OVP: Ball of Fire (1941)

Film: Ball of Fire (1941)

Stars: Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Dana Andrews, Oskar Homolka, SZ Sakall, Henry Travers, Dan Duryea

Director: Howard Hawks

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Actress-Barbara Stanwyck, Score, Sound, Motion Picture Story)

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

We are running behind again this month (I'll try to be more timely in 2023, as we'll be kicking off our fifth season in the next week), but I'm going to attempt to do two Stanwyck movies today and get ahead of her films in the coming days so we have a full five movies in December (she's too big of a star to skip one of our Saturday's).  We're going to start with a conversation about 1941, inarguably the best year of Barbara Stanwyck's career.  We last left Stanwyck with Baby Face, which was a hit during the Pre-Code era for its saucy content, but by the early 1940's Stanwyck didn't need gimmicks to get people into their movie seats-she was a headliner in every aspect.  She got her first Oscar nomination for the 1937 weepie Stella Dallas, and despite not having a studio contract during this era, was in such demand (and so well-respected) that she was cranking out major hits, including three iconic ones in 1941: The Lady Eve, Meet John Doe, and Ball of Fire, for which she won her second Oscar nomination and which is our film today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie has a rather preposterous setup for a romantic comedy, even by rom-com standards.  Gary Cooper plays Bertram Potts, a grammarian who along with a number of other dotty professors (seven, to be exact, mirroring the seven dwarves), are writing an encyclopedia.  Through a chance encounter, they come across Sugarpuss O'Shea (Stanwyck), a nightclub performer who is involved with a gangster named Joe Lilac (Andrews).  As Lilac is wanted by the police, she goes into hiding for a few days to stay out of sight, during which time she stays with Potts, who is studying her vernacular to try to include modern slang in the encyclopedia.  They start to fall for each other, but Sugarpuss has a problem-Lilac wants to marry her, not out of love but so she can't testify against him, and he eventually kidnaps all of the professors to blackmail her into it.  Thankfully, through ingenuity, they free themselves, save the day, and Bertram & Sugarpuss end up together.

The movie is cute, as cute as you'd assume given those involved and the silliness of the plot.  Though they're all interchangeable, the old men who are, even in their advanced age, shellshocked by the appearance of a beautiful woman and encouraging of the relationship Bertram can have with her, steal a lot of scenes.  The movie, though, never rises to the level of a classic-this is a good movie, not a great one, not as sharp as it should be or quite as funny as it ought to be (it's not The Philadelphia Story).  I think, like so many films like this of the era, the nominations for Sound & Score are fine.  There's nothing special there, but it got in because everyone else did (they would have over 20 nominees in some categories, including in Best Score for Ball of Fire's year, so a lot of middling amongst the genius).  The Story nomination makes more sense, especially over screenplay, as the idea behind it is far cuter than the execution.

With Stanwyck & her "year of classics," while I will admit that The Lady Eve is the best of these three (both in terms of the actual movie and in terms of what Stanwyck was doing onscreen), Ball of Fire is some great stuff from Stanwyck.  She plays well off of an against-type Cooper, and has such sass & pizzazz that this would've made a fine win for her.  I partially wonder if Stanwyck missed with Oscar overall because she didn't have a studio rooting for her to get a trophy in the way that Ginger Rogers or Jennifer Jones would've in the same era, but in 1941, I honestly think the only people who were going to take trophies were the De Havilland's.  Oscar made a huge stink about Olivia & Joan competing against each other, and it delivered in both of their star legends for the decades to come as the sisters...did not handle it well when the younger Joan beat her big sister for the statue.

Daisy Kenyon (1947)

Film: Daisy Kenyon (1947)

Stars: Joan Crawford, Dana Andrews, Henry Fonda, Ruth Warrick, Peggy Ann Garner

Director: Otto Preminger

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, 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.

