On YouTube - Glimpses of THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS (David Butler, USA, 1943) especially Errol Flynn singing and dancing

Thank Your Lucky Stars was made by Warner Bros as a WW2 fundraiser, with a slim plot involving two theatre producers played by Edward Everett Horton and S Z Sakall. The stars donated their salaries to the Hollywood Canteen founded by John Garfield and Bette Davis who appear in this film. The female who gets most attention is Dinah Shore who does four utterly anodyne numbers of forgettable songs.

The writing is credited to Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, later the authors of the comic masterpiece The Court Jester. They give Eddie Cantor far more and far better jokes than he deserves. Needless to say it's a film that has its moments. 

The numbers were written by Arthur Schwartz and Frank Loesser and one of them, sung in the film by Bette Davis, "They're Either Too Young or Too Old" was nominated for an Oscar, but lost. The best number features a slim and skinny legged Errol Flynn singing and dancing to a stage number set in an English tavern. Flynn enters and cadges drinks while singing and launches into "That's What You Jolly Well Get,''. His Australian accent occasionally pokes through.

And here's the Bette Davis number.

It appears that Warners has done a 4K restoration of the whole 2hour 7 minute show which you can find when you hunt round the channels

ON SBS-TV - Rod Bishop warns about ROGUE HEROES (Sc: Stephen Knight, Dir: Tom Shankland, UK, 2022)

Connor Swindells, Rogue Heroes

For show creator Stephen Knight, Rogue Heroes is his view of the origins of the British SAS - lawless, viral macho killers with virtually no wartime morality, motivated solely by killing and then killing some more in order to defeat Rommel and his Panzers in North Africa. 

If you miss the point of all the anarchistic, authority-hating viciousness (and how could you?), there’s at least eight loud AC/DC numbers along with Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motörhead and a range of British punk from the 1970s and 1980s, to put you in the right mood. 

It’s like watching the wartime equivalent of British soccer crowds. Nationalistic Brit “wolf-warriors” in the North African campaign - well done, those boys!

The Brits lost up to 35,000 during the 3-year engagement, but there were also some allies there. Here they are only mentioned in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments. The SAS lads steal Australian food and other supplies. And in the case of the New Zealanders, the Brits sneak in under the cover of darkness after the moon has set to pinch the Kiwis’ desert army vehicles and other fighting kit.

A couple of Australians appear in early scenes and are prepared to take on the SAS leader Stirling (known as the “Phantom Major”) in a Cairo bar, but quickly turn tail and meekly depart after Stirling runs through a list of the ways he can kill.

The Americans arrive (“About time!”) but we never actually see one. 

And the Scots are reduced to Cairo street-brawlers, left unconscious in their kilts in dusty alleyways. A Barmy Army chorus singing “Jerusalem” is all that’s missing, but it might have been in there somewhere, drowned out by AC/DC.

As for any mention of the Rats of Tobruk, dug in and holding the town against superior forces for eight months with 3,000 casualties, they are not even remotely on Stephen Knight’s radar.

It’s the sort of series where ten minutes is probably enough to get the hang of it, because not much will change – it stays essentially one-note throughout. The SAS mantra “Who Dares Wins” crops up to replace “Go.Kill.Return.Go Again” and, at the end, an Irishman known as “Paddy” (of course) declares “Now the blood will flow”.

I guess he, at least, is looking forward to a second series.

An Overlooked Australian film (4) - DEVIL IN THE FLESH (Scott Murray, 1986)

Of all the Australian films that have made it into the various official selection sessions at Cannes, probably the most overlooked is Scott Murray's debut, and only, feature Devil in the Flesh.  Made in 1986 the film had its premiere as part of Critic's Week at Cannes that same year. The distributor of the film Hoyts Premium then its time, only releasing the film in 1989.

Devil in the Flesh was and remains a rarity, an adaptation to an Australian setting of a classic European novel of the same name by Raymond Radiguet. The book had been filmed by Claude Autant-Lara way back in 1947, starring Gerard Philipe  and Micheline Presle, and was a major success in its day. Almost simultaneously with Murray's film Marco Bellocchio also did an adaptation which also premiered at Cannes in 1986. 

