I live My Life (1935)

Joan Crawford sports a to die for sailor pants suit and Brian Aherne manages to make boots and shorts work for him. (Just think of William Powell in a similar get-up in I Love You Again, played for laughs.)


In I Live My Life, Joan Crawford plays a spoiled heiress who gets entangled with an archeologist on a cruise to Greece. To her surprise he follows her to New York where he proceeds to interfere with her plan to marry a society stooge. (Fred Keating)

The spoiled-heiress-gets-schooled-by-love plot requires a delicate touch for it not to become a series of increasingly violent hissy fits. Joan Crawford is a force of nature, taking over the movie, and not always to betterment of the picture as a whole. In the scenes where she's supposed to be cracking wise, she bursts into laughter that seems like it might be as likely leveled at the script as it is at her counterpart in the scene. This is the first time I've seen her play comedy, and I wasn't really impressed. Brian Aherne tries admirably to be as rude, petty and obnoxious as his British genes will allow him, managing an insane screaming rant at one point, but even that is not enough to quite balance things when Hurricane Joan takes center stage.

Crawford and Aherne put across the idea that they are attracted to one another, and yet there's no real warmth or feeling of sympathy between them. Mick LaSalle had a good post on his blog a while back about what he called the Romantic Fallacy. The idea that just because a Person A is the wrong mate, doesn't necessarily mean that Person B is the right match. In a good romantic comedy you never question the Romantic Fallacy. In a bad one, it becomes achingly clear. I would say that I Live my Life is a mediocre romantic comedy about two fiercely independent people who have nothing in common and no willingness for compromise. If these two really did get married they'd be miserable, and the audience knows it. The plot doesn't even bother to resolve these differences and in the end Joan just gives in, I guess because she's the woman and this is a post-production code world.

Though I love these two actors, I can't help but think they are probably just miscast. If it were Clark Gable and Carole Lombard we would accept the whole conceit because that was Gable and Lombard after all in real life. In a way, Gable and Lombard loom like a shadow over I Live My Life. Nobody played the spoiled heiress better than Lombard and the following year her performance in My Man Godfrey would make all other spoiled heiresses to come afterward seem like cheap imitations. She had a way of bringing sympathy to the character that Crawford can't manage. In one scene Joan keeps trying to get up from her chair and Aherne keeps pushing her back down in her seat a la Gable in A Free Soul. Apparently some of Aherne's antics were so over the top, they had to be toned down for British audiences to the point that an alternate ending was made for the film for the foreign market. Yet, later that year British Audiences would make rude, unchivalrous Robert Donat in The Thirty-Nine Steps a box office sensation.

Thank goodness for MGM's stable of character actors: Frank Morgan, Arthur Treacher, Eric Blore and Aline McMahon who provide most of the laughs. Crawford's scenes with Morgan are particularly delightful. A good supporting cast is not only essential for a good romantic comedy, but in this case, they manage to keep things reasonably afloat while the leads flounder a bit. I Live My Life is definitely worth watching as an early, though not totally successful, example of screwball comedy.

Chemistry 101

What is meant when people talk about actors having chemistry? I'll start off by telling you what I DON'T mean by chemistry. The phrase has become a kind of lazy shorthand to describe either acting quality or likability of an actor. If two actors are not managing to convey that they are in love when they are supposed to be, it is not because of a "lack of chemistry" but generally a lack of acting. Take for example The Proposal. Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds utterly failed to convince me that they were in love by the end of the movie. Part of the problem was a script which substituted movie cliche's for any kind of original take on romance. Even with a cliched script, I've seen plenty of romantic movies that still managed to convince me of the underlying conceit that the two main characters are in love. About half the story lines in Love Actually would serve as an example. We believe the couple is in love because the actors have conveyed that to us in some way either through body language, their ease and rapport with one another or through good timing in the pacing of their dialog. The way people use words in a romantic movie should be like the way Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers use bodily movement in their films.

