For those with 3D setups, a couple of recommendations:
1953’s
Miss Sadie Thompson has the reputation of being the most watered down and disposable of thethree screen versions of W. Somerset Maugham’s Rain, but while it has a few cosmetic changes and lacks the sordid atmosphere of its two pre-Production Code predecessors with Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford, it’s certainly not negligible. Most of the changes are fairly cosmetic: although common wisdom has it that Sadie has been changed from hooker to nightclub singer, she’s clearly referred to as a prostitute (even in the film’s trailer) and even admits that she did more than sing for her supper when she worked in a notorious Honolulu brothel, while changing Davidson (Jose Ferrer) from an ordained minister to a self-appointed missionary official doesn’t stop a supporting character from pointing out that his desperate need to stamp out sin is no different to an alcoholic trying to enforce Prohibition.
It’s a film with two major assets: strong performances from its central trio of Hayworth (who’s got a few more years on the clock and a few more pounds on the hips, which is just what the part calls for), Ferrer and Aldo Ray and, most surprisingly, its use of 3D.
Few would have got the chance to see it in 3D. Arriving just as the fad was dying out, after two weeks all the 3D prints were pulled and the film played in 2D only, which is a shame because
it’s easily the best use of the format I’ve ever seen, and it plays especially well on Twilight Time’s limited edition US Blu-ray release. It avoids the technical mistakes of early films and avoids throwing things at the screen – the closest to an in your face effect is Rita Hayworth blowing smoke at the screen when lighting up – but instead creates a real sense of depth and perspective that makes the most of the locations beyond the usual foreground/background cutout effect (the foreground palm trees may pop out but there’s real depth in the distant forest too) and the characters relationship within the frame which is helped by the cast moving and interacting with the set and other characters more than usual for a 3D film.
There’s none of the double imaging when things get too close to the camera and only a slightly troublesome lampshade seems awkward in the format, though the problem of backgrounds in interiors seeming to be shot in closeup even when the foreground is in medium shot still endures in a few scenes, as does the tendency to be drawn away from what is happening in the drama by the odd strikingly effective bit of 3D in the frame. But it's one of the few films of that era where it doesn't feel gimmicky even though a few shots like the camera tracking through a crowd of GIs to Hayworth dancing really stand out.
“Bullets are very democratic. They kill good men as well as bad.”
Set in the aftermath of the Civil War,
Gun Fury sets Rock Hudson’s born-again pacifist who thinks the war could have been avoided with compromise and negotiation against Phil Carey’s bitter Southerner who lost everything in the war and now with his old comrades in arms (Lee Marvin and Neville Brand among them) has gone from robbing carpetbaggers to stealing from anyone to get it back. He may play the Southern gentleman while he’s waiting for his next job to come off, but there’s no doubt what’s on his mind when he sees Hudson’s fiancée Donna Reed:
“She can smile without making it a simper. It’s a rare quality in a woman… She’s as different from other women as cognac is from corn liquor.”
“You get the same kind of headache from either one.”
Despite his second-in-command long-term partner (and possibly a bit more) Leo Gordon’s attempts to steer the young lovers away from the stage they plan to rob, Carey naturally doesn’t just settle for the small fortune in gold it was carrying but decides to take Reed as well, leaving Hudson for dead. Just as naturally, his men don’t check too thoroughly and Hudson sets off to get her back.
