Movie Gems from before 1970 (Comments by Bob Racine)

Many of the English language movies that appeared in the pre-1970s, postwar period are still widely familiar to cinema buffs at large.  Who has not heard of “High Noon,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “On the Waterfront,” “Lawrence of Arabia” or “West Side Story?”  But there is some excellent work that either has grown dim in memory or has never been discovered.  I am speaking of masterpieces, ones that will never date or fail to be pertinent to any epoch and represent the finest in motion picture content and craft.  The nine dramatic films I have listed below all fulfill this expectation to my satisfaction.  Anyone barely over thirty years of age at present is not likely to be familiar with most of them.  Six of them are in black and white, released at a time when color movies were the exception instead of the rule.  I have seen each and every one of the nine many times and would not object to seeing them again.  I pass on a few words for your consideration.   All are currently available in DVD.  They are listed alphabetically, not in any order of preference.

Darling

(2 hrs & 2 min, b&w, 1965)

A London fashion model (Julie Christie) flits promiscuously from pillar to post, a kind of bitch goddess whom Christie makes us care very much about without ever dulling her fangs or sparing her the full consequences of her folly.  The lively narrative of moral descent, under John Schlesinger’s brilliant direction, unfolds with style-plus, every scene terse and sharp.  Dirk Bogarde is the sensitive intellectual whose life the woman ruins and Laurence Harvey is the decadent advertising tycoon who does so much to corrupt hers.  There are great touches of imagination everywhere the eye and ear turn.  What at the time was often referred to as “the swinging life” is exposed as a sham.  A moral tale that knows its idolatrous enemy and who gets bought and sold! 

Elmer Gantry

 (2 hrs & 27 min, color, 1960)

The sawdust trail is treated with gusto, fervency and inspired imagination in Director/Writer Richard Brooks’ great award-winning work, from the novel by Sinclair Lewis.  Burt Lancaster gives the performance of his career as the charlatan evangelist of the title – a failed cleric turned traveling salesman, who insinuates himself into the work of a tent revivalist (Jean Simmons) after whom he lusts and becomes both a boon and a liability to her.  Shirley Jones ratchets up the heat as an old flame of Gantry’s turned prostitute.  Revivalism collides with a suspicious press, local officialdom, fateful misfortune, and scandal before the film reaches its blazing climax.  The film moves fast, probes deep, stirs the blood and in its own way acknowledges the gift of faith, however inadequately the chief characters embody it.      

Face in the Crowd, A

(2 hrs & 5 min, b&w, 1957)

The power of the TV tube to create overnight stars out of sleazy people is now widely acknowledged.  But in the 1950s nobody wanted to be told that such a thing was possible, hence this brilliant film’s box office flop.  Director Elia Kazan is the master magician who made it happen, with the indispensable assistance of Screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who first conceived of it.  Andy Griffith is a dissolute deadbeat, who is discovered by a roving radio journalist, Patricia Neal.  First local then national audiences get hooked on his sassy, cracker barrel humor, until he becomes over time a destructive force that politicians as well as TV executives must contend with.  Was the high voltage film ahead of its time?  You betcha!  Will it ever get the recognition it deserves?  We can only hope!

Hud (1 hr & 52 min, b&w, 1963)

An orphan kid (Brandon de Wilde) must choose between the respectable values of his Texas rancher grandfather (Melvyn Douglas) and those of his self-serving, reckless Uncle Hud (Paul Newman).  How that eventuality is reached is the scheme of a tough, muscular drama, based upon a Larry McMurtry novel, and concerned with a deep-seated father-son rivalry.  A hoof and mouth epidemic brings the domestic sore to a head.  Newman and Douglas are tremendous, and Patricia Neal is quite infectious as an emotionally victimized housekeeper.   We are led gently into this den of distress but fully experience the hammer force of events as they build.  Credit it all to Director Martin Ritt.

