Reeling Backward: "From the Terrace" (1960)

"From the Terrace" is not particularly well remembered, but it's an interesting example of midcentury melodrama. It addresses the topics of marital infidelity and divorce in a bold way you generally didn't see in that era. It casts a gimlet eye on the accepted practice of putting business ahead of love and family.

And it stars husband-and-wife team Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in the third of their 10 onscreen appearances together.

Newman plays Alfred Eaton, a young go-getter from a fractured family determined to make his own high place in the world. Woodward plays Mary St. John, the unobtainable daughter of an old-money clan whom he pursues relentlessly and then abandons for his work once they're married.

Though Mary is ostensibly the villain of the piece, it's a much more nuanced portrait of an unraveling marriage, with Alfred bearing an equal share of the responsibility for its descent from joy to neglect to poison. He consciously puts her in a distant second place behind his job, first as co-founder of his own aeronautics company and then as worker drone for a prominent financier.

At first Mary defends Alfred from her friends' taunts about abandoning her. But as time marches on she grows more resentful, insisting that she has a right to socialize while he's away for months at a time -- and emotionally absent even when home. Eventually she reignites an affair with Jim Roper (Patrick O'Neal), the dashing doctor to whom she was engaged before Alfred stole her away.

By the end she's a shrewish harpy gleefully throwing her cheating in her husband's face. Her idea of rapprochement is offering an open marriage where they can each sleep with whomever they want. Woodward is icy and effective in the role, a platinum blonde hairdo offsetting her less-than-angelic demeanor.

It's an atypical performance for Newman, who at this stage of his career usually played earnest young men or charming rascals. Here he's a repressed sort, a guy who secretly craves the affection he never got from his parents. It's essentially a portrait of a hero who falls onto the wrong path. He quickly realizes his mistake, but rather than correct it he's determined to carry through no matter what.

He ends up as rather a grim figure, hectored on the job by Old Man MacHardie (Felix Aylmer) and harried at home by Mary. Indeed, the film's middle section can be rather hard to get through, and at just shy of 2½ hours the movie is much longer than it needs to be. It was written and directed by Mark Robson ("Champion," "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness"), based on the novel by John O'Hara.

Some of the best stuff is at the beginning, when Alfred returns home from World War II. His father is a nouveau riche owner of a Pennsylvania steel mill. Terrifically played by Leon Ames, Samuel Eaton is an old-school tyrant who emotionally checked out of the family a dozen years earlier when his older son died of cystic fibrosis. The great Myrna Loy plays the mother, who's turned to drink and the arms of another man for comfort. One of her favorite habits is to board a train to anywhere and drink herself into a stupor.

Expecting a hero's welcome, Alfred returns to a lost mother and a father who's openly hostile to his presence. He rejects dad's assumption that he'll follow into the family business, instead opting to establish a private plane manufacturing company with Lex Porter, an old-money pal (a superbly WASP-y George Grizzard).

Samuel tries to warn his son that unless he puts up half the seed money himself, Alfred will always be treated as the lesser partner -- a prediction that turns out exactly so. It's his way of offering the dough himself, but there's too much pride and resentment between them for the message to get through. The elder Eaton is too used to keeping the younger in his place.

"You're not big enough to even walk in my shadow. And you never will be!" he thunders.

Perhaps the film's most pivotal scene takes place when father Eaton tries to explain to Alfred why he's been so uncaring toward him. It's a soul in pain reaching out, trying to make amends. But he loses himself in a quagmire of regret over his lost boy, which Alfred interprets as another brick in the wall of shunning him. Dad suffers a heart attack and dies soon after.

Of course, the lesson is that Alfred's father only cared about wealth and status, and it brought him to a low end. But the son can't see it, and like so many sons with chips on their shoulders, unwittingly starts down the same path himself.

The film picks up again in the third act with the introduction of the character of Natalie Benzinger, the daughter of a mine owner who comes to represent for Alfred all the opportunities he eschewed for a life of warmth and family. They begin a tentative affair while he's assessing the mine for purchase by MacHardie.

At first Natalie rejects his overtures because he's married, but comes to recognize the streak of nobility and empathy under Alfred's hard, crusty exterior. She's played by Ina Balin, who received a Golden Globe nomination for her resonant performance.

There are too many twists and turns of the plot in "From the Terrace" -- including the machinations of MacHardie's son-in-law, Creighton Duffy (Howard Caine), whose business affairs are tied up with Alfred's old buddy Lex. He tries to blackmail Alfred with evidence of his affair with Natalie.

