OVP: Teacher's Pet (1958)

Film: Teacher's Pet (1958)

Stars: Clark Gable, Doris Day, Gig Young, Mamie van Doren, Nick Adams

Director: George Seaton

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Gig Young, Original Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Doris Day: click here to learn more about Ms. Day (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Doris Day would never win an Academy Award in her career, and would only be nominated once, for Pillow Talk in 1959.  There are actresses we're going to profile this season who enjoyed genuine critical success (like Audrey Hepburn) and others who never got that kind of recognition (like June Allyson).  Day's Oscar nomination theoretically puts her in the middle, but to be honest-that's being charitable to the Academy.  Day's movies were not meant to be critically-acclaimed-they were meant to make money.  Her citation for Pillow Talk was considered to be something of a surprise, even to Day herself, and less about her acting & more an acknowledgement that she'd been the biggest actress of the decade (and should have an Oscar nomination to show for it).  But the next year, when she got actual buzz for Midnight Lace (a film, it's worth mentioning, that's not very good even if Day was lauded at the time), they felt she'd had enough praise.  This is true for most of the serious or seriously-considered films of Day's, including our film today, Teacher's Pet.  The movie got Golden Globe nominations for Clark Gable & Gig Young, Young got an Oscar nomination, and it was cited by the WGA & Academy for writing, as well as the DGA for its direction.  But Day-not a mention...proof that she was never really taken seriously by the powers-that-be as anything other than a way to make some money.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie honestly has a cute premise.  We've got James Gannon (Gable), a grizzled news reporter who grew up in a newsroom (and only knows that life) who writes a letter to the instructor of a journalism school saying he won't speak in her class because he doesn't believe in journalism school.  When he's forced to apologize, he finds the instructor, Erica Stone (Day) to be less mockable (and far prettier) than he had thought in his letter.  He assumes the guise of a student, one who shows intense promise, and the two start a professional (and romantic) relationship, one that falls apart when James's identity is revealed.  The movie then meanders a bit, both sides softening their stances, and ends with him respecting her and her ending up on his arm, both in love.

The movie's premise and first thirty minutes is really smart, and almost justifies the casting.  Gable & Day are professional movie stars, and both know how to sell a two-dimensional plot, and we get some really fun dialogue about the benefits of both education and real-world experience.  I liked seeing Day in smart woman mode, and not just "preaching from books" but it's clear the writers want her to actually be good at her job and not just "seems good" until Gable shows her the ways of the world.  That theme continues throughout the movie, but it fails once the two start being romantically involved.  Gable is too old for this part, and not necessarily the romance, but the idea that he's going to learn more from Day given his background.  He doesn't sell the transformation particularly well (the script doesn't help him there), and by the last thirty minutes they introduce a whole new topic (the economics of a newspaper) as a bizarre 11:00 number to the plot that feels tacked on because they didn't know how to end the picture.

Honestly, the Oscar nominations perplexed me here.  The film was a hit, so maybe that was the driving factor, but most of Day's movies were hits...I don't get why Teacher's Pet got all of this love when she'd also been in serious films like Julie and The Man Who Knew Too Much a few years earlier with little notice.  Anyway, the two Oscar nominations are quickly discarded.  The screenplay, as I said, suffers after thirty minutes (the movie is two hours long), and really doesn't know how to end this with the two of them both respecting each other AND falling in love AND staying in character (and so it doesn't).  The nomination for Gig Young is even more bewildering, not necessarily because he's bad, but because he's so ancillary.  He's meant, I think, to be a romantic rival to Gable but there's no actual rivalry, and honestly I think he'd 100% be the "gay best friend" if this was a 1990's rom-com.  He's meant to be the comic side piece, but only a couple of his jokes are funny, and there's nothing meaty or showy in his work, or even admirable in adding to the picture.  He's just sort of there-definitely one of the weirder Classical Hollywood acting nominations I've come across...the only way it makes sense is if Teacher's Pet was far closer to Best Picture or Director nominations than I'm giving it credit for (which given the DGA & WGA nominations, may have been the case).

Call of the Wild (1935)

Film: Call of the Wild (1935)

Stars: Clark Gable, Loretta Young, Jack Oakie, Reginald Owen, Frank Conroy

Director: William A. Wellman

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 Loretta Young: click here to learn more about Ms. Young (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we talked about Loretta Young's Pre-Code era, which had a surprisingly excellent film called Midnight Mary at its center.  But the Hays Code was fully in effect by the mid-1930's, and may well have been the end of Loretta Young's career had it not been for some quick thinking from the publicity-minded actress.  In 1935, Young made Call of the Wild, a movie that was relatively uneventful in terms of its theatrical run-it starred two big names (Young & Clark Gable), but it won no Oscar nominations, wasn't a particularly big hit, and paled in comparison to Gable's other movie that year, the Best Picture-winning Mutiny on the Bounty.  But the film would become one of the biggest & most consequential of Young's life (if not necessarily her career), and would continue to be debated for decades to come due to the off-screen relationship between Gable & Young.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is based on the classic novel by Jack London, and is about Jack Thornton (Gable), a gold prospector who along with his pal Shorty (Oakie) go out looking for a hidden gold strike that only they and two other people know about.  We soon learn that half of the other team may be dead, but he's left his wife Claire Blake (Young) behind.  Initially Claire dislikes Jack, but hate turns to love, and she joins their expedition, looking for the gold with Jack, Shorty, and Jack's dog Buck (who is, if you've read the book, the real star of Call of the Wild).  Things turn sour when another group of men, when a bunch of other men try to steal the gold, letting it fall into a river as they drown fleeing from taking the fortune at gunpoint, and Jack has to let both Claire (whose husband has returned) and Buck (who cannot fight his instinct to go run with wolves) go before he can finally be free of the "call of the wild."

The movie is not good, but it's not bad either.  Young & Gable don't have great chemistry, and honestly this is the kind of Young I'm not a fan of onscreen.  Compared to Midnight Mary last week, where she played a woman of the world, here she's a haughty, prim-and-proper type that would become her bread-and-butter as an actress in the coming decades but she comes across as too matronly to be interesting onscreen.  Gable has far better chemistry with Buck the Dog, who genuinely steals all of his scenes and is adorable, but Buck isn't in enough scenes, and the villains feel too ridiculous to be true.  Not a winner.

The reason I picked this movie, though, is because of the weird chapters it had decades after the fact.  Young & Gable had some sort of relationship (more in a second) off-screen during the filming of this movie, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, Judy.  Gable was married to Maria Langham at the time and Young was between marriages, so the scandal becoming public surely would've killed Young's career, likely Gable's as well.  As a result, Young kept the birth hidden, and for the first 18 months of Judy's life, she didn't spend time with her mother, until later Young "adopted" her.  Judy Lewis (last name from Tom Lewis whom Young would be married to for most of Judy's childhood) would spend much of the first couple of decades of her life thinking she was adopted until her husband finally told her the truth, and her mother confirmed it to her.  Decades after that (in the mid-1990's) Lewis published a book confirming the shocking scandal, which resulted in a riff with her mother than would last over three years.  Young would later confirm in her posthumous autobiography that Lewis was Gable's daughter from her time on this set.

That would seemingly have been the end of it, but it wasn't.  Shortly after Lewis's death, her sister-in-law Linda Lewis said that it was not, in fact, a romance between Young & Gable that resulted in Judy, but instead the result of Gable raping Loretta Young on the set.  Lewis claimed that Young had not consented, and had hidden this fact because she considered what she'd done to be "adultery" which to the devoutly Catholic Loretta was a mortal sin.  Young died two years after she purportedly told Linda Lewis about this, and Gable, Young, and Judy Lewis were all dead when Linda Lewis made this public in 2015.  For what it's worth, while Young does acknowledge that she had an affair with Gable on the set of Call of the Wild, she does not call it rape in her memoirs.  As a result, we'll never entirely know what really happened in one of the most scandalous Hollywood moments of the 1930's.

