OVP: Director (1931-32)

OVP: Best Director (1931-32)

The Nominees Were...

Frank Borzage, Bad Girl

King Vidor, The Champ

Josef von Sternberg, Shanghai Express

My Thoughts: Coming off of yesterday's Best Actress field, I am happy to report that we are in much better territory for Best Director.  Unlike Best Actress, this features at least one truly worthy nominee, and one nominee that is no slouch.  It also features three distinctive film directors.  King Vidor & Frank Borzage would gain reputations as some of the better "directors for hire" of Hollywood's Golden Age, sometimes getting lost in their reputations the fact that they had gifts.  Vidor's The Crowd and Borzage's Moonrise, for example, are pretty much perfect films, and their best work (in my opinion).  But only one of these guys is generally given the title of "auteur" and given his cinematic output in the early Sound Era, it's easy to see why.

Josef von Sternberg is that director, who from 1927-1935 was one of the most interesting filmmakers working in cinema, first in Germany, then in the United States.  In that time, he made seven movies with Marlene Dietrich, two of which won him Best Director nominations (the other one was Morocco).  Watching Shanghai Express, it's sometimes confusing how good the movie is because it looks so incredible.  Von Sternberg did impossible things with a camera, giving us a beautiful depth in his films that no American filmmaker would be able to achieve until Orson Welles.  I love the way he moves the camera from different shots, sometimes giving us the action at the center, sometimes moving it to the side, playing with the script visually to the point where you don't really care that the story doesn't make a lot of sense.

Frank Borzage's work in Bad Girl isn't nearly as stylized or sophisticated, and that's especially true when it's paired with such a defanged screenplay.  For a movie literally called Bad Girl, it's quite prudish in its approach, and Borzage doesn't know how to make the weakest of film setups (just a series of misunderstandings between a married couple) elevate into something special.  I know there are people who are champions of this movie, and lord knows in 1932 there were given its Oscar history, but I don't get it at all.  It's less bad and more just confusing in its critical acclaim.

The final nomination is much easier to understand.  Vidor does a superb job of framing the fighting scenes against the action outside of the ring.  I loved the way that the story is built around "the big fight" but by the time it's come, the stakes of what it's supposed to be about have completely changed.  Vidor knows that this movie is not just about economy (and it so easily could've been only about that), but instead about the ways that masculinity (and how it is valued over love) can weaken the resolves of even the strongest of men.  Watching Beery lose his battles to his former glory is heartbreaking.

Other Precursor Contenders: Of the five films that didn't get a Best Director nomination, but did get in for Best Picture, we have Ernst Lubitsch directing two (likely cancelling himself out), and while it would be tempting to pick the Best Picture winner, Edmund Goulding has no Oscar history and Grand Hotel is more of a call sheet film.  Therefore I'm going to assume it was either John Ford for Arrowsmith or Mervyn LeRoy for Five Star Final, and given Ford has the longer Oscar history, he'd be my guess.

Directors I Would Have Nominated: Howard Hawks is one of the most consistent filmmakers in Classical Hollywood, directing classics in every genre from film noir (The Big Sleep) to screwball comedy (Bringing Up Baby) to westerns (Red River) to Science Fiction (The Thing from Another World).  He somehow only got one nomination, for the total snooze Sergeant York.  A perfect time to honor him would've been for 1932's Scarface with Paul Muni, a total achievement and the best early gangster film of the 1930's.
Oscar's Choice: I cannot explain it, but Frank Borzage won.  Given he already had a statue and Vidor & von Sternberg would never win one, it feels like a particularly stupid indulgence from the Academy.

My Choice: It's absolutely von Sternberg, who is in another class with Shanghai Express.  Behind him is Vidor, and then Borzage is forgettably in third.

