OVP: Mister Roberts (1955)

Film: Mister Roberts (1955)

Stars: Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell, Jack Lemmon, Betsy Palmer, Ward Bond

Director: John Ford & Mervyn LeRoy

Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Supporting Actor-Jack Lemmon*, Sound Recording)

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 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.

Ward Bond is unusual, as we've mentioned throughout this month, because he was a true character actor, and someone who, unlike say Thelma Ritter or Walter Brennan, he didn't get semi-lead roles and never was nominated for an Academy Award.  This makes him unusual because Ward Bond holds the distinction of starring in the most Best Picture nominees of any credited actor in the history of the Academy, more than even Jack Nicholson or Robert de Niro or Meryl Streep, with thirteen nominees ranging from Arrowsmith all the way back in 1931-32 to today's film, Mister Roberts, which was the final Best Picture nominee that Bond would appear in in his career.  Mister Roberts was famously a troubled shoot (John Ford fought with both James Cagney & Henry Fonda), one that involved not just two credited directors (Ford & Mervyn LeRoy), but Joshua Logan was uncredited, making Mister Roberts one of the only movies (outside Gone with the Wind) to be helmed by three different Oscar nominees.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in the waning days of World War II, with a bunch of sailors stuck aboard a cargo ship called the Reluctant, where they are under the tyrannical rule of Captain Morton (Cagney).  Morton is frequently at odds with Mr. Roberts (Fonda), a lieutenant on the ship who is desperate to get off this ship, which is safely in a harbor but is not going to see battle, and join the front.  Roberts is frequently fighting on behalf of the men, who are desperate to get shore leave after a year at sea, but Morton wants to keep Roberts under his thumb, primarily because he knows what a bad commanding officer he has been & he doesn't want him to leak that to the brass.  Joined by his pals Doc (Powell) & Pulver (Lemmon), Roberts continues to hatch plans to get under Morton's skin and specifically to get a letter requesting his transfer as well as to get the men shore leave.  He initially has to sacrifice the former to get the latter, but once the men hear about it, the men risk court martial to get Roberts transferred.  The film ends on a bitter note, with Roberts dying in action, and Pulver (until that point something of a coward) standing up to Morton and assuming the antagonistic role that Roberts had played in his life, defending the men.

The movie was an "ehh" for me.  I get what's happening here & I understand why this was a successful play given its mix of tone, but the stage is a different beast and you don't have to feed off of an audience's energy in the same way.  As a result, the mixture of slapstick farce alongside a very serious story feels very off, and the tenor of the picture doesn't quite work.  The cast is a mixed bag-Fonda is good as a revered rule-breaker, even if the script demands nothing from him, but Cagney is actively bad here, not knowing how to play his villain as anything but a hammy Mickey Rooney-level joke.  Jack Lemmon, of course, won an Oscar for this role (his first of eight nominations), and while I get it (seeing Lemmon's signature ability with comedy for the first time had to have been undeniable), it feels weird that he won for something so dismissible, as this is hardly what he'd end up being capable of as he moved to being a leading man.

Mister Roberts was a big film for most of the cast.  Henry Fonda hadn't made a movie in eight years before this (he'd been on stage), and was not favored by Warner Brothers.  This movie was a huge hit, though, and its success brought Fonda back to Hollywood, and two years later he'd be making one of the most important movies of his career, 12 Angry Men.  James Cagney would never make another movie for Warner after this (his home for almost three decades) and William Powell wouldn't make another movie, period, even though he'd live another thirty years.  Ward Bond, of course, would continue to make movies and we'll talk about the most important one of his as an actor next week, but this week I'll admit that I continue to strike out.  While Bond is in this movie, he has a very small part, and so it's hard to really assess his talents as an actor with such a small role.

OVP: The Public Enemy (1931)

Film: The Public Enemy (1931)
Stars: James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Edward Woods, Joan Blondell, Donald Cook
Director: William A. Wellman
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Story)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Jean Harlow-click here to learn more about Ms. Harlow (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

After the success of Hell's Angels, Jean Harlow would have been put in pretty much any high profile picture at another studio.  Warner, Fox, they would have quickly found roles for a woman that had been in such favor with the public.  Howard Hughes, though, was not a producer with a great sense for what to do with his contract players, and instead sent Harlow on publicity tours rather than capitalizing on her fame.  Thankfully for Harlow, in 1931 he began sending her out to other studios since he didn't have material for her, and one of the scripts that came across her desk was The Public Enemy.  The film would be a huge success, and would soon get Harlow into the sights of the most important star-making factory of the 1930's, MGM.  But we'll get to that next week-first, The Public Enemy.

