Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

Film: Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

Stars: Peter Lorre, John McGuire, Margaret Tallichet, Charles Waldron, Elisha Cook, Jr.

Director: Boris Ingster

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

It's sometimes hard to pinpoint what exactly is the "first" film noir.  The movie that is often-cited as the first "classic" film noir is The Maltese Falcon, and honestly it's hard to argue on that one-it's definitely the movie that, along with Touch of Evil, serve as the two bookends of the genre in Classical Hollywood.  But it's not the first.  A movie like, say Algiers in 1938 has a lot of film noir elements (crime, a dangerous woman, etc), and a number of the gangster films of the 1930's starring Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney would also fit this bill.  But if you want to look for a title that is oft-cited as truly the "first film noir" and not just a movie that is a clear precursor to the genre, Stranger on the Third Floor is amongst the most name-checked for that honor.  Made in 1940, it has a detective (in this case, a reporter, and eventually his girlfriend joins the investigation), a beautiful woman, and a seedy underbelly to it that coming in in a crisp 66 minutes, and is told in the fast-paced filmmaking style that the noir genre would become famous for.

(Spoilers Ahead) The plot on this one is pretty simple.  You have Mike Ward (McGuire), who is determined to marry his sweetheart Jane (Tallichet), but needs money & employment to do so.  He gets that opportunity covering a murder trial where he's the key witness (journalistic ethics be damned!), and his testimony convicts the killer to Death Row.  But Jane is convinced the man didn't actually do it (based on nothing but woman's intuition, which in this case is entirely accurate), and this haunts Mike.  Briefly after meeting a Stranger (Lorre) on a street corner, he has an extended dream where it's him who is sentenced wrongfully, and afterward his neighbor is found dead.  Mike is now the chief suspect since both men were killed in the same manner, but as we learn in the final moments of the film, it's actually the Stranger, who has escaped from some sort of asylum, who did it.  Jane tracks down the killer, and is nearly killed herself before he is hit by a car, and confesses before dying.  Jane & Mike get the happy ending (and an implied wedding) as the film closes.

The movie has the vibes of a prototypical genre-creating film.  A movie like The Maltese Falcon or Star Wars inspired a thousand clones they were so good, in both cases basically inventing a genre it worked so well, but most prototypical films in genres are more similar to Stranger on the Third Floor, struggling to find their footing.  The movie has some really good parts-Peter Lorre is spectacularly creepy in the film's closing, when even the least-jaded of filmgoers will wonder if Jane is actually going to get out of his clutches (it makes total sense that Lorre after this movie found a long history in film noir).

But you needed more Lorre and less McGuire.  McGuire doesn't work as the leading man (Lorre gets top billing since he was the most famous person in the cast, but he's only in a small section of the picture), and he really can't land the plot of either being "wrongfully accused" or "maybe an insane killer," which he's asked to be twice.  He's mostly just kind of a lug, there for the movie to work around.  This is perhaps why he didn't get the career in film noir that people like Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson did-he's too generic.  With a better leading man (like Bogart), and some rewriting, this would be a finer picture.  As it is, it's mostly just a curiosity for anyone who loves film noir.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai

OVP: Northwest Passage (1940)

Film: Northwest Passage (1940)

Stars: Spencer Tracy, Robert Young, Walter Brennan, Ruth Hussey

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Walter Brennan: click here to learn more about Mr. Brennan (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

One of my favorite jokes about Walter Brennan, and I want to say I heard it as an introduction Robert Osborne did on TCM to Kentucky a few years back, was about how you never entirely knew what age Brennan would be playing onscreen.  Brennan's big break in the mid-1930's in Barbary Coast, followed by him cementing his status as a valuable character actor in his Oscar-winning turn in Come and Get It, happened just after he had turned 40.  But most of his career was spent playing old men.  He didn't have all of his teeth due to an accident on a film set in 1932 (how he lost his teeth is hard to confirm-some say it was in a fight on a set with another actor, other stories blame a kick in the mouth from a mule), and his thinning hair made him look older than his age.  As a result, most of the roles that Brennan would become well known for in the thirty years when he was beyond being an extra & instead was a highly-billed (though never top-billed) character draw in movies would be playing older than he actually was, including Northwest Passage, where he plays a mentor role of sorts to Robert Young (our star in May!), who was just a decade younger than Brennan in this movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) Northwest Passage is a fictionalized version of the real-life figure Major Robert Rogers (Tracy), who in 1940 was quite well-known thanks to the novel that this book is adapted from (Kenneth Roberts' book Northwest Passage, largely forgotten today, was the second bestselling book of 1937 behind only Gone with the Wind).  The film starts with a disgraced Langdon Towne (Young), after being kicked out of Harvard seminary as he wants to become a painter, joining the military unwittingly along with his friend Hunk Mariner (Brennan).  At this point, while they are critical players, it's Rogers who becomes the main headliner (this is MGM in 1940-you put Spencer Tracy in your movie, he's going to get the biggest part).  The movie follows them as they do raids alongside the Mohawk tribe against the French, but really the biggest problem for the soldiers is that they're starving and going mad with hunger (in some cases, quite literally) in the middle of the woods.  They finally reach the fort they are seeking, and at the end of the movie start a new adventure-seeking out "Detroit" and the famed Northwest Passage.

The movie is fascinating for a variety of reasons.  For starters, they only use half of Roberts' novel, and the studio clearly intended to make a sequel to the film, assuming it would be a hit in the same way that Gone with the Wind was (to the point where they billed it as "Book 1" on the title card).  However, the high production cost ultimately made it less-than-profitable even though it grossed a lot of money, and the sequel never appeared.  The film also attracted a lot of attention for its gross depiction of American Indians, including a raid on a sleeping American Indian village that results in one of the soldiers later attempting cannibalism on one of the deceased American Indians that they killed in the raid out of hunger.  Putting aside the Hays Code for a second (I am stunned the cannibalism was able to stay in this movie), this is hard to forgive & much like Song of the South, it wasn't a byproduct of our eyes today-it was criticized at the time too.

With that aside, there are aspects of Northwest Passage that are easier to recommend.  The film's river chain scene is the most famous sequence in the movie, and a great tribute to practical effects in early 1940's Hollywood, where they literally have one of the most realistic studio tanks rushing through a band of extras (plus stars Tracy, Young, & Brennan) as they attempt to fjord a river that would surely have drowned the men in real life.  The movie's cinematography, which was Oscar-nominated is gorgeous, a sea of green & brown as it was primarily shot outdoors in Idaho rather than in a studio lot (despite the above photo, which was one of the only good ones I could find with Brennan in it, the movie is shot in beautiful Technicolor), and it pays off with lush vistas for the actors to parade through.  The acting is solid too, particularly Tracy (who plays Rogers rightfully as a bit of a jackass) and Brennan.  Brennan would win an Oscar for his evil Judge Roy Bean in The Westerner that year (generally considered to be the best of his three Oscar wins), and he was on something of a role as he plays Hunk as sensitive, washed-up, and dare I say it...a little bit queer?  There's a scene where Brennan & Young are cuddled up and Young is talking about his girl back home that feels a bit gay to my Celluloid Closet eyes decades later.

