Green Fire

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day

Green Fire (Andrew Marton, 1954) 

"...never agree to a role before reading the script."

Grace Kelly

"I had the misfortune to being in the only really bad movie that Grace ever made." 

Stewart Granger

Señor Rian Mitchell (Stewart Granger) is a miner entrepreneur, a man who "looks like he's done things and been places." On one particularly eventful day he's digging around an abandoned mine high in the South American mountains somewhere in Colombia, when he finds a green rock more than the size of his fist, then, making his way from the mine, he's attacked by bandito's, kills one, is clobbered by another, pushed off a cliff, and then nearly attacked by a jaguar, but is saved by a sharp-shooting Spanish monk just in the nick of time. He's done things, alright. But, first impressions say he's had things done TO him!

The "fastest friar in the South" tends to Mitchell's wounds as best he can for the journey off the mountain and takes him to the nearest outpost, the Knowland coffee plantation, home to Catherine (Grace Kelly) and her brother Donald (John Ericson). Tended to by the generosity of the Knowlands and the servitude of their workers, Mitchell makes a quick recovery, regaining consciousness after only a day of bed's rest. He rewards this hospitality by saying he's got to catch the next boat up the river and wanting to find his pants because he has something very valuable in them...like...his car-keys (Yeah, that's it. The car-keys!). Ignoring everyone's protests, Mitchell hurries up and suits up.

He's interrupted by his savior, Father Ripero (Robert Tafur), who lets him know that he found a "valuable ore deposit" while going through his trousers. Mitchell assures him that it's nothing by lying through his teeth and the priest then informs him that he, too, once found the legendary emerald mine, Carrero, once worked by the conquistadors, but covered it up and kept it secret because 1) he's a priest and 2) he knew such riches would only lead to greed, lust, gluttony and the other deadly sins before everyone got tired out and turned to sloth. He then tells Mitchell to say three "hail Mary's" for lying to him. Mitchell just wants to get on the boat, but he tells Ripero he'll back for the emeralds and that the gluttony and lust stuff sound pretty good, too.

The Knowland coffee plantation, located just on the border of a Colombia matte painting.

Mitchell gets back to his business' base, just in time to find out that his partner, Vic Leonard (Paul Douglas) has quit in frustration after twelve years. Mitchell tries, to no avail, to get him to stay, but when the boat is delayed leaving Vic finds Mitchell at a bar, proceeds to get drunk, miss his boat, and Mitchell gambles the funds from the refunded ticket to set up an expedition to the mine and start a mining operation. Vic is mad, but Mitchell convinces him that their efforts will soon pay off.

Vic and Mitchell's boat-trip upriver hits port not too far from the Knowlands'. After a bit of local difficulty, they assemble a work-crew and travel to the mountains to begin work. But, they're under the watchful eye of the bandit leader, El Moro (Murvyn Vye) and he's just as interested in a fortune in emeralds as Mitchell and Vic are. Things become contentious, especially when El Moro tries to sabotage things to discourage the miners from staying, leaving him to collect the spoils. Concurrently, Mitchell and Catherine continue a building interest that heats up when she invites Mitchell and Vic to dinner at the plantation.

Things start to sour in the romance department, when a sudden tunnel collapse halts operations before the emerald deposits are found. Desperate and just-plain-greedy, Mitchell then influences Donald Knowland to lend money and laborers to the mining effort and takes him on as a partner. This puts Catherine in high dudgeon, as the plantation is already short of help to produce a successful harvest. When news of Mitchell's chicanery makes it to Vic, he quits in disgust and offers help to Catherine, whom she takes on as a partner. Trouble is, Vic is also in love with Catherine.

If that doesn't complicate things, brother Donald is killed in a boulder-fall, just as he's discovered the long-sought-after emerald deposits. Mining efforts begin in earnest, but no one is celebrating, especially at the Knowland plantation, where after the death of her brother, the plantation is threatened with flooding due to the mining efforts, putting Catherine's life and livelihood at risk. Mitchell becomes a pariah due to myopic efforts to strike it rich. Maybe he should visit that priest...say a few hundred "Hail Mary's."

You look at Andrew Marton's IMDB page and it's incredible. He did second unit work on some of the biggest movies—where the second unit work was frequently the best part of the picture—and his long string of directing credits—including King Solomon's Mines—shows an inclination towards the exotic with lots of location work spent in far-flung lands and underwater. And he delivers on some good action with explosions and gun-fights amid precipitous locations.

