Reeling Backward: "The Story of G.I. Joe" (1945)

I admit I was confused about the premise of "The Story of G.I. Joe," which I had thought to be a biopic of renowned war correspondent Ernie Pyle. It's probably the signature role of Burgess Meredith's career -- aside from playing the Penguin on the Batman TV show -- and the film also marked the breakout of Robert Mitchum.

In fact, Pyle is barely a character in the movie, which focuses on a motley Army outfit fighting its way up the Italian peninsula. Pyle tags along from time to time, telling their tale as his favored group of "my guys," though their story continues even when Pyle isn't around. In the movie it's C Company, 18th Infantry, which wasn't actually deployed in Italy.

Pyle was involved in the production of the movie, which debuted around the time the theater in Europe was wrapping up. Pyle, who wrote in one of his last pieces that he hated the title but was too lazy to come up with a better one, was killed two months earlier. He personally approved Meredith for the role, with Walter Brennan and James Gleason also in the running.

Meredith was actually serving as a captain in the Army at the time, a fairly unknown character actor whose most prominent film role till then had been as George in the 1939 adaptation of "Of Mice and Men." The Army initially refused to let him go, and the matter was kicked all the way up to the White House. Meredith received an honorable discharge, ending his military service.

Directed by the great William Wellman, the film received wide acclaim and four Oscar nominations, including a supporting actor nod for Mitchum -- amazingly, the only recognition he ever got from the Academy Awards.

"Joe" is a terrific-looking film, with stark contrasting black-and-white photography from Russell Metty. He really makes the grime of the battlefield stand out. Many of the settings reminded me of Bill Mauldin's "Willie and Joe" comic strips.

Overall, though, I don't think the picture has aged all that well, and plays now as a fairly standard "buncha swell guys" ensemble war picture. Certainly it pales in comparison to Wellman's "Battleground" from 1949, which I call a masterpiece.

This is the sort of movie where we see a lot of faces moving in and out of the frame, and just a handful are meant to stick. They include Mitchum as Captain Walker, the noble everyman leader of the outfit who grows grimmer as time goes on and the losses mount, confessing that he often feels like a murderer.

Boxing champ-turned-actor Freddie Steele plays Warnicki, the no-nonsense, high-voiced sergeant who gets things done. He carries around with him a record his wife sent of his baby boy speaking his first words, which for some reason always plays backwards. Toward the end he finally gets it to work, and hearing junior say "Hi Daddy" sends him over the edge.

Wally Cassell is Dondaro, the Romeo of the outfit who seems to have a girl at every stop. Even when they're holed up for weeks in caves surrounding an ancient monastery at Cassino the Krauts are using as an observation post, he somehow sneaks out for his hookups.

Slightly less notable figures are John R. Reilly as "Wingless" Murphy, who washed out of the Air Force because he was too tall, and Pvt. Mew (William Murphy), who starts out as a faceless nobody and pretty much ends up the same way.

One of the film's watershed moments -- screenplay by Leopold Atlas, Guy Endore and Philip Stevenson -- is when Wingless marries his fiancé, who's also serving in Italy as an Army nurse. (She was played by Wellman's real-life wife, Dorothy.) The boys rig up a honeymoon sweet for them in the back of a bombed-out truck. He falls asleep on his wedding night, and we pretty much know what his fate is.

Mew is an orphan with no family, so his main role is keeping track of others through his $10,000 insurance policy courtesy of the Army. He makes a list of beneficiaries, which are crossed out and adjusted as people are killed.

Early on the company adopts a little pooch, which they name Arab -- pronounced so it rhymes with "HAY-rag" -- who's always being snuggled on somebody's lap or inside their coat. The captain initially forbids the men from bringing him along, arguing that the dog will get killed. Of course, he ends up outliving all the KIAs, including Walker himself.

The movie is more cyclical rather than having a traditional three-act plot, and seems aimed at relating what the life of a real dogface was like to the people back home rather than spinning a story. The soul of the movie is not the battle sequences, which are fairly brief and sporadic, but in the waterlogged caves where the rain never stops but time seems to.

The screenplay sprinkles in narration by Pyle taken from his actual writings, which I wanted more of.

Since Ernie Pyle preferred to tell others' stories rather than his own, maybe it's appropriate that "The Story of G.I. Joe" isn't really about him. From what I've learned he had a fairly conventional writer's life, combining long absences from home with bouts of alcoholism and marital discord.

He was the apotheosis of today's high-profile journalists, always making it about themselves. Maybe it's time we got back to celebrating the little guy -- but with a more coherent story.

Reeling Backward: "Ryan's Daughter" (1970)

A lot of people were very upset about "Ryan's Daughter" when it came out, though feelings toward the romantic epic have warmed considerably with time.

