ilprofessore-1 Reviews

Women of Glamour (1937)

Without Barbara

[7/10 · 21 April 2024]

This 1937 Columbia Pictures feature stars Virginia Bruce as the call girl (read hooker) with a heart of gold who falls in love with a rich guy. It's a part many of her contemporaries played and she does more than a decent job with it. The film is a remake of a remake, the nearest predecessor being Frank Capra's superb 1930 version of the story that made a star of Barbara Stanwyck. Bruce is a fine actress, but Barbara makes much more of the part, thanks in no small part to what you could say and do in those pre-Code days. The 1937 sanitized version palls in comparison, partly because it is only staged competently without Capra's flair by Gordon Wiles, a former art director like Mitch Leisen who directed. Melvin Douglas plays the rich boy/ painter to perfection, and is supported by a first rate cast: Reginald Dennis as the playboy drunk and others. Seeing Pert Kelton as the wise cracking, cynical gold digging roommate reminds us why she was Jackie Gleason's first choice for Alice Kramden.

Someone to Remember (1943)

A neglected craftsman and master director

[7/10 · 22 March 2024]

Robert Siodmak (1900-1973) was a member of a group of talented twenty-year-olds, all film fans in Berlin, who made the extremely popular German silent film PEOPLE ON SUNDAY (Menschen am Sonntag) in 1929. Siodmak co-directed the film with Edward Ulmer from a script by Billy Wilder and Siodmak's brother Curt. Fred Zimmerman was the assistant camera. When Hitler came to power a few years later, all five were forced to leave their country, in time ending up in Hollywood where all five became directors. Siodmak, perhaps best remembered today for a series of excellent film noirs, is one of the most neglected of the emigre directors, contantly working all over the world, doing every sort of script that came his way from THE KILLERS with Burt Lancaster and the young Ava Gardner to the pirate takeoff THE CRIMSON PIRATE to COBRA WOMAN with Maria Montez. This sentimental tale made at low-budget Republic Pictures in 1943 (but not looking it) is equally well-staged and photographed with a wonderful performance by character actress Mabel Paige as the old lady who befriends a gifted cast that includes young Peter Lawford, the beautiful ingenue Dorothy Morris, and John Craven who had been the original husband in OUR TOWN on Broadway. Siodmak, much like his contemporary, the Hungarian Michael Curtiz, was one of those always-working contract directors who seemed to be able to direct anything and anyone that any studio handed him; especially good with actors, many of his performers were nominated for Oscars. He is unjustly forgotten these days in most books that glorify the golden age of studio product. A master craftsman.

Good Dame (1934)

Depression days 1934

[6/10 · 2 December 2023]

This Paramount Picture, a tough girl/tough boy romance acted expertly by Fredrick March and Sylvia Sydney was made in 1934, the final year before the code came into effect. Typical of many a Pre-Code picture of the time, it is packed with sleazy unglamorous characters who go unpunished. Not much else to recommend it other than the occasional snappy dialogue, the chemistry between the two handsome leads, and some early Carnival scenes photogaphed by Leon Shamroy before his glossier Twentieth Century Fox days. March, usually the debonair leaving man is cast against type here, playing the sort of role that was to make Jimmy Cagney famous, and Sydney is lovely, vulnerable, and adorable. Once the Code was imposed, stories like this about the seamier side of life stopped being made. This minor film is a document then of how some people survived during Depression days. For that alone, it's worth watching.

