Tag: Robert Mitchum

Film Review: Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison

Take two of Hollywood’s biggest stars and one of its finest directors, plonk them on a lush tropical island surrounded by rocky outcrops and rolling waves and arm them with an interesting script. What is the likely outcome? A damn fine movie, that’s what. Certainly in this case, it is.

I’m always fascinated by a film with a minimal cast. The actors involved have an even greater weight of responsibility than usual in that there’s no one else for the audience to focus on. On the other hand, there are no other performers to point the finger at if the thing tanks. For the actors, it must be both terrifying and supremely massaging to their egos. “You mean I’m in virtually every shot? Yes! That’s just what my fans will want. Of course I’ve got the talent and the screen presence to pull it off. How dare you suggest otherwise!”

Fortunately, the talent in this 1957 John Huston classic is without question. Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr – two gifted actors who apparently clicked immediately and went on to enjoy a lifelong friendship.

Mitchum plays US Marine, Corporal Allison who, after several days adrift in a rubber raft following a skirmish with the Japanese, finds himself washed up on an island in the South Pacific during the Second World War. A quick scout around reveals the island to be abandoned save for Sister Angela, a young nun played by Kerr, who has been there just a few days following a failed attempt to evacuate the priest already there. At first, Allison is relieved to be on the island where there is plenty of fish and fruit to eat and shelter from the tropical weather. He admits its not a bad place to wait out the war. But it isn’t long before a detachment of Japanese return to the island to set up a meteorological camp thereby forcing the Marine and the nun to hide out in a cave up in the surrounding hills.

There’s a wonderfully tense scene some time later when, sympathetic towards Sister Angela’s inability to eat the raw fish that he catches, Allison sneaks into the Japanese camp one night to steal something more palatable for her. It’s a beautifully shot and paced sequence by a master of cinematic storytelling – nothing fancy, nothing over the top, just measured excitement.

Meanwhile, the nights remind them that the war continues as flashes of naval gunfire light up the horizon. Then one day, the Japanese leave the island as quickly as they had come and the two celebrate their unexpected liberty.  Allison gets drunk on a bottle of sake left behind by a Japanese officer and foolishly declares his love for Sister Angela as well as denouncing her holy devotion as a waste of time. His natural urges rising to the surface, he can’t see why their “Garden of Paradise” situation doesn’t become fully instinctive – if you know what I mean. Sister Angela runs away from him and spends the night outside in a storm, becoming sick as a result. The following morning, Allison, full of repentance and shame, finds her with a fever at the same time the Japanese return to the island. Once again they are forced to seek refuge in the cave. Allison, feeling completely responsible for Sister Angela’s condition,  sneaks into the Japanese camp again to get blankets for her but he has to knife a solider to death when he is discovered. This alerts the detachment to an enemy presence and consequently, they begin a thorough search of the island.

To find out what happens next, I’ll encourage – nay recommend – you to watch the film yourself.

The two leads (and for ninety-five percent of the film you’ll see nobody else) are just perfectly cast and they own their time on screen. Between them, they’ve made many great movies and would go on to make two more together (The Sundowners and The Grass Is Greener – both in 1960). They’ve both given numerous wonderful performances as well over their careers and I don’t think either ever gave a better performance than they did here. Mitchum’s Marine is big and bruising, capable of dishing out death and yet kind and tender too; a simple man but a decent one; a product of a childhood he’d rather forget. Kerr’s nun is slightly naive but more uncertain, devout to her vows – of which the final one she has still to take – and yet teetering on the edge of uncertainty that she’s got what it takes to go all the way. Is she ready to forsake her womanhood for the greater calling? Both characters have chosen their paths and both have sworn oaths to tread them but will the time together on the island make a difference?

As if Mitchum or Kerr weren’t strong enough reasons to give this film a viewing, the director must surely tip the scales. From the moment John Huston sat behind the camera and gave us The Maltese Falcon in 1941, he revealed a certain brilliance and while Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison might not be his finest hour, it’s likely a film that many of his contemporaries would have wanted to helm.  It was adapted from Charles Shaw’s novel of the same name by Huston and John Lee Mahin, a prolific screenwriter who penned numerous classics between the 30s and the 60s, among them, Captains Courageous (1937) and Showboat (1951). The island of Trinidad and Tobago where the film was shot was photographed by Oswald Morris, a cinematographer who’s career would span six decades and include a long list of gems like Moby Dick (1956) and The Man Who Would Be King (1975). Naturally, the setting is stunning and one can only imagine the times had by all on location. Deborah Kerr and the writing team of Huston and Mahin were nominated for Academy Awards and there were a handful of other nominations throughout that season but the only win it garnered was for Kerr at the ’57 New York Film Critics Circle Awards. Shame that, because while Mitchum earned a BAFTA nomination, his performance generally seemed to have been overlooked. But then being the kind of guy he was, he probably didn’t give a damn anyway.

