Black and white films are interesting because they reduce the distraction of color so the eye can focus clearly on character and detail. Dialogue becomes that much more important. Here's a couple more b&w films that I've taken a gander at:
Rita Tushingham as Jo has a fling with Paul Danquah in A Taste Of Honey-- ah, young love.
A Taste of Honey (1961)
Lest you think my taste runs only to French nouvelle vague, take a gander at this, the source of that fun little Herb Alpert horn ditty . Counter to the jauntiness of that tune, A Taste of Honey is part of what was known as Britain's "kitchen sink" domestic dramas of the '50s, in which the lives of working class Brits are depicted in all their unglamorous grittiness. The style was a break from the upper-crust dramas and drawing-room comedies of Noel Coward in merry olde England. This story was notable for having been penned by an 18-year-old, Shelagh Delaney, and directed by Sir Tony Richardson (husband to Vanessa Redgrave and father to actresses Joely and the late Natasha Richardson (wife of Liam Neeson)).
Here, a young working class British lass named Jo, raised in a broken home by an alcoholic "good time girl" mom who frequently neglects her, struggles to finish high school and then stand on her own two feet apart from her mother's haphazard lifestyle. By chance she meets and has an affair with a Black sailor off a boat docked nearby. He ships out, and she's left knocked up with a brown baby. Shocking! Meanwhile, fast-pants Mum marries her latest swain and goes off, leaving Jo to her own devices.
The rest of the film follows Jo's travails as she tries to create a support system of sorts, getting a job in a shoe shop and befriending a young man whom she eventually learns is gay. Their friendship weathers that storm of revelation and soon she invites the young man to live with her in the tumbledown attic apartment she's found. As she awaits the baby's birth, it seems her pal is ready to be a surrogate father and her neighbors will be the makeshift relatives, and things seem to be going well, considering. But out of the blue, here comes Jo's half-drunken tart of a mom, freshly ditched by Romeo, to muck things all up to hell with her bigotry and self-centeredness. As the film closes, Jo happily awaits the birth, still oblivious to all she has just lost because of her mom.
We don't know what happens to Jo after the baby comes, but the film makes clear the distinctions between the family we are born to and the family we choose. We know Jo's struggles are about to ramp up again in a seemingly endless cycle.
The film is unique in its time for its frank treatment of interracial relationships and sexuality.
A Man Named Adam (1966)
There are only a handful of big screen performances by Sammy Davis Jr., and most of them are not in starring roles. Here he is the lead as Adam Johnson, a self-indulgent, womanizing, alcoholic jazz trumpeter who tries the patience of everyone around him, as he is determined to dig himself even deeper into oblivion. Nobody likes an angry black man, and in 1965, with integration still a new concept in the country, he is liked even less.
But he has much to be angry and bitter about: the country's persistent divide on race relations, which have some welcoming him with open arms and others heaping him with abuse. This is a man sickened by the pressures of American race relations. As it turns out, he has even more of a reason to be an asshole: A racist incident that put him behind the wheel in a drunken car accident years before in which he lost his wife and young son. But Adam's wallowing in grief and anger causes him to bite every hand that is held out to him, including that of selfless non-violent civil rights activist Cicely Tyson, at her most gorgeous in a short natural and barely any makeup. Tyson's character tries hard to calm the storm raging inside of Adam, but he cannot contain his justifiable anger at the slights angled his way.
The flick is notable for the appearances of Lola Falana as a flight attendant pickup, Ossie Davis as Adam's friend, Good Times actors Ja'Net DuBois as a former girlfriend and Johnny Brown as a blind pianist, Rat Packer Peter Lawford as an agent, Louis Armstrong as a successful bandleader, Frank Sinatra Jr. as Adam's young trumpet protégé, and velvet-voiced jazzbo Mel Torme as ... Mel Torme. It's a bumpy film, an awkward snapshot of a man spiraling to certain self-destruction that no one seems to know how to stop. While the characters are left to cluck over the dirty shame that is Adam's life, the audience knows that even today this is a fate that too often befalls African American men.
William in Green Dolphin Street: "Got me a wife and kid -- granted, not the wife I intended to have, but who's quibbling?"
Green Dolphin Street (1947)
I'm a sucker for old-style melodramas, I guess because I try to keep my own emotions under wraps most of the time. The more dramatic a story, the more attuned I become. These type of films are only successful through careful direction and acting, and Green Dolphin Street definitely has those. This is a classic Hollywood book-to-film costume saga with star turns from Lana Turner, Van Heflin, Donna Reed, then-newcomer Richard Hart and a slew of stock Hollywood character actors like Gladys Cooper, Edmund Gwenn, Dame May Whitty, Frank Morgan, and Reginald Owen.
Set in 1840, starting in England's Channel Islands and ranging all the way to the South Seas, the story turns on one basic tragic mistake: a slip of the pen. To grasp the import of this, you really have to understand how limited communication was in those days -- without phones, international mail could take weeks or months to arrive -- and circumstances for both the writer and the recipient could change completely within that time. You also have to understand how few life choices there were for middle class white women (all women, really) in the 19th century. If a young woman married well -- into a family of wealth and or position -- she could expect to live a decent life. If she married poorly, she could be guaranteed a life of struggle but at least she would have her husband and children for company. If no suitor came along, the woman was destined to live at the whim of her family, to whom she was likely a financial burden, a source of public shame, and likely a servant/caretaker. The only other honorable choice was to devote herself to a life of service in the Lord. A single woman who dared to travel alone, have a career, or sample more than a few love affairs would have been considered at best low class or at worst, a common prostitute. To the merchant class of that time, a young woman had few options and the best was marriage.
The lively and lovely Patourel girls, Marianne and Marguerite, are in the market for a successful beau who can keep them in the style of their shipping magnate father. Both meet the handsome and rakish trader William Ozanne, and both are smitten. William has eyes for the good and humble Marguerite, and noting this, conniving Marianne convinces him to join the Navy to give her more time to work her charms on him. He enlists and soon leaves on a trading trip to China with the platoon but gets drunk, is rolled by locals, and misses his boat. Now MIA from the Navy, William has to make a run for it or face courtmartial and disgrace. He turns up in New Zealand, helping to colonize a tough landscape alongside his friend Tim Haslam. After bending everyone's ear about the love he left behind, Tim encourages him to write and propose marriage. In a drunken spree, William takes up paper and ink. Except he addresses the letter to the wrong sister!
Feisty and scheming Marianne is jubilant when she receives the letter. She defies her parents and sails off to the wilds of New Zealand, while her poor dejected sister surrenders herself to the local convent. When Marianne arrives, William is too noble/stupid/aghast to admit his mistake, and the two are soon married. They have to learn how to live together, work a lumber operation, get along with the local Maoris, not perish in the heat, and survive a spectacularly filmed earthquake and tidal wave (it won best special effects at the Oscars). As Marianne comes to know Tim Haslam better, she soon falls for him, even as she gives birth to William's child. She discovers soon enough that it was Marguerite William wanted all along, but they have made their bed and must lie in it. The irony is that not only did Marianne marry the wrong man for the wrong reasons, she is repeating the fate of her own mother, who chose the rich Octavius Patourel as a husband over the love of her life, Edmund Ozanne -- William's father. And in its final moments we get to see pictures of the saintly Marguerite, locked away in her nunnery, affirming to all that she is satisfied with the life given over to God.
How's that for a twisty story? Elizabeth Goudge, author of the original novel, actually won an MGM Writers Prize for best original story. And as a side note: The movie's haunting theme, titled "On Green Dolphin Street," has become an enduring jazz standard that has been recorded by dozens, including Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughan.
