OVP: Vivacious Lady (1938)

Film: Vivacious Lady (1938)

Stars: Ginger Rogers, James Stewart, James Ellison, Beulah Bondi, Charles Coburn, Frances Mercer, Hattie McDaniel

Director: George Stevens

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Cinematography, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Jimmy Stewart: click here to learn more about Mr. Stewart (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to start our look at Jimmy Stewart during the period in the 1930's when he was still starting to make his way up in Hollywood.  During the 1930's, really leading into Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stewart was not thought of as a leading man so much as an actor to put in to prop up more famous, bankable actresses on the lots of major studios (despite being an MGM star at the time, Stewart rarely actually worked for MGM during this time frame).  This included a number of hit movies, including Born to Dance (with Eleanor Powell), You Can't Take It With You (with Jean Arthur), and Destry Rides Again (with Marlene Dietrich), one of his first cowboy roles.  We're going to focus not on Destry today (despite our month-long theme), but instead on Vivacious Lady (don't worry, Jimmy will done a cowboy hat next week), perhaps the best encapsulation of Stewart's pattern at the time-get a big hit where your leading actress gets more of the credit than you do...and also bedding her.  Though he was married to his wife Gloria for 45 years starting in 1949, affable, stuttering Jimmy Stewart was a lothario in his day, dating a variety of actresses, including Ginger Rogers, with whom according to Hollywood legend (how could you ever prove such a thing, but it is apocryphal gossip), he reportedly lost his virginity.  Stewart & Rogers would both move on (with Marlene Dietrich & Howard Hughes, respectively), but we still have Vivacious Lady to judge them by.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Peter Morgan, Jr. (Stewart) a botany professor who is also the son of a prominent university president, Peter Morgan Sr. (Coburn), and thus comes from a "respectable" family who won't like that he's started a romance with a nightclub singer named Francey (Rogers).  This doesn't stop him from eloping with her, though, before she's had a chance to meet her parents or before he's had a chance to break off his engagement to Helen (Mercer).  As a result, they sneak her in as a new botany student he's clearly pursuing, but Peter Sr. doesn't like this, despite the fact that his wife Martha (Bondi) is a fan of the young woman.  Entanglements ensue, including a marvelous little face-off between America's Sweetheart Rogers getting into a hair-pulling fight with Helen, before both Peter Jr. & Sr. have to chase their brides on a train, and win them back (which, of course, they do).

The movie's plot is mildly ridiculous.  Martha likes her daughter-in-law right away, and while Peter Sr. doesn't approve of her, it's clear that he can be won over without much work.  The "family doesn't approve" is a common trope in romantic-comedies, but it's clear in this movie that there's not a lot standing in Peter's way when it comes to getting to marry Francey.  The main reason to watch this is for the cast, which is a delight, but you wish they were in a better movie.  Rogers is not one of my favorites from this era (and Stewart is), but she outdoes him at pretty much every turn.  Romantic comedies were a place that Stewart did well, but when paired with more natural performers in the genre (not just Rogers, but someone like Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story) he occasionally got upstaged.  One of my favorite moments was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from Hattie McDaniel one year out from her Oscar win for Gone with the Wind, here playing a maid who gets a pretty lascivious comment from Rogers that I'm honestly surprised got past the censors (essentially Rogers hints strongly that a man might be worth giving up smoking for if he's good enough in bed).

The film won two Oscar nominations, neither of which are standouts (and neither is the one night club song that Rogers sings, even though it's the rare song in this era that wasn't a cover in the movie). Cinematography is kind of fun in the close-up shots of Rogers & Stewart teaching, her looking radiant and him clearly smitten (on and off screen) with the actress, but making pretty movie stars look pretty is just as much on the makeup department (and genetics) as it is cinematography, and here there's hardly much else to crow about.  The sound nomination is also odd.  There's only one musical (the aforementioned forgettable tune from Rogers), and the rest of the movie feels like it's just standard-issue sound work.  I'm convinced at this point of profiling dozens of Sound nominations that something changed in the 1960's & later in how this department picked their nominations, as no other category of this era has so many blasé head-scratchers.

I Guested on a Podcast-Come and Listen!!!

I realized the other day that while I talked about this on some other social media, I didn't bring this up on the blog-I made my debut on a podcast recently!  The Gilded Films podcast, which is one of my favorites, is a podcast devoted to looking back on past Oscar races, specifically for Best Picture, and it's a blast if you haven't checked it out (if you like our Oscar retrospectives or come here for old movie-related content, it needs to be queued up on your podcast station).  I was invited for an episode about 1938, which was a treat because I love talking about Golden Age Hollywood (I have been working on this blog for almost ten years solely so I'd have these conversations), and so we discussed Alice Faye, Jean Renoir, Spencer Tracy & the pictured Bette Davis...some really big, incredible cinematic icons of that era.  I'd love it if you could listen to the podcast (the link to our episode is here, though you can find it wherever you find your podcasts)-it's a two-parter, so I'll be posting when the second episode is up, but it means a lot & thank you for making The Many Rantings of John part of your day!

St. Martin’s Lane (1938)

Film: St. Martin's Lane (1938)

Stars: Charles Laughton, Vivien Leigh, Rex Harrison, Larry Adler, Tyrone Guthrie

Director: Tim Whelan

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Being a cinephile requires patience, planning, persistence, & perspective (very proud of that alliteration).  The latter is key because unless they invent a watch that stops time or you plan on living forever, you're never going to see every movie.  I know I'm not as practiced as some of my film-watching brethren (actually having to write reviews for the films on this blog occasionally gets in my way-also, follow me on Letterboxd as I do sometimes skip the longer reviews but do shorter ones on there for films that don't speak to me enough to justify a TMROJ treatment), but I still see 2-300 movies a year and that never scratches the surface of what I'd need to see to get to them all.  Sometimes, though, I'm given the opportunity to see an older, forgotten film that I'd never heard of before I press play, and that was the case with St. Martin's Lane, a British film from 1938 (1938 again!) starring Charles Laughton and a pre-Scarlett Vivien Leigh) which is also known as Sidewalks of London based on your geography.  I ended up being delighted by the movie, finding it moving & featuring two beautiful performances from its juxtaposed leads.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Charles Staggers (Laughton) a street performer who does stately oratory for little money, but seems happy enough because it's what he enjoys doing.  He meets a pickpocket named Liberty (Leigh), who initially steals from him but eventually they become genuine friends, and he incorporates Liberty into his act.  Liberty, though, is young-and-beautiful and is pursued by Harvey Prentiss (Harrison), a songwriter who can offer her a way out of her current life of poverty as a real actress.  Liberty takes the chance, leaving Charles (scorning him as he offers her a life together), and becomes a star, while Harvey becomes an alcoholic.  The ending of the film is bittersweet, as Liberty tries to get Charles an audition, but he botches it, understanding that Liberty deserves better & he leaves her to her stardom, returning back to the happy life he had as a busker.

Laughton & Leigh purportedly hated each other in real life (they never made another movie together), but it's hard to see that in this movie where their chemistry is marvelous.  Occasionally billed as a comedy, it's not-this is a serious picture, one that takes a look at the have's and have not's not only when it comes to money, but with happiness.  There's something so bitter in the rough hand that life has given Charles, who has a genuine talent but years of being beaten down, weathered, and discarded have taken that from him, forever.  Given the light of a new opportunity with Liberty, he tries to touch it, but it's too bright, and she's too much for him, even though he's grateful for the time that he's been given with her.

Both performers, as I said, are wonderful.  Laughton has a tendency to teeter into bombast, but that's not the case here-he's so tender & sweet as Charles, and finds dimensions to him that even the smart script can't quite discern-you get the sense that Laughton knew men likes this, where the talent was there but the world didn't quite give them a chance.  And Leigh is excellent as the live wire Liberty.  A year out from the role that would make her immortal, she shows all of the fire & sensitivity of Scarlett, but in a completely different creation, not being shy about Liberty's faults, but also about her bravery in forging into a world that Charles found too scary to indulge.  Both of them combine to make a lovely, small love story, and one that I hope you seek out as in a sea of endless movies, this is one that's worth your time.

