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Flamingo Road (1949)
Zachary Scott and Sidney Greenstreet
Mildred Pierce is one of Michael Curtiz’ most famous films, and it may be the role that Joan Crawford is best known for. But a few years later the two collaborated on another film, which is lesser known today, but I think actually more interesting.
Flamingo Road tells the story of Lane Bellamy, a woman who we first see dancing in a cheap carnival, but who rises to become the wife of a powerful politician. The story is pure melodrama, but the film is an interesting study of power and corruption. The action plays out in a small town, and the title refers to the section where the rich folks live. When the carnival she dances in skips town to escape the law, Lane decides she’s tired of running and stays behind, going to work as a waitress in a local cafe. All she wants to do is work a job and make a living, but she inadvertently gets drawn into a conflict between two powerful politicians.
Lane is a woman living in a world run by men. She’s happy enough waiting tables in the local diner, but when she falls for lawman Fielding Carlisle she incurs the wrath of Sheriff Semple, who has other plans for his deputy. Semple has her fired, and tells her she’d best leave town. Angered by the way she’s been mistreated, Lane decides to stick around and goes to work as a “hostess” in a “road house”. Here she meets politically connected businessman Dan Reynolds, who is immediately taken with her.
Joan Crawford, tired of running.
This sets up the conflict that drives the movie on more than one level. On the one hand, you have Lane growing closer to Dan, even though she’s still in love with Fielding. At the same time, Semple is infuriated by Lane’s rise in society, and ends up mounting a political attack on Dan as part of a power grab.
Robert Wilder’s screenplay offers a fascinating view of the way politics and business intertwine, showing how deals are made behind closed doors long before they ever see the light of day. (Wilder also authored the original novel, and adapted it for the stage with his wife, Sally.) Curtiz knows this territory well. In the later part of his career, the director made a number of films exploring the crooked world we live in, notably in Casablanca, but also in Four’s a Crowd, The Breaking Point, The Helen Morgan Story and King Creole. Lane, like many of Curtiz’ protagonists, is someone just trying to stay in the game even though she knows the deck is stacked against her. In the 40s and 50s the director repeatedly focussed on characters who struggle to survive in a world that seems bent on grinding them down.
The most complex character in the film is Dan Reynolds, the powerful contractor who falls for Lane. He’s essentially an honest man who knows that projects don’t get built on honesty. Dan understands that everybody’s looking out for themselves, and he’s willing to play the game, but he tries to make sure all the players get taken care of. Curtiz takes us into the smoke-filled rooms where local businessmen play cards, booze it up, and make deals. These scenes play out with a smooth, matter-of-fact ease. The screenwriter and the director both know this melieu, and they also know that, whether we like it or not, this is how the world works.
Playing cards and cutting deals.
There are people who say Crawford is too old for the role, but I disagree. I have no idea how old the character was in the novel, but I think the fact that Crawford was in her 40s when she played the part brings added layers to it. When we first see Lane dancing in the carnival it’s clear she’s been in this game way too long. A young woman might see it as an adventure. A middle-aged woman can’t see it as anything more than a way to make ends meet. After the carnival has fled, we see Lane by herself, lying on a cot in a tent, listening to the radio. She’s tired. She feels ground down. A younger actress couldn’t have expressed the weariness that Crawford brings to this scene. When the deputy walks in on her, she’s too tired to be fearful. She’s been hassled by the law before.
This is the kind of role that Crawford knew well. She probably could have played it in her sleep, but she’s not sleepwalking here. Lane’s weary cynicism rings true. The way Crawford plays the part, we know she’s been around the block a few times. And she makes her part in the love triangle believable. Lane likes and respects Dan, but she can’t get Fielding out of her mind. And when Dan realizes where he stands and walks out, Crawford makes us feel Lane’s misery and shame. Yeah, she’s done all this before, but she still does it really well.
David Brian and Joan Crawford
David Brian has a smoothness and an easy charm as Dan that makes it easy to believe he’s one of the boys in the back room, but he also projects a strength that makes it clear he’s got principles. He’s not just out for a buck. As always, Zachary Scott slides right into his character and makes us forget he’s playing a part. Maybe his unobtrusive skill is the reason his flawless performances never attracted the attention that lesser actors got. Scott shows us early on that Deputy Fielding Carlisle is basically a decent guy with absolutely no backbone. He loves Lane, but he won’t fight for her, and so he not only loses her respect but his own self-respect.