OVP: Tin Pan Alley (1940)

Film: Tin Pan Alley (1940)

Stars: Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Jack Oakie, John Payne

Director: Walter Lang

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Scoring*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on John Payne: click here to learn more about Mr. Payne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to start our month devoted to John Payne by taking a look at his pre-war films.  Payne's career didn't start at Fox, but for all-intents-and-purposes it might as well have.  He made a few films at Warner Brothers in the 1930's, but none of them amounted to anything, and by the end of the decade he was finding himself going back to New York to work on Broadway.  His contract with Fox, though, would dominate most of the 1940's, and at the beginning of that time, it was really focused on musicals.  We oftentimes think of MGM as the home of most of the musicals of this era, and indeed, they made most of the classic ones.  But Fox was making a massive business at the time in musicals, and Payne could sing.  The only problem for Payne was when it came to Fox & musicals, there were only two names that mattered: Alice Faye and Betty Grable.  Both of these women we've actually explored in past seasons of Saturdays with the Stars (which makes me stunned I haven't seen this film), but it's a good indication of the kind of career that Payne was enjoying heading into World War II...playing second fiddle to more important female stars on the Fox lot.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about two business partners, Harry Calhoun (Oakie) and his handsome songwriting pal Skeets Harrigan (Payne), who have a hit song that they need a singer for, and they meet a sister vaudeville act in Katie (Faye) and Lily Blane (Grable).  Skeets and Katie hit it off right away, forming a romance, but obstacles keeps getting in the way, first Skeets' ambition (at one point "accidentally" dropping a glass of wine on Lily so that Katie would get to sing their song) and later by true accident (when a more famous singer coopts the hit song that Skeets promises to Katie).  When World War I breaks out, Harry & Skeets enlist, but can't help wanting to get back to see their girls one more time, and in the process, Katie unceremoniously dumps her fiancee, and instead rejoins Skeets, with promises of more success (and surely love) in their future after the war.

Fox musicals, unlike MGM musicals, are not exactly high-budget works of art, but instead they are an excuse to have excellent singers belt out classics.  None of the four leads are having their voices dubbed (which was more common in MGM musicals as well), and some of them (specifically Faye, whom I am a huge fan of) are genuinely superb singers.  This one doesn't have as many memorable songs as you'd hope, with the best being "Moonlight Bay" sung by Faye, and there's not a lot stringing them together other than a bit of Hollywood propaganda (lots of patriotism).  As a result, that Oscar statue, even in a year of less-than-inspired competitors, feels a bit cheap (just give Pinocchio two music statues-it more than deserves it!).

Payne is fine here.  As I mentioned above and in our biography kickoff earlier this week, Payne's career as a film star wasn't bereft of leading roles, but it was frequently a look at an actor who largely was there to make his more popular leading ladies look good.  He does that here, looking handsome, but largely just being a place for Alice Faye's soulful eyes and heavenly voice to project onto...in many ways he resembled someone like Robert Taylor who was gorgeous, but didn't have a lot of opportunity to act.  This was most of his career before the war, appearing as a romantic lead for Faye and Sonja Henie in hit Fox musicals.  Next week, we're going to stick with a similarly-plotted film, one that even has one of this week's leading ladies, and talk about how World War II offered Payne a new role...though it might well have hurt his career.

Too Many Girls (1940)

Film: Too Many Girls (1940)

Stars: Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Ann Miller, Eddie Bracken, Frances Langford, Desi Arnaz, Hal Le Roy

Director: George Abbott

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Lucille Ball click here to learn more about Ms. Ball (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are not going to go very far into Lucille Ball's career compared to last week's Dance, Girl, Dance, so you might wonder if you only look at the title of this article as to why I'm using another feminine-monikered film from 1940 to continue on our month.  After all, Lucille Ball did spend a full decade making movies before I Love Lucy came along (and she made several after that).  The reason, though, is evidenced in the cast list.  Lucille Ball was married to her husband Gary Morton for thirty years, but it was her first marriage that would attract the attention of the public, and make her a part of one of Classical Hollywood's greatest super couples.  Yes, Too Many Girls is where Desi Arnaz met his future wife Lucille Ball.

(Spoilers Ahead) Too Many Girls is a pretty standard RKO musical of the era.  It features four men (led by Carlson, but including Bracken, Arnaz, & Le Roy) who are hired by a wealthy tycoon to secretly bodyguard his daughter Connie (Ball), who has become something of a celebrity in the society pages for her romances & goings-on.  She is moving to New Mexico to attend her father's alma mater, but little known to him, she also intends to marry a much older writer.  While there, she begins to fall for Carlson's Clint, but there's a catch.  The contract that he's signed (which Connie doesn't know about until late in the film) includes an "anti-romance" clause which requires that the bodyguards not fall in love with Connie.  This is clearly a problem, as Connie & Clint do just that, and while they have to hash it out over Clint's secret job and the clause, they eventually find their happy endings.

The film is weird for a couple of reasons.  For starters, despite getting top billing, Lucille Ball (our star of the month) is hardly in the film.  The focus is more on the randy bodyguards, who are all romancing a series of women (including Ann Miller) at a university that is populated by "virginal" women (they wear a white hat to signal their virtue), but whose flirtations signal that this might be pretense.  Ball is good in this movie, but she's not really in it, which is a pity as Carlson is a charisma drain, and certainly not enough to make up for stealing screentime from proper showstoppers like Ball & Miller.

As a result, it's actually Arnaz who steals the picture.  Impossibly debonair & youthful (he was just 23 when this was made), Arnaz is, well, dead sexy as the most memorable of the four bodyguards.  It's easy to see why Ball, six years his senior, fell for him.  He's in full-throated glory (even is his main musical number is pretty racist in its lyrics), and excellent.  Arnaz, whom we'll talk about a bit in the next couple of articles in conjunction with Ball, was never the generational talent his wife was, but it's nice to see him get out of Lucy's shadow here, as he delivers well even if they rarely share the screen.

Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

Film: Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

Stars: Maureen O'Hara, Louis Hayward, Lucille Ball, Ralph Bellamy

Director: Dorothy Arzner

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Lucille Ball click here to learn more about Ms. Ball (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to start our look at Lucille Ball's career a bit later in her career than she started making movies.  Ball moved from New York to Hollywood in the early 1930's as a Goldwyn Girl, and started getting bit parts in a number of movies including a lot of films with Ginger Rogers, one of which, Stage Door, gave her a larger part & put her in the company of people like Katharine Hepburn & Eve Arden.  After Stage Door Ball would start to get leading roles, albeit in properties that weren't particularly important to the studio's bottom line.  RKO at this time frame would've cared primarily about Ginger Rogers and Maureen O'Hara, the latter of whom teamed up with Ball in what would become one of the more important films in Ball's career at the studio, 1940's Dance, Girl, Dance.

(Spoilers Ahead) Dance, Girl, Dance is a dramedy focused primarily on two women: Judy (O'Hara), an aspiring ballerina who can't find success in that world, and Bubbles (Ball), a beautiful blonde chorus girl who only dreams of making money & finding stardom.  When Bubbles is discovered by a night club owner for a burlesque show, she jumps at the opportunity (even though Judy finds the prospect to be demeaning), and Bubbles turns out to be correct-she is rebranded as "Tiger Lily White," and suddenly finds herself the toast of New York City.  Bubbles incorporates Judy into her act to dance & essentially "act the stooge" to get the audience excited for Bubbles to return to the stage.  Judy resents Bubbles doing this to her, but she needs the money, and she goes along with it.  While this is happening, Judy is chased by an eccentric, emotionally-damaged (but very rich) man named Jimmy Harris (Hayward), fresh out of a relationship & looking for a rebound.  He initially sets his sites on Judy, but after Bubbles realizes he's loaded, she tricks him into marrying her, and gets a fortune in order to grant him a divorce. The film ends with Bubbles getting her act booed after Judy chastises the audience for reveling in her humiliation and the fleshy exposure of the dancers, but still getting her payday, and Judy finally becoming a proper star, one that will be famous for ballet & not for burlesque.

Dance, Girl, Dance was not a hit at the time, either critically or commercially, but it's grown in stature since it was first released, thanks in large part to the reputation of its director, Dorothy Arzner.  For those unfamiliar, that's not a typo-a woman was directing a major studio's films in 1940, and indeed Arzner regularly worked with key stars of that era (until the 1970's, she was one of only two women, the other being Ida Lupino, who had been an active member of the DGA).

This critical rescue is justified because Dance, Girl, Dance is pretty darn great.  The movie never talks down to its two leads.  While there is some sexually conservative messages toward the end of the film (it's always clear that the audience is supposed to be cheering for Judy), it never really shames Bubbles, and in fact in the end of the movie Bubbles gets everything she wanted-headlines & cash, even if she doesn't get her man.  The film also has some really fascinating sexual politics, not just in the way that Bubbles doesn't feel ashamed of cashing in, or the way that it calls out the audience (both onscreen & off) for celebrating these women who don't really have another option given to them to make this kind of money, but also in the bizarre way it makes Louis Hayward's Jimmy into a bizarre, sexually-obsessed loose cannon.  He screams in an early scene at Maureen O'Hara because he doesn't like her eye color, and it's clear throughout the film that he's basically just trying to find a replacement for his emotionally-manipulative wife.  The film is from 1940, but it's easy to see what Arzner is doing here, trying to show that a rich man can get away with such oddities because he's rich...but that doesn't mean he's not bizarre & potentially dangerous.

It's also worth noting that Lucille Ball is incredible in this movie.  O'Hara is badly miscast, not able to make Judy seem like anything other than a doormat, but Ball steals every scene she's in wholesale.  Bubbles in her hands is someone who knows when an opportunity shows up, milks it for all it's worth, and doesn't apologize.  Yes, she's a bit of a backstabber (basically tricking Judy into doing her show), but she also is a backstabber who isn't afraid to take the low road if it means she reaches her destination.  All of the trademark physical comedy skills Ball would later use in television are employed here, but so are some fine acting chops.  Lucille Ball, who would spend the next ten years as the "Queen of the B's" definitely deserved better.

Vigil in the Night (1940)

Film: Vigil in the Night (1940)

Stars: Carole Lombard, Brian Aherne, Anne Shirley, Julian Mitchell, Robert Coote, Ethel Griffies

Director: George Stevens

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Carole Lombard-click here to learn more about Ms. Lombard (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The years after Nothing Sacred, which we profiled last week, were busy ones for Carole Lombard.  She was a big enough star in 1938 that she did something relatively rare for actors of that era-she left Paramount, but didn't sign with another studio; this was unusual, and only a couple of major players of this era didn't have studio contracts & were still able to be major successes (the most notable being Barbara Stanwyck).  In her personal life, she was romancing actor Clark Gable, and in 1939, following Gable's divorce from Maria Langham, she married him.  Lombard at this point, according to her biographers, was desperate to win an Academy Award to match her husband's, but there was a problem with that-the public wanted Lombard in comedies, and while Gable had won his Oscar for a comedic performance, by-and-large comedies even in the 1930's simply didn't win Oscars.  So Lombard began to make a string of dramas, most of which flopped or were met with break-even success.  The best known of these, and the one that Lombard thought would win her an Oscar, was Vigil in the Night.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a nurse named Anne Lee (Lombard), who at the beginning of the film takes the blame for her sister Lucy (Shirley), whose negligence as a nurse causes the death of a young boy; Anne has her certification while Lucy doesn't, and so she knows she can find work somewhere else.  She does go to a city where she gets a job in a much rougher environment, one that has a near constant string of patients (and is severely underfunded), and there she falls in love with a doctor, Robert Prescott (Aherne), but both of their work comes first (more so for Anne than Robert).  As the film continues, Anne becomes more emboldened to fight the smallpox epidemic, a fight that comes to a head when the hospital's stingy funder, who has spent most of the film fruitlessly hitting on Anne, needs the success of the hospital when his own son gets the disease.

This is not where the film ends, but Vigil in the Night is an unusual film for Classic Hollywood because it was distributed with two endings.  This isn't a case where there's a director's cut that was released/found later, but it was that based on the geographic location the film was released in, it got a different ending than other areas.  In the United States, the film gets a romantic ending, one where Robert & Anne end up together.  In the United Kingdom, though, considering when this was released, it ends with (the real) Neville Chamberlain's voice talking about how the country is now at war with Germany, making it a much more somber affair, as the staff understands their fight is just beginning now.  TCM aired both endings when I saw this film, and I will admit the UK ending is better if you have to pick which one to watch.

