Foster on Film » Page 112

Passport to Pimlico (1949)

Sep 071949

The unplanned detonation of an unexploded WWII bomb in a London neighborhood uncovers a buried treasure. Professor Hatton-Jones (Margaret Rutherford) is brought in to determine its historical significance, and discovers more than anyone expect: By a 500 year old royal charter, the area is not part of England, but of Burgundy. The locals quickly find there are great advantages to being a foreigner during the post-war period. They can ignore rationing, licenses, and curfews and live a little. But crooks move in, so the residents, led by shopkeepers Arthur Pemberton (Stanley Holloway), Frank Huggins (John Slater), and Edie Randall (Hermoione Baddeley), banker Mr. Wix (Raymond Huntley), and the newly appearing Duke of Burgundy (Paul Dupuis) must organize a government and seek some sort of agreement with England. However The Home Office has decided to play hardball; so begins a battle between English bureaucracy in the form of Staker and Gregg (Naunton Wayne, Basil Radford) and a plucky group of working class folks.

Passport to Pimlico, along with Whisky Galore! and Kind Hearts and Coronets, all released the same year, set the tone for Ealing Studios and for the Post-War British Comedy movement for the next decade. Highly successful in its native Britain, Passport to Pimlico is a very English film about a specific time in history that is both universal and timeless. There are a few jokes that need to be researched if you come from this side of the pond, but the heart is evident for all.

The War had been tough on English civilians and things didn’t get much better afterwards. The country was in literal ruins, hidden bombs riddled the cities (or at least it felt that way), food was in short supply, and sacrifice was the word of the day. Passport to Pimlico asks what would it be like to escape all that, briefly, supplies an absurd situation to make that happen, and then runs with it. All the humor is the logical result of the premise.

Like most Ealing comedies, it’s a gentle film (I say most because there’s Kind Hearts and Coronets…). The citizens and government are skewered, but it’s done with affection. They are flawed, but you are supposed to like them. If that wasn’t clear, the meta-casting of Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford drives it home. The pair was made famous as lovable twits in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and here they play similar characters. Ealing wanted to point out the stupidity in English society and politics, but was more interested in building up the people of Britain that had gone through so much. The satire could be biting (people immediately turn to crime when given a chance, and the British government is equated to the Soviet Union during the blockade of West Berlin), but T.E.B. Clarke (who would write the screenplays for The Lavender Hill Mob and Barnacle Bill) prefers to keep it friendly and focus on the characters.

Passport to Pimlico zings along, yet does so much while never slowing down. The direction is solid and the cast is superb. Everything works. I chose it as one of the five best films of 1949 for the FOSCARs.

Post-War British Comedy, Reviews Tagged with: four

Whisky Galore (1949)

Jun 051949

Things are bleak on a Scottish island during war times: They’ve run out of whisky. The fishermen are lifeless and miserable, and one elderly inhabitant is dying for lack of a drink. Without Whisky, life is intolerable. When a ship carrying a cargo of bottles of that most desirable liquid ends up on the rocks, the villagers see their chance. If only they can get around the stuffy commander of the home guard.

Whisky Galore is the iconic Ealing post-war British comedy. The war hovers over all, but takes no direct part. This is a comedy to escape the after effects of the war for an hour, not dwell on them. The situation is silly, and it is filled with gentle humor, but there are no big laughs. This is a comedy that generates nods and smiles, but not even a giggle.

Like many of the early Ealing entries, there is a large ensemble cast, with no character dominating, or even getting enough screen time to have more than one trait. There’s the straight-laced home guardsman, the upright soldier, the submissive husband to be, the overbearing mother, the sexy girlfriend, the wise doctor, and the grumpy bar-owner, along with a number of others whose only attribute is they need whisky. They may be quirkly lot, but they represented everyman (after all, isn’t there something just a bit odd about your neighbors?)

It’s all goofy fun, when not treading a tad too close to drama (the lives of a majority of these people are quite sad). That end result is partly due to the differing viewpoints of director and producer. First time director Alexander Mackendrick, raised in a strict and religious environment, sided with rule-obsessed Englishmen. Producer Monja Danischewsky sided with the depressed Scots: a bit of larceny is needed at times. For the most part, Danischewsky wins, or this would be an unbearable film, but Mackendrick manages to make sure that no one can ever profit from ignoble deeds.