The Passionate Friends (1949)

Postwar passion suppressed

[8/10 · 30 November 2023]

Back in the early 1930s when Britain had only a small motion picture industry making films primarily for the home market, a group of young men met and admired each other's work--film editor David Lean, art director John Bryan, cameramen Ronny Neame and Guy Green. When Lean began directing in the 40s, during the war, he often enlisted his talented friends to work on his films, among them GREAT EXPECTATIONS, for which Green was the first Englishman ever to win an Oscar as director of photography. This 1949 film made before Lean's international success as a director of spectacles (BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA) is a perfect example of postwar English studio craftsmanship at its shining best. Particularly impressive, Guy Green's compositions and lighting--the shadows thrown on the faces of the principal actors in close up, the contrast between Bryan's darkly lit interior sets and the sunny foreign exteriors shot on location. Once again on this quintessentially English (I.e., not American) love story of passionate people repressing their emotions, Lean displays his mastery of actors. Yes, Ann Todd and Trevor Howard are unlike the conventional Hollywood lovers. She the upper middle class young woman who must choose between a university lecturer, Howard whom she loves, and a rich banker, Claude Rains, whom she doesn't. A British audience of the time would have recognized how perfectly cast the three actors were, how ideally they understood the psychology. The culture. Rains is magnificent as the pompous husband, a part that asked much more of him than his usual Warner Bros. Roles. American audiences then and now have always had difficulty understanding the apparent lack of sexual chemistry in the film but that is just the point that Lean was trying to make. These people were passionate friends. It was not sex that drew them together.

A footnote. Many years later, the two lighting cameramen, Neame and Green, who were Lean's collaborators were to become highly successful directors in their own right, Bryan a major producer. The camera operator, Oswald Morris was to become one of the greatest cinematographers. The assistant editor, Dick Donner, a director. All in the family.

Lady in a Jam (1942)

The greatest director?

[7/10 · 27 November 2023]

Gregory LaCava was one of the greatest directors of madcap comedy film in the Thirties. W. C. Fields, a good friend and drinking companion, not a man known to waste compliments, once said of LaCava: "I hate his guts, but he's the greatest director that ever lived." Fields often asked LaCava, uncredited, to direct him in scenes in other director's films. LaCava has left us two well-made,original films under his own name: MY MAN GODFREY (1936) and STAGE DOOR (1937), as well as many lesser films, LADY IN A JAM (made at Universal in 1942) being one of them. The film has some wonderful actors--among them, the enchanting Irene Dunne as the ditzy heiress reminiscent of Kate Hepburn in BRINGING UP BABY; Ralph Bellamy as the bumbling songwriting cowpoke; Eugene Pallette as the growly trustee of Irene's failed estate; and little Queenie Vassar as the owner of the abandoned gold mine. The major fault in the film, however, is the choice of Irene's co-star, the handsome and likeable Englishman actor Patric Knowles. Cast here as a confused innocent, a psychiatrist who abandons his profession to be chauffeur and nursemaid to the heiress. The script by LaCava's longtime collaborator Eugene Thackery doesn't give him much to do other than to act frustrated or befuddled. Consequently, the romantic moments don't come off. Perhaps Henry Fonda or Cary Grant might have made something more of the underwritten role, but sadly Knowles, competent and likeable as he was, had none of the others sexual allure. We wonder why a dynamo like Dunne would have found someone so passive attractive. Despite the silly and often improbable story, there are many delightful moments, perfectly staged and cast by the great La Cava. His career came to an end in 1948 with another miss, ONE TOUCH OF VENUS with Robert Walker and Ava Gardner, but his best work lives on.

Fedora (1978)

Screenplay by Desmond?

[6/10 · 25 November 2023]

