NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART
(Clifford Odets, 1944).
Penniless, free-spirited drifter Ernie Mott (Cary Grant) visits his
ailing mother (Ethel Barrymore) at his old East End neighborhood in
London. Torn between his desire to help her and his need to not be tied
down with responsibilities, he falls for a gangster’s girlfriend
(June Duprez) while his mother allows herself to get involved in a stolen
goods racket in order to make ends meet.
This was the first of only two directing stints by the famous left-wing
playwright Odets. The film conveys a genuine feel for working class
poverty that is rare for a Hollywood movie of that time. Beautifully
shot in black and white by George Barnes, the picture is full of darkness
and shadow, expressing the narrow confinement, physical and emotional,
of the slums. It’s not so successful in replicating the physical
details of East End life—the film was shot on the RKO back lot,
after all. Neither does it completely avoid sentimentality, or the too-obvious
telescoping of plot, but the consistently downbeat mood and the trenchant,
worldly wit of Odets’ screenplay make the film seem ahead of its
time.
Cary Grant wanted a chance to break from his popular persona to do serious
roles, and here he does full justice to a brooding, complex character.
The Ernie Mott in Richard Llewellyn’s novel was a 19-year-old
kid, which makes more sense in terms of realism, but Odets aged the
part to fit the 39-year-old Grant in his adaptation. With his Cockney
insouciance, wariness in the face of commitment, and rough-edged lower
class charm, Grant’s Ernie Mott is something of a glimpse into
the Archie Leach that predated the actor’s suave reincarnation
as Hollywood star. Barrymore provides excellent support in a role that
won her an Oscar.
Odets’ fine portrayal of social class, and the dilemma of the
main character’s choice between freedom and responsibility, is
set against the background of the time between the wars. The film opens
on Armistice Day at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where Ernie meets
an older man and future friend played by Barry Fitzgerald. It ends at
the beginning of World War II. The private drama reflects a more universal
one: the end of heedless isolationism and the beginning of a more socially
conscious age.
Audiences apparently didn’t want to see Cary Grant stretch his
talents. The film bombed, costing the studio a pretty penny. Three years
later, during the pathetic Hollywood witch hunts in Washington, a line
of Ernie Mott’s dialogue was quoted at a HUAC hearing to bolster
claims that Odets was a Communist. The movie remains underrated and
little-seen. It shouldn’t be.
THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE
(Peter Yates, 1973).
Aging Boston crook and gambler Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) is facing
possible jail time for a petty bootlegging rap. Worried about his wife
and kids having to go on welfare, he does some business with a gunrunner
(Steven Keats), which attracts the attention of an ice-cold detective
(the excellent Richard Jordan) who wants Eddie to snitch on the gunrunner
in exchange for some help with his court case. Unfortunately the guns
end up being used in a series of violent bank robberies (engineered
by the reliably creepy Alex Rocco), and this puts Eddie in a perilous
position.
This is one of those movies that could only have been made in the 1970s.
The main character is a loser, and a not very lovable one. Yates doesn’t
follow the usual crime film trajectory—he takes his time establishing
character, and introduces new plot threads without a lot of explanation,
leaving it up to the audience to make connections. Shot on location
during a Boston autumn, the picture has a gritty visual style matching
its tough, despairing view of humanity.
Mitchum is nothing less than superb in the title role, and it demonstrates
his integrity as an actor that he would agree to play such a non-heroic
part. Shambling wearily through the lower-class urban environment, slumped
over a drink at a bar or coffee at a cheap diner, Coyle is a rough customer
who has seen too many things, his expressions conveying impatience with
his lot combined with a lurking potential for malevolence, albeit the
petty kind. No overacting here, no star personality, just a spot-on
portrayal of a mixed-up old hoodlum who wants out.
The film’s naturalism might be a source of continual surprise
for those viewers accustomed to larger-than-life gangsters or wise-cracking
cops. Even the gripping bank robbing scenes have an ugly, quotidian
flavor of unglamorous lowlife. The plot doesn’t go the way you
might expect, either. A long late sequence involving Coyle and his mob-connected
bartender friend (Peter Boyle) at a hockey game is perfectly constructed.
Boyle is also very good in this film, as are the numerous supporting
players. The grim meaning of the movie’s title hits you like a
freight train at the end. This film’s sadness and bitter wisdom
of the streets makes it one of a kind.
KES (Ken Loach, 1970).
Billy Casper (David Bradley), a boy in a Yorkshire mining town, is
neglected by his overworked mother and mistreated by his older brother
(Freddie Fletcher) who is already embittered by his dead-end life as
a miner. Billy dreads going to the mines, but nothing in his environment
or schooling has given him hope for much else. He is bullied at school,
gets into fights, and steals. But when he notices a falcon’s nest
near his home, he studies falconry from a book, captures the bird, and
gradually trains it.
In the working-class realist tradition of British cinema, Loach went
a few steps further than his predecessors a decade before, both in style
(more documentary-like, including the use of non-professional actors)
and content (more socially conscious and less inclined to sentimentality).
