Reeling Backward: "The Informer" (1935)

"Stagecoach." "The Searchers." "The Grapes of Wrath." "How Green Was My Valley." "Drums Along the Mohawk." "Young Mr. Lincoln." "My Darling Clementine." "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." "The Alamo." "How the West Was Won." "Mister Roberts." "The Quiet Man." "How the West Was Won." "Rio Grande."

John Ford arguably directed more iconic movies than any other Hollywood filmmaker. Unlike Hitchcock or Welles, who never earned the plaudits during their lifetimes commensurate with their body of work, Ford was well recognized by his peers: his four Academy Award wins for Best Director are a record that will likely never be surpassed.

(He won two more Oscars for his wartime documentaries.)

Interestingly, none of his Oscar wins were for Westerns, the genre with which he is most associated. His first, 1935's "The Informer," is probably the least known of the bunch. Based on the novel by Liam O'Flaherty, it was previously adapted into a 1929 British film before Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols had their own crack at it.

The result was a resounding success, winning four of its six Oscar nominations, losing the Best Picture race to the Clark Gable/Charles Laughton version of "Mutiny on the Bounty." Star Victor McLaglen won for Best Actor, and Max Steiner took the musical score prize. Nichols won the screenwriting Oscar, but became the first person to refuse to accept an Academy Award, citing the ongoing screenwriters guild strike.

The members of the Academy apparently didn't hold it against him -- Nichols would go on to be nominated three more times.

McLaglen is hardly your standard matinee idol. A huge man with a barrel chest, craggy face and balding pate, he mostly resembled an albino ape with an Irish brogue. (He often affected that accent for his roles to the point American audiences assumed he was an Irishman; actually he was a Brit born in Kent who was raised in South Africa.)

McLaglen gives an exuberant performance as Gypo Nolan, a dimwitted bruiser and petty thief who was court-martialed out of the Irish Republican Army for endangering the rebels with his inability to keep a secret or maintain a low profile. For some reason, the IRA guys here are all represented as young, good-looking fellows wearing long trench coats and narrow-brimmed fedora hats, almost like proto-Bogarts.

Gypo is not just dumb; he seems to have absolutely no control over his thoughts and urges. He essentially exists as pure id, his mouth and his fists immediately carrying out whatever thoughts spark inside his primordial swamp of a brain. He swaggers this way and that from moment to moment, becoming increasingly inebriated (a McLaglen specialty) as the story goes on.

The setup is that Gypo, penniless and friendless in 1922 Dublin, rats out an old friend on the lam (Wallace Ford) in exchange for a 20-pound reward from the police. Unfortunately, his friend is caught at his mother's house and refuses to be taken prisoner, and is gunned down by the police.

Gypo had hoped to use the money to buy steamship tickets to America for himself and his sweetie, Katie (Margot Grahame), who has recently been forced to selling herself on the street. His 20-pound fortune now becomes blood money, a deadly albatross hanging around his neck and spilling out of his pockets as he goes on one long bender of drinking and carousing.

Gypo at one point declares it "the greatest night of my life," and he means it, despite his genuine sorrow for his good friend's death as a result of his actions. Always forced to be the mindless muscle, the guy who stays in the back and takes orders, Gypo revels at becoming the "cock of the walk," buying everyone rounds and bursting into an exclusive party of hoity-toity types.

He takes to going around holding his meaty fists in the air like a triumphant prizefighter, shouting his own name with a crescendoing emphasis on the latter syllable: "Gih-POHH!!" It's his cry out to the world, a man celebrating a brief interlude as the center of attention, a bonfire that's bound to burn out.

Of course, his time on this mortal coil is ticking downward. The IRA quickly figures out that it was him who fingered their compatriot. And with every pound Gypo drops at various pubs, fish 'n' chips counters and saloons, it's not hard to put together who claimed the filthy lucre.

