Reeling Backward: "Some Came Running" (1958)

"Some Came Running" is one of those films that seemed to have the pedigree for sure success. After "From Here to Eternity" revived Frank Sinatra's Hollywood career, with an Oscar win for his supporting performance in the adaptation of James Jones' hit debut novel, they re-teamed the author and actor.

It was a pretty common thing back in that era. If a film clicked, studios were happy to order up another version utilizing the same actors, writers, directors -- even stories so similar they were a virtual remake.

In some ways "Running" is an unofficial sequel to "Eternity," about a soldier who comes home after the war and has trouble fitting in with his hometown and family. Although here Sinatra isn't playing his hotheaded character from "Eternity," but something closer to Montgomery Clift's remote loner.

It's an interesting picture in several ways, but overall it's rather draggy and narratively discombobulated. At 2½ hours it unsuccessfully tried to cram too much of the book into the movie. (Arthur Sheekman and John Patrick wrote the script.) Which isn't surprising, given that Jones' sprawling novel tipped the scales in excess of 1,200 pages.

(Jones was not known for brevity. "Eternity" was 864 pages, depending on the printing; "The Thin Red Line," which has twice been adapted to the screen, was a relatively spare 510 pages.)

Sinatra plays Dave Hirsh, who just got out of the Army and wakes up on a bus as it's arriving in his hometown of Parkman, Indiana. (The city is fictional; the film was shot almost entirely in picturesque Madison.) He had no intention of going there, but won $5,500 in a high-stakes card game in Chicago that ended in violence. To save his skin, Dave's buddies put him on the bus, the voucher for the dough safely nestled in the crotch of his pants.

It's his first time home in 16 years. A lot has happened to Dave in those years, but Parkman hasn't changed at all.

It's still a seemingly idyllic place, with the town fathers organizing a huge Centennial celebration to mark the founding, but with a seedy underbelly poorly concealed. The teens dress and talk nice but drink and fool around; the local gossips can spread information about each other (true or not) faster than buzzing bees; Dave's brother Frank appears to be an upstanding businessman but struggles with a sham marriage and an attraction to his young assistant.

Dave and Frank don't get along. When their parents died Frank, who's quite a bit older, didn't want Dave messing up his impending marriage and placed him in a boarding school for charity orphans. Dave grew up rough, traveled around doing odd jobs, and made something of a name for himself as a writer, penning two books that were critical if not commercial successes. These included characterizations some felt were thinly disguised versions of town residents -- including Frank's shrew wife (Leora Dana).

So he returns to Parkman as something of a combination of the town's black sheep and conquering hero.

Played by the great character actor Arthur Kennedy, Frank doesn't quite know what to do about Dave's return. A glad-hander and smooth talker, Frank inherited his bustling jewelry store from his father-in-law, using it as the first of many stepping stones to respectability. One could easily imagine him running for mayor in another 10 years.

He's quite put out that Dave promptly deposited his poker winnings in "the other bank," aka not the one on whose board Frank was recently appointed. This was a deliberate act to needle his big brother -- though I'm a bit unclear on how Dave knows about Frank's doings. Anyway, the siblings quickly take to bickering, then non-communication.

Dave does fall in with some new people, though. He's annoyed at being forced into a dinner with Professor French (Larry Gates) and his daughter, Gwen (Martha Hyer), who's a high school English teacher and literary critic. Both Gwen and Dave smell an obvious set-up, trying to pair up the prodigal son with the old maid.

But in that way that only happens in movies, the two meet, clash, and within a day have decided they are irrevocably in love.

Or... not so much. Fouling up the works is Ginny Moorehead, an idiotic floozy whom Dave met in Chicago on the night he left. Apparently he charmed her, convinced her to join him, then promptly forgot all about her in his boozy blackout. He gives her money to return, but Ginny decides she's smitten and decides to hang around Parkman, quickly securing a job at a factory and a reputation around town.

An old boyfriend (Steve Peck) follows her, following Dave, stirring up trouble.

Ginny was one of Shirley MacLaine's earliest roles and the one that earned her first Oscar nomination. She's a compelling but cloying figure, dumb as a brick and always struggling to catch up with the whip-smart Dave. He tries everything he can to get rid of her, but eventually succumbs to her modest charms, setting up a love triangle.

Normally in this kind of movie the wayward hero eventually lays aside the bad habits -- drinking, gambling, self-doubt -- that are personified by Ginny and turns to a figure like Gwen who inspires his nobler instincts. Gwen even dusts off one of Dave's old stories and has it published in The Atlantic, reviving his prospects as a writer.

