The River (1951)

France / USA / India, 99 minutes

Director: Jean Renoir

Writers: Rumer Godden, Jean Renoir

Photography: Claude Renoir

Music: M.A. Partha Sarathy

Editor: George Gale

Cast: Nora Swinburne, Esmond Knight, Thomas E. Breen, Patricia Walters, Arthur Shields, Adrienne Corri, Suprova Mukerjee, Radha

Director and cowriter Jean Renoir’s first color movie is something of a departure from his acclaimed pictures of the ‘30s, Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, which in many ways set terms for European cinema to come. The River not only flashes with vivid technicolor but is set and was wholly shot in India. Heck, Satyajit Ray is even on the crew as an assistant director, speaking of the greater connections of cinema. The narrative style is familiar to Renoir, an easy-flowing stream of incidents, anecdotes, and storylines in the lives of British colonialists with their families. The main family has a patriarch (“Father,” Esmond Knight), a matriarch (“Mother,” the regally maternal Nora Swinburne), a boy, and four girls, plus Indian servants. The oldest girls, Valerie (Adrienne Corri) and especially Harriet (Patricia Walters), are as close as we get to main characters. It’s told from the point of view of Harriet as an adult, reminiscing, and it’s fair to call the overall picture a coming-of-age tale for both girls.

In my latter-day state of woke I was immediately uncomfortable with the spectacle of British patricians in India, however well meaning (debatable), with their Indian servants and attempts to understand Indian culture, especially via the point of view of white adolescent girls. Father, for example, operates a jute mill (“exploiting resources”—it’s hard not to see it glaringly that way). But Martin Scorsese, in an interview on the Criterion Channel, scoffed at the idea of looking at this movie through a colonial frame. It’s a movie that means a good deal to him personally, and as usual in his interviews he argues eloquently, even emotionally, for the picture. OK, maybe, I’m with him on Renoir, truly, but I could never entirely shake my misgivings even as, of course, The River stands up to all of Renoir’s films.

Ace in the Hole (1951)

USA, 111 minutes

Director: Billy Wilder

Writers: Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels, Walter Newman, Victor Desny

Photography: Charles Lang

Music: Hugo Friedhofer

Editors: Doane Harrison, Arthur P. Schmidt

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Porter Hall, Robert Arthur, Richard Benedict, Ray Teal, Frank Cady, Richard Gaines

Director and cowriter Billy Wilder is one of my favorite filmmakers—Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd. are on my short list of the best of all time, and The Apartment is not far behind—but I’m reluctant to make too much of Ace in the Hole, which Wikipedia among many others includes with Wilder’s major work. I like the noirish feel of it but struggle with the narrative, which exaggerates outrageously under cover of being a satire. And I guess I may also have a Kirk Douglas problem. He plays Charles Tatum with his typical feral intensity, a weaselly ankle-biting reporter on a downward spiral, washing up in Albuquerque and hunting for a break. Any break will do.

The story involves a type of US news item that seems to recur and catch national attention every 10 or 20 years: kids down a well, specific people isolated in floods, miners in a cave-in. Stuff like that. The most famous case at the time of this picture may have been Floyd Collins, trapped for days in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave in 1925. The story was seized on for constant coverage by then-new radio broadcasters. An example on this side of the 20th century is “Baby Jessica,” who was 18 months old when she fell down a well in 1987. It took 58 hours to get her out. In Ace in the Hole the victim is Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), plundering a burial ground in a nearby mountain considered holy by local Native Americans. So among other things Ace in the Hole offers up an early version of violated Indian graveyard business, later a staple of horror pictures. For a long time everybody has hated the media, from newspapers, radio, and TV of the last century to the internet-driven landscape today. As hard as it may be to believe, it has been worse in the past (though we are presently challenging that more and more). This is one of those stories, a theme sounded in the great Citizen Kane, Meet John Doe, A Face in the Crowd, and many other movies.

“Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” (1951)

This story by J.D. Salinger is skillfully done, a kind of tawdry sex farce that takes a hard turn toward pathos at the end. A gray-haired man is in his bedroom with a woman when the phone rings. He asks if she has any reason for him not to answer it. “God,” she says in perfect Salinger diction. “I don’t know. I mean what do you think?” He answers the call. All clues point to it being the husband of the woman. The gray-haired man is a colleague of the husband (they are lawyers). The husband is looking for his wife. She isn’t home yet. He’s distraught. The gray-haired man tries to soothe him, says she probably went off somewhere with mutual friends. All of them were at a party that night. It’s late now, the wee hours. The husband is also worried about a case he lost. The gray-haired man finally calms him—at one point the husband says he wants to come over for a drink—and gets him to go to bed and rest, assures him his wife will show up eventually, it’s just one of those nights. A few minutes later the phone rings again and it’s the husband, calling to say no worries, his wife just got home. It’s a searing, poignant moment. We know it’s a lie—she’s still there with the gray-haired man. But the husband obviously doesn’t want him to worry. Office politics is mixed up in this too. The husband is worried about his job and doesn’t want to alienate the gray-haired man. He may need allies. Yes, it’s another midcentury New Yorker story about white men philandering, but Salinger pulls it off well. As always he is a master of dialogue, with the italicized syllables and everything, and the story is mostly dialogue. It zeros in on the loser in this triangle, the hurt one, however incidental he may ultimately be to either or both the wife and the gray-haired man. The husband is generally annoying and whiny, but the story makes us feel for him. The setup may or may not have been original in 1951 but it’s not new now. We’ve seen countless scenes like it. But like Bob Newhart, Salinger makes the most of a one-sided phone conversation. It’s not presented to the reader that way, we get both sides, but we’re mindful the wife is getting the one-sided version, which adds another dimension. Solid story—more evidence Salinger was one of the best at the form.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

On Dangerous Ground (1951)

USA, 82 minutes

Directors: Nicholas Ray, Ida Lupino

Writers: A.I. Bezzerides, Nicholas Ray, Gerald Butler

Photography: George E. Diskant

Music: Bernard Herrmann

Editor: Roland Gross

Cast: Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino, Ward Bone, Ed Begley, Cleo Moore, Charles Kemper, Ian Wolfe, Sumner Williams, Frank Ferguson, Anthony Ross

The oddly structured and executed On Dangerous Ground is kind of a lumpy affair, arguably stagy and affected in many places. IMDb credits Ida Lupino as an uncredited director with Nicholas Ray, who also gets a credit as writer. Wikipedia has nothing to say about this so I’m not sure what the issues are. Just looking at it, it’s pretty clear most of the first 30 minutes are wasted on establishing that Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is a sadistic cop who beats confessions out of criminals on the regular. It’s not that it’s a bad plot point—indeed, it’s an important one. But they take too long with it in a movie that is already short.

There’s a strange, prolonged, and inadvertently hilarious scene, for example, where Wilson’s boss, Captain Brawley (Ed Begley), is eating solo at a restaurant. He’s going at it like a starving squirrel that just discovered garbage treasure. “More peas,” he orders, telling Wilson the restaurant serves unusually excellent vegetables. He has asked Wilson there to reprimand him, between mouthfuls, for Wilson’s brutality. But the warning doesn’t take, Wilson ruptures the bladder of a suspect during an interrogation, hospitalizing him. He is subsequently sent “upstate” to work a case and cool off. These scenes upstate are shot mostly on location in Granby, Colorado, at which point the picture notably comes alive.

Strangers on a Train (1951)

USA, 101 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writers: Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde, Whitfield Cook, Patricia Highsmith, Ben Hecht

Photography: Robert Burks

Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Editor: William H. Ziegler

Cast: Robert Walker, Farley Granger, Patricia Hitchcock, Kasey Rogers, Marion Lorne, Ruth Roman, Leo G. Carroll, Howard St. John, Jonathan Hale

