Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: The Caine Mutiny (dir by Edward Dmytryk)

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s the 1940s and World War II is raging. The U.S. Navy is model of military discipline and efficiency. Well, except for the U.S.S. Caine, that is. The Caine is something of a disorganized mess, where no one takes his job seriously and sailors have names like Meatball (Lee Marvin) and Horrible (Claude Akins). The men love Lt. Commander DeVriess (Tom Tully), largely because he has given up on trying to enforce any sort of discipline. However, DeVriess has recently been relieved of his command. As he leaves, Meatball gives him a new watch, a gift from all the men. DeVriess admonishes them, snapping that the gift is violation of Naval regulations. He then puts the watch on his wrist and leaves the ship.

DeVriess’s replacement is Captain Francis Queeg and, at first, we have reason to be hopeful because Captain Queeg is being played by Humphrey Bogart. Surely, if anyone can get this ship into shape, it’ll be Humphrey Bogart! From the moment he arrives, Queeg announces that he’s going to enforce discipline on the Caine and if that means spending hours yelling at a man for not having his shirt tucked in, that’s exactly what Queeg is prepared to do. However, it also quickly becomes apparent that the awkward Queeg has no idea how to talk to people. He is also overly sensitive and quick to take offense. Whenever Queeg makes a mistake (and he does make a few), he’s quick to blame everyone else.

Realizing that the men are turning against him, Queeg even begs his officers for their help. He asks them if they have any suggestions. They all sit silently, their heads bowed as Queeg somewhat poignantly rambles on about how his wife and his dog both like him but the crew of the Caine does not.

Queeg’s officers are a diverse bunch, none of whom are quite sure what to make of Queeg or the state of the Caine. Ensign Willie Keith (Robert Francis) is a wealthy graduate of Princeton University who, at first, likes Queeg but quickly comes to doubt his abilities. On the other hand, Lt. Steve Marsyk (Van Johnson) has doubts about Queeg from the start but, as a career Navy man, his natural instinct is to respect the chain of command above all else.

And then there’s Lt. Tom Keefer (Fred MacMurray). Keefer is a self-styled intellectual, a novelist who is always quick with a snarky comment and a cynical observation. (If The Caine Mutiny were remade as a B-horror film, Lt. Keefer’s name would probably be Lt. Sardonicus.) From the minute the viewers meet Lt. Keefer, our inclination is to like him. After all, he seems to be the only person in the film who has a sense of humor. If we had to pick someone to have dinner with, most of us would definitely pick the erudite Tom Keefer over the humorless and socially awkward Francis Queeg. As such, when Keefer starts to suggest that Queeg might be mentally unstable, our natural impulse is to agree with him.

It’s Tom Keefer who first suggests that it may be necessary to take the command away from Queeg. And yet, when it comes time to take action, it’s Keith and Marsyk who do so while Keefer stands to the side and quietly watches. And, once the Caine arrives back in the U.S., it Keith and Marsyk who are court martialed. Will they be found guilty of treason or will their lawyer, Lt. Barney Greenwald (Jose Ferrer), prove that Queeg was unfit for command?

Made in 1954 and based on a novel by Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny is one of those big and glossy 1950s productions that holds up a lot better than you might expect. The film has its flaws. In the role of Keith, Robert Francis is a bit on the dull side and a subplot in which he courts May Wynn feels unneccessary and only serves to distract from the main story. But, for the most part, it’s an intelligent and well-directed film. Humphrey Bogart turns Queeg into a pathetic and lonely figure and you can’t help but feel sorry for him when he talks about how his dog loves him. Van Johnson also does well as Marsyk, effectively portraying a well-meaning character who is in over his head. Jose Ferrer gets a great drunk scene at the end of the film and, of course, you can’t go wrong with Lee Marvin as a smirking sailor, even if Marvin only appears for a handful of minutes.

But for me, my favorite character (and performance) was Fred MacMurray’s Tom Keefer. Technically, Keefer is not meant to be a likable character. He’s totally passive aggressive. He’s pretentious. He’s smug. At times, he’s rather cowardly. And yet, Tom Keefer remains the most memorable and interesting character in the entire film. He gets all of the good one-lines and MacMurray delivers them with just the right amount of barely concealed venom. (“If only the strawberries were poisoned…” he says as he considers dinner aboard the Caine.) It’s a great role and Fred MacMurray gives a great performance. And you know what? I don’t care how bad a character he may have been. I still want to read Tom Keefer’s book!

The Caine Mutiny was nominated for best picture of 1954. However, it lost to On The Waterfront.

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #16: Double Indemnity (dir by Billy Wilder)

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1944 best picture nominee Double Indemnity is probably one of the most imitated films ever made. While it may not be the first film noir, it is one of the most influential and its plot has been duplicated in countless films. In fact, it’s such an influential film that all one has to do is say, “Indemnity” and you automatically know that they’re talking about murder.

