OVP: They Were Expendable (1945)

Film: They Were Expendable (1945)

Stars: Robert Montgomery, John Wayne, Donna Reed, Jack Holt, Ward Bond

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Sound Recording, Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ward Bond: click here to learn more about Mr. Bond (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

All right, I'm aware I skipped the first week of Ward Bond (in the US last weekend was Labor Day and I had family in town & in the year of 2022 we focus on spending time with loved ones at the expense of our responsibilities-that's just the rules), but we won't be skimping on him today, as we're going to do our first ever double-feature so that he gets a full month of movies.  As a result, we're going to talk about a huge chapter of Ward Bond's career in the next few hours.  Bond started as a character actor, and largely stayed there.  Working in B-Grade films in the early 1930's, he did eventually graduate to A-Grade pictures, but almost always as a random "friend of the hero" or a villain of some sorts.  I watched They Were Expendable with my parents last weekend while they were in town, and at one point my mom said "why does he look so familiar?" and it's because Bond's real claim to fame is the breadth of his filmography, and just how many movies he's made.  Bringing Up Baby, Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, The Maltese Falcon, It's a Wonderful Life, The Searchers...he is somehow in all of these landmark classics, but always as a bit player or side part.  I have seen all of these movies so I can't watch them for this project, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention them as we kick off our month devoted to Bond, as he's a true character actor, though one who is familiar to virtually any person who has ever watched a classic film.

(Spoilers Ahead) Made in the waning days of World War II, They Were Expendable is the story of a team of men who command a squadron of US Navy PT Boats in the South Pacific.  Lt. John "Brick" Brickley (Montgomery) is sure that they will be an asset to the navy, but his commanding officers remain skeptical, and his friend Lt. JG "Rusty" Ryan (Wayne) is hoping to get his own command, and nearly goes for it when Pearl Harbor is bombed, throwing his entire world into chaos.  The film that follows shows the divergent paths these two men's careers take, with Brick becoming a war hero, his PT boat experience used to sink a Japanese cruiser, while Rusty (sidelined with blood poisoning) falls in love with a nurse named Sandy (Reed) on land, their romance doomed to failure both because it's impossible to fall into a longterm relationship while at war and because the evacuation of Bataan leaves Sandy behind, certain to die in the process.

This is where the title comes from, and where the most powerful scene in the movie is.  The war is not subtle about the "have's and have not's" of battle, with a large section of the film's middle devoted to the evacuation of General MacArthur into Australia while men around him perish to get him there.  The final scenes of the movie show that Brick & Rusty escape, but others, like Chief Mulcahey (Bond, who has a small part that is most notable for him crooning to Donna Reed through an open window...which he also more famously did in It's a Wonderful Life) are left to die.  Brick & Rusty are too valuable to the war effort to be left behind, even if the unmarried Rusty tries to switch with one of the married infantryman when there are not enough seats in the end of the movie.  It's a killer, rough ending particularly in an era where most WWII films were just populist propaganda, and on top of astounding cinematography and unreal visual effects, a really great forgotten epic.

The film was a critically-important one in the career of John Wayne, which I'd be remiss to not mention before we leave.  Wayne is the most famous WWII Hollywood draft dodger less because he was the only one to do it, and more because Wayne's onscreen persona frequently had him wearing a military uniform, thus making an odd juxtaposition to a man who never actually served.  This came to a head when director John Ford would berate Wayne, his longtime friend whom he thought a coward for skipping out on his patriotic duty, in front of the entire cast & crew of They Were Expendable.  Particularly when juxtaposed with his fellow leading man Robert Montgomery (who had been an ambulance driver at Dunkirk and rose to the level of lieutenant commander in the US Navy), Wayne made for easy mockery by Ford, and it took Montgomery eventually stepping in for the two men to finally make peace.  They would do so in the coming years alongside our star Ward Bond, who would make multiple movies with Ford & Wayne, one of which we'll discuss next week.

OVP: The Dolly Sisters (1945)

Film: The Dolly Sisters (1945)

Stars: Betty Grable, John Payne, June Haver, SZ Sakall

Director: Irving Cummings

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"I Can't Begin to Tell You")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on John Payne: click here to learn more about Mr. Payne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

World War II is a fascinating time frame in Hollywood partially due to the impact that it would have on the legends of some actors' careers.  Certain stars, specifically Jimmy Stewart & Henry Fonda, ended up having some of the most fruitful years of their career after the War, using their service careers as a way to launch the next stage of their stardom.  Other actors like John Wayne never served, in part out of fear that the opportunities (and plum paydays) that were there for them before the war might be taken away if they stopped working.  John Payne was somewhere in the middle of these two.  Payne did not see active battle, but did serve briefly as a flight instructor for the Army Air Corps until September 1944.  Payne, though, wasn't the star that Fonda or Stewart had been before, and when he came back to Hollywood, his options were limited.  His first major film after the end of the war was once again him playing second fiddle to one of the Fox lot's leading ladies (Betty Grable).

(Spoilers Ahead) The Dolly Sisters is about two sisters Jenny (Grable) and Rosie Dolly (Haver) who are trying to break into show business.  Thanks to a chance meeting with a songwriter named Harry Fox (Payne), they meet Oscar Hammerstein and suddenly become major stars as a sister act.  The only problem is that Harry & Jenny are in love, and Harry is jealous of his wife being more famous than him, and wants her to perform with him on the road.  This doesn't happen, though-Jenny won't abandon her sister, and as a result she & Harry divorce during World War I.  While Harry is off fighting, and eventually becoming famous, Jenny becomes a gambling addict & gets involved in a car crash that nearly kills her.  The film ends with the two of them, despite Harry having a girlfriend (who conveniently dumps him when she sees he still loves Jenny), singing onstage with Rosie, a happily ever after for all three.

The Dolly Sisters is based on real-life sisters who had a decidedly different life.  Their real life was far more scandalous than a movie in 1945 would allow.  In real life Jenny never reunited with Harry Fox, and instead spent much of the 1920's romancing a series of monarchs (which is only briefly alluded to in this movie), and both sisters broke up their act (sometimes for show to sell tickets) and occasionally swapped lovers.  Jenny ended up marrying again, but the depression following a car accident caused her to tailspin, and she committed suicide in 1941 by hanging herself.  Rosie never really got over this, retreating from the public eye, attempting suicide herself in 1962 (unsuccessfully) and dying of a heart attack in 1970.

Suffice it to say, these women are fascinating, but this movie isn't.  Without the ability to show what these sisters' painful personal lives were really like, the movie feels adrift, and Grable & Haver (who purportedly didn't like each other in real life) have very little chemistry together.  Worst of the trio, though, is Payne.  I'm hoping in our final two weeks we get to a John Payne performance that I enjoy, but man is his Harry a charmless ass.  He basically blackmails his successful wife into giving up her career so she can support his unsuccessful one...which causes her to go into a deep depression that nearly ruins her life, and yet we're supposed to be happy they end up together?  I don't think so, and Payne doesn't see to be able to find any sort of personality in this cad of a love interest.  The film's score is nothing to write home about (Grable & Haver join the cavalcade of classic film stars who did blackface with the horrendously racist "The Darktown Strutters Ball"), even the slumber-inducing ballad "I Can't Begin to Tell You" which won an Oscar nomination in 1946 (not sure what the deal is with it coming a year after the film's release) is totally forgettable.

