Blood on the Moon: Robert Wise

To read this review, go to: http://theblackmaria.org/2015/06/09/b-roll-robert-wises-blood-on-the-moon-1948/.

6/10

I Want to Live: Robert Wise

In hindsight, the evidence that Barbara Graham, a woman executed in California in the 50s for participating in the murder of a 64-year-old, was actually guilty of her crime is almost definitive and indisputable. Robert Wise's recounting of her arrest, trial, and execution entitled I Want to Live! argues that she was innocent. But even if she was guilty, the film makes a powerful case that the systems of justice used in America are so broken and hyperbolic that wrongful executions are not only probable but inevitable. First Barbara's friends set her up with a phony murder rap to save their skins. Then an undercover policeman essentially commits entrapment by offering to create a phony alibi for her. The press savages her in the headlines, thereby turning the public against her. And finally, as a last indignity, on her last day her execution is delayed several times by the courts. The process turns her into a blubbering mess crying out for them to get it over with. The last 15 minutes are honestly more intense, suspenseful, and terrifying than anything ever engineered by Hitchcock. In a move seemingly reminiscent of his earlier triumph The Set-Up (1949), this sequence is largely depicted in real-time (or at the very least a painstaking facsimile of it). The different devices of execution are laid out and displayed for the audience much in the same sterile, clinical manner as the bombing procedures near the end of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). By forcing the audience to confront the machinery and the rituals of execution, Wise reaches new terrains of dread and terror that most filmmakers can only aspire to. Susan Hayward truly earns her Oscar as Graham. At times nasty, at times defiant, at times pathetic, and, most of all, at times utterly sympathetic, Graham is one of Hayward's greatest creations.

8/10

Born to Kill: Robert Wise

The key to great tragedy is anagnorisis; the "hero's sudden awareness of a real situation, the realisation of things as they stood." In film noir, perhaps the most introspective genre of American cinema, the protagonists would frequently find themselves in such a situation. One of the very best examples that I can think of is contained in the last third of Robert Wise's Born to Kill. The first film noir by the acclaimed director, Born to Kill follows the doomed romance and destruction of Helen Brent (Claire Trevor), an ice-hearted socialite, and Sam Wilde (Lawrence Tierney), a two-bit crook who flies into murderous jealous rages. The two meet completely by accident as they flee Reno, Nevada for different reasons: Helen just finalized a divorce and Sam unknowingly had murdered her neighbor (his cheating girlfriend) and her lover. Though they fall in love, they are forced to maintain a facade of respectability by getting engaged with and marrying other people. It's quite chilling to see these two characters manipulate, abuse, and use other people, even their own friends and family, to suit their greedy desires. Trevor is one of the most subtly diabolical femme fatales this side of Bette Davis. Tierney is more a violent force of irrational anger than a man. However, when Sam's sins are discovered by the police, Helen realizes that she has isolated herself from everyone she cared for. This is the anagnorisis I was referring to earlier. As she desperately tries to find someone she can rely on to protect her from Sam, both she and the audience realize that she is doomed to a fate of her own design. The film also has two very fascinating supporting characters. The first, Albert Arnett, is a private eye hired to investigate Sam. At first, he seems like a foppish, eccentric dandy of a detective. But his charming exterior is merely a thin disguise for a shrewd extortioner. The second is Marty, Sam's ever-faithful friend who seems a little too eager to please him. Are those homosexual undertones I sense? Knowing Robert Wise, I might not be wrong. Either way, Albert and Marty add to the intrigue and tragedy of Born to Kill instead of grinding the plot to a halt like so many other film noir supporting characters.

8/10

Two Flags West: Robert Wise

In Two Flags West, director Robert Wise transforms a rather average story about Confederate POWs joining the US cavalry in exchange for clemency into a surprisingly effective psychological study of two stubborn, patriotic men. The first is Col. Clay Tucker, the commanding officer of a group of captured members of the Confederate 5th Georgia Cavalry. With his men sick and dying in a Yankee prison, he is faced with a devastating choice: stick to his principles as a Confederate and let his men die or change sides, fight for the Union on the frontier, and give his men a fighting chance at survival and, perhaps, escape. With great reluctance, he convinces his men to accept the Union's offer. The second main character is Major Henry Kenniston, the commander of Fort Thorn, New Mexico, the home of the Union 3rd Cavalry and the destination for the newly galvanized Confederates. Kenniston, while patriotic, is furious being sent to the frontier after he was wounded earlier in the war. He is also plagued with feelings of confused lust and protectionism towards Elena, the widow of his brother. Elena is desperate to leave the Fort and travel West to be with her family, but Kenniston refuses, feeling it is his duty to protect her. Elena is one of the film's most tragic characters, essentially being used as a pawn in the power schemes of both Tucker and Kenniston. But the true meat of the movie is in the relationship between Tucker and Kenniston. They engage in a truly fascinating duel of military intrigue. Kenniston knows that he can't trust Tucker and that he and his men will try to escape as soon as they can. And Tucker knows that Kenniston knows that he can't be trusted. And yet he tries to gain Kenniston's trust, a task which he knows may very well be impossible. His dilemma is exacerbated when he is approached by a Confederate spy and told that they will soon have a chance to escape. I enjoyed Two Flags West. It has plenty of intrigue, action, and a surprising amount of insight concerning Union abuses towards Native Americans and Confederate prisoners.

