STANLEY [with heaven-splitting violence]: STELL-LAHHHHH!  (p 60)

My Top 10:

1. A Streetcar Named Desire
2. Detective Story
3. A Place in the Sun
4. The African Queen
5. Strangers on a Train
6. Oliver Twist
7. La Ronde
8. Death of a Salesman
9. He Ran All the Way
10. Alice in Wonderland

Note:  A big step up from the year before.  There are also several films listed at the bottom that made my list but not my Top 10.  Bright Victory is not listed down below because it is reviewed thanks to its Globe and WGA wins.  It remains the only screenplay to ever win both the Globe and WGA and fail to earn an Oscar nominee.
Part of that might be because of the category of the WGA where Bright Victory won its award: Screenplay That Deals Most Ably with Problems of the American Scene.  This is the last year for that category.  This year the WGA dumps the Western category and adds Best Low-Budget Screenplay but that category will also be dumped after this year, just leaving Drama, Comedy and Musical until the late 60’s, which means I will still have to write full reviews of almost every major Broadway production that was turned into a film in these two decades.
One last note – in my Nighthawk Awards post, I only went eight deep in my awards, but in the Comedy / Musical category you will see The Mating Season winning Best Adapted Screenplay over Alice in Wonderland.  I have reversed the two this time, partially because I have watched Alice more and bumped it up just the little bit it needed to overcome Season, and well, to be honest, both the film and the source for The Mating Season are difficult to find whereas I own multiple copies of both the film (videocassette and Blu-Ray) and the book (kids edition, the Ralph Steadman illustrated edition, Norton Critical Edition, original Crown annotated edition and the brand new 150th Anniversary Norton Annotated Edition) of Alice, so making the change made it easier to do this post.

Consensus Nominees:

1. A Place in the Sun  (200 pts)
2. Bright Victory  (144 pts)
3. Detective Story  (80 pts)
4. A Streetcar Named Desire  (80 pts)
5. Death of a Salesman  /  Father’s Little Dividend  (80 pts)

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay):

• A Place in the Sun
• The African Queen
• Detective Story
• La Ronde
• A Streetcar Named Desire

Golden Globe Nominees:

• Bright Victory

note:  There were no other announced nominees.

WGA Awards:

Drama:

• A Place in the Sun
• Death of a Salesman
• Detective Story
• 14 Hours
• A Streetcar Named Desire

Comedy:

• Father’s Little Dividend
• People Will Talk
• You’re in the Navy Now

Nominees that are Original:  Angels in the Outfield, That’s My Boy
Note:  A terrible group of nominees.

Musical:

• The Great Caruso
• On the Riviera
• Show Boat

Nominees that are Original:  An American in Paris, Here Comes the Groom

Low-Budget:

• The First Legion
• The Pickup

Nominees that are Original:  Steel Helmet, Five, That’s My Boy

Screenplay That Deals Most Ably with the Problems of the American Scene:

• Bright Victory
• Death of a Salesman
• A Place in the Sun
• Saturday’s Hero

Nominees that are Original:  The Well

My Top 10

A Streetcar Named Desire

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film twice.  The first was in my Great Director post for Elia Kazan.  The second time was as part of the Best Picture project.  Though Sunset Blvd. beat it to the punch for winning all four acting awards at the Nighthawks (and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf would replicate it), it stands on its own for the sheer force of acting contained in its two hours.  You may argue that this film does not contain the greatest performances of all-time (but you would get a serious argument from me if you tried to take that position) but if you have any knowledge of film history, you can not possibly argue that they aren’t some of the most historically important performances in film history.  If you have not seen this film, then you must rectify that oversight right now.

The Source:

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams  (1947)

Though I haven’t had a chance to see it (more precisely, I haven’t had the $600 per seat to see it), I am a part of the hysteria surrounding Hamilton.  I talk about it, I pay attention to news about it, I listen to it (a lot).  It’s a genuine phenomena and that’s because it’s a major work of drama.  I’m glad I get to be around for something like that.  I can’t imagine what it was like to be around Broadway in 1947 when the new play from Tennessee Williams came out.  Yes, he had already done one major play, The Glass Menagerie, but that was a fairly thinly veiled story of his own growing up, not yet a story that was bursting forth from his own fertile imagination.  It also didn’t have a (soon-to-be) legendary director and stars who would spring forth from the stage to the screen and become Oscar winners.  This play would be something new, not only in the way that method acting would take it over and start to become a major force in the New York theatre, but also in the energy and daringness of what was going on on-stage.  Here we have infidelity, rape, homosexuality, childhood seduction.  It had sex and violence and everything that a crowd could possibly want.  Yet, it does it all with such purity of language, with performances that were widely hailed and a fine focus that kept you interested in the characters no matter what might have gone on in the past (Blanche) or what might be happening in the present (Stanley).

So much of it might come down to one line from Stanley: “When we first met, me and you, you thought I was common.  How right you was, baby.  I was common as dirt.  You showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns.  I pulled you down off the columns and how you loved it, having them colored lights going!  And wasn’t we happy together, wasn’t it all okay till she showed here?”

Depending on how things are directed, you can focus the audience’s sympathy on different characters.  You can make them understand Stanley and the “common” life he has built that he sees being torn apart by the woman who comes in and tries to make him feel inferior, shifting around the comfortable life he has built around himself.  You can bring their sympathy to poor deluded Blanche, married in foolishness, awash in a life of sin that she can’t even bring herself to admit to, let alone find a way to atone for.  She is slipping deeper and deeper into her mind until the actions of her brutish brother-in-law drive any semblance of sanity out from her head and she will indeed depend on the kindness of whatever stranger may pass through her life.  You can find some sympathy for Mitch, the poor man who just wants a little of what Stanley has – a family and a life outside his work and games, the poor fool who so desperately wants to believe Blanche and her stories, until he is finally forced to turn on those lights and come to the truth he hasn’t wanted to face: “You’re not clean enough to bring in the house with my mother,” perhaps the most devastating line in a play filled with them.  Or do you find sympathy with Stella?  If you can get past the way she returns to her brute of a man, you may just feel bad that she can’t escape him.  Or you may understand that she wants to find the different life that Stanley talks about and that it’s actually Blanche who is intruding on her happiness.  You may understand her desperation in returning to him, no matter what he has done, that she won’t take this newborn child and submit him to a life of squalor without a father.

None of those are the truth about this play.  All of them are the truth about this play.  Much like Rashomon, which I will cover in the next year, truth is what we perceive.  The truth is that this is one of the greatest plays in American stage history and the masterwork of the man who is most definitely one of the greatest playwrights this country has ever produced.

The Adaptation:

“There was the matter of creating a shooting script that would preserve the integrity of Williams’s work while satisfying the censors.  In this niggling, absurd struggle Kazan fulfilled all of Williams’s hopes.  It was largely the director who carried the arguments over cuts and changes in the endless discussions with the so-called Breen office. … The censors immediately focused on three aspects of the script: the implication that Blanche had been fired from her small-town schoolteaching job because her marriage to a homosexual was a sham and she had started sleeping with her students; the fact that Stanley rapes her while his wife, Stella, is in the hospital having a baby; the implication, at the end of the play, that Stella remains in sexual thrall to Stanley and returns to him despite the rape.”  (Elia Kazan: A Biography by Richard Schickel, p 212)

Kazan would tone down the overtones of the first point.  The second point was a bit of serious contention and, with the Breen office afraid that Warners would actually release the film without the Production Code seal, “everyone agreed that the rape could be presented if it were ‘done by suggestion and delicacy’.”  (Schickel, p 213).  As for the finale, well Stella isn’t standing there with him as she is in the play, but more on that a little lower.

Kazan had thoughts of opening things up, but really, aside from some opening scenes that involve the actual streetcar (ironic, since it had stopped running in 1948), most of the actions does stay confined to the individual locations, yet it never feels like a filmed play.  With the large set of the apartment building, everything flows nicely.  One interesting little difference is in the “Stella!” scene.  In the play, the direction is this: “Her eyes are glistening with tears and her hair loose about her throat and shoulders.  They stare at each other.  Then they come together with low, animal moans.”  It then describes how he “lifts her off her feet.”  But you watch that scene in the film, and you see an animal sexuality in her eyes and you understand the carnality in this relationship and there is much more than what is in the simple stage direction as she goes over her shoulder to be carried back inside.

The ending had to be changed a bit, of course, as mentioned above.  The rape itself was always suggested, even in the original play (Stanley carries her off to the bed then the scene ends and the final scene is weeks later).  The suggestion stays much the same in the film.  But in the play, while Stella is sobbing, Stanley is kneeling beside her, talking to her (and “his fingers find the opening of her blouse”).  In the film, Stella is swearing to herself and her child that they will never go back.  So, how much you treat the film as different depends entirely on your view of Stella and how much she has changed and whether she really will follow through on that promise or whether you think she will find her way back downstairs to Stanley before too long.

The Credits:

Directed by Elia Kazan.  Screen Play by Tennessee Williams.  Adaptation by Oscar Saul.  Based upon the Original Play “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams.  As presented on the stage by Irene Mayer Selznick.

Detective Story

The Film:

I reviewed this film previously, as one of the five best films of 1951.

The Source:

Detective Story: A play in three acts by Sidney Kingsley  (1949)

Detective Story is a hell of a play, a three act story that takes place all in one precinct house. It involves the arrest of an abortionist and the story that comes out that he once provided a service for the woman who is now married to the arresting detective. It had two parts to the stage, with the main room in the precinct, as well as the lieutenant’s office, which provides a measure of privacy for certain conversations but allows the action to go on (there’s a picture in the original hardcover of the play performed on stage). The subject matter was dark and the play handled it with a deft hand. The detective is compromised by his view of the world in black-and-white and his own inability to compromise, eventually ending up in actions that will bring about his own downfall.

The only downside to the play is that the original stage production starred Ralph Bellamy as the detective. The film got this one right, because Douglas just absolutely shines in the role, but I can’t really see Bellamy bringing the required intensity to the role.

The Adaptation:

Many of the lines and much of the story come straight from the play, which was remarkable in and of itself, as it certainly had issues making it to the screen:

“Originally, Wyler planned to compress Kingsley’s play to heighten its realism. He hired Dashiell Hammett, known for his crisp flint-hard dialogue, to rewrite the drama, but the master of detective fiction quickly abandoned the project and Wyler turned it over to Robert Wyler (his brother) and Philip Yordan. The two eventually convinced the director to film the play with only minor alterations. Several long speeches in which Kingsley commented on the dangers of a police state were trimmed, but otherwise Detective Story went to Breen in June 1950 much as it was performed on Broadway. Breen made it clear from the beginning that the central problem with the play was the element of abortion. Until Wyler resolved that matter, Breen would not even discuss the forbidden cop-killing at the end of the script. In a sense the arrangement of priorities was ironic. The murder of a police officer was specifically prohibited by the Code; abortion was not.” (The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s. Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, p 168)

Eventually, the cop killing actually did make it to the screen, but the subject of abortion still wasn’t going to happen: “[Wyler] would have to come up with a new twist on Kingsley’s plot. Wyler and the screenwriters solved the problem by making the abortionist a doctor who delivers out-of-wedlock babies and gets rich by selling them in an illegal adoption racket. That was mentionable under the code.” (A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler by Jan Herman, p 333-334)

There is also a three page piece on this film, from 128 to 130, of Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1968 of all the work that Wyler did to, first, get the approval for killing a policeman, then, what had to be done in the course of filming it, to maintain that approval.

Wyler also comments in Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute (ed, George Stevens, Jr) about how they had thought more about opening up the play: “We though it would be nice to see where this man lives, to see his apartment, to find his wife there.  We wrote it in the script, but we threw it all out because we found that the play was so constructed that the action was very concentrated, very fast and very good.”  (p 215)

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by William Wyler.  Screenplay by Philip Yordan and Robert Wyler.  Based on the play by Sidney Kingsley.

A Place in the Sun

The Film:

I have reviewed this film already as part of the Best Picture project.  It is a great film, but it’s never quite as great as I think it will be.  It won six Oscars, which was amazing for a film that didn’t win Best Picture.  On some levels, it’s the biggest surprise in Oscar history; it’s the only film in history to win Director and Screenplay and win more than 4 Oscars but not win Best Picture.  Only three other films won more than 4 Oscars with Director and they didn’t win Screenplay (Cabaret, Saving Private Ryan, Gravity), the first two actually losing Screenplay to the Picture winner.  It still has the sixth most Oscar points for any film not to win.  On the other hand, it was up against Streetcar, which should have won all the awards that this film did win, so there’s that going against it.  Either way, though, it’s a great film.

The Source:

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser  (1925)  /  An American Tragedy by Patrick Kearney  (1926)

“Theodore Dreiser should ought to write nicer.”  I have quoted Dorothy Parker’s famous quip (about Dreiser’s autobiography) before, including in my original review of this film (and I may do it again next year when I have to review his Sister Carrie for this project).  It’s appropriate to this book, because it was Dreiser’s need to write about tragedy, to bring in his view of naturalism, formed in the shadow and influence of Emile Zola and Frank Norris that makes this book both an interesting one and quite a slog to get through all at the same time.

Dreiser had been wanting to write something about crime.  He found what he wanted in the story of a man in upstate New York who murdered his pregnant girlfriend because she was demanding he marry her but he had managed to get in with the higher society crowd in his town and wanted to be rid of her.  Dreiser did a lot of research on the case and had waited a long time to write it.  When he did, he couldn’t seem to stop writing.  In the end, he produced a novel that runs 856 pages in the current Signet edition, much of which could have been cut out without any real detriment to the novel itself and certainly without any detriment to the story.

If you have read the novel, first of all, congratulations on having an English degree and I hope you are currently employed.  Second of all, you might expect me to say that the entire first section of the novel could have been cut, which is pretty much what happens in the film.  However, I actually have an appreciation for naturalism (I am a big fan of Zola, Hardy and Norris and I have a fond appreciation of Sister Carrie), so to me the first part of the book is actually one of the strongest parts of the book.  It really focuses in on characters and allows us to see how Clyde could have ended up in his situation and why the shining beacon of his uncle’s factory (and his cousins’ lives) would be so attractive.  It’s actually the third part of the book that really drags things down.  Much is made of the fact that Stevens cut out the first part of the book, but bear in mind that poor Roberta dies on page 515, with over 300 pages left in the book.  Most of that is excised as well, concisely edited into the trial scenes.  It is that final part that simply drags and drags and feels like it will never end.  Had Dreiser not been so determined to be making a social document of his novel, the final part of the book could have been considerably shorter and I would have a higher opinion of the book as a whole.

Overall, though, it is a strong book and probably not nearly as read today as it should be.  The title hearkens down through the ages and anytime we get another “trial of the century”, especially a murder trial like that, we get once again, the notion of an American tragedy like the one Dreiser writes so well about for about 600 pages or so or what is, unfortunately, an 856 page novel.

The Adaptation:

As mentioned above, much of the book is cut.  The second part of the book runs from pages 147 to 515 and contains the majority of the action that is put on-screen.  Some of the things in the book are updated (the film takes place in the present while the book was written in 1925 and the actual crime that inspired Dreiser occurred in 1906) and for some reason all the names were changed (which is too bad, because Clyde Griffiths is actually a much better name for the character than George Eastman.

Those weren’t the only changes however, as Stevens makes clear in an interview he would later give:  “The rich girl, in the reader’s mind is a lesser girl, but in the boy’s mind, she isn’t.  She’s a society girl, she’s bright, and to the boy she is a picture of all that’s attractive . . . Now, maybe I loaded the dice that way.  Maybe in the Dreiser book [Winters is] more acceptable physically.  I wanted her to appear to be the kind of girl a man could be all mixed up with in the dark, but come the morning wonder how the hell he got into this.”  (George Stevens: Interviews, ed. Paul Cronin, p 70)

And really, it’s not unreasonable for Stevens to have made that choice, if you look at the way Clyde reacts when he sees Sondra (the Elizabeth Taylor character): “The beautiful Sondra Finchley!  Her lovely face, smart clothes, gay and superior demeanor!  If only at the time he had first encountered her he had managed to interest her.  Or could now.”  Stevens has the right measure of the character and giving us Elizabeth Taylor allows us to see how attractive this life is for the character.

This novel was adapted once before, in 1931.  Though that had been a solid film (I rate it a mid-range ***), this film really takes the essence of the novel and makes a first-rate film out of it without losing sight of the core of the novel, which is pretty much exactly what a great adaptation is supposed to do.  It might have been Streetcar that deserved the Oscar (and wins the Nighthawk), but the Academy made a fine choice in giving the Oscar to A Place in the Sun.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by George Stevens.  Based on the Novel An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.  And the Patrick Kearney play adapted from the novel.  Screenplay by Michael Wilson and Harry Brown.

The African Queen

The Film:

I have reviewed this film already as one of the five best films from 1951.  In an interesting coincidence, in this same spot in 1950 was The Asphalt Jungle, a film also directed by John Huston, also nominated for Best Director and Screenplay at the Oscars and also not nominated for Best Picture.  Huston was the first director ever nominated for Director and Screenplay but not Picture more than once and remains one of only two directors to do this in back-to-back years (Richard Brooks, in 1966 and 1967 is the other).

The Source:

The African Queen by C. S. Forester  (1935)

This is a charming little adventure story.  It’s about a woman whose missionary brother has died in 1914 after the outbreak of war after they have spent 10 years in Central Africa.  Now she doesn’t know what to do other than blame the Germans (he died of illness, but it was brought on by the Germans coming in and destroying the camp).  When Charlie Allnutt, the boat skipper who brings the mail and supplies rescues her, she can think of nothing but getting revenge.  She wants to sail down the river and into the lake and sink the big German boat there.  The rest of the book chronicles their trip, includes problems with rapids and guns, before finally getting to the lake and succeeding in their goal.

Forester was well-known for nautical works, of course, being the creator of the Horatio Hornblower series.  This is a bit more limited, since we’re on a river not the ocean, but it moves along nicely and never keeps you wanting.

The Adaptation:

“C. S. Forester had told me that he had never been satisfied with the way The African Queen ended. He had written two different endings for the novel; one was used in the American edition, the other in the English. Neither one, he felt, was satisfactory. I thought the film should have a happy ending. Since Agee’s health never permitted him to come to Africa I asked Peter Viertel to work on the final scenes with me. He and Gige joined us in Entebbe before we started shooting, and together we wrote my ending – the ending that we later filmed.” (An Open Book by John Huston (1980), p 190)

I had to actually look up the bit about the other ending online.  The American ending (according to this book blog, “they fail to sink the ship with the African Queen’s torpedo, and Allnutt disappears beneath the waves”) seems to have been dropped.  Wikipedia says nothing about it and the edition I read, the Back Bay Books edition from 2000 (printed here in the U.S.) doesn’t use that ending or even mention it.

Huston does dispense with both endings.  His ending is considerably happier, but it also works better for the story.  It gives them that nice moment where they agree to be married before what they think is their impending doom.  I don’t think either of Forester’s endings would have worked well.

The other significant change is at the opening of the film.  When the book opens, Rose’s brother is already sick and almost dead.  The film moves the opening earlier and gives us some moments of Rose with her brother (and with Charlie) before all the horrible events start to unfold, allowing us a better measure of who she was before all of this happens, rather than just seeing her afterwards.

The Credits:

Directed by John Huston.  Based on the Novel by “The African Queen” by C. S. Forester.  Screenplay by James Agee & John Huston.

Strangers on a Train

The Film:

I go back and forth on whether or not this is the best film that Hitchcock made, though there are several contenders for that distinction (including Rebecca, Notorious, Rear Window and North by Northwest).  I do not go back and forth on whether it is one of the best films of 1951; it absolute is, and because of that, I have already written a full review of it.

The Source:

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith  (1950)

Patricia Highsmith is one of the great pulpish writers.  I use that non-word “pulpish” because she wasn’t writing early enough to be one of the actual pulp writers like Dash Hammett or even Raymond Chandler.  But she follows in their footsteps.  If she is not as hard-boiled perhaps it is because she writes about crime and the criminals that commit them without writing about the men who are solving them.

Strangers on a Train was Highsmith’s first novel and she was not yet 30 when she wrote it.  Yet, she had a mastery of the language (“The train tore along with an angry, irregular rhythm.  It was having to stop at smaller and more frequent stations, where it would wait impatiently for a moment, then attack the prairie again.  But progress was imperceptible.  The prairie only undulated, like a vast, pink-tan blanket being casually shaken.”).  She also comes in with a great idea for a crime – two men who meet by accident on a train, each of whom wants someone in their life killed.  What poor Guy Haines doesn’t expect is that demented, psychotic Bruno Anthony will actually move forward with the murder for Guy (“His hands captured her throat on the last word, stifling its abortive uplift of surprise.  He shook her.  His body seemed to harden like rock, and he heard his teeth crack.”).

What people who have only seen the film will not expect, of course, is that Guy will not be able to escape his destiny and will find himself with a gun pointed at Bruno’s father: “He pulled the trigger again.  The room tore up with a roar.  His fingers tightened in terror.  The roar came again, as if the crust of the world burst.”  In the end, there will be a bit more Dostoevsky than Hitchcock to finish things off: “He knew, too, that he had to face Gerard.  That was part of it all, and always had been.  It was inevitable and ordained, like the turning of the earth, and there was no sophistry by which he could free himself from it.”

By the way, I love pulp copies of books and especially love to use them in these posts.  I do find it amusing, though, when a cover has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BOOK.  This is a great example.  Cool cover.  Nothing to do with Highsmith’s novel.

The Adaptation:

Hitchcock was great at taking less literary works, works that weren’t necessarily all the good, and turning them into cinema gold.  Occasionally he would work with something more seriously written (Rebecca), but for the most part, the history of Hitchcock’s work is a history of things that are far better on the screen than they were on the page, partially because Hitchcock was usually quite ready to ditch whatever he needed to ditch so that it could serve his story.  Strangers on a Train is far better than more novels made into Hitchcock films, but it is no less the same in the way it was made to serve what Hitchcock wanted.  Two men meet on a train, both of them having someone in their lives they want to be rid of.  The events move into action when the psychotic Bruno Anthony kills the estranged wife of Guy Haines, which will allow Guy to marry again.  Bruno seems to have an erotic fascination with Guy and Guy tries to escape from things.  Those are the same.  Almost everything else is different.  A lot of the film takes place in the southwest (they are on the way to Texas in the train, not to DC).  Guy is an architect, not a tennis player.  His future wife is not the daughter of a senator and has no sister to be involved in the mystery.  Guy actually ends up killing Bruno’s father and does not get away cleanly with having done no wrong like in the film.  It is, like so many Hitchcock sources, just the bare bones of the idea that would become the great film.

“The work [Raymond Chandler] did was no good and I ended up with Czenzi Ormonde, a woman writer who was one of Ben Hecht’s assistants.  When I completed the treatment, the head of Warner’s tried to find someone to do the dialogue, and very few writers would touch it.  None of them thought it was any good.”  (Hitchcock/Truffaut, p 193-194)

The Credits:

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  Screen Play by Raymond Chandler and Czensi Ormonde.  Adaptation by Whitfield Cook.  From the novel by Patricia Highsmith.

Oliver Twist

The Film:

I wish, desperately that David Lean had adapted more Dickens novels.  I have seen 20 feature film adaptations of Dickens novels and his two are by far the best.  It is appropriate that both were made in black-and-white, as shadows engulf the characters and they disappear into the darkness of London.  Perhaps what is most remarkable about the two films is that both of them are forced to rely on child actors at a time when most child actors were terrible and both films come out just fine.  Neither is weighed down by a bad child performance and the credit for that must lie with Lean.

Oliver Twist had been filmed multiple times before Lean got to it.  It was made in 1922 with Lon Chaney as a deplorable, disturbing Fagin.  It was made disastrously in 1933 with one of the worst child performances in the history of film.  But Lean finds all the pieces he needs among the people he already had working with him.  Kay Walsh makes a beautiful, but desperate Nancy, ready to find redemption in one act that will lead only to death (she also contributed to the screenplay).  Robert Newton, who had been decent and hard-working as Walsh’s father in This Happy Breed, here is the violent and terrifying Bill Sykes.  Alec Guinness, who had been the charming and affable Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations turns it 180 degrees and finds the darkness, but also the humor in Fagin.  He takes the original Cruikshank illustrations and brings them to life in a remarkable performance.

But aside from the acting, aside from the remarkable performances, aside from Lean’s first-rate direction, the most praise goes to the set and costume designers who really bring the slums (and even the brightness of the houses of the well-of) of London vividly to life on screen and to cinematographer Guy Green, who had won an Oscar for Great Expectations just as this film was beginning filming and does a fantastic job once again here.  His shadows seem to come to life and it makes you weary what be around the next corner.  Yet, for those rare moments when light shines through, he also makes a way to light up the world with Brownlow’s dedication and love.

Dickens novels seem at times like they were made to be adapted into films.  Yet, in all the time since feature films began, only three Dickens adaptations have earned **** from me (the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities is the other).  Perhaps what we need is more people to approach it like Lean, cut the stories down to their bare bones and then build a screenplay from that, finding all the darkness around every corner but remember that there still might be some light at the end of it.  Or maybe we should just sit back and let the BBC do their full-length adaptations and remember that there really isn’t any other director like David Lean.

The Source:

Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress by Boz  [Charles Dickens]  (serialized Feb 1837-March 1839, book form 1838)

I have read Oliver Twist five or six times over the years and I am certain I will continue to read it.  When I ranked all of the Dickens novels after my Year of Reading Dickens, I ranked it fifth, but that was including A Christmas Carol as one of the novels (which ranked fourth).  I wrote more in that piece than I had remembered and it sums up a lot of what I would say here if I were to write more.  I should note that when I wrote that piece, I had it in my head that Brownlow is actually Oliver’s grandfather because I have become much more used to the Lean film than the original novel.  Oliver’s connection to Monks is still a big stretch but it is not as bad as what I was thinking when I said the book contained “the most absurd plot point that Dickens ever came up with.”

In essence, this is not a great novel.  It’s not in my Top 200.  But it hovers just a little below that and it is one of Dickens’ most readable books.  It even works as a book for younger readers (it was adapted by Moby Books, which will never be a For Love of Books post, but I will talk about more when I get to 1956).  It might be the book I would recommend to someone reading Dickens for the first time, though how you could get through high school without reading Dickens would perplex me.

The Adaptation:

“Lean and Haynes completed the screenplay in only a month’s time, on April 12, 1947. They were satisfied with their efforts, except for the opening scene. Dickens begins the novel simply with Oliver’s birth in the workhouse, describing in prosaic fashion how the infant was ushered into a world of sorrow and trouble. Kay Walsh, who was being considered for a part in the picture, offered to try her hand at fashioning a more interesting opening for the movie… She suggested that the movie should open with a pregnant woman trudging through a storm on her way to the workhouse, where her son, Oliver is soon born.” (Beyond the Epic: The Life & Films of David Lean by Gene D. Phillips, p 126)

“Lean says that it would have taken approximately ten hours for a scene-by-scene adaptation of the Dickens novel.  ‘The curious thing,’ he remarks, ‘people see the film and think they’re seeing the whole book.  I suppose some of that has to do with wanting to capture my first impressions as I read it, the main events, as it were.’  For their faithful condensation, which at 116 minutes ran slightly longer than most features of its time, Lean and his cowriter Stanley Haynes (who also directed the film’s second-unit locations in Beaconsfield) ‘read through Oliver Twist several times,’ and from that created an outline stripped of conversation and description and consisting of one-line summaries of each chapter.”  (David Lean by Stephen M. Silverman, p 75)

And, of course, not only do they think they’re seeing the whole book, but sometimes they end up thinking what they’re seeing on screen is the book.  Brownlow has a strange connection to Oliver in the book (but a ridiculous Dickensian coincidence connection nonetheless), but in the film, rather than try to explain the bizarre connection, it’s made out that he is Oliver’s grandfather.  Quite frankly, while that makes the coincidence more silly, it also allows us a better connection between the two and avoids the long-winded explanation of their real connection.  But, for the most part, it is a faithful rendition of the book, certainly far more so than the musical that would later (not even remotely deservingly) win Best Picture at the Oscars.

The Credits:

Directed by David Lean.  Screenplay by David Lean and Stanley Haynes.  The only mention of the source novel is on the title card: Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.

La Ronde

The Film:

La Ronde was made towards the end of Max Ophuls career yet it feels like the work of a fresh new filmmaker.  Perhaps it is because this was the start of the final phase of his career and why some people (or at least me) think of him as French.  Ophuls was born in Germany but fled in 1933.  He made several films in France, then in 1940 came to the United States.  He would not direct again until after the end of the war, but then would make several films in Hollywood in the late 40’s (including the very good Letter from an Unknown Woman).  Ophuls would then return to France where he would make his final four films, beginning with this one; they would be the best four films of his career and this is the best of those.

The “la ronde” of the title is a carousel, but what it really refers to is the way the story progresses.  This is a continuing story that doesn’t follow characters but an idea (Luis Buñuel would later come back to this idea in his surrealistic vision The Phantom of Liberty).  It is about sexual dalliances and the way love / sex travels between people and might eventually come back around to the same place.  I am reminded of the last line of Stephen King’s extended edition of The Stand: “Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long.  And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.”  Today, you could make this film using HIV as a metaphor, but in 1950, this was simply the way that love could turn.

Ophuls takes us on this dance with grace and style.  We are treated to good performances from several great French actors, many of them quite young in this film but who would grow to much more prominence over the next few decades.  There are sumptuous costumes and sets.  We get that French style of charm and flirtation (and occasionally even romance).  This is all very European, and as I said, if you didn’t know any better, you would think this was a new, young filmmaker just starting out, with a fascinating concept of how to make a film.  In some ways, the linking concept of the carousel is similar to how Ed Wood would try to link Glen and Glenda through Bela Lugosi’s narration, but this is done with style and talent.

After this film, Ophuls would stay in France, and he would stay in the past, and we would continue to get the gorgeous cinematography, sets and costumes through his final three films.  If you just watch his work made before this film, you would think Ophuls was a solid filmmaker.  But watching from this film forward, you lament what was lost when he died in his mid-50’s, only four films into his new career.

The Source:

Reigen (printed in English as La Ronde: Ten Dialogues) by Arthur Schnitzler  (1897)

This is a play that really knocks at the moral of upper-class (and lower-class) society and the ridiculous games they play when it comes to sex and love.   Like the film would do, the play follows the trajectory forward one character at a time, eventually coming back to the original character onstage.

The play was written in 1897, published in 1900, then banned, then finally produced on stage in 1920, then banned again (and Schnitzler would then withdraw the German version of the play) before Ophuls would make this film version (only possible because Schnitzler had given away the rights to the French language version).

It is a smart and fascinating play.  But I suspect it works better as a film if for no other reason than it doesn’t leave much for any one actor to do onstage unless some (or many) of the parts are doubled up.  Otherwise, you basically have 10 characters, all of whom get to be onstage for only two scenes and then are gone.  There also isn’t much action in the play, perhaps why it was labelled “ten dialogues”.

The Adaptation:

“Ophuls’ main addition to Schnitzler’s piece is, not surprisingly, the meneur de jeu, who questions his own role in the film, as well as his ‘location,’ as mentioned above. He is ‘the author,’ ‘a passer-by,’ finally, ‘anyone among’ the audience. And we are certainly not surprised that Ophuls also emphasizes the passage of time in the film and adds the ‘chronotype’ of the carousel, which acts as Walbrook’s stage and symbolizes the turning of the circle of desire.” (The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of a Woman by Susan M. White, p 240)

“Schnitzler’s play – written in 1897 and 1898, privately printed in 1900, published in 1903, first performed (in Budapest) in 1912, and not staged in Vienna until 1921 – was ideal material for the filmmaker’s return to his roots. It’s an ingenious piece of dramatic construction. In the first of its ten scenes, a prostitute picks up a soldier, who in the second scene romances a chambermaid, who in the next scene is ravished by her young employer, and so on until the end, when a count spends the night with the streetwalker from the opening scene and the play comes full circle. The elegant structure manages to convey both the transience of individual passions and the durability of passion itself as a motivating force in human behavior. Love doesn’t last, but it makes the world – the hermetic little world of the play, anyway – go round.” (“Vicious Circle” by Terrence Rafferty, p 7-8 in the booklet for the Criterion DVD)

The Credits:

Un Film de Max Ophuls.  d’aprés la pièce d’ Arthur Schnitzler.  Adaptation de Jacques Natanson et Max Ophuls.  Dialogues de Jacques Natanson.

Death of a Salesman

The Film:

I have mentioned (probably more than once) the holy trinity of American playwrights: Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams; the only one of them not to win multiple Pulitzers won multiple Tonys for Best Play (Miller).  Perhaps the best evidence for their place in American literary history is that, even though the Library of America doesn’t publish a lot of playwrights, all three of them have had their entire collected plays published in box sets.  But, while they were all masters of the stage, things were not so even when their plays were made into films.  O’Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but only two of his plays have made films better than *** (The Long Voyage Home, Long Day’s Journey Into Night).  Likewise, Arthur Miller’s great works have not readily made the transition, as will be discussed here.  It is only Williams, who wrote many of the scripts for his film adaptations and worked with prominent directors, that really had a large body of successful plays that made the transition into first-rate films.  Indeed, in a 14 year stretch from 1951 to 1964, there were 5 acting Oscars and an astounding 18 acting nominations that went to screen adaptations of Williams’ plays.  Yet, Miller, in that same period was barely even having his films adapted, with Death of a Salesman being the prominent exception, and while it would earn several Oscar nominations (three for its acting, two of which lost to the Williams adaptation Streetcar), it has long been difficult to find.  So, what is it exactly we have here?

This is a flawed film that gets by mostly on its acting and by the fact that it’s building off one of the greatest of all American plays.  Some of the flaws are built into the film while some of them might only come out depending on who you are and what you bring to the film.  The film is not particularly well-directed and the cinematography and the editing don’t always quite work.  A little of that might be the low quality of prints available to watch (you can find it currently online but I originally watched it on video).  You don’t have to know the play to appreciate the film – it’s not a mangled version of Shakespeare, but it does help to have at least some familiarity and have an idea what you are going into.  The other flaws, as I have said, might come in depending on what you already know.  For instance, you might know what Arthur Miller himself thought of the film (more on that below – so if you want to watch it without that, then stop reading the review and go watch the film now).  But the bigger problem might be if you have already seen the play produced.  Now, you don’t have to have actually seen it on stage because that magnificent Dustin Hoffman performance from the mid-80’s was taped and has long been commercially available (how could you get through high school without seeing it unless you’re older than I am?).  This film has a strong performance from Fredric March, long one of the great screen actors as a man who is disintegrating before our very eyes.  He can’t understand what is happening to him, what is happening to his body, what is happening to his mind, what is happening to his family.  He only knows that he is not the man he used to be, is not the man he still tries to imagine himself to be.  Kevin McCarthy gives the best performance of his career as Biff, the son who was supposed to be the savior but couldn’t handle the weight on his shoulders and Mildred Dunnock is quite good as the long-suffering wife.  But none of them can match what Dustin Hoffman, John Malkovich, Kate Reid, Charles Durning and Stephen Lang brought to their performances.  It suffers because you can not escape the memory of that.  But try to forget that and focus on the performances in this film because they deserve that recognition.

The Source:

Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem by Arthur Miller  (1949)

“This is not a knock against Arthur Miller  /  Death of a Salesman is my favorite play  /  But Marilyn Monroe should have married Henry Miller  /  And if she did she might be alive”  Those are from the song Marilyn Monroe by Dan Bern, a great song which I love in spite of fervently disagreeing with it.  There are problems with the whole concept of the song (it’s really Joe DiMaggio that she shouldn’t have married but that doesn’t work as well for the song), but I bring it up here because of the lines I quoted above.  Death of a Salesman is a great play, certainly one of the greatest in American theatre history, but I don’t really envision people describing it as their “favorite” play.  It’s just not a word that springs to mind for this play.  You admire this play, you are blown away by it, you are moved by it.  But for it to be your favorite?  I’m certain someone will write in to disagree with me, but it just seems the wrong word.

It’s incredible what Miller does in this play.  He takes the common man, the very encapsulation of the American Dream, and he presents him as the failing man, the one washed away in the modern world.  “I am not a dime a dozen!” Willy Loman screams at his son, but he is, and we know it.  Yet, in reading the play or watching it, especially as high school students, we swear to ourselves that we will never be that person, that we will make something special of ourselves, the same way we read Walden and swore to ourselves that we would not be like most men and we would not lead lives of quiet desperation.

I have had my copy of this play for so long that it has a fancy “S” stamp in the inside front cover (it means I took it from my sister Stacy’s bookshelves, probably when I was still in high school and she was away at college).  I return to it from time to time to remind myself of a life list in the need to be important, to be a great man, no matter what life has left you with.

The Adaptation:

Arthur Miller was not involved with the film and was certainly not a fan of it, as is evidenced by his comment in his autobiography Timebends: “My sole participation was to complain that the screenplay had managed to chop off almost every climax of the play as though with a lawnmower, leaving a flatness that was baffling in view of the play’s demonstrated capacity for stirring its audiences in the theatre.” (p 314)

“Roberts’s greatest alteration was to cut about 15 percent of Miller’s dialogue.  Some of the cuts were just to make the movie ‘less talky,’ or to simplify the narrative . . . the most important was the deleting of Ben’s references to Willy’s father, cutting out all vestiges of his role as father-substitute … Roberts also de-emphasized Biff’s negative qualities.  He cut his lines about having stolen the suit in Kansas City, and he gave the line Biff says to Letta about having been in front of a jury to Hap, making it into a simple joke.”  (Miller: Death of a Salesman by Brenda Murphy, p 132)

The Credits:

Directed by Laslo Benedek.  Based upon the Play by Arthur Miller — As produced on the stage by Kermit Bloodgarden and Walter Fried.  Screen Play by Stanley Roberts.

He Ran All the Way

The Film:

This film is a tragedy all the way through, and I’m not even talking about the plot.  It was the last film written by Hugo Butler before he was blacklisted and stopped writing (his name was taken off the credits, although it is in the credits on the print I saw).  Director John Berry was named by Edward Dmytryk (one of the Hollywood 10) after the film was released and wouldn’t direct another film in America for almost 25 years.  Dalton Trumbo co-wrote the screenplay, using Guy Endore as a front (Endore was still listed in the print I watched); I doubt anyone at this point needs me to explain what happened to him.  But the saddest of all was John Garfield, the talented virile actor.  This was Garfield’s last film, and only a year after its release, hounded by the Blacklist, he would die of a heart attack at age 39, two years younger than I am now.

But let’s put all of that aside and focus on the film in front of us.  That’s kind of a tragedy as well.  It’s the story of a young hood (played by Garfield), a man without any better way of life, hounded by his mother, brow-beaten by a smarter partner, and involved in a heist that will end up with his partner dead and him responsible for having shot a policeman.  The policeman, unlike in the book, will live, because they weren’t going to make a big fight about it against the PCA like the filmmakers of Detective Story did, but he’s still viewed as a cop-killer, even if he didn’t actually kill the cop.

The hood hides at a community pool and ends up, in an attempt to not be spotted, helping a shy young woman who is nervous in the water.  He ends up sticking to her, following her home, then taking the family hostage.  That move itself is where the film becomes a bit too much of a Hollywood movie, but once it has been made, we have the very real drama of how to extricate itself from all of this.

The film is well-written and very well directed, but it is in the two main performances that the real quality of the film lies.  Garfield is perfect as a hood who doesn’t seem to have chosen crime so much as it emerging from a variety of bad options.  That’s also how he ends up with a family at his mercy – making a choice from a variety of bad options.  But he’s not alone in the film.  The girl he at first befriends, and then later, holds against her will, is played very well by Shelley Winters.  In both this and A Place in the Sun, we can see how good she was at being overlooked, at being passed by and the quiet desperation that leaks into her eyes in the scenes where Garfield is trying to explain things to her.  She, in her own way, really does want to help him, but by then they’ve all been trapped into tragedy and there’s no way out.

The Source:

He Ran All the Way by Sam Ross  (1947)

This is another one of those novels that probably could have been much more effective if it had been tightened up and turned into a short story.  It’s a good enough thriller about a criminal involved in killing a cop (it’s never quite clear if he shot the cop or not, but in the end, it’s not really relevant) who ends up taking a family hostage.  The problem is that the hostage situation basically takes up 2/3 of an almost 300 page book.  By the time you get to the end, you’re beginning to pine for something more to happen.

An important note: you might find online claims that this novel was written by Trumbo under a pseudonym.  That is not true, and I have corrected it on Wikipedia.  I don’t know how that got started; it probably stems from Trumbo using a front for the script.  But Sam Ross was a Ukranian writer and it’s an insult to him to claim that this wasn’t his novel.  So don’t believe that about Trumbo.

The Adaptation:

Hugo Butler, quite frankly, kept me from fucking up Dalton’s script.  Dalton did one script.  Then Jack Moss went away with me, and we thought we’d fixed up Dalton’s script.  What we actually did was make some romantic piece of shit out of it, although we did find an ending that was quite extraordinary.  When we came back, everybody was upset, so Hugo was put on the script.  Hugo hated our script, said it was all bullshit.  So he fixed our script by going back to Dalton’s, although Hugo got the credit.
The big beef on the script was the ending.  It wasn’t Hugo’s beef, it was Shelley Winters’s.  The one thing Hugo liked was our idea for the ending.  What I didn’t want was the ending of the book, where she stabs him on the couch.  I wanted an ending where a betrayal takes place . . . yet it’s not a betrayal.  (John Berry, quoted in Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, ed. p 73)

Berry is right – the ending in the film, where Nick believes he has been betrayed, when he really hasn’t, works much better for the film, rather than the desperate scene of possible seduction that ends with her pulling out the knife and stabbing him, getting trapped underneath his dead body, waiting for her father to come home and help her.

The Credits:

Directed by John Berry.  Screenplay by Hugo Butler and Guy Endore.  Based Upon the Novel “He Ran All the Way” by Sam Ross.

Alice in Wonderland

The Film:

In some ways, this is the least Disney of all the classic Disney films.  Yet, in some ways perhaps it also exemplifies the way that people attack Disney for the way he (and later, his company without him) commercialize childhood classics.

How you feel about a lot of the Disney films, those adapted from fairy tales, may depend on how much you embrace the darker side of such fairy tales (like, for instance, whether you prefer the Perrault version of Cinderella or the Grimms’).  But the “classic” works of literature are different.  When something as brilliantly satirical as The Wind in the Willows is made into a Disney film, no matter how much I enjoy it, it’s hard not to see the arguments that it has been “Disneyfied”.  So, we come to Lewis Carroll and his two brilliant books.  In some ways, they are perfect for Disney to adapt: they take place in a fantastical world, many of the events in them would have been hard-pressed to reproduce with quality in a live-action film and they are episodic, so they would be easy to pick and choose which episodes to put in a film and which to ignore.  Indeed, some 60 years later, when visual effects had gotten so much more impressive (and budgets had grown so much larger), it’s not hard to see why they would think of this for the first of their live-action versions of the old animated classics.

The criticisms of this film tend to focus on the cutesiness of the film (if you want a very different take on the characters look at the Ralph Steadman illustrations) and on the episodic nature of the story (there is also the ending, where everything comes together awfully quickly).  We just flit from little episode to episode.  But that’s also one of the strengths of the film, and one of the things that makes it so very different from the other Disney films of the era.  This film is almost anarchic in the way it jumps around.  Just look at the tea party scene and the “Unbirthday Song”.  When Alice comes in, she is utterly baffled by the way in which the Mad Hatter speaks to her and the March Hare doesn’t help at all.  Little kids watching this film at the time can’t have known what to make of it.  While it is illustrated for children, in some ways the moment is really made for adults as the Hatter’s logical progression tears down the walls of Alice’s mind.  Yes, the film jumps from moment to moment and from new character to new character, but that’s what happens in Wonderland and it’s part of the joy of discovery.  Almost any moment in the film with the Hatter in it is just sheer ridiculousness and logic evaporates completely.  It is part of what makes this film such a delight.

Now, the film is not great (I ranked it at #17 when I originally ranked all the Disney films and it comes in at mid-range ***.5).  The episodic structure keeps it from working too well as a complete film.  But there are a lot of moments of sheer inspired genius in this film and it’s given entire generations a visual image of the characters in Wonderland that does not let down its original source.

The Source:

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland  (1865)  /  Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There  (1871) by Lewis Carroll

When I did my second Top 100 Novels, the only “kids” novel I included was The Wind in the Willows, which, by default, means I think it is the greatest children’s novel ever written.  I think perhaps that the two Alice books belong there as well.  What they do, with story-telling, with the use of language, with the gift of imagination, makes for one of the greatest things ever put down on page.  The magic begins right away, in the second paragraph when the White Rabbit runs by.  It’s enough to notice that he’s capitalized, meaning he’s anything but a normal rabbit, but once he starts talking as he goes by, we have entered one of the great worlds of fantasy.  Then when we find out it has taken out a watch from its waistcoat-pocket we have to wonder why he has a watch and for the matter, why does he have a waistcoat?  And that does it, we’re lost down the rabbit hole.

If I had to choose a book to read to a child, I would probably start with Alice if the child were younger (I read Alice to Thomas but we didn’t get very far into Through the Looking-Glass before I realized that it wouldn’t work nearly as well).  It creates a fascinating new world and with such things as a talking rabbit, with a girl who shrinks and grows, with a cat who disappears and leaves its grin behind it, it’s all just so silly and fun and little kids can love it.  If they get a bit older, I would go with The Wind in the Willows because it has more of a purpose with its story and the friendship between the four characters is such a wonderful thing to read about.  But then, as kids get older, they can return to Alice and discover all the things about the language that they had never understood in the first place.

The two books are a never-ending depth of magic and wonderment.  Consider this: I have the Norton Critical Edition, complete with literary essays about the book.  I also have multiple editions of the Norton Annotated Edition, in which we can understand what Carroll references throughout the book and get a better understanding of his language and what he does with math.  Or, you could read the kids book version I have which is just an easy edition to read to kids complete with kid-friendly illustrations.  But Carroll’s world is a source of illusion to all, and I also have an edition illustrated by Ralph Steadman and those illustrations are in no way suitable for children and we can remember that this kind of world is an inspiration to any age.

The Adaptation:

Walt Disney first had the idea to adapt Alice before World War II and had enquired into the rights as early as 1932.  But, with the films after Snow White being as successful as he had hoped, the bank stepped in and Disney “would be allowed to finish the features already in production – Dumbo, Bambi, and Wind in the Willows – but no other feature was to be started until these had been released and earned back their costs.” (Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler, p 376).  This meant that both Alice and Peter Pan, which were in the early planning stages, had to be put aside and would not make it to the screen until the 50’s.  When it would finally come out, it would really become one of the key films in the debate over what would eventually be called the “Disneyfication” of classic works.  Would you allow the defining images of a work of literature be what you had seen on the screen, sometimes deliberately aimed at younger audiences?

Alice, in some ways, is able to escape that question precisely because of the way it goes about adapting the stories.  Rather than tackle the two different books and have Alice go into Wonderland twice, once through the hole and once through the Looking-Glass, it contains all of her adventures within one journey.  Consequently, characters like Tweedledum and Tweeledee, who we don’t meet until the second book, are here in the film, complete with their story of the Walrus and the Carpenter.  To that end, those moments which do come from the second book are just thrown into the film as episodes while the main bulk of the story, as well as her arrival and departure from Wonderland are both taken from the first book.

The Credits:

Directors: Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, Wilfred Jackson.  An Adaptation of Lewis Carrol’s The Adventure of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.  Story: Winston Hibler, Ted Sears, Bill Peet, Erdman Penner, Joe Rinaldi, Milt Banta, Bill Cottrell, Dick Kelsey, Joe Grant, Dick Huemer, Del Connell, Tom Oreb, John Walbridge.  Note: the misspelling of Carroll’s name is how it is spelled in the credits.

Consensus Nominees That Don’t Make My Top 10

Bright Victory

The Film:

This film was the last winner of the Writers Guild category “Screenplay That Deals Most Ably with the Problems of the American Scene” and it’s not hard to see why.  It’s a solid film with some solid writing and a first-rate performance from Arthur Kennedy that would earn him the second in a long string of Oscar nominations that sadly never ended with a win (he was the male Thelma Ritter of the time).  But this film definitely deals with problems of the American scene.  In fact, it deals directly with two different problems and while it doesn’t always do it with subtlety, it does so, for the most part, with grace.

The first problem is the one that brings us to the title.  Kennedy plays Larry, a soldier who is shot by a sniper in Northern Africa in World War II and is blinded by the damage the bullet does to his optic nerves.  He must return to life though and figure out a way to cope with the world through his blindness.  This involves rehab back in the States, and then adjusting to life back down South after he has learned how to function outside a hospital.  In the middle of it are two different girls.  There’s the girl that Larry left behind when he went to war, one who becomes uncomfortable when she realizes what a married life with Larry would be like now that he is blind (I guess she’s lucky they didn’t marry before he left).  There’s also the girl that he meets in Philadelphia when he is recuperating, a kindly bank teller who falls in love with him, although given Larry’s gruffness and unwillingness to be drawn into a relationship, the film doesn’t do a particularly good job at making us see what she sees in him unless it’s his pride and dignity.  All of this will come to a happy ending, of course, as we can’t have the nice bank teller be left with nothing when she clearly loves Larry so much and doesn’t care about his blindness.

The other problem is Larry’s metaphorical blindness.  Larry is from the South after all, and he is not inclined towards blacks.  He is a product of his environment and has grown up believing they are inferior and that surfaces when Larry makes a comment about them being allowed on the ward, using the favorite slur of the time of course.  What he doesn’t realize is that his friend Joe (also blind) who he is talking to is actually black.  That will force Larry to confront his ignorant prejudices at the same time that he is trying to cope with his blindness.  He had become friends with Joe because he could no longer see color.

This film was made in 1951, at a time when we were back at war (in Korea) and the issue of soldiers returning home wounded was once again a major issue.  It was also a time of great racial unrest in the country, as so many blacks who had been given better treatment in the Army after Truman de-segregated the forces were suddenly forced to return to lives where they were again second-class citizens.  So this screenplay, even with some unsubtle stumbles along the way and an ending that is a bit too happy given the issues we have been dealing with, is dealing with important issues and is not bothering to shy away from either.

The strange thing is that this film, rather forward for its time, has long been extremely difficult to find.  I happen to own it because years ago one of my readers sent me some prominent films that I had never seen and this was one of them.  It’s an Oscar nominee (Arthur Kennedy might not make my Top 5 but that’s because it’s a really tough year) and a WGA winner and it deserves to be available for people to see.  It’s only a mid-range *** film but it’s definitely worth seeing, for Kennedy’s performance if nothing else.

The Source:

Lights Out by Baynard Kendrick  (1945)

If the film was progressive in looking at two completely different problems that become linked through the problems of Larry, the book was even more so.  It was originally published in 1945, just as the second World War was ending and at a time when people were confronting the problems of wounded returning vets and soldiers were coping with the issue of becoming friends with people under the hazard of war that they wouldn’t normally associate with back home.  It’s a solid novel, if considerably unsubtle at times.  It makes Larry work quite a bit for his happy ending, but in the end he does get it, finding the woman he loves (more through the help of his friends than in the film).  It also takes longer for Larry to deal with his prejudices and learn what a fool he has been.  The racial issues seem to have been a secondary motive in writing the book.  Baynard Kendrick was already well-known for writing a series of books about Duncan Maclain, a blind detective and had made a study of the blind, even serving as Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Blinded Veterans Association (although the book is unclear if this happened before the book was written – I was reading a Bantam copy from 1951 when it had been renamed Bright Victory to coincide with the film and it’s possible that those things happened in the six years between the original publication of the book and the publication of the edition I was reading).

The Adaptation:

One of the major points in the film, of course, is that when you’re blind it’s harder to have prejudices against someone.  The prejudice in Larry, though, is less pronounced in the film, where it consists mainly of one comment and then some reflection on what he thinks, while the book, very early on (page 4) makes it clear how Larry feels: “No foolishness from labor and uppity Negroes.  That was one of the main troubles with the country – the Negroes were getting too damned independent.  He’d heard his mother say so time after time.  Now he was hooked firmly into the Army.  Once he got home, he and a lot of other fellows would show them.  The United States was never made to be run by the Negroes and the Jews.”

Most of the rest of the film does hew closely to the film, with one particular moment I really enjoyed coming straight from the book, when Larry, having returned home to problems, gets some understanding from his father, who wants to take him out for a drink and says to his wife: “Mother, you and Chris get out, and goddam quick.  Larry and I are driving downtown to have some whisky and chase it with some beer!”  Of course, in the film they cut the word “goddam.”

There are some changes in the film, of course.  Larry has another encounter with Joe where he still isn’t able to completely overcome his prejudice before they reconcile.  It’s also not at the end where they reconcile.  In fact, it is Joe, after becoming close friends with Larry again, who manages to connect him with Judy, the girl that he loves.  But the essential flow of the story remains the same.

The Credits:

Directed by Mark Robson.  Screenplay by Robert Buckner.  Based upon the novel “Lights Out” by Baynard Kendrick.

Father’s Little Dividend

The Film:

There are two bits of good news about this film, although the “good news” is relative.  The first says something about films today and the second says something about “classic” films.

The first bit is that when a film suddenly becomes a success and the studio immediately rushes a sequel into production, it’s not a new Hollywood development showing their bankruptcy of ideas.  The good news is that Hollywood has always been short of ideas!  Yes, there have been series of films for a long time, and Horror films were often rushed into a sequel, but the success of this film prompted a new film almost instantly, and thanks to the Studio system, they could take all the same stars, because they were all already under contract, and just plop them all back together pretty much the next day and get shooting on a new film.

The second bit is about what a mediocre sequel does to the original film.  Does a slough of crappy sequels tarnish the brilliance of a film like Jaws or The Exorcist?  I would argue no.  But the good news is we don’t have to worry about that question here.  Some films have “classic” status without actually earning it and the original Father of the Bride is definitely one of those films.  Of the 229 films that have been nominated for both Best Picture and Best Actor at the Oscars, only six of them are worse than Father of the Bride.

Which, I suppose bring us to a third bit of relative good news.  This film really isn’t any worse than the original.  Rather than the pressure of having to plan and pay for a wedding, this time it’s all about the pressure of your young daughter, newly married, being pregnant.  And, if you though you had a lot to deal with concerning the in-laws with the wedding, imagine when there is going to be a grandchild involved!  So there are situations that aren’t particularly funny, a lot of ridiculous moaning, a lot of excessive whining about situations that really aren’t such a big deal and, for a plus at least, a lot of young Elizabeth Taylor walking around looking beautiful.  But, I’ll remind you that in this same year she was also in A Place in the Sun, a film that really does deserve its classic status, so you’re better off watching that.  Yes, it does have a lot of tragedy, but at least it doesn’t have a lot of Spencer Tracy bitching and moaning.

The Source:

Father of the Bride by Edward Streeter  (1949)

First of all, I have already reviewed this book, when I wrote about the original film in the 1950 post.  Second, this film is not so much based on that novel, then on the characters created in that novel, continuing on their story beyond the original novel and the first film.

The Adaptation:

Well, they didn’t have to adapt anything – all they had to do was write a new script that kept to the same characters.  They did that just fine, which is part of why this film isn’t any better than the first one – because all of the things that were so annoying about the first one are just as annoying here.

The Credits:

Directed by Vincente Minnelli.  Screen Play by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich.  Based on Characters Created by Edward Streeter.

WGA Nominees That Don’t Make My List

14 Hours

The Film:

Henry Hathaway was not a great director, but he was a more than serviceable director who could do certain things quite well.  In the late 40’s, he became known for directing a series of films based on true events, portrayed in an almost documentary like style.  So, when Howard Hawks refused to make this film because of the subject matter, Hathaway was the perfect director to bring in.  The irony was that, while this was another true story, the style wouldn’t be in that same manner as before because the studio was actually downplaying its connection to real events.  At the request of the family of the original person who stood for hours on a ledge of a building in midtown Manhattan, the title of the film was changed, as were all the names, and there was nothing made clear about the film that it was based on a true story.

Richard Basehart, in the role that helped land him the role in La Strada that really kick-started his international fame, plays a troubled young man, with a brow-beating mother and a distant father, who is standing outside on a ledge, preparing to jump.  His parents, once brought in, are unsuccessful in getting him off the ledge (the mother, in  good performance from Agnes Moorhead, actually makes things worse).  His fiancee isn’t able to talk him down.  Even the kindly beat cop who first reported the story (a more kindly role for Paul Douglas than he was usually given to play) can’t bring him in, though at least he makes progress.

We don’t just stay on the ledge, keeping the film static.  We see the reactions from the crowd (including the film debut of Jeffrey Hunter as a man who uses the occasion to flirt).  We see a divorcing couple who decide, after seeing the man about to end his life, that their marriage is worth another shot, with the young wife played by Grace Kelly in her screen debut.  We get the reminders that just because traffic has stopped to look at the scene, life itself hasn’t stopped.

Hathaway’s direction is solid, similar to his documentary style direction of his other films of the era.  But is the film perhaps let down by its ending?  In a further departure from the original story, Basehart doesn’t jump, though he slips when a searchlight shines in his face and is able to make a grasp for life and be rescued.

The Source:

“The Man on the Ledge” by Joel Sayre  (1949)

This is a stark piece about New York, written eleven years after the fact about a man who held up traffic in midtown, standing on a ledge outside the Hotel Gotham.  People came and went, including a kindly cop who was brought in because he was good at talking to people, as well as the sister of the man on the ledge who was there when he went out there in the first place.  Sayre’s narrative is crisp, clean and straight forward and there is hope that something good might come of it, until we get to that final moment.  Sayre doesn’t actually describe whether the man (John William Warde) jumps or slips, because the narrative eye is on the cop, back in the room, when “there was a tremendous roar from the crowd below.”  But the power of Sayre’s narrative really comes in through in the paragraph that describes the fall itself:

As John’s’ body passed the sixteenth floor a policeman, who had been stationed there to seize the strands of the net when it was raised before his window, made a lunge for him and barely missed.  A magnesium flare was set off by the newsreel cameramen.  John feel feet first as far as the eighth floor, where he grazed the ledge, then he whirled end-over-end until he struck the hotel marquee, almost hit a Homicide Squad lieutenant coming from under it, and landed partly on the sidewalk and partly in the gutter.  A priest sprang forward to administer the last rites, but John was beyond all rites.

The Adaptation:

The basic premise stays the same, with some of the details deliberately changed at the request of John William Warde’s family.  But, by far, the biggest change from the original true story and Sayre’s description of it is in the ending, when Basehart’s character slips because of the lights and then is able to grab something and keep from plummeting to his death.

The Credits:

Directed by Henry Hathaway.  Screen Play by John Paxton.  From a Story by Joel Sayre.

People Will Talk

The Film:

People Will Talk is a bit of a clumsy, unsubtle film.  One line on Wikipedia says “The movie has been said to be to the medical profession what All About Eve was to the theater.”  I can understand that someone would say this, but that comparison falls completely flat.  Yes, both works were written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, but All About Eve sparkles with wit and scintillating dialogue.  That film really did skewer the people who work in and work around the theater.  But this film has less to do with the medical profession than attempting to skewer self-important people who believe it is their moral duty to tear apart anyone who falls outside their norm.  On a purely filmic level, the film doesn’t hold up simply because it spends too much time early in the film focusing on what is built up as a mystery, then mostly abandoning for long stretches to focus on the love story, before finally coming back to the mystery at the end.  On stage, they might have balanced this more, but the way it is structured in the film, it just makes it look like two completely different films were shoved together awkwardly.

The first story begins with a mystery.  A professor at a college has gone to great lengths to track down information about the past of a fellow professor, Dr. Praetorius, and the strange man who is always around him, Mr. Shunderson.  He starts to learn some information (which we are not privy to), but then the film focuses on Praetorius himself (played by Cary Grant).  He’s a medical teacher, teaching anatomy.  Before long we learn that one of his female students is pregnant and that after she discovers this (the father is dead) she tries to kill herself.  We then continue with that story for quite a while – with Praetorius falling in love with her (she’s easily young enough to be his daughter), pursuing her (including telling her she’s not pregnant when she actually still is) and even marrying her.

At the same time as all of this, the original professor we met (played with some bland vindictiveness by Hume Cronyn) continues to search into his past.  In the end, we get a story in front of a college tribunal (essentially turning this into a courtroom drama for the final part of the film) in which, of course, the whole story comes out and Praetorius is exonerated from any actual wrong-doing.

Most of this is pretty bland.  Grant does an okay job, but it’s weird to see him pursing the young Jeanne Crain and it becomes obvious very early on that they are only going to build up the mystery of Mr. Shunderson to finally be revealed at the end of the film.  Given that this was written and directed by the man who had won both Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay at the two previous Oscars, it really was a letdown.  It’s not a bad film (mid-range ***), but you expect so much more from this talent.

The Source:

Dr. med. Hiob Praetorius, Facharzt fuer Chirurgie und Frauenleiden by Curt Goetz  (1929)

I was not able to get a copy of Dr. Praetorius.  There also seem to be some questions about it.  I got the title and the year from a version in WorldCat held by Queen’s University Library in Ontario.  Wikipedia, on the page for this film, lists the play as being from 1934, but then again, it’s Wikipedia.  The play doesn’t appear to be available in English; there is one listing for it in English in WorldCat, but it also says it’s a “story in 7 Chapters” and lists no library as having that edition, so I don’t know what to make of that.  It does seem strange, if Kenneth L. Geist is correct (see the quote below) that a German language play written by a native German would have a lot of jokes about a girl speaking with a Saxon accent.

The Adaptation:

“Curt Goetz, the author of Dr. Praetorius, also wrote, directed and starred in a German film of his play.  Although this screenplay is credited in the titles of People Will Talk, Mankiewicz says that he never saw the picture.  Mankiewicz says, “People Will Talk departs rather broadly from its source, Dr. Praetorius, which is full of jokes about the fact that the girl speaks with a Saxon accent.  Praetorius’s clinic and his comments on the treatment of patients, doctors, and schoolteachers are all mine.  The Shunderson mystery is in the original.”  (Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz by Kenneth L. Geist, p 208)

If you read the credits below, which I coped directly from the film, you will see that Geist is wrong and that the screenplay for the film is not actually credited.  But that’s about as much as I can say about the adaptation beyond what Geist says since I wasn’t able to get hold of the original.

The Credits:

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.  Written for the Screen by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.  From the Play “Dr. Praetorius” by Curt Goetz.

You’re in the Navy Now

The Film:

On the one hand, Henry Hathaway was a solid director of documentary style dramas, crime and thriller films, as I mentioned above in my review of 14 Hours.  On the other hand, this is a Comedy and that’s not really Hathaway’s forte.  This film probably couldn’t have been very good no matter who directed it, though, and it lands 87 spots below 14 Hours on my list for the year.  At least it doesn’t have the distinction of being the weakest film to earn a writing nomination in this year and thus forcing me to review it, thanks to Father’s Little Dividend.

It’s a ridiculous film about a Navy ship that is put to sea almost entirely manned by civilians.  The premise is that there is a lot of new technology aboard and that the ship might work better with people who have backgrounds in engineering (like Gary Cooper, who plays the captain of the ship) than men with experience at sea.  The other part of that premise is that there aren’t enough experienced men anyway to fill the Navy ships for the war (it takes place in World War II) and they need to find out if men can be put out to sea without experience and still be successful.  Poor Millard Mitchell, playing the chief mate is the only one with real experience.

The whole thing is rather ridiculous, not helped by Hathaway’s direction (he’s really far more suited for the dramatic documentary style).  It’s part of a sub-genre that flourished in the 50’s: the war comedy, and it wasn’t one that resulted in many particularly good films (Mr. Roberts is a notable exception).  This, and other films like it, mainly end up getting reviewed by me for this project because the Writers Guild for some reason kept thinking they were well-written.

The Source:

“The Flying Teakettle” by John W. Hazard  (1950)

This was a short little non-fiction piece in the New Yorker about Hazard’s experiences aboard the exact type of ship that was described in the film – one run by people without any real sea experience.  It’s a mostly forgettable piece about a strange little experiment that the Navy tried that didn’t really work.

The Adaptation:

The original piece in the New Yorker was just a description of what Hazard went through in the course of his duty.  The script embellishes it dramatically, adding a love interest to the story and providing much more of a plot to something that was just a real-life experiment that didn’t actually end up working.

The Credits:

Directed by Henry Hathaway.  Screen Play by Richard Murphy.  From an Article in the New Yorker by John W. Hazard.

The Great Caruso

The Film:

Oh, biopics.  There are far more of them than the world ever could have needed.  Famous writer?  Biopic!  Famous artists?  Biopic!  (Though at least those have the benefit of glorious art on display.)  Famous singer?  Biopic!  Unlike the artists, the enjoyment factor of a musical biopic can really depend on how much you like the music.  Ray and Walk the Line are basically the same film but I would much rather watch Walk the Line because I like Johnny Cash and don’t much care for Ray Charles (or, at least his music).  In recent years, the writing for biopics is more likely to be over-looked.  But, in this era, when there was a separate category at the WGA for Musicals, a lot of them earned nominations and that means I was forced to watch them once (awards OCD) and now I am forcing myself to watch them again for this project.

All of that is a long way of saying that this film is pretty much interchangeable with other Musical biopics, and by that, I don’t mean Yankee Doodle Dandy which is on a completely different level.  Famous singer grows up, becomes famous, has some setbacks, has some huge triumphs, and in the end has an important life that they think is worth making a movie over.

The problem with this particular film is threefold, two of which are more specific to me and the last of which is about the film as a whole.  The first is that this is a biopic of Enrico Caruso, the famous opera singer, and that no matter how much I like classical music, I can’t really get into opera.  Honestly, it’s the singing that throws me off.  I like the music in opera, but I don’t particularly like the opera style of singing.  So I never had any interest in watching a biopic of a famous opera star, no matter how famous he was.  The second problem is Mario Lanza.  Lanza was a talented singer (though the type of singing he did doesn’t interest me at all) but he wasn’t a particularly talented actor and so the moments where he is not singing are a drag (and the moments where he is, I don’t care for).  But the third problem is that the film just isn’t that good.  The acting is mostly forgettable, the director, Richard Thorpe, was never particularly good, and there’s nothing noteworthy to make this more than the greatest hits version of a man’s life built around his opera singing.

The Source:

Enrico Caruso: His Life and Death by Dorothy Caruso  (1945)

To call this a biography isn’t really accurate.  Dorothy Caruso outlived her husband by a long time and finally decided to write a book about him.  But it really focuses on his career and on the time they had together (and they didn’t actually marry until relatively late in his life).  The first 30 pages are all photographs, the end of the book is a list of his recordings, and the rest of the book focuses on individual moments in their lives together as well as stories of his greatest musical triumphs.  I would think any serious Caruso fan would be disappointed in this book; it might give some insights into him but it isn’t really the story of his life.

The Adaptation:

I won’t go into all the various ways that things are changed.  Such things are often to be expected in biopics and apparently this one was more egregious than most.  In fact, even though the credits mention Dorothy Caruso’s book (but only “suggested by” rather than adapted from), the fiction parts of the film were so outlandish that she actually sued the studio.  Many of the parts of the film pre-date the actions in the book anyway, but if you are interested, Wikipedia has (what I assume to be an accurate) list of major discrepancies between Caruso’s actual life and how is portrayed in the book.

The Credits:

Directed by Richard Thorpe.  Written by Sonya Levin and William Ludwig.  Suggested by Dorothy Caruso’s Biography of Her Husband.

On the Riviera

The Film:

Danny Kaye was never a great actor, but he was a talented performer.  He was very good with light comedy, he could sing and he could move around well (all of which made him a lesser version of Gene Kelly, but when you’re being compared to Gene Kelly, that’s more of a compliment than it looks at first glance).  Put him in the right role and you would have a good hour and a half in front of you.

This film is no different.  In this one, he is a man who looks like a famous aviator and ends up being paid to impersonate him.  In the end, the impersonation involves his wife as well, and when the impersonator gets close to the wife, he realizes how wonderful she is, so that at the end of the film, he can make it clear to the aviator himself how wonderful the wife is and that he should take advantage of the fact that he is married to a wonderful woman.

The plot is mostly incidental.  The impersonator is an entertainer, and so we not only get some charming acting  from Kaye (in the roles where he must play both roles), but some good old song and dance numbers that highlight Kaye’s real talent.  The plot itself is just light comedy, the kind of thing that Kaye was perfectly made for and he could do it in his sleep.  There’s a lot better films in this year and this hardly merited its WGA nomination for Best Written American Comedy Musical, but it’s not a bad way to spend an hour and a half, watching Kaye in his prime.

The Source:

The Red Cat by Rudolph Lothar and Hans Adler  (1934)

Other than the name of the play and the year it was first performed, I was unable to find out anything about this play.  Given that both authors wrote in German (the former was a Hungarian born Austrian and the latter was German), it seems odd that the play would be in English, but the TCM database lists it as being performed in New York beginning in 1934.  It is also a remake of That Night in Rio, which was based on the same play but with the added benefit that this film doesn’t make you sit through Don Ameche or Carmen Miranda.

The Adaptation:

Without getting hold of the play, of course, I can’t tell what was done in the adaptation.

The Credits:

Directed by Walter Lang.  Screen Play by Valentine Davies and Phoebe and Henry Ephron.  Based on a Play by Rudolph Lothar and Hans Adler.  Adapted by Jessie Ernst.

Show Boat

The Film:

Because of availability of sources and films, I don’t necessarily re-watch these films in the same order that they appear (every film in this entire project is a film I had seen before I watched it for this project).  As a result, I re-watched Kiss Me Kate before re-watching Show Boat and was already tired of listening to Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson sing at each other.  I wouldn’t call what they do acting, and it amazes me, watching these films, that Grayson would eventually giving such an excellent (non-singing) acting performance in The Night of the Iguana years later.  Coupled with the presence of Joe E. Brown who irritates me anytime he’s not trying to get Jack Lemmon into bed, and this was a film guaranteed to turn me off.  What makes it worse is that this version was the one I had to watch again for this project, thanks to the Musical category of the WGA Awards that existed for some 20+ years rather than the far superior version made by James Whale in 1936.

If you have ever seen the original version, there’s no question what you will remember about it – the magnificent voice of Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River”.  It brings the film to life in a way that all the MGM technicolor of 1951 can’t possibly match.  And MGM seemed to know this – they handed it off to William Warfield.  Never heard of him?  Neither had I.  It turns out he’s a baritone singer but not an actor and did almost no other film work.  Why take such a magnificent cinematic moment and give it to someone that’s so marginalized in the cast list?  Because they wanted to focus on the color and the costumes and the romance and wanted to forget all the things that actually made the musical come to life and achieve a measure of immortality.

Yes, there is a story in the middle of all of this, about a group of performers who travel on a riverboat.  It deals with illicit romance and race relations and there’s a slimy villain and a heel who becomes a romantic lead and a real love between a couple that isn’t allowed at the time.  But all of that is supposed to fall away when the power of “Ol’ Man River” comes on the soundtrack and this film just forgets all of that.  But, hey, this film was directed by George Sidney, a mediocre director of musicals and light comedies.  The original was directed by James Whale, fresh off the success of three of the greatest Horror films ever made and it’s a stark reminder that he was a major talent, which is why he’s in my Top 100 directors and Sidney is mostly forgotten.

The Source:

Show Boat by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II  (1927), adapted from Show Boat by Edna Ferber  (1926)

Show Boat originally came from Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel.  Ferber’s novel is over-written, as is must of her work and never really comes to life.  Perhaps that’s because, even more than this film, it misses the presence of Joe.  He was a creation of Kern and Hammerstein.  What Ferber has, are the silly stories that are best left forgotten, but form, sadly, the core of this film.

Kern and Hammerstein, on the other hand, made something much much more.  I am not a huge fan of the musical, but with the song “Ol’ Man River”, they really made it come to life and it was a huge success on stage, producing numerous films, of course, of which this is the least.

The Adaptation:

Almost all of the dialogue from the original Kern / Hammerstein production was excised in this film version.  I’m not going to go too deeply into all the changes that were made because, for once, someone has done a fantastic job on Wikipedia detailing all of them.  So, if you head over there, you can see, in good detail, all of the changes that were made, both from the original musical and from the first film version, almost all of them for the worse.

The Credits:

Directed by George Sidney.  Screen Play by John Lee Mahin.  Based on the Immortal Musical Play “Show Boat” by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, II.  From Edna Ferber’s Novel.

The First Legion

The Film:

Ah, religious dramas.  They are not my cup of tea.  They are not my cup of anything.  As has (presumably) been made clear in many of the things I have written, I have no use for god and even less use for organized groups that choose to worship some form of deity.  Religious dramas that have something to say (like Through a Glass Darkly or Winter Light or The Silence, or really most of Bergman’s films) I enjoy.  They question, they think, they speak.  If they offer no answers, they at least provoke thoughtful discussion.  My least favorite are films that want to show us the wonder of religion, films like this or The Song of Bernadette (although, while this one doesn’t push as hard with its religion, it also doesn’t have the same kind of acting on display as Bernadette does).

Unless you revel in films about faith (more specifically, films about the Christian faith), I doubt you will find much to crow about either here.  One particular commenter on the IMDb declares that this film has the best performance ever from Charles Boyer making me wonder if that viewer had ever seen Algiers, Gaslight, Fanny, or really any Charles Boyer film.  The performances in this film are forgettable.  The direction is lifeless.  The writing at least tries to deal with some questions of faith (one person begins to walk again in what is viewed in one light as a miracle but it turns out that’s not the case, but it still leads the line at the end “The biggest miracle is faith and to have faith is the miracle.”  After the first “miracle”, we then have to deal with a long subplot about a local crippled girl (the girl makes it to the front of the poster which tells you how much the filmmakers want you to focus on her) but then it gets not only preachy but also boring.

Douglas Sirk has never been to my taste.  His films later in the decade are filled with ridiculous melodrama and his insistence on using Rock Hudson drags all of them down since Hudson rarely gave a worthwhile performance.  But those are far preferable to what Sirk does here.

The Source:

The First Legion: A Drama of the Society of Jesus by Emmet Lavery  (1934)

The Society of Jesus, as the films tells us in an opening title scene, is what is known more commonly as the Jesuits.  To invoke the title of “The First Legion” brings things to a point that I would rather not think about.  While this play does deal with some doubts and some questions and the role of faith, in the end I personally found it too sanctimoniously pious to cope with.

The Adaptation:

With the playwright hired to write the script, it does a fairly close job of keeping to the play.  Like with so many plays, a lot of dialogue is altered or moved around a bit (it’s like people are convinced they can’t just film the play – they have to move things around) with some added scenes, but for the most part, it’s the play moved to the screen.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Douglas Sirk.  Based on the Play by Emmet Lavery.  Screenplay by Emmet Lavery.

Pickup

The Film:

Hugo Haas had been one of those multi-talent people in the film industry in Europe before World War II, producing directing, writing and acting.  I say “multi-talent” rather than “multi-talented” for some of the same reasons that I would use that phrase for Ed Wood.  He wore a variety of hats, but that doesn’t mean he was exactly Orson Welles or Charlie Chaplin when it come to the depths of his talents.  After coming to the States, Haas was a character actor, before he finally got a chance to spread his wings again, beginning with this film.

This film has often been looked at as a low-budget unauthorized adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice which seems a little odd since it was based on a novel that pre-dates Postman both as a film and a novel.  The problem that this film has is that it does, in fact, seem like a low-budget version of Postman, and it’s not just the budget that is the problem.  Or maybe the budget was the problem.  Because while Haas writes a solid script about a railroad worker just hoping to get to his pension with a younger wife.  He has an accident and loses his hearing.  The wife decides then that this is the right time to get rid of her husband (since she’s having an affair anyway).  The problem is that his hearing slowly comes back to him and he doesn’t let her know, so he becomes away of the scheme.  Haas does some decent direction and he’s mostly okay in the lead role.  The problem is that the budget didn’t really allow him to get a decent cameraman and Haas was stuck in front of the camera too much to really focus on how the film looked.  The other budget problem is that we end up with a pretty weak cast around him and so while Haas does a creditable job, no one else in the film is even remotely worth watching.

In the end, Pickup is a decent film – a mid-range *** that shows that Haas really did have abilities on multiple fronts and unlike Ed Wood, might have been able to do something with a real budget.  But I think this film might have been forgotten (and probably never seen by me) if not for the fact that for this little stretch, the WGA decided to have a best “low-budget” category.  It’s an interesting choice, because the script isn’t really affected by the budget, while so many of the other categories you would see at the Oscars would be drastically affected by it (yes, it is affected a little because of choices that have to be made, but not in the same visual way you would notice as the other categories).

The Source:

Hlídač č.47 by Josef Kopta  (1926)

Unfortunately, this is one source I wasn’t able to read.  In fact, as far as I was able to tell, it’s never even been published in English, but given that Haas was originally born in Austria-Hungary, I don’t think that Haas needed it in English.

The Adaptation:

Obviously there’s not much I can do with a novel that I haven’t read in discussing its adaptation.  The film has often been compared to The Postman Always Rings Twice, so it’s possible that Haas picked up noir themes from American films and novels and added them to the original novel.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Hugo Haas.  Screenplay by Hugo Haas and Arnold Phillips.  Based on a Novel by Joseph Kopta.

Saturday’s Hero

The Film:

As is obvious, the WGA used to have a category for scripts “dealing most ably with problems of the American scene”. That’s how, in 1949, we ended up with nominations for Home of the Brave, Pinky and Lost Boundaries, all of them dealing with race relations. In this year, while most of the scripts were much better and dealt with bigger issues, we also have Saturday’s Hero, a film dealing with the issue of athletes getting paid to attend college. Yes, a film made in 1951 dealt with the issues of athletes getting paid to attend college. It is definitely a problem that continues to be part of the American scene. The only problem is that the script itself isn’t very good, and neither is the film.

John Derek plays Steve Novak, a star New Jersey football player who uses the sport to escape his mill town and go to college in Virginia. Most of the first half of the film deals either with his transition to college or with football itself, with lots of game action. Then we start to get into the more serious issue. There are players getting paid to play and there are rich men who are making this happen. This temptation is played off against, what else, the daughter of one of these benefactors, played by Donna Reed. If you guessed that Novak will fall for her, well, maybe you could have written this screenplay yourself.

All of this will come to a bigger head when Novak is injured on the field. Suddenly he has a choice to make about his future and whether education or football are going to play parts in it. Of course Reed will play a part in it – this is Hollywood after all.

It’s hard to believe that David Miller is the same man who would so effectively direct Sudden Fear the year after this. The direction, much like the acting, is wooden (Reed survives this but it’s hard to believe it’s the same actress who would win the Oscar two years later and Derek was never much of an actor) and the script is either mundane or predictable or both. It’s the kind of script that only could have been nominated in this category, and only because of the issue it is dealing with, not because of any quality in the script itself.

The Source:

The Hero by Millard Lampell (1949)

For such a forgettable book, there are some surprisingly relevant issues still at play today. This is the story of a young man who goes off to a good college rather than play football for a powerhouse school partially because he really does want to get an education. He’s provided with some money by a rich alum and later becomes concerned about his health and his future when he is hurt while playing. Of course, the long term health issues and the whole concept of being paid to play sports while in college are both issues that continue to resonate today. So why isn’t this book better remembered? Because it’s not very good. The characters aren’t particularly well developed, from the jock, to his brother who riles things up back home, to his girlfriend that is a bit unsavory.

The Adaptation:

The basic premise of the story comes from the book and much of the first half comes straight from there. Even the climax that becomes so important at the end of the book – the question of whether or not to continue playing while at the same time worried about his health, his education, and his love-life, is similar. But there are some details that are, not surprisingly, completely absent from the film. These include concepts like sex outside of marriage, abortion and suicide. The book doesn’t so much deal with serious issues as throw them in there and see what sticks, but films at the times, of course, were confined by the Production Code and all of that had to be dropped. So what we got on film was a more sanitized version of being a star college football star. The book even sanitizes the girlfriend, making her the daughter of someone important rather than a girl that he meets in a, shall we say, less respectable way.

One thing the film does improve on is the title. The Hero was a pretty damn generic name for a book. But making it Saturday’s Hero really emphasizes the college sports at the heart of the story.

One note of the credits listed below:  “Under current Guild rules, [Buchman] wouldn’t have gotten credit.  He wrote less than twenty percent of the screenplay.  But I didn’t begrudge it to him.  He polished it up and saw it through as a film.”  (Millard Lampell, author of the original novel and writer of the screenplay, as quoted on p 397 of Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, ed.)

The Credits:

Directed by David Miller. Based on the novel, “The Hero” by Millard Lampell. Written for the Screen by Millard Lampell, Sidney Buchman.

Other Screenplays on My List Outside My Top 10:

• The Mating Season  –  Adapted from the play Maggie, a charming high-level *** with good writing.
• Decision Before Dawn  –  Adapted from the novel Call it Treason by John Howe.  As a Best Picture nominee, I have already reviewed it in full.
• The Browning Version  –  Terence Rattigan adapts his own hit play.  A high-level *** with a very good performance from Michael Redgrave.
• The Thing from Another World  –  Adapted from a novella by John W. Campbell, Jr.  A high-level ***.5 and one of the best early Sci-Fi films.