(Spoilers Ahead) While Harlow secured top billing on the film, this is a James Cagney picture through-and-through.  The actor plays Tom Powers in the movie, a lowlife hood who is trying to make his way up the ladder in the Chicago crime world.  The film shows him in constant conflict with his brother Mike (Cook), an upstanding war veteran who is trying to find a way to provide for his mother reputably, even though his brother enjoys more success financially than Tom.  The film shows that Tom eventually becomes too big for his britches, and gets involved in a mob war that ends up taking his life.  Along the way, he meets a number of women, including Gwen (Harlow), a woman who "always falls for the bad guy," giving up more reputable options like Kitty (Mae Clarke).

The film is tough to judge in hindsight, because The Public Enemy is one of those movies that helped build a genre.  The gangster picture is in its shadow, and there are scenes of horror & violence that would become quintessential to the mobster pictures of everyone from Scorsese to Coppola in the decades that followed.  By far the most famous scene in the movie is when Tom & Kitty are having breakfast, and annoyed with a comment from her about him not having another woman who could take care of him, Tom shoves a grapefruit into Kitty's face.  Nearly 90 years later, it's still a shocking scene, considering Cagney's nasty twist of the grapefruit and the genuine look of surprise on Clarke's face.  Urban legend differs on whether that was genuine shock.  Clarke would claim in her memoir she knew it was coming, but reputable film figures still claim that it wasn't in the script.  Either way, it's an iconic moment in pre-Code cinema, and by-far what this film is most famous for.  The movie received an Oscar nomination for Best Story, and probably earned it, though there aren't as many inspired, memorable sequences like the grapefruit scene as the picture becomes somewhat repetitive in the back half.

Harlow gets a throwaway part as Gwen, basically just playing the "tart" to the other character's (like Kitty's) more reputable women for Tom to romance.  Unlike Hell's Angels, she doesn't make the most of some of the later, saucier scenes, instead playing them with dryness, as if she doesn't understand the character she's playing.  One wonders if the filmmakers, so obsessed with the impressive feat that Cagney was pulling off as Tom, simply didn't care to push Harlow in this role.  Her final two features for us, though, she's the main event in the movie, and are considered two of her best parts (one of which is in one of her best movies), so hopefully we'll get some of the promise we saw last week with a character that is worthy of her.

OVP: Ragtime (1981)

Film: Ragtime (1981)
Stars: James Cagney, Brad Dourif, James Olson, Mary Steenburgen, Howard E. Rollins, Jr., Elizabeth McGovern, Donald O'Connor, Pat O'Brien, Mandy Patinkin, Debbie Allen, Norman Mailer...as well as very early performances in small roles from the likes of future stars Jeff Daniels, Fran Drescher, & Samuel L. Jackson
Director: Milos Forman
Oscar History: 8 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Howard E. Rollins, Jr., Supporting Actress-Elizabeth McGovern, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design, Original Score, Original Song-"One More Hour")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

There are very few films remaining that have been nominated for 8+ Oscars that I haven't seen (the stats are harder to find than you'd think).  It's an even shorter list if you don't count movies that weren't cited for Best Picture...in fact, it's now a list that doesn't exist at all.  Only five films have received over eight nominations for the Academy Awards at the Oscars without a Best Picture citation, and with today's review I've seen them all: They Shoot Horses, Don't They (the only one to get 9 nods), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dreamgirls, The Dark Knight, and 1981's Ragtime.  Based on the celebrated novel by EL Doctorow, this movie is a gigantic, all-star extravaganza linking together historical figures with fictional characters so unknown they don't have names, and kudos have to go out to the casting director for putting a number of future superstars onto the call sheet.  But the question is-why did a movie get this kind of adoration but (despite having a very prestigious source material & director), didn't get a nod for Best Picture?  Let's take a look, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) I have never read Doctorow's novel (shame on me, I know), so I don't know if this is faithful or not, but the movie is largely a tangled historical web that eventually settles on one storyline in the back-half of the movie.  Essentially we have a lot of figures, some real-life (McGovern as famed model Evelyn Nesbit, Cagney as Fire Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo), and other characters, major characters in the film, who don't actually get names (Dourif plays "younger brother" while Steenburgen plays "Mother").  The film shows racism, as well as classism at the turn of the century, with newsreels featuring figures such as Harry Houdini, Teddy Roosevelt, and Stanford White (played by Mailer in the movie) to give us a sense of time (and its passage), while checking in on the lives of the main characters in the movie.  The back-half of the film, however, focuses almost exclusively on Coalhouse Walker (Rollins), a fictional figure who is a black man who has made something of a career for himself as a musician, but will not forgive a group of firefighters who destroyed his car while he was driving down-the-road.

