By Pat Perry

The Way We Were is the story of a doomed romance between spectacularly mismatched lovers, set on wobbly political underpinnings.  With its intriguing but underdeveloped subplot about the Hollywood blacklist, it is – to borrow a phrase from Roger Ebert’s review – a film that seems to be about more than it actually is. But its enduring popularity and the status it has earned over the years as a romance classic can be at least partially explained by its trailer’s tagline:

Streisand and Redford together!

by Sam Juliano

One down and four to go.  Our wonderful daughter Melanie -the oldest of our five children- graduated Cliffside Park High School this past week outdoors on a steamy hot and humid Wednesday evening at 6:00 P.M.  For us it is hard to believe that one of our kids has reached this point, though now it we pretty much be one after the other.  We certainly are very proud of our Melanie, who did finish in the top third of her graduating class, finishing with a fantastic senior year in academic achievement.

Best wishes for a soulful retirement to Angelo A. D’Arminio Jr. (our long time voting tabulator extraordinaire) who was the toast of a dinner on Wednesday night at Cafe Tivoli in Ridgefield.  D’Arminio and his wife Kathy plan to re-locate in South Carolina by the end of the summer.  He served as President of the Fairview Board of Education this past year after completing two separate stints on the nine-person panel.  We wish Angelo the very best in the coming years.

Despite a packed week with all kinds of events (Melanie’s graduation party was held on Sunday at the Tiger Hose Firehouse in Fairview) Lucille, Sammy, Jeremy and I managed to see three films in theaters this past weeek, though one of those was a twelve minute short shown at the BAM Film Festival that was directed by our good friend Jason Giampietro.  The two feature films we saw in theaters was another at the same BAM Festival, and the beloved STAR WARS at the Film Forum, shown as part of the Alec Guiness Film Festival.  At the STAR WARS screening on Sunday afternoon we met up with Bob Clark and had a very fine talk after the film in the lobby.  Whether one is a fervent fan of all the films or not, there is no denying this very first film made in the series as a landmark of the cinema for all sorts of reasons.  We all had quite a bit of fun I must say.

Foxy Merkins   *** 1/2    (Friday night)   Brooklyn Academy of Music

Star Wars (1977)  *****   (Sunday afternoon)   Film Forum

by Lucille Juliano

Somewhere in Time     1h 48 min   Drama/Fantasy/Romance   Rated PG

Directed by Jeannot Szwarc

Screenplay by Richard Matheson

Based on the novel “Bid Time Return” by Richard Matheson

Music by John Barry

Produced by Ray Stark and Stephen Deutsch

Rastar Pictures

Released in the fall of 1980, Somewhere in Time takes Superman out of Metropolis, away from Lois Lane, and sends him “back in time” about five years before Marty McFly came on the scene.  Now, you must know that by saying Superman, I am actually referring to actor, Christopher Reeve.  Oh and by the way, in this movie, Margot Kidder (Lois Lane) is replaced by actress Jane Seymour and Gene Hackman (Lex Luthor) is replaced by Christopher Plummer.

      Somewhere in Time is the tale of a young playwright who gives up his life in the present to find what he hopes to be true love in the past.   Early in the movie, a young Richard Collier (Reeve) is approached by an elderly woman who hands him an antique gold pocket watch and pleads,  “Come back to me”.  Eight years later, a photograph of a young actress at the Grand Hotel intrigues Richard.  When he researches about her, he finds a picture of the young actress in her later years.  To his amazement, he realizes that the actress and the elderly woman that gave him the gold pocket watch years before are one in the same.  Collier then becomes obsessed with returning to 1912 and the beautiful young actress that is there waiting for him.

I feel that one of the main attractions of this movie is the background music that supports the action on screen.  The musical score composed by John Barry and the 18th variation of Sergei Rachmaninoff‘s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini run throughout the film.  Each time I have viewed this movie, I find that it’s beautiful music remains in my thoughts for days after.  The Rachmaninoff piece is quite infectious.  It is first heard when the elderly woman returns home after giving Richard the antique gold pocket watch.  She plays it on her record player while clutching onto the playbill from Richard’s current play.  The movie then cuts to eight years later where Richard is listening to that very musical piece while gazing out the window of his Chicago apartment.  At that point, Richard is having a severe case of writer’s block and decides to take a short trip to clear his head.  He winds up at the Grand Hotel where he checks in.  That night he is a little early for dinner in the hotel dining room, so he decides to take a look in the hotel’s Hall of History.  While he looks around at the antiques he sees a picture of a beautiful young woman.  He is so taken by her.  As he gazes at her, you hear the Rachmaninoff piece once again.  Since the photograph does not have a nameplate, he asks one of the hotel workers who she is.  Richard finds out that her name is Elise McKenna (Seymour), an actress that acted in a play at the hotel in 1912.  He becomes completely obsessed with her.  He cannot stop going to see her picture. He reads a book about famous American actresses in hopes of finding out more about her.  He stays registered at the hotel and cannot leave the area until he finds out more details.  He does research at the local library and discovers that Elise McKenna is the old woman that gave him the pocket watch that he has carried with him for eight years.  He visits a woman that is the last known servant for Elise.  In the woman’s home, she has a room of Elise’s things.  While in the room Richard spots a book that was written by one of his college professors about time travel.  He finds out that Elise would read that book over and over.  In this room, there is also a replica of the Grand Hotel that is a music box.  It plays the Rachmaninoff piece.  Richard states that this is his favorite music in the whole world.

This visit sends Richard back to his college to talk to his professor about the possibility of time travel.  He learns that time travel may be possible if you completely disassociate yourself from the present.  You must surround yourself with things from the time period you want to go to and have nothing with you or around you to remind you of the present.  Your mind must be clear.  Richard then collects the things he needs and makes his first attempt at time travel through hypnosis.  He fails miserably and is heart broken.  With the assistance of a hotel worker, he investigates old hotel registers and finds out that his name is indeed in the 1912 register.   Now totally convinced that he was there, he makes his second attempt at time travel.  This time with his mind totally focused, he is completely successful and arrives safely in 1912.  The only problem he has is that his room is not his room anymore.  The story of romance unfolds.

The locations where the movie is shot also add to the allure of the movie.   They are absolutely beautiful.   It is mainly filmed on location at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan.  The island is located off the northern tip of Michigan on Lake Huron.  It is said that it was the perfect place to shoot a movie about time travel.   This island does not allow cars.  People travel by horse drawn buggy, bikes, and the like.  Other signs of the present such as telephone polls are also absent.  Needless to say, the director had to get special permission to have cars and other motorized vehicles on the island.

Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour have very good chemistry on screen.  Just the way they look at each other makes you melt.  As the movie unfolds, you find out that the picture that Richard is obsessed with earlier was taken as Elise is adoringly looking at him.  It is so believable that they are in love.  Christopher Plummer is excellent as Elise’s jealous and controlling manager.  All his attempts to keep Richard and Elise apart are complete and utter failures.

SPOILER ALERT: Near the close of the movie, Richard and Elise are finally together for what you think is for good.   After spending the night together, they are having a picnic on the floor in Elise’s bedroom.  Elise teases Richard about his suit.  As he is showing it off, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a coin from 1979.  He is instantly transported back to the present.  At this point, you are completely devastated.  In the movie, Richard stays in his hotel room, makes fatal attempts to go back to Elise, and eventually dies from complete depression.   Upon his arrival in heaven, Richard is reunited with Elise for eternity and the romantics out there are cheering.

From what I can see on the web, there are many fans of this movie that travel up to Mackinac Island for the near annual  “Somewhere in Time Weekend”.  Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve have appeared at these weekends in the past and were enthusiastically welcomed by their adoring fans.  Tourists still travel up there today even though some of the locations have been altered.  Somewhere in Time is a true cult classic!

A smitten Marine corporal (Robert Mitchum) remorsefully comforts Sister Angela (Deborah Kerr) after his heartfelt but drunken advance has driven her to flee into a torrential downpour that leads to fever, delirium . . . and an epiphany.

by Pierre de Plume

Throughout this World War II tale of unusual love under extraordinary but credible circumstances, a huge elephant is left to linger in the room: The sexual tension between a streetwise soldier and an attractive young nun — marooned on a South Seas island — could not have been more strongly implied. The novel on which this film was based already had taken a plunge into moral turpitude, not just by portraying an explicit sexual relationship between the unlikely pair but also by underscoring their carnal activities in Biblical terms:

For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. [Galatians 5:17]

— From The Flesh and the Spirit, by Charles Shaw (1952)

“What’s this world coming to?”  Movie depictions of sexual expression during the mid-1950s were tame by today’s standards. However, that era’s primary agents of film censorship, the industry’s Production Code Administration (PCA) and the National [Catholic] Legion of Decency, were seeing their authority increasingly undermined with the release of button-pushing movies such as The Moon Is Blue, Baby Doll, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Island in the Sun. So no one was surprised, certainly not veteran filmmaker John Huston, that this tale of a pretty Irish nun alone in the South Pacific with a strapping, hairy-chested Marine would command the attention of censors.

It wasn’t just the premise of the proposed plot of Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison that raised concern but also the casting. The public images of the cast (Mitchum and Kerr pretty much comprised the entire show) were not altogether wholesome: Mitchum much of the time played flawed, dangerous characters from the wrong side of the tracks and had the reputation of a Hollywood bad boy who boozed, caroused with “loose” women, and even served time in jail for marijuana possession. Kerr, though well regarded professionally since her 1940 film debut in Britain, emitted a “fire and ice” persona through such roles as a doubt-plagued nun (Black Narcissus), an adulterous wife (From Here to Eternity, The End of the Affair, King Solomon’s Mines), and in her most recent portrayal, on the Broadway stage in Tea and Sympathy, as the wife of a prep school coach whom she cuckolds by seducing, albeit nobly, a student troubled by sexual identity issues.

Australian author Charles Shaw brought sexual and religious taboos into the open in his World War II adventure/romance about a Marine and a nun who indulge their erotic impulses for each other.

From real life to novel to screenplay.  In his first-person account of the filming of Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, PCA censor Jack Vizzard appears to confirm that Charles Shaw based his novel on a true-life event that occurred during World War II. In his book, See No Evil: Life Inside a Hollywood Censor, Vizzard recalls Huston describing a historical incident in which the bodies of a nun and Marine were found on a beach in an Army mop-up exercise at an otherwise uninhabited island in the Pacific. Shaw apparently used these facts as basis for his fictional tale. (Huston’s subsequent argument to Vizzard, that the film was based on a true story, proved later to be a factor in persuading censors to give the finished film its most favorable, “will offend no one,” rating.)

The rights to Shaw’s novel were purchased soon after publication in 1952 when John Wayne wanted the property as a starring vehicle. After Wayne gave up, Kirk Douglas became interested but the project stalled. In 1954 Twentieth Century Fox bought the rights for Clark Gable to star and William Wyler to direct. In this version the nun was an imposter posing as a nun only to protect herself from harm by Japanese soldiers. Despite this contrivance, PCA censors rejected the script. Another attempt, written in 1956 for director Anthony Mann, likewise failed to satisfy censors.

Advertising for the film tiptoed around its central subtext of eroticism between a soldier and a nun. This British poster emphasizes adventure but also evokes prurience. Notable by its absence from the image is the voluminous habit that enshrouded Deborah Kerr’s body (and red hair) for all but a moment of the film’s running time.

Huston became involved in the project in 1956. He and Mahin developed a new script — with Marlon Brando as first choice for the lead — no doubt keeping in mind that previous attempts had struck a brick wall. With Kerr already on board, Huston certainly was aware of her previous role as a nun in Black Narcissus and how that film earned a “condemned” rating by mingling sexuality with sisterhood. For whatever reasons, Huston and Mahin agreed on a story in which sexuality would be relegated to subtext. This freed the two to reimagine themes. For example, the screenplay is set in 1944, 2 years later than in the novel. This would allow the Allison character more time to have outgrown his checkered past and would give the Marine Corps more opportunities to “make a man out of him” by instilling its revered code of “Honor, Courage and Committment.”

The result, despite censorship problems or maybe even because of them, seems to be a deeper, more meaningful work than the source material. Although one reviewer characterized the writing of Shaw’s 174-page novel as “economical” and easily adaptable for the stage, Huston himself is quoted as saying that Shaw’s story was “a very bad novel which exploited all the obvious sexual implications of a Marine and a nun cast together on a South Pacific Island.”

It may be that the Huston/Mahin screenplay succeeded well because they were compelled under duress to expand their focus to matters beyond sex. Huston’s ultimate message may be that most of the drama of sexuality in any individual’s life has to do with nonphysical aspects of human interaction: affection, attraction, devotion, jealousy, passion, restraint, desire, sublimation and transformation. His film may be asking: How can we truly stand by our beliefs until they’re tested? Whether it’s love of man, love of one’s god, or confronting one’s need to fight or refrain during wartime, Huston may be exploring the nature of belief and its power.

Film critic Roger Ebert may have simplified it in his 1998 review of Six Days, Seven Nights: “If you want to see a movie that knows what to do with a man, a woman and an island, see John Huston’s ‘Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison,’ in which Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr create atmosphere where [Harrison] Ford and [Anne] Heche create only weather.”

The first shot of the film shows Corporal Allison washing ashore in a life raft after drifting for days with nothing to eat or drink. One reason the scene is so convincing is because Mitchum had just downed a quart of vodka in despair after hearing he got the role because Marlon Brando didn’t want it.

Off to a rocky start.  Huston selected Tobago off the coast of Venezuela to serve as the story’s fictional island of Tuasiva located 300 miles from Fiji. Using the British West Indies allowed Huston and the studio to obtain funds and financing from Britain. Censorship issues had been resolved to the extent that filming began in August 1956. The first day of shooting, however, did not go well for the film’s lead actor.

Although Mitchum was enthusiastic about his role, he was unhappy to return so soon to Trinidad and Tobago, where he’d just finished Fire Down Below under tough conditions. He received only 3 weeks notice before having to return there to shoot Huston’s movie. Mitchum didn’t know Brando had been Huston’s first choice all along. According to the film’s cinematographer, Oswald Morris, “Brando wasn’t at all keen to do the film, a personal rebuff that John [Huston] seldom met.”

The first day on location, Mitchum didn’t show up for the first shot, the scene where he washes ashore after drifting in a life raft for several days without food or water. Crew members discovered Mitchum in his hut, angrily sulking and drunk from a bottle of vodka he had downed in the 2 hours since learning he’d been Huston’s second choice after Brando. Morris’s memoir continues:

By now it was 10:30 am, the sun was already lethal, the humidity was high, and Bob was full of vodka. Huston insisted the dinghy should float out much farther than was required — it soon became obvious that Bob was going to be made to pay the penalty for playing us all up. ‘Let’s try another take, coming in a little faster,’ Huston said. Bob obediently turned the life raft and paddled out even further. He was going through absolute hell, bobbing around like a cork in the heavy swell. By the time he was finished, there was no doubt he knew who was the guv’nor.

Huston’s harsh tactic — which occurred during the island’s hottest, most humid season — apparently worked. From that point forward he and Mitchum got along fine. The strong, sensitive performance Huston elicited from him has come to be regarded as some of Mitchum’s best work.

Because filming was monitored by a censor stationed onsite, director Huston was obliged to find subtle ways to convey meaning. Here Sister Angela presents Mr. Allison with Father Phillip’s pipe. Cinematographer Robert Surtees, a veteran of 73 films who worked with Kerr in King Solomon’s Mines, said of Kerr, “She acts with her eyes more than anyone else I’ve worked with.”

Because filming was monitored by a censor stationed onsite, director Huston was obliged to find subtle ways to convey meaning. Here Sister Angela presents Mr. Allison with Father Phillip’s pipe. Cinematographer Robert Surtees, a veteran of 73 films who worked with Kerr in King Solomon’s Mines, said of Kerr, “She acts with her eyes more than anyone else I’ve worked with.”

Huston sets the stage.  The film begins with a view of a life raft on a sea of blue. As the credits roll, the sounds of waves are heard between chords of sonorous music (Georges Auric’s effective score). As each musical interlude grows in intensity the sound of the waves begins to resemble a drum roll. For 7-1/2 minutes not a word is spoken as the camera approaches the drifting raft several more times before getting a glimpse of what’s inside: an unconscious Marine. When he wakes up, he drags the raft ashore as the camera assumes the point of view not of the Marine, but of the raft, somehow evoking a sense of immediacy and urgency.

We follow the corporal as he scurries like an animal into the trees. He finds a lagoon, drinks from it, then swims across. He sees abandoned huts, a makeshift grave, and climbs a hillside to a small chapel. From the doorway sweeps a young nun swathed in white, startled by his presence. With boots tied around his neck and shirt unbuttoned, the Marine is at his scruffiest and hunkiest. “Let’s keep it quiet, ma’am.” The nun asks if the Americans have landed. No, it’s just him. He asks if she’s alone. “God has been with me,” she replies in Irish brogue. He slumps to the floor. Before collapsing he asks, “Are you all right?” Only then does he pass out from exhaustion.

The next day they exchange stories of their circumstances. Mr. Allison learns that Sister Angela’s companion, an old priest named Father Phillip, died shortly before Allison’s arrival. When he asks for a cigarette she brings him the pipe of Father Phillip.

Dual meaning through use of imagery, symbolism and visual perspective: Mr. Allison (out of frame) tosses coconuts from a tree while Sister Angela catches them in her apron.

Sister Angela and Mr. Allison alone together.  The remainder of the film consists of intimate scenes of a developing relationship between the two. These moments are interspersed with scenes of harrowing adventure, mostly involving Allison. We are heartbroken to learn that Allison was abandoned at birth in an egg crate on a doorstep on Allison Street. Life for him has been a succession of orphanges, detention halls and jails. He tells her he’s “just a big dumb guy” and that the Marine Corps “made a man out of me.”

We see them scurry to chase a 300-pound sea turtle. We watch as the turtle yanks Allison into the water and drags him toward a dangerous reef. We see Sister Angela paddle furiously and pull him back into the raft. While feasting on their catch he explains military slang such as “scuttlebutt,” “poop” and “mackerel snappers” as she listens intently. He’s impressed when she agrees to his proposal: a perilous 300-mile journey by raft to Fiji. They discover similarities in their belief systems: “I’ve got the Corps — you’ve got the Church.” He tells her she’s pretty.

Their travel plans are aborted when enemy planes bomb the island, forcing them to retreat up the hillside to the safety of a cave. When Sister Angela trembles he comforts her: “Nothing to be ashamed of, ma’am — even a Marine gets the shakes.” Later, Allison digs a crucifix out of the rubble and presents it to her, but when the Japanese arrive they must retreat to the cave and set up housekeeping. He slips away while she’s asleep and sneaks into the enemy’s camp to find food. Trapped there, he hides until morning. When he returns she becomes agitated and makes him promise to never leave her again without telling her.

