Green Fire (1954)

Director: Andrew Marton
Stars: Stewart Granger, Grace Kelly and Paul Douglas

A couple of weeks after The Country Girl opened and won Grace Kelly her Oscar, MGM put out their big Christmas film for 1954. It had a snappy name, Green Fire, but it's obvious from moment one why this is the least remembered film of her career. With only eleven films in five years, including a whole slew of classics, only Fourteen Hours could possibly compete with this one as a Grace Kelly obscurity and that was her film debut with only a couple of minutes of screen time to make her mark.

While The Country Girl was a serious drama about a cunning drunk of an actor/singer, this one starts out like Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's 1954 so it's Stewart Granger as Rian Mitchell rather than Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. However he's dressed pretty much the same, he has his back to us and he's chipping away at the wall in a lost Columbian emerald mine of Los Conquistadores. Of course he emerges into the sunlight only to be waylaid by natives, but at least there's no giant stone ball threatening to crush him before we get a chance to find out what the plot's about. Instead he gets thrown down a hillside and attacked by a jaguar. To be honest, there isn't much of a plot here and we have to get past a sappy theme tune before we get to what we get. 'Green fire, emerald burning like true love...' Oh dear.

What we get is a typical Hollywood adventure film, heavy on the romance and the melodrama, and short on the adventure. Mitchell is what is quickly described as 'a man who's been places and done things.' He's precisely the sort of character who lives by the seat of his pants, raising money to mine his emeralds betting on his skill in a local game that looks like quoits but is played with stones and firecrackers. He has a silver tongue, enough so that he can persuade his partner Vic Leonard to come with him instead of leaving the life of an adventurer behind for a safe job in Canada. Fortunately for us he's played by Paul Douglas, one of the greatest actors that you're not likely to have heard of, as I'm beginning to discover. Last time I saw him was in that other obscure Grace Kelly film, but while she only made page three of the opening credits he was the lead.

Here she's in between the pair of them in the credits, hardly surprising as she was the hottest star of 1954 but she has nothing to do here beyond looking gorgeous, scaring us with some of her skirts and acting as a love interest for Granger. She would have appeared utterly wasted even had I not just watched The Country Girl, but that just highlighted how throwaway this role is. As Cathy Knowland she's young and beautiful, cultured and elegant, and she owns her own South American coffee plantation and yet the only substance Cathy Knowland has is when compared to her idiot brother Donald, who invests everything in the family kitty while she's away in Bogota, all to gamble on the big strike in the mountains.

This isn't an entire dud, contrary to the tone I've been taking in this review. It bustles along adequately and there a few decent scenes. There's plenty of opportunity to pit safe tradition and hard work against wild risk for glory by constantly comparing the third generation plantation with the lost emerald mine on the mountain above it. People even reload their guns during the shootout scenes. The names involved are able folks, of course. Granger was always good at this sort of thing, however much he reminds of Bruce Campbell (and not the other way round) and it's never a hardship to watch him as the action hero. I'll take his work in King Solomon's Mines over Young Bess any day. Kelly is fine, however little she has to do. Douglas is excellent and Robert Tafur impresses as the local monk. Mostly though there's cliché. Whole sections of this film play out like they were written in someone's sleep, with conveniences everywhere and sweeping music that overplays everything.

The strange part comes in how MGM mounted this production. IMDb only lists Los Angeles as a shooting location but it certainly looks authentic. It's easy to believe that this is South America, not just in the general locale but in the detail locations too. The main actors are obviously there too and yet we get rear projection shots putting them in front of scenery we just saw them in front of. There are sets too with paintings that are at least extravagant but they're still obviously paintings. Sure, there's a big explosion at the end before the Hollywood ending that has both a rainbow and Grace Kelly in a wet shirt, but whether it's worth getting that far is an open question. It's fluff, pure and simple, and while we often wish it would climb above that level it never does.

The Country Girl (1954)

Director: George Seaton
Stars: Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and William Holden

When people think of Grace Kelly, they probably think first of Princess Grace of Monaco. If their attention is limited to movies, they probably think of Rear Window or High Society, depending on their personal taste. Yet it was this film, in the busiest year of her career, for which she won her Academy Award. That's always surprised me, not because I've seen it because I haven't until now, but because I've rarely seen it mentioned outside of idle wondering why it won out over all those other Grace Kelly roles in 1954. That was the year she made Rear Window and Dial M for Murder, for a start. There was Green Fire too, which is probably the least referenced film of her career, after her debut in 1951's Fourteen Hours, and The Bridges at Toko-Ri, which I've certainly seen mentioned a lot more often than The Country Girl. Now I've seen it though, I understand.

It's a Hollywood adaptation of a successful Broadway play from 1950 by Clifford Odets, and it didn't just come from Broadway, it was set on Broadway. We arrive at the theatre with the coffee to find Philip Cook and Bernie Dodd arguing. They're the producer and director of an adaptation of The Land Around Us, some sort of serious source material that they're turning into a quirky musical show, and they've been left in the lurch by their lead actor. They're up against it to find a replacement but Dodd has someone in mind, someone who can 'act while he's singing and sing while he's acting.' In fact he believes that he isn't just up to the part, he has the potential of being a revelation. The catch, as Cook points out, is that he's been living inside a bottle for quite some time.

He's Frank Elgin, in the appropriate form of Bing Crosby, here playing by far the most serious part I've ever seen him play. That's not a dig, because he nails a role that has some similarity to his own dark past. It's just refreshing to see him play a part with some actual substance behind it, someone who is more than up to the task at hand if only he lets himself be. He has some competition to play against though. Dodd, the man he's working for, is played by William Holden, who was riding high having won his first Oscar for Stalag 17 the year before. Dodd has troubles but they're all with other people: with Elgin, with Cook and with Elgin's wife, Georgie. Elgin's troubles are with himself and not all those troubles are obvious.

There are two huge successes here. One is the way that the story weaves a wonderful web of understanding and misunderstanding between the three lead characters. So often a film with three lead actors has two of them playing lead characters and the third just there for star value or because of some movie industry politics that we really don't care about. Yet this one is absolutely and intrically tied up in the way all three interact with each other, with every permutation covered. Elgin says one thing to Dodd and another entirely to his wife and he knows precisely what to say. Dodd hears precisely what he wants to hear and refuses to see things any other way, unwilling to know when he's being played. Georgie knows precisely when she's being played because she knows precisely that she's married to what she calls 'a cunning drunkard.'

It's a story that has us screaming at the screen at the misunderstandings but it's at the characters not at the writing. Even when we know we're hearing outrageous lies we can believe the reactions of those who believe them, however much we scream at them to see through them too. We scream too at the same people when those lies are unravelled and they get trapped in their own reactions. It's wonderful writing, by Clifford Odets who wrote the play and George Seaton who adapted it and directed it too. He was a lesser Hollywood director but he had made Miracle on 34th Street and he would go on to Airport, thus showing a notable versatility.

