Sand (1949)

It feels a bit peculiar to finally watch Sand, a film that I sought for two decades years before giving up on it some five years ago. As is often the case, good things happen when you stop trying so hard—a copy surfaced about a year ago in one of the places where such things occasionally surface. It’s surprising that this film was never released on VHS or DVD, and that it never aired TCM, AMC, or even Fox Movie Channel (given that it’s a 20th Century Fox product). Perhaps given the movie’s literary source there was some issue with the rights.

Regardless, Sand was a worthwhile nominee for 1949’s Best Color Cinematography and deserves to be seen. It was shot primarily among the high timber in Colorado’s spectacular San Juan National Forest. A pair of journeyman filmmakers, cameraman Charles Clark (who was vastly experienced but didn’t do many Westerns) and director Louis King (who did plenty), make the most of the scenery in order to compensate for an otherwise meager budget and brisk schedule. The Oscar nomination is ample proof that their efforts were worthwhile.

Aside from all that, Sand is a good B movie. It’s the sort of thing that, had anyone actually seen it, would be on a bunch of most-loved lists. The cast is led by one of my film noir favorites, Mark Stevens, as charismatic and underrated as ever. I wrote a lot about him here. The love interest / narrator is Coleen Gray, a much bigger star than Stevens and herself a noir icon. Western stalwart Rory Calhoun goes along for the ride. One of the film’s highlights is a well-staged brouhaha between him and Stevens. The human cast plays third fiddle here, following the scenery and the horse.

Sand is a straight adventure yarn with a simple plot. Rodeo showman Stevens loses his prize horse, Jubilee, in a fiery train wreck, and spends the balance of the picture searching for him. In the meantime, Jubilee gets into plenty of mischief on his own—there’s some Jack London at work here. King doesn’t ask much of his cast, instead focusing his efforts on making a pretty picture buoyed by stellar animal action sequences. One in particular, where Jubilee goes hoof to hoof with another horse while a hungry mountain lion looks on, is especially well done.

This was targeted less at Western fans than at tween girls who still dug horses. If the audience saw the older Stevens as a father figure and Calhoun as a love interest, all the better. I’d love to see a high-quality print of this, but, after all these years, I feel grateful to have seen it at all.

Sand (1949) 

Directed by Louis King 

Starring Mark Stevens, Coleen Gray, and Rory Calhoun 

Released by 20th Century Fox 

Running time: 78 minutes 

Availability: Unavailable. 

Grade: B+

8.5.5

The Valiant (1929)

Thanks to TCM’s daylong celebration of the preservation efforts of the George Eastman House, I was able to view Paul Muni’s first film effort, The Valiant, directed by William K. Howard and released by Fox in 1929. The film would earn the Austrian born, New York bred Muni the first of his six Academy Award nominations, each and every one in the Best Actor category. He’d lose the second-ever Best Actor statuette to colossal movie star Warner Baxter (In Old Arizona), but Muni’s time in the sun was coming: he would be nominated four times between 1934 and 1938, winning the award in 1937 for his portrayal of Louis Pasteur. (Muni bookended nicely: his last nomination came in 1960, in his final film, The Last Angry Man.) Along with his rival at Warner Brothers, Edward G. Robinson, Muni dominated screens in the thirties — his star exploding after title roles in a pair of 1932 films, Scarface, and the astonishing I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. All but forgotten by contemporary audiences, Muni was an actor’s actor and one of the biggest stars in the world. He was a chameleon, able to transform himself into whatever his role called for, whether it was suave gentility or brute physicality, regardless of age or nationality, and he could do any accent required — though he famously told Irving Thalberg that he was “about as Chinese as Herbert Hoover” when the boy wonder cast him in The Good Earth.

The Valiant opens auspiciously: Muni shoots an unseen man in some drab big city flat and wanders out onto the street, and eventually into the local precinct, where he confesses. In short order he’s thrown behind bars, tried, and sentenced to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing — a rapid-fire chain of events that Muni takes in stride. He seems resigned to his fate in moralistic, Old Testament sort of way. He tells his captors his victim deserved to die, and that he realizes that he too must be punished in accordance with the law.

