The Three Musketeers (1948)

The Three Musketeers (George Sidney, 1948) Every few years, a new generation has to put their imprint on Alexander Dumas' adventure tale on the chicaneries and hidden agendas during the rule of King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, when it seems everyone was challenging the rule of theocracy masquerading as monarchy.  Every time, a group of four actors can be found to collaborate rather than hog the show, a new version is produced and a different spin is put on the first part of the d'Artagnan Romances, telling of a sword-skilled Gascony bumpkin who goes to Paris to join the King's Musketeers of the Guard—knights on the cusp of a new technology who prefer their battles to be sharp and personal—and learns the ways of the world in love, loss, and politics and how they all cross swords.

My favorite version is still Richard Lester's one-and-a-half film epic The Three Musketeers: The Queen's Diamonds and The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge for their bawdy humor, down and dirty sword fights and occasional stunt-casting, breezily written by George MacDonald Fraser, lovingly photographed by David Watkin, and (for the first one) cheekily scored by Michele LeGrand in his mock heroic style.

 

"Gotta swashbuckle!"

But there have been so many others, going back to the silent era. One of the oddest, despite being a fairly straight adaptation is the Technicolor M-G-M version from 1948, starring Gene Kelly as d'Artagnan, high in the step and long in the tooth, where the fights are choreographed more as dance in natural settings.  All movie fights are choreographed to some extent, but the '48 version of "3M" has a particularly dancerly feel with Kelly.  There's a "lark" aspect to the whole thing, with a winking feel as if to say "isn't this all preposterous?" It feels even more so in Kelly's love scenes with June Allyson playing Constance, confidante to the Queen (Angela Lansbury) and daughter (in this one) of his landlord. Their scenes have a campy, artificial leaning, layered over with a version of Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" theme, which was probably a cliche for love in '48. It makes any emotional investment in the romance so much embarrassing vapor.

Impressive cast, though, with Lana Turner top-lined (probably to assuage her fears that it was a secondary role) as the villanous Milady deWinter, Vincent Price is finely oily as Prime Minister Richelieu (evidently he was defrocked for the film, owing to pressure from the Catholic Church), Van Heflin a good, but not great Athos, Gig Young as Porthos, and Keenan Wynn providing comedy as d'Artagnan's servant Planchet.

And it has one scene that makes the highlight reels—Kelly's tribute to Douglas Fairbanks, vaulting over (M-G-M stage) French roof-tops to rescue his lady-love. It's nicely staged athleticism, marking a sharp contrast to the play-acting of the rest of the film.

Warning Shot (1967)

Warning Shot (Buzz Kulik, 1967) Based on a novel by Whit Masterson (who also wrote the book that had become Touch of Evil), Warning Shot was considered a good vehicle for David Janssen, who was in the middle of his run on "The Fugitive" TV series. The script was by "Fugitive" veteran Mann Rubin* a prolific writer who wrote at least one script for most of the thriller/SCI-FI series of the 1960's and 1970's.

 

The story has a nice affiliation with Janssen's "Fugitive" persona in that he plays a discredited cop accused of killing an unarmed man—and nobody believes his story that the dead man was carrying a gun—a search of the scene has never turned up the weapon, and the prosecuting attorney (Sam Wannamaker) is more than happy to provide no reasonable doubt. It doesn't help that the L.A. police (in the form of Ed Begley's crusty superior and partner Keenan Wynn) have their own suspicions, whether to save face for the force or attain a promotion.

 

Plus, it doesn't help that Janssen has a face that always looks guilty.

It's true that during a drug stakeout, Sgt. Tom Valens (Janssen) has shot a man who was running away from him in the night, in the fog of a swimming pool, but Valens swears it was a "good" shoot; he didn't fire until the suspect drew a gun on him. But, in the light of day, the dead man turns out to be a respected doctor and no weapon can be found on the scene. Valens had been shot a year previously—so the whispers are that he might be a little trigger-happy. Facing manslaughter charges, Valens is forced to do a little investigating on his own.

The victim, Tom Ruston, was a respected doctor catering to diseases of the rich, but also well-regarded for his humanitarian work in Mexico. The doc's accountant (George Sanders) and his floozy wife (Eleanor Parker) are of no help, nor is the doc's assistant (Stephanie Powers). Nope, the only people who seem to have any sympathy for Valens' plight is his ex-wife (Joan Collins) and a pilot (George Grizzard) who lives at "the scene of the crime" and who offers to fly Valens down Mexico-way to see if the doctor's work in Mexico was legit.

