Looking Back: While the City Sleeps

Loving old movies can create some moral conflicts for those of us struggling with generations of white male privilege. Let's face it: some classics seem positively antediluvian in light of contemporary advances in human rights. I may have been thrilled by Gone With the Wind (1939) when I first saw it as a teenager (and it's still something of a technical wonder), but the aging progressive in me is as appalled at its glorification of racism and rape as the theatre artist is embarrassed at Vivien Leigh's dated performance (yes, it's dated and now seems phony, and somebody had to say it). I'm moved by the butterfly-coming-out-of-its cocoon story and the mother-daughter conflict in Now, Voyager (1942) but can't get over the feeling that Bette Davis' Charlotte Vale could do a lot better than Paul Henreid's spineless Jerry, both romantically and artistically. One remedy for this, of course, is to search for signs of enlightenment in unlikely places — the unconscious feminism of the working women movies of the 1930s, the rare depictions of African-Americans as dimensional human beings in films like Alice Adams (1935) and In This Our Life (1942) and the coded commentary on sexual repression in pictures like Cat People (1942) or Rebecca (1940), for example. For the rest, we sometimes tie ourselves into ideological pretzels trying to justify our enjoyment of films that seem to be designed to perpetuate antiquated power structures.

The women of While the City Sleeps: Rhonda Fleming, Sally Forrest and Ida Lupino, the bad, the good and the in-between.

  Fritz Lang's next-to-last U.S. film, While the City Sleeps (1956), combines a 1950s view of sexual politics and women's roles with Lang's heady combination of cynicism and humanism. The picture is a strange study for fans of his work. While the script he co-wrote (without credit) with Casey Robinson echoes two of his major themes (the pervasiveness of corruption and the devastating consequences of compulsive behavior), because of its low budget it doesn't have the look of most of his other films. There's little of the high-contrast lighting that dominates film noirs like The Big Heat (1953) and Human Desire (1954) or proto-noirs like his best film, M (1931). Nor does it put you into the disturbed mind of a character like Rotwang in Metropolis (1927), Hans Beckert in M or even Lee Marvin's Vince Stone in The Big Heat. The only brief peek into the thinking of the serial killer played by John Drew Barrymore (billed as John Barrymore, Jr. at the time) is the opening sequence.

That opener is one of the film's most effective scenes, suggesting another Langian theme, the inevitability of fate. Barrymore, clad entirely in black leather (this was two years after Marlon Brando made the look both sexy and threatening in The Wild One), delivers a package to the apartment of a young woman we don't see at first. We only hear her as the janitor (Vladimir Sokoloff) accepts the delivery. When Sokoloff leaves, Barrymore returns, claiming to have delivered the wrong package. As the woman turns to check her delivery, there are a few quick cuts following Barrymore's line of vision as he notices the door has a pushbutton lock and fixes it so he can slip in later. The camera then follows the woman as she fills the bathtub. We hear the door open. She turns and screams, caught in the web of fate we've seen woven around her.  Without changing shots, Lang has transformed the omniscient camera into the killer's point of view. It's an unsettling effect, in a film full of destabilizing moments.

The film's focus isn't on the killer, however, but rather on the staff of Kyne, Inc., a major news organization covering the case. Early on the CEO (Robert Warwick) dies, leaving the company to his playboy son (Vincent Price). Price spent most of the '40s and '50s on the brink of stardom, with solid supporting performances in A movies and starring roles in B pictures (this film is sort of a B+, packaged for United Artists, but released through RKO years after it was a major studio). In his first scene, as he prepares to meet with the heads of the company's major divisions, Price plays layers within layers. His Walter Kyne is dealing with paternal rejection, feelings of inadequacy over not knowing the business, a grudging respect for some of the department heads, contempt for others and admiration for his best friend, "Honest" Harry Kritzer (James Craig), the head of the photo service. Freed from the responsibilities of playing the romantic lead, Price can project the character's immaturity and even a feminine side that makes Walter one of the picture's most compelling characters.

Walter decides he needs to create a management position to run things for him. In a childlike move, he makes the men compete for the job. It will go to the person who finds out who the serial killer is. It's a fascinating contrast to M, in which the serial killer is hunted down at the command of a powerful and very capable crime lord because the police hunt for the psychopath is interfering with business. Here the hunt is spearheaded by a boy man appealing to the greed and ambition of his underlings — a parting shot at American culture before Lang's return to Europe, perhaps.

The competition is the device that brings the women into the plot. Since the picture was made in the 1950s, it's not surprising that there are no women up for the job. Instead, each of the three men tries to use one of the top-billed female characters to win.

"Honest" Harry doesn't really care about finding the killer. He's having an affair with Walter's wife, Dorothy (Rhonda Fleming), and wants to use the connection to advance his case. Fleming — who usually played heroines, most notably in Technicolor films that took advantage of her red hair — is the complete trophy wife. She's got Price wrapped and wants to get Craig the job so she'll be in control of both men at the top. Lang doesn't have time to create a lengthy backstory to motivate this. His world is simpler, more brutal than that. Dorothy is a woman whose sole asset is her beauty. She trades on being something men want to possess, and becoming the quiet power behind the scenes at Kyne is her way of making the two men in her life pay for the privilege. At times, her husband doesn't even seem to care about her. In one scene, she works out in a leotard while he ignores her to practice his golf swing. When Harry calls to ask for an afternoon assignation, she has no trouble fobbing her husband off with a transparent lie so she can meet her lover. Fleming plays all this with great relish, as if it were a relief to cross over to the wrong side of the moral compass for a change.

The newspaper's editor, Jon Day Griffith (Thomas Mitchell), is older and has a wife at home who's barely seen. But he enlists the TV network's chief news commentator, Ed Mobley (Dana Andrews), for help. Mobley has a pretty young fiancée, Nancy (Sally Forrest), who also works at Kyne, as a secretary of course. Though she's accepted Mobley's proposal, she's made it clear that she doesn't intend to hop into bed until they're married. In fact, the proposal comes at the end of a prolonged courtship scene in which Mobley tries to get her into bed with no luck. So of course they set her up as bait for the killer. It's as if the woman Mobley loves has to be punished for her independence, which offers an interesting parallel to the killer's victims, who also live alone, suggesting a self-reliance that's a threat to the mother-fixated psychopath.