This is Billy Wilder's penultimate film, made in 1978 entirely outside the conventional Hollywood system, filmed and shot on locations and sound stages in Europe. The script is by Wilder and his longtime collaborator Izzy Diamond based on a story by the actor/writer Tom Tyron, but it is not one of their famous comedies. The film is a return gander at mankind's grotesqueries, more in the style of the black and white films Wilder made with Charles Brackett at Paramount in the Forties and Fifties. In some ways it is a sequel or a theme and variations on Wilder and Brackett's great success SUNSET BOULEVARD with a middle-aged Joe Gillis now a desperate producer rather than a desperate screenwriter. The Gillis-like character has come to an island in Greece, Corfu, to peddle a script to a recluse actress, a character obviously based on the great Garbo, here also called monosyllabically Fedora, as in the hat. After many futile attempts to reach the great star on her island, he comes across her, shopping in town, hidden behind her celebrated chapeau only to discover she is not an aged diva long retired from the movie business but an attractive if skittish young woman with the voice and movements of a stage ingenue. Holden accepts this unusual phenomenon without question, just as we, the audience, are expected to do. Much time is then spent in the plot trying to explain how this could be possible, and in craftsman-like fashion Wilder and Diamond tie it all up or bundle it together by the grand finale. The film is elegantly photographed by the English cinematographer Gerry Fisher, lighting spectacular sets built in the Bavarian film studios by Wilder's longtime collaborator, the great Hungarian production designer Alex Trauner (LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS). But none of this, as well-made as it is, can hide the greatest flaw in the film--the many plot improbabilities. Others here have listed some of them but let me add one more: Towards the end of the film, Fedora in hospital receives a phone call she thinks is from the great love of her life Michael York, played as Pauline Kael once wrote "unconvincingly by Michael York," but it is not Michael with his distinctly posh English voice who is calling but Jose Ferrer with his unmistakable American vowels pretending to be. Fedora is fooled, of course, as was Holden in the Corfu marketplace, and as we are constantly asked to be. Sadly, this reasonable request for suspension of disbelief --after all it's only a movie--is not helped at all by the performances of the two female leads. Both earnest but ill-suited for the task. Martha Keller is extremely attractive and talented, but too young and too incapable of acting a young woman trapped in an old woman's body or is it an old woman trapped in a young woman's body. Maybe Meryl Streep might have succeeded but lovely Martha does not. Hildegard Knef as the Polish countess jailer has a few good moments of vulnerability towards the end of the film, but in the beginning scenes she is asked to do nothing more than play an old gorgon barking at Holden in her German accent.

All in all, this may take the prize as the worst film ever written by two men of genius. It plays as if after the death of Joe Gillis in SUNSET, Norma Desmond, who had once written a script of SALOME as her comeback vehicle, decided to have another go at screenwriting by herself and came up with something even more "outlandish" than her last attempt. That in a word is FEDORA.

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950)

Cagney: the best film actor ever?

[8/10 · 23 November 2023]

Jimmy Cagney and his brother had formed an independent production company whose films were distributed through Jimmys' old employee and sometime nemesis Warner Brothers. Given autonomy, he and his brother often took chances on subjects that might not have normally gotten green-lighted by a major studio. One of these was WHITE HEAT (1949), in which the star played a psychopathic criminal so convincingly and sympathetically that even the average filmgoing audience accepted his brutal actions, a feat that only a great actor like Cagney could have carried off. That film was a huge box-office success both and made it possible for the Cagney brothers to try another very bad guy story, Horace McCoy's novel, KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE. In this 1950 film Jimmy is not so much the out-of-control crazy as he is the self-confident mastermind criminal, so clever that he uses the corrupt police to his own advantage. The film is superbly directed by Gordon Douglas, one of the many underrated directors from the Golden Age who got his start with the Hal Roach studio, brilliantly edited by Walter Hanneman and photographed in high style by J. Peverell Marley. There are several exceptional performances, among them Luther Adler (Stella's less famous brother) as the crooked attorney and Ward Bond, as the corrupt police inspector, both given parts more demanding of them than their usual one-dimensional supporting roles. As polished as the film is, as well-paced, it has its obvious weaknesses, most glaring the implausible behavior of the two women in the story: the bad girl and the good girl. Both behave in a very unconvincing manner psychologically. Blame that on the writing more than the acting. Barbara Peyton is not up to the ever-changing emotional demands of her role and often overacts while the beautiful and talented Helena Carter, the society girl gone wrong, can't make much out of her character. Sadly, once Cagney meets Helena and falls for her (or pretends to for his own purposes) his motivation is never clear. The plot takes a most improbable turn, not helped by the fact that their love affair is underscored by Carmen Dragon's (the film's composer) paraphrase of Tristan and Isolde. Despite the film's flaws and there are many, this is one of Cagney's best performances. No wonder Orson Welles called him in the greatest film actor ever.