Whisky Galore followed the successful Hue and Cry, and was released along with Passport to Pimlico and Kind Hearts and Coronets in 1949, and solidified both the new form of Ealing studios and the post-war comedy movement. Big hits in Britain, the films made a smaller splash in the U.S., where the comedy didn’t fit the population quite as naturally. They also ran afoul of the cencors. In the case of Whisky Galore, it was the title that was impermissible–alcohol is the Devil’s drink and all–so it was released as Tight Little Island.

The only post-war British comedy regular is Joan Greenwood, whose role, like most everyone else’s, is small. She had more substantial parts in Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit, and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Post-War British Comedy, Reviews Tagged with: Three Reels

Bagdad (1949)

Feb 211949

A Bedouin princess (Maureen O’Hara) returns home from England to find her father murdered. She wants revenge, and so takes up with the sleazy Pasha (Vincent Price). The assumed murderer is Hassan (Paul Hubschmid), but is he the leader of the savage Black Robes or a hero on the run?

I’ll include Bagdad as a Swashbuckler by taking the broadest interpretation of the genre. It is a costume film, with little care for realism (so not a period drama), set in a strange land of the past (an Arabia that never existed), with bright colors, dialog that is a series of proclamations, and sword-play. I suppose that’s close enough for the genre.

So the incredibly White Maureen O’Hara is an Arab. Yeah. OK. One of the many Irish Arabs no doubt. This screams vanity project. O’Hara gets to do her angry shtick that she’d become famous for, wear beautiful clothing, dominate all of the scenes with a lack-luster love interest, and even sing in a style most unfitting for a film set in Bagdad. The full title should have been Maureen O’Hara in Maureen O’Hara’s Bagdad. It helps that O’Hara is generally worth watching, though this will not be remembered as a high point in her career.

I must admit to a fondness for this subgenre. Beyond the fantasy, there’s all the beautiful dancing girls. With one kind of beauty or another, there’s always something entertaining. But this is a particularly vacuous entry. Everyone is miscast. Perhaps Vincent Price could have played a Turkish lord, but there’s no sign of that here with one of his worst performances. But then if he’d been good, he would have really stood out. Over-acting is the rule, but not in a fun way.

Bagdad is a bright juvenile movie. No character seems like a person, the plot is silly, with numerous things happening for no good reason, and every aspect is lowest-common-denominator (except the cinematography, which is lovely). Taken as that, and watched by children, it is passable.

Reviews, Swashbucklers Tagged with: Two Reels

Battleground (1949)

Feb 081949

During the Battle of the Bulge—December 1944—the 101st Airborne Division is moved to Bastogne. We follow a number of soldiers (Van Johnson, James Whitmore, Douglas Fowley, George Murphy, Herbert Anderson, Ricardo Montalban, Don Taylor, John Hodiak, Marshall Thompson) as they fight, suffer, die, and try to survive in the days they are trapped, surrounded by Germans. Due to the fog, they cannot receive air support. They have no idea what the situation is, or even where they are, though they expect to win once the weather changes and the planes show up.

Battleground was both a critical success and a popular one, but time has not been kind to it. Its strength was its novelty. WWII films had been stylized and heroic, with larger than life figures taking bold actions. Battleground took a more realistic approach, telling the “story” of average GIs. They are flawed with no special skills or abilities. They are sometimes brave, sometimes cowardly, and mostly just do their jobs while being more concerned about getting a warm meal and escaping the snow. Battleground shows the audience only what the soldier see, so neither we nor they know what is going on. Germans show up from time to time but no one knows if this is part of a big push or a few stragglers. The soldier don’t know if they are winning or losing and death comes almost randomly. A lot more time is spent with the condition of the soldiers feet than with combat.

All this was a new experience to movie-goer in 1949. But since then we’ve had Black Hawk Down, Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, and Band of Brothers, making walking with the soldiers old hat. Without that freshness, Battleground has to make it on its quality alone, and there it is a mixed bag. With competition for realism, the sanitized moments become glaring issues. These WWII soldiers don’t swear, have no interest in sex, and don’t bleed. It’s realism after the censor has had his way.