Scarlet Street (1945)

Film: Scarlet Street (1945)

Stars: Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea, Margaret Lindsay, Rosalind Ivan

Director: Fritz Lang

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

Robinson, Bennett, Duryea, & Lang...four names that are quintessential if you're talking about 1940's film noir, not just because they were all in the foundational work The Woman in the Window (one of the most important noirs of 1944), but also because they'd all make a number of film noirs throughout the decade (both Bennett & Duryea will be back later this month for another one of their noirs).  Despite the success of The Woman in the Window, lead actors Bennett & Robinson would only make one more picture together a year after that film's success, Scarlet Street.  You could make a legitimate argument that of all of the films that we're going to profile this month for our film noir features, this is the most famous one that I still hadn't seen.  Generally considered one of the best examples of the form, it proved that not only could Robinson & Bennett strike lightning twice, but also that the second time around, they would be able to pull off an ending worthy of the work they'd just done.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Chris Cross (Robinson), a cashier for a clothing retailer who has a pretty miserable life.  His wife Adele (Ivan) hates him, wishing he was her first husband (who has died), while he works a life that's pointless-the only joy he gets out of life is his amateur painting.  Enter Kitty March (Bennett), a gorgeous brunette whom he chances upon after stopping a man (who turns out to be her boyfriend Johnny, played by Duryea) from robbing her in the streets.  Despite a one-sided attraction (Kitty only loves Johnny), they become friends, with Chris robbing from his employer to give Kitty the money that she needs.  Kitty is convinced that Chris is getting the money from his successful paintings, but it turns out that this is just a hobby, a misunderstanding that Johnny clears up...except then an art critic realizes the paintings are good, and wants to sell them.  Johnny decides to say that Kitty made the paintings, cutting Chris out of the deal, and Chris is so happy that he's being appreciated (and that it makes Kitty the money she desires), that he is fine with her taking the credit (and the money).  When Adele's first husband shows up, though, invalidating Chris's marriage, he goes to Kitty, and after she laughs at him for thinking she'd find him attractive, he murders her.  Johnny, though, takes the fall, and in a bit of a twist for 1945, is executed for the murder.  Chris doesn't get away freely, though.  He attempts later to kill himself (unsuccessfully) and to claim credit for the murder (unsuccessfully).  He ends up destitute & homeless, all the while his paintings are making a fortune under the assumption that the beautiful, dead Kitty painted them.

The film, like the best noir, is nasty & a bit vicious.  The treatment of Chris, who is a good guy if a bit of a wimp, is heartbreaking-he's stuck in a loveless marriage to a woman who idolizes a brutish other man...and is in love with a woman who is doing the same.  He is a case of a guy who picks the wrong girls, and I was intrigued that he didn't get the chair in the end because it feels much worse that he is constantly haunted by that cruelty.  Film noir is best when it lays bare the harshness of the human experience, and you get that here-Kitty doesn't get off scot-free, but she does get away with her con & spends eternity with Johnny while Chris wanders the streets alone...that's not exactly getting your comeuppance.

The film's writing and acting set it apart, as does the ravishing production design.  Robinson, one of the best actors of his era, is vulnerable & heartbreaking as Chris, the man who just wants to be loved.  Bennett is equally good as Kitty.  Gone are some of the other roles she'd be famous for, where her femme fatale was more exposed than dangerous, and she nails the part of this viper with aplomb.  Duryea, as well, is superb.  I love the way that you genuinely don't think Johnny loves Kitty...that there's a weird mirror effect where, like Chris, Kitty is in love with a man that will never love her.  I wish they'd given maybe one more scene to underscore this, but it's there in plain writing (I also would've loved one more moment with Adele, either for Chris's good or bad).  All-in-all, this is a terrific movie, and one of my favorites we'll profile this month.

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

The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945)

Film: The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945)

Stars: Jack Benny, Alexis Smith, Allyn Joslyn, Guy Kibbee

Director: Raoul Walsh

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Jack Benny click here to learn more about Mr. Benny (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to finish our look at Jack Benny this month with what would end up being his last role as a leading man in movies, and one of the film's that Benny himself would make infamous.  The Horn Blows at Midnight was once again a Warner Brothers movie from Benny, and had the actor, then in the heyday of his radio stardom, playing an angel tasked with signaling the end of the world with a trumpet horn on earth.  The movie had the bad timing of being released just eight days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt unexpectedly died, at the tail end of World War II, and as a result a farce about the end of the world seemed, at the very least, in poor taste.  The movie was a huge flop, and basically after that Benny gave up on his film career, only appearing in movies in cameos for the remainder of his career, instead shifting his focus entirely to radio, and soon, television.  The Horn Blows at Midnight, though, would become a standard punchline in Benny's act for the remainder of his career, frequently getting disparaged by the comedian...but I was curious when I realized the terrible position that it played in his career if it was one of those "lost gems" or if this was worthy of Benny's ridicule.  Let's find out, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie, as I said above, is about Athaneal (Benny), who initially is a struggling trumpet player who snoozes off during a radio show he's in the orchestra for (the whole movie is a dream sequence) and imagines he's an angel tasked with bringing about the end of the planet.  He's madly in love with a harp player named Elizabeth (Smith), who believes in him when no one else does. It turns out she is right...when Athaneal misses the midnight deadline to end the world (he's saving a woman from committing suicide, a mortal sin) he becomes a "fallen angel," and only Elizabeth can find a way to help him get another chance to "end the world."  Things get complicated when two other fallen angels, as well as two con artists, try to stop them from ending Earth because they, well, don't want to die.  In the end, Athaneal wakes up from his dream, and starts to devote himself more fully to his present life as a trumpet player.

The movie is about as silly as it sounds.  The plot is nonsense, and occasionally feels a bit repetitive (we literally do the "falling off the building" bit for at least ten minutes of the movies 78 minute run time).  That being said, taken out of the context of President Roosevelt's death, it's kind of fun in a stupid way.  Benny is charming as a foolish angel, and lands pretty much all of the physical comedy bits, the highlight of which is him being thrown into a gigantic cup of coffee suspended over the Manhattan streets below.  It's dumb, and they didn't need the dream framing device, but it's cute & a nice movie to watch when you want to turn off your brain a bit & just laugh.

As I said, though, Benny would be done with films after this, only taking bit parts in things like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and would instead become one of the pioneering earliest figures in television.  His show would become one of the earliest spots that many movie stars appeared on his show-both Marilyn Monroe & Humphrey Bogart made rare TV appearances on his program during its peak years.  Benny would have one of the longest-running shows of his era, ending in 1965, by which time only Lucille Ball & Ed Sullivan were still on regular television from the earliest days of Benny's career.  Benny would continue to do television specials and would become a headliner in Vegas, but failing health caught up with him & would die of pancreatic cancer in 1974 at the age of 80.  Next month, we're going to talk about an actress who was, like Benny, a one-time Warner Brothers contract player who gained a newfound respect in television in the 1950's.  Unlike Benny, though, she was generally considered to be a very good actor in her day...and even got an Oscar nomination to prove it.