How do you convey love? Well, I think it starts by portraying physical attraction. In many cases it is enough to portray lust. And this is where it gets tricky and the viewer's own feelings get tangled up in their assessment. Many female viewers have a hard time buying Scarlett's preference for Ashley Wilkes over Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. Maybe it's just that we're not Victorian Ladies, but modern women, trained by year of viewing movies in which the "bad boy" is redeemed to be the ultimate catch. It doesn't help that Clark Gable was the prototype bad boy. This is a tricky one for me as well, and I have had to put aside my personal indifference to the charms of Leslie Howard on numerous occasions. When it comes to same sex assessment (and I do apologize for the hetro normative bias here, people) I think we have a tendency to like those actors whom we can imagine portray some facet of ourselves or whom we would like to be. I can't exactly relate to Ingrid Bergman because well, she is a Goddess, but I can relate to the insecurity that she frequently hides beneath a barrier of coolness or deflective humor. Cause, like I totally do that too! I love Bette Davis because she conveys qualities such as strength, courage and self-sufficiency that I wish I had in greater quantities.

So when I see an actress whom I like (Ingrid Bergman) paired with an actor whom I don't find particularly attractive (Humphrey Bogart) what is the result? Well if they are good actors, the result is Casablanca. It should still be a fantastic movie if all the other pieces are in place. Bogart and Lauren Becall had great chemistry together on screen. They should. They were sleeping together in real life. But Bogart has equally convincing chemistry with Ingrid Bergman. You really believe that they were lovers once and that they have been greatly effected by their brief affair and that the whole thing is about to come to an explosive conclusion at Rick's Cafe American. And yet, I find Paul Henreid more attractive and think that Ingrid's fate of returning to him would be a no-brainer for me. It doesn't matter what I think though, because good acting can overcome taste.

Sometimes though, good acting is not enough and neither is personal attraction. Take the example of Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh in Fire Over England. This is a screen couple who should have incendiary chemistry on screen. They were married in real life. Olivier is beautiful and Vivian Leigh is an actress I've always admired for her ability to maintain her dignity in undignified situations. And yet, Olivier and Leigh are completely blah together on screen. Olivier does better in scenes with May Robson and Tamara Desni. What the...? I think it is because Leigh and Olivier are both such big actors that they weren't giving the other person enough space on screen. And that is really the only logical explanation because in That Hamilton Woman, a later performance, they are terrific.

This brings up an important thing that I've observed over the years, that chemistry, whatever it is, is not necessarily created instantly, but is often the product of years of working together. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are wonderful together in The Awful Truth. And yet, by their third film together, their comic timing and their ease with one another was so great that in comparison they seem a bit awkward in the earlier performance. They hide it well with lots of hostility, which is in the language of screwball comedy, a byword for love and attraction. But their love scenes together are flat in comparison to Penny Serenade, or My Favorite Wife, both of which are far more effective at convincing the audience that this is a married couple. Though these later films are vastly inferior to The Awful Truth in many respects I still enjoy watching them because of the chemistry between Dunne and Grant.

Sometimes dislike photographs as "like" and accounts for chemistry. In Wuthering Heights Olivier and his co-star Merle Oberon famously hated one another. They fought on set and Oberon told people that Olivier was repulsive with bad breath and a habit of spitting when he spoke. This fed perfectly into the underlying theme of movie which is the blurring of the lines between love and hate. After the Production Code came into force in 1934, sex became sublimated as hostility. It is to the point now that when we see a couple who argues or dislikes each other in the first five minutes of the movie, we are perfectly correct in guessing that they will wind up together. Now this is an old trope, that goes back to Much Ado About Nothing (and probably further-- if I were any student of the Classics at all, I could think of a decent pre-Shakespeare example), but it has come to so dominate the genre of Romantic Comedy that there is almost no other pattern of putting people together in contemporary American Movies. And you know what? I'm totally fine with that. I loved Bridget Jones Diary and I'm looking forward to seeing that new movie with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin. Opposites still attract, and chemistry, whatever it is, is still king.

Ten Favorite Pre-Code Love Scenes

Well it's the end of a decade folks so all the movie blogs are bound to have a lot of lists. Since I have barely watched ten movies from this decade (if I didn't exaggerate, I would die) I will focus on stuff I'm actually watching. You know: old movies. So here's my Ten Favorite Pre-Code Love Scenes to keep you heated up on this cold winter's day.


