Month: January 2020

TCM Watch: The Search (1948)

MONDAY, JANUARY 13 @ 08:00 PM (ET)

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Ivan Jandl is Karel Malik

The Search is really two parallel stories. Karel Malik (Ivan Jandl), separated from his mother at Auschwitz, wanders in post-war Germany. Meanwhile, his mother Hanna (Jarmila Novotna), also a survivor, faces the almost insurmountable task of locating him. Going from one relocation

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Jarmila Novotna is Hanna Malik

camp to another, looking into thousands of children’s faces. Despite false hopes dashed and an unconfirmed report of Karel’s death, she persists against daunting odds. Karel’s fortunes improve when he’s taken in by G.I. “Steve” Stevenson (Montgomery Clift in his first film role). Steve feeds and clothes Karel, and, lacking the ability to communicate with him, renames  him “Jim” and starts to teach him English. Believing Jim’s mother to have perished at Auschwitz, Steve begins making plans to legally adopt Jim and bring him home to the U.S.A. A happy ending seems unlikely.

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Montgomery Clift is Steve

The search is part of the sub-genre, known in German as Trümmerfilm, or  Rubble Film; films made on location in post-war Germany among the ruins.  Other American films include The Big Lift, Berlin Express, A Foreign Affair, I Was A Male War Bride, and The Third Man, all made between 1948 and 1950. Perhaps the beat description of the settings of these films is in the title of a Rossellini film: Germany Year Zero. These films deal variously with several issues, including political intrigue, the plight of a defeated people now facing hardship, the reconstruction of a destroyed society, and in this case, displaced persons. Interpersonal relationships between the occupiers and their vanquished subjects is a major theme in most of the Trümmerfilm. Friendship, distrust, resentment, romance, betrayal all play out in the ruins (usually of Berlin). Clift is the perfect image of occupation-force magnanimity. He takes Karel in (against the kid’s thrashing protest) and shows the kind of paternalistic care which the American public wanted to believe was representative of the occupation in general. 

There are several outstanding performances in The Search. Clift is very likable in his major film debut (he did appear in a 1939 made-for-TV version of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever). Jarmila Novotna has a garbo-like countenance, a certain aloof resignation; she knows her road is long. Being impressed with her performance and curious that I was basically unfamiliar with her work, I took a look and discovered that she was a major opera star of the mid 20th century. [INSERT “DUH” HERE].

I was also unfamiliar with Ivan Jandl, who was remarkable as Karel/Jim, and with good reason. Jandl won both a special Oscar and a Golden Globe for his performance in The Search, but was prevented by the Czech government from attending the award ceremony. The statuettes were eventually delivered to him in Prague, but he was prevented by the government from continuing his promising film career in Hollywood.  

TCM Watch: My Favorite Brunette (1947)

THURSDAY NIGHT, JANUARY 2 @ 01:00 AM (ET)

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Bob Hope, Dorothy :amour and Charles Dingle

This one is recommended for Bob Hope fans for sure. And for everybody else, hey, give it a try. Bob Hope is Ronnie Jackson, a child portrait photographer who daydreams about becoming a private eye like Sam McCloud down the hall (Alan Ladd in a cameo appearance). Through a series of misunderstandings, Jackson becomes involved in espionage, murder, and a certain amount of mayhem. If this sounds like familiar territory-well, My Favorite Blonde worked so well five years earlier that Paramount couldn’t resist. The Nazis are here replaced by more generalized bad guys and Madeleine Carroll’s blonde is replaced by Dorothy Lamour’s brunette, and you know the rest.

My Favorite Brunette is a send-up of the film noir private eye films which were all the rage by 1947. There’s the first-person voice-over, the attempt at hard-boiled dialogue, and the requisite woman of mystery. Unfortunately, he nearly chokes on the obligatory shot of whiskey.  

The film begins on death row, with Jackson facing execution. His comment upon viewing the death chamber, “Gas. Haven’t even put in electricity,” sets the tone. Hope’s comic persona is on full display. He’ll make a bold statement, and then throw shade on it, undercutting his own bravado in the same sentence. Early in the film, trying to pump up his confidence in his ability to be a gumshoe, he declares “It only took brains, courage, and a gun. And I had the gun.” 

Bob Hope had a long and varied career. He began in radio in 1934, moving to television when it came along, making appearances and doing specials, for decades. He started doing USO shows for the Armed Forces in 1941, and continued for over thirty years. He

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Hope and would-be femme fatale Lamour

signed his first movie contract with Paramount in 1938, and his film career took off in 1940, when he was teamed with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour in Road to Singapore, the first of seven “Road” pictures produced over the next 22 years.

The supporting cast includes Peter Lorre playing a caricature of his sleazy weasel roles, John Hoyt as the sinister doctor, Charles Dingle as the head

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John Hoyt, Peter Lorre, Lon Chaney Jr., Bob Hope

of the espionage ring, played with a creepy joviality, and Lon Chaney doing a good imitation of his “Lennie” from 1939’s Of Mice and Men (at one point, Jackson offers to buy him a rabbit if he’s agreeable.) And there’s a very humorous cameo at the end which of course I won’t spoil.