Although Nancy can hold her own in banter with the men working at the paper, she's still clearly a sex object. Her boss (George Sanders) thinks nothing of invading her personal space while they're working, and Mobley is constantly calling her for a little sexual banter while he watches her through the glass walls at the office (the open office space at Kyne is one of the film's more unsettling elements; everybody is always on display, always being watched and judged). It doesn't help that Forrest is the weakest of the film's three leading ladies. She had done some strong work under Ida Lupino's mentorship in films like Not Wanted (1949) and Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951), but in this picture she's a little too arch. Her attempts at witty badinage with Andrews fall flat and rob the character of what little power she has.

In the moral world of Lang, Forrest is the almost totally good woman, which makes her dispensable (like Glen Ford's poor wife in The Big Heat), and Fleming is the bad woman who must be punished (like the judge's wife in the same film). But Lang also depicts another type of woman, the good-bad woman, someone who's morally suspect yet ends up doing the right thing. That's not necessarily a guarantee of survival. Characters like Joan Bennett's in Man Hunt (1941) and Gloria Grahame's in The Big Sleep may be valorized in their pictures, but they don't make it to the final credits alive.

The good-bad woman here is Lupino, as Mildred Donner, the paper's sole female journalist. Mildred does nothing to hide the secret of her success. She parades around the newsroom in a mink coat everybody knows she didn't buy for herself. In the competition for the management job, she works with her current mentor, Mark Loving (Sanders), who runs the company's wire service. Loving may be an oily chauvinist, a role Sanders played perfectly in dozens of films, but he's not about to risk losing Mildred to the killer. Instead, he enlists her to spy on and distract Mobley.

Lupino was pretty independent on her own. After putting in time as an ingénue, mostly at Paramount Pictures, she struck out for meatier roles with an intense performance as a cockney slattern in William A Wellman's The Light That Failed (1939). It was the kind of breakout role that had established Bette Davis as a major dramatic actress in Of Human Bondage (1934), which led to Lupino's being signed by Davis' studio, Warner Bros. There she delivered a series of fine, neglected performances, often in films turned down by Davis (all of the studios kept actors on hand as threats to their major stars). After seven years of that, Lupino went independent, even setting up a production company with then-husband William Dozier. There she stumbled into directing, taking over when the director of their first film, 1949's Not Wanted, had a heart attack and couldn't finish the film.

At the time she started directing, Lupino was the only woman in the Director's Guild. Her work is a fascinating combination of toughness and subtlety, characteristics of her work as an actress. In addition, she pioneered in dealing with social issues like illegitimate pregnancy (Not Wanted) and rape (1950's Outrage). Her low-budget films made money, but in the era when television was rapidly replacing low-budget filmmaking, she naturally moved into television, where she proved a major asset to series like Have Gun Will Travel and Thriller.

She also kept acting, thank God. Like Price, she seems to have fun bringing layers to her character. When Mildred sets out to seduce Mobley, she plays a combination of opportunism, lust and loneliness that makes the scene more fun than Andrews' more conventional love scenes with Forrest. The two have the easy rapport of pros at the top of their game, and you may wish he'd dump his treacly girlfriend for the woman with more of an edge. They just seem like a perfect pair.

By the film's end, Lang has given each of his leading ladies the fate he seems to think they deserve. Although Andrews has set Barrymore up to stalk Forrest, she manages to elude him and ends up marrying Andrews, who's assured of a bright future at the paper. Fleming's character is punished. First, she's attacked by Barrymore (in one of those coincidences that only exist in the movies, her love nest with Craig is across the hall from Nancy's apartment, and when Barrymore can't get at Forrest, he goes after Fleming). Nancy saves her from that (she may be boring, but she can muster up pluck when needed). But that ultimately exposes the affair and leads to her being cuckqueaned (that's the female form of "cuckold"; look it up on Wikipedia). When Mobley and Day learn Forrest has saved a potential victim, they send Mildred to interview her, and Mildred recognizes Dorothy as the boss's wife. She uses that info to maneuvers herself into a position as Walter's personal assistant and, it's implied, his mistress as well. Mildred has graduated from reporting the news to helping run the news service and from minks to just about anything she wants.

In 1950s terms, that's a victory (and certainly better than the fates of most of Lang's good-bad women). By contemporary standards, of course, it all seems a little sour. Mildred is too good at what she does to have to put out for the boss to get ahead. But then, the whole film, even down to the happy endings, has a certain smarminess. Maybe that's intentional. Lang seems to be drawing parallels between the killer's compulsions and the compulsions of the men at Kyne. He may be driven to kill, but these guys never met a drink they couldn't turn down. And their competitiveness sometimes seems as unhinged as his violence. They also seem to share his misogyny, which in his case is painted as a sign of arrested emotional development.

When first we see Barrymore, he looks great in his leather outfit, and he moves with a dancer's ease. When the film picks him up again, watching an on-air editorial in which Andrews baits him, Barrymore has to act…with lines…which turns out not to be such a good idea. His mother (silent great Mae Marsh) comes in and starts giving him a hard time. The contrast in their acting styles reinforces the meanings. Marsh had become a star working for D.W. Griffith. With sound, she moved into supporting roles, becoming a member of John Ford's unofficial stock company. She clearly knows her way around a role and plays the concerned mother with quiet dignity. Meanwhile, Barrymore tries to act all over the place. He doesn't stand a chance. The killings aren't just a psychosexual attack on his mother' they're a form of artistic revenge because mommy can out-act him so easily.

He's hardly the only man motivated by his hatred of women. Day and Mobley's manipulation of Sally, Loving's pimping out Mildred and Walter's casual neglect of Dorothy all reflect the same basic hostility toward women. Is Lang reporting this, supporting it or condemning it? It's always hard to tell when we bring our own contemporary values to older films.  Lang is such a masterful filmmaker we'd like to place him on the side of the 2018 angels in all things. Certainly his social conscience — which led him to tackle topics like the exploitation of labor, lynching, capital punishment and political corruption — suggests an awareness of basic human rights. But that has to be placed within the context of his period, when the patriarchy and white primacy seemed the natural order.

As an artist of some considerable accomplishment, however, his work eschews any two-dimensional parroting of the dominant paradigms of his day. He gravitates toward fully developed characters, which creates the greater potential for their being interpreted through a variety of lenses. A director who could humanize the child killer in M and, in his final moments, even lend him a degree of sympathy, isn't going to fill his movies with cookie-cutter characters of either gender. Although his most virtuous women tend to seem a bit underdeveloped (like the morality that shaped them?), his aptitude for presenting flawed, very human women in search of a moral compass seems almost revolutionary compared to the depictions of women in other works of his era.

