It's Still The Same Old Story (Malaya, 1949)

I wrote this post about Malaya, a 1949 film from MGM that featured Sydney Greenstreet in his final film role, for David Cairns' The Late Show: The Late Movies Blogathon, which can be found at his excellent blog on another network, Shadowplay. Make sure you head on over there to see all the entries. Thanks to David for letting me contribute!

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Let me set the scene a little bit. In 1948, James Stewart made Rope; in 1950, he was in Harvey and Winchester '73. Spencer Tracy appeared in Adam's Rib in 1949 and Father of the Bride in 1950. In between all of that, of course, they both appeared in Malaya (MGM, 1949).

"Hold on," you say. "What do you mean, 'of course'? I've never heard of Malaya." Well, you caught me - Malaya is no Adam's Rib. It's more the kind of movie you might find as you flip through the channels on your hotel's T.V., but that said, I think it's one I'd stay and watch the rest of. This is why I haven't been as exhaustive as I perhaps should have been here - I want to leave something for your to discover on your own!

From Variety, 1949:

Malaya is a pulp-fiction, wartime adventure yarn, based on a factual incident early in the fighting, that takes the customer for a pretty fancy chimerical flight.

Kickoff for the story is tied to a letter from President Roosevelt to Manchester Boddy, LA newspaper publisher, concerning the government’s need to obtain rubber during the war.

James Stewart plays a roaming newspaper reporter who promises to steal rubber for his government, which supplies him with ships for transporting and gold for bribing. He effects the release from prison of Spencer Tracy to aid in the daring adventure.

Tracy and Stewart are at home in their toughie roles. Valentina Cortese appears very well as a jungle torch singer in the Malayan saloon. Sydney Greenstreet’s character of a sharp operator, wise in the ways of man, comes over excellently.

Now that that's over with...

Stewart is cast as almost a hard-boiled character here. I can see the part of newspaperman John Royer being played by Humphrey Bogart, and played much better, too - Stewart is too soft-spoken and too gangly to really pull off Royer's slightly aggressive insouciance. Royer doesn't really seem like a Jimmy Stewart kind of guy, especially when you remember the films that bookend Malaya in Stewart's filmography - the ultimately shocked and ashamed instigator of murder in Rope, the kind Elwood of Harvey, the moral cowboy of Winchester '73. "He's got a thing in here, a coil, instead of a heart," Spencer Tracy's morally flexible Carnaghan says of Royer before they leave for Malaya. "Keeps his blood cold all the time." But, really, it's so hard to imagine Stewart as coldblooded, and unpleasant, too; but Royer is, as Carnaghan says, "taking this all pretty seriously," and it boxes in Stewart the actor.

That seriousness leads to my next point: that though it was made in 1949, Malaya is very much a World War II-era film. It has a very propagandistic element to it, from the prominently displayed war effort posters to Royer's being constantly reminded to get a draft card and go enlist in the Marines. Royer is, we understand from the opening exposition (supplied by a stand-in for the story's inspiration, Manchester Boddy, played by Lionel Barrymore, and the generally extraneous federal lawman Kellar) a somewhat mercenary newspaperman with a bit of a checkered past, legally and romantically. But though he seems reluctant to go get that draft card, he has a terrifically patriotic idea: to get rubber out of Malaya right from under the noses of the occupying Japanese. Kellar, or someone, pulls some strings and gets Royer's old "buddy" (you'll hear this word a lot in the film) Carnaghan out of Alcatraz, and they go off to Malaya.

There's an essential tension established early on. Royer, despite his film noir-ish characterization, is by-the-book; he always wants to look at a map, or stop displaying public affection with Italian saloon singers (despite actually being Italian, Valentina Cortese's Italian accent sounds like a put-on). Carnaghan, on the other hand, wants to "take it easy." It's all in service of a moral lesson - Royer's brother died on Wake Island, and he took this rubber job not for money, but for human decency. Carnaghan is in it for the gold, but as his final shot shows (spoiler alert, he smiles as he watches a Japanese battleship get blown up by a PT boat), the events of the film have an effect on him.

This moral lesson makes sense. In 1949, the U.S. was fighting a war that was really the first of the messy wars, the conflict in Korea. Our involvement in Korea was confusing to Americans, the stakes seemed removed from daily life; and, of course, there were complex political reasons to involve ourselves that didn't really include Freedom and Democracy in the way they had back in 1941. But the war needed to be supported, and what you see is a lot of World War II movies being made. "Remember what that war was like?" these moves seem to ask. "Noble, self-sacrificing?" Cough cough, hint hint. It's an interesting example of subliminal messaging, really. As the Dutchman says in this film, "There have always been wars, this is another."

