Movie Review: Edge Of Darkness (1943)

A World War Two drama, Edge Of Darkness is a stirring tale of resistance in a small Norwegian village.

In the occupied Norwegian fishing community of Trollness, all the residents and all the stationed German troops are found dead. The events of the prior week are revealed in flashback. 

The German commander Koenig (Helmut Dantine) maintains order through intimidation, and his soldiers keep close tabs on the restless villagers, including resistance sympathizers Gunnar Brogge (Errol Flynn), a fisher, and his lover Karen Stensgard (Ann Sheridan). But not all the residents are hostile. Cannery owner Kaspar Torgersen (Charles Dingle) is a German collaborator. Karen's father Martin (Walter Huston) is the village's only doctor and stays neutral, while his wife Anna (Ruth Gordon) is borderline delusional. The innkeeper Gerd Bjarnesen (Judith Anderson) lost her husband to the war and is fending off a German soldier's unwanted romantic advances. 

Gunnar and Karen learn the Allies will drop off a weapons cache from the sea. The villagers are only able to communicate at secret meetings, and have to decide whether to unite, organize and take up arms against the occupiers while guarding against the threat of informers.

An adaptation of the book by William Woods, Edge Of Darkness is an engrossing multi-character drama. The Robert Rossen screenplay patiently explores the tensions simmering among residents chafing under the Nazi occupation, and director Lewis Milestone keeps the story moving, using most of the two hours to delve into the challenge of uniting a group towards a common purpose as the fuse is lit for a raucous climax.

From the opening sequence showing dead bodies strewn all across the village, Edge Of Darkness sets itself apart as a grim and uncompromising view of war. Despite propaganda objectives to rally anti-Nazi support when the war's outcome was very much in doubt, the story rises above shallow pedagogy by avoiding crass emotions and histrionics. Instead Milestone gets down to the pragmatic business of occupiers and the occupied engaged in a deadly game of mental and physical manoeuvring for intimidation and control.

The underlying theme is strength in unity, and despite the presence of stars Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan, they have relatively limited roles. Gunnar and Karen are just two of the many villagers making up a community with diverse viewpoints on how to deal with a well-armed occupying force. And while businessman and factory owner Torgersen is easy to dislike as an all-in collaborator, the grey middle zone of uncertainty is most compelling. 

Doctor Stensgard, his mentally suffering wife Anna, and the church pastor are among prominent citizens unsure whether carrying guns and charging at the Germans is the wisest course of action, while elderly and retired school teacher Andersen (Morris Carnovsky) seeks an independent method of resistance.

In addition to debates between here-and-now action and pick-the-right moment strategy, an undercover agent adds intrigue, while the weaponization of sex features in the story of Polish captive Katja (Nancy Coleman) and a harrowing rape incident. The narrative depth extends to commander Koenig's own ambitions and disillusionment with his superiors.

When the time comes for the bullets to fly, Milestone and cinematographer Sid Hickox deploy gliding camera work to capture a village turning into a battlefield. Filled with human-centred intrigue, Edge Of Darkness is a sharp moment of reckoning.



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Movie Review: And Then There Were None (1945)

A multiple murder mystery, And Then There Were None adapts the Agatha Christie 1939 novel with a distinct lack of passion.

Eight guests assemble at an isolated island off the coast of England, where a single large mansion dominates the landscape. The guests are strangers to each other and include Judge Quincannon (Barry Fitzgerald), Dr. Armstrong (Walter Huston), Philip Lombard (Louis Hayward), Emily Brent (Judith Anderson) and Vera Claythorne (June Duprez). They were all invited to the island by the mysterious Mr. U.N. Owen, who appears to be absent from his own house. Two frazzled servants, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers (Richard Hayn and Queenie Leonard), hired just for the weekend, welcome the guests.

Mr. Rogers plays a recording in which Owen accuses each of the assembled guests of being responsible for a crime in which one or more people died. Soon the guests start dying one by one under mysterious circumstances, following the ghoulish Ten Little Indians nursery rhyme. As each death occurs, one of 10 Indian figurines disappears from the dining table centrepiece. The guests search the island to try and find Owen, before realizing the murderer must be one of their own and they start suspecting each other.

Directed by René Clair, And Then Were None is functional and methodical, but has aged poorly and never comes close to resonating. While the windswept island and the mazy mansion provide an effective setting, and Christie's source material is strong, the film is devoid of everything else needed to create a compelling cinematic experience. The film settles down to a metronomic routine of roughly one death every eight minutes, and the execution is nothing short of frigid.

