Steve Cochran is one of my favorite undersung talents of the films of the 1940s and ’50s.  He had a leading man’s looks—handsome face, lustrous black hair, a well-toned body—yet was primarily a character actor, more specifically the kind of guy who played a lot of mugs and thugs.  Cochran was the fellow most likely to be seen messing around with Virginia Mayo, which is exactly what you could find him doing in A Song Is Born (1948), White Heat (1949), and, most memorably, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).  His “hunk” factor served him well while calling Joan Crawford “a dirty tramp” in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950).  He even got a shot at his own version of T-shirt-wearing Stanley Kowalski in Storm Warning (1950), getting particular rough with Ginger Rogers in this blatant imitation of the play A Streetcar Named Desire, which got to screens before Marlon Brando’s Stanley did.  Cochran was sexy, slick, and exciting, most typically cast in films with titles like Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951) and Private Hell 36 (1954).

Just as Cochran’s movie career was petering out, he got the best (and perhaps most unlikely) role of his career, the recovering alcoholic in Come Next Spring.  This lovely, virtually unknown gem was made with genuine feeling and authentic small-town ambiance, similar in its impact to the wonderful Stars in My Crown (1950).  Set in Arkansas in 1927, it is an effortlessly relaxed, charming, and touching picture.  The film opens with Cochran’s return to his family after a nine-year absence.  He had run out on them, a drunk, but has returned sober (which he has been for three years).  Ann Sheridan, another favorite of mine, another player at the end of her good years, is his wife.  They have a daughter (Sherry Jackson) and a younger son (Richard Eyer) who was born after Cochran bolted.  The thrust of the drama is derived from Cochran slowly proving to his family and their community that he can be trusted, that he is worthy of them, that he is now different.  Sheridan takes him back as a hired hand on their farm but not into her bed.  Their daughter has been mute since a childhood trauma.

Cochran gives what should have been a career-altering performance, certainly one worthy of an Oscar nomination, far beyond the limited boundaries of his stereotypically slimy roles.  He’s intensely likable here, someone we’re rooting for from the moment he appears.  His rehabilitation is deeply absorbing, so alert and alive, so poignant and open.  His best scene is a beautifully delivered speech to young Miss Jackson, about how she came to be mute following a car crash in which Cochran was driving under the influence.  It’s also lovely to watch Cochran and Sheridan fall back in love.  Sheridan, however, isn’t quite at her best, strong and low-key but a bit stiff and too muted.

Director R.G. Springsteen, a man who spent his film career making B and C westerns, crafted a surprisingly gentle and emotionally varied film.  There may be moments of sentimentality and unevenness, but this is still a rare kind of easygoing, unforced commercial filmmaking.  It’s interesting that we never see Cochran drunk yet utterly believe in his alcoholism.  The film came and went without notice, doing nothing for Cochran’s Hollywood career or reputation as an actor.  He did go to Italy, following in Anthony Quinn’s La Strada footsteps, and worked with an Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni, on Il Grido (1957), a minor but effective neorealist drama, stark and simple, grim but beautifully made, another feather in Cochran’s cap that did next to nothing for his career.

Cochran died from a lung infection at only 48 in 1965.  He had spent most of the previous decade working on television programs.  You can easily enjoy him in all those Warner Brothers melodramas that play constantly on TCM, but the one to watch for is Come Next Spring, the one that shows you the Steve Cochran career that might have been.  The thing about the movies is that it’s never too late to be discovered.

In 1939, Tasmanian-born Errol Flynn, already a superstar known to moviegoers as Captain Blood and Robin Hood, became a surprise western star in Dodge City and would continue to dabble successfully in the genre for the next decade, with his most famous western being Raoul Walsh’s They Died with Their Boots On (1942).  Flynn’s final western, Rocky Mountain, virtually unknown and sorely underrated, is not only one of Flynn’s best westerns, it’s one of his best films of any kind.

