Odd Man Out (1947)

 

You might need to know a little bit about the Irish nationalist movement to understand some of the finer points of Odd Man Out, a film that never directly identifies its protagonist and his fellows as anything other than members of an “organisation” rather than the Irish Republican Army in the novel on which it is based. James Mason, giving one of his best performances, plays Johnny McQueen, who’s been hiding out after escaping from prison. The “organisation” demands that he participate in the robbery of a mill to get money for their needs. The robbery goes bad, though, and Johnny kills one of the security guards and gets shot in his left arm. He falls out of the getaway car, and the film follows him as he tries to make his way back to his hideout. A parallel story involves the search by Kathleen Sullivan (played by Kathleen Ryan), the woman who’s fallen in love with Johnny and has been hiding him in her grandmother’s home, to locate and rescue him. The most interesting visual aspects of the film involve Johnny’s “visions.” While he’s hiding out in a railway station, he flashes back to his days in prison and mistakes a little neighborhood girl for someone he knew there. The camera recreates his sense of dizziness during this scene and his hazy memories of time in jail. He’s put into a carriage by some guys who think he’s drunk and manages to make it through a police barricade because no one thinks he'd actually be in a carriage. He also winds up hiding out in a private booth in a bar and starts seeing the images of all of the people he’s encountered on this strange night (and there have been a few) in the beer suds. It’s a wild visual effect, topped only by the sequence involving Johnny seeing various paintings moving about and their images coming to life. The cinematography is sharp film noir, and it makes for a stunning film visually. I can’t possibly recount all of the events of Johnny’s torturous journey, but the film’s suspense is naturally derived: Will Johnny make it back to Kathleen’s place? Will Kathleen find him in time to allow them both to escape? Did she have some sort of romantic relationship with the police officer trying to track down Johnny? How can the local priest help without compromising his moral obligations? The most authentic aspect of the film may be the way that so many people in this city don’t want to help Johnny or, at least, don’t want to be found out to have helped him. That sense of fear from what might happen if you choose the “wrong” side in an ongoing climate of political reprisals shows very clearly on the faces of those supporting characters who encounter Johnny. Interestingly, many of those supporting actors were from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, which had as one its cofounders the great William Butler Yeats. Another intriguing aspect of this film is that it was the first recipient of the BAFTA (British Academy for Film and Television Arts) for Best British Film—in fact, the first of two films directed in the late 1940s by Sir Carol Reed to receive the honor.

Oscar Nomination: Best Film Editing

Song of the South (1947)

 

Good luck finding a copy of Song of the South to watch these days. It’s been unavailable in the United States for decades due to its patronizing and racist representations of African Americans, so your only choices are DVDs (or, worse, VHS tapes) from foreign countries. Thank heavens for that purchase a few years ago of a region-free Blu-Ray player. The film is an interesting mix of live action and animation, with the character of Uncle Remus (James Baskett, more on him later) telling some children the tales of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and Brer Bear. Most of the original Uncle Remus stories were collected and published by Joel Chandler Harris, and they typically are interpreted as coded messages about how African Americans were at times able to subvert the white power structure of the late 19^th Century. Brer Rabbit, who is the real star of the movie, is a trickster figure, and you can’t help but admire his ingenuity and cleverness in getting out of some of the scrapes he finds himself in. Actually, the three animated sequences featuring Brer Rabbit are really the best part of the film. The rest of the movie is about a young white boy whose father leaves the boy and his mother with the maternal grandmother in Georgia during the Reconstruction Era. I mean, I believe it’s supposed to be the Reconstruction Era, but a lot of what happens seems like Georgia is still behaving like African Americans are enslaved. Johnny (played by Bobby Driscoll) tries to run away from his grandmother’s home after his father’s abandonment, but he meets Uncle Remus and gets to hear “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” while hearing the first tale about Brer Rabbit easily outwitting Brer Bear to escape a trap, so Johnny decides to stick around. The part of this sequence that includes Baskett’s rendition of the Oscar-winning song is quite charming by itself; it’s just couched inside a film that treats Uncle Remus and the other black characters as people without any agency on their own. Johnny does manage to have quite a few adventures while in Georgia. He befriends a young black boy, Toby (played by Glenn Leedy), and a poor white girl, Ginny (Luana Patten). He also makes enemies of Ginny’s two older brothers, who could charitably be described as white trash, particularly since their entire existence seems to involve trying to bully and harm other children and animals. When we first meet them onscreen, they’re planning to drown a dog because it’s the runt of the litter! However, Uncle Remus always manages to find just the right story to tell, such as the one about Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, so that Johnny can use what he learns from the tale in his own life. That means that Johnny is spending a lot of time away from the house and, of course, this doesn’t sit well with Johnny’s mother, who is played by the formidable Ruth Warrick from Citizen Kane and (much later) All My Children. She tells Remus that he cannot share any more stories, which prompts the old man to pack his stuff and leave for Atlanta. Then the most astonishing series of events happen: Johnny is hit by a bull while running after the wagon carrying Remus, and he’s only able to revive after Uncle Remus returns. It’s not his mother’s care or his father’s return or the doctor’s ministrations that do the trick; it’s the promise of more stories. Baskett became the first African American man ever to receive an Oscar, allegedly (although it’s a pretty well-accepted story now) after Walt Disney personally campaigned hard for Baskett to be honored. It’s just a shame that someone as talented as Baskett couldn’t have won for a better role in a better movie. Maybe it’s okay that the movie is difficult to watch in America nowadays and that the Disney organization is changing the old Splash Mountain ride that was inspired by Song of the South to something more, um, contemporary and not as steeped in historically racist narratives.