Other Adaptations:
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• Miracle in Milan  –  Adapted from the novel by Cesare Zavattini.  A low-level ***.5 from Vittorio de Sica.
• The River  –  Jean Renoir film, based on the novel by Rumer Godden.  A high-level ***.
• The Desert Fox  –  Based on Desmond Young’s biography of Rommel, this was one of the films that helped make James Mason a star in the States.
• The Red Badge of Courage  –  I hated the novel in high school, but later came to greatly appreciate it.  It made my Top 200 and came close to my Top 100.  A solid adaptation by John Huston though it lost money when it was released.
• The House on Telegraph Hill  –  From a novel by Dana Lyon, an effective mystery from Robert Wise long before he won his two Oscars.
• The Tales of Hoffmann  –  Powell and Pressburger give their take on the famous opera.  As could be expected from them, it looks gorgeous.
• The Golden Salamander  –  Trevor Howard stars in this adventure based on the novel by Victor Canning.
• The Blue Veil  –  Jane Wyman was nominated for an Oscar and actually won the Globe (over Vivien Leigh!) in this adaptation of the short story which had already been made into a French film in 1942.
• Captain Horatio Hornblower  –  In the same year as his The African Queen, we also get a screen version of C. S. Forester’s famous sea-hero, played by Gregory Peck.
• Susana  –  Buñuel’s film is based on the novel by Manuel Reachi.  At mid-range *** this makes this one of Buñuel’s weaker films.
• Kind Lady  –  John Sturges directs this adaptation of the Edward Chodorov play.
• Lightning Strikes Twice  –  Adapted from the novel A Man Without Friends.
• No Highway in the Sky  –  Based on a lesser Nevil Shute novel, this is an intriguing film in which James Stewart tries to make air travel safer.
• Across the Wide Missouri  –  We’re getting into the low *** films now.  This is a Clark Gable Western, based on the novel.
• I’ll See You in My Dreams  –  A biopic (another biopic!), this one of Gus Kahn, the lyricist, directed by Michael Curtiz.
• Fixed Bayonets!  –  Suggested by the novel by John Brophy.  A lesser Samuel Fuller film known mainly for being the (uncredited) screen debut of James Dean.
• Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell  –  Clifton Webb does his third and final go as Mr. Belvedere.  It wasn’t that good the first time.
• On Dangerous Ground  –  Weak Nicholas Ray film, adapted from the novel Mad with Much Heart by Gerard Butler.
• Tarzan’s Peril  –  The third Tarzan movie with Lex Barker and the first Tarzan movie to be shot in Africa.  Pretty much nothing to do with the original novels other than the character.  Everything else from here down is **.5 or worse.
• Jim Thorpe — All American  –  Jim Thorpe, perhaps the greatest athlete of the 20th Century, lived an interesting life, one more interesting than this biopic, all though Burt Lancaster is pretty good casting, for his athleticism, though it would have been more accurate to cast a Native American.
• Apache Drums  –  Forgettable Western based on the novel Stand at Spanish Boot.
• The People Against O’Hara  –  Another John Sturges film, this one from the novel by Eleazer Lipsky.
• Once a Jolly Swagman  –  Based on the novel by Montagu Slater, a mediocre film starring Dirk Bogarde.
• Quo Vadis  –  Nominated for Best Picture, so it’s reviewed here.  As you can tell if you read that review, I’m glad it wasn’t nominated for its Screenplay by any group because then I would have had to try and force myself to read the novel (I attempted it once before and gave up).  It’s a boring novel that was a big seller.  Relentlessly mediocre film that can’t be saved by Deborah Kerr’s beauty or Peter Ustinov’s performance.
• The Brave Bulls  –  I suppose we could chalk up the HUAC pressure on director Robert Rossen for why this film is so mediocre.  Based on the novel by Tom Lea.
• M  –  Joseph Losey remakes the great Fritz Lang film (without credit to the original) and moves the action to LA.  Totally unnecessary film.
• Take Care of My Little Girl  –  Based on the novel, I only saw this film because the director (Jean Negulesco) was once Oscar-nominated.  I then promptly forgot about it.
• Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man  –  Technically only adapted because the characters pre-exist.  Also technically a Comedy, though I think Comedies are supposed to be funny.
• Native Son  –  Just because you write one of the greatest novels ever written (#30 on my list), doesn’t mean you should star in the film adaptation, especially if you are now way too old, as Richard Wright was by this point.  You end up with a ** film.
• When Worlds Collide  –  A bad example of early Sci-Fi, which won the Oscar for best Special Effects, mostly because of a lack of competition.  Based on the novel by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie (whose novel Gladiator was a huge influence on the creation of Superman).
• David and Bathsheba  –  Based, very loosely, on the books from the Bible.  Pretty bad film (low-range **), though only the third worst film I have seen from 1951.

“The crowd milled indignantly in the small Dayroom, everybody talking excitedly. Stark posted himself huskily in the doorway with Pete and the Chief flanking him. Warden gulped off the rest of the coffee and set the cop on the magazine rack and pushed his way down to the other end and climbed up on the pingpong table.” (p 731)

My Top 7:

1. From Here to Eternity
2. Stalag 17
3. The Big Heat
4. The Moon is Blue
5. The Actress
6. Peter Pan
7. Hondo

Note:  After a few years with more than 10 screenplays on my list, I can’t do more than seven in this year.
Note:  This is the earliest year where significant records exist at oscars.org (there are a few for 1952 and even this year is incomplete in strange waves).  One of the great things about oscars.org is that it lists original sources (you can actually look up everything in a particular year with a source author) and it makes it much easier to distinguish between original and adapted scripts.

Consensus Nominees:

1. Lili  (184 pts)
2. From Here to Eternity  (160 pts)
3. Shane  (80 pts)
4. Hondo  (40 pts)
5. The Cruel Sea  (40 pts)
6. The Actress  /  Call Me Madam  /  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes  /  How to Marry a Millionaire  /  Kiss Me Kate  /  The Moon is Blue  /  Stalag 17  (40 pts)

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay):

• From Here to Eternity
• The Cruel Sea
• Hondo
• Lili
• Shane

Golden Globe Nominees:

• Lili

note:  There were no other announced nominees.

WGA Awards:

Drama:

• From Here to Eternity
• Shane

Nominees that are Original:  Above and Beyond, The Little Fugitive, Martin Luther

Comedy:

• The Actress
• How to Marry a Millionaire
• The Moon is Blue
• Stalag 17

Nominees that are Original:  Roman Holiday

Musical:

• Lili
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
• Kiss Me Kate

Nominees that are Original:  The Band Wagon, Call Me Madam
Note:  The Band Wagon is considered Original because the Broadway musical that came before it was simply a revue.  The film only took the title and a few songs from the original, nothing about a story or characters (which the original didn’t have).

My Top 7:

From Here to Eternity

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film twice.  The first time was as part of my Top 100 Directors project.  It’s important to remember Fred Zinnemann really is a great director, since he was denigrated by the Auteur Theorists in spite of such monumental achievements as this film, A Man for All Seasons and High Noon.  The second was when I wrote about it for the Best Picture project and I should point out that this one of those times where the Academy absolutely got it right.  In both of those cases, I used the same photo (Kerr and Lancaster in the surf – which I also used for my Year in Film and my Nighthawk Awards and is the same picture as is on the poster on the right), which I didn’t go with this time because it’s not actually in the book.

The Source:

From Here to Eternity by James Jones  (1951)

From Here to Eternity is a great novel and has been acknowledged as such from the beginning. It won the National Book Award when it was first released, it appeared on the Modern Library list and it appears in my Top 200 Novels of All-Time list. It is not an easy read, being over 800 pages, filled with profanity and adultery (it originally also had some instances of gay sex which were censored before it was published) and hard living and almost none of the characters are particularly likeable. The main character is a man determined to live his life his own way, which is an odd way of going about things when you are also determined to be an army lifer, and circumstances work against him at the end of the book to bring his life to tragedy. The other two main characters are a staff sergeant and the wife of his commanding officer with whom he is having an affair. All of this is set against the Army base in Honolulu in 1941, with the attack on Pearl Harbor coming100 pages before the end of the book and setting in motion the final tragic events that will close out the book’s action. The tone is tough, but the power of the prose shines through, from those first lines (“When he finished packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still early morning fresh.” all the way through to the tragic conclusion.

The Adaptation:

This was always going to be a hard book to adapt. It wasn’t just the language; clearly that was going to have be cleaned up for the film to be made. But there were story problems as well: “The important problem remaining in the story from the code’s standpoint is the lack of proper compensation for the immoral relationship between Warden and Karen. [The matter was resolved by having the adulterous wife tell Burt Lancaster that what they had been doing with such joy and exhilaration was evil and that she and her corrupt officer husband ‘deserve each other.’]” (The Censorship Papers: Movie Censorship Letters from the Hays Office, 1934 to 1968 by Gerald Gardner, 1987, p 56)

Surprisingly enough, most of the rest of the book was left alone when it was transferred to the screen. The characters who were pretty awful remained pretty awful. Terrible things happened to a lot of the characters and they were allowed to happen. Perhaps the hardest thing to do was make certain to get the casting correct. Hell, we almost had Joan Crawford playing the captain’s wife rather than Deborah Kerr. That alone might have screwed up the adaptation.

The Credits:

Directed by Fred Zinnemann. Screen Play by Danial Taradash. Based upon the novel by James Jones.

Stalag 17

The Film:

I have loved this film since the moment I first saw it, as William Holden has always been one of my favorite actors, but, because there were so many Billy Wilder films to chose from during my Top 100 Directors project and because it somehow got passed over for a Best Picture nomination, I didn’t end up actually writing a review of it until the Nighthawk Awards.  At one time I even considered it a rival for the best film of the year, but I have since realized that From Here to Eternity is a greater film.

The Source:

Stalag 17: A Comedy Melodrama in Three Acts by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski  (1951)

This is a decent and interesting play about a cynical man who is at odds with the other P.O.W.s in the camp that they are all being kept in.  He has managed to push thing about as far as he can get away with and when a man ends up in the camp that he thinks can change his fortunes if he helps him to get away (as well as getting rid of the spy in the camp), he decides to take his ticket out.  In the time after the war (and with us back at war in Korea), it’s easy to see why this was a success.  But it doesn’t have a lot of wit to it – that would come later in the film.

The Adaptation:

The Introduction by Jeffrey Meyers to the published version of the screenplay from the University of California Press does a better job of summing up the differences between the play and the script than I could do, so I’ll give a big block quote from him.

Wilder developed the play and made it more interesting in every way.  In the play the Kommandant issues orders but never appears; in the film Wilder makes him one of the most important characters.  The first attempt to escape and the killing of Manfredi and Johnson, as well as the harsh interrogation of Dunbar, take place offstage in the play but are dramatized in the film.  Taking advantage of film’s ability to focus on tiny objects in close-up, Wilder has Schultz and Price leave their notes in a hollow chess piece rather than under a loose brick.  The prisoners insult, ‘Drop dead,’ becomes the comic ‘Droppen Sie dead.’  Dunbar is an officer, rather than a sergeant-major, to intensify his conflict with Sefton.  Wilder, in fact, invented the most memorable aspects of the film: Sefton’s mouse race, his private schnapps distillery, and his telescope.  ‘You couldn’t catch much through that steam,’ the narrator observes, ‘but believe you me, after two years in that camp just the idea what was behind that steam sure spruced up your voltage.’  Wilder also though up the telltale light cord, as well as Sefton’s trunk of luxury goods, his bets against prisoners who try to escape and his great exit line.  Wilder’s conclusion is also superior to the play’s.  In the stage version, as Hoffy says, Dunbar ‘came back to the barracks to pick up his gear so we slipped his guard a doped-up drink and sneaked Dunbar our of the barracks.’  In the film, however, Dunbar is snatched from his SS guards when the prisoners explode a smoke bomb made from thousands of ping pong balls.  And Price is unmasked by Sefton, who uses Price to help Dunbar escape.  (p ix-x)

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Billy Wilder. Written for the Screen by Billy Wilder and Edwin Blum. Based on the play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski.

The Big Heat

The Film:

This was a film that I didn’t see until around 2008 or so, somehow missing it for a very long time when I definitely shouldn’t have.  It’s a great film, a dark, cynical film with a great performance from Glenn Ford.  It’s on my list of the Top 100 Films to Earn No Oscar Nominations.

The Source:

The Big Heat by William P. McGivern  (1953)

The Big Heat is an extremely effective police thriller. If it’s not on the level of Raymond Chandler, it is at the level of most of the work of James M. Cain. Yet, it doesn’t have anywhere near the reputation of a book like Double Indemnity. It’s a story of a Philadelphia homicide detective who ends up embroiled in a case much larger than him. The suicide of a policeman leads to his mistress, then to a crime boss who owns most of the city (with an upcoming election that factors into much of the story). The sheer determination of Bannion, the detective, ends up with a witness dead, with his wife dead, with another woman scarred by boiling coffee. Through it all, Bannion keeps moving forward, determined to arrive at the truth of the matter, not to let the corruption above and around him prevent him from finding out what really happened.

There is a moment where he’s willing to kill a woman (the dead cop’s wife), just so that everything can finally be released into the open, and it’s here where you really see what McGivern does with this book:  “Why did he wait? He had only to pull the trigger, let the firing pin snap forward, and the steel-jacketed bullet would take care of the rest, take care of this soft, perfumed, sadistic bitch, and with her Stone, Lagana, the hoodlums who had murdered his wife and held this town in their big, bitter grip.” But, he can’t do it, and manages to find some small bit of mercy: “Bannion looked down at her without expression and put his gun away. He shrugged then, a gesture of immense and bitter weariness, and walked out of her apartment. The sound of her low, wild, grateful weeping followed him to his car.”

This is definitely a book that deserves to stay in print, as part of some crime series and if you get a chance, it’s definitely worth a read.

The Adaptation:

“The Big Heat was a police thriller, and Sydney Boehm, who wrote the script, would hew closely to McGivern’s novel – while making shrewd improvements . . . Sergeant David Bannion, the lead character in McGivern’s novel, had originally been conceived as an educated policeman, able to quote Hume, Locke and Kant. The erudation was one of the first of the novel’s marginal elements dropped by Boehm. The scenarist made Bannion more of a representative citizen swept up in a nightmare, someone more in sync with Lang’s middle-American complex; another character who became, like the mob victim of Fury, ‘close to John Doe,’ in the director’s words.” (Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast by Patrick McGilligan, p 403)

All of that is quite accurate. One other thing that is different is that the film has all of this taking place in a fictional city, while in the book it is set in Philadelphia.  Bannion’s boss is, in the end, made more sympathetic in the book and some of his odiousness is passed on to the character of the police commissioner who is not a character in the book.  Overall, this is a great example of how to take a crime novel and rather faithfully adapt it for the screen in the era of the Production Code.

Several pages in Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1968 detail the work between the studio and the PCA concerning the amount of violence in the film, with Columbia trying to maximize it, partially to show the brutality involved, while the PCA was trying to limit it (see p 180-185).

This is another film that has a BFI Film Classics book. The volume for this film spends more than the usual amount of space on the original novel and the relationship between the two, covering 10 pages of the book, from pages 12-22.

The Credits:

Directed by Fritz Lang. Screen Play by Sydney Boehm. Based upon the Saturday Evening Post serial by William P. McGivern.

The Moon is Blue

The Film:

For a long time this was a film high on my list to see. It was nominated for three Oscars, one of them major (Actress) and it won the Globe for Best Actor – Comedy. But it was unavailable on video for a long time. I finally tracked it down by getting it as an ILL and being forced to watch it in the library (it was for Library Use Only). But I was not disappointed when I finally got a chance to see it.

This movie might feel dated to some people. Certainly it has a reputation of a film that was once shocking but now is not. That’s certainly true – what was shocking in 1953 is ridiculously tame in 2016. But that doesn’t mean the film doesn’t work. The film works for the same reason that the play works (see below), because these characters are interesting and witty and spending a couple of hours with them as they banter back and forth and never get around to actually doing anything is a welcome time.  It’s a reminder that you don’t need to actually have sex for things to be sexy.

Maggie McNamara (whose career didn’t amount to much after this but is very good here) is a young girl, a virgin (that’s key and she admits it in an amusing scene) who goes to the apartment of a womanizing architect (Don) that she met at the Empire State Building. He’s thinking of getting her into bed. Or maybe he’s not. Her frank discussion of the subject has confused him and he’s no longer sure what he wants to do. He’s intrigued. Unfortunately, while he runs out to get some supper for them, his upstairs neighbor comes down. The upstairs neighbor, a considerably older man is also the father of the woman that Don has been seeing. So now we have machinations going on as the father also tries to get McNamara into bed. It’s not a question of will-they won’t-they (this is 1953) but how witty will things become before she decides that she isn’t going to bed with either one of these men.

It’s certainly entertaining enough. At one point this was one of my Top 5 films of 1953 and if it has fallen out (it has), it hasn’t fallen far (it’s at #6) and it’s because there are other films that belong there more that I hadn’t seen at that point (The Big Heat). It has what I think is the best performance of David Niven’s career (he’s the upstairs neighbor), who I think is far better here than in his actual Oscar winning performance. It has a very charming performance from William Holden. We even have the daughter from upstairs pop in and she’s quite good as well. More importantly, this is a film that actually deals with sex as an adult issue and not some juvenile showcase and even in 2016 that’s not something we see very often on film. Yes, this was once considered daring (it was actually released without a Production Code seal) and it is no longer considered even remotely so. But it is still very good and odds are you haven’t seen it and you really should.

The Source:

The Moon is Blue by F. Hugh Herbert  (1951)

This is a smart and charming play that was daring for its time because it actually talked about sex in an adult and amusing way. It was a huge hit on Broadway and there was considerable speculation as to whether a film could even be made of it. But Otto Preminger, who had directed the original Broadway production decided that he could make it happen and he did. I personally don’t think the play would have worked as well as the film namely for the casting (Barry Nelson instead of William Holden? There are reasons sometimes why movie stars get put into roles when stages make the transition.) But all the amusing and witty dialogue from the film originated right here on stage and if this would no longer work on stage (it would be considered too tame and dated), it at least is still worth reading for the dialogue if nothing else.

The Adaptation:

“Sometimes a play has a major fault which is easy to fix, and other times there are little things, such as inconsistencies in the characters, which require major rewrites. I have never known a script which was so perfect that it could be put on the stage as it was originally written. In the case of The Moon is Blue, I thought the third act would have to be redone from scratch.” (Preminger: An Autobiography. Otto Preminger. 1977, p 107)

But, in spite of what Preminger wrote, he didn’t really redo the third act. As I sat there, reading the play, while watching the film, so much of the play, from the start to the end, was right there as it was on the page. There were some added moments (the first scenes, the first time Don interacts with Cynthia), but much of the play was right there on the screen. Yes, some lines were cut, but this was one of the closest play-to-film adaptations I have ever seen.

“The Moon is Blue had played on Broadway and in theatres all over the country. American audiences found it amusing and were not shocked. I did not believe that movie audiences were different or that they should be protected from something freely available on the stage. The language in the film was exactly the same as the language in the play.” (Preminger, p 109)

In this case, that is the truth. There were a few lines that were cut, but they didn’t seem like censor cuts, but just natural trimming. All of the lines that would have been shocking on stage made it to the screen untouched.

The Credits:

produced and directed by Otto Preminger. written for the screen by F. Hugh Herbert. from his stage play “The Moon is Blue” produced on Broadway by Otto Preminger and presented by Richard Aldrich & Richard Meyers in assocation with Jules Fleischmann.

The Actress

The Film:

The first time I saw this film, I paused it almost immediately. There was a picture of “Our Station” with the word Wollaston on it. Was it true? Was Ruth Gordon really from Wolly Beach, just up the road from where we living in Quincy? (Close – she was from Wollaston Heights, on the other side of the T tracks.) People come from anywhere, but there’s always something interesting about watching or reading something about the people who come from where you do. I wasn’t from Quincy, but I had been living there nearly two years when I first tracked down this film.

Tracked down is really what I had to do at the time. Today, Warner Bros Archive Collection has made a lot of things available that didn’t use to be. I had been trying to see this film for years, because it earned an Oscar nomination, won Best Actor at the Globes, Best Actress at the NBR and was nominated by the WGA. But for years it was extremely difficult to get hold of. That’s unfortunate, because this is one of the best films that Warners has made accessible through their Archive Collection.

The Actress is the story of Ruth Gordon growing up in Quincy and yearning to escape to the stage. What’s so remarkable is not that she managed to do so, but how much she managed to do after she escaped. She became a successful stage actress, yes. And eventually she would be an Oscar winning actress on film, with fantastic performances in Rosemary’s Baby and Harold and Maude. But the most remarkable thing might be what happened in between, when she became a writer, writing the play this film was based on, writing this film, and, as the writing partner of her husband Garson Kanin, earning several Oscar nominations for writing. There are people who earn Oscar nominations for writing after already having earned Oscar nominations for acting (Alec Guinness and Emma Thompson, for example), but it’s really odd to go the other direction (but not unheard of – John Huston also did it).

Gordon’s life comes alive in the performance of Jean Simmons, who seems every inch the 17 year old yearning to discover something more than her own little neighborhood (or even Boston, where she sees the play that changes her life). It’s incredible to think that this performance actually came five years after she played Ophelia in Olivier’s Hamlet. Her performance isn’t the only wonderful thing about the film, either. Spencer Tracy gives one of his best performances (amazingly he wasn’t Oscar nominated) as the gruff, but loving father. It’s a reminder of Paul Dooley in Breaking Away in a similar role. He has dreams for his child, dreams that he wasn’t able to take advantage of, but he also realizes that his dreams for her aren’t her own dreams and he wants her to chase her dreams.

Most of the action is confined, as in a play, but the house looks wonderful, with a beautiful set and nice costumes (that was the Oscar nomination the film did earn), as well as a solid supporting performance from Teresa Wright as Ruth’s mother.

The Source:

Years Ago by Ruth Gordon  (1944)

On one hand, this is a coming of age story that is like so many others – a girl (it’s usually a boy, but not always) wants to escape from her hometown and make something of herself. In this case, the hometown is Quincy, Massachusetts and the goal is to become an actress. Many people don’t do much after they escape and many of those stories are either fictional or thinly veiled fiction, but in this case, it’s the real story of Ruth Gordon, the woman who grow up to become a famous writer and Oscar-winning actress.

That traditional story is set against some smart dialogue and some real nice slice-of-life pieces. It works so well for the same reason the film works well – because the father is gruff, but loving, and in the end he wants to give his daughter her dream and not hold her back. That makes him a bit of rarity on stage and on screen and it makes for a welcome change.

The Adaptation:

As should surprise no one, since Gordon wrote the original play and the script, there isn’t a whole lot that is changed. Some lines of dialogue are different, there is a little bit added outside the home (most notably the opening, where we actually get to see young Ruth see the play that will change her life rather than just depend on her description of it), but for the most part, this is the stage play with movie stars attached to it.

The Credits:

Directed by George Cukor. Screen Play by Ruth Gordon. From Her Stage Play “Years Ago”.

Peter Pan

The Film:

The first time we see Peter Pan, he is hiding in the shadows.  We get a glimpse of him in the darkness, than a maniacal smile lights up his face, the light provided by Tinkerbell, his fairy friend.  We’ve been hearing about him for several minutes from children who firmly believe he exists.  It’s ironic that he’s hiding in the shadows, because he doesn’t have one himself.

In Cinderella, there was an everyday story of a young woman cruelly treated by her stepsisters, when suddenly magic intervenes.  In Alice in Wonderland, Alice is a normal girl who falls down a hole and into an adventure.  But in Peter Pan, we are expecting magic right from the start.  Before we even meet the character, we are hearing about his fight with pirates and Indians and that he lives in a world of fairies and, most important, that he can fly.  If Cinderella had been the stereotypical story for girls (“don’t you want to grow up to be a princess?”) then this was the equivalent story for boys.  Peter gets to have fights, be the hero, kiss the girl (sort-of), save the day, and not only can he fly, but he never has to grow up.  He can remain a kid forever.

Peter Pan, as a film, never quite hits the highs of the best of Disney films – it lacks any real power when it comes to the songs and its story is too similar to Alice – you go to the magical land, have a few adventures, come home.  It also has very outdated stereotypes in its depiction of “Indians” and it’s clearly a “boys” film, with the girl brought to Never Never Land to be a mother, not a fellow adventurer.  But it’s a solid ***.5 film (which makes it one of the better films of 1953) and it’s still fondly thought of as a classic because it does have that grand sense of adventure.  The characters come vividly to life (most notably Captain Hook and the crocodile.  Perhaps, most importantly, it takes Tinkerbell, a character who exists only as a little ball of light and a bell on stage and creates her with such a forceful personality that she would later be given her own series of films at Disney.

I ranked this film at #21 in my ranking of the first 50 Disney films.

The Source:

Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up by J. M. Barrie  (1904  /  1928)

This is always a tricky source.  I cite the title and dates for the play above, because it is the play that is specifically cited in the credits of the film.  But the play and the novel grow together.  If you want a full history of Peter and how he came to be, both in terms of life (the story detailed in the film Finding Neverland) and in literature, the best thing to do is get the wonderful The Annotated Peter Pan.  I didn’t link to that above, because it doesn’t contain the play, but rather the novel, originally known as Peter & Wendy, but now more regularly titled Peter Pan, which is what makes it confusing.

Peter first appeared in The Little White Bird, a 1902 novel by Barrie.  Then he became the star of the play, which was first produced in 1904.  In 1906, the chapters dealing with Peter from The Little White Bird were published separately as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.  Then came Peter & Wendy, a novel version of the play (which Barrie continued to rewrite all this time), which was published in 1911.  The play itself wasn’t published (because of the revisions) until 1928.

It is a very good play, one that works perfectly well for children, with the exciting Peter for kids to cheer for, with adventure and fun to keep things thrilling and with great lines that continue to resonate (“To die will be an awfully big adventure”).  But, as theater, it also does two things quite brilliantly.  The first is when Tinkerbell is injured saving Peter, and Peter must implore to audience to believe in fairies.  It works very well for the same reason that Julie Christie claps so hard in Finding Neverland – because it pulls at your emotions in all the right ways.  The second is what it generally does with the casting.  Lots of plays through the years have had people who double up in roles.  Sometimes that just works best with characters who are never on stage at the same time (like Lafayette and Jefferson in Hamilton).  But in Peter, it works particularly well telling something about the story, with the actor who plays Mr. Darling generally playing Hook as well (this is also done in the 2003 film version).  That provides an extra measure of the terror of growing up and what we might see in our parents, a brilliant observation from Barrie, a man who had no children of his own.  It is still a great play, even after all these years, but if reading a play isn’t your thing (well, then you are hosed for the new Harry Potter), there’s always Peter & Wendy.

The Adaptation:

Peter Pan was one of those Disney films that gestated for a long time.  It was originally in the planning stages before the war (Disney had wanted to make it as far back as 1935 but it took four years to secure the rights), then when things were cut back, first because of financial losses from Pinocchio and Fantasia, then with the move towards the war films, it was put on hold.  Finally, after the package films gained them some financial breathing room after the war, and after Cinderalla and Alice made it to theaters first, this was the last of the Disney films to use all of Disney’s Nine Old Men.

Much of what is in this film does come straight from the original play.  There are a few things that are added that would not have been possible on stage (such as firing at Peter up in the clouds) and there are a few alterations (Peter imploring the audience to clap and save Tinkerbell was cut as it was though that it would be awkward).  But, from start to finish, most of the film, and indeed, even most of the dialogue is straight from the original play.

The Credits:

Directors: Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson.  An Adaptation of the Play “Peter Pan” by Sir James M. Barrie.  Story: Ted Sears, Erdman Penner, Bill Peet, Winston Hibler, Joe Rinaldi, Milt Banta, Ralph Wright, Bill Cottrell.

Hondo

The Film:

Geraldine Page was a great actress but she wasn’t a great beauty.  She was also a method actress and not really thought of as someone who could be in a Western.  So how is it that she captures John Wayne’s heart in a way that no other actress really does in his long history of Westerns?

Part of it is certainly the performance.  It is, with the possible exception of Katy Jurado in High Noon, the best by a female in a Western up to this point.  Indeed, it still stands as one of the best performances by a female in a Western.  I have seen 358 Westerns and only 18 performances by female have even made my acting lists and every female performance I rank higher is from the later, more Post-Modern Western Era (Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Mary McDonnell in Dances with Wolves, Frances Fisher in Unforgiven, Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit, Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hateful Eight).  To have a strong woman like this, out in the middle of nowhere, without a man around is strange enough.  But then she’s also interesting.  She has taught her son to shoot.  She stands off against the Apache on her own.  She even is ready to take down John Wayne.  It’s no wonder that he’s drawn to her.  He might have found better looking women along his trails, but no one more desirable.

But Wayne is bringing his own baggage into this.  He ends up at her ranch by accident and he is worried about her, alone with a young son out in the wilderness.  When he returns to town and meets her husband by accident, it only furthers his concern and attraction towards her.  But then things take two dark turns – first, the Apache warn her that she needs a husband to raise her child and if hers doesn’t return, they will give her one, and Hondo (Wayne) ends up killing her husband in self-defense.  In the end, we get a happy ending of a sort, one that Wayne would rarely get, but you feel he really deserves here.  Both of them find a chance for happiness and a measure of devotion.  This is a good Western, and it’s my #14 film of the year and is a high-level ***, almost just reaching for that higher level of film.

The Source:

“The Gift of Cochise” by Louis L’Amour  (1952)

Do not be confused by the fact that Louis L’Amour wrote a book called Hondo.  Yes, that is this film, but that book is actually a novelization that L’Amour wrote of the screenplay that had originally been based on his short story “The Gift of Cochise.”  It is not the source of the film, but rather a product of the film.  I can understand the desire for a novelization, especially as I used to be a fan of them, but it really wasn’t necessary – L’Amour did a fine job with his original short story and it was poignant and exciting at the same time, even if it is considerably different than the film it inspired.

This story is actually quite good.  It’s the story of a female who is on her own with two small children.  She has taught the boy to shoot and he so impresses Cochise when the Apache arrive that Cochise declares him an Apache boy and that he must have a father.  So, suddenly she has a deadline for her husband, who is off wandering to reappear or she will have to marry an Apache.  However, her husband is dead, the result of a good deed when he stood up for an out-gunned man.  That man then searches for the widow to offer his condolences, with the result that he ends up needing to marry her for both their sakes.

It’s a good little story with a bit of Western mythos behind it all and you can see how the filmmakers looked at it and decided they could build upon it on film.

The Adaptation:

They most certainly built upon it.  Some things are quite close to the book – the way the mother and son face off against the Apache (even if there is no other child in the film) and the fight between the man (he’s not called Hondo in the story) and the Apache in single combat.  However, there are also a lot of things that are very different, most notably that Hondo only meets the woman at the end and that her husband died defending him rather than attacking him.  The filmmakers must have felt that it would work better for getting the audience’s sympathy if the husband was a jerk and potential murderer and that Hondo would be a much better choice than if he had gone seeking amends for his actions.  It’s a good example though of taking the idea of a story and building it up into a film.  And it does work much better with the two of them having already met, then waiting for their meeting at the ending (it also means they have a relationship to build on).

The Credits:

Directed by John Farrow.  Screenplay by James Edward Grant.  Based on a Story by Louis L’Amour.

Consensus Nominees That Don’t Make My Top 10

Lili

The Film:

This is an odd bit of a musical. It’s a strange story of an urchin who ends up becoming a part of a travelling troupe and falls in love with a puppet show. Through the puppet show, she manages to conduct something of a romance with the puppeteer through his puppets, but is more infatuated with the magician that she met that drew her to the show in the first place. It’s not a bad musical, but it’s far from a great one. Yet, somehow it managed Oscar nomination for Director, Screenplay and Actress and became one of the big hits of 1953.

There really isn’t enough to fill a whole film here. It runs 81 minutes, which includes songs and some dream sequences. That’s perhaps because it was based on a short story that was rather moving but had no real story to it and they decided to expand it and give it an actual story (in a rare reversal of expanding upon something, after the success of the film, Paul Gallico re-wrote his short story into a short novel and re-released it, perhaps hoping for more money than he had earned from the story’s original appearance in Saturday Evening Post).

Why doesn’t this film work for me? Well, for starters there’s Caron, who I have never thought was a particularly good actress. She does an okay job, but to see her on that Oscar list with those magnificent performances from Audrey Hepburn and Deborah Kerr just strains credulity. But the bigger problem is that this is, on one level certainly, a romance, and there is no real romance to be had. The more caddish character is the one that Caron falls in love with of course. But the more romantic option is the title character from the original story called “The Man Who Hated People”. The whole point of that original story had been that the man was incapable of interacting outside of his puppets, and that works for part of this film, but then they want to just forget it at the end so she can run away with him and find a happy ending. So, in the end, it’s really the script for this story, light to begin with, and feeling like there wasn’t enough for a feature film, that lets me down and prevents this from ever rising above a mid-level ***.

I don’t normally say where I grab the pictures I use, because I just grab them and claim no ownership. I should point out that I pulled this one from a website dedicated to Paul Gallico, who wrote the story.

The Source:

“The Man Who Hated People” by Paul Gallico (1950)

This is a moving little short story about a girl who is the star of an early television show, in which she rather naturally interacts with puppets. She is the one human character on the show, and her natural interactions with the puppets have made her a star, but this is her last day on the show and it’s known to everyone. There is a man behind the puppets, of course, a man, who, somehow will win her in the end (the end of the story really works against the entire grain, as if a more serious, realistic ending couldn’t be found in a story that was appearing in Saturday Evening Post) even though he still isn’t really capable of showing any human emotions without the puppets to channel himself through.

This must be one of the earliest works of fiction to deal with the emerging world of television. Apparently the show portrayed in the story was based on a real television show and that might account for the easy way in which Gallico describes the show – because he didn’t have to make up the concept, but was something that readers might already be familiar with. In the end, though, in spite of the story’s creativity and poignancy, it’s really rather let down by the “happy” ending.

The Adaptation:

I’ve complained twice now about the ending. The film keeps the measure of a happy ending that the story provided, although it makes it more about the couple than about the continuation of the show. But that’s partially because so little else about the film is the same from the story. Perhaps unwilling to show television on film at a time when television was beginning its ascendency, the medium of the story was transported to a travelling show. This allows for more of an interaction with the audience, even though the audience is of course much more limited. But the story deals much more with how people react to the girl and her interaction with the puppets than the film does. The film wants to concentrate on the love triangle, a part of the story that didn’t exist at all in the original story, as the whole character of the magician was created by the filmmakers. The original story might have made for a very nice short film. But the filmmakers had to create too much, and didn’t do it all that well, to really sustain a feature film.

The Credits:

Directed by Charles Walters. Screen Play by Helen Deutsch. Based On A Story by Paul Gallico.

Shane

The Film:

It has been nice to discover when I have written about this film, most noticeably when I wrote a full review of it in the Best Picture post for 1953, to learn that, while I go against the consensus critical grain on this film, I am not alone in that.  I think this is a vastly over-rated film, mainly because of the mostly sub-par acting and I will never understand those people who hold this film up to be superior to High Noon.

The Source:

Shane by Jack Schaefer  (1949)

Shane is not a bad novel, just like the film is not a bad film. But it is an over-rated novel, a slim little volume about a man who comes to town, ostensibly a peaceful man, but one who is really a practiced gunslinger and who will solve the problems for a family and then quickly depart without waiting to be thanked. What makes it as annoying as the film is that while it doesn’t have the performance of Brandon de Wilde, it is written from the kid’s point of view and that tends to drag considerably, so that a 151 page book seems like a slog. I’ll just give you the final line: “He was the man who rode into our little valley out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane.” If that sentence works for you, have at it. If not, I’ve saved you reading a book that’s not for you.

The Adaptation:

“Stevens crafted the film’s simple opening out of difficult materials. These included the original novel, A. B. Guthrie Jr’s first draft of the script, the advice of co-workers, including historical consultant Joe De Yong, and the director’s own habit of shooting vastly more film than would ever appear in the final cut.” (Shane BFI Film Classics by Edward Countryman & Evonne von Heussen-Countryman, p 16, ISBN 0851707327)

“Another change is the time setting. Schaefer places the story in 1889, one year before the Census Bureau announced that the ‘frontier’ had ended. He has narrator telling the story in about 1893. Stevens changed the film’s setting from 1889 to an indeterminate nineteenth-century ‘West-time’. That let him make an important historical reference to the Civil War (1861-5) as having been in the near past. Abandoning flashback and specific dating also freed him from showing a more developed valley in the never filmed framing sequences.” (p 17)

“[Michael Wilson] wrote a ‘step outline’ of the story based on Jack Schaefer’s spare but effective novella about the earliest white settlers in Wyoming. Wilson’s 17 pages were delivered in March 1950 to director George Stevens while the two men were working together on A Place in the Sun. … [Wilson] did pull into the foreground of the story the historical theme of the struggle over public lands between big cattle ranchers and refugee small-holders. Schaefer, himself an historian, had touched on this, but Wilson’s explicit restatement of the theme in class terms (against a background of Indian dispossession) survived the many permutations of the narrative that were to follow, nearly all of them apparently attributable to Stevens’ own genius.”

Those quotes pretty much say everything that needs to be said. I will say that the menace of death and violence hangs over the film much more so than the book.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Additional Dialogue by Jack Sher. Based on the Novel by Jack Schaefer.

The Cruel Sea

The Film:

Studios become known, at times, for doing certain things, but that doesn’t mean it’s all they do.  Universal might have made Horror films but they also won Best Picture for All Quiet on the Western Front.  Warner Bros made gangster films, but they also made Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy.  Likewise, while Ealing Studios became so (rightfully) known for their brilliant Comedies, they also could make films in other genres and they helped document the English experience both during and after the war.

This particular film is one that documents the length of the war.  It covers the crew of a convoy escort, the type of British naval ship that would sail alongside convoys sailing across the Atlantic.  These journeys were perilous, with the constant threat of u-boats.  But the film, like the book before it, takes an interesting viewpoint – though the Germans were the opposition force in the war, it is not them that are really the enemy.  The only real enemy is the sea itself – cold and detached, ready to embrace lives into its icy depths, not caring with nationality they belong to, what they have done or what lives they might have lead.  It would seem too much to expect this one ship to survive the war and it does not, nor does most of its crew.  What it follows is one particular captain, played very well by Jack Hawkins, always one of the most appreciated British actors in the U.K. and always one of the most under-appreciated in the States, even when he was playing major roles in Best Picture winners like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Ben-Hur or Lawrence of Arabia.  Hawkins is one of the few officers on the ship with actual sailing experience, and in his able hands, he is able to do more than many commanders might have done.  But in the end, even the sea catches up to his ship and most of his crew, with them sinking and those without something firmly to live for ending up sinking to the bottom with their ship.  But that is not enough to keep Hawkins grounded on land and he is given another ship with which to finish out the war.

The film is solidly written and directed.  But what really makes it worth watching is the performance from Hawkins.  Look at his eyes when he is forced to make the decision to drop a depth charge to take out a German boat, even though it means the death of other sailors who are still in the water.  Watch his face when too many of his officers go down with the ship.  Watch the resignation when he is assigned the task of taking in a German boat after the war ends and there is no time for revenge, but only for relief that the killing is finally over.  This is a good enough film (mid-range ***), but Hawkins is the primary reason for that.

The Source:

The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat  (1951)

This is a solidly written book, though it is not really my thing.  It documents the entire war experience of one captain, beginning on one ship, escorting convoys across the Atlantic, and then, after that ship sinks, continuing his duties through the end of the war on a second ship.  I’m not really a fan of war books and they don’t much interest me and this one, because it covers the whole war, starts to feel like a bit of a slog by around page 400 (it runs slightly over 500 pages).

There is one really moving section though that makes it memorable.  That is when the ship sinks, in 1942.  It begins strongly, and movingly: “Some men just died: Sub-Lieutenant Baker, Stoker Evans, Lieutenant Morrell; and many others.  These were the men who had nothing particular to live for, or who had made so fundamental a mess of their lives that it was a relief to forfeit them.”  But then, after a few pages detailing those deaths, we get to those eleven who live.  “It reminded Lockhart of the way a party ashore gradually thinned out and died away, as time and quarrelling and stupor and sleepiness took their toll.”  We eventually get through all the man and arrive at the Captain: “The Captain did not die: it was as if, after Compass Rose went down, he had nothing left to die with.”  Then we get to the line that really seems to sum things up: “Between the dead and the living was no sharp dividing line.  The men upright on the rafts seemed to blur with the dead man they nursed, and with the derelict men in the water, as part of the same vague and pitiful design.”

The Adaptation:

The film pretty much keeps most of what is in the book.  You would think that’s hard with a 500 page book, but so much of the book describes their time at sea, that it’s easy to keep most of the individual episodes throughout the book while dropping a lot of the narrative itself.  Wikipedia notes that the film dropped some of the grimmest moments, but other than the man who goes AWOL so he can deal with his cheating wife, I didn’t notice any particular grim moments that weren’t in the film, and that seems like it was less because it was grim and more because of Code issues.  Certainly the grimmest moments are killing the men in the water so they can also kill the Germans, as well as all the men who die when the boat sinks, and both of those make it to the film intact.

The Credits:

Directed by Charles Frend.  Screenplay by Eric Ambler.  The only mention of the source is in the title card: The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat.

How to Marry  a Millionaire

The Film:

This was the year in which Marilyn Monroe suddenly shot into the stratosphere. She had already shown she had dramatic ability early in the year with Niagara. That cemented her sex symbol status as well, especially when it combined with her dumb blonde role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Then came this film, in which she was forced to share top billing with Lauren Bacall, who wasn’t nearly as good-looking but was a better actress, and Betty Grable, who had been Monroe’s Fox blonde bombshell predecessor, except that Gable wasn’t nearly as good looking either and couldn’t do much in the way of acting. In this film, they play roommates, all of them hoping to find a rich guy and marry him with results that none of them anticipate.

The Grable storyline is the most annoying. She follows her rich guy to Maine, comes down with measles, then he comes down with measles and she’s miserable in the sticks and falls for the local forest ranger that she thinks is rich. Their story takes up too much of the time (possibly because it had a whole play devoted to it – see below) and Grable isn’t particularly interesting and her man, played by Fred Clark, really just wants a distraction from his harried home-life, which doesn’t work out so well in the silliest, but perhaps one of the funniest scenes in the film, when he drives the long way round back from Maine to keep from being spotted, only to be the 5 millionth driver over the G.W. Bridge and get his picture in the paper.

The Bacall storyline is the most interesting, if partially because the rich man she is pursuing is played by William Powell and he’s actually a good guy who deserves to be loved, but he’s also smart enough to realize that Bacall has fallen for the guy she thinks works in a service station.

The Monroe storyline certainly provides us with some eye candy (the way she looks in the dress when she is first romancing her man is perhaps the best she’s ever looked on film), though we know there is something wrong with her man (“no one’s mother is at home on a Friday night in Atlantic City” Bacall tells her as a warning). Thankfully, she ends up with the right guy by accident – she hates to wear her glasses and thus ends up on a flight to Kansas City instead of Atlantic City and meets him on the plane. He loves how she looks with her glasses on, which is ironic, because I love girls with glasses and this is one of the few times where I think a female actually looks worse with her glasses (partially it’s because of the style of her glasses, and partially because Monroe just doesn’t work right with glasses).

In the end, there is more of a happy ending than anyone realizes is coming and it makes for a nice sight gag to end the film. What this is, overall, is a charming romantic comedy, with solid performances from Bacall and Powell, one of the better “dumb blonde” performances of Monroe’s career, the final notch in her cementing her role as the pre-eminent sex goddess of the world and a storyline starring Betty Grable that manages to not quite kill the film.

The Source:

The Greeks Had a Word for It by Zoe Akins (1930) / Loco: A Comedy in Two Acts by Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert (1946)

These are two completely different plays that have pretty much nothing to do with each other. I wasn’t able to read The Greeks Had a Word for It but I was able to get Loco. Loco is really a silly little play about a woman who goes to Maine with a married man who is trying to escape from his family. She comes down with measles and some hijinks ensue. But they are not enough to really sustain the play.

The Adaptation:

Even without having read the Akins play, it’s easy to see how these two plays make up the film. The Akins play is about three women who are all trying to marry rich. That’s the basic plot of the film right there. What Loco adds to the film is the subplot in which Betty Grable goes up to Maine with her rich man and the problems that ensue once she gets there and comes down with the measles. I don’t how much more was added to the film and if the subplots involving the Bacall and Monroe characters are from the Akins play or if they were created by the screenwriters.  I do know that too much time is devoted in the film to the plot from Loco and it makes the film drag.

The Credits:

Directed by Jean Negulesco. Screen Play by Nunnally Johnson. Based on Plays by Zoe Akins and Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

The Film:

So, am I not a gentleman, then?  Yes, I married a brunette like the sequel suggests, but I have never preferred blondes.  There have been some notable exceptions over the years (Grace Kelly, Michelle Pfeiffer, Naomi Watts, Cate Blanchett when she’s a blonde), but Marilyn Monroe’s not really among them.  Her blonde bubbliness, combined with serious curves that aren’t really my thing has never really worked for me (even when she’s wearing glasses like in How to Marry a Millionaire, above).  The films in this part of the post are in order by their awards, so the featuring of the two films that helped make Marilyn Monroe the biggest sex-bomb on the planet is just a coincidence.  I’m glad when she’s in fine form like in a film like Niagara or Some Like It Hot, but for the most part, she’s not for me.  She’s especially not for me in a film like this where she plays dumber than she is and she’s really just in it for the money.  To call her a gold-digger is not a slight, it’s a description.

That being said, this film wasn’t going to win me over with the brunette either.  I prefer my brunettes to be smart and sexy and I don’t find Jane Russell to be either.  Yes, at least she just falls for the wrong handsome guy rather than the rich guy, but that doesn’t really make her character any better.  This is the story of two showgirls, both of whom are used to falling for the wrong guy.  They travel on a boat to Europe in which one falls in love with the wrong man and the other tries to seduce a man who is definitely the wrong man.  In the end, they both end up with the person they really want to be with, so I suppose you could consider it a happy ending.  The really point of the film are the musical numbers where Russell and Monroe strut their stuff.  Unfortunately, their stuff doesn’t really interest me with one major exception and that really has only a little to do with the actual film.

That particular number is called “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”.  As a song, I find it kind of obnoxious, partially because I’ve never cared much about money, so a female singing about how all they want is diamonds doesn’t work for me.  As a performance, Marilyn Monroe gives the best of the film by far, and musically the song flows quite well.  But, in a film that is directed by Howard Hawks at a level much below most of his work, this is the moment where the film really shines.  The musical number really comes through.  The problem is I don’t know how well it comes through for me because of the actual scene or because of my own memories.  I was 10 years old when Madonna made the video for “Material Girl”, and though I never found Madonna to be that attractive, there was an oozing sexuality in this video.  I have never liked the message of “Material Girl”, but with its music and beat and video it has long been one of my favorite pop songs and I still listen to it all the time.  So, when this song comes on in the film, do I think of Monroe, or am I fondly thinking of Madonna?

All of this makes the film sound much worse than it is.  It’s actually a pretty good film, in spite of the all things about it that make me want to not particularly like it.  It has a silly premise, characters that I would despise in real life and an ending courtroom scene that is beyond ridiculous.  Yet, somehow it all flows together better than my review can make it sound.  If for nothing else, you should see it for the iconic song.  Or, well, you could just watch Madonna.

The Source:

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady by Anita Loos  (1925)  /  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos and Joseph Fields  (1949)

This novel was a big deal when it came out.  Loos was a very successful screenwriter and would continue to be.  She would eventually turn her novel into a hit musical in 1949.  But the novel doesn’t work for me at all.  It’s an epistolary novel, in this case told in the diary entries from Lorelei Lee.  The problem for me is that Lee is a rather repulsive character, a gold-digger who just wants to find a rich man and settle down in some comfort.  She’s also not all that bright (she’s written that way specifically by Loos), so to struggle through all her journal entries takes some effort.  This was a key work helping to kick in The Jazz Age, and I can understand why, but I think I’ll stick to Fitzgerald instead.

It’s really the Musical that the film is based on, but I wasn’t able to get that separately.  While the Musical was popular, it wasn’t read a lot, while the Loos novel is obviously still in print from Penguin and must still sell.

The Adaptation:

The basic premise of the film comes from the original novel, but many of the details are considerably changed.  But it was really the musical, co-written by Loos that changed most of the details in the first place.

The Credits:

Directed by Howard Hawks. Screen Play by Charles Lederer. Based on the Musical Comedy by Joseph Fields and Anita Loos. Music and Lyrics by Jule Styne and Leo Robin. Presented on the Stage by Herman Levin and Oliver Smith.

Call Me Madam

The Film:

It is a criticism of a performance to say, “hey, that character is really god damn annoying, but she’s good at being annoying.”  At what point are you separating a character you find irritating from a bad performance?  Or is it a good performance?  In the end, I would just prefer to skip it either way, but I’ve committed to doing this series and so there will be a lot of Musicals for the next decade that don’t deserve to have their writing praised, but, hey the WGA had a Musical category and they decided they had to fill it.

So, let’s get this over with.  Ethel Merman plays Sally Adams, a socialite who manages to get herself appointed ambassador to a tiny little (fictional) country called Lichtenburg.  She’s not remotely qualified and that’s supposed to be the joke premise, but many ambassadors aren’t remotely qualified.  She’s also really damn annoying.  And she sings a lot.  That shouldn’t be a problem, since it’s a Musical, but maybe Irving Berlin just isn’t for me, because none of the songs work for me at all.  The best musical moments in the film are actually a dance sequence and that’s problematic because, first of all, no one is singing at that point, and second of all, it actually goes on much too long and kills the momentum of the film.  The dance number is between Donald O’Connor, who was multi-talented and could act (though doesn’t do much in this film), sing and dance (which he does really well twice in this film, the first number reminiscent of his smashing through things in “Make Em Laugh” in Singin’ in the Rain).  His dance number (his favorite of his career) is with Vera-Ellen, who plays the Princess of Lichtenburg, and could dance, but could do little else (at least by the evidence in this film).  Their romance isn’t allowed (he’s a reporter and an aide to Merman) and so of course there are problems, causing problems for the potential romance between Merman and George Sanders, who is the foreign minister for Lichtenburg.

Look, I’m talking so much about the plot because I didn’t care about the songs, because I found Merman (or her character, or both) really grating and because the film is really rather dumb, way down in the lower levels of ***.  It didn’t deserve a writing nomination, but the WGA gave it one, so that’s what I have to say.  You can watch it if you want, but I certainly won’t recommend it.

The Source:

Call Me Madam by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, lyrics and music by Irving Berlin  (1950)

Because this is considered less of a play than some dialogue around which to hang the songs of Irving Berlin, the only copy I could find was not a printed play (like you can find with Rodgers and Hammerstein or Sondheim) but the libretto for the songs with none of the accompanying dialogue.

The Adaptation:

Without seeing the rest of the play, it’s hard to know what might have changed.  According to Wikipedia at least one song was dropped and replaced by an older Berlin song and another older Berlin song was interspersed throughout the film.  This is why I prefer more modern Musicals, because if you can just drop in a song from another play, how coherent is it?  I prefer Sondheim or Webber or Boublil-Schonberg Musicals where there is a coherent whole piece of music.

The Credits:

Directed by Walter Lang.  Screenplay by Arthur Sheekman.  Based on the Musical Comedy “Call Me Madam”.  Book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.  Produced on the Stage by Leland Hayward.  Music and Lyrics by Irving Berlin.

Kiss Me Kate

The Film:

The 50’s were a big time for Musicals on screen. There’s a reason that from 1948 to 1966, the WGA had a separate category for Musicals and in the late 50’s, the Globes would separate out Musicals from Comedies in their Best Picture category. Some were great, some were good and some were just a stage musical thrown on screen with lackluster results, even though the success of the stage musical usually meant that they would be a financial success. Kiss Me Kate is in that latter category, a fairly lackluster film that isn’t nearly up to the level of the other musicals of the era.

I feel bad, because I feel like I should like Cole Porter’s songs more than I do. Some of them are quite witty. But some of the wittiness is lost in this play (see below) and the songs just don’t work for me. When the songs don’t work in a musical, it’s hard for anything else to work. But that can be overcome by good direction, solid production values and worthwhile acting. The middle one is at least represented in this film but the other two are completely absent.

The last is the biggest problem in this film and it continued to plague film Musicals throughout the decade. You can cast someone who can’t sing as long as they can act (thus Deborah Kerr earning an Oscar nomination for The King and I), but when they can’t do much acting, it makes it much harder to take on-screen. This one gives us Kathryn Grayson (who would, years later, be great in The Night of the Iguana but is unmemorable here) and Howard Keel (well known as a singer but acting was never his strong suit). As lovers, they’re not particularly interesting, and if you can’t be interested in the romantic leads in a film and you can’t be interested in the songs in a Musical, well then, you’re headed for a low-range *** and that’s just where this film ends up.

The Source:

Kiss Me Kate, A Musical Play, music and lyrics by Cole Porter, book by Samuel and Bella Spewack (1948)

Part of the quality of a stage (and then film) musical can come from its original source. After all, a considerable portion of them are adapted from something else. So you would think, starting from Shakespeare, Kiss Me Kate would have had a good head start. The problem (for me) is that The Taming of the Shrew is fairly low down in my estimation of Shakespeare plays. That’s compounded by the obviousness of it all – it’s one thing to adapt Taming (like in 10 Things I Hate About You), but it’s something else for two actors to be playing it and to fall for it anyway.

Like with any major stage musical, this one had its ardent admirers. And they love to brush up their Shakespeare and start quoting him now. But I’ll stick to the actual Shakespeare, thanks very much, and leave this musical behind.

The Adaptation:

As with many plays, the changes come right from the start. This film decides to be a bit meta, with Cole Porter himself (played by Ron Randell, another dud performance) brings the two lovers together to prepare for the potential play they will perform in, even giving “Too Darn Hot” a try right at the beginning of the film rather than waiting until the start of the second act.

Wikipedia once again does a fairly good job of detailing the differences between the stage and film versions, including noting the differences in the most famous song (“Brush Up Your Shakespeare”), which was fairly bowdlerized for the screen version (ironic given where the word comes from in the first place). In other words, if you really decide you’re into Kiss Me Kate, try to see it on stage and skip the film version.

The Credits:

Directed by George Sidney. Screen Play by Dorothy Kingsley. Based Upon the Play Produced on the Stage by Lemuel Ayers and Arnold Saint Subber. Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter. Play by Samuel and Bella Spewack.

Other Adaptations:
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• Mogambo  –  A high range ***.  It stars both Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly and it’s a wonder the celluloid didn’t catch fire.  It’s a remake of Red Dust (with Clark Gable playing the same role as before), which was based on a play, but this is based more on the first film than the play.
• Man on a Tightrope  –  This is one of Elia Kazan’s lesser known films.  It’s a solid ***, based on the novel by Neil Paterson, which was based on his own magazine article about a real circus that escaped from East Germany.
• Julius Caesar  –  Reviewed in full in my Best Picture post.  As I said in that review, it’s actually got too much of Brando, who takes over the film.  Based, obviously on the Shakespeare play.
• The War of the Worlds  –  The great H.G. Wells book comes to life.  Like the later Spielberg version it moves the action to the States.  It has very good effects for the time and wins both the Nighthawk and the Oscar.  Produced by George Pal, who would later produce and direct a film version of The Time Machine.
• House of Wax  –  Another remake, this one of Mystery of the Wax Museum, a 1933 film.  This film is famous for being the first color film in 3-D, but it’s quite a good film with a nice deranged performance from Vincent Price.
• The Importance of Being Earnest  –  This film version of Oscar Wilde’s play was released in the U.K. in 1952 and made it to the States the next year.  A solid adaptation but not any better than that.
• Island in the Sky  –  John Wayne is a pilot in this William Wellman film based on the novel by Ernest K. Gann.
• The Robe  –  The novel by Lloyd C. Douglas was a massive best-seller, holding the #1 spot on the New York Times list for a year.  The film has flaws (as you can see in my review) but does have a very good performance from Richard Burton that keeps it from drifting into mediocrity.
• Miss Sadie Thompson  –  The story “Rain” by Somerset Maugham had been filmed twice already.  I reviewed the story in my 1927-28 post along with the first film version.  This one, with Rita Hayworth in the lead, can’t hold a candle to the original.  Part of that is the toning down of the story, as the Production Code had come into effect since the previous two versions.
• Act of Love  –  A decent romance from director Anatole Litvak (a one-time Oscar nominee).  Based on the novel The Girl on the Via Flaminia by Alfred Hayes.
• The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms  –  The first feature film adapted from a Ray Bradbury story, this one was based a little bit on his “The Fog Horn”.
• The Little World of Don Camillo  –  Based on the novel Don Camillo, this was the first in a series of films that made Fernandel an international star.
• Jeopardy  –  Barbara Stanwyck is trying to get her husband out from under a collapsed pier and escape a convict.  Based on a radio play called “A Question of Time”.  Director John Sturges would soon start making much better films than this.
• The President’s Lady  –  Nominated for 2 Oscars, this story of Andrew Jackson is based on the Irving Stone novel.  Charlton Heston plays Jackson and would so again five years later in The Buccaneer.
• Young Bess  –  Since Charles Laughton is playing Henry VIII again, you could think of this as a sequel to The Private Life of Henry VIII.  But this isn’t nearly as good, with Jean Simmons as the young Elizabeth.  It’s based on a novel by Margaret Irwin.  The costumes were (rightfully) nominated for an Oscar.
• Gaslight  –  The original version of the play, released in the States as Angel Street.  It was made in 1940 but suppressed in the States by MGM after they made their (far superior) 1944 version.  Really only worth watching as a curiosity – stick to the Boyer / Bergman version.  This is listed at oscars.org, so I trust the 1953 eligibility date.
• Torch Song  –  Joan Crawford is a diva (shocking, I know) in this film version of a short story by I.A.R. Wylie.
• So Big  –  A mostly mediocre novel by Edna Ferber that won the Pulitzer (I gave that award a C, but it would have been lower if there had been a book I felt really deserved the award).  It became a mediocre film from Robert Wise.
• Botany Bay  –  Nordhoff and Hall, who wrote Mutiny on the Bounty, also wrote this novel about the founding of Australia as a penal colony.  The movie is the low end of ***.
• The Juggler  –  Now we’ve hit **.5.  Kirk Douglas is a juggler haunted by the Holocaust.  It’s adapted by Michael Blankfort from his own novel.  Blankfort and director Edward Dmytryk would re-team the next year for The Caine Mutiny with much better results.
• A Lion is on the Streets  –  Adrian Locke Langley’s novel loosely based on Huey Long may have preceded All the King’s Men but the film version at least is far inferior, even though it reteams the White Heat director/star team of Raoul Walsh and James Cagney.
• Plunder of the Sun  –  John Farrow (Hondo, Botany Bay) directs his third film of the year, this one starring Glenn Ford and adapted from a novel by David F. Dodge.  It’s pretty mediocre, which I blame more on Farrow than on Ford.
• The Beggar’s Opera  –  The fourth **.5 film in a row with a great star, this one has Olivier in the adaptation of the famous 1728 opera.  Olivier as MacHeath might work better if it wasn’t a Musical.  This story was the inspiration for Threepenny Opera.
• The Clown  –  The crappy 1931 film The Champ is remade with a clown instead of a boxer.  Do I really need to say more?
• The Four Poster  –  The Jan de Hartog play becomes a two person film.  I only recently saw this thanks to constant reader Mike.  The film is mediocre but I always appreciate it when I am able to see hard to find Oscar nominees.
• The Wild One  –  Yes, Brando is iconic in the film, but he’s not actually that good and the film is worse.  It’s based on a short story by Frank Rooney called “The Cyclists’ Raid” which was inspired by a Life Magazine article in 1947.  I first encountered this film as a kid in a Mad Magazine spoof, which must have been a reprint in a collection, because there’s no way my brother had the actual Mad Magazine from September 1954.
• Knights of the Round Table  –  L’Morte de Arthur done really badly, with Robert Taylor as Lancelot and Mel Ferrer as Arthur.  From the same director, Richard Thorpe who made the mediocre Ivanhoe the year before.  I wish I could say it’s the weakest King Arthur film ever but sadly it’s not even close (I’m looking at you First Knight).
• Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  –  It would be adapted because it has Hyde, but it’s also adapted in my mind because of the Abbott and Costello characters who are the same in each film.  This is relentlessly mediocre and yet not the worst film of theirs in this year.
• I Confess –  A French play by Paul Anthelme becomes one of the weakest Alfred Hitchcock films.
• Little Boy Lost  –  Based on a novel by Marghanita Laski, this weepy melodrama is directed by George Seaton (Miracle on 34th Street) and stars Bing Crosby as a man returning to Europe to find the child he lost during the war.
• All the Brothers Were Valiant  –  Based on the novel by Ben Ames Williams, again we have Robert Taylor directed by Richard Thorpe.  Taylor makes Stewart Granger in this film look like Olivier.  This is a low level **.5 adventure film.
• The Story of Little Mook  –  Based on a fairy tale, this is an East German Kids film, if you can imagine such a thing.  It barely squeaks out a **.5 rating from me.
• Abbott and Costello Go to Mars  –  We’re down to **.  Maybe the worst of the Abbott and Costello films and you could probably argue it’s an original as there are no Horror characters dragged through their attempts at humor and they technically aren’t the same characters as in other films.  This wasn’t originally the lowest film – it was It Came from Outer Space, but it turns out that wasn’t based on an actual Bradbury short story, but just a screen treatment, so it’s technically original.

Adaptations of Prominent Works I Haven’t Seen:

Note:  Now that we are up to 1953, I can search through oscars.org by source author.  As I have gone through each year, I have tried to see films made from works by prominent authors (even if the film is supposed to be terrible or if it’s a minor work by a major author).  But not all of them are films that can be found.  In some years, I have found all the films I wanted from my list.  But in other years, this list will list films I haven’t seen, in alphabetical order.

• Affair in Monte Carlo  –  Based on Stefan Zweig’s novel Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman.  It’s a 1952 British film starring Merle Oberon (and apparently released in the U.K. under the book title).
• Hiawatha  –  An adaptation of the Longfellow poem that stars basically no one I have ever heard of.
• Pimpernel Svensson  –  A 1950 Swedish adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel.
• Sea Devils  –  My parents had a copy of Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea the whole time I was growing up but I never read it.  Haven’t seen this film version with Rock Hudson either.
• Tarzan and the She-Devil  –  The Tarzan films in this decade are much harder to find.  They really have nothing to do with the Burroughs novels.
• Tonight at 8:30  –  Three short Noel Coward plays get the omnibus film treatment.

The wonderful opening narration of Sabrina has no corresponding scene in the original play.

My Top 10:

1. Sabrina
2. Forbidden Games
3. Hobson’s Choice
4. The Country Girl
5. A Star is Born
6. Rear Window
7. The Caine Mutiny
8. Gate of Hell
9. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
10. Beat the Devil

Note:  After the list topped out at seven last year, it’s back to a full 10 this year (with a few left over down at the bottom).
Note:  On the Waterfront would possibly today be considered adapted.  But I already decided to keep it in Original, if for no other reason then I’m not going to be able to track down the newspaper articles that inspired the film, making its inclusion here rather pointless, since I’ve already reviewed it.
Note:  This is the first year where full records exist at oscars.org.  That means from this year on, there might be a list at the very bottom of adaptations I haven’t seen.  These will be things I choose based on the original source, not by the quality of the film.  I have tried to find any film with a major literary work as a source (or by a major author).

Consensus Nominees:

1. Sabrina  (184 pts)
2. The Country Girl  (120 pts)
3. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers  (120 pts)
4. Rear Window  (80 pts)
5. The Caine Mutiny  /  Carmen Jones  /  Executive Suite  /  Forbidden Games  /  The Long Long Trailer  /  A Star is Born  /  Susan Slept Here  (40 pts)

Note:  Though the BAFTAs would institute a Best Screenplay in this year, it will only be sporadically included until 1968.  That’s because it was the Best British Screenplay Award with no corresponding Best Screenplay like they did with Picture, Actor and Actress.  I don’t like that it doesn’t include other scripts, so I only include it if the script was nominated for other awards.  You could make a good argument that this simply counterbalances the WGA, which most British films aren’t eligible for.  But, these are my posts and the BAFTA nominees are a lot harder to track down; I’m lucky to have seen them once, let alone try to track them down to see them again (and their often obscure sources).  There is also the annoying aspect that the eligibility years often don’t overlap, so it really messes with the Consensus Awards.  If any film was nominated for the BAFTA, I will mention it either in the review or in the list down at the bottom.
Note:  The Globes will do away with their Best Screenplay Award after this year and won’t bring it back until 1965.  Combining that with the fact that the major critics awards won’t give a Screenplay award to an adapted script until 1963, it won’t be again until 1963 that any adapted screenplay will have more than 160 Consensus points (winning both the Oscar and WGA).

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay):

• The Country Girl
• The Caine Mutiny
• Rear Window
• Sabrina
• Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

Golden Globe Nominees:

• Sabrina

note:  There were no other announced nominees.

WGA Awards:

Drama:

• The Country Girl
• Executive Suite
• Rear Window

Nominees that are Original:  On the Waterfront, The Barefoot Contessa

Comedy:

• Sabrina
• The Long, Long Trailer
• Susan Slept Here

Nominees that are Original:  It Should Happen to You, Knock on Wood

Musical:

• Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
• Carmen Jones
• A Star is Born

Nominees that are Original:  The Glenn Miller Story, There’s No Business Like Show Business

My Top 10

Sabrina

The Film:

I have already reviewed Sabrina as one of the five best films of the year.  In spite of the oddness of the Bogart casting and the ludicrous idea that anyone could ignore Audrey Hepburn, the film absolutely works.  It works because Holden is so great as a cad, because Hepburn is so wonderful and luminous and because Bogart’s grumpiness exudes a quiet charm and because, of course, Billy Wilder is up on that pedestal with Bergman, Kurosawa, Kubrick, Woody Allen and the Coens as the greatest writer-directors of all-time.

The Source:

Sabrina Fair or A Woman of the World: A Romantic Comedy by Samuel Taylor (1953)

This is a nice enough little play about a woman who grew up as the daughter of the chauffeur for a rich Long Island family. After three years away in Paris, she comes home having grown up into a beautiful woman and now suddenly she is thrown between the two brothers in the family, the younger, more impetuous one, and the older, more responsible one. In the end, the comedy is all about which one she is going to chose and the romance is about what happens between them along the way.

The Adaptation:

See that bare bones description of the play? That’s pretty much what Billy Wilder took from the original play. Almost nothing else. The entire first “act” of the film, where Sabrina watches David and then attempts suicide before going off to Paris? Not in the play at all, which starts the day she arrives back home from Paris. All of the great witty lines, such as the scene with the other servants describing her letter or Bogart dictating a rather caustic memo to his brother? All of that is invented by Wilder or his co-screenwriters. Hell, while Sabrina is the focus of the film, it takes 38 pages before she even shows up in the play.

“Very strange case with Sabrina. It was a play. It was first made into a movie, with all the changes, radical changes, and the play came out a year after the movie and was a complete flop. It did not have the same structure anymore. It just kind of kept the relation – there are two sons of a rich industrialist, and a chauffeur and a daughter.” (Conversations with Wilder by Cameron Crowe, p 93)

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Billy Wilder. Written for the Screen by Billy Wilder, Samuel Taylor, Ernest Lehman. From the play by Samuel Taylor.

Forbidden Games

The Film:

A tragic, strange little film that was a massive worldwide critical hit, it is also a film that I reviewed in my Nighthawk Awards as one of the best films of 1954.

The Source:

The Secret Game by Francois Boyer  (1947)

The cover to the right is the current cover of the book, as published by Vanguard Press. It is a terrible cover and it confused Veronica when she saw the book sitting on the counter. “Why are you reading a young adult book?” she asked (caveat: I decided not to include that cover, because it’s terrible but you can find it here). I hadn’t really thought of it like that, but after starting to read the book, it really had that vibe. Perhaps it was the language. Perhaps it was the story, mainly about two young children and the strange friendship and bond between them after she is left orphaned. Or maybe the length – the novel, with generous margins only runs to 150 pages; it very easily could have been printed in 100.

The novel wasn’t originally a novel; it was a screenplay that Boyer was unable to convince anyone to film. So, in 1947 he re-wrote it as a novel and had it published. It is unknown how much of the original screenplay made it into the novel. Most of the novel, certainly, made its way to the screen in the script that was not written by Boyer (though, in the bizarre inanities of the writing categories at the Oscars in the fifties, Boyer was nominated for Best Original Story).

The Adaptation:

The book, unlike the film, though, has a brutal ending. Michel ends up dead, crushed by a cross when they try to steal it.

The Credits:

Un Film de René Clément.  D’APRÈS LE ROMAN DE FRANÇOIS BOYER.  Adaptation cinématographique: Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, René Clément.  Dialogue: Pierre Bost, Jean Aurenche, François Boyer.

Hobson’s Choice

The Film:

A David Lean Comedy. The very phrase makes you pause and think that you read it wrong. David Lean made a comedy? Actually, he made more than one, with Blithe Spirit being the first. But it’s Hobson’s Choice that is the great one, one of the last films he made before taking off into epic land and never looking back. It’s even been restored by Criterion and released on DVD and looks great. It’s a reminder, that far all the talk of Lean and the way he photographed films, that he was an editor first, that he knows how to tell a story, and that his work with actors is first-rate.

For those unfamiliar with the phrase “hobson’s choice”, it is a choice that really is no choice at all. It began with a man named Hobson in 16th century Cambridge who would rent you the horse closest to the door or no horse at all. The added irony in this film, adapted from the play, is that it revolves around a man named Hobson, a man who owns a bootshop and who is also in possession of three grown daughters. Two of those daughters are a bit flighty – they have their young gentleman callers and just wanted to be married and released from the drudgery of the bootshop. The oldest, Maggie, is now 30, is not nearly as good looking as the other two, and basically runs the shop. Not only is she running out of time to find a husband, but her father daren’t let her out of his hands or he won’t know what to do. But Maggie is smart, Maggie is quick-witted and Maggie is very determined to make a future for herself. Part of what makes Maggie so fun to watch on screen is the magnificent performance from Brenda de Banzie, one which can’t get to the top of the Nighthawk Awards list in a year that includes Grace Kelly in The Country Girl, Judy Garland in A Star is Born or Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, but she has no problem earning a nomination. Any woman who can walk on-screen and handle Charles Laughton in every situation that arises is someone who will amaze you. But de Banzie’s performance wouldn’t be enough if the script didn’t give her such a magnificent character to work with. Maggie sees how well poor Willie Mossop makes boots, how brow-beaten he is and how much she could do with talent like his and determination and wits like hers. She’s going to work the situation and make certain she and Willie, who she will grow to love and who will grow to love her, are put in a situation where they both can succeed. A little bit of luck comes along (there’s a fair bit of the comedy in that) and she manages to get her father over a barrel, and if you enjoy watching Laughton be a tyrant, just watch how enjoyable it is to find him beaten by his own daughter.

All of this works so well because it succeeds at every level. It is entertaining, it is funny, it tells a good story, it has wit and intelligence in the script and it has great performances. Most of all, it has the sure hand of David Lean presiding over what is his most unlikely great film.

The Source:

Hobson’s Choice: A Three-Act Comedy by Harold Brighouse (1915)

At a time when women did not yet have the right to vote in Britain, Harold Brighouse wrote a play about a woman so damn set in what she wants and so smart about how she’s going to get it, that the whole of British government, doing their best to botch the war, would have been best served to just hand over everything to her. To add to the difficulties for her, he moved the play back in time to 1880. “Brighouse chose to set the play in 1880 because that was when the first stirrings of the women’s rights movement were being felt in England. Indeed, Maggie, the play’s heroine, would be portrayed as an early feminist.” (BEYOND THE EPIC: THE LIFE & FILMS OF DAVID LEAN by Gene D. Phillips, p 187)

Maggie is the smartest person in the play. She would be the smartest person in most plays. She might not have the gift for language that Shakespeare’s Rosalind would have in As You Like It, but she is just as smart about how to get at her heart’s desire. There is no gentle woman’s life for her. It makes the play a delight to read, with a character that smart and determined.

The Adaptation:

Lean wouldn’t have to do much to make the play brilliant on film. Everything he needed was right there in the play. But, of course, the play had been filmed twice before and neither had been a success. “Lean was too inventive and skillful a filmmaker to allow his version of Brighouse’s quaint provincial stage play to turn into a dated, dull movie, which was the fate of the two previous film adaptations. So he made some substantial alterations for the screen. Most important, he kept in mind that the play, which took place in the single setting of Hobson’s shop, must be opened out for the screen in much the same way as This Happy Breed. His adaptation of Hobson’s Choice adds several scenes that take place in other locations, providing ‘glimpses of Hobson’s blustering behavior in the Moonraker, the local pub, and of Maggie’s drive and determination.'” (Beyond the Epic, p 190-191) That is all very true, and that is part of the reason why the film is such a rousing success – because Lean’s direction make it vibrant and alive. But, of course, the casting does that as well. Charles Laughton, as mentioned above, was the perfect fit for the part and Brenda de Banzie, whose career was never well known in the States, was given the role of a lifetime and she made damn sure she gave the performance of her career to match it.

One thing that is different because of the opening-up is that Maggie, instead of dealing with Willie’s intended when she comes to bring him his supper in the shop, now gets to travel out to her house and have it out with her and her mother, an enjoyable scene that really livens things up.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by David Lean. Screenplay by David Lean, Norman Spencer and Wynyard Browne. The title card “Hobson’s Choice by Harold Brighouse” is the only mention of the source.

The Country Girl

The Film:

Every time I see this film, I am reminded of what I wrote in my review in my Best Picture project.  While Judy Garland is absolutely magnificent in A Star is Born, I feel completely fine about giving the Nighthawk Award to Grace Kelly.  It is unfortunate that two actresses who mean so much to me (Kelly, in my mind, is the most beautiful actress who ever lived and her career was cut short by marrying while there might not be a film performance that makes me fall in love more than Garland’s in The Wizard of Oz and her career of course was cut short by drug and personal problems) would both give their career best performances in the same year.

The Source:

The Country Girl by Clifford Odets  (1951)

This is quite a good play that functions almost as a minor kind of O’Neill play.  It certainly doesn’t really have the social heft for an Arthur Miller play or the unforgettable characters of a Tennessee Williams play.  But it’s a heavy drama with good character parts and people who are determined to tear each other apart.  It even revolves around acting, something which O’Neill was known to deal with, having dealt with it in life.  It’s not a great play.  But it is quite a good play.  It’s the story of Frank Elgin, an alcoholic actor struggling to hold on when given another chance at an important part in a big play.  He is driven down by his insecurities.  Or maybe it’s the story of Bernie Dodd, the director of the play, a misogynist whose hatred of his ex-wife blinds him to the situation between Frank and his wife and is just trying to drive Frank to success and get him away from the influence of the wife who is holding him back.  Or maybe it’s really the story of Georgie Elgin, the title character, that “country girl” who is married to Frank and is really trying to hold Frank together while Frank wants to pretend that she is holding him back.  As Georgie points out, Dodd wants to get the performance that she knows Frank is capable of, make him the actor he used to be while she’s trying to push Frank back to life, get him to be the man he used to be.

The Adaptation:

Most of the film comes directly from the play.  There are a few exceptions.  The rehearsal scenes are all added in, most likely catered to Crosby’s strengths as there is nothing in the original play that suggests that Frank is starring in a musical.  Also, for some reason, they decided to change the gender of the child who died.  In doing that, they heightened the responsibility that Frank felt for the child – in the play it’s mentioned that they lost a child but in the film, Frank was watching the child when he died and feels responsible and that guilt weighs him down.  But a lot of the lines and the structure of the film follows quite well.  All in all, it’s a great adaptation of what was already a strong play.

The Credits:

Written for the Screen and Directed by George Seaton.  From the play by Clifford Odets.

A Star is Born

The Film:

I reviewed this film once already as one of the five best films of 1954.  It has what are probably the career best performances from both Judy Garland and James Mason and is one of the best remakes that Hollywood has ever produced.

The Source:

A Star is Born (1954), Directed by William A. Wellman. Screen Play by Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, Robert Carson. From a story by William A. Wellman and Robert Carson.

This is the first time that I have had a film in this project that began life as an original screenplay for a previous version of the film. I have actually already reviewed the original because it was nominated for Best Picture in 1937 (and was the Nighthawk winner for Best Picture in 1937).

The Adaptation:

The major difference between this and the original, of course, is that this is a Musical. It’s not a traditional Musical (where characters randomly break into song), but it is nonetheless, a Musical. But that is merely a function of the difference in the Vicki Lester as originally portrayed by Janet Gaynor (a dramatic actress) and the one played by Judy Garland in this film (a song and dance actress in Musicals).

The main story-telling difference between this and the original is the presence of Vicki Lester’s family. The first film starts in North Dakota, with young Esther Blodgett yearning to be a Hollywood star before escaping to Hollywood. This comes back at the end, where her grandmother, who paid for Esther to go to Hollywood in the first place, comes out and convinces her that she needs to stay in Hollywood and be the star that she has become. In the remake, it is the friend that she makes in the boarding house that convinces her to stick with her acting life.

The Credits:

Directed by George Cukor.  Screen Play by Moss Hart.  Based on the Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, Robert Carson Screen Play.  From a story by William A. Wellman and Robert Carson.

Rear Window

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film once as one of the five best films of the year.  I always end up wondering, every time I watch it, if I consider it Hitchcock’s best film.  It’s certainly, along with Rebecca, Notorious and Strangers on a Train, a major contender for the position.

The Source:

“Rear Window” by Cornell Woolrich (1944)

A nice tight little story from the same author who wrote “The Boy Who Cried Murder” which had been made into an effective film in 1949 as The Window. It’s about a man who keeps looking out his window and becomes convinced that the man across the way has murdered his wife. He ends up enlisting a friend in the police as well as getting a servant (or at least a man who works for him) to get involved as well. Through some slip-ups, he almost manages to get himself killed, but in the end, is saved and it turns out he’s right. It’s not very long (30 pages) and is quite effective.

The Adaptation:

In the original story, you are left to wonder through much of the story why the narrator is getting Sam, the man who works for him, to do the dirty work. It’s not until the humor of the final two lines from the doctor that conclude the story that it’s made explicit: “Guess we can take that cast off your leg now. You must be tired of sitting there all day doing nothing.” In the film, of course, we know this right from the start, but we still get an added bit of humor at the end, with that second cast.

Much of the concept (the killer, what he has done, the insurance scam, the ending) comes straight from the book. The man, Sam, however, who works for the narrator, has been split into two different characters: the Thelma Ritter character who does work for him, and the Grace Kelly lover who he enlists into the scheme to discover what has happened. It’s a brilliant change, and not the least because then we get to enjoy one of the great character actresses of all-time and the most beautiful woman who ever lived.

The Credits:

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  Screenplay by John Michael Hayes.  Based on the short story by Cornel Woolrich.

The Caine Mutiny

The Film:

I already reviewed this film once, during the Best Picture project. When I made the comment about how Dmytryk wanted the film to be longer, it had been years since I had read the book. Having read the book again, I can see why he wanted to make it longer, but some of the choices that he made could have done the characterization better even without added length simply by cutting the romantic subplot, but more on that below.  Anyone with an interest in film should definitely watch it for the Bogart performance alone, but there’s no question that there are flaws in the film.

The Source:

The Caine Mutiny: A Novel of World War II by Herman Wouk (1951)

I gave the Pulitzer Prize a B for awarding this book in 1952, partially because it’s a good book, but partially because the award deserved more to go to From Here to Eternity or Catcher in the Rye. The comparison to Eternity is more apt because they were best-sellers at the same time. Also, Eternity comes into the war at the end of the novel, yet, in some ways, we see more of the war there than we do here. Wouk called this “A Novel of World War II”, but in his 2003 introduction to the book, he said that he noted in his diary at the time “This is a good book, or I am the more deceived, but it is not yet my War Novel.” He was correct of course. It is a good book, and it was not his War Novel (that would be The Winds of War and War and Remembrance). This book, in fact, in spite of taking place on a Naval boat during the war really has nothing to do with the war, and that might be the point. This is a book about a particular incident that comes about because of the demands on this particular boat and the stress that men undergo during these situations.

This book looks at a particular idea – what would happen if a captain who was particularly unlikeable (and about whose ability there were serious questions) ended up in a situation where his officers decided that they had to take over command from him in order to save the ship? Wouk gives us believable characters and an interesting situation. It does not rise out of nowhere, and when we do see it unfold, I doubt there is anyone who reads it and finds themselves without sympathy for the officers of the Caine.

There is genuine tension in the book, and we wonder right down to the end what is going to happen. But is not a perfect book, perhaps because Wouk, in his determination to give us an angle into the story gives us too much of the story of Willie Keith and his private life. In the end, he might have been better off sticking with the ship more and giving up the romantic subplot that probably increases the book by an unnecessary 100 pages.

