I finally saw It’s A Wonderful Life last week. I opted out years ago in protest of Ted Turner’s colorized version, and then it just annoyed me when it was on 24 hours a day throughout December in the 1990s. By the time that ended, not having seen it had become a test of wills; Matt vs. The World, Christmas edition. But I’ve finally decided that it’s time to finally see this classic film and find out what the fuss is all about.

Of course, I already knew most of the story. You can’t get away from it that absolutely; after all, the story’s been re-used several times. The fun was watching the details that haven’t made it into the cultural database.

The first two thirds of the movie was pretty darn good. I appreciated how George Bailey had grand plans that kept getting interrupted by his sense of duty to others. He didn’t get to college, he didn’t get a honeymoon, he didn’t get to have a lot of money or go to cities around the world or do anything he’d planned. Instead he compromised, and compromised, and compromised.

Not that that’s a bad thing. That’s just the way life happens sometimes.

I wasn’t feeling the last third of the movie, though. From the time Clarence hit the ground on, it took a turn that was a bit too optimistic for me, and a bit narcissistic. I mean, according to Clarence’s reality, no other boy could have saved George’s brother, and Mary would have turned into an old maid who couldn’t possibly have found another mate, and nobody in the world would have stood up to old Mr. Potter. Et cetera.

I’m only half serious here; I’m well aware of the limited message that Frank Capra was trying to give. And while it’s a little heavy handed for me, I do understand the appeal of that message, especially at Christmastime. Regardless, it was all worth it for the scene between George Bailey and his daughter Zuzu. That was a sweet moment.

And of course, without It’s A Wonderful Life, we wouldn’t have The Lost Ending to It’s A Wonderful Life.

Merry Christmas, movie house!

An Alfred Hitchcock film today, this one a remake of a film he’d made 22 years earlier. The Man Who Knew Too Much stars Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, in a rare dramatic role. They are Ben and Jo McKenna, on vacation with their son in Morocco in the 1950s. After a series of seemingly innocent encounters, Ben is given a piece of information that puts the entire family in jeopardy.

Hitchcock is amazing. Even today’s directors don’t hold a candle to his skill. Here we have a mystery with clues flying all over the place as the audience follows Ben and Jo around. But there isn’t enough information to know the good guys from the bad, and the audience is left to try (unsuccessfully) to piece it all together.

At this point Hitchcock does something that most filmmakers won’t. At just the right time, as the tension is becoming unbearable, he veers from the lead characters’ perspective and gives the audience an additional bit of information. He did it in Rear Window when the audience watches a woman leave the neighbor’s apartment while Jeffries sleeps, sure that she’s been murdered. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock takes us to the kidnappers, where we learn exactly when in a piece of music a man will be killed. He points out which instrument to watch and lets us hear a recording several times to make sure we’ve got it.

Then he drops us back into the lead characters’ lap, where we find our place in the viewing fundamentally changed. We aren’t following them around as they search for clues anymore, we’re trying to lead them around hoping they figure out what we already know in time to stop a murder. Hitchcock has made us active participants, powerless to do anything but watch in horror.

Jimmy Stewart is wonderful as the clumsy and confused doctor put completely out of his element without the first idea of what to do. It’s an intriguing series of events that leads to the meat of the story, and Stewart is an exceptional choice for getting the audience there without realizing it.

Doris Day (below) does an impressive job, especially given the departure this was from her usual light-and-fluffy comedies. I wouldn’t call her acting revolutionary, but she’s certainly charming in the role, and especially effective near the beginning when her husband is dismissive of her suspicions.

This is brilliant film making. It’s not my favorite Hitchcock (that still belongs to Rear Window), but still great.

I hadn’t even heard of The Third Man until Netflix told me I’d like it. I decided to give it a shot. I mean, it’s got Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten from Citizen Kane, and the reviews are pretty darn positive, so there must be something to it.

Fortunately for Netflix (we’re still on the outs since The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), I liked The Third Man quite a lot. The zither music throughout the film set it apart as a film, and I was delighted at what I saw. (BTW, it’s rated A for Adults.)

Set during the post-World War II occupation of Vienna, the film follows American author Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotten, below) as he tries to figure out how his friend died. Before long, Holly is caught up in a web of lies so complex that even the audience isn’t sure if he’s right.

And that’s the film’s first success. Before I got the DVD I knew that the accident that killed Harry Lime, and even the fact that he died, was in question. I also knew that the part of Harry Lime (what a great name) was played by Orson Welles, so Harry would obviously be making an appearance. Still, I found myself questioning everything right along with Holly. Was Harry murdered? And by whom? For what reason?

