Brief Reviews

THAT UNCERTAIN FEELING (1941) **½
As regular visitors to The Movie Projector know, I have a special fondness for the films of Ernst Lubitsch. This one, though, is an inconsistent work that doesn't measure up to his usual standard. The film is about a chic Park Avenue couple, Jill and Larry Baker (Merle Oberon and Melvyn Douglas), who have been married six years and whose relationship has begun to grow stale and predictable. Each is just a little bored with the other. When Jill begins getting hiccups at moments of stress or agitation, she consults a psychiatrist. At his office, she meets a neurotic pianist, Alexander Sebastian (Burgess Meredith), a self-proclaimed "individualist" who always speaks his mind and dislikes humanity. But he likes Jill, and the two soon develop a curious friendship that becomes a desultory affair that causes the Bakers to separate and plan divorce.

The movie is not without its delights. Lubitsch handles the comedy with his characteristic light and whimsical touch, and it is at a few points laugh-out-loud funny. A couple of long sequences are equal to Lubitsch's best. One is the first meeting of Jill and Sebastian followed by their visit to a modern art gallery. The other is a very funny dinner party at which the Bakers entertain a group of Hungarians who are potential clients of Larry's insurance firm and which Alexander, invited by Jill without her husband's knowledge, proceeds to disrupt in a delightfully comic way. The best thing about the movie is Burgess Meredith as the solemn and self-centered pianist. He makes an essentially humorless character quite funny.

But the movie also has some obvious flaws. Midway through, I realized that the basic plot isn't that different from The Awful Truth, a movie I have praised as the definitive screwball comedy: a couple breaks up over trivial differences, eventually they realize that they were happier together, and in the end they reunite. So why doesn't That Uncertain Feeling work better? For one thing, the pacing of the script is uneven: entertaining stretches alternate with sections of relative tedium. Then some awkwardly jumpy edits indicate an inattention to detail not typical of Lubitsch; perhaps the filming was rushed or he grew tired of the project. But the biggest problem is the two leads. Douglas is a subdued leading romantic man, but he can be very effective, as he showed in Lubitsch's Ninotchka. But to come across, he really needs a dynamic leading woman like Irene Dunne or Greta Garbo to play off of, and the lovely but bland Oberon is almost wholly lacking in dynamism. Douglas actually gets better as the movie goes along, but Oberon remains rather enervated and dull throughout.

The lesson here, I suppose, is that with even the great directors, sometimes the elements simply fail to gel. That Uncertain Feeling, a decent enough movie, is not quite a disaster. It just isn't of the quality we expect of the great Lubitsch.

THE MALE ANIMAL (1942) ***½
Having seen the banal musical remake of The Male Animal—She's Working Her Way Through College (1952), starring Ronald Reagan and Virginia Mayo—many years ago, I was in no hurry to watch this. It's too bad I waited so long, because the original is so unlike the remake and so much better. I had always wondered what would attract Henry Fonda, who made so few comedies and preferred roles of thematic heft, to such a project, and the movie provided a clear answer.

Fonda plays Prof. Tommy Turner, a mild-mannered academic who teaches English at Midwestern University. On the eve of the big homecoming football game, he finds himself unwillingly enmeshed in a controversy over academic free speech. He is threatened with dismissal by Ed Keller (Eugene Pallette), the despotic, obsessively Red-hunting head of the board of trustees, over his plan to read to his class the last letter of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchist arrested, framed, convicted as a scapegoat, and executed in Massachusetts in 1927. (Vanzetti and the man convicted with him, Nicola Sacco, were pardoned in 1977 by then-Gov. Michael Dukakis.) Keller would even like to censor student writing by suppressing the student literary magazine that announced the upcoming lecture in a story, but it has already gone to press. At the same time, Turner must defend his wife, Ellen (Olivia de Havilland), from the advances of her ex-boy friend, the former football hero Joe Ferguson (Jack Carson), who has returned for the big game. Ellen wants Tommy to give in and not read the letter, using Joe's revived romantic interest in her and Tommy's insecurity at being so unathletic to attempt to coerce him into forgoing his principles to save their comfortable way of life.