The Adaptation:

As I said, Dmytryk wanted a longer film and he wanted to explore the characters more. But in a sense, he stuck too close to the original novel by sticking closely with the love story which he could have dropped entirely (and, by the way, the goof about the Firefall is from the original novel, so that can be blamed on Wouk). There are important character moments that could have been kept in the film (in the book, Willie’s father is in the early parts and he is very sick when he says goodbye to his son but Willie doesn’t know that, so all of the actions of him on the Caine take place under the shadow of his father’s death), which are instead dropped. Aside from that, there are only a few other points that are either dropped (Willie was already familiar with Keefer, as he had roomed with his half-brother at Naval training) or are changed (in the book, Willie is discharged after overseeing the de-comissioning of the Caine after the conclusion of the war rather than ending up back with his original captain). That ending seems put in there specifically to get on the good side of the Navy, ending with a good moment, with a young officer who has learned what it is like to be a sailor and be back with a better captain, rather than having left the Navy behind so he can keep after his girl and finally get her to marry him after he has strung her along through the whole damn war.

The Credits:

Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Screen Play by Stanley Roberts. Additional Dialogue by Michael Blankfort. Based Upon the Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel by Herman Wouk.

Gate of Hell

The Film:

Certain films belong in black-and-white and some of the films that Akira Kurosawa would make in the 50’s and 60’s, films like Ikiru, The Lower Depths, The Bad Sleep Well and High and Low work perfectly in that medium.  But it’s too bad that we never got color for any of his early great samurai epics.  Godzilla might not have looked so great in color (the color certainly wasn’t wonderful in King Kong vs. Godzilla) but the colors of period clothing could have been brought vibrantly to life.  There is no better proof of that than Gate of Hell, the gorgeous 1953 film that would come to the States in 1954 and win Best Foreign Film and Best Color Costume Design at the Oscars.

This is a samurai film, but it’s not really one.  It isn’t anything like the action epics that Kurosawa would make or the passionate exploration of honor that was Harakiri.  Yes, this film is about honor, but it’s a different kind of honor – the one that ties together a romantic relationship rather than a familial one.  Morito has fallen for Lady Kesa (played by Machiko Kyo, who was so brilliant as the wife in Rashomon).  I won’t say fallen in love, because it’s more a powerful lust than any deeper attraction, but it’s strong enough that he wants to eliminate her husband.  To that end, he tries to set things up so that he can kill the husband and have the widow.  The film works on the narrative level so well because of the stain on his honor that Morito is committing and attempting to get Kesa to commit.  For a man who is supposed to embody such a trait, he has fallen as far as is possible.  The choice that Kesa makes at the end of the film is the best possible choice for her and makes for a poignant ending.

But if this were simply that story it would be a good film.  But, with the direction of Teinosuke Kinugasa we get something more.  This film is exquisite to look at.  Normally I would try to describe something about what he does with color, how vibrantly it makes the emotions of the film come to life, but I have already been beaten to the punch, so I will just link to the magnificent essay by Stephen Prince that accompanies the Criterion DVD.  I will just finish with this: if you have never seen this film and the Prince essay does not convince you that should absolutely add it to your Netflix queue, then I wonder how much you really care about film.

The Source:

Kesa no otto by Kan Kikuchi  (1935)

This is a story that owes its history to the Heiji rebellion.  A version of it was written as a short story in 1918 by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the same author who wrote the short stories that were adapted into Rashomon.  In 1923 Kan Kikuchi would turn it into his own short story.  In 1935, Kikuchi would then adapt his story into a play.  I have not, however, been able to find Kikuchi’s play in English and had a hard enough time figuring out the title and what year it was published.

The Adaptation:

Obviously I can’t speak to the adaptation since I haven’t read the original source.

The Credits:

Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa.  Based on the Play Kesa’s Husband by Kan Kikuchi.  Screenplay by Teinosuke Kinugasa.

As will be the case with any film made in a language that doesn’t use the Roman alphabet, I am forced to rely on the subtitles for the credits, in this case those from the Criterion DVD.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

The Film:

Starting in 1950, Disney starting making live-action films to go along with their animated feature films. They specialized in adventure films, starting with Treasure Island and including Robin Hood before their fifth live-action film, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was not only to be easily the best live-action film they would make in their first decade, but all the way up until 2003, it was still the second best live-action film they had made, behind only Mary Poppins.   It sets the tone for what will come to mark success in the Disney films – a big star (in this case, Kirk Douglas), an interesting villain with some charm (James Mason as Captain Nemo, though villain isn’t really the right word), a lot of adventure and some good clean family fun (most notably Kirk Douglas singing “A Whale of a Tale”). It is a success on the artistic level, being a mid-range ***.5 film that is both well-made (it won two Oscars and earned a third nomination; it wins 3 Nighthawk Awards and earns four other nominations) and entertaining, it was a critical hit and it was a commercial success (the second-highest grossing film of the year).

It may surprise people who have only heard about the film and novel second-hand and have never actually seen the film or read the novel that this is not really the story of Captain Nemo, and that not only is he a supporting character, but that he is essentially the villain in the story. The film itself (like the novel) focuses on a professor who, along with his assistant, is on a voyage to discover this monster that has been sinking ships in the Pacific Ocean. Their ship is attacked and the only survivors of the ordeal are the professor, his assistant and the carefree harpoon-master Ned Land, played by Kirk Douglas. The professor is played by Paul Lukas, who, playing it quite stuffy, is the weak link in the film. But that’s okay because he’s surrounded by Douglas, whose charisma is more than enough to make up for Lukas, Peter Lorre as his short, rather wide assistant (in the book his assistant was a boy) and James Mason as Nemo. As I have mentioned before, Mason has that amazing hypnotic voice and that makes him perfect for Nemo. He is a man who has essentially declared war on the human race, but you are still fascinated by him at every turn.

The highlight of the film, as anyone can tell you, is the magnificent battle against the giant squid. Even today this battle is thrilling, and back in 1954, with the best special effects to appear on film since at least The Wizard of Oz, it must have been amazing to watch on the big screen.

This is one of those films that works so well precisely because Disney was involved. At heart, it is still a kids film – a big adventure film with some thrilling moments, a bit of comedy (there is a trained seal who barks when Douglas tries to go after some treasure, prompting Veronica to squeal: “it’s a protective seal!”), a nice fun song and simply a good time to be had by all.

The Source:

Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: Tour du monde sous-marin by Jules Verne (serialized 1869-1870, published in book form, 1870)

I’ve mentioned before that I love the great pulp writers, in a variety of genres, writers like Dashiell Hammet (mystery), Robert E. Howard (fantasy), H.P. Lovecraft (horror). But there are also those classic writers who write in some of those same genres that pre-date the pulps themselves, writers like H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and of course, Jules Verne.

This is a great science-fiction story, of a professor, his assistant and a harpoonist who are all on a voyage to discover what monster has been sinking ships out in the Pacific Ocean. When they are attacked and end up adrift, they find themselves on the Nautilus, a great magnificent submarine, commanded by the mysterious, forbidding Nemo. Nemo has left human society behind and lives only for his men and his submarine, attacking vessels, raiding underwater stores of sunken gold and building up his research. The sea is his world now, from eating a variety of animals to be found under the sea, to smoking a new form of cigar made from seaweed. We don’t learn about his past (that would come in the sequel novel, Mysterious Island, which contradicts some of the story told in this novel), which makes him all the more mysterious.

There is one thing to beware of, in regards to this novel, and it’s one of my arguments against e-books.  The first, most commonly found translation of this novel into English was made by Lewis Mercier.  But, as can be clearly seen if you read The Annotated Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, edited and annotated by Walter James Miller, that original translation is wrought with errors and excised text.  However, since the Mercier translation (often listed as Mercier Lewis, since that’s how he signed that translation) is out of copyright protection while the Miller book is still protected, e-readers can get the original version for cheap (or free).  If you have any real interest in the book, I recommend making certain you get either the Miller or the William Butcher translations.  You’ll get a much more true version of the novel.

The Adaptation:

I have to give credit to Disney for not thinking in terms of a sequel right from the start with this film. If they had been, there is no reason why they couldn’t have used the story as it goes in the book and then at some further point made Mysterious Island, again using James Mason as the star. But they clearly weren’t, and it is clear from the choices they made in the adaptation.

Much of the first half of the film stays close to the first half of the book. We are introduced to the story through the professor (who narrates the book), we have the three men who end up adrift together and join the Nautilus, we have the voyages across the ocean. The only major difference between the book and the film in the first half is that the assistant to the professor in the book is a young man while in the film it is an overweight Peter Lorre.

But in the second half, things veer greatly away from the source material. Yes, there is a battle with a giant squid, but the whole fight at the volcano is created for the film and the decision to kill off Captain Nemo, when his fate (and those of the other members of the crew) is unknown in the original book (and indeed, would be dealt with more in The Mysterious Island) really shows that Disney wasn’t interested in continuing the story, which is too bad, because they might have done well with a sequel.

The Credits:

Directed by Richard Fleischer.  Screen Play by Earl Felton.  The only mention of the source is on the title card: Jules Verne’s “20000 Leagues Under the Sea”.

Beat the Devil

The Film:

“Those are desperate characters,” Jennifer Jones warns her husband.  “How can you tell?” he asks.  “Not one of them looked at my legs.”  It’s a great line (I had read it in my book You Ain’t Heard Nothin Yet long before I had ever seen the film) and a great start to the film (the line is very early in the film).  But, in some ways it’s unnecessary.  Just look at Robert Morley, dressed in white, sweating profusely in the Italian sun, or the platinum-blonde Peter Lorre, so tiny next to him, or the pinched eyes of the Brit on the other side.  If there was ever a group of desperate characters on screen, it’s obvious that these are them.

This film is a Comedy and it’s a character piece in which the plot is essentially irrelevant.  The original novel was a thriller and the plot, while not vital, was important, and it was serious.  But John Huston decided the hell with that and when he realized who he had gathered and what he could do with them, he did what he wanted and he made a rather strange comedy that no one knew what to do with (it completely failed at the box office), certainly not Humphrey Bogart.  Yet, this film works precisely because it is so invested in its characters.  In the end, we don’t care about the plot.  We just want to watch them interact.  Morley is great and fun, with a face you know you can’t trust.  Lorre is a disturbing little character, a German named O’Hara who, hilariously, insists that there are a lot of O’Haras in Chile (where he claims to be from) and when we think about the Nazis who fled to South America we realize it’s probably true.  The squinty little Brit (who had been in David Lean’s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist) laments when he thinks a character has died, comparing him in one breath to other men whose loss he laments: Mussolini and Hitler.  Through it all, Bogart has a smile plastered on his face, maybe because he’s supposed to be married to Gina Lollobrigida and he’s flirting heavily with Jennifer Jones and he is interested in her legs in spite of being a desperate character.

This is an odd little film and it’s unlike almost anything John Huston ever made and it’s certainly unlike anything else that Humphrey Bogart ever made.  But it has wit and humor and it has a strange plot that seems to keep wanting to come to the forefront and then receding when it realizes that the characters are so much more interesting.

One last thing to be aware of – this film fell out of copyright a while ago, and as such, has been released on DVD by whoever wants to release it.  The transfer I watched to review it this time was truly awful, with the sound completely out of synch. Beware of that.

The Source:

Beat the Devil by James Helvick (1951)

This is a small little thriller, set in France, about a bunch of criminals trying to get some interests in vital mineral-rich land in Africa.  It’s really less about the actual plot than about their machinations to get things in motion in the first place.  It’s not a bad novel, but it drags quite a bit, heavy on the dialogue and determined to think it’s dialogue is more clever than it actually is.

The Adaptation:

John Huston decided the hell with the novel.  He didn’t completely throw it out – the basic premise of the plot, as well as the circumstances of the characters are imported from the novel and there are even some lines of dialogue that originated in the novel, including Peter Lorre’s lines about how many O’Haras there are in Chile.  But, after moving the story from France to Italy, after yanking Truman Capote aboard to help write it (disposing of what James Helvick, the original novelist had put in his original version of the screenplay), Huston decided to make it into a Comedy instead of a straight Thriller and things took an interesting left turn.  So, many things in the book come to life on screen, but not in the same way, not with the same inflections and a book that easily could have been forgotten (I feel like I would have forgotten it already if not for the film) stays alive in a different kind of way.

The Credits:

Directed by John Huston. Based on the Novel “Beat the Devil” by James Helvick. Screenplay by Truman Capote and John Huston.

Consensus Nominees That Don’t Make My Top 10

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

The Film:

I reviewed this film for my Best Picture project and got some pushback on how little I think of it. But I have now watched it again, after reading the silly little story it was adapted from and I think no higher of it than I did before. You might love it, but I still think the songs are completely unmemorable and that the performances are simply terrible. Yet, here I am, having to watch it yet again because the Oscars nominated its damn screenplay!

The Source:

“The Sobbin’ Women” by Stephen Vincent Benet (1926)

This short story (by the author of “The Devil and Daniel Webster”, whose story worked much better with Benet’s prose style) is inspired by the old Roman legend “The Rape of the Sabine Women”, and that story is even directly alluded to by one of the characters in the story. There are seven backwoods brothers who feel the need to marry. After one of them does marry, she becomes determined to make the others marry so that she isn’t the only woman around. In the end, they head into town and try to find brides, but are forced to abduct them and a convenient blizzard traps them all together for months, to the point where the women finally feel comfortable around them. The undertones are rather disturbing, just as they were in the original legend.

The Adaptation:

Well, the songs are all thrown in, of course. This is based on a short story, not a Broadway musical (an important point to some of the film’s defenders), so all of the songs in this film were created for the film (interesting that the Academy then didn’t consider any of them worth nominating). There are also a few little points that were changed (the avalanche is an accident in the story, while in the film it’s not only created on purpose, but is telegraphed early in the film). Other than that, the film is just an expanded version of the original story (and to be fair, adding songs in, especially ones that don’t really further the plot, is a great way to pad the time and turn a short story into a feature-length film).

The Credits:

Directed by Stanley Donen. Screen Play by Albert Hackett & Frances Goodrich And Dorothy Kingsley. Based On the Story “The Sobbin’ Women” by Stephen Vincent Benet. Lyrics by Johnny Mercer.

Executive Suite

The Film:

How could a film that stars both Fredric March and William Holden feel so flat?  It’s not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination – it’s got good solid performances all around.  But for something that it supposed to be all about the drama of who will come out on top of a company after its president falls dead of a heart attack there really isn’t much drama.  It’s kind of boring.  I could say that part of it is the storyline, which I will discuss more down below in the source.  But part of it definitely needs to lie at the feet of director Robert Wise, who may be a two-time Oscar winner but really was a lot of the time making bland films like this one.

The film even starts out awkwardly.  Because the president himself is not that important, but merely his absence is, he is never actually shown and his scenes – leaving a meeting, sending a telegram, having the heart attack and dying – are shown from his point-of-view.  That just makes it feel strange (and makes you wonder if this will be like Lady in the Lake and continue all the way through, though thankfully not) and disjointed.  Then we start to meet the various vice-presidents that have the potential to take over – the more ruthless one played by Fredric March, only concerned about money, the one you don’t quite trust because he’s played by Paul Douglas, the older one who seems like his chance has passed him by played by Walter Pidgeon and the younger one who is smart and innovative but is perhaps too young for this position played by William Holden, who a year after Stalag 17 and in the same year as Sabrina and The Country Girl really is rather flat in this film.  There are also all the women in the film – June Allyson as a young wife who is quite smart, Barbara Stanwyck, who wants to make her own play on what is going to happen and Shelley Winters, who loves her man.  But they all kind of fade into the background, because it’s a business struggle and none of them are allowed inside the boardroom.

That’s just another problem.  The movie is outdated, the movie has a boring premise, the movie is flatly directed and the writing has no snap to it.  It has a lot of actors that make you want to watch this film and then, 20 minutes after it’s over, you have trouble remembering who was who and what they cared about.

The Source:

Executive Suite by Cameron Hawley  (1952)

Are you a better writer than Susan Orlean?  That is my standard question when it comes to a writer who is embarked upon a book about a subject that I don’t give a crap about.  She is my barometer because of The Orchid Thief.  It is a book that is beautifully written with some amazing prose and I have never finished it because it’s about flowers and I just don’t care.  Even the glorious writing of Orlean is not enough to get me through the book.  So, if you’re gonna write about say horses (I’ll eventually, someday get to 2003 and write about Seabiscuit) or wine (Sideways will follow the next year) you’d best be a damn sight better than Orlean (neither is).  Which brings me back to this year, 1954, and the goings on among the executives at a furniture company.  They are the main characters in a book by Cameron Hawley and I don’t give a crap about business or about machinations to take over a company after its president dies.  So you need to have a writer who is better than Orlean.  Cameron Hawley is nowhere near as good as Orlean.

That’s a roundabout way of saying that I struggled to even get through half of this book and then I simply gave up.  I just couldn’t really care.  There are far too many vice presidents in this company and I can’t really be bothered to remember which is which, let alone care which one will come out on top.  Hawley wants to make it dramatic – we are constantly interrupted by the insertion of the time.  Astoundingly this book is only a little over 350 pages, but I had given it up long before I got anywhere near that.

The Adaptation:

As far as I could tell, the film follows decently close to the book.  But it’s hard to tell because both the book and the film made my eyes start to go blurry and tune out and no longer care what was going on.  If you have to choose one, go with the film, but that’s not much of a recommendation.

The Credits:

Directed by Robert Wise.  Screen Play by Ernest Lehman.  Based on the Novel by Cameron Hawley.

The Long, Long Trailer

The Film:

In 1954, MGM was apparently reticent to make this film. Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnez could be seen on televisions across the nation for free. Would crowds really go pay to see them in a film? True, the films would be in color and they would get an hour and a half without commercials, but was it a viable financial choice? Absolutely, turned out to be the answer, with the film being one of the biggest of the year. Did it deserve that kind of success? Well, I suppose in part that will depend on your opinion of I Love Lucy. See, I don’t love Lucy. I don’t dislike her either.  I just don’t care about her. I have seen parts of a couple of episodes (one clip on a Superman retrospective when Superman appears on the show and insults Lucy and parts from the episode where Lucy gives birth that they showed us in childbirth class) but have never had any interest in watching the show. Likewise, the film just kind of sits there for me. Watching Lucy browbeat Desi (I keep wanting to call him Ricky) into buying a long trailer they can’t possibly hope to afford, and then all the other highjinks that go along with it, including trying to cook while he’s driving (which at least leads to some lines in a great They Might Be Giants song) and them backing up into a friend’s house and pretty much demolishing it might play for big laughs with some people. To me, they were just kind of there. I didn’t particularly laugh at the film, but Ball and Arnez are talented enough and have such good chemistry together that it wasn’t that much of a drag either. It is what it is, essentially an hour and a half long sitcom about a couple that buys a trailer and then goes driving around and all the problems that creates. If that sounds like the movie for you, then go to it.

One thing I will say in defense of this film. It has a minute where it shows them traveling through Yosemite. I may think this film is silly and rather pointless but any film with beautiful panoramic views of one of my favorite places on earth has at least some redeeming qualities.

The Source:

The Long, Long Trailer by Clinton Twiss (1951)

Both Wikipedia and TCM call this a novel and I think perhaps it is the credits of this film to blame for that. This is not a novel, it’s a memoir (more travel writing than anything else) about Twiss buying a trailer and travelling around the country in it with his wife. At the end, stuck with a lot of debt because of the trailer, she demands he write a book about it so they can earn some money and still keep the trailer. In a bit of strange luck, he ends up a trailer next to James Jones, who was writing From Here to Eternity at the same time and they both share scenes with each other towards the end of the book. This could all be considered amusing enough, if you care about travelling in a trailer or care about this kind of lightly humorous travel writing, but I didn’t really much care.

A really strange note to this book – the copy I received from ILL was from the U.S. Naval Academy Library. Why on earth do they own a copy of this book?

The Adaptation:

The film really takes the basic idea of buying a trailer and then living in it and the problems that can occur with that and the strain it can put on a marriage and created a story to go along with it. Almost nothing in the film, from the destroying of the neighbor’s house, to the disaster of trying to cook while driving, to the treacherous drive over a mountain pass is actually in the book.

The Credits:

Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Screen Play by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. Based on the Novel by Clinton Twiss.

Susan Slept Here

The Film:

This film is uncomfortable in 2016. I can’t imagine how it played in 1954. Well, I know that the Legion of Decency opposed it, but apparently that was simply in response to the title. The thought of a 35 year old screenwriter who takes in a 17 year old juvenile delinquent because 1- he wants to write a script about juvenile delinquency and he’s been suffering from writer’s block since he won an Oscar, 2 – a cop he knows brought him the delinquent because he knows about the script and 3 – it’s Christmas Eve, and if he doesn’t take her in, this adorable girl (adorable is the only word for her – it’s Debbie Reynolds, after all) will spend the holiday in the slammer before she can be arraigned – didn’t seem to be as much of a problem, possibly because the film is played as a comedy. The girl, of course, falls in love with the writer, which causes extreme problems between the writer and his fiancee, a shrill blonde who has him on a pretty short leash and would like to remove some of his lead, and the writer’s best friend, a snarky guy whose main purpose in the film (and the original play) is to stand around and give out snarky lines while pining away for his time in the Navy, even though he doesn’t seem at all like he ever could have been in the Navy, let alone enjoyed it.

All of this would be uncomfortable enough – the girl falls for him almost immediately and then, when he finds out she’ll probably spend the next six months in juvy until she turns 18, he decides to take her to Vegas and marry her. He only does it to keep her safe, and he refuses to consummate the marriage, and that gets into the real issue with this film. The girl is supposed to be 17, and even though this is two years after Singin’ in the Rain, Reynolds was still only 22 and she easily looks like she could be 17. But she’s starring opposite Dick Powell. Time hasn’t made me want to punch him in his smug face any less and it hadn’t been particularly kind to him either. There’s no way on earth you can believe that he’s supposed to be 35. He was 50 in real life and he was not aging well. This would be his last film as an actor, though, tragically (and I mean that word seriously – I always wanted to punch him, but this is tragic) he would become a director, including the director of The Conqueror, the most cursed film in history, and one that would end up with numerous members of the cast and crew dying of cancer, with Powell one of the earliest to go, not even reaching 60. Yes, you can’t blame Powell for eventually choosing Reynolds over his fiancee, partially because she’s cute as a button, and partially because his fiancee is the kind of woman no man really wants to marry. But you can blame the filmmakers for not finding a better choice as a leading man.

There are a lot of people who view Susan Slept Here as a minor Christmas classic. It is, in the end, a light romantic comedy (with a bizarre surreal dream sequence), complete with ridiculous Hollywood happy ending, and Reynolds is a breath of fresh air. But, in the end, it’s just too disturbing to see Powell paired with Reynolds, the dialogue isn’t good enough, the premise is ridiculous and it just really isn’t very good.

The Source:

Susan Slept Here: A Comedy in Two Acts by Steve Fisher and Alex Gottlieb (1956)

Now, I wrote 1956 there, because that’s what it says on the book. The TCM database also gives the same date. That’s the copy printed by Samuel French, a British publisher, and it appears to be the only published version of the play. So, it could be that it wasn’t published in Britain until later. But it also doesn’t have a listing on the IBDB. So, I suspect that this was an unproduced play and it was only the success of the film that managed to get it published in the first place. So I wonder if it has ever been performed. Which would make sense, since the whole premise is quite ridiculous.

The Adaptation:

The film immediately feels the need to provide us with background. So we start with a ridiculous narrative about how Mark won an Oscar but now has writer’s block, even though his rich fiancee would just prefer he stop writing altogether and just marry her. Yet, some of the film is an improvement upon the play. In the play, the action takes place over the course of almost a year and Susan actually leaves to go star in a play and then comes back to him because she loves him. In a sense, the Hollywood ending of the film, which in some ways is the same as the play, is less ridiculous than the ending of the play. As for the dialogue, even though Alex Gottlieb co-wrote the play and wrote the film, much of the dialogue has been changed, with some scenes being almost entirely different, while some scenes hardly change at all.

The Credits:

Directed by Frank Tashlin. Screen Play by Alex Gottlieb. Based on a Play by Steve Fisher and Alex Gottlieb.

Carmen Jones

The Film:

I watched this film again for this project the same day I watched Carousel again. Both are Hammerstein productions (he didn’t need Rodgers to do the music for this one, since he was using Bizet’s). In Carousel, the ending of the original play was changed by Rodgers and Hammerstein to provide something more hopeful for the audiences. But here, Hammerstein keeps the original Bizet ending, the darkness of the story carrying all the way through to the ending. Opera is tragic, after all, and this was opera, not just a Broadway Musical.

This is the story of Carmen Jones, who makes parachutes in an army factory for the war but is fired after being tattled on. She manages to seduce the man taking her to prison and leaves for Louisiana. Working in a club, she spurns a chance to go to Chicago until the man she seduced returns and she goes to Chicago to spite him. In the end, he kills her when she spurns him.

Or maybe this is the story of Joe, the soldier who has a nice, innocent sweetheart and a good future in front of him. But when ordered to deliver Carmen to prison, he is seduced and he can’t escape her wiles. He ignores what she had sung to him in the big song “Dat Love” (Bizet’s “Habanera”) and finds himself sucked into her web. He strikes a superior officer, flees the army and in the end, strangles her when he realizes he can’t have her.

We have two characters, both of them headed for tragic ends. We have a film that is almost entirely made up of black characters being filmed at a time when the Civil Rights struggle was just about the kick into high gear. We have a director who was always determined to make his films his way without bothering to listen to whatever anyone had to say against it. This is not a great film, or even a very good one. But it is a solid film, lead by a solid performance from Dorothy Dandridge as Carmen, a seductive force of nature who powers the film through from start to finish. If the film isn’t higher than ***, perhaps it’s because whenever she’s not onscreen, the film can’t really match the energy level she provides.

The Source:

Carmen Jones by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on Meilhac and Halévy’s adaptation of Prosper Merimée’s Carmen (1945)

Perhaps it says all it needs to say what I think of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals that by far the two best songs ever written with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II are both from Carmen Jones. And I don’t even care that much about the lyrics. Granted, Hammerstein comes up with perfect lyrics that fit the existing cadence, but it’s really the Bizet music that does so much here.

This is a dark play. Nothing good is going to happen any of the characters. But, hey isn’t that partially the point of opera? As a play, it’s okay – it doesn’t have much character development because it has to follow the trail of darkness.

The Adaptation:

“I was fascinated by the idea of transposing the story of Carmen into present-day American life with an all-black cast. I engaged Harry Kleiner, who had been one of my students at Yale, and started to work with him on the screenplay. Except for the lyrics we did not use the text of Hammerstein’s revue or the libretto of the original opera by Meilhac and Halevy but went back to the original story by Prosper Merimee. For I had decided to make a dramatic film with music rather than a conventional film musical.” (Preminger: An Autobiography. Otto Preminger. 1977, p 133)

Preminger really says all that needs to be said. The songs make it on to the screen, but the rest of the play is dropped. And Preminger is accurate – this really is a dramatic film with songs interspersed than a more traditional Rodgers / Hammerstein Musical.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Otto Preminger. Book & Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein 2nd. Based on Billy Rose’s Broadway production of the musical play Carmen Jones. Screenplay by Harry Kleiner.

Other Screenplays on My List Outside My Top 10:

• Le Plaisir  –  A very good Max Ophüls comedy from 1952.  It adapts three Guy de Maupassant stories.
• The Earrings of Madame De…  –  Actually a better Ophüls film, this one from 1953, but listed lower because I rank the script for Le Plaisir higher.  This is my #9 film of the year.  It’s adapted from a novel by Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin.
• Human Desire  –  Both the film and the original novel it’s based on (La Bête humaine by Émile Zola) have already been reviewed in my Great Read post.  To sum it up, it’s interesting that the only Zola adaptation made by Hollywood was made a German emigre.

Other Adaptations:
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• Johnny Guitar  –  This Nicholas Ray Western has become a cult classic and it’s quite a good film, coming in as a top *** film.  It’s based on the novel by Roy Chanslor.
• El  –  A 1953 Buñuel film, it’s based on a novel by Mercedes Pinto.  It was actually made after Buñuel’s mediocre Robinson Crusoe, but released before it, though both ended up with 1954 U.S. releases.
• The Overcoat  –  Italian director Alberto Lattuada adapts the famous Gogol story into a pretty good film.  This is a good example of a film I saw because of looking at the list on oscars.org of source material for 1954 films.  Star Renato Rascel ends up at #10 on my Best Actor list.
• Angels One Five  –  A 1952 British film, nominated for Best Picture and Best British Film at the BAFTAs, this is one of those solid Jack Hawkins films that I sought out because of BAFTA nominations (Hawkins ended up at #9 on my Best Actor list).
• The Lady Without Camelias  –  I saw this one during my Oscar-nominated director project, as its directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.  It’s not listed at oscars.org and the IMDb lists it as being based on a story by Antonioni, but that might be a screen story and thus this might really be an original screenplay.
• Track of the Cat  –  Director William A. Wellman again directs a novel from Walter Van Tilburg Clark, but it doesn’t bring quite the same results as The Ox-Bow Incident.  Still, it is a solid Western.
• The Golden Coach  –  A solid Renoir film based on the play Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement by Prosper Mérimée.
• Twenty-Four Eyes  –  A 1952 film by Keisuke Kinoshita that I first saw because it was one of four winners of Best Foreign Film at the 1954 Golden Globes.  It used to be hard to find but it’s now available on DVD from Criterion.
• Folly to Be Wise  –  An enjoyable British Comedy with Alistair Sim in the lead as an army chaplain trying to recruit entertainment acts for the troops.  It’s based on a play by James Birdie.
• Brigadoon  –  The MGM Musical is based on the original Lerner / Loewe Broadway production.  It’s okay, but isn’t really a classic.  I also would have a hard time taking it seriously now, after years of watching the Troughton Doctor and seeing Jamie run forward yelling “Brigadoon!”
• Crime Wave  –  An Andre de Toth noir film that was adapted from a story in “Saturday Evening Post” of all places.
• L’Air de Paris  –  A minor Marcel Carne film adapted from La Choute by Jacques Viot.
• The High and the Mighty  –  A big budget disaster film adapted from the Ernest K. Gann novel.  It was nominated for 6 Oscars including Best Director but was really hard to find for quite a while and I finally found it on TCM and had to go up to my parents house to watch it.  It was disappointing given the level of Oscar support.
• The Holly and the Ivy  –  Adapted from a play by Wynyard Browne, this is a 1952 film that stars Celia Johnson and Ralph Richardson.
• River of No Return  –  Another film that’s hard to tell if it’s an original film story or an original story.  Either way, it’s an Otto Preminger Western starring Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe, but in spite of that is kind of forgettable.
• Drive a Crooked Road  –  If I told you it had a script by Blake Edwards and starred Mickey Rooney would you guess this is a noir film?  Well it is.  Based on a story by James Benson Nablo.
• Dial M for Murder  –  Based on the play, this Hitchcock film is apparently rated highly (it’s in the top 250 at the IMDb) which makes no sense because it’s one of his most disappointing films.  How could it have Grace Kelly and be directed by Hitchcock and still feel so flat?
• Anatahan  –  It’s a Japanese film, but it’s directed by Josef von Sternberg.  It’s based on the Japanese novel.
• Suddenly  –  Frank Sinatra’s out to assassinate the president and Sterling Hayden has to stop him.  Sounds good, but it’s kind of mediocre.  It’s based on a story from Blue Book magazine.
• Malta Story  –  A 1953 British film about the defense of Malta based on a book about it.  It stars Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins, but in spite of that, is pretty forgettable.
• The Naked Jungle  –  We’re definitely into the lower levels of *** now.  This is based on a short story called “Leinengen Versus the Ants” which actually appeared in Esquire of all places.  Charlton Heston is a South American plantation owner taking on, you guessed it, ants.
• His Majesty O’Keefe  –  Based on the first novel by Gerald Green (who would later become more famous for The Last Angry Man and Holocaust), this is a South Pacific adventure film starring Burt Lancaster.
• The Detective  –  A Father Brown film, with Robert Hamer directing and Alec Guinness starring, but they don’t bring the magic they each had at Ealing.
• The Kidnappers  –  Nominated for three BAFTAs, this 1953 British film was based on a short story by Neil Paterson.
• The Red Inn  –  A 1951 French Comedy that’s supposedly based on the Balzac novel (which oscars.org lists) but is actually not.
• King of the Khyber Rifles  –  Tyrone Power stars in this Adventure film based on the 1916 novel.
• Rogue Cop –  Based on a novel by William P. McGivern (who wrote The Big Heat), this noir film is really only notable for a young, sexy Janet Leigh.
• Pushover  –  Yet more noir, this one the first credited role for Kim Novak.  It’s adapted from two different novels: The Night Watch by Thomas Walsh and Rafferty by William S. Ballinger.
• Apache  –  Burt Lancaster, who was Irish, plays an Apache.  Thank god that kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore.  Based on one of Paul Wellman’s numerous westerns.
• Blackout  –  Before Terence Fisher started making Horror films at Hammer, he made a noir film at Hammer.  It’s mostly forgettable.
• Hell Below Zero  –  Now we’re into **.5.  I’ve seen this because its director Mark Robson was once Oscar-nominated.  Based on the novel The White South.
• Young at Heart  –  Frank Sinatra stars in a remake of The Four Daughters.  Wikipedia claims a January 1, 1955 release date but oscars.org says December 22, 1954.
• Magnificent Obsession  –  Before he sold millions of copies of The Robe, Lloyd C. Douglas wrote this 1929 novel that became this 1954 Douglas Sirk film.  This melodrama earned Jane Wyman an Oscar nomination but it shouldn’t have.
• Desiree  –  If you want to watch Marlon Brando romance Jean Simmons wait a year and watch Guys and Dolls.  He’s playing Napoleon here, and director Henry Koster isn’t up to the task.
• About Mrs. Leslie  –  Wyman was far more deserving of her nomination than Shirley Booth was of her BAFTA nom for this film based on the novel by Viña Delmar.
• Rose Marie  –  The 1924 operetta gets made into a mediocre Mervyn LeRoy film.
• The Unholy Four  –  Another Terence Fisher / Hammer noir film, this one with a way-past-her-prime Paulette Goddard.  Based on the novel A Stranger Came Home, apparently ghost-written by Leigh Brackett (of The Big Sleep and The Empire Strikes Back fame) for actor George Sanders.
• The Adventures of Hajji Baba  –  Based on the early 19th century adventure novels by James Justinian Morier but is entirely forgettable.
• The Sun Shines Bright  –  One of the weakest John Ford films, taken from Irvin S. Cobb stories which makes this a quasi-sequel to Judge Priest.
• The Elusive Pimpernel  –  A 1950 Powell / Pressburger film that finally made it to the States.  One of their weakest films, a new version of The Scarlet Pimpernel with David Niven in the lead.
• Elephant Walk  –  This was supposed to be an Olivier / Leigh film but ended up with Liz Taylor and Peter Finch.  Based on the novel by Robert Standish.  Low-level **.5.
• Romeo and Juliet  –  BAFTA nominated for Best British Screenplay which baffles me.  But it was also nominated for Best Film and Best British Film, so they clearly liked it a lot more than I did.  It really is very sub-par in spite of having Laurence Harvey as Romeo.  High-level **.
• The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe  –  Even Luis Buñuel can make a bad film.  Bizarrely, this was nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars.
• Three Coins in the Fountain  –  Ridiculous romance based on the novel Coins in the Fountain that somehow managed to earn a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars.  Fully reviewed here and I am not kind to it.
• Living it Up  –  A Martin and Lewis comedy based on a Ben Hecht musical.  I suppose you might like it if you like Martin and Lewis but I don’t.
• The Last Time I Saw Paris  –  More weak films from good directors, this is Richard Brooks doing an adaptation of Scott Fitzgerald’s story “Babylon Revisited.”
• Prince Valiant  –  I have always been a comic strip guy.  I have an entire bookcase overflowing with comic strip collections.  But I never read much Prince Valiant, even in collected form, because it’s just too long of a story.  The film version has talented stars (James Mason, Janet Leigh) and a notable director (Henry Hathaway) but just never really comes to life.
• The Egyptian  –  Based on the novel by Mika Waltari, this is one of Michael Curtiz’ later films and I think it’s his worst.  It stars Victor Mature and that should tell you all you need to know.
• The Silver Chalice  –  The worst film of the year, in spite of Paul Newman’s film debut.  Based on one of the best-selling novels of 1953, you should do what Paul Newman implored people to do and not watch it.  I wrote a full review of it here.

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen:

• Julius Caesar  –  A 1950 version of the play made by a graduate student in Chicago with a very young Charlton Heston as Mark Antony.  Received an LA release in 1950 and is listed at oscars.org but I haven’t been able to find it.

Justice League of America #200

• Writer:  Gerry Conway
• Artists:  listed below
• Published:  March, 1982
• Publisher:  DC Comics
• Pages:  72
• First Line:  “They came from space, seven glowing meteors containing seven alien claimants for another world’s throne.”
• Last Line:  “Snapping?  Cripes, now he’s got me doing it!”
• First Read:  Early 1984?

My comic collecting began a bit haphazardly.  There were a number of random comics that my brothers had from when we lived in New York that had somehow ended up in my room.  My brothers both collected comics, and I would read what they had so I didn’t yet feel the need to buy any myself (and all my money in the early 80’s was going towards either Star Wars figures or baseball cards).  The first comic I remember buying was All-Star Squadron #31 at a drugstore on the day after Christmas in 1983.  But my older brother Kelly was collecting both Avengers and Justice League of America, the two major team books of the comics world and I started to gravitate towards them.  I liked the idea of books that combined so many characters.  Unlike Fantastic Four (which my brother John would collect) and X-Men (which all three of us would eventually collect), books in which the teams consisted of characters who didn’t have their own comics (yes, it’s true, there was a time when Wolverine appeared only in X-Men), Avengers and JLA were like getting several comics for the price of one because they each had so many characters who each had their own books.  While Kelly would collect a lot of books moving forward, I immediately began looking back into the past.  I became interested in what came before.  I wanted the whole story.  I had never heard of something called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder back then.

I wouldn’t start buying new issues of Justice League of America until #236, and after that it was still haphazardly depending on what I could find at the closest liquor store or 7-11 until I was old enough to ride my bike across town to the two comic shops in Orange.  But, on a rare trip to a comic book shop no longer in existence down by Chapman, where both my parents worked, I found a used copy of Justice League of America #200 and it was a revelation.  It was 72 pages, a massive story that made full use of comic history, though I didn’t know it at the time.  My comics history was still limited, of course, and though I loved it right from the start, it wasn’t until years later that I really could appreciate it for how great it was.

Team books have been the hallmark at DC since early on.  The Justice Society of America was founded in 1940, the first team book, teaming up what were the heaviest hitters and starting to make them a shared universe instead of just separate worlds that each had their own hero.  It was a great sales idea – for people who couldn’t afford to get issues with every hero currently available, at least they could buy All-Star Comics and see them all together teamed up in the JSA.  Except, there really wasn’t much teamwork going on.  There was a pretty standard formula followed in almost every JSA story – the heroes would gather at the beginning, find out the villain, then each hero would have their own chapter, and then they would all come back together at the end.  It’s a great concept, but reading almost any old JSA story is actually pretty painful today.  The problem is that, when the JSA was re-invented as the JLA in 1959, they decided not to do anything with that formula.  So, if you go back through the JLA Archives books that DC sells (and which, at one point, I owned), you keep seeing all these great characters who are rarely actually working together.  It wasn’t actually until decades later that DC finally started coming up with a better approach to its major team book.  It never stopped me from reading it, but today, when most of the comics I read are books I check out from the library, I don’t even attempt to find early JLA stories; they’re just not very good.  Which brings me back around to #200.

This book is steeped in history and it’s that’s part of the reason it’s still one of the best single issues of the series, maybe the best.  First of all, it does exactly what I just complained about – it takes all the individual members of the league and splits them all up.  However, it does it in a much more interesting way that works well for the story, as I will explain below.

Chapter One:  Firestorm the Nuclear Man vs. Manhunter from Mars  (art by Patrick Broderick & Terry Austin)

This was my introduction to the Martian Manhunter, who would become one of my favorite comic characters.  Several years ago, when I got rid of my comic collection and also got rid of most of my comic based toys, I kept the Martian Manhunter Secret Powers figure.  But I also liked Firestorm, because my brother collected his comic and I got to read them all.  Pat Broderick would become the regular Firestorm artist, which began a few months after this issue and this was probably his try-out, as he had just left Marvel and come to DC.  Terry Austin, on the other hand, had long been respected as one of the best inkers in the business, having done the inks for the great Claremont / Byrne run on X-Men.

This was a great open to the issue – first we get a little recap of the JLA origin, then a magnificent two-page splash of the JLA satellite (clearly drawn by George Pérez), and then here comes Martian Manhunter slamming through the wall of the satellite, kicking the crap out of Firestorm, and then fleeing the satellite with the Appelaxian meteor that we know about from reading the opening bit on the origin.  Now, we’re suddenly into the story with a great burst of action and the call goes out to the rest of the leagues.  But none of the original leaguers show up and Green Arrow, the hero who’s been with the group the longest (and had actually quit the league – this will be his way back into the league) explains why and we get the split-up so each chapter can have its own individual battle.

Chapter Two:  Aquaman vs. Red Tornado  (art by Jim Aparo)

Now that we know the story, we meet a tangential character, The Phantom Stranger, which brings me to another great part of this story.  This issue was a 72 page story with no ads in it.  That meant, that there was no ad on either the back cover or the interior of either the front or back covers.  Instead, the cover is a full page spread of the entire league battling each other, while the interiors of the covers were used to tell the history of the league.  So, even if you didn’t know who The Phantom Stranger was, he is mentioned in the history of the league that covers the first 200 issues.  I don’t know that any other anniversary has ever been treated to such a great production – so many pages, with no ads, and the history of what came before this issue.

So, now we enter the next part.  Now we come to one of the artists who was known for a specific character – Jim Aparo.  He had done the complete art (pencils, inks and even lettering) for the Aquaman series for years when he first came to work for DC in 1968.  His weather looks fantastic, and it makes for a great battle between Aquaman, emerging from the waves, Red Tornado, and his weather based powers, and even the intervention of The Phantom Stranger with a magnificent burst of lightning.

Chapter Three:  Zatanna vs. Wonder Woman  (art by Dick Giordano)

With Wonder Woman headed to get her meteor from Paradise Island, where no man can walk, it’s up to Zatanna to take her on.  While Zatanna easily has the power to take on Wonder Woman, Princess Diana has strategy on her side.  In the new Justice League in 2007 (which may be a future post), when the entire team is captured and Batman only has time to free one member, she’s the one he chooses because she’s the best melee fighter.

Dick Giordano at this time was mainly an editor (he was the managing editor for DC) but he had done various art work over the years (included inking some very famous runs by Neal Adams) and had been the penciller for Wonder Woman during a key part of her history in the early 70’s.

Chapter Four:  Green Lantern vs. The Atom  (art by Gil Kane)

Gil Kane is the first of three artists here who is featured in a great book I have called The Silver Age of Comic Book Art.  Kane is a key player in comic history if, for no other reason, because in the mid-60’s he was the first person to openly work for DC and Marvel at the same time (others did it, but used pseudonyms).  But, that wasn’t the only reason.  He co-created two of the key Silver Age characters for DC, Hal Jordan (Green Lantern) and Ray Palmer (The Atom).  He would also draw two of the most important Spider-Man stories (the drug stories that broke with the Comic Code and the death of Gwen Stacy).  His chapter is great because it allows him to return to two characters that he was the first to draw and it really hearkens back to the Silver Age.

Chapter Five:  The Flash vs. The Elongated Man  (art by Carmine Infantino & Frank Giacoia)

If Gil Kane is a major heavy hitter of the Silver Age, that’s nothing compared to Carmine Infantino.  Whether you like his work or not, you can not minimize the historic importance of Carmine Infantino.  He did not have a hand in creating nearly as many characters as Jack Kirby did, but his vital role really makes him the artist that gave birth to the Silver Age.  The Golden Age began with the creation of Superman in 1938 and ended somewhere between 1949 and 1953, depending on how you want to count it.  But there’s no argument over when the Silver Age of Comic Books began – it was with the creation of Barry Allen, the new Flash in Showcase #4, cover-dated October, 1956.  That issue was drawn by Carmine Infantino.  He actually drew a lot of seminal Silver Age comics and I wrote a piece on him when he died because I felt his importance was over-looked when he died.

Like with Gil Kane, both the heroes involved here were co-created by Infantino.  It was another classic return to characters that had been developed under his hand.  In fact, the year before this issue, Infantino had returned as the penciller for Flash, where he would stay until the comic was cancelled in the lead-in to Crisis on Infinite Earths and in his very first issue back, he had Flash and Elongated Man face off against each other (my brother Kelly collected Flash at that time, so I was very familiar with Infantino’s work with the character).  Infantino brings real emotion to the fight between two friends and also makes good use of Flash’s powers in a way that isn’t normally used.  Infantino, of course, is also featured in The Silver Age of Comic Book Art.

Chapter Six:  Green Arrow and Black Canary vs. Batman  (art by Brian Bolland)

Unlike most of the artists in this issue, Brian Bolland was an artist on the rise.  He had been “discovered” in Britain and brought over to work at DC, mostly on covers at this point.  Ironically, Bolland (whose art in this issue seems to owe something to Neal Adams, who had famously drawn both Batman and Green Arrow in massively critically acclaimed runs in the early 70’s) would later become an important Batman artist, including work on Batman #400 and drawing The Killing Joke, one of the most famous of all graphic novels.

Chapter Seven:  Hawkman vs. Superman  (art by Joe Kubert)

Joe Kubert was one of the longest lasting comic book artists.  His work with Hawkman actually began back in the Golden Age.  He pencilled some of the late adventures of the Golden Age Hawkman, as well as several issues of All-Star, which featured Hawkman as the chairman of the Justice Society of America.  So, in 1961, when Hawkman was the next character up for a revival (rather late, it seems to me, given how important he was in the Golden Age), it was Joe Kubert who was turned to as the artist.  Kubert, like Kane and Infantino is in The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, of course.  But they are also featured in a book that had a major impact on my love of comics.  It’s called Secret Origins of the Super DC Heroes.  It’s long out of print now, but you can find it for sale online.  I used to devour it at the Taft Branch of the Orange Public Library as a kid because it had origins for all the major DC heroes, and it had both the original Golden Age versions, as well as the Silver Age versions, so I have been reading the origin stories drawn by Kane, Infantino and Kubert for decades.  About a decade ago I bought a copy online and I kept it when most of my collection was sold.  Kubert’s work on Hawkman in that issue is great, and Kubert himself would go on to form a school of drawing comic book art and two of his sons would become artists themselves.

This chapter is in some ways the most interesting, because you would think that it’s a huge power differential (which it is, of course – for storytelling reasons they didn’t have Firestorm take on Superman which would have made more sense), but Hawkman uses his wits and strategy, and comes off well until the conclusion.  The ending also allows a cameo appearance from Adam Strange, an honorary JLA member.

Conclusion:

And, now we’re back to the amazing work of George Pérez.  With the meteors gathered together, the original members of the League realize they’ve been duped and they are quickly overcome.  But the rest of the group catches up to them and for the first (and only time), we have the entire membership of the league united in one group shot, drawn by the always awesome George Pérez.  Pérez might very well be my favorite comic book artist of all-time (with his major competition being John Byrne and Jim Lee), and I have a book about his work.  He was drawing JLA regularly at this time, having recently left the Avengers (and in fact had drawn Avengers #200, so it was appropriate to have him here) and he was the star of the industry at this time because of his work on New Teen Titans.  In the final three chapters of the book, the original foe that brought about the formation of the League in the first place is dispatched by the entire League working together in perfect harmony (although, in three different teams).

This issue was the start of my JLA collection.  I would, by the time I stopped collecting, either through actual issues or the Archives hardcover books, own the vast majority of issues of the original 261 issue run of the book.  When I look back at those issues, getting things from the library, most of it wasn’t very good.  Too much of it relied on spotty story-telling and the art wasn’t great during the early years.  But this issue is so very right in so many ways, from the way it hearkens back to the old story-telling, to the magnificent use of all the classic artists, to the teamwork that brings us to the conclusion (they even talk Green Arrow into rejoining the League).  In later years, there would be various ups and downs to the League, the more humor-based Justice League of the late 80’s and early 90’s, to the (in my opinion) over-rated run by Grant Morrison, to the fantastic revival, both in story-telling and art, in the stretch between Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis.  But, in the first 25 years of the League’s existence, this was absolutely the pinnacle.

PULVER: Captain, this is Ensign Pulver. I just threw your palm trees overboard. Now what’s all this crap about no movie tonight? (He throws the door open, banging it against the bulkhead, and is entering the CAPTAIN’s cabin) Curtain.

My Top 10:

1. Mister Roberts
2. East of Eden
3. To Catch a Thief
4. Picnic
5. Bad Day at Black Rock
6. The Man with the Golden Arm
7. The Heart of the Matter
8. Lady and the Tramp
9. Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto
10. Ugetsu

Note:  This year has one of the longest lists of this era, with several more mentioned down towards the bottom of the post.

Consensus Nominees:

1. Marty  (160 pts)
2. Interrupted Melody  (80 pts)
3. Mister Roberts  (80 pts)
4. East of Eden  (80 pts)
5. Bad Day at Black Rock  (80 pts)
6. The Blackboard Jungle  (80 pts)

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay):

• The Country Girl
• The Caine Mutiny
• Rear Window
• Sabrina

Note:  Love Me or Leave Me was the fifth nominee, but it also won Best Motion Picture Story, defining it as an original script.  Thankfully we’re almost done with the inane way the Oscars split the writing awards into three categories.

Oscar Nominees  (Best Story and Screenplay):

• Interrupted Melody

Note:  Yes, the winner of what was essentially the Best Original Screenplay category isn’t original – it’s based on an autobiography.

WGA Awards:

Drama:

• Marty
• Bad Day at Black Rock
• The Blackboard Jungle
• East of Eden
• Picnic

Comedy:

• Mister Roberts
• Phffft
• The Seven Year Itch
• The Tender Trap
• To Catch a Thief

Musical:

• Daddy Long Legs
• Guys and Dolls
• Oklahoma

Nominees that are Original:  Love Me or Leave Me, It’s Always Fair Weather

My Top 10

Mister Roberts

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film once, during the Best Picture project.  It is a great film, with one of the all-time best endings, one I have loved since high school when I was introduced to it by my mother.

The Source:

Mister Roberts by Thomas Heggen  (1946)  /  Mister Roberts by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan  (1948)

The original novel by Thomas Heggen, published in 1946, though the same in the general outlook of things, and certainly in the major events (notably, the palm trees, the death, and the finale), is much different in the particulars.  That’s because it wasn’t then envisioned with Henry Fonda as Roberts.  In the original novel, Roberts is still in his twenties, a man who interrupted his time at medical school to volunteer for the war.  It also makes much more use of the other officers on the ship (there are a number of them other than Roberts and Pulver, though you would never know that from the film).  Overall, the novel is a far cry inferior to the film.

The play, however, is a different story altogether.  Most of what we get in the film is straight from the play, including a lot of the best lines.  There are a few added scenes for the film (when Doc is actually dealing with the men at the beginning, some particulars of the men returning from liberty) and a few things that are changed (the nurses coming on board, which really irked Joshua Logan), but a lot of the play made it intact from the stage to the screen, although it might not have had John Ford stayed on the film (see below).  It is a great play and it must have been great to see Fonda on stage in the role.  There is one great line that didn’t make the play because of the censors (Logan discusses it in his autobiography) – Doc questions how Pulver got something and Roberts replies “How does Frank get anything?  How did he get the clap last year?”  They used the line once and were warned never to use it again.

The Adaptation:

“After his long stage run in the title role, Fonda had a fiercely protective attitude toward the play.  He resented the tinkering Ford had done with screenwriter and playwright John Patrick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Teahouse of the August Moon, and with Frank Nugent, whose shooting script incorporated some material Logan had jettisoned from the novel.  Concerned that Ford had lost much of the play’s poignancy by overemphasizing its comedic aspects, Ford resented the way he changed the timing of lines and added bits of comic business.” (Searching for John Ford, Joseph McBride, p 547)

“In looking at the rushes, I didn’t like the way Bill Powell was because they played him as a drunk, and I changed him back to the way it was in the play.” (Mervyn LeRoy, quoted in Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute, ed. George Stevens, Jr, p 155)

Joshua Logan was given a partial screenwriter’s credit.  In his book Movie Stars, Real People and Me, Logan explains how he was brought in after filming was done to reshape the film from what LeRoy and Ford had shot and that he didn’t actually write any of it, but it wasn’t felt he could be listed as a third director.  As explained above, most of the film comes direct from the play, while only some of the concept dates back to the original novel.  It was really the play that made all the changes.

The Credits:

Directed by John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy.  Screen Play by Frank Nugent and Joshua Logan.  Based on the play by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan.  From the novel by Thomas Heggen as produced on the stage by Leland Hayward.

East of Eden

The Film:

I reviewed this film already, in my Nighthawk Awards, as one of the five best films of the year.  Given its four major Oscar nominations and that the director (who was nominated) had won Best Picture the year before, I still can’t fathom how it got passed over for Love is a Many-Splendored Thing.  It was also the first (and still one of only two) winner of Best Picture – Drama at the Globes to fail to earn an Oscar nomination.  If you have never seen this film, it is essential viewing, not only because it is a great film made from a great book (rare enough) but also because it shows, a bit more than Rebel Without a Cause, the full range of Dean’s emotional acting and is the best evidence that he could have remained a great actor had he lived and not just a young star.

The Source:

East of Eden by John Steinbeck  (1952)

The first time I read this novel, in 2003, I thought it was a very good novel, but something about it didn’t quite work for me.  Perhaps I thought it was trying to do too much?  It is an epic story of a family that begins with the grandfather on a farm in Connecticut and ends with the grandson mourning the father he desperately loves and only wants to receive love from in return in California.  It is a story of a family, but also a story of California itself.  So, several years ago, when I was on a real California book kick (fiction and non-fiction alike), I read it again and I was surprised by how good it was.  At the time, I was in the midst of the Top 100 novels posts.  Had I re-read it before that project began, I would have included it, but I had set the list for the course of the project, so when I put it in my second 100, I noted it as one of three books that really belonged in the Top 100 but were excluded because of my process.

Aside from the characters who spring to life, not only the ones that fans of the film will know like Adam Trask and his twin sons, but also Samuel Hamilton, the crafty old farmer who helps Adam out at key moments (and was John Steinbeck’s grandfather) but is dead before the action of the film takes place, but Adam’s half-brother, his unloving father, the darker moments of the history of Cathy, his wife who leaves him and his sons behind, there is also the story of the land itself.  It takes almost 250 pages for Trask to reach California (though Steinbeck is just as good with the descriptions of life in the East that he provides) but when he does, we really settle into the California land.

A new country seems to follow a pattern.  First come the openers, strong and brave and rather childlike.  They can take care of themselves in a wilderness, but they are naïve and helpless against men, and perhaps this is why they went out in the first place.  When the rough edges are worn off the new land, businessmen and lawyers come in to help with the development – to solve problems of ownership, usually be removing the temptations to themselves.  And finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out of the pain of living.  And culture can be on any level, and is.

The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously.  And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing.  But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.

That is Steinbeck writing about the West, and later, he will be more specific when describing the brothels in Salinas.  This novel comes to life so well because it is a perfect mixture in describing the land and the family that comes to the land.  When I was younger, I was big on Of Mice and Men, because its simple allegorical story appealed to the idealist in me.  But, older now, I look at East of Eden as the second Steinbeck masterpiece, behind The Grapes of Wrath.

The Adaptation:

As an adaptation, there is both a negative way and a positive way to think of this film and they are actually opposite views of the same decision.

The positive view hinges around the decision, wisely in my opinion, the discard the first 3/4 of the book.  The book is divided into four parts and the film only covers the last part (and even cuts the first forty pages of it).  The novel runs 778 pages in my Penguin paperback and the film begins on page 587.  Given how much story is encompassed in the first 586 pages, how much characters age, how many years pass, the only way you could possibly do justice to the entire novel is to film it as a television mini-series (like was done in 1981 – that version is worth watching for the performances from Jane Seymour (greatly expanded from this film) and Lloyd Bridges (whose character was completely excised from this film for good reasons)).  So, it was smart to cut down to what they used in the film and they do a rather faithful adaptation of the material that they do use.

The negative way to approach the adaptation is not about the cutting of most of the book.  I doubt anyone would complain about that decision – otherwise the film would have been too unwieldy, too long and too rushed.  But there is an argument to be made about the things we know about the characters that don’t show up in the film because of actions that occur before the film begins, things like how Aron has always been in love with Alma, but she has always actually found Cal more interesting, or the brutal history of Cathy and what she has done to reach the point she is at.  I have talked before about some films are unfaithful to the original source, but true to the characters.  There is an argument to be made that while East of Eden is fairly faithful to the part of the novel that it adapts that it is also unfaithful to the characters as they are developed through the entire novel.

Either way, what it comes down to is that Kazan and Paul Osborn managed to take a great novel, a great long novel and make a great film out of it, and even though they dropped a lot of the book to do it, it remains an achievement that happens all too rarely.  In fact, it’s the first Top 100 Novel to be made into a **** film since 1947.

The Credits:

Directed by Elia Kazan. Screen Play by Paul Osborn. The only mention of the source is the title card: John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

To Catch a Thief

The Film:

I reviewed this film as one of the five best films of the year in my Nighthawk Awards.  You should see it if no other reason than because it stars the most beautiful actress who ever lived in the role where she looks the best.  But really, you should watch it because it is not only a great Hitchcock film, but one of the most fun ones at that.

The Source:

To Catch a Thief by David Dodge (1952)

This is, I would say, a pretty typical source material for a Hitchcock film. It’s a light thriller, with a former cat burglar who is now being hunted for a number of thefts of high profile jewels along the Riviera where he lives. He then decides to hunt down the guilty party himself. There is really not a whole lot more to it than that – it was successful enough for Hitchcock to buy the rights and forgettable enough that it’s basically been forgotten except as source material for the film.

This is definitely a book that deserves to stay in print, as part of some crime series and if you get a chance, it’s definitely worth a read.

The Adaptation:

The basic premise for the film is the same. The eventual culprit is the same. There is even a female who fills a similar role to the one that Grace Kelly plays in the film. But really, most of the details and pretty much every line of dialogue is different in the film. The film takes a light thriller and makes a classic out of it.

The Credits:

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by John Michael Hayes. Based on the novel by David Dodge.

Picnic

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as a Best Picture nominee.  It doesn’t have a great reputation today (Roger Ebert wrote a rather negative review of it when it was re-released at one point), but I think it is still a great film.

The Source:

Picnic by William Inge (1953)

Picnic was part of a short stretch when the quality of Drama was transformed into the quality of film. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and then was turned into a film that was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. That had only happened with one Pulitzer winner from 1939 to 1952 (A Streetcar Named Desire). After 1956, it would take until 1982 before there would be another Pulitzer winner that would eventually spawn an Oscar nominee. But from 1953 to 1956, there were three: Picnic, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Diary of Anne Frank.

Picnic is a good drama, a look at what happens in a small town when an outsider, specifically one with sexual appeal (and a sexual appetite) comes in. What does it do to the man’s friend, to suddenly have a rival for his girl? What does it do for his girl, to have this hunk suddenly placed in front of her, working hard, sweating next door. What does it do for her younger sister, who knows that her brains will hopefully be her eventual ticket out of town, but can’t help but look at the man anyway. How will it affect the school teacher, who is lost within her own sexuality? Inge approaches all of these questions. It’s a similar town to the one in Our Town, but that was in the years between the wars and now the country has changed. Trains and buses come from this small town and people long to escape. Who will escape and what will they find outside the comfort of their own homes? The young man doesn’t mean the be the engine of this change, but he can’t help causing trouble wherever he goes. It’s a strong play, with well developed characters that are, in the words of Bruce Springsteen, “livin in their own skin and can’t stand the company.”

The Adaptation:

Like with Elia Kazan in A Streetcar Named Desire, this play belongs somewhat to the director. That’s because in both cases, the director of the film was also the same man who had directed the play originally on Broadway. Plays, much more so than scripts, often are the product more of the original author. But the initial director can also have a lot of input on how it works on stage and sometimes even in the development process, even when working with an experienced playwright. That Joshua Logan would then also direct the film version gives him even more of a hand in the process.

What happens with the film is an opening up of the play, not just of allowing more scenes outside of the original locals (such as having the scene at Alan’s house, really showing how rich he is compared to the rest of the town, but also the way things are filmed. This film was made with Cinemascope and it really shows in the opening scenes when William Holden arrives in town (an arrival that takes place before the play begins, but which we see on film) and at the end, where we can see both his departing train and Kim Novak’s departing bus in the same shot.

It is true that William Holden was really far too old to be starring in this film. He has the requisite looks and physique and he does well considering he is too old, but they never should have put him in the film.

The Credits:

Directed by Joshua Logan. Screen Play by Daniel Taradash. Based upon the play “Picnic” by William Inge. Produced on the stage by Theatre Guild and Joshua Logan.

Bad Day at Black Rock

The Film:

I reviewed this film before as one of the five best films of the year.  More importantly, while I have been hard on Spencer Tracy for a lot of his Oscar nominated performances, this is probably my favorite performance of his.

The Source:

“Bad Time at Honda” by Howard Breslin (1947)

This is a short little cross between a morality play and a western. A mysterious man gets off a train in a tiny little western town. He wants to go out to a desolate part of the county, looking for a man. He finds a burned out wreck and he is shot at. Eventually, his very presence will cause the town to turn on itself and he discovers that the man, a Japanese, was killed after Pearl Harbor (the actual killing was accidental, in a bizarre twist). The mysterious man had just wanted to tell the Japanese man that his son had died in Italy during the war. Having done what he could, having seen what he’s seen, he then departs and leaves the town torn apart.

The Adaptation:

The basic idea comes straight from the story, though Honda becomes Bad Rock. Some of the particulars come from the story – the mystery of the man coming off the train, the desolation out at the Japanese man’s house. But the entire second half of the story – the way he is told the truth and the town tears itself apart – is entirely changed. That wouldn’t have been particularly filmable, so they give it something more cinematic.

If you are interested in the process that resulted in the film, there are several pages devoted to it in Spencer Tracy: A Biography by James Curtis (pages 666-670).  It was a project that really only producer Dore Schary believed in, but eventually the results were well worth it.

The Credits:

Directed by John Sturges.  Screen Play by Millard Kaufman.  Adaptation by Don McGuire.  Based On a Story by Howard Breslin.

The Man with the Golden Arm

The Film:

A man returns home from prison.  He returns back to the slums of the north side of Chicago.  His wife is in a wheelchair, a chair she ended up in because of a car crash her husband was responsible for.  Pressure builds on him from all over because he is the man with the golden arm.  But why is his arm golden?  It is because he’s a drug addict and his arm is where the drugs go in and provide a sheen of gold that covers over the darkness of his life, darkness of his own making?  Or is his arm golden because he’s a talented drummer who’s trying to find a way back to that life, creating a beat that will allow him to escape without falling back to the drugs that he was able to purge from his system in prison?  Perhaps his arm is golden because his best talent is dealing cards and there are those who want him back in that life because to them it means money.

This was a bold and daring film to make in 1955.  The Production Code was never going to allow the sympathetic story of a drug addict.  It was not going to allow a look into the life that pushed him into drugs and that is threatening even now, when he is clean, to push him back.  But Otto Preminger, for all his faults, was a bold and daring filmmaker.  He was willing to make the film and release it without the Code seal just as he had done two years before with The Moon is Blue.  While much of what was daring about The Moon is Blue now seems tame (even if the film itself still actually holds up because of its wit and performances), The Man with the Golden Arm still stands out, over 60 years after it was first released.  A lot of the credit for that goes with Preminger, first for making the film, second, for bringing to it the best of his directing talent and third, for not putting a sheen of gold over the proceedings, keeping things in the slums, with the tenement buildings, with drug addicts and strip clubs, with sleazy card games.

But part of the success for this film most certainly goes to Frank Sinatra.  In 1953, desperate to prove he was a real actor and not just a singing pretty boy, Sinatra was down on his knees begging for the part of Maggio in From Here to Eternity and he (deservedly) won the Oscar for it.  In this year, the same year where he would play a charming womanizer in The Tender Trap and a more sanitized version of the criminal life in Guys and Dolls, he would reach down into the depths of his soul to pull forth his performance as Frankie Machine.  Desperate not to fall back into addiction after his release from prison, he finds himself in a jail cell after a friend gives him a stolen suit.  He pushes him up against the bars, trying not to hear the screams behind him of another addict going through withdrawal pains.  Frankie knows there’s a way out – his old boss who runs an illegal card game wants Frankie back dealing for him again and is willing to get him out of the jail cell.  But that would mean a step back into that life he just escaped.  But there are those screams behind him and he just has to get away from them.

When compared to a film like Trainspotting, it would be easy to dismiss The Man with the Golden Arm as a more old-fashioned look at a drug addict.  But the combination of Preminger’s direction and Sinatra’s performance make certain it is shouldn’t be forgotten and that it hasn’t aged.  There are also strong performances from Eleanor Parker (as the crippled wife of Frankie who it turns out isn’t so crippled after all) and Kim Novak (amazing that she should be so good as a former flame who encourages him to return to drumming when she was just eye candy in Picnic in this same year).  The film doesn’t follow the novel all the way into the darkness (see below), but this is a story of Frankie and we want to see something better for him than what he has gotten so far because Sinatra’s performance has pulled at our sympathies.  We hope for something better for him.

The Source:

The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren  (1949)

I had high expectations of this book that it did not meet.  It is not a bad book, far from it.  But I expected something much more, something that would put this book somewhere on the list of great books I have read and it just never got there.  Yes, it does a good job with life on the lower end of the scale in Chicago in the years after the war.  I don’t see the “radical critique of American Society” that Chris Fujiwara describes.  It is a good novel, with a good solid central character of Frankie Machine, a man who is desperately hanging on with everything he’s got only in the end only “To rustle away down the last dark wall of all.”

Part of what I must admit didn’t work for me is the dialogue – so much of it in the language of a lower world (somewhere between what we call civilization and the underworld) that makes it hard to understand.

The Adaptation:

There are a lot of books about Preminger because he was such a daring filmmaker.  Because this was one of his most important (and artistically successful) films, they spend a lot of time on the preparation and execution of the film.  So, I’m just going with the quotes down below as they pretty much summarize things.

“[Algren] was an amusing, intelligent man but he couldn’t write dialogue or visualize scenes. He was purely a novelist, a storyteller. I had to get another writer, Walter Newman, to prepare the script.” (Preminger: An Autobiography. Otto Preminger. 1977, p 111)

“Preminger looked around for another ‘hard-hitting writer’ to do the script. When Walter Newman (having been sounded out by Ingo about his interest and availability) first met Preminger, the director told him that he saw Golden Arm ‘as a murder mystery.’ Preminger’s remark suggest that he already had in mind some version of a crucial plot twist introduced by the film. In both the novel and the film, Frankie’s wife, Zosh, was injured in a car driven by Frankie and is now wheelchair-bound. In the film, it’s Zosh, not Frankie, who kills the drug pusher Louie – to prevent him from exposing her secret: the she has been feigning paraplegia in order to exploit Frankie’s guilt and keep him from leaving her.” (The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger. Chris Fujiwara. 2008, p 185)

“Over a series of daylong sessions, the director and the writer worked out a dramatic line for the film. The crucial change from the novel was to make Frankie Machine (who, in Algren’s book, ends up hanging himself while on the run from the police) a protagonist who struggles to change his life and wins. ‘This provided the necessary conflict and I think made it workable as a film,’ said Newman. According to Newman, ‘I worked very hard to use as much of the book as I could, as many of the people, as much of the dialogue, as many of the incidents as I could – except that I turned them upside down.’ In the novel, Frankie is first exposed to morphine in an army field hospital in France while recuperating from a battle wound. Preminger decided to eliminate the war wound and medication as excuses for Frankie’s drug use in order to widen the application of the story and to emphasize the psychological, rather than physical, aspects of addiction.” (Fujiwara, p 186)

“Preminger sought to make Frankie Machine a character whom middle-class audiences could identify with. In doing so, the film eliminates an important dimension of the novel, the radical critique of American society that Algren announces in the first chapter of the book, which describes Frankie and his fellow jail-cell occupants as sharing ‘the great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one.’ By elevating Frankie in class (and by removing Algren’s important insistence that the police manhunt for Frankie is driven by ward politics), Preminger makes Frankie a hero responsible for his fate instead of a victim of specific social and political forces.” (Fujiwara, p 186-187)

“Preminger’s intention was to wrestle a standard sensation melodrama out of Algren’s literary web. He and his writers give Frankie’s drug addiction far more prominence than it has in the novel, where in fact it was an afterthought, an addition encouraged by the novelist’s agent. And they twist the story in order to conjure a spurious Hollywood ending in which Molly helps Frankie to kick his habit.” (Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King by Foster Hirsch, p 236)

What Hirsch doesn’t mention but alludes to in that quote above is that in the book, Frankie, who is pursued because he accidentally killed Louie (rather than Zosh, as in the book, as mentioned in the first Fujiwara quote), ends up committing suicide, a bleak ending to the book that the film avoids by having Frankie walk away with Molly, trying to find a chance at life.

The Credits:

produced and directed by Otto Preminger.  screenplay by Walter Newman and Lewis Meltzer.  from the novel by Nelson Algren.

The Heart of the Matter

The Film:

I reviewed this film already as the under-appreciated film of 1954.  Of course, that was before I had oscars.org as a resource to determine definitively that this film would have been Oscar eligible in 1955 and it got moved to that year.

The Source:

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (1948)

One of the best novels from one of the best writers.  That’s not me being hyperbolic.  Graham Greene is one of only seven writers to have three Top 100 novels and one of only four to have five Top 200 novels.  I ranked this novel as #65 all-time, which makes it Greene’s second best book, though there are many who would say it is his best.

The Adaptation:

Unfortunately, while the film is available in a great Graham Greene box set on DVD in the UK (also including Brighton Rock, The Third Man and The Fallen Idol), it is still not available on DVD in the US.  So, while I have seen the film, it was years ago.  I do remember the film mostly being faithful to the book with one whopping exception (because of the Code, most likely).  In the book, Scobie, the main character, ends up committing suicide.  But in the film, he is actually killed (though you could say he was ostensibly committing suicide).

The Credits:

Directed by George More O’Ferrall.  Script by Ian Dalrymple.  Adaptation by Lesley Storm.  From the novel by Graham Greene.  Credits courtesy of the IMDb.

Lady and the Tramp

The Film:

I saw the classic Disney films in kind of a random order.  That has to do with Disney’s method of dealing with home video releases of their films and the way they go in and out of the vault.  By the fall of 1997, I had seen the major films with one exception: this one.  That was the case when I moved to Phoenix and discovered a really great video over by campus that I doubt is there anymore.  They had certain videos that were really hard to find that they kept separately.  You either had to be a member in good standing (had rented 50 movies without late problems or lost videos or something like that) or leave a deposit of $200 to rent any of these movies.  By that time, I so wanted to see this film that I actually gave them the deposit so that I could finally see this.  I just hoped it would live up to my hopes.  It did.  It immediately became one of my favorites of the classic Disney films (in my opinion, the best since Bambi) and when, the following year, they pulled it back out of the vault I instantly bought it on video, the same video copy I watched so that I could write this review.

So, what is it that makes this film so good?  I ranked it #7 in my ranked list of the first 50 Disney films, which means I put it above even Aladdin and Snow White.  I think a big part of it is that this film is a romance but without the distraction of a princess.  It’s all very well for the Disney films to have a princess.  But this is more of a class difference romance.  There is the upper-class girl, living a sheltered life, with her well-bred friends who suddenly meets a bit of a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks and they fall in love.  It doesn’t happen right away, of course.  She has to see that he really has a heart of gold.  He has to see that there’s more to her than just her good looks.  They both have to learn how much the other cares, not just about each other, but about the world around them.  When the big dramatic moment comes, when the horrifying rat threatens the baby, it’s both of them that spring into action, both of them willing to risk everything to do the right thing.  It’s a beautiful romance between two people who really are right for each other, complete with a lovely movie romantic scene, a beautiful song in the background (“Bella Notte”) and a lovely dinner to go with it (when watching this for the review, I joked with Veronica that we would need to have spaghetti and meatballs for dinner).

So the couple at the heart of the film are dogs.  So what?  It doesn’t make the romance any less real.  It doesn’t make the other characters in the film, from the horrid Siamese cats (is horrid redundant once you read the words cats?) to the loyal Jock, to the gruff Trusty who doesn’t want to admit he’s past his prime.  The characters are realistic and they act in all the ways that we might expect.  The film brings vivid characters to life, has a wonderful romance at its core and even has some really fun moments (like when the beaver has to chew off Lady’s muzzle).  It’s a complete story, all in itself and it doesn’t even need a bunch of songs to pad the action like so many Disney films do.  It can just rest on the wonderful writing.

The Source:

“Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog” by Ward Greene  (1937?)

I wish I could find the original story, but it’s hard enough even determining precisely what the original story is and where it appeared.  Some places list variations on that title.  I have seen dates for the original story as 1937, 1939, 1943 and 1945.  Either way, I have been unable to find the original story and compare it to what was done in the film, which is definitely considerably different because of all the other aspects that weren’t from the original story (see below).

The Adaptation:

“The project had been in development since 1937, when Walt bought the story from his friend Ward Greene, the head of the King Features Syndicate, which distributed Walt’s comic strips. It had gone through a series of scripts: Joe Grant and Dick Huemer introduced two calculating Siamese cats, Ted Sears introduced a dog pound, and Greene himself apparently introduced a romance – though Grant and Huemer objected to the idea of two dogs falling in love as ‘distasteful’ and ‘utterly contrary to nature’. (It was Walt who had scratched out the name ‘mutt’ in the script and inserted ‘Tramp.’)” (Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler, p 557)

Now, that’s one version.  Look on Wikipedia, and they claim that the 1937 part of this history is when Joe Grant developed an idea based on how his own cocker spaniel was pushed aside when his child was born and that the Greene story wasn’t read until the 1940’s.  In trying to find the story, I also found claims that the original story didn’t run in Cosmopolitan (or an earlier, slightly different titled version of the same magazine) until either 1943 or 1945.  Either way, it looks like the Tramp came from the Greene story while the idea of Lady came from Grant and the various story writers found ways to put the two together.  It’s hard to know, especially since the people mentioned above in the Gabler book, Grant, Huemer and Sears, aren’t given any writing credits in the actual film.

The Credits:

Directors: Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson .  From the Story by Ward Greene.  Story: Erdman Penner, Joe Rinaldi, Ralph Wright, Don Dagradi.

Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto
(宮本武蔵)

The Film:

By the time this film was released in Japan, Toshiro Mifune had not only played a samurai in multiple films, but had been one of the stars of the greatest samurai film ever, The Seven Samurai, released five months earlier.  But, because Mifune’s role in that film is as much in the tone of his bandit from Rashomon and because it would not reach the States until 1956, it was this trilogy, where Mifune plays one of the most famous of all Japanese warriors, Miyamoto Musashi, the man who wandered across the country, winning famous duels and writing one of the most famous books in Japanese history, The Book of Five Rings, that established Mifune as the foremost film samurai in the eyes of American filmgoers.

The best way to think of this film is as one part of a larger story.  Don’t think of the other two Samurai films as sequels, but as the rest of the story, since all three films come from the same novel and they are all the story of one man.  There is no better actor than Toshiro Mifune for playing this role.  He begins as a young man, barely surviving a massive historical battle (which took place in 1600) and then, slowly, learning how to be, not only a man, but also a samurai.  While still playing a samurai, this role is actually miles away from his role in The Seven Samurai and even from his later roles in the great samurai films like Throne of Blood and Yojimbo.  This is a man who searches for honor and will not rest until he has found it.

Yet, in this film, you can also see how why American filmmakers would start looking to the Japanese samurai films for their Western ideas.  For what is a samurai but a lone gunslinger without a gun?  And this film shows the way for future Westerns: glorious color cinematography, dusty hills, glorious costumes.  It’s not just the journey, but the way in which we look at the journey on-screen.

As I said, of course, there are two more films that continue the story of Musashi, both of them centered around epic duels.  This is the best of the three films (by quite a ways), but you really need to watch all three to get the complete story (which is easy because Criterion has put them all together in a box set).

The Source:

宮本武蔵 (Miyamoto Musashi) by Eiji Yoshikawa  (1935-39)

“Inagaki’s two Musashi trilogies are based on the wildly popular novel Musashi, by Eiji Yoskihawa (and on a play based on that novel), which appeared in more than a thousand serial newspaper installments from 1935 to 1939.  Yoshikawa studied historical records and Musashi’s own writings but invented characters and changed the sequence of events.  The Samurai Trilogy follows the novel in concentrating on Musashi’s life from his midteens when he left his village of Miyamoto, until his defeat of Kojiro Sasaki in combat on Ganryu Island, when Musashi was twenty-nine.”  (“Musashi Mifune” by Stephen Prince, Criterion DVD)

This novel is often described as Japan’s Gone with the Wind.  However, and I can’t believe that I’m writing this, Gone with the Wind is actually a more coherent novel.  That’s not necessarily because Mitchell’s writing is any better, because it isn’t.  It’s because Gone with the Wind was conceived and written as a single novel.  This story, as mentioned, ran as a serial for several years.  As a result, it’s full of small little vignettes.  While it does move forward continuously, it also is a lot more episodic and thus doesn’t quite work in the same way as a novel.  It is an interesting adventure story and semi-biography of one of Japan’s most famous men, of course, but it just kind of moves forward and starts and stops, which is a reflection of how it was originally published, of course.

The Adaptation:

The film does a very good job of taking various episodes in the story and bringing them to life as a coherent whole, although, of course, with two more films left in the trilogy, this film really only covers the early part of the book.

The Credits:

Directed by Hiroshi Inagaki.  From Hideji Hojo’s Adaptation of the Novel Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa.  Screenplay by Tokuhei Wakao and Hiroshi Inagaki.
Note:  As with all films in a language that doesn’t use the Latin script, I am forced to rely on DVD subtitles for the credits.  In this case, they come from the Criterion DVD.

Ugetsu
(雨月物語)

The Film:

There are lots of ghost stories.  Yet, somehow, the Japanese ghost stories seem to have a measure of tragedy that exceeds anyone else.  Their ghosts come back for many reasons.  But what is often so tragic about them is that they aren’t designed to be horrific.  They are often not there to frighten anyone.  They return because they must and we don’t even know that they’re dead.

This is the story of two different men, both adapted from short stories in the original Ugetsu Monogatari, a classic work of Japanese short stories from the 18th Century.  What were two different stories in the original book become intertwined here in the stories of two men who both leave their small village to head off to the city during a war.  They cross a fog-covered lake (in a haunting sequence of magnificent cinematography) to get to the city, but, warned of an attack on their village, the men decide to leave their wives behind.  One wife refuses to stay and the other begs her husband not to leave.  Both these decisions will have fateful consequences.

One man is going because of greed.  He wants to be a samurai, he wants to be important.  When his wife comes with him to the city he forgets her and in his quest to become important, she is lost, abused and falls into prostitution.  He will eventually find his way back to her only to discover her pain, something which could have easily been avoided had he simply kept her with him.  for the other man, it is need that drives him.  He must sell his wares, must get the money and return to his wife and child.  But, his journey home is interrupted by a beautiful young woman who seduces him and keeps him close.

This is a ghost story.  There are more than one ghost in the story and they are not there to horrify anyone or to frighten them.  Their tales are of grief and of woe, of love that is incomplete and prevents spirits from finding eternal rest.  They are brought to life in such a way that we don’t know it.  The other characters don’t know it.  They simply go on with life, interacting with the dead.  It works because of the steady direction of Kenji Mizoguchi (long revered as one of the greatest of all Japanese directors), because of the original source that is adapted with great care and consideration and because of the magnificent cinematography that brings the story to life.  Ugetsu was very well received at the time, but I think, in all the consideration of the great Kurosawa films, it has become somewhat over-looked (and I myself am guilty of that).  It is a classic that deserves to be seen, especially in the glorious DVD version that Criterion has released.

The Source:

Ugetsu Monogatari (雨月物語) by Uyeda Akinari  (1776)

These nine stories are each haunting in their own way, though only two of them were the primary basis for the film.  Depending on what version of the book you are reading, they might be the third story (“House Amid the Thickets”) and the seventh story (“Lust of the White Serpent”).  In the version I read, however, the 1971 Kengi Hamada translation published in the U.S. by Columbia University Press, they are actually the first two stories (“Homecoming” and “Bewitched”).  The stories don’t seem to move towards a coherent whole in the way that Dubliners does, for instance, so I wouldn’t say it matters that the stories are in a different order, but since I am not familiar with the work in Japanese, don’t trust me on that.

“Homecoming” is the story of a man who has squandered his family’s money and heads to Kyoto to make some money selling silk, leaving his wife behind, but because of various delays (that stem from Japanese feudal history) he is gone for seven years before finally returning home to what damage has happened at home during his long absence.

“Bewitched” is about a second son who doesn’t get to inherit the family wealth and ends up falling in love with a mystical creature disguised as a beautiful young woman.

