Reeling Backward: "The Defiant Ones" (1958)

I've learned that the filmography of Stanley Kramer as a director is feast or famine. This space has previously featured columns about "On the Beach" and "Ship of Fools," finding them to be heavy-handed films whose strident moralism overpowers their functionality as movies. Of course, he also directed wonderful pictures like "Look Who's Coming to Dinner," "Judgment at Nuremberg" and "Inherit the Wind."

I guess the secret to Kramer is to steer clear of any movies not starring Spencer Tracy.

Sadly, "The Defiant Ones" falls into the former category. It's a mawkish, occasionally cringe-worthy treatise against racism and imprisonment, featuring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as a white man and a black man shackled together while on the lam from a chain gang.

Despite its pedigree -- nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for both Poitier and Curtis, winning two for cinematography and original screenplay -- I found it obvious and blunt as social commentary. It's pretty much ordained that the two main characters' antagonism will boil over, and then cool into a forged friendship based on altruism and shared sacrifice.

Curtis plays Johnny "Joker" Jackson, and Poitier is Noah Cullen. Joker uses the n-word freely befitting his Southern rearing, but deep down his hard-boiled anger is directed more at a world that has beaten him down than any particular race or group. Cullen was a regular farmer and family man before he was sent to prison for assaulting a bank officer who came to foreclose his property.

It's a usual strong performance from Poitier, playing a man who recognizes that he can't change the deck that's stacked against him, but isn't about to take it lying down. It's interesting to see him play an uneducated rural man, since we associate a certain intellectualism with Poitier's screen persona.

Curtis' acting, though, is borderline awful. His famous Bronx accent bleeds through his faux Southern one like a bloody shirt, and he continually grits his teeth in a failed attempt to show the character's self-loathing -- walking around with this ridiculous rictus grin most of the time. Curtis should've taken a few notes from Humphrey Bogart, who could convey a great deal of bile just by sliding his jaw a bit.

Apart from this sub-par turn here, Curtis had a brilliant but truncated career. He essentially had a 10- or 12-year run beginning in 1957, with starring roles in some of the era's most iconic films -- "Some Like It Hot," "Spartacus," "Sweet Smell of Success" -- but by his 45th birthday in 1970 he was essentially done, reduced to silly movies and small parts.

Curtis never seemed to mind being out of the limelight, though, and turned to painting in his autumn years. "The Defiant Ones" was his only Academy Award nomination. It's flabbergasting to me that Curtis was nominated for this terrible performance, while his brilliant one in "Some Like It Hot" was not.

The screenplay has a pretty straightforward three-act structure. The first part deals with Joker and Cullen's escape when the prison van overturns, and the beginning of the manhunt to chase them down. They bicker, and Joker complains about being chained to a black man, but they realize their fates are entwined.

The second act is built around their growing desperation to escape, culminating with their capture by the residents of a tiny village while breaking into the hardware store to separate their chains. The racist mob is whipped into a frenzy by the local hothead (Claude Akins) who wants a lynching. Joker is gobsmacked by the idea that he would be hanged just like a black man, though he later admits to Cullen he saw some lynchings in his youth.

Lon Chaney Jr. has a brief but powerful role as Big Sam, the local foreman who puts a stop to the lynching, and secretly frees Cullen and Joker in the middle of the night. Again, though, Kramer and his screenwriters (Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith) aren't content with a moment of simple humanistic empathy, but have to ramp up the mawkishness by revealing that Big Sam was once a chain gang member, too.

I did admire the cutaway scenes to the pursuing posse, led by a somewhat progressive sheriff (Theodore Bikel, who also got an Oscar nod) with a distaste for employing harsher methods like attack dogs. He's badgered by a gung-ho state trooper -- played by famously gravel-voiced character actor Charles McGraw, who also was the gladiator trainer in "Spartacus" -- who deems the sheriff soft.