It's a classic example of filmmakers adapting a novel and failing to pare down the characters and narrative to the beating heart of the tale. But there's still a vibrant pulse in this film, an odd mix of dourness and elation that subtly encourages us to seek our own bliss.

Reeling Backward: "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness" (1958)

"The Inn of the Sixth Happiness" features the incomparable Ingrid Bergman and also Hollywood's maddening habit of taking a true life story and bullshitting it up into a sappy romance.

Gladys Aylward was a real Englishwoman and longtime domestic (read: maid) who at the spinsterish age of 30 used her life savings to travel to China to work as an unaccredited missionary. She ended up making it her home -- earning Chinese citizenship, the trust of the people and even a minor government post. Aylward adopted several children of her own and rescued more than 100 orphans  from certain death during World War II.

A pretty inspiring tale, which made for a popular book, "The Small Woman" by Alan Burgess.

But of course the studio couldn't leave well enough alone. In addition to casting the tall, stunning Bergman in the lead role -- who hides her Swedish accent about as well Sean Connery sounded like a Russian submarine captain -- they cast German actor Curd Jürgens as her half Chinese/half Dutch lover.

(Speaking of Connery, he screen tested for Jürgens' role, but was probably deemed too young in his late 20s to start opposite Bergman, who was then in her early 40s.)

Jürgens wears slightly tinted makeup and prosthetic to complete the racially insensitive ensemble. Bad enough, except that his character, Colonel Lin Nan, is based on a real (and non-biracial) Chinese official who befriended her. The film's ending shows her abandoning her young charges to return to her home province, presumably to reunite with Lin.

When the real Aylward saw the movie she was mortified, commenting that she had never so much as kissed a man in her whole life.

To complete things, another major Chinese character, the Mandarin of Yang Cheng, is played by British actor Robert Donat, also in embarrassing, unconvincing makeup. (Yellowface?)

At least one major Chinese character, Aylward's cook and companion Yang, is played by an Asian actor, Peter Chong.

They couldn't even get the title right. The name of the hotel that Aylward ran along with an elderly missionary, Jeannie Lawson (Athene Seyler), was actually called "The Inn of the Eight Happinesses." (The Chinese consider the number eight lucky.)

Not really sure why six happinesses is considered worse than eight.

But all films are a product of their times, and I can't dismiss the movie for following common -- if grating -- practices of its era. I'm sure screenwriter Isobel Lennart was pressured into making changes so that American audiences would find the story more palatable.

(Heck, in this space I once profiled a movie called "Across the Pacific" in which the characters never even reach the Pacific Ocean.)

Bergman admirably carries the movie as Aylward, who later is given the name Zhen-Ai, which is translated for us as "she who loves everyone." She depicts the character as brave and resolute without losing her crushing sense of humility. Zhen-Ai Aylward is less Norma Rae than a shrinking violet who learns to toughen up.

The first act is about her saving up the money and pluck to get to China after being refused a spot as a missionary. Despite her faith and obvious devotion, it seems she is rejected solely for being from a lower working class.

Her introduction to Yang Cheng is challenging. The locals are suspicious of foreigners, and she gets chased by some women for daring to help up a small child who had fallen in the mud. The poverty and the way human life seems debased repulse her.

Eventually they get the inn going, a waystation for traveling mule teams who serve as the lifeblood of the rural economy. They entice the men with stories of baby Jesus and other biblical tales. Her older companion soon dies, and Aylward must persevere on her own.

The Mandarin -- sort of a governor and judge rolled into one -- gives her the job of "foot inspector" to make sure the people are following the government's new edicts against footbinding. It was a horrid custom in which little girls' feet are tightly bound to crush them into tiny lotus shapes and never grow any larger. She only gets the job because the previous foot inspectors, all men, were run out of the various villages, and the Mandarin deems her the most expendable candidate.

Lin Nan turns up as the modernistic government official trying to drag the peasants into the 20th century. He's half-Danish and despises his European blood, and at first is deeply suspicious of the two interloper women. But things get progressively mushier.

It's certainly a beautiful film, with the Welsh mountains standing in for Chinese ones. Director Mark Robson, who had just been nominated for an Academy Award for "Peyton Place," scored another nod for this film. This makes him one of the few directors to score Oscar nominations in consecutive years.

Despite the racial swap I enjoyed Donat as the Mandarin, a man who projects an image of fierceness to protect the deep sentiment he secretly harbors. It's the sort of well-written supporting role you saw a lot of in mid-century Hollywood fare.

