The Thief of Baghdad

This is William Cameron Menzies’ show, and proof that an art director is what makes a movie happen as much as anything, in certain circumstances. Walsh photographs it like a dream, and there is Douglas Fairbanks.

The Cock-Eyed World

By all means put the merry soldiers of What Price Glory before the cameras again, roisterous as you please where you need roistering, in the South China Seas.

The Big Trail

A film so monumental as practically to qualify as a representation of the actual events, which is probably what Walsh intended. The great Western painters have nothing on this; nearly every shot is a panorama so vast as to exhaust the imagination of a De Mille, and there are enough of them to fill the galleries of a museum.

Cinematographically, Walsh uses his camera like Muybridge to record the multiple rhythms of oxen and horses walking four or more abreast, for example.

They Drive by Night

The two-part structure has eluded the understanding of critics down to the present day, in spite of subsequent illuminating examples of the form such as Lubin’s Impact and Maté’s D.O.A., the essential metaphor is business, which has the shape of a woman. Wildcat trucking is the precarious existence of a Depression waitress loath to be pawed by management, opposite to this is the wife loyal after her fashion who would rather see her husband without his right arm than lose him to the endless round of highway driving.

Operating a fleet of trucks on your own is a dramatic risk symbolized in a murderous wife who takes over her husband’s business to share it with her lover. The working out of this second theme is highly successful with its invisible lines and forces (the electric eye), madness and villainy in great wealth and ease, compared with the hard-scrabble poverty and sleeplessness of the first, which ends in disaster.

Going into business for yourself was no easier then, because a line is crossed in a Kafkaesque maneuver that ultimately is examined by Arthur Miller in The Misfits, giving Huston something of a last word.

Walsh has the view in his own way that “journeys end in lovers meeting.” The form appears skewed by the persistent critique of a mésalliance, throwing Alan Hale and Ida Lupino into large relief as the trucking magnate and his ambitious wife, more correctly they heighten the dream of success beyond the reach of George Raft and Humphrey Bogart as the wildcatting brothers, with Ann Sheridan as the waitress.

John Litel, who figures so strongly in They Died with Their Boots On, underplays the roadweary trucker to great effect, and Roscoe Karns has an amazing turn as the company driver and pinball slave. His girl gets a “good night” from Raft at the boss’s party and replies, “I certainly am,” innocuously.

They Died with Their Boots On

Custer is the model for Brando’s Fletcher Christian, as he enters West Point. He gains access to the Adjutant General’s office in exactly the same way James Bond entered the Russian embassy in From Russia with Love. Amadeus, Patton, Khartoum and The Eiger Sanction recall some aspect or other. His departure from his wife is repeated in Russell’s Dante’s Inferno, and continues in a collapse between The Magnificent Ambersons and Ada.

The point, ultimately, is The Charge of the Light Brigade and the honor of an officer and a gentleman. The romance of the first part broaches a hairier part out West, but abandons this to Robert Siodmak and comes to a halt in Ford’s country.

Desperate Journey

Criticism now finds this rather bluff, for some reason. “We have met the enemy, and he is ires.”

The Man I Love

For Club “39”, Hotel L’Aiglon, 52^nd St., New York City, sc. “1939”, the start of hostilities. Similarly, the Bamboo Grove, Coast Blvd., Long Beach, Calif., suggests another theater of war.

Walsh and Hickox film jam sessions in both places, the working end of instruments, the musicians listening as they play.

The brutal acerbity of the images is like the swift sight of a stone making ripples. The fragmentary structure rather anticipates Resnais’s Muriel, it suggests two simultaneous lines related to The Best Years of Our Lives and The Conformist, the home front here and there, two places at once (as in O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten or Nabokov’s Ada), in a script as tightly allusive as Les Enfants du paradis.

This is correctly, we are told, appreciated by the public as a great work suggestive of the war’s end. Critics have been of two minds, whether to misunderstand it or dismiss it as abstruse beyond reckoning.

Miss Liberty is homesick, she flies a continent away to find an oppressive nightclub owner, a lost man, a brother-in-law cracked up. These images sift out, leaving the critics with no excuse, into the war profiteer making hay with a soldier’s wife, but there is a great deal more.

