Parky at the Pictures (DVD 22/5/2014)

BOOMERANG (1947).

Screenwriter Richard Murphy earned an Oscar nomination for this reworking of a 1924 murder case that shocked Bridgeport, Connecticut. True to form, producer Louis de Rochemont and director Elia Kazan opted to shoot on actual locations and the resulting thriller is all the more effective for its eerie authenticity. A flashback shortly after the Main Street shooting suggests that Protestant pastor Wyrley Birch was killed by an assistant whose peccadilloes were about to be exposed. But police chief Lee J. Cobb and crooked politician Ed Begley are happy for drifter war hero Arthur Kennedy to take the rap, even though prosecutor Dana Andrews knows he couldn't have committed the crime because the firing pin on his gun doesn't work. The problem Andrews faces, however, is that councillor wife Jane Wyatt loaned money to Begley to buy some land that has since depreciated in value and he threatens to accuse her of graft if Andrews botches the case and Begley's party fails to win the upcoming election that would give him the power to buy the land for public use at an inflated price.

Shooting in inky monochrome, Norbert Brodine reduces a respectable town to a den of venality and violence, while voice of God narrator Reed Hadley reinforces the oppressive mood with his insights into the townsfolk and their motives. Driving the campaign for a quick conviction is reporter Sam Levene, whose taunting pieces in The Record turn a desperate act into a political scandal. As is often the case in noirish dramas, the villains are much more memorable than the heroes, with Begley fulminating with furious self-entitlement whenever anybody crosses him. Nevertheless, Andrews is typically upstanding as the man of conscience, while Cobb (who would find himself on a jury with Begley in Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men, 1957) is splendidly bullish as the lawman more interested in an easy life than seeing justice done.

CASBAH (1938).

Also known as Algiers, this is not to be confused with the 1948 John Berry musical Casbah, which starred Tony Martin and Yvonne De Carlo in another reworking of Julien Duvivier's masterly poetic realist adaptation of Henri La Barthe's novel, Pépé le Moko (1937). In John Cromwell's version, Charles Boyer assumes the role of the notorious jewel thief originated by the peerless Jean Gabin and he is well served by a screenplay written by John Howard Lawson and spiced up by pulp novelist James M. Cain, which not only captures the flavour of the eponymous Algerian enclave, but also the skein of intrigue and suspense that is cast around Boyer when French cop Paul Harvey arrives to pressurise local inspector Joseph Calleia into luring him into a trap. Rival lowlife Gene Lockhart is also keen to get Boyer out of the way and inflames the passions of his gypsy girlfriend, Sigrid Gurie, by making sure she knows all about Boyer's infatuation with tourist Hedy Lamarr, who makes plans for him to escape with her by steamboat

Joshed in its time because impressionists couldn't resist mimicking Boyer's accent as he urged Lamarr to `come with me to the Casbah', this falls a long way short of the French classic, even though it makes shameless use of its uncredited footage. Boyer is too urbane to match Gabin's feral magnestism, while Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr is a little stiff on her Hollywood debut, five years after thrilling the world with her naked dash (as Hedy Kiesler) through the trees in Czech director Gustav Machatý's infidelity saga, Ecstasy (1933). But James Wong Howe's monochrome coverage of Alexander Toluboff's bustling sets is first rate, while Joseph Calleia admirably anticipates the kind of divided loyalties that Claude Rains would experience in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942).

FORT ALGIERS (1953).

