The Hunters

The 1950's were a mixed bag when it comes to war films. There's some classics -- The Bridge on the River Kwai, Stalag 17 -- but I've noticed a trend. There are almost-classics (or at least above average) that are undone by unnecessary love stories jammed into a war story. Otherwise good flicks ruined by scenes of passionate hugging and soldiers and the women they love holding each other cheek-to-cheek. Gasp! The horror! Add 1958's The Hunters to the list.

It's 1952 and the Korean War is raging. On the ground, the fighting is the same, infantry going toe-to-toe for every inch of ground. Up in the air though, things have changed with both sides using jets to control the skies. At an Air Force base in Japan, WWII veteran pilot Cleve "Iceman" Saville (Robert Mitchum) is back at it, going through indoctrination before taking over a fighter group. The aerial dogfights are a mess, the Chinese pilots not as skilled but all it takes is luck sometimes to survive the fighting. Among Saville's group are two pilots, both problems for vastly different reasons. Lt. Ed Pell (Robert Wagner) is a hotshot pilot, desperately wanting to be an ace while Lt. Carl Abbott (Lee Philips) is struggling with a drinking problem. Oh, and Saville has the hots for his wife, Kris (May Britt). As if the fighting to curb Communism wasn't enough...

Okay, here we go...Battle Cry, Force of Arms, Darby's Rangers, Never So Few, all war flicks somewhat to completely undone by stories harping on sluggish love stories typically featuring ZILCH in the chemistry department between its love interests. That's just off the top of my head too. There's more. You just know they're out there....

From director and producer Dick Powell, 'Hunters' is a pretty interesting flick. Enough time had passed since the end of the Korean War that viewers would have had a chance to breathe a little bit, put the conflict behind them. The subject matter, while dark, is far from anti-war and the film itself comes across as slightly shallow. There's just not that much meat there in a story that could have had plenty. It is a good-looking movie -- the print shown on Turner Classic Movies looked gorgeous -- with a decent cast, interesting story and some real potential that never quite takes off. If anything, any depth or a story with an edge is left behind in the wake of...

SPECTACLE. This is a movie about flying jets, fighter planes that zip across the sky and do things that no machine should be able to do. Think of it this way. An audience in 1958 would have been dazzled to see the acrobatics, the dogfights, the impressive speed. This was incredibly new to that audience. Now in 2015, it's an incredibly cool time capsule. The aerial footage is genuinely incredible. The stunts, the long shots of seemingly countless jets racing across the sky, well, Cinemascope never looked so good! Even the shots of the cast in the jets doesn't scream out how obvious it could have been. There's at least a semblance of reality that these guys are actually flying. So while the love story does its best to drag things down, these adrenaline-pumping aerial sequences are pretty freaking cool.

A favorite here at Just Hit Play, Mitchum is excellent here as Major Cleve Saville, a pilot from WWII who can't stay away when there's a fight (and he's a damn good pilot too). His Saville is the 'Hunter' of the title, a diehard pilot who has ridiculously keyed-in focus, blocking out all else to go for the kill during a dogfight. Now, some years since WWII has ended, has Saville changed? Has he mellowed? Mitchum is that low-key, laid back anti-hero the movie needs. Is it acting? Does he just not care? Somewhere in the middle most likely, but it's an interesting performance. You see a former hotshot pilot who's matured some and sees the dangers in what he used to be in those pilots now flying with him. I liked Wagner's Pell, a fast-talking, talented pilot who similarly may push too far. Also look for Richard Egan, John Gabriel and Stacy Harris as other pilots at the base.

That damn love story though. It doesn't help that Mitchum and Britt have little to no chemistry, dragging these already sluggish scenes to an even more screeching halt. No chemistry translates to no energy, especially when Philip's whiny Abbott starts to drink and question and get mad that his wife is drawn to a....blah blah blah. It's not good. When 'Hunters' sticks with the war drama, it's a pretty decent movie, especially in the second half as several pilots find themselves fighting through enemy territory after being forced to bail out from their jets. Some real drama, some tension, some nerves, it's all there. If there had been 103 minutes of that instead of what we have, we'd be talking a pretty decent (if somewhat formulaic) final product. So instead, we get a mixed bag.

A slight recommendation because Mitchum is impeccably cool, Wagner is a lot of fun, and those aerial sequences are impressive whether it's 1958 or 2015.

