Review #1,331: 'The Wrong Man' (1956)

Alfred Hitchcock earned the title of 'master of suspense' with some good old fashioned grafting (he had been making films since the silent era) combined with an understanding of the possibilities of cinema - and an eagerness to explore them - that few directors shared. Ask most film goers to name a Hitchcock film and the answer will likely be Psycho, Rear Window, The Birds or North by Northwest. Few will name The Wrong Man, the tightly constructed and thoroughly engaging little thriller from 1956, made after fluffier works To Catch a Thief and The Man Who Knew Too Much. This is perhaps because The Wrong Man is the filmmaker's least Hitchcockian effort, toning down the sugaryness (he labelled his movies as like 'slices of cake') and playing the story straight with little artistic flair. Even his obligatory cameo is reduced to mere narration at the film's opening.

Many of Hitchcock's thrillers revolve around a case of mistaken identity, which naturally forces the protagonist to make a break for it in the hope of proving his innocence before the police catch up to them. This time, however, the story is true. Based on the plight of Christopher 'Manny' Balestrero, a hard-working jazz musician who found himself identified by many witnesses as a hold-up man, The Wrong Man is Hitchcock's closest brush with realism. Shot on the streets of New York and using locations from the real-life story, there is more of a naturalistic feel to the film that what we are used to from the great director. Hitchcock still squeezes in some subtle camera tricks, depicting Balestrero's situation as disorientating, claustrophobic and increasingly hopeless. But with an actor of such effortless charisma as Henry Fonda at his disposal, Hitchcock mainly opts to tell the story through his lead actor's incredibly expressive face.

Hitchcock documents Balestrero's journey from being incorrectly identified by some terrified clerical workers when trying to take a loan from his life insurance policy for his wife's (Vera Miles) dental work, to his frustratingly unfair trial. The film is used to highlight flaws in a system designed to seek justice, in which an accused isn't allowed to give evidence to prove their innocence (as a truly innocent man doesn't need to prove anything), and a jury under oath makes their minds up before the trial even starts. It's a catalogue of errors from the very start, forcing Manny to seek out his own witnesses to prove he could not have committed the crime. The final reveal also comments on the folly of placing too much trust in eye-witness testimony, and the fact that many are still wrongly jailed due to failings in the system make the film's musings all the more poignant. One of Hitchcock's most underappreciated gems.


Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Henry Fonda, Vera Miles, Anthony Quayle, Harold J. Stone, Charles Cooper
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #1,222: 'The Creature Walks Among Us' (1956)

Directed by John Sherwood, The Creature Walks Among Us is the third and final movie in one of Universal's most beloved monster franchises, that of the Gill-Man of the Black Lagoon. The original is a genre classic, a surprisingly creepy picture given its B-movie shackles that makes powerful use of its man-in-a-rubber-suit special effects. With audiences losing interest in creature features and denying Universal its bread and butter in the process, Creature from the Black Lagoon inspired a quickly-made sequel the following year, Revenge of the Creature, a routine monster movie that proved to be as uninspiring and unimaginative as its title, drawing from what made its predecessor so memorable without any of its skill of execution.

This final bow wraps the trilogy up nicely, while facing the wrath of its fans by being rather hesitant to go underwater and taking the evolutionary curiosity in a different direction all together. After the events of Revenge, the creature is at large in Florida, believed to be hiding out in the wetlands of the Everglades. A new crack team of square-jawed scientists and one of their pretty wives head out on a boat in the hope of snaring the beast, although it quickly comes to light that each man may have their own intentions. The handsome Thomas Morgan (Rex Reason) hopes to gain medical insight through experimentation, but the unhinged William Barton (Jeff Morrow) plans to mess with its DNA and creature a whole new species. The presence of Barton's wife Marcia (Leigh Snowden) has testosterone running high, sending Barton slowly mad in the process, while sleazy jungle guide Jed Grant (Gregg Palmer) tries to catch her eye.

After an incident leaves the Gill-Man badly burned, the crew tend to him and head for home. The burns peel back to reveal a smoother skin beneath, and the group are shocked to learn that the gill-breather also has lungs. The creature starts to, as the title suggests, walk among us, and is here more human than ever. With this idea, the film harks back to the original and turns its focus on man as the beast. He doesn't even need shackles to walk into his enclosure once he is brought ashore, and is eventually only thrown into a rage by evil acts committed by man. There's no claiming and kidnapping women to be his mate, and at one point he even prevents a rape. There is a startling amount of characterisation for a genre normally so reliant of archetypes, thanks to the script by Arthur A. Ross and strong performances from Morrow and Reason (who appeared together in sci-fi turkey and 'classic' This Island Earth. Given its obvious appeal, the Creature has remained surprisingly untouched by Hollywood's fondness for remakes, and judging from the reaction to Universal's introduction to their planned 'Dark Universe', The Mummy, let's keep it that way.


