Come to the Stable (1949)

 

The plot of Come to the Stable is certainly meant as a testament to the power of faith to make things happen. Throughout the film, what seems impossible or unlikely tends to occur, sometimes far too easily, thanks to the beliefs of the central characters, two nuns (played by Oscar nominees Loretta Young and Celeste Holm) who have come to America from France after the end of World War II with the goal of opening a children’s hospital. They wind up in a small New England town called Bethlehem; the state isn’t specified, but it has to be within driving distance of New York City (more on that later). Sister Margaret (Young) and Sister Scholastica (Holm) locate Miss Amelia Potts (Elsa Lanchester, also Oscar nominated) because they have received a postcard with an image of one of her religious paintings on it, which they take as a sign that they should seek her out in the United States. Miss Potts gets easily flustered and can’t quite say “no” when the nuns ask to stay with her. The nuns visit the bishop of a neighboring town, who initially balks at their assertion that all they need is “land and money,” but he allows them one month and provides them with a small amount of money to work on their project. A lot of people impose rather arbitrary deadlines on the two women, but they always (or almost always) seem to make it in time. They choose a hill near Miss Potts’ home as their ideal location, but it’s held by a bookie named Luigi Rossi. However, much like everyone else in the film, even New York City criminals cannot resist helping Sisters Margaret and Scholastica in their quest. Then they put a down payment on an option for a former witch hazel bottling factory even though the “for sale” sign is only just going up. After the arrival of eleven other nuns and a priest from their Mother Church in France, they begin making money by selling stuff that they make, such as lace and pottery and cheese. Really, they seem to keep on succeeding almost by accident; they just keep maintaining their faith that they can establish a hospital. It’s difficult to know if they’re just incredibly naïve or amazingly skillful although, as I’ve already stated, I’m certain that the film is trying to make a point about how a strong sense of faith can make anything happen. One of the obstacles that the nuns face is the composer Bob Mason (the always reliable Hugh Marlowe); he lives next to the hill where they want to locate the hospital, but he wants to have a quiet residence in which to compose. Mason writes a song entitled “Through a Long and Sleepless Night” that is performed twice during the film, and while it may be odd to include a secular song in such an overtly religious film, it becomes relevant to the plot later in the film. Of course, it’s also odd that Marlowe appears nude at one point (you can only see his bare chest) in a film so concerned with religious matters. To be fair, Come to the Stable is much more light-hearted overall than I’ve probably made it sound. It does have quite a few moments of levity, such as when eleven French nuns and a priest emerge from one taxicab or when people keep giving the Sisters Margaret and Scholastica money thinking that will make them go away. The most fun, though, is watching Loretta Young drive Mason’s jeep with such reckless abandon. I wouldn’t want to be a passenger in the jeep with her, but her driving skill is hilarious. One of the cleverest performances in the film is by Dooley Wilson of Casablanca fame, who has the thankless and stereotypical role of playing Mason’s servant Anthony. However, Wilson manages to emit such charm as the servant who knows more than the man for whom he works, and he shows quite a strong sense of support for the nuns and their goal. He finds them fascinating, and the audience can’t help but find him fascinating too. The Academy certainly liked Come to the Stable in 1949 as the film tied with All the King’s Men for the second most Oscar nominations that year. However, it received no Oscars despite those numerous nominations.

Oscar Nominations: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Loretta Young), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Celeste Holm and Elsa Lanchester), Best Motion Picture Story, Best Black-and-White Cinematography, Best Black-and-White Art Direction-Set Decoration, and Best Original Song (“Through a Long and Sleepless Night”)

Mighty Joe Young (1949)