Most people assume that the film is the story of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), an insurance agent who thinks that he’s smarter and smoother than he actually is. When Phyllis Deitrich (Barbara Stanwyck) approaches him with questions about how much her husband’s life insurance would pay off if his death was accidental, Walter immediately figures out that she’s talking about murder. At first, Walter tells her that he’s not interested but actually he’s very interested. Soon, he and Phyllis are lovers (though Walter, from the start, seems to know that Phyllis is just using him) and he’s plotting out her husband’s murder. After he does kill Phyllis’s husband, Walter makes it look as if he fell from a train. At first, the death is ruled a suicide but, just as Walter hoped, his best friend and fellow insurance agent, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), announces that it wouldn’t make any sense for a suicidal man to jump from a slow-moving train. Instead, Keyes successfully argues that the death should be ruled an accident and, as a result, the life insurance pays out for double of its value.

However, the money makes Walter paranoid. He starts to worry that Phyllis will betray him. Even worse, he’s approached by the dead man’s daughter, Lola (Jean Heather). Lola tells Walter that she believes that Phyllis not only killed her father but her mother as well. Soon, Walter is involved with both Lola and Phyllis. Walter claims that he feels guilty and protective of Lola but MacMurray’s wonderfully ambiguous performance leaves us wondering just how much we should trust anything that he has to say.

Now, as I said before, the film may be narrated by Walter Neff and it may be set into motion by his affair with Phyllis but ultimately, the film is not about his relationship with Phyllis. Instead, it’s about Walter’s friendship with Barton Keyes. When we first see Walter, he’s recording a confession specifically for Keyes to hear and the film ends not with Walter and Phyllis but instead with Walter and Keyes.

In many ways, Keyes is the opposite of Walter. Whereas Walter is slick and amoral, Keyes is rather nerdy and ethical to a fault. Walter respects Keyes for his brilliant mind and, to a large extent, he does what he does because he wants to prove that he’s just as smart as Keyes. Keyes is the type of man that Walter aspires to be while Walter is the dark side of Keyes’s own obsession with mystery. It’s only appropriate that the film ends with Walter and Keyes because, ultimately, their friendship is the heart of the film.

Double Indemnity is a classic. Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray set the standard by which all future illicit couples would be judged. But really, the film is stolen by Edward G. Robinson. Over the course of his long and remarkable career, Robinson was never once nominated for an Oscar. Watching Double Indemnity, you can’t help but wonder how such an injustice could have happened.

Lisa Watches The Oscar Winners: The Apartment (dir by Billy Wilder)

Posted on February 18, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

After the Nun’s Story, I continued to experience TCM’s 31 Days of Oscar by watching the 1960 best picture winner, The Apartment. The Apartment is unique among Oscar winners in that it’s one of the few comedies to win best picture. (Though, in all honesty, it would probably be more appropriate to call The Apartment a dramedy.) It was also, until the victory of The Artist, the last completely black-and-white film to win best picture.

(And, as long as we’re sharing trivia, it was also the first best picture winner to feature a character watching a previous best picture winner. At the start of the film, Jack Lemmon deals with insomnia by watching Grand Hotel.)

The Apartment tells the story of C.C. “Bud” Baxter (Jack Lemmon), an anonymous officer worker who is determined to climb the corporate ladder despite not being very good at his job. However, Baxter does have one advantage over his co-workers. He’s single and therefore, his apartment has become the place to go for corporate executives who need a place where they can safely cheat on their wives. Bud spends his day trying to coordinate who is going to be in his apartment and when. Meanwhile, he spends his nights exiled from his own home and wandering around New York. In fact, the only beneficial thing about this arrangement is that all of Bud’s supervisors have been giving him good evaluations in return for using his apartment. (Well, that and Bud’s neighbor, played by Jack Kruschen, is convinced, based on the thinness of the apartment walls, that Bud must be a great lover.)

When Bud finally does get his promotion, it’s only because the personnel director, Jeff D. Sheldrake (an amazingly sleazy Fred MacMurray), wants to use Bud’s apartment. Bud celebrates his promotion by finally working up the courage to ask out Fran (Shirley MacClaine), an elevator operator who works in the office. What Bud doesn’t realize is that Fran is also the woman who Sheldrake wants to bring to the apartment….

Fran is convinced that Sheldrake is going to leave his wife for her. What she doesn’t realize — and what Fred MacMurray’s performance makes disturbingly clear — is that Jeff Sheldrake is basically just a guy having a midlife crisis. He’s the type of middle-aged guy that every woman has had to deal with at some point, the guy who pulls up next to you in a red convertible and stares at you from behind his sunglasses, attempting his best to entice you into helping him relive the youth that he never had. When Fran eventually learns the truth about Sheldrake, it leads both to near tragedy and to Bud having to decide whether he wants to be a decent human being or if he wants to keep climbing the corporate ladder.