Rediscovered Gems: War Requiem

The faces of War Requiem: Nathaniel Parker, Sean Bean and the incomparable Tilda Swinton

I'm currently preparing to direct a production of Stephen MacDonald's Not About Heroes, a moving play about the friendship of British poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen during World War I. Doing a play like that at this point in history has become an emotional challenge for me. The play speaks to my own pacifism, my long-standing belief that humanity needs a massive reframing of its views on violence. At the same time, I feel caught in a political landscape that fills me with anger every day. It's easy to seduce yourself with images of Trump, his political enablers and his cultish supporters writhing in agony. There are times his behavior makes me wish hell existed, though I realize that's the same kind of thinking that leads fundamentalists to threaten hellfire and damnation for everything from same-sex love to wearing yoga pants in public.

After a fulfilling day of auditions to find the perfect actors for the two roles, I was in a very vulnerable state when I decided it was time for a reviewing of Derek Jarman's War Requiem, his 1989 tribute to Benjamin Britten's monumental work and Owen, whose too short life inspired Britten's composition. I had watched the film years earlier and found its imagery compelling but a little beyond my frame of reference. I was fairly new to Jarman's work at the time (I think I'd only seen his 1986 Caravaggio) and didn't know much about Owen beyond the fact that he had been killed in World War I. Watching it again years later from a more informed space, I was deeply moved. I now consider the film and Tilda Swinton's performance among the screen's greatest accomplishments.

In his Washington Post review of the film on its 1990 U.S. debut, Joseph McLellan called it "the first music video that must be taken seriously." (Quick note: I only heard of this evaluation in podcaster Alonso Duarde's informative introduction to the picture on Filmstruck—just giving credit where it's due). That evaluation seems a bit reductive both of music videos and Jarman's film. There were some pretty damned good music videos before 1989, including Jarman's own work for Marianne Faithful and The Smiths, not to mention innovative work from other filmmakers for artists like ABC, Devo, Cyndi Lauper and Bonnie Tyler. I would suggest that even lighthearted videos like ABC's "The Look of Love" and Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" are well worth serious consideration. These videos transcend the commercial end of the form, the sale of music.

In addition, McLellan's assessment reduces the film to the level of marketing tool. It seems to suggest that 26 years after Britten's premiere recording of War Requiem, Jarman suddenly felt the need make a promotional video to increase the recording's sales.

Rather, War Requiem is a fascinating confluence of three artists — composer, poet and filmmaker — to create a wholly new work of art. To obtain the rights to the 1963 recording, Jarman had to agree to present it complete and with nothing else on the soundtrack during the performance. That's a blessing to music lovers who may have cringed at what MGM did to the ballet in An American in Paris (1951) or the cuts Woody Allen took in Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" at the start of Manhattan (1979). All Jarman adds are a bell ringing at beginning and end and a recording of Laurence Olivier's reading from Owen's "Strange Meeting" before the music starts. The images he plays against the music, however, carry the film beyond a mere recording of an admittedly fine composition.

Jarman visualizes the music in three ways. Some sequences are played against montages of newsreel footage from World War I, with images from World War II, Korea and Vietnam added for the "Libera Me" (the images of wounded soldiers may be too intense for some). Using Nathaniel Parker, in his film debut, as Owen, Owen Teale as The Unknown Soldier, Swinton as a nurse and Sean Bean as a German soldier, Jarman also creates his own images related to the war, jumping through time and space to show Owen in the trenches with his men, children celebrating Christmas, Owen with his mother and Swinton grieving over his dead body, among many other visuals. Finally, the second half of the "Requiem Aeternam," the "Libera Me" and the "Offertorium" play against short wartime stories, the only clear narratives in the film. The first shows men going through the initial stages of training, with Parker and Teale becoming friends. The second depicts a brief moment of détente between Teale and Bean, enemy combatants, disrupted when Parker fires at Bean. The third plays out the story of Abraham and Isaac as depicted in Owen's "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young," in which the poet changes the ending to have Abraham defy God to sacrifice his son "and half the seed of Europe one by one."

For the actors, this seems like a return to silent cinema. The "Offertorium" is the only section, however, to present the stereotyped image of silent acting as an exercise in scenery chewing. That seems natural, as the segment is an extended allegory, painted in broad strokes.  Even there, Parker, whose Owen takes the Isaac role, maintains his more naturalistic style from the rest of the film. Nigel Terry, who had played the title role in Caravaggio, is the leering, bloodthirsty priest, performing for an audience of lecherous, gluttonous one-percenters. Their gleeful overacting is jarring, but it's meant to be. Positioned as Owen's fantasy as he writes the poem and reads a Bible (that, in a typical surrealistic touch for Jarman, is overgrown with grass), the embroidered acting style is quite logical within the world of the film.

For the rest, the actors perform silently and simply, often matching their movements to the music's rhythms. That hardly stifles them, but rather seems to liberate depths of emotion tied into the music. Swinton, in particular, is a marvel to behold. In the "Requiem Aeternam," she mourns over Owen's dead body with an impressive physical commitment. When she puts her fingers over her eyes, you may be afraid she's about to pluck them out. The "Sanctus" plays over an extended medium close-up of her braiding her hair (Is this a reference to a section of "Strange Meeting" Britten did not use in the Requiem?). As the music swells, she transitions into laughter and then intense grief, gradually moving her arms and hair to the music in an extended dance of the emotions. It's a devastating sequence and one of the most amazing bits of acting I've seen on film.

As the images fly by, it's hard not to notice reflections of other visionary directors — Murnau, Dryer, Kurosawa and Vigo come immediately to mind. But I think a good deal of the film's aesthetic has a more theatrical basis. You may find yourself frustrated that the classical diction of tenor Sir Peter Pears and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who sing the settings of Owen's poems, can be impenetrable at times. And Olivier's reading of "Strange Meeting" is the kind of plummy overplayed verse that makes my teeth heart. It's more about caressing each consonant than communicating meaning. But that, too ties into the film's artistic goals.

This combination of images, eschewal of an over-arching narrative and devaluing of language, for me, are a reflection of Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. Inspired by a performance of Balinese dance he saw in 1931, Artaud advocated for a theatre of visual and aural images that bypassed language and logic, which to him seemed to be dominating the French theatre of his era, to affect audiences on a visceral level. This penetration to the viewers' psyche is the cruelty in Theatre of Cruelty (though many have associated it simply with the imagery, mainly because Artaud's primary examples were production plans for pieces that would have dwelt on human savagery).

