OVP: Tin Pan Alley (1940)

Film: Tin Pan Alley (1940)

Stars: Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Jack Oakie, John Payne

Director: Walter Lang

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Scoring*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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.

We're going to start our month devoted to John Payne by taking a look at his pre-war films.  Payne's career didn't start at Fox, but for all-intents-and-purposes it might as well have.  He made a few films at Warner Brothers in the 1930's, but none of them amounted to anything, and by the end of the decade he was finding himself going back to New York to work on Broadway.  His contract with Fox, though, would dominate most of the 1940's, and at the beginning of that time, it was really focused on musicals.  We oftentimes think of MGM as the home of most of the musicals of this era, and indeed, they made most of the classic ones.  But Fox was making a massive business at the time in musicals, and Payne could sing.  The only problem for Payne was when it came to Fox & musicals, there were only two names that mattered: Alice Faye and Betty Grable.  Both of these women we've actually explored in past seasons of Saturdays with the Stars (which makes me stunned I haven't seen this film), but it's a good indication of the kind of career that Payne was enjoying heading into World War II...playing second fiddle to more important female stars on the Fox lot.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about two business partners, Harry Calhoun (Oakie) and his handsome songwriting pal Skeets Harrigan (Payne), who have a hit song that they need a singer for, and they meet a sister vaudeville act in Katie (Faye) and Lily Blane (Grable).  Skeets and Katie hit it off right away, forming a romance, but obstacles keeps getting in the way, first Skeets' ambition (at one point "accidentally" dropping a glass of wine on Lily so that Katie would get to sing their song) and later by true accident (when a more famous singer coopts the hit song that Skeets promises to Katie).  When World War I breaks out, Harry & Skeets enlist, but can't help wanting to get back to see their girls one more time, and in the process, Katie unceremoniously dumps her fiancee, and instead rejoins Skeets, with promises of more success (and surely love) in their future after the war.

Fox musicals, unlike MGM musicals, are not exactly high-budget works of art, but instead they are an excuse to have excellent singers belt out classics.  None of the four leads are having their voices dubbed (which was more common in MGM musicals as well), and some of them (specifically Faye, whom I am a huge fan of) are genuinely superb singers.  This one doesn't have as many memorable songs as you'd hope, with the best being "Moonlight Bay" sung by Faye, and there's not a lot stringing them together other than a bit of Hollywood propaganda (lots of patriotism).  As a result, that Oscar statue, even in a year of less-than-inspired competitors, feels a bit cheap (just give Pinocchio two music statues-it more than deserves it!).

Payne is fine here.  As I mentioned above and in our biography kickoff earlier this week, Payne's career as a film star wasn't bereft of leading roles, but it was frequently a look at an actor who largely was there to make his more popular leading ladies look good.  He does that here, looking handsome, but largely just being a place for Alice Faye's soulful eyes and heavenly voice to project onto...in many ways he resembled someone like Robert Taylor who was gorgeous, but didn't have a lot of opportunity to act.  This was most of his career before the war, appearing as a romantic lead for Faye and Sonja Henie in hit Fox musicals.  Next week, we're going to stick with a similarly-plotted film, one that even has one of this week's leading ladies, and talk about how World War II offered Payne a new role...though it might well have hurt his career.

OVP: Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938)

Film: Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938)

Stars: Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, Jack Haley, Jean Hersholt, John Carradine

Director: Henry King

Oscar History: 6 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Motion Picture Story, Original Song-"Now It Can Be Told," Scoring*, Art Direction, Film Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

