Secrets (1933)

Film: Secrets (1933)

Stars: Mary Pickford, Leslie Howard

Director: Frank Borzage

Oscar Nominations: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

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

(Editor's Note: I'm aware it's not Saturday, but we're not going to short-change Miss Pickford because I didn't time my Saturday particularly well this week and over-booked myself...next month's star I've already written half of her articles already, so we'll be back on schedule)

As we talked about with our last article, Mary Pickford had experienced the first high-profile flop of her career with The Taming of the Shrew in 1929, her second sound film and a bad time to be having flops as the studios were nervous about any Silent Era star that couldn't translate.  This was the beginning of the end of Pickford's film career.  No longer able to play teenagers or child roles (by 1929, Pickford was already 27), the kind that made her a star, studios didn't know what to do with her, and increasingly actresses like Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, & Joan Crawford began to succeed her as the most important women in Hollywood.  Her final film & our movie today, Secrets, was released in 1933.

(Spoilers Ahead) Secrets is about a couple, and it takes place in four acts.  The couple are Mary (Pickford) and John (Howard), and initially the power dynamic between them is inverted to what it would eventually become.  She's the daughter of a prominent businessman, he is a lowly clerk in her father's office.  But they begin to romance, and after John is fired from said job, they decide to run away into the American West together rather than her marrying another man.  There, they encounter hardship initially, but after a while great success, with John fulfilling his promise and becoming a governor, and then a senator, and Mary raising four of their five children to adulthood.

The movie is weirder than it sounds, and not because it's intended to be weird.  The four-act structure feels very regimented (you can tell this was based on a play), much to the film's chagrin as it makes it feel like four little movies rather than one big one.  After all, between Act 2 & 3, we go from these two being inseparable pioneers to John repeatedly cheating on Mary with a woman named Lolita (they were not subtle with the character monikers in this movie), and because this is Pre-Code, this is said straight out.  While John obviously stays with Mary, this weirdly doesn't cast a pall on the rest of the film, and I'll be honest, Pickford isn't a strong enough actress in sound to pull this tricky balance off.  It feels like she goes from being hurt to "oh well, my husband cheats on me, but at least he loves me" a little too quickly.  Pickford's inability to adapt to sound in terms of her acting style probably mattered more than her age & her speaking voice...I get why she retired after this, because there wasn't really room for this style of acting in the 1930's.

Pickford, as I mentioned above, would never headline another movie, though she'd sneak into a couple of short films as a cameo in the years that followed.  She would also continue to produce films in the years that followed, including 1949's Love Happy, a Marx Brothers picture which featured a small cameo from a very young Marilyn Monroe, but I'll be honest, most of Pickford's post-America's Sweetheart life is pretty sad.  She became an alcoholic, and divorced Douglas Fairbanks in 1936.  Both of her younger siblings died of alcohol-related illnesses in the 1930's, and she became reclusive, only seeing a handful of friends & family (including longtime pal Lillian Gish).  She was considered for the lead role in Sunset Boulevard (director Billy Wilder even went to meet with her at Pickfair), but by that point, isolated with memories of her stardom and faded glory in an aging house...Mary Pickford had basically become Norma Desmond.

Next month, we will talk about the actress who would succeed Mary Pickford as America's Sweetheart, someone whose career would also go south after she got too old...but would end up with a second career & a much happier ending than America's first Sweetheart.  We'll start our conversation about her on Thursday.

Baby Face (1933)

Film: Baby Face (1933)

Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, John Wayne

Director: Alfred E. Green

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Barbara Stanwyck: click here to learn more about Ms. Stanwyck (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

While Barbara Stanwyck got her start on the stage, first in the Ziegfeld Follies and then on Broadway, she transitioned to film pretty quickly and quite successfully.  She starred early in her film career in Frank Capra's Ladies of Leisure (which sparked a friendship between the two that would pay dividends for both in future films), and was quickly headlining B-pictures for various studios soon after.  We'll talk about this a bit this month, but unlike pretty much every other major player of her era, Barbara Stanwyck was never a contract star.  She managed to become one of the biggest names in Hollywood for two decades without the help of a major studio.  Part of how she pulled that off was today's movie.  Baby Face was a hit, though not a gargantuan one.  But it gained a level of notoriety and fame that quickly elevated Stanwyck to a position that allowed her to not only headline big movies, but four years later, join the upper-crust of Hollywood actresses as an Oscar nominee for Stella Dallas.  Baby Face stands apart as one of the most salacious and well-known Pre-Code films, and after seeing it for the first time, I tend to agree-it's pretty staggering this movie got made in 1933.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a young woman named Lily Powers (Stanwyck) who works at her father's speakeasy as a prostitute, and has since he started pimping her out at the age of 14.  One night, after her father (whom it is strongly suggested sexually abused her when she was a teenager) dies from a whiskey still explosion, Lily decides to move to New York, and under the advisement of an old man she befriended at the speakeasy she "uses her sexuality" to get ahead.  This includes a string of men at her job, frequently sleeping with them to advance her career at work, even if they're married (this includes John Wayne in a very small, very early-in-his-career role).  As she works her way up, she becomes rich and amasses a large fortune, but also can no longer distinguish love from sex.  This is seen as many of these men end up destitute because of their association with Lily, their marriages & careers ruined, but her richer.  This becomes an issue when Courtland Trenholm (Brent), her playboy beau at the end of the movie, asks her to give back all of the bonds & jewelry that he gave her so that he can have a legal defense.  She initially refuses, unable to give up her life's work for a man, but eventually relents, realizing that she actually loves this one, and has found a happiness she couldn't imagine back in the speakeasy.

