WHY GIRLS LEAVE HOME (1945)

 

8.5.5

“C’mon Diana, make with the tonsils.”

Believed to be a lost film for decades, 1945’s Why Girls Leave Home recently became findable for those who know where to look for such things. I’ve been after for it for 25 years. And guess what? It’s a bona fide film noir. It’s not in any of the film noir books or on any of the film noir lists—because nobody has seen it. Were it not for a pair of Oscar nominations (score and song) it likely never would have resurfaced. 

Make no mistake, this is Poverty Row stuff. But as far as PRC trash goes, it’s pretty good. Not Detour good, but good enough to hold me tight for better than an hour. I’m a fan of director William Berke—Cop Hater (1958) was one of the very first movies I wrote up here, all the way back in November of 2008. Berke did a bunch of diggable B crime pics: Pier 23 (1951), FBI Girl (1951), Waterfront at Midnight (1948), and Shoot to Kill (1947).

Lola Lane

Berke’s predominantly female cast is stellar: Lola Lane gets top billing and the juiciest part, though not the lead. Never as famous as her A-list sister Priscilla, Lola nevertheless appeared in more than forty movies (including a few big studio hits) before taking a powder in 1946. This was her next to last picture—she makes the most of it. The girl on that sexy one sheet is actually lead actress Pamela Blake, a steady presence throughout Tinsel Town’s double-bill era and probably best known as the kitten-hating cleaning lady who famously takes one in the kisser from Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire. Constance Worth is fine as the best friend and Claudia Drake is even better here than she was in Detour. (No, not her. Drake was the girl Tom Neal was trying to get to, not the one he was trying to get away from.

Pamela Blake

The men hold their own. Sheldon Leonard does his regular thing and so does Elisha Cook Jr.—except Cook does it and then some. His sleazy performance is the best piece of evidence that this movie has been buried deep since it last aired on small screens during Ike’s first term. If anyone had actually ever seen this, especially film noir folk, they’d still be talking about Cook’s work. Just as he’d done the year before in Phantom Lady, Cook plays a pasty white hepcat—except with a clarinet this time. Get a load of this boast: “Yeah, Benny Goodman’s pretty good, but I think I’m a little deeper in the groove.”  Pamela White must agree. She bounces up and down through a late night “jam session” just like a poor man’s Ella Raines. It’s not the musical numbers where Cook scores this time around though, it’s with the girls. He’s a straight-up predator, of the type seemingly unique to the City of Angels, where fresh-faced cheesecake with canary dreams arrive by the busload. He’s a scumbag worthy of Ellroy; the fake-tough innocence of Wilmer Cook is long gone.

Perhaps I should set the story? Diana Leslie (Blake) doesn’t like it at mother and daddy’s place. It’s too cooped up and the neighborhood stinks these days. She was tired of doing without during the Depression, now she’s tired of doing without during the war. She’s young, she’s bored, she can sing a little, and clothes look good on her—why shouldn’t she go out and make a few bucks if she can, and maybe even have a good time doing it? She wants money. She wants things. She wants…a career. 

Diana’s hipster boyfriend (Cook)‚ a 4F if ever there was one, thinks there might be something for her at the Kitten Club. Her family thinks she’s all wet: “Listen, you’re only my kid sister, but I don’t like you hanging out with those jive jumpers,” her older brother sneers, right before he slaps her face for having a mind of her own. That’s the last straw; Diana bolts. Next thing she knows she’s warbling at the Kitten Club. Between numbers she plays “hostess,” luring out of town squares into the back room where they get fleeced at the roulette tables. The club’s merely a front, illicit gambling and “dates” are where the real money is.

Diana has a knack for the job. She’s a tough dame now, with a Chesterfield in a thin black holder: “I know all the angles and I know how to protect myself in the clinches.” That is, until one of her marks loses his shirt at the tables and then feeds himself a bullet sandwich in the men’s room. When the guy’s buddy protests to the management he catches lead in the temple. Diana sees the whole thing and finally gets wise. Can she get out of it all in time? Here comes reporter Chris Williams (Leonard) to the rescue. Movie good guys back then were reporters.