OVP: Comrade X (1940)

Film: Comrade X (1940)

Stars: Clark Gable, Hedy Lamarr, Oskar Homolka, Felix Bressart, Eve Arden

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Story)

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 Eve Arden: click here to learn more about Ms. Arden (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Eve Arden's career was quite long.  One of the advantages of being a character actress is that while she was never as big of a star as she was during her Our Miss Brooks days (we'll talk about that next week), she didn't have to worry about finding headlining vehicles & could go back to high-profile character work after her television success, unlike actors like Lucille Ball & Jack Benny who had largely eschewed supporting work.  So today we're going to cover one of the many, many films that Arden made in the 1940's & will move into the 1950's next week with Arden.  Arden spent much of the decade as a steady presence in the movies, frequently playing the best friend or assistant to one of the main characters.  This is how she ended up getting her sole Oscar nomination, playing Joan Crawford's best friend in 1945's Mildred Pierce.  Arden lost that Oscar to Anne Revere, but it served as a reminder of what a good performer she was, and makes her one of the only actors we're going to profile this year that got recognition of their talents from the Academy prior to making a big name for herself in television.  I've seen Mildred Pierce before (Arden is quite good in it, if somewhat overshadowed by Crawford & Ann Blyth playing the worst daughter in film history), so I couldn't watch it for this project, so we're going to focus on another film that was cited by the Oscars in the 1940's, and weirdly (I pick all of these films months in advance) feels uncomfortably prescient of our current world situation: Comrade X.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in the Soviet Union circa 1939, where Mac Thompson (Gable) is a reporter who is secretly writing under the pseudonym "Comrade X" writing scathing stories about the Soviet government and the situation in Moscow.  Mac is blackmailed by his valet Vanya (Bressart) into keeping his identity secret, but only if Mac can figure out a way to get his daughter Theodore (Lamarr) out of the country, as her politics have made her a target for imprisonment.  The problem for Mac is that Theodore doesn't want to leave-she's a devout communist, and is wholly devoted to the Soviet cause, so Mac has to trick her into thinking that he is anti-American.  This unfolds primarily in one day, with Mac eventually marrying and falling in love (in that order) with Theodore, and by the end of the movie both of them are on the side of America, and particularly the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The movie is an unusual artifact if you study Hollywood's shifting attitudes toward Russia in the late-1930's and early-1940's.  Comrade X, like the previous year's more successful Ninotchka, is very anti-Soviet and anti-Communist, making everyone, including Lamarr, look like idiots for supporting the Soviet government.  This would change less than a year later when both the United States would enter World War II and Germany would invade Russia & Ukraine (in fact, there's a late plot point in Comrade X where a fictional invasion of Russia from Germany changes Theodore's mind about her country...weirdly predictive of real life), creating a temporary alliance with the United States that would lead briefly to pro-Soviet films like Song of Russia to come out...which would then be used later in the decade as grounds for HUAC investigations into a number of different actors & performers.  Actor Robert Taylor, who starred in Song of Russia, would be the only major Hollywood star to publicly name names in front of Congress, in part because of his initial connection to this movie. But at the time, stars like Gable, Lamarr, & Arden were not put into a position that might have made their careers difficult later, as this film is very much about mocking the Soviet Union.  And of course, in the decades that followed, Hollywood would continue to have an uneasy attitude toward depictions of Russia in everything from James Bond to the 1980's Cold War classics like WarGames...similar to the world's uneasy relationship with a combative Russia, a relationship still dominating headlines today.

Comrade X, though, isn't a particularly good movie.  The story for which it was cited feels like a retread of Ninotchka, and doesn't have a lot to say beyond "Lamarr's character is stupid, Gable's is smart."  It's helped a bit by Gable & Lamarr having good chemistry, and the supporting cast, specifically Arden as Gable's former flame & now fellow wise-cracking journalist, works well, but they can't save a pretty sloppy piece of anti-Russian cinema, which is focused more on casting stereotypes than grounding us in a real relationship between Gable & Lamarr.  Arden, for the second time this month, is a key supporting player but not in a lot of the movie, just two extended sequences that are crucial to changing the tone of the movie.  Next week, though, we're going to look at a movie from Arden where she would take the top of the marquee, and talk about how that came to pass.

OVP: San Francisco (1936)

Film: San Francisco (1936)

Stars: Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, Spencer Tracy, Jack Holt

Director: WS van Dyke

Oscar History: 6 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Director, Actor-Spencer Tracy, Original Story, Assistant Director, Sound Recording*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

If you spend a lot of time on Film Twitter or the online awards circuit, you will find that one of the bigger conversations discussed is "category fraud."  This, for those unfamiliar, is when someone who is clearly a lead player tries for a supporting nomination because they think it will be easier to get the nomination.  The debate runs the gamut between clear cases of fraud (Rooney Mara in Carol comes to mind) to cases where it's more debatable (think Jennifer Lopez in Hustlers).  I'm not in favor of this, and as a general rule when we do our OVP acting write-ups, I make a point of docking one point from any lead performance committing category fraud.  But the opposite occasionally happens, and I will admit...I don't have quite the same problem with it.  This is when a supporting performance for some reason pushes for lead-it's less common, but it's a peculiarity throughout the Oscars.  Perhaps the most flagrant example of this happened the very first year of the supporting categories, when Spencer Tracy was nominated for lead actor...for a performance that clocks in at less than 15 minutes.

(Spoilers Ahead) San Francisco is about Mary Blake (MacDonald), a broke young woman who is trying to make it as a singer.  She encounters Blackie Norton (Gable), who (because she sings like Jeanette MacDonald) pretty much hires her on the spot.  The two start to fall in love, but there's an unease about how they picture domesticity-Mary wants to continue her career to greater heights, whereas Blackie wants her to continue to sing for his nightclub.  This causes a rift in their relationship, where Mary ends up engaged to another man.  The film culminates with a showdown as Mary tries to (against Blackie's wishes) save his club from financial ruin after she leaves it...only to have the 1906 San Francisco earthquake interrupt their fight, killing hundreds in the process, including Mary's new fiancee.  Mary & Blackie reunite, potentially as lovers but certainly as grateful friends, before the ruins of San Francisco morph into a then-modern day San Francisco.

The movie itself, I'll be honest, is a snore.  I love me some Clark Gable, but Jeanette MacDonald...is only good because she's not Nelson Eddy (who is the worst).  Sure she can sing, but her screen persona is so vacant & too wishy-washy.  She reminds me of an operatic Loretta Young, and that is not meant as a compliment.  The one impressive moment of the film is surely the earthquake, and yes-that's spectacular.  I honestly was floored by how it seemed to come out-of-nowhere (even though it had been regularly telegraphed), and in a world without CGI, it has a proper sense of danger & unrest.  If there was a Special Effects Oscar in 1936, San Francisco would've been an easy sell for the win.

But the nominations that did happen, I'm not onboard with.  Directing (and assistant directing) feels like the only thing that's worthwhile is the earthquake scene, but that's maybe 15 minutes of the movie-I can't get behind that.  The story itself is confusing, boring, and pretty repetitive.  I will say that the sound recording gets a thumbs up from me though-between the earthquake & MacDonald's crazy high notes, there's a lot of sound recording here, and I think it comes together well, if not as well as something like Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz just a couple of years later.

Which brings us back to Spencer Tracy.  Tracy's nomination is genuinely confusing.  His priest is a chauvinist (a trope for the actor), one who condemns MacDonald for dressing too provocatively in one scene.  But he's also barely there, and pretty much an afterthought (I didn't include him in the writeup for a reason)-if he weren't Spencer Tracy, you wouldn't notice this character.  I'm at a loss on how this happened.  If MGM wanted a lead actor for San Francisco, Gable was right there and a big star.  If they wanted Tracy for a film, he was considerably more engaging in Fury, which was also an MGM property and one that was nominated for a writing Oscar so it was in the Academy's purview.  I'm not confused as to why Tracy was marketed as lead (it would take until the 1970's before we'd more regularly start seeing leading actors attempt supporting nominations on the regular), but I'm baffled as to why the Academy bought it.