Those were my thoughts-how about yours?  Are you sticking with me and giving this statue to von Sternberg (his personal life aside) or do you want to go with AMPAS and Frank Borzage?  What would you consider to be the best film of these three men, all quite prolific directors in their day?  And was it Ford, LeRoy, Goulding, or Lubitsch in fourth place?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

Also in 1931-32: Actress, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Original Story, Art Direction, Cinematography, Previously in 1931-32

Past Best Director Contests: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022

OVP: Duel in the Sun (1946)

Film: Duel in the Sun (1946)

Stars: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Lionel Barrymore, Herbert Marshall, Lillian Gish, Walter Huston, Charles Bickford, Harry Carey, Butterfly McQueen

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Jennifer Jones, Supporting Actress-Lillian Gish)

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 Gregory Peck: click here to learn more about Mr. Peck (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we discussed last week, Gregory Peck's initial career took off like a rocket, with huge hits such as The Yearling, Spellbound, and The Valley of Decision making him a household name pretty much overnight.  The late-1940's, though, were something of a disappointment.  He starred in another Hitchcock film, The Paradine Case, which was a big flop, as well as the western Yellow Sky and the romance The Great Sinner, neither of which set the box office on fire.  While Twelve O'Clock High and The Gunfighter would bring life back to his career, during this time frame he only had two really notable films.  The first was Gentleman's Agreement, which won the Best Picture Oscar (and got Peck his third nomination) and was a massive success, but one that I've seen before so it wasn't eligible for this series.  The second was one I had heard legend of after reading about movies for 25+ years, but somehow had avoided actually watching: David O. Selznick's infamous follow-up to Gone with the Wind, the soap opera western Duel in the Sun, our movie for today.

(Spoilers Ahead) Based on the novel by Niven Busch, Duel in the Sun is the story of a young biracial woman named Pearl Chavez (played by the very much not biracial Jennifer Jones), the daughter of a white father and a Mexican mother.  After her father (Marshall) kills her mother for having an affair, she's sent to live with his childhood sweetheart (and second cousin) Laura Belle (Gish) on a giant ranch she lives on with her husband Senator Jackson McCanless (Barrymore) and their two sons the proper Jesse (Cotten) and the lascivious Lewt (Peck).  This sets up an inevitable love triangle between the two men and Pearl, with her drawn to Jesse's decency, but clearly there is a hormonal attraction between she & Lewt that cannot be denied in the Texas heat.  Along the way, she tries to find ways of escaping Lewt, including marrying Sam Pierce (Bickford), but Lewt kills Sam, making him a fugitive from the law, but still Pearl can't stop her desire for him.  When it becomes clear that Jesse can save her, even after he's shot by Lewt trying, Pearl understands that the only way that she'll break free of Lewt is to kill him, which she does...but in the process, she also ends up in his arms, their desire in life to be together impossible to deny, even as they're literally murdering each other.

Duel in the Sun was not, it has to be said, Gone with the Wind.  Selznick's obsession with equalling his previous film's success, particularly with the woman he was obsessed with & having an affair with at the time, Jennifer Jones, is kind of the stuff of Hollywood legend.  This was a deeply troubled shoot, and cost nearly $8 million to make & promote, which was basically unheard of at the time, and so despite a solid box office, it barely broke even.  The problem, of course, was that it wasn't Gone with the Wind (nothing is, quite frankly, though Titanic probably comes close enough to earn comparison)-chasing that dragon is the stuff of heartache, even for the man who initially produced it.  The film is tackier, it's less enthralling, and no aspect of the production quite lives up to that film.

If you get past that comparison, though, it's not a bad movie even if it's clearly a "bad" movie.  The film rarely makes a lot of sense, but it goes off of impulse, all id and no ego.  But it's entertaining throughout.  The score is fun, the cinematography is really horny but it works (the cameramen are obsessed with the gorgeous Jones & Peck in all of their carnal lust).  The acting is bizarre, but not boring.  Jennifer Jones, whom I've seen enough of at this point to be able to say she wasn't a very good actress, makes so many choices, swinging for the fences in every scene, but it kind of works with the unbalanced nature of the script.  Save for Beat the Devil, this is undoubtedly Jones' most intriguing performance (at least of what I've seen), and while she's not Oscar-worthy, she certainly is something.  Lillian Gish is a bit bland in the only film that she'd be nominated for an Oscar for (it's a pity it wasn't for The Wind or The Night of the Hunter instead), likely getting it with one deathbed confessional, but overall playing a kindly matron in one of Oscar's worst Supporting Actress lineups.  Butterfly McQueen is playing basically the exact same character she got in Gone with the Wind, channeling Prissy as if that will get Selznick literally back to his original movie (she's the only principle actor to appear in both films).

