BRIGHTON ROCK (John Boulting, 1947)

Based on Graham Greene’s 1938 novel, which Greene and Terence Rattigan adapted, Brighton Rock is a terrifying crime thriller, set between the wars, about a gang of hoodlums, headed by vicious, 17-year-old Pinkie Brown, which “offers” protection and eliminates Fred, who has a rival protection racket. Fred’s death, in a beachside tunnel of horrors ride, is labeled a suicide by authorities, but Ida (Hermione Baddeley, enjoyable), a singer on the same boardwalk, is certain that Fred’s death, as well as a visiting journalist’s, was murder. Her sleuthing to uncover the truth takes on urgency when she gleans that Pinkie poses an ultimate threat to sweet waitress Rose, whom Pinkie marries so that she cannot testify against him. As it happens, 17-year-old Rose is Pinkie’s mirror-image: the kindness and innocence that the cold, brutal world in which Pinkie moves has done what it could to extinguish.
     Almost intolerably intense, John Boulting’s dark film consists of a series of set-pieces emphasizing cruelty, violence and paranoia. Perhaps Boulting’s highest accomplishment is that he relegates these to environment and subject matter; Boulting does not resort to making a cruel, violent, paranoid film. He refuses to inflict cruelty on his audience.
     Pinkie is a case study; his nickname, and the diminutive actor who beautifully plays him, Richard Attenborough, suggest this boy’s vulnerability for which he is doing his brutal best to compensate. His playing cat’s cradle (this is how we are introduced to Pinkie, with only his arms and hands visible in front of the camera as he lies in a probably flea-infested bed), as well as the film’s title, which refers to rock candy, suggest the childhood of which he has been deprived, leading to depravity.
     But not quite. Pregnant, a widowed Rose is attended to by nuns. The film closes on a statuette of Jesus on the wall, signaling two things. One is Rose’s belief that Pinkie loved her, which is supported by a scratched recording aborting Pinkie’s misogynistic message of hate; but Pinkie may have loved Rose after all, however incapable he was of owning up to his positive feelings, and despite his attempt to murder Rose by the proxy of her suicide (which would have condemned her soul to Hell). The other thing that the image of Christ signals is indeed Pinkie’s own redemption.

AMERICAN MADNESS (Frank Capra, 1932)

Written by Robert Riskin, American Madness, a great film of the Great Depression, may even be director Frank Capra’s masterpiece. Perhaps he could be so patiently and penetratingly objective about the times because, a right-wing Republican (who veered into fascism with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939, and Meet John Doe, 1941), Capra wasn’t seduced by the sentimental mythology of F.D.R., whom he politically opposed, or of the New Deal, which he also opposed. Capra sentimentalizes instead a bank president, Dickson (Walter Huston, tremendous), whose generosity in approving bank loans is backed by an analysis of an applicant’s track record and talent. Dickson reasons in the case of a formerly successful but currently failing businessman that greater economic damage will be done if, denied his loan, the applicant must consign his hundreds of employees to unemployment. Dickson was based on Amadeo Giannini, whose working-class bank in San Francisco, The Bank of Italy, looked ahead to today’s Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Dickson may have helped to inspire a later character: Fredric March’s Al Stephenson, the postwar banker who “bets on America” by easing loan restrictions for returning soldiers in William Wyler’s very moving The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).
     About half of American Madness is taken up by a run on the bank triggered by a grinding local rumor mill after a sizeable bank theft: this, the apogee of Capra’s artistic attainments. In particular, overhead inserts of the bank-running mob grip and horrify. The combination of Stephen Goosson’s stunning steely design of the bank vault, Joseph Walker’s dark, deep cinematography, and Capra’s marvelous mise-en-scène locates the housing of the money in the cultural recesses of a nation’s collective unconscious.
     Pat O’Brien is wonderful as an ex-con whom Dickson has given a responsible job and mentored.

LA KERMESSE HEROIQUE (Jacques Feyder, 1935)

“These are lofty matters beyond women’s ken.”

Boom, in Flanders, in 1611 bustles with activity, which slides into desperation when it is learned that a Spanish duke is headed with his troops to spend the night; such occupations normally leave towns skinned and pillaged. The mayor and his council are seized by a dark (and hilarious) vision of what may occur: shooting, raping, looting, rampaging, torture, and six barefooted men, lit to resemble ghastly silhouettes, hanging from a tree. Something must be done! The councilmembers decide to hide—except for the mayor, who plans to play dead. But the mayor’s wife, Cornelia de Witte (Françoise Rosay, formidable), isn’t such a coward; she organizes the women of Boom in her plan to greet, manipulate and pacify the approaching Spanish skunks, and thereby save the honor of Boom.
     Meanwhile, there is a boy who hopes to prove himself a man; Jan Breughel, son of Pieter and brother of Pieter the younger, and Siska, the mayor and Cornelia’s eldest daughter, are hopelessly in love. It is fitting, therefore, that Belgian-born French filmmaker Jacques Feyder’s La kermesse héroïque, a.k.a. Carnival in Flanders, should visually draw, strikingly, from Flemish art.
     Feyder had directed Garbo (The Kiss, 1929) and would direct Dietrich (Knight Without Armor, 1937), but it’s his collaborations with wife Rosay upon which his fame principally rests. La kermesse héroïque is widely considered his best film (I have seen only four others, one of which, the Swiss Visages d’enfants, 1924, is god-awful), but, talky, it falls short of its reputation. Winner of the Grand Prix du Cinema Français, the prize of New York critics as best foreign-language film, and the best director prize at Venice. Responding to its satire of invasion and occupation, the Nazis, prophetic, banned it.