Ultimately, I think this is what Jarman is doing in War Requiem. As the images build, there's no sense in trying to tie them all together. You simply have to let them wash over you, accepting the bits of narrative he supplies while opening yourself to the effects of the imagery. When he ends the archival footage in the "Libera Me" with shots of mushroom clouds, I found my brain trying to reject the image as trite and overused even as the rest of my body was breaking out in goose flesh. At that point, logical thought simply didn't matter.

The fragments of language that you can make out from Owen's poems add to the overall effect. Artaud valued language only for its aural aspects, though you can make a case for the cultural associations from words and phrases playing a role as well, with the power of those associations heightened by their being divorced from any extended syntax. The opening line of Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth," "What passing bells for those who die as cattle?" comes through clearly in the opening movement as young men race into position for wartime training. "Bugles sang" from "But I Was Looking at the Permanent Stars" counterpoints the suffering of the men in the trenches during the second part of the "Dies Irae."

The fragmented words achieve their greatest power in the final scene, the end of the "Libera Me." There's a visual reconciliation between The Unknown Soldier and the German soldier who had killed him. Teale poses as Christ in a re-creation of Piero Della Francesca's "The Resurrection" as Bean approaches him with a basket of poppies. This plays against a setting for tenor and baritone of Owen's "Strange Meeting," but the only really clear line is "Let us sleep now." It's a lovely moment that balances but hardly eradicates the violent images that have preceded it, the end of a symphony of images and sounds that shows Jarman's filmmaking at its best. And it represents a powerful humanistic message, as Jarman moves his imagery from desolation and violence to reconciliation, from war to its opposite.

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If you want to read more about War Requiem, I heartily recommend Jim Clark's blog entry on it at Jim's Reviews - Jarman's War Requiem. I discovered the page trying to identify the painting of the resurrection Jarman copies at the end of the film and found Clark's insights fascinating. It's also a valuable research tool, as he includes information on Owen and Britten and an annotated text of Britten's piece. He even includes the full versions of poems Britten only excerpted.

Better Horrors and Much, Much Worse

I've been in love with horror since my Aunt Louise took me to a Saturday matinee of The Deadly Mantis (1957).  She brought a scarf to put over my face during the scariest parts, and I've always wanted to know what was happening on the other side of that scarf, which sounds more like an introduction to drag than to a film genre.

Being a horror fan still carries something of a stigma with it. I can remember the same aunt later telling my parents I shouldn't be allowed to watch movies like that. Once I snuck home a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland, and when my mother found out she tore it apart in front of me. A few years ago, I tried recommending The Orphanage (2007) to the older women in a theatre workshop I run, only to be shut down as soon as I mentioned it was a horror film. Of course, these were people who wouldn't go see There Will Be Blood (also 2007) because of the title.

Admittedly, being a horror fan means sitting through a lot of terrible films hoping to find the one undiscovered gem with an original approach or a surprisingly good performance. But the best of the genre is as resonant as any other great film. At least the bowsers move and are good for an unintentional laugh. You can't say that about failed social-issue films or yet another snooze-fest with aging British actresses sitting around talking for two hours.

At their best, horror films become metaphors for the parts of life that trouble us most. The best vampire films tend to focus on sexuality issues. The Haunting (1963, not the wretched remake) is about loneliness. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as feature and particularly during its first three seasons as a television series, was a nigh perfect exposition of Joss Whedon's opinion that high school is hell.

Family is a particularly fertile ground for horror. Whether presenting perversions of family life in film's like Rosemary's Baby (1968) or Mother's Day (1980 and 2010), real families fighting off "the other," as in The Hills Have Eyes (1977 and 2006) or extended families assembling for survival as in the two Night of the Living Dead (1968 and 1990) and Dawn of the Dead (1978 and 2004) films, horror can demonstrate the ways the institution functions in crisis and the ways it has changed over time.

More recently, the gifted actor-director John Krasinski has created his own entry in the family horror sub-genre with A Quiet Place, a bit of a family affair in which he directs and co-stars with his off-screen wife, Emily Blunt.

Can the family survive the alien incursion at the heart of John Krasinski's A Quiet Place?

Some of the images in A Quiet Place have the richness of a great American novel. Krasinski and the Danish cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Cristensen photograph the woods of upstate New York with a painter's eye. There's a depth to the images that makes the landscape another character. It's a very threatening character, as the lush greens and lurking shadows hide blind alien predators whose supersensitive hearing makes easy prey of anybody careless enough to produce the least sound.

The film is set in a world that's fallen apart after these creatures arrived unexpectedly. The few people who've survived have given up all sound. They walk around barefoot, use soft items wherever possible (there's a Monopoly game with cloth playing pieces) and communicate via sign language. It's the silent apocalypse. Communication is no problem for the film's Abbott family. Their oldest child, Regan (Millicent Simmonds) is deaf, so they already know ASL.

The film opens with a disorienting, suspenseful sequence. The family is scavenging a drug store to find medicine for their ailing middle child and what few food items are left. They're taking great pains to avoid any sound. The youngest, a four-year-old, tries to take a battery-operated space ship, but his father orders him to leave it. The noises it produces could get them killed. Regan then removes the batteries and gives her brother the toy. As the family leaves, however, the boy picks up the batteries, and you know what's going to happen. This works even if you've missed the film's trailers and media ads. Krasinski establishes the threat simply and economically, and the rest of their walk home is almost unbearably tense.

After the first sequence's violent ending, the action jumps about a year into the future. Blunt is now pregnant. That may seem a questionable choice in a world where silence is survival, but Krasinski and writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck carefully lay out the details of the family's creation of a safe, soundproof room for her delivery and infant care. There are other tensions. Regan still carries a heavy load of guilt over her younger brother's death and feels rejected by her parents, particularly her father. When Krasinski takes his remaining son off to check their fish traps and insists on leaving Regan behind, it only intensifies her feelings of rejection.

One of the film's strengths is the way Krasinski logically sets up details of their life that will become important as the action unfolds: the birthing room/nursery, the hearing aid the father makes for his daughter, a bank of video monitors in the father's workspace and an exposed nail on the basement steps among them. The latter is perhaps a little over-emphasized. With everybody running around barefoot, I found myself covering my eyes every time somebody hit the stairs (yes, the horror fanatic can't stand the sight of blood).

