THE ALAMO (John Wayne, 1960)

Winning a war (at the Battle of San Jacinto) six weeks after horrifically losing a legendary battle might have provided a coda of sorts to The Alamo; but James Edward Grant, who wrote the film, and John Wayne, who produced and directed it as well as starred as Davy Crockett, keep the focus on the Battle of the Alamo, hence, on the idea of the sacrifices necessary for independence from Mexico and freedom for Texas—and, implicitly, as a rule elsewhere. Imbued with tragic grandeur, Wayne’s first film as director—there would be only one other—achieves a heart-walloping result, especially if one allows Grant and Wayne a consideration we gladly extend to William Shakespeare: our disregard of historical inaccuracies when a dramatic yarn of legendary proportions is afoot.
     One may quibble; after all, the film is also almost entirely superficial, with characterizations so close to caricature that when Richard Widmark’s Jim Bowie breaks down upon learning of his wife’s death the viewer is stunned, taken aback—“Wait a minute!” we think; “Only an actual person could lose a spouse!” Wayne sees only the exterior of his characters, so we are entitled to feel that he isn’t entitled to slip in a “human” moment here and there. Note along the way that the strategic debates between Bowie and martinet William Travis lack all credibility. Richard Boone, though, does best with Gen. Sam Houston.
     But why carp when the film itself is so thrillingly spectacular, drawing upon numerous paintings of the battle, and allowing, much more surprisingly, trenchantly, Goya to exert an influence in dramatic scenes of the night? (William Clothier color cinematographed.) And what about the heartrending nostalgia that is distilled in the aching sound of the film’s famous song, “The Green Leaves of Summer”?

OUR MAN IN HAVANA (Carol Reed, 1959)

By harkening back to their coolly corrupt postwar Vienna in The Third Man (1949), even to the point of including a couple of tilted shots in ominous nighttime streets, scenarist Graham Greene and director Carol Reed’s Our Man in Havana, set in the politically sour Cuban metropolis just prior to Castro’s revolutionary overturn, projects an atmosphere, punctuated by a trio of murders, that proves too heavy for the comedy—yes, comedy—that the film purports to be. Marked by as many bad performances as good ones, and with a plot closer to television sitcom than to penetrating political satire, this would be Reed’s worst film if Oliver! (1968), for which he was Oscar-bound, weren’t looming ahead. That said, the film is slyer and more amusing than Stanley Kubrick’s also-looming Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).
     Alec Guinness wryly plays Jim Wormold, the Havana vacuum cleaner shopowner who finds himself in over his head as a freshly recruited British espionage agent whose initial task is to recruit others under his command. Guinness’s anxious performance suits a name, Wormold, that suggests defeatism and decay. This Wormold, trying to provide for his teenaged daughter, his principal responsibility in life, justifies his moonlighting salary by making up recruitments and falsifying surveillance pictures of newfangled weapons of mass destruction that really exhibit parts of his vacuum cleaners! And the British home office believes him! (Ralph Richardson, as “C,” is alone hilarious.) Oh, dear—he is sent a secretary (Maureen O’Hara, expert, but without a speck of chemistry between her and Guinness), and someone is actually killed when mistaken for being one of his non-existent agents. But I mustn’t go on, because I’m making the film sound funnier than it is.

A SUCCESSFUL MAN (Humberto Solás, 1985)

A Cuban The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) that enlists some of the style of Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Un hombre de éxito is largely a sweeping, although carefully detailed portrayal of upper-class extravagance and decadence, and middle-class opportunism, during the last gasps of Machado’s increasingly censorial presidency and the long nightmare of Batista’s vicious police state. Cuba’s liberation by revolution comes as a brief, rushed coda; the front page newspaper headline thanking Fidel Castro may or may not hide a bit of irony, given the press’s subsequent difficulties with Castro’s regime. Written by the director and Juan Iglesias, Humberto Solás’s film won the top prize at Havana.
     The action principally revolves around three individuals: two brothers, Javier and Darío Argüelles, and their mother. Javier, an opportunist, survives Cuban political upheavals, possibly selling out his revolutionary brother, who retains the political idealism that they once both seemed to share. This trite, formulaic approach to complex national history, somewhat akin to soap opera, allows the film to bypass all nature of interesting material. At the very least, such a film as this might have probed in earnest someone’s—I believe, Darío’s—remark that he had traded in violence for “words.” The mother, I might add, appears grossly sentimental. My hope that the film would prove as powerful and humane as Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), also about brothers politically opposed to each other, didn’t pan out.
     On the other hand, the use of blacked-out space, especially early on, to suggest haunted historical memory, from which lit bits of figures and forms struggle to emerge, is exquisite. Moreover, numerous period songs and set-pieces of people dancing—there’s a stupendous amount of dancing in this film—poetically, sadly evoke the passage of time.

