The wild side ....

We like a good catfight and here is a doozy, from another of our Guilty Pleasures: the 1962 campfest that is WALK ON THE WILD SIDE, as Stanwyck's lesbian madam lets haughty Capucine have it, We love Barbara and Cap here at The Projector and they go to town with this. I will have to see the whole movie again soon for a good wallow. It is a certified Trash Classic and a Bad Movie We Love, up there with VALLEY OF THE DOLLS etc. More Bad Movies We Love soon .....

Here is what we said about it a few years ago:
WALK ON THE WILD SIDE – Harvey again in another lulu from 1962 and one of the best trash classics ever, as directed by Edward Dmytryk with that pounding Elmer Bernstein score and that great credit sequence with the prowling cat. (Jazzman Jimmy Smith also had a hit with this theme). Laurence Harvey, as expressionless as ever, hunts for his lost love Capucine in the bordellos of New Orleans in the 1930s, from the well-known novel by Nelson Algren. The movie is quite tame though but the cast are fascinating: young Jane Fonda as Kitty Twist, on the road with Harvey and later in the cat house owned by Barbara Stanwyck who wants haughty sculptress Capucine for herself. There is something fascinating about Capucine, I just like watching her. Anne Baxter has a supporting role here as Teresina, the Italian café owner, who would like Harvey to stay on with her. It all comes to a steaming climax at Stanwyck’s cathouse … one to savour then.

Stanwyck out west

Few of Hollywood's leading ladies looked as capable with a gun holster and riding a horse as 'Missy' (to her friends) Barbara Stanwyck, who seemed to spend most of the 1950s out west - apart from being on the TITANIC in 1953, and CLASH BY NIGHT or ESCAPE TO BURMA or that EXECUTIVE SUITE. Joan Crawford of course made the west her own in 1954's JOHNNY GUITAR (the first film I ever saw, aged 8, as mentioned before), but Barbara had all guns blazing in westerns as diverse as oaters like THE CATTLE QUEEN OF MONTANA in '54 or THE MAVERICK QUEEN in 1956 - how we liked those as kids.. 

1955's THE VIOLENT MEN was a tense one where she is the deceitful wife of crippled Edward G Robinson (they were both in DOUBLE INDEMNITY - below), during the climax she throws his crutches into the blazing house and hopes he is trapped there, as Glenn Ford and her lover Brian Keith shoot it out ... Sam Fuller's FORTY GUNS is another terrific one where she takes the bullet at the end, and Anthony Mann's THE FURIES is a delirious one in 1950 where Babs wields that scissors at rival Judith Anderson .... add in Beulah Bondi and Blanche Yurka for extra Furies. 

One I liked a lot is 1957's TROOPER HOOK where, following Ford's THE SEARCHERS, she is a white woman rescued from the Indians,with a halfbreed son, and his Apache father in hot pursuit ..... review at Stanwyck label. 

Barbara earlier in the 1930s took to the west in ANNIE OAKLEY in 1935, and UNION PACIFIC in 1939, and later, after her hits like THE LADY EVE and Sugarpuss O'Shea in BALL OF FIRE and her "maybe I'm just a dame and didn't realise it" in THE FILE ON THELMA JORDAN, and guesting in various tv westerns, had her own western tv series THE BIG VALLEY, and of course she was a hit in THE THORN BIRDS and certainly enlivened THE COLBYS!. 
Maybe not a western as such, she was re-united with Gary Cooper in the 1953 torrid melodrama down Mexico way in BLOWING WILD where she lures husband Anthony Quinn to his death by oil derrick, while Ruth Roman is the good girl here, and yes again there is a bullet with Barbara's name on it ... (Below: FORTY GUNS).

We will have to re-see her 1962 Trash Classic WALK ON THE WILD SIDE again soon, with that terrific cast of Capucine, Jane Fonda, Anne Baxter, Stanwyck dominating all and Laurence Harvey sleepwalking through it all as usual ...

