Saturdays with the Stars Season 3 Finale

Two of our stars, Shirley & Grace

With this past week's viewing of The Seduction fo Joe Tynan, we are officially done with our third season of "Saturdays with the Stars."  I really like to find a moment before I start the new season (which, unlike past seasons, I haven't told you the theme of & will be doing so in the coming days, as we will indeed do a fourth season starting on Saturday) to discuss the season, talking about what I learned, and also focusing on some of the best of the year's movies/performances.

When I decided to do this theme, I wanted to see how it would turn out picking twelve women who had really nothing in common other than Alfred Hitchcock.  You couldn't find stars as divergent in the way that cinematic history or even contemporary audiences treated them as, say, Maureen O'Hara & Barbara Harris or Shirley MacLaine & Margaret Lockwood.  Hitchcock wasn't always successful with his leading ladies, but it does show what a versatile director he was that he continually tried new things, occasionally making masterpieces but just as often strange curiosities.

It also showed, especially in our month devoted to Tippi Hedren, how Hitchcock's legacy is at once peerless in quality but blemished by the director himself.  Hitchcock was a complicated man, one who brought the downfall of a career or two (Hedren's career, as we discussed, never flourished the way it might have with a less authoritarian mentor), but who also clearly made some of the best films ever made.  What was great about this year was not just focusing on him, but getting to see unknown chapters in these twelve women's lives (I love that I stick to the rule of seeing only films I haven't seen before, because it means every week I get to see a new facet of an actor I thought I knew well, but frequently have my perceptions changed).  As I continue to watch deeper and deeper cuts from Old Hollywood (after three seasons devoted to it on the blog, it seems like watching fresh viewings demands getting into the rafters of these icons' IMDB pages), I am reminded once again how this period of Hollywood has countless movies & careers left to explore.  Thank you so much for playing along!

Favorite Performance from Each Star

January: Madeleine Carroll-The General Died at Dawn

February: Sylvia Sidney-Sabotage

March: Margaret Lockwood-Cast a Dark Shadow

April: Maureen O'Hara-Rio Grande

May: Carole Lombard-Twentieth Century

June: Anne Baxter-The Luck of the Irish

July: Ingrid Bergman-Autumn Sonata

August: Grace Kelly-Dial M for Murder

September: Shirley MacLaine-The Children's Hour

October: Julie Andrews-Thoroughly Modern Millie

November: Tippi Hedren-Marnie

December: Barbara Harris-Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?

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

Ingrid Bergman

Barbara Harris

Margaret Lockwood

Carole Lombard

Shirley MacLaine

5 (err-6, I couldn't corner down) Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Ingrid Bergman, Autumn Sonata

Ingrid Bergman, Journey to Italy

Margaret Lockwood, Cast a Dark Shadow

Margaret Lockwood, The Wicked Lady

Carole Lombard-Twentieth Century

Shirley MacLaine, The Children's Hour

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

Autumn Sonata

Cast a Dark Shadow

The Children's Hour

Dead End

Dial M for Murder

Journey to Italy

The Lady Vanishes

The Trouble with Harry

Twentieth Century

The Wicked Lady

Top 10 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Leading Ladies)

Diane Baker, Marnie

John Barrymore, Twentieth Century

Dirk Bogarde, Cast a Dark Shadow

Humphrey Bogart, Dead End

Sean Connery, Marnie

Audrey Hepburn, The Children's Hour

George Sanders, Journey to Italy

Claire Trevor, Dead End

Liv Ullmann, Autumn Sonata

John Williams, Dial M for Murder

OVP: The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

Film: The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

Stars: Ronald Colman, Madeleine Carroll, C. Aubrey Smith, Raymond Massey, Mary Astor, David Niven, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Director: John Cromwell

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Art Direction, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