10)Gary Cooper and Cary Grant in Uniform. And if that's not enough...submarines! Gary Cooper has many great pre-code love scenes: The scene at the end of One Sunday Afternoon where he in a matter of a few minutes saves his marriage and wins the audience's grudging affection. Not to mention scenes in Farewell to Arms where he makes you forget momentarily that the script has left Hemingway behind pages ago. But none of these scenes are really all that different from Gary Cooper love scenes after the code. A big exception is to be found in the oddball melodrama Devil and the Deep co-starring Tellulah Bankhead, Charles Laughton and a little known (at the time) actor named Cary Grant. Cooper picks Bankhead up, literally, he saves her from keeling over in the midst of a festival, and spends the night with her in an oasis. The scene lasts ten or eleven minutes following the couple as they move through crowded streets, back-alley bazaars and eventually the moonlit dessert. At one point she's trying to get rid of him and she shakes his hand to say goodbye, he keeps it and continues talking to her in a low monotone of hypnotic seduction while stroking the inside of her wrist with his forefinger. It's a completely cheeky thing which would get a mere mortal slapped, if he didn't look like Gary Cooper. Bankhead plays into it beautifully, protesting half-heartedly until it's too late. The rest of the film is campy good fun that ends in a submarine crash in which everyone gets wet (except Cary Grant, who sadly left the movie before this point, D'oh!)

9) Cheap and Vulgar. Warren William and Joan Blondell in The Goldiggers of 1933. Joan Blondell calls herself "Cheap and vulgar Carol" and Warren William replies "I love you, whatever your name is." It's really pretty awesome. See it here. More on Golddigers here.

8)Put em round me. Norma Shearer and Clark Gable in a Free Soul. This whole scene is the essence of pre-code from the costumes (Norma Shearer's loose, low cut dressing gown worn without underwear would never be permitted a few years later) to the context (the scene takes place as the couple are spending the night in Ace's hideaway.) Gable and Shearer argue. He wants to marry and she doesn't. She ends the dialog and the argument with a direct command for some lovin. "Come on. Put 'em round me." A contemporary review of the film found this couple preposterous, but now they are almost cliche--the gangster bad boy and the wild, society girl. The whole scene is linked here, and starts at about the three minute mark. More on A Free Soul can be found here.

7)The pussyfooting. Barbara Stanwyck and James Rennie discuss the ups and downs of shacking up together in Illicit. "I can't stand all this pussy-footing around," he declares to which she replies, "Don't say you don't like the pussy-footing." Stanwyck is adorable and hilarious and Rennie has stuck with me, even though this is the only movie I've ever seen him in. The combination of romance, comedy and a head-strong heroine mixed in this scene would be repeated frequently in Stanwyck's best pictures. Highlights are linked here and begins around the 55 second mark. More about Illicit can be found here.

6) Jungle love. Four Frightened People. Herbert Marshall and Claudette Colbert lose their clothes and, eventually, their inhibitions as they lose their way in the jungle. After epic quantities of flirtation, he touches her shoulder. She tells him that it feels so good when he touches her and he replies "everything I've touched for weeks now has seemed to be you." Squeeeeee! Later in the film the lovers, exchange wedding vows while tied back to back to a piece of bamboo. Marshall's character has a wife back home which adds an extra level of pre-code angst to the proceedings. More about Four Frightened People here.

5) I'm gonna let you watch me shave. In Bed of Roses (1933), Joel McCrea plays a gritty ship's captain who falls for a prostitute (Constance Bennet). The whole thing is a bit of Red Dust rip off in that respect, but it's a fun movie, with well-written dialogue and enormous chemistry between the leads in their third pairing on film. In one scene McCrea's character shaves in front of Bennett and things get pretty steamy. I happened upon this movie in the last five minutes and I was completely mesmerized by McCrea and Bennett, so much so that I made a point to seek out the whole film and others with these two actors. McCrea is ridiculously handsome in this movie. I'd been used to seeing his films from the early Forties, where he was pretty, but wow. OK, just... wow. Fan of Palm Beach Story? Watch one of his pre-code comedies with Bennett and prepare to have your mind blown.

