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Tag Archives: Morris Carnovsky

Man-Eater of Kumaon (July 1, 1948)

Posted on December 1, 2012 by Adam Lounsbery

Man-Eater of Kumaon
Man-Eater of Kumaon (1948)
Directed by Byron Haskin
Universal Pictures

Jim Corbett was the archetypal “great white hunter.”

He was born Edward James Corbett in 1875 in Nainital, in the Kumaon region of northern India (now known as Uttarakhand), and was the eighth of 13 children. Corbett would go on to work for the Bengal and North Western Railway. He also attained the rank of colonel in the British Indian Army.

Between 1907 and 1938, Corbett killed a documented 33 man-eating tigers and leopards (the first tiger he brought down was responsible for more than 400 deaths). Despite his fearsome reputation as a hunter, Corbett was committed to conserving endangered Bengal tigers and their natural habitats, and India’s first national park was renamed in his honor in 1957.

His book The Man-Eaters of Kumaon was published in 1944 and was a great success, so it was natural that a Hollywood movie would soon arrive that bore little resemblance to it.

That movie is Man-Eater of Kumaon, and it stars Wendell Corey as Dr. John Collins, a successful but disillusioned physician who has given up the Manhattan rat race for the thrill of big game hunting. Dr. Collins bears no resemblance to Jim Corbett, and he’s not meant to. For better or for worse, the screenplay by Jeanne Bartlett and Lewis Meltzer is mostly an invention, and not directly based on any of Corbett’s stories.

The director, Byron Haskin, was a Hollywood veteran, and the film looks great despite obviously having been filmed on soundstages and at the Corriganville ranch in Simi Valley, California. William C. Mellor’s cinematography is dramatically lighted and ominously shadowed, and the nighttime scenes look especially good. The story and dialogue are overly serious to the point of ridiculousness, however, and Wendell Corey has neither the acting chops nor the charisma to carry a mediocre film.

Corey’s facial expressions range from glum to deeply depressed, and voiceover narration strings together much of the film. More than one scene involves Corey smoking a cigarette, pacing back and forth, and looking pensive as the narrator explains to the audience what he is feeling.

Indian actor Sabu plays a young man named Narain, and he acquits himself well, but he doesn’t have very much to do. (Sabu does get top billing over Corey, although I’m pretty sure Corey has more screen time.) Morris Carnovsky’s performance as the village elder Ganga Ram is overly mannered and soporific, but part of the blame can be placed on the stilted dialogue. Joanne Page, who plays Narain’s wife Lali, acts her part well, but she isn’t given much to do either.

The most interesting thing about Man-Eater of Kumaon is the Bengal tiger who is shot by Corey at the beginning of the film. Throughout the film the tiger is wounded and tracking the man who has harmed him, leaving a path of death and terror in his wake. (As one character in the film says, “A tiger will not forget the man who wounded him.”) The footage of the tiger is really spectacular, and it seems to be mostly original, unlike most jungle adventure pictures, which rely heavily on stock footage.

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Dishonored Lady (May 16, 1947)

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Adam Lounsbery

Robert Stevenson’s Dishonored Lady is a classic piece of slickly produced fluff from Hollywood’s Golden Age. It has a little something for everyone; romance, sex, courtroom drama, murder, and psychotherapy.

The stunningly beautiful Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr plays Madeleine Damien, the art editor of Boulevard, a chic Manhattan fashion magazine. Exhausted and unhappy with her life of constant parties, dates in nightclubs, drinking, and meaningless affaires de coeur, she attempts suicide in the most sensible fashion imaginable, by driving her car straight into a tree. Luckily for her, it’s a tree on the front yard of the home of psychiatrist Richard Caleb (Morris Carnovsky), and she’s not seriously injured. Dr. Caleb declares that she has no bones broken, but that she needs the courage to face herself, which she’s unwilling to do. Dr. Caleb drives her to the train station and says, “Miss Damien, you’re an intelligent woman, not an idiot. Can you promise me one thing? When you get ready to throw yourself off Brooklyn Bridge Bridge, will you come and see me first?” He gives her his card and she smiles a little. Maybe there’s hope for her after all.

On Monday morning, however, little seems to have changed. Madeleine arrives at work accompanied by that frenetic orchestral music that’s always used in movies from the ’40s to accompany Manhattan street scenes. She appears to be the only woman on the editorial staff of Boulevard, but she’s no shrinking violet. She refuses to be intimidated after she kills the art layout of one of their most prominent advertiser’s spreads, calling it not art, but “a press agent’s dream.” That night, however, she meets the prominent advertiser, Felix Courtland (John Loder), and accepts a ride home from the tall, gray-haired, mustachioed, dapper, handsome, and very wealthy gentleman. After backpedaling on her decision on the art layout, one of her bitter co-workers, Jack Garet (William Lundigan), tells her exactly what he thinks of her and the way she lives her life.