The Hunters (1958): ** 1/2 /**** 

The Conqueror (1956)

I love John Wayne so let's get that out of the way. I've seen just about every single one of his feature-length films, and more than a few of his ventures are on the Just Hit Play All-Time Favorite List. I can be honest though when necessary, and the 1950's were far from the Duke's strongest decade. Though there were some gems -- Rio Bravo, The Searchers, Hondo among others -- there were some duds, real tankers. Blood Alley, The Barbarian and the Geisha, Legend of the Lost, all not remembered so fondly but one rises (or sinks?) above the rest. Definitely Wayne's worst film and one remembered as one of the worst of all-time, 1956's The Conqueror.

"Why is it so bad, Tim?" you might ask. Why? Well, John Wayne, the all-American movie star takes a crack at playing the infamous Mongol warrior and leader Genghis Khan. Yeah, you read that right. John Wayne plays Genghis Khan. And away we go!

Ruling his tribe/clan of Mongols on the Asian Steppe, fiery, brutal warrior Temujin (Wayne) has caused himself some issues. Namely, a violent conflict he's started with a rival tribe because he kidnapped said tribe leader's wife-to-be, Bortai (Susan Hayward). The equally fiery woman wants nothing to do with Temujin and making it worse, her father killed Temujin's father years before. Uh-oh, family drama! Even as war looms and his people threaten to leave him entirely, Temujin refuses to give up his kidnapped bride who wants nothing to do with him (or does she?!?). Instead, the Mongol leader looks to form an uneasy alliance with a past enemy to hold his power and hopefully gain much, much more. Can it all hold together long enough for Temujin to do what he needs to do to reach out and grab everything he wants? The answer lies on a trail of bodies and a river of blood across the Steppe.

Well, that was a fun plot synopsis to write! It's not too often I get to write a trail of bodies and a river of blood in a review. It's an easy plot to spell out because it is just so criminally bad. We will address John Wayne as Genghis Khan in a bit -- that's too easy -- but there's so much badness here in all-around fashion. The script offers one stilted scene of dialogue after another and then one betrayal and backstabbing after another. Imagine the Indians in 1950's westerns -- Me Indian. How! -- but transitioned to a war on the Asian steppe. Yeah, it's just as bad and cliched and just plain dumb as you'd expect. Actor-turned-director Dick Powell is at the helm of a real stinker here, basically from beginning to end. It doesn't build to bad. It just IS bad.

Okay, John Wayne as Genghis Khan. Let's process this. Let's rationalize. It can't be as bad as it sounds, right? No, it's exactly how it sounds. In the late 1940's and into the 1950's, Wayne really developed as an actor, piling up some of his best roles -- She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Red River, Sands of Iwo Jima, The Searchers -- but this is just uncomfortable to watch. As Ben Manckiewicz said during the recent airing of 'Conqueror' on TCM, Wayne has said in interviews he played Khan as an American cowboy, a tough gunfighter and wouldn't you know it? That formula doesn't work. He's trying so give him credit because it would have been easy to phone this one in (real easy). Wayne just has too much working against him from the aforementioned dialogue that sounds especially stiff coming from the Duke down to the ridiculous mustache wardrobe set him up with. Bad. Really bad so be forewarned.

No one in the cast escapes the wrath of the script to be honest. Hayward was one tough actress, but she doesn't have much chemistry with Wayne and that's a problem when the driving force of the movie is their passion-filled, love-hate relationship. Hayward does get a bizarre, forced striptease/sexy dance of sorts so....there's that, I guess? Pedro Armendariz plays Temujin's half-brother, Jamuga, his conscious, a wise sidekick who recommends what to do next. Also look for Agnes Moorehead, Thomas Gomez, William Conrad, John Hoyt and Ted de Corsia in supporting parts. Familiar faces Lee Van Cleef and Leo Gordon get supporting background parts. A whole bunch of very non-Asian actors playing Asian parts and the end results are just as bad as you figured they would be. Not a winner in the bunch!

If there's a positive, it comes as a bit of a loaded statement. The scope and scale of the movie is impressive. The battle scenes of colliding, thundering armies crashing into each other are something to behold. The stuntwork is impressive throughout as hundreds of riders fill the screen in lavish uniforms set against the stunning backdrop of the Utah desert. Then there's the issue...the filming locations were 100-miles south of nuclear testing sites and judging by the amount of cast members that would die from cancer over the coming years, it seems the U.S. government's promise that the nuclear fallout wouldn't head their direction...well, that's garbage. Much of the cast and crew would die over the next 5, 10 and 20-plus years from varying cancers, quite possibly from the arduous filming schedule in the Utah desert. If that's not tragic, I don't know what is.