OVP: Mogambo (1953)

Film: Mogambo (1953)

Stars: Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Donald Sinden

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Ava Gardner, Supporting Actress-Grace Kelly)

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 Grace Kelly-click here to learn more about Ms. Kelly (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I mentioned in our kickoff to Grace Kelly Month, Kelly's story is not one of a robust amount of struggle in terms of getting into the upper echelons of Hollywood (in fact, more than almost any major star of the era, it's hard to find an actress who struggled less to make it in the industry).  A swiftly successful career in theater & television opened up doors for Kelly, first in Henry Hathaway's Fourteen Hours and then in the first of several genuine classics Kelly made, Fred Zinnemann's High Noon.  High Noon was a success, winning Kelly's costar Gary Cooper an Oscar, but her notices were middling, and she was worried she might be considered "just a pretty face" in Hollywood despite getting a lot of opportunity from the picture.  However, when Gene Tierney (who was off being wooed by Aly Khan at the time) dropped out of Mogambo, Kelly jumped at the opportunity to work with screen legends Clark Gable & John Ford in the role that would change her life.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Victor Marswell (Gable), a big-game hunter who spends much of his time trapping animals in Africa to send to zoos and circuses.  He meets Eloise "Honey Bear" Kelly (Gardner), a fortune-hunter who is trapped on their safari briefly.  Though initially they dislike one another, that animosity melts into attraction, and they clearly sleep together (despite not being married).  Honey Bear leaves, and in her place is Donald (Sinden) and Linda Nordley (Kelly), a couple that want to safari to record the gorillas, which Victor refuses to do because it's too difficult to find the gorillas.  However, slowly Linda begins to wear him down, and despite being a prim married woman, she & Victor begin to have a love affair.  This is complicated further when Honey Bear, obviously still in love with Victor, returns, and has to hide their relationship so as not to scandalize Linda.  As the film progresses, Victor clearly loves Linda, and wants to be with her, but doesn't have the guts to break up their relationship, so instead she has Linda catch him with Honey Bear, and in anger she shoots him.  The film ends with Honey Bear claiming that Linda was right to shoot him (since he'd been making advances on her, a lie only the audience and the love triangle knows), and though they have some friction, Honey Bear & Victor end up together while Linda & Donald return to domesticity.

The movie, if it sounds familiar, is somewhat based on a different Clark Gable film, Red Dust, which we reviewed for the blog a few years back for a different season of Saturdays with the Stars.  If you click that film's review, you'll see that I loved Red Dust...and if you look above, you'll see that I did not love Mogambo.  The difference here is the performances.  While Gable is in the same role, he doesn't have the same kind of chemistry with either of his leading ladies that he did with Jean Harlow.  Ava Gardner makes out the best of the two, as she's giving a decent performance (it's the only bit of light in the movie), as Honey Bear, though it's an easy part that Gardner nails thoroughly.  This was the only Oscar nomination in her long career, but it's not the best that Gardner could do-she plays a spunky, jaded lover, but they don't lean in hard enough into the sultriness that Gardner would brilliantly capture in earlier film noir.

That said, Gardner is miles ahead of Grace Kelly who, I'm sorry to say in a month devoted to her, is actively not good in Mogambo.  Kelly is given the more interesting, if also more difficult part.  Linda is a woman who has lived in a glass cage, always being asked to be perfect, and she's feeling something for the first time.  Unlike Gardner's Honey Bear, there's not a lot to like in her, and Kelly underscores that by making her seem stiff, guarded, & without any feeling.  Her romance with Gable should be steamy, a haloed saint deigning to come to life & play among the mortals, but Kelly can't get that across.  Instead she plays Linda as wooden & two-dimensional...I'm honestly flummoxed how Kelly got this Oscar nomination.  Gene Tierney, a more experienced actress, would've been a better choice.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the real story of Mogambo wasn't what was going on onscreen, but offscreen, as the filming of this movie is the stuff of Hollywood legend.  Gable & Kelly were having an affair (this is basically taken as gospel even if neither party seems to have ever officially stated that it was happening), which would be something of a pattern for Kelly during her filming (we'll talk about this in the coming weeks).  Gable, Gardner, & Donald Sinden all fought repeatedly with director John Ford, and Gardner had to be flown off location after she got stuck with a bad case of dysentery.  Of course, this might've been the least of her worries.  Gardner was in one of the rockier patches of her legendary marriage to Frank Sinatra, and determined not to have a permanent connection with her husband, got an abortion during filming (the two would divorce, childless, in 1957).  Next week we're going to move just a year into the future of Kelly's career, but with it we're going to move beyond the early whiffs in her career to the one director who knew exactly what he had when she got onscreen.

OVP: Test Pilot (1938)

Film: Test Pilot (1938)

Stars: Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy, Lionel Barrymore, Marjorie Main

Director: Victor Fleming

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Story, Film Editing)

(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

MGM circa 1938 boasted of having "more stars than there are in heaven," and surely this was the case for the studio with a movie like Test Pilot.  The film features three of the biggest headliners of the era (Gable, Loy, & Tracy...plus Lionel Barrymore to boot!), and truly stunning aerial photography, and was cited for Oscar's top prize based on these stars & the film's significant profit.  However, I had seen Test Pilot maybe 10 years ago, and I had poor memories of it.  I didn't really care for the film initially, though it was so forgettable I honestly was curious as to why it had left a bitter taste in my mouth, particularly considering my passion for some of the actors.  Upon revisit, I was struck by a few things I didn't remember (we'll get there), but I feel like I was right-this movie doesn't really work despite having such magnetism on the call sheet.  Let's talk about why.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Jim Lane (Gable), an ace test pilot who recklessly jumps from dangerous plane to plane (and from woman to woman), much to the chagrin of his buddy Gunner (Tracy) and boss Drake (Barrymore).  One day, he crash lands in Kansas, and there he meets the beautiful Ann Barton (Loy), a country girl who is engaged to another man but who is clearly destined for Jim.  They end up together, marrying, but this isn't happily-ever-after (it's only about 30 minutes into the movie).  Instead, we get a dose of what this marriage is like, with Jim clearly an adrenaline junkie who can't give up his day job (and doesn't want to), and both Gunner & Ann on the ground, holding their breath as Jim nears death repeatedly (including one sequence where he barely lives, but one of his fellow pilots dies, a moment that is so telegraphed when they randomly introduce his wife & three kids that the set directors might as well have put a gigantic neon sign above the actor's death saying "destined for the morgue").  The climax of the film has Jim crash landing, and in the process he lives but it's Gunner who dies, which is enough to push Jim to give up this life for good, allowing him to have a grounded life with Ann & their family.

There are things to like in Test Pilot, and I don't want to push those aside.  For starters, it's interesting to watch a film from 1938 about a troubled marriage.  This isn't something we're used to in romances of this era, where "I do" is almost certainly followed by an end card, and it's interesting to see how Hollywood approaches a troubled domesticity between two of its biggest leading players.  I'll also point out right now that the aerial stunts & photography, particularly the landing in Kansas, are impressive for 1938 & this is the kind of film that would've surely gotten a VFX nomination (deservedly) had that category existed in 1938.

But the movie suffers as it goes on because it almost has whiplash it oscillates so frequently across genres.  The movie casts Loy & Gable, two of the era's most charming figures, and occasionally lets them play off of each other (which is a blast), but more often-than-not their courtship veers into sanctimonious, expositional melodrama, with Loy repeatedly underlining the pains she has of being in love with a man who is wrecklessly putting his life in danger.  This isn't necessarily a bad idea for a film, but it's so oft-repeated, with it being clear how it will end (it's not like Gable's going to pick his job over his wife), but it doesn't find a way to modulate its tone-every five minutes we're laughing then so shuddered with dramatics you almost feel guilty for being charmed by the two leads.  It doesn't know what to do with its story, and as a result it becomes a bit of a slog to get through.

The leads aren't able to bolster the movie either.  Loy & Gable clearly want this to be a spry romantic comedy-their acting styles are well-suited for one another, but when it's dramatic they can't pull it off, particularly Loy, who is the actor I like best in this movie generally, but she can't make her contradictory Ann make sense.  Weirdly, it's Spencer Tracy who is by-far the best person in this film.  I am not a Spencer Tracy cheerleader (hence the weirdly), and I'd pick Gable or Loy over him any day of the week, but Tracy is quite good as Gunner, giving him a wearied gruffness that I liked.  Two years removed from San Francisco (for which Tracy won an Oscar nomination but Gable didn't), this is another case where Tracy is taking the film wholesale away from Gable, who was the better movie star but not the thespian that Tracy was.  It's worth noting that Tracy's Gunner does have something of a queer sensibility (he doesn't seem to have any real romantic entanglements other than fretting about Clark Gable), which is perhaps too generous of a reading of Test Pilot, but I did see those shades as the movie continued.  Without this interpretation, Test Pilot doesn't have much to lend to it-for a movie that feels long, it's just the same story over-and-over again...to use the vernacular of the film, a movie that's not so much turbulent as merely routine.

No Man of Her Own (1932)

Film: No Man of Her Own (1932)

Stars: Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Mackaill, Grant Mitchell

Director: Wesley Ruggles

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.

