Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

 

High Society (1956)

 

Forbidden Planet (1956)

 

Bigger Than Life (1956)

 

A Man Escaped (Un Condamne A Mort S’Est Echappe Ou Le Vent Souffle Ou Il Veut) 1956 **

The Wrong Man (1956) **

Had Alfred Hitchcock not appeared at the beginning of The Wrong Man (1956) to introduce it and to say that it was different than his other films you wouldn’t believe that the master of suspense directed it.  It doesn’t look like or develop like any other Hitchcock movie I’ve ever seen.  Yes, the Hitchcockian theme of the wrongfully accused man is the centerpiece of the story, but countless other directors also enjoyed employing this plot device.  Furthermore, the poster above is misleading, The Wrong Man is not an “adventure into terror”. Instead, it is a dark and depressing docu-drama that is based on the true story of a man arrested and tried for a crime that he did not commit. This, of course, makes it somewhat difficult for me to say that the story is boring and that the movie drags, but it so desperately does both of these things. 

Hitchcock had an unnatural fear of the police and so when he read about Manny Balestrero’s (Henry Fonda) wrongful arrest and subsequent trial for armed robbery, he was intrigued.  And, it is a rather compelling story. A jazz musician at the Stork Club makes the fateful decision to take out a loan against his wife Rose’s (Vera Miles) insurance policy to pay for her to have her wisdom teeth removed.  While at the insurance company, the overly sensitive women who work there mistake Manny for the man who’d robbed them twice in one year. The next thing you know, Manny is picked up by the police, taken on several perp walks, and then arrested for a crime that he did not commit. While out on bail, Manny and his wife try to find witnesses who can prove that he was away on vacation when one of the robberies occurred, but every lead falls through. Surprisingly, his wife has a nervous breakdown and has to be sent to an asylum while Manny stands trial. 

If you work very hard you can pinpoint some of Hitchcock’s stylistic elements. He and cinematographer Robert Burks spend a lot of time focusing on the hands of characters and inanimate objects, and there are a number of low-angle close-ups of faces—what is sometimes referred to as framing for emotion. Additionally, they shot the booking sequence from Manny’s perspective, which had the effect of involving the audience in his distress. Yet, probably the most Hitchcockian element comes when Manny is placed in a cell for the first time.  After suffering through the humility of being questioned, fingerprinted, and charged for armed robbery, Manny is completely overwhelmed by the insanity of the entire situation by the time he stands alone in his cell. To emphasize Manny’s  confusion and mental anguish the camera appears to start spinning—so much so that it is both disorienting and nauseating to the audience.  However, these few elements, along with a cracked mirror and transposed shot near the movie’s ending, is where any resemblance to a Hitchcock production ends—there isn’t even a MacGuffin that I noticed!

For me, The Wrong Man suffers immensely from Hitchcock’s insistence that the audience experience the entire arrest process.  I know that he wanted to put his audience in Manny’s place, but while it does have some effect, it demands that the story be told at a crawling pace, which allows distraction and boredom to creep in.  Boring is not a word that I often associate with a Hitchcock production, but The Wrong Man is indeed just that.  Plus, his matter-of-fact way of telling the story really doesn’t allow the audience to emotionally connect with either Manny or his wife.  Sadly, when Rose goes off the deep end, I found myself annoyed by her presence and the story arc, as it made the movie even longer than it needed to be.

The one good thing about The Wrong Man is Henry Fonda, who stoically portrays a character who should have been at his wit's end but never seems to lose his composure.  Emotionally restrained performances can be difficult for some actors, but Fonda does an excellent job of displaying Manny’s terror through his eyes and body language.  Plus, he capitalized on his own persona as a solid ,trustworthy person to get the audience to be even more outraged by what Manny goes through.

Overall, I am not a fan of The Wrong Man.  The story drags and is often quite boring, which is a black mark for any movie helmed by a master storyteller like Hitchcock.  Thankfully, Fonda’s performance gets me through such tedium. 

Written on the Wind (1956) **

Of Douglas Sirk’s many heralded melodramas, Written on the Wind (1956) is probably my least favorite.  Yes, the Technicolor is as bright as ever and Sirk, generally, draws out  good performances from his cast, but the story and most of the characters fall flat for me.  If you take away Dorothy Malone’s scintillating performance, there is nothing compelling about the film.

