Tag: Porter Hall

The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936)

A visionary struggles against the blind in this genre-defining slightly cosy biopic

Director: William Dieterle

Cast: Paul Muni (Louis Pasteur), Josephine Hutchinson (Marie Pasteur), Anita Louise (Annette Pasteur), Donald Woods (Dr. Jean Martel), Fritz Leiber (Dr. Charbonnet), Henry O’Neill (Dr. Emile Roux), Porter Hall (Dr. Rossignol), Raymond Brown (Dr. Radisse), Akim Tamiroff (Dr. Zaranoff), Halliwell Hobbes (Dr. Joseph Lister), Frank Reicher (Dr. Pfeiffer)

Jack Warner was convinced no one would want to watch the life story of some crusty old scientist. But Paul Muni insisted they would – and he was a star – so with a threadbare budget and host of re-used costumes (many not from the correct period) and sets The Story of Louis Pasteur came to the screen – and much to Warner’s surprise was a hit. It can look like an oddly cliché-ridden affair today: until you realise many biopic tropes we’re used to were virtually coined here.

The Story of Louis Pasteur remixes huge portions of Pasteur’s life to make it more dramatic: the man who was the leading scientist in France for almost thirty years is repackaged as an outsider and laughing stock, constantly scorned by the medical establishment until (but of course!) he is triumphantly hailed as a genius by the same doctors who mocked him for years. Sound familiar? The film charts Pasteur’s efforts to discover vaccines, first for anthrax in sheep (leading to a famous test where 25 sheep were vaccinated and 25 were not, then all of them exposed to the disease, killing all the unvaccinated sheep) then rabies in dogs and treating those bitten by rabid dogs. Pasteur uses his unparalleled knowledge of microbes which (but of course!) every other doctor says cannot possibly have anything to do with infection.

There is a lot to enjoy in The Story of Louis Pasteur, an undeniably old-fashioned “Great Men” view of history that manages to turn bacteriology into effective entertainment. It recasts history into an easily digestible tale of visionaries and scoffers – but, crucially, no real baddies – crafting a series of small steps towards scientific discoveries into flashes of inspiration and triumphant revelations. Science is made simple, plain and understandable with Pasteur to talk us through a few shots of microbes under microscopes. At its centre we have a stubborn maverick determined that it is his way or the high-way and who won’t listen for a second to anyone questioning his theories.

There is something rather touching about the film’s admiration for science and celebration of an altruistic quest to make the world a better place. It carefully outlines the dangers of surgery and poor hygiene in medical practice – it opens with a doctor murdered for failing to save his killer’s wife, the reason for his failure pretty clear from the haphazard way he chucks medical equipment into a bag (dropping some of it on the floor en route). This lack of hygiene affects rich and poor (even Duchesses are not safe), in particular women in childbirth. Its truly the enemy of mankind, as a caption explaining the 1870 war stresses (European squabbles being a distant second). This is a problem that is truly noble to take on.

And it motivates Pasteur. Paul Muni is on Oscar-winning form as Pasteur, brilliantly precise and superbly conveying great intelligence mixed with an arrogant self-assurance. But Pasteur’s egotism comes not from vanity but from simply knowing more of which he speaks than anyone else. He’s also a man consumed by a sense of duty to the world: when his work can literally save lives (be they either animal or human) he will not let scorn stand in his way. Muni captures all this wonderfully, creating a prickly man with a playful streak determined to do the right thing the right way (Pasteur may disagree with his critics, but woe-betide their assistants disrespectfully doing the same).

Dieterle’s film crafts a series of excellent set-pieces to present Pasteur as a visionary ahead of his time. To make this really land, he’s therefore completely altered into being seen as a crank and pariah by everyone around him, rather than the influential scientific leader he actually was. This might be poor history, but it’s much better drama. From a furious encounter with Napoleon III (who won’t wear the idea his hand-picked doctors might be wrong about sterilization) to the Medical Academy publicly poo-poohing Pasteur’s outlandish ideas that vaccines might prevent anthrax. To give a face to this mocking of Pasteur (from an establishment we are told is totally wrong on every count) the film invents Dr Charbonnet (well played by Fritz Leiber), an honest but pig-headed critic who exists to be wrong (for noble reasons) on almost every single issue.

Noble as important: this film want to stress everyone acts for decent reasons, so that its final celebration of Pasteur is unblemished by deeply personal rivalry. Charbonnet and Pasteur are both framed as decent men and their relationship allows for plenty of fun melodrama, such as Charbonnet injecting himself with Pasteur’s (fortunately for him) weak rabies sample to ‘expose’ his ideas. When Pasteur’s daughter falls ill in childbirth, but of course Charbonnet is the only doctor available: he humours Pasteur’s sterilisation rules in exchange for a signed letter from Pasteur rubbishing his own theories (Muni’s shuffling flash of conflict that flows across his face at this moment is very well done). But of course, Charbonnet and Pasteur eventually reconcile in honour and decency.

