What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Edward]

Finally caught Renfield the other night with Nicolas Cage as Dracula and Nicolas Hoult in the title role. It's tremendous, silly fun. The best bit, though, is the flashback to their first meeting in Hoult's opening expositionary narrative: filmed in black and white, and styled after Bela Lugosi's 1931 version. Lovely touch.

 

[Zombie_61]

Finally caught Renfield the other night with Nicolas Cage as Dracula and Nicolas Hoult in the title role. It's tremendous, silly fun. The best bit, though, is the flashback to their first meeting in Hoult's opening expositionary narrative: filmed in black and white, and styled after Bela Lugosi's 1931 version. Lovely touch.

I tried to watch that--I think it was a few weeks ago--and although I thought Nicolas Hoult was quite good, I just can't stand Nicolas Cage any more. It's like watching the Village Idiot on a bender, which was somewhat entertaining when I was younger, but now I just want to drop a car onto him and move on.

 

[Fading Fast]

Chicago Syndicate from 1955 with Dennis O'Keefe, Paul Stewart, Abbe Lane, and Allison Hayes


In the 1950s, many movies blended crime drama with film noir. In Chicago Syndicate, the blend leans heavily toward crime drama, with its authoritative voice-over narration and its framing of the story as a government effort to take down the Chicago crime syndicate.

Organized crime was a big story in 1950s America, so Hollywood followed with a slew of A and B movies. In this B effort, Dennis O'Keefe stars as an ambitious accountant recruited by a combined law-enforcement and citizens committee looking to break the Chicago mob.

They need an accountant because the postwar mob is smarter and better organized than its up-from-the-street 1930s predecessor. The new mob buries its corruption in a web of legitimate companies and honest fronts, which makes getting evidence against the higher ups difficult.

O'Keefe plays a reluctant recruit, coaxed into it by a large financial reward. He is tasked with infiltrating the Chi-Town syndicate to find evidence against the top guy, played by Paul Stewart.

After O'Keefe proves himself a smart and loyal accountant, he is brought into the inner sanctum by Stewart, who had his last head accountant rubbed out before he could turn state's evidence. The other two key pieces of the movie's plot puzzle are on the distaff side.

Abbe Lane plays the pretty, brassy chanteuse girlfriend Stewart is tired of, but he can't quite get rid of because she knows things and won't go quietly. Allison Hayes – on the side of good, playing the daughter of the accountant who was rubbed out – is looking for justice or maybe just revenge.

Most of the movie is O'Keefe in the dangerous undercover position of trying to get very close to Stewart so that he can find evidence against him that will hold up in court. There are several scenes of Stewart testing O'Keefe's loyalty that take O'Keefe right to the edge.

It climaxes, as many of these crime-drama pictures do, a bit obviously – as if the producer told the director, "we need a lot of action at the end." Still, it's smarter than the average B-movie crime drama, with a cast that can pull it over its script holes and its occasional awkward dialogue.

O'Keefe is big, gruff and handsome in a banged-up way that is perfect for the part. He shows excellent nuance shifting from playing a smooth hood in front of Stewart to a smart undercover agent when working with others. It's interesting to see him switch his personality on a dime.

Stewart is perfectly scripted to play this new-style crime boss: he can be ruthless, but is a more polished gangster than the bully-style crime bosses of the 1930s. He's no Cagney and that's not a knock on either actor: the times just called for a different approach.

Lane is good, but she's one or two degrees off the beam as Stewart's cagey girlfriend trying to protect herself despite swimming in shark-infested waters. Lizabeth Scott or Yvonne De Carlo would have taken the role up a notch or two, but Lane handled it well.

Hayes, though, proves fully up to the challenge of playing the daughter out for revenge, but one who knows she has to be more thoughtful and patient than bold. She shows a lot of range, plus in the scene where she has to go full va-va-voom, she has the va-va-voom called for.

All of this is shot in incredibly crisp black-and-white cinematography that leans more crime drama than noir by staying away from shadows and other dark touches. Combined with the commanding narration, the crisp film style says serious crime enforcement is happening here.

