Edward Copeland's Tangents

By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
Around my home base at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, the “Gangster Trilogy” is the nickname assigned to the three movies that for many kicked off the crime film genre in the 1930s: Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932). The first of these films starred Edward G. Robinson in what has commonly been called his “breakout” role, and Enemy did likewise for James Cagney…making both actors silver screen legends. Though there are variances in the plots of each movie, they feature a unifying theme of a racketeer who rises to the top of his profession stealing, killing and plundering all the way…only to achieve his comeuppance before the lights in the theater come up and the second show begins.

Scarface — which at the time of its release 80 years ago on this date was subtitled “The Shame of a Nation” — also made veteran stage actor Paul Muni a household name among theatergoers, though his starring turn in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang equally boosted his cinematic stature (he received an Oscar nomination for the role, and was soon signed to a long-term contract by Warner Bros.) as well. While both Caesar and Enemy were Warner releases, Scarface was an independent production funded by the deep-pocketed Howard Hughes (and released by United Artists) and as such it’s often the overlooked feature of the three. (At one time, the movie even was withdrawn from release and didn’t resurface until 1979.) If it’s remembered at all today, it’s probably because it was the inspiration for the 1983 Brian De Palma cult classic with Al Pacino as the lead. But there’s much more than meets the eye in the Howard Hawks-directed original. (Much more.)

Crime boss “Big” Louis Costillo (Harry J. Vegar) is gunned down by a mysterious assailant shortly after he’s thrown one of his impressive shindigs, and as dedicated police inspector Ben Guarino (C. Henry Gordon) has been instructed to round up the usual suspects, he brings in Antonio “Tony” Camonte (Muni) and Guino “Little Boy” Renaldo (George Raft), two lieutenants who work for one of Costillo’s rivals, Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins). Lovo gets both men released with writs of habeas corpus, and we learn that Tony was responsible for croaking Big Louie at the behest of Lovo. Johnny then informs his now second-in-command that they’ll be taking over the beer concession on the city’s South Side, selling illegal suds to speakeasies and squeezing out those bars owned by rival gangs. Lovo has specifically ordered the ambitious Camonte to leave the North Side operation (run by a hood named O’Brien) alone, because that’s just asking for trouble.

Tony’s stock starts to rise in the beer rackets, and he finds himself constantly trying to attract the attention of Poppy (Karen Morley), Lovo’s girlfriend. He’s also earned the disapproval of his mother (Inez Palange), who scolds Tony’s sister Francesca (Ann Dvorak) when she accepts her brother's “dirty” money. Tony has a rather unhealthy (and suggestively incestuous) relationship with “Cesca” to the point that he gets enraged when he sees her in the company of eligible men. Finally, the impatient Tony makes a bid for the North Side operation by having Little Boy “eliminate” O’Hara in his flower shop, and this stunt earns him both the disapproval of Lovo and the enmity of Gaffney (Boris Karloff), the hood who takes over for the deceased O’Hara. Tony and his men wage a full assault on Gaffney and the other gangs…and seeing that Camonte is consolidating his power, Lovo orders a hit on Tony. The attempt fails, and Tony (with the help of Little Boy) exacts swift retribution.

The forces of good beat their collective breasts at the lawlessness exhibited by Tony, who is now king of all he surveys, and despite increased pressure by the newspapers and law enforcement, there seems to be little that will stop him. His downfall comes when he shoots and kills Little Boy after finding him in the same apartment with Cesca, not knowing that they have secretly wed. Returning to his stronghold (his sidekick Angelo, played by Vince Barnett, also has been killed as a result) as the police close in, Cesca arrives to Tony's surprise; she had planned to kill him for revenge but now realizes that “you’re me and I’m you” and she agrees to hold them off, but she’s felled by a stray bullet, and tear gas drives the now abandoned Tony out of his hideout to face Guarino and two detectives downstairs. Camonte agrees to come quietly, but bolts from his captors at the last minute and ends up gunned down in the street.

W.R. Burnett, the author responsible for the novel on which Little Caesar was adapted, was one of several credited scribes who supplied dialogue and continuity for Scarface, along with Seton I. Miller and John Lee Mahin (with uncredited contributions from producer Hawks and Fred Pasley) — but the bulk of the screenplay was penned by old newspaper hand Ben Hecht, who adapted Armitage Trail’s 1929 novel of the same name. “Scarface” also was the well-known nickname of racketeer Al Capone, and concerned that the film might possibly portray him in a negative light, he supposedly sent a couple of his boys around to see Hecht, hoping to discourage him from finishing the project. But Hecht, being a veteran ink-stained wretch, was not an easy man to scare…and according to legend, not only did he convince Capone’s goombahs that the movie was not about their boss, but he called upon them as consultants. (Further legend states that the end result pleased Al so much that he later obtained a print of the film for his very own.)

At the time of Scarface’s release, a vocal faction of individuals, concerned that others might be having more fun than they were, decried the product coming out of Hollywood…and the Hawks-Hughes movie was one on which they complained the longest and loudest. The accusations claimed the film glamorized gangsters and crime, and that this might be a bad influence on impressionable minds. Most of the time, this was true — it’s what was known as the “sin-and-salvation” approach to filmmaking. Cecil B. DeMille mastered this; presenting sequences of immorality and debauchery in his silent epics (which he got away with provided the characters received their just deserts at the end). Many of the later “message” movies that tried to warn innocent dupes away from sex or drugs (such as Reefer Madness) also took the same approach…and you often have to wonder how effective that was, showing kids having the time of their lives drinking and partying while frowning upont this type of behavior to be frowned.

I don’t think anyone would ever emulate the onscreen conduct in Scarface, however. The main character, Tony Camonte, isn’t a particularly admirable role model — as played by Muni, he’s positively primal; at times it’s as if someone shaved a simian and forced him into a nice suit. (Critic Danny Peary once observed that Muni’s Tony is essentially Fredric March’s Mr. Hyde, only without the fangs.) Camonte is constantly in a state of macho swagger, thinking himself sophisticated (but he’s not) and like a 1930s Donald Trump, judges the quality of what he buys by how much it costs. “That’s pretty hot” proves to be the highest praise he can bestow upon any item or individual, proving that Paris Hilton didn’t just come up with that asinine catchphrase by her lonesome. And like James Cagney’s Cody Jarrett in White Heat, Tony Camonte has some serious psychological problems. Man, has he got it bad for his sister Cesca. Of the film's many elements, the incest theme intrigues the most in what I consider to be the best gangster movie of the 1930s, addressed in the uncomfortable familial relationship between brother and sister Camonte. Hecht based the characters on the Borgia family, making actress Ann Dvorak a delightfully slutty carbon copy of Lucretia and while Muni received many of the critical kudos for his performance in the film, I think Dvorak walks away with the picture. Scarface made me a huge fan of the underrated actress; her tantalizing dance moves and naughty double entendres (not to mention that unmistakable glint she gets in her eye when she talks to Muni’s Tony) no doubt concerned the censors more than the violence.

I also became a Karen Morley fan because of this film, even though I’ll certainly concede that Dvorak gets the showier role and makes much more of an impression. (Morley was an underrated thesp, often on the receiving end of static from the industry about her personal life and politics, all coming to a boil in 1947 with her blacklisting in the motion picture industry after testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee.) As Poppy, the fair-weather bitch who switches her romantic allegiance to Tony when she’s able to read the tea leaves that Johnny Lovo hasn’t much of a future, I like her blasé responses to Camonte’s advances (“I’m nice with a lot of dressing”), and how at times it seems as if she’s having difficulty holding it in and not laughing at the jerk. Scarface also served as a breakout vehicle for actor George Raft, who had danced his way to fame on Broadway (under the tutelage of Texas Guinan) before venturing out to Hollywood to crash the movie business. Raft had appeared in films before Scarface but his “Little Boy” character in the picture really cemented his stature in the motion picture industry; during the 1930s he was the go-to individual for gangster portrayals alongside Cagney and Robinson. George was quite cozy with a number of real-life hoods (including Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky), which led many people to speculate that he actually might have been in the mob at one time (he wasn’t). A bit of business performed by Raft — flipping a nickel in the air and catching it while never looking at the coin — soon became a trademark and even provided a hilarious in-joke in 1959’s Some Like It Hot, in which he had a nice comic (and menacing) turn as hood Spats Columbo.