Eroticism, 1957-style: During a scene in which half the action is visible to neither Mr. Allison nor to the audience, Sister Angela’s clothing dries on the rocks as she bathes in the lagoon while humming a tune. Throughout the shot the camera lingers on Allison as he floats on his back.

Allison whittles a comb for her and wraps it in a palm leaf with red hibiscus. He imagines her hair to be “long and blonde.” Even though she can’t use the comb because nuns wear their hair short, she accepts it saying “I will cherish it always as a keepsake.” A moment later Allison asks whether nuns can “change their mind.” She tells him she’s a novice and hasn’t taken her final vows. “You mean you could pull out?” he asks. “I could if my heart and my mind were not made up,” she tells him.

At night they hear a sea battle in the distance and discover the next day that the Japanese have left the island. As Allison and Sister Angela explore the abandoned camp they dance together while singing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me).”

A proposal of marriage.  As they sit in the moonlight, Allison again sings “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” She expresses surprise that “a big handsome fellow like you” doesn’t have a girlfriend. She accepts his offer to pick more of “them big red flowers.” Impulsively he announces, “Ma’am, I just got to tell you. Please don’t do it. Please don’t take those final vows.” His tone deepens: “I never loved anybody before, never lived before. I want to marry you, look after you. . . .” He hangs his head and adds, “I couldn’t keep from saying it, ma’am. Tell me if there’s a chance. . . . Is there?” “No, Mr. Allison,” she replies. I’ve already given my heart to Christ our Lord.” She points to her “engagement” ring. He apologizes for “speaking out of turn” and leaves as the camera lingers on Sister Angela’s face.

The following day Sister Angela watches from across the lagoon as Mr. Allison paces the beach. He turns to her. The camera cuts to crashing surf. Later he apologizes, “I must’ve been off my rocker last night.” She walks away and the camera cuts to foaming surf.

Trouble in paradise: Sister Angela discovers a bottle of sake, Mr. Allison gets drunk, and he confronts her with his feelings. She breaks down and runs outside into a violent tropical storm.

Too much truth.  Later that night Sister Angela discovers a bottle of sake left by the Japanese. Allison’s eyes brighten and he offers her some. She agrees to “just one” and becomes flushed. He becomes drunk and sings his song, this time more aggressively. “What do you wanna be a nun for? If you have to be a nun why couldn’t you be old and ugly — not with big blue eyes, a smile . . . freckles?” She tries to divert his attention but his tone turns angry as he laments they could be stranded for years, “like Adam and Eve.” She bursts into tears. He approaches her as if to console, but she pushes him away and flees, sobbing, into a torrential downpour.

The next day Allison finds Sister Angela lying unconscious in a swamp. He lifts her into his arms. At that moment he sees Japanese ships approaching so he carries her to the cave, where she develops chills, fever and delirium. He comforts her and puts his hand on her forehead. When her condition worsens, he places his life in danger by returning to the enemy camp during daylight for food and a blanket. A Japanese soldier discovers him and Allison kills him during a struggle.

In her essay at OpenSalon.com, Katharine Yee writes, “Mitchum and Kerr never kiss in the entire picture. They do fall in love, but in a way that is inconceivable to modern audiences today. . . . Censors aside, it’s a comfort to know, in the little world that is the film, that Allison shows her such courtesy. He will be her constant protector and a gallant one at that.”

Stripped briefly of her veil and habit, Sister Angela is a chaste and erotic spectacle that attracts and commands the respect of Mr. Allison. In his book, John Huston’s Filmmaking (1997), film scholar Lesley Brill writes, “‘Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison’is the most sympathetic of Huston’s films to regard Christianity. . . . It’s a matured perspective of the ways the real Allison and Sister Angela might have behaved. There is no sex, no amorous signs of affection — not even a kiss between them. This is Huston’s idea of what Adam and Eve could have done right.”

Divine intervention.  When Sister Angela awakens from her trauma, she notices her wet clothes have been removed and she’s wrapped in a blanket. Allison tells her, “I had to, ma’am. You’ve been 2-3 days out of your head. It’s my fault you got sick.” She replies, “I wasn’t running from you, I was running from the truth. There’s a lot of truth in what you said.” She pauses and adds, “Dear Mr. Allison, we’re living from hour to hour.”

After the Japanese discover one of their troops has been murdered they search the hillside shouting, “Hey Joe — come out with hands up.” Explosions are heard — not a Japanese grenade but bombs from American planes. Allison rejoices by singing his song and dancing his jig. As the bombing continues, Allison tells Sister Angela he’s had a divine revelation: a plan to disarm the enemy’s howitzers. She assures him, “If it’s God saying it and not yourself, then He’ll protect you.” Allison slithers through the darkness and disarms the cannons but gets hit by schrapnel. When Sister Angela sees his silhouette in a cloud of smoke, he announces, “Mission accomplished — I ain’t killed or nothin.’” She notices his bleeding and helps him to the ground.

“Marriage” vows.  Before Sister Angela removes Allison’s shirt to tend to his wounds, a smile darts across her face as if to say she accepts, or at least acknowledges, the physicality and depth of their respective feelings. He says he has something to say and she looks into his eyes as he determinedly recites, “Ma’am, we’ll be coming to the end of our time together. It won’t ever be just the two of us again, maybe, so I’d like to say this now.” She listens intently as he continues, “I’m very pleased to have met you. It’s been a privilege to know you.” He falters: “I wish you ev- . . . every happiness.” In a voice that’s softer . . . breathier, he says, “Goodbye.” She answers, “Goodbye, Mr. Allison. No matter how many miles apart we are, or whether I ever get to see your face again, you’ll be my dear companion always. . . . Always. . . .”

In the early morning light we see an American flag being raised. Sister Angela walks beside Mr. Allison as fellow Marines carry him on a stretcher down the charred hillside. Members of the landing party turn to watch as Sister Angela holds a cigarette to Allison’s mouth. Knestled in her other arm is the scorched crucifix. As Sister Angela drops back to follow the stretcher we see she’s carrying the comb Allison made for her. She smiles proudly as they cross the footbridge over the lagoon. Several Marines bathing in the lagoon below look up to watch the 2 survivors as they continue toward their rescue boat. A crescendo of music begins as the end title appears. It reads: “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison.”

During their final moments alone together, Sister Angela tends to Mr. Allison’s injuries from friendly fire. Although they don’t literally pledge love to each other, the film leaves little if any doubt they’re in “some kind” of love. Critic David Denby has written of Deborah Kerr that she possesses “an erotic doubleness, a forte for both concealing and revealing a passionate nature.”

Notes from the author. Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is one of my favorite films, certainly one of my favorite romantic films. Although I can’t say it’s better than Huston’s other World War II romance The African Queen, I believe the story of Mr. Allison and Sister Angela is a better romance than that of Charlie and Rosie. This may be because I prefer the chemistry of Mitchum and Kerr over Bogart and Hepburn. I think the Bogart/Hepburn film has enjoyed more success not just because its stars were “bigger” in Hollywood terms but also because their roles in that film were more protagonistic in nature. They had a mission — to get their boat down the river so they could destroy the German gunboat. Their romance sort of happened along the way.

In contrast, Mr. Allison and Sister Angela weren’t focused on an overriding goal other than their survival. They were bystanders to the war more than protagonists, and the action between them was more internal (emotional) than external (physical).

I believe that some film goers and critics in 1957 may have misunderstood Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. For example, Bosley Crowther’s review states, “It is inevitable that, at one point, the Marine should think it love. This crux of the personal drama is treated with tenderness and tact.” These words suggest to me that either a) Crowther didn’t think Sister Angela loved Allison back, or b) neither Allison nor Sister Angela was really in love. Either choice seems to be missing the point. To me, one of the key lines of the film is uttered by Sister Angela after she has recovered from her delirium: “Dear Mr. Allison, we’re living from hour to hour.” This suggests to me that she really does love Mr. Allison. She seems to telling him that, if they end up staying on the island for any length of time, she may very well change her mind and enter into a husband/wife relationship with him.

But you see, I personally don’t care how the film ends in that regard. For me that’s soap opera stuff and not the real point. What’s more important is that, by knowing Mr. Allison she became a whole person and, in the process, learned she could love another human being. Armed with this realization she could be more confident in her decision to take her final vows. And for the rest of her days she would have — in her mind, heart, body and soul — an entirely human love that would never cease to exist.

John Huston didn’t say or write much about this film, probably because of the ongoing difficulties he had with the censors. He has been quoted, however, as saying this film is “one of the best things I ever made.”

After this film was completed, Mitchum and Kerr went on to star together in 3 more: The Grass Is Greener (1960), The Sundowners (1960), and the TV movie Reunion at Fairborough (1985). Although “Sundowners” is a better film than the others, the plot of “Fairborough” indulges sentiments that are rooted in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison.

While researching this article I came across a number of entertaining anecdotes surrounding the making of the film. The one that touched me the most is quite simple and involves the personal relationship between Kerr and Mitchum. In Lee Server’s biography of Mitchum, “Baby, I Don’t Care,” Server writes of Mitchum and Kerr: “The two had remained, in that show business extended family way, warm but not close friends through the years. Deborah occasionally penned a note to him, always addressing it, “Dear Mr. Allison. . . .”

And so it was until Mitchum passed away in 1997, just as Sister Angela had said to Mr. Allison 40 years earlier: “No matter how many miles apart we are, or whether I ever get to see your face again, you’ll be my dear companion always. . . . Always. . . .”

Sister Angela and Mr. Allison dance to their song, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me).”

Critical and popular reception.  Upon the film’s release, reviews were generally favorable with some dissension. New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther wrote, “In the hands of a writer and director less skilled than Mr. Huston, . . .  this obviously delicate story might have been pretty badly abused. At least, in its hints of budding romance, it might have been quite embarrassing. But Mr. Huston has kept it free of nonsense.” The Hollywood Reporter admired the “chaste approach” the film took to “a subject that has been taboo, the possibility of romantic love for a man.” Film Daily saw the film as an edifying and spiritual story “of moral strength of character played against the uncertainties of war.”

Yet other reviews were not so respectful. Time dismissed the film as “one more theological striptease,” citing Kerr’s earlier performance in Black Narcissus. Monthly Film Bulletin was uncomfortable with the film’s “near-blasphemous contrivance.”

A Variety reporter remarked there were potentially 2 audiences for this film, one secular and the other Catholic. The first might be drawn to the erotic “implications inherent in throwing the Marine together with the nun on a lonely and dangerous island.” The second, he assumed, would find pleasure in the nun’s goodness, in her “steadfast rejection of the Marine’s advances and in the glowing description of her firm faith.”

Box office.  Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison was successful at theaters but was not a top hit. With a budget of $3.0 million, its domestic rentals in 1957 were $4.2 million. In comparison, the top grossing film that year was The Bridge on the River Kwai ($25.3 million). The American public apparently had a stronger taste for melodrama (Peyton Place, $16.1 million).

Awards.  Best Film: Nominated for BAFTA Award — Best Director: Nominated for Directors Guild Award — Best Screenplay:Nominated for Writers Guild of America Award and for Oscar — Best Foreign Actor: Nominated for BAFTA Award — Best Actress: Won New York Film Critics Award; nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe Award.

Kerr received the Photoplay magazine Gold Medal Award for Most Popular Actress (based on Gallup polling and reader voting). According to Inside Oscar by Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Barbara Stanwyck lobbied for Deborah Kerr to win the Oscar. (Joanne Woodward won.)

Online critic and user ratings. Turner Classic Movies User Rating: 4.5/5 — Internet Movie Data Base User Rating: 7.4/10 — Rotten Tomatoes Critic Tomatometer Rating: 88% — Rotten Tomatoes Audience Rating: 82%.

For additional reference:

Marriage proposal/storm scene:

Final scene:

Original 1957 trailer:

Bosley Crowther’s New York Times review dated March 15, 1957:

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9903EEDB1639E33BBC4D52DFB566838C649EDE

Review of Charles Shaw’s novel, The Flesh and the Spirit

http://stevereads.blogspot.com/2009/08/flesh-and-spirit.html

by John Grant

US / 90 minutes / bw / MGM

Dir: Vincente Minnelli (reportedly helped by Fred Zinnemann)

Pr: Arthur Freed

Scr: Robert Nathan, Joseph Schrank

Story: Paul Gallico, Pauline Gallico

Cine: George Folsey

Cast: Judy Garland, Robert Walker, James Gleason, Keenan Wynn, Marshall Thompson, Lucile Gleason, Ruth Brady, Chester Clute.

Corporal Joe Allen (Walker), an Indiana boy home from the war on furlough with no knowledge of where next in the combat zone he’ll be posted, finds himself in New York’s Grand Central Station with no real clue as to what to do with himself. Just then, pretty office worker Alice Maybery (Garland) trips over his foot, breaking the heel on her shoe. The chance encounter leads them to a trip around the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in due course out on a date—she standing up her regular squeeze Freddy, her romance with whom, we soon understand, is the creation of her roomie Helen (Brady), who would like her to be less giddy-headed and start going steady.

Soon they’re convinced there’s a romantic inevitability in their having tripped over each other:

            Alice: Suppose we hadn’t met?

            Joe: We couldn’t not have met.

On the way home after midnight from Central Park they’re picked up by milk-cart driver Al Henry (James Gleason); most “comic relief” characters of the period seem woeful to us now, but Gleason’s has weathered well. When he gets socked by a drunk (Wynn, in a bravura performance), the young couple decide to deliver his milk for him.

            Joe: I don’t know, though, I don’t think it’s fair to the girl, a soldier getting married. He doesn’t know what condition he’s going to come back in . . . he may not even come back at all.

From there on it seems they’re fated to be married. But, thanks to a succession of moronic bureaucracies, this takes far longer than they’d like; only after they’ve jumped through a gazillion hoops to qualify for a civil marriage do they discover this isn’t enough (one of the dehumanizing requirements is that they have to acquire blood-test certificates). In a very effective final sequence they sit in St Patrick’s Cathedral and recite a version of the marriage ceremony to each other. After that they are, in their own terms, married; today, of course, they’d not wait for the clerical okay. Only when they’ve conducted their own form of the Catholic wedding ceremony in a cathedral do they feel finally able to consummate the relationship.

There’s so much to like about this movie, not least that the romantic pair aren’t what they should be. He’s exactly the opposite of the studly seducer—he’s the Joe Schmoe with a good sense of humor . . . which is likely why she responds to him so much. He’s a Mork to her Mindy, his Indiana naivety contrasting with her Manhattan worldly-wisdom . . . except that she discovers she prefers his naivety to her—and more especially Helen’s—sophistication.

            The Clock does, in its later stages, start to get a little long, but before that it’s a paradigm of what romantic movies should be. Here’s Alice on the limitations of her civil marriage with Joe: “It was so, so . . . ugly.” Yet her final “church wedding” is little better.

By Pat Perry

Diane: “Nobody thinks it will work, do they?”
Lloyd: “No. You just described every great success story.”

- final lines of Say Anything

 

By Tony d’Ambra

The fog of angst seeps from the faces of two doomed lovers in the dank gloom of Le Havre. Jean is on the run and Nelly is trapped in a psychic prison as real as the physical constraints on her existence. Happiness is something that may exist but neither knows it.

They meet by chance one night in a broken-down bar on the waterfront amongst the detritus of an ephemeral humanity. Panama’s is a haven for the down-and-out named for the hat of the publican, an old shaman with a rusted soul as deep as the canal he visited in his youth. Father confessor of an unholy convent for lost souls. He keeps his counsel, asks no questions, and strums his guitar.

And everywhere the fog and the harbor with rusting hulks at anchor ever-waiting transport for deliverance. The two lovers stroll as tentative friends with a hope as forlorn as it is sublime, when a bright clarity intrudes, a hoodlum with a malice as sharp as his clothes and his shave, and as evil as his cowardice.

A night of bliss follows. Jean and Nelly find love at a sea-side carnival and that elusive union we all seek – in a rented room. They keep missing pernicious Fate a drunken vagabond. The glory of a new dawn is soon shattered. They each leave alone. Fate occupies the sheets of last night’s passion, and they are lost.

Screen grab from Richard Lester’s classic Beatles film “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964)

by Sam Juliano

A few glorious days have followed the remnants of a storm that went out to sea on the cusp of the July 4th weekend that saved the holiday for many, and allowed barbecues to operate successfully until the fireworks upstaged all.  Independence Day was a fine day for many, and it’s conclusion marks the start of the dog days of summer.

I want to thank Dee Dee from the bottom of my heart for her remarkable sidebar updating and the usual holiday markings.  This site remains in her debt for years.

The romantic countdown continues with several more superlative entries this past week.  Both the page view and comment totals remain constant in a very good way, as we get closer and closer to the mid-way point.

The tragic passing of a 57 year-old longtime friend of a 12 year illness kept everything in a state of melancholy most of the week.  John Mesisca was a trustee on the Fairview Board of Education for multiple terms.

Lucille and I had hoped to see the new Roger Ebert documentary, but as stated above this was a very difficult weekend.  We managed to see two films in total, one a recent release, the other a classic revival.

Snowpiercer   ****    (Saturday night)    Angelika Film Center

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)  *****  (Sunday morning)  Film Forum

SNOWPIERCER is for the most part a wildly creative and violent  futuristic yarn set on a train -some have compared it to Transformers- with a dazzling set design and some very fine performances.  Take a little while to get going, but when it does it rocks.

Richard Lester’s stylish A HARD DAY’S NIGHT is one of the greatest of all music films, and it’s the most beloved film from the greatest band of all-time.  The two week Film Forum run coincides with the Criterion blu-rays availability at 50% off during July Barnes & Noble sale.

Screen grab from “Snowpiercer.”

By J.D. Lafrance

      It took a Canadian filmmaker to make Moonstruck (1987), the quintessential Italian-American romantic comedy from a screenplay written by an Irish-American playwright, but then isn’t that what the American experience is all about? For what is the United States, but the great melting pot? Norman Jewison’s film is a celebration of love, life and food. John Patrick Shanley’s script is full of romantic yearnings for, among many things, the opera and, of course, the moon. Above all else, the film places an emphasis on the importance of family. Moonstruck was the My Big Fat Geek Wedding (2002) of its day only infinitely better and about an Italian family as opposed to a Greek one. Watching Jewison’s film again, you realize just how much Nia Vardalos’ romantic comedy is heavily indebted to it. If Moonstruck is La Boheme than Greek Wedding isTony and Tina’s Wedding.

Loretta Castorini (Cher) is engaged to Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello). They act like an old married couple and they haven’t even tied the knot yet! And therein lies the problem – their relationship lacks passion. He is called away suddenly to Italy to see his mother on her deathbed and asks Loretta to invite his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage) to their wedding. Ronny works in a bakery and is bitter over having lost his hand in a freak accident, blaming Johnny for what happened. In a classic case of opposites attracting, Loretta and Ronny find themselves irresistibly drawn to each other.

