Punchy

Film: The Champ
Format: DVD from NetFlix on The New Portable.

I’ve said before that Oscar seems to be obsessed with boxing more than any other sport. While there are sports elements in many an Oscar nominee and Oscar winner, there are three Best Picture winners that have a significant sports element (and despite the football and ping pong elements in Forrest Gump, it’s clearly not a sports movie) and two of them have to do with boxing. So it’s not really that shocking that as I come close to closing out both the Best Picture and Best Director categories, there’s yet another boxing movie to get through. That would be The Champ, from 1931.

As befits its status as an early talkie, we’re going to be diving deeply into melodrama here. It seems like a requirement of most movies of the era to have a massive dollop of melodrama tossed in, likely a hangover from the silent era when everything had to be significantly overacted to resonate on the screen. Also, it’s worth noting that for a movie about boxing, there’s not going to be a huge amount of actual boxing that happens here (and the boxing that does happen is very clearly terrible).

Praise Be

Film: Hallelujah
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Before the actual opening of Hallelujah on the version I received from NetFlix, there is a long disclaimer from Warner Bros. Essentially, it says that the film that is about to be displayed is filled with prejudice and stereotypes that were common when the film was made. That’s certainly true. The disclaimer goes on to say that the depictions in question were wrong when they were made and still wrong, but that it’s important to show the films unadulterated, as it were, because to do otherwise would be to essentially pretend that this part of history can be or should be ignored. It’s interesting, and having now seen Hallelujah, I get why they felt the disclaimer was necessary.

What makes Hallelujah historically interesting is that it was one of the first, if not the very first, major studio production with an all-black cast. Certainly every named character is black and every character who has anything to say is black. Within Our Gates came first, of course, but didn’t have the backing of a big studio. Hallelujah was evidently seen as such a risky proposition that director/producer King Vidor was forced to invest his own salary into the production. After all, in 1929, this would not necessarily seem to be the sort of movie that would attract Middle America…or even any of white America.

Quackery?

Film: The Citadel
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

Every now and then, a movie surprises me. The Citadel turned out to be a pretty big surprise. I expected on thing based on the blurb for the film on Turner Classic Movies, or at least on the recording I had on the DVR. According to that blurb, The Citadel was about a doctor attempting to help mine workers and be thwarted in his research. That certainly happens during the course of the film, but it happens in the first act and is then pretty much forgotten.

This is, though, the story of a doctor. Andrew Manson (Robert Donat) has newly qualified as a doctor and takes a job in Wales. There are a number of obstacles to overcome, not the least of which is that in the world of The Citadel, the Welsh are completely backwards, hidebound, and fearing of any change. Manson realizes that many of the locals are sick because of problems with the local sewage system. With the aid of his friend Dr. Phillip Denny (Ralph Richardson), the two blow up the sewer with dynamite, forcing the British government to rebuild it. The tyrant of a wife of his boss forces him to quit, and he takes a job as a doctor for a mining company. The position requires that he be married, so he awkwardly proposes to the local schoolmistress, Chris (Rosalind Russell), who accepts.

Lust in the Dust

Film: Duel in the Sun
Format: DVD from Mt. Morris Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

Anyone who has worked on a group project knows that there’s often a benefit to having the suggestions of other people. Sometimes, though, other people turn out to be much more of a hindrance than a help. In the case of Duel in the Sun, King Vidor is give the sole directorial credit, but there are six uncredited directors on this film. Six. I can only imagine that at some level, this led to a “too many cooks” situation.

This is exacerbated, at least for me, by the fact that this film stars Jennifer Jones, who tends to leave me cold. This is balanced by it also featuring Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Lillian Gish, and Lionel Barrymore. Still, I specifically watched this because Jones was nominated for Best Actress for this film, so she was the main reason I spent time with Duel in the Sun in the first place.

Epic Disappointment

Film: War and Peace (1956)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

While the term “epic” in movie language tends to bring up films like Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur and even modern films like Gladiator, in the literary world, “War and Peace” is king. This isn’t the case when it comes to the film version—any film version, for that matter. The film in question here is the 1956 version brought in far less than the studio would have liked. There are serious problems with this version of War and Peace, not the least of which is the length of just under three-and-a-half hours.

I’m not going to try to rehash the plot here. The story takes place in Russia during the Napoleonic era, which means old-school military with guys standing in ranks in bright-colored uniforms shooting at each other. It starts with Russia attempting to assist in Austria (or maybe it was Poland) and ends with Napoleon’s attempted invasion of Russia. In between , there’s some romance and a lot of dithering around. Suffice it to say that everyone in the world appears to be in love with Natasha Rostova (Audrey Hepburn) despite her evidently being about 16. Among those after her hand are her cousin Pierre Bezukhov (Henry Fonda), Bezukhov’s friend Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (Mel Ferrer) and a womanizing rogue named Anatol Kuragin (Vittorio Gassman). For her part, Natasha, being young and blindingly naïve, loves each of them in turn, because that’s the way a Russian epic rolls.