And as for Gregory Peck?  His casting is...a choice.  I've talked about this a bit, but it's strange that Peck would become most associated with To Kill a Mockingbird, a film where he exudes absolute no sex appeal, because his exaggerated face (big eyes, pouty lips) and lanky frame were used to make audiences thirsty in the mid-1940's, and that's definitely the case here.  He looks hot in Duel in the Sun.  The only problem here is that Peck is not meant to be playing a "sexy math teacher" vibes like he'd play in most of his films of this era, but instead is supposed to be a dangerous "bad boy you make out with under the bleachers" sort of vibes, a forbidden sexiness that you know is wrong but you can't help it.  Peck, though, is not good at this-he's too inherently decent, and playing a villain here who also has to turn you on...it just doesn't work.

HM Pulham Esq. (1941)

Film: HM Pulham, Esq. (1941)

Stars: Hedy Lamarr, Robert Young, Ruth Hussey, Charles Coburn, Van Heflin, Bonita Granville

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: No nominations

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 Robert Young: click here to learn more about Mr. Young (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we talked about how Robert Young's early work was largely unremarkable, and while he was a leading man for most of his career, he was oftentimes overshadowed by the women in his career.  Indeed, Young, in a similar vein to someone like Robert Taylor (who, it's worth noting was a MUCH bigger deal than Young in his day) was a star who coasted off of the considerable charms of his leading ladies for over twenty years.  Today we're going to find the rare movie that was the exception to that rule.  While if you look at the poster for HM Pulham, Esq, you'd find that Hedy Lamarr is the top-billed player in the movie, it's Young who is at the center of this film.  Directed by King Vidor, HM Pulham Esq. was arguably the best chance that Young would've had to actually distinguish himself and become like the other actors of his era (the Spencer Tracy's and Clark Gable's) who could genuinely command the screen without the assistance of a Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Crawford.  Unfortunately for Young, he didn't have the charisma to pull off such a heavy lift.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Harry Moulton Pulham, Jr. (Young), who is a middle-aged businessman in a loveless marriage to his wife Kay (Hussey).  After being asked to organize his 25-year reunion from college, he begins to reminisce about his long lost love Marvin (Lamarr, and yes despite the name this is not to a queer love story though after writing that I really wish there was enough to the allegory to make that case as it'd be a far more interesting movie).  The two were from different castes, and while they love each other, it's clear that Harry is as much a product of his posh Boston upbringing as his seemingly stuffy parents are.  Marvin & Harry eventually reconnect, even sharing a passionate kiss, but they are both married & there's nothing there anymore-they made the right decision 25 years earlier when they decided to go separate ways.  In the end, Kay comes to Harry & seemingly acts differently, determined to have another go at the romance that has left their marriage, and the film ends with them hopefully getting a second chance at life.

HM Pulham Esq. reads as more interesting than it actually is when you look at that description, as well as what Vidor tried to do with the story structure.  Based on a novel by John P. Marquand, the book is told in the first person, and Vidor tries to emulate that by having everything in the movie from Harry's point of view.  Young is in every scene of the movie, and things like telephone calls you only hear what Harry hears (i.e. when Marvin calls her husband while Harry is in the room, we only hear her side of the conversation).  It's a neat trick, and combined with the sort of "lovers that couldn't make it work" trope that I love in this era's films (think Brief Encounter), this would normally be up my alley.

But it's not, and honestly it's mostly Young's fault.  I was worried when I picked Young for this series that I'd have to admit that I don't historically like Young as an actor, but I figured going through four of his undiscovered movies I'd find something to love...but so far I'm bankrupt.  Young doesn't have enough style or leading man flare to pull this off.  Someone like Robert Taylor whose insane handsomeness gave him a romanticism even when his acting didn't, would've been a better choice (or someone like Robert Montgomery, who frequently succeeded in the types of roles that Young couldn't, primarily because Montgomery was a significantly better actor, and would've given this part more callous regret).  But Young isn't capable of such things, and while Lamarr is better, her parts are usually so underwritten because the filmmakers are reliant on her otherworldly beauty, that she's unable to give Marvin (who doesn't even show up until a third of a way through the movie) much grounding.  The film flops with such underwhelming leads, and no amount of plot potential can get by a lack of chemistry.

