The Master of Suspense puts the pedal to the metal once again in SABOTEUR, another “double chase” spy thriller that doesn’t get the attention some of Alfred Hitchcock’s other films do, but should. I’ve always enjoyed the performance of Robert Cummings as the “ordinary man caught in an extraordinary situation”; his naturally laid-back, easygoing charm makes him perfect playing Barry Kane, accused of sabotaging a wartime aircraft plant and killing his best friend in the process, who winds up on a cross-country chase alongside reluctant heroine Priscilla Lane . SABOTEUR is certainly an important film in Hitchcock’s body of work for one important reason: it’s the director’s first film for Universal Pictures, a studio he’d have a long and profitable association with, and where he’d later create some of his finest movies.
SABOTEUR is in many respects a loose remake of Hitchcock’s THE 39 STEPS , transplanted to America and…
The 44th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set was the classic 1940 comedy, His Girl Friday.
Earlier this week, when I mentioned that Cary Grant’s Oscar-nominated work in Penny Serenade was not the equal of his work in comedies like The Awful Truth and The Philadelphia Story, quite a few people took the time to let me know that their favorite Cary Grant film remains His Girl Friday. And I can’t blame them. Not only does His Girl Friday feature Cary Grant at his best but it also features Rosalind Russell at her best too. Not only that but it’s also one of the best films to ever be directed by the great Howard Hawks. There are a lot of career bests to be found in His Girl Friday, and that’s not even counting a supporting cast that is full of some of the greatest character actors of the 1940s.
The film itself is a remake of The Front Page, that classic story of an editor trying to keep his star reporter from leaving the newspaper in order to get married. (Along the way, they not only manage to expose municipal corruption but also help to hide and exonerate a man who has escaped from death row.) The action moves fast, the dialogue is full of quips, and the whole thing is wonderfully cynical about … well, everything. The major difference between The Front Page and His Girl Friday is that the reporter is now a woman and she’s the ex-wife of the editor. When Cary Grant’s Walter Burns attempts to convince Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson to cover just one last story, he’s not only trying to hold onto his star reporter. He’s also trying to keep the woman he loves from marrying the decent but boring Bruce Baldwin.
Bruce, incidentally, is played by Ralph Bellamy. Bellamy also played Grant’s romantic rival in The Awful Truth. To a certain extent, you really do have to feel bad for Ralph. He excelled at playing well-meaning but dull characters. As played by Bellamy, you can tell that Bruce would be a good husband in the most uninspiring of ways. That’s the problem. Hildy deserves more than just a life of boring conformity and Walter understands that. Not only do Walter and Hildy save the life of escaped convict Earl Williams but, in doing so, Hildy is also saved from a life of being conventional.
As we all know, it’s fashionable right now to attack the news media. Quite frankly, modern media often makes it very easy to do so. For that matter, so do a lot of a movies about the media. To take just two of the more acclaimed examples, there’s a smugness and a self-importance to both Good Night and Good Luck and Spotlightthat becomes more and more obvious with each subsequent viewing. (Admittedly, Edward R. Murrow was prominent way before my time but, if he was anything like the pompous windbag who was played by David Strathairn, I’m surprised that television news survived.) Far too often, it seems like well-intentioned filmmakers, in their attempt to defend the media, end up making movies that only serve to remind people why the can’t stand the old media in the first place.
Those filmmakers would do well to watch and learn from a film like His Girl Friday. His Girl Friday is a cheerfully dark film that is full of cynical journalists who drink too much and have little use for the type of self-congratulation that permeates through a film like Spotlight. Ironically, you end up loving the journalists in His Girl Friday because the film never demands that you so much as even appreciate them. There are no long speeches about the importance of journalism or long laments about how non-journalists just aren’t smart enough to appreciate their local newspaper. Instead, these journalists are portrayed as hard workers and driven individuals who do a good job because deliberately doing anything else is inconceivable. They don’t have time to pat themselves on the back because they’re too busy doing their job and hopefully getting results.
If you want to see a film that will truly make you appreciate journalism and understand why freedom of the press is important, watch this unpretentious comedy from Howard Hawks.
The 16th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set was 1940’s Dr. Kildare’s Strange Case. It’s about a doctor who investigates a medical case and wow, is it ever a strange case.
Apparently, there was a whole series of Dr. Kildare films that were released in the 30s and 40s. I guess the films were the cinematic equivalent of a TV show like Grey’s Anatomy or ER or Children’s Hospital or… well, every medical show that’s ever shown up on TV since the beginning of time. Dr. James Kildare (Lew Ayres) is a passionate young doctor who may break the rules but he gets results! His mentor is Dr. Gillipsie. Gillipsie is played by Lionel Barrymore and since the character is cranky and confined to a wheelchair, it was impossible for me to watch him without thinking about Mr. Potter from It’s A Wonderful Life. Whenever Kildare went to him for advise, I kept expecting Gillipsie to glare at him and say, “You once called me a warped old man…”
Anyway, Dr. Kildare works in a hospital and, when he’s not silently judging everyone else that he works with, he’s busy silently judging the wealthy Dr. Lane (Sheppard Strudwick), a brain surgeon whose patients keep dying. Kildare and Lane are also both in love with the same nurse, Mary Lamont (Laraine Day). Mary wants to marry Kildare but Kildare would rather be poor and single than compromise his medical principles. Lane, on the other hand, sends her a box full of silk stockings. Plus, he’s rich!
Seriously, how is this even a competition? Forget Kildare and marry Lane!
Except, as I mentioned earlier, all of Lane’s patients keep dying. Is Lane incompetent or, as Kildare suggests, is it possible that brain surgery is just really, really hard? I imagine it was even harder in 1940, when this movie was being made. While Kildare and Lane are operating on brains, Dr. Gillipsie is still using leeches to suck sickness out of the poorer patients.
(You don’t actually see it happen in the movie but Gillipsie comes across as being a leech man.)
Anyway, eventually, Kildare has to cure a schizophrenic and it turns out that he can do this by putting the man into an insulin coma. As is explained in great detail, forcibly putting a patient in a coma will cause that patient’s mind to go back to a reset point. It’s kind of like how Windows sets up a restore point before doing a major update.
And that therapy sounds so crazy that you just know it had to be based in an actual practice. I checked with Wikipedia and I was not shocked to discover that apparently Insulin Shock Therapy used to be a thing!
Anyway, Kildare’s gets into a lot of trouble for putting his patient into a coma and attempting to erase a huge part of his mind. Will Kildare’s results vindicate his methods or will Gillipsie have to use leeches to suck the crazy out of the patient’s brain?
Watch the film to find out! Or don’t. Dr. Kildare’s Strange Case was directed by Harold S. Bucquet, who did a pretty good job with The Adventures of Tartu. His direction here is flat and uninspired, which only serves to make this entire film feel like an old TV show. I’m tempted to recommend the movie just because of the scene where it’s explained that insulin shock therapy causes patients to devolve so that they can re-evolve but otherwise, Dr. Kildare’s Strange Case is forgettable.
If you want to see it, you can watch it below!
Or you can just watch this classic episode of Children’s Hospital!
Through the Shattered Lens 