When we think of classical Hollywood musicals of the 1930's through the early 1950's, what we initially name-check are almost always the MGM musicals of the era.  Films like The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, and Singin' in the Rain were all from the same studio.  Other studios, of course, were making musicals, most importantly 20th Century Fox, but Fox's best-remembered musicals would come in the 50's & 60's, when they would adapt the Rodgers & Hammerstein productions The King & I, South Pacific, and The Sound of Music, the latter of which basically saved the studio from bankruptcy.  Their musicals from the 1930's and 40's were hits, some pretty big hits, but none have the same kind of cache now that they did in their era.  Today we're going to revisit one of those films (a blockbuster hit), Alexander's Ragtime Band, which was cited for six Oscars, including Best Picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Alexander (Power), a young classical composer who joins a band (to his family & professor's chagrin) of ragtime musicians, and who luck into a gig at a nightclub partially because they are joined by singer Stella Kirby (Faye), another performer on the rise.  Stella & Alexander fight it out, but are clearly falling for each other in an "opposites attract" situation, and both are on their way up, though when a producer decides he only wants to give Stella a big break (not the band), Alexander gets jealous & they break it off.  World War I looms, with Alexander and some members of the band getting drafted, and while he's away, Stella marries the band's piano player Charlie (Ameche), and they have success but it's clearly not enough to keep their marriage afloat, and they divorce.  Meanwhile, Alexander is back & having great success with his band, including new lead singer Jerry Allen (Merman), who is in love with him but knows that he still pines for Stella.  The film has a "will they or won't they finale" with Alexander performing "Alexander's Ragtime Band" at Carnegie Hall, and as you would suspect for a movie from 1938, they do, in fact, end up together.

The 20th Century Fox musicals of this time frame follow not only the same plot formulas, they nearly always repeat the same stars.  You may remember we featured Alice Faye in a Saturdays with the Stars a few years ago, and we profiled films she made with both Power & Ameche (the former would make three films together, the latter would make six).  As a result, the films feel interchangeable, and as I've seen a lot of Alice Faye movies from this time frame, I know the formula well, and also to know based on billing whether or not she's going to end up with Don Ameche in the end (here, of course, she doesn't as Power is the headliner).

This basic story work makes the film feel more like a jukebox musical than the more complete productions happening at MGM at the time, which had more centralization on story and grand production numbers.  Most of the songs in the musical are not original to it (we'll get to one of the ones that was in a second), and very few of them are full production numbers with lots of dancers & choreography.  While we do have a few costume changes (most notably "Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil" with Ethel Merman sashaying in a horned headband amid a group of sparkling demons), this is a movie that's really just about the music.  It helps that they hired two actresses who can genuinely sing.  Alice Faye is one of my favorite underrated performers of this era, and she's luminous as ever as Stella, giving her just enough depth and longing to make the paper-thin plot feel fuller, and her voice is a melodic lullaby. Merman, of course, brasses up some of the band's biggest numbers, and while a little bit of Merman can go a long way, it's weird (in a good way) to see her playing such a young figure as most of her most iconic roles (like Mama Rose) come from figures out of their youth.

As a result, your patience for this film is going to be tried by how much you can handle a musical with very little plot or grand choreography, and mostly just focused on some good-time songs.  Mine resides right in the middle, mostly because of my love of Ameche & Faye (I always cheer for them to end up together even though it's more a 50/50 split in their pictures).  The Irving Berlin songs sound great, and are brimming from every corner so you get your money's worth on the Oscar-winning scoring from Alfred Newman.  The original song "Now It Can Be Told" honestly falters amidst so many outright classics, in many ways echoing songs like "I Move On" and "Learn to Be Lonely" in later years where an addition that scores an Oscar nomination can't compete with the classics.  It's pretty, but it's just not special with so many iconic ditties.  The nomination for editing is a weird one, perhaps getting it for so many production numbers in one movie (though, again, it's less the production and more just the singing that stands out there), though the art direction feels more at-home; all of the stages feel like true, distinct  venues rather than just different window dressing, and as a result it genuinely feels like you get a sense of where the band is headed in terms of their theater's stature as the film progresses.

Two last things before we go, both because they struck me as unusual.  We talked yesterday in regard to a different 1938 Best Picture nominee, Four Daughters, how John Garfield's acting style felt weirdly out-of-place compared to the bright-and-bubbly portrayals from the Lane sisters.  Alexander's Ragtime Band has that too from omnipresent character actor John Carradine, here playing an unnamed taxi cab driver.  Carradine is in literally hundreds of movies during this era, so him showing up is not a surprise, but his performance-style is so at-odds with the rest of the movie, particularly dove-eyed Alice Faye, that it feels unusual.  He drives Faye around, and you almost feel like he's about to kidnap her & bring her into a completely different movie.  It's not a bad performance (I quite liked it), but it's so atonal to the film that it feels like this strange interlude in the picture where you think it might turn sinister (it doesn't help matters that one of Carradine's most iconic roles is playing Count Dracula in this regard).  I couldn't leave without at least mentioning this bizarre late-act swing in an otherwise conventional movie.

