by ·Comments Off on Esther Williams double feature

Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949, Busby Berkeley)

I finally watched some Esther Williams movie with Katy the night we heard she’d died (Esther, not Katy), but I have to say she didn’t make a huge impression (again, Esther, not Katy, who always makes an impression). She plays the inheritor of a baseball team, led by superstar trio Ryan (Frank Sinatra), O’Brien (wildly mugging Gene Kelly) and Goldberg (Jules Munshin, fifth-billed in a short run of late-1940’s musicals). Esther was at least noticeable better than Gene’s love interest Betty Garrett, who I was always afraid would try to catch up with Gene’s frantic comedy act, a la Shirley Maclaine in Artists & Models.

The best baseball-related song, “O’Brien to Ryan to Goldberg,” was based on a poem which I remember from that Ken Burns thing. Overall, kind of a lame finale to Busby Berkeley’s shining career, passing the reins to cowriters/choreographers Gene and Stanley Donen, who’d make On The Town and Singin’ in the Rain over the next few years.

Thrill of a Romance (1945, Richard Thorpe)

Oh this one was much better, and with a ton more water (Esther plays a swim instructor). She marries a neglectful rich guy who immediately runs away on business errands while she spends her unconsummated honeymoon with a colorful opera star and hunky war hero Van Johnson, with whom she swims and hikes and talks and laughs. Will she stay with the coldly absent husband who bought her attention with gifts, or the rugged handsome new man who she repeatedly admits that she loves? I’m not spoiling it.

An early starring role for Esther. Thorpe was a Tarzan movie vet, also in charge of the latest Thin Man picture. Esther’s meddling friend Frances Gifford had appeared in an unrelated Tarzan movie. Musicals are generally improved when they costar an opera singer – Lauritz Melchior would return in Esther’s This Time For Keeps.

by ·Comments Off on A Letter to Three Wives (1949, Joseph Mankiewicz)

Three wives go off on a boat trip to somewhere, it’s not important, knowing that one of their husbands has run off with local temptress Addie Ross (who is cleverly not shown). Many flashbacks ensue.

Military farmgirl Jeanne Crain (Leave Her to Heaven) is married to Brad, and even though she’s kinda the movie’s lead, neither of them has much going on. Ann Sothern (The Blue Gardenia) is a radio writer whose husband Kirk Douglas (between Out of the Past and Ace in the Hole) tells off her insufferable bosses when they come for dinner. Oh, and she forgets Kirk’s birthday and she works too much. Linda Darnell (Unfaithfully Yours, also a movie about imagined cheating) is a hot gold digger from a poor family who landed dumpy, rich shop owner Paul Douglas (Clash By Night). He’s the husband who ran off with the unseen Addie, though he comes back, and all three wives get happy endings, though oddly we don’t see Jeannie’s.

Also: the great Thelma Ritter plays a family friend of Linda’s. Based on A Letter to Five Wives – two wives got cut. Remade in 1985 with Ben Gazzara as the shop owner.

by ·Comments Off on Mr. Lucky (1943, H.C. Potter)

A rah-rah-war-effort movie disguised as something else. Potter’s follow-up to the great Hellzapoppin’ is a letdown in the comedy and unpredictability departments, but solid on the drama and romance – Katy agrees, a decent flick overall. Cary Grant plays a Harry Lime type, a gambler and draft-dodger who takes advantage of a woman who loves him (Laraine Day of the Dr. Kildare series), a war relief campaign, and a dead man with whom he swaps identities, all to raise money for a gambling cruise. At the end he ought to be killed, but you can’t kill Cary Grant so he’s redeemed by love instead.

Amusements: Grant and his assistant Crunk learn to knit in order to impress Laraine and set up a running joke. And the movie’s lasting legacy is that it introduced Katy to rhyming slang.

by ·Comments Off on The Strawberry Blonde (1941, Raoul Walsh)

We got a Roku and I’m filling an attached USB drive with classic movies to watch, dubbing it the “TCM drive”. Of course we always could have watched these same movies by hooking my laptop to the TV, but now it’s ever-so-slightly easier, so we celebrated by watching a couple and pretending we still get cable (I forgot to do my Robert Osbourne impression to introduce them).

