Audrey Hepburn, Native American?

Another of those movies that I recorded quite some time back and didn't get around to watching until not long before it expired from the DVR was the 1960 western The Unforgiven, which is of course not to be confused with the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven. Anyhow, having watched it, I wrote up this post and saved it in drafts for some time when I didn't have other westerns coming up on TCM to do posts about.

The action opens with a panoramic view of a ranch somwhere in west Texas where the nearest civilization is Wichita, KS, or at least where Ben Zachary (Burt Lancaster) returns from. Before that, however, we see the only two people on the ranch at the current time are Rachel (Audrey Hepburn), adopted kid sister of Ben, and their mother Mattilda (Lillian Gish). The camera also pans to a grave stone, which is that of the patriarch, Will Zachary, who was killed by the Kiowa.

And then a strange old guy named Abe Kelsey (Joseph Wiseman) shows up, claiming that Audrey was actually stolen from the Kiowa and adopted by the Zacharys, which might have something to do with why they wanted to kill Will and why Mattilda is ticked with the presence of this man. Meanwhile, the family is working with another family in the area, the Rawlins family. They're headed by patriarch Zeb (Charles Bickford), and have a son Charlie (Albert Salmi) who is thinking of courting Rachel. Kelsey shows up again now that Ben Zachary is back, and this time Ben ticks off Kelsey. Enough so that he starts telling anybody else who will listen the story of Rachel's supposed provenance. That, and he gets a couple of Kiowa to show up at the Zachary place, looking to buy Rachel from the family, a sort of bride price if you will, except that this man says he's actually Rachel's brother.

Best, I suppose, that they marry Rachel off now, and give Charlie permission to court Rachel. For this Charlie gets himself shot by the Kiowa, not that he's actually guilty of anything. But it gets the rest of the Rawlins family pissed at the Zachary family, especially Charlie's mom who gets to have one of those big emotional scenes cursing Rachel and the rest of the Zacharys. Making matters worse is that a posse goes out to catch Kelsey, and when they catch him and bring him back, Mattilda and Ben basically engage in vigilante justice which gets Zeb to believe that the story about Rachel is actually true.

The Kiowa show up again demanding Rachel, who really ought to be allowed to make the decision herself since she's now an adult. But instead Ben and brother Andy kill one of the Kiowa, who respond by laying siege to the Zachary homestead. It's a siege they ought to be able to win because they've got time and numbers on their side. But the Zacharys seem willing to fight to the last man, and woman.

The Unforgiven was produced by Burt Lancaster's production company and suffered a troubled production including Audrey Hepburn falling off a horse and the original director being replaced by John Huston. Huston and Lancaster apparently clashed over the artistic vision of the movie, and I think it shows somewhat in a movie that takes some odd twists and turns tht don't always work. Everybody's professional and the movie is visually nice to look at for the most part, but there's always this feeling that something isn't quite right here.

Still, even though The Unforgiven is a bit of a misfire, it's an interesting misfire.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady

As I've mentioned on a reasonable number of occasions, I've got a bunch of movies on my DVR that I need to get around to watching before they expire from the DVR. With that in mind, I've got movie posts scheduled a good three weeks in advance, along with several left in draft form either so I don't have a bunch of movies in the same genre or with the same star coming up in rapid succession. Some draft posts then get re-edited if I seem them on the TCM schedule only after I write the first draft, so things might look a bit off. Such is the case with our next movie, A Big Hand for the Little Lady. I had written a post some time back and scheduled it, and then saw the Summer Under the Stars schedule release. Henry Fonda is being honored tomorrow, August 24, and A Big Hand for the Little Lady shows up at 2:00 PM.

It's sometime in the late 19th century, possibly in the New Mexico Territory or west Texas, although there's reference to a "Laredo Territory" which I don't think ever existed. Benson Tropp (Charles Bickford) is driving his hearse as the town's undertaker, picking people up, although he's not picking up the dead, and the people he's picking up seem to want to be picked up. The other men he picks up are Drummond (Jason Robrds), a cattleman whose daughter is about to get married; and prominent attorney Habershaw (Kevin McCarthy); another rancher named Wilcox is already in town as is storekeeper Buford (John Qualen). They all gather in the back room of Sam Rhine's saloon, and everyboy in town seems interested in their presence.

The reason for this gathering is that it's that time again for the annual high-stakes poker game, which seems to have as its only rules that they'll play a marathon session until one person has all the money, and that if you can't call the current bet, you're out. This, combined with no mention being made of a maximum bet, is something that I'd think would cause a problem if one person could just bet everyone else out of the game, but then maybe their game doesn't work like this. You get the impression that these men have been coming together for years, and budgeting to take part in the match.

