Classic Rewind: Underwater! (1955)

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More of a marketing ploy than an actual film, this underseas voyage typifies the kind of shamelessly tacky filmmaking that tended to crop up in the advent of the widescreen era in the mid-50's, exclamation point and all.
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Built more around the industrialist and sexual exploits of producer Howard Hughes than a script, Underwater! with its promises of skimpy Jane Russell attire and relatively uncharted nautical diving, feels listlessly built in reverse - like making a film around a poster. 
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And for its majority, we're subjected to dingy underwater dives interspersed with boatside chats, preferably with shirts off, as our four scavenging voyagers search for gold buried at sea - whether they find it, or if we particularly care, is seemingly all that's at stake. 
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Yet even it's tawdry title comes with false pretenses, when after weeks of shooting off the coast of Hawaii produced little to no usable footage, a massive underwater tank was built on an RKO soundstage in order to capture the actors in their scuba gear, underwater it is not. [D]

Quick Reviews: Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935), Twentieth Century (1934)

"BROADWAY MELODY OF 1936" (1935)
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This bubbly showbiz musical - a resuscitation of 1929's Oscar winning formula - is a classic backstage tale of yearning stardom, clean-cut producers and desperate gossip columnists, with a  beaming, positively perky debut from Eleanor Powell. 
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"You Are My Lucky Star" and "Broadway Rhythm", which would both be featured by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen in Singin' in the Rain, make their bebut, and Powell's dancing is electrifying, but shoddy, senseless climax nearly ruins the mood. [B-]
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"TWENTIETH CENTURY" (1934)
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Howards Hawks' first try at comedy isn't as furiously madcap as His Girl Friday, but John Barrymore and Carole Lombard are a match made in heaven in this early satirical screwballer with a touch of Lubitsch. 
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Playing a prestigious playwright and the belligerent, overnight star respectively, Barrymore and Lombard pull off some of the best acting in their careers, most of it a hysterically heated tete-a-tete aboard a moving train. [B+]

The War is Over...For Now

The fire is being put out on my 2nd annual WWII Marathon has concluded with the viewing of Von Ryan's Express. This year's slate wasn't nearly as good as last years (how could it be with Where Eagles Dare, The Guns of Navaronne, Sahara, The Bridge on the River Kwai, etc.) but I'm already gathering a list for next year and it looks promising.
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So for those who missed any, here are my full write-ups: (and as always, any kind of marathon/blogathon can be revisited on the sidebar to the right--->)
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The Enemy Below (1957)
Run Silent, Run Deep (1958)
Operation Crossbow (1965)
The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)
A Yank in the RAF (1941)
The Devil's Brigade (1968)
Objective, Burma (1945)
Air Force (1943)
They Were Expendable (1945)
The Young Lions (1959)
Never So Few (1959)
The Caine Mutiny (1954)
Von Ryan's Express (1965)

Quick Reviews: The Three Musketeers (1948), Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942)

"THE THREE MUSKETEERS" (1948)
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Alexandre Dumas' classic novel gets one of its better adaptations here in MGM's breakneck, agile Technicolor retelling. Impressive, deep cast holds their part and the high-flying stunt work and sword fighting is some of the best of the era.
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One of Gene Kelly's rare non-musical roles (his homage to his favorite actor, Douglas Fairbanks) , the dancer and choreographer brings his quick-feet and tireless work effort to put together a skillful, wily D'Artagnan. [B]
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"ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON" (1942)
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Cary Grant rescues Ginger Rogers from her Nazi Austrian husband in this dreadfully misguided impersonation of Ernst Lubitsch. 
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Set in the European front in the wake of WWII, the film can't find the right balance between comedy and drama (our two stars, with their mink coats and pin-striped suits, even find themselves in a concentration camp at one point) and thus the whole thing comes off as woefully tacky. [C-]

X-Men: First Class and the fleeting glimpses of Fassbender as Bond

I don't really know what to think of Matthew Vaughn's brisk and reckless X-Men: First Class, but I know that the film promised to me by so many as not only an expert comic-book origin story, but a terrific mainstream action film altogether were being ever so generous. 
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Which isn't to say that I hated the film, because I enjoyed watching this cast (specifically Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy) and its pseudo-James Bond Cold War globe-trotting too much to store up any genuine disdain. No, I suppose my reluctance has to do more with the X-Men franchise as whole which, even at its height in the early aughts, never quite did it for me.

