Big Brown Eyes

I was jolted by a scene of violence in “Big Brown Eyes” (1936). What starts out as a cute if somewhat formulaic comedy starring a sparring Cary Grant and Joan Bennett turns sour and casts a pall over the remainder of its 76-minute running time, a pall the film never quite recovers from.

Gangster/Jewel Thief Lloyd Nolan is having a discussion with fellow jewel robbers on a park bench when an argument erupts between the two parties. Two gangsters knock Nolan down and he responds by drawing a gun and firing at their fleeing selves. He misses but instead hits a baby carriage and kills the infant.

What was director and co-writer Raoul Walsh thinking?

Killing an infant seems unusually harsh to get a plot point across. Why make the victim an infant? I’m not trying to be facetious, but couldn’t an adult passerby have been killed instead?

Later on for a second or two, its fun seeing the nattily-dressed Nolan in court, casually trimming his fingernails and without a care in the world. Thanks to a fix he knows he’s going to be acquitted. But then we see the grieving mother, dressed in black, silently weeping and when the not guilty verdict is read she can barely stand and has to be helped out of the courtroom.

It just sucks all the joy out of the movie.

Cary Grant plays Detective Sergeant Danny Barr, who’s trying to crack a ring of jewel thieves. When not detecting, he’s getting a haircut and manicure at a gloriously Art Deco barber shop that reminds me of one featured in the wonderful Carole Lombard/Fred MacMurray film “Hands Across the Table” (1935).

Since both films come from Paramount, it would not surprise me if the same barber shop set was used. (While the film is a Walter Wanger production, if Wanger had a distribution arrangement with Paramount, its possible Paramount let him use some of their existing sets.)

Everyone seems to hang out in the barber shop, including members of the jewel thief ring, including Benny Battle (Douglas Fowley) and his seemingly respectable boss Richard Morey (Walter Pidgeon).

Danny and manicurist Eve Fallon (Joan Bennett) have an attraction for each other, but they seem to fight more than kiss. There’s one amusing scene where, with a door between them, Grant pretends to be romancing a woman in the hallway as Bennett listens in.

Benny Battle is attracted to Eve’s friend Bessie Blair (Isabell Jewell). (Alliteration will do that.) They meet in the park just before the shooting, so Bessie is able to I.D. Benny.

He won’t confess though, so (only in the movies) former manicurist turned crime beat reporter Eve concocts, very cleverly, a means to make Benny confess to the police and finger Lloyd Nolan.

In this movie, Cary Grant still isn’t THE Cary Grant, so he’s still in his learning stage. He does OK, I guess, but the seemingly effortless charm would come later. Still, he and Bennett work well together, though I enjoy more the other film they made together the same year, “The Wedding Present.”

Later in the movie, one of the gangsters who intimidates Bessie looks like a very young Morris Ankrum. IMDB does not list him as being in the cast, but it sure does look like him. You may not know the name, but you would surely recognize the face. Ankrum played generals in a slew of 1950s science fiction movies and played the judge in many a Perry Mason episode.

“Big Brown Eyes” is a trifle, and no more. The baby killing scene is very unpleasant and unfortunately it’s probably the most memorable thing in the movie. Not a very auspicious quality to be remembered for.

“Big Brown Eyes” is part of a very affordably-priced DVD collection titled “Cary Grant Screen Legend Collection). Other titles include “Thirty Day Princess” (1934) co-starring Sylvia Sidney”; “Kiss and Make Up” (1934) with Genevieve Tobin; “Wings in the Dark” (1935), an early pairing with Myrna Loy; and the aforementioned “Wedding Present.”

I haven’t seen most of these so I’m looking forward to watching the rest of these. It’s always interesting to see early appearances by future stars. These titles may not be essential Cary Grant, but as a bedrock to a great career, these efforts can’t be denied.

The World In His Arms

“The World in His Arms” (1952) is a rousing adventure film, the type today’s Hollywood would be completely incapable of making. Oh, they could try to make it, but they would be so insistent on giving psychological shadings to the characters, or creating elaborate back stories as to why the characters behave the way they do, that the entire enterprise would become a turgid two-and-a-half-hour bore.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with back stories, but sometimes you just want to sit back with an adventure yarn lavishly told with a strong handsome hero, a beautiful strong-willed woman, colorful supporting characters, large-scale action scenes, elaborate costumes, fabulous production design capable of creating exotic backgrounds for the story, and a lush orchestral score with a big sweeping melody sure to get the heart pumping. These elements are all front and center in “The World in his Arms”, a full-blooded adventure yarn directed by the master Raoul Walsh that uses all of its 104-mintue running time to tell an exciting story.

In this case, that exotic background I mentioned earlier is San Francisco circa 1850 and a Russian-governed Alaska territory. Gregory Peck is Sea Captain John Clark, known to everyone as “The Boston Man”, a procurer and trader of seal pelts he brings back to San Francisco from the shores of Alaska. He hatches the idea of buying the Alaska territory with his riches; not only for the territory, but to help end the cruel Russian rule of the territory. Of course there’s the beautiful Czarist Countess Maria Selanova (Ann Blyth) who he falls in love with after she disguises herself as a Barbary Coast dancing girl. She’s engaged to Prince Semyon (Carl Esmond, not as forceful as I would like), a cruel member of the nobility who tends to chop off the hands of uncooperative Eskimos in his territory.