But maybe the most impressive performance in the film is Sydney Greenstreet as the Machiavellian sheriff. Greenstreet was a masterful actor, and he’s a powerful presence in this movie. There’s no ambiguity in the character. Sherrif Semple is absolutely ruthless and completely corrupt. So it’s impressive that Greenstreet’s performance is as compelling as it is. It could have been a total cliche, but the actor brings so much life to the role, he makes this vile old man so vivid, it’s hard to take your eyes off him.
Part of the reason this melodrama works so well is that the world these characters inhabit is so completely imagined. Curtiz was surrounded by technicians who were masters of their craft, and they were expert at creating cafes, carnivals and construction sites on a soundstage. Art director Leo K. Kuter and set decorator Howard Winterbottom breathe life into all the places and spaces that make up this small town. Ted McCord’s subtly textured cinematography brings everything together as an expressive whole. I can’t understand why McCord has never gotten the attention he deserves. A seasoned pro with an incredible eye, he had gift for creating images with depth and texture whether he was working on a set or on location. Curtiz and McCord worked together a number of times, which leads me to believe the director valued his abilities. I don’t see how anyone could look at his work on Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Breaking Point, and East of Eden without coming to the conclusion that he was one of the best cinematographers in Hollywood.
I probably don’t have to tell you that Lane’s situation goes from bad to worse, until the film comes to a harrowing climax, and then quickly settles into a reassuring resolution. I’m sure you already know the territory. Curtiz knew it, too, and he knew he had to deliver what audiences expected. It’s not the big dramatic moments that make this film, it’s what comes in between. It’s the way the townspeople bend over backwards to stay on the sherrif’s good side. It’s the glimpses we get of men making deals over liquor and cigars. And it’s the way the director presents the poignant reality of a middle-aged woman stranded in a small town, trying to figure out what her next move is.
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
John Huston loved losers. While he worked in a range of genres and told all sorts of stories, he seems to have a had a special affection for the people who just couldn’t make it. Desperate prospectors looking to strike it rich. Cowboys trying to live in the past when the world was moving on. Fighters who kept climbing back in the ring after everyone else knew they were finished. Huston kept coming back to these people, following them as they lived their lives in the margins, fascinated by the way they kept hanging on after the world had given up on them.
Huston’s 1950 adaptation of W.R. Burnett’s novel The Asphalt Jungle is a terse and unsentimental look at a handful of thieves who plan a jewelry heist. But this isn’t a movie about criminals. It’s about people. These are guys who are trying to make ends meet, one way or the other. They may live on the wrong side of town, but they’re just trying to get by like anybody else. And as the story unfolds, we see that they’re not so different from the guys on the right side of town.
Huston doesn’t preach. (With one key exception, which I’ll get back to.) He just follows the characters as the heist unfolds, letting us get to know each of these men, allowing us to learn what makes them tick, what their frailties are. The director worked closely with screenwriter Ben Maddow on crafting the script. In his autobiography Huston says he had great respect for W. R. Burnett’s novel, and consulted with the author repeatedly while writing the screenplay.
James Whitmore and Sterling Hayden
The story centers on Dix, a tough guy from the rural South. He has fond memories of the farm he grew up on, but he’s filled with anger over the way that life was taken away from him. The jewel heist could be the big score that allows him to get it all back. The plan is set in motion by Doc, a courtly German immigrant who’s just gotten out of prison. Doc is the mastermind, the man with a foolproof scheme for the perfect job. On arriving in town, he immediately connects with an underground intermediary and sets about choosing his team and finding someone to front them the money they need to get started. The backer they find is Emmerich, a well-respected lawyer who’s having cash flow problems, which seem to be tied to his young mistress.
Louis Calhern and Marc Lawrence
The Asphalt Jungle is filled with character actors you may have seen many times, but you’ve probably never seen them better than in this film. Cobby is your classic simpering gangster tool, but Marc Lawrence makes his weakness seem all too human. James Whitmore and Anthony Caruso are both in fine form playing ordinary guys who are just trying to make living. To them the jewel heist is just a job. Jean Hagen’s performance as Doll is impressive in its directness. She doesn’t hide behind mannerisms or theatrics. She seems totally vulnerable, completely exposed. It’s a moving performance. Veteran Louis Calhern plays Emmerich, the crooked lawyer, with a degree of polish that speaks of his many years of experience on stage and screen. To put it simply, he’s a total pro. But he also lets us see the cracks in the smooth veneer, the brief hesitations where we glimpse his fear, the deep sadness in his weary eyes. In contrast to this seasoned pro, Emmerich’s mistress is played by newcomer Marilyn Monroe in her first significant role. She’s fine, but she doesn’t make much of an impression here. You don’t get a sense of the personality that would make her a star just a few years later.