All of this we learn through flashbacks. The whole picture unfolds that way, another trademark of classic noir. There are more: an opening sequence that features a shadowy nighttime game of cat and mouse along the waterfront. A midnight car chase on the back end. Booze, smokes, broads. A succession of back rooms, gutters, and nightclubs, all dimly lit to hide the cheapjack cardboard PRC sets. There’s even a montage. The movie snaps along with sharp, rat-a-tat lines delivered by a game cast who know how to get plenty of chatter into a brief running time. Hard boiled? Only every once in a while, but plenty stylish.

More than mere style, however, Why Girls Leave Home carves out its noir street cred in how it treats its protagonist. (And, just as importantly, who it ultimately reveals as its villain. Wish I could say more on this, but forget it!). Diana Leslie makes the classic noir blunder: she wants. Our noir heroes get themselves into trouble when they want more than society has determined they ought to have. For Diana, it’s a career, new digs, a little money of her own. Why the hell not, we surely ask ourselves now. Plenty of reasons, 1945 audiences roar back at us. Ours, I guess, is not to judge.

Like I said a few hundred words ago, make no mistake, this is Poverty Row stuff. It’s not Detour, it’s not Phantom Lady, but it does have something all its own. A rotgut charm that was enough to keep a jaded customer like me fixed to the screen.

Why Girls Leave Home (1945)

Directed by William Berke

Cinematographer: Mack Stengler

Story and Screenplay: Fanya Foss (once Billy Bob Thornton’s mother-in-law)

Starring: Pamela Blake, Lola Lane, Sheldon Leonard, and Elisha Cook Jr.

Released by: Producers Releasing Corporation

Running time: 69 minutes

CORNERED (1945)

In 1945’s Cornered Dick Powell plays a man exhausted, angry, and with little hope for the future. Though almost fatally marred by its serpentine plot, Cornered is worth seeing — it’s even an important film noir. It offers an extraordinarily bleak worldview, precocious even for noir, and helped pave the way for the spate of neurotic, cynical, and dark movies that would define the post-war classic period.


Character and atmosphere trump story here, so let’s cram this into as small a nutshell as possible: Powell plays Laurence Gerard, recently of the Royal Canadian Air Force, who endured the last gasps of the war as a PoW. His young bride got the blindfold and the brick wall as part of La Résistance, sold out by some Vichy prick named Marcel Jarnac, believed by all but Gerard to be dead. His dreams of post-war bliss splintered, Gerard goes on a globe-hopping manhunt for Jarnac. The story shuttles him from England to France to Switzerland and finally lodges in Argentina — destination of choice for gold-laden absconders — Fascists fleeing the tribunals and terrified of the rope. Powell settles into Buenos Aires like a tornado settles into a trailer park; upending both those eluding justice and those striving for it. By the time this whirlwind of a story blows itself out, its twists, turns, and changes in direction will have left every viewer not holding a flowchart in the same state as its protagonist, who gets lied to, led astray, and pistol-whipped so often that he spends much of his screen time massaging his temples.


Cornered was brought to the screen by the same team that reinvented Dick Powell as tough gumshoe Philip Marlowe the previous year in Murder, My Sweet. Unlike the 1944 film however, Cornered reflects a less glib, less stylishly expressionistic; and far more irresolute world. Considering the current events of the time it’s easy to understand why the filmmakers would find such convoluted intrigue appropriate, but also situate it among such frightened, neurotic, and selfish people. Yet a filmic idea can be appropriate and damaging at the same time. The plot of Cornered is so overwrought, the vision so depressing, that even director Edward Dmytryk found the film unsatisfactory. Given the significance of the film in his life though, the sentiment is understandable. Dmytryk, producer Adrian Scott, and replacement writer John Paxton were loosely involved with the Communist party during the production of Cornered (Dmytryk paid dues for a mere two months, amounting to a total contribution of four dollars, along with a fifty-cent initiation fee), and the friends actually broke with the reds when party leaders, along with the original screenwriter, tried to turn Cornered into something of a socialist manifesto. Dmytryk and Scott, both imprisoned by HUAC in 1947 as members of the Hollywood Ten, would cite Cornered as the catalyst for their break: “This is the thing,” Dmytryk said, “which actually got me out of the party.” He would serve four months at an honor farm in my home state of West Virginia, only to become the lone member of the Ten to reappear before HUAC and name names. (That whole story is far too big for this essay, but Dmytryk himself wrote of his experiences with the blacklist in Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten.)