"Closer than that, Walter"

DOUBLE INDEMNITY was on television. I know it well but looking in just as the credits rolled I was reeled in again and sat there fascinated until the last bitter moment. Billy Wilder's hardboiled 1944 noir classic is still a giant of the genre, as scriped by Raymond Chandler. So many marvellous lines to savour.  Barbara Stanwyck has her all-time classic role as Phyllis Dietrichson, that suburban Medusa lying in wait in that dusty 1930s California spanish-style home, to trap some stupid sap insurance man into that plot to kill her husband whom she now despises, after, as it turns out, killing his invalid wife some years previously when she was her nurse. Walter Neff (Fred McMurray is just right here) is just the perfect cocky guy who falls into her clutches, and together they plan their perfect crime. But his associate Barton Keyes (Edward G Robinson) comes to feel his gut reaction that something is wrong with the case. Why didn't the victim make a claim for his injured leg? - maybe because he did not know he was insured for accidents .....

It is a bleak, pitiless world where the lovers meet in that early type supermarket, and oddly, the door to Neff's apartment opens outwards - convenient for when Keyes drops in on Neff, just as Phyllis is about to arrive, and can hide behind the open door .... then the scales fall from Neff's eyes and the lovers meet one last time. She shoots first but can't finish it as she suddenly realises she has feelings after all ... and finally our fatally injured sap tells all into the dictating maching as Keyes arrives and hears all. Walter tells him he could not see who the guy was as he was too close, just across his desk - to which Barton dryly comments that he was closer than that ....

Wilder shot additional scenes of Neff in the gas chamber, but realised they were not needed, just like he did in SUNSET BOULEVARD, his other great classic (apart from SOME LIKE IT HOT and THE APARTMENT) showing Joe Gillis's corpse arriving at the morgue and the other corpses asking him how he got there - but preview audiences laughed at this, so Wilder wisely scrapped it (but its on the dvd extras). But we will always have Phyllis with her ankle bracelet artfully drawing Neff into her web with that sparking talk of a speed limit which Walter was exceeding ..... Play it again ! I may now have to go back and re-see GILDA, LAURA, MILDRED PIERCE, ROAD HOUSE, OUT OF THE PAST, NOTORIOUS, etc .... Black and white '40s noirs, theres nothing like them. 

Roman revels

Two more Ruth Roman movies from that busy year for her, 1951 - when she also played the female lead in Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, probably her best remembered film. Ruth, as I have mentioned here before - see label - was a tough gal, who did lots of melodramas and routine actioners (ok, B-movies) in the '50s and into the '60s, having began in the '40s - she is in Bette's BEYOND THE FOREST, and thanks to my IMDb pal Jerry for a mid-'40s serial she is in: JUNGLE QUEEN - I am saving that one for "some snowy night in front of the fire" and I am the lookout for her 1955 take on Shakespeare: JOE MACBETH (with her as the mobster's Lady Macbeth), which I remember seeing as a kid.  Ruth should have been as big a name as those other tough gals like Susan Hayward, or Barbara Stanwyck - Ruth could have played a lot of Stanwyck '50s roles like CLASH BY NIGHT or BLOWING WILD (she is the good girl in that, while Barbara is the bad wife, they have a nice scene together), or even some of Joan Crawford's roles, or Lizabeth Scott's or Jan Sterling's, and of course we love her in 1966's LOVE HAS MANY FACES where she gives Lana  Turner a run for her money in that delirious soap/trash classic. Ruth (1922-1999) ended up in shows like MURDER SHE WROTE and KNOTS LANDING. 

TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY teams bad boy Steve Cochran with cheap dime-a-dance girl Ruth - looking very glam in a brassy blond wig (like Jane Russell's 'hostess' in wartime Hawaii in Trash Classic THE REVOLT OF MAMIE STOVER, Russell label). 

Here is the blurb:

What kind of future awaits a couple with a past? Ruth Roman and Steve Cochran in a film-noir gem.

