Kiss of Death (1947)

Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947) Another of Henry Hathaway's neo-realist film noir's that aped the post-war Italian film penchant for shooting dark themes in real locations without glamour and emphasizing the grit.  This one, about the rise and fall and rise of heist-criminal Nick Bianco (Victor Mature), starts out in the sky-scrapers, jail-houses, and police offices that reverberate with the realistic sound that you can't acquire in a sound-baffled soundstage, but once the mayhem starts, the film scurries back to the safety of studio sets.  It's rough in the mean streets of noir.  Safer to make your own.

Bianco is an ex-con who can't find a job, and with a wife and two kids to support, he decides to make his own work—robbing a jewelry business in downtown Manhattan.  The job goes South and he ends up on the street with a police bullet in his leg and a stretch awaiting him at the gray-bar hotel.  He's offered a chance by assistant D.A. Louis D'Angelo (Brian Donlevy) to supply evidence on his cronies, but Bianco sticks to the criminal code—he won't squeal, sing, or rat, even when D'Angelo offers him an early parole so he can see his kids.  But Bianco won't bend.  His family is being "taken care of" by his sheister of a lawyer (Taylor Holmes), who visits him in prison to keep tabs on Bianco's loyalty.

But, in prison, Bianco gets wind that things aren't going so well.  And a visit to the prison library newspaper galleys tells him his wife has committed suicide, his kids are now orphans, and his silence has bought him nothing.

Hathaway's direction is no-nonsense throughout, but stylistic, anyway, and the scenes in the initial robbery, in the D.A.'s office and the lock-up have a drab, utilitarian look to them—the robbery has a nice touch in it, as the crooks' target is on the 44th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, and the post stick-up elevator ride (with plenty of stops) provides a particularly teasing kind of tension.  Mature is fine, Donlevy's abilities aren't taken advantage of, and there are bit parts by Karl Malden and one of my character actors, the short-lived Millard Mitchell (who played Gene Kelly's producer buddy in Singin' in the Rain).

But Kiss of Death is also the feature debut of Richard Widmark, who plays the cheap gangster killer Tommy Udo.  You don't see him kill too many people, but one of them is indelible in its cruelty and vicious enthusiasm.  Widmark's performance is amazing, looking like a wire-thin Dan Duryea, with Cagney's ability to hold the eye in every scene he's in.  His dialogue isn't the greatest (even though the script is by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer) and limited, and repeated over and over, but Widmark punctuates it with a goonish laugh that implies a sarcastic inner amusement that he knows he's stringing you along.  Hathaway, knowing what he was getting from the young actor, pulled out all the stops for his performance.  There's one scene where someone's waiting for udo, who's holding court in a curtained-off restaurant back-room.  Hathaway holds on the curtain, elongating the wait, then cuts to a close shot of the part in the curtains, where all you can see is the glint in Udo's eye before he gets up and makes his way to the camera,  It's an amazing shot and one that shows the director's confidence in his young actor's ability to hold an audience's attention, even when he isn't actually seen.

It's curtains for Widmark's Tommy Udo

The Desert Fox

The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (Henry Hathaway, 1951) "In the somber wars of modern democracy, there is little place for chivalry." Words of Winston Churchill, during the Second World War and his censure debate before Parliament concerning Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, nicknamed "The Desert Fox," considered Germany's greatest strategist of WWII. 

Churchill may have been referring only to the consequences of his words, but that he made them is extraordinary.  No less extraordinary is that an American film studio would make a movie about a Nazi soldier six years after the termination of that war.  Even more extraordinary that the head of that studio, Darryl Zanuck, had spent a goodly amount of time as a chronicler of the North Africa campaign, and was as patriotic and conservative as they come.

But, he loved a good story.