But that doesn't happen here. Gwen is mortified by Dave's exploits turning up in the local paper and chatter. When Ginny shows up in her classroom offering to step aside for the sake of Dave's happiness, Gwen is shocked to discover the man she loves associating with a dimwitted trollop. She promptly gives Dave the boot, and in one of his drunken binges offers to marry Ginny, which she joyfully accepts.

Dean Martin also turns up as Bama Dillert, a professional card player who befriends Dave and invites him to join in his traveling game of poker, making the tour to Indianapolis, Terre Haute and the like. It's a quintessential Dean role, a hard-drinking con man who never removes his garish hat and lives by his own internal moral code.

Bama is a charmer because he never tries to charm anyone, offering take-it-or-leave-it friendship to Dave and dismissing as "pigs" any woman who would tie him down -- which as far as he is concerned is just about all of them.

It was the first onscreen pairing of Sinatra and Martin, and more or less marked the start of the Rat Pack pictures. As much as I enjoyed Martin as Bama, his character is a prime candidate for culling in the adaption process. The same goes for Dave's niece, Dawn (Betty Lou Keim), who has many of the same problems with her father as Dave does, and starts to act out. Similar sentiments for Nancy Gates as Edith Barclay, Frank's employee and seductee, who should also have been written out.

Sinatra earned some of the best notices of his career for this performance, but I'm not a fan. He was not a particularly contemplative actor who could show you what's going on inside the character's head, and Dave's journey happens mostly on the interior. I can't help but think what a Brando or Montgomery Clift could have done with this part.

Director Vincente Minnelli doesn't help him out with paucity of close-up shots to help us see the turmoil. Perhaps his mind was more on "Gigi," which came out the same year and earned him the Academy Award for direction.

Minnelli seemed mostly interested in making the most of the film's CinemaScope visuals, with lush colors and complex camera techniques. The final sequence of the Centennial celebration, as Dave and Ginny are tracked as they walk through the crowd while being stalked by her Chicago beau, is reminiscent of the opening scene of "Touch of Evil," also from 1958. It's often cited by filmmakers and historians, including Martin Scorsese and Peter Bodanovich, as a watershed bit of cinematography. (William H. Daniels deserves some of the credit.)

Perhaps the decision to keep the camera farther away from the lead actor was intentional given the picture's romantic ambitions. I've written about this before, but physically Sinatra was the human equivalent of a "20-foot car." That's a vehicle that looks great far away or medium distance, but its dings and nicks show up more glaringly the closer you step to.

With his multiple scars, deformed ear and acne-pitted cheeks, Sinatra was no longer the baby-faced crooner who made the girls swoon. His hairline was rapidly fleeing, and despite the use of concealing makeup his balding crown shines prominently in many of the shots. By the following year he'd successfully transitioned into toupee acting.

Since I was often bored during the movie, I wondered exactly how old the character of Dave was supposed to be. Both Sinatra and Kennedy were in their early 40s when the movie was made, so the idea of one brother being significantly older doesn't hold much air. My guess is Dave is around 30, but with Sinatra's creaky looks and stiff acting he seems closer to 50.

"Some Came Running" the book was savaged by critics, though the movie fared better -- more than it deserved, I deem.

Video review: "Lawrence of Arabia: 50th Anniversary Edition"

“Nothing is written,” T.E. Lawrence famously says. But almost from the moment “Lawrence of Arabia” hit theaters in 1962, it seemed destined to become one of the most iconic films ever made.

It is by most reckonings the pinnacle of the epic movie-making impulse that surged in the 1950s and ‘60s – a grand, lush drama filled with exotic foreign trappings and a history-making tale to tell. It won a slew of awards, including the Best Picture Oscar, and deserved them all.

A restoration of director David Lean’s masterpiece was released in theaters in 1989 – one of the last films distributed in a 70mm print. Now, a new digital remastering from the original film negative has been completed for the movie’s 50th anniversary. After a brief theatrical run, it debuts in two Blu-ray collections.

The story is familiar to any serious film-lover: an oddball British lieutenant (Peter O’Toole) is plucked from obscurity during World War I to act as liaison to the disparate Arabic desert tribes, and ends up forging them into a united army that helps take down the Turkish Empire. As he becomes a famous and charismatic figure, Lawrence finds his sanity crumbling as his lust for power grows.

“Lawrence” has seen a number of video editions, but this represents its first time on Blu-ray. For comparison, I popped in my copy of the film from its 2001 DVD edition and then watched the same scenes on the new Blu-ray. The gap between the two was simply astonishing.

Of course, the image was much crisper and cleaner in the higher-resolution Blu-ray based on Sony’s 4K remastering. But what really struck me were the colors, which were dazzlingly vibrant in the new edition.
If you thought the golden sands and aching blue skies of the desert looked good before, you won’t believe how much they leap off the screen of the Blu-ray. When Lawrence first dons his white Arabic robes, it seemed like O’Toole was standing right before me.

