OVP: How the West Was Won (1963)

Film: How the West Was Won (1963)

Stars: Carroll Baker, Lee J. Cobb, Henry Fonda, Carolyn Jones, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Robert Preston, Debbie Reynolds, James Stewart, Eli Wallach, John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Spencer Tracy, Walter Brennan, Agnes Moorehead, Thelma Ritter, Russ Tamblyn, Raymond Massey, Mickey Shaughnessy

Director: Henry Hathaway, John Ford, & George Marshall

Oscar History: 8 nominations/3 wins (Best Picture, Original Screenplay*, Film Editing*, Sound*, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Debbie Reynolds: click here to learn more about Ms. Reynolds (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We cannot do a month devoted to Debbie Reynolds without talking about one of the most famous scandals of the Classical Hollywood era, her relationship with Eddie Fisher.  Fisher was a major singer at the time, on-par with acts like Fabian and Elvis Presley in terms of his popularity, and even had his own hit television program.  The two were the equivalent of what today we'd think of as Zendaya & Tom Holland (or for you older people, Brad Pitt & Jennifer Aniston)-America's Sweethearts, the boy and girl next door who had married each other.  Their marriage was rocky when it wasn't on the front pages, though, with Fisher a serial philanderer, including an affair with Playboy Playmate Pat Sheehan.  But it was when he had an affair with Elizabeth Taylor, the rare celebrity at the time on-par with Reynolds & Fisher, that the entire world paid attention.  Taylor, who had recently been widowed after the death of producer Mike Todd, was best friends with Reynolds, but still ended up in bed with her husband.  The scandal was sensational, one of the biggest celebrity news stories of the decade, and it had bizarre implications for all involved.  Reynolds, of course, was canonized as the scorned woman, and would have five movies come out in 1959 alone.  Elizabeth Taylor, the mistress, normally would've been the one to pay the price in the public's eye, but she was fine career-wise.  Within a year she was clutching her first Oscar, and a few years later would become the highest-paid actress in film history (and the centerpiece of an equally-famous affair) on the set of Cleopatra.  Instead it was Eddie Fisher who actually paid a career price, with his show being cancelled and his music career largely being destroyed.  It's hard to grasp now, but at the time Fisher was as big of a deal as Reynolds & Taylor were...now, he's nothing but an asterisk compared to the two women, who famously years after they'd both left Fisher reconciled and even starred in a film written by Fisher & Reynolds' daughter Carrie.

(Spoilers Ahead) During the wake of the scandal, Reynolds got a lot of career mileage and a number of hit movies, one of the biggest being today's film How the West Was Won.  The movie is less a cohesive story, and more a series of vignettes that tell the tale of how the American West began as well as how it ended, but the centerpiece around the film is Reynolds, who despite not getting top-billing (it went alphabetically for all of the main stars) is the movie's main character as Lilith Prescott, a woman dragged to the wilderness by her parents (Moorehead & Malden), and then when they die, she ends up making the west her home, marrying a scoundrel (Peck) who ends up making good, and eventually settling in the West with her nephew (Peppard) after most of the rest of her family dies.  In the meantime, we get pirates (led by Walter Brennan), the growth of the railroad, and, oh yeah, the Civil War.  

The movie is BIG, and it's not afraid of it.  There's a reason it has three directors and 17 (not a typo, I counted) Oscar-nominated actors on the call sheet.  But the thing is-it's not very good.  None of the actors are giving particularly good performances, and given who they are, that's a crime.  The best in the cast might be...Wallach, only because he gets to play a villain?  Honestly, even that feels like a stretch to me.  It's more a cavalcade of cameos, each seemingly doing John Ford a favor by appearing in a movie that would be such a big hit it'd be a weird case of it being one of their signature movies of the 1960's despite only Reynolds being in very much of the picture.  It deals a lot with cliche, and trying to shove what would've been a miniseries today into a couple of hours of celluloid.

The film won eight Academy Award nominations, and they're a mixed bag, but definitely not all bad.  The movie's screenplay win is abject silliness (it barely runs together as a plot!), and the same can be said for the editors, who probably got this nomination because it was a novel concept to have unrelated stories start to blend this way, but just because it's unique doesn't mean it's good.  The art direction & costume nominations are better, but less inspired.  The art direction feels more a tribute to the beauty of nature in the film, which is definitely on-display (also, because this is shot in Cinerama there's a lot more art direction than you'd normally expect), and the costumes are fine though nothing stands out in particular.  It's the last three nominations that worked best and felt most-earned.  The film's cinematography, capturing the beauty of the west (lots of this was shot off a studio lot), and it also works really well in conjunction with the stunt and effects teams (the Civil War & river rapids sequences, in particular, are the stuff that makes you wonder why it's taken so long to get a Stunts Oscar).  This also works for the sound work, with a lot of the action set pieces feeling really in-your-face, and it works well with the film's high musical quotient.  And of course Alfred Newman's score, generally considered to be his best work, is spectacularly grand.  All-in-all, there's a lot of elements of a classic here...if only the movie itself were any good.

Call Northside 777 (1948)

Film: Call Northside 777 (1948)

Stars: James Stewart, Richard Conte, Lee J. Cobb, Helen Walker, Betty Garde

Director: Henry Hathaway

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the month of June 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.

The movies have always been fascinated by "things that are real."  You can go well into the Silent Era to movies like Saved from the Titanic, where actress Dorothy Gibson (who had been a real-life survivor of the tragedy) appeared in a depiction of the disaster in the dress she actually wore the night the ship sank (possibly the lost film I'd most want to see).  You see it well into the 21st Century, with movies like The 15:17 to Paris where the actual heroes of the 2015 Thalys train attack play themselves in the main roles.  This has always been a selling point in a movie, and it definitely was for Call Northside 777.  The first studio film to be shot entirely on location in Chicago, the movie tells the tale of a man wrongfully convicted of a murder.  The movie was shot with many scenes in the same places actually depicted in the film, and in one case, the actual inventor of the polygraph to administer a polygraph.  This likely titillated audiences of the time, feeling like they were watching a real criminal investigation play out in the same vein as a documentary.  Years later, we are not so lucky with what the end result was.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is centered around PJ McNeal (Stewart), a skeptical reporter who is assigned to look into the criminal conviction of Frank Wiecek (Conte), who was convicted of murdering a police officer 11 years earlier and is in the middle of a life sentence.  As McNeal investigates Wiecek, he gets to know his humanity, and understands that he can make an actual difference in his reporting, even if it started from the cynical vantage of just trying to sell newspapers.  He also begins to believe that he's innocent, and jumps through hoops to make sure that he is given another chance, particularly given the missing (and we learn soon, untruthful) witness Wanda Skutnik (Garde).  In the end, McNeal manages to get Wiecek out of jail, though it's worth noting that in some ways the damage is done for Wiecek.