Distraught, she sees Dr. Caleb, and through good old-fashioned talk therapy, realizes how much she hates her life. She was always trying to emulate her father, a successful painter who loved and left more women than he could count. Madeleine adored her father, and thought he was the happiest man in the world. Until he killed himself, that is. Dr. Caleb convinces her to find her true self. She quits her job at Boulevard, gives up her apartment, and moves into a cheap, one-room flat under the name “Madeleine Dixon,” where she pursues her painting.

It just so happens that one of her neighbors is a big handsome lug named David Cousins (Dennis O’Keefe), a pathologist working on a report called “The Effect of Anti-Reticular Serum on Cell Tissue.” He needs some medical illustrations of blood cells done, and Madeleine is just the person. Madeleine and Dr. Cousins fall in love, but she can’t bring herself to admit to him who she really is, and all the details of her past life, even after he proposes marriage.

Her past life comes back to haunt her in the person of Felix Courtland, who finds out where Madeleine is living, and comes a-courting. With David out of town, she unwisely accepts his offer of a night on the town, and becomes embroiled in a murder investigation in which she is the prime suspect.

Will David be able to accept Madeleine after he learns the truth about her and realizes that she’s been lying to him all along? Will Madeleine be able to forgive herself? Or is she heading for a one-way trip to the gas chamber?

Dishonored Lady, which was re-released under the title Sins of Madeleine, is based on the 1930 play Dishonored Lady by Edward Sheldon and Margaret Ayer Barnes. It’s competently made entertainment elevated by Hedy Lamarr’s performance. She’s beautiful to look at, and she strikes a nice balance between wide-eyed vapidity and muted sadness.

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Dead Reckoning (Jan. 2, 1947)

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Adam Lounsbery

Lizabeth Scott looks a lot like Lauren Bacall. It’s hard not to compare her to Bacall even when she’s not acting opposite Humphrey Bogart.

There’s a lot of that going around in John Cromwell’s Dead Reckoning, a film that isn’t as well known as some of Bogie’s other noirs, like The Maltese Falcon (1941) or The Big Sleep (1946), and which suffers in direct comparison with them. But taken purely on its own merits, it’s a tense, well-made picture, full of post-war desperation, but with little of the silliness of a lot of returning-vet noirs, like Somewhere in the Night (1946).

Bogart plays a paratrooper, Capt. “Rip” Murdock, who was ordered to Washington, D.C., to receive the Distinguished Service Cross along with his buddy, Sgt. Johnny Drake, who was to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. Before they could get there, Johnny hopped off the train and went on the lam before any newspaper reporters could snap his picture.

Rip finds a Yale pin from the class of ’40 that reveals that Johnny’s real name was John Joseph Preston. Rip follows the clues to Johnny’s hometown of Gulf City. (It’s unclear where Gulf City is supposed to be, but it has to be somewhere along the Gulf Coast. There are palm trees, and Bogie refers at one point to “Southern hospitality.” There is a real Gulf City in Florida, but it’s an unincorporated little town that had a population of zero by the 1920s.)

Rip rolls through the microfiche in the Gulf City public library until he finds a newspaper article dated September 3, 1943, with the headline “Rich realtor slain.” The motive was jealousy — both men loved a woman named Coral Chandler — and Johnny confessed to the murder, but disappeared before he could be sentenced, and enlisted in the army under a false name.

Rip finds a scrap of paper in his hotel room with a single word, “Geronimo,” scrawled on it. It’s from Johnny (it was what they always yelled before jumping out of planes), but the next time Rip sees Johnny, he’s a burnt-up corpse in a twisted car wreck.

Rip tracks down the woman in the case, the beautiful and statuesque Coral “Dusty” Chandler (Lizabeth Scott), a singer in a Gulf City nightclub. The scene in which she sings “Either It’s Love or It Isn’t” under a spotlight to Rip at his table is memorable, though Scott’s lip synching is pretty awful. Rip calls her “Cinderella with a husky voice,” and they embark on a whirlwind love-hate romance.

Most of the film is told in flashback. Rip sits in a pew in a church, his face hidden in the shadows, confessing his sins to Father Logan (James Bell), whom he sought out because he’s a former paratrooper. Logan was known as “the jumping padre, always the first one out of the plane.”

If you’re starting to think that Dead Reckoning might have an overabundance of references to parachuting, you’d be right, and we haven’t even scratched the surface. (The title of the film refers to flying a plane without the aid of electronic instruments — which is a metaphor for Rip’s dangerous, seat-of-the-pants investigation — and the final image of the film is a woman’s face metamorphosing into a billowing white parachute floating to earth along with the whispered word “Geronimo.”)

In many ways, Dead Reckoning feels like a pastiche of earlier Bogart film noirs. The loyalty to a dead man is straight out of The Maltese Falcon (“When a guy’s pal is killed he oughtta do something about it,” Rip says). A villain who rushes to open a door at the climax, only to be shot down, is straight out of The Big Sleep. And the film’s chief antagonists, the effete, cultured Martinelli (Morris Carnovsky) and his brutish, mildly brain-damaged henchman, Krause (Marvin Miller), are straight out of too many noirs to count.

