1940s Movie Reviews

Key Largo Review

January 4, 2017 by JD Hansel

This film is essentially “Film Noir’s Greatest Hits.” It has Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in leading roles, sharing the spotlight with a wealthy mob boss played in the most Edward-G.-Robinsony way possible by none other than Edward G. Robinson. In a supporting role is Claire Trevor of Murder, My Sweet and Raw Deal, and one of Robinson’s main gangsters is played by Dan Seymour, whom some may remember as Capitaine Renard from To Have and Have Not. Character actor Marc Lawrence – Cobby in The Asphalt Jungle – also makes an enjoyable appearance, so the gang’s all here. The film is as claustrophobic, dramatic, and violent as anyone could want from a film noir, with a satisfying sense of witty cynicism. That being said, there are a few ways in which this stands out from the usual film noir stereotypes.

Most films noirs – and most films in general – change locations, but this story is about people who are stuck in one building for the whole movie. The particular location the film chooses is particularly odd: it’s in a hotel on the beach in Key Largo, which is radically different from the general consensus that film noir concerns urban settings. The movie cleverly uses this to its advantage, employing a hurricane to amp up the usual noir trope of heightening drama with rain by making the rain more intense and to take out the building’s electricity. The power outage serves as both another way to create anxiety among the cast, which feels very noir, and as a great excuse for making the lighting more extreme. The result is a lighting style that is more expressionistic than any shadows I’ve seen in any film noir since Stranger on the Third Floor, and it’s absolutely delightful. It’s also very different for a film noir to avoid themes of male anxieties about women completely (or, in other words, to avoid a femme fatale or similar type), and Lauren Bacall seems almost out-of-place in her “loving, devoted wife” role.

While I think some parts of the film, such as the Bogart-Bacall romance, could have been more interesting than they are, I do think this is one of the greatest films noirs I have ever seen, and perhaps one of the greatest films I’ve seen at all.

It’s a Wonderful Life Review

December 25, 2016 by JD Hansel

This movie is not supposed to be a classic – it happened by accident. It was a flop at the box office (far more so than The Wizard of Oz) and only got played on TV because the studio let its copyright on the film lapse in the 1970s. Because so many people watched it as children with how often it was on television, it became a tradition to watch the movie every Christmas, but that doesn’t mean it’s that great. It’s one of those movies that we remember as being great from our childhood, so we can still enjoy it, much like with the Rankin-Bass specials. The difference is that It’s a Wonderful Life feels more original with the classic, memorable, charming moral of its fable, more high-quality with its top-notch director, long run-time, and great cast, and more like it fits in stylistically with the family of Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, and other films that just feel emblematic of Classical Hollywood. At the end, however, it feels like a pretty average Classical Hollywood film to me: sometimes boring, sometimes charming, sometimes impressive, and sometimes absurdly (and dare I say stupidly) weird.

First of all, its structure is about as bizarre as that of a film noir. While Out of the Past has its interesting part in the first act and what feels like a boring afterthought for its second, this film spends the first two acts on generally humdrum exposition, leaving its iconic fantasy story for the ending. Consequently, the whole film seems long and drawn-out, and while I can appreciate how interesting it must have seemed when it first came out because its high concept was completely new to cinema at the time, I couldn’t really stay all that interested seeing as how I knew exactly how the story ends. I will say that the character of Mary Hatch/Bailey (Donna Reed) kept me interested in the story for a while, but the way that George Bailey (Stewart) treats her in most scenes, and the way he behaves in general, struck me as entirely unappealing and unrelatable. I have a very difficult time caring about what happens to Bailey in general, but I will say that the film’s ending oddly warmed my heart far more than any movie I’ve seen in a long, long time. The strength of the ending, however, is counterbalanced with the weirdness of the scenes at the beginning with the blinking stars, which were nearly a face-palm moment for me. This film is a mix of a great many distinct and interesting things, some positive and some negative, and while I can’t say that I like it, I do think its concept is one worth consideration, and I can appreciate the original ideas it has brought to the art of the moving image.