Based on Robert Wilder’s 1945 novel of the same name, Written on the Wind opens with a bang—literally. A drunken man, who we later learn is Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack), tears across a Texas road toward his family’s estate and stumbles into the house. As leaves blow inside the open door, we see a woman, who we soon learn is Kyle’s sister Marylee (Malone), slam the door shut. A few moments later, we hear a shot ring out and we see Kyle stagger back outside with a gun in his hand, where he proceeds to crumble to the ground dead.  And, then the wind blows again and turns a calendar back more than a year—Sirk’s not so clever way of saying he’s going to show us the events that led up to Kyle’s last fateful night.  It all began when Kyle’s best friend Mitch (Rock Hudson) brought a pretty secretary to lunch who caught Kyle’s eye. The heir to an oil fortune and a world-class playboy, Kyle doesn’t care that Mitch saw Lucy (Lauren Bacall) first—what he wants he gets.  And, so he turns on the charm by flying her to Miami in his private plane and stocking a luxury suite with fine clothes for her. When she informs him that she’s not a tramp he marries her after knowing her for only one day.  This was undoubtedly a mistake on Lucy’s part, because she soon learns that her new husband not only suffers from anxiety, depression, and alcoholism, but that he also has an inferiority complex when it comes to Mitch—the man his father (Robert Keith) adores and calls his second son.  It also doesn’t help that her sister-in-law, Marylee (Malone), is a world-class bitch and whore who is obsessed with Mitch—who happens to only have eyes for Lucy. When Kyle learns that he has weak sperm and that he may never be able to father a child he goes into a tailspin, which is exacerbated by Marylee’s insinuations that Mitch and Lucy are having an affair.  Oh, it’s so soapy—even for Sirk!

Once again, Russell Metty was Sirk’s cinematographer of choice for Written on the Wind. Over a period of seven years, Metty and Sirk worked together on ten films. There’s a reason that of the more than 30 films that Sirk directed in his career that his most highly regarded ones had Metty as their cinematographer: Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Imitation of Life (1959), and Written on the Wind. Metty’s deft understanding of how to use light/shade and angles to superbly capture the mood of a scene was the perfect compliment to Sirk’s brilliance when it came to visual composition. Most of their films had a reoccurring visual motif (for example, their endless use of windows in All That Heaven Allows) which they employed throughout the picture. Written on the Wind was primarily about psychologically fractured people, so Sirk and Metty used several mirror shots to depict characterization.  Additionally, I suppose they wanted to make a statement about how empty and sterile the lives of the Hadleys were because they used a lot of glaringly bright lights and garish colors—gone was the matte world of All That Heaven Allows, replaced by full enamel, ala Magnificent Obsession.

My overall disregard for Written on the Wind stems from the fact that I could never bring myself to care about what happened to the characters. About twenty minutes into the film it becomes obvious that the most entertaining and engaging person in the movie, Marylee, is doomed to end up unhappy, so it’s irritating to watch Mitch politely pine for the beyond boring Lucy, who spends most of her time fretting over her overacting (on so many levels) husband.  Sure, Marylee’s a tramp and a manipulator, but her pathological desire to have Mitch love her is far more exciting to watch than both Bacall and Hudson’s mediocre performances.  Of course, they may have only appeared to be sleepwalking through this movie because Dorothy Malone was completely on fire throughout it.  Malone deservedly won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her turn as a bitter woman who vehemently and defiantly acts out as a result of being constantly rebuffed by the man that she loves. Her testimony scene at the inquest is nothing short of brilliant—full of rawness, honesty and vulnerability.  It irks me beyond measure that this most pivotal scene has absolutely no chance of changing the inevitable ending of the film—boring and boring ride off together while the most electrifying person is doomed to an empty life of unhappiness.

Overall, I’m not a big fan of Written on the Wind. It’s not a bad picture, per se, but it is irritatingly predictable and cursed by the fact that every character other than Maryann is beyond boring.  Thank you, Dorothy Malone, for making it somewhat palatable.

Giant (1956) ***

Giant (1956)—was there ever a more appropriately named Hollywood production?  And, I’m not just referring to its three hour and twenty-one minute runtime, either. Director George Stevens rightly earned his second Academy Award for Best Director by capturing the vast landscape and racial complexity of Texas, while coaxing out tremendous performances from his cast. 