The actor who wasn’t quite as convincing as Raft playing a gangster was Boris Karloff, who also had a small role in Scarface as Gaffney. Personally, I welcome Boris in any movie but the man was just a little too cultured and refined to play a hood. Be that as it may, Boris does get a memorable death scene in which he’s gunned down by Muni and his mob while bowling…and though he leaves this world having bowled a strike, the “kingpin” symbolically takes a little time to fall before finally doing so. Symbolism plays a large part in Scarface; director Hawks came up with an interesting motif in that all of the gangsters who are “rubbed out” are designated as such with an “X” visible onscreen. Hawks thought this great fun, even to the point of offering crew members $200 for each creative suggestion to allow him to present this. Scarface originally had been scheduled to be released in September 1931, but producer Hughes still was getting grief from the Hays’ Office about the movie’s violent content. In an attempt to pacify the censors, the producer had Richard Rosson shoot an alternate ending, one in which Muni doesn’t die in a hail of bullets at the end but gets taken into custody, tried and convicted by a judge (who gives Muni’s character a lecture though you never see the actor) and sentenced to hang by the neck until he’s really most sincerely dead. (This scene also was shot without Muni’s participation; a double was used in long shots.) The censors weren’t wild about this ending either so Hughes finally threw up his hands and just did an end run around them, releasing the movie in states where there were no censorship boards. (It did great box office and received positive critical reviews.) The “alternate ending” has survived and is available on Universal’s 2007 DVD release…but seeing as how they also eliminated some of the more overt sexual attraction between the Muni and Dvorak characters, I’m glad Hughes stuck to his guns and kept Ending A.

That stand-alone disc release of Scarface provided the best news a classic film fan could get in that before that DVD, the only way you could purchase a copy of the Hawks original was on a 2003 “Anniversary Edition” box set of the 1983 Brian De Palma version…and that’s a purchase I simply wasn’t capable of justifying. There’s even more bad news on the horizon in that Universal has got another remake of the film in the works (this was announced last year) that will combine elements of the 1932 and 1983 films…but as a cinematic British barrister once observed: “Is that really desirable?” Classic film fans can take solace in that the one-and-only original is being looked after; having been added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 1994. Otherwise I’d have no other recourse than to respond with one of Tony Camonte’s most memorable quips: “Get out of my way, Johnny…I’m gonna spit!”

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Labels: 30s, blacklist, Cagney, De Palma, Edward G., Fredric March, Hawks, Hecht, Howard Hughes, Karloff, Movie Tributes, Pacino, Raft

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By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
Mention director Fritz Lang’s name to a movie fan and more likely than not they’ll conjure up visions of the style that eventually became identified as “film noir.” Lang was one of the godfathers of noir, with elements present in films from his German expressionist period (Der Müde Tod, M) to his later American works (The Woman in the Window, The Big Heat). Crime dramas were Lang’s forte, though he worked in any number of genres (one of his best-known vehicles, 1927’s Metropolis, is considered by many to a science-fiction masterpiece) but they all share a common thematic bond…one that was described succinctly by critic Andrew Sarris as “the same bleak view of the universe where man grapples with his personal destiny and invariably loses.”

Lang even directed Westerns, a genre that seems at first a bit alien to his cinematic M.O. The first two oaters he helmed, The Return of Frank James (1940; also his first color film) and Western Union (1941), were assignments during his stint at 20th Century Fox, but he nevertheless accepted both projects with enthusiasm, once comparing the history of the Old West to the European saga of the Nibelungen (a subject he brought to celluloid in back-to-back films released in 1924). His third and last Western — released to theaters 60 years ago on this date — was Rancho Notorious (1952), a film that succeeds despite so many things being against it and that today remains the most intriguing and “noir” of his brief flirtation with the genre.

Vern Haskell’s (Arthur Kennedy) dream of marrying fiancée Beth Forbes (Gloria Henry) vanishes in smoke when the assayer’s office in which she works is robbed by two desperadoes and she ends up dead after being shot by one of them, a man named Kinch (Lloyd Gough). Kinch and his partner Whitey (John Doucette) race out of town with a posse hot on their tails, but when the sheriff announces that they’ve ridden out of his jurisdiction and the remaining members refuse to ride any further; it’s up to the grieved Vern to continue the hunt. Vern finally catches up to Whitey, who’s been shot and left for dead by the treacherous Kinch after an argument. Whitey’s enigmatic dying words are “Chuck-a-luck,” and Vern persists in his pursuit despite not knowing its meaning.

As he rides from town to town in the search for answers, he manages to cross paths with a wanted outlaw (Fred Graham) in a barbershop who gives him another mysterious name: “Altar Keane.” The outlaw, Ace McGuire, draws on Vern when he realizes Vern is just seeking information and Haskell is forced to kill Ace in self defense. Taken into custody, Vern is cleared and offered a reward for McGuire’s killing but all Haskell is interested is information on “Altar Keane”; fortunately, a deputy (Dick Wessel) is able to identify her as a former saloon gal (Marlene Dietrich) he once knew but can’t give Vern any more than that.

Vern finally gets more background on Altar in another small town — she once worked for saloon owner Baldy Gunder (William Frawley), who after firing her helplessly watched her clean up at his chuck-a-luck game under the watchful eye of gunslinger Frenchy Fairmont (Mel Ferrer). Learning that Fairmont is cooling his heels in jail in the nearby hamlet of Gunsight, Vern manages to get himself arrested and thrown into the same jail cell as Frenchy, and the two men are able to execute a successful jailbreak. On the lam, Frenchy takes Vern to his hideout: a horse ranch near the Mexican border dubbed “Chuck-a-Luck” and run by Altar…who is now Frenchy’s girlfriend. Since Fairmont vouches for Vern, Altar agrees to allow Haskell to stay (the rules are that he is to ask no questions and do his fair share of work around the ranch) and introduces him to the rest of the men also hiding out at Chuck-a-Luck Ranch, who have gained admittance by tithing 10% of their stolen swag to their hostess. Vern’s assignment is to find out which of the guests is responsible for killing his fiancée, without tipping his hand that he’s just masquerading as an outlaw.

As Vern’s stay at Chuck-a-Luck stretches longer and longer, Altar begins to develop feelings for him and Vern reciprocates…but only to achieve his mission of locating the murderer, accelerated by the discovery of a brooch he gave to Beth as a gift that now adorns an evening dress worn by Altar. Vern is racing against the clock because the man responsible for Beth’s death, Kinch, is among the outlaw contingent and he recognizes Vern after seeing Haskell mount a horse one afternoon. When Vern must help the men rob a nearby bank to continue his outlaw charade, Kinch takes a shot at him and misses. Vern finally learns Kinch’s identity after presenting Altar with her share of the proceeds from the robbery, and confronting Kinch in a saloon, he manages to reign in his instincts to kill the outlaw, allowing the law to take over and mete out justice. Kinch is rescued by his pals before he is locked up, and the band of outlaws rides out to the ranch, convinced that Altar sold them out. Altar, in the meantime, has decided to abandon her life at Chuck-a-Luck and attempts to explain to a jealous Frenchy that she’s also given up on Vern, who had earlier could barely conceal his disgust with her lifestyle. Altar and Frenchy are then ambushed by the outlaws, and in the resulting shoot-out Kinch is killed (putting an end to Vern’s quest) and Altar dies from a bullet she took for her Frenchy.

Vern Haskell, the protagonist of Rancho Notorious, shares a similarity with those heroes played by James Stewart in the '50s Westerns directed by Anthony Mann (such as Winchester ’73 and Bend of the River): a man obsessively driven to right a past wrong who finds himself compromising his morality in his pursuit to do so. Haskell is basically a decent guy (we don’t learn much about Vern, other than he’s a lovestruck cowpuncher) who must play the part of a bad man in order to achieve his goal of vengeance, and often at his own peril since he’s in the company of other individuals he can’t trust. While Stewart’s heroes also were ready to be welcomed back into the societal fold after finishing what they set out to do; in Notorious, once Vern achieves his revenge, it’s apparent his life is over and done with — the final frames of the film find him and Frenchy riding off for points unknown, with the narrator singing the final stanzas of a ballad hinting of their eventual demise.

Rancho Notorious’ ballad, “The Legend of Chuck-a-Luck,” was written by Ken Darby (a member of the vocal group The King’s Men, who were regulars on radio’s Fibber McGee & Molly for a time) and sung by William Lee, and it adds a note of Greek tragedy to Lang’s remarkable Western. (The ballad idea was later appropriated for High Noon.) The title of Darby’s composition was originally going to be shared as the title of the film until director Fritz Lang learned from one of Howard Hughes’ lackeys at RKO that the movie would instead be known as Rancho Notorious because “Mr. Hughes doesn’t think they would know what Chuck-a-Luck was in Europe.”