Mighty Joe Young owes a very large debt to King Kong, but perhaps that’s understandable since of the producers and writers of the film, Merian C. Cooper, was also responsible for the 1933 classic about a giant ape that wreaks havoc on New York City. The title gorilla of this later film, billed as Mr. Joseph Young in the credits, is not as large as his predecessor and he gets transported to Hollywood instead of New York, but the larger narrative strokes are somewhat similar. There’s a girl, of course. Jill Young (played by Terry Moore) has raised Joe since he was a baby gorilla; in fact, we get to see Jill as a little girl trade some of her “valuables” and her father’s flashlight to get the orphaned gorilla from two natives. Twelve years later, an Oklahoma cowboy named Gregg (Ben Johnson in his first featured role) comes to Africa to capture animals for Max O’Hara’s next nightclub act. They’ve managed to capture some lions when a now fully grown Joe wanders into their camp. The sequence where a group of cowboys try to capture him is quite thrilling, a merger of a western picture and a jungle film. Jill interrupts the attempted capture, but is persuaded by Max to come back to America with Joe and become a star. Apparently, even if you’re in Africa and isolated from the rest of the world, the lure of potential stardom is too great to turn down. Max’s nightclub called the Golden Safari is where Joe becomes a huge hit. The act is somewhat simple; he lifts a platform where Jill is playing “Beautiful Dreamer” (Joe’s favorite song) on a piano, he easily pulls ten strongmen (played by real-life strongmen) into a pool of water during a game of tug-of-war, and he is supposed to pick up giant coins while dressed as an organ grinder’s monkey. Both Joe and Jill and even Gregg eventually become disenchanted with Max’s demands. What is it about producers that they want to put whatever they have discovered on display for everyone to see despite the inherent dangers of doing so and then they make it worse by mistreating and exploiting the talent? Of course, it all goes horribly wrong. One night three drunks find Joe’s cage in the basement of the nightclub and give him too much to drink. He breaks out of the cage and begins to destroy the building. (Either that or he feels that the African jungle-inspired décor is far too over-the-top even for Hollywood). For good measure, he kills a few lions along the way as well. He obviously hates lions; he even tried to kill one of the caged ones that Gregg had captured back in Africa. The final third of the movie involves an extended escape sequence that features a particularly effective series of red-tinted scenes involving Joe rescuing orphans from a fire at a children’s home. It’s quite a sharp contrast to the rest of the black-and-white film. Most of Mighty Joe Young, aside from the moments involving his attempted capture in Africa and the attempted escape from captivity in America, is quite hokey. A totally unnecessary love story between Jill and Gregg develops, showing that filmmakers even in 1949 felt obligated to include such a ludicrous plot point in an action movie about a giant gorilla—another moment influenced of King Kong. And it probably should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with film history that the depiction of the few blacks in the film is cringe-inducing. They are all “natives” or dressed like what Hollywood thinks natives dress like, which is to say like no African native has ever truly dressed. None of them speak English (if they speak at all), and they are prone to emotional outbursts. Blacks, however, are not the only group subjected to this kind of stereotyping. The Asian waiter in the “chop suey” restaurant where Jill and Gregg first profess their love for each other is also an embarrassing caricature. Aside from the naïve performances by Moore and Johnson early in their careers, Mighty Joe Young is perhaps most known today as one of the first films to feature stop motion animation work by special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen. Sadly, Joe isn’t really very convincing as a flesh-and-blood-and-fur gorilla to modern day audiences and, frankly, probably wasn’t realistic to the audiences of 1949 either. The film features a few moments of comedy, such as when Joe sticks out his tongue and makes faces at the police who are trying to kill him during the attempted escape. Mostly, though, it’s just an unremarkable film that pales in comparison to its progenitor.