The movie's frank sexuality would likely get it a PG-13 rating today, which is saying something for a nearly 90-year-old movie.  Baby Face is frequently credited as one of the movies that got Will Hays to start actually enforcing his Code, rather than just paying it lip service, and you see that as it's heavily implied throughout the film that not only is Stanwyck's Lily engaging in sexual favors for money, but she's clearly good at it.  Men become entranced by her, and I'm not kidding by how forthright they are in the film's first ten minutes about her upsetting relationship with her father, and afterward, the way that she seduces a train owner on a boxcar with her maid essentially listening.  It's scandalous stuff, and you wouldn't see movies like this again until the 1960's.

The movie's sole reason for existence is Stanwyck.  The rest of the cast can't compete (not even a very handsome young John Wayne), and honestly they become interchangeable by the film's end.  But Stanwyck is glorious, and it's easy to see why this is heralded as her great star turn.  She has to sell the arch of a woman who is eventually redeemed & finds love...but man does she make sure that getting there is tough.  Stanwyck gives her a rough but still real exterior, clearly impacted by what she's doing to men, but also totally aware that no one is looking out for her, so she needs to ensure that she comes first in this equation.  It's spectacular, and a sign that one of the most singular Hollywood stars of her era had it from the beginning.

Midnight Mary (1933)

Film: Midnight Mary (1933)

Stars: Loretta Young, Ricardo Cortez, Franchot Tone, Andy Devine, Una Merkel

Director: William A. Wellman

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Loretta Young: click here to learn more about Ms. Young (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Loretta Young's career is unusual in that the earliest parts of it seem effortless.  She was a child actress after her family moved from Utah to Hollywood, and while she wasn't as successful as her sister Gretchen, she quickly got into movies, and even as a teenager was a WAMPAS Baby Star and acting opposite Lon Chaney (then one of the biggest stars in silent pictures) in the late 1920's.  Young's career, as we'll track, is sometimes hard to define because other than her two Oscar-nominated roles and The Bishop's Wife, which all happened over two decades into her career and in rapid succession, she was a consistent headliner but never someone who made a particularly strong mark on Hollywood.  So as we piece together her career, we're going to focus on five films that happened during key moments in Hollywood, and talk about how Young adapted to a town that was still reeling from the advent of talking pictures, and starting next week, the Hays Code. This week, though, we have Young in one of her more salacious roles, a Pre-Code drama called Midnight Mary.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told in flashback, as Mary Martin (Young) we see in the opening scenes is being tried for murder, and we understand through flashback what led to this moment.  Mary, from a young age, was given the fuzzy end of the lollipop, accused of crimes she didn't commit & growing up in poverty.  This put her into the company of a criminal crowd, as this was the easiest way to make money (though, to the film's credit, it gives Mary enough utility to make the choice to go into crime rather than just forcing her into it).  She chances upon a wealthy lawyer named Tom Mannering (Tone) who gives her a chance at a better life, but at this point the cards are dealt.  When Mary is finally found by the police for her life of crime, she makes it look to Tom like she'd conned him for his money, rather than admit she fell in love with him but can't bear to inflict on him the shame of being in love with a criminal.  Later in the film, when she kills her abusive boyfriend Leo (Cortez) as he's going to go for Tom & kill him out of jealousy, rather than admit what happened, she is willing to go to the chair to save Tom's dignity...but Tom storms in at the last second and sacrifices his honor to save the woman he loved, and they live happily ever after.

The movie sounds schmaltzy, but it doesn't read that way except for the last ten minutes.  The film's Pre-Code looseness helps a lot, making Mary's criminal cronies feel very real while also genuinely scary.  There's a scene where Leo is beating Mary senselessly in the next room, and his associates, celebrating one of them becoming a father, instead of stopping Leo turn up the music with knowing glances to each other, understanding that "Mary deserved it" even as they're celebrating another woman in their lives making them so happy.  It's a nasty bit of informed toxic masculinity, which runs rampant through the film, and is a good testament to why we need more female writers in every era of Hollywood (this was written by Anita Loos & Kathryn Scola).

The other reason the film doesn't read as schmaltzy, and I can't believe I'm saying this, is Loretta Young.  Young is not my favorite actress, as I said when I introduced this month, and one of the reasons I picked her was because I didn't like the idea of such a celebrated screen star having nothing for me to point to as "that's the role you should start with."  Now I have that.  Young plays this role differently than someone like Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Crawford might have, actresses known for playing tough-as-nails figures who can make it in a man's world largely by emulating the behavior of men.  The best parts of Mary's story, though, are that she can't make it in a man's world-that she needs to rely upon her femininity to get by, and sometimes she falls.  It makes the film more realistic, and Young's performance feel so true to a woman who knows she'll never get better than this, so she might as well make do.  A very strong piece-of-work right out the gate, making me excited we might find more hidden gems this month.

No Man of Her Own (1932)

Film: No Man of Her Own (1932)

Stars: Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Mackaill, Grant Mitchell

Director: Wesley Ruggles

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 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.