The movie's focus on Coalhouse was probably inevitable, but arguably the wrong decision for the movie as it's more interesting in the first half of the movie.  The vignette-style stories almost have a Terrence Malick "figure out the plot" kind of coherence to them.  It's not remotely as arbitrary or abstract as Malick, but I quite liked the idea that we were getting a series of short stories rather than one larger narrative, but the Coalhouse plot, which ties together all of the loose figures in the film, almost feels anti-climactic compared to the looseness to Forman's approach to the movie.  It seems impossible that an anthology tale would have been greenlit in 1981, but it's where the movie works best.  When it focuses on Coalhouse it becomes more predictable, and more reliant on the actual figures at-hand, and the acting is a bit over-the-place here.

McGovern & Rollins got the Oscar nominations, and they do have the showiest parts (though it was Steenburgen who scored at the Globes, and it was Randy Newman's score that most deserved the AMPAS recognition), but Ragtime is a movie that doesn't really allow for standouts in the traditional sense, and I left wanting more from both actors.  McGovern plays Evelyn Nesbit as somehow a dope and a brainy girl, someone who knows how to manipulate every situation but doesn't always know that she's doing it (a girl too pretty to lose), but it only sometimes works when McGovern makes Nesbit in on the joke.  One wonders if this nomination was in part due to McGovern's shocking display of nudity about a third of the way into the picture, where she nonchalantly sits on a 100-year-old couch with her breasts on full-display.  It's better than the meek-and-mild Steenburgen (who adds little to her character) or Patinkin's overbearing director, but it's an ingenue part that probably needed a more seasoned actress to make it work.

Rollins grounds his character a bit more, but honestly I left this performance with something to be desired as well.  His righteous anger is warranted, but you can't quite compromise the man we initially meet who quickly becomes a doomed vigilante within Rollins work.  He seems to only know how to reason in Shakespearean speech, so often out-of-place with the rest of the cast's more naturalistic performances, and you don't leave understanding enough of his motives.  The Academy could have done worse here (considering it was the sentimental 80's, a nomination instead for Cagney's humorous but one-dimensional fire commissioner could so easily have been cited instead), but I left the performance wishing for more, and glad that ultimately the Oscars picked John Gielgud in Arthur, a more fully-realized creation.

OVP: The West Point Story (1950)

Film: The West Point Story (1950)
Stars: James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Doris Day, Gordon MacRae, Gene Nelson
Director: Roy Del Ruth
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Scoring of a Motion Picture)
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 Virginia Mayo-click here to learn more about Ms. Mayo (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

