OVP: Objective, Burma! (1943)

Film: Objective, Burma! (1943)

Stars: Errol Flynn, James Brown, William Prince, George Tobias

Director: Raoul Walsh

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

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Errol Flynn: click here to learn more about Mr. Flynn (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

To talk about Errol Flynn, you cannot ignore the almost cartoonish difference between the flawed-but-noble heroes that he perfected on the big screen, and the debaucherous nature of his real-life persona, which was brought to the foreground in 1942 when Flynn was accused of statutory rape by two teenage girls.  To note, Flynn at the time was still a huge movie star, having just finished releasing Desperate Journey with Ronald Reagan to enormous box office days before the accusations-Warner Brothers was not in a position to just cut him given the box office receipts.  But the scandal was huge, as the shocking details of what happened were spread in papers across the country.  Attorney Jerry Giesler, at one point the most famous lawyer in Hollywood, was able to get Flynn acquitted, mostly by destroying the reputations of the women who accused Flynn of rape.  But something happened in the wake of this scandal that would not be the case for a number of other figures (like those of Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, & later Ingrid Bergman): Flynn emerged with a different reputation, but one that largely still had box office draw even in the immediate wake of the scandal, and was still allowed to work regularly in Hollywood

(Spoilers Ahead) That can be seen in the movie Objective, Burma!, which was released just over two years after the trial, and was by pretty much all accounts a hit, and it wasn't Flynn's only one of this period.  Gentleman Jim was released during the height of the coverage to success, and both of the (now largely forgotten) movies that Flynn released in 1943 were also hits.  In fact, Flynn would be successful for much of the mid-1940's...but he'd do so in very different pictures.  Objective, Burma! is a good example of that.  The film is a fictionalized telling of the Burma Campaign during World War II, with Flynn playing an army captain whose platoon is trudging through the jungle, in near constant danger from the Japanese.  The film is one of several movies that were released during the Golden Age of Hollywood that favored realism over a more fictionalized, personalized storytelling method, in many ways resembling more a documentary film (which was a familiar format to audiences during WWII due to newsreels), than a more traditional storytelling technique.

As a result, the film is technically really impressive.  The special effects, especially during some of the early attack scenes when we see an entire army camp decimated by timed explosions, are wonderful, and the sound work & cinematography are strong.  But the movie itself is a bore.  With the exception of George Tobias (the future Mr. Kravitz on Bewitched), none of the numerous side characters stand out, and frequently you're left watching their deaths be mourned onscreen with an internal monologue of "which guy was this again?" all of which makes the film's three Oscar nominations (for editing, writing, and music) feel a bit like a head-scratcher: why are we awarding these when the special effects or sound work are the actual calling card here?

Flynn, as well, feels muted to the point of being boring, something that never crossed my mind during his Captain Blood and Robin Hood era.  Whether intentionally or not, much of the work that Flynn stars in that I've seen after his trial feels a bit too noble, as if the studio was scared to put him into films where he could be seen as a rake or a cad...because it suddenly felt too close to home.  This would cause his career in the late 1940's to suffer, as audiences who had been more than willing to give in to a controversial celebrity in the wake of his trials because they still loved him so much, weren't willing to give in to the studio wanting to clean up his image onscreen to protect them from the public confusing real life and fiction too much.  It wasn't until the studios finally let him play another sex-pursuing hero in The Adventures of Don Juan in 1948, that audiences truly returned home, and allowed him to be a dependable box office draw into the early 1950's.

This is all to say that Flynn's reputation, and much of his modern association (if you ask lay moviegoers what they know about him today, it will be the statutory rape allegations) did not have the impact on his career that later major movie stars like Mel Gibson or Johnny Depp would receive when they had scandals threaten their careers.  Gibson & Depp would see their careers largely evaporate, but despite some setbacks in the years after the war, Flynn largely got away fine from this scandal-it is only history that really hurt him, but if you look at what his career was like, he paid a surprisingly small price for one of the biggest scandals of Hollywood's Golden Age.