We are going to conclude our month devoted to Madeleine Carroll this week with a movie not too far away from our last film.  Picking Carroll as a Star of the Month was a tossup for me (there were other leading actresses from Hitch's early films that we could've gone with).  She obviously starred in two movies he directed, which lends a lot to her, but Carroll's fame was sharp but brief, and we'll talk about that below, but it also means that there's not a lot of opportunity for growth in her characters & acting style.  This is true once again for Prisoner of Zenda, a body-swapping tale set in 19th Century Austria where Carroll is asked to play the doted-upon beauty.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a man named Rudolf (Colman), who is fishing when he comes across Colonel Zapt (Smith) and Captain von Tarlenheim (Niven), who are shocked by how much he resembles the soon-to-be king, Rudolf V (also played by Colman).  The king is a drunkard, and on the morning of his coronation it is found out that the wine has been drugged, thus Rudolf V cannot be coronated.  Since both of his aides are worried that without Rudolf there, his brother Michael (Massey) will steal the thrown he covets, they put Rudolf in his place, which fools most of the court, though eventually not Michael & his aide Rupert of Hentzou (Fairbanks), but there's a problem-the king's betrothed Princess Flavia (Carroll) is now in love with the imposter king, and before they can switch back, the real Rudolf is kidnapped by Rupert & Michael, with madness ensuing that eventually kills both men, and results in Flavia & the faux Rudolf falling in love, but having to stay apart out of her duty to her country.

The movie is fun, though more fun in the first half than in the second when it gets too melodramatic.  Not all of the cast works (Astor is badly misused as the leg of a Rupert/Michael love triangle), but Fairbanks is delicious as Rupert (I've never seen him this good), completely stealing the film, and I always David Niven (even if his part is small).  Carroll, as I mentioned, is kind of just there-there's a twinkle to her work here, but not much more, and certainly it's not a performance I would've paid attention to were I not looking at it from this angle.  Particularly coming a year after the abdication (in this film, of course, Colman in both the Wallis Simpson role to Carroll's Edward VIII decide that duty comes before love), there are more interesting things to focus on than Carroll's wallflower.

The film was nominated for two Academy Awards.  The Score was the first citation for Alfred Newman, who would during his long career win 43 Oscar nominations, so we will be hearing from him a lot in the upcoming years, and while he wrote some truly brilliant music, this is just fine.  It's the kind you'd expect from a swashbuckler, rousing but not that original.  The art direction is better (this is before Best Costume was a thing, otherwise that likely would've occurred, especially for Fairbanks' sexier looks), and has lots of great-looking sets though there's nothing that stands out as truly detailed in the movie.

As I said above, we will end our chapter focused on Madeleine Carroll here.  The actress would continue working in Hollywood for the remainder of the decade, acting opposite Henry Fonda, Fred MacMurray, Gary Cooper (again), and Bob Hope.  However tragedy would strike Carroll's life early in the 1940's, when her only sister Marguerite died during the London Blitz, and afterward devoted pretty much her entire existence to the war effort and beating the Germans (Dwight Eisenhower purportedly said she did more for the war effort than any other movie star).  This resulted in her eventually winning the Medal of Freedom and the Legion of Honor, but it also killed her career in film.  She'd make only three films after the war (most notably Otto Preminger's The Fan), and spent the rest of her life living with family in Europe, eventually dying at the age of 81 from pancreatic cancer.  Next month we're going to focus on a different actress, one who was a contemporary of Carroll's, but whose career took far different turns (and lasted many decades longer) on the big screen.

OVP: The General Died at Dawn (1936)

Film: The General Died at Dawn (1936)

Stars: Gary Cooper, Madeleine Carroll, Akim Tamiroff

Director: Lewis Milestone

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Akim Tamiroff, Score, Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

Madeleine Carroll's career in movies was relatively brief, and we'll talk about the end of it next week a little bit, but her two pairings with Alfred Hitchcock made her a marketable star in America, and as a result she signed a contract with Paramount, becoming the first really important British actress to get a star contract from a major studio.  This led, of course, to her working with the pride-and-joy of the Paramount lot, Gary Cooper, in The General Died at Dawn, our picture today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The plot of The General Died at Dawn is confusing.  Essentially what the movie is about is O'Hara (Cooper), a man living in a war-ravaged China, attempting to give ammunitions to the peasants to fight General Yang (Tamiroff), who is mad & acts as a tyrant in the countryside.  Judy's (Carroll) father is in league with Yang, and she's essentially tasked to "distract" him (i.e. use her feminine wiles to get after Cooper), but in the process of course falls in love with him.  In the end, Yang & Judy's father both die (the latter dying literally at O'Hara's hands, and yet the romance still remains a thing), and the ammunitions are saved.

