On Sep 2, 5:28=A0pm, ralph wrote:
> One of the eeriest yet unquestionably beautiful water graves in movies
> is Shelley Winters' =A0-- the horror of its lyrical fluidity glues our
> eyes and Laughton the fox gives us plenty of time to absorb it. But
> this classic, adapted to the screen by the gifted James Agee, doesn't
> quite deliver the goods: both the climax and the ending are
> accommodations to studio executives who were uneasy about going this
> deep into terror and intention of murder of children. (If not the
> honchos, then the censors
> would have forced changes.) The movie's a combination of emphatic
> naturalism and expressionism, primarily achieved through lighting and
> theatrical blocking, and
> because of budget some of the sets have that dreadful early 50s TV
> look. Many believe Robert Mitchum gives his "greatest" performance,
> though I much prefer his
> villain in "Cape Fear," and I'd nominate "The Sundowners" as his
> career high. He gets the job done, however, as do Winters, Lillian
> Gish and especially Evelyn
> Varden, who's a diarrhea-of-the-mouth type and oh, how you'd love to
> see her get Mitched. (Just as you wanted little Patty McCormack to
> dispatch her in "The Bad
> Seed.") Laughton didn't have a particularly happy time of it with the
> two kids -- there weren't any Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin
> types to ease the director's pains -- and film editor Robert Golden
> didn't slice away some gratuitous quick shots of the kids that border
> on the comic. Agee's attempts at childhood psychology looked fumbled
> but not out of incompetence -- his lengthy script was cut in half by
> necessity. (He died at the age of 45 from a heart attack the year of
> the movie's release.) The credits name Stanley Cortez as
> cinematographer, but according to Winters in "Shelley II," the great
> James Wong Howe shot some scenes.
I see you haven't read the novel, Callow's biography of Laughton and
Callow's BFI monograph on the film. They explain a lot of what is
unclear on how the movie came to be made. |