“BEHIND EVERY MAN…”

By Raymond Benson

One of the more popular Hollywood movies of 1954 was The Country Girl, written and directed by George Seaton, adapted from a stage play by Clifford Odets. The Academy liked it well enough to nominate it for Best Picture, Director, Actor (Bing Crosby), Black and White Art Direction, and Black and White Cinematography (John F. Warren). The movie won Oscars for Actress (Grace Kelly) and for the Adapted Screenplay by Seaton.

The Academy sure loves it when a beautiful actress dispenses with any hint of glamour and presents herself in a dowdy, plain, or even “ugly” appearance. And while Grace Kelly could never not be beautiful, her role as Georgie Elgin is not known to emphasize her timeless attractiveness and sensuality. Furthermore, she delivers an outstanding performance that was good enough to surpass the likes of Judy Garland (A Star is Born), Dorothy Dandridge (Carmen Jones), Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina), and Jane Wyman (Magnificent Obsession). Whether or not Kelly deserved the awardr over these four equally superb performances is one of those forever debatable Oscar quandaries.

Besides Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, The Country Girl features a fine performance by William Holden, who is really the protagonist of the film (oddly placed at third billing). The movie is basically a triangle between the trio, with Kelly’s Georgie as the object of both conflict and adoration between the two men.

Bernie Dodd (Holden) is a successful Broadway theater director, whose new musical, The Land Around Us, has lost its leading man after one week of rehearsals. Scrambling to replace him, Dodd wants Frank Elgin (Crosby), but producer Philip Cook (Anthony Ross) objects. Elgin is allegedly a washed up alcoholic who could no longer carry an entire production. Nevertheless, Dodd gets his way and Elgin is hired. It soon becomes apparent that Elgin is completely dependent on his younger wife, Georgie (Kelly), to give him moral support, prop him up, keep him in line, and dictate what he should do or not do. Dodd interprets the couple’s relationship as detrimental to Elgin, seeing Georgie as the reason for the actor’s decline. Elgin presents a different position—that Georgie depends on him and that he could never leave her. Thus, Georgie accompanies her husband to rehearsals, interferes in production decisions, and annoys both the director and producer in the process. Things come to a head when Elgin succumbs to the pressure and starts to drink again. What happens next would spoil the story, but suffice it to say there is much melodrama, a switcheroo of affections, and backstage intrigue.

Oh—and it wouldn’t be a Bing Crosby vehicle without some songs, so musical numbers were added to the script by Ira Gershwin (lyrics) and Harold Arlen (music) to accompany Victor Young’s somewhat overwrought score.

The Country Girl is pure melodrama, for sure, and all three actors give it their all. Crosby is quite effective as the pathetic and insecure Elgin, Holden is dynamic and forceful as Dodd, and, yes, Kelly is full of surprises as the dowdy woman who in reality is stronger than either man. If anything, the picture is worth seeing for the three actors that carry it.

While any motion picture should be evaluated within the context of when it was made and released, The Country Girl does suffer from being dated in its sensibilities about marriage and the relationships between men and women. Audiences today might cringe at the blatant misogyny, especially exuding from Holden’s character. (In referring to wives, he says they “all start out as Juliets and wind up as Lady Macbeths.”) In short, the movie emphasizes the old adage that “behind every man stands a (fill in the blank) woman.”

Additionally, there is a kiss—and subsequent confession of affection—that occurs at a crucial point in the story that is so unexpected, out of the blue, and unbelievable, that one wonders if some sort of foreshadowing or clue to this development was missed. And therein lies the biggest flaw of the film.

Imprint’s new 1080p high definition presentation in Blu-ray looks quite good, and Warren’s cinematography wonderfully captures the light and dark of a Broadway theater (Georgie: “There’s nothing quite so mysterious and silent as a dark theater, a night without a star.”) The feature comes with a new audio commentary by professor and film scholar Jason A. Ney. A 1987 hour-long documentary, Grace Kelly: An American Princess, is a welcome supplement, along with a photo gallery and the theatrical trailer.