When one looks over a chronological list of all of the best picture winners, it’s a bit strange to see The Apartment listed in between Ben-Hur and West Side Story. As opposed to those two grandly produced and vibrantly colorful films, The Apartment is a rather low-key film, one that devotes far more time to characterization than to spectacle. And while both Ben-Hur and West Side Story are ultimately very idealistic films, The Apartment is about as cynical as a film can get. The Apartment may be a comedy but the laughs come from a place of profound sadness.

Because it’s more interested in people than in spectacle, The Apartment holds up better than many past best picture winners. We’ve all known someone like Bud. We’ve all had to deal with men like Sheldrake. And, in one way or another, we all know what it’s like to be someone like Fran. The Apartment remains a truly poignant and relevant film.

Shattered Politics #21: Kisses For My President (dir by Curtis Bernhardt)

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

If there’s anyone who deserves to be the subject of a big budget biopic, it’s Victoria C. Woodhull. Back in the 19th century, at a time when women were not even allowed to vote, Victoria C. Woodhull was not only the first woman to ever work as a stockbroker but also the first to ever found her own newspaper. A fierce advocate for women’s right and free love, Victoria Woodhull was also the first woman to ever run for President. She was nominated in 1872 by the Equal Rights Party and, for the crime of trying to cast a vote for herself, she spent election day in jail.

Since that day, many more women have run for President but none have been elected. Since 1984, two women have received major party nominations for vice president but neither came close to being elected. Since 1964, Margaret Chase Smith, Shirley Chisholm, Patsy Mink, Ellen McCormack, Patricia Schroeder, Elizabeth Dole, Carol Mosely-Braun, Michele Bachman, and Hillary Rodham Clinton have all campaigned for the presidential nomination of one of the two major political parties but none of them have been nominated.

I do believe that a woman will be elected President within my lifetime. In fact, it could even happen in 2016. But until then, the only place where you can find a female President is on TV and in the movies.

Take, for instance, today’s final entry in Shattered Politics, the 1964 film Kisses For My President. This may very well have been the very first movie to feature a woman as President. Needless to say, in 1964, this idea was considered so outrageous that it had to be played for laughs.

Kisses For My President starts with an image of hundreds of women chanting “We want Leslie!” We get a shot of Fred MacMurray looking out over the crowd. The next scene, the new President is being sworn in. We start with a close-up of the chief justice reciting the oath of office to “Leslie Harrison McCloud.” The camera pans over to Fred MacMurray, listening intently. However, just when 1964 audiences were expecting MacMurray to swear to uphold the constitution, the camera pans yet again, over to …. Polly Bergen!

“OH MY GOD!” audiences in 1964 gasped, “LESLIE McCLOUD IS A WOMAN!”

That’s right. Polly Bergen is playing President Leslie McCloud and Fred MacMurray is playing her husband, Thad. As the film makes apparent in its opening scenes, Thad is not quite sure what his role is supposed to be. He has an office in the White House but it’s just so … feminine! And it’s full of painting of previous first ladies who were all ladies! And, at one point, Thad even imagines a picture of himself wearing a lady’s hat!

Oh my God!

Now, to be fair to the movie, Polly Bergen does get a few scenes where she shows herself to be a strong President. There’s a great scene where she coolly dismisses a condescending senator (Edward Andrews) who suggests that, as a woman, Leslie might not be up to the task of standing up to America’s enemies. It’s a brief scene but it’s a good one.

But, ultimately, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Kisses For My President, a film about the first female President, is mostly interested in how Thad handles being “first gentleman.” It’s a film that imagines a historic moment for women and then focuses on what it would mean for one man.

How 1964!

On the one hand, Kisses For My President is a dated comedy that runs way too long and tries to get too much mileage out of one joke (i.e., Fred MacMurray looking confused). However, the film also features a great performance from Eli Wallach. Playing a strutting dictator named Vasquez, Wallach is a lot of fun and the scenes where MacMurray shows him around Washington are the best in the film. I also appreciated the fact that the President’s daughter reacts to the restrictions of living in the White House by dating a guy that she knows her parents will hate, largely because I would have done the same thing in her situation.

I’m a little bit torn on the ending of Kisses For My President. (Should I spoil it? No, I don’t think I will.) On the one hand, it’s outrageously sexist and seems to suggests that Leslie — despite being a strong President during the few times we actually get to see her doing the job — should have been content to just be a wife and mother. On the other hand, it’s one of those endings that would seem to perfectly capture the dominant culture of the time when the film was made. So, it has some worth from a historical point of view.

When last I checked, Kisses For My President is currently available for free on YouTube. The film is interesting as a historical document if nothing else.