OVP: Of Human Hearts (1938)

Picture: Of Human Hearts (1938)

Stars: Walter Huston, James Stewart, Beulah Bondi, Gene Reynolds, Charles Coburn, John Carradine

Director: Clarence Brown

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actress-Beulah Bondi)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

We are continuing our look at some of the films of 1938 today with Of Human Hearts, a Clarence Brown religious melodrama from the era.  This was still in the time period where Jimmy Stewart, who would become one of the most important figures in Hollywood for much of the next 25 years, was finding his footing, not getting top billing even in movies where arguably he was the most important figure, and where it's clear the studio didn't really understand what they had, giving him movies that, for my money, were totally below him.  Of Human Hearts is a movie that probably resonated at the time because it was serious & about serious, run-of-the-mill people, but in retrospect it totally reads differently, and is honestly a genuinely bad movie from my perspective because it has no concept of its characters.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Jason Wilkins (Reynolds as a boy, Stewart as an adult) who is raised by a stern preacher Rev. Ethan Wilkins (Huston), one who practices what we'd consider now to be child abuse but at the time was just considered "discipline."  Jason wants to be a medical doctor, one who isn't poor & suffering like his parents make him be, but when he becomes an adult he turns his backs on them, using them for money to some degree but never really caring what happens to them, which in the case of his mother is unfortunate as she has sacrificed repeatedly for him.  In the end, Jason does learn that his mother sacrificed for him, and after a weird turn during the Civil War (more on that in a second), Jason comes home to his mother, finally learning the cruelty of his ways and gets her forgiveness.

The film suffers almost throughout for being too melodramatic for its own good.  Stewart's Jason is a selfish asshole, and there's not really an indication as to why.  I get why they don't have him redeem his relationship with his father (who is also an asshole, and one whose redemption arch I didn't really need), but why does he treat his mother like dirt, particularly after the death of his father?  There's no logical explanation, and the film suffers as a result.  Bondi definitely plays the part we're meant for her (saintly martyr mother), but it's not an interesting role, and it's a sympathetic rather than a good performance.  Oscar had much better options in other roles where she played Stewart's mother (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life).

That being said, Of Human Hearts is noteworthy for one specific reason.  Character actor John Carradine shows up late in the film (no surprise there-he showed up in hundreds of movies), as Abraham Lincoln.  The Lincoln cameo initially feels like he's giving Jason an award for his stellar medical work on the field, but it turns out this is a guise, as Lincoln, in the middle of the freaking Civil War, is giving Jason a lecture about how "he needs to write to his mother."  It's bonkers-what the hell is this even about?!?  It's so weird I almost gave this two-stars for sheer wackiness, but honestly this bizarre left turn isn't enough for me to recommend it.

OVP: Carefree (1938)

Film: Carefree (1938)

Stars: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Ralph Bellamy, Luella Gear, Jack Carson, Hattie McDaniel

Director: Mark Sandrich

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Art Direction, Scoring, Original Song-"Change Partners")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

The partnership of Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers is the stuff of cinematic legend, one of the most iconic pairings in Classical Hollywood.  That the two were at best "fine" with the pairing by 1938 was something that was starting to be reflexive in its box office returns.  Carefree, our movie for today, is the eighth in the ten films that the two made together, and was the first movie starring the two not to turn a profit according to box office receipts at the time.  It was also one of the first films in the series to really mess with the formula of the two, being shorter than you normally saw from an Astaire-Rogers picture, and with far less-dancing.  The result is a quirky (the plot is weird if not unpleasant) little musical with much less of what we'd learned to love from the Astaire-Rogers pairings in terms of toe-tapping.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is centered on Tony Flagg (Astaire), a psychiatrist who has been asked by his friend Stephen (Bellamy) to help make his girlfriend Amanda (Rogers) come to a decision on whether they should be married or not.  Amanda is a successful singer, and isn't sure she's ready to give that life up, or if Stephen is the right guy for her.  Tony puts Amanda under hypnosis, and in the process Amanda comes to (in a trance) and starts destroying property & behaving as a menace.  She also, in the process, begins to start having dreams about her doctor, and becomes convinced she's in love with him, not Stephen.  Eventually Tony realizes after putting Amanda under a trance again (where he instructs her to not like him) that he is in love with her, but at that point it's too late...until of course it isn't when in the end Tony interrupts Stephen & Amanda's marriage, and during one more subconscious session, convinces her he loves her.

As I said above, unlike a lot of Astaire/Rogers films, this one has less focus on the dancing than you'd expect.  At this point in their partnership, the public's interest in the couple was waning, and their careers were headed in different directions.  Rogers was on an upswing, as the success of Stage Door proved she didn't really need Astaire, and within a few years, she'd be an Oscar winner & the highest-paid actress in Hollywood.  Astaire, meanwhile, was in the middle of one of his down swings (we think of him as one of the great performers of the Golden Age, which he was, but that was checkered with several comebacks as he went in-and-out of fashion).  The plot is a bit, silly, but it's kind of fun.  It allows Rogers, in particular, some great comedic moments as she has to wander throughout her hypnotized state, oftentimes for laughs.  But I will admit as someone who just adores Fred Astaire, I could've used one or two more musical numbers.

The film won three Oscar nominations.  The art direction is sublime (isn't it always in Astaire-Rogers musicals?), with gigantic ballrooms, large spacious offices, and a glorious wedding hall among the highlights.  It all feels very modern, but in an elegant way...you can definitely see the money that was clearly spent on this film (the first of the pairings partnerships to lose money).  The scoring is good, though as I mentioned there's only really one number that's of note, and the rest is just sort of there (it's lovely, because of the stars, but there's nothing notable here).  The one number that stands out, though not ultimately in the pairings long pantheon of dancing, is "Change Partners," which is the Oscar-nominated turn.  It's sung at the very end of the picture as Fred is trying to woo Ginger away from Ralph Bellamy, and it's quite lovely-sort of this lovelorn song about a man trying to win back a girl who is with someone else.  It became a standard afterward, and it works quite well within the picture.

A Slight Case of Murder (1938)

Film: A Slight Case of Murder (1938)

Stars: Edward G. Robinson, Jane Bryan, Allen Jenkins, Ruth Donnelly, Willard Parker, Bobby Jordan

Director: Lloyd Bacon

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

We are continuing our look at some of the films of 1938 with a movie that Oscar did not pay attention to, despite it having a pretty fun premise (and the 1930's being the rare decade where Oscar was actually into comedy (he'd lose his sense of humor by the late 1940's): A Slight Case of Murder.  This is one of several films that Edward G. Robinson did throughout the decade riffing on his his tough guy persona, and was one of the rare films between the very popular gangster films of the early 1930's and the film noir pictures that were about to become the rage with the success of 1941's The Maltese Falcon.  As these are two of my favorite genres, I figured this was a great movie to investigate during our look at the pictures of 1938, and so that's what we're going to do today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place at the end of Prohibition, where bootlegger Remy Marco (Robinson) has decided to go legitimate, selling his beer legally and buying his wife Nora (Donnelly) and daughter Mary (Bryan) a spot in proper society.  There's a problem though-Remy's beer is terrible, and has only been successful because there wasn't any competition on the market.  Flash forward a few years, and Remy is broke (and his crew is still getting used to being "legitimate"), and needs money to save his brewery.  This seems to fall right into his lap when four dead mobsters show up in his house, complete with $500k worth of loot, but Marco's problems aren't entirely solved-his daughter has brought home her fiancé, who just happens to be a cop.  The film follows what happens as Marco tries to stay legitimate, and how his yes men eventually let him know that his beer is, well, terrible.

A Slight Case of Murder is not a complicated film-this isn't something that stands up with the great pictures of Robinson's later career like Double Indemnity and The Woman in the Window which are challenging and take a look at the tougher parts of human nature (and give him some boffo acting moments).  But it is hilarious, genuinely, and Robinson is pitch perfect for the part.  Robinson was a bit of a precursor in some ways to figures like Robert de Niro, Jack Nicholson, and Al Pacino, aging stars who knew that they couldn't compete with a new generation of leading men as "tough guys" on their own, so instead they began to make a profit spoofing that persona for box office points.  Like these later movie stars, Robinson didn't do this to the chagrin of his career-he was able to play the kinds of dramatic roles that made him famous into the 1950's, but he added to his persona in a smart way by giving us comedy (and opening up a whole new type of movie that the studios knew they could find success with him in).  Robinson is one of the most baffling actors when it comes to the Oscars and why he was never nominated, particularly when seen in the light of something like A Slight Case of Murder, as he makes comedy look so easy after making his name in drama...he could genuinely do it all.