Oscar Wins: Best Original Song and Honorary Award to James Baskett “for his able and heart-warming characterization of Uncle Remus, friend and storyteller to the children of the world”

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Scoring of a Musical Picture

Black Narcissus (1947)

 

How to describe Black Narcissus to a contemporary audience? The plot involves a group of nuns who trek to a remote former palace in the Himalayan Mountains to start a school for girls and a hospital to treat the indigenous population. However, they encounter harsh winds and frequent misunderstandings with the people they claim to want to help. And something else happens… Each of the nuns starts to become, well, disturbed or distracted. The Sister Superior, Sister Clodagh (the great Deborah Kerr), starts experiencing flashbacks to her life before she joined the order, a time she was in love with a young man she hoped to marry – memories she has not recalled in many years. Sister Philippa (Dame Flora Robson, subtle and effective) keeps getting distracted from her duties of planting vegetables and stares off into the distance, eventually planting lots of beautiful flowers instead of the vegetables necessary for food. Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron, giving a performance that is so gloriously unhinged it’s impossible to ignore), who was ill before the sisters made the journey up the mountain, decides to renounce her vows. And on and on and on… Is it the wind that causes these feelings? Is it the pure air they are now breathing? Is it the history of the place, its rather carnal past as a location where a former king kept his women? Is it David Farrar’s hunky Mr. Dean? The film features a lot of sexual tension between Mr. Dean and the Sister Superior, and Sister Ruth fantasizes that she and Mr. Dean will be together once she’s left the order of nuns. Is there a possible love triangle there, or is it the frenzied mind of an unwell person? The film doesn’t really answer most of the questions that it raises. Should someone succumb to what they’re feeling, no matter how disturbing it might be, or should they just ignore their feelings? Can someone ignore those kinds of feelings? While you’re contemplating the underlying eroticism of the movie, you also can’t help but pay attention to the cinematography of Black Narcissus. It’s pretty spectacular even by today’s standards. You’ll see high-angle shots, canted angles, a range of dominant colors in different scenes, and some of the most astounding matte paintings integrated into the story. Considering that the film was shot inside the famed Pinewood Studios in England – yes, almost all indoors – the filmmakers were certainly able to create the feel of the outdoors through, for example, those matte paintings. They certainly wouldn’t have risked an actress being so close to a cliff; the insurance company would have vetoed that, certainly. I mean, it seems like a pretty bad place to put a bell anyway. I also kept noticing – how could you not notice – how Farrar, the male lead, is photographed. A lot of his body is exposed throughout the movie; he’s shirtless or has his chest exposed throughout the movie. And has any man ever worn shorter shorts on film? (I will refrain from mentioning the awful hat that he wears.) He’s clearly a distraction for Sister Clodagh and Sister Ruth and perhaps even for us as audience members. As beautiful and intriguing as the film is, it’s also very problematic in its depictions of the indigenous and native people. Some of them are meant to be comic relief, such as May Hallat’s Angu Aya, or even Eddie Whaley Jr. as the young translator Joseph Anthony, who knows way more than he ever tells. The nuns, especially Kerr’s Sister Clodagh, are often confused by the behaviors of the indigenous people, and it leads to some very ridiculous behavior. For example, trying to get rid of a holy man revered by many people is a really, really bad idea. Sister Clodagh also gets to represent that British colonial gaze when, for instance, she (and the camera and we viewers) looks at – leers at? – Kanchi (played by British actress Jean Simmons, horribly miscast here) and makes some pretty offensive assumptions about her. Indian-born actor Sabu, playing the so-called Young Colonel, gets the most well-rounded role for a native actor, and he is the only person playing an indigenous person in an important role who isn’t a British actor in yellowface. Black Narcissus was released just months before India declared its independence from Great Britain in 1947. Perhaps the film can be read as a commentary on how the British were truly never able to comprehend why they didn’t belong in India and had to retreat quietly but with unresolved confusion.

