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Lincoln isn't President yet
Anthony Mann's The Tall Target (1951) is not my favorite historical noir, but only because it's got some ridiculously stiff competition. Set on a southbound night train on the eve of the first inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, it's an assassination thriller powered by the vital anger of issues that have not become any less inflammatory or inextricable from the politics of this nation in the years since the Civil War whose imminent outbreak charges the tension in every frame of this film—from engine to caboose, the Washington Night Flyer is the microcosm of a nervy country, full of fractious alliances, incompatible ideologies, and casually pervasive violence, in which it is a mere accepted fact for Democrats and even some non-radical Republicans that the furies will be loosed the instant Lincoln takes office, unless, of course, some concerned citizen should take him out first. In other words, it's film noir based on the Baltimore Plot, and it is a tribute to the combined screenwriting powers of George Worthington Yates, Art Cohn, and Daniel Mainwaring that it feels so tensely and successfully as though secret history might turn at any second to alternate history, the shout from the stage of Ford's Theatre forestalled by screams from the crowd around Calvert Street Station. Or if history is to happen as we know it, will our disbelieved hero have to buy it with his life? It may be my favorite movie starring Dick Powell, if it comes to that.
It starts with the clever hook of telling the audience what they don't know: "Ninety years ago a lonely traveler boarded the night train from New York to Washington, D.C., and when he reached his destination, his passage had become a forgotten chapter in the history of the United States. This motion picture is a dramatization of that disputed journey." The words crawl over the steam and clang of an engine backing into a cavernous station whose wet tracks gleam under the lime-harsh lights of the platform, one of the darkly liminal zones in which noir thrives. When we meet our protagonist, pacing impatiently outside a closed door on whose other side he can hear men laughing at him, he's already stepped into its no man's land, even if it will take him a disorientation or two to realize it. His name is John Kennedy (Powell), which in 1951's 1861 just denotes that he's Irish; he's a detective sergeant of the New York Police and the big joke is his confidential report on a credible threat to the life of the president-elect which his superintendent doesn't find credible at all. Dismissed as a star-struck scaredy-cat—"Sergeant Kennedy was detailed for two days to guard Abe Lincoln when he was electioneering in New York last fall. He thinks he's still on the assignment!"—a fuming Kennedy quits the force and heads off to Baltimore, either to make his case to an authority who'll listen or stop an assassination singlehandedly if he has to. At once all bets of a reasonable world are off. At the station where soldiers on both sides of the splitting Union are mobilizing with brass bands and banners and newspaper hawkers shouting, "Jeff Davis sworn in!" Kennedy takes a moment of reckless precaution to dispatch an urgent telegram to Lincoln en route his inaugural whistle-stop tour, but then he can't find the friend who was holding his ticket, he has to shell out for a new one in the last-call crush and does himself no favors trying to claim the privileges of his shield when he left it on his superior's desk, he barely makes it aboard the departing train and his frantic search through the crowded, jouncing, sway-lit compartments ends in the discovery of his friend's glasses shattered on the baggage car floor and Inspector Tim Reilly (Regis Toomey) himself a murdered body no sooner recognized than falling away at a jerk of the tracks into the lonely steam-whistle night. Shaken not just by the death but by its implications, Kennedy returns to his seat to discover the most nightmarish touch yet, a brawny stranger (Leif Erickson) wearing his coat and flashing his ticket and claiming to be "John Kennedy." It's clear enough that the conspiracy against Lincoln is real and on the train with him, but it's not at all obvious that he'll be able to identify its actors in time to save anyone, even himself. Atlanta-bound Lance and Ginny Beaufort (Marshall Thompson and Paula Raymond) make the most natural suspects, especially when the proud belle of a sister confirms that her cold young sniper-trained brother has resigned his commission at West Point in order to take up arms for the nascent Confederacy, but it's a building contractor from Connecticut (Will Wright) who offers the most explicit violence to the president-elect with boasts like "I'd inaugurate him—with a stout rope from the White House chandelier" and "If somebody puts a bullet into Abe Lincoln, I'll be the first to shake his hand." The Lincoln-partisan abolitionist from Boston (Florence Bates) is a nineteenth-century nice white lady who wants to interview the Beauforts' enslaved maid Rachel (Ruby Dee, early and magnificent) mostly in order to instruct her on what she is supposed to feel, like a desire to emigrate to Africa. Militia Colonel Caleb Jeffers of the Poughkeepsie State Zouaves (Adolphe Menjou) admits he never wanted "old Abe" in the White House, but claims an assassination would only martyr the man and consolidate Republican power for generations. Meanwhile the conductor (Will Geer) and the engineer (Victor Kilian) couldn't care less who gets elected or shot so long as the train runs on time, which right now it isn't, not least because some hot-headed fool of an ex-policeman is running around making a nuisance of himself with fistfights and gunfights and being wanted in three states by the actual police. As Jeffers remarks to Kennedy in the aftermath of a violent struggle under the engine-wheels of the train idling for three action-packed minutes in New Brunswick, "I don't know anything about a plot against Lincoln's life, but there certainly seems to be one against yours."
