Tag Archives: Series

The Courageous Dr. Christian (1940)

05 Tuesday Feb 2019

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D: Bernard Vorhaus / 67m

Cast: Jean Hersholt, Dorothy Lovett, Robert Baldwin, Tom Neal, Maude Eburne, Vera Lewis, George Meader, Bobby Larson, Bobette Bentley

Outside of the small town of River’s End, lies an area of hardship and poverty called Squatters Town. With its people ignored by their more affluent neighbours, it’s only kindly local doctor, Paul Christian (Hersholt), who has any time for them. A visit to a sick girl at the site leads to Christian taking in a young man, Dave Williams (Neal), while his younger brother and sister (Larson, Bentley) are looked after by town matriarch, Norma Stewart (Lewis). Norma has a vacant lot in the centre of town that Christian thinks would be ideal as a new housing development for the people of Squatters Town to move into. He secures the deed to the land – at a personal price – but soon faces opposition from local businessman, Harry Johnson (Meader), and the town council. Dave takes matters into his own hands and gets everyone from Squatters Town to move onto the vacant lot. Johnson and his cronies on the council invoke a little known by-law, and arrange for the police to have everyone dispersed. But just as a violent confrontation seems inevitable, Dr Christian realises that the sick girl he treated before has spinal meningitis – and it’s highly contagious…

One of the benefits of watching old black and white movies from the Thirties and Forties, is the number of pleasant surprises you’re likely to come across, and often in the unlikeliest of places. Between 1939 and 1941, RKO made six movies based around the radio character, Dr Paul Christian. They were family friendly dramas with a recurrent streak of obvious, gentle humour, made quickly and cheaply, and featured Hersholt in the role he’d become famous for over the airwaves. The Courageous Dr. Christian was the second in the series, and is remarkable for the quality of its screenplay, which was written by Ring Lardner Jr and Ian McLellan Hunter. An original story, its depiction of the social and class divisions between the people of River’s End and Squatters Town, and the inequalities experienced by the latter (along with prejudice and blatant xenophobia), mark out the movie as something of a departure from the standard small town fables that the likes of Andy Hardy were focused on. Here the movie has a clear message about tolerance and the true meaning of community spirit. There are differences on either side – Dave is just as contemptuous of the people in River’s End, as George Johnson is of Dave and his fellow Squatters Town inhabitants. How then to bring them all together?

An outbreak of spinal meningitis might not be the most obvious motivator for public and personal contrition, and Lardner Jr and Hunter aren’t about to lather on the altruism (one couple decide to donate their blankets – because they need new ones anyway), but their screenplay is sharper than this kind of movie usually deserves, and the characters all appear to have inner lives, something that is also unusual. Even the likes of Roy (Baldwin), drug store owner and the series’ romantic stooge, comes across as more rounded and capable of surprising the viewer than he does in all the other entries. With the cast given more to bite into, and the humour (a necessary component of the material) arising from the drama instead of sitting alongside it, the movie exerts a more compelling interest than expected, and offers director Bernard Vorhaus a chance to show just why he was a mentor to David Lean; his approach to the material is intelligent, sincere, and unforgiving of the prejudice shown by both sides. There’s good camera work by John Alton, and a score by William Lava that knows when to throw off the small town whimsy, and engage in more serious motifs. Hersholt impresses as always in the role he’d made his own (and which has never been played by anyone else), and there’s sterling support from Lewis and Meader, stalwarts at this kind of thing, and exactly the kind of familiar faces that you know will do the whole thing the justice it deserves.

Rating: 8/10 – an above average entry in a series that never again attained the heights it does here, The Courageous Dr. Christian is proof positive that “old, low budget, and black and white” doesn’t have to mean a poor quality experience; entertaining and thoughtful at the same time, it’s well worth seeking out as a simpler and more effective alternative to what passes for small town drama in the 21st century.

NOTE: It may not come as a surprise, but there’s no available trailer for The Courageous Dr. Christian.

Oh! the Horror! – The Nun (2018) and Strange Nature (2018)

11 Tuesday Sep 2018

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The Nun (2018) / D: Corin Hardy / 96m

Cast: Demián Bichir, Taissa Farmiga, Jonas Bloquet, Bonnie Aarons, Charlotte Hope, Ingrid Bisu, Sandra Teles

The fifth entry in the mega-successful Conjuring series, The Nun sees the franchise try to take a previously minor character and expand on them to make a stand-alone movie that fits in with the established mythos, while also providing the requisite scares and universe building that we’ve come to expect. But this is a horrible mis-step, a movie that makes absolutely no sense from beginning to end, but which does make you wonder if all this universe building is being as carefully planned and worked out in advance as it should be. On this evidence, the answer has to be a resounding No, because The Nun is truly terrible, with the slackest plotting seen so far, characters who barely register as recognisable human beings, a setting that seems arbitrary rather than necessary, a number of poorly executed paranormal effects sequences that are both narratively redundant and tiresome, and an overall vibe that says, “we did this because we could, not because we should”. And that’s without dialogue of the calibre of, “I’m afraid there is something very wrong with this place.”