Oscar Wins: Best Color Cinematography and Best Color Art Direction-Set Decoration

Green Dolphin Street (1947)

 

Green Dolphin Street is quite the potboiler. It’s an epic soap opera about two sisters who fall in love with the same man, about how a woman’s ambitions during the 1840s had to be subsumed into her husband’s, even about the dangers of colonialism. It’s also, for a thrilling six minutes, a spectacular disaster movie. Lana Turner and Donna Reed are the Patourel sisters, and they both fall in love with newly arrived neighbor William Ozanne (played by Richard Hart). Oddly enough, their mother, played by the superb Gladys Cooper, had a relationship decades earlier with William’s father, Dr. Edmond Ozonne (Frank Morgan, best remembered as the Wizard from The Wizard of Oz but demonstrating some real emotional depth here). Reed plays Marguerite, the so-called “nice” sister, and Turner plays Marianne, the sister who’s always scheming and looking for a way to make money. She has a good mind for business, but being a woman during that time means that she isn’t taken seriously. The film has a rather leisurely pace at almost 2.5 hours, but a lot happens to the characters over the span of the several years covered by the plot. For example, William joins the Navy thanks to Marianne’s influence, but he’s charged with desertion after being drugged and robbed in China. That leads him to escape to New Zealand to avoid prosecution. He meets Van Heflin’s Timothy Haslam, who had a secret crush on Marianne back in her hometown of San Pierre off the English coast. (The oddest coincidences occur in this film.) William gets drunk, writes a letter to Marguerite’s father, accidently asks to marry the wrong sister, setting of a chain of events that leads to Marianne coming all the way to New Zealand to marry him. The move challenges Turner’s Marianne, but she acclimates enough to start advising William and Timothy how to run their lumber business better. Turner and Hart may be meant as the primary focus of the film, but several members of the cast have memorable moments. Cooper delivers an amazing deathbed scene, where her character confesses to her husband (played by Edmund Gwenn, still best remembered as Kris Kringle from Miracle on 34^th Street) that she grew to love him more than she ever loved Edmond. There’s a nice parallel scene later in the film when Hart’s William explains how his feelings have evolved for Marianne. Marguerite, the “jilted” sister, is really a supporting role, but Reed does get a very physical scene involving her climbing up the center of a mountain to avoid the rising tides. The film won an Oscar for its special effects, and it’s easy to see why. The earthquake and flood sequence is a true highlight. As an aside, Turner’s character is meant to be pregnant at the time of the earthquake, but of course, she doesn’t look pregnant at all, certainly not in the period costume in which she’s clothed. Films weren’t allowed to show pregnancy onscreen during the era of the Production Code, which is quite ludicrous when you’re told that the woman on screen has given birth. That’s a minor objection, though. Otherwise, since Green Dolphin Street is an MGM film, many elements, such as the production design and costume design, are first rate. You have to admire a film that has an abbey at the top of a mountain so that the sisters are frequently divided from the rest of San Pierre by rising tides. (I guess that’s one way to keep the nuns mostly isolated from the rest of society.) Turner was really more of a movie star than a great actress at this point in her career, and she easily is the most interesting performer in this picture. She’s paired with a rather wan leading man, frankly, so by comparison, she’s given many moments to shine. I think some of her most effective work occurs when she and her family are captured during a Maori rebellion—I told you that a lot happens in this movie. However, as good as Turner is, the script fails her when it requires her to pretend that she didn’t know that William was more in love with her sister than herself. That rings particularly false for an attentive viewer and almost undermines what has transpired in the first two hours of the film.

