Reviews

Though Stamboul Quest is probably not very accurate about the German spy service in World War I, I found it a most enjoyable movie, mostly because of Myrna Loy. I would've said Myrna was miscast as a sly, duplicitous, sexy spy. But remembering her previous (pre-MGM) performances in movies like The Squall and Thirteen Women, she could have indeed played the part to the hilt; it was just that MGM wanted her to be sympathetic and ladylike, even when inappropriate.

Even so, she seems to be having fun and gets to wear some sexy outfits designed by Adrian. One, that she wears in the restaurant where she picks up George Brent and subsequently at his apartment, is so skimpy that wearing it in public in many US cities might've gotten her arrested in that period. In the opening scene where she shows up disguised in the office of Von Sturm (Lionel Atwill), the German spymaster she works for, after a little hugging she immediately takes a bath in a bathroom so conveniently located right there in his office. Her undressing and teasingly tossing her shirt and slip in his face makes it clear there is an easy intimacy between them. (He scrutinizes her clothes closely, ostensibly looking for a message in invisible ink; this was as close as 1934 Hollywood could get to showing a panty fetishist--and Atwill, even when down-playing his customary hinted-at lewdness, gives signs of being obsessed with her.) This could've been a real cutting-edge film if it had focused a good deal more on the dignified middle-aged spymaster's fascination with his much younger, carefree, sleep-around spy, who seems quite a tease--and might be a perk that goes with the job?

She has a conventional but sexy romantic scene with George Brent (who I found a little annoying) and later on, she manifests a subtle eroticism in her scene with the Turkish commander (C. Henry Gordon) whom one would think would be more on his guard against such womanly wiles. When she lowers her dress at one shoulder (so he can write an invisible-ink message on her back) the feeling is very erotic, quite knowingly so on her part, cool and calculating--her finest acting moment in the movie and one where she really gives a feeling of ambiguity, as she obviously doesn't find this stiff, pompous Turkish big shot attractive but knowing she's been sent to seduce him, she certainly gets with it.

The superb cameraman James Wong Howe's talent for mood is unfortunately constrained by the MGM glossy, brightly lit look. However, he lights Myrna's close-ups with care and, for a few delicious seconds (to be exact, at 101.32) he uses baby spots on her eyes. It's such an exquisite effect that I freeze-framed it to savor it at length.

I was interested that reviewer "earlytakie" commented on the use of Trucolor in this picture and grateful that it's been preserved. I second that. I have read that Trucolor was essentially Republic's name for Cinecolor, which I have found to generally awful, especially in its rendering of flesh tones. (For example, in the 1948 spy film Sofia--which I've also reviewed--it is annoying that the beautiful Patricia Morison is so unflatteringly photographed and appears to have a sickly, waxy complexion.) To return to the film at hand, I think the Trucolor here is very good, especially in scenes shot in the desert. If it is Cinecolor, then Republic's lab must have processed it in their own way, making distinctly better.

The picture is basically about two characters--a reformed gambler who has gotten religion and an angry young woman who masquerades as a male when performing as a bandit. Bill Elliot is a very low-key actor, who is a lot easier to take than many B-movie (or even A-movie) heroes, but he does get a little monotonous. As far the cross-dressing bandit: In 1908, Max Beerbohn, reviewing a production of Euripides's The Bacchae, in which a prominent actress of the day, Lillah McCarthy, played Dionysus, wrote in his review: "It is a dangerous thing for a woman to impersonate a man except in a Christmas pantomime." He thought Ms. McCarthy carried it off though. Similarly, when Marie Windsor plays a tough woman who masquerades as a tough male outlaw in the first 40 minutes of Hellfire, she is highly effective in the part, only not 100% convincing because of the womanly way she fills out her outlaw shirt.

At midpoint, when she shucks off her masculine guise and transforms into a sexy, genial but conventional saloon singer, the movie gets less interesting (though she is very appealing in her frilly costumes and flirts amusingly with sheriff Forrest Tucker). She has a great cynical line to Tucker, hinting at her past as a whore, "I've known a lot of men who were in love with their wives." A scene that is really worth waiting for comes toward the end, when she is in jail, lolling on her bunk hugging her rather oversized guitar--the most suggestive use of a musical instrument since Cary Grant played a saxophone in Once Upon a Honeymoon. I recommend this movie to all Marie Windsor fans (though from mid-point on rather deficient in action).