OVP: The Seventh Veil (1945)

Film: The Seventh Veil (1945)

Stars: James Mason, Ann Todd, Herbert Lom, Hugh McDermott, Albert Lieven

Director: Compton Bennett

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Original Screenplay*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Sexual politics have, as you can imagine, changed since 1945, pretty much exclusively for the better.  This means that when you watch an old film, particularly one that is about the dynamics of a woman succeeding in a man's world, you have to adjust your expectations.  I will be honest, though, that when I started The Seventh Veil, I didn't think I'd have to adjust as much as I did.  British melodramas of this era are often reductive to women, but they still will find a way to make a woman's power feel like something desirable to the audience, even if it's in a titillating way.  Both of our stars today (James Mason & Ann Todd) have starred in some of the better examples of this like The Wicked Lady or Madeleine.  Unfortunately, The Seventh Veil does not stand next to the campy, seedy pleasures of those two pictures.

(Spoilers Ahead) Francesca Cunningham (Todd) is a celebrated concert pianist who is under the delusion that she has lost the ability to use her hands, despite no such actual malady.  Dr. Larsen (Lom) is trying to help her through hypnosis to regain the use of her hands, and as a result we are treated to flashbacks into Francesca's life, including her upbringing from a vicious second cousin, Nicholas (Mason), who berates her but this does pay off with her learning to play the piano.  We also get a look into her love life during this time, first to conductor Peter (McDermott), and then to Nicholas's artist friend Max (Lieven), both of whom fall for her.  In the end, all three men pursue Francesca, who through hypnosis has overcome her apprehension about the piano, but now has also lost all inhibitions, and can only go to the man she will be happy with.  This results in her picking not her more respectable beaus, but instead Nicholas, whose passion is the only one that she responds toward.

The movie itself is, well, dull.  I actually quite like the British melodramas of the 1940's, and both Mason & Todd have been actors I've admired in this motif.  Their intense, overly-expressive acting styles suit the genre, and they can be quite salacious, and unlike American film of that era, brimming with a bit of sex (we leave relatively confident that not only is Francesca not a virgin, she seems to have had sex with a couple of men before the curtain falls).  But the film itself is repetitive, too much of Pygmalion, not enough originality, certainly not for a writing trophy, and without better dialogue, I don't entirely get what the Academy was thinking.

The biggest problem for me, though, is the movie's treatment of Nicholas.  As I mentioned above, the film's sexual politics are problematic, and usually I can get beyond that.  After all, it's the mid-40's-feminism involved things like getting the vote (which in 1945 was only 17 years in the making in Great Britain), not necessarily focusing on female independence.  But that they have so much of the conversation in the film being about Francesca's choices, about her wanting to choose for herself (never mind that she's been hypnotized by a man to be the sort of person to make those choices), makes the ending kind of gross.  Nicholas has been abusive to her the whole film, treating her like garbage & literally smashing her fingers (and her dreams) down with the piano's fallboard.  He doesn't deserve her, and he doesn't truly apologize where you should even expect her to forgive him.  This is a step too-far for me, and left an already dull film egregiously sexist.

The Wicked Lady (1945)

Film: The Wicked Lady (1945)

Stars: Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, Patricia Roc, Griffith Jones, Michael Rennie

Director: Leslie Arliss

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Margaret Lockwood-click here to learn more about Ms. Lockwood (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week, Margaret Lockwood's career had entered a new chapter.  The success of her role in The Man in Gray made Lockwood a major name in British cinema (though she never translated in the same way in the United States), and she enjoyed a string of successes, though it was clear that Lockwood's talents (and where audiences wanted to see her) were in melodramas, similar to The Man in Gray.  This is what led to today's film, another that reunited her with her leading man from that film (James Mason) and director Leslie Arliss.  The Wicked Lady would be the highlight of Lockwood's career-her biggest financial success, a critical hit, & arguably the most important (non-Hitchcock) film that she's associated with.  It's also SO much fun.

(Spoilers Ahead) Okay, this movie has just a gigantic amount of plot, and I'm not going to be able to do it justice, but I will try my best.  The film centers initially around Caroline (Roc), a riotous woman who has invited her beautiful cousin Barbara (Lockwood) to her wedding, but when Barbara arrives she falls madly in love with Barbara's fiancé, Sir Ralph (Jones), who also happens to be loaded.  It turns out that Barbara isn't in love with Ralph, and she learns that on her wedding night when she meets the dashing Kit (Rennie), but it's too late.  As the film goes on, though, we kind of understand that what Barbara really loves is sadism, taking things that don't belong to her & punishing everyone who isn't Barbara.  She takes up a life of crime, stealing from horse carriages, eventually joining notorious bandit Jerry Jackson (Mason), but even that's not enough, and she begins to murder people who attempt to expose her life of crime.  The film ends with Jerry being killed by Barbara, and Barbara intent on offing her husband so she can be with Kit...but a masked Barbara instead is murdered by Kit, who doesn't know he's killing his love.  The final death scene has Barbara confessing everything to Kit, hopeful that she can gain some sort of absolution, but he leaves her none, and lets her die alone.

The movie is fascinating, almost as if it's a Roger Corman picture with its overacting & tasty melodrama.  Similar to The Man in Gray, it is indulgent and nowhere near subtlety, bawdy & sexual, but it totally works.  The film is sinister fun, like a Classic Hollywood version of Gone Girl, with everyone involved leaning heavily into the sharp, soap opera plot lines & ridiculous camp.  Occasionally it's slightly too long (trim maybe ten minutes off of the movie & it'd be the kind you'd constantly re-watch), but it's so scrumptious you won't really care.

Lockwood is marvelous.  This is the sort of heightened acting exercise that others might not enjoy, but I was enthralled by it, as she so fully commits to this woman who cannot understand why she does truly terrible things, an adrenaline junkie who cannot help but destroy everyone for her own pleasure.  It says something about Lockwood that she overshadows all her costars in the movie, even constant scene-stealer James Mason.  Bordering between Faye Dunaway in Network and Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, she completely commits to this performance in a way that just wasn't done in Hollywood's Golden Age, and while she's not a truly great actress in the sense of a Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck, I'm kind of flummoxed how her work & acting hasn't been rediscovered by cinephiles.  Thankfully, we have one more film next week to enjoy our star.

OVP: Lady on a Train (1945)

Film: Lady on a Train (1945)

Stars: Deanna Durbin, Ralph Bellamy, David Bruce, George Coulouris, Dan Duryea

Director: Charles David

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Getting older in Hollywood is never easy for child stars.  There is practically a cottage industry just focusing on how child stars in film & television end up broke, addicted to drugs, & dying young.  It's considered bizarre when stars like Patty Duke or Jonathan Taylor Thomas end up normal, and more impressive when they end up like Natalie Wood or Jodie Foster, proper stars into their adulthood.  Deanna Durbin only truly managed half of that equation.  Durbin was not a star like Judy Garland (a peer of hers) who ended up struggling with a difficult personal life & issues with drug/alcohol abuse until her death in the sense that she couldn't handle adulthood.  But she was someone who never properly got to grow up as an actress, and eventually that caused her to quit show business.  One of the turning points in Durbin's career was Lady on a Train, which was one of several pictures made by Universal at the time that tried to get Durbin out from under her squeaky-clean teenage persona.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a comedy, but it reads on paper as a thriller, which it is to some degree.  Durbin plays Nikki Collins, an heiress on her way to New York City to visit her aunt.  While on the way, she spots a murder occurring from her train window.  The police don't believe her when she says the murder occurred, so she tracks down Wayne Morgan (Bruce), a famed mystery novelist whom she begrudgingly convinces to help her with the case.  As it turns out, she was not imagining things, and through a case of mistaken identity (where she's confused with a gold-digging lounge singer), she & Wayne find the killer and fall in love in the process.