With a Mother Like That...

Film: Stella Dallas
Format: VHS from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on big ol’ television.

It’s no secret that when it comes to the women of the golden age of Hollywood that I have a little crush on Barbara Stanwyck. For me, there’s nobody from the 1930s or 1940s who had the mix of everything that she did. She could play an ingénue, she was certainly capable of showing an evil side, and she could also play down. That’s what Stella Dallas is all about, at least in my world. It’s all about Barbara Stanwyck being awesome.

Stella (Stanwyck) is the daughter of blue collar worker and the sister of a blue collar worker, but she has aspirations. While working in the mill might be enough for dad and brother, Stella wants a life in society, mixing with the right people and living the high life. She sets her sights on Stephen Dallas (John Boles), who works at the mill, but not as one of the workers. As it turns out, Dallas came from money and was prepared to marry into more money when his father killed himself because he’d gone broke. Dallas’s aim was to earn his way back into society, and just when he was getting there, his former finacee Helen (Barbara O’Neil) marries someone else.

An Ordinary Average Guy

Film: The Crowd
Format: VHS from Downers Grove Public Library through WorldCat on big ol’ television.

Films often are about the people we want to be or wish we were. Frequently it seems to me that films are about a sort of wish fulfillment. The people in films are beautiful, and their characters live the sort of lives we dreamed we would as children. They have meaningful and important dream jobs, carry with them the fate of the world often enough, and exist in a world of either opulence or of at least quiet luxury. “Poor kids” in a lot of John Hughes films still live in big houses and have their own cars—they just aren’t the nicest houses and the cars aren’t new. That’s how you can tell they are poor in the film world.

This is why Italian neo-realism was such a shock. It’s also what makes King Vidor’s The Crowd such a noteworthy film for its time. It certainly starts out like the film we expect, with the main character overcoming terrible odds and adversity to become the great success he always knew in his heart he deserved to be. And yet it doesn’t really play out like that when we come right down to it. Instead, it is a sort of precursor to a film like It’s a Wonderful Life in tone if not in plot.

John (James Murray) is born on the 4th of July and has no reason to disbelieve his father when he is told that he is destined for great things. Despite the loss of his father at a young age, John is convinced that he is something and someone special and needs only a slim opportunity to make the best of everything. At 21 he moves to New York and starts on the bottom rung of a large company, one man in a sea of faceless office workers and identical desks. But he still has hope and ambition.

He eventually meets the equally ubiquitously named Mary (Eleanor Boardman) and the two are soon married. John isn’t much of a hit with the in-laws, particularly with his low-rent job and high-rent speech about his rosy future. A couple of kids follow, as do bills, marital strife, bickering, and a terrible tragedy that nearly crushes the couple under its weight. John eventually sinks into a terrible depression, quits a series of jobs, and becomes essentially a nothing, not capable of doing much of anything. Naturally for the time the film ends on an uplift, but throughout, the film depicts the slow spiral of John from his idealistic youth to the reality of the world around him.

And that, more or less, is the entire point of the film. John and Mary are not exceptional in any way. Oh, John can juggle a bit and play the ukulele, and Mary can sew a dress, but in the grand scheme of the world, there’s nothing about them that is particularly noteworthy or special. All of this makes John’s die-hard belief in himself and his own abilities that much more tragic and painful to see play out on the screen. In fact, the only real thing that John has going for him is this unwavering belief in himself that slowly erodes as the film wears on.

It’s an interesting theme for a film, particularly for 1928. Interesting in that John’s woes of unemployment and long lines of people seeking work seem to presage the stock market collapse of the following year. But also interesting in the sense that John is not by any stretch a movie hero. He’s a bum, He’s a man who spends much of his time dreaming about something better but who is evidently unable to work up the courage or the effort to do much of anything about it. Because of this, he is a tragic figure, lost, and lost because of his own shortcomings and faults.

Also critical here (and why the film was named as it was) is the faceless and impersonal nature of the crowded city itself. John can do nothing to separate himself from that crowd and can do nothing to rise above it. His complete lack of any exceptional quality turns him into just another faceless drone at his job and just another face in the crowd in the rest of his life. Ultimately, like most of us in the world, John’s fate is to be just a man struggling with his own existence rather than mastering the fates as he had always believed himself capable.

