Putzberger

For about twenty years, from the phenomenal success of "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" to the phenomenal flop of "Ghost Story," there was a trend in Hollywood to have A-list actors class up the B-grade genre of horror. By 1980, the great George C. Scott's career was at a low enough ebb that he got sucked into a routine chiller called "The Changeling," bringing with him his lovely wife Trish Van Devere and Oscar-winning Hollywood legend Melvyn Douglas. As a result, a TV-scale idea gets major-studio scale production, kind of like a One Direction song being played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Speaking of classical music, Scott plays the only famous American composer of the latter 20th century, who must have married, to put it charitably, late in life, since he's mourning the wife and preteen daughter who die in a freak accident before the opening credits. The opening sequence should be scarifying but actually reminds the viewer of a little-noted horror movie trope: the happier the character appears, the more likely they are to buy it. Having survived this cliché, the Scott character heads straight for another one by moving into a -- natch! -- spooky old mansion, which he rents via small-town Realtor Van Devere and has some convoluted connection to a creaky old Senator played by Douglas. Don't get me wrong, "The Changeling" is a non-stop thrill ride if you've never seen a ghost story before. Otherwise, you can predict the long-buried secrets in long-shuttered rooms as if there were signs on the door (and there may as well be). It's not badly made -- the director has mastered the fundamentals of horror, such like chases down long dark halls, and Scott's grief is entirely believable, since, well, he's George C. Scott, who can communicate a thousand tortured feelings just by standing alone on screen (had he done more of that, he might have had a better career -- "difficult" is the kindest adjective attached to him). So if you don't set your expectations too high, "The Changeling" is just moderately entertaining enough to satisfy.

Reason # 1 - Lousy casting. "The Last Time I Saw Paris" is an expansion of F Scott Fitzgerald's elegiac short story "Babylon Revisited," a lightly fictionalized depiction of the aftermath of Fitzgerald's marriage to Zelda. If MGM stretching a melancholy, intimate portrait of a flawed man into a feature-length romantic extravaganza was a bad idea, casting Van Johnson as the Fitzgerald character was a worse one. Charles Wills, the Fitzgerald stand-in, is a journalist who marries a beautiful but impulsive debutante in Paris right after World War II, lapses into drunken self-loathing after writing a few failed novels, and wastes his wife's inheritance on the way to becoming a puffy, alcoholic playboy. Johnson is certainly believable as a spineless gigolo, but he's too light in his loafers to play an angry husband and too light in the head to play a brilliant, tortured artist. Plus, he was in his late thirties by the time all this celluloid was wasted, so his celebrated boyish good looks were turning flabby. Thus, there's no reason Charles would attract two hot prospects like Liz Taylor and Donna Reed, the expatriate sisters who fight for the pudgy pretty boy's love in post- WWII Paris. Liz wins, of course, and while she's not bad as Wills' erratic wife Helen, she didn't have the acting chops to connect her character's wild, fountain-swimming side and hurt, vulnerable, wronged- wife side. At least she's having a lot more fun than poor Donna Reed, another beautiful actress hagged up to make Liz Taylor even prettier (I don't think Shelley Winters ever forgave George Stevens for frowzing her up in "A Place in the Sun"). The normally effervescent Miss Reed is asked to play Helen's repressed, embittered sister, and just in case she didn't get the hint that her character was emotionally distant, the studio decided to style and costume her like a constipated schoolmarm. Why MGM would waste an Oscar-winning knockout like Reed on such a drab, thankless role indicates some discombobulated priorities. Veteran actor Walter Pidgeon, as Liz and Donna's penniless bon vivant father, manages to project the necessary seedy charm, but since that's all he has to do, his near-constant presence makes him a well-manicured bore. Compounding the absurdity is Zsa Zsa Gabor, who by 1954 already looked like she'd just emerged from her seventh face-lift, wandering on screen as a wealthy socialite who has a tryst with Charles (why not just cast a drag queen - - it's Van Johnson, after all!). Van and Liz also manage to conceive a daughter, the most saccharine movie child this side of a Disney flick. The whole thing is a mess.

Reason # 2 - Profligacy. Thousands of extras wander across the MGM soundstages intended to replicate post-WWII Paris. What could have been a sad, intimate portrait of two flawed people in love becomes an overlong Technicolor extravaganza of crowd scenes, party scenes, racetrack scenes, and one Monte Carlo Grand Prix auto race just to impede character development. At one point, the MGM costume department puts Johnson in a harlequin costume. The point?

"Dark Passage" is a 1947 Warner Brothers film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. That sentence telegraphs a few things about the film: it's a film noir with murders, betrayals and a femme fatale. A little formula isn't fatal for a film noir, since the genre is dependent on how human the archetypes can become -- is the existential hero believable? Is the femme fatale just tragic and mysterious enough to be alluring? Is the hero's faithful but ill-fated friend more than a plot device? As noir goes, "Dark Passage" is a bit too generic, but as filmmaking goes, it's a clever experiment that works more often than it fails. As a bonus, Agnes Moorehead turns in one of the most unexpected performances in cinematic history, and that alone makes "Dark Passage" worth viewing.

As a man falsely convicted of killing his wife, Bogart plays a standard noir hero with a troubled past and no future. To compensate for his commonness, director Delver Daves shoots most of the first part of the film from Bogart's perspective, which, as a choice, turns out to be more of a gimmick than a thematic choice but the early scene of being in an oil drum rolling down hill is pretty cool anyway. The movie is, naturally, concerned with finding out who murdered Bogart's wife, and the plot is a little muddled and weighted down with too many expository scenes. (Howard Hawks had just directed Bogie & Bacall in "The Big Sleep" and demonstrated that the more complicated the plot, the less important the exposition. I guess Daves didn't pay attention.) Bacall shows up as Bogart's helpmate, there are creepy supporting characters speaking strange monologues (another noir trademark), and enough weak but interesting men to keep the plot moving forward. But aside from the camera work, the most remarkable thing about "Dark Passage" is the casting of Agnes Moorehead as the de riguer evil woman. Sure, we can all know that Ag can play a domineering rhymes-with-witch, but who thought she could play a sexually voracious one? Her character of Madge is never fully explained, but seems to be an annoying rich woman whom everyone must tolerate because of her social position. To be bearable, Madge must be attractive in some way, and since the stately Ms. Moorehead exudes all the smoldering sensuality of a Mother Superior, she has to act sexy, which she's just talented enough to do. You've seen in "Citizen Kane," "The Twilight Zone" and "Bewitched," but you've never seen her like this. Check her out.