And he found it in Desmond Young's post-war biography of Rommel; Young was also in that campaign, but in the trenches and had a brief encounter with him, inspiring him to research the man and write the book.  Young appears as himself in the film, but the narration sounds more like Michael Rennie.  The script, spare as it is, is by Nunnally Johnson (who wrote for Ford, Hawks, Wilder, Aldrich in a long career), who does very well at "writing to silence"—the practice of creating dialogue for conversations that no one surviving heard.  There's a lot of padding going on.  A pre-credits sequence of sorts that has a British commando raid on Rommel's HQ, some Allied talk about him—the letter telling soldiers not to attribute supernatural powers to the man is word for word true—and a lot of stock-war-footage sequences that bridge incidents that round out the story and provide the big picture (some of the scenes show Eisenhower and Patton).

But Rommel, played by James Mason, is the focus, specifically his years in the Second World War, his victories despite supply problems, and an increasingly erratic strategizing by the Fuehrer-in-Chief, which ultimately led the Field-Marshall to side with the conspirators who plotted to kill Hitler in a French bunker during a battle briefing (which was detailed in Valkyrie) and led, ultimately, to his death by Nazi-assisted suicide.

That turning of purpose, showing the conscience of a soldier fighting for his country, for its advancement and survival, whether by conquest or by treason, makes a very interesting story of principals.  And, along with the war footage, it is the through-line for the story, as Rommel comes to realize that in order to win the war and gain the peace, he must cut a little red tape, right at the jugular of the High Command.


Hathaway's approach is, as ever, artfully utilitarian.  He doesn't try to sentimentalize Rommel (too much), and spends a lot of time in desert locations trying to simulate the North African situations.  Stock-footage allows  Rommel to visit installations long since obliterated.  But mostly the filming is in California and Hathaway makes it work.  Johnson's script is first-rate, and nicely incremental in detailing Rommel's change of heart...and target.  Particularly nice is a prolonged dialogue with Field Marshall von Runstedt (Leo G. Carroll) full of irony and dripping sarcasm, but not so much that you'd mistake them for being other than loyal Germans...and chivalrous warriors of the Old School.  

Great cast, too, with Mason's cool intelligence drawing in all the veteran character actors like George Macready, Cedric Hardwicke, and Everett Sloane, and up-and-comers to the screen like Jessica Tandy (as Mrs. Field Marshall) and Richard Boone as his adjutant.  Luther Adler (brother of Stella) plays Adolf Hitler, and the Jewish actor had all the erratic moves and vocal cadences down.  Nice bit of irony there, in a film that was chivalrously kind to the enemy.

Mason would return to the role of Rommel two years later in the Robert Wise film of The Desert Rats, starring Richard Burton.

13 Rue Madeleine

"13 Rue Madeleine" (Henry Hathaway, 1947) There are several good movies to be made based on the exploits of the American and British Secret Service during World War II. The OSS wasn't all encrypters and code-breakers listening over wirelesses in sterile little offices. There were field agents, double agents, and mis-information spreaders and they had at their disposal all sorts of spy ledgerdemain that has been cobbled for many of the traditional thrillers that came out after the war. No one that I know has ever made a movie about Camp X, where training was done, papers forged and weaponry created.

But "13 Rue Madeleine" is, at least, a good start. Directed by Henry Hathaway in a slightly more flashy style than his true-life crime dramas earlier in the war, it still employed a lot of photography "in the field" as the movie explains, "often in the actual locations."

The story follows the training of Group 077 (the writers had to change the name over script objections), each one in non-specific training until they're called upon for "a job" in whichever corner of the world they're dropped. Heading the training is Robert Sharkey (James Cagney), who has one complication—one of his agents-in-training is a Nazi agent, and during the course of training he has to find out who it is to exploit him. The film is surprisingly cold-blooded, with many agents dying in the process of carrying out their missions, and there's one case of "burning the village in order to save it." There's also a lot of appearance by well-known actors in small roles at the beginning of their careers including Karl Malden, E.G. Marshall, and Red Buttons. But, towering over all of them is Cagney, who still manages to show off a lot of grace in a role that's pretty rough. But he's also the perfect actor who you believe could kill with impunity and laugh at the enemy in the face of torture.