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First off, there are just too many characters in these films, way too many. First Class introduces a whole new slate of recruits, none of whom are relatively interesting in either their unique ability/power/mutation or sloppy characterization. (Here's Zoe Kravitz as a betraying butterfly woman...)
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On the whole, though, I just think this mutant self-acceptance stuff is, if not horribly misguided, than rather tedious. The entire mid-section of First Class is this "it's hard out here for a mutant" stuff and I just have trouble buying it. 
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I know there are parallels with gay and civil rights (certainly with the film's Cold War-era inception), but when a good portion of your film involves secondary characters pouting about how their powers (which, I might say, I would trade my listless existence for in a second) are this crippling social boundary - I mean, get over it, Mystique.
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There's just so much stuff going on here, and only so few elements work, that the whole thing ends up coming off as overcrowded. I wanted it to just focus on Magneto's revenge-and-betrayal, but anytime the film moves on from its two stars, it wavers too badly to recommend. [C+]

WWII Marathon #13: Von Ryan's Express (1965)

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Luckily the second annual WWII marathon ends on an unusual high in the form of Mark Robson’s Von Ryan’s Express, which is pure adventure along the German-occupied Italian landscape. 

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Essentially The Great Escape with a train, the film, based on the David Westheimer novel, begins as a prison camp drama before shifting into a more comfortable, more exhilarating escape movie.

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Frank Sinatra plays American pilot Joseph L. Ryan, whose plane is downed near an Italian POW camp. Populated mainly by British soldiers led by ranking officer Major Eric Fincham (Trevor Howard), whom becomes displaced as camp leader by Ryan upon his arrival.

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The two bicker and bemoan each other throughout – with Ryan’s by-the-book morality winning out over Fincham’s more agitated, compulsive conduct – until they are transported North on-board a Nazi train, which they so ably overtake.

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From there, Val Lewton understudy Mark Robson stages some uniquely comical suspense sequences as the train covertly sneaks past Nazi stations and North towards Switzerland, to eventual freedom.

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There’s a wonderful climax in the Alps in which our escaped prisoners’ train is stalled in the mountains with Nazi troops at their heels and a genuine surprise of a final shot, but it’s the film’s stunning location work from start to finish that guarantees its success. [B+]

WWII Marathon #12: The Caine Mutiny (1954)

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This unavoidably compelling naval drama, based on Herman Wouk's 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, is a classic mutiny story construct - first-half sea-voyage conflict, second-half courtroom drama - that inevitably surprises with its ambiguous lack of answers and questionable motives.
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The film, apparently at a quicker gape than the novel, tells of the mutinous acts on board the USS Caine in the Pacific, in which a small party of officers, led by Lieutenant Steve Maryk (Van Johnson), took over the ship from the highly enigmatic Captain Queeg (Humphrey Bogart).
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Like the classic (and innumerably filmed) Mutiny on the Bounty, the film discusses the ethics and morals behind the mutiny at sea and what is or isn't considered a treasonous act, though to its credit it doesn't blatantly vilify Bogart's Queeg, nor does it condone the acts of the mutinous party. 
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The majority of the cast is spot-on, with Bogart's confused, paranoid Queeg toeing the line between outright lunacy and just isolated neuroticism. Fred MacMurray turns in perhaps the most tricky role as the cowardly Lieutenant Tom Keefer. 
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Troublingly for this film adaptation, the story is framed around Ensign Willie Kieth (Robert Francis), a straight-laced, clean-cut Princeton boy whose brief service record and inexperience works against him as an officer on-board the Caine. Francis plays him like a shell-shocked bore and briefly (not not extensively) the film threatens to take on his demeanor. [B-]

WWII Marathon #11: Never So Few (1959)

