The High and the Mighty (1954)

 

Can we go back to the kind of air travel depicted in The High and the Mighty? No, not the part where the engines start failing and everyone has to start rethinking whether their life has turned out as they had hoped. Not that, no. Just the part where there are only seventeen passengers and big, wide seats and hot food cooked on the plane. I mean, I could do without the smoking on the plane, but the rest of it looks awfully luxurious compared to the cramped seating of contemporary flights. Of course, that’s not the point of the movie at all because this is a doomed flight from Honolulu to San Francisco, and everyone on board has some kind of issue that they’re grappling with that requires them to become quickly introspective. With a 2.5-hour running time, The High and the Mighty has plenty of space to share something about everyone on the plane. Even when each guest checks in at the desk in Honolulu, we get a little bit of insight into what their character is like. John Wayne, the primary star of this all-star cast, is a pilot haunted by the plane crash that killed his wife and son; we get some pretty vivid flashbacks of that event. In fact, we get flashbacks into the lives of several of the people on the plane, just enough to give us a taste of their lives on the ground. We have a couple who have been on their honeymoon and seem determined to join the Mile High Club even though they’re sitting in the first row of the cabin in full view of the other passengers and frequent view of the crew members in the cockpit. Another couple, Phil Harris and Ann Doran, have had a series of misadventures on their trip, and the issues with the plane seem destined to continue their bad luck. The great Laraine Day plays Lydia Rice, an heiress married to a man she doesn’t support emotionally. The rest of the players seem to represent particular stereotypes. For example, a young Korean woman on the plane keeps talking about badly she speaks and writes English even though the letter she’s writing to her brother is poetic. A painter named Flaherty is a scientist with regrets about his role in developing missiles. Another passenger is horribly afraid of crashes, and another one is terminally ill and treated very tenderly by the rest of the people on the plane. Two of the performers did get attention from the Academy Awards, and both seem to play a variation of the same role: the aging ingénue who has to face up to changes in her life. The first, Jan Sterling, plays the winner of a magazine’s popularity contest who’s on her way to meet her potential fiancé for the first time, and the second, Claire Trevor, plays an aging party girl who gets chummy very quickly with David Brian’s Ken Childs, a playboy accused of having an affair with the wife of another passenger. There’s even a young boy on board flying by himself from his father in Honolulu to his mother in San Francisco. Yes, it’s all a bit Peyton Place in the sky, and it’s clear this film heavily influenced later movies like Airport. Even the crew members have their issues. Robert Stack plays the pilot who is very experienced and has a sense that something might be wrong with the plane almost from takeoff, but he freezes when he needs to act. Willy Brown plays navigator Lenny Wilby, who doesn’t seem willing to admit to himself (or anyone else, for that matter) that he’s married to a very unfaithful woman who sounds like she might be drunk a lot of the time and not especially loving toward her husband. We have lots of confessions that come to light and many moments of coming to terms with their potential deaths as the film progresses and the problems with the plane seem to keep increasing. We get lots of shots of the pilots in the cockpit talking to the people on the ground trying to figure out how to rescue the passengers and crew, and the tension does begin to mount more heavily and effectively in the last half hour or so. Are they going to make it to the coast and a landing strip? Would the filmmakers really kill off all of these stars, including John Wayne? How did that kid sleep through all of the drama that was happening on board, even the sequence where everyone throws their luggage out of the rear door in order to lighten the load and save some gas? And he slept through the tense moments when the jealous husband tries to shoot Childs with a gun? That’s a very good sleeper. The High and the Mighty was filmed in widescreen CinemaScope, and the movie’s cinematography is truly beautiful. It’s great at capturing what it’s like to be on a plane, especially what it’s like to see so much of the world out of the small windows of a plane. The plot is certainly melodramatic and verges on becoming a soap opera, but we get enough insight into almost everyone on the plane to have a little bit of genuine empathy for almost all of them.