The film's supporting cast is also spry-these aren't breaking any molds (pretty much everyone is playing to stereotype), but great acting doesn't always require you to standout-sometimes it's important just to make the script the winner, and they all feed into the comedic gags throughout the film. The movie's look at the nouveau riche and "be careful what you wish for" would've played well with a destitute Depression-era audience, as well as the decadence of the Marcos' lifestyle.  I also want to call out that Bobby Jordan (as a young hoodlum orphan) is fun a year out from his big break in Dead End.  It's nice to see him get such a plum central part here, as Jordan's life would be rough in the years that followed: World War II would essentially cut him out of the Dead End Kids franchise as it transformed into the lucrative Bowery Boys series, and eventually he'd become a divorced alcoholic who would die of cirrhosis at the age of only 42.

OVP: Three Comrades (1938)

Film: Three Comrades (1938)

Stars: Robert Taylor, Margaret Sullavan, Franchot Tone, Robert Young

Director: Frank Borzage

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actress-Margaret Sullavan)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Hey there!  First off, I want to say sorry about the relatively scant offerings on the blog over the past two weeks.  A combination of events both expected (and welcomed) and unexpected (and less welcomed) kept me busy with real world events, and as a result, I've been unable to do much writing beyond our Saturdays with the Stars series.  I am hopeful that we'll be able to get some semblance of normal, though in the next week or two we'll likely be a bit more sporadic before we settle back into our daily routine.  Today, we're going to get back into at least something of a groove by looking at another film from 1938 (I'm not sure of the exact date of when I can reveal why we've been focusing so much on 1938 lately, but there is a reason & I'm hopeful I'll be able to share it by the end of the month) and with a unique film not because of its actors or its director, but because of its writer.  Three Comrades is the only film to ever be written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most influential novelists of the 20th Century.  I enjoy Fitzgerald's look at the anguish of modern life, and have a particular sense of pride that he's from my home state, so I was curious what a man who has written a lot of novelists that are basically pronounced as "unfilmable" would do with his sole cinematic output.

(Spoilers Ahead) Three Comrades is the story of three soldiers, Erich (Taylor), Otto (Tone), and Gottfried (Young) and their time in the years coming up toward World War II (though obviously made in 1938, they don't know that's about to break out, neither character nor actor).  The movie largely focuses on their movements as they try to battle fascism in Germany, while also each of them being drawn to a young woman named Patricia (Sullavan), who ultimately lands on Erich (Robert Taylor is the lead for a reason) as her primary love interest, but there's a catch: Patricia is dying from tuberculosis, and as a result their romance has a tragic sell-by date.  Still, they continue on, and we see their struggles to keep their romance alive while also seeing the cost of fighting against the Nazis & the toll it takes on the friendship (it won't be just Patricia who dies in this movie) before the film comes to its inevitable, melancholy fate.

The film is quite melodramatic, and the direction initially is off-putting.  All of the figures are meant to be playing Germans, set against the rise of fascism in World War II, but all of the main actors are American, and none of them attempt an accent.  This is particularly galling for Taylor, who speaks in a deeply Midwestern intonation and is an odd fit for this story (which is weird, because Robert Taylor with his curt demeanor and intense handsomeness, was always at-home in melodramas).  The film's politics (all taking place on the eve of World War II) also feel strange in how insightful they are, showing the growing discord ravaging the European continent.

But the film works-I liked it.  Fitzgerald knows story structure, and isn't afraid to have his characters dying to serve the story (note the plural-as I mentioned above several characters die here), and Sullavan's work is strangely effective.  Other than Shop Around the Corner I didn't know a lot about her as a performer, and I found her deeply-affected work here quite transportive.  She plays Patricia as a woman who knows she's doomed, but has fallen in love anyway (perhaps with all three men in her way).  This sort of romantic figure could be frustrating, but I think she gives her a wide-eyed pessimism that I liked.  Patricia in her hands is less a victim of circumstance and more someone who doesn't want to be a saint.  In a different life she was the gay life force of a party, not the woman stuck in a disease that will claim her...and she knows that the illness has affected her ability to be that person, forcing her to choose the life of a martyr.  It's delicate stuff, and sometimes too much (the death scene is overly dramatic, and perhaps too indulgent though it worked on me), but Three Comrades is a great time, and she bolsters it.

OVP: You Can't Take It With You (1938)

Film: You Can't Take It With You (1938)

Stars: Jean Arthur, Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart, Edward Arnold, Mischa Auer, Ann Miller, Spring Byington, HB Warner, Harry Davenport

Director: Frank Capra

Oscar History: 7 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture*, Director, Supporting Actress-Spring Byington, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Film Editing, Sound Recording)

(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I remember once someone said to me that watching a primary field of presidential candidates is a bit perplexing, because they all start out looking normal, like average human beings, and yet one of them is going to become immortal, putting their stamp forever on history (for the good or the bad).  The same can be said, to a degree, about a film that wins Best Picture.  You take 5, 8, 10, 12 (the number varies) movies, and then at the end of the night, one of them gets to be immortalized (and debated) forever as the "Best Picture of the Year."  This, of course, comes with some strange side effects in the same way that presidential races do.  After all, there are some Best Pictures that even with pedigree & fame, don't really amount to much historically, and you'd be forgive for thinking of You Can't Take It With You in that way.  The film, the victor in 1938, is a movie that doesn't necessarily standout in the careers of either its actors or its director, and yet despite its passed over reputation, it's a genuinely lovely (and perhaps more modern than you'd expect) movie that deserves its time in the sun.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Anthony Kirby (Arnold), a business mogul in the late 1920's, who only has a mind for the matter-of-fact.  He is grooming his son Tony (Stewart) to take over the family business at one point, but there's a hiccup-Tony is in love with his stenographer Alice (Arthur), and they know nothing about her family.  It turns out that Alice's family is full of eccentrics, led by the understanding & wonderful Grandpa Vanderhof (Barrymore).  As the film continues, we see a meeting of the stuffy Kirby's with the laid-back Vanderhof's which results in all of them going to jail (due to an illegal fireworks explosion).  After this, Alice breaks up with Tony, not comfortable with the way that his family has been judging hers, but as this is a Frank Capra film, we do find a happy ending for all.  Mr. Kirby, who has been trying to buy the Vanderhof's house the whole film (and successfully does when Grandpa wants to move to be closer to Alice, who has fled), gives back the house, Tony & Alice end up together, and the family is filled with a group brimming with even more eccentrics.

I have seen You Can't Take It With You before, though it has been at least 20 years (if not longer), and it was one of the first films I caught when I started watching Best Picture winners.  I remembered relatively little about the film, to the point where I remembered a woman frequently dancing, but it wasn't until I saw the movie that I suddenly understood the "no talent" hoofer in the film is actually Ann Miller, one of the greatest dancers of Hollywood's Golden Age.  As a result, I kind of had downgraded my initially pleasant interactions with the picture because I assumed that the more saccharine elements that I had encountered with the movie would hold, perhaps over-washing them, as does on occasion happen with Frank Capra's "lesser" classics.

This wasn't the case here, though.  You Can't Take It With You is genuinely charming, and like I said, thoroughly modern.  While the film's racial politics do present some problems (the white people live a life of leisure where they pursue their dreams while the two black characters are both servants who are not given the same kind of leniency with their interests), it does show a world where people don't put all of their value in money, and more importantly, don't put it on work.  Grandpa Vanderhof occasionally indulges in libertarian conversations with random people about his dislike of taxes, but really there's a lot of socialist indulgence here which is refreshing-the movie's politics basically say "pursue your dreams-life is short, and what makes you happy is the best thing for you," and I honestly can't think of a lot of movies of this era (or any era) that say to do this, even if it doesn't mean you'll make money from it.  There's something really shocking about putting value into hobbies & interests without needing to justify it through finance that I found hit a nerve with me (a man who spends much of his time watching & chronicling movies for a blog that he gets no financial compensation for), and that resonated in a way that felt refreshingly Millennial/Gen Z.