In director Alfred Hitchcock’s rogue’s gallery pantheon of woman-hating psychopaths—which includes at least Joseph Cotten as Charlie Oakley in Shadow of a Doubt, Robert Walker as Bruno Antony here in Strangers on a Train, and Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho—Walker is not to be underestimated or taken for granted. I would not put him last in any stack-ranking and might put him first. Everyone knows the story in Strangers on a Train from the Sonic Youth song “Shadow of a Doubt”: “Met a stranger on a train / ... He said / ‘You take me and I’ll be you’ / ‘You kill him and I’ll kill her.’” Tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Granger) becomes the target of convenience in Antony’s plot for the perfect murder(s). Antony wants to rid himself of his judgmental tycoon father and save his inheritance too. He offers to kill Haines’s troublesome wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers, billed as Laura Elliott), who won’t give him a divorce now that she knows he’s involved with a senator’s daughter. Miriam is also pregnant by another man. Antony says his plan is perfect because no one can connect the murderers to their victims. Haines, who has indeed just met Antony on a train, takes it as an unpleasant joke and thinks no more of it. Then Miriam turns up dead, strangled to death in a lover’s lane near an amusement park. And now Haines begins hearing from Antony about what he needs to know to murder Antony’s father.

Miriam is killed surprisingly quickly, almost as soon as the idea comes up—barely 20 minutes into the movie. It’s practically a shock to the system. Miriam and the amusement park and the two men she is on a date with are lurid and wanton and the whole scene seems made to order for murder if not orgies of violence. Once the deed is done the boom increasingly lowers on Haines, who doesn’t know how to get out of the mess and instinctively tries to hide that he knows Antony at all—which of course does not work. Antony has ways, as a D.C. party scene shows, of insinuating himself into the life of Haines and the senator’s family. Granger plays Haines like a cornered rat, sweating and licking his lips in anxiety and trying to square the various points of guilt that are hemming him in. Inevitably the movie ends up back at the amusement park, whose ambience has not improved any.

“The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” (1951)

Margaret St. Clair’s very short story should be a reminder to all of us to read more Lord Dunsany. It rivals Dunsany’s original gnoles story from 1912 (“How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles”)—both are in the Weird anthology. Gnoles are jewel-eyed creatures who live in the woods and have no use and little regard for humans. This story features a Rotary Club style of midcentury salesman, Mortensen, who studies Dale Carnegie and other sales literature. Mortensen has decided on setting up trade with gnoles in order to service their “cordage requirements.” The situation is absurd. Very little is known about gnoles other than a general sense they are quite dangerous. But our go-getter is determined to give it a try—he needs to get his sales numbers up. The story is short enough to verge on short-short but there’s no real hard twist to it. We come to it with a good idea of what’s going to happen. “The gnoles had a bad reputation,” it starts. But Mortensen “reasoned, correctly enough, that cordage must be something for which the gnoles had a long unsatisfied want.” Indeed, that’s exactly what proves out. They are happy to purchase rope and pay him with a fabulous emerald the size of a personal watermelon. Mortensen should have quit while he was ahead but thinks it would be taking advantage of them to accept such an enormous gem. For one thing, he thinks he couldn’t possibly make the change for it. Instead, he asks for something he thinks is less valuable. But that item turns out to actually be infinitely precious to the gnoles. Even asking for it so offends them that they promptly issue their lethal response. “Though they fattened Mortensen sedulously, and, later, roasted and sauced him and ate him with real appetite, the gnoles slaughtered him in quite a humane fashion and never once thought of torturing him. That is unusual, for gnoles.” It’s all quite enjoyably ridiculous, much like the original Lord Dunsany. St. Clair has her slightly savage fun with it and she has an admirable facility for moving in and out of grotesque scenes with a deceptively light hand (much like Lord Dunsany). St. Clair was an occultist, a Quaker, a nudist, and a long-time correspondent of Clark Ashton Smith. She published under various names (“Rope” as by “Idris Seabright”) and was known mostly for science fiction. Her voice could be so tart and acerbic that she had problems with readers who thought she was making fun of them—she might have been. Though gnoles only appeared in these two stories, as far as I can tell, they live on now as “gnolls” in the Dungeons & Dragons universe.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories My Mother Never Told Me, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.

