Reeling Backward: "Sudden Fear" (1952)

 

Everyone loves the story of Jack Palance winning an Academy Award at the end of his career for "City Slickers," nearly 40 years after losing the Oscar for his previous nomination as the menacing villain in "Shane." The one-armed stage pushups, Billy Crystal's endless host quips thereafter, and the redemptive story of a not-quite-star finally getting his golden recognition have officially entered Hollywood lore.

What most people don't realize is "Shane" wasn't Palance's first Academy Award nomination. It actually came a year before "Shane" for his role opposite the great Joan Crawford in "Sudden Fear," a largely forgotten film noir. Crawford received her own nomination, along with nods for the excellent black-and-white cinematography by Charles Lang and costumes by Sheila O'Brien.

It's a great-looking though middling picture that falls somewhere between the gritty realism of film noir and the family/romance melodramas of Douglas Sirk and his ilk. It's basically a woman-in-distress star vehicle for Crawford as a famous, wealthy playwright who falls hard for a young actor whom she marries before realizing he's a conniving cad who wants to off her for her fortune.

The age differential between the two characters is never overtly stated or discussed, though it seems clear she's supposed to be significantly older than him. Palance was 32 when the film came out, in the full bloom of vibrant manhood. He looked almost like an entirely different person as a young man, simultaneously handsome and frightening with his hard-angled features. 

Palance looked like a devil they'd plucked out of hell and wrapped some skin around.

The exact year of Crawford's birth is somewhat obscured in mystery, though using the most commonly accepted timeframe she was nearly 50 when "Sudden Fear" debuted. She was one of the rare Golden Age actresses who got by more on raw talent and her powerful screen presence than her looks.

A lot of people don't know Crawford broke into showbiz as a chorus line girl. She used to attend every party in town she could to show off her dance moves in hopes of getting better parts. Her famous queen's eyebrows were ferociously plucked and/or dyed during her ingenue years, to the point that like Palance she was barely recognizable between her younger and older self.

I have to admit to being a little disappointed in "Sudden Fear." Director David Miller was a journeyman who seems not to grasp the dark mood and rhythms of the noir genre. The screenplay by Lenore J. Coffee and Robert Smith (with uncredited contributions by Crawford), based on the story by Edna Sherry, is rather overlong and poorly paced.

Myra Hudson (Crawford) finds out that her new husband, Lester Blaine (Palance), is conspiring to kill her around the 45-minute mark, leaving more than an hour for her to fret and scheme and run from danger. What we end up is a whole lot of closeup reaction shots of Crawford and Palance just becomes this guy on the sidelines going in and out of doors.

It may seem sacrilegious to say, given his Oscar nomination and subsequent iconography, but Palance doesn't come across as particularly scary in this movie. He actually seems to be a straight-arrow type who has genuinely fallen for Myra until his old flame, Irene (Gloria Grahame), wanders into town and threatens to expose his sordid past unless he goes along with her plans to fleece his new wife. 

In a lot of ways, she's the real villain of the piece -- and an unexplored one at that.

I found it strange that he film never talked much about Myra's work as a playwright, other than she's independently wealthy as a result of it aside from the estate she inherited from her father. Upon first meeting on a train to San Francisco, she knows Lester because he was turned down recently for a role in her new play. She wants to explain to him why to reassure him it had nothing to do with his acting ability, but he refuses in a gentlemanly way.

It would have been more interesting if Myra primarily wrote mystery plays so we could see how she functions as one of her characters might in a similar plight. Alas.

Interestingly, the script keeps dropping all sorts of hints of ways that Myra might die that never come to fruition. There is the perilous stone staircase from her mansion down to the sea, which Lester makes out to be terrified of for her safety. We also uncover a bottle of poison, a revolver and other methods for death, and she has nightmares about falling or being smothered by a pillow.

I suppose the filmmakers' idea was to keep teasing the audience with the possibility of her murder, but to me it didn't heighten the sense of danger so much as keep stretching things out longer than they needed to be.

There is a nice gimmick using a recording machine in Myra's office that she uses to dictate her plays and other business. At one point her friend and attorney, Steve Kearney (Bruce Bennett), presents her with an update to her will that makes a meagerly allowance for Lester should she die or they divorce, and Myra instead dictates a much more generous version.

We think Lester will stumble across this information -- Myra had shown him how the machine works, including the fact it turns on automatically whenever someone starts to speak -- but instead he and Irene blab out their entire plan while hiding out in the office during a party. Then Myra hears the recording and realizes they're going to kill her.