Ignoring the “reality,” the movie is…fine. Van Johnson was always a weak actor and he is a weak one here. He plays it a bit cartoonish. The rest of the cast is good enough, though no one is exciting, which is doubly true of the characters. They are stock war movie characters, most being defined by a single trait. One character chews tobacco. Another repeats, “That’s for sure; that’s for dang sure.” Yet another used to be a newspaper columnist. That’s all we know of them, and they never become more human.

The framing is too confining. There isn’t a wide shot to be found. This isn’t a matter of keeping the focus on the individual soldiers, but of having small sets (the exteriors were shot on a sound stage) and a tight budget. I kept expecting an actor to step off of a snow pile and come crashing down on a wood floor. It feels cheap and tiny. And that cheapness carries through to every aspect of the production.

That’s not to say Battleground is terrible or unpleasant, but without the selling point of being a rare “truthful gaze” into the life of soldiers, there’s not a lot of reason to watch.

Miscellaneous, Overrated Films, Reviews Tagged with: Two Reels

Alias Nick Beal (1949)

Jan 161949

Overly pure politician Joseph Foster (Thomas Mitchell) says out loud that he’d sell his soul to convict a mob boss. Nick Beal (Ray Milland) appears at that moment with the needed information. Foster begins to fall under Beal’s influence. Beal brings drunken actress Donna Allen (Audrey Totter) in to romance Foster, and gangster Frankie Faulkner (Fred Clark) to support him, all part of of his plan to corrupt Foster.

Alias Nick Beal is Faust, in modern times, shot in the style of Film Noir. It also has Noir’s fondness for broken people and corruption. What it doesn’t have is interesting human characters. I suspect the problem is the times and the production code. 1949 wasn’t a time for a serious movie with the Devil. They couldn’t take it where it needed to go, with a cop-out ending, and had to bow to good Christian morals. So Foster is ridiculously, unrealistically pure. His wife is the equivalent of a missionary. The trollop isn’t sleazy at all, but constantly wants to do the right thing. It makes it very hard to root for the good guys when they are so sickeningly sweet.

What Alias Nick Beal does have, besides some claustrophobic and spooky expressionist shots, is Ray Milland as a spectacular Mephistopheles. It’s one of his best performances. He displays the proper amount of menace mixed with class. He gets the best dialog:

The last time I was here was quite exciting. City was on fire. Picked up quite a lot of recruits that night. Made quite a transportation problem.

But it is more how he says the words than the words themselves, always sure of himself, always a touch tired. Milland joins Robert De Niro, Walter Huston, and Viggo Mortensen in the club of finest portrayals of the Prince of Darkness. I wish the whole film had been as good, but with Milland’s performance and the cinematography, this is a movie to see.

Fantasy, Film Noir, Reviews Tagged with: Three Reels

Words and Music (1948)

Dec 151948

Lyricist Lorenz Hart (Mickey Rooney) was deeply, tragically upset about being short, which is a little odd since he was actually an alcoholic homosexual, but since no one was either of those things in 1940s cinema, it’s being short that bothered him. He teams up with the composer Richard Rodgers (Tom Drake), who is too dull to be any kind of human but loves Hart like a brother, which is awkward since Rodgers was none-too-happy with his partner’s troubled ways. Hart gets turned down by Peggy (Betty Garrett), while Rodgers has better success with Dorothy (Janet Leigh). They also time travel as that’s the only way to explain how they wrote songs more than a decade early (or late) and how they became friends with adults who ought to be children.

Yes, this is a film you need to see. It’s also laughably bad, as a film. In case it isn’t clear, it’s an inaccurate account of Hart’s life. Everything is wrong. People dress wrong, speak wrong, and behave in ways they didn’t. I suppose there can be an excuse for that if the changes make for a more dramatically satisfying story. They don’t, however, I’m guessing they saved a lot of money on wardrobe by dressing everyone in 1948 fashions.