This forms a fun thread throughout the movie, that’s never less than well-staged by Dieterle, with pace and energy. The anthrax test is very dynamic – all celebrating crowds and circus side-shows – and the dramatic appearance of a host of Russian peasants (led by Akim Tamiroff’s bombastic doctor) desperate for a cure for rabies-induced sickness is well-executed. Some beats work less well than others. Donald Woods gets dealt a rotten hand as the dull son-in-law of Pasteur. The women in Pasteur’s family get even worse, with most of Josephine Hutchinson’s lines being of the “stop trying to cure anthrax and come to bed Louis” variety. The costumes are bizarrely all-over-the-place (the women look more like Southern Belles) and there is a reassuring cosiness about everything.

But that’s also one of its most successful features. The Story of Louis Pasteur is a little twee – but it’s also effective. It’s why it laid down a template that worked for countless films that follow (A Beautiful Mind pretty much follows its model and won an Oscar for it 65 years later). That’s because there is also a feel-good factor to see someone who is, without doubt, in the right triumphing over the stubborn. With a great performance by Muni, it’s a rewardingly entertaining biopic.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Warm Christmas fable will make you want to believe in Santa all over again

Director: George Seaton

Cast: Maureen O’Hara (Doris Walker), John Payne (Fred Gailey), Edmund Gwenn (Kris Kringle), Natalie Wood (Susan Walker), Gene Lockhart (Judge Henry X Harper), Porter Hall (Granville Sawyer), William Frawley (Charlie Halloran), Jerome Cowan (DA Thomas Mara), Philip Tonge (Julian Shellhammer), Henry Antrim (RH Macy), Thelma Ritter (Peter’s mother)

Santa Claus is a sweet little story we were told as kids, all part of buying into the magic of Christmas. How can we have been so silly as to think a jolly fat man with a red coat and flying reindeer delivered our Christmas presents? It’s the sort of fantasy adults are primed to burst like an over-inflated balloon. As a tribute to the earnest joy of believing in childish things, Miracle on 34^th Street should also be the sort of thing the adult in us can’t wait to mock. Instead, its warmth and good-natured sweetness carries you along and makes you want to believe.

It’s the build-up to Christmas, and Macy’s in New York is working overtime to bring the magic to its customers (and turn a tidy profit). Macy’s Day Parade director Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara) is relieved when Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) takes the place of a drunken parade Santa and then occupies Santa’s Grotto in the store. Kringle is exactly the sort of guy you picture when you think of Santa – and, on top of that, claims to be Santa himself, much to the discomfort of Doris who doesn’t believe in all that stuff and certainly doesn’t want her daughter Susan (Natalie Wood) to. But when Kringle finds himself in court, fighting against being committed to an institution, with only Doris’ boyfriend Fred Gailey (John Payne) to defend him, can he prove there is a Santa Claus and it’s him?

Seaton’s film is an adorable delight which is funny and good-natured enough to avoid the trapdoor of sickly sentimentality. It’s a film about adults getting back in touch with the giddy delight of believing childish things. It flags up every cynical objection – and then gently suggests we’d be happier forgetting them. After all, what’s the harm in allowing ourselves in a few harmless flights of fancy – why should everything be measurable? Kris Kringle comes up against the hard-headed: harried mothers, businessmen, judges and lawyers and wins them over with his genuineness and warmth. He makes people want to believe – and doesn’t that, in a way, make him Santa?

It helps a huge amount that Edmund Gwenn is perfectly cast. Piling on the pounds and facial hair, Gwenn looks the part but also is the part. His performance is kind, considerate and bursting with warmth and good cheer. In a performance full of light, unforced playfulness, Gwenn gets the level of sweetness just right. A squeeze or two more and you would choke on the schmaltz of the whole conceit: but Gwenn is so adorable the audience wants to believe in him as much as the characters.

Especially as this Santa melts some of the cold commercialism of our modern Christmas. Miracle on 34^th Street has a lot of good-natured fun at how Kris confounds the latent money-making of Christmas. On hire he’s instructed to memorise a list of preferred products to push on children. Instead he points mothers towards competing stores where they can get the exact gift they want or pick up better quality goods than at Macy’s. Of course, the concept proves so popular with customers that RH Macy is confounded by the goodwill it creates in his customers (and the huge sales it will lead to from their loyalty). Even other department stores start doing the same.