No point here in analysing the changes made to settings from the novel and the Autant-Lara version except to say that Murray constructed a very thoughtful update in the times, changing it from an early 20th century locale to Australia during WW2.

Katia Caballero, Keith Smith, Devil in the Flesh

The film was highly praised by Rolando Caputo's entry in Australian Film 1978-1992: "From the opening image of a car moving into frame and taking with it the gaze of the audience into this imaginary world of the screen, Murray directs the drama with subtle and stylish delicacy. He is complemented by Andrew De Groot's brilliant cinematography which captures every nuance of colour - especiallystriking in the Balthus-inspired production design of Marthe's apartment - and aided by Philippe Sarde's quietly effective music score."

In the Oxford Companion to Australian Film Brian McFarlane is similarly enthusiastic: "...a comparative rarity in new Australian cinema in the way it directly confronts issues arising from sexual love. Scott Murray, editor of Cinema Papers directed his first feature film with a firm focus on this central governing idea, and this separates it somewhat from the rites-of-passage films common in the local film revival."

Katia Caballero, Keith Smith, Devil in the Flesh

The film was produced by the late John Murray whose body of work is currently being privately restored. The original cut was 104 minutes but the film was released in Australian cinemas at 99 minutes. The  2K restoration is hoped to produce a version corresponding to the original cut.

Previous entries in this series

The Golden Cage (Ayten Kuyululu)

The Phallic Forest (Kit Guyatt)

Aya (Solrun Hoaas)

German Film Festival 2022 - Barrie Pattison uncovers THE FORGER (Maggie Peren) and A STASI COMEDY (Leander Haussman)

It’s early days yet but so far nothing in the German Film Festival is startling enough to draw attention from competing attractions.

Louis Hofmann, The Forger

First out of the gate for me comes Maggie Peren’s Der Passfälscher / The Forger from the autobiography of  one Cioma Schönhaus, a half way plausible account of WW2 Germany and a curious companion piece to Stefan Ruzowitzky’s 2007 Die Fälscher/The Counterfeiters or even 5 Fingers and Casablanca, backed with convincingly drab art direction. It seems that European film makers now see WW2 in

shades of khaki, as with Leander Haussmann’s Stazicomödie or Emmanuel Finkiel’s 2017 Marguerite Duras film La douleur, though Der Passfälscher shows Berlin rather than Paris. It’s more probing realist than the 3rd Reich movies we are used to. 

 

Jewish 21-year-old Samson "Cioma" Schonhaus (Louis Hofmann) looks like the Gestapo will get him at transport Lost & Found in what proves to be a flash forward opening. He has survived by getting about with a service man haircut and a dodgy transport pass that means he canget a bus rather than walk to work in the dark for three hours, though he still just makes it to the factory where he saws off lengths of metal pipe in a Reserved Occupation which will soon be turned over to wounded servicemen. 

 

Hofmann and friend Jonathan Berlin manage to live quite well in the flat left by his late grandmother. The Tax Inspector inventories the items there and puts a Double Eagle stamp paper on the door, which doesn’t stop Berlin inviting in the women he does black market trades with to buy them. However, mean landlady Nina Gummich, who hovers round the house putting up signs about the black-out, is awake to them and sends his customers on their way. She buys the Jewish family possessions at a fraction of their value making sure she gets receipts so she can’t be accused of exploiting them after the war. 

 

Hofman’s workmate, aware of his brief run at art school, sends him off to the lawyer who is (pro bono) producing fake documents for the city’s fugitive Jews. He isn’t satisfied with Hofman’s work (broken grommet) and dismisses him, warned to walk rather than use his transport pass.

 

However, getting a grommet press to go with his low tech art school materials, our hero continues his document faking with the door unlocked, and parties in purloined navy uniforms, which he sees as “mimicking” the prey copying the behaviour of their predators. Going to a dance, he picks up Luna Wedler who proves to be a Jewish fugitive after his ration coupons - scenes of him bringing re-cycled flowers to their rendezvous at the cafe with the leaded windows, where the waiter greets them “Heil Hitler” and serves them chocolate tart which he tells his fat woman customer is off the menu because of shortages.

 

The whole masquerade unravels and he has to flim flam a document inspection checking the police officers’ own papers and getting back to the cafe to see Wedler already pairing with a soldier and the waiter serving him water chocolate without charge to get him out of the place.