Poverty Row stalwart Lesley Selander ditched the sagebrush for the desert in this action B, which is primarily of interest for its intimation that the oppressed Arabs of North Africa could always rely on their true friends from the United States. Algeria was still a French colony when the picture was produced, but the notion that a square-jawed Yank could prevent precious oil reserves from falling into the hands of a dictatorial emir will strike a discordant note with those who considered petroleum rather than democracy and global security to be the prime reason for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Almost betrayed by old flame Carlos Thompson, French agent Yvonne De Carlo infiltrates the circle of Maghrebi chieftain Raymond Burr in a bid to discover who ordered the attack that led to the death of her legionnaire brother. Having been dismissed from the US Signals Corps for striking a superior, Thompson has gone to Africa to forget. But he and buddy Leif Erickson soon find themselves acting as go-betweens for De Carlo and General Charles Evans, as she tries to smuggle out plans of Burr's palace before a daring raid. However, Burr finds the recording device that had enabled De Carlo to rumble his scheme to seize foreign oil wells and she is grateful for Thompson's timely intervention. But they still have to fight a desperate rearguard at the oil field before Burr and his marauding minions can be confounded and Thompson and De Carlo can kiss after she is made a knight of the Legion of Honour.

This is a rather obnoxious piece of propaganda, whose patronising depiction of the Arabs and their culture is highly resistible. Yet it boasts talents like John F. Seitz behind the camera and Boris Leven in the production department, while De Carlo (who remains best known today for playing Lily Munster) makes a spirited heroine who initially resists doing the bidding of the French imperialists. It eschews a few Beau Geste stereotypes, but this has not worn well.

LULU BELLE (1948).

Producer David Belasco stunned the Great White Way in 1926 with Charles MacArthur and Edward Sheldon's play about a mulatto jezebel who lured men into her orbit. However, the Production Code ensured that the sting had been safely drawn before Leslie Fenton started shooting Everett Freeman's highly sanitised screen version. Taking a break from the Road movies with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour tries hard to prove there was more in her locker than sarongs as a turn-of-the-century chateuse whose attempted murder in her Broadway dressing-room leads to ex-husband George Montgomery telling their story to cop Addison Richards. It's a tangled tale that begins when a budding lawyer allows his career to go off the rails when he sees Lamour sing at a saloon in Natchez, Mississippi. However, she ditches him when his money runs out and has flings with New Orleans gambler Albert Dekker and prizefighter Greg McLure before railroad magnate Otto Kruger promises to make her a star in New York.

Suspected of shooting Lamout and Kruger because he had done time for drunkenly stabbing McLure in the eye with a fork, Montgomery turns out to be the forgiving type and it doesn't take a genius to identify the real culprit. But there is much melodrama to be ploughed through before the truth emerges. Lamour sings a couple of numbers with her customary sultry ease, while Montgomery (an ex-boxer whose housekeeper, ironically, would try to shoot him in a crime of passion in 1963) makes a decent stooge. Glenda Farrell and Charlotte Wynters show well as Lamour's best pal and Kruger's starchy wife, while the underrated Dekker is suitably hissable as the tough guy. But, despite the proficiency of Ernest Laszlo's photography and Duncan Cramer's sets, Fenton directs with little pizzazz, while the busy scenario leaves too little room for much character development.

RED RIVER (1948).

Rightly hailed as one of the genre's finest, Howard Hawks's Western was adapted from a Borden Chase story that was serialised in the Saturday Evening Post. Chase co-scripts with Charles Schnee, but this fictional account of the first cattle drive from Texas to Kansas along the Chisholm Trail bears all the hallmarks of Hawks's gritty studies of tough men doing whatever it takes to complete a job. The action opens with aspiring rancher John Wayne and trail hand Walter Brennan striking west from St Louis and finding orphan Mickey Huhn shortly after learning that Wayne's sweetheart, Coleen Gray, has been killed in a tribal raid. The boy is the sole survivor of the same attack and Wayne adopts him and teaches him ranching after seizing some land near the Rio Grande.

Fourteen years later, Wayne, Brennan and the now-grown Montgomery Clift set out for Missouri to sell 9000 head of cattle. Wayne hires gunslinger John Ireland as back-up and they survive stampedes, dwindling supplies and an attempted lynching before Clift rebels against Wayne's tyranny and links up with the railroad at Abilene. Soon after ditching Wayne, Clift meets Joanne Dru and gives her a bracelet that had belonged to Wayne's mother. He spots this on her wrist when he encounters Dru and she offers to bear Wayne a cherished son if he abandons his quest to kill Clift. But he is too pig-headed to recognise his folly and it takes a furious punch-up and a couple of wild shots before peace is restored.