Based on a play by James Thurber and director Elliott Nugent, the movie has intelligent, witty dialogue and a deftly constructed plot. It even contains a memorable drunk sequence with Tommy and his star pupil that ends in a shambolic fistfight between Tommy and Joe. The cast is uniformly good (although deHavilland sometimes seems a bit too intelligent for her role, and comedy wasn't really her forte) and even includes Hattie McDaniel as the wisecracking housekeeper, Cleota.

Even among such great performers Fonda, predictably, is remarkable. He is especially outstanding in the climactic scene when Prof. Turner defies Ellen and the board and reads the brief but eloquent letter to a packed classroom that includes Keller, Ellen, Joe, students, reporters, and the just plain curious. Fonda reads the letter with quiet, underplayed conviction (much the same way he reads the final letter of the lynched Dana Andrews in The Ox-Bow Incident, released the following year) and wins over even his antagonists. The happy outcome seems a bit pat, but who wouldn't sympathize with Fonda's risking his marriage and career to defend academic freedom? If only such disputes always turned out so felicitously in real life.

SHACK OUT ON 101 (1955) ***
This movie would make a super second feature on a double bill with Pickup on South Street (1953) or Kiss Me Deadly (1955). It has the same basic plot setup of good guys battling Communist spies after government secrets during the Cold War of the 1950s. The movie opens with a cheesy close-up of Kotty (Terry Moore) sunning on the beach in a two-piece bathing suit. Up creeps Slob (Lee Marvin), who pounces on her and attempts to molest her before she can fend off his advances. Both Kotty and Slob work at the shack of the title, a Southern California beachfront greasy spoon run by Keenan Wynn that appears to be located near Malibu before it became developed—she as the waitress, he as the cook. The beach and the cafe are the only two locations in this clearly very low-budget movie.

Kotty is being romanced by Prof. Sam Bastion (Frank Lovejoy), a research scientist working at a top-secret government research facility just up the coast. The professor is encouraging the pretty, lively, but slightly dim Kotty to improve herself by studying for the civil service exam to be a stenographer. Moore doesn't look much like Marilyn Monroe, but she sure sounds exactly like her, and every male in the cast treats her as though she is just as desirable as MM. Unfortunately, one evening Kotty inadvertently overhears the professor passing secrets to an enemy agent, and realizing he is a Communist spy, breaks off with him. Without a protector, she is now at the mercy of the lecherous Slob.

The plot and characters are dealt with in an entirely functional way that lacks the artistic vision or cinematic personality of a Samuel Fuller or Robert Aldrich. The two big revelations at the end—the truth about the professor and the identity of the mastermind behind the operation, the mysterious Mr. Gregory—are wholly predictable, as is the means of Kotty being saved from rape and murder by Slob. But the dialogue—especially the repartee between Kotty and her male pursuers, which at times borders on the camp—is uniformly snappy. And the plot is presented with economy and great forward momentum.

But the movie really belongs to Lee Marvin as Slob. He is by turns sadistic, pathetic, comical, dumb, shrewd—simultaneously a feckless joker and a menacing villain. His chameleonic performance only highlights the two-dimensional characters who otherwise populate the film. The scene of him and Keenan Wynn working out with barbells and weights in the diner is the comic highlight of the movie. Of the performances nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar that year, his is equaled only by Jack Lemmon's winning turn in Mister Roberts, and Marvin wasn't even nominated. Shack Out on 101 is by any measure strictly a B-movie, but it does present an amusing time capsule of the insecurities of the era, and it is consistently entertaining. It may not be a masterpiece, but a splendid time is guaranteed for all.

RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1935) ****
In the 1930s, Leo McCarey made three comic masterpieces, starting with the best movie the Marx Brothers ever made, Duck Soup (1933), and ending with what I have called the definitive screwball comedy, The Awful Truth (1937). In 1935 he made this film, which in style falls somewhere between the manic anarchy of Duck Soup and the restrained sophistication of The Awful Truth. The title character, Ruggles (Charles Laughton), is the British manservant to the Earl of Burnstead (Roland Young). Red Gap is the name of the frontier town in Washington state where Ruggles finds himself after the Earl loses him in a poker game in Paris to Egbert Floud (Charles Ruggles), a nouveau riche hick making the grand tour around the turn of the 20th century.