Incidentally, a few years later in the TV series Stories of the Century (produced by a Republic subsidiary), Ms. Windsor played the real-life outlaw Belle Starr, making her as ruthless and savage as could be imagined. She engages in a no-holds-barred, furniture-destroying battle with show's distinctly overmatched heroine (the bland Mary Castle), staged with his usual manic zest by William Witney. You have to see it to believe it. It's curious that this TV series, though obviously intended to appeal to "the whole family," was often (as here) more violent than anything you were likely to see in contemporary movies. It was even sometimes more sexy (as in the "Cattle Kate" episode, where Jean Parker plays a very lewd middle-aged outlaw) than anything in films at the time. It's a shame that the two leads, Jim Davis and Mary Castle, are not very interesting. (In the second season, Castle was replaced by the excellent Kristine Miller, a great improvement.) The show uses a lot of stock footage from old Republic films, judiciously cut in for the most part. An exception: at times when there is a scene in a modest smallish saloon, the film editor couldn't resist cutting in a laughably inappropriate extreme long shot of a huge saloon-cum-theater set packed with hundreds of extras watching six chorus girls dancing on stage. Maybe some kind of private joke.

Aside from the travelogue type shots of Rome, the movie's main interest is in its depiction of three types of young unmarried American women of the early fifties. There is The Cute (Maggie McNamara) who is rather brainlessly preoccupied with landing a husband--not unlikeable but a lot less charming than the makers intended. McNamara is okay but this is a part that would've been better played by Phyllis Kirk.

The second type is the Clever, Scheming, Opportunistic (Jean Peters). More interesting than the first type, very sensual, a little opaque, perhaps "too American" to relax and enjoy Italian men. (Peters seems to hate the movie.)

The third type is The Intelligent (Dorothy McGuire, the oldest at 35+), who seems fairly content being the loyal secretary to a pompous Famous Novelist (Clifton Webb). Unlike most movie stars who play writers, Webb looks like he could actually write something, though probably too intellectual, haughty and misanthropic to write best-seller type fiction.

The main reason I watched this was for Jean Peters, for I much admired her performances in Pickup on South Street and Viva Zapata. Unfortunately, Three Coins in the Fountain is not her finest hour and a half. She walks through the film wearing a bored sexy smirk not unlike Jane Russell, maybe reflecting her contempt for the movie and her stupid lines. When the script requires her to sit at her desk and daydream sighingly about Italian heartthrob Rozanno Brazzi, she is so obviously faking it as to offer a knowing, cynical critique of the movie's dumb idea of "romance."

All in all, a pleasant time killer whose images of women are very dated, but I would say illuminatingly so.

The Devil's Agent is a spy thriller that I thought pleasant viewing, at least the first half of it (it loses momentum after the mid-point), though it never gets very thrilling. The lead is played by Peter Van Eyck, who is really not a good fit as a leading man--too shallow and one-note. When Van Eyck and Christopher Lee bump into each other in a train station in the opening scene, greeting each other as old school chums who are delighted to see each other after these many years, the palpable lack of warmth between these two cold fish can't help but make the scene seem unreal, almost verging on a Saturday Night Live skit.

In my opinion, there are only four really interesting things about the movie. First, the credits give Hans Habe, the author of the novel that is the source of the picture the TINIEST credit I have ever seen in any movie. This must be an interesting story behind this; he must've done something that really pissed off one of the producers (probably Artur Brauner).

The three other interesting things are the performances of Billie Whitelaw as a bar girl in a strange Budapest night club, Helen Cherry as Chris Lee's sister, and Marius Goring as a German general. Whitelaw's idiosyncratic performance is a case of a fine actress trying to do more with a stock part than it warrants, so that her sexy-sensitive-enigmatic B-girl seems all but surreal with her unconvincing Hungarian accent, fake laugh and sudden inappropriate smiling it seems too much like a trying-to-do-everything acting class exercise. It's hard to believe that even a naive and horny guy like Van Eyck is playing would not be on his guard against her. The scene ends with her bending over him in a way that is both sexy-maternal and kind of vampirish. Odd as it is, this scene is the highlight of the movie, for me at least. In the same scene, I noticed that when she tells Van Eyck that four people sitting at at nearby table are "the leaders of the Communist Party in Budapest," they make the mistake of cutting in a few shots of them that are almost laughable--four very ordinary looking Irish extras, none of whom look like they could be leaders of anything.

I will say that director John Paddy Carstairs and art director Tony Inglis do a good job of creating a seedy middle-European ambiance on what must have been a limited budget. The English actress Helen Cherry plays Christopher Lee's dignified but warm and charming older sister with real distinction. The only thing is she maybe expends too much "warmth" toward the cold and remote Van Eyck not to seem a bit suspicious. An interesting performance though.