Edna Ferber wrote novels and plays that Hollywood liked to turn into movies: So Big (1924, 1932, and 1953), Show Boat (1932, 1936 and 1951), Cimarron (1931 and 1960), Saratoga Trunk (1945), Stage Door (1937), Dinner at Eight (1933), and The Royal Family of Broadway (1930)—to name a few, although there are others. Published in 1952, Giant was Ferber’s tenth novel. Her critique of Texas race relations in the book scandalized the Lone Star state and caused quite a stir in the literary world. As controversy was good for the box office, just about every studio in Hollywood wanted to buy the rights to it, but only George Stevens made her an offer she couldn’t refuse: he made her a producer and promised to make a faithful film adaption of her novel. As it turns out, he made as faithful an adaption as he and Warner Brothers were willing to make.  Specifically, sections of the novel that dealt with African Americans and Jim Crow were cut altogether or amalgamated into the film’s discussion of racism against Mexican Americas.  Still, Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat’s Oscar-nominated adapted screenplay was groundbreaking not only in its treatment of racism but also in its portrayal of class and gender issues.  The story, spanning the lives of Jordan (Rock Hudson) and Leslie Benedict (Elizabeth Taylor) over a period of twenty-five years, is the solid foundation on which Stevens’ greatest cinematic effort is based.  And, while it most assuredly could have been trimmed down a bit, as there are, admittedly, a few scenes that could have been cut without the film missing a beat, it is still a spectacularly told story.

When Texas rancher, Jordan “Bick” Benedict, travels to Maryland to buy a feisty horse named War Winds he not only takes home a horse but its ornery, free-thinking owner, Leslie, as his wife. Somehow her straightforward critique of Texas history—Texans stole the land from the Mexicans—is overlooked by Bick—I’m sure her stunning beauty was the culprit.  Anyway, Leslie’s comfortable and lush, green world of Maryland is replaced by an endless landscape of dirt and dust and overbearing heat. She also has to deal with Bick’s unmarried, hard-as-nails sister, Luz (Mercedes McCambridge), who is threatened by Leslie’s presence.  When Leslie asserts her authority as the woman of the house, Luz takes out her anger on War Winds, who, thankfully, throws her from the saddle, which results in her death—problem bitch solved.  With Luz out of the way, the only thing that stands in Leslie’s way is racism, classicism, and sexism—all of which her husband displays throughout their marriage. How dare she treat their Mexican servants with respect or think that Mexicans should have decent places to live and proper medical care?  Why on earth would you be friendly and polite to a no-account farmhand like Jett Rink (James Dean)?  And, how dare you attempt to discuss either business or politics with men?  To say the first few years of marriage are rocky for them would be an understatement. Yet, Leslie’s progressive ways, not to mention her red-hot sex appeal, have a way of tempering her husband’s moods.  So what if they fight a lot? As Leslie likes to say, the best thing about quarreling is the making up afterward—which yields a set of fraternal twins, Jordy (Dennis Hopper) and Judy (Fran Bennett), and a high-spirited daughter, Luz (Carroll Baker).  Of course, after awhile they start getting on each other’s nerves—especially after Bick is particularly traumatized by the fact that his son doesn’t like horses. As a result, Leslie returns to Maryland with children in tow, while Bick has time to reconsider home on the range—alone.  And, so he finally yields to his wife and goes after her and a certain understanding is agreed upon.  You’d think that’s where the story ends, but wait, that’s only the first third of the picture.

After Bick and Leslie’s reconciliation the film jumps ahead about fifteen years, where we find the couple fully engaged in the lives of their nearly grown children.  Obviously, Leslie’s free-thinking ways ruled the nursery, because all of their children do exactly the opposite of what their parents want them to.  Instead of taking over the ranch as his father demands, Jordy goes off to Harvard and then medical school, and eventually, God-forbid, marries a Mexican girl. Judy, for her part, disregards her mother’s desire that she go to a Swiss finishing school and attends Texas Tech, where she studies animal husbandry, and then elopes with a local ranch hand (Earl Holliman).  And, Luz…well, she becomes involved with the one absolute man that both her parents universally dislike: Jett Rink. By this time, Old Jett has struck it oil rich on the Benedict land that the first Luz left to him when War Winds snapped her neck. And while Jett and Uncle Sam might have convinced Bick to use his own ranch land for oil wells during World War II, Jett is still seen as a no-good son of a bitch by Bick and as a drunken manhandler by Leslie.  You see, Leslie knows that Jett wants Luz as a consolation for herself, but she can’t really say that to her daughter. With children like these, is it any wonder that both Leslie and Bick are fully gray after only twenty-five years of parenting?