Good stuff here, and a marvelous supporting cast including Anthony Quinn as a sometimes rival, sometimes friend to Peck; John McIntire, Eugenie Leontovich, Hans Conreid, Rhys Williams, and the incomparable Sig Ruman. There’s not a movie made that isn’t immediately improved by Sig Ruman’s presence.

Walsh is one of the best action directors of all time, with most of his movies brimming with lusty action and broad comedy. There’s a marvelous sequence here where Peck and Quinn race their ships from San Francisco to Alaska. We become so caught up in the action of the tall ships racing through the crashing ocean waves that we barely notice the scenes of the crew on deck filmed in front of a process screen.

The climax is memorable too, and very reminiscent of “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938). This time, Peck’s men disguise themselves as hooded monks to crash the wedding between the Countess and the Prince. Peck disrupts the wedding when he makes a spectacular crash through a plate glass window in the church balcony.

I’m sure the cast and crew had no illusions they were creating art here, and were satisfied at turning out nothing more than a rousing good time at the movies. There’s no skimping on production values here, and the score by the underrated Frank Skinner is top notch. There’s a little something for everyone. Men like the action and the women are sure to appreciate the final scene, with Captain Clark and the Countess together at the wheel of his ship, off to new adventures. As John McIntire’s character says, “He’s got the world in his arms.”

Battle Cry

For a World War II movie titled “Battle Cry” (1955), there’s very little battle on display.

I don’t think there was a more service-friendly film since Abbott and Costello joined the Army in “Buck Privates” (1941). In “Battle Cry” there’s very little training and very little war, but there sure are a lot of furloughs and three-day leaves.

“Battle Cry”, based on a novel by Leon Uris, shows a squad of young men as they train to become Marines in the early days of World War II. Squad commander Major Sam Huxley (Van Heflin) knows what his boys will be facing and relies on his Sergeant (James Whitmore) to help him train the man for the rigors of combat. At least I think so, but there’s very little training. Instead the film focuses on their seemingly never ending three-day leaves and furloughs. Really, that’s all these guys do is go on furlough. With all the leaves and furloughs these guys receive, it’s a miracle we won the war.

The recruits are played by such up-and-coming actors as Aldo Ray, Tab Hunter, John Lupton, William Campbell and Fess Parker. For the latter two we are afforded only a few glimpses of each, and I suspect additional footage of them did not make the final cut.

We meet their various women, played by Mona Freeman, Dorothy Malone, Nancy Olson and Anne Francis (very appealing as the hooker with the heart of gold. Aren’t they all?)

When director Raoul Walsh turned in his original cut it ran more than three hours long so lots of footage had to go. I wonder if some battle scenes got cut because there’s hardly any action in it.

The film runs 148 minutes. The first 85 minutes consist of very short training sequences dropped into romantic entanglements and furlough scenes. Once basic training is over they ship to New Zealand, where the men are, you guessed it, granted leave.

At the 85-minute mark the squad is sent to Guadacanal for a clean-up mission, so I thought we would finally see some action. But by the time they get there, most of the Japanese have retreated so there’s no action. For their bravery (?), the men get, you guessed it again, a three-day leave. So back to New Zealand they go. There’s another half hour of leave and furlough footage until they are called back to duty.

A competing squad has set a record for hiking. There’s no way Huxley’s Hookers (as they become known) are going to let this happen, so they decide to beat the record and engage in a 17-hour hike. Of course the men are exhausted but persevere and win the competition. For this great achievement, they win, you guessed it yet again, another leave!

Now I wouldn’t want to engage in a 17-hour hike, but I sure would rather have a 17-hour hike than be shot at. More leave scenes, and we are now at the two hour and ten minute mark with 20 minutes to go and no war footage.

Huxley’s Hookers get sent to Saipan, and they do face combat for about 10 minutes of routinely staged action. The movie gives us another 10 minutes of reunion footage, and the film is mercifully over.

It’s all watchable enough, but the balance is woefully off throughout the film. Walsh and Company should have left in some battle footage in the midway point of the film (again, assuming it was shot) and ditched the stupid hike sequence.

Max Steiner contributes a rousing march theme, but I don’t know any Steiner score filled with so much source music. Steiner could write themes with the best of them, but not here. Again, I wonder if there was a lot of post-production editing. The theme for the romance between the Aldo Ray and Nancy Olson characters is the song “I’ll String Along With You” from the 1934 Warner Bros. musical “20 Million Sweethearts. Dick Powell sang it to Ginger Rogers, if you care. But as Groucho Marx would say.what the song has to do with a romance between a Marine and a New Zealand girl I’ll never know.

The song “Put ‘Em in a Box” is heard a source music at one point in a restaurant but that song was introduced by Doris Day in the 1948 Warners musical “Romance on the High Seas”, several years after the war had ended. I know its trivial but that’s irritating. Surely there are other songs in the Warners Song Catalog they could have used that were true to the time?

“Battle Cry” is one of the most soap opera-like war films I’ve ever seen. No wonder it was such a big hit for Warner Bros. in 1955, because this was one war film that girlfriends and wives gladly went with their men to see. Still, I wonder how many men saw the film and joined the Marines, thinking it was going to be one long furlough, with that furlough interrupted by three-day leaves.

Rating for “Battle Cry”: Two stars.