Director David Lean was so hurt by harsh criticism of the film -- including some from the people who worked on it -- that he vowed never to make another. (He would, but only one more, "A Passage to India," 14 years later.)

Robert Mitchum said working with Lean was "like constructing the Taj Mahal with toothpicks." Others had already declined the role, including Pete O’Toole, and Mitchum nearly did so too, telling Lean he was contemplating suicide as an alternative. (Later, he would call Lean one of the best directors he ever worked with.)

Leon McKern lost his glass eye and nearly drowned while braving the crashing waves for a scene, and grumbled about the stretches of downtime on Lean's famously long, meticulous shoots.

How obsessed was Lean with getting a shot just right? He reportedly waited for an entire year for a sufficiently violent storm to film one of the most memorable scenes, when an entire Irish village turns out to help Irish Republican Brotherhood rebels retrieve weapons that have been dropped from a German ship for them.

Probably the person with the best case for complaining, though, is co-star Christopher Jones, playing the physically and spiritually mangled British soldier who falls for the Irish schoolteacher’s wife. “Ryan’s Daughter” effectively marked the end of his acting career.

Jones was already struggling with the death of ex-lover Sharon Tate in the Manson murders, and he repeatedly clashed with Lean on the set. Jones and star Sarah Miles detested each other to the extent that Lean struggled to shoot their love scenes together.

After Jones refused to film the famous forest tryst, Mitchum and Miles conspired to lace his morning cereal with a hallucinogenic, possibly with Lean’s consent, rendering him virtually catatonic and pliable. (No "allegedly" qualifier necessary; Miles herself confessed the deed in her autobiography.) Unaware of the drugging, Jones thought he was having a nervous breakdown, and crashed his car afterward.

As the final insult, Lean thought Jones’ line readings were too flat, and had his entire vocal performance redubbed by Julian Holloway. Jones didn’t even find out until he saw the movie. The vicious reviews made a point of singling him out -- "An actor could hardly express less without playing a corpse," wrote Roger Ebert -- and Jones gave up acting at age 29, spending the rest of his life as an artist and beach bum.

(Not counting a brief 1986 role.)

The only person who came out of the experience relative well was Miles, who broke out of a parade of rather obscure screen and stage roles to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. She was helped by a bit of nepotism in that her husband, Robert Bolt, wrote the screenplay and pitched it to Lean with Miles in mind for the lead.

Bolt originally wanted to do a film version of “Madame Bovary,” but acquiesced to Lean’s request to change the setting and story dynamics. He chose 1916 Ireland in the days of the Easter Uprising, in the remote fictional seaside village of Kirrary on the Dingle Peninsula, where the movie was shot. (Though some of the beach scenes were filmed in South Africa.)

The town set was razed at the end of the production, but the ruins of the schoolhouse remain to this day and are a stopping point for tourists.

As you expect from a Lean film, the cinematography by Freddie Young and a lush musical score by Maurice Jarre, both constant collaborators, combine to give us a sense of immense space, and the tiny human contretemps happening as one small part of that vast environment. Young would win an Oscar for his work, beating out “Patton,” amongst others.

Whatever else you want to say about “Ryan’s Daughter,” it is a ravishingly beautiful movie to gaze upon.

Rosy Ryan (Miles), daughter of the local publican/pub owner, Tom Ryan (McKern), pines for her former schoolteacher, Charles Shaughnessy (Mitchum), a middle-aged widower. He resists her overtures, citing their age difference and lack of compatibility. She's a frisky Irish pony, and he's a dour dabbler in botany, collecting gorgeous native flowers just so he can press them into books no one will ever see.

But they marry anyway, and she is soon bored by a quiet life of little passion.

The local priest, Father Hugh Collins (a terrific Trevor Howard), tries to offer her counsel and comfort, to no avail. He’s up to his ears every day trying to keep his little flock of a couple hundred or so from straying too far into sinfulness beyond a little excessive drinking and carousing. He also protects Michael (John Mills), the resident village halfwit, from the taunts and abuse of the poor, plain folk.

Evin Crowley stands out as Moureen Cassidy, the brazen young woman leading the motley Greek chorus.

There’s a tiny British military outpost nearby, just over the hill from the schoolhouse. Insults are tossed but there’s little threat of real violence. But when a new commander is installed, war hero Maj. Randolph Doryan (Jones), things quickly sour – especially after he’s found to be carrying on an affair with Rosy.

Doryan is a complete wreck, shell-shocked and despondent. He wears the Victoria Cross for some vague heroics, and drags his right leg like a totem of the wounds inside. He even has a vertical scar near the corner of his eye that makes him look like he’s weeping. He’s treated with a slight sense of awe, but the man has nothing but the tatters of his soul.

