by ·Comments Off on I’m No Angel (1933, Wesley Ruggles)

Katy’s response to this: Mae West is so weird. It’s true – takes some time to get used to her personality at the start of the movie, as she slowly struts and moans, throwing out quips in a Popeye mutter as everyone who sees her becomes instantly entranced. Then the story gets weird too. Circus star Tira has been dating a rich guy (prolific small-timer Kent Taylor, who’d end up in MST3K-bait in the 1960’s) under the nose of his jealous fiancee Alicia, then dates the rich guy’s rich friend (Cary Grant) instead. Tira ends up suing Grant when he breaks off their engagement due to interference from her pickpocket ex-buddy Slick, acts as her own attorney, winning both the case and Grant. Feels more like she has successfully defended her own promiscuity, coming off as the most sexually liberated woman in movies for thirty years in either direction. The authorities agreed, establishing the production code to shut her up.

I wonder if 12-year-old Jack Clayton (director of The Innocents and Something Wicked This Way Comes) saw Cary Grant’s “Jack Clayton” getting the girl and thought he oughtta get into the picture business.

by ·Comments Off on 5th Ave Girl (1939, Gregory La Cava)

One of those Great Depression movies where a poor girl is inexplicably taken in by a millionaire family (see also: Easy Living). Mopey millionaire Walter Connolly (Twentieth Century) has home problems. His wife (Verree Teasdale, queen of the amazons in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) goes out with her playboy friends and forgets his birthday. His son (future Western star, played one of Wyatt Earp’s brothers in My Darling Clementine) plays around, neglecting his role in the family business. And his daughter is hot for communist chauffeur Mike (not the first classic movie we’ve seen featuring plot points stolen by Downton Abbey).

Out for a walk, Walter runs into down-on-her-luck Ginger Rogers and invites her to celebrate his birthday. After he invites her to stay at the house, he realizes her presence has an electrifying effect on the family, who think he has blatantly taken a mistress. Ginger is glad to not have money problems for a little while, but the family drama gets to her and she finally runs off until rescued by son Tim Holt.

Maybe the best Ginger movie we’ve seen yet. Features the great Franklin Pangborn in a small role. Katy also recognized Jack Carson as a ukelele-playing sailor. We’ve lately seen him as Cagney’s frenemy in The Strawberry Blonde and Myrna Loy’s hot neighbor in Love Crazy.

by ·Comments Off on The Most Dangerous Game (1932, Ernest Schoedsack)

Catching up on some early Criterion releases – this was filmmakers Schoedsack and Cooper and star Fay Wray’s precursor to King Kong. The Old Dark House, Island of Lost Souls, Vampyr and Freaks were also released in 1932, an amazing year for horror and horror-hybrids.

Leslie Banks (protagonist of The Man Who Knew Too Much) lords over a tiny jungle island where he hunts and kills people who shipwreck on his trap reef. Fellow hunter Joel McCrea (eight years before Foreign Correspondent, which was previously the earliest of his movies I’d seen) escapes a boat full of boring disaster-bait yachtsmen, and pals up with Fay Wray, while her doomed drunk brother (Robert Armstrong, the Jack Black of the original Kong) is killed offscreen. Banks, a great villain who might’ve seemed hammy had Armstrong’s drunk routine not far out-hammed him, chases the young couple with his bow, rifle, dogs, and mute guard played by Noble Johnson, a black actor in white-face. McCrea lays traps, which pro hunter Banks detects, and the good guys only win because of a lucky cliff fall.

The story by Richard Connell (who also cowrote Thrill of a Romance) has been filmed a million times, starring the likes of Sid Haig, Jane Greer and Richard Widmark. Good, short movie with some slick motion-camera shots.

by ·Comments Off on Stranded (1935, Frank Borzage)

Katy asked what makes a Borzage movie unique. I can answer regarding the silents I’ve seen – Seventh Heaven, Street Angel, Lucky Star and bits of The River. But after watching this, I don’t know – it seems that he was ground into the Hollywood sound-film factory, only managing a couple of cool (second-unit?) location scenes and one evocative shot involving would-be-lovers separating in front of a staircase.

George Brent doesn’t help the movie one bit. His character is a huge asshole, and the last-minute happy ending features him becoming very slightly less of an asshole. Fortunately the movie belongs to Kay Francis (of the great Trouble in Paradise), who works at Travelers’ Aid, which appears to be a general help booth at a train station. Bridge-builder Brent (of Dark Victory and The Spiral Staircase) goes there in search of a runaway drunk employee, recognizes Kay, and is soon threatening marriage.

