Four Faces West (1948) + Blood on the Sun (1945) – DVDs

FOUR FACES WEST
*/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Joel McCrea, Frances Dee, Charles Bickford, Joseph Calleia
screenplay by C. Graham Baker, Teddi Sherman; adaptation: William Brent and Milarde Brent, based on the novel by Eugene Manlove Rhodes
directed by Alfred E. Green

BLOOD ON THE SUN
**½/**** Image F Sound B+
starring James Cagney, Sylvia Sidney, Porter Hall, John Emery
screenplay by Lester Cole, with additional scenes by Nathaniel Curtis
directed by Frank Lloyd

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Auteurism giveth, auteurism taketh away. It’s generally assumed that if we gravitate to the director with the greatest skill and the most obvious “personal” style, we will be doing ourselves a big cultural favour and putting ourselves on the side of the angels. And indeed, we generally strive for the power and aesthetic purity of those “originals,” as they give us the most pleasure. But if we declare–regardless of whether that personality has anything to say or says anything halfway coherent–that the only criterion of value in a film is a director’s personality, we will be shutting ourselves off from the other thing that artists do, which is interpreting the world for us. And sometimes lesser filmmakers take on subjects that great artists ignore–creating, if not brilliant analyses, something to stand for or against.

A couple of new no-name releases show us the pros and cons of non-auteurist filmmaking. Neither Alfred E. Green’s Four Faces West nor Frank Lloyd’s Blood on the Sun has any kind of distinguished profile: Both directors are excluded from Andrew Sarris’s canon, and, accordingly, neither film’s style will pique the interest of aesthetes and intellectuals. But while West shows the failure of a director to impose meaning on its material, Blood is crammed so full of fascinating (if wrongheaded) details about its time and place that it hardly matters that it lacks a director’s star turn.

Four Faces West has a basic moral dilemma that a better director might have fashioned into something solid. Its protagonist, Ross McEwen (Joel McCrea), has robbed a bank to assist his father; he intends to pay back every penny, of course, but in the meantime, he has to elude a posse led by none other than Pat Garrett himself (Charles Bickford). An intelligent director would have seized the possibilities in the story of a well-meaning bandit and his drift into criminality: he/she might have defined the meaning of a criminal, the distinction between that and the hero, and related back to the law that pursues him. And as he has a virtuous love interest (Frances Dee) to draw into his dark orbit, and a good-hearted gambler (Joseph Calleia) on his side further complicating matters, this might have been a truly complex film about the morality of crime and power.

Alas, the film was directed by Green, who takes everything for granted and reduces all narrative interest to a mere outline. There’s no such thing as a director with no point of view, but if there were, Green would surely be it: he’s catastrophically naïve in his total trust in the surface and blissfully unaware of anything that might lie beneath the surface. Thus we simply wait to see if McCrea will get out of his predicament, if he’ll get the girl despite his brush with ill behaviour, and if all will be right with the world. (Guess what the answers are.) The film can’t live up to its potential because there are no values or beliefs at stake, only stick figures and straw men, and by the end, we’re merely thankful to be rid of the shiny plastic people with whom Green has trapped us.

On the other side of the divide is Blood on the Sun, a bizarre attempt to reconcile “yellow peril” war propaganda with left-wing sympathy for those under the thumb of the Emperor. It doesn’t really succeed, hampered as it is by the constraints of studio and propaganda norms, but the attempt is interesting, and I doubt if the mere presence of a “personal” director would have made it more so. Concerning the adventures of a reporter (James Cagney) in the midst of pre-Pearl Harbor Japan, the film pits him against Tojo and Tanaka when a reporter friend is murdered and he acquires the documents for which his amigo was extinguished. This, naturally, leads to much intrigue and culminates in a sequence where Cagney takes on what looks like the entire Japanese military with his bare hands.

In brief, it’s a fascinating example of a production divided against itself. We’re supposed to believe that it stands for the freedom of China and, by extension, the Japanese who suffer under totalitarian rule (elements we can probably attribute to screenwriter Lester Cole, later one of the Hollywood Ten), yet the film is scrupulous in its efforts to ensure that no Chinese or oppositional Japanese will actually make it on screen–and that the “honolable sirs” and “velly solly“s fly fast and furious. It’s not creditable, and it doesn’t even get out of the soundstage, but it is a fiery smash-up of good intentions and bad faith, and there isn’t a director in the world who could keep it from doing otherwise.

THE DVDs
Artisan provides fair-to-disastrous treatment of the two films on DVD. Four Faces West just squeaks by–there’s a little print damage, and the fullscreen transfer is not heavy on fine definition, but the mise-en-scène isn’t that complex anyhow. The mono sound is undramatic but serviceable, though slightly dull and fuzzy in its rendering.

Alas, Blood on the Sun suffers the terrible indignity of being…colourized. Yes, the geniuses at either rights-owner Republic or distributor Artisan were lazy in their selection of the master and dug up the colourized number from 1993. (Strangely, the picture is billed as B&W on the packaging.) Not smart, people. If you can handle a peach-pink Cagney, you’ll be thrilled to know that you’ll at least be able to hear him with a minimum of hindrance in what’s labelled a Dolby Surround mix. The track hasn’t been especially gussied-up, and again, while it’s not very sharp sounding, it adequately does the job.

• Four Faces West
  89 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; DVD-5; Region One; Artisan
• Blood on the Sun
  94 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English Dolby Surround; CC; DVD-5; Region One; Artisan