Of course, one wonders why Myra doesn't immediately go to the police, or call her attorney, or simply jump on a train to anywhere. It's never sufficiently explained, though she accidentally breaks the disc recording of Lester and Irene's plotting, so I guess the idea is supposed to be she has no proof. But surely a woman of Myra's intelligence and resources would've thought of something better.

For awhile she tries to turn the tables on them, planting false letters and luring them to Irene's apartment so Myra can kill Lester and frame Irene for it. It all seems overly complicated and unlikely.

Crawford is her usual terrific self, playing a character who's a little more reserved and less self-assured than her normal commanding performances as a strong woman up against bitter circumstance. I just wish the movie could've cooked up a better part for Palance, who's more dimwit than devilish. 

Reeling Backward: "The Greatest Show on Earth" (1952)

Awhile back I took a look at one of the films often mentioned in discussions about the worst movies ever to win the Best Picture Academy Award, "Around the World in 80 Days." That compelled me to seek out more "bottom dwellers" from Oscar history -- though being sneered at as "the worst of the best" is not really too crushing an insult, if you think about it.

"The Greatest Show on Earth" hearkens back to a time when audiences craved sheer spectacle for its own sake. That this 1952 picture produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille has in spades, showing both the real show of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey's Circus troupe while mixing in a behind-the-scenes story laden with romance and intrigue.

The back-of-the-show parts aren't nearly as good as the front, but it's still an agreeable piece of entertainment, even if it could easily have lost one-fifth of its 2½-hour runtime.

"Show" was not up against a weak field in the Oscar race its year. "High Noon" was the heavy favorite to win, and may have been undermined by its anti-McCarthy themes. "The Quiet Man" and "Moulin Rouge" were also strong contenders, though "Ivanhoe" does not hold up well. Heck, the masterful "Singin' in the Rain," generally regarded as the greatest film musical ever, did not even merit a Best Picture nomination.

It has been noted that "Show" is one of only a couple of films to win Best Picture without also receiving nominations for both director and screenplay. (The other is "Gladiator.") While it has occasionally happened that a Best Pic saw its director shut out ("Driving Miss Daisy") or its screenwriter(s), it's exceedingly rare for it to happen to both. It did earn a "Best Story" nomination at a time when the Academy still had that category.

The consensus of film historians is that "Show" was seen in the industry at the time as the last, best chance to give an Academy Award to the legendary DeMille, whose career was winding down. The Oscars have a long history of "make up" awards to reward people who deserved a golden statuette but never got one through various circumstances. (See: Newman, Paul, "The Color of Money.")

Little did they know that in 1956 he would go on to direct "The Ten Commandments," possibly his greatest cinematic triumph. In a bit of ironic turnaround, DeMille, having been the beneficiary of the one of the greatest upsets in Oscar history, saw his grand epic beat out by -- you guessed it -- "Around the World in 80 Days." There's some kind of cosmic harmony in that series of events.

About half of the screen time is given over to footage of the show in progress, which is essentially just filming what the circus really did touring around the country. This was a time when kids from rural areas might only ever see a elephant or a tiger or lion when the circus came to town --  not to mention trapeze artists, clowns and so forth.

There's also quite a bit of documentary-style peeks at the monumental logistics behind moving around an entire circus operation of 1,400 people. A lot of this is pretty dull stuff, though the actual raising of the big top is pretty interesting. (This is also the only section of the movie where you'll see any people of color.)

The story part is pretty simple. Charlton Heston plays Brad, the whip-cracking boss who keeps everything running on time. He's sweet on Holly (Betty Hutton), the young trapeze star who's set to take over the center ring. Until, that is, Brad recruits the Great Sebastian (Cornel Wilde), a famous lady-killer who only works in the limelight.

Sebastian takes a shine to Holly, who uses this to make Brad jealous, who is in turn wooed by Angel (Gloria Grahame), the elephant performer who's been around the block a few times. Also hanging around is Phyllis (Dorothy Lamour), who does an "iron jaw" hanging act as well as singing in a big island musical number.

The two high points of the narrative are Sebastian falling during a dangerous battle of one-upsmanship with Holly, and the big train wreck near the end that threatens to shut the circus down permanently. There are also confusing subplots involving a mobster, a cheating carny and a German trainer who's green-eyed for Angel.

The big problem with "The Greatest Show on Earth" is it couldn't decide if it wanted to be a journalistic look at what goes into putting on a major circus or a schmaltzy Hollywood story set against a circus backdrop. It tries to do both, and as a result neither part is thoroughly successful, though the show part wins a contest between them.