Jean Hagen
As Dix, Sterling Hayden is forceful and intimidating. In this film just his presence on the screen creates tension, in large part because of the anger burning inside him. It doesn’t take much to set him off. The threat of violence is always just below the surface. This makes for an interesting contrast with Doc. Sam Jaffe plays the older man as a thoughtful, businesslike planner, who (almost) never acts on impulse. The actors have an excellent rapport, and this makes their friendship believable. In spite of their profession, they’re both men of honor. They both have a code.
Huston respects these men, regardless of their faults. They may live by a different set of rules than you and I, but they do have a set of rules, and Huston doesn’t care which side of the law they’re on. Which is why the Commissioner’s stern speech to the press at the end of the film, where he lectures them on the importance of law enforcement, seems so completely out of place. The scene was so out of character for Huston that I wondered if he’d been pushed to insert it by the studio, possibly to counter the film’s portrayal of a crooked cop. But a look at the pages in the director’s autobiography that deal with The Asphalt Jungle don’t reveal any mention of studio interference. Whatever the reason for this scene, it’s a sharp departure from Huston’s usual perspective, and to my mind it’s the film’s only real flaw.
But in scanning Huston’s autobiography, I found out that he did run up against the censors on another scene. When everything comes unravelled and Emmerich is facing arrest, he decides to end it all. Huston initially had him going to his study, pulling out a gun, and blowing his brains out. But depicting a suicide onscreen was not allowed by Hollywood’s production code, unless the character was mentally ill. In order to appease the censors, Huston tweaked the scene to show Emmerich sitting down at his desk, starting to write a suicide note, tossing it away, starting another note, tossing it away, and then finally just pulling the trigger. This satisfied the censors by indicating that the character was unstable, and they gave it the go ahead. The way the scene plays out is a classic example of Huston’s laconic, hard-nosed approach, and he actually felt the changes made it stronger. We see a tight shot of the desktop as Emmerich makes his first, then his second attempt to leave a suicide note. Then his hand reaches into a drawer, removes a gun, and a second later we hear it go off. This one brief shot is an intimate glimpse of a desperate man’s last moments.
Marilyn Monroe
One of the ways Huston avoids sentimentality is by keeping the music to an absolute minimum. Miklós Rózsa’s score is limited to brief cues at the beginning and the end. The film has a spare, stark quality to it. Certainly most of it was shot on sets, but Harold Rosson’s visuals give the impression that the run down diners and cheap hotels are defined by whatever light happens to be in the room. And the people are defined by the rooms they occupy. The art direction, by Randall Duell and Cedric Gibbons, gives every space a distinct character, from the bare walls and wooden chairs of Cobby’s office to the lush comfort of Emmerich’s home.
Huston may be telling the story of a handful of criminals, but really he’s letting us take a look at ourselves. These men may be on the wrong side of the law, but they’re trying to find the same things we’re all looking for. They want to pay off their debts, buy a piece of land, escape to a place where life is easy and the sun is always shining. And they make terrible mistakes, because, like us, they’re blinded by pride, overconfidence, and greed. Huston would probably be the first to admit he was guilty of all three of these sins. Watching the films he made about frail, fallible, foolish people, we may end up thinking about our own lives. All our dashed hopes. All the mistakes we’ve made. All our plans gone wrong.
City Lights (1931)
Charlie Chaplin and Virginia Cherrill
In the twenties, Charlie Chaplin was sitting on top of the world. An international star and owner of his own studio, he had complete control over the films he made. Chaplin worked at his own pace, taking as much time as he needed to get things right. He might spend days on a single scene, and if later he decided it wasn’t right, he’d go back and shoot it all over again. If he felt like he needed a break in the middle of shooting, he’d shut the production down and go back to it when he was ready to resume. I can’t think of another commercial filmmaker who had the same freedom.