Krasinski also carefully limns the relationships. There are subtitles for the signed scenes, but rarely are the words the only signifiers. You can see the relationships in a look, a touch. You can even see the disconnects. The daughter's feelings of rejection are physicalized, even as we see the physical expression of her parents' love for her. It helps greatly that Krasinski has found two strong young actors to play the children. He's to be commended for casting Simmonds — a particularly gifted young actress who, like her character, is deaf, — to play the daughter and for casting kids who look like real kids, not plastic stand-ins for our dreams of the perfect family.

When her father leaves her behind, Regan goes off on her own, eventually visiting the shrine they've created where their youngest was killed. The camera captures the depth of her feelings of guilt and mourning, and Simmonds embodies the pain of dealing with emotions she's almost too young to understand. It's like The Member of the Wedding with aliens.

There's also a particularly powerful sequence as Krasinski brings his son back from the river. They pass a house that's overgrown with weeds. That's not necessarily a sign that it's abandoned. You can't exactly use a weed whacker in this world. The son is drawn to it, but Krasinski pulls him back to the path. Then they see the dead body of an older  woman on the other side of the road. Next to her is an old man (the wonderful character actor Leon Russom), his face a mask of grief. He opens his mouth and emits a cry — half scream, half wail. Krasinski pulls his sun to hide behind another tree just before one of the aliens swoops in to grab the man. Those simple images are all it takes to render one of the film's most upsetting moments. It's suicide by sound.

It's hard to unpack all of the film's richness without venturing into spoiler territory. All I can say is that as rich as that sequence is on its own, it also feeds into later plot developments. You can't miss a detail in this film. Many of them are set-ups for what will happen next, and even when they're not, they reveal something about the characters, their relationships and the world in which they live. The film carefully sets up the rules of its world, and then follows them through logically. It's a refreshing change from all the cheaply made, poorly thought out horror films, and even some highly regarded films from other genres, that change the rules simply to wind things up.

In addition, A Quiet Place creates a powerful metaphor for the family under siege. For all the bleakness of the world Krasinski and the writers have created, it's ultimately a very hopeful film. It suggests that the strength of connection can withstand anything, be it the vicious fast-moving aliens in the film or the rather more horrifying forces assailing us in the real world.

Don't tell mom The Babysitter's a Satanist.

There's a metaphor underlying the Netflix original The Babysitter (2017), too. For all its slapstick violence, it's basically a coming-of-age tale, a satanic twist on the teenage rom-com.

Twelve-year-old Cole (Judah Lewis) is afraid of everything: needles, the bullies who routinely torment him and rejection (which explains why he can't see that classmate Emily is attracted to him). He's such a phobic wimp his parents can't leave him home alone. Fortunately, his babysitter, Bee (Samara Weaving), is pretty much his favorite person on the planet. She treats him like an equal, stands up to the bullies for him and lets him ignore his parents' rules once they're out of the house. There's only one problem. She's a Satanist who plans to use Cole's virgin blood for a sacrifice to the dark forces. At base, this is the story of a boy growing up fast when he realizes the object of his hero worship isn't what he thought her to be.

Of course, the hero with feet of clay is hardly confined to horror films. Paul's disenchantment with his nationalistic professor adds to the character's growing disillusionment in Lewis Milestone's classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), while Jack Burden's growing awareness of Willie Stark's flaws underlies the plot of Robert Rossen's All the King's Men (1949). Brian Duffield's script for The Babysitter cleverly moves this kind of story into the worlds of romantic comedy and horror. He sets up the plot with solid, internal logic. Bee offers Cole his first alcoholic drink before he goes to bed. Not liking the taste but wanting to appear cool, he dumps the drink while she's not looking. Unknown to him, the drink was drugged so he would sleep through the satanic ritual. Unable to sleep, he sneaks out of his room to watch her play spin the bottle with some of her high-school classmates. Earlier he had spotted her coming on to class nerd Samuel (Doug Haley), which had seemed out of character. When Samuel gets to kiss her during the game, Noah watches as she kills him with two daggers and the other students collect his blood. When they realize Noah's been spying on them, Bee and the teens set out to kill him. His various means of defending himself — a misplaced kitchen knife, a decrepit tree house, even a divorced neighbor's "penis" car — have all been planted carefully in the script.

Duffield is aided greatly by a strong cast. The Australian Weaving, the niece of actor Hugo Weaving, seems to have come out of the "Get Me an Emma Stone Type" casting pool, which is a good thing. Like Stone, she has catlike eyes that make her face lively and interesting, and more important, she shares Stone's gift for sly comedy. She can be brash when she's taking on the bullies and takes on a great conspiratorial air in dealing with Noah. You can tell in a minute why the kid's infatuated with her. Lewis commits to his character's immaturity but has just enough edge to make his standing up to Bee believable. Best of all is Robbie Amell, who manages to be both goofy and scary as the Bee's jock boyfriend. Nor does it hurt that he spends most of the film with his shirt off (which is well enough motivated that you don't have to feel too smarmy for enjoying it).

The Babysitter would be a great guilty pleasure except for one thing — the direction. I suppose there are worse choices to direct a witty genre piece. I mean, Uwe Boll is still working for no discernible reason, and the best thing about the success of the Terminators series is that it keeps Michael Bay away from other people's projects. But after the first scene, in which Noah panics at the thought of receiving a vaccination at his school, it's hard to imagine anybody doing a worse job than McG, best known for the unspeakably bad Charlie's Angels movies. That first scene is so flatly shot it reads like a comic strip, but without the surrealistic edge of great comics-inspired movies like Tim Burton's Batman (1989) or the Deadpool features. McG's approach to action is to play with time, often resorting to slow motion or freeze frames to make parts of a sequence stand out. There's no real sense of style or grace to his use of the device. Just in case you miss those details, he also throws up titles over some of his freeze-frames. When Cole arms himself to deal with Bee and her accomplices, McG has to make sure we see it, so he freezes the frame and throws up "POCKET KNIFE" on the screen. It's like going to the movies and sitting in front of one of those couples that has to explain everything on the screen to each other. And you thought you could get away from them by staying home and watching Netflix! At least you can eat your own snacks without having to sneak them in.

 

The Apocalypse has little pity for the stupid in Stake Land II.

