Three Films Make A Post: The gun that became the law of the land !

Pickpocket (1959): The arthouse crowd loves to recommend this short crime drama with a prologue scroll explaining it isn’t a crime drama as a comparatively easy in to the world of French director Robert Bresson’s “minimalist, “austere”, “hypnotic” etc style. So I thought to myself, why not try it, for I do find quite a bit in at least a third of the films recommended thusly. It’s certainly easy to see the artfulness of the filmmaking, the intensity and elegance the film comes by exactly because Bresson is so aesthetically focussed. I’m much less sure about the rest of the style: emotionally and intellectually, this does very little for me. Bresson’s moral viewpoint seems completely disinterested in complexity, so is frankly rather boring for my tastes; I also find it hard to emotionally connect to a central character who mostly spouts half-cooked mock-existentialism about the superman. Add to this Bresson’s habit of casting non-actors in the main role to get “authentic” camera performances (or as I call it “the jitters” and monotonous line reading) which is something I absolutely loathe, and I think I’ll pass on Bresson’s films for the next decade or so.

The Mourning Forest aka Mogari no mori (2007): This also arthouse crowd approved tale of what I assume to be a care-giver (Machiko Ono) at some sort of retirement home (the film doesn’t do exposition) getting stranded in a forest for several days with one of their patients (Shigeki Uda) and working through their respective griefs, as directed by Naomi Kawase on the other hand, does quite a lot for me. It does appear rather loose and unfocussed at the beginning, but that’s really Kawase opening up the world of her characters for the audience without comment, opening up an approach to her grieving people’s endless complexities that may make things difficult, and not always obvious, but which also makes it possible to understand much more about them once one has tuned into things in the right way.

Colt .45 (1950): This Edwin L. Marin western with Randolph Scott as a salesmen for new-fangled colts finding himself set against the evil and somewhat perverse Zachary Scott (no relation) is a bit rough around the edges. There are certainly some great moments and ideas in here, but Marin isn’t quite the director to make the most of them.

So expect Scott teaming up with the local native American tribe in a nicely progressive turn, but also expect their portrayal to be even more awkward than typical of the era, and whose problems only start with their Chief being played by Chief Thundercloud, who was no chief of any tribe, and most probably not a Native American. There are huge (these things look as phallic as all get out, so I use the word on purpose) suggestions of the colts’ psychosexual influence particularly on our villain but they never quite gel in the end. Also worth mentioning are a pretty juicy part for Ruth Roman as the wife of a secondary villain (Lloyd Bridges in his young and buff phase) turning to Randolph rather quickly; a corrupt sheriff and other elements that make this unmissable on paper.

In practice, it’s just not that good of a movie (though not a bad one, either).

In short: Invisible Agent (1942)

1941. German agent Conrad Stauffer (Cedric Hardwicke), “Japanese” “Baron” Ikito (Peter Lorre, as we all know the most Asian guy in Hollywood at the time, Austria being so very close to China or Japan) and their henchmen have a nice little talk – with assorted introductory torture – about a certain family invention with one Frank Raymond (Jon Hall). Raymond changed his name to Raymond from Griffin, and the film usually calls him the grandson of Frank Griffin, the Invisible Man, even though Frank was the brother of the original Invisible Man. Far be it from me to suggest a Universal movie doesn’t give a crap about even the simplest facts surrounding what came before in a franchise, so let’s just pretend “Grandson of the guy who helped Vincent Price become the second Invisible Man” would be too difficult for the tiny brains of an audience to comprehend.

Anyway, Frank manages to escape the bad guys’ clutches, delivers news of the affair to some kind of military gentleman, declines to deliver the invisibility serum to the US military (because bah, gas chambers, who cares, one can’t help but mentally add), but quickly changes his tune after Pearl Harbour, for once Americans are getting killed moral compunctions aren’t important anymore. However, Frank still has one condition: only a single man shall be treated with the serum, and that man must be him! Because this is a movie, various Allied higher-ups agree with the plan, and quickly, the Invisible Amateur, I mean Agent, is on a mission to Berlin to find out all available information about a coming Japanese/German attack on US soil.

Will he bumble around even worse than you expect the amateur he is to, and risk his invisibility cover on the tiniest of provocations? Will the film awkwardly shuffle between portraying the Nazis as fools even more bumbling than our nominal hero and actually evil? Will Stauffer and Ikito just happen to become involved? Will there be an attractive woman (Ilonay Massey) in the spy business for our hero to romance? Will character actors like Albert Bassermann and J. Edward Bromberg try their best working from a particularly sloppy Curt Siodmak script? You betcha!

Turning a version of the invisible man into a propagandistic war time hero obviously made a lot of sense in 1942, and of course suggests to the excitable mind further movies only made in an alternative reality like “The Wolfman Howls at Himmler” and “Dracula bites Hitler: Perhaps not the best idea”. Alas, what Universal and director Edwin L. Marin deliver here is quite a mess, featuring a hero so incompetent he is threatened even by the most Keystone Koppish of the Nazis, and Nazis the film never can decide are bumbling fools or terrifyingly effective evil. It’s a tonal problem that isn’t helped by the Universal love for bad slapstick, nor by the film’s episodic structure, where single scenes can be quite impressive but no care seems to have been taken with actually turning these scenes into a narrative with a coherent mood. Which of course, war time propaganda or not, does fit perfectly into the way Universal treated its fantastic films after The Wolfman, disposable trash good enough for the peasants to spend their money on but not important enough for the studio to put any effort in.