 

It’s a case of using his desperate charm to get into a freezing hideaway and work on a new set of documents despite his fingers trembling and an air raid which proves fortuitous. 

 

Even with the menace of the death camps hanging over the film, the tone is surprisingly comic. We find ourselves watching a tightrope walk between self-respect and self-preservation. 

 

A Stasi Comedy

Stazicomödie is set in Cold War East Germany but it’s the same game of outfoxing a comic regime where an error can be fatal. 

 

The opening incident where David Cross (Balloon) waits at an interminable traffic light, seeing a loveable kitten in the path of a mechanical street sweeping machine, proves to be a reference point for the film as does the declassifying of his released Stasi file thirty years later, in the presence of his family.

 

Cross was recruited to be a police spy on the Nev Degs, the hippy "Negative Degenerate" community which had squatted a rundown area of East Berlin and whom the Stasi were convinced were holding subversive meetings in churches, if they could only find when. This puts a couple of young women who are willing to get naked with him in Cross’ path because they believe the police report he is furtively typing is actually a poetic work exploring their alternative society.  There’s also a visit by an Allen Ginsberg imitator who sees Cross breaking the transvestite’s string of pearls as an art statement.

 

That’s actually nearly funny but most of the film is ponderous - the undercover trio, who can’t blend in, playing like the Three Stooges, the rejected admirer who has to have his head dragged out of the gas oven or the headquarters cellar bathroom serving double duty as a place for police murders and secret promotions. The department head staging costume balls in the manner of a Hans Steinhoff period movie spectacle is a step further into weird, though passing off Cross’ superior Henry Hübchen to his alternative society as his distraught middle class parent does generate a few laughs.

 

Now a respectable family man who keeps his Stasi items in a glass case, the character grown to be Henry Hübchen finds the released Stasi file a considerable embarrassment. 

 

I met someone who had actually lived this scenario and eventually put his own file up at an exhibition, after he found that the cops documented him in the belief that he was the other person in a two man photo. We compared notes and he recognised my description of that always open window in the building opposite 52 Philip Street, where the Realist Film Society operated. After a while I used to acknowledge the dark room as I went in. I wonder if they’ve shredded the ASIO dossier with photos of my teenage self waving at them.

On YouTube - Barrie Pattison takes a lucky dip and finds A SALUTE TO FRANCE (Jean Renoir & Garson Kanin, USA, 1944) and THE WESTERNS (Van Fox, USA, 1958), an episode of WIDE, WIDE, WORLD

 Lockdown has provided an extended opportunity to plumb the depths of the Movies’ Sargasso Sea, their elephant’s graveyard, the one they call YouTube. Anyone can put in his thumb and pull out something plum. Think about all those bits and pieces that were never intended to survive beyond their first showings?

Take 1944’s A Salute to France (Click here to view) , directed by Garson Kanin & Jean Renoir from a script by Renoir, Phillip Dunne and Burgess Meredith and scored by Kurt Weill - a genuine curiosity, a medium length propaganda film we must assume was made for Allied forces distribution with the possibility of slipping into theatrical.

 

On a studio-built fragment representing the railing of a troop ship headed to Europe, three soldiers sit smoking. American Burgess Meredith is in conversation with Britisher (!) Philip Bourneuf, with Frenchman Jean-Pierre Aumont perched behind them. They discuss words in common between languages when Aumont’s English proves better than Meredith’s phrase book.  We trace their backgrounds with a glimpse of their careers - “whatever Joe was, he’s fighting to do it again - or something better.”

Burgess Meredith, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Philip Borneuf,
A Salute to France

Jean-Pierre resents Meredith’s implication that the Frenchies left the fighting to them and launches into a history lesson for them (and the audience) with four wars between the Germans and the French in a hundred and fifty years.

 

The home life scenes go dark and the narrator’s discussion of words like liberty, equality and fraternity are drowned out by a lip synched Adolph Hitler on about the master race, with a montage of propaganda footage (spot Confessions of a Nazi Spy in with all the actuality). The Hitler raised hand salute dissolves into a canon pointing sky wards and a montage of battle activity. “Wonder why us democracies never get ready for a war?” “Science, like religion, belongs to everyone” “Some understand war better than peace” to go with a collage of collaborators, the Fighting French, prison camps, scuttling the fleet at Toulon and De Gaulle as against Petain “the hero of Verdun” who didn’t stand out against the executions and deportations. 