We're going to start our month devoted to Carole Lombard with a film that should be a bigger deal than it is.  Lombard's career up until 1932 had been fine, but not particularly interesting.  She'd been signed to a star contract Paramount, and was regularly working (she made five films in 1931 alone), but wasn't really known as a headlining star.  In fact, it was more her marriage to actor William Powell (significantly more famous than she) who was giving her the bulk of her press, as people were clamoring for gossip about the newlyweds.  It was about this time that Clark Gable got the opportunity to be loaned out from MGM (a rarity for the actor) to Paramount (so that Marion Davies could get Bing Crosby as her leading man), and he selected a script called No Man of Her Own, where he was initially paired opposite Miriam Hopkins, but when she backed out, the studio picked Lombard to be his costar.  As we'll find out below, this was a weird stroke of fate...that ultimately would go nowhere for years.  But first, the movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a low-key romantic comedy, where we have Babe Stewart (Gable), a gambler who hustles rich men out of their fortunes in rigged games of poker.  In the opening scenes he dumps the distraction in the card game, Kay (Mackaill), who is smitten & wants revenge on him.  With a jilted lover & the latest victim of his card game aware of what happened, Babe goes to Glendale, a small town where he meets a worldly (but still innocent) librarian named Connie (Lombard).  She falls for him, and eventually tricks him (through his gambling addiction) into marrying him.  Marital bliss doesn't work out for the two of them, though, as Babe refuses to make an honest man of himself, and hides his criminal past from Connie.  Things come to a head when Babe "goes to South America" (but really turns himself into the police so that he can "come clean") and while Connie knows that he is lying to her, she realizes he's doing it out of genuine love, and lets him continue lying about where he's been, knowing that what matters, their marriage, is built on reality and not falsehoods.

While the film was a hit, it wasn't particularly important in Lombard's (or Gable's, for that matter) career.  It would be two years before Lombard would have her first major film role, and graduate from leading lady into superstardom, and Gable had far bigger things going on in 1932 than this movie.  The film is also pleasantly-regarded but not well-remembered amongst film historians, and that's because it's not very good.  The chemistry between the two leads is there, but it's not outstanding, and the script meanders & loses focus, never quite knowing what to do with Connie (or Kay, for that matter).  It's forgettable, and qualitatively nothing more than a footnote in the careers of the two stars.

So why'd I pick it when there are dozens of options for Lombard to choose from?  Because No Man of Her Own is a bizarre curiosity that had to be witnessed due to what was happening off camera...which in 1932 was nothing.  Despite Gable's reputation as a ladies' man, he & Lombard didn't have an affair on the set of No Man of Her Own (she stayed faithful to William Powell, though they'd be getting a divorce soon).  Bizarrely, Lombard & Gable, a couple that would eventually marry and are now regarded as one of the most iconic Classic Hollywood couples, didn't feel any heat during the filming of their only movie, and would only become romantically-involved a few years later.  They are also part of one of my favorite Hollywood Love Squares (or at least a rhombus), as Powell, after he broke up with Lombard, would eventually romance Jean Harlow (before her untimely death), who (while not romantically involved) would be arguably Clark Gable's best & most frequent leading lady.  Despite Harlow & Powell and Gable & Lombard being the iconic pairings offscreen, both actresses would do their best work with the other guy onscreen-Harlow lighting the cinema on-fire with Gable in the sizzling Red Dust and Lombard scoring her sole Oscar nomination for My Man Godfrey a few years after their divorce.

The Misfits (1961)

Film: The Misfits (1961)
Stars: Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter, Eli Wallach
Director: John Huston
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 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 Marilyn Monroe-click here to learn more about Ms. Monroe (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Few films have productions as steeped in lore as The Misfits.  If you study film history at all, The Misfits shows up in a lot of texts about this era.  It was, as we'll discuss below, the final film of two Hollywood legends.  It also had pretty much everyone on the set at each other's throats, from Clark Gable & John Huston quarreling throughout the shoot (weirdly in the first & only film that they ever made together) to Marilyn Monroe & screenwriter Arthur Miller's marriage falling apart on the set of the movie they were making together to of course the continued "slow suicide" of Montgomery Clift after his car accident.  Pretty much everyone on the set suffered from some form of alcohol abuse, and production delays abounded.  But what of the film itself?  I have weirdly, despite having read about this movie for most of my life (and having written in college a 120-page paper about American cinema in the 1960's), never actually gotten around to seeing it, and if I was going to do a month devoted to Marilyn Monroe, there was no way I wasn't going to plug this gap in my film-watching.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Misfits is a little hard to explain in a conventional way, but let's give it a shot.  The picture starts with Roslyn (Monroe) getting a divorce in Reno from her husband for emotional neglect (her husband is played by Oscar nominee Kevin McCarthy in a truly 1-minute cameo, if not less).  She is staying with a local landlord named Isabelle (Ritter), and being as she's played by Marilyn Monroe, Roslyn quickly gets attention from the men of the town, including two cowboys: Gay (Gable), a rough-and-tumble guy and his driver best friend Guido (Wallach).  Roslyn & Gay move in together in Guido's house, even though it's not entirely clear that they are romantically linked (it's treated in many ways throughout the movie not as a love story, but more as a father getting a chance to raise the surrogate daughter that he gave up for his cowboy ways), though Guido clearly lusts after Roslyn.  At a rodeo, they meet Perce (Clift), a dumb rider who nearly kills himself and decides to join up with Roslyn, Gay, and Guido as they wrangle mustangs in the desert.  Slowly, Roslyn understands the cruelty of these men's lives as she sees them basically track and nearly murder a bunch of wild mustangs.  She calls them out on it, and in the dark with Perce she frees them, angering Gay.  Guido, still obsessed with her, tries to make a move but she says he's heartless, and it turns out she's right-he encourages Gay to leave her, but instead, after an extended shoot where he tries to tame a stallion, he lets them loose, driving off into the sunset with Roslyn, their future uncertain but knowing they love each other.

The Misfits is a strange film.  Honestly-I didn't really know what to expect considering its place in film lore and its position in the early 1960's, when even westerns that would be conventional like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance would challenge some of the assumptions we have about heroes and villains.  It's more avant-garde than you'd think.  While yes, at its center this is the story of one man (Gable) struggling with modernity, aided in that struggle by a beautiful woman (Monroe)-basically the plot of most westerns-we also realize that it's Monroe's Roslyn who was right the whole time, not just about him needing to give up this life, but that perhaps this life wasn't necessary to begin with.  The film is brutally violent in scenes (the mustang wrangling is disturbing, particularly since with John Huston in the director's chair, there's no assurance those horses weren't injured at some point), and sex permeates the movie.  Aside from a scene where Monroe is topless (you see her from the back), you have Eli Wallach's Guido lusting after Monroe in a way that I don't remember seeing in a movie like this, at least not very often.  It feels carnal, and is a big payoff for the later scene where Monroe tells him off.

Because honestly-this movie is fantastic.  You can quibble over whether certain sequences go too long, or whether it's too much mood, but I loved it.  The script is tight-Miller was writing it as he went along, but it doesn't show as his vision comes together in the end.  The direction is glorious-Huston enjoys the action sequences the most (and they're thrilling if also gut-wrenching), and the score is divine.  Best of all is the acting.  Wallach, as I mentioned, is out-of-this-world good; if this movie hadn't been considered a disappointment at the box office, it's easy to see him getting an Oscar nomination.  Ritter is great as ever; there's this weird, odd scene in the center of the movie where she opines about the husband who left her for her best friend, and everyone is confused about why she's happy to see them, but it works.  Ritter's face & gestures indicate an understanding of love, even love that's lost or mistreated, that I found so moving.  And then there's Clift, who finds an authenticity in his rodeo clown that feels genuine.  Clift occasionally feels like he's about to forget his lines (and indeed, that might have been the case-if I had to pick a weakest link in the cast, he'd be it though he's still solid), but at least he picked a character where that is convincing.

Gable & Monroe are sensational in the leads.  Even with the box office disappointment, I'm kind of stunned Gable didn't get a posthumous Oscar nomination for this-it might be the best performance he's ever given (give or take Rhett Butler), and I like Gable in a lot of movies.  As he's worn down, you find a man who has long since lost his youth & his reason for even existing, but he keeps on living, and has to find a way to acknowledge that he's still living.  It's so profound, and while Gable is an A+ movie star at his best, I didn't really know he was this good of an actor.  The same has to be said for Monroe.  This could be another dumb blonde where men do crazy things to sleep with her, but it's not.  She finds something there in this lost soul, a woman who has something to say but doesn't understand how to get it out.  Monroe, deeply introverted in real life, rarely played such characters onscreen (there are actually very few introverts in Classical Hollywood cinema), but here it suits her grandly. This is possibly Monroe's best performance too (give or take Sugar Kane), and it's a bummer she didn't think so (Monroe disliked the movie & her work in it).

