THE PIED PIPER. 20th Century Fox, 1942. Monty Woolley, Roddy McDowall, Anne Baxter, Otto Preminger, J. Carrol Naish, Peggy Ann Garner, Marcel Dalio, Marcelle Corday, Odette Myrtil, Helmut Dantine. Screenplay by Nunnally Johnson from a novel by Nevil Shute. Director: Irving Pichel. Shown at Cinevent 35, Hollywood CA, May 2003.

   There was a time when I objected to the addition of films from the 1940s to the programs at Cinevent, but the quality of productions like this one I has pretty much taken care of my objections.

   Woolley is an Englishman vacationing in France in the spring of 1940 as the Germans have swept across France and are beginning to think of conquering England. As Woolley attempts to return to England in advance of the German army, he acquires — against his curmudgeonly objections — a group of English and French children he attempts to shepherd to safety.

   Their escape — with the help of sympathetic French patriots — seems assured until they fall into the hands of a German company headed by Major Diessen, played by Otto Preminger.

   Garner and MacDowall are both superb and there’s not a typical Hollywood child actor in the small group recruited for the film. I’ve listed some of the French actors in the film. Although their roles are small, they are distinguished film performers. (Dalio starred in Jean Renoir’s masterly The Rules of the Game.) I found this to be a moving film, and with not a false step by the numerous fine actors.

YouTube Notes: The confrontation scene between Preminger and Woolley can be seen here. A longer ten-minute clip can be found here. This one’s from earlier in the movie, as Monte Woolley begins to discover what fate has in store for him.

   The film was nominated for three Academy Awards: for Best Picture, losing to Mrs. Miniver; Best Actor, with Wooley losing to James Cagney for Yankee Doodle Dandy; and Best Cinematography.

THE BIG KNIFE. United Artists, 1955. Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen, Rod Steiger, Ilka Chase, Everett Sloane, Miss Shelley Winters. Based on a play by Clifford Odets. Director: Robert Aldrich.

   [This review follows that of director Robert Aldrich's The Last Sunset, which you may find here.]   Too bad Aldrich couldn’t have worked similar magic with The Big Knife because he had all the elements: a corrosive play by Clifford Odets, edgy camerawork, and an off-beat cast: Rod Steiger; Ida Lupino, Wendell Core, Shelley Winters, Everett Sloane and Jean Hagen, all headed up by Jack Palance as Charley Castle, a talented actor (something of a stretch) who wants out of his contract and on to better roles.

   To be fair, The Big Knife has some nice stuff in it. There’s a neat dichotomy in Castle’s character: pampered and polished on the outside but inwardly rotting away.

   Rod Steiger is engagingly hammy, played off against the effortless ease of Sloane and Corey, but someone let the women go w-a-y over the top, and three really talented actresses come off as little more than caricatures.

   And then there’s the pace — or rather there isn’t. Knife is the kind of classic tragedy that needs fatalistic momentum; we should see Charley Castle’s destiny come careening at him in the course of a single day, like Oedipus.

   Instead, director Aldrich and adapter James Poe open Odets’ play out and let it meander around, a fatal mistake with material like this. It weakens the concentration a drama needs with characters like these, and we come away wondering who to really care about.

   Oddly, the one memorable characterization in the whole thing is Wendell Corey — never the most electrifying of actors — as lethal press agent “Smiley” Coy. When Smiley pours himself a drink and talks casually of killing off Shelley Winters you get a real chill. Which may be part of the problem: any movie where Wendell Corey is scarier than Jack Palance has its priorities twisted.

THERE AIN’T NO JUSTICE. Associated British Films, 1939. Jimmy Hanley, Edward Rigby, Mary Clare, Phyllis Stanley, Edward Chapman, Jill Furse, Richard Ainley, Michael Wilding, Nan Hopkins. Screenplay: James Curtis, based on his own novel. Director: Pen Tennyson.

   I don’t watch boxing movies, not even if they’re nominated for Oscars or other awards, or even if they win. That has nothing to do with boxing, per se. I don’t watch sports movies of any kind. Well, maybe baseball, but that’s because I like baseball.

   Call it prejudice if you want, but it has nothing to do with sports movies. I don’t read sports fiction either, not even baseball. There’s nothing the screenwriter of a sports movie can make up that can match (ever) the kinds of things that are reported on every day in the sports section of your daily newspaper, the kinds of things that if you read them as fiction, you’d say, Nah, that’d never happen. But they do, and as often as not, they just did.

   No matter. Here I am reporting on a boxing movie I saw the other night, and after a slow start, I actually enjoyed it. Surprised me, I tell you that.

   Jimmy Hanley is the star. Later on he became a big name in British TV, or so I’m told, but in 1939 he was still a lad. A good-looking, boy-next-door sort of fellow, maybe not the sharpest guy in the neighborhood, but not the dumbest, either.

   In order to win the hand of fair maiden (Jill Furse) he quits his job as an auto mechanic to become a boxer. The money’s better, for one thing, and of course there’s a small bit of fame to go with it, which a cocky young lad wouldn’t mind having, but in 1939, times were tough.

   The problem is, well, boxing is a sport not particularly noted for the honesty of the guys running it, and Tommy Mutch’s big mistake is signing up with a promoter as crooked as they come — the kind of guy that gives snakes in the grass a bad name.

   Which is almost, but not quite, all I need to tell you, but I am going to tell you one more thing, and that’s that Tommy’s would-be girl friend sees one boxing match and wants nothing more to do with him nor his new found profession. Even the cockiest guy in the world would find his world upside down, and Tommy is no different from the rest.

   Let me insert a word about Jill Furse about here. She’s a frail beauty, a mere wisp of a girl, the kind that some men dream about, not only Tommy. She might have had a long successful career in films, but she didn’t. She appeared a stage play that was telecast by the BBC as a special production in 1938, had a small role in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, also in 1939, this movie, and that was it. She died in 1944 soon after giving birth to her second child. There ain’t no justice, that’s for sure.

   In any case, let me end this review by reminding you of the old joke about going to a fight and a hockey game broke out. In There Ain’t No Justice the movies ends with a boxing match in which a fight breaks out. I’ve never seen such a fight, and I’ll bet you haven’t either.