The last thing was a dumbstruck moment for me personally.  One of the songs that is sung in the song is "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," which is a Berlin number performed by Jack Haley in the movie.  I know this song very well, but had no idea until watching it this past weekend that it had been written by Irving Berlin...I honestly thought it had been written by my dad.  My dad, when I was a kid, would make up little songs to sing to my brother & I, and one of the songs that I remember most was him singing a (slightly different lyrics, but the same exact tune) version of this number to us when he was waking us up in the morning in lieu of an alarm clock.  I had no idea until I was literally watching this movie that this was not, in fact, one of his made up songs, which I found hysterical as a man in his mid-30's, apparently somehow believing his father is Irving Berlin.

Saturdays with the Stars: Season 1 Recap

Ida Lupino & Ann Sheridan, two of our
stars kicking their heels!

With yesterday's sojourn into the South Pacific, we have finished our first season of "Saturday with the Stars!"  I'm not much for naval-gazing (mostly because I am aware this blog is not read by swaths of people), but I am really, really proud of this past season.  When I came up with this idea, I mostly wanted to see if I could do it for a year, and with one exception (you won't be able to tell this unless you were paying really close attention because I pre-dated the article, but when I was suffering from a 103-fever & pneumonia, I published one article on a Sunday), I did!

This year has taught me about the careers of twelve amazing artists, and I hope you learned some things about them too.  I had never really done something like this with actors, focusing instead on genre or something arbitrary like Oscar nominations, but getting to see the progressions in these women's careers was eye-opening, noting the similarities as well as the differences in their journeys.  I am struck by how expansive the universe of classic film is still to me some 25 years after I first started to delve into it. This year we watched movies that I'd never even heard of until I included them in the project, and made a bunch of "deep cut" discoveries.

We'll begin our second season in a few days (click here if you want to learn more about it), but before we go I am a lover of lists, and wanted to rank a few of the movies we watched this year.  I'm appreciative to all of these actresses for the education & cinematic pleasure they gave me during this journey, so I'm only focusing on the positives (no "worst of" lists).  If you have enjoyed this series, please feel free to comment or tweet this post-I'd love to have more people joining us in Season 2.  And if you have opinions on these actresses (or further research I should do), share in the comments as well!

Favorite Performances from Each Star
January: Ann Sheridan-Woman on the Run
February: Virginia Mayo-Along the Great Divide
March: Cyd Charisse-The Band Wagon
April: Alice Faye-Hello Frisco Hello
May: Linda Darnell-A Letter to Three Wives
June: Lizabeth Scott-Too Late for Tears
July: Rhonda Fleming-While the City Sleeps
August: Ruth Roman-Lightning Strikes Twice
September: Esther Williams-Bathing Beauty
October: Hedy Lamarr-Ecstasy
November: Ida Lupino-The Hard Way
December: Mitzi Gaynor-Les Girls

5 Favorite Actresses of the Year (Alphabetical)

Linda Darnell
Alice Faye
Rhonda Fleming
Ida Lupino
Lizabeth Scott

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Linda Darnell, A Letter to Three Wives
Alice Faye, Hello Frisco Hello
Ida Lupino, The Bigamist
Ida Lupino, The Hard Way
Lizabeth Scott, Too Late for Tears

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

The Band Wagon
The Bigamist
Brigadoon
It's Always Fair Weather
Les Girls
A Letter to Three Wives
The Man Who Came to Dinner
My Darling Clementine
Strangers on a Train
Too Late for Tears

10 Favorite Performances of the Year in these Films (Not By Our Leading Ladies)

Humphrey Bogart, High Sierra
Kirk Douglas, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
Nanette Fabray, The Band Wagon
Patricia Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train
Van Johnson, Brigadoon
Kay Kendall, Les Girls
Janis Paige, Silk Stockings
Ann Sothern, A Letter to Three Wives
Robert Walker, Strangers on a Train
Monty Woolley, The Man Who Came to Dinner

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.

OVP: Hello, Frisco, Hello (1943)

Film: Hello, Frisco, Hello (1943)
Stars: Alice Faye, John Payne, Jack Oakie, Lynn Bari, June Havoc
Director: H. Bruce Humberstone
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Cinematography-Color, Best Original Song-"You'll Never Know"*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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.