Drake and Rooney don’t help. Together they’d equal one actor as Drake hardly acts and Rooney acts enough for two. Or six. This is comedy stuff, when it’s supposed to be serious. The big death scene would fit into a slapstick parody. Was Rooney over-dosing on cocaine?

So we’ve got an unevenly paced picture, filled with lies, expressed in lame dialog, and filled with interesting acting. It’s a mess as a narrative movie. However, as a musical review, it’s pretty good, and if you watch it from home and can skip from song to song, it’s great. These songs have nothing to do with the “story,” which is all to the better. So we get some of the best performances of the day popping in to do a song. June Allyson does a light and bubbly version of Thou Swell. Mel Tormé matches that with an emotional Blue Moon, which fades next to Lene Horne’s sexy The Lady is a Tramp. Even better is Judy Garland at the top of her game with two songs: I Wish I Were In Love Again and Johnny One Note. (It’s amazing how good she is considering her fragile health at the time; she took the gig to pay off half of her debt to the studio and when it turned out so well, they asked for a second song several months later to pay off the rest.) Best of all is Gene Kelly and Vera-Ellen dancing a jazz ballet to Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. These, and others, are great renditions of great songs. So I’ll give the whole 3-Reels, and suggest you see it at home with your remote control handy.

My other reviews of musicals including Gene Kelly: Cover Girl (1944), Anchors Aweigh (1945), Ziegfeld Follies (1946), The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), Summer Stock (1950), An American in Paris (1951), Brigadoon (1954), It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), Les Girls (1957), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967).

Musicals, Reviews Tagged with: Two Reels

The Pirate (1948)

Oct 061948

Manuela (Judy Garland) is about to be married off by her aunt (Gladys Cooper) to the rich, older, dull mayor, Don Pedro Vargas (Walter Slezak) when she meets a traveling actor, Serafin (Gene Kelly). Discovering that she secretly fantasizes about the pirate Macoco, Serafin masquerades as the villain, taking over the town and postponing her wedding until she can fall for him. Needless to say, posing as the most wanted man in the Caribbean has its complications.

A lush, Technicolor fantasy, always three steps removed from reality, The Pirate is one of Kelley’s best musicals, though it wasn’t appreciated when it was released, with audiences and critics clamoring for blander song-filled entertainment. Time has been good to it.

Many musicals of the time haven’t stood up as well because their plots are nearly non-existent: just there to hang the songs upon. Think of An American in Paris. But The Pirate, based on a stage play, has a solid romantic-comedy story. Pull the music, and you still have a movie. There are plenty of laughs (often subtly worded innuendo since sexuality didn’t go over big with the Breen office; this cleverness didn’t allow the film to have a married heroine as in the play—the censors wanted to reassure America that married women don’t have fantasies.)

Director Vincente Minnelli never managed to create anything close to a real-world feel for his films, nor get his actors to appear as actual people. This is grating in many of his productions, but it makes The Pirate a perfect vehicle for his gaudy sensibilities. The extravagant sets are a pleasure to look at, and as fake as a 3 cent piece. The costumes range from elegant to flamboyant. This isn’t reality folks; it’s a lot more fun. It’s a Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler, if Fairbanks had danced instead of waived a sword.

The music is by Cole Porter, and while not his best work, even weak Porter is better than the best compositions of ninety percent of other song-smiths. The standout is Be a Clown, (plagiarized four years later to create Make ‘Em Laugh for Singing in the Rain), performed first with extremely athletic choreography by Kelly and The Nicholas Brothers, and then as a comic duet by Kelly and Garland. Mack the Black and Nina sound best during their instrumental sections—the lyrics seem to have been written as an exercise in awkward rhyming—but since those sections are so good, it’s not a problem.

The Pirate is a well crafted, quick, witty musical. It doesn’t rank with the likes of Singing in the Rain. Garland was starting to show signs of the addiction which would eventually kill her, and none of the dances are spectacular. So, it’s a second tier musical, but a star in its division.

My other reviews Gene Kelly films: Cover Girl (1944), Anchors Aweigh (1945), Ziegfeld Follies (1946), Words and Music (1948), On the Town (1949), Summer Stock (1950), An American in Paris (1951), Brigadoon (1954), It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), Les Girls (1957), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967).