In its bare outline, the plot sounds risibly melodramatic. But such is Hawks's mastery of the medium that this slips effortlessly between macho adventure, folksy comedy and Greek tragedy. Allowing their contrasting styles to inform their feud, Wayne and Clift are superb and Duke's regular director John Ford was reportedly flabbergasted that he was such a good actor. Ireland and Brennan provide excellent support, but Dru is less impressive, although the fault is as much Chase and Schnee's as hers, as her dialogue rings hollow and the cosiness of the denouement is hugely disappointing. But Russell Harlan's crisp monochrome vistas are quite exemplary, as they contrast the majesty of the uncompromising terrain and the gruelling nature of both the cattle drive and the pioneering life in the period 1851-66. Clift would revisit many of the same themes alongside Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in John Huston's The Misfits (1961). But this is more essential to the genre, as it showed that the West no longer had a place for thugs who murdered Native Americans and Mexicans in the name of the Manifest Destiny.

THE SON OF MONTE CRISTO (1940).

Filmed on sets used to make James Whale's The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), this owes much less to Jules Lermina's 1881 novel than the ongoing situation in war-torn Europe. However, plenty of swashbuckling staples lifted from the likes of John Cromwell's The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) and Rouben Mamoulian's The Mark of Zorro (1940) recur here, as Louis Hayward assumes the role of Edmond Dantès, Jr., who risks all by riding into the Grand Duchy of Lichtenburg in order to rescue the Grand Duchess Zona (Joan Bennett), who has been ousted from the throne by General Gurko Lanen (George Sanders), who has imprisoned Prime Minister Baron Von Neuhoff (Montagu Love) and used a troop of loyal Hussars to prevent Zona from making contact with Napoleon III of France. Posing as a banker, Dantès doubles up as a masked freedom fighter known only as The Torch, who vows to prevent Lanen from legitimising his tyranny by marrying Zona and conducting a secret defence pact with Russia.

The latter is the clearest clue that this is an anti-Nazi allegory. But the studios were fully aware that Isolationist America couldn't be seen to be too antipathetic towards the Axis and the 1860s setting just about keeps this in the realms of fantasy. John DuCasse Schulze and Edward G. Boyle's Oscar-nominated Mitteleuropean production design and Edward P. Lambert's costumes belie the paucity of producer Edward Small's budget, while Rowland V. Lee directs with brio and a feel for the material honed in guiding Robert Donat and Walter Abel respectively through The Count of Monte Cristo (1934) and The Three Musketeers (1935). Returning from Whale's picture, the lightweight Hayward is easily upstaged by the ever-suave Sanders and Lionel Royce as his dastardly sidekick. But this still rattles along satisfyingly to its inevitable conclusion. 

A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE (1958).

A degree of confusion surrounds Dietlef Sierck's flight from Germany. Actress wife Hilde Jary asserted in a TV interview that the couple had left Berlin on Christmas Eve in 1936. But Sierck only had his passport returned the following spring, when Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels sanctioned a trip to Tenerife to make La Habanera, in the hope that it would provide the same sort of populist entertainment as  Zu Neuen Ufern (1937), Sierck's first collaboration with Swedish nightingale, Zarah Leander. However, with Sierck's ex-wife, Lydia Brinken, denouncing Jary as Jewish, the pair wisely decided to slip away to Italy, where Sierck was supposed to be scouting locations for his next venture, Wiltons Zoo. After detours to France and the Netherlands, Sierck was invited to the United States by Warner Bros. to remake Zu Neuen Ufern. Nothing came of the project, however, and Sierck, who steered clear of the other German émigrés in Hollywood because of what he perceived to be their contempt for all things American, was reduced to running a chicken farm in Southern California. Eventually, he rebranded himself as Douglas Sirk and began to rebuild his career with Hitler's Madman (1943), a worthy attempt to alert US audiences to Nazi barbarity by re-enacting the reprisal massacre that occurred in the Czech town of Lidice following the assassination of acting Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in June 1942.