If you've been following this blog at all over the past year, you know that one of my main quests has been about creating a better, more sustainable breath of classic cinema on streaming, and to start investing once again into physical media until streaming is able to sustain what we once counted on a Blockbuster Video to do.  A perfect example of this happened to me last night when I found out that the Virginia Mayo film I wanted to start out our month dedicated to the actress with was unavailable despite having been available when I began researching her in November.  Unfortunately, none of the early leading work of Ms. Mayo's career was available on streaming; either it was films that she had a supporting role in (against the rules for the project) or it was from arguably the peak of her career, 1949 or later.  As a result, we're going to be starting in the middle of Ms. Mayo's career as a headliner, which is a bummer as I quite liked the storytelling angle of watching her from beginning to end, and will be substituting in a different picture in two weeks from her career (where she's lead, but was arguably  more important for her male costar).  At this point, Mayo had been a leading lady opposite the likes of Bob Hope & Danny Kaye for several years at Warner Brothers, and had starred in the two true classics of her career (The Best Years of Our Lives and White Heat, both of which are splendid but I've already seen them so I couldn't cheat & include them, though you should check them out if you haven't seen any of Mayo's work as she's great in both).  Here, oddly enough, she's about to be upstaged by a star far-better remembered today in a musical, a genre tailor-made for the former Vaudeville star.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Bix Bixby (Cagney), a tempestuous Broadway director who is out-of-work, and is recruited by a producer to go and produce an annual variety show at West Point, in hopes that Bixby can recruit the producer's nephew Tom (MacRae) to quit the military and instead join show business.  Bixby convinces his assistant/long-suffering girlfriend Eve (Mayo) to join him on the excursion, though they've broken up (sometimes they're dating, sometimes they aren't-the movie is weirdly fluid on the subject), and quickly upturn the show, and in order to get Bixby to stay on as the director, he has to join the military (because, you know, it's the movies and a 51-year-old James Cagney seems like a good recruit for such an endeavor).  Antics and romance follow, with Bixby & Eve falling back in love while Tom falls for a movie star friend of Bixby's named Jan Wilson (played by a young Doris Day in one of her first major roles).  The film ends with them performing, as Bixby regains his mojo, along with the book of the hit show he's put together at West Point.

The film is silly fun, and was even nominated for an Oscar for its score (which, while good, only features one properly memorable song in "By the Kissing Rock," which is basically a song supporting date rape so it's hard to raise the flag for it too high).  Cagney had just finished filming White Heat at this point in his career with Mayo, arguably his best performance, so he can be forgiven for this feeling a bit phoned-in at times, particularly considering the (by-then) song-and-dance man had done this schtick before more memorably.  As I said when I introduced the series, I'd never seen Mayo in a song-and-dance picture, and while her voice is dubbed, she's really lovely in this film and a helluva hoofer.  She likely owes the costume designer some thanks for making her legs so eye-popping (also, I'd thank God as when you could give Rita Hayworth a run for your money in the gams department, genetics are playing a part), but she's charming and has a ribald chemistry with Cagney.  She'd be the highlight of the film were it not for Doris Day coming in late in the movie and basically stealing it out from under her.

Day is lovely as Jan Wilson, playing the quintessential Doris Day girl-next-door, but in doing so from the sidelines you see how America quickly fell in love with her.  She has a polish and magnetic quality that's impossible to ignore, and while MacRae is hardly her equal as an actor, they're both ace singers & they sparkle when they dance and sing.  The film follows a familiar pattern with its script (such is the curse of a musical), but Day keeps it from veering off-course in the third act when you know exactly what's about to happen  (and are a bit frustrated at how convoluted the plot is getting), and within a year she'd be starring in I'll See You in My Dreams with Danny Thomas, a film that made her one of the biggest stars of the 1950's.  Mayo would also have one of her biggest hits of the 1950's coming within a year, but we'll get there next week.  In the meantime, share what your favorite early (starring) film of her career was in the comments, so that I can reach out for it someday even if it won't make the cut for this project.

OVP: The Strawberry Blonde (1941)

Film: The Strawberry Blonde (1941)
Stars: James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Rita Hayworth, Alan Hale, Jack Carson, George Tobias
Director: Raoul Walsh
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Scoring)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

James Cagney has never been one of those performers I've really loved when he wasn't in his true heyday.  Cagney in the early 1930's, when he was just being discovered as a star was truly wonderful, and later on his career when he was in White Heat he rediscovered that magic, but as a leading man, especially one in light comedy, I was never a big fan.  My memories of Yankee Doodle Dandy are relatively hazy, but even that film I sort of am "ehh" about in the years since, and so watching The Strawberry Blonde, I wasn't wild about the prospect of Cagney doing his schtick for 100 minutes or so.  However, I did love the prospect of the two leading ladies, both of whom I deeply adore (de Havilland for years, Hayworth a more recent adoration that has burned into a major passion).  So the film presented a conundrum-would my love of two actors cancel out my ambivalence for a third?