The other success is Grace because while I've always appreciated her talents as an actress I was powerfully surprised at how great she is here. When Jennifer Jones, who had been advertised in the role, backed out after becoming pregnant, a lot of people laughed at the suggestion of Grace Kelly taking her place. After all, while she was a prominent new name in the movies but one who epitomised the sort of role she had just stamped her authority on: the new elegant young blonde in Hitchcock movies. Picturing the same actress who had been so good in that vein in Dial M for Murder and Rear Window playing a serious dramatic role that oozes its stage origins and calls not only for some major acting chops but for her to look notably older than her mere 25 years was not an easy task. The Academy Award shut those critics up.

It's not entirely her achievement. She's dressed dowdily, her hairstyle is not one you'd see 25 year olds wear and the make up job is so well done that we know it's there but we can't see it, so there are a number of names who deserve recognition, but the rest is Grace Kelly. She slumps just a little, her voice is deeper than we remember and she rides close to the other side over the control she was so good at keeping in her other roles. In short, she's surprisingly believable, even with knowledge of that Oscar win hovering behind her every movement. A flashback scene where she's the sparkling young beauty that moviegoers were falling in love with in the early fifties only serves to highlight the difference between that persona and the character she plays during the bulk of the film.

It's a superb performance and it's one that will quiet the inner surprise I raised in my first paragraph. No, The Country Girl isn't the film Rear Window was, though it is a genuine classic, but it's certainly an acting challenge that I don't believe Grace Kelly took on at any other time in her brief five year screen career. It makes sense that it's the acting role of hers that got recognised. I'm just surprised that the film isn't remembered more for its other merits.

Sansho the Bailiff (1954)

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Stars: Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaka Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa, Eitaro Shindo, Akitake Kono, Masahiko Kato and Keiko Enami

Set during the late Heian period, a high spot in Japanese cultural history which ran from the 8th to 12th centuries and predated the rise of the samurai, the film's title character doesn't seem to stand for either of the words that 'Heian' commonly translates to: 'peace' and 'tranquility'. Sansho is the richest man around, a bailiff who runs one of the minister's estates, successful through exploitation of slaves and use of rigid discipline. It's here that two young slaves, Zushio and Anju, grow up, with their only real initial friend Taro, Sansho's son and second in command who does not believe in the same principles and who soon leaves to become a Buddhist monk. It's Taro that instils in them the courage to endure until they're old enough to leave and find their family. He also gives them false names, Matsu and Shinobu.

They're hardly peasant brats, secretly being the children of a governor in exile. This governor, Masauji Taira, is a compassionate and well loved man, who extols principles far more in tune with Taro than Sansho. When a general requests more taxes on rice to finance his war and more men to fight in it, he refuses because the locality has been suffering under a famine for thirteen years and the people need every man in the fields. So he's exiled to remote Tsukushi and he sends his wife Tamaki and children off to her mother's in Iwashiro. Unlike the people, who are incensed at this exile, his children are young enough to take it all in stride, at least until they're betrayed by a priestess on the road, split up and sold into slavery.

So Zushio and Anju end up with Sansho, ostensibly enduring and biding their time but really growing into adults within a very specific and unpleasant environment. As ten years pass with no knowledge of their mother beyond that she was sold into slavery on the island of Sado, they change as they grow, Zushio gradually putting aside all his father's carefully instructed words about mercy and growing into the sort of thug he thinks will impress his boss. Eventually hope arrives, along with a new slave from Sado to work with Shinobu. She sings a popular song about how life is torture without Zushio and Anju, one written by a courtesan called Nagakimi who of course has to be Tamaki under her own secret alias.

Given how attentive to composition and detail so much of classic Japanese culture is, from bonsai to ikebana to calligraphy, not to mention all the ritual associated with everything from the tea ceremony to the martial arts, it's hardly surprising that such composition would be so obvious in so much of classic Japanese film but it can be found across the board. It's there in what would be the equivalent of genre films, and of course it's there in something like Sansho the Bailiff, which is more like a historical drama. The cinematographer was Kazuo Miyagawa, who also shot many Kurosawa classics like Rashomon and Yojimbo, a number of entries in the long running Zatoichi series and other major films like Yasujiro Ozu's Floating Weeds.

By 1954, director Kenji Mizoguchi was a past master at composition, having been directing films over three decades and as a result even films that are too slow for their own good, like the two part The 47 Ronin, still look awesome. Here he was at the height of his powers, with the three most consistently high rated of his films arriving within a three year period: Life of Oharu in 1952, Ugetsu a year later and finally 1954's Sansho the Bailiff. Ugetsu is certainly one of the great classic films, from anywhere not just of the Japanese cinema, and while this one isn't its equal, it's a powerful film nonetheless and a visual treat. Everything down to the placement of footprints within the frame is carefully done, and it isn't just what's framed but what moves into and out of that frame.

The story is a touching one, tying as it does to the eternal struggle to be free. The way it's phrased is akin to a fairy tale, a cup full of sadness but overflowing with hope. Characters fall through circumstances into the depths of despair and depravation, only to rise again to a position of power and authority or to die through great sacrifice for others. Given such dramatic shifts in possibility, the emotions rise and fall like crashing waves and it's impossible not to be caught up with them. I found the sheer sweep of the thing a little too much, as some of it becomes overblown and unduly theatrical. Perhaps that's inherent in the material but I'm not entirely convinced of that.

There are others problems with the film too, not least the inevitable question of why Masauji Taira felt that his family couldn't follow him into exile, given that it wasn't exactly to be eke out a living in a hovel but merely to become the governor of somewhere more more remote and less important. Was he intending to track them down at some point and we're just spared the search, focusing instead on the children, or did he just exile them? I understand that we're talking here about a different culture and different morals, but he seems to be defined as someone out of his time, given that he drums into his son lessons like 'Men are created equal', 'Everyone is entitled to their happiness' and 'Even if you are hard on yourself, be merciful to others.' Surely such a man would care what happened to his family.

So while this is certainly a great film, I much prefer other Japanese films from this period and fortunately we have many to choose from as this is yet another prime example of how much amazing cinema was being made in Japan at the time. 1954 was the year of both The Seven Samurai and Gojira, surely two of the most influential films of all time, though in very different ways. 1953 didn't just have Ugetsu but also Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story and the highly underrated Gate of Hell, directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa. Kurosawa's Ikiru was only a year earlier and it was only in 1950 that Japanese cinema had really broken outside its own borders when Rashomon became a global hit. This wasn't the golden age of Japanese film but the golden age of many of its directors such as Mizoguchi, who like his national cinema, was at his peak.