This would be Sirk's only film about the war for 15 years, however, as he proved himself to be a jack of all directorial trades and a master of the opulent melodrama. But in 1958, with his sight failing and his tenure at Universal Studios looking increasingly uncertain, he decided to go home to make A Time to Love and a Time to Die, which followed disillusioned Wehrmacht trooper John Gavin on a long-overdue furlough after two years of fighting a losing battle against the Red Army. Crushed to discover that his parents' home has been levelled in an air raid, Gavin becomes enamoured of doctor's daughter Liselotte Pulver, who provides a haven away from the dismaying discovery that college tutor Erich Maria Remarque has been reduced to living in a hovel (where he shelters Jewish refugees) and that classmate Thayer David is now an important Nazi henchman, who throws all-night orgies for sadistic concentration camp chief, Kurt Meisel.

Sirk's motives for returning to Berlin seem as scrambled as those for his flight 21 years earlier. The Russian Front setting of Remarque's source novel clearly had a personal significance, as Klaus Detlef Sierck (the son who had acted in several pro-Party pictures) had been killed in the Ukraine in 1944. However, it was never entirely certain whether Orin Jannings's screenplay was a plea for the victors to understand the suffering endured by the vanquished during the last days of the conflict or whether the killing of the Good German by a vengeful Communist guerilla was intended to be Cold War propaganda. Regardless of its objectives, this touching study of the brevity of happiness was hailed as a masterpiece by Jean-Luc Godard in an effusive Cahiers du Cinéma review that launched the Sirkian cult that still attracts copious devotees. However, German audiences deeply resented a fugitive recreating their misery, while the film was banned in both Israel and the Soviet Union. It was somewhat fitting, therefore, that when Sirk quit the States in 1959, he settled in Switzerland - which had, of course, remained neutral during the war.

A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN (1945).

Both James Dunn and Peggy Ann Garner received Academy Awards for their performances in Elia Kazan's adaptation of Betty Smith's bestselling saga of a struggling family in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn in the early 1900s. However, thanks to the debuting Kazan's careful nurturing, the pair were as close off screen as they were as the bibulous singing waiter and his adoring teenage daughter. An Irish charmer whose love for his family was matched only by his fondness for a tipple, Dunn is an unreliable breadwinner and wife Dorothy McGuire has to scrub the steps of their tenement building to make the rent. She also has to raise Garner and younger brother Ted Donaldson pretty much on her own, as Dunn is either out working or recovering from another night on the tiles. Moreover, she gets little assistance from her free-spirited sister, Joan Blondell, who has just married milkman John Alexander without bothering to secure a divorce from her long-absent second spouse.

While McGuire constantly reminds Garner of life's responsibilities, Dunn encourages her to be a dreamer. He tells her in magical detail about each swanky function he works and teaches her about simple pleasures like the tree in their courtyard, which he promises will flourish again, despite a severe pruning. Most importantly, Dunn supports Garner's wish to transfer to a better school so she can fulfil her ambition to become a writer and, despite ill health, he goes out in the depths of winter to find employment so that she doesn't have to take a menial job at James Gleason's bar.

Garner takes some time to recover from Dunn's death and it's only when she finds the graduation flowers on her desk (which Blondell had bought with money that Dunn had given her) that she finally succumbs to her emotions. Indeed, it's this acknowledgement of Dunn's contention that everything has its season that also enables her to acquiesce in McGuire's new relationship with genial cop, Lloyd Nolan. Yet no matter how touching the make-up scenes are between McGuire and both Garner and Blondell (after each woman has a baby), it's Garner's heart-to-heart talks with Dunn and the look of trust in her eyes as she listens to him sing that make this such an affecting picture.