In order to peg what makes a difficult film like this worthwhile, it has to be placed within the macrocosm of film noir. The noir movement, genre, style — call it what you will — encompasses numerous generic and thematic types, as well as its share of –isms. The list is almost endless, and seems to become more inclusive with each new boxed-set, dissertation, or edition of the Film Noir Encyclopedia (The Day the Earth Stood Still, really?). What makes Cornered important within this grand scheme is its unprecedented view of the world. Certainly no Hollywood film to date had brought to the screen a milieu so desolate or a hero so pathologically dour. Coming so quickly on the heels of cataclysm, previous efforts couldn’t have imagined the world portrayed in Cornered, neither This Gun for Hire nor Journey into Fear come close — and no previous film featured a protagonist with so little hope. In terms of global change the Second World War is the defining moment of the twentieth century, and a singular one in the development of the noir style. Insofar as this is concerned, no entry is more emblematic of that change than Cornered; whether or not it’s a particularly good narrative film is secondary.


Much of Cornered’s originality comes from Powell’s interpretation of Laurence Gerard. He’s ill tempered, irate, and intent on bowling over anything in his way. Frustrated after spending the better part of the war interned, he needs to get in his share of the licks, and who gives a damn if the hostilities are over. Yet along with this, there’s something in Powell’s performance that goes beyond the clichéd term world-weary — Gerard isn’t just tired, he’s dead tired. This is a man on fumes. He simply wants to find Jarnac and execute him, and he’s incapable of thinking about what happens after. He lives only in the now; having learned that thinking about tomorrow gets your heart broken and your teeth kicked in. It has been said that Cornered might have suited Humphrey Bogart better, an actor for whom tiredness was natural. Yet while Bogart could do angry, his rage seemed to have a leering quality — and while Gerard is reckless he’s no head case. Powell was surely no Bogart, but he nails Gerard.


Cornered is also stark in its brutality, even if its most heinous acts are committed just off-screen. In the film’s climactic scene an important character is shot not once, but seven times. The camera lingers on the gun as the shooter pumps round after round into the victim — not passionately, but in a cold effort to render the corpse’s face unrecognizable to the police. Later in the scene one character, using bare knuckles, beats another to death; the camera moving in and out of focus with each blow. The beating is administered with so little passion that it barely registers on the perpetrator. Violent acts, especially the up-close, dirty, wet ones, have become frighteningly impersonal in Cornered, as the survivors are now numb to the moral absolutes of pre-war society. It’s in this notion of lashing out, of poker-faced violence, that Cornered also anticipates film noir’s shell-shocked man apart, plagued by some unknown neurosis or gnawing guilt.


Like most good noir, the brooding thematic elements of Cornered are supported by the mise en scene, which pushes the dark frame to extremes. Dmytryk, art director Carroll Clark, and cinematographer Harry Wild give us the expected interplay of shadow and light (though the quality of the shots vary), as well as numerous offbeat camera angles. In fact the only conventional shots seem to involve one of the film’s two female characters, which is a subtle clue to her true nature. Wild often shoots from behind a pillar, around a corner, or from on high to obfuscate our sense of environment. Filming Powell in tight close-up, making him difficult to place and reinforcing the idea that he doesn’t belong further heightens this confusion. The effect is claustrophobic, disorienting, and perfectly in keeping with the film’s tone. Cornered gets progressively darker and darker as it approaches its climax, eventually to place Gerard in utter darkness, groping and bumbling through a deserted warehouse.


With the end of the war came a gradual return to normal life in the United States. Cornered was a bitter reminder for a people still celebrating victory that not all was well in the world, yet it did well with critics and audiences. It may be a shallow reason, but the film’s box office owes itself directly to the casting of Dick Powell. Preview audiences were ecstatic to see him again in what they described as a “he-man” role, with hardly any comments recommending a return to musical comedy. Even New York Times grouch Bosley Crowther lauded the film: “Cornered is a drama of smoldering vengeance and political scheming which builds purposefully and with graduating tension to a violent climax, a committing of murder that is as thrilling and brutal as any you are likely to encounter in a month of movie-going.” Yet while Don Craig of the Washington Daily News also recommended the film, he referred to the “new” Dick Powell as “ a bit self conscious” and the character Gerard as “plain stupid.” The focus on Powell aside for a moment, Cornered provides a time-capsule vision of a world gone to hell, and it does it early enough in the noir cycle to set the bar for the films of the subsequent ten years.