But, the script—by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts (they wrote the classic, over-the-top White Heat!) is one of those "write me a Clark Gable movie" concoctions where the star is a bad-boy who has to go from a bastard to the side of virtue and have you on his side from the first reel, despite whatever boorishness he displays. That's not Stewart Granger. Granger could play "rogue," but there is always a veneer of civility to it, and Grace Kelly plays one of those poor creations who reluctantly falls for the bad boy against all signs pointing to the obvious that it's a bad match. Kelly can play "sly" and she can play "doormats" (as long as they wise up by the end), but she rarely was good at conveying bad taste.

And the script lets both actors down. It delivers exotic and it delivers last-minute tension and action, but motivations are mighty light and the resulting actions emanating from them are bewildering. It's drama for the sake of drama that merely gets the job done so they can turn up the house-lights. But, a movie shouldn't make you grateful for the occasion.

Clash By Night

Clash By Night (Fritz Lang, 1952) Interesting. Fritz Lang directing Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan and Marilyn Monroe in an adaptation of a play by Clifford Odets (produced on stage by Billy Rose!). Talk about clashes. The events take place in a fishing town and director Lang gets a lot of mileage with various shots of Nature—seals, gulls and a violently crashing surf—drawing parallels between the various top-feeders trying to take advantage of the spoils of the fishing fleet's daily labors. They're scavengers of opportunities and Lang keeps the beasts, both on land and sea, in the same universe, making a far more direct and poetic pictorial comment on the squalid life in town than any amount of purple prose Odets can provide.

Oh. And watch out for the nets. They come in all shapes and sizes and the guys casting them have teeth, too. You just don't see them immediately.

Mae Doyle (Stanwyck) comes back to Monterey, after years on the road, to move back into the family house with her brother (Keith Andes). "Home is where you come when you run out of other places," she snarls. But her purpose is not to settle down so much as to lick wounds. Her search for a better, easier life than working in a cannery (like Monroe's Peggy) or marrying a fisherman and raising kids has proven a bitter disappointment. She slinks back into town ("Home is where you go when you run out of places") and word gets 'round that Joe's sister's back, which attracts the attention of Jerry D'Amato (Douglas), a bachelor-fisherman living with his widowed father (Silvio Minciotti) and sleazy Uncle Vince (J. Carroll Naish). Mae and Jerry start seeing each other, but she rejects any advances he makes, telling him he doesn't even know her, "what kind of animal I am.  Do I have fangs?  Do I purr?"  

He takes her to meet his friend Earl (Robert Ryan), whom Jerry describes as "in the movie business;" He runs the projector at the local bijou. Earl's one piece of work. A sour drinker, married to a vaudeville dancer, he'll tell you all about what's wrong with women to your date. "Take any six of them. Throw them up in the air. The one who sticks to the ceiling, I like."* Mae is repulsed, but Jerry is still loyal to Earl, even though he'll talk bad about his friend behind his back.  "Jerry's the salt of the Earth—but he's not the right seasoning for you." (Ugh. Odets) Again, Mae's reaction to Earl is to be repulsed, which sends her right into the arms of Jerry, and any previous objections she had to marrying him are suddenly forgotten. Before long, they're hitched and have a daughter, which is upsetting to Jerry's opportunistic Uncle Vince, who will never put up with anything that interrupts his mooching lifestyle. Jerry ends up throwing him out.

But, Mae is still restless, and complications ensue that tie back to life in the animal kingdom, and the charm of aggressive males.  Because the movie then starts to take place solely at night, there are those that will call this a "film noir," the genre most commonly associated with gangsters, surly private eyes, never-spoken-of family secrets, and the evil impulses of men. Got the last one right, as the worst of people gets the better of others. But, the film noir genre is less prominent than the soap opera one, and it doesn't help that the material is sometimes eye-rollingly colorful. Still, the cast is uniformly excellent, and Lang's hand is sure, and makes puts everything in the proper perspective.

* This is one of the problems I have with Odets as a writer: that sentiment must mean something—at least to Odets—but it makes no sense to the rest of humanity, which is supposed to be his audience. I suppose it means that Earl doesn't like any woman; there's a better way to say it, I'm sure. But then I don't like Odets much—take any six of his works. Throw them up in the air. The one that sticks to reality, I like.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady

A Big Hand for the Little Lady (Fielder Cook,1966) This entertaining little gambling drama came out of a television presentation—its director, Fielder Cook, was one of the pioneer directors of live television, and one of the few to stick to the medium, only occasionally making a film for the movie studios, finding them more restricting. The source was a drama for "The Dupont Show of the Week" entitled "Big Deal in Laredo" and starring Walter Matthau, Teresa Wright and Zachary Scott. It was written by Sidney Carroll who wrote the screenplay for The Hustler, and knew a thing or two about the mind-games while playing games.