Civil War-era westerns are a fascinating sub-genre, placing the war in an unfamiliar context, far outside the realm of Gone With the Wind or Abraham Lincoln.  A fine example of a Civil War western is Budd Boetticher’s impressive Westbound (1959), a Colorado-set picture about the North’s attempt to move gold from the West to support the war effort (plus the South’s attempt to foil the plan), and starring, of course, Randolph Scott.  Rocky Mountain, directed by William Keighley, is another potent melding of an intriguing Civil War plot and a turbulent western landscape.

Robert E. Lee sends a Confederate captain (Flynn), with seven other soldiers, out West to find outlaws who will fight for the South in the war’s waning days.  The men rescue a stagecoach from an Indian attack, saving a Yankee woman (Patrice Wymore, soon to be the real-life Mrs. Errol Flynn) on her way to meet her Union fiance (Scott Forbes).  Like Anthony Mann’s great western The Naked Spur (1953), this is one of those rugged films without a single scene set indoors.

Shot in stunning black and white, and primarily taking place on a gorgeous location called “The Rock,” Rocky Mountain is bookended by two outstanding large-scale action sequences:  the aforementioned stagecoach attack, with Flynn and his crew hopelessly racing to get to the coach before the Indians do; and the climactic sacrificial slaughter, in which Flynn and his men play decoy so that Ms. Wymore and others can be saved.  This massacre is brutally staged, with Flynn and his team no match for an onslaught of Indians.  (It may remind you of Flynn’s similar fate as Custer in They Died with Their Boots On.)  But the violence isn’t gratuitous, resulting in an emotionally painful and deeply sad episode, made even more affecting by the fact that Union soldiers try valiantly to aid Flynn but are unable to get there in time.  Is there another Civil War movie that ends with Yankee soldiers planting and raising a Confederate flag out of respect and gratitude for their “enemy”?

Perhaps the movie sags a bit in its middle section, but it’s consistently surprising and unusual.  Flynn was beginning to look fairly worn before his time, but he gives a solid, fully engaged performance.  (You’ll see a young Slim Pickens as one of Flynn’s men.)  Rocky Mountain is a moving western/war movie, both heartbreaking and hopeful, also scenically expansive, intellectually stirring, and emotionally intimate.  It demands attention for its fresh spin on American history, as well as for being one of the best films that no one’s ever heard of.

Yesterday, January 8th, would have been Oscar winner Jose Ferrer’s 100th birthday.  Once one of our most celebrated and admired stage-and-screen actor-directors, his renown hasn’t lasted, mostly because, it must be said, he was also prone to being one of our worst stage-and-screen actor-directors.  (Ferrer, who was born in Puerto Rico, died at age 80 in 1992.)  When famously married to Rosemary Clooney, it might have appeared that he was the big talent in the family, another Laurence Olivier or Orson Welles, married to a mere popular ”girl singer.”  Time has shifted things, with Clooney’s lifetime of sublime vocal artistry far surpassing Ferrer’s often pompous screen performances, making hers the more lasting and cherished contribution to our culture.  Whereas Olivier and Welles, even at their over-the-top worst, were usually entertaining and imbued with the sheer joy of performing, Ferrer stopped being fun early on, miring himself in a self-admiring humorlessness.  

The good years of Ferrer’s movie career came at the start, particularly in three roles as Frenchmen.  He made a striking debut, and received an Oscar nomination in the supporting category, as the selfish Dauphin of France in Victor Fleming’s hollow and mostly misguided version of Joan of Arc (1948), with Ingrid Bergman repeating her Tony-winning stage triumph in the title role.  This may be the only time that I have ever thought that Ferrer wasn’t in a movie enough.  Bergman glows, a bit tediously as the film drones on, more a pageant than a drama, but Ferrer injects it with the zing missing elsewhere. 