 

We see more dramatisations, notably ones with Aumont who gets to do all the work in this one - a speech in front of the firing squad or playing a country priest who gives downed fliers a meal before putting them into a small boat manned by the secretary of the local Communist party and the son of the Chateau, to be taken across the channel, with the wind-up rousing Weill “The Song of Liberation”.

    

We can only speculate on Renoir’s participation, the division of labor, but Kanin had a flair for these. His one-reel Ring of Steel voiced by Spencer Tracy and Fellow Americans (with Jimmy Stewart) remain imposing today. Like them Salute to France is very much of its moment. Even now it’s possible to be carried away by this one with its pared down, Hollywood view of history and use of film form.            

 

Proving more ephemeral still, is NBC-TV Series Wide Wide World’s 1958 "The Western" episode Directed by Van Fox.  Click here to watch

Gary Cooper, Gene Autry, John Wayne
The Westerns

 

Everybody did cowboy movie compilations in the days of Black and White TV. Terry Sanders’ They Went That-a-way in Wolper-NBC’s Hollywood and the Stars series starts with Japanese cowboys shooting it out in front of a barbed-wire fence sign reading “OK Corral.” Kevin Brownlow’s later Hollywood series has its Out West ep. My favorite remains the jokey 1965 Canadian CBS Wayne and Shuster Take an Affectionate Look At The Westerns. Reb Russell used to tour fan conventions with his copy of an ABC half hour which he treasured because it had footage of his old cowboy actor friends, though it treated his own appearance with little sympathy. 

 

The Westerns came first. Then important frontman Dave Garoway in an armchair in front of a suspended globe telling us about “the cowboy - free of women, property and society” doesn’t really add much. However an aged Bronco Billy Anderson remembering being busted when he tried to mount a horse from the wrong side for The Great Train Robbery is more like it. The film runs to a joke card game between Anderson, Gabby Hayes and Walter Brennan in the saloon at Gene Autry’s Radio Ranch.

 

However, there’s more. They got a monologue by John Ford at ease in front of the camera, even if what he does is a piece that sounds pre-scripted by the press office and comes over as self-congratulating - he likes She Wore a Yellow Ribbon best of his westerns. It’s interesting to hear him speak. He says he never hurt a horse on one of his film and it is confirmed by the Humane Society Representative. 

 

There’s a scene of selecting and training a movie falling horse with them asserting as much money is spent on those as on a steeplechase winner.

 

They claim Gunsmoke’s John Meston came up with the phrase “Adult Western.” James Arness, in character as Matt Dillon, does a fight with a stunt man for them in a single take without editing. 

 

High point however is the  trip to location for The  Hanging Tree where they interview Delmer Daves, who is the best they’ve got at doing this. His talking about “learning the need to come to the desert alone” registers as being the considered voice of someone who's spent a large part of his life thinking about the program’s subject. 

 

Gary Cooper and Maria Schell are interviewed and, apart from being ultra-winning, Maria does the formidable feat of arriving in the charged scene with emotion at full pitch after taking just three steps. 

 

Jay Silverheels cites Daves’ Broken Arrow as the first intelligent presentation of the American Indians (we didn’t have native Americans when they did this one). That’s a bit rough on films like George B. Seitz’ 1925 The Vanishing American or Alan Crosland’s 1934 Massacre.

 

Live TV coverage was still dodgy unfortunately. The quality of the “kinephoto” copy is poor, complete with “black halo”. There are lapses like cutting to the Tim McCoy poster at the wrong moment or the Stagecoach sound track intruding before it’s called for. Their selection of excerpts is over-familiar and their best moments pass without comment - Schell’s three steps or Arness’ fight.

 

However, while Garoway, producer Ted Rogers and writer Harold Azine’s understanding of cowboy movie history may be limited, they do show a sense of the moment they are recording - when it was already Twilight on the Trail. The ending offers the main street of Radio Ranch with a column, headed by Cooper, Wayne and Autry striding ahead of TV cowboys, James Garner prominent among them. That’s as iconic an image as we are ever likely to get. Imagine actually being there.