This damage is something that I wish the film had spent more time upon.  This is framed as a story of redemption, of something good, but Frank Wiecek spent 11 years in prison for something he didn't do.  During that prison sentence, his mother went broke trying to get him out of jail, and his wife eventually divorced him upon his insistence (the final scene shows him greeting, nervously, her new husband...the man who wouldn't be there had he not been convicted).  This is touched upon, but it doesn't became a damning enough indictment given the messaging around this, and I wish it had been.  I can't imagine the Hays Code (or HUAC) would look kindly on a film that was making cops look like villains, but that's clearly what happened in this story-a miscarriage of justice that was continued by prejudice because of whom the murder victim was.

This lack of really strong perspective (in my opinion) leaves behind a staid film.  We have spent decades watching Law & Order or NCIS, so we know well enough about the different minutia of the criminal justice system, which here has to be part of the appeal (the public wouldn't have had this kind of insight), so I'm giving it some benefit of the doubt, but by sticking so closely to reality, we frequently don't get much intrigue.  Jimmy Stewart is one of the great actors of this era, and he's basically giving a half performance because the script isn't giving him enough to do.  Stewart still carries it through, as does Garde in the best supporting part, but this same year he was solving crimes in Rope with far more intrigue behind it.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai

OVP: The Glenn Miller Story (1954)

Film: The Glenn Miller Story (1954)

Stars: James Stewart, June Allyson, Harry Morgan, Charles Drake, George Tobias

Director: Anthony Mann

Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Original Screenplay, Sound*, Scoring)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on June Allyson: click here to learn more about Ms. Allyson (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In 1953, coming off of Remains to Be Seen, a crime musical that flopped badly at the box office, June Allyson was dropped from her contract with MGM.  This wasn't the end of June's career, though.  Allyson smartly made her first post-contract movie with her costar in the MGM hit The Stratton Story Jimmy Stewart in The Glenn Miller Story, which was a critical & commercial success (and our film today).  Allyson would reteam successfully with Stewart the following year in Strategic Air Command, and Alan Ladd in The McConnell Story (another war picture) the same year.  She'd even return to MGM for one last musical at the studio in The Opposite Sex (a musical remake of The Women that also has Joan Collins & Ann Sheridan) in 1956, but that would bomb badly, and by 1957 she'd be ready for a new chapter, which we'll get into next week.  But first, let's talk about one of the films that helped keep Allyson a leading woman throughout her late thirties, The Glenn Miller Story.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a (somewhat) accurate depiction of the life of Glenn Miller.  Miller might not be super well-known to the general public today, but in 1954 if you asked "who is Glenn Miller?" they would've looked like you in the same way  people would look at you today if you asked "who is Rihanna?"  Miller was a wildly successful big band leader in the 1930 & 40's, and we see that in this film as Jimmy Stewart plays him from his unsuccessful beginnings, including his unusual courtship of his wife Helen (Allyson), to eventual success, recording such standards as "Moonlight Serenade" and "Chattanooga Choo Choo" which would become the first-ever certified gold record.  The film ends where Glenn Miller's life did, with his plane going down during World War II into the English Channel, his final resting place still unknown to this day.

The movie is a part of my least-favorite subgenre, the musician biopic, one that has been pounded into the ground in recent years thanks to the success of the film Bohemian Rhapsody (we've got an upcoming one about Amy Winehouse while a Bob Marley biopic is still playing in most theaters).  So color me as surprised that I loved this movie.  It helps that Glenn Miller is one of my favorite recording artists.  My friend Drew, after I told him I was cooking while listening to Glenn Miller the other day said "how old are you???" but there's something about Miller's orchestrations that feed my soul.  Every moment of actual music in this picture is heaven.

But it's honestly the film itself that makes it work (I didn't like Respect with Aretha Franklin and I love Aretha's music).  I think it's primarily because of the way the film is constructed.  We don't need Miller to struggle with fame or a drug addiction-his story feels refreshing, particularly since it's unique (how many music superstars have died for their country?), and because Stewart & Allyson have a lot of fun with it.  Their courtship is silly & delightful, even if they're both too old for these parts, and as the film progresses, they do a really good job of showing us how bittersweet this love story's ending is going to be, knowing that it will end too soon, but that Miller's music will live on with countless lovers in the decades that follow.  Stewart is excellent (I love the way he conducts, showing that he loves Helen in a way that's different than being in love with music, but when they connect, it fills his heart), but Allyson is strong too.  Allyson didn't get enough credit as an actress during her career, but she's very good here, and the last few minutes, when she goes on a facial journey listening to her husband's arrangements, a special song just for her (for the last time), is beautiful.  Really well done on her part.

The film won three Oscar nominations, and two of them are impossible to argue with; I wasn't as enamored with the screenplay just because it was sometimes confusing at the beginning as to what Helen exactly saw in Glenn, but that's only a quibble because there's an Oscar at stake as it's otherwise solid.  But the scoring is divine-all of the Glenn Miller musical choices, particularly "Moonlight Serenade" and the way they show its evolution, are spectacular.  And the sound...I honestly was surprised how well this went.  I'm not one of those "it's a musical-it must have good sound!" people primarily because it downplays how great it can sound when you get it right-the sound here is rich, full, and captures all of the melancholy grandeur of Miller's music.  The scene where he plays while the enemy planes are dropping bombs near a still-enraptured audience...death be damned if the music is that enchanting.  What a terrific choice for an Oscar win.

