ABCs at the Movies: The Doubles Round!

[memento]

From IMDB: Occasionally charming foreign adventure/romance with Glenn Ford as a down-on-his-luck American returning to post-war France to retrieve the title treasure he found during the war and becoming entangled with cops, bad guys, and tour guide Geraldine Brooks. Lovely Brooks has a wonderful girl-next-door quality, but the 50s priggishness makes the romance tiresome at times.

The whole affair has a nice Hitchcockian feel, altho Hitch would never have been so priggish--with either with the sex or the violence. Director Rudolph Mate was the cinematographer for Hitch on Foreign Correspondent and other A-list directors in the 40s but had already directed several films himself by the time he did The Green Glove, including the classic DOA in 1950, with Edmund O'Brien.

Still, something is missing. Ford remains a cipher thruout; we don't get the feel of desperation that Hitch (or his leading men) was so good at conveying. Ford was a battle-hardened lieutenant in the war, yet it doesn't seem to help him much against the bad guys. Brooks is clingy, yet coy. A European dame, sexier and more independent, might have been a more interesting choice. (This is one of those stories where the leads have to pretend to be married at one point, thereby forcing them to be titillatingly intimate, right? Wrong: Mate blows it by having them demand separate rooms anyway!) The climax is good, if a bit predictable. But the exciting mountain chase down a goat trail feels a bit like a setting in search of a story, since we know from the opening scene that the story doesn't end there. Overall, it's a good A-picture adventure that could have benefited from a bit of B-picture sex and violence.

[Fran]

From IMDb:  Ginger Rogers, a bored New York office girl, goes to a camp in the Catskill Mountains for rest and finds Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

[oilgun]

IMDb Plot Synopsis: The simple told story, based on Corra Harris' biographical book, of a Methodist minister, called to a north-Georgia mountain-community in 1910 who, with his gently-bred new bride, meets the problems and crises of his circuit-riding congregation fearlessly and honestly.

[memento]

Plot: April 1944. Rosa, a farmers wife, and her daughter Vroni manage a small, remote farm in the Bavarian mountains. Since her brother Josef had been drafted by the army, the usually cheerful Vroni suffers under her mothers bitterness. But one evening a young, frightened man in a tattered Wehrmachtsuniform appears at the door. And only few minutes later the military police arrives.

=aside= Fran
Thank you.

[Fran]

Also known as:  The Happiness of The Katakuris

From IMDb:  The Katakuri family has just opened their guest house in the mountains. Unfortunately their first guest commits suicide and in order to avoid trouble they decide to bury him in the backyard. Things get way more complicated when their second guest, a famous sumo wrestler, dies while having sex with his underage girlfriend and the grave behind the house starts to fill up more and more.

[southendmd]

Hiroko Watanabe's fiancé Itsuki died two years earlier in a mountain climbing accident. While looking through his high school yearbook, Hiroko in a fit of grief decides to write a letter to him using his old school address. Surprisingly she receives a reply, not from the dead Itsuki, but from a woman with the same name whom had known Hiroko's fiancé in school. A relationship develops between the two women as they continue to exchange letters and share memories of the dead Itsuki.

[oilgun]

Synopsis: Spencer Tracy stars in this outdoor adventure as Zachary Teller, a retired Alpine guide lured back into mountain climbing by his fortune-hunting younger brother, Chris (Robert Wagner). A passenger... Spencer Tracy stars in this outdoor adventure as Zachary Teller, a retired Alpine guide lured back into mountain climbing by his fortune-hunting younger brother, Chris (Robert Wagner). A passenger jet has crashed high in the Alps, and Chris hopes to recover the jewels and money carried by the undoubtedly dead survivors. After a long and treacherous climb, the pair discovers one passenger is still alive--a young Hindu girl (Anna Kashfi). Soon it's brother vs. brother in a test of strength and wills over the girl, the loot, and getting down the mountain alive. Director Edward Dmytryk (MURDER MY SWEET, THE CAINE MUTINY) nicely captures some eye-popping Alpine scenery while carving out this rugged, character-driven story. Tracy is a little too portly and gray to be climbing mountains, but he knows how to act the role of a spiritually intrepid adventurer. Robert Wagner comes off well in one of his early roles as the greedy brother.

[Fran]

Also known as:  North Face

From MoviesTrailer.org:  Set in 1936, ["Nordwand"] centers around four mountain climbers who attempt to climb the north face of the Eiger Mountain in Switzerland and the tragic events that follow.

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbbXWyI2AqE[/youtube]

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM3e4i2KBD0[/youtube]

[southendmd]

This set of several stories is well conveyed by use of flashbacks. Lourdes' pursuit of the villagers' stories for her film project sets up several different story lines with no small amount of intersection in this remote mountain village.

But there are no real surprises in these stories in that the use of "magical realism" is used inconsistently. Some stories are resolved logically and others remain unresolved by rational explanations. The film suffers a little in not making up its mind about whether to be magical or not.

It's still a good movie but not a great one. I think it would be worth picking up Axtaga's Obabakoak collection to get a fuller view of this (potentially) mysterious place.

[memento]

Cornel Wilde's role in Passion is something that Tyrone Power might have done or Cornel himself might have done at 20th Century Fox when they were both there. Of course had it been done at Fox, Darryl Zanuck would have had a better plotted story than RKO did.

Wilde is a vaquero who has impregnated Yvonne DeCarlo and she's got a surprise for him when he returns from a roundup. She's got a bundle of joy for him and they're not married. But Wilde is going to do right by her.

Sad to say though DeCarlo's family is involved in a range feud with a local Don who sends riders to burn out who he considers squatters. They kill DeCarlo and her grandfather John Qualen.

They don't get DeCarlo's twin sister, also played by DeCarlo. She rides for Wilde and he gets there too late. But like Gregory Peck in The Bravados and Steve McQueen in Nevada Smith, Wilde's a man with a mission.

For reasons I don't understand the local law who is played by Raymond Burr won't arrest Lon Chaney, Jr. after she identifies his voice as one of the riders. It's a pretty lame excuse for Burr not doing his duty. Of course Wilde's duty is clear.

Later on Burr does in fact catch up with Wilde, but allows him to escape and then he tracks Wilde as Wilde tracks the bad guys. Again his reasons are rather lame.

Wilde tracks the last of the bandits to the snow clad Sierra Mountains and the cinematography here is pretty good. RKO spent a bit more here than they normally do.