The Film Junkie

This is the story of sweet child ballerina (Margaret O’Brien) who hero worships the prima ballerina (Cyd Charisse) until another more famous prima comes along (Karin Booth) and takes the lead role.  The child then sabotages the prima so that her hero will become a star.  The child then has to deal with the consequences of that action and her emotions.

O’Brien is a skilled child actor, however her role here seems like little more than a watered down version of her work in ‘Meet Me In St. Louis’.  She schemes and weeps and cries just as she did in that far superior film.

Charisse is a lovely dancer and thankfully the film doesn’t ask her to act all that much.  Karin Booth is beautiful as well as a lovely dancer and her performance is the constant that gets us through the film alongside Danny Thomas as the child’s volunteer guardian.  

While most of the film falls flat, the dance scenes are solid as is the work by Thomas and Booth.

Grade: C 

So much of this film is well intentioned, but the plot is so loosely strung together that it is hard to make sense of.

We begin with a man (Humphrey Bogart) escaping from San Quentin prison.  Apparently he was found guilty for murdering his wife, though he pleads innocent.  From that moment on we see the world from his perspective and we only see his face when it is shown on the cover on the newspaper. 

He is helped along by a strange woman (Lauren Bacall) who has sympathy for his case due to her dead father’s similar case. 

Agnes Moorhead has a supporting role as a friend of Bogart’s dead wife who helped put him in the slammer.  She owns every scene she is in and my best memories of the film are of her majestic presence.

Of course, Bogart undergoes plastic surgery to change his face to his famous mug and elude the cops.  However it never seems to help and everyone in San Fran seems to know who he is.

The frustrating parts about this film come down to how Bacall fits in with just about everyone Bogart knew before he got locked up.  I was waiting for her to be revealed as a bad guy, but it never happened and that left me disappointed.

The love story didn’t fit with the rest of the film, however it is saved by a tremendous performance by Moorhead and great cinematic style.

Grade: B+

This was one of the first Hollywood films to deal with anti-Semitism.  It won the Best Picture Oscar and made Gregory Peck a huge star.

The story follows a reporter (Peck) who decides to go undercover as a Jew to see what it feels like to be hated because of his religion.  Peck is good, if not great, in a still and sometimes annoying role.  He falls for a Christian girl (Dorothy McGuire) who seems a little too pleased with the idea that he is not actually Jewish.

The story is a little too nice and a little too cut and dry.  However it is an important topic that was certainly worth discussing in the years after WWII.  The romance never really worked for me, I felt that Peck’s character belonged with the fashion reporter (Celeste Holm) who was always understanding and far more intelligent than McGuire’s character who is frustratingly pent up.

One of the best parts of this movie is the relationship between Peck’s character and his son.  The boy has to pretend to be Jewish as well, and thus learns the harsh truth of the world through the prejudices of others.

This is a good film dealing with issues that have been since dealt with in better ways, but for 1947 it is a pretty remarkable acheivement by the great Elia Kazan.  It won Best Picture, Director and Supporting Actress for Holm and was nominated for five other categories.

A worthwhile and important film.

Grade: B+