I haven't even mentioned Jimmy Stewart as Bubbles, a sympathetic clown who never removes his makeup and seems much more worldly than a clown should, particularly when it comes to medical matters. (At one point, he's able to diagnose that Sebastian's mangled rictus arm should make a full recovery just by watching him try to throw a punch at Brad.)

He's got his own back story about being a wanted murderer on the lam, a doctor who performed a mercy killing for his sick wife. I enjoyed Stewart's antics as a clown -- like the rest of the cast, he actually spent time living and training with the real circus performers. Though his character and tale don't carry much emotional weight, also just like the rest of the cast.

"The Greatest Show on Earth" is very much like going to the circus. There are momentary thrills and chills, a few scary moments, some funny scenes, and a whole lot of mushy stuff. Then you go home and, after a while, you forget about it. Worthy Best Pictures can be many things, but the one thing they should not be is forgettable.

Reeling Backward: "The Man Who Never Was" (1956)

"The Man Who Never Was" is a crime caper built inside a war film. It's the (mostly) true story of the one of the biggest hoaxes ever played, with the winner earning not stacks of money but sums of lives -- 30,000 Allied soldiers spared, by some reckoning.

Operation Mincemeat was one of the those things that sounds elegantly simple in abstract: British Intelligence would dump a body with secret documents detailing an Allied invasion of Greece -- not Sicily, where everyone (including their Axis enemies) was sure the blow would fall. The Germans would find the documents, route their forces elsewhere, and a victory secured with greatly reduced bloodshed.

And that's exactly what did happen.

In execution, though, the scheme was frighteningly convoluted and could have come apart at the seams in any number of ways. Ewen Montagu, the real-life intelligence officer who cooked up the idea -- adapted from one suggested by RAF Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley -- wrote a 1953 best-selling book after his team's exploits were declassified. It, and the movie adaptation three years later, lays out all the details of the operation with some engaging storytelling.

It was such a fiendishly good idea, in fact, that the Allied forces tried replicating it several more ties during the course of World War II. German intelligence forces, of course, were none too keen on repeating their mistake. This actually translated into other instances captured cinematically in which the Germans ignored crucial intelligence that fell into their lap. For instance, there's a scene in "A Bridge Too Far" where a German soldier captures a map of Allied bridge objectives, but when he turns it in his commanders dismiss it as a ruse. That really did happen.

The chief challenge facing Montagu, played by Clifton Webb, was finding a body and preserving it in such a way that the Germans would think the man had died in an airplane crash at sea and his body floated ashore several days later. After consulting with medical experts, he convinces the father of a young fellow who died of pneumonia to donate the body, no questions asked. They would store the body in a special container filled with dry ice, and a submarine launch it a mile off the shore of Spain -- where the supposedly neutral government would cooperate with a German investigation.

The steps Montagu and his team (Robert Flemyng plays his sidekick) took to convince the Germans the body belonged to a real British Royal Marine were truly astounding. Dubbing the man William Martin, they concocted all sorts of fake papers and records. His death was published in the regular newspaper rolls of war dead. They even stuffed theater tickets, a clothing store receipt, keys and other personal articles into his pockets.

The most intriguing trickery was inventing a fiance for young Willy Martin. They enclosed a love letter from a fictional sweetheart in his pocket, and a receipt for an engagement ring. In the movie the sweetheart is played by Gloria Grahame as Lucy Sherwood, a buxom American gal who is the roommate of Pam (Josephine Griffin), Montagu's assistant. Spurned in her own romantic misadventures, Lucy dictates a convincing letter of yearning and regret that the intelligence officers find positively enthralling.

The last third or so of the movie is pure flimflam. It involves a German spy posing as an Irishman (Stephen Boyd) who is sent to London to inquire after Willy's activities to see if they're legit. This eventually leads him to the doorstep of Pam and Lucy, where the latter, having actually just been told of the death of her flyboy beau, convinces the interloper that she's genuinely devastated.

The culmination is Montagu and his men rushing over to the spy's whereabouts to arrest him, and suddenly pulling up and realizing they have to let him go. Otherwise, Montagu reasons, the Germans will have been tipped off to their ruse.

None of this occurred, but its makes for a satisfying conclusion to the movie. The real Montagu spoke approvingly of the changes -- he surely could not have minded being portrayed as a brilliant gumshoe in addition to a military intelligence strategist. The movie's final coda has Montagu placing the Order of the British Empire medal he received for his exploits on the fictional Willy Martin's grave in Spain.

In movie-making if not in war, myth always trumps history.

3 stars out of four