A man who spent his formative years in prison for murder is released, and struggles to adjust to the outside world and escape his lurid past. He gets involved with a cheap dancehall girl, and when her protector is accidentally killed, they go on the lam together, getting jobs as farm labourers. 
But some fellow workers get wise to them. Steve Cochran conveys the loneliness of his character, freed for killing his brutal father when he was only 13, and now he's still a tentative, gawky pubescent operating inside a man's hulky frame. Lonesome, he visits a 10-cents-a-dance palace and falls for brassy, grasping Ruth Roman. But the sudden shooting of her police-bigwig boyfriend causes the ill-matched couple to hit the road, ending in a California migrant-worker camp. Directed by one Felix Feist.

This conjures up a world of diners, drab rooming houses, people on the move hitching lifts and riding on trains and cheap motels like the Shady Nook where our couple on the run hole up, before they join that settlement of farm workers and make friends and seem to have a whole new life, leaving their sordid pasts behind them. Ruth even lets her hair go natural to black. But Steve's photo turns up in a magazine and the neighbours have to decide whether to turn him in for the reward .... fate however intervenes, but the ending is uplifing as our newly free couple can start all over again. Though surely a good time girl like Ruth would hardly settle for living in a shack and working in the fields ?

Both Cochran and Roman are ideal, he is in his prime here, as magnetic as Brando's WILD ONE in his tee-shirt and jeans, at least Warners didn't insist he shave his chest, like William Holden had to for PICNIC! - he was also good with Anne Baxter (another dame who could be tough when called for) in CARNIVAL STORY in '54, and of course his best known film, as the lead in Antonioni's IL GRIDO in 1957 (review at Cochran/Antonioni labels), and we reviewed his last film MOZAMBIQUE a while back. (He died aged 48 in 1965 while sailing a yacht in the Pacific, a notorious Hollywood bad boy in the Erroll Flynn tradition...).

LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE is a more routine meller, directed by the great King Vidor (the '56 WAR AND PEACE, RUBY GENTRY, DUEL IN THE SUN, SOLOMON AND SHEBA etc), with British actor Richard Todd, and sterling support from Mercedes McCambridge firing on all cylinders as usual (as in JOHNNY GUITAR!) and that seedy lothario Zachary Scott (in a similar role here to his in MILDRED PIERCE). This time Ruth is the touring actress recuperating in the desert small town and getting to know Todd who is on reprieve from murdering his wife and facing a re-trial. Mercedes is the possessive woman who was on the jury, so it has all the elements for a romantic murder mystery suspense. 
Is the heroine in danger? - though hard to imagine Ruth not being able to fend for herself. It all plays out nicely, but if only it was as over the top as that other meller set in the desert in lurid colours: 1947's DESERT FURY which had Lizabeth Scott and Mary Astor as well as the young Burt Lancaster and that odd couple of John Hodiak and Wendall Corey, as per my review (Astor label).  

I have now seen a 1987 episode of MURDER SHE WROTE (from Series 4) where Ruth guests as Loretta, the owner of the Beauty Salon (think pink!) in Cabot Cove, where the local ladies - including ageless Julie Adams, Kathryn Grant and Gloria De Haven - get their hair done and gossip.
 Ruth is a joy and obviously in her element presiding over the Salon and dispensing gossip to Jessica .... she did 3 episodes of Lansbury's successful series, I shall now have to see her other two guest spots as well, as Ruth wound up her career here in a good way, in a deliciously entertaining tale. 

Westerns I love: Trooper Hook

TROOPER HOOK - I really liked this 1957 western when I saw it as a kid so nice to see it again 50 years later. Its a rather neglected wesern now, perhaps it would be screened more if it were in colour? I like Barbara Stanwyck's other '50s westerns too (CATTLE QUEEN OF MONTANA, THE MAVERICK QUEEN, THE FURIES (a recent discovery, as per Stanwyck label), 40 GUNS, THE VIOLENT MEN), this is a nice black and white one made the year after THE SEARCHERS and is also about a woman being rescued from living with the indians - here though its a mature woman with her son by the Apache chief Nanchez (Rudolfo Acosta). Joel McCrea is the Trooper Hook of the title who has the task of taking Cora and her son back to her husband as they travel though Indian territory on a stagecoach which also has Senorita Susan Kohner, cowboy Earl Hollimann, and the splendidly venal Edward Andrews on board). 
 