The Last Metro (1980)

Director: François Truffaut
Stars: Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu and Jean Poiret

Paris in 1942 wasn't a particularly safe place to be, especially if you're a prominent German Jew like Lucas Steiner, who runs the Theatre Montmartre. The north of France was under Nazi occupation had been for a couple of years, but fortunately the day the authorities came for him he had already escaped to the free zone, the Vichy run south. Now the theatre is managed by his wife, Marion, who seems to be doing an able job even accounting for the problems inherent in the time: the Nazis censor all material shown on the stage and periodically purge Jews from theatres whatever jobs they're doing. She also has another, more secret problem: she's the only one who knows that her husband couldn't get out in time so is secluded down in the cellar until he can be spirited away.

Just as Marion is more than capable of running the show, Catherine Deneuve who plays her is more than capable of carrying our film, but she's not the only name here. As we wait for Marion to surreptitiously organise his escape, we watch the day to day operations of the theatre under such awkward circumstances. They're putting on a new play, ironically called Disappearance, and they've even brought in a new leading man, Bernard Granger from the Grand Guignol, who's played by Gérard Depardieu. Marion compares him to Jean Gabin in La bête humaine, very physical and yet quite gentle. That physicality is obvious from moment one, as Depardieu is hardly a stick figure and we first meet him trying to chat up a woman in the street who turns out to be the costume designer of the theatre he's about to work for.

What Marion doesn't know is that he's yet another danger to her husband, as he's not just the womaniser that he appears to be, he's also a resistance fighter prone to do things like try to blow up Admiral Froelich with a exploding record player he took from the theatre. There are many dangers, of course, not least a theft that takes place in the theatre while they plan the seating, so much of which has to be reserved for the Nazis. Obviously the last thing she needs is to have the police searching the theatre, even though Lucas has rigged up a heating vent to enable him to hear the rehearsals and the play from his hiding place.

There's also a character called Daxiat who is a looming presence of menace throughout. He's the drama critic for Je suis partout and he's widely respected even though he's more than just in with the Nazis. He's utterly unpredictable and could turn on a dime. One minute he's telling Marion that her husband's talent is above any question about race, the next he's calling virulently for Jewish purges from the theatre. One minute he's the first to stand to applaud the opening night's performance of Disappearance, the next he's ripping it to shreds in his column. As the play's director Jean-Loup Cottins tells him at one point, he was reluctant to visit him because 'with someone like you it's hard to tell if it's an appointment or an arrest.' He even tries to weasel his way into co-ownership of the theatre with Cottins, but we're not quite sure how much of that aim is arrogant power and how much is a serious love for the theatre and a desire to see it continue.

Much of the success of this film is in how well it builds through characterisation and clever set pieces a tableau of life in Paris during the Nazi occupation. The presence of the Germans pervades throughout, even down to little touches like set manager Raymond Boursier teaching the son of the concierge all the bad words he can think of to desribe them. Yet they're rarely seen, highlighting just how much the occupation force was a minority ruling out of fear. People like Bernard Granger are able to live and work under their thumb while remaining able to avoid them most of the time. At one point the troupe visits a nightclub and Granger turns up late, only to promptly leave again when he checks his hat and realises from the stack of military caps just how many Nazis are there.

There's depth to each of the characters. Just as Marion has her secret and Bernard his, they're far from the only ones. Jean-Loup Cottins has his connections and makes things happen though we have to ask just what that means. Bernard doesn't get anywhere with the voluptuous Arlette because she has a secret of her own that gets discovered one night through a carelessly unlocked door. Young actress Nadine Marsac, eager to be a star, takes every job she possibly can, meaning that she flits from the radio in the morning to dubbing in the afternoon and on to the stage in the evening. Such dedication is admirable, except that she admits that she'd even have taken a role in Jud Süß if they had a part for a young French girl.

There are little touches everywhere to help build these characters and provide flavour and colour to the story, from benign ones like the German soldier painting in the streets or Germaine Fabre knitting backstage to more dubious ones like little Jacquot's subversive garden to the fact that all the actors sign contractors stating that they and their ancestors were not Jewish. Some of them are obvious, like the ever inventive Raymond Boursier finding a way to keep the theatre open when others close for lack of electricity by rigging up bicycle powered lamps to be the footlights. Some are more obscure, such as the title which is a clever little touch: Paris had a curfew of 11.00pm, meaning that it was massively important that whatever you were doing you didn't miss the last métro.

It would be so cheap for me to follow that by saying that whatever you're doing you shouldn't miss The Last Metro either, but it's appropriate. It isn't Truffaut's best but it's up there with something even more lauded like The 400 Blows to me, at least based on a single viewing of each. Somehow it manages to be both lush and claustrophobic: the set design and the choices of colour flesh out the theatre wonderfully, just as when Bernard attempts to chat up Arlette in the street I couldn't stop looking at the posters around them, but the looming menace of the occupying forces hems in the viewers just as it confined Lucas Steiner to the cellar of his own theatre. I'm slacking on Truffaut it seems, catching up some of his fellow French directors far easier, but like each of the preceding four of his films I've seen, it has a voice of its own and it makes me look forward to the next one.

The Victim (2006)

Director: Monthon Arayangkoon
Stars: Pitchanart Sakakorn, Apasiri Nitibhon and Penpak Sirikul

Recording off the Sundance Channel's Extreme Asia season with the expectation that this was the 1999 Hong Kong movie called Victim, made by Ringo Lam and featuring Tony Leung Ka Fai, it turned out instead to be a Thai ghost story called The Victim, made seven years later by director Monthon Arayangkoon, the middle of his three films as writer and director, after a monster movie called Garuda and before The House, a true murder story. This one contains plenty of murders too but it's far from a conventional film: part ghost story, part thriller, part something else entirely that I'll get to later.

Our lead character is a young acting student called Ting who becomes employed by the Bangna Metropolitan Police to do a very Thai job: to play the part of the victims in reenactments of crimes with the real handcuffed criminals playing themselves, so that pictures can be taken and published on the front page of Thai newspapers as closure. This is such a bizarre job for anyone to have that we half expect Steven Seagal to play it but fortunately it goes to the charming young Pitchanart Sakakorn, who looks notably younger than her 25 years and who was already on her seventh movie at this point. She apparently has an interesting set of roles behind her, including blind characters and cripples. I'd like to see more of her work.

Ting is demonstrating how she can laugh from within to someone at a bar when police lieutenant Teerasak Kedkaew notices and hires her. She's good at what she does, as we soon discover. In reenacting a mugging she gets into the character so well that the people watching get caught up in the moment and beat up the perpetrator. When she prays to the victim offering respect by burning incense at a small shrine nearby, the victim appears, though in this instance we have no idea whether she's appreciative or not given that she has no head. Further cases build her reputation, not just with fans around her that she knows but on the other side of the veil too. As she plays more and more victims, we see more and more ghosts and they are definitely appreciative of her respect.

