Nothing Sacred (1937)

Film: Nothing Sacred (1937)

Stars: Carole Lombard, Fredric March, Charles Winninger, Walter Connolly

Director: William A. Wellman

Oscar History: No nominations

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 Carole Lombard-click here to learn more about Ms. Lombard (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

One of the rules of "Saturdays with the Stars" is that I never rewatch a movie for the series (I'm experiencing the star new along with you).  This oftentimes means that some of the bigger films in an actor's career (especially as we continue with this series) get left behind, and that's the case jumping from Twentieth Century to today's movie Nothing Sacred for Carole Lombard.  In 1936, Carole Lombard starred in My Man Godfrey, a movie that would earn her her only Oscar nomination & is generally considered to be her best film (it is one of my favorite screen comedies, and if you haven't seen it I order you to rectify that immediately).  Coming off of that, Lombard was a golden girl in Hollywood-a critical darling, and a name that basically was printing money.  Nothing Sacred was something of a disruption of that pattern.  Critically-acclaimed (both then and now) it was somehow a flop at the box office, and its enduring reputation has been largely due to its status as a genuinely good movie (albeit no Godfrey) and its place as the only Technicolor picture of Lombard's career.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Wally Cook (March), a reporter who is coming off of a story where he was hoodwinked into covering a con job as legitimate (which involves Hattie McDaniel in a one-line part, two years before she'd win the Oscar).  He sees a feel-good story as a potential redemption by covering Hazel Flagg (Lombard), who is dying of radium poisoning, and decides to give her a send-off that involves a ticket-tape parade & toasts all over New York City.  The only problem is that Hazel isn't dying, but let's him believe it so she can get out of her small-town life in Vermont.  When she falls in love with him, she realizes she needs to either disappear or die in order to not humiliate Wally, but in the end she marries him, assuming a different name, and letting the "celebrity" Hazel Flagg slip into the night.

Nothing Sacred is the exact sort of movie from the 1930's that I always enjoy, frequently love, but isn't really something that exists today.  Screwball comedies are truly something audiences have grown out of, but it's also genuinely a movie without a lot of laughs.  Nothing Sacred is clever, but it's more of a "hmm, that's witty" sort of observation rather than something that will have you bowling over with laughter.  It doesn't help that the Technicolor is unnecessary (it's fun to see Lombard in her only color film, as she looks glorious, but it does nothing to add to the movie), and the plot is ridiculous (why is the entire city of New York randomly in love with this blonde girl who is dying?).

That said, Lombard continues to sparkle.  She is a truly gifted comedian, and someone who knows how to have chemistry with virtually everyone, even a miscast Fredric March (I adore March in most things, but there's something off here-he seems to be underselling the part, and doesn't really relate to the role as a journalist...there's not enough meat on this role).  Her speech about the logic of her committing suicide is a riot (it's funny in the context even if that sentence is obviously no laughing matter in reality) & her crying jags are spot-on...at this point I'm starting to believe there's nothing she can't do, though next week we're going to see her stretch her skills in a movie that put Lombard beyond what audiences expected from her.

OVP: Lady of Burlesque (1943)

Film: Lady of Burlesque (1943)

Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Michael O'Shea, J. Edward Bromberg, Iris Adrian, Victoria Faust, Stephanie Bachelor, Frank Conroy