On the bridge project, gangster Sharkey (Barton MacLane of The Maltese Falcon) secretly gives the workers booze, which they happily drink on the job until one falls to his death, causing a near-strike. The workers are portrayed as easily-led, drunken children – weren’t union construction jobs hard to come by during the Great Depression? Kay saves Brent’s ass, leading him to stop badgering her to quit her job, with help from fired drunk Janauschek (Robert Barrat, a judge in The Baron of Arizona).

Frankie Darro, the guy inside Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet, plays Hollywood’s typical “Jimmy”, a young, naive annoyance. Future director Delmer Daves wrote the screenplay, based on a story called Lady with a Badge. I don’t believe Kay had a badge.

by ·Comments Off on Jericho (1937, Thornton Freeland)

First Paul Robeson movie I’ve seen. Looks unpolished, with clumsy sound recording, but Robeson’s performance shines right through. Jericho saves some guys in a sinking ship, during which a real asshole of a superior officer is killed, so Jericho ditches the army leaving friendly Captain Mack (who refers to his black soldiers as children) to take the punishment. Jericho steals a boat containing drunken white sailor Mike (Wallace Ford, lead clown in Freaks), who follows like a dog for the rest of the picture (Jericho calls him “boy”). They get to Morocco, where Jericho uses his medical skills to gain trust, eventually marrying a local and becoming a peace-keeping tribal chief. Mack (Henry Wilcoxon, propagandist preacher in Mrs. Miniver) gets out of prison, is kicked out of the army, and searches the world to get his revenge on Jericho… but of course they team up at the end. Robeson also performs a helluva version of “My Way” (not the Frank Sinatra song) against a stormy desert backdrop. Criterion calls it “his most satisfying film role” so I guess the rest of the box set will be downhill.

by ·Comments Off on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, Alfred Hitchcock)

Some boring rich vacationers casually befriend a spy who is immediately killed, shot whilst dancing. Their daughter is kidnapped to shut them up. The couple (Leslie Banks, star of The Fire Raisers the same year, and Edna Best of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) sulks back to Britain sans daughter, deciding that if they can’t tell the police, at least they can solve the case themselves. Actually, espionage and adventure isn’t for ladies, so Banks goes off on his own.

Banks and Wakefield go to the dentist:

A sinister dentist is dispatched with his own gas, and I didn’t exactly get the involvement of a basement-dwelling cult (“The Tabernacle of the Sun”), but wooden chairs prove to be good defence against revolvers, and the place gets trashed. Some delightful villains emerge, much more colorful than the heroes (despite an aborted attempt to involve a monocled uncle, Hugh Wakefield of Blithe Spirit, as comic relief). Prominently-chinned Frank Vosper (who’d soon die falling off an ocean liner) and frown-mouthed nurse Cicely Oates would’ve been fine, but Peter Lorre…

DCairns:

Frank Vosper is a good sleazoid bad guy (the only obvious thing Hitch took from Waltzes), but obviously Peter Lorre is the important character here. Although the plot throws out a whole gallery of malefactors, including an old lady with a revolver, a threatening dentist, and an evil hypnotist, Lorre dominates effortlessly, just by constantly making strange. Still sporting the carnival-float head of solid fat he modeled in Lang’s M, and decorated with a skunk-like white stripe and a dueling scar to match Banks’, Lorre as “Abbott” drools cigarette-smoke and apologises to the hero after striking him. He’s good-naturedly contemptuous of his own hired hitman, devoted to his nurse, and prefers to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, but his goal is to plunge the world into war.

Trying to rescue his daughter, Banks gets kidnapped too, caught in the villains’ hideout during a massive police shootout after an Edna Best-thwarted assassination attempt at the Royal Albert Hall. Best then shows up at the shootout and saves her own daughter from Vosper, some 70 minutes after the movie pointedly established her as a celebrated sharpshooter.

Pilbeam and Oates:

No insufferable child actor, daughter Nova Pilbeam is a daughter worth saving, out-acting both of her parents at times. She would return as star of Hitch’s Young and Innocent. This was the first of Hitch’s six Gaumont movies, and Lady Vanishes (more vacationers caught up with spy rings and kidnappings) was the last. Must now watch the ones in between.

by ·Comments Off on Morocco (1930, Josef von Sternberg)

Marlene Dietrich sails away from a troubled past, becoming a nightclub singer in Morocco. She takes up with young Legionnaire Gary Cooper (three years before Design for Living, sans his stammery, wooden persona), who has his own problems, having slept with his commanding officer’s wife. Gary gives her up and marches into battle, where his boss (Ullrich Haupt, who’d die in a hunting “accident” in under a year) is killed, while Marlene prepares to marry wealthy Adolphe Menjou (anti-Lincoln conspirator in The Tall Target and anti-communist conspirator in the McCarthy hearings) instead. But she ditches Adolphe at their wedding party, returning to Gary, finally throwing away her pride and independence to follow him sheepishly into the desert.

