The Finale of Sweet Smell Of Sucess (1957)

The final two minutes of Mackendrick's (and Odets and Lehman's and Wong Howe's) Sweet Smell of Success clinch its status as one of the greatest films of the '50s, and it's Elmer Bernstein's remarkable score that, having jet-propelled the film since its first frames, now brings it home. Bernstein makes two miraculous transitions, from a violin threnody to a reprise of the brassy Street theme from the beginning of the movie to a first wistful then heraldic, Copland-ish theme as Suzie Hunsecker steps out of the Brill Building and, after we close on a trembling J.J. 30 storeys above, she crosses the street into the light and her future. Perfect.

Claire Bloom in Carol Reed's The Man Between (1953)

Carol Reed's The Man Between (1953) reprises much of the structure of The Third Man (1949), with a bombed out Berlin substituting for Vienna, James's Mason's Ivo Kern making for a slightly less shady/trying-to-make-good version of Welles's Harry Lime, and Claire Bloom's Susanne Mallison combining aspects of both Alida Valli's Anna and Cotten's Holly Martins.

Susanne arrives in Berlin all smiles:






While she soon realizes that something potentially unsavory is up with her brother's wife's friend, Ivo:


since Ivo is James Mason, any wariness she feels is made bearable:






Happy through a dissolve:




Love in the ruins....




Things take a more serious turn; still very beautiful though:


Not even being captive in a Psycho-cellar-like room brings her down:










Susanne ends up whacking that big light like she's Vera Miles too! See about 1m 45s into this German trailer for TMB:


It wouldn't be Reed without some Dutch Angles:




Oh, just kiss her already!


I mean, look at her:




Happy Saboteurs.


Susanne and Ivo end up sheltering in a prostitute's apartment to evade capture. He ends up clinging for dear life out the window, while she has to pose as another prostitute:




Susanne reveals that she's quite the hotsy-totsy under her lady-like exterior, finally getting Ivo to kiss her:














And quite a bit more by implication. We cut to the morning...


Aww:




Needless to say, there's not a happy ending after all this. But for a tale about bombed out cities, war criminals, kidnappings, East-West tensions,  and so on, The Man Between is pretty sunny and romantic. Thanks to Mason and Bloom's charm and beauty, it's a hell of a date movie.

Bloom is such a brunette ringer for Grace Kelly in TMB - and hits some of the same notes that Kelly will as Lisa Fremont in Rear Window (becoming a saboteur and posing as a prostitute rather than breaking and entering) - that TMB almost feels almost like a missing Hitchcock picture: Lisa Fremont meets VanDamm. As far as I know, however, Bloom never worked with Hitchcock. Maybe he was too low-brow for her? Bloom was classically trained, after all, did lots of prestige theater, hung with Olivier and Burton, married heavy-Method-guy Rod Steiger in the '50s, and lived with Philip Roth through the '80s, marrying and then spectacularly divorcing him in the '90s (go here for a gossipy overview and some nice photos). Or maybe Hitch associated her too strongly with Chaplin (after her breakthrough in Limelight (1952)), or found Bloom too not-blonde and too English at the exact moment he was at his most American, really making his bones in Hollywood, and the most waist-deep in blondes signable to long term contracts he'd ever be. Presumably the rough answer is available in one of Bloom's two memoirs/autobiographies.

Bonus Video: I've heretofore mainly known Bloom from Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) and from her Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited (1981) for TV. Here's one of her key scenes from the latter:

Doris Day's There's A Rising Moon (For Every Falling Star)

Doris Day killing it as she always does. (Memo to self: track down Young At Heart (1954).)

And, God damn it Academy, get this woman her Honorary Oscar stat (she's 91)!

I've Overlooked George Stevens

Gap-filling recently with Alice Adams (1935) and A Place In The Sun (1951), George Stevens is emerging for me as a bang-up director. Before this I'd mainly thought of him in connection with Penny Serenade (1941) [fine but not my sort of thing], Shane (1953) [great], and Giant (1956) [just OK], stupidly never associating him such star-identified classics as Swing Time (1936) and Woman Of The Year (1942). Given that Alice Adams is good with some great parts and A Place In The Sun is flat-out terrific - Stevens is already up to between 5 and 7 classics. Beyond that I have at least Annie Oakley (w/ Stanwyck) Gunga Din (w/ Grant), Talk of The Town (w/ Grant and Arthur), and The More The Merrier to further gap-fill with, and who'd bet against finding at least one classic among those?