Directed by: John Sherwood
Starring: Jeff Morrow, Rex Reason, Leigh Snowden, Gregg Palmer
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #706: 'Beyond a Reasonable Doubt' (1956)

Fritz Lang's last American film before he returned to Germany, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt suffers from the director's clear lack of interest. Lang was reportedly dismayed by the lack of visual creativity allowed by American producers (which was also clear in his penultimate American noir, While the City Sleeps (1956)), and so shortly after returned to his homeland to make the visually lavish double-bill Tiger of Bengal and The Indian Tomb (1959), dubbed the 'Indian Epic'. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, an intriguing little noir starring Dana Andrews, is by no means a bad film, but is clearly the work of a man handicapped by the system and a film that is pessimistic in its execution.

Tom (Andrews), a novelist in search of inspiration for his second book, is approached by his newspaper publisher father-in-law Austin Spencer (Sidney Blackmer) to help aide his opposition of state capital punishment. The plan is to plant circumstantial evidence of Tom's fake involvement in the recent unsolved murder of nightclub stripper Patty Gray. Naturally, during the trial, an incident prevents Austin from delivering the evidence and testimony that will prove Tom's innocence, so Tom's disgruntled fiancée Susan (Joan Fontaine) races against time to prevent Tom getting executed on Death Row.

Lang had already exposed the fragility of the justice system in his German masterpiece M (1931), and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt begins in suitably grim fashion with the silent execution of an inmate. The plot is a great idea (to think what Hitchcock would have made of it) but the execution is plain and predictable. Although Andrews' performance is solid and the movie sometimes threatens to push the boundaries set by the censors at the time, it simply goes through the motions until a twist reveal in the last 15 minutes livens things up a bit. You most likely won't see it coming, but it ends the film with plenty of plot-holes to pick at and left me scratching my head at exactly what point the movie was trying to make. A rather flat end to a solid period of film noir for the German master.


Directed by: Fritz Lang
Starring: Dana Andrews, Joan Fontaine, Sidney Blackmer, Arthur Franz
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #590: 'The Bad Seed' (1956)

Hollywood had dealt with the precocious little girl before with the likes of insipid movie starlet Shirley Temple. But by the mid-1950's the sweetness and innocence of the diminutive lassies with pigtails and pretty summer dresses had been tarnished by the advent of youth movements, and particularly the media attention of juvenile delinquency. The parental fear of something sinister brewing within their own little treasure is addressed in The Bad Seed, and the horror archetype of the creepy, evil child was thrust onto cinema goers, a tool of the uncanny and frightening monstrosity that still finds an audience in modern cinema (Insidious (2010) or Mama (2013) for example).

But compared to the more direct horror of our modern child-monsters, Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack), the titular 'bad seed' of this narrative, presents herself as a wholly innocent girl, clinging onto parents and adults, subtly manipulating them with a pristine veneer, but hiding churlish glee. In early scenes Rhoda's doting landlady, Monica (Evelyn Varden), notices that whilst Rhoda's contemporaries wear the fashionable styles of the times (jeans and t-shirt), she still wears the attire of idealism - it seems, even in the '50's this vision of childhood is a lost image of Victoriana. But this is a petulant child, one of those girls who could 'scream and scream' until she gets what she wants (I've encountered a few adult "girls" who have the same temperament - encounters that are largely unpleasant).

After losing a gold medal award at her school, Rhoda and her school friends go out for a picnic, and, off-camera, she pesters the little boy who had rightfully won the award. At home her mother, Christine (Nancy Kelly), holding conversation largely about the hot topic of the time, psychoanalysis - a preoccupation that is thinly thread throughout the film, - hears on the radio of the news that a child at the school picnic has drowned becomes fraught with anguish. But on arrival home, the precocious Rhoda walks in stating that the incident was "fun". This detachment from the event concerns Christine, but as time goes by, the mother begins to suspect that Rhoda is not an innocent in this death, and begins to unravel her daughters manipulative nature, believing eventually that Rhoda is a murderer.

Aside from the heavy Freudian psycho-babble presented by the intellectuals that surround the Penmark family (the father, Col. Kenneth (William Hopper) is absent during Christine's mental collapse, away as he is for work), the film also portrays another social issue that still is topical today, the question of nature and nurture on the subject of child-rearing. As mother casts doubt upon the validity of her child's innocence, and begins to see the manipulative make-up of the girl, the issue of her own hereditary and parentage comes into question. This highlights rather naively, that there would be no way that a child raised in a stable home could commit any kind a atrocity, and that this behavioural trait is strictly for the lower classes. But this is a minor quibble.

