Phone Book Actresses

I thought the swoon worthy actors seemed lonely so I decided to give them some company. Here are my actresses who I'd watch read the phonebook.


Katharine Hepburn: Did she ever give a weak or boring performance? I can't think of one. From the flimsiest comedy to drama with a capital, "D" she was always a pro. Though Bringing Up Baby is my favorite I have a soft spot for all her films with Cary Grant, especially Philadelphia Story which was more or less created with her in mind. I know this picture has Jimmy Stewart in it too, but Kate looks so pretty, I couldn't resist.



Irene Dunne: Another actress who was at her best when she was with Cary Grant, nevertheless she made some great movies with other people too (Theodora Goes Wild, Love Affair, I Remember Mama ) Favorite Film: The Awful Truth Favorite Hat: see above.



Barbara Stanwyck: While I adore her comedies, Barbara can get me to watch her in anything. I must have watched half a dozen of her pre-code melodramas last year and I never tired of her. She certainly knows when to show a little leg, doesn't she? I love that about Babs. Favorite Film: Ball of Fire.



Ingrid Bergman: Woody Gutherie wrote an unpublished song about Ingrid Bergman after seeing her in Stromboli. That's how hot she was. Yet, she didn't really seem aware of that and she put forth both vulnerability and a down to earth quality that I've always appreciated. Favorite Film: Notorious and Spellbound.


Claudette Colbert: I think of Colbert as the quintessential 1930s actress. She just kept turning up in movies that I was interested in until eventually she became the reason to watch a movie. I think it's pretty funny that not one but two Colbert bathing scenes (Four Frightened People and Sign of the Cross, above) were among the "last straws" leading to Production Code enforcement. Favorite Film: It Happened One Night and Smiling Lieutenant


Jean Arthur: Whether she's holding a varmint at gun point or going undercover to report a story that little gal sure has moxy. Favorite Film: Only Angels Have Wings


Myrna Loy: Of course her work with William Powell was what originally brought me to Myrna Loy. Her career had so many facets, including an early vamp/Asian period where she played exotic villains. I think we have Myrna to thank for the fact that just when the Code made domestication the ultimate goal of every film, she actually created a vision of marriage and being a wife that was sexy, glamorous and fun. Favorite film: The Thin Man


Miriam Hopkins: I've only seen four of her films but all of them have blown me away so I'm putting her in here. Hopkins seems like she could survive today and be just as versatile and popular as she was in the early 30s. The roles she created for Lubitsch films feel completely modern. With her ability to change her look for any part she didn't really mesh with the glamor machine of the studio system and I think she would have fared better in a more independent climate. Favorite Film: Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living and Smiling Lieutenant.


Greta Garbo: Smarter people than I have tried and failed to sum up Garbo's appeal. Simply put she is the quintessential movie star. Favorite film: Ninotchka.


Bette Davis: Even as a very young, inexperienced actress, Bette Davis put forth a feeling of worldliness and sophistication in every role she played. She must have come out of the womb a little jaded, I think. Favorite Film: All About Eve.


Carole Lombard: This has to be the most awesome picture ever. Even if I wasn't going to put Lombard on my list, this picture would have shown up in Eye Candy sooner or later. She's pretty much the queen of my favorite film genre, Screwball Comedy. Favorite film: My Man Godfrey, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and To Be or Not To Be.


Kay Francis: She created strong female characters with careers and minds of their own. She was also a style icon which seems like it would require no talent, but I suggest that not just anyone could pull off some of the outlandish creations she wore rather casually in her films. The Code more or less killed her popularity, but she has had lately the revival she was due. Favorite film: Trouble in Paradise.



Sylvia Sydney: She was a good actress, but really I just love her because she's so adorable. I know that sounds lame but I can't help it. She is cuter than the most precious object on Mod Cloth. Favorite Film: Thirty Day Princess.


Greer Garson: The first Greer Garson movie I ever saw was Pride and Prejudice and I became an instant fan. Favorite film: Goodbye Mr. Chips.

Not quite phonebook actresses: Margaret Sullavan, Joan Blondell, Margaret Lockwood, Norma Shearer, Constance Bennett

Thirteen Women is about 11 too many

If you would have told me ten years ago that I'd be giving a bad review to a movie starring Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne, I would have told you that you were nuts. Loy and Dunne are two of my favorite leading ladies of the thirties and to imagine them in the same movie is almost one of those Dream Team scenarios that film geeks like to imagine from time along the lines of "Wouldn't it have been great if Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart had made more than one movie together?"