Both stories are painful, but also moving.  In fact, that could be said for almost any of the nine stories.  Like the stories in Rashomon, while only a couple of them are the basis for the film, all of them are well worth reading.  The version that I read was also illustrated with beautiful woodcuts that were reproduced from the original 1776 version, so if you get a chance to read it or buy it, I highly recommend it.

The Adaptation:

The film is split between the stories of two men and the stories each take the film in the direction of the two separate short stories that form the basis for the film.  There are considerable liberties that are taken in the adaptations – the stories really give the ideas that spark the film (a man who leaves his wife and then is delayed and only returns years later and a man who falls in love with a mystical creature disguised as a beautiful young woman) with almost all of the particulars changed or created for the film.  But what the film really does so well is take the spirit and emotions of the book and translate them faithfully onto the screen.

The Credits:

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi.  From Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Akinari Ueda.  Screenplay by Matsutaro Kawaguchi, Yoshitaka Yoda.
Note:  As with all films in a language that doesn’t use the Latin script, I am forced to rely on DVD subtitles for the credits.  In this case, like with Samurai above, they come from the Criterion DVD.

Consensus Nominees That Don’t Make My Top 10

Marty

The Film:

When I reviewed this film as part of the Best Picture project I talked about how it was a fine film but that circumstances and emotions worked so that it ended up being a massive critical success – it won at Cannes, won both existing critics groups and won the Oscar.  Which is a bit silly for a film that’s really only about the level of high ***.  But it’s a nice film about two nice, lonely people who finally manage to find some bit of happiness.

The Source:

“Marty” by Paddy Chayefsky  (1953)

This was originally a made for tv movie, or, what at the time was called a television play.  But, like most television plays at the time, it was filmed live, so that limits you to more of what can be done in a stage production than what could be done in what we today think of as a made for television movie.  It is still structured like a play, however, with a three act structure and it ran 51 minutes.

It’s a charming little play, the story of a lonely butcher who sees himself as an ugly man who will never be able to find a girl and settle down and get married.  All his siblings are out of the house now and it’s just him and his mom (and soon, his aunt, who is being forced out of the house she lives in with her married son) and he just wants to stop feeling alone all the time.  He meets a girl (her name is Clara but the script lists her as GIRL) who is in a similar situation and they hit it off and have a nice time walking and talking together.  At the end of the play, it looks like he might not call her the next day as promised, but after enduring grief from his mother (“She don’t look Italian to me.  What kinda family she come from?  There was something about her I don’t like.”) and then more grief from his friends (“Marty, you don’t wanna hang around with dogs.  It gives you a bad reputation.”) he finds his self-respect and his decency and honor and makes the phone call to her that will presumably lead to some happiness.

The Adaptation:

Almost every line in the film comes directly from the original teleplay.  That makes sense, of course, since it was Paddy Chayefsky’s play and its his script.  Things had to be added, of course, because on television it only ran 51 minutes and a film needs to be at least around 90 (it runs exactly 90 – still the shortest running Best Picture).  There are little bits here and there that are added in, but it’s really in the last half hour that things get added in.  In the original play, after Clara leaves, there is only one more act – a shorter version of the aunt arriving the next day, the argument between Marty and his mother, and then the argument with his friends that ends with the phone call.  The film greatly expands this – Marty walks her home, there is a scene with her at her own home, interacting with her parents, there is much more with the aunt arriving the next day and then we have the scene of Marty and his friends.  There is a big difference there, since that is in the evening, which means that by that point, Marty has actually skipped the phone call that he promised to make.  That makes the scene where he tells off his friends and goes to make the phone call that much more of a big deal than it was in the original teleplay.

The Credits:

Directed by Delbert Mann.  Story and Screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky.

Interrupted Melody

The Film:

Oh good lord, another opera biopic.  I already went through this with The Great Caruso, and that’s an appropriate reference because as the poster says “the greatest musical drama since ‘The Great Caruso’.”  I don’t know how to react to that.  I do rank The Great Caruso as a better film.  It was a decent film that had a subject that I just didn’t care about.  Interrupted Melody isn’t as good a film – it has poor direction, the writing is substandard and it has the same lack of interest for me in spite of having Glenn Ford.  But this film has one thing going for it, and that’s the performance of Eleanor Parker.  Parker encompasses some of the same things that I write down below about Jean Simmons in Guys and Dolls (because I wrote that review first) – she’s not in the first range of actresses for ability and she’s certainly not in the first range for beauty, but she’s a pretty solid actress and she is quite pretty, so she becomes the solid performer.  Like Simmons, she was nominated for multiple Oscars but never won.  She was actually nominated for this film (she also earns a Nighthawk nomination but that’s because of a real dearth of performances – my whole list is only six long) and she’s the best thing about it.

In fact, what does that say about this film that Parker is the best thing about it?  Well, for one thing it says that this film is a magnificent waste of Glenn Ford.  Not a waste of his talent, because he actually doesn’t do much with here.  It’s just a waste – he stands around loving her and then worrying about her (more on that below) and finally having a semi-happy ending with her in spite of all their troubles.

The real star of this is Parker.  She stars as Gertrude Lawrence, an opera singer from Australia who eventually becomes a worldwide sensation, marries a man that she has a bit of tempestuous relationship with, then, in a tour of South America, contracts polio.  Without the polio there wouldn’t be much dramatic arc in the story, but she needs to overcome the disease in order to pull her life together and even perform again, even if she can’t do it in the same way now that she’s confined to a wheelchair.  Parker, whose singing scenes are fine, really comes through in the more emotional scenes between the singing and that’s what really makes her performance so good.  But, the script gives very little for Ford to do, and as a result, the film itself just falls flat.

The Source:

Interrupted Melody: The Story of My Life by Marjorie Lawrence  (1949)

To be fair, I was never going to care about this book because I don’t care about the real person.  I have always liked classical music, although by always, I mean since I was 15 and first saw Fantasia.  In spite of that, though, I have never been able to get into opera.  Something about the singing just doesn’t work for me.  So, the autobiography of an opera singer wasn’t ever going to be something I was going to care about.  Marjorie Lawrence was born and raised in Australia, became famous, had World War II interfere with her career and then contracted polio and that essentially ended her career, at least as a singer in opera, if not as a singer of opera.  But she really lost me at one point in this book:

Besides sharing with the rest of humanity its well-founded loathing and detestation of the Nazis, I have my own special and particular reasons for hating Hitler and his hoodlum pack.  They and the ghastly war they foisted upon the world prevented my attaining the ambition of every Wagnerian singer – to appear in the master’s operas at hallowed Bayreuth.  I went to Germany for the first time to sing at the Zoppot Waldoper and was invited to return, not only for Zoppot but for Berlin and Bayreuth as well the following year: but the following year was 1939!

Oh boo fucking hoo.  Over 60 million people died, including over half of the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe and over 10% of the total populations of Poland, Latvia and Lithuania.  But you didn’t get to sing Wagner at his festival.  At that point, I went from not caring to being disgusted.

The Adaptation:

As far as I can tell, the film follows fairly accurately the life of Lawrence, but so much of the damn book is just about her performances in various operas that I kept tuning it out and it’s hard to remember what’s what when it came time to comparing them.

The Credits:

Directed by Curtis Bernhardt.  Written by William Ludwig and Sonya Levien.  Based On Her Life Story by Marjorie Lawrence.

Blackboard Jungle

The Film:

It’s amazing how a film can look so badly dated now, the remnants of what a society once thought about a particular social problem, yet, at the same time, can be a vision into the future, of what might spring forth at an artistic level that never could have been imagined.  In the end, we have a film that holds on to the lower ends of ***.5 because of quality direction, a solid star in the lead role doing the kind of things he’s always done well (and would continually do well) and a budding new star who had been threatening to break through for years and finally would in a real way.

Glenn Ford, always the great stalwart of honesty and decency, plays a hard-working teacher who comes in to an inner-city school that has some severe behavior problems.  Not that the school is about to admit that; they, in fact, adamantly deny that in the opening moments of the film.  Ford is threatened and pushed and eventually his wife is even harassed to the point where she almost miscarries their child (it’s a change from the book that doesn’t – see below).  But he stands firm, no matter how many other teachers want to buckle under the pressure.  At first he suspects the young black in the class of being the leaders of the juvenile delinquents (“Hey, I got a social disease!”), but eventually realizes that the black is a natural leader and a talented musician.  He begins to learn that the what is happening in his class is less a symptom of society than a symptom of a particular person and if you can cut that person down, the followers will find somewhere else to look.

This film worked very well in 1955, becoming a big hit and earning solid reviews and a number of Oscar nominations.  It helped, of course, to have a writer-director as talented as Richard Brooks (who would later win an Oscar for writing) and to have Ford as the teacher.  Ford’s headstrong determination had made him perfect as the cop determined to get his man in The Big Heat a couple of years before, and he’s just as stubborn and determined this time and again, is heedless of the potential consequences.  But the film might not have worked had they not managed to get Sidney Poitier as the black student.  In the long, grand tradition of being far too old to actually play a high school student (five years earlier he had played a doctor in No Way Out) but Poitier is believable in every aspect of the role and helps keep the film from getting derailed by a plot that today seems badly dated.  Too much has been written and discussed about juvenile delinquency in the 60 years since this film for this film to be considerably painful in some of the ways they approach the problem.

Yet, the film continues to work, and it’s not just the direction of Brooks or the performances from Ford and Poitier alone that do it.  It’s the way this film looks to the future, with those opening and closing scenes that seal the deal.  Songs had been used in films before, but nothing like this because there really hadn’t been songs like this before.  When “Rock Around the Clock” comes blaring through, it’s a revolution and it helps us sink into this story and slide out of it with sheer precision.

The Source:

The Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter  (1954)

This is a decent novel that has not aged well.  It is melodramatic to the extreme, about a new teacher in a vocational school.  He was must deal with violent students (one tries to rape another teacher and some of them send harassing notes to the teacher’s wife that prompts a stillborn child and he is attacked when outside the school) and teachers who have given up caring and are just trying to survive.  It was a big deal at the time, a novel dealing with an issue that was just rising in the news as a social issue but it now feels a bit dated.

The Adaptation:

“He followed the outline of the book closely but with notable exceptions. First, he took an anecdote told by one teacher about another – the teacher had once turned his back on his class and a student threw a baseball, taking a chunk out of the blackboard – and put Dadier in place of the teacher under fire. In the book, Dadier’s wife, Anne, suffers the stillbirth of their son. However, Richard’s script allows the baby to be born alive if prematurely, perhaps trying to keep the overall tone upbeat. He also makes student Artie West more menacing in the film, showing West leading the afterschool assault on Dadier and the other teacher.” (Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks by Douglass K. Daniel, p 87)

Aside from that, the biggest change in the film is that the word “rape” is never used in relation to the assault on the female teacher while in the original book it is used a lot and emphasized.

The Credits:

Directed by Richard Brooks. Screen Play by Richard Brooks. Based On the Novel by Evan Hunter.

Phffft

The Film:

In 1954, Judy Holliday would star in two films: It Should Happen to You and Phffft, the latter film not earning an LA release until a couple of months after it’s New York release and making it eligible in 1955.  Her co-star in both films would be a new young actor named Jack Lemmon in his first two credited film roles.  I’ve never been quite clear why Holliday became such a big star and certainly can’t understand how she managed to win the Oscar in 1950, but there’s no question that she was the star of those two films.  Within a couple of years, Holliday would be back to Broadway (successfully) and would only star in a few more films while Lemmon would be an Oscar winner and would go on to one of the great careers in film history, earning eight Oscar noms.  Though this film is far from great, it’s clear here that Lemmon has an incredible talent, perfect comic timing and a wonderful screen presence and that he was destined to last.

Lemmon and Holliday play Robert and Nina, a married couple whose marriage is at its end after eight years.  They are divorcing and gladly going their separate ways.  He’s going to be a carefree bachelor like his best friend (played by Jack Carson, and poor Carson was always so solid in so many supporting roles during this decade and almost never gets pointed out).  She’s going to do the things he never wanted to do.  The only problem is that they’re clearly still crazy about each other.  He sees an attractive woman and honks at her on the street; it’s his ex-wife.  They end up at the same club to go dancing and end up dancing with each other.  That’s the best scene in the film, because Lemmon dancing is an inspired sight; if it’s not as hilariously horrendous as The Elaine Dance, it’s still great fun to watch.

The Source:

Phfft: Chronicle of a Happy Divorce by George Axelrod (1954)

It was hard for me to determine that this indeed was an adapted screenplay and there could be a case made that it’s not since the play was never produced, but then again, neither was Everybody Comes to Rick’s.  TCM gave me the full name of the play and confirmed the Wikipedia info that it was unproduced.  But, it is also, as far as I can tell, unpublished, so I have no idea what it was like.  To that extent, I also arbitrarily gave it the date of 1954, when this film was made.

The Adaptation:

Which means, of course, that I also can’t tell how closely Axelrod stuck to his original play.  But, given how irritated he was this year at how many changes were made to his The Seven Year-Itch, it’s likely he liked what he had written enough to follow it pretty closely.

The Credits:

Directed by Mark Robson.  Story and Screen Play by George Axelrod.

The Seven Year Itch

The Film:

Marilyn Monroe stood on a subway grating and movie magic happened.  It wasn’t an accident, of course.  Billy Wilder had her stand there and there were thousands of people watching (one of whom, Joe DiMaggio, was her husband and got pissed off and left though Monroe loved the attention, but you know what, DiMaggio was a Yankee so the hell with him).  It’s not even an accident in the film; Monroe’s The Girl has been over-heated the whole film.  She’s in New York during the summer without an air conditioner and the new fan she just bought isn’t doing much.  She even keeps her underwear in the refrigerator to cool herself off (imagine what the thought of that did to the men watching the film).  So, when walking back from the movies with her downstairs neighbor (who does have an air conditioner), she stands over the grate so that the train will keep her cool.  She doesn’t know that it will push her dress up but she doesn’t seem to mind when it does.  It’s instant movie magic, perfectly matching a star with an indelible image that works for that star – there might not be a better moment that matches star with image in the history of film.

There’s just one problem.  The film itself isn’t all that great.  It’s likely that many people know the image without the faintest idea what the film is and that’s understandable.  Monroe in the film doesn’t so much exist in reality as exist in an unreachable fantasy.  She’s not even given a name – she’s just The Girl, that unattainable beauty just upstairs, with her naked body just out of the line of sight.  It was the right image for the star but the wrong film for its time.  Even Billy Wilder couldn’t take the play and make it into a first-rate film.  He made nine films in the decade and this is the weakest, yet, in many ways, is the most remembered.

Most of the problems with the film were beyond Wilder’s ability to make better.  The original play really isn’t all that great, a whiny executive is thinking of cheating on his wife because he’s been married seven years (he’s got the “seven year itch”) and because she and their son are away in Maine for the summer.  A bombshell has just moved in upstairs and is way too hot and desperate for air conditioning (in the original Broadway production she wasn’t even blonde, played by Vanessa Brown).  The exec is whiny and indecisive about whether he wants to have an affair and is never quite clear why he wants one unless it’s because the girl is so overwhelming (which, on film, she is).  It just wasn’t that witty.

But the bigger problem is that Wilder was unable to use his first choice for the role (Walter Matthau, and wow, how that would have helped the film), being pushed into using Tom Ewell who had played the role on stage and just doesn’t come across as interesting enough for Marilyn to ever take notice.  He was also hampered by the Code of course, which would never allow them to actually consummate the affair (which they do in the play and which really is the only way to end this properly).  So it’s just kind of a waste – a few funny moments, but not many, a flat performance that is the lead in the film and a waste of Monroe that at least gets one iconic moment to hang its hat on.

The Source:

The Seven Year Itch: A Romantic Comedy by George Axelrod  (1952)

This was a fairly solid hit on Broadway, but I am not quite certain why.  The main character, Richard Sherman, is a whiny man who seems unhappy with his lot with his good job at a publisher, a wife and a son and an air-conditioned apartment in Manhattan.  So, when his wife and child depart for Maine for the summer, he considers having an affair with The Girl upstairs (“The GIRL is standing in the doorway.  She is an extraordinarily beautiful girl in her early twenties.  She wears an extravagantly glamorous evening gown.  There is a wise, half-mocking, half-enticing smile on her face.  She looks like nothing so much as a Tabu perfume ad.”).  It doesn’t have a whole lot of wit and quite frankly if he’s this miserable after only seven years of marriage, then his wife is better off without him.

The Adaptation:

The premise comes from the play as do some of the individual lines.  But much of the film is actually the invention of Billy Wilder, including the iconic subway grating scene.  The original play confines all of the action to the apartment.  The biggest difference, of course, is that in the play the relationship is consummated while there was no way the filmmakers would be allowed to do that because of the Production Code.  So, in the end, Richard Sherman simply fantasizes about what might happen while his wife is away and in the end, runs off to join her in Maine while leaving his air-conditioned apartment for The Girl.

The Credits:

Directed by Billy Wilder.  Screenplay by Billy Wilder and George Axelrod.  Based upon an “Original Play” ‘The Seven Year Itch’ by George Axelrod as presented on the Stage by Courtney Burr & Elliott Nugent.

The Tender Trap

The Film:

Julie is young (twenty-two) and she’s determined to be married within a year.  She wants to find the blue-eyed man of her dreams and then settle down in Scarsdale (the best schools are there – everybody knows that) and start to raise a family.  She’s also a talented singer and quite cute and adorable (she’s played by Debbie Reynolds, who was 23 at the time and got married the year this film was released), even if she does still live with her parents and in kind of a fantasy world that even in 1955 seems kind of silly.  But she does have talent and her agent knows it.  Oh, and her agent, Charlie also happens to be played by Frank Sinatra, and if you’re looking for a man with blue eyes to fall for, well, this is 1955 and Paul Newman isn’t quite that well known yet, so this is as good as it’s gonna get.  There’s only one problem.  Charlie likes women.  He likes having them around and taking them to dinner.  He likes them to come over and neck and do everything for him.  And there are a lot of them in his life.

This situation would normally be enough for a Hollywood romantic comedy, but this film originally came from Broadway, and they like to have at least a little more in their plots, even if it’s a silly and pretty dumb plot like this one.  So, to spice things up, there is Joe, Charlie’s best friend who has the life Charlie kind of longs for, with a wife and kids at home.  But now Joe, who really wants Charlie’s life, has come to the city to try and live a bit of Charlie’s life and he’s left his wife and kids behind.  To this end, he starts trying to score with the various women who keep coming through Charlie’s apartment like it’s Grand Central Station, and he finally manages to start getting somewhere with Sylvia (Celeste Holm).  Joe’s attentions to Sylvia make Charlie wonder if he really does want Julie, who is young and can really try his patience.  Maybe he should just settle down with Sylvia instead?  Or maybe he likes the life he’s living?

What it comes down to is that this a pretty standard romantic comedy and you know where things are going to end up.  There will be a happy ending for Charlie and Joe will go back to his wife.  Things will work out in a way they likely wouldn’t in real life, but, hey, you didn’t watch this film to get a glimpse of real life.  You watched it so you could watch Frank sing the Oscar nominated title song a lot (by himself before the credits, later, showing Reynolds how to sing it during the film, and with the other three main cast members at the end of the film) and be a womanizer and a bit of a cad but also a bit of a romantic.  Well, that’s what you get, and for that, there are a lot worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

The Source:

The Tender Trap: A Comedy by Max Shulman and Robert Paul Smith (1954)

This is just a silly little romantic comedy play.  It’s about a womanizer who can’t seem to settle down, his best friend who comes to town and falls for one of his women (in spite of the fact that he’s married), the woman that his best friend falls in love with, which makes the womanizer want to settle down with her, and the young girl who comes into his life because she’s the assistant to a man the two friends want to get in on a business deal with them.  Much of it works like you would expect a romantic comedy of the time to work – with false starts and retreats, with coming forward and declarations of love for someone you barely know and a kind of muddled happy ending.  In the end, the womanizer settles down with the young girl, the best friend goes home to his wife and the other woman hopes to find some happiness somewhere in the city.  It’s all really rather dumb.

The Adaptation:

Does the film improve upon the play?  Well, in the play, the best friend has left home to quit his job.  Here he’s decided to leave his wife because he wants his best friend’s life.  The womanizer is a talent agent and the young girl is actually a client of his (which allows for use of the title song, which was, rightfully, nominated for an Oscar).  In the end, there’s a year gap before the other woman actually settles down and gets married and it’s only then that we get the happy ending for the womanizer and the young girl, which makes a hell of a lot more sense than how it was down in the original play, even if it’s still not all that great.  But, it’s got Frank Sinatra instead of Ronny Graham in the lead, and if you need a blue-eyed man you can believe in as a womanizer, well, then Frank is your guy.

The Credits:

Directed by Charles Walters.  Screen Play by Julius Epstein.  Based On the Play by Max Shulman and Robert Paul Smith And Presented On the New York Stage by Clinton Wilder.

Daddy Long Legs

The Film:

Early on in Daddy Long Legs, there is a nice gag.  Fred Astaire plays Jervis Pendleton III.  Jervis is a rich man, but he’s also eccentric and he likes to get his own way.  But because he’s good with business, he’s brought along to France with a trade group lead by the president.  When the car breaks down and Jervis decides to go for a walk, a woman asks “Why would the President have appointed him?”  Then Jervis’ right-hand man (Griggs, played by perfect indignation throughout the film by Fred Clark, more beset by problems than usual and giving the best performance in the film) pulls out Jervis’ golf bags.  Suddenly the woman realizes why this particular president has invited Jervis along.  It’s quite amusing and you can easily miss it.  Sadly, it’s the best thing in the film.

This film was always going to be a bit hard to take because of the source material.  In the original novel, a trustee of an orphanage sends a young orphan to college and pays for it, only demanding one letter a month in exchange.  Over the course of her years in college, the orphan falls in love with a rich businessman, the uncle of her roommate, only for her (and the readers) to discover in the end that he’s also the rich trustee.  It’s a bit of a creepy story that seems tailor-made for Maurice Chevalier.  Fred Astaire was 56 when this film was released and Leslie Caron was 24 (and playing 18-22).  Then, of course, there is the Caron factor to begin with.  I will quote my own review of An American in Paris: “‘Why is he so interested in the weird-looking girl?  The blonde sitting next to him is so much better looking.’ That’s my wife speaking, not that I’m going to disagree.  Leslie Caron is decidedly odd-looking and that she should so inspire the fierce passions of Gene Kelly, Louis Jourdan and Horst Buchholz in two Best Picture winners and a Best Picture nominee is outside of my scope of understanding.” To add to that, there is the creepiness factor of the age difference in this film.

What keeps the film from going too overboard is that Astaire plays up the charm, and not in a Chevalier creepy kind of way.  He wants to do right by this girl, who is in a bad position at the orphanage (having aged out, but having no way to succeed out in the world).  He is established as eccentric, so it’s believable.  But none of the songs win me over, the silly ballet scene seems out of place (not that I could tolerate it in An American in Paris, when it wasn’t out of place) and the film as a whole never quite works.

The Source:

Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster (1912)

This is a book to give young girls an eye for a romantic story in which a rich man can both provide you with a better life and then also step in and sweep you off your feet.  It’s an epistolary novel about an orphan who is sent to college by a rich trustee with orders to write the trustee.  While at college, she falls in love with the rich uncle of her roommate and at the end of the book, but she and the readers discover that those are the same person.  It’s really a silly, very outdated story.

The Adaptation:

The film takes some of the basic premises of the plot and leaves them intact.  Yes, the orphan is sent off to college by a rich man (but he just happens to come across this orphanage in France while on a trip for a trade commission and he’s not a trustee).  Yes, he is the uncle of the girl who will become the orphan’s roommate at college.  Yes, she does fall in love with him and they end up happily together.  However, since the film focuses on the Daddy-Long-Legs character right from the start, rather than focus on the girl’s life, we know from the very beginning what the story is and we learn much more about him than we ever did in the original novel.  Most of that is invented just for the film. It doesn’t make it any less silly.

The Credits:

Directed by Jean Negulesco.  Screen Play by Phoebe and Henry Ephron.  From the Novel by Jean Webster.  Words and Music by Johnny Mercer.

Guys and Dolls

The Film:

Marlon Brando is not a singer.  He was never a singer and he was never going to be a singer.  So, if he was going to play Sky Masterson, he was going to need some support with the songs around him.  So, you give him a co-star, one who really can sing, and you beef up the role of Nathan Detroit.  Why not Frank Sinatra?  Sinatra was quickly becoming one of the best actors around, two years after his Oscar for From Here to Eternity, this film came in the same year as The Man with the Golden Arm, the film that proved his performance in Eternity wasn’t a one-off or a fluke.  Sinatra could easily be Nathan, the man who keeps moving his game so that the cops don’t know where to find it.  That left Brando in the role with the romance, trying to win over a Sister while also essentially running a long-con on her.

It works for three reasons.  The first is Sinatra, of course – he seemed almost born to play Nathan Detroit.  The second is that Brando, who doesn’t quite work whenever he tries to sing, is so sly and devilish when he isn’t singing.  Look at him when he catches Sister Sarah out on a matter of biblical quotation.  It turns out this no-good gambler doesn’t read anything except The Gideon Bible which he finds in every hotel room he stays in.  The third reason it works is Jean Simmons.  Something occurred to me while I was watching her in this film.  Simmons is the perfect acceptable substitute to combine beauty and performance.  She was never as beautiful or as sexy as Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe or Grace Kelly.  She was never going to be an actress on the level of Katharine Hepburn or Deborah Kerr.  But she was quite beautiful, especially when given the right role to play.  And she was a very good actress.  If you didn’t need the character to be drop-dead gorgeous and you didn’t need a home run from the acting, well then Jean Simmons was the perfect actress to cast.  So, in films like Hamlet, The Actress, Guys and Dolls and Elmer Gantry, you could put here in there and get exactly what you needed out of her.  She is absolutely believable in the role of the Sister whose ire goes up when she first meets Sky, but is also so taken with him that she will run off to him with Havana, never realizing that the rest of the mission will be tricked into going out on the town to solicit donations, thus leaving the building empty for Nathan’s card game.

The film never really quite works for me, partially because Runyon’s humor works better on the page than it does on the screen (see below), but also because the songs never really work that well for me.  There will be some people who will read that and will scream with indignation but it’s happened with other musicals and will happen again.  Yes, “Luck Be a Lady” is a fantastic song, and “Sit Down You’re Rockin the Boat” would eventually become a song I would really like (when sung by Don Henley, but not as it is performed in the film) but as a whole, the music doesn’t work for me, especially any of the songs that are meant to be romantic.  So, I can enjoy Brando’s performance, I can look at the wonderful sets and costumes and smile at those.  But in the end, it’s still a film that can’t ever really rise above mid-level ***.  But, hey, that’s a hell of a lot better than a lot of the Musicals I’m having to review in the middle 50’s thanks to the Musical category at the WGA.

The Source:

Guys and Dolls by Frank Loesser (1950) /  “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” (1933) and “Blood Pressure” (1930) by Damon Runyon

While the musical Guys and Dolls has some nice moments and some nice songs (“Luck Be A Lady” being the key one), its humor and fun really originate in the stories by Damon Runyon.  While many characters run through Runyon’s stories, some of which are in the musical, the primary story that formed the basis is “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown”, which tells the story of Sky Masterson and the Sister that he falls in love with and tries to win over, to the extent of betting for souls.  The musical (and the film) lack the true Runyon humor because that really comes through in the first person narration prevalent in so many of his stories and it’s never really able to come through in the full Runyonesque way.  Yet, it does bring to life many of the characters that exist in a variety of the stories.  If you like the Musical, and even if you don’t, I do recommend seeking out the original stories because Runyon’s style isn’t really like anyone else.  He may not be exactly who you’re looking for, but he is a fairly unique voice in American literature.

The Adaptation:

The Nathan Detroit role was beefed up – expanding from “a supporting part in a comic subplot to a starring role worthy of Sinatra and the equal of Brando’s.” (Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz by Kenneth L. Geist, p 259)  In the original stories, Skye is the star of the one story, but Nathan runs through a lot of stories, complete with his game that keeps getting moved from place to place.

There is more in the Geist book on pages 260-261 about the new songs, which forced the removal of three of the ballads from the original play, as well as the “expanded courtship sequence”.

The Credits:

Written for the Screen and Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.  Based upon the play Guys and Dolls.  Book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows.  From a Damon Runyon story.  Produced on the Stage by Cy Fever and Ernest H. Martin.  Music and Lyrics by Frank Loesser.

Oklahoma!

The Film:

As will be said a number of times in later years, while I love Musicals, I am not a particular fan of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Though State Fair (which was written for film) had been the first film with their work, this is where their stage work began to appear on film and they would become mainstays for the next decade, culminating with the film version of The Sound of Music, a film whose box office and cultural standing make it among the most essential films ever made. Oklahoma!, loved by many, though not be me, isn’t quite at the same level but it has some of the same problems that keep it from really being a top-notch Musical (and perhaps kept it from being a Best Picture nominee).

Oklahoma, perhaps because it is directed by Fred Zinnemann, who had already won one Oscar and would late win another one, has some very effective moments. The dance scene and the singing flow rather well, it has an effectively brutish performance from Rod Steiger as Jud and it has a wonderful performance from Shirley Jones, making you realize precisely why she is worth fighting over. The scenes out in the fields are beautifully photographed and the costumes and sets generally look good.

There are a couple of real problems with the film though that prevent it from becoming a classic film musical and though I am not a fan of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the fault is not theirs (or, at least mostly not theirs). The one part where they get some of the blame is the long balletic part of the dream sequence, which is unnecessary and goes on far too long; they only get the blame for the sequence in the first place, not for the directorial decision to place it on what is clearly a stage and make it look forced (that’s why I said the costumes and sets generally look good instead of saying they always look good). There is also a real casting problem in the film and it mars almost every part of the film. In the subplot, Gloria Grahame, so amazingly sensual just a few years before in films like Sudden Fear and The Big Heat, seems to have lost all of it – maybe Zinnemann didn’t work well with her or maybe she just needed to be in black-and-white. She’s also pursued by Eddie Albert, whose performance as Ali Hakim is just painful to watch.

The other problem is bigger and is evident from the very first moment of the film. Gordon MacRae just doesn’t work well enough for Curley. I can believe Shirley Jones’ Laurey falling for Curley, but I can’t believe her for falling for Curley as played by MacRae. His singing just doesn’t work for me and his acting isn’t any better. It doesn’t help that I can picture Hugh Jackman in my head (see below), but there must have been someone better that could have come in and been perfectly cast against Jones and maybe turned this film really into a great one.

The Source:

Oklahoma!, music by Richard Rodgers, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II (1943)

What a start for this show-writing partnership. Is it any wonder that they would become so phenomenally successful when their first musical begins with such a glorious and optimistic song as “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin'”? Go hear and watch Hugh Jackman at the Cameron MacIntosh celebration sing it, just like he did so many nights on stage and you can feel how happy Curley is, with the first lines preceding his presence on stage.

However, for me at least, the joy doesn’t last that long. Just a few minutes later we get “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top”, one of the silliest songs they ever wrote. There are lots of people who will dive into that song and drink up its sugary syrup, but I draw the line there and it carries over into the rest of the musical. The characters stray into parodies (Jud is too much of a repulsive thug, Aunt Addy is too silly and Ali Hakim is just too much). Some of the scenes are effective and the songs work well, but some of the scenes, like the dream just get a bit too long.

The Adaptation:

The Wikipedia page gives a long detailed description of what is different between the stage and the film and there are some considerable differences, so it’s best to just go there and let them give you the lowdown.

The Credits:

Directed by Fred Zinnemann.  Music by Richard Rodgers.  Book and Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.  Screen Play by Sonya Levien and William Ludwig.  Adapted from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Musical Play.  Based Upon a Dramatic Play by Lynn Riggs.

Other Screenplays on My List Outside My Top 10:

• The Rose Tattoo  –  A very good film from a good Tennessee Williams play.  It was a Best Picture nominee, so there’s a full review of it here.
• Othello  –  The best film not in the Top 10 (my #7).  The script is a bit uneven because of the way that Welles had to make the film, bringing back cast and crew over time to film different scenes as he would make enough movie doing other films.  An essential Shakespeare film.
• Summertime  –  David Lean’s nice Venice romance.  The lead performance from Katharine Hepburn was Oscar nominated and was #2 on my Best Actress list.  It’s based on the play The Time of the Cuckoo.
• Trial  –  Based on a novel by Don Mankiewicz (Herman’s son), this quite good film (high ***) is very hard to find and I had to see it on TCM.  It’s got a strong lead performance from Glenn Ford and one of Arthur Kennedy’s numerous Oscar nominated performances.
• The Desperate Hours  –  Based on the 1954 novel and 1955 play, this William Wyler film is one of his lesser known ones since it wasn’t one of the 12 for which Wyler earned an Oscar nomination.  This effective thriller is a low-level ***.5 film.

Other Adaptations:
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• The Night of the Hunter  –  Based on the novel of the same name, this film is quite unnerving.  But the script is the weakest point, while the direction from Charles Laughton (his only directorial effort) and the lead performance from Robert Mitchum are unforgettable.
• The Wages of Fear  –  Better directed than it is written, this 1953 French film which came to the U.S. in 1955 is considered a classic.  It’s based on the novel by Georges Arnaud.
• The Phenix City Story  –  I only list this here because oscars.org lists it as “based on documentation by Crane Wilbur” who is the listed co-writer with Daniel Mainwaring.  Mainwaring was very proud of his work on this film as he actually went to Phenix City, Alabama to do research before writing the script (his daughter told me that).  The ironic bit about this film is that it presents John Patterson as the hero, a few years before he would become an arch-segregationist governor of Alabama, but Patterson would modify his beliefs over time and even endorsed Obama in 2008.  It’s a high level *** and has been shown on TCM numerous times, partially because Martin Scorsese is a big fan of the film.
• The Purple Plain  –  A multiple BAFTA nominee from 1954 that earned a 1955 US release.  It’s based on the novel by H.E. Bates.
• Kiss Me Deadly  –  Widely considered a noir classic though it’s no better than mid-range ***, this thriller is based on one of the Mike Hammer novels by Mickey Spillane.  It is most famous for its nihilistic ending with the glowing suitcase that was a massive influence on Pulp Fiction.
• The Bridges at Toko-Ri  –  The James Michener novel was a big seller.  The Oscar winning film (Best Visual Effects) is solid, if, for no other reason, than having both William Holden and Grace Kelly.
• The Man from Laramie  –  Jimmy Stewart in another Anthony Mann Western, though not the best work from them.  It’s based on a Saturday Evening Post story.
• Kismet  –  The fourth version of this story, this one is the first Musical (based on the 1953 Musical rather than the original 1911 play) and is directed by Vincente Minnelli.
• Not as a Stranger  –  Stanley Kramer was already a very successful producer when he turned to directing with this film.  It’s got a great cast but doesn’t do enough with it, which could be a description of a lot of Kramer films.
• The Dam Busters  –  Another film loved by an Oscar winning director, in this case Peter Jackson, who keeps saying he’ll remake it.  It’s an enjoyable War film from Michael Anderson, whose Around the World in 80 Days would win Best Picture the next year.
• I Am a Camera  –  A middle step in a long adaptation process.  Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories would become the play I Am a Camera and then this film, before eventually becoming the musical and film Cabaret.  Julie Harris is good, but if you’ve already seen Cabaret (which is likely), her Sally just can’t compare to Liza’s.
• The Belles of St Trinian’s  –  Ronald Searle’s cartoon characters would be brought to life in this film, the first of a series in the decade.  Alistair Sim is mildly amusing as the headmistress of a girl’s school and her brother.  This would be remade over 50 years later with Rupert Everett in the Sim roles.
• Court Martial  –  Known as Carrington V.C. in the UK (and based on the play of the same name), this film was nominated for 5 BAFTAs and eluded me for years and years until I was finally loaned a copy a few months ago.  The action is solid but the film itself is a mid-range ***.
• Doctor in the House  –  Similar to the above in that it was a big BAFTA film (4 noms, 1 win), was hard for me to find for a while and I finally saw it and was disappointed.
• Unchained  –  Based on the non-fiction book Prisoners of People, this is a decent film about prison life that would almost certainly be forgotten today (not that it isn’t) if not for the song written for the film which bears its name: “Unchained Melody”, a song I have versions on my iTunes by The Righteous Brothers, U2, Heart, Neil Diamond, Elvis Presley and Harry Belafonte.  The Heart version is my favorite.
• Man Without a Star  –  We’re getting down into the low-level *** now.  This Western is based on the novel by Dee Linford and stars Kirk Douglas.
• Moonfleet  –  One of the weakest Fritz Lang films, not least because it has Stewart Granger in the lead.  It’s inspired by the original novel with significant changes in the film version.
• Battle Cry  –  When I hear the words “battle cry”, I think of the old board game which we had growing up and which I don’t think I ever remember any of us ever playing.  But that was a Civil War game and this was a World War II film based on a Leon Uris novel.
• My Sister Eileen  –  Oh, another complicated process.  This began as short pieces in The New Yorker, then became a play, then a 1942 film, then this Musical, which isn’t connected to Wonderful Town, a 1953 Broadway Musical also based on the original stories.  And this film was unnecessary since, even with Janet Leigh and Jack Lemmon, this film is inferior to the 1942 film.
• The Last Frontier  –  Another Anthony Mann Western, but unfortunately this one stars Victor Mature instead of Jimmy Stewart.  It’s based on the novel The Gilded Rooster.
• The End of the Affair  –  I’ve already reviewed this film when I wrote about the novel as #82 in my Top 100.  Skip it.  Watch the 1999 version instead.  But definitely read the book.
• The Long Gray Line  –  A weak John Ford film based on the autobiography of the man who was swimming instructor at West Point for 30 years.
• We’re No Angels  –  A rare Bogart Comedy that’s a reminder of why he didn’t make Comedies.  Based on the play My Three Angels, which had been based on a French play.  Like The End of the Affair, this was later remade by Neil Jordan, but this one isn’t at remotely the same level.
• Captain Lightfoot  –  How do you take a novel by W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar, High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle) and make a dull dud?  Let Douglas Sirk and Rock Hudson get their hands on it.
• The Glass Slipper  –  It’s a forgettable Musical version of Cinderella with Leslie Caron in the lead role.
• The Rains of Ranchipur  –  The 1939 film The Rains Came wasn’t great, but it was better than this remake (both based on the novel The Rains Came, although this film changes the ending).
• Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle  –  Gordon Scott takes over the role of Tarzan and that helps the series a little.  Like most previous Tarzan films, it has basically nothing to do with the original Burroughs novels (which is ridiculous, because there were plenty of them to be filmed).
• The Pickwick Papers  –  This 1952 British version of the first Dickens novel (not one of my favorites as seen here) was Oscar nominated for its costumes but that doesn’t make it any better than low-level ***.
• The Deep Blue Sea –  Another film that been remade, skip this version of the Terrence Rattigan play and watch the 2011 film instead.
• The Tall Men  –  Mediocre Clark Gable Western from the novel by Clay Fisher.
• Tennessee’s Partner  –  Another mediocre Western, this one stars Ronald Reagan and is adapted from a story by Bret Harte (loosely).
• A Prize of Gold  –  Richard Widmark can’t lift this Crime film above a high **.5.  It’s based on the novel by Max Catto.
• Good Morning, Miss Dove  –  Sentimental schlock with Jennifer Jones as a school teacher.  Based on the novel by Frances Gray Patton
• The Racers  –  Kirk Douglas is a race car driver.  Since good movies almost never involve the phrase “is a race car driver” you can tell how good it is.  Based on the novel.
• Soldier of Fortune  –  More mediocre Clark Gable.  This time he’s helping someone escape from China.  Based on the Ernest K. Gann novel.
• I’ll Cry Tomorrow  –  Susan Hayward earned an Oscar nom as an alcoholic Broadway star, but she didn’t even make my list.  Based on the autobiography by Lilian Roth.
• The Left Hand of God  –  We’re in China again, this time with Bogey masquerading as a priest.  It’s even from Edward Dmytryk, who also directed Soldier of Fortune.  It’s based on the novel.
• Ulysses  –  We’re talking Homer here, not Joyce.  In spite of starring Kirk Douglas as the title star, this film is a low **.5.
• Tarantula  –  Based on a story that had aired on the television show Science Fiction Theater in May of 1955, this giant monster flick could have been worse, though at a low **.5 it could have been better as well.  Still, at least I like tarantulas.
• The Big Knife  –  Robert Aldrich directing a Clifford Odets play couldn’t do much with this.
• This Island Earth  –  Mediocre Sci-Fi film based on the pulp novel.
• Green Fire  –  Based on a memoir, this is about an emerald mine in South America.  It’s pretty weak (low **.5) but it does have Grace Kelly.
• The Cobweb  –  Weak melodrama from Vincente Minnelli.  Based on a novel by William Gibson (The Miracle Worker William Gibson, not Neuromancer William Gibson).
• Blood Alley  –  In China again!  This time it’s John Wayne.  It’s also a waste of time, even though it was directed by William Wellman.  Adapted by Albert Sidney Fleischman from his own novel.
• A Man Called Peter  –  A biopic about the Chaplin of the U.S. Senate.  Not for me, although I would argue it’s weak enough that it’s not for anyone.  Based on the memoir by his wife.
• You’re Never Too Young  –  Based on a short story called “Sunny Goes Home”, this is a Martin / Lewis Comedy by crappy director Norman Taurog.
• Queen Bee  –  Joan Crawford plays a dominating Southern mother.  Based on the novel.
• Love is a Many-Splendored Thing  –  There’s a full review of the film here because it was (mind-bogglingly) a Best Picture nominee.  It’s based on the autobiography novel by Han Suyin, the woman that Jennifer Jones plays and who I may remind you, was half-Chinese (and half-Belgian).
• Artists and Models  –  The play Rockabye Baby becomes another crappy Lewis / Martin Comedy (provided you can call it a Comedy when it’s not funny).
• Svengali  –  Somehow this film earned a BAFTA nomination for Donald Wolfit (the stage actor who is the inspiration for the egotistical oblivious Sir in The Dresser) so I saw it and wished I hadn’t.  It’s mid-range **.
• The View from Pompey’s Head  –  Not listed in my Nighthawk Awards as one of the 5 Worst Films of the Year because I hadn’t seen it when I did that post, but one of my frequent commenters loaned me a copy so I could finally cross it off my list because it won the NBR for Best Supporting Actress.  Which is ridiculous because the acting in this film is terrible.  In fact, everything in this film is terrible.  So thanks to Mike for loaning it to me and getting that off my list.  But god was it bad.  Low-range **.  It was based on the big-selling novel by Hamilton Brasso.

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen:

• none

Where’d You Go, Bernadette

• Author:  Maria Semple
• Published:  2012
• Publisher:  Little, Brown and Company
• Pages:  326
• First Lines:  “The first annoying thing is when I ask Dad what he thinks happened to Mom, he always says, ‘What’s important is for you to understand it’s not your fault.’”
• Last Lines:  “Say yes.  And know I’m always, Mom.”
• Film:  none
• First Read:  Spring 2014

Old fashioned letter writing might be disappearing but the epistolary novel is still surviving.  In fact, the two novels over the last few years that I have enjoyed more than almost any other have both been epistolary novels.  (One of them, Dear Committee Members, is even still keeping letters alive, though not the kind of letters you necessarily want to read.)  Where’d You Go, Bernadette isn’t a complete epistolary novel – our valiant teenager, Bee, provides us with linking narratives that help explain some of the things.  But that’s necessary in this case, because she helps us sort through some of the e-mails, memos, faxes and vital documents that make up one of the funniest books of the last decade.

I discovered this novel the way I used to be able to discover such things – it kept getting recommended by everyone at the Booksmith to everyone else.  It seemed that everyone had to read it and once we did, we became part of the cult pushing it on new people.  But, more than most of the booksellers there, I had a special understanding about this book because I’d spent a lot of time in Seattle over the years.

I lived in Portland for 13 years.  During that time, I spent a lot of time headed up to Seattle because, in spite of actually living in Portland, I viewed it in kind of the same way Dan Savage did (“Seattle’s a hilly, damp place with a lot of water and trees.  Portland’s a hilly, damp place with a lot of water and trees.  Portland and Seattle both have Pioneer Squares, Hamburger Marys, homeless street punks, and huge bookstores.  Why would anyone who lives in Seattle vacation in Portland?”  (The Kid, p 5))  I viewed Portland as the less exciting little brother and preferred the bigger city when I could.  But that wasn’t quite accurate.  Portland and Seattle are both quite extraordinarily strange in different ways.  If you watch Portlandia, you have an idea of Portland.  That song that opened the show on the pilot pretty much summed it up.  I did see the Jim Rome Circus in Portland, you can stick a bird on something and call it art and it is most definitely where young people go to retire.  But Seattle, well, that’s the Tech world of Microsoft and Amazon, of crazed parents trying to push their children to success, where you couldn’t possibly notice if everyone around you is weird because you’re too plugged into your devices to bother with human interaction.  This is the world that Where’d You Go, Bernadette takes to town and completely shreds.

I honestly don’t want to write too much about what happens in the book because you really should treasure it for yourself.  But it’s the kind of world where it’s important that one of the main characters gave the 4th most watched TED talk (for me, the person who isn’t on Facebook or Twitter and writes this blog as an outlet for creativity rather than a social media device, I had never heard of a TED talk and didn’t realize it was a real thing when I was first reading the book).  On the first page, when we get Bee Branch’s 8th grade report card, the grading system alone lets us know what kind of world we have entered: “S: Surpasses Excellence.  A: Achieves Excellence.  W: Working Towards Excellence.”

What this book gives you is a mother who is incapable of human interaction, a father who seems to have forgotten that other humans do interact and a truly amazing teenage girl who is bright and witty and damn motivated.  We have the disaster of blackberry bushes (if you’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest you know how invasive they are), the horror of parents who are blind to their children’s faults while focusing on everyone else’s and the kind of world where an official communication from the FBI ends with “We all love your TEDTalk.”

They may have passed up my recommendations, but they got it right.

I have been asked by several people for my reaction to Bob Dylan’s recent Nobel Prize for Literature.  Part of that is because I have written about the Nobel Prize before.  Part of that is because I am a fan of Bob Dylan.  Part of that is because I write a lot about literature and know even more because I’ve read my way through all the great books lists and have made my own lists.  Part of it is just because I’m really opinionated (“the most opinionated of my children” my mother says on days when she forgets that this description also fits three of my four siblings).

Now, I won’t pretend I’m not a little disappointed that none of my five have won the Nobel Prize yet.  They are now all six years older than they were when I wrote this post.  But I am also a believer that literature encompasses more than the Nobel Prize Committee was admitting.  I thought they should have given the award to Ingmar Bergman, and while there’s I suppose still the possibility they could give it to Woody Allen, it was Bergman who was the perfect recipient.  In terms of music, there is no one better than Dylan to win the award.  Leonard Cohen is the most poetic and Paul Simon would also be a good choice, but neither has been nearly as prolific as Dylan.  Springsteen has been prolific, but his songwriting is less poetic than Dylan’s.  Dylan was the perfect person to be the first songwriter to be a recipient.

It is Dylan’s lyrics that have really captured my imagination and the imagination of most people.  At one point I envisioned an entire book of short stories inspired by Dylan quotes, to be called The Dylan Stories.  I wrote several of them and then shoe-horned a couple of other stories into the idea.  But for some stories, the quote was the key to the story, which I’ll get into more detail about lower down.  That’s why it was so easy to get into Dylan through the cover versions – his lyrics are so amazing that everyone with a good voice wants to sing his songs.

I am by no means a huge Dylan fan and I had to slowly grow into appreciating his voice.  For many songs, I definitely prefer cover versions.  But I do have a lot of Bob Dylan CD’s.  In fact, in terms of quantity, he would rank 4th, behind U2 (two shelves), Bruce Springsteen (a shelf and a half) and R.E.M. (most of a shelf).  Dylan takes up almost half a shelf.  Now, that’s not to say that Dylan is my fourth favorite musical artist of all-time, not when the Levellers, the Clash, Pearl Jam, Pink Floyd and the Beatles exist.  The Dylan part of the shelf takes up so much room for a few reasons.  The first is that Dylan has been so prolific for so long.  The Beatles are the greatest and most important musical act in the history of rock and roll, but they only lasted eight years and didn’t leave behind much in the way of unreleased songs (most of the three Anthology discs were remixes, which had a lot of awesome stuff, but didn’t expand their number of total songs).  Even compressing a lot of Dylan (on the shelf, the first Dylan CD is 1962/63, which is a compilation of his first two albums and then 1964, which is a compilation of his next two), it still takes up a lot of space because there have been so many good songs for so long.

Dylan was one of the artists that grew in my collection during the years that I actively collected records on vinyl (1997-2004).  Like so many artists that I had large collections of (Clapton, Neil Young, Peter Paul & Mary, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones) it was easy to get most of their work on vinyl if you didn’t mind scratches and cheap copies.  Which was fine, because my goal with all of those artists, was to find out which songs I really liked so I could put together mix tapes.  For a long time, the only Dylan I had on CD were post-1989 works (Bootleg Series Vol 1-3, Greatest Hits Vol. 3, Unplugged, Time Out of Mind) or the albums that were actually hard to get on vinyl (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited).  I had almost all of his other work from 1962-1989 on vinyl.  Later, I would make a lot of CD’s that encapsulated his best work while also buying certain albums on CD (Blood on the Tracks, for instance).

But, enough with the intro.  Here are my lists.

My Top 10 Bob Dylan Albums:

Note:  By this, I mean, the best studio albums.  So, that doesn’t count greatest hits collections, live albums or any other compilation of Bob Dylan songs.  See the next list for that.

#10  –  The Basement Tapes  (1975, though recorded in 1967)

• I’m already going against the grain of big Dylan fans by ranking this album so low.  I admire the album, but not the same way that many others do and there’s no real stand-out song on it that works for me.  But it is a seminal album and it brought about The Band as The Band and that alone is important.  My favorite track on it is “Odds and Ends”.

#9  –  Another Side of Bob Dylan  (1964)

• As the Rolling Stone Album Guide put its it, this is where “Dylan began moving away from the explicit to the suggestive, from prose toward poetry.”  Several songs on this album would later be recorded by the Byrds.  “My Back Pages” is the best song as sung by Dylan, but “Chimes of Freedom” is one of the great lyrical songs in the Dylan songbook.

#8  –  Time Out of Mind  (1997)

• This is the only Dylan album I ever bought when it first came out.  It was widely hailed as a return to form when it was released.  The New Rolling Stone Album Guide says “Time Out of Mind shocked the world because it didn’t even echo past glories – it was a ghostly, beautiful new sound, yet another side of Bob Dylan.”  I’d take “Not Dark Yet” as the best track.

#7  –  The Times They Are a-Changin  (1964)

• Both versions of the Rolling Stone Album Guide give this **** instead of the ***** they give most of my list.  But this album has always worked very well for me.  Yes, it is in the same vein as Freewheelin and not as strong as the previous album, but its depth of protest songs from the title track (the best on the album) to the gut-wrenching “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol” has always moved me.

#6  –  Blonde on Blonde  (1966)

• There is no question that many people would rank this at the top.  Rolling Stone ranked it 9th all-time (which made it second among Dylan albums).  In the second version of their Album Guide, RS said “it’s his greatest album anyway, a surreal fever dream of a record, racing through his sharpest, slickest, scariest, and most seductive songs at breakneck speed.”  To me there is no question that “I Want You” is the best track on it.

#5  –  Oh Mercy!  (1989)

• In their first Album Guide, published in 1992, RS gave this ****, noting “it wasn’t until Oh Mercy!, from 1989, that Dylan made an album of anything near his earlier grace” though, by the time of their second guide, in 2004, they had dropped it to ** and described it as “studio-slick mush”.  I think the album is brilliant, and if “Series of Dreams” had been on the album it would be just amazing.  Still, it’s a great album, one that moves from the personal to the political with ease.

#4  –  The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan  (1963)

• The classic album that proved that the young protest singer wasn’t just a Woody Guthrie clone.  It contains several of his best songs, some of which would instantly become classics for other artists.  Even the cover of this album would almost instantly become iconic.  The best song is a hard choice between “Blowin in the Wind”, “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” or “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right”, but the last is probably the one that Dylan does best.

#3  –  Bringing It All Back Home  (1965)

• One of two 1965 albums that completely re-imagined Dylan.  The first side is electric, beginning with “Subterannean Homesick Blues” and ending with the album’s best track, the hilarious story-song “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”.  Then we get that second side, the acoustic side, just four songs, but all of them instantly classics.

#2  –  Highway 61 Revisited  (1965)

• The other 1965 album that reinvented Dylan.  It begins with “Like a Rolling Stone”, the song Rolling Stone ranked #1 of all-time.  It closes with “Desolation Row”, one of the great all-time long songs.  In between are several visionary songs that almost re-invent Dylan as a songwriter.  Rolling Stone ranked this album as the 4th greatest of all-time and would write in their Album Guide “the entire record wasn’t only that of a new Dylan, it was music and words of a force seldom heard in pop music ever before.”

#1  –  Blood on the Tracks  (1975)

• Leave it to his personal life to give him the baggage that would provide the fodder for his best album.  Beginning with his best song and moving through to a simple closing number, the album covers a range of emotions, from love to pain to anger.  What is also impressive about this album is how much the songs changed (he re-recorded the entire album after being unhappy with it) and alternate versions of most of the songs have been released, meaning you can even reimagine the album yourself.  I would imagine that before too long the alternate versions of this album will become a new release in the Bootleg Series.

My Top 5 Bob Dylan non-albums:

#5  –  Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits  (1967)

• The original greatest hits recording.  It contains all of the basic hits that you need to know from Dylan’s early career.  It was the first Dylan tape I owned, bought my Freshman year in college, and where I got the first couple of Dylan songs that I put on mix tapes (“Like a Rolling Stone”, “The Times They Are a-Changin”).

#4  –  The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack  (2005)

• The companion piece to the Martin Scorsese documentary, this covers Dylan’s early years, from high school work, to the bitter live version of “Like a Rolling Stone” at the Royal Albert Hall where Dylan intones his band to “play fucking loud.”  It’s a great retrospective of the early work with live and alternate versions of classic Dylan songs.

#3  –  The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue  (2002)

• Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour is quite famous but the only live recording from it was Hard Rain which was recorded late in the tour and it showed, as the songs sound tired.  Here they sound vivid and alive with an especially remarkable version of “Sara”.  There have been lots of Dylan live albums, especially with the release of the various Bootleg Series, but to me, this is still the best.

#2  –  Biograph  (1985)

• Dylan’s first box set is still one of the all-time greats.  First, it has magnificent liner notes from Cameron Crowe (especially memorable when he talks about going to a party where everyone was dressed as a character from a Dylan song).  Second, it doesn’t skimp, giving you 53 songs spread across 3 CD’s (or five records originally).  Third, aside from major songs, it also delves into the archives, with the best being “Abandoned Love”, a song I knew first from the Dylan lyrics book before I ever heard it and loved from the first minute.

#1  –  The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3: Rare & Unreleased, 1961-1991  (1991)

• Dylan, like Springsteen, has always been known for having a treasure trove of unreleased music (if you think Hendrix and Tupac have had big careers after their deaths, just imagine what will happen if all the vaults of Dylan and Springsteen are opened after they die).  The Basement Tapes were famous and circulated for years before they were officially released.  So, Dylan finally started opening the vault in 1991 with this three disc collection of unreleased work.  Some of them are songs that had been copyrighted (and whose lyrics had appeared in print back in 1985), some were alternate versions of classic songs (imagine “Like a Rolling Stone” as a waltz).  And then it ends with the double whammy of “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky” moving right into one of Dylan’s absolute best songs, “Series of Dreams”, a song which would even appear on his third greatest hits collection.

My Top 30 Bob Dylan covers:

#30  –  Too Much of Nothing  (Peter, Paul & Mary – 1967)

• When my sister and I were kids just after moving to California, we shared a room.  My mother used to put us to bed with The Best of Peter, Paul and Mary: 10 Years Together.  I seem to recall listening to it at bedtime every night.  It helped inspire a love for those songs, three of which were written by Bob Dylan, including this one.

#29  –  Shelter from the Storm  (Ed Roland and the Sweet Tea Project  –  2012)

• In 2012, Amnesty International would release a charity compilation of Dylan covers called Chimes of Freedom.  Ed Roland, the lead singer of Collective Soul, recorded a cover of Shelter from the Storm for the album with his side project, the Sweet Tea Project.  It’s a great cover that really hearkens back to the original recording without being the same at all.

#28  –  It Ain’t Me Babe  (Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash – 1965)

• For such a snarky song, it seems kind of revolutionary to use it as a duet by a married couple.  This was also one of the few songs at the 30th Anniversary Celebration that had been previously recorded by the same musical artists.  For an extra bit of fun, you can find here the film version sung by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon which is also damn good.

#27  –  You Ain’t Goin Nowhere  (Brett Dennan – 2012)

• I first heard of Brett Dennan in 2007.  It was Christmas Eve and I was driving from Arlington back to Quincy to pick up some packages at our old apartment and I was listening to WCBN’s Christmas Eve countdown.  It was where I first heard Spiralling’s mind-blowing version of “Do You Hear What I Hear” (with samples from “Baba O’Riley”), the song “Land of the Glass Pinecones” and Brett Dennan’s “The Holidays are Here and We’re Still at War”.  Listening to Dennan, I thought it was a black female, similar to Tracy Chapman.  Imagine my surprise when I would later find out that Dennan was a white male.  Dennan would also do a song called “Ain’t No Reason” which would be used beautifully in an episode of Scrubs.  This version of Dylan’s song would comes from the Amnesty International charity album Chimes of Freedom.

#26  –  Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door  (Guns N Roses  –  1991)

• Dylan seems an odd choice for GnR, but it worked.  In fact, they had been playing it in concert since their first tour and had originally recorded it in 1990 for use on the Days of Thunder soundtrack, then re-recording it for Use Your Illusion II.  While this, surprisingly, didn’t chart in the US, it was a big hit around the world.

#25  –  The Mighty Quinn  (Manfred Mann  –  1968)

• Probably one of the best known covers on this list.  This cover even changed the song title (the original title is actually Quinn the Eskimo).  This is one of the most fun Dylan covers and I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of people didn’t even realize this was a Dylan song.

#24  –  Maggie’s Farm  (U2  –  1986)

• Though U2 has never done a studio version of this song, it was in their playlist for a while in the mid-80’s.  Like Springsteen (see below), they decided to use Dylan while on tour for Amnesty International.  This song is a perfect song for such a tour and Bono really gives it his all here, ending the song with a bit of Lennon’s Cold Turkey.

#23  –  Blowin in the Wind  (Neil Young  –  1991)

• Certain guitarists have their own traits.  One of the things that helps you know that you’re listening to Neil Young is that he plays notes.  He doesn’t just play chords, he plays actual notes.  That’s what makes his version of Blowin in the Wind so remarkable, as he plays those opening notes on the guitar.  This version was released on his double live album Weld.

#22  –  The Times They Are a-Changin  (Billy Joel  –  1987)

• One of three versions of this song on the list and I could have included more.  I love other versions of this song.  It’s interesting that many versions of this song cut a verse and what’s more, they don’t necessarily cut the same verse.  Billy Joel cuts the third verse of the song (“Come mother and fathers throughout the land”).

#21  –  Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door  (Eric Clapton  –  1975)

• Probably the best known cover of this song.  This was a Top 40 hit in the UK though it didn’t even crack the Top 100 in the US.

#20  –  When I Paint My Masterpiece  (The Band  –  1971)

• This is another of those songs (like much of The Basement Tapes) that would be released as a cover version before the Dylan version would be released (the Dylan version wasn’t on an album and would find its first release on Greatest Hits Vol II).  The Band would also do a great version of this at the 30th Anniversary Celebration.

#19  –  Tangled Up in Blue  (The Indigo Girls  –  1995)

• This is a live version.  This is really a great version, with the one caveat that the verse where they decide to slow things down doesn’t work for me at all.  But aside from that, I’m a big fan of it.  What’s more, I love that they don’t change the gender, which adds some interesting twists to the song.

#18  –  Bob Dylan’s Dream  (Peter, Paul & Mary  –  1967)

• The only one of the four Peter, Paul & Mary versions on this list that isn’t on their 10 Years Together.  Quite frankly, I could have included other PP&M covers, like “The Times They Are a-Changin” or “I Shall Be Released”.  When my mother took a Bob Dylan class at the adult learning at San Diego State, I made her two CD’s of Dylan covers, the second of which was entirely PP&M and The Byrds.

#17  –  The Times They Are a-Changin  (Tracy Chapman  –  1993)

• Tracy Chapman has, for me, been an acquired taste and I haven’t fully acquired it.  But I have gotten used to some of it, partially through her brilliant “Fast Car”, a song that has really grown on me over the years and this cover version of one of Dylan’s greatest songs.  She actually sings the entire song.

#16  –  When the Ship Comes In  (The Clancy Brothers  –  1993)

• “You never thought you’d hear Dylan with an Irish accent, did you?”  That’s how the Clancy Brothers introduce themselves at the 30th Anniversary Celebration.  Their Irish accents provide the perfect harmony to the beautiful lyrics of this song which originally appeared on The Times They Are a-Changin.

#15  –  Forever Young  (Rod Stewart  –  1987)

• You could make the argument that this isn’t a Dylan song and my mother keeps trying to insist it isn’t.  So, it’s really supposed to be just a complete coincidence that Rod Stewart took basically the chord progression of the Dylan song and several of the lyrics and wrote a completely new song?  Either way, I have included it.  I have always had mixed feelings on Rod Stewart (as opposed to Veronica who hates him) but I have been a big fan of this song since the first time I heard it and it’s absolutely one of my two or three favorite Stewart songs.

#14  –  Like a Rolling Stone  (The Rolling Stones  –  1995)

• How is it that it took so long for this to happen?  I’m sure there must have been times over the years that the Stones sang this song in concert.  But it took until their 1995 live album Stripped before they recorded and released a version of it.

#13  –  Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door  (The Alarm  –  1986)

• There are certain Dylan songs that seem to cry out for a new cover version.  I have heard a lot of versions of “I Shall Have Been Released” and considered including one on this list but I couldn’t decide between Chrissie Hynde, Peter Paul & Mary and the all-star version from The Last Waltz.  This is another song that always seems to need more because it hasn’t quite been perfect.  The closest I can come is this Alarm version.  They sang it live for years (my brother and sister both heard them perform it live and I have long had a bootleg tape my sister recorded at Irvine Meadows of them singing it) and they finally released a live version on their live album.  Both my brother and sister are in the audience of the video I link to.

#12  –  My Back Pages  (The Byrds  –  1967)

• One of the numerous songs from Another Side of Bob Dylan that the Byrds have covered, probably the best known of them and aside from Mr. Tambourine Man, probably the best known Byrds version of a Dylan song.  The Byrds harmony really seems to catch the great line “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

#11  –  Chimes of Freedom  (Bruce Springsteen  –  1988)

• Bruce Springsteen started playing this song in preparation for a short tour for Amnesty International.  He played it with the announcement of the tour, a version that was then included on a four song EP.  It was the first time I had ever heard the song and it was one of those songs that made me realize how great a songwriter Bob Dylan was.  Like with many Dylan covers, Bruce has to cut a verse to keep the song from lasting forever (it’s over six minutes even with the cut verse) but I wouldn’t know that until I bought the Dylan lyrics book.

#10  –  License to Kill  (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers  –  1993)

• This is another of those performance from the 30th Anniversary Celebration, or as Neil Young calls it in his introduction to Petty, “Bobfest”.  This is a Dylan song that might have slipped through the cracks for me if I had not heard this cover version.

#9  –  All Along the Watchtower  (U2  –  1988)

• One of the songs played on the Joshua Tree tour and then included in the film and on the album Rattle & Hum.  The video is to the version that is used in the film which is slightly different than the one that was on the original album.

#8  –  Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right  (Peter, Paul & Mary  –  1963)

• The second of the three Dylan songs on Ten Years Together, this is, of course, another song I grew up listening to.  With the way the melody of the sings works in conjunction with the acoustic guitar, this is one of the most beautiful covers of a Dylan song.  While it isn’t one of the three PP & M songs I originally put on one of my first mix tapes (see below), this one and For Lovin Me were the ones that I really grew to love later on.

#7  –  Masters of War  (Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready  –  1993)

• The last of the versions from the 30th Anniversary Celebration.  I couldn’t find the video of that performance, but the video linked is the whole band playing the song together on Letterman in 2004.  Eddie’s got a voice that works perfectly for the political anger in this song.

#6  –  The Times They Are a-Changin  (Don Henley  –  1993)

• On Inauguration night in 1993, MTV, in celebration of Bill Clinton’s victory, threw the MTV Rock and Roll Inaugural Ball.  It had some very memorable performances, like Michael Stipe singing with the 10,000 Maniacs, half of U2 and half of R.E.M. combining to become Automatic Baby and sing a very memorable version of “One”, and Don Henley, backed by the Woodrow Wilson High School choir to sing what is still my favorite version of one of my favorite Dylan songs.  Don Henley cuts the final verse (“The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast”).

#5  –  Mr. Tambourine Man  (The Byrds  –  1965)

• The biggest hit ever written by Dylan.  The Byrds song immediately became a classic and has been well-loved for 50 years.  I think this was the third Dylan song I ever put on a mix tape after Blowin in the Wind and A Hard’s Rain Gonna Fall.  Still one of the best songs of the 60’s.

#4  –  Like a Rolling Stone  (Jimi Hendrix  –  1967)

• Ah, the glory of vinyl.  As I have mentioned, I used to have a large vinyl collection.  Aside from various artists I would try to collect for cheap, I would buy anything that looked interesting and that I didn’t think I could find on CD.  In fact, when I bought the Monterey Pop Festival album the songs weren’t available on CD, so it was a major shock to discover Jimi Hendrix playing Like a Rolling Stone.  The greatest guitarist who ever lived playing what is possibly Dylan’s greatest song?  How could it get any better?  Thankfully by the time I passed my vinyl collection onto my college roommate it had been released on CD and I could put it on a homemade CD (that was the whole point of the vinyl collection – so I would know what songs I would want on a homemade greatest hits collection).  The linked video isn’t Monterey, but it is still Hendrix shredding the song.

#3  –  Blowin in the Wind  (Peter, Paul & Mary  –  1963)

• This was the first Bob Dylan song I ever knew.  Of the three Peter, Paul & Mary songs that really stuck with me when I first started becoming interested in music and making mix tapes this was the only Dylan song (the other two were Puff the Magic Dragon and Leavin on a Jet Plane).  This is a song that has been covered countless times, but this remains my favorite version and probably my favorite Peter, Paul & Mary song.

#2  –  A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall  (Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians  –  1989)

• My first year and a half of high school corresponded with a revived interest in music videos because VH-1 had debuted and they actually played videos.  They were mostly lighter fare than what had dominated MTV in the early to mid 80’s, but hey, at least they were playing videos.  So songs like Veronica, Stand and No Myth were ones I watched constantly.  Another was What I Am by Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians, a song that was lyrically interesting but I didn’t love (I like it more now than I did then).  But the next video from Edie was a song for the Born on the Fourth of July soundtrack (annoyingly, I couldn’t find the actual video online) which turned out to be a Bob Dylan cover.  I bought the soundtrack, because it also had American Pie (a cleaner recording than I already had third-hand from siblings) and the John Williams score and this song was amazing.  I absolutely loved it and I put it on Eric Songs VI and you can tell it’s old because I still spelled my name with a ‘c’.  This is still, lyrically, my favorite Dylan song (even if Edie does cut a verse) and I have loved this version of the song ever since.

#1  –  All Along the Watchtower  (The Jimi Hendrix Experience  –  1968)

• This is one time where I think the popular consensus will be on my side.  Much like Dylan himself, Hendrix was an acquired taste for me because of his voice.  His guitar, on the other hand, was easily acquired and this is possibly the best job he has ever done on guitar.  What he does with the opening riff of this song is simply amazing.  If I were to name my favorite guitar riffs of all-time, it’s easily up there with Layla and Whole Lotta Love.

My Top 40 Bob Dylan lines:

These are a very personal list.  Some of them are deep and meaningful.  With some of them I like the pure poetry.  Some of them are amusing.  Some of them just speak to me.  As mentioned above, many of these were the inspiration for short stories I wrote.  The most important for that is #3, which provided the whole basis for a very long story I wrote and sent out to friends on e-mail back in 1998.  Then #5, combined with a Brett Easton Ellis quote (“THIS IS NOT AN EXIT” – the last line from American Psycho) provided the title and concept for the follow-up story, which was also sent out to friends over e-mail as a serial.
There are some songs with multiple lines on this list.
Because these lyrics say enough on their own, I haven’t included any commentary on why they are included (although some might be mentioned down below in the list of 50 best songs).  Some would surely be on anybody’s list.  Some work just for me.
With the exception of those lyrics from after 1985, all of the lyrics are quoted directly from Lyrics, 1962-1985.  Because of how long I have owned that book, some of these songs I knew by lyric before I ever heard the song.
Some of these lyrics I also first learned in different ways.  The lines from Desolation Row are quoted at the end of the first issue of Watchmen (the second issue is what introduced me to Elvis Costello’s The Comedians).  But, while every issue of Watchmen ended with a quote only two of them were Dylan (and the other, from All Along the Watchtower, doesn’t make my list).  But in high school I also read Green Lantern / Green Arrow: The Collection Volume One: Hard-Traveling Heroes, the first collection of the seminal issues by Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams.  That collection had a Dylan quote to introduce each of the seven issues.  Though only #8 on my list comes from those quotes, most of the other songs quoted in the issues are also quoted (with a different line) below.

#40  –  Some people thinkin’ that the end is close by  /  ‘Stead of learnin’ to live they are learning to die  –  Let Me Die in My Footsteps

#39  –  Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain  /  That could hold you dear lady from going insane  –  Tombstone Blues

#38  –  Now he’s hell-bent for destruction he’s afraid and confused  /  And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill  /  All he believes are his eyes  /  And his eyes they just tell him lies  –  License to Kill

#37  –  Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp  /  And a piece of an old ship that lies on the shore  /  You always responded when I needed your help  /  You gimme a map and key to your door  –  Sara

#36  –  Mama take this badge off of me  /  I can’t use it anymore  /  It’s gettin’ dark, too dark for me to see  /  I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door  –  Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

#35  –  Most of the time I’m strong enough not to hate  –  Most of the Time

#34  –  I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand  –  Mr. Tambourine Man

#33  –  For all eternity I think I will remember  /  That ice wind that’s howling in your eye  /  You will seek me and you’ll find me  /  In the wasteland of your mind  /  When the night comes falling from the sky  –  When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky

#32  –  I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame  /  And every time I pass that way I always hear my name  /  Then onward in my journey I come to understand  /  That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand  –  Every Grain of Sand

#31  –  My love she speaks like silence  /  Without ideals or violence  –  Love Minus Zero / No Limit

#30  –  Standing next to me in this lonely crowd  /  Is a man who swears he’s not too blame  /  All day long I hear him shout so loud  /  Crying out that he was framed  –  I Shall Be Released

#29  –  It was gravity which pulled us down and destiny which broke us apart  /  You tamed the lion in my cage but it just wasn’t enough to change my heart  –  Idiot Wind

#28  –  Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain  –  Not Dark Yet

#27  –  I was thinking of a series of dreams  /  Where nothing comes to up to the top  /  Everything stays down where it’s wounded  /  And comes to a permanent stop  –  Series of Dreams

#26  –  So now I’m goin’ back again  /  I got to get to her somehow  /  All the people we used to know  /  They’re an illusion to me now  –  Tangled Up in Blue

#25  –  I got a head full of ideas  /  That are drivin’ me insane  –  Maggie’s Farm

#24  –  I asked the captain what his name was  /  And how come he didn’t drive a truck  /  He said his name was Columbus  /  I just said, ‘Good luck’  –  Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream

#23  –  Oh but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears  /  Bury the rag deep in your face  /  For now’s the time for your tears  –  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

#22  –  The guilty undertaker sighs  /  The lonesome organ grinder cries  /  The silver saxophone says I should refuse you  –  I Want You

#21  –  Stayin’ up for days at the Chelsea Hotel  /  Writin’ ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you  –  Sara

#20  –  Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught  /  Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended  –  Chimes of Freedom

#19  –  And I hope that you die  /  And your death’ll come soon  /  I will follow your casket  /  In the pale afternoon  /  And I’ll watch while you’re lowered  /  Down to your deathbed  /  And I’ll stand o’er your grave  /  ‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead  –  Masters of War

#18  –  You don’t need a weather man  /  To know which way the wind blows  –  Subterranean Homesick Blues

#17  –  Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll  –  Chimes of Freedom

#16  –  In a many dark hour  /  I’ve been thinkin’ about this  /  That Jesus Christ  /  Was betrayed by a kiss  /  But I can’t think for you  /  You’ll have to decide  /  Whether Judas Iscariot  /  Had God on his side  –  With God on Our Side

#15  –  But goodbye’s too good a word, gal  /  So I’ll just say fare thee well  –  Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right

#14  –  Ah, but I was so much older then  /  I’m younger than that now  –  My Back Pages

#13  –  I met one man who was wounded in love  /  I met another man who was wounded with hatred  –  A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

#12  –  Most of the time /  I can’t even be sure  /  If she was ever with me  /  Or if I was ever with her  –  Most of the Time

#11  –  Look out kid  /  It’s somethin’ you did  /  God knows when  /  But you’re doin’ it again  –  Subterranean Homesick Blues

#10  –  At dawn my lover comes to me  /  And tells me of her dreams  /  With no attempts to shovel the glimpse  /  Into the ditch of what each one means  /  At times I think there are no words  /  But these to tell what’s true  /  And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden  –  Gates of Eden

#9  –  I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it  /  And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it  /  Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’  /  But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’  –  A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

#8  –  Well, I spied a girl and before she could leave  /  “Let’s go and play Adam and Eve”  /  I took her by the hand and my heart it was thumpin’  /  When she said, “Hey man, you crazy or sumpin’  /  You see what happened last time they started  –  Talkin’ World War III Blues

#7  –  And every one of them words rang true  /  And glowed like burnin’ coal  /  Pourin’ off of every page  /  Like it was written in my soul from me to you  /  Tangled up in blue  –  Tangled Up in Blue

#6  –  Well the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount  /  But nothing really matters much it’s doom alone that counts  /  And the one-eyed undertaker he blows a futile horn  /  “Come in,” she said  /  “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”  –  Shelter from the Storm

#5  –  There must be some way out of here  –  All Along the Watchtower

#4  –  Now at midnight all the agents  /  And the superhuman crew  /  Come out and round up everyone  /  That knows more than they do  –  Desolation Row

#3  –  One more time at midnight near the wall  /  Take off your heavy make-up and your shawl  /  Won’t you descend from the throne from where you sit  /  Let me feel your love one more time before I abandon it  –  Abandoned Love

#2  –  Come mothers and fathers  /  Throughout the land  /  And don’t criticize  /  What you can’t understand  /  Your sons and your daughters  /  Are beyond your command  /  Your old road is  /  Rapidly agin’  /  Please get out of the new one  /  If you can’t lend your hand  /  For the times they are a-changin’  –  The Times They Are A-Changin’

#1  –  How many roads must a walk down  /  Before you call him a man?  –  Blowin in the Wind

Note:  The answer to #1, by the way, is 42.

My Top 50 Bob Dylan songs (as sung by Dylan):

#50  –  Simple Twist of Fate  (1975)

• The second song on Blood on the Tracks, it’s acoustic like Tangled Up in Blue, but is different in almost all other ways.

#49  –  Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)  (1967 / 1975)

• One of the songs from The Basement Tapes that almost immediately became known thanks to a famous cover version.  It’s very different from the Manfredd Mann version but it’s fascinating and it shows off the basement aspect of The Basement Tapes.

#48  –  Political World  (1989)

• This was the only song I heard off Oh Mercy when it was first released.  I didn’t appreciate it much at the time, but when I heard it later, in its place on the album, it grew on me.

#47  –  Isis  (1976 / 2002)

• The second song off Desire.  I thought it was okay when I first heard the studio version, but I liked it a lot more when I heard the live version from The Bootleg Series Vol. 5.

#46  –  Forever Young  (1974)

• This was both the last song on the first side of Planet Waves and also the first song on the second side.  There have also been alternate versions released over the years and live versions (the video links to the live version recorded with The Band).

#45  –  Maggie’s Farm  (1965)

• The third song on Bringing It All Back Home and one of the best at merging Dylan’s political protest sensibilities with the new rock sound he had brought to the album.

#44  –  Chimes of Freedom  (1964)

• The fourth song off Another Side of Bob Dylan.  This is one of his most beautiful songs and thus why it makes for such a great cover version for Bruce Springsteen and The Byrds, who have voices that work with such a beautiful song more than Dylan’s.  They cut verses, of course, because the song is really long otherwise.

#43  –  Love Sick  (1997)

• A dark vision of the world.  This was the first song off Time Out of Mind and gave a first look at where that album would go.  It’s one of the songs that best fits that later, even worse singing voice that Dylan would have in his later career.

#42  –  Buckets of Rain  (1975)

• The beautiful short song that ends Blood on the Tracks on a much more poignant note after so much dark bitterness through much of the album.

#41  –  It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue  (1965)

• The final song on Bringing It All Back Home, it’s been covered by lots of bands because of its lyrical strengths and because it is a reminder of the kind of folk music he played before that album but also the later lyrical poetry he was already developing.

#40  –  License to Kill  (1983)

• I first heard this song sung by Tom Petty at the 30th Anniversary Celebration.  I was worried that the original wouldn’t hold up very well, but it is quite good.  It’s off Infidels, the best album Dylan would record between 1976 and 1989.  It’s either the fourth track or the last track on the first side depending on how you want to count.

#39  –  I Shall Be Released  (1967  /  1971)

• This song has a complicated release history.  It was written during The Basement Tapes sessions and the first released version was the version by The Band on Music from Big Pink.  The first Dylan version would surface on Greatest Hits Volume II.  Then a live version would be on Before the Flood.  An all-star live version that includes Dylan and The Band would sing it at the conclusion of The Last Waltz.  Other versions have also been released in various forms on multiple albums in the Bootleg Series.

#38  –  Man in the Long Black Coat  (1989)

• This is the last song on the first side of Oh Mercy (or the fifth track if you’ve got it on CD).  It is a dark, moody song and would show the direction that Dylan would later take with such artistic merit on Time Out of Mind.

#37  –  Lay Down Your Weary Tune  (1963  /  1985)

• Though this song was written in 1963 for The Times They Are a-Changin, it would not be released until Biograph in 1985.  But it had long been known to Dylan fans because the Byrds included a version of it on their second album.

#36  –  Not Dark Yet  (1997)

• While many prefer To Make You Feel My Love, this has always been my favorite song off Time Out of Mind.  It’s got a vision of the world that perfectly matches what his voice had become by this time.  It’s telling that it was released as a single at a time when Dylan didn’t really sell singles anymore.

#35  – Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blue Again  (1966)

• This is the sixth track on Blonde on Blonde, which is ironic as my two favorite tracks on the album are then followed by my least-favorite Dylan song ever.  Hunter probably would yell at me for having this so low on the list.  This song was heavily reworked in the studio while the album was being recorded.

#34  –  It Ain’t Me Babe  (1964)

• The final song on Another Side of Bob Dylan, this is a great bitter song.  This song would kind of set the blueprint for the more bitterly personal songs that would follow years later in Blood on the Tracks.

#33  –  Things Have Changed  (2000)

• Like many great rock stars, Dylan had been passed over by the Academy Awards for eligible songs before, most notably for Knockin on Heaven’s Door.  But, having given the Oscar to Springsteen had kind of opened things up and in 2000, Dylan would win the Oscar.  It doesn’t win the Nighthawk because of the original song from Crouching Tiger, but it does earn a nomination and it’s a great closing song for one of my favorite movies, Wonder Boys.

#32  –  Gates of Eden  (1965)

• The second song on the second side of Bringing It All Back Home (the acoustic side), this is one of those songs that I actually knew the lyrics of before I knew the song.  It is one of his truly great lyrical songs and the line that is #10 above was the epigraph to one of my actual completed Dylan stories.  This was actually the b-side to the single of Like a Rolling Stone.

#31  –  My Back Pages  (1964)

• Though it would be the Byrds that would really capture the feeling of this song (one of numerous songs they covered from Another Side of Bob Dylan) but the original Dylan version is also a great song.  Like with I Shall Be Released, the linked video is actually an all-star version, this one from the 30th Anniversary Celebration.

#30  –  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  (1964)

• One of the most famous political Dylan songs, this one builds to its final climactic bitter irony that underscores the need for social justice, a need that has not gone away in the 50+ years since he first recorded this song.

#29  –  When I Paint My Masterpiece  (1971)

• One of the songs by Dylan that had been released by other artists before he released his own version on Greatest Hits Volume II.  One of the nice things about that second Greatest Hits, which I almost included in the Top 5 non-albums is how much use it made of songs that were already well-known thanks to cover versions but had never been released by Dylan before.

#28  –  When the Ship Comes In  (1964)

• The eight track off The Times They Are a-Changin, this is one of the early songs that actually merges the political with the personal.  I actually had the Clancy Brothers version of this song before I had Dylan’s original.