Oscar Win: Best Special Effects

Bicycle Thieves (1949)

The title Bicycle Thieves, known in Italy as Ladri di biciclette, is often translated as The Bicycle Thief although there is more than one such thief in the film. This classic of Italian neorealism has a fairly straightforward plot, but its power is truly in simplicity of the emotions that it can still arouse. A man’s bicycle is stolen, and he attempts to find it and get it back so that he can continue to work—that’s about it. Antonio Ricci (played by Lamberto Maggiorani in his first ever acting role) is one of a group of poor, desperate men hoping to find work when he gets chosen for a job as a poster hanger. He needs to have a bicycle in order to keep the job, so his wife Maria (Lianella Carell) pawns her bed linens to reclaim Ricci’s pawned bike. The family, which also includes son Bruno (the amazingly empathetic Ezno Staiola) and a small baby, is overjoyed for a brief time, but the bike is stolen about 18 minutes into the film when Ricci goes out on his first day of work. He loses the thief in a crowd and then spends much of the rest of the movie trying to locate it and/or the thief who stole it. Some friends and Bruno join him to look in the flea market for the bike but cannot find one with the right serial numbers to match his model. A couple of encounters with the thief also end unsuccessfully. Ricci sees him talking to an old man, and he follows the old man into a church but gets no useful information. He also encounters the thief at a brothel, but the crowd steps in to defend the thief and a police officer discourages Ricci from pressing charges since there are no witnesses who will support his story. Frustrated, Ricci tries to steal an unattended bike, but a crowd leaving a soccer match catches him and tries to get him arrested—the opposite of what happened to Ricci himself when his bicycle was stolen. The film ends with Bruno taking his distraught father’s hand, and they walk off into the darkening night, hardly the sort of upbeat ending you might expect from a Hollywood version of this story. As Ricci says at one point, “I’ve been cursed since the day I was born,” and it often feels like that bleak sentiment is accurate. The film rarely gives much respite from the sad state of the poor after World War II with the exception of a few moments of levity, such as when Ricci and Bruno stop in their search to eat at a restaurant. The film’s director, Vittorio de Sica, selected non-professionals to act in the movie and shot much of it on location in the streets of Rome. Bicycle Thieves retains all of its power to move viewers with its depiction of the desperate lives of people like Ricci and his family, and much of that is due to the clarity and simplicity with which the story is presented.

Oscar Win: Honorary Award for Best Foreign Language Film

Oscar Nomination: Best Screenplay

A Letter to Three Wives (1949)

A Letter to Three Wives is the film equivalent of a five-paragraph essay. For those of you who are not English teachers, the five-paragraph essay is a formulaic way of writing. It's given as a model to students so that they can concentrate on generating and developing ideas instead of having to worry about coming up with a way to organize their thoughts. Such an essay starts with an introduction that contains a thesis with three distinct parts. Each of those three parts is discussed separately in a body paragraph, with awkward transitions such as "next" or "secondly" or "finally" thrown in on occasion. The essay ends with a conclusion that attempts to bring all of the ideas back together again, usually by either repeating the idea in the three-part thesis or by briefly summarizing the information in the three body paragraphs.

To be clear, this shouldn’t suggest that A Letter to Three Wives is formulaic or boring. Each of the three segments features a unique story, and if it were to be remade today, I’m sure it would likely be a jumble of three stories to the point of distraction. A contemporary take on this film would jump back and forth between the three women of the title, and a viewer wouldn’t get to feel the accumulative effective of learning about how each one of them responds or reacts to the central aspect of the plot.

The film starts with the three title characters getting ready to serve as chaperons for a picnic. It's a Saturday morning, and they've volunteered to spend the day with a group of kids on a boat trip to an island. All three of their husbands are engaging in some odd behavior for a Saturday the first Saturday in May, as the story keeps reminding us. Deborah Bishop (Jeanne Crain) is trying to get her husband Brad (Jeffrey Lynn) to tell her when he will be home from a conference he's attending; he only promises to call and let her know later on that evening. Rita Phipps (Ann Sothern) notices, finally, that her husband George (Kirk Douglas) is wearing his blue suit on the weekend; she had figured on him going fishing like he normally does. And Lora Mae Hollingsway (Linda Darnell) doesn't even know that her husband Porter (Paul Douglas) was seen boarding the train earlier in the day.