VARIETY LIGHTS (Alberto Lattuada, Federico Fellini, 1950)

Since he is credited first and his wife, Carla Del Poggio, co-stars, we may assume that Alberto Lattuada is the co-director of Luci del varietà who counts more heavily; but, since the hectic atmosphere surrounding the vaudeville troupe resembles that of a circus (Fellini came up with the story from which he, Lattuada, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano wrote the script), and Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife, is a prominent cast member, some may think of this beautiful, visually intricate film primarily as Federico Fellini’s.
     Eerily anticipating Chaplin’s Calvero in Limelight (1952), Checco Dal Monte is the troupe’s principal comic. Masina (superb—best supporting actress, Italian critics) plays Melina Amour, another careworn troupe member and Checco’s caring partner. (At one point she asks Checco, “We will get married one day, won’t we?” but so casually, fleetingly, it is more an expression of doubt than a question.) Del Poggio’s Liliana insinuates herself into the troupe, by degrees taking over Checco, who takes over the troupe to advance her career. Lily, though, trades him in for someone who can be many more times helpful in making her a star. (Del Poggio is more realistic and complex than Anne Baxter in a similar though more flamboyant role in All About Eve, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950.) Checco, beaten, goes back to Melina; at a station, while Lily’s train is headed for Milan, Checco and the troupe’s train is headed in the opposite direction, toward another series of inconspicuous small towns. The film ends with Checco eyeing another girl on the train; perhaps she, too, will become a star.
     Lattuada and Fellini create memorable shots: an angled one of a nighttime street suggesting phantasmagoria; a metaphor for the troupe and its tenuous existence: a goose in a straw basket.

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THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)

Rich with a sense of autumnal beauty, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, which was promoted as “[a] comedy about a corpse,” turns on the joke that the corpse of Harry Worp, found in the woods one morning with what appears to be a fatal gunshot wound, won’t stay buried. Four times after clandestine burial the corpse is dug up for one reason or another. Hitchcock’s “lighthearted” style, however, has been widely misinterpreted as showing how harmoniously the residents of a sleepy Vermont town live with death and the idea of death. Characters may wish to get over their mortal fear as easily as one resident, absorbed in reading a book, obliviously steps over the corpse. (Later, still reading, he stumbles over it.) But the corpse’s serial reappearances ironically suggest that humanity fails in its attempts to look the other way when it comes to death. Consult Poe on the subject of the reappearing dead.
     Yes, I know, there’s the early shot of the town church to put the “season of dying” into perspective; after wintry death, spring’s rebirth follows. But our glimpse of the church comes in a long-shot—one not from any human perspective, but perhaps only from God’s. Humanity hopes that their faith holds water, yet their fear of death persists. Hitchcock’s film, written by John Michael Hayes, adapting (and transplanting) Jack Trevor Story’s novel, premiered in New York in late 1955 but was withheld from nationwide distribution until 1957, during which time its best promotion was pondered. Two of Hitch’s next three films, Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960), also involve “corpses” that will not stay buried, but which are suited to much “darker” styles than is The Trouble with Harry.
     Indeed, note that Hitchcock’s “light” comedy is full of talk of the passage of time, which is contrasted with five-year-old Arnie’s total lack of the concept, which is beautifully encapsulated in his failure to recognize the corpse as that of his uncle and stepfather. Moreover, its parallel new romances—an older couple; a young couple—suggest the need for companionship in the shadow of mortal fear. The very slow pace of the film, suited to how people live their lives in this neck of the woods, also suggests a concerted effort to forestall the dreaded end.
     Miss Ivy Gravely’s—note the name!—protracted virginity provides an extreme example of someone’s mortal fear having determined the course of her life. Thank goodness she has a gentleman caller now. Thank goodness, also, for Mildred Natwick, who gives the film’s best performance as this spinster.
     This was Bernard Herrmann’s first score for Hitch and Shirley MacLaine’s first, and still best, film performance. Jerry Mathers plays Arnie, the son of MacLaine’s Jennifer Rogers; the future Leave It to Beaver star, hauling a dead rabbit, endears.