Dead Reckoning carves out its own misanthropic place in the noir pantheon with its doses of brutal violence, fiery finale, and Rip’s distrust of dames, which is nothing new for a noir, but which Dead Reckoning takes to new heights. Rip says things like “I don’t trust anybody, especially women” and “Didn’t I tell you all females are the same with their faces washed?” And his diatribe about how women should all be shrunk down to pocket size has to be heard to be believed.

Dead Reckoning is full of memorable hard-boiled dialogue. Unfortunately, Scott can’t always pull it off the way Bogart can. The dialogue in film noir is often artificial, but it’s artificial in the same way as Shakespearean drama — it can express something more real than “naturalistic” dialogue can, but it takes a very talented actor to make it work.

Bogart had his limitations as an actor, but he perfectly delivered every single line of dialogue in every single film noir in which he appeared. Dead Reckoning is no exception, and while it’s not the greatest film I’ve ever seen, it’s damned good, and I look forward to seeing it again some day.

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Cornered (Dec. 25, 1945)

Posted on January 26, 2010 by Adam Lounsbery

Cornered was director Edward Dmytryk’s second film to star Dick Powell. Powell was a boyish crooner and star of musical comedies who made a 180 degree turn into hard-boiled noir territory at the age of 39 when he played detective Philip Marlowe in Dmytryk’s film Murder, My Sweet (1944), an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely. Powell jumped into his new, hard-boiled persona with both feet. Between the two films, Powell started appearing every week on the Mutual Broadcasting System as private investigator Richard Rogue in the radio series Rogue’s Gallery. The series was mostly standard P.I. fare, but it featured one unique element; every time Rogue was knocked out (which was nearly every episode) he’d drift off to “Cloud Eight,” where his alter ego, a little white-bearded gnome named “Eugor,” would taunt him, occasionally dropping a clue for Rogue to pick up on later, when he’d regained consciousness.

Cornered has no fanciful elements like that one, and the devil-may-care charm Powell exhibited in Murder, My Sweet has been completely done away with. In Cornered he plays a broken man who will stop at nothing to exact vengeance.

When we first meet Flight Lieutenant Laurence Gerard (Powell), an RCAF pilot, he is in London, receiving £551 back pay for the time he spent as a P.O.W. His next stop is a passport office, where he seeks passage to France. He wants to settle his wife Celeste’s estate. She was a French citizen, and they were married during the German occupation. When Gerard is told that all passports to the continent require investigation, and that it will take at least a month to clear, he walks out of the office without saying another word. In the next scene, he is alone in a rowboat, crossing the English Channel. When he sees land, he chops a hole in the hull, sinks the boat, and swims to shore.

In a muddy French town that is mostly rubble, Gerard meets with Etienne (Louis Mercier), a former resistance leader, and Celeste’s father. Gerard demands to know who is responsible for her death, and who betrayed her. “If there was any betrayal, I betrayed her, by fathering her in a century of violence,” Etienne tells him. Gerard doesn’t accept this circumspect response, and vows to hunt down the Vichy collaborator Marcel Jarnac, who ordered the killing of Celeste and several other members of the resistance. Jarnac supposedly died in a fire, but Gerard refuses to believe he is dead. He sets out with a single goal; to kill Jarnac.

Gerard follows Jarnac’s trail to Buenos Aires, and it is there that most of the film takes place. As soon as Gerard steps off the plane, he is approached by a fat man in a white suit. This man, Melchior Incza (Walter Slezak), is an operator with no clear allegiances. Gerard is quickly drawn into a world where no one is what they seem. Former Nazis and their collaborators have fled to Buenos Aires, biding their time until the next great war, while a loose-knit, clandestine organization seeks to root them out. Incza introduces Gerard to Jarnac’s wife (or possibly widow), Mme. Madeleine Jarnac (Micheline Cheirel), and even her loyalties are unclear.

While it may sound like a globe-trotting adventure film, Cornered is really a claustrophobic film noir with healthy doses of paranoia and tension. The script, by John Paxton (with uncredited assistance from Ben Hecht), from a story by John Wexley, takes a run-of-the-mill manhunt plot and ratchets up the tension with crisp dialogue, excellent pacing, and a brutal finale. Harry J. Wild’s cinematography is classic film noir, with inky nighttime exteriors, close-quartered interiors, and actors’ shadows frequently preceding them into the frame.

Powell plays Gerard as a shell-shocked man who suffers from frequent headaches. He’s on a mission to avenge a woman to whom he was only married for 20 days. He’s an amateur doing the work of a detective, and while he’s clever enough to connect the dots, he’s still just one man at the mercy of forces beyond his comprehension. “You are sick with fear,” Mme. Jarnac tells him. “You’ve been hurt so deeply you cannot trust anyone but yourself.”

Is there a better description of the classic film noir protagonist?

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