For The American Scholar, I've posted short essays on the movies I've listed here. Here are links to, and brief excerpts from, the articles:
-- Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-shadow-of-evil/#.Xn5LrNJKiM8 ("The Shadow of Evil")
<<< Horror is what we feel witnessing the aftermath of a fatal car wreck. Terror is what we feel in anticipation of something terrible that has not yet happened.
What Cape Fear (1962) offers is a pure example of a third kind of sensation, one that attracts even as it repels: menace. Menace is Robert Mitchum as Max Cady, newly released from an eight-year prison sentence, a cigar in his mouth and a Panama hat on his head, into the heat of summer in a small, southern town. Cady embodies evil and Mitchum embodies Cady, a character who is as cunning as he is vicious.
Although he plays an unreformed sex offender who beats up women and has no business gaining control of the viewer’s attention, Cape Fear is Mitchum’s picture from the moment he appears on the scene, confronting the attorney who put him behind bars. “Hello, Counselor. Remember me?” Cady is back with a vengeance. >>
-- William Holden, in two POW films, Stalag 17 and The Bridge on the River Kwai
https://theamericanscholar.
The slam-bang conclusion of The Bridge on the River Kwai is magnificent, and I shall say nothing more about it here except to reveal that the movie’s last word is “madness!” At the end of Stalag 17, Sefton takes wire-cutters to cut through the barbed wire, rescue a lieutenant the Germans want to kill, and guide the two of them to freedom. Duke: “The crud did it.” Harry Shapiro: “I’d like to know what made him do it.” Animal: “Maybe he just wanted to steal our wire cutters. Ever think of that?” >>>
<<< A great scene: lovesick Peggy confronts her parents, saying they can’t understand her because they “never had any trouble.” To which Milly responds, turning to Al: “We never had any trouble. How many times have I told you I hated you, and believed it in my heart? How many times have you said you were sick and tired of me, that we were all washed up? How many times have we had to fall in love all over again?”
I am always moved by a scene in which Fred climbs aboard a discarded bomber, his “office” during the war, which is now rusting in an aircraft boneyard. The scene has no words, just music, as Fred sits and stares into his turbulent past and blank future. This may be my favorite moment in the film, but there are others very nearly as affecting, including the one in which, at a formal dinner of bank officers and trustees, Al gulps down too many highballs but manages not to hiccup when he makes a speech that begins unsteadily but ends with eloquence. >>>
The Killing ends with the greatest money shot in the movies, its nearest competition being the shower of love bestowed on James Stewart on Christmas Eve at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. Johnny (Sterling Hayden) and Fay (Coleen Gray) are at the airport about to board a flight to Boston and freedom. He doesn’t want to let go of the suitcase, but it is too big for the overhead compartment, so he reluctantly yields it. He and Fay watch the suitcase totter atop the checked luggage in the cart taking it from terminal to plane. When a spectator’s dog runs into the cart’s path, the driver swerves, and the suitcase falls off. It pops opens, and the money flies around like snow in a swirling wind.
The set-up has been executed perfectly and yet, because of a stray event, a tiny happenstance, all is for naught—all the blood spilled, all the careful calculation.
>>>
Next time how about adding "The Stranger" by and with Orson Welles -the great man at his most sinister, controlled, subtle, derailing a suburban idyll, with E.G. Robinson a perfect, wily foil.
Posted by: Caroline Seebohm | March 28, 2020 at 07:48 AM
Great suggestion. Robinson and Welles are at their best. I wouldn't call it a "suburban idyll," as it takes place in a picture-postcard Connecticut village, site of an exclusive boys' prep school. Loretta Young's father is a supreme court justice. I wrote about the movie in my book about Paul de Man, "Signs of the Times," because of certain parallels between the Yale professor and the Welles figure (Franz Kindler, I think). Best moment: when Ed ward G. wakes up in the middle of the night and realizes who the Nazi is, because at dinner the night before he had said "But Marx wasn't a German, he was a Jew." --DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | March 28, 2020 at 11:40 AM
And ,as always, Casablanca, Rebecca, Citizen Kane, Random Harvest, and remember? The Scarlet Pimpernal and That Hamilton Woman.
Posted by: Grace Schulman | March 28, 2020 at 02:06 PM
You're right. Thank you, Grace. -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | March 29, 2020 at 04:02 PM