The film came to the screen through novel written by Willaim March (who died the same year of publication, 1954), then through the stage production written by Maxwell Anderson, to the screenplay written by John Lee Mahin and directed by veteran director Mervyn LeRoy. It is brilliantly cast, and particular attention should go to McCormack's performance. As a girl who presents innocence, but has the ability to snap and commit murder, she brings those juxtapositions with bravado and skill. It is also a quite frightening performance. It was a low budget film that garnered four academy award nominations, and introduced the concept in horror cinema that the monster is not always the uncanny icons such as the wolf man, but that the monstrous lives within humans. This, four years before that horror trope began its enduring mark on cinema with Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). You may never look at an innocent little child in quite the same way again.


Directed by: Mervyn LeRoy
Starring: Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormack, Henry Jones, Eileen Heckart, William Hopper
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Marc Ivamy

Review #511: 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' (1956)

The first of many adaptations of Jack Finney's novel 'The Body Snatchers', - which was originally serialised in Colliers Magazine in 1954, - Don Siegel's film set the science fiction template for cinema narratives about control, and the subversion of individualism. Whilst it has been reported by Finney, Siegel, and others involved in the production, that no political or metaphorical message was intended (they all simply thought that they were making a thriller), the simple story of aliens quietly invading our world and replacing us with emotionless replicas, was an irresistible package that was open to many contemporary interpretations.

The America of the 1950's was one of social convention and conformity, and the desire to present an habitually formal appearance. The outsider who sees behind this veneer is a dangerous person, transgressing from normal linear passages. The teenagers of America (as seen in James Dean's Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (1955)) were a dangerous new opponent to the hypocritical values of the countries proverbial "dream". Therefore, the pervading consensus in political and social attitudes was to distinguish individualism, and to suppress those random and spontaneous desires.

In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kevin McCarthy's Dr. Bennell's hysteria is revealed at the start of the film, his recollection of the past days events, told not only to clear his own anxiety-riddled memory, but to also defend his sanity, to confess his erratic behaviour as non-conformist, and to logically explain the reason he "stood out from the crowd". In the next scene the doctor is calm, respectable looking, merging into small town life. He begins to hear reports about people behaving unusually. Close family friends becoming devoid of emotion over night. In a later scene, Bennell and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), an old friend of the doctors, watch a haunting image from a window. A congregation gathers in the town centre, as pods (the alien, plant-like objects that duplicate the humans) are distributed for the indoctrination of their children and loved ones. A violent response to the rise of adolescent rebellion, from the formative generation, but also a more sinister political philosophy.

When the pod people begin enveloping the inhabitants of Santa Mira, their ideological conspiracy is an easy metaphor for the political machinations of McCartyism, the propagandist attack on communism, and the perceived danger to American values; or a reflection on the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany in the 1930's. In these context's, it is the loss of personal freedoms and individual rights, brought on by political conformity, that transforms the population into zombies. Without these fundamental human emotions and freedoms, we are simply mechanisms to order. Nothing unique comes from that. As Dr. Bennell discovers the ramifications of conformity, he disputes the outcome; he doesn't want to lose love, anger, frustration, or grief. These emotional reactions to the various obstacles of life or essential to our originality.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers wasn't at all unique in its themes. Many of the decades science fiction films were expressing similar fears of invasion (The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), War of the Worlds (1953)), but Siegel's was a far more subtler production, than some of the more lavish special effects driven movies. Partly, no doubt, to the minuscule budget. But the film is still effective today, the pace building tension throughout, and revealing increasingly horrific and terrifying images. Over fifty years later, it is consistently the best adaptation of the source novel, and the alarming themes of global control and political corruption, are still relevant (possibly more insipidly) in the twenty-first century.


Directed by: Don Siegel
Starring: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan, Carolyn Jones
Country: USA

Rating: *****

Marc Ivamy

Review #138: 'The Searchers' (1956)

Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) is an outsider; a wanderer after the Confederate wars were lost by the south. Arriving back at his brothers ranch in Texas , three years after the end of the civil, Ethan is later dismayed by the systematic killing of his brothers family and the kidnapping of his young niece, Debbie, by the Comanche. Ethan enters a 5 year odyssey to find his niece. He later discovers that she has become "one of them". Ethan hates them "Injuns". His plan now is to find Debbie and kill her; It's better that she dies than to live as a Comanche. His total, racist hatred towards the Indians is palpable throughout the film.