By 1943, Alice Faye was a conundrum for Fox.  It was clear, even to Faye herself (she'd later say so in interviews) that Warner was less-interested in her as a headliner and were more interested in promoting Betty Grable, who had eclipsed her as a box office draw.  Fox had a number of hit musicals throughout its Golden Age tenure, something we don't always think of when compared to the Grand Tetons of musical cinema that were being produced at the nearby MGM lot, but Faye had dominated musicals at the studio during this era, never really making a flop even when she was tasked with poor films.  Grable was a massive star across seas at the time, with her iconic pin-up poster becoming the bestselling one of World War II, and despite the two of them being framed as rivals (to the point where Faye was replaced by Grable in Down Argentine Way), they were actually good friends in real life.  This is a long way of saying, that by 1943, Faye had a lot more riding on Hello, Frisco, Hello than her stellar box office track record might have indicated.  Thankfully for Faye (and throwing Fox's plans for a loop), this was a MASSIVE hit in its era, one of her biggest films at the studio, and she was still too important to the studio to toss aside just yet.  As we'll see next week, Darryl Zanuck wasn't content to keep Faye at the top even if the public wanted her to stay there, but let's first get through Round 1 of her fight with the studio chief.

(Spoilers Ahead) Hello, Frisco, Hello has about as thin of a plot as you could get with a musical without it turning into a revue.  Johnny Cornell (Payne) is a vaudeville promoter and actor who wants to prove to his friends Dan (Oakie) and Beulah (Havoc, and yes this is the June Havoc of Baby June/Gypsy fame), as well as his neglected love interest Trudy (Faye) that he has what it takes to be a big-shot after they are thrown out of a bar early in the film.  Johnny proves them right, coasting in large part off of the talents of his leading lady Trudy, but fame comes at a cost.  He soon is romancing a beautiful heiress (whose fortune is a bit slack even if her attitude is not) Bernice Croft (Bari, in one of the many, many roles in this era where Bari is playing the "gorgeous rich bitch"...though supposedly Bari was second only to Betty Grable in terms of "pin-up girl" popularity during World War II despite her being a complete unknown today).  This causes a heartbroken Trudy, still madly in love with Johnny, to try her luck at stardom in Europe.  Trudy succeeds, Johnny fails, and Bernice proves herself to be the terrible human being the audience knows her to be (while Johnny is blinded by his lust of prestige and beautiful women).  The film ends with Trudy, Dan, and Beulah tricking Johnny into taking Trudy's money and starting a new club for them to perform in, and Johnny/Trudy getting their happy ending.

Musicals, more than any other genre, can get past cliches if they're charming enough.  Unlike, say, a film noir or a period drama, where cliche is going to give into boredom, solid stars and great numbers can carry a musical pretty darn far, and Hello, Frisco, Hello is a lot of fun.  The movie is littered with an array of really great musical numbers, with Faye in peak vocal form and Oakie & Havoc lovably mincing behind her for full comic effect.  The film was nominated for two Oscars, and it deserved both citations.  The cinematography (shot in Technicolor) is sublime, and perfectly lights all of the musical numbers, as Faye in particular has never looked more radiant.  And the movie introduced to audiences the Oscar-winning "You'll Never Know," a standard that has been covered by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Rosemary Clooney to Shirley Bassey, being big hits for all (due to a weird contract stipulation at the time, Faye wasn't allowed to record the song for record sales, but it became her signature tune anyway).  It's weird to think of such a popular standard being "original" at some point and not just part of the American lexicon, but you can see why during the film it's had such an enduring legacy.

And that's because of Faye.  As you may have been able to tell, I've been a bit surprised by how much I've adored the actress this month (considering so few people discuss her in film history), but this is her best role we've profiled to date, even if it's somewhat of a stock musical.  Faye is marvelous, heartbroken, finding just the right balance with her relationship with Payne to never make her feel like a doormat, but simply someone in love who also has dreams of her own (she just wants him along with for them).  It helps that, weirdly, Faye had already played this part in King of Burlesque, as Hello, Frisco, Hello was a remake of this 1936 film (which starred Faye & Oakie in the exact same roles, albeit playing differently-named characters).  The musical numbers are magic-her voice could so easily be on modern radios in a way I don't think you could even counter for stars like Sinatra today.  The way she brings a desperation to "You'll Never Know" is incredible-it says something that it feels like you're truly hearing the song for the first time even if you know it by heart.  I loved everything about her work here, and can see why this was a smash hit.  Next week we'll go into our first "straight" role for Faye (our final film in our tribute to her), and the role that caused her retirement from movies, but in the meantime, join me in the comments if you want to discuss your favorite Alice Faye musicals.

