OVP: The Spoilers (1942)

Film: The Spoilers (1942)

Stars: Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Margaret Lindsay

Director: Ray Enright

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 Marlene Dietrich: click here to learn more about Ms. Dietrich (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We have alluded a lot this month to Marlene Dietrich's legendary personal life.  Dietrich's sex life is arguably the most storied in terms of rumor & legend, and it's almost impossible to separate fact from fiction.  There are the affairs that pretty much everyone agrees happened (Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, Yul Brynner) and those that are harder-to-track-down, but are too salacious not to at least mention (Frank Sinatra, Claudette Colbert, Joseph P. Kennedy...and his son President Kennedy).  Dietrich is inarguably the actor I most wish had had a tell-all interview with Oprah.  

One of the actors that pretty much everyone agrees that Dietrich had an affair with was John Wayne, with whom she made a series of pictures in the wake of the success of Destry Rides Again.  After the success of Destry, the studio was adamant to get her back into a western, and Dietrich (according to legend) selected Wayne as her leading man by telling producer Joe Pasternak "Mommy wants that for Christmas" after seeing Wayne for the first time in the Universal Pictures commissary.  The pair made three films together, two westerns (Seven Sinners and The Spoilers) and a rags-to-riches drama called Pittsburgh, and of the trio I thought The Spoilers looked the most interesting (and was an unsee part of the OVP) so we're going with that for our movie today.

(Spoilers Ahead) Taking place in Nome, Alaska, the movie is honestly kind of a mess of a plot, but I'll sort through it just to ground you.  Dietrich, as is her wont in this era, plays a saloon proprietor who has a heart of gold.  That heart belongs to Roy Glennister (Wayne), her old beau who is back from a trip to Europe with a more proper match, the judge's niece Helen (Lindsay).  However, the judge, like most in the film, is corrupt and Roy finds this out too late when he sides with him and the new gold commissioner Alex McNamara (Scott) rather than his old mining partner.  The partner forgives him, and (after donning blackface) they try to disguise themselves and steal back their money from the judge.  The movie ends with Randolph Scott punched in the face, and Dietrich left in Wayne's arms.

The movie doesn't work, and it's partially because the plot is absurd, and occasionally offensive.  Marietta Canty, who plays Dietrich's maid, is arguably the best-in-show in a stereotypical role, getting most of her one-liners out well, though she has to pretend that Wayne in blackface is an actual African-American man which...no.  Not acceptable.  Weirdly, despite real-life heat between them, there's no chemistry between the cavier-and-corn chips pairing of Dietrich & Wayne onscreen.

The movie's sole Oscar nomination was for Art Direction, and I get it.  The beach landing sequence, in particular, is impressively shot and you almost feel like it's actually in an Alaskan shore, it gives off the aura of being properly cold.  But the real achievement is the costume design.  Dietrich's costumes are INSANE, with her wearing ornate choker necklaces and solid gold dresses in the middle of the 19th Century wilderness of the Alaskan Territory, looking like she'd just gotten done cleaning out Bergdorf Goodman.  Costume hadn't been created as a category yet by the Academy, but if it had, it'd have been easy to look beyond the historical inaccuracies & given this a nomination because Dietrich looks that good.

OPV: The Pride of the Yankees (1942)

Film: The Pride of the Yankees (1942)

Stars: Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Babe Ruth, Walter Brennan, Dan Duryea, Elsa Janssen

Director: Sam Wood

Oscar History: 11 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Actor-Gary Cooper, Actress-Teresa Wright, Art Direction, Cinematography, Special Effects, Film Editing*, Score, Sound, Motion Picture Story, Adapted Screenplay)

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 Gary Cooper: click here to learn more about Mr. Cooper (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we talked about how Gary Cooper became a star with The Virginian, but this week we're going to talk a little about how he became a legend.  Cooper is an odd conundrum for modern cinephiles, partially because as an actor he (despite two Oscars) isn't everyone's cup of tea.  The stoic handsomeness was frequently miscast, and while he has his legendary roles (specifically High Noon), much of his legendary years in Hollywood are forgotten or haven't aged as well.  But from the mid-1930's (when he did Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and won his first Oscar nomination) to the mid-1940's Cooper was about as untouchable as you could get in Hollywood, and frequently took on the role of outsized hero.  He did this while having a very colorful personal life (which we're going to explore more fully next week) bedding half the women in Hollywood.  One of the legendary roles that Cooper undertook during this time was of Lou Gehrig who had died the year before from the disease that was eventually named after him in The Pride of the Yankees.  That's the movie we're covering today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a relatively traditional biopic focusing on Lou Gehrig's (Cooper) life, the son of German immigrants who wanted a better future for him, but one through education.  However, Gehrig's incredible talent for baseball becomes too impossible to deny as the film progresses, and he's recruited to the New York Yankees, where he become a star to rival Babe Ruth (played, somehow, by the real-life Ruth who had been retired for seven years at this time & had to lose a significant amount of weight before he could play himself).  He also falls in love with a woman named Eleanor (Wright), who is the sweet girl next door who has to fight his domineering mother until Lou steps in.  After an unparalleled career in baseball, Gehrig was diagnosed with what we now know is ALS (aka Lou Gehrig's Disease), and must step down from baseball as he will be unable to be alive much longer after retiring, and the movie ends with him retiring with the famous "I'm the luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech which is what you instantly know this movie from even if you've never seen it.

In 1942, Lou Gehrig would've been as famous as LeBron James would be today, and so weirdly the film focuses relatively little on his baseball feats, which are impressive, save for his incredible consecutive games played streak that Cal Ripken broke in 1995 (fun personal fact-one of the only sports memories I have with my dad, as I was not a sport-watching child, was watching Cal Ripken break that record on the tiny 13-inch TV in our basement, as my dad insisted my brother & I watch it as it was a record that would stand forever).  This decision is a mistake-Gehrig's life was pretty picturesque, at least from what we see in the movie, and given the real-life Ruth is playing himself here, they totally skip over the two legend's complicated relationship with one another (including allegations that Ruth slept with Gehrig's wife before she married Gehrig).  Even by the definition of a biopic of this era, this movie is incredibly vanilla, bordering on propaganda to Gehrig's memory.

That said, I loved the last fifteen minutes of this movie, and it made me wish the rest of the movie had earned them.  There's something so beautiful about what Cooper does with Gehrig, knowing he's dying, and both the little boy (who earlier in the film was said he wouldn't walk again) going up to a stoic Gehrig & saying he did, in fact, walk, and then the farewell speech...it's a beautiful ending, and feels like a lovely testament to the way that we all have to, eventually, play our last game.

The film won 11 Oscar nominations, making it one of the only remaining films that has received 11+ Oscar nominations that I've never seen (just Gandhi and Becket can out do it on my missing OVP titles list).  Cooper is too old for this part, and feels too mundane up until those last fifteen minutes when he (pardon the expression) knocks it out of the park.  Teresa Wright's Best Actress nomination is weird, both because she's given nothing to do and because there were better options that year (hello-Carole Lombard in To Be or Not to Be!).  The story concept is arguably better than the tepid screenplay, but neither are breaking much new ground, and while I liked the sound in the last ten minutes, there's nothing noteworthy about the rest of the film.  The art direction is standard-fare...you never actually feel like you're at Yankee Stadium in the movie, but just a sound stage.  The editing is arguably the film's best element, which is what it won its Oscar for, because it does do a decent job of showing the passage of time, but it's nothing compared to something like Citizen Kane or Now, Voyager that year.  The cinematography is noteworthy because of the lighting effects that were used to try to de-age Gary Cooper...which barely work.  This is true of the Special Effects, which is a truly weird nomination because other than some matte screens behind Cooper, there's nothing special about these effects other than the lighting.  There are apocryphal stories that Cooper (who was right-handed in real life, unlike the famous southpaw Gehrig), had to have trick photography to recreate certain baseball scenes, which would be impressive for the time, but research indicates that at best happened in one brief scene, and not most of the baseball scenes where Cooper learned to bat as a lefty.