It’s one of the recurrent themes of the film: Kris brings out the best in people. Maybe not always for the right reasons: the shop-owners who want money, the judge who wants re-election. But it shows what benefit a little bit of good can have in the world. Kris also shows how little touches of consideration can change lives. There is a truly heart-warming moment where Kringle meets a Dutch orphan who simply wanted to meet Santa – although her adopted mother warned her Santa can’t speak Dutch. Much to her surprise, Kris launches into fluent Dutch, to the delight of the child. Miracle on 34 Street has several moments where the unstudied delight of children is captured to great effect, not least Natalie Wood’s delighted response to discovering the reality of Kringle’s beard (it also, to be fair, has several fairly cloying child actors).

Eventually the forces of darkness – led by Porter Hall’s twitch-laden store “psychologist”, whose bullying self-importance makes him the only person Kringle dislikes – insist we all put away childish things and chuck Kringle in an asylum. Miracle on 34^th Street segues into a Capra-esque court-room drama (it’s hard not to detect touches of Mr Deeds Goes to Town) which pits Kringle’s home-spun honesty against legal cold professionalism. The clash becomes a delightful headache, as both the Judge and DA confront outraged children at home who can’t believe they are putting Santa on trial. It’s a great gag: who wants to be the judge who rules categorically Santa does not exist?

Alongside these gently amusing courtroom shenanigans (with John Payne doing an excellent job as Kris’ inventive lawyer) the film balances an endearing domestic plot. There is the inevitable will-they-won’t-they between Payne and O’Hara (if there is a bit of slack you need to cut the film today, it’s in Fred’s pushy wooing of Doris, including corralling Susan). But also, can O’Hara’s all-business professional, who’s raised her daughter with a Gradgrindish obsession with facts, melt her heart and allow both of them to believe a little bit? O’Hara handles this softening with all the consummate skill of a gifted light-comedian, while Gwenn’s delightful interaction with Wood’s precocious Susan, keen to access a world of imagination she’s never really known, is perfectly done.

it becomes a film about the power of believing. In our modern age we become expected to only base decisions on cold hard facts. Doris has taught her daughter to doubt imagination as a weakness to protect her from disappointment in the world (she is after all divorced, quite daring for a 40s family drama). But its also made Susan less likely to invest in faith, to open herself up to hopes and dreams. Its recapturing the ability to believe in something and be enriched by it that becomes one of the film’s richest messages.

It would be incredibly easy to poke fun at the good-natured naivety of Miracle on 34^th Street, where businessmen are money-focused-but-decent and lawyers are amiably ready to indulge Kris with a smile. But it’s a film that zeroes in on an in-built nostalgia for simpler times in all of us. We’ve all been little Susan, sitting in a car desperately wanting to believe in the magical. It’s a film that demonstrates the eventual emptiness of cynicism, encouraging the audience to just put all that aside for 90 minutes and remember what it was like to be a child again. Throw in with that Edmund Gwenn as the definitive Santa and it might just be one of the greatest Christmas films ever made.

His Girl Friday (1940)

Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant bicker and spar in His Girl Friday, one of the all-time classics I’ve never quite clicked with

Director: Howard Hawks

Cast: Cary Grant (Walter Burns), Rosalind Russell (Hildy Johnson), Ralph Bellamy (Bruce Baldwin), Gene Lockhart (Sheriff Hartwell), Porter Hall (Murphy), Ernest Truex (Bensinger), Cliff Edwards (Endicott), Clarence Kolb (The Mayor), Roscoe Karns (McCue), Frank Jenks (Wilson), Regis Toomey (Sanders), Abner Biberman (Louie), Frank Orth (Duffy), John Qualen (Earl Williams), Helen Mack (Mollie Mallot)

There’s always one film classic that the world and his dog love to bits, but every time you watch it you just don’t get it. That classic for me is His Girl Friday. I’m not sure many films have appeared more than this one on film buffs’ lists of Top Ten Movies of All Time, but while I admire its many, many qualities, every time I’ve watched it – and it’s at least three now – I just don’t love it. More to the point I don’t find it funny (I know, I know I can practically hear your jaws hitting the floor), neither do I engage with or root for its lead characters (please don’t hit me). I admire a lot of things about this film and how it is made. And I chuckle from time to time when I watch it. But for some reason even I’m not sure of, I’ve got no click with this film. Compared to The Awful Truth or The Lady Eve or The Philadelphia Story (all films this bears a lot of comparison with) I just don’t feel it.

It’s an adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play The Front Page. In quite a modern touch, one of its lead characters is gender flipped. In the play, a newspaper editor tries to persuade his star reporter not to quit the game: in His Girl Friday the star reporter not only becomes a woman but, don’t you know it, the ex-wife of the editor, about to walk out (in more ways than one) to marry her dull fiancé. Cary Grant (who else?) is the fast-talking editor Walter Burns, Rosalind Russell the fast-talking star reporter Hildy Johnson. In fact, everyone is fast-talking, in the film that holds the world record for dialogue speed. Can Burns persuade Hildy to hold off leaving with fiancée Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy – sportingly playing up to his dull reputation) for one more day so she can cover the story of strangely naïve convict Earl Williams (John Qualen)? Let the madness ensue.