Critics applaud Jean-Pierre Melville's ARMY OF SHADOWS (France, 1969) - Screening in Melbourne Sunday 11 July at 4.00 pm at the Elsternwick Classic and Monday 12 July at 7.00 pm at the Hawthorn Lido

Click here to watch a trailer

David Stratton writes to Cinema Reborn enthusiasts. 

“Much as I admire Jean-Pierre Melville’s hard-boiled thrillers, I think his best film is L’ARMÉE DES OMBRES, perhaps because it reflects his own experience in the French Resistance during World War II.  It’s one of those films where the direction seems effortless but its nail-biting depiction of a dangerous, tragic underground war is gripping from start to finish.”

 

Simone Signoret, Lino Ventura

L’ARMÉE DES OMBRES/ARMY OF SHADOWS (1969,145 mins)

“Bad memories, welcome… you are my long lost youth.” Often seen as a transposition of Melville’s beloved gangster genre to the underworld of the Resistance in wartime France, this unbearably moving reverie faithfully adapts Joseph Kessel’s seminal novel to the screen. The film’s dream-like, almost clandestine sense of geography, place and period is matched to the soulful, autumnal mood created by cinematographer Pierre Lhomme. Perhaps the greatest cinematic testament to the lived experience of the French Resistance. Featuring beautifully modulated performances by Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse and Simone Signoret.(Adrian Danks, Co-curator Melbourne Cinémathèque).

 

Manohla Dargis,  New York Times

“…a thrilling story about a handful of French Resistance fighters that also happens to be a masterpiece.”

David Thomson, Have You Seen

It’s a world in which strangers or shadows come together under code names, in which brothers may not know that they follow the same bleak service, and in which you sometimes murder your own people to prevent the risk of their talking. The threat of torture and helpless betrayal, hangs over the whole enterprise, and part of the film’s grip, I find, comes from the certain understanding that even the Paris one loves and admires was once chilled by this terror.

Chris Peachment, Time Out Film Guide

“…the summit of both his own work and his collaboration with the actor Ventura…Melville’s style here has a quite outstanding hallucinatory quality entirely appropriate to its subject of lives and memories that are forced underground for too long.” 

Book Tickets at the Classic here

Book Tickets at the Lido here 

Streaming - Barrie Pattison retrieves and enjoys REVEILLE WITH BEVERLY (Charles Barton, USA, 1943)

Just watched Charles Barton’s 1943 Reveille with Beverly. Breezy and lightweight this one fills time agreeably as a kind of cut price addition to the This Is The Army, Thousands Cheer cycle of WW2 service musicals. You could consider it to be slight to the point of insignificance.

However, like a lot of popular cinema, it is more revealing than the serious movies which normally get scrutiny. Eighty years after it was made, it has all manner of resonance. WW2 is foregrounded. Star, winningly teenaged Anne Miller’s brother Larry Parks, is in uniform. Her sister Adele Mara is a munitions worker and her dad Douglas Leavitt an air raid warden. She takes suitor William Wright for a walk in the family victory garden.  Chocolate heir Wright and his chauffeur Dick Purcell cheerfully accept the draft, throwing up a “Two Gentlemen of Verona” plot which no one takes much notice of. 

 

The intrigue has radio station KFEL Wartime switchboard operator Miller ousting classical musical devotee Franklin Pangborn from his “Symphony in the Morning” spot to do her “Reveille with Beverly” swing hits program, which draws waves of fan mail from the servicemen in training round the country. 

Ann Miller, Reveille with Beverly

This is already the aggressive assertion of American culture which we find in the Hollywood films of the day – Mickey Rooney assuring Charles Winninger “Beethoven, Brahms - George Gershwin  is as good as those guys and he’s American” in the 1939 Babes in Arms or Donald O’Connor’s teen musical replacing the school production of “Antigone” in 1943’s Mr. Big, all leading to the delirious heights of Fred Astaire in the 1953 The Bandwagon rejecting Jack Buchanan’s preposterous "Oedipus Rex" for the Broadway musical Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray have concocted. 

 

This was the real cultural front line in post war Australia, though it barely registered in centres like the ABC or a Sydney University embracing the arrival of espresso and sub-titled movies, as recorded in Ladies in Black.