At the time, Nicolas Cage was considered an odd casting choice because of his reputation as an eccentric character actor. The way he gestures and enunciates certain words is off-kilter in such a way that it gives his scenes a wonderfully unpredictable vibe. He makes unusual choices and surprisingly they all work. Cage delivers a very physical, Brando-esque performance only filtered through his very distinctive style of acting as evident in the scene where Ronny and Loretta meet for the first time. Cage is fascinating to watch for the unusual choices he makes. Ronny paces around the room, starting his rant quietly before gradually building in intensity, punctuating his impassioned speech with words like, “huh” and “sweetie.” Jewison orchestrates the actor beautifully through editing so that the scene has an absolutely captivating rhythm as we gain insight into Ronny’s character. Cage conveys an impressive range of emotions as Ronny goes from pride to rage to sadness.

He plays well off of Cher and they have the kind of chemistry that is so important for this kind of film. His fiery, Method approach works well in contrast to Cher’s more controlled style and their scenes together crackle with the intensity of two actors with very different approaches bouncing off each other. Ronny is a wounded animal, “a wolf without a foot,” as Loretta puts it, and she is “a bride without a head,” as he tells her, but over the course of the film she transforms him into a civilized human being. She brings out the romantic who likes to dress up and go to the opera. Cher does a wonderful job of immersing herself in the character of Loretta, a strong-willed, smart woman who thinks she has it all figured out until she meets Ronny. On the surface, Loretta may seem like a cynic, but she has taken what she feels is a more realistic approach towards love because of the death of her previous husband. She has chosen to marry Johnny not because she loves him, but because he’s a safe bet. Her heart has fallen asleep only to be awakened by Ronny. Cher won a well-deserved Academy Award for her performance as a widow who, against her better judgement, falls in love again. Watching her in this film reminds one how natural an actress she is and what a crime it is that she doesn’t act more often.

Cage and Cher are well supported by a fantastic cast of colorful character actors. Vincent Gardenia plays Loretta’s cheap father Cosmo who has a lover on the side and Olympia Dukakis is Rose, her wise mother full of world-weary pearls of wisdom, like when she tells her daughter about men: “When you love them they drive you crazy because they know they can.” There’s an air of sadness to her character as Rose seems to have resigned herself to a life where every day is the same. Then there’s Feodor Chaliapin, Jr. as Loretta’s grandfather who can be seen in several scenes walking his small fleet of mangy dogs and seems to be used as merely window-dressing until Jewison gives him a pivotal moment towards the end of the film.

The film’s secret weapon is Danny Aiello as mama’s boy Johnny. From hysterical crying to the way he interacts with Cher’s Loretta, his portrayal of Johnny is a master class in comedic acting. Johnny thinks he knows something about men and women (“A man who can’t control his woman is funny.”), but is quickly put in his place by Loretta. Aiello does wonders with throwaway bits of dialogue like, “My scalp is not getting enough blood sometimes,” as Johnny tells Loretta over dinner while vigorously rubbing his hair. He doesn’t mug per se, but rather plays it straight in a way that makes his character look ridiculous via tiny gestures or through a specific facial expression. Compared to someone like Cage, you know Aiello has no chance with Cher, but the actor plays it like Johnny believes they are going to get married all the way through the film.

There are superb recurring gags, like John Mahoney’s sad university professor who keeps striking out with younger women that throw wine in his face midway through dinner before storming out of the restaurant. While his character is a bit of a Lech, Mahoney’s expressive eyes convey a sadness that makes you feel somewhat sympathetic for him. There’s a nice scene between his character and Rose where they end up having dinner together at the restaurant after he’s publicly embarrassed yet again by his latest young lady friend (Canadian actress Cynthia Dale in a small role). It’s a lovely scene between two lonely people as they talk honestly about their lives and she asks him, “Why do men chase women?” He has no good answer and she tells him, “I think it’s because they fear death.” It kickstarts a fascinating conversation that allows us to understand these two people. Every time I watch Moonstruck I imagine an offshoot film that follows Rose and the professor as they run off together or perhaps have a brief affair.

The use of location is excellent. For example, the opening shot is of Lincoln Center (which features prominently later on) in New York City so we know exactly where we are. Most of the film is set in Brooklyn and Jewison conveys an almost tactile feel for the borough. You want to be there and know these people. You also get a real sense of community. The warm, inviting lighting of the Italian restaurant where Johnny proposes to Loretta and where her mother has dinner with Mahoney’s professor has a wonderful, intimate atmosphere made up of warm reds and contrasting greens that puts you right there. There is another scene where Loretta looks out the window at the full moon in the night sky and the lighting is perfect with just the right music that results in such a touching, poignant moment. No words are spoken because none are needed with such visuals.

As much as the 1980s was typified by Wall Street’s (1987) Gordon Gekko and his “Greed is good” mantra,Moonstruck is about blue-collar people. It pays tribute to folks that represent the glue of society, showing us bookkeepers, bread makers, liquor store owners, plumbers and so on plying their trade. The characters in this film may lead workaday jobs, but their personal lives are anything but average. Like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Moonstruck does heighten ethnic stereotypes for comedic effect, but the latter film does so sincerely and with class. Moonstruck perpetuates a lot of Italian stereotypes, but not in a grating way, playfully making fun of some of them while celebrating others with affection. Far from being a bundle of ethnic clichés, it is a celebration of the Italian-American experience. The crucial difference between the two films is tone. Where Greek Wedding is all cuddly, feel good sitcom, Moonstruck has some bite to it, an edge as represented by Cage’s passionate performance. This film is full of fantastic acting and much pleasure comes from watching a very talented cast speak brilliantly written dialogue. Best of all it has a wonderful sense of romantic naivete, a cinematic love letter to New York City.

1 Attached Images

by John Grant

vt Build My Gallows High

US / 97 minutes / bw / RKO Dir: Jacques Tourneur Pr: Warren Duff Scr: Geoffrey Homes Story: Build My Gallows High (1946) by Geoffrey Homes Cine: Nicholas Musuraca Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming, Richard Webb, Steve Brodie, Virginia Huston, Paul Valentine, Dickie Moore, Ken Niles, Theresa Harris, Wallace Scott, John Kellogg.

Film noir is not generally a genre much associated with romance, so it’s perhaps a surprise to find prominent noirs listed in this countdown, and perhaps most surprising of all that this, one of the half-dozen or so films noirs that could be regarded as defining the genre, is one of them. Other noirs deal exquisitely with the obsessive face of love—The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) and Double Indemnity (1944) spring instantly to mind (and is obsession truly romance?)—but Out of the Past manages to tell a tale of obsession that more than matches those while doing so in the context of, and within the narrative framework of, a genuinely romantic love story.

The tale of obsession first:

A couple of years ago PI Jeff Markham (Mitchum) was hired by hoodlum Whit Sterling (Douglas) to track down the mistress who’d put four bullets into him and run off with $40,000 of his money, Kathie Moffatt (Greer). With the help of her maid, Eunice Leonard (Harris), Jeff tracked her down to Acapulco, where he became instantly infatuated with her. When Whit and his goon Joe Stefanos (Valentine) followed Jeff to Mexico, Jeff claimed that Kathie had left for some destination unknown in South America. In fact, Jeff and Kathie then snuck away to San Francisco, where they lived together incognito for a while before Jeff’s old PI partner, Jack Fisher (Brodie), spotted them quite by chance at a racetrack. Fisher followed them home and there was a confrontation, during which Kathie shot the interloper dead, then thereafter fleeing into the night . . .

So much we’re told in flashback as Jeff explains his past to Ann Miller (Huston), the nice young woman with whom he’s very deeply in love; they hope her parents will come round to the idea of their getting married. Since the events of the flashback Jeff has been operating under the nom de guerre Jeff Bailey, running a small-town gas station with the assistance of a deaf-and-dumb youth universally called The Kid (Moore). But now Joe Stefanos has appeared out of nowhere to tell Jeff that Whit wants to hire him for that noirish archetype: Just One Last Job. Jeff doesn’t feel he’s in any position to refuse, but he promises Ann he’ll be back as soon as he’s managed to disentangle himself.

What he doesn’t expect is to find that Kathie is once again Whit’s mistress, and that now his obsession for her has almost entirely evaporated: he can see her as the poisonous viper she is. The casting of Greer in this part is a triumph. As events proceed and the sociopathic Kathie’s actions become viler and viler, as it’s clear that she’s entirely amoral in every sense, she manages to stay looking more like a virgin than a virgin does. She has the fresh-faced prettiness of Hollywood’s ideal nun, and only occasionally—in the shifting of an eye or the curving of a lip—does her true corruption show through this apparently guileless mask.

The job Whit has in mind involves accountant Leonard Eels (Niles), whom Whit claims is blackmailing him over his unpaid taxes. As it’s explained to Jeff, the idea is that, with the help of Eels’s treacherous secretary Meta Carson (Fleming), he should steal the relevant documentation; in reality, however, the plan is for Stefanos to murder Eels after Meta has engineered matters such that Jeff’s fingerprints are all over Eels’s apartment—i.e., that Jeff’s to be set up as the patsy. Luckily for Jeff he cottons on fast—not fast enough to stop the murder, but fast enough to screw up the schemes of the bad guys.

Again there’s a casting triumph. Fleming was one of the great Hollywood femmes fatales, so was a natural for the part of the faithless employee, the secretary who’s taking advantage of the boss’s unspoken love for her—near worship, in fact—not merely to sell him out but to connive in his destruction. Yet there’s also a certain physical echo of Greer in her appearance and, by design (we assume), in her onscreen affect; indeed, soon afterwards, when Jeff spies on Kathie making a phonecall that she thinks will spring the next part of the scheme to frame him into effect, it takes us a moment or two to realize that it’s Kathie, not Meta, whom he’s spying upon. As it were, then, Meta is Kathie with the mask removed: one glance and you can tell she’s a mercenary femme fatale, whereas with the far more dangerous Kathie it takes longer.

Kathie continues to play not just both ends but every conceivable end against the middle. Her latest seduced chump is clearly Joe Stefanos, with whom she’s seemingly plotting to cheat Whit, betray Jeff, and skedaddle with the loot. Cleverly, she works out that the way to track Jeff down is for Stefanos to follow The Kid; stupidly, neither of them realize that The Kid’s muteness has nothing to do with lack of intelligence—and indeed, as Stefanos prepares to murder Jeff, The Kid very craftily dispatches him.

Having herself murdered Whit, Kathie reckons that her best bet for the next stage of her campaign of terrorism against the world is to hook up yet again with Jeff, whom she assumes she can still enslave with the merest amorous glance. She’s also incapable of comprehending that he’s not in fact like her: “You’re no good for anyone but me. You’re no good and neither am I. That’s why we deserve each other.” But, far from being no good, Jeff is a man of integrity and honor, all the more so because of his love for Ann.

Yet one more thing Kathie doesn’t realize is that Jeff has finally concluded that the only way of expunging her poison is for her to die, and that his love for Ann is great enough that he’s willing to sacrifice his own life to help bring this about. And in the very closing moments of the movie we come across yet another sign of how much Jeff adored Ann. While Jeff was still alive, Ann was fending off the attentions of local stalwart Jim (Webb); now that Jeff’s dead she tries to settle her mind by asking The Kid if he knows whether, in his final moments, Jeff was planning to run away with Kathie. The Kid lies that, yes, this was what Jeff was doing; while there have been various interpretations placed on this closing exchange, the one that seems most attractive is that Jeff briefed The Kid to act this way should anything happen to him, so that Ann could get on with her life.

That Out of the Past should be such an exemplary piece of moviemaking (aside from the odd continuity error that people who have always known Jeff as Markham call him Bailey in the second half of the movie) may seem paradoxical. The screenplay is credited to Geoffrey Homes, a usual nom de plume of the writer Daniel Mainwaring (he used it on the novel too), and it’s been generally accepted that there were some uncredited dialogue contributions from James M. Cain. According to Roger Ebert, however, Homes’s screen play was lousy, Cain didn’t so much do some polishing as produce a complete rewrite, which was also lousy, so that the final screenplay was done by resident house writer Frank Fenton. Whatever the truth, the result’s little short of a masterpiece. It has perfect pacing. There’s superb characterization of not only the principals—Mitchum often had to make the most of poorly imagined roles, but here he has one of sufficient complexity and empathy for him really to get his teeth into—but also in minor parts like Petey (Scott), a cabby who’s an old pal and accomplice of Jeff’s, and most especially in The Kid, where Moore gives us a brilliant performance. And there’s a plethora of stunning one-liners:

• “You say to yourself, ‘How hot can it get?’ Then, in Acapulco, you find out.”
• “They say, the day you die, your name is written in the clouds.”
• “All women are wonders, because they reduce all men to the obvious.” “So do martinis.”
• “Build my gallows high, baby.”

That last gave its title to Homes’s novel, and also the title of the movie’s first UK release. It’s extremely rare for a movie’s main title and variant title to be each as good as the other in their encapsulation of the movie’s ethos. It’s Jeff’s past actions, as much as Kathie’s fevered, incurable conspirings, that have built those gallows. He has tried to escape his past, but there’s no escape: in typical noir fashion, fate insists there can be no redemption.

Musuraca’s cinematography is as usual impeccable without always being ostentatious. The item that most people recall is Jeff’s first sight of Kathie, but for me the sweetest part comes a few minutes later as Jeff waits for her in a different bar: there’s a short pan around the bar, symbolizing the passage of a day’s tedious expectancy, and then there she suddenly, almost unexpectedly is. A similar observation can be made about Roy Webb’s soundtrack and Jacques Tourneur’s direction: both are superb but both, rather than pushing themselves in your face, serve the movie so well that it’s only afterwards you realize quite how good they were.

Because that’s what characterizes Out of the Past, what makes it such an extraordinary offering: the way that everything is so well integrated, like a painting that perfectly satisfies the eye even though it’s hard to isolate which aspect is the one that appeals so much, the one that takes the painting from exquisite to masterpiece. Every time I watch Out of the Past I find it’s an even better movie than the one I recalled, and every time I realize that the real love story it tells us is not the one we always remember, about the passion-fueled infatuation that Jeff has for Kathie, and her exploitation of his blind obsession, but the tale of the deeply powerful love Jeff has for Ann—the love that sees him gladly give up his life to protect her.

The movie was loosely remade as Against All Odds (1984) dir Taylor Hackford, with Jeff Bridges, Rachel Ward, James Woods, Richard Widmark, Alex Karras, Swoosie Kurtz and Dorian Harewood; Jane Greer has a small role as a corrupt businesswoman and mother of femme fatale Jessie (the equivalent of the earlier movie’s Kathie, so Greer is playing her own mother, as it were). The remake tends to suffer by comparison with the original, and plenty of folk have had fun savaging it, but in reality, looked at in isolation, it’s a perfectly respectable piece of work.

            Out of the Past was added to the National Film Registry in 1991—ironic in that, on release, it wasn’t so much as nominated for a single award

© 2014 by James Clark

      I don’t usually refer to other critics in pursuing these film entries; but here it seems to make a lot of sense. The esteemed film observer, Jonathan Rosenbaum, produced (in 1982) a review of Amarcord (1973) that was both typically cogent and typically half-hearted. Seeing clearly that Fellini’s outreach about an Adriatic town in the 1930s comprises “community rituals and seasonal changes,” he describes the longings of many of its residents, for something more than that often charming inertia, as “dreams and other fantasies,” which is to say, a type of reflexive inertia veering away from reality. Smoothly disarming any traces of abrasiveness in this finding to be quite futile any challenge to mechanics and orthodoxy, the appreciation identifies the auteur’s evolution as an increased trusting of “imagination over ‘realistic’ observation.” “Fact and fancy are never far apart” in Fellini’s work. But that proposition does nothing to sustain that what he calls “fancy”—in its sense of the “more” that is remarkably new to history—could be a mature, serious form of consciousness. Rosenbaum concedes that “… it is precisely the domain of privacy that the town’s collective dream life feeds upon…” But I can’t help reading between the lines here that “the town’s collective dream life” amounts to some kind of sad little joke. He declares, “…the film charts the lot of provincial dwellers everywhere;” and with that the unwelcome whiff of sociology begins to fill the air.

For all his rhetorical gracefulness, what Rosenbaum seems intent to play hard ball with is the question of fantasy ever being recognized as a phenomenon, with not only as much purchase upon concrete power as conventional culture and experience—but more. Unattended to, in Rosenbaum’s brief skim to establish Amarcord’s poignancy, is the recurrent image of a motorcyclist suddenly roaring through the streets and quickly disappearing who knows where. Near the end, he terrifies and infuriates one of our protagonists, Titta, as the latter tries (in vain) to catch up with another protagonist whom he is very fond of, namely, Gradisca, after a record snowfall which leaves the town square resembling the trenches of World War I. From that perspective, and from the copious actions of conflict and coercion that fill the screen, we might regard the vaguely military form on two wheels as a ghostly messenger rushing urgent information amidst points of a battleground that extends far beyond the quirky little outpost. The battle would be precisely about those, like Rosenbaum, who like things the way they have always been and pretend to know that there is no way of countering them; and those, like Fellini, and his protagonists, who endow Amarcord with phenomenal weight, wit and passion. It has been necessary to orient in this way, because instances of influential figures like Rosenbaum actively vitiate the reflective phenomena so carefully primed by daring filmmakers, amongst whom Fellini is extremely important. Amarcord’s depths, subtleties and beauties need to be approached as closely as possible in the spirit in which they were designed and produced, in order that the phenomenal range comprising film and audience elicit that intensive magic, unique to film art.