Having teamed with Shirley Temple in Baby Take a Bow, Stand Up and Cheer! and Bright Eyes (all 1934), Dunn knew exactly how to steal scenes while still allowing the spotlight to remain on his juvenile co-star. However, Kazan did much behind the scenes to strengthen Dunn's protective attitude towards Garner by telling him how much she worried about her father, William, who was fighting overseas in the US Army. Indeed, Garner was so close to the English-born attorney that she went to court after her parents divorced in 1947 to have him made her legal guardian in preference to her mother, Virginia, who had taken her from Ohio to Hollywood in the hope of finding fame.

VIOLENT SATURDAY (1955).

Don't let Charles G. Clarke's lush widescreen colour imagery fool you, as this adaptation of William L. Heath's Cosmopolitan story is a pitch dark film noir. The Hollywood studio system may not have been perfect, but it's hard to imagine anyone behind the Iron Curtain at this stage of the Cold War being allowed to produce such a lacerating exposé of small-town foible. Bank manager Tommy Noonan stalks nurse Virginia Leith, who has a crush on copper mine owner Richard Egan, who is drinking heavily because wife Margaret Hayes is cuckolding him with country club stud, Brad Dexter. Even prim librarian Sylvia Sidney steals purses to pay off her bank debt, while mine supervisor Victor Mature has to cope with 10 year-old son Billy Chapin asking why he isn't a war hero like his best friend's dad.

But this is just the background, as the real action starts when Stephen McNally, J. Carroll Naish and Lee Marvin arrive in Bradenville, Arizona in the guise of travelling salesman in order to case the bank for a Saturday closing raid. Director Richard Fleischer paints the scene with deft assurance and tempers the more melodramatic aspects of Sydney Boehm's scenario. Moreover, he makes fine use of long takes to establish the pace of life before employing more rapid cutting during the heist and the climactic shootout on the farm of Amish outsider Ernest Borgnine, who abnegates his pacifism to thrust a pitchfork into the raging Marvin's back. The performances are uniformly solid, but Marvin excels as the inhaler-sniffing psycho, who is mean to kids and yet still crushed by the break-up of his marriage. An undervalued gem.

WONDERWALL (1968).

Joe Massot's debut feature would have been forgotten entirely had George Harrison not composed the score. Harrison was following the lead given two years earlier by fellow Beatle Paul McCartney, who had teamed with George Martin to produce a brass band and strings soundtrack for Roy Boulting's The Family Way. But the influence of Ravi Shankar is very much in evidence in sitar and guitar compositions that demonstrated how far Harrison was diverging from the Fab Four and it's interesting to note how much more experimental he would become with his second solo project, Electronic Sound (1969).

Based on an idea by Roman Polanski's trusted cohort Gérard Brach, the screenplay by Guillermo Cabrera Infante centres on absent-minded scientist Jack MacGowran, whose studies are interrupted late one night by rock music coming from the neighbouring flat. On peering through a hole in the wall, he spots the elfin Jane Birkin posing provocatively for photographer boyfriend Iain Quarrier and, in spite of the scolding of cleaning lady Irene Handl and lab assistant Richard Wattis, MacGowran loses interest in anything but the enticing newcomer.

Trendily designed by Assheton Gorton and photographed with a myriad of coloured lights and filters by the great Harry Waxman, the action veers off into delightful flights of fancy, in which MacGowran battles with Quarrier using outsize props. However, fun though the psychedelia is, it might have been nice to give the characters a little more to say, as the picture winds up feeling like a grandiose promo for the Harrison music that would eventually inspire an Oasis hit. Nevertheless, Massot (whose other claim to fame is being removed from the Led Zepplin rockumentary, The Song Remains the Same, 1976) slyly conveys the notion that, for the majority of people, the Swinging Sixties happened to someone else while they got on with their mundane, but perfectly acceptable lives.