Into town comes Meredith (Henry Fonda). He's got a wife Mary (Joanne Woodward) and son Jackie. They're traveling through Texas to San Antonio, where Meredith is intending to buy a plot of land for the family to make a new start in life. That also means that Meredith has the money for that plot of land on hand, in cash since this wasn't an era of electronic funds transfers. And he's going to be in town for a night because the wheel on their wagon needs to be repaired before the family can get back on the road. Everybody else in town is interested in the poker game, so it seems natural for Meredith to be interested in what's going on too. But he also has more interest as he's an inveterate gambler, with the assumption that the family is moving in part to escape Meredith's past gambling losses.

As you can guess, Meredith gets really interested in the poker game. The others have never really been interested in bringing somebody new into the game, but they get the feeling that Meredith might make a good mark: if you don't know who the mark at the table is, it's probably you. So they do let him into their game, and he predictably starts losing money, up until it comes time to make the big wager, at which point he suffers a medical issue that will force him out of the game and giving him no more chance to win back the family money he lost. At that point, Mary makes the insane request that she should be allowed to finish the game for her husband, even though she doesn't even know how to play poker.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady is another of those movies where you can see why the people involved would read the script and think it's the sort of material they could have a lot of fun making. And to be fair to all of them they do a reasonable job with the film, while looking like they're enjoying making this one. The only thing is that the material is pretty darn thin, the sort of thing that in the generation before World War II probably would have been written to be a two-reel short instead of a feature-length movie. So A Big Hand for the Little Lady will probably appeal more to other people than it did to me. Not that it's not worth watching, however.

A Star Is Born (1954)

A Star Is Born is one of those classic Hollywood tales that's been don a bunch of times: four under that title, and some would argue that the 1932 film What Price Hollywood? is pretty much the same story. I haven't seen the most recent remake with Lady Gaga, although I think I've done posts on the 1930s and 1970s A Star is Born as well as What Price Hollywood? I saw that the 1954 version starring Judy Garland is on tonight at 8:00 PM, so I watched it off my DVR to do a sort of review on it.

Now, I call it a sort of review because this is the sort of film where I'd guess most people already know the story. Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland) is struggling in her career until she's seen by Hollywood star Norman Maine (James Mason) who is painting the town red for the umpteenth time. Maine gets Esther a screen test, and she eventually changes her name to Vicki Lester, becomes a star, and marries Norman. But as Vicki's career rises, Norman drinks more, until the tragic ending.

So, in discussing this version, I think it's a bit better to talk about some of the things that distinguish it from previous versions. The first one is that as the movie opens, Esther is already a singer in a big band, with a maybe-boyfriend in Danny McGuire (Tommy Noonan). Esther having to suffer in the Dakotas during the Depression but with a grandmother with a heart of gold who helps Esther get to Hollywood isn't here at all. (Indeed, the May Robson character is totally written out.) I think that having Esther already have at least a halfway successful career isn't such a good choice. I couldn't help but think of her traveling singer in comparison to the one her real-life daughter Liza Minnelli goes on to play in New York, New York, where it doesn't seem to be that bad a career.

Judy Garland being a singer, there are a lot of musical numbers for her to perform, as that's a talent she definitely had as opposed to Janet Gaynor. Fans of Judy Garland's singing will obviously love the plethora of musical numbers. I have to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of Garland's singing. The songs help push the movie out to a shade under three hours, which includes a few minutes here and there of production stills with the dialogue track. This last conceit, however, is not like the "restored" version of Greed which added on a good 100 minutes of production stills.

On the plus side is the casting of Charles Bickford in the role of studio boss Oliver Niles, a character played by Adolphe Menjou and done reasonably well. Bickford doesn't have quite the elegance that Menjou always did, although I think that for the dark story line that's something that works even better. Bickford has a sort of bitter elder statesman dignity that I don't think Menjou did. Jack Carson gets a beefed-up role as the publicity agent and is good, although there's that one scene where he's gratuitously nasty to Norman Maine. A reading of the 1937 synopsis points out that the scene is in that movie too, although I didn't remember it, probably because the publicity agent there was played by Lionel Stander who is much lower down the status list than Jack Carson was.

Personally, I prefer the 1937 A Star is Born, but I'm sure many people will greatly enjoy tonight's showing of the 1954 version.

