THIS COULD BE THE NIGHT

Anthony Franciosa, Jean Simmons, Paul Douglas

THIS COULD BE THE NIGHT (1957). Director: Robert Wise. 

Anne Leeds (Jean Simmons of Angel Face) is a schoolteacher who inexplicably gets part-time work as a secretary for one of the partners, Rocco (Paul Douglas), in a Manhattan nightclub. Rocco's partner, playboy Tony Armotti (Anthony Franciosa), thinks Anne, due to her upper-crust education, is stuck up and doesn't belong in the club, but Rocco takes a shine to her. As Tony and Anne work out their differences, other denizens of the club interact with our trio: singer Ivy (Julie Wilson); dancer Patsy (Neile Adams) and her mother Crystal (Joan Blondell); Hussein (Rafael Campos), a busboy who slowly warms up to Anne; and slick lawyer, Devlin (Tom Helmore). Will Anne and Tony ever get together, and what will Rocco think of it when they do?

Jean Simmons and Anthony Franciosa

This Could Be the Night came out two years after the film version of Guys and Dolls, which also starred Jean Simmons, and while it's a quite different story and may take place in a different time period, I doubt if it's a coincidence that it presents a "greenhorn" (virgin) interacting with various gangster and nightclub types. There are musical numbers in this, too, although they are integrated into the nightclub setting and This Could is not a musical as such. The three leads all give very good performances. However, one has to say that while Franciosa is a very good and intense actor, he is not a charm boy. He plays a scene with some schoolchildren with absolutely no humor at all!

Simmons, Franciosa, and Rafael Campos

Although one can understand why no cult grew up around singer Julie Wilson as it did around Judy Garland, she is a snazzy entertainer and is okay as an actress; she was essentially a cabaret star. Filipino Neile Adams appeared on Broadway, in a couple of films and several TV shows, but her chief claim to fame was as the wife of eventual superstar Steve McQueen (from 1956 - 1972). Joan Blondell is fat, unpleasantly brassy, and unappealing in this. Along with the leads Adams and Blondell are shown in the end credits, but not Rafael Campos, which is distinctly unfair. Talented Campos [Lady in a Cage] is exuberant and quite good in the film and has at least as much to do as the other two. (Frankly, I didn't understand the whole business with Hussein being able to change his name if he passes an algebra test!?) 

Franciosa with William Joyce

Another interesting player is William (Ogden) Joyce, who plays Bruce, a fellow teacher of Anne's who, oddly, never gets to first base with her -- he isn't treated all that well. (Joyce is handsome and adept in this but his only leading role was in I Eat Your Skin.) Attractive bandleader and trumpeter Ray Anthony [Girls Town], one-time husband of Mamie Van Doren, is cast as himself and exudes charm, and J. Carrol Naish plays the club chef with his usual charisma.  While the three lead characters are fairly well-developed, and there's some attempt to flesh out the supporting characters, the portraits tend to be on the superficial side. This is a somewhat unusual directorial assignment for Robert Wise. The film is sharply photographed by Russell Harlan. 

Verdict: With good actors and several interesting sequences, this is smooth entertainment. ***. 

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Best performance: Brock Peters as Tom Robinson

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962). Director: Robert Mulligan.

Small-town Southern lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), lives with his small daughter, "Scout" (Mary Badham of Let's Kill Uncle) and her slightly older brother, Jem (Phillip Alford), and their black part-time housekeeper, Calpurnia (Estelle Evans). The children are obsessed with a never-seen neighbor "Boo" Radley (Robert Duvall), who leaves them little trinkets in the hole of a tree and is said to be crazy. Atticus begins getting threats from the townspeople when he decides to defend a black man named Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), who has been accused of rape by the neurotic Mayella Ewell (Collin Wilcox) -- in court it becomes very clear that Robinson is innocent but racism must have its day. At the end of the film the two storylines -- Boo and Robinson -- come together when the childrens' lives are threatened and they have an unexpected savior. While it's easy to see why many people love this picture, it does have more than its share of problems and has not worn well with time. For one thing the movie, while admirably against racism, is awfully self-conscious and self-congratulatory, almost as if it were putting out a sign saying "Important, Socially-Aware Film Here. Don't You Dare Criticize!" [For the record, To Kill a Mockingbird is hardly the first film to deal with racism. In This Our Life, which was also based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and was made twenty years earlier, also had a black man -- the first non-domestic positive black character in a Hollywood film -- wrongly accused of a crime.] Elmer Bernstein's musical score does a lot of the work for this movie, and is quite good, although at times it is also positively cloying. Badham, Alford and John Megna as their friend, Dill (said to be based on novelist Harper Lee's friend, Truman Capote) are all marvelous child actors, and there are other good performances in the film. Peck won an Oscar (as did Badham) and while the role of Addicus is in his range (unlike the sexy bad boy in Duel in the Sun), he perhaps underplays too much, hardly giving the kind of impassioned speech that might have gotten through to the jurors. Admittedly Addicus (at least in the film) may be mild-mannered, but Peck almost makes him wimpy. While we're on the subject of racism, the very talented Brock Peters is superior to Peck in his brief scenes, but he never got an Oscar nod as supporting player, making the whole project seem hypocritical to say the least. [Although it could be argued that it is not the fault of the filmmakers if the Academy was behind the times.] On the plus side, Robert Mulligan's direction is generally assured, and Russell Harlan's cinematography is superb. The kids calling their father "Addicus" instead of "Dad" is never explained and becomes irritating very quickly. Since its publication in 1960 people have been debating whether Harper Lee's source novel is great literature or just a young adult novel with socially significant themes. Mulligan also directed Fear Strikes Out and many others.

Verdict: A painfully obvious message movie that was notable in its day. **1/2.