Girlish weakling James Cagney is saddled with a tough-guy’s name (Biff Grimes) and an embarrassing womanizing drunk for a dad (Alan Hale, atheist farmer in Stars In My Crown). Biff’s only friends are ambitious scammer Hugo (Jack Carson, somewhat-star of Red Garters) and genial Greek barber Nick (George Tobias, in Sergeant York the same year). Cagney can’t get a girl, can’t keep a job, is studying to be a dentist because all his life his dad has blamed his poor behavior on pains in his teeth.

Cagney gets a single date with the hottest girl in town, titular blonde Rita Hayworth (Lady From Shanghai) and blows all his money on her, but as Jack Carson gets more successful, Rita ends up with Jack, and Cagney marries her pretend-feminist friend Olivia de Havilland (Cagney’s Midsummer Night’s Dream costar). Cagney is bummed, but of course Olivia is just as pretty and much nicer, so we know he’s being a dummy.

Given a vice-president job at Carson’s firm, Cagney is set up as the official scapegoat when cheap building materials lead to the death of his own dad (“my teeth don’t hurt anymore”), spends five years in prison getting his dentistry degree by mail and practicing on other inmates. He returns home to his loving wife and to the sunday afternoon framing-story, where he sees Carson as an emergency patient, and instead of killing him with nitrous oxide, realizes Cagney’s got the better life than his rich ex-friend since Rita Hayworth is a materialistic shrew.

I think Una O’Connor played a friend of Cagney’s dad and George “Superman” Reeves was a friend of Carson’s, but neither made an impression.

Based on a play from late 20’s, also filmed in 1933 with Gary Cooper and Fay Wray, redundantly in 1948 with Alan Hale Jr. and Raoul Walsh, then on TV in ’49 with Burgess Meredith, ’51 with June Lockhart and ’57 with Gordon MacRae. Adapted here by the twin Epstein brothers who wrote Casablanca and shot by James Wong Howe.

by ·Comments Off on Late Spring (1949, Yasujiro Ozu)

First of three Ozu movies within a few years in which Setsuko Hara is named Noriko. Here she’s a young woman (but not so young anymore) living with her absent-minded professor father (Chishu Ryu of Tokyo Story), refusing thoughts of marriage so she can take care of him. She hangs out with Aya, a cousin about her age, and her dad’s assistant Hattori, who is already engaged to another woman. Elder relatives meddle as usual: an irritating aunt (Haruko Sugimura) insists Noriko should marry, and twice-wed uncle Onodera offers a different perspective on marriage. Finally Noriko’s dad forces her hand, lies that he’s marrying an aquaintance so she’ll leave home and live her own life. It’s a movie full of very small revelations, building to a huge emotional moment. The movie has told us that Noriko will adjust to married life and grow to love it, though she seems unhappy on her wedding day, and her dad has said that he wants only what’s best for his daughter, but he cries when he’s finally alone. Most relationship movies end with a wedding, but this one has a very different take.

The meddling aunt starred in Naruse’s Late Chrysanthemums (not this one), also in the final segment of Kwaidan, and uncle Onodera was in Pigs and Battleships. This was Hara’s first film for Ozu, having previously starred in Kurosawa’s No Regrets For Our Youth. Katy liked, but can’t figure out its top-twenty placing in the Sight & Sound list.

M. Atkinson for Criterion:

Ozu’s Zen-infused sensibility translates on film to something like the art form’s nascent formal beauty: patiently watching little happen, and the meditative moments around the nonhappening, until it becomes crashingly apparent that lives are at stake and the whole world is struggling to be reborn. … Late Spring is a hushed battlefield where no one is right or wrong. We watch the infliction roll out inexorably, wishing there were a cheesy, American-style resolution somewhere on the horizon in which all of the well-meaning characters could be happy. But that’s not Ozu. Ozu is the natural energy of Noriko’s generous grin, dispensed selflessly in all social situations, until she realizes where her life is helplessly headed – and the blood-cooling shock of seeing that resilient smile finally drop.

“The turning point is the uninterrupted, eight-minute performance of a Noh drama during which Noriko suddenly becomes aware of her father’s apparent interest in an attractive widow and realizes he may not actually need her after all.” From a good James Williams article in Film Quarterly on the influence of Late Spring on Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum:

Certain episodes correspond exactly: for example, the Noh play and the Nightshift sequence, the final trip together to Kyoto and the journey to Lubeck (both feature a scene where the pair sleep side-by-side like lovers), an abortive concert, and the focus on preparations for mar- riage rather than the ceremony itself … What particularly interests her in Late Spring is its representation of the “strong yet awkward” father figure that resonates so powerfully with her own family background.

by ·Comments Off on The Charters and Caldicott Trilogy

I’ve always wanted to watch The Lady Vanishes, and since I found out that it has two recurring characters who appear in two other Criterion-released British wartime comedies, I checked out all three.