Soon she gets a huge case to reenact. A former Miss Thailand, Meen by name, has been missing for some time, presumed dead. Finally the police find traces of her body, which was apparently chopped up into pieces and left in a bathtub by her estranged husband, Dr Jarun. Ting wants the job, of course, but it goes to a female police officer instead. However when she prays to Meen with the heartfelt promise that if she had got the part she'd have played it with all her worth, the cop gets killed in awesome Asian ghost story style and the job becomes hers after all. Meen even helps her out with her research, helping her through the Likae dance and other things.

Ting literally has a fan club beyond the grave. Throughout the first half of the film there is a consistently good use of mirrors as we see ghosts that the characters mostly don't, but these scenes get awesomely creepy, especially when Ting climbs into the bathtub and experiences a horrific vision. As she walks down a corridor, passing a bleeding victim that turns into Meen, the ghosts crowd around her as if she's a star who they want to help them, reminding of nothing less than Val Lewton's Bedlam. During this vision and at points afterwards Meen explains to her that Dr Jarun is not the killer after all and sends her instead to visit Fai, a lesbian plastic surgeon friend of Meen, who is the real killer.

And here we discover how great the editing is that we've been enjoying throughout, because it isn't just about how it's done but also in what is done. Halfway through the film we're given a revelation through a powerful piece of editing. The story of Ting channelling the ghost of Meen to discover her real killer ends at a crucial moment and becomes a reenactment of that story portrayed by the very actors we've been watching. Ting is really May playing Ting, just as Meen is really Oom playing Meen. Suddenly everything we think we know goes out the window and we have to look at whole new characters in a whole new light and work out whole new motivations.

Most importantly we have to work out just how the whole concept of ghosts possessing live people continues into this new reality, as apparently Meen wasn't just possessing Ting in our reenactment, she's also possessing May to play Ting as she's possessed by Meen. Oh, there are levels here, that's for sure. We get dreams within dreams within dreams and it takes a lot of concentration to keep up with what's really going on. Unfortunately I'm not sure I was up to that task. Everything during the first two thirds of the film makes total sense to me, but from then on it kept drifting into new territory that didn't appear to fit.

So we're left with a whole slew of questions that apparently go unanswered. Who's really possessing who? Why do people who are apparently happy with other people suddenly torment them? What's the meaning of the Likae dance and especially the headdress used during performances and why do these things keep coming up as reference points? And where's Ting? We know Meen is dead because the investigation of her murder is a huge part of the first half of the film, but what happened to the Ting that's portrayed there? Was she even real or just made up by the filmmakers we watch change the story?

So while it's mostly very well done indeed, there are flaws and these questions are chief among them. It looks great, both as far as the cinematography and the effects, but the inspiration behind them seems to be notably inconsistent. Some of the shocks are gloriously done, taking inspiration from the greats and turning them into something new, but others come across as less inspired copies, meaning that half the film is stunning and the other half is much closer to blah.

These things are much harder to forgive than the flaky subtitles, which come with the territory, giving us characters called Joke and Shane which really doesn't seem to fit. If I could find answers to those questions this would go back up a notch or two for me but otherwise it's a very well played and ambitious Thai horror movie shot at real crime scenes and real haunted houses with a number of actors believably playing double roles, but which falls apart two thirds of the way through.

Dial M for Murder (1954)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: Ray Milland, Grace Kelly and Robert Cummings

I began this blog in 2007 when I started getting serious about writing reviews. Prior to that I'd spent a year scratching together reviews that were often more like notes, insubstantial and often pretty poor stuff. However I began investigating classic film at depth in 2004 as I waited for the US immigration authorities to grant me permission to work and then to actually get a job. At that point I'd only seen a few Hitchcocks: Psycho, of course, and Rear Window and Rope. I'd also seen his silent Jack the Ripper story, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. And then came TCM with Hitchcock their star of the month sometime in late 2004 or early 2005 so I caught up with most of the rest. I've now seen 41 of his films, over two thirds of them, but I only have a single review on this blog because all the others came before I began the thing. The only one here is Rope because it was a rare Hitch that I didn't like and I wanted to revisit it.

This one is one of his masterpieces. It opens with only a hint of suspicion that anything's up, as we watch a husband and wife kiss at the breakfast table, but being a Hitchcock film we know that there's something going on and his camera whisks us through the setup effortlessly. They're the Wendices, Tony and Margot, played by Ray Milland and Grace Kelly, and they both have a secret: she's been cheating on him and he knows it. The third party is an American crime writer called Mark Halliday and the morning newspaper announces that he's on board the Queen Mary on his way back to London. It doesn't mention that he's also coming back to Margot Wendice.

He doesn't find what he expects though, as times have changed and she's not leaving her husband for him after all. Tony Wendice was a tennis player, whose profession kept him away from his wife too long, long enough for her to dally with Halliday, but in the year since she's seen him her husband has reformed. It's as if her dreams had come true: he's retired from the game and now he spends all his time taking care of her, making her happy again and no longer planning to leave Tony for Mark. What she doesn't realise is that it's all a con. Tony knows about Mark because when she burned all his letters she kept one and her husband found it. He's been biding his time, planning the perfect murder, which of course goes wrong.

The film is perfectly cast. Ray Milland is smoothness personified, as he excuses himself from a night out at the theatre with his wife and Halliday, ostensibly to complete a report for his boss but really to cleverly entangle a crooked old university colleague into his schemes with a knowing smile and a smooth line of banter. He's been planning the whole thing long enough to come up with an intricate plan, one that he doesn't see any chance of failing. He even manages to bring up the concept of the perfect murder to Halliday just because he can and because it's Halliday's stock and trade.

Halliday is Robert Cummings, young and full of life, even though this was towards the end of his screen career, which had flourished in the thirties and forties. He was 44 when this film was released. As a professional crime writer, his character talks about putting himself into the mind of the criminal. He even suggests that while the perfect crime is theoretically possible on the written page, he'd never get away with it himself because he'd slip up on some little detail and everything would fall apart. Sure enough, that's what happens to Wendice, initially because C A Swann, the man he'd hired to kill his wife, failed to do so, instead dying at the hands of a pair of scissors snatched up at the last minute by Margot.

Grace Kelly, only in her fourth film, was the epitome of Hitchcock's perfect leading lady. She was beautiful, of course, and elegant, with a cultured voice and inevitably short blonde hair. As Margot, she's believable as a decent but flawed wife, able to have an affair but also to end it. She's also believable as the victim, not just of her husband's initial plans to murder her but of his subsequent patch job that sets her murderer up as her blackmailer and her as his murderer. She's a big part of the first half of the film but then leaves it, having been arrested for the crime and she reappears only on the day she's about to die for it. She was a big hit here, so returned the same year for Hitchcock's Rear Window, an even greater film than this one. All in all, five of her eleven films were released in 1954, not just these two but also The Country Girl which won her the Academy Award for Best Actress.