The Country Girl is for fans of Grace Kelly, for sure, as well as Bing Crosby and William Holden, for fans of Broadway theater storylines, and of 1950s Hollywood melodramas.

(Note: this Blu-ray is region-free.)

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“HITCH, THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR”

By Raymond Benson

The decade of the 1950s is generally considered to be director Alfred Hitchcock’s most glorious period, stocked with some of his acknowledged masterpieces of cinema (Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, etc.). Those ten years didn’t begin so promisingly, though.

In the late 1940s, Hitchcock had finally broken away from the smothering contract he had under producer David O. Selznick, and he had set out with a partner to form his own production company, Transatlantic. The company made two box office losers—Rope (1948, a failure despite being quite a good movie), and Under Capricorn (1949, no question one of the filmmaker’s weakest pictures). Transatlantic bombed, but Hitchcock continued to work with Warner Brothers, the studio that had distributed these two titles.

Stage Fright was made at Elstree Studios in England and employed an all British crew and cast except for the two female leads, Jane Wyman (under contract at Warners) and veteran star Marlene Dietrich. The male leads were filled by reliable Michael Wilding (who had been in Under Capricorn) and Richard Todd. Stealing the movie in a supporting role, however, is Alastair Sim, the great comic actor who was very popular at the time. Oddly, Sim’s first name is misspelled as “Alistair” in the opening and closing credits of the film!

Eve (Wyman) is a budding young actress, a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, whose friend, Jonathan (Todd) has found himself in a pickle. Eve is sweet on Jonathan, although the relationship is mostly platonic, for Jonathan is in a relationship with the flamboyant star of the stage, Charlotte Inwood (Dietrich). The problem there is that Charlotte is married… until her husband is lying dead on the floor of their house, allegedly killed by Charlotte herself. Jonathan has helped her cover up the crime, but he believes he was seen by Charlotte’s housekeeper, Nellie (Kay Walsh). Jonathan, now the prime suspect, gets Eve to hide him from the police, so Eve enlists her father, the “Commander” (Sim) to help. Despite the Commander’s doubts as to what really happened, he dutifully works with his daughter and Jonathan to avoid suspicion from Detective Smith (Wilding). As the plot unfolds, Eve decides to do some investigating herself and manages to bribe Nellie to go away for a while, and Eve takes her place as Charlotte’s new Cockney housekeeper, “Doris.” Things get complicated when Eve begins to fall for Detective Smith (and he for her). Eventually, of course, the truth is discovered and the real killer is pursued through a theatre building in grand Hitchcock style.

When Stage Fright was first released, it received some criticism because the film begins with a flashback narrated by Jonathan, explaining what happened at Charlotte’s house with footage that “re-enacts” the crime. It’s not a spoiler to say that this flashback turns out to be untrue. Hitchcock deliberately lets us believe events occurred, when they really didn’t. Audiences and critics at the time felt this was something of a cheat. However, this is a perfect example of a trend that has cropped up in film and mystery novels quite often in the last twenty years—the “unreliable narrator.” Is Stage Fright the first instance in which the unreliable narrator device was used in cinema? Perhaps not, but in 1950, it was perceived as new and unsettling. Now, this device is fairly commonplace. It just goes to show how Hitchcock really was ahead of his time!

That said, Stage Fright is only middle-tier Hitchcock. It never reaches the highs of the later masterpieces of the 50s mentioned earlier. The plot is rather unbelievable, especially when Eve pretends to be the Cockney maid and becomes a sleuth on her own. Wyman is fine in the role, but one questions her common sense in sticking with Jonathan and his legal problems. The great Marlene Dietrich performs exactly how one would expect… as the great Marlene Dietrich. She exudes a deliciously sinister subtext to her actions, but we can see right through it from the beginning. Richard Todd is never believable as an innocent man, and this is a stickler. However, Alastair Sim is such a delight as Eve’s crafty father that the movie is worth a watch just for him. Even weak Hitchcock can be good fun.