That being said, Vigil in the Night is a bit of a slog.  The film is too melodramatic, and the script is too repetitive-Anne has to have the same fights over-and-over, to the point where you kind of wonder if the characters aren't a bit too consistent.  Oftentimes with this style of melodrama, part of the problem is that it's taking itself too seriously, particularly if it's leading toward a happy ending...the movie feels too light on occasion, and to my chagrin, a bunch of that falls on Lombard.  We've established over the past few weeks that Lombard was a terrific actress, someone capable of greatness with comedy, but she plays Anne as too light, and while she's good in parts (the standing-up-to-the-man scenes are classic Lombard), overall this is the least successful of her performances, and with no one else bringing much energy to the movie, it falters.  I get why an actress would read a part like this & think they'd win an Oscar for it, but it's not just about the role-you need to find a part that would fit (this feels much more attuned to a Bette Davis-style actress than Lombard).  Of course, Carole Lombard would never win an Academy Award, and we'll talk about the tragic reason as to why next week as we conclude this month devoted to the star (and yes, we'll finally get to the one picture she made with our director this season, Alfred Hitchcock).

OVP: The Letter (1940)

Film: The Letter (1940)

Stars: Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, Frieda Inescort, Gale Sondergaard

Director: William Wyler

Oscar History: 7 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Actress-Bette Davis, Supporting Actor-James Stephenson, Cinematography, Film Editing, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

As I work my way through all of the Oscar nominees from every year, while the films are oftentimes randomly-selected, I do end up gravitating toward movies that I suspect I'll actually like more often-than-not, and as a result some of my favorite performers I've nearly completed all of their nominated work.  Bette Davis would win 10 Oscar nominations in her career, one of the largest counts of any performer ever, and I am nearly done with the list after recently catching her in The Letter.  Bette is one of my favorite actresses-she's versatile in a way that modern performers are, fully-committing to the role (had she rose to fame in the 1950's, she would have certainly been part of the "Method School" of acting), and eschewing her glamour if need be to sink a part.  That's evident in The Letter, the remake of the 1929 film that won Jeanne Eagels a nomination for the same part that won Davis hers, where she totally inhabits the cutthroat Leslie Crosbie.

(Spoilers Ahead) Leslie Crosbie is a married woman in Malaya, who in the opening scene of the film has shot Geoff Hammand, a man we otherwise assume to be "decent" but who Leslie confesses tried to rape her (or in 1940's parlance, "make love to me") and she killed him in self-defense.  While Leslie will stand trial, everyone assumes that she's innocent, and the only person who seems to suspect her story is her attorney Howard Joyce (Stephenson), whose clerk shows him a letter that Leslie wrote to Hammond, asking him to come to see her (implying that they were having an affair).  As the film goes, it turns out that, despite Leslie's shifting story, she was having an affair with Hammond even though they are both married (he's wed to a Eurasian woman played by Sondergaard), and she killed him in a jealous rage.  In the end, Howard buys back the letter, putting his legal career in jeopardy, but it works temporarily-Leslie is acquitted due to lack of evidence.  However, as the film ends, Leslie tells her husband Robert (Marshall) that she still loves Hammond & doesn't love him, and when she enters their garden, she realizes that Mrs. Hammond is there, ready to kill her, which she does...and then is promptly arrested for the crime of enacting revenge on the woman who killed her husband.

I'd already seen the Eagels version of The Letter (you can read about it here), and liked it-Eagels is magnificent, and it's a good part.  The 1940 film is even better, but it struggles because in 1929 you could have a pre-Code ending, and you can't in 1940.  In the Eagels version, the ending is different-the Leslie character lives & gets away with the murder, but her husband keeps her in Malaysia as punishment for her sins rather than letting her return home.  She's left, therefore, in a prison of her own marriage.  It's much more effective than simply having Leslie, who has spent the entire movie crawling over barbed wire to ensure that she doesn't pay for her sins, randomly walk into her own death.  I don't know a better way to have gotten around the Hays Code without changing the court result (which would have totally ruined the plot, since the corrupted justice system is so central to the plot of the film), but the ending nearly ruins the movie, which otherwise is a triumph.

Much of that triumph comes from the two key parts in the film played by Davis & Stephenson.  Davis was born to play the role of a woman like this-she was so good at making complicated women genuinely complicated, rather than having them wither under the male gaze.  She plays her as someone who knows her privilege, who knows her status as a woman-of-good-background, and knows how to wield that power to maximum effect.  The makeup department helps (the heavy smoky eye look just accentuates that "she's got Bette Davis eyes"), but Davis brings a fire to this role, a woman who wants to roll the dice as long as she can to see if she's caught.  Stephenson is equally good as the lawyer drawn into her lair.  Oftentimes with this part he'd be played for a sap, but he goes in willingly, though perhaps not with the same level of knowledge of how bad Leslie is for him until it's too late.  Both were richly deserved Oscar nominations.  The only real weak link in the cast is Sondergaard, who has virtually no words and is heavily into yellowface dramatics that, are, well, pretty racist (you'd be fine fast-forwarding through most of her scenes).

The remaining nominations are all good, though not all equal.  The score is fine-it's a heavy, dramatic score, but it doesn't standout in the way you'd expect a film like this to (this is not Now, Voyager).  The direction is taut & layered, as is the cinematography (so focused on Davis unmoved face, it captures the spirit of her character without her even needing to say a word).  The editing is also strong, though again the Sondergaard sequences needed to be trimmed or played for less dramatics (even in 1940, when the treatment of Sondergaard's character might have been commonplace, it should have been obvious that this was hitting a melodrama that the rest of the film didn't meld with).  I will say, again, that had this been a year where Makeup was a category at the Oscars (that didn't become a competitive field until the early 1980's), I would have cited it, as Davis has never looked better & I think this is one of those moments where the increasingly dramatic makeup (showing her guilt with a heavy mascara pen) is crucial to the character herself.

OVP: The Invisible Man Returns (1940)

Film: The Invisible Man Returns (1940)
Stars: Cedric Hardwicke, Vincent Price, Nan Grey, John Sutton, Cecil Kellaway
Director: Joe May
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Special Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

We're going for a double-dip today, with our second outing with The Invisible Man (as I said above, you can see all of our past monster outings below in the links).  The Invisible Man Returns boasts a pretty impressive cast: a knight, a horror icon, and an Oscar nominee, and so it continues its place as the "classiest" of the Universal horror outings.  That said, this one plays relative lip service to the previous film, only mentioning the plot once (in a similar way to how they'd handle all of the Frankenstein sequels-the characters continue to just be another random Frankenstein relative that can reawaken the monster).  Here, we have Price stepping into the shoes (and little more) as the titular character, but he has the same problems that befall all those who turn invisible.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe (Price), a wealthy man who has been framed for the murder of his brother.  He convinces Dr. Frank Griffin (Sutton) to make him invisible, similar to the Claude Rains' character in Invisible Man (our only shoutout to the previous film), and he succeeds, but knows there's a ticking clock on this experiment before Radcliffe becomes mad & murderous.  As it turns out, even with Inspector Sampson (Kellaway) on his tail, Radcliffe is able to prove that it is his cousin Richard (Hardwicke) who is the true killer, and while he flies into madness, he still maintains a goodness to his character, and when Richard confesses & then dies, Radcliffe is a free man, made visible again by a blood transfusion, and reunited with his fiancee Helen (Grey).

