Champagne (1928)

Film: Champagne (1928)

Stars: Betty Balfour, Jean Bradin, Gordon Harker, Ferdinand von Alten

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

(Throughout the year, in connection with our 'Saturdays with the Stars' series, I am watching every gap I have in Alfred Hitchcock's filmography in what we're calling 'Sunday Leftovers.'  Every Sunday, I'll be watching a Hitchcock film that I've never seen before as I spend 2021 completing his filmography)

Today in "Sunday Leftovers" we're hitting our penultimate Hitchcock silent feature.  Hitchcock would continue to make films outside the thriller genre throughout the early 1930's, so we aren't going to be saying goodbye to his formative years quite yet, but as today's Champagne proves, Hitchcock wasn't adept at everything.  Champagne is a weird movie, and we'll get into some of the reasons why below, but it's also the second comedy that the Master of Suspense would make (though not his last, as we discussed during our month devoted to Carole Lombard).  The first one, The Farmer's Wife was okay if a bit misguided.  Champagne feels more experimental than that picture, but also less successful, particularly when it comes to, well, comedy.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Betty (Balfour), a spoiled heiress who is jetting across the world and crashing an airliner just to rendezvous with her boyfriend (Bradin), against her wealthy father Mark's (Harker) wishes.  The two are planning on eloping, even as Betty is pursued by a mysterious man (von Alten), but when her father comes aboard the ship, he tells her that he's lost his fortune, and they are now broke.  Betty's boyfriend leaves in the confusion, and Betty then assumes he was just a fortune-hunter.  Betty & Mark start living in poverty, with Betty attempting to make the best of it, though Mark's behavior seems to indicate that he might be tricking Betty.  This proves to be the case when Betty gets a job selling flowers at a night club (there's a firm hint this is going to be, if not prostitution, at least an escort situation), and both the boyfriend & dad come to tell Betty that this was a ruse to get Betty to be more serious, and her fortune isn't loss.  Betty runs off with the mysterious man, who it seems at first is going to kidnap her, when suddenly we realize that he is also in on the ruse, and was on the ship to stop Betty from marrying her boyfriend, who now that her dad also thinks he's worthy, she'll marry.

The plot reads as messed up because it is.  Betty is not a particularly good person in the first ten minutes of the picture, but for the remainder of the film she's basically gaslit by the men in her life, trying to manipulate her into being exactly who they think a woman should be.  Considering she takes her father losing his fortune in stride & gets a job right away (and is promptly slut-shamed for it), she's a better person than all of them and deserves to let them rot, for my money.  The film's comedy elements are also pretty sparse, and the treatment of Betty to a modern audience doesn't read as comedy.  The flagrant sexism of The Farmer's Wife is broad enough that even if it's problematic, you still see the humor motifs on display.  Champagne doesn't do that, though, and as a result it's a comedy without any laughs.

I will say, to its credit, that Hitchcock is clearly getting his footing in the first twenty minutes, and you almost think you're about to see a different movie.  The mysterious man and the woman headed for danger are classic plots of his later films, and would've worked better in a straight drama.  I also loved the cinematography in the scenes with the plane & the ship, even if I found them a bit confusing (it wasn't entirely clear what was happening in the early scenes-I saw an earlier cut of the film rather than the restored version, so this might work better in the 104-minute version).  But nice camera work doesn't get around that this movie is a snooze.

Easy Virtue (1928)

Film: Easy Virtue (1928)

Stars: Isabel Jeans, Robin Irvine, Franklin Dyall, Eric Bransby Williams, Enid Stamp Taylor

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

(Throughout the year, in connection with our 'Saturdays with the Stars' series, I am watching every gap I have in Alfred Hitchcock's filmography in what we're calling 'Sunday Leftovers.'  Every Sunday, I'll be watching a Hitchcock film that I've never seen before as I spend 2021 completing his filmography)