“But they would know what Rancho Notorious is?” Lang fired back as he took his leave of the company man's idiocy.

The production history of Rancho Notorious was troubled from the get-go — Hughes was only a small part of it (the film’s limited budget forced Lang to shoot the Western in the studio, which resulted in some none-too-convincing exterior scenes that hamper the movie’s credibility a tad). Star Marlene Dietrich and director Lang did not get along well at all (despite the two enjoying a brief affair during the making of the film) Lang originally designed Notorious with Marlene in mind, with the original plot centering on an aging saloon girl and an equally up-there outlaw who couldn’t quite cut the mustard anymore. The notoriously (sorry about that) vain Dietrich pooh-poohed that idea, and also bickered with cinematographer Hal Mohr (with whom she had worked on Destry Rides Again) when he was unable to maintain her eternal youth before the camera to her satisfaction. Despite all that foofrah, it’s a great showcase for Marlene; there are many parallels between this role and her portrayal of Frenchy (is it coincidental that both movies feature characters with that name?) in Destry and she also gets to sing a song, “Get Away Young Man.”

Star Arthur Kennedy effortlessly shifts back-and-forth between hero and rotter, and never loses the audience’s sympathy from the start (granted, that would be difficult to do since his girl was raped and murdered by a remorseless dirtbag) despite his later descent into the dark side. He demonstrates a nice rapport with Dietrich’s Altar (so named because she’s worshipped?) even though it’s all show on his part to eventually learn what he needs to know. Mel Ferrer, as the charismatic Frenchy, isn’t quite in the same thespic league as Kennedy but manages to deliver a solid performance…and again, there’s an adoption of an oft-used Anthony Mann theme in that Frenchy serves as Vern’s doppelganger — an example of what Haskell could become in a similar set of circumstances (the two of them riding off together at Notorious’ conclusion reinforces this). Lloyd Gough, the actor who plays the target of Vern Haskell’s obsession, sadly doesn’t even rate a mention in the movie’s opening credits due to his being on the Hollywood “blacklist” (more evidence of Hughes’ meddling). Rancho Notorious also spotlights a first-rate supporting cast of actors familiar (and in some cases, unfamiliar) to Westerns — it’s great to see B-Western and serial veterans such as Lane Chandler, I. Stanford Jolley, Fuzzy Knight (shout-out to a West Virginia homeboy), Pierce Lyden, Kermit Maynard and Francis McDonald on hand. Jack Elam is a treat as one of the bad guys as is reliable Frank Ferguson, who’s a defrocked preacher hiding out at Dietrich’s. The film also showcases one of the rare cinematic turns of George Reeves, whose movie roles would start to dissipate once he became too well-known as TV’s Superman. (If that guy working the chuck-a-luck wheel in Frawley’s saloon looks like a guy who spent three years on a deserted island with six other castaways, that’s because it’s Russell Johnson, in one of his early movie appearances.)

Critics weren’t particularly kind to Rancho Notorious at the time of its release, but with the passage of time the movie has developed a cult following and a reputation as an offbeat but enjoyable Western; it’s an early example of what could be called a feminist Western (with its themes of violation and rape, not to mention the Dietrich character as a strong, fascinating character more than capable of holding her own in “a man’s world”) and much of its titillating sexual content was “liberated” by Nicholas Ray for his film Johnny Guitar, released two years afterward (equating stealing from a woman’s safe as rape, for starters). Scripted by Daniel Taradash (based on a story written by Lang associate Silvia Richards), Notorious manages to overcome its budget limitations and occasional seams-showing to become a film not too easily forgotten — as a critic for Time Out Film Guide once observed: “The fateful moral, the complete avoidance of naturalism, and the integration of an ongoing ballad into the plot, all make the movie quintessential Lang; add an overt political stance and it would be quintessentially Brechtian too.”

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Labels: 50s, Anthony Mann, blacklist, Howard Hughes, J. Stewart, Lang, Marlene, Movie Tributes, N. Ray

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"My heroes are no more neurotic than the audience. Unless you can feel that a hero is just as fucked up as you are, that you would make the same mistakes that he would make, you can have no satisfaction when he does commit a heroic act. Because then you can say, ‘Hell, I could have done that too.’ And that’s the obligation of the filmmaker — of the theater-worker — to give a heightened sense of experience to the people who pay to come see his work."

By Kevin J. Olson
When I think of consistency in the cinema, Nicholas Ray is a name that always comes to mind. In fact, I struggle greatly finding a film of his that I really, truly dislike. Some of his later films were flawed, sure, but I've never had an unpleasant experience watching one of his movies. What I think of more than the man’s consistency, is how Ray always was a director ahead of his time creating the type of characters described in the quote above — characters that were flawed, misunderstood outcasts. It’s because of this that I’ve always been drawn to Ray’s films and continue to revisit them.

What I remember most from his films was his propensity for making films about solitary social misfits. Whether it was Joan Crawford’s saloon owner in the brilliant Johnny Guitar (the film that acted as the catalyst for Godard’s remark that, “The cinema is Nicholas Ray.”), James Dean’s angsty teenage outsider in Rebel Without a Cause, or Bogey’s screenwriter from In a Lonely Place, Ray loved the theme of solitude and was better at it than perhaps any of his contemporaries. Like the quote above, Ray wasn’t interested in the status quo; he was a filmmaker who enjoyed existing in the margins, who wanted to push the viewer out of their comfort zone as it pertained to how they understood the role of the hero in film. He did the same for the actors with whom he worked. In almost all of his masterpieces (which pretty much encapsulates every film he made between 1949– 1958), Ray was able to exorcise whatever bad habits hammy actors had a tendency for in that era (just look at the differences between Dean’s performance in East of Eden versus Rebel) and elicited genuinely strong and poignant performances out of the most unlikely of actors; he definitely pulled what are arguably the best performances out of such screen icons as Humphrey Bogart (In a Lonely Place) and Robert Mitchum (The Lusty Men). It’s not just his themes or the fact that he could get a great performance from unexpected sources, but it was in the way that from that golden age of his career, he so rarely erred.

An antagonist by nature, I can’t think of another filmmaker who has had that kind of run in Hollywood while simultaneously feeling so un-Hollywood; Ray was an iconoclast. He often used his films to explicate the kind of themes that not only interested him but were the kind of themes that allowed him to try and make sense of the chaos and isolation he felt in his own life as he often made films filled with themes and motifs that mirrored his bisexuality, marginalization, and increasing impatience from Hollywood producers. It is why, I think, he was able to elicit such great performances from his young actors — he connected with them. But Ray’s legacy rises above all of that to leave a lasting mark on cinema. I can think of only a handful of directors (Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder to name a few) that, for me, define the 1950s American cinema more than Nicholas Ray.

John Houseman financed Ray’s first picture (after giving Ray a copy of the source material to read; the two fell in love with it) for RKO in 1947, They Live by Night, which wouldn’t be released until 1949. The story is as simple and cut-and-dried as a noir can be, and I mean that as a compliment. Ray, for a first time filmmaker, has incredible control of the film from beginning to end (he had complete creative control of the film). They Live by Night is an excellent precursor to Bonnie and Clyde — the kind of doomed-love-affair/bank heist picture that Arthur Penn popularized. From the opening tracking shot (shot from a helicopter) to the immediacy of a POV from inside a getaway car, Ray’s aesthetic for his debut film fits the noir genre perfectly. However, as is the case with most of Ray’s films, They Live by Night is not your usual noir crime story.

At its heart is a story we would see fleshed out with Ray’s subsequent projects. The mismatched, doomed lovers who just don’t seem to fit in a way that society says two people in love should fit is nothing new to the genre; however, the film is filled with great, quiet moments (music and sound are used brilliantly throughout) between its two leads Farley Granger (Bowie, a bank robber who has just escaped from prison) and Catherine O’Donnell (Keechie, a gas station owner’s daughter) who give the film’s central (doomed) love story an added weight that a lot of noirs don’t slow down for. There’s a beautiful moment on their honeymoon (look and admire the way Ray lights the scene, incredible for a first time filmmaker) that showcases the deftness in which Ray handles young, idealized (and, again, doomed) love. The scene is when Keechie and Bowie are in a cabin talking about what they want to do in the future; it has a nice tinge of tragic irony as they try to fashion out a little domestic life for themselves on the run (they even go and get married on the cheap at a small chapel). Bowie has yet to see how the real world works as he’s still convinced that he and Keechie can escape and live happily ever after just as long as he can get enough money to get a lawyer to get him off the hook for a murder.

