by ·Comments Off on The Great Moment (1944, Preston Sturges)

Released the same month as Hail the Conquering Hero, Sturges at the top of his game with his regular comedy collaborators: Joel McCrea as the straight-man dentist, with appearances by Franklin Pangborn and Georgia Caine and Porter Hall, and yet another Betty co-lead – not Hutton or Grable but Field (of Renoir’s The Southerner). Twisting the concept of WC Fields as a big-nosed patient-hating dentist, McCrea empathizes with his patients and fights the establishment to advocate for painkillers in the form of ether. If that doesn’t sound like a madcap comic premise, well… it’s not… I’m sorry, this is just a dull historical drama. William “Muggsy” Demarest does liven up the movie in the second half, first as the doctor’s biggest failure (he has a bad reaction to the treatment and experiences an office-destroying war flashback then jumps out a second-floor window) then as his biggest advocate, following the doctor around and humorously/tediously proselytizing for ether treatment.

Betty gets mad after McCrea chased her dog with a bottle of ether:

So, what happened here?

Alessandro Pirolini in The Cinema of Preston Sturges:

Triumph Over Pain, Sturges’s original script for a movie that was re-edited and released by Paramount as The Great Moment. In the script (and in the original cut), Sturges had created a complex non-chronological flashback structure that shifted back and forth between flashback and framing story, with Lizzie Morton and Eben Frost taking turns both as narrator and narratee

Pirolini compares the original script to Terence Davies: “with the ultimate goal of portraying the act of remembering, instead of the events remembered … the studio’s re-editing was mainly intended to ‘correct’ the non-chronological order of flashbacks, in order to normalize the narrative structure.”

A normal patient in the pre-ether days:

James Curtis in Between Flops says the studio-proposed title was Great Without Glory, and the movie was butchered by Buddy DeSylva, a songwriter turned producer, who’d written “Button Up Your Overcoat” and co-founded Capitol Records. Curtis quotes Sturges: “My next picture is coming out in its present form over my dead body. The decision to cut this picture for comedy and leave out the bitter side was the beginning of my rupture with Paramount. They did the same thing to Hail the Conquering Hero, but through a last-minute maneuver I was able to get the picture back into shape. I was unable to do so in the case of The Great Moment. The dignity, the mood, the important parts of the picture are in the ash can.”

Muggsy fainting in the operating theater:

How is this helpful?

Stuart Klawans in Crooked but Never Common:

In 1938, amid a small wave of enthusiasm in Hollywood for tales of crusading scientists — The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) — Paramount bought the rights to a history of surgical anesthesia, Triumph Over Pain, by René Fülöp-Miller, and hired [Samuel] Hoffenstein to work up a biopic … Sturges kept it alive … and asked to take over from Hoffenstein as screenwriter … By the time Sturges had [The Palm Beach Story] in the can, the script for Triumph Over Pain had lain in his drawer for more than two years. He might easily have left it to die of suffocation. Instead, he lobbied Paramount to green-light Triumph Over Pain and began revising the script again in February 1942.
…
By late April 1943 the [recut] picture, now retitled The Great Moment, was ready for release.
But it wasn’t released. Neither was The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Paramount held them both back while Sturges finished shooting Hail the Conquering Hero. Mixed responses to the previews of the latter film, in late 1943, prompted DeSylva to subject it to a fate similar to that of Triumph Over Pain … When Paramount at last released The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, in January 1944, it immediately vindicated Sturges, becoming his greatest box-office hit. The next month brought further vindication: Paramount previewed DeSylva’s reedited Hail the Conquering Hero to a dismal response. When Sturges offered to return to Paramount to fix the picture, without salary, the studio could only say yes. But when Sturges subsequently appealed to DeSylva’s boss, Y. Frank Freeman, to let him do the same for Triumph Over Pain, the answer was a flat no.

by ·Comments Off on Colorado Territory (1949, Raoul Walsh)

A darker remake of High Sierra; all the characters here are worse, corrupt and quicker to turn on each other. Virginia Mayo very good, always looks like she has secret access to a well-equipped powder room in the dusty abandoned church where they’re hiding out, and bolder than Ida Lupino, gets killed along with Joel “Bogie” McCrea when he runs into the high sierras (err, the rockies).

Doctor Henry Hull is recast here as the girl’s dad, and Dorothy Malone (Written on the Wind) doesn’t just turn Joel down, she tries to turn him in for the reward money. Joel isn’t released from jail – he’s sprung by “the old man” who pairs him with two assholes for a train robbery. Tough guy Reno (Destination Moon star John Archer) and smart guy Duke (James Mitchell, also in Joel’s Stars in My Crown) get themselves hanged, and I think the traitor cop gets shot. All different dialogue, and just as good.

L-R: smart guy, tough guy, Mayo

by ·Comments Off on Bird of Paradise (1932, King Vidor)

A too-young Joel McCrea is out with his rich white yachting buddies when he decides to stay behind on a tropical island with the hot girl he met, who he soon learns is scheduled to be sacrificed to a volcano. Seems like this movie inspired both Joe vs. the Volcano and The Thin Red Line.

Ridiculous movie, but at least Dolores del Rio is good – and does some nude swimming.

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 Foreign Correspondent (1940, Alfred Hitchcock)

Hitch’s quickie, less extravagant follow-up to the great Rebecca. He didn’t quite get the cast he wanted, ending up with Joel McCrea (just before Sullivan’s Travels), the poor man’s Gary Cooper, and Laraine Day (of the Dr. Kildare movie series), the poor man’s Barbara Stanwyck. A wartime spy flick, rather stiff with loose and uninteresting parts but a few great thriller setpieces to balance them out. Katy and I started it for being a TCM Essential, but only I saw the second half.

Joel, Laraine, and returning from Hitch’s Rebecca, Mr. George Sanders:

Take it away, TCM:

Official U.S. policy was still one of strict neutrality. Despite the fact that the British government urged their most famous native, Alfred Hitchcock, to remain in America during this time, the director desperately wanted to contribute to the British war effort so he sought out a property that would allow him to make a pro-Britain statement. The subsequent production, Foreign Correspondent, is the story of an American correspondent in Europe who becomes committed to the fight against fascism during his investigation of a kidnapped Dutch diplomat, a situation that requires him to travel from London to Holland.

I’d say Joel was more committed to following a hot story than to fighting fascism, but he certainly gets caught up in it, leading to a fantastic Great Dictator speech into a radio mic at the end as air-raid sirens howl, possibly the most thrilling last-minute ending to a Hitchcock film I’ve seen.

Van Meer, an Armin Mueller-Stahl-looking diplomat, knows a secret clause within a peace treaty that could help the other side when war breaks out, a macguffin that I never fully understood, but that’s why he’s kidnapped and tortured by baddies. Joel is present for VM’s assassination (my favorite scene, above), but smells a rat because the old man, usually very sharp, doesn’t recognize Joel although they shared a cab the previous day. In fact, a lookalike was murdered so nobody would search for the real VM. Joel follows the killer to a windmill for a fantastic sequence of hide and seek, then escapes from killers sent to his hotel room by first crawling out the window then using a comic room-service gag, is later assigned a bodyguard who tries to push Joel off a high building but falls off himself, and finally I was tuning out and didn’t follow exactly what led to the climactic plane crash, a miniature version of Lifeboat.

I read through D. Cairns’ post on the film looking for a great quote to steal, but they’re all great quotes, so I must instead link to the full article.