Cornered (1945)

Directed by Edward Dmytryk

Produced by Adrian Scott

Cinematography by Harry Wild
Screenplay by John Paxton, John Wexley, and Ben Hecht (uncredited)

Starring Dick Powell, Walter Slezak, Micheline Cheirel, Luther Adler, and Nina Vale

Released by RKO Pictures

Running time: 102 minutes

NOIR RISING: JOSEPH LEWIS & BURNETT GUFFEY DOUBLE FEATURE

Just after the war director Joseph Lewis and cinematographer Burnett Guffey collaborated on two prototypical film noir pictures for Columbia’s B unit. Both My Name is Julia Ross and So Dark the Night are suspense thrillers set overseas. While neither is a full-fledged film noir, each film has definitive noirish elements — both in terms of Lewis’ conceptual handling of the material and Guffey’s visual style. Although neither man’s name would ever become part of the public consciousness, each made a significant impression in the realm of the crime film. Lewis would go on to direct numerous noir films, including two with iconic status: The Big Combo and Gun Crazy, though he wouldn’t work with Guffey on either. Guffey however had an incredibly bright future. He would hone his skills photographing a multitude of iconic noirs. In addition to Scandal Sheet, The Sniper, Human Desire, Convicted, and the extraordinary In a Lonely Place and The Reckless Moment, Guffey shot the Best Picture Winners All the King’s Men and From Here to Eternity, as well as indelible classics such as Birdman of Alcatraz and Bonnie and Clyde. The pair would cross paths one last time in 1949 on The Undercover Man with Glenn Ford and Nina Foch — the resulting film a noir programmer that ostensibly covers the same ground as The Untouchables. However if Lewis and Guffey ever struck gold together, it was with My Name is Julia Ross, a film that has risen in stature steadily throughout the decades.

My Name is Julia Ross concerns an elderly society widow, Mrs. Hughes, and her eerie, knife-obsessed son Ralph, who contrive to find a substitute for the wife that Ralph strangled during a psychotic fit. They plan to shanghai a young woman on the pretense of hiring her as a live-in secretary, and then pass her off as Marian, Ralph’s emotionally troubled and recently murdered wife. The pair’s ultimate goal is to snuff the young woman and make it appear that Marian has committed suicide — thus getting Ralph off the hook. The audience is let in on their plan within the first few minutes, and most of the story is concerned with the title character’s attempts at escape. Nina Foch is fine in that role, though it’s difficult to get through the film without once imagining the part in more versatile hands. Foch plays it with a bit of a poker face, and her British accent tends to come and go. May Whitty is dependable as the old bag and Macready is menacing as the son. Lewis and Guffey use visual style to accentuate the neurotic, unhinged aspects of Macready’s character throughout the film, often by photographing his face half in shadow. The same can be said to a lesser degree of Foch’s character, though the filmmakers never invest much of the narrative into any struggle she may have had with her own sanity, which is, perhaps, where they missed an opportunity. For Foch’s part she never seems to doubt herself — and the point is wasted about thirty minutes in when Julia conveniently overhears a conversation between her captors and gets wise.

Although the British setting gives the film the feel of a gothic mystery, and much of it is presented in that mode, the trappings of film noir are everywhere: Julia is an unwitting victim of fate, guilty of nothing more than answering an ad in the newspaper. But like the typical noir protagonist (in spite of her gender) she has difficulty in distinguishing between the benign and malevolent forces at play around her; and unable to properly anticipate danger, she’s forced to defensively react in order to save her life. Had the film been made just a few years later, it’s certain that more effort would have been placed in depicting her struggle with madness. The casting of an actress often described as aloof makes the portrayal of these struggles difficult.

Despite the low budget, and in a few shots because of it, the visual style is quite vivid, from the opening scene with a hand-held camera that tracks Foch as she walks through a downpour to her boarding house, to the expressionistic ending where Macready tries to lure her down a treacherous stairway. Although not entirely cohesive from start to finish, Guffey’s camera work shows the virtuosity that would make him the most dependable and prolific noir cinematographer of them all, not to mention the winner of two Academy Awards.

