's first moments; in Guilty Bystander cigarettes fall lazily from characters' mouths onto floors, and no one even stubs them out. This film is set in the underbelly of underbellies. There's an extraordinary fight sequence in which our anti-hero has to wrestle a guy with one arm because he's been shot. It's bracingly realistic, almost tedious. Guilty Bystander is no studio picture.

The acting is not great, however. J. Edward Bromberg gives a kind of low-rent Peter Lorre that works fine, but Faye Emerson is quite boring (one never truly believes she might be part of a double cross), and Mary Boland should really be a lot better than she is. But Kay Medford does excellent work here, and Sam Levene and Harry Landers are great in their smaller parts. Zachary Scott... well I don't think I've decided how I feel about him yet, mostly because I hate his mustache, but I think he might be good in this.

Guilty Bystander was restored from a print—apparently no negative exists anymore—through funding from Nicolas Winding Refn. I'm so glad it was. This is B-movie gold, and I found it to be a compelling portrait of New York petty crime. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it. 

Le Mura di Malapaga (1949)

The Walls of Malapaga feels like a fairly standard post-war tragic romance in the vein of the great De Sica movies from this period. Jean Gabin does his gruff lovable-yet-unlovable thing. Isa Miranda is lovely in this, and Louis Page photographs the war-ravaged city of Genoa with heartbreaking care (it's a sound stage, actually, but I believed it).

Also, I had been looking for a copy of this with English subtitles for years and was happy to have finally found one, so I watched it as soon as I found it. You can't find it on YouTube but it's over at Dailymotion:

The Black Rose (1950)

I am not quite sure why I was so disinterested in Henry Hathaway's The Black Rose. Perhaps it is Cécile Aubry as the protagonist's love interest... she's twenty-one or so, but she looks much younger because she's very short, and so the love between her and Tyrone Power never really registers as believable. She isn't a bad actress per se, acquitting herself well in a scene where she declares her love for him, but I just never bought his attraction for her. She just looks like a little kid.

I think, too, The Black Rose suffers from not having any narratives about the sea. I am used to seeing Tyrone Power on a ship, and this adventure narrative covers an overland trip through medieval Persia to China. This has its appeal, and there are some cool scenes, but Power feels kinda trapped.

In any case, despite being a very expensive and beautifully designed epic, this is just not that great. It's narratively wonky – it should have been more like two and a half hours instead of just two – missing big chunks of important travel and information. And its nationalist politics feel really on the nose: Power plays a Saxon who hates the Normans even though it's 200 years after the Conquest. What he needs to learn is that he loves his nation, and that's more important than who runs it... or something like that? The lesson is unity: we love this land where we were born, and so Saxon and Norman can work together for its glory. (I.E. Put aside all of your complaints about what a bad job I'm doing running this country, and stop complaining about all of the injustices you've suffered under my illegitimate colonial reign, and think of the land.)

I am skeptical.

No Way Out

Joseph L. Mankiewicz made No Way Out the same year (1950) that he made All About Eve. This movie (why it's called No Way Out is absolutely anyone's guess) is your standard anti-racist Hollywood fare from 1950. It's a good enough drama, with a sensational race riot in the film's center. Aside from the high drama of the riot (which is filmed very, very well, without showing even a little bit of violence), the rest of No Way Out is quite predictable stuff. The whole thing is tied together gorgeously by Sidney Poitier in one of his earliest screen appearances. (This is 5 years before Blackboard Jungle but must have been filmed just before Raisin in the Sun appeared on Broadway). Linda Darnell is great in this too, and Ruby Dee plays a small (uncredited) role! The real star here, though, is Richard Widmark, who gives a superb performance as a vile racist asshole. The performance is never sympathetic, and Widmark doesn't worry a bit about whether or not the audience will hate him. It's bold and rich work for a script that doesn't quite deserve it.

The Men (1950)

The Men is a solid mid-century postwar disability drama that has a great performance from Marlon Brando and an excellent supporting turn from Arthur Jurado.

It is, as you might imagine from the title, obsessed with the idea that disabled men are (still) men. Much of this Fred Zinnemann feature rings oddly now, I guess, but there are still some intriguing ideas, and, as I say, some interesting acting. Although probably the most interesting thing is watching an acting style like Teresa Wright's – truly old school Broadway stuff – next to performers like Brando, Jurado, Everett Sloane, and Jack Webb, who just didn't have that same kind of approach to acting.