Movies like Chicago Syndicate show that America was telling a much more complex story about itself in the 1950s than the inaccurate shorthand used today, which asserts that Hollywood simply pitched audiences a pretty picture of Ike's postwar America.

Sure, the Production Code often forced the "right" ending onto these pictures, but audiences understood what they were seeing in noir and crime dramas. Nobody walked out of the theater after a movie like this thinking everything in America was safely tied up with a neat bow on top.

 

[Fading Fast]

Holiday from 1938 with Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Doris Nolan, Henry Kolker, Lew Ayres, Edward Everett Horton, Jean Dixon, Binnie Barnes and Henry Daniell


Most mature people realize they have to strike a balance between the need to earn a living and the enjoyment of all the other things in life. Hollywood, though, prefers to set it up as a dichotomy, with the "free spirits" as the heroes and the "money worshipers" the villains.

Holiday is a completely contrived version of this tale that works because of its star power, witty lines, and seamless direction from George Cukor. Almost all the characters are two-dimensional and the story forced, but it's still a heck of a ride.

On a vacation, a young banker, played by Cary Grant, meets a young society woman, played by Doris Nolan. They fall in love and plan to marry when they get back home to New York City.

Once there, Grant discovers that his fiancée is a member of an immensely wealthy banking family who lives in a mansion on Fifth Avenue. Nolan's father, played by Henry Kolker, cautiously accepts Grant as Grant is known as an up-and-comer on Wall Street.

Nolan's sister, played by Katharine Hepburn, and her brother, played by Lew Ayres, are the black sheep of the family. They don't abide by the banking, money, work-ethic and social-position ethos of the family, much to the frustration of Kolker.

Grant, though, leans more toward Hepburn and Ayres' way of thinking, as he's only working now to make enough to quit for a few years to see the world while he's still young. (It's an early version of today's FIRE idea – Financial Independence, Retire Early.)

When Nolan and her father Kolker discover this, they both question if Grant is really good husband material, while Hepburn and Ayres embrace this "radical" thinker.

Rounding out the cast are Grant's good friends: a likable left-leaning professor and his wife – played by Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon – and Nolan's money-grubbing, snooty cousins – played by Binnie Barnes and Henry Daniell. They are all caricatures.

That's really the entire setup and conflict for this pretty straightforward movie. Grant comes to like Ayres and Hepburn, while he begins to question his fiancée and her father. Each camp tries, in its own way, to pull Grant to their side.

Hepburn and Ayres hang out in the mansion's "playroom," the one warm and inviting room in the otherwise cold and imposing house – a room Nolan and Kolker despise. It's obvious and manipulative symbolism, but in Cukor's skilled hands, it's effective.

It also plays to one of Hollywood's all-time-favorite tropes: businessmen lead unhappy lives because all they think about is money, while artists (Hepburn paints, Ayres is a musician) truly enjoy life because they exist on a superior moral and intellectual plane.

It's all garbage as the world isn't divided that way. Some business people are, of course, like that and some artists are truly kind and generous, but plenty of business people are charitable and curious about life and many artists are ruthless in business and society.

If you just go with all the clichés, Holiday is a fun romp. Grant is likeable as the confused young man and Nolan is good as the fiancée forced to learn who she really is. Kolker, despite the script, manages to bring some humanity to his villainous character.

Ayres is excellent as the son who is too weak to defy his father, so he turns to alcohol. It's the classic story of a father wanting a son to follow in his footsteps even though it's obvious to all, except the father, that the boy isn't cut out for that kind of life.

Hepburn was born to play a to-the-manner-born "rebel," as she kind of was one in real life. Born into a wealthy and prominent family, her choice to "go on the stage" was a radical move as, back then, "theater types" were looked down upon by society types.

There's a wonderful line in the 2004 movie The Aviator, a Howard Hughes biopic, in which Hughes puts Hepburn's family in its place when they haughtily dismiss money. He notes they can do so because they've always had it. Very few rich "radicals" ever give up their money.

The climax, no spoilers coming, has Grant pinging one way and then the other as business and romance decisions hang in the balance. Look for Nolan's final response to Grant's ultimate decision; it's the most sincere scene in the movie.

