by ·Comments Off on Christmas In July (1940, Preston Sturges)

Briskly plotted and barely over an hour long, seems like a good first movie… but it was his second, after The Great McGinty, which I enjoyed a bit more.

If you can’t sleep at night, it isn’t the coffee – it’s the bunk!
image

A very blustery, fast-talky movie with maybe one too many blustery fast-talking characters. We’ve got the president of our loving couple’s coffee company employer (Ernest Truex, a reporter in His Girl Friday the same year – the guy whose desk the killer hides inside), our guy’s direct boss the strict office manager (Capra veteran Harry Hayden), the president of their largest competitor, the company which is running the contest (Capra veteran Raymond Walburn), and department store head Alexander Carr (of Bela Lugosi movie The Death Kiss, which sounds good). Then there’s the most blustery man of all, the virtuoso, the blustermaster, Capra veteran William “Muggsy” Demarest, as the stubborn contest jury holdout who, in the most predictable twist ending of Sturges’s career, picks our man as the grand prize winner after his previous grand-prize-win had been exposed as a fraud.

Our heroes:
image

Dick Powell was already a star, having appeared in all three of Busby Berkeley’s big 1933 musicals. No singing or dancing here. Katy called him a poor man’s Jimmy Stewart. Ellen Drew was saddled with the worst Sturges-penned female role, just grabbing her man’s arm and breathlessly saying “Oh, Jimmy” with a variety of inflections. She was just getting started in the pictures, would spend the next decade acting in movies I will probably never see, ending up in Stars In My Crown, which I probably will.

Other familiar faces: Capra veteran Frank Moran as an Irish cop (the bus driver in Sullivan’s Travels), below with Alex Carr.
image

Capra veteran Franklin Pangborn as the radio announcer (played a realtor in Palm Beach Story), below with Ray Walburn.
image

And Capra veteran Snowflake as the janitor (terrified bartender in the Ale & Quail club car in Palm Beach Story). Lots of Capra actors here… maybe Katy’s right, and Sturges tried to get Jimmy Stewart and throw a total Capra-party.

Muggsy!
image

by ·Comments Off on The Palm Beach Story (1942, Preston Sturges)

An update of one of my earliest entries. Practically all I wrote last time was “funniest movie ever, when drinking.”

Stubborn failed inventor Joel McRea (fresh off Sullivan’s Travels) is in love with his wife Claudette Colbert (puffy-cheeked oscar-winner, played the modern girlfriend in The Smiling Lieutenant). Thanks to a random cash infusion by the Weenie King (below), she’s able to leave him and go searching for a new husband, a rich one, so she can support Joel’s ridiculous airplane net idea.
image

Along the way she meets… William “Muggsy” Demarest!
image

And other members of the Ale & Quail club, who torment her until she almost crawls into bed with this extremely rich Rockefeller stand-in (played by former megaphone crooner Rudy Vallee, who would appear in two more Sturges movies)
image

Ah, but Joel also got random cash from the Weenie King and flew down to intercept her. He’s caught in a web of lies and ends up an object of lust of Rudy’s flighty sister Mary Astor (who was on a roll, having just won an oscar and starred in The Maltese Falcon)
image

Toto ain’t too happy with this, since he was after Mary Astor before Joel arrived.
image

Uh oh, Joel and Claudette are still in love. How can we keep nice rich guy Rudy from being disappointed and keep our happy-again couple from returning to their life of poverty?
image

Easy: Joel and Claudette are both identical twins, and their twins marry the lusty megawealthy siblings for an extremely goofy happy ending!
image

Katy wasn’t too sure about the goofy happy ending, because she’s unable to be satisfied by any comedy that does not star Reese Witherspoon (see also My Man Godfrey). We both thought Joel needed to lighten up a bit. It’s hard to be the straight man.

March 2025: Watched again with K’s mom, who pronounced it “weird.”

by ·Comments Off on Sullivan’s Travels (1941, Preston Sturges)

One of the least jokey of Sturges’s films (up there with Unfaithfully Yours), but makes up for that by being completely wonderful. Katy and I watched together for the first time. Even when I know it’s coming, I can’t help but jump when Sullivan says how much he wants to make O Brother Where Are Thou. No plot overview needed, watched it enough times.

William “Muggsy” Demarest, one of my favorites, plays the same type as always. More prominent in this movie are the butler and valet, Eric Blore and Robert Grieg, who were apparently professional butler-actors throughout the 30’s and 40’s. Veronica Lake was 21 when this was shot, looks younger. As famous as I thought she was, I’ve only heard of three of her movies (also The Blue Dahlia and I Married a Witch). Looks like after the 40’s, she switched careers from acting to drinking. I mainly know Joel McCrae from this, but apparently he was in a bunch of westerns. The poor “colored chef”, Charles R. Moore, has 100+ movie roles, all of them listed as porter, driver, bootblack, elevator operator or prisoner. Lot of in-film shouts-out to Capra and Lubitsch, who at this time were working on Meet John Doe and To Be or Not to Be.

image

Todd McCarthy calls Sturges “the first screenwriter to decisively break through as a director”… guess I never realized that’d never happened before 1940. Now it happens all the time (see Synecdoche New York).