4) They are still talking about typewriters, right? Leave it to Lubitsch to make even an old typewriter sexy. In Design for Living Frederich March and Glinda admit there feelings for one another and then move on to more important matters--talking about Tommy's old typewriter. Him: "Ya didn't keep it oiled! The keys are rusty." Her, "It still rings." He moves really close to her and she whispers, "it still rings." See the whole scene here starting at around minute 54.

3)Garbo and the furniture In Queen Christina Garbo and her real-life lover John Gilbert act out the doomed love affair between a queen dressed as a man and her Spanish lover, Antononio. They spend three days together snow bound in an inn. In one memorable scene Garbo moves around the room touching the furniture and draperies with a sensual delight. She explains to Anotonio "in the future in my memory I shall live a great deal in this room." See the whole scene here.

2) What about breakfast? In The Smiling Lieutenant, Claudette Colbert and Maurice Chevalier discuss when they will next see each other. She suggests dinner, but he says no that's too long to wait he is hungry now. Then she suggests tea and he says, knowingly, what about breakfast? As she's leaving, they kiss and the screen fades to black. In the next scene she is happily cooking him breakfast. And that, ladies and gentleman is why they call it the Lubitsch touch! See the whole thing here, from the five minute mark.

1)UNF. If you don't know what UNF is try looking it up and you might just find a scene from Red Dust there as an explanation. The rather crude acronym has come to mean"paradigm of sexiness" and that about says it all really. It's hard to pick just one scene from Red Dust. One might do a list of at least five just from that film. My favorite is the first meeting of the couple in which they mostly debate the merits of different kinds of cheese. It's almost as if the writers were trying to come up with the least sexy dialog possible, but Gable and Harlow somehow set it on fire anyway. See it here.

Eye Candy of the Day: A Free Soul

I've posted a lot of gorgeous eye candy since I started this blog, but I have to say this may be one of the prettiest. Not only did Doctor macro come through with a still of Gable and Shearer together (many of the publicity images for the film understandably feature its stars Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer), but I wanted to talk about the smokin' hot "dress" that she wears in this scene. Also, I love the way the scene is lit so that her hair has that halo effect. Every time I watch a Norma Shearer movie I have the sudden urge to get a perm. It must be the lighting!

I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of A Free Soul, especially in comparison to The Divorcee which was made just a year earlier. A Free Soul is better written, her character far more daring and interesting, the acting vastly better, and the production values are miles ahead. This feels almost like a mid-thirties film. The sound if not great, is at least fully audible, and the flow and the pace of the film are much more like a talkie than a silent.

I've said before that Norma Shearer is an actress who is really only good when she is acting with other people of her level of talent. Many great actors will make bad material and weak co-stars better, but Shearer wasn't able to do that. Here, thankfully, she clicks with everyone on screen . Luckily everyone in the movie (Gable, Leslie Howard, Lionel Barrymore and James Gleason) are also excellent. Her co-stars are so good that it would be tempting to say that they carry her, but that is not the case. Lionel Barrymore won an Oscar for his performance as her alcoholic father and that award came mainly for a long monologue he delivers in a courtroom. It is very over the top, but Barrymore doesn't go too far. A big scene like that is risky in that if it fails it will be as memorably bad as it is good. Barrymore nails it and he deserves his accolades. But Norma Shearer is in the scene too, holding her own.

Clark Gable is probably the most interesting thing in the film. It was clear that he was going to be a star and he and Shearer have an incandescent chemistry. The infamous scene where he shoves Shearer back onto the sofa, plays as fairly tame today. His character is reasonably sympathetic most of the way through and in many ways this film marks a turning point in attitudes toward "antiheroes." The New York Times review in 1931 said that it was absurd that a woman like Shearer would be romantically interest in Gable's character. Now it seems absurd that Leslie Howard would have a shot at all.

Sub Mission: A tribute to submarine movies

Cary Grant in Destination Tokyo. If there isn't a scene like this in every sub movie, there should be.

I love a good submarine movie. There's something about the genre. You can say what you want about the Freudian symbolism of the craft, but I wonder if it's a coincidence that they all have at least one scene where the men start stripping off their wet shirts to deal with the heat and oppressive atmosphere. It's always Tennessee Williams hot on board a submarine, in more ways than one.

Das Boot goes for gritty (and sweaty) realism.