We're going to start our month devoted to Carole Lombard with a film that should be a bigger deal than it is.  Lombard's career up until 1932 had been fine, but not particularly interesting.  She'd been signed to a star contract Paramount, and was regularly working (she made five films in 1931 alone), but wasn't really known as a headlining star.  In fact, it was more her marriage to actor William Powell (significantly more famous than she) who was giving her the bulk of her press, as people were clamoring for gossip about the newlyweds.  It was about this time that Clark Gable got the opportunity to be loaned out from MGM (a rarity for the actor) to Paramount (so that Marion Davies could get Bing Crosby as her leading man), and he selected a script called No Man of Her Own, where he was initially paired opposite Miriam Hopkins, but when she backed out, the studio picked Lombard to be his costar.  As we'll find out below, this was a weird stroke of fate...that ultimately would go nowhere for years.  But first, the movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a low-key romantic comedy, where we have Babe Stewart (Gable), a gambler who hustles rich men out of their fortunes in rigged games of poker.  In the opening scenes he dumps the distraction in the card game, Kay (Mackaill), who is smitten & wants revenge on him.  With a jilted lover & the latest victim of his card game aware of what happened, Babe goes to Glendale, a small town where he meets a worldly (but still innocent) librarian named Connie (Lombard).  She falls for him, and eventually tricks him (through his gambling addiction) into marrying him.  Marital bliss doesn't work out for the two of them, though, as Babe refuses to make an honest man of himself, and hides his criminal past from Connie.  Things come to a head when Babe "goes to South America" (but really turns himself into the police so that he can "come clean") and while Connie knows that he is lying to her, she realizes he's doing it out of genuine love, and lets him continue lying about where he's been, knowing that what matters, their marriage, is built on reality and not falsehoods.

While the film was a hit, it wasn't particularly important in Lombard's (or Gable's, for that matter) career.  It would be two years before Lombard would have her first major film role, and graduate from leading lady into superstardom, and Gable had far bigger things going on in 1932 than this movie.  The film is also pleasantly-regarded but not well-remembered amongst film historians, and that's because it's not very good.  The chemistry between the two leads is there, but it's not outstanding, and the script meanders & loses focus, never quite knowing what to do with Connie (or Kay, for that matter).  It's forgettable, and qualitatively nothing more than a footnote in the careers of the two stars.

So why'd I pick it when there are dozens of options for Lombard to choose from?  Because No Man of Her Own is a bizarre curiosity that had to be witnessed due to what was happening off camera...which in 1932 was nothing.  Despite Gable's reputation as a ladies' man, he & Lombard didn't have an affair on the set of No Man of Her Own (she stayed faithful to William Powell, though they'd be getting a divorce soon).  Bizarrely, Lombard & Gable, a couple that would eventually marry and are now regarded as one of the most iconic Classic Hollywood couples, didn't feel any heat during the filming of their only movie, and would only become romantically-involved a few years later.  They are also part of one of my favorite Hollywood Love Squares (or at least a rhombus), as Powell, after he broke up with Lombard, would eventually romance Jean Harlow (before her untimely death), who (while not romantically involved) would be arguably Clark Gable's best & most frequent leading lady.  Despite Harlow & Powell and Gable & Lombard being the iconic pairings offscreen, both actresses would do their best work with the other guy onscreen-Harlow lighting the cinema on-fire with Gable in the sizzling Red Dust and Lombard scoring her sole Oscar nomination for My Man Godfrey a few years after their divorce.

The Invisible Man (1933)

Film: The Invisible Man (1933)
Stars: Claude Rains, William Harrigan, Gloria Stuart, Henry Travers, Una O'Connor
Director: James Whale
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

So far this month, we haven't watched what we think of as a "traditional" monster movie classic.  While we've seen monsters (and Boris Karloff), we haven't really caught one of the truly iconic characters of the Universal canon.  That ends today, as I'm going to watch possibly the last really iconic monster of the Universal canon for the first time: the Invisible Man (other titles we've hit are listed below, including my thoughts on Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy), and throughout the rest of the month we will look at Universal monster sequels, as well as a couple of other American classic horror films before the late-1960's, when violent slasher films started to become en vogue.  With that said, let's just dive into one of Universal's most transparently evil creations.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie stays (for the most part) loyal to the premise of HG Wells' novel, and finds Dr. Jack Griffin (Rains, in his American film debut) staying at a remote inn where he appears to be a burn victim of sorts, since he constantly covers his face.  This elicits suspicion from Mrs. Hall (O'Connor), who eventually realizes that the Griffin is 1) mad and 2) invisible, unable to be seen by anyone.  After being kicked out of the hotel room for not paying his rent, Griffin goes about terrorizing the community, and realizes that he can essentially do whatever he wants while being invisible.  He meets his cowering former partner Dr. Kemp (Harrigan), and blackmails Kemp into helping him obtain more-and-more power, and in the process Griffin becomes ruthless & murderous.  The only people who sympathize with him are his former fiancee Flora (Stuart) and her scientist father Dr. Cranley (Travers).  However, Griffin doesn't repent and is eventually found out by the police after killing several people (including Dr. Kemp).  In those final moments, he seems apologetic, and we see him appear in human form again, a sign that he has died.

The Invisible Man was a big hit for Universal, the biggest monster movie hit they'd had since Frankenstein, and it's easy to see why.  The movie's effects were pretty revolutionary at the time, using a black screen to make it appear as if certain hats or glasses that Rains is wearing onscreen are floating in thin air.  In an era before CGI, it's pretty cool how well this effect works (though obviously a modern audience can tell that some of this is done through wires).  Rains, a genuinely good actor whom we'd see graduate away from horror in a way that Karloff, Lugosi, & Chaney never would, instantly takes to the sinister nature of the character, and plays him with a bit of camp.