Apache Trail (1942)

Film: Apache Trail (1942)

Stars: Lloyd Nolan, Donna Reed, William Lundigan, Ann Ayars, Connie Gilchrist

Directors: Richard Thorpe & Richard Rosson

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 Donna Reed: click here to learn more about Ms. Reed (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Donna Reed's career at its beginnings was unusual because while she started out playing significant parts, she never really graduated to the kind of film stardom we generally associate her with.  We'll talk about this more next week, but when you think about Donna Reed's film career, you don't necessarily think about her as having a lack of success.  She won an Oscar, after all, and she starred in two undisputed classics of Hollywood's Golden Age (It's a Wonderful Life and From Here to Eternity).  But in her early years before she took on Mary Bailey, she largely was a disposable love interest in a number of different films for MGM, the studio she signed a star contract with in 1941.  Though she appeared in a lot of movies during this era, none of them stand out with the exception of It's a Wonderful Life in retrospect, largely because Reed was a minor character, just a pretty girl-next-door love interest.  Weirdly I've seen a lot of these films for other projects on the blog, so to signify this era, we're going to talk about Apache Trail, one of the few westerns that Reed appeared in, and one of her first higher-billed roles (she was rarely "top" billed).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie starts with the honorable Tom O'Folliard (Lundigan) getting out of jail for a crime that we learn eventually was largely the result of his brother Trigger Bill's (Nolan) involvement.  Tom is given a tough job, managing a remote stagecoach stop that is frequently under attack by Apaches.  There he meets a woman named Rosalia (Reed), whom he knew in her youth but has grown up to be a beautiful young woman, and also comes across Constance Selden (Ayars), a wealthy woman with a mysterious past (that, quite honestly, we don't get enough of and feels like a giant plothole given she gets a pretty pleasant sendoff for a woman who might've murdered her husband or at least cheated on him).  We also have the return of Trigger Bill, who comes fleeing the Apaches, who want him dead, and after a fraternal showdown over a valuable lock box that Bill wants, the entire stagecoach has to decide whether or not they want to give Trigger Bill up to the Apaches to save their own lives.  They vote no, with Tom the deciding vote, but Bill leaves to join the Apaches anyway, understanding his time is over.  Tom & Rosalia kiss, and we get our happy ending.

This is a pretty standard-issue western, and would be fine (westerns & film noirs are generally my favorite genres so I'm more generous in my ratings with them) were it not for the pretty overt racism that runs through it.  We don't actually see any Native American characters, but they are referenced often, and rarely in flattering terms.  The best performance in the movie (by far) is Nolan's, who gets top billing as the villain precisely because he's the only thing of interest to look at, and when the film gets off of his evil quest, particularly in the last twenty minutes when he's largely sidelined, it loses focus.  It doesn't help that O'Folliard, a notorious outlaw who ran in real life with Billy the Kid, is portrayed in this movie as a handsome wet blanket by Lundigan.

As for Reed, get your cringe meters on, because this is definitely a low point in her career.  Reed plays Rosalia Martinez, and yes, she's supposed to be Latino (which the lily white Donna Reed was not), and plays the part with a thick, stagnated accent.  She has very little chemistry with Lundigan (Ayars as the other woman has the better time of it), and her character's entire journey is to stare moon-eyed at him in every scene.  This is not the brilliance that Reed would bring to Mary Bailey, but based on my experience with Reed playing window dressing love interests during this time, is far more indicative of the kind of roles she was getting from her studio.

Panama Hattie (1942)

Film: Panama Hattie (1942)

Stars: Red Skelton, Ann Sothern, Rags Ragland, Ben Blue, Marsha Hunt, Virginia O'Brien, Dan Dailey, Lena Horne

Director: Norman Z. McLeod

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 Ann Sothern: click here to learn more about Ms. Sothern (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

After Maisie, Ann Sothern's career definitely entered a strange era.  Similar to an actor today like Melissa McCarthy or Jon Hamm, who has a hit TV series and then tries to experiment with other options in their film career, seeing if lightning strikes to bring them to the next level she alternated between her moneymaking series & trying to find a less typecast niche.  For Sothern, Panama Hattie, which was made during the midway point of her Maisie-bolstered career (her last film for the series was in 1947), both was & wasn't that movie.  The film was a hit, a pretty big one by the standards of Sothern's career, but it was not a critical success.  Originally starring Ethel Mermen when the musical it was inspired from was playing on Broadway, the translation was lambasted by critics, and the production was troubled.  When it comes to Saturdays with the Stars, this kind of recipe (where critical & commercial success differ) is frequently my favorite combination-getting to go into a movie trying to understand if it was the critics or the public that got it wrong usually yields some of the most interesting movies.  Unfortunately, the critics were the correct ones in this scenario.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Hattie (Sothern), a nightclub singer who is in love with a moneyed naval officer named Dick Bulliard (Dailey).  Dick's ex Leila Tree (Hunt) has designs on him, and she might have a shot at him as Hattie keeps screwing up her relationship with Dick's daughter, who has recently started staying with him.  What starts as a frosty relationship blossoms into a friendship, and soon his daughter Gerry is helping Hattie, along with three of her naval buddies, including one played by Red Skelton, who get into a series of shenanigans that eventually (inexplicably) involve a bed of hungry crocodiles.  The movie ends with Hattie & Dick together, though it actually concludes with a patriotic rendition of "The Son of a Gun Who Picks on Uncle Sam," to close things out.

The movie is strange for a variety of reasons, and perhaps one of the biggest, and why it failed in its translation, is that a lot of the musical numbers from the original production are not in the movie.  Only three songs made it to the film version, and while there are times that's okay (specifically the two Lena Horne numbers, which are the highlight of the movie), most of the time the additions are silly filler, and not successful.  The closing "Uncle Sam" number, in particular, feels like wartime propaganda that falls completely flat, and like it misread the movie entirely.

The cast doesn't help much.  Sothern works fine here (she's a pro for a rom-com), but she's saddled with playing a ridiculous woman, and that's hard if the script doesn't acknowledge it.  It's a key plot point that Hattie behaves like a child in front of Gerry rather than just brush off a little girl laughing at her outfit, and yet that takes up like a third of the movie, and we're meant to believe that a nightclub singer could be so ruffled by a little girl.  Sothern is better than most of her costars, though.  The entire subplot involving Skelton, Ragland, & Blue as interchangeable sailors feels like such a bizarrely-handled scenario (they read like a comedic Rosencrantz & Guildenstern) that you'll be forgiven for forgetting what their actual connection to Hattie is at all.  And Dan Dailey continues to be one of the dullest leading men in Classical Hollywood, his Dick about as charming as lead paint.  The only saving grace on the call sheet is Horne, in immaculate vocal range during her years at MGM where she was relegated to just doing musical numbers that could easily be lifted in Southern theaters.  Despite being a hit for Sothern at the time, this movie is a giant miss for me.

