Stuart Galbraith Iv

The Shop at Sly Corner (1947), meaninglessly retitled Code of Scotland Yard for its initial U.S. release, is a disappointing British crime drama, based on a popular, same-named play by Conservative MP Edward Percy. The film has fine production values and several decent performances but the story is sentimental and obvious, bordering on cruel and sadistic, and very predictable and obvious in other ways. It’s rather like a gussied-up version of the type of ‘30s and early ‘40s B-pictures that starred Boris Karloff as a sympathetic, grandfatherly criminal or rogue scientist. Unsurprisingly, Karloff himself starred in a short-lived Broadway run of the play in 1949.

For those unfamiliar, some important background: In 1960, Ralph Smart, a producer at ITC, the British television production company headed by Lew Grade, created a half-hour, black-and-white series called Danger Man. Patrick McGoohan, born in Queens, New York City to Irish immigrants but raised in Ireland and later in England, starred as a murkily-defined, globe-trotting secret agent. As his opening narration for each episode notes, “Every government has its secret service branch. America, CIA; France, Deuxième Bureau; England, MI5. NATO also has its own. A messy job? Well that’s when they usually call on me or someone like me. Oh yes, my name is Drake, John Drake.” Compact and adult, the series has the flavor of Ian Fleming’s 1950s James Bond novels; Fleming himself reportedly assisted in the program’s development, though departed early on. McGoohan, a devout Catholic, himself helped shape the show, insisting that Drake would not use firearms and he refused to do love scenes in accordance with his strict religious beliefs. It’s a terrific series but, regrettably, was a hard-sell to American television, seemingly the ultimate goal of every Lew Grade/ITC program. With no American financing for a second season (“series” in Britain) forthcoming, Danger Man was canceled after 39 episodes.

The biggest surprise about Prison Walls: Abashiri Prison I-III (1965) is that it took this long for a western world video label to release it. Considering the international popularity of yakuza films, those from Toei Studios particularly, it seemed odd, at least to me, that these films—some 18 features produced 1965-1972—would be ignored for so long. They’re among the most phenomenally popular movies in the history of Japanese cinema. Consider this: the second, third, and fourth entries all made the list of Top 10 Domestic Films at the Japanese box office in 1965, ranking sixth, fourth, and second, respectively. The following year the fifth, sixth, and seventh films also made the Top Ten, ranking ninth, third, and first place. Compared to, say, Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard, the top-grossing film of 1965 in Japan but which cost ten times as much, the Abashiri Prison films were inexpensive and thus hugely profitable. They’re the films that solidified Ken Takakura as a top film star and, what’s more, the early ones are especially good—several cuts above the usual Toei yakuza programmer. Prison Walls packs the first three entries onto two discs, supplemented by strong extras.

Included as an extra feature on Kino Classics’ The Cocaine Fiends/The Pace That Kills is a 1973 re-release trailer for The Cocaine Fiends, when it was distributed by the then relatively new distribution company New Line Cinema. They had successfully reissued Reefer Madness (1936) to college campuses and as midnight shows to great success, contemporary audiences regarding such films as high camp, pictures to be laughed at for their dated drug slang and melodramatic excesses.

The Hairdresser’s Husband (Le mari de la coiffeuse, 1990) is an eccentric film about eccentric people basking in idealized romantic love so perfect it’s not without its consequences. I admired filmmaker Patrice Leconte’s previous work, Monsieur Hire (1989), and after seeing Roger Ebert rave about the film on At the Movies all those decades ago had wanted to see it but never did, until now. It wasn’t quite what I expected, nor I daresay it’s what anyone might expect.

When Columbia Pictures groomed Kim Novak (b. 1933) for stardom, they envisioned a kind of cross between Rita Hayworth, the studio’s top star of the ‘40s and early ‘50s, and Marilyn Monroe. In truth Novak ended up nothing like those personalities, but became a top star nonetheless. She starred or co-starred in just two dozen or so films, many forgotten, a few justly so. But she starred in Picnic and The Man with the Golden Arm and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. She was also in the noir gem 5 Against the House and, later in her career made appearances in movies of widely varying quality, including the strangely beguiling The White Buffalo. For me, her finest performance was as Polly the Pistol, the sweet-natured prostitute who finds that she enjoys masquerading as an ordinary housewife with a fiercely protective husband in Billy Wilder’s hilarious, sweet, and much-underrated Kiss Me, Stupid.

Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), a film of William Inge’s 1950 Broadway play, is one of those award-winning, acclaimed and commercially successful pictures that hasn’t aged as well as other such movies. It’s a commendable work overall, despite Burt Lancaster being wildly miscast, though what was fairly innovative by Hollywood standards then isn’t particularly unusual now. The core aspects of its human drama still hold up fairly well, however.

A pleasant surprise, You’ll Never Get Rich (1941) is a very entertaining Fred Astaire-Rita Hayworth musical from Columbia Pictures. I was expecting a lot of superior dancing built around an innocuous, flag-waving wartime propaganda piece, but the screenplay is clever and funny—and quite different from the typical Astaire vehicle. Instead of playing his usual top-hat-white-tie-and-tails screen persona, Astaire is atypically something else, rather hard to describe, but almost a kind of goofball when he’s not dancing. Unless you’ve seen a lot of Astaire musicals you probably wouldn’t notice, but the character he creates here is subtly a notch-and-a-half broader, leaving one to wonder why he didn’t play amusing characters like this more often. Further, the picture is less the standard A-picture musical-comedy and more like a musical-screwball comedy with a lot of funny, inventive material.

Known as Marie: A True Story on the posters but just Marie on the film itself, this is a fact-based, small-scale drama-thriller similar in approach to the better-known Silkwood (1983), and in the tradition of other movies about determined women fighting for their rights in a male-dominated, corporate landscape, e.g., Norma Rae, The China Syndrome, and even Coal Miner’s Daughter, also starring Sissy Spacek.

Director Fernando Di Leo (1932-2003) is remembered as something of a master of Italian crime films of the 1970s, pictures including Caliber 9, The Italian Connection, Shoot First, Die Later and others, though like his contemporaries Di Leo dabbled as both screenwriter and director in myriad other genre films, including giallo and erotica. Madness (Vacanze per un massacro, or “Vacation for a Massacre”) was made at the tail-end of this cycle, when the genre was dying out and the local theatrical film industry was struggling. Unlike his past work, Di Leo was on Madness little more than a hired hand. The picture was produced on a low-budget, the 89-minute film shot on a very brief 12-day shooting schedule. Di Leo himself was not happy with the results.