The film, as I mentioned above, was the end of the road for two Hollywood legends.  Gable died 12 days after shooting of a heart attack.  He wasn't that old all-things-considered (the film would be released on his 60th birthday, a few months after shooting), but you can tell that decades of smoking & drinking had worn down the matinee idol.  Monroe, 24 years his junior, also would never complete another film.  Though she had started shooting the (yet-another-troubled-shoot) film Something's Got to Give, Monroe died before it was completed, of a drug overdose, a potentially intentional one.  We've discussed the many conspiracies surrounding Monroe's death before (click the link if Hollywood true crime is your jam), but in the light of just watching The Misfits, it feels especially tragic, and adds a sense of anguish to the final scenes of Gable & Monroe driving off into the sunset that John Huston never could have intended.  Here we have two of the true legends of cinema, uniting for the only time, in some of their best ever work, and soon to die tragically young.

That ends our month devoted to Marilyn Monroe, the quintessential sex symbol in a year-long series devoted to cinematic sex symbols.  As we'll see in July, though, we aren't entirely abandoning Marilyn-her legacy will be felt next month, both in terms of heightened, sexualized glamour...and unfortunately, even more tragedy.

Red Dust (1932)

Film: Red Dust (1932)
Stars: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Mary Astor, Gene Raymond
Director: Victor Fleming
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Jean Harlow-click here to learn more about Ms. Harlow (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Three weeks into our series on Jean Harlow, we reach arguably the most important time in her career. While we've seen her through two classics of the early Sound Era (Hell's Angels and The Public Enemy), Harlow's public persona wasn't really defined, and she didn't have a consistent brand despite clear clamoring from the public for her to be in more pictures.  MGM, however, changed that.  Upon the insistence of her then-husband (who would die soon after from mysterious circumstances we discussed here), she was signed to the studio, and they started to give her "real" parts-not just girlfriends or floozies, but parts that would resemble those played by some of her contemporaries at the time.  One of the earliest, and most famous of these roles was Red Dust, which would team her for the second time with Clark Gable (though neither actor got particularly high billing in their first outing The Secret Six), and would cement them as one of MGM's most iconic pairs of the 1930's.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about a plantation owner named Dennis Carson (Gable) who works in Indochina in the 1930's.  He is boorish, rough, and kind of a sexist, and treats a prostitute who is living their named Vantine (Harlow) like garbage, even though he's pretty smitten with her.  When a new worker Gary (Raymond) comes with his classy wife Barbara (Astor), Dennis is torn, and dismisses Vantine for the chance to get with Barbara, which presents itself when Gary nearly dies of a fever.  Barbara is willing to run off with Dennis, despite their differences in station, but after Dennis realizes how much Gary is in love with his wife, he throws her out, saying she was nothing more than a fling (which she wasn't-he was very much in love with her), and she shoots him in a rage.  Dennis, though, wanting them both to leave, covers for her and ends up back with Vantine, whom he clearly was destined for the whole time.

The movie may sound familiar even if you haven't seen the film, and that's because it was remade in the 1950's with Ava Gardner taking on the Harlow role, Grace Kelly taking over for Astor, and Clark Gable weirdly playing the same part in Mogambo.  This was slightly more common in earlier Hollywood than you'd think (you may recall when we looked at Lillian Russell for this series last year that Edward Arnold did something similar with his character of Diamond Jim Brady) but was still noteworthy.  I haven't seen the later film, but I have to say I get the impulse to revisit, because Red Dust is pretty great.  Pre-Code Hollywood isn't my favorite era (in the way it is for virtually every other cinephile) as I find it hit-or-miss, but this is a sexy, fascinating little movie.  Gable is great as a scalawag, and the movie doesn't have to shy away from the clear sexual elements of the picture.  Astor, for example, probably would have had to die or had her marriage wrecked just a few years later for letting her virtue disappear.  But here, we get a happier ending without her having to feel too much shame for her marital indiscretions.

Best of the bunch, though, is Harlow, who brings it hardcore in this role.  The Pre-Code scenes allow for one of the more scandalous moments of the era, Harlow in a tub while basically throwing herself at Gable while a horrified Mary Astor watched.  The most famous pre-Code scene is probably Claudette Colbert in The Sign of the Cross taking a milk bath-while this doesn't quite get there in terms of scandal (unlike Colbert, there is not a "blink and you miss it" scene with her nipples showing, which has basically made The Sign of the Cross one of the most notorious movies of the 1930's), but the clear desire between Harlow & Gable is palpable, and even if it weren't-Harlow's an ace comedian.  There's a great scene where she debates with herself about the merits of different types of cheeses while Gable looks on, flabbergasted at the absurdity of the conversation, and there is no pretense when faced with Astor over whom the audience should root for, even if Harlow's character is the "tramp" and Astor's the "good girl."  Weirdly, in real life, it would be the reverse, with Astor getting involved in one of the most famed sex scandals of Hollywood in the 1930's, before eventually in the 1940's seeing her career turn into a series of matronly roles in classics like Meet Me in St. Louis and Little Women.  By that point, of course, Harlow would have been dead for nearly a decade...but we'll get to that when we conclude our look at the actress next week.

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: Cain and Mabel (1936)

Film: Cain and Mabel (1936)
Stars: Marion Davies, Clark Gable, Allen Jenkins, Roscoe Karns, Walter Catlett
Director: Lloyd Bacon
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Dance Direction)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I sometimes watch movies and can't concentrate.  This is occasionally because I'm bored or because I am insisting that I am capable of doing two things at once when one of them involves a movie (spoiler alert: I can't), but there are times where I'm distracted by what's going on onscreen.  This was the case recently when I saw Cain and Mabel, a forgettable boxing musical (that wasn't a typo, it's actually a boxing musical), about a vaudeville star who falls in love with a boxer at first for the tabloids, and then for herself.  The distracting part was that it starred Marion Davies, far more famous for her off-screen romance with William Randolph Hearst, and I couldn't help but spend most of the film thinking of Citizen Kane, comparing every little dance number to her more famous fictional counterpart.

(Spoilers Ahead) This ended up being a bit unfair to Davies, as it's not really appropriate to spend a movie trying to see if the leading lady specifically is talented, and not just well-suited for this part, but honestly the movie itself is a pretty forgettable trifle.  The film follows an almost ludicrously cliched plotline (even for 1936), with Davies playing Mabel O'Dare, a down-on-her-luck aspiring dancer who catches her big break after a random diva has a tirade and the chorus girl off the street gets her spot.  She practices every single day, and eventually drives her downstairs neighbor Larry Cain (Gable) crazy by continually tapping on the ceiling all night long, but the two of them are paired up to gain publicity for their respective careers, and suddenly they start falling for each other.  The movie's climax is them headed to be married, and then whisked away to live in happiness, but their PR teams leak it to the press, having both parties assuming the other one was truly "just in it for the fame."  The film ends with Gable losing his boxing match, but winning his girl (and also, with it, a stack of cash as she in anger bet all of her fortune on his opponent).

It's a silly movie, as far as silly movies go, but there's a lot of problems because that thing I was looking for with Davies-talent-isn't as apparent as it should be; she's not very good in this movie.  Don't get me wrong here-I think that history has exaggerated her pitfalls, particularly in terms of acting ability as she has solid comedic chops even if she's no Kate Hepburn or Constance Bennett, but she's not a very good dancer.  When she becomes a headliner, it feels like when everyone was trying to say Katherine McPhee was better than Megan Hilty on Smash-she's not special just because you say "she's special."  It's worth noting that Gable isn't particularly good either, and is about as convincing as a boxer as Rue McClanahan, but Davies is more problematic both because Gable at that point had proven he was a major talent and because of the film's sole Oscar nomination.

It was only for a few years (I'm curious if anyone knows why they eliminated Dance Direction as a category-Choreography could have run as long as they had Song Score, at least), but the dancing was the only nod for this film, and it's kind of comically bad compared to pretty much everything else that was happening then.  In an age where Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire are your competition, you have to be a supernova in order to compare, and Davies is merely adequate in terms of her timing and dancing.  Like I said, she had comedic skills, but the dancing here by a professional marker is genuinely bad-she's regularly outdone by her partners and by the chorus line, and you don't really understand why someone would be paying for her to be the headliner compared to a truly accomplished hoofer.  It's a mean focus, and admittedly I probably didn't go into this movie with a great attitude, but my impression of Davies after this film is that Orson Welles had it right.

Those are my thoughts-how about yours?  Has anyone out there already seen Cain and Mabel?  If not, what do you think of Davies in general?  And who was the best Golden Age Hollywood dancer?  Share below!

