Bryan Ho Reviews

Gentleman's Agreement (1947)

Important message, poor execution

[4 December 1998]

Although one certainly cannot say Gentleman's Agreement is not passionate in its aim to uncover the invisible cloak of anti-Semitism in post-war America, the execution of that objective could have used slightly more dramatic tension and immediacy.

Released the same year and touching on the same subject was Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire, which dealt with anti-Semitism at its extremes: murder with anti-Semitism as the motive. Gentleman's Agreement takes a more humanistic and subtle approach--one that is too subtle at times. Where Crossfire dropped the bomb of anti-Semitism into the laps of the audience, Gentleman's Agreement gives it to you in periodic shots in the arm in the form of a sermon, and each one says the exact same thing: anti-Semitism is bad. (But we knew that.) Yes, the message is an important one, but feeding it to the audience in a manner that is literally shoving it down our throats every few minutes doesn't help the digestion any.

Also lacking in Gentleman's Agreement is a three-dimensional protagonist. Peck's crusading writer who masquerades as a Jew is simply too zealous and unswerving for his own good. He has no faults, no inner conflicts and no doubts about himself. Whether he's being shunned by bigots or Dorothy McGuire, he's such a straight-shooter you know what he's going to do before he does: the right thing right away.

There's no real dramatic arc in the story, with the entire weight of the movie resting on the torrid on-again-off-again love affair between Peck and McGuire. She symbolizes the hypocrisy and passiveness of the everyday American on anti-Semitism, and he points it out to her every chance he gets-and that's all. It pretty much rambles on the same dramatic level all throughout the picture, dividing its time between love scenes and sermons, most of which are indistinguishable from one another.

In the end, the important message and the overall entertainment value of the picture suffers from this redundancy.

Rope (1948)

Precision filmmaking

[30 November 1998]

Rope is an eighty-minute waltz, with the camera dancing cheek-to-cheek with a provocative story of cold-blooded murder. The gimmick of filming the movie in one fluid shot in real-time puts extra burden on the actors and on Hitchcock to tell the story effectively without editing as a narrative device. And they all perform their tasks with resounding success. The lack of cuts takes away from several key reaction shots and such cinematic qualities as pacing and rhythm, but it accentuates the dialogue, which mimics the fluidity of action Hitchcock seemed to be going for.

There is a keen sense of space at work, with the camera slowly bringing us into contact with the various areas of the apartment in which the film is set. The camera frame isolates the characters, making us voyeurs on their intimate conversations. It moves about like a silent accomplice to the murder and the events proceeding it. The characters and situations are placed in front of us, forcing us to deal with them whether we want to or not--the dissolve or fade out won't save us this time.

All of it is executed with the utmost precision and skill of all involved. Although the film isn't necessarily cinematic, it does what many other films fail to do: tell its story effectively. And in that respect, Rope fulfills one of the basic purposes of the medium of film.

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

One of the greatest detective thrillers ever made.

[28 November 1998]

If The Maltese Falcon (1941) was the definitive true detective movie, The Big Sleep (1946) the definitive glamourized detective movie, and Chinatown (1974) the definitive allegorical detective movie, then Kiss Me Deadly is the definitive sleazy detective movie.

Mickey Spillane's sadistic private eye Mike Hammer, turned from successful private eye to sleazy bedroom dick, is the quintessential anti-hero, doing just about anything and everything wrong to get a piece of the pie that the characters call "The Big What's-it."

The movie survives by giving the usual Spillane buckets-of-blood story and its protagonist new dimensions. Right from the electric opening scene and the audacious opening credit sequence, the audience is drawn into Hammer's seedy world, where morality is suspended, and the credo of the end justifying the means dominates Hammer's actions. His reckless abandonment is almost never questionned and the film seems to understand his brutality as what he must do to get the job done in an equally brutal world.

Director Robert Aldrich observes all of it with an objective eye that neither glorifies nor condemns the action on-screen, letting the audience draw its own conclusions--even where the plot is concerned. The pace is unrelentless and the plot turns are never fully explained, forcing the audience to participate willingly in all that Hammer does to, hopefully, see the story through to its ending.

And what an ending! I'd de damned to a special place in Hell if I elaborated, so I'll just say that it's one of the greatest I've ever seen. That goes same for the movie itself, which is one of the most stylish, jarring and truly entertaining movies of its genre.

The Petrified Forest (1936)

Allegorical Depression-era drama is stagy but effective

[27 November 1998]

The Petrified Forest is a social allegory that's the product of the Great Depression. Although not as brutal and seemingly spontaneous as its later noir cousin, John Huston's Key Largo (1948), there's something romantic about a group of characters, plucked from the various facets of American society, who, by some inexplicable fate, come to meet in a greasy spoon in the middle of the Arizona desert where their destinies are played out.

The diner is almost another dimension, separated from the America of the Great Depression. The social obligations, classes and morality of the characters are forgotten, leaving only the base substance of the human being, who yearns for love, loyalty, truth and freedom. Howard's intellectual pauper, Davis' waitress dreamer and Tobin's upper-crust snob are put on the same human level as Bogart's cold-blooded killer, and the result is the drawing out of the true personality of the individual, not the group whom the individual represents.

Written for the stage, the material is naturally stagy, taking place, for the most part, in the eating area of the diner. But director Archie Mayo uses the layered staging of actors and the camera frame to create instant relationships between the various characters, as well as dimensions on the dialogue being spoken. Unfortunately in his search cinematic quality, at times he is almost forcing the lines down the our throat through the use of POV.

Still, the material holds up well in spite of the dated quality, and The Petrified Forest ranks as a top-notch and literate crime drama with an eclectic cast of characters and dramatic tension that holds your attention.