Reeling Backward: "A Town Like Alice" (1956)

"A Town Like Alice" is a historic romance in which the romantic relationship is the least successful thing about the movie. Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch in fact spend less than 15 minutes of screen time together. It is her character's tremendous struggle to survive as a Japanese prisoner of war that drives the narrative. Her hooking up with an Australian soldier is merely a sidebar.

Maybe it's because this 1956 movies based on Nevil Shute's novel actually truncates the story to only focus on Jean Paget's experiences during and immediately after than the war, ending with her reuniting with Joe Harman back in his hometown that gives the film its name. The book went on to chronicle her experiences starting a raft of businesses that revitalized the economy of that  area.

Indeed, it was probably a mistake to keep the title of the movie the same as the book, since thematically they're on opposite sides of the same canoe. Heck, if it was up to me I would've ditched the Peter Finch part entirely.

I say this not because I'm contemptuous of the film, but because I think the rest of it is so strong that it doesn't really need the romance part. It ends up dragging the story down more than lifting it up. McKenna received the BAFTA Award for Best Actress, and well-deserved it was. Her performance is a knockout. Finch won the Best Actor prize, which seems out of place for what is obviously a supporting role.

"Alice" is notable for being one of the very first depictions of female POWs that was unflinching in how harsh the conditions were and how uncaring the Japanese soldiers (for the most part). It must have been quite a thing for midcentury audiences to watch finely mannered English ladies being forced to sweat and scrape through the jungles of Malaya.

The story opens with Jean and the rest of her office being evacuated as  a result of the Japanese invasion. She lingers behind to help her boss' wife with their children, and ends up escaping with them in their car. But they're trapped in a local seaside town because all the transport boats have already departed, and they're captured.

The men are rounded up and sent off by truck to a POW camp. The Japanese have little use for the women and children, so they're sent marching across the countryside with an elderly sergeant (Kenji Takaki) in tow. No prison commander will take them in, and they end up trudging to and fro for months on end, slowly dropping off like flies.

Director Jack Lee is unflinching in portraying their suffering, including shots of little children taking their last breaths that must have been quite controversial at the time. He's also extraordinarily successful at creating a mood of sweltering, oppressive environs. We can practically feel the jungle closing in on the wayward little troupe of women.

At one point they stumble upon Joe and his buddy, who are Australian POWs in charge of driving supplies up and down the main roads. They arrange for several convenient breakdowns of the truck so he can spend time with Jean, sharing a cigarette and telling her about his lonely home in the middle of the outback.

Later, Joe steals chickens from the prison commander's private coop and gives them to the women for food. He's soon caught, as he must have known he would be, and literally crucified for his crimes. Jean thinks him dead, but he actually survived the ordeal, setting up their big reunion to end the film.

The depiction of the Japanese is about typical for this era. Several of the officers were those big round Coke bottle glasses that for some reason became an icon of anti-Japanese propaganda. They're generally shown as incredibly proud and egotistical, and Napoleonic in their desire to subjugate these tall, imperious British ladies.

The sergeant, though, is portrayed as sympathetic and humanized, attempting to rescue one of the small boys from a snake. At some point her morphs from being their guard and leader to something more than a chaperone, following the women around in their wayward odyssey. 

I really enjoyed everything about "A Town Like Alice," except for the part that it purported to be all about.

Reeling Backward: "No Highway in the Sky" (1951)

"No Highway in the Sky" was an early progenitor of the disaster flick genre, and quite possibly the first film ever made about a commercial airliner in peril. A quarter-century later, this sort of thing would become fodder for a movie-going public with a ferocious appetite for things that crash, burn, erupt or sink. Of course, then came the inevitable "Airplane" spoofs, followed by the whole thing coming full circle with modern plane disasters like "Red Eye," "Air Force One" and "Flightplan."

The latter picture most resembles "No Highway in the Sky," in that it's about a socially awkward scientist trying to convince everyone that the airplane is unsafe and must turn back, immediately. No captain every follows this advice, at least in the movies.

I imagine the film was quite bothersome to the nascent commercial airline companies when it came out in 1951, especially with that title explicitly contrasting the safety of the American highway to the dangerous, untested machines hurtling through the air. Within a few years flying would surpass driving as the preferred -- and safest -- mode of long-distance transportation. 

Jimmy Stewart plays Theodore Honey, a British scientist -- with a curiously absent English accent -- working for a large airline company, the Royal Aircraft Establishment. This is not exactly a plausible-sounding name for a real company, but then "No Highway in the Sky" is a pretty awful-sounding title, too. The film is based on the book by Nevil Shute, adapted for the screen by R.C. Sherriff, Oscar Millard and Alec Coppel, and helmed by journeyman director Henry Koster.

Honey is a widower who lives alone with his 12-year-old daughter Elspeth (Janette Scott), wears only one suit and can't remember the number of the apartment where he has lived for the past eight years. It's the classic cinematic genius archetype, his head so filled with physics and high-end mathematics that the mundane challenges of the workaday world leave him baffled.

Honey is running an experiment about the reliability of the tail section of the new "Reindeer" propeller airliner. He's convinced that metal fatigue will cause the tail to fall off after 1,440 hours of flight time, based on his calculations. One Reindeer already crashed under mysterious circumstances, and Honey is sure it was the tail section that caused it.

His experiment involves shaking a Reindeer tail in a laboratory to see if it'll snap off. Unfortunately, he's only allowed to run the vibrating machine for eight hours a day, due to noise complaints from the neighbors. It seems like Honey's only function is waiting around in that vast hangar, hoping the tail will split off.

