The Search (1948)

The Search (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) "Ich weiss nicht" It's the only thing that comes out of the mouth of a small Czech boy (Ivan Jandl), a refugee from a concentration camp, now in post-war Germany. He is mostly silent and that makes it hard for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to identify him and try to reunite him with family. His only mark of identification is an arm tattoo from Auschwitz—A24328. All the UNRRA staff can do is to keep him fed, clean, and safe...until something, or someone, turns up. Anything else would make looking for a needle in a haystack look easy. But, they keep trying. If no one turns up, the kids move to another location...maybe there, a miracle will happen.

But, they can't stop the kid's memories. When he gets put on a transport to go to another UNRRA site, the memories of the trip to Auschwitz kick in. Uniforms. Ambulances. Like the Nazis used. He and another kid bolt and when they get to the river, the other kid falls in and drowns. His body is found, as well as the cap of the Czech kid, so the assumption is both boys drowned.

But, the boy, Karel, is alive. And he makes his way through the ruined city scratching out an existence among the rubble and refuse.

Unbeknownst to him, his mother, Hanna Malik (Jarmila Novotna) has also survived the camps and is searching for him throughout the UNRRA facilities. And the chances of finding her boy are as unlikely as him finding her. At one Catholic orphanage, she finds that there's a young boy named Karel Malik...but the boy is not hers—he merely responded to the name when no one else did. She goes to find another facility and another chance at hope, finally arriving at the center where Karel was first staying, only to learn that he drowned during his escape. Hanna refuses to give up hope, even in the face of being presented Karel's cap found in the river.

Meanwhile, Karel has found something—a jeep. One being used by Army engineer Ralph Stevenson (Montgomery Clift). Ralph has seen these kids before, but this kid speaks no English, doesn't say anything, and "Steve" determines that he'll try and find out who he is and where he came from. Giving the kid the name "Jim," he sets him up in the billet he shares with Jerry Fisher (Wendell Corey), who's about to be sent back stateside and starts a rudimentary course on English. When Fisher's wife and kid visit, it jogs Karel/"Jim"'s memory that the last time he saw his mother was when they were segregated at Auschwitz, with one last kiss through the chain-link fence separating them. "Steve" concludes that the kid's mother is dead. But, he'll keep looking...and adopt the kid to bring him back to the States if all else fails.

That the two will be re-united is slim, but Zinnemann's film keeps teasing with close calls and missed chances that raise the stakes and increase the tension. It would be maddeningly Hollywood if it wasn't staged in the obvious hell-scape of post-war Germany and shot almost like a documentary (the crew consisted of merely ten Swiss technicians)...and if the performances by all concerned weren't so naturalistic that they feel lived in, rather than performed. It's Clift's first released movie—he'd already filmed Red River—and he's so loose and relaxed—always chewing gum—that you might confuse him for a regular G.I. that the camera just happened to find. Aline MacMahon as the most visible member of the UNRRA seems like a government drone, spouting platitudes, but keeping just enough reserve to keep the hopelessness at bay. Novotna and Jandl are both Czech—and Jandl really couldn't speak English when the movie's filming started, so Clift was teaching him for real—so, the film feels like a cross between a documentary and an Army Training Film. 

To think this was the film Zinnemann made after My Brother Talks to Horses! Those two films couldn't be more different in tone and verisimilitude, the first laden with studio artifice and ladled on saccharine and the second, lean and spare and natural, almost neorealist. The Search serves as the turning point of the director's career, creating something fast, cheap, and compelling, while not under the watchful eye of home studio M-G-M. It's one of those special movies that seems to subvert all expectations and turns into a classic despite all odds, and another one of those post-War films about trying to pick up the pieces and putting something back together...after the world has been torn asunder.

The Big Knife

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day

The Big Knife (Robert Aldrich, 1955) 

"Odets, where is thy sting?" George S. Kaufman 

How much you like this movie depends on how much you like Clifford Odets and his writing. 

Me, not so much. 

Clifford Odets has always grated on me, his writing seeming like a creative writing parody of Tennesee Williams. He's of the "cookie made out of arsenic" school,* where every metaphor is tortured and every character is an overwrought drama-queen, pontificating in the most flowery way possible their transparently obvious thoughts, often at the top of their lungs. Their world comes down to good and bad, the bad being moustache twirling scene-stealers and the good down-trodden martyrs. It's a theater-world as realistic as a proscenium arch and as subtle as projecting to the back of the house. 

The Big Knife is no better. An "exposé" of Hollywood corruption written in the '40's, but filmed in 1955—a decade saturated with industry self-loathing—the film suffers from its over the top theatricality. Robert Aldrich has never been the most tasteful of directors, but his stylishness with dreck has never been questioned. He can make chopped liver look like foie gras (even though it still tastes like chopped liver). Directing The Big Knife** (the year after directing the brutal, but terrific Kiss Me Deadly) he barely leaves the ornate living room of screen idol Charlie Castle, nee Charlie Cass (Jack Palance), well-payed but agonizing over signing a seven-year contract with a studio that might not be artistically fulfilling. At the time of the signing, he's artistically throwing himself into a boxing picture, so already his motivations are suspect. Mrs. Castle (Ida Lupino), recently separated from Castle, doesn't want him to sign (they're separated for Castle's philandering—what does she care?).

The reason Charlie's even considering signing is the hit-and-run accident that the studio has covered up to keep Castle's reputation with the public spot-less. And studio chief Stanley Shriner Hoff (Rod Steiger) is only too willing to spill the beans if Castle doesn't co-operate and limits his work to his studio. As a signing bonus the studio just might eliminate the only witness to the case (Shelley Winters).

Odets prided himself on being of the "Kitchen Sink" school, but here he expects you to feel sorry for the plight of the privileged boo-hooing through their silk handkerchiefs rather than tissue paper. By the time of writing "The Big Knife," Odets was making good money, so maybe it was more artistically fulfilling to write about his contemporaries "in the biz," than take on the troubles of Ma and Pa Average. He also has no problems with Charlie being a perpetual letch and philanderer, but "a sell-out?" Horrors! One might ask Frances Farmer her opinion of his choices. 

John Garfield, who was Odets' stage mouth-piece, played Castle on Broadway in 1949. But the role is beyond Jack Palance—he didn't yet have the polish to play (or be) a Hollywood leading-man, so he mostly just seethes and heaves himself around the room. Ida Lupino, one of the best actresses around, is reduced to soap opera sop work here. The only actors who seem able to cope with Odets' purple prose are Winters with a force of cluelessness and Steiger, who just powers his way through like a bull—no hesitations, no apologies, which works well for the character—a studio mogul of the Louis B. Mayer/Harry Cohn ferocity. 

The final act of the film is a mess of theatrical hysteria and misdirection that compresses a lot of story and reactions off-screen, while a running narrative informs us (or rather misinforms) about what all that hub-bub is upstairs. Perhaps Aldrich rushed through it to cut through the giggle factor, but the material is lumpen at any speed. You need a bigger knife than this movie's got to make it play.

 

* A bit "on-the-nose", that, as Odets wrote that line for The Sweet Smell of Success.

** I keep seeing The Big Knife being referred to as a film noir. Nah. Sure, it's got a gritty title, and it's filmed in black and white, and the souls are sordid and Aldrich directed noirs--but, this is as much a film noir as The Oscar is!