Without being familiar with the play by Edward Ellis and wife that is the basis of this film, I would hazard a guess that its fine screenwriters Cyril Hume and Peter Ruric (aka Paul Cain) were doing their best to humanize a shallow, formulaic kind of mystery play--and did not wholly succeed. The basic idea, an author who is a suave, elegant ladies man having to cope with a multiplicity of ex-mistresses, all worried about their reputations being tarnished if he detailed his affairs with them in his forthcoming book, is a good one. (Women must've been a lot more concerned about their "reputations" then than they are now.) Paul Lukas is, as always, very good in the principal role and the supporting cast of beauties are at least adequate, sometimes better than that. But it was done at budget-conscious Universal, obviously hastily made, and with particularly anodyne sets. (I doubt that art director Charles D. Hall designed anything new for this picture, likely reused standing sets.)

One can't help thinking the same story, with much the same script, would have been done better as an "A" picture at Paramount with William Powell in the lead and, say, Mitchell Leisen directing. Aside from having a more polished look and more elegant sets, it would, most importantly, avoid the rushed feeling we get here. It seems like director Edwin L. Marin was always conscious of the need to fit the story into a 60-minute running time, not wanting to dwell on any scene longer than necessary, so that the relationships between Lukas and the various women seem shallower and more transitory than intended. Of the actresses the standout is now unfairly forgotten Dorothy Burgess, portraying his most lasting love, a sensitive woman who appears to be recovering from a long self-pitying drunk. (Not spelled out, but that's the implication.) She has a couple of marvelous scenes and the most touching line in the movie: "Oh, why don't you send me to South America? No one has any nerves down there." ("Nerves" apparently meaning nervous breakdowns.) She says it so poignantly, it plays much better than it reads.

Of the other actors, the excellent Sara Haden is somewhat wasted as Lukas's self-sacrificing secretary. Patricia Ellis plays a rather naive young book jacket designer who thinks she is in love with the great man but who is upset, disillusioned to find--duh!--that Lukas has another girl friend. Her acting is unimpressive but her bosom is. Props to Universal's costumer Vera West for putting her in a dress that, while "tasteful," shows them off in all their abundance. Richard Carle amusingly plays Lukas's publisher, who harks back to an era when most publishing houses were essentially run by one man (outstanding examples: Alfred Knopf and Horace Liveright). Decisions about what they wanted to publish and how to market it were made without recourse to committee-think or numbers crunching. That era is of course long gone, though maybe still exists to some extent in some of the smaller niche publishers.

I don't think director Marin brought much to the movie; on the other hand, he did permit Dorothy Burgess's scenes to come through with all the actress's sensitivity intact, just as he did a decade later with Signe Hasso's scenes in the otherwise routine George Raft vehicle Johnny Angel. So give him credit for something. His only directorial mannerism that I noticed was a penchant for staging sort-of-romantic scenes with the woman standing with her back to the man (Lukas) and talking to him coquettishly over her shoulder. Some of the time it works, some of the time it's just a mannerism.

Mitchell Leisen's Bride of Vengeance was a box-office flop on its release in 1949 and, as far as I can tell, has not received much critical attention since. It doesn't rank with Leisen's best work but it doesn't deserve to be called "minor" either. It tries to bridge two disparate stories, which do not mesh very well. One is a sexy "woman's picture" about the haughty and fiery Lucrezia Borgia and the other is a would-be "rousing adventure" film about the casting, testing and deployment in battle of a new huge cannon. The audience that would have appreciated the one were uninterested in the other and, realizing they'd only be getting "half a loaf, stayed away in droves. While the film has a few dull spots (all the scenes involving the court painter are dead wood), it avoids the absurdities that inevitably turn up in DeMille's films and, indeed, in most costume pictures set in a distant era.

Paulette Goddard was one of the most charming and delightful actresses on the screen (and, needless to say, a real hottie) and I'm happy to report that she carries off the part of Lucrezia quite well, aided by some very judicious camera placement by Leisen. (We are also given revealing glimpses of her lovely bosom.) The part of the Duke of Ferrara is played by the seriously miscast John Lund, who often tries to cope by affecting an air of amused sophistication a la William Powell. But where Powell always looked like he was having fun, with Lund it's just to compensate for how uncomfortable he feels in the part. Unforgivably, he throws away the script's best double-entendre: "All the same, I should like to show you my Big Jupiter when next you visit our little Ferrara." (Imagine what Powell or Cary Grant would have done with that line!)