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John Sturges' WWII film - a foray from his many beautiful westerns of the mid-50's - is a puzzling, disappointingly spiritless action film that takes nearly 90 minutes to get rolling and once it does, turns into a murky legal war-crime dilemma. 
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Frank Sinatra, with his brown slouch hat and deadly-calm demeanor, plays Captain Reynolds, leading local Kachin warriors against the Japanese in the Burmese jungles. Among his flock are Peter Lawford, Richard Johnson and Dean Jones alongside future Sturges pen-pals Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson. 
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After an initial raid (in which Captain Reynolds contentiously takes the lives of one of his own mortally wounded men), he meets the wealthy debonair Nikko Regas (Paul Henreid) and his girlfriend, Carla Vesari (Gina Lollobrigida), which leads to a tireless romantic interlude to the Himalayans, where the film sputters under this nonexistent sexual ardor. 
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Once back in action, Reynolds is ordered to attack a Japanese outpost, but once they stumble upon a ravaged, beaten American convoy, their attentions turn towards a rogue Chinese outpost, where an inconvenient truth is uncovered, that the Chinese are, in fact, raiding and collecting American supplies, killing U.S. soldiers in the process.
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It's here where the film resembles the kind of muddled, insubordinate war films being produced at the time and in the future (The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Devil's Brigade, The Dirty Dozen) which were less concerned with patriotism and more with the injustices of war. 
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Sturges, at this point, had and would go on to make far better films (even better ones about the war, specifically) but Never So Few, while dramatically inert for its majority, does remain an appealing visual treat as it continues Sturges' reputation as a master of the widescreen - even if the results are never quite compelling. [C]

Review: Super 8 (2011)

I'll try to keep the word Spielberg to a minimum here, but truth be told, J.J. Abrams' sweetly nostalgic Super 8 is as blatant and reverent an homage as you could conceive, for better or worse. 
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Combining the small-town discovery of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind with the children's-adventure viewpoint of The Goonies, Super 8 easily (and knowingly) finds that magic of youthful innocence and childhood wonder against the backdrop of spooky exploration.
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Perhaps far more enjoyable for its delicate coming-of-age portrait of a family than its cacophonous, overblown creature-feature dressings, the film is at once too much of a Spielberg thing and yet not enough of it. 
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Beginning with the derailment of a passing train and the root of the town of Lillian's oncoming problems, the scene is unavoidably overstated and illogically staged, which is starkly adverse to the kind of slow-burn aesthetic that Spielberg so welcomed in his early days. 
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Conversely, the film's child stars, lead by Joel Courtney and Elle Fanning, are nothing short of breathtaking in their roles which require some startling intimacy and emotion, a common trait of Spielberg's films that holds true here.
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In fact, Joel Courtney's Joe Lamb, the imaginative, romantic teenage lead, could easily be considered a portrait of Spielberg himself (an obsessive genre geek, a train-set enthusiast and an admirer of the Fannings), just another added element to this indebted, appreciative puzzle.  
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Inevitably, Super 8 might be too slavishly admiring of its own influence (and even its own additions are not entirely welcome), but its heart, its big gushing heart, is unequivocally in the right place. [B+]

Quick Reviews: Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1948), Summer Stock (1950), Born to Dance (1936)

"TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME" (1948)

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This goofier, slimmed-down version of Anchors Aweigh sees singing and dancing baseball players Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra woo the team's new manager, a stunning Esther Williams. 

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The musical numbers are unmemorable and almost harmful in their non-conformity, proving after Damn Yankees that baseball musicals just aren't a good idea. [C]
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"SUMMER STOCK" (1950)
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Judy Garland's last film at MGM is a surefire b-side, with the actress and singer's well-recorded behind-the-scenes issues coming to the forefront (most notably her fluctuating weight, which changes throughout the film). 
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Gene Kelly plays a deadbeat stage producer who is brought in by Garland's aspiring sister to put on a show in the barn of the family farm. 
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The film plays out like a vaudeville, hay barrel version of White Christmas, with Kelly's inventive tapping the only reprieve from what is essentially a musically-challenged, anti-climactic production. [C-]
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"BORN TO DANCE" (1936)
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Queen of tap Eleanor Powell shines in this endearing soldiers-on-leave musical-romance which sees Jimmy Stewart attempt to croon (and dance) his way through a few catchy Cole Porter songs.
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"Hey, Babe, Hey" and the nearly ten-minute finale "Swinin' the Jinx Away" are pure bliss, while Porter staples "You'd Be So Easy to Love" and "I've Got You Under My Skin" also make an appearance in this brash, high-energy MGM musical. [A-]