High and Dry (1954)

A neglected gem by McKendrick

[9/10 · 21 November 2023]

This is a 1954 film from the Ealing Studios that seems to have disappointed its viewers, then and now, perhaps because all of us who came upon the work of Sir Michael Balcon, surely one of the world's best producers, expected another wry comedy in the style of his studio's other international successes. But THE MAGGIE is not a comedy in the classic Ealing style despite its many comic moments. It is the classic drama about a rich man, in this case simply called The American, who comes to understand something about himself and life by encountering simpler and often devious folk. The film is brilliantly cast and directed by Alexander Mckendrick, a Scotsman born in America, one of the many British directors of small films who would go on to make bigger ones in the United States, among them SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, one of the best views of American self-corruption ever filmed. In addition, the film has a first-rate comic/dramatic script by the expatriated American screenwriter, William Rose, who wrote GENEVIEVE and would go on to do Stanley Kramer's IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD. Mckendrick's film, shot mostly on location on the island of Islay in Scotland, has an air of reality rarely captured in non-Italian or French films of the time. Mckendrick must have been a difficult man, constantly quitting or being fired by his employees, perhaps because he fought too hard for the integrity of his films. He ended up with a prestigious post as the Dean of the Film Department of the California Institure of the Arts, but made no feature films after 1967. He died in 1993. A director of exceptional talent.

Arrowsmith (1931)

Two titans clash in 1931

[7/10 · 19 November 2023]

Film history has it that producer Sam Goldwyn and director John Ford did not get along, and this is the only film the great Ford ever did for Sam. He quit the second one. Although this adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis was made in 1931, in pre-Code days, the adulterous affair with Myrna Loy in the novel was shot by Ford but cut by Goldwyn-not by any censorship board. One suspects that Goldwyn, who kept his eye on the box office as well as micromanaging his directors, feared or discovered in preview that such a situation would make his idealistic doctor appear unsympathetic. As always, Ford, the master story teller, did his more than competent job of directing any script he was handed. The acting here is brillant, down to the smallest parts, and the film benefits from superb sets and lighting, typical of a Goldwyn production. Had Goldwyn left Ford to his own devices-i.e., left him alone-this might have been a better fillm, but Ford even at his less than inspired was never less than a first rate director of actors as the best of this flawed film demonstrates.

No Hands on the Clock (1941)

Keep it moving!

[7/10 · 16 November 2023]

This much better than average comedy mystery made in 1941 by the Pine-Thomas B picture unit at Paramount is excellently staged by journeyman director Frank McDonald, but I'm guessing that much credit must go to film ediitor Bill Zeigler who started with comedies at the Roach studios, then did a number of Hitchcock pictures, and ended up editing many of Warner Bros. Greatest A budget musicals like MY FAIR LADY. Zeigler, master editor, keeps all his cuts moving so effortlessly, switching from laughs to drama and back, that the viewer soon doesn't give a damn about who did what to who and why. The crime plot is enormously convoluted, impossible to follow, but that doesn't inhibit us from enjoying the excellent Nick and Norah chemistry and laughs between Chester Morris and his jealous bride Jean Parker. They are surrounded, as to be expected, by first rate cast of familiar faces, including Jack Norton, who for once is not the drunk at the bar but the bartender behind it. All highly entertaining. This is one of those 1940s quickies that feels as if everyone working on it had a good time, having no idea how good the film would turn out,

Road House (1948)

Big studio magic, c. 1948

[8/10 · 11 November 2023]

This expertly directed film by Jean Negulesco, made in 1948 almost entirely on the Twentieth Century Fox lot, is an excellent example of Hollywood studio craftsmanship at its best. Although the makers did go outside the Pico studio to film in a nearby bowling alley, the rest of the production, including the final climatic lake scene and the chase through the woods was entirely shot on the lot. (A few years later directors would insist on going on location, but back in those days soon after World War II if it could be built or faked, it stayed inside the sudio.) The film is distinguished by an excellent performance by Ida Lupino who is quite believable as the tough girl who falls for the right guy, only to have to deal with the consequences. The studio let her sing her own songs-no dubbing--and for once the musical numbers sound as they might have at a piano in an actual roadhouse. Widmark does his famous crazy guy role again with no surprises, while Cornel Wilde and Celeste Holm do what is expected of them. Not in any way a film noir, this is a standard big studio psychological thriller, better made and better photographed (Joseph LaShelle) than most. Unjustly underrated.