Holiday is a high-class fairy tale about the evil banker and the kind free spirit. It works because it's a fun story – who doesn't like a fairy tale, after all – adroitly produced by a major studio. It's nonsense, but enjoyable and entertaining nonsense.

 

[Fading Fast]

I Walk Alone from 1947 with Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Lizabeth Scott, and Wendell Corey


I Walk Alone is almost great, especially with its outstanding cast, striking noir atmosphere, and a brilliant face-off scene, but a few plot holes occasionally have you shaking your head at a movie you'll still enjoy overall.

Burt Lancaster plays a gangster just released from prison after fourteen years. He took a rap for his former bootlegging partner, played by Kirk Douglas, who promised Lancaster half of whatever he makes while Lancaster is locked up.

There are promises in spirit, and there are promises in technicalities. Everything here pivots on which type of promise you believe in. Lancaster shows up at Douglas' swanky and legal nightclub wanting half, which Douglas, using lawyer finagling, is happy to provide.

"Technically, I promised you half of a now bankrupt partnership, but when we liquidated it...well, here's half of the few thousand dollars that was left," is a paraphrasing of Douglas' doublespeak. Lancaster's answer is to later show up with a bunch of thugs and demand half of the club.

It's a scene like few others in noir. Lancaster is all 1930s gangster bully "give me, it is mine now;" Douglas says contently, "what's 'it?'" He then has his accountant, played by Wendell Corey, explain "it" is an intricate web of holding companies that legally can't be handed over.

Lancaster is now Gulliver, standing there with all the "muscle" he needs if it were the 1930s, but unable to understand the tangled ownership that makes his "muscle" useless. His rage and Douglas' smugness make it a scene to behold.

It's also a scene between two giants of midcentury noir, but it still needs the brilliant acting of Corey to make it work. Corey's bland, patient accounting speak, barely masking his abject terror – Lancaster looks ready to explode – makes the scene a masterpiece of tension.

A scene does not a picture make, though, so there is a full movie plot around it, with Lizabeth Scott playing a young, pretty, but world-weary chanteuse who's been kicked to the curb by Douglas. He's going to marry a society dame because it's good for business.

Now it's the old "...nor hell hath fury like a woman scorned" as Scott teams up with Lancaster to find a way to break Douglas. It's also some good but standard noir scenes of Lancaster getting beat up in an alley and having a murder wrap hung on him.

Even the climax – no spoilers coming – is pretty good but boilerplate noir, with a gun battle in a dark mansion, a final faceoff at the club, and a last-minute twist even after the police seem to have wrapped it all up.

Unfortunately, a few of the last minute twists are forced and obvious, as is an earlier story pivot around Corey's character and Douglas that has you a bit put off by the plot. The story gets it ninety percent right, but if you can't sell the critical turns, you have an issue.

Director Byron Haskin tried to paper over those script challenges with a classic noir atmosphere of men in broad-shouldered suits, women in cut-on-the-bias slinky silk evening gowns, dark streets, smokey nightclubs, beatings, shadows, and cop cars racing at night with sirens blaring.

You can't, though, fix a plot flaw with cool style, as a story has to stand on its own. The reverse is true: style can enhance a story, but a story can do fine with not much style if the narrative is flawless. Haskin tried to finagle it, but the scriptwriters handed him some unpluggable holes.

Haskin also let his actors run. Lancaster pushes his street-tough 1930s gangster persona to the max, but those boys won with full-force bullying. Douglas, conversely, is perfect as the modern oleaginous gangster more comfortable with a shell corporation than a shell from a .38.

Scott, too, deserves some praise as she is bounced back and forth between Douglas and Lancaster, but carves out a place for herself not as a femme fatale, but a woman trying to do right, or at least better than she did in the past.

Surprisingly not well known, I Walk Alone sits just below the pantheon of postwar noir films. With Douglas, Lancaster, and Scott – and all its noir touches - if you haven't seen it, it's like finding a slightly flawed gem that had been tucked away in the back of a drawer and forgotten.