OVP: The Stratton Story (1949)

Film: The Stratton Story (1949)

Stars: James Stewart, June Allyson, Frank Morgan, Agnes Moorehead

Director: Sam Wood

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Motion Picture Story*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on June Allyson: click here to learn more about Ms. Allyson (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We don't really think about this anymore, but one of the best aspects of the Classical Hollywood era was that, while they weren't really big on sequels (they had them, mind you, but the concept of a tentpole wasn't a thing), they did tend to milk cinematic pairings until they were no longer adored by the public.  Had Barbie been as big of a hit in 1949 as it was in 2023, the studios would've basically forced Margot Robbie & Ryan Gosling into another 3-4 more movies, knowing that the public would show up to cheer them on.  This is something that happened to June Allyson a lot, and honestly I wish studios would do more of now (I like capitalizing on movie stars more than I like capitalizing on franchises).  We talked about this initially with Van Johnson in Two Girls and a Sailor, but this week (and next week) we're going to focus on maybe the most-remembered of her pairings.  Even though she would ultimately make more movies with Johnson or Peter Lawford, June Allyson's most beloved pairing to modern audiences is probably with Jimmy Stewart.  The two made a trio of movies together, all of them big hits, and in the case of The Stratton Story, Allyson's favorite picture from her whole career.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie talks about now largely-forgotten baseball player Monty Stratton (Stewart), at one point a promising pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, who would end up sidelined during his prime after a freak accident where he accidentally shot himself in the right leg, forcing it to be amputated.  The film focuses on his career from the beginning to end, including being raised by a thorny mother (Moorehead) and being recruited by a sweet baseball scout (Morgan).  Along the way, he marries the love of his life Ethel (Allyson).  The movie spends a long time on his recovery, which is less physical and more emotional, until Monty decides to take his glove back to the baseball field, and remarkably stages a (true-to-real-life) minor league comeback, even as an amputee.

The movie won an Academy Award for Best Motion Picture Story, a category that's a little hard-to-understand to modern audiences, but essentially boils down to "best idea for a movie" and in that way, it generally works.  This is a movie film, one that tells the story of a hero who overcame the odds, and it does the best thing that biopics can do-it tells you a new tale of a person you didn't know about.  But it also doesn't really work.  The first hour of the film is a snore, giving us virtually nothing but repetition and basically feels like it's explaining the concept of baseball, which (I'm sorry) in 1949 was not something America needed a lesson upon.  So I'm in the middle on that statue, even if I understand why it happened.

The film's back half is much better, and easily to invest upon.  A broken man overcoming the odds is the subject of a lot of Jimmy Stewart's best films, and he definitely nails this part.  His boy-next-door charm plays well with Allyson's girl-next-door pluck, and I get why the studio saw not just the dollar signs at the box office, but also them playing off of one another and understood this was a formula worth repeating.  I just wish that they were in a stronger movie, especially in the first half.

2023 Saturdays with the Stars Recap

Yesterday we finished up our month with Kris Kristofferson, and today, we are putting the final cap on our "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood" season.  I will totally own this, our fifth season, is probably my favorite season we've done since Season 2 (when we tackled sex symbols), and maybe my favorite ever.  I knew going into this that westerns have always been one of my favorite genres, and getting to see such a wide array, including a lot of hidden gems that have been on the To Do list for a while, was an absolute treat.  But I didn't realize how many of the films would end up being downright classics, from Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy to some of the gorgeous westerns that Anthony Mann made with Jimmy Stewart, there are movies on this list that have quickly catapulted to my favorite westerns list, and I have even added a few already to my home collection.

The biggest thing that excited me, though, was how this really ended up being the tale of Hollywood, starting with The Big Trail and ending with Heaven's Gate, and how much of Classical & New Hollywood came in-between.  This has been the case in all of our seasons, but seeing it through the most American of genres, the western, it felt like I was hearing it for the first time.  We'll get into our sixth season, where we will be "Crowning America's Sweethearts," on Saturday, but one last time, take a look at some of the best from this season of "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood."

Favorite Performance from Each Star 

January: Gary Cooper, Man of the West

February: James Stewart, The Naked Spur

March: Gregory Peck, The Gunfighter

April: Marlene Dietrich, Witness for the Prosecution

May: Randolph Scott, Ride the High Country

June: Yul Brynner, Westworld

July: John Wayne, The Shootist

August: Franco Nero, Querelle

September: Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

October: Robert Redford, Barefoot in the Park

November: Sam Elliott, Molly and Lawless John

December: Kris Kristofferson, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

5 Favorite Performers (Alphabetical, and based solely on the films we watched as a collective & not on the rest of their careers)

Marlene Dietrich

Clint Eastwood

Robert Redford

James Stewart

John Wayne

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Marlene Dietrich, Witness for the Prosecution

Clint Eastwood, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

James Stewart, The Man from Laramie

James Stewart, The Naked Spur

John Wayne, The Shootist

12 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

The Big Country

Destry Rides Again

A Fistful of Dollars

For a Few Dollars More

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

High Plains Drifter

The Naked Spur

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Ride the High Country

Westworld

Winchester 73

Witness for the Prosecution

Top 12 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Stars...and Yes, Alphabetical)

Ellen Burstyn, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Dan Duryea, Winchester 73

Mariette Hartley, Ride the High Country

Burl Ives, The Big Country

Katy Jurado, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Diane Ladd, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Elsa Lanchester, Witness for the Prosecution

Charles Laughton, Witness for the Prosecution

Una O'Connor, Witness for the Prosecution

Lee van Cleef, For a Few Dollars More

Lee van Cleef, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Eli Wallach, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

OVP: The Shootist (1976)

Film: The Shootist (1976)

Stars: John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, James Stewart, Richard Boone, John Carradine, Sheree North

Director: Don Siegel

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the 1970's, John Wayne as a persona was not something the hip, New Hollywood cinema had an obvious fit for, but the actor was bankable & kept working.  True Grit had been a proper hit, and he actually ended up acting for much of the decade while other headliners of his generation like Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart had to sit back and take supporting parts.  Films like Big Jake, The Cowboys, McQ, and Rooster Cogburn (a sequel to True Grit) all made money, and it was pretty clear at this point that it wasn't going to be changing tastes that eventually stopped John Wayne, but instead Father Time.  That came to pass in 1976 with The Shootist.  Wayne once again donned his cowboy hat and spurs, but this would be the last time that he would.  Fittingly, in many ways it recalls a film that he once turned down (The Gunfighter), and stars a host of major names of the past to watch him in his final ride.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Shootist takes place over the course of a single week, and starts with gunfighter JB Brooks (Wayne) finding out from his physician, Doc Hostetler (Stewart) that he is dying of cancer, and will soon die of that if he doesn't go out in a blaze of glory.  The film then becomes a series of vignettes, with Brooks meeting with a number of people from his past, many of whom are trying to profit off of their connections with a famous gunslinger since he will no longer be able to gain from it himself.  During this time, he lives in a boarding house run by Bond Rogers (Bacall), a widowed mother of a young man named Gillom (Howard) who is fascinated by Brooks' history of violence and death.  As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Brooks will not go down to cancer, but instead (in a very rare moment for a John Wayne film, as the actor only died a handful of times onscreen during his fifty-year career) he is killed in a gunfight, one that hopefully turns off Gillom (who flees rather than engages, despite his obsession with this type of violence) and protects the next generation from the mistakes of the past.