Platinum Blonde (1931)

Pre-code Pre-corn

[9/10 · 6 November 2023]

This is 1931 Frank Capra in his pre-Capra corn days making the best of a rather conventional plot. Wise-cracking reporter falls for snooty society lass only to discover, etc.-a story repeated endless times in the Depression years but rarely with the dazzling dialogue Robert Riskin wrote. (He and Capra were to collaborate on many more films in the years to come, winning themselves many Oscars.) Typical of Capra's genius, the cast, each and everyone, is perfect, down to the one-line uncredited reporters and even the credited butlers. The title? One suspects the misleading one was meant to attract those who had seen Harlow in Hell's Ángels but it is not her film; it is Robert William's story, and he was, as everyone here acknowledges, the best, the most believable of the many working class, hard-boozing cynical Newspaperman characters of countless 1930s films. Teenage Loretta Young plays the.typical girl reporter, one of the guys, but unlike Jean Arthur or Roz Russell, she'a a bit too gorgeous to have gone unnoticed by an man, of course. All and all, this is Capra at his best, one the greatest directors of the Golden age, master storyteller and director of actors, for once, neither too saccharine nor preachy.

This Movie Must Die!: She Done Him Wrong (1933) (2021 Podcast Episode)

Come up and see her sometime

[9/10 · 17 October 2023]

This lavish production filmed on the Paramount Hollywood lot in 1933 is a pitch-perfect evocation of the tawdry Bowery in the Gay Nineties with its free lunch saloons, singing waiters, and guys and gals-none harder than tiny Mae West who grew up among these streets and knew these characters when she wrote the hit play that became the film. She is perfectly cast as the cynical seen-it-done-it-all entertainer with a heart as hard as the diamonds she covets. Make knows what she wants and how to get it. Rare for women depicted on screen in those pre-Code days, she is not in the least sentimental. She's tough. There's no heart of gold hidden here. With Mae, when t comes to men, it's all about sex, sex and more sex. It was no wonder that this film was in many ways responsible for the censorship codes that followed the following year.

The film is expertly directed by the much under-rated actor/director Lowell Sherman (What Price Hollywood) who manages to get the best out of everyone in the large case iincluding young Cary Grant in the days when he was usually a bit stiff. Sets and costumes (Edith Head) are authentic and spectacular, as are the songs. In later years, Mae became a major star playing parody of herself, but here she is-if the words can ever be applied to someone so extravagant-both realistic and believable. An unusual film.

Top of the Town (1937)

The worst musical ever made?

[2/10 · 11 October 2023]

Universal Pictures underwent a big management change around 1936, kicking out the Laemmles who had founded the studio and replacing them with a newer set of geniuses who, in an attempt to outdo their competitors like MGM and Fox, came up with this embarrassingly over-the-top, very silly B&W extravaganza few have seen and for a reason.. The plot, if you can call it that,, is just an excuse to sting together any number of mostly mediocre speciality numbers and tunes sung by two imported performers from Broadway-the gifted but sadly unphotogenic Gertrude Nielsen and the little annoying dynamo Ella Logan, who would go to star in the original production of Finian's Rainbow. (Here she just chews the scenery.) The new bosses also decided to gild their lilly by borrowing some personalities from other studios-Hugh Herbert, Gregory Ratoff, and.even Misha Auer doing Hamlet accompanied by a minstrel choir in blackface. And if that isn't enough to offend, they also added a second-rate vaudeville trio, The Three Sailors, a poor imitation of the Ritz Brothers mixed with the Stooges. There's even an absurd love story: the wacky heiress and the ambitious bandleader. She, Doris Nolan, attractive and likable but no Carol Lombard, and he, George Murphy, doing his best in a thankless role that Dick Powell had done better many times before. The film ends with a lavish production number on a gigantic set with a symphony orchestra orchestra conducted by Henry Armetta competing with Murphy's modest swing band. Guess who wins? Hundreds of bored society swells in tuxedos and evening gowns get up to let down their long hair and dance. That's entertainment? Ralph Murray is the credited director of what in one man's opinion may be one of the worst musicals ever made. But others may disagree.