There are only really a couple of other actors in the film, the story revolving tightly and almost entirely around the core players. Anthony Dawson, the English actor not the Italian genre director Antonio Margheriti under his standard western pseudonym, is fine as C A Swann, gradually but carefully won over by Wendice who seems to know more about him than he does, having followed him for months. Dawson had played the role before in New York, even winning a Tony award for his work in the original play. It's surprising to find that a film that has Alfred Hitchcock stamped all over it originated instead as a play a couple of years earlier.

It's John Williams who comes close to stealing the show though as Chief Insp Hubbard, also reprising his role from the stage. He's perfect as the cultured and polite English policeman, brushing his moustache with a comb and presaging Columbo with his 'Just one more thing...' lines. It seems almost wrong to think of a Hitchcock character spawning a TV series, but he would have been fascinating to follow into such a thing. Hitch must have liked his performance too, not just to hire him for the film version but also for ten episodes of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show and for To Catch a Thief a year later.

Hitchcock himself could do no wrong at this point in his career, it would seem, though the only films he made in the States that I haven't caught up with yet come right before it: Under Capricorn, Stage Fright and I Confess. Strangers on a Train had come two films earlier and I rated six out of his next nine films with my highest rating as they include some of the greatest thrillers ever made. Rear Window would be next in 1954, Vertigo in 1958 and Psycho in 1960. The Trouble with Harry and The Wrong Man are less known but almost as good. I still have problems with North By Northwest, but even so it's still a great film, and that leaves only To Catch a Thief and Hitch's remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much to bring down the average and even though they're notably lesser than those around them even they are hardly bad films. One of these days I'll have to work my way through his career afresh so I can post reviews.

Poor Pretty Eddie (1975)

Director: Richard Robinson
Stars: Leslie Uggams, Shelley Winters and Michael Christian

TCM Underground has done a great job over the last few years at bringing us the famous cult films that we've all already seen, such as Night of the Living Dead, Plan 9 from Outer Space and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, as well as the rare titles whose names we've only read about, like Spider Baby, The World's Greatest Sinner and Putney Swope. Its real value though is bringing us films like this one: almost definitive cult movies which we've often never even heard of. Poor Pretty Eddie, along with I Bury the Living and Wicked, Wicked are the real finds for me, as Sonny Boy must have been for those who weren't lucky enough to see it on Moviedrome, the British equivalent of TCM Underground back in the eighties, probably the last time anyone showed it on TV anywhere. Like Sonny Boy this is rivetting viewing throughout, as we watch open mouthed and when the film ends we can't help but wonder precisely what we just saw.

Singer Leslie Uggams opens the film with a rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at some big sporting event, probably stock footage even though we're supposed to believe it was her character singing, Liz Wetherly. Uggams was a singer in real life, an important one too, which makes us wonder all the more what she's doing in a film like this. Certainly she wouldn't appear in another one for another 18 years. Her character is a bona fide star like her, one who wants a vacation to leave the spotlight and relax by taking photographs. So she heads down south in her expensive car but when it breaks down she finds herself stranded in one of those little towns that was mostly cut off from reality when they built a nearby interstate. The nearest thing around is Bertha's Oasis, which is a backwoods bar and hotel even though it looks more like a junk yard.

It appears for a while like we're about to watch a blaxploitation version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, this being 1975 and all, but the names we've been watching pop up onto the screen during the opening credits aren't blaxploitation names. This is a hicksploitation film, one with a name cast of actors who, like Uggams, aren't who we might expect to find in such a creature. There's Ted Cassidy as Keno, a huge man who's chopping the head of a chicken when Liz finds him. You know him better as Lurch from the the TV version of The Addams Family. The Bertha who owns Bertha's Oasis is Shelley Winters, who famously ran the gamut from sexy pinup girl to roles like this where she was happy looking truly awful. The forces of law and order are represented by Slim Pickens and Dub Taylor as the local sheriff and justice of the peace respectively. Yes, you read that right.

The title character is played by the least name of the bunch, Michael Christian by name, who apparently was well known on television having played a recurring role on Peyton Place in the sixties. He also produced this film. Christian plays Eddie Collins, Bertha's toyboy who effectively runs the place for her given that she's hardly in a fit shape to do it herself, something we discover as soon as we see her. She gets out of bed still drunk from the night before with a cigarette already in her mouth. She picks up her false eyelashes from the bedcovers and has bloody maries for breakfast. 'You are an ugly bitch,' she tells herself in the mirror. Quite what Eddie sees in her we really have no clue, but then Eddie seems to see things that nobody else sees and that's what effectively provides our story.

Initially Liz is merely stranded in the back end of beyond but dinner soon proves how surreal a nightmare she's got herself into. Bertha saw Eddie through the window showing Liz to her cabin so turns up to the table in an outrageous outfit that looks like it deserves to be on the stage, all feathers and flamboyant colours. She exudes jealousy, throwing the unsubtlest hints at Liz throughout the meal to keep away from her man. Meanwhile her man has dressed up in a rhinestone suit and he gets up on stage to do an Elvis impersonation to impress Liz, who he hopes will be his ticket to stardom.

At this point it's Sheriff Orville whose trying it on with the visitor, slapping his hand on her knee at the dinner table, even though his retarded nephew is sitting on the other side. With his ample belly and memorable voice, Slim Pickens is the epitome of the unsubtle backwoods Southern sheriff and he throws out every colourful metaphor you could comfortably imagine. Lou Joffred as his retarded nephew Odell is aided by the terrible quality of the print, which often looks like it was sourced from an old VHS tape, as when he claps enthusiastically at Liz's name and Eddie's performance he turns into a blur. So it's the sheriff who first tries it on with Liz and he's the one who triggers much worse to come, convincing Eddie that she was making eyes at him at dinner.

And if it wasn't there already, here's where it gets truly bizarre with a jarring triptych of weirdness a third of the way through the film that just stuns us into amazement. Spurred on by the idiot sheriff's suggestions, Eddie turns up to Liz's cabin fully expecting to seduce her only to be rebuffed in no uncertain terms, namely a knee to the nuts after he refuses to leave. So he rapes her in slow motion, even though I don't think he actually gets undressed at any point. Meanwhile outside, a truckload of hillbillies turn up with a dog to throw into Keno's dog pit and watch the critters breed. The rape and the dog mating scenes are quite literally intercut here, hammering home a Freudian point, but most bizarrely the actress being raped sings a sappy love song on the soundtrack to accompany the action. Who sings a love song while their character is being raped? I mean, c'mon!