Then, things start to get complicated; Valens acquires quite a few bruises after he's been beat up in an apparently random attack. Then, Ruston's nurse dies and the doctor's office is ransacked. Then, Valens is dosed with a mickey in his milk—this was the days of door-stop deliveries**—and nearly gassed by his own fireplace. It would have looked like an accident. But, Valens knows it's enemy action.

Now, it being the 1960's, there's a little bit of experimentation on director Kulik's part with camera angles that are a little too precious,*** and when Valens is beat up (not too convincingly and in sloooow motion) his POV is shown with vasellined and distorting lenses, which is groovy, baby, but didn't strike me as being very convincing. Frankly, when these sorts of shots appear I think less that the person is going unconscious and more that trends in film-making in the '60's were very fleeting.

Ultimately, the entire movie is not very convincing. The plot hinges on one of the most unbelievable and least likely MacGuffins**** in movie history (nope, I won't spoil it, but, once you know, you'll say "why would they use THAT?"). It's odd, but Warning Shot is one of those movies where the script is supposed to be deadly serious, but there are those moments—when Kulik is focusing on a bottle of milk at Janssen's feet, or a shot that shows just how convenient meeting in a graveyard can be—that you think they're trying to have as much fun with the material as they can, the results seeming half-hearted, like the film-makers realizing somewhere in filming they were making one of those Hitchcock "wrong-man" movies. The film is top-heavy with talent—Sanders, Parker, Walter Pidgeon and Lillian Gish—all playing characters they've played and excelled at in their careers—but, the film is far less entertaining than one would expect given all that. The film needs a little bit more absurdity to work. Especially given its ending.

 

* Yeah. No, he didn't write for "Star Trek" but for Irwin Allen and the "Bionic" people. Quite a few scripts for The Alfred Hitchcock show and most of the detective/mystery shows of the era.

 

** It's just a cautionary note in these pandemic times, but don't be like David Janssen and leave the delivered food on the stoop all day so bad guys can poison you...or the food gets so old it poisons you. 

 

*** Check this shot out—that's the heavy-hand of the prosecutor in the foreground during the manslaughter trial. Yup, the judge is Carroll O'Connor.

**** And just in case you don't know what a "MacGuffin" is, here is Alfred Hitchcock to explain...

King of the Roaring Twenties: The Story of Arnold Rothstein

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day here.

King of the Roaring Twenties: The Story of Arnold Rothstein (aka The Big Bankroll) (Joseph M. Newman, 1961) In the early 1960's, "the Roaring 20's" was a big deal. "The Untouchables" was on TV and there was even a series called..."The Roaring 20's." It seemed to break up the glut of westerns, gumshoes, and family-comedies—as well as the Kefauver Hearings—that saturated small screens in the 1950's.  

Amidst all this, there were a spate of low-budget movies that also looked back at those days, but it was not what you would call a trend. Mickey Rooney starred as "Baby Face" Nelson. Rod Steiger as Al Capone. Charles Bronson as "Machine Gun" Kelly. There was Studs Lonigan. Just before this film was The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond.

And at the tail end of the cycle was King of the Roaring 20's: The Story of Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein was featured in Legs Diamond. Nicknamed "The Brain", he is credited with putting the "organized" into organized crime, turning the scatter-shot "wild west" approach of mobstering into a business model of bankrolling potential racketeering schemes (but just be advised to check your receipts). I suppose at the end of the film-cycle, after finishing all the tommy-gun action, they had to include the accountants. You're not done until you do the paperwork.

KOTR2:TSOAR (geez, even the abbreviation is too long!) follows Rothstein's rise  in turn of the century New York as a troublesome kid-grifter (played by Jimmy Baird), giving the local police guff and his upright, serious father (Joseph Schildkraut) so much tsuris for not applying his mathematical gifts to rabbinical studies like his older brother. Rothstein (eventually played by David Janssen) would rather calculate odds and gamble, and eventually, partnering first with a neighborhood pal (Mickey Rooney) on booking centers and poker networks and then with "Big Tim" O'Brien (Jack Carson) on casinos and bigger game.

The film is a little vague on what made Rothstein so successful, other than a careful sizing up of the percentages, making sure that he got his cut and finding strategies that would either undercut the pay-out to his partners or negotiate deals that would have lucrative rewards to himself if his partners screwed up and have to sell out.