Let’s focus on all the good stuff first. Not least because my general lack of connection to a film loved by all and sundry is so personal, it almost defies analysis. Hawks was, rumour has it, won round to the idea of gender-swapping Hildy by hosting a read-through of the play at a dinner party with a shortage of people, meaning Hildy was read by a woman. That opened up a host of ideas around combining this with the classic re-marriage genre and bang away we go. It is, needless to say, a brilliant idea and adds such a spark to every single interaction between the two characters that it distinctly improves the play (later productions have often carried the idea – and the dialogue – across from this film).

On top of this, Hawks wanted to make this the fastest talking comedy film ever made. And boy does he succeed at that. The dialogue of this film is delivered with such rat-a-tat speed that clock watchers report it hits a rate of over 300 words a minute (try reading that many words out in one minute to see how fast that is). It gives the film a ferocious manic energy and thunder-cracker momentum and keeps the punchlines coming fast. It also needs gifted actors, which it sure-as-hell gets here. Grant possibly hits his comedic peak here, managing to still remain suave, cool and collected, even as he’s ripping through words and shifting verbal goalposts at dazzling speed. This is also Russell’s career highlight, embodying the image of the sort of spunky, arch and no-nonsense professional woman of screwball comedy that all others (even Hepburn) are measured against.

They race through a film that makes excellent use of long-takes, intelligent single-shot camera moves and careful, intelligent editing to highlight the electric speed of the zany dialogue. In particular, Hawks makes a brilliant motif of telephones (those old candlestick phones), which characters are forever hurling instructions down, using as escape tools from awkward moments and juggling conversations with (either from multiple phones or between the phone and people in the room). They are used for short, sharp, punchy lines – and it fits a film that is all momentum and short-hand. The ultra-smart, quotable banter, littered with one-liners, is the ultimate epitome of the popular style of dialogue at the time, which favoured this style over the speeches and deeper content that was seen as more of the preserve of theatre.

Walter and Hildy in this version also become the epitome of “the screwball couple”. The divorced partners who of course still love each other, largely because they recognise that no-one else will share their insane energy and obsession. Not to mention that fighting and feuding with their intellectual equal is a million times sexier (and better foreplay) than a thousand dinners at home with someone average will ever be. Ralph Bellamy does good work here (essentially, like Grant, repeating his role from The Awful Truth) as that dull, trusting man – the only one in the film who vaguely resembles a human being and therefore, obviously, the character the audience likes the least (who goes to the cinema to see someone like themselves on the screen, eh?)

There is so much right about His Girl Friday. The actors are sublime, the dialogue delivered perfectly, Hawks’ direction is pin-point in its mix of old-Hollywood classicism, and it’s very well shot. So why don’t I like it more? It’s that most personal feeling: I just don’t find it funny enough. Maybe that’s because I need to connect with characters more – and I don’t connect with Hildy and Walter. In some ways I don’t even like them. His Girl Friday is frequently an unapologetically cruel film: Hildy and Walter treat several people like crap, largely for their own amusement or as collateral damage in their own war of foreplay. At one point a desperate, lonely woman attempts suicide (she jumps out of a damn window falling a couple of floors) – Hildy and Walter are joking about it in seconds. They are cold, self-obsessed people and for all their superficial charm, there isn’t any touch of warmth to them at all. They are very artificial people in an artificial world. In all, I don’t really like them and I find it hard to careor want them back together (other than recognising that they deserve each other).

Believe me, I understand some comedy is cruel, I don’t have a problem with that. But I don’t think His Girl Friday realises it’s that kind of film. The Awful Truth has a very similar plot – but that had its characters recognise their own faults and also gave us reasons to care for them as human beings. His Girl Friday doesn’t do either of those things, meaning I laughed a lot in The Awful Truth and not so much in His Girl Friday.

Can you still bear to read on after such blasphemy? But there you go. Everyone has that stone-cold classic that they just can’t get on board with. This film is mine. I respect so much about it, but it neither tickles my funny bone nor makes me feel welcomed. I find it a cold and cruelly minded film, that looks down on people with scorn – from Bruce to criminal Earl Williams and most especially to his distraught girlfriend Molly – and invites us to do the same. It wants us to love the popular kids in the class and join them in spitting paper balls at the losers. This doesn’t do it for me. I know everyone loves it. Hell, I know I’m probably wrong. But I just don’t love His Girl Friday.