The dramatic thrust of the film lies not in the identity of the victim or the motive for the crime, but in the real name of the killer himself, which Muni stubbornly refuses to divulge. Instead, he assembles the moniker “James Dyke” from a police station wall calendar. (The earliest instance of this particular film cliché I’m aware of.) Cut to the prison, where we learn that not only is Dyke a model inmate, but that his sensational case has even provided him the opportunity to write moralizing newspaper editorials, making his story and face known to a fascinated nation. In Ohio, the elderly Mrs. Douglas sees the condemned man in the paper and wonders if he could be her son Joe, gone without a trace these fifteen years. Her daughter Mary and Mary’s fiancé Robert (the popular Johnny Mack Brown) make the trip to New York in an effort to learn the truth, but although the film makes it abundantly clear to the audience that James Dyke certainly is Joe Douglas, Joe is able to convince the desperate young woman that he is not the loving older brother who used to read Romeo and Juliet to her when she was a little girl. Instead, in the sort of turn that could only happen in an early Hollywood tearjerker, “Dyke” claims to have known a man named Joe Douglas during the war, and to have seen the youth die heroically in the trenches. I’ll call it quits after this in order to spare as much of the ending as possible — Mary is then able to leave the prison with her chin up, believing that her brother died a hero and now able to return home to marry free and clear of any potential scandal.

This is an engaging movie, and thankfully it’s short enough (only 66 minutes) that one can get through it without ever feeling taxed. First is Muni: the abilities that would see him become the preeminent dramatic actor of the thirties are evident; he’s simply light years ahead of everyone else in the film in terms of ability and intuiting the medium. More than that though, Muni has that intangible something, the charisma, the screen presence, the “it” that has characterized actors such as Cagney, Dean, and De Niro throughout film history. The Valiant is a rudimentary early talkie, but Muni owns the thing.

Speaking of which, the film is notable for its technical accomplishment. While the cameras are static (there are a few close-ups), and the sets are theatrical, there are some fine “special effects” shots that appear during various flashback sequences, when a young Muni is superimposed over a medium shot of the character (usually his Whistler’s Mother-like ma) doing the remembering. And although it boasts no musical score, the sound in the Eastman print is crisp and clean, with all of the spoken dialogue easily understood. Part of that owes to the simplicity of the Oscar-nominated writing itself: a great many of the Fox theaters chains were rural (compared to those of Paramount and MGM), and consequently numerous Fox features were targeted at the uneducated or the unsophisticated, who nevertheless frequented American movie houses in droves. All of the characters deliver their lines deliberately, and with no small amount of silent-era pantomime, but it’s also apparent that the writing itself was been simplified in order to facilitate easy understanding. The narrative moral of the movie — and even its title — speak directly to rural audiences about the corruption of city life. A good mid-western boy was called to the war, and at its end was lured to the city instead of back to his home — and there he was obliged to do murder. Audiences are warned that even a young man worthy of the film’s title, The Valiant can still be ruined by the perils of the city, and that in forsaking his home and his family, he has sufficiently challenged the fates to destroy him.  

The Valiant (1929)
Directed by William K. Howard
Starring Paul Muni
Released by Fox Film Corporation (20th Century Fox) 
Running time: 66 minutes
Availability: Just aired on TCM, previously quite rare. Poor quality copies on ioffer.com. 
Grade: B, historically significant. 

Golden Girl (1951) and Les Girls (1957)

Mitzi Gaynor is a recent re-discovery for me, having never been a fan of South Pacific, which I saw once eons ago and promptly moved on from. I just watched a much younger Mitzi in 1951’s Golden Girl, and found something in her first featured performance quite endearing. The forgotten film casts Mitzi as Gold Rush honey Lotta Crabtree, making her name as a performer in the mining camps throughout California during the Civil War period. There’s not much to speak for Golden Girl beyond Gaynor — the songs aren’t memorable and the romance with a dashing southern spy / officer (TV Western star Dale Robertson) who robs Union payrolls feels dated and a little uncomfortable. The climax finds Gaynor bleating a tearful rendition of Dixie in a high-falootin’ San Francisco auditorium just as news of the surrender at Appomattox has made its way west. Golden Girl has never been released on DVD (or VHS?), and the print showing on Turner Classic Movies is so poor as to not bode well for its future. On a side note, the poster for Golden Girl is simply one of the most awful I’ve ever seen.