Oscar-Connected Lost Films, Part 2

Last week, we chronicled through the Top 10 missing Oscar-nominated films (the films that keep my OVP-loving heart up at night knowing that I'm doomed to failure even if I manage to hit most of the pictures).  Today, however, I decided to try a slightly different tack (one that includes a bit more of a list).  Here we have lost films starring Oscar-nominated actors or directed by Oscar-nominated directors.  While this list is far from complete, these stand out in my mind as some of the more important feature-length films that are hopefully still in someone's attic.

Note: While I couldn't include every missing feature-length film starring an Oscar nominee, I'm curious about which ones are on your "where is it?!?' list, so please share below in the comments!

12. Tenderloin (1928)

Directed by future Oscar winner Michael Curtiz and starring Dolores Costello and Conrad Nagel, the film is in a weird place in history as it's the second Vitaphone feature, and reportedly featured the first feature where actors actually spoke their lines (though the dialogue was so hammy people actually laughed when it first came out).  Considering its place in history, you'd think this would have hung on, but it's still considered lost.

11. Lilies of the Field (1924)

While it shares the name of an Oscar-winning film, it actually has no connection to the movie starring Sidney Poitier.  Instead, it gets its AMPAS connection through leading lady Corinne Griffith, who would be one of the first women ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress (in The Divine Lady).  The film sounds pretty messed up, and I'm curious to see how the sexual politics of the period play out, but like all of the other eleven films on this list, it's lost for now.

10. Red Sky at Morning (1944)

One of several missing films from the early career of future Oscar-winner Peter Finch, this one struck me as odd simply because of its late release date.  While portions of films from the 1940's and 50's are missing (most famously A Star is Born), this entire movie (about a sailor who falls in love with the wife of a captain) is completely gone, which is unusual for a film with a now recognizable star.

9. The Promise (1969)

By far the latest film on this list, and the only one that features a currently living Oscar nominee that I can find.  Sir Ian McKellen, very early in his career, made the first big-screen adaptation of an Aleksei Abuzov play, that is now considered lost.  Weirdly, it featured another actor who'd gained some fame the year previous (John Castle) for starring in an Oscar-winning film (The Lion in Winter) and was reusing Oscar-winning sets from the previous year's Best Picture winner Oliver!, so how this remains lost is also a mystery.

8. Men of Tomorrow (1932)

One of those films where you didn't know what you had until it was gone, the film actually stars Maurice Braddell and Joan Gardner, but it was the supporting cast that calls out a bit more ferociously, featuring Oscar-nominee Merle Oberon and future Oscar-winner Robert Donat in his film debut.  The film apparently was a bit salacious and had to be trimmed for re-distribution (and was dubiously marketed in the United States in 1935 because Oberon and Donat were headliners at that point, even though they weren't the stars of the picture).

7. White Man (1924)

One of the earliest films on this list, White Man would be a largely forgotten film starring Kenneth Harlan and Alice Joyce were it not for a bit part (that of Joyce's brother) played by one of the biggest leading men in Hollywood history: Clark Gable.  Yes, the future Oscar-winner made his film debut in a small role in this film, now largely lost (perhaps due to the fact that Gable wouldn't be a huge star for a bit longer after this).

6. Convention City (1933)

A plethora of big name actors are featured in this film, including Joan Blondell, Adolphe Menjeu, Dick Powell, and Mary Astor, 75% of which were Oscar nominees (Menjeu even was a nominee already at that point).  But what sets this film apart is that it is apparently quite scandalous, with a number of double entendres and Blondell's costume budget being smaller than Jack Warner wanted it to be.  As a result, it's one of those movies that you want to see more out of shock value than anything else.

5. The Forward Pass (1929)

This would be worthy of inclusion simply based on the premise alone: how many movies in cinematic history have ever been made about football, and turned into a musical?  Throw in Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and future Oscar-winner Loretta Young and the intrigue is factored up.  But it's a cameo by a 22-year-old John Wayne (in one of only a couple of his films that are considered lost) that makes me truly curious-what was John Wayne like at 22?!?

4. The Callahans and the Murphys (1927)

Toward the top more for the director of the film, and what he was able to do with his leading lady in other films.  George W. Hill, while never an Oscar nominee, managed to helm two major Oscar contenders early on in the Academy's history: The Big House, which was an early Best Picture nominee, and Min and Bill, which won Marie Dressler (who stars in Callahans and the Murphys) her only Oscar.

3. For the Love of Mike (1927)

Another film with a man who'd later bring his leading lady an Oscar, but here we have even bigger names than Hill and Dressler: Claudette Colbert and Frank Capra.  Seven years before both of them won Oscars for It Happened One Night, these two screen icons made a silent picture (Colbert's only one), which bombed and almost caused Colbert to quit the movies.  Thankfully she didn't and went on to make decades of classics, but this one is sadly not one that can be discovered by new film audiences.

2. Hollywood (1923)

What gets a film you've never heard of into the Top 2?  Well, it's that literally every major star of this era somehow managed to make it into the film!  Yes, while the leads are a pair of unknowns (Hope Drown and Luke Cosgrave), you have everyone from Will Rogers to Douglas Fairbanks Sr. to Baby Peggy, as well as six-Oscar nominated/winning entertainers (Gloria Swanson, Betty Compson, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Mary Astor, and Cecil B. DeMille), all made more impressive as the Oscars hadn't even happened when this came out.  Throw in one of the only screen appearances Fatty Arbuckle made after his arrest, and you have arguably the biggest curiosity on this list.

1. The Mountain Eagle (1927)
An easy choice for the list, as The Mountain Eagle is the only lost film of Alfred Hitchcock's extensive filmography.  Hitch reportedly hated the film (and the production was apparently a nightmare) and was glad it was gone, but for the legions of his fans (myself included) it remains a film that we most hope is discovered in someone's attic.  I mean, it's hard to really compare with finally getting the only missing feature-length film from Alfred Hitchcock.

OVP: Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

Film: Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
Stars: Charles Laughton, Clark Gable, Franchot Tone, Herbert Mundin, Eddie Quillan, Movita Castaneda
Director: Frank Lloyd
Oscar History: 8 nominations/1 win (Best Picture*, Director, Film Editing, Score, Adapted Screenplay, Actor-Clark Gable, Actor-Charles Laughton, Actor-Franchot Tone)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

It's rare that I get to see a Best Picture winner for the first time and know that it's a Best Picture winner.  After all, I almost always see the current one before it is crowned and the list of past ones are fleeting that I haven't viewed.  So perhaps the most significant Best Picture winner left on my To Do list was this seafaring epic starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, the film that famously created the supporting categories at the Oscars after Franchot Tone joined his fellow nominees in the Best Actor race (you read that right up top-there are three lead nominees in the same category here, something you can't even pull off with two in the same category anymore).  The film chronicles the merciless attacks of one Captain Bligh in a historically-questionable but still riveting tale of the sea.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows the Bounty and its voyage to Tahiti, focusing principally on a tyrannical Captain Bligh (Laughton), his lieutenant Fletcher Christian (Gable), and a young midshipman named Byam (Tone) who is of a more sheltered background but wants to go and create a dictionary of the Tahitian people.  The voyage to Tahiti, to try and get breadfruit, is fraught with peril and becomes all the worse under Bligh's greed and sadism, frequently finding ways to unjustly torture and demean the men on board, even resorting to keelhauling and beating a dead man.  By the time the crew are returning from Tahiti, they've had enough and assume that they may starve to death aboard the Bounty, so they throw Bligh overboard and he has to navigate the waters for 3000 miles and eventually makes his way back to England.  Byam does as well, and almost dies in a trial until we see that Bligh's viciousness was worth the uprising, and Fletcher Christian stays in Tahiti and colonizes an island called Piticairn where he and the men live forever, seemingly in paradise.

The film's historical accuracy is quite questionable (in real life Bligh wasn't nearly as bad as depicted here, and Fletcher Christian's end wasn't nearly as noble or as peaceful as he was likely murdered soon after the mutiny), but the two lead actors are riveting in the roles.  Admittedly Clark Gable occasionally feels a little miscast, as his 1930's rogue doesn't quite seem to leave him in this film, and occasionally you wonder if he should be aboard a ship that is entirely made up of Englishmen, but Gable has a movie star's tenacity and that's always enjoyable.  Better, but also only if you love his brand of bombast, is Laughton, who eats the scenery whole in his role as Captain Bligh, but he's insanely watchable.  There's absolutely no scene he's out there where you aren't wondering what's next, what terrible evil will come up from those bulbous eyes.  He is, of course, a one-dimensional cartoon but something worth watching, for sure.  As for Franchot Tone, it's easily a supporting role, one that it's hard to imagine making it in lead today and quite frankly it's hard to realize why then, as it's the sort of naive young man that you'd normally expect to be forgotten, except of course Tone was becoming a bit of a star at the time and this was probably a way to acknowledge that.  Still the acting is solid.