We are back!  We have slowly, but steadily after my brief hiatus in early July been reintroducing all of our series, and we are back with our final missing series "Sunday Leftovers" today.  For those unfamiliar, I have been chronologically watching all of the Hitchcock films that I haven't seen before and that aren't part of our "Saturdays with the Stars" series.  I have timed this well so that we have exactly enough Sundays left to match the number of Hitchcock films that I haven't seen, so we are going to be doing a late-night article today to make sure we stay on track.  Each Sunday for the rest of the year my plan is to get another missing Hitchcock film, so we'll end the year with his whole filmography completed.  Today, we're going to be back in the Silent Era with Eaty Virtue, based on a play by Noel Coward.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film starts in something of a strange manner, with a courtroom scene between two figures we don't yet know (I was confused at first, thinking that perhaps a scene was lost on my DVD, but this is how it was meant to be filmed).  We soon learn that Larita Filton (Jeans) is on trial for a divorce, as her jealous ex Aubrey (Dyall) shot a man named Claude (Williams) who had made a pass at her, and he gets away with this violence even though Larita had no intention of romancing Claude.  Larita leaves, disgraced, and moves to the French Riviera where she exists under an assumed name to avoid the press.  She meets a man named John Whittaker (Irvine), who falls for her, but when they impetuously marry, his family doesn't approve of Larita, and John doesn't know about Larita's secret past.  John's mother slowly poisons her son against Larita, and soon he openly is hoping for a divorce.  When they figure out the scandal, Larita says she has no need to apologize, but in the end grants John an uncontested divorce.  The film ends with Larita single again, but this time not fleeing from the photographers, proclaiming that she has nothing left for them to destroy.

We are still in the era where Hitchcock was making domestic dramas that didn't lean into his thriller tendencies that we know so well.  This isn't an era where he hadn't started doing them, mind you (his iconic The Lodger had already come out), but he was still making films that aren't in his obvious wheelhouse.  About the closest we get to a natural Hitchcock angle is Larita, a woman with a terrible secret who is being pursued by a clueless man (which is the background of a lot of his pictures).

But Hitchcock weirdly doesn't know how to handle this scandal.  It doesn't help that divorce, more than any other taboo from early cinema, isn't remotely forbidden today.  Though obviously a murder would get headlines in any era, the scandal of being divorced certainly wouldn't, and so Larita's sins play differently to a modern audience.  But it's also strange because it's not clear whether or not Hitchcock thinks Larita should be punished.  The story reads as a woman caught in a difficult scenario, inviting sympathy, but the ending also has her miserable & alone, starting over honestly but still without a man or the kindness she deserved.  The title of "easy virtue" doesn't really jive with this treatment of Larita, and as a result the movie feels disjointed.

The Farmer's Wife (1928)

Film: The Farmer's Wife (1928)

Stars: Jameson Thomas, Lillian Hall-Davis, Gordon Harker, Gibb McLaughlin, Maud Gill, Louie Pounds, Olga Slade

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

(Throughout the year, in connection with our 'Saturdays with the Stars' series, I am watching every gap I have in Alfred Hitchcock's filmography in what we're calling 'Sunday Leftovers.'  Every two weeks, I'll be watching a Hitchcock film that I've never seen before as I spend 2021 completing his filmography)

We are continuing on our look at the films of Alfred Hitchcock's early career with The Farmer's Wife, yet another silent film (we'll finish up his Silent Era by the end of April), and this one outside what we typically associate with Hitchcock.  While the director has a lot of humorous imagery & was a practical joker offset (sometimes crossing the line into harassment), Hitchcock is not a director we normally associate with screen comedy.  His early works ran the gamut across genres, but generally he is most known for suspense, horror, or straight drama.  That wasn't always the case, though, as we find out with The Farmer's Wife, which isn't just humorous-the film is meant to be a straight up humorous film, and some ninety years later actually succeeds in that regard.