What makes the scene so great is that it isn’t just the big dreams (Bowie wanting to escape the life to have a legitimate marriage) that they have or the brooding nature of the romance (before it became cliché, mind you, as Ray had a great sense of what makes brooding young people tick), it’s in the small, little things, like going to a movie and holding hands in the theater, they know they can’t do because he’s being pursued by the law. It’s in moments like this that make They Live by Night one of my favorite of Ray's early films; he would only expand on these themes in subsequent films, making them more tragic.

After seeing and being impressed with They Live by Night, Humphrey Bogart called up Ray to see if he wanted to direct him in his next project (and first for the actor’s Santana production company), the 1949 courtroom noir, Knock on Any Door. The film would be remembered as yet another example of Ray tapping into the disenfranchised youth with lines such as, “live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,” which, of course, would be a similar credo for a generation that identified with his most popular “teenage outsider” film, Rebel Without a Cause. This isn’t one of Ray’s best efforts (it’s too heavy-handed), but it’s an interesting addition and memorable because of how it acts as a sort of precursor to Rebel as well as further establishing the themes and character types that drew Ray's empathy.

After a so-so noir starring Maureen O’Hara (A Woman’s Secret) and a failed attempt to save a sinking-ship of a film (Roseanna McCoy), Ray returned with what is arguably his best film (it’s at least an easy candidate for top three). In a Lonely Place is the story of out-of-control, cynical screenwriter Dixon Steele (Bogart, who draws from his own feelings of loneliness to create his greatest performance) and Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame, Ray’s ex-wife, although people on the set were unaware of their separation) and their doomed love affair that exists in the cruel world of showbiz that would be more popularized in two films released the same year, Sunset Blvd. and All About Eve. Even though those other two films are rightfully hailed and firmly entrenched as two of the best films ever about the entertainment industry, In a Lonely Place more than holds its own.

The film has all the trappings of noir, but like They Live by Night, In a Lonely Place is more interested in the love story which is deeply existential. Once again, the audience gets to see one of Ray’s favorite themes at play: Dixon is the troubled soul who often retreats to its dark corners, and Laurel is the woman who thinks she can save him. It won’t be the last time that we see Ray use mismatched characters to showcase doomed love. It borders on cliché — the cynical, down-on-his-luck misfit and the good-hearted woman who thinks she can change him — but Bogart’s performance (drawing from his personal life) and Ray’s direction (not to mention the great cinematography from Burnett Guffey who uses the film’s apartment complex location wonderfully to show the isolation and fragmentation of the characters) keeps it from becoming that. The film’s title more than suggests the existential themes Ray loves to explicate in his films, but it also suggests that even the sexiest of places — 1950s Hollywood — can be a lonely place. The film is an interesting precursor to some of the elements Curtis Hanson would eventually use 40-some years later in his masterpiece L.A. Confidential (Hanson had his actors watch this film to prepare for their roles).

In a Lonely Place is filled with beautiful images (I love that moment on the beach between Dixon and Laurel, or the scene where Dixon is describing the murder from his script to his two leads…and the way Bogart is lit as he goes to that dark place) and some of the trademark moments of isolation that we associate with Ray. Even more interesting is how Ray stayed true to his title of iconoclast by switching the ending at the last second. Displeased with how “neatly” they had wrapped up the story, Ray kicked everyone off set with exception of his two leads and Art Smith. With his urging, he and the actors improvised the ending of the film so that it felt more organic — real to life — which is an attribute of Ray’s films where it is apparent he tried really damn hard to get his vision on the screen. Life, and love, is a damn messy thing for Ray, and he respected the audience enough to show them protagonists who weren’t squeaky clean idealists; rather, they felt like real people doing real things with which the audience could identify. It’s why I lead this piece with that quote; it perfectly describes what it is he’s going for with his films, and I’m not sure he did it any better than In a Lonely Place.

After making a successful war picture (The Flying Leathernecks); a so-so melodrama starring Joan Fontaine (Born to be Bad); and attempting to save the botched-adventure film Macao, originally helmed by Josef von Sternberg (Howard Hughes fired von Sternberg and hired Ray to finish the movie), Ray went back to his roots with one of my favorite film noirs, On Dangerous Ground. One of Ray’s final films for RKO, this is a great cop flick that shows the energy Ray instilled in his films. David Denby, in his retrospective piece for The New Yorker, offers up a great quote from Jacques Rivette (Ray was a favorite of the New-Wavers) on Ray’s style, and then goes on to say this about Ray’s aesthetic and this film:

As early as 1953, Jacques Rivette identified in Ray a “taste for paroxysm, which imparts something of the feverish and impermanent to the most tranquil of moments.” On Dangerous Ground (1951), a high point of neurosis in film noir, stars Robert Ryan as a cop so tautened by his calling that the simplest act turns savage; in his apartment, he washes and dries his hands as if wringing the neck of an invisible suspect.

That is a great quote from Rivette and a great moment described by Denby, and it’s probably the one I would select as my favorite of the film. I think Rivette’s quote works best for Ray’s later films (specifically Johnny Guitar), but it works, too, on this great little noir, especially in the way Ray innovatively used hand-held camera to capture the immediacy of being a cop (he would again use hand-held in The Lusty Men), specifically in the way he films yet another violent protagonist. I can see why Ray had such an influence on Scorsese. Film noir was always an arena for filmmakers to be more experimental — it’s what made the genre so great — and Ray uses some great expressionistic camera movements in the film as well having his characters go to literal dark places rather than existential ones.

If Curtis Hanson used In a Lonely Place to educate his actors on the correct tone for when they filmed L.A. Confidential, then On Dangerous Ground is definitely the film he showed Russell Crowe for him to get into his character, Bud, for that film. Robert Ryan’s portrayal of Jim Wilson is scary in how quickly he can become unhinged; he has no problems roughing people up in order to get what he wants; however, there’s also something else lurking beneath the rough exterior (as is the case with most Ray protagonists), and in one scene (a really well done, hand-held chase in an alley) Wilson is accosted by his partner for, again, roughing up a suspect. His reply to his partner’s cries for some decorum is simply, “OK, so I get kicked off the force…what kind of a job is this anyway? Garbage, that’s all we handle, garbage!” It’s this mix of unpredictability and surprising introspection from his misunderstood, violent-tempered protagonist that Ray loved to invert about half-way through his films by introducing a love interest. As has been stated already, most of these romances are doomed from the start, but there’s always a speck of idealized romance that exists in these characters (again, you see this influence in L.A. Confidential where Bud is seemingly one-dimensional, but is looking for something beyond his profession, which he's become disillusioned with despite doing it well). Ray gives Wilson a happy ending at the end of On Dangerous Ground as Wilson has his thoughts played out in voice over acting as the catalyst for taking him back to the cabin where Ida Lupino lives. They embrace and kiss, and it actually feels kind of weird for Ray to give his character such an optimistic ending (he would give a similarly toned happy ending to his similarly dark Bigger Than Life).

The immediacy and the down-and-dirty tone of On Dangerous Ground is definitely less subtle than In a Lonely Place, but that’s part of its charms; it’s a great noir film and a natural fit for Ray, who again furthers the themes he was drawn to by making a film where his misfit characters (violent and disturbed and outcasts) seem right at home in the world of film noir. It’s one of my favorites.

I’ve heard (I can’t remember where, but I’m definitely not taking credit for this) somewhere that Nicholas Ray may have been the first existential action filmmaker. I’m assuming wherever I read and whoever said it was referring to The Lusty Men. A Western/rodeo picture on its exterior, it’s in the quiet, contemplative moments where the film has a headlong energy that we just know — knowing what we know about Ray’s tragic heroes — is going to end tragically. That much talked about, great opening shot of Mitchum’s bull-rider solitarily limping out of the emptied rodeo arena is the quintessential Ray shot: encapsulating in one, brief moment everything that characterizes Ray’s heroes and everything that represents the characters found in The Lusty Men who exist in a fast-paced world that chews them up and spits them out (I love the final shot: despite a man’s death, the show must go on) with little regard for their well-being.

Anyone who has seen Ray’s films knows him as the iconoclast that he is; however, when one thinks of such a term to ascribe the auteur, I’m sure their mind does not go towards this small western. Ray, though, loved this film and it shows. It’s one of his most keenly observant psychological profiles, and despite the film’s horrendous title, it’s one of those movies that sneaks up on you with its power.