The film is 97 minutes long, and would have benefitted from a longer length to better delve into the backgrounds of at least some of the assembled guests. Instead, the characters are never developed beyond Clue board game definitions, and they remain cardboard representations. Who dies next is of barely any consequence, because the victims are just about interchangeable and barely introduced before being knocked off.

Clair also does not try to inject any level of tension: all the deaths occur off-screen, the bodies are discovered with hardly any sort of reaction, and its quickly on to the next perfunctory and emotionless scene.

None of the cast members are provided the opportunity to shine, sharing the screen time in unsatisfactory snippets and defaulting to theatricality in the absence of depth.

For audiences unfamiliar with Christie's typical but still ingenious sting in the tale there may be enough interest sustained until the murderer is finally revealed, but for everyone else, the film becomes a test of survival where the sooner everybody dies already, the better.

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Movie Review: The North Star (1943)

A pro-Soviet propaganda film intended to whip up sympathy for the war effort against Germany, The North Star (also known as Armored Attack) is a cringe-inducing dud.

It's 1941, and the Nazis are about to invade the idyllic farming village of North Star in western Ukraine, part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Before the shooting starts, five youth from the village embark on a trip to the capital Kiev, including Marina (Anne Baxter), her would-be lover Kolya (Farley Granger), Clavdia (Jane Withers) and Kolya's older brother and conscripted soldier Damian (Dana Andrews).

The travellers don't make it very far: the Nazi's attack with bombing raids, tanks and troops. The village is occupied before it can be burned down. In the face of Nazi atrocities including forcing local children to donate blood, the villagers have to scatter to join the nascent resistance movement.

Produced by Samuel Goldwyn, directed by Lewis Milestone and written by Lillian Hellman, The North Star is unabashed agitprop. Despite the high budget and respected cast, Milestone delivers a painfully bad cinematic experience devoid of any artistic merit.

The first half is preoccupied with portraying Ukrainian villagers living under the Soviet boot as happy simple folks, and it's punctuated by ghastly singing and dancing interludes straight out of amateur high school plays. The fingers-on-the-chalkboard level of irritation is enhanced by inane nationalistic dialogue, ham-fisted delivery and enough over-sugared sentiment to kill a horse.

Once the Nazis make an appearance, the music mercifully stops and the fighting starts. The second half improves, but it's a really low bar to step over. As a story of guerilla warfare and peasants taking up arms, The North Star lacks anything resembling thoughtfulness, nuance or genuine emotion. This is an in-your-face sophomoric effort intended to rally the home front, and Milestone can't even get the basics right: the battle scenes, tactics and consequences are asinine.

Everyone from the children to the old geezers lustily and blindly buys into the die-for-your-country hokum. Given the general level of near unwatchable incompetence, the film boasts a remarkable cast collectively performing at their worst, consumed by Hellman's fatuous prose. Anne Baxter leads the way with one of the many overwrought eyes-dreamily-to-the-stars performances on display. Walter Huston is a local doctor tangling with Erich von Stroheim's Nazi surgeon, while Walter Brennan is a stereotypical crusty farmer-on-a-wagon.

The North Star is not bad because it's propaganda; it's bad because it's a wretchedly awful film.

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Movie Review: The Outlaw (1943)

A Western drama, The Outlaw is a ridiculously uneven mishmash of love, sex and violence.

In the dusty town of Lincoln, New Mexico, Doc Holliday (Walter Huston) reunites with his friend Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell), who was recently appointed town sheriff. Doc soon tangles with notorious outlaw Billy the Kid (Jack Buetel), who has stolen Doc's horse. But Doc and Billy strike up a friendship, much to the disgust of Garrett.

The relationship between the three men is further complicated by Doc's girlfriend Rio McDonald (Jane Russell), who would like to kill Billy because he previously murdered her brother. Instead, while Doc is away distracting Garrett's posse, Rio and Billy fall in love when she helps him recuperate from a gunshot wound. Garrett, Doc, Billy and Rio eventually catch up with each other and collectively have to survive an encounter with Mescalero Apaches.

Directed by Howard Hughes, The Outlaw achieves a level of awfulness that has to be seen to be believed. Prolonged, boring, oscillating wildly between juvenile comedy and blatant sexuality, saddled with a stupendously bad music score, featuring amateurish acting, directing, editing and lighting, Hughes' only objective in making The Outlaw was to showcase Russell's cleavage. The subsequent notoriety and censorship scandal, fanned by Hughes, turned the much-delayed movie into must-see event. By contemporary standards what appears on the screen is tame, leaving only a mess of a film splattered all over the walls.