(Spoilers Ahead) Samuel Sweetland (Thomas) has just lost his wife, and his grown daughter (recently wed) is intent on finding him a new wife to help run the farm & take care of him.  Sweetland makes a list of local widows & spinsters, but finds that as he starts to court them that they aren't as interested in his romantic advances as he is in them.  One by one, the four women he initially listed as a match for himself declines the offer, saying he is too controlling, too old, just a bad match.  This hurts his pride, and makes those around him, including his farmhand, ashamed of him having no self-respect & basically just giving himself away to no one who wants him.  However, Minta (Hall-Davis), his housekeeper, doesn't see a pitiable figure, but a man she's desperately in love with, and as the film ends (with one of the women who rejected him coming back to state that he changed his mind), Samuel marries Minta, and they live happily ever after.

The film's plot is kind of funny, and not just wry like Hitchcock usually goes, but actually intended to be properly funny.  So atypical is it that Hitch doesn't even make one of his trademark cameos.  This makes it feel like a bit of a cheat compared to some of the other work we've profiled, as for a director that made everything part of his "signature" this gives off the vibes of a "job for hire" which at this point in his career Hitchcock didn't really need to be taking (after the success of The Lodger).

That said, it's a good movie.  The scenes where Samuel is brought down a peg by these women are kind of a riot.  All (admittedly handsome) machismo, he deserves some of the comeuppance he gets, and while it is unkind in retrospect, Olga Slade steals the movie as a stout, high-on-herself postmistress who refuses Samuel for being too old, though clearly she, like him, has perhaps too high of expectations for herself.  Overall, this is a strange movie, and the picture that feels the least like the Hitchcock we all love, but it's a film that stands up on its own.

Downhill (1927)

Film: Downhill (1927)

Stars: Ivor Novello, Ben Webster, Norman McKinnel, Robin Irvine, Annette Benson

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

(Throughout the year, in connection with our 'Saturdays with the Stars' series, I am watching every gap I have in Alfred Hitchcock's filmography in what we're calling 'Sunday Leftovers.'  Every two weeks, I'll be watching a Hitchcock film that I've never seen before as I spend 2021 completing his filmography)

We are continuing on our look at the film's of Alfred Hitchcock, and are still (despite the fact that we're in March) in his Silent Era, a place we'll be for at least a couple more weeks-I haven't checked & want to be surprised when we move to sound).  This week's film is once again not a thriller or horror film in any way, though perhaps our lead character might characterize it as such his vantage point.  Hitchcock two films after his breakout success with The Lodger was not yet "Hitchcock!" and as we talked about yesterday, it wasn't until The Lady Vanishes in 1938 that Hitch would become the "Master of Suspense," moving to Hollywood and basically getting to write his own ticket for the rest of his career.  That doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't signature touches from the director, or that this isn't a good film, because it is.  For my money this is our best "Sunday Leftovers" screening so far.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie starts out with something of an unusual premise, and one that doesn't quite hold water to a modern viewer, even if it would've at the time.  Roddy (Novello) is a champion student & athlete at his prestigious boarding school, while Tim (Irvine), his best friend, is a poorer student there on scholarship who lives in his shadow.  When the two boys meet Mabel (Benson), a "promiscuous" waitress, Tim sleeps with her getting her pregnant (or is she pregnant...the film is never quite sure about that which is where the "holding water" for me doesn't work since this isn't confirmed?), but Roddy claims the child so that Tim doesn't leave school, since Tim can't afford expulsion like Roddy can (him being wealthy).  Unfortunately for Roddy, his father is humiliated & fights with Roddy, who then leaves the house on principle, working first as an actor, and then after an unsuccessful marriage that bankrupts him, as a male gigolo.  He is at death's door before some friends ship him back to his home, hoping for a reward in the process, and Roddy comes to his old house, where his parents (who understand what he had done now) welcome him back with open arms.

