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riogarhed
Reviews
Mannequin (1937)
Alan Curtis, the script and some condescending reviews
I was curious about those external reviews that are stupidly condescending about "Mannequin," evidence that critics who accuse a film of being formulaic and routine can exemplify the same flaws.
I want to add a good word for Alan Curtis, who in flashes reminded me, not in looks but sensitivity to nuance, of the soon to emerge Alan Garfield. A speech about his core character delivered by Joan Crawford about his being a world unto himself lacking complete empathy for others in the real world is fully realized in Curtis' performance. That includes their earliest scenes in which her gushing affections almost nauseate him though he plays it with subtlety, almost imperceptibly, though it's there.
And the script can take credit for a lot here. More than movies to which it appears to have been glibly likened it examines motives beneath character actions with some serious delving. Tracy and Crawford and all in the cast are astute in making it breathe and director Borzage masterful in highlighting what is significant in it.
The Big Valley: Night in a Small Town (1967)
Whitmore
Whitmore is always worth watching, as savvy an actor, as powerful a presence as you can get. On his ability to attain great stardom a writer in the early Sixties wrote that Whitmore did not pan out as "the next Spencer Tracy." No, but in that age of teen idols could Tracy himself have been the next Tracy? This episode of The Big Valley shows just how easily Whitmore could leave a lasting impression by mining the depth of a character's psychosis up to the very end, where he tops a grinning performance with a maniacal mug showing how nuts he really is and always was. It is not the kind o guy he played in his many brilliant performances over many years, yet aptly this is a Western, for this deeply intelligent, richly acute acting force of nature was the Wallace Stegner of actors.
Ensign Pulver (1964)
Logan betrayed his own vision
Not everything in the film version of "Mr. Roberts" avoided the redolence of the mid-1950s--particularly the cornball aspects of a lot of "service comedy" then. Still."Mister Roberts" was made when World War II was not a distant memory, and some fidelity to that remembered collective experience is respected even in the vein of comedy. "Ensign Pulver" is perhaps not much more broad, but it is much more crude and is no longer interested in capturing the sensibility of the period in which it is set. Instead it panders to the period in which it was made, as if to say the gold standard of comedy then was found on TV in "Get Smart" and "Batman." In short, its sensibility was what was then called Camp. This is understandable except for the fact that the director and collaborator on the original material, Joshua Logan, directed "Ensign Pulver" and should have had a stake in staying true to the impulses behind the creation of this story and these characters. After all, Henry Fonda, having spent years as Mr. Roberts onstage, fought his old pal John Ford (and got a punch in the mouth for it) during the early filming of "Mister Roberts" in order to uphold the integrity of Logan's vision. But Logan himself in "Ensign Pulver" seems to have thrown that integrity overboard with the blessed palm tree.