Stanwyck is very compelling as Cora and plays it mainly silent as she re-adjusts to civilisation. Nanchez is also in pursuit as he wants his son. John Dehner is the husband who wants his wife back but not her half-breed child ... its tense and nicely resolved and its one of Stanwyck's better '50s films, all wrapped up in 80 minutes and there is even a Tex Ritter theme song! Directed by Charles Maquis Warren (?).

Stanwyck out west, redux

I love Barbara Stanwyck out west where she excelled at playing strong-willed, independent women, usually a cattle queen or town big wig who gave as good as she got - I grew up on those movies like CATTLE QUEEN OF MONTANA and THE MAVERICK QUEEN and 40 GUNS. See Stanwyck label for comments on these and 1957's very under-rated TROOPER HOOK which I loved as kid where she plays the white woman rescued from the redskins in a very interesting way, quiet and watchful. (The '50s was a good decade for Barbara what with CLASH BY NIGHT, EXECUTIVE SUITE, TITANIC, all these westerns before programmers like ESCAPE TO BURMA or WITNESS TO MURDER, and her other deceitful wife in BLOWING WILD).

A posed shot with scissors for THE FURIES

Now I have discovered two more of her '50s westerns I had not seen before: Anthony Mann's THE FURIES in 1950 and Rudolph Mate's THE VIOLENT MEN in 1955.  THE FURIES (like Wyler's THE BIG COUNTRY) is hardly a western at all but an engrossing drama of a divided family out west.  Walter Huston (his last role) is the powerful rancher who has brought up his daughter Vance to be as tough as himself and and has promised her the ranch The Furies will be hers after his death. But then he brings home his ageing fancy woman Judith Anderson (firing on all cylinders as usual) who wants to be his wife and begins to ease Vance out but goes too far by telling her there will always be a room there for her .... we had earlier seen Barbara playing with that large pair of scissors and it is an electrifying moment when she lets Judith have it in the face, which leads to bitter emnity between father and daugher.

Barbara lets rip with the scissors

Apart from Barbara and Judith we also have Blanche Yurka and Beulah Bondi - what a quartet - the men are Gilbert Roland, Barbara's Mexican pal who gets strung up - but his mother Blanche gets her revenge at the climax - and that oddity Wendall Corey, surely the dullest least attractive leading man ever? (see review of DESERT FURY, westerns label) This is a long western drama as Vance aims to buy out her father's ranch  and has some great black and white photography and as usual with Mann, there are some great compositions.

Barbara has a great line when visiting Corey, his girl tells her she is new here, Barbara retorts "honey, you wouldn't be new any place".

Ford, Keith, Robinson & Stanwyck

THE VIOLENT MEN is a more conventional western with great ourdoors vistas in Scope and colour as another rancher Glenn Ford faces up to crippled Edward G Robinson who wants to own the whole valley, as egged on by his unfaithful lustful wife Barbara (who is carrying on with his brother, the fitter Brian Keith). This gets pretty violent too, there is the sadistic murder of a ranch-hand by evil Richard Jaeckel, and also that great scene as Barbara (a mix of Medusa and Lady Macbeth) throws Edward G's crutches into the fire as their house burns leaving him to perish in the flames... She has a great moment at the climax when she thinks Robinson is dead but he rides back and like Bette at the climax of THE LETTER she too meets her nemesis ....a good afternoon's viewing then.

Joan Crawford was of course just as good out west in JOHNNY GUITAR (westerns label) the first movie I ever saw aged 8, as I often mention. Coming up: more on Joan's 50s classics, and Lana Turner's 50s sudsers, and also that other outdoor gal Susan Hayward who also went west a few times...how I spoil you.

Titanic, 1953

Fanscination with The Titanic rolls ever onward - in its centenary year. We will soon have a new 4-part series written by Lord Julian Fellows (DOWNTON ABBEY), and of course whatever one thinks of James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster, the second half after the iceberg hits is stunningly well done as one really feels the ocean invading and sinking the ship ... so it was interesting to catch Jean Negulesco's 1953 version. Winner of three Academy Awards, the 1953 TITANIC holds up well, even on a much smaller budget - as does the 1958 A NIGHT TO REMEMBER, with Kenneth More, perhaps the best all-round version of events without silly stories at the forefront.