#27  –  With God on Our Side  (1964)

• The third track from The Times They Are a-Changin, this is one of Dylan’s most pointedly political sides.  This song sums up a lot of how I feel about war and god.

#26  –  You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere  (1967 / 1971)

• A complicated song.  It’s one of the songs originally recorded for The Basement Tapes but not released.  The Byrds would then cover it in 1968 but they would mess up one of the lines.  That prompted Dylan, when he re-recorded the song for Greatest Hits Volume II (the first release of a Dylan version) to make the little dig at Roger McGuinn.  But there are actually several lyrical differences between the Basement Tapes version and the Greatest Hits Volume II version (the latter of which I prefer).

#25  –  Dignity  (1994  /  1995)

• One of the first CDs of Dylan’s I ever owned was his 1995 Unplugged album.  That was where I first heard this song.  It had been recorded originally during Oh Mercy in 1989 (one of two songs cut from that album that would have moved it considerably up the list had they been included) and then released on Greatest Hits Vol III in 1994 before the live version appeared on Unplugged.  My favorite version is still the live one.

#24  –  Every Grain of Sand  (1981)

• I am not a fan of the trilogy of Christian albums that Dylan released in the late 70’s / early 80’s after he converted.  The one song that does really stand out among those albums though is this one, a lyrically beautiful song.

#23  –  Idiot Wind  (1975)

• Like every song from Blood on the Tracks, there are multiple versions of this song.  Every version is long and every version is filled with unbridled anger.

#22  –  A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall  (1963)

• This song began with various lines that Dylan wanted to use to open a song.  He figured that he would never have time to write them all, so he put them all into one song.  It is one of his most lyrically powerful song and was one of the first Bob Dylan songs I knew thanks to the magnificent over by Edie Brickell.

#21  –  All Along the Watchtower  (1968  /  1974)

• Though originally recorded for John Wesley Harding in 1968, it was the Hendrix version that made this song come to life.  Clearly even Dylan recognized that, as almost all live recordings of this song (of which there are several) reflect the Hendrix version much more than the original version.  My favorite version is the one from the 1974 double live album with the Band, Before the Flood.

#20  –  Mr. Tambourine Man  (1965)

• In 1965, Dylan would go electric on Bringing It All Back Home.  But many people often forget that only the first side of the album was electric.  On the second side were four fantastic folk recordings, lead by this song.  Ironically, of course, this song would then go electric when the Byrds would use it to help kick off folk rock and turn it into a #1 hit.

#19  –  Blowin in the Wind  (1963)

• One of Dylan’s most famous songs and the first Dylan song I ever knew, though I would know the Peter, Paul & Mary version by heart long before I ever heard the Dylan version.  This was one of the songs that made me think Dylan wasn’t for me, as it was so difficult to listen to his rough voice after years of the wonderful harmonies of PP&M.

#18  –  Masters of War  (1963)

• The third track off The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, this was one of the almost instant classics, the modern day protest songs that heralded Bob Dylan as the successor to Woody Guthrie.

#17  –  Hurricane  (1976)

• We’ve hit kind of a demarcation spot on this list.  Not because this is the only song on this list not written just by Dylan (look most of Desire, which this is the first track on, it was co-written by Jacques Levy).  But it’s because while many of the songs below this point on the list have a definitive version that is sung by someone else, with the songs from here on up, either I don’t know a good cover, or I think the Dylan version is the best one.  The reason for that is because of Dylan’s musicianship.  In his first few albums, his songs bore the unmistakeable influence of Woody Guthrie, not just in the political aspect but also because they relied mostly on an acoustic guitar and harmonica.  When Dylan went electric, he not only changed what kind of guitar he was playing, but he also started incorporating more instruments into his music.  With this song, not only are the lyrics powerful (if not entirely accurate) but the music is powerful.  The violin work of Scarlet Rivera is a key part of the song.  Many of the songs above this one on the list are far more interesting musically in the Dylan versions while with many of his early songs, it was left to the cover versions to do that.

#16  –  When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky  (1991)

• There’s a reason why this says 1991 and not 1985 (when the song was originally released on Empire Burlesque) and it’s the same reason there’s no linked video.  Dylan originally wrote and recorded this song with several musicians (including Roy Bittan and Steve Van Zandt of the E Street Band) then decided to re-record it as basically a disco song.  That version went on the album (and I really dislike) but the original surfaced on The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3 as the penultimate song, complete with a great fade out into Series of Dreams.  That version is excellent and shows what you can do with a different take of a song.

#15  –  Subterranean Homesick Blues  (1965)

• Dylan’s voice may never be much but here’s a song that shows how much he can make a song his.  This is the song that took Dylan electric and the music is fantastic.  One of the defining songs of rock and roll, complete with one of the first great videos thanks to the film Don’t Look Back.

#14  –  Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door  (1973)

• Bob Dylan’s performance as Alias in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is one of the weakest things about the film.  But his soundtrack is fantastic, both the score and this original song, still one of the greatest original songs written for a film.  The ironic thing is that the song isn’t even on my copy of the film – I have the director’s cut and it excised the song, which is too bad because the scene is really powerful, reminiscent of the classic ending to Ride the High Country.

#13  –  Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right  (1963)

• The first track on the second side of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (or the seventh track).  It’s the highest ranked song on this list from the album because his singing finds just the right tone for the song, one of his best jobs of singing.  I still prefer the PP&M version but Dylan’s is quite beautiful.

#12  –  Abandoned Love  (1975  /  1985)

• This is a song that I knew the lyrics of before I knew the song and I was glad when it turned out to be excellent.  I had read the song lyrics in my Dylan book and decided that I really loved one particular verse which would later be used as the epigraph for a story (which also foreshadowed the ending of the story).  This is another song which has wonderful music to go along with the lyrics.  This song was a last minute cut from Desire for Joey, which means that Dylan weakened his own album by taking off one of his best songs in order to include one of his worst.

#11  –  I Want You  (1966)

• Another song where the music becomes almost as much a part of the song as the poetry of the lyrics.  That’s why I’ve never heard a really satisfying cover.  This is one of those rare Dylan songs that became a Top 20 single.

#10  –  Desolation Row  (1965)

• This is the last track on Highway 61 Revisited and it’s the perfect ending to an album that began with Like a Rolling Stone.  Both songs are long and epic, both songs are filled with vivid characters and yet, musically they are completely different.  I first knew this song from the quote on the list above that was used in Watchmen.  This is probably my second favorite song of all-time that is longer than 10 minutes in the studio version (behind The End).

#9  –  Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream  (1965)

• This is the song least likely to appear on anyone else’s Top 10 Dylan list.  It’s the 7th song on Bringing It All Back Home (the last song on the first side).  Sadly, I couldn’t find a video to link to because it’s vitally important to get the studio version, so you should track it down yourself.  There’s a false start as Dylan starts busting up laughing and they have to go again (amusingly enough, that was actually from a different take and they deliberately edited that on to the actual take of the song used on the album).  The laugh is appropriate because this is one of Dylan’s funniest songs.  Lines like “They asked me for some collateral and I pulled down my pants” or “I picked up the phone and this foot came through the line” are hilarious, but even more so as you follow them through the story.  The line up above in my favorite lines is funny enough but as a punchline to the entire story it just makes me bust up every time.

#8  –  Sara  (1976 / 2002)

• As I have mentioned above, I used to collect vinyl.  I would use those albums to come up with potential lists for greatest hits collections that I would then make.  So I used to have pages and pages (and later on, spreadsheets) of ratings for songs so I could make my lists.  When I first heard Sara as the last song on Desire, I thought it was a good song.  But when the Bootleg Series Vol. 5 was released in 2002 I realized that this was a great song and that the studio version didn’t really do it justice.  The video linked is not that version because I couldn’t find it but it is a live version.

#7  –  The Times They are A-Changin  (1964)

• The one early folk song without other musicians that makes the top of this list.  That’s because, no matter how much a better job other singers do with this song, the original still possess incredible powers.  To me, this is the definitive Dylan protest song, defining those early few years before Bringing It All Back Home.

#6  –  Tombstone Blues  (1965)

• The second track off Highway 61 Revisited and one of his rocking songs.  I wonder if Columbia Records or Dylan’s people have tried to wipe his songs off the web, because I had considerable trouble finding videos for a lot of the songs and I couldn’t find the original studio version for this one.  I first heard this when I bought the album on CD in 1996.  Loved it right from the start.  Have always loved the line “My advice is to not let the boys in”, mainly because I then imagine the preacher peaking out the window, watching for the boys and then sneaking off (kind of like the narrator in So Long It’s Been Good to Know Ya who “put on my coat and tiptoed out the door” after learning that his intended can’t cook or sew).

#5  –  Most of the Time  (2000)

• I wish I could have found the video I wanted for this one.  Actually, I did, but the audio had been removed due to copyright violations, making me think I’m right in my previous song.  Anyway, there are some songs that you hear and then you later hear again through a new lens.  A perfect case in point is that my original Greatest Hits tape for Queen, made back in the 90’s did not have Don’t Stop Me Now, but by the time I made a Greatest Hits CD for Queen, sometime in 2004, Shaun of the Dead had been released and that song had taken on a new meaning for me.  The song hadn’t hanged, but my appreciation for it had.  The same goes with this song, which I liked when I first heard it, but when I first saw High Fidelity, that like turned to love.  It is one of Dylan’s most powerful songs and that film gave a new level to it for me.

#4  –  Shelter from the Storm  (1975  /  1996)

• I think there was a stretch where this was my favorite Dylan song.  It still was one of the few I considered for the #1 spot.  Lyrically, in spite of all the amazing things Dylan wrote in the early and mid 60’s, it might be my favorite Dylan song.  I slightly prefer the alternate version of the song (as I have said before, all of the songs from Blood on the Tracks have alternate versions) that first found release on the Jerry Maguire soundtrack.  This song inspired one of my Dylan Stories, the plot of which I took from New Mutants #41, because it seemed to perfectly embody #6 in my lyrics list above.

#3  –  Series of Dreams  (1989  /  1991)

• I mentioned above on Dignity that if the two outtakes from Oh Mercy had been on the album, it really would have improved that album in my estimation.  I just can’t understand how this song was left off, and after it appeared on The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3, it was highly regarded enough to end up on Greatest Hits Vol 3.  On The Bootleg Series, When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky continues directly into this song (like it was something off Dark Side of the Moon) and it’s an amazing 1-2 punch to end that collection.  I gave serious consideration to making this my #1 Dylan song.  This song is a good example to give to someone who doesn’t think that a producer is important.  How do you make someone like Dylan sound, musically like U2?  Give him Daniel Lanois as a producer, the same man who co-produced The Joshua Tree.  That is probably part of why I love this song so much.

#2  –  Like a Rolling Stone  (1965)

• Yeah, it’s never the obvious one with me.  This is a truly incredible song, both lyrically (think back to Cameron Crowe’s liner notes to Biograph and that party he attended and how many characters for a party you can do just from this song alone).  Then think about what this song does musically.  And think about it’s importance in musical history.  It charted to #2, which makes Dylan, like Springsteen, a man who hit #2 but in spite of one of the greatest careers in music history, never hit #1 (Springsteen of course will eventually have his own list, but since this Dylan one took me most of a month, the Springsteen one might take me the better part of a year).  It kicks off one of Dylan’s greatest albums (what many would people call his greatest album) with a magnificent start.  And yet, unlike some truly great songs, it also works live.  Specifically, listen to the version on The Bootleg Series Vol. 4 (and also on Vol. 7).  Listen to how he’s called a Judas by fans in the Free Trade Hall and how he responds (“I don’t believe you.  You’re a liar.”) and then how he turns to the band and says “Play fucking loud” before kicking off one of the greatest live versions of any song, let alone one so perfectly constructed in the studio.  Is the best measurement of this song that Rolling Stone ranked it #1 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All-Time, that a song over six minutes in length went all the way to #2 in the short song era of the middle 60’s (behind my favorite Beatles song Help) or that in the six disc version of The Bootleg Series Vol. 12, an entire disc is devoted just to the recordings for this one song.

#1  –  Tangled Up in Blue  (1975)

• So how could Like a Rolling Stone not end up at #1?  Because quite frankly, this song moves me more.  I won’t argue with anyone who prefers my #2 but this is my #1.  Part of it is that it is the perfect opening to the album I ranked the best of Dylan’s storied career.  Part of it is that is so lyrically beautiful, yet manages to tell a fascinating story at the same time.  Part of it is that you can listen to the original version and see how different it is and see how similar it is as the same time.  Like with all the songs on the album, it presents a new experience while also allowing you to sink into an old familiar classic.  I think, when it comes down to it, one line in this song sums up Dylan for me, both in embodying the poetry in Dylan’s lyrics but also in the way the lyrics move me personally: “And every one of them words rang true  /  And glowed like burnin’ coal  /  Pourin’ off of every page  /  Like it was written in my soul from me to you.”

The ending of The Killing isn’t in the original novel at all.  But damn is it brilliant.

My Top 10:

1. The Killing
2. Baby Doll
3. Diabolique
4. The Trouble with Harry
5. The Searchers
6. Richard III
7. Anastasia
8. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
9. Written on the Wind
10. Wuthering Heights

Note:  The list once again exceeds 10; the rest of the list is down at the bottom except my #11 (Lust for Life), which is reviewed as an Oscar nominee.

Consensus Nominees:

1. Around the World in 80 Days  (160 pts)
2. Friendly Persuasion  (120 pts)
3. The King and I  (80 pts)
4. Baby Doll  (80 pts)
5. Giant  (80 pts)

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Adapted):

• Around the World in 80 Days
• Baby Doll
• Giant
• Friendly Persuasion
• Lust for Life

Note:  Thank f’ing god that this is the last year of the stupid and confusing three categories at the Oscars.  I could have included The Proud and the Beautiful, a film nominated for Best Motion Picture Story, a nomination given to philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre.  Sartre wrote several scripts for Pathé in the early 40’s and his script Typhus was then turned into the film.  But, to take an unproduced script and turn it into a produced script isn’t really adapted.  That, plus the film is really hard to find these days.  So I’m not including it.
Note:  High Society was originally nominated for Best Motion Picture Story as well because of confusion between the Grace Kelly / Bing Crosby film and a Bowery Boys comedy.  It was clear that people were voting for the Kelly film but it was the Bowery film that would have been eligible in this category and that earned the nomination.  The Bowery film decided to withdraw their nomination.

WGA Awards:

Drama:

• Friendly Persuasion
• Baby Doll
• Giant
• The Rainmaker
• Somebody Up There Likes Me

Comedy:

• Around the World in 80 Days
• Bus Stop
• Full of Life
• The Solid Gold Cadillac
• Teahouse of the August Moon

Musical:

• The King and I
• Carousel
• High Society

Nominees that are Original:  The Eddy Duchin Story, Meet Me in Las Vegas

My Top 10

The Killing

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as one of the Top 5 films of 1956.  It’s the third film from Stanley Kubrick, but it’s his first great film and it helps pave the path for what will follow.  Kubrick follows the path of John Huston in that he is a writer-director but most of what he writes is adapted from other sources, and yet, he stamps it with a style all his own.  This first great film is a crime film (like his previous film) but he will almost never again make two successive films in the same genre.

The Source:

Clean Break by Lionel White (1955)

Some pulp novels you look back on and you can see the quality shining through. In others, you can see why it was a pulp novel. This thin little novel (with larger than normal print, the cheap reprint of this novel runs only 126 pages) is little more than a good plot. There isn’t much in the way of characterization (there is a little for Johnny, the leader and planner of the heist), so the book really rolls forward on its plot. The plot (the heist of a racetrack during a big race, with the distraction of a sniper shooting the lead horse during the race) is what attracted Stanley Kubrick to it. It’s a very quick read and there’s really not that much to it – certainly not a novel well worth remembering outside of the film.

The Adaptation:

Most of the plot for the film comes straight from the book. There is one main difference along the way (the girl, who is important in the story, partially as a future for Johnny, is barely in it and certainly doesn’t have the importance that she has in the film), but for the most part, aside from Kubrick giving much more depth and characterization, it follows the original plot. The big difference comes in the end, though. Yes, most of the characters end up dead, like in the book, and no, Johnny doesn’t make it away with the loot. But it’s how the end comes about that is so drastically different, and the violent end of the book is wisely dropped for an ending that is much more poetic and almost tragic in the film.

The Credits:

Directed by Stanley Kubrick.  Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick.  Dialogue by Jim Thompson.  Based on the novel “Clean Break” by Lionel White.

Baby Doll

The Film:

A man goes upstairs in a dilapidated house dressed in pajamas, calling for “baby doll”. He knocks on a door but she doesn’t answer. He goes into the next room and peers through a hole in the wall. She is asleep on the bad, a woman-child, dressed in clothes for a girl, on a bed too small for her and sucking her thumb. But there is an aura of sensuality about her and there is an understanding why this man would be staring at her. We feel his lust and our shame at the same time. We can tell already that this is nowhere near a healthy relationship but we’ve also already seen the writing credit for Tennessee Williams, so there was never going to be anything approaching a healthy relationship.

The man is Archie and he’s played by Karl Malden. Archie is kind of losing his mind. He’s definitely losing his business. What he’s not losing is his massive lust for his young bride. She’s been married to him for two years but he hasn’t been allowed to deflower her thanks to an agreement he made with her father. But in a few days she’ll be 20 and he’ll finally be allowed to take full “possession” of her. Still, he can’t wait that long, which is why he’s peeking in the hole. But he’s got other problems as well. His business is rapidly receding, as his cotton gin is losing out to Silva, the Sicilian. Archie decides to burn Silva out so Silva, no fool, decides to come bring some business to Archie and see if he can nail down the proof of what has happened. But what Silva ends up discovering is Baby Doll and the sexual tension between Carroll Baker (who was 25 when the film was made but looks much younger and is so much better here than she ever was before or after on film with an unbridled sensuality wrapped up in a slow-moving innocence) and Eli Wallach (one of the most under-appreciated actors of all-time, making his screen debut here, two years after he was supposed to be in From Here to Eternity and after a decade of starring in any number of major plays on Broadway) threatens to start yet another inferno. And it’s not just the sexual tension (made more interesting in a scene on a swing where there is a tight focus and we can’t see what Wallach is doing with his hands, and given Baker’s reactions, it leads to all sorts of potentialities), but the film tension as well, as Wallach is determined to twist her around until he can get the information he needs from her.

Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams had a long working relationship. Kazan had directed many of Williams’ best plays on Broadway. They only made two films together, both times with Williams actually writing the screenplay (though Kazan would claim that most of Baby Doll was actually written by him). The first, of course, was Streetcar, one of the greatest films ever made with perhaps the greatest ensemble acting in film history. This one is the other, and if it gets lost in the shuffle because of Streetcar (and because for a long time it was actually hard to find, unavailable on DVD and not readily available on video when I first saw it in 2005), it doesn’t deserve to be. It’s a great film in its own right, with remarkable performances and a blend of carnality and black comedy that makes it uneasy for some, but just right for others, including me.

The Source:

27 Wagons Full of Cotton: A Mississippi Delta Comedy by Tennessee Williams (1946)

This is a small little one act about the horrible things we do to each other, yet set in such a way that Williams himself would declare it a comedy. A 60 year old fat man with a very young wife has burned down the competitor’s cotton gin and is now going to gin the neighbor’s cotton for him. What he doesn’t know is that while he’s hard at work, the competitor is also hard at work, not only tricking the young wife into confessing the truth about the fire, but also taking sexual advantage of her. At the end, the wife appears ready to have more dalliances with the neighbor while her husband seems happy with the work he’s going to have coming in.

The Adaptation:

The original play provided a basis for the film – the rivalry between the two men and the sexual nature of what passes between the rival and the young wife while her husband is off taking care of the cotton. But there is so much more to the film, with the whole concept of the young bride who is still a virgin and the sexual tension in her own marriage, which isn’t present at all in the original play.

The Credits:

Directed by Elia Kazan. Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll. Original Screenplay: Tennessee Williams.

Les diaboliques

The Film:

There are two women.  They are both sleeping with the same man.  Neither can be called a love affair, because while one of the women is married to the man, there is no evidence of love in either relationship.  The two women like each other more than they like the man.  In fact, no one likes this man – not his harried wife, not his harassed mistress, not the schoolchildren who make up the student body at this not particularly respectful private school that he runs.  So, it’s really to no one’s great loss when they decide to kill him.

The plan is quite simple.  They will lure him to an apartment, then they will drown him in a bathtub.  After that, they will dump his body in the school pool and since he died from drowning, it will look like an accident.  So they go about their plan and wait for the body to be discovered in the pool.  Except no body is discovered in the pool.

We have entered squarely upon Hitchcock territory.  That, of course, is because Hitchcock himself wanted to make this story into a film.  It is a little unfortunate that Hitchcock would become such a master of the thriller that every great film in the category ends up being forced to endure the comparison.  Thankfully this is a film that can stand the comparison.  Part of that is because Clouzot was a talented filmmaker (his previous film, The Wages of Fear, is one of the most lauded French films ever made).  Part of it is because of the other talent involved behind the camera, most notably the great black-and-white cinematography and the first-rate score from Georges Van Parys.

But last of all, we can not forget the work of Simone Signoret.  There have been a lot of great foreign actors and actresses who would never get their due from the Oscars but thankfully in 1959, Signoret would make Room at the Top and even in a language not her first she would give such a masterful performance as to win the Oscar.  She was one of the great French actresses of all-time and her performance as the mistress who doesn’t love the man she’s sleeping with is one of the best things about the film.

You’ll notice I don’t say anything about what happens after the body doesn’t turn up.  That’s because this is a film that should be seen rather than read about and if you have never seen it, well Criterion has released it on DVD and you should watch it now and skip reading anything further in this post.

The Source:

Celle qui n était plus by Boileau-Narcejac  (1952)

Perhaps I should just learn to read French.  But given that I can’t even pronounce French, I don’t know that it would help.  This is the popular thriller that Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make into a film, but supposedly he was beaten to the punch by Clouzot by just a few hours.  It has all the trappings of a Hitchcock film.  Unfortunately, I have only been able to find the novel in the original French, and since I don’t read French, that leaves me out of luck.  By the way, that’s not an author’s name above – it’s the publishing combination of the two authors last names.

The Adaptation:

Just from reading a description of the book, it’s clear that changes were made (he’s a salesman in the book, not the head of a private school), but the basic idea remains the same – a murder plotted by a couple that spins out of control with some mysteries behind it.

The Credits:

un film produit ét dirigé par H.G. Clouzot.  d’ aprês le roman de Boileau et Narcejac “Celle Qui N’Était Plus”.  scênario et dialogues de H.G. Clouzot et Jérôme Geronimi.  avec la collaboration de René Masson et Frédéric Grendel.

The Trouble with Harry

The Film:

Back in the days before I discovered the database at oscars.org, I wrote a review of this film as the under-appreciated film of 1955.  Just because I have learned that it was Oscar eligible in 1956 doesn’t make it any less under-appreciated.

It’s fun to look back at this film, at the young pixie Shirley MacLaine, to see how delightful and sexy she was and how she could play the mother of a six year old when she was still only 21 and be utterly believable.  Her reputation has gone all over the place over the years and she’s certainly been quite odd in her public life but there’s no denying that she’s one of the great comedic actresses to ever work in film and it all begins here.

The Source:

The Trouble with Harry by Jack Trevor Story (1949)

This is a rather droll, charming, funny book. It is the story of a man who has turned up dead and that inconveniences several people throughout the course of a day. None of them are particularly bothered that he is dead, but rather but must figure out something to do with the corpse. There are four primary people involved, three of whom think, at various points, that they may have been responsible for his death. He gets buried three times, unburied three times, and finally, after being certain that none of the main people involved actually are responsible for his death, left on a copse to be discovered so that he can be properly identified (one of them is his wife who won’t be able to remarry unless she can prove that her husband is dead). It’s very droll and very British and it’s impressive that Hitchcock was so perfectly able to move it to Vermont without losing the tone of the book. It’s quite short (121 pages) but is very enjoyable. Story knows exactly the right tone to take: “This is Ridiculous” is one of the late chapter titles. You can get an idea of the tone here: “The body the man called Harry came as a complete surprise to Sam Marlow, though not as a tragedy, as the hedgehog had been.” or the final line of the penultimate chapter: “Soon they sat eating supper while Albie lay gently snoring in the next room and Harry lay clean, polished, brushed and dead on the sofa.”

The Adaptation:

Most of the film comes straight from the book, including a lot of the dialogue (like “He looked exactly the same when he was alive, except that he was vertical.”). One huge change in the film is the addition of Wiggy’s son, the intrepid policeman. He doesn’t exist at all in the book and he’s a good Hitchcock addition because he provides some suspense to the film and a bit more confusing humor as they have to constantly deal with him. If not for him, the film, which isn’t long to begin with, really would have been too short.

While Harry is the step-father to the child in the film as well as in the book, there is more about it in the book than in the film (“I’m going to hang dear Robert over our bed, dear. You are bearing his child, remember. So when I make love to you, Jenny, I want you to imagine that it’s really Robert making love to you.” he tells his young wife in the book), but since the film already had Forsythe telling MacLaine he wanted to paint her nude, this was almost certainly too much to add in.

There is also a little subplot in the book involving two married couples that are each having an affair with the other that is dropped entirely for the film, which was a good idea as it’s simply distracting in the book and adds nothing to it.

One last bit – the final line isn’t in the book. That whole bit about the double bed was added in for the film and provides a nice amusing final line.

The Credits:

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by John Michael Hayes. Based on the Novel by Jack Trevor Story.

The Searchers

The Film:

The film is a classic, as I have written before. If it is not my #1 film of the year, well, in my defense, this is the same year as The Seven Samurai, a film as equally well-regarded (in TSPDT, they finished #7 and 9 back when I did my Year in Film, with The Searchers on top, but at the moment, they are #9 and 10 with Seven Samurai on top).  It is certainly one of the greatest Westerns ever made and one of John Ford’s greatest films.

The Source:

The Searchers by Alan LeMay (1954)

This is a pretty standard Western novel with a strong, dark theme running through the middle of it. It’s really the vision that sustains it, though at 300 pages, it starts to run really thin.  At 120 minutes, the film version would just about perfectly make use of its length, with the fight scene thrown in towards the end for a bit of humor before the final push.  The book doesn’t really work like that and just starts to wear you down with their endless wandering.  Then, comes the unexpected moments at the end for those of us who have seen the film so many times.  First, when they come into the camp at last, and Martin goes to protect who he thinks is Debbie, we expect the scene from the film, but instead we get this shocker: “The girl turned upon the rider, and Mart saw the broad brown face of a young Comanche woman, who could never possibly have been Debbie.  Her teeth showed as she fired upward at Amos, the mustle of her pistol almost against his jacket.  He fell heavily; his body crumpled as it hit, and rolled over once, as shot game rolls, before it lay still.”  I have to give LeMay credit for being willing to kill one of the two main characters in the penultimate chapter, so close to the end of the search.  But then things go in a different direction.  We know that Martin feels protective of Debbie and that she was close to him when young, but there’s a much different twist on their relationship when he finally does catch up to her: ” ‘I remember,’ she said in a strangely mixed tongue of Indian-English: ‘I remember it all.  But you the most.  I remember how hard I loved you.'”  Okay, she was a kid (“pushing ten”) when she was taken (by the way, that chapter is one of the best in the book – the sheer terror of an impending attack), so that’s a whole different look at things.

The Adaptation:

The following three quotes, from two different books on John Ford and the BFI book on the film itself pretty much sum up all the differences between the book and the film, though, as noted above, the ending (which is mentioned in the final quote) really has a different vibe to it than the film does.

“The primary difference between Alan LeMay’s source novel and John Ford’s film is the protagonist.  LeMay’s is Martin Pawley, Ford’s is Ethan Edwards.  The film version of the character is far darker than the novel’s Amos Edwards, who makes the idealistic speech about bringing civilization to the frontier that the film gives to Ollie Carey’s Mrs. Jorgenson.  Ethan’s secondary motivation, after taking revenge for the killing of his brother’s family is to kill Debbie for becoming the squaw of the Indian Scar.  This is entirely the invention of Ford and Nugent, as is Martin Pawley’s Indian blood, and, for that matter, the sexual relationship between the Indian and the white girl – in the novel, Debbie becomes Scar’s adopted daughter.”  (Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford by Scott Eyman, p 418)

“Frank Nugent’s screenplay vastly improved on LeMay’s gripping but often lurid and superficial novel, adding layers of psychological depth, humor, and social context.” (Searching for John Ford, Joseph McBride, p 552)

“LeMay’s novel wasn’t holy writ; Nugent made a number of significant changes, and some minor ones.  Originally, the hero was named Amos Edwards; his name was changed apparently because of its comic association with the popular radio show Amos ‘n’ Andy.  In the novel, though Amos is in love with his brother’s wife neither she nor her husband are aware of this.  Marty is not part-Indian. Amos does not have a mysterious or shady past.  And instead of bringing Debbie home, Amos is killed by a Comanche woman during an attack on their camp.  It’s left to Marty to rescue Debbie, and the implication is that he will eventually marry her; in the book Laurie does not wait for him.  There’s some amalgamation of characters: in the book there are two Indian chiefs, Bluebonnet and Scar; there is a character named Mose Harper in the book, but Mose in the film is more like the novel’s character of Lige Powers, an aged buffalo hunter.  Clayton is largely an invention of the film.”  (The Searchers: BFI Film Classics by Edward Buscombe, p 45)

The Credits:

Directed by John Ford. Screenplay by Frank S. Nugent. From the Novel by Alan LeMay.

Richard III

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as one of the best films of the year.  It is unfortunate that Olivier, the premiere Shakespeare film actor and directed prior to Branagh, only directed three Shakespeare films.  If this one is the weakest of the three, well that’s hardly a complaint given how good the other two are.  And, because he doesn’t face off against Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life or Humphrey Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, this is the film that wins Olivier the Nighthawk.

The Source:

Richard III by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare composed 11 history plays but the film versions mainly come down to two of them for very good reasons.  One of them provides one of the great screen heroes, young Henry, the king come into his own setting forth to inspire his men and beat the hell out of France.  The other provides one of the great screen villains, a man who will seduce his future wife over the corpse of her father-in-law (husband, usually, on screen), who will kill off his brothers, his nephews and any one else who dare stand in his way.

Richard III is a great play, but it becomes a great film because of what it has in it that is so perfectly filmic: a great character at its core that you can root against (or root for, depending on how twisted you are), battles that can be filmed to liven up the action and several smaller roles for great character actors.  It begins with one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines (if you need me to tell you what it is then you seriously need to pick up the play) and climaxes with a line that is possibly even more famous.  In between, we have a villain of such extremes that it must be a pleasure to play him, whether on stage or on screen.  Hell, if you really don’t want to read the play, then just watch the documentary Looking for Richard and see the masterful job that Al Pacino does looking at the play and why people love to be in it.

The Adaptation:

The film actually begins, first with a brief introduction of the history then the final scene of Henry IV, Part III before we get into the real story of Richard (which means we don’t start with his first soliloquey).  But, after that, we settle into the original play.  As is almost always the case with Shakespeare films, various scenes are cut in their entirety (the character of Queen Margaret, Henry’s widow, is cut entirely)  There are certain other changes, at least one of which is masterful (Richard does his wooing of Anne over her husband’s corpse rather than her brother-in-law’s corpse, adding a much more disturbing aspect to this scene and he cuts the scene in half, moving the second half of it to later).  Olivier, in the screen credits, acknowledges the 1700 revision of the play by Colley Cibber and ideas on the character made during the 35 years that David Garrick played the role on stage in the mid 18th century.

The Credits:

Directed by Laurence Olivier.  Richard III by William Shakespeare.  With some interpolations by David Garrick, Colley Cibber, etc.

Anastasia

The Film:

Do people look at this film and realize that it’s actually kind of daring?  I’m not talking about the return of Ingrid Bergman to stardom (and the Oscars) after years of being ostracized over her affair.  I’m talking about the film itself.

In a lot of ways you wouldn’t think about it.  It’s a costume drama, set in the late 1920’s, roughly a decade after the Russian Revolution.  General Bounine lives in exile in Paris.  He tries to put money together, to put plans together, but there’s nothing much to any of it.  Then he meets a woman, a young woman who bears a resemblance to the almost mythical Grand Duchess Anastasia, the Czar’s child who was supposedly executed with her family but there were conflicting reports and doubts about a body.  This is what he needs, someone that can help propel him back to the top, to help with funds, with an idea to fight for.  He enlists her in a scheme, carefully planning how to make use of her in approaching the Dowager Empress.  It follows the model of Pygmalion and I wouldn’t be surprised if it helped inspire Lerner and Loewe in their new musical.

Up through here, we’re in fairly standard costume drama fare, allowing for the fact that the film is solidly directed, solidly written, has a magnificent performance from Ingrid Bergman that deserved her Oscar and a solid performance from Yul Brynner as Bounine.  The sets and costumes look wonderful, but this was 1956 and there was serious competition if you wanted to get attention just because your sets and costumes looked wonderful.

So now we move to the part that is actually daring.  It’s not the idea that this might actually be Anastasia (in real life not possible, but this is film, so it is possible and it is hinted very strongly that it is actually the case).  It is a good move and it makes the film more interesting.  But here’s the daring part.  Anna (as she is called) has actually been falling in love with Bounine without realizing it.  And Bounine has been falling in love with her.  Circumstances would not allow for that.  But the Dowager has realized it and sets things up so that they can go be happy together.  That’s the daring aspect – not that they fall in love, but that we don’t see it.  We know they have been sent to the same room and the Dowager knows how they feel and then we discover they are both gone.  It’s a daring move – no big romantic scene, nothing that lets us know for certain they they are together.  But that’s perhaps for the best – they needed their love to be secret and away from the rest of the world and that is what they are given.  Good job by the filmmakers for being daring enough to do it.

The Source:

Anastasia by Marcelle Maurette, English Adaptation by Guy Bolton  (1952)

This is an interesting play about the idea that the Grand Duchess Anastasia survived the assassination of her family and, a decade later, resurfaces in Europe.  She is then found by a former Russian General who is anxious to reestablish himself as an important person and looks to use Anastasia to curry favor with the Dowager Empress.  Or maybe the Anya that they have found is really just an impostor that they have set up to seem like the real one.  The confusion extends to the character herself and in the end, it is her journey of discovery that becomes the important thing, both to her and the Dowager Empress, who may or may not be her grandmother.

It’s a solid play with a very good leading role of Anya and an interesting role for an older, more distinguished actress as the Dowager Empress.  Though, whether it was the playwrights or the play, either way the original Broadway cast was not particularly distinguished (it’s rare for me to not recognize a single name in the original cast list in the published version of a play).

The Adaptation:

Some of the film comes directly from the play, including a lot of the lines.  But there are also a considerable number of changes.  Some of them are less important to the overall feel of things (the entire play takes place in Berlin and there is much talk of other cities in Europe while the film takes place in Paris).  But the important thing is that in the film, there is a love story (subtly told) between Anya and the Russian general Bounine.  There is no such subplot in the original play, and while we do end with the Dowager Empress getting the last line in both versions, it is a much more triumphant last line in the film that hearkens to the whole idea of the plot while in the play, a depressed Bounine has watched his scheme fall apart and he sinks into a chair bemoaning the mad Romanovs.  As much as it seems like a stereotypical “bad” Hollywood thing to add in the romance, it actually makes for a much more interesting end to the film, partially because Arthur Laurents’ writes it so well and the filmmakers had the daring idea of not actually showing us the couple.

The Credits:

Directed by Anatole Litvak.  Screenplay by Arthur Laurents.  From the play by Marcelle Maurette as adapted by Guy Bolton.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The Film:

I wrote about this film as the under-appreciated film of 1956.  While it was ignored by awards groups, in some ways it isn’t under-appreciated at all because it’s seen as a pivotal film of its genre (whether you decide the genre is Horror or Sci-Fi).  But I wrote about it because it was the first of three films that I wrote about that had to do with the Blacklist.  Daniel Mainwaring, the screenwriter of this film, had his career damaged by the Blacklist and, given that this film is often described as a parable against the dangers of Communism, I felt it was important to blow that theory out of the water.

The Source:

The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney  (1954 / 1955)

The Body Snatchers originally appeared in Collier’s Magazine in 1954.  It was then expanded and put out in book form in 1955.  It is a fascinating and effective thriller, one which combines aspects from Science Fiction (the invasion of an alien race) and Horror (the replacement of humans by their “pod” versions).  Its quality is perhaps evident in its initial publication.  Like Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, it was Science Fiction published in Collier’s, which was a magazine with a national reputation.  Though you will pretty much know the story if you have seen the film, it is still a story that is worth reading.  Finney would actually become more well-known as a writer for his later Sci-Fi novel Time and Again.

The Adaptation:

“Jack Finney’s story is a good one.  [Danny Mainwaring and I] just translated it into cinematic terms.  There was a real effort to make it completely believable – that was the big chore – so that it wouldn’t be just another special-effects picture.”  Don Siegel quoted in Who the Devil Made It by Peter Bogdanovich, p 741.

As I mentioned in my original review, there was a key change made from the book to the film.  The book takes place in 1976, which, of course, was 20 years into the future.  But the film takes place in the present day.  That plays into the idea of the film as a parable and a warning, if this is something going on now.

One major difference also, of course, is the framing device:  “The studio also insisted on a prologue and an epilogue.  [Producer Walter] Wanger was very much against this, as was I.  However, he begged me to shoot it to protect the film, and I reluctantly consented.”  (A Siegel Film: An Autobiography by Don Siegel, p 185)

The Credits:

Directed by Don Siegel.  Screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring.  Based on the Collier’s Magazine Serial by Jack Finney.  The IMDb lists uncredited writing from Richard Collins.

Written on the Wind

The Film:

If Douglas Sirk is an acquired taste, then, in spite of having seen 14 films directed by him, I have not acquired it.  It certainly doesn’t help that he insisted on casting Rock Hudson over and over again.  Or perhaps they were meant for each other.  Hudson’s attempts at emoting perhaps seems perfectly paired with Sirk’s endless penchant for melodrama.

This film, in my opinion, is Sirk’s best.  It is the one that rises above the melodrama to become a very good film, although, with a 76 rating, it is the very lowest ***.5.  It’s not Hudson’s performance that brings it up to that level, since there isn’t much depth to it.  It’s not even Lauren Bacall, because if Jane Wyman couldn’t bring Sirk’s melodrama to a higher level, than Bacall certainly wasn’t going to do it.  In some ways, it’s definitely the script that does it – a level of depth to the characters, or at least to the understanding of their characters (most of the characters have no depth at all, but that’s actually a good understanding of their characters) that provides us with a story that’s more interesting than the usual Sirk melodrama.  Granted, it almost gets sunk at the end of the film, when we’re forced to endure a trial which we know can only have one ending, because aside from the Production Code, this film just can’t bring itself to commit to total misery for the characters who actually deserve some shred of happiness.

What really makes this film so much better than the other Sirk films is the two supporting performances, the siblings who can not manage to get control over their lives, and played so well by Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone.  It is easily the best performance of Stack’s career and likely the best from Malone, although I will always love her little cameo in The Big Sleep.  Both of them drink too much, both of them are disappointments to their father and both of them live in the shadow of Hudson.  Hudson is Stack’s best friend and the man that Malone has been in love with forever, but he is the man that Malone can never have (made worse when Bacall comes upon the scene and Hudson so clearly falls in love with her even though she ends up marrying Stack against all good judgement, but then again, this is a Sirk melodrama) and the man that does the job that Stack can’t manage to do, and thus, in his father’s eyes, the man that Stack should be but isn’t.

All of this will be wound up in tragedy, for this is a Sirk melodrama after all.  But it never gets out of control and Stack’s controlled performance and Malone’s out of control performance both keep things moving, towards the tragic climax, and then, through the anti-climactic ending that, if it isn’t a great way to tie things up, at least doesn’t completely fall apart.

The Source:

Written on the Wind by Robert Wilder (1946)

Right from the first sentence, this is a surprisingly solid novel: “A latticed moon, caught in the slender line of trees straggling across the ridge, tossed a wavering stencil on the wall; a pattern of curiously humped shapes that danced nervously when the wind tugged at the branches, darting back and forth in a torment of nervous indecision.”  It’s a good novel, mostly about two spoiled siblings, cursed with self-destruction, and the path they tread down towards it.  The brother in the pair eventually does end up dead, with the circumstances never made quite clear, but no one seems particularly surprised or even that upset once he is gone.  The sister manages to sort things out just a little at the very end, breaking out of her hopeless longing for her brother’s best friend in order to lend a voice in support of him, in spite of the fact that he’s going to end up with her sister-in-law and not her (she’s wrong on that, though).

The Adaptation:

The basic premise for the film and several of the individual moments come straight from the novel.  But, aside from the name changes (all the names are changed for some reason), there are a considerable number of changes.  A lot of them are detailed in the BFI book about the film.  The most crucial, though, is in the ending of the film.  The film is very clear what happens to Stack’s character – there is a struggle over the gun and then he is shot.  The book has no such clarity.  Stack is found dead in the morning by one of the servants.  And there is no trial like there is, bringing down the end of the film.  Instead, there is a tense scene in the district attorney’s office, where both the Bacall and Malone characters come to the defense of Hudson’s character and manage to prevent charges from ever being brought.  The ending might be explained by this quote from screenwriter George Zuckerman: “I ‘authored’ the screenplay of Robert Wilder’s WRITTEN ON THE WIND, because censorship and construction demands necessitated a great deal of invention.” (George Zuckerman in The Hollywood Screenwriters, p 289)  Given the doubts involved in what might have happened to Stack’s character in the original novel, it seems that the filmmakers felt they had to make it clear that Hudson didn’t do it and actually have him cleared.

The Credits:

Directed by Douglas Sirk. Screenplay by George Zuckerman. Based on the Novel by Robert Wilder.

Abismos de Pasión

The Film:

As can be seen from the quotes below, Luis Buñuel had long wanted to make a film version of Wuthering Heights.  When he finally did, it wasn’t one of his best works – the writing wasn’t at the same level as his late masterpieces and the acting isn’t really up to par, especially when you look at the 1939 version (it’s always rough to remake a film when the original film is a classic).  But it was the passion of the story that he wanted and it’s the passion of the story that really brings the film to life.

What is Wuthering Heights to you?  Have you read the book?  Have you seen the original Wyler film?  To Buñuel, it was the passion of two people, people who don’t really belong together, but who are brought together, almost by fate, almost against their wills.  They have passion for each other (thus the title of the film) and it sweeps them up, against reason, against class distinctions, against monetary considerations.  So they fall in love, or they fall in lust, or they just have unbridled passion.  And that’s what we get – the story of a young man who is raised in a household where he does not belong, who falls in love with the girl he is raised with, who hates the world around him, who hates himself, who, sometimes even hates the girl that he loves, and will finally be forced to confront all of that when circumstances arise that mean he no longer has her all to himself.  Because life gets in the way.

I could write more about the plot.  But, follow the link below, and you can find what I have already written about the novel and about the original film.  Or simply watch this film and watch how it all unfolds on the screen.  It is not a great film, but it is a powerful film and one that reminds you of how talented a filmmaker Buñuel was.

The Source:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

I have already discussed this book when I ranked it at #93 all-time.  I remember both that I read the book when I worked at Barnes & Noble even though by then I had owned it for six years and that it was one of Veronica’s favorite books, but I can’t remember if I was already reading it when I discovered that, or if I started reading it deliberately because I discovered it (and maybe was trying to use it to attract her).  One of the great works of 19th Century literature.  I will never understand why people read Austen so much when there are the novels of the Brontë sisters available to read.

The Adaptation:

“In adapting Wuthering Heights for the screen, Buñuel had to simplify one of the most complex novels in literature.  What is left in Buñuel’s version is precisely what surrealists considered of value in transcending conformity and social dicta.”  (Luis Buñuel by Virginia Higginbotham, 84)

“Buñuel’s version of Wuthering Heights (Abismos de pasión was a commercial tag added later) stands as an attempt to record the ferocity, anguish, torment, and hate that, as the surrealists knew, defy reason.  They discovered these emotions described in astounding detail in the novel, which distressed the Victorians who were the first to read it.  Not only a horror tale, but an account of passion that transcends time, sex and social repression, Buñuel’s Wuthering Heights is stark, repellent, abrasive and thus faithful to surrealist principles.”  (Luis Buñuel by Virginia Higginbotham, p 86-87)

Yeah, those two quotes pretty much sum it up right there.

The Credits:

Dirgida por Luis Buñuel.  Argumento: Luis Buñuel.  Inspirado en la obra “Cumbres Borrascasas” de Emily Brontë.  Adaptación: Luis Buñuel, Julio Alejandro y Dino Maiuri.  The IMDb lists Pierre Unik as uncredited with “Story”, but how do you get a story credit for this?

Consensus Nominees That Don’t Make My Top 10

Around the World in 80 Days

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film because it won Best Picture.  But something I want to note from watching it this time; I want to again stress the fact that this film won the Oscar for Best Editing.  Now, this film is entertaining, and it works as a remarkable triptych at a time when a lot of people still couldn’t travel much.  But too many shots go on for way, way, way too long.  There is no way on earth this film should have even been nominated for its editing, let alone won the Oscar.  That’s actually worse than Titanic winning for Editing.  It’s even terrible during the credits, which go on forever, interspersing all the actors in the film (and there are a lot) with all the other credits, forcing me to watch until the end because there were no opening credits.

That being said, I want to again defend this film against people who declare it one of the worst winners, or the guy who, in the Best Picture post called it one of the worst Hollywood films of all-time.  That’s just silly.  Too long?  Absolutely.  But it looks good enough, it has solid enough acting, it has the fun of all the stars and all the locations to be a decent film.  It’s nowhere near being a bad film, so to call it the worst Best Picture winner means you haven’t seen Broadway Melody or Cimarron or you have some irrational hatred of this film.

The Source:

Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours by Jules Verne  (1873)

This is one of the most enjoyable novels of the 18th Century.  It’s good simple fun.  Verne has never gotten his literary due, he’s certainly not held by the French in the same sentence as Hugo and Zola.  He’s perhaps more comparable to Dumas because of the adventure aspect of his stories.  He has finally started to get more critical attention and his works have been annotated and translated more lately.  This is the odd man out among his most famous stories because of the lack of science fiction in the story.  It’s simply a good adventure – the story of a man who determines that he can go around the world in 80 days and then does it.  What happens along the way, of course, is a serious of adventures, from risking his life to save a young woman in India, to dangerous passage over a bridge in America, from steamers to trains to elephants to sledges, it’s a journey around the world.

I have a fondness for this book that extends back to childhood because of something called Moby Books.  I had originally thought of doing a For Love of Books post about those little illustrated editions of classic works of literature but decided against it because I didn’t have a lot of them and because there was a great blog post already available about their history.  Unfortunately, that blog seems to no longer exist on the internet.  Around the World in 80 Days was one of the two books I had in this series since childhood (The Three Musketeers was the other) and it seems odd because the book itself is so simply and easy to read that you wonder why they bothered.  Perhaps because it lends itself well to such a series – you don’t have to cut much and you can include illustrations from around the world.

I must say, this book makes me want to travel.  I don’t like to fly, so travel by train, which is a good portion of the book, really appeals to me (of course, I get sick on boats, so maybe not).  It reminds me of simpler times.  If you have never read the book, you really should give it a read, if for no other reason than because it is a classic that is so easy and quick to read.

The Adaptation:

If I were to mention this film and ask you what the first mode of transportation comes to mind and you were to say “hot air balloon”, well then, congratulations, you have never read the book.  To be fair, that was the answer both my wife and my mother gave, so you’re not alone in that thought.

There is no hot air balloon in the book.  If you remember the scene, the hot air balloon is what they get on in Paris and it ends up taking them to Spain, where Passepartout then indulges in some bullfighting.  No such scenes like this exist in the book.  On page 21, Fogg and his servant board the train for Dover.  For the next few pages, we have a short chapter about how the betting turns against Fogg and then a chapter in which we meet Detective Fix, which ends with Passepartout disembarking from the steamer in Suez.  The book basically skips continental Europe (on page 33, we see Fogg’s entries, in which they go from Paris to Turin to Brindisi and then board the steamer).  But, hey Europe, is a big market and it has interesting stuff, so the filmmakers decided to take almost an hour to get Fogg from London to Suez.

Most of the rest of the book follows decently close to the original.  Veronica commented that America doesn’t come off too well, but I noted that it actually comes off better than in the book, with the riot in San Francisco that breaks out during the election of a justice of the peace.  But, many of the individual events stay fairly true to the book with some minor details changed (the wind sledge travels over the snow because it’s December rather than traveling on the rails, the captain of the Henrietta is far more amicable in the film than in the book) or added so as to get in more cameos (the bar scene in San Francisco is completely added to get in George Raft, Marlene Dietrich and Frank Sinatra).  But, once they actually get to Suez, the film actually does quite a good job of sticking to the original book.

The Credits:

directed by Michael Anderson.  screenplay by James Poe, John Farrow, S. J. Perelman.  based upon a book by Jules Verne.

Friendly Persuasion

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as one of the Best Picture nominees of 1956.  It really drags, as I mentioned in the review and is too long, which is ironic, since it’s significantly shorter than three of the other four nominees.  It really wants to be more than it turns out to be – unlike the book, which really does emphasize the Quaker nature, the film eventually will yield, of course, so that the public can get Gary Cooper as a form of hero.

The Source:

The Friendly Persuasion by Jessmyn West  (1945)

Is this a coherent novel?  I suppose it is, and as I am in the midst of putting my own novel, which is made up of separate short stories, up on this blog, I suppose I can’t argue against it.  It’s a series of separate short stories about a family of Quakers (known as “the friendly persuasion”, thus the title) during and after the Civil War.  There is one stronger piece, called “The Battle of Finney’s Ford” which deals with the older son’s actions during the war, when he first thinks he can be a soldier then decides he can’t.  It is by far the longest piece in the book and it is the strongest because it deals with some real issues rather than just the family back and forth that covers most of the book.  The book, outside of that story, is a mostly pretty dull read, and I say that having been raised Quaker.

The Adaptation:

“[Wyler] gave Millar a script called The Friendly Persuasion, which had been written for Capra by Michael Wilson back in 1946 and was based on a collection of short stories about an Indiana Quaker family during and after the Civil War.” (A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler by Jan Herman, p 366)

Wyler was not pleased with the Wilson script; he thought Wilson had ducked the issue “of what a Quaker farmer who doesn’t believe in fighting does when he’s confronted with violence.” (Herman, p 367) and also thought the issue was ducked in the original stories.  Because Wilson was blacklisted, he couldn’t do a rewrite, so Wyler brought in the original author Jessamyn West, who turned the focus back to Jess (the Gary Cooper character), partially in order to get Cooper to play the role.  “You will furnish your public with the refreshing picture of a strong man restraining,” West would tell Cooper to get him to play the part (Herman, p 372).

“Capra was pleased enough with Wilson’s work [on It’s a Wonderful Life] to ask him to write a film adaptation of The Friendly Persuasion, Jessamyn West’s 1945 book of short stories about a Quaker family in the Civil War era, which Liberty purchased on April 4, 1946. This was more provocative material: a vehicle for the pacifist convictions Wilson had brought back from the war. His adaptation, based primarily on a story called ‘The Battle of Finney’s Ford,’ dramatized the conflict in a Quaker youth who goes into combat, feeling he has a higher duty to his country, but finds it impossible to kill and decides to become a stretcher bearer instead. In West’s story, the Confederate raiders bypass Finney’s Ford and the boy is able to go home without having to test his convictions, but Wilson’s script, while emphasizing the pressure American society exerts on pacifist citizens, insisted that under the American system a man of principle can choose to remain loyal to his principles.” (Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, Joseph McBride, p 514)

There are several pages (335-338) in the book William Wyler: The Life and Films of Hollywood’s Most Celebrated Director by Gabriel Miller that detail the work done on the script, from the time Capra requested it, all the way through the final shooting script.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by William Wyler.  From The Book by Jessamyn West.
There are no writing credits because of the Blacklist.

The King and I

The Film:

As one of the Best Picture nominees, I have already written a review of this film.  It barely manages to get into the ***.5 range and thus become eligible for my Best Picture list.  That makes it the best of the five nominated films, but in 1956, the fifth worst year in Best Picture history, that’s not saying much.

The Source:

The King and I, a musical play by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II (1951)

The copy of The King and I that I am holding is from the Modern Library’s Six Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein. It says, on the title page for this musical, “Based on the book Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon”. But, this is really based more on the original film than on the book. For the most part, things that were changed in the original film from the book (like Anna being present at the king’s death) were kept for the musical.

As for the musical itself? Well, I’m not really a big fan. Like with so many Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, I don’t much care for the music. Aside from that, the story is so dated, it doesn’t work for me either. The film has always succeeded for me (and at a low-level ***.5 you can decide how much of a success that is) because of its production values and because of the performances from Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner. So if the play would require those, that doesn’t say a lot about the play itself.

The Adaptation:

The film follows fairly closely to the original musical. As with many of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals that moved from stage to screen, there were some songs that were cut (three of them in this one), but unlike some of them, there wasn’t a lot of moving around of songs.

The Credits:

Directed by Walter Lang. Screenplay by Ernest Lehman. Music by Richard Rodgers and Book and Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. From their musical play based on Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon.

Giant

The Film:

I have reviewed this film once already.  Which means by now I have seen this film at least three times – the first time I saw it, years and years ago, watching it for the Best Picture project, and then seeing it again for this project.  It’s by no means a bad film but I think I would prefer not to have to sit through all of it again.  Three plus hours of Rock Hudson emoting is more than enough for me.

The Source:

Giant by Edna Ferber (1952)

According to the little afterward in the current Harper Perennial edition of the novel, the novel did not get a positive response. People in Texas “called for nothing short of Ferber’s hanging” and the reviews were less than glowing, suggesting that Ferber was not writing up to her par. For me, all of that is fraught with considerable irony, as I have suffered through a number of Ferber novels, including Show Boat, Cimarron (both for this project) and So Big (because it won the Pulitzer). This, to me, is her best book. That’s not because of its theme of showing the true heart of Texas, or of the way it attacks the new money in Texas (in Texas, oil is new money, while cattle is old money). It’s certainly not because of its dialogue, which is trite and typical of Ferber. It’s because, whenever she can get away from her story and her dialogue, she can just settle in on her narrative voice and that is stronger here than in any other Ferber novel. Just look at what she is able to do with a description in this book:

“They were approaching another gate – a wooden one, cross-barred – and a line of fence that stretched away endlessly. On the other side of the fence, facing them, were perhaps fifty men on horseback. They sat like bronze equestrian statues. Erect, vital, they made a dazzling frieze against prairie and sky. Their great hats shaded the dark ardent eyes. Their high-heeled boots were polished to a glitter, narrow, pointed, they fitted like a glove. Their saddles, their hatbands, their belts were hand-tooled. Their costumes lacked, perhaps, the silver, the silks, the embroidery, the braid, but in every basic item this was the uniform that the Mexican charro had worn three hundred years before and that every American cowboy all the way from Montana down to Arizona and Texas had copied from the Mexican.” (p 102)

The Adaptation:

“The original script of Giant was by Ivan Moffat, myself and Fred Guiol. It was based on Edna Ferber’s novel and was 370 pages. I talked with Edna and she liked the script very much, saying ‘You know, I wrote this book twice already and want to write it a third time and fill it out. But I think you’ve done it with the screenplay.’ This was a surprise announcement from a lady whose novel we were massacring. After finishing the script I made a deal with Warner Brothers to make the film there. Then Freddie and I sat down and worked on cutting the script. We cut it from 300 pages to 250 pages. I think we got it down to 204 pages.”(George Stevens, quoted in George Stevens: Interviews, ed. Paul Cronin, p 102)

“The most important change Stevens made to Ferber’s novel was to rearrange this opening and restructure the entire narrative. His film opens twenty-five or so years earlier. … Stevens rearranged the narrative because his story sense told him that audiences needed a great adventure – of course, a big adventure. He changed his focus to Leslie and made her the story’s centerpiece.” (Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film by Marilyn Ann Moss, p 223)

The Moss quote is an exaggeration. While the novel begins in the present, it quickly, in the second chapter flashes back to the first meeting of Bick and Leslie. After reading the Moss quote, I expected the novel to only take place in the present and to leave aside the history of their relationship, but all the film does there is drop that first chapter and leave it in its chronological place instead of providing an opening setting.

The Credits:

Directed by George Stevens. From the novel by Edna Ferber. Screen Play by Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat.

The other Oscar Nominees

Lust for Life

The Film:

I first watched this film some 20 or so years ago.  At the time, I was not particularly interested in painting (to be fair, I’m still not overly interested in painting – film, music and literature have always been my preferred art forms).  I had a passion for Dali and very little beyond that.  So I watched this film, and I was moved by Kirk Douglas’ magnificent performance (is it redundant to say Kirk Douglas and then say magnificent performance?), loved the color of the film in its cinematography, art direction and costumes and thought that Anthony Quinn was definitely the best of the Oscar nominated performances for Supporting Actor (it would later take Oscar eligibility to decide that he wouldn’t win the Nighthawk).  I knew that Vincent Van Gogh had lived a life of pain and had found a way to express it through art but it didn’t necessarily move me.

But something change in the last 20 years.  I don’t know that I have come upon a huge appreciation for painting, though it interests me far more than it did back then, especially as I stare up at one my favorite paintings, just above my desk, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jette.  I used to even own a 2000 piece puzzle of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, but had to get rid of it, because to complete it meant taking the dining room table out of commission for a really long time because it’s really damn hard to do a 2000 piece puzzle of Starry Night.  Van Gogh will never mean to me what Dali or Renoir or Seurat do, but his paintings and their use of color move me in a way they never used to.  So I came back to the film with all of that and what was different?

Well, surprisingly not as much as you would think.  I think some of that is because I didn’t need to appreciate Van Gogh’s art and what he has able to do in spite of his constant mental anguish in order to appreciate the film because Kirk Douglas had already found that in his performance.  Quinn’s performance didn’t change for me at all because I still don’t much care for Gauguin’s art.  Other aspects of the film I already greatly admired – the wonderful use of color in its cinematography, art direction and costumes.  Hell, 1956 is one of the best years in film history for great uses of color on screen with sumptuous sets and costumes on display in numerous films.

The film is well-made.  It’s a very solid example of an artist biopic.  It brings the artist to life, most especially in the performance, but also in the way it captures the various places that Van Gogh would capture so amazingly in his work.  It makes it easy to see why his life was filled with so much pain and it makes it a little easier to understand why such an artistic genius would feel the need to take his own life.  Was there any greater artist who was filled with more pain?  Yet, in Douglas’ performance we get all of that – the genius and the pain.

The Source:

Lust for Life by Irving Stone  (1934)

To be fair, I warned you about this complaint back in my 1952 post when I was complaining about having to read the novel Moulin Rouge.  I am not a biography reader for the most part, though there is an irony there which I will mention in a minute.  But I am even less of a fan of the “biographical novel”, a book which would be a biography except that the writer either wants to insert fictional conversations or they don’t want to do enough research to label it a biography.  But, with an artist, it’s even worse.  Now, the irony is that I have just read my way through several musical biographies for different reasons, and with those, it immediately made me seek out the music.  But you can’t put music in a book.  But you can put art in a book.  And there just doesn’t seem to me to be a point to a book about an artist, especially one for whom color was so much a part of his life as Van Gogh, and then not have any of the art except for a bit on the cover.  What is the point of that?

So, I struggled through Lust for Life (and, when I get to 1965, if this project hasn’t killed me first, I will struggle through The Agony and the Ecstasy).  Yes, Van Gogh lead an interesting life, though tragic is really the correct word.  But it’s his painting that I am most interested in, which is why a film was so much a better idea than a book and I am surprised it took over 20 years from the book’s publication to the film.  I didn’t much care for the book or the way Stone wanted to use so much melodrama to draw out our emotions about what Van Gogh went through.  We could have just looked at examples of his work and we would have understood.  Or, really, just listen to Don McLean’s song and that kind of says it all.

The Adaptation:

“Relying on Van Gogh’s letters to Theo, Corwin stripped away Stone’s character of a seductive young woman who appears in the artist’s hallucinations, opting instead for a more straightforward account of his life. Changing the book’s sentimental conceit, specifically the female figure who brought to the surface Van Gogh’s dark inner demons, Corwin instead adhered more accurately to the historical record of the painter’s life.” (Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer by Emanuel Levy, p 272)

Well, we also get more of the focus on the painting itself.  There is only so much you can do in a novel in describing what a man does when he paints, what he sees, what he creates.  But on film, especially in a gloriously color film like this one, it is easy to see it come to life.

The Credits:

Directed by Vincente Minnelli.  Screen Play by Norman Corvin.  Based on the Novel by Irving Stone.

The other WGA Nominees

The Rainmaker

The Film:

Katharine Hepburn was nominated for 12 Oscars over the course of her long and distinguished career and this might be the least of them.  It’s not a bad performance and in a weak year like 1956, it’s good enough to rank 9th in Best Actress at the Nighthawk Awards.  But it lacks the real passion and humor of her great performances.  It’s a standard performance that Hepburn could have pulled off in her sleep.

In the film, Hepburn plays Lizzie Curry, a woman who is starting to feel like a spinster because her family sends her off to some cousins to find a husband and she is unsuccessful.  She has an interest in the town sheriff but he doesn’t seem to even notice her.  She is feeling like she is just going to be a burden on her brothers, who have their own problems, because it hasn’t rained in a really long time and their animals are starting to die.

Enter Starbuck.  He claims that he can make it rain.  He also calls Lizzie beautiful and courts her.  Shades of The Music Man, before it was even produced on stage?  Perhaps, except in that film we get wonderful songs and much better performances and a lot of humor.  The Rainmaker doesn’t really have any of that.  Oh, we get Burt Lancaster as a huckster, and that’s always a good sight to see.  But because of writing changes, we find out about that much earlier in the film than we did in the play (see below) and in this film I don’t think that works as well.  I think we need to see more sincerity in Starbuck before we completely doubt him.

This film just never really rises above mediocrity.  Hepburn can’t save it because her performance isn’t up to her usual par (which, to be fair, is pretty damn high).  Lancaster can’t save it because the writing allows us to see right through him.  The directing and the writing can’t save it because they’re not really all that good.  So, in the end, we have a film that’s really just kind of blah.

The Source:

The Rainmaker: A Romantic Comedy in Three Acts by N. Richard Nash  (1954)

This is a decent little play about a plain woman starting to enter spinsterhood looking to find some love, or at least a marriage.  She ends up caught between the town sheriff that she has been hoping will show her some signs (he is recovering from a bad divorce when his wife ran off and he tells others that he is a widower, not a divorcee) and the huckster who comes to town trying to make a fast buck by convincing the townspeople, who are stuck in a drought, that he can make it rain.

It’s not a bad play, but it’s far from a particularly good one and I would say its most forgettable but it has actually continued to have some success over the years, even in spite of having a film made out of it.

The Adaptation:

Did N. Richard Nash not really know what he had written?  Or is this just the adaptation from the stage to the screen.  Because according to the title page, his original play is a “Romantic Comedy”.  The Globes didn’t think so (they nominated it for Picture, Actor and Actress as a Drama).  I didn’t think so – I list it as a Drama.

It’s interesting that Nash wrote the script because he makes some significant changes from the stage to the screen.  Of course, there is the usual opening up, with some scenes broken up into different locations to make the film seemed less like a filmed play and more like a film.  But there is a significant change made to the opening.  In the original play, the first thing we see is the family, gathered together, eating, after Lizzie has returned, but before they have talked to her.  We eventually meet Starbuck, but only after things have been established in the Curry household.  But in the film, we start with Starbuck.  The things that we only hear about later on (that Starbuck is wanted for his actions in other towns) are actually the first scenes in the play.  We know from the start that he’s a huckster and a liar.  So why begin the film that way?  My guess is because Starbuck is played by Burt Lancaster and you want to get that star power on screen right away instead of waiting until page 38 to see him.  The play starred Geraldine Page as Lizzie but Darren McGavin as Starbuck and that’s a considerable difference in star power.  So, the film really has to build up Starbuck’s role and it does, perhaps at the expense of the film as a whole.

Other than that, much of the film comes straight from the play, including the ending, which is word for word from the original play.  It’s just that there is a lot added at various points to beef up Starbuck’s role.

But there is also a big difference in casting Katharine Hepburn, in her mid 40’s and Geraldine Page at age 30, so that really adds to the feeling of spinsterhood that is coming over Lizzie.

The Credits:

Directed by Joseph Anthony.  Screenplay by N. Richard Nash.  Based on his Play Produced on the New York Stage.

Somebody Up There Likes Me

The Film:

Biopics aren’t really my thing.  I have complained about that before, most notably in a couple of opera biopics that I have been forced to review because the WGA had that Best Musical category for so long, although to be fair, the only person forcing me to review them is me and my OCD.  But I don’t much care any more about some boxer just because he was a champion any more than I cared about some opera singer.  Yes, if you are a boxer and your biopic is made by Martin Scorsese, one of a handful of directors competing for the title of Greatest Director of All-Time, then I will be interested.  But this isn’t Scorsese, this is Robert Wise and in spite of his two Oscars no one is putting him on that shortlist.

So, here we have the story of one Rocky Graziano, a reprobate who cut hit people with enough power to knock them out for a long time.  He couldn’t float like a butterfly like Ali.  He just had a first like a sledgehammer and a wind-up that delivered it like drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.  He’s played here by Paul Newman and it’s weird.  It’s not a terrible performance like Newman’s first starring role (The Silver Chalice, my worst film of 1954).  Yet, we’re not anywhere close yet to the Newman that will come on in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and become one of the greatest screen actors of all-time (#4 is what I ranked him in a post I did after he died).  His performance is solid and he’s really got the swing down pat (I wouldn’t want to be hit by that punch, that’s for certain), but the accent, well, the accent is I suppose spot-on.  The problem is that every time I would hear him speak, I would look up and expect to see Tony Curtis on the screen.  So I guess that means he has that accent down pat.

Graziano was a guy who got in a lot of trouble, raised by a father who didn’t care and who would beat him.  So Graziano went to jail and then went he got out, was thrown in the Army (just after Pearl Harbor), but he slugs a captain and flees out a window and becomes a professional boxer because he’s got such a powerful swing.  He eventually is caught and serves his time and becomes a champion boxer.  There you go.  There’s his story.  This film won Oscars for both Cinematography and Art Direction because, you know, there weren’t any black-and-white films that deserved those Oscars much much more like maybe The Seven Samurai, Baby Doll, Diabolique, La Strada, Sawdust and Tinsel or The Killing.

The Source:

Somebody Up There Likes Me: The Story of My Life Until Today by Rocky Graziano, written with Rowland Barber (1955)

Because most of the adaptations up to this point have been based on works of fiction, I haven’t really railed too much against autobiographies.  I don’t much care for them.  Especially please spare me the autobiography of a boxer who seems barely literate, who was a crook and a man who fled from the army after knocking out a superior officer.  Yes, Rocky Graziano was a championship boxer.  But I don’t care about boxing and the brilliance of Raging Bull and When We Were Kings hasn’t changed that.  If you care about this particular boxer, then by all means, track down this book, but if you don’t, you will miss nothing by skipping it.

The Adaptation:

The film does a fairly good job of sticking close to what is written in the book.  I would say that you should take what is in the book with a grain of salt, but Graziano at least is willing to admit his many faults, such as slugging pretty much any person who ever gets in his way for any reason, so maybe he’s pretty much being accurate in telling his story.

The Credits:

Directed by Robert Wise.  Screen Play by Ernest Lehman.  Based on the Autobiography of Rocky Graziano, Written with Rowland Barber.

Bus Stop

The Film:

Coming back to this film this time, I didn’t remember anything about it from the first time I saw it, well over a decade before.  But this time, well, it was disturbing.  Is it a Comedy?  In that sense, does it have a happy ending?  Two people walk off together and it seems determined to make us believe that they can find some happiness.  But can they?

The male in the couple is Bo.  Bo is a cowboy who is on the way to Phoenix to participate in a rodeo.  He’s riding along with his mentor, Virgil and Virgil has been encouraging Bo to start trying to talk to girls.  So, when Bo meets a cafe singer named Cherie, he falls for her hard and becomes determined to marry her.  He drags her outside and kisses her (which could get her fired) and after the rodeo, drags her on the bus so they can go back to Montana together and be married.  He doesn’t understand how people act with other adults and he’s simply decided what he wants and is going to have it.

One on level, we can’t understand what he sees in Cherie.  She’s trying for Hollywood but hasn’t made it past Arizona yet (she began in the Ozarks).  She’s not very talented.  She doesn’t seem all that bright.  Or maybe we understand what he sees in her.  She’s being played by Marilyn Monroe, after all, and she’s got sexuality in spades.  She’s the gorgeous buxom blonde and that’s what he wants because he doesn’t actually know what he wants.

Things come to a head at a bus stop diner on the way back to Montana, the same diner where Bo caused trouble on the way to Phoenix.  Cherie wants to escape him but bad weather prevents it.  She just wants to be left alone, just wants to find a man who will respect her.  Bo, unused to other adult interaction, thinks that what he is providing her.  In the end, of course, this is designed as a romantic comedy, so they will end up together and she will realize that Bo is trying to provide her with what she claims she wants.

But is this a Comedy?  Is this Romance?  The film is decently made.  Joshua Logan wasn’t a great film director, but he does a credible job and William Inge creates real human portraits, even when he is creating complete portraits of people who are woefully incomplete.  But I left the film this time with the feeling that at some point Cherie will realize that she can’t live with Bo and that he’s going to force her to stay and that it’s just a recipe for a complete disaster.

The Source:

Bus Stop by William Inge  (1955)

If you were to look on Wikipedia, you might see this film as also being adapted from the play People in the Wind by William Inge, but that’s because People in the Wind was the one-act play that takes place in one particular diner and was later revised and expanded into the play Bus Stop.

This was one of the plays that helped make Inge one of the most successful and popular playwrights of the 1950’s.  He never quite reached the levels that Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were at and he is not nearly as well remembered or studied, but between this, Come Back Little Sheba, Picnic and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (all of which were adapted into hit films), he was a big deal at the time.  All of them focus on severely flawed characters, characters who can not adjust properly to adult life.

The main character in this one is Bo Decker, a wanna be cowboy who doesn’t really know how to interact with women.  This causes a problem because, when in Kansas city for a rodeo, he meets a young woman named Cherie and ends up deciding that he’s going to marry her.  The play gives a well-rounded look at both Bo and Cherie, neither of whom seem capable of real adult interactions, only to find that it draws them together after a fashion.  In some sense, it’s all really disturbing, the notion that Cherie would run from Bo and his boorish, demanding ways, only to discover that just because he legitimately cares for her that she should end up with him.  It just seems like a relationship that is screaming out to end in domestic abuse.

The Adaptation:

This is another perfect example of opening a play up.  In the original play, all of the action is confined, in three acts, to the bus stop diner (in Kansas City in the play, in the mountains of Northern Arizona in the film).  But we get a much earlier look at Bo and his interactions with Virgil in the film and we see him out in the real world attempting to interact with other people.  Almost all of the action in the diner is something we see in the film, but we get a much more complete story in the film, not that it’s any less disturbing.

The Credits:

Directed by Joshua Logan.  Screenplay by George Axelrod.  Based on the play by William Inge.

Full of Life

The Film:

This was a film that for a long time I couldn’t find. In fact, I still wouldn’t have been able to find it had a friend of mine, who recorded it off TCM years ago hadn’t loaned me a copy (thanks Betsy). It was one of the films that had been been an incredible nuisance, by the time I saw it the only post-1949 WGA nominee I hadn’t seen. Thankfully I finally watched it in plenty of time to include it in this post. Unfortunately, that means I have seen it, and good lord did it irritate me no end.

The first thing was the casting. The story in the film involves a married couple trying to make ends meet (he’s a writer who is struggling a bit and they are living in a pre-fab house in LA that has some serious problems, meanwhile she is pregnant). It’s a comedy based around family foibles and other problems around the house. The husband is played by Richard Conte, who is fine when he’s being asked to play a criminal, but doesn’t work too well for light comedy. The wife is played by Judy Holliday, who is fine for light comedy but I just don’t particularly care for. In a role like Born Yesterday, where she is supposed to be a dumb blonde, her grating voice works well for the character, but when you’re really supposed to care about the character she just grates on my nerves.

When she falls through the floor of the house (thankfully only half-way since she is, as I said, pregnant) and they are unable to afford repairs, he is forced to call in his father, a stone-mason to repair the floor. They have a distant relationship and he is reluctant to call in his father. But all of it will work out of course, because this is a comedy after all.

But that’s where the main source of the irritation grated on me. The father is a devout Catholic, and he doesn’t feel that his son is really married because they were married outside the church (Holliday’s character is not a Catholic). So, while he’s supposed to be repairing the floor, instead he’s meandering, he’s knocking holes in the wall to build a fireplace, he’s enlisting a priest to come lecture his son, he’s nagging his daughter-in-law that she should become a Catholic. All of this will be wrapped up in a happy ending, of course, and that’s what really bothered me, because everything just gets tied up in a neat bow, with everything working out the way the father wants (she converts and they are married in the church just in time for the child to be born a Catholic – which just makes me reflect on Michael Palin singing “You’re a Catholic the moment dad came” because if the mom isn’t but the dad is, is that still true?). Differences in religion and family strife just doesn’t get resolved this easily and there really didn’t seem to be enough here to justify a feature-length film, and certainly not enough to justify a writing nomination.

The Source:

Full of Life by John Fante (1952)

This is a very thin little book about a man who is a bit distant from his father. When a hole opens up in his kitchen floor, he enlists his father to come repair it and in the course of things, his father manages to convince his wife that she should convert to Catholicism and that then they can be married in the church. The book is really quite forgettable.

The Adaptation:

Given that Fante himself adapted the book, it’s surprising what a turn there is from the book to the film. Much of the story is the same, with one massive difference. In the film, Conte’s character is extremely reluctant to call in his father to do the work, constantly arguing against his wife’s idea that they should call him because they can’t afford to get the hole repaired otherwise. But in the book, the relationship is not nearly so distant and he suggests calling in his father almost immediately. What is more serious in the book (the father pushing the wife towards Catholicism) is played more for laughs in the film, with the relationship meandering along (and a lot more doubts of his faith for the husband).

The Credits:

Directed by Richard Quine. Screen Play by John Fante. Based on his Novel.

The Solid Gold Cadillac

The Film:

There has always been this suggestion that holding stocks is the hallmark of the middle class.  You see it in television commercials, especially that horrid animated one where the guy says something like “I’m an average guy, I own a few stocks, make a few trades.”  Fuck you.  Average people don’t own any stocks.  They don’t have the money to invest in it.  Stop selling this bullshit.

This film is a prime example of this.  Now, I am probably being too hard on something that’s supposed to be just a silly romantic comedy (which is actually a far cry different than it was on stage, but see below for that).  They just want to have a film about the little woman who is able to take on some crooked corporate guys by just asking some questions and listening to the answers.  Granted, it is true that things would probably be a lot better if we did have people like Mrs. Partridge, a link between average people and the people at the top of a corporation.  But, since average people don’t own stocks, then that kind of makes this meaningless anyway.  But, at the moment, I will stick to the film I am reviewing and not how much anger it brings to the surface in me.

The film is just rather silly.  It stars Judy Holliday as a woman who wants some answers at a shareholder’s board meeting of a company where the CEO is stepping down and she is leery of the new people in charge of the company (rightfully, as it turns out).  When she becomes such a problem (and later befriends and falls in love with the former CEO), the new CEO puts her in charge of stockholder relations, seeking to keep her too busy to be a bother, but in the end, as can be guessed by anyone who has ever seen a Hollywood film, she will end up ousting the new CEO and bringing a happy ending not only to the film, but to the company as well.

The film does do a decent job of building up the romance between the old CEO and the woman.  Holliday gives her kind of typical ditzy blonde performance but you can see how she admires the honesty and work ethic of the old CEO, who has gone off to a Washington job.  That CEO is played by Paul Douglas.  Douglas had a rare ability to both seem like a thug, but also to be very kind and generous.  You could understand why someone would fall for him while at the same time being perplexed why it would happen.  He plays up more of the gruff charm in this film and it works as well as it can given the silliness of the whole situation.

At the end of the film, once the two are married, they are given a gold cadillac by the shareholders.  To emphasize that, the film suddenly goes from black-and-white to color in the final shot, just so they can get in the ridiculous shot of the ridiculous car.  What a perfect ending to such a dumb film.

The Source:

The Solid Gold Cadillac: A Comedy by Howard Teichmann and George S. Kaufman  (1953)

We are a far cry from the classic George S. Kaufman plays that seemed to be in every year of my Adapted Screenplay posts in the 1930’s.  There are some charming moments in this play about a woman who befuddles the new CEO (and his minions) of a company she owns stock shares in and to keep her busy, they make her in charge of stockholder relations.  In the end she manages to oust the new CEO (who’s a crook, basically) and bring back the old CEO that she has come to admire.

The Adaptation:

There is a massive difference between the original play and the film (as well as a small subtle difference at the end).  In the original play, the role of Mrs. Partridge was played by Josephine Hull (Cary Grant’s aunt in Arsenic and Old Lace and Jimmy Stewart’s sister in Harvey).  There wasn’t going to be any love story with Josephine Hull and there wasn’t.  But, once they had a much younger, more attractive leading lady in the film, they decided that a love story would be a good idea, so in the film, not only does Mrs. Partridge enlist the former CEO to help her out, but she has also fallen in love with him (and he with her).  It’s amazing how much of the play is still the same as the film, just with all the love story added to it.

The small difference at the end is much more interesting in the play.  In the film, the happy couple run outside and the film turns to color so we can see their completely ridiculous solid gold cadillac.  But in the original play, the cadillac simply brings Mrs. Partridge to the next shareholder’s meeting where, presiding over it, someone goes to ask her a question, and, recognizing where she got her start, she immediately cuts the person off: “Oh no!  That’s how I got my start!  The meeting is adjourned!  The meeting is adjourned!”  That seems to indicate that Mrs. Partridge may have had a taste of being CEO and doesn’t want to give it up quite yet and that’s a much more interesting ending than the couple riding off the screen in that ridiculously ostentatious car.

The Credits:

Directed by Richard Quine.  Screen Play by Abe Burrows.  From the Play by George S. Kaufman and Howard Teichman.  Produced on the Stage by Max Gordon.

The Teahouse of the August Moon

The Film:

I’m not sure how I’m supposed to think about this.  In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, it’s easy.  The performance by Mickey Rooney is so awful, so pathetically stereotypical and just so jarring that it almost kills the film dead.  But what about this film?  Is it because Marlon Brando actually does some acting in this performance that it is so much easier to take?  Or is it because it’s on a level of comedy that the rest of the film reacts to – it doesn’t take us out of the film the way Rooney does.  Either way, I don’t love it, but it doesn’t kill the film for me the way that Rooney does.  Or maybe it’s just because that’s a great film that he’s slaughtering while this is a ridiculous silly comedy, no better than **.5 and Brando’s performance is more in line with the rest of the film.

That is certainly the case.  This film is just silly.  Paul Ford plays a colonel who is trying to get something built on Okinawa now that the war is over and perhaps the U.S. occupying army should do something for the civilians on the island.  To get that done, he enlists Glenn Ford as a captain to be in charge of this.  But it turns out that Glenn Ford is terrible at his job – in fact he’s terrible at every job and he gets pushed around from department to department because no one wants him around.  It’s a far cry different from most Glenn Ford roles and it is amusing at the start before things just start piling on.  Because while Ford tries to get the natives interested in capitalism and find something they can produce that will help the economy, the locals want to build a teahouse and bring in some geishas.

Everything then starts to turn into a screwball comedy, but only in the sense that things keep piling on.  Brando is the interpreter, both communicating between Ford and the natives and between the movie and the audience, our guide into the comedy.  Things keep coming fast and steady.  Everyone wants to travel with Ford.  The natives don’t want to embrace his ideas.  The army sends in a psychiatrist to work with Ford but he also ends up enthralled by the village.

The problem is none of it is particularly funny and the film isn’t so much directed or written as thrown at us to see what will stick.  They want everything to be funny and if it isn’t, well then, they’re already on to the next gag.  Ford’s performance can be quite enjoyable, as can Paul Ford as the poor beleaguered colonel.  But in the end, it’s just a silly comedy without much staying power.

The Source:

The Teahouse of the August Moon by Vern Sneider  (1951)  /  The Teahouse of the August Moon by John Patrick  (1952)

This is pretty much exactly what the film is.  It’s a silly little comedy that deals with a few different subjects (fish out of water / military occupation after the war).  It’s not particularly good.  It’s not all that funny.  It was certainly timely, given the time period (still soon enough after the end of the war that it was of interest but long enough after that a comedy could work for people) but it’s not particularly good or interesting.

The play expands on some of the themes from the book, turning them into more of a narrative and pretty much outlines exactly what the film would do.

The Adaptation:

Most of the main plot elements come directly from the novel.  The constant use of Sagini, though, the narrator, doesn’t come from the novel – he is used much less and he isn’t originally the translator for the colonel as he is in the film.  But it does come directly from the play.  In fact, most of the film comes directly from the play, which makes sense since John Patrick, the man who adapted the novel into the play is also the same man who write the script.