Stevens is neither a dazzling stylist like Hitchcock or Kubrick nor a dialogue fireworks specialist like Wilder or Lubitsch, instead, rather like immediate peers Wyler and Cukor, he's a talented craftsmen who serves the story whatever it may be, gets great performances, always has the camera in the right place. The upshot is that Stevens racked up (near-)triumphs for more than twenty years, a very fine career albeit not a revolutionary one. But the history of any artform must give proper respect to its exemplary regular practitioners.

Note that about 28 mins into Alice Adams there's a 'rain streaks on the windows as tears' shot that substantially anticipates a famous shot from near the end of In Cold Blood (1967):

One difference: the rain-streak shadows are in addition to Katharine Hepburn's real tears whereas they're instead of Robert Blake's. But Hepburn's father in the film, hearing his daughter weep, gets (subtler) rain-streaks instead of real tears, so I say that Stevens and his DP Robert DeGrasse indeed gazump almost all of Richard Brooks's and his DP Conrad Hall's conception.

Update: Talk Of The Town (1942) is just OK. Above all it's brutalized by a crazy ending (apparently enofrced by giving A/B test audiences final cut!) in which, Movie-Star Logic holds - Cary Grant gets the girl - at the expense of Story and Performance Logic - a beautifully underplaying Grant allows and helps Ronald Coleman (w/ a touch of Victor Laszlo about him) to get the girl. Obviously Grant's movie-star-ness had deformed Suspicion (1941) the previous year so we're now pressing up against the serious downsides of the Golden Age studio/star system: it became impossible for beloved actors to surprise us, and only utterly archetypal story forms could be diligently cast and competently told. In the early '40s both Hitchcock and Stevens are trying to find new stories and open Grant and other stars up to different kinds of roles but the studios (and to some extent audiences) won't let that happen yet.

Anita Ekberg before La Dolce Vita (1960)

Audrey Hepburn Leotard Collage

A collage of some dance training/stretching publicity stills shot by Bob Willoughby, one of Audrey H.'s favorite photographers on the set of Green Mansions (1959). Audrey's almost 30 at the time of these shots yet looks barely a teen! In the film Audrey H. plays a wood-nymphy, S. American Indian girl (who's burned to death in a tree at the end of the film, only to reappear in spiritual form!). Arguably AH was too inherently urbane and refined for that role. The leotarded publicity shots (which appeared in McCalls Magazine) feel like an attempt at a bait and switch on the audience, and as a partial acknowledgement that no one really wants to see (or believes) Audrey as a wild child cut off from culture and fashion.

Kiss Me Moody

Some moody music by me set to images from the beginning of Robert Aldrich's disturbing, bonkers masterpiece, Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Our sequence ends just as Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) wakes to a female face - that of his secretary, Velma (Maxine Cooper). Of course, KMD concludes with Mike and Velma staggering into the Malibu surf as (perhaps) the world ends. It's one of the greatest endings and most potent (and widely imitated) set of images in all of cinema.

Cooper died on April 4, 2009, but the Oscars broadcast in 2010 did not see fit to include her in its In memoriam reel. While Cooper never became a star, she's crucial to one of the greatest American movies and had small parts in a couple of other films for Aldrich. In my view she should have been included. A closely related argument will be able to be made vis-a-vis Gaby Rodgers whenever she dies. Who cares if she didn't do much beyond KMD? She was the spooky Lily Carver, the gal who opens the box, who has one of the only truly iconic deaths in Hollywood history. That should be enough.

Simply as a matter of Hollywood's self-interest, you'd think that the Oscars would always jump at the chance to squeeze a couple of seconds from the end of KMD into their broadcast. It's arguably the most important representation of LA on film ever. Maybe some Griffith Observatory shots from Rebel Without a Cause or various films' Bradbury Building shots are its equal. Maybe.

One would think too that

• Generally building film literacy
• Possibly firing the imagination of some precocious 8 year old somewhere who'll be the next Lynch or Tarantino
• Reassuringly reminding the non-star majority of the Academy that non-stars who play important roles in great films can be immortal

would be ample, subsidiary motivations for the Oscars to officially remember the likes of Maxine Cooper and Gaby Rodgers. But apparently not. Bozos if so.