The film is super cute and quite twisty with a great premise.  None other than Agatha Christie herself would borrow elements of this plot in 1957's 4.50 from Paddington (I couldn't find if this was a coincidence or a "coincidence" in looking up more about Christie's novel, which was called What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw if you're in the States & read this as a teenager like I did).  I haven't seen any of Durbin's work as a teenager, so I didn't go into this with any preconceived ideas about her, but while she's a little too adorable for someone who ends up a bride at the end of the picture, I liked her.  She has pluck, and great chemistry with pretty much every guy onscreen, though the men feel interchangeable (only Dan Duryea, eternal scene-stealer, stood out for me).

Durbin's career continued to slide here as while the plot was influential on later mystery novels/films (and also, it's a good movie), it wasn't a big enough hit to justify Durbin's payday at the time (she was purportedly the highest-paid woman in the United States at one point), and audiences refused to allow her to grow-up.  Even with a few musical numbers (that feel out-of-place to Durbin's character, but sound great...the nomination is totally worth it for Durbin's "Night and Day" alone), they didn't want to see America's sweetheart married & solving crimes.

Durbin would be make five more films after this, but in 1950 (after marrying her director here Charles David) she retreated to the French countryside to raise a family, and never looked back.  Despite repeated attempts to get Durbin to return to the screen or stage, she refused, and only granted one interview in 1983.  She was critical of the studio system, and loathed her last three pictures, and little is known about her later life as she was so private.

House of Dracula (1945)

Film: House of Dracula (1945)

Stars: Lon Chaney, Jr., Onslow Stevens, John Carradine, Martha O'Driscoll, Jane Adams, Glenn Strange

Director: Erle C. Kenton

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

On Tuesday, we had the first of a trio of monster mashups (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man), where some of Universal's most famous monsters began interacting with each other.  Today, we get something of a conclusion to that series.  While the traditional movie monsters of Dracula, the Wolf Man, & Frankenstein would show up in future films (specifically the horror comedies starring Abbott & Costello), and obviously would be revived in countless later decades, this is kind of the end of the road for these characters in the traditional sense within the Universal canon.  Going forward, either they were played for laughs, or they aren't really in the traditional first-run of the Universal canon.  We're not done with Universal monsters yet this month, and we'll need to do one more season for me to fully have seen all of these movies (my hope is that I'll get this fully off the bucket list next October), but this is a bit of an end of an era, particularly for the creature that started this series, Frankenstein (as I've now seen all seven of his original horror films).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film initially is entirely about Dracula (Carradine), who is meeting with Dr. Franz Edelmann (Stevens), supposedly trying to find a cure for his vampirism.  Dr. Edelmann is assisted by two women, the beautiful Milizia (O'Driscoll), and Nina (Adams), who has a hunchback (thus throwing in a Lon Chaney Sr. era "monster" into this mix though to modern audiences this doesn't register in the same way it would've in the 1940's).  Dr. Edelmann must get good monster ratings on Angie's List, as soon Larry Talbot (aka the Wolf Man, aka Lon Chaney, Jr.) shows up at his door, also wanting to cure his condition.  Edelmann does know what he's talking about, initially giving Dracula blood & having this seemingly work, but Dracula falls victim to his own lusts when he can't resist seducing Milizia, and Dr. Edelmann kills Dracula to protect her.  Afterward, though, Dr. Edelmann goes mad as he starts to turn into some kind of monster due to Dracula's blood, and while he is able to cure the Wolf Man before he does, in the end a cured Larry Talbot kills Dr. Edelmann, who in his madness is trying to revive the Frankenstein monster (Strange), and buries the monster in yet another exploding castle, with poor Nina inside.

The movie really should've been called Dracula Meets the Wolf Man, as Frankenstein is pretty much an afterthought here (it's worth remembering that though Boris Karloff starred in the best-remembered Frankenstein pictures, Strange played the role just as many times), only showing up midway through the movie.  The film itself is fascinating in a different way (not just because it basically dismisses the most popular monster in the franchise) but because if this is seen as an ending for the series, the Wolf Man gets a genuinely happy ending to his story.  Larry Talbot is cured in this movie, something that doesn't happen in the other pictures, and while Chaney would return to the role in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, that kind of took place in a different universe, and so if you are a "canon" person, Talbot gets a happy ending, even if Dracula & the Frankenstein Monster once again are killed at the end of this picture.

This is the only interesting part of House of Dracula, though.  I honestly should give this one-star, as it's not well-constructed, and in particular Carradine's Dracula is badly written, as if the writers don't know what to do with a man who is actually evil, and not just so by circumstance (the irony of his being the weak link is that based on other roles Carradine is by far the best actor on this cast sheet).  The mad doctor angle is played for more fears than we've seen in the past, but Edelmann's character feels off, and not interesting enough for you to not want to know more about the monsters.  However, I had a good time-I'm learning that this is one of those rare guilty pleasures for me that I'm willing to look past the flaws, and so I'm going to go with 2-stars here.  As I said, we are not done with the Universal monster movies quite yet, but this will be the last of the more horror-minded Frankenstein, Dracula, & Wolf Man pictures we're watching this month, so if you have enjoyed our takes, bring your thoughts about these monsters to the comments!

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Werewolf of London, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, The House of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Masque of the Red Death

OVP: The Bells of St. Mary's (1945)

Film: The Bells of St. Mary's (1945)
Stars: Bing Crosby, Ingrid Bergman, Henry Travers, Joan Carroll
Director: Leo McCarey
Oscar History: 8 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Director, Sound*, Actor-Bing Crosby, Actress-Ingrid Bergman, Film Editing, Score, Song-"Aren't You Glad You're You")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We're continuing on our Best Actress races today with The Bells of St. Mary's, one of the rare movies to get major acting nominations (and a Best Picture nomination) as a sequel (I might do an article on this someday, but it's actually hard to define what is and isn't a sequel when it comes to Best Picture nominees...though Bells of St. Mary's qualifies under any metric).  The movie is a followup to Going My Way, which we watched a few months back, and features a third consecutive nomination for one of its stars, Ingrid Bergman.  Bergman was one of the biggest names in Hollywood at the time, and with Casablanca and Gaslight behind her, one of the most bankable.  Bells of St. Mary's might not have been the creative peak of her career, but it was inarguably the financial peak of her career.  The film was the #1 movie of 1945, and adjusted for inflation is still on the Top 100 most successful movies ever.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film largely leaves behind most of the characters we know from Going My Way, save for Father O'Malley (Crosby), who has been assigned to a teaching parish in a dilapidated old school building that is under threat of being condemned.  The church is run by Sister Mary Benedict (Bergman), who desperately wants a businessman, Horace Bogardus (Travers), in the neighboring brand-new building, to donate the space, potentially making it so that the school can stay, but he has his designs on buying the school from the church to put up a parking lot.  While other things happen, specifically with a young woman who struggles in her school and family life (played by Joan Carroll), this is the heart of the story.  In the end, the church does get the building (it's old Hollywood, come on), but Sister Mary Benedict doesn't get to see it as she's transferred to a dry climate to help with her tuberculosis, and she & Father O'Malley become friends rather than friendly adversaries.