The Shootist on its merits is an oddly-structured film.  The vignettes take a bit to get used to, particularly given that you rarely can tell which characters are going to stick around and which you need to invest into, and honestly, because in many cases actors like John Carradine & Harry Morgan feel less like they are paying tribute to the film itself, and more are there marveling at Wayne, doing his final ride.  That morbid curiosity, quite frankly, is what makes The Shootist worth something.  If you take it just as a movie, it's okay, but forgettable.  But understanding that Wayne, one of the most important figures of the Old Hollywood era, was coming to an end (in many ways taking that era with him), something that Wayne himself likely understood given his age, it makes the film a lot more powerful.  It helps that Wayne is very solid in this movie, playing the part with a type of desperation, a type of bargaining, that feels unusual for the two-dimensional actor, giving a fine performance (a worthier performance to give him an Oscar for than True Grit if the Academy had been inclined).

Wayne never made a movie again.  Contrary to common belief, Wayne wasn't battling cancer when this film was made, though he did struggle with a serious case of influenza during the filming of the movie.  In 1979, though, he was afflicted with it when he was given the task of handing the Best Picture Oscar to The Deer Hunter (a movie, let's be honest, the conservative Wayne probably loathed), and if you look at the clip you can see a visibly shaken Wayne, getting a standing ovation (which in those days of the Academy were quite rare) while longtime colleagues like Gregory Peck & Laurence Olivier look on the verge of tears.  Wayne opened the presentation, a little winded and his voice breaking just slightly, with "(Oscar) and I are both a little weather-beaten, but we're both still here, and plan to be around for a whole lot longer."  The Hollywood icon would be dead just 9 weeks later.

With us finishing John Wayne month, the quintessential cowboy in our year devoted to the leading stars of westerns, next month we're going to move into a new chapter in our series.  For the final five months of 2023, we'll focus on actors who made their name in westerns during the New Hollywood era, when the western went through a transformation and would eventually fall out-of-fashion.  We'll start with an actor who who would become synonymous with the western, despite hailing from a place far from the American West.

Destry Rides Again (1939)

Film: Destry Rides Again (1939)

Stars: Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart, Mischa Auer, Charles Winninger, Brian Donleavy, Una Merkel

Director: George Marshall

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Marlene Dietrich: click here to learn more about Ms. Dietrich (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Since we took last weekend off due to the Easter holiday, we're doubling-up with Marlene this week to give this star her full menu of Saturday's.  You might be wondering at this point "when are we going to get to the westerns?" and you'd be right to do so-for the first decade of Dietrich's career, she largely eschewed the genre, and was focusing on continuing to make large-scale epics with (and then without) the skilled hand of Josef von Sternberg, and by 1939 her celebrity was going out of style.  She was one of the major stars in 1938 listed as Box Office Poison alongside people like Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, & Katharine Hepburn.  Like these legends, Dietrich would prove that she was not box office poison, and in short-order, when she took an against-type role in a Universal Pictures' western called Destry Rides Again, where she would play a saloon girl.  This was against type for both she and her leading man, Jimmy Stewart (Stewart, our star in February, would not be a huge fixture in westerns until the 1950's & 60's...he actually wouldn't do another western until Winchester 73 in 1950, and this was the first time he'd worn spurs onscreen).  Though she had to have a pay cut to do the role, the film would revive her career-a huge hit with both critics & audiences, it got her a smash song on the radio ("See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have," which would become a staple in her cabaret act years later), and opened up a new genre for her that she'd continue to explore for several years: the western.

(Spoilers Ahead) The town of Bottleneck is run by a lawless group of men, and the powers-that-be intend to keep it that way when they appoint Wash Dimsdale (Winninger), the town drunk, as the new sheriff.  Saloon owner Kent (Donlevy) thinks that this is the end of his problems with the law, but Dimsdale has an ace-up-his-sleeve in the form of Tom Destry, Jr. (Stewart), the son of a legendary lawman who comes to town as Dimsdale's new deputy.  Destry is competent, honorable, & intent on following the law...all of which are anathema to Kent, and initially to his beautiful saloon gal girlfriend Frenchy (Dietrich).  But slowly, it becomes clear the town needs to uproot Kent and his crew, and even Frenchy understands this (as she also realizes that she's in love with Tom).  The film ends with a riot, as the women of the community decide to end the violence by subduing Kent's gang, but in the process both Kent & Frenchy are killed in a shootout, thus ending Tom's relationship with the reformed singer.  The film ends with him likely marrying a different (more respectable) girl who has long pined for him as a wagon of kids passes by, singing one of Frenchy's songs showing her legend will live on.

Destry is a comedy despite that rather somber ending, and it's quite well-done largely because of the chemistry between Dietrich & Stewart.  The two allegedly had an affair (Peter Bogdonavich claimed later that Dietrich confided in him that she had to have an abortion as a result of her affair with Stewart), and there's a mountain of heat between the two, with Stewart playing the hapless, awe-shucks fella to Dietrich's more seasoned sexuality.  It's dynamite-Destry Rides Again occasionally has plot issues (maybe one too many side characters), but that central romance between the two main characters is electric...I wanted to watch Dietrich & Stewart flirting for hours afterward.

This was not the first film that Marlene Dietrich sang in, nor would it be the last, but we can't have a month devoted to Dietrich without at least mentioning her very successful side hustle as a singer, which would become her primary gig in the 1950's when she would largely leave movies in favor of her wildly successful cabaret act (which would feature arrangements by a very young Burt Bacharach).  Dietrich's range wasn't big (she's certainly not, say, Jeanette MacDonald if you want to pick one of her 1930's contemporaries), but it's intoxicating.  I love Dietrich's voice and songs ("Cherche la Rose" is my favorite), and am so glad that she found this niche in the movies where it could last forever.

