War fought on the frontlines of alleged domestic bliss

THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946)

An Appreciation by Jerry Saravia

When World War II ended, it signalled a victory for America after four arduous years of defeating the Japanese and the Nazis. The American war-time propaganda illustrated that soldiers came back from the war virile and ready to dive right back into society without a hitch. They were America's heroes yet the sad reality was that many young soldiers never came back and were killed in action. "The Best Years of Our Lives," a stupendously enlightening and divine motion picture, shines a light on three soldiers who survived and returned from the war. They reluctantly and awkwardly matriculate back into society with mixed results. Director William Wyler and the astute writers Robert E. Sherwood and MacKinlay Kantor have fashioned a relatable story of coming home to a different kind of war being fought - emotional struggles with family and marriages rather than the Germans' piercing bullets. War is hell and so is the homefront.

The three men returning from combat are Air Force Captain Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), a married soda jerk who had lived with his parents in an impoverished neighborhood and married a woman he hasn't heard from in years; Sergeant Al Stephenson (Fredric March), who worked in a bank and is married to the faithful Milly (Myrna Loy) and has two children who have matured; Navy sailor Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) who lost both of his hands and has hooks instead that can be tricky to use. The men have difficulty in acclimating to the environment they left behind for too long. Fred comes home to his apartment only to find his wife is not present and has never written to him. When he tries again, she's home and delighted yet she doesn't comprehend his mental issues, which include PTSD (shell-shock was the term at the time, though you never hear it mentioned here). Al Stephenson doesn't have to rebuild his relationship with his wife or his grown-up children yet he feels the need to imbibe alcohol - to cure his potentially ailing mind and revisit his favorite bar. Homer loves the girl-next-door but he imagines she will not want to spend her life with a wounded man - she may not realize his deeper wounds are in his heart than in his physical handicap. 

"The Best Years of Our Lives" doesn't sugarcoat Fred's trauma but you almost get the sneaky suspicion that he misses the war as far as his relationship with his brothers-in-arms. A scene where he visits an airport graveyard with inoperable war planes is powerful stuff. Fred is battling his vivacious wife (Virginia Mayo) who wants to go clubbing every night - Fred is more comfortable being home. Al Stephenson seems to fare better but that is because he has a family that supports him and a bank job that is seemingly secure, as long as he doesn't give away too many loans to GI's. It is Homer who should be the weakest link to the war, considering his wounds, yet he tries to move forward except he's not sure how. Will that girl-next-door be the ticket to domestic bliss? And what of Fred's obvious love for Al's daughter, Peggy (Teresa Wright)? Peggy reciprocates that love and is willing to break up his unhappy marriage. That is strong stuff for 1946. And let's not get started on that drugstore customer who has the audacity to tell Homer that the war was for suckers! I can imagine audiences getting a little irate over that statement so soon after the war ended.

"The Best Years of Our Lives" is thankfully fussy with character details and nuances over melodrama. This film could've been a high-pitched soap opera and could've featured footage of the war itself with the soldiers on the frontlines. Wyler opts for the war fought on the frontlines of alleged domestic bliss in suburbia and the cities. This is peak cinema of the 1940's.   

Familiar yet engrossing tale of wealth inequality

 HIGH AND LOW (1963)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

An endlessly fascinating treat of a movie, "High and Low" is a highly watchable police procedural directed with smoothness and precision by Akira Kurosawa. Once you see it, you can ascertain its influence on most anything having to do with police procedurals nowadays. What is more enthralling about "High and Low" is how enveloping it is in terms of character and motivation to move the plot forward. It also has an extended third act that feels both ghostly and decadent. 

The great, towering presence of Toshiro Mifune lends itself to gravitas specifically as Gondo, a fiercely devoted executive for a shoe company called National Shoes. Gondo anticipates a takeover from board members of the company, sensing that their loyalty lies to sales and not their devotion to a superb product (the board members want to use cheaper materials to increase profit.) Gondo refuses to budge despite knowing there could be a takeover and they could sell him out. He has other plans which quickly fall apart when his son is kidnapped, no more than mere seconds after the board members hastily leave their meeting. It turns out that Gondo's son was not kidnapped, it was the chauffeur's son! A call is made expeditiously by the kidnapper to Gondo and if a ransom is not paid (the sum is in the region of what his company is worth), the child will be killed. Whereas Gondo was adamant about paying the ransom when it was presumably his child, he has a change of heart when it involves his chauffeur's offspring. Is money everything and anything - what kind of man values money over a human life? We understand Gondo's dilemma - he will lose his company and his luxurious lifestyle which his wife (Kyôko Kagawa) was more than accustomed to - but should it be a dilemma? 