The coupling with Rosy is sudden, almost violent, and inexplicable. He has a flashback to his war experiences while sitting alone in Ryan's bar, where Rosy is tending while her dad's away. Cradling the crumpled man in her arms, they kiss fiercely, which revives him instantly. Without exchanging names, they agree to meet again to consummate their passion.

Things go from there. Charles suspects right away, but receives her assurance that she'd never betray him. They carry out the affair more or less in the open, meeting for horse rides and walks, then sneaking off to ruined towers, beach caves or that idyllic forest to have sex.

There's one memorable scene where Charles' suspicions are aroused while taking his students on a field trip along the beach, and he spies footprints that he surmises belong to Rosy and the major. (His scraping walk is the telltale heart.) Lean intercuts Charles' imaginings with the couple playing out his dark fantasy -- when Rosy's footprints turn barefoot, he beholds Doryan tenderly removing her shoes for her.

Eventually, the cuckold and his betrayers are merged onto the same screen; Charles even slides behind a rock to conceal his spying.

He tracks them to a cave, and we expect a violent scene of discovery will follow. Instead, Charles turns away from that forbidding knowledge.

Rather, it is Michael who unwittingly gives them away. Sneaking into the cave -- possibly with the same suspicions as Charles -- he discovers Doryan's Victoria Cross in the sand. He pins it to his own chest and parades about town in a military uniform he makes out of junk, and the villagers put two and two together.

Mills would win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Michael, in a wordless performance of pantomime, yearning emotions and a mouthful of horrid teeth. He is desperately in love with Rosy, something that is apparent to everyone, though they try to pass off his pleading behavior toward her as characteristic of his quirks. She, in turn, is alternately mean and tender toward him, clearly embarrassed by the attention.

At Rosy and Charles' wedding, all the men push through the crowd to give the bride a kiss (on the cheek), but when Michael presents himself for the honor, everyone bursts into laughter and Rosy is humiliated. He finally gets that kiss in the end, though.

The role as written by Bolt seems rather antiquated now, not to mention insensitive toward the mentally and physically challenged. In addition to his simple-mindedness, Michael drags one leg around in a clear mirror of Doryan's. Both are wounded souls pierced by the arrows of outrageous fortune, who have little left to give. Their affection for Rosy is their one redeeming quality.

The storytelling moves along with the re-arrival of Barry Foster as Tim O'Leary, a famous Irish rebel who has decided to start a beach head of revolt on this quiet stretch of shore. He turns to Tom Ryan, the local publican -- a sort of small-town office dating back to medieval times -- for help in rounding up some good lads to help.

What nobody knows is that Ryan is secretly on the payroll of the British. You'd think somebody would be curious about his (relative) wealth in the poor fishing town, wearing smart suits and even buying an expensive mare for Rosy to ride. Faced with going turncoat against his people or being exposed by the English, he chooses to have it both ways -- with dire consequences for the village, and the tragic love triangle in particular.

Admittedly, there's not a lot of story for a film stretching past 3½ hours, including musical interludes at the beginning, middle and end. Much of the criticism of "Ryan's Daughter" upon its initial release focused on its indolent plotting. Ebert again: "Lean's characters, well written and well acted, are finally dwarfed by his excessive scale."

Some movies require the right moment and mood to be truly enjoyed. By today's standards, "Ryan's Daughter" is rather slow-paced and self-obsessed, stretching out shots that could be three seconds into 30.

But I just think that's part and parcel of the David Lean aesthetic. The man just didn't do small pictures. So even an intimate portrait of an Irish lass on the wrong side of love is churned up into a maelstrom of rent emotions and deeper meaning.

Whatever devastation it wrought on the lives of those who made it, it's a storm worth witnessing.

Reeling Backward: "The Sundowners" (1960)

"The Sundowners" was a financial flop in the U.S. but made bank in other parts of the world, especially Australia, where it was set and shot. Despite its lack of domestic box office, the film received critical acclaim and an impressive slate of Oscar nominations: best picture, director, screenplay, actress and supporting actress, winning none.

Like a lot of quality of pictures of that era, its reputation has unfortunately waned with the passing of years, to the point it straddles into the "forgotten films" category.

Robert Mitchum was a last-minute replace for an ailing Gary Cooper, reteaming with his "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison" co-star, Deborah Kerr, even offering her top billing. They play a husband-and-wife team of sheep drovers wandering the early 20th century outback. The title from the 1952 novel by Jon Clearly refers to people who willingly wander without a home: they pitch their tent wherever the sun goes down.

(I should mention this movie bears no relation to a 1950 one with the same title, a cattle-rustling Western starring Robert Preston.)

