Tag: 1948

Belle Starr’s Daughter

  By

★★½
“Like mother, like daughter.”

After one of her henchmen kills a local marshal, a posse is sent from Antioch to deal with outlaw Belle Starr, who had previously been in an uneasy truce with the town. However, when they arrive, they find Belle dead, and the gang subsequently scatters. Her daughter, Rose (Roman) mistakenly blames the new marshal, Tom Jackson (Montgomery), for her mother’s death. She apparently takes up honest work as a waitress, and Jackson falls in love with the young woman, initially unaware of her felonious ancestry. But Rose ends up leaving town with Bob Yauntis (Cameron) – he’s a former member of the gang who, unknown to her, was the actual killer of Belle and the previous marshal.

I guess this is something of a follow-up to Belle Starr – or maybe Badman’s Territory, since Isabell Jewell played Belle in both movies. This certainly has a similarly loose approach, taking historical fact as a jumping-off point for fictional adventure. Belle did indeed have a child: however, she was named Pearl Starr. Rather than an outlaw, she became a prostitute and ended up running several bordellos herself, and died in Arizona in 1925 (I’m a little surprised she wasn’t covered in Outlaw Women of Arizona). This appears to be taking another Western wild woman, Cimarron Rose, and making her Belle’s daughter. In reality, that Rose did hang with a criminal nicknamed ‘Bitter Creek’, as Bob is called here. She was supposedly involved in the Battle of Ingalls, an 1893 gunfight between outlaws and law-enforcement. 

Back in the cinematic world, it’s a shame Belle doesn’t survive longer into the movie. Having her, not just be an outlaw, but being the leader of an entire gang, is not something you see much on Westerns, particularly from this era. Obviously, the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree, but you don’t get the idea Rose is exactly the sharpest tool in the box, letting Bob manipulate her at every step of the way. She refuses to accept the truth, well beyond the point at which any sensible person would be going, “Wait a minute…” While Roman might not be Gene Tierney in Belle Starr, there is something of a resemblance. She passes muster in a “We have Gene Tierney at home” way. 

It is a little disappointing how she ends up sidelined in the middle, in favour of Marshal Jackson hunting after Bitter Creek Yauntis and his gang. Rose just becomes one of the gang, though the way she isn’t treated particularly differently from anyone else, is somewhat refreshing. She does take the lead in trying to help an injured gang member, leaping off her horse to help him when he collapses into a river. Bob’s callous indifference here is what helps turn Rose against him, and she flees (across some very nice scenery), with Bob and his henchmen in pursuit. No prizes for guessing who arrives to save the day: having a woman who could save herself was still a little too advanced for Hollywood.

Dir: Lesley Selander
Star: Ruth Roman, George Montgomery, Rod Cameron, Wallace Ford

The Paleface

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★★★
“Starring the two and only Jane Russell.”

palefaceOr, to steal another line from Mr. Hope, “Culture is the ability to describe Jane Russell without moving your hands”. It’s surprisingly advanced for its 1948 era, with Russell playing Calamity Jane, who is busted out of prison to go undercover and infiltrate an arms ring guilty of the heinous crime of selling weapons to Indians. [Because, from a liberal 2015 perspective, god forbid anyone try to even the playing field on that particular genocide…] She’s set up with a cover husband, but when he turns up dead, she’s forced to improvise and settles on ‘Painless’ Peter Potter (Hope), an itinerant dentist, as the patsy for the role, as they join a wagon train heading West. Needless to say, he’s delighted, and the legend of his own mind only grows after he fends off an attack by Indians – unaware, all the sharpshooting was entirely Jane’s doing. For her aim is to set him up as some kind of heroic Federal agent, provoking the gang into tipping their hand with retaliation.

It’s impressively even in tone, with Jane clearly the smarter, braver and more talented one of the pairing, running rings around Peter as she manipulates him into being the unwitting stalking horse for her mission. It’s only right at the end, when they both have (somewhat inexplicably) been captured by the Indians, that he rises above his humble origins and skills, doing his part in a rousing finale involving some brisk horse stunts. Russell’s performance was the subject of some mockery, Life magazine saying at the time, in a feature called Jane Russell’s Gamut of Emotions, “she demonstrates how to express a great variety of emotions, without twitching a facial muscle.” However, I think it has perhaps stood the test of time better than Hope’s comic mugging, playing into the cold and calculating killing machine trope – she would rather whack Potter into unconsciousness than kiss him. Certainly, it has lasted better than Bob’s rendition of Buttons & Bows, which inexplicably won the Academy Award that year for best original song.

To be honest, the comedic aspects also seem rather out of keeping with the body count, though it’s hard to tell how much of this may be parody of the genre – certainly, the site of Potter standing beside a literal pile of native American corpses is more likely to provoke embarrassed silence these days, than mirthful chuckles. The film is on much less questionable grounds concentrating on the nicely reversed dynamic between the two leads; even if this collapses into the obligatory and entirely expected fluffy ending, the final sight gag did actually make me laugh out loud, and that’s not easy to do.

Dir: Norman Z. McLeod
Star: Bob Hope, Jane Russell, Robert Armstrong, Iris Adrian

Joan Of Arc (1948)

  By

★★
“Joan of Talk”

joanofarcingridThis film’s origins as a stage play are painfully apparent, and you can also see why the distributor’s felt it needed to have 45 minutes cut out before it could be released, as frankly, it’s a bit of a bore. The battle to recapture Orleans is the only action of note here, even though that represented the start of the Maid’s campaign to restore France to its proper ruler (Ferrer), rather than the end. After that, this more or less skips forward to his coronation, then Joan’s capture, spending the rest of the movie – and there’s a lot of it – going through the trial, and the railroading of the heroine into, first throwing herself on the church’s mercy, then recanting her recantation and returning to wearing men’s clothes, thereby sealing her fate. There’s not much here which you won’t have seen before, if you’ve seen any of the other versions of the story, touching the usual bases from Joan’s revelations that she’s going to be the saviour of France, through her trip to see the Dauphin, and so on. It does downplay the “voices” aspect, especially early on, perhaps a wise move since it’s difficult to depict, without making her seem like a religious fruitcake.

The other problem I find is Bergman. It’s not so much her performance here, which is actually very good, and help hold the film up when things get particularly static: she hits her emotional marks well, and the Oscar nomination she received was not undeserved. However, she was solidly into her thirties by this point, probably close to twice the age of the actual Miss of Arc [hat-tip to Bill and Ted!]; there’s only so far make-up can go in taking years off someone. It does seem to have been a character to whom she related: she’s play the role again later, for Roberto Rossellini in Joan at the Stake, when she was nearly forty. The other problem is Bergman’s Scandinavian origins, which poke through her dialogue persistently, also damaging the illusion; it might have been fine in forties Hollywood, where one European accent was considered much the same as another, but now, it sounds too much Joan was a Swedish exchange student or au-pair – especially when she’s wearing her headsquare, and looks ready for a spot of light dusting.

But there’s no denying it looks the part, with production value seeping out of every frame – the Oscars this actually won, for cinematography and costume design, are hard to argue. However, there’s only so far this can take a film, along with Bergman glowing her way through her scenes, in such a way you could probably read a newspaper by her incandescence. That distance is considerably less than 145 minutes, and by the time this is over, you might find yourself guiltily cheering for her arrival at the stake, knowing this means the end is nigh.

Dir: Victor Fleming
Star: Ingrid Bergman, Francis L. Sullivan, José Ferrer, J. Carrol Naish