The best part of the film, though, may be the direction.  Frank Lloyd's ability to keep every scene compelling, particularly with a two-hour epic that has a narrative that even at the time most people would have been familiar with, is excellent.  The pace is sharp, the film's action sequences pop and hold-up well, and while the film has moments of racism on the island, we're not talking about Gone with the Wind-levels of cringe-worthiness.  I would have lightened up on the beginning and the end of the film, where Tone's naivete becomes obnoxiously plot-serving, but the middle, and particularly the showdown between Bligh and Christian are well worth the praise this film long ago acquired.

Someday (probably in a number of years) we'll get to the OVP for 1935 so if you have thoughts on Mutiny on the Bounty now is the time to share them.  Do you like this particularly noted film of the 1930's, or it is one of those AFI flicks you never got around to?  Who is your favorite of the three leading actors?  And what film actually deserved three Best Actor or Actress nominations other than Mutiny on the Bounty?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

75 Years of Gone with the Wind

I initially planned on writing a review proper of Gone with the Wind for today, the film's 75th anniversary, but time and what is turning into a runaway December (stress, way too much ambition, occasionally realizing that ambition, more frequently not realizing that ambition, and then more stress tend to find a way to affect this month more than any other in my world).  Someday I want to get a review of this film, one of those gold standards of cinema, part of that Holy Quintet of Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Godfather where you should hang your head in shame if you haven't seen them all (in a weird conundrum, whenever I mention these five films to someone, there's always at least one that they've hit, and at least one that they're "getting around to" but never actually seem to get around to-if you're one of these people, move that movie to the TOP of your Netflix queue right now (I'm serious-get on it), and prepare yourself for something absolutely incredible).

Gone with the Wind has an impressively lasting memory.  It says something about the film that 75 years after its release date we say "of course" when it's mentioned that the film won the Best Picture Oscar, even though it tops some of the other greatest films ever made like Wuthering Heights, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and the equally classic The Wizard of Oz (seriously-the rest of the list includes the original Goodbye, Mr. Chips, the Bette Davis sudser Dark Victory, the Ernst Lubitsch gem Ninotchka, Lewis Milestone's frequently copied Of Mice and Men, and the classic Love Affair...and this doesn't even take into account films like The Rules of the Game, The Women, Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Destry Rides Again all being out that year...there's a reason 1939 is considered the undisputed pinnacle of movie-making).  It's easy to name check as the definition of a big, grand, soap opera style of a movie that has terrific acting, and while it's never quite groundbreaking art in the same fashion as Citizen Kane or La Dolce Vita, it's probably the best and largest piece of epic entertainment Hollywood will ever be able to produce.

I saw Gone with the Wind for the first time when I was roughly thirteen-years-old.  I had never seen it before, but knew that it was the sort of movie that I had to own, and so I remember buying it on VHS at the same time as the great, epic romance of my youth, Titanic.  Both films sort of created an impossibly high standard for what would become my favorite genre of movie (the romantic epic), as they are arguably the two best films of that particular trope, and because there aren't that many romantic epics coming out of Hollywood to begin with; there's too much risk involved in putting that much money into one particular basket, and for every Gone with the Wind or Titanic, there's a dozen Duel in the Suns, overwrought and ready to bomb.

I think what initially drew me to the film was the modernity of the lead performance by Vivien Leigh.  Leigh gives two of the greatest performances in the history of film, which sort of overshadowed her in every other movie of her career (though you're a fool if you haven't seen the marvelously enchanting Waterloo Bridge, one of my personal favorites and a movie I am intent on telling everyone I know to see), but when they are Scarlett O'Hara and Blanche DuBois, you can't really pity the actress.  I love how very bold and of-our-time Leigh's work is in both these pictures, but especially as Scarlett.  You change around some of the dialogue and you could easily see Scarlett as a Mean Girl or especially as a carefree member of The Bling Ring.  She'd be sneaking onto her iPhone when Melanie was reading from David Copperfield or be wearing a halter instead of her rouge dress, but there's something deeply modern in her work in that it translates.  Olivia de Havilland, Clark Gable, Hattie McDaniel, and Leslie Howard all give really sublime performances, in many cases hitting career bests, but Leigh is sort of in another world.  It was incredibly risky to cast her initially.  She was a complete unknown and other actors like Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, Katharine Hepburn, Loretta Young (the actual list of actresses rumored to play this part is basically every woman of this era outside of perhaps Garbo) would have been better Box Office insurance, and she actually got fourth billing when the film initially ran, but you needed an unknown who could eventually become a legend, and that was what Leigh was.

I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the journey I eventually had with Gone with the Wind.  As I got older (and have seen this movie MANY times), I learned that there were parts of the film that were unsavory, particularly the depiction of the slaves and the marital rape scene.  Of course I wish that you could erase these aspects, and quite frankly, even in 1939 the depictions of African-Americans in this film seem unusually dated, though the film itself did open doors for the African-American community in some aspects (it led to Hattie McDaniel, of course, becoming the first African-American to win an Academy Award, though she famously was denied entrance to the Atlanta premiere of the film due to it being in a segregated theater, something that made her friend Clark Gable so mad that he almost didn't show, until she personally asked him to).  However, it does remain an interesting look at where we've come cinematically.  You could never make a film that looked like Gone with the Wind in Hollywood today, and I mean that in a good way-an epic film would never have, while not necessarily glamorizing slavery (though it comes close with that horrible opening title card, which always makes me cringe), been able to sort of skirt around the issue.  In fact, had it not been for McDaniel's extremely strong performance and a couple of key elements being removed from the novel, this film would be relegated into the cinematic dustbin in a similar way to The Birth of a Nation, another monumental picture that is weighted down by its racist roots.  David O. Selznick, GWTW's producer, probably cemented the film's legacy when he decided to skip several of the most racist moments from the book (principally that Rhett and Ashley were members of the KKK and the use of the n-word), though Selznick, a social liberal at the time, certainly would have gone further in creating a more equality-driven film were it not for worry about Box Office receipts in the South.  Still, as with most art, you occasionally have to ground the film in a time-and-place, and while not dismissing or looking past the racist or sexist attitudes of the film, at least appreciate if there is something  remarkable in the other attributes of the motion picture for fear of dismissing all art that doesn't match the viewpoints of the current era.

The film continues on with us today, and thankfully we still have one of its stars with us to celebrate the 75th year of the movie (the 98-year-old living legend Olivia de Havilland, one of the greatest actors of the era, and, if her health is up for it, the PERFECT choice to present Best Picture this year at the Oscars instead of Jack Nicholson yet again).  The film continues on with me as well.  It's one of those films with its scale, scope, and acting that makes me remember why I sit through hundreds of movies a year, even if the vast majority underwhelm me.  It's because on occasion I get a film that totally just leaves me breathless, waiting to see what can happen next-that's what Gone with the Wind will always do for me. It's a film where all of the magic dust of Golden Age Hollywood is flying at full force, and you get to see why they once called it Tinseltown.

AFI's 25 Greatest Actors, Part 1

This Article is Part of a 15-Year Anniversary series commemorating the American Film Institute’s 25 Greatest Stars.  For the Actresses, click the numbers for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

One of the things that I learned with the 25 Greatest Actresses list is that I still have a lot to learn when it comes to actresses, but for whatever reason (perhaps the length of their careers or the fact that Best Picture nominees tend to have lead actors), I do considerably better at catching the classics of the most famous actors.  In fact, there is no actor on the list that I haven’t seen one of their pictures.  Still, though, there are a number of actors that I am missing a major part of their filmography, and I’m sure this is the case for you as well, so share along in the comments.  We’ll investigate the first eight men on the list, and then explore the remaining men, the “just-misses,” and the living nominees all throughout the next week or two.  Without further adieu…

1. Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957)

Oscar Nominations: Three, with a win for Best Actor in 1951’s The African Queen

Probably Best Known Today For: Being the tough-but-sensitive man who charmed Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca.  It’s amazing how a gigantic career can come down to a single role, and indeed Bogie has had a pretty impressive set of characters throughout his career, but Casablanca and his trench-coated Rick is easily what he is most identified with today.

My Favorite Performance: Casablanca is my favorite movie, and there’s really no beating Bogart in it-his Rick is a lost soul content with living in his memories, until they come back to bring him into the present.  It’s a wonderful performance in the greatest of films.  That being said, I do adore Bogie in general when he’s playing a guy skirting the law, and any of his noir films are toward the high end on my personal list.