Oscar Win: Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Director (William Wellman), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Jan Sterling and Claire Trevor), Best Film Editing, and Best Original Song (“The High and the Mighty”)

Rear Window (1954)

 

Rear Window is an intriguing movie about the ethics of voyeurism, and if there were ever any major film director who was fascinated by voyeurism, it’s this film’s director, the master himself, Alfred Hitchcock. He and his crew chose to place the central character, L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries, in a wheelchair confined to his apartment for six weeks. Jeff, played by Jimmy Stewart with his typical acerbic smile, works for Life magazine so he’s accustomed to looking at people. The camera equipment for seeing other people at various distances lies conveniently around the apartment. Jeff’s favorite tool during his recovery, though, is a telescopic lens he uses to watch his neighbors. He’s nicknamed some of them, such as Miss Lonelyhearts, a woman who can’t seem to catch a break when it comes to dating, and Miss Torso, a model who gets lots of male attention. He also watches – “spies on” doesn’t quite seem to capture exactly what he does – a couple of newlyweds, a composer, a couple who likes to sleep outside on the stoop, almost everyone in the complex. His greatest interest, though, is with a salesman named Thorwald (played by the physically imposing and often glowering Raymond Burr), especially after Thorwald’s wife disappears after he’s seen making three trips out of the apartment in a rainstorm, and then there’s the matter of the large trunk held together by a rope. Jeff calls a detective friend of his, Wendell Corey’s Tom Doyle, but Jeff’s theory/explanation/conspiracy as to what happens just doesn’t make sense to Doyle. He does check on a couple of “leads” that Jeff gives him, but really, he just thinks Jeff is bored and his imagination is getting the best of him. Voyeurism can do that to you, I suppose. Interestingly, Jeff’s girlfriend, a model named Lisa, initially refuses to believe Jeff but later develops a theory of her own. Lisa is played by Grace Kelly, the epitome of style and elegance in the 1950s. When she becomes so intrigued by what might have happened to Mrs. Thorwald, she even sneaks into his apartment to do some searching (snooping?). Jeff, ever the voyeur, has to watch as Thorwald returns home and threatens Lisa. What is a helpless man to do in a situation like this? What is a helpless audience in the same situation to do? When Jeff realizes that Thorwald knows he suspects the salesman is a murderer, he’s pretty much incapable of escaping. I mean, I wouldn’t want to know that Raymond Burr is coming to my house to seek revenge, would you? Rear Window features some great tension at moments like this. It’s certainly one of Hitchcock’s most accomplished thrillers from when he was perhaps at or near his peak of his talents as a filmmaker. Some of his usual filmic touches are on display. We watch as the camera moves through Jeff’s apartment and around the courtyard so that we become voyeurs too, looking at or spying on everyone Jeff watches. Sometimes we look at Jeff, and sometimes we see what he sees. Hitchcock could easily make us feel uncomfortable, particularly when we engage in behavior that we see the characters doing against their better judgment. He also makes his usual cameo, here as a clock repairman in the composer’s apartment. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the performance of Thelma Ritter as Stella, the nurse sent by the insurance company to give Jeff a massage and encourage his healing. She is blunt, direct, and funny; she even speculates about how and where Thorwald might have cut up his wife’s body. The morbid nature of her curiosity doesn’t detract from the moment of great comic relief that she provides. By the end of the film, she and Lisa have joined us in the audience as being implicated in what happens. It’s a clever turn in a clever film.

Oscar Nominations: Best Director (Alfred Hitchcock), Best Screenplay, Best Color Cinematography, and Best Sound Recording

There's No Business Like Show Business (1954)

 There’s No Business Like Show Business is, by today’s standards and perhaps even by the standards of the 1950s, a rather old-fashioned musical. It’s a family drama that begins in the vaudeville of 1919. Ethel Merman and Dan Dailey play a performing couple named Molly and Terry Donahue experiencing the ups and downs of a theatrical life. The arrival of each of their three children means another addition to the act until they become known as the Five Donahues. However, Molly wants a stable life for her children, and she and Terry agree to pack them off to a boarding school while they continue earning a living on the road. The three children, now grown up, return to the family act, naturally, but each of them starts to want a different path than show business. The eldest child, Steve (played by singer Johnny Ray), becomes a priest. Tim, the younger son (played by the always reliable Donald O’Connor), falls for a very ambitious hatcheck girl, Vicky Parker (Marilyn Monroe—more on her later), but she’s not interested in him initially because he can’t help to further her career. Tim’s sister, Katy (the delightful and underused Mitzi Gaynor), eventually joins him as a backup performer for Vicky. Katy and Tim have an argument, Vicky and Tim have a disagreement, and Tim disappears. Of course, you know O’Connor is not going to be gone for too long, not in a movie this focused on family dynamics. Monroe is definitely the highlight for a modern audience, and her few numbers are wonderfully staged. “Heat Wave” is quite a showcase for her talents; why Hollywood couldn’t see how remarkably gifted she was remains a mystery. You’ll likely recognize the iconic white gown Monroe wears for “After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It.” (Many of her best songs relied on that kind of double entendre.) As great as Monroe is or was, she isn’t truly the star of the film. Merman is really the star and is a more fascinating performer to me. She was never a huge movie star; she just couldn’t seem to transfer her Broadway superstardom to the big screen. Perhaps it’s because she always seems to be so… “on.” She never sings quietly; you can always hear her distinctive voice above everyone else, particularly in the rendition of the movie’s title song. All of the songs in the movie were written by Irving Berlin, a favorite composer of Merman’s. However, I don’t know that I needed to hear nine minutes of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in Scottish dialect and French and German and…. It’s a bit much, frankly, even for such a nice and well-loved song. My favorite of the songs is “A Sailor’s Not a Sailor (‘Til a Sailor’s Been Tattooed),” a real eye-opener performed by Merman and Gaynor in naval attire. It’s the butchest I’ve ever seen Merman on screen, and that’s saying a lot. Honestly, nothing all that dramatic happens in the movie. Having children choose different paths from their parents isn’t a new storyline. So when Molly starts belting out the title song during a benefit performance at the Hippodrome, it’s hardly surprising to see her husband and three children join her. Even Marilyn’s Vicky is there. The final scene goes just as you would expect, and really, you shouldn’t necessarily want it to go any other way.

