Vigil in the Night

A movie has to be pretty damn good to get me past killing a five year old boy in the first five minutes. Vigil in the Night does just that and though I felt like I could hardly forgive it for such monstrousness, I decided to hang in there at least until Brian Aherne showed up. I managed it and I'm glad I did. It's embarrassing to admit just how much I cried during this movie despite the fact that I was wary of the obviously manipulative writers with the whole dying kid thing. To say Vigil in the Night is a melodrama isn't quite fair to it. It would be lumping it in with all those ordinary melodramas that have only half a dozen far-fetched calamities piled on top of one another in two hours. Vigil in the Night has so many more, it's difficult to list them all. It's one of those films that if you step out to make a cup of tea, you better hit the pause button or you won't know where you're at when you return. In fact, skip the tea altogether because that's how the kid dies: his nurse steps out to get a cup of tea and he suffocates.

Carole Lombard plays a nurse who takes the heat when her sister's lapse in professionalism and love for hot caffeinated beverages allows a sick child to die. Brian Aherne plays the doctor she loves. A very determined series of coincidences and calamities keep the lovers apart (just barely) for two hours. It all winds up in quarantined fever ward where doctor and nurse put it all on the line to save a ward full of sweating little tykes. The story is based on the novel by doctor turned novelist, A. J. Cronin, who also wrote The Citadel. Today we take the medical drama as a genre for granted. There's no disease too horrifying that it can't play out for us in prime time. Back in the thirties though, the genre was just finding its feet. Of course, good doctors are glorified to a ridiculous degree (and bad ones vilified in the same extreme), but what I liked about this movie was the focus on the nurses. In one scene, the head of nursing looks at a room full of workmen scrambling to get a quarantine ward ready and comments, "it's the first time I ever saw a man work as hard as a nurse." There's a lot religious imagery in this film, and it's not difficult to see the parallel between nurses and nuns. Well, nuns who get to canoodle on occasion with Brian Aherne, anyway. If you have a nurse in your life, you could do worse than watch this movie thinking of them and then call them up and thank them for working their butts off for humanity.

Gog (1954)

It was worth watching Gog, which is a fairly tedious, but stylish 50s sci-fi outing, just to see Herbert Marshall with these awesome round, tortoise-shell glasses and undone polka-dot bowtie. If I didn't know better I'd say that Thomas Dolby stole his entire look from this screencap. (Of course, I do know better. He stole it from Harold Lloyd.) I would have felt amply reward for my time, but I was also treated to the image of urbane and elegant Mr. Marshall carrying a flame-thrower later in the film. In that scene, Marshall bears the most priceless look: a mixture of boredom, loathing and back pain that perfectly sums up this late period of his career. At that moment you can see that he is thinking that Ernst Lubitsch or Alfred Hitchcock would never have made him carry a flame-thrower.



I work in an almost 100 year old physics building, which is mainly furnished in cold war Herman Miller and old oscilloscopes. One of the credits in the film thanks Minneapolis Honeywell Controls, a name intimately familiar to Minnesota physicists. I could walk out the door of my office and start filming Gog. Or rather Wes Anderson could. Since all Anderson's films are elaborately set-up homages to art directors of films past, I think he could really do something with Gog. And when he does, brother, do I have the dials and gauges for him.

Speaking of work, watching Gog is a bit like being on the job because it takes so long to get to the actual plot of the film. Each of the labs in the elaborate underground facility has a little cast of characters doing a different futuristic experiment. They range from the plausible (a space mirror that blows stuff up) to the campy (a sexy couple who wear magnetic leotards and dance around trying to simulate zero gravity conditions). Each experiment is explained in detail to the point where even Wes Anderson would be shouting, "get on with it already. Bring on the killer robots."

Since I brought up killer robots you should know a couple of things. First of all everyone in Gog pronounces the word "robot" as if were "row-bit" stressing the first syllable and barely pronouncing the second. This also happens to be the quirky habit of a character on the kid's tv show, Word Girl, that my son watches. I'm not going to say "robot" the right way any more. I'm going to say it the Gog/Word Girl from now on. The second thing you need to know is the robots roll around slowly and swing their arms randomly. They are about as terrifying as the Daleks on Doctor Who, which is to say not terrifying at all.

The very Leslie Nielsenesque Richard Egan, "stars" and forties film noir siren, Constance Dowling plays Marshall's assistant who takes us on the real-time tour of the endless laboratory. Dowling manages to fill out a jumpsuit in an inspiring way, but she is saddled with a horrible haircut that reminds me of Jobriath. Egan's character is sent in to investigate a series of killings in the laboratory, which means when the plot does eventually arrive it feels like an episode of Columbo with good production values. The robots kill everyone remotely by manipulating all the automated controls around the lab. Oh goody! More closeups of dials and gauges! I'm sure there are people out there who have a fetish for vintage scientific equipment, and Gog is to them the most amazing porn ever, but the rest of us will long for the robots to roll slowly up to someone and bludgeon them with random arm movements.

I'm not really all that interested in 1950s science fiction except as a clearing house for some of my favorite actors of earlier eras. You know I watched Forbidden Planet just because Walter Pidgeon was in it. To that end, Netflix Instant has been streaming a lot of rarities in the genre, like this one. Stream it while you can, people.

