The Talk of the Town, Fury, The Great McGinty, The Sea Hawk, & The Street with No Name

The Talk of the Town really doesn't quite match the title. Is anyone seriously talking about Cary Grant running from a lynch mob? And Jean Arthur and Cary Grant and Ronald Coleman are all well and good, but who eats borscht? It lost me with that, but the whole thing just seemed over the top, and not in the good screwball way. The debating scenes were just boring. Too much political diatribe, not enough comedy.

Fury is another film about a guy hiding from a lynch mob that took a very different approach. Too bad it suffered from the inability of the code to accept that a hero can be evil. Because man, I didn't want Spencer Tracy to be at all good. I wanted him to be an avenging angel, exterminating those who wanted to railroad him. I bet the original script had him painted in more shades of gray, maybe even made him evil. Because that would have made me like the film, rather than just have been bored with it. Well, not bored, because there were some good scenes, but it doesn't work as good as it should have.

The Great McGinty doesn't work as well as later Preston Sturges films, but really what does work as well as... well, any of the films he made over the next couple of years? The film has a place in any film lovers heart, because it allowed Sturges to make his later films, plus it helped to create the writer-director, which gave us such great cinematic geniuses as David Lynch, David Cronenberg, and Edward Burns. Brian Donlevy is great as the corrupt beggar, voter, and politician who gets a conscience and suffers his downfall for that reason. It's still a funny film, and all, but it's short and really feels it.

The Sea Hawk is worth it just for Claude Rains as a Spaniard. Who knew? Well, the swashbuckling is a little on the eh side, not nearly as good as some of Flynn's other works, like, ummm, his prodigious sexual appetites. And the expression "In like Flynn", and being responsible for one of the good songs on Combat Rock, in a roundabout way (his son was the Sean Flynn of the song, and who attended Duke University). The film itself is a weird combination of one that goes on far too long, and doesn't do enough. Or maybe I just couldn't pay attention to the boring bits.

The Street with No Name is no good. It's a "realistic" film noir, but it doesn't work nearly as well, as other docudramas of the era, like Call Northside 777. And Mark Stevens was a stuffed shirt. The only thing at all worthwhile in the film is Richard Widmark, but he's far better in other films, like, ummm, his war or western films, or Pickup on South Street. Don't watch a bad film just because it has a good actor in it. I still haven't quite learned that lesson. And don't even get me started on those scenes at the FBI. Such a waste of time.