It continues down these bizarre pathways throughout the film, leaving us in something close to shock at what we're actually watching. You see, Eddie doesn't believe that he's just raped his guest, he sees the whole event through some romantic haze, so while she's trying to get the hell out of there he's busy setting up their future and nothing, absolutely nothing, can convince him of the true reality of the situation. As Bertha is more than willing to help Liz leave so she can get her poor pretty Eddie back, she sends her off with a Bertha's Oasis customer who's going to take her to Atlanta. Of course he wants a little payment in kind first down at the riverbank but just as she's being forced into yet another indignity up pops Eddie from the back seat to take care of business.

The scenes of justice are the most surreal here and they're comparable to anything I've seen recently, and given that I've been watching Robert Downey Sr films like Greaser's Palace that really says something. When she's brought in for stealing Eddie's jeep, Sheriff Orville is less interested in finding out whether Liz was raped or not and more interested in whether he bit her on the titties to warm her up some. He takes her to the JP, who also runs the local VFW Club, and he interrupts the live music so he can hold court right there in front of everyone. That sounds fine and dandy, but the JP is comedian Dub Taylor, remember, and his idea of proof is for her to strip off in front of everyone to show them the evidence.

Apparently based loosely on an acclaimed play by Jean Genet called The Balcony, which Shelley Winters starred in when it was adapted into a serious 1963 film version, it would appear that the adaptation here is far looser than say, the translation from Ingmar Bergman's film The Virgin Spring to Wes Craven's exploitation gem The Last House on the Left. Apparently there are various versions, which differ in many ways, not least the level of violence. Under the title of Heartbreak Motel, it's apparently more serious with more back stories and less violence, which cuts out the entire ending. When known as Black Vengeance or Redneck County Rape, it's apparently far more like what we get here under its original title.

Lead characters in films like this should always feel like they've left their own world and found themselves in an entirely different one, whether they be Deliverance, Swing Your Lady or Two Thousand Maniacs! The tone can vary, as it does completely across those three examples, but this one trumps them all in making we viewers feel like we're in a completely different world too. Much of that comes from the fact that we often see things from the perspective of the character's thoughts, such as when smitten Eddie takes his rape victim on a sightseeing tour of the local dam and asks her to take pictures of him with her Nikon. As you can imagine she visualises the scene as taking place with a shotgun instead of a camera, so that's what we see.

Part of it comes through the actors involved though. Ted Cassidy, in particular, looks at once comfortable playing a redneck and yet utterly strange not just in that sort of a role but in colour, given that it's hard to see him as anything else except Lurch. Apparently he was used to roles like this, having already appeared in Charcoal Black, Thunder County and The Great Lester Boggs in the previous three years. Most of these were for Chris Robinson, who variously directed, produced, wrote and acted in a number of such films. He directed this one, though he's strangely credited as Richard Robinson. Just like this one all these have multiple alter egos with various exploitation rings to them. Thunder County, for instance, is also known as Cell Block Girls, Convict Women, Swamp Fever, Women's Prison Escape and even Women's Penitentiary XI. If they're anything like this one, I'll be fascinated to find them.

Leslie Uggams is perfect at looking out of place, but she couldn't act to save her life and so runs through the entire film with the same expression and tone. There's no real difference between her barbed conversation at dinner, her attempts to politely remove the would be rapist from her cabin or reporting the rape to the police. Shelley Winters was one of the great character actors, because she had both talent, enough to win her two Oscars, and a willingness to play whatever role appealed to her. In that way she reminds me of Warren Oates, who was also great at looking like crap when the part needed but then climbing out of it believably as if the struggle had been a real one. Dub Taylor is one of those people who all Americans recognise but nobody east of Boston Harbor has a clue who he is. I have no idea how his comic turn here ties to his real life career as a comedian but it fits the film.

For such an out of control story, it's told pretty well with solid pacing, memorable scenes and some good cinematography. Not only do we get those scenes shown from the perspective of a character's mind, but editing that mimics Liz's Nikon and some great changes of focus at the dam. It's a rough but accomplished film, packed with talent, yet it still leaves us gaping at the end wondering just how this picture got made and what the motivations of the filmmakers were. Why did they feel they needed to make this film and what did they think they would get out of it? It almost seems destined to fail, only to be held high by a small but devoted audience who will remember it well enough to warrant a showing on TCM Underground a third of a century later. It's fascinating stuff for sure and I'm looking forward to much more in the same vein.

Bob the Gambler (1956)

Directors: Jean-Pierre Melville
Star: Roger Duchesne

'As told in Montmartre, here is the curious tale of Bob the Gambler...' and it comes with a serious pedigree. No less a cinematic name than Stanley Kubrick said that he gave up making crime films because Jean-Pierre Melville had already made the best of them with this one. Jean Luc-Godard called it the best of the French films influenced by American film noir and it seriously influenced the French New Wave that began only a few years later with pictures like The 400 Blows and Breathless. You can see that influence in some of the editing, as well as the casting of thoroughly natural beauties like Isabelle Corey, refreshingly amateur yet utterly beguiling as an ingenue called Anne.

The Bob of the title is Robert Montagné, a compulsive gambler played by Roger Duchesne. Everyone who's truly part of Montmartre knows Bob: not just the the cops and the crooks but also everyone in between. He's an old school crook who the narration calls 'an old young man who was already a legend of the recent past.' From his appearance that recent past is obviously the American film noir: with his hat and trenchcoat, he looks like a hard boiled detective, aging and tired and a little long in the tooth. He doesn't talk much. The cops call him a hood who's wised up with age, time served having calmed him down, but they're wrong on all counts. He's even a reference point for people to compare others too and they're right. Young Paolo is obviously trying to be Bob.

Because Bob's luck is waning, he decides to set up a job, perhaps the first one in twenty years and a big one too that will be the crowning achievement of his career. The Deauville casino safe has 800 million francs in it on the day of the grand prix and he thinks he's worked a way for it to come to him. He also plenty of contacts, old and new, to make the caper work. However, as the opening narration tells us Montmartre is both Heaven and Hell, and the story takes us through both with a delightful ironic touch. It refuses to leave its steady and painstaking pace, but in doing so becomes a sheer delight. Bob has been betrayed even before he sets out for his big job, but we're never sure how anything is going to play out.

Jean-Pierre Melville was a maverick, who came to cinema as a fan after seeing White Shadows in the South Seas in the twenties, making his own home movies in 16mm. After the war, he became an independent film maker and while his output was never prolific it was important, beginning with his feature length debut, Le silence de la Mer in 1949. He directed only 14 films over almost a thirty year span and one of those was a short. This came early in his career, after Les enfants terribles but long before Le samouraï and Army of Shadows, and it's my first experience of his work. Just from this film alone it isn't difficult to see how influential it must have been, though surprisingly it's only been remade once, as Neil Jordan's The Good Thief in 2002, with Nick Nolte in the lead role.