(Spoilers Ahead) It ended up being, quite frankly, kind of wash.  The film follows Biff (Cagney), an ex-con who is somehow also a dentist, who has a quick temper (when does Jimmy Cagney not have a quick temper?), and starts to reminisce about a girl long ago, despite the fact that his wife Amy (de Havilland) is very much in the picture.  The movie moves back in time, when Biff is seen with his rival Hugo (Carson) both chasing after the same gorgeous girl Virginia (Hayworth), and trading off who has to be stuck with the suffragette and less glamorous Amy (only in the movies could Olivia de Havilland, beautiful as any creature on earth, somehow be "less glamorous," especially compared to Cagney and Carson, neither of whom was Gary Cooper, let's be honest).  Eventually Hugo wins Virginia, and Biff is stuck with Amy, who is head-over-heels for Biff despite him being rather indifferent toward her affections, and Hugo continues to take advantage of Biff, setting him up as the fall-guy in a construction scheme, and eventually getting him wrongfully imprisoned.  The end of the film shows Biff, who has the chance to kill Hugo in revenge, instead simply pulling out one of his teeth and finding out that he and Amy, who are truly happy with each other and expecting a baby, are the real victors in this battle of wills.  It's a cute ending, even if the whole "could he murder him?" line seems a bit dark for such a fluffy picture.

The film feels like a pretty cliched romantic comedy, and were it not for the stars I think it would have been lost years ago, but Cagney's enduring popularity and the two women's game performances seal the deal for the film.  I left still not sold on Cagney-I love him in dramatic work, but here he oversells and overacts, and it's impossible to figure out what exactly his appeal to both Virginia and Amy are.  His Biff is too quick to punch someone out, and perhaps the film is too dated in gender roles in this regard, but there's nothing attractive or sweet about his ill temper.  The leading ladies, on the other hand, are both delicious.  De Havilland's Amy is a forward-thinking woman, frequently making passes at men through winks or provocative conversation that floors Biff (who assumes she isn't a "nice girl"). While this is shown to be a bluff later in the film sort of dampening Amy (wouldn't it have been grand if she actually believed the things she said-can you imagine someone like de Havilland playing such a character and not passing it off to, say, Joan Crawford or Tallulah Bankhead?), it's still such a rich character choice and easily brings about the film's best moments.  Rita Hayworth, in a smaller part (she became a major star after this picture, though), is wonderful as a tart who constantly flirts with different men just to sort of throw them off and keeps her options open.  Hayworth was a fine dramatic actress (seriously-I've developed such a love affair with her lately), but here she nails the comedic role that was originally intended for Ann Sheridan (who also benefited from turning down this role, as she went on to star in Kings Row and get top billing, a film that would win a Best Picture nomination and be arguably the most important of her career).  These two women save the picture from it being a totally toss-away rom-com from the 1940's.

The film received a sole Oscar nomination, for Best Scoring.  The film is not a musical in the traditional sense, and most of the most memorable music in the film was not originally intended for the picture.  The movie has a delightful moment before the credits where it encouraged the theatrical audience in a singalong over the classic "The Band Played On" by John F. Palmer, perhaps my favorite moment in the picture after de Havilland's scandalous winking (you know I joined in), but all of the other songs sort of find themselves as background noise, and really don't factor into the scoring of the picture at all. Overall, it's a strange nomination for the movie, and you'd think it would have gotten something like Sound or Screenplay instead if it was going to make it with Oscar.

Those are my thoughts on this charming, though relatively frivolous way to spend an evening-how about yours?  Are you a fan of James Cagney, or are you like me where you don't get his comedic appeal?  Who would you choose-Olivia de Havilland and Rita Hayworth?  And do you wish more movies would have random singalongs over the credits?  Share in the comments!

OVP: The Doorway to Hell (1930)

Film: The Doorway to Hell (1930)
Stars: Lew Ayres, Dorothy Mathews, James Cagney, Leon Janney
Director: Archie Mayo
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Story)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Frequently when reviewing older movies you run into an issue that's quite hard to get around that I call "The Stagecoach Paradox."  Stagecoach, a classic John Ford western from 1939, is a wonderfully-constructed film starring John Wayne, Claire Trevor, and Thomas Mitchell that would essentially make all of them major stars, particularly Wayne.  Looking back on the film, though, you realize that you've seen this movie before even if you haven't.  This is because Ford's original film, so beloved in its day, has been ripped off countless times, frequently even by Ford himself.  As a result you develop a respect for it rather than a love for it since you've already had the treat of your first classic western and this is just a retread of that, even if it came first.  This is part of the problem with Archie Mayo's mafia drama The Doorway to Hell-it inspired so many Public Enemies and Scarfaces that were to come (and were improvements on the original format), that while you have deep respect for the innovation, you can't quite love it because you know something coming later will be so much better.