Hustler, The

 (2 hrs & 15 min, b&w, 1961)

The Faust legend is brought into the pool hall in Director Robert Rossen’s masterful drama of a soul in turmoil.  Our lead character is Fast Eddie (Paul Newman, never better), a nobody who happens to be king of the pool table in his own back alley, until he takes on reigning pool champion Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), not knowing that in so doing he also takes on a scurrilous racketeer (George C. Scott) who owns Fats and demands the Devil’s due.  Piper Laurie is super-terrific as Eddie’s souse-y but wise girlfriend, the tragic Gretchen who stands between them.  Close-ups are used to amazing advantage all through the scenario, the script is flawlessly incisive, and everything about the production clicks, right down to the slightest flourish of a cue stick.  (Note: Newman did a pretty fair sequel to it in 1986 entitled “The Color of Money” under Martin Scorcese’s direction.)

In the Heat of the Night

 (1 hr & 50 min, color, 1967)

Sidney Poitier is a literate, proud, courageous, shrewd, well-dressed, self-respecting, and professionally competent police detective from Philadelphia who shows bigoted small Mississippi town sheriff Rod Steiger how to solve a murder and throws Jim Crow racism back into the redneck teeth with a flourish.  Director Norman Jewison and Screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, working from a John Ball novel, are our benefactors.  The film is full of high tension face-offs, and almost every scene is memorable.  The African American male image in movies has never been the same since this one was released in 1967.  It grabs and just will not let go.  I never tire of watching it again and again.       

Paths of Glory

(1 hr & 26 min, b&w, 1957)

Long before his “Strangelove” and “Space Odyssey,” Stanley Kubrick gave us this wrenching drama of military injustice set during World War I.  Do not let the uninspired title fool you; it is meant sardonically.  Nothing happens to cheer about in this screen story, adapted from a novel by Humphrey Cobb.  Three French soldiers face prosecution for cowardice in the face of the enemy (punishable by a firing squad) on behalf of an entire company so accused.  Kirk Douglas is the company commander, who steps out of his place in rank to come to the trio’s courtroom defense in an apparently losing battle for sanity and for their lives.  Few movie indictments of the war apparatus have ever burned hotter or more unforgettably.  The film well deserves rediscovering.

Snake Pit, The

(1 hr & 48 min, b&w, 1948)

The first major Hollywood movie ever to treat the subject of mental illness with studied seriousness remains a first rate drama of brokenness and healing.  Olivia de Havilland is marvelous as a victim of deprivation and subtle abuse, who has to descend into the bowels of a state-run asylum to find the face of her personal demons.  Mark Stevens is her faithful but bewildered husband and Leo Genn her devoted psychiatrist.  The screenplay, adapted from a novel by Mary Jane Ward, is a dynamic piece of work, a mixture of eeriness, excitement and loving encounters.  Thanks to the sensitive touch of Director Anatole Litvak it is the kind of experience you can carry inside you forever.  [Note: There are no snakes in the picture.  The phrase is only used as a metaphor at one point in the dialogue.] 

Sweet Smell of Success

(1 hr & 36 min, b&w, 1957)

This screenplay by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets has both an emotional and a cerebral impact, having to do with a corrupt, misanthropic syndicated columnist and his long arm of silent, inconspicuous influence into lives and affairs both private and public.  (Some claim to see in him a fictional counterpart to the hated Walter Winchell.)  Though Burt Lancaster is a force to contend with as the columnist in question, it is Tony Curtis who dominates the scenery, giving one of his best dramatic performances as Lancaster’s press agent lackey, playing informant, blackmailer, even pimp to gain his favor.  The film packs a mighty wallop and is handled with great economy, subtlety and dead-on-the-mark control of atmosphere by Director Alexander Mackendrick, aided in no little measure by the cinematography of veteran James Wong Howe.     

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Hearing with the Eyes (Essay by Bob Racine)

High frequency hearing loss is affecting many more individuals in our civilization than it used to.  The increased decibels of sound to which people have been subjected in the past century, getting more raucous from generation to generation it seems, accounts for much of this development, or so we are told by the experts.  I have no ready statistics on the subject, but I do have a firsthand acquaintance with the phenomenon, being one of that multitude so afflicted. 