The movie's actors have all had bigger classics (Mr. Smith, It's a Wonderful Life, On the Town, Shane), but really this cast is A+ and Capra achieves something with a call sheet that reads like a Film Twitter dream list of the 1930's.   Arthur got top billing here (Stewart was still one year away from being the eternal "first name" on the poster), and shines-if you like Jean Arthur, with her omnipresent perkiness, you'll love her here as she's at her brightest (Arthur's offscreen persona was vastly different to her onscreen one, loathing publicity & regularly struggling with even the briefest of public interactions, to the point where her later theatrical career was a series of breakdowns...she'd make a good biopic if Hollywood is listening).  Stewart is charming & lovely, given a side role but one that he manages to make affable.  Edward Arnold gets to play what would become a prototypical part for him (the large-and-in-charge wealthy villain).  Arnold had to have enjoyed this film's reputation more than anyone.  Earlier in 1938, he'd been labeled "Box Office Poison" by the Hollywood Reporter, saying he was one of the actors that theater owners most loathed seeing on a movie poster...that he ended up months later starring in a movie that won Best Picture and was a financial success had to have been great revenge.

The Vanderhof's are all great too.  Barrymore, like Arthur & Stewart, could play this part in his sleep, but that doesn't mean that we should just assume that his movie star aura is easily administered.  Spring Byington & Ann Miller are both fun in small roles as people pursuing their passions without a hint of success; Byington won the only Oscar nomination of her long career for this part, and in a lot of ways it resembles some of the "character nominations" we see even today, where a longtime side favorite gets their due in a successful Best Picture contender (think June Squibb or Laurie Metcalf).  All-in-all, this is a great ensemble, one where it's difficult to single out a specific actor, but where everyone is at peak condition.

The film's Oscar nominations are all worthy.  The cinematography is standard, but well-utilized-you get a sense from the way the camera moves that they know that the house itself (a surefire Art Direction nominee if that category had existed yet) is a great supporting player in this piece.  The writing is sharp, with silly (sometimes schmaltzy, but not too bad) dialogue, while the editing is solid-giving us enough fun moments with the Vanderhof's to get you to really know them without it ever feeling long (and at 2+ hours that was a risk for a movie that doesn't really have much of a plot to speak of other than boy-meets-girl).  The sound design is also great-the film's fireworks pop & crackle, and the regular musical interludes play perfectly.  I honestly had a great time-this isn't a landmark Capra film (it's not quintessential like It Happened One Night or It's a Wonderful Life), but if all of the Best Picture winners are "immortal," similar to my presidential theory above, this is one that feels like a president you didn't realize was impressive as history books would have led you to believe.

OVP: Jezebel (1938)

Film: Jezebel (1938)

Stars: Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, George Brent, Donald Crisp, Fay Bainter

Director: William Wyler

Oscar History: 5 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Actress-Bette Davis*, Supporting Actress-Fay Bainter*, Cinematography, Scoring)

(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Only twice in Academy history has an actor scored five consecutive Oscar nominations, something that not even Meryl Streep herself can boast (Streep did, it's worth noting, go 5-for-6 from 1978-83, but didn't score anything in 1980).  The second of these two performers is Greer Garson, whose run is generally ignored today by cinephiles (somewhat unfairly, as Garson had the ability for great work, even though she was clearly overrated).  The other performer, though, was part of a legendary Oscar tour: Bette Davis.  From 1938-42, Davis was cited for Jezebel, Dark Victory, The Letter, The Little Foxes, and Now Voyager, all of which are still considered to be triumphs, and combined they encompass a lot of what gave Davis the "greatest actor of her generation title."  Today we are going to discuss Jezebel, which is the first of these nominations and a movie that I hadn't seen in some 25 years until I chanced upon it this past weekend, the one film of this quintet she translated that nomination into an actual victory.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Julie Marsden (Davis), a spoiled, beautiful young southern belle who at the beginning of the film is mad that her beau Preston Dillard (Fonda) won't come to her dress fitting.  She decides to enact revenge on him by wearing a red dress to a local dance where all of the unmarried girls wear white, much to the chagrin of everyone around her, including her Aunt Belle (Bainter).  Though Pres protests, she goes to the dance dressed in red, and quickly realizes the error of her ways when she's shunned by virtually everyone, and becomes a pariah.  After this dance, Pres dumps her, and goes north.  When he returns, she's ready to placate him, but he's already married to Amy (Margaret Lindsay), a northerner who feels like an outsider to Julie, and competition she must squash.  She goes about this by dating Buck Cantrell (Brent), who is madly in love with her, and who consistently fights with Pres.  This goes awry when Pres's brother (Richard Cromwell) challenges Buck to a duel, and in the process Buck dies.  Later in the film, there is a pandemic breaking out, and soon Pres becomes infected.  Julie wants to treat him, fighting with Amy, and eventually convincing her that Julie will be better for Pres, that Amy won't have the strength to fight for him the way she will.  The film ends with Julie, defeated but ready to finally repay Pres for her slight, headed into an unknown future where they may well both die of the disease.

As I mentioned above, I had seen Jezebel, but it had been a really long time since I watched it; it was surely something I recorded off of AMC with a VHS tape when I was a child at the beginning of my Oscar-watching.  I did remember it better than I expected, I will say, particularly the fuss over the red dress, Bainter's title character speech, and the defiant Davis headed off with a handsome, scruffy Hank Fonda into near-certain death.  What I didn't recall, and quite frankly this might be because I hadn't seen it yet, was how similar it feels to Gone with the Wind.  Jezebel the film preceded Gone with the Wind, and the play on which it is based preceded Margaret Mitchell's novel.  But it's hard to watch this film & not think of it as a lesser chapter compared to the magnum opus, and not just because most movies feel dwarfed by Gone with the Wind, the Grand Teton of what Hollywood can do when everything goes for the widest possible angle.

After all, in Gone with the Wind there's a section where Scarlett also has to wear a red dress, albeit less of her own volition & more because she's being punished for (trying to take) another woman's man, which Julie eventually attempts in this film.  So much of the plot is ripped wholesale it almost feels unfair to punish Jezebel, but in Wyler's film it all feels so slight compared to Gone with the Wind, and the few ways that the later Fleming film should be improved, specifically around racism, are not addressed in a movie like Jezebel.  If anything, Julie uses the slaves in her film more as props than Scarlett did, at one point singing with them gaily as she starts to lose her grip on her sanity, in a scene that feels uncomfortably like she's using a group of black people as metaphors to indicate her straying from reality.

The movie also doesn't really know how to treat the central romance, and Julie herself.  Unlike Scarlett, who has a sense of purpose not with Rhett or Ashley or the war, but to her home (to Tara), Julie doesn't really have that guiding light.  She's obsessed with Preston, but we don't entirely know why other than he's the one thing she can't have.  It doesn't feel like they're actually in love, particularly since Preston Dillard is a massive dud of a character.  This is weird to say about Henry Fonda (if you've read this blog long, you know I'm a fan-this is not an actor I criticize frequently, if at all), but he is totally wrong for this part.  The two reportedly had an affair in real life, but Davis & Fonda have zero chemistry onscreen, and he feels all wrong for this part.  There's no charisma, and while Davis is knee-deep in an authentic southern accent, the Nebraska-born Fonda does little to buckle his home-spun Midwestern cadence.  The result is a central romance that never takes off, and feels like a total failure, quite frankly-Fonda is actively bad in this movie.

Davis is good, though upon revisit she's not as good as I remembered, mostly because I've seen a lot more of her work in the years since and I know what she's capable of doing.  Few actresses of this era (perhaps no major stars of this era, period) committed to a role like Bette Davis, and that's certainly the case here.  She plays Julie to the hilt, but she doesn't give her quite enough purpose.  Yes, it's marvelous to behold: her soliloquies are wonderful, the way that she glances at Fonda as he forces her to dance, suddenly becoming aware that she's in over-her-head and as a rich, privileged girl this isn't a feeling she's used to, her gigantic saucer eyes somehow stretching wider...that's breathtaking and the kind of minute character work that Davis is so freaking excellent at.  But there are other scenes later in the film that don't feel quite right.  The callous way that she basically sends her "one true love's" brother off to his death feels like a weird editing choice, and she can't sell the final moments with Amy...there's not enough to her relationship with Preston to make her pleading work.  Davis is very good, but this is not the best performance in her run, and it's hard to compare this with the heights she was about to hit with The Letter and Now Voyager, some of her best work without coming away with a slight whiff of "she's been better."

