Reeling Backward: "Action in the North Atlantic" (1943)

At first glance, "Action in the North Atlantic" seems like a typical jingoistic World War II war drama, conceived to pump up the troops overseas and the folks at home, while delivering some thrilling action and a little romance.

And it is. All that is missing is a "Buy War Bonds" title card.

It's about the Merchant Marines, carrying oil and military arms across the sea where they are desperately needed by Allied forces while dodging German U-boats and aircraft. It's the usual "swell bunch of guys" rogue's gallery of supporting characters, playing cards and getting into beefs, while coming together in a swell way during times of duress, with occasional nostalgic asides about their swell gals back home. It's swell!

What sets it apart from the pack, though, are two things: the truly impressive naval combat sequences/special effects, and the realistic grim tone and depictions of violence.

Let's talk about the latter first. I was struck by the overt (for its time) depictions of bodies being flung away in explosions or otherwise severely traumatized. Usually in films of this era, you'd hear an explosion off-sceen and then cut to dissipating smoke as a noble hero lies dying, but largely undamaged other than some handsomely blackened cheeks.

In one early scene, a lifeboat full of men is rammed by a German submarine, and a body is seen being chewed up by its propellers. It's very brief -- I rewound and played the film frame-by-frame to confirm -- but still gruesome stuff.

Beyond the depictions of violence, though, is the dire sense of consequences ready to befall anyone. (Well, maybe not star Humphrey Bogart.)

During that same sequence, when an oil tanker is torpedoed and sunk, one of the younger crewman, Johnny Pulaski (Dane Clark), valiantly rescues one of his mates who got trapped in the mess room. He turns back from the clamor toward the lifeboats, busts through the door with an ax, shields him from the raging inferno, straps him into a life vest, then takes it off when they see the ocean is a pool of fire from burning oil, dives into the icy brine together, helps him swim under the glames... only to have the man drown a few feet from the lifeboat.

Similarly, the captain and first mate (Raymond Massey and Bogie, respectively) learn there are men trapped in the stern of the ship, and make to go back and rescue them personally. But they take one look a the burning deck in front of them and conclude it's suicide. Neither do they go down with the ship, though they are the last ones into the lifeboat.

That may not seem like a big deal. But normally we'd see some kind of "we'll find a way!" heroics. The fact they decline to sacrifice themselves in a brave but pointless act speaks to the realities of wartime.

And speaking of war, the depictions of it are just tremendous. By 1943 the U.S. military had accrued a decent library of stock footage from the war, which is sprinkled throughout the film. But for the most part director Lloyd Bacon, a workhorse of the Warner Bros.' pen, used actual actors on actual sets, often with fire and debris right up in their faces.

I was mentally comparing it to similar scenes in the recent "Deepwater Horizon," and "Action" holds up quite well 74 years later.

This is especially impressive given that war edicts prevented any filming at sea -- the threat of enemy submarines right off our coastlines being a very real thing in 1942-43. So everything was shot on the Warners lot, including some rather good ship models for the complicated maneuvers depicted.

Even by today's standards, the war scenes are engrossing and impressive.

(I should note that Bacon did not actually complete filming on the production, as his contract was up and a dispute with the studio resulted in an uncredited Byron Haskin wrapping things up.)

The story's a pretty straight line. John Howard Lawson penned the screenplay, from a story by Guy Gilpatric. Gilpatric got an Academy Award nomination for his work while Lawson did not, under the more arcane rules of the Oscars back then.

Massey plays Steve Jarvis, Captain of the tanker Northern Star, and Bogart is his wiseacre first office, Joe Rossi. Their ship is torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine, whose crew even films and taunts the survivors before running aground their lifeboat. Jarvis vows to get his revenge, and after some floating in a raft and a little shore time for lovin' and such, they get a new mission aboard the Liberty-class cargo ship Seawitch, and another scrap with the Nazis.