He's recruited by a new forward-thinking company executive (Jack Hawkins) to fly out to the site of the Reindeer that crashed. Honey resists at first, saying that scientists must concern themselves with facts and not be swayed by the emotional factor of human lives and relationships. Indeed, Honey had not even told anyone about his theory that the tail sections will fall off until the exec questioned him about his work.

Honey has, in fact, never even flown on a plane before -- I enjoyed Stewart's gangly crab-walk up the boarding stairs, like a man suddenly plopped on the moon and told to traverse the foreign landscape. In fact, well into the flight he learns that the plane is in fact a Reindeer, and one of the oldest ones with more than 1,400 hours of flight time.

Honey appeals to the captain to turn back -- we already know how that ruena out -- and then turns his attentions to two women aboard the flight. Marjorie (Glynis Johns), a young and helpful stewardess (don't bark, that's what they called them then) tries to control the situation of a passenger causing a panic. The other is Monica Teasdale, played by the great Marlene Dietrich, a famous movie star. Because Honey's deceased wife adored Teasdale's pictures, he tries to warn her about their impending doom. The actress at first is put off by this strange man, but then puts faith in his analytical mind. When the plane lands without incident, though, she dismisses him.

Dietrich's character is really unessential to the story, but having her around jazzes things up. Dietrich -- 50 years old and without a line on her iconic face -- has a mesmerizing effect on any film, and her presence is used to good effect here.

Honey sabotages the plane by pulling up the landing gear while it's grounded, causing it to collapse and be destroyed. The last third or so of the movie is concerned with the aftershocks of this incident, in which Honey is accused of insanity and ineptitude. In an unlikely turn of events, Marjorie comes to live with Honey and his daughter, taking care of them during his travails.

The plot is pretty contrived hokum, even by the standards of a nascent airline industry that was uncharted territory for 1951 audiences. In the end, of course, Honey is proved right all along and vindicated.

The airline honchos, played by Hawkins and Ronald Squires, seem awfully accommodating to an oddball egghead whose ideas are threatening a major blow to their company's reputation and financial standing. As the inquiry commences and the pressure mounts, they're shown to be firmly in Honey's corner, if trying not to be too obvious about it. Perhaps my own encounters with the corporate world of late have left me cynical, but I doubt men in their position would be doing anything other than frantically covering their own tail sections.

I should note that the airplane is a model, both in its ground scenes and in the air, and not very convincing in either case. When Honey collapses the Reindeer, part of the engine tears open to reveal a hollow wooden frame. The passenger compartment and especially the cockpit are laughably cavernous -- the pilot and co-pilot are joined by no less than three other officers working their own stations along a corridor between the pilots' seats and the passenger cabin.

"No Highway in the Sky" is notable for its nascent depiction of both airline travel and disaster film dynamics. Unfortunately, it's not very skilled at executing either one.

2 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "On the Beach" (1959)

Subtle as a sledgehammer, "On the Beach" is a movie about people waiting to die. Anyone who watches it will know exactly how they feel.

The 1959 film is set in the post-nuclear apocalypse. The entire world population has been erased except for Australia, and they'll soon be gone when the weather brings radiation poisoning to the holdouts in five months or so. Gregory Peck is captain of a U.S. submarine that escaped the bombs, and is sent out by the remaining joint Australian/American leadership to survey the spread.

(Even in 1959, scientists knew it wouldn't take five months for radiation to spread. But audiences probably didn't.).

Directed by Stanley Kramer, "On the Beach" was written by John Paxton from the novel by Nevil Shute. It's really heavy-handed stuff as the characters try to put a brave face on their impending doom, and take a break now and then to wail about how mankind could have been so stupid as to play around with nuclear weapons.

The story is set in 1964 -- the near-distant future. Peck plays Dwight Towers, the sub commander who still speaks about his wife and two children as if they're alive. He's not bonkers, or at least not more so than any of the other people trying desperately to maintain an even keel.

Anthony Perkins plays a young Australian naval officer assigned to Towers as a liaison, and Donna Anderson plays his nervous wife. Ava Gardner stars as Moira, a friend of theirs who soon gets caught up in romance with Towers. Gardner gives a vibrant, fetching performance as a woman with a big personality and an excess of passion, but there's a layer of self-hatred underneath.

Fred Astaire plays Julian, an English scientist who bears a guilty conscience, since he was one of those who helped build the bomb.

The most interesting thing about the movie is its depiction of how society adapts after the bombs have fallen. The short version is, not very much. They still have electricity, telephones and plenty of booze -- which all the characters help themselves to generously. About the only major change is that everyone gets around by bicycle or horse, since there's little gasoline for cars.

Although Julian does own the last functioning Ferrari in the world, which he intends to race in the upcoming (and last) Australian Grand Prix, despite being a bit long in the tooth for this sort of thing, not to mention a total novice as a race car driver.

The movie is quite dull and repetitive. There's lots of scenes of men and women sharing drinks and trying not to talk about the radiation that's coming to kill them.

Eventually, Towers and his crew do set out on their mission. It includes a side trip to San Diego to track down a mysterious Morse Code signal they've been receiving.

I don't mind a movie that's depressing, but "On the Beach" is simply a great bore. The anti-war and anti-nukes message is delivered so stridently, it feels more like a lecture than a forbidding cautionary tale.

1.5 stars