Both Kerr and Mitchum employ workable Aussie accents, though Mitchum's has a tinge of the Irish, befitting his portrayal of fiercely independent Paddy Carmody. It's a little unclear if Paddy actually emigrated from Ireland; based on the accent I'd guess he's a first-generation natural born son. He still has a fondness for drinking, fighting, gambling and singing, which apparently every Irish in the history of cinema does.

I've noted before that Mitchum's characters almost always have an aspect of danger about them, but Paddy's no threat to anyone. His tragic flaw is his wanderlust, which compels him to always stay on the plains, driving sheep from here to there, taking seasonal jobs as a shearer or what have you when the cash in the family jelly jar starts to run low again.

After nigh on 20 years of this, though, the life has taken its toll on his wife, Ida. As she often did, Kerr plays a strong-headed, smart redhead who knows just how to deal with rough, gruff men while letting them operate under the delusion they're in charge. Though Paddy is a little less blinkered, occasionally referring to Ida as "boss" in front of other men.

Ida desperately wants to buy a farm and settle down. She's a woman of simple tastes: she desires a big kitchen with a real stove, something solid over their heads and a bit of security for their future. Though there's one terrific wordless scene where Ida is standing next to their wagon, windblown and sunburnt, and gazes enviously upon a woman in fine clothes sitting in a train powdering her nose. Their eyes lock for just a second.

But she's mostly thinking of their son, Sean (Michael Anderson Jr.), who is 15 going on... maybe 13. He's a quiet, respectful lad but is clearly being held back by his pop, who won't even let him ride drover with him, despite having the size and skills. Ida wants him to go to school, learn a trade, meet some girls, and otherwise scoot on down the road toward manhood.

As the story opens Paddy has accepted a commission to drove a large herd of sheep to Cawndilla. Because they only have one old horse they need to pull the wagon, they have to take on another drover with a couple of mounts for himself and Paddy. Conveniently they run into Rupert Venneker, a refined British gentleman played by the great Peter Ustinov. He offers to come along, mostly to escape the clutches of the woman he works for, who clearly would like to convert him from employee to husband.

Rupert is a benevolent but intemperate soul with an air of mystery he enjoys cultivating. Rumor has it he was once a nobleman with lands and a title, disgraced and exiled after some mishap. He himself cops to having once been a cavalryman in Her Majesty's army and an officer of a merchant vessel in the Far East. He's not that old, but seems to have soaked up several lifetimes' worth of world-weariness during his treks. Like Paddy, he prefers to be on the move.

Paddy and Rupert exchange a few tongue-lashings that are understandable given their difference in breeding, but despite appearances the latter is a competent horseman and they make it to Cawndilla, escaping a fast-moving forest fire in the process. They're prepared to part ways, but Ida convinces the men for them all to take jobs working the sheep-shearing season at a big local farm operation.

Rupert later refers to himself as the Carmody's pet, a dyspeptic creature with "a hard shell and a soft underbelly." He even falls in with the local pub owner, a lively widow named Mrs. Firth (Glynis Johns). Rupert repeatedly talks about how he knows one day he's going to break her heart when it's inevitably time to leave again. Until then, they enjoy lively nights together, with Rupert creeping back to the farm around dawn.

But when that fated day does arrive, it's Firth talking c'est la vie while Rupert owns the hangdog pout.

Much of the second half of the movie has to do with money. Ida carefully counts their growing savings, quietly maneuvering to put a down payment on a lovely farm they passed at the beginning of their journey. Paddy mostly plays along, as long as he can go into town with the boys every now and then to drink, sing old Irish ditties and lose a little money at "two-up," a popular coin-flipping game. He doesn't know about the farm plan, but he's cagey enough to figure out she's up to something.

Paddy gets roped into a shearing contest against another farm crew, and finds himself put up against a doddering 80-something fellow. But the movie goes sideways from expectations, as the strapping Paddy is laid low by the tireless oldster. Still, no one blames him for the loss and life goes on. In some ways this sequence best encapsulates the film's theme, which is that luck changes but relationships endure.

At one point Paddy has a massive winning streak at two-up, and not only do they have enough cash for the farm he also wins a thoroughbred racing horse. Soon Sean is recruited as jockey and they're winning races and more dough. But something's got to give, and it does.

Gorgeously directed by Fred Zinnemann with wonderful cinematography by Jack Hildyard, "The Sundowners" is part travelogue exposing the Australian outback, part adventure story and part family dramaturgy. Isobel Lennart provided the screenplay adaptation, and it's probably her best-remembered work apart from "Funny Girl." (For which, oddly, she did not receive an Oscar nod.)

It's an old-fashioned story with some modestly modernistic aspects, such as a fairly frank attitude toward sex for 1960. Kerr disrobes for a nighttime scene with her figure starkly outlined behind a backlit negligee, as Paddy talks admiringly of her curves. And it would be hard to suppose exactly what else Rupert would be up to during his nightly sojourns into Cawndilla.

