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: "Notorious"

In many ways, "Notorious" is the most quintessentially Hitchcock film.

The voyeurism that marked Alfred Hitchcock's movies is in clear evidence, with the many extreme close-ups and tracking shots, which were highly unusual in 1946 American cinema. There's one shot of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman embracing, and the camera slowly rotates around their heads -- a trick Hitchcock would use again, for example in his masterpiece "Vertigo." The overall effect in this movie is of following a subject, or being followed. Since it's a movie about espionage, it gives the audiences an unsettled, borderline paranoid mood.

There's also the classic use of the MacGuffin -- an object or other plot device that is used to drive the story, but which remains ill-defined or whose importance is never really made clear. It doesn't really matter what it is, in other words, only that everyone wants it. Hitchcock's films were replete with microfilm or sinister powders or such things that had the main character being chased around nilly-willy. In "Notorious" the MacGuffin is bottles of wines that turn out to contain a mysterious black sand.

And the misogyny that was often part and parcel of Hitchcock's work was never stronger than in "Notorious." Bergman plays Alicia Huberman, a German-American playgirl who is used as a Mata Hari by intelligence agent Devlin (Grant) to infiltrate a Nazi cel in Rio De Janeiro. Devlin, who recruits her after her father is convicted as a traitor, is at first repulsed by her constant boozing and loose morals. But he eventually falls for, only to learn that his assignment is to use Alicia as bait to lure out Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), one of the Nazi co-conspirators.

Grant's performance is particularly icy and cruel, as opposed to his usual cocksure charm. At one point he admits that he's always been afraid of girls -- something feminist film theorists have had a field day with.

There's one great scene where Alicia is meeting with Devlin at a horse race to update him on her snooping, and she playfully tells him, "You can add Sebastian's name to my list of playmates" -- a not-at-all subtle indication that she has slept with him. The look that comes over Grant's face, one of anger and humiliation, quickly sours into an image of pure contempt.

Devlin's associates (the redoubtable Louis Calhern plays Devlin's boss) also speak contemptuously of Alicia, even though she's supplying them with invaluable intelligence about their enemies, because she's using sex to get what she wants. It goes without saying that these gentlemen would not be so quick to disparage one of their own employing the same tactics. When Alicia agrees to marry Sebastian to further the ruse, they view it only as an opportunity for them to dig up dirt on their foes.

Claude Rains had one of those truly magnificent film careers, nearly always as a supporting man (he was nominated for the Oscar four times, including this film, never winning) but occasionally in the lead. His portrayal of Sebastian is most interesting -- he is never shown committing an overtly evil act, even after he discovers Alicia's role as a spy. He and his iron maiden of a mother begin to slowly poison her, but it's the old lady who actually does the deed. Sebastian is shown as a decent guy who just happens to be working with his fellow Nazis. He also seems to truly love Alicia -- they previously had a fling years ago, which was what helped make Alicia the perfect mole.

It's interesting to think what it would be like to remake this movie from the perspective of the Claude Rains character, with an overbearing mother and a mysterious stranger who keeps showing up in an attempt to steal your wife away.

Leopoldine Konstantin plays Sebastian's mother, in a memorable performance. Since Sebastian is seen as such a nice guy, even something of a wuss, she represents the most villainous figure in the film.

One of my favorite games is spotting mother-son cinematic pairings in which the actors portraying them are actually about the same age. Claude Rains was 57 when this film came out, while Konstantin was but three years older. There's one scene where they're interacting in a close two-shot (i.e., both their heads are visible in the frame) and you can see how smooth and unlined her face is, compared to Rains' elegant but craggy features.

3.5 stars

Reeling Backward: "Spellbound"

I found another Alfred Hitchcock movie I don't like.

Few, if any, Hollywood directors were as productive and consistently good as Hitchcock. From the time he started making pictures in the U.S. in 1935 until his last big hit in 1964, he directed 37 films, while starting up an important television franchise, too. It's simply astonishing how many classics came out of that three-decade period: "Psycho," "North by Northwest," "Vertigo," "To Catch a Thief," "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "Lifeboat," "Notorious," "Strangers on a Train," "Rear Window" -- it goes on and on.

But Hitch also made some clunkers, although a lot of people are reluctant to admit it. I never cared for "The Birds," which its silly plot about killer pigeons, and "Marnie" is absolutely laughable.

I'd never seen "Spellbound," which is considered to be one of his major works, until recently. And it was a real let-down.

There's the approach to psychoanalysis that's absurdly simplistic -- all you have to do is get the patient to remember their repressed memories, and voila! No more crazy.

Add to that the cliche of a man and woman meeting and immediately falling in love. Especially Ingrid Bergman as a cold, calculating psychiatrist who's willing to pitch her entire career and go on the lam with a man she's only just met, while he was posing as the new head of the clinic where she works. Turns out he's an impostor with amnesia who believes he killed the doctor he replaced.

So, here are the facts:

1. He's nuts. And maybe a murderer.
   
2. In the course of 24 hours, she falls in love with him enough to ignore point #1.
3. They run away together, her theory being to cure him before the police capture them.

Not exactly brainiac behavior, and her character is supposed to be super-smart.

Also, "Spellbound" contains bar none the worst fake skiing scene in cinematic history. They're careening down a mountain together, going really really fast. The long shots of the stunt doubles look like they're going down a 45-degree grade at least 30 mph. But in the close-ups, their bodies stay perfectly smooth, never jostling up and down or side to side. They look like two people standing on an escalator.

I've never gone in for a lot of feminist film theory, but I have to say the much-touted misogyny of Hitchcock is on full display here. Every single male character makes some kind of cutting remark about Ingrid Bergman in particular and the female gender in general. "There's nothing I can't stand more than a smug woman!" "Women make the best psychoanalysts ... until they fall in love. Then they make the best patients!" "Listen to yourself, it's baby talk!"

Obviously he got a lot better, but in one of his first film roles, Gregory Peck is just cringe-worthy. I lost count of the number of times he swooned. I think Peck prepared for this role by practicing to faint without hurting himself. Then he comes out of his spell, flashes a big smile and pours on the showbiz charm. Granted, the character is supposed to be crazy, but did he have to be so smarmy?

Hitchcock is deified more than just about any other American film director, and deservedly so. But let's not blind ourselves to the fact that amidst all those great films, he made some flicks like "Spellbound" that are worthy of ridicule.