Warner Archive’s new Blu-ray release is a port-over from their previous DVD edition from several years ago. The feature film looks marvelous in glorious black and white high definition, and the London and English countryside locations are a treat. The supplement “making of” documentary is also ported over from the DVD release, along with the theatrical trailer.

Stage Fright is for fans of Alfred Hitchcock, Jane Wyman or Marlene Dietrich, and especially Alastair Sim.

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“UNCHANGING EVOLUTION”

By Raymond Benson

The early 1970s was a time of experimentation and risk-taking in Hollywood. Studios were more willing to allow filmmakers to take a project and run with it, just to see if something thrown at the wall would stick. After all, this was the period of “New Hollywood,” maverick young directors just out of film school, and pushing the envelope when it came to what was permissible on screen since the Production Code was gone and the relatively new movie ratings were in place.

Playboy Enterprises got into the movie making business in the early 70s (see Cinema Retro Vol. 2, issue #5 from 2006 for the magazine’s exclusive interview with Hugh M. Hefner about Playboy’s film productions). After the critical success of Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Playboy produced The Naked Ape (1973), loosely adapted from Desmond Morris’ 1967 best-selling non-fiction book.

Morris’ book was an entertaining anthropological study of man’s evolution from primates and how social norms and mating rituals, especially between males and females for procreation, have more or less never changed since prehistoric times. Morris had relatively nothing to do with the film adaptation, for the filmmakers decided to make a “hip” comedy out of the concepts in the book, illustrating how “unchanging evolution” still dictated man’s behavior.

The idea probably looked good on paper. Perhaps the box office success of Woody Allen’s loose, comedic adaptation of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1972), which was also parodied a best-selling non-fiction book, was an inspiration. However, The Naked Ape, directed by avant-garde filmmaker Donald Driver, does not possess the wit and brilliance of a Woody Allen or a Mel Brooks, who also might have done wonderful things with the material. Instead, The Naked Ape is a head-scratching curiosity that might have played somewhat well as a “midnight movie” for college-age audiences in altered states of consciousness.

Johnny Crawford (who had played Mark McCain in the TV series The Rifleman, now grown up and looking hunky and handsome) is Lee, a college student infatuated with Cathy (Victoria Principal, in an early film appearance), a tour guide in a natural history museum. Through a series of fantasy vignettes, both live action and animated, the film takes us through the couple’s courtship, marriage, and subsequent relationship, as well as Lee’s stint in the army and the pair’s experience in school (they are in an “erotic literature” class together). The animations, usually narrated by Cathy, interrupt the flow of the loose storyline to comment, in a humorous fashion, on the proceedings from an anthropological viewpoint.

Both Crawford and Principal are attractive on screen (yes, there is nudity; after all, this is a Playboy Production), but the script is, frankly, subpar. While the actors do their best, the movie is just not as clever as it thinks it is. The animations, made by Murakami-Wolf Studios, are somewhat interesting (Frank Zappa’s album cover artist, Calvin Schenkel, is one of the animators). Vocal rock songs by Jimmy Webb help liven up the action.

This reviewer became friends with Johnny Crawford (who passed away in 2021) over the years. Crawford was always a kind, soft-spoken gentleman who had numerous stories about his Hollywood years, such as having a studio mailbox right next to Joan Crawford’s and the two of them often accidentally receiving each other’s mail. Whenever The Naked Ape was brought up in conversation, Crawford would simply shake his head, roll his eyes, and smile.

(Photo courtesy of Raymond Benson.)

Kino Lorber has distributed Code Red’s presentation of The Naked Ape in 1080p high definition, and that distinctive 1970s film stock looks good enough. There are English subtitles for the hearing impaired and a theatrical trailer, but otherwise no other supplements.

The Naked Ape is for fans of Johnny Crawford and/or Victoria Principal, early 70s experimental films aimed at the college crowd, and, ahem, amateur anthropologists.

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