Oscar Win: Best Special Effects

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Black-and-White Cinematography, Best Sound Recording, and Best Film Editing

Gentleman's Agreement (1947)

Gentleman's Agreement, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture of 1947, is a pretty bold attack on anti-Semitism. I think it's still a powerful movie even if some of the situations that it depicts have changed since the 1940s. What stands out most for me is just how relevant the arguments are that it makes against the silent forms of discrimination, the ways that people feel even if they do not publicly express those feelings. I just wish there were a better movie to deliver that message.

Gregory Peck plays a reporter who goes undercover as a Jew to find out how prevalent anti-Semitism is. Peck's Phil Green has moved to New York City to work at a top magazine and has to find a new "angle" on the subject he is given by his new boss. He simultaneously falls in love with his boss's niece, played by Dorothy McGuire, who soon becomes the brunt of many of his complaints about the ways that Jews are treated in America. McGuire's Kathy Lacy is one of those people who doesn't want to do or say anything that will upset the ways that others live their lives. For example, she wants to tell her sister and brother-in-law that Phil is undercover so that they can select which people not to invite to a party being hosted on his behalf. Kathy doesn't want to make waves, but Phil does. It's the central conflict of their relationship.

If the movie gets anything "wrong," it's perhaps the attention that the romance gets. Instead of going deeper into the kinds of discrimination that Phil encounters, the film instead allows Green and Kathy to talk about the future of their relationship too often. I'd rather have seen more scenes between Phil and his Army buddy, Dave Goldman, played by John Garfield. Dave could have given Phil more of a chance to see what day-to-day life is like for Jewish men. That Dave keeps having difficulties finding a home--no doubt because of anti-Semitism--is only casually integrated into the plot. That should have been a key part of Phil's investigation for his story.

However, what the movie does well is show that even among a specific group of people, there can be feelings of resentment. For example, Phil's new secretary, Elaine Wales (played by June Havoc), is Jewish herself but has chosen to "pass" so as to avoid mistreatment in the workplace. She too has to be chastised by Peck's character about her internalized dislike of her own people. It's pretty powerful stuff, to be sure but it's also a bit condescending to have the gentile tell the Jew how life should really be. As noble as the film tries to be, I just can't quite overcome a feeling of disappointment at times that it could have been stronger or better. I realize that this is delicate material; it was in 1947, and it still would be today. Yet in choosing to focus on the relationship between Phil and Kathy and by putting the arguments against anti-Semitism almost exclusively in the hands (and mouth, I suppose) of one man who spends just a few weeks living as a Jew, Gentleman's Agreement waters down its message just a bit too much to make it one of the best films of the decade.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

The other Christmas movie to be nominated for Best Picture of 1947, Miracle on 34th Street is rightly a classic. It takes a rather odd premise--the court must decided if an old fellow who claims to be Santa Claus is truly who he says he is--and makes it work despite some incredible leaps of faith demanded from the viewer. I watched it again this year after many years of avoiding it ("who needs to see that again?"), and I was charmed all over again by how it restores your faith in your fellow human beings.

Edmund Gwenn is delightful as the would-be Santa Claus. He certainly makes you want to believe again in your childhood fantasy that a man in red from the North Pole will bring you lots of presents and make sure that you get what you ask for, too. John Payne does a nice turn as the lawyer who agrees to defend Kris Kringle, and Maureen O'Hara is great, as always, as the no-nonsense business executive who doesn't want her daughter to believe in fairy tales like those about Santa. Of course, watching Natalie Wood give one of the best performances by a child ever in the movies is a highlight. She's remarkable in her ability to convey how her emotions change throughout the story. She and O'Hara have a conversation late in the movie about the need to believe in Santa Claus, and it's one of the most touching mother-daughter moments I've ever witnessed.

