Having enjoyed movies, but, really, most stories in any format, about escaping Communism, I recently discovered Never Let Me Go (1953) co-starring Gene Tierney (Leave Her to Heaven) and Clark Gable (Gone With the Wind). It’s good. I recommend it as crisp, taut entertainment.
Do not expect philosophical depth on the level of We the Living or The Lives of Others. It’s not that caliber of anti-Communist filmmaking. But, especially for the Fifties, when Hollywood’s disgusting affinity for Communism, in particular Soviet Communism during its bloodiest era, reached its zenith and was all the rage, Never Let Me Go takes a strong position against Soviet Russia with two major movie stars. This alone merits awareness and remembrance. With renewed relevance due to Communist China’s unceasing influence on, and what amounts to extortion of, the American press and technology and gaming industries, it is both pointed and fierce.
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Gable stars as an American reporter who’s savvy about Soviet Russia, having covered the U.S. ally during World War Two. But, being an American, he’s uniquely naive, as Ayn Rand explained during her historic 1947 congressional testimony, about the fact, scale and depth of pure evil of the Soviet dictatorship’s impact on daily life; he can’t fully conceive it and this shows in his narrative and initial actions in post-war Moscow.
He learns. This is not made explicit but it’s undeniably implied and embedded in what he chooses to do after falling in love with a ballerina (Tierney with a Russian accent). He’s been in love with her from the audience of the ballet for two years. Early on in Never Let Me Go, they meet once backstage after her encounter with his British press colleague, who is more compliant with Soviet censorship. Her name is Maria. He is shocked that she confesses that she’s spotted him in the crowd and has fantasized about him, too.
This is late career Clark Gable but he’s still Clark Gable and his gallantry, strength and fire still light up the room. Tierney, too, a beautiful actress of ability, shines here as the Russian ballerina, conveying the loss, pain and superior firsthand knowledge of Stalin’s barbarism and dancing in the climactic Swan Lake which precedes an elaborate, tense and daring attempt at defection when the Communist regime moves to strike the couple down.
Thirty-two years before director Taylor Hackford put Mikhail Baryshnikov as a ballet dancer who conceives of a brilliant defection to escape Soviet Russia in White Nights, director Delmer Daves (Destination Tokyo, Dark Passage, Spencer’s Mountain) featured one of the screen’s greatest movie stars as an American journalist who creates for the woman he adores a way to escape the 20th century’s worst dictatorship. Never Let Me Go, involving forged, earned alliances of shared values, mastery of the sea, swimming in the cold, dark water, a horrifying car chase, luck and a stunning surprise at the ballet, holds true to the end.
Read my newest classic movie analysis — this one of director Martin Scorsese’s seminal film from 1976, evoked in this year’s penetrating Joker — on this week’s cover of The New Romanticist:
The granddaughter of Melvyn Douglas appeared this spring in the room where the first Academy Awards were held to moderate a discussion with Cary Grant’s, Charlton Heston’s and Ruby Dee’s adult children on being a child of Hollywood. It happened at the classic movies festival.
Douglas, Grant, Muhammad and Heston at TCMFF 2019
I wrote about the insightful panel discussion, dubbed ‘the descendants’ by Turner Classic Movies for their 10th annual TCM Classic Film Festival, for Flicker Alley’s online classic film journal. The Hollywood-based company, which creates, distributes and sponsors top caliber movie restorations and releases, kindly announced that “[o]ur Flicker Alley Team attended the TCM Film Festival in April, where we met the talented Scott Holleran who graciously shares his experience in this month’s blog.”
Read my article about surviving Hollywood parents — besides Melvyn Douglas, these include Dyan Cannon, Ossie Davis, Charlton Heston, Ruby Dee and Cary Grant — here.
Read my writing on David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind (1939) which I wrote after seeing the movie at Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood this spring during TCM’s annual movie festival.