The Man from Laramie (1955)

Film: The Man from Laramie (1955)

Stars: James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Crisp, Cathy O'Donnell, Alex Nicol

Director: Anthony Mann

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Jimmy Stewart: click here to learn more about Mr. Stewart (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We've jumped about a bit with Stewart, last week discussing some of the films he made in the late-1950's with Alfred Hitchcock, attempting to escape in some respects the persona with which he'd long been associated.  This week, we're still in the mid-1950's, but I want to discuss a bit what happened in the latter half of Stewart's career.  Today's film was his last movie with Anthony Mann, but it was hardly his final western.  In the decades that followed, that was mostly what Stewart would make, but with less assured results.  The actor worked steadily throughout the 1960's & 1970's, but usually in cameos that traded on his star power.  More so, he appeared in flops, including an ill-fated eponymous television show (did you know there was a Jimmy Stewart sitcom in the 1970's?!?).  He made only two classics during this period, both of which starred John Wayne, both of which were westerns, and one of which is a personal favorite (hence why we aren't ending with it): The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Shootist.  Today, though, we're going to discuss Stewart's eighth and final film with Anthony Mann, The Man from Laramie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie follows Will Lockhart (Stewart), who is delivering supplies from Laramie to Coronado, a desolate western town, while also trying to find the man who led to Apaches killing his brother by selling them guns.  Concurrently, we have a wealthy landowner named Alec Waggoman (Crisp) who is haunted by the thought that someone is going to kill his ne'er-do-well son Dave (Nicol), whom he loves but cannot control.  Dave after shooting many of Will's mules after he mistakenly takes salt from one of Alec's lakes, gets into a fist fight with him, and while most of the town wants Will to leave, he wants to find the gun runner who led to his brother's death.  He ends up in a course collision with much of the Waggoman family, including their attractive niece Barbara (O'Donnell) and a hired hand Vic Hansbro (Kennedy) who is jealous of Dave since Vic has been truly loyal to Alec.  As we continue, it becomes clear that Dave & Vic were the reasons for Will's brother dying, and both end up dead before the credits roll, though neither by the hand of Will Lockhart, who doesn't have the stomach for cold-blooded murder.

The movie is glorious, and that starts with the cinematography.  Shot by 18-time Oscar nominee Charles Lang, this was one of the first westerns shot on CinemaScope, the film is beautiful, desert shots (such as the gorgeous final shootout between Stewart & Kennedy), the movie looks sensational, and is a fitting end to Mann & Stewart's partnership.  Stewart is once again excellent in this mold, learning a bit from his previous iterations as a cowboy by leaning into the "last ride of a legend" motif.  You know from the opening scenes that he's going to end this standing tall, but also that he will never rest, a wandering spirit of the west.  The film suffers in its supporting actors, particularly with a miscast O'Donnell & Crisp, but Stewart's performance and all of the technical aspects are first rate, and I loved the title track.

Jimmy Stewart, as I mentioned above, continued making movies, some of them successfully, well into the late 1980's, though he worked sparingly.  The only really important movie of his post-1960 era was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which is his best western and brought him face-to-face with John Wayne.  I wrote about this the first time I saw it ten years ago, and it's only grown in my estimation since then as one of the great movies of the year, and one of the bitterest endings in all of Classical Hollywood.  Next month, we're going to talk about another actor whose modern mythos is associated with a gentle, kind figure, one that Oscar also noticed, but whose fame throughout the 1950's came from wearing a cowboy hat.

OVP: The Naked Spur (1953)

Film: The Naked Spur (1953)

Stars: James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker, Millard Mitchell

Director: Anthony Mann

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Jimmy Stewart: click here to learn more about Mr. Stewart (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

His work with Anthony Mann opened up a new chapter in Jimmy Stewart's career, and one that led to far more interesting films being made by the actor in the 1950's than he had made in the 1940's.  This included Anatomy of a Murder in 1959, which dealt with the subject of rape (groundbreaking for its time), and won Stewart his fifth & final Oscar nomination.  But more importantly in film history, this is the decade when he worked repeatedly with Alfred Hitchcock.  Stewart's relationship with Hitchcock actually preceded the 1950's, when he appeared in 1948's Rope for the director, but critics at the time were divided on the film, and on Stewart in the lead role (I tend to agree with them that he is poorly chosen, and perhaps a star with more natural sexuality onscreen like John Garfield would've been a more suitable choice).  However, his work in the 1950's is harder to dismiss.  Between 1954 and 1958, he made Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo, an enviable list from the standpoint of 2022 even if it wasn't quite as glowing in 1959.  It's hard to believe now, but Vertigo, which is considered by many to be the greatest film ever made (and features Stewart in what is likely his best acting performance), was disliked by critics at the time.  While there were hiccups critically & commercially for Stewart in the decade, it's hard not to look at what he did in the 1950's and think of it as the best qualitative chapter of his career, and that includes our movie today, the chilling The Naked Spur.

(Spoilers Ahead) In the wake of the Civil War, Howard Kemp (Stewart) chances upon Jesse Tate (Mitchell), a grizzled prospector, and he makes a deal with him.  If he can help him find the man he's looking for, Ben Vandergroat (Ryan), he will give him $20.  As they move, they come across first Roy Anderson (Meeker, brilliantly sexy in this role & threatening to steal the entire movie in all of his scenes), a morally questionable former cavalryman, and then they come across both Vandergroat & his female companion Lina Patch (Leigh).  It is revealed at this point that Howard tricked Jesse, as Ben is worth far more than $20...there's a $5000 reward for his capture, and so, after some debate, Jesse, Howard, & Roy decide to split the money by bringing Ben into town, getting their reward and letting him hang in the process.  Along the way, though, they face the difficulty of Ben pitting them against one another, and Lina, who believes in Ben's innocence, trying to convince them to stop the endeavor entirely.

The Naked Spur feels like a setup for a western, and indeed what I just profiled is only about 30 minutes into a 90-minute movie.  But it's worth noting that the film doesn't take the easy way out here.  While there are technically other actors who show up after this in very small, extra work, but instead remains these five performers, as we never actually get to town & see them collecting the reward.  Instead what we get is a chamber play of sorts, filled with psychological drama, betrayal, and trauma, as we learn that Howard was once betrayed by the woman he loved & lost his ranch, which is what he's trying to get back with this arrest.  It works really well playing this as a bottle episode of a western, us never leaving the shifting dynamics of these five as they learn more about each other and shift alliances, frequently to their doom.  Westerns almost never got nominated for writing Oscars in the 1940's & 50's...it's a testament to how perfectly this is structured that this one did.

I had planned on introducing Stewart this week with Hitchcock because you can't discuss Stewart without discussing Hitchcock, but I was surprised by how clear the parallels are between his Howard Kemp and Scottie Ferguson, his character in Vertigo.  Both are obsessed with women who betray them, both are given the opportunity to be with a more conventional woman who genuinely loves him, and both want something that they know is impossible.  Plus our love interest is Janet Leigh, star of Hitchcock's most famous film Psycho!  Unlike Scottie, Howard ends up with the woman who loves him in this movie, and it works, but it's a question mark if that will be how this ends, and that tension is brought on by the way that Stewart plays Howard, loose, angry, & miserable...it's hard to see much of George Bailey behind an actor who was clearly stretching his public persona, and doing it beautifully.