Colorado Territory

Film buffs know Colorado Territory primarily as a Westernized re-make of High Sierra. The chief advantage to me of the later film is getting to watch Joel McCrea instead of Humphrey Bogart. McCrea plays Wes McQueen a train robber who breaks out of prison and plans to pull one last big job before going straight. He meets a hard luck rancher who has a pretty daughter (Dorothy Malone). He plans to marry the girl and use the loot from the robbery to stake himself in his new life. His schemes are complicated by his accomplices who want to kill him and take his share. There is also a "bad girl," nick-named Colorado,(Viriginia Mayo) who wants to shack up with him.

Never mind the horses and cowboy hats. This is film noir. In typical noir fashion, the hero is neither as good or as bad as Hollywood film poster copywriters would like. The good girl, is actually a bit of a greedy tramp and the bad girl turns out to practically a saint in disguise. Mayo and McCrea are really delicious together and true to the genre (noir that is) their supposedly illicit relationship is actually full of quaintness and purity-- they try to give the money from the heist to a mission church.

Director Raoul Walsh who also made High Sierra, and Gentleman Jim, keeps the tension ratcheted up till the inevitable shoot-out in a dead -end canyon. The ending made me think that Bob Dylan must have been watching this movie when he wrote Romance in Durango. That's as much of a spoiler as I'll give you, people.

I'm not sure why but Colorado Territory stuck with me for weeks after watching it. I found myself dressing in peasant tops and long skirts and bidding on Navajo jewelery on Ebay. Sometimes a really solid, well-made movie has more staying power than something more ambitious. Colorado Territory is just such a film.

She Married Her Boss (1935)

Gregory La Cava directed some of the seminal films of the 1930s, My Man Godfrey and Stage Door being the first that usually come to mind. I also enjoy some of this director's lesser known stuff including the pleasing 1935 romp She Married Her Boss. Claudette Colbert plays a driven, highly effective executive secretary who is in love with her boss (Melvyn Douglas). In order to get him to notice her as a woman she agrees to straighten out his chaotic domestic affairs, including a stroppy, bratty child, an overwrought sister and a pack of disagreeable, dishonest servants. After she sorts out his life, he marries her as a reward. You know, just like real life. She expects romance to come eventually but instead her man is even more of a workaholic than before, partly because she's no longer in the office keeping things in order.

What's a girl to do? Well, if it'a 1930s film, in this situation, the best thing to do is to run off with Robert Montgomery, play piano, drink, dance and get caught by the press in a compromising situation. If Robert Montgomery is unavailable, than a Robert Montgomery-type should be enlisted to be the good-time Charlie, friend with benefits. Such is the case in She Married her Boss and a justifiably forgotten Michael Bartlett plays the boyfriend. I found myself longing for Melvyn Douglas to play the good-time Charlie because he does those types of roles so well. (See Angel, Ninotchka, etc.) Here, Douglas is stuck playing the Herbert Marshall type. If we had Herbert Marshall and Melvyn Douglas then we'd really have something. Fantasy football casting aside, this is still a fun, if predictable film. Nothing here to threaten the greatness of Godfrey atop the La Cava canon, but still not a bad way to spend 90 minutes.

My biggest beef with this film is the insipid, oft-repeated idea that a woman's first job is marriage. They were running along nicely with the idea that Colbert's character was indispensable at home AND at work, when they suddenly decided work wasn't important. What? Maybe it was Hollywood's way of pandering to the unemployed to make out that a job wasn't that important. Or maybe it was pandering to the production code which suddenly meant that women couldn't work and be happy any more. At any rate, Colbert is stuck at home, trying to look feminine in a lot of hideous lace collars and I just want the snappy, competent, well-dressed Gal Friday back.

Colbert was at the height of her powers coming off It Happened One Night, the year before. Sexism, bad clothes and anemic scripts can't hold her back. She just shines. And Douglas has the good sense as he always did when acting with magnificent, talented actresses like Garbo and Dietrich, to just get out of the way and let her carry the show.

Private Lives (1931)

I'm just going to go ahead and say it: Noel Coward inadvertently created the genre of screwball comedy. When his stage play, Private Lives was being made into a film, he advised director, Sidney Franklin, to keep things moving along. In response Franklin turned in a comedy so blisteringly fast that its rapid fire dialog to competes with the infamous His Girl Friday. I had to watch many sections of this film twice to make sure I caught all the quips. I'm sure that, like Friday, it will reward multiple viewings. Not only is Private Lives fast, it's loud, shrill, and full of pratfalls and impossibly mixed-up situations. All it's missing is an escaped fugitive in a roll-top desk.

Until I watched Private Lives, I thought Noel Coward was all about cocktails in the drawing room and biting sarcasm. He is, but, apparently he's also about full body tackles and insulting one's mother-in-law with a viciousness that would make Walter Burns blush. Robert Montgomery and Norma Shearer play Elliot and Amanda, an English couple who have divorced after a series of violent rows. They both remarry and end up honeymooning in the same hotel in the South of France. Their adjacent rooms share a veranda, so it is inevitable that an awkward confrontation and, eventually, a reconciliation will follow. All of the action is compressed into three days, so Coward can be forgiven for packing a decade's worth of arguments into an hour and a half. Elliot and Amanda are loathsome characters, selfish and obnoxious, but they are also a lot of fun. I don't think I could take much more than 90 minutes of their carrying on, though.