Okay, so let’s get this out of the way right now: contrary to popular opinion, James Dean is NOT the best thing about Giant. In my opinion, judgment of his performance is colored by the fact that he died a few weeks after his scenes wrapped and months before the movie was released.  Don’t get me wrong, he does an admirable job of playing an anti-social, ill-mannered non-conformist—the same role he pretty much played in all three of his films (East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause being the other two)—but he is not what makes Giant tick. That responsibility rests solely on the delicate shoulders of Elizabeth Taylor, who finally was allowed to show that she was indeed a gifted, ADULT actress who deserved to be given substantial roles.  Stevens gave Hudson the choice of picking either Taylor or Grace Kelly as his leading lady in Giant.  For his part, Stevens didn’t think the 23-year-old Taylor had the emotional range required for Leslie and wanted Kelly for the role. Thankfully, Hudson chose Taylor—who, in my opinion, could act circles around Kelly.  It’s not easy playing a character who ages over twenty-five years during a movie, and especially when you are so highly regarded for your beauty, as Taylor was.  Yet, she expertly depicts the various periods of life her character encounters in the story. In the beginning, her Leslie is flirty and precocious but also a young woman who knows what she wants, namely Bick.  In the early stages of her marriage she comes off as caught between two worlds or selves—the woman Bick wants her to be and the woman she knows she is.  Leslie’s ability to stand up to her husband, and Texas for that matter, in a defiant but polite manner without appearing as a sort of Pollyanna or saint-like figure is a direct result of Taylor’s deft acting abilities. 

My two absolute favorite scenes in Giant take place in the Benedict’s bedroom. This is fitting, of course, because this is probably the one place that she always got her way.  The first scene follows the aftermath of her defiant speech to Bick and his friends about them being cavemen and that women have enough sense to discuss politics and business.  When he comes up to the bedroom she pretends to be asleep but when he purposefully throws his boots on the floor to wake her up, she serenely pretends like she has forgotten her daring scene.  But he hasn’t, and so to appease him she apologizes for being rude to his friends, but that’s not enough for Bick and he says, “I'm asking you right now when you are gonna settle down and behave like everybody else.” Her answer of “never” sends him toward the adjoining room, where he plans to sleep.  But Leslie knows how to control Bick and she simply says, “You knew what a dreadful girl I was when you married me. I did not deceive you, sir. From the first moment I couldn’t have been more unpleasant,” and then she just sits there staring at him smoldering with unbridled sexuality.  The next morning, having completely decimated all of her husband’s strength by her wanton ways, she casually mentions, oh by the way, that she’s pregnant. 

The second memorable bedroom scene isn’t based on sex, though. No, this one is all about a class that all successfully married people eventually graduate from: Spouse Psychology 101. Nope, by the time the Benedict’s are approaching middle age and sleeping in twin beds, Leslie can’t really rely on sex to impose her will on Bick anymore. Instead, when he believes he is manipulating her into agreeing to allow their daughter not to go to school in Switzerland but in Texas by saying, “I wonder if we love them enough to do what's really right for them,” Leslie knows what he’s doing and lets him have just enough rope to hang himself before dropping the hammer by informing him to brace himself because there’s another sacrifice to be made: Jordy wants to go to Harvard and then Columbia medical school. Priceless…and all done in the comfort of her twin bed.

For its time, the film’s straightforward look at racism against Mexicans was rather bold—not as bold as it was in the novel, but still bold nonetheless. However, Leslie’s insistence that Mexicans be treated with dignity isn’t necessarily the same as saying that they deserve to be treated as equals, either. Still, by the end of the movie, when Bick gets his ass kicked by a racist diner owner who makes comments about his daughter-in-law and grandson, it is clear that Stevens is making a statement about racism in general, when he has the diner owner toss a sign on Bick which reads: “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone”.  Was it an all-out attack on Jim Crow? No, but at least it was a start.

Overall, Giant is an entertaining film that dares to take on such things as racism, classism and sexism.  While it would have benefitted from a bit more editing, fine performances from Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean elevate the overall effectiveness of the movie.  In particular, Taylor is mesmerizing as Leslie—how on earth she wasn’t nominated for a Best Actress Oscar is beyond me.