Kurosawa toys with these questions over a man's reluctance to take care of his own, no matter the cost. Mifune doesn't play Gondo as an unsympathetic man, only an unreasonable one who eventually gives in to the kidnapper. The rest of the film follows the police proceeding to find the child and the kidnapper. The child is eventually found but not the kidnapper, and the calculated approach of giving the kidnapper the bags of money by throwing through a window in a moving train will leave you gasping for air. The details of the police investigation are intriguing as we follow the clues from a phone booth location to a plume of pink smoke that serves as a major plot point (the film is in black-and-white with one moment of pink color that is one of the best uses of color ever). 

"High and Low" may seem long but every moment counts and is done under the assured direction of Kurosawa, one of our great filmmakers. There is a moment where Gondo is seen outside a shoe store looking in, and the police are surveilling the kidnapper who asks Gondo for a light. It brings up a question of not some inevitable twist around the corner but rather a situation where the have and the have-not meet, only one knows who the other is. There is also a sequence where a bunch of drug addicts are walking around in an alley like zombies with the kidnapper looking for someone to inject with heroin. The pale-faced addicts are all lost souls looking for their next fix in a post-World War II environment. Both as an obvious yet essential statement on how money is an overriding factor in business and relationships and the decay of certain parts of Japan where poverty exists, "High and Low" is never unrelenting or grim but it is a nail-biter with an astounding ending that doesn't feel victorious or triumphant. Vintage crime film by the one and only Kurosawa.

The Perfect Chase Picture

 NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)

An Appreciation by Jerry Saravia 

Frenetic chase pictures are a dime a dozen but only one holds any true merit to go that extra mile, unafraid of going ballistic in terms of absurdity and breathless moments that will leave you awestruck. Alfred Hitchcock's "North By Northwest" is not just a perfect chase picture, it is the perfect chase picture. It is chock full of action galore and suspenseful situations that continually build into elegant, inventive moments of spectacle and more intimate moments in intimate surroundings as well (the hilarious auction sequence; the Franklin Lloyd Wright house sequence). Only Hitchcock can build suspense at a cafeteria that faces Mount Rushmore! Only Hitchcock can astound with a crop-duster plane dusting fields where there are no crops while trying to kill our reluctant hero.

The coup de resistance is the perfect, charismatic leading man, Cary Grant, playing the most indelible unlikely hero with a name that, admittedly, may not be the most memorable yet you get used to it. That name is Roger O. Thornhill, a successful advertising executive who has been married once too often and still communicates with his mother. Grant doesn't play Roger as some unlikable lout - he is simply a suave, educated man who doesn't think for a second about stealing a cab ride (neither do the villains). He has charm, elegance and sophistication and is not boring - the way Grant walks gracefully across a room in this movie has always inspired me. When Roger is kidnapped and mistaken for a secret agent who doesn't exist, we feel for him and hope he can get out of this haywire situation. The beauty of a mystifyingly uniformed screenplay by Ernest Lehman is that you always wonder how Roger will get out of any perilous situation he is in, no matter how hair-raising. Whether he is forced to imbibe copious amounts of bourbon, not paying a ticket and escaping into the former 20th Century Limited train after an assassination hit at the UN (!), climbing down the Mount Rushmore in cliffhanging moments that would make any formidable hero sweat, bidding ridiculous amounts of money at an auction on a statue holding microfilm with government secrets, and so much more that it would be criminal to reveal all. The whole movie is about a spy who isn't one yet he becomes rather good at it. We are never one step ahead of Roger - when he discovers a new angle or a twist about someone, we are in lockstep with whatever new surprising information develops.   

From the most delicious nefarious villain of 1950's cinema that I can think of, the devious Vandamm played by James Mason, to one of the most mature and intelligent blonde female leads of almost any Hitchcock film, Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall, a mysterious woman on the train who has more than a few secrets up her sleeve, "North By Northwest" has much up its own sleeve. Saint's romantic scenes with Grant set the fireworks ablaze, more so than in "To Catch a Thief" and possibly "Notorious." A sumptuous, exciting, goose-pimpling music score by Bernard Herrmann adds enormously to the proceedings. "North By Northwest" is about as entertaining as most Hollywood movies ever get.