"The Hungry House" (1951)

This Robert Bloch story takes on the haunted house template and somehow beefs it up into something new. A young couple rents a nice but long abandoned house in the country. It doesn't take long before pandemonium starts edging in by degree. It's interesting to see a more conventional ghost story showing up in The Weird, as the anthology's editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have noted elsewhere they are not much into them. Bloch achieves an extraordinary tension here as events quickly transpire. He's usually good at story structure, and always good at keeping things moving, though he is also too often prone to a jocular tone and rimshot puns, which can dispel tension. But that's pretty much under control here, and his innovation of locating the malevolent spirit in mirrors and reflective surfaces is a good one. It's not so much the mirrors that set this apart as it is Bloch for once not getting in his own way. The story gets hooks in early and they only dig in deeper. The shadows and omens work in quiet but penetrating ways. Things seem to be there in the reflections but it might just be the light or the angle. There's a good moment when the husband finds a locked room in the attic full of mirrors, stuffed away presumably by a former resident. At a stroke it changes the whole story, accelerates the coagulating menace. You feel the clamp coming down. Bloch really wants to hit this reveal hard so the language becomes a bit overheated: "A thousand silver slivers stabbed at his eyeballs," etc. It takes too many sentences to find out these are mirrors. The scary part is that they are there, not that they glitter. But if some of these mirror passages are weak others are quite good, subtle and compelling, especially in the first experiences of the house. I suspect Bloch worked largely by instinct because when he hits it he really hits it. And he is hitting it here. He seems to be naturally inhabiting the material of this story, and it works. His depiction of the experience of this couple is great, and then, when we finally get to the legend behind all of it, that's great too. And Bloch is right to make us wait, because at the moment he's simply good at everything he's doing.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online (scroll down).

From Here to Eternity (1951)

I would be lying to you if I said this didn't sometimes feel like the most aptly named novel ever. My recurring question—how many more miles to eternity?—was probably not helped by reading a version with all the original excisions restored (mainly swearing and sex). It's not really a war novel, though it's set in Hawaii and includes the Pearl Harbor attack in a chapter near the end, but more a novel of the Great Depression. The cast of characters is a roundup of officers, noncommissioned officers, enlisted men, and their various women. There's a kind of manly unadorned style of language that is simple and clean, and rarely ornate, but often strays into self-consciously clunky. James Jones is not a skilled storyteller any more than a gifted stylist, by this novel. So it goes on for a long time. I like the way it's fully committed to the underdog, but honestly, a lot of these underdogs are not that sympathetic, even if we get how they got that way. From Here to Eternity has much more in common with Catch-22 than The Naked and the Dead, focused fiercely on the stultifying bureaucracy that was day-to-day life in the prewar military. Most of the characters, even the women, are hard drinkers. As usual, women and non-white people get the worst of everything. There are prostitutes and the usual related issues (hearts of gold, "I don't have to pay for it!" etc.). As a sheltered white boomer from the suburbs I have to say this kind of thing is mostly lost on me. Not only were prostitutes never any kind of formative experience for me, they were never even a factor at all. These lives look dreary and suffocating, going ridiculously flinty no harm no foul on all kinds of severely questionable behavior. I've also spent my life repelled by the kind of drinking reported here. The novel seemed most interesting to me in the section on the stockade. Our main hero (of two or three), Prewitt, was played by Montgomery Clift in the movie. He's a bit of a '50s antihero type, self-destructive and poetical, but that side of him (seen in his bugle playing, for example) is not very convincing, though Jones is often trying hard. Another important character, Sgt. Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster), is a similar case but with a slightly different flavoring as a noncommissioned officer. Another, Sgt. Maylon Stark (George Reeves, but the character was mostly written out of the movie), is more of same. Arguably a fourth, Angelo Maggio (Frank Sinatra), is yet more of the same. From Here to Eternity is an interesting big mess in many ways, but I'm still not sure it's really worth the time, let alone one of the 20th century's best novels.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

USA, 92 minutes
Director: Robert Wise
Writers: Edmund H. North, Harry Bates
Photography: Leo Tover
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editor: William Reynolds
Cast: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe, Billy Gray, Frances Bavier, Lock Martin

In the old movie business parlance (pre-'60s), a B movie was a low-budget shorter feature, often in a genre style, intended for the back half of double features. The A movie was the main attraction. It was full of stars and class and intended to win awards or make big box office or both. I would have guessed that The Day the Earth Stood Still, a science fiction picture with a theremin soundtrack I have been watching all my life, was a B movie, but no. It had a budget. The special effects are restrained, even primitive, but they are effective. The director is Robert Wise, a student of Orson Welles, whose career spanned The Magnificent Ambersons and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music between. Patricia Neal, an intriguing versatile cross between a character player and a leading lady, had a career starting to bust out all over. And the score is by Bernard Herrmann, a rising A player, who was among the first to use the theremin for the movies, followed shortly by thousands of B movie science fiction for the rest of the decade. In fact, the spooky electronic instrument was almost exclusively associated with science fiction movies until Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys tore it away for their own purposes. Pere Ubu returned the favor decades later but that's all another subject for another day. With everything else, The Day the Earth Stood Still is basically patient zero for science fiction theremin movies.