Stake Land II (2016, aka The Stakelander) has the opposite problem. Although well directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, Nick Damici's script has more than its share of problems. That's particularly disappointing given that Damici co-wrote the much better Stake Land (2010) with that films director, Jim Mickle

The Shake Land films are examples of the mumblegore movement, low-budget independent horror films that, like the mumblecore genre that spawned it, focus on character, relationship and naturalistic dialogue over plot. That may be the problem with doing a mumblegore sequel. The original film focused primarily on setting up its vampire apocalypse world and the relationship between Mister (Damici), a seasoned vampire hunter, and his protégé Martin (Connor Paolo), whose parents were killed by vampires. With its world and relationships established, there's more plot in Stake Land II, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

Stake Land had ended with Martin's laying down roots with a tough young woman (Bonnie Dennison's Peggy) and Mister's leaving him to go return to his solitary life. The sequel picks up just as Martin has lost his new family (which is rather a waste; Dennison is a good actress, one of the saving graces of Guiding Light's final years). He sets out on foot to find Mister. And that's where the trouble starts. You'd think surviving in the vampire apocalypse would require some kind of street (or given the rural setting, field) smarts. Not for Martin, though. On the road, he meets an older couple who help him dispatch some vampires. He happily accepts their hospitality, only for them to drug him. He wakes up to find them about to kill him, possibly as a source of food. Fortunately or conveniently, depending on your point of view, he comes to in time to dispatch them and get back on the road. Then he finds a seemingly abandoned building. There's a wild girl there, and he approaches her to see if she needs help. Of course, she's just bait for another group that cannibalizes captives or makes them fight to the death in a post-apocalyptic MMA cage. I suppose you could argue that a few years of domesticity blunted his survival skills, but after getting duped by the couple, you'd think he'd be a little more careful.

Anyway, the cage fight puts him back in touch with Mister, and eventually they wind up at a large survivor's camp run by character actors A.C. Peterson and Steven Williams (best known for playing Mister X on The X-Files). Of course, that puts them in the crosshairs of the vampires, who are working in tandem with the cannibals, and leads to a whole lot of plot complications. In escaping from the cannibals, Martin and Mister capture one of their members. The boy claims to have been forced to work with them, but at the camp, he's held in solitary. He then tricks the young woman serving his meals into unlocking the door and hilarity does not ensue. When a plot depends on this much stupid to keep moving, it gets hard to trust the screenwriter.

At least the thing is fairly well played. Paolo, who's easier on the eyes here than in Friend Request (q.v.), and Damico have their roles down pat and bring the strong sense of relationship the material requires. And Peterson and Williams are the kind of seasoned pros who are fun to watch in almost anything. One of the script's few nice elements is their relationship. As the action unfolds, it's clear that the two are lovers, and they get to go out with some class.

But the film's best element is probably its direction. Berk, who's primarily a writer, and Olsen, an actor, use the camera effectively and know how to frame a scene for maximum effect. They make particularly good use of the Canadian locations, which seem almost an extension of Stake Land's upstate New York and Pennsylvania settmgs. With their depictions of a civilization being rebuilt, the two Stake Land films are similar to Westerns, though their Eastern settings make them seem more like a re-creation of the original 13 colonies. Three's some of the feel of films like John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk (1939). The sylvan setting also calls up memories of the best of regional, independent filmmaking. Stake Land II may not be as good as John Sayles' Matewan (1987), a love letter to West Virginia's mining country, but at least visually it can stand up to John D. Hancock's great rural horror film Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971) and even A Quiet Place.

 

If nothing else, House of the Witchdoctor offers a chance to catch up with Allan Kayser, Leslie Easterbrook and Bill Moseley

 There's mumblegore, and then there's just downright cheap. I'd love to say House of the Witchdoctor (2013) was some great undiscovered gem, but it's not. It's about as vile a piece of exploitation as you're likely to find roaming around the streaming services, though I'd rather you didn't find it. I'll stand by the horror genre until they pry the DVD of Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988) from my cold, dead fingers, but there are a few films I'd be embarrassed for people to know I've seen. I'll just excuse this by saying I suffered through it so you won't have to. Yeah, that's the ticket.

The film's sole claim to originality is that it works a variation on the home invasion sub-genre of pictures like The Strangers (2008) and its much better European precursor, Ils (2006). As in those films, vicious outsiders assault an unsuspecting group holed up in some remote location. In this case a group of college students have gotten together to help the homeowner's daughter commemorate her fiancé's murder (not quite my idea of a suitable party theme, but to each his own). The invaders are an ex-con (Allan Kayser) and his partner in crime. Kayser has already murdered his mother and a drug dealer, along with raping and killing the dealer's girlfriend. They break into the house, tie up the four houseguests (one stereotyped over-sexed couple, one stereotyped Christian couple), and do all manner of horrible things to them. What they hadn't counted on, however, was the nature of the house and the weekend. Since I don't really want you to see the film, I'll spoil it for you (though if anything I've said has intrigued you, then stop reading here and pretend you don't know me). The girl's parents head a vodoun cult and the four houseguests were intended as sacrifices to their goddess. And just to tip things off that all may not be as it seems, the daughter's name is Leslie Van Hooten, just one letter off from Manson Family member Leslie van Houten. In a better film, that would be a nice touch.

As an index of the film's hatefulness, I'll point out that the rape scenes are the most realistic I've seen since the original (and much maligned) I Spit on Your Grave (1978), yet the murders are surprisingly low in gore. I suppose that's because Kayser, the chief malefactor, has the courage to throw himself into those odious scenes, while the filmmakers didn't have the money or the smarts to come up with convincing stage blood. Still, you can't help wondering what kind of mentality insists on realistic scenes of violation but draws the line at too much gore? Not one to whom I'm happy to have devoted 87 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

What drew me to the film in the first place, was its outré cast list. Like many gay men, I used to lust over young Bubba on the syndicated version of Mama's Family, and I've wondered whatever happened to Kayser, who played him. Well, here he is, still in good shape and trying his damnedest to make his character's unmotivated, two-dimensional hatefulness work. He doesn't really succeed. The vodoun cult includes Dyanne Thorne and Howard Maurer, the married actors who appeared in the Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS series.  They play the doddering couple in the cult, which makes the ceremony more pathetic than frightening.

More prominent are Leslie's parents and the cult's leaders, played by William Moseley and Leslie Easterbrook, who played adoptive siblings in Rob Zombie's best film, The Devil's Rejects (2005). In that film, Easterbrook had taken over the role of Mother Firefly from Karen Black, who had played it in House of 1000 Corpses (2003) but wanted too much money for the sequel. Easterbrook only had one scene, an extended interrogation with sheriff William Forsyth, but it was one of the film's highlights. The two worked off each other beautifully, just pushing the edge of too much without ever going past it. It was an acting duet to rival the kind of work that wins awards in more respectable films. She attacks House of the Witchdoctor with the same gusto. In a better film, her performance would be infectious and might have brought the audience along for the ride. But this film isn't better; it could hardly be any worse. At least she seems to be having fun. That makes one of us.

