Monthly Archives: June 2016

Los Olvidados (Nov. 9, 1950)

Posted on June 20, 2016 by Adam Lounsbery

Los Olvidados
Los Olvidados (1950)
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Ultramar Films

Most serious film nerds know about Luis Buñuel, even if they’ve never seen any of his movies.

And even if they’ve never seen Buñuel’s first film — the influential surrealist short Un Chien Andalou (1929) — they’ve probably heard about its shocking, disjointed images, like ants crawling out of a hole in a man’s hand or a woman’s eyeball being sliced open by a straight razor. (If you’ve never seen Un Chien Andalou, go ahead and watch it right now. It’s only 16 minutes long.)

Buñuel made a big splash with Un Chien Andalou (1929) and his next film, L’Age d’Or (1930), but his career and life went in strange and interesting places between 1930 and 1950, taking him from his native Spain to working in Paris, Hollywood, New York, and eventually Mexico, where he settled in 1946.

I last reviewed Buñuel’s work-for-hire Jorge Negrete musical, Gran Casino (1947), which was neither an artistic nor a financial success, but I missed his more successful follow-up, El Gran Calavera (The Great Madcap) (1949).

Los Olvidados, however, is the film that really put him on the map, and if you’re only going to see one Buñuel film, I think it should be this one. (Of course, if you’re a serious film nerd, why would you only see one Buñuel film?)

Roberto Cobo

At its November 9, 1950, premiere in Mexico City, the film scandalized and enraged audience members. Los Olvidados dared to not only show the worst side of life in Mexico City — the desperate poverty and parentless children of the slums — but also dared to depict those children not as sentimental objects of noble suffering, but as vicious, angry, and hopeless.

I first saw Los Olvidados at Film Forum in New York, and I was blown away by not only the film’s unflinching depictions of poverty and violence, but also by its incredible beauty.

Cobo and Mejía

A workaday writer or director handed the scenario of Los Olvidados would find hope by giving one of its main characters a happy ending and allowing the audience to nestle comfortably in the lie that good is rewarded and evil punished. (Incidentally, this is exactly what happens in the alternate ending that Buñuel — or someone — was forced to shoot, and which was rediscovered in 1996. After the screening I saw at Film Forum, the alternate ending was introduced and shown via video projection as a historical curiosity, and was received with incredulous laughter from the audience.)

But Buñuel knew that in the world of Los Olvidados, happy endings are a bourgeois lie. At the same time, Los Olvidados is not a hopeless film. It is an exhilarating masterwork, in which a sense of reality is undermined by moments like the one in which the young actor Alfonso Mejía throws an egg at the camera. Ironically, this breaking of the fourth wall undermines reality while at the same time creating a heightened sense of reality, when Mejía stares into the camera with disdain as the egg drips down the lens.

1 Comment

Posted in 1950, November 1950 and tagged , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

King Solomon’s Mines (Nov. 9, 1950)

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Adam Lounsbery

King Solomon's Mines
King Solomon’s Mines (1950)
Directed by Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

King Solomon’s Mines was the first Hollywood production to be filmed in Africa since the disastrous Trader Horn in 1931.

Trader Horn made a tidy profit at the box office, but the actual shooting was fraught with danger, disease, and even death. The leading lady, Edwina Booth, contracted a serious illness that forced her to retire from acting, and she sued MGM, who settled with her out of court.

So MGM was naturally hesitant to mount another massive production shot on location in Africa, but King Solomon’s Mines was a gamble that paid off. Not only is it a beautifully shot, well-acted, and exciting film, it was a massive financial success, and was MGM’s most popular release of 1950.

Stewart Granger

It’s been awhile since I’ve read H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel, King Solomon’s Mines, but this film version felt very different to me from its source material, and mostly in ways that I liked.

The most obvious change from the novel is the gender switch of one of the main characters to allow for a female lead. In the novel, a safari leader named Allan Quatermain is hired by a British aristocrat, Sir Henry Curtis, who wishes to find his brother who went missing while searching for the mythical treasure of King Solomon in uncharted regions of southern Africa.