In years past, I always kind of looked at this movie as a two-hour-long commercial for Macy's department stores. While the store certainly plays a central role in the film (much to their delight, I'm sure), it didn't seem quite as overwhelming this year as it had in the past. That might have a lot to do with the fact that all of the competitors mentioned in the film are no more, and only Macy's remains standing. It is fun to watch how the annual Thanksgiving Day parade looked back in the 1940s, quite different from the elaborate spectacle staged for television today.

Just as an aside, don't watch the remake from 1994. Richard Attenborough is a pale substitute for Gwenn as Kris Kringle. Attenborough is actually much better as the "entrepreneur" in the Jurassic Park movies. And Mara Wilson is no Natalie Wood either. She's charming in her own way, but Wood was already so talented as such a young age. Fox Movie Channel alternates screenings of these two versions on Christmas Eve, but hold out for the original. It's worth the wait.

The Bishop's Wife (1947)

Sometimes when you watch a movie that's grounded in fantasy, or perhaps just any movie, you have to set aside your critical thinking skills so that you can just be swept up in the joy that the movie presents. Such is the case with The Bishop's Wife, which was nominated for Best Picture in 1947. It's a Christmas movie, actually one of two Christmas movies nominated that year, the other being the classic Miracle on 34th Street. I'm not usually fond of Christmas movies (or even Christmas music, as you can read on my other blog), but this one has such charm that you can't help but smile as you watch it.

The main reason for the movie's success is Cary Grant. He plays an angel named Dudley who comes to Earth to answer people's prayers. An Episcopal bishop, played by David Niven, thinks Dudley is there to help him build his new cathedral. Dudley, however, quickly seems more interested in helping the minister's wife, played by Loretta Young. The bishop's wife (hence the title) has been feeling increasingly distant from her husband, whose thoughts of late seem to be too focused on raising money for "his" glorious cathedral. For the next hour or so, Dudley makes remarkable things happen, bringing happiness to almost everyone he encounters, save (of course) for the bishop, who begins to suspect that his wife is becoming too enamored of Dudley.

Grant, of course, makes it easy to see why even the maids and cabdrivers and everyone else feel better around him. He displays such optimism, such a sense of vitality, that you couldn't help but feel happier when Dudley talks to you. He can make Christmas trees light up on command, he can make a bottle of sherry continue to refill itself, and he even can make a group of boys who'd rather be outside playing all show up for choir rehearsal. Grant...well, Dudley can apparently do anything. I was never that fond of Loretta Young as an actress, to be honest, and I didn't think she was particularly attractive either. But even she glows here, undoubtedly because for the first time in a while, someone is paying attention to her, just her, and it doesn't hurt that the someone is Cary Grant. Watch the two of them (well, the three of them if you include their cabbie) ice skating, and you'll see what I mean. It's one of the most magical sequences in this enchanting movie.

The supporting cast is great too. Elsa Lanchester plays one of the maids, and she's terrific, so warm and funny, a far cry from The Bride of Frankenstein. Monty Woolley plays a professor who's an old friend of the bishop's family, and in my opinion, he does as good a job in this movie as he did when he starred in The Man Who Came to Dinner. Gladys Cooper steals almost every scene she's in as a rich widow who's trying to assuage a guilty conscience by dedicating a chapel in the new cathedral for the husband she never truly loved. And James Gleason, who plays Sylvester the cabdriver, brightens up the screen whenever he's on; you look forward to each of his brief appearances.

It would be easy to be cynical about movies like this. Of course, they are completely unrealistic, and no one ever truly behaves this way, and it's stretching the bounds of possibility to even think that such stuff could happen, etc. Yet I found myself completely immersed in what happened to these characters. It isn't cloying or sappy or any of the other things often associated with Christmas movies. It also isn't heavy-handed about religion despite its focus on bishops and cathedrals and angels. It's just pleasant fun. That's one of the signs of a great film. If it can make you forget for a couple of hours almost everything else going on in the world, you know you have a winner.