O, De Havilland!

Olivia de Havilland climbs the staircase to freedom at the climax of The Heiress.

Although she was one of the most intelligent and dedicated actresses of the studio era, Olivia de Havilland has never quite ascended to the legendary status attained by Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn. One problem was that she lost two peak years in the 1940s to a lawsuit against her first studio, Warner Bros. She was suing because Warner's wanted to add six months to her original seven-year contract to compensate them for time she had been on suspension for refusing scripts. Two years on career hold to avoid six months' work may seem too much of a sacrifice, but that's the kind of commitment de Havilland had to her career. She thought the studio was assigning her to indifferent projects that would damage her more than her absence from the screen. When she won the case (in a landmark decision ending the addition of suspension time to seven-year contracts, which was a big boon to the leading men who had gone on suspension while fighting World War II), she was rewarded with a juicy role in Paramount's To Each His Own (1946) and an Oscar for Best Actress. Warner's got back at her by cutting her best scenes from their final film with her, Devotion (1946), turning her role as Charlotte Bronte into a supporting part. It was the kind of pettiness she had seen done to actors like Ruth Chatterton and Kaye Francis in the past

De Havilland also made some career mistakes in the 1950s (most notably turning down the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire) before cutting back work altogether to relocate to France with her second husband. As a result, she never engaged in the kinds of reinventions her contemporaries did. Nor was she prone to the larger-than-life emoting that helped turn Davis and Crawford in particular into camp icons. She gave simple, honest performances, though over time there was a tendency to excessive sweetness. Even in her prime, in The Snake Pit (1948), she's much more appealing as a madwoman than she is sane. Her character's normal seems almost artificial next to the gritty realism of the asylum scenes. There's none of that, however, in the two nicest ladies she played — Melanie in Gone With the Wind (1939) and the romantic schoolteacher in Hold Back the Dawn (1941). Nor is there in arguably her best and most honest performance, as Catherine Sloper in The Heiress (1949).

Catherine is the plain, shy daughter of a doctor (Ralph Richardson) who resents her because the wife he has idealized as a great beauty and charming hostess died in childbirth. The makeup and hair departments did their best to make de Havilland look dowdy (they can't do anything about those wonderful cheek bones), and she plays her character's gaucheness with subtlety. There's none of the slapstick indulged in in the later Washington Square (1997), adapted from the same Henry James novel on which Ruth and Augustus Goetz had based their play The Heiress. There's something just a little off in the way de Havilland walks and curtseys. When she fans herself, she does it so vigorously people ask if she's too warm (as the great Edith Evans once said, you can do anything with a fan except cool yourself). The film opens up the play, which was set entirely in the Sloper's drawing room, so that she and her family attend an engagement party for her cousin early in the film. Sharing the scene with the people who know how to behave, particularly her aunt Lavinia (Miriam Hopkins knows how to work a fan), she just doesn't fit in. When the handsome, young Morris Townsend (played by the handsome, young Montgomery Clift) asks her to dance, she keeps kicking him.

But then a small miracle happens. With his gentle coaching, her dancing improves. As he courts her, her gaucheness starts to evaporate. Director William Wyler shows more generosity toward Catherine than do her contemporaries. He lets her have moments of grace. And he doesn't make her cousin Marian, conceived in the play as the example of what a perfect young society woman should be, upstage her. Of course, the role is significantly diminished from the stage version. But under his guidance, Mona Freeman is only just a little prettier. She's younger, obviously, but her real gift is a confidence bred by more supportive parenting than Catherine has had.

Humanity and generosity are key elements in Wilder's films. On the rare occasions he presents a major character as a villain — Oscar Hubbard  (Carl Benton Reid) in The Little Foxes (1941), Marie Derry (Virginia Mayo) in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Messala (Stephen Boyd) in Ben-Hur (1959) — they're still human beings. You know what's made them that way. When he agreed to direct The Heiress (at de Havilland's request; she knew what he could do for actors), he asked the Goetzes to make Morris less of a villain. That primarily involved cutting one section from the play in which he complains to Lavinia that if Catherine's father disinherits her the income she's inherited from her mother won't be enough to live really well (her mother left her $10,000 a year, equivalent to about $300,000 today). Montgomery Clift focuses a great deal of his performance on de Havilland. There are times he seems genuinely concerned for her, to the point that you might actually hold out hopes for their marriage. When he jilts her on the night they're to elope, it's almost a surprise.

Dramatically, of course, it's a blessing. This isn't the story of a woman blossoming as she finds the right man. It's the story of a woman's growth after she realizes the only role that will give her value in society, that of wife, has been denied her. De Havilland builds her frustration subtly as she realizes she's been jilted. And Wyler frames the scene with her in the background (one of his famous deep compositions) and Hopkins in the foreground, the aunt's desperation slowly seeping into her niece. There follows a powerful confrontation with her father, who's realized he's dying (the scene in which Richardson listens to his heart and lungs through a stethoscope is an acting gem). Where he had feigned warmth and affection in the past, only allowing his disdain to creep through in a line reading or a gesture, she makes no efforts to hide her revulsion. At this point she knows she'll never have his love, much less his approval, and flatly informs him she doesn't even want his money. The two actors work off each other masterfully, and the shift in power dynamics is truly exciting.

Wyler saves the best for last, however. After a time jump, we meet the older Catherine, now alone and very wealthy. There's a calm about her, but also a coldness. She's still a prisoner of her father's disapproval and Morris' rejection. Then Morris returns. There are two ways to play the scene. You can show that Catherine is setting him up for revenge or you can hide it and make the final moments a surprise. Wyler and de Havilland choose the former, and at first that may seem a mistake. It's not a question of Morris' realizing she's setting him up. It's all very subtle, and Clift plays his excuses with a certain forced arrogance. He can't believe that Catherine would turn him down. It's a question of how soon the audience should be let in on Catherine's plans. That's the wisdom of director and actress. Were the scene played totally sincerely, the shock when she leaves him locked out and pounding on the door at the end would upstage any other point they wished to make. Letting the audience in on Catherine's thinking, allows them to share the artists' point of view about what's happening at the end. De Havilland's reaction when Morris moves in for the kill and suggests that now that her father is dead and the inheritance is settled they're free is like a moment of revelation for the audience. You can see the realization and relief in her eyes. Once she rejects him, she doesn't have to be tied to the past roles forced on her. When she climbs the steps at the end, the last in a series of ascents Wyler has used to capture her shifting emotional states, she pauses briefly, listens to Morris' calling her name, and then goes up with just the hint of a smile. This isn't the grimace of revenge. Catherine truly is free.