More American than Knute Rockne?

The next movie on my DVR that's coming up soon on TCM is the sports biopic Jim Thorpe -- All American. That next airing comes tomorrow, January 25, at 4:15 PM.

The movie opens up at a banquet in Jim Thorpe's (Burt Lancaster) honor later in his life, where he's getting a portrait in Oklahoma's equivalent of Statuary Hall or something similar. Speaking on behalf of Thorpe is a former coach of his, Glenn "Pop" Warner (Charles Bickford, and yes, it's that Pop Warner of youth football fame). This, as you can guess, is a plot device to fade into the inevitable flashback which gives the movie version of the story of Thorpe's life.

Jim Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox tribe of Native Americans, living on a reservation in the Oklahoma territory. His father wants him to get a good education so he can make something of his life rather than just making tchotchkes for white tourists to buy. Young Jim doesn't seem to care much about education, consistently running away from school but showing himself to be a pretty good distance runner, or at least one with stamina. Eventually, Dad deals with his problem child by sending the kid to a boarding school the federal government set up back east with a student body of mixed tribal heritage, the Carlisle School

Jim is still a good runner, but knows nothing about football, failing when one of the upperclassmen tries to get him to break a tackle. But he eventually tries again and, showing himself to be a good runner, comes to the attention of the aforementioned Pop Warner. Jim also proves to be good at pretty much every sport he tries, dominating the track team and doing fairly well at baseball however. Meanwhile, in his personal life, he falls in love with nursing student Margaret Miller (Phyllis Thaxter).

But Jim's personal life requires him to work in the summers to have enough money to pay the bills on campus. One summer on the farm, he's invited to play some semi-pro baseball, which is going to have severe consequences later on in life. He doesn't think anything of it and goes back to Carlisle, where he decides that after college he'd like to go into coaching. The only thing is, he's not white, and constantly feels like that white society isn't giving him an equal chance which is why he can't get that coaching job.

And then the chance for glory comes with the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. Jim decides that he's going to compete in both the athletics pentathlon (different from today's "Modern Pentathlon" in that it was five track and field events), and the decathlon, an absurdly grueling physical challenge. And yet, Thorpe wins gold in both! However, it's later discovered how he had spent that one summer playing semi-pro baseball. Professionalism was profoundly discouraged in the Olympic movement in those days, so Thorpe is stripped of his gold medals.

This begins a downward spiral; even though Thorpe is playing sports professionally, he's also turning to drink, destroying his marriage and his sporting career. In the movie version of Thorpe's life, however, Pop Warner gives Thorpe the chance to redeem himself.

I'm not certain exactly how much of the story is slightly less than true but for the required dramatic effect; Thorpe as I understand it had multiple failed marriages but it's not really necessary to show marriage after marriage to get the point across. On the other hand, some of the "dramatization" is fairly egregious. Thorpe did not have the happy ending that the movie seems to give him. Burt Lancaster is the one Hollywood actor of the era who had both the star power and the athletic prowess to play Thorpe, and does as well as a white person can playing the character. (I don't think there was anyone even of mixed race at that time who could have been cast.)

Jim Thorpe -- All American is another good example of the Hollywood biopic of the studio era: a movie that's never not entertaining, but also never fully accurate.

Stanley Kramer makes a medical drama

Whether producing or directing, Stanley Kramer was known for making "message pictures" dealing with important social issues. Sometimes, his style was blunt enough that the message came across as more important than the picture. One good example of this is Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. This was something I kept thinking about as I was watching his debut directorial effort (although he had already produced several movies), Not As a Stranger.

Lucas Marsh (Robert Mitchum) is a medical student at Big City Medical School, studing under Dr. Aarons (Broderick Crawford) and lightening the mood with his best friend, Alfred Boone (Frank Sinatra, and yes, everybody is pushing 40 and much too old for the parts they're playing). Watch also for a young Lee Marvin as another medical student, although he's not part of the second half of the movie. Marsh is highly driven and pretty darn intelligent, but this causes him to clash with the established doctors. To be fair, part of this is that they may not be up to date on the latest medical techniques.

Also causing problems for Marsh is his father (Lon Chaney in a small role). Marsh's mom died some time back and left him a fair amount of money which should help pay for medical school. But Dad is an alcoholic, and drank away the money, leaving Lucas with no money to pay his upcoming tuition. Thankfully for him, however, he does meet somebody who has a little bit of money saved up. That's nurse Kirstina (Olivia de Havilland), who has been saving up money, and who for some reason is part of the Swedish immigrant community along with Oley (Harry Morgan), forcing her to essay a ridiculous Swedish accent for no discernible plot reason. Lucas marries Kristina for her money.