Coward's outlook on love is bleak; if Private Lives weren't so dang funny, it would be depressing. In his worldview, passion is a miserable roller coaster of blissful kisses and socks to the jaw. This drunken slugfest can be difficult to watch. Take out the jokes and you'd have a Lifetime movie, or a TMZ expose on Madonna and Guy Ritchie.

The acting is uniformly excellent. The new spouses are played by sadly forgotten Pre-Code bombshell, Una Merkel and stalwart, supporting actor Reginald Denny. And the leads, though miscast as English, are wonderful. Montgomery looks completely at ease as an unchivalrous cad and his role in Private Lives reminds me of my favorite Montgomery performance in Mr. And Mrs. Smith. Speaking of which Norma Shearer seems to have gone to the Carole Lombard School of Meltdowns. Yeah, I had to mute her a few times, but even Lombard, the unquestionable queen of the spoiled rich female temper tantrum, could occasionally cross that line. I'm sure I never let the remote out of my hand while watching Twentieth Century.

Shearer is an able comedian and she brings star quality to the table as well. When Elliot declares that Amanda is the most thrilling, fascinating woman every born, you can't help but think the same applies to the actress playing her. If nothing else there is her habit of forgetting to wear a bra which is in evidence in a couple of scenes in Private Lives. I predict that Shearer will gain a whole new following if her filmography is ever transferred to Blu-Ray.

Thanks to Classic Movie Favorites for the stills.

Crack Up (1946)

While casting Crack Up, the filmmakers must have made a clerical error. How else to explain Pat O'Brien playing an art critic and Herbert Marshall a cop? Still, it works because Pat O'Brien is pretty bad ass: he makes art criticism seem like a gritty profession. As usual, he drags me, kicking and screaming into liking him. Herbert Marshall is pretty urbane for a cop, but he is supposed to be an undercover agent from Scotland Yard. I guess that makes a difference.

Despite the weird casting, Irving Reis' highly competent direction ended up selling me on this film noir. Reis seamlessly strings together the various set pieces, including, my favorite sequence: O'Brien on the run from the law in a penny arcade. Deft camera movement and clever editing work together to turn a guy standing around pretending to play a video into edge-of-your-seat action.

The script is less good--at times, not even up to the level of a decently written teleplay. An overly enthusiastic writer gives Marshall a rant about how Americans don't appreciate their law enforcement, thus ruining the surprise revelation of Marshall's cop identity. At least the writers do manage to keep track of the plot twists. I like film noir best when it's not so grand at the expense of logic. If I get to the end of the movie and feel that I've learned something about the nature of good and evil but still don't know who dunnit, I get a little peevish. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Big Sleep! No, of course, I'm not saying that Crack Up is better than The Big Sleep--just that it annoyed me less.

O'Brien plays George Steele, whom we first meet in the throes of an alcoholic bender and apparent mental breakdown. In typically circuitous noir style, we soon learn that he began his evening aboard a train that crashed. The problem? The cops have no record of a train wreck. Even in 1946, they kept track of that kind of stuff. So it's not looking good for our hero's sanity. One of his museum colleagues (Claire Trevor) agrees to help him clear his name. He retraces his steps, beginning with another ride on the same train that made him loopy. So far it's a little Lady Vanishes with a some Spellbound tossed in for good measure.

I'm fine with derivative filmmaking, but in those particular Hitchcock films, it’s the romance that keeps me coming back. Here, Claire Trevor manages to play both gal Friday and mysterious dame. Her friendship with O’Brien teeters on the edge of romance and, although it's not a huge surprise when they hook up, it's satisfying. Marshall provides the third side of the triangle, but that plot element doesn't really work. He and Trevor have no chemistry, and in one scene she admits that he makes her miserable. If it weren't for Marshall’s sudden uptick in energy at the end of the movie, I would want to give him B-12 shots. Eventually, however, he solves the crime with panache and starts to seem like an actor who might be worthy of a detective series of his own.

Speaking of detective series, I let out an internal "squee" every time someone in the movie called O'Brien "Mr. Steele." I can't help but wonder if the creators of my all-time favorite TV show, Remington Steele, weren't referencing Crack Up. If you gave Pat O'Brien's wardrobe to a woman, turned the urbane undercover cop into an urbane undercover con man, kept the references to art theft and forgery, squinted and stood back twenty paces, you might have Remington Steele. 


Thanks to the epic series The 100 Greatest Posters of Noir, I will never take movie advertisements at face value again. This poster is terrible. If Where Danger Lives did a 100 Worst, this might well make the list. The title is too small and the tagline is too big. The cracked font is an obvious concept carried out in a half-assed fashion, and, combined with the green, the whole thing reminds me of a turtle. Claire Trevor looks nothing like the poor woman on the poster, who appears to have a painfully broken leg. Pat O'Brien’s portrait does him no favors, either. Herbert Marshall gets third billing, but his portrait dominates the poster. Maybe the artist was a secret Herbert Marshall fan? Nah: no one with such good taste could turn out this little fiasco.