Oscar Nominations: Best Motion Picture Story, Best Color Costume Design, and Best Scoring of a Musical Picture

White Christmas (1954)

White Christmas actually does very little with the song from which it derives its title. The song only appears twice during the entire film: at the very beginning and at the very end. In between those performances, the film does very little with even the season of Christmas. It’s really about a couple of World War II veterans who decide to pay tribute to their former general. Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye play the nationally famous show business performers who cross paths with an upcoming sister act, played by Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen, and wind up in Vermont at an inn where they meet up with the general, who has fallen on hard times because it’s not snowing in Vermont in the wintertime. In case that plot doesn’t sound quite silly and convoluted enough, there are also phony engagements, silly misunderstandings that lead couples to break up, and a couple of production numbers (such as the embarrassing one dedicated to minstrel shows and another one that seems to evoke Martha Graham’s company in a contest with tap dancers) that seem to have been dropped in from another, even weirder movie. The highlight of the film is, of course, the famous “Sisters” number performed first by Clooney and Ellen and then performed in quasi-drag by Crosby and Kaye. I loved seeing the great Mary Wickes in a supporting role as the nosey housekeeper at the inn who is responsible for several of the mix-ups, and I was captivated by Vera Ellen’s big dance numbers. She had to be one of the best dancers on film in the 1950s, but she’s been long overlooked and underrated. By the way, “White Christmas” (the song, not the movie) was not eligible for the Best Song category; it had already won that honor thirteen years earlier when it was introduced in the film Holiday Inn.

Oscar Nomination: Best Song (“Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep”)

Them! (1954)

 

If you’re going to make a successful movie about giant ants, those ants need to look realistic. One of the strengths of Them! is that, even by today’s standards for special effects, its ants are pretty large and scary—just as they should be. We don’t actually see these ants until almost thirty minutes into the film, but we hear their rather crazy, eerie sound the first time just ten minutes into the action. It’s as distinctive and foreboding as the John Williams da-dum that announces the impending arrival of the shark in Jaws. The film opens with a sequence of haunting mysteries: a little girl wandering in the New Mexico desert, an abandoned car and trailer destroyed from the inside, and a store that’s also been destroyed, its owner found dead beneath the store. A New Mexico state police sergeant, Ben Peterson (James Whitmore), begins the investigation; he’s quickly joined by James Arness as FBI investigator Robert (Bob) Graham and the two Dr. Medfords, both of them apparently insect experts. The older doctor is played by Edmund Gwenn, forever to be known as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34^th Street but here sort of doddering about while his daughter, Patricia (Pat) does much of the heavy lifting. Dad gets to show a movie about ants to military and government officials, describing ants in very militaristic terms: “savage, ruthless, courageous fighters.” Pat, however, gets to go down into the ants’ nest in the desert after putting Bob in his sexist place when he says that women shouldn’t take on dangerous tasks: “Look, Bob, there’s no time to give you a fast course in insect pathology, so let’s stop all the talk and get on with it.” It’s good to see a bit of feminist sensibility shine through one of the many entries in the radiated-creature genre of the 1950s. The film begins in Alamogordo, the area near the nuclear testing site of White Plains, New Mexico, so it taps into the fears of the time: the lingering effects of radiation from atomic tests and a more general fear of the atomic age and bombs. The climactic scenes of the film take place in the storm drains of the Los Angeles River where two little boys have disappeared after their father was killed by the ants. There is a lot of fire and bullets to take down the giant ants. Them! features Fess Parker, later to become famous starring as Davey Crockett on television, in a small but pivotal role as a pilot who saw the ant queens flying near Brownsville, Texas, and is now under psychiatric observation because his story sounds so crazy. Dub Taylor also shows up, uncredited, as a night watchman who somehow missed seeing a bunch of giant ants stealing forty tons of sugar from a railroad car. The fun of watching movies like this now, apart from seeing how bizarrely Cold War era fears manifested themselves in Hollywood films, is seeing the creatures attack. While one of the highlights is certainly seeing enormous carnivorous ants aboard a navy ship, crushing sailors with their mandibles, nothing quite compares to the image of an enormous ant climbing out of a hole in the desert with a human ribcage in its mandibles. It’s moments like that we tend to enjoy most in movies like this.