Winchester 73 (1950)

Film: Winchester 73 (1950)

Stars: James Stewart, Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea, Stephen McNally, Rock Hudson

Director: Anthony Mann

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Jimmy Stewart: click here to learn more about Mr. Stewart (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Frequently with legendary actors, we don't think of their careers as having lulls, but with Jimmy Stewart, this was the case by 1950.  Though he starred in what would ultimately be the role he was best-remembered for in 1946 (George Bailey in the Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life), the film had a mixed result at the box office and actually was considered a flop when it first ran.  The next few years brought about movies that are considered to be classics today (specifically Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and the film noir classic Call Northside 777), but it was clear a new generation of actors was replacing Stewart, who had not really had a hit film that had captured the public imagination since before the war.  That changed in 1950, though, when Stewart's career opened a new door.  Stewart made what would end up being his first of eight films with Anthony Mann, which would largely be critical & commercial successes throughout the 1950's, and would reimagine the war hero and Frank Capra's everyman type as a classic cowboy, giving him a spot as one of the most important western stars of Hollywood's Golden Age. The film that started this collaboration was Winchester 73.

(Spoilers Ahead) Winchester 73 is one of many, many big screen takes on the famed Dodge City myth, and starts with Lin McAdam (Stewart) and Dutch Henry Brown (McNally) in a shooting contest to win a famed Winchester 73, the best gun in the west.  Lin wins, but is stood up by Dutch in his apartment and has the Winchester 73 stolen from him.  Thus ensues a chase, which involves both men meeting up with a variety of figures, including a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold named Lola (Winters), Waco Johnnie (Duryea), a wild-eyed bandit who kills Lola's boyfriend to be with her, and a group of Native Americans led by Rock Hudson of all people as Young Bull (a case of redface that I didn't know happened until I saw his name buried in the opening credits, one of Hudson's very early films before his eventual breakout in 1954's Magnificent Obsession).  As the film goes, we realize that Lin & Dutch are brothers, and Lin is still angry about Dutch murdering their father years earlier after their dad refused to provide cover for Dutch after a bank robbery.  The film ends with Lin killing Dutch with the titular gun, their feud now ended.

I really liked Winchester 73, I'm going to be honest, and two films into Stewart's partnership with Mann (I watched this month's out of order) I'm thrilled by the movies that they made together.  This film doesn't quite hit the mark of an all-time western classic (the stakes are there, but it doesn't have the harrowing nature that something like Shane or The Searchers would bring to their final showdowns), but it's close.  There's something so magnetic about Stewart in this role.  He's not a natural cowboy.  The "awe shucks" charm that he brought to something like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington isn't absent here, but it adds a mystery to him.  He's kind, but capable of great violence.  Stewart plays with this well, making his Lin a man of honor, but a man who is foremost set on his mission.  It's a great juxtaposition, and likely why the public was drawn to him; he struck a different, more intelligent chord than other western figures like John Wayne & Gary Cooper in the same era.

The rest of the film works really well too.  Sadly we are deprived of a song (side note for those who are not well-versed on westerns of this era-they almost always had a great ballad associated with them sung by someone like Tex Ritter or Frankie Laine), but the cinematography from William Daniels (who won an Oscar for The Naked City) is splendid, crystal clear & deliciously shot in medium close-up.  There's a moment about halfway the movie where Jimmy Stewart sees a just-waking up Shelley Winters, her cleavage as low as you could get it in 1950, and you see the lust before he remembers he's a man of honor all in one take-it's a great moment, and indicative of the kind of knowingness that Mann & Daniels would frequently bring to their work.  Duryea, whom I'm fast-realizing might be the best character actor of the Classical Hollywood era who never got an Oscar nomination, is marvelous as a late addition to the movie as Waco Johnnie, totally unnecessary to the plot, but he plays his villain as lusty & has better chemistry with Winters (who is good but, again, unnecessary, which she complained about when reflected on this movie and said (I'm paraphrasing, but not by much) "all these men were more interested in that gun than a beautiful blonde like me!") than Stewart or any of the other actors.  All-in-all, well worth your time if your first reaction to me saying "Jimmy Stewart" for a theme of westerns was one of surprise.

OVP: Vivacious Lady (1938)

Film: Vivacious Lady (1938)

Stars: Ginger Rogers, James Stewart, James Ellison, Beulah Bondi, Charles Coburn, Frances Mercer, Hattie McDaniel

Director: George Stevens

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Cinematography, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Jimmy Stewart: click here to learn more about Mr. Stewart (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to start our look at Jimmy Stewart during the period in the 1930's when he was still starting to make his way up in Hollywood.  During the 1930's, really leading into Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stewart was not thought of as a leading man so much as an actor to put in to prop up more famous, bankable actresses on the lots of major studios (despite being an MGM star at the time, Stewart rarely actually worked for MGM during this time frame).  This included a number of hit movies, including Born to Dance (with Eleanor Powell), You Can't Take It With You (with Jean Arthur), and Destry Rides Again (with Marlene Dietrich), one of his first cowboy roles.  We're going to focus not on Destry today (despite our month-long theme), but instead on Vivacious Lady (don't worry, Jimmy will done a cowboy hat next week), perhaps the best encapsulation of Stewart's pattern at the time-get a big hit where your leading actress gets more of the credit than you do...and also bedding her.  Though he was married to his wife Gloria for 45 years starting in 1949, affable, stuttering Jimmy Stewart was a lothario in his day, dating a variety of actresses, including Ginger Rogers, with whom according to Hollywood legend (how could you ever prove such a thing, but it is apocryphal gossip), he reportedly lost his virginity.  Stewart & Rogers would both move on (with Marlene Dietrich & Howard Hughes, respectively), but we still have Vivacious Lady to judge them by.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Peter Morgan, Jr. (Stewart) a botany professor who is also the son of a prominent university president, Peter Morgan Sr. (Coburn), and thus comes from a "respectable" family who won't like that he's started a romance with a nightclub singer named Francey (Rogers).  This doesn't stop him from eloping with her, though, before she's had a chance to meet her parents or before he's had a chance to break off his engagement to Helen (Mercer).  As a result, they sneak her in as a new botany student he's clearly pursuing, but Peter Sr. doesn't like this, despite the fact that his wife Martha (Bondi) is a fan of the young woman.  Entanglements ensue, including a marvelous little face-off between America's Sweetheart Rogers getting into a hair-pulling fight with Helen, before both Peter Jr. & Sr. have to chase their brides on a train, and win them back (which, of course, they do).