The Credits:

Directed by Daniel Mann.  Screen Play by John Patrick.  Based on a Book by Vern J. Sneider and the play by John Patrick presented on the stage by Maurice Evans.

Carousel

The Film:

Is this the best of the Rodgers / Hammerstein musicals? Certainly it provides my favorite bit of music that was ever written by Rodgers, the “Carousel Waltz”, though I must admit that part of that love comes from its use at the beginning of the Dire Straits song “Tunnel of Love”. Aside from the music, this has one of the stronger stories of the Rodgers / Hammerstein musicals, with a darkly told tale of romance with a man’s soul in balance between heaven and hell. If it is not the best of the films made from their musicals, part of that must be on Henry King, the director, and part on the casting of Gordon MacRae (sadly, the film was originally set to star Frank Sinatra, and if he had played Billy Bigelow, this probably would have been a much better film).

This is the story of Billy Bigelow, a carnival barker who falls in love almost instantly with Shirley Jones (and really, can you blame him?) and gives up his job for her sake. She also loses her job, staying out too late with him, and they marry and settle on the seaside. While they love each other, they are also cursed with poverty and eventually, in his anger and pain, Billy strikes her, beginning his real downfall. He agrees to commit a robbery to support his wife and unborn child, but when it all goes wrong, he ends up falling on his knife and accidentally killing himself. But, even though this is the bulk of the film, it is still just set-up. Because we began the film in a sort of purgatory where Billy exists and he has been given a chance to return to Earth for a day and do a good deed. That deed involves giving hope and love to his now teenage daughter.

This story had been filmed multiple times before this. Frank Borzage had made a solid version of the original play Liliom in 1930 and Fritz Lang, stopping in Paris between fleeing Germany and coming to the States, made a better version in 1934 with Charles Boyer. Those films had better leads, but the color in this film helps the music come to life and this film has the wide-eyed beauty and innocence of Shirley Jones to help push it along. It is not a great film, but I’ll take this over some of the other Rodgers / Hammerstein films anyday.

The Source:

Carousel: A Musical Play by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, based on Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom (as adapted by Benjamin Glazer), book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II (1946)

Rodgers and Hammerstein did themselves a favor this time by taking a solid original starting point. What was interesting is that they would take such a dark original source, the story of a man in purgatory who killed himself and gets a chance to redeem himself on Earth and actually fails (the film versions change that, as do Rodgers and Hammerstein). They then, as I mention above, give it their best bit of music, with the wonderful “Carousel Waltz”. There are no songs that are as good as the best songs in Oklahoma, but there are still some lively moments. There are also some dark moments, with a lead character who stabs himself rather than face prison and a teenage daughter in despair, but it ends with a moment of pure hope.

The Adaptation:

This is another one of those musicals where someone on Wikipedia has done a solid job of listing all the changes between the original stage version and the film version. I won’t repeat everything they say and you can see it here, but there is one key thing that I will point out that really changes the nature of the play. In the original Liliom, and in the original stage version of Carousel, when the robbery goes wrong, Billy ends up stabbing himself, yelling “Julie” as he does. But in the film, it’s changed to be an accident, probably because the Production Code wouldn’t have allowed for redemption of the suicide. The other major version is that this film has a set-up around the action. The film begins with Billy in “purgatory” and being told he has a chance to return for a day (it doesn’t specify that this is his chance to go to either heaven or hell), while the play began with the carousel. Supposedly they did this so that audiences wouldn’t leave when Billy died thinking the film was over.

The Credits:

Directed by Henry King. Screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron. Music by Richard Rodgers and Book and Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. From their musical play based on Ferenc Molnar’s “Liliom” as adapted by Benjamin F. Glazer.

High Society

The Film:

In 1940, Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord had three choices.  The first was an actor I can’t even remember the name of.  He plays a rich, stuffed shirt and though he says he is in love with her, it’s more her status and class that he is in love with.  The second choice is Jimmy Stewart in an Oscar-winning performance.  He is Mike, a reporter who has crashed her wedding to write a story because he hasn’t been able to hack it as a writer and he also falls for her class and status, but is much more interested in her as a person.  However, he is also in love with his photographer and she for him and Hepburn can see that, so she demures.  That’s also because she’s still really in love with her ex-husband, who is infuriating, but is also fascinating, and, of course, he’s also Cary Grant.  So there’s really no questioning why she chooses him.

Now we look at the character of Tracy Lord again, this time played by an actress who was even more beautiful than Katharine Hepburn.  This time it is Grace Kelly who must choose between three men.  The first is again an actor that I can’t even remember even though I just saw the film.  The third is played by Bing Crosby.  Now, in The Country Girl, Grace Kelly had chosen Crosby over William Holden, but part of that is she plays a woman much more beaten down by life and one who has stood by her husband for years after the death of their child.  It is understandable why she chooses her husband.  But here, there is none of that.  There was no child.  Her husband doesn’t need her in the same sense.  She’s not trying to help him cope with his own failures.  Instead, she could just friggin choose Frank Sinatra!  So, it’s a bit harder to understand in this version of the film why she goes with the choice that she does.  Perhaps because that’s how the story works.  I just wish they had chosen an actor with a bit more charm and one who was a bit younger.  I think I would have preferred Sinatra in the Crosby role or maybe even Gene Kelly.

The casting of Crosby isn’t the only reason that this film is charming but isn’t the classic that The Philadelphia Story is.  First of all, the acting isn’t even remotely on the same level.  Stewart won the Oscar.  Hepburn was nominated (and should have won).  Cary Grant deserved an Oscar for his performance.  But while the performances in this film are solid enough, it’s not the same thing.  The writing is the same.  As I mention below, because this is a musical, they have to make room for the songs and they do so by cutting some of the witty dialogue from the original.  Look at one of my favorite scenes from the original film, the one in which a drunken Jimmy Stewart accosts Cary Grant at his house and discovers that Grant has his book.  That scene is nowhere to be found, instead replaced by a variety of mostly mediocre and forgettable songs.

There are things to recommend about this film, of course.  It is beautifully filmed in lovely locations.  It has Grace Kelly in her final film role looking luminous and giving a graceful and charming performance.  Even if it doesn’t keep enough of the dialogue it does hold on to the plot of one of the greatest classic comedies.  It may not be a classic, but there are definitely things worth watching for in this film.  It may just be and my belief that she was the most beautiful woman who ever lived, but the picture on the right definitely qualifies, for me, as one of those reasons.

The Source:

The Philadelphia Story by Philip Barry  (1939)

I already gave a very brief review of this play when I discussed the original film version.  It’s a good play, smart, witty, funny, romantic.

The Adaptation:

There are parts of this film that come from the original play.  There are certain lines that spring right from the original pages (like the scene the next morning when Tracy realizes that she didn’t actually do anything with Mike), but there are also lines that spring right from the original film version (such as when Mike picks up the phone and makes his amusing threat and Tracy’s mother announces that one of the servants has been at the sherry again).  But much of this film is different simply because of the musical aspect.  Having to devote a bunch of time to the songs (or to interactions with Louis Armstrong), they have to cut some of the sparkling dialogue.  It’s one of the reasons why this film is charming but isn’t anywhere close to the classic level that the first film is.

The Credits:

Directed by Charles Walters.  Screen Play by John Patrick.  Based on a Play by Philip Barry.

Other Screenplays on My List Outside My Top 10:

• Monika  –  Also known as Summer with Monika, this is one of the films that helped establish Ingmar Bergman in America, though at mid-range ***, it’s not really indicative of how great his later work would be.  It also helped establish Harriet Andersson as one of the first Bergman stars.  Based on the novel by Per Anders Fogelström.
• The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz  –  A very good Luis Buñuel film about a serial killer that was adapted from the crime novel Ensayo de crimen by Rudolfo Usigli.
• The Man Who Never Was  –  A British World War II film about the plan to deceive the Axis Powers about the impending invasion of Sicily.  It’s from a book by Ewen Montagu, who came up with the actual plan and is played by Clifton Webb.

Other Adaptations:
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• The Harder They Fall  –  Humphrey Bogart’s last film is a boxing drama based on a novel by Budd Schulberg with solid performances from Bogart and Rod Steiger.
• Animal Farm  –  The 1954 British Animated version of the great Orwell novel is a high *** but not quite good enough to win the Nighthawk for Best Animated Film.  There’s a full review of it at the link.
• Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple  –  The second of the Samurai trilogy from Hiroshi Inagaki, the first of which was reviewed here.  The second and third films are high *** but not any better than that.  They are all based on Miyamato Musashi.
• The Prisoner  –  A film version of the Bridget Boland play that stars Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins.  Not very cinematic but Guinness, of course, is good.
• The Quatermass Xperiment  –  The 1955 Hammer film based on the British television series (and released in the US in 1956 as The Creeping Unknown).  An important early Hammer film that helped pave the way for Hammer Horror.
• While the City Sleeps  –  Fritz Lang noir starring Dana Andrews, from the novel The Bloody Spur.  One of the last Lang films I saw and still a bit hard to find.
• Tea and Sympathy  –  The film uses the same stars from the hit 1953 stage production but Production Code restrictions keep it from being explicitly about homosexuality.  A framing device is added to the start and end that aren’t in the original play.  A solid film but Deborah Kerr’s performance is the best thing about it.
• Moby Dick  –  Ray Bradbury helped co-write the script with John Huston.  The novel has always felt too dry to me but my high school Fine Arts teacher said that you shouldn’t read it until you’re over 50, so I’ll go back to it in eight years.  The film is solid with Gregory Peck playing against type as Ahab.
• A Kiss Before Dying  –  Ira Levin was only 24 when this became his first best-seller.  This film version is hampered a bit by the Production Code but is still much much better than the 1991 version namely because Joanne Woodward plays the pregnant lover rather than Sean Young.
• Bhowani Junction  –  Based on the 1954 novel, this is a mid-range *** which is about the best you can expect from an Adventure film set in India starring Stewart Granger and Ava Gardner.
• The Proud Ones  –  A solid Robert Ryan Western based on the novel by Verne Athanas.
• War and Peace  –  You can read a full review here of how this is an epic film but the actors are badly handled.  A second Top 100 Novel filmed in this year.
• Tribute to a Bad Man  –  A James Cagney Western based on a short story by Jack Schaefer, the man who wrote the novel Shane.
• The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit  –  The novel, when it was published in 1955 was a cultural sensation (I never realized how much of one until I read David Halberstam’s wonderful The Fifties).  The film was a success but didn’t have the same impact.
• Bigger Than Life  –  One of those Nicholas Ray films that is supposed to be brilliant but is really no better than mid-range ***.  It was based on an article in The New Yorker.
• Between Heaven and Hell  –  Low-range *** World War II film based on the novel The Day the Century Ended.
• The Lone Ranger  –  A feature film version of the extremely popular television show, which was based on the original radio program.  A simplistic plot and the kind of cliches you would expect from television, but any use of the “William Tell Overture” is, of course, stirring.
• Twelfth Night  –  Mediocre Russian version of the great Shakespeare play.
• The Mountain  –  This is based on a French novel (La neige en deuil) and the cinematography is nice but the idea that Robert Wagner and Spencer Tracy could be brothers is just as absurd as the idea of casting the then 56 year old Tracy as a mountain climber.
• There’s Always Tomorrow  –  Written on the Wind may be the best of Sirk but this is far from it.  It’s just more silly Sirk melodrama, in this case based on the novel by Ursula Parrott.
• A Kid for Two Farthings  –  A 1955 Carol Reed film adapted from the novel by Wolf Mankowitz.  Completely forgettable.
• Patterns  –  Rod Serling might be adapting his own teleplay but don’t expect anything like the quality of The Twilight Zone.  It’s just another forgettable film about business.
• Teenage Rebel  –  Mid 50’s mediocre melodrama about troubled teens starring Ginger Rogers.  Rebel without a Cause it is not.  Adapted from the play A Roomful of Roses.
• The Last Hunt  –  One of the weaker films written and directed by Richard Brooks, this Western is adapted from the novel by Milton Lott.
• The Catered Affair  –  Another Richard Brooks film, but this one was written by Gore Vidal and adapted from a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky.  They were probably hoping for something like Marty (it even starred Ernest Borgnine) but it’s not all that good.
• Doctor at Sea  –  The last of the *** films.  The second of seven Doctor films based on the novels by Richard Gordon.
• The Killer is Loose  –  This **.5 Budd Boetticher Suspense film is based on a novella by John and Ward Hawkins.
• Bundle of Joy  –  A remake of the 1939 film Bachelor Mother, which had been a remake of a 1935 Austrian film.  It’s got Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher and that’s all you need to know.
• The Man who Knew Too Much –  One of Alfred Hitchcock’s worst ideas: let me remake my first great film but I’ll have Doris Day as the star.
• Good-bye, My Lady  –  Sappy drama from director William Wellman, adapted from the novel by James H. Street.
• D-Day  –  Based on the novel The Sixth of June, this look at D-Day also tries to be a romance, which is a major reason why it is **.5.
• The Ten Commandments  –  This epic film is ridiculous, with terrible casting, performances and a stupid script.  But is a massive epic with some really good production values.  A massive box office hit and a Best Picture nominee, and thus already reviewed in full.
• 1984  –  The third Top 100 novel on this list and thus the film is already reviewed here (not kindly).
• Forever, Darling  –  I’m going with oscars.org here as both the IMDb and Wikipedia list this as an original script.  But oscars.org lists this silly comedy with Lucy, Desi and James Mason (yes, you read that correctly) as being based on a short story called “The Woman Who Was Scared” by Marya Mannes.
• Slightly Scarlet  –  James M. Cain’s novel Love’s Lovely Counterfeit gets a relentlessly mediocre film version from director Allan Dwan.
• Earth vs. The Flying Saucers  –  This silly early Sci-Fi film got some “non-fiction” research from the book Flying Saucers from Outer Space which was written by a naval aviator who thought the country should investigate UFOs.
• The Opposite Sex  –  This ridiculous Musical is based on the 1939 film The Women (and thus, on the original play by Clare Booth Luce).  The original isn’t exactly a classic but the cast of the original is so, so, so much better than this one.
• 23 Paces to Baker Street  –  Don’t let the Baker Street bit confuse you.  This is not Sherlock Holmes.  It’s an adaptation of a Philip MacDonald Mystery and it’s not very good.
• Trapeze  –  It’s films like this that lend credence to the rumor that Orson Welles directed The Third Man rather than Carol Reed.  It’s based on a novel by Max Catto and though it has Burt Lancaster in a circus, it’s really not good.
• The Vagabond King  –  The bottom **.5 film, this one from an actual Top 100 Director (Michael Curtiz).  It’s a film version of the 1925 operetta and you should skip it.
• The Power and the Prize  –  Now we’re into the dregs.  This is a ** film based on the novel by Howard Swiggett which I saw because it was (very stupidly) nominated for an Oscar for Costume Design.
• The Revolt of Mamie Stover  –  The book by William Bradford Huie was a big hit and the later novel using the same narrator, The Americanization of Emily, was made into a great film.  But this film is just terrible, which could be expected with Jane Russell as the star.
• Helen of Troy  –  Surprisingly, not my lowest ranked film from director Robert Wise (because of how low I rank I Want to Live!) but almost.  A very loose adaptation of Homer with someone named Rossana Podesta as Helen who didn’t know English and whose performance makes Diane Kruger’s in Troy look more like Meryl Streep.
• The Bad Seed  –  Based on the play by Maxwell Anderson, which was based on the novel by William March.  I saw this back in college and viciously hated it.  I have refused to ever see it again and reconsider it.  I rate it at *.5 and can’t believe it was nominated for Best Actress and Supporting Actress (twice).  A terrible film about an evil child.

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen:

• none

” ‘My God,’ the Colonel suddenly yelled, ‘the bridge has been mined, Colonel Saito. Those damn things I saw against the piles were explosives! And this wire . . .’ ” (p 174)

My Top 10:

1. The Bridge on the River Kwai
2. Paths of Glory
3. Sweet Smell of Success
4. 12 Angry Men
5. Witness for the Prosecution
6. Rififi
7. The Good Soldier Schweik
8. A Face in the Crowd
9. A Hatful of Rain
10. Heaven Knows Mr Allison

Note:  There are 12 films on my list.  The last two are listed down at the bottom.

Consensus Nominees:

1. The Bridge on the River Kwai  (160 pts)
2. 12 Angry Men  (120 pts)
3. Love in the Afternoon  (80 pts)
4. Heaven Knows Mr Allison  (80 pts)
5. Peyton Place  (80 pts)
6. Sayonara  (80 pts)

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Adapted):

• The Bridge on the River Kwai
• 12 Angry Men
• Heaven Knows Mr Allison
• Peyton Place
• Sayonara

WGA Awards:

Drama:

• 12 Angry Men
• Heaven Knows Mr Allison
• Paths of Glory
• Peyton Place
• Sayonara

Comedy:

• Love in the Afternoon
• Don’t Go Near the Water
• Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter

Nominees that are Original:  Designing Women, Operation Mad Ball

Musical:

• The Joker is Wild
• The Pajama Game
• Pal Joey

Nominees that are Original:  Les Girls, Funny Face

My Top 10:

The Bridge on the River Kwai

The Film:

It is one of the greatest films of all-time, of course.  I have acknowledged that in both of my reviews, the first when I wrote about David Lean as a Top 100 Director and the second time when I reviewed it as part of the Best Picture project.

The Source:

Le Pont de la Rivière Kwai by Pierre Boulle (1952, tr. 1954)

This is a nice little war thriller.  It deals with a bridge being built over the River Kwai by British prisoners of war forced into labor by their Japanese captors.  At the same time that we watch the British colonel first deal with the notion of whether officers will be forced to do labor and then, once that is solved, moving on to making the best bridge possible, this is transposed against an Allied mission to come upriver and destroy the bridge to prevent the Japanese from having a complete rail line that will aid in the war.  It comes to a violent, sudden conclusion that is rather disappointing.

The Adaptation:

“Lean exaggerated when he contended that ‘there is not a single word of Foreman’s script in the picture.’  If one compares the final shooting script with Foreman’s draft, one finds that, while much of the dialogue was heavily revised or deleted, some of it was retained.” (Beyond the Epic: The Life & Films of David Lean by Gene D. Phillips, p 231)

That quote is in response to Lean’s claim, included in the book David Lean by Stephen M. Silverman that “There isn’t a single word of Foreman’s in the picture.” Lean was irritated when Foreman was awarded the posthumous Oscar in 1985.  It’s tricky to write about this, because, of course, thanks to the blacklist, neither Carl Foreman nor Michael Wilson originally received credit for the script.  That, and the Oscar, went to Pierre Boulle, the author of the original novel, who didn’t speak a word of English, so he clearly didn’t write the script.  Lean’s claim, in the Silverman book, is that he wrote pretty much the entire script, but “I had trouble with the part of the American.”  In the original novel, Shears was a Brit (and hadn’t been in the camp, nor was he faking being an officer so he wasn’t blackmailed into the mission as in the film), but the first Foreman script had added the American character.  Michael Wilson was hired by producer Sam Spiegel to write the dialogue for the American (Lean felt Wilson’s Oscar was deserved).  Lean wanted the credit to read “By Michael Wilson and David Lean” but according to Lean, Spiegel simply gave the credit to Boulle because Wilson was also blacklisted at the time.

It’s hard to know what happened with it.  Lean insists that Foreman’s version diverged quite a bit from the book (in the film, except for Sears’ character, most of the film follows fairly true until the end – more on that below), which would indicate that not much of Foreman was used.  The IMDb however, has an agreement with the WGA that when they supply credits, it does not allow “uncredited” writers to be listed, so Lean’s credit is essentially lost (probably because the WGA has very stringent rules about when a director can be given a writing credit).

Now we come to the ending, which is drastically different in the book.  In the book, we find out (in a post-mission report from Warden) that the mortar he launched didn’t just mortally wound Nicholson, as in the film.  Instead, it obliterates his two men and Nicholson so Warden is forced to launch another mortar which does some damage to the bridge but does not destroy it.  It’s the film that we have to thank for the classic ending of Nicholson coming to his senses and with his dying effort, managing to blow up the bridge.

The Credits:

Directed by David Lean.  Screenplay by Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson.  Based on the novel by Pierre Boulle. (These are the current credits) There is definitely uncredited writing from David Lean and possibly Calder Willingham.

Paths of Glory

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as one of the best films of 1957.  It is the consummate #2 film – it finishes in second in an astounding eight categories, including Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay and Actor, all of them to Bridge on the River Kwai.  Yet, of course, it failed to be nominated by the Academy in any category.

The Source:

Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb (1935)

Paths of Glory is a good book, one that is stark and un-relenting in its portrayal of the waste and idiocy of war.  Just look at one paragraph depicting what it is like out in No Man’s Land:

“A sibilance began high in the air above them.  It had hardly begun before it had grown to a piercing whistle, it was hardly a whistle before it became a tremendous, fearful sound, rushing with terrific speed straight at the section.  Everyone flattened out in his tracks, including Duval who had the feeling that something enormous was going to hit him.  The terrifying thing seemed to pass right down the length of each cringing spine, then it went off with a roar to burst behind them.  The explosion seemed to Duval to be strangely far away for something which had been right on top of him.  He raised his head, preparing to get up now that it was all over.  He had just time to note that the rest of the section was still flattened out on the ground when the air around him became alive with pieces of flying, humming metal.  He flattened out again and listened to the flying metal being abruptly silenced by the earth into which it embedded itself.”

Cobb believed that his book was the truth of the war, in comparison to Remarque, claiming that his books “fail utterly as anti-war propaganda, indeed where they become pro-war propaganda, is in the stoicism, the self-abnegation, the idealism and romantic nobility which they portray.”  (Cobb quoted in the Penguin Classic Foreward to the novel).  The introduction goes on “Cobb’s own words do not waste themselves on pathos or the stoic heroism of the everyman.”  That is definitely true, but I would argue that’s why Remarque’s book, though written at a lower age level than Cobb’s (since Remarque was deliberately writing from Paul’s point-of-view) is the more powerful.  Cobb’s book is so firm in its indictment of the leadership that everything blurs together into one large waste.  It’s true that it makes it perhaps more accurate to the truth of war, but it also makes it less on the storytelling level.  The novel functions more as a documentary vision of the waste of the war, as an indictment of the brutality and lack of vision that ground a generation to dust.  As a novel, it doesn’t work as well because we lack the human connection that makes novels work.

The Adaptation:

You might be thinking to yourself that Colonel Dax, played so brilliantly in the film by Kirk Douglas provides that human spark.  But you’re thinking of Dax as he is written in the film, not how he is written in the novel.  Indeed, the biggest (and best) scene with Dax is the scene where he turns his back on the general after the executions have been carried off.  Such a scene doesn’t exist in the book (nor does the poignant final scene) – the novel ends with the execution of the men: “His first shot was, therefore, one that deftly cut the rope and let the body fall away from the post to the ground. The next shot went into a brain which was already dead.”

The Foreward to the Penguin Classics version by David Simon makes that clear: “It is no slight to Cobb’s creation that Kubrick and his screenwriters managed to tease out even more political implication than the novel itself offers.  It is the 1957 film version of Paths of Glory in which the lieutenant is compelled to face, in the last moments, the man he has sent to his death.  And it is the film version that parses between the generals, with one turning on the other as the unlawful order to fire French artillery on French positions is revealed.  These were nuances upon nuances – the gamemanship of ambition and command brought to even greater heights by an auteur operating against the darker strain of the cold war.”  Except I think Simon is wrong – that is a slight to Cobb’s book once you realize that the humanity in the film, of which there is precious little, but just enough to give us someone to hang upon, all comes from the screenwriters and that it is absent in Cobb’s original novel.  Simon goes on: “Similarly, it was Kubrick who would use the character of Colonel Dax as the moral center of the tale, allowing Kirk Douglas his star turn, and making it possible for him to both lead the doomed charge against the German position and then defend his men passionately in the ensuing court-martial.”

The Credits:

Directed by Stanley Kubrick.  Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson.  Based on the novel, “Paths of Glory” by Humphrey Cobb.

Sweet Smell of Success

The Film:

I already reviewed this film as one of the five best films of the year in the Nighthawk Awards.  It is, among other things, the film with the best performance of Tony Curtis’ career, the film that really showed that Alexander MacKendrick could have been a first-class director, and that the Academy could really miss the boat sometimes, given that they gave 9 nominations to that piece of shit Peyton Place and missed out on this altogether.

The Source:

“Sweet Smell of Success” by Ernest Lehman  (1957)

This is a short story (the credits to the film refer to it as a novelette, but 55 pages doesn’t seem long enough to me to merit that term) about a rather pathetic, rather desperate press agent who just wants to get his clients mentioned in the press (so he can keep them) and sucks up to Hunsecker, a rather repulsive gossip columnist clearly based on Walter Winchell.  It’s a well-written story that effectively creates the two main characters.  But, it’s really the film that brings everything to life.  The story is worth reading, but the rub is that, the film is brilliant and once you’ve seen the film, you don’t really need to read the story and these days, who would end up reading this story before seeing the film?

The Adaptation:

“‘Tell Me About It Tomorrow!’ centres on New York press agent Sidney Wallace’s attempts to curry favour with entertainment columnist Harvey Hunsecker, a man who, ‘merely by adding new and scabrous meanings to the word rumor‘, has become one of the most influential personalities in America. (The novella was derived from an unfinished 1946 novel entitled You Scratch My Back …, from which Lehman had previously gleaned two short stories, ‘Hunsecker Against the World’ and ‘It’s the Little Things that Count’.) Sidney, who narrates, is more successful than his counterpart in the film and more troubled by guilt.” (Sweet Smell of Success BFI Film Classics by James Naremore, p 9)

That is all information that comes from the BFI book on the film.  But in the collection of short work by Lehman (Sweet Smell of Success: The Short Fiction of Ernest Lehman), there is no mention of the earlier works.

While there are some details added in, much of the film comes from the original Lehman story, from the beginning, right down to the end.  That’s perhaps because Lehman was already a highly touted screenwriter before the story was published and it was easy for him to adapt it and, at 55 pages, it doesn’t count too bogged down in things that would be hard to put on film.

The Credits:

Directed by Alexander Mackendrick.  Screenplay by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman.  From the Novelette by Ernest Lehman.

12 Angry Men

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film once, as one of the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture.  It is one of the highest rated films on the IMDb, not because it is great (which it is), but because it is one of those films that everyone seems to agree is great and there are no dissenters who bring the score down at all.  As the first film for Sidney Lumet, it stands as one of the great debut films of all-time and the start of what would turn out to be a magnificent directing career.

The Source:

Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose  (1955)

This began as a 1954 teleplay for the show Studio One.  It was then adapted, by its original author, Reginald Rose, as a play for theatre the next year and that is the version that is currently available in print.

It’s a smart play, designed to make people look inside themselves at what they believe.  It follows twelve jurors who look at a case for a poor immigrant who is accused of killing his father, a case in which the prejudices outweigh the actual evidence.  It’s a story of one man who is willing to make a stand because he believes “testimony that could put a human being into the electric chair should be that accurate.”  It’s a great play because it doesn’t preach the morality of the death penalty but makes certain that when someone is put there, it must be clear and concrete.  There must be no mistakes.

The Adaptation:

The play, as it was written for the theatre, is almost exactly what appears on the screen.  Even though I wasn’t watching the film while reading the play (and it had been a while since I had seen the film), I could hear Henry Fonda in every single line that his character says.

But the play was the original expansion upon the teleplay.  That original story was only an hour long.  Almost all of the dialogue from the original is still there in the play and the film, but a lot of it has been expanded upon.  Rose gives more time to each of the characters.

One other thing about the major difference between the original show and the film: the talent involved.  Other than curiosity, there is really no reason to seek out the original.  It was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, who, in spite of having an Oscar that Sidney Lumet never won, wasn’t half the director Lumet was (most notably in the scene I mentioned in my review of the way the camera backs up and then backs in during the racist rant).  Aside from the directing, there is also the acting.  It’s your choice.  Do you want Robert Cummings and Franchot Tone, two actors who were in television in 1954 because they were no longer handsome enough for movies and had never been much in the way of actors, or do you want Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb.

The Credits:

directed by sidney lumet.  story and screenplay by reginald rose

Witness for the Prosecution

The Film:

As one of the Best Picture nominees, I have already reviewed this film.  It’s odd that Billy Wilder, who was known so much for his writing, would fail to be nominated in this year while they did nominate the wretched Peyton Place.  It is a great film that has more than one twist towards the end, which I discuss below, so, please, if you have never seen the film, you really should stop reading here and watch the film.  It’s definitely worth it.

The Source:

“The Witness for the Prosecution” by Agatha Christie (1933) / Witness for the Prosecution: A Murder Mystery by Agatha Christie (1953)

“Witness for the Prosecution was originally published in 1933 as part of a short story collection entitled The Hound of Death and Other Stories.  In 1948, it was released with short stories again, although this time the book’s title was Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories.  It was 20 years after the story’s original release, in 1953, that Witness for the Prosecution first appeared in play form, with a new, dramatic and violent ending concocted by Christie.” (The Films of Agatha Christie, Scott Palmer, p 35)

“As with Ten Little Indians ten years before, Christie wrote a new ending especially for the stage presentation of Witness for the Prosecution.  Therefore when seeing the film after having read the book, you will naturally notice a drastic change.  But again, as with Ten Little Indians, it was Christie, not the theatre producers nor the film producers, who wrote the new ending for stage and screen.  In fact, Christie insisted on the new ending to the point of refusing to allow the play to be put on if the producers insisted on the same ending as in the original story.” (Palmer, p 35)

Now, there is something that I should make clear about those quotes from the Scott Palmer book.  It is true that Christie added to the ending of the play, a considerable change that occurs after the action ends in the original story.  But Palmer makes it sound like she discarded her original ending.  The original ending is still used, of course, just as it is in the film, but more happens after that original ending that drastically changes the outcome of the characters.

The original story is a great example of the kind of dramatic mystery that Christie was so good at.  In this case, we don’t know until the final line of the story what the actual truth of the matter is.  We simply have a compelling story with so many different variations on what has happened that we have to try and decide which character to trust.  In that original story there are really only three characters: Leonard Vole, his wife, and the solicitor, Mr. Mayherne.  Most of Mayherne would then become Sir Wilfred in the play.  Many of the lines and descriptions in the story would then be included in the play, though the play would greatly expand upon them.  Both the story and the play are examples of why Christie was such a good mystery writer – she never had the command of the language that Hammett had, but she could write a great mystery that kept you guessing until the very last line.

I must point out that when the play originally came to Broadway, Sir Wilfred was played by Frances L. Sullivan, the magnificent character actor from Great Expectations and Night and the City.  I would have loved to see the play with him in the lead.

The Adaptation:

The changes that were incorporated (especially the ending) were kept when the play was adapted into the film.  But the film, aside from opening things up made a major change to one of the characters, added a completely new, vital character, and made yet another addition to the ending that once again gave it a new twist.

Neither the original story nor the play mentioned any problems with Sir Wilfred’s health.  It’s the screenwriters that decided to add that development and with it, the character of the Nurse, who is played so brilliantly by Elsa Lanchester.  The interplay between the two characters played by real life wife and husband Laughton and Lanchester adds some great dramatic developments, but also almost every moment of humor in the film and keeps it from becoming too unbearably bleak.

But it’s the ending where Wilder really adds on to what Christie originally did.  In the original story, of course, we end with the wife’s admission “I knew – he was guilty!”  In the play, we’ve added the young woman that Vole is about to run away with and the murder of Vole by his wife.  But in the film, with the added character of Lanchester, we have the ready-to-depart Sir Wilfred and the nurse realizing that they won’t be going anywhere, that they will be sticking around, together, to defend Vole’s wife.  It’s a fantastic ending, just like the first two were, and it’s great that even having read the story and seen the play, it still wouldn’t prepare you for that final twist.

The Credits:

Directed by Billy Wilder.  Screen Play by Billy Wilder and Harry Kurnitz.  Adaptation by Larry Marcus.  The only mention of the source is in the card before the title card: “Agatha Christie’s International Stage Success”.

Du rififi chez les hommes

The Film:

Some films are easy for me to complain about.  The Before films from Richard Linklater are mediocre films that have an over-inflated reputation.  It’s harder when a film is very good (like this one) or even great (see next year’s bit about Vertigo), yet still have a reputation that is greater than I think it deserves.  I don’t want to complain about Rififi (the film in America is generally referred to by the single word rather than the entire title).  It’s a very good heist film, one of the very best films from Jules Dassin, whose own reputation after he left America ended up being over-inflated.  But if you believe some writers, you would think that this film singularly invented the heist film and that everything that comes after it must owe something to it.  To suggest that, such writers must basically ignore the existence of The Asphalt Jungle.

That’s the problem with this film and it’s unfortunate that it’s a problem because this is really a good film.  It has a lot of the same general story arc as The Asphalt Jungle: the gathering of the gang, the heist itself, the breakdown after the heist and the eventual violent end for basically everyone involved (The Killing, made a year after this film, but released before it in the States, also follows a lot of the same arc).  Unfortunately, Rififi doesn’t have the same kind of cast that Jungle had (or The Killing – both of them have gangs lead by Sterling Hayden, one of the most under-appreciated actors of all-time) and while Dassin does a first-rate job here, he is no Huston (or Kubrick) and so things aren’t quite functioning at the same high level.  Dassin does the best with what he has – he keeps the script popping, with considerable tension throughout the film, no matter whether it’s the heist itself (more on that below) or on the interactions between various people, all in various states of betrayal (or being betrayed).  You watch films like these three and you wonder how, over 25 years later, no one knows what happened to the Gardner paintings, because it always seems like heists go wrong at some later point when everyone starts betraying everyone else.

But let’s get to the heist, because if it’s somewhere that Rififi really does stand out, it’s in the heist itself.  It’s one of the best in film history.  That’s because Dassin decided to not only focus on the heist (it’s the centerpiece of the film), but, since his actors weren’t the best, he completely rid the scenes of dialogue.  They have to be quiet during the heist, so they are and they work with precision and detail and we see how they break in and make their daring robbery.  A lot of films have copied this and it is a much more detailed operation than it was in Jungle and it’s the place where Rififi really has been influential.

And I’ll leave it there, because this is a very good film.  It doesn’t quite break into the **** range, namely because I don’t think much of the acting, but it is a very good film and I’d like to finish this review on that positive note.

The Source:

Du Rififi chez les hommes by Auguste Le Breton  (1953)

I have not been able to find a copy of the book in English and I am not certain that such a copy exists.  That won’t get me anywhere then, since I don’t read French (and, if you believe Dassin, quoted down below, even reading French might not have been able to help).  But it’s clear from the quotes and from other things written about it that it’s supposed to be pretty bad, which is interesting since Le Breton worked on the film with Dassin.  But much of the larger story was dropped from the book to focus on the heist, which apparently only takes up about 10 out of 250 pages but takes a good quarter of the film.

The Adaptation:

“I couldn’t even read the book. It was all in an argot that even many people in France can’t read. I got hold of a friend, who sacrificed his love life to read it to me that weekend. I had no idea of what to do with the book. I went to say no but heard myself say yes. The producer said I was the only person who could make the book into a film. I asked why. He said, ‘The problem is that all the bad guys in this story are North African, and at this moment relations between France and Algeria are explosive. But you can make the bad guys America.’ I said, ‘Has it occurred to you to make them French?’ He was stunned at first and then accepted.” (Jules Dassin quoted in Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, ed. Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, p 218-219)

“The astonishing thing is that Dassin accomplished all of this on the fly, rejecting everything in the novel whose rights the producers had purchased for him. He rewrote the story from the bottom up, using all of the considerable skills he had accumulated from his time in Hollywood to transform what is essentially a U.S.-style film noir (it even has a nightclub with a ‘thrush’) with a conventional story line into a root film for a new sub-genre, the suspense techno-thriller.” (Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002 by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, p 106)

The Credits:

un film de Jules Dassin.  d’aprés le roman D’Auguste Le Breton.  édité par La Librairie Gallimard.  Adaptation de Jules Dassin.  avec la collaboration de René Wheeler, Auguste Le Breton.  Dialogues: Auguste Le Breton.

Dobrý voják Švejk

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film once, as my under-appreciated film of 1957.  I came upon this film through a confluence of circumstances.  I had read the book (not when I was supposed to – see below) and there was a Golden Globe nominated version from 1960, a German film.  Netflix claimed they had that film, but it turned out to be this film (that film, which isn’t as good, I later found).  I was glad to find it, as it was quite good and I’m not certain I would have ever found it otherwise and I eventually saw the sequel as well (which isn’t quite as good).  Netflix apparently no longer has this film (though they have the sequel), but my local library did.  See it if you can.

The Source:

Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války by Jaroslav Hašek  (1923, tr. 1930)

It was my Sophomore year and I was taking a class called Literature About War.  We were supposed to have this book read before class began.  No one did.  I’m not certain anyone had it read by the time the class ended.  It was over 700 pages, this was a class meeting every day and it had all these Czech names (which our professor threatened to quiz us on if any of us mentioned Notre Dame’s bowl loss over the holiday – he literally wrote the book on Notre Dame football).  But, years later, I went back and read it (along with several other books I was supposed to have read in college) and I was quite impressed with it.  It was funny, it was wise, it was interesting.  And it definitely belonged in that class because it’s a book about war, even if the character never really gets around to fighting in the war (which was appropriate for that professor because he used to start his Studies in Fiction class with Tristram Shandy, in which Tristram never really gets around to telling his story).

Svejk has been in the army already once before: “who had left military service years before, after having been finally certified by an army medical board as an imbecile” and how he gets back in is the kind of humorous circumstance that runs through the book.  He brags in front of a policeman who sends him to jail, then he goes before a medical board, then he ends up in an asylum.  He ends up back in the army and gets sent towards the front and keeps on not making it there.  He befuddles his commanding officers and manages to keep himself alive by being incompetent.  Yet, Hasek also manages to see some great truths about the war, one of which has always stuck with me: “The excrement of soldiers of all nationalities and confessions lay side by side or heaped on top of one another without quarrelling among themselves.”

There are also some really wonderful illustrations (by Josef Lads) to go along with the book (you can see an example on the cover), which vividly bring the characters to life.  The book meanders through a variety of vignettes, but also manages to tell a complete story.  Or almost one.  More on that below.

The Adaptation:

This film does a very good job of bringing the book to life.  Or part of the book.  Or part of part of the book.  The first is because the book was intended to run six parts but when he had finished three and a half, Hasek died.  As I mentioned in the original review of the film, it still reads like a fairly complete book, unlike something like The Mystery of Edwin Drood or even The Last Tycoon.  The second is because this film cuts what exists of the book in half, with the second part coming in the sequel, which was titled The Good Soldier Svejk: Beg to Report, Sir and was released the following year (“Humbly report, sir” would have been more accurate, given that is what Svejk almost always says to almost anyone, but that might be a translation difference – all of my quotes come from the Cecil Parrott translation from 1973).  So this film does only give you half the story, though it ends in a better way than say Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings, which just suddenly ends with almost no warning.  Almost all of the scenes and the dialogue come straight from the original book.  It is really a solid adaptation of the book, a book that shouldn’t be forgotten and a film that shouldn’t be over-looked.

The Credits:

Scénár a rezie: Karel Steklý.  (note: there is no credit for the source and there are accent marks on some of the consonants that WordPress doesn’t have characters for)

A Face in the Crowd

The Film:

Actors can be trapped by our expectations, even if those expectations were formed later.  That’s especially true for a film like this which wasn’t widely watched at the time of its release.  Years after its release, of course, people would find this film and talk about how prescient it was, how smart and observant it was about the world we were living in.  Really, it should have been obvious at the time, in the fading era of McCarthyism, but it wasn’t.  So, by the time most people were going to watch this, they weren’t watching a remarkable performance from a little known comedian.  They were watching a man they had come to love, complete with a particular persona.  And that would last through the years, because even after Andy Griffith stopped his own show, he would continue in that persona, and indeed, an entirely new generation would discover him in Matlock (although I really have the feeling the most of the people who actually watched Matlock were the same people who had watched The Andy Griffith Show when they were young).  So, I guess I started this film with an advantage that most others would not.  I didn’t have to believe in a particular persona for Andy Griffith because I have never seen an episode of The Andy Griffith Show or of Matlock.  I could just watch him here sinking into his role as Lonesome Rhodes, a folk singer who discovers a way to connect to the common people and then uses that to make the jump to fame and then to public persona.

This film is hardly the work of just one man.  There is a lot of really good work in this film, from the sure handed direction of Elia Kazan, bringing a kind of social realism to this film that it really needed, to the writing of Budd Schulberg, who had written the original story and really had some pointedly political points to make to the solid performance from Patricia Neal as the female producer who discovers Lonesome and can’t seem to quite escape from his spell no matter how much she wants to, no matter how much she is turned off by his ideas, by his former wife, by the sexy little drum majorette that he marries on a lark.  But, in the end, it all comes down to Griffith, because if his performance didn’t work, then the film itself would just collapse.

His performance works and, while this is miles away from his widely accepted persona, it’s also close in some ways.  Lonesome is a hick, a guy who can play a little guitar, sing a little, but mostly has a way of connecting to people that should not be surprising in the current political climate.  He plays on people’s hopes but he also plays on their fears.  He knows some of their fears because he came from the same place, but he also knows how to stoke them and when he begins to rise in the world, it’s because he’s found that fire he can keep things piling on.  When things fall apart it’s because he’s pushed things too far and they get out of his control.  Griffith isn’t generally thought of much as an actor, but this film shows, that with the right script and the right direction, there was really something to him, something darker than he ever showed on television.

The Source:

“Your Arkansas Traveller” by Budd Schulberg  (1953)

This story didn’t just spring out of nowhere.  It had its roots in an odd combination of Will Rogers and Father Coughlin and of course was published during the height of McCarthy’s power.  Rogers, of course, was the folk humorist and radio uber-star who also made some pointed political commentaries (“I am not a member of an organized political party.  I’m a Democrat.”).  He was widely considered the voice of the people.  From that persona springs forth Lonesome Rhodes, an Arkansas hick who manages to find a voice that the common people like.  Yes, he’s a bit of a singer and a humorist, but mostly he just captivates people by rambling on about what ever comes to mind.  The problem is that what seems to keep coming to his mind is the darker side of the American isolationist persona.  By the end of the story, he has risen in the American culture to the point where he thinks he wants to declare war, to force Congress to step out against the world and declare that they will no longer be pushed around.  And that’s where we get to Father Coughlin.  By the time Coughlin was forced off the air after the advent of World War II, he had spent a decade as one of the most listened voices in the nation.  But what had began as a campaign for social justice had degenerated into an anti-Communist, anti-Jewish crusade.  Sadly, Coughlin had a voice and it was an ugly, violent voice that was headed down a horrid road.

So Budd Schulberg, a man who always a notion of how popular culture spoke to the masses (as the son of a prominent Hollywood producer, he wrote the brilliant novel What Makes Sammy Run) wrote a story that seemed to merge the two personas.  Here we have a folksy voice of the people who becomes a very dangerous man before an accident ends his career and his life.  It’s prescient in the way it heralds the rise of ugly talk radio, of Rush, of Hannity, of the rise of a wanna-be demagogue like that small-handed, even smaller-minded worthless pile of fake hair and very real prejudice.  Yet, as a story, it’s probably been forgotten.  What became important is the film that it was adapted into and one that really should be getting more discussion as I write this review, just one week before the election (or the apocalypse).  Little extra note there: clearly I wasn’t the only one thinking of this film, as I wrote the review before the election, but TCM would later air this film on the day of the inauguration.

The Adaptation:

“Budd and I had such a good time doing On the Waterfront I said, ‘Let’s do another picture together.’  He knew the kind of thing I was thinking about so he suggested a short story he had written called Your Arkansas Traveller.  I read it and liked it and that was it.  Then we spent literally months doing research.  We went to Young and Rubicam product meetings and talked to advertising people.  We went to Nashville a lot and got into the Nashville sound and the Grand Ole Opry.  I hung around with a camera.  We met a lot of stand-up comics, some of whom are in the picture.  Every aspect of the film was carefully researched.”  (Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films by Jeff Young, p 234-235)

“I worked with [Budd Schulberg] all the time on the conception and on the ordering of the scenes, but I never wrote a word.  My contribution was not in the verbal language, the dialogue, but in the language of film, especially in the language of sequence and climax.  They are as much the director’s prerogative as the writer’s, so they have to be determined in collaboration.  We worked out the basic movement of the story – what they used to call the continuity.  Then I disappeared, and Budd wrote a complete first draft.  Then I reappeared and we worked over it.”  (Young, p 238)

That second quote from Kazan is especially illuminating.  It illustrates how the auteur theory works in relation to directors like Kazan (or Hitchcock, Spielberg and Scorsese) who don’t actually write their scripts, but nonetheless, are deeply involved with the construction of the script.

The film follows, for the most, the basic outline of the original story, from the discover of Lonesome, to his rise, to his betrayal and marriage, to the end.  The end is handled much differently though, as the Neal character has fled from him and been talked back in the story when Rhodes declares how he will declare war on the world, then drunkenly falls down a staircase and dies before he can actually self-destruct on the air.

The Credits:

Directed by Elia Kazan.  Story and Screenplay by Budd Schulberg.

A Hatful of Rain

The Film:

This was a year that was easy to cover the big films (all five films nominated for Picture and Director I had seen by the mid-90’s) but was difficult to finish in the major categories.  It wasn’t until 2007 that I first saw either A Hatful of Rain (Actor nominee at the Oscars, Actor, Actress, Director nominations at the Globes) or Wild is the Wind (Actor and Actress nominations at the Oscars).  The latter was a good film with a really good performance that absolutely deserved its Oscar nomination.  A Hatful of Rain, on the other hand, was a really good film, with a good performance from the Oscar-nominated Anthony Franciosa, but a better performance from the non-nominated Eva Marie Saint (who does earn a Nighthawk nomination).  It’s hard to believe that it even got made in 1957, let alone had people rewarding it.

An older man travels to New York to see his two sons.  One of them is married and the father dotes upon him, the army hero who survived a brutal experience in Korea.  The other works in what the father views as a dive bomb and when he explains to the other son that he needs the money he loaned him to build up a bar in Florida he’s retiring to, he can’t believe that his son doesn’t have the money.  He explodes and the whole trip seems like a disaster.  We clearly have a case of the black sheep of the family hanging on with the golden boy.  Except it’s not like it seems.  The black sheep is actually helping his brother out as best he can, feeding him money.  The golden boy needs that money because his experience in Korea left him addicted to morphine, which has morphed into a heroin addiction.  That money went to support the habit and this can’t be explained to their father without destroying his view of his boy.

Dealing with drug addiction on a very real level (we see the man who supplies the drugs and one of the plot points hinges on arrests being made to drug dealers around New York), while also dealing with the realities of familial problems when all is not what it seems, even to the characters involved, we get a stark drama that is acted with precision, especially from Anthony Franciosa (taking his role from the stage as the black sheep) and Eva Marie Saint.  Fred Zinnemann, shooting a lot on the actual streets of New York, brings a level of realism to the film that still makes it a stark drama.  In fact, the day I re-watched this, the headline in the Boston Globe was about the opioid problem here in Massachusetts.  The film doesn’t cut corners in showing the problems of addiction and the problems that families face, first in finding about it, then in understanding it, then, finally in dealing with it.  This is a film that was very much ahead of its time and I can’t really understand why Fox has only put it out in their Archives series and it has been so hard to get hold for so very long when it is so much better than most of the bigger films from this year like Sayonara, and most especially Peyton Place.

The Source:

A Hatful of Rain: A Drama in Three Acts by Michael V. Gazzo (1954, first produced 1956)

It’s strange to think of people in different ways then you are used to thinking of them.  I have recently been watching Alfresco, the original television sketch show starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, with Emma Thompson there among them, years before she would become the most accomplished actress at work.  Who knew she was brilliant at sketch comedy?  Likewise, I think of Michael V. Gazzo as a major player at the Actors Studio and a key supporting player in The Godfather Part II, not as a playwright who could write such a heartfelt play about drug addiction.  This is a smart play, one that knows its characters well, understands how families interact with each other and hold on to things for years, and how hard it is in a family to make anyone understand that things and people can change.  It is very much a New York drama, and it’s good that the film was able to make such good use of New York location filming.

The Adaptation:

As turns out to be the case so very often, a lot of the play is changed.  A lot of the dialogue does come straight from the play, but there are other changes that are made to open things up.  The key difference from the play to the screen is the introduction of the early scenes, when the father first arrives, and then travels with the older son to the dive bar to see the black sheep at work.  All of that action only comes through in the dialogue of the play, but it makes for some excellent dramatic scenes in the film that help give you an idea of how these characters interact with each other.

But, with Gazzo working on the script and having written the original play, much of the action does stick fairly closely the play, including most of the lines of dialogue, right down the very end of the film (although the film does add the line about him being her husband – that wasn’t in the play).

The Credits:

directed by Fred Zinnemann.  Screenplay by Michael Vincente Gazzo and Alfred Hayes.  based on the play by Michael Vincente Gazzo produced on the stage by Jay Julien.

Heaven Knows Mr Allison

The Film:

A marine, adrift at sea, comes to rest on a small island.  When exploring it, he comes upon a church.  More startling, he comes upon a nun in the church.  They are close to the Japanese lines (such as lines exist in an ocean), but she speaks English and, in what will turn out to be a rather an awkward issue later, she is rather beautiful.  It turns out she is alone, the priest posted with her having died and no relief having yet arrived.  This problem would be enough (two stranded together on an island, waiting for help), but it is the Japanese who arrive first, and what started as a drama of two lonely souls, both motivated inwardly by their duty that neither has forgotten, one to country and the other to god, becomes a more dangerous tale of survival against whatever odds may come against them.

That they will survive is what must come in a drama like this.  But it is how they must come together in different ways to survive that makes the film as good as it is (a mid-level ***.5).  It is helped, of course, that they are played by two actors who seem like they were made for the role.  Robert Mitchum, who earned his only Oscar nomination for playing a soldier, is back again in the role.  He knows his duty, but he also knows he must try to survive.  Aside from that, he also knows that he is starting to grow lonely and that this nun, whatever her devotion to god may be, is quite beautiful.  She is played by Deborah Kerr, who has always been magnificent at balancing the prospect of love with whatever might be coming against it.  This time she does not waver, in spite of pain, fever, doubt, and she is able to stand firm against Mitchum, no matter what goes through his mind.

As a film about a marine on an island during WWII where the Japanese land, it might be easy to think this will be an action film, but what this really is, is a character study.  In the script from Huston, his deft hand at directing, and the sure performances of Mitchum and Kerr, that this film works as well as it does.

The Source:

Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison by Charles Shaw (1952)

This is a solid enough book, the story of a soldier and a nun who both end up deserted on an island in the Pacific Ocean during the later days of World War II.  They must first deal with each other, then deal with the Japanese, who land on the island.  It’s an interesting enough novel, but even at only 224 pages, it feels quite padded.  There’s a lot of narrative and this really could have been a very satisfying short story that just seems drawn out to novel length.

The Adaptation:

The film really does a very good job of taking the book and putting it straight on the screen.  Much of the dialogue and almost all of the action comes straight from the book.  Because so much of the novel does feel padded, it makes it easy to just take out all the unnecessary narrative and cut it down to a 106 minute film that doesn’t feel stretched or compressed.

The Credits:

Directed by John Huston. Screenplay by John Lee Mahin and John Huston. Based on the Novel by Charles Shaw.

Consensus Nominees That Don’t Make My Top 10

Love in the Afternoon

The Film:

Is it the Lubitsch in the film?  Or is it the ridiculous pairing that makes me cringe?  Either way, on the list of Billy Wilder films, this ranks towards the bottom.  Granted, we’re talking Billy Wilder here, so even when a film ranks towards the bottom of his works, it’s still a fairly good film, in this case a mid-range *** romantic comedy with a lovely, charming performance from Audrey Hepburn and a rather amusing one from Maurice Chevalier.

There are echoes of Ernst Lubitsch in this film, the man whom Wilder looked up to.  It is the kind of light comedy with amusing situations that Lubitsch often favored.  It takes place in Paris, which Lubitsch loved, setting some of his best films there.  And it stars Gary Cooper, who was the star of Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, one of Lubitsch’s best films (also set in Paris), which was written by Wilder.  But I’ve never been that fond of Lubitsch, believing that his films were often too light in their touch and lacked the biting wit of a good Wilder film.  And that’s the problem here – this film does lack biting wit, and that, along with the uncomfortable situation, is a drag on the film.

The set-up of the film is that Maurice Chevalier plays a detective in Paris who tracks down straying wives.  Gary Cooper is a bit of a Don Juan, who comes into town and sleeps with various wives before moving on to another big city.  The problem is that Hepburn, playing Chevalier’s daughter, is a young, innocent cellist who falls for Cooper’s picture and goes to warn him of a cuckolded husband coming to shoot him.  She then becomes the mysterious woman that Cooper falls for, because he doesn’t know anything about her.  There are some definitely funny situations, such as when Cooper hires Chevalier to find out about his mystery love, but Cooper, late in his life, playing opposite the young luminous Hepburn just doesn’t work.  In the end, it’s good and charming and occasionally rises to the occasion, but not enough to clear the hurdle of being just a mid-range *** film.

The Source:

Ariane, jeune fille russe by Claude Anet (1920, tr. 1927)

The title translates to Ariane, young Russian girl. That’s who she is – a young Russian girl who comes to Paris and falls for a Don Juan and decides to play a game of mystery to keep the affair fresh. The author, Claude Anet, was a star tennis player who turned to writing after retirement. It’s a light, charming romance, but nothing particularly memorable.

The Adaptation:

If I hadn’t known beforehand that the film was based on this novel, I would not have guessed it from reading the book.  The father?  Not in the book.  Because of that, we have eliminated the key set-up for how the characters initially meet as well as the main focus of humor in the film.  In essence, the romance is there in the original book.  But it’s the script from Wilder and Diamond that turns it into a romantic comedy.

The Credits:

produced and directed by Billy Wilder. screen play by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. based on a novel by Claude Anet.

Peyton Place

The Film:

This film is just trash.  It’s not trash because it’s about things which are lurid (abortion, incest) but because it’s badly written, badly directed, mostly badly acted and it wants to be important when it’s really just stupid.  That this film was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture is completely absurd.  That is was nominated for its script is just obscene.  Don’t bother with it.  It is absolutely not worth it.

The Source:

Peyton Place by Grace Metalious  (1956)

The edition of this novel that I read for the purposes of writing this (why else would I read it?) has an absurd introduction that attempts to argue for the literary merits of the book.  Let’s be clear.  This is not the worst book I have ever read (hello The Bridges of Madison County) but it is extremely bad.  Just look at the opening: “Indian summer is like a woman.  Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.”  That’s just the opening two sentences.  If I were to quote the whole opening paragraph you would (hopefully) shake your head in dismay over the fact that this was a big seller.  But, hey, so was 50 Shades of Grey.

This was a big seller because it was scandalous.  New England towns weren’t supposed to have secrets like this.  There wasn’t supposed to be pre-marital sex.  There wasn’t supposed to be abortion.  There wasn’t supposed to be incest.  Yet, there were because there always were and there probably still are.  But in the fifties, that was a shocking idea, and so when someone actually dared to write about it, people read it in droves.  But you shouldn’t, because good lord is it bad.

The Adaptation:

You might read a lot about how much this book was toned down for the film release.  Perhaps this is because the town itself is presented as a more decent place while one particular family has some really nasty secrets.  But those secrets (the daughter is raped by her step-father and then the decent town doctor gives her an abortion out of pity) are presented pretty much intact on-screen, because they would have to be in order to have the trial that is the dramatic conclusion of the film.  But those are the really salacious elements of the book.  Many of the main characters aren’t presented as nastily in the film as they were in the book and it’s not necessarily a town you would want to avoid, as you would in the book if you didn’t want your whole life described in gossip everyday, but it’s hardly fair to say that it was completely whitewashed.

The Credits:

Directed by Mark Robson.  Screenplay by John Michael Hayes.  From the Novel by Grace Metalious.

Sayonara

The Film:

I reviewed this film once already as one of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture.  It is not a bad film; it is too well acted for that.  And it has something that it wants to say about interracial romances and how they come about in the military.  But the writing is about as subtle as a sledgehammer and the direction isn’t very good.  It’s what you could expect from Hollywood in 1957 trying to make a film about this issue.

The Source:

Sayonara by James A. Michener (1954)

If the writing in the film is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, what does that make the novel?  It seems like Michener has his heart in the right place.  He wants to make it clear that the regulations about military men not being allowed to marry natives and bring them home is wrong.  But the novel is filled with so much racism, both explicit (one of the characters revels in being allowed to force soldiers home rather than allow them to marry) and more casual (the Japanese women are constantly denigrated, with the words plain and round often being used).

This is a ridiculous melodramatic novel, the story of an air force officer who is friends (soft-of) with a young soldier who has fallen in love with a Japanese girl and marries her and then, after witnessing some local theater, falls in love himself and abandons the woman he’s supposedly been in love with his whole life (also, she starts to act like her mother, because of course, only then would she suddenly start to do that after all the years he has known her).  In the end, faced with being forced home without his wife, the young soldier (and his wife) commits suicide.  The air force officer relents and allows himself to be sent home.  It’s really kind of a mess and I honestly can’t really fathom how Michener ever got much of a reputation even before he started writing ridiculously long travelogues.

The Adaptation:

Marlon Brando objected to the ending – “I can’t do a picture where the American leaves the Japanese girl like the arrogant ending of Madame Butterfly.” he told director Joshua Logan. Logan suggested he marry the girl instead with screenwriter Paul Osborn saying “I’d like that better – it’s less cliche. We only thought we had to use that ending because Michener wrote it that way.” (quotes from p 88 of Joshua Logan’s Movie Stars, Real People and Me).

That is, indeed, the biggest difference between the film and the novel.  There are certainly other differences along the way (the James Garner character is combined with another character – it wasn’t the Garner character who tried to bring his date into the club).  The suicide is handled differently as well.  In the novel, Brando’s character is climbing in the window when he sees them dead (“While my leg was suspended I saw Joe.  He was on the floor with his head blown apart by a .45.  Across him, obviously having died later, lay Katsumi with a kitchen knife plunged completely through her neck.”).  In the film, he comes in and finds them dead in the bed together.  You can see a gun in the foreground, but the way they are lying in the bed kind of belies that (more of the bad direction in the film) – it seems more like they have died together of poison.  It is certainly nothing like the gruesome scene described in the book.

The Credits:

Directed by Joshua Logan.  Screen Play: Paul Osborn.  Based on the Novel by James Michener.

The other WGA Nominees

Don’t Go Near the Water

The Film:

This was a subgenre for a while, the War Comedy.  A lot of them tended to be Navy films, perhaps because it’s easier to set a Comedy among the Navy where you’re out at sea and various hijinks can occur than in the army where you’re too close to combat.  Either way, it makes, for the most part, for uninspired films.  They feel tired, they feel flat, and even the presence of someone as good on film as Glenn Ford just isn’t enough.

In this case, this is a Comedy because these men never manage to get near the war.  Hell, as the title itself says, they don’t even really manage to get near the water.  They are PR guys and their job is to buck up morale and write glowingly about the Navy, not to actually go out and fight in a war.  To that end, this film consists of such things as recording a newspaper man coming on to an underage girl or dealing with a foul-mouthed sailor (this is the 50’s, so all the words are used, but actually bleeped out).  And, of course, there is a romance in the middle of it, because it seems like they felt one was necessary to the plot.

It’s astounding when you look at a film like this to remember that Charles Walters was at one time an Oscar nominee for Best Director, but then again, it was for Lili, and you find yourself wondering that while you’re watching the film for which he was actually nominated.  This film isn’t all dreary – Ford manages to liven it up and Russ Tamblyn, still a few years from being reduced back to being a teenager in West Side Story is an enjoyable sidekick.  But really the best part of this film comes from Mickey Shaughnessy as Farragut Jones, the man spotlighted by the PR guys as the ultimate Navy man (because of his name) but who turns out to be heavily tattooed, utterly uncouth and hilariously foul-mouthed.  The sequences with him and with Ford’s desperation to make something of the man are really the only things that light this film up and keep it from slipping down into **.5 range.

The Source:

Don’t go near the water by William Brinkley (1956)

This would be the single best-selling book of 1956.  It hit the top of the NYT Best Seller list in August and stayed there for a remarkable 19 weeks until Peyton Place came along and dislodged it (if Peyton Place had been published earlier in the year this book wouldn’t have been the top seller of the year).  I was all set to write about how I can’t understand how this book was such a big seller and that perhaps it’s a question of the changing times and that I was never in the military so perhaps this type of humor just doesn’t appeal to me, but I can hardly question the merits of this book being on the top of the best seller given what pushed it out of the top spot.  This is hardly great literature, but it’s certainly better than Peyton Place.  It is pretty much what the film would be – a humorous look at men who work in Public Relations in the Navy and the problems they run into.

The Adaptation:

The film changes things somewhat from the books – the big moment of the panties being flown from the mast that’s on the cover of the book wasn’t in the film.  But much of the film does come straight from the book, including all of the issues surrounding Farragut Jones and his ridiculously foul mouth.  One big change though, was to take the main character (Siegel, played by Glenn Ford) and promote him from an Ensign to a Lieutenant.

The Credits:

Directed by Charles Walters.  Screen Play by Dorothy Kingsley and George Wells.  Based on the Novel “Don’t Go Near the Water” by William Brinkley.

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

The Film:

This film starts out in a really clever way, with Tony Randall coming out to introduce it and announcing the title as The Girl Can’t Help It.  Then he stops and says “No, we already did that one.”  He goes through his pockets trying to figure out the title.  Then the film begins and the credits are a series of televisions ads for clearly shoddy products, a good start to a film that mocks the advertising industry.  Unfortunately, after the credits, the film itself starts and things go downhill rather quickly.

Rock Hunter is an ad exec, trying to come up with a campaign for lipstick.  To that end, he eventually ends up involved with Rita Marlowe, the actress with the “oh-so-kissable lips”.  Highjinks will ensure, of course, that involve Hunter, misunderstandings with his fiancee (who also happens to be his upstairs neighbor), his perky 16 year old niece who lives with him and Marlowe herself, played by Jayne Mansfield.  Perhaps played is the wrong word, since that would imply some sort of acting was involved and this is Jayne Mansfield that we’re talking about.  If they had gotten Marilyn Monroe, there could have been an actual performance to go along with those lips and that body, but the only point of Mansfield is to be a big-busted blonde for men to drool over.  Hunter will drool over her, but tries to stick to his fiancee, and the performance by Tony Randall as Hunter (and to a small extent, the performance of Lili Gentle as his niece) is the only thing that really keeps the film going.  Well, there is also the cameo at the end of the film when Marlowe’s acting teacher and the one man she really loves finally shows up and that is funny.  But the film is mostly a slog, with ridiculous situations.  At least they didn’t completely screw up the film by also giving it a standard Hollywood ending, but the ending of the film is silly enough that it doesn’t really matter.

The Source:

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?: A New Comedy by George Axelrod (1955)

George Axelrod’s first play, The Seven Year Itch had been a huge hit.  But then had come the film, which was also a huge hit, but had massive changes because of the stringencies of the Production Code.  For his second play, Axelrod decided to write a play about a writer who goes to Hollywood and then refuses to bow to their pathetic required changes to his work.  It is witty and insightful into what goes on with the process of writing in Hollywood and was a big success on stage, and the movie rights quickly sold.

The Adaptation:

And, once the movie rights were sold, 20th Century-Fox promptly took the entire play and threw out everything but the title and the character of Rita Marlowe. Ah, the amusing irony of taking a play about a writer selling out to Hollywood and then dropping everything about Hollywood from the play and turning it into an indictment of the advertising agency instead.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Frank Tashlin. Screen Story and Screenplay by Frank Tashlin. Based on the Play written by George Axelrod and Produced on the Stage by Jule Styne.

The Joker is Wild

The Film:

Can’t you imagine why this would appeal to Frank Sinatra?  Joe E. Lewis began as a singer and then, after being brutally attacked by the Mafia for changing nightclubs, couldn’t sing anymore and turned to being a comedian instead.  It was not only a perfect showcase for Sinatra’s talents (there was even a lot of serious acting involved, since it deals with the man’s descent into alcoholism and the destruction of two marriages), but with the Mafia connection, it must have seemed like it was an echo of his own life.

Sinatra gives a strong performance, and if I had considered this film a Musical like the WGA did (I didn’t because the songs are cut down so early in the film after the beating and then it turns more into a dramatic biopic), I probably would have him on my list for Best Actor – Comedy / Musical (which was a weak list in this year and is lead by Sinatra for Pal Joey).

In the end, this film doesn’t work for me on a personal level.  Oh, it’s well-made enough, with some serious drama, and Sinatra gets some joy out of the singing in the early scenes and then gets to be dramatic later on.  But it’s a biopic about someone I don’t care about and there just isn’t enough in the writing of the film to sustain any interest in it beyond that.  The direction is fairly lackluster, as if it were done as a paint-by-numbers.  It’s a mid-range ***.  But, for some reason, it has never been readily available on video, in spite of winning the Oscar for Best Original Song.

The Source:

the joker is wild: the Story of Joe E. Lewis by Art Cohn (1955)

I wonder if maybe this is my least favorite kind of book of all those that I have been reading for the first time in the course of this project.  It’s a biography about someone whose life I don’t care about it, even a little.  Joe E. Lewis was a singer in Chicago during the Capone era and when he left one nightclub for another, Capone’s lieutenant had his throat slashed (against the wishes of Capone, I might add).  He survives the attack but was unable to sing anymore (it took him years just to be able to speak again), so he became a comedian instead.  I managed to push my way through the book, but I couldn’t really be bothered to care.  It’s certainly written well-enough for such a book, but when you have zero interest in the subject matter, it doesn’t really matter.  My barometer for such things by the way is Susan Orlean.  I tried three times to read The Orchid Thief, but in the end, just couldn’t care enough to read it.  So, if you want me to read about a subject I have no interest in, you need to be a better writer than Susan Orlean, and that’s tough to do.

The Adaptation:

For the most part, this follows pretty well along with the book.  It does a good job of making use of the key moments in the life of Lewis, as well as giving Sinatra some songs to perform before they cut his throat so we can be reminded, not necessarily of how good a singer Lewis was, but how good Sinatra was.

The Credits:

Directed by Charles Vidor.  Screenplay by Oscar Saul.  From a book by Art Cohn.  Based on the life of Joe E. Lewis.

The Pajama Game

The Film:

Oh, when will the damn WGA category of Musical end and allow me to stop this cycle of endlessly reviewing mid to low *** films that don’t belong in a post about good writing (answer: 1968).

It’s pretty easy to write reviews of these films.  It’s almost a fill-in-the-blank.  There is a man.  He’s probably at least a little obnoxious.  Certainly the girl won’t like him at first (or for a stretch in the middle).  He is often a newcomer.  Then there is the girl.  She is supposed to be pretty, but it all depends on your taste, since they’re often blonde and I’m not interested in blondes, particularly (especially, in this case, Doris Day).  There will be a conflict that will keep them apart.  Sometimes it has to do with work (like in this case).  Sometimes it is something about where they live, or their social status, or family.  But there will be tension.  All of which will be resolved by the end, of course, usually in a rather silly or melodramatic way.  There will be a happy ending.

All of that could also describe a lot of romantic comedies, of course, with the main differences being that generic romantic comedies don’t often end up earning WGA nominations and that the Musicals also end up with a lot of songs in them.  The songs are often appreciated by groups of people and, because we’re in the era before Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Weber, that usually doesn’t include me.

Case in point, The Pajama Game, in which John Raitt (who?) is the new supervisor at the pajama plant where he will fall for Doris Day (why?) but their romance will be strained because of her insistence on a 7 1/2 cent raise for the workers, which it turns out the manager claims in his books was already instituted so he could pocket the money (what?), but then all of this will be revealed and there will be many songs (why?).

The songs in this case are by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross.  If they are memorable to you, I am glad for you.  For me, I could not remember any of the them from the first time I watched it and they have already slipped my mind again.  They also wrote Damn Yankees, which also doesn’t have a single song I remember and which I will be covering in the next year, because, hey the WGA Best Musical category will still exist.

The Source:

The Pajama Game: A New Musical Comedy, Book by George Abbott and Richard Bissell (Based on Mr. Bissell’s novel, 7 1/2 Cents), Music and Lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross  (1954)

Yes, that is the full title, as listed on the title page of the Random House copy of the book.  But don’t think for a minute I’m gonna go track down the original novel by Bissell.  I’ve been through this story enough.  It’s a silly little Musical about a new guy at a pajama company who faces off against the union, lead by the girl that he falls for.

The Adaptation:

What you saw on stage is pretty much what you get on film.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by George Abbott and Stanley Donen.  Screen Play by George Abbott and Richard Bissell.  Based upon the play “The Pajama Game”.  Book by George Abbott and Richard Bissell.  From Richard Bissell’s novel “7 1/2 Cents”.  Music and Lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross.  Original stage production directed by George Abbott and Jerome Robbins.  Produced by Brisson, Griffith and Prince.

Pal Joey

The Film:

Is this the quintessential Frank Sinatra role?  And if so, does that explain why I don’t rate the film any higher than mid-range ***?  Or is it that rating the quintessential Sinatra role at that level explains why I am not a fan of Sinatra, that, in spite of his obvious talent in multiple fields, he just doesn’t interest me?  None of that is to say that this Sinatra’s best performance – certainly that is either From Here to Eternity or The Man with the Golden Arm.  But, in the years after he broke away from his goody-good image that he had developed through his early crooning years and in films like Anchors Aweigh and On the Town, he would become a bit of a rake, a bit of a cynic about love, a man who could sing and could charm a little mouse but was fundamentally untrustworthy and no role better suits that than this one.

It is a good Sinatra performance, of course, and I rate the performance higher than I rate the film itself.  That might have to do with a lot of things.  Sinatra, for one, gives a good performance while no one else in the film even comes close.  Being in a Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak sandwich might be delicious (as Sinatra put it when asked about not receiving top billing), but at least if you aren’t getting top billing you don’t have to worry about anyone acting you off the screen.  Sinatra’s the only one who gives any kind of performance, putting on the charm when he has to, being a cad the rest of the time (more in tune with the character as originally written) and belting out classic Rodgers and Hart numbers in between (see below).

But the film just doesn’t really flow, perhaps because of the two sides of it – the quick-talking nightclub guy who’s at ease in that life contrasted with the romance that the film wants to put center screen, complete with giving it a happy ending that the original didn’t have and which this character doesn’t fit.

Pal Joey is a good film, but it’s a good film mainly because Sinatra gives a spot-on performance (he wins the Nighthawk for Best Actor – Comedy / Musical). I just wish it had more to offer than that.

The Source:

Pal Joey, book by John O’Hara, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart (1940) / Pal Joey by John O’Hara (1940)

This musical is a rarity, in that it involves the author of the original source to write the book for the play (which is probably also why you can both books in one currently from Penguin Classics).  John O’Hara wrote Pal Joey as a series of pieces in The New Yorker and Rodgers and Hart, who were already a team, turned them into an unconventional musical.  It needed an actor who could play a heel and still maintain the audience’s sympathy (which turned out to be Gene Kelly, which must have been a marvel on stage).  Though I don’t love any of the musical numbers, the musical itself was quite a departure from much of the work on Broadway at the time.  We have a star who is pretty much a cad and never becomes a better person through the course of the show.  We have two completely different types of songs, with the more showy numbers reserved for the nightclub while the more introspective ones were the ones outside of the nightclub, actually showing real emotions.

The original collection of short vignettes (short stories isn’t really the right word for them) by John O’Hara isn’t credited in the film, but it’s where the original musical came from.  They were a series of letters written by Joey back to his pal Ted talking about his life since leaving New York City, including trying to get (and keep) work and the mice he meets and sweet-talks (I was going to say romance, but romance isn’t a verb that applies to Joey).  They’re interesting reading (O’Hara was quite a talented writer, though he is all but forgotten today) and they give an interesting take on Joey, since his tendency to be a cad shines through even though the whole book is written from his point of view.

The Adaptation:

If you watched Pal Joey on the stage and came to this film expecting to see the same musical you were probably in for quite a surprise.  Just watching the opening credits you would be thinking, wait, the musical took place in Chicago.  That would only be the start of the changes, and they would come hard and fast.  It would be quickly apparent that the songs were different as well.  Yes, several of the songs from the original made it to the film.  But a bunch were dropped as well.  In their place were songs that were probably quite familiar, songs like “The Lady is a Tramp” and “My Funny Valentine” that were already standards before Pal Joey even hit the stage.  The producers decided to bring in some other Rodgers and Hart songs (four in all) to take the place of the songs they had dropped.  But that wasn’t all that was different either.  That moment, early on, when Joey is staring at a girl who is looking in the window of a pet shop, they have a nice meet cute.  That girl, a stenographer, is now a chorus dancer that he meets after he starts crooning at a night club and she’s in the background (they do eventually get the pet shop scene, but they’ve already met and she really doesn’t like him by then).  To top off everything, that final meeting of the two of them (back at the pet shop) is quite different, in that Joey no longer ends up alone on stage.  He’s walking off into the future with Linda.

The Credits:

Directed by George Sidney.  Screen Play by Dorothy Kingsley.  From the Musical Play: Book by John O’Hara, Music by Richard Rodgers, Lyrics by Lorenz Hart, Produced on the Stage by George Abbott.

Other Screenplays on My List Outside My Top 10:

• 3:10 to Yuma  –  The original, based on a short story by Elmore Leonard.  This is a good film, a high level ***, but when remade in 2007 with much better stars it will become a great film.
• The Great Man  –  Jose Ferrer isn’t thought of as anything but an actor, but he would direct and co-write this film, based on a novel by Al Morgan, a Citizen Kane type film looking into a popular radio host after his death.  An under-appreciated film with good acting throughout.

Other Adaptations:
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• No Down Payment  –  Joanne Woodward won her NBR award for Best Actress for this film and Three Faces of Eve.  While Eve is the better performance, this is one that shouldn’t be over-looked (and has been) and is the better film, about problems in suburbia.  It’s based on a novel by John McPartland, the one more serious novel from a man more known for hard-boiled pulp novels.
• A Town Like Alice  –  My mother is a big fan of the book, written by Nevil Shute and probably his most famous book until On the Beach.  The film is good, but not good enough to justify the BAFTA wins for Actor and Actress and nomination for Picture (it was BAFTA eligible in 1956).  It would later be re-made as a much more well-known tv mini-series.
• The Curse of Frankenstein  –  Yes!  Hammer Horror has arrived!  Let there be blood and gore in full color!  This, of course, is very loosely adapted from Frankenstein.  It stars Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and what could be better than that?
• Raintree Country  –  Based on the 1948 novel by Ross Lockridge, Jr., which, according to Wikipedia was considered a contender for The Great American Novel, which is completely absurd.  It earned four Oscar nominations, including the first Best Actress nomination for Elizabeth Taylor.
• The Bachelor Party  –  A solid film, adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from his own 1953 teleplay that shouldn’t be confused with the stupid Tom Hanks film.  It earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the Oscars.
• The Three Faces of Eve  –  Joanne Woodward’s Oscar and Nighthawk winning role as a woman suffering from multiple personality disorder.  The non-fiction book, written by the real psychiatrists involved in the case, was also published in 1957 and the film was rushed into production.  The film is okay but Woodward is great.
• The Enemy Below  –  A World War II film starring Robert Mitchum and based on a novel by a former British naval officer.
• Time Limit  –  The one film directed by Karl Malden and adapted from the play.  It was nominated for Best Actor at the BAFTAs, who liked Richard Basehart a lot more than the Oscars did.
• Gunfight at the O.K. Corral  –  If you’re gonna watch a Western, watching one with both Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster is kind of the way to go.  Not particularly historically accurate, but good entertainment.  The IMDb lists it as “suggested by an article by George Scullin”.  The way it was listed at oscars.org made me classify it as adapted, but since that site is now apparently dead, I can’t confirm how it was listed there.
• Street of Shame  –  Solid 1956 drama from acclaimed Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi about five prostitutes, based on the novel by Yoshiko Subaki.  It stars Machiko Kyo, the star of Rashomon, Ugetsu and Gate of Hell.
• Reach for the Sky  –  Another 1956 film that reached the States in 1957, this one won Best British Film at the BAFTAs.  It’s a biopic about Douglas Bader, a British aviator and was based on a 1954 biography.  Like A Town Like Alice, it received 5 BAFTA noms and no other awards attention.
• Old Yeller  –  The Disney classic that scars every kid once poor Yeller gets rabies and has to be shot.  I read the story a lot in Walt Disney’s America before we had a VCR so I was prepared for what would come on screen.  The film is based on the Newbery Honor winning book by Fred Gipson.
• Stella  –  A 1955 Greek film that is a retelling of Carmen directed by Michael Cacoyannis.
• The Green Man  –  A British comedy with Alistair Sim, based on the play Meet a Body, written by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, who had worked with Sim several times previously.
• The Abominable Snowman  –  Another early Hammer Horror film, this one based on a teleplay called “The Creature”.  Good, but not at the same level as the other Hammer films and is in black-and-white rather than color.
• Four Bags Full  –  A 1956 French Comedy starring Jean Gabin, adapted from the novel La Traversée de Paris.
• The Prince and the Showgirl  –  Based on the Terence Rattigan play The Sleeping Prince, surely this film is more famous now because of My Week with Marilyn.  And really, that’s a much better film; this is easily the weak spot in Olivier’s directorial work.
• The Spirit of St Louis  –  The Charles Lindbergh movie, based on his autobiographical account.  While it’s a solid mid-*** film, I’m glad it wasn’t nominated for its script, because the book apparently spends over 300 pages in an hour by hour account of the trip.
• The Colditz Story  –  A 1955 British P.O.W. film that stars John Mills (which, in spite of being mid-***, automatically makes it worth watching).  Based on the book from the real man that Mills plays.
• Edge of the City  –  Directorial debut of Martin Ritt, starring Sidney Poitier, this was based on a teleplay (this was a big year for that).
• This Could Be the Night  –  A mild, forgettable Robert Wise film starring Jean Simmons.  It’s based on short stories by Cornelia Baird Gross.
• Desk Set  –  Based on the play, this is quite possibly the most forgettable Tracy / Hepburn film.
• The Brothers Rico  –  Mild gangster film noir adapted from a story by Georges Simenon, though this isn’t one of his Inspector Maigret stories.
• Island in the Sun  –  So it turns out that Evelyn Waugh’s older brother was also a writer, but a much less famous one.  He wrote the novel this was adapted from, but what people really remember about this film is the Harry Belafonte song.
• Silk Stockings  –  What people remember most about this film is probably Cyd Charrise’s legs.  It’s based on the Musical, but that was based on Ninotchka.  We’re down into the lower *** range here, so you can tell I’m not as big a fan of this film as some are.
• Men in War  –  An Anthony Mann film about Korea, though the novel it was based on (Day Without End) was actually about the Normandy invasion.
• The Rising of the Moon  –  An anthology film that is one of the weakest films ever directed by John Ford.  One part is based on a Frank O’Connor short story, one part is based on a one-act comedy and one on the play The Rising of the Moon by Lady Gregory.
• Nightfall  –  Based on the novel by David Goodis, this is pretty forgettable film noir.
• Fear Strikes Out  –  A little personal history here.  My baseball obsession began early.  So did the reading.  And when I was in sixth grade, my brother and his then girlfriend gave me a book called Temporary Insanity by Jay Johnstone.  It’s a fun book, about Johnstone’s wacky life in baseball and I’ve enjoyed it for over 30 years now.  Well, Johnstone talks early on about how his first roommate in baseball was Jimmy Piersall and that explains it, right?  Well, wrong.  I had no idea who Jimmy Piersall was.  I knew all the baseball greats, even in 6th grade (especially in 6th grade) but Piersall wasn’t known for being great.  He was known for being nuts.  It would be years before I would finally learn a lot more about Piersall and even longer before I would finally see this film, about how Piersall was driven by his father and, though he played for the Red Sox, he also went bonkers and spent time in an institution (which he is famous for, but I didn’t know that back then).  Decent film, with Anthony Perkins kind of trying out to play Norman Bates.  Based on Piersall’s memoir.  All of this was years before he and Johnstone would room together.
• Oedipus Rex  – I saw this on the list at oscars.org (when it existed) and watched it because I wanted to try and see any adaptations of notable source material (thus the list down below of the ones I haven’t seen).  It’s a decent Canadian production of the play (complete with masks) but not much better than that.  It was apparently rather a dud at the box office as well, prompting a Tom Lehrer song, which, of course, is hilarious, because Daniel Radcliffe is pretty much right when he describes Lehrer.
• Beau James  –  Bob Hope doing some actual dramatic work, playing Jimmy Walker, the former mayor of New York.  Based on the book by Gene Fowler.
• Something of Value  –  Richard Brooks are usually a lot better than this, but they also don’t usually star Rock Hudson.  Based on the novel by Robert Ruark.
• My Man Godfrey  –  Hey, let’s remake a screwball classic, but instead of having William Powell and Carole Lombard, we’ll have David Niven and June Allyson.
• Johnny Tremain  –  I read this book in 4th grade when I read my way through the Newbery list (yeah, I’ve always been like this – it’s called OCD).  I hated it.  Pretty much everyone I know who ever read it, hated it.  I saw this because the director, Robert Stevenson, would later be Oscar nominated (for Mary Poppins).
• Smiley  –  A British kids film but you’ll be forgiven if you think it’s Australian, since it was filmed in Australia and takes place there and the author of the original novel was Australian.  Nominated for a BAFTA Screenplay Award, which is why I don’t count those.
• The Burglar  –  Another Goodis adaptation, this one just scraping in with ***.  It must have been on the TSPDT 13,000 starting film list because I can’t fathom why else I have seen it.
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover  –  Now we’re into **.5 range.  This is another film I saw after I saw it on oscars.org.  It’s a 1955 French version directed by Marc Allegret.
• Band of Angels  –  Clark Gable hamming it up in a Civil War era film.  From the novel by Robert Penn Warren.
• The Barretts of Wimpole Street  –  The original isn’t a great film but it had some great acting from three of the best of the 1930’s (Norma Shearer, Fredric March, Charles Laughton).  John Gielgud isn’t great, Jennifer Jones is no Norma Shearer and Bill Travers doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same review as Fredric March.
• The Pride and the Passion  –  Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra and Sophia Loren fail to bring this story of a cannon in the Napoleonic Wars to life thanks to lackluster direction from Stanley Kramer.  Based on The Gun by C.S. Forester.
• April Love  –  It stars Pat Boone which should tell you enough.  It’s based on the novel Phantom Filly.  This is the first of an astounding nine films from 20th Century-Fox that are on this list and are **.5 or lower, two of which are listed up above because of nominations (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter and Peyton Place).
• The Wings of Eagles  –  John Ford gets even more lackluster, with John Wayne as the man who helped spur American military aviation, based on an article he wrote.
• The Sun Also Rises  –  It’s a Top 100 novel, yes.  But this film is lackluster as you can see in my review.  This and the next film helped kick off a few years of Hemingway over-exposure on film that would lead to the death of Hemingway on-screen.  A Fox film.
• A Farewell to Arms  –  Briefly mentioned in the above review.  The book is brilliant and I think today it would have bounced back up into my Top 100.  But this film, starring Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones is a dud.  Another Fox film.
• An Affair to Remember  –  Even the 1939 Love Affair wasn’t great, but it was better than this, no matter what my mother or Meg Ryan’s character in Sleepless in Seattle may think.  What a waste of two great talents.  Yep, also a Fox film.
• The Story of Esther Costello  –  Another BAFTA winning film (Best Actress), this is based on the novel.  Hard to find and forgettable once I found it.
• Tammy and the Bachelor  –  The first of apparently four Tammy films, based on books by Cid Ricketts Sumner, this is the only one to star Debbie Reynolds.  A very forgettable romantic comedy that was Oscar nominated for Best Song.
• The Shiralee  –  Another British film that was made in Australia and based on a novel by an Australian writer, about a man and his four year old daughter.  It received a BAFTA nom for Best Picture and Best British Film.
• Tarzan and the Lost Safari  –  The second film with Gordon Scott as Tarzan finally brings him to life in color for the first time.  This film, while rather disappointing (mid **.5) has more hints of the original Burroughs works than most Tarzan films.
• The Incredible Shrinking Man  –  One of the more famous Sci-Fi / Horror films of the 50’s (I actually consider it Fantasy because of the elements of how he shrinks) isn’t actually all that good (mostly because of crappy acting).  It’s based on a novel by Richard Matheson, more famous for writing I, Legend.
• Kiss Them for Me  –  Another crappy Fox Comedy with Jayne Mansfield, based on the play.  It has Cary Grant but that doesn’t help.
• Hellcats of the Navy  –  A World War II submarine film based on a book by a Vice Admiral.  The only film to pair Ronald and Nancy Reagan and if that gets you excited, well, then you need serious help.
• The Wayward Bus  –  John Steinbeck, one of the greatest writers ever produced by this country, deserves better than to have one of his novels turned into a Fox film starring Jayne Mansfield, even if it is one of his weaker novels.  It would be another 25 years before we would see another American adaptation of a Steinbeck novel (not counting television).
• The Gold of Naples  –  Another anthology film, this one from Vittorio de Sica.  Based on the novel by Giuseppe Marotta.
• Until They Sail  –  How can a film with Paul Newman, Piper Laurie, Jean Simmons and Joan Fontaine be this bland?  Ask Robert Wise because he directed it.  Based on a short story by James Michener.
• The River’s Edge  –  Low level **.5 with Anthony Quinn and Ray Milland.  Based on an unpublished short story.  Yet another Fox film.
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame  –  Anthony Quinn again, except this time he’s hamming it up as Quasimodo.  Great novel.  High ** film.  The first film version of the novel in color.
• The Unholy Wife  –  Making a film noir in Technicolor kind of defeats the point.  But then John Farrow was never a particularly good director, even when he earned an Oscar nomination.  Based on yet another teleplay.
• The Little Hut  –  Pretty bad romantic comedy from Mark Robson (Peyton Place).  Based on the play.
• Saint Joan  –  Famously bad for Jean Seberg’s awful performance after the big search for someone to play the part.  Based on the play by George Bernard Shaw.
• The Story of Mankind  –  Another Newbury winner.  In fact, the original Newbury winner and the one that nobody (but me) reads because it’s so long.  This adaptation has an all-star cast (it’s directed by Irwin Allen, who was always big on that idea) but is only loosely related to the book.  Another film I watched after finding it listed on oscars.org.
• Quatermass 2  –  Like the first film, based on the BBC show.  Unlike the first film, this one is crappy (low **).  Released in the States as Enemy from Space.
• The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown  –  This one has Jane Russell and is directed by Norman Taurog, one of the worst directors to ever be nominated for an Oscar (or win one).  It’s based on the novel by Sylvia Tate and is low **.
• Daughter of Dr. Jekyll  –  A low-budget Horror film from Edgar G. Ulmer.  Even at *, it’s not the worst film of the year (there are four films worse that were all original).  Very, very loosely derived from the Stevenson classic.