This is really what stands The Invisible Man apart from most of the remainder of the Universal classics (save The Bride of Frankenstein)-it's hilarious.  I always struggle with satire in older movies because I don't like it when people laugh at films that weren't meant to be funny (this happened when I saw live screenings of both Mad Love and Detour), but The Invisible Man is genuinely meant to have moments of humor, and it works beautifully.  Una O'Connor's shrieking Mrs. Hall is the highlight of the movie-you will cackle she's so ridiculous (she'd also play a key role in Bride of Frankenstein), and steals the first half of the movie even from Rains.  The film isn't perfect (Gloria Stuart is radiantly beautiful but shows no signs that she'll eventually be an Oscar nominee for her paint-by-numbers love interest), but it's delicious.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Son of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The House of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Masque of the Red Death

The Old Dark House (1932)

Film: The Old Dark House (1932)
Stars: Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart, Raymond Massey, Lilian Bond
Director: James Whale
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

We shall rejoin the Sound Era today with The Old Dark House, an early pre-Code film, one from James Whale that in many ways anticipates his later picture The Bride of Frankenstein, which also stars Boris Karloff.  The film mirrors it in that it's kind of funny, and feels like it's supposed to be played for laughs even though it's relatively straight-faced in its approach.  The Old Dark House has a strange history as a film, and a happy one if you look at the ending.  The movie was considered lost for decades, but after William Castle remade it in the late 1960's, there was a concerted effort to find a copy of this all-star movie & bring it back to audiences, and eventually a copy was found, which is what we're enjoying today (I'm a film preservationist in my soul, so this makes me smile-all movies deserve to be seen!).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is prototype of the classic haunted house motif.  A group of strangers are brought during a storm to a house: a married couple Philip (Massey) & Margaret (Stuart), their handsome bachelor friend Roger (Douglas), and later on in the film a chorus girl Gladys (Bond) and her companion William (Laughton, in his first Hollywood movie).  When they get there, they meet the Femm family, a gothic crew, complete with Morgan (Karloff), their near-mute, scarred butler, whom they seem to have a strange reluctance toward, and keep warning the visitors about.  It turns out that Morgan becomes rash & violent when he drinks, and he starts drinking with them trapped in the old house, and in the process he frees Saul (Brember Wills) from being trapped.  Saul is the true Femm family member to be afraid of (Morgan feels a combination of bad decisions & misunderstood), and is a murderer obsessed with fire.  Before he can kill the group & burn down the house, Roger is able to throw himself into danger, nearly killing himself by falling off of the balcony, but in the process saves all involved.  In the end, everyone (other than Saul) lives, and because it's Hollywood, Roger & Gladys end up engaged before the credits pull.

The movie is quite enjoyable, if completely silly.  The film plays the villains, with the possible exception of Morgan, as truly comic figures.  Saul is meant to be ridiculous, as are his relatives Horace & Rebecca (who resembles in some ways Grandmama from The Addams Family), and strangest of all is Sir Roderick, their 100-year-old father in the attic, who is played for some reason by a woman rather than a man (other than Whale's penchant for challenging heteronormative culture in his movies there's no explanation as to why the clearly female actor is playing the part, which may have been the point).  All of this makes the movie more fun, and with Stuart, Douglas, & Laughton all game for laughs, the movie is a delight.

The movie doesn't feature one of my favorite Karloff performances.  This was his first role to receive top-billing after his star-making work in Frankenstein (The Mummy would be released a few months later), and he's kind of playing the same character he would in his breakthrough part.  Morgan is mute, misunderstood but on some level a monster (he does unleash Saul on unsuspecting guests knowing the potential for danger, and seems to have a kind of rabid lust for Gloria Stuart's Margaret), but there's not as much soul in this character as Frankenstein's monster, and it feels like a carbon copy.  We're going to get to a less typical Karloff role later this month, but I'm curious if you've seen this movie where you'd rank this performance, as I think it's the rare film where the perpetual scene-stealer gets washed out in the movie.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, Freaks, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Son of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The House of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Masque of the Red Death

OVP: Lady for a Day (1933)

Film: Lady for a Day (1933)
Stars: May Robson, Warren William, Guy Kibbee, Glenda Farrell, Ned Sparks, Jean Parker
Director: Frank Capra
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Actress-May Robson, Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

We leave the 1980's today and head all-the-way-back to the 1930's with our weeklong theme of Best Actress at the Oscars, here looking at a film from a one-time nominee, and one who had a very late-in-life bit of success at the Oscars.  May Robson had spend much of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries as a leading lady of the stage, and by 1933 was in her mid-70's.  At that point, she was transitioning from the stage into a cinematic career, but not so much as a leading lady as as an aging character actress, and Lady for a Day was one of the few films that she got above-the-line-billing; if you haven't seen this Frank Capra film, you're probably more familiar with Robson for her small parts in the 1937 A Star is Born (as Granny) and Bringing Up Baby (as Aunt Elizabeth).  But at the time, Lady for a Day was a big hit, and Robson likely came very close to besting her future Baby costar Katharine Hepburn at the Academy Awards.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Apple Annie (Robson), a beggar woman who sells fruit and lives a ragtag life where the one joy she has is writing letters to her daughter Louise (Parker), whom she sent to live in a Spanish convent when she was quite young.  Louise thinks that Annie is a sophisticate, a wealthy lady-of-class (there's hints throughout the movie that there's some truth to this lie, that Annie probably was from a more moneyed background & eventually fell on rough times), and this lie becomes a problem when Louise decides to visit her mother with her wealthy fiancee, the son of a wealthy count.  With the help of a mobster named Dave the Dude (William), who thinks Annie's apples bring him luck, they find a way to borrow a fancy apartment, and even get a pool hustler named Henry (Kibbee) to pose as Annie's husband.  The scheme works, though not without a lot of shenanigans (namely the kidnapping of a reporter who wants to expose Annie's story to sell papers based on the Count's celebrity), and in the end Annie gets to be the person she always pretended to be in the eyes of her loving daughter, able to have successfully given her the life she dreamt of by sending away the only person she ever cared about.