Raw Deal Review

October 30, 2016 by JD Hansel

SPOILER ALERT

Unlike many of my fellow millennials, I have no reservations or concerns about watching films from Classical Hollywood, because I do not share in their fears that old movies are “too boring.” My issue with classic cinema is that it can be uncomfortable recommending or showing older films to friends of mine without explaining to them beforehand that I don’t condone the sexism or racism that sometimes appears in these classic films. When I heard that Raw Deal brings a female perspective to film noir by having a woman narrate, I was hoping that it would be a film noir I could show to friends with no such concerns. Better yet, the professor of the class that was screening Raw Deal said it was his favorite film noir, which sounded like a good sign (as he was also a big fan of Double Indemnity, which I find excellent). Regrettably, I not only greatly disliked the film, but was very disappointed to find no trace of feminism or anything of the sort. While I do think the recurring theme throughout the film is the theme of the choice(s) of its women, I do not think that the film presents the women’s freedom to choose in a positive light.

Most scenes in Raw Deal are part of a set up for the main female choices in the film: Pat’s choice to lie to Joe about Rick’s goon’s phone call concerning Ann, and then her choice tell him the truth. Pat is the character who is most clearly being silenced throughout the film, never getting the chance to take part in the decision-making in her and Joe’s relationship during the first two acts. She’s actually being told what to do by men even before Joe starts – at the prison, she’s told she’ll have to wait to see Joe, which is just the first of many moments in the film that focus on how she’s forced to wait, and then she and Joe are commanded by the security guard to keep their voices up. When Joe starts, if Pat’s narration is to be trusted, the commanding gets alarmingly strict. She hardly gets to finish one sentence once he gets in the car before he tells her to focus on the wheel, and then when she tells him he doesn’t like his plan to use her and Ann to get through the dragnet, he dismisses her concerns immediately and tells her to get dressed. She is similarly told what to do and/or silenced when speaking her mind – either on screen or according to her voiceover – in their car ride to the border, just after they pass the dragnet, at the campfire, when they make their way to Walt’s bar by the beach, and repeatedly throughout their whole discussion when he decides to leave her behind and go to Rick’s. Pat’s narration makes it seem almost as though it’s the story of a woman who’s trapped in a film that’s about her lover’s love story, not hers.

From the perspective of screenwriting theory, it seems like this would be the obvious set-up for a story about a woman who finally learns to make her own choice. While Joe may be the protagonist and dominate the film’s climax, Pat has her own semi-climactic moment when she decides to lie about the phone call. However, the liberation that seems to be displayed in this scene is undercut by her more climactic scene, when she realizes her one big decision in the film was a mistake. If she learns any moral lesson – although that’s debatable – it’s that she should have done as Joe told her in the first place and told him what the man said on the phone call.

Rick goes further in his mistreatment of women, as I suppose one would expect of the villain, and he shows this by keeping his cool after he’s lost his poker game and found out that Joe successfully escaped, but losing it when his lady friend accidentally spills a little bit of her drink on him. (That’s rather small in comparison, even if it is supposed to be the last straw.) Still, it’s ultimately Pat’s narrative that reveals time and time again that she lives in a world in which women’s views aren’t as important as men’s, and I don’t see how her decision to withhold information from Joe changes that. Ann’s choice to shoot a man, which is also set up earlier in the film (with her mentioning in her apartment that she’d be able to stop Joe if she had a gun), but this choice leads to her overwhelming guilt, and ultimately Joe ends up dying hours later anyway. Add this to the number of times they use the word dame and the way the whistle blows when Ann walks out of the prison and it’s clear that the film does not play as well as one would hope to younger audiences who find anti-feminism in film morally unsatisfactory. While I’ve heard some make the case today that the way women are presented and/or treated in film today seems worse that it was back in the days of Classical Hollywood, this is clearly the kind of movie that people are afraid to find when they watch classic films because it perpetuates the view that it is the woman’s place to shut up and obey. At the end of the day, as much as I really appreciate the film’s charmingly “Noir-Expressionist” visual style, I have found nothing else about the film which is particularly noteworthy or memorable, which presents me in the Song of the South conundrum – if all that’s really memorable about the film are the few parts that seem particularly politically inappropriate, should those alone be the memorable part of its reception and ratings?

In this case, I vote yes.