In the essay, which includes an extended section on my personal context for seeing the film and reading the 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell, which won a Pulitzer Prize for literature, I examine its treatment of slavery, romance, women, history and war. This includes my analysis of its most famous line, which I think is misunderstood, overestimated or underestimated, and a new discovery about the character Prissy.
Read my analysis of Gone With the Wind on New Romanticist here.
Another movie I had seen before, long ago, but never reviewed, is Samson and Delilah, Cecil B. DeMille’s 1949 Bible epic. This, too, I saw at TCM’s festival. This, too, contains certain aspects that I think today’s audiences (to the degree they’re aware of these movies) may miss. Read my guest review for a classic movies blog of this movie about sex between man and woman here.
Though I had never seen Winchester ’73, a Western starring James Stewart and Shelley Winters, I knew about its anti-Western or modern reputation. I think I detected an aspect about the 1950 film which other analysts may have missed, which I write about in my review. You can read my guest review of Winchester ’73here.
Each new review includes a short postscript on the screening including my thoughts on TCM’s presentation. Additionally, I reported on TCM’s tribute to the 20th Century Fox studio founded by a Hungarian immigrant named William Fox, which like Marvel Comics has been consumed by Disney, for one of the Internet’s best classic movies sites, Once Upon a Screen. Read the appreciation of Fox here, where I also share other classic movies posts, including my roundup of TCM’s 10th annual Classic Film Festival.
One of the TCM event’s best features included a program with the child of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, as well as Charlton Heston’s son and Cary Grant’s kid with Dyan Cannon. An article about this discussion, moderated by the granddaughter of Melvyn Douglas (Ninotchka, Hud, The Candidate), will be posted soon.
In the meantime, I’ve also conducted a thorough examination of the 1969 Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Midnight Cowboy, which turns 50 years old this year. I had never seen the movie, which is curiously forgotten, ignored or rarely discussed yet widely heralded as a masterpiece, an assertion which I dispute in my analysis. Read my thoughts on this bleak and miserable gay-themed film, which debuted in the same year as the hippies’ music festival near Woodstock, Charles Manson’s mass murderous hippies in Los Angeles and America’s landing a man on the moon, here.
Recalling the opposite of Midnight Cowboy‘s extremely depraved and influential sensibility, today’s the date that Turner Classic Movies airs its movie marathon in memory of the late Doris Day, who died last month in California. I was moved to write a tribute to this wonderfully American star which I hope you choose to read. Turner Classic Movies features the article, “America Needs Doris Day”, here.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a strangely prophetic film starring Laurence Harvey (Butterfield 8), airs this month on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). John Frankenheimer’s controversial conspiracy-themed movie, withdrawn by the studio from distribution after the assassination of President Kennedy, shows on May 18 (check local listings for all movies in May).
Another conspiracy-themed film, the sterling Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), shows on May 23. So does the fine little British war movie, Hope and Glory (1987). On the following day, May 24, TCM airs three unforgettable movies with extremely dark themes about the child in mortal danger: Barbara Stanwyck in 1931’s chillingly exquisite Night Nurse (I rarely say this but do not miss this movie, especially if you like to see strong women depicted in proximity to heroic men); 1955’s Night of the Hunter, based on the novel, starring Lillian Gish and Robert Mitchum as good and evil religious practitioners and John Wayne in The Searchers (1956).
Inherit the Wind, the 1960 motion picture version of the stage play about the trial of a Tennessee teacher who dared to teach Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, shows the next day (May 25), followed by a 1973 romp starring Richard Chamberlain, Charlton Heston and Faye Dunaway based on Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Three Musketeers.
The 1989 movie about an all-black unit of the Union Army in the Civil War, Glory, starring Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington, screens on May 27 after a showing of the World War 2-era film From Here to Eternity (1953) starring Montgomery Clift, Donna Reed, Ernest Borgnine, Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster. Two classics by director Howard Hawks, 1959’s outstanding moral alternative to the anti-heroic High Noon (1952), Rio Bravo (1959) starring John Wayne, and the romantically heroic Only Angels Have Wings (1939), air on May 30.
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