The movie differs greatly from the original, and indeed from most of the monster movies in that Radcliffe lives through the movie, and gets a happy ending.  This is rare-while I haven't seen every one of the Universal monster movies, happy endings for the monsters is not something you see, and in fact this is the only film I remember that the monster ends up in a truly happy ending (in almost every other case they die or are "left behind").  This makes the movie better than it should be, considering it's largely a knockoff of the first film without the great supporting cast (specifically Una O'Connor).  Price is a great horror actor, but no one else is elevating this work, and it's all fairly routine other than the ending.

This is one of the only Universal horror films of this era to get an Academy Award nomination, and since this is a blog devoted to the Oscars, I can't let this moment slide without discussion.  The Oscar nomination was for Best Special Effects, which wouldn't have been a category when the original came out (otherwise it probably would've been nominated but lost to King Kong).  This nomination in some ways makes up for that, but seven years after the fact, the technology isn't different from the original, and in some ways is less impressive as a result (we were already starting to see more impressive use of these effects by the 1940's).  It helps that in 1940 there were WAY too many nominees in this category, which is probably why an effects-driven picture like Invisible Man Returns gleaned a nomination for past-its-prime tricks.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Werewolf of London, Son of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The House of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Masque of the Red Death

OVP: The Long Voyage Home (1940)

Film: The Long Voyage Home (1940)
Stars: John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter, Barry Fitzgerald, Wilfrid Lawson, Mildred Natwick, Ward Bond
Director: John Ford
Oscar History: 6 nominations (Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Special Effects, Film Editing, Score, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Sometimes when we're doing these theme week write-ups we're getting arguably the most important nomination for a film (particularly when it's an acting week), or in many cases it's perhaps the only nomination.  That's not the case today.  While The Long Voyage Home was definitely cited for Best Editing, and therefore is a legitimate inclusion in this week's theme, you'll notice nominations for Best Picture & Adapted Screenplay that seem a bit more "headline-y" in terms of this movie.  The film, one of the lesser-known Best Picture nominees from perennial Oscar contender John Ford, the film was a bit of a departure for the director.  After all, it wasn't made at Fox (it was for United Artists), and was a downer compared to some of the major hits he'd had in the previous two years like Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and The Grapes of Wrath, arguably his finest movie to that point.  The Long Voyage Home did not equal these film's successes at the box office (it didn't turn a profit), but Ford would be back pretty quickly with the massive success of How Green Was My Valley to prove his value to Hollywood.  However, financial success isn't always indicative of a film's quality, and Ford never made an uninteresting picture, so I was excited to embark on this viewing.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is based on a series of plays by Eugene O'Neill, and tells the tale of a motley crew of men who are on a British Tramp Steamer, headed from the Caribbean to England during the very early stages of World War II.  The men aboard all have different dreams for themselves, from get-rich-quick-schemes to sex with the women they meet in ports to the most wholesome of the bunch, Ole Olsen (Wayne), who simply wants to go home to his Swedish mother.  The men, though, don't have an easy lot-in-life, or an easy voyage, as they are traveling with dynamite, which could explode in the rough seas, and along the way they will have to travel through English waters that are under attack.  As the film goes, we learn more about the men, and they learn about each other, particularly what they're capable of as one of them dies during a storm (Bond), and another (Hunter) is accused (unjustly) of being a German spy, when in reality his secret alcoholism has caused him so much shame he's been driven to this dangerous life even with a wife begging him to come home (he, of course, dies, as these are based on O'Neill plays).  In the end, happiness is only there for Ole, sent home but in the process dooming the fate of another sailor, and the rest of the men reluctantly return to sea, knowing they do not have the luxury of an escape from its grasp.

It's easy to see why The Long Voyage Home was not a hit in its day despite the presence of both Ford & Wayne.  The film is dark-even Ole, the sweet, lovable man who has women flocking to have sex with him, at one point is drugged in hopes of kidnapping him onto a boat crew before he's rescued, and the movie isn't shy about telling us the tales of these men & their horrors at sea.  The sequence where Thomas Mitchell's Drisk reads Hunter's Smitty's letters, assuming they contain evidence of Smitty being a spy but in reality its from a wife begging her husband to forgive himself & come home to her (and the subsequent moment where Smitty of course dies before he can absolve himself to her), will make you cry, and this is a movie that doesn't indulge sentiment.  The story's a bit broad, the first twenty minutes drag a bit, and Wayne's Swedish accent is, to put it charitably, ill-advised.  But this is pretty much the definition of a hidden gem, the sort of movie that you start watching at midnight & can't put down.

The film received six Academy Awards, and I honestly wouldn't begrudge any of them, even if they're earned to varying degrees.  The Special Effects are cool, though not particularly groundbreaking (the big scenes that got this nomination are the gigantic, swirling storm that kills Ward Bond's character, and the later attacks on the ship that kill Hunter's), and the Score is sturdy but unmemorable.  The screenplay is an achievement, though-even with the sloppy first twenty minutes, it melds together four different O'Neill plays (no easy feat), and the editing helps with that, making the chapters seamless while still connected.  Editing is the "invisible art," which isn't the case here (we know when one script ends & begins more because of tell-tale cuts), but the movie isn't shy about bringing out sequences showing the physicality of this life rather than just dialogue shots, and that wasn't the case even in all of Ford's work, much less most work of the era.

The best nomination was the Cinematography.  I didn't know that this was lensed by Gregg Toland, who was the most important cinematographer of the 1940's, and it was done the year before Toland's masterwork Citizen Kane.  If you've seen Citizen Kane as much as I have, you'll notice similarities in the way that Toland uses deep focus techniques, and really plays with light & size on the screen in a way that we normally attribute to Citizen Kane as being the pioneer of, but it's proved here that Toland was already starting to perfect these techniques in previous movies.  The effect is marvelous-The Long Voyage Home is breathtaking, particularly the way that it uses bright & shadow, where even a man running in the dark can be just staggering (I picked the top photo as an example to exhibit, this, rather than where we'd customarily go with a glossy shot of Wayne in the movie).  If you see this, and you should, notice how glorious the camerawork is here, and pity me for having to pick between this, Waterloo Bridge, and Rebecca when we get to this OVP writeup.

