The Well (1951)

The Well is rather an enjoyable melodrama. It’s the kind of story about race that has no idea why a race riot might occur, and it’s also plenty corny in its own way. For some reason it also thinks it’s perfectly ok for police to beat a guy up and treat him unfairly – and for racist cops to go unpunished. But this is a successful little thing, and it’s very well made – particularly in its editing.

I think Russell Rouse, who co-directed this picture, is a pretty good filmmaker. I liked the movie The Thief, which he made the year after The Well: it's a tight, intriguing thing with the gimmick that it contains no spoken dialogue at all. His 1964 film A House Is Not a Home, however, had problems. 

The House on Telegraph Hill

Robert Wise's The House on Telegraph Hill is an excellent film noir. It's filled with surprises and it manages to be sexy and scary and suspenseful. It is, in many ways, a kind of riff on Rebecca and Gaslight, but it has new things to say and new ways to say them! Valentina Cortesa is great, and Richard Basehart is magnetic and attractive and rather disarming. The whole thing is actually quite disarming. Robert Wise's films noirs from this period are excellent. And this one is made richer and much more interesting by its link to survivors from the genocide of European Jews. This is, in other words, a post-Expressionist noir that's in many ways about both its German aesthetic roots and its U.S. American criminal subject matter. I loved this.

The Great Caruso (1951)

Watching The Great Caruso is a sad business now, knowing that its wonderful star, Mario Lanza, died – just like Enrico Caruso – long ahead of his time. This movie was the highest grossing film of 1951, but it's hard to see why: it's a standard, even sub-standard, biopic, with no really deep emotional moments and not much of a narrative at all. Caruso doesn't struggle with alcoholism... or anything, really. So what we get instead are great performances of famous arias by the wonderful USAmerican tenor Mario Lanza. The storytelling is a little wonky. We don't really know what causes Caruso's death in the movie, and the film doesn't lead up to it at all or explain anything that's happening as Caruso becomes ill. All of a sudden, he's just sick. 

But I'm not complaining, really. This is a Hollywood jukebox musical designed around great tenor arias, and they are performed beautifully. There's no reason to gripe, but I can't say it's that interesting, really.

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)

The Lavender Hill Mob is a funny crime caper farce that I enjoyed thoroughly, although it really is always such a disappointment when the criminals who pull off these excellent heists in the 1950s get caught. I never want them to. 

This film is very silly and very funny. But... nominating Alec Guinness for best actor for this is truly absurd. Why was he nominated? How is this possible? This was a delightful film, but it did not demand any great acting.

Bright Victory (1951)

Bright Victory is a sentimental tale about which I don't have much to say. There is one really great moment halfway through the film in which the main character (whom we're supposed to like) says some racist language in front of his black friend. See, he hates black people, but he's blind and so he doesn't realize that his best friend is black. This is all quite contrived, of course, but this scene is really shocking, and I was upset by it despite my skepticism about this movie in general and its disability metaphors.

Listen, Bright Victory is no The Best Years of Our Lives. And the idea of being literally color-blind strikes me as schmaltzy, even for 1951.

Two queer connections that are worth making: the film's title is clearly a reference to Dark Victory, the Bette Davis starrer from 1939, which also starred Ronald Reagan (feh). In Dark Victory, Bette Davis's character goes blind at the end of the film. This was a "woman's" film, of course, and the twist of Bright Victory is that our hero, Arthur Kennedy, deals with blindness in a "masculine" way by working through his disability and becoming a useful member of the U.S. American labor force. His victory is therefore bright rather than dark. Whatever. The other queer item of note in this movie is that Rock Hudson has a small part at the beginning of Bright Victory, and he's great. He wasn't a star yet in 1951?

David and Bathsheba (1951)

David and Bathsheba is a really interesting biblical movie. (It's boring, don't get me wrong; I am not here to say that it is a good movie.) But although this movie looks like your typical swords-and-sandals epic – it has the lush score by Alfred Newman, the beautiful Leon Shamroy cinematography, the insanely enormous cast, beautiful art direction, big stars – but what is interesting about this movie is that this movie is skeptical of a Christianity/Judaism that is invested in laws and punishment and destruction. It is also skeptical of priests who interpret the desires of gods. Henry King's film doesn't go quite so far as to say that the priests in David and Bathsheba are corrupt and self-seeking – although it certainly could have taken this tack if it wished – but this is a skeptical film, one that asks its audiences to think ethically about punishment, cruelty, desert, and judgment.

Susan Hayward as Bathsheba

David and Bathsheba conflates a series of events in Hebrew history – the affair of David and Bathsheba and the civil war of Absalom against his father – but more than anything this is a kind of character study of David himself. The film spends long minutes exploring David's face while nothing else happens. We watch David carefully as he makes decisions, as he wars with himself, as he debates the nonsense spoken by the priest of Israel.

As I say, this is a really weird film. It is in the film's third act when we flashback to Samuel's anointing of David as a shepherd boy and then to David's battle with Goliath. Of course, this means that we follow David as a young man (i.e. not Gregory Peck) at the end of the film rather than the film's star, Gregory Peck, whom we have been following for the movie's first ninety minutes.

Despite this poster's promises, Gregory Peck wears a shirt at all times.

The film justifies David and Bathsheba's affair from the beginning. They like each other, an Bathsheba's husband does not love her. He does not even care about her, and is not the least interested in what she thinks. In the end, even the film's god blesses David and Bathsheba's relationship. It is, as I say, a film made by a skeptic. The conflict in the film is that David has forgotten the ways of the god and has broken the Mosaic law. The film doesn't really believe this, but tries to make us believe this in act two by introducing a prophet none of us likes. Then in act three, David argues with Bathsheba about those laws. One of the great moments in the movie is in the third act, when David tells Bathsheba that the god he knew as a boy, in the trees and rocks is not the god of vengeance that the priests preach. (In act two the film watches a beautiful woman get stoned to death for adultery. It's a sequence that judges this kind of law very harshly, but it doesn't seem to treat those laws in an orientalist fashion. In other words, David and Bathsheba doesn't call Mosaic law backward or barbaric as such. Instead, it is asking audiences to judge these laws for themselves, and to be skeptical of unjust law in general.)

But what David does at the end of the film is in fact defy the Mosaic law and go talk to the god directly. Once he does this – once he remembers the god – the god forgives him and it rains in Israel. What the film is saying is that laws against adultery aren't important (it has said that throughout the film). Each man must make the ethical choices that accord with his own beliefs. As long as the individual remembers the god, believes in him, pays homage to him, then his behavior is immaterial – or at least mostly immaterial. Even David's murder of Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba's husband, is apparently forgiven by the rain that the god sends at the film's end.

Decision before Dawn

Decision before Dawn is a surprisingly good film. It is about a German spy working for the Americans and has no real stars attached to it, so I understand why it's basically forgotten today, but this is good stuff.