So here we are. The fact that 'Conqueror' has a 3.3 rating on IMDB is a testament to John Wayne fans who are fighting a heck of a battle to bring that number up at least a little. This movie is just as bad and worse as you've heard. I lost interest pretty quickly but stuck it out, hoping things might improve at some point. That's the worst kind of a bad movie, one that's almost impossible to even enjoy in guilty pleasure fashion. Give this one a wide, big-old berth, and that's coming from one of the biggest John Wayne fans around.

The Conqueror (1956): */****

The Tall Target

Like so many episodes of The Twilight Zone rose above its trippy sci-fi roots to tell some stories that are still around in the pop culture psyche.  One episodes -- "Back There" -- has future Professor from Gilligan's Island time traveling to April 14, 1865, realizing he can try and change history, saving President Abraham Lincoln's life but ultimately failing to do so. It's a great example of 'What if?," a question that can be applied to any and all parts of history -- some better than others. What if Lincoln had lived? What if assassin John Wilkes Booth had missed?

The tragedy of the situation of course is that Booth didn't miss, killing Lincoln with a shot to the head as he watched a play at Ford's Theater just days after the conclusion of the Civil War, the defining moment of his Presidency. Remembered as fondly as he was for helping save the United States from its most bloody conflict, it is easy to forget that Lincoln was not an extremely popular president, even among the Union states, much less the Confederate states who seceded. Were there other attempts on his life that failed? So goes the premise of 1951's The Tall Target.

A sergeant on the New York City Police Department, John Kennedy (Dick Powell) turns in a report explaining his investigation of a coming assassination attempt on the soon to be inaugurated president, Abraham Lincoln. It's 1861, and the country is tearing itself apart, both Northern and Southern opposition wanting nothing of this new Republican president. No one believes him though so he boards a train heading south to Baltimore, finding his partner -- a fellow detective -- murdered on the train. Someone has caught wind of what he is up to and intending to stop.  The train is packed as the passengers head to the inauguration in Baltimore, but can Kennedy find out who's targeting him before the assassination attempt can be made?

As a history buff, I'll watch anything associated with the Civil War, especially a little known story like this one about a failed assassination attempt on Lincoln.  A title card says the story is accurate to history, and attempts like these showed how chaotic and violent the months leading up to the Civil War actually work.  The historical backdrop is just gravy because setting the story on a fast-moving train is always a good jumping off point, especially when we're fully aware the killer is on-board somewhere. Think Murder on the Orient Express mixed with a little Strangers on a Train and a little historical what-if thrown in for good measure.

The guessing game comes from the passengers as Powell's Sgt. John Kennedy (interesting choice of name looking back on the 1951 movie now) goes about his investigation. There are a handful of characters, some obvious choices, others coming as a twist, and others serving as a red herring to the real identity of the plotters.  A mix of Northern and Southern passengers keep you guessing. Paula Raymond and Marshall Thompson play Ginny and Lance Beaufort, Southern brother and sister heading home, Lance a recent graduate of West Point. Ruby Dee is memorable as Rachel, Ginny's slave/maid, who may know something that will help Kennedy out. Adolphe Menjou plays Col. Jeffers, a Union militia officer heading to the inauguration, Florence Bates is Mrs. Alston, a well-known abolitionist writer, and Will Geer is the train conductor who finds his train caught up in a twisting, confusing murder investigation.

Having heard his name several times but never having seen in him anything, I've now seen Dick Powell in two different movies in as many weeks.  For a guy who made a name for himself on musicals and on stage, this is another part for the actor where he seems like a less than ideal choice to play a tough lead character. In Station West, he was a government agent investigating two murders, and here again he plays an officer who no one believes, albeit involved in something much, much bigger. I don't know much more about Powell than what I've been able to take away from these two roles, but I like him. He's got kind of a snobby side to him, but he's still personable and a likable lead (if that makes sense). Song and dance man, maybe, but he's good here.

The 1950s were the high point of director Anthony Mann's career, but because he had so many successes over a 10-plus year span, some get lost in the shuffle. This is one of them unfortunately which hasn't gotten the credit it deserves. It is a movie that qualifies in my 'different so it's good' category of rating a movie. Mann brings his typical strong hand directing, keeping the mystery going with a hard edge to Kennedy's investigation. Anyone and everyone is a suspect as the bodies start to mount up. A cool, little historical murder mystery....oh, and Lincoln makes it.