Musicals, Reviews

The Three Musketeers (1948)

Oct 051948

Naive, arrogant D’Artagnan (Gene Kelly) travels to Paris to join the musketeers. After a rocky start, he befriends the three finest members of that guard, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (Van Heflin, Gig Young, Robert Coote). The four become involved in defending France and the queen (Angela Lansbury) from the schemes of the dastardly Minister Richelieu (Vincent Price) and his assassin, Lady de Winter (Lana Turner).

Dumas’s tale of pre-revolutionary French swordsmen defines literary Swashbucklers. So why can no one get it right on film? The best cinematic renditions have been mediocre, missing the magic, adventure, and humor of The Adventures of Robin Hood and Scaramouche, and this isn’t the best. Or even the second best.

The Three Musketeers won the Oscar for Best Color Cinematography, and I agree with the academy. The color is vibrant and effective. It’s never a good sign when I have to discuss the color to find something that works in a movie. But after color, things go down hill. Not into the depths of incompetence and total disaster, but to the more mundane level of adequacy and nearly-diverting.

The studio, or director George Sidney, or screenwriter Robert Ardrey never got the tone under control. At times it is the type of over-the-top pure fantasy that only works in a musical. Other times it goes for tragedy (and nearly achieves melodrama). It fills in the rest with teen comedy antics, which is unseemly when the teens are thirty-six to thirty-nine year old men.

Kelly’s athleticism is impressive, and he can manage leaps that make most swashbuckling stars hide in jealous embarrassment. However, even in the world of fake film swordsmen, he looks particularly unreal. That wouldn’t be a problem if the rest of the film acknowledged it, played with the fantasy, dance-like swordplay instead of treating it as authentic. His moves are little different than the ones he used in the ballet in The Pirate. If everyone would break into a soft shoe from time to time, then this might have worked. It might even have allowed me to forget that D’Artagnan is at least ten years too old.

The rest of the star-studded cast does its job. Both Lana Turner and June Allyson tried to get out of the production, but onscreen they don’t look any more out of place than anyone else. Van Heflin, Gig Young, Robert Coote, Angela Lansbury, Keenan Wynn, and Vincent Price don’t show up enough to judge them. Think of them as having long cameos, leaving more time for Kelly’s uneasy romantic trials.

Perhaps there’s just too much story. Most filmmakers have chopped the book in half. Trying to cover it all makes this a video Cliffs Notes. Love is instantaneous, entire plot threads last only a few minutes, and there’s no time to for anything to develop.

In 1952, an entire swordfight from The Three Musketeers was plopped into the classic Singing in the Rain. It was used to represent the over-done, silly, blustery silent pictures that Don Lockwood had been making. It works great there, but in its original state, where we’re supposed to be excited by the action, it is still over-done, silly, and blustery.

My reviews of Gene Kelly musicals: Cover Girl (1944), Ziegfeld Follies (1946), The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), Brigadoon (1954).

Back to Swashbucklers

Reviews, Swashbucklers Tagged with: Two Reels

Hamlet (1948)

Oct 021948

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Laurence Olivier), upset that his mother, Queen Gertrude (Eileen Herlie) has married his uncle Claudius (Basil Sydney) just two months after the death of the old king, is informed by his father’s ghost that Claudius murdered him. Hamlet vows revenge, but moves slowly, feigning madness, rejecting and abusing the young Ophelia (Jean Simmons), and confronting his mother.

This is Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet. Produced by Laurence Olivier. Directed by Laurence Olivier. Co-written by Laurence Olivier. Staring Laurence Olivier. And focusing almost exclusively on Laurence Olivier. If you’re a huge fan of Olivier, this should be a treat. If you’re a huge fan of Shakespeare, not so much.

Hamlet is a difficult play to perform, and I have seen more failures than successes. Still, from time to time there is a version that moves quickly, delves into the complexity of the characters and explains their actions, and highlights the beauty of the language. While lauded by critics at the time, and given the Oscar for best picture, this Hamlet does none of those things. But then, I’ve rarely found the Academy awards to indicate the best film of the year, nor do I expect those who vote for it to be familiar with Shakespeare.