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen:

note:  I’ve tried to see all of these, but they aren’t available from Netflix, my library system didn’t have them and often I even try to ILL them and can’t get them.  They also aren’t available online.  I’m not alone in not having seen them as all of them have fewer than 200 votes on the IMDb.

• The Deerslayer  –  I may not value Cooper’s writing any higher than Mark Twain does, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see the films if I can.  This is a Fox film though, so it might have been terrible.  It stars Lex Barker (the former Tarzan) who wasn’t exactly Daniel Day-Lewis.
• The Seventh Sin  –  It’s Bill Travers again, this time starring in an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil.  It was directed by Ronald Neame, who did direct a number of very good films (The Horse’s Mouth, Tunes of Glory, The Chalk Garden).
• Short Cut to Hell  –  The only film directed by James Cagney, though he didn’t act in it.  It’s another version of Graham Greene’s A Gun for Sale, which had been made in 1941 as This Gun for Hire.
• The Surf  –  A 1954 Japanese film version of Yukio Mishima’s The Sound of Waves that earned a U.S. release.  It only has 16 votes on the IMDb.

High Fidelity

• Author:  Nick Hornby
• Published:  1995
• Publisher:  Victor Gollancz LTD
• Pages:  323
• First Line:  “My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order.”
• Last Lines:  “When Laura hears the opening bars she spins round and grins and makes several thumbs-up signs, and I start to compile in my head a compilation tape for her, something that’s full of stuff she’s heard of, and full of stuff she’d play.  Tonight, for the first time ever, I can sort of see how it’s done.”
• Film:  2000 (****)
• First Read:  Spring 2000

The Novel:  In the book, Barry is the one who is first obsessed with lists, who introduces them to the other two in the store.  But it’s Rob who’s narrating, Rob who can’t stop making lists, who, in fact, begins the novel with a list.  I read this book because the trailer was out and it looked great and Veronica and I were going to go see it (she owned the book).  And suddenly, for the first time since Catcher in the Rye, I felt like I was reading about myself.

Rob Fleming owns a record shop in North London.  He and his two employees sit around most of the time, talking about music, making lists.  I’m the same.  Less of my lists are about music these days, namely because I hate the radio and without my friends at Powells or working at Borders (where we sold and I had to listen to new music), I don’t hear a lot of new bands.  But music lists do pop up (like 100 great lines, or the Top 100 U2 Songs, or my Top 100 Albums, which probably won’t ever get put up).  I also had a tendency, before I met Veronica, to think about my past relationships, to wonder what went wrong, if I wanted to go back or move on and sometimes, in those first couple of years out of college, I was searching for old names on the web.

It’s not just Rob’s profession or his past reflections that I saw myself in.  I have some of the same ideas: “The lesson I learned from the Charlie débâcle is that you’ve got to punch your weight.”  I agree.  You end up with someone much better looking or much smarter than you, then things end up uneven and one of you ends up with too much power in the relationship.  There is a much longer rant that I mostly agree with:

A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners, a two- or three-page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases.  It was intended a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made.  It amused us at the time, although Barry, being Barry, went one stage further: he compiled the questionnaire and presented it to some poor woman he was interested in, and she hit him with it.  But there was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.

That’s the kind of piece that helps show the bitter humor that works so well throughout the book (“I mean, I know we don’t have any customers, but I thought that was a bad thing, not, like a business strategy.”).  It also doesn’t hedge on Rob’s character, even though he’s the narrator: “I kiss her on the cheek and go to the pub to meet Dick and Barry.  I feel like a new man, although not very much like a New Man.  I feel so much better, in fact, that I go straight out and sleep with Marie.”  Rob knows he’s not the world’s greatest guy and he tells us the truth, although sometimes it’s a little slowly.  But that’s part of what makes the book so honest and true.

But the thing about the book that really spoke to me is something that wouldn’t work as well for a younger audience.  It’s the making of mix tapes.  “I spent hours putting that cassette together.  To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again.”  That’s the beginning of a paragraph where he describes the rules.  I know the rules and sometimes I made use of the rules by breaking the rules.  Off the top of my head, I can think of at least half-a-dozen girls I made mix tapes for over the years.  The last several were for Veronica.

The Film:

“We went to see High Fidelity.  Is that film about you?”  That’s my mom asking me that question.  My answer was, yeah, pretty much.  It was about me in so many ways and it’s ironic, of course, that I saw it on an early date with Veronica, the person in my life who made me stop looking for things, stop trying to figure out what went wrong and if I wanted to go back to anyone, the person who made me focus.  On lists, but still, focus.

This film had me won over before I ever saw it.  That’s because of the trailer, which is magnificent.  Then I read the novel, so I knew what to expect.  And the film was everything I hoped it would be.

First, there were the ways in which it embraced the book so perfectly.  A book like this, with a solid first person narration, needed something that would stick to that narration.  The film makes great use of John Cusack, constantly talking to the camera.  And he’s interacting with us, challenging us, reminding us that he’s not perfect and that we aren’t either.  His narration is among the best in film history.  And so many of the classic lines in the book come to life.  But then there are all the ways in which the film is different from the book, the way the novel is adapted.  The main thing, of course, is that the film is transplanted from London, where Hornby lives, to Chicago, where Cusack grew up.  Or moments like when the discussion of what film Rob hasn’t seen yet (though he has seen it) changes from Reservoir Dogs to Evil Dead II (which made Veronica really happy since she had made me see it) or the slight change in the Top 5 First Tracks.

There is also the cast.  It’s not just John Cusack, who gives what might be the best performance of his career (it’s close between this and Say Anything).  There’s the way he interacts with Tim Robbins, someone he’d been making movies with as early as 1985 (see the great cameo in The Sure Thing).  There’s the way he interacts with his sister Joan, so different from the way they interacted in Say Anything or Grosse Pointe Blank.  There is the great supporting performance from Jack Black, who I was completely unfamiliar with before seeing this film (and who works so perfectly, both when he’s obnoxious and over the fact that he’s supposed to be able to sing and his performance of “Let’s Get It On” is fantastic).

But what might be most important is what should be the most important about this film: the soundtrack.  In a year where I own multiple soundtracks, this was the one that I chose as the best for the year in the Nighthawk Notables.  In my long ago post about the best use of rock songs in films, this film made the list twice, once for the moving, perfect use of “Most of the Time” after the funeral and the great use of the Beta Band, not just by the filmmakers, but by Rob himself.  Then there is the end.  By the time I was growing up, Stevie Wonder was considered kind of a joke, as such the scene about “I Just Called to Say I Love You”, so it was always hard for me to realize how big a deal he was in the 70’s.  His song, “I Believe”, really is an amazing song and it comes as the perfect ending to those final lines, the same final lines from the book, to show how much Rob has grown, how much he has learned.  Then the dialogue ends and the music kicks in and we get those perfect end credits over the spinning record.

I, Claudius

• Roman depravity, decay and decadence in all its literary glory.

  Author:  Robert Graves

• Published:  1934
• Publisher:  Arthur Barker
• Pages:  432
• First Line:  “I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as ‘Claudius the Idiot,’ or ‘That Claudius’, or ‘Claudius the Stammerer’, or ‘Clau-Clau-Claudius’ or at best as ‘Poor Uncle Claudius’, am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach that fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the ‘golden predicament’ from which I have never since become disentangled.”
• Last Lines:  “What a miraculous fate for a historian!  And as you will have seen, I took full advantage of my opportunities.  Even the mature historian’s privilege of setting forth conversations of which he knows only the gist is one that I have availed myself of hardly at all.”
• ML Edition:  #20; tan cover
• Acclaim:  ML Top 100 English Language Novels of the 20th Century #14; TIME 100 Best Novels Since 1923 List; James Tait Black Memorial Prize
• Film Version:  1937 (aborted); 1976  (TV – ****)
• First Read:  Late 1998

The Novel:

Roman history has long fascinated the world.  Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was long-regarded as a classic and was a big-seller for decades in spite of the fact that it’s rather dry and extremely long.  Films about the Romans pre-date the Sound Era and have never stopped coming; Ben-Hur may be subtitled “A Tale of the Christ” but it’s the Roman chariot race that makes it so exciting – look for a new version this summer (okay, I’ve been sitting on this post since May of 2016 waiting for when I needed it).  Television loves it some Romans and has for decades.  So it’s no surprise that when Robert Graves, supposedly in need of money, moved away from what he was already successful at (poetry, autobiography, mythology) and decided to write a novel about one of the more curious Roman emperors, Claudius, that it was a big hit.  Claudius had never been a focal point before; he lacks the power and authority of Augustus, the political machinations of Tiberius, the sheer audacity and depravity of Caligula or the madness and decay of Nero.  He was the stammerer, the accidental emperor who wanted a return of the Republic, yet ruled for 13 years.  Graves decided that a novel written as if it were an autobiography written by Claudius that had been lost for 1900 years (much is made of the notion that his book would be lost for so long) would focus attention back on this interesting figure.  For, if Claudius did not have the military reputation of the older emperors or the sheer interest because of their failures of the younger ones, he was interesting nonetheless.  After all, he was the one figure who had managed to survive when everything around him was falling apart, who was never poisoned, was never assassinated and then became ruler.  He was a historian and an intellectual when most thought him a fool and Graves’ notion that Claudius would secretly know so much while viewed so unfavorably makes the novel that much more interesting.

Claudius, unfortunately, is not the most interesting character in his own autobiography, but the way Graves writes it, he is even aware of that.  The central mover and figure in the book is Livia, the grandmother of Claudius, the mother of Tiberius and the wife of Augustus.  Perhaps that is why the main action of the book begins not with The Battle of Actium where Augustus defeated the forces of Antony and Cleopatra and cemented his power, but with the events that lead to the fall of Marcellus and the rise of Agrippa.  It is with those events that Livia begins: “The name ‘Livia’ is connected with the latin word which means Malignity.  My grandmother was a consummate actress, and the outward purity of her conduct, the sharpness of her wit and the graciousness of her manners deceived nearly everybody.”  It is Livia who systematically starts to remove anyone who might be in her way.  Marcellus due to inherit?  Have him poisoned.  Her own son Drusus wants a return of the Republic?  She has him eliminated so that her other son Tiberius can eventually take over: “Livia was not sure how far she could trust Tiberius.  On his return with my father’s body his sympathy with her had seemed forced and insincere, and when Augustus wished himself as honourable a death as my father’s she saw a brief half-smile cross his face.  Tiberius who, it appears, had long suspected that my grandfather had not died a natural death, was resolved now not to cross his mother’s will in anything.”

This is the tale of Livia and how she will remove anyone in her way.  There are no depths to which she will not sink, and sometimes, even in the horror, there is some humor:

There was great alarm in the City when it was known that Sejanus was to become related with the Imperial family, but everyone hastened to congratulate him, and me too.  A few days later Drusillus was dead.  He was found lying behind a bush in the garden of a house at Pompeii where he had been invited, from Herculaneum by some friends of Urgulanilla’s.  A small pear was found stuck in his throat.  It was said at the inquest that he had been seen throwing fruit up in the air and trying to catch it in his mouth: his death was unquestionably due to an accident.  But nobody believed this.  It was clear that Livia, not having been consulted about the marriage of one of her own great-grandchildren, had arranged for the child to be strangled and the pear crammed down his throat afterwards.  As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.

In the end, she allows Caligula, the most horrible of all her descendants to be the heir, not because she thinks it will be good for Rome, but because she knows of the depths of his depravity and she believes that she has blackmailed him properly into making her a goddess, the one thing that she believes will keep her from burning in the depths.

This is where the use of Claudius as narrator makes things so interesting.  The first is that he can be so dispassionate in what he writes about because he believes it is his duty as a historian (Drusillus is his son, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the above quote).  The second is that because his personality is so invisible, it allows all the other horrible characters to really come to the forefront.  Livia may be the most dominant personality, but she is far from the worst in a book that also has Caligula.  There are no end to the horrible things that happen in the book, but they are all so endlessly fascinating that you don’t dare put it down, and all so well told.  Just before the long quote above, we have this line:  “So I told him that if Tiberius proposed the match I would be glad to give my consent: that my chief feeling had been that four years old was rather young for a girl to be betrothed to a boy of thirteen, who would be twenty-one before he could legally consummate the marriage and by that time might have formed other entanglements.”  The implications of this are quite large – the age of consent, the marrying off of people, all the sex and violence that are rampant in Rome.

Perhaps that’s why Claudius the God isn’t nearly so interesting a book as I, Claudius.  It covers the actions from the time Claudius becomes Emperor until his death.  While his wife, Messalina is suitably depraved, there just isn’t the same force of personality as there is in the first book.  It’s certainly telling that in the television series, only three of the twelve episodes are used to cover the second book, even though the second book is actually over 100 pages longer than the first.  It’s far from a bad book; it just doesn’t have the same force of dramatic power that the first does.

All of this is to remind you that while the television series still ranks as one of the greatest mini-series ever made for television (more on that below), it had a great source.  There’s a reason why people had worked for so long to put it on the screen (if you ever get a chance watch the documentary The Epic That Never Was about the aborted 1937 film with Charles Laughton, which might have earned him a second Oscar had it been finished).  Don’t let yourself pass the book by simply because you’ve seen the show.

Still powerful after 40 years.

The Television Mini-Series:

If I wanted to get someone my age who had never seen I, Claudius (such as Veronica before a few weeks ago), I would point out the actors in it.  At one point, a future Doctor (John Hurt) arranging things for a future Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) has the future Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) killed.  When Caligula is stabbed, I turned to Veronica and joked “Don’t worry.  He’ll regenerate.”  When Patrick Stewart first appears we marveled that he had hair; the opposite reaction came for the first appearances of both Brian Blessed, who plays Augustus and John Rhys-Davies, because those actors that we are so used to seeing with beards are both clean-shaven.  The main two stars are Derek Jacobi, one of the finest Shakespearean actors of any generation (his performance as Hamlet was what inspired Kenneth Branagh to be an actor, and when he was first offered this part he thought it was for the role of Claudius in Hamlet and he said he was too young to play it) and Siân Phillips, the great British actress who I was lucky to see on stage in A Little Night Music in London in 1996.

But if I wanted to try and get a younger generation to watch this series, perhaps I wouldn’t even have to mention all the wonderful actors.  I would say probably the same thing I turned to Veronica and said at one point during the show: “Given all the incest and all the assassinations with political aims at the throne, this is really like Game of Thrones without dragons.”  Or maybe that’s just what I should say to an older generation that remembers this show so very well (both my parents remember it vividly having seen it on Masterpiece Theatre nearly 40 years ago): “You should watch Game of Thrones.  It’s like I, Claudius, but with dragons.”

The big difference though (aside from the dragons), is that this was a deliberately lower budget series.  There are nice sets and nice costumes, but they deliberately kept things low-key, using the sets as the main decoration.  Almost everything is clearly filmed in a studio, but it doesn’t matter.  What matters here is the interplay between the actors.  Derek Jacobi’s performance is key, of course, as he is the only person who is in every episode (the episodes that take place before his birth or when he is still a young boy have him at the beginning and the end providing the narrative).  He’s got the stutter, the personality, the tics, everything about the character to really make him come alive (I would say that for comparison you should compare it with the worthless performance in Caligula, but then you would have to watch Caligula, the worst film ever made).  The other massive stand-out performance is from Phillips.  Her Livia is so ruthlessly alive, determined to make her son, and then later, her great-grandson, the Emperor.  She has a plan right from the start and she is going to make it happen no matter what tries to get in her way, whether she has to go out and poison the figs directly on the tree because someone is suspicious, or put up with the horrible revelations and abuse from Caligula (their final two scenes together are among the most disturbing in the entire show).

As I said, there are plenty of great actors that we fantasy fans know well, and they get their star turns.  Patrick Stewart, who we are so used to seeing be noble and dignified here gets to be a ruthless killer, until he is finally toppled by Rhys-Davies in a scene that involves a line so horrifying I won’t even mention it here.  John Hurt gets a star turn as Caligula with a scene involving his sister so outlandish that both my parents mentioned it to me in separate conversations.

But don’t feel like things are limited to just those great actors that you might know by name.  One of the best performances comes from Sheila White as Messalina.  Her performance combines sensuality, ruthless manipulation, tears, anguish, contempt, and in her final moments, sheer abject terror in what is perhaps the most memorable death scene in a series full of them.  I joked at one point that each episode should list which character died during the course of it.

Don’t be afraid of watching I, Claudius just because it aired on Masterpiece Theatre.  It’s got bloody violence.  It’s got sex and nudity.  It’s got dominant personalities that come from mesmerizing performances.  In short, it’s got everything you could want from a great television show.

“Your future’s all used up.” The line doesn’t go with this scene, but neither that line nor this scene are in the original novel. All that great work comes from Welles.

My Top 10:

1. Touch of Evil
2. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
3. Separate Tables
4. The Horse’s Mouth
5. Vertigo
6. Therese Raquin
7. The Last Hurrah
8. The Bravados
9. The Horror of Dracula
10. The Brothers Karamazov

Note:  There are 13 films on my list.  Me and the Colonel is reviewed because its was a WGA nominee and the other two are listed down below.

Consensus Nominees:

1. Gigi  (160 pts)
2. Me and the Colonel  (80 pts)
3. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof  (80 pts)
4. I Want to Live!  (80 pts)
5. Separate Tables  (80 pts)
6. The Horse’s Mouth  (80 pts)

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Adapted):

• Gigi
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• I Want to Live!
• The Horse’s Mouth
• Separate Tables

WGA Awards:

Drama:

• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• I Want to Live!
• The Long Hot Summer
• Separate Tables

Nominees that are Original:  The Defiant Ones

Comedy:

• Me and the Colonel
• Indiscreet
• The Reluctant Debutante

Nominees that are Original:  Houseboat, Teacher’s Pet

Musical:

• Gigi
• Damn Yankees
• South Pacific
• Tom Thumb

Nominees that are Original:  The Girl Most Likely

BAFTA Nominees (Best British Screenplay):

• The Horse’s Mouth

note:  I have mentioned before that because the BAFTA only included British Screenplays at this time, I only count it for the Consensus if it nominates a film also nominated by another awards group.

My Top 10

Touch of Evil

The Film:

It is one of the greatest films of all-time, of course.  It is also proof that Hollywood just never knew what to do with Orson Welles.  Yes, they allowed Welles to direct, but only because Heston suggested it, and in the end they took the film away from Welles and buried it.  It was the last Hollywood film that Welles would direct and his genius is visible in almost every shot.  I already reviewed it here.

The Source:

Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson (1956)

“I read the novel after the picture was made. There wasn’t a copy around and I never would have had time to read one if there were. I think I didn’t even know it was a book then. But about three or four years later, I happened to see it somewhere and I read it… Anyway, the book is better than the script they gave me – it isn’t that bad a book.” (This is Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, p 297)

Welles is correct – it is not that bad of a book. It’s a decent little thriller about an assistant D.A. who ends up involved in a murder case (a prominent man has been killed by dynamite). The case itself gets subsumed by the realization that the two main cops in town have been framing crooks for years (some of them were guilty, some are much more questionable) and he wants this done right. That runs him afoul of his boss and all the forces begin working together to have him silenced or killed. In the end, he is able to appeal to the heart of a cop inside of the two corrupt ones and work towards an ending in which the guilty are finally punished.

The Adaptation:

Well, obviously Welles wasn’t sticking too close to the book with his brilliant script if he hadn’t even read it. That’s because Welles came in to a pre-existing situation; he had a script handed to him that he turned upside down, adding depth and nuance and turning a little pulp thriller into one of the great films of all-time.  Although, I should point out that in his book Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios, Clinton Heylin points out “In fact, as John Stubbs establishes in his detailed comparison of Welles’s screenplay with both the original novel by Robert Wade and William Miller (under the joint pseudonym Bret Masterson) and the previous screenplay by Paul Monash, the recently assigned director must have at least perused the original novel.  Much of the dialogue Welles gave Manolo Sanchez, the Mexican shoe clerk accused of the murder of Rudy Linneker, is taken directly from the book, yet is absent from the Monash screenplay.” (p 282)

Some of the things in the film are the same as in the book – a killing by dynamite that must be solved but turns into bigger things, a corrupt cop, the kidnapping of the protagonist’s wife and setting her up in a drug bust and throwing her in jail.  Some of the things in the film are similar, but different in details, like the cop named Quinlan and the corrupt cop who is betrayed by his protege with a tape-recording, except that in the book Quinlan is the protege and the betrayer.  Then some of the things are very different, the key one being the protagonist. In the book, he is named Mitchell Holt and he is an assistant D.A.. In the film, of course, he is named Vargas, and he is a Mexican policeman who has just married a beautiful American girl. It is that change which really makes this so much more interesting than just the original crime thriller that was in the book.

Almost every classic scene or line that you can think of in the book (like “Your future’s all used up” or “You really liked him, didn’t you?”  “The cop did.  The one who killed him.  He loved him.”) is a creation of Welles and not from the original novel.

If you have a serious interest in a comparison between the film and the original novel, you have to read the Rutgers Film in Print book for this film.  John Stubbs has an excellent 19 page piece that details the book, the original script, the Welles script and the shooting script and the differences between all of them.  This book was published before the 1998 re-edit of the film, so the script you read might not be the version of the film you find to watch.

The Credits:

Directed by Orson Welles.  Screenplay by Orson Welles.  Based on the Novel “Badge of Evil” by Whit Masterson.
The IMDb lists Franklin Coen with uncredited writing for reshoots and Paul Monash with uncredited additional scenes, which is referencing the original script.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film once, as one of the Best Picture nominees.  I have loved this film from the first time that I saw it (at the time I still hadn’t seen Touch of Evil and it was easily my #1 film of 1958).  I have always believed that Taylor should have won the Oscar (not just because of her performance but because the choice of Susan Hayward was such a bad one) and I have always loved what Newman and Ives were able to bring to their roles.  This is really the film that Ives should have won the Oscar for, not The Big Country, but an Oscar rules snafu kept him from being nominated.

The Source:

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams  (1955)

Where to start with the play? Should I start with the fact that it won the Pulitzer, that it’s considered one of the masterpieces of a man widely considered to be among the three greatest playwrights this country has ever produced? It was a massive success on Broadway because Williams was able to take the seething Southern drama that had already propelled him to success and marry it to his own personal passions – the disintegration of the family, tied into the secret of homosexuality, especially when it isn’t so secret. This continues to be an intensely powerful play, one that is constantly revived because, like with Streetcar, it has several roles that just cry out for great actors to try their hands at it – Brick, the self-loathing man who can’t decide who he is and is tired of trying to be something he knows he is not, Maggie, that cat on the hot tin roof whose unbridled sensuality melts the stage but can’t even put a thaw in her husband and Big Daddy, the powerhouse patriarch who is going to overwhelm you with life for as long as he has it in his body.

But there’s also another interesting bit to this play that hearkens back to the collaboration that can sometimes happen between playwrights and directors. Novelists have their editors and, in a similar sense, playwrights have their directors. On pages 124-125 of the Signet edition of the play, Tennessee Williams explains why there are two different third acts to the play and how his collaboration with Elia Kazan, a fruitful one for both men, lead to the different third act, the one that actually ended up on stage (and, for the most part, on film) rather than the original one that Williams had written. Both have their merits, but in the end, I think Kazan’s works better for the precise reasons that Kazan wanted it there. But, it’s great to have an edition that allows you to see the two different versions (and both were written by Williams, so it’s not like someone came in and altered the play).

The Adaptation:

“He accepted the basic premise that Pandro Berman had determined would avoid the homosexual subtext that, whether anyone wanted to admit it, was central to the play, and he repeated the too-convenient contention that the play was really about people who cannot communicate their true feelings. To provide the father-and-son moment Berman had outlined, Richard added a scene and played up the dialogue necessary to support the idea that the emotionally immature Brick needed to grow up. He set the encounter in the basement since it was the lowest point in the story. Drawing inspiration from his own days riding the rails, Richard had Big Daddy reminisce about hopping trains with his father.” (Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks by Douglass K. Daniel, p 127)

“I read the script and said, ‘Well, I can’t do this script.’ [MGM head Benny Thau] said, ‘I know. Neither can we. There are things in here we can’t do.’ I called Elia Kazan – I didn’t know Tennessee Williams and still haven’t met him, by the way – and asked, ‘What did you do about the third act?’ Kazan said, ‘Well, we had two third acts. Would you like to read the other third act? I think it’s a little better, but it still didn’t solve all the problems.’ So I finally got a script that I thought I could do, and I told Benny Thau I would try.” (Richard Brooks, quoted in Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute, ed. George Stevens, Jr, p 551)

Unlike Douglass K. Daniel I do think it works to make the play about people who cannot communicate their true feelings. It’s unfortunate, and it makes me think of Harvey Fierstein talking, in The Celluloid Closet, about how he wrote Torch Song Trilogy because he was tired of watching straights and having to imagine that experience as he would have lived it and he wanted the straights to have to imagine his situation and how they would have lived it. So, to take something specific and make it general, is unfortunate, given that viewpoint. But I do think it works because it does make it universal and it works for the characters. Clearly it required excision of some lines, but not as many as you would think.

In fact, the film differs from the play more in the way it is filmed – the play has three acts which don’t change locations. The film makes much better use of locations, even adding in several scenes outside of the main ones and allowing for more dialogue between the characters, even if it doesn’t actually mean more communication between them.

The Credits:

Directed by Richard Brooks. Screen Play by Richard Brooks and James Poe. Based On the Play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” by Tennessee Williams.

Separate Tables

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film because it was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.  I noted when I wrote it that this was one of those films that actually went up when I saw it for a second time, rising from a high *** to a high ***.5.  It is a very good drama, especially highlighted by the level of writing and acting.

The Source:

Separate Tables: Two Plays by Terrence Rattigan  (1954)

Though this is published as one work (and listed as “a play” in the credits), it is actually two short plays: “Table by the Window” and “Table Number Seven”.  The first play is that of a divorced couple, a politician who drinks and his manipulative ex-wife, dealing with her failure of a remarriage and his affair with the woman who runs the hotel.  The second play deals with a repressed young woman who is ruled by her autocratic mother who feels sympathy for a retired Major who has been convicted of sexual impropriety.  The two couples in the plays are played by the same actors while the other small roles carry over from one to the other and are played by the same actors (in my original review I wrote that only character carried over but that was clearly incorrect and I don’t know where I originally read that, but I hadn’t actually read the play until now).  Both plays are effective but what they mainly are, are dialogues between two people who are struggling to overcome loneliness and find some measure of companionship.

The Adaptation:

While some of the lines and certainly the very concept of the two stories come directly from the two plays, there are considerable changes, not the least of which is that the two stories are now happening at the same time as opposed to happening eighteen months apart as they were on stage.  Because there are four actors instead of two actors doubling up, we actually get some crossover between the two couples (to the effectiveness of the film, as I mentioned in my original review, as the Lancaster interaction with the Kerr-Niven story is to its benefit) and all of the events make for a very interesting hotel as opposed to two different stories happening at different times.  All of this means that instead of getting one drama, followed by another, we can slowly move into both stories at the same time.

There are also a lot of other smaller changes made to the film.  In the film, Lancaster’s character is a writer (rather than a politician) and he’s not British.  He is also engaged to Miss Cooper, not merely having an affair with her while his ex-wife is claiming to be engaged (when she isn’t).

The Credits:

Directed by Delbert Mann.  Screenplay by Terence Rattigan and John Gay.  Based on a play by Terence Rattigan.
The IMDb lists John Michael Hayes as an uncredited writer.

The Horse’s Mouth

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as my under-appreciated film of 1958.  It’s a departure for Guinness, going back to something like his old Ealing films in terms of tone but not in terms of style.  This film isn’t a breakneck laugh-out-loud comedy, but a sly look at a rather disagreeable artist who is determined to have his way.  It has one of the most under-appreciated of all the great Guinness performances.  With his hair dyed white, just a year after Bridge on the River Kwai, he suddenly looks like he will look 20 years later as Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The Source:

The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Carey  (1944)

This is a bit of an odd novel.  In fact, supposedly Alec Guinness didn’t even get past the first 15 pages the first time he read it, during the war, because of the style.  It is also apparently part of a trilogy, though it’s a thematic trilogy, not one of characters carrying over.

It’s the story of Gulley Jimson, a badly behaved painter who is just out of jail and seems pretty desperate to get back in, making harassing phone calls threatening to cut out livers.  But when he’s not making everyone’s life miserable, he is a painter of rare genius.  Unfortunately, he paints where he wants and sometimes that doesn’t work out so well, for, say, a woman whose blank wall of her flat is now the canvas for Gulley.

The book follows his misadventures with Gulley as a first-person guide who shouldn’t be trusted and absolutely shouldn’t be let in the house.  Once you cut through the narrative to find the man himself it’s easy to see why this would be a good subject for an actor to make his only screenplay.

The Adaptation:

This was suddenly something different.  People had been nominated for Oscars for writing before who were also actors, but those were people who were writer / directors, people like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles (and John Huston, who wouldn’t earn an Oscar nomination for acting until later).  But an actor turning to writing and suddenly earning an Oscar nomination, let alone one who had just won Best Actor at the Oscars the year before?  Now that was something different.  It would later be repeated in quite similar fashion by Emma Thompson, except there was a three year gap between the Oscar and her script and she would actually win the Oscar for her script (and would go on to write others).

Most of the book comes vividly to life, though there are definitely differences (much of the humor comes more from the film as Cokey’s role is greatly expanded in a very good performance from Kay Walsh and the mason’s block crashing through the floor wasn’t in the book).  The ending is very different, however, with the stroke-laden Gulley in the care of the nuns in the book, his physical misadventures, at the least, limited for the future, while Guinness’ Gulley is off in his houseboat and you have no idea what trouble he might eventually cause.

The Credits:

Directed by Ronald Neame.  From the novel by Joyce Cary.  Screenplay by Alec Guinness.

Vertigo

The Film:

This is a tricky thing to do.  How do you write about a film that you feel is a great film, a **** film, but one which you think is over-rated by most people?  Vertigo has many great things about it.  It has a suitably obsessive performance from Jimmy Stewart, has great direction from Alfred Hitchcock and anchors itself on its magnificent cinematography and score.  None of those things were appreciated by the Oscars, where it received nominations only for Sound and Art Direction.  But to so many critics, it is the end-all-be-all.  It is hailed by many as the greatest film ever made and I just don’t see that.  I can’t even understand it.

So what do I write about?  Do I write about the ways that this film, along with Hitchcock’s earlier Rear Window, help us re-imagine who we imagine Jimmy Stewart might be?  Is he the kindly man from next door you can trust, a little bit from Mr. Smith, a little bit from Harvey?  It’s a Wonderful Life had shown a bit of a darker side to him, but in the end, it was the need to be alive and the Christmas cheer that ends the film that people remembered.  In Rear Window, we had a man who was a bit on the edge, spying on his neighbors, getting his beautiful girlfriend involved in something dangerous, but in the end, he was still calmly asleep in the chair at the end, with a smile.  There would be no such ending for Vertigo, even if it wasn’t as dark as its source (see below).  Jimmy Stewart is asked to watch the wife of an old friend because she’s been acting strangely.  But Stewart, after rescuing her from a possible suicide attempt, starts to fall for her.  I don’t say fall in love, because his need for her, his obsession about her goes to darker places than that.  Then we get to a moment in the mission we watch her fall past the window as he struggles to get past his crippling vertigo and make it up the stairs.  Then she is dead on the ground and there is nothing left for him.  He falls apart in a way it’s hard to imagine him doing.  But that’s part of the greatness of the film, the way in which it plays upon our expectations of this actor and goes to places we don’t expect.

That comes true in the second half as well, when we see him meet another woman who looks like her.  Of course it is her, because you’ve seen Vertigo, I assume.  I’m not covering the plot for you.  I’m trying to explicate what it is about the film that keeps it down in the lower level reaches of **** when it has such magnificent work from both Hitchcock and Stewart and the answer is glaringly obvious, in a couple of ways.  It has Kim Novak.

There was nothing so devastating to Hitchcock’s films as the decision of Grace Kelly to retire.  She was the epitome of the icy-blonde that Hitchcock so desired and wanted to put on screen in every one of his films.  After she left, he had to make do with others and sometimes he got somewhat lucky (Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest) and some times you end up with Kim Novak.  Novak’s performance just doesn’t work.  I can’t understand her appeal to Stewart, especially when she re-emerges in the second half of the film and nothing about her performance is able to overcome that.  She is supposed to be the focus of the obsession and there’s nothing about her that inspires that.  Not all of the blame is on Novak.  She is forced to make do with a scene that undermines the tension in the film and which Hitchcock strongly considered cutting (the letter-writing confession) and which the film would do much better without.  The film works better at that point if you think that Stewart really has gone a bit bonkers and if he doesn’t know that it really is the same woman.

I get that Vertigo is a great film.  It will always be a great film.  But, to me, it’s just one of many great Hitchcock films and it’s nowhere near the level of Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, North by Northwest, Shadow of a Doubt or a number of others.

The Source:

D’Entre les morts by Boileau-Narcejac  (1954)

Boileau-Narcejac is the nom de plume for two writers, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who would write mysteries together.  They had written the novel Celle qui n était plus that had been adapted into the novel Diabolique, a film that many saw Hitchcock’s influence on.  Hitchcock managed to snag their next novel and this one at least has been released in English (the UK imprint Pushkin Vertigo did a translation just last year and re-titled the novel Vertigo just so you would know it was the source).  It’s an effective thriller and it would be familiar to anyone who has seen the film (see below).  In one way it is more effective than the film because it keeps the secret of the reveal that it is the same woman until almost the very end (easier to do anyway, without an actress to see on screen).  But, though we get a darker ending, it doesn’t bring us back to the church in a bit of symmetry like the film does.  Instead, the man in love with her has a much more violent reaction: “She no longer moved.  Painfully, Flavières removed his fingers from her neck, and with a trembling hand switched on the light.  Then he uttered a cry which brought people running out of their rooms into the corridor.”  But that’s not the end of it, like in the film.  Just before he is taken away by the detective, we get this scene:  ” ‘May I kiss her?’ asked Flavières.  The detective shrugged his shoulders.  Flavières went up to the bed.  The dead girl looked so slim lying there, and written on her face was an immense peace.  Flavières bent over and kissed her forehead.  ‘I shall wait for you,’ he said.”  That’s the end.  Enjoy!

quotes are taken from the Pushkin Vertigo translation by Geoffrey Sainsbury

The Adaptation:

When asked by Peter Bogdanovich in Who the Devil Made It why he set Vertigo in San Francisco, Hitchcock replied: “The key factor in the whole story was the church tower, for the purposes of the murder. And the church had to be of some interest – a place with visitors – and also remote so that the murder could be committed, shall we say, with comfort and without interruption. Now in America there are no village churches as there are in France – this was originally a French novel called From Among the Dead – but there are old missions. I knew of San Juan Batista near San Francisco and there was a period when it did have a short tower, though it doesn’t now. So we shot there and matted one on.” (p 530)

“Taylor didn’t yet add a death plunge to the opening rooftop sequence, but what he did add may have been far more important to making the people real: a brand-new character, Midge.  The exposition scene among Scottie’s fellow detectives remains, but all of the previous establishing work is now accomplished in conversation between Scottie and Midge in her apartment.”  (Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic by Dan Auiler, p 51).  Auiler is referring to the first draft by Samuel Taylor, who was brought in after Alec Coppel to work on the script (Taylor would later ask for full credit for the script but the WGA determined enough of Coppel’s work remained to grant him credit).  Auiler’s book also gives detailed descriptions of the whole script-writing process, which went through numerous drafts from multiple writers.  It does look like much of what was changed from the original novel to the film came mostly from Taylor.

But most of what was on the screen originated with the original novel.  In the BFI Classics book on Vertigo, there is a long plot description given that applies to both the original novel and the film.  The key differences are that the film is set in San Francisco, that there is the new character Midge (that Taylor added) who isn’t in the book, that the time has been updated (the book took place during the war), that we don’t find out about the plot until later in the book because there is no equivalent to the letter-writing scene (which was a source of argument between Hitchcock and his producers and almost didn’t make the film) and, the most important difference that wouldn’t have played as well with using Stewart, that in the book it is actually the Scottie character who kills the woman, strangling her out of his pain and grief rather than having her accidentally fall to her death.

The Credits:

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  Screenplay by Alec Coppel & Samuel Taylor.  Based upon the novel “D’Entre Les Morts” by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.
The IMDb lists uncredited writing from Maxwell Anderson, which is mentioned in the Auiler book.

Thérèse Raquin

The Film:

This was apparently the year for Émile Zola adaptations to hit the States, even if none of them had been made in this year.  There would be three of them eligible for the Oscars this year, though they had been made in 1953, 1956 and 1957 (and all of them were French).  This is the best of the three, perhaps because the director, Marcel Carné is the best of the three (the others are listed down at the bottom).

When this film was released in the States, it was retitled The Adulteress, which gives you a notion of the plot but really isn’t the right title for this story.  The title belongs to the woman because it is her story.  She has been pushed into an unfulfilling marriage with her cousin by her aunt (the cousin’s mother).  He is sickly and can’t do much.  Thérèse then meets his friend, Laurent.  Laurent is everything her husband is not and she finds a measure of happiness with him, physical and otherwise.  That is what makes her take things to the next level.  The title seems to place the onus for what happens only on Thérèse while ignoring all the other factors.

Things go horribly wrong when Thérèse and Laurent decide to kill her husband because there is a witness and Thérèse’s aunt suspects things (she has a stroke soon afterwards that limits her physical movement to just her eyes).  Things descend into more of a thriller but the quality of Carné’s adaptation, bringing Zola’s story of naturalism into the present time keeps things at a high level and Simone Signoret, long of the greatest of French actresses brings a magnificent performance as Thérèse.  If the male actors in the film could have been anywhere near her level, this film might have made the jump from mid ***.5 to **** and this film might not languish with 6 Top 10 finishes at the Nighthawk Awards but not a single nomination (it finishes in 6th in both Adapted Screenplay and Actress).

American filmmakers have never seemed to embrace Zola in spite of his brilliance as a novelist and the numerous successful (both artistically and commercially) films that have been made of his novels in France for over a century now.  But thankfully the French did make those films and it’s easy enough for us to see those films.

The Source:

Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola  (1867)

As I said here, I didn’t actually start reading Zola until 2010.  Even with a Masters in English and all those reading lists, there was still nothing that meant I needed to pick him up and check him off the list and sometimes that’s the problem with lists.  Things get missed.  Like Émile Zola, one of the great all-time novelists.

This was not Zola’s first novel but it was, arguably, his first important novel and it helped set the stage for what would become his great series.  With this novel he moved away from the pot-boilers he had been working on and began to become a serious writer.  Yet, this novel would also set the stage for a lot of the controversy that would attend him for the rest of his life.  It was decried pornography and when Zola published a second edition the next year he wrote an introduction that explained what he was doing with his literary theory of Naturalism.

This book, as I said, sets the stage for the series that would follow, the Rougon-Macquart saga.  It is tragic (a sickly youth is married off to his cousin by his mother who has raised both but the cousin becomes miserable and has an affair with the man’s friend and then eventually they hatch a plot to kill him), it has sex (the affair as well as some disturbing scenes later when the mother decides that then those two should get married, not realizing yet that they conspired to kill her son), degradation (there is a horrifying scene when Thérèse, knowing she is pregnant and is horrified (“She dimly feared that she might give birth to a drowned body, and it seemed as though she could feel inside her the cold sensation of a soft, decomposing corpse.”) and provokes her new husband to kick her, forcing a miscarriage) as well as misery and sorrow.  Those who go to Zola’s books go because he is a brilliant writer (“They were, so to speak, hanging over each other as though over a chasm, fascinated by its horror; there they were, each peering down into the other, unable to move, unable to speak, while stabbing ecstasies, making their minds whirl and their limbs melt into nothingness, filled them with a mad desire to fall into perdition.”) and because he presented an unfettered view of life as he saw it out on the streets and wanted to present it to the world.  His work would set the stage for later great writers like Thomas Hardy and Frank Norris.  You should read Zola because he is great and important and vibrant and alive but, good lord, don’t go looking for anything happy.

note:  The quotes are from the 1962 translation by L. W. Tancock.

The Adaptation:

In his book, Child of Paradise: Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema, Edward Baron Turk mentions that Carné regretted not being able to film La Bête humaine when it was offered to Renoir and suggests that the director made use of parts of one of Zola’s most famous novels in adapting this one: “In adapting Thérèse Raquin, Carné and Charles Spaak seem to have borrowed key elements from La Bête humaine: the site of the murder is no longer a canoe on the Seine but, as in La Bête humaine, a passenger train heading for Paris; the invention of a witness to the crime, which the original source barely justifies, mirrors La Bête humaine‘s central situation, that of a stranger who observes a murder and then involves himself intimately with its perpetrators.” (p 377)

All of that is fairly accurate.  Up to the point of the murder, aside from the updates made to the story that move it almost a century forward in time, the film follows the book.  But, once the murder itself happens, the film deviates in a variety of ways and most of the second half of the film, concentrating on the different death scene and the witness to the death (and their involvement with him) is almost entirely different from the book.

The Credits:

Un film de Marcel Carné.  Inspiré du Roman d’ Émile Zola.  Adaptation de Marcel Carné et Charles Spaak.  Dialogue de Charles Spaak.

The Last Hurrah

The Film:

In 1958, as was so often the case, Spencer Tracy was nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards. As is often the case, I don’t think the nomination was merited. But, what made it particularly irritating in this case was that Tracy gave one of the best performances of his career in 1958; it just wasn’t in the film that he was nominated for. He was nominated for his lackluster performance in The Old Man and the Sea while at the same time his performance as the mayor who is reviled by some and revered by others in The Last Hurrah was overlooked. The film itself, while it won Best Actor and Director at the NBR and earned Tracy a BAFTA nom actually lost money and isn’t generally considered to be among the better works of director John Ford.

While it’s not a great film, as so many Ford films are, it is a very good film, an under-appreciated film that moves much more slowly, that is more subtle and interesting in a lot of ways and which, as I said, contains one of the best performances of Tracy’s career.

Tracy plays Frank Seffington, the current mayor of a large New England city (read: Boston) and former governor of his state (the title he has kept, as most people refer to him that way). Skeffington is in many ways an FDR democrat – using big city projects to keep people employed, to keep progress moving forward. He does it at the expense of the richer upper class, entrenched old money population in his city who loathe him and have been doing everything they can to bring him down. The problem that they have is they never have a worthwhile candidate with whom they can take out Skeffington. Now, the mayor has once again announced he will be running for re-election even though he is 72 years old and has been mayor for quite a while (and was mayor before he was governor as well – if this sounds familiar, well maybe you’re from Boston – see below). This time, Skeffington invites his nephew to come along for the ride. The nephew is a newspaper cartoonist who has spent much of his life out of the city and has a wife whose father is part of the group that loathes his uncle.

Tracy does a good job of walking a fine moral line. The people love him and he embraces that love namely through the use of his political power. Look at the wake he goes to for an unlikeable man. His presence brings crowds which cheer up the grieving widow. And he manages to work a deal so the funeral won’t cost her much. Of course, he works that deal by essentially threatening the undertaker with licensing problems. It’s a perfect example of such a mayor – he could use his considerable wealth to pay for the funeral, but he would rather use his political power to badger someone he doesn’t particularly care for.

Ford does a good job with this because he doesn’t frame things either in favor of or against Skeffington. He allows Tracy’s charm to shine through in the performance. Jeffrey Hunter is also quite solid as the nephew along for the ride and they are both surrounded by a number of Ford regulars that keep things interesting no matter what’s going on. The Last Hurrah is a nice study in the way political games are played and the way political campaigns used to be run and it’s a very good film that has been too long over-looked.

The Source:

The Last Hurrah by Edwin O’Connor (1956)

If the film The Last Hurrah is over-looked and under-appreciated in spite of its quality, what can be said about the original novel that was its source? I listed it among my Top 200 Novels of All-Time, yet apparently today it has just come back into print. It is one of the best novels set in Boston and is almost certainly the best novel about Boston, even if the city is never once mentioned in the book.

The book is about Frank Seffington, the long-time mayor of the city (it’s only ever referred to as “the city”). The city itself vividly comes to life in O’Connor’s prose: “It was from this man’s unskilled and laboriously drawn plans that the present City Hall had arisen, and for generations it had been decried as the prime eyesore of the community. Despite this, the building had its defenders, and intermittent suggestions that it be razed had met with howls of protest from those who had worked long within it and who, with a certain rude poetic vision, saw in this inefficient, tangled warren the perfect symbol for municipal administration.” Oh boy, is it ever, especially in the Skeffington administration. He runs an old boy network, the kind of thing that is dying out. He talks in the book about his last hurrah, about how the world has changed and he rightly places those changes at the feet of FDR. It was FDR who pulled a lot of patronage jobs away from the state and local levels and turned them into federal positions.  But Skeffington still manages to give back to the people (even when he is skimming off the top) and they love him for it.

As I said above, if this sounds familiar, then maybe you live in Boston. No, this isn’t a dig at Marty (though his administration certainly seems to be a tit for tat group) or even Mumbles Menino who spent 20 years as mayor of a city that gladly kept electing him no matter how little he got done (to be fair to Menino, he had many flaws but corruption and skimming off the top wasn’t one). No, this novel is a thinly veiled portrait of James Michael Curley, a mayor who was worshipped by the people he served in spite of the fact that he was a crook. Now, that’s not hyperbole. He was a convicted criminal and in spite of that, was elected alderman while in jail and won re-election to the mayor’s office while under indictment for mail fraud (which he would be convicted of and serve his sentence while mayor). It was the Boston mentality that it was okay that Curley was a crook because he was a crook that served the people. Never mind that he was hardly a Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Yes, he gave people jobs and attention, but let’s be fair – he was stealing from the rich to give to himself.

O’Connor does a masterful job of portraying this politician, of eliciting our sympathy but also making clear precisely what kind of man he is. It’s a complicated portrait of a complicated man, one who absolutely believes he has done the right thing, rising from his death bed to proclaim that he would do it the same all over again if he had the chance. It’s an under-appreciated novel that should definitely still be in print and if you get the chance, find it at a library or a used bookstore.

In an added little benefit, when Curley was finally voted out of office in 1949 (in favor of his deputy mayor, who had left certain things aside for Curley until Curley was released from prison knowing Curley wanted that, then had to listen to Curley complain about how the deputy mayor didn’t do anything while in charge so the deputy ran against him out of spite and won – the concept was altered for the novel but there were aspects of that race that informed this novel), the best thing was that the fifth place finisher was a Progressive Party candidate named Walter O’Brien who couldn’t afford radio advertisements so he hired folk singers to sing a campaign song; that song is “Charlie on the M.T.A.” and while O’Brien is pretty much forgotten, the song lives on forever, as thousands of people swipe their CharlieCards every day.

The Adaptation:

“Coyly set in ‘A New England City’ (a slightly transparent legal disclaimer), the film goes even further than the book in presenting Skeffington as an urban Robin Hood. Curley’s popularity was based on forcing the Yankees to subsidize extensive public works programs for the benefit of the working class. The film dramatizes this strategy while taking pains to exonerate the mayor from involvement in the system of kickbacks and patronage that Curley was also well known for practicing.” (Searching for John Ford, Joseph McBride, p 588)

That is definitely true – the Skeffington of the film gets a bit more sympathy than the Skeffington of the novel. There are also some other minor changes that compress some things (like Ditto knowing about the main candidate they will face). But this is a first-rate adaptation, taking most of the action and the dialogue straight from the book and making a very good book into a very good film.

The Credits:

Directed and Produced by John Ford. Screen Play by Frank Nugent. Based Upon the Novel by Edwin O’Connor.

The Bravados

The Film:

There are two different ways of looking at Gregory Peck.  There is the more traditional, popular way of looking at him, as the solid film star, the hero as Atticus Finch, the good man throughout so many films, in some ways similar to the roles that Tom Hanks would later play after he turned from comedy to drama.  But there is the other way of thinking of him, the less kind way that many serious students of film think of him.  He was the man who wasn’t that complex, who didn’t have enough depth in him for the Hitchcock roles, who was so wrong as Ahab, who was just a surface character.  Neither of these views really appreciate what he brought to some of his performances, most notably the few that were directed by Henry King.

The irony is that Henry King wasn’t that much of a director to begin with.  He had seven films nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars but was only nominated for Best Director twice.  And it was none of those that are among his best films, the two Westerns he made with Gregory Peck: The Gunfighter and The Bravados (after directing Peck to an Oscar nomination in 12 O’Clock High).  Here, both the direction and the acting is solid because the script is so solid.  Peck plays a man who is chasing down the men who raped and killed his wife.  They have been imprisoned for a separate crime, but when they escape, he heads out after them.  He is relentless in his quest for vengeance and it’s not something you would ever think to see from Peck.

What makes this film so good is a twist it takes towards the end.  We’ve been following Peck in his quest and we know what happened to his wife.  But when Peck finally catches up to the last of the men we learn some things at the same time that Peck does and it changes everything.  It’s there that Peck really gives his best performance in the film, forced to react to what he is learning and how that changes how he has been living his life.  The scene is handled well and it brings the film to a conclusion that makes this so much more interesting than most Westerns.  And yet, somehow, this film hasn’t really earned the reputation that other classic Westerns have.  That’s a shame because this really is a very good film, a high-level ***.5 film and one of my Top 10 for the year and among the Top 30 Westerns of all-time.  In fact, though we are reaching the end of the classic Western era, there are only nine Westerns that came before this one that I rank higher (chronologically, they are Stagecoach, The Ox-Bow Incident, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Red River, The Gunfighter, Winchester 73, High Noon, The Searchers and The Tin Star).

The Source:

The Bravados by Frank O’Rourke  (1957)

This novel has turned out to be more difficult to find than I would have imagined.  O’Rourke was a popular writer for a while and he made his name with Westerns (another of his novels will come up in 1966, made into The Professionals, but that one my local library system has).  This was the first of his novels to be made into a film.

The Adaptation:

Of course, I am unable to compare the film to the original source novel.

The Credits:

Directed by Henry King.  Screenplay by Philip Yordan.  Based on the Novel by Frank O’Rourke.

Dracula

The Film:

This film is more widely known in the States, of course, as Horror of Dracula.  But, in the same spirit that I list Foreign films under their original title (and books under their original titles in the original languages), I use the original British title of the film (and that’s a British poster on the right).  I have actually reviewed this film twice already.  The first time was as one of the numerous films reviewed in my Top 100 Novels post about the novel (see below).  The second time was part of my For Love of Film piece on Hammer Horror, one of the great all-time fun film series.  More recently, this film has also appeared in my Top 100 Favorite Films.  In short, I love to watch the film and I love to read the book, so I keep returning to both.  If you have never seen it, then you need to.

The Source:

Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)

Ah, Dracula.  It pops up so much in the blog that I gave it its own tag.  There’s a good reason for that.  If you look at that list of my 100 Favorite Films you will see three different film versions on it.  It was also one of the very few books to appear both on my list of favorite books and on my Top 100, which means that it’s not only a great novel but that I also love to read it over and over again.  Hell, I even read it again for this piece even though I clearly didn’t need to, since I had already written everything I needed to write.

The Adaptation:

I actually gave this extensive consideration in both reviews of the film, so you can check there for detailed differences.

The alterations which Sangster wrings from the material are primarily ones of detail and emphasis, as much a product of the time of the film’s creation as they are a reevaluation of the myth of the vampire.  If Dracula is flawed, it is in its Curse-like rush to a climax (the Count reveals himself to Van Helsing at the appropriate moment and the chase is on) and in the illogicalities that some of these changes were to produce: Harker is aware of the Count’s vampire nature from the start, yet he barely pauses to consider if the same might not be true of the woman in his castle!  But it was Sangster’s background in production that ultimately was to bring about one of the most striking attributes of Hammer Horror.

“I do budgets and I knew what a picture cost,” Sangster explains, “so when I’d finished the script, I knew what it would cost to within the nearest penny.”  In Dracula’s case, the nearest penny was £82,000, and it had been achieved by compressing the geography of the tale.  Castle Dracula is on the outskirts of Klausenburg, a coach ride away from Carlstaat and the home of the Holmwoods.  Yet they have never heard of him, and their typically English-Victorian world does not appear to be in any way affected by the fact that it has been transplanted in Bavaria!  (A History of Horrors: The Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer, Revised Edition, by Denis Meikle with Christopher T. Koetting, p 53)

The Credits:

Directed by Terence Fisher. Screenplay by Jimmy Sangster. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker.

The Brothers Karamazov

The Film:

I have reviewed this film once already.  It is a good film and at times it seems to even rise to the level of very good, namely because of the first-rate supporting performances from Maria Schell and Lee J. Cobb.  Even the presence of William Shatner as Alyosha isn’t able to sink the film, although the ending does get a bit ridiculous.

The Source:

Бра́тья Карама́зовы by Fyodor Dostoyevsky  (1880)

I have already reviewed this book because, of course, it is my #2 novel of all-time.  I first read it when I was in college.  It is one of my primary examples of countering that a novel can be long and still be the exactly correct length.  I would not lose a word of this.  I have read it several times, both the original Constance Garnett translation and the Pevear / Volokhonsky translation.

The Adaptation:

As I mentioned in the original review, the film actually does a fairly good job for most of the way of sticking to the story, even getting in some of the philosophical ideas, either coming from Alexei or Alyosha.  But in the end, the film goes in a completely different direction, tacking on a happy ending that has nothing to do with where the novel goes at the end.  It’s like the filmmakers wanted to have the spirit of the novel’s ending (between Alyosha and the boys) without going through the pain of the tragedy that precedes that ending. It doesn’t completely betray the spirit of the novel but it does come pretty close.

The Credits:

Screen Play and Direction by Richard Brooks.  Adaptation by Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein.  From the Novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.  In Its English Translation by Constance Garnett.

Consensus Nominees That Don’t Make My Top 10

Gigi

The Film:

I have already reviewed Gigi, of course, since it won Best Picture.  I was hardly kind in the review.  Lerner and Loewe, outside of My Fair Lady, have never really been to my taste.  So I am stuck with a musical in which, with one exception (“I Remember It Well”, which is quite funny and droll) I don’t like the songs at all.  It is hard to overcome that, and that could be a matter of taste.  But I don’t find the film to be that well-directed, acted (except for Gingold and Chevalier) or written.  It falls flat for me, aside from the distasteful aspects of the plot (the child expected to grow into a courtesan) or the creepiness of Chevalier’s opening number.  To me, it ranks as one of the weakest Best Picture winners in Oscar history, certainly the weakest winner between 1952 and 1995.

The Source:

Gigi by Colette (1944, tr. 1953)

If Colette’s original story brings the idea to life with some wit and charm (if still a bit disquieting), that says something about the way that Colette wrote it, as well as the fact that she was able to write it how she wanted to, and not have to worry about something like the Production Code interfering with what she was trying to say.  And, in some ways, the film lives up to the book, because a paragraph like “Lachaille twirled the tips of his moustache between two fingers, and for a moment looked away from a pair of darkened blue eyes, a pink cheek with a single freckle, curved lashes, a mouth unaware of its power, a heavy mass of ash-gold hair, and a neck as straight as a column, strong, hardly feminine, all of a piece, innocent of jewelry.” could be matched by the sumptuous costumes and art direction in the film.  But there is still the story – the young girl who is groomed to be a courtesan, but when she falls in love with the man she is supposed to be with, wants to marry instead, and indeed gets that happy ending when he finally agrees to marry her – and it makes me a bit queazy.  Ah, the French.

The Adaptation:

“Wherever there was any doubt, we would revert to the original. The only character not in the book was Honoré Lachaille, the part Maurice Chevalier was to play.  Since Colette had introduced him as an actual character in the French picture she worked on, we could say his living embodiment was also based on Colette.  Gigi’s mother, who seemed so tiresome to me in the Broadway production, would be treated as an off-stage voice.” (I Remember It Well by Vincente Minnelli (with Victor Arce), p 306)

“[Lerner] demanded that the part of Gaston’s uncle, Honoré Lachaille, be built up and that every effort be made to cast Maurice Chevalier.” (Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood’s Darkest Dreamer by Emanuel Levy, p 297)

Yes, the presence of Chevalier’s character certainly is a change from the original, although, as Minnelli points out, it’s a change that sticks to the spirit of the original and to something Colette herself had added.  It’s probably a good idea to dump the mother as well.  In fact, given the dumping of the mother and the adding of the Chevalier part, it’s hard to see how I could tolerate the original Broadway production since those are both improvements.  Perhaps though, I would have been fine with it, because it would have lacked the songs, and those are what really makes the film just drag on the screen and make me want to shut it off.  I have felt that way all three times I have seen the film.

The Credits:

Directed by Vincente Minnelli.  Screen Play and Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner.  Based on the novel by Colette.
The IMDb lists uncredited writing from Niven Busch.

Me and the Colonel

The Film:

Danny Kaye was a talented light entertainer for a long time. He would occasionally get some notice for his comedic work, but there was very little dramatic work. So this was the perfect thing to get him some real notice – a dramatic role in a film that is overall structured as a comedy, but with a deeper, darker tone to it. He plays a Polish Jew who has been moving from country to country, just ahead of the Nazis. From Poland to Germany to Vienna to Prague, and finally to Paris, he has been just ahead of the spectre of death. Now there is a chance that he can catch a submarine that will get him off the continent. The problem is that the person who knows where that submarine is going to be and who also needs to get it because he is carrying classified information, is a Polish officer who also happens to be an anti-Semite.

This is the situation that we have. The overall situation is a comedy – two men who are ill-suited to be travelling companions who are forced to flee in each other’s company and, in the end, trust each other with their lives. There will even be a woman for them to fight over. But there is something much more serious hanging over them and that gives the film a more serious tone that the film never really quite manages to live up to. It’s a solid enough film, namely because Kaye is well-suited for the role; he can play the comic moments with ease and he does a more than serviceable job with the more dramatic moments. In the end, though, it lacks a bit of seriousness perhaps because we know how it’s going to end – it doesn’t have enough dramatic heft to have anything other than a form of happy ending. So, it’s a solid film, a mid-range ***, but nothing more than that.

The Source:

Jacobowsky and the Colonel: Comedy of a Tragedy in Three Acts by Franz Werfel (1944)

Like the film, this is a comedy in its overall structure, but it has a more serious tone lurking in the background. It doesn’t really have the measure of darkness and danger that the film would have because of the changes (see below) and I’m honestly a little surprised that it was as successful as it must have been, if it actually was a hit in Germany and then was translated and was re-done as a play for the American stage.

The Adaptation:

Now, there’s a tricky thing here. The book that I was able to read was “Franz Werfel’s original, as distinguished from the version now appearing on Broadway”, although it was translated from German. Which makes me wonder why they bothered to translate the original rather than simply publish the American version of the play (although they might have also done that). But what it means is that the changes to the play, and there are lots (the whole serious pursuit of Jacobowsky and the Colonel, including the capture of them, the charade, and the chase to conclude the film aren’t in the original play) might have been done, at least in part, for the American version of the play. I can tell you that none of those were in the original play, and it focused far more on the relationships between the three main characters rather than the more movie-like tropes that appear in the film.

The Credits:

Directed by Peter Glenville. Screen Play by S. N. Buchman, George Froeschel. From the Original Play “Jacobowsky and the Colonel” by Franz Werfel. American Play by S. N. Behrman. Produced upon the stage by Theatre Guild in assocation with Jack Skirball.

I Want to Live!

The Film:

Every now and then I used to come across a film and wonder what the hell the Academy was thinking.  I mean, it still happens, but now it’s happening in the present tense.  I go back to certain films, films like The Bad Seed and I Want to Live! and I don’t just see films that shouldn’t have nominated for Oscars, but genuinely badly made films.

This film won an Oscar for Susan Hayward for a performance in which she mostly yells or struts about.  She’s a hard-luck case, a perpetual convict who has lead a hard life and ends up involved with a couple of men who murdered an elderly woman (see below for the more accurate details).  That leads us into the rest of the film – her time in jail and her trial, followed by the wait for death.

The dialogue is stilted, the film asks us to believe things that are ridiculous, even though they claim it’s based on fact (like the idea that she could be convicted of a capital crime based on entrapment), it’s not edited very well, the direction is spotty and the overwhelming jazz score just made me want to watch the film on mute.  Even the scene that’s supposed to be serious, with the cops making announcements for them to surrender, just sounded like the Woody Allen routine about the public library demanding their books back.

As I said, Hayward won the Oscar for this film.  It was the fifth time she had been nominated and I imagine there was a large group who thought it was about time that she won.  They could, of course, have gone for the best performance of the year and given the Oscar to Elizabeth Taylor, but passing her over here just meant they could give her the Oscar two years later when she didn’t deserve it (and had almost died before the ceremony).

The Source:

newspaper articles by Ed Montgomery and the letters of Barbara Graham

Those are the sources listed in the credits.  There is a disclaimer at the beginning of the film that says “You are about to see a FACTUAL STORY.  It is based on articles I wrote, other newspaper and magazine articles, court records, legal and private correspondence, investigative reports, personal interviews – and the letters of Barbara Graham.  Edward S. Montgomery.  Pulitzer Prize Winner.  San Francisco Examiner.”  I haven’t been able to read the original Montgomery piece, but see below for more.

The Adaptation:

I can’t compare the original Montgomery pieces to the film but there is something to be aware of, which is that Montgomery was not a reporter at the trial and while the film may claim to follow court records, it is clear from this article that Montgomery’s disclaimer is extremely misleading.  It is a tricky thing for me because I am firmly opposed to the death penalty and the article makes clear that the numerous delays at the end of the film are entirely accurate and that makes it even more cruel.  But that doesn’t change that this film does not follow accurately the way that the disclaimer claims that it does.  The film would have you believe that Barbara Graham wasn’t even at the scene of the crime while it would seem the preponderance of evidence is that she in fact killed the woman.

The Credits:

directed by Robert Wise.  Screenplay by Nelson Gidding and Don M. Mankiewicz.  based on newspaper articles by Ed Montgomery.  and the letters of Barbara Graham.

The other WGA Nominees

The Long, Hot Summer

The Film:

I have reviewed this film once already.  It’s one of those films that I wish was better than it was.  It has Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Orson Welles, a smoldering Lee Remick and it adapts Faulkner and I still have it at the very high end of **.5.  It reminds me of the 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream which I always want to remember as better than it actually is.

The Source:

The Hamlet by William Faulkner  (1940) and “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner (1939)

I have also reviewed this novel once already, although the novel that I reviewed was Snopes as a whole, which covers three novels (The Hamlet / The Town / The Mansion) and this film only covers one of the four parts that make up The Hamlet.  And, actually, it doesn’t even really do that, but I will discuss that more in the Adaptation section below.  It also makes use of the story “Barn Burning”, almost certainly the most famous story that Faulkner ever wrote and definitely one of the best.  If you haven’t read it and you grew up in the States, I feel sorry for you because your English teachers didn’t do right by you.

The Adaptation:

As you can see from the image on the right, Signet published a movie cover copy of the book (as they also did that same year with Pylon and would do the next year with The Sound and the Fury– for more of the same, go here and scroll down to the Movie Covers section).  The problem is that for this book, they printed “The Long Summer”, the third section from The Hamlet that gives the book the title (sort of).  But, if you were to see the film and then buy the book, you would have been disappointed, or at least confused.  That’s because very little of the film actually comes from this book, in spite of the title.  The beginning of the book (and a bit of the end) is inspired by what happens in “Barn Burning”.  A good chunk of it comes from the first part of The Hamlet, which various places (including Wikipedia and the IMDb) list as coming from “Spotted Horses”, but since “Spotted Horses” (published originally in 1931) was incorporated into the first part of The Hamlet, that seems an odd thing to distinguish.  Other aspects of the story come from other parts of the book, including the way that Ben Quick starts wearing the bow-tie and rises from a share-cropper to the clerk to marrying the daughter of Will Varner.  But the film is a hodge-podge of all that.  Ben Quick is the name of a minor character in the story but in the film he takes aspects of Ab Snopes (the barn burner), Mink Snopes (the story about the hog) and mostly Flem Snopes (bringing in the horses, the bow-tie, marrying the daughter) although the daughter that he marries didn’t exist in the original book.

The Credits:

Directed by Martin Ritt.  Screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr.  Directed by Martin Ritt.  The only source credit is “William Faulkner’s The Long, Hot Summer” on the title card.  That gets around the specifics of which source this is derived from.

Indiscreet

The Film:

Cary Grant pushed off making a decision on whether to star in this film.  He agreed to do it for director Stanley Donen (whom he worked with several times late in his career) but only if Donen could get Ingrid Bergman to do it.  Donen was convinced he would never be able to sign Bergman, but in the end he did, and so the film was made.  This is obviously designed to make you think of Notorious, the other Grant-Bergman pairing.  The problem is that this isn’t Notorious and Donen isn’t Hitchcock.  The film mostly works because the pairing works (and because Cecil Parker and Phyllis Calvert are entertaining in the supporting roles) but it doesn’t have the same feeling.

The basic premise of the film is this: Ingrid Bergman is a famous actress who meets Cary Grant, a man the U.N. is trying to convince to take a job with them (through Parker, who is married to Calvert, who is Bergman’s sister – nothing is made of the fact that Calvert and Bergman sound like they’re from different countries and that Grant, clearly English, is supposedly from San Francisco).  They are instantly attracted to each other because they supposedly find the other one interesting, although, it’s really because they’re Cray Grant and Ingrid Bergman.  They’re beautiful people who are naturally attracted to each other.  Grant, however, doesn’t ever want to be married.  So, to keep women from pressing him on marriage, he tells them that he’s already married and that he can’t get a divorce.

That, that really is just an astoundingly stupid idea.  The character seems to really believe that this is a better plan than telling them he doesn’t want to be married because he believes that any woman who hears that will just try to win him over to being married (which, in fact, of course, is what actually happens – he is won over by the idea of being married to her and anyone who doesn’t see that coming within a few minutes of the start of the film is deluding themselves).  So, you can just enjoy the pairing and you can enjoy the slow revenge that Bergman tries on him when she learns that he really isn’t married and you can enjoy the supporting performances and try to overcome what is a completely absurd idea that couldn’t be dropped because the entire film hinges on the notion.

The Source:

Kind Sir by Norman Krasna  (1953)

I have not been able to get hold of the original play to read it.  The reason I haven’t been able to find the original is because it was such a notable Broadway flop.  It starred Charles Boyer and Mary Martin, but director Joshua Logan was in the midst of a breakdown and it completely bombed on stage.  But Stanley Donen liked it (“‘I told Norman his story about this guy who lies was an absolute knockout of a plot,’ said Donen, who was in turn informed by the playwright, ‘Well it’s deader than a doornail in Hollywood.  I’ve tried everywhere and nobody will touch it.  If you want it, it’s yours.'”  (Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Moves by Stephen M. Silverman, p 267)) and so got Krasna to rewrite parts of it and turn it into a script.

The Adaptation:

“Despite the stage-bound nature of Krasna’s script, which a bemused Joshua Logan found to differ from the stage version by only a few altered lines,” is what Stephen M. Silverman has to say on page 272 of Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Moves.  So, there’s apparently not much difference between the original play and the film, although the film was a big success while the play was not.

The Credits:

produced and directed by Stanley Donen.  screenplay by Norman Krasna.  from his play “Kind Sir”.

The Reluctant Debutante

The Film:

Do you possibly expect me to give a shit about these people?  I know that this film was a financial success, that there are people who really enjoy watching this kind of thing, but I will remind you that there are also people who are obsessed with the royals and with celebrity marriages and I think they’re the same kind of people.  It’s bad enough in a Henry James novel to have to try to care about the people, but this is just insipid.

Here’s the deal: Rex Harrison plays the father of a seventeen year old girl who is about to be presented (apparently debutantes used to be presented to the Queen, which isn’t something I knew, but also isn’t something I would have cared about even if I knew).  She’s played by Sandra Dee and gives about the performance you would expect from Sandra Dee.  She’s supposed to go for one rich young David but instead falls for the other David, the one who plays drums and supposedly is a bit of cad (though that’s just a misunderstanding).  In the end, she will fall in love with him and they will end up together and he’ll get some sort of Italian title and so the parents (actually, father and stepmother, with the stepmother played by Harrison’s real life wife Kay Kendall in one of her final film roles before her early death of leukemia).  It’s the kind of happy ending you would expect from something so dumb.  Really, the one thing that redeems the film at all is that the stepmother’s nosy friend, who tries to sabotage the whole thing, is played by Angela Lansbury and she at least provides a little bit of wit to lighten things up.  Other than that, it’s just a lot of people I can’t possibly care about and their ridiculous troubles that are just boring and annoying.  The costumes and sets look good and Vincente Minnelli does a solid job of directing, but really, you can’t expect me to care.

The Source:

The Reluctant Debutante by William Douglas Home  (1955)

It’s not that this is badly written.  It’s that it’s a drawing room comedy (technically, according to the stage directions, it’s the sitting room) about rich, spoiled people whose lives I can’t possibly be expected to care about.  Yes, it does poke some fun at them, but really it’s trying to draw in an audience that cares about these type of people and the lives they lead rather than those who would mock them.

The Adaptation:

“Pan Berman had sent me a script to read. It was The Reluctant Debutante, an American adaptation of William Douglas Home’s successful London play. The American setting of the screenplay struck me as off kilter. I turned to the original play. It was marvelously British, very uppity, with delicious implications, and very funny. It told of the last group of debutants to be presented to the Queen, before the practice was abolished and a new era of social democracy was ushered in. There were popular elements to the work, and if these could be developed, I informed Pan I’d gladly direct the picture.” (I Remember It Well by Vincente Minnelli (with Victor Arce), p 318)

There is certainly a lot in the film that wasn’t in the original play, as the film really expands things (the play basically takes place in the sitting room while the film makes good use of Minnelli’s talent for making sets look good).  But it does keep that British flair that attracted people to the play in the first place and drops that whole ridiculous American idea.

The Credits:

Directed by Vincente Minnelli.  Screenplay by William Douglas Home.  Based on the Play by William Douglas Home.  The IMDb lists Julius J. Epstein as a writer because he wrote that script that Minnelli read and rejected.

Damn Yankees

The Film:

There is a completely ridiculous premise at the heart of this film.  I’m not talking about the idea that the Devil would appear to a long-suffering Senators fan and offer to turn him into a power hitter so that the Senators could win the pennant; after all, that’s just a film fantasy.  I’m also not talking about the idea that the Devil would be rooting against the Yankees, although that idea clearly is ludicrous; if there was ever a major league baseball team that Satan rooted for, it’s the Yankees.  I’m talking about the central idea – that this long-suffering fan would take this Faustian bargain to be the power hitter that is all the Senators need to take down the damn Yankees.  In 1954, the year the original novel was written, the Senators lost 88 games and finished in 6th place, some 45 games back (although the Yankees didn’t actually win that year; their 103 wins was 8 short of the Indians).  That was the best finish the Senators would have through the rest of the decade, which included the 1955 Broadway premiere of the musical and the 1958 release of this film.  The Senators had a power hitter; Roy Sievers at the time was one of the best in the game, especially in 1957, the last full season before the release of this film, when he managed to come in third in the MVP voting in spite of playing for a last place team, finishing only behind Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams.  The Senators had the worst pitching in the American League in the mid to late 50’s; you could have given them three more power hitters and they still wouldn’t have been able to score enough runs to overcome that pitching.

Putting all of that aside, this film is a bit of a slog to get through, as so many Musicals in this era are.  Of course there are people who will disagree with me, who will love these songs and will defend them to the death.  But none of the songs move me at all and of the performances in the film, the only one I think that really gives it any life is Ray Walston, and when you find yourself rooting for the Devil, well then, that’s a bad sign.

The premise of the film, as I make clear, is that a long-suffering Senators fan.  I would say, were there any other kind, but that suggests that there were Senators fans.  While the Senators were not the first team to uproot and move cities, Washington was the first city to lose a franchise entirely (the first five franchises to move were all from cities that had multiple franchises) and they spent over 30 years without a baseball team.  Anyway, back to the film.  I keep getting distracted because I would rather write about baseball than the film.  Anyway, fan gets tempted with Faustian bargain, becomes power hitter, turns Senators into contenders, must turn back at end of season to avoid losing his wife forever.  There you go.  Oh yeah, and a subplot about how he’s not who he says he is and whether he’ll be able to play in the key game.  It’s mostly forgettable, although I am certain that there are people who will talk about Gwen Verdon’s big strip-tease song, the one that is featured so prominently on the poster (and was on the original Broadway posters as well) but even that I don’t find particularly inspiring.

The Source:

Damn Yankees: A New Musical, book by George Abbott and Douglass Wallop, music and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross  (1955)  /  The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant: A Novel by Douglass Wallop  (1954)

The original novel was an interesting idea – the merging of the Faust legend with baseball.  Because the book was published in 1954 but takes place in 1958, there are a couple of bizarre points to it (at one point, Mickey Mantle seems to have ended up on the Indians and there’s a point where Applegate (The Devil) insists that the Dodgers have to lose the World Series because they have always lost the World Series, the same problem I ran into with my own novel when I made one character in 2005 a long suffering Red Sox fan because I wrote that story in 2000), but it’s mostly just a quick little read that might excite baseball fans (there’s an introduction to the 2004 reprinting by baseball guru Bill James).  It’s okay, but not much to get excited over.  Yet, clearly some people did get excited and it was turned into a Broadway Musical with, what for me, are extremely forgettable songs.  But it was a big hit, there’s no question about it and so a film adaptation was the next obvious move.

The Adaptation:

I suspect that no one looks for truth in advertising, but that tagline on the poster is either pushing things a bit or making a comment about what “made the show New York’s greatest!”  As has often been the case with the musicals that other people care much more about than I do, someone has listed on Wikipedia the various differences between the original stage version and what as put on film and there were definitely some differences.

But, to me, the big difference was not in comparing the stage play to the film, but in comparing the stage play with the original novel.  In the film and the play, much is made of Joe wanting to return to his wife.  But in the original novel, he’s definitely feeling like he needs a break from his wife and that’s part of why he does it (“So far as he and Bess were concerned, it was true that they had come to the end of something.  Not of marriage, necessarily, but of an era.”).  I never got that sense in the film, where his love for his wife is part of what holds him back.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by George Abbott and Stanley Donen.  Screenplay by George Abbott.  Music and Lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross.  Based upon the play “Damn Yankees”, book by George Abbott and Douglass Wallop.  From Douglass Wallop’s novel “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant”.  Music and Lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross.  Produced by Brisson, Griffith and Prince.

South Pacific

The Film:

“I suspect this is something we disagree on, but if you hear me over at the computer retching it’s because someone is washing that man right out of her hair,” I told Veronica. She assured me that it was, in fact, something we disagreed on. “I think I may even remember the choreography,” she replied, since she was in the musical in high school. I am a big fan of musicals, but Rodgers and Hammerstein aren’t my thing. Most of them have at least one song I really like, but aside from that I can pass on them. This one struggles even to find one song.

Having a musical where you don’t like any of the songs makes it difficult to like the film. But liking a musical and thinking it is good can be separated in my mind. The problem is that I don’t think this musical is all that good either. Part of the problem with it is the leads. There are different ways you can approach the casting of a musical. You can find good actors and get the singing dubbed (enter Marni Nixon). You can find actors and trust them to their singing (Russell Crowe in Les Miserables). Or you can find singers who can really belt out the roles but perhaps struggle with the acting part. Enter Rossano Brazzi and Mitzi Gaynor. Do they do a good job with the songs? Yes. There’s no question that Brazzi belting out “Some Enchanted Evening” wins over a lot of people and though the song and the singing aren’t to my taste, I won’t argue with the talent involved there. But Brazzi and Gaynor completely drop the ball when it comes to acting, and with their romance at the center of the film, it just can’t hold together. You keep wanting to get to the other bits of the film, and the problem is those aren’t all that interesting either.