The General Died at Dawn shouldn't work.  This is a film that is incredibly convoluted, with a tacked-on love story & nondescript character actors playing their parts as two-dimensionally as possible...but it does.  The film is moody, often disjointed, but that works in its favor somehow.  There's a madcap aspect to it, as if we're meant to be confused alongside Cooper's O'Hara that I liked about the movie, and it's way better than it has any right to be.

Part of that are the performances.  Carroll is great here, as is Cooper (and both are jaw-droppingly gorgeous).  Carroll, as we've seen this month, is an actress whose glamour & beauty got in the way of her getting to play a part to its fullest (the directors wanted to bring forward her looks more than her performance), but Milestone doesn't do that.  He actually allows Carroll to get some real acting in, and while she's tasked with a ridiculous part (the scenes where she essentially writes off her father are so bizarre), she shows she has the talent to sell an offbeat part to the audience.

The film won three Oscar nominations, to varying reviews.  The Score is fine if unimpressive (sturdy, standard-fare action movie from the 1930's sort of bounce), but the real winner is the cinematography.  Victor Milner's work here is some of the best I've seen from the mid-1930's, atmospheric & cool.  It recalls in some ways what we'd eventually get from Gregg Toland in The Long Voyage Home and Citizen Kane (though not quite that sophisticated)-using the lighting in a way you didn't really see in 1930's cinema, and it's genuinely impressive.  The film's third nomination is for Akim Tamiroff, and yes, he's sporting yellowface onscreen.  Even discounting the significant racism involved, Tamiroff's work here is rudimentary-he gives Yang very little other than a sense of menace, and there's no nuance or personality in what he's doing.  This was the first year of the supporting categories at the Oscars, and thankfully they quickly started picking better work than this.

Secret Agent (1936)

Film: Secret Agent (1936)

Stars: John Gielgud, Peter Lorre, Madeleine Carroll, Robert Young

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

Madeleine Carroll is one of the least known (if not truly the least known) of the women we're going to profile this year for our third season of Saturdays with the Stars.  But she holds a distinction shared by just a handful of these women, and that is that she actually starred in two Alfred Hitchcock films.  Last week we talked about her complicated relationship with Hitchcock (at one point he put handcuffs on her that literally resulted in her getting welts on her wrists in The 39 Steps), but it's undeniable that that film made her a star, and it made sense (by 1930's logic) for her to reunite quickly after with Hitchcock and her leading man Robert Donat in another thriller (if it ain't broke...).  Unfortunately, Donat wasn't well at the time (he suffered from severe asthma that inhibited his leading man potential), and so with Secret Agent we got Hitch, Madeleine, and John Gielgud, an unlikely (and ill-suited) replacement for Donat in our second Hitchcock film this month.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Edgar Brodie (Gielgud), a member of the British army, who has been pronounced dead in the newspapers by mistake, and therefore is the perfect person to undertake a spy mission.  He is hired by a man named "R" who wants him to find a German agent who is working against British interests in the Middle East.  He is partnered with the "General" (Lorre), who is not a general but is a hired killer, and a heartless, eccentric one at that.  Brodie, now under the guise of "Ashenden" is also assigned a wife named Elsa (Carroll), who despises him at first (or so it seems), and is interested in this caper due to the thrill of it, not realizing that it comes with a cost; she spends much of her time, despite being "married" to Ashenden flirting with playboy Marvin (Young), who doesn't seem to mind that the women he's chasing has a husband.  Ashenden & the General initially think a mountaineer is the spy, killing him in a harrowing scene atop a mountain, but then they learn he isn't the spy (which causes Elsa to be despondent over her involvement in killing an innocent man).  We finally learn, after she leaves, that Marvin is the secret agent, and aboard a train there is a standoff between the four, with both Marvin & the General killed, and Ashenden & Elsa, now in love, quitting the espionage business and instead pursuing a real marriage.

The movie is conventional.  While modern audiences will initially wonder if Lorre is the double agent due to his long history of playing double-crossers, it's pretty apparent as the movie goes that it'll be Young (otherwise why is he there?).  Secret Agent was not as well-received as The 39 Steps, and it's not difficult to understand why.  The twists are routine, and while the camerawork is inventive (particularly the murder of the mountaineer, and a strange crime scene involving an organist), that doesn't solve the biggest problem in the movie-the casting of Gielgud.