While growing up I was unaware of any deficiency in my auditory capacities – until one day in high school a class in which I was enrolled was required to take a hearing test that necessitated the use of earphones, be they ever so primitive in the early 1950s compared to what we have at our disposal today.  A series of words was spoken by a recorded voice, the first word the loudest and each subsequent word softer than the one before it, the readings gradually fading out until only the sharp ear of an animal could detect it.  We were not told how long the list of words was to be, only that we were to write down what we heard in a descending column on test sheets for as long as we were able to identify the word clearly enough to transcribe it to the paper. 

I had no trouble with the first six or seven words, but after that the speaker was off the page for me.  That I was only able to pick up what was being spoken for that short a stretch caused me no great concern while the testing was going on.  It was after the testing was over that I got to look at the listings other members of the class had made.  All of them were quite proficient in accurately writing down well over twenty or twenty-five.  I was a bit chagrined momentarily, but the pressure of other classes and courses of study soon deflected my attention away from matters of hearing acuity and I thought nothing more about the question for many years.  Looking back now I wonder why no faculty member ever approached me later about my poor performance.  That I never heard another investigative word is a mystery to me right until this very day.  To be sure my limited competence must have been apparent to those officials of the local school board who instituted this test and especially to those who conducted it and collected the findings.

It would be almost another two decades before it would become an issue for me again.  In the late 1960s I worked as a film critic and media consultant for a company that published a newsletter for international circulation.  My job took me to theaters to review current cinema, and I began to notice that I was missing words in the dialogue on screen, much of conversation between the characters sounding garbled and blurred, words that I knew others in the theater were picking up quite well.  I let the matter slide for a few years, assuming that the technological changes taking place in soundtrack recordings at that period of media buzz were such that I would need time to acclimate myself to them.  I of course had no trouble with foreign language movies; they had subtitles, which allowed me to hear with my eyes and not be dependent upon auditory stimulation.  But the problem with English language films continued and got worse. 

It was in the spring of 1971 that physicians at Johns Hopkins told me that I was suffering from a damaged inner ear.  They supposed that I had undergone some kind of blow to the head at some point in my early childhood, well before that high school administered hearing test.  Immediately I was 90% sure when that incident had occurred.  At the age of five I fell off a porch banister head first, and my head landed squarely on the concrete walk below.  I had a swelling for some time after that, but since I got no medical attention for it (except ice packs that my mother administered) and since the swelling bye and bye went down, neither I nor my parents thought any more about it.  I might have had a fractured skull, but in the absence of x-rays there was no way to tell and there is no way now to determine if that was in fact what developed from the accident.  The Johns Hopkins folks explained that when the inner ear, involved as it is with balance, is damaged, the hearing acuity can suffer, since balance and hearing are closely intertwined.  In my case a high frequency hearing loss was the apparent result. 

This was very unsettling news to me, since I had a job that required a lot of ear usage.  I knew at a certain level, though it took me a while to face it, that my movie reviewing days were numbered.  Tons of water have gone over the dam in these past fifty years since then, a time during which my attendance at theaters has dropped off considerably, as the hearing problem has predictably gotten worse.  I now rarely go.  In most cases the frustration of not being able to follow dialogue on the soundtrack has been too acute for me to derive any pleasure from any viewing.  Even those devices that many theaters now furnish to help the hearing impaired have not been enough to solve my problem, with my degree of impairment.  To this day I am lucky if I can grasp as much as 50% of what is being said, even with the use of that device.  This explains why you readers do not see me reviewing new movies until months after their date of theatrical release.  I have to wait for them to be released into DVD before I can fully absorb their content.  If it were not for the subtitles that can now be selected out of the menu on just about all the discs I would still be at a great loss.  You might say that DVD has brought about a Renaissance in my love affair with movies.  Now I can hear with my eyes in English language films just as I have always done with foreign films.   

But this essay is not essentially about me and my life story.  I want to say a few things about how you people of normal hearing can and should relate to those of us with severe impairment.  I want to leave you with a few do’s and don’t’s.   