The movie's plot is mildly ridiculous.  Martha likes her daughter-in-law right away, and while Peter Sr. doesn't approve of her, it's clear that he can be won over without much work.  The "family doesn't approve" is a common trope in romantic-comedies, but it's clear in this movie that there's not a lot standing in Peter's way when it comes to getting to marry Francey.  The main reason to watch this is for the cast, which is a delight, but you wish they were in a better movie.  Rogers is not one of my favorites from this era (and Stewart is), but she outdoes him at pretty much every turn.  Romantic comedies were a place that Stewart did well, but when paired with more natural performers in the genre (not just Rogers, but someone like Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story) he occasionally got upstaged.  One of my favorite moments was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from Hattie McDaniel one year out from her Oscar win for Gone with the Wind, here playing a maid who gets a pretty lascivious comment from Rogers that I'm honestly surprised got past the censors (essentially Rogers hints strongly that a man might be worth giving up smoking for if he's good enough in bed).

The film won two Oscar nominations, neither of which are standouts (and neither is the one night club song that Rogers sings, even though it's the rare song in this era that wasn't a cover in the movie). Cinematography is kind of fun in the close-up shots of Rogers & Stewart teaching, her looking radiant and him clearly smitten (on and off screen) with the actress, but making pretty movie stars look pretty is just as much on the makeup department (and genetics) as it is cinematography, and here there's hardly much else to crow about.  The sound nomination is also odd.  There's only one musical (the aforementioned forgettable tune from Rogers), and the rest of the movie feels like it's just standard-issue sound work.  I'm convinced at this point of profiling dozens of Sound nominations that something changed in the 1960's & later in how this department picked their nominations, as no other category of this era has so many blasé head-scratchers.

Saturdays with the Stars: James Stewart

Each month of 2023 we are taking a look at a star who made their name in westerns, rustling cattle & riding horses during the brief time when cowboys ruled Hollywood.  Last month, we focused on Gary Cooper, the first talking cowboy of the Sound Era who would use the genre to stretch his stardom into the 1960's.  This month, we're going to focus on a contemporary of Cooper's whose stardom actually lasted even longer, though not quite as early.  A leading man in the mid-1930's, he would make countless westerns throughout his time in the spotlight, eventually spoofing his persona in his final role as a sharpshooting Great Dane (you read that right).  However, it is not the west, but Christmas that this actor remains a permanent force in in pop culture today.  This month's star is James Stewart.

James "Jimmy" Stewart was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, to a prominent local family.  He grew up in a deeply religious background, and was expected to take over the family hardware store after attending Princeton.  During his time at prep school, however, Stewart developed a fondness for the arts, particularly acting, and after Princeton he joined a summer stock program to the chagrin of his father.  He spent years doing bit parts in theater, even finding his way to Broadway, but this led him to Hollywood, where he began getting work in small roles in films like The Murder Man opposite Spencer Tracy and even getting a small part in the famed Thin Man movie series.  Though under contract at the time to MGM, it was with two other studios in 1938 that Stewart finally proved to movie executives exactly why they should bet on him.  In RKO's Vivacious Lady, he exhibited his romantic comedy chops against one of the biggest stars in Hollywood at the time (Ginger Rogers, who would be one of many romantic partners Stewart had during this time frame) and in Columbia's You Can't Take It With You, which won the Best Picture Oscar that year and would cement Stewart as a leading man.  

It would also introduce Stewart to Frank Capra, who would become one of his favorite directors, and would direct him in two of the best-remembered films of his early stardom: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life.  Stewart was a tough choice for me for this series, because I focus always on films that I have not seen before, and with Stewart-I've seen most of them, including all five of his Best Actor nominations & all of his outings with Alfred Hitchcock; I count him as one of my all-time favorite actors.  What I haven't seen a lot of, though, is Stewart's westerns.  With the exception of the John Ford classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stewart's long history as a cowboy in Hollywood remains something of a mystery to me, and so this month while we'll visit one movie that wasn't a western, we'll spend most of our time trying to fill the gaps of Stewart's career on the range.

OVP: Of Human Hearts (1938)

Picture: Of Human Hearts (1938)

Stars: Walter Huston, James Stewart, Beulah Bondi, Gene Reynolds, Charles Coburn, John Carradine

Director: Clarence Brown

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actress-Beulah Bondi)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

We are continuing our look at some of the films of 1938 today with Of Human Hearts, a Clarence Brown religious melodrama from the era.  This was still in the time period where Jimmy Stewart, who would become one of the most important figures in Hollywood for much of the next 25 years, was finding his footing, not getting top billing even in movies where arguably he was the most important figure, and where it's clear the studio didn't really understand what they had, giving him movies that, for my money, were totally below him.  Of Human Hearts is a movie that probably resonated at the time because it was serious & about serious, run-of-the-mill people, but in retrospect it totally reads differently, and is honestly a genuinely bad movie from my perspective because it has no concept of its characters.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Jason Wilkins (Reynolds as a boy, Stewart as an adult) who is raised by a stern preacher Rev. Ethan Wilkins (Huston), one who practices what we'd consider now to be child abuse but at the time was just considered "discipline."  Jason wants to be a medical doctor, one who isn't poor & suffering like his parents make him be, but when he becomes an adult he turns his backs on them, using them for money to some degree but never really caring what happens to them, which in the case of his mother is unfortunate as she has sacrificed repeatedly for him.  In the end, Jason does learn that his mother sacrificed for him, and after a weird turn during the Civil War (more on that in a second), Jason comes home to his mother, finally learning the cruelty of his ways and gets her forgiveness.

The film suffers almost throughout for being too melodramatic for its own good.  Stewart's Jason is a selfish asshole, and there's not really an indication as to why.  I get why they don't have him redeem his relationship with his father (who is also an asshole, and one whose redemption arch I didn't really need), but why does he treat his mother like dirt, particularly after the death of his father?  There's no logical explanation, and the film suffers as a result.  Bondi definitely plays the part we're meant for her (saintly martyr mother), but it's not an interesting role, and it's a sympathetic rather than a good performance.  Oscar had much better options in other roles where she played Stewart's mother (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life).

That being said, Of Human Hearts is noteworthy for one specific reason.  Character actor John Carradine shows up late in the film (no surprise there-he showed up in hundreds of movies), as Abraham Lincoln.  The Lincoln cameo initially feels like he's giving Jason an award for his stellar medical work on the field, but it turns out this is a guise, as Lincoln, in the middle of the freaking Civil War, is giving Jason a lecture about how "he needs to write to his mother."  It's bonkers-what the hell is this even about?!?  It's so weird I almost gave this two-stars for sheer wackiness, but honestly this bizarre left turn isn't enough for me to recommend it.