Going My Way (1944)

Bing Crosby wins hearts and minds in the sentimental Best Picture winner Going My Way

Director: Leo McCarey

Cast: Bing Crosby (Father Chuck O’Malley), Barry Fitzgerald (Father Fitzgibbon), Frank McHugh (Father Timothy O’Dowd), Rise Stevens (Genevieve Linden/Jenny Tuffel), James Brown (Ted Haines Jr), Gene Lockhart (Ted Haines Snr), Jean Heather (Carol James), Porter Hall (Mr Belknap), Fortunio Bonanova (Tomaso Bozani), Eily Malyon (Mrs Carmody)

“Schmaltz isn’t selling” record producers tell Father O’Malley (Bing Crosby) when he pitches them the little ditty he’s penned to raise funds to save his church from financial ruin. Well no one told the producers of this film: and just as well, as this became one of the most successful films of the 1940s, raking in buckets of cash and armfuls of Oscars. Watching it today, you’d hardly believe it – but that’s to forget the stress and fear of a nation at war, or that Bing Crosby (in a tailor-made role) was practically the most popular human being alive. For all that, watching Going My Way today won’t challenge you at all – other than perhaps your patience.

Father O’Malley (Bing Crosby) arrives in a (allegedly) rough neighbourhood in New York. He’s to take over the parish from the ageing Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald) but, gosh darn it, Father Bing doesn’t have the heart to tell Father Fitzgibbon that, so pretends to be his new curate. Promptly, Father Bing sets about solving all the problems of the parish with his charming homespun wisdom, decency, empathy and ability to bond with all. Gosh darn it, before you know what’s happened he’s turned the rough-and-tumble local boys from larcenists into an all-male choir and has roped in an old friend (who just happens to be the lead singer at the MET Opera) to give him and the boys the stage to sing a few of his songs and help save the church.

Yup, Going My Way is exactly that sort of film, and your enjoyment of it is going to be inversely proportional to how quickly being dipped in pure schmaltz brings you out in hives. This film is sickly sweet in its cozy comfort, a reassuring view of a world straight out of Enid Blyton, where the priest has all the answers, the hearts of businessmen can be melted by a few wise words, and dropping a few sporting references can win over the local ‘tough’ kids.

Going My Way is so homely and quaint, it makes Capra feel positively edgy. In fact, it lacks any of the energy, wit and style Capra brings to his pictures. That lack of buzz doesn’t help it, the languid pace drawing your attention all the more to its overbearing decency and careful weeding out of anything that could even cause a scintilla of doubt.

Instead it’s a warm gentle hug – and a hug that takes a great deal of time (at just two hours, it can seem like it’s going on forever). There are fewer songs in it than you might expect – only one every 10-15 minutes max. Often very little happens – and when it does, drama is very far from the agenda. Instead every problem is solved with consummate ease (it just needs Father Bing to open people’s eyes). Everyone is at heart decent in the extreme: the local tough kids have more high spirits than hooliganism to them, the (very) Irish women have stern exteriors but soft hearts, and the ruthless businessman is a devoted family man. After a while, I felt my patience being sorely tested.

In the middle of this, we get Bing Crosby, who won an Oscar for his work here. It’s a part tailor-made for Bing. In fact, so much so, that he essentially turns O’Malley into a dog-collar wearing version of his own stage persona, with touches of wry humour, whimsy and an affectionate smile. It’s no mean thing creating an entire persona – or performing it – but it feels a little rich to win an Oscar for it. O’Malley is of course perfect, a man free of any blemish who backs humbly into the limelight. A liberal who thinks Church should be fun (though far from a radical), there is nothing to cast even a shadow of doubt on his perfection: his flirtation with a girl never went so far as a date, he has the patience of a saint and he always knows exactly what to say to everyone.

He even wears down the defensiveness of Barry Fitzgerald’s Father Fitzgibbon. Fitzgerald also won an Oscar (for Supporting Actor) and effectively created the cinematic template for what an Irish priest is like. Fitzgibbon is bumbling with a sing-song whimsy, stuck-in-his-ways but basically decent, a touch prickly but also vulnerable and caring. His Irishness (like many of the rest of the cast) is dialled up to eleven. It’s an engaging performance, even if this old-cove-with-a-heart-of-gold schtick already felt familiar. But blimey, like the rest of the film, it can be far too much.

John Ford would have loved the Irish sentimentality of this film. It’s not perhaps Going My Way’s fault that its unquestioning regard and confidence in the church – and the assumption that all would treat them with complete deference and absolute respect – has dated it. But then maybe this was the case then as well, and it just felt much more reassuring to watch a simple world where a priest has all the answers and can change everyone’s lives. In the simple world of the film, you just let the cliché and coincidence wash over you and go with the flow.