Son of Dracula (1943)

Film: Son of Dracula (1943)

Stars: Lon Chaney, Jr., Louise Albritton, Robert Paige, Evelyn Ankers, Frank Craven

Director: Robert Siodmark

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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.

Lon Chaney Jr. is almost certainly the actor that we have profiled the most in the years we've done this Halloween series, which is weird because as a rule I don't really like Lon Chaney, Jr.  This is a shame because Chaney is definitely an important figure in classic American horror cinema.  He is the only actor in American film history to star as all four of the classic Universal horror monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy.  This was his only outing as Dracula, and there's a reason for that-the most loquacious of all of the Universal monsters, this was not a great fit for Chaney's skill set.

(Spoilers Ahead) Son of Dracula is a bit of a departure from the normal Dracula format, as it takes place in the United States on a New Orleans plantation, which has been left to Katherine Caldwell (Abritton), who soon after she inherits the plantation marries Count Alucard (Cheney), much to the chagrin of her longtime boyfriend Frank (Paige).  Frank confronts Alucard, shooting him in a fit of passion, and is shocked when it does nothing to him.  As you can guess (if you can spell backwards), Alucard is Count Dracula, who has fallen for Katherine & made her a vampire like him.  Frank & Katherine's sister Claire (Ankers) initially assume that Katherine is under a spell, but it turns out she knows about Dracula, and wants to trick him into giving her immortal life & then she will have Frank kill him, so they can be together.  Frank, though, cannot follow through, and kills both Dracula and Katherine, in a downer of an ending (rare for a Universal Monster picture).

As I said above, Chaney isn't my favorite of the Universal actors-I find his acting to be too leaden and not having the pizzazz of Lugosi, Karloff, or his own father.  That said, even by my low expectations Son of Dracula misses them.  Chaney is weirdly sidelined for long stretches of the film (one wonders if this was one of the multiple productions that Chaney's violent behavior & alcoholism led to the studio having to cut chunks of the script), and it shows that the movie doesn't really know what to do with itself, particularly getting repetitive & a little bit silly with aspects of the plot.

This is weird because Son of Dracula has a fascinating story to tell.  It's not so much Dracula in this film that becomes the horror for the audience, but Katherine.  Though it's not a good performance, Albritton at least pulls off an interesting character with this woman that is obsessed with immortality, even if it means sacrificing her humanity & giving in to the Count Dracula (whom she intends to kill).  This results in one of the few truly downer endings in Universal monster films, where the "girl" is not saved, but instead burned with Dracula in the fire.  If only the acting & production had been willing to lean harder into this plot, this might have been a salvageable picture.

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, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, 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: Phantom of the Opera (1943)

Film: Phantom of the Opera (1943)

Stars: Claude Rains, Nelson Eddy, Susanna Foster, Edgar Barrier

Director: Arthur Lubin

Oscar History: 4 nominations/2 wins (Best Sound Mixing, Art Direction*, Cinematography*, Scoring)

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.

The Universal Monster canon, in its original run, largely went from 1931 with Dracula through the mid-1950's with Creature from the Black Lagoon.  I have been saying all month that we're finishing off the series, and to a degree we are-we're seeing all of the films that are connected to the classic monsters in a significant, tangible way, but we're not hitting every Universal monster movie with a vampire or a werewolf-that'd be impossible.  This is best illustrated not by our film today, which is almost always considered part of the "Universal Monster canon," and indeed it's the last "origin" film about one of their horror figures during this era, but by the fact that Universal didn't start with horror in 1931.  They had been doing it for years earlier, their most successful films being with Lon Chaney, Sr., whose wizardry with screen makeup is legendary and gained him the nickname "man of a thousand faces."  His most successful creation was as The Phantom of the Opera, a story that has been told through the decades repeatedly on screen & stage.  Today we're going to get to one of those iterations, and the only one that ever won an Academy Award.