The film ends on an ambiguous note, with the Carmodys losing their entire stake but cementing their love for each other, with Rupert as the add-on uncle/mate/sheepdog. Some things can't be counted, only embraced.

Reeling Backward: "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison" (1957)

"Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison" is something of a forgotten relic, despite being nominated for two Academy Awards and the presence of some very high-wattage talent, including stars Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr and writer/director John Huston. It's a solid World War II adventure/romance flick that served as a precursor to "Cast Away" and other stories about characters surviving in isolation, though it hasn't aged particularly well.

Mitchum is generally regarded as one of Hollywood's greatest talents, if one who was somewhat under-acknowledged during his career -- including by himself, who often made dismissive comments about his abilities or the acting craft in general. Kerr, on the other hand, was widely regarded as one of the premier actresses of her day, as her six Oscar nominations (including one for this film) attest. Losing six times, she eventually was given an honorary Oscar.

I should note, however, that like many female performers before and after her, Kerr's career as a film star waned sharply starting around age 45 -- an almost magical number that serves to delineate the trajectory of everyone from Julia Roberts to Susan Sarandon. Some do successfully extend an ongoing career roll past this unfortunate sell-by date (e.g., Sandra Bullock), or come back from a lull stronger than ever (Meryl Streep).

Still, it's the rare film actress who enjoys a sustained career arc of undimmed popularity from their 30s to 60s, as untold male counterparts have -- Harrison Ford, Charleton Heston, Cary Grant, Paul Newman, to name just a few.

Based on the novel by Charles Shaw and adapted by Huston and John Lee Mahin, "Allison" is the tale of the title character, a meathead career Marine whose rubber raft washes up on a lonely island in the South Pacific after the submarine carrying his team was forced to submerge and strand them. (The movie was actually shot in Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, so as to take advantage of British film industry funding and tax revenue.)

There he finds a primitive village, completely deserted, but with a Western-built church atop the hill. There he stumbles across Sister Angela, a young nun in angelic white robes. She, too, has been stranded by her fellows. She and a priest came to the island to rescue another priest, but it turned out the Japanese had already attacked, capturing or killing everyone. Her companion died himself a few days later of old age and exertion.

The rest of the movie is the tale of their relationship as they struggle to survive and come to terms with their fate. Allison is natural-born survivor, the sort who could be plopped down most anywhere on the globe and find a way to get on. She's a bit more sheltered, but tougher than she seems.

Needless to say, they wind up developing romantic feelings for each other, and much of the tension is about whether she'll give in and forsake her vows, and if he'll ask -- or force -- her to.

They'd probably have stayed that way together, for months or years until the war ended, eating coconuts and breadfruit till they were rescued. But the Japanese take over the island, not once but twice, first as a tiny meteorological monitoring station, and later as a full-blown staging area holding thousands of enemy soldiers.

Allison and Sister Angela are forced to decamp to a well-hidden cave near the island summit, subsisting on whatever food they can pick, kill or steal from the Japanese. In one (over)long sequence, Allison sneaks into the enemy camp, armed only with his service knife, to pilfer some cans of food. He's cornered by a pair of Japanese in the supply depot, and must hide atop some bags of rice while they finish a long session of drinking sake and playing board games.

The Japanese leave as suddenly as they came, leaving behind a treasure trove of supplies -- not to mention some rather hefty-looking buildings that they apparently constructed in a day or two. Allison gets roaring drunk on the enemy booze and makes some vaguely threatening comments to Sister Angela about them being just like "Adam and Eve." Fearing a rape attempt, she runs off into the jungle, gets trapped in a downpour and falls deathly ill.

Allison nurses her back to health, but by now a major landing of Japanese have taken over the island again. (Fickle about their strategic deployments, they are.) Allison tries to steal supplies again but is forced to kill a soldier who discovers him, and it seems only a matter of time before they're captured or killed.

Narratively, there's not a whole lot going on in the movie. It's essentially just these two actors playing off each other. Kerr, not bothering to hide her natural-born Scottish brogue for this role, is a stalwart presence as a woman who has a strong sense of herself and her moral inner center. Even though she's attracted to Allison, we never really sense that she truly contemplates abandoning her faith for him. It's more a what-if temptation for her.

Mitchum is something of a conundrum, which Mitchum often was. Even in his most straightforward heroic roles, Mitchum always had an element of danger about his characterizations. Allison seems like a man playing a role as the tried-and-true Marine, though we later learn he had a scrappy, crime-filled upbringing as an orphan. Here is a man who has done bad things in his life and set them aside, but appears capable of going back to them if needs be.

Huston and Mahin received their own Academy Award nomination for their screenplay, which is essentially a character study set against a war-romance backdrop.