OVP: Down Argentine Way (1940)

Film: Down Argentine Way (1940)
Stars: Don Ameche, Betty Grable, Carmen Miranda, Charlotte Greenwood, J. Carrol Naish
Director: Irving Cummings
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Cinematography, Art Direction, Original Song-"Down Argentine Way")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Betty Grable-click here to learn more about Ms. Grable (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Betty Grable was no one's idea of an overnight success in Hollywood if you were willing to do the research.  During the earliest parts of her career, she hopped from studio to studio in hopes of establishing herself as a dancer and an actress.  However, she couldn't make it at Paramount or RKO, and by 1939 (at the age of only 23-her mother lied about her age to get her more mature parts early in her career), Grable would have been forgiven for assuming that mainstream success wasn't coming her way.  However, a well-reviewed supporting part in the Broadway production of DuBarry was a Lady led her to get a contract with Fox, and fate took a hand when Alice Faye, then Fox's most important leading woman, had to drop out of her next picture Down Argentine Way, with Grable coming in to substitute for Faye.  The film was a smash hit, becoming one of Fox's biggest pictures of the year, and not only cemented Grable as the new star on the Fox lot, but also sealed the fate of Alice Faye's career (you can read more about this here, as Faye was one of our stars last year) and launched the unusual career of Grable's costar Carmen Miranda as well.

(Spoilers Ahead) Like so many of the Fox musicals of this era, the plot here is a bit of a hodgepodge.  We have Ricardo Quintano (Ameche), a handsome horse salesman, who goes to Argentina to sell some of his father's prize steeds, but only if he promises not to sell to any member of his arch-nemesis's family the Crawfords.  Naturally when he gets there, not only does Ricardo accidentally sell one of the horses to a Crawford, he falls in love with his father's rival's daughter Glenda (Grable), before choosing his father over Glenda.  However, their love can't be denied and so the two start to see each other secretly, and then eventually prove to Ricardo's father that their love is more important than an old feud, and that he should stop just selling horses and get back into racing them as well.

And also, Carmen Miranda is randomly there.

The film is about the best encapsulation of Fox musicals of the era, in both the good and the bad.  Fox, unlike MGM's perfection machine, was more likely to just throw together a series of musical numbers and hope that they stick.  Down Argentine Way, therefore, is technically a love story but there's not much stakes in it-you don't really get to know Glenda or Ricardo, and we're just supposed to assume that since they're beautiful and young that love is the only course of action for the two.  Ameche & Grable are both fun in these parts, but it's hard to imagine how Grable became a star off of such a vehicle other than her technicolor blonde-ness and enviable gams; this series is focused on finding what's below the surface of some of Hollywood's most iconic beauties, but Grable doesn't give us much to root for in Glenda, and quite frankly she doesn't have the instant depth and charm of Alice Faye (but it's early in her film career so I'll hope for the best in coming weeks).

The musical numbers are still fun though.  While Miranda is literally playing herself (like she'd pretty much do her entire film career), man does she come in and steal this whole film with her trio of musical numbers, particularly the first onscreen use of her signature song "Mamae Eu Quero."  By the end of the decade, Miranda & Grable (both in their breakout roles here) would become two of the highest-paid entertainers in the world, so Down Argentine Way certainly had a major place in film history even if it's pretty slight (if harmless).

The film won three Oscar nominations.  The Cinematography is glorious Technicolor (Grable looks ravishing, as does Ameche for that matter), but it's not technically interesting, particularly compared to some of the color work that was happening in films like The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind just the previous year.  The same goes for the Art Direction-the interior shots all feel like vacant lots, and one wonders if this simply got the nomination based on how much money Fox spent filming in both Argentina and New York (to accommodate Miranda's Broadway engagements).  The best of the three nominations is Song, the title track which is sung in the picture by Grable & Ameche, and features Grable doing a saucy dance number (though with her legs covered-the bare legs come later in the picture).  The song recurs throughout the film, and is a bit of an unofficial theme to all of the musical numbers, but while it was cute, it doesn't really jump-off-the-screen the way that Miranda's numbers will halfway through the movie.

Overall, I left the first Grable outing a bit underwhelmed, but since she's the rare Saturday Star to get five films in one month (only in a Leap Year!), we have plenty of time to get better acquainted with the actress. Next week we'll take a rare detour for Grable (who specialized in romance and musicals) into the universe of film noir, and one of Grable's only dramatic roles.

They Drive By Night (1940)

Film: They Drive By Night (1940)
Stars: George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart, Gale Page, Alan Hale Sr.
Director: Raoul Walsh
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ida Lupino-click here to learn more about Ms. Lupino (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We will start out our month-long look at Ida Lupino a few years into her career in Hollywood.  Lupino was an actress the movies always struggled to know what to do with-beautiful & talented, but not an actress that seemed to take off with critics at all, the closest she probably came to graduating from (to quote Lupino herself) "the poor man's Bette Davis" to a proper star was in 1940/1941, when she had back-to-back hits for Warner Brothers, both opposite someone who would graduate to Davis's level, Humphrey Bogart.  In what I believe is a first for this series, we'll be hearkening back to one of our former "Saturday Stars" today with the return of actress Ann Sheridan, whom we had as the very first star in our series in January, as she'll play opposite Lupino in this melodrama about truck drivers (no, that's not a typo).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on two brothers: Joe (Raft) and Paul (Bogart), both of whom are down-on-their-luck and always one day ahead of loan sharks.  Joe has big dreams for his trucking game, wanting to turn this into a major enterprise that'll show the guys who constantly put him down he is a big deal, while Paul seems to just want to get out of the business alive, and let his wife (Page) have the baby he claims they can't afford.  Joe meets a beautiful-but-sassy waitress named Cassie (Sheridan), and falls in love with her.  The only problem is his boss's (Hale) wife Lana (Lupino) is also madly in love with Joe, and doesn't understand why he doesn't return her advances.  After Paul is injured in a driving accident, losing his right arm, Joe is brought on to work in his office (at Lana's insistence) as she feels she can seduce him there.  When that doesn't work, Lana kills her husband, assuming that if she's not married Joe will fall for her, but it turns out he's just interested in working his way up in the business, and proposes to Cassie.  Afterwards, Lana claims Joe insisted that she kill her husband so that he could have the business (and her), but she breaks down and confesses on the stand, having gone mad, and claims an insanity defense.  As a result, Joe gets the business and Cassie, becoming the big shot he always dreamed of, while his brother Paul announces in the closing scene that his wife is pregnant, fulfilling his dreams.