The DVD commentary starts out funny, mostly a good time but sometimes one of them will resort to narrating and saying “that’s so great”. The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer doc is better, with a full career overview of Sturges, going into the whole post-Conquering Hero part of his life which I had wondered about – it’s sad stuff.

by ·Comments Off on Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)

Ahhh, Casablanca at the nearly-packed 4600-seat Fox Theater. Katy liked it!

Ingrid Bergman had been in Hollywood three years, and it’d be eight more before she met Robert Rossellini. Bogart owned the 1940’s, had already done Maltese Falcon and High Sierra. Police chief Claude Rains would play Bergman’s evil husband four years later in Notorious. Her husband in this movie, underground war hero Paul Henreid, didn’t appear in many other interesting films, but directed a whole bunch of Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes. Nazi chief Conrad Veidt died a year after this came out. Dooley Wilson (Sam), would’ve been higher than tenth-billed if he was white.

Opened with Rabbit Seasoning from 1952, a full decade later. What, Blitz Wolf and Tulips Shall Grow from 1942 weren’t available? Or one of the Bogart-parody Looney Tunes? I have more imagination than the Fox programmers. A one-joke short, but it’s an enjoyable joke. The crowd loved it.

by ·Comments Off on Shockproof (1949, Douglas Sirk)

“Stop being melodramatic” – Harry Wesson to Jenny Marsh… in a Douglas Sirk movie!

Did I even have to be told that Samuel Fuller wrote this, when the lead character is named Griff?

Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight, Cornell Wilde’s wife of 14 years, career fell apart after their divorce soon after this movie came out) is a bad girl just out of jail. She went there covering for her boyfriend Harry Wesson (John Baragrey, appealingly slimy, pretty much a TV actor except for this movie). Gets out and meets parole officer Griff Marat (Cornell Wilde, kinda big star in the 40’s). Trouble ensues.

To keep an eye on the girl, Griff naively hires her to live/work at his house and care for his blind mother. She still visits Wesson on the side and schemes to fake falling in love with Griff to corrupt him and ease her situation. But of course they really fall in love, and she shoots Wesson in a struggle. She’s back in trouble, and Griff will be in trouble if he’s found out for marrying a parolee, so they escape to an oil town to start a new life (leaving behind blind mom and super-irritating younger brother). “But the strain of poverty and fear of apprehension begin to corrode” and they turn themselves in. In a suspiciously happy twist ending, a recovering Harry Wesson lets them both off the hook and they live happily etc.

Tight little 80-minute noir drama. I don’t know much about Sirk, but the Fuller element is there in traces. Fuller’s own debut, I Shot Jesse James, came out the same year.

IMDB reviewer points out: “The title, by the way, seems basically meaningless but to have been chosen for its purely abstract, noirish resonance.”

by ·Comments Off on Gran Casino (1947, Luis Bunuel)

First movie Bunuel directed in 14 years, beginning his Mexican period with producer Oscar Dancigers.

Guitar guy in the prison in opening scene glances at the camera a couple times. Not on purpose, was it? Guess I’d have to hear the lyrics to know for sure. Damn cheap Lionsgate paid for an audio commentary but didn’t subtitle any of the songs. Why? It’s a musical. Lyrics might be meaningful. I can understand about half of the spoken Spanish dialogue but hardly any of the song lyrics. Wotever.

image

Dreamy Gerardo and his mechanic friend Demetrio break out of prison and go looking for work… meet up with Heriberto, who introduces to Jose Enrique, owner of The National oil field, under siege from evil oil barons who threaten the workers. G & D are naive and need work so they recruit people easily and get the place running again. all is fine until baddie oilman Fabio has owner Jose Enrique killed.

Demetrio takes over the National next. The night before the oil is to start pumping, he goes to the casino and falls for Camelia, same girl J.E. was last seen with, and he too disappears courtesy of Fabio’s goons.

