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Reviews
Captains of the Clouds (1942)
Nice planes, awful story
As a pilot, yes I enjoyed the airplanes. And the early technicolor views of Canada. But this is such a false, poorly written Hollywood script that I found the movie almost unwatchable. Every cliché in the book is trotted out, many of them at odds with the story. A guy marries the girl to keep his pal from marrying the wrong girl. Wrong because she dreams of the city life and this means she will run through the guy's money when he should be starting his dream airline. Really -- that's why you marry someone? But he, being the strong, silent type, and somehow thinking this is noble, doesn't tell his pal who ends up so bitter and broken-hearted that he throws away his money and never starts his dream airlines anyway. The irony seems to go completely unnoticed, probably because irony is not in the script. After another pal dies in an airplane crash, the hero sneaks onto the flight using his other pal's papers, and no one recognizes it is the wrong guy! A clever ploy that I am guessing only works in Canada. Well, you get the idea.
Rikugun (1944)
A very moving vision from wartime Japan
I was particularly moved by this film. Although I lived in Japan off and on for much of my adult life, I have had few chances to see anything of the wartime mentality of the Japanese, as this part of recent history has been forgotten or just revised. As one friend of mine once put it, wartime Japan was like North Korea today. People subjugated their own lives as well as the lives of their own children for their country and for the emperor, and found meaning in their lives by doing so. This is shown full face in this film. It is a closed view of the world, amplified by the belief that foreign powers are trying to destroy you and that only your own resilience and the grace of a god-like ruler provide a way forward. To watch these sincere young men being fed into this war machine and knowing the destruction they would wreak, as well as the devastation they would themselves suffer is hard to watch. Many of the generation that followed despised the emperor and everything he stood for, something I often heard expressed by my college host family and by my university professor who refused to stand for the Japan national anthem. There is also a strong strain of nationalism that still views Japan as a victim, and you can see some of the history of this as well.
It is also a rather odd film. Sponsored by the Japanese military at the time, it nevertheless feels like an anti-war film. The patriotism and the fervor expressed throughout the film always appear somewhat foolish, and the fealty to the emperor somewhat rote. The final scene (apparently censored by the military) is simply devastating in the way it shows a mother's emotions and fear trying to come to grips with the pride she is supposed to feel at her son marching off to war.
"Army" is fascinating in its historical context, poignant in its human emotions, and thoughtful in how it threads such a fine line between expressions of patriotism and individuality.
Her Night of Romance (1924)
Weak and confusing script
The story and the script are terribly weak, to the point where it is hard to understand the motivations of any of the characters. Lord Paul Menford (Ronald Colman) is an upper class twit who apparently does not know how to do anything except look handsome, and as a result he is now on the verge of losing his estate. Fortune falls into his arms in the form of heiress Dorothy Adams (Constance Talmadge) who is instantly smitten. Lord Menford manages to meet Dorothy again by a simple and miraculously unnoticed deception and the romance is off and running. At each difficulty in this twisted plot, Lord Menford's first instinct is to lie and hope for the best, but of course this only complicates matters. In the one critical scene where he actually is innocent, he is strangely silent, and so what follows is the favorite device of script writers everywhere: the misunderstanding that isn't explained and that drives the rest of the plot. Somehow through all of this, Dorothy still loves the cad, and even the Dad is smitten. Well, love prevails in the end, but you already knew that, as did everyone who watched this thing in 1924. But I had to check "spoiler alert" anyway to be legal. As for redeeming qualities, well it is old and as Noah Cross would say, anything gets respectable if it gets old enough. Ronald Coleman does a fine job in the role he is given, Constance Talmadge seems to overact terribly, but this is the style of the silent era. And everyone dresses really well.
China Clipper (1936)
Don't let the title fool you
This movie has very little to do with the actual China Clipper or even with aviation for that matter. It is basically an on-the-ground Hollywood fantasy that uses airplanes as a kind of backdrop for yet another lone-hero-overcoming-all-odds-to-succeed-while-sacrificing– true-friendship-and-love boilerplate script. Inspired designs for a new type of plane conceived in 2 minutes on the back of a diner napkin, arrogant ultimatums delivered by the financiers who don't understand that the future of aviation is at stake, brave pilots who are willing to risk their lives in the name of progress, and the women-folks, those gentle guardians of home and hearth who love their man – but not enough to sacrifice the sanctity of the family.
