The Big Sleep (1946)

It's probably too early in this essay for a cheap quip, but I'll do it anyway.  "The Big Sleep" was The Big Meh.  There was little exciting or challenging or even surprising in this picture.  Instead, this was a product of Hollywood's assembly line with star wattage and a standout director (Howard Hawks), but it never rises above what you'd expect from a Hollywood thriller.  Over the years it's been slapped with the noir label and regarded as a classic, but there's nothing subversive or outstanding about it to earn either distinction.  "The Big Sleep" plays it safe, and I don't care how charismatic the stars are.  A 70 year old film that played it safe in its own day is rather boring in this one.

It's a little puzzling to see how it got its classic status given its initial reception.  It was met with, basically, a lot of head scratching because if there's one thing The Big Sleep is known for, it is its indecipherable plot.  I still don't know exactly what all the different cons were about, and it's so confusing I find it hard to care.  A good whodunit makes you want to figure out a complicated plot.  This one doesn't, and apparently many critics of the day felt the same way.  That's not to say they hated it or it bombed.  They ate up the Bogie and Bacall angle, but that's one I'm not so enamored of.

Let's look at Bogart's and the writers' characterization of Phillip Marlowe.  The Marlowe we get here is nothing more than a facade of Bogart.  It's all surface characterization.  There's the familiar grey suit and hat, the Bogart voice, even the Bogart grimace.  However, on matters of substance, this character is a light breeze.  I've written before I thought Dick Powell's Marlowe from 1944's "Murder, My Sweet" was a little too light and breezy, but in his own way Bogart is similarly airy.  Bogart plays him as unflappable, which might be interesting if the writers gave him a backstory that shows how this came to be so.  Is he battle-hardened?  Too cynical to care?  We don't know.  He's the protagonist played by Humphrey Bogart, and that's about the extent of it.

And then there's Bacall.  Some actors' looks can cover up for a mediocre performance, but with Bacall it's her voice that covers it up.  Oh, when she got older she could turn in good performances, and her earlier work had a raw, feline sexuality, but here that feline rawness is missing.  Her character is oddly domestic, even though she's single, as she hovers over her reckless younger sister and tries to keep her very wealthy father's house in order.  About all Bacall brings to the table is her voice, and although it's a great one, it doesn't get to deliver any great lines like the "put your lips together and blow" one.

That signature moment from "To Have and Have Not" spoke to a great chemistry between Bogart and Bacall, but in "The Big Sleep" it takes a semi-vacation.  No great sparks fly in this film, only a mild flirtiness.  The one scene that's supposed to showcase their chemistry, the one where she calls the police and then he gets on the phone and there's this whole comic interlude, you know, that one, it's so forced and awkward I can't believe they left it in.  It wouldn't have been any more hamfisted if they put marquee text onscreen saying, "Look at us.  We have chemistry."  If you're looking for chemistry, the Bogart and Bacall relationship is the wrong one.  The duo in this film that had real chemistry was Bogart and Malone.  That's Dorothy Malone in her first big film playing the observent (and very pretty behind her glasses) bookseller across the street from the AJ Geiger Bookstore, the front for the central crime in the story.  That Malone kid really comes through here.  It's a shame we don't see more of her.

The other performances are workmanlike, except for Anne Vickers as Bacall's slutty younger siss.  If they hadn't cut the part down out of fears she was overshadowing Bacall, Vickers would have put an end to slut shaming permanently.  She's that good.  Okay, maybe that's hyperbole, but I'd still prefer to see a cut of this film with all her scenes restored.  It's also in Vickers character where the film gets a reputation for being daring and edgy.  She's not a good girl, and there's one scene where she's clearly stoned, though they leave the impression that she was drugged.  It's edgy if you look back at this era in a patronizing way, but it still falls comfortably within the Hays Code and more importantly doesn't really challenge the audience's preconceived notions going in.  It's judgmental comfort food.