Despite his war experiences, initially at least, Hudson’s clearly out of his depth. His botched attempt to thwart the robbery leaves two more innocents dead and gets him shot (a wound he recovers from with remarkable ease), so it’s no wonder that he immediately accepts the offer to team up with Gordon, who Carey left tied to a corral for the vultures to dine on at their leisure for trying to get him to leave Reed behind and now wants his own revenge (the Italian poster art by Anselmo Ballester reproduced on the cover of Twilight Time’s Bluray and its US and French variations all used an image of Hudson tied up while Reed is about to be molested by Carey, though it has to be said that Carey is the only figure to look remotely like any of the stars in this version). And, aside from an unbilled Pat Hogan’s vengeful Native American who wants to kill both Gordon and Carey for destroying his village and stealing his sister and Roberta Haynes as Carey’s cast-off Mexican lover, Gordon’s the only help he’s going to get, with the nearest sheriff emphasising that his job is limited to protecting his town while the local sheep ranchers can only sell them guns and horses because they’re so shorthanded…
The script by Maverick and The Rockford Files’ Roy Huggins and best-selling author Irving Wallace offers plenty of choice dialogue but what’s missing is the kind of dramatic conflict the opening scenes promise to compliment the gunplay it does deliver. It’s not too much of a problem imagining Hudson immediately disavowing his pacifist ideals to save his girl with no further discussion after nailing them so firmly to the mast but his alliance with Gordon is immediately accepted with no qualms and his part in the previous reign of terror overlooked with a few words about his disapproval of Carey’s actions and none of the dramatic sparks you’d expect and get if the two were played by James Stewart and Arthur Kennedy in an Anthony Mann Western. This sets its sights much lower, and with Hudson’s seriously underwritten role as righteous avenger taken for granted with no real moral challenge to his newfound post-war principles and Gordon never really forced to confront his own past actions in any meaningful way, all the script’s character development and sturm und drang is reserved for Carey, allowing him to easily dominate the film.
He may like to pretend that he’s still fighting the war and that it’s a defiant desire not to be among the army of mourners or cripples left in its wake down south that drives him, but, as Gordon is only too aware, that’s just an excuse for polite company. When the chips are down he’s out for whatever he can get any way he can get it, only to lose interest in it once he’s got it and go after something else. For him
“Ordinary men live by ordinary laws. I’m not an ordinary man. The laws I need I make for my own convenience.” The result is a good Western with a great villain rather than a great Western with several great characters, but to be fair to the film it’s clearly the kind of movie that no-one making ever intended to be more than a good evening’s entertainment for a mainstream audience, and on that level it succeeds.
Like Andre De Toth’s House of Wax, this has the distinction of being a 3D film shot by a one-eyed director, Raoul Walsh, who lost his right eye and career as an actor in a freak accident (how else could you describe a jackrabbit crashing through your car windscreen?) on the set of In Old Arizona in 1928. Columbia’s 50s 3D films were often superior to their competitors – Miss Sadie Thompson boasts one of the very best uses of the format ever – but at times it feels like Walsh is trying just a little too hard to keep objects (mirrors, candles, sagebrush) in the foreground to emphasise the depth in the first couple of reels and in a couple of early shots you have a choice of focussing on the foreground or the distant mountain ranges because the other will appear ever so very slightly wrong while there are a couple of shots that have that cardboard cut-out toy theatre effect (most notably when the stagecoach arrives at the rest station). The definition is a little soft in some of the exterior extreme long shots and the colour is certainly problematic and not always convincing, especially with skin tones, as was the case in some other 50s colour 3D films, but overall the 3D effect in Twilight Time’s limited edition Bluray is more impressive than not.
There’s a pleasing sense of depth and some standout 3D sequences like the opening scene that attempts to give This is Cinerama’s famous rollercoaster sequence a run for its money with a driver’s point of view of a racing stagecoach and horses and the finale, which makes great use of the undulating landscape and sees every gunshot throw dust or splinters at the screen. Not that they’re the only things that get chucked at the audience, with rocks, logs and a striking rattler thrown at us and Roberta Haynes throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Lee Marvin. I don’t know if the film had an intermission card when it played in 3D, but there’s none included here.
As for the elephant in the room, yes there is a synch problem in the second half of the film – but it is a compatibility problem that depends on what player you watch the film. Seen on my Sony UHP-H1 (an extremely glitch-prone and overpriced model I wouldn’t recommend to anyone unless I seriously disliked them) it’s noticeable but could be easily corrected by adjusting the audio synch on my TV settings, though obviously not every TV set has that option. However, played in my Panasonic DMP-BDT180 and it’s a different story, with the film playing in synch throughout.