All this movie has going for it are some decent actors who have a pretty good go at it, but I can only imagine the sarcastic quips they exchanged in the evening after a few drinks. Pat O'Brien is his usual forthright self, Bogart is quite good as the hot-tempered sidekick pilot, and of special note is one of the few appearances of the personable and short-lived Ross Alexander. But the advertised stars of the show, the airplanes themselves, rarely make an appearance. The unfortunate character here is history itself, which gets very short shrift in this mangled, comic-book re-telling of what was a much larger, and quite interesting effort to establish air routes across the Pacific by Pan American.
Even if you manage to achieve the proper suspension of disbelief necessary to watch this film, what remains is simply not that entertaining.
Mission to Moscow (1943)
awful yet fascinating
An odd little movie. "Mission to Moscow" was brought to my attention by a BBC documentary on Stalin in the war years "WWI Behind Closed Doors". It describes the intense diplomatic efforts made by the allies during WWII to bring the Soviet Union into the war against Germany. Leaders in the West were willing to cast a blind eye to Soviet brutality and repression, including the massacre of Polish military officers at Katyn and the establishment of puppet governments in the territories they controlled, in order to keep them on the side of the West. This effort involved swaying public opinion in Western countries, and Joseph Davies' "Mission to Moscow" was cited as an example of this effort. There is an excellent article on Davies in Wikipedia, which describes how keen he was to see only the positive in the Soviet Union. Ironies abound in this film. Molotov appears as a kindly old professorial gent, Stalin is a hopeful visionary yearning for world peace. The glimpses of daily life in the Soviet Union include ice skating parties with piles of food, high fashion for the ladies, English-speaking railroad workers with nothing but love for their country, and American expatriates expressing admiration for the inventiveness of the Russian hosts they are there to help. In fact, while Davies was ambassador, a large number of American expats were being imprisoned by Stalin as counter-revolutionaries, despite having voluntarily emigrated to the Soviet Union to contribute to building a new society. Many petitioned the US Embassy to have their passports restored, and Davies refused to intervene. At one point, the US embassy staff in Moscow threatened to resign en masse. When Stalin consolidated power with the purges of his former associates in 1936 ~ 1938, Davies attended several of the show trials, and in "Mission to Moscow" he is shown nodding knowingly when Bukharin and the other defendants "confess" to their anti-Soviet activities and conspiratorial association with the now arch-enemy Trotsky. In the movie, Davies repeatedly insists that his mission is to see the **real** Soviet Union first-hand, yet in his visits were said to have been highly scripted and organized by the Soviet authorities. In retrospect, Davies comes off as a naïve fool, but seen in the larger context, perhaps someone a little more competent would not have been able to supplied the West with the kind of pro-Soviet view Davies could supply.
But let's put history aside for a moment. This is just a bad film. It is stilted, over-scripted, and whatever points it is trying to make are spoon-fed to the audience. Davies had control over the final script, and his scenes come off as highly self-serving: Davies warning of the dangers of war over the objections of more experienced statesmen, Davies being congratulated at every turn by one world leader after the next for his insight into the coming war in Europe. You know pretty much at the beginning of each scene what is going to unfold – a vacation with the family to get away from world affairs ends with a phone call from the White House, a meeting with senators expressing doubt about the strength of Germany will end with Davies convincing them with facts to the contrary. And Walter Huston is just overworked here – he has to carry virtually every scene, because really, Mission to Moscow is mostly about Davies himself.
A just plain awful movie and yet fascinating to watch, especially for a glimpse into this brief period of time when the US actually tried to like Stalin, and fascinating also for the fantasy views of Soviet life in the late 1930s. And particularly worthwhile if you also take the time to research the persons and events portrayed in the movie and juxtapose these against the events portrayed in Mission to Moscow. It is a very educational experience.
At the time I saw this movie, it was not available on DVD, but could be downloaded from the Warner Brothers movie archive.
Storm Warning (1950)
Decent film noir, but sidesteps any real social issues
A very nice film overall, with Ronald Reagan probably turning in the best performance of this cast. Also notable for its direct attack on the Klu Klux Klan at a time when they were still a force. But this is also where the film gets a little strange. Virtually no mention is made of the Klan's ideology -- other than a few passing references to "hate" and "bigotry". There is a mob lynching/murder at the start of the film -- but it is not a racial attack. It is the killing of a white reporter who had been investigating and threatening to "expose" the Klan. Expose them for what? Tax evasion! They had been selling Klan trinkets to members and not reporting the income. The Klan is shown as essentially a criminal organization whose purpose is to fleece its own members for profit. In fact not one black actor has a line in this film. I am sure the producer's intentions were noble and maybe they felt they could not address the issue of racism head on, and therefore chose a somewhat oblique approach to discredit the Klan. But I can't help but feel that there is a certain disingenuousness to this film. Maybe this was brave for 1951, I really don't know.