In fact, if you think about it couldn't a film with huge stars as leads and a star director adapting a hit novel have come up with something more challenging?  If this was the best they could do to push the Code, well, that's weak tonic.

When you combine characterizations that are weak tea and a plot too complicated for its own good, you get a resolution that doesn't live up to the hype.  Because, with this mix, who cares?  Can anyone truly say they were moved or invested in any way toward these characters?  Is anyone truly on pins and needles waiting to see how Bogart gets out of a seemingly impossible jam?  I can't imagine it.  The appeal here is eye candy and nostalgia porn.  This is a "classic" that isn't all that good.  It's just entertaining enough not to bore viewers to tears and features two stars who are now icons, but they didn't become icons from this film.  It was their films before and after that did it.

Vertigo (1958)

Vertigo is not the greatest film of all time.  In 2012, Sight and Sound's critics' poll named Vertigo as the greatest film of all time.  Vertigo is not the greatest film of all time.  Citizen Kane is the greatest film of all time.  Citizen Kane is the story of hope, greed, power, and mortality centered around a stand-in for American exceptionalism named Charles Foster Kane.  Vertigo is about about some director's obsession with blonde ladies.  Vertigo is not the greatest film of all time.

Don't get me wrong.  Vertigo has a lot going for it.  It has wonderful cinematography showing off San Francisco's unique vistas.  It has possibly the best film score ever written, by Bernard Herrmann.  And it boasts two iconic stars, Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, giving the best performances of their careers.  It's a good film, a very good one.  But it isn't the best and shouldn't even crack the top 100.

Let's face it.  There are a couple of things about this film that are downright silly.  The biggest howler is when Stewart's Scottie Ferguson pulls that "Oh, I just had to take your wet clothes off while you were unconscious" thing after Kim Novak throws herself into the San Francisco Bay, and Novak reacts with a moment of trepidation to preserve her modesty before settling into a bemused acceptance.  Let's examine how this moment would play out in real life:

Novak:  Where are my...

Stewart:  Oh, I'm sorry.  Your clothes were all wet and I put them by the fire...

Novak:  You took my clothes off?!  Who are you?  Where am I?

Stewart:  Now Miss, Miss, just a minute.

Novak:  Help!  Police!  Police!

Stewart:  Shhh!  Quiet!  You'll alert the neighbors.  It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.

Novak:  Help!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This "comedic" predicament had played out in many films before, such as in 1932's Hot Saturday, with Randolph Scott and Nancy Carroll playing the lothario with few senses of boundaries and the very accommodating ingenue, respectively.  I imagine this was hackneyed in 1932, and by 1958 it's just clumsy and old-fashioned.  It's just not believable that Novak's character would choose this way to rope him in.  There's no way she keeps a straight face through it all.

Then there's Scottie's psychedelic nightmare sequence in the middle of the film.  This didn't work much better for Stanley Kubrick in 2001:  A Space Odyssey.  Filmmakers, don't try to recreate psychedelic mind trips in a two dimensional space like film.  Just don't.

Those two issues aside, there are other problems with the film.  Whereas first half was slow and intriguing, the second half was just slow.  The spark and mystery between Stewart and Novak were gone and all we were left with were two people groping in a bad situation they couldn't get out of.  It's the stuff taut thrillers are made of, but this was not taut.  And Novak's makeup and hair as Judy, with her exaggerated eyebrows and kiss curls over her forehead, just looks awkward.  It's the one sequence where her performance falters, possibly because she looks so silly.

Things pick up eventually with the makeover and Scottie turning more frenzied, and it all culminates in a suitably tragic ending that served the preceding film well.  That said, this isn't as deep a film as it has been made out to be.  Much has been made about Hitchcock's obsessions with his blonde leading ladies and how this film is a barely disguised subtext of that, but let's not let our self regard at recognizing this inflate the film's psychological depth beyond what it deserves.  It's a film about a man's obsession.  What produces the obsession, we don't really know, so it's not very revelatory.  We're meant to live through these characters and wonder, "What if?"  Like any good mystery.