The movie is schmaltzy, but you'll be forgiven if you love it.  Lady for a Day is not the classic movie that later Frank Capra films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life would be-it doesn't have the kind of orderly plotting that stands up against the really hokey ideals of the script.  It also never properly explains why Annie is able to pull off such a turnaround from a loud-mouthed beggar dame into a grand doyenne of society, but you won't care.  It's overlong, but the cast is fun, and you genuinely end up cheering for Annie to succeed in her increasingly screwball attempts to maintain the charade.  The supporting cast is also solid, particularly William as a mobster-with-a-heart-of-gold.

Robson, as I said, struggles occasionally with the script-there's no Eliza Doolittle moment here indicating that she suddenly learned how to behave in "polite society," and there should be considering how boorish she makes Apple Annie in the film's opening scenes.  That said, Robson knows how to play a broad part (the stage roots show pretty quickly in her performance), and she nails some of the emotional closing scenes, especially her goodbye to her daughter, finally having a success after what seemed like a lifetime of failures.  The film's best moment is upending what we'd expect, where we'd assume Louise would find out the truth about her mother, and then still love her anyway, but Capra (always willing to give a little of the bitter with a lot of the sweet), doesn't do that.  Louise will never know the sacrifice her mother made, giving up her daughter to have a life that she couldn't have, and her willingness to call in every favor as a gift to her daughter, and that's kind of beautiful in a melancholy way.  Robson captures that so well in the film's final moments, when it seems the gig is up, and I loved that aspect of her performance.  I haven't seen all of the nominees here (still missing Diana Wynward in Cavalcade), but if Robson had taken away one of Kate Hepburn's Oscars, it wouldn't have been something to mourn too ferociously.

Red Dust (1932)

Film: Red Dust (1932)
Stars: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Mary Astor, Gene Raymond
Director: Victor Fleming
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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.

Three weeks into our series on Jean Harlow, we reach arguably the most important time in her career. While we've seen her through two classics of the early Sound Era (Hell's Angels and The Public Enemy), Harlow's public persona wasn't really defined, and she didn't have a consistent brand despite clear clamoring from the public for her to be in more pictures.  MGM, however, changed that.  Upon the insistence of her then-husband (who would die soon after from mysterious circumstances we discussed here), she was signed to the studio, and they started to give her "real" parts-not just girlfriends or floozies, but parts that would resemble those played by some of her contemporaries at the time.  One of the earliest, and most famous of these roles was Red Dust, which would team her for the second time with Clark Gable (though neither actor got particularly high billing in their first outing The Secret Six), and would cement them as one of MGM's most iconic pairs of the 1930's.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about a plantation owner named Dennis Carson (Gable) who works in Indochina in the 1930's.  He is boorish, rough, and kind of a sexist, and treats a prostitute who is living their named Vantine (Harlow) like garbage, even though he's pretty smitten with her.  When a new worker Gary (Raymond) comes with his classy wife Barbara (Astor), Dennis is torn, and dismisses Vantine for the chance to get with Barbara, which presents itself when Gary nearly dies of a fever.  Barbara is willing to run off with Dennis, despite their differences in station, but after Dennis realizes how much Gary is in love with his wife, he throws her out, saying she was nothing more than a fling (which she wasn't-he was very much in love with her), and she shoots him in a rage.  Dennis, though, wanting them both to leave, covers for her and ends up back with Vantine, whom he clearly was destined for the whole time.

The movie may sound familiar even if you haven't seen the film, and that's because it was remade in the 1950's with Ava Gardner taking on the Harlow role, Grace Kelly taking over for Astor, and Clark Gable weirdly playing the same part in Mogambo.  This was slightly more common in earlier Hollywood than you'd think (you may recall when we looked at Lillian Russell for this series last year that Edward Arnold did something similar with his character of Diamond Jim Brady) but was still noteworthy.  I haven't seen the later film, but I have to say I get the impulse to revisit, because Red Dust is pretty great.  Pre-Code Hollywood isn't my favorite era (in the way it is for virtually every other cinephile) as I find it hit-or-miss, but this is a sexy, fascinating little movie.  Gable is great as a scalawag, and the movie doesn't have to shy away from the clear sexual elements of the picture.  Astor, for example, probably would have had to die or had her marriage wrecked just a few years later for letting her virtue disappear.  But here, we get a happier ending without her having to feel too much shame for her marital indiscretions.