The final act is where things fall utterly apart. After finally coming to blows, Cullen and Joker stumble across a lonely farm wife (Cara Williams) and her young son. Although she's initially a hostage, the woman (who is never named) helps the two prisoners break their chains, feeds them and nurses Joker back to health after he collapses from his injuries and ordeal.

Then, the predictable happens: She and Joker fall in love. Or at least lust. Or something. After having sex, they wake up early in the morning before Cullen and her son, and resolve to take her car and run off on both of them. Cullen wakes up and overheard their conversation, and sees that he's no longer necessary to Joker.

The woman gives Cullen false directions to the railroad tracks through the swamp, believing he will be swallowed up by the bog and not be able to give away their plans. Joker discovers her ruse and is enraged, and races after his friend to save him, after being shot by the boy when he wrestles with his mother. Joker and Cullen fail to catch the train -- Cullen makes it aboard but refuses to let go of the injured Joker and is pulled off -- and are caught by the sheriff, wrapped in each others' arms.

This whole sequence is either way too short or too long. The idea that a woman would be willing to abandon her life and child for a man she's only met a few hours earlier -- a runaway prisoner at that -- simply strains credulity to the breaking point. Granted, she's lonely and dreams of life in a big city, but to believe she's that desperate we would need to know a lot more about the character than we learn in a relatively short amount of screen time.

As Joker points out right before running off, she doesn't even know his name.

I wanted to like "The Defiant Ones," but its strident moralizing and hammy story construction put it into the "Bad Kramer" file for me.

2 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Ship of Fools" (1965)

There's a lot of stuff to like about 1965's "Ship of Fools" -- aptly described as "Grand Hotel on a boat." But overall it's a heavy-handed bit of social commentary along the lines of "On the Beach," which was recently featured in the Reeling Backward column.

That's no surprise, since both films were directed by Stanley Kramer. Kramer had a long and illustrious career as a producer and director, and often gravitated to material with a social conscious. Often the results were sublime ("Guess Who's Coming To Dinner," "Judgment at Nuremberg") but sometimes it feels like a big lecture.

The cast of "Ship" is huge -- Lee Marvin, Janet Leigh (in her final film role), Simone Signoret, Jose Ferrer, Oskar Werner, George Segal, Heinz Ruhmann, Michael Dunn, Jose Greco, and on and on.

It's all one big circus of human frailties and prejudices. It's set aboard a German ocean liner in 1933, just when Nazism is on the rise. Virtually every Western society is represented, and almost always in a negative light.

The only truly good characters are the outcasts: The Jew and the dwarf. They sit together at their own dining table, even though the rest of the German passengers get a seat at the captain's table.

Dunn, who was one of the first Little Persons to have a serious dramatic film career, even takes on the role of the narrator who addresses the audience directly at the beginning and end -- not so subtly indicting those watching the movie for having the same flaws as the poor creatures they just watched.

Leigh is great as Mrs. Treadwell, an aging divorcee whose bitterness about the tatters of her own hopes and dreams seems to infect all of her interactions.

Marvin has an awful role as a racist American Southerner and ex-baseball player whose biggest problem in life was that he couldn't hit the outside curve ball. He spends most of the movie tomcatting after this feminine object or that. He's depicted, quite explicitly, as an ape.

I could spend a lot of time describing the rest of the characters, but I think you get the idea.

The centerpiece of the film is the plight of the ship's Dr. Schumann. Disaffected and estranged from his family on shore, he falls for a rich Mexican woman whose paramour has been deposed. Because of her habit of aiding the poor and needy, she's being deported to Spain, a country she's never been to.

A high-class drug addict, she gloms onto Shumann for her fix, but they soon recognize the same world-weary resignation in each other. Their romance is doomed from the start, and they both know it, but they can't help stirring the embers of their youthful passions.

I also liked Jose Ferrer in this film -- but then, it is virtually impossible not to like Jose Ferrer in anything. He plays a rich industrialist and early proponent of eugenics and Nazism. A raconteur who enjoys shunning those who do not live up to his definition of proper Germans, he spends most of his time chasing a nubile blonde German half his age. There's no meanness to the performance, though, but rather the wayward pride of a man who has confused patriotism with elitism.