14 Hours

"14 Hours" (Henry Hathaway, 1951) Its place in film history is assured by being the first film role of a high-toned girl from Philadelphia who lived a cinderella existence in Hollywood, and traded it all in for life as a real princess in Monaco--Grace Kelly. Her role is small, but she does make an impression as an innocent by-stander whose life is affected by the circumstances in the movie.

But there's much more to this film than that. Another young star is introduced--Jeffrey Hunter, who is another of the morbid on-lookers as a troubled youth (Richard Basehart) walks out on a ledge and threatens to jump. There's only one beat cop (Paul Douglas) he'll talk to, so cop-in-charge Howard DaSilva puts Douglas out on the ledge as much as he can. He's not helped by the guy's parents (Agnes Moorehead and Robert Keith), or the former fiancee (Barbara Bel Geddes), or the increasingly restless crowd below, egging the jumper on.

Fox is releasing "14 Hours" as part of its "noir" series, but it's not noir. In tone and execution, it more resembles a Hitchcock scenario--a limited space, lots of process work, POV shots, and a rather wicked sense of humor. It also has a passing resemblance to a film that would be released two months later--Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole"--which also dramatized the callousness of mob mentality and reporters covering the story. Yes, it travels the back-alley of human emotions, and the last part of it does take place at night (albeit with klieg lights blazing away), but at the end of the day, dark it might be, but noir it ain't, although Hathaway directed a number of them in his career. And he makes good use of his previous films shot like documentaries for this story. Ultimately, though, it's a suspense film that hangs on a slim thread, anchored by performances uniformly delivered in the higher registers.

True Grit

"True Grit" (Henry Hathaway, 1969) Yeah, John Wayne got his Oscar for it, and I could harp that it's a performance both hammy and less disciplined than Wayne's usual output, and nowhere near Wayne at his best, but The Academy, in their sentiment-besotted wisdom, chose this as the film to finally honor Wayne, as they honored Bogart for, of all things, "The African Queen."

At least they acknowledged and honored them.

But it would be easy to dismiss "True Grit," as just "the film that got Wayne the Oscar." It's a marvellous combination of rough action, gritty Western, social commentary and an Emancipation Tract. It's a post-modern Western that fits into the niche of Peckinpah and Leone (without the attention-grabbing direction and editing), and slots easily into Wayne's output, which is a nifty balancing act to pull off. And it's entertaining as all Hell.

Credit has to be given to Charles Portis' original novel, with its prissy female narration, it's school-marmish way with the English language ("Jane Austen writes a Western"), and it's abundance of humor given the clash of style and subject matter--when Mattie Ross falls into a snake-pit, breaking her arm and leaving her vulnerable to rattlers, this is Portis' passage "I thought 'I am in a bad way.'" Fact is, Portis' book feels like it was written at the time, and, even though it turns the genre on its maiden-head, it could just as easily stand on the bookshelves with the pulps of the Old West and not reveal its academic pedigree. The actors' peculiar way with pro-nun-cye-ation makes a good dramatical equivalence. (sic)

Credit also the screenplay by Marguerite Roberts (who was black-listed, a fact that Wayne ignored when giving enthusiastic praise to the screenplay), and the no-nonsense, cut-to-the-bone direction of Henry Hathaway. The only fly-in-the-ointment is singer Glen Campbell's acting debut as "LaBoeuf" (heh), but even that works to the film's advantage--Campbell's such a "burr in the boot," his amateurishness "plays."*