It isn't just Melville's hand that makes this film so special. The script by Auguste le Breton is superb, as painstaking in the way it builds up the characters and details the upcoming heist as Bob isn't when picking the right people to take part. In fact the heist itself becomes less important as the film goes on. Initially we see it put together: the participants recruited, the details planned, the caper financed. Then we see it rehearsed, on a football pitch with the floor plan of the casino marked out in white paint. We even see it come to fruition in Bob's mind. Over time though it really doesn't matter, for a number of reasons, not all of which I'm going to write about here.

Most importantly, the film is about character, not just Bob but especially him. Bob is very much a man of two halves, as highlighted by the fact that he is a thief and inveterate gambler but who is unmistakably the hero of our story, also by the title of the remake, The Good Thief. He has a bad side that seems to define him, his gambling being an addiction and his path in life being one of a gangster. Yet even as a gangster in the good old days he had a good side. He refuses to shelter pimps on the lam, seeing that as repulsive. He helps Yvonne finance Le Carpeaux, a bar that is a frequent setting for the story, apparently without anything needed in return. He saves the ingenue Anne from a life on the streets, again without reward, even though she's more than willing to offer herself as one.

What we see is a question that continues to reaffirm itself throughout the story. While there never sees to be a struggle between his good and bad side, it's obvious from moment one that each holds the other back from reaching its full potential. Given our western expectation that people are either good and bad, it's impossible to fit Bob into that model. He even has a solid relationship with the chief of police, Commissaire Ledru, though he's no informer. The two merely have a connection, Bob having saved his life once, and in many ways they are friends. Leaping well over the French New Wave, this relationship influenced the modern generation of French filmmakers, being a major influence on The Transporter.

Even the lesser characters are well defined. Anne the ingenue is at once an ephemeral character and one of the deepest in the story. She's apparently uninvolved with the main thrust of the plot yet intricately woven into it to the degree that she is the cause of much of it. Isabelle Corey is so natural in her debut role, that it's surprising to see that she only made fifteen films before retiring from the screen six years later. Anne is a very modern character but defined in a very fifties way, a young lady utterly confident in her feminine wiles and utterly willing to flit around with the breeze. She knows what she wants but isn't too concerned about how she gets it. She's almost excluded from the whole good and bad character delineation because she's apart from both. Only one scene shows her fit into either.

Daniel Cauchy is an excellent Paolo, caught up in a big world he thinks he has power over but is really just still young enough to know everything. Apparently Melville auditioned the young Alain Delon as Paolo but didn't cast him because he saw that he'd steal the film. Delon debuted instead a year later in When a Woman Meddles. Guy Decomble is excellent as Commissaire Ledru, a good cop who does a good job but one who has always known that he may have to arrest his friend Bob. He's not torn between friendship and duty, but nonetheless doesn't want the situation to ever get to the point where he might be. There's insinuation that while he still wouldn't be torn, his colleagues aren't so sure of that.

None of these actors are big names, as indeed Roger Duchesne wasn't in the lead, though I was surprised to find that this was his last but one film. He looks great as Bob, fitting all his character paradoxes, his only flaw being that he sometimes resembles Leslie Nielsen a little too closely. Perhaps the fact that I didn't recognise anyone and they didn't really look like anyone else, Duchesne excepted, helps the film to succeed in grounding itself. The camerawork helps too, sometimes handheld, rarely overtly cinematic in the old ways, and the sound is wonderful. The score by Eddie Barclay and Jo Boyer builds the tension constantly. I have two more Melvilles on my DVR, courtesy of the Sundance Channel and while I was eager to record them, I'm now even more eager to watch them.

Mad Detective (2007)

Directors: Johnnie To and Ka-Fai Wai
Stars: Lau Ching Wan and Andy On

In the offices of District Crime Kowloon West, a dead pig hangs from the ceiling and a man is stabbing it repeatedly. He's Inspector Bun, the mad detective of the title, who is working out who did the same thing to a student. As we soon discover, he's not just experimenting CSI style, he has some sort of clairvoyant talent, as rookie cop Ho finds out when he reports for duty. His first job is to push his superior, who's locked himself inside a suitcase, down a number of flights of stairs. When he climbs out at the bottom, he knows who killed someone who had suffered the same fate. We can't help wondering just how much of this is real and how much is lunacy, especially when the chief retires and as a gift to him, he cuts off half of his own ear.

Five years later, he's a civilian, presumably fired from the force because of that Vincent Van Gogh incident. He's still trying to help people though, all the while seeing things that other people don't see. And here's where we discover the other key to this story: Inspector Bun isn't just clairvoyant, he also sees people's inner personalities as if they were separate people. This device is joyous to behold but it's easy to see how it could be confusing to viewers that don't grasp the concept. It's one that could easily bring the film down because it opens up so much potential for inconsistency but it's solid throughout.

However directors Ka-Fai Wai and Johnnie To, hardly a minor name in Hong Kong cinema, cleverly establish the concept so that it's initially jarring but quickly and cleverly a part of the film. Bun shouts at a girl in a convenience store who's persuading her friend to steal. Nobody else sees her, and as he leaves with his wife, she complains about how he sees things that nobody else sees. When Ho turns up at his door to ask for help on a case he's been stuck on for six months, his wife doesn't want him to be involved. Yet, as we soon realise by watching Ho, his wife isn't there either.

Bun helps out, of course. The case has to do with a missing detective, Wong Kwok Chu, who disappeared eighteen months ago on a stakeout with his partner, Ko Chi Wai. His gun has been used since during armed robberies that end in murder, there now being four dead. At the Regional Crime Unit, where Ho begins to show him the details, he keeps getting interrupted by a nagging woman who he promptly headbutts into silence. She's actually the inner personality of a large male detective. Best of all, when Ho and Bun follow Ko Chi Wai, we find that he has no less than seven personalities, of different ages, sexes and backgrounds, including a gluttunous coward, a young enforcer and an ice cool young lady who generally controls the others.

I first discovered Johnny To when buying every release that the Made in Hong Kong label released in the UK in the mid nineties. The Heroic Trio and its sequel couldn't fail to become favourites, given that they teamed up Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui and Michelle Yeoh as the leads. My favourite though was The Bare Foot Kid, with Cheung again, along with Aaron Kwok and Hong Kong legend Ti Lung film. I've been trying to track it down in the States under another title, Young Hero. Now through Asia Extreme on the Sundance Channel I've been happy to see more recent To films, made for his Milky Way production company, like Breaking News and Fulltime Killer.