There's no disputing John Ford's film making virtuosity in this 'classic' Hollywood western. The outsider nature of Wayne's character is highlighted in the mise-en-scene and positioning of the shots. Ethan is nearly always framed in shots through windows, doorways and rock. We as the spectator are looking out at his character. Wayne is always outside looking in. He is alienated in-frame; his racism detached from the audience. This framing device also provides from this film, one of the most iconic images from the history of cinema. At the close of the film, as the family is reunited with Debbie, Ethan dithers at the doorway before turning to walk away. We are not supposed to like this bigoted character, yet we are to follow his "heroic" quest. Wayne sits uncomfortably throughout the film, seemingly looking awkward with the dimensions of Ethan.

This segues into John Wayne himself. I have only seem a small handful of Wayne's films. Two (now three) I have thoroughly enjoyed - Stagecoach (1939) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). However, these are more to do with the pleasure of the films themselves and not the Wayne performances. I really have a lot of difficulty liking him. Like his performance in The Searchers, I was agitated and uncomfortable. Wayne walks through his performances like a man with severe hemorrhoids. He stands, walks, shoots awkwardly. His diction sounds like a frustrated sex-pest drawling, and spurting out lines as if he had recently had a throat-stroke.

Aside from my passionate hatred of John Wayne, I can state that whilst he is clearly out of place with a compromised character - and not the clear-cut hero characters he was used to playing - it is quite refreshing to see him play something a little left-field (or right-field, if you like!), this is thoroughly entertaining western film making, in the classic Hollywood mode. The sumptuous cinematography capturing the true beauty of Monument Valley - it's location - is stunning. No one shots that landscape quite like Ford. It's no wonder that this was nominated in 2008 as the greatest American western, and number 12 on the AFI's top 100 American films of all time. I have to state though, that the western genre only really delights me when made outside of America.


Directed by: John Ford
Starring: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Marc Ivamy

Review #22: 'A Man Escaped' (1956)

There have been many films down the years focusing on escaping from prison. Whether it be the wrongly imprisoned facing the injustice of the prison system (The Shawshank Redemption (1994)), scouting a group of misfit characters to forge a masterplan to be carried out on a grand scale (The Great Escape (1963)), or the simply plain ridiculous (Escape To Victory (1981)), director's have seemingly always had a fascination with escape. Perhaps it's a mixture of the desperation and excitement of breaking free and rebelling against a suppressive system. Of all the prison movies I've seen, none have been as focused, thrilling, or as involving as Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped.

It follows French resistance fighter Fontaine (Francois Letterier) as he is being exported to Nazi prison Fort Montluc during WWII. He instantly seizes a chance to escape on his way but is quickly re-captured and thrown back in the car. We see from the off that Fontaine is an opportunist, and will do everything in his power to battle against his situation. Upon arriving at Montluc, Fontaine quickly begins to devise his plan of escape by obtaining a safety pin which he uses to unlock his handcuffs, but upon being moved to a higher cell his handcuffs are removed anyway. He steals a spoon from the cafeteria, which he uses to slowly chip away a his cell door, filing and scratching the sides of the panels until it can be completely removed, leaving him able to roam the halls at night and plan his escape further.

His plan is thrown into disarray with the arrival of young soldier Francois (Charles Le Clainche) who bears the uniforms of both the French and German army. Fontaine must decide whether to trust this possibly spy and take him on his escape, or to kill him. Upon Francois' arrival, Fontaine also learns that his activities working for the French resistance have earned him the death sentence, so must quickly escape or face his fate. The film is based on the memoirs of Andre Devigny and his experiences imprisoned by the Nazis.

Bresson's genius shines through in this film with his ability to conjure nail-biting tension in the tiniest of things. Fontaine spends most of his time squatted in front of his cell door, filing down the door panels with his blunt spoon, and it's these scenes where you feel the excitement of Fontaine's slow progression, and the elation of the eventual success. The focus stays on Fontaine, as he conspires with his fellow inmates and slowly executes his plan. We see little of the Nazis and how they treat the inmates, and we don't need to, we know they were quite the bastards and weren't very nice. The fear of being at their will is written on Fontaine's face, and it's much more powerful for that.

This is a prison escape movie carried out with pinpoint precision by a masterful director. This is the first Bresson I've seen and I'll be seeking out many more when I get the chance. This is character study mixed with the intensity of a thriller. I have only experienced a similar feeling with Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages Of Fear (1953). The prison genre will most likely forever be eclipsed by The Shawshank Redemption, but this film deserves to equally regarded.


Directed by: Robert Bresson
Starring: François Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, Maurice Beerblock
Country: France

Rating: *****

Tom Gillespie