Oscar Nomination: Best Special Effects

On the Waterfront (1954)

You can't really write about On the Waterfront, named Best Picture of 1954, without noting the performance of Marlon Brando. It's one of the iconic performances on film. Brando stands out so sharply from so many of his fellow actors because of the pain and torment and joy that he seems to contain within him in this film. It's a masterpiece, certainly. And if you haven't "gotten" it by the time of the famous "I could have been a contender" speech, then you likely will never understand.

Likewise, you can't really write about this film without noting its place in history. It's the movie that director Elia Kazan made soon after he named names at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. It's an attempt, perhaps, on his part to justify his actions, to say that wasn't' really a "pigeon," the somewhat heavy-handed recurring image in the film associated with Brando's Terry Malloy. This is a film about the consequences of providing information to the authorities against your own kind. I'm not sure that it truly expunges what Kazan did; that's a debate best saved for someone and somewhere else. I can only say that within the context of the movie, Terry's actions are certainly justified. It's not such a clear parallel to what was happening with HUAC and the search for Communists in Hollywood, though.

On its own merits, On the Waterfront is still a great film. You don't have to note Brando's style of acting to appreciate the difficult situation his character faces. Here's a man who has been, to a degree, taken care of so long as he goes along with the actions of the union bosses, one of whom is his brother. Now, however, thanks to the intervention of the sister of one of his "victims" and the guidance of a local priest, Terry has to rethink his actions and reconsider what he has done with his life. His transformation throughout the film is the key to its success overall.

Brando's is not the only great performance in the film, for the record. Karl Malden is also strong as Father Barry, the priest who gets involved in union busting despite some pretty severe opposition. Eva Marie Saint as Edie Doyle, the sister of an informant who has been killed, is a remarkable blend of tenderness and intensity. She's so young here, but she already exhibits the talent that would lead her to have such a long career. And I admired Lee J. Cobb as Johnny Friendly. Cobb was always exceptional when he played a tough guy, and as the local union leader or "mob boss," he is a standout. There's a rage to his character that is always in danger of escaping, and Cobb captures that sense perfectly.

Still, it's Brando you'll remember. No one could have had the same impact that he had during Terry's walk along the docks at the end of the film. I won't spoil the ending for you, but watching him stride past all of his fellow longshoremen, knowing the pain that he is feeling at that moment, is revelatory. Brando holds the film together and, as a result, changed the way that actors acted on film from that point on. Brilliant stuff.

The Caine Mutiny (1954)

The Caine Mutiny was a nominee for Best Picture of 1954, and it's a very intriguing look at what constitutes leadership in times of crisis. It's the fictional story of a naval mine sweeper during World War II and what happens to its crew after the arrival of a new captain. A series of strange events leads several of the officers, in particular, to suspect that the captain is mentally unstable, a belief that leads to one of them taking command of the ship during a typhoon. The film ends with the court martial of that man, who is accused of mutiny by the captain.

Humphrey Bogart plays Captain Queeg, actually Lt. Commander Queeg, he of the infamous silver balls that he takes out of his pocket whenever he is under stress or must make a tough decision. (Could there be a more obvious symbol than a pair of balls that a man takes out of his pants pocket?) After taking the command of the Caine, Queeg attempts to impose some discipline on a crew that has become rather lax after years of being on the second-rate ship. He becomes obsessed with shirts being tucked in, for example, and he attempts to rewrite events so that he comes out looking guilt-free when he is to blame for a blunder. The most infamous event, of course, is the alleged theft of a quart of strawberries. So paranoid does Queeg become with finding the "guilty" party that every member of the crew has to surrender his keys to be checked. It's that sense of absurdity of behavior that leads his officers to question his reasoning ability.

