davidmvining

John Frankenheimer returns to feature filmmaking after retreating to television at the behest of Burt Lancaster and United Artists. This feels like Frankenheimer, a New York based television director, being a director for hire for Lancaster, liking both Lancaster and the material, and throwing himself into the project at a level that he couldn't on The Young Stranger. For the handsomeness of Frankenheimer's first film, The Young Savages is a shotgun blast of interesting angles and compositions, announcing Frankenheimer as new blood in the world of cinema. However, the script by Edward Anhalt and J. P. Miller is just too clever for its own good, taking on way too much to explore and ultimately digging far too shallowly to be effective.

Two young Italian-American in Harlem, Danny diPace (Stanley Kristien) and Anthony Aposto (Neil Burstyn), follow their Irish-American leader, Arthur Reardon (John Davis Chandler), attack a blind Puerto Rican boy, Roberto Escalante (Jose Perez), with knives and murder him in front of his sister Louisa (Pilar Seurat). Assigned the criminal case is assistant district attorney Hank Bell (Burt Lancaster) who convinces his boss, the DA Dan Cole (Edward Andrews), to pursue pre-meditated murder charges on all three boys. It feels like an easy call because the white (were Italians and Irish considered white at this point? They weren't for a long time) attack on the blind, Hispanic boy feels so open and shut, but Hank's pursuit of justice, partially inspired by a drunken rant by his wife, Karin (Dina Merrill), makes everything murky.

Now, this is the kind of thing I should like a lot, but I think one element holding the film back is its running time. It's only 105-minutes long, and digging into nearly a dozen characters from the three killers, one of their mother's, Danny's mother Mary (Shelley Winters) who was an old girlfriend of Hank's, Louisa, Cole, two background figures of the dueling cultural centers in Harlem, and even the dead Roberto himself, all in the name of painting a portrait of poverty that leads to crime. Except, the film isn't interested in an easy explanation like that. In fact, it doesn't want an easy explanation. And that's what I should like about it. I kind of admire the fact that it sidesteps a lot of easy explanations except...I don't think it actually does sidestep them. It's kind of cagey about what the ultimate point is, and I think that's because the cast of characters is so big while the actual runtime is so short.

It doesn't help that the ending of the film is a courtroom drama. Of course it's going to be a courtroom drama. What else could it be with an assistant DA as the main character. My problem is that courtroom dramas are just generally not that compelling. There will be exceptions here and there, but I don't think The Young Savages is one. Where the film falters is in the general application of courtroom drama dynamics (including, lord, last second evidence admission which...I'm not a lawyer and I know that this never, ever happens) and in the obfuscation of everything in the utilization of a joint trial to begin with.

The most interesting part of the film is the portrait of the three young men, the titular savages, who killed a blind Puerto Rican kid for no reason and the investigation around the mess of reality that was the Bronx as the film portrays. Like, for instance, Roberto wasn't a complete innocent. There's evidence that he was a willing mule for illegal weapons for the gang. And, on top of things, Aposto has an IQ well under 100 and just gets into fights because they make him feel good. DiPace is a good boy who probably didn't actually stab Roberto at all. This leaves Reardon, the brains of the outfit and the mean streak, who orchestrated the whole thing. Except, Bell's entire effort becomes massively confused because it's a joint trial. He wants to get Aposto and diPace off because of their circumstances, and that ends up leaving Reardon kind of lost in the action with Bell ending the movie explaining that everyone's at fault.

I...disagree with this, but I don't reject the film for it. Heck, 12 Angry Men is a step removed from this conclusion and I don't reject the film for it. I resist the film because of that confusion of the final act, the use of courtroom mechanics which never feel right and the intentional obfuscation of guilt which denies any sort of ending to the story. It's an intentional choice driven by political considerations, a leftist impulse to deny the agency of the individual in place of the fault of society, and that is a killer for dramatics. "Ah, we're all to blame," says the audience, unfulfilled.

And yet, I admire Frankenheimer's skill. He's putting the camera anywhere he can imagine, getting interesting compositions wherever he can find them, intense performances from everyone, and painting an interestingly complex portrait of a complex situation. There's a lot to admire in the first two-thirds of the film. The last third, though, simply fumbles things uncompellingly with a combination of bad courtroom antics and intentional obfuscation.