The film version instead features a character named Elizabeth Curtis, whose husband is missing. She’s played by the red-haired Scottish actress Deborah Kerr.

Allan Quatermain is played by the English actor Stewart Granger. The role was originally offered to Errol Flynn, but he balked at the rigorous location shooting and turned it down in favor of appearing in Kim (1950), an adaptation of the novel by Rudyard Kipling. That film was shot in India, but the actors didn’t have to rough it, and stayed in a resort, where presumably Flynn could continue drinking himself to death in comfortable surroundings.

Meeting Siriaque

The gender switch is an obvious change, but it’s the overall tone of the film that I thought was the biggest shift from Haggard’s novel. The novel is a rousing Victorian adventure story, while the film is much more of a travelogue. In fact, one of the most common complaints about King Solomon’s Mines from modern viewers is that it’s “boring,” and has very little of the type of action they expect from an adventure story.

Which version you prefer depends upon your personal taste, but I personally loved this film. After so many years of “Africa” in Hollywood films being depicted as a jungle set on a sound stage, seeing the actual landscapes of Uganda, Kenya, and the Congo was a revelation. This is a stunningly beautiful film, and Robert L. Surtees’s Oscar for best color cinematography was well-deserved.

King Solomon’s Mines premiered on November 9, 1950, in New York, and went into wide release on November 24.

3 Comments

Posted in 1950, November 1950 and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Dial 1119 (Nov. 3, 1950)

Posted on June 6, 2016 by Adam Lounsbery

Dial 1119
Dial 1119 (1950)
Directed by Gerald Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Dial 1119 is an exceedingly well-made B-movie. It’s suspenseful, well-acted, and holds up extremely well. You don’t have to be a fan of film noirs or “old movies” to enjoy this one. As long as you can tolerate watching movies shot in black & white, Dial 1119 will keep you on the edge of your seat for its brief running time of 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Dial 1119 takes place in the fictional burg of “Terminal City,” where an insane young man named Gunther Wyckoff (Marshall Thompson) has come in search of his psychiatrist, Dr. John D. Faron (Sam Levene). The title refers to the police, fire, and ambulance emergency number that exists in the world of the film. (Although a nationwide emergency phone number was proposed in the 1950s, it wasn’t until the 1960s that 9-1-1 became the standard in North America.)

Wyckoff is a convicted murderer who has escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane. Dr. Faron’s testimony kept Wyckoff from going to the electric chair, but the young man is clearly deeply disturbed. He is obsessed with war, death, and murder, and is a deadly threat to anyone who crosses his path.

After stealing a pistol and killing a bus driver, Wyckoff goes in search of Dr. Faron. When he finds his office closed for the night, he crosses the street to the Oasis Bar, where he holes up and takes hostages.

Levene and Thompson

It’s surprising how current many aspects of Dial 1119 feel — like hostages watching their own predicament on TV. All the chime-in Charlies blathering into a reporter’s microphone about what they’d do if they were in the same situation will feel eerily familiar to anyone who’s read comments on an article on the internet.

Also, if you’re used to television sets in movies from the 1950s with screens that are the size of a postage stamp, brace yourself for the biggest TV screen you will see in a movie from 1950. The bartender at the Oasis, Chuckles (William Conrad), has a TV that’s so large and flat that it almost looks like a modern hi-def set. He mentions at one point in the film that he paid $1,400 for the television set, and then complains that for all the money he paid it still only shows crummy westerns and professional wrestling. Replace “westerns” with “reality shows” and this movie could take place in 2016.

Marshall Thompson

One of the things I especially loved about Dial 1119 was how much of the story is told without dialogue or music. We watch the actors’ nervous eyes and sweating faces, and we know exactly what they’re thinking. The score by André Previn is great, but it’s used very sparingly, and never tells the audience how to feel. The actors’ performances and Gerald Mayer’s deft direction tell us everything we need to know.

Dial 1119 has a low budget and was obviously shot as a second feature, but M-G-M productions were always glossy, nicely lensed affairs, even when they were “B” flicks.

Leave a comment

Posted in 1950, November 1950 and tagged , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.