Ironically, Ferrer never looked more attractive than with the extended nose he wore as the title character in Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), repeating a stage performance that had won him a Tony in 1947.  And that’s really all the film is, a filmed record of a dazzling theatre performance.  It’s an unforgivably cheap production, beyond stagy, beyond looking like a television production.  Ferrer won the Best Actor Oscar (over fifty years before Nicole Kidman got her own false-nose-assisted Oscar for The Hours), and he is wonderful as Paris’ greatest swordsman, also a soldier, poet, playwright, and all-around superman except for that nose (and his masochistic tendencies).  The biggest surprise is that Ferrer, soon to be one of our hammiest actors, gives a performance devoid of self-indulgence, and in a role so inherently theatrical!  Oh, he’s dazzling, but he’s also deeply affecting.  The movie, if you can call it that, is all Ferrer and nothing else.  It was a performance worth preserving, definitely, but, regarding that Oscar, weren’t there more deserving performances that year, ones that truly lived and breathed for the screen, such as William Holden’s in Sunset Boulevard, Gregory Peck’s in The Gunfighter, and John Garfield’s in The Breaking Point?

In 1952, who but Ferrer could have been as convincingly cast as Toulouse-Lautrec in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge?  A visually ravishing film that is far less successful dramatically, it does truly look like one of its subject’s paintings.  Huston’s work is far more impassioned regarding the film’s look than its content, and who could blame him with the riches of Technicolor so irresistibly at his disposal?  Those first twenty minutes, set inside the Moulin Rouge, are an astonishing display of color, movement, atmosphere, and flat-out beauty.  With his penchant for makeup and disguise, Ferrer was by now the Paul Muni of the 1950s, but, as in Cyrano, he is surprisingly restrained as Lautrec.  But the conception of the character is unfortunately very limited, portraying him as a quietly sad and brave and dignified (yet pitiable) man, reducing his life to a soap opera, not much different than the way Larry Hart (Mickey Rooney) was depicted in Words and Music (1948), another great talent with romantic woes because of his small physique.  Ferrer also plays Lautrec’s father, a count.  Overall less satisfying than Lust for Life (1956), the biopic about Van Gogh, Moulin Rouge is still an admirable work, and it brought Ferrer another Best Actor Oscar nomination, his final one.

Among the terrible Ferrer performances, consider the following.  In Whirlpool (1950), he’s laughable as a stud and never the figure of stylish menace (playing an astrologer/hypnotist) that the film requires.  In The Caine Mutiny (1954), he starts well, as Van Johnson’s defense counsel, but, unable to leave well enough alone, he insists on overacting his big drunk scene.  Probably his worst and most obnoxiously offensive performance came when he played Sigmund Romberg in Stanley Donen’s Deep in My Heart, in which Ferrer, not content with his insufferable acting, tried to wow us with his song-and-dance skills (the way Kevin Spacey tried, with similarly unappetizing results, in Beyond the Sea).  Ferrer was later the worst thing in the all-star cast of the mostly awful Ship of Fools (1965), this time as a Nazi.  The problem with all of these performances is that Ferrer remained outside his characters, self-consciously commenting on them while playing them, coming off as dreadfully phony.  This continued, for example, with his laugh-free performance in the backstage comedy Enter Laughing (1967).  By then, Ferrer seemed so puffed-up and self-important that he had smothered whatever sense of humor he had, incapable of being light and charming.  And if being on the ship of fools wasn’t enough, there he was as part of the ensemble of Voyage of the Damned (1976).

Ferrer also directed seven feature films between 1955 and 1962.  The best one may be I Accuse! (1958), a retelling of the Dreyfus case, another French story.  Though it’s a good, worthy version, Ferrer himself, playing Dreyfus, can’t compete with the poignancy of Joseph Schildkraut’s Oscar-winning Dreyfus in The Life of Emile Zola (1937).  Ferrer’s is a bizarrely unsympathetic performance, all technique in its pose of nobility.  His eyes are dead, yet he never seems anything less than immensely impressed with himself.  But, aside from his handling of himself, he did a fine job with Gore Vidal’s screenplay and the film’s host of esteemed actors, including Viveca Lindfors and Donald Wolfit.  His final two directorial efforts were, of all things, Return to Peyton Place (1961) and State Fair (1962), in which he did not appear.