And then there’s Les Girls. If it were not for Mitzi, whose part is too small for my tastes, I would have liked it a great deal less. If you are a fan of MGM musicals however, Les Girls is available everywhere and is a film that you simply have to see, even if I say that in a somewhat weary, obligatory tone of voice (being a completist has its downside). The production values are as sumptuous and as artistic as anything else Metro did during the period — particularly in Mitzi’s big number towards the end of the film. (The film was an Oscar winner for its costumes.) The narrative gets a little tedious though: the story is centers around a London courtroom libel suit that finds two of Gene Kelly’s former troupers — Les Girls — at each others throats over a tell-all book one has just written. The same set of events are related three times, each time through the eyes of a different character, and before long we see way in which all the strings are going to tie neatly together.

In addition to Gaynor and Gene Kelly, the film casts lanky Brit Kay Kendall as the author of the tell-all, and sexy Finn Taina Elg as the libeled lady. Elg was certainly a stunner, but she never really caught on with American audiences, while Kendall had all the talent in the world yet never had a fighting chance to use it — she would succumb to leukemia two short years later, in 1959. While each of the girls brings something worthwhile to the film, they never quite gel on screen together in the way they do with their male costars, and the movie suffers a little for it.

The biggest drawback for me is that this is yet another late-cycle musical that fails to properly integrate the musical numbers into the story. As so often became the case as the fifties grew tired, the musical interludes show up like television commercial breaks — here in the form of the Les Girls nightclub acts, each one a little more artsy-fartsy and self indulgent than the last. (And don’t get me wrong either, I think An American in Paris is great stuff!) This is not a bad film by any means, but it is rather soul-less and clearly shows that the musical was running on fumes in 1957, and desperately needed the shot in the arm that West Side Story was stirring up on Broadway at the time, and would in a few years give the motion picture musical.

At almost 80, Mitzi is still out there somewhere, though her motion picture career was too damn short: eighteen credits, and no big screen work after 1963. She did a number of TV specials in the seventies, but they are nowhere to be found. It’s too bad, Gaynor had a look, style, and screen presence that doesn’t translate to photography — you’ve gotta see her in films.

Golden Girl (1951)

Directed by Lloyd Bacon

Starring Mitzi Gaynor, Dale Robertson, and Una Merkel

Released by Twentieth Century Fox

Running time: 108 minutes.

Availability: Has aired on TCM

Les Girls (1957)

Directed by George Cukor

Starring Mitzi Gaynor, Gene Kelly, Kay Kendall, and Taina Elg

Released by MGM

Running time: 114 minutes.

Availability: Widely on DVD, airs on TCM

The Other Side of Midnight (1977)

Billed as “The Romance of Passion and Power,” The Other Side of Midnight is one of the most stunningly asinine movies ever made — and widely known to be one of Andy Warhol’s favorites. It was also intended to be one of Fox’s biggest 1977 releases, with high hopes for a major run at that season’s Academy Awards. As a matter of fact, legend holds that Fox executives considered the film to be such a sure thing that studio chief Alan Ladd Jr. drew on the block-booking tradition of the previous era in order to force theaters to accept Midnight as a package deal with one of the studio’s B products — in this case a science fiction picture from a new director named George Lucas. While it is certain that, at least in this instance, theater owners ended up with nothing to grumble about, Midnight failed at the ticket booth and turned out to be a train wreck for everyone involved, except for costumer Irene Sharaff, who managed the film’s lone Oscar nomination — though the nod owes more to Sharaff’s reputation as a five time winner than it does her work in this film. Marie-France Pisier is a wonderful mannequin, but the costumes aren’t that good.