It is the day of the "big" poker game in Laredo, Texas. The richest men in the state all gather on this particular day for a high-stakes game that is legendary throughout the state, having taken place over sixteen years. Undertaker Benson Tropp (Charles Bickford) careens through the Texas territory in his horse-drawn hearse, picking up the participants: lawyer Otto Habershaw (Kevin McCarthy), who abandons a closing argument in a murder trial to make the game; cattle-baron Henry Drummond (Jason Robards) skips out on his daughter's wedding. When the three get to Sam's saloon in Laredo, they are joined by Jesse Buford (John Qualen) and Dennis Wilcox (Robert Middleton) and convene to the backroom of Sam's, leaving the bar-flies to hang out and conjecture about what might be happening behind the door of the invitation-only exclusive "big game."

Not much it turns out. The millionaires all know each other and the game proceeds without many changes except the heighth of the chips.

Then, as they are wont to do, a stranger comes into town. Meredith (Henry Fonda) is moving with his family—his wife Mary (Joanne Woodward) and son Jackie (Gerald Michenaud)—to buy a house and property in the neighboring county, but a busted wagon wheel keeps them put in Laredo until the blacksmith can repair it. They come to the crowded saloon to pass the time until they can get on the trail again.

The prim and proper family makes an odd contrast to the rough and tumble saloon dwellers, but Meredith seems more comfortable in the honky-tonk, and is genuinely interested in the poker game going on in the backroom when he gets wind of it. He gets "the gambler's itch" and pretty soon, he's eyeing the families' stakes for the $500 to buy in. Mary argues with her husband that they've scrimped and saved for a long time for the stake and she doesn't want him risking it. Then, there's his gambling addiction, which he's resisted long enough for them to get that stake. But, that wagon-wheel needs fixing and if they just get a little more...

The regulars at the poker table, particularly Drummond, object to Meredith joining, but Habershaw, taken with Mary, presses the others to let Meredith join the game. 

Things start out okay—Meredith is only a passable poker player—but pretty soon, he's hooked and he starts to lose. He becomes increasingly agitated and starts looking the worse for wear. While Mary frets in the saloon, Meredith is sweating through some mediocre hands until he gets a hand that he knows he can win, but he doesn't have the money to meet Drummond's raised bet. The strain causes Meredith to collapse, stricken.

The town doctor (Burgess Meredith) is called, and he orders Meredith taken out of the room and back to his office for examination, leaving Mary in the situation to play the hand and either lose or keep the family farm. It does not bode well when she turns to Drummond and asks politely "How do you play this game?" 

How does she get out of it? How does she play the hand without the collateral funds to make a bet? How will she buy the farm...without buying the farm?

This is where A Big Hand for the Little Lady really gets interesting...and entertaining. Everything that has gone before is merely a set-up for the rest of the movie and how "the hand she is dealt" plays out.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady crosses a couple of genres. It is, on the surface, a western, that form that allows the problems of today to be seen in a silvered mirror of the past, making the issues complicated in today's world, simpler and deconstructed and standing out in fine relief. It is, in some instances, a comedy, in how it sets up a male-female tension. And it is a satire of how men can be "played," especially by forces that may be outside of their comfort zones.

But, it is also something of a feminist tract (Don't run away, boys, the film is entertaining) and might serve as an audio-visual aid to "The Feminine Mystique," illustrating the secret power of women (not so much hidden, but societally repressed) in a world dominated by subjugating men. It is fascinating to behold not only in a western, but also in something so light (when its equivalent is present in the darker, more resolute—and, one has to admit "camp"—Johnny Guitar). That is part of the delight of the construction and the big pay-out for A Big Hand for the Little Lady.

A Letter to Three Wives

A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949) One of the better movies of Mankiewicz's career of well-made films. This one was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay (Mankiewicz was directly responsible for the latter two, and indeed, for the first, although the producer team usually gets the laurels). None of the actors were nominated, although there are many very subtle and intricate performances throughout, with little touches of brilliance that go beyond the dialogue (which, in itself, is subtle and brilliant).

Based on a Cosmopolitan story, the film owes its roots to The Women, but tops it in terms of psychology and structure, while still maintaining that film's level of cattiness.