Like most of Ray’s films, The Lusty Men is a narrative with multiple layers. On the surface, the film looks like a movie about the rodeo, when, in reality, The Lusty Men is a film about what it means to go home — both professionally and personally — and make a home, and the complexities that surround such a journey. Ray loved the idea of love triangles, and the pursuit of happiness despite the situations his characters find themselves in — situations that seem to offer no such reprieve from their depressed and banal reality. This motif would pop up again, most famously, in Rebel Without a Cause with the great scene where the trio of characters from that film obtains a glimmer of happiness while playing “house” in an abandon mansion.

The film contains the typical Ray love triangle, but it’s also typical of the way Ray infused real life problems into melodrama (much like another of my favorites from the ‘50s — and this would be even more apparent in Bigger Than Life — Douglas Sirk), and he has his characters act as unpredictably and honestly as they would in real life. There’s a great scene where Susan Hayward just has an outstanding moment of acting. It’s toward the end when her husband Wes is fully entrenched in the rodeo circuit. She blames herself for their failing marriage and how she’s no fun anymore (“not like the blonde with the skirt down to her knees” is a line that made me chuckle), but she also is fed up with the role of woman when it’s just the man that gets to do what he wants. Her line, “I’m supposed to sit here waiting for him to come staggering through that door, and then I’m supposed to put my arms around him and make him some black coffee and stick an ice bag on his head and take off his boots and wrap him up warm and put him to bed” is a powerful monologue and a perfect example of how Ray was always looking to throw the customs of the time under a critical microscope. It’s an interesting scene in what is maybe one of Ray’s sneakier message pictures. Obviously there’s dual taming going on here — horses and men — but Ray, ever the one to challenge society's mores, is doing something radical for a film that, on its surface, seems like nothing more than an early ‘50s Western: he’s openly talking about the banality of domesticated life, but he’s speaking from the female perspective.

Ray would follow The Lusty Men with the three films that cinephiles everywhere point to as the defining run of his career; three films that would cement Ray's legacy as one of the great auteurs of American cinema.

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Labels: Arthur Penn, Bogart, Crawford, Godard, Hitchcock, Howard Hughes, James Dean, Lupino, Mitchum, N. Ray, Robert Ryan, Russell Crowe, Scorsese, von Sternberg, Wilder

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"One of the most interesting and technically superior films that has ever come out of a Hollywood studio."
Kate Cameron, New York Daily News (1941)

“Perhaps the one American talking picture that seems to be as fresh now as the day it opened.
It may seem even fresher.”
Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1971)

"Staggering and belongs at once among the greatest screen achievements."
William Boehnel, New World Telegram (1941)

"The boldest free-hand stroke in major screen production since Griffith and Bitzer were running wild
to unshackle the camera."
Otis Ferguson, The New Republic (1941)

“Probably the one film that has started the largest number of filmmakers on their careers.”
François Truffaut

By John Cochrane
What can you say about Citizen Kane (1941) that hasn’t already been said many times before? Orson Welles’ landmark first feature — which received its American premiere 70 years ago today — has routinely been called by general consensus "The Greatest Movie Ever Made" by countless filmmakers, critics and movie buffs — topping lists such as AFI’s Greatest Films Of The Century, Cahiers du Cinema’s 100 Greatest Films Ever Made and every Sight & Sound Critics and Directors poll since 1962. Despite almost universal acclaim, even from the beginning, the movie was blacklisted on its initial release — and almost literally destroyed by a nervous industry that resented its precocious and talented creator and didn’t want to offend the then-still powerful publisher on which it was largely based. The film miraculously survived though, and many critics say that if D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) was a watershed moment for the silent period, Citizen Kane was a brilliant summation of the sound era up to that point in time — forever changing how movies could be photographed and edited, and how stories could be told.

Citizen Kane is a fictional biography of an enigmatic newspaper tycoon named Charles Foster Kane — a character largely inspired by William Randolph Hearst, but also borrowing details from real life figures such as Samuel Insull, Harold Fowler McCormick, Howard Hughes and, some would argue, even Orson Welles himself. The film begins with Kane’s death as an old man, and is made up mostly of flashbacks — which are shown in a circular, rather than linear fashion. We watch an almost completed newsreel of his life — which deftly gives a quick summary of the story we’re about to see. We then listen to interviews or diary entries from five different people — Kane’s guardian, his business manager, his closest friend, his second wife and his butler — who all tell overlapping anecdotes and opinions of him, in an attempt to fill in the gaps of who Charles Foster Kane really was. Kane inherited an enormous mining fortune from his mother — who sent him away from home as a child to be raised and groomed to be one of the world’s richest and most influential men. He took over a foundering newspaper at 25; created a publishing empire based on sensational journalism; was derailed from becoming governor of New York due to an extramarital affair; failed to mold his mistress-turned-second wife into an opera star and died alone when she left him. Kane’s last word was “Rosebud” — which has become the most famous single word in the history of cinema — and the quest of News on The March reporter Mr. Thompson is to determine what Rosebud is. He never does, though the audience learns what it means in the closing shots of the film.

Citizen Kane is remembered as Orson Welles’ masterpiece, and no one is more responsible for its greatness than Welles himself — who was heavily involved at practically all levels of the production. But the picture also was a coming together of a group of gifted craftsmen and actors, all working together at the top of their game. The first thing that comes to mind when most people think of Citizen Kane, is Gregg Toland’s amazing cinematography. By 1940, Toland already was one of the industry’s top cameramen — having worked with Hollywood heavyweights John Ford and William Wyler. He lobbied hard to be on Welles’ first picture, and the two made a terrific team. Welles later recalled how he believed that a film director was responsible for lighting a set — as a theatrical director would be. For the first few days of shooting, Toland would quietly shadow Welles — fixing his ideas so that they would work and telling everyone else to keep their mouths shut. When a crew member informed an embarrassed Welles that setting the lights was the cinematographer’s job, Toland was frustrated that his cover had been blown. He explained to Orson, “The only way you learn anything new is from someone who doesn’t know what can’t be done.”

Welles and Toland shot the film in deep focus — an extremely difficult process even today — which keeps the entire visual picture in absolute clarity, just like the human eye. (Toland had previously experimented with the process while making Ford’s The Long Voyage Home in 1940.) Working with special effects by Vernon L. Walker and optical printer effects by Linwood Dunn, Welles and Toland created impressive sets and crowd scenes out of miniatures, dissolves and creative shadows and lighting — most noticeably in photographing Kane’s vast, almost gothic estate of Xanadu — his campaign for governor and Susan Alexander’s opera house performances. Sometimes Welles and Toland double exposed the film to create two simultaneous images in focus — as in when Kane discovers Susan after she’s tried to commit suicide by an overdose of pills. Sometimes they simply spliced two images together, or put the camera in an odd place to get an unusual shot, such as cutting a hole in the floor to get an incredibly low shot of Kane and Leland after Kane loses the election making the characters appear bigger than life. Before Citizen Kane, you rarely saw ceilings in films. Toland and Welles used low cloth ceilings throughout the picture (which looked real in black and white) and concealed microphones to record the sound. Soon afterward, many other American filmmakers began to use this technique as well.

In the News on the March sequence — which wickedly satirizes Time magazine’s then-popular The March of Time newsreels — Welles and Toland dragged the film stock on the floor to make it look old and worn and used more camera effects to seemingly place Kane in historical places with famous figures. Orson once said, “A long playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make a picture with a pair of scissors and a two inch lens.” In that respect, Citizen Kane also has a number of long scenes that are played with very few cuts. In the sequence in which Kane’s mother signs away guardianship of him to Mr. Thatcher, the camera starts at a window that looks out at Charles playing in the snow, and then backs up over seemingly invisible furniture that is quietly moved into place beneath the moving camera. As Mary Kane sits down at a table to sign the document, a still-wobbling hat inadvertently shows how the shot was achieved. The scene then continues in one take — until Mrs. Kane returns to the window to call for her son — and the camera follows the Kanes and Mr. Thatcher outside, in the second of three shots for the entire sequence. Welles praised his cinematographer, saying that he would constantly ask for miracles and Gregg would perform them without fanfare, like it was no big deal. Orson would show his gratitude by sharing his director’s title card with Toland — an almost unheard of gesture in motion pictures. (Ford did the same thing on The Long Voyage Home, the previous year.) “He was the greatest cameraman who ever lived,” Welles would say. “He deserved it, didn’t he?”