Just before the women get on the boat, they receive a letter addressed to all three of them. It's from Addie Ross (whose voice-over is supplied by Celeste Holm), allegedly a friend of theirs. Addie has left town with one of their husbands, but she doesn't reveal which one in her letter. The women have no time to make a last-minute phone call before the boat leaves—remember, this was long before cell phones—so they have to carry on. Naturally, if you receive a letter like this one, you can't ignore it all day long; you'd start to wonder if your husband was the one who left with Addie. What follows is a series of flashbacks, one for each woman, that attempt to show Addie's role in their lives.

First up is Crain's Deborah Bishop. She and her husband have just ended their military service; he was in the Navy and she was in the WAVES. It's her first time to meet some of his friends at the local country club, and Deborah is worried that they'll see that she's still just a farm girl at heart. She's upset about her hair and her dress, and she starts to drink a few martinis to give her some courage. Of course, she winds up drunk before too long and embarrasses herself by losing one of the large flowers attached to her ugly gown. During the course of the evening, Addie sends champagne to the table, prompting the men to talk about how much class and taste Addie has. By the way, we also learn that Brad once dated Addie, and everyone thought they would be married until he came home with Deborah. The cinematography and editing of this portion of the film are particularly effective in moments such as when Deborah is drunk and dancing at the country club, and we get to see and feel what she’s experiencing.

The second segment belongs to Sothern's Rita. She writes soap operas for the radio to help with the family's expenses. Her husband George is a high school English teacher, a profession of which he's proud, but Rita wishes he could have a higher paying, more prestigious job, like the editor's position that has opened up at the radio station. She and George are entertaining her bosses, the Manleighs (Florence Bates and Hobart Cavanaugh), but the evening isn't going well because George would rather listen to the record his friend Addie has just sent to him; she's a former school mate of his. It's his birthday, after all, and Rita has forgotten (but Addie hasn't). By the end of the evening, George is fed up with all of the talk about the quality of writing for the radio serials and describes it as "bilge" to the Manleighs. Besides, Mrs. Manleigh has carelessly (and unapologetically) broken the record that he received from Addie, and everyone has been forced to listen to an hour-long radio program called Confessions of Brenda Brown, a cliched, boring melodrama.  Needless to say, he's not likely to be chosen for the job of editor.

I should mention that the Phipps family maid, Sadie, is played by the great Thelma Ritter. She brings her usual sarcastic charm to the role, and she gets some of the funniest lines in the movie. For example, Rita has purchased a maid's uniform for Sadie to wear for the evening, but Sadie would rather stay in the kitchen than have people see her in the outfit. In particular, she doesn't like the cap; she says it makes her look "like a lamb chop with pants on." Only Thelma Ritter could get away with a line like that.

The final segment involves the courtship of Lora Mae and Porter. It's a tempestuous relationship, to put it mildly. Lora Mae works in one of Porter's department stores, and he asks her out with the clear intention of making a pass. She, however, wants to get married and manages to keep stalling him date after date after date. Yes, she’s a bit of a golddigger, but she knows what she wants and needs out of life, and she does seem to have actual feelings for Porter. He has also apparently had a relationship with Addie in the past; there's a large picture in a silver frame of Addie on his piano. Lora Mae tells him that she wants to be the kind of woman whose picture sits on a piano. They understand each other, and despite an apparent initial lack of romance between them, they marry. For most of the movie, whenever they are together, they're bickering. She even claims that if he's the husband who's run off with Addie, she won't be upset.

Before her marriage, Lora Mae lives with her mother and sister in a small home near the railroad tracks. It's so near the tracks, in fact, that whenever a train passes, the entire building shakes. This makes for a recurring sight gag that, I'll be honest, is funny every time it occurs. Ritter's Sadie is a friend of Lora Mae's mother, Ruby Finney (Connie Gilchrist), and even she gets to enjoy a cup of tea while the house rattles from the nearby train.