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I’ve seen most of his bigger films (The Maltese Falcon, African Queen, Key Largo, Sabrina, Treasure of Sierra Madre, and of course Casablanca), but I have somehow never gotten around to In a Lonely Place where he charms the eternally sexy Gloria Grahame, despite it being high on my personal to-do list.

2. Cary Grant (1904-1986)

Oscar Nominations: Two, for Penny Serenade and None But the Lonely Heart; Grant also picked up an Honorary Oscar at the 42^nd Academy Awards

Probably Best Known Today For: Being the guy that inspired George Clooney (kidding, kidding, though Clooney frequently gets compared to him).  Grant’s known to modern audiences for his class, handsomeness, and consistent charm, even if they’ve never seen one of his movies-everyone is enchanted with Cary Grant.

My Favorite Performance: Like all things in life, it’s a tough call between Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story, though in this case I’m going to lean toward Philadelphia (the opposite of what I did with Katharine Hepburn in the same circumstance, for the record).  His C.K. Dexter Haven is just mischievous enough to charm everyone on the screen, and I find him as a cad more believable than as a loveable nerd.

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: My mom’s favorite actor is Cary Grant, and so I’ve seen basically every major Cary Grant film.  I’ve seen all of the films with the Hepburns, all of the films with Hitchcock, and most all of his screwball comedies.  Looking through his filmography, though, I do notice two misses: His Girl Friday his bouncy film with Rosalind Russell in 1940 and the previous year’s Gunga Din with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

3. James Stewart (1908-1997)

Oscar Nominations: Stewart won five Oscar nominations in his career, winning Best Actor for 1940’s The Philadelphia Story.  He also went on to win the Life Achievement Award at the 57^th Academy Awards.

Probably Best Known Today For: Being the guy that inspired Tom Hanks (again, kidding, kidding, though Hanks frequently gets compared to him).  Stewart’s the affable, awe shucks nice guy that everyone seems to admire.  A war hero in his day and one of the great stars, he’s best known to modern audiences for that Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life with Donna Reed (you know it-every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings…)

My Favorite Performance: I’m going to go against type here.  I do think Stewart is sensational in It’s a Wonderful Life, but there’s no comparing to what he did in Vertigo-it’s so jarring seeing the nicest guy onscreen play a ruthless, obsessed man torturing poor Kim Novak.  It’s Hitchcock’s best film, and Stewart’s as well.

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I’ve seen most of his biggest hits (again-most people have, which is why the comments should be interesting here if you’ve only missed one or two films).  I’d probably go with Anatomy of a Murder, the only of his Oscar-nominated work I haven’t gotten around to, but I’ve seen basically every other major film he was in.

4. Marlon Brando (1924-2004)

Oscar Nominations: Brando nabbed eight nominations in his career, winning for 1954’s On the Waterfront and 1972’s The Godfather.

Probably Best Known Today For: Being the greatest actor of all-time?  At least to some people that is (myself included).  For others, he is one of those names you throw out when you try to benchmark great acting like Meryl and de Niro.  And of course, he is running through the street screaming "Stella!" and constantly making people offers they cannot refuse.

My Favorite Performance: Brando is so good so often he's one of those rare actors who could genuinely equal Katharine Hepburn's four wins with me for the OVP.  For me, though, he will always be the sexiest man in the history of the screen, seducing everything in his path in A Streetcar Named Desire, in my opinion a tie for the greatest performance of all-time (with Vivien Leigh...in A Streetcar Named Desire).

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I've seen most of Brando's biggest films because he's my favorite actor, but I've never seen his musical debut in Guys and Dolls-that would probably be the one with the biggest intrigue around it.

5. Fred Astaire (1899-1987)

Oscar Nominations: Astaire only received one competitive Oscar nomination in his career (for The Towering Inferno of all things), but did receive an Honorary Award in 1950, presented to him of course by Ginger Rogers.

Probably Best Known Today For: Being the classiest hoofer of them all.  His longtime partnership with Ginger Rogers onscreen is the stuff of Hollywood legend, and even if you're someone who has never seen an Astaire/Rogers film (and I insist that you rectify this situation immediately), you'll know that Astaire is one of those actors who's "gotta dance."

My Favorite Performance: Astaire was an extremely classy dude onscreen, but he, like Rogers, frequently played himself.  I'm going to go with Top Hat in a slight nod over Swing Time (since that's always been my favorite of their films, despite modern enthusiasm being for the latter film).  Funny Face is also wonderful, but I can't list it because the age difference between Hepburn and Astaire has always given me the heebie jeebies (though it's a marvelous movie otherwise).

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: Astaire is the first actor on this list where I can say that I've got some work to do.  While I've hit a couple of his major films with Rogers, films like The Gay Divorcee and Follow the Fleet are still in the ole Netflix queue.  However, some later Astaire (including Easter Parade, The Band Wagon, and Daddy Long Legs) is still on the to view list, so this would need to be a marathon.

6. Henry Fonda (1905-1982)

Oscar Nominations: Just two for acting, but boy did he make them count: The Grapes of Wrath, for which he lost to Jimmy Stewart, and On Golden Pond, for which he won Best Actor.  He was also nominated for producing 12 Angry Men and won an Honorary Award in 1980.

Probably Best Known Today For: Being the father of an acting dynasty, as well as his work in The Grapes of Wrath, a move most high school students will sit through at some point (and he's also in 12 Angry Men, another high school movie staple).  His larger career isn't quite as consistently noteworthy as Stewart, Grant, or Brando, but the highlights are known by pretty much anyone.

My Favorite Performance: I feel really weird not listing Grapes of Wrath (Fonda is just wonderful in that movie), but for me there is no topping cold-hearted Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West, the greatest western ever made, and one where Fonda plays duly against type as a ruthless villain being challenged by good guy Charles Bronson.

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I've seen most of his major hits, so if we're ranking by fame I'd probably have to go with something on the B-roster of Fonda movies like The Ox-Bow Incident or The Wrong Man, but personal preference would be for The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, which was one of my grandpa's favorite movies and one that I have oddly never seen.

7. Clark Gable (1901-1960)

Oscar Nominations: Gable received three, winning for 1934's It Happened One Night.

Probably Best Known Today For: Not giving a damn.  It's amazing how a single scene or line can make someone immortal amongst the public, but while Gable was once the King of Hollywood and starred in multiple classic film roles, his work as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind will eternally be the film that he is most famous for with the general populace.

My Favorite Performance: This is a tough call, as I really love Gable in It Happened One Night, and he's probably my fourth favorite performance in GWTW.  Still, fourth in GWTW is toward the top of my personal list, and so I'll go with his "not a gentleman" work in that movie.  What I love about that film, even today, is how desperately modern both he and Vivien Leigh's work seems-the script may be dated, but the performances could work just as well today.

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: For some reason, I have never gotten around to Gable's third Oscar-nominated performance in Mutiny on the Bounty (this is also one of the extremely rare Best Picture winners that I've never seen).  That would definitely be toward the top of the list, and I honestly think it actually is-I want to say it's in my next ten movies on my Netflix queue.

8. James Cagney (1899-1986)

Oscar Nominations: Cagney received three nominations in his career, winning for 1942's Yankee Doodle Dandy

Probably Best Known Today For: He's not as well-known today, if we're being honest.  This was one of the more surprising elements of the AFI list not because Cagney didn't deserve to be on the list, or that I didn't expect him on the list (I did and would have), but because he's clearly the least well-known in the Top 10.  That said, Cagney's work today is probably most known due to his early gangster pictures.  People picture him holding a gun, not wanting to get caught, and cheering for him to get away.

My Favorite Performance: I mean, there's no really beating White Heat is there?  His demented Mama's boy is a startlingly real and powerful performance, and one that seems to get lost when you're listing the classic performances of the 1940's, but it shouldn't be.

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I am going to say The Public Enemy.  Part of me thinks that I've actually seen this movie, but I'm not 100% certain if I have (I've seen a lot of movies...part of the reason that I started this blog was to keep track of them and my opinions on them)-maybe it's just that I've seen Cagney shove that grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face so many times that I feel like I've seen the movie.  Either way, that's the top of the list (...or, since it's Cagney, perhaps top of the world?).

Those are the first eight actors on our (what will be five-part) series on the AFI's 25 Greatest Actors list.  These are some of the most famous film stars of all-time, so I know you've got opinions on their best, worst, and the films you're most looking forward to seeing-share them in the comments!