Young and Innocent (1937)

Thrills, Chills + Something More. Romance.

[8/10 · 5 July 2023]

This is one of Hitch's last English films before coming to America, and, short as it is, it displays all the expected low comedy, thrills, chills and red herrings that made the man famous. It also displays something else, often overlooked when the master's work is celebrated and studied for his art--Hitch's unique talent for romance. As he was to prove later in America with such glamorous stars as Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly, Hitch knew exactly how to show to show us male-female attraction This sexual undertone of his stories take his films out of the standard chiller mode into something unique and special. In all of his best films, young people falling in love are always amazingly convincing and attractive, winning our sympathy. Here, we have the handsome Derrick de Marney and the charming teenager, Nova Pilbeam, as the young and innocent. Selznick with his amazing eye for talent wanted Nova to play the young bride in Rebecca. But Hitchcock, who he also discovered and hired to direct the story, vetoed the notion, thinking she was too young. How wrong he was! Had Nova come to America, she would certainly have had as great success and some of the other English roses of her generation who went on to fame.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

What stars can do

[6/10 · 11 May 2023]

This 1953 Twentieth Century Fox film, based loosely on a 1920s best-seller by Anita Loos, has always been a great audience favorite because of the undeniable chemistry between two very attractive and talented women comfortable enough to make fun of their sex. The direction by the once great Howard Hawks is pedestrian at best; the two unattractive male leads Tommy Noonan and Elliot Reed, poor; Charles Coburn an embarrassment; the photography by Harry Wild as badly lit as the quickest TV movie being made on the lot. And yet, all together it all works! Hawks was the first to admit that he had nothing to do with the sexy Las Vegas style dances staged by Jack Cole, nor with the outrageous parade of dresses designed by the studio's best costumer Charles Le Mare. This film only goes to prove what a Hollywood studio even at the end of the golden age could do better than anyone: just put MM and Jane in front of a camera, turn on the lights, and something glamorous and sexy was bound to happen. It does, it does. What stars could do.

Chad Hanna (1940)

Worth watching for Fonda

[5/10 · 9 May 2023]

Made in 1940 in Technicolor on the Twentieth-Century Fox lot in Hollywood, this film suffers from uninspired direction by old reliable staff director Henry King, a man who could direct almost anything efficiently, but rarely with much flair or enthusiasm. The visual possibilities of the one-ring circus travelling from town to town in Upstate New York, ideal atmosphere for a movie, are hardly exploited by King. Co-star Dorothy Lamour as the bad girl bareback rider is attractive, but seems miscast as a seductress, although she tries. Linda Darnell, then a teenager, is lovely and appealing as the good girl, and has some good believable boy-girl moments with Henry Fonda, then under Fox contract. He made this film the same year as GRAPES OF WRATH, and a year before Sturges' THE LADY EVE. As always he is perfectly natural, ideally cast as the innocent American boy, shy, romantic, full of feelings he tries to hide. The perfect film actor.

TRIVIA: his Daughter Jane was three years old when this film was made.