Each of these strands is a film by itself, in close proximity they make for just the rapid précis that speaks volumes. The refinement of characterization makes child’s play of Walsh’s psychological Western that followed (Pursued). Take a lesser strand, the nightclub owner Nicky Toresca’s Goering, whose name is Riley (Alan Hale). His cheerful fist hits the bar to mime holding a drink, he twists the neck of an imaginary bottle and pours it out, thus delivering his order. He knows his limitations, the end is near and inevitable. “Get ‘em while they’re young” and don’t look for a permanent position. Liberty’s kid brother Joe works at Nicky’s, he plays solitaire in the girls’ dressing room with a beautiful view, Riley calls him away to dispose of a jealous husband’s wife, Joe leaves, Riley gets the door slammed in his face (he smiles and walks away).

Not knowing the score is the fatal, forgivable error. “She was just a kid,” says the widower slapped by Liberty out of his vengeance, his wife’s death was an accident, “she didn’t know the score.”

The soldier racked up with battle fatigue, insanely jealous, is healed by rest. His young son greets him as a “hero”, just the way he looked down from his bedroom window at his mother driven home by Nicky and asked, “is that our Christmas tree?” (she works at a restaurant owned by Nicky’s uncle, she has last-minute shopping to do, Nicky has forcibly kissed her, she gets out angrily and refuses the tree, then the boy speaks).

The humaneness of the discretion with which these matters are dealt accounts for most of the tautness. The surreal division of characters also serves to build up a comprehensive expression.

The farewell on the pier at the end is also a resumption and somehow a homecoming, the latter is what audiences felt, the girl on shore with upraised hand, the man on the ship waving back. He is San Thomas (names are also expressive in this film), a brilliant jazz pianist “ten years ahead” who “never caught on” but married a socialite, divorced her, lost his spark and joined the merchant marine on a tramp steamer. Here again is the cinematic strand and the succinct image. His ship has docked at Long Beach, he misses its departure while in jail for a fight in an illegal gambling joint, the kid brother Joe is arrested too but fobs the responsibility off on San and walks, Liberty (her name is Petey Brown) atones by putting up bail and shortly recognizes the pianist’s name, she is a singer and he is well-known to jazzmen by recording. A romance founders on his divided loyalty to his former wife, now in town and an ex-Countess.

Petey takes a job at Nicky Toresca’s nightclub (with Charlie Barnet leading the band), gets her homebody sister Virginia a date there, it’s a swank spot if you avoid entanglements. Gloria, the next-door mother of twins, slips away from her husband and gravitates there dangerously, Joe has to take her home, she runs from the car and is hit by another.

So much delicate ambiguity so tersely stated, and what you get is a plot description about a love triangle in Santa Monica, nowadays.

Pursued

“Spurs that jingle jangle jingle, as I go ridin’ merrily along.” Practically a tale of Moses, harried along trackless deserts to a final showdown.

White Heat

Just an explosion in slow motion for a couple of hours. The final incandescence probably inspired Kiss Me Deadly.

Along The Great Divide

The way up is toward the light of passionate objectivity, the marshal was a deputy once to his father, and held to swift and sure justice. His father was lynched with his prisoner, the marshal now kicks a pot of beans into the fire lest any moment delay him from the rescue of an unlawfully condemned man. The first half of the film raises this line superabundantly clear in his desert ringed by mountains, he brings the prisoner in for trial.

Among massive rocks halfway, the injured party strikes back. On through desert heat and sandstorm to Santa Loma, where court is held that very night.

Exigency breeds suspicion, the path of justice is difficult at best. Duty is fulfilled, limited circumstantial evidence convicts the cattle rustler of murder, he hangs at dawn.

The marshal knows he’s innocent, but hasn’t bothered to prove it. And so a higher range of mountains is clearly visible, the great divide between lawful and lawless is overtaken by that of faithful and faithless.

Walsh transcends the psychology of his earlier Westerns quite consciously, grist for the mill. The prototypes of lynching are the witch hunt and the Inquisition, which always concluded with confiscation of worldly goods, as here.

Two brothers, Cain and Abel, sons of a cattle rancher, a sodbuster three times raided, his crops destroyed, set to be lynched by ranch hands.

His daughter vis-à-vis the marshal forms the basis of the title, at last.

Captain Horatio Hornblower

Virginia Mayo down with the grippe and no makeup is the bare bones of the scenic element, thus rendered truly.

Distant Drums

Rather like a return to Desperate Journey, with a bit of Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt thrown in.

A Lion Is in the Streets

It took the director of What Price Glory to equilibrate this delicate time bomb, so that it goes off in just the right unmistakable way.

Band of Angels

Walsh talks turkey. He slices it and gives you gravy, and while you’re stirring your potatoes he tells you a few things.

The beauty of Gable’s performance is one of his great postwar developments, heading toward distant territory with unflappability and funny ears.