The Lady Vanishes (1938, Alfred Hitchcock)

Opens with the fakest model town since Beetlejuice. The DVD extras and interviews make much of how cheaply-made the film was, but after the first scene you never notice it. Snappy, briskly-plotted comedy-mystery with charming leads – at least as good as The 39 Steps.

Our eventually-romantic couple:

Margaret Lockwood meets annoying freewheeling musicologist Michael Redgrave in her hotel, tries to get him kicked out for making too much noise. Meanwhile, we’re introduced to a new hit comic duo Charters and Caldicott – the gimmick is that they’re incredibly British, clueless about foreign customs, but always travelling.

C&C:

They’re all on the same train out of town, along with Linden Travers (title role in No Orchids for Miss Blandish), her lying secret lover Cecil Parker (Ingrid Bergman’s unmemorable brother-in-law in Indiscreet), a not-at-all-sinister surgeon with a neat mustache (Paul Lukas, oscar winner in ’44), travelling magician Doppo and a thoroughly pleasant British woman named Froy (May Whitty, wealthy flower grower in Mrs. Miniver). But then Froy vanishes and Margaret seems to be the only person who remembers her. All the Germans (they’re from Unspecified Euro-Country, but they have nazi-like tendencies and this was the pre-WWII era, so let’s call them German) lie because Froy is a spy and they’ve kidnapped her, and all the Brits lie because they don’t want to get involved. But Margaret finds an ally in the musicologist and they set off to cracking the mystery, which involves fighting the magician through secret compartments and dealing with a fake nun. Trains are diverted, and Charters and Caldicott step up (and the cheater gets killed) in a climactic shootout. It’s all too tense and fun to worry that the central premise and the secret Froy is protecting are all ridiculous – Hitchcock admits so himself in his Truffaut interview.

Lukas with giant poisoned drinks, reminiscent of The Small Back Room:

Hitch’s second-to-last British picture (Jamaica Inn was last) Writer of the original story also did The Spiral Staircase. Remade in the 70’s with Angela Lansbury as Froy. It all reminded me of Shanghai Express, though I guess train dramas were pretty common.

G. O’Brien:

The whole film breathes an air of delight like nothing else in Hitchcock. The central situation—the disappearance of a woman whose very existence is subsequently denied by everyone but the protagonist—may seem to provide the perfect matrix for the kind of paranoid melodrama that would proliferate a few years later, in the forties, in films like Phantom Lady, Gaslight, and My Name Is Julia Ross, but here the dark shadows of conspiracy are countered by a brightness and brilliance of tone almost Mozartean in its equanimity. Most of the time we are too exhilarated to be frightened.

C. Barr:

While the train speeds Iris back toward her loveless marriage, her attempt to solve the mystery of Miss Froy’s disappearance is blocked by the obstinate intransigence of her countrymen, working in unconscious collaboration with the forces of European fascism that have kidnapped her. Clearly, this gave the film an especially potent meaning for the England of 1938, a time when the ruling classes were still working to appease Hitler and a class-stratified country was patently unready to pull together effectively if war should nonetheless become unavoidable.

Night Train to Munich (1940, Carol Reed)

See if this sounds familiar: Margaret Lockwood meets and immediately dislikes a handsome musician who ends up helping her flee from nazis aboard a train. Rex Harrison (Unfaithfully Yours) seems blander than her Lady Vanishes costar at first, but ends up being the highlight of the film. The effects are even cheaper-looking than the previous picture, but the action’s all there and the stakes are higher, war with Germany having started.

Charters didn’t have many options at the German railway book store:

Lockwood is the daughter of a Czech scientist working on some super armor. They flee to England as the nazis invade, hiding out with music salesman Rex, but get easily kidnapped by rival spy Paul Henreid (more dashing here than as Bergman’s husband in Casablanca) and flown to Germany. Not taking this defeat lying down, Rex grabs a nazi uniform, forges himself a letter of introduction with unreadable signature and flies down in to kidnap them back, all ending up aboard the titular train, where Charters and Caldicott are miffed to learn that Britain has declared war on Germany that same day, and so the ever-patriotic comic duo help our heroes escape the train to safety, via a cable-car shootout.