Sternberg’s and Dietrich’s first American picture, a follow-up to The Blue Angel but beating it into U.S. theaters. Dietrich got an oscar nomination despite delivering her lines phonetically. She was beaten by Marie Dressler, with Cimarron, Norman Taurog and Tabu winning out for Morocco’s other nominations. It’s not my favorite Sternberg movie, but Dietrich’s obsessive performance towards the end is among her best. Sternberg loves his tragedies: nobody gets out of this one easily, and Dietrich’s final humiliation reminds of the Emil Jannings pictures that preceded. Controversial at the time: Dietrich wears a tux and kisses a woman. “Battling” Butler was sixth-billed, but I didn’t recognize him.

Film Quarterly in 1948: “The story itself was exceedingly simple, romantic .. However, it was not von Sternberg’s intention to produce a film of reflected reality, but rather to evoke cinematically an exotic locale peopled with extraordinary characters. .. [the] absence of background music gave the film a sharp, immediate quality seldom found in films today, generally burdened, as they are, with a lush musical score.”

by ·Comments Off on Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Howard Hawks)

I enjoyed watching this with Katy much more than I did in film class. Everything is worse when doing it in class (or everything is better with Katy).

Mail flyers in Argentina struggle with difficult terrain, disabled pilots, a love triangle, infighting and a contract saying they get new planes if they fly a few more difficult missions on schedule. Dutchy (Sig Ruman, covert nazi in A Night in Casablanca) owns the planes but Cary Grant gives orders to the flyers. Kid (Thomas Mitchell) is the oldest with poor eyesight, Joe (Noah Beery Jr.) dies early, Sparks is the radio man, I think Les gets injured (most of them do at some point) and Tex (Westerns actor Don Barry) sits in a booth warning of weather conditions.

New flyer Bat (Richard Barthelmess, star of Broken Blossoms and The Dawn Patrol, sort of Henry Fonda crossed with Peter Lorre) shows up putting everyone on edge because of a word-of-mouth story that he’d abandoned a copilot – oh, and he brings new wife Rita Hayworth, an ex-flame of Cary’s who doesn’t know the dead-copilot story. And Jean Arthur (You Can’t Take It With You, Easy Living) was just passing through until she caught sight of Cary Grant, then follows him like a puppy for two hours trying to get him to tell her to stay, refusing to leave until he does, a catch-22 that works out romantically at the end.

Hawks and Cary Grant made this between Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday. Thomas Mitchell (The Kid) won best supporting actor as Doc in Stagecoach, also played the plantation owner (Scarlett’s dad) in Gone With The Wind, king of the beggars in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and appeared again with Jean Arthur in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington – all in the same year as this movie.

EDIT 2024: Watched again… a movie about a rude attack on some birds… and their revenge.

by ·Comments Off on Belle of the Nineties (1934, Leo McCarey)

Just as narratively complicated as The Strawberry Blonde but with 100% less weight – a fluffy Mae West comedy written by a fluffy Mae West and directed by McCarey, who could surely handle this after dealing with the Marx brothers in Duck Soup. Mae gets all the attention, massive hats, punchlines and glamorous lighting, and there’s nothing else to say about the filmmaking – except for one amazing scene. She has given a few bucks to her maid Libby Taylor (also Mae’s maid in I’m No Angel), who goes down to a musical prayer meeting at the river while Mae stands in her window above the river singing her own song – as the songs collide and blend, so do the visuals.

Anyway the plot is ridiculous – Mae likes a boxer (Roger Pryor, son of bandleader Arthur) but pretends to dump him during training and moves to New Orleans where she continues her hit stage show of standing silently in huge costumes subtly moving her hips to rapturous applause (she also sings sometimes). The boxer comes to N.O. to fight the champ, and Mae’s promoter (professional mustachioed villain John Miljan) is ripping her off. Mae spikes her boyfriend’s water, causing him to lose the fight and ruining Miljan financially – then as his theater burns down, the boxer kills Miljan, and somehow all this is okay and they end up together.

There’s also a rich beau, a damsel in distress, and Duke Ellington, who appears on piano but wrote none of the songs. We didn’t know what instrument Duke plays or what he looks like, so weren’t even sure that he was in the movie.

Wikipedia: “A publicity stunt went awry when 50 parrots were trained to shout the original title of It Ain’t No Sin. The parrots were subsequently released in the jungles of South America still repeating ‘it ain’t no sin’ over and over again.”