Surprisingly good acting: Oscar Wilde, The Nun's Story, Man Hunt, Ride the High Country, The Moon and Sixpence

I watched The Nun's Story (1959) last night. I was expecting it to be mawkish and sentimental, awash with heavenly choirs and phony piety, and I doubted I'd get through 150 minutes of it without a lot of fast-forwarding. But I watched every damned minute of it - and loved every damn minute of it. I was expecting Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans, Peter Finch and Dean Jagger to be good - which they all were - but I doubted whether Audrey Hepburn could carry that much weight on her delicate shoulders. She smashed it for six. The fact that her ethereal, almost asexual, angelic beauty was actually enhanced by her nun's cowl helped - but in the end it was her ability to convey Sister Luke's continual struggle with the vow of obedience that made the film work (that, and Fred Zinnemann's masterly, unflashy, tasteful direction). Here's the official trailer:

I'd always viewed Audrey Hepburn as a beautiful, elfin creature who the camera loved - but, given the right part and the right director, she could really act. Similarly, I've always treated Robert Morley as a bit of a fruity joke, but having recently seen him as Charles James Fox in Young Mr. Pitt, and, last week, as Oscar Wilde in the 1960 film of that name, I have to admit that the fat man could do the business.

Oscar Wilde was overshadowed at the time of its release by the same year's far more lavishly appointed The Trials of Oscar Wilde, starring Peter Finch, with Lionel Jeffries offering his entertaining, over-the-top portrayal of Bosie's dad, the demented Marquess of Queensbury, as some sort of aristocratic gangster.  I've always enjoyed The Trials, but Oscar Wilde is the better film, mainly because Morley is a far more convincing Wilde (Finch was too slim and handsome), Wilde's relationship with the appalling Lord Alfred Douglas is more believable, Edward Chapman (Mr. Grimsdale of Norman Wisdom fame) is less of a pantomime villain Queensbury - and Ralph Richardson does an absolutely superb turn as Sir Edward Carson, the barrister who utterly destroys Wilde in court. The whole film is available on YouTube:

Commenter SDG recently recommended Ride the High Country (1962) on this blog. I followed his advice and watched it last week on TCM. It's a Sam Peckinpah western, set in the early years of the 20th Century, when old cowboys like Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott are finding it hard to earn a living. Scott has been reduced to passing himself off as a legendary gunslinger, and McCrea takes a job transporting a shipment of gold from a mine high in the mountains back to town through bandit country. McCrea hires his old chum Randy and Randy's young sidekick to help him - little realising that Scott intends stealing the gold, with or without his help. 

It's not a comedy, but there's humour in it, mainly derived from its underlying strain of affectionate parody. It's elegiac, but it doesn't lapse into rank sentimentality. There's violence, but not too much - this was well before Peckinpah had developed his addiction to slow-motion gorefests (and, in any case, he'd never have got away with that stuff in 1962). The widescreen, colour cinematography and the mountain landscapes are simply stunning. Joel McCrea is splendid as the honest, upstanding cowboy upholding the defunct Code of the West -  but, then, he was a greatly under-rated screen actor. It's Randolph Scott - old Stone-Face himself - who's the real surprise, evidently having a whale of a time in his last film (he was a canny businessman, and retired to enjoy his wealth) playing a once-decent man made bitter by a modern world that has little use for him. Very highly recommended. Here's the trailer:

I put off watching Fritz Lang's Man Hunt, a 1941 film version of Geoffrey Household's book, Rogue Male, about a British big-game hunter who stumbles upon Hitler's mountain retreat, and is tempted to  assassinate the swine, only to be disturbed and arrested as he lines up the shot. I'd assumed Walter Pigeon would be too middle-aged and dozy to turn in a convincing performance as the virile, impulsive hunter - but, while the film would undoubtedly have benefitted from a younger star with a less cardigan-wearing, pipe-smoking image, Pigeon is actually pretty convincing. Here's the whole film:

The German officer who interrogates and subsequently pursues Walter Pigeon is played by George Sanders, who forsook his lounge-lizard persona - although not an iota of his habitual heartlessness - to play Charles Strickland in the the 1942 version of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, a novel very loosely based on the life of Paul Gaugin. 

Strickland is a dull London stockbroker who suddenly ups and deserts his wife and children to become a cruel, starving, sociopathic painter in, first, Paris, then Tahiti, where *SPOILER ALERT* he creates a savage masterpiece on the walls of his rickety dwelling, which - carrying out his instructions - his beautiful native wife (whom he genuinely loves) puts to the torch after he succumbs to leprosy. It's not a great film, but it's certainly watchable. The ever-dependable Herbert Marshall is the Somerset Maugham figure who, despising Strickland's character but appreciating his genius, flits in and out of the artist's sordid, chaotic life at intervals. But it's Sanders who surprises: his success at conveying Strickland's wildness, viciousness and obsessiveness makes the character believable (which is more than Maugham managed to do). I was already a George Sanders fan - but I'm an even greater one now. The full  film's available on YouTube (albeit with Spanish - or something along those lines - subtitles):