Downhill is a dark film with a happy ending.  The movie shows the ways that one man's decision to behave honorably can impact his life forever.  Roddy repeatedly throughout the film behaves the way we think he should-he helps his friend, he believes his wife, he defends his honor-but is constantly punished for it, which is pretty bleak for a film of the 1920's, and almost certainly would've been difficult to do a in a post-code era.  The film is also one of the earliest films (along with The Lodger) where Hitchcock cast a queer man in the lead role (we'd see this later with Farley Granger, John Dall, and if Hollywood legend is to be believed, Cary Grant), and Hitchcock uses that.  Novello exudes a pretty gay man quality with his expressive, sensitive eyes, and while the older women he's romancing as a gigolo are women on the screen, having them appear overtly masculine gets across the point that Hitchcock is trying to make here.

Downhill has a lot of cool artistic choices, using shadow-and-light in the ways that were popular with German expressionists like FW Murnau & Robert Wiene at the time, and it's a compelling narrative.  I liked the movie-I thought Novello was excellent in the lead role, even if he's forced to learn a lesson that doesn't feel fair (though the fact that Hitchcock never acknowledges that isn't fair is a true sense of realism in the picture).  Though its treatment of women is super problematic, the movie otherwise has aged pretty well, and while it's not his most famous silent film, it's one of his better ones for my money.

The Ring (1927)

Film: The Ring (1927)

Stars: Carl Brisson, Lillian Hall-Davis, Ian Hunter

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

(Throughout the year, in connection with our 'Saturdays with the Stars' series, I am watching every gap I have in Alfred Hitchcock's filmography in what we're calling 'Sunday Leftovers.'  Every two weeks, I'll be watching a Hitchcock film that I've never seen before as I spend 2021 completing his filmography)

We continue our series of "Sunday leftovers" with another Hitchcock film from his Silent Movie Era (we'll actually be here for quite a bit longer-Hitch made a handful of movies from 1927-29).  As I mentioned earlier this week, we won't be seeing The Mountain Eagle, Hitch's second feature-length film as it is the only one of his full-length movies considered "lost," and we'll actually be skipping The Lodger as well.  I'm only profiling films that I haven't seen before 2021, and The Lodger (a creepy, good film, probably his most celebrated of this era & one that would be a harbinger for much of his later work) was the only one of his movie's I'd seen from the 1920's.  So we move on now to The Ring, our next picture.  Technically The Ring was the fifth film that Hitchcock made, but it was released fourth so we're going with that (we'll get to the other film that would compete for this slot in two weeks).  The Ring, despite coming after The Lodger, deals with topics that Hitchcock didn't always put into his movies.  The film has no thriller or horror elements, and is in fact a relatively straight-forward boxing love triangle, one of the earliest pugilist films (inarguably the cinema's most-loved sport).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film, as I said above, is a love story, though an atypical one.  Jack (Brisson) is a circus boxer who is famous for being able to win any match in "one round," (he has that as his nickname), and is romancing Mabel (Hall-Davis) the ticket girl smitten with her he-man boyfriend.  When Bob Corby (Hunter) is able to beat Jack in the ring, it's a shock until his identity is revealed: he's the Australian heavyweight champion, and sees a lot of potential in Jack as his sparring partner.  Bob also sees potential in a romance with Mabel, and while Jack marries a reluctant Mabel early in the film (the wedding scene has the comic effect of a two-headed woman and the world's tallest man showing up in front of a bewildered priest...which is kind of hilarious & the sort of visual gag a cheeky Hitchcock would throw in later films), she continues her affair with Bob, which causes a rift in their marriage.  Eventually Jack decides the only way to win back Mabel is by beating Bob in the ring, which he does in the final scenes of the movie after working his way up the ranks of the boxing world, becoming the champion & officially taking Mabel's heart forever.

The Ring is quite distinct in that it's the only (credited) script that Alfred Hitchcock wrote from scratch (he'd adapt a few later, but always from books or plays), and you can tell he genuinely loves the story as for a silent movie it's quite detailed & legible as a plot.  You could add dialogue here & have to change very little.  The film's politics are problematic, both racially (the n-word shows up in a title card with a nonchalance that will make you wince), and sexually (Mabel is a one-dimensional trope, unusual for Hitchcock with female characters, who is only interested in whichever man comes out on top), but if you can move past that there's some good here.

