A couple of double features.

Trucks. We watched Jonathan Hensleigh’s The Ice Road (2021) the other night and it brought to mind its original, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear (1953), and so we re-watched that film too. What differentiates the two films? Well one takes place in northern Manitoba in April and the other takes place in some unnamed torrid zone. One is about graft, corruption, and greed involving diamond mining and the other is about graft, corruption, exploitation, and greed involving oil drilling and extraction. One has trucks that at any minute can sink through the ice into a couple hundred feet of water and the other has trucks that carry a lethal load of nitroglycerin. One has a character who sets out to sabotage the journey and the other has a character who is simply not suited to the job. One has Liam Neeson and the other has Yves Montand. One is in colour, the other in black and white. They differ in their endings, one having a typical Hollywood ending and the other having an ironic ending more suited to the characters. Both have tension. Clouzot’s film is justly admired for its thrill ride, filmed at a time when CGI could not help make things look believable. It has something of the “feel” of John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), although the characters have an insouciance, especially at the beginning, that the characters in the other films lack. As a coda, I might add that the story has been filmed at least once more in William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977).

 

Two from writer/director Preston Sturges: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) and The Palm Beach Story (1942). The first of these takes Capra’s small-town America and gives it a twirl so that it lands on its head. The kerfuffle over pre-marital sex and a pregnancy out of wedlock may seem quaint now, but Sturges is taking aim at the production code instituted in the early 30s. His screenplay incorporates words taken from correspondence with the Hollywood censor, Joseph Breen. Sturges satirizes family, marriage, politics (McGinty makes an appearance, that McGinty from Sturges’s 1940 film, The Great McGinty), and small-town life. The action is zany, the plot convoluted, the female lead’s name, Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) is wry, and the whole concoction delightful. The Palm Beach Story also satirizes marriage. Here we have a devoted couple who are down on their luck. The wife (Claudette Colbert) decides to divorce her husband (Joel McCrea) in order to help him get on with his dream of building an experimental airport landing area. She finds a wealthy bachelor (Rudy Vallee) she woos in order have him fund her “ex-husband’s” airport. Of course, we have the familiar screwball mix-ups and misunderstandings and dialogue that overlaps and silliness laced with slapstick. In these films, Sturges brings together silent era physical comedy with 30s screwball plots and dialogue. The first of these films, Morgan’s Creek, takes the war for its background, but Palm Beach Story, made at the beginning of America’s engagement in the war, offers nary a trace of soldiers or America’s participation in the European or South Pacific theatres.