OVP: George Washington Slept Here (1942)

Film: George Washington Slept Here (1942)

Stars: Jack Benny, Ann Sheridan, Charles Coburn, Percy Kilbride, Hattie McDaniel, William Tracy, Joyce Reynolds

Director: William Keighley

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)

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 Jack Benny click here to learn more about Mr. Benny (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

1942 was an interesting year for Jack Benny as an actor, and certainly the height of his film career.  At the time, Benny was one of the most important names in radio, a major star who was coming into homes across America.  It made sense, therefore, that films would continue to invest in him as an actor because he was a known commodity.  During 1942, he made what many now consider to be his best film, To Be or Not to Be, a black comedy from Ernst Lubitsch starring Carole Lombard.  Though its initial reviews were tepid, and audiences were not comfortable with the American Benny sporting a Nazi uniform (even in jest) during the middle of World War II, it has later been saved by critics and is considered one of the greatest examples of the Lubitsch Touch (if you click on over to the review, I give the film & Benny a rave).  We only watch films that I've never seen before for this series, though, and so today we're going to be focusing on a different comedy hit that Benny made in 1942, one that didn't need time for critics to warm up to it, George Washington Slept Here.

(Spoilers Ahead) Connie (Sheridan) & Bill Fuller (Benny) are a normal American couple living in New York City, but Connie wants something more.  After they are evicted from their apartment (due to Connie's misbehaving dog), she buys a dilapidated old house that supposedly belonged to George Washington without Bill's knowledge.  With the help of local man Mr. Kimber (Kilbride) who seems to gouge the couple at every chance, they start to build up the place, but learn initially that it was Benedict Arnold, not George Washington, who had slept at the house (ruining its place as a spot of Americana).  Bill hates the house initially, but grows to like it as the film goes on, but there's a catch-they have overspent and will have to give the property to their cantankerous neighbor if they don't find the mortgage payment. While they initially try to get it from Connie's rich Uncle Stanley (Coburn), when it turns out he's broke they attempt increasingly far-fetched paths to the cash before finally realizing that, due to a letter their dog finds in an old boot in the yard, that the house did have connections to George Washington, and they can sell the letter to pay for their house.

The movie supposedly has some similarities to Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, a movie I have always meant to see (I love Cary Grant, and this is maybe the biggest movie in his filmography that I've never caught before), but since I hadn't this was new to me, and I was delighted.  What initially felt like it was going to be a boring marital strife movie (Sheridan, whom I'm generally a fan of in comedies, doesn't hit her stride until the second half of the picture & never quite gels with Benny as a believable couple) is lifted in the second half by bravura performances from Kilbride & Coburn, both coming in to steal large swaths of the picture.  Benny is good too, even if, once again, he proves that it was more his casting director making him work in these films than his expansive acting talent (I have yet to see a film role where Benny wasn't just playing some version of his public persona, and this is the case here, even if it fits well).

The film won one Academy Award nomination, for Best Art Direction.  This is a knowing nod to the film itself, as the movie's entire point is to focus on this house and the way it's cleaned up.  It is, admittedly, a fun house for the camera to explore, but if we're being technical, it does also feel like there's not enough scenes before it becomes this glamorous little property in the middle-of-nowhere.  We essentially jump from shack to palace in far too quick of a fashion for a movie that's entirely focused on the house as a main character.  Still, it's a nice house-I get the urge from Oscar to go there with this movie.

The Big Street (1942)

Film: The Big Street (1942)

Stars: Henry Fonda, Lucille Ball, Barton MacLane, Eugene Pallette, Agnes Moorehead

Director: Irving Reis

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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 Lucille Ball click here to learn more about Ms. Ball (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Initially when I planned this month's look at Lucille Ball, I had a film later in her career for our third week.  Ball spent most of the 1940's under contract not to RKO, where she made most of her most famous films, but instead to MGM.  But, both because it is a key plot point in the recent biopic Being the Ricardos (which looks increasingly likely to win Nicole Kidman a second Oscar), and because it was Ball's favorite film performance, we're going to continue our look at Ball with The Big Street today, a movie that could've taken an entirely different direction for Lucy if it had been a hit, but instead was one of the final movies she made for RKO.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Big Street is the story of Pinks (Fonda), a waiter who is madly in love with a spoiled singer named Gloria (Ball).  Gloria is a beautiful crime boss's girlfriend, and treats everyone (especially Pinks) like garbage.  When Gloria is pushed down the stairs by her mob boss boyfriend, she become paralyzed, and needs constant help (and money), which Pinks provides even though she still continues to treat him poorly.  After she eventually is scorned by a former lover of hers, she & Pinks stop speaking until it turns out she's clearly dying.  Gloria confesses to Pinks that she wants to just be her old self again, if only for a night, and through a series of blackmail, theft, & pulling every string he can, Pinks does just that, getting her a night of dancing & singing & fawning in a club before she dies in his arms.

I enjoyed this movie, though your mileage may vary as it's less a good movie and more a great melodrama...but I'm a sucker for a four-hankie, "doomed romance" style melodrama, and so I was onboard.  It helps that Lucille Ball is at the top of her game, totally owning every angle in the complicated role of "your highness," playing Gloria as totally unlikable, but charismatic to a degree that you get why people want to be on her good side.  I was less enthralled with Henry Fonda, who is playing Pinks as a mousy cartoon character, but Ball...there's a reason she thought this would open up new doors for her at the time.

But it didn't.  The Big Street was a big opportunity for Ball, and she only got the role because Carole Lombard wasn't available (and because write Damon Runyon overrode RKO's wishes to put Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur into the part).  Ball got rave reviews for the film, but it wasn't a hit, and RKO, after having spent years trying to find the right formula that would work for Ball on the big-screen, let her contract go after which she signed with MGM.  We're going to, as a result of spending time with The Big Street largely gloss over the MGM portion of Ball's career, but it's probably okay as she made very few films for the studio worth mentioning, and indeed, it looked like Ball's career as a film headliner was almost over before a radio show called My Favorite Husband would change Ball's life (and the medium of television) forever.  We'll talk about that, and one of the films that resulted from it, next week.

OVP: Invisible Agent (1942)

Film: Invisible Agent (1942)

Stars: Ilona Massey, Jon Hall, Peter Lorre, Cedric Hardwicke, J. Edward Bromberg

Director: Edward L. Marin

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Special Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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.

Since we're on the third season of our collective look at the Universal Monster movies, we're getting to the deepest of cuts in the original run of the series, which you're going to see over the next two weeks before we end with some 1950's films that aren't connected to the Universal Monster canon, and are considered in a different "style" of horror film.  The Invisible Man series will have three installments this month, this being the second one of the run, and it stands apart in the monster movie pantheon primarily because, well, it's not a horror genre after a while.  Though undoubtedly the original films in the series were in the classic mode of the horror genre, unlike say a vampire or a mummy, there were more practical aspects to invisibility that you could apply to a hero or love interest that you couldn't other monstrous creations.  We saw that on Thursday with The Invisible Woman, a romantic-comedy (links below), and we see that today with Invisible Agent, which is not a monster movie at all but a film made about World War II (during World War II).