First of all, when speaking with one of us, face the individual.  Let him/her see your lip movement.  That is not to say that many hard of hearing folk are trained to read lips, as many completely deaf people are.  I certainly am not.  But it helps if the lips are seen.  We have something visual to match with the ear’s experience, however poor that experience.  You are not likely to connect, if your head is turned away or your back is to the one with whom you are speaking.  Hearing impairment does not mean that the person is deaf.  We can hear you, but in most cases what we lack is not volume but clarity. 

Clarity!  Clarity!  Clarity! 

That is the most important word you will read in this essay.  Facing off in another direction can give your speech a muffled sound, one that is similar to the way you would be heard if you had your head in a bucket or if you were covering your mouth with a pillow.  And of course keep your hands away from your mouth so that the lips stay visible.  Give the handicapped individual the chance to hear you with the eyes.    

Secondly, do not shout to make yourself heard.  It is not necessary and may be unsettling to the impaired person.  As stated in the preceding paragraph, we need clarity, not volume.  Loudness does not improve the chances of a successful exchange.  Once my church installed a new sound system, and beforehand I was consulted as to where the amplifiers should be located for my maximum advantage.  Nobody understood me, when I replied that it did not matter where they were placed.  What was needed was a hearing loop system.  Amplifiers are always “off yonder somewhere,” never close enough to guarantee auditory efficiency.  They are like voices coming from somewhere across a crowded room.  Today that same church of mine has the kind of loop that only requires me to snap a button on my hearing aids and at once the voice over the system sounds as if it is talking directly into my ear.  The level of sound is unimportant.  The clarity of the words is of paramount importance.  Please do not shout.

Thirdly, talk slowly.  Some people have more naturally speedy voices than do others.  Locality can be a major factor.  In the Deep South, somewhere I have not been for a long while, I would probably have relatively little difficulty following what people say; in that region there is more drawling and broad expressiveness.  In the more northern or western states the natives tend to step on the gas much more.  That has been another factor that has made movie viewing without subtitles so nerve-rackingly hard for me.  Since the early 1960s dialogue has been much more life-like.  Even the best of performers with the best of sound engineering and editing give us slurring and mumbly speech in conversation more so than the performers of yore did.  Dialogue has become more colloquial.  As for pop singers, backed up by electronic instrumentation-  well, for the likes of me that is a lost cause.  And whispering is out of the question.  I have for many years been totally unable to access whispers, no matter how close the whispering tongue gets to my ear.  We live in a fast-talking culture, with even the most learned of televised personalities often rushing their words or failing to enunciate.  It behooves someone trying to speak with a hearing impaired person not to add to the problem by babbling and sputtering.  You may have to change your normal way of conversing to get the person to comprehend you.

All this advice is based upon the assumption that you really do wish to communicate.  So I suppose the fourth admonition is to examine your mind and heart, be in touch with how much this person means to you or how little.  Are you really committed to connecting with her or him?  Naturally, some individuals mean more to you than do others, and it depends upon what this impaired person is asking of you.  There are some conversations we all wish to avoid, even if hearing capacity is normal, some people we like more than others and feel closer to than others.  You are under no obligation to give a hearing impaired person a carte blanche amount of your time.  But be polite and clear with anyone with whom a conversation has started.   You do not have to let them bend your ear, if they are on a subject that you would rather not get into.   But let what you do choose to say be said slowly. 

Fifth and last for those who hear normally is a very big don’t.  Don’t – please don’t ever say to a hearing impaired person, “Oh, never mind!”  Those words are deadly to us.  If you have been struggling to make one of us understand something you have said and do not appear to be succeeding, do not be dismissive by saying words to the effect “Oh, never mind, it isn’t that important.”  If it is important enough for you to bring the matter up in the first place and speak about it, it is important enough to get it across.  Please be responsible for your own communication.  What you are probably saying is “You, not what I’ve been trying to say, are not important enough for me to waste any more breath on you.”  To speak thusly is to disparage the person being addressed.  We who have severe hearing losses suffer enough sense of alienation as it is; please refrain from adding to it.  And make no mistake about it, hearing loss is the most alienating of all afflictions.  Any behavioral expert and certainly any ear doctor or audiologist will tell you this.  Someone who is blind experiences much of it, but at least he or she can follow conversation.  They are not cut off.  The same goes for a paraplegic.  But when one’s capacity to receive words being spoken is hampered, it makes one feel shut out.  And you can say “Oh, never mind” without ever uttering the words.  A facial expression or a bit of body language can say it.  A gesture of dismissal is not hard to come by and it hurts just as much as the spoken words.