Rather than netting those sensually striking women, so apparent in Amarcord, in a presupposed web of rather farcical illusion, we would be much better off opening our eyes to what they actually show us on the screen. Gradisca (resembling Juliet of the Spirit’s Suzy—perky, bright-eyed and alluring—but pared down, due to having to hold down a job as a hairdresser) comes along with her sister and another friend, to an event in the town square whereby a towering bonfire signals the end of dead winter and the beginning of lively spring. She, by a kind of aristocracy of physical harmony and playful warmth, is called upon to light the heap of branches and no longer wanted wooden furniture, after which she enthuses, “I feel it [spring] all over me already!” (which is to say, she is swept up in an unusual surge of dynamic creativity). Outstripping her and the other women featured in this film in their capacity as Sirens, we have disinterested moments from them, like that which we’ve just noted (and like those of the motorcyclist and his Futurist infatuation with dangerous speed) which have to be factored into this film’s easily confusing scramble of self-assertion apparently devoid of mystery. Gradisca’s second walk on a wild side you have to keep your eyes open to see comes to us encumbered by the adolescent, Titta, determining not to include an episode with her in his confessional contretemps with a priest more intent on decorating a chapel than serving one of his flock. Titta catches up with her in the darkened profane chapel of a deserted movie house on a weekday afternoon. She is enraptured by Gary Cooper on the screen, in the Foreign Legion tale, Morocco, concerning Marlene Dietrich throwing away a life of comfort and prestige for anonymity and primordial love on burning desert sands. Her attitude in being thus overcome (as with the bonfire) includes regal occupancy of the murky, dramatically highlighted movie palace, emotively comparable to the stance of Cocteau’s Belle making a suspenseful beachhead in Bête’s dark, vast and empty dining room. Whereas Titta shifts from seat to seat to finally sit next to her and put his hand on her thigh, we have the precedent to such a tete-a-tete, involving an ardent but regal suitor/Bête, holding at bay the sway toward farce. The smoke from Gradisca’s cigarette spans both a palace where tapers (ending in live hands and arms) inform optics of satin (and filmy white curtains billow in the breeze) and a dream factory out of which she has to ask the rude, even beastly, boy, “Looking for something?” Well, Belle and Bête were all about looking for something from each other, something which will endow them with better preparedness for a sphere of breathtaking riches and difficulty. Prior to his reverie about Gradisca, Titta silently vowed (at the confessional) not to divulge a hard to dignify moment with one of the other women we need to take seriously despite the strong temptation to see them as incapable of seriousness. Billed by one and all as “the town nymphomaniac,” Volpina is more than that. But how hard is it to stay that course with Titta referring to “the day I pumped up her [bicycle] tires”? Fellini and screenwriting assistant, Tonino Guerra, are masters of ribaldry; but it is for us to understand that they are far more than facile gag writers. (As with Fellini’s Roma, written and produced the year before, Fellini has piled on a staggering flood of often grating miscues, in order to capture the extent of the oblivion at issue; and to go on to pose a test as to identifying vital signs.) Back on the hunt for the soul of Gradisca’s extremis, there is a Fascist rally with Mussolini himself as very special guest. She yells, most excitedly and happily, “There he is!” That visiting trace of world history gives the folks a pack of antiquated hot air (a big balloon version of his face having been brought in by the design geniuses at Party headquarters). “… The salute of ancient Rome that shows us the path of destiny that Fascist Italy must follow…” “Oh, let me touch him, I want to touch him!” she screams, inadvertently putting herself in the same boat as Titta stalking her in the movie palace being weighed upon by Bête’s palace. To twist the knife a little bit more, we have Il Duce, jogging along with one of those run-along military bands which amused us in Fellini’s early film, The White Sheik (1952), about a naive but ardent bride who throws herself at a fat, show-biz type. “Long live, Il Duce,” she shouts, showing the Fascist salute. But her chic little purse is in that raised right hand, and we should be able to see that she has a hard-to-touch Leader substantially (if not definitively) eclipsing the short-lived sensation. (She’s headed for a wedding with an officer of Mussolini’s ill-fated project. At the reception she cries a lot.) The whole town forms a flotilla one night, to see close up the regime’s chic ocean liner, “The Rex,” passing the seaport four miles offshore. As the celebration forms up, a village idiot remarks, “Where are they going with hearts pounding?” It’s quite impossible not to recall the old lady (a sort of Chorus) in Tati’s Jour de Fete, joining in, as best she can, on the rapturous edge of the excitement befalling a thrill-deprived centre. (Rosenbaum notes that both Fellini and Tati would depict town squares. But there’s a hell of a lot more than that to their affinities. To get there you have to care about the stakes and mistakes of body language.) On the ride out to the Rex (“It’s coming all the way from America”—America, where, in Jour de Fete, all the new things come from), the sunset providing a frisson, Gradisca tells a friend, “I was full of hope every time, but it never came to anything… I haven’t given up hope. I want one of those encounters that last a lifetime…” Finally sighting the floating palace, swirling up within a heavy mist (a sort of Bête’s palace, in accordance with the understanding, “… the greatest thing the regime ever built”)—the whole town having been, naturally, asleep and only wakened by a restless child, endowing the vision as a dream, quite out of this (mainstream) world—Gradisca cries, swamped by that elicitation of so much more than her life has been mired in. She goes on—in accordance with a bit of grasping for comfort in addition to high impact (“I want a family, children…a husband to chat with in the evening over coffee…”)—to marry a stolid Fascist Army officer, quite a contrast to Foreign Legionnaire, Gary Cooper; and their outdoor wedding reception (at Il Paradiso) strongly resembles the wedding gig of Gelsomina and Zampano, in La Strada.

Sexpot Volpina and the nameless tobacconist with enormous breasts, would, in accordance with the significant energies of Gradisca, be more aptly considered in terms of larger than (average) life than ignition of those settling for low-wattage buzz. Getting past the former’s clownishness—for instance, peeing on the beach in view of a construction crew (then coming over and telling them, “I lost my pussycat”)—it is her perhaps apocryphal crack-junky visage (a waxy sheen to her skin and remarkably kinetic eyes) that crowds out her goofiness and coheres with a haunting last glimpse of her in the hospital bed next to Titta’s dying mother. Getting past the startling proportions of her sexual properties, it is the isolation of the tobacco store proprietor which really matters. (Moments before, at an all-night car rally through the streets, Titta’s parasitical uncle rushes to examine a stray dog hit by a speed demon, finding that there is one of its ears on the road. Titta, on the other hand, had imagined being a Grand Prix hero. There are disconcerting affinities between those two; and as the latter [with his blonde hair and lips seemingly enhanced] makes his way through empty streets to the retail precincts of a Beast, after the race’s end, we have to not only weigh the woman’s energies [she being perhaps the only person in town not engaged by the public entertainment]; but also his capacity to break away from a family trait of perpetual adolescence. The parasite is Titta’s mother’s brother. We behold, also, a retarded, institutionalized brother of his father, on an outing, lobbing stones at all and sundry, from the vantage point of a tall tree, howling all the while, “I want a woman!”) The woman Titta wants tells him the store is closed but she lets him in, he claiming to be after a cigarette. He also claims that he could lift her off her feet, and she becomes intrigued that such a delicate little beauty (or, with that blonde hair, rosy cheeks and lipstick, the la of la Bête) has come into her orbit, a solitary orbit of consciousness the delicateness of which lies hidden within a no-nonsense facade (not, however, so no-nonsense as not to include, prominently displayed on her wall, a poster of a Surrealist painting, with a man whose brains are exposed due to the top of his skull being removed, and with a de Chirico-like chimney in the background, adding to the challenge toward brainwork). He lifts her twice. Both are aroused, eyes ablaze. The woman being cradled looks skyward as though beginning to have an orgasm that promises to reach epiphantic proportions. “See how my strength did it?” he declares. “Yes, my little darling!” From her sweater she pulls out a breast and tells him, “You really are sweet… Drive me crazy… Just a little…” [that last phrase revealing much about her]. “What should I do?” the boy asks desperately. “Suck!” she commands; and her delighting face is right beside that graphic image of downplaying rationality. “You can have this one, too,” she’s happy to say. But Titta’s limitations—“Don’t blow! Suck!”—break the spell and her rare ecstasy disappears. “I have to close up… [And, handing him a cigarette] It’s on me… Now, scram!” (The coda to this skirmish finds Titta sick in bed. He blames the downturn on the shop’s having disease-carrying flies; we can see that it’s about his not being up to the job.)

Amarcord was produced only one year after Fellini’s Roma. Whereas the latter evinces devastation that the law is an ass, lighting little incense sticks quietly bringing to bear mercies of grace in Surrealist films and the miracle that was Anna Magnani, Amarcord, every bit a cognizant that the school system, the Church, the government and the population at large have not done themselves proud, pulls out of its battered hat a weird and wonderful victory lap, of sorts, in taking the measure of individuals with workable (which is not to say, effectively functional) affection. In the course of delineating the clash between old and new (Volpina screams out, “Fu Manchu!” giving us to understand that she [far more incisively than Titta] feels herself to have been poisoned by agents of corruption), our film , as we have seen, envisions a form, however nebulous, of that always-welcome Beauty and Beast constellation. The obvious torch-bearers to that effect are Gradisca and Titta. During that kooky Confession, Titta muses, “I’m crazy about Gradisca! I want a wife just like her!” During the monumental snowfall, he tries to defend her against his randy school chums pelting her with snowballs. He gets one of her friendly fire missiles in the face; and then she runs away, saying, “Enough! I give up!” But, before she disappears, there is an apparition—“Look, it’s the Count’s peacock!” The wonderful, tropical fan tail spreads amidst the falling snow. Gradisca regards it with awe. Soon she’s tossing her bridal bouquet into an overcast void, seeing it plop onto a brown, grotty field. (At the ragged outdoor reception area, the tobacconist—so edgy in close-up with her nocturnal admirer—looks merely fat, rather old and even ill at ease in a shy way.) Titta is on the dock, packed to leave town. Then he shows up at the wedding reception, seen in a distant shot, aimlessly milling about with those chums having got up a little drag number for the celebrants—a number, part Gelsomina, part Mamma Roma. Not much of a sharing of wisdom and carnal energy; or so it seems.

But Fellini’s is a surreal, not a “let’s see the money” world. And though Gradisca (like Cocteau’s Belle, at the end of his film, oppressed by lousy choices and yet still able to put on a brave face) does not seem to have a future to calm her anxiety (“I’m so full of affection… but who can I give it to? Who will take it?”), the mere envisioning of threading such a needle goes a long way in this moment when a peacock dazzles in a snowstorm.

There is another Belle and another Bête here; and they are just as surprising as the weather, and just as brilliant as the peacock. At first, or even fifth, glance, Titta’s parents don’t seem to rise to the possibility of changing the world. Our first impressions of this pair all point to unremarkable self-serving assertion, resentment and conventionality. At the bonfire to celebrate powers of fruition, the dad, Aurelio, declares, “One father can look after a hundred kids; but a hundred kids can’t look after one father.” Not only resentful and self-pitying, his aphorism is of real interest in its challenge to populism, an odd state of affairs for the town’s premier Communist, who, during the day devoted to Mussolini, had “the Internationale” sent over the square, by recording. Tracking him down, the local masters pump him full of castor oil, and he cuts a poor (even beastly) figure staggering home covered with shit and greeted by his anxious wife, Miranda at their gate. “You won’t listen to me,” the eager-to-illuminate woman sadly maintains. So here they are, in the middle of the night, she carefully soaping him down, and Titta, seemingly always the jerk, laughingly noting, God, he stinks!” (The work-averse brother of this Belle had informed the authorities that Aurelio had committed that act of defiance, further showing himself—and, by implication, Titta—to be irrevocably hopeless.) Miranda had locked him into their compound, during the afternoon right-wing rally, to offset just such violence—all the while Aurelio raving, “Think I’m scared?” The captain in charge of his punishment had called him an “animal;” but, lion-hearted or not, his optical component lacks Cocteau’s Bête’s magnificent, poetic mane: he’s bald, with some kind of wart making him cringe-worthy; and his little mane at each side is far more amusing than charming. Certainly, you could not say he reigns over his dining room domain like a man intent on making salient life’s great poetry. The dinner we do observe could hardly show more cluttered domesticity. He chases Titta out of the house, having learned that the impudent boy had, the night before, peed on a man’s hat from the balcony of the movie theatre, featuring warring cowboys and Indians. Aurelio’s father, part of the extended family inured to conflict, can’t stop molesting the maid, who tells him, “You think my fanny’s a good luck charm?” Aurelio openly despises his brother-in-law, in a hair-net and bathrobe, who only stirs to seduce women with his nice looks and ballroom skills, who ridicules the Futurist speedster and takes pride in endangering the workman kindling the bonfire. Surmounting this hotbed of domestic homicide, there is his being peeved by something missing about Miranda’s energy, which he inflects into the general complaint, “I work hard all day [as a building crew foreman] and I have to come home and look at a bunch of long faces…” She turns her back—“Now you won’t have to see me”—and she refuses to eat so much as a bite of the heavy meal she has prepared (“I don’t want anything”), a stance that introduces a barely perceptible loving care into a firestorm of mutual devaluation and clownish fury. She erupts, in face of his badgering, “I’m going mad! I’ll put strychnine in your soup! I’ll kill myself first!” When, some months later, she is hospitalized with a terminal illness, she tells Titta (whose limitations, as with her brother, she chooses to mine rather than write off) she’s feeling better; but she muses on her wedding ring no longer fitting her finger, and Aurelio follows her signal and the course of her ordeal which he had not noticed until very late, with a stoic, saddened presence.

That could not come close to being a great instance of interpersonal love; but, as presented in this subtle and complex context, it is riveting in its own way. Convalescing from his uneven struggle with the tobacconist, Titta asks Miranda, “How did it happen with you and Dad?” Surprised by this resort, by her seemingly immature-for-life son, to the volatile phenomenon of love, she sums up her marriage as being dull and crude. “Your dad’s not a great one for compliments…” But in describing their mutual attraction a tincture of rebellion has to be acknowledged. “He was a laborer. My folks had a bit of money and didn’t think much of him… So we eloped without a word to anyone…” Being, despite all but swallowed up by conventional socioeconomic pressures (Her funeral is firmly in the hands of the Church and we see a priest fussing at the outset of the cortege, about getting a troupe of black-clad orphans in place; moreover, she anxiously stage-manages Titta’s Confession—“Not even water before” [it]), they did embrace risk and, within a close fit with much of conventional life, would, together, and tempestuously, taste the tang of something more.

Youngsters like Gradisca and Titta might have more boldly and consistently drawn away from the old and developed more intense areas of the new. (Her fling with a prince [cued by a town official looking for the latter’s investment in expanding the port], a figure not quite like Gary Cooper in Morocco, begins with her heartfelt bid to find cogent love, and ends with her mechanically assuming the gestures of a cheap hooker; his passion for the glamorous life is even less developed than his uncle’s, but it does light upon sensuous paths bucking a long trend, whether he knows it or not. With the onset of the countless, gracefully hovering snow crystals, he rushes from his sickbed, and his face registers true rapture, which lifts him decisively beyond that illness.) But Aurelio and Miranda, flattened though they are by pressures of survival (material and emotional), would have entered upon exigencies unapparent to mere rebels. Despite involving a similar welter of those dead ends which leave Fellini’s Roma almost deliriously dark, Amarcord, by providing rich protagonistic initiatives, makes its way to the misty vision of infiltrating what dimensions of “affection” can be elicited from within a deadened world history. (The near Ice Age of the incongruous snowfall pre-empts a movie audience [far more numerous than at that moment of musical chairs for Titta and Gradisca] getting into the swing of a lion’s roar. The exodus from the theatre and into the street neatly replicates the carnival scene where Genevieve gets fussy in Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; the relentless cascade of white also recalls the sign-off between the two lovers in that latter film.) Swooning in face of Il Duce, Gradisca cries out, “This enthusiasm makes us young and old at the same time!” But she has not effectively entered upon the mysteries of mixing that cocktail. Amarcord is especially remarkable in its directing attention, in light of flashy but lost bids, to the possibilities of effervescence latent within interplay almost entirely dull, jangled and ludicrous. Aurelio and Miranda undergo outings from the mental hospital by his retarded brother, driving them to a frenzy of frustration; but somehow they manage to stay the course. Aurelio shows us both his individualistic skepticism and his crippling obtuseness, when he scowls at the weather which occasions in everyone else big smiles. “Still snowing! Four days this goddamn thing’s been around!” This register of clown-show is something an ultra-chic agent like Cocteau could never have embraced. But it is something ironically indispensable to a film so laced with Futurist lightning. The two prominent (though all-but hidden) Belles and Bêtes here establish a problematic of synthesis amongst their strengths.

The film begins and, a year later, ends with feathery seeds being carried in the breeze, giving the locals to understand not only that “when the puffballs come, winter’s almost gone,” but also that it is in such motion that we really live. During Gradisca’s doing the honors of that other spring kickoff, one of her friend’s remarks, “It gives me a funny feeling!” (This so easily ignored law of nature is roughed up by the school staff, with their precious and bored recitations about the motion of pendulums, spirit in the realm of matter, perspective [in sacred paintings], mathematics and Greek. It is also a bit more charmingly compromised by a “lawyer”/ Chorus who nails down historical data as the supposed essence of the town’s integrity.) At one point, Aurelio’s dad finds himself disoriented in a thick fog. “I don’t seem to be anywhere,” he muses. Then he sneers, “If death is like this, I don’t think much of it. Everything’s gone. Well, up yours!” Moments later, Titta’s younger brother, on the way to school, goes past the old man, whose discomfort had been relieved (after a close encounter with a black vehicle that terrifies him) by a neighbor pointing out that he’s a few steps from his gate and the escapist gabfest within. The preamble to presenting Miranda’s death has him being whisked away, in light of his not being able to countenance the bite of finitude. By contrast, on that walk to school, the boy walks past dead trees forming the configuration of donkeys. He doesn’t notice that; but he notices a cow, which causes him to run away quickly, into the safety of the soft fog. The upshot here, amidst rather clownish actions, is to give us a perspective upon death and dignity being not for old men and little boys. The “I Remember” sense of the term Amarcord looks to remembering how close to and yet so far from consummate power those days were and still are.

by John Grant

US / 91 minutes / bw / Columbia Dir & Pr: Leo McCarey Scr: Viña Delmar Story: The Awful Truth (1924 play) by Arthur Richman Cine: Joseph Walker Cast: Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy, Alexander D’Arcy, Cecil Cunningham, Molly Lamont, Esther Dale, Joyce Compton, Robert Allen, Robert Warwick, Mary Forbes, Kathryn Curry, Miki Morita, Asta.

One of the first screwball comedies and among the best, this has at its core the romantic story of the realization by an unfaithful husband that, in point of fact, it’s his wife whom he loves the most, alongside her realization that, despite his infidelities, she loves right back. It’s based on a play that was earlier filmed as a silent in 1925, dir Paul Powell, with Agnes Ayres, Warner Baxter and Raymond Lowney, and as a now presumed lost talkie in 1929, dir Marshall Neilan, with Ina Claire, Henry Daniell and Paul Harvey. A later musical reworking was Let’s Do It Again (1953) dir Alexander Hall, with Jane Wyman, Ray Milland and Aldo Ray. I haven’t seen any of the other adaptations, alas, so I can’t draw any comparisons.

The version under discussion here betrays its stage origins in that it’s made up of a number of discrete scenes; those scenes are often almost independent set pieces, or sketches, so the movie comes to have a cellular structure along the lines of, to use a much later and highly dissimilar example, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975): a string of sketches is linked together by an overarching plot. Rewatching the movie after a long interval—approaching half a century, I think—I found that, aside from the general plot, which I vaguely recalled, I was greeting some of the scenes/sketches as old friends while others I’d entirely forgotten. Some of the characters appear in a single scene/sketch and then vanish from the story, such as the Warriners’ maid Celeste (Curry) or—although there’s a major caveat in this instance—the scandalous dancer Dixie Belle Lee (is her name a nod to Gypsy Rose?). A couple of scenes/sketches could have come from a musical. The net effect is that we end the movie feeling as if we’ve enjoyed a—very satisfying—evening of variety (near-burleyQ) entertainment rather than a single offering.