One such long con is the eventual prosecution of a tarnished cop (Dan O'Herlihy) who always made sure Rothstein got nicked from boyhood on. The obsession—at least in Jo Swerling's treatment (his last credit)—would prove to be his undoing, as well as a long-held desire to win a poker game with a royal flush. Everything else is as spur-of-the-moment as a dice-roll, and with as much attention as that requires, such as selling out his friends and a "fair-weather" marriage to a chorus girl (Dianne Foster).

That would take somebody extraordinarily charismatic to pull off, and the saddest thing about King of the Roaring 20's is that David Janssen, fine as an actor as he could be, is incapable of doing it. Always an interior kind of actor—as he proved in his long stretch as TV's "The Fugitive"—Janssen is more than capable of luring the audience in and winning their respect if not sympathy, without resorting to theatrics. But here the role is so repellant than no amount of casual inscrutability provokes any interest. And his lack of remorse—or much of anything beyond surface cool—inspires nothing but our own indifference. The audience reflects the performance.

It's too bad because the cast is flush with good character actors—Rooney, O'Herlihy, William Demarest, Keenan Wynn, Diana Dors (in a "blink-and-you'll-miss-her" role), and, one of my favorites, Jack Carson in his last role before his death. But, they're circling around an empty suit, and there's not even enough venom in Janssen's performance to inspire that he get his just desserts, which occurs in a contrivance that's too "on-the-nose." All the way around, the movie's just a bad bet.

Olde Review: Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) 

"I can no longer allow...Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion...and the international Communist conspiracy...to sap and impurify...
all of our precious bodily fluids!"

Stanley Kubrick was sitting, working out the first draft of a screen-play based on the nuclear thriller "Red Alert" by Peter George, when he came to a scene in which the President of the United States gives out secret information to the Russians in order that they may stop a squad of U.S. B-52's before they can drop their nuclear payload on the USSR and instigate world-wide destruction. Kubrick decided to throw it out because audiences would laugh at such an implausible occurrence. But, as he went along, Kubrick found himself throwing away more and more important plot developments, and slowly peeling away his story.

A fine story it was, too. A lower echelon general goes mad and mis-uses a government-approved contingency plan that would allow him to make nuclear war decisions in the event that Washington D.C. were destroyed. It is up to the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stop the General and obtain the code that will stop the B-52 attack on Russia.

Kubrick solved his dilemma with an almost suicidally daring decision—to treat this thriller as a comedy, a nightmare-comedy where the grins are the same as produced by rigor mortis. So, have the mad general attack Russia because of their plot to fluoridate our waters and turn the men impotent. Turn the B-52 commander into a Stetson-sporting "Hot Damn!" baboon. Make the head of the Joint Chiefs a gravel-voiced reactionary and a sex maniac. And turn almost every communication device in the film against them. Then turn the title into Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

This decision let Kubrick have his cake and eat it, too, for not only is Strangelove funny, but it is, at the same time, the skillfully realized edge-of-your-seat thriller it originally was. And the comedy aspects cast a realization of what an insane situation the nuclear "stand-off" is. Despite the characterizations, Kubrick managed to pull to present a completely factual account of a possible nuclear accident, right down to the equipment in the B-52's. It is all plausible no matter how broadly drawn the characters (and the Air Force disclaimer at the beginning of the film only adds fuel to this argument). As is Kubrick's style, the most horrendous occurrences will happen and Kubrick will sit back and watch, for his films, by this time in his career, had become cold observations taken, as some have commented, from the view of some extra-terrestrial life, not human, and unmoved by what he sees...with a definite slant, but without a heart.*

And so the comedy bill in 130 Kane is a full one--a perverse comedy of warmth and sweetness and a perverse comedy of cold and destruction--and both excellent in each other's way.

Broadcast on KCMU on Januray 7th, 1977

* That's a pretty tortured last 'graph, and I think I put it there just to have that final statement contrasting Young Frankenstein and Dr. Strangelove—the films were paired together on that night's double-bill.

I no longer think Dr. Strangelove is cold. I think it presents the case and lets the viewer decide. But that stratagem is ham-strung by Kubrick's decision to make it a comedy (he felt that it was going to be laughable no matter what he did, so making it a romp would make it, at the least, entertaining, all the hewing to fact is for naught if you have an audience resenting the lecture). But the best part of Dr. Strangelove is the coda, where plans are made to maintain the status quo, despite that policy already having lead mankind down the path of total annihilation. The scenarists in power take the situation and find out how to make the best of it (usually for them), completely devoid of accountability and conscience or any sense of responsibility for its part in the disaster. It's all about self-justification. 

And all it takes is one mad man to set the intricate death-trap in motion.

Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is timeless.

And should be required viewing every election year.