Remember him for his Dauphin, Cyrano, and Lautrec (his Oscar-nominated French trio), despite the fact that, in the next several decades, he seemed to do everything he could to make us forget them.

I admit that I have at least ten major year-end releases to see before I can begin to talk about the best and worst of 2011.  However, that doesn’t mean that I can’t say what my favorite movie of the year is, so far.  That would be Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, and I must say how much that surprises me.  After all, I haven’t loved a Scorsese movie in over twenty years, not since Goodfellas (1990).  I was just beginning to think of him as one of the more overrated figures in the movie business, someone it seems everyone is afraid to criticize…because he’s, you know, Martin Scorsese!  But he surely has made some awful movies in recent years:  Gangs of New York (2002) and Shutter Island (2010) spring to mind.  So, imagine my genuine delight at falling so completely in the thrall of Hugo.

I loathe the 3D phenomenon we’re living through.  I keep thinking, and hoping, that it’s going to end any minute now.  Aside from Avatar (2009), Hugo is the first 3D movie I’ve seen that actually makes the process an integral part of the experience.  This is an exquisitely crafted, rapturously beautiful, and ultimately very moving film, not necessarily a kids’ movie, just a movie about a boy in an admittedly fairy-tale situation.  In the early 1930s, Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is secretly living within the inner workings of a Paris train station, continuing to winds its clocks in fulfillment of the job his uncle had (and abandoned). 

As you’ve heard, this isn’t “gangster” Scorsese, but, rather, “film preservation” Scorsese, with Hugo unexpectedly evolving into a poignant valentine to early film visionary Georges Melies, a forgotten and outmoded figure by the 1920s.  Broke and anonymous, Melies (Ben Kingsley) runs a toy stall in the train station, but, through Hugo’s intervention, will be rediscovered and restored to acclaim and appreciation.  With its mix of technology (the constant workings of clocks, machines, trains) and dreams (which is how Melies describes movies), the film celebrates cinema’s wondrous melding of technique and imagination, with the result that Hugo feels as state-of-the-art as Melies’ films did at the turn of the last century. 

Among the film’s highlights are the flashbacks to Melies in his glass studio, feverishly creating movies that seem both primitively stagy and astoundingly cinematic (in their camera tricks and special effects).  For lovers of film history, Hugo is an overwhelming, essential experience.  Its theme of ”fixing things,” both mechanically and in human terms, is tenderly wrought.  Scorsese pays tribute to one of the men who gave birth to the movies as we know them, and his heartfelt gratitude is felt in every frame.  But this isn’t any film-class lesson that you should see and like because it’s good for you.  Hugo, inspired by “fantastic” films made over a hundred years ago, becomes one of the more magical and transporting films of its own time.

My final 100th birthday tribute of 2011 goes to director Jules Dassin, an American writer-director whose career actually improved after he was blacklisted in Hollywood and then reinvented himself in Europe.  Dassin, who died at 96 in 2008 and who would have turned 100 on December 18, had quite an eclectic career, with his first directing assignments primarily lower-budget MGM features, movies such as The Affairs of Martha (1942) and A Letter for Evie (1945), both of which I’ve written about on this blog.  He also directed Joan Crawford in Reunion in France (1942), Charles Laughton in The Canterville Ghost (1944), and Lucille Ball in Two Smart People (1946). 