It has become obvious to me, as I suspect it has become obvious to the readers of these reviews, that I really value Code-era movies that get outside the straight white picket fence of their Catholic-moral remit, not because they prove that Hollywood was always the ne plus ultra of progressive politics or even only because subversion is worth celebrating wherever it sneaks in, but because there's such a powerful, pernicious tendency to regard history as a process of linear improvement, I like these reminders that social justice is not a post-millennial invention, no matter what those in power in this country at the moment may be trying to claim. The Tall Target is far from the boldest statement on race relations that could have been made in 1951, but it is striking to me who and what it chooses to make visible in a narrative still so often, and so dangerously, softened and simplified. John Kennedy is the hero of his narrative. He has all the conventional virtues of courage, honor, and action, and they don't feel like cardboard when animated by intelligence and vulnerability. One of the most delicate scenes in the picture reveals the source of his devotion to Lincoln, shared in a whisper appropriate to his fugitive status but also his depth of feeling:
"Look, Rachel, I'm no Republican or abolitionist, but I guarded Mr. Lincoln while he was campaigning in New York. I helped him open a window. He held a door for me. I found a parcel for him—some nightshirts back from the laundry. I was only with him forty-eight hours, but when he left, he shook my hand and thanked me and wished me well. I was never so taken with a human man."
He happens to be wrong that he's apolitical, as it turns out that he cares a great deal whether Rachel is enslaved or free, but he's right to recognize the importance of these intimate, insignificant moments and Powell recounts them tenderly and directly, as a man would in a time before affection for another man had to be constantly qualified no-homo. So he'll throw away his reputation, his career, his life if necessary to keep this man safe, and none of his heartfelt, quixotic efforts would count for beans without the even more audacious and unseen heroism of his partner in this conversation and counter-conspiracy, Rachel of Tall Trees, Georgia. Just because the part's soft-spoken doesn't mean Dee's not incandescent in it, her dark eyes so somberly concentrated under uneasily crooked brows that she's impossible to look away from, and the script gives surprisingly complex attention to the gravity of her decision to aid Kennedy and transitively Lincoln, at first in small ways of passing information, eventually in open defiance. Bound to the Beauforts by relations as close as blood—indeed, when Ginny reproaches her that they "grew up like sisters," it may be only the double-speaking of the truth—she has never known a life beyond Tall Trees, which does not mean, as sententious Mrs. Alsop would have it, that she does not know "what freedom is." Kneeling at Ginny's side to help wind up a skein of yarn, she has only to glance at her regally complacent mistress to answer quietly, "I know what it is." The love between them is real, but only within the limits of Rachel's submission. At a tense moment between the two women and Kennedy, Ginny bursts out defensively, "Rachel is as free as I am!" and then turning to her maid as if appealing for reassurance, "You know that. That's why you never thought to ask for your freedom—and why I never thought of giving it to you." Profiled in the shadowy, searing foreground of a deep-focus two shot, one hand still pressed to the side of her face where her sisterly mistress slapped her without a second thought as she snatched the pistol from her hand and trained it on Kennedy, Rachel speaks with tears on her lashes and an unbroken voice that tells us how many, many times she's thought of it: "Freedom isn't a thing you should be able to give me, Miss Ginny. Freedom is something I should have been born with." Perhaps alone of the characters in this movie, she doesn't fear the war that is coming, even though—perhaps because—it registers to white Southerners and Northerners alike as the next best thing to apocalypse. She's not given the chance to use it, but she's holding a gun when she says steadily to the man who still owns her, "I'm not afraid." I don't think it's accidental that she's Kennedy's true ally aboard the train, not the deceptively friendly, thoroughly respectable white man whose stake in a successful assassination turns out to be the most venal and plausible of motives—"Northern cotton mill shares. You know what would happen to those mills if war came and the supply of raw cotton was cut off from the South." Even more than the hateful bluster of the building contractor, it's the film's moment of "Molasses to Rum," the sharp reminder of Northern complicity that profited from Southern slavery with or without direct ownership. Even above the Mason–Dixon line, Black lives matter less than profit margins. The modern-day parallel is not difficult to draw. The last card up the film's sleeve is the identity of the Pinkerton agent without whose undercover assistance, we are encouraged to believe, the sixteenth President of the United States might well have been a very startled Hannibal Hamlin, but I love that from a modern perspective it is a successful weaponization of the invisibility of women whose concerns are assumed to be domestic no matter how many state lines they cross. None of these elements undercut Kennedy; they make the world through which he moves as unpredictable as the past should be. We know more or less how it all turned out, but that's no reason to feel superior. We're the rest of this story, and look how well we've told it.