Double Indemnity Review

October 23, 2016 by JD Hansel

MINOR SPOILER ALERT

Before watching this film, I was informed by a reliable source that this is the “perfect film noir,” and its screenplay by Raymond Chandler and cinema god Billy Wilder is commonly regarded as holy. Perhaps it was because of the hype that I did not find the film absolutely perfect, but I have been having a hard time thinking of anything that’s wrong with the film, and it’s been growing on me both in hindsight and as I’ve re-watched certain scenes. I do consider it brilliant, and I hail it as a great cinematic achievement, but maybe its simply not quite my style of film. Much of the visual style is more or less in the cinematographic territory that I most like, and there are good tracks on the soundtrack, and the story is interesting, and the performances are very good, and the pacing keeps me engaged, but I think I still have a hard time loving a story that doesn’t have the kinds of characters that really interest me in it. Duck Soup has one type of character that I like in Firefly, while Labyrinth has a protagonist that reminds me of my youth, and Little Shop of Horrors has a great villain, and Phantom of the Paradise has an even better villain, while Gremlins is a delightful, childlike collective of loony villainy – but Double Indemnity doesn’t have any of the usual character types that tickle my fancy. Still, that’s never stopped me from enjoying films like Mockingjay or Casablanca, and Edward G. Robinson’s character, Keyes, is probably one of my favorite characters in all of cinema at this point, so what’s the problem?

I think that the reason why I haven’t fallen head-over-heels in love with the film is that I’m not wrapped up in the goals of the characters – their motives don’t grab me. Phyllis gives the impression that she’s willing to attempt to kill off her husband simply because she’s grown bored with him, and Walter Neff is willing to attempt murder just for the fun of it – an attitude that comes out of nowhere from this otherwise charming, polite, likable every-man. The results of Walter’s efforts don’t seem to matter to him much, and neither does his life, so it’s very difficult for the audience to care too much about what happens to him. That being said, I still have both an intellectual appreciate and a special soft spot for this film noir classic, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves a good drama.

Sullivan’s Travels Review

October 21, 2016 by JD Hansel

While I’m not sure I would say that this is one of the funniest comedy films of all time, I do see why it is considered one of the greatest. After all, a quick Google of the film will list it in the genre(s) of “Drama/Romance,” so clearly there aren’t many particularly memorable belly laughs throughout the movie. In all fairness, I do get a good laugh out of some parts, and it features one of the best chase sequences I’ve ever seen (and I usually don’t go for chase sequences much). The character actors who were placed around Sullivan made for a very pleasant experience because of how much I enjoyed hanging around the fun cast, and Veronica Lake‘s character is much more charming than she might have been if the film had been made by (or cast with) the wrong people. I think the drama is very impressive and moving, but as much as it stirred up passion in me, I fear that it may have detracted from the overall feeling of joy from the comedy. What’s problematic about the drama is that the film can be viewed as an argument for why comedy is more important than drama – in which case the film’s reliance on drama to make its point seems to work against it – but film critics and historians have since argued that the protagonist’s conclusion regarding comedy’s significance is more a matter of plot than message. While I would hope that someday I’ll find a film that does attempt (and succeed) to make a great case for the superiority of comedy, I think that Sturges’ goal here is much simpler – to tell a good, fun, engaging story – and this goal is accomplished with finesse.

Detour (1945) Review

October 6, 2016 by JD Hansel

This film is an absolute mess. It looks as cheap as it is, constantly making it painfully obvious that the director’s been given less than $100,000 and less than a week to make a movie. The script is all over the place, with a story that the biggest of fans of this film concede makes little or no sense. The characters are clearly not meant to be likable, but I found them utterly detestable without reason. The whole experience is painful, and I think most film critics/historians recognize that, but they still review it well and consider it a classic because they justify its badness. I’m not going to do that, because this film doesn’t deserve my help.

I’ve heard a number of reasons why the story and characters are as bad as they are and explanations of what it’s supposed to mean. I’ve come up with a few similar explanations myself, which the professor of my film noir class found rather thoughtful. Some argue that the story is addressed directly to us, while I argue he’s mentally preparing his story for anyone – primarily the cops – who may question him, and some would say it’s all essentially a dream (which would explain why it seems to function in an over-dramatized fairy tale world of “dream logic” rather than in reality). The running theme throughout interpretations and justifications of the story is the unreliable narrator, but in the end, these are all mere excuses. I think the real reason why people make such excuses is that the film is so intellectually fascinating to critics, and these critics want to make their fascination with the film – which often transforms into love for the film – seem justified. In my view, however, this is not a matter of a film being so bad that it’s good, although I’ve reviewed such films positively in the past. This is a case of a very creative and fascinating (yet illogical) film that feels like it ought to have a logic to it, so it remains a memorable enigma, and for that it is a classic . . . it’s just not a good classic.