Best of the bunch, though, is Harlow, who brings it hardcore in this role.  The Pre-Code scenes allow for one of the more scandalous moments of the era, Harlow in a tub while basically throwing herself at Gable while a horrified Mary Astor watched.  The most famous pre-Code scene is probably Claudette Colbert in The Sign of the Cross taking a milk bath-while this doesn't quite get there in terms of scandal (unlike Colbert, there is not a "blink and you miss it" scene with her nipples showing, which has basically made The Sign of the Cross one of the most notorious movies of the 1930's), but the clear desire between Harlow & Gable is palpable, and even if it weren't-Harlow's an ace comedian.  There's a great scene where she debates with herself about the merits of different types of cheeses while Gable looks on, flabbergasted at the absurdity of the conversation, and there is no pretense when faced with Astor over whom the audience should root for, even if Harlow's character is the "tramp" and Astor's the "good girl."  Weirdly, in real life, it would be the reverse, with Astor getting involved in one of the most famed sex scandals of Hollywood in the 1930's, before eventually in the 1940's seeing her career turn into a series of matronly roles in classics like Meet Me in St. Louis and Little Women.  By that point, of course, Harlow would have been dead for nearly a decade...but we'll get to that when we conclude our look at the actress next week.

Ecstasy (1933)

Film: Ecstasy (1933)
Stars: Hedy Lamarr, Aribert Mog, Zvonimir Rogoz
Director: Gustav Machaty
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 Hedy Lamarr-click here to learn more about Ms. Lamarr (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

A few housekeeping mentions before we get into our discussion of Ecstasy.  First off, this is a very special article not just because we're kicking off our month-long tribute to Ms. Lamarr, but also because it's an historic one for two specific reasons on the blog.  For starters, it's our first ever foreign-language film we've profiled in "Saturdays with the Stars."  Lamarr is in fact our very first actress for the series that wasn't born in the United States (we've had nine months of American girls), and while some of those women filmed movies in non-English-speaking Europe (specifically the likes of Ruth Roman, Rhonda Fleming, and Linda Darnell), none of them had a major career in another language like Lamarr did.  Though our goal for our 2019 season of "Saturdays with the Stars" is to focus on the career's of Hollywood actresses, it felt a damn shame to dismiss the rare opportunity to see a legitimate Golden Age star like Lamarr act in a different language, so I made an exception.  Next week we'll return to see what Lamarr did with her career in the United States, but this week we'll see her infamous turn in Ecstasy.

The other thing I want to note before we dive in, though, is that this our 2500th article here on The Many Rantings of John.  I had a big plan to roll out some facts or a list we've never done, but I'm currently on vacation & am not about to let a perfect record with getting "Saturdays with the Stars" articles out be ruined by me being too lazy (or to put on an optimistic spin, too much enjoying my vacation) to postpone a day or two for Ms. Lamarr.  I'm approaching another major milestone I'm hoping to hit sometime in late December, so when we get to that we'll do some naval-gazing and self congratulations, but if you are someone who has enjoyed any of those 2500 articles on the blog, thank you very much and I'm glad to have you here.  I'll get started on the next 2500 tomorrow, but for now...Ecstasy!

(Spoilers Ahead) Filmed in 1933 in Slovakia, the movie is just far enough into the Sound Era that it isn't a silent film, but frequently plays as such.  As a result, there aren't a lot of characters, and the plot is relatively easy to follow since there's not much dialogue to exhibit complexity of story.  The movie follows Eva (Lamarr), a beautiful young bride who seems at the beginning of the film to be headed to a life of domestic bliss.  Her husband Emil (Rogoz) is a bit sheltered, but appears to genuinely care for her...except when it comes to matters of the bedroom.  I'm not sure if we're supposed to assume things about Emil's sexuality, but let's face it-if a man in a 1933 movie isn't going to sleep with Hedy Lamarr, they probably want you to think he's gay.  Eva doesn't want a marriage without affection, so she leaves him, and goes back to her family's farm, where she meets a young engineer who isn't really of the same station as Emil, but nonetheless is able to make up for it in the bedroom (he's definitely the "manly man" in the eyes of the screenwriters), and they start a passionate affair.  This turns tragic when Emil finds out, and kills himself, sending Eva into a moment of self-loathing & depression, and she leaves Adam despite their clear romance, heading off into the unknown on a midnight train.  The film ends with a sweaty Adam hammering, wondering what might have happened to his brief love.

The film, as I mentioned above, is considered pretty infamous.  Nudity in film is not a new thing.  Even if you discount filmed pornography, which began almost instantaneously with the invention of cinema itself in the late 19th century, legitimate actresses like Annette Kellerman had appeared nude in major studio production's as early as 1916, with the release of Fox's A Daughter of the Gods.  However, by 1933 the Hays Code was in effect, and as a result nudity in film simply wasn't done, and the movie never received a major release in the United States, even after Lamarr became famous.  Lamarr's husband Friedrich Mandl once tried to buy every copy of the film ever produced and have it destroyed (clearly unsuccessfully, as I just streamed it on Amazon).  To gain some perspective on how shocking a film with nudity and where a woman experiences an orgasm would have been in this era, the first major star to appear nude onscreen in a motion picture post the Hays Code was Jayne Mansfield in 1963's Promises! Promises, thirty years after the initial release of Ecstasy.  It's staggering to me that this didn't end up ruining Lamarr's career, and she admittedly had very mixed feelings about the film, frequently decrying it later in her career.

But the movie isn't that bad, and of course to our modern audiences it isn't that shocking.  Yes, Lamarr exposes her breasts and does have an onscreen orgasm in closeup, which is kind of bizarre to watch (I frequent classic cinema almost daily, and I'd never seen something so explicit in a movie of the era), but it's not a major part of the movie.  What is, and what is more groundbreaking to me, is that it is clearly sympathetic to the sexual desires of Eva, wanting her to have a full romantic life, not one with sacrifices.  The film's ending is ambiguous (what are we to make of Eva leaving behind Adam, whom she loves, to honor the memory of Emil?), but it's interesting.  The film is short on plot, and the Emil character in particularly is wildly underwritten/acted, but it's a fascinating picture, one that has a natural energy from Lamarr that I didn't know she was capable of, and makes me excited to see if any of her American productions were able to capture that luminous quality she brings to Eva, a broken woman who isn't willing to blame herself for problems she didn't cause (a novel concept in cinema even today, but surely in 1933).