Mitchum was just shy of 40 when this movie came out, his famous 48-inch chest starting to fall southward, sucking in his gut mightily in his own imitable way during a few shirtless scenes. With his barrel chest and broad shoulders, wide cheekbones and pointed chin, Mitchum resembled one inverted triangle perched atop another.

I also chuckled to myself at how this man who seemingly never gets to bathe or visit a barber always has perfectly coiffed hair.

Kerr is almost completely covered head to toe in her habit, though during her illness sequence we discover that she did indeed shear her famous red locks close to her head in the traditional nun style. That's a pretty brave move for a single scene -- possibly it's a wig, but it looks authentic.

I enjoyed "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison," which is a great-looking film featuring a pair of immensely charismatic stars. It's not remembered as a great film, which it isn't, but it certainly deserves more of a reputation than it has.

Reeling Backward: "The Night of the Hunter" (1955)

'Preacher' Harry Powell of "The Night of the Hunter" has been called one of the most frightening villains in cinematic history, but Robert Mitchum doesn't actually seem to be trying very hard to be scary. In fact, there are times when his performance is downright comical, as if he's channeling a character from Loony Tunes.

The great actor Charles Laughton only got once chance to direct a feature film. "Night" was a critical and commercial failure, and his tenure in the director's chair was done. But over time the movie has risen in stature and today is regarded as a seminal midcentury film, due in large part to its distinctive look and Mitchum's bold turn.

It's generally included in the film noir tradition, though Laughton was consciously trying to emulate the German expressionist style of the 1920s. With its low angles, looming shadows and stretched perspectives, there are some shots that could have come straight out of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."

I think this sensibility also influenced Laughton's direction of Mitchum's performance. Powell is a serial killer who poses as a wandering preacher during the Great Depression. He famously has "LOVE" and "HATE" tattooed on the four fingers of each hand, and has a prepared little speech about these forces continually grappling with one another. He talks to God frequently, and seems to think he's part of the Lord's higher purpose. A switchblade in the pocket of his black reverend's coat is the instrument of his judgements.

Powell grows increasingly deranged as the story goes on. By the end, he's leering into the camera and making animalistic squawks. He clutches a wounded limb with a sense of mortification, almost like Wile E. Coyote being  unable to believe that the Road Runner keeps getting one up on him.

At a spare 92 minutes, "Night" is one of the few films you wished was longer. It would help better flesh out the characters, particularly Willa Harper (Shelley Winters), the lonely widow who Powell woos and weds. He was prison bunk mates with her husband (Peter Graves), who was executed for a bank robbery in which he killed two people and made off with $10,000. He hid the cash inside his little girl's doll, admonishing the children to never speak of it to anyone. Powell is determined to procure it for himself.

In seemingly the space of just a few minutes of screen time, Willa is widowed, introduced to Powell, married, rejected out of her wedding bed, turned into a religious zealot and murdered. There's a beautifully creepy shot of Willa dead at the bottom of the river, still tied to the driver's seat of Powell's Ford Model T, her long hair flowing with the kelp. It only serves, however, to  underline the fact that she exists in the movie as a construct there to service the plot, rather than a flesh-and-blood person.

Another problem with the script (by James Agee, based on a novel by Davis Grubb) is that it's told largely from the perspective of Willa's son John (Billy Chapin), but he largely remains inscrutable. Chapin tries in vain, but the script sets him up as a totally reactive character. Though there is a certain level of threat during his scenes alone with Powell, where the "preacher" drops the wholesome pretense he shows to adults and becomes coy and belligerant.

The film takes the unusual twist of introducing a main character two-thirds of the way through the picture. John and his little sister Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) escape down the Ohio River in their father's skiff and eventually end up on shores belonging to Mrs. Cooper (the great Lillian Gish), an old woman who takes in orphans.

"I'm a strong tree with branches for many birds," she says, musing to herself as she is wont to do.

Cooper is religious and fierce, and is the only person in the movie not intimidated or fooled by Harry Powell. She siccs the shotgun on him to run him off, then stays up all night waiting for him to break into the house. Strangely, she has a phone in her home, but waits until she's put buckshot into the false preacher before calling the state police.

I liked how Powell exists more as an existential threat than an actual one, riding around the countryside looking for victims, singing gospel tunes in a rich baritone while trolling for the next helpless woman or child to harm. But in the end he's just a kook wielding a skinny little knife that an elderly widow easily gets the best of.

Entertaining? Certainly. Genuinely threatening? Hardly.

I admired "The Night of the Hunter," but it works better in pieces than as a whole.

Reeling Backward: "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo"

I found myself getting really annoyed at "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," because the first half was all about the pilots getting mushy with their girls. To quote the kid from "The Princess Bride," you go to war movie expecting lots of action, and everyone keeps kissing all the time.

