Time Without Pity

TCM ran a morning and afternoon of the films of actress Ann Todd some time back. One that I watched just before it expired from my DVR so that I could write up a review of it here was Time Without Pity.

Todd isn't the star here; that would be Michael Redgrave, although we don't see him in the opening scene. Instead, that pre-credits scene is of an older man killing a young woman named Jennie Cole. Then, after the opening credits, we see a plane landing in the UK after a transatlantic flight. Getting off is David Graham (Michael Redgrave). He's an alcoholic who has been away in Canada in some sort of in-patient treatment, which must have taken quite a long time since David missed not just that murder. David's adult son Alec (Alec Macowan) was accused of the murder of that young girl, found guilty, and sentenced to hang, with the execution being the day after Dad arrived back in Britain. We also learn that Dad's alcoholism has been going on long enough that his son doesn't care about his father, and is perfectly willing to be executed even though we know he's not guilty. Dad is convinced his son couldn't have done such a thing, and plans on proving his son's innocence.

The first person David tries to talk to is Agnes Cole (Joan Plowright), the sister of the murder victim. Agnes is a showgirl, and is convinced that Alec must be guilty. Or, at least, that's what she has David believe with the way she's screaming at him and doesn't want to talk to him at all.

Alec, having been forced to spend a lot of time away from his father, became friends with the Stanford family, specificall with the son Brian. Brian's adoptive father Robert (Leo McKern) is a wealthy automobile manufacturer, and it was in the Stanford house that the murder took place. Alec, you see, spent a lot of time there what with his father being away, and was the boyfriend of the murder victim. David doesn't let on who he is when he visits the Stanfords, (Ann Tood plays Mrs. Stanford), and Dad doesn't seem to recognize David, although the son Brian does and doesn't tell his father that David is using a false identity to visit the Stanfords.

David continues to try to find clues, all with a metaphorical clock constantly ticking down the hours until the scheduled execution. It seems ridiculous that this tyro should be able to solve the mystery when the police haven't been able to, even if we already know who the killer is since we see his face in the opening scene. It also seems ridiculous that the trial went the way it must have gone, but then we wouldn't have had a movie if these things hadn't happened.

Time Without Pity is another of those movies where I can see why somebody like Michael Redgrave would want to take the lead. The idea of having to try to prove somebody's innocence against an extremely tight deadline makes for a potentially really interesting story, as we've seen in great movies like Saboteur. Here, however, it seemed to me like it would be so unlikely for the legal system to screw up this badly, to the extent that it makes the movie not work all that well for me. Still, everybody tries, but can't quite overcome the script flaws.

Mourning Becomes Electra

I mentioned back in November that TCM had a double-feature of Rosalind Russell movies I hadn't seen before. One of them was the movie version of Eugene O'Neill's play Mourning Becomes Electra, which I finally got around to watching.

The movie, like the play, is divided into three parts. The first, called Homecoming, is set in April 1865. In a small town in New England, news is reaching the locals that it looks as though the Civil War is finally about to end, although news of Lee's surrender hasn't been made official. The town is dominated by the Mannons, although all of them are out of town. Patriarch Ezra (Raymond Massey) and son Orin (Michael Redgrave) have been off fighting, while mom Christine (Katina Paxinou) and daughter Lavinia (Rosalind Russell) are both off in New York, although not together. Tending the house is groundskeeper Seth (Henry Hull), who serves as a sort of Greek chorus for this tragedy, giving a bit of backstory to some locals who have never been in the house because the Mannons have a complicated relationship and keep outsiders out as much as possible.

In New York, Lavinia spies on Mom, and follows her to the house of ship's captain Adam Brant (Leo Genn). Worse, Lavinia sees Mom kiss Adam. This pisses Lavinia off, in part because Mom's being unfaithful, but also in part because Lavinia herself has the hots for Adam. Further complicating things is a legend that Adam is actually a cousin to Lavinia: Ezra's brother ran off with the nurse ages ago, leading Ezra to destroy the previous iteration of the Mannon house and build a magnificent new one. Adam would be the now adult child of that relationship. Meanwhile, Lavinia's got another man pursuing her in the form of Peter Niles (Kirk Douglas). He's been in love with Lavinia, and his sister Hazel (Nancy Coleman) has been interested in Orin. But Lavinia wanted to put off marriage until she knows that Peter would survive the war.