It was Brute Force (1947), a prison picture at Universal, that placed him in the film-noir arena to which he properly belonged.  His next three films proved that he was a distinctive talent with a keen eye for composition, a gift for creating compelling and believable atmospheres, and a worldview both fatalistic and touching.  The Naked City (1948) is one of the key docudramas of the post-war era, a look at the inner workings of New York City’s homicide squad.  It’s all terribly familiar now, but this was a fresh experiment forever enhanced by its continual location photography.  Though it has a solid, well-built story, plus the bonus of the unexpected casting of Barry Fitzgerald as the police lieutenant, this is definitely a case of style over content, with the explicit realism of the actual city becoming the dominant character.  The film took home Oscars for cinematography and editing, and it’s capped with a memorable final line:  “There are eight million stories in the naked city.  This has been one of them.” 

Dassin surpassed The Naked City with the next one, Thieves’ Highway (1949), starring Richard Conte (the Italian John Garfield) as a tough war veteran, a trucker in conflict with bad-guy produce dealer Lee J. Cobb.  This socially conscious noir is a forerunner to On the Waterfront (not just because of Cobb’s casting as the villain), a tale of a man being abused by a big shot and fighting back.  It deals in cheating, violence, and revenge, and is primarily set in San Francisco among Italians and Greeks.  The black and white is stunning, the locations are gritty, the script is hard and relentless.  However, it needed more depth of character, and it suffers particularly from Cobb’s overacting and a none too plausible climax and ending.  Dassin’s direction, though, has consistent flavor and texture, and this is the rare film in which the male lead ends up with the sympathetic whore (Valentina Cortesa) rather than his blond fiancee (Barbara Lawrence), who turns out to be greedy.  

Best of the three is Night and the City (1950), a London noir with Richard Widmark as a punk and a hustler, “an artist without an art.”  Widmark actually does more running than acting here, with the film doing for London what The Naked City did for New York.  Gorgeous black and white is matched by a good, nasty plot and sharp dialogue.  The film charts the demise of a slick opportunist.  Dassin’s direction combines style with heat, bringing palpable life to a grim underbelly of society.  Widmark gives his usual hyper-intense but superficial performance, and Gene Tierney is shockingly wasted as his long-suffering girlfriend.  Herbert Lom, with his Peter Lorre eyes, is the big-time crook, though he’s not terribly scary.  It’s Googie Withers who steals the show as the rotten wife of club owner Francis L. Sullivan.  She has real bite and edginess, an overt sexuality, and a real flair for cruelty.  Night and the City is the finest example of Dassin’s ability to combine, complement, and balance voluptuous visuals with large, intense (and sometimes desperate) emotions.  It’s a standout noir.

During the blacklist, Dassin found international acclaim when he made the French heist movie Rififi (1955), winning the Best Director prize at Cannes.  He then found his greatest popularity as the writer-director (and star!) of Never on Sunday (1960), which made Greek actress Melina Mercouri a worldwide sensation as a happy-go-lucky hooker.  Dassin plays her reformer, making the picture a lighthearted version of Rain.  Yes, he proved to be a charmless, amateurish actor, but he did receive Oscar nominations for his writing and direction, while Mercouri found herself among the Best Actress nominees.  They had another notable success with Topkapi (1964), a comic caper in which Mercouri masterminds a scheme to steal four emeralds from a sultan’s dagger on display at the titular museum in Istanbul.  Peter Ustinov is expectedly and delightfully funny as the Mercouri cohort with a fear of heights, though the Oscar he won seems an excessive gesture of appreciation for what is, essentially, a typical Ustinov performance.  

Never on Sunday and Topkapi made a lot of people very happy but they were both seriously overrated, despite the admitted dazzle and magnetism of Mercouri, a formidable, irresistible life force.  Compared with Dassin’s film-noir pictures, these 60s hits seem forced, slickly commercial, and more flimsy than enchanting.  And not nearly as funny as people seemed to think they were at the time.  Dassin and Mercouri married in 1966 and were together until her death in 1994.

For the fullest appreciation of Dassin’s talent, skip his most famous movies and settle in for a double feature of Thieves’ Highway and Night and the City, immersing yourself, at a safe distance, in the dark, lurid, and shadowy pleasures of film noir.  It is as a master of this genre for which Jules Dassin deserves to be celebrated.