WWII Marathon #10: The Young Lions (1959)

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Edward Dmytryk's The Young Lions - with its stark, monochrome lensing - is a particularly unique war film that examines both sides of the European front and the men whose fragile psyches, ideals and relationships inhibit them.
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Marlon Brando plays Christian Diestl, a Nazi officer whose view of the party as necessary for peace soon turns to apathy and then embarrassment, as he struggles to find his true motivation, bouncing from a glorified policeman to a active participant in the North African campaign to a witness to the horrors of a concentration camp. 
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Meanwhile, Montgomery Clift plays a Jewish store clerk Noah Ackerman, who is drafted alongside the selfish, resistant Broadway actor Michael Whiteacre (Dean Martin) as the two form an unlikely friendship during the course of their basic training.
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As the war comes closer and closer to a conclusion, these men, on different sides of the struggle, seem to pass one another in their view of this great conflict, with Christian and Noah's efforts becoming more and more futile while Michael's becoming more and more brave. 
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Quite predictably, the film ends in a fleeting moment of Bridge on the River Kwai madness, but The Young Lions is ultimately too coincidental and overbearing and yet scarce of the smaller, profound moments that make the former film so decidedly major. [C+]

In Progress

Watching The Young Lions ('59) from the couch. 

WWII Marathon #9: They Were Expendable (1945)

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His first project produced after the start of the war, John Ford’s They Were Expendable tracks the treacherous, undervalued journey of American PT boats in the early months of the Pacific theater. By turns stern and warm and full of powerful imagery, the film is pure Ford at heart, though it remains firmly on his second-tier.

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Picking up just before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the film follows both John Brickley (Robert Montgomery) and “Rusty” Ryan (John Wayne), two Lieutenant’s fighting for a chance to get their discriminated, neglected PT boats into the war, only to be continually relegated to mail carrier status.

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When the Japanese attack, the men get their chance, with the exception of Ryan, whose busted wing lands him in the arms of a Corregidor nurse (Donna Reed) as the two irrevocably fall in love amidst twilight bombs in the film’s most genuine, heartfelt and fleeting moments. 

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The rest of the film sees Rusty and Brickley encountering opposition in the form of ceaseless Japanese cruisers and destroyers, although the film seems to meander from conflict-to-conflict and never seems to gain much traction in the second half.

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For all of its brief moments of brilliance or affection, the majority of the film wilts under one of Ford’s most puzzling traits, his complete disregard (or purposeful inattention) towards any sense of time and space. They Were Expendable, like many of films, has a listless, wooly demeanor that can either hinder or enhance his work. [B-]

Quick Reviews: Bells Are Ringing (1960), Sex and the Single Girl (1964)

"BELLS ARE RINGING" (1960)
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A highly successful 1956 stage musical, Bells Are Ringing, like Born Yesterday, took Judy Holliday from the stage to the big screen, reprising a role that I don't believe anyone else could pull off with such dippy, adorable finesse. 
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As the prime member of a ramshackle answering service, she falls in love (sight unseen) with a dwindling, deadbeat writer (Dean Martin) and conceals her identity so as to confront him and help him out with his reckless lifestyle. The cast is brilliant and the tone is never far from wonderfully nutty, but the musical numbers (as with most from its era) are rather immobile and only sporadically catchy. [B-]
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"SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL" (1964)
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A gossip rag columnist (Tony Curtis) flirts with a sex psychologist (Natalie Wood) for a story in this wildly kooky sex comedy that also stars Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda and Edward Everett Horton. 
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Part satire, part screwball, the film is pure 60's camp at its worst - sexually risque, brightly colored, musically flavored - until it even flounders in its own starpower. Natalie Wood is the only one who escaped unharmed. [C-]