(Spoilers Ahead) Perhaps the central problem that comes out of Doorway to Hell is that it has the wrong man headlining the picture.  Lew Ayres was coming off a leading role in Greta Garbo's The Kiss and had landed the role of his career in All Quiet on the Western Front (which also came out in 1930), so it made sense that when he was loaned to Warner Brothers that he take the lead over a contract player at the studio named James Cagney.  Cagney, of course, would go on to be one of the greatest stars of the 1930's and 40's, and would film one of the most famous scenes in all of cinema the next year in a movie very similar to Doorway to Hell (for those who are wondering what I'm talking about, google Mae Clarke, Public Enemy, and grapefruit and you'll get the gist).

Cagney totally steals the film from Ayres, who is too much of a choir boy and too naive (his girlfriend is cheating on him with Cagney) to be believable as a man that could control a city.  Cagney, on the other hand, has nuance and subtlety in his corner, and plays every scene with the knowledge that people are going to focus on him.  In a film where almost all of the other actors had limited or no careers (leading lady Dorothy Mathews made almost no other films and eventually moved to be a TV producer when stardom never happened), it's Cagney that steals the picture.

This is no fault on the screenplay, though, which is actually pretty strong and occasionally quite good, especially when we see Lew Ayres' Louie return to his haunt, realizing that there's no escaping his past misdeeds, well aware that he can't have his cake and eat it too, no matter how noble his intentions are for his bride.  But Ayres is too broad in the role, even by the acting standards of the day (sound was still really new to actors and many were still reliant on using facial expressions and body language to convey emotion), and Cagney isn't in enough of the film to save it.

It's also worth noting that the side characters, so critical to the film's success, don't have enough differentiation so we don't know whom to actually trust.  One of the neater things about the screenplay is that it leaves certain things unresolved (we don't know precisely what happens to either Dorothy Mathews or James Cagney, for example), but that also means that the deceptive characters are difficult to keep track of, particularly toward the end when we can't tell who is gloating and who is feeling empathy for Louie.  Still, this is that rare film where the acting sucks down the screenplay, which is the finest attribute of the film, which thankfully Oscar was smart enough to notice.

Those are my thoughts on this film-what are yours?  Do you also find yourself wishing Cagney was the lead rather than Ayres?  Do you also find movies frequently suffer from "The Stagecoach Paradox?"  And what's your favorite 1930's gangster film?  Share in the comments!

AFI's 25 Greatest Actors, Part 1

This Article is Part of a 15-Year Anniversary series commemorating the American Film Institute’s 25 Greatest Stars.  For the Actresses, click the numbers for Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

One of the things that I learned with the 25 Greatest Actresses list is that I still have a lot to learn when it comes to actresses, but for whatever reason (perhaps the length of their careers or the fact that Best Picture nominees tend to have lead actors), I do considerably better at catching the classics of the most famous actors.  In fact, there is no actor on the list that I haven’t seen one of their pictures.  Still, though, there are a number of actors that I am missing a major part of their filmography, and I’m sure this is the case for you as well, so share along in the comments.  We’ll investigate the first eight men on the list, and then explore the remaining men, the “just-misses,” and the living nominees all throughout the next week or two.  Without further adieu…

1. Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957)

Oscar Nominations: Three, with a win for Best Actor in 1951’s The African Queen

Probably Best Known Today For: Being the tough-but-sensitive man who charmed Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca.  It’s amazing how a gigantic career can come down to a single role, and indeed Bogie has had a pretty impressive set of characters throughout his career, but Casablanca and his trench-coated Rick is easily what he is most identified with today.

My Favorite Performance: Casablanca is my favorite movie, and there’s really no beating Bogart in it-his Rick is a lost soul content with living in his memories, until they come back to bring him into the present.  It’s a wonderful performance in the greatest of films.  That being said, I do adore Bogie in general when he’s playing a guy skirting the law, and any of his noir films are toward the high end on my personal list.