We're looking at film noir throughout the month, but with that, we're going to occasionally veer into areas that aren't really film noir.  Usually when you think of noir, you think of something to do with crime, likely murder, and there's at least one antihero detective at the center, and probably a couple of glamorous women who might be bad news (or might be there to save the antihero before the count is done).  Daisy Kenyon is not a film noir, but it is frequently billed as one (hence why it's part of this series).  During inarguably the most creative period of Joan Crawford's stardom (coming off of her Oscar win for Mildred Pierce, for much of the rest of the 1940's & early 1950's Crawford made most of her best movies, and got the remainder of her Oscar nominations), she made several films, including some noirs, but Daisy Kenyon by my definition is not a noir-it doesn't have a crime element, and while its center is certainly a glamorous woman, she's not really dangerous.  That being said, it is a fascinating film, and so I'm glad it randomly came up for this series.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Daisy Kenyon (Crawford), who is having an affair with Dan O'Mara (Andrews), a married lawyer.  After he stiffs her one too many times, she goes on a date with Peter Lapham (Fonda), a widower who recently got back from the war.  This sets in motion a bizarre love triangle, where it's not entirely clear whether or not Daisy loves Dan or Peter more (or, in a weird twist, which one is better for her given their marital status and this being 1947), nor is it clear which of the two men truly love Daisy.  Dan has deep feelings for her, but doesn't want to disrupt his life, and Peter seems at times to be more in love with his dead wife than with Daisy, dating her more because he expected to be married than because she's the one he wants to end up with.

Daisy Kenyon is famous today for its approach to its material.  Dan's eventual divorce in most films of this nature would be handled through melodrama, with his long-suffering wife Lucille (Warrick) likely killing herself or looking out longing windows rather than actually getting revenge on him, but Daisy Kenyon plays this straight.  It's a bit jarring to watch, and kind of hard to explain, but treating divorce, adultery, & romance in a level-headed (rather than overtly cinematic) way is very unusual to watch, and the film reads more like something you'd see in the 1970's or 80's than out of Tinseltown's heyday.  The realism, though, hurts the ending, because it's clear by the end of the movie that neither of these men are good enough for Daisy, or particularly good for her in general, and it'd be best if she just ended up alone.

As a result, I liked it, but didn't love it.  I think it's a fascinating thought experiment, though not everyone seems to understand the assignment.  Fonda is badly miscast here, bizarre as Peter & honestly making him feel too abrupt to believably pair with the confident Crawford.  Despite arguably being the least of the three (very talented) leads, Andrews comes across the best of the crew, giving Dan a realism that you wouldn't expect.  Dan is obviously in love with Daisy, but wishes she'd be less-complicated, and be the sex goddess he clearly initially fell for; he's obviously mad at himself for falling in love with her & not being able to move on to the next woman, but toxic masculinity is never going to allow him to blame himself for having feelings.  Sadly, even in 1947 this movie doesn't quite have the foresight to explore such complicated work from Andrews, and I think while this is good, it's not the reappraised classic some describe it as.

Previous Films in the Series: Murder My Sweet, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, The Killers, The Big Sleep, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, Night and the City, They Live By Night, Gun Crazy, In a Lonely Place, Sweet Smell of Success, The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, The Killing, The Long Goodbye, Body Heat

OVP: Up in Arms (1944)

Film: Up in Arms (1944)
Stars: Danny Kaye, Dinah Shore, Dana Andrews, Constance Dowling, Louis Calhern
Director: Elliott Nugent
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Scoring, Original Song-"Now I Know")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I'm trying to watch a few of the Criterion films that are leaving this month before they adios, and amid the middle of a coronavirus quarantine, one of the films that I ended up chancing upon was 1944's Up in Arms, which is a movie about, well, a hypochondriac.  The 1944 war musical, one of many films that were built around Danny Kaye's unique sensibilities, was a flick I had never heard of until I saw it was one of those random Oscar nominees I hadn't gotten around to (the music awards used to allow well over five nominations in the early 1940's, so they end up with a lot of movies that got "Oscar-nominated" solely around this loophole).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about two buddies, Danny (Kaye) and Joe (Andrews), who are in love with the same girl Mary (Dowling), who really only has eyes for Joe (just based on looks, she has a point).  Mary's friend Virginia (Shore), though, is madly in love with Danny, even though Danny is, well, an acquired case.  He's a raving hypochondriac, frequently harassing doctors to examine him at the hospital where he's an elevator operator and constantly letting his neuroses project onto the people around him.  All four of them are drafted into the army (since it is World War II, after all), and comedy ensues when Danny & Joe stow Mary on their ship when she isn't drafted to come with them.  As the film unfolds, Danny accidentally makes himself into a hero when he convinces a group of Japanese troops to surrender (by dressing up as their commander...yes, this is one of many "yellow face" movies of the 1940's), and ends up falling for Virginia, so both couples can live happily ever after.