Nixon's "War-Room" from Zack Snyder's Watchmen (2009)

Battle Circus

Battle Circus (Richard Brooks, 1953) You don't get very far along in Battle Circus before you realize that it is actually, basically M*A*S*H (the 1970 movie, the novel it was based on, and, ultimately, the television series based on it), but without the 1960's counter-culture sensibility of the Robert Altman film. As the P.A. announcements would say "Follow the exploits of some zany Mobile Army Surgeons, cutting up and cutting loose, laughing and loving their way through Korea, dodging bombs and commitments, while passing the penicillin and morphine, but not the 'Mary-Jane.' That is all" (and that last part would be "Bogarting"). 

 

There's even a little flaunting of authority to go along the way, what with Humphrey Bogart as a less-than-regular-Army surgeon, who takes a lot of pride in his meatball-surgery but not a lot of guff from the higher-in-rank. You could almost imagine Richard Hooker, Ring Lardner, jr. and Larry Gelbart writing this stuff, if not, in fact, being inspired from it. It's like there's a pool of Korean War Army hospital stories that everybody is drawing from.

But, Battle Circus came first, and was in production while the war was still going on. Focusing on the arrival of Nurse Lt. Ruth McGara (June Allyson) to the MASH 8666 unit near the front lines, she has to learn her way through the no-better-than-camping conditions, the closeness of the battles, the harrowing work on wounded soldiers on a seemingly endless supply being choppered in, and the "bailing-wire-and-spit" resourcefulness of the unit in tending to the wounded but also the Korean villages caught in the cross-fire.

Then, there's the relations in the camp. Nerves are frayed, but the only way to cure those are to drown them in alcohol. Chief among those patients is Chief Surgeon Maj. Jed Webbe (Bogart), meticulous in the OR but erratic anywhere else. Warned of his tendency to think of breaking hearts as minor surgery, McGara keeps him at scalpel's length. But Webbe, being a brilliant surgeon, has a way of getting under your skin.

When one of the village children is in need of a delicate open heart surgery, she entreats the Camp Commander, Lt. Col. Hilary Walters (Robert Keith) who refuses, due to the man-hours and supplies such a procedure would drain on the already strapped base. But, Webbe knows his way around a heart and goes against the rules and performs the surgery anyway, despite the consequences, winning McGara's regard...and her own heart.

Webbe has a way of going against the grain. When blood supplies are needed at a nearby outpost, he convinces their chief helicopter pilot (William Campbell) to risk taking him there during a bad storm, barely making it, and when they return, going on a bender that Walters tells him it may be the last straw, threatening his career in the Army and probably stateside unless he sobers up. Good thing he stays, because at some point, the colonel takes a bullet, and Webbe has to take command, in a particularly hazardous re-deployment to another site (with some pretty tricky jeep maneuvers down precipitous hills that are done for real, no dummies, and the slipperiest of brakes).

So, who's "Radar?" That would be Keenan Wynn's Sgt. Orvill Statt (nice name in a hospital), loyal, unquestioning, and extraordinarily gifted in the "mother-of-inventions" department. He makes the camp work, seemingly by himself, and if you need a jeep repaired, a route planned, a supply filled, or an orderly on stand-by, he's your man.

Nurse McGara has a tough time adjusting to the craziness, but when a North Korean prisoner is being operated on and pulls a grenade (I think that was on the TV series at least twice), she's able to be disarming, earning the company's respect...and a scar...for her efforts. She wins her stripes in the community, if not from the Army. And it makes the flirtatious banter between Allyson (who's quite good, although I've always found a bit creepy) and Bogart (never one for too light a touch, but who acquits himself well) turn more serious as ties bind and wounds heal.

Richard Brooks wrote and directed Battle Circus from a story by Allen Rivkin and Laura Kerr and Bogart was attracted to the mixture of drama, action, romance and comedy. But, he wasn't entirely happy with the result, falling out with the director with whom he made Deadline-U.S.A. Perhaps it's because Brooks has mostly been a very deliberate, even heavy-handed, director, who, when he sets out to make a joke, does so without much subtlety, and was always more successful when it was sub-text rather than front and center. His subject matter could be controversial and boundary-pushing, but his approach to it rarely was. He was good at action (as movies like The Professionals and Bite the Bullet proved), but seemed to think little of it, aspiring to bigger (and big "I" important) themes that he pushed all too leadenly. Richard Brooks could be quite good, but rarely great. It's why Battle Circus is largely forgotten, while M*A*S*H stole the play-book, and lingers on.