Gentleman Jim (1942)

Before I saw this movie, my knowledge of Gentleman Jim Corbett had been limited to a particularly audacious Bob Dylan rhyme in the song "Hurricane." (We're gonna put his ass in the stir/we're gonna pin this triple mur/der on him. He ain't no Gentleman Jim.) Nevertheless, I was quickly absorbed in this biopic chronicling the life of the famous 19th Century boxer. For those who need more to entrance them than Errol Flynn's near-constant shirtlessness, this tightly plotted film has plenty of action. Director Raoul Walsh (White Heat, High Sierra) keeps things moving along briskly, with fight scenes peppered liberally throughout the script.

Flynn plays a boxer so cocky and self-absorbed that in the climactic championship bout his main concern is that his hair not get mussed. In addition to fame and fortune, Corbett is also pursuing wealthy boxing patron Victoria Ware (Alexis Smith), who keeps promoting the up-and-coming fighter in hopes that he will get his ass kicked and learn his place already. He keeps winning, and eventually Ware realizes that Corbett differs from his nouveau riche "betters," a bunch of dirt prospectors and miners who got lucky in the Gold Rush, only in being a few decades more nouveau.

The Not So Quiet Man

In the meantime co-stars Alan Hale and Ward Bond steal all their scenes as, respectively, Corbett's scrappy Irish father and larger- than-life Irish rival, John L. Sullivan. Bond is particularly fun to watch; this character stands alongside his hilarious turn as a gambling, boxing-enthusiast priest in The Quiet Man as outstanding examples of his supporting work. Also in the mix is another The Quiet Man alum, Arthur Shields, who plays a gambling, boxing-enthusiast priest. Like The Quiet Man, this movie is funny, sentimental and wildly entertaining. What the later, better-known film has--and Gentleman Jim lacks is the romance. Flynn and Smith have nice-ish chemistry but their constant arguing is shrill and annoying. There's a fine line with these things, and usually it is the script that makes the difference. Give squabbling people amusing things to say, and you've got a Noel Coward play. Give them the script to Gentleman Jim and you're eavesdropping on the dysfunctional couple upstairs. But Smith and Flynn are so gosh-darned pretty that this shortcoming doesn't sink the film. Feel free to use the mute button, is my motto. The movie works as light entertainment and solid proof, if you needed any more, that Raoul Walsh could direct the heck out of an action scene.


The only thing I really learned about 19th Century prize fighting from Gentleman Jim, was that boxers favored sweaters over robes at one point in history. Several scenes show meaty, sweaty boxers with sweaters tied around their necks like 1980s yuppies.

Cinema OCD Valentines

Once again, I make Valentines out of random photos I've collected this past year. Print these out and give them to your would-be Valentine or anyone else you want to deeply confuse. (Click on the image to see print-ready version. )

Best. Screencap. Ever.

Note: pixelated refers to the movie dialog, not to the fact that my thumbnails look like crap!

Forgive me, but I could see no other way to get this on to my blog.

Valentines + sarcasm= a winning combination.

Nora, this one's for you!

Scotland: Land of Heroes

On my first trip to Scotland, upon the recommendation of my Scottish mother-in-law, we stopped at a gas station/gift shop called The Canny Scot where you could choose between canned and frozen haggis, sample the delight known as tablet and get a bargain price on smoked fish. For me, the biggest lure of the Canny Scot was their incredible collection of cheesy t-shirts. I settled on one emblazoned with pictures of Mel Gibson as Braveheart and Liam Neeson as Rob Roy and that read "Scotland: Land of Heroes." (The wonderful irony of this is that Mel Gibson is Australian and Liam Neeson is Irish.) As it is Burns Night this evening, I thought I would round up some of my favorites from Scotland: Land of Heroes.

I Know Where I'm Going: Best movie about Scotland, ever. A romantic comedy set in the Scottish Hebrides starring Roger Livesey and Wendy Hiller. Of course, Scotland itself is a character and film-makers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's cinematography is hauntingly beautiful. The tone of the film is quiet and the humor subdued. Best of all no one gets drawn and quartered.

Local Hero: This 1983 film by Scottsih director, Bill Forsyth, was seen by few people, except for the producers of Northern Exposure who completely ripped it off for the series. The story is about an oil man (Peter Reigert) who comes to a remote Scottish village to purchase the town and finds one lone hermit who refuses to sell up. As in I Know Where I'm Going, one of the highlights of the film is a ceilidh, or a Scottish country dance.

The Ghost Goes West/The 39 Steps: I'm always up for a Robert Donat double feature. While the former features Donat in a kilt, sporting a somewhat outrageous accent, the latter has Hitchcock using Scotland as a dramatic background for some of his most intense chase scenes.

My Life So Far: I admit that I stumbled on this movie during my time as a Colin Firth completionist. (As if I'm over my Colin Firth phase!). It's difficult to tease out my feelings for the film's leading actor, but I quite liked the between the wars, coming of age story on its own merit. The Scottish castle and setting are beautifully filmed and the whole thing is quirky and pleasant if not deeply profound.

Rob Roy: Longing to be a rip-roaring swashbuckling adventure movie, this film is ultimately too heavy to really do the genre properly. Liam Neeson and Jessica Lang are really pretty wonderful in the romantic parts of the film, and if you are into broad swords, then the ending of the film is a must see. Tim Roth and John Hurt round out the cast as vile villainous villains. Roth especially stands out as the loathsome Archibald Cunningham an evil and stylish man, the likes of which we haven't seen on screen since the days of Basil Rathbone.