The movie has the occasional moment.  By far my favorite was a strange fourth wall break about two-thirds of the way through the movie.  The women on the set, not just Shore & Dowling but a whole host of "Goldwyn Girls" are dressed in skimpy daywear, showing off their figures and legs, are parading on the deck of the ship making it look more like a luxury liner than a vessel of war.  One of the two men observing says "I don't remember this from the last war," and the other guy said "I don't remember it from this war either," while both men look at the audience shaking their heads, indicating that a boatful of beautiful women is not what American soldiers should have-in-mind when they get drafted.

But this is one of the few moments that isn't bogged down in Danny Kaye's madness.  Kaye was a major star for much of the 1940's and 50's (we'll get to another one of his films I caught recently later this week), but he's also an acquired taste.  Much like Robin Williams could make any interview work, but sometimes felt exhausting in a movie (especially when the material wasn't up to the rapid fire snuff of the leading man), Kaye's films occasionally are too indulgent to the actor, even if it's clear he's a gifted comedian.  His number about Hollywood musicals notwithstanding, I found the whole exercise to be exhausting, the same indulgent sound gags and ridiculousness repeated for some 2 hours.  With no one else, not even the usually game Shore, able to get much screen-time, I left honestly more tired than anything else.

The film's two Oscar nominations aren't worthy either.  The torch song "Now I Know" was sung not by Kaye but by Shore, and while few people of this era could belt a sad tune quite like Shore, it feels quickly disposable.  The same can be said for the overall score of the film.  The one exception is "Theater Lobby Number," which is funny, showy, and actually gives Kaye a reason to be what he is.  But the rest of the movie is fluff, and overlong.

While the City Sleeps (1956)

Film: While the City Sleeps (1956)
Stars: Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Howard Duff, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, Sally Forrest, John Drew Barrymore, James Craig, Ida Lupino
Director: Fritz Lang
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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 Rhonda Fleming-click here to learn more about Ms. Fleming (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We continue on with our look at the career of Rhonda Fleming with a second noir film for RKO.  By this point in her career, Fleming's fame had largely passed, or at least was nearing its tail-end.  She'd continue to headline films for the rest of the 1950's, and we'll get to one of the final films that she starred in next week, but after several years as the Queen of 3-D, she was no longer at Paramount and RKO wasn't putting her in gigantic epics.  You can see that here when, rather than being the main character (or at least his love interest, as the billing order suggests), she's largely sixth or seventh in terms of actual screen credit, and doesn't even share the screen with the film's proper star, Dana Andrews.  Still, though, While the City Sleeps is an impressive and rather frank look at serial killers in the 1950's, focusing on a fictionalized version of the real "Lipstick Killer" William Heirens.

(Spoilers Ahead) After the death of his father, spoiled media heir Walter Kyne (Price) is pitting three key figures in his dad's news organization (Jon Day Griffith (Mitchell), Mark Loving (Sanders), & Harry Kritzer (Craig)) against each other for essentially the job of "CEO" of the organization while Kyne enjoys all of the wealth and privilege of being the titular head of the conglomerate.  Essentially he's using a recent string of murders of young women perpetrated by an unknown assailant (whom the audience knows from witnessing one of the crimes in the opening scene to be Barrymore's Robert Manners) as a proxy fight to see who is worthy enough of snagging the story and getting Kyne more sales.  Each of these men have a key asset in their fight: Griffith has Edward Mobley (Andrews), a savvy former crime beat journalist who now hosts an Edward R. Murrow-style nightly news program and recently has become engaged to Nancy (Forrest), Loving has Mildred Donner (Lupino) a lascivious and ambitious newspaper columnist, and Kritzer has Kyne's own wife Dorothy (Fleming) with whom he's having an affair.

The film progresses with each of these men and their allies duking it out, all-the-while trying to suss out Barrymore's killer.  The film is very much an ensemble piece (though Andrews is decidedly the lead), and this makes it easy to compare and contrast the different performances.  By far the best one is Lupino, playing up her sexuality to the hilt (she flirts with anyone that moves, particularly Mobley, getting him to kiss her while he's engaged to Nancy), and getting all of the best lines.  Barrymore is, well, not great as a mama's boy killer who seems to have no real reason other than his own adoption to hate the world and the women in it.  But the film keeps humming with us genuinely guessing who might end up on top in the newspaper fight, and watching Thomas Mitchell of all people try (unsuccessfully) to be corrupt when he's really just a good guy (as are all of Mitchell's characters).