The movie is odd-melodramas like this don't usually take place in such a hyper-masculine (particularly in the 1940's) industry as trucking but it totally works.  They Drive by Night is a well-written (four-time Oscar nominee Jerry Wald penned the script) and well-acted piece of dramatics, and proves a film's subject matter ultimately doesn't matter if the movie itself is strong (side note: I always get asked for my favorite genres or film subject matter-They Drive by Night is a good reason why I say "it doesn't matter as long as the movie is good").  It's a briskly-paced picture, and one that shows off in some ways why Bogart would be a future superstar, commanding the screen in every one he's in (he's decidedly a supporting player here, though, so don't be fooled).  Bogart would in the next year surpass Raft in the movie pantheon forever when Raft would turn down two of the biggest films of Bogart's career: High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, two decisions that would essentially cement his place in film lore as perhaps the actor with the worst taste in scripts (rumor has it that he also turned down Casablanca, another iconic Bogart role, but that feels more fanciful than the other two).

But what of our star, Ida Lupino?  She's awesome in this movie.  At first I was kind of curious if Sheridan would overpower her (Sheridan's also good...in fact other than Raft who feels a bit dry as the stoic lead, everyone is putting in a winner here), but Lupino steals the picture.  As a jealous, bored housewife she's frothy & campy, giving the best performance Joan Crawford never gave when she kills her husband and then has to confess in a manic fit of laughter on the stand that she did it.  The movie's ending is cute and sweet, but it hardly matters because at that point Lupino has committed grand theft robbery as our now-absent villain.  She's arguably third lead (I could see this going either direction), but in our modern, more "category fraud"-friendly era, she'd certainly be getting a Supporting Actress nomination at the Oscars for this work, and it'd be well-earned, though it'd preclude her from this series (which only focuses on actresses Oscar forgot).  November is one of those months with five Saturday's, and if this is what Lupino can deliver, I'm excited I pencilled her in for the extra title.

OVP: Boom Town (1940)

Film: Boom Town (1940)
Stars: Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert, Hedy Lamarr, Frank Morgan, Lionel Atwill, Chill Wills
Director: Jack Conway
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Cinematography, Special Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Hedy Lamarr-click here to learn more about Ms. Lamarr (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Hedy Lamarr's career in Hollywood was hitting its stride by 1940, and indeed she was about to have a massive run of hits for MGM before her contract would expire in 1945.  Lamarr, frequently written into parts that would tailor to her unmatched beauty, here managed to be in one of the biggest moneymakers of her career opposite two of the biggest stars on the MGM lot (Clark Gable & Spencer Tracy) as well as an actress of major acclaim who had just left a lucrative contract at Paramount to make a play as a freelancer (Colbert).  Lamarr, as a result, is someone who is getting top billing but nonetheless isn't getting a part that probably warrants it.  That being said, Boom Town is a pretty fun film even if it's not a leading showcase for Lamarr, and one that puts together two stars who proved six years earlier for Columbia that they were a pair-to-be-reckoned with.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers around the on-again-off-again friendship & working relationship of two oil men who start the film largely down-on-their-luck: Big John (Gable) and Square John (Tracy).  Both men have dreams of striking it big, and between Big John's know-how and Square John's land purchase in the middle-of-nowhere, they begin to strike it rich.  However, Square John wants to marry a girl that he left home, but when she comes to town, Betsy (Colbert) in fact falls for Big John, not Square John, and they elope.  This sets off a rivalry between the two men as they see their fortunes ebb-and-flow, clearly in love with the same woman.  The back-half of the movie centers around Big John, who has gotten egotistical and is having an affair with a woman named Karen (Lamarr), who feeds him insider information about the oil game as she hears it (in the way that beautiful women always hear everything).  Square John essentially tries to destroy Big John's company in hopes of making him go back to Betsy, his love for her overcoming his own need to be with her, and it works.  In the end both men find themselves broke, trying to find another oil fortune, and Betsy is happy living with them on the frontier.

The film is fun, if admittedly way-too-long.  The picture was nominated for Best Cinematography, which feels a bit of a stretch for a movie so conventional, and for Best Special Effects-both of these nominations come from one extended sequence where one of the oil derricks is on fire, and we have to see the two biggest stars on the MGM lot put it out with nitroglycerine.  It's a thrilling sequence, one that likely required a great deal of visual trickery as well as pragmatic effects, but the rest of the movie is devoid of such technical creativity, relying instead on movie star magic to fill in the gaps, so it's likely the film's gargantuan box office that reminded AMPAS to include it for such honors.

That said, I liked Boom Town a lot-Colbert & Gable, in strangely the only re-teaming they ever did after It Happened One Night, are electric and lovely together, pretty much stealing the picture.  The pickup scene recalls some of their best chemistry, and while Colbert's character has some eye-rolling moments in terms of the film's feminism, overall I enjoyed their relationship; it wasn't perfect, but it was real & we see sides of the marriage that usually disappear behind the end credits sign.

The shoot wasn't a great one for Lamarr.  While she enjoyed Gable, she and Tracy didn't get along at all (Tracy spent most of the shoot moping about getting second-billing to Gable-the two would never make another film together as a result).  There's a scene in the movie where Tracy pushes Lamarr's chest where Lamarr looks visibly upset, and pushes away; apparently he was actually hurting her and she was angry about the way he was treating her while the cameras were rolling.  Despite her success in Algiers, Lamarr needed a hit here as MGM had been giving her crap since then, and she got it-Boom Town got her enough clout to ensure leading roles for years (though some would argue she'd squander that clout, given that she'd soon be turning down Laura and Gaslight which are now considered classics).  Either way, Lamarr's terrific in an underwritten role.  She doesn't show up until over an hour into the picture, but I loved her in it-she takes the "other woman" and makes her genuinely likable, someone that you don't want to break up the central marriage, but honestly hope will end up with a nice guy, as she's much smarter than the men that she's helping get to the top.  Some of the moxie that I enjoyed in Ecstasy finally finds its way into this movie.  Next week, our last with Lamarr, we'll go toward the tail-end of her time in the spotlight with an even bigger hit than Boom Town, and in fact one of the biggest (inflation-adjusted) grossers of all time.