The film's other nominations, save for Best Picture (you already saw the star rating-you know where I landed) were totally earned (and for the record, while I'm not done with most of the viewings from 1938, Davis is in the running for me for both an OVP & a My Ballot nomination).  Fay Bainter was the first performer ever nominated in both lead and supporting in the same year, and she got this award in part as a consolation prize for not besting Davis.  It's not as showy of a role as I remembered, though she does get that great scene about "a woman called Jezebel" that would've been her Oscar clip if such things existed in 1938.  She's good, subtle, the sort of woman who knows that her niece is beyond her control & she's not entirely certain how much effort she wants to put in anymore-it's a strong role that stands out because of the stellar actress behind it.  The Max Steiner score is marvelous, combined with some Strauss & Stephen Foster to give us a full southern push (Steiner reportedly won the job of scoring Gone with the Wind based on this picture), and the cinematography, particularly in the last ten minutes is moody & wonderful.  Kudos also have to go to the costume designers (Davis is exceptionally glamorous, and that red dress, really bronze in real life, is a showstopper), and art directors, neither of whom had this category in 1938 but surely would've been in the running.  But overall, Jezebel is a movie that's fine, and might even be good, but it's impossible to escape the weight of what was to come the following year & redefine the southern saga for always in Hollywood.

OVP: Test Pilot (1938)

Film: Test Pilot (1938)

Stars: Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy, Lionel Barrymore, Marjorie Main

Director: Victor Fleming

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Story, Film Editing)

(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

MGM circa 1938 boasted of having "more stars than there are in heaven," and surely this was the case for the studio with a movie like Test Pilot.  The film features three of the biggest headliners of the era (Gable, Loy, & Tracy...plus Lionel Barrymore to boot!), and truly stunning aerial photography, and was cited for Oscar's top prize based on these stars & the film's significant profit.  However, I had seen Test Pilot maybe 10 years ago, and I had poor memories of it.  I didn't really care for the film initially, though it was so forgettable I honestly was curious as to why it had left a bitter taste in my mouth, particularly considering my passion for some of the actors.  Upon revisit, I was struck by a few things I didn't remember (we'll get there), but I feel like I was right-this movie doesn't really work despite having such magnetism on the call sheet.  Let's talk about why.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Jim Lane (Gable), an ace test pilot who recklessly jumps from dangerous plane to plane (and from woman to woman), much to the chagrin of his buddy Gunner (Tracy) and boss Drake (Barrymore).  One day, he crash lands in Kansas, and there he meets the beautiful Ann Barton (Loy), a country girl who is engaged to another man but who is clearly destined for Jim.  They end up together, marrying, but this isn't happily-ever-after (it's only about 30 minutes into the movie).  Instead, we get a dose of what this marriage is like, with Jim clearly an adrenaline junkie who can't give up his day job (and doesn't want to), and both Gunner & Ann on the ground, holding their breath as Jim nears death repeatedly (including one sequence where he barely lives, but one of his fellow pilots dies, a moment that is so telegraphed when they randomly introduce his wife & three kids that the set directors might as well have put a gigantic neon sign above the actor's death saying "destined for the morgue").  The climax of the film has Jim crash landing, and in the process he lives but it's Gunner who dies, which is enough to push Jim to give up this life for good, allowing him to have a grounded life with Ann & their family.

There are things to like in Test Pilot, and I don't want to push those aside.  For starters, it's interesting to watch a film from 1938 about a troubled marriage.  This isn't something we're used to in romances of this era, where "I do" is almost certainly followed by an end card, and it's interesting to see how Hollywood approaches a troubled domesticity between two of its biggest leading players.  I'll also point out right now that the aerial stunts & photography, particularly the landing in Kansas, are impressive for 1938 & this is the kind of film that would've surely gotten a VFX nomination (deservedly) had that category existed in 1938.

But the movie suffers as it goes on because it almost has whiplash it oscillates so frequently across genres.  The movie casts Loy & Gable, two of the era's most charming figures, and occasionally lets them play off of each other (which is a blast), but more often-than-not their courtship veers into sanctimonious, expositional melodrama, with Loy repeatedly underlining the pains she has of being in love with a man who is wrecklessly putting his life in danger.  This isn't necessarily a bad idea for a film, but it's so oft-repeated, with it being clear how it will end (it's not like Gable's going to pick his job over his wife), but it doesn't find a way to modulate its tone-every five minutes we're laughing then so shuddered with dramatics you almost feel guilty for being charmed by the two leads.  It doesn't know what to do with its story, and as a result it becomes a bit of a slog to get through.

The leads aren't able to bolster the movie either.  Loy & Gable clearly want this to be a spry romantic comedy-their acting styles are well-suited for one another, but when it's dramatic they can't pull it off, particularly Loy, who is the actor I like best in this movie generally, but she can't make her contradictory Ann make sense.  Weirdly, it's Spencer Tracy who is by-far the best person in this film.  I am not a Spencer Tracy cheerleader (hence the weirdly), and I'd pick Gable or Loy over him any day of the week, but Tracy is quite good as Gunner, giving him a wearied gruffness that I liked.  Two years removed from San Francisco (for which Tracy won an Oscar nomination but Gable didn't), this is another case where Tracy is taking the film wholesale away from Gable, who was the better movie star but not the thespian that Tracy was.  It's worth noting that Tracy's Gunner does have something of a queer sensibility (he doesn't seem to have any real romantic entanglements other than fretting about Clark Gable), which is perhaps too generous of a reading of Test Pilot, but I did see those shades as the movie continued.  Without this interpretation, Test Pilot doesn't have much to lend to it-for a movie that feels long, it's just the same story over-and-over again...to use the vernacular of the film, a movie that's not so much turbulent as merely routine.

OVP: Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938)

Film: Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938)

Stars: Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, Jack Haley, Jean Hersholt, John Carradine

Director: Henry King

Oscar History: 6 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Motion Picture Story, Original Song-"Now It Can Be Told," Scoring*, Art Direction, Film Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

When we think of classical Hollywood musicals of the 1930's through the early 1950's, what we initially name-check are almost always the MGM musicals of the era.  Films like The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, and Singin' in the Rain were all from the same studio.  Other studios, of course, were making musicals, most importantly 20th Century Fox, but Fox's best-remembered musicals would come in the 50's & 60's, when they would adapt the Rodgers & Hammerstein productions The King & I, South Pacific, and The Sound of Music, the latter of which basically saved the studio from bankruptcy.  Their musicals from the 1930's and 40's were hits, some pretty big hits, but none have the same kind of cache now that they did in their era.  Today we're going to revisit one of those films (a blockbuster hit), Alexander's Ragtime Band, which was cited for six Oscars, including Best Picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Alexander (Power), a young classical composer who joins a band (to his family & professor's chagrin) of ragtime musicians, and who luck into a gig at a nightclub partially because they are joined by singer Stella Kirby (Faye), another performer on the rise.  Stella & Alexander fight it out, but are clearly falling for each other in an "opposites attract" situation, and both are on their way up, though when a producer decides he only wants to give Stella a big break (not the band), Alexander gets jealous & they break it off.  World War I looms, with Alexander and some members of the band getting drafted, and while he's away, Stella marries the band's piano player Charlie (Ameche), and they have success but it's clearly not enough to keep their marriage afloat, and they divorce.  Meanwhile, Alexander is back & having great success with his band, including new lead singer Jerry Allen (Merman), who is in love with him but knows that he still pines for Stella.  The film has a "will they or won't they finale" with Alexander performing "Alexander's Ragtime Band" at Carnegie Hall, and as you would suspect for a movie from 1938, they do, in fact, end up together.

