Moonfleet (1955)

Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1955) Fritz Lang's only film in Cinemascope—a format he famously described as only good for shooting "snakes and funerals" (well, he says it in Contempt, anyway!). 

 

"Moonfleet" was a popular novel published in 1898 and was considered a classic of literature—on a par with Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island"—but not so much in the U.S. Producer John Houseman, working at M-G-M, maybe influenced by the success of Disney's 1950 version of Stevenson's classic, wedged in Moonfleet between prestige pictures, but on a limited budget—no ocean scenes, no tall ships, no cluttered sword-riots, no piratey aspects that required crowds and location work. Lang, who actually preferred studio work over the capricious lighting of location scenes, was hired two weeks before shooting started and hadn't worked at M-G-M since his first film in America, the 1936 production of Fury. The script had aspects of the novel, but didn't follow it too closely, taking the novel's hero and making him a child, as opposed to the young man of the novel, who depends on an older mercenary smuggler to pursue his quest of a legendary diamond belonging to the pirate Blackbeard.

That's one way to use the Cinemascope frame.

 

Well, it's "Redbeard" in the movie (public domain issues?). Young John Mohune (Jon Whiteley) is sent by his dying mother to the town of Moonfleet, site of the original Mohune estate, to seek out a man with whom she had a past, Jeremy Fox (Stewart Granger). Exhausted by his travel, young John wakes up in a tavern surrounded by ruffians—including Dan Seymour and Jack Elam—who search him and find a letter from the boy's mother, appointing Fox as John's guardian. It's convenient because Fox just happens to be the man now occupying the Mohune manse.

It's inconvenient because, when Fox hears this, he wants nothing to do with the boy, being a man of the world and all. But, he does acknowledge knowing the mother, being fond of her, and that he and the boy may have more in common than Fox will acknowledge—like the boy's nightmares of being attacked by dogs echoing the scars on Fox's back from such an attack while he was running from the Mohune house so many years ago. Probably as many years as the boy's been alive, but the film skirts this issue, while hinting that it's probably true. Still, he plans to have the boy sent packing in the morning, while he continues on to Moonfleet.

 

He, of course, hasn't reckoned with the boy being a Mohune, and a tenacious one at that. The boy manages to make his escape and, with the help of some locals, make his way back to his family's estate, where he finds Fox in mid-debauch, hosting several drunken lords, complete with entertainment by a gypsy dancer (Liliane Montevecchi). Young John insists he won't be sent away this time and that he intends to stay with Fox as per his mother's wishes. Fox is impressed by the boy, but secretly intends to send him away to the colonies on the next boat. When Fox's mistress Mrs. Minton (Viveca Lindfors) accuses Fox of his actions towards John as being proof of his continuing love for the boy's mother, he tells her that, in that case, she can leave on the same boat with him.

The next day, John attends church services, where he is informed—via a fiery sermon about superstition—that the villagers fear that the spirit of the pirate Red Beard, who was a Mohune, is haunting the church graveyard looking for the diamond that made him renounce his military career and become a pirate. While walking the grounds that night, John falls into an open grave that leads to the catacombs under the church full of broken caskets and the bones of the departed. But Fox's pirates come down there, too, looking for potential riches, and the boy finds a locket while hiding away from sight.

When rescued from the catacombs by Fox, his band is ready to slit the boy's throat for anything the kid might have found, and when Fox defends the boy, the pirates—being pirates—turn against him. This puts Fox in a difficult position—he is being challenged by his own band at the same time he's trying to finagle a deal with the duplicitous magistrate Lord Ashwood (venomed by George Sanders, as only George Sanders can) and his equally devious wife (played by the ever-delightful Joan Greenwood in her first American role).

That locket John has snatched will contain  a secret that must be decoded and from there, Fox and friend must evade his former co-conspirators, as well as the Ashwoods, and the authorities to find the diamond and extricate it from its hiding place smack-dab in the middle of a military prison, even while they're considered wanted fugitives. This gives plenty of opportunity for composer Miklós Rózsa to create bustling tension music (which sounds like it's a dress rehearsal for his score for Ben-Hur), while the duo put themselves directly in harms way to achieve their goals.

It's not the novel—which shares the diamond and the locket and the clues, and that's about it—but Lang makes the most out of the material scraped from the book to accommodate Granger's starring persona, while directing it from the vantage of a child's point of view, and enveloping it in a child's nightmare of Gothic structures and macabre situations, with a mentor who is as questionable a father-figure as one could encounter (outside of Dickens). Maybe that's why it never found an audience—too "mature" for kids, too cynical for adults, and not "family-friendly"—which led Houseman to write: "All too often, in those days, I felt that the director was receiving credit for the producer's work. This time (Lang) was taking the blame for the producer's errors." Hard to believe that—with all of his fanciful German work, Moonfleet was the most expensive film, Lang ever worked on.

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.

King Solomon's Mines (1950)

King Solomon's Mines (Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton, 1950) The classic H. Rider Haggard novel, the first in the adventures of Allan Quatermain* has been filmed several times,** but this one is the best known, earning several Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture) and inspiring all sorts of African-set adventures throughout the '50's.

