Getting to Know “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison”

I suppose it’s part of some divine plan that I watched Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison on Good Friday. This 1957 film certainly reflects its era: it’s a widescreen romantic drama  populated by major stars (Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr), using World War II as a backdrop for a tale of love and sacrifice. One of its two central characters is a Roman Catholic nun, and formal religion is treated with all due respect. Sentimental? Yup—but also an appealing reflection of an era when (at least in theory) men were men, and women were decidedly not.

 Adapted from a popular novel by an Australian author, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, was directed as well as co-written for the screen by the great John Huston. His filmography was long and varied, but this film most reminds me of 1951’s The African Queen, which contains a similar sense of opposites attracting under dangerous circumstances. In The African Queen, a prissy missionary (Katharine Hepburn) and a rough-and-ready ship’s captain (Humphrey Bogart) bond while on a life-or-death wartime journey down an African river.

 Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is set in a similarly dangerous time and a similarly exotic place. It takes place on a small Pacific island during the later years of World War II. We open with a desperate American Marine, the only survivor of a Japanese attack, reaching the shore in a rubber raft. Fortunately, the enemy is not present. The island’s sole inhabitant turns out to be a pretty young British nun with her own tale of woe. The only surprise about this meet-cute is that Allison has no apparent beef against the Church, and from the start treats the coiffed and veiled sister with full respect. When it comes to survival tactics (like catching a giant sea turtle for dinner), he’s endlessly capable, and she’s hardy enough to go along with his every scheme. Once a Japanese squadron has returned to the island, Mitchum’s character manages a successful raid on their well-stocked pantry. In addition to canned goods, he comes back with bottles of sake, but then—thoroughly under the influence—makes the mistake of telling Sister Angela that he’s in love with her. Since she has not yet taken her final vows, anything is possible . . . but she flees into the night in total dismay.

Much of the film’s acclaim was directed toward Kerr’s performance as Sister Angela, for which she was Oscar-nominated. (The film’s other Oscar nom went toward its concise, impactful script.) In this era, Kerr was making something of a specialty of playing outwardly prim young women who harbor deep emotions beneath a ladylike surface. (See The King and I, Tea and Sympathy, Separate Tables, and of course From Here to Eternity.) During a long career, she was nominated for six Oscars, always as a leading lady. She never won, but thankfully was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1994 as “an artist of impeccable grace and beauty, a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance.” 

 I tend to associate Mitchum with film noir (like the classic Out of the Past). With his slightly dissolute look and manner, he could be terrifying, as in 1955’s Night of the Hunter. In Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, he’s brash and a bit crude, but there’s a gentle side to his character as well. The film’s ending certainly doesn’t leave us with any hints of  happily-ever-after. Yet this is a feel-good movie, one that seems to suggest that all things are possible. And I say Amen to that! 

 

 

 

 

Ascending the High Sierras: Bogart Died Here

Humphrey Bogart got second billing on High Sierra, but you’d never know it. When the Warner Bros. crime thriller was released in 1941, Bogart had already made a name for himself in cold-blooded killer roles, starting with the screen version of his electrifying performance in Broadway’s The Petrified Forest (1935), opposite good-guy Leslie Howard. But his studio already had George Raft, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson on its payroll, and for a time it seemed Bogart would never be anything but a sidekick.

 This all changed in 1941, with High Sierra, a novel adapted for the screen by his drinking buddy John Huston.  Fortunately for his career, Paul Muni, Raft, Cagney, and Robinson all turned down the part before it came to him. Bogey may have been billed second to Ida Lupino (playing a tough, loyal gal who’s been around the block a time or two), but the film is his story all the way. He plays yet another criminal, one who has just been released from prison and immediately returns to a life of thievery and worse. But his Roy “Mad Dog” Earle is a complicated man who is not without a soft side. Roy loves nature, and seems to yearn for the simple life he knew on the family farm back in Indiana. He also loves pretty women, whom he treats with a respect that borders on the courtly. And he also has great affection for animals, like the little dog who plays a key role in the plot. In the film, we don’t know quite why he has deviated from the straight and narrow path, but sense that there’s a concealed trauma behind his lawless ways.

 The film is full of action, including a deadly robbery at a swank hotel in a resort area that is clearly modeled after Palm Springs, California. It takes its title from a climactic shoot-out, with Bogart’s character perched high on a Sierra Nevada peak, as crowds of law enforcement and looky-loo types gather below. Because of the strictures spelled out in the infamous Production Code, we know that in movies of this era crime never pays, and so there’s no point in hoping for Roy Earle’s survival. Still, his character is so appealing that we can’t help wishing him well.