Kiss the Bride Goodbye (1945)

Silly but vastly entertaining

[7/10 · 8 May 2023]

This romantic comedy made at the Hammersmith studio in the UK in 1945 during the last year of WWII is remembered today chiefly because it features two great English beauties playing sisters, young Patrica Medina and the teenage Jean Simmons, before their Hollywood days The great surprise here is Medina, particularly appealing and believable as a high-spirited lass. It's shame that she never got to play anything like this in her long and undistinguished Hollywood career. (Most of the time, she just stood around looking gorgeous and/or mysterious.) The film also benefits from excellent direction from Viennese-born Paul L. Stein, one of the many refugees from Europe who emigrated to England in the !930's, and a splendid cast of perfectly cast character actors including Marie Lohr (Prof. Higgin's mother in Pygmalion), Claud Allister, and Irene Handl. There's even a song sung by Medina with words by Eric Maschwitz, best known for the lyrics for "These Foolish Things." Vey entertaining!

Crime Doctor (1943)

AGAINST TYPE

[7/10 · 7 May 2023]

"CRIME DOCTOR" is a well-made, fast-paced 1943 Columbia Pictures programmer directed by MICHAEL GORDON, actor and film editor, who had been a classmate of Elia Kazan at the Yale Drama School, and one of the younger members of the Group Theater during its final Broadway years. This film is distinguished by fine acting, particularly by a number of Hollywood's most reliable character actors for once cast against type: Ray Collins (Boss Gettys in CITIZEN KANE), John Litel (Nancy Drew's understanding father) and Leon Ames (Father in MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS), all playing the sort of roles they were rarely given again. It's unlikely that Gordon, on staff at Columbia at the beginning of his career had anything to do with the casting, but he's does a splendid job with all members of the cast. Gordon, who was blacklisted in the McCarthy era, is best remembered today for PILLOW TALK. This film is a perfect example of the factory system that gave many a talented beginner a chance to learn how to make movies.

Dragonwyck (1946)

All in a studio

[8/10 · 21 January 2023]

This 1946 film, the first Joe Mankiewicz directed after many years of producing, is a perfect example Twentieth Century Fox high-art in the Zanuck years, visually distinguished by the glorious sets, set decoration, props and costumes that no studio, perhaps not even MGM, could equal. All this magnificent careful detail was lit in black and white by Arthur Miller in the great tradition of shadowy expressionism the studio learned from Murnau and other expatriated UFA technicians who came with him to Fox from Germany. In addition to it visual splendors, we have the inventive underscoring of Alfred Newman, his sudden shifts from the romantic to to the ominous, and the exceptional performance of the beautiful Gene Tierney, a much under-appreciated actress, the perfect virginal heroine for this classic Gothic nightmare film. She is particularly effective in her transition from the wide-eyed country girl to the grownup wife of a complex man, played here by Vincent Price. Walter Huston is her father; one of the great actors of his generation, he steals the few scenes given him. The plot, of course, is full of holes, as many posters here have pointed out-e.g., What happened to all the characters introduced in the earlier part of the story who suddenly disappear? Despite its faults, DRAGONWYCK is an impressive example of superb Hollywood craftsmanship at the time when everything was created on Hollywood sound stages, and no one thought it necessary to go on location..

The Lady in the Morgue (1938)

On the cheap

[5/10 · 20 January 2023]

A few years before this Universal cheapie was made in 1938, the Laemmles, father and son, were ousted from the studio because of the excessive amount of money they overspent on their 1936 prestige production of the Irene Dunne SHOWBOAT. This typical lowest-budget B picture shows what the same studio could do for pennies. Stanley Cortez, who was to go on to photograph MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, must have lit these cheap sets in five minutes. The music is all stock, some borrowed from THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. The director, the talented former editor Otis Garrett, does a commendable job. He shoots close angles to hide the bare sets and minimal furniture, and keeps the actors moving and talking so frantically that no one need bother to follow the plot. Lots of good wisecracking dialogue,and excellent no-nonsense acting from the usual tough guy and tough girl regulars. Well worth a visit if only to see the butler in the penthouse scene.

