Reeling Backward: "Watch on the Rhine" (1943)

Sometimes when a movie is totally different from our expectations, it can be a glorious thing. I remember going into "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" expecting a slapdash prequel, and came out convinced I'd just seen the best movie of the summer.

But diverging too far from what people thought they were going to get can be a fatal drawback, too, and I admit I approached "Watch on the Rhine" expecting to see a gripping spy thriller. This was, after all, a film that was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Screenplay and Supporting Actress, and won a golden statue for Paul Lukas as Best Actor.

Alas, "Rhine" couldn't be more different than I expected, and it seriously sapped my enjoyment of the picture. I went in thinking spy thriller with lots of twists and turns in the plot. It's much more a dramatic piece of high-toned propaganda, as characters speechify about the evils of Nazism and the nobility of those who stand up against it.

As its opening screen crawl makes clear, the film is an ode to Germans who resist the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich through armed resistance. Coming out in 1943, it couldn't be seen as anything other than an overt appeal to the fighting resolve of Americans and their allies abroad.

Set in 1940 and based on a famous play by Lillian Hellman, "Rhine" concerns an American woman, Sara Muller, (Bette Davis) who returns home after 18 years abroad with her German husband Kurt (Lukas) and children in tow. It soon becomes clear that Kurt is not just the mild-mannered engineer he seems to be, but is one of the key leaders of the German resistance.

Alas, Sara's wealthy mother Fanny (Lucile Watson) has a disgraced Romanian count loitering as a house guest on an extended stay -- why, it's never made clear since she doesn't really know him very well -- and he conspires to sell the information about his identity to the Germans. He threatens to blackmail the husband, who shoots and kills him, then returns to Europe to fight on.

If that doesn't sound like a lot of plot, it's because it isn't. Dashiell Hammett was a famous novelist used to seeing his books turned into movies and television, but as near as I can research this was his only screenplay credit. He tries in vain to breathe some life into the proceedings, but it's hard to escape the story's stilted stage origins, as characters talk and talk and talk ... and talk.

Similarly, director Herman Shumlin was a stage veteran with no experience behind the camera, and it shows. His camera work is stagy and stiff, with characters tending to plant themselves in one spot and barely move around. The performances are also uniformly formal and inorganic, as the actors recite their lines by rote as if schoolkids who have proudly memorized a speech for class.

Shumlin only directed one other feature film, and promptly went back to his native soil on Broadway, where he racked up an impressive array of Tony Award nominations and wins. I'm glad he found success in the medium where he was most suited, because clearly film work was not for him.

The scene where Kurt shoots the count, Teck de Brancovis (George Coulouris), was controversial in its time because the Romanian is only looking for a bribe, not threatening his life. Kurt forces him into the garage at gunpoint, and a shot rings out. It's pretty clear that Kurt kills him in cold blood.

At first this ran afoul of the censors of the time, since the Hays Code stipulated that criminals always had to be shown getting their comeuppance in the end. According to a book about Davis' career, the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures actually suggested changing the ending so Kurt is captured and executed by the Nazis. In the end, the producers managed to convince the censors that Teck was the true villain, and he intended to betray Kurt even after extorting money out of him.

All the Germans except Sara speak in very stilted tones as if English were not their first language. I can understand what the filmmakers were going for, but the result is stiff and strange, with the children speaking like little academics. There's also the odd youngest child, a chubby child who informs his grandmother that he is "not beautiful," and she does him one better by telling him she adores him despite his being ugly.

There's also a distracting subplot about Sara's playboy brother David (Donald Woods) having a thing with the count's young wife Marthe (Geraldine Fitzgerald). It adds nothing to the tale, and only serves to distract from the spy story. Of course, since that is so spare, perhaps they just needed something, anything to pad out the script.

All the European names makes for a difficult time remembering who is who -- Teck, Anise, Marthe. Even "Kurt" comes out sounding more like "Koort."

Maybe it's just because I was expecting something completely different -- I was picturing back-alley assassinations and a potboiler plot -- but I just couldn't get engaged in "Watch on the Rhine." Even the title seems like a misdirection, since the action rarely leaves the Farrelly mansion, let alone shifting to Germany. But this is a whole lot of pompous pontificating with little dramatic punch.

Reeling Backward: "A Tale of Two Cities" (1935)

The 1935 version of "A Tale of Two Cities" is a movie stuck in time between two eras: Silent film and sound, theatricality and realism, literature and melodrama.

In the early years after the advent of sound, filmmakers were still figuring things out. The sound wasn't very good usually, evidenced by the disparity of levels at which dialogue and music were recorded. While watching the film, I found myself turning the volume up and down in order to hear what an actor was saying, or to quiet the din of a rowdy crowd scene.

But film was still evolving from one based on the stage to an entirely new visual medium with its own language and style. Performers, who at this juncture almost invariably got their start on the stage, were still doing wild gesticulations and oversized facial expressions to "reach the back of the room." They were also learning to emote with their voices, unable to lean on title cards anymore, and sometimes they overdid it.

I think directors who got their start in the waning days of sound or after adjusted better than those like Jack Conway, who started directing in 1912. He stages his version of Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" like a silent movie rather than a sound one, with static cameras and long takes where he lets his actors fume and pout and carry on.

The screenplay by W.P. Lipscomb and S.N. Behrman necessarily pares down the narrative to its core elements, but even at over two hours the film feels like a Cliffs Notes version of the great novel. All the characters except Sydney Carton are more or less cardboard cutouts, though Madame DeFarge gets a fiery scene or two that stand out.

It's still a worthy movie, if only for the sweep of Dickens' story of love and revolution, despair and revenge. And several of the big crowd scenes, especially the storming of the Bastille, are big-budget showstoppers with thousands of extras filling the frame in a way that CGI still can't match.

Ronald Colman plays Carton, a brilliant barrister self-consciously throwing his life away on booze and self-interest, who learns through is love of Lucie Manette (Elizabeth Allan) to make the ultimate sacrifice. The other characters -- Lucie's father Dr. Manette (Henry B. Walthall), her husband Charles Darnay (Donald Woods), her strident companion Miss Pross (Edna May Oliver) -- fade into the background. Within the confines of the movie, they are mere facilitators of the plot.

A couple of exceptions to emerge. I quite enjoyed Blanche Yurka as Madame DeFarge, whose rage at the aristocrats boils over into a bloodthirsty need for revenge. Yurka was an opera star who branched over into the movies with this film in her late 40s, and had a rather busy career thereafter.

Basil Rathbone also has a small but delectably cruel role as Charles Darnay's uncle, the Marquis de St. Evremonde, who regards oppressing the peasants as his natural birthright.

Interestingly, there had been two silent film versions of "A Tale of Two Cities" prior to this iteration, but only once since, in 1958 starring Dirk Bogarde. I would say Dickens' novel is ripe for another adaptation, one that incorporates modern filmmaking styles with classic sensibilities.

3 stars out of four