The stiffest of the competition I mentioned at the top is The Black Book (1949), Mann's first experiment in historical noir and a masterclass in the style even before we get into the French Revolution. The Tall Target has the high-contrast photography of Paul Vogel which especially flourishes in night shots of the train and low-angle close-ups of characters in darkening circumstances, and I have nothing to say against the no-budget immersion of the production design by Cedric Gibbons and Eddie Imazu which crams all the divisive, fermenting energies of the oncoming war into one stretched-out tracking shot through the otherwise chaos as usual of a train station late at night, but it just isn't as weird a film; it's more earnest, less blackly playful, and it has a brilliant last line and then fumbles its last shot in a way that makes me wonder if this country is ever going to get out of its hagiography of Lincoln because it's exactly the same mistake that mars the closing moments of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), plastering over flawed human reality with reassuring institutions. (Seriously, I want to watch Spielberg's Lincoln (2012) now just to see if he can make it to the credits without blowing it.) It is still a pearl among B-noir, mining a remarkable degree of uncertainty from the lacunae of well-documented events. I love the inclusion of historical detail, like the smearing of Lincoln as a "Black Republican," the awareness that New York Irish Kennedy would of course have been a Tammany Democrat, and the city ordinance that required locomotives to be horse-drawn through the center of Baltimore, thus necessitating a terrifying slowdown just when it would be safest to speed clean away. The dialogue isn't as wild as the high pulp of The Black Book, but it acquits itself honorably enough on the hard-boiled front, as when Kennedy dismisses a suspect with the damningly accurate "He wouldn't shoot off anything but his mouth." I would be remiss if I did not mention that Powell looks better in this movie than anywhere else I've ever seen him: the nineteenth-century sideburns suit his face, as does stiff-greased rather than slick-parted hair; if you've read Gemma Files' Hexslingers, I find him a surprisingly convincing older Ed Morrow. He'll be out of your hair in 78 minutes if you're not as charmed as I am, but I hope you are. There's Katherine Warren and Ruby Dee either way. This close call brought to you by my wily backers at Patreon.
It starts with the clever hook of telling the audience what they don't know: "Ninety years ago a lonely traveler boarded the night train from New York to Washington, D.C., and when he reached his destination, his passage had become a forgotten chapter in the history of the United States. This motion picture is a dramatization of that disputed journey." The words crawl over the steam and clang of an engine backing into a cavernous station whose wet tracks gleam under the lime-harsh lights of the platform, one of the darkly liminal zones in which noir thrives. When we meet our protagonist, pacing impatiently outside a closed door on whose other side he can hear men laughing at him, he's already stepped into its no man's land, even if it will take him a disorientation or two to realize it. His name is John Kennedy (Powell), which in 1951's 1861 just denotes that he's Irish; he's a detective sergeant of the New York Police and the big joke is his confidential report on a credible threat to the life of the president-elect which his superintendent doesn't find credible at all. Dismissed as a star-struck scaredy-cat—"Sergeant Kennedy was detailed for two days to guard Abe Lincoln when he was electioneering in New York last fall. He thinks he's still on the assignment!"