I loved and hated "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness." Before seeing it I would have said I could watch Ingrid Bergman in just about anything, but this film tested that resolve at times. It's a classic white-person-goes-someplace-exotic-and-finds-their-inner-peace story, which I could have appreciated for what it was, if not for the stiff and manufactured love story.

It's a romantic film; but the real passion was between a woman and her adopted homeland. No kissyface necessary.

Reeling Backward: "Von Ryan's Express" (1965)

There are many different variations of the World War II film -- the submarine adventure, the combat pilot thriller, the romance-amidst-the-horror drama. One of the most enduring sub-genres is prison movies.

Some of these dealt with life inside the prison/concentration camp ("Stalag 17") while others focused on escape attempts by daring Allied P.O.W.s ("The Great Escape"). Some of these movies combined a bit of each, including the grand poo-bah of WWII prison movies, "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

"Von Ryan's Express" starts out as a prison movie and morphs into an escape movie, and does neither particularly well. It was one of Frank Sinatra's most commercially successful films, a great rousing war adventure that culminates in a spectacular action sequence where prisoners fleeing on a train are pursued by fighter planes and German soldiers.

Sinatra plays the title character, Joseph Ryan, an American pilot who's shot down in Italy during the waning days of the war. Taken to the nearest P.O.W. camp, he finds the prisoners in a state of near revolt, whipped up by the acting C.O., Major Fincham (Trevor Howard). It seems the old C.O. just died after being locked in a hot box by the haughty Italian commander (Adolpho Celi).

As a colonel, Ryan finds himself the ranking officer. At first he is reluctant to take up the mantle of leadership. But his clashes with Fincham escalate as he has organized the entire camp around attempting to escape or defying their captors. Ryan rationalizes that the war is nearly over -- American troops have already landed in Italy and are pushing north. If they just wait a few weeks, they'll be rescued peacefully.

When two of the handful of American G.I.'s -- Brad Dexter and James Brolin -- get in trouble for stealing medicine Fincham had set aside for escapes, Ryan takes over. He even leads the Italians to the tunnel the Brits had been digging, in exchange for the clothes, showers and first aid packages the prisoners had been denied.

This leads Fincham to start referring to Ryan as Von Ryan, dubbing him a collaborator who will earn the Iron Cross for assisting the enemy so well.

I think the film would've done better if the had made the Ryan/Fincham the central conflict of the entire story. Instead their rivalry exists in the background, occasionally heating up as events transpire.

The odd thing is, Fincham is portrayed as being the deranged one, burning with a mad lust for revenge -- "justice" he calls it -- against their enemies. But in every occasion where the two men disagree over strategy, Fincham makes the right call while Ryan's decisions end up costing lives.

For example, when Italy surrenders and their prisoners flee, Fincham wants to try and execute the prison commander as a war criminal, which Ryan refuses, putting him into the hot box instead. Later the man is rescued by the Germans and leads them right to the prisoners, who are all killed or recaptured.

Later, they are put on a train heading deeper into Nazi-controlled territory. The prisoners eventually take over, killing all the German guards except for the officer and his Italian mistress (Wolfgang Preiss and Raffaella Carrà). Once they reach a point of no return and their captives become expendable, Fincham wants to do away with them. Ryan against refuses, and they later escape, kill a British lieutenant and imperil the entire group.

In this context, Ryan's acts are the humane option while Fincham would become the very thing he holds in contempt. But nice guys come in last here, and Ryan's leniency comes back to bite him every time.

After the German train officer and his mistress escape, Ryan himself is forced to gun them both down lest they are given away. Shooting an unarmed woman in the back is a pretty ballsy scene for 1965, and director Mark Robson milks it for every ounce.

I noticed throughout the movie that he rarely gives his stars close-ups, preferring medium shots where they interact together. According to the film's Wikipedia page, Robson and Sinatra clashed throughout the production -- so perhaps this was his way of paying his petulant star back. It certainly isn't one of Sinatra's better performances, seeming almost stiff at times.

Once the story gets rolling along the train tracks it has a certain amount of momentum, with the Allies staging an elaborate con job to convince all the enemies along the line that their German captors are still in charge. The highlight is the mild-mannered vicar (Edward Mulhare), the only one who speaks fluent German, being forced to impersonate an imperious Nazi. He succeeds, but then faints from the stress.

I couldn't get terribly engaged with "Von Ryan's Express." The movie feels distant and impersonal, a humdrum war adventure where nothing much is at stake.