The sprawling three-hour adaptation of Sidney Sheldon’s trashy novel concerns a French girl named Noelle (Pisier) who flees her Marseilles home for Paris in the years just prior to the second world war. Just as it appears she’ll be devoured by the shadier aspects of the city of lights, Noelle is rescued by Larry Douglas (John Beck), an American RAF captain, who seduces her with dinner and the promise of a place to sleep. They couple enjoys a short-lived fairy tale romance, that ends abruptly when Larry is called back to the U.S. in order to train fighter pilots, leaving Noelle — now secretly pregnant (!) — jilted and alone. In a rather shocking bathtub abortion scene, jarringly out of character with the rest of the film, Noelle terminates how own pregnancy and vows to start a new life as a (wait for it!) … film star! Over the course of the next eight years, her career flourishes and eventually she becomes the trophy of a Greek shipping tycoon, who happens to be the world’s richest man. Meanwhile, Larry romances and weds Cathy (Susan Sarandon), a fresh-faced girl Friday to the chief of a Washington DC public relations firm. Unable to hold down a job as a commercial pilot in the years after the war, Larry bounces from job to job and his marriage slowly crumbles — that is until he’s hired to pilot the private plane of a certain Greek shipping tycoon. Old flames flare once again, and in true Postman Always Rings Twice fashion, plans of murder follow — though in this case the target isn’t the Greek, but the shrewish American wife. The film tries hard to take itself seriously, but the ending is so delightfully contrived and over the top — some might say bad, others, hilarious — that it almost makes the whole affair worth watching.

This is an awful film, in all of its late 70s Sheldon glory. It’s poorly executed, especially considering the narrative continuity and film editing. The story moves through time, but does little to help the viewer situate the story in a time or place, using only spoken dialog to do so. It fails to capture the flavor of the war years — barely addressing them at all — making only a half-hearted effort to authentically portray the French capital, expecting viewers to be held rapt by the movie’s melodrama. Even Leonard Maltin, that faithful friend of classic film, rates this as a bomb. Yet it somehow manages to maintain a shaky hold on your attention, though I’m certain that in the case of most male viewers, myself included, it’s the film’s abundant nudity that does the trick. Pisier is certainly beautiful, and Charles Jarrott (the same director responsible for previous big Oscar contenders Anne of the Thousand Days and Mary, Queen of Scots) gets her out of her clothing as often as possible. The requisite shot of a topless Susan Sarandon is to be found as well, but Pisier is clearly the film’s leading actress. The casting of John Beck is one of Midnight’s biggest flaws. Essentially a TV actor, and one of little note, Beck has neither the looks nor the chops to make good here. The film lives or dies on his ability to have believable, even if not smoldering, chemistry with both women, yet Beck just doesn’t deliver. His performance is awkward, clumsy, and shows that the actor was well out of his depth. Frankly, given Beck’s resume, one wonders how he got such a big part in such an important picture.

If this weren’t so unbelieveably long, I’d happily recommend it as a piece of fun camp along the same lines as Meyer’s Valley of the Dolls or even Jacqueline Suzanne’s Once is Not Enough, but in the case of The Other Side of Midnight once is plenty.

The Other Side of Midnight (1977)

Grade: F

Directed by Charles Jarrott

Starring Marie-France Pisier, Susan Sarandon, and John Beck

Released by Twentieth Century Fox

Running time: 165 minutes

Availability: DVD, Netflix

A Man Called Peter (1955)

Hollywood got religion in the years after the Second World War. Biblical epics, sword and sandal adventures, and religious biographies formed a sizable (and very profitable) part of the motion picture landscape for a decade-and-a-half following the allied victory. The mid-century fervor for religious pictures was the result of a confluence of numerous interrelated causes. Primary among these was the desire to project American society and culture as superior to that of the Soviets. If the commies were godless, then we needed to embrace religion in as many ways as possible — although the phrase “In God We Trust” had adorned US coins since the days just prior to the Civil War, it wasn’t added to paper currency until 1957; the phrase “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance during the Eisenhower years as well. There was also great pressure to conform to a Rockwellian model of the perfect community, a notion that included public displays of religiosity. It’s also fair to suggest that in the boom years following the war, as citizens embraced The American Dream of home, auto, and appliance ownership they also sought to compensate for their materialism by creating what has been described as a “veneer of piety.”