7/10

The Captive City: Robert Wise

Let me be blunt: Robert Wise's The Captive City feels like a watered down version of Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story (1955). Both films are about medium-sized, post-World War Two American towns that fall into the clutches of organized crime. When intrepid individuals try to expose the corruption, they quickly discover that the criminal operation goes deeper than they could have possibly imagined. In both films the city's police are under the gangster's payroll. And in both films, innocent people are brutally murdered in an attempt to prevent justice from being done. These plots actually remind me a great deal of Westerns: an idealistic hero stands up against evil criminals who keep God-fearing townsfolk in a state of terror. But The Phenix City Story is simply the better film. The Captive City chugs along without the same energy, falling into a narrative pattern that is repeated ad nauseam: newspaper editor Jim Austin provokes the forces of mob boss Murray Sirak, Sirak's men threaten him to stop snooping, Jim ignores them, Jim provokes them, etc, etc, etc. I will give credit where credit is due: cinematographer Lee Garmes manages to turn the seemingly innocent town into a web of deceit and lies, even in the bright daytime. That takes talent. I just wish this film had a bit more pep and intensity to it.

6/10

The Body Snatcher: Robert Wise

While a rather minor work, Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher is widely remembered for being the last time that horror legends Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi would share the screen together. Karloff is in top form as John Gray, a sinister cabman who steals freshly buried bodies from cemeteries to sell to unscrupulous surgeons for dissection and study. As can be expected from these kinds of movies, eventually Gray resorts to murder in order to fill his, ahem, quota. The scenes where he threatens to blackmail the surgeons are tense and gripping, thoroughly displaying Karloff's talents for playing wicked yet sickeningly suave and intelligent characters. Unfortunately, Wise makes the mistake of framing the film from the point of view of the surgeons, relegating Karloff as a mere supporting character. As such, the film meanders and loses momentum after the supposed main plot (an operation on a paralyzed little girl) is suddenly resolved approximately halfway through the overall running time. It is only afterwards that the grave-robbing becomes the film's central plot element. But still, the film is dark, spooky, and satisfactorily atmospheric. A word, though, on Lugosi's role: he plays a dim-witted man who idiotically tries to extort Gray after discovering how he manages to obtain fresh 'specimens.' Gray then easily deceives and murders him. I'm not sure if Lugosi had already developed his crippling drug addiction when The Body Snatcher was filmed. But his performance seems...addled. The scene of Karloff killing his colleague and rival of so many years is, in hindsight, disturbing and tragically prophetic.

6/10

Cat People II: The Curse of the Cat People: Robert Wise, Gunther von Fritsch

Cat People (1942) by Jacques Tourneur was a low, low budget horror film that, despite its title, subverted expectations by not actually featuring any people dressed in cat costumes. In fact, Cat People was one of the first films that truly took advantage of the fact that what we don't see is much more terrifying than what we do see. It was a ground-breaking horror film that made a killing at the box office. So, of course, a sequel was inevitable. Just two years later, The Curse of the Cat People was released. Much like the first film, it also subverted expectations. Instead of being a traditional horror film, it played with the idea of horror itself by diving into the mind of one very sad, very lonely, and very imaginative little girl. The Curse of the Cat People doesn't even have any true "scare" moments like the bus that seemingly materialized out of nowhere in Cat People! Here's the plot: after the strange events of the first film, Oliver Reed has married his former co-worker Alice Moore and fathered a six-year-old daughter named Amy. Amy is extremely shy and introverted. After being shunned by her classmates, Amy is approached by an imaginary friend that resembles Irena, Oliver's first wife who died in Cat People. They quickly become best friends. However, when Oliver discovers the supposed identity of her new friend and punishes her, the fragile world that she has constructed comes crumbling down...with potentially deadly results. The Curse of the Cat People is a psychological smorgasbord, challenging the audience with questions over what is and what isn't real. There are moments in this film that make the heart weep with beauty: when Amy discovers Irena in the yard singing counterpoint to a group of Christmas carolers, Irena's Christmas gift, Amy's snow-covered body during her climactic flight from reality, when Amy is told the story of the Headless Horseman by the old actress living in the "haunted" house down the street, etc, etc...The Curse of the Cat People is a strange, magnificent, eery, and mesmerizing film that manages to surpass the original in almost every manner imaginable.