OVP: You Can't Take It With You (1938)

Film: You Can't Take It With You (1938)

Stars: Jean Arthur, Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart, Edward Arnold, Mischa Auer, Ann Miller, Spring Byington, HB Warner, Harry Davenport

Director: Frank Capra

Oscar History: 7 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture*, Director, Supporting Actress-Spring Byington, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Film Editing, Sound Recording)

(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I remember once someone said to me that watching a primary field of presidential candidates is a bit perplexing, because they all start out looking normal, like average human beings, and yet one of them is going to become immortal, putting their stamp forever on history (for the good or the bad).  The same can be said, to a degree, about a film that wins Best Picture.  You take 5, 8, 10, 12 (the number varies) movies, and then at the end of the night, one of them gets to be immortalized (and debated) forever as the "Best Picture of the Year."  This, of course, comes with some strange side effects in the same way that presidential races do.  After all, there are some Best Pictures that even with pedigree & fame, don't really amount to much historically, and you'd be forgive for thinking of You Can't Take It With You in that way.  The film, the victor in 1938, is a movie that doesn't necessarily standout in the careers of either its actors or its director, and yet despite its passed over reputation, it's a genuinely lovely (and perhaps more modern than you'd expect) movie that deserves its time in the sun.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Anthony Kirby (Arnold), a business mogul in the late 1920's, who only has a mind for the matter-of-fact.  He is grooming his son Tony (Stewart) to take over the family business at one point, but there's a hiccup-Tony is in love with his stenographer Alice (Arthur), and they know nothing about her family.  It turns out that Alice's family is full of eccentrics, led by the understanding & wonderful Grandpa Vanderhof (Barrymore).  As the film continues, we see a meeting of the stuffy Kirby's with the laid-back Vanderhof's which results in all of them going to jail (due to an illegal fireworks explosion).  After this, Alice breaks up with Tony, not comfortable with the way that his family has been judging hers, but as this is a Frank Capra film, we do find a happy ending for all.  Mr. Kirby, who has been trying to buy the Vanderhof's house the whole film (and successfully does when Grandpa wants to move to be closer to Alice, who has fled), gives back the house, Tony & Alice end up together, and the family is filled with a group brimming with even more eccentrics.

I have seen You Can't Take It With You before, though it has been at least 20 years (if not longer), and it was one of the first films I caught when I started watching Best Picture winners.  I remembered relatively little about the film, to the point where I remembered a woman frequently dancing, but it wasn't until I saw the movie that I suddenly understood the "no talent" hoofer in the film is actually Ann Miller, one of the greatest dancers of Hollywood's Golden Age.  As a result, I kind of had downgraded my initially pleasant interactions with the picture because I assumed that the more saccharine elements that I had encountered with the movie would hold, perhaps over-washing them, as does on occasion happen with Frank Capra's "lesser" classics.

This wasn't the case here, though.  You Can't Take It With You is genuinely charming, and like I said, thoroughly modern.  While the film's racial politics do present some problems (the white people live a life of leisure where they pursue their dreams while the two black characters are both servants who are not given the same kind of leniency with their interests), it does show a world where people don't put all of their value in money, and more importantly, don't put it on work.  Grandpa Vanderhof occasionally indulges in libertarian conversations with random people about his dislike of taxes, but really there's a lot of socialist indulgence here which is refreshing-the movie's politics basically say "pursue your dreams-life is short, and what makes you happy is the best thing for you," and I honestly can't think of a lot of movies of this era (or any era) that say to do this, even if it doesn't mean you'll make money from it.  There's something really shocking about putting value into hobbies & interests without needing to justify it through finance that I found hit a nerve with me (a man who spends much of his time watching & chronicling movies for a blog that he gets no financial compensation for), and that resonated in a way that felt refreshingly Millennial/Gen Z.

The movie's actors have all had bigger classics (Mr. Smith, It's a Wonderful Life, On the Town, Shane), but really this cast is A+ and Capra achieves something with a call sheet that reads like a Film Twitter dream list of the 1930's.   Arthur got top billing here (Stewart was still one year away from being the eternal "first name" on the poster), and shines-if you like Jean Arthur, with her omnipresent perkiness, you'll love her here as she's at her brightest (Arthur's offscreen persona was vastly different to her onscreen one, loathing publicity & regularly struggling with even the briefest of public interactions, to the point where her later theatrical career was a series of breakdowns...she'd make a good biopic if Hollywood is listening).  Stewart is charming & lovely, given a side role but one that he manages to make affable.  Edward Arnold gets to play what would become a prototypical part for him (the large-and-in-charge wealthy villain).  Arnold had to have enjoyed this film's reputation more than anyone.  Earlier in 1938, he'd been labeled "Box Office Poison" by the Hollywood Reporter, saying he was one of the actors that theater owners most loathed seeing on a movie poster...that he ended up months later starring in a movie that won Best Picture and was a financial success had to have been great revenge.

The Vanderhof's are all great too.  Barrymore, like Arthur & Stewart, could play this part in his sleep, but that doesn't mean that we should just assume that his movie star aura is easily administered.  Spring Byington & Ann Miller are both fun in small roles as people pursuing their passions without a hint of success; Byington won the only Oscar nomination of her long career for this part, and in a lot of ways it resembles some of the "character nominations" we see even today, where a longtime side favorite gets their due in a successful Best Picture contender (think June Squibb or Laurie Metcalf).  All-in-all, this is a great ensemble, one where it's difficult to single out a specific actor, but where everyone is at peak condition.

The film's Oscar nominations are all worthy.  The cinematography is standard, but well-utilized-you get a sense from the way the camera moves that they know that the house itself (a surefire Art Direction nominee if that category had existed yet) is a great supporting player in this piece.  The writing is sharp, with silly (sometimes schmaltzy, but not too bad) dialogue, while the editing is solid-giving us enough fun moments with the Vanderhof's to get you to really know them without it ever feeling long (and at 2+ hours that was a risk for a movie that doesn't really have much of a plot to speak of other than boy-meets-girl).  The sound design is also great-the film's fireworks pop & crackle, and the regular musical interludes play perfectly.  I honestly had a great time-this isn't a landmark Capra film (it's not quintessential like It Happened One Night or It's a Wonderful Life), but if all of the Best Picture winners are "immortal," similar to my presidential theory above, this is one that feels like a president you didn't realize was impressive as history books would have led you to believe.