randy_byers | Entries tagged with raoul walsh

I've now watched all four WWII movies that Raoul Walsh made with Errol Flynn while the war was still raging: Desperate Journey (1942), Northern Pursuit (1943), Uncertain Glory (1944), and what is widely, but by no means unanimously, considered the best of them, Objective, Burma! (1945). Dave Kehr has argued that these four films form a kind of continuing story, "one that traces both the progress of the war, from the Blitz to the Pacific campaign, and the evolution of a hero, from carefree swashbuckler to somber leader of men." The last two movies in the series certainly seem the best to me, although all four are very good. Objective, Burma! is probably the grimmest. It shares with the first, Desperate Journey, a story about being trapped behind enemy lines, but Flynn is indeed a more introspective and melancholy figure in the later film, and the whole tone is much darker.

I wondered in my post about Desperate Journey whether Hollywood was ever as sympathetic with the Japanese as that film was with the anti-Nazi German underground. Objective, Burma! is not it, if so. Hatred of the "Japs" is expressed left and right, although at least they are spared the buffoonish caricature that the Nazis are lampooned with in the character played by Raymond Massey in the earlier film. The Japanese characters in Objective, Burma! are nameless and essentially voiceless, since we're never given any translation of what they're saying. I couldn't tell if they were even speaking actual Japanese. It mostly didn't sound like it. One of the most powerful scenes is when our heroes find a comrade who has been tortured by the Japanese, and the reporter played by Henry Hull bellows that he's seen atrocities in the U.S., including lynchings, but never anything as horrible as this. The evocation of lynching in this context is like a punch in the gut, coming in a pre-Civil Rights era in which lynching was still going on, especially considering that Japanese-Americans were being held in internment camps at the time. On the other hand, the Chinese and Indians are happily portrayed as great allies in this front of the war.

Director of photography on this one was James Wong Howe, who filmed some of Walsh's greatest movies, including my favorite, Pursued (1947). There's nothing flashy, but just one effective shot after another. I love this opening shot that merges a map, the animated silhouette of a military plane, and real sky (not Howe's work, most likely). The whole opening sequence, as reconnaissance film is developed to illustrate the map, is a beautiful transition into a filmic world. The intelligence at work in this propaganda piece is subtle and deep.

( The map is not the territory ... )

Northern Pursuit (1943)

Does anybody know what that donut of light with the two stars or plus signs in it is called? I've seen it in other screen caps where light is shining or flashing directly into the lens. Definitely has a toroid shape.

An Australian, a Canadian, and an American walk into a pub ...

Raoul Walsh's Desperate Journey is a load of old tosh, but it's ridiculously entertaining tosh. Errol Flynn (a Tasmanian by birth) plays the Australian leader of a multinational bombing crew that is shot down during a mission over Germany. Their desperate journey is through enemy terrain, trying to make it back to England. The movie opens with an explosion, and the action hardly lets up after that. This is an adventure story, for the most part, but there are serious undertones beneath the swashbuckling and patriotic fervor (and groan-worthy death scenes). Most notable, perhaps, is the discovery of underground anti-Nazi Germans. I wonder if the Japanese were ever portrayed this sympathetically in Hollywood during WWII? Less serious is Raymond Massey as an unconvincing, nearly-comic, blustering, flailing Nazi commander. Who sometimes speaks German! Flynn's character can speak German too, which I guess is okay for an Australian. The American characters (affable good old boys Ronald Reagan and Alan Hale) can only mock the language.

Walsh's ability as a visual storyteller speaks for itself, I think. The lighting by DP Bert Glennon, who also shot for Josef von Sternberg and John Ford, is dark and atmospheric and frequently shot from low angles, like a noir. The movie is full of striking visual imagery, even when it's models and miniatures.

( Bombs away ... )

I watched this on the TV last night, so no screencaps. It was directed by Raoul Walsh, who was one of the great studio directors of the classical Hollywood era. The Strawberry Blonde is a romantic comedy based on a play by James Hagan called One Sunday Afternoon. It's a nostalgic movie -- or perhaps a movie about nostalgia -- set in the 1890s and featuring a lot of popular music from that era, including, of course, the song from which the title is taken, "The Band Played On". James Cagney plays an Irish-American hothead (how cliche!) who longs for the titular neighborhood beauty, played by Rita Hayworth, but ends up with plain Jane (in this fantasy world) Olivia de Haviland when Rita is taken by up-and-coming go-getter Jack Carson.

This is a pretty standard story in a lot of ways that benefits from a witty script by Julius and Philip Epstein and beautiful camera work by James Wong Howe. There's a fair amount of mildly amusing Hollywood blarney provided by Alan Hale and Una O'Connor. Walsh is a deft director, and he's a master of visual story-telling who keeps the story rolling along. The characters have interesting nooks and crannies in them that keep the cliches from becoming too stultifying. The story is well-structured to show the callow Cagney character learning an important life lesson, although he certainly is slow on the uptake.

There are aspects I have mixed reactions to. De Haviland is initially portrayed as a strident suffragette and feminist, and the script both pokes fun at her and yet gives her some great lines. Early on she denounces marriage as "an institution started by the cavemen and endorsed by florists and jewelers" and she insists on her right to flirt with men despite the proprieties of the era. "What did we come for if not to be trifled with?" she demands of Hayworth as they wait for Cagney and Carson to approach them in the park. The girl's got spunk, and in these early scenes she owns the movie.