The Tall Target <---TCM clips (1951): ***/****

Station West

A singer, actor, producer, director and studio head over a cancer-shortened career, Dick Powell did it all in his short time in Hollywood.  He made a name for himself in the 1930s in musicals but made the jump to more and more genres over the 1940s and 1950s. Of all his roles though -- film, television, radio, stage -- Powell only did one western as an actor, an interesting gem from 1948 called Station West.

Interesting is a nice way of saying here that I was very skeptical going into this movie because of all the different (even weird) elements that needed to work together for it to be successful.  As is so often the case with my overthinking anything and everything, the joke was on me because my worries were unfounded. I still maintain it is a very different western -- atypical to just about any other western I can think of -- but somehow it works.  Actors not associated with the genre, a story full of twists and turns, and the feel of a film noir as opposed to a western oater.  Sounds like the makings of an interesting western now, don't it?

An undercover government investigator assigned to investigate the murder of two cavalry troopers guarding a gold shipment, Lt. Haven (Powell) arrives a remote western outpost trying to piece everything together. The nearby fort is brimming with gold shipments that need to be moved, but bandits keep hitting the shipments. Haven works his magic and gets a job with a woman who rules over everything in the area, Charlie (Jane Greer), working to rebuild her stagecoach line. He is sure she is somehow involved with the gold robberies with her right hand man, Prince (Gordon Oliver), and henchman, Mick (Guinn Williams), but he can't prove it just yet. As he investigate the case though, Haven starts to fall for Charlie so can he find the culprits before he gets too involved?

A day after watching this movie, I keep coming back to a thought that popped up time and time again as I watched it. While it has all the fixings of a western, I feel more comfortable calling it an anti-western...if that makes any sense. 'Station' more has the feel of a murder mystery that happens to be based in a western setting as opposed to a western with a murder mystery. Director Sidney Lanfield shoots his movie like a film noir, full of shadows and darkness as Powell's Haven investigates who is stealing gold and killing U.S. cavalry troopers. This is not a down and dirty western that you might expect. Everyone is immaculately dressed -- nice, pressed suits for the guys and Greer always wearing ball gowns with perfect hair -- and the saloons look like some pretty classy establishments. None of this counts against the movie. It isn't trying to be a gritty, hard-edged realistic western. It's a murder mystery film noir western, a first in my mind.

Working against the typical conventions of the western hero and the lead female character, enter Dick Powell and Jane Greer. None of this is intended as a complaint, instead it ends up being a ringing positive endorsement for the movie. Nothing about Powell screams WESTERN HERO! His Haven character drinks champagne and wine, smokes a pipe, and generally has an easygoing way about him. He's especially smooth with Greer's Charlie and puts his own spin on the typical western hero. When I think of Greer, I think film noir, the femme fatale like in 1947's Out of the Past. She would seem to be out of place in a western, but as the kingpin in the area who pulls all the strings, she's perfect in the part. Her Charlie is beautiful, intelligent and another new one in the western genre; a bad guy...um, lady. Well, sort of, she wants to go straight, but she might be too far gone. Two strong leads -- with some great chemistry -- that set the tone for the whole movie.

As for the murder mystery aspect of the story, Lanfield keeps the viewer guessing and up on their toes if they want to keep up. It's pretty clear from the start that Greer's Charlie is heavily involved with the continuing gold robberies, but as for how, that's kept in the dark for awhile. Throwing you for a loop, we get a list of possible suspects, some more inclined to shenanigans than others. Working with Greer are Oliver and Williams, two solid henchmen that immediately incriminate her just because they're clearly henchmen. There's also Agnes Moorehead as Mrs. Caslon, a rich woman working with Haven, who you immediately think is up to no good because Moorehead always played shady characters. Tom Powers plays Captain Iles, the shady commander of the post with Raymond Burr making a good impression in a smaller part as Bristow, a weasel of a lawyer trying to play all sides. Christmas crooner Burl Ives is also good as a hotel owner who sings and knows everyone in town, quite a help to Haven.

I went along for the ride on this one, enjoying it for all the little different things that make it an atypical western. Some parts drag as Powell's Haven investigates -- long scenes of a man walking around, looking through things tend to that -- and other scenes have stagecoaches or Powell on horseback riding across the rocky desert. Beautiful to look at in smaller doses, they get a little tedious at times. No movie is perfect though, right? Casting and story, this one just works because it does try to be different. Not particularly well known, but a hidden gem in the film noir western category (if there is that category).

