Sundown (1941)

This is British colonial war propaganda made during WWII. It has a cool vibe for a while, honestly, and it's a sort of exciting spy-adventure-mystery film with an intriguing tension and mood – not Five Graves to Cairo level, but approaching it. Sundown also stars Gene Tierney, looking lovely in orientalist clothes by Walter Plunkett.

Where Sundown fails is when it becomes explicitly propagandistic at the film's end. For some reason, the film thinks it can accomplish this using a character whom we've hated for the entire running time. He dies at the end, and he pityingly says out of nowhere that war is just like church. He then gives this whole speech about church and religion and fighting the Axis Powers. It makes no actual sense and has nothing, really, to do with the film, which is about fighting Nazis in British-colonized Kenya, but is absolutely not about religion. Worse yet, in many ways, this character (played in usual withering style by George Sanders) is hateful. He makes numerous bad decisions as soon as he arrives – and they're shown to be bad decisions immediately – and he is a racist jerk to Gene Tierney's character for being mixed race, yet another trait that is shown to be terrible and awful immediately. After George Sanders gives his church speech, we fast forward to England and are suddenly in a bombed-out church in London, where Sanders' bishop father gives yet another speech to his entire congregation about how fighting in the war and sending your sons off to war (these men never want to go themselves) is a pure and wonderful sacrifice. We also find out – in another insane plot leap – that the bishop has officiated a wedding between Gene Tierney and Bruce Cabot, who sit in the congregation and repeat the bishop's words before (presumably) heading back to the British East Africa Protectorate to fight the Nazis.

Ok, but it is good and mysterious and intriguing for a while, even if it is colonial propaganda.

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.

Souls at Sea (1937)

Souls at Sea is an intriguing 1930s film by Henry Hathaway about a man working as a kind of one-man army against the African slave trade in the 1840s. What's sort of weird about this – aside from Gary Cooper's more-than-a-little-wooden performance – is that the main import of the film is an explosion and shipwreck that have nothing at all to do with the slave trade. Cooper's character is on an anti-slavery mission, sure, but the boat that sinks is not a slave ship at all, and so the main thrust of the drama is about something else entirely. 

The film's script seems designed to avoid Black actors. We get a few images of enslaved Africans killing a slaver, but although we know that the two heroes of the film disobey orders and unlock everyone enslaved aboard the ship, Souls at Sea doesn't show us any scenes of Black freedom, preferring to jump ahead in time to the men explaining what they've done to the enforcers of maritime law. 

It's a strange movie – probably because it is produced for a segregated film industry that will distribute the film to segregated theatres during Jim Crow. 

Sunburnt Barbary

I've been nursing a sunburn the past couple of days, but I've been working too. I have almost finished my syllabus for my Play Analysis class that I begin teaching on May 12th, and I finished cutting the script for Midsummer, which has its first rehearsal on May 12th.

I've also watched a couple films. First, Torch Song with Joan Crawford as a crazy bitch actress/dancer/singer woman who hates everyone and is mean to everyone. Then a blind piano player walks into her life and everything changes. And by everything, I mean nothing. But she loves the piano player. It's a weird movie because it isn't that interesting, and the whole blind love-interest thing comes across as more token than anything else. Director Charles Walters doesn't understand points of view, either, and he gives us Joan's and then her lover's and then the other people in Joan's world. Because of this we never really feel for Joan and her bitchy self; she just comes across as a gorgon. There is a bizarre blackface number that might be worth the price of a rental, though. Joan sings a song called "Two-faced Woman" in blackface with a chorus in blackface and I have no idea why.

P.S. Marjorie Rambeau was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Joan's mother in this movie. Again, there is no explanation that suffices. The part is no more than a cameo and Rambeau's acting is hardly remarkable. So strange.

Today I watched Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death from 1947 with Victor Mature and the late Richard Widmark. It's a fairly good noir about a crook who decides to go good and rats out some other criminals, specifically Tommy Udo, a grinning, giggling murderer of old ladies played by Widmark. The plot of this film is cool and Hathaway does a great job with both light and tension, but the dialogue doesn't quite sparkle, the plot lags near the halfway point, and it felt a tad predictable at times. Still, the performances are really superb. Victor Mature gives what is probably his best performance (the scene when he first squeals is extraordinary) and it gets better the more I think about it. Richard Widmark has the flashiest part and his is the one you really remember when the picture is over. This one is definitely worth the rental if you're into film noir.