Gielgud apparently disliked this film, thinking that Robert Young got the better part of the two men, and while he's wrong (Peter Lorre is the only person giving a great performance here, and completely steals the picture), he is correct that he was a horrible fit for this.  Hitchcock's leading men need to be everyday guys stuck in extraordinary circumstances, and while Gielgud was a fine actor, he was not great at playing an "average chap."  His chemistry with Carroll isn't as good as hers with Donat, as both feel stilted & she gets on much better with Young (who of the two actors in general I'd never prefer, but is better here even if he's nowhere near as good as Lorre).  As a result, Secret Agent is a miss, and it's easy to see why Carroll never worked with Hitchcock again.  Next week, we're going to move away from Madeleine's relationship with Hitchcock, and watch what happens as she takes full advantage of her new stardom in America.

The 39 Steps (1935)

Film: The 39 Steps (1935)

Stars: Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Mannheim, Godfrey Tearle, Peggy Ashcroft, Wylie Watson

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

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

In writing up the Saturdays with the Stars series over the past two years, we get a lot of deep cut films.  We've had movies that I'd never heard of, not even in a footnote or a "virtually unknown" way...just movies that I never knew existed until this series.  And then there are times where I sheepishly have to confide that I haven't seen a bonafide classic, and that's where we are today.  Madeleine Carroll's career was filled with an enormous number of hits, made with some of the most important leading men & directors of the 1930's, but when it comes down to it, her story is really about The 39 Steps.  While movies like Vertigo and Psycho are the first go-to's for the director, The 39 Steps is chronologically the first movie of his that pretty much everyone involved has universally-praised as a masterpiece, and is the most important film of Madeleine Carroll's life.  Nearly 90 years after the film came out, it's worth confessing-it's also still really good.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie's plot is complex, even for Hitchcock, but I'll get through it so we have some grounding before we get to the actual quality of the movie.  The film is about Richard Hannay (Donat), an ordinary man who witnesses a man who can recall anything at a side show called Mr. Memory (Watson).  Shots are fired in the theater, and on his way out Hannay meets Annabella Smith (Mannheim) whom he convinces to come back to his apartment, and there she says she's a spy, and is trying to protect British intelligence, alluding to the enigmatic "39 Steps."  After she is found dead the next day, the police assume Hannay to be the murderer, and he becomes a fugitive to prove his innocence.  Along the way he meets Pamela (Carroll), a beautiful woman whom he becomes handcuffed to at one point, and who doesn't trust him, but because they're thrown together they have to work together to prove what the 39 Steps is, as both are in real danger if its secret is not discovered.

The movie is good up until the last moments, when it becomes truly great.  The film is prototypical Hitchcock in the ways that it takes an ordinary man (Donat here, but you see shades of later leading men like Jimmy Stewart & Cary Grant in his work), puts him in an extraordinary situation, and sees how he handles it.  But the climactic scene is shocking & delicious.  Hannay suddenly realizes that the code is hidden not on paper, but instead Mr. Memory himself has memorized them & will be used to smuggle the secrets out of the country.  He confronts him onstage, thus spoiling the men's plans, with Mr. Memory dying as he compulsively tells the men his secrets.  It's a brilliantly-constructed thriller move, one with a great "aha" moment (I'll admit-I hadn't figure out this was where the story was headed even though it's obvious in retrospect), and literally I got goosebumps.  Honestly, the only real complaint I had about the movie is that it was too rushed-Hitch a few years later would've been able to add more tension to the story, and made the remainder of the pacing worthy of his magnificent climax.

Madeleine Carroll is fun, if perhaps slightly wrong for the tone of the film.  There are moments in the middle of the movie where it almost feels like we're watching It Happened One Night with rich banter between Donat & Carroll, but it takes you out of the picture as it feels tonally wrong.  The two have great chemistry, though, and she looks like a Hitchcock leading lady.  This movie made her a star, though not without some caveats.  This year with Hitchcock we take the good with the bad, but we don't hide the latter, and the director, notorious for putting his leading ladies through the ringer, at one point literally handcuffed Donat & Carroll together (lying about whether or not he still had the key) so that they could understand better what their characters went through.  As a result, you can actually see real welts on Carroll's wrists in the film that weren't makeup-that was a result of Hitchcock's "prank."  This wasn't enough, though, to make Carroll not work with him again, and next week we'll take a look at their second pairing.

