Movie Monday: Confidential Agent

Movie Monday: Confidential Agent

Based on the Graham Greene novel of the same name, Confidential Agent was released in November, 1945 and stars Charles Boyer, Lauren Bacall, and Peter Lorre. According to Greene’s autobiography, Ways of Escape, he wrote the manuscript in six weeks after determining that to be successful, he needed to “write another entertainment” to provide for his family. He also stated that he used Benzedrine (brand name for amphetamines) twice a day to increase his writing pace.

Having just come back from Mexico, Graham wrote the plot around the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). You’d think Hollywood have had enough of war movies, but they jumped on the publication. The screenplay was written by Robert Buckner and stays true to the novel.

Boyer, who by this time had starred in dozens of movies, including silent films in the 1920s, played a

former concert pianist and composer who travels to England as a confidential agent of Spanish Republicans to purchase coal or deny it to the Fascist rebels. On the ocean crossing, he meets a “bored, rich girl” and daughter of the man which whom he’ll be negotiating, played by Lauren Bacall in only her third movie.

The characters miss their train and decide to travel together by car. Their journey is fraught with foibles and danger, and the pair eventually get separated before coming back together for their happily ever after.

Reviews of the movie are mixed, with one site commenting that “Boyer conveys more than a touch of Denard’s world-weariness, but the character is much less anxious and despairing than he is in the novel. Bacall’s performance was panned across the board, giving an “awful performance—playing a bored English aristocrat with a flat New York accent and a voice devoid of inflection. The actress would later say in an interview, “To case me as an aristocratic English girl was more than a stretch. It was dementia.” Lorres does his usual masterful job of playing a villain.

Despite the poor reviews and slow pace, I enjoyed the movie and think it’s worth watching. I learned a bit about the Spanish Civil War, and it was fun to see Lauren Bacall in the early days of her career. I never tire of watching Peter Lorre.

Have you seen this classic?

__________________________

A Lesson in Love

He thinks he’s too old. She thinks she’s too young. Can these teachers learn that love defies all boundaries?

Born and raised in London, Isobel Turvine knows nothing about farming, but after most of the students in her school evacuate during Operation Pied Piper, she’s left with little to do. Then her friend Margery talks her into joining the Women’s Land Army, and she finds herself working the land at a manor home in Yorkshire that’s been converted to a boys’ school. A teacher at heart, she is drawn to the lads, but the handsome yet stiff-necked headmaster wants her to stick to farming.

Left with an arm that barely works from the last “war to end all wars,” Gavin Emerson agrees to take on the job of headmaster when his school moves from London to Yorkshire, but he’s saddled with the quirky manor owner, bickering among his teachers, and a gaggle of Land Army girls who have turned the grounds into a farm. When the group’s blue-eyed, raven-haired leader nearly runs him down in a car, he admonishes her to stay in the fields, but they are thrown together at every turn. Can he trust her not to break his heart?

Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/3YHgUb0

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidential_Agent (movie)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037610/
https://www.cineaste.com/summer2011/from-the-archives-confidential-agent
https://www.tcm.com/watchtcm/titles/1870
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Confidential_Agent (novel)

Photo credits:

Movie poster: Warner Brothers

Movie Still: Warner Brothers

Movie Monday: To Have and Have Not

Movie Monday: To Have and Have Not

The 1944 film, To Have and Have Not, is often cited as being “loosely” based on Ernest Hemingway’s 1937 novel of the same name, however, the movie bears little resemblance to the book. According to one source,* “Legend has it that Hemingway and film director Howard Hawks went on a ten-day fishing trip on which Hawks continued his futile efforts to get Hemingway to write scripts for him. Finally, Hawks told him, “I can make a picture out of your worst story.” Reportedly, they decided To Have and Have Not met the criteria, but Hemingway continued to assert that Hawks couldn’t “make anything out of that.”

Jules Furthman wrote the first screenplay, and William Faulkner the second. The location was changed from Cuba to Martinique in the interest of good international relations. Met with mixed reviews by the critics, To Have and Have Not was (and still is) compared to Casablanca. Even the head of publicity at Warner Bros. is reported to have said, “not only a second Casablanca but two and a half times what Casablanca was.”

• The film teams Humphrey Bogart with Howard Hawks again
• The story is set against the war in an exotic French territory
• Bogart’s character is trying to run a business but gets involved in local politics and a girl
• Several scenes include a clever piano player in the café bar

Variety posited that the film was inferior to Casablanca and other melodramas, and Time called it a

“tinny romantic melodrama which millions of cinemaddicts have been waiting for ever since Casablanca." Another critic, James Agee commented that Going My Way was better because To Have and Have Not focused too much on “character and atmosphere” rather than plot.

Rather than the book’s character of ordinary-fisherman Harry who is pushed into the black market of running contraband between Cuba and Florida because of the Depression, the movie features sport-fishing boat captain Harry (who is called Steve) living under the occupation of pro-German Vichy France. The island is littered with sympathizers of Free France (including Bacall’s character Marie “Slim” Browning). Other changes (fortunately), are the omission of episodes of racism, misogyny, bullying, and spousal abuse.

To Have and Have Not was 19-year-old Lauren Bacall’s first movie, and the on-screen romance turned into a real-life affair. The couple would marry the following year after Bogart divorced his third wife and appear in three more films together (The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and Key Largo). Several sources indicate that because the film was Bacall’s debut, there were fewer scenes originally written for her character in case she didn’t do well. Instead, the chemistry between her and Bogart was so palpable, scenes between the two were added.

Budgeted at slightly more than $1.6 million, the movie earned $3.65M at the box office and $5.257 worldwide.

_____________________

The Mechanic & The MD

All’s fair in love and war. Or so they say.

High school and college were a nightmare for Doris Strealer and being an adult isn’t much better. Men won’t date a woman of her height, and they don’t understand her desire to repair car engines rather than work as a nurse or a teacher. When her father’s garage closes, and no one will hire a female mechanic, she joins the Red Cross Motor Corps, finally feeling at home. Until she comes face to face with her past in the form of Ronald McCann, the most popular boy in school.

On the brink of a successful career as a surgeon, Ron's plans crumble when he’s drafted and assigned to an evacuation hospital in England, the last place he expects to run into a former schoolmate. The gangly tomboy who was four years behind him in high school has transformed into a statuesque beauty, but a broken engagement in college leaves him with no desire to risk his heart ever again.

Will the hazards of war make or break a romance between this unlikely couple?

Purchase Link: https://books2read.com/u/3RNpjY


*https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/classic-40s-movie-to-have-and-have-not-7b0d2d7532a9