—a fuming Kennedy quits the force and heads off to Baltimore, either to make his case to an authority who'll listen or stop an assassination singlehandedly if he has to. At once all bets of a reasonable world are off. At the station where soldiers on both sides of the splitting Union are mobilizing with brass bands and banners and newspaper hawkers shouting, "Jeff Davis sworn in!" Kennedy takes a moment of reckless precaution to dispatch an urgent telegram to Lincoln en route his inaugural whistle-stop tour, but then he can't find the friend who was holding his ticket, he has to shell out for a new one in the last-call crush and does himself no favors trying to claim the privileges of his shield when he left it on his superior's desk, he barely makes it aboard the departing train and his frantic search through the crowded, jouncing, sway-lit compartments ends in the discovery of his friend's glasses shattered on the baggage car floor and Inspector Tim Reilly (Regis Toomey) himself a murdered body no sooner recognized than falling away at a jerk of the tracks into the lonely steam-whistle night. Shaken not just by the death but by its implications, Kennedy returns to his seat to discover the most nightmarish touch yet, a brawny stranger (Leif Erickson) wearing his coat and flashing his ticket and claiming to be "John Kennedy." It's clear enough that the conspiracy against Lincoln is real and on the train with him, but it's not at all obvious that he'll be able to identify its actors in time to save anyone, even himself. Atlanta-bound Lance and Ginny Beaufort (Marshall Thompson and Paula Raymond) make the most natural suspects, especially when the proud belle of a sister confirms that her cold young sniper-trained brother has resigned his commission at West Point in order to take up arms for the nascent Confederacy, but it's a building contractor from Connecticut (Will Wright) who offers the most explicit violence to the president-elect with boasts like "I'd inaugurate him—with a stout rope from the White House chandelier" and "If somebody puts a bullet into Abe Lincoln, I'll be the first to shake his hand." The Lincoln-partisan abolitionist from Boston (Florence Bates) is a nineteenth-century nice white lady who wants to interview the Beauforts' enslaved maid Rachel (Ruby Dee, early and magnificent) mostly in order to instruct her on what she is supposed to feel, like a desire to emigrate to Africa. Militia Colonel Caleb Jeffers of the Poughkeepsie State Zouaves (Adolphe Menjou) admits he never wanted "old Abe" in the White House, but claims an assassination would only martyr the man and consolidate Republican power for generations. Meanwhile the conductor (Will Geer) and the engineer (Victor Kilian) couldn't care less who gets elected or shot so long as the train runs on time, which right now it isn't, not least because some hot-headed fool of an ex-policeman is running around making a nuisance of himself with fistfights and gunfights and being wanted in three states by the actual police. As Jeffers remarks to Kennedy in the aftermath of a violent struggle under the engine-wheels of the train idling for three action-packed minutes in New Brunswick, "I don't know anything about a plot against Lincoln's life, but there certainly seems to be one against yours."
It has become obvious to me, as I suspect it has become obvious to the readers of these reviews, that I really value Code-era movies that get outside the straight white picket fence of their Catholic-moral remit, not because they prove that Hollywood was always the ne plus ultra of progressive politics or even only because subversion is worth celebrating wherever it sneaks in, but because there's such a powerful, pernicious tendency to regard history as a process of linear improvement, I like these reminders that social justice is not a post-millennial invention, no matter what those in power in this country at the moment may be trying to claim. The Tall Target is far from the boldest statement on race relations that could have been made in 1951, but it is striking to me who and what it chooses to make visible in a narrative still so often, and so dangerously, softened and simplified. John Kennedy is the hero of his narrative. He has all the conventional virtues of courage, honor, and action, and they don't feel like cardboard when animated by intelligence and vulnerability. One of the most delicate scenes in the picture reveals the source of his devotion to Lincoln, shared in a whisper appropriate to his fugitive status but also his depth of feeling:
"Look, Rachel, I'm no Republican or abolitionist, but I guarded Mr. Lincoln while he was campaigning in New York. I helped him open a window. He held a door for me. I found a parcel for him—some nightshirts back from the laundry. I was only with him forty-eight hours, but when he left, he shook my hand and thanked me and wished me well. I was never so taken with a human man."
