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Reviews
The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947)
Worst movie of her starring career, sad to say
After the huge critical and box-office success of Sister Kenny, her well-deserved, Oscar-nominated return to screen drama, Rosalind Russell next chose this script about a woman traumatized by her husband's death during WWII and her need to find healing through the truth behind it. This is proof positive that strong production values and good casting cannot overcome a good story idea ineffectively presented. The use of fantasy sequences via drug-induced dream therapy had been used by Alfred Hitchcock with Salvador Dali in Spellbound - to brilliant effect - and would be used by director Rudolph Mate' to explore a killer's psyche in the later William Holden crime drama The Dark Past. Also in 1948, the best use of this cinematic device was done by director Anatole Litvak in The Snake Pit: here absolutely integral and vital to the story's development and resolution. In The Guilt of Janet Ames however, a more realistic, film-noir approach should have been utilized. This would have ditched the need for flashback elements out of place in this story - used superbly by director Curtis Bernhardt that same year of 1947 in the Joan Crawford psychodrama Possessed - and would have resulted in a tighter, convincing, and far more compelling and absorbing scenario then the contrived and uninvolving misfire presented here. When the credits list four writers and no producer...uh, there's a sign of pre-production trouble! Happily for Miss Russell, her next film, produced at RKO Radio, was Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, for which she received huge acclaim and her third Academy Award nomination. And there would be greater triumphs ahead in both comedy and musical comedy for a truly stellar career. To quote the final line from Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot: "Nobody's perfect!"
The Four Poster (1952)
A glamorous acting duo find their forte in stage-to-screen tour de force
The Four Poster(1952)is a warm,witty,and wise play chronicling a marriage, from "I do" to "til death do us part", from the candlelit late-Victorian years through the late nineteen-thirties. The Stanley Kramer-produced movie version of the Jan de Hartog stage success utilizes the gifted, Academy-award winning cinematographer Hal Mohr (A Midsummer Night's Dream, WarnerBros. 1935) to create a frequently non-static fluidity to the mies-en-scene (the overall "look") of the necessarily stage-bound piece (the closeups are luminous). The scintillating score by the virtuoso Dimitri Tiomkin perfectly captures the changes of the characters' moods and attitudes as each of them grow and evolve - both as individuals and as a couple - through each succeeding decade of their life together. The music also helps work against staginess, literally sweeping up and propelling forward the film's pace, briskly and jubilantly. In fact, Tiomkin's screen credit "Music Composed and Directed by Dimitri Tiomkin" is entirely appropriate, for he is as much to be credited with producing a movie that moves as are producer Kramer and director Irving Reis (best-remembered film The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer starring Cary Grant). An additional innovation was the use of the famed U.P.A. cartoon studio's (Gerald McBoing-Boing their signature character) animation sequences between acts to delineate the couple's lives outside the confines of their bedroom as time moves on. The results are delightful and often poignant. Lastly, and best of all, are the shining brilliance of the performances of (at the time) real-life married couple Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer. They had been brought to Hollywood together after their British film success The Rake's Progress (U.S.A. title The Notorious Gentleman), with Mr. Harrison signed by Twentieth Century-Fox and Miss Palmer by Warner Bros. After each had enjoyed a rising success at their respective studios - Harrison especially in movies such as Anna and the King of Siam and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir - everything came to a screeching halt in 1948 after the suicide note written by actress Carole Landis implicating Harrison in an affair. Miss Palmer's decision to stand by her husband had them both deemed persona non grata and returned to England for work in the theatre and one oddly-autobiographical movie about marital infidelity, The Long Dark Hall in 1951. Stanley Kramer's desire to cast them in The Four Poster brought them back to Hollywood the following year, at last for a vehicle tailor-made and perfectly suited to each actor's respective gifts. Harrison is at his peak here: dashing and debonair, temperamental, sometimes foolish and childish, others compassionate and knowing. Palmer had never before and would never again be given a role in a Hollywood film that so completely utilized her versatility and enormous strengths. As the wife she is girlish and sophisticated, vibrant and ebullient, supportive yet never docile, fiery and earthy and warm and ever-hopeful for life's blessings. Miss Palmer's radiant beauty is seen to best advantage here in a performance that is quite simply sublime, and for which she was awarded the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival for the year 1953 (Academy Award consideration should also have been hers but shamefully was not). One can sense in these two superb performances a lot of catharsis: the trials of their exile and the tensions of their personal relationship being diverted and channeled into those of their characters' situations. The Four Poster was acclaimed critically but sadly was a box-office failure, perhaps its sophisticated, innovative presentation a little ahead of its time. Yet happily for viewers today the movie is at the very least a filmed record of two glowing performances by two great stars, whose middling success overall as an acting couple would be eclipsed by later individual stage and screen successes. And this film can be seen as a reminder of what dynamic star charisma and sheer acting presence used to be.
Three Came Home (1950)
Colbert splendid via Negulesco's sparseness in sublime war film
Three Came Home is a unique and distinguished motion picture, unique in its intelligent, understated direction by the Rumanian Jean Negulesco, distinguished by the stunning performances of Claudette Colbert and Sessue Hayakawa. Negulesco, who is perhaps best known among film fans for the fifties' crowd-pleasers How to Marry a Millionaire and Three Coins in the Fountain and his masterpiece, Jane Wyman's 1948 Oscar-winner Johnny Belinda, was a director whose style was influenced by the general mies-en-scene, or overall "look" of the studios he worked for. These were Warner Brothers and Twentieth-Century-Fox, respectively. In a Jean Negulesco film one doesn't usually pick out extraordinary camera shots, because the emphasis is on character and atmosphere and how the characters are often so affected by their environment as to be very nearly engulfed by it. This was literally the case with the Joan Crawford character in Negulesco's unforgettable Humoresque. In Three Came Home he adopted the spareness of the Fox lot's production values- no gloss- to invoke the harshness and deprivation of a Japanese internment camp for women during World War II. Negulesco's pacing and emotional truth make every scene decidedly devoid of melodrama. I liked the scene of the character played by Colbert (on whose memoir the film is based) searching in the night darkness for her quarters before being caught by the prison camp guards. Absolutely harrowing and poignant at the same time, and the scene's wrap-up is emotionally and overpoweringly satisfying. As is the entire picture. Claudette Colbert (like her contemporaries Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr, Dorothy McGuire, Jean Simmons) was a great female star who evoked her own natural warmth and friendliness through her roles. Primarily remembered for her charming comedic performances (It Happened One Night, Midnight, The Egg and I chief among them) she grew into a dramatic actress of power far and above sincerity and star magnetism. Never was she more real and on-the-mark than in her portrayal of Agnes Keith in Three Came Home. Her scenes with Sessue Hayakawa (superb as a powerless, conscience-stricken Japanese commander) are wonderful, as are the scenes with (precious) Mark Keuning as her little son and the finale. Three Came Home was a brave film to make for its time due to its balanced perspective of two cultures represented by two main characters, showing the inhumane and human sides of war. It failed at the box office though critically acclaimed. It should be seen and appreciated as a film testament to a time in history, a delineation of the impact of tyranny and intolerance that can still be felt in today's world.
The Lady Pays Off (1951)
Darnell delightful in rare solo starring comedic role
For Linda Darnell fans, of which I am one, this little comedy from Universal studios is a refreshing surprise. One of the 1940's most consistently underrated screen brunettes, due to her phenomenal beauty she was frequently placed in roles subordinate to the leading male star she was appearing with (some of the best: Henry Fonda, Rex Harrison, Richard Widmark, Tyrone Power, George Sanders, Robert Mitchum, to name a few). Yet in all these she was always far more than merely adequate, in fact, consistently good. At the time of this movie's release Miss Darnell was at the peak of her success, having just scored two back-to-back triumphs at her home studio Twentieth-Century-Fox: A Letter to Three Wives and No Way Out. Here in this film she plays an independent professional woman at a crossroads in her life who is forced by chance to reevaluate and prioritize. Miss Darnell exudes poise and self-confidence in the role, and is clearly having fun letting the true Linda shine through. It is a shame she was not given the opportunities to do more vehicles like this one, where she was absolutely front-and-center in the storyline. Catch this hard-to-find gem, and enjoy one of the cinema's loveliest ladies truly letting her hair down and having a ball!