Plunder of the Sun

Glenn Ford and Sean McClory in Plunder of the Sun (dir. John Farrow, 1953).

I rented this after reading the novel by David Dodge, which was re-released recently as one of the monthly editions in the Hard Case Crime paperback series. It's pretty faithful, and captures Dodge's breathless travel-adventure flavor, even if the budget apparently limited the beautiful location shooting to Havana and Oaxaca, and not the book's third major locale of Peru and Lake Titicaca.

All the elements of a classic are here: Ford is great, Sean McClory makes a villain worthy of Orson Welles, and the camera work, as I said, is often breathtaking. What's missing? I don't know, gravitas or something. Not that the novel has any, either. Good fun, in any case.

Where Danger Lives

Robert Mitchum in Where Danger Lives (dir. John Farrow, 1950).



Faith Domergue.

Another flawed but entertaining B-noir vehicle for Mitchum from the RKO mill. The line between greatness and mediocrity in these films is so maddeningly thin that it confuses all my aesthetic standards, which are confused to begin with. Mitchum as a kindly surgeon who rescues the mentally unstable woman from her suicide attempt and then gets a concussion during a confrontation with her rich husband (Claude Rains, in fine form) and is swept up with her in a desperate dash for the Mexican border: brilliance or inanity? One feels finally that, as is so often the case, the deciding factor relegating the movie to "minor" status is in the little moral details, and that these details are to such a great extent determined by things like the Production Code that finally one just learns to make the appropriate little adjustments, to "translate" what is on the screen mentally into what it "would" have been if these strictures were not in place. And yet the best examples of the genre find ways to work around these strictures, even taking advantage of them as generative constraints. When the film simply goes along with them in what seems like utter apathetic compliance, it's disheartening.

The Big Clock

Charles Laughton in The Big Clock (dir. John Farrow, 1948)

From the novel by Kenneth Fearing, which was remade by Roger Donaldson in 1987 as No Way Out with Kevin Costner and Sean Young. The remake is just okay, but John Farrow's almost-whimsical treatment, with its high modern corporate interiors and droves of grey-flannel sharks, shows some real sensitivity to Fearing's stylistic vision. Ray Milland is perfect as the suit-who's-had-enough, the gifted company man who is just waiting for an excuse to reject the entire system, but finds himself professionally and personally stuck like a fly on flypaper--especially when he's implicated in a murder. Charles Laughton, as publishing magnate Earl Janoth, twirls his hint of a mustache and makes his employees dance like puppets. Elsa Lanchester has a charming small part as a dotty artist, and Harry Morgan plays the most menacing role of his career with no lines.

His Kind of Woman

Robert Mitchum in His Kind of Woman (dir. John Farrow, 1951)

Half top-notch noir, half tropical sex comedy. Towards the end, Vincent Price starts playing the farcical gallant with such intensity you may forget for a spell what movie you're watching. Thank Howard Hughes, whose grubby handprints are so all over this film that he should just have shared directorial credit (He did bring in the uncredited Richard Fleischer to take it over from Farrow). On the other hand, if it weren't for Hughes' interference, we wouldn't have Raymond Burr as the gangster Nick Ferraro. It's long and silly, but it does envelop you in its distinctive world of kitschy resort architecture and shaggy-dog supporting characters (like Jim Backus, Philip Van Zandt, and John Mylong). Jane Russell is the femme fatale, but she's more of a femme non-fatale. It's funny that the titular phrase refers to her (okay, that was not meant as a pun), as her presence in the narrative is more or less a big non-sequitur. Although I guess that could be said for almost all the characters. Anyway, Charles McGraw is always impressively menacing, Mitchum doesn't seem quite as bored in this as he does in The Racket, and there is some classic dialogue here: "I was just taking off my tie ... and deciding whether I should hang myself with it."