Such a narrowly defined utopia couldn’t last however — the pressure to conform was simply too great for a culture that at its core was still a diverse melting pot. By the late fifties and early sixties films began to question the values and the hypocrisy of the postwar decade, and cynicism became a thematic force in the movies — as witnessed in such films as The Sweet Smell of Success, Elmer Gantry, and The Manchurian Candidate. Yet 1955’s A Man Called Peter is about as sincere a movie as you’ll ever find; and being that it is contemporaneous rather than a period piece, it functions as a telling historical document as well as an entertaining biopic. It stars Richard Todd as Peter Marshall, a Scotsman called to service in his homeland, who nevertheless ends up serving in the United States. The film follows his rise through the clerical ranks from a small Georgia church, to ministering the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington DC, to becoming chaplain of the US Senate. Along the way he meets and marries Catherine (Jean Peters), and together they have a son. The film is surprisingly engrossing, with dramatic tension coming from multiple sources: his DC parishioner’s reluctance to accept him, his wife’s illness, and the Second World War. Todd and Peters are fine in their roles, the Oscar-nominated color cinematography is rich and vibrant, and Henry Koster’s direction is suits the material. If you are amenable to the subject and watch this as simple entertainment, you’re certain to enjoy it.

For my part, I was more fascinated by the telling attitudes projected by the film. It certainly sees itself as progressive — time and again throughout Marshall bucks the status quo in his sermons, to the chagrin of the old folks, and tries to create a church based on equality, open and welcoming to all … well, sort of. Early on he invites a few of the younger members of his Atlanta congregation, including Catherine, to speak at a “youth rally.” When things begin to unravel Catherine rises and offers an impassioned speech about what it means to be a young Christian woman. Her sermon would have been considered hip and unorthodox at the time, but seen through a contemporary lens is characterized by its effort to place women nowhere other than the home. A sort of equality to be sure, but a separate sort at best — and Catherine’s message to those girls who might want to do the same sorts of things that men do (like work) is problematic: Why bother? Women simply aren’t meant to do such things. Here’s a girl who attends an expensive Atlanta university in order to become a teacher (of course), but after she finds her husband her career ambitions are dropped and are never mentioned again as she takes on the role of wife and mother. A Man Called Peter seems to characterize co-education as little more than a very expensive matchmaking service. Certainly the movie wasn’t the only one to take such a stance, but only the most deluded would argue that a multitude of fifties women didn’t have or aspire to a professional life. 

It’s also troublesome that a film that tries to deliver a message of love and equality fails so miserably whenever the issue is race. Considering A Man Called Peter is set in Atlanta and Washington DC and would likely receive many southern bookings, it isn’t surprising that it is so drastically conservative, but that being the case, why have any black cast members at all? Instead there are many, and every single one of them is a servant. We aren’t discussing a film from the thirties or forties here either, but one in theaters at the same time as The Blackboard Jungle. To cast blacks as only servants in a film such as this represents conscious pandering on behalf of 20th Century Fox to the racist attitudes of the country (and theater chain owners) at the time. It greatly mars a film in which the main character delivers a lengthy sermon about hypocrisy. Despite these flaws, there’s still much to like in this sincere film, the trick is to watch it with some sense of removal. And for those who don’t like it, A Man Called Peter yet offers a glimpse at a fascinating moment in our history.

A Man Called Peter (1955)

Grade: C+

Directed by Henry Koster

Starring Richard Todd and Jean Peters

Released by 20th Century Fox

Running time: 119 minutes

Availabilty: DVD, Netflix Instant Watch.

Oscar and Lucinda (1997)

Certainly one of the more original films I’ve viewed in some time, Gillian Armstrong’s 1997 film Oscar and Lucinda tells the story of two lost souls who find each other through a shared obsession with gambling. Although in the decade-plus since this was released, gambling, specifically poker, has enjoyed a colossal resurgence in popular culture, this film is highly character driven and gambling plays no role beyond establishing character distinctions. Besides, this is particularly unusual in that it’s a period piece—taking place in mid-nineteenth-century England and Australia.