OVP: Comrade X (1940)

Film: Comrade X (1940)

Stars: Clark Gable, Hedy Lamarr, Oskar Homolka, Felix Bressart, Eve Arden

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Story)

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 Eve Arden: click here to learn more about Ms. Arden (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Eve Arden's career was quite long.  One of the advantages of being a character actress is that while she was never as big of a star as she was during her Our Miss Brooks days (we'll talk about that next week), she didn't have to worry about finding headlining vehicles & could go back to high-profile character work after her television success, unlike actors like Lucille Ball & Jack Benny who had largely eschewed supporting work.  So today we're going to cover one of the many, many films that Arden made in the 1940's & will move into the 1950's next week with Arden.  Arden spent much of the decade as a steady presence in the movies, frequently playing the best friend or assistant to one of the main characters.  This is how she ended up getting her sole Oscar nomination, playing Joan Crawford's best friend in 1945's Mildred Pierce.  Arden lost that Oscar to Anne Revere, but it served as a reminder of what a good performer she was, and makes her one of the only actors we're going to profile this year that got recognition of their talents from the Academy prior to making a big name for herself in television.  I've seen Mildred Pierce before (Arden is quite good in it, if somewhat overshadowed by Crawford & Ann Blyth playing the worst daughter in film history), so I couldn't watch it for this project, so we're going to focus on another film that was cited by the Oscars in the 1940's, and weirdly (I pick all of these films months in advance) feels uncomfortably prescient of our current world situation: Comrade X.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in the Soviet Union circa 1939, where Mac Thompson (Gable) is a reporter who is secretly writing under the pseudonym "Comrade X" writing scathing stories about the Soviet government and the situation in Moscow.  Mac is blackmailed by his valet Vanya (Bressart) into keeping his identity secret, but only if Mac can figure out a way to get his daughter Theodore (Lamarr) out of the country, as her politics have made her a target for imprisonment.  The problem for Mac is that Theodore doesn't want to leave-she's a devout communist, and is wholly devoted to the Soviet cause, so Mac has to trick her into thinking that he is anti-American.  This unfolds primarily in one day, with Mac eventually marrying and falling in love (in that order) with Theodore, and by the end of the movie both of them are on the side of America, and particularly the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The movie is an unusual artifact if you study Hollywood's shifting attitudes toward Russia in the late-1930's and early-1940's.  Comrade X, like the previous year's more successful Ninotchka, is very anti-Soviet and anti-Communist, making everyone, including Lamarr, look like idiots for supporting the Soviet government.  This would change less than a year later when both the United States would enter World War II and Germany would invade Russia & Ukraine (in fact, there's a late plot point in Comrade X where a fictional invasion of Russia from Germany changes Theodore's mind about her country...weirdly predictive of real life), creating a temporary alliance with the United States that would lead briefly to pro-Soviet films like Song of Russia to come out...which would then be used later in the decade as grounds for HUAC investigations into a number of different actors & performers.  Actor Robert Taylor, who starred in Song of Russia, would be the only major Hollywood star to publicly name names in front of Congress, in part because of his initial connection to this movie. But at the time, stars like Gable, Lamarr, & Arden were not put into a position that might have made their careers difficult later, as this film is very much about mocking the Soviet Union.  And of course, in the decades that followed, Hollywood would continue to have an uneasy attitude toward depictions of Russia in everything from James Bond to the 1980's Cold War classics like WarGames...similar to the world's uneasy relationship with a combative Russia, a relationship still dominating headlines today.

Comrade X, though, isn't a particularly good movie.  The story for which it was cited feels like a retread of Ninotchka, and doesn't have a lot to say beyond "Lamarr's character is stupid, Gable's is smart."  It's helped a bit by Gable & Lamarr having good chemistry, and the supporting cast, specifically Arden as Gable's former flame & now fellow wise-cracking journalist, works well, but they can't save a pretty sloppy piece of anti-Russian cinema, which is focused more on casting stereotypes than grounding us in a real relationship between Gable & Lamarr.  Arden, for the second time this month, is a key supporting player but not in a lot of the movie, just two extended sequences that are crucial to changing the tone of the movie.  Next week, though, we're going to look at a movie from Arden where she would take the top of the marquee, and talk about how that came to pass.