(Spoilers Ahead) Frank Griffin, Jr. (Hall) is the grandson of the original invisible man, and as a result has access to his secret formula.  He is confronted by a German member of the SS named Conrad Stauffer (Hardwicke) and his Japanese ally Baron Ikito (Lorre, not specifically in yellowface but clearly intended to be a Japanese man despite the fact that Lorre is white & Hungarian, so yes, problematic).  They want the formula, but they can't get it, and Griffin is recruited by the Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor to infiltrate the Germans and find their list of spies (and help to understand their war mission).  While he's in Germany, he meets Maria Sorenson (Massey), who seems to be the object-of-desire of pretty much every character in the film save Lorre's Baron.  As one might expect, she's secretly working with the Allies (so she can end up with our hero), and after a large showdown (that involves both Stauffer & Ikito dying), they escape with a book of spies & Griffin becomes visible once again.

The movie is a far enough departure from the formula of the other monster movies you might be confused to find it refreshing, but that would be a bad impulse.  Obviously Lorre's work is problematic here (he plays into a lot of racial stereotypes), but he's also the only person in the cast who is any good at this style of acting-he's by far the best actor (sorry, Cedric Hardwicke, I know you're a knight & all, but this isn't your best work as a mustache-twirling Nazi), and he's given such a low-grade character it's impossible to look past.  Both Massey & Hall are dull and have no chemistry, and all-in-all this is a disappointment, particularly coming after the sparkling fun of Invisible Woman a few days ago (this is the first film in the Invisible Man franchise I genuinely didn't enjoy, disparate as they've all been).

That said, the special effects are really good and this Oscar nomination feels quite earned.  The invisible trick we've seen a lot already, but they do some remarkable stuff especially where an invisible Frank lights a room on fire, a group of pyrotechnics clearly triggered around a room in a well-timed sequence that's super impressive.  There's also a surprisingly effective series of massive explosions as Frank & Maria flee Germany, with Frank trying to take down a Luftwaffe airbase single-handedly (and because it's 1942 in a war film, he's successful).  All-in-all, this is one of the better invisible nominations for Special Effects we've run across, and the first one I'd have probably agreed with Oscar in handing over the nomination.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, The House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Revenge of the Creature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob, The Masque of the Red Death

OVP: Orchestra Wives (1942)

Film: Orchestra Wives (1942)

Stars: Ann Rutherford, George Montgomery, Glenn Miller, Lynn Bari, Carole Landis, Cesar Romero

Director: Archie Mayo

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"I've got a Gal in Kalamazoo")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

A few weeks ago, we got into the movie Sun Valley Serenade, a film that featured Glenn Miller, and by sheer coincidence, I chanced today in my DVR on another musical called Orchestra Wives.  Like Sun Valley Serenade, it was nominated for Best Original Song, and like Sun Valley Serenade, it also features Glenn Miller, a brilliant musician who I have a soft spot for both because I will oftentimes listen to him on hot summer nights (because I love jazz or swing music on a warm summer night), and because his music features into a key scene on my favorite show Lost.  What I didn't realize was that these films were connected by an iconic piece-of-music, one that was initially supposed to be featured in Sun Valley Serenade, but is instead important to Orchestra Wives, a worthy Oscar contender that likely got shuffled due to eligibility concerns.

(Spoilers Ahead) First, though, let's get to the film itself.  The movie isn't quite as outwardly creepy as Orchestra Wives, though it does have its moments as playboy musician Bill Abbott (Montgomery) heartily pursues his biggest fan Connie Ward (Rutherford) after she comes to a concert of his.  When she refuses to spend the night with him, they decide to get married (before he even learns her name), but this causes a problem.  You see, as an "orchestra wife," she has to put up with the supposed infidelities of her husband (even though Bill never actually cheats in the movie), and the cattiness of her fellow wives & orchestra hangers-on, including Jaynie (Bari), who is the lead singer in the band and Bill's ex.  Jaynie cravenly befriends Connie, but only to get close to Bill, and due to mistaken identities, she nearly steals him away from her, but Connie realizes at the last second that Jaynie is going to betray her, and she ends up back in Bill's arms just in time for the credits.

The film's plot is ehh.  There are moments of genuine fun with the women; the banter between them is saucy enough to keep you going even if Connie is a mouse & kind of annoying in her naïveté.  None of the actors, not even Bari, are able to elevate this material enough to warrant sticking around beyond the occasional squabbles between a gaggle of wives that it seems like even the script can't keep straight (let alone their husbands).  Throw in a pretty saccharine and date rape-y courtship (most of the first twenty minutes is basically Bill making Connie uncomfortable for not going to bed with him), and this is a miss for me.

That being said, the song is okay.  There's a great performance from the Nicholas Brothers (always a winner), and in many ways it is reminiscent of the "Chatanooga Choo-Choo," though that emulation comes with a bit of a derivative feel.  A better choice, had it been eligible, was "At Last," which is sung by Pat Friday (she dubs Lynn Bari's singing voice), and yes this is the song that inspired the iconic Etta James tune.  Since "At Last" was written for Sun Valley Serenade (an instrumental version of it is even featured in the picture), it likely wouldn't have been eligible for Oscar, but that's a pity as it feels like a home run in this performance.  Glenn Miller would not make another film after this-he'd join the Air Force soon after, and two years later he'd be dead, downed in a plane crash (that would invite a host of conspiracy theories, though that's a tale we can get into a different day).

OVP: The Pied Piper (1942)

Film: The Pied Piper (1942)

Stars: Monty Woolley, Roddy McDowall, Anne Baxter, Otto Preminger, J. Carrol Naish, Peggy Ann Garner

Director: Irving Pichel

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Actor-Monty Woolley, Cinematography)

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

Anne Baxter got into movies pretty quickly and with quite a bit of success early on.  She was only a teenager when she started to get star billing at Fox, first with the 1941 film noir Swamp Water.  A year later, she would appear in two Best Picture nominees, one of which would later be considered one of the great films of the era, The Magnificent Ambersons (which she made on loan to RKO), but that is a film I have seen (and loved) of Baxter's several times, and the goal with this series is always for me to watch (hopefully signature) films I hadn't seen of a performer for the first time.  As a result, we're going to focus today on the other Best Picture contender that Anne Baxter was in from 1942, a hit film that helped add luster to her growing leading lady status, but for which she is definitely playing second billing to another breakout star of 1942, Monty Woolley.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is focused on Howard (Woolley), a curmudgeonly old British man who detests being corrected & being around children.  When war breaks out, and Howard decides it is important for him to return to Britain in solidarity, he is asked to bring two children (McDowall & Garner) with him, as their parents are joining the war effort.  They venture forward, and soon we find that Howard is a bit of a pied piper (hence the title) leading a half dozen children out of war-torn Europe toward America.  Along the way he meets Nicole (Baxter), a French woman who romanced Howard's now-dead son, and they form an alliance that is nearly disrupted when Major Diessen (Preminger, in a rare acting role), a Nazi commander, imprisons them, but after finally believing that Howard truly is trying to save the children, he adds one of his own (a young girl who is half-German and half-Jewish), knowing what awaits her in Hitler's Germany.  The film ends with Howard finally embracing his grandfatherly position, excited to help these children get to safety.

The film is meant to be a happy wartime effort, and it is.  I always find movies about World War II made during World War II (the most famous being Casablanca) to be fascinating, mostly because it's essentially Hollywood making well-constructed propaganda, not ultimately knowing what will happen.  We take for granted years later that a film like The Pied Piper has a happy ending, but this wasn't something that was known in 1942-the ending has a degree of uncertainty even if it's hopeful.  This contradiction (where Hollywood doesn't know how to end the movie fully) is one of the more interesting things about The Pied Piper.