Is it art?  It's paced like art, but it doesn't transcend its genre.  It merely exemplifies it.  Besides giving critics an excuse to ruminate about psychosexual issues they know little about in a ponderously pretentious manner, it's also possible the film's reputation is so inflated because it was out of circulation for a decade, from the early '70s to early '80s.  Perhaps too much non-critical legend building went on then, and coupled with the fact that it wasn't very successful in its first run, well, you have all the ingredients for a self-congratulatory, contrarian revival.  I'm just not buying it.  It's very good, hypnotizing at times, but there are too many problems to allow it to be placed among the all-time greatest.

Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Sometimes audiences were right.  That's the phrase, in fact, that inspired this blog.  There are many films that flopped over the years but then have been resurrected as classics by us moderns who are so much more enlightened and sophisticated about these things.  One such film is "Bringing Up Baby," a screwball comedy that did lackluster business on its first release and was mostly forgotten, until its subsequent resurrection.  But this is one case where the revisionists have it wrong.  Audiences in 1938 were right to ignore this film, and every modern critic who holds this up as a shining example of the screwball comedy ought to have their head examined.

From the first shots, it's apparent this film is made by a skilled director and actors.  Hawks' camera is fluid, and the banter between Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn shows often impeccable timing.  However, two flaws exist which sink this boat before it even leaves port.  First, it's not that funny.  There are an overabundance of gags and what people who try too hard tend to refer to as "madcap high jinks," but most of them fall flat.  Second, and this is most fatal, Hepburn's character, Susan Vance, manages to be both unsympathetic and not make any sense.  Cary Grant (and the writers) are no help as he gives no sign of any attraction back in this, what I can only assume to be, "romantic comedy."

You see, Susan wants to marry paleontologist David Huxley (Grant).  Why?  An animal attraction?  In the guise of Katharine Hepburn?  Please.  Some other reason, perhaps?  We're neither shown nor told.  We're just supposed to accept she's an absent-minded idle riche who sees a flappable man one day and decides in a beat she wants to marry him.  That would be fine for most comedies—a little flimsy, but it wouldn't kill it.  However, there's something in the way.  David is engaged to be married to an uptight colleague who wants to have a modern marriage where work and career take precedence.  After all, uncovering the fossil history of the Earth is important.  This is a very modern perspective, but it's portrayed for very regressive reasons.  The writers want to make it easy for Grant to part with this shrew and find true love with someone more acceptable.  The problem is Hepburn knows he's engaged, practically from the first scene meeting him.  This causes her no hesitation, doesn't stop her one moment.  In one instance, she actually laughs at his mentioning it.

What follows are several misadventures where Susan and David bump into each other under unfortunate circumstances.  He's in Connecticut hunting down one last fossil piece for his dinosaur exhibit while at the same time trying to secure a large donation from the very wealthy Elizabeth Random, who coincidentally is Susan's aunt.  Susan uses this to scheme her way into his business and keep him from returning home to get married.  This is where the madcap part comes in (lacks key for eyeroll).  The bone goes missing, a leopard comes into the picture (the "baby" in the title), and it all crashes together in a long jailhouse sequence which I thought would never end.  It's here the film takes a war of attrition approach to comedy.  I guess they figure they can wear the audience down and time it just right so you want to laugh and not shoot yourself.  I wanted to shoot myself.

All this makes Hepburn's character coldly malicious if you think about it for one-tenth of a second.  She barely knows David and never once met his fiancee.  Nevertheless, she decides to destroy their lives together, sight unseen.  Hepburn's considerable acting skills and charisma do little to win any sympathy because the part is so underwritten.  Not that she doesn't have anything to say.  She's in practically every scene and has plenty of lines, but it's all so shallow.  She exists to serve a construct of screwball plotting and situation with no thought to how to make her resonate as a real person with audiences.