Aside from that, there is also the problem of the filters. Joshua Logan, best known for directing on stage, though he had done some solid film work (Picnic), wanted to use filters to produce a dream-like effect for some of the most important songs (like “Some Enchanted Evening” and “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy”). Unfortunately, the studio used more powerful filters than Logan wanted and there wasn’t enough time in post-production to fix it. So, the big moments of the film just look bizarre and they’re completely distracting. For a film that was already working uphill with the acting, this just was something it couldn’t overcome.

Do people love this film? There are definitely those people who do. But I suspect what they really love is the songs and what this film does is just provide them a way to enjoy those songs. It’s harder to defend the film itself as a work of art.

The Source:

South Pacific by Rodgers and Hammerstein (1949) / Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener (1948)

Well, in some ways I can’t just blame the film. Some of the blame has to go on the original music. As I mentioned, Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals just don’t work for me. They’re cheezy and they really play up the romance, sometimes even when the romance is just silly. When there is a song that can win me over (think “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin” in Oklahoma), then at least I can enjoy myself for a while. But I don’t think South Pacific works any better on stage than it does on film, though at least if you got the right actors you could do something more with it than the film did.

Michener’s book is rather disappointing. It was a huge success at the time and won the Pulitzer (I gave that win a C) and, with the switch from the Pulitzer being awarded to a Novel to changing it to Fiction, it was the first collection of short stories to win. It could be argued that this is a novel, but it work less as a coherent whole than as a collection of stories that all happen to share a setting. That’s why it was so easy to adapt into the musical, because you didn’t have to worry about the story – you could mix and match with some characters and some of the little bits in various stories without upsetting any larger story.

The Adaptation:

Most of the musical appears on stage, but like with many musicals, they feel the need to move some songs around, I guess just to make certain that people who saw it on stage don’t get too bored. It’s obvious right from the start, as we kick right in (after an overture and credits and a little opening dialogue) into “Bloody Mary is the Girl I Love”, which was the fourth song on stage. I think some of this was to push back “Some Enchanted Evening”. It was the third song in the musical on stage, coming really early on. But, perhaps partially to allow the romance more time to build, and partially because they knew it was the big hit song and wanted to not use it right away, it’s pushed back until 40 minutes into the film. But that also means, instead of having three songs in between, less than 10 minutes after “Some Enchanted Evening” is over, Nellie is singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair”, which seems awfully quick.

The Credits:

Directed by Joshua Logan. Screenplay by Paul Osborn. Adapted from the Play “South Pacific” by Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan. Based on “Tales of the South Pacific” by James A. Michener. Originally Produced on the Stage by Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, Leland Hayward and Joshua Logan.

Tom Thumb

The Film:

George Pal was an interesting film-maker.  He began with Puppetoons (which are also used in this film), moved on to producing early 50’s Sci-Fi films (three of which won Oscars for Visual Effects) and then moved on to directing with this film.  His films are fun and visually interesting.  Even this one, which on one level is a typical MGM musical with bland songs comes to life much more with what Pal has to offer.

It’s the traditional fairy tale story of a childless couple who wish to have a child, even if he’s the size of a thumb and are gifted with Tom Thumb, the thumb-sized boy.  In this story, his adventures include getting involved with a couple of thieves (played by British comedians Terry-Thomas and Peter Sellers) by accident and then having to help his parents after they are arrested for the crime.  But the plot isn’t really the point.  Hell, even the songs aren’t really the point.  The point is George Pal.

While the special effects in this film might not look like much today, they were quite advanced for 1958 (and won the Oscar while earning a nomination at the Nighthawks), with the tiny Tom acting on the same screen as the full-sized world.  And it’s not just Tom – there are dancing puppets, there is a forest queen who disappears and there are people who fly.  Pal knew how to make a fantasy world come to life and he would take that to the next level with his next film, an adaptation of The Time Machine.  So, you might come looking to this film for the music, but what you really want to do is enjoy the visuals.

The Source:

“Daumdick” by The Brothers Grimm  (1819)

The credits get this kind of right.  The story is from the pen of the Brothers Grimm, though, they, of course, got it from another source (an unknown source from a town near Cologne).  It is a typical Grimm story, a little fairy tale with some magic and a few adventures.  A childless couple prays for a child, even if he was no bigger than their thumb and they are rewarded with Thumbling, their new son.  He allows his father to sell him so that he can sneak back home and they can enjoy the money together but has several adventures on his return and eventually his father has to cut him out of the belly of a wolf.

While I often use the Norton Annotated Brothers Grimm for the cover (and the link), this story is not actually in that collection, so I went with the Bantam, which is where I read it for this project.  The Bantam version actually has the complete tales in two volumes and I have had my copies now for over 20 years.

The Adaptation:

This is actually one of those films where they didn’t follow the original story but they kept to the spirit.  Tom Thumb is granted to the childless couple by the forest queen, different than the original, but in the same spirit.  He ends up helping a couple of criminals by accident (in the original story he helps a thief but only so that the thief will get caught).  That, combined with the songs, manages to pad the length of the film to feature length.

The Credits:

Directed by George Pal.  Screenplay by Ladislas Fodor.  Based on a story from the pen of the Brothers Grimm.

Other Screenplays on My List Outside My Top 10:

• Parash Pathar  –  Satyajit Ray expands beyond his Apu Trilogy with this Comedy which I have as a high ***.
• Some Came Running  –  James Jones gets the Rat Pack treatment.  Perhaps proof that every film in the late 50’s could have benefited from Shirley MacLaine and Arthur Kennedy.

Other Adaptations:
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• Gervaise  –  Adapted from the seventh of the Rougon-Macquart novels by Zola (a great novel), this Rene Clement film has a strong performance from Maria Schell.  Released in France in 1956.
• Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island  –  The third of the trilogy adapted from the famous novel Musashi.  Released in Japan in 1956.
• Lonelyhearts  –  Nathaniel West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts had been adapted back in 1933, but this time it’s got Montgomery Clift and an Oscar nominated performance from Maureen Stapleton as well as a really good supporting performance from Robert Ryan.
• The Fly  –  Based on the short story, this is a highly effective Horror (or Sci-Fi) film that still works today.  Not nearly as grotesque as the Cronenberg remake.
• Lovers of Paris  –  This Julien Duvivier film is adapted from the 10th novel in Zola’s series (which I haven’t read yet).  It is a high ***, though it doesn’t have a performance as good as Signoret’s or Schell’s.
• Stage Struck  –  Sidney Lumet’s second film, which doesn’t have a great reputation.  It stars Susan Strasberg and she’s quite good.  It’s based on the play Morning Glory which had a 1933 film version that won Katharine Hepburn her first Oscar.
• Law and Disorder  –  A British Comedy from Charles Crichton (who directed The Lavender Hill Mob) baed on the novel Smugglers’ Circuit.
• A Night to Remember  –  Based on Walter Lord’s book about the sinking of the Titanic, this film doesn’t have the epic scope and production values of Cameron’s but also doesn’t have his stupid Jack and Rose love story.
• Run Silent, Run Deep  –  Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster in a submarine during World War II.  The first of three straight solid World War II films.  Based on the novel.
• A Time to Love and a Time to Die  –  Because everyone focuses on All Quiet on the Western Front, people forget that Remarque also ended up writing about World War II.  This film, a Douglas Sirk film I actually tolerate, is based on his novel.
• The Young Lions  –  Irwin Shaw’s famous novel is made into a film with Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Dean Martin.
• Windom’s Way  –  A British thriller starring Peter Finch from director Ronald Neame, based on the novel.
• The Good Soldier Svejk: Beg to Report, Sir  –  In my 1957 post, I mentioned that Svejk had a sequel.  The sequel isn’t quite as good as the original, but it does finish adapting the rest of the lengthy novel (which was really only 2/3 completed at the time of the author’s death).
• The Tarnished Angels  –  Faulkner at the movies twice in one year.  As mentioned up above in the The Long Hot Summer review, there is a movie cover version of this book published by Signet.  It’s based on Pylon, one of Faulkner’s lesser read novels.  The same director and main cast as Written on the Wind, but not as good.
• The Red and the Black  –  Another great novel getting a film treatment.  I watched this specifically for this project, when I noticed that on oscars.org that there was a film adaptation eligible in this year (even though it came out in France in 1954).  Solid adaptation of the great Stendhal novel.
• The Captain of Kopenick  –  This 1956 West German film was based on the play and was a Best Foreign Film nominee at the Oscars.
• Man of the West  –  Gary Cooper in an Anthony Mann Western based on the novel The Border Jumpers.
• The Confessions of Felix Krull  –  I don’t like Thomas Mann so I haven’t read the book.  But I do like Horst Buccholz so I have seen the film and his performance makes it worth seeing.  He comes in #2 in Best Actor – Comedy / Musical at the Nighthawks.
• Bell, Book and Candle  –  Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak reunite in a romantic comedy.  The play was a big hit but the movie is just a mid range ***.
• The Buccaneer  –  A remake that’s better than the original.  Cecil B. DeMille had made the original in 1938 but was too sick to direct this one.  Instead, his son-in-law Anthony Quinn, who had played a small role in the first, made this his only film as a director.  It’s got an effective Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson.
• Cowboy  –  Based on the semi-autobiographical novel My Reminiscences as a Cowboy by Frank Harris, this is the rare Jack Lemmon Western.
• The Proud Rebel  –  One of the later Alan Ladd films, with him playing a Confederate veteran with a mute son.  Based on a 1947 short story.
• Hell Drivers  –  1957 British Drama that’s based on a short story by John Kruse.
• Buchanan Rides Alone  –  One of a number of Budd Boetticher Westerns that I think are over-rated.  This one stars Randolph Scott and is based on the novel The Name’s Buchanan.
• Night Ambush  –  A Powell / Pressburger film that’s not one of their stronger outings.  Based on the non-fiction book Ill Met by Moonlight about trying to capture a German general on Crete during World War II.
• The Law and Jake Wade  –  I could do without any more Robert Taylor films.  Based on the novel, this Western is mediocre.
• Home Before Dark  –  Mediocre Mervyn LeRoy film starring Jean Simmons and based on the novel.
• The Lineup  –  Film noir from Don Siegel adapted from a radio series that ran from 1950 to 1953.
• A Man Escaped  –  A 1956 French film from Robert Bresson (who has never been to my taste) adapted from the memoir of a member of the Resistance who was jailed by the Nazis.
• Crazed Fruit  –  A Japanese Drama adapted from the novel by Shintaro Ishihara.  It was controversial on its release in Japan in 1956 and is currently available from Criterion.
• Torpedo Run  –  Oscar winning (for Visual Effects) World War II film adapted from stories by Richard Sale.  One of a number of 1958 films with Glenn Ford.
• Marjorie Morningstar  –  Natalie Wood transitions into adult roles in this adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel.
• Tarzan’s Fight for Life  –  The third film with Gordon Scott in the loincloth and the last produced by Sol Lesser.  We’re into low *** by this point.  This is actually the last film with Tarzan speaking broken English until 1981.
• King Creole  –  Michael Curtiz, the great director of Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca makes an Elvis film.  It’s based on the novel A Stone for Danny Fisher but like most Elvis films got a title that could have a song.
• From the Earth to the Moon  –  Mediocre version of the Jules Verne Sci-Fi classic that stars Joseph Cotten.
• The Revenge of Frankenstein  –  The second of the Hammer Frankenstein films doesn’t have Cristopher Lee and it falls way short of the first one as a result.
• The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold  –  The second of the two Lone Ranger films made with Clayton Moore after the success of the television show has all the hokiness of the show but it also has that stirring music and that always works.
• Tonka  –  One of those Disney films that I knew for over 30 years before I actually saw it because of this book series.  It’s based on the book Comanche: Story of America’s Most Heroic Horse.  When this film came out, Tonka Trucks still weren’t that big, otherwise I think they might have given it a different title.
• The Key  –  Carl Foreman wrote this British film for Carol Reed, based on the novel Stella by Jan de Hartog.  In theory, Foreman was still blacklisted at this time, but Wikipedia, the IMDb, and TCM don’t say anything about that.
• Bitter Victory  –  It’s directed by Nicholas Ray and has both Richard Burton and Christopher Lee but this film set in World War II North Africa is no better than mediocre.  Based on the novel by René Hardy.
• Across the Bridge  –  Rod Steiger stars in a drama based on a short story by Graham Greene.
• The Tunnel of Love  –  A romantic comedy with Richard Widmark and Doris Day.  Who wouldn’t want to watch that?  It’s based on the play, which was a hit on Broadway.
• The Inn of the Sixth Happiness  –  A year after earning an Oscar nomination for Peyton Place, Mark Robson is again undeservingly nominated for this drama that stars Ingrid Bergman.  When I look on TCM every weekend at the upcoming week for films to record so I can rewatch them for this project, I also look at Fox Movie Channel because it’s only two spots down on my cable and during the early part of the day it often plays classics.  It plays this movie something like every week and I always have to remind myself it wasn’t nominated for its writing and that I don’t need to see it again.  Thankfully I will now be done with 1958 and won’t have to think about it anymore.  It’s based on the novel The Small Woman by Alan Burgess.
• Darby’s Rangers  –  Yet another World War II film (the seventh on this list so far), this one is based on a group of real rangers and based on the book written by one of them.  I saw it because director William Wellman is a former Oscar nominee.
• The Old Man and the Sea  –  This film was what Spencer Tracy earned his Oscar nomination for when it should have been for The Last Hurrah.  I actually don’t think the book is among Hemingway’s better work and it’s a bone of contention between my mother and I because she always feels the need to mention that she doesn’t like it and I don’t feel like defending it.  I also have to point out that while it’s mentioned in the Nobel commendation for Hemingway, the Nobel Prize is not given for a specific work and that Hemingway earned his Nobel Prize with his early novels and his magnificent short stories.
• Frankenstein–1970  –  Now we’ve hit **.5 films.  Boris Karloff returns to Frankenstein but as the Baron and not the monster.  Apparently it ran on a double bill with Queen of Outer Space, which is reviewed in my Nighthawk Awards as the worst film of the year.
• The Big Country  –  This is the film that Burl Ives actually won his Oscar for (it should have been for Cat), a mediocre Western from the novel by Donald Hamilton and directed by William Wyler.
• God’s Little Acre  –  The Erskine Caldwell novel was considered scandalous when it was published in 1933 and even this film was considered a bit scandalous.  It was not considered to be very good (but the book isn’t all the good either).
• A Certain Smile  –  Former Oscar nominee Jean Negulesco directs yet another mediocre film, this one adapted from a novel by Francoise Sagan written when she was just 20.
• Night of the Demon  –  A British Horror film from a French director based on the M.R. James story “Casting the Runes”.
• Auntie Mame  –  You can read a full review here because this film, based on the original novel and the hit play by the same playwrights who wrote Inherit the Wind was a Best Picture nominee.  It’s lower here than the *** I originally gave it.  Rosalind Russell is quite good but the film is not.
• The Quiet American  –  Joseph L. Mankiewicz made many great films but this isn’t one of them.  It’s a Top 100 novel though, so you can go here and read more about the book (which is brilliant) and the film (which is not).
• Fear  –  Loosely based on a Stefan Zweig novel, this film is one of the ones made while Rossellini and Bergman were still married and he directs and she stars and you shouldn’t bother.
• Onionhead  –  A year after showing his dramatic chops, Andy Griffith is in a goofy comedy based on the novel by Weldon Hill.
• Ten North Frederick  –  A lot of the later John O’Hara novels aren’t very good but they were still made into not very good films in this era.  It stars Gary Cooper.
• From Hell to Texas  –  A forgettable Western from classic director Henry Hathaway, adapted from the novel The Hell-Bent Kid.
• A Tale of Two Cities  –  I gave this film a tepid, not very long review when I wrote about the novel for my Top 100.
• The Naked and the Dead  –  The book, by Norman Mailer, didn’t make my Top 100 but it is a very good, very well regarded and very popular book.  The film is none of those and it was hard to find.  You shouldn’t bother finding it.
• China Doll  –  Yet another film set in World War II but this is one is a romance starring Victor Mature and it’s about as good as that description would lead you to believe.  Directed by Frank Borzage, long after he won his Oscars.
• No Time for Sergeants  –  The second dumb comedy in seven films that star Andy Griffith and that I saw because the director was once nominated for an Oscar (in this case, Mervyn LeRoy).  It was originally a best-selling novel by Mac Hyman, then became a teleplay then a Broadway play before this film and in 1964 would even become a television series.
• Desire Under the Elms  –  Eugene O’Neill died in 1953 so he didn’t have to live to see Sophia Loren butchering one of his best known plays.
• Tarzan and the Trappers  –  The last of the **.5 films.  This was not intended to be a feature film (which is why it’s in black-and-white, not color like the other Tarzan films at this point).  It was an intended as three pilot episodes for a new television series (which wasn’t picked up) but then were packaged together for the film.
• Bonjour Tristesse  –  A fairly bad film from Otto Preminger which has Jean Seberg, which shows that Preminger didn’t learn his lesson after Saint Joan.  Like A Certain Smile, it’s based on a novel by Francoise Sagan, but this one was published when she was just 18.
• The Gun Runners  –  Don Siegel directs a much more faithful adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not than the Hawks film but, with Audie Murphy in the lead, it’s also much, much, much worse.  This is a mid-range ** film.
• Rock-a-bye Baby  –  Now we’re into low-range ** films.  A crappy Jerry Lewis remake of the brilliant The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.
• Fiend Without a Face  –  A low budget British Horror film based on a story that originally appeared in Weird Tales (of Conan fame, among other things).
• The Left Handed Gun  –  Not the worst film of the year by far (this is #132 of 144) as most of the worst films are original.  Not even the worst film from an adapted screenplay as I Want to Live! ranks at #136 but that was up above because of its Oscar and WGA noms.  But it is the worst film on this list.  It’s an Arthur Penn film with Paul Newman as Billy the Kid, based on a Gore Vidal teleplay.  It was a huge flop in the States but it actually helped Penn’s reputation in Europe.

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen:

• none

Introduction:

A Note on the Order of the Books:

The Tintin books are listed here in the order in which they were originally written and published in French.  That is very different from the order in which they became available in America and the order in which I first read them.  Because my family collected Tintin books as Atlantic-Little, Brown originally published them in the States, I can give an idea of when they were published in America, although there is at least a little confusion with that.  My (now falling apart) original copy of The Crab with the Golden Claws lists four titles on the back.  Yet, one of those titles is King Ottokar’s Sceptre.  My (now falling apart) copy of King Ottokar’s Sceptre is a “First American Edition” and lists eight titles, the same eight titles listed on the back of my (now falling apart) original copy of Cigars of the Pharoah, which is a “First American Edition” and is from 1975.  In Tintin in America (“Third American Edition”) it lists 20 books on the back – all except Soviets, Congo, Blue Lotus and Alph-Art.  Tintin in America was in fact, the twentieth published in the United States (it says so on the back of the book).
One of the oddities is that two of the books that were among the original four, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure, were published during the decade as serials in Children’s Digest.  I still have the cover for the January 1977 issue of Children’s Digest with The Secret of the Unicorn on the cover.  Odd, that they would only at that point be publishing a story that was already available in book form.

A Note on the Illustrations I Make Use Of:

Aside from the fact that I don’t own the copyright for any of them (I either grabbed scans from online or took pictures of my own copies), I want to point out that all of these are compressed to fit into the width that WordPress provides (not a lot, but hey, it’s also free); in some cases, I shrank them considerably to make the piece look better.  If you click on almost all of the illustrations, you will find larger versions that will allow you to look at them in more detail.

A Note on the Editions:

Because this is one of my For Love of Books posts, it focuses on the copies I own.  I have included ISBNs (when possible) of the editions I own.  Links on the ISBNs are links to buying the book.  If there is no link, that ISBN is no longer in print, but you can still often find them here.

The Adventures:

The Adventures of Tintin Reporter for “Le Petit Vingtième” in the Land of the Soviets
(Tintin au pays des Soviets)

Serialized:  1929-30
Album:  1930
Color Album:  N/A
EL Edition:  1989
Editions I Own:

• Methuen Hardcover  (0416197655)

The Adventure:  If I had come to Tintin chronologically, it’s entirely possible I never would have gotten very far.  Of course, when I was a kid and first enjoying Tintin, you couldn’t come to it chronologically.  The first two adventures weren’t available in English at that point and even the third, Tintin in America, wasn’t available in America (I remember buying it new when it was first released).

Unlike the later editions, this adventure was never re-done in the more comic book format that would later be adapted.  So, what we have is the early art of a man who would become much more stylized (and much more interesting) over time.  We also have his early story-telling.  Hergé originally wanted to send his young reporter to America, but the editors of the children’s newspaper (an off-shoot of one of Belgium’s daily newspapers) wanted to show the mistakes of the Soviet Union, so Tintin headed east instead, off into propaganda land in an adventure this is utterly ridiculous, where he displays acts that are so silly that you wonder why anyone would have enjoyed it.  If you want to enjoy Tintin, and I sincerely hope that you do, skip this one at first and come back to it after you have a feel for the character.

Tintin is off to the USSR as a reporter, though he never seems to actually report anything (in the next album, he is offered a lot of money for his anticipated reports from the Congo and Snowy mentions that his reports from the Soviet Union must have made him famous, yet he never seems to have any time to file any reports).  In the first 14 pages alone, his train is blown up (which he survives), he is arrested, escapes by beating up a guard, steals a motorcycle, crashes into a tree, steals a car, is bombed by a plane and has his car hit by a train (which he survives).  Tintin is always solving problems instantly (he would put MacGyver to shame), beats the crap out of anyone in his way (even though he is quite small and is supposed to be a boy reporter).  I think my favorite absurd moment is when the propeller of his plane is broken (of course he can fly a plane) and he uses a pocket knife to carve himself a new propeller (but he carved the pitch the wrong way round which makes his plane fly backwards so he has to carve a new one).

This is a ridiculous book, with a silly propaganda story and simplistic art (not the “clean lines” that Hergé would late use, but actually simplistic art).  I can only recommend it to Tintin completists.  But it is where the adventures begin.

The Adventures of Tintin Reporter for “Le Petit Vingtième” in the Congo
(Tintin au Congo)

Serialized:  1930-31
Album:  1931
Color Album:  1946
EL Edition:  1991
Editions I Own:

• Casterman Hardcover  (0867199024)
• Juventud Spanish language softcover  (082885095x)
• Casterman French Hardcover  (2203001011)

The Adventure:  Hergé would realize that his first Tintin adventure wasn’t worth preserving.  So, in 1946, when the Tintin magazine was founded and he started to redraw the original 10 adventures, he skipped it.  But, he did redraw Tintin in the Congo, one which had some issues that were much more problematic than the first adventure.  Yes, the first one was full of propaganda, but I suspect it was the roughness of the adventure that actually made Hergé decide not to have another go at it.  Tintin in the Congo had two severe issues (racism, hunting) that were differently viewed in 1946 than they were in 1930.  In fact, the issues were such that an English language edition of the book wasn’t produced until far, far later.  I first read this as an interlibrary loan of a Spanish language edition back when I was in high school and my mother was an interlibrary loan librarian.  I wouldn’t own a copy until much later.  I would first buy a French hardcover so that I had an edition of it.  Later, I would buy a Spanish softcover because while I can’t read any French, I can at least read a little bit of Spanish.  Eventually, the facsimile version of the original adventure, as it appeared in newspapers and was collected in 1931, was released in English and I was able to get that.  So, right now, my choice is to read the more racist, more offensive original version with cruder art or to attempt to read the later, slightly less racist and less offensive version (with better art).

The original black and white version of the waterfall scene.

The later, re-drawn, in color version of the same scene.  You can also get a sense of how things are compressed to fit into fewer pages.

One of the interesting things about this is, in spite of all the problematic aspects, this one is a big step up over the first adventure.  That’s because this one is really more of an adventure.  Yes, Tintin goes off to the Congo once again as a newspaper reporter, but we never really see him sending any dispatches.  Instead, after refusing to take boatloads of money offered him by other newspapers and sticking with his Belgian paper, he heads off into the jungles of Africa where he immediately, well, starts killing animals by the barrel.  He doesn’t kill a croc (just jams a rifle in his mouth), but he accidentally slaughters a herd of antelope trying to just kill one (the blood is excluded in the later version), kills a monkey to skin it so he can pretend he’s a monkey to rescue Snowy, manages to scare off a lion (Snowy bites off his tail), takes the ivory from a dead elephant (he doesn’t kill the elephant – a monkey manages to do that with Tintin’s gun) and later will blow up a rhino that has chased him up a tree (this would later be changed to the rhino scaring himself off by bumping the gun in the Scandinavian version who refused to publish the original).  In all of this, Tintin is chased, bedeviled and even shot at by a man who first appears as a stowaway on the ship that brought Tintin to the Congo in the first place.  But it turns out that man has been sent by Al Capone to get rid of Tintin; after Tintin’s “reporting” from the USSR, Capone doesn’t want Tintin reporting on Capone taking over the Congolese diamond mines (this is clearly something that Hergé decided part-way through the adventure).  All of that is just set-up for the adventure that Hergé wanted to write in the first place, and soon Tintin would find himself off to America.

This adventure is significant in a couple of different ways.  It’s significant in the development of the Tintin books.  As is detailed in Tintin: The Complete Companion, Hergé really upped his level of research for this book.  That book shows comparisons between his panels and the photographs and articles that he was working from.  While Hergé didn’t travel much, Tintin did, and he wanted the places he appeared to look real.  To that end, research was a massive part of these books and it really shows.  But, the downside with this particular book, of course, is that the research takes place under the shadow of European colonialism.  What that does is make this book a document of its time.  If you want a good understanding of what the general European view of Africa was at the time (and especially, the Belgian view of “their” Congo), this book provides it.  Times have changed and there are things about this book which are absolutely repulsive today.  But, just like Mark Twain’s language and Charles Dickens’ anti-Semitism, they are not things that should just be locked away for no one to look at, but rather studied and remembered for a time that is (thankfully) now past.

Tintin in America
(Tintin en Amérique)

Serialized:  1931-32
Album:  1932
Color Album:  1945
EL Edition:  1978
American Edition:  1979
Editions I Own:

• Casterman hardcover  (2203797002)
• Atlantic-Little Brown, softcover  (0316358525)

the color plate that accompanies the original black-and-white version of the book

The Adventure:  In this book, Hergé took a big step up, both in the art and in the story.  In the Congo, aside from the racism and the hunting, there wasn’t much of an actual story – it wasn’t until late in the game that we learned that the stowaway was after Tintin.  Before that, Tintin was just going through the Congo at his own pace.  But, he comes to America determined to face down Capone after being hunted in the Congo (there is reference made to it in the second panel).  The action is going right from the start – in the first six pages he is kidnapped twice and manages to capture Capone (who gets away because the cops refuse to believe Tintin).  But when he gets away from an assassin, he runs up against Bobby Smiles, the rival to Capone that Tintin will spend most of the rest of the book facing off against (Smiles, when nervous has two exclamations, which makes you wonder if he’s been there or fears them: Alcatraz! and Sing Sing!).  Tintin chases Smiles to Redskin City and here we have an interesting contrast against what we saw in the Congo.  Hergé seems to understand how badly mistreated natives have been in our country (a pretty rare view back in the 1930’s).  Yes, there are some stereotypical aspects to them, but he brings them vividly to life (the color looks great in the later version, especially on the cover).  When Tintin accidentally strikes oil, we get some of Hergé’s best satire, with people showing up within minutes wanting to give Tintin thousands for his oil.  But when they find out it belongs to the Blackfeet (the Big-Toes tribe in the original version), they give them $25 and throw them off the land.  Three hours later, a bank has been put up and the wells are pumping out oil.  In the west, we also get some of the Tintin ridiculousness, like Tintin stealing a train and then not dying in the explosion when it hits a trolley full of dynamite.

The original black-and-white version of the oil scene.

The color, re-drawn version of the well scene.

That’s not the whole story.  There is a subplot when Snowy is kidnapped and later Tintin is nabbed again, but he manages to survive being tossed in the drink thanks to a wooden barbell (it’s part of a carnival scheme and the “weightlifter” looks like a fool when he can’t lift the real barbell even an inch).  All in all, it looks great and it’s a good fun adventure.  It was much more of what we would see in the future.

This is also one of the stories that’s available in a facsimile version of the original edition.  Hergé’s art is getting better and he’s closer to the Tintin we know and love but still not quite there, though he does develop over the adventure.  Seeing those original pages also gives you an idea of how compressed things were in the color versions – two full pages in the original becomes one page in the later version, though it’s not always that compressed.  This book also has three really nice full pages in color (which I assume were in the original – they have the old style of art), although the cover of the book is clearly later art.  On the back of the book, Casterman advertises all the original adventures that appeared in black & white, but English language editions only seem to have been done for the first five.

Tintin in America also holds a special place in my heart because it was one of the five books that was always mine (see above).

Cigars of  the Pharaoh
(Les Cigares du Pharaon)

Serialized:  1932-34
Album:  1934
Color Album:  1955
EL Edition:  1971
American Edition:  1975
Editions I Own:

• Casterman hardcover  (2203797037)
• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (LCC 74-21620)
• Little, Brown softcover  (9780316358361)

The Adventure:  This was one of the first adventures to finally make their way over to America and with good reason.  This is where Tintin really moves out of political adventures and starts really becoming an adventurer.  He’s actually on holiday and plans to travel along the Mediterranean, pass through the Suez Canal and then go down through the Indian Ocean and eventually end up in Shanghai.  Ironically, by the time this adventure is completely over, he will have eventually made his way to Shanghai.  But, in the meantime he’s off for an adventure in Egypt.  He runs into an Egyptologist and, since he’s a reporter, the international drug cartel that is working on the ship decides to frame him for drug possession so that he doesn’t get wise to them (a bad move – he might never have gotten involved if they hadn’t done that).  But that not only sets the plot in motion, it also brings in Thompson and Thomson, the two detectives that will become the backbone for humor in the adventures.  In the original, they are kind of bumblers, but there isn’t the wordplay humor, but that is brought in during the redrawn version (“Bother!  We were mistaken!”  “To be precise: we’re a mistake.”).

Like many of the black-and-white versions, Cigars had some color plates.

A quick note here about the differences in this adventure between the original black-and-white and the redrawn color version (one of the last to be redrawn, oddly enough).  In the original, Tintin is arrested at the bottom of page 13.  The next panel shows deckhands discussing the arrest.  It’s a clear sign of where the story broke off for the serialization.  In the new, color version, there are a couple of extra panels where we see the drugs shown to Tintin.  Also, in the original version, when Tintin wakes up in the Red Sea, he doesn’t see the professor and drift away from him – it’s always just him and Snowy.

The original black-and-white hallucination scene.

The color version of the scene.

After Tintin makes it to shore, he and the Egyptologist make it to the tomb of Kih-Oskh.  The professor disappears and Tintin goes into the tomb to look for him and that’s where things really start to take off, with him getting much more heavily involved with the drug cartel.  By the end of the adventure he will have been kidnapped (multiple times), drugged, met gun-runners, interfered with a movie being shot, be condemned to death (and saved by the detectives who are determined to arrest him even if it means saving him from a firing squad), escaped by plane to India, narrowly avoided being eaten by a tiger and brought down the cartel.  Along the way he will meet the movie producer Rastapopoulos, who will return in a lot of later Tintin adventures and, thanks to the redrawn color version, we will also meet Allan, the smuggler who will be a key supporting villain in numerous other adventures.

When this adventure began, Egypt was still very much alive in popular culture, as was the idea of a curse being put upon any who would enter a tomb.  It allows for a great, fun adventure, as well as allowing Hergé to really indulge in some fun illustrations.  The tomb of Kih-Oskh really comes vividly to life as Tintin explores further and further in.  This was one of the first Tintin adventures I ever read (our original copy, the First American Edition, has now come completely apart, thus my second, later softcover copy) and it is still one of my favorites.

The illustrations I include for this one have some interesting aspects to them.  First of all, compare the mummified Egyptologists in the original black-and-white album as compared to the redrawn color version.  In the original, there are dates (which marks the date of Tintin’s visit to Egypt).  In the color version, the dates have been removed, perhaps to make it a bit more timeless.  Yet, if you look above on the cover, the dates are on that illustration.  Interesting that such a change would be made inside the book but not on the cover.

Two little notes about this book: the first is that when this adventure was re-drawn, some things were changed to fit it in with later adventures – Allan, a later recurring villain appears in the new version though he didn’t originally (he wouldn’t actually be introduced until Crab with the Golden Claws) and one man recognizes Tintin from Destination Moon, which hadn’t been written yet (I was very confused about that as a kid, as clearly that adventure happens later).  The second note is though it was not one of the ones that we had from Children’s Digest growing up (we had it in book form, so there was no need to have it), it was one of at least three Tintin adventures that had the title changed for Children’s Digest.  It was called “The Pharoah’s Revenge” (perhaps because Children’s Digest didn’t want a story with “cigar” in the title?).

The Blue Lotus
(Le Lotus bleu)

Serialized:  1934-35
Album:  1935
Color Album:  1946
EL Edition:  1983
American Edition:  1984
Editions I Own:

• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (0316358568)

The Adventure:  Though this was one of the earliest Tintin stories, it was one of the last to finally appear in America.  In fact, in those pre-Internet days, we thought we had all the Tintin adventures until this one went on sale in 1984 – until that point, which was the first book we saw with all the covers pictured on the back of the book, we never knew it existed, as it had never been listed in the lists previously on the back of the books.  It even came complete with a historical note explaining the belligerence between Japan and China at the time and the presence of the international settlement in Shanghai (the same settlement that J. G. Ballard was born in and whose experiences in its dissolution would be reflected in Empire of the Sun).  We never knew that this early adventure existed and that it was one of the direct sequels (in fact, it’s really the only direct sequel, as Red Rackham’ s Treaure, Prisoners of the Sun and Explorers on the Moon were really the second halves of their respective stories as opposed to sequels).  Not only is this the conclusion of the story of the drug cartel we met in Cigars, but it also introduces us to a prominent character who will return much later and a minor villain who will also appear later, and more importantly, changes the very nature of a character that we thought we knew, explaining why he leaves Tintin as a friend in Cigars but the next time he returns it’s as an enemy.

An example of the vibrant art and color in The Blue Lotus.

Because this is a sequel, it presents a bit of a different Tintin than in previous adventures.  He begins the adventure still in India, where we left him at the end of Cigars, and he’s still trying to fight the war against opium.  But, within the first few pages he’s off to Shanghai in response to a garbled message.  The rest of the adventure will take place there, and it was the opportunity for Hergé to do a lot of things.  The first was a chance to really expand his art (and, in the color version, to really bring in some bright and vibrant colors once Tintin arrives in Shanghai).  The second was a chance to really tell more of a political story.  In the second adventure, Hergé had been completely taken in by the Belgian views on the Congo and it had been obvious in the views of natives and on hunting.  Here, he wanted to tell a more pointed political story, one that attacked the way Japan was acting with belligerence towards China.  It depicts (a somewhat fictionalized version of) the Mukden Incident, the bombing of a railroad in China that would lead to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the eventual withdrawal of Japan from the League of Nations (which helps show how powerless the League was).  These were historic events that I had never heard of before I read the book for the first time (I was only 10).  It was also the first place I ever saw the word “Hara Kiri” and I had to try and find out what it meant.  The third thing is that Hergé was contacted by a Catholic chaplain who convinced him to put in more research and be careful about how he depicted the Chinese people and culture.  He put Hergé in touch with a young Chinese by the name of Zhang Chongren.  Zhang would become a lifelong friend of the illustrator, would help him with research for the book and would be immortalized in it as the character Chang (who would return, many years later, in Tintin in Tibet).

Given all of this, it’s interesting that it took so long to make it to the States.  There are a lot of great moments in it – from Tintin rescuing Chang from a flooded river, to him battling the opium cartel to the political machinations.  There are also plenty of the more silly moments, like when Tintin disguises himself as a Japanese general or when Tintin’s friend rents a house next to the prison where Tintin has been sentenced to death and then digs him an escape tunnel.  In fact, that was a common thing with Tintin at this time.  This was the second of three books in a row in which Tintin is sentenced to death by local authorities and all three times he escapes in different ways (in Cigars, he is shot with blanks as a planned escape, here he is tunneled out and in The Broken Ear, first he is pardoned, then the guns don’t work, then he is too drunk to care and is standing around when the revolution sweeps in and saves him).

This adventure also has the first appearance of something that will become a welcome, amusing common occurrence in the Tintin books: when Thomson and Thompson decide they will disguise themselves in order to fit in with the local culture.  They had disguised themselves in Cigars, but quite well (and it wasn’t meant to be humorous).  Here, their attempt to fit in fails so badly that they are followed by everyone in town and that’s how Tintin ends up running into them (even though they became friends by the end of Cigars, they are here to arrest him on trumped up charges – it won’t be the last time either, as they will arrest him again in The Black Island with some very amusing results).

The Broken Ear
(L’Oreille cassée)

Serialized:  1935-37
Album:  1937
Color Album:  1943
EL Edition:  1975
American Edition:  1978
Editions I Own:

• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (LCC 77-90970)

The Adventure:  This is one of the books that I always owned (as opposed to having been my brothers’ first), and so, has always had a special place in my heart.  It also causes a not-so-special pressure in my chest.  One summer, when my mother decided that I hadn’t worked hard enough in Spanish class the year before, she checked the Spanish language edition out of the Chapman Library where she worked.  She then made me translate the entire book over the course of the summer, about a page a day.  It did provide full proof that I will never be able to draw (yes, I actually drew panels, but mostly traced them).  But she kept my copy all summer and would check my translation each day.

A good example of Herge’s humor – we think they’re puzzling over military strategy but then it turns out they’re only playing chess.

This was another adventure that, not having it with our original batch of Tintin books, left a hole.  That’s because it introduces the character of General Alcazar, a vital supporting character who will be a key character in the final completed Tintin adventure, Tintin and the Picaros.  Before that, though, he would also show up in small supporting roles in two other books (The Seven Crystal Balls and The Red Sea Sharks).  But we’ll meet him, and his violent temper for the first time here.  Before we get him, though, let’s figure out how we get to South America, which is where Alcazar comes into it.

This is one of the few adventures that actually shows Tintin acting as a reporter.  Though he is usually described as such, all the way until the end, we rarely ever see him pursuing any stories (he does pursue criminals, but that’s a different matter).  He goes to a museum to look into the tale of a theft, then returns again when the Arumbaya fetish that was stolen is supposedly returned.  Tintin, however, notices that the ear of the fetish, broken in drawings of it (Tintin has a good reference library which will come up again) is whole when it was returned.  So he sets off in pursuit of the thieves, and then murderers, as bodies start piling up having to do with the theft.  This leads him to a South America in the midst of revolution.

In South America, we get a look at native culture that is much less condescending than we saw in the Congo.  We also get a great deal of political satire.  There are the numerous South American revolutions going on, with people bouncing back and forth (very well done during the “execution” scene).  There are two countries that are going to war over the potential of finding oil (based on a real situation between Bolivia and Paraguay) and a man who sells arms to both countries (based, even down to his hat, coat and beard, on a real German arms dealer who did exactly these kind of despicable things).  But that’s just the backdrop for an adventure that involves crooks, a valuable diamond, native tribes with blowpipes, piranhas (my first experience with the dangerous fish) and numerous doublecrosses.  At one point, two different people try to kill Tintin at the same time and the results are on the right, a great little slapstick moment from the artist.

One interesting thing about this book is that it is essentially the last completely solo Tintin book.  There would be two more books before Captain Haddock shows up, as well as a third in which he barely features (because it was started before he existed and then finished later), but those books much more heavily involve Thomson and Thompson.  In this book, the two detectives only show up in the first three pages investigating the original robbery (“It was removed by a collector.”  “To be precise: it was collected by  a remover.”).  But, for the rest of the adventure it’s just Tintin and Snowy.

The Black Island
(L’Île noire)

Serialized:  1937-38
Album:  1938
Color Album:  1943
EL Edition:  1966
American Edition:  1975
Editions I Own:

• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (LCC 74-21624)

The Adventure:  This is one of the Tintin titles that my family originally had read in Children’s Digest and had pulled the pages out of the magazines and taped them together.  Until the mid-80’s, when we started trying to get the books to replace those, that was the only copy we had of this book.  But this was also one of the (at least) three adventures where Children’s Digest changed the name.  It was printed in Children’s Digest as “The Castle of Doom”.  I was almost certain of that, but the Internet didn’t help me with that at all (surprisingly, almost no website about Tintin lists those title changes) until I found this page.  So, thanks to the MSU Library Special Collections, first for having this in their collection, and second, for actually having done a bibliography for their collection.

The original color version of the book.

The 1966 version.

It seems appropriate as this adventure has one of the most complicated printing histories.  It was serialized originally from 15 April 1937 to 16 June 1938.  It was then published in album form later that year.  In 1943, it became one of the first Tintin books to be released in color, but there were almost no changes.  In 1966, however, the British publishers of the series felt that it needed to be modernized before being published in English (they included a list of 131 errors of detail they wanted corrected).  So, when it was finally released in English, it was the only book that had a new version specifically for that release (many of the changes are detailed in pages 73 to 78 of Tintin: The Complete Companion).  Then, of course, came the CD serialization before the American version of the adventure was released in album form.

This is also the first Tintin adventure that my oldest brother John ever remembers reading.  It began serialization in January of 1973 in Children’s Digest.  The family moved to New York in the summer of 1973 (I wasn’t born until the next year) and my brother doesn’t remember Tintin before New York, but those memories might all mix together.

The castle Craig Dhui may be my favorite setting in a Tintin book. I love the way it is drawn.

This is a great adventure, one which Tintin stumbles upon at random (like most of his adventures, really).  While out for a walk, he sees an airplane in trouble.  While going to see if they need help, he is shot (almost certainly where the first installment of the original serial would have left off).  In going back to look into things, he is framed for attacking a man who is one of the villains, and that sets Thomson and Thompson after him, in spite of their friendship.  He manages to give them the slip, although there are a couple of great gags thanks to them being handcuffed together (we also get one of their great subtle lines: “Yes sir, Thompson, with a p, as in psychology.”).

In the end, Tintin runs into a counterfeiting ring lead by Dr. Müller, a villain who he will encounter again years later (though looking somewhat different).  In the end, Tintin will find himself in Scotland, dressed in a kilt (his regular blue sweater and plus-fours being cut up when the plane he is in crashes and Tintin lands in the brambles).  He takes a boat out to Craig Dhui, a castle (the “castle of doom” of the CD title), on the Black Island that is rumored to be haunted.  It turns out to be the headquarters of the ring, with the noises coming from a large ape that is kept there by the gang to scare off visitors (and is an homage to King Kong, which had been released not that long before the adventure was begun).

Herge does love to let the smaller animal win the battle.

This adventure brings out some interesting uses of animals in the Tintin oeuvre.  In Congo, Tintin hunted for sport.  Here, the ape is seen at first as a villain, and Tintin spends several pages either fighting it or fleeing it.  In a nice turnabout, the ape is afraid of Snowy (similar scenes will happen with larger animals being afraid of Snowy in multiple later adventures – though there will also be irony here as Snowy himself is afraid of a spider).  In the end, Tintin realizes the ape is simply being used and is able to becomes friends with it.  This adventure is also notable in that it develops Snowy’s passion for whiskey, which also brings about one of the few times Tintin gets genuinely mad at Snowy, actually spanking him the third time he catches him drinking whiskey.

Overall, this is a great adventure.  It’s got a good group of criminals, an interesting plot, some great humor (the detectives end up trapped in an airplane), a great locale and an interesting twist with the use of the ape.  It’s always been one of my favorites and still is.

King Ottokar’s Sceptre
(Le Sceptre d’Ottokar)

Serialized:  1938-39
Album:  1939
Color Album:  1947
EL Edition:  1958
American Edition:  1974
Editions I Own:

• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (LCC 73-21251)
• Little, Brown softcover  (9780316358316)

The Adventure:  I think that from the first time I read this, it has been my favorite of the Tintin adventures.  That’s odd because it doesn’t yet have Captain Haddock, who brings so much life to the stories.  Yet, nonetheless, it is still my favorite.  I love the adventure, I love the politics, I love the art.  I always thought it would make a perfect first film, and then, if that worked, you made Crab with the Golden Claws and introduced the captain.  I even wrote a script for the film, following the book almost exactly.  This is also my brother Kelly’s favorite of the Tintin books.  He’s never much liked Thomson and Thompson and he thinks Haddock can be a bit much, so he thinks he likes this one the best because it’s mostly just Tintin and Snowy.

It starts like so many of the Tintin adventures begin, with a random coincidence in which Tintin manages to stumble upon a criminal enterprise.  In this case, he finds the briefcase of Professor Alembeck, a professor of sigillography (the study of seals – and it’s so little known that WordPress thinks I’ve made the word up).  Alembeck is heading to the fictional country of Syldavia and Tintin, after stumbling upon a conspiracy around the professor, decides to travel with him as his secretary.  Then the real danger sprouts up, with numerous attempts to kill Tintin before he can make it to Syldavia and then conspiracies to keep him quiet once he does finally make it.

The wonderful artwork within the story depicting the battle that established the royal line of Syldavia.

I think Syldavia itself is a major reason why I love this book so much.  While Hergé had created fictional South American countries for The Broken Ear, he was still mostly making use of real places in the adventures.  But here he not only creates two new European countries (Syldavia has an enemy in neighboring Borduria, which is involved in the conspiracy), he gives Syldavia a rich and interesting history.  On the plane, Tintin looks at a brochure about the country and we get three pages of its history, complete with an illustration stylized after a 15th century painting.  It is one of the most interesting things that Hergé does with the adventures and Tintin will return to Syldavia again before his adventures are over.  This is also one in which the changes that Hergé made to the color album were significant.  The original Syldavian honor guards were dressed very much like British Beefeaters.  But, in the revised album, they are made to look much more like Central European outfits would look.  It is again a detail that provides a richness to the book.  The brochure itself is even important to the plot, as it details the circumstances surrounding the all important sceptre and what the implications of its disappearance are.

One of the interesting things about this story is that it clearly represents the events of the world crowding in around Tintin.  The plot for the forceful annexation of Syldavia mirrors what was happening with Nazi Germany.  Hergé continued along those lines with the next adventure, The Land of Black Gold.  Tintin was in the middle of that adventure when the Nazis conquered Belgium and shut down the newspaper that Tintin appeared in.  With a German villain and international sabotage, that story would never be allowed.  So, instead Hergé would go a different direction and drop the politics and go back to drugs, the same problem that had been so effective in Cigars.

The Crab with the Golden Claws
(Le Crabe aux pinces d’or)

Serialized:  1940-41
Album:  1941
Color Album:  1943
EL Edition:  1958
American Edition:  1974
Editions I Own:

• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (LCC 73-21249)
• Little, Brown softcover  (0316358339)

The Adventure:  The Tintin adventures had been going strong, with Snowy always along for the ride and usually Thompson and Thomson showing up at some point along the way, primarily providing comic relief.  But Tintin was usually on his own.  Well, that wasn’t going to be the case anymore and the world’s vocabulary of insults would never be the same.

Tintin stumbles into his adventure, of course.  He runs into Thompson and Thomson who drag him into a counterfeiting case.  Through a coincidence (Hergé loved them as much as Dickens) he has just seen a can in a rubbish bin that is connected to the case.  That leads him onto a boat and into danger.  In attempting to escape after being locked in the hold, he mets the captain of the ship, a drunken self-pitying sod that helps him escape.  The villain is the captain’s mate Allan, who we met in Cigars of the Pharoah, him having been added in the color version after he had actually been introduced in this story.

One of the interesting things in this story is that it actually turned out to be too short.  To meet the 62 page requirement when it was adapted into color, Hergé needed to include four full color plates to expand it to the necessary length.  So, we get four wonderful full page plates.  The first is the attack of a seaplane on Tintin and Haddock, the second an exhausted, thirsty Haddock and Tintin crossing the Sahara, the third the two of them running through a market and the final one, the mysterious villain riding through town on a donkey.

The adventure goes along nicely – after escaping from the sea, Tintin, Snowy and Haddock end up stranded in the Sahara.  In the days after Lawrence became famous but before the brilliant film, it was still a very mysterious place (and a different desert than Lawrence’s, but no matter).  Their danger and adventure is in stark contrast to the sheer endless expanses of sand (it won’t be the last time Tintin is stranded in the desert).  When, on page 27 Haddock fortifies his courage during a firefight with bandits with a drink, the bottle is shot and four panels of him shouting “REVENGE!” then turns into the first of many, many, many creative and persistent stream of insults.  This first one (which, for a moment makes you actually think it scares off the bandits): “Swine!  Jellyfish!  Tramps!  Troglodytes!  Toffee-noses!  Savages!  Aztecs!  Toads!  Carpet-sellers!  Iconoclasts!  Rats!  Ectoplasms!  Freshwater swabs!  Bashi-bazouks!  Cannibals!  Caterpillars!  Cowards!  Baboons!  Parasites!  Pockmarks!”  On page 42, we get the first instance of the Captain screaming “Blistering barnacles!”  (they aren’t yet blue and they aren’t yet billions of them).  Later, when one of the criminals tries to take his bottle of wine, his insults last for three pages and range from “Politician!” to “Hydrocarbon!” to “Liquorice!”  You can find a whole list of all the ones Haddock uses over the years here.  A full section is devoted here to the history and use of the insults.  This is the most creative use, actually creating a generator that will have Haddock insult you.  At the end of the book, having firmly established his drunkenness and his insults, Hergé then adds in one little extra bit about the captain, when he is taken ill on the final page after drinking a glass of water.

As a kid, when reading the books, because Ottokar was my favorite, I wanted to make it as a film.  But in many ways, this is the place to start, as it introduces Haddock.  Indeed, it is the place where many people start.  It was the first Tintin book published in the U.S., it was the first made into a film (see below), it was made into a television episode in 1957, was the first book adapted for the 1991 animated series and aspects of the plot were used in the Spielberg film (again, see below).

The Shooting Star
(L’Étoile mystérieuse)

Serialized:  1941-42
Album:  1947
EL Edition:  1961
American Edition:  1978
Editions I Own:

• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (LCC 77-90969)

The Adventure:  With politics still off the board, this adventure would become a bit of a foray into Science Fiction.  Unfortunately, it kind of gets away from what makes the Tintin books so good.  It is definitely one of the weakest of the adventures.

It begins with a meteorite passing close to the planet, with a big chunk crashing in the ocean (which should have caused a tsunami, but never mind).  An expedition sets out to find the meteorite and claim what is supposedly a new element on it.  Tintin is teamed once again with Haddock, who has found sobriety since the end of the last adventure and actually does a fairly good job manning the helm of the ship.  In fact, Haddock doesn’t even show up until page 14 and it almost seems as if he wouldn’t be there if Tintin didn’t need a ship for the adventure.  Joining him as well is the latest in a line of eccentric professors, this one the director of the observatory that first noticed the meteorite.  He will be just about the last of this trend, as soon there will be a permanent eccentric scientist to bring along on the adventures.

Most of the adventure is taken up with the sea voyage (over half the 62 pages) and there is some nice humor involved in it, especially in the scene where Hergé shows the various academics along on the voyage having trouble adjusting to eating while onboard.

But once Tintin lands on the meteorite, things get pretty strange over the course of the last dozen pages.  A strange mushroom (see the cover) starts growing up and then explodes.  Then the apple core that Tintin throws away from his supper turns into a tree.  That’s followed by the spider that was in his supper box also getting large and a suspenseful sequence follows.  All of this is a bit surreal, which worked fine with drug hallucinations in Cigars, but seems just weird in this adventure.

This book has, I believe, the first use of Haddock’s oft-used phrase “Thundering typhoons!” when he finds out a rival ship has launched ahead of them.  We also get the first “Billions of blue blistering barnacles!” when he slips on spaghetti left behind after Snowy has devoured the lunch for the crew.  When Snowy eats the sausages for the crew earlier in the book we get a cultural difference – in the original, the sausages are to go with sauerkraut while in the U.S. version it’s the much more palatable mashed potatoes.

This has always seemed to me one of the weakest of the adventures, but that’s okay, because we’re just about to go straight into one of the best.

The Secret of the Unicorn
(Le Secret de la Licorne)

Serialized:  1942-43
Album:  1943
EL Edition:  1959
American Edition:  1974
Editions I Own:

• Children’s Digest, January 1977
• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (LCC 73-21250)

The Adventure:  This book (along with the next) is one of my brother John’s favorites and it’s easy to see why.  It was reportedly also one of Hergé’s favorites and its sequel is still the best-selling Tintin book of all-time.  There’s a reason that it would be the basis for the Spielberg film.

First of all, it is simply a fun adventure.  It is a mystery (actually a double mystery – there is first the mystery of who has been stealing the wallets of everyone in town, and then the bigger mystery of who ransacks Tintin’s flat to try and steal a model ship that he was planning to give to Captain Haddock).  But it is also a more old-fashioned adventure.  The ship that Tintin finds at the street market is the Unicorn.  It turns out the Unicorn is also the ship captained by an ancestor of Haddock’s, Sir Francis Haddock.  To help set the stage for the direct sequel (while The Blue Lotus had continued the story of Cigars, they were both also self-contained stories – these two stories and the two other two-parters that follow really require you read them together), Haddock gives us the story of the battle between his ancestor and the pirate Red Rackham that ends with the destruction of the Unicorn and the sinking of the treasure.

You gotta love the expression of the pirate who’s just been shot.

The 12 pages that cover Sir Francis’ adventures are some of the more beautiful work that Hergé has done.  We get the glorious colors and sights of a 17th century ship out on the ocean.  When the pirates arrive, we get a thrilling battle, made more interesting by Haddock’s energetic re-telling of the adventure, complete with bringing his ship-wheel chandelier down upon his head.  I especially love the main panel of Sir Francis fighting single-handedly against the pirates and the hilarious look on the pirate who’s just been shot by Sir Francis.

But just discovering that there is a treasure only makes for part of this tale.  To find the treasure, first Tintin and Haddock must put together the three clues that will tell them where to find it.  To do that, they have to solve the mystery of who has been trying to kill people involved in the hunt and who has been stealing the wallets of just about everyone in town.  Eventually, this will lead to Tintin being kidnapped and that kidnapping brings on one of the most important developments in the Tintin adventures.

Tintin has been kidnapped by the Bird brothers, two antique dealers who have learned about the treasure and want to find the other clues.  When they kidnap Tintin, he is brought to their palatial estate out in the country, filled with antiques (another glorious illustration, on the right, is so nice that it has been made into a 1000 piece puzzle and if you don’t think I’m getting that, then you don’t know me very well).  Though it will take until the end of the next book, this is Marlinspike Hall, and will be the jumping off point for the future Tintin adventures.  It even comes supplied with Nestor, a faithful butler (not knowing at this point that he is a faithful butler for crooks) who will become a major supporting character in the later Tintin adventures.

The Secret of the Unicorn works so well because while it hearkens back to the earlier Tintin books with the mystery, it is also a good old-fashioned adventure, one that will continue in the sequel.  From that viewpoint, it’s easy to see why the second half of the story is the #1 selling Tintin book of all-time.

Red Rackham’s Treasure
(Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge)

Serialized:  1943
Album:  1944
EL Edition:  1959
American Edition:  1974
Editions I Own:

• Joy Street-Little, Brown softcover  (0316358347)

The Adventure:  As I said above, this adventure really is an adventure.  There’s no villain in this story – unless you want to count nosy newsmen, drunken sharks or belligerent birds.  You just get a fun hunt for the treasure.  And, of course, it probably has the best-looking cover of all the Tintin books.  You get the glorious sea life, with the jellyfish and the fish, the seaweed all around the shark shaped submarine.  It’s a glorious visual image and sets the stage for the book.  Ironically, this was the last of the originally available Tintin books that I bought.  I only bought it after I had pulled all the Tintin books from my family’s house and remembered that, because we had the old Children’s Digest version of this one, it had never been purchased in book form.  I finally bought it at Tower Books in East Portland in 1995 (yes, my memory really does work like that).

What could be a better welcome than insulting parrots?

This book picks up exactly where the last one left off.  In fact, in the final panel of Secret of the Unicorn, Tintin breaks through the fourth wall, telling the readers they’ll finish the adventure in Red Rackham’s Treasure.  So, they’re off to the Caribbean to find a small little uninhabited island (well, it is inhabited by birds, and they managed to pick up some of the more colorful Haddock language over time thanks to Sir Francis having been stranded there for a while).  They’ll find a statue on the island and evidence of Sir Francis, but no treasure.  Instead, it’s under the sea for that, and into the fascinating one-man submarine.  A quick note about that – Snowy gets pulled along in the submarine but this is kind of the start of the silliness of having Snowy along.  He’s a great dog and he’s loyal but there will be so many places that it’s just ridiculous to have him and he becomes a hinderance.  I don’t mind it personally but I know some readers do.

Now, on to the submarine.  It’s vitally important for two reasons.  First, it’s a great visual and it also provides them with the means to explore the sea (with Snowy – he can’t go down when Tintin is in the diving suit).  But second, it arrives because of the new character who wants to help.  That’s Professor Cuthbert Calculus, the important third cog of the wheel, whose inventiveness and cluelessness will be played off against Tintin’s calm rational demeanor and the Captain’s excitability.  It does mean that Thompson and Thomson are now generally reduced to just the site gags (including their attempts to blend in with clothing).  In this one, it includes them getting their hats stuck on their heads (for the second book in a row).  But that makes for a good gag, because it’s when the hats are being removed that Calculus (Tournesal in the original French) arrives.  Calculus, as he will point out, is a little hard of hearing (he’s basically stone deaf).  Haddock screams so loud when wanting to know his name that the hat comes right off Thompson’s head, a great little sight gag in the background.  Calculus’s lack of hearing will continue to make for great fun in future installments (especially the moments when he actually does hear things), but it is his intelligence that will make him such a vital part of the adventures.  Calculus is the summation of what Hergé has been working on for several years: the epitome of the absent-minded professor that had seen earlier versions in Cigars of the Pharoah, King Ottokar’s Sceptre and The Shooting Star.

But the most important moments come under the sea.  Some of them are dramatic (when Tintin is threatened by a shark and he manages to get him to swallow a bottle of 17th Century rum and the shark gets drunk and then falls asleep).  Some of them are amusing (Haddock finds the first bottle of rum, then drinks it and dives back in without putting the helmet back on).  But the best of them are just amazing.  Many of the most amazing visual moments in the whole of the adventures take place under the ocean in this book, whether it’s when Tintin is in the submarine, or whether it’s when he goes back under in the diving suit.  The images and the colors really come to life.

The end of the book is another turning point in the series, playing off the end of the previous adventure.  Marlinspike Hall, the stomping grounds of the villainous Bird brothers has gone up for sale.  But, thanks to documents found in the ship, they now know that it’s Haddock’s family estate.  The hall is purchased (thanks to Calculus, helping to explain why he will live there after this adventure) and the later adventures will generally begin from there.  It’s a wonderful hall and we finally get the great establishing shot that shows us what it really looks like (it’s based on a real chateau and in Michael Farr’s book there’s an image of a brochure of the real chateau with Hergé’s pencil drawing of Haddock and Tintin at the bottom of the picture, clearly the plan for the illustration on the right).

The Seven Crystal Balls
(Les Sept Boules de Cristal)

Serialized:  1943-44, 46-48
Album:  1948
EL Edition:  1962
American Edition:  1975
Editions I Own:

• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (0316358401)

The Adventure:  My brother John clearly likes the double-long stories, as this and the next book are listed among his three favorites.

As Michael Farr would point out in his Companion, The Secret of the Unicorn had been the start of a new life for Tintin.  While there were villains, the adventure was more the primary thing than solving a crime.  Snowy had become more of an add-on than the sidekick with Haddock filling that role.  Thompson and Thomson were reduced to walk-ons for humorous effect while Calculus would take on the third role.  The adventures were moving from Labrador Road to Marlinspike Hall.  All of that sets the stage for The Seven Crystal Balls, and this is an adventure unlike any that had been done before.  Cigars of the Pharoah had been a complete story with a sequel that followed the next adventure but was also self-contained.  The Secret of the Unicorn had a kind of conclusion but also directly lead into Red Rackham’s Treasure.  But The Seven Crystal Balls really doesn’t so much conclude as simply stop.  Because the adventure wasn’t written towards a conclusion at the end of the adventure, the pace is much different.  How surprising it must have been for the original readers to get to the end and realize that there was really no climax, but just a pause as we change locations from Marlinspike (whether it be in Belgium or in England) and Peru.

This adventure returns to the ideas first presented in Cigars, the violated tomb that brings a curse upon the explorers.  Except, while in the first case, it was really a front for drug-running, here there are much more supernatural powers at work.  The various people involved in the expedition that discovered an Incan tomb in Peru are all falling into comas.  Nearby is always found the remains of crystal, as if a ball had been smashed near them, causing them to fall into the comas.  Last up is Professor Taragon, a friend of Calculus who is a fun one-time character.  He’s jovial and enormous (with either the name or nickname Hercules) and his house is magnificently illustrated.  While visiting him, a burst of ball-lightning comes down the chimney, causing great disorder (it’s on the cover) and exploding the remains of a mummy that Taragon has been holding onto.  It is one of the more memorable scenes in all of Tintin history.

At the same time, Tintin and Haddock run into General Alcazar, the former leader of a South American country who has once again been deposed by General Tapioca.  This, aside from providing a fun aside (especially when Haddock gets a bull’s head stuck on him backstage) links to the story through Alcazar’s assistant, a full-blooded Inca by the name of Chiquito.  He is wary of Tintin and near the end, when Tintin meets Alcazar again, he discovers that Chiquito has disappeared.  In between, Calculus has discovered the jewels of the Incan mummy and put on a bracelet, has disappeared, a man with a gun has shot at Tintin and Haddock and Calculus has, apparently, been spirited out of the country.  It makes for a fascinating mystery, not the least because Hergé doesn’t necessarily bother to provide scientific explanations for some of the events that are going on, including the fact that all the expedition members who are in comas wake up and have massive seizures at the same time everyday.

This adventure was during a rough period in the author’s life.  He was almost in trouble with the Nazis for making drawings of the house that he used as the model for Taragon’s.  When Belgium was liberated, he was arrested as a collaborator and forbidden to publish.  The adventure thus had a two year gap in its serialization (coming just after Tintin sees the expedition members having their seizures) before it was restarted in the brand-new Tintin magazine after Hergé was finally cleared to publish again.  The entire adventure, complete with the next, was published as one under the title of The Temple of the Sun, but was split into two different adventures for the albums.  It was a strange bit when we first read it, because we had the serialization of this adventure in Children’s Digest, but we didn’t get Prisoners of the Sun until I got it for either my birthday or Christmas, sometime after we moved to California in 1981.  So we waited a long time for the conclusion, but as the conclusion was the first Tintin book I ever owned, these two have always had a special place for me.

Prisoners of the Sun
(Le Temple du Soleil)

Serialized:  1946-48
Album:  1949
EL Edition:  1962
American Edition:  1975
Editions I Own:

• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (LCC 75-7897)
• Little, Brown softcover  (9780316358439)

The Adventure:  There are lots of places that people want to visit that I have no interest in.  I have no interest in Jerusalem or China and minimal interest in Japan or India (except the Taj Mahal).  But I have long had an interest in going to Peru and this book is a primary reason why (later increased by the opening shots of Machu Picchu in Aguirre).

Why wouldn’t I want to visit?  Look at what Tintin and the Captain see over the course of this adventure.  On page 11 they are still on the beach.  By page 13, they are on a train up in the mountains (their train is sabotaged, leading to a hair-raising escape).  On page 21, they are adventuring higher up in the mountains (they are still looking for Professor Calculus, who is drugged and has been sentenced to death).  They have their second encounter with a llama, who spits in Haddock’s face (in Aladdin, I always forget it’s the camel that spits because this book imprinted on me at a young age that llamas will spit).  By page 30, we’re high up in the mountains and we have snow and even an avalanche (after a particularly powerful sneeze from Haddock).  By page 35, they’ve descended into the jungle.  This jungle involves mosquitos, snakes, a tapir, anteaters and a river full of alligators.  Then they’re back into the mountains, complete with crossing a waterfall on a rope on page 41.  Behind that waterfall is a long ascent up through caves that eventually lead to the Temple of the Sun.

I’ll stop here and mention art direction.  In a film, art direction is the look of the film – the sets and designs.  There really isn’t such a thing as art direction in a book, but this feels like it.  There are glorious sets and colors in this adventure, from what they find in the tomb (see the cover) to the the interiors of the temple itself.  There is also a number of vivid dreams that Tintin has that are beautifully illustrated.  The whole adventure springs to life with amazing life and color.  Hergé did his research and it really shows.

This adventure brings back a lot of childhood memories.  I remember playing the computer game Aztec, where you went into a tomb and faced snakes and alligators.  It was inspired, of course, by Raiders of the Lost Ark, but what it always made me think of was this book.  There is also the llama, of course.  I mention that again because, after Haddock has been spit on twice and had his beard bitten, he finally gets revenge at the end of the book, providing a nice humorous ending.

Land of Black Gold
(Tintin au pays de l’or noir)

Serialized:  1939-40, 1948-50
Album:  1950
EL Edition:  1972
American Edition:  1975
Editions I Own:

• Little Brown, 3 Adventures in 1 Volume  (0316358169)
• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (0316358444)

The Adventure:  This adventure deals with socio-political events and, as a result, was the interrupted adventure, even more so than The Seven Crystal Balls.  After fighting the proto-fascists in King Ottokar’s Sceptre, Tintin was back off to the desert, this time to solve the mystery of cars that kept exploding.  In the desert he once again found Dr. Müller, the German who had been responsible for the forgery scheme in The Black Island.  This adventure was also dealing with the concept of oil, specifically European oil companies and their place in the Middle East.  Hergé was almost half-way through the adventure when the Germans invaded Belgium and the newspaper that the Tintin adventures were published in was shut down.

After the war was over and Tintin had gone through several more adventures, Hergé was thinking of sending Tintin to space.  He was undergoing a great deal of stress in his personal life and his wife suggested, to lighten the stress, that he instead return to an adventure that was already half-completed.  Hergé did just that, but returned all the way to the beginning and started the adventure again, this time in color.  But he had to make a few changes.  I am reminded of the Dr Who serial Kinda, when the Doctor’s companion Nyssa was not envisioned as still being on the TARDIS, so she makes a brief appearance in the first episode and then is back for the fourth, with her passed out on the TARDIS in between – brief appearances to remind us that she’s there, but otherwise out of the action so they wouldn’t have to revise and write her in.  This adventure has begun before the character of Captain Haddock had been introduced.  Yet, Haddock was now the main companion of Tintin.  What to do?  Well, on the top of page three, Haddock is mobilized in response to the situation and is essentially removed from the story for almost its entire length, popping back in at the end to help rescue Tintin (he keeps trying to explain to Tintin how he has shown up in the nick of time but his explanation keeps getting interrupted and, amusingly, we never find out).  We also get a brief mention of Calculus at the end when he helps solve the problem.  But, this is essentially an old Tintin adventure with a slight revision to make it fit into the changes that Hergé had built in during the years between.

As mentioned, Tintin heads off to the Middle East to investigate why cars have been blowing up.  He finds himself in a scheme to push one oil company out of the (fictional) Middle Eastern country of Khemed.  In the course of the adventure he will meet the Emir of Khemed.  The Emir will become yet another friend of Tintin, but the much more important character is his son Abdullah.  He is the perfect picture of a rich, spoiled child.  The only thing he cares about are having fun and his actions cause problems for both Tintin, and once he shows up, even more so for Haddock.  But it is also Abdullah’s ink gun that provides a humorous ending to what looks, for a second, like a tragic conclusion.  The scenes where Tintin first meets Abdullah are ones I vividly remember from the original Children’s Digest version (the reason I have an ISBN edition of this book is because it was another we put off buying because we had the Children’s Digest version) is Tintin running into a room after him on page 50 was the end of one of the CD installments.  Abdullah (and his father) will return in a later adventure and cause even more problems for Tintin and Haddock.

With yet another adventure in the desert we get more of Hergé’s wonderful desert illustrations.  In this one, mirages play a major part of the story (this adventure is specifically where I first learned about what a mirage is).  The Thomsons, driving endlessly around the desert, keep coming upon mirages, except for two major exceptions that provide a great deal of comic relief, including when they manage to drive into what appears to be the only date tree in the entire desert.  At the end of the adventure, the Thomsons will also swallow some pills that will cause some very humorous effects (see the cover above) that will also return after they get to the moon.

It is perhaps appropriate that Tintin returns to the desert in this adventure since it is a return to the old school adventures.  It is the last adventure that really doesn’t make use of Haddock (it’s the last in which Haddock doesn’t appear on the cover) and it returns him to a locale where he had previously adventured.  It’s that final farewell to the original Tintin before he really settles into his life with Haddock and Calculus.

Destination Moon
(Objectif Lune)

Serialized:  1950-52
Album:  1953
EL Edition:  1959
American Edition:  1976
Editions I Own:

• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (LCC 76-13279)
• Little Brown, 3 Adventures in 1 Volume  (0316358169)

The Adventure:  This book (combined with the next) is one of my brother John’s favorites.  I have the old family copy with my brother Kelly’s name written in it.  The strange thing is that the lists on the back of the books would seem to imply that we got the second part of this adventure before we got the first, but who knows, although we have the First American Edition of this book (see the Introduction about the Order).

Destination Moon starts in an interesting way – Tintin and Haddock are just returning from somewhere only to find that Calculus left several weeks before and has now telegraphed them to come join him in the fictional country of Syldavia that we first visited in King Ottokar’s Sceptre.  The first several pages are taken up with the mystery of what is going on (Calculus promised to write but didn’t, Tintin and Haddock are escorted once they land in Syldavia, dealing with numerous checkpoints) and when we finally see Calculus, he’s about to be bludgeoned with a hammer.  But it turns out Calculus is wearing a “multiplex” helmet for use on the moon.  Because, almost two decades before Apollo 11, Calculus is headed to the moon.  But so are Tintin, Haddock and Snowy.

A fascinating upside down map of Europe in the background gives us a rough idea of Syldavia’s location in Central Europe.

Of all the adventures, this might be the one with the most impressive research by Hergé.  No one had yet gone to the moon; indeed, the Apollo missions didn’t even exist as a concept yet.  And this rocket was being powered by atomic energy just a few years after Hiroshima made the atomic energy a new and terrifying concept for the world.  But the detail that Hergé goes into in this story is amazing.  There is a small scale model of the rocket that is sent up as a test (and destroyed when they realize it has been taken over by a foreign power).  We get detailed blueprints of the interior of the rocket (Hergé actually built a small model version to use while working on the story).  The spacesuits look similar to what the Apollo suits would eventually look like.  The end of the story even has the crushing power that pushes down upon astronauts when sent into space.

Whatever you do, don’t tell Calculus he’s acting the goat.

In spite of the grand science-fiction aspect of the story, there are still the hallmarks of a traditional Tintin adventure.  Thompson and Thomson show up (referred to by Snowy as “the Thomson twins”) dressed in Greek costumes that they think are Syldavian.  Tintin, suspecting attempted sabotage, hikes into the mountains, has a narrow escape from some bears and is shot (this was particularly suspenseful, as after he was shot, Hergé went on an extended leave and left the story there with his readers anxiously awaiting the conclusion).  We also get a great bit of humor that leads up the first image of the actual rocket (and the cover) when Haddock, upset with Calculus, accuses him of “acting the goat”.  This sets Calculus off, as he scares off the security guards and drags Haddock and Tintin out to see the actual rocket and it’s fun to see this tiny little man scaring the crap out of everyone.  This ends with Calculus getting a bout of amnesia and some more humor as Haddock tries to frighten him back to his senses.

The story ends with two bits of real suspense.  The first is that we now know who the villain is (it’s Colonel Jorgen, the traitor from King Ottokar’s Sceptre) but we don’t know who the traitor is inside the project that is helping him.  The second is that we end with the actual lift-off.  The lift-off is pretty realistic, especially since no human had yet travelled in space and all of this was just theoretical.  But the crushing force knocks all of the astronauts unconscious and that is where we leave off, with the rocket hurtling towards the moon (no decade of exploration between the first time in space and walking on the moon for our adventurers) and no response from anyone inside.

Explorers on the Moon
(On a marché sur la Lune)

Serialized:  1952-53
Album:  1954
EL Edition:  1959
American Edition:  1976
Editions I Own:

• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (LCC 76-13297)
• Little Brown, 3 Adventures in 1 Volume  (0316358169)

The Adventure:  The Secret of the Unicorn had a conclusion, but to find out about the treasure you needed to read the next adventure.  The Seven Crystal Balls had a bit of a cliff-hanger with Calculus kidnapped, but Tintin and Haddock were fine and in pursuit and the next adventure began rather casually with them having arrived in Peru.  But Destination Moon had ended with the major characters all unconscious, hurtling towards the moon with ground control sending them signals and getting no response.  Even the first page of Explorers on the Moon doesn’t give us even a sign of the characters.  It’s the next page where Snowy wakes first and then wakes Tintin up.  They have made it into space.

But the unexpected comes right away, with the hatch opening and Thompson and Thomson climbing up, having mistaken the early morning launch of the rocket with an afternoon launch.  This immediately brings into question whether there is enough oxygen to last the trip given the extra passengers.  But then we get into the adventure of being in space, including Thomson accidentally turning off the artificial gravity, leading to one of the most memorable scenes in all of Tintin’s adventures, where Haddock and his whisky start floating.  Before they even get to the moon, Tintin also has to rescue a floating Haddock from becoming a satellite of an asteroid.  Then, just to keep things light again, the detectives have a relapse of their hair condition from the end of Land of Black Gold with their hair growing faster than Haddock can cut it.

The tension mounts again as they land on the moon, with the crushing power of the rocket pushing them all back into unconsciousness and the haunting image of Snowy, the only one awake and “howling for the dead”.  But the landing is successful and, over a decade before Neil Armstrong, Tintin makes his own fateful steps: “This is it!  I’ve walked a few stops!  For the first time in the history of mankind there is an EXPLORER ON THE MOON!”  While the idea of going to the moon had been explored before, it was now up to Hergé to create the landscape itself.  The desolate landscape isn’t so different from the desert that he had done so well before, but he also gives us new vistas, including a sheet of ice and a glorious cave.

But we can’t forget that there is a villainous plot and accidents soon start happening and eventually, Colonel Jorgen is revealed and starts to take command of the situation.  Tintin and his friends will come out of that okay, but it is a close thing and it means there is even less oxygen to go around for the return trip (they already cut the trip short and abandon certain things on the moon to save time).  The tension is heightened all the way until the last page, when the rocket has safely returned and Haddock is lying on a cot with an oxygen tank hooked up.  But this is Captain Haddock and all it takes is a mention of the word whisky and he rips off his mask and is ready and raring to go for the next adventure.

This actually won’t be the last excursion into science-fiction for Tintin, though this one sticks closer to the science than the fiction and it does a first-rate job of it.  This adventure really does give me the longing to be an explorer, to set off for places that no one has ever set foot upon.  It manages to perfectly balance some of the most tense moments in all of the adventures with some great moments of humor and my brother is right, it really is one of the best adventures.

Note:  This book was originally given as a Christmas gift to my brother John in 1977.

The Calculus Affair
(L’Affaire Tournesol)

Serialized:  1954-56
Album:  1956
EL Edition:  1960
American Edition:  1976
Editions I Own:

• Little, Brown softcover  (0316358479)

The Adventure:  From science fiction we head into a Cold War suspense-thriller.  Without actually making use of America or the Soviets, we still get an idea of two foreign powers fighting over a potential weapon.  The countries in this case are the fictional ones previously visited in King Ottokar’s Sceptre: Syldavia and Borduria.  But, in an even-handed way, both sides are presented rather shadily here.

Things start out with a bit of humor (a soon to be recurring gag of the phone number for Marlinspike being confused with the number for Cutts the Butcher) and then a bit of mystery as glass starts shattering all over the place.  We get a little hint of what is going on when, twice, before the glass shatters, Snowy starts howling.  But by then things are getting more mysterious, with someone shooting at Calculus (he’s, as usual, oblivious, even though there is a hole in his hat) and someone lying shot on the grounds.  Calculus departs for a conference in Geneva and when Tintin and Haddock inspect his laboratory they are attacked by a man hiding there.  That leads to them following Calculus to Geneva, and then across quite a bit of Europe.

Hergé is equal in the way he approaches the suspense here.  Though Syldavia has been an ally (Tintin saved the king, after all, and they sponsored the space program in the previous adventures), they are trying to get hold of Calculus and his invention as much as the (more villainous) Bordurians.  Everyone wants to make certain they get this weapon (Calculus has invented a machine that uses sound-waves and could actually destroy buildings).  The suspense doesn’t mean we are without humor.  There’s an amusing scene where Tintin and Haddock have rescued a colleague of Calculus and while Tintin is getting information, Haddock just keeps prodding him about his wine, until the house explodes (don’t worry – Haddock drinks the wine after they are rescued before he passes out).  The Thompsons also show up, to see Haddock and Tintin in the hospital, but then fall on the newly waxed floors and end up in beds themselves.

In the end, we get a daring chase to rescue Calculus and get him out of Borduria.  That involves a car with a detached top, a crash, stealing a tank and getting across the border.  It’s exciting from start to finish, one of the most suspenseful of all the adventures.  It hearkens back to King Ottokar’s Sceptre, except updating the suspense for the Cold War.

Note:  This is another adventure my family originally had in Children’s Digest and another that was originally printed under another title (“The Calculus Invention”), perhaps because a children’s magazine decided that “affair” wasn’t a good word to have in a title.

The Red Sea Sharks
(Coke en stock)

Serialized:  1956-58
Album:  1958
EL Edition:  1960
American Edition:  1976
Editions I Own:

• Atlantic-Little, Brown softcover  (LCC 76-13278)
• Little, Brown softcover  (9780316358484)

The Adventure:  This adventure is the favorite of my nephew Luke.  I have also long been a big fan, partially because it’s one of the books that always belonged to me, but also because it has a nice balance between humor and the adventure and because the adventure has continued to stay relevant through the years.  From the Cold War, we move back to the Middle East in a story that deals with illegal arms shipments, the battle over oil and modern slavery.

This is a story that presages Flight 714 in its return of a number of characters from previous adventures.  Hergé had been reading Balzac’s The Human Comedy and liked the way that characters returned into it from the earlier parts of it.  First, there is General Alcazar, who shows up in a Dickensian-like coincidence just after Tintin and Haddock discuss him.  After meeting Alcazar, the two return to Marlinspike to discover Abdullah, the bratty child of the Emir is now there, complete with a retinue.  He has been sent to Tintin and Haddock for safekeeping because a revolution has displaced his father from the rule of his country.  After Thompson and Thomson show up (being effective at their jobs for once), Tintin looks into Alcazar’s actions, which include buying aircraft from Dawson, the man who ran in the International Settlement in The Blue Lotus.  With Abdullah driving them nuts, Tintin and Haddock head off to Khemed to help the Emir.

That gets the main plot going.  Delayed by a timebomb on their plane, Tintin and Haddock arrive and seek help from Senhor Oliveira.  Meanwhile they are hunted by patrols (with some humor thrown in about Haddock’s snoring).  Muller is back as a villain, in a small cameo.  Then Tintin and Haddock finally reach the Emir in a scene that has always fascinated me.  The Emir is hiding in what, essentially, is the Treasury in Petra.  When I first read the book, I was just fascinated by the idea of buildings carved out of the rock.  I had no idea that it was based on a real place.  It would be several years later, when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was released, that I realized that this was a real place, a magnificent work of architecture carved from nature.  Though I am hesitant to travel to the Middle East, there are few places in the world that I would want to see more than the Treasury at Petra.  It has a majestic beauty that was clear to me from this first encounter and is more clear anytime I look at a photograph.

But it’s after seeing the Emir and escaping to the Red Sea that the main part of the plot really comes into focus.  After narrowly missing meeting Rastapopoulos, they end up on a boat captained by Allan, Haddock’s old first mate.  It turns out (after Allan and his men flee the boat during a fire) that the boat is full of Africans who have been kidnapped to be sold as slaves.  Coming a long way from his early colonial outlook on Africa, here Hergé is trying to make a statement about the ongoing slave trade in the world.  Also involved in this is the one new character, Skut, a pilot who they befriend after he tries to kill them and who will be one of the numerous characters returning in Flight 714.

The tension is heightened on the boat, with a storm, with the fire, with a broken radio, with a u-boat trying to sink them, with a frogman trying to blow them up.  But in the end, of course, things work out and they return for one final returning character, the obnoxious Jolyon Wagg (who had been introduced in the previous adventure) making life a pain for them.

Tintin in Tibet
(Tintin au Tibet)

Serialized:  1958-59
Album:  1960
EL Edition:  1962
American Edition:  1975
Editions I Own: