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Category Archives: August 1949

Batman and Robin (15 chapters) (May 26-Sept. 1, 1949)

Posted on March 9, 2014 by Adam Lounsbery

Batman and Robin
Batman and Robin (15 chapters) (1949)
Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet
Columbia Pictures

Batman and Robin was the second live-action Batman movie to hit the big screen.

The first, simply titled Batman, was also a 15-episode Columbia serial. It starred Lewis Wilson as Batman and Douglas Croft as Robin, and was directed by Lambert Hillyer, the man who made Dracula’s Daughter (1936), one of my favorite Universal horror movies.

The 1943 version had a slightly darker and more sinister tone than the 1949 version. I believe it featured the first appearance of “The Bat Cave,” and emphasized the Gothic elements of the Batman mythos. The title card and music were far superior to the 1949 version, and Wayne Manor looked a lot better.

Batman 1943

On the other hand, the 1943 version had slightly less impressive stunts than the 1949 version, and was made during World War II, so the 1949 version is probably a better choice to watch with your kids, unless you want to have a conversation with them to explain lines like “a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs.”

The 1949 version was made by producer Sam Katzman and director Spencer Gordon Bennet, the same creative team behind the serial Superman (1948), which starred Kirk Alyn as the Man of Steel. Batman and Robin stars Robert Lowery as the Caped Crusader and Johnny Duncan as the Boy Wonder.

Katzman and Bennet’s version starts out less impressively than the first Columbia serial. Batman and Robin leap onscreen, ready for action, and then stand there looking around as the music plays and the credits roll, as if they’ve lost something and can’t find it.

Maybe they’ve lost the keys to their 1949 Mercury convertible, which they drive in lieu of a Batmobile.

Batman 1949

Both serials have their good points and their bad points. Unfortunately, neither is a comic-book masterpiece like Republic’s Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), but both are essential viewing if you’re a serious Batman fan.

Katzman’s Batman and Robin is campy fun if you like chapterplays, and I think it works a little better than Katzman’s Superman, if for no other reason than Batman looks great in black & white, whereas with Superman it seems as if something’s missing without those bright blues and reds.

Unlike the 1943 serial, the 1949 version features Commissioner Gordon (played by Lyle Talbot). He has a little portable Bat Signal in his office that he can turn on and wheel over to the window to beam the sign of the bat onto clouds. It’s ridiculously tiny and looks like an overhead projector, and Commissioner Gordon refers to it as “the Batman Signal.”

Gotham Central

Batman and Robin also features Jane Adams as reporter Vicki Vale and Eric Wilton as butler Alfred Pennyworth (the only supporting character from the comics who also appeared in the 1943 version).

Unlike the dimly glimpsed and imposing Wayne Manor of the 1943 version, in the 1949 version Bruce Wayne and his ward, Dick Grayson, live in what appears to be a four-bedroom, two-bath, single-family home in the suburbs. (Incidentally, this version of “Wayne Manor” is the same movie-studio house that Danny Glover and his family occupied in all four of the Lethal Weapon movies.) When Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson relax at home with Alfred serving them drinks and Vicki Vale stops by, there’s barely enough space for all four of them in the living room.

Oddly enough, the antagonist of Batman and Robin lives in a mansion that looks tailor-made to be Wayne Manor. He’s Professor Hammil (William Fawcett), who’s confined to a wheelchair but can turn himself into a lean, mean, walking machine by sitting in something that looks like an electric chair and zapping himself. This pulp lunacy seems to allow him to don the guise of “The Wizard,” a fearsome black-hooded criminal mastermind. The MacGuffin of the serial is a powerful ray that can remotely control any vehicle.

While I enjoyed Batman and Robin, its flaws are legion. Robert Lowery and Johnny Duncan are the two most disreputable-looking versions of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson you may ever see on film. Lowery looks kind of like Victor Mature and Johnny Duncan was about 25 years old when this serial was filmed, which makes him hardly a “Boy” Wonder anymore.

Lowery and Duncan

Also, apparently Kirk Alyn — who played Superman — was originally cast as Bruce Wayne/Batman, so the costume was designed for his measurements. Lowery was slightly smaller, which means that he’s constantly leaning his head back to see out of the eye holes in his cowl, which is too big for him.

Lowery’s stunt double is fine, but Duncan’s stunt double looks absolutely nothing like him. Unlike Duncan’s full head of dark, curly hair, his stunt double has straight, thinning, light hair, and appears to have a bald spot.

Batman and Robin lacks the technical sophistication of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films and the colorful pop sensibilities of Tim Burton’s 1989 version, but it’s a lot of fun. I think if you’re a Batman fan you have to accept all the iterations of the character — from the excessively dark, grotesque, and violent comic-book adventures of the ’80s and ’90s to the most ludicrously campy and brightly colored adventures of the ’50s and ’60s. Batman and Robin leans farther toward the campy end, but its black & white cinematography and closeness to the era of the pulps make it a little less silly than the ’60s TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward. It’s definitely not going to be to everyone’s tastes, but if you’re a Batman fan you should make the time to watch both the 1943 serial and the 1949 serial.

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The Third Man (Aug. 31, 1949)

Posted on March 8, 2014 by Adam Lounsbery

The Third Man
The Third Man (1949)
Directed by Carol Reed
London Film Productions

OK. True confessions time.

I don’t really like the music in The Third Man.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s catchy as hell and does a good job of establishing the post-war Vienna setting, but I find it wildly at odds with the mood of some of the dramatic scenes. After the first couple of reels I was sick of it. Not because it’s a bad tune, but because of the way it was used in the film.

I know I’m in the minority with this opinion. The music is one of the most commonly praised aspects of the film. The simple zither melodies in The Third Man made the previously unknown Viennese musician Anton Karas internationally famous. After the film’s release, “The Harry Lime Theme” — which recurs throughout the picture — sold half a million copies and worldwide sales of zithers reportedly skyrocketed (from their previous sales position of “next to nothing,” one presumes).

I first saw The Third Man about a decade ago. I liked it, but I didn’t think it was a masterpiece.

Recently, I’ve seen more films by the director, Carol Reed, and better come to appreciate his talent. Three years ago I reviewed Odd Man Out (1947) and said that I thought it was better than The Third Man. I wrote, “[James] Mason is a more compelling central presence than any of the actors are in The Third Man, and the music, cinematography, editing, and direction are all tighter in Odd Man Out.”

Last year I reviewed The Fallen Idol (1948). With that review I didn’t take another swipe at The Third Man, and simply said that Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, and The Third Man are “as brilliant a trio of films as any director has ever made.”

I stand by that statement, and I liked The Third Man a lot more this time than the first time I watched it. I don’t like it quite as much as The Fallen Idol, which had more personal resonance for me, but it’s a brilliant film.

Three films in a row that are as good as Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, and The Third Man is an extremely rare feat, and only the greatest of directors have ever pulled it off (like Billy Wilder, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick).

Cotten on the stairs

Like The Fallen Idol, The Third Man is a collaboration between Reed and writer Graham Greene. It stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins, an American writer of popular western novels. Holly Martins arrives in Vienna, looking for his old friend Harry Lime, only to find out that Harry Lime was hit by a car and died a few days before his arrival.

At Harry’s funeral, Holly Martins meets a pair of British Army Police, the stiff-upper-lipped Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and the more rough-and-tumble Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee). (Incidentally, if you’ve ever seen a James Bond film from the ’60s or ’70s, you’ll recognize Lee as Bond’s superior, “M.”)

Holly Martins also meets Harry Lime’s girlfriend, the beautiful actress Anna Schmidt, who is played by Alida Valli — she’s listed in the credits as simply “Valli,” as she was in Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947) and the Frank Sinatra shmaltz-fest The Miracle of the Bells (1948).

Eyewitness reports of Harry Lime’s death don’t add up — did only two men spirit his body away from the scene of the accident, or was there a “third man”? Holly Martins begins to suspect that there is more to the story than he’s been told.

Cotten at the fairgrounds

Joseph Cotten has the most screen time in The Third Man, but the presence of the mysterious Harry Lime and the character of postwar Vienna both dominate the film.

Like Germany and Berlin, Austria and Vienna were broken into zones after World War II — British, American, French, and Russian. And just like in Berlin, the black market was booming.

Harry Lime was deeply involved in the black market, and in the worst way possible. He sold penicillin, which was desperately needed, but he diluted it to make more money, and many children and adults died as a result.

Orson Welles shows up late in the film to explicate Harry Lime’s philosophy to Holly Martins, and it’s these lines that are some of the film’s most enduring.

Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax — the only way you can save money nowadays.

Welles is a magnetic presence, and his nihilistic philosophy in The Third Man is seductive. I’ve even heard his words quoted as a celebration of death and destruction. (I suppose that like all great art, his speech is what you make of it.)

Third Man sewers

You know what? I take back what I said about the music. I started writing this review last night, and woke up with “The Harry Lime Theme” in my head. I’ve been listening to the soundtrack all morning while finishing this review.

I still find it at odds with the mood of the film, but perhaps a delicious sense of irony was Reed’s intention.

The Third Man is a brilliantly shot, brilliantly acted, and wonderfully involving film.

After three amazing films in a row, I’m really looking forward to seeing Carol Reed’s next picture, Outcast of the Islands (1951), which no one ever talks about.

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King of the Rocket Men (12 chapters) June 7-Aug. 23, 1949

Posted on February 25, 2014 by Adam Lounsbery

King of the Rocket Men
King of the Rocket Men (12 chapters) (1949)
Directed by Fred C. Brannon
Republic Pictures

When I was a kid, one of my favorite comic books was The Rocketeer, by Dave Stevens. The protagonist, Cliff Secord, was a stunt pilot who strapped on an experimental jet pack and fought criminals and Nazi saboteurs. As a child of the ’80s who was obsessed with old radio shows and the pop culture of the past, The Rocketeer was amazing. It was a loving homage to the pulp entertainments of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.

As a budding adolescent, the thing I loved best about the series was Cliff Secord’s girlfriend Betty, who was clearly modeled after pinup queen Bettie Page.

Betty

But pretty much everything about The Rocketeer was great. I especially liked how up-front Stevens was about his homages. Cliff Secord’s jet pack and streamlined metal helmet were taken straight from Republic’s “Rocket Man” serials — King of the Rocket Men (1949), Radar Men From the Moon (1952), and Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952), as well as Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe (1955), which was originally filmed as a TV series but ended up being released theatrically as a week-to-week serial.

King of the Rocket Men is the chapterplay that started it all. It was released by Republic Pictures and directed by Fred C. Brannon, who co-directed (with William Witney) one of my favorite serials of all time, The Crimson Ghost (1946).

King of the Rocket Men shares some similarities with The Crimson Ghost. Both are about a scientific consortium with one member who is secretly a criminal mastermind, and both feature the actor I. Stanford Jolley in similar roles. Instead of the Crimson Ghost, however, the evil genius in King of the Rocket Men is called “Dr. Vulcan,” and he’s the alter ego of one of the members of “Science Associates.”

King of the Rocket Men lobby card

In the first chapter of the serial, Dr. Vulcan — Traitor, noted “cyclotron expert” Prof. Drake, who was working on wild, unpublicized experiments on “flying suits” is killed after his car goes off a cliff (driven by remote control operated by some unseen evildoer, natch).

Our hero, Jeff King, springs into action with one of the flying suits, and blasts, zooms, and punches his way through 12 action-packed weeks of Saturday-afternoon entertainment.

King is played by Republic Pictures mainstay Tristram Coffin, who’s older and more distinguished looking than the average serial protagonist. He was only 39 or 40 when King of the Rocket Men was filmed, but his gray hair and stiffness give him a patrician air.

Rocket Man Title Cards

Every kid has dreamed of strapping on a jet pack and taking to the skies. Part of the appeal of King of the Rocket Men is that the controls of King’s flying suit are so simple even a child could operate them. There are only three controls — ON/OFF, UP/DOWN, and FAST/SLOW — and they all have numbered dials, even the ON/OFF switch, which really doesn’t make sense.

The serial also features Mae Clarke, who starred in much higher-profile films in the ’30s, like Frankenstein (1931) and The Public Enemy (1931), in which she famously received a grapefruit in the face from James Cagney.

In King of the Rocket Men, Clarke plays an intrepid reporter named Glenda Thomas. While Jeff King never shoves anything in her face, his treatment of her is occasionally less than gallant. For instance, in Chapter 3: Dangerous Evidence, he tells her to jump out of a speeding car. Miraculously, she doesn’t die or receive any injuries. He jumps too, and flies away, then they reunite while dusting themselves off. She says, “Thanks, Rocket Man! You know, at first I thought you were an invader from some other planet, but it’s plain to see you’re human and you’ve made a great scientific discovery. I’d like to write an article about you for my magazine.” He responds, “I’m sorry, that’s impossible.” He wants to put an end to the mysterious activities of Dr. Vulcan, and he doesn’t want her to publicize his actions. And then, like a true gentleman, he tells her to wait for the bus and he flies away.