Floud doesn't know what to make of the British class system, finding it incomprehensible that people would voluntarily submit to such institutionalized indignity. He is determined to treat Ruggles as a social equal and to loosen his stiff-upper-lip demeanor, but his wife Effie (a hilarious Mary Boland), a dedicated social climber, has other plans for Ruggles. She wants to flaunt him to the locals as proof of her newfound social status and to use his knowledge to transform her gauche husband into her image of an English-style upper-class gentleman. When the henpecked but crafty Egbert introduces Ruggles as Colonel Ruggles to his hometown cronies, he sets up a dual identity for Ruggles that results in many comic ramifications.

The movie's comic situations are of course, given McCarey's experience working with many of the comedy greats of American movies of the early 1930s, inventively devised and highly entertaining. To me the movie is most reminiscent of McCarey's work with early Laurel and Hardy, with its carefully paced set-ups building slowly to controlled comic explosions, and its opposition of rambunctious characters and repressed ones, But the comedy here is given extra resonance by the social and character details that underpin it: the absurd social pretensions of Effie and her relatives, the tension between the belief in social equality of Egbert and the adherence of Ruggles to the tradition of a prescribed social hierarchy, and the dawning realization by Ruggles that the American way of life and the misunderstandings about him deliberately fostered by Egbert present him with the opportunity to reinvent himself.

Even with all these great character actors (including fluttery, nasal-voiced Zasu Pitts as a potential love interest for Ruggles), it is Charles Laughton who elevates this movie beyond expectations. It might seem inconceivable that the notoriously hammy Laughton could so effectively play a buttoned-up comical character. But he is a marvel as he proceeds through the various phases of the psychological transformation of Ruggles from a Jeeves-like automaton to a new man, one freed from the stifling belief in a life predetermined by social class and presented instead with the ability to create his own identity. Ruggles is like a prisoner inching his way to freedom. When that freedom comes, it is a liberation that, although achieved through comic means, is deeply moving.

Ruggles of Red Gap is a sort of social fairy tale powered by American optimism, the belief in the entitlement of every person to self-definition and an open-ended future. In an age when practically anyone could use a few good laughs and a reminder that people once genuinely believed in such ideals, watching Ruggles is like getting a glimpse into an Edenic past, a less complicated and more innocent time.

Point Blank: Film Noir Meets Existentialism

Watching Lee Marvin in Point Blank (1967)—with his granitic facial features, deep voice, and confident, ultra-masculine presence—I couldn't help thinking of Humphrey Bogart. Like Bogart, Marvin was for years typecast as a heavy, usually in supporting roles. He played vicious, sadistic, sometimes psychotic thugs in movies like The Big Heat (1953), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). After winning the Oscar for his atypically comic performance in the Western The Ballad of Cat Ballou (1965), Marvin became a big star playing leads. But like Bogart, even after he was able to choose his roles, Marvin stuck largely to tough-guy parts. The hard edge that made him so effective in those early roles became a major part of his later, more benign screen persona, serving him well in roles like those in The Professionals (1966), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and The Big Red One (1980).

As Walker, the main character in Point Blank, Marvin plays a man who has been betrayed by a good friend and his own wife. Reluctantly persuaded by the friend to help him steal a mob payoff being delivered to the abandoned Alcatraz penitentiary, Walker is double-crossed, shot, and left for dead in the derelict prison. After somehow miraculously making it to shore, Walker recovers and hooks up with a mysterious stranger (Keenan Wynn) seeking his help in bringing down "the organization." This person's identify and motivation are not revealed at this point, and Walker doesn't ask. He might be a policeman, a member of a rival mob, or even like Walker a victim. Walker has no real interest in the stranger except as a means to enable him to achieve the one thing he lives for—to find his wife and former friend and recover the $93,000 that was his share of the robbery. Like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, he cares less about personal revenge than about his own code of ethics and justice. His sense of fair play is unambiguous, and it is his sense of fair play that guides his actions.

In short order Walker is on his way to Los Angeles in search of the treacherous wife and former friend. He is either by nature or as a result of the Alcatraz experience a habitual survivalist—a wary, vigilant loner who trusts no one. In view of the events that follow, it's a good thing. In Los Angeles Walker finds himself in a Machiavellian situation where everyone seems to be playing everyone else, and his attempts to fulfill his mission become a life-and-death game of strategy against ruthless and unscrupulous opponents. Duplicity is pervasive. Nobody can be trusted, and nothing can be taken at face value; to do so could be fatal. Walker's attitude to this is stoic and dispassionate. As in everything else, he is unsentimental, his emotions always tightly under control.