OVP: The Citadel (1938)

Film: The Citadel (1938)

Stars: Robert Donat, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Richardson, Rex Harrison, Penelope Dudley Ward

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Actor-Robert Donat, Adapted Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

When you are reviewing films, you need to be aware of your own particular genre biases.  I see a lot of movies, frequently ones that are favored by the Oscars (due to our ongoing "Oscar Viewing Project" on the blog), and with that it becomes a situation where genres that the Academy favors, but I don't, become a point-of-contention unless a movie is truly great (and thus genre becomes irrelevant).  This is never more true than "uplifting dramas," which have been a staple of the Academy's for decades (though in recent years this have largely been true stories or biopics rather than based on wholly original creations), a genre that I don't find all that interesting.  The Citadel is a good example of this.  This is a fine film, it has a lot of vigor and fulfills its purpose-it's a worthwhile undertaking.  But I must admit that while I can respect the film, I didn't like it.  Let's get into why, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is the story of Andrew Manson (Donat), an idealistic young doctor who goes to a coal mining community in Wales and starts to treat tuberculosis.  He starts out as someone who works entirely by-the-book, but finds that bending the rules is a better way to get solid treatment for his patients (and earn their respect).  He is a far better doctor than they would normally be able to afford, but resists calls to go after bigger paychecks.  However, after his research is destroyed by the nearby miners, he moves to London, with a newly-found wife in tow, a local schoolteacher named Christine (Russell), and begins to practice a type of pseudo-medicine where he treats wealthy people for ailments that aren't real (essentially hypochondriacs), for a life of comfort, prestige, and wealth.  His wife doesn't like this, seeing the sort of man that her husband is becoming, and this all comes to a head when Manson's old friend Denny (Richardson) shows him that he's changed, and when Denny dies after an accident at the hands of one of Manson's fellow charlatan doctors, he decides to return to what he was good at, curing the sick & impoverished people who don't get fair access to healthcare.

The Citadel is surely a movie that, while parts of it are a bit green (more on that in a second), has a message that is sadly resonant over eighty years later.  The film is set in the UK, but even as an American now I can see that access to quality healthcare is largely the dictate of a person's financial status.  Medicine & surgery are expensive, frequently bankrupting people in a near criminal way, and almost always attached to your employment status, so the wealthiest people can gain access to treatments that poor people would only dream of seeing-in this way, The Citadel still feels quite relevant today.

But for me, it struggles in this conversation by having Manson played less-than-complexly, which is a shame because as written this is a complicated character.  Manson has a point here-he is fought, frequently, by the people that he's trying to help.  The scene at about the movie's midpoint where the local miners, spurred on by rumors about what he's doing to laboratory guinea pigs and fears of the unknown around him in his research into the adverse effects of coal mining on your health (something we take for granted today), destroy his work, the work that's literally trying to save their lives, is harrowing stuff.  It's the kind of crux that should have been intriguing for the audience-Manson is essentially being punished for doing the right thing, other people's prejudices getting in the way of him saving their lives (I don't need to make the obvious Covid vaccine allusion to show you this is also still relevant, mostly because if you're reading this you were surely thinking it), and it should inform the character quite a bit.

But Donat plays Manson as kind of naive, never imagining him in a serious way.  The English actor, who won his first Oscar nomination for this performance, was three years removed from his classic work in The 39 Steps (which I like & enjoy him in, for the record), but this doesn't have that film's finesse.  It's the kind of work that screams "GREAT ACTING!" in a major way, mostly because it's a series of lengthy, oftentimes powerfully-delivered monologues, but there's nothing happening below the placid surface here.  His switch into a snobbish fop is so full, but you don't get any hints of that coming in the first half.  Donat doesn't find a way to bridge the man that he's playing between the three acts, and the film suffers.  Rosalind Russell is better as his fellow lead, particularly in the film's first half when she gets to play a sharper character, getting at least some good chemistry moments with the befuddled doctor, though as the movie's melodrama wears on, she begins to falter as well into subdued dramatics (potentially unpopular opinion-I've never liked Roz Russell in a drama despite that being kind of what the Academy always found her useful for, but I think she's aces at comedy).