Another key collaborator on Kane was Herman J. Mankiewicz, who co-wrote the script. A veteran screenwriter since the silent era, Mankiewicz worked — often uncredited — on dozens of Hollywood pictures such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Pride of the Yankees (1942) and comedies by the Marx Brothers. He also was part of the social circle of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies until he was banned from their parties due to his heavy alcoholism and gambling. Mankiewicz was nursing a broken leg in the hospital in 1939 when he met Welles, who was a big fan of Mank’s talent and sharp, cynical humor. After many brainstorming sessions together, Citizen Kane — under the working title The American — was born.

The actual credit for the screenplay has been the subject of debate for decades, with some people such as Pauline Kael and John Houseman suggesting that Mankiewicz was Kane’s sole screenwriter, with Welles usurping a co-writing credit. But these suggestions largely have been discredited by other vocal critics such as Robert Carringer, Jonathan Rosenbaum and filmmaker/writer Peter Bogdanovich. Various Welles’ collaborators on the film also vouched for his screenplay input — including Welles’ own secretary Katherine Trosper, who typed his manuscripts and notes. Welles’ own plausible explanation to Bogdanovich was that he and Mankiewicz discussed the story and characters for a long time and then, in the interest of efficiency, separated to write their own versions. When it came time to make the picture, Orson simply took what he liked from both scripts and improvised and rewrote as needed during the filming process — methods he used on practically every film he ever made — causing Mankiewicz to complain vocally about his many changes.


“Rosebud” was Mankiewicz’s invention. Telling a story from different viewpoints — an idea that was explored more fully by Akira Kurosawa in his great film Rashomon (1950) — was largely Welles’ idea. The breakfast montage between Kane and his first wife showing the disintegration of their marriage also was Welles. Bernstein’s speech about noticing the girl on the ferry for a split second and never forgetting her, was all Mank. It was Welles’ favorite moment in the picture. Despite accusations that likely damaged Welles’ career and that some argue brought a case brought before the Screenwriters Guild, Orson loved Mankiewicz. When the screenplay matter was settled with credit bestowed on both of them, Welles gave Mank top billing and continued to praise him for years afterward, calling his contribution to Citizen Kane “enormous.”

A third essential contribution was from composer Bernard Herrmann, a veteran of Welles’ radio days who was working on his first picture. Herrmann would go on to become synonymous with Alfred Hitchcock, but his score for Citizen Kane is wonderful and varied — sometimes mysterious, grim, tragic and mournful, at others, joyous, energetic or even romantic. Herrmann even created the opera pieces that Susan Alexander sings in her theatrical debut. The music consistently punctuates Kane’s pictures and words perfectly, heightening the emotional impact of the story. Even though Citizen Kane is in many ways a dark film, Herrmann’s score seems to celebrate its artistic quality and achievement and, by the movie’s end, you feel exhilarated. In at least one instance, Welles said that 50 percent of the film’s success was due to Bernard Herrmann. Kane also was a showcase for editor and future Oscar-winning director Robert Wise, who worked closely with Welles on the film’s perfectly cut flash-forward sequences and beautiful dissolves.

The fact that Citizen Kane largely is thought of as a technical masterpiece probably unfairly overshadows the many wonderful performances in the film. Welles used many of his Mercury Theater players in the film, with the idea that he wanted to present fresh faces that never appeared in movies before. He had an ability to bring out the best in his actors — encouraging their creativity, and making them feel like they could accomplish anything. The cast is terrific and their wonderful moments include Joseph Cotten as Kane’s friend and drama critic Jedediah Leland — absent-mindedly tearing up his program to shreds as he watches Susan Alexander perform on stage; Ruth Warrick as Kane’s first wife Emily Norton, arguing with her husband over breakfast; Everett Sloane as Kane’s loyal business manager Mr. Bernstein talking about the girl on the ferry who made a lifelong impression; Agnes Moorehead as Kane’s mother, Mary, calling her son to meet his new guardian and revealing that he’s to leave home and George Coulouris as Kane’s guardian and banker Walter Parks Thatcher, arguing with Kane about using his newspapers to attack companies with which Kane personally has stock in.

Best of all are Dorothy Comingore as Kane’s second wife, Susan Alexander, and Welles himself in the title role. Some people may argue that Charlie Kane isn’t a likable character, but Welles does make him sympathetic — particularly in his scenes with Comingore, which are among the most moving in the picture. Closeups reveal Kane’s insecurity and when he meets Susan Alexander for the first time, you can see how much he values being in the presence of someone who doesn’t realize his stature and likes him for who he is. A comment later in the same scene reveals a subtle feeling of wistfulness for his mother (who at this point in the story has died a long time ago). When Susan tries to kill herself with an overdose of pills, Kane looks genuinely fearful for her well-being and tries to cover up the embarrassment of her suicide attempt to the estate’s staff. When Susan finally leaves him, Charles Foster Kane looks sad and lonely. He is a defeated man, close to tears — walking through his castle in a daze, with a snow globe in his pocket — after tearing Susan’s room apart in a rage. As his wife, Dorothy Comingore gives Susan an often tacky and loud quality, but her quiet moments as an older alcoholic reflecting on her ex-husband are beautiful. Looking at him when she awakens in bed from her overdose, she appears like a frightened and vulnerable child. She is apologetic, but unable to endure the harsh notices from her singing career any longer. “The audience doesn’t want you,” she says. “That’s when you’ve got to fight them,” a visibly shaken Kane tells her. “You won’t have to fight them anymore. It’s their loss.”

Orson Welles was able to keep the subject matter of Citizen Kane secret for a long time, thanks to a closed set, very few rushes being seen and by carefully controlling the press. When word got out that Charles Foster Kane closely resembled William Randolph Hearst, Hollywood erupted in turmoil. It didn’t matter that there were many differences between Welles’ fictional character and the actual publisher. (McCormick built the opera house for his wife, not Hearst, for example.) But there were too many similarities, which deep down Welles and Mankiewicz wanted to exploit on some level to attract attention for their film. Hearst may have been 78 years old at the time, but he was still feisty and had a loyal staff that was ready to punish Welles, RKO and even the whole film industry in print for what they perceived to be a harsh portrayal of their employer and his mistress, Marion Davies, who was well-liked in Hollywood. Davies was in fact considered a talented comedienne — though Hearst inadvertently hampered her career by using his influence to miscast her as a starlet in romantic epics. Welles for the record personally liked and admired her, and he would later agree that Hearst had a right to be upset for how she was unfairly caricatured.

Led by Louis B. Mayer, the other Hollywood studios offered to reimburse RKO for all expenses if they burned the film’s negative and all prints. The film escaped that fate by the skin of its teeth but Hearst newspapers still managed to blacklist RKO's movies for two weeks. That ban was lifted, but any mention of Citizen Kane either in articles or advertising still was strictly forbidden. The film also was denied exhibition by most major movie chains — largely owned by the movie studios at that time — as a safety precaution to avoid repercussions from Hearst’s empire, which was more than ready to expose the private, dirty laundry of any Hollywood insider that it didn’t like. Despite rave reviews and good business in big cities — mostly from independent movie theaters that weren’t afraid to show the film — Citizen Kane died in the heartland of America and lost money on its initial run.

Going into the Academy Awards, Kane had nine nominations including best picture, best director, best actor, best black-and-white cinematography and best music score of a dramatic picture, but it only won one Oscar for best original screenplay, which most people acknowledged was really for well-liked Hollywood pro Mankiewicz and not Orson Welles. Nominated editor Robert Wise recalled that every time Citizen Kane was mentioned during the ceremony, the booing became louder. The big winner that year was How Green Was My Valley (1941), a beautiful elegiac story of a Welsh coal mining family by legendary director and industry favorite John Ford — whose classic western Stagecoach (1939) Welles had screened almost 40 times in preparation as a textbook for making his own film. Valley has an unfair reputation today as the film that beat Citizen Kane, but the movie is one of Ford’s masterworks — the finest movie to ever win best picture, according to Bogdanovich — though he was quick to add that Kane was the movie of the decade.

After its disappointing performance at the Oscars, RKO retired the film from distribution, keeping it out of circulation in America until 1956 — five years after Hearst’s death. During this time, the movie’s reputation as an unseen masterpiece began to take shape. Citizen Kane belatedly received its first release in Europe in 1946 after World War II, where it was immediately embraced by the French. The founding members of the New Wave would immediately hail Welles as one of the great American film auteurs, with Jean Luc Godard later exclaiming “Everyone will always owe him everything.”