Dad and brother Orin eventually return from the war, although Dad is in many ways a broken man. He's already getting up there in years considering how he's already got two adult children and he's reaching the age where it's not uncommon for a man to suffer a fatal heart attack, especially if he's spent four years fighting a stressful war. Lavinia knows about Mom's dalliance with Brant, and knows that if Dad learns about it, it will kill him. Worse, Mom is becoming the vindictive sort of person who would tell the husband she hates about this affair just so it will kill him and leave Mom free to marry Brant. And if that doesn't do it, Mom can always try to get some poison that will do the job.

Unbelievable, all of this drama happens just in The Homecoming. We're an hour into the movie, and we've got two more sections to deal with. The Hunted deals with the aftermath of the death of the patriarch. Orin doesn't seem ready to take over the family, especially considering the sort of relationship he had with his mother. He too wouldn't be able to deal with learning about Mom's relationship with Adam. Lavinia tries to turn Orin against Mom by making him see that Mom has been having that affair with Adam, while Christine tries to turn him against his own sister by claiming to him that Lavinia is going insane. And then comes The Haunted. By now, Mom has died, too, but Orin and Lavinia can't escape their respective pasts.

I've never seen the stage version of Mourning Becomes Electra, which as I understand goes on even longer than the movie version, which is long at 159 minutes. At least, it's 159 minutes in the print TCM ran. Supposedly the original cut was even longer (which would make sense if the play was longer), and that got edited down to under two hours for American audiences with the British still getting the 159-minute version. In any case, it's a slog. It's easy to see why the movie was a box office failure.

However, Rosalind Russell gives a fine performance and picked up an Oscar nomination, as did Michael Redgrave. Kirk Douglas was just starting out at this point; I think this is even before Out of the Past. So he doesn't have all that much to do, although he shows he's a more than capable actor. It's just a shame that nobody could figure out how to edit the material down into something that would work if conceived as a two-hour film.

Bunbury

I've mentioned a lot how I've got a bunch a movies on my DVR that need watching before they can expire. With that in mind, coming up next is the 1952 adaption of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest. Having finally watched it, I can now do a review on it.

The movie opens up in London, at the apartment of one Ernest Worthing (Michael Redgrave). He's visited by an Algernon Moncrieff (Michael Denison), who claims among other things to have Ernest's cigarette case. This, however, is a ruse, as the cigarette case is one with a dedication from a Cecily that Ernest claims not to know anything about. And it's about to get a whole lot more complicated. Ernest theoretically does know Cecily, except that Ernest isn't Ernest. Ernest is really Jack Worthing, who lives at an estate out in the country where a much younger Cecily is his ward. Ernest is a fake identity, a made-up poor brother used by Jack as a ruse to be able to get away from his country home and go down to London.

And, to be fair, he's not the only faker out there. Algernon has created a fake identity, too, that of Bunbury, a friend who lives out in the country and is an excuse for Algernon to get away from London to go to the country. And once Algernon learns about Cecily, he'd like to go see her and put the moves on her. And Alergnon has a young female relative of marriageable age himself: his cousin Gwendolen (Joan Greenwood), still living with her mother, Jack's aunt Augusta, Lady Bracknell (Edith Evans).

Worthing and Algernon meet the two women, and Algernon comes up with a way to leave Jack and Gwendolen alone. Except that Gwendolen thinks this is Ernest Worthing, not Jack, a deception Algernon is perfectly willing to keep up. So when Aunt Augusta starts questioning Worthing, this being an era when the parents had to approve of marriages, Jack has to make up a pedigree about having been abandond as a child.

And then to make things more complicated, Algernon figures out where the Worthing country house is, and shows up unnanounced. Cecily and her governess, Miss Prism (Margaret Rutherford), immediately presume that this is the Ernest that Jack keeps talking about, something that displeases Jack to no end when he shows up. Algernon-as-Ernest proposes to Cecily. But then in a move that ups the complexity another level, Gwendolen also shows up, claiming that she too is engaged to Ernest, even though we all know there is no Ernest.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a movie that really demands a lot of attention while watching, as it's mostly in the dialog and there's a lot going on. It is, however, very well acted, and sure to be a delight for anyone who's a fan of the works of Oscar Wilde. I have to say that I haven't seen or read that much of Wilde's work, although obviously I think I did a review on the 1940s MGM adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Grey ages ago.