In James' novella, he can tell the audience that Catherine has found a new life devoting herself to charity. Agnieszka Holland does the same thing in Washington Square, but it's too clearly spelled out. When Morris in that version watches Catherine relating to an orphaned girl, it seems like the point is hammered home. The audience is reduced to students at a sophomore-level lecture on feminist theory. It's also a little disappointing that after losing her socially dictated role as wife, Catherine moves into another socially acceptable role for women, that of caregiver.

In The Heiress, Wyler and de Havilland let the audience decide what that new freedom means. It's interesting that in the final scenes, she's almost pretty. Her face is less pinched than in the earlier part of the film, her hair is softer and she's wearing a lighter gown than previously. It's not a miracle transformation. This isn't a variation on Now, Voyager (1942). Nor is this to suggest the film equates feminine beauty with success. But it isn't Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), either. Catherine no longer has to shut herself away from a world that's hurt her. She's freed herself for whatever she wants to be. And that's a pretty powerful feminist message.

A study in contrasts: Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland in In This Our Life

Olivia de Havilland is the eye of a hurricane of overblown dramatics in John Huston's second film, In This Our Life (1942). The picture was a huge misstep for Warner Bros. and Huston. Co-star Bette Davis always blamed it on the script, credited to Howard Koch, but in the studio era there's no telling how many hands got stuck into a stew like that. A lot of fans blamed it on Davis. I tend to side with her and would suggest her performance has been unjustly maligned. Ultimately, however, it's a film whose main recommendations are a strong supporting cast and some social commentary trying to break through.

Ellen Glasgow had won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel about raging passions and racial unrest in Richmond, Virginia. The book is almost 500 pages long, which points to the main problem with the movie, which tries to cram all that action into just over 90 minutes. Some of the supporting characters, particularly Billie Burke as the female stars' chronically ill mother, are given no background. And Davis' character seems to have no motivation. In 90 minutes, she steals sister de Havilland's husband, drives him to suicide, goes after her ex, who's now dating her sister, kills a child in a hit-and-run accident and tries to pin it on an African-American law clerk whose mother is the family's housekeeper. There's nothing unfamiliar about that kind of behavior. She's basically a soap opera spoiler in the tradition of Alexis Carrington, Erica Kane or Iris Carrington. Unlike them, however, she has no reason for her bad behavior. She's just there to keep the plot moving.

Davis does her best to keep the picture alive. She had originally fought to switch roles with de Havilland, arguing that a) she was too old to play de Havilland's younger sister and b) audiences were getting tired of seeing her play bad girls. She was probably right, and it would have been fun to see de Havilland take on the other role. Once she knew she had to play it, though, she threw herself into it with her usual full commitment. Her Stanley (one of the film's gimmicks is that the leading ladies both have men's names, Stanley and Roy) can't keep still. She's always dancing to the record player at home or a band or a jukebox when she's out trying to have fun. Fans didn't like her hair, makeup or costumes, but she actually does a good job of acting younger than de Havilland (whose, of necessity, more staid performance helps carry off the illusion) and there's only one costume (a harlequinade pattern she throws on when she comes out of mourning) that seems over the top. In addition, Davis' penchant for realism pays off. After her husband's suicide, when de Havilland comes to take her home, Davis wears little makeup, and her hair is a mess. Few actresses of the era would have played the scene without being practically lacquered into shape.

De Havilland is the steadier character and manages to keep Roy from seeming a total wimp. There's a weariness about her interactions with Stanley. She knows her sister is going to get her way eventually, so why make an issue of it if she doesn't have to. After Davis runs off, de Havilland is perfectly capable of driving her part of the action. She stumbles into a relationship with her sister's jilted fiancé, a lawyer played by George Brent, and has some charming scenes with him as they fall in love. Brent could be a bit of a lug in some of his films. It took an actress like Davis or de Havilland or Barbara Stanwyck (in the wonderfully soapy 1946 My Reputation) to get something out of him, so when he gets two strong leading ladies, he almost gets to shine.

The real shining in the film, however, comes from the supporting cast. As truncated as her role is, Burke immerses herself in it, and it's fun to see her break from her typecasting as a dizzy society matron (her Lavinia could be the poor country cousin of Millicent Jordan, her role in 1933's Dinner at Eight). Frank Craven is just as good as her husband; he makes long-suffering integrity touching. Lee Patrick sums up her character, a party girl who befriends Davis after her marriage, in one hip-swinging walk, then gets to show the character's depth when Davis is widowed. And Charles Coburn breaks out of his usual typing as a bluff upper-class clown to play the women's venal uncle, who cheats their father, oppresses the rest of the town economically and secretly lusts after Davis. His quietness when he realizes he's dying is a surprise in this otherwise feverish soap opera.

The other surprise is the picture's acknowledgment of racial inequality. Hattie McDaniel, as the family's housekeeper, gets her best role since winning the Oscar for Gone With the Wind. Her simple, sincere explanation of how she knows her son isn't responsible for the hit-and-run accident is another island of sincerity in the movie. As her son, Ernest Anderson goes beyond defining stereotypes; he's more of an anti-stereotype. His character growth is kept mainly off-screen, but his rise from errand boy to law clerk (as he saves to go to law school) is one of the film's most compelling plot points. When he's arrested, his repeated statement that "Nobody's going to believe me in this world" is a powerful indictment  delivered simply and quietly. This isn't to suggest the film was a trailblazer by any means. Much of the novel's racial politics was toned down to pass the Production Code, and some of Anderson's work had to be cut in southern states for fear of creating racial unrest, as if cutting a few scenes from a film could stem the tides of history.

The treatment of race is the most interesting part of In This Our Life. Huston's opening shot, showing laborers at the tobacco plant where Craven and Coburn work, says it all. There's a raised dock at the level of the factory itself and a street below. The African-American workers are confined to the street level unless called for, while the whites occupy the upper level. With that set-up and the background presence of African-American servants in the two main households, race becomes like an ostinato running beneath the rest of the action. It's a pity Huston couldn't have focused the entire film on McDaniel, Anderson and the town's other black inhabitants. All the insane doings of the white populace could have been just so much noise in the background.