This is because the film itself is quite dull.  Woolley is terrific in his other star-making role of 1942 in the Christmas classic The Man Who Came to Dinner, but while he's wearing a similar routine here, it's a bit tired & doesn't really work.  Woolley is great at playing erudite snobs, but he's not as strong as playing obstinate men who fight the war effort, and while it's fun to think of him being this man who will stand up to the entire Third Reich, the film's relationship between he & Preminger's Nazi suspends belief so high you're going to need to a telescope.  Combined with him not really being able to pull off the film's schlockier moments, the movie falls apart, and Woolley, though a treat in his best scenes, is totally unprepared for this character, which probably needed someone better at straight drama.

Baxter's role is secondary-this is most definitely a supporting part, and not a well-drawn one at that.  The Indiana-born actress does a decent French accent (kudos for trying-most stars of that era wouldn't have), but that's about all she is asked to do.  Baxter's strength is melodrama, but the tonal shifts in this film (and Woolley's inability to roll with them) doesn't allow her to really capitalize on the film's weightiest moments.

OVP: Tortilla Flat (1942)

Film: Tortilla Flat (1942)

Stars: Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr, John Garfield, Frank Morgan, Akim Tamiroff

Director: Victor Fleming

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actor-Frank Morgan)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

The concept of an "art film" has changed dramatically throughout film history.  Film historians differ about the definition of what an art film is, and it's a loose term, but by-and-large what we think of an art film as today is some variation on both its funding (usually they are independent movies), and frequently are told in a nonlinear or atypical fashion.  Prominent modern filmmakers that come to mind with the term include Terrence Malick, Bong Joon-Ho, Lars von Trier, Jonathan Glazer, Kelly Reichardt, & Darren Aronofsky.  Classical Hollywood wasn't really focused on avant-garde or art films, and as a a result when sound was introduced into movies, most of what we might classify modern art films as didn't really exist, especially in the 1940's in studio system.  In Italy & France at the time they were experimenting with these ideas (think Children of Paradise, Open City, or Bicycle Thieves), and certainly Powell & Pressburger were achieving something similar to what would eventually be an art house film with Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.  But even films like Brief Encounter which altered our expectations of what movie stars will look like or what we'd expect on a screen (by having actors that look like "ordinary people") still followed relatively conventional habits throughout the 1940's.  That being said, occasionally Hollywood will introduce some aspects (perhaps on purpose, perhaps considering the very conventional if talented director of this movie, by chance), and Tortilla Flat is a movie that reads as more "art house" to someone like me (who has seen a lot of major studio cinema of the 1940's) than I'm used to getting from a place like MGM.

(Spoilers Ahead) Tortilla Flat is based on a novel by John Steinbeck and it's about a group of men, one of whom is named Danny (Garfield) inherits two houses in a poor California town.  This is a huge step up for he and his friends, principally Pilon (Tracy), who were basically homeless, and in Danny's case, in jail, prior to the movie starting.  They enjoy the trappings of this more comfortable lifestyle, with Pilon being a bit of a scoundrel (I don't know that I've ever seen Spencer Tracy, sturdy & solid American movie star, play a character who for large swaths of the film is a total jackass before Tortilla Flat).  Danny falls in love with a local girl named Dolores (Lamarr), who wants a steadier man than he is, but after an accident that nearly kills Danny (and in the novel by Steinbeck, does), they realize they were made for each other, in part due to Pilon praying to the statue of St. Francis.  The movie ends with both of Danny's houses having burned down, the first by accident, the second on purpose, and all of Danny's crew now back to where they started, but Danny, the best of them, having escaped & started a new life with his bride.

Okay, so that's what the movie is about on paper, but it's not remotely as conventional as that.  For starters, there's virtually no consistent conflict.  While there are arguments between Dolores & Danny especially, it doesn't seem to really be about anything, and though Garfield was a pretty big name at the time (and Danny is the most important character in the film's structure), he disappears for extended periods of the film.  It's hard to exactly describe, but Tortilla Flat defies convention by not really being about what it's showing at its center (the relationship between Danny & Dolores), but instead about a journey of faith from Pilon, and without saying it, him changing his morality (even though it's rarely remarked upon by characters other than a priest played by Henry O'Neil who is barely in the movie).

Perhaps the best illustration of how this is strange is Frank Morgan's character.  He plays a man named Pirate (not, in fact, a pirate no capitalization), who is a sweet old man who spends most of his time caring for a group of devoted dogs (one of which worked with Fleming in a different, more famous film, where she was called Toto).  Pilon expects that Pirate is hiding money in the woods, and tries to trick him out of the money, but in a twist for the film, Pilon is right-Pirate is sitting on a gold mine in the woods, but he intends on using all of his money to buy a candlestick for St. Francis because he prayed to him once to save a favorite dog (who then lived).  After this happens, Pirate has an epiphany & shows the dogs what appears to be a religious vision of St. Francis in the woods, as a thank you for the new candlestick.  It's as weird as it sounds...this is such an odd plot in a film from a studio not known for risks, and with very conventional leading stars.  I struggle to know how to rate Tortilla Flat in part because I don't know what it's about, because it's basically about nothing (and it's not good at that), but it's a film I'd recommend if you are into curiosities like this, and Morgan is good in this role-this is a strange Oscar nomination, but not an unworthy one.

The Mummy's Tomb (1942)

Film: The Mummy's Tomb (1942)
Stars: Lon Chaney, Jr., Dick Foran, John Hubbard, Elyse Knox, George Zucco, Wallace Ford, Turhan Bey
Director: Harold Young
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 are going to be encountering our second (and for this month, at least, final) outing with the Mummy, one of the more repeated monsters from the Universal canon during the "Golden Age" of Universal monsters.  This film marks our first outing in 2020 with a Lon Chaney (in this case, Junior as the Mummy).  The Chaneys were huge stars of the horror genre, and some of the bigger names to come out of this era of moviemaking.  If you've read past reviews I've done in other seasons of this series (see below), you'll find that while I enjoy the elder Chaney, I'm not wild about Junior.  His characters are kind of lugheaded, and never have the expressiveness that we'd expect from someone as talented as Boris Karloff, the original Mummy.  I was curious if he was playing a mute, frequently doesn't even speak character like Kharis, if that would translate better onscreen.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place 30 years after The Mummy's Hand, and begins in flashbacks to the previous film where a now older Stephen Banning (still played by Foran) takes us through his adventures with Kharis, and how he ended up marrying his wife, now deceased, whom he saved from the Monster.  We cut back to Egypt, where Kharis is being reawakened by Adhodeb (Zucco), who we assume is about to die, and instructs his follower Mehemet Bey (Bey) to enact revenge on the Banning clan, going to America and having Kharis (Chaney) kill all of the living members of the Banning family.  He does this, with both Stephen and Babe (Ford, who was also in the previous film) dying at the mummy's hand in short cameos, while our young lovers John (Hubbard) and Isobel (Knox) are trying to understand how to stay safe.  As is inevitable, Mehemet falls for the beautiful Isobel, and captures her to be his bride, but before he can, he is killed by a mob tracking down the Mummy, and the Mummy is burned (which leads to the happy ending of John & Isobel getting married).

