RJC-4

Double-crossed ex-jailbird Powell settles his scores with sadistic relish in this mildly satisfying, workmanlike noir. Nothing special, particularly in the plot department, but watchable for a few cool elements -- notably the bitter dialogue and character actor Richard Erdman's scene-stealing turn as a witty drunken chiseler. The script constantly pushes its bad-girl theme, serving up plenty of floozies eager for the impassive Powell; it pants long and hard for little spark. Visually things start promisingly, but director Parrish has exhausted his interesting stuff within five minutes. Noir lite.

Terribly good fun, with brilliant production design, and just the right mix of desperate situation and winking dialogue, "Reign" is survival horror as it hasn't been done since George Romero.

The film's accomplishment is to take the gritty stacked odds of Romero's "Dead" trilogy and pair it with the iron-plated biological terror of the "Aliens" series. Planet-wide agoraphobia!

For genre fans, "Reign" has a deft way of appealing to both the thirteen and thirty-year old in you -- this is that elusive pop culture mastery, a casual kind of genius about pushing narrative buttons, tightrope walking between hokiness and plausibility, stacking up menace and delivering thrills.

The script has some superb throwaway quips and the narrative a slower, more methodical pace than most contemporary junk (several nice detours for backstory and texture). The cast delights with plenty of bug-eyed seething, stomping, and screaming. And the dragons are hellish. What superior pop crapola "Reign" is! I wasn't displeased for a second.

Finding this oddity on cable recently, I was quickly seduced by its opening sequence, a Welles-like plunge down main street into a small everytown's heart, Marsh's pharmacy. Here, as some clever camera work reveals, solid citizen Lew Marsh (Don Ameche) tends to the blisses of early 40's Hollywood America; everyone's prescription is filled, sundaes topped off with a cherry, local oddballs humored, etc.

What most recommends the film is its frame narrative. Quickly the idyll is broken when Marsh learns his son has been killed in the war. He sinks into a lengthy depression. Enter the ghost of Gramp to conduct psychotherapy: he spirits Marsh back into the past where we relive the childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood of the now-dead Rusty. While the mid-section unfolds linearly, Marsh and Gramp function offscreen as a Greek chorus (their melancholy dialogue often a grim counterpoint to the generally cheerful scenes). Then it's back to the present where an exorcized Marsh learns to stop questioning the wisdom of sacrificing young men in war. "Rusty died a good death," Gramp's ghost counsels, and we know it's only a matter of time before Marsh will agree.

Three years before "It's A Wonderful Life" (1946), "Happy Land" was already hijacking the "Christmas Carol" device of reliving the past on a therapeutic sightseeing tour. Unlike the Stewart film, though, the tone is more darkly somber, lingeringly mournful. The theme of sorrow outweighs the theme of recovery. Ameche looks and sounds wracked, bitter.

In fact, the film's heart is scarcely in its chief enterprise, which is to steel its audience for more wartime sacrifice. It seems at times almost to be working against its own message that war deaths are "good deaths." I imagine it may have helped salve some broken hearts, but the crime of this type of film is that, if it succeeds, it only helps to break more.