Mary of Scotland: Hollywood knows how to do spectacle and this costume drama from Warner Brothers has plenty of pipers on castle ramparts. Katharine Hepburn and Frederich March play Mary Queen of Scots and James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, lovers enmeshed in court politics. Donald Crisp, John Carradine and Douglas Walton round out the excellent cast.

Brigadoon: Ok, take what I said in my write-up of Mary of Scotland and multiply it by ten. This is what happens when the big studio glamor machine goes bonkers on a meme. In this case, the idea that Scottish people wear as much plaid as possible, tams on their heads and like to dance a reel. Filmed on a sound stage it lacks the authenticity of the other films in this list, but with a blazing, bright technicolor widescreen transfer, it's difficult to say no to Gene Kelly, Sid Charisse and Vincente Minnelli production values.

Highlander: I'm kind of amazed that this movie didn't make the Canny Scot's t-shirt of Scottish heroes played by foreign actors. Perhaps they feared that people would confuse Christopher Lambert with Mel Gibson as they are difficult to tell apart when they are all done up in their highlander garb. (Hint: Mel has the blue face.) The story of an immortal Scottish warrior (Christopher Lambert) and his Spanish fight trainer (Sean Connery with a pearl earring) and their adventure across time to defeat fellow immortal and vile villainous villain, the Kergan (Clancy Brown.) In many ways, this is the movie that Rob Roy wanted to be, but couldn't because it had to stick to some semblance of historical accuracy. It's shamelessly entertaining, surprisingly original and will have you shouting, "there can only be one" in your next outing involving swordplay.

Braveheart: My least favorite of the films on this list, though it does contain a bravura performance from one of my favorite obscure actors, David O'Hara who plays Stephen the Mad Irishman. (O'Hara, ironically was one of the few native Scottish actors with a speaking part in the film). Action film lovers can look to the film's influential battle scenes whose up-close, visceral style became the standard for this sort of thing. It's a bit like watching the Lord of the Rings, actually: a lot of guys with long, dirty hair, giving rousing speeches, head-butting each other. At least there's lots of kilts.

I have not been kidnapped

To all my faithful friends who have patiently waited for a new blog post, I'm sorry. I really have no excuse other than I needed a little break.

A few things that have ruled my world during hiatus:

1) Tired Old Queen at the Movies. If you haven't seen him, check him out. No one could get me to watch as many 1950s films as he has. Also, you gotta love (and perhaps fear slightly) a guy who collects Barbie doll outfits from classic films.

2) The 100 Greatest Posters of Noir. I'm not even a noir fan and I've been loving this series in an obsessive way. This makes me want to go back to school and take a class from Mr. Fertig. He obviously knows his stuff.

3) Classic Film Scans. Kate from Silents and Talkies lovingly scans pictures of classic film stars and posts them in all their high-res glory. She has wonderfully broad taste and that means that lots of actors like Robert Donat and Herbert Marshall who usually get the short shrift in the world of high res scans get space. I dare you not to spend the rest of the day at this site. I dares ya.

4) Netflix instant. I can't stop watching TV shows this way. Entire seasons of Doctor Who, Slings and Arrows, MI-5 and No Reservations have been gobbled up. A few classic movies might have slipped in as well, like Damn the Defiant and The Girl Rush. Stupid TV. Be less good so I can go back to watching classic movies. Lord help me if they ever get Mad Men.

5) Facebook. Like a massive ven diagram of my life, Facebook allows me to spend untold hours cross pollinating my various obsessions among groups of my friends and family. Most of my online film friends are on here so if you are one of them, get on here already. Together we can and will remain staggeringly unproductive!

An extra big shout-out to all the friends of the blog who continued to e-mail, send goodies by mail and just generally be the most supportive and awesome people ever. You know who you are! Kisses!

Quality Street (1937)

A few years ago I was up in Duluth, Minnesota looking for someplace quiet, to grab a bite when we suddenly the perfect place: a small restaurant, with a kitschy, pseudo Russian theme that served custom-made burritos named after Rasputin and the like. It was as if the universe had reached into my brain and conjured up exactly what I needed to make me perfectly happy. I've treasured that memory, odd as it may seem, because I felt like it was evidence that of the interconnectedness of all things.

I was content to live my life with just that one instance of planetary alignment, but the other day it happened again. I was home sick, feeling very much in need of a cinematic pick-me-up, something light and frothy with just a touch of screwball. I needed one of those rare tonic films. To complicate matters, I was also feeling very Jane Austen-y since watching The Young Mr. Pitt had reminded me of the early 19th century and, inevitably, of Austen. I picked disconsolately through my Austen DVDs. Sense and Sensibility was too sad. (I always, always cry like a baby when Marianne almost dies). Pride and Prejudice was just too long, Emma was not quite right and Bridget Jones was definitely not on the bill. I scanned my Tivo and alighted randomly on the description of Quality Street: a young woman (Katharine Hepburn) becomes an old maid waiting for a young man (Franchot Tone) to return from the Napoleonic Wars. OK, Kate Hepburn and Franchot Tone--I'm there already. Throw in Napoleonic Wars and you've definitely got me intrigued. And doesn't this outline sound just a little bit like...PERSUASION?! Oh, Universe, you've done it again. You've reached into my brain and provided me with exactly what I wanted, when I wanted it.