Of course, the picnic on the island eventually has to end and the women have to return home to find out whose husband has left. You can't have a formulaic structure without the payoff at the end. After all, the whole point is to build suspense for the audience and make us wonder which of the three men was the one who has abandoned his wife. Brad Bishop is the only one who's not home when the women get back to town. He's left a message saying he won't be home that night. Nevertheless, Deborah decides to go to the club with her friends as planned. It's pretty sad for Crain's character until one of the other men makes a surprising revelation. Well, actually, I don't think it's really all that surprising given the man in question.

A Letter to Three Wives won Joseph L. Mankiewicz two Oscars, one for his direction and the other for his screenplay. I know I've made it sound like this film is too formulaic in its structure, but to be honest, I suspect it was an incredibly novel idea in 1949. I don't even think we had the five-paragraph essay format back then; I believe it's a more recent development. Even though we've reached a point where there have been lots of films that follow a structure like this one, I still admire the cleverness with which Mankiewicz has linked the stories of these three women and the way he ensures that we never actually see Addie. She's only an arm or a puff of cigarette smoke or sometimes only a reference to someone at another table in a restaurant, but never a full person on screen. We learn a lot about life in a small town where everyone knows everyone else. The cast, especially Sothern, who was never as fully appreciated as she should have been for her talent, are all very good. They make the different stories interesting to follow, and they make us hope that, at the end of the film, we will discover that Addie has been lying. It's poetic justice how it all turns out.

Oscar Wins: Best Director (Joseph L. Mankiewicz) and Best Screenplay

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Motion Picture

Battleground (1949)

I will admit that I have never been a huge fan of war movies. I've seen quite a few of them over the years, but too many of them seem to fall back on the cliches of soldiers bonding in the trenches and lots of battle sequences. Imagine my surprise then to watch a movie about just that and enjoy and admire it. Battleground was a nominee in 1949 for Best Picture, and although it does have several battle scenes and much of it is about the bonds between the men, I still had to acknowledge just how all that can still be fascinating if handled by the right people.

The story concerns a group of soldiers who are stuck in Bastogne, France, during the last winter of World War II. They're trapped there without much ammunition or supplies because the thick December fog is keeping the airplanes from dropping them any help. Meanwhile, the Battle of the Bulge, one of the key battles of the war, is happening all around them. After a short period of time in Bastogne itself, the soldiers are relocated to the forests outside town, where they dig holes and take turns on guard duty and talk and occasionally encounter German soldiers. It's during those moments of talking that you learn the most about these men and their lives. Battleground is not a sentimental movie, really, but it is inspirational. I watched it over Memorial Day weekend, and it's a fitting tribute to the men who served during that war and all of the others that this country has been involved in.

The cast includes such notables as Van Johnson, a young James Whitmore, John Hodiak, and lots of others. However, I was most touched by Ricardo Montalban's performance as Rodrigues. If you only know Montalban from his years on Fantasy Island, you have probably underestimated just how good he was. Here he tells stories about baseball and his parents, both seemingly mundane topics, but there's such a sense of joy when he talks about his life back home in the United States. And his close friendship with George Murphy's "Pop" rings true; they do seem to care about each other.

I suppose it is accurate that most war movies are really anti-war movies. The human cost of war is made all too clear in a film like Battleground. The director, William Wellman, was known for his many films about tough men and tough circumstances. Here he showcases men facing perhaps the most difficult situation of all, the constant possibility of their own deaths, and yet he still manages to make you accept and support what these men go through. Try, for example, to watch the last sequence, in particular, without feeling a sense of pride in the armed services.

Oscar Wins: Cinematography (Black and White) and Story and Screenplay

Other Oscar Nominations: Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Whitmore), and Film Editing

Twelve O'Clock High (1949)

Nominated for Best Picture of 1949, Twelve O'Clock High is the story of some of the earliest Americans involved in fighting the Germans during World War II. Gregory Peck takes over as commander of a group of bomber pilots who have suffered a series of losses and are now suffering from low morale. At first, his stern manner and strict adherence to military codes of behavior are greeted with dissatisfaction from the pilots and others, but he begins slowly to increase their morale and their success rates.