The first thing that strikes me about this movie is the sequel nature of the film.  Movie serials were relatively common in the 1930's and 40's before the advent of television, but it's worth keeping in mind that until the 1980's, there was no obvious way to keep track of characters over multiple years.  You didn't have movies, and in the early 1940's the only way you'd see a movie like the The Mummy's Hand in advance of The Mummy's Tomb is through the film being re-released in theaters.  This is interesting to me because The Mummy's Tomb does a decent job of being continuation of the story-the opening scenes with the last movie are helpful, but I'll be honest here-if I hadn't just seen The Mummy's Hand the week before, I might not have noticed the attention-to-detail of having three actors from the previous film coming back in the same roles.  In my experience this is unusual, as most of the Universal movies will recast or completely upend the setting so it's not necessary for you to have seen the previous film, and made me wonder a year from now when we do another season (and I hopefully give the next two Mummy movies their due) whether or not I'll have to rewatch these films for context.

This, unfortunately is the only really fascinating thing about The Mummy's Tomb.  The story is more succinct than the last film, but the acting is worse, and Hubbard & Knox are hopelessly generic.  Chaney adds little to the Mummy other than to make him a brute-there's none of the sensitivity that Karloff brought to the character, and he's largely upstaged onscreen by Bey's (problematic) Mehemet.  Overall, this is confirmation for me three (of the five) films in that the Mummy franchise is the least of the Universal horror films in retrospect.  On Tuesday, we'll leave him behind and go for arguably the best creature in the canon, so make sure to stick around as we enter the final two weeks of our Month of Horror.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Werewolf of London, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Wolf Man, Cat People, 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

Cat People (1942)

Film: Cat People (1942)
Stars: Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Tom Conway, Jane Randolph
Director: Jacques Tourneur
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.

We're going to take a brief break from the Universal monster movies in our month of horror, and head over to the RKO lot today.  There, Val Lewton, the producer & writer of this film, was crafting his own sense of horror films to counter-balance the Universal films of the era.  But while the horror movies at Universal feel in retrospect like they're a little cheesy or gimmicky, that's not the case with Lewton, and certainly not the case with our movie today (arguably his best-known work) Cat People.  I chose this film because it's one of the more famous horror movies of the era I've never seen (our ultimate goal for this series, after all, is to not just complete the Universal canon, but also to fill in the gaps in my horror movies of the era), but watching it, Cat People in many ways is a psychological thriller more than a monster picture, teasing whether or not it's a horror movie until the movie's final moments.

(Spoilers Ahead) Irena (Simon) and Oliver (Smith) meet at a zoo, while Irena is sketching a black panther.  They start a flirtation, but Oliver realizes that Irena holds some superstitions related to her childhood village-she's convinced cats are evil, specifically due to a legend from her youth about King John of Serbia & how he killed a number of her citizens who used witchcraft to become cats themselves.  Though Oliver is dismissive of this fact, strange things do happen around Irena-cats hate her, reacting strangely in her presence, and she becomes increasingly obsessed that she's going to carry the curse of her village by turning into a cat person.  They marry, but it's an unhappy marriage, and Oliver persuades Irena to visit a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd (Conway).  While all of this happens, Oliver begins to fall in love with his assistant Alice (Randolph), whom he eventually loves enough to ask Irena for a divorce.

I'm going to take a break here to discuss the film's quality a little bit, because at this point in the movie it's really not clear to the audience whether or not Irena is going mad (and driving those around her, particularly Alice, crazy with suspicion), or if she's correct-that she's going to become a cat person.  This is rare in a film of this era, because there's a genuine thrill in not knowing how this movie will go from this point.  Most monster movies usually laid out their cards right away, and by this period the Universal horror films had become almost comically formulaic.  But Cat People delivers on actual scares as the movie goes as we learn that Irena is, in fact, a cat person, as she transforms finally in the last act of the movie, first letting Alice & Oliver go for begging forgiveness of her, and then murdering Dr. Judd who tries to seduce her, potentially having destroyed her marriage to get to her.  In the final act, Irena releases the black panther from the beginning of the movie, who strikes her down (it's not entirely clear if she lives or dies), and the panther is killed by a passing car, with Oliver & Alice assuming at this point that the panther is Irena herself, now dead and out of their lives.

The movie has received mixed reviews since its inception.  Some people are in love with the camera angles, mood, and thrills of the film, and I'm mostly in their camp.  The scene of Alice in a pool, hearing the growling of what we learn is Irena is frightening, and the building tension totally works.  Also-the camerawork is great & I love the idea of a horror film being lensed like a film noir (considering the rise of "elevated horror" some filmmaker needs to try this again today by making a black-and-white horror film).  The acting isn't great.  No one except Simon is trying anything unusual (her stylized acting I found fascinating, even if others have found it stilted, though I wonder if their treatment of her work is marred by accusations she was "difficult" on set & that other than the two Cat People films her career never really went anywhere), and the ending's ambiguity is probably a little too ambiguous for its own good.  Still, this is a great, moody film (I need to watch the sequel for a future series as I hear good things about it as well), and one well worth your time this Halloween season.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Werewolf of London, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, 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: Kings Row (1942)

Film: Kings Row (1942)
Stars: Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, Ronald Reagan, Betty Field, Charles Coburn, Claude Rains, Judith Anderson, Maria Ouspenskaya, Harry Davenport
Director: Sam Wood
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 Ann Sheridan-click here to learn more about Ms. Sheridan (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are only two films into the career of Ann Sheridan as our January star, and I'm already starting to note a really strange pattern-Ann Sheridan gets top billing when she probably shouldn't.  I'm hoping, since I'm trying to learn about her as a leading woman, that this doesn't continue for our final two pictures, but last week she received second billing for The Man Who Came to Dinner when really the star of the film was the then-unknown Monty Woolley.  This week, while she's again one of the leads, few would argue that she's actually the lead of this film where she receives top billing, instead the film focuses more on up-and-coming actors Robert Cummings and Ronald Reagan.  Kings Row is the best-known Sheridan film we're going to profile this month (give or take Angels with Dirty Faces, it's her best-known film period but I couldn't easily get a copy of that 1938 film), so I was excited to investigate to learn more about Sheridan (as well as to take a look at what is widely considered to be Ronald Reagan's best performance), and left kind of floored-Kings Row is a pretty sordid melodrama, one based on an even more scandalous book, that for 1942 comes across as quite shocking.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a soap opera with a lot of plot, but here's the gist of it.  Essentially it's two alternating tragic love stories, both started in childhood and then continued into adulthood.  The first, that takes up the top half of the movie is between Cassie (Field) and Parris (Cummings), and the back half is dominated by the relationship between Drake (Reagan) and Randy (Sheridan).  Both have a lot of intrigue and mystery behind the relationship.  With Cassie & Parris, she is largely ostracized by her classmates for having a strange mother (who clearly suffers from some sort of dementia), and is pulled out of school/society as a young girl, though she never stopped thinking of Parris as her first love.  Parris, as an adult, tries to gain the respect of her father (Rains), and secretly starts to see Cassie, but she's now nervous, frail, and constantly paranoid about being found out and about seeing the world.  At the halfway point of the movie, she is killed by her father in a murder-suicide after she makes plans to run away with Parris.  At this point, Parris flees to Vienna to become a well-respected doctor, and the plot shifts to his lothario best friend Drake, who is engaged to the doctor's daughter (Nancy Coleman), but her parents (Coburn & Anderson) disapprove of such a man dating their daughter, and as a result he ends up in the arms of the (literally from the wrong side of the tracks) Randy.  After a freak accident, Drake's legs are amputated by the doctor, and he is forced to deal with being crippled & broke (oh, right, his money was stolen by a banker-forgot to mention that).  Eventually, now a psychiatrist, Parris finds out the doctor had been a Mengele of sorts and there was no need for Drake's legs to be amputated (he had done this to anyone in town he considered "dirty"), and he must tell Drake the truth.