OVP: Lillian Russell (1940)

Film: Lillian Russell (1940)
Stars: Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Henry Fonda, Edward Arnold, Warren William, Leo Carrillo, Helen Westley
Director: Irving Cummings
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)
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.

We continue our look at the career of Alice Faye this week with a film that's a bit of a conundrum.  Lensed in 1940, it was arguably at the height of the actress's fame and time at Fox, and was considered a favorite by the actress.  Faye, as we've profiled so far, was insanely popular during her time under Darryl Zanuck, but didn't have a lot of what we'd name-check as classics today (unlike some of her contemporaries at the time like Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck), and so this makes the list in part because Faye herself loved the role so much (it's the reason we won't get to Alexander's Ragtime Band, as I was curious about Faye's assessment of her own talents).  However, it is also one of Henry Fonda's least favorite roles he ever did in his career (though in his memoirs he had nothing but nice things to say about working with Faye herself), a role he only took so that Fox would let him do The Grapes of Wrath.  So with this film (also an Oscar nominee, so OVP gets one step closer to being done), I'm curious-will I end up siding with Alice or Hank?

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Faye as Lillian Russell, the biggest stage actress in the world at the end of the 19th Century, frequently inspiring women across the country to copy her fashions and hairstyles.  Russell is legendary for her relationship with Diamond Jim Brady (played here by Arnold), as both had indulgent tastes and voracious appetites.  The movie spends some time on their relationship together, but more focuses on Russell's romances with composer Edward Solomon (Ameche, yet another film that paired the two) and Alexander Moore (Fonda), a young man smitten not with Russell the Superstar, but with Helen Leonard, the girl he met before she became the most famous woman in the country.  The movie is interspersed with different musical numbers and multiple dance halls for Faye to feature her dulcet voice across the relatively long (for a pretty slight plot, it's over 2 hours) motion picture.

The movie has some things going for it even though I'm not a big fan of it as a whole.  Faye is, once again, sublime-I'm in love with her so far this month, and really hoping one of the final two movies of the month manage to equal the talent we're seeing onscreen.  She knows how to play lovestruck well, and has a plum chemistry with Arnold, better than with any of her intended love interests in the picture.  The movie helped Arnold, who had recently been labeled "Box Office Poison" by an exhibitor publication (this was a hit, proving that article wrong), and was trying to transfer into character parts that weren't reliant upon him losing weight like his brief time as a leading man.  Weirdly, Arnold had played Diamond Jim five years earlier in a film for Universal, though in that film he was top-billed and Binnie Barnes a supporting part as Lillian Russell.

Other than Faye & Arnold, though, it's hard to call this a particularly strong picture.  Fonda was right to dislike the film-it's rare that I've seen Henry Fonda given so little to do in a movie, particularly one with his name above the title.  He plays Alexander as a lost puppy, someone who both wants to put Lillian Russell in her place and put Helen Leonard on a pedestal.  This could be an interesting conundrum (the world is trying to do the exact opposite), but the screenwriters don't give us enough to make this interesting, and Fonda seems to be phoning in this performance.  Don Ameche's work is better, though his character is a mess-he's somehow both an absolute cad and someone that Russell mourns horribly, perhaps because the studio didn't want Alice Faye to be anything other than a saint.  Both men are so critical to the plot that you kind of roll your eyes when Lillian Russell ends up with Fonda's Alexander, rather than Diamond Jim, or perhaps more believably, her adoring fans.  You may object, but considering this was VERY loosely based on Russell's life (almost everything is a fabrication), they might as well have given the audiences a sensical ending.

The movie was nominated for a sole Oscar, for Art Direction, and here it's a winner.  The movie has some really fun designs when it comes to the dance halls that Russell adorns, and the houses are ornate & fascinating.  I loved the increasing gaudiness of Lillian's dressing rooms as she becomes more famous and more used to Diamond Jim's extravagances.  These are nice touches, but really it's just a big, giant production that somehow fits the script of a big, lavish, bloated musical.  And while that's an insult to the film, I kind of think it works with this nomination.

