A near miss by King Vidor, this remarkable picture's 5-reel Kodascope cutdown is available on a very good Grapevine DVD, accompanied by an excellent music score by Blaine Gale. Actually, Gale provides two alternative scores. Noir in mood, the movie is so grippingly unusual that you'll want to play it twice, first with one score, then with the other. The main strike I have against the film is that it ends somewhat abruptly. No, "abruptly" isn't quite the right word. "Hurriedly" would be better. Yet, despite this unwelcome speed, Vidor (or Kodascope) find time for a lengthy farewell close-up of Harry Todd. Now right up to this very last shot, Todd has given us a very good performance and has mercifully restrained himself from his customary vice of blatant camera-hogging. Maybe Vidor made a deal with him: "Harry, restrain yourself and I'll reward you with a really lengthy close-up right at the end of the picture!" Whatever the deal, this concluding close-up is awful. It's way overdone. Just using the medium shot would have been quite sufficient. Todd's hammy close-up quite ruins the tempo, pace and appeal not only of the concluding scene but of the picture as a whole. In all other respects, what King Vidor presents to us here is a really astonishingly realistic movie with a most unusual yet really engrossing plot that dares to attack religious bogies (both the movie's visuals and especially its subtitles emphasize that the hero's prudishness is directly responsible for the death of Buddy's young mother), law enforcement officers, and even the Dickensian laws themselves (which remain both unchanged and unchallenged at the movie's close. There is a way out, of course, and no doubt this is detailed in Butler's novel. But it's not even hinted at in the movie as we see it today in its Kodascope cutdown). Even in the cutdown version, we are told no less than three times that the hateful Briggles receives a $20 bounty for each orphan he captures, on delivery to the jail – I mean the workhouse. No! No! The orphanage! How could I make such a mistake? Buddy's plight is too fresh in my mind, that's the trouble.
Review of The Jack-Knife Man