Following so far?  If you are, you're doing better than I did.  Kings Row is, despite being just over 2 hours long, probably 2 hours too short to accomplish this level of plot.  For example, the film's most harrowing scene (Reagan screaming after seeing that his legs are gone "Where's the Rest of Me?!?", a line he would later title his 1965 memoir), pairs really poorly with the jolly-good moment where Drake finds out that his legs were not stolen by an accident, but by the father of a scorned daughter.  Looking to the book, we find that there's a lot seedier explanations for what in the movie comes across as intentionally veiled.  For example, it's pretty clear in the book that the relationship between Cassie and her father is incestuous, and that both Parris & Cassie and Randy & Drake consummated their relationships before marriage.  In the movie, they managed to slyly sneak in that Cassie is pregnant if you look below the surface, but in the book it's not entirely clear whether or not she's pregnant with Parris's baby or her father's.  They entire cut out a gay character from the novel who tries to put the moves on Parris, and it's pretty glossy over the sadistic surgeon, framing him more as a "father scorned" than as a true monster of the community.  Watching Kings Row, I realized it's that rare classic film that would be primed for a more modern telling that's loyal to the book-HBO, if you want me to get writing it, let me know.

The film received three Academy Awards, for Best Picture, Director, and Cinematography, none of which feels quite right but is understandable given the circumstances.  The movie isn't exactly good even if it's usually entertaining, throwing in too much plot and overstuffing with a lot of clutch-the-pearls moments to keep the audience entertained.  The cinematography feels relatively standard, though some of the closeup shots and especially the way that James Wong Howe frames Betty Field's face is intriguing.  Still, it doesn't feel like particularly inventive work, especially the year after Citizen Kane.

Sheridan, our star of the month, literally doesn't show up in the movie until we're 64 minutes into the picture.  I want to say Dev Patel probably takes that long to get into Lion (I haven't taken out a stop watch there, but it feels about right), but otherwise can you think of another film where the top-billed star doesn't show up until we're an hour into the movie?  Sheridan, for her part, is not as much fun as she was in last week's The Man Who Came to Dinner.  I liked her scenes where she tries to justify the casualness of her fling with Drake (it's pretty clear she doesn't consider him a potential-husband, but he's good in the sack so she's keeping him around), but once she becomes the doting girlfriend/wife, she loses all sense of personality with Drake and her performance suffers as a result.  Reagan (and I don't know that I'll ever say this again considering his abilities as an actor) is the best part of the film, particularly as a fun-loving rake in the first half of the movie, and it's easy to see how he became a star.  It's a pity he couldn't have translated this into some of his other performances, and we might have been spared his political career.

The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)

Film: The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)
Stars: Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Monty Woolley, Richard Travis, Jimmy Durante, Billie Burke
Director: William Keighley
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Reaction: 5/5 stars

We will start our "Saturdays with the Stars" series focusing on Ann Sheridan by looking at one of her better-remembered movies The Man Who Came to Dinner (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, click here & like Clarissa, I explain it all).  While they never seem to be as popular in modern cinemas (thanks to Hallmark & Lifetime, they've become hopelessly generic and almost comically interchangeable), a really strong holiday classic can have legs that most movies can only dream of, and while The Man Who Came to Dinner is hardly in the same pop culture class as It's a Wonderful Life or White Christmas, it still plays with regularity on TCM and is one of the few films of this era where Sheridan shares top-billing with a woman, not a man, as this is one of two Christmas classics starring Bette Davis (the other being Pocketful of Miracles).  Of course, for anyone familiar with the film, it is neither Davis nor Sheridan who deserve the top billing here, but instead the curmudgeonly (and until this point in his career almost completely-unknown) Monty Woolley as Sheridan Whiteside.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on Woolley's Whiteside, a noted humorist and radio personality who is famous for his acid tongue & sharp impatience with anyone that isn't himself.  Whiteside is on a speaking tour much to his chagrin, and is forced to have lunch at the home of Mrs. Ernest Stanley (Burke), but when walking into the house, he slips and falls on the front steps.  The doctor orders him to stay in bed, and as a result both he and his secretary Maggie (Davis) have to stay in the small town, with Woolley barking orders at his hosts, their staff, and his poor beleaguered nurse (naturally played by character actor Mary Wickes, as this was the only part she ever seemed to play, but did it with aplomb).  Maggie quite likes the situation, though, as she falls for a young newspaper man named Bert (Travis), and decides to quit her post, which forces Whiteside to pretend he hasn't recovered, in hopes of scheming a way to keep her on as his secretary.  His plan involves recruiting gold-digging actress Lorraine Sheldon (Sheridan) to come and try and steal Bert away from Maggie, which she doesn't succeed in doing (during one of many comic set pieces in the film, she is trapped in a sarcophagus after a change-of-heart by Whiteside and Jimmy Durante, basically playing himself). The film ends in proper Christmas fashion with Bert & Maggie in love, and Whiteside finding some empathy for the world around him...which quickly disappears as he slips on the front steps again & as a result is forced to go back to staying at the house with the Stanleys.

The film is a riot, and one I wish more people had caught (it was an awesome way to start our new series).  Based on the play by Moss Hart & George S. Kaufman, the movie is hilarious and wry, with Woolley, Davis, and Sheridan in sharp form (Travis is mostly there to be handsome, which he does exceedingly well).  I had never seen a film of Woolley's prior to this, and was surprised I knew so little about him.  The actor enjoyed a brief bit of fame after this picture, almost always playing snobs, and won two Oscar nominations before his cache wore off.  It's rare to find an actor starring opposite Bette Davis that can keep up with the bitchiness, but Woolley delivers, and I am excited to see more of him (one has to wonder if The Pied Piper nomination he won in 1942 was more a joint effort for his work here, as Whiteside is completely worthy of an Oscar nomination).

Our Star of the Month gets high billing, but is decidedly the third lead of the film (I picked the films based on billing, not actually knowing the content of the pictures).  Sheridan is sly fun as a broadly-played "glamour girl," and since I'm so unfamiliar with her (I've only seen one other movie she's made), I don't know if this is a departure for her or not (all of our other films with her this month will be dramas).  She has a great dynamic with Woolley & Davis, and while she isn't quite in their league, she rings out every joke with ace timing and I am already a bit of a fan-we'll see next week if she can succeed in arguably her most well-regarded film, but we're off to a good start with The Man Who Came to Dinner.