It's an unfortunate end to a promising beginning.

John Frankenheimer was an established television director, doing mostly live dramatic broadcasts, when William Dozier became head of productions at RKO, inviting the young, talented director to make a new, feature film version of a teleplay Dozier's son, Robert, had written based on his own life. The experience turned Frankenheimer off of feature filmmaking for a few years, reportedly because he didn't like working with an unfamiliar crew which, he thought, limited his ability to accomplish what he wanted. However...this movie is really good. I mean, it's kind of great. Frankenheimer takes a very good script that touches on the popular teens in trouble genre, keeps everything restrained in tone, and accomplishes a shockingly effective emotional catharsis by the end.

Hal Ditmar (James MacArthur) is son to Hollywood producer Tom (James Daly). He's a teenage kid in high school, and his father isn't letting him have the easy life. Hal's car is old, broken, and needs to be constantly pushed just to start. Considering the house they live in with Hal's mother, Helen (Kim Hunter), it's obvious that Tom could buy Hal a brand new Cadillac if he deemed it worthwhile. But, Tom is trying to teach Hal life lessons before he goes out in the world. It's not quite that explicit, Tom walking through the logic of how Hal's car still works which means Hal doesn't actually need Tom's car that evening to go to the movies, but it's obviously the point.

The turning of the film happens at the movies with Hal's friend Jerry (Jeff Silver). Hal acts impudently to another patron at the theater, a situation that leads the theater manager (Whit Bissell) to kicking the boys out. Except, that's not all the theater manager wants to do. He wants to teach this hoodlum a lesson, so he orders the theater's usher to grab Hal as he's leaving peacefully which leads to Hal punching the manager in the face, which brings in Sergeant Shipley (James Gregory).

The actual dramatic center of the film is very simple: Hal wanting his father to believe his version of events. The manager insists that Hal's punch was unprovoked. Sergeant Shipley believes the manager completely and wants to throw the book at Hal but can't because he's a minor. Tom listens to the adults and can barely look his own son in the eye.

This feels like the stuff of melodrama, but Frankenheimer has the good sense of keeping everyone's acting in check. MacArthur could have gone full James Dean and screamed his way through scenes. Instead he's obviously frustrated and angry, but he doesn't yell. He actually gets quieter most of the time, like he's barely holding in his rage at the situation, only letting it bubble up once again when he goes to the manager, nearly begging him to tell his father the truth so that his father will believe him only for the manager to refuse.

And the resolution is surprisingly quiet. Having just come off the collected works of Yasujiro Ozu, I was shocked at how easy of a transition Frankenheimer's first feature film was from Ozu's family dramas. It would fit into Ozu's more melodramatic output rather than the family dramas, but the restrained approach to telling a small story works really, really well. And I have to mention the music. It's much more prominent in the beginning than in the end. Sometimes, it feels like a papering over of silently filmed footage (I think everything filmed outside, not on a set, was filmed silently), but it creates a kind of typical, mid-50s studio feel to things. And then, as the drama plays out on its small scale, the focus turning more towards indoor sets negating the need to create soundscapes not captured on stage, the music falls away, giving Frankenheimer that space to focus on what he had been doing through live television: getting performances from actors.

And that focus works really well with the modestly ambitious script with strongly written characters with clear goals tied to their emotional connections.

It doesn't surprise me that no one searches out Frankenheimer's first film, a small family drama he made in the middle of his television career before Birdman of Alcatraz with no movie stars and not at all genre related. But, I think that should be fixed. This is a great little film. Frankenheimer films it handsomely. The script by the younger Dozier is clear in intention. The acting is very quite good from a small, professional cast.

Really, this is underseen and underappreciated. It's kind of great.