The Crowd suffers from precisely what most other silent dramas do. It is very melodramatic in terms of the acting style, and this is frequently off-putting. Additionally, there’s a reason that most films contain truly heroic characters. It’s easier to get behind and root for someone who is in some way exceptional than it is to cheer and hope for a many who seems at each turn to be unable to help himself at all.

Despite this, The Crowd is very effective at showing the life of this simple, average man an in showing how simple it is for that life to quickly become a tragedy.

Why to watch The Crowd: It’s tailor-made for the 99%.
Why not to watch: It’s still laden with melodramatic overacting, like most silent films.

It's Nothing Like What Macy's Does

Film: The Big Parade
Format: VHS from Downers Grove Public Library through interlibrary loan on big ol’ television.

Most of the time, movies are about escapism. At least the movies I tend to enjoy the most are about escapism; I don’t always look for a lot of reality in my films because I get enough reality in my everyday life. It’s one of the reasons I tend to like horror, science fiction, and action as genres more than any other. But with war films, I appreciate a level of realism instead of escapism. The Big Parade, the highest grossing silent film in history, made a real attempt at realism, showing the war not as a grand adventure or something that turned boys into men, but a terrible conflict that caused pain, death, and destruction, but still had the potential to ennoble those who survived.

Our main character is James Apperson (John Gilbert, and notice that the character’s last name is a letter and a space away from being “a person”), who is a wealthy wastrel more interested in having a good time than in doing an honest day’s work. When war is declared, Jim is essentially guilted into joining by his friends, and wearing an Army uniform is evidently the first thing he’s ever done to meet with his father’s approval. Jim heads off to war and France with the assurance that he will one day return to marry his sweetheart, Justyn Reed (Claire Adams).

Along the way, we meet the two men who will prove to be the main companions of Jim as he experiences life in the Army and the war in France. These men are Slim (Karl Dane), a construction worker with a constant huge plug of tobacco in his cheek and Bull (Tom O’Brien), a short, feisty bartender. The three men make an unlikely trio, but as they prepare for the fighting during a stay in the village of Champillon.

The most important event in Champillon is the meeting of the three men with Melisande (Renee Adoree), a local girl in the village. All three men are attracted to her, but it’s Jim that she decides to allow to court her. Slim and Bull break into cellars and drink wine, Jim and Melisande romance each other for a bit, and Jim feels guilty about making time with the girl while Justyn is still waiting at home for him. Right when this is going to become a problem, the Americans are sent to the front and into the shooting war.

For me, this is where the film really picks up. The first hour of the film is really little more than a character study of Jim as he goes from spoiled, wealthy socialite with no social conscience or accountability to a man willing to put himself out for his fellow soldiers and willing to feel something about two-timing his faithful girl back home. I certainly understand the point of this part of the film, but would have been just as happy with it had it been about half as long.

The war scenes, though, are impressive. Huge lines of vehicles, massive explosions, and clouds of poison gas cover the battlefield, and it very much looks like the real thing. Mortar shells and bombs land near groups of men who are nearly buried in the massive clods of earth that spray up and cover them. Men drop in the wake of brutal machine gun fire. These scenes, while obviously staged for the film, have the feel of the genuine article. I can’t imagine the logistics involved with filming something of this size and scope in 1925, but King Vidor pulled it off brilliantly.

I have no real desire to spoil this film. Suffice to say that the three men in our story aren’t too long at the front, at least in terms of the film’s narrative. Jim finds himself wounded and has a face-to-face encounter with a German soldier that was later referenced in All Quiet on the Western Front. Eventually, Jim is taken to a field hospital and while recovering, he learns that Champillon has changed hands over and over. Worried about Melisande, he leaves the hospital to investigate, which creates a number of complications in his recovery.

The happy ending feels a bit tacked on here, but in its own way, it also feels earned. Following the still harrowing scenes of war and battle, a little happy ending isn’t so bad. It’s here that the first hour of the film—the comic scenes with Slim and Bull and the romance between Jim and Melisande pay off. I’m not entirely convinced that the payoff is entirely big enough to justify the length of that segment of the film. I’d still like to cut a bit from it, but based on the second half, I like them better in retrospect than I did in the moment of watching them.

Silent dramas are still a tough watch, but in the case of The Big Parade, it’s worth the struggle of getting through. Make it past the first hour, and you’ll find yourself amply rewarded both in terms of the quality of the action sequences and in terms of satisfaction in getting a return on the investment in the characters.

Why to watch The Big Parade: An early, successful attempt at wartime realism.
Why not to watch: The first hour is too slow even if it pays off eventually.