Each month, as part of our Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ann Sheridan-click here to learn more about Ms. Sheridan (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)

Film: The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)
Stars: Lon Chaney, Jr., Cedric Hardwicke, Ralph Bellamy, Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill, Evelyn Ankers
Director: Eric C. Kenton
Oscar History: No Nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We continue on our month of classic horror frights with yet another trip to Frankenstein's castle, our fourth this month (in many ways this has more become the month of Frankenstein, as we will definitely be visiting the castle at least once more before Halloween on Wednesday).  This installment is unique compared to our other three visits, though, as we for the first time are going without Boris Karloff.  Karloff, fearing that there was nothing left to say about the creature, decided to quit playing the character, and wouldn't revise the role until the 1960's in an episode of Route 66.  As a result, while we have the return of Bela Lugosi's Igor, we are instead treated to our first visit from Lon Chaney, Jr., another major star of the Universal Horror films, albeit one that I'm less thrilled about than Karloff or Lugosi.  Because while Ghost of Frankenstein has its moments (and arguably the most famous call sheet we've seen on one of these movies), it's by-far the least of the movies in the series thus far and doesn't bode well for House of Frankenstein, our next visit in this series with the monster.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film starts, once again, with a group of angry villagers complaining about Frankenstein's monster (Chaney) cursing their land and causing them hardships.  Despite being, well, dead, they claim that Igor (Lugosi) is still at the castle, and as long as the castle stands, they will continue to endure troubles.  The village elders (several of whom died in the last film, perhaps the picture's most notable continuity error), eventually give in to the mob, and they storm the castle, tearing it apart brick by brick.  Igor is there to fortify it, but once he sees the monster come alive from the rubble, he flees the castle with him in tow, trying to track down Dr. Frankenstein's other son (the one that isn't Basil Rathbone's Wolf, and has conveniently never been mentioned until now), played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who is at first reluctant to try to help the monster but haunted by his father's memory, he sets about trying to correct the monster, making him be a decent human being through a brain transplant of one of his recently-deceased colleagues.  Eventually Igor manipulates himself into getting the brain transplant for himself, becoming the monster but then going blind because he isn't the right blood type, eventually burning down the house with Ludwig and the Ygor-Monster inside.  There's also, like most of these films, a subplot involving a beautiful woman (Ludwig's daughter, played by Ankers), and a local lug (Ralph Bellamy once again coming to the rescue), but even by horror movie standards this feels a bit tacked-on and unnecessary.

The Universal horror movies always lived-or-died based off of the charisma of the actors playing the monsters and the cheap thrills that they're able to elicit.  This film is an odd juxtaposition in that regard, since Lugosi's Igor is such a sturdy creation, a more impressive achievement, in my opinion, than his Dracula (it stands out in a stronger way).  The plot lines revolving around Igor are ridiculous-that he's able to continually manipulate everyone around him as if he's simply a normal human being, rather than a scheming man and murderer rubbing his hands together offscreen while mumbling his plan, is beyond absurd, but beneath the makeup you can tell that Lugosi was a strong stage actor as he hams it up wonderfully for the camera.  Honestly-Igor is a more terrifying creation than the monster ever could be, since he walks among us and seems to always be hatching a plan to create more violence and chaos.

But Chaney's creature is an enormous step down from Karloff's monster.  Karloff was an accomplished film star, one who never would have taken off were it not for his work in the Universal horror films, but was an actor with skill who always brought something to his performances.  Lon Chaney, Jr., well, had a very famous father.  Chaney's monster has none of Karloff's soul or tenderness, making him appear a sympathetic-but-complicated figure, and instead has him lumbering like a giant doll the whole film, with his arms outstretched (I believe this is the first time we see this now iconic image of the monster with his arms out-stretched, his wrists limp, marching forward).  Chaney's performance is, well, terrible, not just because it pales in comparison to Karloff's because it's not that good on its own.  Thankfully Universal didn't start with him in this role, because it wouldn't have had such strong franchise films up until this point in the series if they had.  Lugosi's Igor makes this film worth checking out, but it's not very good, and despite real actors in the supporting roles (Hardwicke was a knight, for crying out loud!), Lugosi is the only reason this film should exist.

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, The Mummy, Freaks

OVP: To Be or Not To Be (1942)

Film: To Be or Not To Be (1942)
Stars: Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack, Felix Bressart, Sig Ruman
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I always marvel at the idea that I'm seeing a classic movie for the first time.  There's only so many such films that still exist in my world, and it's very rare that I get to do this activity anymore, particularly for a film that isn't a "modern classic" but in fact something from eons ago.  This is why I was so thrilled to get to investigate To Be or Not To Be, one of those great Lubitsch pictures and the final movie of Carole Lombard's career.  I thought in a way I might be tempting fate a bit watching this movie on a plane (considering Lombard's ultimate demise), but figured I'd go with it as it was the next movie in my Netflix DVD queue, and I wanted to give it a try.

(Spoilers Ahead) The strange thing about Hollywood in the 1940's is that they continually made movies about the Nazis and World War II as it was happening (Casablanca is the most famous example, but there are lots of them).  I don't know why, but that always shocks me.  I'm aware that we made movies about the Iraq War while it has still been being fought, but because it is so alien to the news (whereas World War II was constantly a part of the day-to-day life of every Americans what with the draft and rations, as well as attacks on actual American soil), it doesn't quite feel the same.

The movie unfolds during World War II, specifically looking at Maria (Lombard) and Joseph Tura (Benny), an acting couple who have lost some of the spark in their relationship, and are playing Hamlet in Poland just before the occupation.  Maria is being pursued by a handsome young pilot named Sobinski (Stack), who meets with Maria one night after excusing himself during the famed "To Be or Not To Be" speech of Shakespeare's play, much to the chagrin of the easily-annoyed Benny.  The film unfolds with Maria and Joseph both having regular run-ins with the Nazis, and Joseph having to deal with his wife conducting an emotional affair even if she didn't mean it as anything more than friendship, and the entire acting troupe trying to pull one over on Adolf Hitler & his Gestapo, particularly the bumbling Col. Erhardt (a precursor to Hogan's Heroes in a lot of ways, and the role that would win Charles Durning an Oscar nomination with the remake).  The movie ends, in typical comic fashion, with the good guys winning even though the war still rages on, and both Benny & Stack confused by a different handsome solider getting up during his "to be or not to be" speech.

The film is shocking in its attitude toward the war in a way I don't know that I've seen outside of a Mel Brooks comedy, and The Producers came out decades after the fighting had stopped.  Seeing Benny decked out in a Nazi uniform is startling, and the Nazi salute is so frequently and comically used I felt uncomfortable sitting next to the guy on the plane while I was watching it, eventually informing him when he inquired that I run a classic film blog which is why I was watching the picture.  The movie's cavalier attitude occasionally goes into the insensitive, particularly when it juxtaposes the absurd against Felix Bressart's impassioned speeches as Shylock.  Still, though, it's marvelously entertaining, particularly Lombard who has never looked so beautiful and is by far the film's biggest highlight.  Stack does little more than is required of him (to be handsome), but he succeeds on that front, and Benny, well, always played Jack Benny and if you like that sort of thing this will work well for you (I love Benny-I think he's marvelous in interviews, so I was frequently chuckling at his antics, even though his range as an actor is essentially one character-himself).

The movie received a sole nomination for Best Score, an odd citation as it wasn't memorable at all.  In fact, of all of the aspects of the movie (acting, writing, costumes), it's one of the areas that stand out the least, and seems like pretty standard-fare trumpets that you'd expect from the era.  Still, it's nice to know such a sharp and edgy film (for its day) got picked up by AMPAS in at least one category so we get to include it in the OVP.

The movie is definitely worth a see, and if you have, please share your favorite moments in the comments!  I was partial to Lombard's lusty comment about "five tons of dynamite," but there's many to sort through.  And for those who haven't seen it, share your favorite moments in the filmographies of Lombard, Benny, and Stack!  The comments await!