Preston Foster plays Dan Gallagher, the local IRA commandant, who knows he has to enforce the code against snitchers but it reluctant to condemn another man, especially one so pure of heart as Gypo. By "pure of heart" I don't imply that Gypo is angelic -- far from it. What I mean is that the towering lummox hasn't an ounce of deceit or falseness in him. Whatever he's doing or feeling at any given moment, he gives himself over to that completely.

At first pathetic and imbecilic -- watching him fritter away his money on whiskey and hangers-on, his dreams of finding a new life in America almost immediately dashed -- Gypo eventually becomes a tragic, sympathetic figure. At the end when he's finally caught he pleads, "I didn't know what I was doing!" And it really is true.

After he escapes (briefly) from the IRA and runs to Katie, he demands to know where the 20 pounds he gave her is -- forgetting, in his drunkenness and stupidity, that there were only a few crumpled notes left when he finally handed them over.

Heather Angel plays Mary McPhillip, the sister of Gypo's betrayed friend. She has a romance with Gallagher that feels ill-placed within the story of Gypo's descent and ultimate absolution. Una O'Connor plays her mother -- her name may not be recognizable, but her face is, a character actress often called upon to play ridiculous older women, such as the pinch-faced maid in "Witness for the Prosecution."

"The Informer" isn't a great movie, but it shows off John Ford's burgeoning talent for using landscapes to his benefit, weather sprawling vistas in Monument Valley or the mist, dank streets of London. And McLaglen is a revelation as the flawed, pitiable Gypo.

Known to be extremely hard on actors -- Ford was dubbed "the only man who could make John Wayne cry" -- he also knew how to get great performances out of them.

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: "The Long Voyage Home" (1940)

"The Long Voyage Home" is a curious animal. It stars John Wayne, already a major star in 1940, who gets top billing in this adaptation of a Eugene O'Neill play about the salty, often cruel life of sailors aboard a merchant marine ship.

And yet Wayne's character is not one of the most important in the story -- in fact, he's essentially a bit player.

Wayne barely speaks more than a few lines of dialogue throughout most of the movie, finally getting to string a couple sentences together in a scene near the end. But for the most part, other members of the ensemble cast rotate in and out of the limelight, with Wayne off to the side and in the background.

Imagine "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" with Jack Nicholson in the Martini role (played by Danny DeVito) and no McMurphy in the ward. That'll give you an idea how strange it is to see John Wayne in the margins of his own movie.

True, John Wayne was not quite yet JOHN WAYNE -- having just had his big breakout role a year earlier in "Stagecoach," also directed by longtime collaborator John Ford. But still, it's one thing to see the star of a picture relegated to a secondary role, and quite another when they have barely any screen time and hardly say a word.

It's a good film, a less plot-driven movie than a meandering look at the nomadic men who make their life on the high seas for various reasons. The cinematography by the great Gregg Toland -- his next film was "Citizen Kane" -- is a gorgeously bleak swath of shadows and light that makes the ship seem like its own world rather than just a dingy old merchant vessel.

The S.S. Glencairn is a slow, decrepit, rusty ship making one more long trip across the Atlantic. "An old hooker" is just one of the many colorful epithets the captain and crew lovingly (we think) use to describe the ancient bucket.

As the story opens, the Glencairn is docked in the West Indies, but most of the crew has been forbidden shore leave due to the secrecy of their next voyage. In an arresting opening shot, the men stand on the deck casting yearning glances at the beach, where native women writhe half-dressed. The gal in the foreground wears a blouse that barely clings to her shoulders as she runs a hand over her considerable cleavage -- pretty hubba-hubba stuff for 1940.

It's a typically motley crew. Aside from the stern captain (Wilfrid Lawson), the man who seems most in charge is Driscoll, an Irishman with a fondness for drink and trouble. Having gotten into a scrape with the law on shore, Drisc barely makes it back on board, scrambling up the anchor chain, to make roll call.