What a fun discovery this movie was. It IS a screwball version of Persuasion. Take out Louisa's head injury and add in Anne Elliott posing as her own coquettish, young niece, and you more or less have Quality Street. This film has all the tea-swilling, pelisse-wearing, repressed-sexual-smoldering of a Jane Austen adaptation and all the chaotic misunderstandings and physical gags of 1930s RKO comedies. The story is based a play by Edwardian playwright, James M. Barrie, best known for his novel Peter Pan. The ever-competent George Stevens directs.

Franchot Tone, whom I've liked ever since he took my attention, however briefly, away from Cary Grant in Suzy, is really great here. I've rarely seen him in comedies, and he definitely shines in the part of the cocky young man who is humbled when he actually has to pursue a woman. Even while he chases "niece" Olivia, hoping to reign her in as a favor to spinster aunt Phoebe, he tips his hand in just the right places to show the audience that it's Phoebe he really loves. Hepburn, is excellent as well, belying the old story that she learned everything she knew about comic timing from Walter Catlett in Bringing Up Baby (1938).

If it's so great, why doesn't Quality Street top the list of Hepburn films from this her infamous "box office poison" period---a list that includes such gems as Sylvia Scarlet, Stage Door and Bringing Up Baby? Maybe it's the 19th century setting that puts people off. We think of Hepburn as a modern actress and prefer her comedies edgy and hip. There's nothing particularly edgy about Quality Street,--none of the cross-dressing deviance of Scarlet, or the risque undercurrents to Baby's fast-moving mayhem. (My bone! It's rare! It's precious!) Quality Street has remained quietly buried, dug up once a year when TCM does a Katharine Hepburn tribute; I captured it only through exhaustive Tivo-ing. But if you have any interest in Katharine Hepburn, Franchot Tone, 1930s comedy, or Jane Austen, I'd say you definitely want to make the effort to watch this one.

Young Mr. Pitt (1942)

Certain Robert Donat films so deserve a DVD release that I feel compelled to do some kind of civil disobedience on their behalf. That's it: I'm going to lie down in the middle of the street until The Young Mr. Pitt comes out on DVD. Not only is it one of Donat's most important performances, it's directed by Carol Reed for Pete's Sake. Carol Reed! You've heard of the The Third Man, right?

I apologize for the poor quality of the screencaps and their limited number. The DVD I obtained was a bootleg made when the movie was shown on TV in England. My computer didn't like this particular DVD very much so I only have captions from the first 40 minutes of the film. Grrrr. But yeah, we really need a DVD of this wonderful film.

Robert Donat plays Pitt the Younger, an obscure, idealist, reform-minded MP in late 18th century England who is suddenly thrust into the premiership as part of a complicated back room deal between the outgoing government and the King. William Pitt was the youngest Prime Minister in British history and his administration was dubbed the "mince pie government" because everyone assumed it would be over by the end of the Christmas season. Of course, if the guy is a subject of a biopic he must have lasted longer than that. He sees Britain through the dark early days of the Napoleonic Wars promoting a then-obscure young seaman named Horatio Nelson to leader of the navy. Nelson's triumph over the French fleet in Egypt suddenly turns the tide of the war and Pitt's popularity skyrockets. All this from a man who promised his father that he'd never seek fame in war.

The ever-fickle public call for peace, though Pitt is sure that Napoleon has no plans to retire anytime soon. He is sure they will be called to defend themselves and their allies again and again. Pitt is in love with the daughter (Phyllis Calvert) of one of his powerful constituents and they become secretly engaged, which was quite the scandalous thing back in the day. His health is wavering as well, so he plans to step down as Prime Minister as soon as he can groom a successor. It looks like the anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce would be the perfect candidate. Fate begs to differ, Pitt is trapped at the helm and money troubles eventually force him to relinquish his dream of marrying.

Donat is very good here, doing his usual schtick of playing a character from late twenties into middle age. Early in the film he plays Pitt the Elder as well. I guess Old Mr. Pitt isn't as good a movie title. It's pretty remarkable that he does manage the young part so well, and I love that he allows his middle-aged face to show through when appropriate. I think that in real life, Donat felt fairly older than his years, so I guess it's not a surprise that he plays a tired, middle-aged man with such delicate poignancy.

My favorite scene in the film involves Donat joining in a pillow fight with a bunch of little kids while Calvert looks on lovingly. His hair gets mussed up. It's all good. Of course, none of this is remotely historically accurate. In real life, Pitt was never romantically linked to any one. The filmmakers did a good job of sneaking the romance in at the edges of Pitt's life and of making the inevitable break-up reasonably believable. Of course in real-life Regency England it would have been perfectly acceptable for a Prime Minister, no matter how beleaguered by bills, to marry a rich young woman. But no matter--it all makes for some lovely angst on Donat's part.