Rich playboy Jerry Warriner (Grant) returns home, supposedly from a trip to Florida but quite apparently from a fling, to find that his wife Lucy (Dunne) has spent the night away from home in company with her music teacher, the dashing Armand Duvalle (D’Arcy). She maintains it was merely a matter of an automobile breakdown (“You’ve come home and caught me in a truth, and there’s nothing less logical than the truth”); Jerry, however, either genuinely suspecting the worst or merely attempting to deflect attention from his own duplicity, makes a deal of it, and the next the couple know they’re talking divorce. The court grants an interlocutory decree of divorce, which will become final within 90 days.

And then comes a brief but memorable sketch as the couple argue over who should have custody of their Asta-like terrier, Mr. Smith . . . in fact, not so much Asta-like but actually played by Asta! The judge decrees that the dog himself must be the one to decide, and the couple are set up with Mr. Smith between them: whoever he goes to first wins him. It’s an appealing piece of silliness, not least because Lucy wins by cheating.

Lucy takes an apartment with her acerbic, worldly wise aunt, Patsy Adams (Cunningham); oddly, Lucy alone calls her not Patsy but Patty throughout. Aunt Patsy urges her to move on with her life, and even does the heavy lifting by picking up a man on her behalf: Dan Leeson (Bellamy), an amiable, seemingly kindly but deathly unimaginative Oklahoman who’s made his fortune in oil and is visiting the Big City with his mother (Dale) but doesn’t plan to stay. Whether it’s his dough or the rebound effect or just an urge to show Jerry a thing or two, soon there’s talk of engagement in the air—even though Mrs. Leeson cannot hide her suspicions of her prospective daughter-in-law, especially when she picks up some juicy gossip about a certain French music teacher . . .

Jerry, despite professed delight at his imminent freedom and his frequent shows of goodwill toward the couple, is immensely jealous. To demonstrate to Lucy that he’s not without his own attractions, he allows her and Dan to come across him dating a much younger chanteuse, Dixie Belle Lee (Compton), in the nightclub where she’s a headliner. Dixie Belle comes across as an absolute sweetheart as she explains that she operates under a stage name because her conservative mother believes that somehow singing isn’t really a job. The three agree to wait for her act . . . which, when it comes, is sufficiently outrageous that Jerry is soon hurriedly blurting, “I’ve only just met her.” The performance and the trio’s reaction to it comprise one of the funniest set pieces in the movie. As Dixie Lee sings a woesomely trite song about the old cottage that was home, every now and then she encounters the phrase “gone with the wind” or some equivalent, at which point an under-stage fan blows her dress up over her shoulders, revealing—gasp!—her smalls. Says Lucy tartly: “I guess it was easier for her to change her name than for her whole family to change theirs.” The real joke, though, is that Compton exudes such bubbly innocence throughout that the display is absolutely innocuous.

Later in the movie, when Jerry is lining himself up to become engaged to fabulously rich and very pretty heiress Barbara Vance (Lamont), there’s a reprise of Dixie Belle’s performance. Through circumstances, Jerry has had to pretend that Lucy is his sister. At a soiree where he’s trying to impress Barbara and his inlaws-to-be (Warwick, Forbes), Lucy—as “sister Lola”—makes an entrance and, after publicly puncturing a few of Jerry’s bubbles of pretension, proceeds to emulate Dixie Belle’s “My Dreams are Gone with the Wind”; she doesn’t have an under-stage fan, of course, but, in a quite brilliant piece of physical comedy, Dunne manages to give the impression of her skirt being blown up around her hips. This rendition alone is worth the price of admission. Not only is it very funny—Dunne was one of the screen’s great comediennes—but it’s funny in a quite different way from the Dixie Belle version. Where Dixie Belle’s naivety and all-around wholesomeness made her performance seem gloriously innocent, as if we were laughing at a child who’d triumphantly jumped in a puddle, Dunne’s imitation does carry a sexual charge. And that charge affects her viewers differently: the stuffy Vance parents (and their daughter) are appalled by such a display while Jerry receives a not-uncertain message about the delights he’s planning to abjure.

By this time Dan’s out of the picture after the events of another raucously funny sketch—perhaps the movie’s most ambitious. Here we have all the groundwork for the kind of bedroom farce that two or three decades later would start to make London’s Whitehall Theatre internationally famous. We’ve noted Jerry’s inappropriate jealousy. With Dan he can control it, but his wrath still boils for the suave music teacher Armand. We’ve already seen him indulge in some knockabout slapstick when interrupting what he assumed would be a tryst between Armand and Lucy but proved instead to be a po-faced salon recital, Lucy singing and Armand accompanying on the piano. (Eventually Jerry’s chair collapses under him; Lucy’s smile-turning-to-laughter as she realizes how much she loves him is arguably the movie’s single most romantic moment.)

Now Armand comes to visit Lucy to tell her there’s no need for apology. When Jerry arrives, Armand slips into her bedroom out of sight, to avoid confrontation . . . but inadvertently leaving his bowler hat behind. Jerry arrives wearing a bowler of his own (nowhere else does Jerry wear a bowler; again, we feel we’re watching a string of brilliant sketches rather than a unitary piece), and there’s an elaborate routine involving the two bowler hats and a hide-and-seek game with Mr. Smith. Lucy somehow manages to allay any suspicions Jerry might have. But then Dan arrives with  mother in tow. Before Lucy can stop him, Jerry has slipped into her bedroom to keep out of sight of Dan. The fight that ensues when Jerry finds Armand already there nixes any plans Lucy might have had of wedding Dan, who assumes she’s enticed to her boudoir not one but two former lovers . . .

The final sketch is yet another brilliantly conceived piece of cinema. Jerry and Lucy find themselves stranded for the night in adjoining rooms at Aunt Patsy’s remote country lodge (don’t ask). The wind is up, and the intervening door occasionally blows open, betweentimes rattling in uncanny imitation of that distinctive noise you hear through the wall of a motel bedroom. As the minutes tick down toward midnight, the moment when the couple’s divorce finally becomes absolute, Jerry more than once comes to the door to close it, each time seeing his soon-to-be-ex-wife languishing yet more desirably in her own bed. (There’s a certain amount of Barbara Stanwyck in Dunne’s performance in this movie, but it’s hard to imagine that Stanwyck would have allowed herself to look so blatantly, well, fuckable as Dunne does here.) By way of accompaniment, the quarter-hours are being sounded by a Swiss clock: at each chiming, a male and a female figure emerge from two doors in the clock face . . . until finally, when Jerry comes to the obvious conclusion about his own fatheadedness, the male figure crosses the divide and follows the female into her door.

Which firmly shuts as the closing credits begin. Also, as it happens, that last sounding of the clock was for midnight, so really what’s going on unseen by us has just become technically extramarital. It’s lucky for Middle America that it survived this onslaught of immorality.

I think it was Bergen Evans who once observed that the merest milquetoast, if married, likely has a more imaginative and varied sex life than do most Casanovas. This seems to be one of the prime messages of The Awful Truth, a piece that’s quite astonishingly preoccupied with sex. (It’s a tribute to the charm with which this is conveyed that the movie didn’t run afoul of the Hays Code.) The romance that lies at its core is married romance. Jerry has made the classic error of believing the grass on the other side of the fence is greener; his sexual fling at the movie’s outset is a betrayal not just of Lucy but, even more fundamentally, of himself. Perhaps the girl was younger and prettier, perhaps he needed to prove himself to himself as adolescent males so often do—and much as later he tries to prove himself to both himself and Lucy by knocking around with the younger and arguably prettier Dixie Belle and Barbara (and the latter even has pots of money!). Whatever the case, we can assume the fling was a pursuit of sex perpetrated in defiance of the romance Jerry has in his marriage.

It’s Lucy who, post-interlocutory decree, first spots how confoundedly sexy her spouse is—confoundedly sexy not because of himself (viewed dispassionately, he’s a self-absorbed klutz) but because she sees him in the context of their romance, a romance that’s ongoing whether they’re aware of it or not. It takes Jerry a while longer to recognize that his acts of jealousy aren’t just products of a petty possessiveness but defensive reactions to the threats the unacknowledged marital romance faces. When he finally sees (and we see through his eyes) how scintillatingly sexually alluring his wife is, as she lies in her bed in the cabin, it’s because the cloud that he has permitted to cover the light of their romance has finally been blown clear. Sex is a pretty damn’ fine thing, the movie seems to be telling us, but there ain’t no sex can compete with the sex we have within a romance.

The theme of a married couple suffering some kind of a fission such that the two parties are on the brink of marrying others before discovering that in reality they belong best to each other was a recurring trope in Hollywood’s golden age, mostly as inspiration for comedy romances. In My Favorite Wife (1940), which has the same director and stars as The Awful Truth, Dunne’s character is presumed dead but returns to civilization immediately after the marriage of her supposed widower husband (Grant) to another (Gail Patrick); discovering the truth, he postpones the consummation . . . to great comic effect. This was remade as Move Over, Darling (1963) dir Michael Gordon, with Doris Day, James Garner and Polly Bergen in the appropriate roles. In The Philadelphia Story (1940) dir George Cukor, Katharine Hepburn’s character falls in love all over again with her ex-husband (Grant once more). In That Uncertain Feeling (1941) dir Ernst Lubitsch, Merle Oberon’s character divorces her husband (Melvyn Douglas) in favor of another man (Burgess Meredith) before realizing that in truth she still loves her existing husband. In Random Harvest (1942), a rare drama to utilize the theme, an ex-serviceman (Ronald Colman), rendered amnesiac through shellshock, almost marries a much younger woman (Susan Peters) while oblivious to the fact that his secretary (Greer Garson) is his real wife. There are plenty of other examples.

But The Awful Truth is arguably the best of them. Audiences at the time thought so too—as did the Academy. McCarey won an Oscar as Best Director and the movie was nominated for five others: Best Picture, Best Actress (Dunne), Best Supporting Actor (Bellamy), Best Screenplay and Best Editing (Al Clark). In 1996 the National Film Preservation Board added it to the National Film Registry as a movie of historical importance. It was a career-maker for Grant, who hereafter would carry the same persona through most of his screen roles. It put the screwball comedy on the map. And it still gives us a chance today to see that irrepressible, irreplaceable comic genius Irene Dunne at the height of her powers.

A smitten Marine corporal (Robert Mitchum) remorsefully comforts Sister Angela (Deborah Kerr) after his heartfelt but drunken advance has driven her to flee into a torrential downpour that leads to fever, delirium . . . and an epiphany.

by Pierre de Plume

Throughout this World War II tale of unusual love under extraordinary but credible circumstances, a huge elephant is left to linger in the room: The sexual tension between a streetwise soldier and an attractive young nun — marooned on a South Seas island — could not have been more strongly implied. The novel on which this film was based already had taken a plunge into moral turpitude, not just by portraying an explicit sexual relationship between the unlikely pair but also by underscoring their carnal activities in Biblical terms:

For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. [Galatians 5:17]

— From The Flesh and the Spirit, by Charles Shaw (1952)

“What’s this world coming to?”  Movie depictions of sexual expression during the mid-1950s were tame by today’s standards. However, that era’s primary agents of film censorship, the industry’s Production Code Administration (PCA) and the National [Catholic] Legion of Decency, were seeing their authority increasingly undermined with the release of button-pushing movies such as The Moon Is Blue, Baby Doll, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Island in the Sun. So no one was surprised, certainly not veteran filmmaker John Huston, that this tale of a pretty Irish nun alone in the South Pacific with a strapping, hairy-chested Marine would command the attention of censors.

It wasn’t just the premise of the proposed plot of Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison that raised concern but also the casting. The public images of the cast (Mitchum and Kerr pretty much comprised the entire show) were not altogether wholesome: Mitchum much of the time played flawed, dangerous characters from the wrong side of the tracks and had the reputation of a Hollywood bad boy who boozed, caroused with “loose” women, and even served time in jail for marijuana possession. Kerr, though well regarded professionally since her 1940 film debut in Britain, emitted a “fire and ice” persona through such roles as a doubt-plagued nun (Black Narcissus), an adulterous wife (From Here to Eternity, The End of the Affair, King Solomon’s Mines), and in her most recent portrayal, on the Broadway stage in Tea and Sympathy, as the wife of a prep school coach whom she cuckolds by seducing, albeit nobly, a student troubled by sexual identity issues.

Australian author Charles Shaw brought sexual and religious taboos into the open in his World War II adventure/romance about a Marine and a nun who indulge their erotic impulses for each other.

From real life to novel to screenplay.  In his first-person account of the filming of Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, PCA censor Jack Vizzard appears to confirm that Charles Shaw based his novel on a true-life event that occurred during World War II. In his book, See No Evil: Life Inside a Hollywood Censor, Vizzard recalls Huston describing a historical incident in which the bodies of a nun and Marine were found on a beach in an Army mop-up exercise at an otherwise uninhabited island in the Pacific. Shaw apparently used these facts as basis for his fictional tale. (Huston’s subsequent argument to Vizzard, that the film was based on a true story, proved later to be a factor in persuading censors to give the finished film its most favorable, “will offend no one,” rating.)

The rights to Shaw’s novel were purchased soon after publication in 1952 when John Wayne wanted the property as a starring vehicle. After Wayne gave up, Kirk Douglas became interested but the project stalled. In 1954 Twentieth Century Fox bought the rights for Clark Gable to star and William Wyler to direct. In this version the nun was an imposter posing as a nun only to protect herself from harm by Japanese soldiers. Despite this contrivance, PCA censors rejected the script. Another attempt, written in 1956 for director Anthony Mann, likewise failed to satisfy censors.

Advertising for the film tiptoed around its central subtext of eroticism between a soldier and a nun. This British poster emphasizes adventure but also evokes prurience. Notable by its absence from the image is the voluminous habit that enshrouded Deborah Kerr’s body (and red hair) for all but a moment of the film’s running time.

Huston became involved in the project in 1956. He and Mahin developed a new script — with Marlon Brando as first choice for the lead — no doubt keeping in mind that previous attempts had struck a brick wall. With Kerr already on board, Huston certainly was aware of her previous role as a nun in Black Narcissus and how that film earned a “condemned” rating by mingling sexuality with sisterhood. For whatever reasons, Huston and Mahin agreed on a story in which sexuality would be relegated to subtext. This freed the two to reimagine themes. For example, the screenplay is set in 1944, 2 years later than in the novel. This would allow the Allison character more time to have outgrown his checkered past and would give the Marine Corps more opportunities to “make a man out of him” by instilling its revered code of “Honor, Courage and Committment.”

The result, despite censorship problems or maybe even because of them, seems to be a deeper, more meaningful work than the source material. Although one reviewer characterized the writing of Shaw’s 174-page novel as “economical” and easily adaptable for the stage, Huston himself is quoted as saying that Shaw’s story was “a very bad novel which exploited all the obvious sexual implications of a Marine and a nun cast together on a South Pacific Island.”

It may be that the Huston/Mahin screenplay succeeded well because they were compelled under duress to expand their focus to matters beyond sex. Huston’s ultimate message may be that most of the drama of sexuality in any individual’s life has to do with nonphysical aspects of human interaction: affection, attraction, devotion, jealousy, passion, restraint, desire, sublimation and transformation. His film may be asking: How can we truly stand by our beliefs until they’re tested? Whether it’s love of man, love of one’s god, or confronting one’s need to fight or refrain during wartime, Huston may be exploring the nature of belief and its power.

Film critic Roger Ebert may have simplified it in his 1998 review of Six Days, Seven Nights: “If you want to see a movie that knows what to do with a man, a woman and an island, see John Huston’s ‘Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison,’ in which Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr create atmosphere where [Harrison] Ford and [Anne] Heche create only weather.”

The first shot of the film shows Corporal Allison washing ashore in a life raft after drifting for days with nothing to eat or drink. One reason the scene is so convincing is because Mitchum had just downed a quart of vodka in despair after hearing he got the role because Marlon Brando didn’t want it.

Off to a rocky start.  Huston selected Tobago off the coast of Venezuela to serve as the story’s fictional island of Tuasiva located 300 miles from Fiji. Using the British West Indies allowed Huston and the studio to obtain funds and financing from Britain. Censorship issues had been resolved to the extent that filming began in August 1956. The first day of shooting, however, did not go well for the film’s lead actor.

Although Mitchum was enthusiastic about his role, he was unhappy to return so soon to Trinidad and Tobago, where he’d just finished Fire Down Below under tough conditions. He received only 3 weeks notice before having to return there to shoot Huston’s movie. Mitchum didn’t know Brando had been Huston’s first choice all along. According to the film’s cinematographer, Oswald Morris, “Brando wasn’t at all keen to do the film, a personal rebuff that John [Huston] seldom met.”

The first day on location, Mitchum didn’t show up for the first shot, the scene where he washes ashore after drifting in a life raft for several days without food or water. Crew members discovered Mitchum in his hut, angrily sulking and drunk from a bottle of vodka he had downed in the 2 hours since learning he’d been Huston’s second choice after Brando. Morris’s memoir continues:

By now it was 10:30 am, the sun was already lethal, the humidity was high, and Bob was full of vodka. Huston insisted the dinghy should float out much farther than was required — it soon became obvious that Bob was going to be made to pay the penalty for playing us all up. ‘Let’s try another take, coming in a little faster,’ Huston said. Bob obediently turned the life raft and paddled out even further. He was going through absolute hell, bobbing around like a cork in the heavy swell. By the time he was finished, there was no doubt he knew who was the guv’nor.

Huston’s harsh tactic — which occurred during the island’s hottest, most humid season — apparently worked. From that point forward he and Mitchum got along fine. The strong, sensitive performance Huston elicited from him has come to be regarded as some of Mitchum’s best work.

Because filming was monitored by a censor stationed onsite, director Huston was obliged to find subtle ways to convey meaning. Here Sister Angela presents Mr. Allison with Father Phillip’s pipe. Cinematographer Robert Surtees, a veteran of 73 films who worked with Kerr in King Solomon’s Mines, said of Kerr, “She acts with her eyes more than anyone else I’ve worked with.”

Because filming was monitored by a censor stationed onsite, director Huston was obliged to find subtle ways to convey meaning. Here Sister Angela presents Mr. Allison with Father Phillip’s pipe. Cinematographer Robert Surtees, a veteran of 73 films who worked with Kerr in King Solomon’s Mines, said of Kerr, “She acts with her eyes more than anyone else I’ve worked with.”

Huston sets the stage.  The film begins with a view of a life raft on a sea of blue. As the credits roll, the sounds of waves are heard between chords of sonorous music (Georges Auric’s effective score). As each musical interlude grows in intensity the sound of the waves begins to resemble a drum roll. For 7-1/2 minutes not a word is spoken as the camera approaches the drifting raft several more times before getting a glimpse of what’s inside: an unconscious Marine. When he wakes up, he drags the raft ashore as the camera assumes the point of view not of the Marine, but of the raft, somehow evoking a sense of immediacy and urgency.