So it is almost complete disbelief that I type the words "Thirteen Women (1932) starring Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne is one of the worst pre-code movies I've seen." Not only is it bad, it's not really bad enough to be quite laughable. Myrna Loy plays a woman who seeks revenge for ill treatment in boarding school by killing her classmates one by one. As was typical for this period in Loy's career she plays the Asian exotic. It's one of those oddities of film history that she beat out an actual Asian actress, Anna May Wong for the part of Ursula Georgi, the killer who uses the power of suggestion to murder her former class mates. This character fits into the vamp type that was slowly fading in this period after being hugely popular in the silent era. Loy at least is a convincing vamp, and the scenes where she is held in the camera's gaze with only her eyes to hold the viewer do have a certain creepiness to them. Also her wardrobe is to freakin' die for. Really, I think she must have used the power of suggestion to get those amazing dresses that she's poured into throughout the film.

Irene Dunne plays the one standout school chum who manages to resist her suggestions and schemes and so Georgi goes after Dunne's little boy. Part of the problem with the film is the script which spends a great deal of time expositing on the other twelve women who after a while all blur together. There are only so many women in short marcelled hair cuts that you can absorb in 90 minutes. Ricardo Cortez is underused as the detective solving the case. He and Dunne have decent chemistry and its too bad the movie didn't focus on those two more. On her own, though, Dunne's character is pretty dull and after a while I started rooting for Ursula, whose grudge at least comes from the fact that she was kept out of a sorority because of her race. If Thirteen Women were just a little campier, it would be fun and if it were a little better made, it could have actually been a decent thriller given the talent involved in the production.

Beyond the Thin Man: Powell and Loy

How is that I've had this blog for a month and I haven't talked about Powell and Loy? They are my favorite screen couple of all-time. He was so dashing yet wacky. She was so funny in a cool way. Together they were dynamite and crazy sexy to boot. Best known as Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man movies, Powell and Loy were such a popular pairing that appeared in eight other films outside that series.

Manhattan Melodrama and Evelyn Prentice were released in 1934, the same year as The Thin Man. This accounts in part, I think for their ease of portraying a married couple in The Thin Man. They'd already spent a fair time together on screen. I was so excited the first time I watched Manhattan Melodrama. Here was a Powell and Loy movie with Clark Gable in it as well. I should have known what with the word "melodrama" actually in the title that it wasn't going to be funny. I guess I was hoping it was ironic. Well the only irony I could find in Manhattan Melodrama was that it was the movie that bank robber John Dillinger went to go see on the night he was killed, though it is debatable whether he was there for the instructive anti-crime story or the air-conditioning. (Dillinger was shot in Chicago in mid-July.) It's not a bad movie and on second viewing I liked it better because I wasn't disappointed with the lack of comedy. Powell plays a lawyer and politician who defends his childhood friend from his orphan days (Clark Gable) on a murder charge and falls in love with his girlfriend (Myrna Loy). Of course, that's a gross over-simplification of the plot. A lot is packed into this movie including a ferry boat accident and a riot started by Bolsheviks.

In Evelyn Prentice, Powell plays a defense attorney again, and this movie isn't funny either. It is a decent romantic drama with Rosalind Russell, in her first screen performance as John Prentice's seductive client who causes a rift between he and his wife, Evelyn (Loy). Evelyn goes out and gets even. Since this movie was made just after the enforcement of the code it is very careful to show that both John Prentice and his wife's cheating were mere flirtations that were unwise and indiscreet but nothing more. Evelyn's mild flirtation really comes back to bite her. I guess taking tea with someone other than your husband is really a gateway to murder. The other man, Kennard, sets her up for blackmail as he's well aware she's the wife of a prominent attorney. After trying numerous times to give him the brush off, Evelyn naively goes to his apartment to try to convince him to leave her alone and witnesses his murder by his long-suffering and abused girlfriend, Judith (Isabell Jewell). Evelyn's bad luck keeps getting worse as her husband takes on the Judith's case. Loy is excellent as a woman in a difficult moral position and Isabell Jewell is very compelling in her part.

Powell and Loy's next non-Thin Man outing was the Great Ziefeld (1936). This is not at all what I expected from one of their movies. It is a huge production musical with long, intricate musical numbers interrupted by anecdotal vignettes about Ziegfeld's (Powell) life. Myrna Loy doesn't come in until the very end as Ziegfeld's second wife, actress Billie Burke. The musical numbers are entertaining in the same way as watching large set-ups of dominoes. It looks cool and you appreciate that a lot of work went into it.