OVP: In Old Chicago (1937)

Film: In Old Chicago (1937)
Stars: Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Alice Brady, Andy Devine
Director: Henry King
Oscar History: 6 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Supporting Actress-Alice Brady*, Score, Sound, Original Story, Assistant Director*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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.

Alice Faye's career trajectory is odd because rather than having a nice curve, it just sort of stops in 1944, when Faye walked off the FOX lot and never returned despite being a proper star still.  However, the beginning is much more traditional, and after making a splash in George White's 1935 Scandals (which is not available on any streaming platforms #iwilldieonthissoapbox), she cemented her stardom with In Old Chicago, which purportedly was being considered for Jean Harlow before her untimely death at the age of 26.  This film, which teamed her with Don Ameche and Tyrone Power (by far her two most frequent costars), was considered one of the most expensive films of the era, thanks to its gargantuan recreation of the Great Chicago Fire, and was nominated for six Academy Awards, winning two including Best Supporting Actress for Alice Brady.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place in three parts.  There is the opening scene, an odd one where the O'Leary family is idiotically racing a train, and then suddenly Mr. O'Leary dies leaving Mrs. O'Leary (Brady) to raise her three sons as a washerwoman, the eldest of two are Dion (as an adult played by Power) and Jack (as an adult played by Ameche).  As adults, these two men have pursued completely different life courses, with Jack a respectable (if frequently unsuccessful lawyer) and Dion a sneaky saloon owner & gambler, who is in love with a singer named Belle (Faye), whom his mother forbids him from marrying.  Eventually, in hopes of eliminating his competition who once humiliated him, Dion tricks his brother into running for mayor, and thanks to some dirty blackmailing of the police commissioner on Dion's behalf, he wins.  The film then routinely pits Dion and Jack against each other, with Dion going to extraordinary lengths to hurt the bond with his brother, even at one point tricking Belle into marrying him so that she can't testify against him.  All of this comes to a head in the final twenty minutes of the movie, where Mrs. O'Leary's cow (a legend in real life, but not here apparently) kicks a lantern and burns the city to the ground.  In the fire, Jack dies and Dion finds redemption, with Mrs. O'Leary forgiving Belle for, well, being a singer & approves of their union.

There's a lot to unpack with In Old Chicago, and I'm going to start with two of the biggest issues I had with the film: Tyrone Power's character is an awful human being, and Alice Brady's Mrs. O'Leary is a horrible cliche.  Dion has multiple moments of duplicity, but when he starts turning it onto his brother Jack (who is a genuinely good guy and should be our hero) and his feisty love interest Belle, it ruins my idea of him ever getting redemption.  Let's be real here-Jack ends up dying trying to save his brother, who wouldn't have needed saving if Dion hadn't sent the mob to try and kill Jack in the first place (even though Jack was just following the law).  Jack also basically tries to rape Belle in the beginning of their romance, which in the 1930's was a more common cinematic trope than you'd think (just watch literally any Errol Flynn movie), and then spends the rest of the movie emotionally abusing her, using her love for his own gain, and also assaults her again halfway through the movie.  There's a recurring "gag" where Belle's maid Hattie (played by Madame Sul-Te-Wan) runs to the police to arrest Dion, to just have the two be kissing when she returns.  Basically the joke is that Tyrone Power is so ludicrously handsome that no woman would possibly turn down sex with him.  I'm all for adjusting to the time period when you consider a movie, but this felt gross even by the standards of 1937 (technically 1938, but we use the years they were nominated for Oscars on this blog).

(Side Note-do yourself a favor right now and google Madame Sul-Te-Wan, who I knew nothing about before seeing this film, but realized afterwards that I had seen her in more pictures than I had Faye.  She was the first black person ever put under a contract in Hollywood, was the daughter of slaves, and had a career that spread from The Birth of a Nation to Carmen Jones, costarring alongside stars as famous as Jane Wyman, Barbara Stanwyck, Lucille Ball, & Veronica Lake at different points in her career.  She'd make a fascinating biopic if anyone would like to think outside of the box.)

Brady, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily have a lot of problematic aspects to her performance, but she's soooo hammy it's kind of hilarious she won an Oscar for such a character.  Her Mrs. O'Leary is pious, constantly finding the problems with her child but treating her husband as a saint, even though in our brief time with him he seems kind of like an idiot.  She feels like the sort of one-dimensional work that was popular in the era, but that style of acting is completely out-of-style today.  That she won an Oscar for such work feels odd, and considering how inconsequential she is to the plot, her story arch is a bit of a stretch.  The film received a sextet of nominations, the others slightly more earned.  The score is serviceable, interesting during the firefighting sequences, while the sound is excellent thanks to the action set-pieces.  The story itself is a bit too hammy and requires too many suspensions-of-belief for my taste, particularly when you compare it to the fantastic A Star is Born that was competing against it.