Made the following year and set in France, So Dark the Night tells the story of a famous Parisian police inspector, who after eleven years of solving cases finally takes a vacation, only to find himself on a busman’s holiday, investigating a string of murders centered around the residents of his country hotel. There’s a romantic angle to the killings, as the first victim is none other than the innkeeper’s daughter. Coincidentally, the dead girl has just agreed to marry the detective, in spite of their vast age difference and her already impending nuptials to the local Brom Bones, himself soon to be a victim. All roads lead toward the film’s climax, when a major plot twist is revealed. It’s the sort of development that may seem obvious to some viewers, while others may need to re-watch in search of clues. At any rate it stymies attempts to review the film, as practically every noirish morsel is wrapped up in the twist.

So Dark the Night is not a very good movie, and it suffers greatly because of its cast. Steven Geray is featured as inspector Henri Cassin. Hungarian actor Geray participated in nearly 200 Hollywood films, and although this was a routine project for him it did provide the almost unheard of opportunity to play the lead. He tries but comes up short: his acting underscores why he never managed larger parts. The supporting cast is disastrous. Lewis seems to be going through the motions, but despite numerous obstacles he’s able to grind out a watchable, modestly entertaining picture. Guffey as well makes the most of a bad situation. As other writers have noted, many of the shots of Geray’s character are filmed through windows, which become an integral prop in the climax, and central in understanding his character.

Film noir was still in its early stages in the mid-forties when Lewis and Guffey collaborated on My Name is Julia Ross and So Dark the Night. The European settings of these two films, Julia Ross in England and So Dark in France, may appear at first to be problematic in establishing them as film noirs, but it’s important to note that both productions are completely American — made by the second unit at a major studio and filmed entirely on lots and sound stages in California. If the settings themselves are troublesome, consider their place early in the cycle before passing judgment. My Name is Julia Ross is by far the better known of the pair, for numerous reasons — chief among them that it is simply a stronger movie. It also airs with some regularity on television, ensuring that many more viewers are aware of it. Over the years it has gained in reputation and has come to be considered one of the better B pictures of the 1940s. Much like another famous B project, The Narrow Margin, My Name is Julia Ross was given the remake treatment in the 80s, as Dead of Winter starring Roddy McDowell and Mary Steenburgen. So Dark the Night is currently only available as a bootleg, and is likely to stay that way.

MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS (1945)

Director: Joseph H. Lewis

Cinematographer: Burnett GuffeyScreenplay: Muriel Roy Bolton, based on a novel by Anthony Gilbert

Starring: Nina Foch, Dame May Whitty, and George Macready.Released by: Columbia

Running time: 65 minutes 

SO DARK THE NIGHT (1946) 
Director: Joseph H. Lewis

Cinematographer: Burnett GuffeyScreenplay: Dwight Babcock and Martin Berkeley, based on a story by Aubrey Wisberg

Starring: Steven Geray, Micheline Cheirel, and Eugene Borden. 
Released by: Columbia

Running time: 71 minutes

BEWITCHED (1945)

Considering many viewers don’t seem to care for Bewitched, there’s a lot of ink floating around out there about this slick little second feature from MGM. I find myself in the minority, because I think it’s a gem. Make no mistake, in one important way (depending on your point of view) it hasn’t aged well: it’s a rather crude look at schizophrenia in its most sensational form — multiple personality disorders. And because of the era’s (or rather, Hollywood’s) limited understanding of psychology and the movie studio’s propensity to take dramatic license with existing scientific knowledge, the film does a disservice to those whose lives have been touched to one degree or another by mental illness. Be that as it may, the problems are easily forgiven, and what remains is a well-made and inventive thriller with a few great moments. 


Why here at WDL? Bewitched is also distinctive as a prototypical film noir.


The story goes down smooth: Joan Ellis is a pleasant young woman with everything life has to offer, particularly a fine family and loving fiancé — but hang on — she hears a nasty voice in her head that wants to be in charge, to be “let out.” 


Fearful of a scandal, Joan skips her small mid-western town and makes for New York City, where she finds work as a cigar counter girl. Soon, she’s wooed by Eric, one of the building’s many attorneys (Stephen McNally). At first she’s skittish but after he comes on strong they are quickly engaged. Just when Joan feels that everything is once again coming up roses, she discovers her old fiancé waiting for her in her room — he’s tracked her down and wants to take her back home. As he packs her bag for the return trip, the voice in Joan’s head finally speaks up: it doesn’t want to leave the big city for Dullsville, so it commands Joan to pick up a pair of scissors and kill — which she does!