Fritz Lang does Rebecca

Some months back, TCM ran a movie that sounded interesting to me, so once again I recorded it in order to be able to watch it later and do a review on it. This time, the movie in question is Secret Beyond the Door. Having watched it, it is now time to do the review of the movie.

Celia (Joan Bennett) starts off with a bizarre prologue about certain dreams, before telling us that doesn't matter because it's her wedding day! She's in Mexico, where she's met Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave). She went to Mexico after the death of her brother, and wound up with a trust fund that her lawyer set up. He's not just the family lawyer, he's a good friend who is willing to marry her. But as we see she winds up marrying this mysterious Mark.

The honeymoon seems to go well, until she locks the door of her suite as a bit of a joke to make him jealous. Mark responds by saying that he has to go back to New York immediately. He's been publishing a money-losing magazine, and supposedly a company in New York wants to buy it. He's also abruptly emotionally cold to Celia, telling her that she shouldn't follow him to New York, but instead should go straight to the Lamphere family home outside of the city. And then the maid tells her Mark was lying about getting a telegram. Nice way to start a marrige.

And then Celia gets to her new home, and finds that there's a lot more going on. Mark is an architect, which is no big deal, but the much bigger deal is that he's a widower, with a teenaged kid that Mark never told Celia about. Also living at the house are some servants, Mark's sister Caroline (Anne Revere), and a personal assistant, Robey (Barbara O'Neil). Robey jealously guards Mark's office, and wears scarves because she got burned saving David from a fire some time back.

If the secrets we've already found out that Mark kept from Celia aren't enough, we're going to find there's a lot more. When Mark holds a house party, he decides to show off his hobby, which is designing spare rooms that are replicas of rooms where famous murders happened! Boy is that odd, and it unsurprisingly puts Celia off a bit. She's even more put off when there's one room that's locked. That must be the room where Mark keeps the uranium sands from the Ai Moraes mountains... oh wait, that's a different Alfred Hitchcock movie, and Celia is only the second Mrs. De Winter, not a spy and daughter of a Nazi.

But as you can guess, Celia is exceedingly curious about what's behind that last door. She's also beginning to get the impression that there's something Mark hasn't been telling her about the death of his first wife. All of this gets Celia to start wondering whether he might have killed his first wife -- and whether he might be harboring thoughts of killing her, too!

Secret Beyond the Door is a movie that has some obvious parallels to some Alfred Hitchcock movies, but was directed by Fritz Lang. Unsurprisingly with such a director, the film is technically quite competent, with a lot of interesting visual touches. However, I can't help but think that Lang could have picked a better script to which to apply all those touches. The plot is enough of a mess that I almost found myself wondering whether the film was about to break out into parody. But it never stops taking itself seriously.

Not that Secret Beyond the Door is a bad movie; it's more that if I'd recommend movies from any of the main people involved, this isn't the first one I'd pick. It's still worth one watch, however.

Young Cassidy

Er, not that Cassidy....

One of TCM's daytime themes back in December was of "young" characters, that is some famous people earlier in their lives. The movies included Young Cassidy, which is on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection. Not having blogged about it here before, I decided to watch and do a post about it.

Rod Taylor plays the title role, a man named John Cassidy who ultimately becomes the Irish playwright Seán O'Casey, whom you may recall from Alfred Hitchcock's version of his play Juno and the Paycock. (He was born John Casey, and among his pen names was apparently Cassidy and a Gaelicized version of Cassidy.) He's a laborer in Dublin circa 1910, a time in Irish history which was about to get very turblent, something that you may again remember from another classic movie, Clark Gable's Parnell. A lot of the Irish are getting radicalized due to the grinding poverty and want home rule if not outright independence. As for Cassidy, he tries to add to the support of his family by writing revolutionary pamphlets and short stories.

Along the way, Cassidy meets the prostitute Daisy (Julie Christie) and has a brief affair with her; he also meets bookstore employee Nora (Maggie Smith) and has an affair with her to. A couple of the events in the run-up to the 1916 Uprising are depicted, but Cassidy rejects joining the military arm of the revolutionaries because he thinks their military tactics are stupid. Eventually Cassidy sells a short story but is apparently too stupid to know what a check is or how to open a bank account, and he needs that money to pay for the funeral of his dear beloved Irish mother (Flora Robson).