Nevertheless, it still can make for a long watch if you aren’t in the right mood for this constant spin of Sunday-afternoon-gentleness. I have to confess it was too sweet for me – way too sweet. And there isn’t much of interest in the film, McCarey directing with a professional but uninteresting staidness (you couldn’t believe he cut his teeth doing Laurel and Hardy, so visually dull and slow is this film). Every outcome is dipped in sentimentality and sweetness and eventually watching the film is like gorging on candy-floss. Light, insubstantial, not as filling as it should be, and at the end you feel like throwing up.

Double Indemnity (1944)

Barbara Stanwyck is the dark force beyond Fred MacMurray in Wilder’s classic Double Indemnity

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Fred MacMurray (Walter Neff), Barbara Stanwyck (Phyllis Dietrichson), Edward G. Robinson (Barton Keyes), Porter Hall (Mr Jackson), Jean Heather (Lola Dietrichson), Tom Powers (Mr Dietrichson), Bryon Barr (Nina Zachett), Richard Gaines (Edward Norton)

In the wake of the Second World War, morally complex and dark (in every sense of the word) stories spoke to a nation coming to terms with what it had been through. Out of this was born a new genre: film noir. Double Indemnity might just be the best example and one of Billy Wilder’s best films.

Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is a bored insurance salesman, smitten with the sexually alluring Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), wife of a potential client. When she suggests that, with his help, they could get rid of her husband and collect a massive insurance payout on his death, Neff is quickly won over. But murder is a hard thing to get away with – particularly when Neff’s colleague and close friend Barton Keyes (Edward G Robinson), the best investigator in the business, smells something amiss in the ‘accident’.

Double Indemnity is one of those films that it’s easy to forget was as influential as it was, precisely because it’s narrative and filmic techniques have been so comprehensively imitated in a host of films since. But imagine: this was one of the very first real film noirs. It was one of the first films that used shadows and darkness as effectively as this to reflect mood and atmosphere. It was the one of the first films to use a femme fatale as prominently (and unapologetically) as this. It’s also one of the first films where sex permeates almost everything you see in the picture.

Phyllis is a woman who understands the power of sensuality, who is well aware of how she can use her body and aloof mystery to get what she wants out of men. But even more than that, Stanwyck’s wonderfully cold performance suggests she hardly seems to care about anything at all: in fact the impression is almost that she is locked into moving forward, passing through husbands and lovers, leaving men dead on the wayside. That’s the magic of Stanwyck in this film: can you remember a character as unremittingly, unapologetically sinful, manipulative and conscience-free as this?

Of course Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff is the perfect rube for this fiercely intelligent and determined woman. MacMurray’s slight B-movie blandness – his lack of star quality, his everyday, folky unimaginativeness – is perfect for the overconfident, slightly smarmy, laziness of Neff. It’s never said outright, but you suspect that the attraction of the danger Phyllis offers is escape from his own dull life. Does he love Phyllis? I would say almost certainly not – but is he horny for her? You better believe it. It’s a man on the cusp of a mid-life crisis getting a chance to throw himself into a sex-driven affair.

What do these two think of each other? Both of them seem barely capable of trusting each other, using sex and flirting almost as a filler between bouts of mutual suspicion. Does she care for him even a little behind her use of him? And does he feel anything like a bond with her inbetween the bouts of sex? They stumble so quickly into the plan that it almost feels like they are going through the motions – she is so used to manipulation and murder, it’s all she knows; he is so bored with his life that the excitement of violence and murder with his sex seems impossible to resist.

And Wilder lets sex run through this whole film. From Phyllis’ long descent down her flight of stairs at her first entrance to the irresistible anklet, everything about Stanwyck in this film is about the power of her sex. The dialogue exchanges between Neff and Phyllis crackle with magnetism. Later, Wilder skilfully shoots a sex scene without showing a thing: we cut from the two of them kissing on a sofa, to their positions shifted, Phyllis fixing her dress and Neff reclining smoking.

It helps that the dialogue is scintillating. Each exchange is packed with crackling and quotable lines. You get a perfect marriage here between Wilder’s acerbic cynicism and dry wit, and Raymond Chandler’s arch, spiky, carefully constructed dialogue, with its gritty poetry. I mean just watch the exchange here – perfection.

And they write some knock-out speeches too – but then you would if you had an actor as brilliant as Edward G. Robinson to deliver them.

Neff’s voiceover uses the technique where it should be used – not to tell us information any well informed viewer can already work out for themselves, but to allow us insight into Neff himself and his situation, that complements and develops our appreciation of the picture (it’s also beautifully well delivered by MacMurray). I’d also add it’s the same conceit as Sunset Boulevard – its lead character narrates the film mortally wounded – and it works just as well here, stressing the disaster that hangs over every action by our anti-heroes.