In many ways, James Wan and co should be congratulated for the success they’ve had in creating the Conjuring universe, but this should be the point where they stop and take stock of where they’re taking the franchise, and why. The Nun is like the movie that quality control forgot. Watching it is akin to seeing a cinematic car crash happening in slow motion, but instead of bodies in the road it’s the makers’ reputations. Hardy, making his second feature after The Hallow (2015), appears to have been a director for hire only on this occasion, as he brings none of the visual flourishes he brought to that first feature, and his direction is largely anonymous. The cast don’t have a chance thanks to the banal nature of regular scribe Gary Dauberman’s screenplay, and Bichir in particular looks uncomfortable and/or wishing he’d taken another gig altogether. The set pieces rely on roving camera work to hide the so-called scares (which are astonishingly predictable), but worst of all, the title character remains a bystander in her own movie, brought out occasionally for a cheap jolt, and at the end for what amounts to a showdown. Anyone expecting to learn more about Valak and his origins (and why a nun) will be looking in the wrong place, as this is so badly constructed as to be completely nun-sensical.

Rating: 3/10 – The Nun‘s box office performance – $133 million so far – proves that you can fool a lot of the people (initially), but this is far from being a good movie, or one that deserves to do so well; a chore to sit through and woeful on so many levels – and just having a character called Frenchie is bad enough – this is movie making without thinking or conviction.

 

Strange Nature (2018) / D: Jim Ojala / 99m

Cast: Lisa Sheridan, Jonah Beres, Bruce Bohne, Faust Checho, Stephen Tobolowsky, John Hennigan, Carlos Alazraqui, Justen Overlander, David Mattey, Chalet Lizette Brannan, Angela Duffy, Tiffany Shepis

In Strange Nature, the world we’re introduced to is one that we can more easily recognise than in The Nun, but it’s not without its own unexplained phenomena. Based on a mystery that dates back to the mid-Nineties, when deformed frogs began appearing in ponds throughout Minnesota, the movie takes this as a jumping off point (excuse the pun) for a tale of mutations that begin with said frogs and which then makes its way up through the biological food chain until it starts to affect humans. Working with a limited budget, first-time feature writer/director Ojala has created a horror movie that trades on established genre tropes but which does so while doing its best to focus on a small town community that finds itself under attack from both outside and within. Ojala uses the character of Kim (Sheridan) as our guide to the ensuing developments, as stories of people going missing slowly become forgotten as the potential reason for their disappearances becomes more obvious. As Kim delves deeper into the mystery of the deformed frogs, various culprits – agricultural fertilisers, waterborne parasites, nature gone haywire – are explored, but as with real life (where the problem has since spread to India and China), the movie doesn’t settle for one easy explanation over the rest.

The movie wears its horror credentials on its sleeve, and peppers the narrative with various examples of body horror (a deformed puppy, skin sloughing away from flesh), but the effectiveness of these scenes is hampered by the budget, and though Ojala opts for practical, in-camera effects wherever possible, many of them betray the lack of funds available (editor David Mattey does what he can, but in trying to obscure the lacklustre effects he actually draws attention to them even more). Away from the more overt horror elements, Ojala does a good job of developing the sense of a small town whose initial scepticism soon gives way to fear and paranoia, and adds a layer of tragedy when one character’s pregnancy doesn’t end in the blessed event she was expecting. The performances are adequate, with Tobolowsky suitably oily as the town mayor, and the Duluth, Minnesota locations add a degree of verisimilitude that works well as a backdrop for the action. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Strange Nature, and it’s certainly not as bad as some other horror movies out there (see above), but it does suffer from a surfeit of ideas that it doesn’t have the wherewithal to explore fully, and refreshingly, keeps any unnecessary melodramatics to a minimum.

Rating: 6/10 – though its narrative arc is entirely predictable, and some of the characters remain stereotypes throughout, Strange Nature works exceedingly well as a cautionary tale, and is well worth a look; with a sense of ambition often missing from low budget horror movies, Ojala’s feature debut unfolds confidently, and more importantly, with a purpose that is often missing from some of its bigger budgeted brethren.

