Reeling Backward: "How to Marry a Millionaire" (1953)

I can't quite decide if "How to Marry a Millionaire" is a daringly progressive film or a horribly anachronistic throwback. Probably one for 1953, and another for 2016.

It's silly to judge the social politics of a 60-odd-year-old movie by today's standards. Back then as women who worked in factories during World War II were pushed back into the home, "marrying well" was not a topic people shied away from talking about openly.

For men, that meant finding a spouse who was pretty, kind and a good mother. For women, it meant marrying a stable guy with a good income.

The problem comes when you put these foremost qualities on a scale, with the assumption that more must be better. If a well-to-do man of prospects is desirable, then why not a fabulously rich fellow? Why settle for next-door beauty when you can get Marilyn Monroe?

Speaking of Monroe, "Millionaire" more or less marked her ascension from breakout star to screen icon. Betty Grable was billed first in the movie, though the blonde WWII pinup girl was closing in on 40 and her legendary duels with the studios meant her career was crumbling. Monroe actually took over her part in "Gentleman Prefer Blondes," which came out a few months earlier and made her a star.

(Though Grable received top billing in the credits, Monroe was usually listed first on the posters and advertising.)

Grable's screen persona was actually somewhat similar to Monroe's, the bubble-headed blonde with hidden qualities beyond a gorgeous face. Their characters in "Millionaire" are rather the same, too; both are sweet and rather dim. They play man-hungry Loco Dempsey (Grable) and nearsighted Pola Debevoise (Monroe), who's constantly bumping into things because she fears to wear her glasses in public.

"Men aren't attentive to girls who wear glasses," Pola says, echoing Dorothy Parker and setting up an inevitable romance with a four-eyed suitor (David Wayne) who appreciates her spectacles.

The funny thing is, the movie really belongs to Lauren Bacall. She plays Schatze Page, the smartest and most outgoing of the trio. She hatches the idea for the girls, all fashion models, to pool their resources and rent out a New York City penthouse as a man-trap for rich men. She's calculating and rather mercenary, but in the end the frozen cockles of her heart melt for a guy she assumes is a gas station jockey (Cameron Mitchell), but is actually worth $200 million.

That's $1.8 billion in today's dollars, folks. Dude even has a city named after his family.

I was pleasantly surprised by the character of J.D. Hanley, a 56-year-old widower played with charm and class by William Powell. He becomes Schatze's main target, but he puts her off due to their age difference. Hanley later changes his mind and agrees to marry her, though she undergoes her own change of heart at the altar.

Hanley is gracious and considerate throughout, even when Schatze breaks his heart. That's the beauty of getting old, he says: you learn how to deal with disappointment.

Probably the most cringe-worthy scene in the movie is when Schatze dreams of how her life will be after she marries Hanley, as she leans over a display of jewelry and points, telling the salesman she would like "That... and that... and that... and that and that and that..." My modern sensibilities recoil at the notion of a woman seeing a man as simply a path to comfort and baubles.

But eventually Schatze evolves from gold-digger to kind heart.

I should point out that models of this era were not the high-paid celebrities we know today. In one of the film's signature scenes, a whole gaggle of women, including our trio, try on clothes and parade around for a client at a snooty retail store, like living, breathing mannequins. (Though how this is less degrading than doing the same thing on a runway for a hundred people escapes me.)

Palo initially falls for a rich Arab oilman, but he turns out to be a conman. She has several unwitting conversations with the man who owns their apartment, who's on the lam with IRS troubles -- he blames them on a crooked accountant -- and sneaks in to retrieve papers from a hidden safe. She doesn't know who he is and assumes it's Hanley because of her poor vision.

They later bump into each other on a plane and share love at first sight -- fuzzy first sight, to be sure, until she dons her glasses.

Loco's story is the most convoluted, and least interesting. She agrees to go up to a lodge in Maine with a crabby millionaire named Brewster (Fred Clark), thinking a "lodge" means a large gathering of men. It actually means his cozy cabin, and she's mortified at the implication.

But then she catches sick and falls into the arms of Eben (Rory Calhoun), a good-looking local bumpkin. She assumes he's rich when he shows her the mountain range and calls it "his" as far as the eye can see, but he's actually a forest ranger talking about his scope of responsibilities. Loco is disappointed when she finds out the truth, and he's disappointed that she's disappointed, but they patch things up in the end.

