Ideas on Screen

...Written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the film is a showcase production on the grandest of scales, with color photography by Christopher Challis that intends the look of pageantry, rather than realism...

...I'll Cry Tomorrow, about Lillian Roth...

...Here is played out the last drama of a man on an edge...

...He is transformed from a monster into a man—and brought to human defeat...

...Rod Steiger, again applying the self-projective Actors' Studio "method" to the portrayal of a megalomaniac, is an erstwhile omnipotent tycoon, running away from the British police who are seeking to arrest him for fraud and embezzlement...

...Her qualities are far too wholesomely physical—even if she had the range as an actress— for her to be able to wring all the nuances of lying, stealing, drinking, dope-taking, and morbidly ambitious bitching around out of the role that was written by Daniel Fuchs, Sonya Levien, and John Fante...

...The striving for glory without politics, however, misses at least one crucial point in the affair, that is forgotten only at the cost of inadvertently admiring the politics, after all...

...and Mexico are joined and divided by a bridge and border officials...

...The previous melodrama of his incognito flight across the U.S., during which he demonstrates that he will do anything for his own ends, accentuates his inability to act now...

...The British may properly admire the man Langsdorff, if they like...

...II When Gregory La Cava first made My Man Godfrey (Universal Pictures), in 1936, it was in a style of "screwball" comedy that had something to do satirically with the world of the time...

...The unsought for loyalty of a dog at last reveals his essential need for something to love, as his love for himself vanishes with his power over others...

...Langsdorff may have special honors because he lost to the British at sea—in one of the last major sea battles decided by naval gunnery, in which echoes of Drake, Nelson, and Beatty could be heard more easily than in the subsequently dominating roar of carrier aircraft, or the bubbly wakes of submarine torpedoes...

...But it is gradually clear that the fugitive is his own prisoner, in this town on the barest edge of any freedom and belonging—as he can no longer choose even to surrender, although he has long ago given up all that really matters...

...Out of the elements of melodrama, and the existentialist preoccupation with man's situation on the edges of nothingness, there is fashioned a film that is considerably more than melodrama, and something of a morality...

...But it is even more puzzling why so much trouble is being taken to make them unattractive...

...A movie biography of a star whose career splashed so sordidly and point-lessly might be expected to be candied into something sweetly unreal, with no offense intended to the dead— and more particularly to the living, who are able to go to court...

...and The Joker Is Wild, about the night club comedian Joe E. Lewis...

...And his impeccable service as butler no longer makes any point about true aristocracy under the veneer of poverty—as the difference between servant and served is no longer a matter of wealth or privilege or opportunity...

...There was always a line beyond which Western dignity, morality, and the drive for individual expression must not go...

...Not much of the Eagels sensation in Rain on the Broadway stage is shown— which is just as well, as what we do see is likely to evoke too easy a condescension towards what was thought sensational in another era...

...Why their lives deserve dramatization in the first place may be dubious...

...Most curiously, the now perfect butler, played with easy aplomb by David Niven without taxing a tenth of his talents, is not an erstwhile millionaire—as William Powell had been in the old film...

...The Eddy Duchin Story, about the late popular pianist...

...Without the pervading presence of the Depression, the same story, touched up for today, makes for no satire, little comedy, and less sense...

...Ships Ajax, Exeter, and Achilles and Admiral Graf Spee ("played" with sufficient resemblance by the U.S...

...The Seven Little Foys, about Eddie Foy, Sr...

...In the world after the second World War, characteristically delimited by the existentialists' clamorous vacancies, the fashionable edge of everything seems to have moved—to North Africa, somewhat in the old manner, but especially to Central America...

...The film makers, in fact, have taken some trouble, Hollywood style, to specify the locale, going carefully to places in Spain to find just the right atmosphere of the Rio Grande country, where the U.S...

...Hitler may not be as respectably magnificent, as yet, as is Napoleon...

...Kim Novak is a lovely girl, decorating the screen with a sleepy sensuality that appears to be awaiting affectionate awakening...

...But Rommel, Canaris, a Luftwaffe pilot named von Werra who successfully escaped back to Germany—and Langsdorff, captain of the Graf Spee, are apparently apolitical enough to be admired in popular books and films...

...The portrayal of actual people, by Peter Finch, Anthony Quayle, Bernard Lee, John Gregson, and Ian Hunter, is carefully heroic...

...It should be noted that the safeguard clause printed on the release material for the film virtuously proclaims that "all events in this photoplay are based on fact or fiction...

...But they really demean their accomplishment, instead of heralding it, by seeming to admire Langs-dorff's enterprise—from beginning to end wasteful and futile...

...And the signs of effort are the more egregious as it is remembered that the earlier version gained much of its wacky lilt from La Cava's deservedly famous sense for improvising as he went along...

...The screenplay by Guy Elmes and Denis Freeman properly interprets the intention of Greene's melodrama as moral...

...For the rest of her career, from beginning to end, what is presented, by Producer-Director George Sidney, is pure hog-wash, with only the faintest odor of actual events to entice those following the current nostalgia for the 1920s—although it smells badly enough in its own right...