Fascination with the fate of the huge and opulent liner is as strong as ever, especially since improved technology has led to more breathtaking visits to the ship's resting spot on the floor of the Atlantic where state-of-the-art robots with cameras explore the crumbling interiors of the still eerily majestic but rapidly decaying wreck.



20th Century's contribution to the story hold the interest with Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck heading the cast as an ill-matched couple; she is in fact leaving him and returning to America with their children as he joins the ship at the last minute to reason with her. Webb and Stanwyck bring their expertise to this soap opera story and it remains very affecting. Add in young Robert Wagner, more like a 50s teenager than a 1912 one, and Thelma Ritter as the famous Unsinkable Molly Brown, and Brian Aherne as the captain and the stage is set for some dramatics. Negulesco keeps it going nicely and it has that early 50s 20th Century Fox look in spades.

The tempestuous exchanges between Webb and Stanwyck are strongly and believably acted, and then we have the sinking of the vessel - not as graphically done as in the later versions, but suitably stiff upper lip to the end. Interesting to compare these versions this anniversary year, we shall be hearing more about them.

Its that time: Christmas in Connecticut or France ?

Some seasonal viewing: a '40s Hollywood christmas tale, or a recent French look at another dysfunctional family during the holiday season ?

CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT: Released the last year of WWII in 1945 (I was born that December), the film is full of subtle patriotic gestures and holiday nostalgia but never sinks to sentimentality. Stanwyck is sexy and sassy as always and is a lot of fun here. She is a cooking columnist who's built up this whole image of living on a small Connecticut farm with husband and baby cooking all these marvelous delicacies. Trouble is she's unmarried, childless, writes her column from her apartment in New York and doesn't know how to boil water. But her writing is a hit with the public. Trouble comes when she's hijacked into cooking a home Christmas dinner for a war hero sailor played by Dennis Morgan who gets to sing a couple of songs as well. Her publisher Sidney Greenstreet likes the idea so well that he invites himself to the dinner. So with borrowed farm, baby, and Reginald Gardiner who'd like to make it real with Stanwyck she tries to brazen it through. S.Z. Sakall adds a great deal of Hungarian malaprop & double-entendre humor in support as Babs' true source of culinary talent & Una O'Connor is hilarious as Gardiner's obnoxious Irish housekeeper. A nice treat then.

A CHRISTMAS TALE: Fancy another French family dysfunction drama? Rather like Assayas's SUMMER HOURS (reviewed at French label), only this one is two and half hours long in the company of some unsumpathetic people as the Vuillard family gathers: parents Junon and Abel, a daughter Elizabeth and her son Paul, Henri and a girlfriend, Ivan, his wife Sylvia and their young sons, and cousin Simon. Six years before, Elizabeth paid Henri's debts and demanded he never see her again or visit their parents' home. Paul, at 16, has mental problems and faces a clinical exam. Junon learns she needs a bone marrow transplant if she's to live beyond a few months: thus the détente bringing all together. Two family members have compatible marrow, but the spats, fights, cruel words, drunken toasts, and somewhat civilized bad behavior threaten all; plus Junon may simply refuse treatment.

It turns out to be an overly long and incredibly talky dysfunctional family drama, by Arnaud Desplechin, led by a chilly Catherine Deneuve as the dying matriarch (such a contrast to her sunny role in the delicious POTICHE (yes, also reviewed recently at French label). She's dying of a rare kind of cancer, and the spectre of that eventuality plus the proximity of brothers and sisters who haven't seen each other for a while and have scores to settle puts everyone in a reflective mood. It rather strikes home if you too have brothers and sisters who do not see or have much contact with each other .... Melvil Poupaud (so effective in Ozon's TIME TO LEAVE - yes, its at the french label) scores as the youngest son.

We also of course have the perennial IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE with Jimmy Stewart running through Bedford Falls in the snow as he gets his life back, and THE MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET (the Maureen O'Hara-Natalie Wood one) and '54's WHITE CHRISTMAS though how many times can one watch that? and of course theres always those recent christmas perennials like ELF and BAD SANTA and GREMLINS. I was pleased to catch up with favourites Lee Remick and Angela Lansbury in the glutinously sentimental tv film A CHRISTMAS STORY: THE GIFT OF LOVE from 1982, and dear Loretta in CHRISTMAS EVE one of her final roles in '85, as the rich old lady with not long to live re-uniting her family, assisted by ailing Trevor Howard. If that does not get you crying for christmas nothing will ! Perfect viewing anytime though, and particularly at this time of year, is the 1952 film of the play THE HOLLY AND THE IVY, a perfectly British treat with Ralph Richardson, Margaret Leighton and Celia Johnson all sublime (and yes see Richardson, Leighton or Johnson labels for review); and let's not forget the lovely if rarely seen HOLIDAY AFFAIR from 1949 with Janet Leigh having to choose between Robert Mitchum or Wendall Corey! It should be a holiday staple too.

Blowing Wild: homage to Gary Cooper

BLOWING WILD - nice to re-acquaint myself with this nifty 1953 tough little meller, which I saw at a Sunday matinee back in the 50s. Directed by Hugo Fregonese and scripted by Philip Yordan it assembles 5 tough cookies somewhere in South America for a tale of oil riggers versus bandits. When your cast is Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Anthony Quinn, Ruth Roman and Ward Bond then wait for the fireworks!

Coop and partner Bond have their oil digging operation ruined by bandits and have to seek work. Enter wealthy Quinn and his predatory Medusa-like wife Stanwyck who once had the hots for laconic Coop and wants him back - he though falls for new girl in town Roman, playing a nice girl here .... then the bandits come back for the final explosive shoot-out - after Stanwyck has disposed of Quinn, so like all bad girls she has to pay the price. Stanwyck and Cooper (their third teaming?) are great together.

This had made me realise how much I love Gary Cooper, particularly his later films - perhaps the most beautiful man of the 1930s (check out his two with Dietrich MOROCCO and DESIRE, and the delirious THE FOUNTAINHEAD with Patricia Neal in 1949 and he and Ingrid Bergman are perfect together in SARATOGA TRUNK in '43), he was ageing rapidly in the '50s - like Gable, Tracy, Bogart, Flynn, Power and those other early '30s hellraisers who partied hard with all that smoking and heavy drinking - most of them did not see much of their 60s or the 1960s.

He turned out lots of routine movies but I particularly like him in Wyler's still charming FRIENDLY PERSUASION, that fondly remembered hit of 1956 (Samantha the goose and Pat Boone's theme song) and then Wilder's LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON in 1957, one I did not see until lately but this one does not work for me at all, Audrey Hepburn being far too young for his ageing roue - Wilder may have intended a light souffle in the spirit of Lubitsch but not for me. Much better is TEN NORTH FREDERICK in '58 from John O'Hara, and that brace of tough westerns: Anthony Mann's MAN OF THE WEST with Julie London and Lee J Cobb, and Delmer Daves' THE HANGING TREE in '59 with Maria Schell and Karl Malden, a particular childhood memory. Rossen's THEY CAME TO CORDURA is also a tough drama with the ageing Coop and Rita Hayworth very touching here. He then made his final two in Britain for Michael Anderson - the Hammond Innes adventure THE WRECK OF THE MARY DEARE with Charlton Heston and a great supporting cast (Michael Redgrave, Virgina McKenna, Richard Harris etc) and the thriller THE NAKED EDGE in '61, again the cast is the thing, with Deborah Kerr, Diane Cilento, Hermoine Gingold etc but it is impossible to think Coop could be the murderer. He was clearly ill by then and died on May 13 1961, aged 60, shortly after Gable's passing a few months earlier.

Seeing Coop now always reminds me of my father as my dad was a very Gary Cooper kind of man, both in looks and manner. We will always keep watching Coop and Cary Grant and James Stewart and Bogart and John Wayne, perhaps the greatest of the great male stars - there are others like Gable, Tracy and others whom we do not see so much now, perhaps their later films were not that special and are not revived much now.