The trailer is also included in both 2D and 3D versions and is a classic example of the old hard sell technique – ‘Donna Reed in a role surpassing her triumph in From Here to Eternity! Phil Carey, the new thrill man! And Roberta Haynes, the girl you've heard about and Hollywood is raving about!' Although this played on its original release with The Three Stooges short Pardon My Backfire, that’s not included, though it can be found on TT’s The Mad Magician Bluray.
NB: there is one wondrously outrageous bit of overacting from Maudie Prickett, who is absolutely determined to steal one scene even though she doesn't have any dialogue.
And one 2D steal at $6.95:
"Take care of yourself. The water is full of sharks."
The McCarthy-inspired Blacklist in the late 40s and 50s is such a shameful incident in America's history that film and TV has largely steered clear of the subject altogether: you can count the films dealing with it directly on the fingers of one hand, so it sounds like damning with faint praise to say that the rarely revived
The Front is the best of them all. That it's the `Woody Allen film' that time forgot hasn't helped it's reputation, but in truth, although many regular Allen collaborators from co-star Michael Murphy to producers Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe are involved, this isn't an Allen film: some of the wisecracks may be tailor-made for him, but this is Martin Ritt and Walter Bernstein's film and Allen's just playing a role, that of a cashier and small-time bookie who finds himself `fronting' for blacklisted writers for 10% of whatever they get for their scripts.
Kicking off with a superb scene-setting montage of the 50s at its best and worst, from baseball and apple pie to the Korean War and the execution of the Rosenbergs while Frank Sinatra sings Young at Heart on the soundtrack, it's a film that certainly speaks from personal experience. Along with writer Walter Bernstein and director Martin Ritt (who had both touched upon the blacklist more obliquely in 1970's
The Molly Maguires) many of the cast - Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, Lloyd Gough, Joshua Shelley - were blacklisted, while the daughter of one of the blacklist's most tragic victims, John Garfield, also appears. Yet surprisingly it's not a whitewash: the blacklisted writers make it clear that they weren't put on the list by mistake but because they are communists, while Allen's front may start out on his new career as a favor to a friend but quickly shows his true opportunistic colors. No sooner has he seen how much money he can make than he's taking on more writers at higher rates, seducing Andrea Marcovicci's production assistant who is really in love with the words that aren't even his own rather than the man himself and getting ideas above his station, refusing to hand in scripts he thinks aren't up to his standards because "It's my name that goes on the script." In that he's really no different from anyone else in a world where club owners take advantage of the blacklist to get performers like Mostel's increasingly suicidal Hecky Green at bargain rates and then still knock them down even further after a sell-out show. But it's not long before he becomes a political suspect himself...
Set in the fledgling TV industry where gas company sponsors insisted on rewriting concentration camp dramas to avoid giving their product a bad image and where businessmen who only owned a couple of stores could demand - and get - the right of veto over any cast members they thought are `too red' for their customers' liking by threatening to withdraw a single commercial (both true incidents), it doesn't really need to resort to comic invention, but it's more of an absurd yet dry black comedy that's often too dark NOT to laugh at. The final scene where Allen comes up against the committee and tries to bluff his way out of a contempt charge is really just a piece of wish fulfilment, the kind of thing you wish you had said long after the moment has passed, but it's hard to begrudge Ritt and Bernstein their moment: they earned it. Running a tight hour-and-a-half and with great photography by Michael Chapman, it's well worth investigating.
While Sony's DVD release offered no extras, Twilight Time's Bluray release more than makes amends with an audio commentary featuring co-star Andrea Marcovicci, isolated score (the Sinatra song is not included on that track, though it remains on the film proper), trailer and booklet, as well as featuring a solid widescreen transfer.
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