...Ill Of all the varieties of "The (Somebody) Story" films, the treatments of show business figures seem to have the least connection with actuality— perhaps because the actuality of show business itself is devoted to make believe, and perhaps because performers are relatively uninteresting except when they are performing, and so their lives have to be fictionalized in order to be playable...

...The account of the pursuit of the powerful, elusive raider in the vast reaches of the South Atlantic is dramatically detailed, and the battle between H.M...

...The form seems to be a mutant of that special species of the new "adult" film that deals "frankly" with alcoholism and drug addiction— with more than a few characteristics of ancient soap operas and traditional appreciations of the penalties of sin...

...He surely was an outstanding commander, perhaps as respectful of the rights of neutrals and prisoners as military exigencies allowed—although the matter of his responsibility for the conditions of the prisoners aboard the auxiliary, the notorious Altmark, is unclear, even in this admiring movie, Pursuit of the Graf Spee (Rank Organization...

...There is a sad irony in this reminder of the distinction...

...He is still wealthy, with lands somewhere in Central Europe...

...The stress upon faults—such as compulsions towards the bottle, the needle, or various forms of cussedness in behavior—may be a device to provide some sort of drama in lives which are too truly colorful for legal safety, or too colorless for anything but gaudy depreciation...

...The image of the South or Central American village as the last frontier, the verge of nothingness, appears with wholly unmystical clarity in the British Across The Bridge (Rank Organization), based upon a story by Graham Greene...

...For another man, all opportunities and strategies are far from exhausted in the situation that is depicted...

...Less likely, but still remotely possible, would be a serious reenactment, attempting to penetrate a sadly self-destructive character, thereby possibly illuminating some of the noisy darknesses of the 1920s...

...In any case, it is a strange sort of ceremonial mythology that the movies have been creating in these films about show people...

...Director Henry Roster can little more than labor with what is now a laboriously artificial story...

...There, in the desert junkyards behind the skyscrapers of the titan of the New World, the rusting mechanisms and mechanized men of what must seem to be the last modernity come to the very edge, beyond which is nothing—for they have already passed through all possibility...

...And, for a nice exotic touch to attract the parvenu Americans, particularly the hoarsely, but perennially virginal June Allyson, he had even fought for the Axis during the war...

...The discovery of a down-and-out but perfect gentleman during a gossip-column version of a socialite game of "scavenger hunt" no longer makes the necessary social point...

...In the sun scorched Mexican village, he finds himself alone and powerless, his money useless, caught between legitimate surrender to Scotland Yard, represented by Bernard Lee, and the coldly rapacious obstructionism of the local police chief, brilliantly played by Noel Willman...

...And the myth making in Jeanne Eagels (Columbia Pictures) is strangest of all...

...There, for Joseph Conrad, for example, the ravelling fringes of European decadence touched the decadence of ancient civilizations, or the elemental jungle itself...

...The Graf Spee, like Gneisenau and Scharnhorst representing a vain-gloriously ersatz "pocket" fleet, was doomed from the start to be no more than a temporarily successful commerce raider—a stupid waste of power, no matter how many merchant vessels were taken...

...As the final battle itself proved, a ship that was really a cruiser with dreadnought armament could be gunned down by vessels of lesser power, if there were enough of them to force the turrets to be turned in different directions, and if they were directed with skillful determination...

...and a whole new sequence of events, improbable even as fiction, and more depressing than any realism, as its fabricators just as easily could have made up something else...

...But it may also be a sign of deepening currents of projective masochism, if we can assume that people in audiences associate with the film characters at all...

...IV The edge of the world for Europeans, in the romantic view of the novelists of an imperial age, used to be somewhere in central Africa, or southeast Asia, or the archipelagoes of the southern seas...

...And there was always a beyond of sloth, of easy acquiescence to the continual rot, of evil growing ever more habitual and seductively hopeless...

...A distinctive genre of glorification by disparagement has developed in the past four years or so, with Love Me Or Leave Me, about Ruth Etting...

...Director Ken Annakin and editor Alfred Roome create a rhythm in which the melodramatic climaxes steadily diminish, as the possibilities for action dwindle, and yet the intensity mounts...

...But it is an entirely new, consistently despicable personality who is presented in Jeanne Eagels—as well as a whole new cast of characters, phonies to begin with and bores to the bitter end...

...For the whole "pocket battleship" idea was essentially an expression of Nazi pathology...

...The Helen Morgan Story, about the late torch singer...

...However splendid the British victory actually was, the true event was a foregone triumph over an impossibly grandiose attempt to jerry-build a major navy—an attempt characterized by the same maniacal striving for the panoply of prestige to be found in so many other of the Germans' ruthless ingenuities...

...In fact, the form may be something of a reaction, scandal magazine style, to the usual statutory glorifications of movie biography...

...heavy cruiser Salem) is properly exciting—although at times somewhat self-consciously ceremonial...