Then there's Grant's side of the equation.  He acts like a man continuously in pain at his predicament, and Hepburn's presence does nothing to change his outlook.  In fact, I couldn't find one scene or one instance where he seemed to brighten at her presence.  In their many entanglements, he constantly complains he wants nothing more to do with her but curiously doesn't act on it.  He's strangely passive throughout in a way that's not revealing, but rather opaque.  The script doesn't give him any depth, either.  This is confirmed in the end when he grabs Hepburn's hand under a collapsing brontosaurus exhibit and rescues her from the wreckage, finally declaring his love for her.  He does it with all the enthusiasm of a guy being confronted by a flat tire when walking out to his car.  I wasn't convinced by any of this.

The scene in the restaurant with the torn dress—that was funny.  If only the reel had run out of film at that point, I'd have said, "Wow, what a lost classic."  Unfortunately we have to endure the rest of it.

The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)

When The Year of Living Dangerously first came out, it received some very positive reviews, but many critics had misgivings.  Director Peter Weir's cinematic style and vivid portrayal of the tropics won unanimous praise, however, and Linda Hunt bagged a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for it, so it wasn't a failure, by any means.  But in the years since, a growing appreciation has gathered around this film, uplifting it to near classic status, which tends to overlook some of the original flaws that undermined its initial reception.  There's a patronizing undercurrent that becomes more overt as the storylines are resolved, and a good film is ultimately marred by a Westernized, colonialist-minded ending.

The outlines of the plot are fairly basic.  Guy Hamilton, a journalist played by a young and impossibly appealing Mel Gibson, arrives in Jakarta amid the political turmoil of 1965 Indonesia.  Green and without contacts, he nevertheless lets his ambition lead the way and enlists the help of Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt), a dwarf photographer who sees potential in the newcomer.  After initial success in landing an exclusive with the country's top Communist leader, Guy meets (via Billy) Jill Bryant, a British embassy worker played by Sigourney Weaver.  Thus begins a love story with a possible Communist revolution as its backdrop.  In fact, it becomes a love triangle of sorts, with Billy playing the matchmaker and master manipulator before taking his tragic turn as protestor and martyr for the people.  With Billy gone from the scene, Hamilton finally figures out what he really wants and races to the airport to escape with Bryant just as the country descends to chaos.

First off, I want to give this film credit where credit's due.  The look and feel of the film is extraordinary.  The cinematography makes you viscerally feel what it's like to live in the tropics.  Hell, even the air conditioners in this film sweat (from the condensation).  There's also the selective use of the color red to break up the monotony, from the red walls of the journalist bar to Billy's Hawaiian-style shirt, and to the scarves and insignias at the Communist rallies.

The casting is impeccable.  Mel Gibson confirmed himself an international star with his role, and Sigourney Weaver is suitably regal while generating plenty of heat with Gibson, despite her British accent sometimes taking an early leave.  The biggest coup, though, goes to the casting of Linda Hunt as a male dwarf, Billy Kwan.  More than mere stunt casting, Hunt gives the performance of her career and absolutely inhabits the role.  In supporting roles, Bembol Roco is memorable as Hamilton's Indonesian assistant, but Michael Murphy overdoes it as the stereotypical jerk-American reporter, Pete Curtis.

So where do things go wrong?  It's not the plot, really.  The politics are murky and a challenge to follow, but films don't fail because they're challenging.  Weir doesn't even overtly take sides and make his film a polemic.  However, his Western assumptions seep in, and that's the flaw of this film.  About a half hour in, this becomes a love story between two statuesque foreigners, with the chaos of revolution a mere backdrop to serve our lovers' passion.  Cynical, but this is storytelling.