All of this dampens my enjoyment of The Citadel.  It's a good movie on a technical level, and so I'm giving it three stars.  The early courting scenes with Donat/Russell are fun, and the script is well-constructed & the directing is efficient.  But I didn't feel it-the message here is important, and it carries a lot of weight even today, but Donat's inability to elevate Manson through the film's three acts kept me from loving it in the way that I would something like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and there is so little outside of what he's doing onscreen to latch onto (I believe he's in every single scene in the movie if memory serves correctly) that I left respecting, but not loving, what had just happened.

Solomon and Sheba (1959)

Film: Solomon and Sheba (1959)
Stars: Yul Brynner, Gina Lollobrigida, Marisa Pavan, George Sanders
Director: King Vidor
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 Gina Lollobrigida-click here to learn more about Ms. Lollobrigida (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In the careers of a lot of beautiful actresses from the late-1940's through the mid-1960's, one of the weirder tropes that seemed to befall these actresses was playing the romantic lead in a biblical epic.  Throughout Saturdays with the Stars, we've already run into this a couple of times.  There was Hedy Lamarr in Samson and Delilah and Virginia Mayo in The Silver Chalice.  Last month, though we didn't profile it, Sophia Loren got to play the female lead in The Fall of the Roman Empire, which while not biblical definitely takes place during the times of the Bible.  And this week Gina Lollobrigida goes into the trope.  The production of Solomon and Sheba is legendary (we'll get into that after we discuss the film) even though that had little to do with Lollobrigida, but suffice it to say this was a big deal in Gina's career, and probably the height of her time as a leading woman in Hollywood (perhaps coincidentally, this was also about the time that her longtime rival Sophia Loren was starting her rise in Tinseltown).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a gigantic epic (read: too long) look at only a partial portion of the reign of King Solomon.  The film is loosely based on the Book of Kings in the Bible, which details some sort of relationship between King Solomon (Brynner) and the Queen of Sheba (Lollobrigida), though the Bible is not entirely clear on what that relationship was (and historical evidence of Solomon's reign is scant, and in the case of the Queen of Sheba, bordering on non-existent).  Either way, within this movie they are lovers, though not without their initial problems.  The Queen is recruited by the Pharoah to seduce Solomon, and trick him so that she can gain additional lands, and she does so, but then she falls in love with him.  The Pharoah then persuades Solomon's jealous brother Adonijah (Sanders) to betray him, which he does, but thanks to the prayers of the Queen of Sheba, Solomon is saved from certain defeat, and returns to save her from Adonijah's ordered stoning.

There's a lot more to this movie, but to be honest, that's really the highlights version.  I am not opposed to biblical epics (I love Ben-Hur and consider it a proper masterpiece, and was quite fond of The Ten Commandments), but this movie drags and is SO dull.  The film is famously bad, showing up in "worst films of all-time" lists, and while it's not quite "worst of all time," that's about the closest I'm willing to get to a compliment.  The acting from Brynner, Lollobrigida, and Sanders is super cheesy (and Pavan's saintly sister is really annoying, to the point where you are inappropriately relieved when she dies halfway through the movie), and the script is repetitive & hammy.  This movie was a hit in 1959, even with critics at the time giving it tepid reviews & director Vidor publicly stating that he didn't like Brynner in the lead.

His idea for who should play the lead was Tyrone Power, which gets us to the best story about Solomon and Sheba, because Tyrone Power was supposed to be the lead, and actually filmed large chunks of the movie that were eventually reshot with Brynner.  Looking at news articles at the time, it appears that Power was in the middle of a sword fight with George Sanders (which if the script wasn't changed, this is one of the movie's final scenes), and after doing repeated takes, he complained to Vidor about his left arm hurting.  He then went to his trailer, his makeups artist got him a brandy, and Vidor paged for the studio nurse.  Power was then driven to the hospital by Lollobrigida, but didn't make it-he was pronounced dead when they arrived at the hospital, supposedly still in costume.  While other actors have died in more shocking ways (Martha Mansfield, Brandon Lee, Jon-Eric Hexum), Power is arguably the most famous actor to die on a movie set, a fate that bizarrely also befell his actor father, for whom he was named.  This makes Solomon and Sheba a weird curiosity to modern viewers, even though at the time it was a blockbuster.  Next week, we'll close our month devoted to Gina with her costarring with a different actor whose death (not on a set, but decades after the two starred together) would also become the source of tragic scandal.