So what did Orson Welles ever do after Citizen Kane? It was an unfair question that bothered Welles for the rest of his life. Orson was lured to Hollywood in 1939, as a 24-year-old prodigy who seemed to be able to do it all. He had created groundbreaking theatrical productions in New York — including radical re-workings of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (staged in Harlem with an all African-American cast) and Julius Caesar (updating the play with a modern Fascist Rome as its setting). He also had a vastly influential radio career with his company the Mercury Theater, whose countless programs culminated with the notorious broadcast of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds in 1938, sending much of the country into hysterics with the idea that aliens were landing in New Jersey. Desperate to bring potential hits and prominence to their movie studio, RKO offered Orson a two-picture deal — with complete creative control as writer, director, producer and star. It even included final cut — a deal that even today few Hollywood filmmakers receive and many would kill for. To give this to an untested, brash 24-year-old rubbed many studio system veterans the wrong way and the town quietly watched with anticipation, waiting for Welles to be taken down. When Kane didn’t live up to box office expectations and only won one Oscar, many in the industry felt a sense of smug satisfaction.

Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests the theory that depending on whether you view Kane as a supreme example of the studio system or as an independent feature made in Hollywood, Orson Welles is either a failed artistic genius who burned bridges, couldn’t complete films and never lived up to his potential or he is a brilliant independent filmmaker who made the most of his opportunity to make one film in Hollywood with a good budget, top talent and complete creative freedom. Welles’ history and legacy is complicated, and there are a lot of conflicting facts and opinions, but Orson Welles was a lot more than just a one trick pony and his standing as a one of the cinema’s greatest directors has only grown since his death in 1985. It’s true that he never had final cut on any of the subsequent motion pictures he would make in Hollywood. His independent features from the '50s through the '70s also would be delayed and hampered by legal issues and a lack of funds which Welles would often raise himself through his many acting jobs, the most famous of these being Orson’s appearance as Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s immortal film noir The Third Man (1949) — arguably the greatest extended movie cameo in history.

Welles was a true renaissance man whose talents also included being an accomplished magician and painter. He was a maverick who never would have really thrived in the strict and careful confines of the Hollywood studio system. He also was a contradiction, exuding bigger than life confidence, but also deeply hurt by much of the criticism leveled at him over the years. He strongly disliked talking about his movies as art, but took his work very seriously and would freely admit that he was not a popular artist. Despite a number of setbacks and unfinished projects, Orson Welles would go on to complete 12 more films in his career, including at least three more masterpieces — The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Touch of Evil (1958) and Chimes at Midnight (1965).

The Magnificent Ambersons — a darkly beautiful and disturbing film that depicts the decline of a prominent family, as America ends one era and enters into the age of the automobile — may have even been a better film than Citizen Kane, according to Orson himself and others who saw the original version. But the film was butchered and re-edited by the studio after a disastrous preview during Welles' absence on another project in Brazil, something that Kane never had to endure. Roughly an hour of Ambersons was removed, a happier ending shot by others was tacked on and the discarded footage destroyed. Welles’ cut (with its devastating finale) remains the Holy Grail of lost cinema. Chimes at Midnight (also known as Falstaff) draws from parts of five Shakespeare plays to create a new work about one of the Bard’s most beloved characters. Chimes has been widely unavailable in the United States for decades, but it was Welles’ personal choice for his best film — an opinion that a number of Welles historians and critics might agree with. Two Welles films — Touch of Evil and The Lady from Shanghai (1948) — also are considered classic films noir, a genre almost unthinkable without the visual influence of Citizen Kane. Welles never stopped being an artist and he never repeated himself. His flair for striking visuals and inventive editing always were a constant in his work. If you love the art of cinema, anything he directed is worth seeing.

As the life of William Randolph Hearst faded into history, he became largely remembered through the character and movie that he and his company tried to suppress. Welles himself resented being largely remembered only for Citizen Kane, but the picture’s quality and history captured the public imagination. The legend of a brilliant 25-year-old shaking up Hollywood and redefining the art of filmmaking to everyone’s astonishment was too much to resist. Pauline Kael called the film a shallow masterpiece, but that’s not really true. Everyone remembers Rosebud. (If you don’t know what it is, you deserve to find out for yourself.) What the picture really seems to say is that it is impossible to completely know someone. People are too complicated and mysterious and you can never truly know the secrets of their heart. Sometimes you might not even truly know the secrets of your own heart. We are many people in different situations — as the mirror sequence showing multiple Charles Foster Kanes walking down the hallway so beautifully exemplifies. As filmmaker Ernest R. Dickerson said in Sight & Sound magazine, “One word can't explain a man's life. But the final two words in this film can: "No Trespassing." It’s that mystery, along with the enigmatic genius of Orson Welles that makes Citizen Kane not only a great cinematic work of art, but a terrific entertainment that deserves to be seen and enjoyed.


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Labels: 40s, Agnes M., Bogdanovich, Carol Reed, Godard, Hitchcock, Howard Hughes, John Ford, Joseph Cotten, Kael, Kurosawa, Marx Brothers, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Shakespeare, Truffaut, Welles, Wise, Wyler

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By Edward Copeland
Those words grace a title card before the credits for the 1931 version of The Front Page, literally set against the turning pages of a newspaper begin. The first screen version of the hit Broadway comedy (produced by Howard Hughes) about Chicago newspapermen covering an impending hanging written by former Chicago reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur turns 80 years old today. It would go on to be revived three times on Broadway and remade three times on film, in one case accomplishing the rarest of things. The 1931 version remains a very good film and, typically, remakes of good movies fall flat on their ass but its first remake, 1940's His Girl Friday, actually improved on it. The same could not be said for the two later remakes, one of which was even directed by Billy Wilder. We may speak of the other films later, but today we salute the first film incarnation with Adolphe Menjou as Walter Burns and Pat O'Brien as Hildy Johnson.

Since His Girl Friday is one of my favorite films of all time, the story of The Front Page plays quite familiarly to me and since I've the seen the original several times as well (though not recently), I decided to focus on different aspects upon my return trip for this 80th anniversary piece. First, for those who might know the story only through His Girl Friday or aren't acquainted with the story at all, a brief plot summary. The main conflict concerns Walter Burns, editor of The Morning Post, a Chicago tabloid, who doesn't want to lose his ace reporter Hildy Johnson, who is planning to leave the state and start a new life after getting married. It's set against the backdrop of the impending execution of a particularly controversial convicted killer that has been politicized by the town's mayor and sheriff who face re-election and the governor, who belongs to the opposite party. The key difference, and what really made His Girl Friday work even better, is that they made Hildy a woman and Walter's ex-wife. In the original, Hildy is a man and as great and funny as The Front Page is, something strange lurks in the idea that a newspaper editor would be so possessive of his reporter that he'd want to thwart his marriage and his exit to another state and a better job just to keep his hooks in him. It isn't just Hildy that the Walter of The Front Page acts this way about either. The boys in the criminal courts newsroom mention the time another reporter tried to leave the Post and Walter tricked him into a fight so he'd get arrested and thrown in jail on assault and battery charges and only Walter could bail him out provided he returned to his job.

Synopsis out of the way, what stood out the most to me this time about The Front Page was how exceptional Lewis Milestone's direction was. In the very first year of the Oscars, they had for the first and last time the category of best comedy direction and the prize went to Lewis Milestone for Two Arabian Knights, a silent which, despite its title, actually was set during World War I. To show how diverse he could be, he won best director again two years later for another WWI tale, that year's best picture, All Quiet on the Western Front. The following year, he received his third and final best director nomination for The Front Page and a quite deserved nomination it was. The fast-paced, overlapping dialogue that everyone tends to credit as an invention of Howard Hawks in His Girl Friday really can be found nine years earlier in Milestone's The Front Page, albeit not executed by as interesting actors as in His Girl Friday. In fact, I think the inability to match that pacing doomed Wilder's 1974 remake and was just one of the many reasons that the 1988 remake Switching Channels starring Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner resulted in such a disaster. That isn't Milestone's only contribution though. As he showed in Western Front, he also happened to be one of cinema's early visual masters. When it gets to the point in the story when condemned man Earl Williams (George E. Stone) escapes and the reporters in the criminal courts press room clear out, Milestone combines a wonderful montage of their editors back at their newspapers calling for them as he keeps cutting back to a continuous pan of the unmanned phones in the press room. One of my other favorite shots comes later in the film when Hildy and Walter (O'Brien, Menjou) try to keep everyone out because they are hiding Earl in the press room and Hildy's fiancee Peggy (Mary Brian) shows up to see why Hildy hasn't made it to the train station. Peggy argues with Hildy who tries to flee her walking backward, still clutching his typewriter, while they circle Burns who is giving orders over the phone at the same time he interjects his own comments in Hildy and Peggy's dispute.