Seeing the film as a young lad, I remember the extremely quotable Wayne dialog ("She reminds me of me!," or Wayne's admonition to his horse after having the temerity to fall on in after being shot: "Dammit, Beau...first time ya ever gave me reason ta...cuss ya"), and the near-occassion of violence--the severing of fingers (and it's Dennis Hopper's fingers--his presence, and Robert Duvall's, give the movie added re-visitation enjoyment) made quite the impression on me in a world dominated by Disney and television.
But as an adult, one appreciates Hathaway's eye for grand vista's (framing in the same painterly fashion as he used shadowy urban spaces in the 40's), Elmer Bernstein's mature background score that gooses when it needs to and keens in quiet moments, Kim Darby's eccentric performance (did she ever play a normal human being?) made even more amazing in that she was deathly afraid of horses, and the latter half of the episode when Wayne takes the edge off Reuben J. Cogburn, and leans back into John Wayne pater-familias territory. My memory retains the image of snake-bit Mattie Ross being administered to at a trading post, and the camera heaving to the door-way holding a silent, unmoving John Wayne, eyes in shadow (of course, one's wearing an eye-patch!) doing nothing but watching not-helplessly, his hand up-raised on the door-frame, keeping danger away. God only knows how long he's stood at that door, or how long he will.

Perhaps that's why they gave him the Oscar--despite all the tinkering with the Western tradition, it still became a "John Wayne movie."

Or, maybe it's just because he wore an eye-patch. The Academy loves disability performances.

* I remember Wayne appearing on The Joey Bishop Show (the talk version) around the time of the movie's theater-run, and Bishop asking him "How was Glen Campbell's acting?," and Wayne paused...a wonderful example of how he used theatrics and his persona...and said, simply "He's a Hell of a singer."

The House on 92nd Street

"The House on 92nd Street" (Henry Hathaway, 1945) Another of those neo-realist films, filmed in the locations in which they occurred. But this one goes a step further--except for the lead actors, everybody's a real FBI agent--you can tell, the line readings are merely that, line readings. "Bob, let's get this over to the Cryptanalysis boys to see what they think." "O-kay, Wendell!" And the actors, mostly unknowns except for the always-natural Lloyd Nolan stick out because they're at ease and have better hair-styles. Real surveillance footage of the German Embassy during the war is used in this story of a Quantico-trained double-agent tracking a Nazi plot to discover the secrets of The Manhattan Project (or "Project 97," as its called in the movie--it was made in 1945, after all). It's a stunt-film, a propaganda document, an early film-noir (without the noir stylistics). And the blend of styles almost gives it a documentary feel. Henry Hathaway does some ingenious work making this all work together, at the cost of making the staged segments feel extremely staged in a D-budget sense.

Call Northside 777

"Call Northside 777"(Henry Hathaway, 1948) There was a brief period in American films where Hollywood embraced the neo-realist school coming out of Italy--where stories were filmed out in the streets, not in the rarified atmosphere of a film-studio (Italy's huge studio, Cinecitta, was being used to house refugees), and it dove-tailed with the gritty world of film noir and crime-thrillers. Elia Kazan made one, even Hitchcock did. But the most well-remembered of them was "Call Northside 777" with James Stewart as blasé "Chicago Times" reporter Jim McLane, who, upon taking an assignment he doesn't want, turns it into a cause celebre and his own obsession to see Justice done.

This was one of the first movies Stewart did after his Air Force service, as he was beginning to challenge and even destroy his callow image at the beginning of his career. Now, with an added maturity he could actually pull off the cynical journalist role he wasn't too convincing as in "The Philadelphia Story" (which won him a "sympathy" Oscar after losing the previous year for "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" the year before) He returned from the war determined to play characters with a darker edge.

Henry Hathaway directed with a subtle eye, finding interesting deep-focus shots in lackluster surroundings. McLane's first encounter with a scrub-woman washing the stairs of a cathedraled office building carries the visual weight of years of work needed to raise the reward-money to help spring her imprisoned son (Richard Conte). The jailhouse of the visitation scenes IS the jailhouse, and the arrest of Conte's character looks and feels like actual newsreel footage. Finally, you get to go back in time and watch vital clues produced by the old technology of wire-photo transfer. It's another instance where the straight-laced neo-noir style goes a long way in selling the truth of a story, however implausible it might seem.