Boys
of the City
They open a fire
hydrant to cool off and inadvertently upset the apple cart.
The East Side
Kids, off to the Adirondacks with a judge up for bribery, wanted by the mob,
and privately embezzling his pretty ward’s money.
The whole scene
shifts to a castle called Briarcliff Manor, very shady, with Minerva Urecal a
ringer for Judith Anderson in Hitchcock’s Rebecca,
coincidentally.
Sarris mentions
the director’s “1940 record,” which includes this film and That Gang of Mine.
That
Gang of Mine
The money of
horse racing is an inducement, Muggs wants to be a jockey.
It’s not his
style, as he discovers.
Everything’s
riding on a thoroughbred, Muggs positively insists a professional jockey ride.
The owner and
groom, the trainer, the backer, various shady track interests, and the jockey,
a well-trained athlete, not to mention the bettors.
Pride
of the Bowery
It is subjected
to the C.C.C. in lieu of the Golden Gloves, and therein lies the tale.
They ain’t got
any money, the East Side Kids, and Muggs the contender.
See?
There is a
neverending struggle at the camp, and that’s the story.
“Just as
truculent, loudmouthed and nasty as ever” (T.S., New York Times).
Invisible
Ghost
The wife who ran
off and was killed with her lover in a car crash (Le Mépris), or nearly.
She returns,
fearfully, a face at the window, setting the husband off to murder some
innocent.
Lewis’ cruel wit
and brutal insights illuminate the picture entirely.
A brilliant film,
notable also for Lugosi’s transformations, a noctambulism, a derangement, a
strangler.
It was,
incredibly, “a cinematic curio” to T.M.P. of the New York Times,
“incredibly amateurish” and “silly,” thus are standards maintained.
The
Mad Doctor of Market Street
The genius idea
is that he places subjects in suspended animation in order to cure their
diseases, it doesn’t work.
Fleeing the
authorities, he lands on a desert island...
The sublimity of
this was lost on Geoff Andrew of Time Out Film Guide, on the other hand,
he might get it eventually.
Lionel Atwill,
one of his greatest performances.
Bombs
Over Burma
Burma Road, China
under Japanese attack.
Truck convoys are
the key, the Japs have spies to pinpoint them. An officer in German military
intelligence is traveling by bus, the bridge is out, all the passengers spend
the night at a monastery, the Chinese schoolteacher, some Americans, Sir Roger
and his body servant.
This was, to T.S.
of the New York Times, “a dud at the Central”, the harrowing footage of
aerial bombardments “a few old stock shots” and the meticulous action “the
ancient plot device used in ‘Shanghai Express’,” but later critics have come to
a better understanding.
Lewis opens with a
device from Henry King’s Marie Galante, the first few minutes are all in
Chinese, without subtitles.
Nothing to do
with Sternberg in the sense meant by T.S., a lot about “funny” Americans
hearing both sides of a story first.
Minstrel
Man
The plan of the
work conveys the period 1929-1944 (the central date is the S.S. Morro Castle
disaster in 1934), the war is never mentioned and no dates are given.
The artiste and
his métier (“My Bamboo Cane”).
The minstrel show
in all its glory.
The New York
Times reviewer found Benny Fields to be what Dixie Boy Johnson is called in
the film, a great song stylist, and dismissed the rest as “an easy-to-take
picture.”
Halliwell’s
Film Guide speaks of “interesting
sidelights”.
My
Name Is Julia Ross
The London secretary
who wakes up a Cornish wife.
Mother and son
have her for a replacement, she must be a suicide, the other was murdered.
A matter of
money.
A film as
brilliant as they come, typically Lewis, with monstrous roles for Whitty and
Macready as foils to Foch.
“A B-plus for
effort at least,” thus Bosley Crowther of the New York Times indited,
department-wise, for the record.
Shrewdly assessed
by Variety, “fast and packed with tense action throughout. Acting and
production (though apparently modestly budgeted) are excellent... Joseph H.
Lewis directed for pace, and he achieves it all the way.”
Rosenbaum and
Kehr essentially follow Variety’s line in the Chicago Reader.
“Having toiled
industriously on nonsense for years,” writes Geoff Andrew in Time Out Film Guide,
a real authority.
Halliwell’s
Film Guide gives the devil its due
but finds it “culted into a reputation beyond its worth” and has James Agee, no
less, in support with his “generally successful attempt to turn good trash into
decently artful entertainment.”