The 20th Century Fox musicals of this time frame follow not only the same plot formulas, they nearly always repeat the same stars.  You may remember we featured Alice Faye in a Saturdays with the Stars a few years ago, and we profiled films she made with both Power & Ameche (the former would make three films together, the latter would make six).  As a result, the films feel interchangeable, and as I've seen a lot of Alice Faye movies from this time frame, I know the formula well, and also to know based on billing whether or not she's going to end up with Don Ameche in the end (here, of course, she doesn't as Power is the headliner).

This basic story work makes the film feel more like a jukebox musical than the more complete productions happening at MGM at the time, which had more centralization on story and grand production numbers.  Most of the songs in the musical are not original to it (we'll get to one of the ones that was in a second), and very few of them are full production numbers with lots of dancers & choreography.  While we do have a few costume changes (most notably "Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil" with Ethel Merman sashaying in a horned headband amid a group of sparkling demons), this is a movie that's really just about the music.  It helps that they hired two actresses who can genuinely sing.  Alice Faye is one of my favorite underrated performers of this era, and she's luminous as ever as Stella, giving her just enough depth and longing to make the paper-thin plot feel fuller, and her voice is a melodic lullaby. Merman, of course, brasses up some of the band's biggest numbers, and while a little bit of Merman can go a long way, it's weird (in a good way) to see her playing such a young figure as most of her most iconic roles (like Mama Rose) come from figures out of their youth.

As a result, your patience for this film is going to be tried by how much you can handle a musical with very little plot or grand choreography, and mostly just focused on some good-time songs.  Mine resides right in the middle, mostly because of my love of Ameche & Faye (I always cheer for them to end up together even though it's more a 50/50 split in their pictures).  The Irving Berlin songs sound great, and are brimming from every corner so you get your money's worth on the Oscar-winning scoring from Alfred Newman.  The original song "Now It Can Be Told" honestly falters amidst so many outright classics, in many ways echoing songs like "I Move On" and "Learn to Be Lonely" in later years where an addition that scores an Oscar nomination can't compete with the classics.  It's pretty, but it's just not special with so many iconic ditties.  The nomination for editing is a weird one, perhaps getting it for so many production numbers in one movie (though, again, it's less the production and more just the singing that stands out there), though the art direction feels more at-home; all of the stages feel like true, distinct  venues rather than just different window dressing, and as a result it genuinely feels like you get a sense of where the band is headed in terms of their theater's stature as the film progresses.

Two last things before we go, both because they struck me as unusual.  We talked yesterday in regard to a different 1938 Best Picture nominee, Four Daughters, how John Garfield's acting style felt weirdly out-of-place compared to the bright-and-bubbly portrayals from the Lane sisters.  Alexander's Ragtime Band has that too from omnipresent character actor John Carradine, here playing an unnamed taxi cab driver.  Carradine is in literally hundreds of movies during this era, so him showing up is not a surprise, but his performance-style is so at-odds with the rest of the movie, particularly dove-eyed Alice Faye, that it feels unusual.  He drives Faye around, and you almost feel like he's about to kidnap her & bring her into a completely different movie.  It's not a bad performance (I quite liked it), but it's so atonal to the film that it feels like this strange interlude in the picture where you think it might turn sinister (it doesn't help matters that one of Carradine's most iconic roles is playing Count Dracula in this regard).  I couldn't leave without at least mentioning this bizarre late-act swing in an otherwise conventional movie.

The last thing was a dumbstruck moment for me personally.  One of the songs that is sung in the song is "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," which is a Berlin number performed by Jack Haley in the movie.  I know this song very well, but had no idea until watching it this past weekend that it had been written by Irving Berlin...I honestly thought it had been written by my dad.  My dad, when I was a kid, would make up little songs to sing to my brother & I, and one of the songs that I remember most was him singing a (slightly different lyrics, but the same exact tune) version of this number to us when he was waking us up in the morning in lieu of an alarm clock.  I had no idea until I was literally watching this movie that this was not, in fact, one of his made up songs, which I found hysterical as a man in his mid-30's, apparently somehow believing his father is Irving Berlin.

OVP: Four Daughters (1938)

Film: Four Daughters (1938)

Stars: Priscilla Lane, Rosemary Lane, Lola Lane, Gale Page, Claude Rains, John Garfield, Jeffrey Lynn, May Robson

Director: Michael Curtiz

Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor-John Garfield, Adapted Screenplay, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We will likely in July restart the Sunday Leftovers series (I had one too many things on my plate over the past few weeks as I began to resume normal activities outside the house, and I needed to lift one of them-this ended up being the culprit), which will be nice because we're now in the 1950's for Hitchcock, so it'll be difficult for you to guess which movies we're still hitting in the coming weeks, and therefore each starlet is going to be a surprise.  But I'm going to spoil one today, and let you know one of Hitchcock's leading ladies who won't be part of our series this year: Priscilla Lane.  The star of 1942's Saboteur, best known today for her work as Cary Grant's hapless fiancee in Arsenic and Old Lace, was briefly a headliner for Warner Brothers in the late 1930's & early 1940's.  That fame was largely a byproduct of Four Daughters, a movie that Priscilla made with her sisters Rosemary & Lola, and which resulted in an unusual franchise (both Four Wives and Four Mothers would follow in the coming years).  While we'll get to Saboteur later this year in our 2021 devoted to Hitchcock, today we're going to take a look at how Priscilla Lane's stardom commenced.

(Spoilers Ahead) Four Daughters is a story about the Lemp sisters: Ann (Priscilla), Kay (Rosemary), Thea (Lola), and Emma (Gale Page, the only one of the sisters who wasn't an actual blood relative in real life), all very musical and doted upon by their conductor father Adam (Rains).  At the beginning of the film, Thea is courted by a wealthy young bachelor, whom she eventually marries, and this kind of sets the stage for the remainder of the film, as the movie keeps us guessing over which of the suitors that are parading around the Lemp house are going to eventually end up with the beautiful daughters.  The primary love square exists between Emma & Ann, both of whom are initially in love with Felix (Lynn), a promising young composer who is clearly smitten with Ann, but Ann, not wanting to destroy her sister's heart, runs off with Felix's friend Mickey (Garfield), a vagabond composer who always "gets the short end of life."  As the film progresses, Emma realizes that the boy-next-door was her great love, not Felix, and when Ann returns, she's heartbroken that she gave up Felix for nothing, and is in a relationship that while loving, isn't what she wanted.  Mickey realizes that Felix is better for Ann, and commits suicide in an automobile accident.  The movie ends with Felix & Ann together again, Mickey dead, and three sisters happily in relationships (poor Kay ends up being the Mary Bennett of the group, continually singing by the piano).

The movie suffers pretty quickly from tonal issues, and they bog down the whole film.  The first 15 minutes or so are a delight, with all of the sisters showing a strong chemistry with one another (Rosemary being my favorite of the bunch), but as the movie progresses it becomes clear that it can't sustain a focus on four female characters without them having a bunch of men to fight over, and it becomes a more standard-issue romantic drama.  This is a problem because while Rosemary Lane is funny in a side role, the two primary women, played by Priscilla and Page, are kind of boring.  Page is beautiful but sort of a porcelain doll, never emoting past what her eyes are telling us, and Priscilla Lane's Ann is, and I mean this in the nicest possible way (I love Arsenic and Old Lace), kind of annoying.  There's a scene a third of the way through the film where she chastises John Garfield's Mickey, whom she's just met, for not laughing the second she wants him to.  Garfield refuses, and she instantly judges him even though she's kind of ridiculous for treating a stranger such a way (even in 1938).  Lane, who was 23 when this movie was released, plays Ann like she's 14, and never really matures her as the film goes on, and it gets weird considering by the end of the film she's literally a widow.

This is just one of several tonal problems with the movie.  The film's direction is all-over-the-place.  The sequence where Garfield kills himself suddenly shifts into the style of a 1940's noir, and then we're back in Frank Capra land in about three minutes after he dies, and it's clear that Curtiz doesn't really know how to manage the four different sisters, differentiating them enough for the audience to care about them as separate entities (by the end, it's mostly just "Ann" and "the other ones").  It's funny, except when it's deadly serious, and the jokes are repeated often (think of how Felix & Mickey flirt with Aunt Etta, played by May Robson, with virtually the same lines).  The script doesn't work, and the sound nomination is maybe plausible to a degree (there's lots of singing, I suppose), but the only thing that stood out to me was the grating, nauseating noise of the hinge on the front gate, which is repeatedly used as a comic device but literally had me covering my ears as the movie progresses.