The film is very, very sweet & pleasant.  This kind of works in the sense that it's a holiday picture (there's a sequence where the children put together a ragtag Christmas pageant), and no one wants something too complicated during the holidays.  But it also has almost no proper plot because it's so averse to struggle or conflict.  Everyone, even Travers' businessman, is really kind & loving, and there's no sense of struggle in what will happen in the end.  Even Sister Mary Benedict's illness, which couldn't be blamed on anyone, seems certain to be cured in the end, and so there's no resolve.  The movie is thus egregiously boring even if it's difficult to dislike.

The film's seven Oscar nominations are all, therefore, a disappointment.  The editing is lousy as the story oftentimes feels strung together by vignettes rather than any central plot, and the Sound (which won the Oscar!) has nothing remarkable about it other than a few musical numbers from Crosby, including the forgettable "Aren't You Glad You're Here?"  Crosby doesn't complicate his work as Father O'Malley, and neither does Bergman as Sister Mary Benedict.  This feels like less of a sin from Crosby (a limited actor) but Bergman was scoring home runs during the 1940's (she'd be making Notorious, for crying out loud, just months after this film was released), so this feels like a wasted citation for the actress.  Overall, the movie doesn't impress-it's not spiteful or wrong, and it has its heart in the right place, but it's difficult to understand how this became a classic when it's hard to remember previous scenes even while you're watching the film.

OVP: Wonder Man (1945)

Film: Wonder Man (1945)
Stars: Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo, Vera-Ellen
Director: H. Bruce Humberstone
Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Special Effects*, Sound Recording, Scoring, Original Song-"So in Love")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

We move on in our week-long look at Oscar-nominated movies that were cited for their music with Wonder Man, a movie where I have to lead off with a confession: I don't like Danny Kaye.  Like, in almost any movie.  This is weird because I enjoyed White Christmas growing up, like many Midwestern gay boys who were obsessed with the "Sisters" number; my brother can attest that I will randomly start singing "doing choreography" without any prompt.  But Kaye's schtick gets old fast, and it's almost always surrounded by a movie that's basically just a vehicle for his brand of self-involvement.

(Spoilers Ahead) Which makes a movie like Wonder Man all the more frustrating for someone like me because there's twice as much Kaye.  You'll notice that this film won a nomination for Best Special Effects in 1945, and that's because the film's main gimmick is around Kaye playing two characters at once, oftentimes in the same frame.  Kaye's characters are Buster, a loud vaudeville performer and Edwin, a bookish historian; they are identical brothers who have not seen each other for many years.  When Buster is killed after witnessing a murder, though, Edwin must pretend to be Buster to take his place and bring the mobsters to justice.

Hijinks, of course, ensue, particularly since both Buster and Edwin had girlfriends: Virginia Mayo's Ellen and Vera-Ellen's Midge.  However, the film gets lost in the shuffle.  It's pretty clear how it will turn out the second that Buster dies, and while the effects are intriguing (particularly getting Kaye into solid objects, which was remarkable at the time), the entire film is flat.  Kaye doesn't have chemistry with either leading woman, and none of the musical numbers are all that memorable.

The film won four Oscar nominations, but the only one I'm entertaining as remotely worthy is the special effects.  They're definitely technically impressive, although they don't really make the movie any better (for modern movies, I tend to make that a criteria, so I feel like I should for past films).  The Sound is merely okay-the musical numbers aren't impressive, and they don't add much to the effects.  Overall, while this is a musical and a film that thus fits our theme like a glove this week, it's also a movie with nothing compelling in its score.  I'm shocked that they even remembered a song long enough to distinguish it in Best Original Song.

OVP: The Woman in the Window (1944)

Film: The Woman in the Window (1944)
Stars: Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, Dan Duryea
Director: Fritz Lang
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)...for the 1945 Oscars, so we're using that tag below since tags follow the OVP, even though the film was released in November 1944.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.

You're going to see a lot of classic (or below-the-line) classic movies with our month-long tribute to film noir, but you might wonder why I started with this particular picture, and I wish I had a better counter to make than "it was first chronologically"...but I don't.  I saw this one first because I couldn't find a more binding theme without getting into the twists and turns of noir, one of the few Classic Hollywood genres that genuinely has surprises in the plot formula.  After watching The Woman in the Window (no relation to the novel by AJ Finn which is being made into a movie with Amy Adams & Gary Oldman later this year), though, I think it's the perfect film to kick off our tribute to noir.  Sneaky, beautifully-acted, and with enough twists to both comment on the brilliance of film noir (and point out the clearest flaw of the genre), The Woman in the Window is pretty much everything I love about the genre wrapped into one 99-minute package.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers on a married psychology professor Richard Wanley (Robinson) whose wife and family are out-of-town and he's being egged on by a few coworkers to make the most of his temporary bachelorhood by pursuing a woman while he's alone.  He demurs, saying his randy days are over, but soon meets the subject of a beautiful painting that he's walked by earlier in the film, Alice Reed (Bennett), who invites him back to her place for "drinks."  The movie then takes a sharp turn as Alice's lover finds them, and tries to murder Wanley in a jealous rage, when Alice kills the lover to save Wanley's life.  However, it's obvious at this point that no one would believe that they didn't kill the man, so he attempts to cover up the crime by driving the man to the middle of nowhere, dumping the body, and hoping to ensure that they get away with it.  This doesn't work out, and Wanley gets a firsthand account of what he did wrong as he's invited by a mutual friend to watch DA Lalor (Massey) track down the killer, not knowing that it's Wanley himself who committed the crime.  There's a great subplot involving Dan Duryea playing a blackmailer who also makes some cheap passes at Alice (even though she's trying to poison him) before we get to the movie's controversial ending.

1944 was essentially the beginning of film noir as a mainstream Hollywood entity.  While it had certainly been prevalent in previous years with movies like The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key, 1944 brought about what would be four staples of the genre: Double Indemnity, Laura, Murder My Sweet, and of course The Woman in the Window.  Most of what we see here is classic, standard-fare film noir tropes, with a beautiful woman (Bennett) bringing an honorable man (Robinson) down while the law (Massey) is watching.  The movie rises above just being a prototype, though, with bravura work from all involved.  Robinson was such a good actor (truly one of the best performers never cited for an Oscar), and has great rapport with Bennett despite not having the traditional leading man good looks of a Dana Andrews or Tyrone Power.  I liked Bennett (though I've always been a bit more partial to her sister Constance), and thought Dan Duryea was fabulous as the blackmailing Heidt, giving us all of the nasty villainy that we're lacking from the seemingly "good people" played by Bennett & Robinson.  The movie won one Oscar nomination, for Best Score, and it definitely deserved it-Hugo Friedhofer creates an atmospheric, moody piece that totally matches the desperation of the main characters and plot.