Macdonald Carey is far from ideal as Cesare Borgia but reasonably effective in the part and certainly makes Cesare's lust for his sister believable (not hard to do if your sister is Paulette!). He is too suburban-earnest to give the part the conviction it requires. He is overshadowed by Raymond Burr as his henchman, or "tool villain," Michelotto. Burr gives the film's strongest performance (though he overdoes the glowering and dies grimacing in hammy fashion) and one wishes he and Carey had switched roles. Burr's flamboyant costume must have been a favorite of Leisen's; he's given plenty of opportunity, too much maybe, to stride about displaying it.

Leisen's direction displays the care, taste and tact he brought to all his films. Perhaps the best scene, certainly the most Leisen-like, is the one where Lucrezia teasingly refuses to sleep with her new husband (Lund) on their wedding night, giving Paulette a chance to display her talent as a sexy light comedienne. In her more serious love-and-scheming scenes, Leisen uses some carefully composed Hitchcock-like shots with Goddard's face partly concealed, emphasizing her flashing, devilish eyes. When we get to the actual use of the cannon ("Big Jupiter") by the Duke of Ferrara to counter the assault by Cesare's troops, Leisen stages impressive battle scenes, though devotees of the rough and tumble action cinema of William Witney and Phil Karlson might complain that too many of the shots look too obviously "designed" to capture the frenzy and confusion of war.

It is now fashionable to discuss movies made under the strictures of the Code in terms of hidden sexual subtexts. Much as I deplore this tendency, I will indulge in by pointing out three such "subtexts."

Leisen stages the brutal strangling of Lucrezia's first husband, the Prince, by the False Physician in a way that emphasizes the feeling of orgasmic release he feels. Hitchcock had a similar moment in the opening scene of Rope but Leisen makes it even more emphatic. One caveat: the Prince's chamber is so overstuffed with decor as to be distracting, an error Hitch would never have allowed.

The fadeout at 25.30 implies that Cesare, after getting Lucrezia excited at the prospect of poisoning the Duke of Ferrara and getting her in a near-frenzy thinking about "righteous revenge," they were in such a state that they must have had sex right then and there.

Finally, then Lucrezia, overcome with curiousity, ventures down into the dank cellar where the highly secret Big Jupiter is stashed, from her POV the camera slowly travels the length of the hugh phallic cannon and then we see the awestruck Paulette's eyes bugging out hilariously--a proto-Frank Tashlin moment that some might well think the highlight of the movie!

I suspect that if censorship had permitted, Leisen would have liked to dissolve from Paulette daydreaming of orgasmic bliss to Big Jupiter firing off one mighty blast in battle--an effect achieved with unabashed bluntness 11 years later in Karlson's Hell to Eternity.

To anyone not turned off by costume pictures and the expected period mannerisms, I recommend this film highly.

When I first thought of writing a review of The Devil's In Love, made by William (here "Wilhelm") Dieterle for Fox Films in 1933, I thought I would begin by calling it the most von Sternberg-like film by another director that I know of. On reflection, while I think this is still true, I don't think Dieterle thought for a minute "This is going to be an imitation JvS" the way many directors decades later made obvious Hitchcock imitations, I think the similarities to JvS's Dietrich films are worth considering but the differences are really more important.

First, the similarities: There is a scene between Loretta Young and Victor Jory where the effect of shadows from an overhead trellis or some such on her face is reminiscent of the shots in JvS's Morocco where we see the French Legionnaires overlaid with similar shadow patterns. Probably Hal Mohr, the excellent cameraman, had taken notice of Lee Garmes's photography of JvS films and this sort of thing came naturally, without being intended as imitation or "homage."

When the hero (Victor Jory, more often a villain), fleeing from unjust punishment in the Legion, takes up residence in a new town under a new name, he is visited by an old flame, Rena (the excellent Vivianne Osborne), who operates a cabaret-brothel in town. Her joint looks like a seedier, more low-rent version of the one LoTinto (Paul Porcasi) operates in Morocco, which at least aspired to "class." (Interestingly, Paul Porcasi, who played LoTinto in Morocco here appears as an irascible bartender--much more butch-looking than LoTinto was.) Where LoTinto's cabaret had a special section for the "society" of Morocco, so they wouldn't have to mingle with the hoi polloi, Rena's clientele appears to be all hoi polloi.

Rena's floor show is the tackiest imaginable with no-talent dancers who, it is implied, can be rented out for other purposes. Her floor show opens with a brash, untalented comedienne in a ridiculous oversized headdress rushing on to perform a cockney comic song--a blatant "distanciation effect" of the kind JvS used in The Blue Angel and, though it came later, in unexpected moments in The Devil is a Woman to emphasize the painful humiliation of Lionel Atwill's obsession with Dietrich. Perhaps to Dieterle, with his cultured German background, this sort of thing came naturally, with any similarity to JvS unintended.

