From the Rental Vault: Lost and Found

Henry Hathaway was one of Hollywood's most consistent directors -- rarely a shining talent but even more rarely a dud. Screenwriters Ben Hecht and Robert Presnell, Jr., were two of the most respected scribes in the movie business. Rossano Brazzi had come off top-rated English language turns in South Pacific and The Barefoot Contessa. John Wayne was John Wayne, and Sophia Loren was Sophia Loren.

So go figure how all of these talented folks could collaborate in 1957 to produce one of the least energetic and most lifeless movies of all of their careers, Legend of the Lost. Wayne was in the middle of a small handful of movies that took him away from the American West or the World War II battlefield to some different locations and different roles, mostly to poor results. Legend is nowhere near as bad as The Conqueror, but that's mostly because it lacks enough energy, focus and direction to really hate. Trashing it, as many have done to Wayne's portrayal of Genghis Khan in Conqueror, is like karate-chopping jello.

Wayne is Joe January, an expatriate American guide living in Timbuktu and trying to earn enough money to pay off his debts and leave. Hired by Paul Bonnard (Brazzi), he sets out to find a legendary lost city that Bonnard's father was supposed to have found before he died. Dita, a prostitute living in Timbuktu, is enthralled by Paul's vision of using the treasure in the lost city to help the poor. She is also drawn to him because her work has left her at best indifferent to men and his religious convictions mean he is not interested in her. But the journey across the blazing Sahara, in which the three nearly perish before finding the city and its water, reforges each of the trio and their relationships to each other.

Part of the problem may be a bad audio mix that leaves the heavily-accented Brazzi almost unintelligible during crucial parts of his exposition of his beliefs and motives, rendering Paul's later actions equally unintelligible. Part of it may be a story that depends heavily on Dita's life as a prostitute even though 1957 big-screen morés don't really allow enough to be said about that to clarify the picture. Whatever the reason, Legend earns a top spot in only one category -- biggest waste of potential. When your movie has John Wayne playing opposite Sophia Loren and Legend is all you manage, somebody somewhere was laying down on the job.

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Submarine warfare presented unique opportunities for moviemakers who wanted  to  tell stories high on suspense, with built-in sources of natural tension that didn't require a lot of exposition or setup. Several great ones have been filmed over time, most of them descended in one way or another from Cary Grant's excellent 1943 entry, Destination Tokyo. Filmed while WWII was still ongoing, it tells a fictionalized version of preparations for the April 1942 bombing of Tokyo, conceived and led by Lt. Col. James Doolittle.

Grant commands the U.S.S. Copperfin, an attack submarine selected for a special, secret and dangerous mission. After a rendezvous in the Aleutian Islands where Copperfin picks up a military meteorologist, it must sneak into Tokyo Bay to allow him and a team to land ashore in Japan, gather information about weather conditions and munitions factories, and transmit the data to raid planners.

At two hours plus, Destination is packed with story, some of which seems very familiar because it's been done many times between the movie and today. The grizzled veteran cook, wet-behind-the-ears new sailor who grows up through adversity, carefree womanizer and man haunted by the past all show up, as does an instance of emergency surgery performed by someone who's "not a real doctor," a depth-charge duel and several sailors who reminisce about life back home are all there.

But the elements work together in spite of their familiarity, thanks to a great cast headed by Grant, John Garfield, Robert Hutton, Dane Clark and Alan Hale. And thanks to an excellent screenplay by director Delmer Daves, Steve Fisher and Albert Maltz, who give these incidents the right amount of "just doing my job" polish that keeps them believable (the emergency appendectomy, for example, is based on an actual incident in which a pharmacist's mate had to peform such a surgery aboard ship).

In movies as well as writing, clichés are certainly something to avoid. But every cliché started out as a real incident, and Destination Tokyo shows that the story at the root of the quickly stereotypical "submarine picture" could be a very good one indeed.