The Fallen Sparrow (1943)

I persist in my fascination regarding WWII films made during WWII. The Fallen Sparrow, edited by Robert Wise (!) and directed by Richard Wallace, ​is well plotted and moves quickly. So much had happened by the end of the first 10 minutes, I was astounded by the amount of information we’d already gotten and had to look at my watch.

The best thing about this minor piece of anti-Nazi propaganda, though, is John Garfield. Despite the fact that The Fallen Sparrow was made as a vehicle for Maureen O’Hara, he’s just so good!  The camera loves him, and he’s a completely dynamic performer, immediately lovable despite his tough exterior. This film gives him some beautiful material to work through, including an intense monologue about torture in act one (of all places)! The monologue needs to be in act one because it needs to set up the psychological tension of the plot's twists and turns as well as the traumatic residue for the character.

Anyway, this is great. It's on the Criterion Channel until January 31st as part of a series celebrating Garfield's mostly underappreciated work as a performer.

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.

Oh the Humanity!

Robert Wise's 1975 film The Hindenburg is a curious kind of disaster film. It was made in the 1970s, in peak disaster film time (Airport was made in 1970, The Poseidon Adventure was '72, then Earthquake and the mother of all disaster films The Towering Inferno arrived in '74). The Hindenburg is set up like a disaster film, too. It's cast is enormous: George C. Scott, Gig Young, Anne Bancroft, Charles Durning, Roy Thinnes. And in what I guess is a weird coincidence, William Atherton, Burgess Meredith and Richard A. Dysart, all of whom were in (also from 1975) The Day of the Locust, which I just screened earlier this week.

The weird thing about The Hindenburg is that the disaster doesn't happen until the last half hour of the film. All of the rest is just setup. Seriously, there are ninety minutes of setup. It's really strange. The Hindenburg, I suppose, unlike most other disaster films is based on fact, and so it is hampered a little by history, but it's an oddly made film. It's also not nearly as campy as other disaster films (see my review of Airport '77). Robert Wise, instead, has made a serious drama, dealing with anti-Nazi Germans and the difficulties of living in Germany for conscientious objectors to Hitler's regime. The acting is excellent (Anne Bancroft and William Atherton in particular) and the special effects are pretty cool for 1975. Anyway, it's worth a look-see if you're into disaster flicks.