Ostensibly a war movie, Twelve O'Clock High is actually a dissection of the psychological impact that war has on men. Peck's ironically-named Brigadier General Frank Savage (he is frank but hardly savage in his demeanor) seems to understand why the men in this unit are feeling demoralized, and he also seems to know just how hard he can push them without breaking their spirit completely. Peck gives a stellar performance here, almost as good as his Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, but then again, Peck was always a reliable actor. He manages to take a character who could come off as incredibly unsympathetic and make him into someone you admire and support.

There are other standouts, including Oscar winner Dean Jagger as the ground officer, Major Stovall, a lawyer in civilian life who only occasionally needs a drink when things get too rough. The film is framed by Stovall's return to the site of his group's headquarters, so I assume that most of the events that we see are his memories. I also admired Gary Merrill as Colonel Keith Davenport, who is removed from command because he cannot help but befriend the men in his company. Merrill was always underrated as an actor, I think, and he shows here why he was such a mainstay in films during the 1940s and 1950s.

My favorite performance, though, is by Hugh Marlowe. He plays Lt. Col. Ben Gately, a pilot who has managed to screw up so many times that he's been put behind a desk. However, Savage takes him and turns him back into a top pilot. Marlowe takes Savage's "abuse" with stoic grace; he is forced to call his squadron the "leper colony" and take all of the other screw-ups as his crew. The scene where Gately and Savage have a conversation after Gately has been injured is particularly touching for what it reveals about how both men have so much they would like to say to each other, but neither is able to break from the kind of behavior expected of military men.

The air battles are actual footage of bomber pilots in World War II. The sequences in the air are pretty thrilling to watch, particularly knowing that you are not watching special effects but actual fighting. These scenes come near the end of the film, and they add a nice sense of closure to the ways that Col. Savage has rebuilt the company after taking over its command. Of course, he has his own issues while these battles are going on, but that just makes them all the more significant in their outcome.

All the King's Men (1949)

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture of 1949, All the King's Men charts the rise to power of Willie Stark, a working class guy who manages to struggle his way from being a "nobody" to a position of great authority and influence: governor. It's loosely based upon the career of Huey Long, who served as governor and later senator of Louisiana, but the key word here would be "loosely." In fact, it's not even clear where the movie is set; it could truly be anywhere in the United States. The novel from which the story is drawn was written by Robert Penn Warren, and it's still a classic study of the ways that even those who have good intentions can be corrupted by political machinery.

This version of the film stars Broderick Crawford. He makes the most of the part, particularly in the scenes where he is giving public speeches to the people who will eventually elect him. He berates them as "hicks" who have too often let slick government officials take advantage of them. It's pretty stirring stuff despite the gruffness with which Willie attacks these common people. You can see why his populist approach makes him so appealing to them. He's one of them, a "little guy" who's been the victim too often of corruption, and he speaks their language. Even when he himself is later caught engaging in corrupt activities (and he is caught several times), he always turns to "the people" and manages to get them on his side through his skills at public persuasion.

One of the intriguing aspects of the story is how Stark first gets the political bug. He's actually denied something he wants by a county official. So incensed is he by this refusal that he decides to run for public office. His thirst for power seems to grow with each office that he's able to win, and his concern for his family and the people who elected him becomes weaker and more distant. It's as if the need for power consumes what is left of his soul. The film presents quite a picture of how intoxicating politics and power can be. You can see just how caught up Willie becomes in the quest for more and more control.

I've not seen the recent remake with Sean Penn in the lead role. I'm certain that it attempts to make a statement about the influential role of politics in our time. I don't think you need to update the story at all. The original version does an admirable job of showing the consequences of power, and its rawness still manages to resonate even today.