9/10

The House on Telegraph Hill: Robert Wise

That's it...I need to go on a Robert Wise binge. In the past I have successfully managed to track down and watch the complete filmographies of Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and Alfred Hitchcock. Now I need to do the same with Wise. I have yet to see one of his films that hasn't blown me away. The Set-Up (1949) is still my all-time favorite boxing film. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) was one of the first sci-fi films to truly capture my imagination. What can I say that hasn't already been said about the phenomenal West Side Story (1961), The Haunting (1963), or The Sound of Music (1965)? And now I find myself confronted by another one of his films, a lesser known film noir entitled The House on Telegraph Hill. After surviving the Holocaust, Victoria Kowelska assumes the identity of her best friend, Karin. Before dying, Karin had told Victoria that her infant son, Chris, had been sent to America to live with a small fortune in San Francisco. Once in America, she assumes Karin's identity, inheriting her fortune and massive home on top of Telegraph Hill. But a strange thing begins to happen: she develops genuine feelings of love towards her "son." But things are complicated when she starts getting into potentially fatal accidents, suggesting that somebody in her new family might want her out of the way...This film truly took me by surprise. At first I thought that it would be a tired melodrama revolving around a case of mistaken identity. But it evolves into an extremely effective thriller with one of the most tense final acts that I can remember. It involves a glass of orange juice that may or may not be poisoned and a husband who may or may not be responsible. The scene reminds me of a similar situation involving a glass of milk in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941). But The House on Telegraph Hill reaches levels of suspense and tension that completely outstrip that film. Not many directors can legitimately claim to have beaten the "King of Suspense" at his own game. But, as I keep discovering, Robert Wise was not your average director.

8/10

The Sound of Music: Robert Wise

It's always been a joke among my friends that even though I'm a huge film buff, I've never actually seen Robert Wise's The Sound of Music. Well, that's not entirely true. I remember growing up as a child and catching snippets of it every time we would visit my grandmother's house in Florida. But my attention span was even more pathetic than it is nowadays and I could never survive more than the first few musical numbers. But I'm older now and my attention span has grown to a point where I can watch entire Ozu movies in one sitting! This summer I find myself living with my grandmother in California, so I thought that it would be the perfect time to try and watch the whole film with her from start to finish. She only had an old, two-tape VHS version of the film, so I found myself battling with a VCR for the first time in years...literally. But once the film got started I was mesmerized by one of the most beautiful and magnificent American musicals ever made. I don't think I need to go into specifics about the plot or the music. Everything that can be said about them has already been said. The only thing I can add to the discourse is my own personal experience watching it. Watching my grandmother's eyes light up when Julie Andrews sang "I Have Confidence," laughing with her at lines I had missed as a child ("Yes, but seven!!"), and even taking a break as we swapped VHS tapes like we were back in the 90s...these are the memories that are precious to me. And I wouldn't trade them for anything.

I love you, Baba.

10/10

The Set-Up: Robert Wise

In his autobiographical account of his childhood as a young boy growing up in Cleveland during the 50s entitled The Quitter, Harvey Pekar recounted how he fell in love with the sport of boxing. The son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Pekar admired how many successful Jewish boxers were able to become superstars despite racial prejudice. But after awhile, he began to notice something about the boxers that he looked up to. He wrote, “I didn’t know much about Jewish boxers, but they got into the sport when they were recent immigrants and didn’t have much money. Then got out in the 1940s with the coming of better economic opportunities. This indicated that they weren’t in love with boxing, just wanted to use it to make a living until something better came along.” That’s part of the majesty of boxing films: the best ones aren’t about people who love to box. They are about people who have to box.

Rocky Balboa had to prove to himself that he could go the distance. Jake LaMotta used boxing as an affirmation of his own insecurities surrounding his masculinity and self-image. Maggie Fitzgerald saw boxing as a means to escape her exploitative family and her own blue-collar purgatory. But what about Stoker Thompson, the working class hero from Robert Wise’s The Set-Up? What does he want? The man has been a boxer for most of his adult life. He’s 35 years old, hasn’t won a fight in years, and is scheduled to have a match against the rising superstar Tiger Nelson. Everyone expects him to lose. In fact, there are many who want him to lose. Stoker knows that this could very well be his last fight. So why does he box when the odds are so impossibly stacked against him?