He happens to be wrong that he's apolitical, as it turns out that he cares a great deal whether Rachel is enslaved or free, but he's right to recognize the importance of these intimate, insignificant moments and Powell recounts them tenderly and directly, as a man would in a time before affection for another man had to be constantly qualified no-homo. So he'll throw away his reputation, his career, his life if necessary to keep this man safe, and none of his heartfelt, quixotic efforts would count for beans without the even more audacious and unseen heroism of his partner in this conversation and counter-conspiracy, Rachel of Tall Trees, Georgia. Just because the part's soft-spoken doesn't mean Dee's not incandescent in it, her dark eyes so somberly concentrated under uneasily crooked brows that she's impossible to look away from, and the script gives surprisingly complex attention to the gravity of her decision to aid Kennedy and transitively Lincoln, at first in small ways of passing information, eventually in open defiance. Bound to the Beauforts by relations as close as blood—indeed, when Ginny reproaches her that they "grew up like sisters," it may be only the double-speaking of the truth—she has never known a life beyond Tall Trees, which does not mean, as sententious Mrs. Alsop would have it, that she does not know "what freedom is." Kneeling at Ginny's side to help wind up a skein of yarn, she has only to glance at her regally complacent mistress to answer quietly, "I know what it is." The love between them is real, but only within the limits of Rachel's submission. At a tense moment between the two women and Kennedy, Ginny bursts out defensively, "Rachel is as free as I am!" and then turning to her maid as if appealing for reassurance, "You know that. That's why you never thought to ask for your freedom—and why I never thought of giving it to you." Profiled in the shadowy, searing foreground of a deep-focus two shot, one hand still pressed to the side of her face where her sisterly mistress slapped her without a second thought as she snatched the pistol from her hand and trained it on Kennedy, Rachel speaks with tears on her lashes and an unbroken voice that tells us how many, many times she's thought of it: "Freedom isn't a thing you should be able to give me, Miss Ginny. Freedom is something I should have been born with." Perhaps alone of the characters in this movie, she doesn't fear the war that is coming, even though—perhaps because—it registers to white Southerners and Northerners alike as the next best thing to apocalypse. She's not given the chance to use it, but she's holding a gun when she says steadily to the man who still owns her, "I'm not afraid." I don't think it's accidental that she's Kennedy's true ally aboard the train, not the deceptively friendly, thoroughly respectable white man whose stake in a successful assassination turns out to be the most venal and plausible of motives—"Northern cotton mill shares. You know what would happen to those mills if war came and the supply of raw cotton was cut off from the South." Even more than the hateful bluster of the building contractor, it's the film's moment of "Molasses to Rum," the sharp reminder of Northern complicity that profited from Southern slavery with or without direct ownership. Even above the Mason–Dixon line, Black lives matter less than profit margins. The modern-day parallel is not difficult to draw. The last card up the film's sleeve is the identity of the Pinkerton agent without whose undercover assistance, we are encouraged to believe, the sixteenth President of the United States might well have been a very startled Hannibal Hamlin, but I love that from a modern perspective it is a successful weaponization of the invisibility of women whose concerns are assumed to be domestic no matter how many state lines they cross. None of these elements undercut Kennedy; they make the world through which he moves as unpredictable as the past should be. We know more or less how it all turned out, but that's no reason to feel superior. We're the rest of this story, and look how well we've told it.
The stiffest of the competition I mentioned at the top is The Black Book (1949), Mann's first experiment in historical noir and a masterclass in the style even before we get into the French Revolution. The Tall Target has the high-contrast photography of Paul Vogel which especially flourishes in night shots of the train and low-angle close-ups of characters in darkening circumstances, and I have nothing to say against the no-budget immersion of the production design by Cedric Gibbons and Eddie Imazu which crams all the divisive, fermenting energies of the oncoming war into one stretched-out tracking shot through the otherwise chaos as usual of a train station late at night, but it just isn't as weird a film; it's more earnest, less blackly playful, and it has a brilliant last line and then fumbles its last shot in a way that makes me wonder if this country is ever going to get out of its hagiography of Lincoln because it's exactly the same mistake that mars the closing moments of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), plastering over flawed human reality with reassuring institutions. (Seriously, I want to watch Spielberg's Lincoln (2012) now just to see if he can make it to the credits without blowing it.) It is still a pearl among B-noir, mining a remarkable degree of uncertainty from the lacunae of well-documented events. I love the inclusion of historical detail, like the smearing of Lincoln as a "Black Republican," the awareness that New York Irish Kennedy would of course have been a Tammany Democrat, and the city ordinance that required locomotives to be horse-drawn through the center of Baltimore, thus necessitating a terrifying slowdown just when it would be safest to speed clean away. The dialogue isn't as wild as the high pulp of The Black Book, but it acquits itself honorably enough on the hard-boiled front, as when Kennedy dismisses a suspect with the damningly accurate "He wouldn't shoot off anything but his mouth." I would be remiss if I did not mention that Powell looks better in this movie than anywhere else I've ever seen him: the nineteenth-century sideburns suit his face, as does stiff-greased rather than slick-parted hair; if you've read Gemma Files' Hexslingers, I find him a surprisingly convincing older Ed Morrow. He'll be out of your hair in 78 minutes if you're not as charmed as I am, but I hope you are. There's Katherine Warren and Ruby Dee either way. This close call brought to you by my wily backers at Patreon.
