Fuller favorite RIchard Widmark (Adam) rubs his
cheek against the periscope like a kitten while the wonderful, too seldom cast
Bella Darvi (Denise) sorts out the fleshy and greasy all male submarine crew
with a charm school lesson in gender politics that has them licking it up in
Fuller's completely mad apocalyptic and wonderful Cold War, Chinese Commie, camp
masterpiece Hell and High Water from
1954.
I first saw this and fell in love with it in the
60s back in the KIngs Cross Gaiety Theatre days where a knockout Tech IB print
of it used to often play there. Fuller was the perfect director for those
totally honest, completely non-bourgeois or hideous pretentious arthouse
audiences, along with Visconti at least for his high period up to and including
Vaghe Stelle dell'Orsa (Sandra) from 1965. These were two directors
that genuinely moved the crowd physically and emotionally, and which allowed us
to relate to the screen, often verbally with shouting, cheering, booing and
general concurrence. Cinema going has never been as engaging for me and was
best avoided if I could, until perhaps the fabulous full house for Lube's Trouble in Paradise (1932) earlier this
year in Bologna in which a substantially first time young audience to the
picture again lapped it up like kittens with cream and gave the movie
thunderous applause for minutes at the end and the final credits.
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| Bella Darvi, Hell and High Water |
And that's how Fuller makes movies, you can never
be unengaged from them. This one for all the supposed hokum and drop in his
quality is no different to any of his greatest fifties pictures to my mind.
Some writers condescendingly ascribe the idea of naivety or fauvist
characterization to the background crew/chorus characters here. But their
dialogue and actions are actually cleverly constructed to incorporate them into
- literally - a chorus and a prediction of how the audience will react, without
ever taking the spontaneity of the audience's reactions from us.
And the submarine crew here is as sociologically
diverse and emblematic for 50s American movies as is the group of atomic
scientists, nationally and linguistically (Bella speaks at least six languages
here as do the crew. And Fuller makes a big deal about showing the diversity.)
Perhaps the most unexpected of the crew characters is an almost outrageously
openly gay David Wayne, playing a kind of ship jester mostly shot with baretop,
in line with the other beefcake specimens of greasepaint and brawn who
elaborately depict a backdrop of masculinity and muscle to play off in
counterpoint to Fuller's central romance between Adam and Denise, Labor and
Science, with a central, very long take of an astonishing four minutes in the
cabin love scene completely saturated and printed in screaming deep (Commie and
Passion) red, to a depth that only the old dye transfer prints could render
properly.
The encode is from a splendid new transfer by Fox
for Twilight Time, and the disc is
region free. I've only said this once before in relation to the superb BD disc
of Dracula's Daughter and the 30s and
40s Universal Horror cycles but anyone who can't love a movie like Hell and High Water doesn't love movies.
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| The Kings Cross Gaiety |
Fuller told me about the genesis of HELL AND HIGH WATER. Zanuck was having trouble launching CinemaScope and asked who was the dumbest director on the lot. The minions all picked Samuel Fuller so they gave the film to him to show anyone could use the process.
ReplyDeleteThere was also Fuller's briefing to the Admiral they had as technical adviser. He explained his function to the man. "If there's any kind of disagreement, I'll turn round to you and say 'That's right isn't it admiral?' and you nod."
And so it came to pass!
ReplyDelete