Yes, sometimes making us understand is all but impossible, due to any one of a number of factors.  But if you see you’re not getting across, ask someone nearby to try a hand at it.  Get help.  It may be the shape of your voice or your accent or a speech mannerism peculiar to your ethnic group or your locality.  Someone else’s voice may be more compatible with the handicapped hearer’s range.  But never be dismissive.      

It should be pointed out, of course, that not all hearing incapacities are the same.  Some are more severe than others.  Some require more sophisticated hearing assistance than others.  My hearing aids are the top of the line, and no, I will not tell you how much I paid for them.  It is true that much of these  passionate feelings about communication that I have been sharing are conditioned by the severity of my impairment.  I have family and friends who have the same type of loss that requires aids but can function far better than I can in situations in which I am completely wiped out.  Not all of us are the same, but I trust any hearing impaired individual whom you might encounter to make it clear and plain to you what she or he requires in order to hold a coherent conversation with you.

 

Finally, I have a “do” for the hearing impaired.  Yes, I am talking to us in the club now!  Do be patient with those who are trying hard to make you hear.  Do not show arrogance or exasperation – and don’t you be dismissive.  I have had moments in my long history when I wanted to say, “Oh, never mind!  Trying to understand you is not worth the effort.”   We have to bear in mind that the person with whom we are trying to converse did not create our hearing problem.  No one is to blame.  And I often have a hard time remembering that if I had not undergone that inner ear damage and all the aftereffects of it, I would have had just as hard a time comprehending why volume increase is not enough or why it does not matter where the amplifiers are placed.  So let us, my sisters and brothers, be patient with the hearing world around us.  Let us be responsible for getting clear as to what is being said, however much trouble we must go through.  Hearing loss may be alienating, but do not accept alienation without a fight.  And find a way to hear as much as you can with your eyes.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Rain Man (Movie Review by Bob Racine

                         (2 hrs & 11 min, color, 1988)

An entire generation has been born and grown to adulthood since this prize possession of a motion picture put in its first appearance.  Anyone under thirty years of age has in all likelihood not seen it or at most has fleeting memories of it.  I was quite touched by the picture when it was first put into release in theaters, but when I recently viewed it again on a Netflix DVD, I was more than touched; I was profoundly enthralled.  And I found it easier to identify with the characters for a very personal reason, which I will now try to explain.

Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) is not the sort of individual with whom I would be likely to fraternize, if he were real and if he were in my vicinity.  He is something of a rogue yuppie living in Los Angeles, a fast-talking huckster of a salesman who thinks of himself as a smooth operator when in fact he is a bit rough, coarse and heavy-handed and ever so impulsive a manipulator.  His lowbrow impudence is matched by his raw nerve.  Right off the bat he and I have nothing in common – except for one very crucial thing: We are both, as far as we have been told, only children, the only offspring of our parents.  (Yes, now you know something about me!)  But how would it feel to discover by chance, as Charlie does, that somewhere I have a sibling from whom I have been forcibly separated?  It would be culture shock and future shock all in one payload. 