So when it all shakes out, two of the three women actually do marry millionaires, though Schatze didn't know it at the time and the other fortune is currently in government hock.

It's a beautiful film to look at, with vivid colors and striking costumes (which earned an Oscar nomination.) It was actually the very first film shot in CinemaScope, though "The Robe" beat it to the box office by a few months. Journeyman director Jean Negulesco makes very good use of the widescreen format to show off New York's locales.
Nunnally Johnson produced and wrote the script, which was actually based on two different stage plays, "Loco" and "The Greeks Had a Word For It."

Though it may seem terribly outdated, "How to Marry a Millionaire" is enjoyable as an artifact of a bygone era and (mostly) outgrown attitudes.

Reeling Backward: "Dark Passage" (1947)

"Dark Passage" wouldn't have been a particularly notable film noir, except for three things: Bogie & Bacall, Bogie's face swap and first-person camera perspective.

It was, of course, one of several onscreen pairings of offscreen couple Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. They met on the set of "To Have and Have Not" (profiled in this column some months back) and soon became a permanent item. Even though she was much younger than him, somehow their faces just fit well together on the screen.

Another interesting thing is that Bogart, whose distinct face is indelibly etched into the iconography of American cinema, does not show his mug until about halfway through the movie. When we do see him, his face is all bandaged up like the Invisible Man. Bogie has to do a lot of acting with just his eyes, and gives a softer, more sensitive performance than his usual tough-guy routine.

For the first third or so of the movie, we don't even see Bogart at all, bandaged or otherwise. That's because director Delmer Daves shoots from a very unusual perspective, as if the audience is seeing through Bogart's eyes. We see his hands coming into the frame, but that's it.

If indeed they are Bogart's hands -- they look more beat-up and hairy-knuckled than I would have thought. It seems more likely that they rigged up a special camera to an operator, who walks around and pretends to be Bogart, sticking his own hands in front of the lens when necessary.

Bogart's voice narrates his thoughts as his character, Vincent Parry, escapes from San Quentin, where he's been imprisoned for a bum murder rap after supposedly killing his wife.

Young painter Irene Jansen (Bacall) picks him up in her car, saving him from being recaptured, and keeps Vincent in her apartment until he can figure things out. He goes to see an old friend, trumpet player George, and bumps into a helpful cab driver (Tom D'Andrea) who, rather than turning him into the authorities for the $5,000 reward, suggests he visit a plastic surgeon instead.

Plastic surgery is something depicted in Golden Age movies as some kind of magic process by which people's faces can be completely altered in the matter of 90 minutes under the knife, followed by a mere week of recovery.

The doctor, who makes vague threats about turning Vincent's face into that of a monkey if he takes a dislike to him, ends up doing his job very well indeed. Interestingly, he suggests making Vincent look older and with a few scars, which seems to serve no purpose other than to justify Bogart's distinctive look.

The movie abruptly shifts from the first-person perspective after Vincent is sedated, the camera turning around to show us Bogart's face in all those bandages.

He tries to return to George's to lay up while his new face heals, but finds him dead, bludgeoned with his own trumpet. Out of options, Vincent returns to Irene's.

The second half of "Dark Passage" is not nearly as good as the first, as the plot devolves into a mix of gobbledygook and double-crosses. A small-time crook that Vincent bumped into earlier turns up again to blackmail Irene and Vincent. Madge (Agnes Moorehead), a friend of Irene's who also was the star witness against Vincent at his trial, also makes an appearance, along with her once-fiance Bob, who now has an eye on Irene.

I have to say the romance between Bogart and Bacall is not terribly convincing. Irene seems to have talked herself into believing she loves Vincent without ever really having a reason for doing so. There's a few moist eyes, but not much real passion.

The ending is notable in a few ways. Having figured out that Madge was the one who framed him, Vincent confronts her, trying to force her to confess. When she refuses, he seems completely stumped as to what to do next. Was his entire plan to get a murderer to admit to what she did, even though there's no proof to substantiate it?

Anyway, Madge falls through the window to her death. Vincent describes it as her stumbling, but I think the real implication is supposed to be that she threw herself against the pane. Either way, Daves shows her entire fall from several angles, including her body lying on the pavement far below -- fairly gruesome for 1947.

Vincent and Irene talk on the phone from the bus station, where he's crossing the Mexico border on his way to Peru. Their conversation is reminiscent of the one between Red and Andy in "The Shawshank Redemption," where the person on the run tells the one they've left behind what little remote town they'll be in, even making Irene repeat the name back to her. In the last shot, they're reunited in a beach-side club.