I wish Yasujiro Ozu had lived another 30 years and worked every single one of them making movies well into his 80s. I doubt he would have done well with the collapse of the Japanese studio system in the 70s, but 1963 just feels far too early for a man of his talent to go. However, it's hard to imagine a better film for him to go out on. There are directors who end their careers on low notes, and then there are those who end careers on shockingly high ones. Ozu was at the absolute top of his creative power in 1962/3 when he made An Autumn Afternoon, another refinement of the story of a father giving away a daughter, and it shows. This is a tremendous achievement, a quiet melancholy for a changing world at the personal level.

Shuhei (Chishu Ryu) is the widowed father of three children. His eldest, Koichi (Keiji Sada), has moved out of the house and is married to Akiko (Mariko Okada). His youngest, Kazuo (Shin'ichiro Mikami), has just started his professional life and still lives at home. His middle child, Michiko (Shima Iwashita), is 24-years-old and probably should get married soon. So, Shuhei, once his eyes are opened to the situation, conspires with his friends Shuzo (Nobuo Nakamura) and Horie (Ryuji Kita) to find a husband.

That would normally be enough for an Ozu movie, but Ozu and his co-screenwriter Kogo Noda find more ways to fill the time. I think it's a great example of how Ozu kept making the same movies over and over again but kept finding ways to tell the same stories in new ways. It doesn't blow the story up and upend it, but the choices the pair bring into this newest telling provide some wonderful context that never felt necessary before but feels necessary now that it's been introduced. The newest wrinkles largely center around a reunion the three adult friends throw for their middle-school teacher, Seitaro, the Gourd, (Eijiro Tono). Seitoro, who now runs a poor noodle shop, never let his daughter, Tomoko (Haruko Sugimura) marry to the point where she's middle-aged with no prospects for marriage ever and can only help run the run-down noodle shop that even its regulars call a dump when her father comes home stinking drunk. She's deeply saddened and obviously so (she has a great moment where she breaks down in tears, but she's alone when she does it), and it is the context beyond convention that convinces Shuhei to get moving on Michiko's marriage prospects.

Another wrinkle is how Michiko has the example of Koichi's and Akiko's relatively new marriage as her chief comparison point. The married couple bicker over money. Koichi has to borrow money from Shuhei to buy a refrigerator, but he asks for more than he needs so that he can buy some used golf clubs from a friend. This causes a row between husband and wife that Michiko witnesses, a fight she finds amusing more than anything, but feeds the idea that marriage isn't something she needs right then. It's never said explicitly, but she's in that room during that scene for a reason (and the golf clubs stop getting mentioned after it for the same reason, the point has been made).

I also should note that Ozu's very deft handling of changing tones comes roaring back here after what I considered a slight (only slight) fumbling in The End of Summer. The movement from quiet, private tragedy to almost jaunty comedy is so smooth that there's no jarring sensation. However, the film definitely does move more towards the dramatic in its final act, and I was on edge through it all. It wasn't like a thriller, holding my breath, but it was this realization that a deep sadness of loss was coming, arrived, and washed over me along with the characters.

When one character, drunk, sad, and alone, sits down at a kitchen table to drink a glass of water, far from the camera in the furthest depth of a long shot down a traditional Japanese house, his back turned towards us, we know he's crying. We don't need a closeup of his face to understand the emotions of loss that he's experiencing. We feel it too. Ozu knew exactly what he was doing.

This is also the only film of Ozu's to deal with the idea that Japan lost WWII in any kind of detail (it's been mentioned briefly a couple of times), with Shuhei being a former naval captain and running into one of his crew, Sakamoto (Daisuke Kato), leading to some drinking and reminiscing where Shuhei says explicitly that it was good that Japan lost the war. It's interesting both as a comment from Ozu and Noda about the Japanese ethos almost 20 years after the end of the war but also Shuhei's sense of the inevitability and acceptance of loss. Here he's saying, about halfway through the film, that losing can ultimately be good. A harsh lesson to learn personally. Gosh darn it, this is really well written.

I loved this film. Absolutely loved it. If Late Autumn hadn't hit me so hard, I'd be calling this Ozu's best work in a body of work that includes Tokyo Story. And that's why I wanted Ozu to live and work another 30 years. He could make the same story of a parent giving away a daughter repeatedly forever, and I'd watch and enjoy them forever.

Thank you, sensei. Your work was remarkable.