Well, Gerardo isn’t gonna take this anymore. When the beautiful Mercedes, J.E.’s sister, arrives from South America, she gets a job as a singer at the casino in order to find out more. Initially thinks G. is in on the plot, but belatedly teams up with him and helps foil Fabio. In the end she sells the National to the big big oilman, knowing that G has rigged the whole place to explode if he doesn’t make it back on time (and he doesn’t). Poor Heriberto and his kleptomaniac girlfriend Nanette are presumably left back in town with no work, as Mercedes and Gerardo ride the train outta town.

image

A few, very few, possibly Bunuelian touches through psychologically meaningful shots… a drunk Gerardo stares at Nanette’s distorted, fading reflection in an ice bucket… a pane of breaking glass is superimposed on the image when G. knocks a guy out. Other than that, this is a very straightforward little studio movie. Looks awfully cheap for a musical, but not in a shoddy way, just in a non-Hollywood scaled-down way. We mustn’t blame Bunuel for the trite flicks he made in order to get by… it’s films like these that got him back in the director’s seat again, directly leading to Los Olvidados a few years later.

image

by ·Comments Off on Curse of the Cat People (1944, Robert Wise)

Co-directed with Gunther von Fritsch, but I’ve never heard of that guy.

Watched the first Cat People again, and I still like it. Cool movie. Male lead Kent Smith (later of The Fountainhead and Party Girl) is like a ten-year-old in love, simple and naive, which only makes Simone Simon (who has the most excellent mouth of any actress) more interesting and mysterious. Smith’s character name is Oliver Reed. Oliver Reed the actor was only five when this came out.

Curse, the sequel, has Kent and his friend (now wife) Alice returning from the first movie, now with their young daughter Amy, who is seeing the ghost (?) of Simone Simon in the back yard. Not super interesting movie, and even if it was, I wasn’t paying much attention, but it did have a rollicking Christmas carol singalong. Has a nice spooky part at the end, when the reclusive Old Lady Farren (who the young girl befriends) dies on the stairwell and the woman’s grown daughter threatens to kill Amy since Farren preferred Amy to her own daughter (whom she accused of being an impostor, “my daughter is dead!”). So two “ghosts” in one movie, although clearly daughter Farren is not really dead, and the returned Simone Simon might be in the little girl’s imagination. So, it’s like Cat People, another spook movie that might not contain any actual spooks.

by ·1 Comment

First of three anthology films in which famed author W. Somerset Maugham introduces short films made from his short stories. Each segment is from a different director, but you couldn’t tell… just plays like a classy studio picture all the way through (so that’s the producer’s name up top).

The Facts of Life – dad tells his college son, going to Atlantic City to play tennis, never to gamble, lend money or get involved with women. Son immediately does all three, wins a bundle, goes home with hot girl who steals it in the night. But he saw her and stole it back, accidentally grabbing her entire cash stash along with his winnings.

The Alien Corn – rich kid wants to be concert pianist, makes a deal with his parents and adoring wannabe-girlfriend, he’ll study piano for two years then play and be judged by someone trustworthy – if they say he’s good enough, he’ll devote his life to it, otherwise he has to quit and do something regular. Well he does, and a famous concert pianist comes to the house and tells him he sucks, to the delight of everyone but him.

The Kite – stupid one, dumb guy with awful parents is in jail for abandoning his bitchy wife because she trashed his prize kite. Wife learns to appreciate kites and they’re back together in the end. Katy compared the guy’s awful mother to my mom because Katy is mean.

The Colonel’s Lady – Katy already wrote a long comment about this one – I agree, it’s the only great piece in the bunch.

A pretty alright little movie, full of British people calling each other “old boy” and acting stuffy and proper to each other.

by ·Comments Off on The Return of Frank James (1940, Fritz Lang)

Not as interesting as Sam Fuller’s later I Shot Jesse James, but a lot better than I’d expected. Maybe I can enjoy a Western more than I’d thought. Some story differences, too… for instance, Fuller’s movie has Bob Ford re-enacting the murder as a play pretty much the same way it happened, while Lang’s has the Fords camping it up onstage and acting the heroes. Don’t know which really happened, but each version was well-suited to its own movie.

Henry Fonda is James, hears news of Jesse’s death and sets out with young Jackie Cooper (not Jackie Coogan) to get Bob Ford (a nervous bearded John Carradine) and brother Charlie.

Not technically the last Fritz Lang film I have to see, but the last one available until Human Desire shows up on cable again. That’s 36 down, 1 to go! Guess I’ve been trying to watch all of Lang’s movies since college, so seven years. At around five per year, it didn’t go nearly as fast as my Sam Fuller quest. Even if I didn’t pick up on the geometric patterns hidden within Lang’s mise-en-scene that auteurists wet themselves over, it was neat to see forty years of cinema from one director’s perspective. He covered 1920 to 1960, the period I know least about, and Sam Fuller was 1950 to 1990. And they both made so many movies… gives me a convenient handle on chronology. Oh, 1953, that was the year Pickup On South Street and The Big Heat came out. Anyway, on now to Bunuel, Rivette, Marker and Resnais for a western european perspective.

image

image

image

image