"Dark Passage" isn't a particularly good film -- there's a lot of disparate elements that never quite sew themselves together. It's like a crazy patchwork made up of different pieces of other movies. Still, the audacious camera work alone make it memorable.

2.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "To Have and Have Not" (1944)

Lauren Bacall was 19 years old and a total acting novice when she appeared in a doorway to ask Bogie for a match. She reportedly was so nervous to be starring next to the screen legend that she tucked her chin into her chest to keep from shaking, tilting her eyes up at Bogart in an alluring way that soon earned a nickname, "The Look."

Later on in the film, standing in that same doorway, Bacall would deliver the lines that would cement her debut as one of the most memorable in cinematic history: "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow."

Talk about togetherness: Bacall and Bogart would initiate a romance during the shooting of 1944's "To Have and Have Not" that eventually led to their marriage (and the demise of Bogie's).

Directed by Howard Hawks from a script by William Faulkner and Jules Furthman, "To Have and Have Not" was based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway that bears little resemblance to the movie, other than the Caribbean setting and being about a fishing boat captain. Hawks supposedly called it Hemingway's worst novel, and the author dared him to produce a decent movie out of it.

The result is a film whose plot is a mishmash that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but is so strong on mood and romantic tension that we don't give a fig.

Bogart plays Harry "Steve" Morgan, an itinerant boat skipper in Martinique. Much like the city of Casablanca, Martinique is an exotic locale ostensibly under the control of the French, but with the influence of the Nazis clearly visible. The Vichy thugs are running the show, while the Free French are trying to drum up a rebellion.

As the story opens, Steve has been taking a rich American out for big-game fishing every day for two weeks, without much success. On the last day the client loses the rod and reel, and slaps Steve's friend and first mate Eddie across the face. Played by the great character actor Walter Brennan, Eddie is an old drunk who has to beg for his booze. But he's still Steve's friend, and he can't stand to see Eddie treated that way, even if he is a worthless rummy.

His client tries to skip out on Steve without paying his bill, but dies first in a gunfight between the Vichy and patriotic French. The fat, diabolical police Captain Renard -- played by Dan Seymour, in something like a combination of the Claude Rains and Sydney Greenstreet roles from "Casablanca" -- confiscates Steve's passport and money.

Penniless, he's forced to take a job from the resistance to pick up one of their leaders on a remote island, but the important passenger is shot during an encounter with a patrol boat. Steve spends the rest of the movie nursing the injured man, insisting to the Free French that he's not taking sides, and dodging questions from Renard.

It's funny; as you watch the movie, you can't take your eyes off Bacall. But once it's over and you start thinking about it, her character is almost totally unnecessary to the story. See, I just gave you a pretty complete overview of the plot without ever mentioning Marie Browning -- aka "Slim."

Slim is a young pickpocket whose M.O. is to lure men into buying drinks for her, then making off with their wallets. That's how she and Steve first meet -- she's just duped Steve's fishing client, and when he demands she return the wallet, he finds a ticket for a plane that takes off right before they were supposed to meet at the bank for his payoff.

Slim and Steve spend most of the movie fighting and kissing, often both within the same scene. It's real screen magic, the two of them. Bogart's doing his usual world-weary cynic shtick, but in between we catch little moments where he seems totally amazed by Bacall.

Jazzman/composer Hoagy Carmichael has a small role as Cricket, the saloon piano player, and Bacall even sings a couple of his tunes. Well, perhaps not. Accounts vary about whether the voice is actually Bacall's. According to legend, as a boy Andy Williams was recruited to dub Bacall's singing. It certainly sounds like her famously low (though not yet husky) voice.

I love the film's ending, which is somewhat abrupt but still satisfying. Having shot one of Renard's men, Steve proceeds to beat the captain and his cohort until they agree to release Eddie, who they've taken hostage. Leaving the villainous police in the hands of the resistance, they gather their stuff to hop on the boat, hoping they have enough gas to get them to another island and a new start.

Slim, whispering her goodbye to Cricket, asks him to play a happy song, and Bacall does this gorgeous little jig on their way out of the nightclub. It was the start of a beautiful friendship -- between Slim and Steve, between Bogie and Bacall, and between her and audiences for decades to come.

3.5 stars