Margaret and Rex:

Defeated Henreid:

P. Kemp:

If its view of the Third Reich now seems frivolous, not to say naive, it should be remembered that it was made, and released, during the period known as the Phony War—before France fell, the British Army narrowly escaped annihilation at Dunkirk, and the Luftwaffe began to rain bombs on British cities. At that time, with the full horrors of Nazism not yet widely known, Hitler and his storm troopers were often treated as figures of fun (other British films of the period, such as Powell and Pressburger’s Contraband, adopt a similar stance). … [Henreid] plays Marsen not unsympathetically, far from the standard ranting Nazi blowhard, and the final shot of him lying wounded and defeated, watching his rival make off with everything, including the girl, even exerts a certain pathos.

Crook’s Tour (1941, John Baxter)

A huge step down from the previous films. It’s not necessarily the fault of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as Charters and Caldicott, who now play the leads, foiling an enemy spy plot and even getting the girl. They’ve got a new set of writers and a lesser director, and the whole thing feels cheap and unnecessary, and rarely funny – the silly cartoon music does it no favors.

This time the guys are touring the middle east, and Caldicott (the smaller, mustache-less one) is engaged to marry Charters’ sister Edith, whom they’re meeting in Budapest. Some setup in the Saudi desert where they meet a sheik (Charles Oliver, who had small roles in all three movies) who went to Charters’ school in England, who mentions that he’s protecting the British oil pipeline from German shit-starters. Then a ludicrous mixup with a ridiculous waiter leads them to gain possession of a gramophone record containing secret German plans to steal oil from the Saudis. Caldicott has eyes for Greta Gynt, and nobody seems to think it’s super weird that she’s the live entertainment at the next two cities they visit as well.

I didn’t know this kind of thing was allowed in the 1940’s:

Greta has an owl!

Baddie Ali (Abraham Sofaer of Bhowani Junction) is accidentally killed when Charters pushes him into the “bathroom,” which turns out to be a hole straight into the sea. Edith (Noel Hood, somebody’s aunt in The Curse of Frankenstein) shows up and gets mad that Caldicott is involved in spy-business with Greta. Ali’s partner Rossenger is a terrible spy, so his boss Cyril Gardiner gets involved, promises to kill and torture and all that, but our heroes (including Greta, a British spy all along) manage to escape.

Baddies Ali, Rossenger and double-agent Greta:

I’m aware that there’s another C&C movie, Millions Like Us, directed by Lady Vanishes and Night Train writers Launder and Gilliat. Holding off on watching it for now, since I presume the deluxe Criterion restoration is just around the corner.

by ·Comments Off on Max Ophüls double-feature

Madame de… (1952)

A talky rich-person drama with lots of fainting – not usually my thing. Of course it’s sumptuously shot, and I got caught up in the drama by the end.

The earrings of Madame:

Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux, costars of Mayerling seventeen years earlier, are an upper-class married couple (she also played a married cheater in La Ronde, and I know Boyer from Stavisky twenty years later and Liliom twenty years earlier). He’s a general and a count, and she’s a socialite, secretly running up debts, so she sells a pair of diamond earrings, a gift from her husband.

Boyer in bed:

After she claims to have lost her earrings there’s a blow-up about possible theft at the theater, so the jeweler (Jean Debucourt of The Eagle Has Two Heads) contacts the general, tells him the story, and Boyer buys them back, gives them as a parting gift to his affair Lola. She immediately gambles them away and they’re bought by Baron Vittorio De Sica (the year after he shot Umberto D, six years before Il Generale della Rovere), who sees Madame Darrieux then stalks her at every party until she falls in love with him.

He eventually gives her the earrings, and she claims to have found the lost earrings – a sign to her husband of her extramarital affair, and a reminder of his. Feelings are hurt, honor is challenged, a duel is arranged – she gives away the earrings to a church before fainting to death as her husband shoots Baron Vittorio off-camera.

Ophuls’s second-to-last film, after Le Plaisir. Written by Louise de Vilmorin, who would adapt other writers’ stories into screenplays on The Immortal Story on Malle’s The Lovers.

M. Haskell:

[Madame de…], beginning in the lilting superficiality of a frivolous woman looking to pawn her jewels and ending in death and the ironic sanctification of those jewels, is Ophuls at his bleakest and most beautiful. The very opulence and swirl of the world from which Madame de is ostracizing herself — the opera, the gowns, the balls, the jewels, the servants — will be stripped away as love burns through the outer layers of life. A woman is rescued from shallowness and inauthenticity, but at what a price!