Fortunately, the movie redeems itself with a second act that is decidedly dark and dreary, and an extended air combat sequence that's still amazing nearly 70 years later. It incorporated some actual footage from Col. Jimmy Doolittle's bombing raid on Tokyo a few months after Pearl Harbor, so no wonder.

Militarily, the raid was inconsequential. Negligible damage was done to Japan's war-making industry, and all 16 of the B-25 bombers were lost -- crashing when they ran out of fuel, or the crew ditching before reaching this point. A large number of the servicemen who participated in the raid were killed, wounded or captured.

But the fact that American soldiers were able to deliver a sting right to the heart of the Japanese empire, a little more than four months after the devastating attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet had raised doubts in many Americans' minds about their ability to defend themselves, boosted morale by an unmeasurable factor. Doolittle, who at first thought he'd be court-martialed as the brains behind a colossal failure, later admitted the raid was conceived entirely for the sake of appearances. He won the Medal of Honor for his efforts.

Spencer Tracy plays Doolittle, but it's really a pretty minor role. He shows up every once in a while to give the pilots and crews a pep talk and a little strategy, then disappears for a long while. Considering the cast was mostly a bunch of unknowns -- Van Johnson and Robert Mitchum were not yet household names -- many have opined that Tracy took the role merely to help the project gain financial backing.

If so, Tracy was giving a leg up to the career of Johnson, whose work I've enjoyed discovering through the Reeling Backward journey. (See previous columns here, here and  here.) One of the few blond (or reddish-blond) male movie stars, "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" was his first lead role, and I'm guessing the story was constructed to emphasize his romantic appeal.

Of course, reality is not always what Hollywood would like it to seem. Johnson was fairly open about his gay lifestyle for the time, until the studios cracked down and forced him into a charade marriage. He also suffered serious injuries to his face during a 1943 car accident, including a metal plate in his head, and heavy makeup was usually used to conceal the scars on his forehead.

Ironically, his character Ted Lawson and his wife Ellen have a running joke about their shared handsomeness -- "How'd you get so cute?" "I had to be, to get such a good-looking fella" -- and he ends up losing a leg and having his face sliced open. It was unclear to me if the filmmakers simply removed the makeup to reveal Johnson's actual scars, or painted their own.

Ellen was played by Phyllis Thaxter in her first screen role, who is indeed exceptionally cute, especially the way she squints when she smiles. She would go on to have a long career in film and television, playing Ma Kent in her final film role in 1978's "Superman."

Anyway, roughly the first half of the movie -- it's 138 minutes, rather long for that era -- is taken up with the training for the Doolittle raid, about which the pilots and crews are kept completely in the dark. The fact that the main part of their preparation was how to get a mammoth B-25 to take off in 500 feet or less should've been a pretty big hint that they'd be launching from the deck of an aircraft carrier.

As much as I enjoyed Johnson and Thaxter's chemistry, I struggled to get through this section. It's fairly prototypical World War II propaganda-type stuff, with every soldier a good American who doesn't gripe or slack off and gets along with his comrades.

It's the "swell guy" routine -- that's Ted, he's a swell guy! And that tall fella, we call him Shorty, he's from New Orleans, what a swell guy! Hey, have you yet Bob, he was best man at Ted's wedding, he's a little on the glum side, but a swell pilot!

One yearns for a morose outsider, a la William Holden in "Stalag 17."

Bob, by the way, was played by Robert Mitchum in one of his early film roles. "Thirty Seconds" gave a big boost to his rising stardom, and soon like Johnson he was a top leading man. The other major role is Robert Walker as David Thatcher, the gentle-natured mechanic/gunner aboard Lawson's "ship" -- as they referred to their aircraft -- nicknamed "The Ruptured Duck."

Right around the time I was starting to lose patience with the movie, they take off on their bombing raid. It's an astonishing sequence, at least 30 minutes long, with hair-raising shots of the plan flying just a few dozen feet above the ocean, and later the hilly Japanese landscape, to avoid detection.

Director Mervyn LeRoy and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (who adapted Lawson's book) make this sequence absolutely thrilling, despite the fact that the Duck never gets into any dogfight situations with Japanese Zeroes. The raid was such a surprise, it seems, that few anti-aircraft forces were effectively deployed.

Alas, the gaping hole in Dolittle's plan was what happens to the flight crews after the bombing, beyond a vague directive to "land in China." In fact, none of the 16 B-25s landed safely. Most crashed somewhere along the Chinese coastline, or the crews intentionally ditched them or bailed out. Two crews were captured by the Japanese, and another was interned by the (supposedly friendly) Soviet regime.

