The Moveable Marquee

Notes on Classic Cinema

This marquee is the restored Hollywood Theater in Gowanda, New York.

If you’re new to The Moveable Marquee, this is my new twice-monthly love letter to old movies—more often if I get on a roll, which I’m known to do. It is not academic, but informative, for the classic cinema lover—as a movie lover I am a classicist. I have been disappointed by the flippant nature of much of what I have read about film online and especially most of the podcasts (although there are some great ones such as “Movies that Made Me”), and I want to offer something lively but more informative. I hope to draw you to old films that you have not seen before or inspire you to give a fresh look at ones you have seen. I hope you’ll subscribe—it’s free. And I invite you to comment, either on Substack or at stevenhuffpen@gmail.com. 

—Steven Huff

Two Early David Lean Films

Most movie lovers think of David Lean as the director of some of the biggest blockbusters, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter, and a few more. His earlier films, while not entirely neglected, are little written about but a pleasure to explore, such as A Brief Encounter, and one of my favorites, Hobson’s Choice. His David Copperfield and Great Expectations remain, I think, the best representations of Dickens on film. Here I write about two of his early films that I think are especially worth viewing, and hold up wonderfully well.

Madeleine (1950) David Lean’s historical triangle

There is a happy sufficiency of information on the internet about the historical Madeleine Hamilton Smith, but if you do not already know who she was it is better to wait until you’ve seen David Lean’s Madeleine  before you go wading into it, or you’ll spoil your fun. The film is a fairly factual account of the daughter of a wealthy Scottish architect who was the center of a scandalous murder case in Glasgow in 1857.  As we all know, people love scandal, and they adore murder.

Ann Todd is superb in the delicately balanced role of Madeleine, whose despotic father (Leslie Banks) fully intends to force her into a society marriage. But she is secretly seeing an ambitious young French immigrant laborer Emile L’Angelier (Ivan Desny) and has written him a heap of letters professing her love and promising to marry him. However, Papa would split the atom if she ever dared to introduce them. By the time she breaks off from Emile, after realizing he is a brute who wants only to marry up to her family’s fortune, and accepts the proposal of  a genuinely loving man ( of whom Papa approves), there’s no stopping the scorned and malicious Emile who now threatens to use her letters to expose her infidelity—unless she agrees to marry him. She’s in a dreadful fix, terrified of her father, and equally afraid of Emile, who has resorted to blackmail. Checkmate? Madeleine’s next move is to send an errand boy to the druggist for prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide). And then she herself picked up a healthy supply of arsenic.

Lean makes effective use of tension builders, such as the hostile clatter of L’Angelier’s cane on the filigree fence around the Smith residence in wealthy Blythswood Square, the clack-clack of pacing boots outside her house and outside her cell door. Most memorable is the last frame with Madeleine’s inscrutable face. There is a truly frightening scene when a mob tries to tear her carriage apart on her way to court, with but one scared cop seated with her ready to use his Billy club against about two-hundred loonies. She holds up, remains prim, if not exactly impassive.

Andrew Sarris called Madeleine “that most muddled of all murder mysteries,” but I find that unfair. In the first place, it is more drama than mystery. Cinema is notorious for thumbing its nose at historical accuracy, but Lean was wise not to attempt to fill in what cannot be proven in the historical record of a case as well-known in Britain as the Lizzie Borden case is in America. Still, David Thomson wrote that Lean puts cast and audience “through a wringer of contradictory feelings."  Which might be a good thing. The real strength and significance of this film is, of course, a young woman fighting to gain control of  her life and pursuit of happiness. But doing so she must stand balanced on the brink of hell. It also warns  that there is a lace ceiling for brash young cads who want to marry into money.

Ann Todd was married to David Lean (his third of six wives), and was one in his stable of actors in his early films along with Trevor Howard and Alec Guinness. She had a fairly long career which finished in TV. The cinematographer was Guy Green who won an Academy Award for his work on  Great Expectations which Lean made in 1946, a gorgeously photographed film. But he was also a director, who made Diamond Head with Charlton Heston and Yvette Mimieux, A Patch of Blue with Sydney Poitier and Shelley Winters, and 23 other films.

Leslie Banks was better known for The Most Dangerous Game (1932, Ernest B. Schoedsack), and Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). Madeleine was his last film—he died of stroke in 1952 while out for a stroll in London.

Streaming on Criterion, Plex, Tubi, YouTube

Summertime (1955) David Lean Goes International

In David Lean’s Summertime, Katherine Hepburn is Jane Hudson, a single, middle-aged secretary from Akron, Ohio, who has just arrived for vacation in Venice where she’s hit unexpectedly hard and fast by loneliness. After refusing one invitation to dinner, and being herself  refused by another party, her face morphs from regret, to hurt, to despair and vulnerability. There is an illuminating moment when, on the terrace of her hotel, she calls to a cat in the courtyard below, which, being a cat, ignores her. What the hell did she come here for? Does she even know? Her guide book isn’t going to help much. It’s these emotions that will draw her into the web of Renato de Rossi (Rossano Brazzi) a suave antique dealer, who might be a player, who might be a scoundrel (he did jip her on a goblet he sold her). He’s married but might be separated. He might be the love of her life; at least she thinks he might. One of the more complex relationships in 1950s film.

In the 50s Hepburn began taking middle-aged women roles, as in Suddenly Last Summer. In Summertime, as in The African Queen, she is a prim and assertive woman past her youth who falls in love in spite of herself. She was Lean’s favorite actor, not Ann Todd, or so he said.

The strengths of Summertime (an uninspired title if one ever existed, but don’t let that deter you) are, first, Hepburn’s compelling tension between her demure and erotic selves (the erotic is going to win, naturally), plus the ongoing riddle of what Brazzi is really pulling, whether or not she’s rushing to hell. Or if she is going to hell, it might be better than Akron.

Cinematography is by Jack Hildyard, who also shot Hobson’s Choice and The Bridge on the River Kwai with Lean.  Summertime marks the transformation in David Lean’s career, the big expansion from his old studio pictures made safely at home in Britain, to location settings elsewhere in the world, for pictures like Lawrence of Arabia, where “the sun’s anvil” awaited him, Passage to India, etc. Summertime was shot entirely in Venice. The opening minutes may look like one of the travelogues you might have seen before the main feature back in the B Movie days, as Hildyard focuses on the whole abundance of historic architecture and monuments. But they’re important expositional scenes here, because the protagonist Jane is supposed to be awestruck when she arrives, and remain so.

Streaming on Criterion, Max, YouTube

Copyright 2023 by Steven Huff