Libeled Lady came next with it's star packed cast that also includes Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy. Harlow and Powell were an off-screen couple and they wanted the story fitted so that might end up together on screen. MGM wasn't about to let that happen and they insisted that it remain a Powell and Loy vehicle. Libeled Lady has some of Powell and Loy's most romantic scenes as he plays playboy sent to seduce her out out of a lawsuit. This is a not to be missed outing from the couple, and one that stands with the best of the Thin Man films.

The next thee films, Double Wedding, I love You Again and Love Crazy are among the best the pair ever made. The Thin Man formula was starting to wear a bit thin, at this point and it seems that the duo could get by at the box-office without the Nick and Nora moniker. Double Wedding( 1940) is about a bohemian artist (Powell) who falls in love with a controlled society lady (Loy) and goes to crazy lengths to win her hand. Double Wedding is a heady cocktail of romance and screwball comedy. Some of their best love scenes and funniest antics are in this film. I Love You Again (1940) is about a failing marriage saved by amnesia. The improbable plot is buoyed along by an improbable series of complications that end with Powell dressed in a boy scout uniform leading troops of kids through a swamp. That sequence alone makes it worth a rental. Love Crazy (1941)is my personal favorite Powell and Loy movie. It pushes the boundaries of what they had done in a comedy, especially Powell who is in drag for a good deal of the movie. The plot involves a nosy mother-in-law, an anniversary misunderstanding and a husband who tries to prevent a divorce by getting himself declared legally insane. There's nothing William Powell won't do for love including throwing all the top hats at a swanky party into the pool and declaring them emancipated.

Powell and Loy reunited for one final film after the The Thin Man series ended in 1947, The Senator was Indiscreet (1947). Though it wasn't a true Powell and Loy film, in that Loy only appears in a surprise cameo at the end, I include it here for the sake of completion. By the mid forties, times had changed and the emphasis on family comedy and film noir. The Thin Man movies adapted by giving the Charles' a kid as well as a dog, but part of the escapist fun of a wealthy gentleman who solves crime in spare time was lost when added domestic comedy. Myrna Loy and William Powell continued to make films without one another for the next two decades, Loy continuing to act on television until the early 1980s.

Topaze: A sparkling pre-code meditation on integrity

This comedy follows scrupulously honest Professor Topaze (John Barrymore) who is fired from a boy's academy because he refuses to give good marks to a rich pupil. Topaze unwittingly becomes the name behind a brand of dodgy tonic water called "Sparkling Topaze." Lulled into complacency by financial, scientific and the glimmerings of romantic success, Topaze goes through a major moral crisis when he discovers his research has been a sham that's been used to dupe the public into buying over-priced tap water.

Myrna Loy is suprisingly ineffectual as the vamp turned lab assistant who helps Topaze switch careers from chemistry to blackmail. It is hard to believe that Loy was less than a year away from The Thin Man and that a supposed comedy would make so little use of her talents in that genre. As the notorious Coco, she's mostly required to look worldly in Chinese pajamas (Loy got her start in Hollywood playing the "Asian" exotic) which she trades in for a rather chic lab coat for the second half of the film. She develops a sweet platonic friendship with Professor Topaze and eventually chooses to go to afternoon matinees of tawdry movies with him over more lucrative meetings with her married lover.

The film rests mostly with Barrymore who manages to be both charmingly naive and funny at the same time. At times his mannerisms dip across the line into caricature, but for the most part it is a surprising performance that departed from Barrymore's more usually serious material.

That the film ends with no calamities befalling calculating Coco or the unrepentant Topaze, will surprise movie fans who've mostly been schooled on the cinema after 1934. Instead Topaze delivers a moving speech at his old academy again refusing to reward the same rich pupil, giving honors instead to all the boys who will soon be turned out in the real world armed only with maxims about the value of honesty and that ill-gotten gains never satisfy. Within these walls, Topaze says, justice can for once be done, even though it can not be in the real world. Then he and Coco go take in a movie called Man, Woman and Sin. It is as if the filmmakers foresaw the coming of the Production Code reinforcement that a year later would have made Topaze impossible. By summer of 1934, censors would drop a similar screen between the public and the storyteller. Within the walls of movie houses around the country, crime could never pay and justice was always meted out in the final minutes of the movie.