The Germans are repeatedly referred to as Nazis, though of course the terms are not interchangeable. The depiction of the enemy is one of the harshest I've ever seen in a WWII film, with the Germans seen as bloodthirsty killers not dissimilar from a pack of slavering wolves. They also speak their native language throughout, a notable departure for films of that era, in long dialogue scenes that can be annoying if you don't sprechen sie deutsch.

Alan Hale, Sr. -- daddy of "The Skipper" and a noted character actor in his own right -- plays "Boats," the older bosun who's in charge of the enlisted men. He rarely goes ashore, because that means facing legal papers from his growing gallery of wives, ex- or otherwise. Sam Levene plays "Chips," the vaguely ethnic veteran  who can divine the movement of the Germans by the ache in his corns. He's supposed to be a veteran of World War I, though Levene was only born in 1905.

Dick Hogan is the young cadet fresh from Merchant Marine officer school, distrusted by the captain for getting his learning from books instead of the open sea. Though he proves himself able in the end. Julie Bishop plays the lounge singer who attracts Bogart's eye and becomes his wife in about a minute and a half.

Ruth Gordon, who would go on to an accomplished screenwriting career before becoming a star late in life, tackles one of her early acting role as Jarvis' loving wife. She would not act in another movie until 1965.

Wilhelm von Brincken plays the sneering German submarine captain. He has an interesting backstory. He met his wife in America while serving in the German consulate during World War I, and was arrested for espionage and sent to prison (including Alcatraz). Afterward he was recruited by Erich Von Stroheim to work in Hollywood, enjoying a busy career for the next two decades, including playing the Red Baron in Howard Hughes' "Hells Angels." When war came again, he was kept quite busy playing enemy commanders on land, sea and air.

"Action in the North Atlantic" may not amount to much more than wartime propaganda. But it's very well-done propaganda.

Reeling Backward: "East of Eden" (1955)

Nine-tenths of James Dean's performance in "East of Eden" isn't in the screenplay.

As conceived it's already a strong part, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by John Steinbeck and helmed by one of one of the greatest directors of actors ever, Elia Kazan. Paul Osborn would receive an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay adaptation, as did Kazan.

But it'd Dean show, in every way that matters. His style of performance, along with Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and few others, more or less marks the transition to what I consider "modern" film acting. Previously most movie actors came up through the theater tradition, and were taught their performance had to be big and broad. They learned Shakespearean elocution and good posture. They still saw themselves as being on a stage, just with cameras and sound booms.

Actors were, literally, stiff.

"Real" actors didn't mumble, or stoop, or not look people in the eye. Similarly, the midcentury conception of ideal masculinity was John Wayne -- composed and remote. Yet here came Dean with his twitchy, emotionally raw turn in his very first film role. (After numerous small television roles.) He seems so uncomfortable and alienated, like he's literally about to shiver his way out of his skin

As Cal Trask, the wayward teenage son of a respected farmer in World War I-era California, Dean embodies the dark half of the parable of Cain and Abel. Cal has been raised without the respect or admiration of his stern father, Adam (Raymond Massey), which he instead bestowed on Cal's fraternal twin brother, Aron (Richard Davalos).

He's essentially a walking wound. I think of the little moments, the touches and quirks Dean infuses into every minute onscreen to convey Cal's vulnerability and multitudinous flaws.

Cal can be kind and empathetic one minute, petulant and just plain nasty the next. He blows like a zephyr, and Dean does, too.

When his dad loses his entire fortune on a risky gamble to preserve and ship lettuce using a crude form of refrigeration, Cal resolves to earn the money back by investing in bean commodities. With a $5,000 loan from his estranged mother -- more on her later -- he and a partner offer local farmers a premium to grow beans, knowing they'll prove a valuable, spoil-resistant crop as America is on the cusp of entering the war in Europe.

In a brief scene -- throwaway exposition, really -- Cal suddenly takes off on a spirited frolic/dance through a bean field. He's positively giddy at the prospect of growing in his father's admiration, much like those tiny sprouts. This, like a number of other key moments in "East of Eden," was pure improvisation by Dean. Kazan wisely kept his cameras rolling to see what would happen.