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Totally agree. The only feature lacking from many of these reviews is how to find the movie - DVD? VHS? Scrying?
It’s good (or bad, depending on your view) that no equivalent to Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940)’s claim to fame occurs - as the eponymous Raymond Massey is boarding this very train, an extra among the farewelling crowd sounds off loud and clear, “’Bye, Mr Massey…”
Like the Vulcan salute held high at the end of Logan’s Run (1976), the only pre-digital recourse of reshooting the entire scene (after shooting the culprit) was a luxury beyond budget. C’est la vie.
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I have only ever seen this one on TCM, but it appears to exist on DVD from the Warner Archive! Sorry; I try to mention when things I watch are actually available, as opposed to unicorns from some dimension with better home video than ours.
Thank you!
It’s good (or bad, depending on your view) that no equivalent to Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940)’s claim to fame occurs - as the eponymous Raymond Massey is boarding this very train, an extra among the farewelling crowd sounds off loud and clear, “’Bye, Mr Massey…”
I believe Elizabeth Taylor's entrance into Rome in Cleopatra (1963) received similar interference.
(Does the movie otherwise not blow the ending?)
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You're welcome! I don't think it's very well known. Richard Brody at least seems to be a fan, which is nice. (Life's too short for me to hate-read anyone, but Brody seems to dislike so many movies, I am surprised every time he likes one and I like it, too.)
[edit] It's screening at the Film Forum in NYC in February as part of a jaw-droppingly good-looking series of Black women on film! And I don't think I can go because of the timing. Oh, man. I don't want to live in New Haven again, but I miss the Metro-North.
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Kate Warne, or someone else?
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She's only ever addressed by her cover identity in the course of the film, but for all intents and purposes, she's Kate Warne. (Who should show up in more movies, honestly.)
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So would I.
Spielberg Lincoln
Re: Spielberg Lincoln
Whether or not I approve, I might find it interesting. My track record with Spielberg is so-so, but I tend to like things written by Tony Kushner. I'm seriously thinking about it.
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Thank you!
I saw this film a couple of years ago, and the main performance I remembered was Ruby Dee.
She's so good! Ian McDowell said nice things about my review and the movie on Facebook and he's absolutely right that it should have been her breakout role; instead it's awkward proof that Hollywood didn't know, or couldn't handle, what it had in her. I must have first seen her (and Ossie Davis, for that matter) in Do the Right Thing (1989).
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!!!!
That's pretty good, that is! That's pretty damn good!
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Thank you!
(I reposted it after some initial confusion. I am trying to acclimate properly, not even to self-promotion, but just to acknowledgement.)
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Unless it's Zeppo. Zeppo only looks like a normal person until you get close enough to see he's a Marx. But I agree Dick Powell was not. I have nothing against his crooner characters, but I don't have much feeling for them, either: "I'm Young and Healthy" really does tell you everything you need to know.
But the events of seeing him in the likes of Blessed Event and having you tell me about how he rocks 19th century sideburns like nobody's business let me burnish that impression until he shines.
He had supernal levels of smarm in Blessed Event. I'm just as glad he didn't get typed that way, but I was impressed.
I still need to see him as Marlowe. He's excellent in Pitfall (1948), but his character is such a midlife implosion, I wish he would just get a hold of himself so Lizabeth Scott can get on with her life.
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Ah yes, the song that competes with "Honeymoon Hotel" for Pre-Code Musical Song What Gives Me The Most Squigglies.
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I agree with what you aay about social justice. The race-splaining woman is grimace-makingly familiar.
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I know it's just human pattern-making, but it does feel like history warping back. Greil Marcus' BFI monograph on The Manchurian Candidate (1962) is as much about this phenomenon as about the film itself; it's like reading ghosts.
I agree with what you aay about social justice. The race-splaining woman is grimace-makingly familiar.
The reflex is to say the film's ahead of its time, except that's the point: it's of its time, and its time knew what that looked like, and we should, too. We keep forgetting. And it's so useful to know we don't have to invent everything from scratch.
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I really like it and I really wish more people knew about it! So many Hollywood movies just go to pieces whenever they get near the Civil War. This one faces it dead-on, in some ways more successfully even than movies that followed it. It's rare even now to find a movie that will acknowledge racism among its white characters as a de facto state, not a villainous marker. I think it must have been the B-picture latitude again.
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Yay!
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I don't think I'd known that, and I'm glad to.
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