Added to this, the film looks beautiful. The shadows have an all-consuming inky depth. Cinematographer John Seitz is not afraid of turning the lights down and down, and the darkness absorbs and consumes the whole picture. It allows striking lighting effects – the blinds that seem to be in every room allow slits of light through them that draw lines across the faces and bodies of the actors (as many viewers have commented, it also has the effect of making half the characters appear like they are behind bars). The darkness looms in from the corners of the frame, trapping the leads into the action – and into their own disastrous decisions.

Wilder’s skilful camera placement is what makes this film really work. He presents action constantly in challenging and different ways, never doing the expected. During the actual murder (committed while Phyllis drives), the camera never looks at Neff committing the crime, but closely follows the look of almost sensual satisfaction on Phyllis’ face: she never once looks at what is happening in the seat next to her, but her face makes us experience the killing in an even more disturbingly intimate way than watching it would be.

But what makes this film truly brilliant and unique is that its main relationship isn’t even the one you expect. Neff and Phyllis may have an electric physical relationship, but the real romance in the film is between Neff and his colleague Keyes. These two share a deeply close and personal bond. Theirs is a friendship that skirts around a platonic romance – made sharper of course as Keyes is the only man who stands a chance of working out what exactly is going on. There is a fine visual motif throughout of Neff lighting matches (with his thumb!) for Keyes – a gesture that feels both manly and intimate.

Keyes is played by a career-best Edward G. Robinson. Robinson blazes through the big speeches – but with a confident skill that never makes them feel like showboating moments. He gives Keyes an eccentric brilliance, mixed with a delicate humanism. To be that good at sniffing out wrongdoing and deceit from his fellow men, you can’t help feeling that he must have a pretty good idea about what human fallibility feels like. It’s this warm human understanding that Robinson does so brilliantly. It’s also what helps to make this relationship so moving. It’s hard not to share the obvious awkward discomfort MacMurray gives to Neff when he feels as if he is letting down his friend, and betraying the trust between them.

It’s this that makes Double Indemnity stand out. It’s a film that’s actually about the relationship between two men – part friendship, part father-and-son, part romantic – their love for each other, which happens to have an irresistible femme fatale thrown into the middle. It feels like a very unique and different approach – a touch of Wilder magic if you will – that makes the film stand out. It’s also what lies behind the link it has with audiences, the human interest that makes you come back again and again to this film about two ruthless killers.

This is a film in which everyone was at their best. MacMurray never did anything again to match it, Stanwyck seized the part with such commitment that she spawned countless imitators, Robinson is just magnificent. Wilder’s direction is perfect, the film looks ravishing, the script is to die for. Double Indemnity may not only be the most influential film noir ever. It might also be the best.

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake go on a journey of discovery – with a lot of jokes

Director: Preston Sturges

Cast: Joel McCrea (John L. Sullivan), Veronica Lake (The Girl), Robert Warwick (Mr Lebrand), William Demarest (Mr Jonas), Franklin Pangborn (Mr Casalsis), Porter Hall (Mr Hadrian), Byron Foulger (Mr Johnny Valdelle), Robert Grieg (Burrows), Eric Blore (Sullivan’s Valet)

Sullivan: I’m going out on the road to find out what it’s like to be poor and needy, and then I’m going to make a picture about it.
Burrows [his butler]: If you’ll permit me to say so sir, the subject is not an interesting one. The poor know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamourous.

Preston Sturges was one of Hollywood’s first writer-directors, a whip-sharp satirist. In Sullivan’s Travels he turned his guns firmly on Hollywood, satirising the industries self-importance. However, what he did so well was to counterbalance this with a genuinely insightful look at the urban poor and a celebration of the magic of the movies. The fact that he managed to cover this all in one movie – without making the film feel wildly inconsistent in tone – is quite some accomplishment.

John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is a Hollywood director tired of making shallow crowd-pleasers. He wants to make a serious, social-issue film (called O Brother Where Art Thou?). When studio heads point out he knows nothing about the working man, Sullivan declares he will head to live the life of a drifter until he understands them. After several false starts, it isn’t until he meets a girl (Veronica Lake) that he starts to truly experience the life of the poor.

I’ve mentioned Sullivan’s Travels shifts in tone. In many ways, it’s a film that wants to have its cake and eat it – to be a satire of self-important move-making, and at the same time be an important movie. The extent to which it succeeds is a matter of taste: I can imagine plenty of people being thrown by the sudden shift in tone that kicks in for the final 40 minutes, after the slapstick and screwball comedy of the opening hour. But that’s partly the point. Sullivan’s Travels works because it puts all the objections you could make to a film “teaching” real people about their lives in that first hour – so you feel disarmed heading into the final half hour when the film does just this.

So that first hour first: it’s very funny. The scattergun satire of Hollywood folks is brilliantly done. The fast-paced dialogue of Sullivan and his studio bosses discussing his plans is wonderfully funny – how could you not like an exchange like this:

Sullivan: I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions. Stark realism. The problems that confront the average man!
Studio head #1: But with a little sex in it,
Sullivan: A little but I don’t want to stress it.