Fleming's role is small (she's in more of the back half than the front half, but regardless she's got a relatively small part, especially compared to Forrest or Lupino).  She's good in it though-Fleming got her start as a character actress, and makes the most of the work she does here.  There's that great scene where she instinctively puts on her sunglasses to not give away any tells that she's lying, or the way that she speaks to Lupino's Mildred with the confidence of a woman who knows she'll never really be caught as long as she's beautiful.  It's not really a lead performance at all, but it's solid work, and she does a great job in the ensemble, even if Lupino is the one stealing the film.

Fallen Angel (1945)

Film: Fallen Angel (1945)
Stars: Alice Faye, Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell, Charles Bickford, Anne Revere, John Carradine, Percy Kilbride
Director: Otto Preminger
Oscar History: No nominations
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.

And so we conclude our short time with Alice Faye as our Star of the Month, largely where Ms. Faye herself ended her career.  We profiled a bit in our overview of Alice Faye's career (see the link above) why Fallen Angel was such a big moment in her career, and largely ended it (long story short-Faye caught on to Darryl Zanuck trying to screw her over to give a better part to Linda Darnell, and she wasn't having it so she left show business, leaving Zanuck without one of his biggest stars).  Faye would work again decades later, most notably in 1962's State Fair (where she had to play second fiddle to Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, & Ann-Margret, a new generation of musical stars), but this was it for her time as a headliner.  Considering the director here is better than any we've profiled so far in Faye's career (real talk-Otto Preminger may be the finest director we've hit for any Saturday with the Stars articles, give or take Vincente Minnelli), I was curious if Faye had overreacted, or if she indeed gets screwed over by Zanuck.  What I found was that Faye, if she had assumed she'd get the better part, was justified in her storm off, but neither actress is saving a particularly strong picture with Fallen Angel.

(Spoilers Ahead) Fallen Angel is about a love triangle in a small town between a conman of sorts Eric Stanton (Andrews), a "loose" waitress at a local diner Stella (Darnell), and the prim organist who happens to be a wealthy heiress June Mills (Faye).  Eric is intent on marrying Stella by any means necessary, but she won't go with him unless he has some money, so he tries to steal it from June, first by tricking her into giving it to him and then by marrying her to get to hers and her sister Clara's (Revere) inheritance.  This doesn't entirely work, though, because June is genuinely in love with Eric and Stella soon finds herself dead, with us assuming Eric didn't do it, but we aren't entirely sure who did.  The movie follows with Eric confessing to being a cad and then slowly falling for June (for real this time), trying to prove his innocence.  At the end of the movie, yet another guy obsessed with Stella, the detective investigating her murder (Bickford), turns out to be the killer, with Eric & June going off into the sunset together.


The film has a lot of great makings of a movie, including reuniting Andrews & Preminger, who just a year earlier had made the cinematic masterpiece Laura, which this film was clearly trying to duplicate both creatively and financially.  While it was a modest hit, it never really approaches Laura in terms of its quality.  Everyone was right to single out Darnell's Stella, who is given less screen time than I would've assumed considering her billing and star status at the time, but she's the best part about the movie.  Her Stella is dangerous, nasty, and clearly the sort of film noir character that, nowadays, would be having sex with guys just to mess with them.  She works every guy in the film, either to get what she wants or occasionally just to screw up their lives, and she looks great doing it.  The movie's best parts are all Darnell, and it falls to pieces in the back half when she disappears, and we're left with a relatively lousy mystery.  Even with a really great supporting cast (John Carradine as a conman medium! Anne Revere as an enigmatic spinster! Percy Kilbride as a lovelorn cook!) giving solid work, its script just isn't that good, and feels hollow when you compare it to the heights that Laura achieved.

Faye, for the first time this month, feels out of her element.  I wonder what the additional scenes would have been like, if they would have added some depth to her work or if this wasn't a genre that she could pull off, but she feels too mousy to be interesting compared to the stellar work that Darnell is playing.  We're meant to root for June, but what is there to root for other than she seems like a nice girl?  Her previous iterations were so compelling because they took seemingly "gold-hearted gals" and made them interesting.  Here, though, she's left with little to do other than be upstaged, and though it's a bummer that she didn't make any major movies again, perhaps the lesson of Alice Faye is that she was never given a proper shake to begin with.  Despite clear talent, beauty, and incredible star charisma, none of her movies that we profiled this month ever felt worthy of her.  One has to wonder what, a decade later, someone like Gene Kelly or Stanley Donen could have made of such a rare talent.  At the very least, while she didn't get the decades of star legend that some of her peers would get, she did seem to have a genuinely happy life with her husband Phil Harris for the next fifty years.  Unfortunately, as you'll soon see, our May Star of the Month wasn't so lucky.