Nazi Agent (1942)

Visually impressive B Picture

[7/10 · 18 January 2023]

This 1941 spy thriller, Jules Dassin's first feature film, is distinguished mainly by Veidt's virtuoso performance and its remarkable deep focus B&W photography by Henry Stradling, Sr., one of the great cinematographers of Hollywood, a favorite of everyone from Alexandra Korda to Barbra Streisand. Although it was budgeted as a B picture, destined to be the bottom half of a MGM double feature, Stradling has given it all the high gloss of the studio's best A pictures, helped greatly by the art department that dressed even a minor vehicle like this, lavishly. Dassin would go on to more demanding often pretentious projects in Europe after he was blacklisted, but this first film proves he was a solid craftsman. He, along with others like Fred Zimmerman, learned their trade making shorts at MGM. An excellent school for directors.

Angel (1937)

Lubitsch with a heavier touch

[9/10 · 8 January 2023]

Fans of Lubitsch have always been disappointed in this 1937 film, the last one Marlene made under her Paramount contract and a failure at the box office. Perhaps because it is not one of the director's champagne comedies, although it has its occasional comic moments. It is, unlike most of the director's later works, a serious drama about a neglected woman, dutiful wife of a workaholic English diplomat, who has a brief fling in Paris with an attractive American playboy and chooses to forget about it until... Marlene is absolutely superb in this demanding psychological role, radiantly beautiful and flirtatious at times, glacially cold at others. The men, Herbert Marshall as the stiff upper class Brit, and Melvyn Douglas as the frivolous Yank out for pleasure, are exactly right as men of the world without the slightest notion of what a woman might be. Films like this about adultery were rarely made after the Pre-Code era and, as to be expected, Lubitsch displays his genius for erotic suggestion. He never shows us what he knows we can imagine. Filmed entirely on the Paramount Hollywood lot in the golden age, it is filled with gorgeous sets and furniture, Dietrich in Travis Banton gowns, underscoring by Fredrick Hollander, and glamorous back-lighting by Charles Lang-all dedicated to creating a world of sophistication that never existed other than in Hollywood. This is a major Lubitsch film, among his most complex efforts.

Reaching for the Moon (1930)

Hollywood learning

[6/10 · 14 May 2022]

This 1930 film is at best a document worth watching if only because it is an vivid record of what is was like when Hollywood was learning how to make the transition from silent to sound. Directed and written by the Englishman Edmund Goulding, it is paced like a 1920s Broadway or West End high-comedy with almost all the actors projecting their voices and playing broadly to the last row. Only Edward Everett Norton, of all people! Seems to understand he is playing for the camera. Fairbanks, one of the great stars of the previous decade, overacts terribly, as does Bebe Daniels. Most of the time. A silly story attributed to Irving Berlin with only one song..

Impact (1949)

A decent effort. Stop complaining!

[7/10 · 12 April 2022]

This film, in my opinion, is by any defenition a true film noir, not because of dark streets and dark people or lack of them, but because it follows a classic pulp story plot: bad lady tricking good guy. Brian Donlevy is entirely credible as the good guy. Helen Walker as the baddie. The direction by Arthur Lubin, most famous for his Universal Pictures Abbott and Costello comedies (to which he was allegedly once paid $350 dollars a week to do) is far more than competent. Yes, Lubin ain't Nicholas Ray Sidomack, or Dmytryk,, but he's no hack either. Far from it. His work is fast-paced and well-staged. The script he was handed is by Harry Davenport's daughter and Jay Dratler (Laura) is full of the usual noir implausiabilites--for one, how come nobody in a small town ever reads the newspapers? Nevertheless, this is an above average post-war film made not a big studio product, an indie released by United Artists and produced by the Popper Bros. Not low-budget. It has an excellent cast and a first-rate technicians. All do admirably. Yes, Brian Donlevy is a bit too old, and Ella Raines a bit too young, but had the Poppers or their writers the courage to spell it out, the story would have worked well. Brian was still attractive, and why wouldn't a small town widow fallen for him? Charles Coburn is perfectly acceptable as the Irish detective with an accent no less awful than Orson's in TOUCH OF EVIL. Pick on someone else please! Look for Jason Robard's father as the judge in the court room scene and Korean Phillip Ahn as the Chinese who speaks Hebrew.