There's also Cocky, the acerbic ship's steward; and Yank (Ford mainstay Ward Bond), a lusty brawler and Drisc's right-hand man; John Qualen as Axel, a Swede who's small but feisty; and Donkeyman (Arthur Shields), who's given up on the land and is always ready to sign on for another voyage, no matter how bad the last one was.

Wayne plays Ole Olsen, a big Swedish farmer who's been promising his mother for the past 10 years he'll come home after the next voyage. Invariably, he and the boys go ashore for "one last drink" to celebrate his departure, and the next thing he knows he's signed on for another.

When he does talk, Wayne does so in what must be the worst Swedish accent in the history of cinema. Coupled with the fact that he looks about as Swedish as Sammy Davis Jr., and you've got a strong nominee for Wayne's worst screen performance.

Wayne, as has often been said, was not an actor but a movie star. He was good at playing one character: Himself ... or, at least, what the public believed to be his star persona. When Wayne tried to stretch himself into more exotic roles, he usually crashed and burned. I've never seen 1956's "The Conqueror," in which Wayne plays Genghis Khan -- yes, really -- but I hear it's howlingly bad.

The Glencairn crew nearly jumps ship when they learn their next job is a hold full of ammunition for the British. That means going through the War Zone patrolled by German U-boats hunting for ships bringing supplies for the war effort, and a huge target on the ol' Glencairn.

"The Long Voyage Home" was actually based on three different plays written by O'Neill, one of which bore that title, that were set during World War I. It's not much of a stretch to change the setting to WWII, since the life of a seaman wasn't very much different in the intervening quarter-century or so.

Much of the first half of the film is devoted to piercing the mystery of Smitty (Ian Hunter), a crew member with a mysterious, haunted past. He speaks the King's English like an aristocrat, and tries to jump ship after picking up their explosive cargo but is arrested and brought back.

Driscoll and the others come to believe Smitty is a German spy, but after opening the mysterious black box he hides under his pillow, they discover he's a disgraced officer who has run away from his family. It's quite a poignant moment  where Drisc reads a letter out loud from Smittie's wife in which she refuses his request to tell their two children he is dead.

The last third or so of the movie is one long bar crawl, as the men from the Glencairn are set up by some unscrupulous club owners. Ole, his ticket for Stockholm and last two years' wages sewn inside his coat, is drugged and shanghaied aboard another ship. His drunken crewmates stage a daring rescue, but Drisc is knocked unconscious and captured, replacing Ole as a conscript. The next day, newspapers reveal the ship was sunk in the Channel.

What does it all really add up to? "The Long Voyage Home" is long on character and atmosphere, and not really concerned with telling a story. It's a worthwhile film, especially for those wanting to explore John Ford's non-Western oeuvre. Even if John Wayne, the ostensible star, is woefully misused.

3 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "It Happened Tomorrow" (1944)

I first heard of "It Happened Tomorrow" when a local blogger and former colleague at The Indianapolis Star, Ruth Holladay, approached me asking for names of newspaper movies for a post she was writing. She already had this 1944 picture starring Dick Powell and Linda Darnell on her list, and I admitted I'd never heard of it before.

Perhaps it's because "Tomorrow" is less a movie about journalism than a fantasy-slash-morality tale. An enterprising young reporter receives the next day's paper a day early, and uses that information to advance his career and love life. It's amusing enough, but I suppose because I was expecting something completely different, it underwhelmed a bit.

The film opens with a clumsy framing device. An old man and woman are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in a grand mansion. Rows of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are lined up to greet them when they begin arguing over a newspaper. Powell and Darnell -- shown only in long shot to disguise an inept attempt to age them up -- talk about an article he wants to publish about his life, and she forbids it to save him embarrassment.

It brings a note of awkwardness to the film's opening and closing, and I don't see what it really adds.

Powell -- who directed last week's classic film subject, "The Enemy Below" -- was at this time a song-and-dance man who had grown tired of being cast in lite musicals and comedies. After "Tomorrow," he refused his next assignment and broke his contract to star in the film noir "Murder, My Sweet."