Reportedly Wise was interested in this project because he was a believer in UFOs. Indeed, the picture rings with its message, an uplifting one even, a fervent belief in a kind of idealized United Nations vision and proto hippie yearning for peaceful coexistence. These are the things I like about the movie myself—with my appreciation for Star Trek, it's possible that I just like a good stirring liberal skit. But actually there's a good deal of art and old-fashioned craft to this movie. At the same time, it reminds me a little of a friend I spoke to once who was "against" UFOs. It wasn't that he didn't believe they existed, but rather that he didn't believe aliens from other planets deserved the degradation of associating with humanity.

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

It's a strange feeling to go back to something so adolescent, by definition, at a time when adolescence is far more memory than reality. It's easy enough to see why I fell in love with this book when I was 15. The language is a torrential force in its own right, that cocky, wheedling, judgmental, insecure fine whine of the teenager in living angst—the invisible, the unheard, yearning to be seen and heard. Holden Caulfield is no one I would like to know anymore (if I ever did—more like I felt I was him) (there's a telling parenthetical). When I see him in public now I go in the other direction as soon as possible. And yet it's impossible not to have at least some affection for the poor guy. Details I never noticed before: how big he is, over six foot two. How often he uses the word "really," like a tic. The book is known for its use of the word "phony" but I'd bet "really" is in there even more. I really would. That singing narrative voice was J.D. Salinger's great gift, I think, and his most famous novel is one of the best examples. I'm almost, not quite, as well-read as Holden Caulfield now, so I caught more of the literary references. The Catcher in the Rye is narrow, in a way, with its Manhattan and East Coast preoccupations. It's a novel about an upper-middle-class prep school kid who's a little high-strung. If I had only his problems I'd be doing a lot better already—it's open to that kind of class-based derision, I can see that better now. Yet it transcends prep school and Manhattan and class. Holden Caulfield gets inside your head as much as any other first-person fictional character, and he's on a profound quest too, looking for significance in a world of phony surface. He reminds us of that adolescent idealism whose momentum, if we are lucky, carries us through middle age, when all the hard realities strike. It's easy to snort over his small problems, particularly the ones he creates himself in his own fatuous stupidity, such as an encounter with a prostitute, or picking a hopeless fight with his dormitory roommate. He is on a hard downward spiral and he's taking us with him. That's the trajectory here. According to Wikipedia, The Catcher in the Rye has sold 65 million copies since its publication in 1951, and is still moving 250,000 a year. Amazing. So it is off its peaks but still widely read. I'm surprised by that, honestly, because it's often dated, especially in its treatment of women and girls. But Holden Caulfield remained compelling on a recent visit, if more cringeworthy more often than I remembered, and it's still attracting new readers too, so it must be doing something right. P.S. When are we going to see the posthumous Salinger manuscripts? Come on lawyers, we're counting on you.

In case it's not at the library.

'50s science fiction trilogy (1951-1956)

#3: The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951) / The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953) / Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)

The rather high placement here and the trumped-up "trilogy" idea both are the result of bitterly fought negotiations on the part of me with my 11-year-old self, who threatened to blow up not just this project but all of Facebook and most of the known universe if he didn't get his way. He will tell you that he had to sacrifice separate rankings, This Island Earth, and the #1 slot, but I think I overheard him telling a reporter rather smugly that he's happy that he got 98% of everything he wanted.

I know I have my gaps here as everywhere, but sometimes it feels like science fiction is the one film genre that just keeps bringing me out, over and over again, like Charlie Brown poised to take the run and kick that football Lucy is holding for him. I seem to keep chasing it down even in the face of continual disappointment, and I am fiercely devoted to the things I like (I just rewatched the Abrams reboot of Star Trek the other night, for example, and was wowed all over again).