The problem with the film is the ending, and it's why we're going with 4 stars rather than 5 here, as it would have assuredly gotten to five with a better finale.  The film likely was precluded by the censors from ending with Eddie Robinson, having just moments earlier gotten away with the murder (thanks to a series of circumstances outside his control, the cops had come to believe it was Duryea's Heidt, not Wanley or Alice, who had killed the lover), killing himself after going down his slow march to hell, a desperate Joan Bennett running to try and stop him.  However, we instead got a hackneyed dream sequence (which was probably not all that hackneyed in 1944, but still feels cheap) where we learn all of the preceding events had been an illusion, and we get a comic piece at the end with Robinson seeing another beautiful woman in front of a shop window who wants a light, and him running in fear from her for fear that the dream will become reality.  I don't like "it was all a dream" sort of plot laziness, but there's too much good here to say that the movie is ruined by its ending.  However, the finale stops it from being the true masterpiece it probably should have been.

Other Articles: Intro to Film Noir Month

Fallen Angel (1945)

Film: Fallen Angel (1945)
Stars: Alice Faye, Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell, Charles Bickford, Anne Revere, John Carradine, Percy Kilbride
Director: Otto Preminger
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Alice Faye-click here to learn more about Ms. Faye (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

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

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


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

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

Detour (1945)

Film: Detour (1945)
Stars: Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

With me going more and more to revival/retro screenings, I've learned that I have a new pet peeve: rude audience members who don't respect the time-and-place of a film being made, perhaps best illustrated by a recent viewing of Detour on a big-screen.  Made on Poverty Row, the film is the stuff of cinematic legend, a movie with no major stars that yet somehow remained in the public consciousness, to the point where Criterion will be releasing a movie from PRC of all movie studios later this year.  The film's dialogue, film quality (thanks to a thin budget and broad speaking styles from the stars) would be easy-to-ridicule, but I don't like hate-viewing & think people who want to laugh at an actor's performance or the dialogue should do so at home, and respect the vision onscreen for what it is.  And it's not like Edgar Ulmer's film is some Room-style atrocity.  Beneath the cheaply patched-together cinematography and the bad-gangster-movie dialogue is a really interesting, engrossing movie that sits with you as you leave the theater, wondering how something so dark came out of Hollywood's Golden Age.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is relatively simple.  Al Roberts (Neal) is a man-on-the-run, with us seeing his life through flashbacks of how he once had a great relationship with Sue (Drake), but she pursued her dreams in Hollywood, and spite for the universe that gave him a great, Carnegie Hall-style gift for the piano (but no ways to use it), has led him to hitchhiking across the country to reunite with her.  Al comes across a man named Charles Haskell Jr. (MacDonald), who treats him well but complains about how a woman earlier in his journey had fought back when he'd tried to assault her (it says this in so many words), and he's still bitter about it.  Haskell suddenly dies while Al is driving (more on that in a second), and disposes of the body because he assumes that no one will believe he didn't murder Haskell for his money/car.  He picks up an ornery woman named Vera (Savage), who turns out to be the woman that Haskell picked up and assaulted, and she then blackmails Al into giving her the profits of the car or she'll go to the police.  The two start to sell the car, with Vera clumsily coming on to Al, but her rejecting him, and her eventually finding out that Haskell is poised to inherit millions, and says if Al pretends to be Haskell, they can be on "easy street."  Al refuses, begging her to let him go, but then accidentally kills her (more on that in a second too) by strangling her accidentally with a phone cord.  The final sequence seems to be a dream of sorts, a projection of the future, when Al inevitably is caught for this murder.

Okay, that's a lot to unpack; Detour, at only 68 minutes, is a story that doesn't have time for frivolity.  The film, at least what the rude woman in my theater found so amusing, is not impressive on a technical level.  Neal is hardly Gregory Peck, and seems to spend most of the movie either pleading or pouting.  Ann Savage is better, though it's not always clear whether she's giving a great performance or just being totally original & memorable as a steely, angry, oversexed femme fatale.  They are forced to sputter deeply-dated phrases as they fight and flirt and quarrel, and a modern audience would be forgiven to (in the comfort of her own home) chuckle at some of the acting onstage.

But it's just so damn entertaining, and so rich with nastiness that you can't help but want to continue, and I get why people called it a classic & kept coming back to it year's later.  By casting non-stars, Walsh is able to go into this without any sort of pretense about what these characters will be to the audience, which serves him well as he continues to make them cruel & dismissive.  While the Hays Code of the era stops, say, Al from fleeing from the police (though it's obvious to a modern audience he's arrested in a dream sequence rather than reality), or Al & Vera from sleeping together on the road, it's all there below the surface.  What makes Detour so mesmerizing is that, unlike even the most famous film noir, there's no relief here-there's no light or sense of humanity.  Even Sue feels like a distant dream, someone too pure to be associated with such a story.

Which makes you assume that she's not.  The most creative aspects of Detour are surely the fact that Al is lying about this entire story, which is why such a crumby guy comes across as so noble.  We're expected to believe that someone as chaste and lovely as Sue would associate with such a fellow?  Or that he, months deprived of companionship, decided to just not have sex with Vera who is throwing herself at him?  And the two people just die, randomly, solving all of his problems?  No, Detour is that rare unreliable narrator story where the narrator never acknowledges he's lying, but it's there for anyone paying attention.  Dubious Al, combined with the blackhearted nature of the film that recalls a Cormac McCarthy story in its downward trajectory, with one man buying a ticket to Hell, makes Detour a classic worth revisiting-just try not to laugh if it's a public screening.

OVP: Love Letters (1945)

Film: Love Letters (1945)
Stars: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ann Richards, Cecil Kellaway, Gladys Cooper, Anita Louise
Director: William Dieterle
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Actress-Jennifer Jones, Art Direction, Score, Original Song-"Love Letters")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Jennifer Jones is not really whom you'd consider my favorite actress of the 1940's.  Her pie-eyed optimism and constant saintliness (I'm aware I still need to see Duel in the Sun, where supposedly this image should be shattered) was in direct contrast to the femme fatales, the Bette Davises and Joan Crawfords and Gene Tierneys that populated this era and my heart.  She certainly was one of Oscar's however, as she managed to scoop up five nominations, including four consecutively from 1943-1946. Love Letters is smack dab in the middle of her nominations count at number three, and was when she was one of the biggest names in Hollywood.  Under the watchful eye of her soon-to-be-husband David O. Selznick, she stars as an amnesiac (possible murderess) in this potboiler that is scripted by (of all people) Ayn Rand.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film tells the tale of Alan Quinton (Cotten...doesn't that feel like the name of every one of Joseph Cotten's characters though?) writing love letters for his caddish fellow soldier in a war that is so inconsequential they don't even bother to say which one it is (it's World War II, for the record) and we learn soon that he has fallen in love with the woman, named Victoria, whom he has been pulling a Cyrano toward.  The war ends, and we learn that the caddish soldier has died and that Alan's fiancee Helen (Louise) can't handle his PTSD and that he is clearly in love with a woman he has never met, and instead he goes off into the world, living at his aunt's house and meeting a woman named Singleton (Jones) who is clearly in love with him even as he pines for Victoria, whom he discovers has died and murdered her husband.  Singleton cannot handle this, and though Alan soon figures out that Singleton is indeed Victoria, he cannot tell her because she has amnesia and everyone thinks the shock will hurt her.  The film eventually shows that the caddish soldier was killed by her grandmother after he drunkenly hurt her granddaughter Victoria, and then Alan and Victoria, like all good 1940s romances, end up living happily ever after.