Director: William A. Wellman

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Trying to understand the concept of celebrity of eras you didn't live through is occasionally difficult to achieve.  Obviously for the past 150 years or so actors have been a mainstay of celebrity gossip (and before that, royalty & the nobility took that position), with the advent of magazines & a widely-read newspaper industry (and later, tabloid journalism, television, & the internet) it wasn't just status or ability that made people famous-sometimes they just happened to be famous-for-being-famous.  This didn't start with Kim Kardashian & Paris Hilton.  Brenda Frazier, Doris Duke, & the Gabor Sisters all became national obsessions for a time through their tragic glamour (and extensive love lives).  But one figure I can't quite get a handle on is Gypsy Rose Lee.  Obviously most well-known today for the Stephen Sondheim-penned musical Gypsy, Lee led a provocative, and frequently public, life as a well-known exotic dancer, and at one point a mystery novelist.  The first of her books was The G-String Murders, about a group of strippers being offed by a mysterious serial killer.  Though shocking for the time, the novel was optioned by United Artists, renamed Lady of Burlesque, and is our film today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Dixie Daisy (Stanwyck), a headliner at a burlesque theater, though most of the film focuses less on the on-stage performances & more about what's happening offstage, namely catfights between the women & suddenly a series of shocking & grizzly murders of the dancers, one of whom is found with her g-string tied around her neck.  Everyone is a suspect, including Dixie, who is being courted throughout the film by mid-level comic Biff (O'Shea).  As the film goes on, we find out that one of the stagehands (Conroy), driven mad by being demeaned by the dancers (and angry that the opera house he once worked out is now a house of ill-repute) was the killer & nearly offs Dixie before Biff & her friends save her.  At the end, Dixie, despite claiming she'd never marry a comic, runs off to elope with Biff, the day saved.

The movie is oddly-paced, and is probably only interesting if you're a big Stanwyck fan or are interested in curiosities.  Made in the post-Code era, the film gets around the bulk of the more scandalous aspects of the picture (one of the women does, in fact, get strangled with her g-string), by largely implying things while Stanwyck's Dixie remains pretty upright.  Clearly she's not meant to be an innocent lamb, but she's still sturdy Barbara Stanwyck, as American as the red-white-and-blue.  This causes confusion though as the movie is less interested in seeing these women as more than caricatures, and the two murdered women are the ones that the script most heavily implies "have it coming."  Combined with a left field twist on the murder (where we find out after-the-fact that the murderer was the grandfather of one of the victims, whom he was ashamed was involved in burlesque), and it just feels too dated for my tastes.

The film's Oscar nomination is uninspired.  The film has musical connections (Stanwyck even "sings" on screen several times), but the score isn't particularly noteworthy or impressive, and I dare you to hum even one line of it five minutes after seeing the picture.  In the 1940's, the Best Score category was a smorgasbord, with virtually every studio getting multiple nominations (this was something we only saw in the music categories), sometimes 20 films in one lineup, which is why something like Lady of Burlesque, an otherwise forgettable picture, gets its due.

OVP: The Public Enemy (1931)

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

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

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

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

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

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

OVP: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)

Film: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
Stars: Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Harry Morgan, Frank Conroy, Harry Davenport, Anthony Quinn, Mary Beth Hughes, Jane Darwell
Director: William A. Wellman
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Picture)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

In the early years of the Oscars, 16 films received only one nomination, but it was somehow for the big category, Best Picture.  This list is due to a variety of factors (campaigns were different then, studios had more control over who was nominated, for a number of these films there were simply less categories as options).  The final of these 16 films (to date) to only receive a nomination for Best Picture is the small (it's only 75 minutes long) Henry Fonda western The Ox-Bow Incident, which both Fonda and eventually Clint Eastwood would highlight as one of their all-time favorite movies.  Since my dish is out (like a lot of Minnesotans, my house is buried in snow right now and it was too cold to go outside and fix the dish at 9:30), I figured it was a good time to clear a film out of my DVR, so I caught it as my late-night Saturday movie this weekend.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in a small Nevada town in 1885 where Gil (Fonda) and Art (Morgan) are eyed with suspicion by the locals, assuming the two men to be rustlers.  It turns out there are rustlers afoot, as we learn soon that Larry Kincaid, a local ranchman, has been murdered by such men, and suddenly the mob in the bar wants justice.  Only a sole shop owner Davies (Davenport) seems to think this is a bad idea, but he's overruled by the townspeople, and suddenly they are on horseback before they come across a trio of strangers, including a handsome young man named Donald Martin (Andrews) and a quiet Mexican called Juan (Quinn), who turns out to be a famed gambler.  The three men are accused of killing Larry Kincaid, and after a 12 Angry Men-style moment where only a few of the mob decide to wait until the sheriff gets there, the three men are hanged despite there being no tangible evidence that they weren't just associates of Kincaid's.  The mob finally chances upon the sheriff, and proudly tells him that Kincaid's murderers are dead.