Cassidy continues to struggle and eventually writes a play Shadow of a Gunman, which the famous writier and Abbey Theatre proprietor W. B. Yeats (played by Michael Redgrave; the name rhymes with mates and not meats) accepts for staging. It's not much of a success, but Cassidy eventually writes another play, The Plough and the Stars that causes a literal riot at the Abbey Theater (this was based on a real incident), and Cassidy has to leave for England, eventually becoming Seán O'Casey.

There's probably enough material in O'Casey's life to make a good biopic, but we don't really get it in Young Cassidy. That's because it was produced by John Ford, who was supposed to direct as well before illness got in the way. Ford had a nauseatingly doe-eyed view of Ireland culminating in the ultra-treacly The Quiet Man. Irish politics of the era was incredibly complex, since there was all that difficulty with Britain followed by a Civil War (to this day, the two biggest parties in Irish politics don't fit into the standard left-right spectrum seen in most other countries). But with the large number of Irish-Americans, we only seem to get a view of the country that says "Britain Bad, anti-Britain good" and generally avoids the complexity. (Granted, I probably go too far in the opposite direction from growing up with a mother of Irish descent and seeing the inveterate whining of the sort of Irish-Americans still claiming to be fighting against bigotry that hadn't existed for generations.) John Ford is probably the worst of the lot when it comes to the subject.

Still, some of the acting is good, as should be expected when you've got people like Maggie Smith and Michael Redgrave in the cast, and the production values with Irish location shooting are good. And some of you will probably like this one more than I did. So as always, watch and judge for yourself.

The Quiet American

I saw The Quiet American on the TCM schedule as part of the spotlight on reporters, and since I got it on DVD last year, I decided to watch the DVD to do a full-length post here.

The movie starts off at Tet, the Vietnamese New Year celebrations, in Saigon circa 1952. This was when French Indochina was still a thing, divided into several provinces, but there was a war for independence going on that eventually drove the French out in 1954. Anyhow, during this particular celebration, a dead body washes up in the river. Apparently, the dead man was a westerner, the titular American, so a British journalist named Fowler (Michael Redgrave) who knew the American is brought in for questioning by the police.

Fowler flashes back to an early meeting with the American (whose name is never given, and is played by Audie Murphy). While Fowler and a lot of the other westerners in Saigon had grown cynical, our American is a fresh, unused mind who doesn't know the difference between an ism and a kangaroo. He works not for the US government, but for one of those organizations that is supposedly providing relief aid, but may in fact be doing something else. Meanwhile, the American meets a local woman Phuong (Girogia Moll) and falls in love with her. This is a problem in that Phuong is Fowler's mistress; further complicating things is that Fowler has an estranged wife back home who isn't going to grant him a divorce.

Fowler covers the Communist insurgency as a reporter -- and keeps bumping into the American, who somehow seems to be everywhere and knows everyone or something like that. It leads Fowler to investigate, helped by Mr. Heng (Richard Loo) who knows something of what is going on, but leaves it to Fowler to fill in the blanks. Apparently one of the shipments the American's organization had sent was opened, revealing barrels of a plastic used for injection molding, which means the American is doing something far more serious.

I have to admit that I didn't care for The Quiet American as much as many other reviewers seem to. I found it talky with a whole lot of nothing going on, and I found the expats to be largely as tiresome as the ones in Soldier of Fortune which I watched not too long ago. The love triangle didn't particularly interest me, either. Audie Murphy definitely has a different role here than he essayed in most of his movies, and he does about as well as I think he could have considering that I didn't feel the screenplay helped his enigmatic character. Redgrave is better, but that shouldn't come as a surprise.

Some of the shooting was done in Vietnam -- the movie was filmed in 1957 and released a year later, so this is when South Vietnam was solidly pro-Western. That shooting is definitely a plus, although it would have been nice to see it in color. The rest of the movie was shot in Italy, which is why you have an Italian actress playing a Vietnamese woman.

Considering everybody else's glowing reviews, this is probably one you should watch for yourself. The DVD I bought isn't very expensive, so even if you don't like it, you're not out much money.