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I’ve seen most of his bigger films (The Maltese Falcon, African Queen, Key Largo, Sabrina, Treasure of Sierra Madre, and of course Casablanca), but I have somehow never gotten around to In a Lonely Place where he charms the eternally sexy Gloria Grahame, despite it being high on my personal to-do list.

2. Cary Grant (1904-1986)

Oscar Nominations: Two, for Penny Serenade and None But the Lonely Heart; Grant also picked up an Honorary Oscar at the 42^nd Academy Awards

Probably Best Known Today For: Being the guy that inspired George Clooney (kidding, kidding, though Clooney frequently gets compared to him).  Grant’s known to modern audiences for his class, handsomeness, and consistent charm, even if they’ve never seen one of his movies-everyone is enchanted with Cary Grant.

My Favorite Performance: Like all things in life, it’s a tough call between Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story, though in this case I’m going to lean toward Philadelphia (the opposite of what I did with Katharine Hepburn in the same circumstance, for the record).  His C.K. Dexter Haven is just mischievous enough to charm everyone on the screen, and I find him as a cad more believable than as a loveable nerd.

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: My mom’s favorite actor is Cary Grant, and so I’ve seen basically every major Cary Grant film.  I’ve seen all of the films with the Hepburns, all of the films with Hitchcock, and most all of his screwball comedies.  Looking through his filmography, though, I do notice two misses: His Girl Friday his bouncy film with Rosalind Russell in 1940 and the previous year’s Gunga Din with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

3. James Stewart (1908-1997)

Oscar Nominations: Stewart won five Oscar nominations in his career, winning Best Actor for 1940’s The Philadelphia Story.  He also went on to win the Life Achievement Award at the 57^th Academy Awards.

Probably Best Known Today For: Being the guy that inspired Tom Hanks (again, kidding, kidding, though Hanks frequently gets compared to him).  Stewart’s the affable, awe shucks nice guy that everyone seems to admire.  A war hero in his day and one of the great stars, he’s best known to modern audiences for that Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life with Donna Reed (you know it-every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings…)

My Favorite Performance: I’m going to go against type here.  I do think Stewart is sensational in It’s a Wonderful Life, but there’s no comparing to what he did in Vertigo-it’s so jarring seeing the nicest guy onscreen play a ruthless, obsessed man torturing poor Kim Novak.  It’s Hitchcock’s best film, and Stewart’s as well.

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I’ve seen most of his biggest hits (again-most people have, which is why the comments should be interesting here if you’ve only missed one or two films).  I’d probably go with Anatomy of a Murder, the only of his Oscar-nominated work I haven’t gotten around to, but I’ve seen basically every other major film he was in.

4. Marlon Brando (1924-2004)

Oscar Nominations: Brando nabbed eight nominations in his career, winning for 1954’s On the Waterfront and 1972’s The Godfather.

Probably Best Known Today For: Being the greatest actor of all-time?  At least to some people that is (myself included).  For others, he is one of those names you throw out when you try to benchmark great acting like Meryl and de Niro.  And of course, he is running through the street screaming "Stella!" and constantly making people offers they cannot refuse.

My Favorite Performance: Brando is so good so often he's one of those rare actors who could genuinely equal Katharine Hepburn's four wins with me for the OVP.  For me, though, he will always be the sexiest man in the history of the screen, seducing everything in his path in A Streetcar Named Desire, in my opinion a tie for the greatest performance of all-time (with Vivien Leigh...in A Streetcar Named Desire).

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I've seen most of Brando's biggest films because he's my favorite actor, but I've never seen his musical debut in Guys and Dolls-that would probably be the one with the biggest intrigue around it.

5. Fred Astaire (1899-1987)

Oscar Nominations: Astaire only received one competitive Oscar nomination in his career (for The Towering Inferno of all things), but did receive an Honorary Award in 1950, presented to him of course by Ginger Rogers.

Probably Best Known Today For: Being the classiest hoofer of them all.  His longtime partnership with Ginger Rogers onscreen is the stuff of Hollywood legend, and even if you're someone who has never seen an Astaire/Rogers film (and I insist that you rectify this situation immediately), you'll know that Astaire is one of those actors who's "gotta dance."