Reeling Backward: "Champion" (1949)

"Champion" has a great twist ending. It's not a fake-out in the classic sense -- rather, the movie establishes a set of expectations for what will happen, and then something even worse occurs, but once it happens it feels like just the right outcome.

It looks like it's going to be a bad ending for the champion, Midge Kelly (Kirk Douglas), as he's getting pounded to a pulp by the challenger. He's barely on his feet, his left eye is puffy and closed, and his face is a ferocious grimace of blood and anger. Enraged at the broadcaster and crowd calling for his blood, Midge rallies his strength and knocks out his opponent. Minutes later, he dies of a brain hemorrhage in his locker room.

Like so many boxing dramas, 1949's "Champion" is about hubris and ambition. A man who has nothing rises up to the top of the fighting sport through sheer determination, and not a little savagery in the ring. As he climbs the ladder, his personal life descends into a morass of failed relationships and selfishness. Midge gives up everything that's important in exchange for glory in the ring, then watches even that slip away.

Also like so many boxing movies, there's someone waiting just outside the ring who's subordinate to the fighter. Sometimes it's a kid, sometimes it's a girl, and in "Champion," like "Raging Bull," it's a brother. Arthur Kennedy plays Connie, who walks with the aid of a cane. (He's literally listed in the credits as "Midge's lame brother.") Connie is supportive and loyal, until he realizes Midge's fountain of ego will eventually drown everyone close to him, including his sibling.

There are three lady loves for Midge in the movie, and it's one too many. Ruth Roman plays Emma, a waitress at the diner where Midge and Connie land jobs. Connie is clearly attracted to her, but Emma only has eyes for the athletic, aggressive Midge. Her father catches them canoodling and forces Midge to marry Emma, at which point he immediately abandons her, angry at his wings being clipped.

The next is Grace (Marilyn Maxwell), a brassy blonde who seems to hang on the arm of whoever is the biggest contender for the championship, switching allegiances as the rankings rise and fall. "I'm expensive," she warns Midge, "Very expensive." She uses Midge, and Midge uses her until such time as he doesn't need her anymore. He dumps her, in a devastatingly cold move, but we don't really feel sorry for Grace. Midge may be a mercenary, but at least he plies his trade in the ring, not the bedroom.

Perhaps the most interesting, but also the most unnecessary, female is "Palmer" Harris (Lola Albright), the much-younger wife of Midge's shyster of a manager, Jerome Harris (Luis Van Rooten). She's a trophy wife, but is comfortable about being one, until she encounters the brooding Midge, who by this time has sunk to almost caveman levels of testosteronal behavior.

Paul Stewart has a nice role as Tommy, Midge's laconic first manager who discovers him. When Tommy tells him he has to take a dive before he'll get his shot at the championship, Midge refuses, thrashing his opponent to the canvas in mere seconds. Soon the mobsters and gamblers are after him. To atone to the moneymen who control the sport, Midge is forced to part ways with Tommy in favor of Jerome. He's not happy about it, but Midge pays whatever price in personal relationships is required to keep climbing upward.

The fight scenes in "Champion" are fairly weak by modern standards, but for 1949 they pack a pretty punch. Douglas has the physique and pugnaciousness of a fighter, though as usual more punches are landed in a single round than in an entire real bout. They are quite obviously stunt punches, with the glove never quite contacting the face, and it shows.

Director Mark Robson keeps his camera roving inside the ring in a dynamic way. The film won an Oscar for editing, and earned a slew of other nominations, including Douglas for Best Actor and Kennedy for Supporting Actor.

Carl Foreman earned his own Academy Award nod for the screenplay, which was based on a short story by Ring Lardner. (Interesting aside: Carl Foreman was Blacklisted during the 1950s, and posthumously awarded an Oscar for his uncredited work on "The Bridge on the River Kwai." Lardner's son, Ring Lardner Jr., was also a Blacklisted screenwriter and Oscar winner.)

I should note that I watched "Champion" in a colorized version -- the only one available (sadly) on streaming Netflix. The movie was shot in black-and-white, and in fact earned an Oscar nomination in Best Cinematography, Black-and-White for Franz Planer -- back when the Academy gave out separate awards for color and monochrome.

I can't say as I found the colorization terribly intrusive. Truth be told, I didn't even know about it until I began my post-viewing research. But the many slanted shadows and inky pools of darkness should have clued me in that "Champion" belongs in the film noir category. Somehow, I can't think of film noir as being anything other than black-and-white.

3 stars out of four