Jump to a quick trial where Joan’s sweet nature guarantees that she’ll beat the rap. Just as the not guilty verdict is being read, the voice speaks up, telling Joan how kill again and again in the future. Not wanting this to happen, Joan blurts out a last second confession and Bewitched begins to take some strange turns….


The voice in Joan’s head belongs to Audrey Totter, of Tension fame. Though Totter is uncredited, she really sinks her teeth into her part and although there’s a campy quality to the way she taunts and jeers at Joan, it works. The presence of Totter also lends Bewitched some extra credibility as a film noir, though it isn’t needed. The fascinating aspect of Joan’s dichotomy is that each half of her mind represents an archetypical film noir woman — Karen is a femme fatale and Joan is the good girl.


The femme fatale part is a no-brainer: Karen is a black widow — she uses Joan’s good looks to attract men, in order to act out her violent impulses. She kills Joan’s first fiancé, and warns her that she’s ready to kill the next, and then the next after that. Joan herself is both the pure innocent and the noir anti-hero: she’s cruelly victimized by fate and by chance, through what her psychiatrist calls “one birth in a million.” Like other noir protagonists, most often males, Joan is forced to ride out her predicament, with only the merest illusion of the outcome fate has in store for her. Despite this trauma, Joan’s actions are heroic: she attempts to save her family from the stigma of scandal by fleeing her hometown; and when presented with the unvarnished truth of Karen’s intentions at her trial, she sacrifices herself in order to kill Karen. Phyllis Thaxter’s performance deserves praise: she is able to make Joan and Karen appear dramatically different, without stooping to Jekyll and Hyde style preening. Her timing is good, and she is able to make her violent scenes creepy, if not actually frightening.


In addition to the role of fate and the thorough characterization of Joan, there are some exciting visual moments in Bewitched, including an expressionistic street sequence featuring an elaborate tracking shot: Joan is caught late at night on a deserted street, where she encounters a few real-life manifestations of her inner turmoil. The noirish quality of the atmosphere is excellent, though it doesn’t quite mesh with the rest of the film. Bewitched also uses montage to great effect, although the primarily to keep the running time brief. Joan’s entire arrest, booking, and courtroom experience is summarized in a fast cut, claustrophobic, and for lack of a better term — sweaty — montage that shows attorneys, witnesses, and jurors all grotesquely leering at the accused. Oboler’s direction is competent, but he doesn’t maintain a noir vision for the duration — after all this was only 1945.


Mental illness was popular fodder in film noir, especially in the years just after the war. The idea of a film protagonist being stricken by something so arbitrary and invisible (and at the time: fantastical) was a trendy way to demonstrate how an everyday Joe or “Joan” can get worked over by cruel fate. What separates noirish takes on the subject from more “serious” productions is that the illness in noir invariably becomes an excuse for violent crime. So in this regard film noir is quite exploitative of mental illness, which is why viewers shouldn’t knock the manipulative and melodramatic treatment of multiple personalities in Bewitched. If the subject was treated clinically instead of tongue-in-cheek, the film just couldn’t have been made. The one place where we can gripe is the whitewashing of Joan’s “cure.” It’s disappointing to think that even in 1945 audiences would believe a ten-minute hypnosis session with a psychiatrist would cure Joan of her demons. It smacks of witch-doctoring, and actually makes the finale somewhat droll. It would be more in keeping with the tone of films to come, and with the fact that the character had actually killed, if audiences thought Joan was obligated to bear her burden uncertainly into the future. In the end though, the trick to enjoying this picture is to take it with some salt. Bewitched isn’t The Three Faces of Eve or The Snake Pit — it’s a sensationalist second feature with roots in radio drama and isn’t meant to be viewed as anything more than diversionary entertainment. After all this is MGM, not Warner Brothers.

Bewitched (1945)

Director: Arch Oboler
Cinematographer: Charles Salerno Jr.
Screenplay: Arch Oboler
Starring: Phyllis Thaxter, Edmund Gwenn, Audrey Totter (voice only).
Released by: MGM
Running time: 65 minutes