It's all as melodramatic as it sounds, and never once does it veer into a particularly compelling series of performances to make up for the sincere lack of surprise (it's quite obvious to anyone who has seen a movie before that headliner Jennifer Jones, who is far too misty to not have something going on in her head, is clearly the woman he initially fell in love with and not some other actor).  Jones and Cotten were constantly playing romantic leads in the 1940s (three of her five Oscar nominations, in fact, were for falling in love with Cotten though he never once would be noticed by the Academy, making him one of the weirdest snubs in their long history considering the pedigree of his pictures), but I see very little chemistry here to explain why.  Jones is too glass-eyed and willing to throw herself on the tracks for my taste and her character is banal and uninteresting.

The film received three other nominations on-top of Jones baffling citation, though only one of them really stands out as something that deserved the accolade.  The film has a wonderful score, written by Academy favorite Victor Young, soaring throughout and adding a dreaminess to the mystery that Ayn Rand tries to inject into the film to keep the plot running and not just making the film an hour long.  The original song, which is entirely instrumental in the film, lends credence as to why Young deserved a nomination though considering we don't get the words to the Dick Haymes hit it feels a little self-indulgent that we get a second nomination for Young's score when one would have been sufficient (it feels like mad cheating to include the film as a song nominee when words were only added later as part of a radio-friendly hit-this would never pass the music branch's tough muster now).  The film's third nomination is for art direction, and while we get many dusty old English country houses, I never actually believed we weren't on a Hollywood sound-stage, which is a pretty hard knock against a nomination in this category.

Those are really my thoughts on the disappointing Love Letters, for which I'd had much higher hopes.  I'm now just one performance (Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary's) away from finishing off the 1945 Best Actress lineup-do you have a favorite amongst them?  What are your thoughts on Love Letters' three other Oscar mentions?  And why do you think Joseph Cotten was never AMPAS' cup-of-tea?  Share your thoughts below in the comments!

OVP: Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

Film: Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
Stars: Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price, Mary Philips
Director: John M. Stahl
Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Actress-Gene Tierney, Art Direction, Cinematography*, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Ooph, I frequently take a random week off each summer to catch up on my life and get it in order, but quite frankly I should really reconsider moving that to February each year, as between the Oscars, the thrill of watching awards season, Turner Classic Movies' 31 Days of Oscars, and my general urge to move as fast as lightning through my goals in the first third of the year, I find myself most in need of time in the month made for lovers and presidents.  I am continuing to sail through as many of the TCM classics as possible to keep my DVR from brimming over (I will find myself unsuccessful in the next couple of days, admittedly, as there's no way I can maintain this pace with a weirdly busy social life for me), but I will try my best and continue to give you as many lovely and random pictures as I can find from this most heavenly of channels.

(Spoilers Ahead) It is, of course, Valentine's Day today but since I'm single I thought it would be fun to watch a noir movie, which of course ended up about as close to Fatal Attraction as one can get from a 1940's film, so it goes along well with my jaded heart on such a day (kidding, kidding...kind of).  The film is the tale of one Ellen Berent (Tierney) a woman desperately in love with an author she meets on a train named Richard (Wilde), who marries her quite impetuously and watches as her entire world crumbles.  The film is a melodrama as much as it is a noir, with the final third of the film turning into a pretty staid and eye-rolling courtroom drama as Ellen, after going on a bit of a murderer's spree (killing both Richard's disabled brother and her unborn son) offs herself to frame her sister Ruth (Crain) of the murder after she suspects Richard has fallen in love with her.

However, up until that point the film has a couple of really great scenes amidst some soggy melodrama.  Gene Tierney won her only Oscar nomination for this mammoth hit for FOX (it was the studio's highest-earning picture of the 1940's), and you can see what the draw is.  The film is not shy about first making you almost cower in fear at her beauty (I texted my brother as the film started, "Cornel Wilde is cute and all, but Gene Tierney is so gorgeous she genuinely looks like a cartoon"), and then spend the rest of the film subliminally making excuses for her as she continues to be worse and worse of a human being.  Tierney will always be one of my favorite performers (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which we recently visited, as well as The Razor's Edge or especially my beloved Laura, all being treats in my opinion), but I will admit that I was a bit flummoxed for the first half of the film as to why Tierney was nominated, and part of me wondered if she was getting it simply because she was (at the time) one of Hollywood's biggest stars and this was such a big picture that it felt like she had to have it, in a similar way to say Doris Day in Pillow Talk or Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side.  However, I will admit that the scene where she watches a young Darryl Hickman drown in broad daylight is bone-chilling, and played to perfection in a method that rivals Barbara Stanwyck waiting at the train in Double Indemnity.  Tierney's performance never again matches Stanwyck's (she's too full of clenched glares and doesn't have the ease that this role requires in scenes with other people to make her seem convincingly manipulative), but there's power in her Ellen and the drowning scene alone probably mandated this nomination.

The mention of broad daylight is an interesting look at the cinematography, which actually won the Oscar.  The film is shot beautifully, all gorgeous shadows like we're in a Douglas Sirk film, but the real trick of Leon Shamroy's work in Leave Her to Heaven is the way he throws typical noir on its head by having the most heinous of actions take place not at night, but during the day.  Look at how brightly-lit something like the drowning sequence is in the film-you almost certainly assume Tierney will dive into the water and save Hickman at the last minute, and that he'll die later on in the evening, but here (like when she forces her miscarriage) Shamroy and director John Stahl play with our expectations and force us to realize that even in the safest of settings we cannot trust Ellen.  The film was also nominated for Art Direction (the set is fine, but the backdrops look unusually fake even for a 1940's picture, particularly an early scene where Cornel Wilde somehow manages to step in front of a series of mountains in just a ten-foot jaunt) and Sound (a strange nomination, quite frankly, and one that feels like it was earned in the courtroom scene for getting Vincent Price's voice to be as loud as possible, but the movie's score work in compliment with the film and the rather clumsy way that noise=passion makes me think this is the least of the citations), but it's the cinematography that stands out: gorgeously-lit, beautifully subtle, a sort of precursor to the grandness that something like Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes would soon perfect in the hands of Jack Cardiff.

Those are my thoughts on Leave Her to Heaven, a film I have long wanted to see thanks to my devotion to Tierney.  Do you have any thoughts on the picture?  What is your favorite Gene Tierney film?  What is your favorite of Leon Shamroy's eighteen nominated films?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

OVP: Captain Kidd (1945)

Film: Captain Kidd (1945)
Stars: Charles Laughton, Randolph Scott, Barbara Britton, John Carradine, Gilbert Roland
Director: Rowland V. Lee
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Charles Laughton is one of the most unlikely of movie stars.  Portly, always, with a rough temper and consistently playing bad guys he is hardly what you'd have considered a fine choice to be one of the biggest headliners of the 1940's, but that's what happens sometimes-Hollywood gives the public what they want, and films starring Laughton is what came as a result of that.