But the Best Picture nomination lands right in the middle for me, and that's because while Power & Brady are both disappointments in the film, the movie has two great assets: that final fire sequence and Alice Faye.  The fire sequence is mesmerizing, and staggering considering they had no access to CGI at the time.  I'm honestly surprised that this didn't win Best Picture at the time as a result of these scenes, which required controlled sets, and were so dangerous that women (save the three female stars) weren't allowed on set.  These scenes are really interesting, and fascinating to watch staged, and part of the reason I had to give this a 3-star even though it had so many problems.

The other is Alice Faye-I loved her in this movie.  She has a natural comedienne's gift, finding the perfect chemistry with both Power & Ameche, and still grounding her character without making her a saint or a woman scorned.  She manages to realize her love for Dion doesn't make sense, but she still leans into it, and her singing is great.  In many ways she feels like a hybrid between Jeanette MacDonald & Barbara Stanwyck, and I instantly understand how this movie made her a star.  Considering I'd never seen one of her films before, I'm really hoping that this is an indication that we're in for a fun month.

Saturdays with the Stars: Alice Faye

Each month of 2019 we will be looking at the careers of leading ladies of Classical Hollywood who were never nominated for an Academy Award as part of our "Saturdays with the Stars" series.  Last month, we focused on the films of Cyd Charisse, a major musical star in the 1950's for MGM.  This month, we turn back the clock about twenty years and examine an actress largely forgotten by modern audiences who was nonetheless the biggest star at Fox during her years as a leading lady, so much so that they received thousands of fan letters after she retired begging the studio to bring her back to the screen.  Interestingly enough, both Charisse and this month's star shared a husband (singer Tony Martin), though Charisse was married to him a bit longer (sixty years, to be exact), while April's star enjoyed a long second marriage to orchestra leader Phil Harris, so this is the rare Hollywood shared romance that ended well for all concerned.

Alice Faye's rise to stardom sounds an awful lot like a Hollywood cliche.  A Broadway chorus girl, she eventually moved to Hollywood just after finally making a name for herself on Rudy Vallee's radio program.  When Lillian Harvey dropped out of George White's 1935 Scandals, Faye was cast as the lead despite being relatively unknown in cinemas as the time.  The casting ended up being a smart decision by Fox, as Faye was wildly popular with audiences, and studio chief Darryl Zanuck took her under his wing, making her the "girl next door" to counter MGM's platinum blonde box office draw Jean Harlow.

Faye would continue being a cash cow for Fox for the next decade or so, frequently cast in movies just to bolster their profits.  This is probably why she never was nominated for an Oscar-Faye was a natural comedienne, and oftentimes put into films that were beneath her talents.  She did star in major Oscar films, however, most notably In Old Chicago and Alexander's Ragtime Band, both of which were nominated for Best Picture (one of which we'll kick off our series with).  Even in the early 1940's, when Fox started to care more about Betty Grable as a leading woman, Faye was still eminently bankable, and would remain so until 1945's Fallen Angel.

Fallen Angel costarred Faye with up-and-coming actress Linda Darnell, whom both director Otto Preminger and studio chief Zanuck had become quite obsessed with at that point (Zanuck had tried to make advances at Darnell, but according to Darnell these went nowhere).  The editing of the film made Darnell appear like the proper star, despite Faye being the established audience favorite who received top billing.  Faye effectively retired from show business at that point, content to be a mom and homemaker, and disappeared from screens.  She was still under contract to Fox, who would sue her if she made a film at another studio, so she didn't, but Zanuck was hounded by Faye's fans begging him to bring her back to the screen, which he tried to do to no avail.  Faye would decades later come out of retirement for cameos and for one more substantial musical (1962's State Fair), but she largely stuck to her word of retiring after Fallen Angel.  This month, we'll take a look at her heyday at Fox and see why so many film fans were aching to have her back on screens after she retired, arguably at the height of her fame, as well as examine the film that ended her career, Fallen Angel.