I watched The Men on the Criterion Channel - just before it leaves at the end of the month.

Annie Get Your Gun (1950)

I understand casting a comedienne in the title role of Annie Get Your Gun, especially after the production lost Judy Garland. But... Betty Hutton cannot sing. Howard Keel, obviously, sings beautifully, and all of the proper theatrical stuff that is supposed to be (and may very well have been) the actual Wild Bill show is great. But there is lots in this film that did not work for me. Mostly it's just the weird, quirky, folksy-jokey thing that is supposed to be charming Annie Oakley behavior. I was not charmed. 

And then there is all the redface. Like... a lot of redface. Betty Hutton even has a song called "I'm an Indian Too". It's extraordinarily cringe-worthy.

Destination Moon (1950)

For one of the first movies to depict space travel, Destination Moon is awfully boring. This is a bit of weird nationalist–capitalist propaganda. It's not without interest, though. It contains an intriguing animated sequence with Woody Woodpecker explaining the science behind space travel, and its images of the moon and of the space ship are interesting. The movie itself just doesn't have much content to it.

Broken Arrow (1950)

Meh. Broken Arrow is, like, fine, but it's full colonialist fantasy. Good white man learns that Chiricahua Apaches are humans. Congratulations.

The movie itself is well shot, but the script is drivel even if it is well intentioned. And James Stewart doesn't work for me as a cowboy. I just don't like him in westerns. I can only see him as a city boy.

I guess this is the second Delmer Daves western in a month or so that I have thought was just not that great. Sorry about it Delmer Daves, but I'm just not here for it.

In a Lonely Place (1950)

This script is dynamite. It's actually just brilliant. Bogart and Grahame are fucking fantastic. No... everyone's good. This is an extraordinary film. It's absolutely excellent from start to finish. It's clearly a kind of riff on Greek tragedy, and one can easily see why this movie is such an important inspiration for the Safdie Brothers. I streamed it on Criterion on a channel of films that have been inspirational for the Safdies. Totally tracks.

But man this thing is good. The script is just so nuanced and well done. In a Lonely Place toys with its audience, effectively turning us into Gloria Grahame, so that we worry along with her. It's a great, great movie.

Blackboard Jungle (1950)

Well... Blackboard Jungle is about teaching high school in the inner city – I think we're supposed to be in Chicago. Glenn Ford plays the protagonist, and I love watching Ford at all times, so Richard Brooks' movie definitely has that going for it.

But I am hung up on the title, and if you look at this poster and combine the title with the poster, you get a series of images that are designed to communicate an old message. White woman, torn dress (or is it just hanging off the shoulder?), inner city kids, jungle... well it becomes fairly clear that we are in race-baiting territory.

Blackboard Jungle, to its credit, looks like it's selling one thing (a story about black students being unruly or unmanageable), but it's selling something altogether different. This is a film where race is everywhere and constantly being discussed, but this is not a film about race, and I'm not sure it has anything to say about race, either. Sidney Poitier plays the most important black kid in Ford's classroom, and it's hard not to love Sidney Poitier no matter what you're doing. Poitier's character turns out to be all right, as the kids in the '50s used to say.

This movie has good intentions, I think. But it takes a kind of colonialist or parochial tone that I found annoying, upsetting, and ill-advised. In many ways, Blackboard Jungle sees juvenile delinquency as a problem with the kids themselves and not their environments. The film's script attenuates this at certain points, but mostly Blackboard Jungle understands this to be the kids' behavior to be the kids' fault. I am skeptical.

King Solomon's Mines (1950)

King Solomon's Mines begins – in the first minute of the movie – with the killing of an elephant and the mourning of the other elephants for his loss. After this, there was basically no way I could enjoy this movie. How any director could think someone would enjoy watching an elephant be murdered while other elephants grieve is beyond me. Anyway, the rest of the picture is standard white-people-in-Africa-on-safari stuff, although this one does feature a great deal more African fauna than usual, and it is in a different region of Africa (southeast and central Africa) than the geography that usually makes it into Hollywood movies.