Worth mentioning are the excellent supporting players. Robert Morley is brilliant as Pitt's rival, Charles James Fox and Raymond Lovell makes a hilarious, bumbling King George III. I think it was actually a fairly bold wartime an English monarch as so utterly incompetent. Here, the king is more concerned with his latest turnip crop than with affairs of state. Since the real King George was declared mad only a few years later, it's not such a stretch although it was his grandfather, though who was turnip-obsessed.

Parts of the film are unintentionally funny. As a Big, Important sweeping biopic it keeps reminding us of the march of history in corny ways. As Pitt the Elder watches his son sleep, the screen goes fuzzy at the edges and we cut across the Channel to baby's baptism. "Congratulations Mrs. Bonaparte," an off-screen voice intones. Later we check in on young Napoleon pwning his examination at military school. I guess this is what Robert Donat's biographer, J.C. Trewin meant when he called The Young Mr. Pitt "dated." But what does it really mean to say an old movie is dated? To me, it means that the values it espouses are irrelevant or antithetical to the modern viewer. Gone with the Wind is dated in its portrayal of happy-go-lucky slaves, for example. Still a great film, though, no? The Young Mr. Pitt must have seemed a bit fusty in 1968 when Trewin wrote Donat's biography. Give it another forty years or so and it's just fine: a nice example of British war-time filmmaking that managed to get its message across without beating you over the head with it. There is a whole sub-genre of war films that use past conflicts to make a point about the current political situation. In this case, the Napoleon=Hitler analogy works alright if you don't think about it too much. The point is that having a politician, not a king or a strongman at the wheel is bound to be complicated, but preferable to the alternatives. Some politicians, like the corrupt Fox will be a hawk or a dove depending on the prevailing winds. Actually trying to lead from one's principals is far more difficult. It's Mr. Pitt goes to Whitehall with a downer ending.

Jupiter's Darling (1955)

This was my first Esther Williams movie. I'm always amazed by the movies I think I know because I've seen lots of clips or satires of them. It's easy to sell a movie like Jupiter's Darling short. Williams plays Amytis, a Greek woman who lives in Rome around the time of Hannibal's invasion. She is trying to squirm out of a protracted engagement with Fabius, Dictator of Rome (George Sanders), when she stumbles onto Hannibal himself (Howard Keel). Amytis and her slave Meta (Marge Champion) are taken prisoner and, of course, find love as a result. Singing, dancing and flimsy excuses for underwater ballet ensue. One of the most enjoyable things about an Esther Williams movie is that almost anything is a pretext for a swimming sequence. She always wears a bathing suit under her clothes, just in case she needs to throw down. In one scene she jumps her horse off a huge cliff, leading a pack of Hannibal's men on an underwater chase that is exciting as it is graceful.

The action begins with Amytis and Meta on a shopping trip that ends with Meta buying a boyfriend, Varius (played by her real-life husband, Gower Champion), in one of several terrific numbers choreographed by Herme's Pan. Meta and Varius take turning owning one another through a plot twist or two which providies a comic foil for the mondo battle of the sexes going on between the leads. A lot of people getting tied up in this movie. I'm just sayin.




The most interesting water scene is "I have a Dream." It begins with a forgettable musical number that Esther sings while feeling up the muscle-bound statues around her pool. Then she dives under water and the statues become dudes in body paint swimming around with her. This is how shallow I am: I think a scene where a woman gets to fondle a bunch of silent guys is feminist. Heck, it's the same principle behind Jane Campion's The Piano except that I was actually entertained by Jupiter's Darling.





I admit that I watched this movie because it starred George Sanders. His character doesn't get much screen time, but he makes the most of it. Fabius has mother issues. He also wears yellow all the time. I'm not sure what this means, but Sanders gets some priceless scenes of being a ruthless dictator completely controlled by his mom. He gets to "simper" in about a dozen different ways. C'est magnifique.


So after Esther hooks up with Hannibal, of course, the first thing she does is get him in the water. He doesn't swim so she drags his whining, baritone ass along with her. I've never been a big Howard Keel fan, but I like him in this movie, because he has nice legs and he doesn't ever wear pants. Not even once. Way to go, Howard. One of my informants tells me that Keel and Sanders got along on set and spent a lot of time giggling during their scenes, which instantly makes me like Keel even more.
I heartily recommend Jupiter's Darling for the sparkling, mindless entertainment that it is. I look forward to more Esther Williams in future.

A Farewell to Arms (1932) picspam

As usual, I started off making a few caps to illustrate my review and went crazy. Warning: spoilers within.

Director Frank Borzage leaves out star Gary Cooper's face in many scenes, including a fairly long point of view sequence. I like this screen cap because it shows how skinny Coop's legs were.

I watched A Farewell to Arms fairly early in my Gary Cooper fandom. The verdict: young Gary Cooper is brain-meltingly attractive.




This scene introduces the playful relationship between Renaldi (Adolphe Menjou) and Lt. Henry. Renaldi calls him "baby" all the time which has the unintended effect of making him sound like a 1970s record producer.

Menjou is really wonderful in his role. He had been one of the biggest stars on Paramount's lot until Cooper came along, which makes the whole friendship/jealousy theme in the movie a bit more interesting, I think. Also, I love how awkwardly tall Gary Cooper must have been to act with.