This one is even better than them, with a magnetic lead performance by Lau Ching Wan and an able supporting cast, including Andy On as Inspector Ho, even though he spends much of the film obviously wondering if he's doing the right thing by involving Inspector Bun. Now I'm looking forward to Election and Triad Election which are sitting on my DVR. Johnnie To is fast becoming an established favourite in my mind, a worthy and reliable filmmaker who chose to stay in Hong Kong to build his career after the handover to Chinese rule in 1997. While he works in varied genres, it's easy to see him as a successor to John Woo, who left for Hollywood even before the British handed over the colony.

While Johnnie To is a consistent point of excellence, he didn't have a hand in the writing here, leaving that to a couple of frequent collaborators. Kin-Yee Au has written or co-written eleven Johnnie To films, including this one. Ka-Fai Wai didn't just co-write and co-direct Mad Detective, but also partnered with To in setting up their production company. All of these filmmakers often play with the narrative for artistic reasons, giving us unreliable narrators or even switching the narrator partway through. Films like Fulltime Killer and Mad Detective are fascinating viewing because they don't just entertain us while playing, they leave us with questions that resonate long after they're finished, wondering on what the underlying truth of the films are.

I'd make a crack about Hollywood endings here, but it wouldn't be entirely fair. Big budget Hollywood movies like The Usual Suspects and Fight Club provide highly unreliable perspectives too, but while they don't cop out with their endings in the traditional manner they do at least tend to provide a solid resolution. Films like this are more akin to say, Bubba Ho-Tep, in that we're given multiple ways to read the stories and multiple perspectives in which to select one that we trust, but we're never given that answer as to which is real or true.

So here, we have to answer the question ourselves as to whether Bun really has supernatural vision or whether its a product of his delusion built by not taking his medication. Ho asks himself the same question throughout the film and the level of even his trust varies depending on circumstances. It's fascinating to watch the perspectives of the owner of a restaurant that Bun frequents, who has got used to serving him and his wife, even when his wife isn't there, but assumes she's dead and is stunned when she actually walks in for real.

While the supporting cast are excellent here, including those like Flora Chan, Suet Lam and Jay Lau who don't exist outside of Bun's visions, it's Lau Ching Wan who steals the show, perfectly cast and giving a tour de force performance as Inspector Bun. After a long and distinguished career as a character actor, he had managed to become finally established when he made Mad Detective. It was the eighth year he'd been nominated as Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and that encompasses nine films because in 1994 he was nominated twice in the same category, once for Thou Shalt Not Swear and once for Endless Love. However it took him until 2006 to win, for a film called My Name is Fame. I haven't seen many of his films, perhaps only Heroic Trio 2: Executioners, the disappointing Black Mask and Jackie Chan's Police Story 2. I'm now committed to tracking down much more of his work.

The Vagabond Lover (1929)

Director: Marshall Neilan
Star: Rudy Vallée

Every small town has its band with big ideas. In my part of town that would be a mariachi band but this is 1929 in New England so they're the Connecticut Yankees, all ten or so of them. They laugh about how bad they are, except for Sam, but perhaps that's because they have Rudy Vallée as a saxophonist instead of a singer. However they've improved considerably as Rudy soon demonstrates with his new gold plated sax. He's Rudy Bronson here, he's been studying for six months through the Ted Grant Correspondence School of Music and it seems to have worked. Now they're a real band with real talent and all they have to do is find their way to Grant's highly advertised summer home at Longport to play for him. Of course they discover that the advertising was all a con to drum up publicity for the correspondence course and he promptly throws them out.

This was Rudy Vallée's debut screen performance, something that shows painfully because he's about as comfortable on screen as I would be. He's nervous and wooden and he keeps missing his cues so only gets more and more uncomfortable as the film goes on. IMDb describes this as 'a zany musical' but that presumably refers to a whole new meaning to the word 'zany' that I've previously been blissfully unaware of because the laughs are few and far between. Compare this to another 1929 film featuring a notable debut performance, for instance: The Cocoanuts starring the Marx Brothers. To say that there's no comparison is more than a painful understatement.

Vallée was no small name, even at this point. He was the original crooner in whose wake floated people like Bing Crosby, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, so you could claim that he influenced a good portion of the next few decades of American music. Young ladies were already swooning at his voice or just a sight of his lips through his trademark megaphone, so perhaps they just didn't notice how awful an actor he was. What makes things worse was that everyone else in the film obviously acts so much better than he does, even when they're not great themselves. For instance Sally Blane is a lovely leading lady, though her role as Jean Whitehall, Ted Grant's neighbour, doesn't exactly call for much beyond looking like a lovely leading lady. Even with as little as she has to do and even with a few cue flubs herself, she still shows up Vallée's lack of acting chops something rotten, something his band (who were his real band) manages too on a regular basis.

What's still worse for Vallée, Radio Pictures decided to throw in a real actress to back him up, no less a name than Marie Dressler, as Jean's aunt, Mrs Ethel Bertha Whitehall. If you've ever seen her, you can just hear her saying that name aloud and she does it with characteristic relish. Dressler is the reason I'm watching this, courtesy of TCM's tribute to her on what would have been her 141st birthday. She only made 29 films in her career, from the first feature length comedy, 1914's Tillie's Punctured Romance, to Christopher Bean in 1933, the year she ranked the top box-office star of the year. TCM showed no less than ten of them in a row, four of which I hadn't seen and was eager to record.

As Mrs Whitehall, in social competition with the more connected Mrs Whittington Todhunter, Dressler flusters around like it was an Olympic sport, but if it was she'd have taken home the gold medal without any competition. She certainly doesn't have any competition here and could really have breezed through this film and stolen it. She does a lot more than breeze though and she is by far the best thing about the film, though that's hardly surprising given her co-stars. A year later she'd be playing opposite bigger names than this: Greta Garbo in her talking debut, Anna Christie, and of course her best foil Wallace Beery in Min and Bill, which brought her an Oscar.

Outside Marie Dressler, this film is a pretty dismal affair. The story is predictable, obviously designed to showcase the talents of Rudy Vallée and his band who get far more songs than you would think would fit into a 65 minute running time. Yet it distracts away from that too often, to give us a terminally cute rendition of Georgy Porgy by four screen orphans and a strange dance scene that served only to highlight the lack of technical expertise in 1929 Hollywood. Under every high kick is an audible bouncing board. The comedy is almost non-existent, there being a single joke that made me laugh and that surely an old chestnut even back then. The acting is poor, Marie Dressler notably excepted, with Vallée ranking lower than any other acting performance I can think of off the top of my head. I think he's worse than Marshall Grauer in Zaat, whose painful walk and overblown narration won't leave my head.

Really, beyond Dressler, there's a lot of early crooning and a cute lead. Is that enough to warrant your interest? If not, don't bother.