Stuart Galbraith Iv

The great German-French actress Romy Schneider considered her leading performance in L’important c’est d’aimer (That Most Important Thing: Love, 1975) the best of her career. It’s hard to argue that point, though personally I find her work in La Piscine, The Things of Life, Max and the Junkmen and others equally superb. Moreover, I like those films much more than That Most Important Thing. Part Fellini-esque in its fascination with grotesques and Satyricon-like orgies, part Bergman-like for its psychologically fragile, unhappy women and its love for the theater, the film is rather pretentious and trendy, with some painfully bludgeoning symbolism. At its core is an examination of destructive romantic-sexual relationships, but its heavy-handed eccentricities get in the way of any real insight, though Schneider undeniably acts her out, so something is revealed, at least emotionally.

A boxed set devoted to director John Farrow is a little surprising. Accurately described by director Joe Dante as a poor man’s Victor Fleming, Farrow worked for a variety of studios (first Warner Bros., then RKO, and Paramount) in myriad genres, though like Fleming leaned toward commercial, manly adventure-type pictures. He was not without talent; many of his films feel more authentic with greater verisimilitude than other genre films, and in many of his pictures there’s some unique quality or unusual approach to the material that makes it stand out. Visually, Farrow’s films are also often quite interesting; many have extremely long, uninterrupted takes using a mobile camera (often on a crane) roaming large groups of people in both extremely wide and tight close shots, a style probably inspired by director Max Ophüls. Admirably, and quite unlike many younger filmmakers who utilize this now-familiar technique, Farrow’s use of these long takes is never distracting; it’s easy not to even notice its use.

Not as well remembered as other literary and screen sleuths, Philo Vance was the dapper amateur detective of 12 crime novels by writer S.S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright), published during 1926-1939. Film versions of Dine’s novels were especially popular in the late ‘20s and early-to-mid ‘30s, eleven of which were made prior to 1940, the last four (to date) released in 1947 with none since. William Powell was the first to play him, in four of the first five films, the first three produced by Paramount Pictures and collected in The Philo Vance Collection by Kino: The Canary Murder Case, The Greene Murder Case (both 1929), and The Benson Murder Case (1930). Powell himself disliked playing the character, though he would reprise the role for The Kennel Murder Case (1933), made later at Warner Bros. In other films actors as varied as Basil Rathbone, Warren William, Paul Lukas, Edmund Lowe, and Alan Curtis played him.

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.