Of course, it comes with a host of extra features – some seen before in previous editions, and some all-new. The highlight is a new graphic-in-picture track that allows the viewer to learn about the customs and rituals of the desert tribes. There is also a featurette featuring O’Toole looking back on the film, newsreel footage of its New York premiere, and more.

The 50th Anniversary Edition is available as either a two-disc version or the four-disc Gift Set. Opt for the latter, and you’ll receive several more featurettes, a never-before-seen deleted scene and conversations with Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese.

The Gift Set also comes with a handsome 88-page coffee table book, a CD of Maurice Jarre’s unforgettable musical score (including previously unreleased tracks) and an authentic 70mm film frame (newly printed and numbered).

“Lawrence of Arabia” has never looked so good.

Movie: 4 stars out of four
Extras: 4 stars

Reeling Backward: "Air Force" (1943)

Written and shot in the heady days after Pearl Harbor, "Air Force" is a cheery bit of war propaganda that struck a chord with audiences when it was released in early 1943, less than 14 months after the surprise Japanese attack. The fictional tale of the intrepid crew of the B-17 "Mary-Ann" in the days before and after Dec. 7, 1941, it was a box office hit, earned a slew of Oscar nominations (including Best Screenplay) and became a rallying call for the war effort.

Seen today, though, it's a borderline cringe-worthy drama in which American soldiers seem extraordinarily giddy about the prospect of near-certain death, coupled with some terrible special effects miniatures that scarcely look better than cousin Johnny's toy planes and ships blown up with firecrackers.

Throw in some nasty anti-Japanese sentiment, virulent even by the standards of the time, and you've got a war film that has aged exceedingly poorly.

Perhaps most disturbing are several references put in during the Pearl Harbor attack scenes of "local Japanese" or "native Japanese" -- aka Japanese-Americans -- engaging in preplanned sabotage or attacks coordinated with the surprise air strike. Subsequent investigations proved that such claims were completely unfounded.

Though screenwriter Dudley Nichols, who received uncredited assists from Leah Baird, William Faulkner and Arthur T. Horman, cannot be entirely faulted for these harmful scenes -- which doubtless contributed to the xenophobic paranoia that helped justify the mass internment of Japanese-Americans. They were working on the movie in the weeks and months after Pearl Harbor, with the script being altered on the fly to reflect the shifting realities of war.

As a result, a number of historical inaccuracies crept into the story -- such as the B-17 crew flying to Manila, when in fact U.S. troops in the Philippines retreated to Australia shortly after the outbreak of hostilities.

"Air Force" is named after the flying division of the U.S. Army, which didn't get split off into a separate military branch until after the war. Curiously, the studio chose to showcase the Mary-Ann as the real star of the picture, despite a large and able cast of B-list stars and character actors.

John Ridgely plays the skipper, Capt. Michael "Irish" Quincannon, who's the perfect mix of inspiration command. Gig Young (an Oscar winner for "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?") is the trusty co-pilot. Arthur Kennedy, who I'll always remember as the crusty journalist from "Lawrence of Arabia," is the bombadier. Charles Drake turns up as the navigator with daddy issues, George Tobias is the obligatory New Yawkah crewman, and Harry Carey has a nice turn as the elder crew chief.

Rounding things out are James Brown as "Tex" Rader, a fighter pilot who enjoys a good-natured rivalry with the B-17 crew, and John Garfield as Winocki, the cynical gunner.

It's the familiar mix of characters you see in wartime movies, complete with the green young kid, etc. Winocki is the most interesting, since he was a pilot trainee who got washed out of flight school by Quincannon a couple of years earlier, and has a huge chip on his shoulder. His stint in the Army is set to expire three weeks after Pearl Harbor, but it doesn't take too many guesses to know he undergoes a change.

It's that insipid, familiar everybody's-a-swell-guy syndrome, except for the one not-so-swell guy, who later migrates in a swelltherly direction.

My biggest problem with the depiction of the Americans forces is that everyone's just so damn happy all the time! I quickly grew tired of all the aw-shucks smiles and playful bantering, and men cracking jokes even as they know they're about to be overrun by the Japanese. One commanding officer of a tiny island, already grievously wounded, is offered a flight out on the Mary-Ann and refuses with, of course, a joke and a smile.

The combat scenes range from a few decent aerial sections to absolutely horrible. The miniatures of battleships and carriers at sea are entirely unconvincing, as are the numerous shots of planes taking off and landing. There's just no weight to the images -- we can sense the lack of immense inertia from these great steel beasts.