The setting is turn-of-the-century New York. Powell plays Larry Stevens, a young reporter for The Evening News who's just written his 500th obituary, and has now graduated to full-scale reporter. He and several colleagues are celebrating with some two-fisted drinking in the newsroom after closing out that evening's edition -- a much more common practice in the trade than is generally known

(By the time I broke into newspapering in the 1990s, overt imbibing had disappeared, but a few old-timers were known to keep a bottle somewhere in their desk. And I saw more than one editor put together the next day's section in a red-eyed, bleary state.)

Stevens and the other fellows josh around with Pop Benson (Hoosier actor John Philliber), the ancient curator of the paper's morgue, who tells them that every day's edition contains both the past and the future. Larry offhandedly claims he'd give up 10 years of his life to see the next day's news ahead of time. Pop, who we later learn actually died that night, appears to Larry over the next three days to hand him a copy of the following day's Evening News.

Larry uses the information in the manner of any hungry reporter: To be present wherever the next day's biggest news is going to happen so he can get the front-page scoop. Of course, when Larry gets the paper it already has the story under his byline, so he doesn't even really have to write it, just copy it down.

His first blockbuster is a shoot-out a the opera house between some bandits and the police. Interestingly, Larry makes no attempt to stop any untoward behavior, but simply uses it to make a name for himself.

If you think that's ethically shaky, it's also not unusual in the hyper-competitive world of newspaper reporting, where front-page bylines are the mark of relevance. When I moved from my first job at a tiny newspaper to my second at a middle-sized one, I heard tell of one unscrupulous reporter who brazenly stole from her own colleagues. The editors asked each reporter, before they left for the night, to enter what they planned to work on the next day in a shared file.

This newshound made it a habit to show up early every day, scan the list of proposed articles, and start working on the most promising idea -- whether it infringed on another staffer's beat or not. When the other reporter showed up later that morning or afternoon -- a typical schedule for that ilk -- the editors would invariably say, "Well, she's already deep into it, so we'll let her finish." She had a lot of front-page stories, and few friends.

Any way, Larry becomes enchanted with Sylvia (Darnell), a girl working in a magic act with her uncle Oscar, who goes by the stage name of Cigolini. He pretends to put her in a trance, while she stands out in the audience and makes predictions about the future. Cigolini/Oscar is played by Jack Oakie, who was known for doing a tongue-twisting Italian accent, despite being from Oklahoma by way of Missouri. He used this same skill in his most famous role as Benzino Napaloni, the caricature of Mussolini in Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator."

The Larry/Sylvia romance is one of those swept away deals where they're getting married two days after meeting. By this time Larry has received the last day's early paper, with his death notice on the front page. Morose, his only goal is to marry Sylvia, win a bunch of money at the horse track, and leave her with a comfortable inheritance.

Reticent before to change the future, Larry now does everything in his power to avoid being at the appointed time and place of his demise. Of course, events conspire to bring him there anyway, where he learns the paper had his death wrong. The thief who made off with the $60,000 he won at the track is shot dead by the police, who find Larry's wallet on him. The error is not discovered in time before the first edition of the Evening News goes out with the incorrect identification.

This begs lots of metaphysical ponderables: Was Pop always bringing Larry the first edition? Why not the last, most factually complete one? What kind of slipshod ghost/guardian angel is he?

And why exactly is Pop's ghost passing out newspapers a day early? He says something about not being able to change the future despite knowing it in advance, but it seems to have a major impact on Larry's life. Also, if Larry lost his winnings -- the cash is missing when the wallet is recovered from the thief -- how did he ever become rich enough to afford the mansion we saw?

More a daffy comedy than a true newspaper movie, "It Happened Tomorrow" left me with more questions than answers.

2 stars out of four

(I couldn't find an embeddable clip from the film, but Turner Classic Movies has one here.)