Eventually everybody graduates from medical school and does their internship before going into practice. Alfred decided to go the route that Robert Donat did for a while in The Citadel, of becoming a wealthy doctor in private practice, although he's going to remain Lucas and Kristina's friend and show up when necessary to advance the plot. Lucas, on the other hand, decides to go to a small town that looks partly like a studio backlot and partly like a smaller city than a small town. There are some farmers around, and Lucas will certainly be serving them, but there's also a surprisingly well-equipped hospital and some ritzy areas.

The ritzy areas and farm life come together one evening when Marsh goes out to attend to a farmer who got kicked by his horse. The farmer's wife says that Miss Lang (Gloria Grahame) wants to see him, even though it's 1:00 AM. Now when you see the name Gloria Grahame in the credits, you can guess that the character is a bit of a vamp, or a femme fatale. Well, more than a little bit. Lang lives in a big house with a sort of hobby horse-raising concern attached to it, and she leads a lonely life drinking more than she should. You can guess that Lucas is going to find himself falling in love with her, and that this is going to cause a problem with his marriage to Kristina.

I mentioned at the beginning that Stanley Kramer made a bunch of message pictures, and boy does he try to insert as many of the medical drama tropes as he can to get The Message across. At times this makes the movie become unintentionally funny. There are montages of the doctors treating patients which look like they could have come from a medical issue of the week TV drama. Worse, or more hilarious depending on your point of view, is Kramer's use of horses when Marsh finally falls and becomes unfaithful with Lang. There's also the blatant foreshadowing. Kristina talks so much about having a family that you know that she's going to get pregnant, and it's obvious way before we see the scene of Dr. Boone telling her that it's already happened.

The casting is also interesting. Robert Mitchum is clearly miscast, much like epileptic research scientist Ronald Reagan in Night Unto Night. And as I mentioned, why Kramer made de Havilland and Harry Morgan take on Swedish accents was beyond me. On the other hand, Broderick Crawford shows he could play more than tough guys. Charles Bickford plays the elderly small-town doctor who takes Marsh into his practice, and he does well too.

Overall, Not As a Stranger is a movie that's more interesting for how it lets The Message dominate the movie than it is for being any sort of truly great movie. But it's still worth a watch.

The country of size

Gregory Peck was honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August. That gave me the opportunity to record one of his films that I hadn't blogged about before, The Big Country. Actor Burl Ives picked up a Supporting Actor Oscar for his role, so TCM can use it during 31 Days of Oscar as well. Indeed, it shows up again this year, getting its airing tomorrow (March 30) at 11:15 AM. So as always, I made a point of watching it with an eye to doing a review on it here.

Gregory Peck stars as Jim McKay (but would not go on to host Wide World of Sports), a man who had worked as a captain in his family's shipping company but is now going west. That's because in port one of those times, he met Pat Terrill (Carroll Baker), who was going east for some reason not specified, since all of that took place before the action depicted in the movie. The two fell in love and McKay proposed to her, so now he's coming out to marry her since her father Maj. Henry Terrill (Charles Bickford) owns a substantial ranch.

McKay meets Pat in town, where Pat is staying with friend Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons). Julie is the local schoolteacher, but she owns a spread of her own that is fallow since the death of her father. The big thing about her spread, however, is the "Big Muddy", a lake which has a good deal of water on it that's important for watering one's cattle. Julie is intent on letting everybody water their cattle, but for obvious reasons various landowners want the lake for themselves.

On their way out to Maj. Henry's ranch house, Jim and Pat run into the Hannassey brothers, whose father Rufus (Burl Ives) is one of the ranchers who wants Big Muddy and has been trying for years, obviously unsuccessfully, to get Julie to sell. Rufus at heart does have a sense of honor, as we'll see in the finale, but he's raised his kids badly as eldest brother Buck (future Rifleman Chuck Connors, getting to play one of his bad-guy roles) leads the rest of the brothers in trying to waylay Jim and Pat. Indeed, there's long been a feud between the Hannasseys and the Terrills.

Further complicating matters is the presence of Maj. Terrill's ranch foreman, Steve Leech (Charlton Heston). He has a feeling his position is going to be in jeopardy once Pat marries Jim, since the major has no sons to take over the ranch. Steve also isn't so sure an easterner who spent a lot of time on the ocean is one to know much about ranching, so he doesn't have much respect for Jim.