(Spoilers Ahead) This is one of those many pictures that Laughton starred in in the 1940's (he would make twenty films during the decade), a historically inaccurate look at the life of William Kidd, a 17th Century pirate who was more famous than most and more ruthless to go along with it.  He manages to trick King William III to let him sail to India with a crew of pirates in order to bring a ship back from India.  The Indian Lord Fallsworth and his beautiful daughter Lady Anne (Britton) are taken aboard at this juncture, though Lord Fallsworth is soon murdered in an "accident" by Kidd, who then destroys the other ship, but wants to find a way to both bring back his loot from the beginning of the film (a treasure plundered from a ship called the Twelve Apostles) and also become a gentleman in the court of the king (seriously-the guy has mad social-climbing ambitions).

Thankfully for Lady Anne, who has found herself on a ship full of pirates ala Keira Knightley, she's got her own personal Orlando Bloom in the form of Randolph Scott (random thought: is there a better modern day analogy for Randolph Scott than to call him the 1940's Orlando Bloom?) as an undercover pirate who is out to avenge the death of his father, who was the captain of the Twelve Apostles.  Through some swashbuckling sword-fights and a smartly timed trip to shore, the two manage to escape Captain Kidd's clutches, incriminate him to the king, see Kidd hanged at the gallows, and then get married with a fleet of ships from the king as a wedding present.  Seriously-that's how the film ends.  It's the 1940's-what do you expect?

Honestly, the entire endeavor seems rather silly even if you disregard the gross historical inaccuracies (never mind that Kidd went back to New York, not to London before he was eventually hanged-the better question is how did Tower Bridge show up in one scene 200 years before it was actually built-was it time-traveling pirates...cause that's a movie I want to see?!?).  Laughton is always insanely watchable even if he's a giant fussbudget and a bit too worldly and proper to be believable as a pirate.  I've always found Randolph Scott incredibly dull onscreen, a bizarrely popular movie star who doesn't seem to have enough charisma to be a compelling leading man, and who at 47 is too old to be playing this part and twenty years the senior of Barbara Britton.  The film is occasionally fun (I loved the pirate quarrel at the beginning of the film), but once it becomes Laughton vs. Scott I sort of lost interest, as Laughton is always more interesting even if he's being a bit hammy and scenery-chewing in certain scenes.

The film landed one Oscar nomination, for Best Score, though not to impugn nominee Werner Janssen's nomination too much but this was the final year where basically any studio could guarantee a nomination for Best Score just by submitting at least one eligible film.  As a result Captain Kidd was actually one of 21 nominees in this category, three of which actually belonged to Janssen himself.  The music is exactly what you'd expect from a pirate film, and doesn't really compare with some of the contenders it was facing that year, including Miklos Rozsa's winning Spellbound.  I doubt very sincerely that in a five-wide field this would have been one of the ones that made the cut-the score only comes out when they need to cover some action, and relies too heavily on cliches (the light, frilly music whenever Lady Anne comes on, the ominous notes starting at least thirty seconds before we see that Captain Kidd is about to do something unspeakable yet again).  It occasionally takes away from the film, and even if it is boisterous to listen to on its own, that doesn't mean that it's any good when it comes to aiding the story.

Those are my thoughts on this pretty forgettable pirate adventure-has anyone else seen it (it's in public domain, so it's probably one of those $2 DVD's you see in a K-Mart bin)?  If not, what are your thoughts on the careers of Randolph Scott and Charles Laughton?  And anyone want to speculate why they made it so easy to get an Oscar nomination for music back in the day?

OVP: The Enchanted Cottage (1945)

Film: The Enchanted Cottage (1945)
Stars: Dorothy McGuire, Robert Young, Herbert Marshall, Mildred Natwick, Spring Byington
Director: John Cromwell
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Original Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

It's hard to imagine somedays, but there was once a time when television and its ability to shape dozens of stories, characters, and ideas into a weekly visit into our living rooms was not a regular occurrence, or even something that was a possibility.  At the time, the only way of doing that was through the mediums of literature, and later movies.  I kept thinking back on this while watching The Enchanted Cottage, as the entire plotline seemed, for better or worse, to be a perfect tale for one of the all-time greatest television series, The Twilight Zone.

(As I just mentioned The Twilight Zone, you know spoilers are coming, so carry on at your own risk) The movie takes place in a small New England town, where a homely girl becomes a maid at a mysterious cottage.  The girl is Dorothy McGuire, though, so "homely" is a bit of a stretch when you have someone as beautiful as she onscreen-they may have subtracted the makeup and given her dumpy clothes but with those eyes and that complexion, "homely" is not the correct word.  She works for a housekeeper played by veteran character actress Mildred Natwick (channelling Judith Anderson in Rebecca, at least in the start of the film) who has lived in the house ever since her husband tragically died during World War I.  They are taking in guests on the eve of World War II, including the dashing bridegroom-to-be Robert Young.  Young goes off-to-war and comes back with tragic scarring and becomes a recluse in the house, only to find himself falling for, and then marrying McGuire's dowdy maid.

The story progresses with a twist, that after their marriage, suddenly they have returned to their movie star good looks (good looks in quotations here for Young-while he's obviously not ugly, I've always found him a little too "Mickey Rooney" looking for my tastes, but for the sake of argument let's proceed once more).  They share this good fortune with no one except their blind friend, played by Herbert Marshall.  What Marshall eventually realizes, and which McGuire and Young find out in an unfortunate scene with Spring Byington later, is that they have not in fact changed, but love has caused them to see themselves as beautiful, and that is the enchantment of the cottage.  After realizing that this is all that matters, we get a movie-star kiss and a happy ending.

For anyone familiar with The Twilight Zone, you can tell that this is the exact sort of "twist, then moral-of-the-story" sort of tale that they familiarized itself with.  Unfortunately, this is not in one of their tight, 25 minute packages, but instead in a 91-minute film, and so there's quite a bit of filler.  The score (which features prominently in multiple scenes in the movie, as the characters are constantly playing the piano) aides the film, and the two leads, whom I'm not a super big fan of, to be honest, both do lovely jobs (particularly McGuire), but it's the sort of film that would be too simple to have been made today-charming, sweet, and with a dash of mystery, but even at an hour and a half, far too long for the film at hand.  Don't feel too badly for them, though-McGuire in particular was having a landmark year in her career-she had also made the classic The Spiral Staircase and my personal favorite of her films, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  Two years later, she'd be a headliner in her sole Oscar-nominated performance, in Gentleman's Agreement.  Young would continue playing the overly-confident romantic lead roles in B-Grade movies, until finding massive success later on in that already discussed medium of television.

How about you? Have you seen The Enchanted Cottage?  Do you agree with my assessment that it would be better suited for television, or was only the big screen appropriate for this love story?  And what are your thoughts on Young and McGuire-do you have a favorite role, and do you think they should be better-remembered film stars than they are today?