This version boasts dazzling Technicolor cinematography as well as a vast array of wild-life photography including an impressive stampede of zebras, gazelles, even giraffes that threaten to trample the explorers mid-way through their travels to find the husband of Elizabeth Curtis (Deborah Kerr) who has been lost in unexplored Africa (unexplored by whites, that is). It also featured Stewart Granger (he was known as James Stewart in Britain, but changed it so as not to be confused with the American actor) as Quatermain, who's a bit of a stiff, but still manages to be a commanding presence, as he's always the "smartest guy on the veldt."

But, for all the talk of the mines, there is very little time spent in them, as it is used (as in the book) as a trap to contain the colonialists while royal political struggles are going on outside. Where in the novel the Brits are trapped for days, they almost escape immediately in the film (some trap—but a lot of time-compression goes on in the film as a daunting trek seems to take no time at all, with not much wear on the explorers—nobody so much as rips a shirt).

Another worrisome aspect is the sense of a time; there is none. Despite the presence of pith helmets and stabs at period dress, there is no indication that the film is going on in the 19th rather than the 20th century. In fact, Haggard's novel and Quatermain's character are a bit more advanced than the film is willing to go, taking out any references to an interracial romance in the party and Quatermain's expression, though condescending, of admiration for some natives over Europeans.*** 

This one is for the exotic locales and for the testy romance that occurs between Curtis and Quatermain (Curtis is a man looking for his brother in Haggard's novel and needless to say there isn't any romance!). But it would be interesting to revisit the story, make it truer to the source—and that includes not making it an "Indiana Jones" ride as in the 1985 film. I'd also like to see a film of Haggard's combining of his two great creations, "She and Allan." One would hope that they'd be better than this. 

* That's how you spell it, though not necessarily how you pronounce it. Among other egregious liberties taken with the character, the film adaptation of Alan Moore's "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" featured the character (played by Sean Connery) and a misspelling of his name as "Quartermain." 

** Including the heinous two-part version done for laughs by the Golan-Globus studios that featured Richard Chamberlain as an Indiana Jones re-write of the character, and Sharon Stone moments before she would become a star. 

*** One other good thing about it (as revealed in an IMDB thread written by a native Kenyan) is that the languages are accurate swahili and kikuyu—spoken well by Granger—and that members of the indigenous tribes were used for the African parts.

The Last Hunt

The Last Hunt (Richard Brooks, 1956) Writer-director Brooks followed up his urban drama Blackboard Jungle with this film far afield of JD's and ghetto schools, out into the wide open spaces. But people are still being buffaloed.

Stewart Granger plays Sandy McKenzie, a hunter sick of killing and looking to get out and do something else. He's approached by Charlie Gilson (Robert Taylor) with a business proposition—going into the buffalo pelt business. It's too tempting for the expert marksman (he has a sight on his rifle) to pass up. The beasts are a renewable resource, after all, and their hides bring in a sizable profit from the trading companies, guaranteeing that Sandy can retire. And they're so plentiful on the plains, the volume of them will make a quick killing in greenbacks, and they'll make a fine trading material for the natives to provide food, horses and supplies. There's no down-side. The two set out with the company of leathery skinner Woodfoot (Lloyd Nolan, given a chance to play something beyond his dependable world-weary professional) and half-native apprentice Jimmy O'Brien (Russ Tamblyn, whiter than white) to the wilds of what-will-soon-be South Dakota to make a considerable killing. 

Things go well for awhile.  It becomes a competition between the two hunters over who can drop the most beasts. And Gilson isn't content until he has wiped out entire herds. The movie encapsulates the wholesale slaughter of what used to constitute rivers of beef across the plains—an example of the profilgate short-sightedness of the western expansion, of the desire to make a fast buck, even while littering the landscape with corpses.

But the competitiveness turns to needling, more than knives get under skins, and the two hunters begin bickering, Gilson riding McKenzie and the other keeping his own simmering counsel. It's clear their motivations are incompatible. Things come to a head when Gilson's personal ambitions run afoul of anybody but himself to an increasing degree, first irritating Gilson by killing a local hunting party—he doesn't like the competition—and taking possession of the surviving woman (Debra Paget, whiter than white) and her son, and then horrifying the local natives by taking down and skinning a white buffalo, sacred to the tribe. 

Granger is properly (and typically, for his roles) stalwart, but Taylor gets the rare opportunity to play a genuine asshole, a portrayal he seems to relish as it's done with more energy than he exhibited in his more heroic roles in such films as Quo Vadis?, Ivanhoe, and Knights of the Round Table. He certainly doesn't try to hedge his character's avarice by trying to make him in any way sympathetic. It's also good to see Lloyd Nolan in a character part of some distance from his crusty, trusty Irishman (at least he's not cast as Native). It's Brooks at his best (despite the casting compromises), bringing a subtle message underneath the black and white morality on the surface.

Debra Paget's "Native Girl" doesn't even have a name.