What’s sparkling about the exchanges is that Sullivan is just as out-of-touch and elitist as the suits, but with a higher degree of self-delusion. His attempts to head off onto the open road and live the life of the drifter are hilariously inept – his first sees him travelling with a “support team” (including a doctor, chef and media man); the second sees him accidentally return back to Hollywood. Sullivan wants to make a film about real people, but Sturges stresses he is as clueless and confused about the subject as any other rich Hollywood snob. The film has a glorious mixture of verbal acrobatics and slapstick pratfalls to demonstrate the comedy of this extraordinarily rich man (who at one point off-handedly runs through the features of his vast home) trying to relate at a distance to the poor.

It takes his meeting with Veronica Lake’s unnamed Girl for him to begin to understand the drifter’s life. Lake’s character remains unnamed, which is another joke on Hollywood – earlier Sullivan discusses women in films with the phrase “There’s always a girl in the picture”, so the plot shoe-horning a Girl in (without even naming her) as a sort of beggar Viola is, in itself, a neat parody of the structural conventions of Hollywood films. Anyway, it’s the introduction of this character that serves as Sullivan’s gateway into seeing what the world is like. Disguised as a boy (which allows plenty of neat gags in itself) the Girl takes Sullivan on a tour of shanty-towns and soup kitchens.

It’s here the tone of the film slowly shifts towards seriousness as we finally get to see the lives of paupers, in a film satirising a Hollywood director who wants to make a film about that subject. It’s wonderfully meta! Sturges shoots these scenes with tenderness and simplicity, without dialogue and scored only by gentle music. There are some small laughs on the way – but we never laugh at the poor and the overall impression is of the quiet dignity of these people just struggling to get by. It couldn’t seem further away from Sullivan’s privileged expectations. It’s quiet and it’s dignified.

Sullivan ends the film (for various reasons) as part of a chain-gang, and finally true suffering and gains the strength of character to acknowledge his own vanity. In one of the film’s most magical sequences, Sullivan watches a film with his fellow convicts and a poor black congregation. Unlike a sequence earlier where he watched a film with the urban middle class (hilariously then every possible breach of cinema etiquette is made, from crunching loud food to babies wailing) this audience are transported by the magic of a Walt Disney cartoon.

This sequence is justly famous, not only for its innocent charm, but also its ahead-of-its-time treatment of the black congregation. The congregation is open-hearted, intelligent and generous. There is a marvellous (and moving) rendition of Go Down Mosesand the black working class is contrasted with the dehumanising conditions of the chain gang. The whole sequence points out the underlying social injustice of America during this era. It’s wonderful – so well done you forget the film (in its jauntier first half) had a crude “white face” gag with its forelock-tugging black chef.

That’s the kind of film this is – a real mixture of genres, of views, of satire on social commentary mixed with real social commentary… Sturges throws almost everything at the wall here, and nearly all of it sticks. The underlying theme, if there is one, is the nature of class and privilege in America. Sullivan is well-off, from a rich background. He finds himself on a chain-gang when he is mistaken for the bums he is attempting to find out more about – but when he is revealed as a rich film director he is immediately released, despite still being guilty of the offence he was arrested for in the first place. In America, money talks and everyone else walks.

Sullivan’s Travels is probably not going to be everyone’s taste. Watching it, I missed the comedy of the first half during the more serious second half, cleverly done as the build of expectations was (how can you criticise the film, when the film is already criticising itself successfully?). Sure parts of it are dated, but it contains so many different types of film-making (screwball wit, Chaplin-esque pratfalls, animation, social realism, melodrama, romantic comedy) it’s almost a film school essay. It also manages to make its changes of tone throughout feel like natural developments.

All this and I’ve hardly mentioned the performances. The cast is full of brilliant character players, all of whom get their moments to shine – Sturges cast from a pool of regular actors, and he was a superb judge of distinctive faces and unique vocal delivery. Veronica Lake is very good – endearing but also sharp and smart as the Girl – but the film is totally anchored by Joel McCrea’s superb, low-key, straight-forward performance which resists all temptations to wink at the camera.

Sullivan’s Travels feels like a little known masterpiece – but it deserves being known better. It’s original, it’s funny, it’s moving, it’s clever and it’s packed full of great moments. It’s a wonderful example of old-school Hollywood looking harshly at itself – not only at its shallowness and formulaic nature, but also at its self-importance and self-satisfaction – but still acknowledging that the escapist pleasure it can give to people is valuable, that it can be a force for good, for all its faults. It tries to have its cake and eat it – but do you know what? It’s probably one of the very few films that pulls that off.