My Favorite Performance: Astaire was an extremely classy dude onscreen, but he, like Rogers, frequently played himself.  I'm going to go with Top Hat in a slight nod over Swing Time (since that's always been my favorite of their films, despite modern enthusiasm being for the latter film).  Funny Face is also wonderful, but I can't list it because the age difference between Hepburn and Astaire has always given me the heebie jeebies (though it's a marvelous movie otherwise).

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: Astaire is the first actor on this list where I can say that I've got some work to do.  While I've hit a couple of his major films with Rogers, films like The Gay Divorcee and Follow the Fleet are still in the ole Netflix queue.  However, some later Astaire (including Easter Parade, The Band Wagon, and Daddy Long Legs) is still on the to view list, so this would need to be a marathon.

6. Henry Fonda (1905-1982)

Oscar Nominations: Just two for acting, but boy did he make them count: The Grapes of Wrath, for which he lost to Jimmy Stewart, and On Golden Pond, for which he won Best Actor.  He was also nominated for producing 12 Angry Men and won an Honorary Award in 1980.

Probably Best Known Today For: Being the father of an acting dynasty, as well as his work in The Grapes of Wrath, a move most high school students will sit through at some point (and he's also in 12 Angry Men, another high school movie staple).  His larger career isn't quite as consistently noteworthy as Stewart, Grant, or Brando, but the highlights are known by pretty much anyone.

My Favorite Performance: I feel really weird not listing Grapes of Wrath (Fonda is just wonderful in that movie), but for me there is no topping cold-hearted Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West, the greatest western ever made, and one where Fonda plays duly against type as a ruthless villain being challenged by good guy Charles Bronson.

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I've seen most of his major hits, so if we're ranking by fame I'd probably have to go with something on the B-roster of Fonda movies like The Ox-Bow Incident or The Wrong Man, but personal preference would be for The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, which was one of my grandpa's favorite movies and one that I have oddly never seen.

7. Clark Gable (1901-1960)

Oscar Nominations: Gable received three, winning for 1934's It Happened One Night.

Probably Best Known Today For: Not giving a damn.  It's amazing how a single scene or line can make someone immortal amongst the public, but while Gable was once the King of Hollywood and starred in multiple classic film roles, his work as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind will eternally be the film that he is most famous for with the general populace.

My Favorite Performance: This is a tough call, as I really love Gable in It Happened One Night, and he's probably my fourth favorite performance in GWTW.  Still, fourth in GWTW is toward the top of my personal list, and so I'll go with his "not a gentleman" work in that movie.  What I love about that film, even today, is how desperately modern both he and Vivien Leigh's work seems-the script may be dated, but the performances could work just as well today.

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: For some reason, I have never gotten around to Gable's third Oscar-nominated performance in Mutiny on the Bounty (this is also one of the extremely rare Best Picture winners that I've never seen).  That would definitely be toward the top of the list, and I honestly think it actually is-I want to say it's in my next ten movies on my Netflix queue.

8. James Cagney (1899-1986)

Oscar Nominations: Cagney received three nominations in his career, winning for 1942's Yankee Doodle Dandy

Probably Best Known Today For: He's not as well-known today, if we're being honest.  This was one of the more surprising elements of the AFI list not because Cagney didn't deserve to be on the list, or that I didn't expect him on the list (I did and would have), but because he's clearly the least well-known in the Top 10.  That said, Cagney's work today is probably most known due to his early gangster pictures.  People picture him holding a gun, not wanting to get caught, and cheering for him to get away.

My Favorite Performance: I mean, there's no really beating White Heat is there?  His demented Mama's boy is a startlingly real and powerful performance, and one that seems to get lost when you're listing the classic performances of the 1940's, but it shouldn't be.

Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I am going to say The Public Enemy.  Part of me thinks that I've actually seen this movie, but I'm not 100% certain if I have (I've seen a lot of movies...part of the reason that I started this blog was to keep track of them and my opinions on them)-maybe it's just that I've seen Cagney shove that grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face so many times that I feel like I've seen the movie.  Either way, that's the top of the list (...or, since it's Cagney, perhaps top of the world?).

Those are the first eight actors on our (what will be five-part) series on the AFI's 25 Greatest Actors list.  These are some of the most famous film stars of all-time, so I know you've got opinions on their best, worst, and the films you're most looking forward to seeing-share them in the comments!