The thing here, is, though, that there's a part of Four Daughters that really worked for me...except it doesn't work at all for the movie itself, and that's John Garfield.  Garfield, for those who aren't as familiar with him since he didn't have a lot of classic films under-his-belt before his untimely death at the age of 39, was a forerunner of the likes of Marlon Brando & James Dean, a young naturalistic performer that wasn't conventionally handsome, but still exuded a heat onscreen that was undeniable.  During Garfield's first scene onscreen, he is playing the piano like a virtuoso, in a clean-cut house, smoking a cigarette to its ashy end, and casually flirting with Aunt Etta, and it's...sexy.  John Garfield in this movie is smoldering, like, there's no denying it.  His character arch, as a man that doesn't quite know how to handle good news, and is clearly not the "right choice" for Ann even though he obviously loves her, is heartbreaking, but in most movies of this era, he'd be made to be a louse or a cad, deserving the eventual death that's coming his way.  Garfield doesn't play him that way, though-he's so engrained into this performer, that he is making him feel rich & complex onscreen, so that you leave feeling something you'd normally have to wait until at least 1940's noir, if not 1950's melodrama to get to-he's a three-dimensional human being.

The problem is that this is not the right approach for a movie like Four Daughters, where Garfield's acting is on such another level it feels like an anachronism.  It's not just better than anyone else onscreen, it's also a totally out-of-place.  Him next to Priscilla Lane's perky sweet Ann isn't just opposites attracting, it feels like they're in a different movie, and honestly it reads as kind of weird.  This is totally a great performance, and obviously this was the kind of film that a studio executive would watch & realize they had a talent on their hands...but within the confines of Four Daughters, it doesn't fit.

OVP: The Citadel (1938)

Film: The Citadel (1938)

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

Director: King Vidor

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

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

OVP: Grand Illusion (1938)

Film: Grand Illusion (1938...technically 1937 but it gets a 1938 Oscar year so we're going with that because this is an Oscar-centered blog)

Stars: Jean Gabin, Marcel Dalio, Pierre Fresnay, Erich von Stroheim

Director: Jean Renoir

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Picture)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Two years ago, Oscar made history by awarding Parasite the trophy for Best Picture, a truly seismic moment in Oscar history as it was the first film not primarily in English to win Oscar's top prize.  This might beg the question to the curious (and if you read this blog, I assume that includes you), of what was the first film to be nominated for Best Picture to not be in English.  This happened much earlier than you would expect, at the 11th Academy Awards, with Jean Renoir's celebrated opus Grand Illusion.  Weirdly, modern cinephiles might not think about this film in the same way that others did at the time in part because Renoir, while a celebrated filmmaker, has seen a later film of his, The Rules of the Game, which was dismissed by critics at the time, supplant Grand Illusion as his greatest film (Rules regularly shows up on lists of the greatest films ever made).  However, this was far more popular at the time, and established Renoir's, the son of the famed impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (whose painting Le Moulin de la Galette I'm sitting under a print of right now), reputation as one of the first true auteur directors.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place in World War I, where French Lieutenant Marechal (Gabin) and Captain Boeldieu (Fresnay) are taken prisoner by the Germans, specifically Captain (later Major) von Rauffenstein (von Stroheim).  In the opening scenes, they are given the courtesy of their position as officers, but as the film progresses, they are put through considerably stronger hardships, forced to live in barracks with a group of other prisoners.  These prisoners, it turns out, are planning an escape from the camp, and have dug a tunnel out of the prison.  We see the men, from different backgrounds and classes, begin to form a camaraderie, which eventually culminates in a spontaneous round of "Le Marsaillaise" when the French capture Fort Douaumont at the Battle of Verdun (this scene supposedly inspired the later, more famous sequence in Casablanca where the French anthem was sung at a moment of victory).  The men are not able to use their tunnel, though, as they are transported just before it is completed, and Marechal & Boeldieu are brought to a variety of camps, never successfully escaping.  They eventually are brought back to Rauffenstein's authority, with him now promoted & badly injured to the point where he wears a neck brace the remainder of the movie.  They reunite with Rosenthal (Dalio), a Jewish lieutenant from their first camp, and the three French men decide to escape. In executing their plan, Boeldieu essentially sacrifices his life so that the other two men have a chance, and they succeed in escaping, first taking refuge in the home of a widowed German woman (who falls in love with Marechal), and then running to Switzerland, with their fates beyond that are unknown.

Renoir, between Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, was deeply critical of the fascist movements that were rising up in Europe at the time, and both of these films serve as veiled critiques of the far right movements springing up in Germany, Italy, and Spain at the time (Renoir, it should be noted, had to flee France to Hollywood in 1940, likely a result of his films being banned by the Nazis).  In Grand Illusion, for example, we regularly see the increased prevalence of antisemitism (in the treatment of the Rosenthal character by both Rauffenstein & Marechal), and the film also has a lot to say about the class system.  In his deathbed scene, we understand that Boeldieu, who is from an aristocratic background like Rauffenstein (despite being on different sides of the war), feels that it might be better for a man like him to die in battle, that a new era of wealth & opportunity has finally supplanted the privileged ones who have had that position for generations.  This scene is powerfully told because it essentially shows the two men understanding that their time has passed, a particularly powerful & melancholic message for a film from the late-1930's.

The movie's attitude toward war is also quite obvious, and not complimentary.  The movie repeatedly, constantly has characters essentially at war for reasons that they don't understand.  A known pacifist, Renoir is certain to show that not only a war like World War I was fought over essentially nothing (few knew why this had happened, and the result was a generation lost), but that war is inevitable because man will always keep fighting.  With war that would ravage Europe just a few years away, Renoir's film feels deeply prescient, horrifying but prescient.

But that's what it was about-what did I think of it?  I thought it was terrific.  I wasn't entirely into the film in the opening thirty minutes, when the motley crew of men were trying to dig their tunnel.  I thought it was a bit glib, and while it was fun to see the inspirations (everything from The Great Escape to The Shawshank Redemption has clearly been behind this movie), I wasn't into it.  But as the movie started to progress, giving us a better picture of where we were going with this deeply anti-war film, it felt more alive.  The script allowed for moments of brief pause, sometimes moving (like the "Le Marseillaise" scene) others a bit abstract (there's a random scene where this younger man, in gay parlance a "twink," dresses like a girl and actually looks quite feminine in a dress & wig, and the men all stand awestruck, forgetting what a woman looks like...it's queer coding & clearly meant to be gay, and I'm shocked that censors at the time would allow something like this past as while it might have comedic setup, it's not how it reads by the end of the scene).

The performances got better as well as the movie went by.  Gabin plays his everyman very straight, but also with enough growth as the film progresses to feel like war has changed him in ways he can't quite comprehend yet.  Better yet are Fresnay & von Stroheim, playing men who are actually seeing something of their way-of-life lost coming out of World War I.  There's a bit of a homoeroticism in this performance as well, but it's more so that they are bitter that they understand they'll never get back what they lost.  The other men dream of what their future will be, but these men know their fate is sealed, that  they are relics in a new world that no longer will have use for them.  It's smart, informed acting, and much like the script, they say things you'd rarely hear in a film from the late 1930's (in any language).