While the censors were abuzz about Russell, Hughes slipped by them an unambiguous gay love triangle between Garrett, Doc and Billy, with Doc's abandonment of Garrett in favour of the younger Billy the cause of all the drama. Also in the mix is one in-the-dark rape scene and another prelude-to-sex scene between Rio and Billy, both creaking with melodrama and dreadful camera dynamics. The actual slow moving and repetitive story spends an outlandish amount of time rehashing arguments about who owns a horse, the film adding outright but unintended parody to its abominable genre mix. A brief, non sequitur episode with Apache Indians is thrown in just because.

Russell, in her debut at l9 years old when The Outlaw was filmed in 1940, is ironically one of the least bad things in the film, and she went on to salvage a career. Poor Jack Buetel must have thought that he was on his way to stardom after Hughes plucked him from obscurity, placed him under a long term contract and offered him the nominal lead role of Billy the Kid. Buetel wears the same expression throughout the film, and Hughes refused to allow him to act again. Thomas Mitchell and Walter Huston offer typically dependable performances that deserved a much better movie.

The Outlaw is a classic example of a more modern theme: famous for being famous, the film is lurid attention-seeking trash.

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Movie Review: The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (1948)

A classic tale of greed and the influence of sudden great wealth on those ill-equipped to handle it, The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre is a marvellous achievement. Director John Huston crafts an epic exploration of human nature, Humphrey Bogart is spellbinding in a transformational performance, and Walter Huston, lovingly directed by his son, delivers a career-defining performance.

Dobbs (Bogart) is an American drifter, scratching out a living in a small Mexican town in the 1920s. He meets Curtin (Tim Holt), a younger American in much the same situation. The two men appear to meet some good fortune when they are hired for a few days of well-paid labour by the businessman McCormick, but he cheats them out of their wages. Reduced to sleeping in a shelter, Dobbs and Curtin meet Howard (Walter Huston), a grizzled gold prospector who has found and lost several fortunes. His talk of heading to the hills and striking gold resonates with the younger men as an adventure if not a plan.

The three men head off into the surrounding hills and as the remote terrain gets harder, the older Howard is in his element. Eventually he hits the bull's eye, finding a rich deposit of gold deep in the mountains. Once the three men start mining, Dobbs' real personality emerges, causing deep divisions and mistrust. Prospector Cody (Bruce Bennett) shows up uninvited and offers to help, but trouble in the form of Mexican bandits is not far behind.

Huston directed and wrote the screenplay based on the book by the mysterious B. Traven. The narrative cleverly steers Howard, Dobbs, and Curtin to their chosen destinies, although not on any path they selected, the treasure proving to be a passageway but not an objective. Howard, of course, knows this already. Whether he is monetarily rich or not makes no difference, his life's pleasure fueled by sequential quests.

It's a different story for Dobbs and Curtin, who are new at the prospecting game. They will both discover for the first time who they really are, as the gold accelerates the revelation of the men's hidden values.

Huston composes every frame with artistic flare, finding camera angles to enhance the storytelling and add to the growing tension. The initial scenes of interaction between Dobbs, Curtin and Howard are brilliant examples of a master director's unobtrusive hand. Dobbs and Curtin are always in the frame together, facing Howard as the third point of the triangle, the catalyst who will help them understand their true selves.

Humphrey Bogart is captivating as he embarks on a dark descent into Dobbs' soul. In one of his most complex and satisfying screen roles, Bogart keeps Dobbs' anxieties well hidden until the discovery of the gold, then expertly and gradually delves into the corners of the psyche where self-destructive evil thoughts are harboured.

Walter Huston as Howard is the heart of the movie, an old man who has long since learned the impact of gold on weak personalities. Huston conveys the thrill of looking for and finding treasure; what happens afterwards is almost inconsequential, as he is just as happy losing a fortune to start the process of finding the next one.

Tim Holt, who spent most of his career in western movies, plays an earnest Curtin, and emerges as the perfect counterbalance to Bogart's Dobbs. Younger and less saddled with life's disappointments, Curtin is the innocent subject of Dobbs' growing lack of trust as it deforms into violence. Curtin has to first find and then hold onto his principles, and the gold adventure leads him to his dream but along a most convoluted path.

With masterful artistry, The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre exposes gold's most important property: reflecting back the character of the men who hold it.

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