 I suspect the audiences of 1941 felt the same way. High Sierra became the pivotal film of Bogart’s career, the one that elevated him to leading-man status. Also in 1941 he graduated into the role of melancholy private detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, then followed this up  by playing Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. His unusual combination of toughness and softness made him a natural for film noir, but he also  revealed a memorable romantic side in Casablanca and, later, in The African Queen. And his real-life love story with actress Lauren Bacall, triggered by their on-screen chemistry in To Have and Have Not (1944) was fodder for fan magazines around the globe..

 High Sierra was not life-changing only for Bogart. John Huston, the son of a legendary actor, started out in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Beginning in 1930, he had ten screenplay credits before High Sierra, some on big-name pictures like Jezebel and Juarez. But after High Sierra, which was directed by action-specialist Raoul Walsh, Huston moved into the director’s chair, starting with The Maltese Falcon and continuing until 1987, when he directed a poignant adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead. The grand total for Huston as a director: 38 films in all, with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Moulin Rouge, and Prizzi’s Honor among them.

 

 

“Prizzi’s Honor”: Where Are They Now?

After The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) swept up every honor in sight, Hollywood couldn’t get enough of Italian-American mafioso types. But well before Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990, starring the late Ray Liotta) and TV’s The Sopranos (for six seasons, starting in 1999), came Prizzi’s Honor, directed by one of Hollywood’s oldest and feistiest lions. I’m talking about John Huston, responsible over the decades for such studio gems as The Maltese Falcon in 1941, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948, The African Queen in 1951, and The Man Who Would be King in 1975. As an actor, he also turned in an unforgettable performance as sinister tycoon Noah Cross in 1974’s Chinatown. Prizzi’s Honor was released in 1985, when Huston was almost eighty. It was his last film but one; he followed it up with a poignant adaption of a James Joyce story, The Dead, made as he approached his own death in 1987.

 Prizzi’s Honor, too, has its somber moments, but it is at base a comedy, if an extremely macabre one. Jack Nicholson, reuniting with Huston a decade after Chinatown, plays a Mafia hitman with a deep loyalty toward his ancient padrone. The latter, Don Corrado Prinzi, is vividly played by a sepulchral-looking, gravel-voiced William Hickey, who earned an Oscar nomination for this role. The body of the film starts, à la The Godfather, with an elaborate cathedral wedding scene in which an overblown bride is joined in holy wedlock to a shrimpy little groom, as a massive group of wiseguys looks on with approval. Nicholson’s Charley Partanna is one of them, cocky and slightly cynical about the world around him, but newly entranced by the unknown blonde in the balcony.

 That luscious lady in lavender is played by Kathleen Turner, just three years after she’d burst onto the screen as the dangerous Matty Walker in Body Heat. Svelte and blessed with an seductively throaty voice, she couldn’t be more enticing. Of course Charley is smitten, but the surprise is that she seems to be enraptured by him as well. Their coupling plays out both in New York and L.A. (lots of amusing shots of a now-defunct airline heading right to left, then left to right, across the screen). But who is this mysterious blonde, and what’s her game? The audience figures it out before Charley does. (He’s not too smart. She likes that in a man.) 

 Tension builds, as Charley’s love for Irene starts to interfere with his obligation toward the honor of the Prizzi family. All is resolved in a conclusion you won’t soon forget. This was a movie that was adored by critics, but perhaps less so by squeamish audiences. Though nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, it won only for Anjelica Huston’s supporting-actress turn as  Maerose Prizzi, the Mafia princess spurned by Charley and itching for revenge. Sweet revenge for Anjelica too: the talk had been that she was cast in the film only because she was Huston’s daughter and Nicholson’s girlfriend. Turning in a seethingly angry performance, she fooled them all.

 John Huston, of course, is long gone now. Jack Nicholson, once Hollywood’s favorite man- about-town, has not been on screen in a dozen years, and rumors fly abut his physical and mental state. Turner’s still working, notably in TV’s The Kominsky Method opposite Michael Douglas, but her svelte shape is long gone and her husky voice is now almost a baritone. Happily, Anjelica too remains active, though a lot of her recent work is in voiceover. Time is cruel in the entertainment biz.