By David in TN
Friday, September 20, 2019 at 8:13:00 P.M. EDT
TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight ET and 10 a.m. ET Sunday is Jean Renoir’s The Woman on the Beach (1947). Featured are Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan, Charles Bickford, and Nan Leslie.
Ryan is a Troubled Veteran.
Film Noir Guide: “French director Jean Renoir, in his last American film, applies the noir treatment to the hackneyed triangle plot. Unfortunately, it’s all atmosphere and no substance. Ryan plays a Coast Guard officer, recuperating from severe mental and emotional stress as a result of his combat experiences. One day, while horseback riding on the beach, he runs into Bennett as she collects firewood from an abandoned shipwreck. Feeling an immediate attraction to the woman, Ryan quickly drops his fiancee (Leslie), and he and Bennett begin a torrid love affair behind the back of her husband (Bickford), whom she accidentally blinded several years earlier. Once a successful artist, Bickford is now an embittered and jealous husband. Ryan believes the man is faking his blindness and goes to extremes to prove it so the guilt-stricken Bennett will feel free to leave him. But Bickford plans to hold onto his wife no matter what. Beautifully photographed but not one of Renoir’s or noir icon Ryan’s best.”
TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 am ET is The Harder They Fall (1956), Humphrey Bogart's last film. It also stars Rod Steiger, Jan Sterling, Mike Lane, Max Baer, Jersey Joe Walcott, directed by Philp Yordan and based on Budd Schulberg's novel.
ReplyDeleteFilm Noir Guide: "Bogart, a down and out sportswriter, takes a job as a P.R. man for a crooked fight promoter (Steiger) who has discovered a new boxing sensation in Argentina. When Steiger realizes that the 275-pound gentle giant (Lane) has a 'powder puff punch and a glass jaw,' he sends the 'Wild Man of the Andes' on a promotional tour of fixed prizefights, with the ultimate aim of pitting him against the heavyweight champion (Baer). Then, of course, Steiger will bet against Lane, who by now believes he's invincible. Meanwhile, Bogey begins having guilt pangs, especially after his wife (Sterling) leaves him as a result of his moral descent. When a boxer dies in the ring while fighting Lane, the grief-stricken Argentine wants to give up fighting. Bogey, who knows that the fighter died as a ersult of injuries sustained in a previous bout with Baer, convinces Lane to go ahead with his fight against the champ, who is in no mood to go easy on his overrated opponent. The Harder They Fall is a brutal and unglamorous expose of the fight game, with Bogart (in his final role before succumbing to cancer in 1957) outstanding as the writer with a serious moral dilemma. Steiger is excellent as the heartless promoter, and former heavyweight champion Jersey Joe Walcott gives a surprisingly good showing as Lane's compassionate trainer."
There is a lot else to say about this film. Schulberg based the novel on Primo Carnera, who mob figures arranged a series of fixed fights for in the 1930's, even making him heavyweight champion in 1933. He was badly beaten (1934 in real life) by Max Baer, who plays the man who beats him in the movie.
By the way, Max Baer was not like the character he plays in the 1956 movie, a brutal fighter "who loves to pound a man into jelly." The real life Max Baer did kill a man in the ring and tended to play the clown from then on. Baer's claim to fame as a fighter was a fearsome right hand when motivated. Another oddity of this film--The fighter who dies in the movie was played by former contender Pat Comiskey, who Max Baer knocked out with one right hand punch in the first round in a 1940 bout.
I'm looking forward to what Eddie Muller says about The Harder They Fall. Will he tell the audience something of the above? Or will he rant about Budd Schulberg?