Upon the death of his estranged millionaire father (whom we never see), Charlie is informed that he has inherited nothing but an old Buick convertible and some flower bushes, while the three million dollars from the estate has been awarded to Raymond Babbitt, the autistic brother he never knew he had, a permanent resident in a mental institution in Cincinnati, Ohio that has been appointed keeper of the trust.  Charlie is so furious that by a clever ruse he succeeds in virtually kidnapping Raymond from the premises with the intent of holding him for ransom in the amount of half the estate, the half to which he feels he is entitled.  Of course Raymond does not comprehend that he is being kidnapped; he is just moving about with another caretaker.  This drastic action is spurred on by huge financial troubles with which Charlie is faced.  He is a car dealer and has imported four foreign cars which he incorrectly thought he could sell in a hurry at a reduced price but finds the EPA breathing down his neck and threatening confiscation if he does not meet their legal requirements within hours.                                         

The scheme, however, proves to be easier planned than executed, mostly because Raymond is deathly afraid of flying and Charlie can only get him back to California by driving across country in the old Buick convertible, thereby eating into the limited time he has before the EPA foreclosure.  Further complicating things is the fact that Raymond is a savant, in possession of a super computer brain, about which the self-possessed and self-serving Charlie is highly skeptical – at first.  What follows is probably the most unusual road picture sequence ever devised. 

The only emotion to which Raymond appears to be subject is extreme, irrational fear when he perceives he is faced with bodily harm.  Otherwise he evidences no gut experience of the things he learns by rote or the digested facts and quotes he repeats ad infinitum.  He is also fanatical about doing every little thing during the day at a specified time – eating, watching certain TV programs, going to bed, etc.  His life is precisely laid out in his mind and any deviation from the routine threatens to bring on a crisis, which Charlie is forced to deal with.  A reluctant party to the snatch is Charlie’s girlfriend Susanna (Valeria Golino), who is also employed by him in his fly-by-night car dealership and goes along for the ride until she sees that Charlie is not interested in Raymond as kin but as someone to exploit, and she cuts out. 

Many who saw “Rain Man” in the 1980s and 1990s mistakenly concluded that all autistic people are savants, with special powers of recall, which of course is not true.  Very few are.  The characters in the story are fictitious, but it needs to be noted that Barry Morrow, co-author of the original screenplay with Ronald Bass, based Raymond upon a true life individual he had met who was so gifted.  We can say, therefore, with some justification that Hoffman’s portrayal has a basis in fact.

Hoffman’s portrayal!  I could write pages and pages about it.  And so could he.  To create Raymond he had to abandon almost all conventional approaches to acting.  He had to walk a certain way quite unlike his usual style of ambulation.  He had to learn to play every scene without any eye contact, with either other characters in the picture or the audience.  But most difficult of all he had to perfect a manner of speech that scarcely ever changes pitch and has to sound like a mechanism triggered by external influences and do so without seeming to imitate a robotic voice from a sci-fi flick.  What comes out is something somewhere between a mutter and a drone with a nasal twang.  He brings it off and sustains it beautifully. 

The film’s dramatic power derives from a great use of contrast.  Charlie’s raging belligerence and fits of frustration play off of Raymond’s unexcitable and remote demeanor to pack quite a wallop.  This contrast by itself, however, could never have sufficed without Morrow’s and Bass’s brilliant script.  We are treated to some of the most incisive, amusing dialogue our ears will ever hear.   

Hoffman won the Best Actor Oscar, which he richly deserved, but I think Cruise was at least entitled to the nomination he did not get.  As far as I can perceive this could very well be his best performance on screen.  The role of Charlie could very easily have pushed a lesser actor over the top and made him overbearing and corny, but Cruise gets the balance just right.  He controls his own magnetism and force and finds quite a lot of nuance in his interpretation.  We have the veteran director Barry Levinson (of “Bugsy,” “Wag the Dog,” “Diner,” and many more) to thank for bringing it all together and giving it pace and push and clarity from scene to scene.  He and the Morrow/Bass writing team also won Oscars, as did the film for Best Picture. 

Charlie’s inward journey, as he slowly warms to the idea of caring for his brother and valuing him more than the money, is a joyride beyond words.  “Why didn’t somebody tell me I had a brother?”  At first he asks this in anger, but finally he does it in wonder and with at least the hint of gratitude.  In spite of the barriers a strange but wonderful bonding takes place.  I highly recommend it for everyone over the age of fifteen.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net