OVP: Pygmalion (1938)

Film: Pygmalion (1938)

Stars: Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller, Wilfrid Lawson, Marie Lohr, Scott Sunderland

Director: Anthony Asquith & Leslie Howard

Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Actor-Leslie Howard, Actress-Wendy Hiller, Adapted Screenplay*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

As a child, I oftentimes would watch the film My Fair Lady, which was one of my father's favorite films, and really the only musical I genuinely remember him gravitating toward more than my mom.  I loved it-I thought it was terribly romantic, with a number of catchy tunes, and introduced met to Audrey Hepburn, who is one of my favorite stars of the late Classical Hollywood era.  I have not, however, rewatched it in a number of years, and while I hit a lot of favorites during the pandemic quarantine, this hasn't been one of them.  However, I'm working my way through the 1938 Best Picture lineup, and got something similar with Pygmalion, the nonmusical film version that eventually inspired the Lerner & Loewe classic, a film I had never seen and was startled to understand just how loyal My Fair Lady was to the original.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is focused on Eliza Doolittle (Hiller), a young Cockney flower girl who meets Professor Henry Higgins (Howard), a scholar of language, who has a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering (Sunderland) that he could transform Eliza into a proper lady.  Eliza, hoping to improve herself (potentially to be able to work in a flower shop) eventually relents to being a part of the bet, even if she doesn't seem to care for Professor Higgins.  Though they struggle, with him berating her to better succumb to his training, it eventually works.  Eliza does, in fact, pass for a true lady (one man even assumes she's falsely a Hungarian princess in disguise), and wins the bet for Henry.  At that point, though, she realizes that she wants more from this relationship-she has been changed on the outside, as well as on the inside, and can no longer simply return to being a Cockney flower girl.  Henry Higgins, after much prodding from her, also (begrudgingly) admits that he can't live without her, and that they will continue on their lives together, in some version of happy coexistence.

The film is well-constructed, and very similar if you're only familiar with My Fair Lady, with lines from this picture plucked directly by Lerner & Loewe for their songs like "The Rain in Spain."  It's also, upon revisit, quite problematic, particularly the ending, which strays from playwright George Bernard Shaw's original intent.  In the original, Eliza leaves to marry the hapless Freddy character, even if Henry Higgins is more of an intellectual partner for her, but this film (and My Fair Lady) has her return to Henry Higgins, implying that they will end up together in some fashion.  This is troubling because Henry Higgins doesn't ever really relent, other than admitting that he "needs" Eliza, in treating her with true respect.  Unlike some of the much later versions of this (like, say, Pretty Woman), there isn't an acknowledgment that Henry, not Eliza, truly needs to change.  As a result, I've always been with Shaw here-Eliza deserves better than Henry, and particularly here, it feels like a superb cheat of the writers to give us such a sweet ending.

That's because Pygmalion is given a rare depth through leading lady Wendy Hiller's great work.  I love the Audrey Hepburn version, and she's wonderful, but Hiller is somehow better in this part, mostly because she gives Eliza such terrific desperation.  She is, in fact, a woman who tries to live by a strict moral compass ("I'm a good girl I am"), something that Henry Higgins doesn't acknowledge, and that stays through even as she has to press through a society that doesn't see her as something valuable.  Hiller gives Eliza range by showing that knowledge, particularly for a woman without money in this era, is a dangerous tool because she gets to see how limited her situation is.  Shaw hints at this with his tale, but the truth is that even as Eliza moves up, her freedom is held by either Freddy or Henry or her father-she, as a woman, never gets to control it even if she might have more opportunities after her "transformation."  Other actresses would have dismissed this, but Hiller makes it central to her performance, and it's a well-done triumph.

The rest of the case is quite good, though no one is as superb as Hiller.  Howard, best known to modern audiences as the passive Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, is good & cruel as Henry, finding the heartless callousness of this character in a better way than the forlorn Rex Harrison would decades later.  The supporting cast has a lot of plumb parts, but the only one that stood out for me was Wilfrid Lawson as Alfred Doolittle, the man who by sheer accident comes across great respect & fortune.  In My Fair Lady, this is a scene-stealing delight from Stanley Halloway, but here Lawson isn't given as much to chew on, and it's hard for me to tell, honestly, whether I'm cheering on him as an actor or if this is simply a really good part that any actor would've been able to love.  I also cannot leave without acknowledging that even with the ending & the politics of the movie that make it hard to watch in some parts in retrospect, this script & story is really well-constructed, and the set design is great (I love a crowded English study in an old movie-mess is so rare on the sets of most films).  All-in-all, a classic retelling of the story, even if it suffers in the end (and wonderful stuff from Wendy Hiller as the lead).

OVP: Boys Town (1938)

Film: Boys Town (1938)

Stars: Spencer Tracy, Mickey Rooney, Henry Full, Leslie Fenton, Bobs Watson

Director: Norman Taurog

Oscar History: 5 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Director, Actor-Spencer Tracy*, Adapted Screenplay, Original Story*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

In the 1930's & 40's, it was quite popular (particularly with the Academy) to honor films that featured devout religious figures in major roles.  This isn't something entirely out-of-the-ordinary for Oscar, who has throughout the decades showered biblical epics like The Robe and The Ten Commandments and (most notably) Ben-Hur with nominations, but the films of this kind in the early Classical Hollywood period weren't plucked from the Old Testament-they were simply about religious men & women and the mundane (or not so mundane) aspects of their own lives.  The peak of this was arguably 1944/1945's one-two punch of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, both of which were nominated for Best Picture (the former won) & made mountains of cash at the box office.  Less-than-a-decade earlier, though, was 1938's Boys Town, also cited for Best Picture and winning Spencer Tracy his second (and last) Oscar for Best Actor.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Father Flanagan (Tracy), a real-life figure who believes "there's no such thing as a bad boy," and is intent on proving it by starting a sanctuary for troubled youth called Boys Town, where the young men who live there have their own government & judicial system, where they disperse their own punishments.  This seems to work, but Father Flanagan encounters considerable trouble when Whitey Marsh (Rooney) joins the school; his brother is in prison for murder, and Whitey is sent there against his will.  When he stays, he decides to prove Father Flanagan wrong, running for "Mayor of Boys Town" under a rebellious campaign, trying to wheel-and-deal his way to power to show up Father Flanagan, but it doesn't work & he leaves.  As he's departing, though, the little boy named Pee Wee (Watson) who has been following Rooney around for the whole movie, is struck by a car.  Whitey is horrified, thinking Pee Wee might die, and he runs back to see his brother, who accidentally shoots him & swears him to secrecy on a robbery he's witnessed, a secrecy that could doom Boys Town.  As one would expect, Whitey doesn't keep the secret & instead saves Boys Town, and becomes its mayor.

The film, as I mentioned above, is reminiscent of later films like Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, which...isn't a compliment coming from me.  Those two films are striking not just because they were so commercially & critically popular, but because they're essentially about nothing.  Each film is just a series of vignettes with no character growth & a minimal amount of strife enjoyed by the main characters. Boys Town isn't that, though it does threaten to become that in the first half hour focused on Father Flanagan.  Whitey is a lot of things, but consistent is not one of them, and when he comes in, it's clear we'll get a cliched arc, but the film itself is going to be about Whitey's story, making it an easier film to sit through than the Bing Crosby pictures.

That being said, Boys Town isn't particularly good.  Filled with cliches, a lot of it is going to be dependent on how allergic you are to the shoot-for-the-rafters appeal of Mickey Rooney.  Rooney is not an actor that I can really subscribe to.  If you want to use the parlance of current meme culture he "understood the assignment," but only because most films required him to be Mickey Rooney.  There's no part of the film where he isn't playing Rooney, which doesn't really work for Boys Town's street tough.  You won't really buy that Rooney, America's boy next door (and at this point in his career, pretty much exclusively Andy Hardy) is the younger brother of a small-time crook, or that someone so easily bamboozled has an ounce of street smarts.  Rooney gives the film some oxygen, but it's mostly hot air.

That being said, he's considerably more watchable than Spencer Tracy.  I've talked on this blog about my aversion to Tracy before, but I wouldn't really put Rooney & Tracy in the same category of actor.  Rooney always played himself, and I have yet to find the role that feels like he's genuinely stretching himself or adding a new dimension to the part he's playing.  But Spencer Tracy can act, he just usually plays the same version of the same curmudgeon.  Father Flanagan is a kindlier, gentler role for Tracy, but it's also one of the dullest parts I've seen him bring to the screen.  Spencer Tracy is a lot of things, but he's definitely not an actor who lacks stature in his role (I often use the word "sturdy" to describe him), but here Father Flanagan feels flat beyond words.  Tracy has a wry twinkle he can give him, but that's hardly great acting, and it's weird to think a man who would play such a specific type onscreen (and be nominated for nine Oscars in the process) won his second Academy Award for such a nothing performance.