Even with these similarities, the differences are more salient. Dieterle moves his film along at a brisk pace, in the manner of WB films of the period and doesn't indulge in the dreamy languorousness of JvS films. The dialogue is delivered crisply and so the whole feeling of the acting is different, more realistic. (I suspect that JvS had Dietrich speak her lines so slowly not for any aesthetic reason but simply to compensate for her lack to fluency in English.) Dieterle gives his actors many big close-ups, which JvS used sparingly. Loretta Young is Dieterle's lovely leading lady, a fine actress who JvS would surely have found uncongenial--but that just shows his limitations! Victor Jory makes for a tough, virile, no-nonsense leading man, a distinct improvement over Victor McLaglen, Clive Brook and--dare I say it?--even Gary Cooper.

Since screenwriting is not often celebrated unless it calls attention to itself, I'd like to say a good word for Howard Estabrook's script--a model of compression that covers a lot of ground without seeming rushed. His dialogue scenes, though they lack the wit of Sternberg and Furthman, are good at conveying characters' backstories without seeming to, without any of the languid reminiscence common to JvS's principals.

All in all, an unusually interesting film that combines the pace and zest of the best WB films with the conscious artistry common not just to JvS but also to Paramount films of the time. Highly recommended. -- Patrick O'Neill, 3/12/22.

I don't have a strong desire to review this movie but since only two others have done so, perhaps I had better give my review. The Candidate, like many other exploitation films from the 1930s on, pretends to address a "social problem"--in this case, corruption in Washington. Its taking-off point was the then-recent scandal involving Bobby Baker, an aide to congressman who was "exposed" as a pimp to Washington VIPs. In this film, the equivalent character is called Buddy Barker and the actor who plays him, Eric Mason, aside from being not very talented, is wrong for the part. He plays him like a road company version of Tony Curtis' Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success--appropriate for the Big Apple but the wrong vibe for D. C.

Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have said after seeing Darryl Zanuck's film of his novel The Sun Also Rises, "Any picture where Errol Flynn gives the best performance is in trouble." What can you say about a picture where the best performance is given by June Wilkinson? On the evidence of her performance here I'd guess that, were it not for the cheesecake magazine stigma, she might have had a career as a conventional leading lady, along the lines of Joan Fontaine. Too bad she was stuck with the sleazy image! But of course with a picture like this a major part of its appeal is its sleaziness.

Buddy Barker introduces her to an earnest and slightly thick senatorial candidate, fairly well played by Ted Knight. Under his pomposity he's a caring guy, at least where June is concerned; he seems to have even fallen in love with her. The movie's idea of irony is panning over from a shot of he and June rolling bed to a shot of his campaign poster, which has a photo of him looking gutsy and the slogan "He'll conserve your heritage." (It seems obvious that he was cast for his resemblance to Sen. Barry Goldwater.)

The movie keeps cutting to a senatorial investigating committee which is almost as turgid as the real thing, but does provide the immortal line, "Do you intend to show this committee a STAG MOVIE produced by Buddy Barker?" And we get to see this little gem, or part of it anyway--which is the highlight of the movie. (It gets shown at about 116.40, for those who wish to skip the rest.) I have to confess to being unacquainted with stag movies, other than having read, some years back, a lengthy installment of Playboy's endless "Sex in the Cinema" series devoted to this phenomenon, for which the author must have done heroic antiquarian research, watching many an old stag movie at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. (In a late news flash, a print of a long sought-after stag movie starring Joan Crawford, circa 1923, has recently been found and is being preserved by the Kinsey Institute for future generations of researchers.) The one we get to watch here, titled "Steam Heat," involves June and an unappealing burlesque comic as a repairman who has come to fix her radiator which is not giving out any heat. When he does the trick, simply by banging on it, she is grateful enough to want to reward him! This little movie is marvelous, at once sleazy, sexy and outrageously camp. (It's a bit spoiled by cutting away to the senators on the committee--wooden actors--looking "concerned." Some of them shoud look as if they were enjoying it.) If only some of the imagination that went into "Steam Heat" had gone into the rest of the movie!

I can envision an alternate movie, one with more intelligence and wit, in which June Wilkinson's character, Angela, is presented as a blithe, high-spirited Zuleika Dobson thoughtlessly but quite unintentionally decimating Washington's self-important but--believe it or not--emotionally vulnerable senators and congressmen. (Unfortunately US senators are too hardened to be equivalent to Beerbohm's dreamy Oxford youths.)

Recommended for June's performance--and especially for "Steam Heat." -- Patrick O'Neill.