After all, for a 90-minute (longer than most of Hitch's movies until this point) film it's brisk, and it's lensed well.  The boxing scenes at the end were clearly a template for future films, and there are great comic bits in an otherwise dramatic movie from side characters & visual cues at the circus.  I didn't love it (it's been a while since I've seen it, but I'd put The Lodger above this in Hitchcock's pantheon), but it's a reminder that a great director can do wonders with virtually any script, particularly his own, if he has a vision in mind.

OVP: The Racket (1928)

Film: The Racket (1928)
Stars: Thomas Meighan, Marie Prevost, Louis Wolheim
Director: Lewis Milestone
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Picture)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

For those of you who are not fans of the Olympics (judging from the traffic, that may not be a lot of you), you may have been wondering what has become of the Oscar Viewing Project.  Never fear, while I did take a slight break to watch the world's greatest athletes and discuss the Republicans' nominee for Vice President, we are going to be returning hot and heavy into the films that Oscar deemed worthy.  I have a lot of fun stuff planned for September as well-more Oscar films, theatrical releases, September TV show premieres, the U.S. Open, the Democratic National Convention (I will be recapping all of the televised nights), and possibly more-so hang onto your hats and pray that I don't get distracted by shiny objects.

To welcome both you and I back to Oscar Viewing, I thought it would be great fun to go with not only our first Silent Era film, but also one of the first three films to be nominated for Best Picture.  At the first Academy Awards, Best Picture was broken out into two categories-Outstanding Production and Unique and Artistic Production.  Unique and Artistic Production got canned, though considering that the masterworks Sunrise and The Crowd were amongst the films in that category, it sort of makes you wonder what sort of course the Academy Awards would have taken had they stuck with the category.  This is my first of the three films in the Outstanding Production that I've seen, and while Seventh Heaven (the other losing nominee) could pop up at any time, I've decided to save the ultimate winner of this category, Wings, for my final OVP movie.  So it may take a bit of time, as I've got 2249 films to go!

But let's start that countdown with this film, directed by Lewis Milestone, who scored two Oscars in the first three years of the Oscars, and is noted for his big pictures, as well as his massive ego.  Considering the film was produced by Howard Hughes, also famously sure of himself, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall on this set.  Milestone's epic masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front relied largely on the naivety of some of his characters, as they slowly became world-weary men.  He's less sturdy here, where all of the characters have long-established relationships, and while it's hard to call them cliches since it was 1928 and film hadn't been around long enough to deal in cliches, the wise-cracking mob moll (Prevost), a justice-defying crime boss (Louis Wolheim, who would also memorably work with Milestone in the aforementioned AQOTWF), and the unflappable cop with a solid moral compass (Meighan) are such standard and overused tropes that you feel like you've already seen the film halfway through it.  This isn't necessarily Milestone's or Hughes's faults, but what is their fault is the way it treats Meighan in particular-it seems unbelievable that someone with the experience he has would, for example (SPOILER ALERT) leave his star witness meandering around the police station where Wolheim's mob boss is able to shoot him, rather than locking him up.  The best part of the film has to be Prevost, all Mae West spunk and able to seduce any man in her path, except oddly our two stars.  Prevost would be one of the more tragic stars of the 1930's, purportedly having an affair with Hughes (though really, what starlet didn't sleep with Hughes at some point during the 30's?), and becoming an alcoholic after this film.  She died of heart failure at the age of 38 (Joan Crawford, a longtime friend, paid for the funeral as Prevost was broke).

Overall, the film was a bit of a disappointment considering the heights that Hughes and Milestone were able to reach later in their respective careers, but I'll turn it over to you now.  Have you seen The Racket, and does it rank alongside of Wings or Seventh Heaven (or Sunrise and The Crowd, for that matter), in your opinion?  Do you have a favorite Marie Prevost performance?  And have you been doing any Oscar-viewing while I've been slacking off?  Do tell!