Olivier has forged a plodding film, where his own frequent dramatic pauses and profile close-ups, as well as winding shots of the stairs, take precedence over the famous dialog. Substantial portions of the play have been cut, including all of the political intrigue, and the popular characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. With them, almost all of the lighter moments have also been removed. Since filmmakers in general have avoided a rapid-fire version, I cannot blame Olivier for making such severe chops. Although I find the loss of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern particularly unfortunate, I cannot think of a scene he left in that I would have removed to allow their return. However, before cutting important segments of the work, he should have first removed unnecessary silences and vanity shots.

Hamlet (the man in this case) is significantly simplified. Partly this is due to the missing text, but mainly it is how Olivier plays him. This Hamlet is never insane or even out of control. He is upset about his father’s death and his mother’s quick marriage. Toss in an out-of-place Oedipal complex, and you have the entire character. That’s as deep as it goes. There’s an added prolog that states that Hamlet was a “man who could not make up his mind.” OK, but it would be nice if there was an indication why he could not make up his mind. It’s pivotal to the play that the viewer understand why it takes him five acts to do anything, and even then it is only when he is forced to. Just saying he has problems making decisions puts Hamlet on par with a sitcom.

This is also an old Hamlet. The brash, spoiled, but thoughtful Prince of Denmark should be in his twenties. Olivier was forty-one. This produces the comical situation of Hamlet being older than his mother…by thirteen years. Ah, but that’s something you can ignore and… You know, you just can’t ignore a mom being thirteen years younger than her kid. Unfortunately, Olivier didn’t, giving us a long romantic mother-son kiss plus some random shots of the bed.

A poorly conceived Hamlet can be saved by an emotional delivery of the signature lines (and this is Hamlet, so there are a lot of them), but there is no salvation there. No one speaks; they recite speeches, with all the impact one would expect from a dry reading. Worse, the great soliloquies are presented in monotone voice-overs, removing the power and immediacy. In other cases, it sounds as if no one knew what the words meant. Shakespearian Primer time: the phrase “Get ye to a nunnery” means go to a brothel. Hamlet is telling Ophelia to become a whore, not a nun. That makes Ophelia’s reaction sensible (she becomes hysterical), but Olivier says the line as if he’s sweetly advising her to give her life to the church.

Almost any discussion of this Hamlet will bring up the impressive cinematography. The camera sweeps around like it is mounted on a large hawk. Now that’s skill. It’s also all wrong. Good camera work does not draw attention to itself. The viewer shouldn’t even notice it; rather, it should emphasize the story and characters. This time, it emphasizes acrobatics.

This Hamlet soured an entire generation on Shakespeare. I’ve heard classrooms of high school teens moaning as it played. Those same teens had previously cheered during Polanski’s Macbeth. Still, a Shakespeare fan can find something of value. The play has some of the greatest words ever written, and I can’t fault the enunciation. Outside of the mother-son relationship, this is a straightforward rendition, and while the themes and motivations may be lacking, the story is easy to follow. Think of it as a dated study-guide.

Overrated Films, Reviews, Shakespeare Tagged with: One Reel

Vice Versa (1948)

Oct 021948

A pair of wishes—pronounced over an Indian artifact stolen by a disreputable brother-in-law—switch the bodies of Paul Bultitude (Roger Livesey), a pompous Victorian stockbroker, and Dick (Anthony Newley), his more than ordinarily silly son. Dick, happy with the transition, attempts to emulate his father but appears to those around him to have gone insane. Paul refuses to come to grips with the situation and finds himself on the wrong end of the boys at boarding school.

Body switching comedies became overly common in the ’80s, but the ground was less trod (but not virginal) when Peter Ustinov introduced his absurdist and thoroughly British take on the material. Surprisingly, it was not only fresh at the time, but still is many years later. We are spared a saccharine examination of the generations and instead offered a whimsical tale without a shred of meaning. Vice Versa a is pure silliness, but it is silliness with wit.