The Mummy (1932)

Film: The Mummy (1932)
Stars: Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners, Edward van Sloan, Bramwell Fletcher
Director: Karl Freund
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

We are double-dipping today with our classic monster movies (like most of my blog projects, real life got in the way a bit of me actually accomplishing some of these, but my hope is we'll have at least one review a day until Halloween so it will have maintained its marathon-esque size).  For our evening article, we're going with one of the more intriguing Universal Movies' monsters: the Mummy.  The Karloff creation weirdly never had any proper sequels, instead being reimagined with 1940's The Mummy's Hand, and despite mummies themselves being high on the list of traditional monsters, it's one of the lesser-known of the "Big 8" Universal Horror monsters.  As a result, I knew the least about this film of all of the major monster movies we're going to encounter in our marathon, and was excited to see Boris Karloff in a role that wasn't Frankenstein.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers around the unearthing of an Egyptian tomb (the public was still very much in awe of the unveiling of the tomb of King Tut a decade earlier, so this played well into the general audience's fascination).  The movie begins on an expedition that is run by Dr. Edward Whimple (van Sloan, who was also in Dracula and Frankenstein, making him the Unofficial Mascot of TMROJ this month, plays this role, essentially the same one he had in Dracula).  He discovers that the mummy Imhotep (Karloff) was not mummified at all, but instead buried alive.  After his assistant Ralph (Fletcher) opens a cursed box (going mad in the process), Imhotep is brought back to life and we are quickly transitioned to ten years later.  Imhotep is now living as a regular man with an odd skin condition (Karloff's casting as an Egyptian is, well, not great by modern expectations), and believes that a young woman named Helen (Johann) is in fact the reincarnation of the princess he loved and was murdered for so many years earlier.  Helen is in love with Frank (Manners), who is like so many (honorable) men in these films a handsome dolt, but manages to save her from the curse that Imhotep puts her under in order to resurrect her as his bride.  The film ends with the scroll that brought Imhotep back to life being burned, thus sentencing him to actual death rather than his mummified stupor.

The film is striking in that the monster here is a well-spoken, smart man.  The only similarity Imhotep has with Frankenstein's monster is they both lumber around, but otherwise Karloff's posh British accent and deep bass is on full display here, and he's mesmerizing as Imhotep, by far the best part of the movie.  The film is at its absolute best when we're seduced by his plan, and the cameraman knows just how to light him.  There's a recurring effect (seen in the photo) of Karloff's eyes being lit up and staring off as he's using his magic to either seduce or kill, and it works.  The movie's center is strong, as we learn his backstory, and it's a darn shame that the film cut the sequence with Henry Victor as a Saxon Warrior (who proves that Helen has, indeed, lived through multiple lifetimes between the present and her time as a princess), as this was the best part of the movie.

Because while this is another monster film I enjoyed, it's diminishing returns when it comes to the supporting cast.  There's no moral message here in the same way as Frankenstein or Creature from the Black Lagoon, and while Karloff is terrific, no supporting player is saving this picture and Johann & Manners as the other legs of the triangle aren't really up-to-snuff.  Manners is terrible, falling in love at the drop of a hat and it seems preposterous that someone so dumb could stop Imhotep's 3000-year-old plan while Johann's only real goal here is to look beautiful, which she does...but shouldn't we demand more from women in these films?  One of the bigger issues I'm starting to have watching these back-to-back is that I want to see better parts for women, but I suspect that like even modern horror (save for Laurie Strode), there just aren't that many fleshed-out roles for the ladies of these films (at least with male directors behind the scenes).  As a result, this is fine but hardly special and I see why it gets lower-billing on the Universal Studios' scale.

This Month We Are Seeing As Many Classic Horror Movies from the Pre-1970 Era as Possible.  If you want to check out some of our past reviews, here they are:

Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, Mad Love, Son of Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon

Dinner at Eight (1933)

Film: Dinner at Eight (1933)
Stars: Marie Dressler, Lionel Barrymore, Billie Burke, Madge Evans, Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, John Barrymore
Director: George Cukor
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

In a quest to prepare for 31 Days of Oscar, I have been trying to quickly and efficiently view as many movies from my DVR as is physically possible (every year this is an uphill battle, every year one that I lose).  As a result, you'll be seeing a lot of obscure Oscar nominees on this blog in the coming weeks as I progress through the Oscar Viewing Project & 31 Days in a fight to see what day I actually run out of space.  Weirdly, though the first film that I decided to watch lounging on my DVR wasn't an Oscar nominee, but simply a movie that I have long wanted to see, and in a signficant moment for my cinematic viewing career, the first time I have ever seen a Jean Harlow picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) Dinner at Eight is the sort of movie that doesn't get made today, and quite frankly doesn't really have an obvious evolutionary successor in movies today either.  An all-star film, it is littered with fine theatrical performers (the Barrymores, Dressler, Burke), and is the sort of drama that plays largely like a comedy because everyone is so eloquent.  Centered around a dinner party that Millicent Jordan (Burke) is throwing for a noble couple that are visiting from England, we see all of her guests, as well as her ailing husband Oliver (Lionel Barrymore), encounter struggles during the height of the depression.  It's a very serious film when taken on the surface, but these actors are so eloquent and frequently witty (particularly Dressler & Harlow) that there's enough comic relief so you'll be forgiven into thinking that it's a dramedy of sorts.