Together again: Maltese Falcon and Casablanca co-stars Bogart and Greenstreet appear in the New York Times in February 1950 in publicity shots for two World War II films.

I mentioned earlier that I think Bogart would have done a better job with Stewart's character. The specter of Bogart hangs over this film mainly because of Sydney Greenstreet. Malaya  was Greenstreet's final film role - he continued to act in radio as Nero Wolfe. Greenstreet's two most famous performances are in Bogart's films, and it is perhaps the curse of his career that this makes the viewer naturally seek out similarities to those earlier movies watching any of Greenstreet's other films.

Here, the similarities are to Casablanca. Greenstreet is "The Dutchman," and his saloon in Malaya is essentially Rick's Cafe, with gambling tables, a pianist (and standard from the Great American Songbook - "Blue Moon"), a bar, and tensions between the customers and owner and an occupying Army - here, the Japanese. Colonel Tomura, played by the Hawaiian-born Chinese-American actor Richard Loo, gambles at the Dutchman's saloon, which I suppose makes him Captain Renault in this equation, although he's also Major Strasser. Gilbert Roland, playing our heroes' connection to the anti-Japanese resistance, would probably be Laszlo (or at least Laszlo-ish).

Greenstreet's Dutchman is Signor Ferrari, complete with gleeful giggle, erudite grammar and precise, yet somewhat blubbery, diction. He has some good lines - "That might be even more expensive than dangerous," he says of the rubber smuggling plan - but the part is essentially a retread of a typecast, with more screen time. It's a shame that Greenstreet didn't have the opportunity to really break out of his one role, as a corpulent, well-spoken slimeball, in the public imagination. His acting is as good here as it was in earlier films - Greenstreet wouldn't die until 1954 - but we've seen it all before. In that way, Malaya is really an insult. Greenstreet played other characters (including William Makepeace Thackeray), but he had to go out on a one-note.

At one point in the film, Tracy's Carnaghan says, "I can't stand those shut-in places." Indeed, Tracy seems to be pushing on the walls of Malaya, trying to find something more interesting than the character and the lines he's been given. But he also doesn't seem to care - he knows, despite his love subplot with Luana the singer and his time in center frame, that this movie isn't about character. It's about selling an idea. Stewart approaches his lines with singleminded determination, and one gets the sense that it's because he feels it's the right thing to do.

There is a welling power to a film like Casablanca, a film made in 1942 that really had something to say about the effects of war on complicated people who try to pretend that they're in simple situations; Malaya gives us simple people in an all too complicated scenario. The Dutchman is a complex character, one trying to survive between a rock and a hard place. The same could be said of Ferrari, or Kasper Gutman; but unlike those earlier characters, Greenstreet's Dutchman has no accompanying complexity to play off of, no Sam Spade or Rick to dance with. Ultimately, the Dutchman, like the film, falls flat. When he speaks cynically of "cementing his friendship" with Tomura by giving him bribes, one feels it's just because that's what a Sydney Greenstreet character does, not because that's what the Dutchman must do in this story. Greenstreet made the original mold for a character like the Dutchman; here, he's trapped in it.

By the end, Carnaghan has escaped this film. He refuses the medal he earned with his actions, sending it back with the message, "Pin it on the Dutchman." Royer is out of the picture (I'll leave it at that), and Carnaghan is finally free with his improbable soulmate. The Dutchman is left alone. He proudly shows the medal to his cockatoo, who laughs at him; Greenstreet mugs as the screen fades to black. His final words on film are, "Good night." His co-stars have escaped - Stewart to Hitchock and Westerns, his acclaimed second act; Tracy to Hepburn and white-haired elder statesmanship. Greenstreet is stuck in his white suit, with his gurgling chuckle and his wide stomach; still in Casablanca.

Plus:

- Greenstreet plays Thackeray in Devotion, which is also a "last film," as Montagu Love died three years before this film, featuring his final role, was released. Perhaps next year...

- Twelve O'Clock High was another World War II film made at the height of the Korean conflict. I'm sure there are more (besides Chain Lightning, the minor Bogart film publicized in the New York Times clipping).

- James Stewart is well-known as a highly decorated Army, and then Air Force, pilot who rose to the rank of Brigadier General before his retirement, but his co-star Gilbert Roland also served in the Army Air Corps during World War II.

- Valentina Cortese, who played the inexplicably smitten Luana, later won an Academy Award for Truffaut's Day For Night. She was also in The Barefoot Contessa and some other notable films.

- DeForest Kelley, best known for Star Trek, had an early role here as "Lieutenant Glenson," though his scenes were cut from the final film.