King of the Rocket Men Chapter 8

Weird little moments like that aside, King of the Rocket Men is well-made, fast-paced entertainment, and highly recommended for any cliffhanger fans who haven’t seen it yet. It has plenty of stock footage of car crashes and explosions taken from earlier Republic serials, but the Rocket Man himself is unique. The jet pack technology might be pure hokum, but it’s still thrilling for kids and the young-at-heart when he takes to the skies.

The reason for this is the brilliant special effects work of brothers Howard Lydecker and Theodore Lydecker, who ran Republic’s special effects and miniatures department. As they proved in Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), simple techniques like a dummy on a wire and running the film in reverse are only as good as the technicians who employ them. The Lydecker brothers were magicians. Prior to Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), I think the effects in Adventures of Captain Marvel and King of the Rocket Men were the best flying-human effects achieved on film.

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I Was a Male War Bride (Aug. 9, 1949)

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Adam Lounsbery

I Was a Male War Bride
I Was a Male War Bride (1949)
Directed by Howard Hawks
20th Century-Fox

Here’s what I knew about I Was a Male War Bride before I watched it: It’s a screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks. It’s the only Howard Hawks movie my cinephile friend Oskar doesn’t like very much. Cary Grant dresses in drag at the end.

Beyond that, I went in with no preconceptions, and I had a great time. I laughed more at I Was a Male War Bride than any comedy I’ve watched in the past few months.

I’m sure it’s hard for a lot of people not to unfavorably compare I Was a Male War Bride with Howard Hawks’s two previous screwball comedies with Cary Grant, Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). Both films are widely acknowledged classics. Taken on its own merits, though, I think I Was a Male War Bride is great. It’s a really funny movie, with a wonderful blend of witty dialogue and physical comedy.

Ann Sheridan plays Catherine Gates, a lieutenant in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), and Cary Grant plays Henri Rochard, a captain in the French Army.

Capt. Rochard is an incorrigible skirt-chaser and Lt. Gates is a hard-nosed officer with a quick wit. When the film begins, they’ve already been paired on multiple missions, and have the easy romantic-comedy repartee of two bickering people who profess to hate each other but can’t get enough of each other.

The opening scene of the film mocks the military’s obsessive use of acronyms and initialisms, when Capt. Rochard is so caught up in making sense of abbreviations that he can’t decipher the door of the women’s lavatory. And the film as a whole mocks the endless layers of bureaucracy and red tape everyone in the military has to contend with.

I Was a Male War Bride is based on the memoirs of the real-life Henri Rochard, a Belgian who married an American Army nurse, which were published under the humorously verbose title I Was an Alien Spouse of Female Military Personnel Enroute to the United States Under Public Law 271 of the Congress.

There’s a lot I loved about this film. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, with great gags and crisp dialogue that is frequently sexually suggestive, and Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan have wonderful chemistry.

My one problem with the film was that I could never accept Cary Grant as a Frenchman. Cary Grant is one of the all-time great screen stars, but he had two speeds: Comedy and Drama. He never altered his accent and barely ever changed his mannerisms. I wouldn’t have had trouble accepting him as a “French” military officer if it wasn’t so inextricably linked to the film’s plot. The film has a good deal of authenticity. Much of it was shot in Germany, and a lot of the throwaway dialogue is in German, so the fact that Grant doesn’t look French, doesn’t act French, and never speaks in French is really bizarre.

On the other hand, Cary Grant is perfect for this type of comedy, and I don’t think I Was a Male War Bride would have been a better film if his role had been played by Jean Gabin or Jacques François.

Grant and Sheridan

The final sequence with Grant in drag didn’t play as humorously for me as it probably did when the film first played in theaters. Seeing a popular male star dressed as a woman isn’t a novelty anymore, after movies like Tootsie (1982) and The Birdcage (1996). And this certainly wasn’t the first movie to feature a man in drag, as anyone who’s seen The Devil-Doll (1936) can attest.

The only thing funny about seeing Cary Grant in drag is that you’re seeing Cary Grant in drag. He plays a woman the same way he plays a Frenchman, only with a bit more discomfort.

But the scenes of him in drag take up a blessedly short amount of screen time, and didn’t diminish the overall good time I had watching this film. It’s a great comedy with great stars, and holds up really well. It was also 20th Century-Fox’s highest-grossing movie of 1949, and Howard Hawks’s third most financially successful film of all time, after Sergeant York (1941) and Red River (1948).

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