This Front Page also existed in that glorious pre-Code era where it could get away with lots of things films just a handful of years later wouldn't be able to do. It opens with gallows humor — literally. We open with a closeup of a large sack of flour whose slogan reads "SUNSHINE FLOUR INSURES DOMESTIC HAPPINESS." The camera pulls back to show that it's being used to test the rope that will be used to hang Earl Williams the following morning. As it's released and the bag of flour drops through the platform, one man tells another to make certain that the rope works well enough this time. "Last time the guy bounced up and down like he was on a rubber band." The man insists he allowed for the proper weight, but the guy below says the last condemned inmate added weight like they all usually do by stuffing himself during his last meal and "The sheriff wants his neck to snap this time." The noise below disturbs the men of the press who can see and hear the scene a few stories above from the criminal courts press room. One thing that does set The Front Page apart from its remakes, even His Girl Friday, is that the other reporters are more distinctive as characters. Not that they have their own stories, but they stand out more as individuals, especially with standout character actors such as Edward Everett Horton, Frank McHugh, Slim Summerville and others filling the roles.

In another pre-Code touch, the character of Mollie Malloy, the woman abused by the members of the press by having befriended Williams, actually refers to herself as a streetwalker where I don't remember any of the other movie versions coming out and calling her a prostitute. I know they didn't in His Girl Friday and it's been a long time since I've seen the Wilder version with the horribly miscast Carol Burnett. Switching Channels is such a wretched piece of filmmaking that I only saw that once and checking IMDb, every character's name was changed and I don't recall a Mollie Malloy equivalent anyway since they tried to update it by setting it in the world of cable news. One other thing I always find interesting is the slight physical resemblance between Stone as Earl Williams here and John Qualen as Earl in His Girl Friday, though the characters are quite different otherwise. In the 1931 Front Page, Mae Clarke played Mollie and, as in the two other versions in which her character appears, she does take the dive out the window as a distraction, so it makes the grapefruit Clarke took to the face from James Cagney the same year in The Public Enemy not seem as bad. While the reporters' portrayal comes off as callous and cruel in His Girl Friday and even Wilder's 1974 version, they prove to be even harsher and more heartless in the original. As Mollie tells them at one point, "If you were worth breaking my fingernail on, I'd tear your faces off." In the very first scene of the film, we see the reporter McCue (Frank McHugh) calling a peeping tom victim on the phone and harassing her while the other newsmen in the room shout lewd remarks. She finally hangs up on him when he asks if she played Lady Godiva once for charity. The films, to say the least, do not offer the most noble or shining examples of The Fourth Estate. Even the ostensible hero of the piece, Hildy Johnson, who actually seems to be a good reporter who strives to get the facts right while the other reporters have no qualms about making up stories as trivial as what Williams will be having for his last meal, isn't above chicanery to get what he needs. Granted, it's a story from the days of yellow journalism, but one has to wonder if more truth managed to sneak out then than now when so many government reporters seem to be little more than stenographers.

The most famous supporting actor playing one of the reporters is the incomparable Edward Everett Horton and, as in many of his films such as the countless Astaire-Rogers musicals in which he took part, he's the standout here as Roy V. Bensinger, a germ-obsessed, prissy writer who isn't quite as nasty as the rest and who owns that rolltop desk that proves so pivotal in the plot (and holds his rhyming dictionary as well). We first meet Bensinger when he returns from a trip to the "death house" where Earl Williams awaits his execution and the conditions drive Bensinger batty, saying they are so awful they need to be reported to health authorities. "It's amazing these prisoners live long enough to be killed," he tells the other reporters. Of course, he becomes a victim of Walter Burns' scheming later when he and Hildy have hidden an escaped Earl Williams within his rolltop desk and need to sneak it out of the building, so Burns hires Bensinger to get him out of the building while telling his man Duffy to look over his work, tell him it stinks and stick him somewhere else. It's one of the things Walter does that makes Hildy want to get as far away from him as possible, though Burns argues than it will teach Bensinger for leaving his newspaper without giving notice.

What I'd also forgotten and that sets the 1931 Front Page apart from later versions stems from a racial undercurrent in the storyline. Now, no African-American characters appear in the film (though one slur term for them is used) but Earl Williams has been painted by the corrupt mayor and sheriff (James Gordon, Clarence H. Wilson) as a communist who took part in a demonstration and killed an African-American police officer as part of their plan to woo the black vote for re-election the week following Williams' execution. Of course, it's mostly lies, printed by the always willing-to-run-anything press. The truth comes out when a few hours before his execution, the sheriff is forced to make Williams meet with another psychologist, one Professor Englehoffer (Gustav von Seyffertitz), who suggests re-creating the crime so the sheriff hands Earl his gun and William promptly shoots the professor in the gut and escapes.

As Earl ends up being hidden by Hildy (with Mollie helping at first and eventually Burns), he tells his story. He was a man who had been fired from his job after 14 years and was at wit's end. He declares, "I'm not a Bolshevik, I'm an anarchist." Earl also begs for people to let him die. He wants to go back and await the hangman's noose, but there are too many people with too many agendas to let that happen. "Better to die for a cause than the way most people die — for no reason." Hildy's problem is that as much as he hates Burns and the job he does, he is addicted to the job and every time a new development falls into his lap, he can't stop himself from calling it in to Walter and trying to write it up so they can scoop everyone, even if it results in alienating fiancee Peggy further and even watching as Burns has his crooked henchman Diamond Louie (Maurice Black) abduct Hildy's future mother-in-law (Effie Esler).

Hildy tries his best to escape Walter's net, which starts out with Burns offering cash to anyone who can find Hildy, who at the time is obtaining his marriage license with Peggy. Hildy dreams of moving to New York where he has a job lined up with an ad agency for $150 a week. Peggy's bright enough to know that he's too addicted to the news game to give it up easily, no matter how hard Hildy tries to convince her. "Ever climbed out of the sewer and smelled the cool, fresh air? You are the cool, fresh air," Hildy tells her. When Peggy does bust in on the newsroom in that one scene and Hildy tries to explain that it's a big story, she does sort of put him in his place with a line of dialogue that seems particularly timely even today. "It's always a big story, the biggest story in the world and the next day you can't remember what it was about," she tells him. It reminds me of when we were transfixed as the Iranian people took to the streets protesting their stolen election and fraudulent dictatorship only to have it instantly vanish from view the moment Michael Jackson dropped dead and sucked all the air out of the news for a week or more. O'Brien does fine as Hildy, but it's Menjou's Burns who steals the show. It earned him an Oscar nomination, though as good as Menjou is, he's no Cary Grant. The Front Page itself also earned a best picture nomination. The only one of the five nominees from 1930-31 I haven't seen is East Lynne, but of the four I have, The Front Page wins by a mile and the fact that Cimarron won best picture at all is ridiculous. If not The Front Page, Skippy or Trader Horn deserved it before that dusty Western.

As The Front Page ends, Menjou's Burns even manages to charm Peggy and convince her that he's not all bad. As a wedding gift, he gives Hildy his golden pocketwatch engraved, "To the finest newspaperman I've ever known Walter Burns" and tells him he can scratch his name out and put in his if he likes. They drop the sound, so you can't hear the last word of the final punchline, which Walter Matthau at least got to deliver in Billy Wilder's version, when Burns calls Duffy and tells him to radio ahead to the train's first stop and give the sheriff Hildy's description and have him arrested. "The son of a bitch stole my watch."

His Girl Friday remains my favorite, but this 80-year-old version of a play which premiered in 1928 is pretty damn good as well. I've never seen The Front Page staged in its play form, but it would have been fun to see either of its last two Broadway revivals since the 1986 revival's Walter Burns was John Lithgow and, even more intriguing, the very successful 1969 revival starred Robert Ryan as its Walter Burns. When is that time machine getting built for me already?

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Labels: 30s, Astaire, Burt Reynolds, Cagney, Cary, Ginger Rogers, Hawks, Hecht, Howard Hughes, Lithgow, Matthau, Menjou, Milestone, Movie Tributes, Musicals, Oscars, Remakes, Robert Ryan, Silents, Wilder

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