OVP: The Mark of Zorro (1940)

Film: The Mark of Zorro (1940)
Stars: Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Basil Rathbone, Gale Sondergaard, J. Edward Bromberg
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Linda Darnell-click here to learn more about Ms. Darnell (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The career of Linda Darnell can be broken up into two parts, largely before-and-after her work in Fallen Angel, which we profiled last week as the final starring role in the career of Alice Faye.  We’ll also split our series about Darnell into two parts, with a pair of films from the first half of her career pre-Fallen Angel, and then two post Fallen Angel when her career as a proper leading woman (rather than just “the love interest”) took off, with her landing critically-lauded and more important pictures before her career derailed permanently in the early 1950’s.  This week, we will profile her work with her most famous costar, Tyrone Power, in a massive hit for FOX that was seen at the time as a reaction to Warner Brothers success with The Adventures of Robin Hood.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film tells the story of Don Diego Vega (Power), a wealthy young man who returns to California from Spain to find that his father is no longer in charge of Los Angeles, and instead he is being backed by a corrupt mayor (Bromberg), whose true muscle in office is the cruel Captain Esteban (Rathbone).  Don Diego comes across as a dandy (and quite frankly, there’s a LOT of coded language implying that he’s pretending to be gay), but it’s all an act-he’s actually Zorro, the masked bandit who steals from the rich and gives back to the poor. Zorro comes across a beautiful woman Lolita (Darnell), who at first is disgusted by Don Diego even though she’s smitten with Zorro, and then eventually falls for them both, realizing they are one in the same.  Don Diego fights Esteban to the death toward the end of the film, sending the corrupt mayor back to Spain & getting the girl while saving the city, a fitting & quick ending to a surprisingly brisk film.

The movie is a remake of a Douglas Fairbanks picture from 1920, and you can kind of see the lines from the Silent Era into the sound.  The most thrilling aspects of the movie are all action that could have worked without dialogue, with my favorite being an incredible jump from a bridge where Zorro, mounted on a horse, jumps into a real river and somehow stays atop the animal (it’s hard to imagine anyone, much less Power, doing this stunt in the era before CGI).  However, the movie’s actual scripted parts fall flat, even with Bromberg & character actress Gale Sondergaard as his horny-for-Power wife providing some comic relief.  Even the Oscar-nominated score fails to impress, frequently feeling rather banal & while bouncy, not particularly memorable or in aid to the film itself.

Darnell’s major complaint about her earliest starring films was that she didn’t have anything to do except look beautiful…this feels like a pretty valid criticism of The Mark of Zorro.  Darnell’s performance here is nothing above ordinary, with her looking beautiful but given little to do except be commented upon.  There’s a scene where she’s talking with Zorro dressed as a monk (she doesn’t know it’s Zorro or Don Diego at this point), and she seems stunned that someone thinks she’s pretty since she’s only ever heard that from her maid, which feels vaguely absurd as she clearly has access to a mirror.  Power is considerably better, dashing and funny and occasionally a bit more camp than you’d expect a film to be self-aware enough to achieve in 1940. This is the third of the four films I’m profiling of Darnell’s that I’ll be seeing this month, so I know she’s capable of more, and it’s a pity she’s mostly an ornament for Zorro to win here rather than adding much else to the picture.

OVP: Lillian Russell (1940)

Film: Lillian Russell (1940)
Stars: Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Henry Fonda, Edward Arnold, Warren William, Leo Carrillo, Helen Westley
Director: Irving Cummings
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Alice Faye-click here to learn more about Ms. Faye (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We continue our look at the career of Alice Faye this week with a film that's a bit of a conundrum.  Lensed in 1940, it was arguably at the height of the actress's fame and time at Fox, and was considered a favorite by the actress.  Faye, as we've profiled so far, was insanely popular during her time under Darryl Zanuck, but didn't have a lot of what we'd name-check as classics today (unlike some of her contemporaries at the time like Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck), and so this makes the list in part because Faye herself loved the role so much (it's the reason we won't get to Alexander's Ragtime Band, as I was curious about Faye's assessment of her own talents).  However, it is also one of Henry Fonda's least favorite roles he ever did in his career (though in his memoirs he had nothing but nice things to say about working with Faye herself), a role he only took so that Fox would let him do The Grapes of Wrath.  So with this film (also an Oscar nominee, so OVP gets one step closer to being done), I'm curious-will I end up siding with Alice or Hank?

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Faye as Lillian Russell, the biggest stage actress in the world at the end of the 19th Century, frequently inspiring women across the country to copy her fashions and hairstyles.  Russell is legendary for her relationship with Diamond Jim Brady (played here by Arnold), as both had indulgent tastes and voracious appetites.  The movie spends some time on their relationship together, but more focuses on Russell's romances with composer Edward Solomon (Ameche, yet another film that paired the two) and Alexander Moore (Fonda), a young man smitten not with Russell the Superstar, but with Helen Leonard, the girl he met before she became the most famous woman in the country.  The movie is interspersed with different musical numbers and multiple dance halls for Faye to feature her dulcet voice across the relatively long (for a pretty slight plot, it's over 2 hours) motion picture.

The movie has some things going for it even though I'm not a big fan of it as a whole.  Faye is, once again, sublime-I'm in love with her so far this month, and really hoping one of the final two movies of the month manage to equal the talent we're seeing onscreen.  She knows how to play lovestruck well, and has a plum chemistry with Arnold, better than with any of her intended love interests in the picture.  The movie helped Arnold, who had recently been labeled "Box Office Poison" by an exhibitor publication (this was a hit, proving that article wrong), and was trying to transfer into character parts that weren't reliant upon him losing weight like his brief time as a leading man.  Weirdly, Arnold had played Diamond Jim five years earlier in a film for Universal, though in that film he was top-billed and Binnie Barnes a supporting part as Lillian Russell.

Other than Faye & Arnold, though, it's hard to call this a particularly strong picture.  Fonda was right to dislike the film-it's rare that I've seen Henry Fonda given so little to do in a movie, particularly one with his name above the title.  He plays Alexander as a lost puppy, someone who both wants to put Lillian Russell in her place and put Helen Leonard on a pedestal.  This could be an interesting conundrum (the world is trying to do the exact opposite), but the screenwriters don't give us enough to make this interesting, and Fonda seems to be phoning in this performance.  Don Ameche's work is better, though his character is a mess-he's somehow both an absolute cad and someone that Russell mourns horribly, perhaps because the studio didn't want Alice Faye to be anything other than a saint.  Both men are so critical to the plot that you kind of roll your eyes when Lillian Russell ends up with Fonda's Alexander, rather than Diamond Jim, or perhaps more believably, her adoring fans.  You may object, but considering this was VERY loosely based on Russell's life (almost everything is a fabrication), they might as well have given the audiences a sensical ending.

The movie was nominated for a sole Oscar, for Art Direction, and here it's a winner.  The movie has some really fun designs when it comes to the dance halls that Russell adorns, and the houses are ornate & fascinating.  I loved the increasing gaudiness of Lillian's dressing rooms as she becomes more famous and more used to Diamond Jim's extravagances.  These are nice touches, but really it's just a big, giant production that somehow fits the script of a big, lavish, bloated musical.  And while that's an insult to the film, I kind of think it works with this nomination.