OVP: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)

Film: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
Stars: Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Harry Morgan, Frank Conroy, Harry Davenport, Anthony Quinn, Mary Beth Hughes, Jane Darwell
Director: William A. Wellman
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Picture)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

In the early years of the Oscars, 16 films received only one nomination, but it was somehow for the big category, Best Picture.  This list is due to a variety of factors (campaigns were different then, studios had more control over who was nominated, for a number of these films there were simply less categories as options).  The final of these 16 films (to date) to only receive a nomination for Best Picture is the small (it's only 75 minutes long) Henry Fonda western The Ox-Bow Incident, which both Fonda and eventually Clint Eastwood would highlight as one of their all-time favorite movies.  Since my dish is out (like a lot of Minnesotans, my house is buried in snow right now and it was too cold to go outside and fix the dish at 9:30), I figured it was a good time to clear a film out of my DVR, so I caught it as my late-night Saturday movie this weekend.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in a small Nevada town in 1885 where Gil (Fonda) and Art (Morgan) are eyed with suspicion by the locals, assuming the two men to be rustlers.  It turns out there are rustlers afoot, as we learn soon that Larry Kincaid, a local ranchman, has been murdered by such men, and suddenly the mob in the bar wants justice.  Only a sole shop owner Davies (Davenport) seems to think this is a bad idea, but he's overruled by the townspeople, and suddenly they are on horseback before they come across a trio of strangers, including a handsome young man named Donald Martin (Andrews) and a quiet Mexican called Juan (Quinn), who turns out to be a famed gambler.  The three men are accused of killing Larry Kincaid, and after a 12 Angry Men-style moment where only a few of the mob decide to wait until the sheriff gets there, the three men are hanged despite there being no tangible evidence that they weren't just associates of Kincaid's.  The mob finally chances upon the sheriff, and proudly tells him that Kincaid's murderers are dead.

The thing is, though, that Kincaid isn't dead-he'd just been shot, and the men who shot him are already in custody.  The mob suddenly realizes that their brutish mentality has cost three innocent men their lives.  In 1943 this might have come as a surprise to the viewer, but for me it was pretty obvious that this was where we were going, as the films of the 1940's frequently echoed what would later feel like a Twilight Zone-style lesson of tolerance told through metaphor.  The film ends with Gil, our hero, having his head held high because he was one of the few to stand for Donald Martin getting justice, but no one feels particularly good, and it's somewhat implied that the whole mob could face criminal repercussions.

The movie itself is nothing more than that metaphor, and as a result it ages kind of badly.  Issue films are generally ones that don't work as well in hindsight, because there's little growth of the characters. What was the story, for example, of Gil's romance with Rose (Hughes, in one of her rare major studio turns), which culminates with an awkward encounter with her new husband...and then suddenly nothing happens with her, as we never see her again and Hank Fonda, who was pining for her earlier never really brings her up again?  The film is good, don't get me wrong (Fonda is his great stoic self, and I liked the supporting turn from Frank Conroy as a bloodthirsty army major), but it's hard to call such a one-dimensional script a classic, even if it might have been ripped off by stronger filmmakers in the years since.  The Ox-Bow Incident is that rare film that probably would have been better had it been longer, and that brevity likely cost it other nominations with the Academy-after all, there's barely enough time for other filmic elements to register.

Laura, My Love

There are a few things that I do on a daily basis. Shower, check my email, utter the phrase "Oscar-winning." You know, the usual. And, of course, there is nare a day where I don't think about one of my all-time favorite movies, the one to the left. Laura is one of the finest things that I have ever had the pleasure at viewing (cinematic or otherwise). Simply put, I don't think there is a movie that I am in love with more than Laura. Casablanca is my favorite, The English Patient is the one I'm most passionate about, but I long for Laura. The mystery, the wit, the stylish direction and production, I can't get enough. It's the best film that Alfred Hitchcock never directed. And that cast, from the smoky Gene Tierney to the lugheaded Vincent Price to the "neanderthal" Dana Andrews to the stony Judith Anderson to the monument to verbal venom, Clifton Webb, there's a sumptuous feast of thespian antics in this film. Simply mentioning this movie puts me into a trance-I'll just sigh, go off into my beautiful Preminger world, with a whisper of, "Laura."

And, though Oscar never seems to get these things right, the fact that he had both Laura and Double Indemnity to give a trophy for in 1944, and yet it was Going My Way that swept the trophies still irks me.