But of course she's all too willing to become a dutiful wife when push comes to shove, which makes her earlier feminism seem like a mockery. And yet, and yet, there's that very witty and pointed denunciation of marriage sitting right there being witty and pointed, and while de Haviland's story is subsumed by Cagney's, she actually gets the better lot of the two central female characters, compared to the one who goes for the success-oriented guy. Hers is the happier ending, and it's not just because she abandons her feminism. She also has a less superficial view of men and of life than Hayworth does.

Which is somewhat related to the other interesting aspect of this movie, which is its frank view of successful go-getters as being corrupt swindlers. If the film is not outright anti-capitalist, it's at the very least more sympathetic to the working lug -- and also to downright deadbeats like the fun-loving, womanizing Alan Hale character, who is always hitting on the lonely wives of working men. (See also Cagney's scrapping with the Yale boy next door.) The climax of the story involves a corrupt businessman who causes an industrial accident and then gets an innocent man sent to prison in his place. It's a pretty sharp critique at the heart of a nostalgic romantic comedy, and it's one reason that some critics say this actually an anti-nostalgic story. As one of them puts it, the lesson Cagney has to learn is that nostalgia for a romanticized view of the past only sets himself up for failure. In the end this is a romantic comedy, so failure ain't in the cards.

The Man I Love (1947)

"Isn't life difficult enough without mixing it up with memories?"
"I don't know. Mine don't go back far enough yet."

They Drive by Night (1940)

"The doors made me do it! Ahahahahahahaha! The doors made me do it!"

The milieus of the film, the dingy apartment Petey shares with her family and the beach bar where she meets San contrasting with the flashy nightclub and its patrons, represent the dual impulses of the main character. For Lupino as Petey is the true protagonist of the film and what disturbs her, more than the antipathy between these two environments through which she moves or her tenuous relationship with the impenetrable San, is the sense of imprecise but tangible malaise which those around her both experience and engender. ... The songs which she sings in The Man I Love capture her emotional vacillation from the idealism of the title song and "My Bill" to the hopelessness of "Why Was I Born?"

-- Film Noir, An Encylopedic Reference to the American Style, 3rd Ed.

Wow. This is a very unusual picture. Is that why it's so obscure? Directed by Raoul Walsh, who got his start in the early days of Hollywood (circa 1913) and kept working into the '60s. By 1947 (or 1945, when The Man I Love was actually filmed) he was such a master of Hollywood genre film-making that he could move effortlessly between genres within a single film, as he does here. Crime film, musical, noir, romantic melodrama -- it should be a confusing mishmash, but instead feels incredibly sophisticated. Part of that is down to Ida Lupino in the lead role. She is just magnificent as the sexy, smart, tough, and tender torchsinger, Petey, on the rebound from a failed relationship, playing temporary matriarch for her troubled sisters and brother, making her way through a dark and disillusioned post-war America, fixing the problems she can but still running aground on hidden shoals of the heart.

Even as as a musical, this is quite different from other Hollywood musicals of the era. The songs, by George Gershwin, comment on the feelings of the characters, but it's all within the context of performing musicians. The film captures the feeling of late night jazz jams like nothing else I've seen. You feel like you're hanging out in a bar with a band that's really feeling it. All shot in film noir style, with sharp shadows and lazy lattices of cigarette smoke.

Walsh once again (as in his great Western noir, Pursued) gives a ninety-minute movie a novelistic density. There doesn't seem to be a wasted move, and the storyline is always evolving, even if its less about plot than about character, feeling, and atmosphere. Early on the slimy nightclub owner, Nick, makes a move on Petey's married sister, Sally, who blows him off. He threatens her, reminding her that her brother works for him. A few scenes later, the worthless wannabe-gangster brother brings her a Christmas present, a beautiful gown. It turns out to be a gift from Nick, and she rejects it. Next scene, Petey shows up at Nick's nightclub dressed in the gown. She's going to get him off her sister's back. She auditions for him with a song. He's glued to her thereafter, but she's quite capable of fending him off, still looking for a man she can love, somebody worthy of her.

There are a lot of subtle visual touches. At the beach club, the owner comes up to say hi to Nick and to be introduced to Petey, whose reputation as a singer has spread around town. She pointedly does not offer her hand to him. He puts his own hand on her shoulder, and she gives it a little look of contempt. She doesn't make a scene, but she lets everyone know where they stand with her.

I suppose this is the kind of movie that will never be widely popular. The cast is too obscure (no Bogart, no Bette Davis), the director is too obscure, the genre too mixed, too contradictory, not quite fatal enough for true film noir, yet too downbeat for a musical. Perhaps it's a film for aficionados. Martin Scorsese loves it, and it's one of the "musical noirs" (along with My Dream Is Yours) that he styled his New York, New York after. It really is something. And I haven't even mentioned the bitch-slapping that Lupino gives one of the men who loses his cool over a no-good woman!

By the way, I got this as a download from the Warners Archive. It's ten dollars cheaper than buying one of the archive movies as a DVD-R (once you take shipping into account), yet there are definite disadvantages. It has DRM that supposedly keeps it from being played on any other device than my computer. There are no chapter stops, so you pretty much have to watch the whole movie at one sitting or start over from the beginning. I can't watch it with my normal movie software, so I can't take screen caps. Still, the ten dollars cheaper is significant. I may get more movies this way, perhaps more Raoul Walsh. (I've previously ordered two Jacques Tourneur movies as DVD-Rs.)