Maybe it’s to escape the world that he inhabits. Stoker’s city is a tangled mess of dark alleyways and slums. Everyone is sweaty and greasy.

Only the local mobsters seem to have clean, unstained shirts. The masses who attend the matches aren’t much better, either. Rowdy off-duty sailors, disheveled businessmen, made-up streetwalkers clutching to their latest customers, and fat louts balancing hot dogs on their enormous guts call for blood.  

The locker rooms where the various fighters prepare for their bouts reeks of desperation. Utilizing a real time narrative structure three years before it was popularized in High Noon (1952), the film keeps the audience largely contained in these lockers as they watch fighters get called up one-by-one for their fights. A young kid triumphantly rejoins his comrades after winning his very first fight in the wake of a minor nervous breakdown. 

An enthusiastic older boxer with a cracked face only a couple of matches from hitting the big-time returns so badly beaten that he is rushed to the hospital. 

Maybe it was here that Stoker found his motivation. But, maybe it was his wife, Julie. While Stoker prepares for his fight, she walks the mean, grimy streets around the boxing center. She hates that her husband has to fight. She’s tired of him being humiliated and used by the boxing industry. Stoker wants to make good so he can support them in the future. But Julie has begun to wonder if it is worth it. In a fantastic scene, she walks by a store with the radio turned on to the boxing matches. She hears that a boxer has just been brutally defeated, and her heart sinks. But then it is announced that this boxer was not Stoker and that his fight is coming up soon. Watch her relieved realization. At that moment, the spark of hope filled her heart.

Whatever Stoker’s reasons for fighting, one thing he didn’t count on was that everyone was counting on him to lose. His manager, Tiny, has made an arrangement with the mob for Stoker to take a dive. The only problem is that he never bothered to tell Stoker. He fully believed that Stoker would lose on his own. But he didn’t expect for Stoker to go for the glory one last time.

The Set-Up is a glorious film and one of the very best examples of the boxing sub-genre of film noir.  This isn’t a film about boxing, per say. The Set-Up is a lyrical poem about broken dreams and impossible goals. Stoker is played by that reliable stand-by of B-grade film noir, Robert Ryan. This film was made just five years after he had been a drill instructor in the United States Marine Corps. So not only is Ryan’s performance filled with emotional and psychological pathos, he looks like a man who has been battered, beaten, and abused for years. 

I mentioned that The Set-Up isn’t as much a boxing film as a psychological character study. But that doesn’t mean that the film doesn’t contain some of the best fighting footage ever featured in the genre. Ryan fight scenes are particularly authentic, probably in no small part to his being a boxing champion while studying at Dartmouth college. But more importantly, the fights aren’t just random flurries of punches and jabs. There’s a rhyme and rhythm to the fighting like a ballet. Each round of Stoker’s fight becomes symbolic of him overcoming his personal demons and doubts.

A word about the ending. Few times have I ever seen a film have an ending that was sad and uplifting at the same time. Don’t mistake that with an ending being bitter-sweet. The Set-Up ends with triumph and loss, punishment and salvation, humiliation and acceptance. This is a story about a man, after all...a man with everything to lose and nothing to win, except his own dignity.

9/10

Odds Against Tomorrow: Robert Wise

Odds Against Tomorrow is a rare heist film that works on two distinctly different levels.  One the surface, it is a hard-hitting crime caper.  Three desperate men are forced by circumstances outside of their control to participate in a bank heist.  David Burke, the leader, is an ex-police man who refused to take part in a state investigation.  Earl Slater is an ex-con who has fallen upon desperate times and is determined to support his wife.  Johnny Ingram is a nightclub performer with such crippling gambling debts that the mob has begun to threaten his family.  However, there's just one big problem: Johnny is black.  Here is where the second level of the film comes in: it is a powerful racial commentary.  Earl is a nearly sociopathic racist.  It isn't just the way he treats Johnny that betrays his crooked emotions.  Watch how he acts around the black elevator operator at the start of the film and the black bank guard at the end.  It's subtle, yet extremely powerful.  Like most crime noir, their plot is doomed to fail.  But it is how their plan fails and the result of its failing that makes Odds Against Tomorrow such a great film.  Most of the time, when a film noir tries to do too much in terms of story and commentary, the results are lopsided and miscalculated.  Odds Against Tomorrow strikes just the right balance.

7/10