That is provided by the opening narration by one Addie Ross (voiced by Celeste Holm in a creepy "know-it-all" tone that reminded me of the disembodied voice-overs of "Desperate Housewives"). She sets the scene—and the motion picture—by moving away from the New York suburb from her "friends" Deborah Bishop (Jeanne Crain), Rita Phipps (Ann Southern), and Lora Mae Hollingsway (Linda Darnell), and leaving them all a "good-bye" note, the dear thing, on the very day all three women are out of town helping underprivileged children at a day-camp.

Thoughtful, but not in a good way. Scheming, more like it. The letter from Addie (known for always doing "the right thing at the right time") has a zinger of a farewell—informing the three that she has taken one of their husbands with her.  And to rub salt in the wound, she doesn't even tell them which one.

Bitch.

All three husbands (Jeffrey Lynn, Kirk Douglas and Paul Douglas, respectively) had been acting a little reserved and distant that morning, off to their little pursuits, knowing full well the wives are doing some community service that they're committed to. They'll be gone all day, leaving the men to whatever rendezvous awaits them. They hadn't given it a second thought before. Now, it's all they can think about. 

Darnell, Southern and Crain look at the last telephone they'll see all day.

As the women move forward to that day-camp across the lake, all they can do is move backwards and reminisce about their marriages, what's right and what's wrong (and one of the things that's wrong they all share—their husbands think the world of Addie Ross). All afternoon, when they should be thinking of others, they are at their most self-absorbed. There's not even a pay-phone (pay-phone? Yes, kids, there was such a thing) out at that camp for them to ring home in the hope someone answers.

They all have their issues: Deborah met husband Brad during the war and had no ties to his small-town roots. She was an outsider who inherited the Phipp's, the Hollingsway's...and Addie. They were all chummy and comfortable and Deborah is anything but...wanting to make a good impression, but knowing she has a lot of time and history to make up. Her first "coming-out" get-together with the couples at "the club" does not go well—her dress is none-too-stylish (although Rita does some alterations that are altogether flimsy) and to loosen up, she gets a little tipsy. Then, that galoot of a husband, Brad, decides to whirl her around the dance floor, creating one of Mankiewicz's few attempts at enhanced POV.

Deborah on the dance floor...

Darnell, Ford, Southern and Douglas in an alcoholic haze.

With such an inferiority complex, she's sure Brad's the straying husband. But Rita has her doubts and self-doubts, as well. She's a writer of soapy radio dramas while husband George is an English teacher, who makes no secret of his contempt for the "low-writing" that suffices as entertainment these days. Mankiewicz throws in some sharp barbs about pablum and sponsored writing, but of the three, the only thing she's concerned about is her time spent away from George doing constant re-writes at the behest of the soap-peddlers. She doesn't consider the time that he spends away grading papers.

Then there's Lora Mae—gorgeous, smart, calculating. She remembers her days playing the field with all the good prospects in town. And those aren't shoulder-pads in the get-ups she wears on her many dates so much as chips on her shoulders. Lora Mae grew up on the wrong side of the tracks...and very close to them, as they trains rumble by, threatening the plates several times a night. There, she squabbles with her Irish mother (Connie Gilchrist) and her best friend Sadie (Thelma Ritter, her third movie but still uncredited)—who also happens to be the Phipps' maid. She plays the field, but it appears to be narrowing to her divorced, rough-hewn, older boss Porter Hollingsway (Paul Douglas, his first big role after being a Broadway success in "Born Yesterday"). He's bitter, she's passive-aggressive and their conversations are like verbal boxing matches.

Sisterly conflict (with Thelma Ritter sparring)

Southern and Douglas don't have much chemistry and clashing acting styles—they barely seem like a couple. Crain and Lynn don't register much together—he's barely around (dramatic music here) and is such a non-entity he's not missed. But sparks fly between Douglas and Darnell, despite the fact that they're so mis-matched; he's older and charmless and she's fiery and gorgeous, they both gotten what they want out of the marriage, but neither one of them is satisfied or happy and the two actors make the most of their interplay—they crackle and spit and even with their mouths shut and the focus on others, their eyes throw daggers at each other. It was Douglas' film debut...and maybe he overplays it a bit...but the scenes between him and Darnell make you sit up and take notice.

So who's the philandering husband? Not saying. From the writer-director perspective synching with the wives', it could be any of them, and Mankiewicz (the writer) has fun dropping clues and suggestions. It will keep you guessing...except that Mankiewicz crafted a clever soap-opera. The next year, he would oversee his masterpiece—All About Eve.