Alida Valli, the actress who played Harry’s love interest Anna, has a haunting, troubled beauty. She knows things as they are, not as she wishes them to be. In occupied Vienna, she knows that things like the black market and forged papers are necessary. But with American ideals that see the city from across the ocean, Holly would claim that morality is binary; either a thing is right or it is wrong.

The occupying forces, of course, agree with Holly. They’re bringing Vienna back from the brink of barbarism, and their rules are there for a reason. What they cannot see, or at least cannot acknowledge, is that their laws may work when looking at the grand scheme, but also crush the people with their rigidity.

Major Calloway and Sergeant Paine (pictured above) are, then, in an impossible position. They’re the middlemen who see the hardship on the street while also seeing the ideal being propped up. They understand why people must circumvent legal means of trade, but see the importance of shutting down the black market.

And that’s where Harry Lime comes in. Harry is the underbelly of the black market personified. He’s in Vienna to make a buck, plain and simple. If someone gets hurt in the process, then that’s just the price we pay for society’s advancement.

This is what makes The Third Man successful. It’s a seemingly simple problem, but writer Graham Greene and director Carol Reed present it within a story of intrigue that both complicates and finally answers it with a breathtaking chase through the sewers of Vienna and a long walk after a funeral.

Dark and humorous, beautiful and cynical, this classic noir is a film of contradiction. Give it a look and see if you agree.

With apologies, this is easily the shortest review I’ve written. It’s just that I don’t have much to say about this one.

I saw The Treasure of the Sierra Madre last weekend. I was mostly unimpressed by the experience. I’m not sure if I was just in the wrong mood, but I felt like it was just standard 1940s movie fare. Pretty heavy handed on the moral lesson, a bit over-the-top on the performances, overbearing music, the whole nine.

It’s not that Humphrey Bogart or Tim Holt (above, for example) gave a bad performance, it’s just that it was so obvious how it was going to turn out. I guess there’s only so much you can do with “Hey, I’m a swell guy.” “Gold’ll change you!” “Hey, I’m a bad guy now because of gold.” “Told you.”

I never knew where the “stinking badges” line came from, so it was fun to have it sneak up on me. That was the best part of the film for me. Well, that and Walter Huston’s little jig.

His Oscar-winning little jig.

All in all, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre only ended up rating mediocre for me. Better luck next time, John Huston.

Warning: This review contains a major spoiler, so if you don’t want to know what happens in the last ten minutes turns out, turn back now.

I actually enjoyed The Heart is a Lonely Hunter for most of the movie. It had the right mix of quirky and earnest to suit my tastes. It’s the story of a deaf man (Alan Arkin, below) who is waiting to gain legal guardianship of another deaf man who is also mentally challenged and committed to a mental hospital.

While he waits for permission to remove his friend from the hospital, we follow him as he gets acquainted with the town he’s moved to. We meet a middle aged couple dealing with financial hardship, a teenage girl afraid to dream, a drunken drifter, a black doctor looking back on a lifetime of choices, and the doctor’s daughter, who has a tenuous relationship with her father.

The film has a great cast, including Cicily Tyson, Stacy Keach, and Sondra Locke. I even recognized the second deaf man as Tinker Jones from the first season of Little House on the Prairie ¹, so that was cool. Even with this cast, though, I don’t think The Heart is a Lonely Hunter lived up to its potential.

Maybe it was the change of era from the book’s 1930s to the late 1960s. The financial problems would have been a lot more potent set against the Great Depression. Other parts of the story would have made more sense in the original setting, too. The institutionalized racism shown in the doctor’s subplot were interesting and germane to the times, but I wonder if his story would have benefited from being set before the Civil Rights movement.

There were also problems with the direction. It had that late 1960s loosey-goosey ‘that’s good enough’ feel to it. It reminded me of the direction in Sybil, though in that case the failure wasn’t fatal. Here, I just kept wondering if they couldn’t have given each scene one more shot.

But the biggest problem I had with The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was in the last ten minutes. It’s going along, and going along, and a bunch of disconnected things are happening, and I’m waiting for all the storylines to join into one, and hey isn’t that drifter going to return soon, and then Alan Arkin kills himself and the end. Muh-wha? Excuse me?

I just about threw the remote at the TV.

If I were handing out opinions about what film you should see (which, come to think of it, I am!), I’d skip The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Maybe see it for Alan Arkin, because he’s truly wonderful in the role. And the doctor’s story is kind of poignant. Otherwise, it’s a pass.

 

 

¹ And yes, I remembered the character’s name without looking it up. Such is my love for the first season of Little House. ⇧

(Thanks to DVD Beaver for today’s screencap.)