The stuff up in the air is better, with some actual dogfight footage spliced in with decent special-effects shots of enemy planes seen through the gunners' doors. We get a real sense of how a B-17 crew works together -- the gunner on one side shouting out when a target is about to pass over to the other -- and I can't help but think this movie influenced George Lucas when he was shooting the first "Star Wars" film.

War is terrible, but as seen in "Air Force" it's one great big smarmy smilefest, with toy airplanes.

2 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "High Sierra" (1941)

I've seen probably three dozen Humphrey Bogart movies in my lifetime, and no matter what his part in it is, the experience always affects me the same way.

I spend the next couple of days unconsciously talking through my teeth in a fast, low patter. I imagine walking around with a .45 automatic tucked into my belt, and pistol-whipping any wiseguys who ticked me off.

That's the thing about the great iconic stars -- we instinctively want to like them, and be like them.

So what intrigued me while watching 1941's "High Sierra" is why we end up liking Roy "Mad Dog" Earle so much. He is, after all, a hardened killer who slaps people around and guns down innocent people who get in his way. Just released from an Indiana prison on a pardon that was bought and paid for, Roy's a gray and grizzled veteran con man.

Rather than looking to go straight, Roy's only intention is to nail one last big score so he can retire. Big Mac, a dying mob boss, arranged for Roy's release so he can head up a big job to steal half a million in jewels from a California resort. Roy's been given a couple of pinhead small-timers as his wing men (Arthur Kennedy and Alan Curtis) and he's none too happy about it. He also isn't thrilled with having to hole up in a camp up in the mountains, waiting to get the word the job is a go.

So why do we root for Roy, so much so that when the cops are on his tail and he's got a box full of hot jewels, we want him to get away with it?

Perhaps it's Roy's misplaced love for Velma (a 16-year-old Joan Leslie), a poor girl with a club foot he meets along the road to Los Angeles. Velma's grandfather -- played by Henry Travers, forever Clarence the angel from "It's a Wonderful Life" -- takes an instant liking to what he senses is a kindred soul, for Roy used to be just another Midwestern farm boy before he became a notorious gangster.

Roy arranges for Velma to have an operation to fix her foot, which he pays for, with a mind to marry the girl half his age. I think Roy convinces himself he's in love with her, rather than because of any real connection they share. She's goodness incarnate, and he knows he's bad, and maybe he thinks being around her will rub off on him. Velma represents an ideal Roy strives for but can never attain.

The flip side of the female coin is Marie (Ida Lupino -- who actually got top billing over Bogie), a two-bit moll who falls hard for Roy, without getting much of anything in return. She was brought along by one of the two small-time crooks, who fight like dogs over her, until Roy sets them straight and takes the girl under his protective wing.

The other notable player is Pard, a scraggly little mutt who starts following Roy around at the mountain camp. Algernon, the black handyman at the camp, relates that everyone Pard has taken a shine to has died -- which obviously doesn't bode well for Roy. (Willie Best plays Algernon in a shiftless, google-eyed depiction of servitude that is outrageous even by 1941 standards.)

Incidentally, a lot of people have mistakenly thought that Pard was played by the same dog that played Toto in "The Wizard of Oz," but in fact it was Bogart's own pet, Zero. Hopefully the star negotiated a decent contract for his mutt.

The last act of "High Sierra" is the least interesting, as all the little pieces of the Production Code-era morality lesson fall into place.

The two small-timers buy it in a car crash, and the inside man from the resort squeals like a stuck pig, resulting in Roy's mugshot on the cover of every newspaper. Velma, fixed of the problem that saw her labeled a cripple, becomes a party girl who loves to dance and drink. Roy decides to get hitched with Marie as some sort of consolation prize for Velma, and she immediately starts behaving like a whiny rhymes-with-witch.

Their downfall is, of course, the mutt Pard, who gets recognized by a motel manager, putting the cops onto Roy's trail. Roy helps them by stupidly giving Marie all his money so she can take a bus to Las Vegas, forcing him to hold up a drugstore for gas money, which begins a high-speed pursuit that ends with Roy trapped in the high mountains.

Marie, rushing to the media hoopla over public enemy one being cornered, is given away by Pard, who runs barking up to Roy's hideout spot. Hearing the dog, and realizing Marie must be near, Roy comes out from cover long enough to be taken out by a sharpshooter with a scope rifle. Roy's careening fall down the mountain side is pretty graphic for its time.

"High Sierra" was directed by Raoul Walsh from a script by John Huston and W.R. Burnett, based on Burnett's novel. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to label it film noir, especially with all the sunny location shots, but it's an early and above-average example of the hard-boiled heist film.

And, of course, it's got Bogart, doing that unexplainable and inescapably magnetic Bogart thing he does.

3 stars out of four