Unexpectedly, the film follows the wounded Lawson and his men on their terrible journey to safety, aided by the Chinese natives currently under the harsh thumb of the Japanese. A little-known piece of history is that the Japanese killed an estimated 250,000 Chinese citizens while searching for the American air crews. The movie shows them burning a village the Americans had just left, but I had no idea the retribution was on that scale.

Every one of Lawson's crew is seriously injured except Thatcher, who heroically guarded and tended to his mates. Lawson eventually loses his leg after it becomes infected. The film ends with an odd denouement in which Lawson, recuperating in a Washington D.C. hospital, refuses to allow Ellen to see him because of his injuries. Of course, with a little (likely fictitious) assistance from Doolittle, they are joyously reunited.

I don't often say this, but "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" is a film that's due for a remake. I enjoyed the movie, despite its overly long and mushy first half, but the dramatic way the Doolittle raid was planned and executed is riveting stuff.

 3 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "The Enemy Below" (1957)

One of the things I always appreciated about Humphrey Bogart is that he doesn't look like a movie star -- with his stopped posture, unimposing stature, scarred lips, slurred speech and (reputed) toupee, he was nobody's idea of handsome. And yet he commanded the screen with his soulful eyes and the way he rolled his jaw.

Robert Mitchum, on the other hand, looks every inch the movie star. I have this theory about stars that mostly applies to women but, to a lesser degree, men as well. It's not enough that they be attractive. There are thousands of perfect-looking models who never make it in the movies. The may lack the acting ability, but looks play a role, too. People respond to actors who are not only handsome, but have a distinct look that sets them apart.

Take Julia Roberts. Her sparkly eyes, cascade of curls and iconic horsey smile make her not only beautiful, but unforgettable. Audiences don't want blandly beautiful, but performers who stand out and are memorable.

Mitchum was a tall, good-looking lug, but very much in a distinct way all his own. If you look at him in profile, his entire face seems to be sloping forward like an arrowhead, with his eyes marking the tip of the point. It gives him this aggressive, confident quality that he carried in all his roles. His eyes were famously baggy, but set deep and so wide apart they seemed to have a mournful tilt. His long nose and jaw fell straight down to a chin that seemed less dimpled than cleft with an axe.

"The Enemy Below" may not have been Mitchum's greatest acting job, but the movie doesn't really call for one. Mitchum, who liked to say that acting is mostly about showing up, hitting your marks and not flubbing your lines, manages to do just that here. Jurgens fares better, getting in a few licks as a reluctant warrior who fights for his country rather than the current regime.

It's a straightforward World War II picture, a battle of wits between an American destroyer captain (Mitchum) and a German submarine commander (Curt Jurgens). Mitchum really doesn't have much to do other than snap orders, with the exception of one brief scene where he confides in the ship's doctor (Russell Collins) that he was a merchant ship captain before the war, and that his wife was killed when his boat was cut in two by a U-boat torpedo.

Still, while recognizing that it's not any sort of great piece of acting by Mitchum or a searing portrait of war, if one accepts "The Enemy Below" as an action-filled war movie, it's thoroughly entertaining stuff.

Director Dick Powell -- a busy actor who also directed a half-dozen flicks, including Mitchum in "The Hunters" -- and screenwriter Wendell Mayes concern themselves with the manly exploits of naval combat, with a few human scenes tossed in to give it a little color. Interestingly, it's based on a book by D.A. Rayner, a British naval officer who saw plenty of anti-submarine combat. All the Brit characters were changed to Yanks for the movie.

For awhile, we follow the conversations of two or three swabbies aboard the USS Haynes expressing their concern about the fitness of their new captain, and I figured they'd pop up now and again as sort of a resident Greek chorus. But the movie misplaces them after the first 20 minutes or so. There's also an African-American sailor constantly mopping the deck who sneaks into a couple of conversations, I guess to comment on on the segregation of the military during WWII. By 1957, when "Enemy" came out, the forces were mostly integrated.

The battle scenes are indeed impressive for the time, although one doesn't have to look too hard to spot when the edits cut from footage of the real vessels to the models. The film won an Oscar for special effects.

All the hallmarks of the submarine genre are here -- the pinging sonar, the worrying creak of the hull as the captain orders the ship below the maximum recommended depth, the shaking as depth charges explode, one man freaking out at the claustrophobic setting, etc. What's notable about "The Enemy Below" is it was one of the first films to show the Germans on the receiving end.

Even 24 years later, the great "Das Boot" was considered groundbreaking (and controversial) for daring to show German submariners as brave and true.

The film ends with both ships fatally wounded, and the American skipper saves the German captain and his number two (Theodore Bikel) before the automatic detonators blow up the U-boat. The idea of Americans and German being equally capable of nobility and depravity was still pretty bold in 1957.

3 stars out of four