The
Undercover Man
Treasury agent,
Internal Revenue, bookkeeper, with two associates against a murderous gangster
known as the Big Fellow.
The far behind of
law enforcement that brought down Al Capone, a peculiar theme especially close
to Lewis, who wastes no time on recriminations or even analysis but plunges
right in with the deadly silence all around the agents, something here,
something there, nothing, grueling work, an inspiration, anything, a miracle,
desperation, dedication, a life-or-death struggle down to the first day in
court.
“This fearful
fable”, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called it (his news is
that Duke Ellington was playing the Paramount).
“A good
crime-busting saga,” said Variety.
“A superior crime
thriller” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out Film Guide).
“Good” (Halliwell’s
Film Guide).
Gun
Crazy
A couple of
sharpshooters out on a spree, usually arrogated to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and
Clyde, not entirely without reason.
The one is
heavily indebted to the other for her killer instinct, a matter of fear, and
then it’s all nothing, a waste of talented youth brilliantly analyzed by Penn.
A sagacious film,
the camerawork in a moving car is justly famous for its skill and tenacity.
A
Lady without Passport
While working on
a case of alien smuggling out of Cuba, a Border Patrol agent falls in love with
a beautiful survivor from Buchenwald.
Lewis’
pictures of Havana make a million-dollar film, the great stone buildings,
Magnacola, a fruit cart upset by the agent (disguised as a rich Hungarian) to
throw off pursuit and stop a streetcar in laughing detachment, the sunny
seaport, a romantic construction of serenade and paseo and orchestra on
the wharves in the evening, a nightclub dancer.
The
smuggler’s plane is ditched in the Everglades, the crash is viewed from a Navy
scout plane that circles to observe the distant pantomime of fists and murder
over a small rubber raft.
Crooks
and undesirables have to be rescued from the swamp, the agent goes after the
smuggler Palinov, the girl and the pilot heading to the mouth of the Shark
River, where a cabin cruiser is waiting, he empties the fuel tank and sees the
smuggler weigh anchor for a short cruise into Coast Guard hands. Offered her
choice, the girl stays behind to be arrested. The pilot has been left in the
jungle with snakebite, for Border Patrol agents to find.
A
bare clue allows the experienced hands at INS to locate the plane before
takeoff, a simple ruse throws them off, three Navy planes are sent on reconnaissance,
one of them flown by a local man with a drawl on the radio back to flight
control, “due south? Do tell!”
The Chosin
Few, from the initiation of hostilities to their heroic defense and the even
greater heroism of their “advance in another direction.”
The
Big Combo
The fix is in,
the mob treasurer hands out money with a phone call, no books.
A direct picture
of the situation, Conte looks at the camera to spell it out in hoodlum
doubletalk, very familiar.
It breaks apart like
a ship in a storm because a lieutenant in the 93rd Precinct has his
mind on it and uncovers a few salient facts about the smooth, silent operation.
There are amusing
sidelights, the underling skipped in a takeover, the moll feigning madness for
security, the new moll at a concert recital for comfort to her mind, and of
course the two hoods, Fante and Mingo.
Reviewers at the
time could not see it, gradually it has come to be discerned more clearly.
A
Lawless Street
Medicine Bend, a
“snarling beast” of a town the marshal hears every day.
A strict
definition of a town-tamer. It bites him, a couple of leading citizens put in
force a plan to kill the marshal, hinder the founder and make a fortune on it
“wide open”.
The nightmare
vision is fully stated, the marshal bites back.
A Western as
classic as they come, with an especial portrait of the town-tamer wearing
himself out and his luck and his guts day after day until the beast dies or he
loses his nerve or some other calamity (the founder’s dream is statehood).
But a town isn’t
tame until it’s ready, the catastrophe makes up its mind for it.
“Gamet’s
Vegetable Compound” on the calendar means the screenplay (last date June 6th).
“It’s no
masterwork,” according to Geoff Andrew (Time Out Film Guide), go figger.
7th
Cavalry
The disaster,
inquest, burial detail.
The effect of the
battle, a sizable delinquency of the Army.
Redress at Little
Big Horn, collecting the dead in the face of the Sioux.
“Weird and
occasionally wonderful”, says Geoff Andrew of Time Out Film Guide.
The
Rifleman: The Journey Back
One is not an
Indian, cowardice under torture has another aspect, if villainous murder does
not.
John Anderson as
one accused by his own and condemned by the enemy.
Harry Carey, Jr.
as the trooper dogging his betrayal.