Honestly-it's a very well-done movie, one that I'm surprised didn't get more Oscar love (in an era where supporting performances were crowned it's impossible to think that some of these people wouldn't have been nominees), particularly considering it's nearly the equal of Grand Hotel the previous year (it's been a few years, but I think I favor the Best Picture winner just slightly over this one).  The film is less a cohesive plot and more a series of acting duets between the principle players, as we learn more about them.  It's very well-written, and you leave without a proper villain (Wallace Beery comes the closest as a gruff businessman, but even he gives an understanding of wanting to stick it to people who simply didn't want his success because of where he grew up), but instead a sharp understanding of these characters.  It's surprisingly thorough-no one goes into cartoon-mode, and there's more than room for such a fare (I suspect on the stage that actors would lean a bit more heavily into their stereotypes).

Look at the way that Harlow finds a courage in her trophy wife as the film progresses, essentially blackmailing her husband into a better life for both of them.  Dressler, who can be truly hammy, shows her cards early and plays her Carlotta as a woman who is scared not only of being broke, but perhaps more so of being a joke, someone who was taken seriously and is now on the outskirts of her life.  Perhaps best of all is John Barrymore, who courageously plays an actor who is starting to be washed-up and perhaps being outdone by those around him who were more talented than handsome.  It's a small part (in one of several ironies in the film, he's an actor complaining about how small his part in a play is), and one that borrows quite a bit from reality (Barrymore's struggles with booze, age, and his then faltering matinee idol status feels a bit reality-inspiring-art), but it's terrific work.  His final scenes are harrowing, as we realize that he can't bounce back to who he once was, and to paraphrase The Hours, "he has to die so the others can appreciate life more."  The film itself is a jewel, and while it's hard to adjust to melodrama when you're not used to it, once you do you find that this film's "forgotten classic" status is more than earned.

OVP: The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933)

Film: The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933)
Stars: Myrna Loy, Max Baer, Walter Huston, Otto Kruger
Director: W.S. van Dyke
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Story)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Oscar has always loved a boxer.  Sports films at the Oscars come and go-really, considering how much athletics is perched into our national psyche, it's kind of staggering that Oscar doesn't focus more on the field, but boxing has always been the exception to that rule.  I could name you ten boxing films that have been nominated for Oscars before I could name you five in all the rest of the Olympic fields.  So it was of no surprise to me when I discovered that this love has extended almost since the beginning of the Oscars.  This past week I caught The Prizefighter and the Lady, languidly perched in my DVR, which featured several real-life boxers at the time alongside MGM leading lady Myrna Loy.

(Spoilers Ahead) Prizefighter is the story of Steve (Baer), a barroom bouncer who is discovered by the Professor (Huston, because of course Walter Huston plays a character named the Professor), a retired boxing manager who sees Steve's potential.  Soon Steve is working his way up the rings of the boxing world, as well as romantically as he falls for the girlfriend of a mobster, Belle (Loy).  However, Steve has a wandering eye, and that gets him into trouble as the film progresses, as he regularly cheats on Belle even as he's on the top of the world in boxing, getting a chance at the belt and starting to become a vaudeville headliner in the process.  The film, like most of this ilk, ends with a gigantic fight, though weirdly here we get a tie rather than the expected knockout for Steve, and with him realizing that Belle was the girl for him all-along, we also get the cliched MGM happy ending.

It's always weird to judge the screenplays of early cinema, because at this point it was still a relatively recent phenomenon to have sound in the pictures, and you can tell that here.  The film's dialogue is kind of clunky, except perhaps that delivered by Loy, though with her glittering laugh and delivery she can make bon mots out of anything.  As a result, I'm surprised it was sighted for screenplay, though really there weren't a lot of options at the time (that being said, this came out the same year as King Kong, so there were certainly better options).  The film feels relatively basic, and even if it was inventing a story that everyone from Rocky to Million Dollar Baby would fall into the shadow of, it's not that interesting of a story to begin with.

However, the point of boxing films isn't necessarily the writing, but instead what happens in the ring, and here we've got a slight improvement.  Seeing Baer fight against Carnera is fascinating, particularly considering this bout would be a precursor to when Baer would defeat Carnera the following year in real-life and actually take the title (rumor has it he used what he picked up about their fight in Prizefighter to defeat Carnera in real-life).  Additionally, you have Jack Dempsey, another champion, in the same ring as the referee.  If for no other reason that the sheer curiosity factor of seeing actual, real-life boxers act and play a part in a movie, this is probably worth seeing even if the story surrounding it isn't very good.  Additionally, Myrna Loy, one of my favorites (it's still smarting that I couldn't include her in this rundown) is wonderful and the best part about the actual cinematic aspects of the film, even if this isn't one of her "great" roles like Nora Charles.

There you have it-it's 2/5 because I can't properly recommend the film as it's pretty bland, but there are enough curiosities of history and for Loy fans to make it worthwhile to a point.  Don't seek it out, but if it's on TCM you don't need to change the channel.  At least those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Share what you think of boxing movies, Myrna Loy, and Oscar's weird fascination with one (but unfortunately not the other) in the comments.