We follow the corporal as he scurries like an animal into the trees. He finds a lagoon, drinks from it, then swims across. He sees abandoned huts, a makeshift grave, and climbs a hillside to a small chapel. From the doorway sweeps a young nun swathed in white, startled by his presence. With boots tied around his neck and shirt unbuttoned, the Marine is at his scruffiest and hunkiest. “Let’s keep it quiet, ma’am.” The nun asks if the Americans have landed. No, it’s just him. He asks if she’s alone. “God has been with me,” she replies in Irish brogue. He slumps to the floor. Before collapsing he asks, “Are you all right?” Only then does he pass out from exhaustion.

The next day they exchange stories of their circumstances. Mr. Allison learns that Sister Angela’s companion, an old priest named Father Phillip, died shortly before Allison’s arrival. When he asks for a cigarette she brings him the pipe of Father Phillip.

Dual meaning through use of imagery, symbolism and visual perspective: Mr. Allison (out of frame) tosses coconuts from a tree while Sister Angela catches them in her apron.

Sister Angela and Mr. Allison alone together.  The remainder of the film consists of intimate scenes of a developing relationship between the two. These moments are interspersed with scenes of harrowing adventure, mostly involving Allison. We are heartbroken to learn that Allison was abandoned at birth in an egg crate on a doorstep on Allison Street. Life for him has been a succession of orphanges, detention halls and jails. He tells her he’s “just a big dumb guy” and that the Marine Corps “made a man out of me.”

We see them scurry to chase a 300-pound sea turtle. We watch as the turtle yanks Allison into the water and drags him toward a dangerous reef. We see Sister Angela paddle furiously and pull him back into the raft. While feasting on their catch he explains military slang such as “scuttlebutt,” “poop” and “mackerel snappers” as she listens intently. He’s impressed when she agrees to his proposal: a perilous 300-mile journey by raft to Fiji. They discover similarities in their belief systems: “I’ve got the Corps — you’ve got the Church.” He tells her she’s pretty.

Their travel plans are aborted when enemy planes bomb the island, forcing them to retreat up the hillside to the safety of a cave. When Sister Angela trembles he comforts her: “Nothing to be ashamed of, ma’am — even a Marine gets the shakes.” Later, Allison digs a crucifix out of the rubble and presents it to her, but when the Japanese arrive they must retreat to the cave and set up housekeeping. He slips away while she’s asleep and sneaks into the enemy’s camp to find food. Trapped there, he hides until morning. When he returns she becomes agitated and makes him promise to never leave her again without telling her.

Eroticism, 1957-style: During a scene in which half the action is visible to neither Mr. Allison nor to the audience, Sister Angela’s clothing dries on the rocks as she bathes in the lagoon while humming a tune. Throughout the shot the camera lingers on Allison as he floats on his back.

Allison whittles a comb for her and wraps it in a palm leaf with red hibiscus. He imagines her hair to be “long and blonde.” Even though she can’t use the comb because nuns wear their hair short, she accepts it saying “I will cherish it always as a keepsake.” A moment later Allison asks whether nuns can “change their mind.” She tells him she’s a novice and hasn’t taken her final vows. “You mean you could pull out?” he asks. “I could if my heart and my mind were not made up,” she tells him.

At night they hear a sea battle in the distance and discover the next day that the Japanese have left the island. As Allison and Sister Angela explore the abandoned camp they dance together while singing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me).”

A proposal of marriage.  As they sit in the moonlight, Allison again sings “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” She expresses surprise that “a big handsome fellow like you” doesn’t have a girlfriend. She accepts his offer to pick more of “them big red flowers.” Impulsively he announces, “Ma’am, I just got to tell you. Please don’t do it. Please don’t take those final vows.” His tone deepens: “I never loved anybody before, never lived before. I want to marry you, look after you. . . .” He hangs his head and adds, “I couldn’t keep from saying it, ma’am. Tell me if there’s a chance. . . . Is there?” “No, Mr. Allison,” she replies. I’ve already given my heart to Christ our Lord.” She points to her “engagement” ring. He apologizes for “speaking out of turn” and leaves as the camera lingers on Sister Angela’s face.

The following day Sister Angela watches from across the lagoon as Mr. Allison paces the beach. He turns to her. The camera cuts to crashing surf. Later he apologizes, “I must’ve been off my rocker last night.” She walks away and the camera cuts to foaming surf.

Trouble in paradise: Sister Angela discovers a bottle of sake, Mr. Allison gets drunk, and he confronts her with his feelings. She breaks down and runs outside into a violent tropical storm.

Too much truth.  Later that night Sister Angela discovers a bottle of sake left by the Japanese. Allison’s eyes brighten and he offers her some. She agrees to “just one” and becomes flushed. He becomes drunk and sings his song, this time more aggressively. “What do you wanna be a nun for? If you have to be a nun why couldn’t you be old and ugly — not with big blue eyes, a smile . . . freckles?” She tries to divert his attention but his tone turns angry as he laments they could be stranded for years, “like Adam and Eve.” She bursts into tears. He approaches her as if to console, but she pushes him away and flees, sobbing, into a torrential downpour.

The next day Allison finds Sister Angela lying unconscious in a swamp. He lifts her into his arms. At that moment he sees Japanese ships approaching so he carries her to the cave, where she develops chills, fever and delirium. He comforts her and puts his hand on her forehead. When her condition worsens, he places his life in danger by returning to the enemy camp during daylight for food and a blanket. A Japanese soldier discovers him and Allison kills him during a struggle.

In her essay at OpenSalon.com, Katharine Yee writes, “Mitchum and Kerr never kiss in the entire picture. They do fall in love, but in a way that is inconceivable to modern audiences today. . . . Censors aside, it’s a comfort to know, in the little world that is the film, that Allison shows her such courtesy. He will be her constant protector and a gallant one at that.”

Stripped briefly of her veil and habit, Sister Angela is a chaste and erotic spectacle that attracts and commands the respect of Mr. Allison. In his book, John Huston’s Filmmaking (1997), film scholar Lesley Brill writes, “‘Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison’is the most sympathetic of Huston’s films to regard Christianity. . . . It’s a matured perspective of the ways the real Allison and Sister Angela might have behaved. There is no sex, no amorous signs of affection — not even a kiss between them. This is Huston’s idea of what Adam and Eve could have done right.”

Divine intervention.  When Sister Angela awakens from her trauma, she notices her wet clothes have been removed and she’s wrapped in a blanket. Allison tells her, “I had to, ma’am. You’ve been 2-3 days out of your head. It’s my fault you got sick.” She replies, “I wasn’t running from you, I was running from the truth. There’s a lot of truth in what you said.” She pauses and adds, “Dear Mr. Allison, we’re living from hour to hour.”

After the Japanese discover one of their troops has been murdered they search the hillside shouting, “Hey Joe — come out with hands up.” Explosions are heard — not a Japanese grenade but bombs from American planes. Allison rejoices by singing his song and dancing his jig. As the bombing continues, Allison tells Sister Angela he’s had a divine revelation: a plan to disarm the enemy’s howitzers. She assures him, “If it’s God saying it and not yourself, then He’ll protect you.” Allison slithers through the darkness and disarms the cannons but gets hit by schrapnel. When Sister Angela sees his silhouette in a cloud of smoke, he announces, “Mission accomplished — I ain’t killed or nothin.’” She notices his bleeding and helps him to the ground.

“Marriage” vows.  Before Sister Angela removes Allison’s shirt to tend to his wounds, a smile darts across her face as if to say she accepts, or at least acknowledges, the physicality and depth of their respective feelings. He says he has something to say and she looks into his eyes as he determinedly recites, “Ma’am, we’ll be coming to the end of our time together. It won’t ever be just the two of us again, maybe, so I’d like to say this now.” She listens intently as he continues, “I’m very pleased to have met you. It’s been a privilege to know you.” He falters: “I wish you ev- . . . every happiness.” In a voice that’s softer . . . breathier, he says, “Goodbye.” She answers, “Goodbye, Mr. Allison. No matter how many miles apart we are, or whether I ever get to see your face again, you’ll be my dear companion always. . . . Always. . . .”

In the early morning light we see an American flag being raised. Sister Angela walks beside Mr. Allison as fellow Marines carry him on a stretcher down the charred hillside. Members of the landing party turn to watch as Sister Angela holds a cigarette to Allison’s mouth. Knestled in her other arm is the scorched crucifix. As Sister Angela drops back to follow the stretcher we see she’s carrying the comb Allison made for her. She smiles proudly as they cross the footbridge over the lagoon. Several Marines bathing in the lagoon below look up to watch the 2 survivors as they continue toward their rescue boat. A crescendo of music begins as the end title appears. It reads: “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison.”

During their final moments alone together, Sister Angela tends to Mr. Allison’s injuries from friendly fire. Although they don’t literally pledge love to each other, the film leaves little if any doubt they’re in “some kind” of love. Critic David Denby has written of Deborah Kerr that she possesses “an erotic doubleness, a forte for both concealing and revealing a passionate nature.”

Notes from the author. Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is one of my favorite films, certainly one of my favorite romantic films. Although I can’t say it’s better than Huston’s other World War II romance The African Queen, I believe the story of Mr. Allison and Sister Angela is a better romance than that of Charlie and Rosie. This may be because I prefer the chemistry of Mitchum and Kerr over Bogart and Hepburn. I think the Bogart/Hepburn film has enjoyed more success not just because its stars were “bigger” in Hollywood terms but also because their roles in that film were more protagonistic in nature. They had a mission — to get their boat down the river so they could destroy the German gunboat. Their romance sort of happened along the way.

In contrast, Mr. Allison and Sister Angela weren’t focused on an overriding goal other than their survival. They were bystanders to the war more than protagonists, and the action between them was more internal (emotional) than external (physical).

I believe that some film goers and critics in 1957 may have misunderstood Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. For example, Bosley Crowther’s review states, “It is inevitable that, at one point, the Marine should think it love. This crux of the personal drama is treated with tenderness and tact.” These words suggest to me that either a) Crowther didn’t think Sister Angela loved Allison back, or b) neither Allison nor Sister Angela was really in love. Either choice seems to be missing the point. To me, one of the key lines of the film is uttered by Sister Angela after she has recovered from her delirium: “Dear Mr. Allison, we’re living from hour to hour.” This suggests to me that she really does love Mr. Allison. She seems to telling him that, if they end up staying on the island for any length of time, she may very well change her mind and enter into a husband/wife relationship with him.

But you see, I personally don’t care how the film ends in that regard. For me that’s soap opera stuff and not the real point. What’s more important is that, by knowing Mr. Allison she became a whole person and, in the process, learned she could love another human being. Armed with this realization she could be more confident in her decision to take her final vows. And for the rest of her days she would have — in her mind, heart, body and soul — an entirely human love that would never cease to exist.

John Huston didn’t say or write much about this film, probably because of the ongoing difficulties he had with the censors. He has been quoted, however, as saying this film is “one of the best things I ever made.”

After this film was completed, Mitchum and Kerr went on to star together in 3 more: The Grass Is Greener (1960), The Sundowners (1960), and the TV movie Reunion at Fairborough (1985). Although “Sundowners” is a better film than the others, the plot of “Fairborough” indulges sentiments that are rooted in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison.

While researching this article I came across a number of entertaining anecdotes surrounding the making of the film. The one that touched me the most is quite simple and involves the personal relationship between Kerr and Mitchum. In Lee Server’s biography of Mitchum, “Baby, I Don’t Care,” Server writes of Mitchum and Kerr: “The two had remained, in that show business extended family way, warm but not close friends through the years. Deborah occasionally penned a note to him, always addressing it, “Dear Mr. Allison. . . .”

And so it was until Mitchum passed away in 1997, just as Sister Angela had said to Mr. Allison 40 years earlier: “No matter how many miles apart we are, or whether I ever get to see your face again, you’ll be my dear companion always. . . . Always. . . .”

Sister Angela and Mr. Allison dance to their song, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me).”

Critical and popular reception.  Upon the film’s release, reviews were generally favorable with some dissension. New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther wrote, “In the hands of a writer and director less skilled than Mr. Huston, . . .  this obviously delicate story might have been pretty badly abused. At least, in its hints of budding romance, it might have been quite embarrassing. But Mr. Huston has kept it free of nonsense.” The Hollywood Reporter admired the “chaste approach” the film took to “a subject that has been taboo, the possibility of romantic love for a man.” Film Daily saw the film as an edifying and spiritual story “of moral strength of character played against the uncertainties of war.”

Yet other reviews were not so respectful. Time dismissed the film as “one more theological striptease,” citing Kerr’s earlier performance in Black Narcissus. Monthly Film Bulletin was uncomfortable with the film’s “near-blasphemous contrivance.”

A Variety reporter remarked there were potentially 2 audiences for this film, one secular and the other Catholic. The first might be drawn to the erotic “implications inherent in throwing the Marine together with the nun on a lonely and dangerous island.” The second, he assumed, would find pleasure in the nun’s goodness, in her “steadfast rejection of the Marine’s advances and in the glowing description of her firm faith.”

Box office.  Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison was successful at theaters but was not a top hit. With a budget of $3.0 million, its domestic rentals in 1957 were $4.2 million. In comparison, the top grossing film that year was The Bridge on the River Kwai ($25.3 million). The American public apparently had a stronger taste for melodrama (Peyton Place, $16.1 million).

Awards.  Best Film: Nominated for BAFTA Award — Best Director: Nominated for Directors Guild Award — Best Screenplay:Nominated for Writers Guild of America Award and for Oscar — Best Foreign Actor: Nominated for BAFTA Award — Best Actress: Won New York Film Critics Award; nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe Award.

Kerr received the Photoplay magazine Gold Medal Award for Most Popular Actress (based on Gallup polling and reader voting). According to Inside Oscar by Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Barbara Stanwyck lobbied for Deborah Kerr to win the Oscar. (Joanne Woodward won.)

Online critic and user ratings. Turner Classic Movies User Rating: 4.5/5 — Internet Movie Data Base User Rating: 7.4/10 — Rotten Tomatoes Critic Tomatometer Rating: 88% — Rotten Tomatoes Audience Rating: 82%.

For additional reference:

Marriage proposal/storm scene:

Final scene:

Original 1957 trailer:

Bosley Crowther’s New York Times review dated March 15, 1957:

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9903EEDB1639E33BBC4D52DFB566838C649EDE

Review of Charles Shaw’s novel, The Flesh and the Spirit

http://stevereads.blogspot.com/2009/08/flesh-and-spirit.html

by John Grant

US / 90 minutes / bw / MGM

Dir: Vincente Minnelli (reportedly helped by Fred Zinnemann)

Pr: Arthur Freed

Scr: Robert Nathan, Joseph Schrank

Story: Paul Gallico, Pauline Gallico

Cine: George Folsey

Cast: Judy Garland, Robert Walker, James Gleason, Keenan Wynn, Marshall Thompson, Lucile Gleason, Ruth Brady, Chester Clute.

Corporal Joe Allen (Walker), an Indiana boy home from the war on furlough with no knowledge of where next in the combat zone he’ll be posted, finds himself in New York’s Grand Central Station with no real clue as to what to do with himself. Just then, pretty office worker Alice Maybery (Garland) trips over his foot, breaking the heel on her shoe. The chance encounter leads them to a trip around the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in due course out on a date—she standing up her regular squeeze Freddy, her romance with whom, we soon understand, is the creation of her roomie Helen (Brady), who would like her to be less giddy-headed and start going steady.

Soon they’re convinced there’s a romantic inevitability in their having tripped over each other:

            Alice: Suppose we hadn’t met?

            Joe: We couldn’t not have met.

On the way home after midnight from Central Park they’re picked up by milk-cart driver Al Henry (James Gleason); most “comic relief” characters of the period seem woeful to us now, but Gleason’s has weathered well. When he gets socked by a drunk (Wynn, in a bravura performance), the young couple decide to deliver his milk for him.

            Joe: I don’t know, though, I don’t think it’s fair to the girl, a soldier getting married. He doesn’t know what condition he’s going to come back in . . . he may not even come back at all.

From there on it seems they’re fated to be married. But, thanks to a succession of moronic bureaucracies, this takes far longer than they’d like; only after they’ve jumped through a gazillion hoops to qualify for a civil marriage do they discover this isn’t enough (one of the dehumanizing requirements is that they have to acquire blood-test certificates). In a very effective final sequence they sit in St Patrick’s Cathedral and recite a version of the marriage ceremony to each other. After that they are, in their own terms, married; today, of course, they’d not wait for the clerical okay. Only when they’ve conducted their own form of the Catholic wedding ceremony in a cathedral do they feel finally able to consummate the relationship.

There’s so much to like about this movie, not least that the romantic pair aren’t what they should be. He’s exactly the opposite of the studly seducer—he’s the Joe Schmoe with a good sense of humor . . . which is likely why she responds to him so much. He’s a Mork to her Mindy, his Indiana naivety contrasting with her Manhattan worldly-wisdom . . . except that she discovers she prefers his naivety to her—and more especially Helen’s—sophistication.

            The Clock does, in its later stages, start to get a little long, but before that it’s a paradigm of what romantic movies should be. Here’s Alice on the limitations of her civil marriage with Joe: “It was so, so . . . ugly.” Yet her final “church wedding” is little better.

By Pat Perry

Diane: “Nobody thinks it will work, do they?”
Lloyd: “No. You just described every great success story.”

- final lines of Say Anything

 

By Tony d’Ambra

The fog of angst seeps from the faces of two doomed lovers in the dank gloom of Le Havre. Jean is on the run and Nelly is trapped in a psychic prison as real as the physical constraints on her existence. Happiness is something that may exist but neither knows it.

They meet by chance one night in a broken-down bar on the waterfront amongst the detritus of an ephemeral humanity. Panama’s is a haven for the down-and-out named for the hat of the publican, an old shaman with a rusted soul as deep as the canal he visited in his youth. Father confessor of an unholy convent for lost souls. He keeps his counsel, asks no questions, and strums his guitar.

And everywhere the fog and the harbor with rusting hulks at anchor ever-waiting transport for deliverance. The two lovers stroll as tentative friends with a hope as forlorn as it is sublime, when a bright clarity intrudes, a hoodlum with a malice as sharp as his clothes and his shave, and as evil as his cowardice.

A night of bliss follows. Jean and Nelly find love at a sea-side carnival and that elusive union we all seek – in a rented room. They keep missing pernicious Fate a drunken vagabond. The glory of a new dawn is soon shattered. They each leave alone. Fate occupies the sheets of last night’s passion, and they are lost.

Screen grab from Richard Lester’s classic Beatles film “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964)

by Sam Juliano

A few glorious days have followed the remnants of a storm that went out to sea on the cusp of the July 4th weekend that saved the holiday for many, and allowed barbecues to operate successfully until the fireworks upstaged all.  Independence Day was a fine day for many, and it’s conclusion marks the start of the dog days of summer.

I want to thank Dee Dee from the bottom of my heart for her remarkable sidebar updating and the usual holiday markings.  This site remains in her debt for years.

The romantic countdown continues with several more superlative entries this past week.  Both the page view and comment totals remain constant in a very good way, as we get closer and closer to the mid-way point.

The tragic passing of a 57 year-old longtime friend of a 12 year illness kept everything in a state of melancholy most of the week.  John Mesisca was a trustee on the Fairview Board of Education for multiple terms.