Although one could argue that at the time of this writing Oscar winner Cate Blanchett’s star is brighter than that of Ralph Fiennes, that certainly wasn’t the case in 1997 when Oscar and Lucinda was in theaters. The pair shared a similar amount of feature film experience and years in front of the camera, but by 1997 Fiennes had already headlined two Best Picture winners (Schindler's List and The English Patient) and had achieved household name status in the United States via other Hollywood films such as Quiz Show and Strange Days. Blanchett was an unknown at the time, with her breakout performance in Elizabeth a year away. Consequently, and in spite of the pair of first names in the title, this treatment of Peter Carey’s novel focuses on Fienne’s character Oscar, with Blanchett’s Lucinda in a featured supporting role. In a nutshell, the movie concentrates much more of its running time on what Oscar does and thinks and shares much less about Lucinda, beyond how her actions serve to inspire Oscar’s.

I began with the originality of the film and it’s worth discussing. Although this is a character study the circumstances of the plot are quite novel and do much to keep moving forward. I want to be careful to not give anything away, because even though gambling is a significant element of the narrative, one wager in particular defines the second half of the movie and it shouldn’t be spoiled. Suffice it to say that the movie goes places (as literary adaptations often do) that are atypical of Hollywood narratives—and then some. It’s occasionally tender, often unsettling, and in at least one instance abhorrent—all played out within constructs of love: platonic, religious, and obsessive.

Perhaps what’s most astonishing about Oscar and Lucinda is that all of its drama is brought to life through Fienne’s performance, which may be his best—he’s sublime in a role so difficult most actors wouldn’t go near it. Oscar and Lucinda was released with the Academy Awards in mind: it hit theaters on December 31, 1997, the last day of eligibility. This was the year defined by the competition between Titanic, As Good as it Gets, and L.A. Confidential, with the comedy film The Full Monty also garnering a Best Picture nomination. I certainly would have argued for this instead. Yet in spite of broad critical acclaim this garnered only a single nomination in the Best Costume category. Get your hands on a copy and decide for yourself.

Oscar and Lucinda (1997)

Grade: B+

Directed by Gillian Armstrong

Starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett

Released by Fox Searchlight

Running time: 132 minutes

Availability: DVD, Netflix, Fox Movie Channel

It Happens Every Spring (1949)

As a college professor I get really nervous whenever I watch a Hollywood film about people who do what I do for a living. Academics are usually portrayed in the movies as myopic bookworms or comic buffoons. Not the case with 20th Century Fox's It Happens Every Spring, which finds chemistry teacher Ray Milland taking a leave of absence to spend a season on the pitchers’ mound for St. Louis. Milland’s Vernon Simpson becomes screwball hero “King” Kelly after accidentally discovering a chemical solution that makes baseballs impervious to wood. Once Milland cleverly figures a way to get his solution onto game balls he becomes the best pitcher in the majors, and miraculously leads St. Louis to the World Series — all while trying to keep his identity hidden from his academic colleagues and fiance.

It Happens Every Spring received a well-deserved Oscar nomination in the Motion Picture Story category, though the film is universally strong. Good dialogue, fine performances, and a story that manages to avoid all the clichés — or at least put a witty spin on them. Jean Peters is fine as the fiancé and Ed Begley is a perfectly-cast team owner — but Paul Douglas positively steals the show as the salty veteran catcher who mentors Milland through the big time. It's easy to see why he would be cast two years later in Angels in the Outfield. The comedy works as well now as it did then and this hasn’t aged a bit.

My only qualm is that the film fails to address the fact that Milland’s discovery makes him a cheater. Cheating has a long and extraordinarily well-documented tradition in the American Pastime, but It Happens Every Spring takes the notion of a spitball a bit far. That Milland runs out of formula by the time he’s called to perform in the penultimate game would likely make little difference to the teams who would have been in the series otherwise. Nevertheless this is a warm, yet inexplicably forgotten, entry in the grand tradition of baseball pictures.

It Happens Every Spring (1949)

Grade: A-

Directed by Lloyd Bacon
Starring Ray Milland, Jean Peters, Paul Douglas and Ed Begley.
Released by 20th Century Fox
Running time: 87 minutes.
Availability: VHS - Fox Movie Channel