Things get more complicated for Jim as he begins to learn about all the things that have been going on in the time before he got to the area. Things get even worse when the major decides he's going to try to prevent the Hannasseys from watering their cattle, resorting to force if necessary. As mentioned earlier, Rufus Hannassey has been trying to get Julie to sell, and she hasn't. But Jim, unsurprising for a character played by Gregory Peck, has an uncompromising and unerring sense of right and wrong. After seeing first-hand the conflict between the major and Rufus, Jim decides to buy Julie's ranch, with the proviso that he's going to let everybody water their cattle there.

When Pat finds out about that wrinkle and that the ranch isn't a wedding present to her, she gets furious. Rufus understandably thinks that if Jim has bought the ranch, it's going to screw him over since everybody knows Jim and Pat are supposed to get married. (Well, nobody knows yet that the engagement has been broken off.) It leads to the final battle between the Hannasseys and the Terrills.

The Big Country is a big movie, running 166 minutes. And frankly, that's the one big problem with the movie. It's unsurprisingly well acted, with very nice cinematography. But at its heart it's a fairly simple western story that had no need to be expanded to 166 minutes. The writers could easily have distilled this down to around two hours and come up with something just as good. Still, the quality of the other parts of the movie is good enough that its length is less of a flaw than in some other movies.

So definitely give The Big Country a go. Just be aware that you're in for the long haul.

The Song of Bernadette

Er, not that song of Bernadette

One of the movies that started showing up in the FXM rotation a few months back is The Song of Bernadette. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow morning at 3:10 AM (or overnight tonight depending on what time zone you're in).

I have a feeling that the basic story is already reasonably well known. Bernadette Soubirous (Jennifer Jones) is an adolescent girl living with her siblings and poor parents (Anne Revere and Roman Bohnen) in the town of Lourdes in southwest France in the mid-19th century. Bernadette goes with a couple of her sisters to go fetch some firewood, something which requires crossing a creek. Because she's sickly, she has to stay behind while the others cross the creek. It's there that she sees an apparition of a lady that doesn't identify itself.

She doesn't want to tell her sisters, but they saw Bernadette acting strangely when they returned, so they know something's up and get her to tell about the vision, which they promptely report to Mom, Way to keep a secret, girls. And unsurpisingly, word is going to get out to the rest of the town.

Meanwhile, the apparition, which of course only Bernadette can see, has told her to keep coming back to the grotto where she first saw it because the apparition is going to appear again every day for the next 14 days. Bernadette goes, and others start following her.

However, there are people who don't like this, notably the local prosecutor Dutour (Vincent Price). As for the Catholic Church, well, let's just say that figuring out whether something is a miracle is highly political as well as religious. When it comes to a powerful person the Church wants to canonize, such as recent Pope John Paul II, they'll come up with a way to declare the existence of a miracle come hell or high water. But if some dumb schlub like Bernadette claims to see something, the Church is going to drag its heels and try to come up with every possible scientific explanation for the supposed miracle because they don't want the skeptics proving them wrong. And this puts local priest Fr. Peyramale (Charles Bickford) in a bind.

Of course, we know what happened, which is that the Church eventually declared the events miraculous and that Lourdes would go on to become one of the major Catholic pilgrimage sites. Bernadette would go on to become a novitiate and die young thanks to her chronic asthma (in the movie, it's changed to a combination of tuberculosis and a tumor that's probably cancerous).

The movie states openly at both the beginning and the end that if you believe, no explanation is necessary, and that if you don't, no explanation is possible. As for the movie, it's clearly on the side of the believer; after all, the movie lets us in on the apparition, which reminded me of the dream sequence in Sparrows. But while the movie is reverent, I didn't find it obnoxiously so.

Jennifer Jones won the Oscar for Best Actress, but to be honest I felt like she didn't have a particularly difficult role to play. Multiple people received supporting acting nominations and frankly they all deserved it. Best among these is Gladys Cooper as Sr. Marie-Thérèse, a local nun teaching Bernadette at the beginning who shows up at the convent at the end. She's clearly deeply envious of Bernadette to the point that I was going to comment on her being a jerk. But she gets her comeuppance at the end of the scene and has a powerful resolution. Bickford and Revere also received nominations.

The Song of Bernadette is a well-made movie in the style of pre-TV era Hollywood biopics, and is certainly worth a watch. The TCM Shop lists it as available on what looks like a dodgy DVD, while Amazon has it available on streaming video.