 

Film Review: Out of the Past

While it may be true that for some of us, Mamma Mia! or There’s Something About Mary is the best film of all time (Are you sure?), it’s likely that any film aficionado with an eye for quality will draw up a reasonably predictable list of movies that has a certain resemblance to another’s. Of course, there may be the odd obscure title included in there somewhere on account of some personally preferred artistic or inventive merit but generally the same titles will crop up again and again. These lists, and there are countless of them online, are a great way to create a ‘watch-list’.

It wasn’t one of these lists that brought me to watch Out of the Past but rather a moment of web surfing that brought to my laptop screen a poster of Robert Mitchum nonchalantly lighting a cigarette while a demure Jane Greer inspects his ears for wax. The truth is, I’d never heard of this film before but having enjoyed noir-ish revelations with The Killers and Double Indemnity, both of which I watched for the first time a couple of months ago, I felt confident that I was about to view another classic. It came as no surprise to subsequently see all three of these films feature in high positions on numerous lists of best ‘noir’ films ever.

Robert Mitchum plays Jeff Bailey, owner of a gas station in a small out-of-the-way Californian town. His romancing local girl Ann Miller (Virginia Huston) is not viewed well by her parents who are mistrustful of him and sure enough, when a tough guy turns up at his gas station, it becomes apparent that Jeff has a past. This henchman, Joe Stephanos (Paul Valentine) informs Jeff that his boss, Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) wants to see him and after some glorious dialogue, Jeff reluctantly agrees to the meeting. That night, after picking Ann up for the drive to Whit’s lakeside retreat, he tells her all about his past.

The next section of the film is told in flashback with Jeff narrating the story of his mysterious past as a private investigator. Together with his partner Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie), he was hired by Whit to find his girlfriend Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) whom he claimed had shot him and run off with $40,000 of his dough. Using his investigative talents, Jeff traced Kathie to Acapulco but on meeting her, fell for her charms and her pleads of innocence and decided not to hand her over to Whit, who would likely have punished her for something she claimed she didn’t do. Instead, the two headed north to San Francisco where they attempted to live together as inconspicuously as possible, out of sight and reach of Whit and his henchman. But (isn’t there always a but?), one day they were spotted by Jeff’s old partner, Fisher, who demanded a heavy payoff for his silence. A fight broke out between the two men, which Kathie brought to a sudden end when she shot Fisher dead. She then drove away, leaving poor old Jeff to cover up her crime. In doing so, he came across her bankbook which had an entry for a $40,000 deposit.

Back now to the present where Jeff and Ann arrive at Whit’s home. Before turning the car around to drive back to town, Ann forgives Jeff for his past and hopes he will return safely to her once his meeting with Whit is over. Jeff is surprised to see that Kathie is back together with Whit, who for his part, displays genuine delight in seeing Jeff again and wants to hire him for one more job in order to make things even between them. The job entails breaking into Whit’s lawyer’s office to steal documents that include income tax records proving Whit guilty of tax fraud, a fraud which his lawyer is using to blackmail him. Jeff refuses the job, suspecting a set-up, but Whit insists and so after trying to warn the lawyer, Jeff returns to the man’s office to find him dead. Now Jeff’s job is to locate the documents, which also include an affidavit from Kathie swearing Jeff was the one who killed Fisher, as well as to prove that he is innocent of the killing of the lawyer but with a henchman on his tail and a femme fatale who switches allegiance more times than Lady Gaga changes outfits, he needs to use all his street-smarts to stay alive. It’s all mildly convoluted, as the best crime dramas are, but well worth paying attention to.

Released in 1947, Out of the Past was directed by Jacques Tourneur, a man perhaps better known for low-budget horror films such as Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, rather than hard boiled crime films but he had a great team around him, many of whom had already worked together for RKO on numerous pictures. The film was adapted by Daniel Mainwaring (under the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes) from his novel Build My Gallows High with uncredited revisions by Frank Fenton and James M. Cain. This point is clearly evident from the superb dialogue so typical of the genre but here somehow a little less contrived and more natural. Don’t forget, James M. Cain was the genius behind, among others, Double Indemnity.

The role of gumshoe fitted Mitchum as comfortably as the raincoat and fedora he wore much of the time and it’s easy to see why he would later go on to portray Philip Marlowe. He breezes through this film with a cool self-assurance and a likability that make you (almost) overlook his potential for violence. Jane Greer’s femme fatale, with her baby face and deceitful eyes, smoulders, like the best of them and Kirk Douglas plays the gangster with controlled intensity – sure, he seems charming enough but you wouldn’t want to be around when he looses his temper.

For a film noir, the locations are worth noting too. Yes, we get the usual nighttime cityscapes and atmospherically lit bar rooms and office interiors, trademarks of the genre, but we also get out into the wide open Californian countryside as well as sunny Acapulco. The way cameraman Nicholas Musuraca captures this variety of locations lifts the film well and truly out of the murky pool where a high number of the genre languor.

In 1991, the film was included in the US National Film Registry as being deemed, “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”. Also, it will doubtless come as no surprise to learn that it features highly in many of the American Film Institute’s 100 Years of cinema lists. For me, it’s a recent discovery I’m very thankful for and yet another reminder that the ’40s was an awesome decade for movies. It’s one that has aged extremely well and one that will encourage me to continue scanning the Internet and the lists of films people consider the best ever made.