Heart and Heaven

Caught up on a couple of old movies recently: Places in the Heart (1984) and Heaven Knows, Mr Allison from 1957.  The first stars Sally Field in one of her best roles, and the second has a relatively gentle Robert Mitchum co-starred with Deborah Kerr.  Kerr plays a nun, so for most of the film only her face is visible.  Other body language is almost minimal, but this doesn't stop her giving a wonderful performance.  

Yes, both the movies are old-style, tear-jerkers, the former focusing on forgiveness and the latter on an impossible relationship that nevertheless transcends its boundaries.  Places in the Heart is a story about forgiveness (there's an echo of the beginning of Les Miserables early in the piece) and how people who ought not to get along can manage to do so if they're willing.  It also has a curious subplot that never quite connects with the main story.  In this Lindsay Crouse plays Field's sister whose husband, played by Ed Harris, is having an affair with a mutual friend.  Obviously Crouse connects with Field because they're sisters - they have a few short scenes together - but for the most part this story plays out by itself almost in parallel with the main one.  At the very end all the characters are gathered together in church for a service.  A wonderful travelling shot begins with Harris being forgiven by Crouse - the touch of her hand on his is enough to tell us.  The camera moves from row to row as each person receives the communion wine, and finally we see Field's deceased husband sitting beside her.  He was accidentally shot early in the film by a young and very drunk negro, who was subsequently lynched. The camera moves a foot or two more and there is the negro boy.  He whispers to the husband, Sorry, and there's a look that might mean all sorts of things on the husband's face, but none of them are antagonistic.  It's a strange ending that comes out of nowhere - there hasn't been a hint of the surreal prior to this.  For all that, it's in keeping with the tone of the movie and its theme.

John Malkovitch plays a blind boarder who's foisted upon Field as a way to forestall her having to sell the house.  Of course they eventually learn to get along, but the performance by Malkovitch is somewhat over-the-top (Malkovitch is always over-the-top, you might think) and for me it jarred. 

Heaven Knows etc is a story about a marine who lands on a deserted island in the Pacific during the Second World War.  It's not quite deserted: a nun has been left behind on the island through some odd circumstances and the two begin a rather edgy relationship.  The Japanese arrive, take over the island, but fail to realise it's not quite as empty as they think.  They also fail to notice that their supplies are getting lower than they should be as Mitchum does a daring night raid on the stores. Eventually the US arrives on the island and conquer the Japanese.  That's pretty much the story, but Mitchum and Kerr invest the script with a great deal of warmth and humour, and humanity.  Kerr's character might seem a bit too much a member of the weaker sex at times, though Kerr brings some feistiness to the part, and Mitchum is given the chance not only to be a gentleman but also to be very protective gentleman.  The actors manage to make both the people credible, and John Huston films the whole thing with minimal fuss, knowing that he can rely on his two main cast members to do all the work. 

Beat the Devil

Continuing to use up the additional broadband we took on for this month, I began to watch Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood.  Unfortunately it was all in Russian, without subtitles. Still, it looked good!

As an alternative I turned to Beat the Devil. The only thing I'd heard about this was the title - I had no idea it had such a fabulous cast and that, supposedly, it was rewritten as they went along.  I'm always a bit suspicious of these sorts of stories - the script being handed to the cast as the scenes were being shot. Knowing something of just how difficult it is to pull a movie together in the first place, and then to keep it ticking, it always strikes me that such stories may be more than a little apocryphal. Still, when an authority like Roger Ebert quotes such stories, you have to wonder if they're not at least partially true.

Anyway, Beat the Devil has almost no story to speak of.  It was based on a novel, but it seems that the connections between the novel and the film may be few.  Having got a marvellous cast together, John Huston, the director, lets them rip. They almost don't need a script; they could probably have made the thing up as they went along.  However, there is a semblance of a plot about uranium and Africa and colonialism and such.  Truman Capote is credited with scriptwriting, but whether there really was a Capote script or not is moot.

Humphrey Bogart is the ostensible hero, but barely makes a showing in this department. He just plays Humphrey Bogart, pretty much as he always does, and gets away with it. He hardly breaks into a sweat (except when pushing a car uphill and then watching it run away by itself downhill.) He has two leading ladies, after a fashion: Jennifer Jones as an English woman who lets her imagination run wild to the extent that even the audience isn't quite sure when she's telling the truth or embroidering it. And Gina Lollobrigida who undercuts her glamour with quite a witty performance.

It's the quartet of rogues who make the movie what it is, however.  Robert Morley leads the charge playing Robert Morley (who else did he ever play?) aka Mr Peterson; Peter Lorre plays a German called O'Hara, using his baby face to its fullest advantage; Marco Tulli plays the Italian of the four, munching his lines with great vigour; and Ivor Barnard plays what must be one of his scariest roles as a murderer who looks like a civil servant - until he opens his mouth and goes on with enthusiasm for Hitler and Mussolini's worthwhile ways.

Edward Underdown, as the stiff upper lip Englishman who turns out to be not quite such a posh gent as he claims, seems at first to be the only actor taking anything seriously, but by the end even he's chewing the scenery with gusto.

The camerawork by Freddie Francis is a delight, though the bright Italian sun seems to have flummoxed even his expertise in some scenes. Would it really have been intentional to have two of the actors' faces in the shadow while their stomachs reflected the sun?   Probably not. And Huston directs the whole thing for laughs - not the laugh out loud kind, but the quiet amusement gained from seeing a bunch of artists thoroughly enjoying themselves.