Chaplin started out making shorts in the teens. His early efforts were rough, but by 1920 he’d mastered the medium, and it’s important to understand what the medium was in those days. In the silent era, commercial filmmaking relied on characters that were easily recognizable stereotypes, and stories that were told in the clearest possible terms. Without dialogue to help define more complex characters and situations, filmmakers had to use a visual language that was simple and direct.
Harry Myers and Charlie Chaplin
When Chaplin came on screen as the Tramp, audiences recognized the character immediately. He was the little guy, the ordinary fellow who didn’t want any trouble, and spent most of his time just trying to get by. Put him next to a burly roughneck or an elegant society woman and the situation was clear right away. Without a word being spoken, it was easy to see he was either dealing with an antagonist or an aristocrat, and audiences would naturally be rooting for Chaplin, the underdog. The plots were just as simple, setting up blunt contrasts between love and hate, kindness and cruelty, selfishness and self-sacrifice. They appealed to the audience’s most basic emotions, and at their best, the silent films of the studio era had a primal power that was irresistible.
City Lights is one of the prime examples of this kind of filmmaking. The story is real simple. The Tramp falls in love with the Blind Girl who sells flowers on the street. When he finds out she needs money, he (sort of) steals the cash to help her out, but ends up going to prison for the crime. You can’t get much more melodramatic than that, but Chaplin uses this soap opera storyline to create a film that’s funny, beautiful, and sometimes heartbreaking.
These days there are lots of people who complain that Chaplin’s work is too sentimental, and even in his own time there were critics who held that view. All I can say is, it works for me. If I thought that he wasn’t sincere, that he was just trying to manipulate the audience, then I’d be angry at this fraud who was tugging at my heartstrings. But I think Chaplin absolutely believed in the world he created on the screen. Not to say that he believed it was realistic, because he certainly knew that his movies relied heavily on artifice. The reality he was reaching for was an emotional one. Even if the situations were sheer fantasy, Chaplin tried to make the emotions ring true.
One of the reasons Chaplin was so good at putting us in touch with his characters’ feelings is that he understood the relationship between the performer and the camera. For his comic scenes, he spent endless hours shooting rehearsals so that he could fine tune every gesture, making it fit precisely within the frame. The sequence where we see him gazing at the statue in the store window is a classic example. The whole thing is shot from one angle, but it’s absolutely the right angle. Chaplin shot reel after reel of rehearsals, slowly working out a subtle choreography that can wring laughs out of the smallest gesture. In the scene where he meets the Flower Girl, played by Virginia Cherrill, it starts out sweetly charming, then there’s a sense of wistful longing, and suddenly we’re laughing at a slapstick gag. Chaplin accomplishes all this with the simplest set-ups, but he always makes sure that the camera is positioned to pick up everything the actors are doing. It’s not just the expressions on their faces, it’s the way they stand, the way they walk, the way they move their hands. The storyline may be pure melodrama, but scenes like this are a subtle, complex dance.
City Lights shows how completely Chaplin understood silent filmmaking, but he never figured out how to deal with sound. His art was built on the poetry of popular melodrama. The images were so simple you didn’t need words. When he finally started making films with dialogue, the words seemed like excess baggage, weighing everything down. He certainly has some interesting things to say in movies like The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux, but in those later efforts it seems like he’s trying to explain himself, rather than trusting us to understand. In City Lights he doesn’t need to explain anything. We don’t have to hear what Chaplin is saying. We can feel it.
The moment of recognition.
The Southerner (1945)
Betty Field and Zachary Scott
Jean Renoir was not cut out for Hollywood. Like many European directors fleeing the Nazis, he landed in LA around the beginning of WWII. And like many European directors fleeing the Nazis, he found himself faced with a choice between working on genre films or hardly working at all. He made a few movies that more or less fit the standard Hollywood mold, but that wasn’t really what he was interested in. The studios wanted movies about gangsters, dancers, cowboys and comedians. Renoir just wanted to make movies about people.
In 1944 he got his chance, but it didn’t come easy. According to the AFI web site, Renoir was not interested when he first read Hugo Butler’s screenplay based on the novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Perry Sessions. But he must have seen possibilities in the project, because he ended up rewriting the script himself. Having signed Joel McCrea and Frances Dee for the leads, producers David Loew and Robert Hakim arranged distribution for the film through United Artists. But when McCrea bailed out because of creative differences, UA wanted to bail, too. Loew got them to reconsider by threatening to withhold other productions that the distributor was interested in. Zachary Scott and Betty Field stepped in to replace McCrea and Dee. And Renoir began shooting the film that was eventually titled The Southerner.