He is a superior observer and strategist who predicts in advance what moves the other players will make and is able not only to forestall them but to manipulate them in subtle ways that serve his own ends. The source of his power seems to be that, unlike everyone else in the move, he has no interest in power itself. This detachment from the allure of power allows him to play the game on a meta-level. Driven by his single-minded focus on his own relatively limited and straightforward goals, he is a still point of steadfast purpose in the midst of corruption and deceit. When it is revealed at the end that Walker is himself being used by Wynn as a pawn in his own scheme, Walker seems unsurprised and unfazed. As always, he simply adapts to the new circumstances.

If Point Blank sounds a lot like a modernized film noir, it's because that's exactly what it is, with all the updated stylistic trappings of the late 1960's provided by director John Boorman. These trappings include dazzling color photography by Philip Lathrop, casual sex, and a fair amount of matter-of-fact violence.

The storytelling is frequently elliptical. We have no idea how Marvin managed to make it from Alcatraz to San Francisco. In one scene he is struggling into the waters of the bay; in the next he is riding with Wynn in a boat taking a tour of the bay while a guide explains over a loudspeaker that no one ever successfully escaped from Alcatraz. In one scene he is in his wife's apartment discovering her in the bedroom, a suicide dead from a drug overdose; in the next he is sitting in the same apartment, now completely stripped of all its furnishings. We don't know how much time has elapsed or what has happened to the dead wife (although he does later visit her grave). In one scene Walker learns from his dead wife's sister (Angie Dickinson), with whom he has begun a desultory affair, that the building across the street from the mob's stronghold is an apartment building. In the next scene he is sitting in an apartment in the building with two men (are they gay?), who are willingly complying with his instructions to tie themselves up and call the police to say they have been robbed. There seems to be no coercion involved. How did he get into the apartment? How did he get them to cooperate?

Boorman is masterful in his use of setting to convey a strong sense of place. The abandoned prison buildings and cells at Alcatraz, the seedy club where Walker goes looking for the friend who betrayed him, the bleakly modernistic apartments, penthouses, offices, the soulless showplace of a house where the head of the mob (the pre-Archie Bunker Carroll O'Connor) lives, the concrete canyon of the Los Angeles River—all these locations greatly intensify the alienated and unsettling effect of the movie. Boorman has just as vivid a sense of setting as Antonioni; the difference is that with Boorman these are clearly backgrounds to the action, not ends in themselves. Boorman even uses setting as a structural device, bringing the movie full circle by opening and closing it on Alcatraz.

The editing of Point Blank is also noteworthy, at times fracturing the linear chronology of the movie not as a flashy gimmick but for legitimate narrative purposes. The opening sequence is particularly brilliant, with Walker regaining consciousness in the derelict prison cell and struggling to remember how he got there. For its first several minutes the movie shows us the fragmented jumble of memories and images that flood his mind as he attempts to piece together the explanation. That Boorman manages to use this process as a means of covertly providing exposition without confusing the viewer is proof of his economy and skill as a storyteller.

At certain points later on, Walker flashes back for a moment to something else that has happened in the movie, and again Boorman makes these momentary flashbacks seem the entirely natural result of the movie slipping briefly into Walker's point of view. These stream-of-consciousness memories that replay themselves in his mind are never gratuitous, but rather are echoes triggered by something that reminds Walker of an event that happened earlier in the film at a moment of heightened awareness and that continues to haunt him: another time he opened a curtain, another time he walked into a bedroom, another time he was attacked and beaten.

Apart from these references to earlier events in the movie, Walker seems to exist in a vacuum. At one point, when asked his first name he replies, "I never use it." We know nothing of his background, of his profession, of his interests. He seems to inhabit an eternal present with the only fixed points of reference the events of the movie itself. He is, in short, an exemplary existential hero, a solitary man moving through a dangerous, unstable, and unpredictable world in which the only way to survive is to react to each new situation with a new response. In Point Blank, film noir attitude meets existential philosophy. Even the title sounds like a pun that suggests the ultimate meaninglessness of existence.