WWII Marathon #8: Air Force (1943)

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A bomber en-route to Honolulu gets pulled into the war when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor the morning of their arrival in Howard Hawks' absorbing WWII flyer Air Force, which, like Mervyn's LeRoy's Twenty Seconds Over Tokyo, makes excellent use of its confined space to let its characters breathe. 
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Bookended by jingoistic, rah-rah sentiment (including a quote from Abraham Lincoln), the film can be excused from other products of shameless propaganda simply because it's too honest and too well-made. 
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The B-17 bomber, the Mary-Ann, is piloted by "Irish" Quincannon (John Ridgely) and Bill William (Gig Young) with a colorful supporting cast (or crew) including Harry Carry, George Tobias and John Garfield, as a cynical insubordinate who has his eyes set on leaving the Army in three weeks - hardly an emblem of patriotism. 
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And like most of Hawks' films, his mournful-but-sober take on death is truly felt, as it was in the masterful Only Angels Have Wings ('39). Air Force never attains true top-level status in the Hollywood mater's oeuvre, but as an action film produced during wartime, it's passionate, patriotic filmmaking without being ignorant. [B]

Quick Reviews: Four's a Crowd (1938), It's Love I'm After (1937)

"FOUR'S A CROWD" (1938)
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A game, talented cast gets to stretch their comedic legs for middling, sub-par material in Michael Curtiz's Four's a Crowd, a true madcap screwball comedy that's more madcap than comedy. 
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Rosalind Russell's furiously committed reporter woman and Errol Flynn's public relations man steal the show, but too often the film doesn't trust its cast enough, as evidenced by a goofy, misguided recurring joke involving a pack of guard dogs. [C+]
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"IT'S LOVE I'M AFTER" (1937)
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Leslie Howard and Bette Davis play bickering, lovelorn stage actors in this performance satire and screwball comedy that's equal parts brilliant and garish. 
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Olivia de Havilland, as the starstruck heiress, is an adorable fury of gushing youthful lust as she fawns over the classy, self-possessed Basil Underwood (Howard). Film takes a turn towards the predictable in the final reels (and may take too long to get there), but it's overall effect is slightly more canny than daft. [B]

WWII Marathon #7: Objective, Burma (1945)

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A wearisome trudge through the Burmese jungle, this strictly one-note action film is exasperatingly overlong and listlessly-paced as it clocks in at over 140 minutes, during which Objective, Burma never once becomes convincingly empathetic or genuinely riveting.

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Errol Flynn plays Capt. Nelson, the man in charge of leading a stealth attack on an enemy radar position in preparation for the invasion of Burma. When a Japanese force threatens the landing of the rescue plane, the squad is stranded in the Burmese jungle with a 200-mile hike back to base.

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So what begins as a standard-order (albeit capable) action film-cum-history lesson quickly, and detrimentally, turns into a grubby, perpetual survival story, rendering a twice-a-week supply drop into the most fascinating moments of this otherwise tiring journey.

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Matters are worsened by Flynn’s Capt. Nelson, who is a disciplined, subordinate hero of the worst kind – that is, a pure, uncomplicated and inescapably minor protagonist. Flynn was always best as the charming, self-confident swashbuckler with an irresistible smile, but here, under all of the grim and dirt, his charming disposition and overwhelming presence is all but mute. [C-]

WWII Marathon #6: The Devil's Brigade (1968)

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Another intensively gritty widescreen collection of misfits fighting in the European front, The Devil’s Brigade is The Dirty Dozen without the direct insubordination and Kelly’s Heroes without the self-aware buffoonery.

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Tinged with true-story sentiment, The Devil’s Brigade takes on the usual bisected story structure, focusing on the rigorous, team-building training at the hands of the savvy, stern squadron commander (William Holden here, Lee Marvin there).

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A confluence of undisciplined, slack Americans and tight, diligent Canadian forces, the group – through raucous bar fights and friendly desert races – becomes a singular, cohesive unit, which leaves the commander particularly distressed when the brigade his ordered disbanded before being put into action.