The key moment, though, is during a storm when Queeg keeps giving out orders to the helmsman that could lead to the ship's destruction. Lt. Maryk (ably played by Van Johnson), fearing for the safety of the men on board, takes over command of the ship. Queeg charges Maryk with mutiny, and they both wind up at the proceedings of the court martial. It's during the court scenes that Bogart is at his best. He is pretty tame for much of the film, only showing a few moments of excitement, a flash here and there of emotion, but once he takes the stand, it becomes pretty clear very soon to everyone why Maryk reacted the way that he did.

There's a silly subplot involving a romance between one of the new ensigns and a nightclub singer, someone the ensign feels his mother might not approve of. There's also a rather condescending speech by Jose Ferrer's Lt. Greenwald that seems to support Queeg's position as captain. I found it rather insulting, frankly, to think that after the testimony in court, the lawyer who represented Maryk would still be so obviously opposed to his actions. I suspect it was a scene added to placate those who wanted to have some passing reference to respect of authority included.

I enjoyed the scenes on board the Caine. I can't vouch for their authenticity, of course, having never been in the Navy myself, but if they do approximate what life is like for the sailors, it's an interesting world out at sea. I think that's one of the appeals of this film. Its evocation of the ways that these men must live their lives, particularly when they are under the command of one person whose decisions must be followed and those decisions are questionable, is a key to the movie's overall success.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

How bittersweet to watch Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a nominee for Best Picture of 1954, so soon after choreographer Michael Kidd's death. His work here is certainly the highlight of this musical. The scene involving the barn raising, with its competition between the mountain men and the city men for the affections of the unmarried girls, is just dazzling, one of the best dance sequences every put on film. What a loss his death was, but what a contribution he made to the art of film choreography. If only one film could stand as a testament to his talent, it would have to be this one.

The story involves Howard Keel as Adam, a headstrong backwoodsman , who comes to town to get supplies for the winter and to find a wife. He is determined not to leave town until he has found the right woman to marry. He meets Jane Powell's Milly, and by the end of the day, they are wed and on their way to his rustic home. Milly discovers that Adam has six brothers, all of them lacking manners, and she sets about to cure them of their ways in order to get them married off as well. However, as soon as they learn how to behave from her, Adam contradicts her lessons, suggesting that she is making them weak (perhaps even effeminate). He goads his younger brothers into kidnapping potential wives from town, and they all wind up trapped in the mountains due to the snowfall. As the winter very slowly becomes spring, the brothers and their "chosen" brides begin to fall more in love with each other. This is an MGM musical so if you can't guess how it's likely to end, I don't think I'm going to help you.

One of the more intriguing themes underlying this film is the notion of what constitutes masculinity. Certainly, the brothers all engage in some very demanding physical labor (but then Milly is shown chopping wood just as easily they can), but they also quickly learn how to dance and they subject themselves to Milly's tutelage quite readily. They even shave off their facial hair as a way to demonstrate her power over them. Doing so gets them what they want--women--but the film seems to ask if there is a cost to doing so. Even Adam, allegedly the most masculine and strong-willed, must submit to Milly when she becomes pregnant (guess the gender of the baby). The filmmakers may have used the story of the myth of the Sabine women (or "sobbin' women," as one of the songs puts it) as an organizing principle for the plot, but they also seem to have in mind something about the feminization or "taming" of men as being necessary for civilization. Okay, let's save that theory for an analytical paper some other time.

I have always liked Howard Keel's singing voice, and Jane Powell was one of the better dancers ever to work at MGM. Their talents are used to great effect in this film. Jacques d'Amboise is a standout among the brothers, primarily for his dancing (not surprising, considering his status as a ballet star at the time), and you'll notice Julie Newmar and Ruta Lee (with different names) among the brides with lovely voices. The songs aren't particularly memorable here, but there are moments of clever humor throughout the movie--one of the slyest involves the naming of the brothers after Biblical characters in alphabetical order (pity the brother whose name begins with "F"). At the heart of this film, though, is the dancing. I never watch it without marveling at the amount of work it took to put these images on film. Thankfully, they've been preserved forever for us to watch and take delight in. Enjoy.