In the film's pivotal scene, when Cal offers the money to his father and it is rejected as foul war profiteering, the script called for the boy to turn his back and flee in anger. Instead, Dean broke down in a gush of tears and embraced Massey, almost clawing at him as if to wring the reluctant affection out of him. Massey, a decidedly traditional actor, could only stammer "Cal! Cal!" in shocked tones.

That electric combination of old and new methods of acting is a cinematic watershed moment.

I think, though, that my favorite moment in the film is much smaller and subtler. Cal is smitten with Abra (Julie Harris), the longtime girlfriend and presumed fiance of Aron. He doesn't want to betray his brother, but the weight of keeping his feelings repressed eventually becomes unbearable. He climbs up to her bedroom window in the middle of the night and enlists Abra's aid in preparing a surprise birthday party for his father.

Dean stares at her, and in the moonlight his face is the far prettier of the two. You can see all the pain and loneliness mirrored in his sad, tired eyes. He wants her, but can't say so. So there's a distance to his expression. He smiles shyly, and just for a second he rests his face against the window frame -- like he can't stand to hold up the charade.

Better than any single image I can summon, this frame captures the essence of what it's like to be a teenager. 

The rest of the movie isn't quite as memorable as Dean's performance. It's a rather messy narrative, trying to wind big themes into a story that doesn't really add up to much. I don't envy Osborn ("The Yearling"), tasked with translating Steinbeck's sprawling novel into a two-hour film. All of the first half of the book about Adam's youth gets jettisoned, and much that remains is shifted around to place the spotlight on Cal.

Davalos as Aron doesn't get a lot to do, other than make an 11th hour conversion from perfect son to cackling loon. Abra is a more rounded character, and we get a glimpse of her life outside of the prism of her love triangle with two brothers. That's more than you can see about most female supporting characters (then or now).

I also appreciated Burl Ives as Sam the Sheriff, who sees himself as not just the law but the moral conscience of the town of Monterey. He steers Cal into more productive behavior, and puts down a bout of anti-German hysteria that could've turned into a riot with just a few glares and veiled pleasantries.

Jo Van Fleet is terrific as Kate, Cal and Aron's mother, who ran out on them as babes after shooting Adam when he tried to stop her because she couldn't bear the isolation and Bible-thumping of life on the ranch in Salinas. The boys believe her to be dead, but she's become a hard-bitten madame running a prosperous brothel in Monterey.

Cal follows her around like a lost puppy, eventually confronting her and getting her to loan him seed money for his bean scheme. He beholds himself in her, while Aron is more akin to their strict, God-fearing father.

Kate is both powerful and self-loathing, refusing to submit to any man's yoke but still hating what she's become. It's impressive work for Van Fleet, especially when you consider how little screen time she has -- really only two substantial scenes adding up to maybe five minutes. She won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her turn.

The cinematography is something to behold, and I'm surprised Ted McCord didn't get any notice from the Academy. Kazan was reputedly proud of his use of CinemaScope to capture the Western landscapes, in contrast with the tight urban spaces he was previously known for filming. My favorite shot is of the train bearing Adam Trask's lettuce shipment -- his dreams, really -- puffing away into the horizon. He ambles around the back of the station to watch it go, and unbeknownst Cal follows him, watching his father watch.

It beautifully encapsulates the entire father-son dynamic, with one's back turned to the other, not so much indifferent as unawares.

Kazan and McCord also used visual distortion a couple of times to wonderful effect, both during spats between Cal and Adam. One is when Adam is making Cal read from the Bible, not for enlightenment but as punishment; the other is when Cal jumps on a swing and leers at his father each time his momentum carries him near, spitting and taunting.

By zooming the wide lens in close they were able to get a bending effect in the corners, underlining the way the two men can't get their personalities to mesh. This is accented by tilting the camera mid-shot to give it a carnival funhouse effect. It's brilliant without feeling like the direction is intruding into the film.

The brevity of James Dean's career is an essential part of his iconography. "East of Eden" is his only film that came out while he was still alive; he never even got to see "Giant" or "Rebel Without a Cause," for which he would become the first posthumous Oscar acting nominee.