Station West <---Youtube clip (1948): ***/****

The Enemy Below

While a majority of WWII movies cover the campaigns on land and air in both the European and Pacific theaters, there's a cool little genre within the WWII genre, the submarine movie.  The 1950s were ripe with these flicks of submarine commanders in the Atlantic or Pacific aiding the war effort on either side.  These submarines were such a new technology that audiences ate the movies up, and there was a lot of them.  I'd seen many of them and finally watched 1957's The Enemy Below this week.

What took me so long in watching this movie was that most of the 1950s WWII movies from major studios were pretty flat, interested more in the spectacle of what was on the screen than making it interesting story-wise.  There were these great premises, loaded casts, and then that was it.  As a viewer, we were supposed to be content with just watching what was on-screen without having anything invested in it.  Director Dick Powell expands on just the visual, delivering a great cat and mouse submarine story that also wisely tells the story from both the German and American perspectives. 

It's midway through WWII, and the U.S.S. Haynes is on patrol in the south Atlantic.  A new commander, Capt. Murrell (Robert Mitchum), has taken over in recent weeks, but the crew is worried about the new officer possibly being a jinx having seen no action since he came on board. Seemingly miles away from the action, the radar picks something up, leading Murrell to think the destroyer has found a German U-boat on patrol.  Playing it coy, Murrell holds his ship back, waiting to see what the U-boat does.  A few miles ahead, German commander Von Stolberg (Curd Jurgens) is aware of what's following him but with an important mission tasked to him knows he can't play his hand too early. With help days away for either crew, the two captains prepare for a battle that could end with both ships at the bottom of the ocean.

Right off the bat, I liked this movie because of its intelligence.  This is a story interested in battle tactics and strategies where other movies would just show a destroyer chasing down a U-boat with no explanation offered.  'Enemy' tries to keep the viewer at a point where they always know what's going on, and in that way is a sign of things to come with other sub movies like Das Boot or The Hunt for Red October.  Throw out the overdone score from composer Leigh Harline because the natural sounds are more appropriate. It is the sounds of radar and sonar pinging, the ca-chung of a depth charge being fired, the silence of a crew waiting for an explosion that makes the movie almost unbearably tense to watch. You feel like you're there with Mitchum's crew waiting for an inbound torpedo to be sighted, or Jurgen's crew waiting for a depth charge to rip the submarine apart.

A title card at the end of the movie thanks the U.S. Navy and the Department of Defense for all their cooperation in making this movie, and do they ever deserve it.  Besides some obvious uses of miniatures late in the movie's finale, most of the movie looks to have been filmed on an actual U.S. destroyer at sea.  Just like the natural sounds working their magic, a movie gets a ton of credibility when you actually see star Robert Mitchum at the conning tower of a destroyer on open water.  Even better, Mitchum in frame why a few hundred yards back a whole screen of depth charges go off, jetting water several hundred feet straight up into the air, almost like you can feel the blast of the water on your face.  Other similar movies might have cut away to some stock footage, but 'Enemy' shows the process as realistically as possible with the cast involved.  Good choice, Mr. Powell.

Now if it was just 97 minutes of this footage, it would get tiresome, but the cat and mouse game that ensues works so well because Mitchum and Jurgens in the lead roles.  I will always give a war movie a try that attempts to show the war from both sides, not just one or the other.  We get to see that there were good and bad soldiers/sailors on either side.  Depending on the story, there is no need to demonize the enemy.  Here, Mitchum and Jurgens are human beings, not killing machines with a bloodlust.  Mitchum's Murrell lost his wife when a German U-boat sunk the ship they were on, and Jurgens saw both of his sons killed for the Third Reich.  Seeing these characters do their job is half the fun of the movie.  They do it because it is their job, and they want to protect their crews.  The only way to do that is to take out the enemy right in front of them.

The cat and mouse game between the two captains highlights the movie and helps it through the parts that lean toward the tedious at times.  Each man can predict what the other is doing, not because the actions are predictable or easy to figure out; they just know exactly what they would do in that situation.  The chase continues over hundreds of miles and several days as either man tries to get a hand up on the other.  The ending goes for a message of hope that is fitting considering the story that led up to the finale.  There were two ways it could go. One, both ships go down, or two, one side wins.  'Enemy' finds a nice middle ground, but I can't spoil it here.  It's a moving ending to an above average story. I'm also pretty sure the DVD cover is not Jurgens on the right, but who knows?

The Enemy Below <---trailer (1957): ***/****