There's a lot to take in with "Ship of Fools." But its high-mindedness gets the better of it.

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

Reeling Backward: "Inherit the Wind"

I first saw "Inherit the Wind" when I was 11 or 12 -- right at the age when you start to question your upbringing, the values your parents endeavored to instill in you, even your religion.

What I most remember about the movie was the scene where the brilliant defense attorney questions his opposing counsel on the witness stand, and gets him to admit that the word of the Bible is not necessarily the literal truth. Since God didn't make the sun until the fourth day, how do we know the first three days were exactly 24 hours long, he needled? Couldn't it as easily been 10 million years? And if so, how are we expected to take every single word in the Good Book at face value?

The Scopes Monkey Trial -- of which "Inherit the Wind" is a fictionalized version -- may not seem that relevant today, more than 80 years on since a Tennessee schoolteacher was accused of giving lessons on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. But with recent polls showing public faith in evolution at an historic low, the 1960 film starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March still resonates.

Funny what I just wrote: "Faith in evolution." It's amazing how quickly radical ideas become doctrine, ripe for the next wave of thinking to tear at their foundation. We are so quick to divide ourselves into believer and non-believer, whether it's faith in a deity or the theories of science.

Look at how the global warming debate generally goes: Anyone who dares to express skepticism, or even point to scientific data that casts doubt on global warming is labeled a "denier" -- as if they were some sort of apostate, rather than a thinking individual with a right to reach their own conclusions.

The trial was extremely famous in 1925, and 30 years later it was made into an equally regarded play (written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee) that formed the basis of the 1960 film directed by Stanley Kramer.

The trial itself became a spectacle because of the clash of two titans in the courtroom: civil liberties attorney Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and former secretary of state. The film needed to have equally giant cinematic figures standing in for them, so Tracy took on the Darrow role and March the Bryan role.

(Incidentally, the photo that runs with this article is not from the movie, but is a contemporaneous photo from the trial of Darrow and Bryan. If you watch the movie, you can see that the actors made for excellent physical matches for their parts, and the look of the small-town courtroom is also authentic -- right down to the hand fans everyone used to combat the suffocating heat. I was able to find a number of good images from the movie, but I used this photo just because I like it so much.)

The movie plays out as a series of thundering oratory battles between Darrow and Bryan, who were renamed Henry Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady for the film. Drummond, of course, eventually gets the upper hand, though Brady is a sympathetic figure. After all, he is the one who attempts to calm the local preacher, who thunders fire and damnation upon his own daughter, who is engaged to the offending schoolteacher.

The two men spend more time addressing each other than they do the judge or the jury, and I am compelled to point out that such theatrics would not be tolerated in any courtroom, now or then.

Gene Kelly, in one of his few dramatic roles, plays a cynical Baltimore journalist who comes to cover the trial and ends up sticking his nose right into the middle of it, siding with Drummond and even sitting in at the defense table. He has a great line where the schoolteacher's fiance is summoned to be a witness for the prosecution, and he tells the teacher, "Sit down, Sampson, you're about to get a haircut." His character was based on real-life journalist H.L. Mencken, who covered the trial.

One of the most interesting things about the movie is how many supporting actors went on to have notable careers on television. The judge was played by Harry Morgan of "Dragnet" and "M*A*S*H*" fame, and Dick York as the teacher was best known as Darrin from "Bewitched." Claude Akins, as Rev. Brown, played Sheriff Lobo on "B.J. and the Bear" -- a show I'm ashamed to admit I watched religiously when I was about 9 -- and starred in a spin-off. Norman Fell, the immortal Mr. Roper from "Three's Company," played a radio guy.

"Inherit the Wind" has fallen a little in my eyes since I saw it as a questioning youngster. It's a little staged and long-winded, but still an enjoyable bit of courtroom drama. And to think that we once had movies that openly examined the relationship between God and science -- the notion of such a movie being made in Hollywood today is truly heretical.

3 stars