Rather than fretting about what might have been, we revel in a young performer's transformational journey that forever altered our conception of cinematic acting. There is before Dean, and after.

Reeling Backward: "A Matter of Life and Death" (1946)

I love the idea of "A Matter of Life and Death." It's the movie they actually made I'm not wild about.

David Niven plays a British bomber pilot who was supposed to die, but files an appeal in the court of heaven for more time. Stories of this kind are pretty familiar, from "A Guy Named Joe" to "Heaven Can Wait" to "Always." Even Albert Brooks' "Defending Your Life" -- a criminally underrated film, in my humble opinion -- contains similar notes about an orderly afterlife, complete with a celestial, fallible bureaucracy and innocent souls striving against its capricious strictures.

It's a tantalizing notion, which is probably while filmmakers keep returning to it.

But this well-regarded film from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger -- the writing/directing team better known as The Archers -- is a daffy, dippy rendering that ends up defending True Love as its central theme. The big court trial in heaven, which was what made me interested in seeing the movie in the first place, is a disappointing and bizarre affair in which British and American ideals are weighed against each other.

Niven plays Squadron Leader Peter Carter, a 27-year-old budding poet who knows he's going to die. As he pilots his flaming wreck of a plane back across the Chanel, with all of his crew dead or bailed out, he speaks to an American girl on the radio. In these few minutes of insistent chatter -- in which Peter does almost all of the talking, I might add -- we're to believe they formed a lifelong bond that cannot be broken.

The official story is that Peter's angel, otherwise known as Conductor 71 -- a foppish French Revolution-era aristocrat played by Marius Goring -- lost him in the fog and failed to transport him to heaven. As a result, Peter ends up alive on the beach, where he comes across a girl riding a bicycle and lo! It's June (Kim Hunter), the gal he fell in love with over the phone.

Conductor 71 appears 20 hours after the oversight to collect his charge, but Peter objects on the grounds that he fell in love as a result of a heavenly mistake. The conductor agrees to file his appeal up the chain of command.

The military medical staff thinks Peter's gone bonkers, of course, led by an unctuous doctor named Frank Reeves, played by Roger Livesey. Frank humors Peter's story, determining he needs a brain operation or he'll die. On the way to the hospital, Frank is killed in a motorcycle accident during a violent storm, which conveniently allows him to be appointed Peter's counsel for the trial.

The metaphysics of the story are beyond silly. An angel can't find his soul because of fog? Pretty shoddy work for divine beings. I also found silly the trick of Conductor 71 stopping time whenever he's on earth, allowing him to do things like plucking a tear from June's cheek to use at the trial.

What I really couldn't stand, though, was the mawkish idea that two people can fall irrevocably in love in a matter of hours. And that this would be the entire basis upon which Peter's case stands. He can't leave Earth because he loves a woman? What about the millions of women (and men) who lost their true love during the war? Don't they get an appeal?

The actual trial is a just plain weird affair. The prosecution is taken up by a Boston patriot who died during the American Revolution, Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey). His arguments are based entirely around his hatred of the English, referring to the many nations around the globe who have suffered in wars of the British empire. His pride veers beyond American exceptionalism into outright bigotry and Anglophobia.

"A Matter of Life and Death" still stands for its excellent cinematography and special effects. The Archers used Technicolor for the earthbound scenes, while the heavenly sequences are in a twinkling black-and-white -- essentially a reverse of the technique used in "The Wizard of Oz." The film was titled "Stairway to Heaven" for its American release, a reference to the stunning image of Peter and his conductor riding a massive escalator up into the sky.

Although it's undeniably a great-looking film, I just found "A Matter of Life and Death" to be too harebrained to take seriously as a piece of important cinema. I was astonished to learn via the film's Wikipedia page that it was named the second most important British film ever in a 2004 magazine survey of critics.

All I can say is they must have also suffered a conk on the head, resulting in overly ambitious delusions.

1.5 stars out of four