Lightning Strikes Twice (1951)

Film: Lightning Strikes Twice (1951)
Stars: Ruth Roman, Richard Todd, Mercedes McCambridge, Zachary Scott
Director: King Vidor
Oscar History: No nominations
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 Ruth Roman-click here to learn more about Ms. Roman (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to cheat a little bit here in our profile of Ruth Roman's career by going back a few months before the release of last week's Strangers on a Train, but in a lot of ways this feels like a step in a different direction in Roman's career.  At this point, we've profiled three films where Roman had top billing, but she's never actually "been the lead" in any of the movies we've taken a gander at in these pictures.  Frequently Roman's career was marked by forays into westerns or noir, genres that usually have a main female role, but rarely center upon it.  This week, though, Roman actually gets to be the proper main character in our film (even getting to GASP act opposite other women!), and like Strangers, it's helmed by a man who would be cited for Best Director five times in his career.  This week, we come across the little-known Roman picture Lightning Strikes Twice.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on Shelley Carnes (Roman), a stage actress who is essentially trying to flee from her life.  After a grueling tour of Othello leaves her at death's door, she decides to go out to a dude ranch run by Liza McStringer (McCambridge) & her brother String (Darryl Hickman, in one of his few adult roles, and I believe one of the last roles before he joined a monastery), only to find that it's largely abandoned, as they no longer take on guests.  This is all happening in the shadow of a famed trial where Liza exonerated Richard Trevelyan (Todd), who was accused of murdering his wife (and most people assume he did, in fact, kill her).  The problem is that Trevelyan is living on a nearby ranch, hiding from his surrogate parents (whom he thinks killed his wife), and of course as he's the male lead, Shelley is going to fall for him.

The movie's second half is some batshit crazy melodrama, enough to make this worth checking out if you're a lover of the Douglas Sirk-style of filmmaking.  It turns out, of course, that Richard wasn't the killer (how else will he end up with Shelley in the end of the picture?), and it's not Scott's Harvey, who is a louse (which Zachary Scott characters aren't louses...see also our recent Roman picture Colt 45?), though there is a truly bizarre scene after Shelley turns down his marriage proposal where we're very much supposed to believe he's about to rape Shelley, even though all he's doing is reuniting her with Richard...if I missed something here, I'd love for you to tell me as I didn't understand what the hell was going on during that scene.  Either way, though, it turns out that mousy Liza was the one who killed Richard's wife when she found out she was having an affair with pretty much every other male character save her brother (and not for a lack of trying on his part), and has every intention of killing Shelley too, but doesn't, because she (and her brother) both go down in flames in a car chase just while Shelley & Richard, now exonerated, skate away to a happy life together.

The film's best element is its camp value.  McCambridge, one of the best supporting players of the era, brings it up to the rafters as Liza during those final scenes, chewing scenery as much as possible (I haven't seen it, but I've heard this is one of the more appealing aspects of putting her opposite another scene-stealer, Joan Crawford, in Johnny Guitar).  However, Roman doesn't really get much of the camp.  She's fun in this part-there's an amiability to her onscreen presence that's likable, but she doesn't really know how to land the movie against actors who understood the material better like McCambridge and Richard Todd (just two years after his Oscar-nominated work in The Hasty Heart, his career was already on the bit of the skids, and would need to go to Disney to play Robin Hood to continue keeping his name in lights).  Roman, as a result, shows that even with a central role in an interesting if not particularly strong picture, that she doesn't know how to elevate when she's made captain of the ship, instead being better as a supporting player.  Next week we'll conclude our look at Roman's career with a film from much later in her time as a leading woman, but in the meantime, share your thoughts on Roman so far in the comments, and if there's a crucial part of hers I've been missing in this series that might ignite more love for the actress.