The Reckless Moment (1949)

The last of his quartet of Hollywood films (nobody ever talks about the Douglas Fairbanks period drama The Exile). Ophuls’ attempts at style and elegance are mostly lost here, trampled by the silly thriller plot of this cheapie noir.

Best part is Joan Bennett (star of four Fritz Lang films in the 40’s) who goes to ever-lower depths to protect her foolish young daughter who’s been going out with a sleazeball (Shepperd Strudwick, who’d once starred as Edgar Allen Poe). Joan drives from her idyllic small lake town into the big scary city to tell the guy to piss off, but he comes by the house that night, falling to his death onto an anchor after the girl whacks him on the head with a flashlight. Great, wordless scene follows as Joan discovers the body the next morning then dumps it in the lake.

So the cops have found the body and suddenly irish-accented James Mason (returning from Ophuls’s Caught six months earlier) shows up to blackmail Joan over the dead guy. She tries to raise the cash, but with her husband out of town can’t manage it. Fortunately, unbelievably, Mason falls for her and tries to protect her from his partner who still wants the money (Mason is a terrible blackmailer). They nearly kill each other and Mason stages a car crash to get Joan off the hook.

Mason in the shadows:

Since it’s a 1940’s movie the family has a black housekeeper, Cybil, who once says an entire line fully on-camera that got erased by the music score. Wonder what it was. Joan’s daughter mostly pouts in her room while Joan’s insufferably hollywood-youth-talkin’ son putters with his jalopy.

Based on a story for Ladies Home Journal, naturally. Remade with Tilda Swinton in 2001.

by ·Comments Off on The Barkleys of Broadway (1949, Charles Walters)

A fluke Fred & Ginger movie ten years after their other collaborations. They’re a married song-and-dance act, best friends with their songwriter Oscar Levant (I liked him more than I did in The Band Wagon – he gets a good solo piano number here). Ginger’s husband is critical of her performance but smooth-talking stage director Jacques Francois says she’s wonderful and should do dramatic work. So Fred carries on with understudy Gale Robbins while his wife acts with the french guy, but Fred sneaks into rehearsals and secretly gives her acting tips. She finds out, they get back together.

Too much breaking-up and acting serious, not enough dance numbers

This Scottish routine was horrible:

The best scene is Fred solo as an enchanted-shoe salesman:

by ·Comments Off on The Bank Dick (1940, Edward Cline)

My re-introduction to WC Fields. I must’ve either seen him on TV when I was eight, or maybe I just know him through cartoon caricatures. He kinda seems like someone whose routine is best appreciated by an eight-year-old, so maybe I should’ve let it rest. A lightly enjoyable short feature with some poor moments (a stupid-talkin’ negro joke comes right after a penny-pinching shylock joke).

All comedies wrongly think they need a handsome young romantic couple in the cast, so comically alcoholic Fields (named Sousé, heh) has a daughter (Una Merkel of The Bat Whispers) in love with some dude named Og. He also has a shrew wife and hateful mother-in-law, but more important is his bartender (Shemp Howard).

Fields gives some bad car-repair advice, stumbles into a job directing a film, then pretends to have foiled a bank robbery, earning himself a job as a security guard.

“You talkin’ to me?”

He gets bank clerk Og to steal money to invest in a junk-stock scam, then has to spend the rest of the movie diverting an auditor (rain-thin Sturges regular Franklin Pangborn, the same year he did Christmas In July). One of the bank robbers (named Repulsive Rogan, nice) returns and steals the now-valuable stocks in a second holdup, and Fields actually helps stop him this time, earning the respect of his now-wealthy family.

Pangborn, not feeling so well:

Criterion:

He is a pathetic, bad-tempered figure who curses everyone under his alcohol-scented breath—everyone, that is, save Joe the bartender (played by the positively restrained Shemp Howard, the intellectual’s Stooge) who patiently administers Sousé’s medicine. . . And in typical Fields fashion, his fortune is not made through honest effort but by luck, circumstance, and beautifully timed accidents, later turned into heroic epics by Sousé as he exaggerates his role in each. Here and elsewhere, Fields accurately nails the American tendency to inflate one’s importance, especially if money and fame are at stake.