Much of the humor comes from playing with the old, stiff-upper-lip stereotype as well as the Victorian obsession with propriety. Everyone’s priorities pass from the ridiculous and enter the bizarre. No one focuses on what is important. When the participants in a duel are hauled into court, the judge is more concerned with the music that a nearby band was playing and what schools people went to than in a potential stabbing. All this could be taken as a satire on English society, but that’s adding weight to fluff.

There are few rules in this comedy. The forth wall is broken repeatedly with several characters speaking directly to the audience. Religions and peoples have little connection to reality, and the two leads behave without any regard to their situation. None of that should be taken negatively. Much of the joy comes from the no-holds-barred preposterousness. It is clearly pointing the way to Monty Python.

The rest of the fun comes from the dialog, where the English language is twisted into a mobius strip. It seldom matters what is said, but how it is said, and how is always amusing.

Vice Versa is a Post-War British Comedies, in the sense that it is British and made after WWII, but while its country of origin is clear, it shows no influence from the war. It could have been made as easily in 1934. I’d like to say it could be made now, but I’m afraid that isn’t true.

Post-War British Comedy, Reviews Tagged with: Three Reels

Adventures of Don Juan (1948)

Sep 281948

Famed lover Don Juan (Errol Flynn), and his faithful servant, Leporello (Alan Hale), return to Spain to find it under the thumb of the traitorous Duke de Lorca (Robert Douglas). Assigned as a fencing instructor, Don Juan devotes himself to the welfare of Queen Margaret (Viveca Lindfors). When de Lorca moves against the crown, it is up to Don Juan, his friends, and students to save the Queen, the feeble King (Romney Brent), and Spain.

The last and least of the lavish, Warner Bros., Errol Flynn Swashbucklers, Adventures of Don Juan may have been the perfect farewell for the king of the genre. Sword epics, as a form, were aging, as was Flynn, and the golden age was almost at its end. The makers of Adventures of Don Juan seemed to know this. The movie is one step from a parody, and Flynn’s self-deprecating performance sends a message to his fans: “I know I’m not as young as I was and have a reputation as a Don Juan myself, so let’s all sit and enjoy that for an hour and a half.” Flynn went on to make many more films, including a few Swashbucklers, but they were smaller affairs. Luckily, Adventures of Don Juan is a good way to end an era. It is bright, quick, and filled with charm.

Flynn is joined by his long time costar, Alan Hale (Little John in The Adventures of Robin Hood), who plays the same kind of role he had in most of their other thirteen collaborations. Like Flynn, he was aging, but still had his charisma, if a bit muted. He died two years later. To continue the reunions, consummate character actress, Una O’Connor (Bess in The Adventures of Robin Hood) has a cameo.

The plot treads ground well trampled by Swashbucklers before it: the good natured hero is looked down upon by both polite society and the beautiful woman, and the evil-for-evil’s-sake villain plots dastardly deeds. It’s familiar, but fun, and pulled off with flair. Robert Douglas is effective as the archfiend, hitting all the right notes, but never bringing anything new to the part. There’s more than the average amount of humor, exhilarating sword fights, extravagant sets to frame it all, and a jaunty, though slightly over-used theme to set the mood. The final, with Don Juan and de Lorca facing off on the grand stairway, is a classic moment in the genre and not to be missed.

The one significant misstep is its single variation from lockstep Swashbuckler form: there’s no romance. This is particularly glaring since the hero is Don Juan, known as the world’s greatest lover. He’s fallen for the Queen, and vice-versa, but that’s not to be. A few moments of mutual admiration hardly gets the blood pumping. It’s hard to get excited about the threat to Spain without a girl involved.

Vincent Sherman’s direction is impressive considering the problems Flynn was having finishing a scene (he wasn’t the physical specimen he once had been), but lacks the vision and power of Michael Curtiz, who was at the helm for all of Flynn’s great costume movies. Even with the huge, elaborate sets, the movie feels claustrophobic.

No fan of Swashbucklers will be disappointed by Adventures of Don Juan. It succeeds as a middle ground adventure yarn at the end of a long string of great ones.

Flynn’s other Warner Bros Swashbucklers are: Captain Blood (1935), The Prince and the Pauper (1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), and The Sea Hawk (1940).

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Reviews, Swashbucklers Tagged with: Three Reels