Probably the best sub movie of all time is Das Boot. It's also the longest. I've heard rumors of five hour cuts of this film. That's a lot of submarine. Even I might tire of a submerged tin can full of pent up testoreone and men in wet shirts. Nah. Who am I kidding? If one of my loyal readers sent me the five hour Das Boot, I'd watch it. This is a hint, people, by the way.

I dug up the trailer for Crimson Tide (1995) on Youtube. Watch for a pre-Sopranos James Gandolphini saying "Dive, Dive" and sweating a lot. Notice how everyone is sweating a lot in the clip. And in the scenes where they aren't sweating it's raining really hard, just to up the wateriness quotient of the movie, I guess.

Gable: They carried the whole "wet look" a bit too far.

One of the dramatic devices of Crimson tide, the clash between an old captain and a younger officer, is a recurring theme in the genre. From Charles Laughton and Gary Cooper in Devil in the Deep (1932) to Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson in K-19, the Widowmaker (2002), you pretty much now that two things are going to happen. The young guy is gonna get wet and then he's gonna yell at the older guy. In Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), it's the old guy, Clark Gable who gets wet.

After the yelling and the second guessing, there will be certainly be a contrastingly quiet scene where almost we hear is that "Boop....booop" noise that you always hear in the background in a sub movie. That's usually the cue to start the tech talk. "Crush depth," "fire torpedos," "up, persicope" and the like. I love all the tech talk in a sub movie. It reminds me of Battlestar Galactica, which is really every kind of navy battle movie set in space. You definitely have the submarine thing, because they put their nukes in tubes and fire them like torpedos. Every time Admiral Adama (Edward James Olmos) starts barking out navigational coordinates, you can tell that President Roslin (Mary McDonnel) just wants to jump his bones. Submarine movies have long extended sequences where people talk in this kind of gibberish and yet it's always tense and dramatic.

Gregory Peck and his periscope in On the Beach.

Speaking of Battlestar Galactica, I wouldn't be surprised if the creators of that series had seen On The Beach with Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck. They are both about people coping with the end of the world. How do survivors move on with their lives and what problems do they have hooking up with other survivors. Turns out they have a lot of issues. Gregory Peck plays a submarine commander whose surely lost his family in the war that's destroyed all of the the Northern Hemisphere, but he continues to act as if they are o.k., buying them gifts, writing letters home. Yet he's trying to come to terms with his relationship with Ava Gardner, which is like mental adultery to him. It's a very fine drama that has amazing work from Gardiner, Peck, pre-Pyscho Anthony Perkins, and Fred Astaire among others. That's why I resisted the temptation to title this whole piece "Das Booty Call: Gregory Peck in On the Beach." That would be too flippant even for me.

I wasn't expecting On the Beach (1959) to be a sub movie, since it's about nuclear war. The opening scene has Gregory Peck bending over a periscope. I had to stop the movie and replay it and say aloud, "You had me at 'up periscope' On the Beach."

Eye Candy of the Day: Clark Do-over

Well, I was being slightly cheeky by posting the most unattractive picture ever of Clark Gable yesterday. So for all you Gable fans out there, here's a proper one for you. I love this scene in It Happened One Night (1934), my favorite Gable movie. I'm not certain, but I think this is "day for night" photography, but it gives everything an ethereal moonlit glow.

The thing I love about this movie is the combination of the heavily romantic atmosphere and the world-weary cynicism of Gable's Peter Warne who is pre-occupied with the idea that he never "be taken for a buggy ride" or played for a fool. His time with the runaway heiress, Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert), shows him that toughness is causing him to miss out on life and that what he really wants is a girl who jump in the surf and love it is as much as he does. The balance between the romance and the comedy is just perfect and sets the formula for the entire genre. It also has a stellar supporting cast including Walter Connolly as Ellen crotchety but lovable dad and Roscoe Karns as Shapely, the slimy traveling salesman who starts every conversation with "Shapeley's the name and that's the way I like 'em!"

It Happened One Night marked a real transition for Gable away from tough-guy who slaps women around type roles to more humane characters and it also proved that he could do comedy. The movie cleaned up at the Oscars and allowed Columbia Pictures to go from a small-time "B-movie" studio to join the ranks of Paramount and MGM.