When Guy Hamilton first arrives in Jakarta, it's utter chaos to his foreign eyes.  The crowds, traffic, shouting, rampant poverty, are all overwhelming to the senses.  Kwan remarks that to visit the Jakarta slums for the first time is to be a child again, and in this new environment Hamilton is a wide-eyed child.  That's all well and good—an interesting jumping-off point.  But where it sinks is when he meets Weaver's Jill Bryant and it becomes a conventional Western love story.  And conventional Western love stories need resolution, so obstacles need to be swept aside.  When the obstacles being swept aside are the actual Indonesians, things get uncomfortable.  It's not overtly offensive, but it's deflating.  This film could've been so much better than that.

The most obviously glaring example of this sweeping aside occurs with Billy's ultimately futile act of protest and death.  To protest the dictator Sukarno's uncaring tolerance of his nation's poverty, Billy unfurls a banner from a hotel window in the path of Sukarno's motorcade and is immediately assaulted by security and tossed out the window, his banner folded up before Sukarno even sees it.  This act of martyrdom may or may not have been necessary to the internal logic of the character.  That's debatable.  But it was absolutely necessary to the love story.  Billy was in love with Jill, and the story had get rid of him before Guy and Jill could truly be together.  The traumas Billy experienced to get him to that desperate point were just manipulations by the writers to get us to buy his basically committing suicide.  When the love story is this cliched, the manipulations become obvious.

Up till this point I could tolerate or even overlook it because other aspects of the film were so appealing, but the ending left a bad taste in my mouth.  After an unsuccessful push by the Communists and then a military coup, Jakarta was descending into chaos with roundups and public executions.  Jill Bryant was scheduled to be on the last plane out, which is where we see Hamilton's final race to the airport.  He finally gets through a hair-raising struggle through security and boards the plane, to be met by Jill atop the steps where they embrace.  At this point Indonesia becomes a convenient backdrop, something to leave behind now that that they have true love.  Indonesia's purpose is served.  This wasn't the intended message, but it was the implicit one.  And it inhibits me from really enjoying this film.

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)

This film always seemed schizophrenic to me.  Or rather, it's like three separate films in one.  The first is a cornball stateside wartime drama, the second an edge-of-your-seat action thriller, and the third a bleak, almost existential survival tale.  Of course, we're talking about "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," a fact-based film about the Doolittle Raid, the first American action that brought World War II to the Japanese homeland.  The script was based on the book of the same name by Ted Lawson, one of the Dootlittle Raiders and not coincidentally the main character in the film.  Both behind and in front of the camera, the film has an impressive pedigree and was instantly successful with audiences, but outside some stylistic choices and special effects, this was a time capsule of cliched Hollywood filmmaking that looks less and less worthy as time goes on.

Splitting the film into its three disparate parts, the most effective by far is the middle, or edge-of-your-seat thriller section.  This is the long sequence that portrays the raid itself, and it's effective because the director, Melvyn LeRoy, intersperses special effect shots with film footage taken on the actual raid.  This could have gone really wrong, but the special effects are credible enough, for its day, and the editing tight enough that the visual retelling doesn't lose any of its momentum.  Moreover, LeRoy makes great use of cockpit view shots as the planes fly low over the coast to their targets.  I don't know it this nose camera footage was taken during the actual raid, but the maneuvering to avoid treetops adds to the hair-raising tension.  There's also very little dialogue here.  Mostly, the only sound is the engines revved at full throttle, giving the audience a visceral sense of all that vibration and power.  As for the footage over Tokyo itself, as I said, the editing is seamless, so even if you can easily distinguish the documentary from the special effects footage, it's easy to give it a pass.  Incidentally, the best special effects were probably aboard the carrier portraying the takeoff beginning the mission.  As this was made in 1944, the US Navy couldn't spare any of its own carriers, so a mockup was built in a studio and the results are pretty great.

So what about these other two sections I mentioned, these disparate parts to the whole?  Unfortunately they come off worse, especially the first section.  I believe cornball was the word I used.  This stateside part of the drama, where the raiders are brought together for secret training in Florida, tries to let the presence of war do all its work for it.  The writer, Dalton Trumbo, feels little need to make his characters more than cardboard cutouts, with wartime worries about the girl back home and other trite cliches.  As a result, these characters never breath as real people.  They're merely stand-ins for the common experience, which is boring.

Cinematically, the photography in these early scenes is handsome but quaint.  The love scenes between Van Johnson's Lawson and his wife (Phyllis Thaxter) have a haloed shadow effect, giving the shots a timeless effect that feels forced.  The music doesn't help.  These scenes are scored exactly as you'd imagine a 1940s love scene with tender dialogue would be.  Quaint all up and down, much like the other characters who make up the flight wing.  In whole, this stateside section was like "From Here to Eternity" without the interesting parts.

Then there's the other bookend to the raid, the final survivalist section.  Since they had to take off earlier than expected after being spotted by a Japanese scout ship, the raiders were short of fuel when flying to their destinations in China.  Lawson's ship ran out of fuel right on the coast, and worse, was caught in a blinding rain storm.  I want to say crash-landed, but it was more crash than landed, though Lawson and his crew were able to wade ashore in the shallow surf.  However, except for Robert Walker's Corporal Thatcher, they were badly hurt.

The sequence exudes a sense of loss and hopelessness from the beginning as Lawson looks out at his broken, sinking plane and says, with the wind and rain beating his face, "I lost my ship.  I lost my ship."  What's a man without his ship?  What's more, what's a man without his use of arms and legs, which is the boat most of the crew are in.  Fortunately they get help from local Chinese fighters and begin their long trek to safety.  These scenes weren't terrible, but they were a bit of a missed opportunity.  The danger, the pain, the sacrifice of others on their behalf, was too sanitized and Hollywood, though they did show their beards growing out which is an ode to realism you don't often see.  Not terrible scenes, but not great, either.  Things were further undermined by Lawson's flashbacks of his wife back home.  In his wound-induced delirium (he'd eventually have his leg amputated), he'd be transported back to his wife with the same cornball dialogue and same cornball music.  These were not welcome intrusions.

So was this triteness the fault of the writing or the performances?  Well, the performances didn't help.  Spencer Tracy as Jimmy Doolittle isn't bad.  He doesn't have a whole lot to do and plays it straight as the pressed creases on his Army Air Corp slacks.  Van Johnson doesn't fare as well.  He'd later go on to be an effective everyman, but here he plays every moment so on the nose the cumulative effect is almost comical.  All the other flyers seem to be suffering from the same disease, or maybe direction, of hamming it up and overplaying all the obvious beats.  Only Robert Mitchum, as Lt. Bob Gray, seems to have failed to listen.  In this, one of his earliest roles, he plays it cool as a cucumber.  He seems to already have this acting thing figured out, thank you very much.

Phyllis Thaxter does okay as Lawson's wife, but I've never seen an eyelight so abused as with her.  An eyelight in cinematography is a light level with the eyes behind the camera, but not too bright to cause shadows or the actor's eyes to squint.  The effect is a small reflection in the eyes to make them stand out.  With Thaxter, the cinematographers give it to us in practically every shot, and not subtly, either.  That was one bright eyelight.

Curiously, the view of the raiders is portrayed as somewhat less than blood thirsty toward the Japanese.  Lawson and Gray have a conversation aboard the carrier when they're out to sea, and Lawson waxes about about his parents' Japanese gardener ("a nice little guy"--cringe).  They say they can't hate the Japanese, but if it comes down to it, it's either "we bomb them or they bomb us."  Additionally, Doolittle repeatedly gives these volunteers a chance to back out of the mission, saying if they have moral qualms about possibly killing civilians, no one would hold it against them.  No one takes him up on his offer, but I found it interesting knowing what would come less than a year after the film's release, where the US adopted a firebombing, and then an atomic, bombing policy that would deliberately target and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.  It's hard to square the attitudes of this film, which were relatively restrained, with the massively homicidal actions in the last six months of the war.  It's like they're two different countries.