theognis2

Her horrendous childhood prepared her for the Hollywood meat market. Her husband's best days as a playwright were behind him and now Arthur Miller married the subject that put him back on the map, this picture and then his 1964 play, "After the Fall." It was simultaneously her last completed film and the last for her girlhood idol: of his performance, Clark Gable said, "It's the best thing I've ever done." In an early scene when she is introduced to Gable in a bar, she seems genuinely flustered. In "An Open Book," director John Huston wrote, "She wasn't acting--I mean she was not pretending to an emotion. It was the real thing. She would go deep down within herself and find it and bring it up into consciousness. But maybe that's what all truly good acting consists of." The supporting cast excelled as well: Montgomery Clift, a rodeo cowboy, who spends most of his life recovering from injuries and Eli Wallach, a widower and veteran with PTSD. Huston again: "...my memories of 'The Misfits' are mostly melancholy." The performances are wonderful, but melancholy is primarily what remains.

At the nadir of the Great Depression, this musical about wealthy men falling in love with showgirls was the top grossing picture for Warner Bros., which had done much to promote "talkies." It also came at the end of the pre-code era and included shots of women in lingerie and, in silhouette, nude. Different versions had to be released, depending upon censorship rules in different states and nations. Most memorably, it included spectacular Busby Berkeley song and dance numbers. For destitute young women, it appeared to be instructive.

It takes more than a wobbly handheld camera and a faux cinema verite style to convince me that I'm looking at something real or true. Even mentions of the PLO and Yasser Arafat or clips of Peter Jennings and Ronald Reagan don't help. Jon Hamm's wife has been killed in Beirut, during some terrorist operation and now he's been recalled, ten years later, by the CIA for a special mission. So he's there in this exotic, Near Eastern locale, unshaven, drunk, disheveled, mourning his loss, just like Bogey in "Casablanca" (1942). Sounds like a financeable project, right? But this plot is awfully complicated. Who's who, doing what, why? The best stories of international intrigue/espionage are best kept simple. Like our hero, we don't know why we're there. The wealth of detail is what Hitchcock often referred to as the MacGuffin. As in "Casablanca," when we see Hitchcock's "Notorious" (1946), it's not the uranium mining that fascinates us. Pretty Rosamond Pike is the female lead in this picture and often within grabbable distance. She's not Ingrid Bergman, just as Hamm is no Bogart or Grant, but she'll certainly do, in a pinch.