The Seventh Victim (1943)

In this very strange horror film from 1943, a young woman discovers a... satanic cult? This is bananas, and it's actually very scary, even though there's nothing at all satanic on screen. I enjoyed this. It's shot beautifully. And goddammit is it weird.

My Foolish Heart (1949)

No thank you. My Foolish Heart is a real mess. It starts off by giving us a portrait of a young woman as a spoiled bitch – this is the kind of part Susan Hayward would excel at playing forever – but then we are supposed, somehow, to see her as an innocent kid falling in love and all that jazz. Didn't work for a second. You set up a thing like that and it's difficult to break. 

Even worse, this part could've been played by any actress from the period and we would've gotten a similar performance. It's just not that great a part. It's a version of Olivia De Havilland's part in To Each His Own (a movie I also disliked, for the record). 

Incidentally, was 1949 the worst year for Best Actress nominees ever? No wonder De Havilland won her second Oscar for The Heiress. It's easily the best performance among these 5 nominees. 

Worse yet, Dana Andrews, who is top billed in My Foolish Heart, phones his performance in! A mess from start to finish. I never even got around to liking any of the characters! Except Robert Keith. He's at least having fun in all of his scenes.

The Harder They Fall (1955)

The Harder They Fall is the second Bogart movie I've watched this week, and I'm just so impressed. Obviously I've seen dozens of Bogart movies in my life, but I guess I just hadn't thought much about what good choices this man made as a filmmaker and also how well he can hold a picture together and bring the audience along with whatever his character is thinking.  

The Harder They Fall is not a great movie, but it has some excellent acting – Rod Steiger chews the scenery beautifully and gives a superb performance, and former boxers Jersey Joe Walcott, Max Baer, and Pat Comiskey make appearances... as older boxers, of course.

The script is not bad, but the whole thing just doesn't hang together very well, and it lags in the middle. I hate to say this as a lover of Columbia noir, but I think it needed just a little more heart – which is something Somebody Up There Likes Me (another movie about pugilism from the same year with Paul Newman) has. While we're on boxing movies, Mark Robson directed one of my favorites – also about corruption in the ring – Champion, from 1949 with Kirk Douglas.

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?

The Champions

For some reason, Champion, Mark Robson's excellent picture from 1949, hasn't been released through normal DVD channels and Netflix doesn't carry it. (Well, it is on Netflix Instant but in a colorized version, which, I hope we all recognize, is an unwatchable format.)

Anyway, this is the only explanation I have for only having seen Champion a couple of days ago.

A couple of important things about this movie. It stars the great Kirk Douglas – '49 was his breakout year, with both A Letter to Three Wives and Champion. And let me say that if you aren't familiar with this actor's excellent work, or if you only know Kirk Douglas from Spartacus, it is time for you to rent Detective Story or The Bad and the Beautiful or Ace in the Hole. All of them are superb and Douglas is fantastic. In Champion he is perfect, he plays the tragedy of his part to the hilt. It is a beautiful performance.

And okay, okay, I hear you say: It's a boxing movie. Aren't they all the same? Well, Champion is a boxing movie, true enough, but it's also a gangster picture. This movie is a story about a boxer who is also deeply involved in the racket that makes the fight-game happen and pays the bills of the pugilists who basically work as slaves. All of the fights are fixed in this racket. There is no way to get ahead except to do as you are told. There are few guns in Champion (it was 1949, and the PCA still had teeth), but the sense of danger is palpable in every scene once Midge, the main character, gets anywhere close to the bigtime.

The best thing about Champion, though, is its style. This movie is one of the blackest films noirs I've ever seen. There is so much shadow in this movie that it is at times even distracting. I found myself straining to see, wondering if my television needed to be adjusted. It didn't. Take another look at that poster up to the left. It is nothing like any poster from the time period. Check out this poster from Battleground, for example. The style is totally different. Champion's poster focuses on darkness. That black is astounding, in fact. It swallows the hero and his girl. And if the text pretends that the movie might in any way be about loving, the sheer audacity of this all-encompassing black belies any of the tagline's pretensions to being a love story.

This darkness works to incredible effect. In the images below, Midge, his trainer, and his brother (Arthur Kennedy, also nominated for an Oscar for his work) discuss the possibility of getting a shot at the title. Midge is supposed to fight the guy in the #2 slot with the hope that he will win and then his next fight will be a shot at the title. Here are the men discussing the situation:

That's Kennedy in the background. Then the trainer tells Midge that he will have to take a fall in this fight. The #2 guy is due his turn. If #2 fights the champion and wins then everyone makes more money and Midge can fight the new champion in a year or two. But no matter what, right now, Midge takes the fall if he ever wants to fight in New York again. Midge is furious, but he agrees to take the fall. Then he knocks that lamp in the foreground straight off right with a powerful blow, and cinematographer Franz Planer (1894-1963) gives us this:

Kennedy has turned to look at his brother, but the light is now gone and there appears to be no one there. What an image! It conveys so much with light: so much of this man's inner turmoil. This is the kind of cinematography I am talking about. Planer's work is fantastic in Champion. It's worth it to watch this movie just for the lighting. Seriously.

And this noir style is not restricted only to scenes about gangsters and violence. We also get exquisite images like this:

Planer puts Douglas directly in the way of the light. He moves immediately after lighting her cigarette, but for just this moment, we get an image of a woman deep in thought, even if she looks as if she is only accepting a light.

I should add that Champion did not win the Oscar for cinematography. That went, and deservedly so, to Paul Vogel for Battleground, another film from 1949 for which I have nothing but love.

Three Movies

...and a fucked up weekend. I received some terrible, terrible news on Saturday, and I will probably write about it on this blog in a day or two. Right now I am in denial and I don't feel like writing about it. So: movies.

Watched Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time Redux yesterday. I am not sure what Wong re-did with this movie, because I never saw the original—the DVD quality of the original Ashes of Time has always been super sketchy. I know that the new version has a new score with cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma, but that is all I really know. A couple thoughts about this movie. It took me a little while to get interested in it. This is partly because the movie is set in a kind of rural, medieval netherworld of a desert in China. This is beautiful, but completely unhinged from reality even though it maintains a premise of realism for a while.

Ashes of Time is beautiful to look at, though, and by the end of it, I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I have one more complaint, though, which is that the swordfighting and action sequences are not interesting at all. They are often in slow-motion and they lack tension, as well as a rooting factor.

I did not care for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle. It's famous gay cinema, but its charms were lost on me almost completely. It's sexy, that's for sure, but it never really works. This may be because it is not really clear about what it is trying to do. It may be because Fassbinder is attempting to re-create the feel of Genet's book on film. I am not sure what he is trying to do, though, because whatever he was trying most certainly did not work. Frank Episale, a colleague of mine, has written an interesting essay about Fassbinder's film, which I, quite frankly, found more interesting than Querelle itself. Querelle is definitely no Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

It's a disaster!! I really liked Earthquake. I am a big fan of seventies disaster movies anyway, but I think Earthquake has to be one of the best. Great special effects, interesting (and sometimes very weird) characters, and an uncompromising, very cool ending. I also loved Earthquake's photography. The editing and camerawork build tension very well and the ends without dragging on the story for too long, and—perhaps more importantly—without tying up the loose ends of the disaster the way most disaster films do. A little less all-star than, say, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake stars Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Geneviève Bujold and George Kennedy (is he in every disaster movie?). I am not a Charlton Heston fan, but Bujold is delightful. Definitely worth the rent.