Here he is relentless in his portrayal of the deadening effect of class
on the consciousness of a child.
Billy’s relationship with the falcon Kes, which in a more conventional
film would act as a central symbol of hope or transcendence, is here
more of a simple counterpoint to the sense of everyday oppression. The
picture is particularly masterful in its depiction of life at school.
One scene where a group of boys is lined up to receive a caning from
the brutal, contemptuous headmaster manages to be grimly amusing and
appalling at the same time. A long sequence with a gym teacher (Brian
Glover) behaving more childishly than his students in a football game,
and then later cruelly punishing Billy for not showering, has a devastating
power.
Billy’s interest in falconry is evidence that an initiative springing
from within a child, as opposed to expectations imposed from without,
offer a true alternative, a fact skillfully highlighted in a late scene
between Billy and a superficially kind but indifferent guidance counselor.
The counselor’s offering of various low-level career possibilities
to the unresponsive boy is a low-key summing up of the entire film—it
never occurs to Billy to mention his interest in falconry to this adult,
probably because it seems to exist in a wholly separate realm.
Based on a novel by Barry Hines, the movie does not attempt to “clean
up” the story’s heavy Yorkshire dialect, another daring
move by Loach. It was difficult for me to understand what was being
said a lot of the time, and I would recommend that American viewers
use a closed-captioning or English subtitle feature when viewing the
film, if possible.
Kes is a moving tragedy of working class despair. Loach’s
commitment to truth allows our insight, and whatever hope we may find,
to exist only just outside the frame, as it were, in the compassion
of the film’s direct method. This was the movie that brought Ken
Loach to the world’s attention, and for good reason.
NUMBER SEVENTEEN
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1932).
A young man (John Stuart) enters a dark, empty house where he runs
into a Cockney ne’er-do-well (Leon M. Lion). They both find what
appears to be a dead body, and then a girl from next door (Ann Casson)
shows up with a story about a stolen necklace. Eventually, eight different
people are stumbling about the dark house, several of them criminals,
and none of them exactly who they claim to be.
Hitchcock was assigned to do the film, adapted from a play owned by
the studio, British International. It has the common drawback of filmed
plays—confinement to one set for most of the picture, and a predominance
of talk over action. The fact that much of the movie takes place in
half-darkness makes the already confusing plot even more so. Lion’s
comic relief is rather annoying and dated, I think. Still, the mystery
elements and plot reversals are not without some entertainment value.
Throwing characters together without explaining who they are, or why
they’re in this house, was actually a bit ahead of its time. It
certainly keeps the audience on its toes, and the director continued
to hone his fast-moving style, already a marked contrast with the pace
of most other British films. The movie ends with a good chase sequence
involving a train (a nice mix of models and stock footage) that is a
taste of better things to come from Hitchcock.
IMPROMPTU (James Lepine, 1991).
The notorious female novelist George Sand (Judy Davis) is smitten
with composer Frederic Chopin (Hugh Grant), but her double-dealing friend
Marie (Bernadette Peters), the lover of Franz Liszt (Julian Sands) intrigues
to prevent the match.
You might be forgiven for having low expectations of a comedy romance
about famous literary figures. Sarah Kernochan’s screenplay, although
hewing fairly well to historical fact, doesn’t go too deep into
the artistic concerns of the characters, but has a bit of fun with their
public personas instead. On those terms, the film is more entertaining
than I had reason to expect, and most of the credit goes to Judy Davis.
With a combination of fierce intelligence, wit, and passion, Davis makes
you believe in Sand as an object of perpetual fascination for male artists,
and a figure of scandal for the more conventionally minded. Davis is
certainly better looking than George Sand was, if we are to judge by
portraits, but in Hollywood terms she is not a “looker.”
With great energy and conviction, this wonderful actress demonstrates
how a brilliant mind and a strong character are more attractive than
beauty.
The best part of the movie, taking up most of the running time in its
first half, concerns a stay by Sand, Liszt, Marie, Chopin, and the painter
Delacroix at the country home of a bourgeois lady (Emma Thompson) with
artistic pretensions. Sand’s former lover Alfred de Musset (Mandy
Patinkin) shows up, as well as her current pretty-boy companion, a jealous
blockhead named Mailefille (Georges Corraface). A bedroom farce ensues,
with Sand sneaking into Chopin’s room and making a bad impression,
Musset crashing through a window on a horse, and an amateur theatrical
that makes a fool out of the bewildered hostess. Yes, it’s all
a bit silly, but witty and light-hearted enough to delight this viewer.
The second half of the picture fails to quite measure up to its rollicking
first half, but the romantic interplay between Davis and the effete
Grant (attempting a Polish accent) is enjoyable. Although Impromptu
doesn’t truly convey the thought or artistry of the 19th century
author, it plays off the new sense of bohemian rebellion and female
empowerment that Sand represented to amusing effect. Judy Davis should
have been a great star, I think, and this is one of the handful of films
that demonstrates why.
2010 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