The World Moves On (1934)

Film: The World Moves On (1934)

Stars: Madeleine Carroll, Franchot Tone, Reginald Denny, Louise Dresser, Stepin Fetchit

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

All right, we start out our third season of Saturdays with the Stars with Madeleine Carroll, an actress many probably don't know, despite the fact that she starred in two Alfred Hitchcock films.  We're going to continue doing these chronologically in 2021 (so, as a result, we will hit the Hitchcock films over the next two weeks rather than starting there), and instead go to the movies of a different icon, John Ford.  We'll talk about Carroll's career at this point in a second, but Ford was not yet "John Ford, Screen Icon" but was getting close to it.  Earlier in 1934, he had made The Lost Patrol, which would be a big hit (and critically-acclaimed), and the following year he'd make one of his important movies, The Informer, which would win him his first Oscar for Best Director.

(Spoilers Ahead) The World Moves On is an oddly-plotted movie, but I'll give it a shot here.  Essentially it takes place almost 200 years apart, with the opening scenes being a will reading of a man who gives his empire to his sons, and ensure that each will represent a different country as part of the business.  This works, but 185 years afterward, they run into a situation with World War I, where these men's businesses are at odds with each other.  Two of the family members, Richard from America (Tone) and Mary Warburton (Carroll) play lovers both 185 years later, and as distant cousins, in the 20th Century.  They end up together, but they have to do so through decades of strife, and largely losing the business as the war progresses.

The movie is deeply anti-war from my perspective, and that's its most notable trait other than the meandering (and frequently perplexing) plot.  I was shocked even in 1934 to see a post-Code Hollywood so fervently against World War I in the actions of the family, seeing our main characters like Richard & Mary suffer so much at the hands of a war that few can explain the cause of (this isn't incorrect, it's just surprising coming from John Ford & the studio system).  The movie is also heinously racist, having Stepin Fetchit (then the most famous black man in the movies), playing a bumbling, foolish African-American servant who is constantly procreating.  Fetchit's Dixie is not a large character, but it borders into the obscene how he's treated onscreen, and I would be remiss if I didn't point it out.

As for our star, she's gorgeous, but kind of bland.  Franchot Tone is kind of the textbook definition of "gorgeous but bland" during this era, and he & Carroll make an attractive couple, but they don't bring any fire to these creations.  This did, however, cement her stardom at the time, as this was her first major American film & within two years she'd be the first British leading lady to have a major star contract in Hollywood, and likely draw the attention of a specific director.  After all, her Mary is a tortured woman, icy & beautiful & very, very blonde, something a certain director would make a trademark in his career...

Saturdays with the Stars: Madeleine Carroll

Each month of 2021 we will be taking a look at the leading ladies of some of Alfred Hitchcock's many celebrated classics; we'll be doing this series chronologically to when they first entered Hitchcock's filmography.  While Hitchcock started making feature-length movies as early as 1925 (and indeed his first film starred a woman, Virginia Valli, who was a leading woman of the Silent Era), we're going to enter his career a decade later, during his early sound films with an actress who actually headlined two of Hitchcock's pictures, including possibly his earliest "classic," or at least one of the earliest films oftentimes name-checked with Hitchcock.  This month, our star is Madeleine Carroll.

Carroll grew up near Birmingham, England, the daughter of an Irishman and a French woman.  Her early career didn't scream "actress," in the same way that other stars of her era did (she went to university and was at one point a teacher), but she eventually started doing stage work, and many would comment on her icy beauty.  She appeared in a number of British productions (including the scandalous Young Woodley, about a student who has an affair with his headmaster's wife), and then headed to Hollywood, where she quickly made a name for herself, starring in the John Ford film The World Moves On.

Carroll would appear in two Hitchcock films, The 39 Steps and Secret Agent, both with Robert Donat as her leading man.  Though Carroll would enjoy a long life, she didn't grant a lot of interviews so there's not much in terms of contemporary accounts of what she thought of the director.  The films cemented her fame though-she'd go on to be a contract star of the late 1930's until the early 1940's, when a personal tragedy (her sister died in the London bombings during World War II), got her more involved in the war effort, and her film career waned.  She also had an extraordinary personal life (which we'll discuss throughout the month) including several well-documented marriages to public men.  This month, we'll take a peak at Madeleine Carroll on-and-off the screen, and in particular the two films with Hitchcock that cemented her legacy.