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This allows us some of that Dirty Dozen dissention amongst superior officers (and a few cameos from Dana Andrews and Michael Rennie), before the squad can set their sails for southern Italy, where this highly trained, highly unique set of individuals can make their mark.

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The action at first is jovial, snide and really quite fun as the brigade sneaks across enemy lines to break the necks of those silly Nazi’s, but that’s before a brutal, more vulnerable and affecting action climax, which is inevitably earned and sold by Holden’s tanned, wearying stature. [B]

WWII Marathon #5: A Yank in the RAF (1941)

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This bland, distasteful WWII quasi-love triangle is tonally akin to a sawed-off shotgun. It’s a veritable, highly inaccurate scatter-shot of ingredients errantly tragic, comedic and romantic, with a central cast of nearly insufferable, bewildering characters who appear more like wartime pin-ups than actual people.

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Henry King, who directed nearly every top-level action film at 20^th Century Fox (be it pleasant or miserable) for nearly two decades, is hopelessly disadvantaged with this material, but his set-pieces (excluding a moderately watchable climactic dogfight) are equally haphazard.

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Tyrone Power plays the titular Yankee R.A.F. pilot, a woefully ignorant, slimy and loutish brute who has followed and inevitably ensnared a beautiful nightclub singer and dancer (Betty Grable) who is also entertaining the virtuous charm of a British captain who, coincidentally, finds himself in the same flight crew as our irritant anti-hero.

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Power is intolerably smug and conceited while Grable is adorably puzzling and the film, to its greatest disservice, never makes us feel for either one of them. The aforementioned dogfight which punctuates the film is more desperate than stirring, and by its conclusion, A Yank in the R.A.F. has utterly lost its sense of direction – a prolonged, inescapable nosedive. [D+]

Twilight Fan. DVR Activity.

WWII Marathon #4: The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)

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There may not have been a better director – that is a more reserved, honest and careful craftsman – of war films than William A. Wellman. A veteran himself, Wellman brings a mournful but not suffocating, cynical but not contemptuous viewpoint of men at war.

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Much more deliberate and diffuse than the director’s spiritual successor, the comparatively brisk Battleground, The Story of G.I. Joe unfolds at an artist’s gape, confidently easing in-and-out of squatted conversations amongst the 18^th Infantry both wistful and casual.

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Following them is real-life war correspondent Ernie Pyle (played here by Burgess Meredith), who through his tenderly-typed news articles and transitional voiceovers, narrates the progress, good or bad, of this fragile, battered bunch.

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Robert Mitchum, who received his first and only Oscar nomination for the role, plays Capt. Bill Walker, a tough-nosed soldier with a hushed, comforting demeanor, but it’s Wellman’s supporting cast (as with Battleground) that fleshes out this impeccable ensemble piece, bringing a pronounced human influence, be it wicked or saintly, to every single character.

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Sprawling yet intimate, his films bristle with interaction and sensitivity, but more than any other filmmaker of his kind, Wellman makes films that feel, don’t tell. [B+]

Digital Bath

WWII Marathon #3: Operation Crossbow (1965)

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Mounted like a James Bond film, this British spy thriller loosely about the real-life "Operation Crossbow", in which British intelligence attempted to sabotage the Nazi's long-range weapons operations, is only half of a good thing.
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Part alluring wartime espionage, part stodgy history lesson, Operation Crossbow would be better served as the former, given the dull machinations of the opening forty-five minutes, which switch back-and-forth between German and British operations (the former testing the weapons, the latter trying to find them) before the film gains any sort of traction. 
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To combat the Nazi threat, the British send three soldiers to pose as Dutch, German speaking engineers who will go undercover into the heart of the long-weapons facility in an attempt to bring it down. 
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It's here where Operation Crossbow really stretches its legs, its middle-section is fun, sexy, tense, it even has an extended cameo with Sophia Loren as a native who discovers that her husband, now dead, is being interpreted by a British agent, played by George Peppard. 
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Like classic Bond, the film concludes in a hollowed-out underground facility with bad guys going splat and an ambitious weapons plan mangled, only this time, the British class and pride is overwhelming. [B-]