Henry and Renaldi enjoy one of the "new girls" at Villa Rosa, the town brothel. Borzage never shows us any more of the girl or the brothel than this framing, which sets up the "meet cute" in the next scene. In the novel, Hemingway also describes the Villa Rosa obliquely. Henry's numerous interactions with prostitutes are summed up in a single long paragraph of verbal pastiche with snippets of dialogue and snatches of description. This book works so well as a film in part because paragraphs like that read almost like a screenplay description of a montage.

An air raid breaks up the fun at the Villa Rosa. Henry goes to a shelter and grabs the nearest naked foot he sees, thinking it must belong to the "new girl." In a wonderful reverse-Cinderella moment, the shoe doesn't fit, and Henry is embarrassed to find himself with English nurse, Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes). None of this beautiful nonsense is in the book, but I like it because it's just so movie-ish, and because it introduces the romance in a way that's less jarring than the way it's presented in the book, where the lovers meet and immediately begin discussing the most intimate details of their lives.

"We seem to be fated to run into one another in the dark," Catherine says, in one of the screenplay's cheesiest attempts to improve on Hemingway's spare and elegant dialogue. Luckily, most of the dialogue in the film is cribbed right from the book. The film deservedly won the Oscar for cinematography. These gorgeous and romantic night scenes are part of the reason. In the novel, the meetings in the garden are awkward, closely supervised, but in the movie the lovers are free to have sex twenty minutes after they've been introduced.

I forgot my review-based excuse for making this screen cap.

This is one of the most romantic scenes in the book, and in the movie it's played in a wonderfully low-key fashion that mirrors the book. Henry is sent to the front, but he turns his ambulance back to town so that he can say good bye to Catherine. "I really wish I could kiss you, right now."

"I got blown up eating cheese," Lt. Henry answers when asked if he did anything heroic to get his war wounds. That's probably my favorite line in all of Hemingway. It's nice that the filmakers left in details like the ambulance drivers eating cold spaghetti with their fingers. In the 1950s version of the film, Lt. Henry is a lot more dashing and heroic in the battle scenes. There's nothing about cheese in the dialogue of that version.

Henry is sent to Milan, where Catherine is working as a nurse in a new hospital. This is the point in the book where Catherine and Henry have sex for the first time, after which they decide they are married, though they are not. I'm not sure why the filmmakers moved the sex scene to the beginning of the story. Although the code was not enforced at the time, A Farewell to Arms nearly failed to get a release because of the frankly sexual nature of the relationship. My guess is that the producers thought sex occuring in a fit of passion would seem more palatable to the censors than rather than a pre-meditated encounter. At any rate, this scene is still pretty hot.

Another invention for the movie: Catherine and Lt. Henry are secretly married by the priest. While they do talk as if they are married, and the priest does visit the lieutenant in the hospital, in the book they never marry.

The couple on their "wedding night." This scene is peppered with bizarre, supposedly sexy dialogue about castor oil. Borzage's camera cuts away to the search lights on the balcony, a detail taken right from the book.

Lt. Henry is sent back to the front but spends his last night in Milan with Catherine, in the classiest hotel they can find. "Darling, I wish we could do something truly sinful," Catherine opines, "but everything we do feel so innocent."
"I hate the rain. Sometimes I see me dead in it." This is one of Hemingway's most difficult lines of dialogue, I think. It's very difficult to make a statement like that and not seem completely overwrought. Hayes does a wonderful job of making Catherine seem a touch neurotic, but not as crazy or annoying as she could easily become in the hands of the wrong actor (e.g. Jennifer Jones in the 1950s remake).



The good-bye in the hotel is one of the most romantic and sad moments in the movie. Gary Cooper's height comes into play again as he picks her up, kisses her and carries her a few feet to the chair.
She looks so small when he puts her down. I think it's the simple, every day details that make this scene so powerful, the way one remembers every bitter sweet second of a parting like this. In a way, for me as a viewer, it's the end of the story because, after this moment, the movie goes off the rails, covering five chapters in five minutes of montage and, most painfully, cutting Catherine and Henry's brief period of happiness in Switzerland.


Some of the expressionistic images from Borzage's montage which collapses a great deal of the book into a five minute silent film, featuring sound effects and music. As much as I'm annoyed by this part of the movie which boils all the heart-ache and complexity of Lt. Henry down to "he deserts because his letters to Catherine come back unopened," I can't help but admire its unique beauty.

The llieutenant hops a freight train to Milan. Meanwhile, Catherine, who is pregnant, has gone to Switzerland. In the book , she goes to a town near the Swiss border, where they are reunited, make a daring escape to Switzerland in a row boat where they live happily ever after, until Catherine dies in childbirth.

Lt. Henry arrives at the hospital to find Catherine moments away from a c-section to save her life and deliver their stillborn child. This image could be Alvin York, Lou Gehrig or Longfellow Deeds-- it is such a classic Gary Cooper moment. Though he's better known for those later roles, this performance could stand alongside the best of his work from the forties.


I swear William Wyler copied this entire death scene for Wuthering Heights. I often wonder if the censors would have released this film at all if Catherine hadn't died at the end, effectively punished for her wanton ways. The studio filmed an alternative ending in which she lived; Hemingway hated it. In fact, it is said that Hemingway really disliked the entire movie with one exception: Gary Cooper. He admired Cooper so much that he insisted he be cast as the hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls.