One of my favorite elements of Saboteur is the sequence where Cummings is riding with the performers on a circus train - and scriptwriter Parker uses each sideshow freak to espouse a different take on the Nazis and whether the U.S. should get involved in the Troubles in Europe. In so doing, Parker & Hitchcock transformed these figures into a movie editorial cartoon - in a period when our public officials were still saying that Germany was not our concern. . .
YES! I meant to include a comment on that scene, which I liked for the sheer oddness of it in the context of the movie...and it didn't occur to me that one, Parker wrote it and two, it was a comment on reactions to Nazi Germany. Thanks for mentioning that to me, it makes that scene even more interesting for sure!
My favorite scene in "Carnival of Souls" is where the heroine is playing lovely music on the organ in church, but her playing gradually becomes more and more intense and abstract, and finally the priest kicks her out - FOR PLAYING IN THE KEY OF SATAN!!!
that is a great scene--just a few words from "fascist midget" with a mustache accomplishes everything that Chaplin wasted an entire film on just a year earlier...
on Cummings--it's true, he's oddly upbeat throughout these proceedings, but I really like that about his performance! I have a strange relationship to Hitchcock, I guess... I mean, I like his movies a lot, but his aesthetic is almost as antagonistic to my beloved Capra/Cassavettes school of filmmaking as Kubrick's... "Actors are cattle" is no joke--the man really meant it--and I don't like to see the herd go quietly to the slaughter (that's why Shadow of A Doubt is by far my favourite of the Master's films--it's Hitch vs. the Our Town players, and they battle to a stand-still!)
Saboteur isn't quite in SOAD's league, but the performative quirks really stand out in the director's streamlined oeuvre... all of this is just to say: "If you know you're just a compositional element in a series of set-pieces, don't ever take your plight too seriously" And Cummings doesn't--but he's not mugging either. Every bemused grin deconstructs the thriller genre. Cummings is a damned underrated actor, if you ask me--he's also great as a proto-Peter Parker in Kings Row.
Dave
I can't really comment further on Cummings; I haven't seen many of his other films...unless it was an airing of an old Bob Cummings Show rerun. I remember him from Beach Party, where he was doing pretty much straight comedy, and he was good there. I'd like to see Kings Row sometime, and after consulting IMDb, I'd like to see the film he did with Dean Martin, Paul Newman, Shirley MacLaine, Gene Kelly and others- What A Way To Go!.
I suppose that Hitch was OK with Cummings' portrayal, can't see him keeping it if he wasn't. It just really stood out to me as I watched. In his defense, I don't think Cooper would have been much better!
he used him again too--in Dial M For Murder--a fairly lame film in which the actor plays a similar kind of antagonist role vis-a-vis the director... whenever things get too tense, we just know that Cummings is going to start musing his way toward a way out of the dilemma... But Kings Row man! That's a genius movie! Cummings is also great in Dieterle's bizarre The Accused (194
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Dave
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