Nancy Drew… Reporter (1939)

13 Monday Jul 2015

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Nancy Drew... Reporter

D: William Clemens / 68m

Cast: Bonita Granville, John Litel, Frankie Thomas, Dickie Jones, Mary Lee, Larry Williams, Betty Amann, Jack Perry, Thomas E. Jackson, Olin Howland, Sheila Bromley

When she takes part in a newspaper contest, headstrong Nancy Drew (Granville) doesn’t like the assignment she’s given, so instead she swipes another reporter’s assignment: to cover the inquest of a woman, Kate Lambert, who was recently found dead. At the inquest, it’s revealed that Mrs Lambert was poisoned by a photographic chemical, and suspicion falls on her companion, Eula Denning (Amann). Protesting her innocence, and stating that whoever killed Mrs Lambert would have left fingerprints on the tin the poison came in, Eula is still remanded in custody for trial.

Also at the inquest is a man with a cauliflower ear (Perry) who hits Nancy’s bumper as he leaves the courthouse. She follows him to the Lambert house where he tries to gain entry, but Nancy and a guard stop him. She tells her father, well-known and respected lawyer Carson Drew (Litel), all about it but he warns her to leave well alone. Instead, Nancy gains the help of her neighbour, Ted Nickerson (Thomas) and together they visit Eula in jail. She tells them the tin must still be in the house and gives them a clue as to where to find it. At the Lambert house, Ted distracts the guard while Nancy sneaks inside and finds the tin. But the man is also there, and tries to grab the tin but Nancy gets away from him. She takes the tin to the police station, but before she can hand it over, the man’s girlfriend (Bromley) steals it from her.

Nancy discovers that the man is a boxer, Soxie Anthens, and she also discovers the gym where he trains. She and Ted go there and further learn that Soxie’s girlfriend is called Miss Lucas. They track her down to the Beldenburg Hotel, where they also find out that she’s gone to the Mandarin Cafe. Nancy and Ted head over there, and find Soxie’s girlfriend in the company of Miles Lambert (Williams), the son of the murdered woman. Alerting Soxie to their being together, he causes a scene when he arrives at the cafe. During the altercation, Nancy learns enough about the tin and the murder to set a trap for the killer.

Nancy Drew... Reporter - scene

The second of four movies made in 1938-9 by Warner Bros. and based on the character created by Edward Stratemeyer, Nancy Drew… Reporter is a fast-paced comedy whodunnit that has time to pause for a musical interlude, and adds two young “whippersnappers” in the form of Ted’s younger sister Mary (Lee) and her friend in mischief Killer Parkins (Jones) to the mix as often as it can. It has a certain degree of innocent charm, and is largely inoffensive, but beneath the irreproachable content of the plot and storyline, the movie is surprisingly subversive.

When Nancy steals the reporter’s assignment, she later justifies her actions by stating that a good reporter should always do what it takes to get the story. It’s the best example of the lying and manipulation that Nancy displays throughout the movie in her efforts to catch the killer. She hoodwinks Ted on more than one occasion, traps her father into defending Eula thanks to a fait accompli, and blatantly lies in order to get the newspaper to print a fraudulent headline in order to flush out the killer. In her quest to uncover the truth it seems that Nancy will bend or break the rules in whatever way she needs in order to do so. And it’s noticeable that she rarely – if ever – apologises.

With its heroine proving almost as devious and deceitful as the bad guys, the movie carries on as if it hadn’t noticed at all that Nancy was so duplicitous, and of course, she wins the newspaper contest (though, to be fair, she declines the cash prize, but accepts the accompanying medal). There’s too much of this ironic counterpoint for the movie to be an entirely comfortable watch, with its moral compass being so broadly compromised. Of course, Nancy isn’t the only character in the movies to behave in such a way, but this is a character who was intended to encourage young girls to read more; what message are they meant to be getting when Nancy behaves as if the usual rules don’t apply to her?

Away from the dubious character of Nancy, there’s the small matter of the plot, which is very basic to say the least, and which advertises the villains straight away at the inquest. Usually, the killer is revealed in the final reel, but here anyone will be able to work out their identity well in advance, and this helps to dilute whatever drama or tension is inherent in the plot. In fact, there are times when the plot is so lightweight it’s almost gossamer thin. But the cast are entertaining to watch, with Granville and Thomas proving a good pairing, while Litel is kept firmly in the background, aside from an uncomfortable moment when he carries Granville off to bed and sings an awkward lullaby to her while also tucking her in.

Series’ director Clemens maintains a loose feel throughout and gives his cast enough room to indulge themselves when appropriate, and this happy-go-lucky approach makes the movie seem smarter and more energetic than it actually is, and despite the best efforts of screenwriter Kenneth Gamet. A mention too for editor Frank DeWar whose skill in the cutting room means the movie contains very little fat, and has a freshness to it even now, over seventy-five years since its release.

Rating: 6/10 – allowing for its (probably) unintentionally crafty heroine, Nancy Drew… Reporter is still an interesting, if flawed, take on the teen sleuth genre; bolstered by good performances, though with a mystery that even a blind person could work out, the movie is nevertheless a minor treat for fans of this type of movie, and of Granville in particular.