The thing is, though, that Kincaid isn't dead-he'd just been shot, and the men who shot him are already in custody.  The mob suddenly realizes that their brutish mentality has cost three innocent men their lives.  In 1943 this might have come as a surprise to the viewer, but for me it was pretty obvious that this was where we were going, as the films of the 1940's frequently echoed what would later feel like a Twilight Zone-style lesson of tolerance told through metaphor.  The film ends with Gil, our hero, having his head held high because he was one of the few to stand for Donald Martin getting justice, but no one feels particularly good, and it's somewhat implied that the whole mob could face criminal repercussions.

The movie itself is nothing more than that metaphor, and as a result it ages kind of badly.  Issue films are generally ones that don't work as well in hindsight, because there's little growth of the characters. What was the story, for example, of Gil's romance with Rose (Hughes, in one of her rare major studio turns), which culminates with an awkward encounter with her new husband...and then suddenly nothing happens with her, as we never see her again and Hank Fonda, who was pining for her earlier never really brings her up again?  The film is good, don't get me wrong (Fonda is his great stoic self, and I liked the supporting turn from Frank Conroy as a bloodthirsty army major), but it's hard to call such a one-dimensional script a classic, even if it might have been ripped off by stronger filmmakers in the years since.  The Ox-Bow Incident is that rare film that probably would have been better had it been longer, and that brevity likely cost it other nominations with the Academy-after all, there's barely enough time for other filmic elements to register.

OVP: The Star Witness (1931)

Film: The Star Witness (1931)
Stars: Walter Huston, Frances Starr, Grant Mitchell, Dickie Moore, Chic Sale
Director: William A. Wellman
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Story)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

There are occasionally films that I see for the Oscar Viewing Project, particularly the films from the early 1930's, where I have to just sort of marvel at how far the Oscars have come.  The early 1930's, after all, were host to some truly great pictures.  Movies ranging from City Lights to King Kong to M were all made during this time period, and yet most of the movies that were cited by AMPAS in his single-digit ceremonies are pretty forgettable genre and drama pictures.  It's not like, years later, Oscar has gotten a lot better at identifying the best and the brightest of movies, but the films that are selected have, in my opinion, got a little more sophisticated in their taste.

(Spoilers Ahead) This is my way of saying that The Star Witness feels a bit flat and juvenile, even if I found myself looking at it like one looks at their kid brother in a middle school play, just proud that he can remember his lines.  That may sound condescending, but it's probably the best I can muster for the film.  The movie is about a gangster Maxey Campo (Ralph Ince) who commits a double-homicide outside the home of a sweet, multi-generational family.  He comes into the house, threatens them, and then leaves, but everyone in the family gets a solid look at him before they go.  As a result, District Attorney Whitlock (Huston) enters the picture, at first convincing them to testify but then the mob starts to deal the family bodily harm, beating Pa (Mitchell) and kidnapping their son (Edward J. Nugent).  The film ends with Grandpa Summerill (Sale) saving the day and being the only one brave enough to testify.

The film plays everyone for being an archetype, from the all-talk Jackie played by Nugent to the Civil War-spouting Grandpa to the world's most adorable child (Dickie Moore, of course).  The movie feels ridiculous even by the 1930's standpoint as I anticipate Walter Huston's hardline DA would have tried slightly less bullying tactics to try and get the family to continue to testify in the wake of bodily harm and kidnapping of a child.  There's never any doubt, of course, in how the movie will end and who will save the little boy, and the film has a solid dose of anti-Italian racism coming from Grandpa (multiple times he refers to foreigners as murderers) that made me leer.

All-in-all, there's not a lot to lend to the movie, and it seems unthinkable that a film this sophomoric came out the same year as something as masterful as M, one of the truly great screenplays of the era (or any era, really).  It's also weird, looking at the Motion Picture Story category of the time, how many of these films managed to randomly be gangster pictures, perhaps anticipating a lifelong affair that Oscar would have with the genre?  Either way, it's a boring if at least easily dismissed picture that's never odious enough to be a one-star endeavor.

Those are my thoughts-anyone out there already have seen The Star Witness (it's pretty eclectic so I'm guessing this is a no)?  If so, I'd love to have a conversation?  If not, at least pipe in with some of your favorite films from the early 1930's!