 

Reveille with Beverley was very much a recruiting tool. The troops never seem to do any military training, spending their time lazing about listening to Miller’s program and dashing off to mess call. There are none of the bullying NCOs of the Bob Hope or Abbot & Costello movies. They march off to war, like those in This is the Army, almost as an afterthought.

 

While the musical numbers that we iris into, as Miller spins their disks for her program, feature a substantial proportion of black artists, there are no black faces among the recruits, a point registering strikingly when the impressionists “The Radio Rogues” include "Amos and Andy" in their routine - white men playing white men playing black men in a way that would be castigated in the seventies. 

 

Duke Ellington, Reveille with Beverly

The film anticipates the rock musicals of a decade later, now studied as showcasing the popular music of the day. It fields a performer roster that can hold its own with most more substantial productions. The Mills Brothers doing “Cielito Lindo” and “Sweet Lucy Brown”, Bob Crosby’s “Big Noise from Winnetka’, Count Basie on “One O'Clock Jump”, Duke Ellington and “Take the 'A' Train”, Freddie Slack on “Cow-Cow Boogie” with an Ella Mae Morse vocal, Frank Sinatra in a grotesque staging of “Night and Day” all female pianists and violin players. The Radio Rogues perform “Wabash Moon” & “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.”

 

It’s not till the film is nearly over that Ann Miller gets into her net stockings for her “Thumbs Up and V for Victory” dance number.

 

Director Charles Barton (Broderick Crawford’s off-sider in the Wellman Beau Geste) was one of the most accomplished in this field. He did the best of the Abbot & Costello films and, if Universal had trusted him with Hellzapoppin’, instead of taking on lumpen A feature blow-in H.C. Potter, that could have been an even more substantial achievement. Barton keeps the piece moving nicely, coasting over the unfunny comedy with Andrew Tombes and Doodles Weaver and getting the most out of the slim plot. No dance director is credited, though Ann Miller’s big number involves considerable choreography. Duke Ellington's jitterbug dancers could stand more prominence.

 

All in all, Reveille with Beverly is better and more revealing viewing than other ambitious films of its day. I certainly enjoyed it more than watching Paul Muni in the John Farrow-Irwin Shaw Commandoes Strike at Dawn or Cornel Wilde being Chopin in Charles Vidor’s Song to Remember.

**************************

A so-so copy of Reveille for Beverly  is streaming If you click here

On Blu-ray - Rod Bishop welcomes a restoration of NONE SHALL ESCAPE (Andre De Toth, USA, 1944)

 

De Toth’s sixth feature and his second for Columbia opens at the end of WW2 when a “War Crimes Commission” puts a Nazi officer on trial for crimes against humanity.

In flashback we learn of the life of Wilhelm Grimm (Alexander Knox), once a German teacher in the village of Lidzbark before WW1. Having lost a leg during the war, he returns to Poland angrily denouncing the Versailles Treaty. Through the 1920s and 1930s he develops a devotion to Nazism, is elevated to the SS and becomes the Reich Commissioner for the Western Region of Poland after the German invasion.

Back in Lidzbark, his behaviour is cruel and violent. The war crimes Grimm commits include massacring Jewish villagers who are being forced onto a train headed for concentration camps. The Rabbi who addresses them makes it clear they will be extermination camps.

Alexander Knox (second from left), None Shall Escape

Cinematic value aside, the most striking feature of this war drama is its dates. 

Released in the USA in February 1944, producer Samuel Bischoff reportedly had the idea for the film back in 1942 when Roosevelt announced the Allies were gathering evidence of Nazi war crimes.

None Shall Escape was on American screens 17 months before the end of WW2 and was in production two years before the start of the Nuremburg Trials in November 1945. 

Some have used the film as evidence the Americans - if not all the Allies - knew of the extermination camps long before Patton’s army uncovered the crimes during their drive towards Berlin.

Written by Lester Cole who was destined to be blacklisted as a member of HUAC’s Hollywood Ten, De Toth’s film has recently had a 4K restoration and Lee Garmes’s sparkling chiaroscuro-influenced black and white cinematography seems just as distinctive as it was on Morocco and Shanghai Express.

None Shall Escape - a surprisingly clear-eyed predictor of the Holocaust from the heart of Hollywood.