You can find a few different stories in The Southerner, but really it’s just about a family trying to scrape by living on the land. At the start of the film, Sam and Nona are picking cotton on a plantation, barely making enough to get by. Sam makes a deal with the boss to take over a nearby farm that’s been lying fallow for years. The film follows the Tuckers as they clear the land, plow it and plant it, always struggling to overcome the obstacles that life puts in their way. Instead of inventing an artificial plot to give the film structure, Renoir allows the passing of the seasons to give The Southerner its rhythm.
Husband and wife working the land.
Apparently the director had wanted to shoot in Texas, but ended up having to find the locations he needed in California. Cinematographer Lucien Andriot’s handling of the natural light shows both sensitivity and subtlety. We can feel the heat beating down on Sam and Nona as they’re sweating in the dusty fields. We can see the sky reflected in a placid lake as Jot goes wading by the shore. And while there’s a fair amount of studio work, the sets blend almost seamlessly with the real locations. Production designer Eugène Lourié, a longtime collaborator of the director’s, not only makes the Tuckers’ scraggly house seem a natural part of the landscape, it also feels completely lived in.
The film has a wonderful ensemble cast. Charles Kemper disappears into the role of Sam’s amiable friend Tim. Veteran character actor Beulah Bondi is in fine form as Granny. If she’s cranky and difficult, it’s because life hasn’t been easy. Her face and her body appear to have been worn away by the elements. The child actors here don’t seem to be acting at all. Jay Gilpin and Jean Vanderwilt are surprisingly unselfconscious as the Tucker children, Jot and Daisy.
Beulah Bondi and Betty Field
But the movie is centered on Sam and Nona, played by Zachary Scott and Betty Field. They’re an idealized vision of rural Americans, simple, hardworking people who just keep moving forward no matter how hard things get. Usually Hollywood turns characters like these into tedious clichés. Here Renoir uses his gentle, unforced approach to put this humble couple at the center of his poem about the rural South. Betty Field plays Nona with a straightforward simplicity that’s easy to take for granted. I’ve seen the film a number of times, but it’s only recently that I began to appreciate how good her performance is. Field had a long career on stage, screen and TV, but she never called attention to herself or her work. As a result, she was overlooked during her lifetime and now she’s pretty much forgotten. As Sam, Zachary Scott seems like an agreeable, easygoing guy, but there’s a toughness beneath the surface that gives the character strength. Scott was an intelligent, versatile actor, who, like Field, seems to have faded into obscurity. It’s too bad. They both deserve more attention.
While Renoir felt that The Southerner was the best of his American films, it’s never gotten the attention that his earlier work received. These days it’s fallen into the public domain. It’s available on DVD, but the quality isn’t great. My guess is that the distributor started with a faded sixteen millimeter print. This movie deserves better. I have no idea how many prints are out there, or what condition they’re in, and I know restoring and remastering a film can be costly, but I wish somebody would put together a quality re-release of this movie. The Southerner has been neglected for far too long. Won’t somebody adopt this beautiful orphan?
Oz in 3D?
I was standing on Hollywood Boulevard the other day, and I noticed that the Chinese Theatre was advertising a new version of The Wizard of Oz in 3D. I’ve gotta say, this really bugs me.
I have no problem with recent 2D films being converted to 3D, as long as the director approves. If James Cameron wants to re-release Titanic in 3D, that’s his business. But Victor Fleming and his numerous collaborators have been dead for many years, so there’s really no way of knowing whether or not the original creators would approve of this update.
It’s not just The Wizard of Oz I’m worried about. The thing that really concerns me is the precedent this sets. If the 3D Oz is a success, does this mean studios will start a stampede to do the same thing with other classics? I’m thinking back to the eighties, when companies were colorizing movies for release on video. Isn’t this the same thing?
If the theatrical re-release of Wizard of Oz in 3D makes a lot of money, what’s next? Lawrence of Arabia? 2001? Psycho? And now that technology has advanced to the point where 3D is available on home video, does this mean we’ll see “enhanced” versions of The Maltese Falcon? The Searchers? Rebel without a Cause?
Does anyone else see this as a problem? And if so, should we be doing something about it? I wonder if the DGA has this on their radar….
Reality Is Scary 