Lucille and I had hoped to see the new Roger Ebert documentary, but as stated above this was a very difficult weekend.  We managed to see two films in total, one a recent release, the other a classic revival.

Snowpiercer   ****    (Saturday night)    Angelika Film Center

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)  *****  (Sunday morning)  Film Forum

SNOWPIERCER is for the most part a wildly creative and violent  futuristic yarn set on a train -some have compared it to Transformers- with a dazzling set design and some very fine performances.  Take a little while to get going, but when it does it rocks.

Richard Lester’s stylish A HARD DAY’S NIGHT is one of the greatest of all music films, and it’s the most beloved film from the greatest band of all-time.  The two week Film Forum run coincides with the Criterion blu-rays availability at 50% off during July Barnes & Noble sale.

Screen grab from “Snowpiercer.”

By J.D. Lafrance

      It took a Canadian filmmaker to make Moonstruck (1987), the quintessential Italian-American romantic comedy from a screenplay written by an Irish-American playwright, but then isn’t that what the American experience is all about? For what is the United States, but the great melting pot? Norman Jewison’s film is a celebration of love, life and food. John Patrick Shanley’s script is full of romantic yearnings for, among many things, the opera and, of course, the moon. Above all else, the film places an emphasis on the importance of family. Moonstruck was the My Big Fat Geek Wedding (2002) of its day only infinitely better and about an Italian family as opposed to a Greek one. Watching Jewison’s film again, you realize just how much Nia Vardalos’ romantic comedy is heavily indebted to it. If Moonstruck is La Boheme than Greek Wedding isTony and Tina’s Wedding.

Loretta Castorini (Cher) is engaged to Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello). They act like an old married couple and they haven’t even tied the knot yet! And therein lies the problem – their relationship lacks passion. He is called away suddenly to Italy to see his mother on her deathbed and asks Loretta to invite his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage) to their wedding. Ronny works in a bakery and is bitter over having lost his hand in a freak accident, blaming Johnny for what happened. In a classic case of opposites attracting, Loretta and Ronny find themselves irresistibly drawn to each other.

At the time, Nicolas Cage was considered an odd casting choice because of his reputation as an eccentric character actor. The way he gestures and enunciates certain words is off-kilter in such a way that it gives his scenes a wonderfully unpredictable vibe. He makes unusual choices and surprisingly they all work. Cage delivers a very physical, Brando-esque performance only filtered through his very distinctive style of acting as evident in the scene where Ronny and Loretta meet for the first time. Cage is fascinating to watch for the unusual choices he makes. Ronny paces around the room, starting his rant quietly before gradually building in intensity, punctuating his impassioned speech with words like, “huh” and “sweetie.” Jewison orchestrates the actor beautifully through editing so that the scene has an absolutely captivating rhythm as we gain insight into Ronny’s character. Cage conveys an impressive range of emotions as Ronny goes from pride to rage to sadness.

He plays well off of Cher and they have the kind of chemistry that is so important for this kind of film. His fiery, Method approach works well in contrast to Cher’s more controlled style and their scenes together crackle with the intensity of two actors with very different approaches bouncing off each other. Ronny is a wounded animal, “a wolf without a foot,” as Loretta puts it, and she is “a bride without a head,” as he tells her, but over the course of the film she transforms him into a civilized human being. She brings out the romantic who likes to dress up and go to the opera. Cher does a wonderful job of immersing herself in the character of Loretta, a strong-willed, smart woman who thinks she has it all figured out until she meets Ronny. On the surface, Loretta may seem like a cynic, but she has taken what she feels is a more realistic approach towards love because of the death of her previous husband. She has chosen to marry Johnny not because she loves him, but because he’s a safe bet. Her heart has fallen asleep only to be awakened by Ronny. Cher won a well-deserved Academy Award for her performance as a widow who, against her better judgement, falls in love again. Watching her in this film reminds one how natural an actress she is and what a crime it is that she doesn’t act more often.

Cage and Cher are well supported by a fantastic cast of colorful character actors. Vincent Gardenia plays Loretta’s cheap father Cosmo who has a lover on the side and Olympia Dukakis is Rose, her wise mother full of world-weary pearls of wisdom, like when she tells her daughter about men: “When you love them they drive you crazy because they know they can.” There’s an air of sadness to her character as Rose seems to have resigned herself to a life where every day is the same. Then there’s Feodor Chaliapin, Jr. as Loretta’s grandfather who can be seen in several scenes walking his small fleet of mangy dogs and seems to be used as merely window-dressing until Jewison gives him a pivotal moment towards the end of the film.

The film’s secret weapon is Danny Aiello as mama’s boy Johnny. From hysterical crying to the way he interacts with Cher’s Loretta, his portrayal of Johnny is a master class in comedic acting. Johnny thinks he knows something about men and women (“A man who can’t control his woman is funny.”), but is quickly put in his place by Loretta. Aiello does wonders with throwaway bits of dialogue like, “My scalp is not getting enough blood sometimes,” as Johnny tells Loretta over dinner while vigorously rubbing his hair. He doesn’t mug per se, but rather plays it straight in a way that makes his character look ridiculous via tiny gestures or through a specific facial expression. Compared to someone like Cage, you know Aiello has no chance with Cher, but the actor plays it like Johnny believes they are going to get married all the way through the film.

There are superb recurring gags, like John Mahoney’s sad university professor who keeps striking out with younger women that throw wine in his face midway through dinner before storming out of the restaurant. While his character is a bit of a Lech, Mahoney’s expressive eyes convey a sadness that makes you feel somewhat sympathetic for him. There’s a nice scene between his character and Rose where they end up having dinner together at the restaurant after he’s publicly embarrassed yet again by his latest young lady friend (Canadian actress Cynthia Dale in a small role). It’s a lovely scene between two lonely people as they talk honestly about their lives and she asks him, “Why do men chase women?” He has no good answer and she tells him, “I think it’s because they fear death.” It kickstarts a fascinating conversation that allows us to understand these two people. Every time I watch Moonstruck I imagine an offshoot film that follows Rose and the professor as they run off together or perhaps have a brief affair.

The use of location is excellent. For example, the opening shot is of Lincoln Center (which features prominently later on) in New York City so we know exactly where we are. Most of the film is set in Brooklyn and Jewison conveys an almost tactile feel for the borough. You want to be there and know these people. You also get a real sense of community. The warm, inviting lighting of the Italian restaurant where Johnny proposes to Loretta and where her mother has dinner with Mahoney’s professor has a wonderful, intimate atmosphere made up of warm reds and contrasting greens that puts you right there. There is another scene where Loretta looks out the window at the full moon in the night sky and the lighting is perfect with just the right music that results in such a touching, poignant moment. No words are spoken because none are needed with such visuals.

As much as the 1980s was typified by Wall Street’s (1987) Gordon Gekko and his “Greed is good” mantra,Moonstruck is about blue-collar people. It pays tribute to folks that represent the glue of society, showing us bookkeepers, bread makers, liquor store owners, plumbers and so on plying their trade. The characters in this film may lead workaday jobs, but their personal lives are anything but average. Like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Moonstruck does heighten ethnic stereotypes for comedic effect, but the latter film does so sincerely and with class. Moonstruck perpetuates a lot of Italian stereotypes, but not in a grating way, playfully making fun of some of them while celebrating others with affection. Far from being a bundle of ethnic clichés, it is a celebration of the Italian-American experience. The crucial difference between the two films is tone. Where Greek Wedding is all cuddly, feel good sitcom, Moonstruck has some bite to it, an edge as represented by Cage’s passionate performance. This film is full of fantastic acting and much pleasure comes from watching a very talented cast speak brilliantly written dialogue. Best of all it has a wonderful sense of romantic naivete, a cinematic love letter to New York City.

1 Attached Images

by John Grant

vt Build My Gallows High

US / 97 minutes / bw / RKO Dir: Jacques Tourneur Pr: Warren Duff Scr: Geoffrey Homes Story: Build My Gallows High (1946) by Geoffrey Homes Cine: Nicholas Musuraca Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming, Richard Webb, Steve Brodie, Virginia Huston, Paul Valentine, Dickie Moore, Ken Niles, Theresa Harris, Wallace Scott, John Kellogg.

Film noir is not generally a genre much associated with romance, so it’s perhaps a surprise to find prominent noirs listed in this countdown, and perhaps most surprising of all that this, one of the half-dozen or so films noirs that could be regarded as defining the genre, is one of them. Other noirs deal exquisitely with the obsessive face of love—The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) and Double Indemnity (1944) spring instantly to mind (and is obsession truly romance?)—but Out of the Past manages to tell a tale of obsession that more than matches those while doing so in the context of, and within the narrative framework of, a genuinely romantic love story.

The tale of obsession first:

A couple of years ago PI Jeff Markham (Mitchum) was hired by hoodlum Whit Sterling (Douglas) to track down the mistress who’d put four bullets into him and run off with $40,000 of his money, Kathie Moffatt (Greer). With the help of her maid, Eunice Leonard (Harris), Jeff tracked her down to Acapulco, where he became instantly infatuated with her. When Whit and his goon Joe Stefanos (Valentine) followed Jeff to Mexico, Jeff claimed that Kathie had left for some destination unknown in South America. In fact, Jeff and Kathie then snuck away to San Francisco, where they lived together incognito for a while before Jeff’s old PI partner, Jack Fisher (Brodie), spotted them quite by chance at a racetrack. Fisher followed them home and there was a confrontation, during which Kathie shot the interloper dead, thereafter fleeing into the night . . .

So much we’re told in flashback as Jeff explains his past to Ann Miller (Huston), the nice young woman with whom he’s very deeply in love; they hope her parents will come round to the idea of their getting married. Since the events of the flashback Jeff has been operating under the nom de guerre Jeff Bailey, running a small-town gas station with the assistance of a deaf-and-dumb youth universally called The Kid (Moore). But now Joe Stefanos has appeared out of nowhere to tell Jeff that Whit wants to hire him for that noirish archetype: Just One Last Job. Jeff doesn’t feel he’s in any position to refuse, but he promises Ann he’ll be back as soon as he’s managed to disentangle himself.

What he doesn’t expect is to find that Kathie is once again Whit’s mistress, and that now his obsession for her has almost entirely evaporated: he can see her as the poisonous viper she is. The casting of Greer in this part is a triumph. As events proceed and the sociopathic Kathie’s actions become viler and viler, as it’s clear that she’s entirely amoral in every sense, she manages to stay looking more like a virgin than a virgin does. She has the fresh-faced prettiness of Hollywood’s ideal nun, and only occasionally—in the shifting of an eye or the curving of a lip—does her true corruption show through this apparently guileless mask.

The job Whit has in mind involves accountant Leonard Eels (Niles), whom Whit claims is blackmailing him over his unpaid taxes. As it’s explained to Jeff, the idea is that, with the help of Eels’s treacherous secretary Meta Carson (Fleming), he should steal the relevant documentation; in reality, however, the plan is for Stefanos to murder Eels after Meta has engineered matters such that Jeff’s fingerprints are all over Eels’s apartment—i.e., that Jeff’s to be set up as the patsy. Luckily for Jeff he cottons on fast—not fast enough to stop the murder, but fast enough to screw up the schemes of the bad guys.

Again there’s a casting triumph. Fleming was one of the great Hollywood femmes fatales, so was a natural for the part of the faithless employee, the secretary who’s taking advantage of the boss’s unspoken love for her—near worship, in fact—not merely to sell him out but to connive in his destruction. Yet there’s also a certain physical echo of Greer in her appearance and, by design (we assume), in her onscreen affect; indeed, soon afterwards, when Jeff spies on Kathie making a phonecall that she thinks will spring the next part of the scheme to frame him into effect, it takes us a moment or two to realize that it’s Kathie, not Meta, whom he’s spying upon. As it were, then, Meta is Kathie with the mask removed: one glance and you can tell she’s a mercenary femme fatale, whereas with the far more dangerous Kathie it takes longer.

Kathie continues to play not just both ends but every conceivable end against the middle. Her latest seduced chump is clearly Joe Stefanos, with whom she’s seemingly plotting to cheat Whit, betray Jeff, and skedaddle with the loot. Cleverly, she works out that the way to track Jeff down is for Stefanos to follow The Kid; stupidly, neither of them realize that The Kid’s muteness has nothing to do with lack of intelligence—and indeed, as Stefanos prepares to murder Jeff, The Kid very craftily dispatches him.

Having herself murdered Whit, Kathie reckons that her best bet for the next stage of her campaign of terrorism against the world is to hook up yet again with Jeff, whom she assumes she can still enslave with the merest amorous glance. She’s also incapable of comprehending that he’s not in fact like her: “You’re no good for anyone but me. You’re no good and neither am I. That’s why we deserve each other.” But, far from being no good, Jeff is a man of integrity and honor, all the more so because of his love for Ann.

Yet one more thing Kathie doesn’t realize is that Jeff has finally concluded that the only way of expunging her poison is for her to die, and that his love for Ann is great enough that he’s willing to sacrifice his own life if need be to help bring this about. And in the very closing moments of the movie we come across yet another sign of how much Jeff adored Ann. While Jeff was still alive, Ann was fending off the attentions of local stalwart Jim (Webb); now that Jeff’s dead she tries to settle her mind by asking The Kid if he knows whether, in his final moments, Jeff was planning to run away with Kathie. The Kid lies that, yes, this was what Jeff was doing; while there have been various interpretations placed on this closing exchange, the one that seems most attractive is that Jeff briefed The Kid to act this way should anything happen to him, so that Ann could get on with her life.

That Out of the Past should be such an exemplary piece of moviemaking (aside from the odd continuity error that people who have always known Jeff as Markham call him Bailey in the second half of the movie) may seem paradoxical. The screenplay is credited to Geoffrey Homes, a usual nom de plume of the writer Daniel Mainwaring (he used it on the novel too), and it’s been generally accepted that there were some uncredited dialogue contributions from James M. Cain. According to Roger Ebert, however, Homes’s screen play was lousy, Cain didn’t so much do some polishing as produce a complete rewrite, which was also lousy, so that the final screenplay was done by resident house writer Frank Fenton. Whatever the truth, the result’s little short of a masterpiece. It has perfect pacing. There’s superb characterization of not only the principals—Mitchum often had to make the most of poorly imagined roles, but here he has one of sufficient complexity and empathy for him really to get his teeth into—but also in minor parts like Petey (Scott), a cabby who’s an old pal and accomplice of Jeff’s, and most especially in The Kid, where Moore gives us a brilliant performance. And there’s a plethora of stunning one-liners:

• “You say to yourself, ‘How hot can it get?’ Then, in Acapulco, you find out.”
• “They say, the day you die, your name is written in the clouds.”
• “All women are wonders, because they reduce all men to the obvious.” “So do martinis.”
• “Build my gallows high, baby.”

That last gave its title to Homes’s novel, and also the title of the movie’s first UK release. It’s extremely rare for a movie’s main title and variant title to be each as good as the other in their encapsulation of the movie’s ethos. It’s Jeff’s past actions, as much as Kathie’s fevered, incurable conspirings, that have built those gallows. He has tried to escape his past, but there’s no escape: in typical noir fashion, fate insists there can be no redemption.

Musuraca’s cinematography is as usual impeccable without always being ostentatious. The item that most people recall is Jeff’s first sight of Kathie, but for me the sweetest part comes a few minutes later as Jeff waits for her in a different bar: there’s a short pan around the bar, symbolizing the passage of a day’s tedious expectancy, and then there she suddenly, almost unexpectedly is. A similar observation can be made about Roy Webb’s soundtrack and Jacques Tourneur’s direction: both are superb but both, rather than pushing themselves in your face, serve the movie so well that it’s only afterwards you realize quite how good they were.

Because that’s what characterizes Out of the Past, what makes it such an extraordinary offering: the way that everything is so well integrated, like a painting that perfectly satisfies the eye even though it’s hard to isolate which aspect is the one that appeals so much, the one that takes the painting from exquisite to masterpiece. Every time I watch Out of the Past I find it’s an even better movie than the one I recalled, and every time I realize that the real love story it tells us is not the one we always remember, about the passion-fueled infatuation that Jeff has for Kathie, and her exploitation of his blind obsession, but the tale of the deeply powerful love Jeff has for Ann—the love that sees him gladly give up his life to protect her.

The movie was loosely remade as Against All Odds (1984) dir Taylor Hackford, with Jeff Bridges, Rachel Ward, James Woods, Richard Widmark, Alex Karras, Swoosie Kurtz and Dorian Harewood; Jane Greer has a small role as a corrupt businesswoman and mother of femme fatale Jessie (the equivalent of the earlier movie’s Kathie, so Greer is playing her own mother, as it were). The remake tends to suffer by comparison with the original, and plenty of folk have had fun savaging it, but in reality, looked at in isolation, it’s a perfectly respectable piece of work.

            Out of the Past was added to the National Film Registry in 1991—ironic in that, on release, it wasn’t so much as nominated for a single award

© 2014 by James Clark

      I don’t usually refer to other critics in pursuing these film entries; but here it seems to make a lot of sense. The esteemed film observer, Jonathan Rosenbaum, produced (in 1982) a review of Amarcord (1973) that was both typically cogent and typically half-hearted. Seeing clearly that Fellini’s outreach about an Adriatic town in the 1930s comprises “community rituals and seasonal changes,” he describes the longings of many of its residents, for something more than that often charming inertia, as “dreams and other fantasies,” which is to say, a type of reflexive inertia veering away from reality. Smoothly disarming any traces of abrasiveness in this finding to be quite futile any challenge to mechanics and orthodoxy, the appreciation identifies the auteur’s evolution as an increased trusting of “imagination over ‘realistic’ observation.” “Fact and fancy are never far apart” in Fellini’s work. But that proposition does nothing to sustain that what he calls “fancy”—in its sense of the “more” that is remarkably new to history—could be a mature, serious form of consciousness. Rosenbaum concedes that “… it is precisely the domain of privacy that the town’s collective dream life feeds upon…” But I can’t help reading between the lines here that “the town’s collective dream life” amounts to some kind of sad little joke. He declares, “…the film charts the lot of provincial dwellers everywhere;” and with that the unwelcome whiff of sociology begins to fill the air.

For all his rhetorical gracefulness, what Rosenbaum seems intent to play hard ball with is the question of fantasy ever being recognized as a phenomenon, with not only as much purchase upon concrete power as conventional culture and experience—but more. Unattended to, in Rosenbaum’s brief skim to establish Amarcord’s poignancy, is the recurrent image of a motorcyclist suddenly roaring through the streets and quickly disappearing who knows where. Near the end, he terrifies and infuriates one of our protagonists, Titta, as the latter tries (in vain) to catch up with another protagonist whom he is very fond of, namely, Gradisca, after a record snowfall which leaves the town square resembling the trenches of World War I. From that perspective, and from the copious actions of conflict and coercion that fill the screen, we might regard the vaguely military form on two wheels as a ghostly messenger rushing urgent information amidst points of a battleground that extends far beyond the quirky little outpost. The battle would be precisely about those, like Rosenbaum, who like things the way they have always been and pretend to know that there is no way of countering them; and those, like Fellini, and his protagonists, who endow Amarcord with phenomenal weight, wit and passion. It has been necessary to orient in this way, because instances of influential figures like Rosenbaum actively vitiate the reflective phenomena so carefully primed by daring filmmakers, amongst whom Fellini is extremely important. Amarcord’s depths, subtleties and beauties need to be approached as closely as possible in the spirit in which they were designed and produced, in order that the phenomenal range comprising film and audience elicit that intensive magic, unique to film art.

Rather than netting those sensually striking women, so apparent in Amarcord, in a presupposed web of rather farcical illusion, we would be much better off opening our eyes to what they actually show us on the screen. Gradisca (resembling Juliet of the Spirit’s Suzy—perky, bright-eyed and alluring—but pared down, due to having to hold down a job as a hairdresser) comes along with her sister and another friend, to an event in the town square whereby a towering bonfire signals the end of dead winter and the beginning of lively spring. She, by a kind of aristocracy of physical harmony and playful warmth, is called upon to light the heap of branches and no longer wanted wooden furniture, after which she enthuses, “I feel it [spring] all over me already!” (which is to say, she is swept up in an unusual surge of dynamic creativity). Outstripping her and the other women featured in this film in their capacity as Sirens, we have disinterested moments from them, like that which we’ve just noted (and like those of the motorcyclist and his Futurist infatuation with dangerous speed) which have to be factored into this film’s easily confusing scramble of self-assertion apparently devoid of mystery. Gradisca’s second walk on a wild side you have to keep your eyes open to see comes to us encumbered by the adolescent, Titta, determining not to include an episode with her in his confessional contretemps with a priest more intent on decorating a chapel than serving one of his flock. Titta catches up with her in the darkened profane chapel of a deserted movie house on a weekday afternoon. She is enraptured by Gary Cooper on the screen, in the Foreign Legion tale, Morocco, concerning Marlene Dietrich throwing away a life of comfort and prestige for anonymity and primordial love on burning desert sands. Her attitude in being thus overcome (as with the bonfire) includes regal occupancy of the murky, dramatically highlighted movie palace, emotively comparable to the stance of Cocteau’s Belle making a suspenseful beachhead in Bête’s dark, vast and empty dining room. Whereas Titta shifts from seat to seat to finally sit next to her and put his hand on her thigh, we have the precedent to such a tete-a-tete, involving an ardent but regal suitor/Bête, holding at bay the sway toward farce. The smoke from Gradisca’s cigarette spans both a palace where tapers (ending in live hands and arms) inform optics of satin (and filmy white curtains billow in the breeze) and a dream factory out of which she has to ask the rude, even beastly, boy, “Looking for something?” Well, Belle and Bête were all about looking for something from each other, something which will endow them with better preparedness for a sphere of breathtaking riches and difficulty. Prior to his reverie about Gradisca, Titta silently vowed (at the confessional) not to divulge a hard to dignify moment with one of the other women we need to take seriously despite the strong temptation to see them as incapable of seriousness. Billed by one and all as “the town nymphomaniac,” Volpina is more than that. But how hard is it to stay that course with Titta referring to “the day I pumped up her [bicycle] tires”? Fellini and screenwriting assistant, Tonino Guerra, are masters of ribaldry; but it is for us to understand that they are far more than facile gag writers. (As with Fellini’s Roma, written and produced the year before, Fellini has piled on a staggering flood of often grating miscues, in order to capture the extent of the oblivion at issue; and to go on to pose a test as to identifying vital signs.) Back on the hunt for the soul of Gradisca’s extremis, there is a Fascist rally with Mussolini himself as very special guest. She yells, most excitedly and happily, “There he is!” That visiting trace of world history gives the folks a pack of antiquated hot air (a big balloon version of his face having been brought in by the design geniuses at Party headquarters). “… The salute of ancient Rome that shows us the path of destiny that Fascist Italy must follow…” “Oh, let me touch him, I want to touch him!” she screams, inadvertently putting herself in the same boat as Titta stalking her in the movie palace being weighed upon by Bête’s palace. To twist the knife a little bit more, we have Il Duce, jogging along with one of those run-along military bands which amused us in Fellini’s early film, The White Sheik (1952), about a naive but ardent bride who throws herself at a fat, show-biz type. “Long live, Il Duce,” she shouts, showing the Fascist salute. But her chic little purse is in that raised right hand, and we should be able to see that she has a hard-to-touch Leader substantially (if not definitively) eclipsing the short-lived sensation. (She’s headed for a wedding with an officer of Mussolini’s ill-fated project. At the reception she cries a lot.) The whole town forms a flotilla one night, to see close up the regime’s chic ocean liner, “The Rex,” passing the seaport four miles offshore. As the celebration forms up, a village idiot remarks, “Where are they going with hearts pounding?” It’s quite impossible not to recall the old lady (a sort of Chorus) in Tati’s Jour de Fete, joining in, as best she can, on the rapturous edge of the excitement befalling a thrill-deprived centre. (Rosenbaum notes that both Fellini and Tati would depict town squares. But there’s a hell of a lot more than that to their affinities. To get there you have to care about the stakes and mistakes of body language.) On the ride out to the Rex (“It’s coming all the way from America”—America, where, in Jour de Fete, all the new things come from), the sunset providing a frisson, Gradisca tells a friend, “I was full of hope every time, but it never came to anything… I haven’t given up hope. I want one of those encounters that last a lifetime…” Finally sighting the floating palace, swirling up within a heavy mist (a sort of Bête’s palace, in accordance with the understanding, “… the greatest thing the regime ever built”)—the whole town having been, naturally, asleep and only wakened by a restless child, endowing the vision as a dream, quite out of this (mainstream) world—Gradisca cries, swamped by that elicitation of so much more than her life has been mired in. She goes on—in accordance with a bit of grasping for comfort in addition to high impact (“I want a family, children…a husband to chat with in the evening over coffee…”)—to marry a stolid Fascist Army officer, quite a contrast to Foreign Legionnaire, Gary Cooper; and their outdoor wedding reception (at Il Paradiso) strongly resembles the wedding gig of Gelsomina and Zampano, in La Strada.

Sexpot Volpina and the nameless tobacconist with enormous breasts, would, in accordance with the significant energies of Gradisca, be more aptly considered in terms of larger than (average) life than ignition of those settling for low-wattage buzz. Getting past the former’s clownishness—for instance, peeing on the beach in view of a construction crew (then coming over and telling them, “I lost my pussycat”)—it is her perhaps apocryphal crack-junky visage (a waxy sheen to her skin and remarkably kinetic eyes) that crowds out her goofiness and coheres with a haunting last glimpse of her in the hospital bed next to Titta’s dying mother. Getting past the startling proportions of her sexual properties, it is the isolation of the tobacco store proprietor which really matters. (Moments before, at an all-night car rally through the streets, Titta’s parasitical uncle rushes to examine a stray dog hit by a speed demon, finding that there is one of its ears on the road. Titta, on the other hand, had imagined being a Grand Prix hero. There are disconcerting affinities between those two; and as the latter [with his blonde hair and lips seemingly enhanced] makes his way through empty streets to the retail precincts of a Beast, after the race’s end, we have to not only weigh the woman’s energies [she being perhaps the only person in town not engaged by the public entertainment]; but also his capacity to break away from a family trait of perpetual adolescence. The parasite is Titta’s mother’s brother. We behold, also, a retarded, institutionalized brother of his father, on an outing, lobbing stones at all and sundry, from the vantage point of a tall tree, howling all the while, “I want a woman!”) The woman Titta wants tells him the store is closed but she lets him in, he claiming to be after a cigarette. He also claims that he could lift her off her feet, and she becomes intrigued that such a delicate little beauty (or, with that blonde hair, rosy cheeks and lipstick, the la of la Bête) has come into her orbit, a solitary orbit of consciousness the delicateness of which lies hidden within a no-nonsense facade (not, however, so no-nonsense as not to include, prominently displayed on her wall, a poster of a Surrealist painting, with a man whose brains are exposed due to the top of his skull being removed, and with a de Chirico-like chimney in the background, adding to the challenge toward brainwork). He lifts her twice. Both are aroused, eyes ablaze. The woman being cradled looks skyward as though beginning to have an orgasm that promises to reach epiphantic proportions. “See how my strength did it?” he declares. “Yes, my little darling!” From her sweater she pulls out a breast and tells him, “You really are sweet… Drive me crazy… Just a little…” [that last phrase revealing much about her]. “What should I do?” the boy asks desperately. “Suck!” she commands; and her delighting face is right beside that graphic image of downplaying rationality. “You can have this one, too,” she’s happy to say. But Titta’s limitations—“Don’t blow! Suck!”—break the spell and her rare ecstasy disappears. “I have to close up… [And, handing him a cigarette] It’s on me… Now, scram!” (The coda to this skirmish finds Titta sick in bed. He blames the downturn on the shop’s having disease-carrying flies; we can see that it’s about his not being up to the job.)

Amarcord was produced only one year after Fellini’s Roma. Whereas the latter evinces devastation that the law is an ass, lighting little incense sticks quietly bringing to bear mercies of grace in Surrealist films and the miracle that was Anna Magnani, Amarcord, every bit a cognizant that the school system, the Church, the government and the population at large have not done themselves proud, pulls out of its battered hat a weird and wonderful victory lap, of sorts, in taking the measure of individuals with workable (which is not to say, effectively functional) affection. In the course of delineating the clash between old and new (Volpina screams out, “Fu Manchu!” giving us to understand that she [far more incisively than Titta] feels herself to have been poisoned by agents of corruption), our film , as we have seen, envisions a form, however nebulous, of that always-welcome Beauty and Beast constellation. The obvious torch-bearers to that effect are Gradisca and Titta. During that kooky Confession, Titta muses, “I’m crazy about Gradisca! I want a wife just like her!” During the monumental snowfall, he tries to defend her against his randy school chums pelting her with snowballs. He gets one of her friendly fire missiles in the face; and then she runs away, saying, “Enough! I give up!” But, before she disappears, there is an apparition—“Look, it’s the Count’s peacock!” The wonderful, tropical fan tail spreads amidst the falling snow. Gradisca regards it with awe. Soon she’s tossing her bridal bouquet into an overcast void, seeing it plop onto a brown, grotty field. (At the ragged outdoor reception area, the tobacconist—so edgy in close-up with her nocturnal admirer—looks merely fat, rather old and even ill at ease in a shy way.) Titta is on the dock, packed to leave town. Then he shows up at the wedding reception, seen in a distant shot, aimlessly milling about with those chums having got up a little drag number for the celebrants—a number, part Gelsomina, part Mamma Roma. Not much of a sharing of wisdom and carnal energy; or so it seems.

But Fellini’s is a surreal, not a “let’s see the money” world. And though Gradisca (like Cocteau’s Belle, at the end of his film, oppressed by lousy choices and yet still able to put on a brave face) does not seem to have a future to calm her anxiety (“I’m so full of affection… but who can I give it to? Who will take it?”), the mere envisioning of threading such a needle goes a long way in this moment when a peacock dazzles in a snowstorm.

There is another Belle and another Bête here; and they are just as surprising as the weather, and just as brilliant as the peacock. At first, or even fifth, glance, Titta’s parents don’t seem to rise to the possibility of changing the world. Our first impressions of this pair all point to unremarkable self-serving assertion, resentment and conventionality. At the bonfire to celebrate powers of fruition, the dad, Aurelio, declares, “One father can look after a hundred kids; but a hundred kids can’t look after one father.” Not only resentful and self-pitying, his aphorism is of real interest in its challenge to populism, an odd state of affairs for the town’s premier Communist, who, during the day devoted to Mussolini, had “the Internationale” sent over the square, by recording. Tracking him down, the local masters pump him full of castor oil, and he cuts a poor (even beastly) figure staggering home covered with shit and greeted by his anxious wife, Miranda at their gate. “You won’t listen to me,” the eager-to-illuminate woman sadly maintains. So here they are, in the middle of the night, she carefully soaping him down, and Titta, seemingly always the jerk, laughingly noting, God, he stinks!” (The work-averse brother of this Belle had informed the authorities that Aurelio had committed that act of defiance, further showing himself—and, by implication, Titta—to be irrevocably hopeless.) Miranda had locked him into their compound, during the afternoon right-wing rally, to offset just such violence—all the while Aurelio raving, “Think I’m scared?” The captain in charge of his punishment had called him an “animal;” but, lion-hearted or not, his optical component lacks Cocteau’s Bête’s magnificent, poetic mane: he’s bald, with some kind of wart making him cringe-worthy; and his little mane at each side is far more amusing than charming. Certainly, you could not say he reigns over his dining room domain like a man intent on making salient life’s great poetry. The dinner we do observe could hardly show more cluttered domesticity. He chases Titta out of the house, having learned that the impudent boy had, the night before, peed on a man’s hat from the balcony of the movie theatre, featuring warring cowboys and Indians. Aurelio’s father, part of the extended family inured to conflict, can’t stop molesting the maid, who tells him, “You think my fanny’s a good luck charm?” Aurelio openly despises his brother-in-law, in a hair-net and bathrobe, who only stirs to seduce women with his nice looks and ballroom skills, who ridicules the Futurist speedster and takes pride in endangering the workman kindling the bonfire. Surmounting this hotbed of domestic homicide, there is his being peeved by something missing about Miranda’s energy, which he inflects into the general complaint, “I work hard all day [as a building crew foreman] and I have to come home and look at a bunch of long faces…” She turns her back—“Now you won’t have to see me”—and she refuses to eat so much as a bite of the heavy meal she has prepared (“I don’t want anything”), a stance that introduces a barely perceptible loving care into a firestorm of mutual devaluation and clownish fury. She erupts, in face of his badgering, “I’m going mad! I’ll put strychnine in your soup! I’ll kill myself first!” When, some months later, she is hospitalized with a terminal illness, she tells Titta (whose limitations, as with her brother, she chooses to mine rather than write off) she’s feeling better; but she muses on her wedding ring no longer fitting her finger, and Aurelio follows her signal and the course of her ordeal which he had not noticed until very late, with a stoic, saddened presence.

That could not come close to being a great instance of interpersonal love; but, as presented in this subtle and complex context, it is riveting in its own way. Convalescing from his uneven struggle with the tobacconist, Titta asks Miranda, “How did it happen with you and Dad?” Surprised by this resort, by her seemingly immature-for-life son, to the volatile phenomenon of love, she sums up her marriage as being dull and crude. “Your dad’s not a great one for compliments…” But in describing their mutual attraction a tincture of rebellion has to be acknowledged. “He was a laborer. My folks had a bit of money and didn’t think much of him… So we eloped without a word to anyone…” Being, despite all but swallowed up by conventional socioeconomic pressures (Her funeral is firmly in the hands of the Church and we see a priest fussing at the outset of the cortege, about getting a troupe of black-clad orphans in place; moreover, she anxiously stage-manages Titta’s Confession—“Not even water before” [it]), they did embrace risk and, within a close fit with much of conventional life, would, together, and tempestuously, taste the tang of something more.

Youngsters like Gradisca and Titta might have more boldly and consistently drawn away from the old and developed more intense areas of the new. (Her fling with a prince [cued by a town official looking for the latter’s investment in expanding the port], a figure not quite like Gary Cooper in Morocco, begins with her heartfelt bid to find cogent love, and ends with her mechanically assuming the gestures of a cheap hooker; his passion for the glamorous life is even less developed than his uncle’s, but it does light upon sensuous paths bucking a long trend, whether he knows it or not. With the onset of the countless, gracefully hovering snow crystals, he rushes from his sickbed, and his face registers true rapture, which lifts him decisively beyond that illness.) But Aurelio and Miranda, flattened though they are by pressures of survival (material and emotional), would have entered upon exigencies unapparent to mere rebels. Despite involving a similar welter of those dead ends which leave Fellini’s Roma almost deliriously dark, Amarcord, by providing rich protagonistic initiatives, makes its way to the misty vision of infiltrating what dimensions of “affection” can be elicited from within a deadened world history. (The near Ice Age of the incongruous snowfall pre-empts a movie audience [far more numerous than at that moment of musical chairs for Titta and Gradisca] getting into the swing of a lion’s roar. The exodus from the theatre and into the street neatly replicates the carnival scene where Genevieve gets fussy in Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; the relentless cascade of white also recalls the sign-off between the two lovers in that latter film.) Swooning in face of Il Duce, Gradisca cries out, “This enthusiasm makes us young and old at the same time!” But she has not effectively entered upon the mysteries of mixing that cocktail. Amarcord is especially remarkable in its directing attention, in light of flashy but lost bids, to the possibilities of effervescence latent within interplay almost entirely dull, jangled and ludicrous. Aurelio and Miranda undergo outings from the mental hospital by his retarded brother, driving them to a frenzy of frustration; but somehow they manage to stay the course. Aurelio shows us both his individualistic skepticism and his crippling obtuseness, when he scowls at the weather which occasions in everyone else big smiles. “Still snowing! Four days this goddamn thing’s been around!” This register of clown-show is something an ultra-chic agent like Cocteau could never have embraced. But it is something ironically indispensable to a film so laced with Futurist lightning. The two prominent (though all-but hidden) Belles and Bêtes here establish a problematic of synthesis amongst their strengths.

The film begins and, a year later, ends with feathery seeds being carried in the breeze, giving the locals to understand not only that “when the puffballs come, winter’s almost gone,” but also that it is in such motion that we really live. During Gradisca’s doing the honors of that other spring kickoff, one of her friend’s remarks, “It gives me a funny feeling!” (This so easily ignored law of nature is roughed up by the school staff, with their precious and bored recitations about the motion of pendulums, spirit in the realm of matter, perspective [in sacred paintings], mathematics and Greek. It is also a bit more charmingly compromised by a “lawyer”/ Chorus who nails down historical data as the supposed essence of the town’s integrity.) At one point, Aurelio’s dad finds himself disoriented in a thick fog. “I don’t seem to be anywhere,” he muses. Then he sneers, “If death is like this, I don’t think much of it. Everything’s gone. Well, up yours!” Moments later, Titta’s younger brother, on the way to school, goes past the old man, whose discomfort had been relieved (after a close encounter with a black vehicle that terrifies him) by a neighbor pointing out that he’s a few steps from his gate and the escapist gabfest within. The preamble to presenting Miranda’s death has him being whisked away, in light of his not being able to countenance the bite of finitude. By contrast, on that walk to school, the boy walks past dead trees forming the configuration of donkeys. He doesn’t notice that; but he notices a cow, which causes him to run away quickly, into the safety of the soft fog. The upshot here, amidst rather clownish actions, is to give us a perspective upon death and dignity being not for old men and little boys. The “I Remember” sense of the term Amarcord looks to remembering how close to and yet so far from consummate power those days were and still are.