(Spoilers Ahead) You know the story of Christine Dubois (Foster), a young soprano who has a mysterious benefactor who turns out to be (surprise!) the Phantom of the Opera (Rains) by heart even if you weren't a little gay boy humming along to the OBC version of "Masquerade" in your room.  But if you've somehow been living under a rock, we actually get more backstory here than we usually do, with us learning that the Phantom, who eventually haunts the opera and starts killing people in the Paris Opera house, is Erique Claudin, a broke violinist whose shaking hands have made it impossible for him to perform anymore, who in a jealous rage after his concerto is stolen from him, is disfigured by a vat of acid, and lives in the shadows of the Paris Opera, on the run from the law.  During a scene where he drops the chandelier (we get the chandelier drop, don't you worry), he runs off with Christine, but they don't escape together-the Phantom is crushed by falling rocks, and Christine gets away with all of his voice lessons, money, and her newfound fame (while the Phantom is dead).

If you think that description sounds cheeky, it's meant to be.  Phantom is a great guilty pleasure musical for me-I love it unabashedly, and know every song by heart.  But I'm also aware that there's a silliness to it, and this movie leans in on that motif hard.  For starters, there's basically two Raoul's (the actual one played by Barrier, as well as a hammy baritone played by Nelson Eddy), and both are unnecessary.  Foster is also as thrilling as dried paint as Christine, a character who is difficult to bring to life even for the best actors.  Rains is the best of the cast (duh), but he underplays Erique so much in the first half of the film that he feels like a weird 180 into being an actual "monster" in the second half of the picture.

The film, as I mentioned above, won two Oscars and an additional two nominations.  Of the four, the best is Art Direction, which is gorgeous.  We don't get the moody ambience we usually get from the Phantom's catacombs, but the recreations of the Paris Opera House are meticulous & well-designed, the chandelier is appropriately gaudy, and the additional drawing rooms paint the screen well.  The cinematography is beautiful (Technicolor in the 1940's often was), but it isn't as creative as I would've expected from an actual winner of this trophy, and I left less-impressed by this nomination than Oscar was.  The Scoring is ehh (it's hard not to compare pretty much anything that isn't Andrew Lloyd Webber favorably here), and the sound is okay (nothing great, though considering the dearth of nominees that Oscar nominated so far that I've seen, it's probably going to come out in the top half).  All-in-all, the Art Direction is the ticket for me, and the rest are just AMPAS being enamored with a classic cinematic tale that feels lifeless despite its inherent thrills.

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, Invisible Agent, 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: The Sky's the Limit (1943)

Film: The Sky's the Limit (1943)

Stars: Fred Astaire, Joan Leslie, Robert Benchley, Robert Ryan

Director: Edward H. Griffith

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Scoring, Original Song-"My Shining Hour")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Oscar in the early 1940's tended to nominate a lot of movies, mostly due to a quirk in the music categories, where the number of nominees was bizarrely large.  You'd see fields of songs stretch to 15-20 strong, and as a result there are a lot of movies that have been nominated simply for their music that otherwise would've been long-gone in the AMPAS pantheon.  This occasionally means that we get films that aren't impressive, cited for songs that aren't all that good.  That's not the case here-The Sky's the Limit, as we'll discuss below, has a solid song nominated for best Original Song, a nod that Oscar shouldn't at all be ashamed of.  The strange part of it is...the movie features one of the best-loved songs of the entire decade, one of the most important songs of Fred Astaire's career, which was eligible for this film, but somehow didn't get the inclusion over the less iconic ballad.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place during World War II, where flying ace Fred Atwell (Astaire) comes home on a ten-day leave a national hero with a ticker-tape parade.  Fred is supposed to be on a tour boosting national morale, but he wants to have fun (and meet some girls) so he sneaks away from the trip and meets Joan Manion (Leslie) at a nightclub.  She's a singer there, and so Fred, tired of being always identified with his hero persona, lies to her and pretends to just be a roustabout.  She attempts to get him a job, which of course he doesn't want because he has to go back to the front soon, but their unlikely chemistry sparks into love, and soon Fred must decide if and when he's going to tell Joan that he loves her and that he is, in fact, a war hero.

The movie is a relatively run-of-the-mill piece of wartime propaganda, a standard romance whose appreciation of it will depend entirely on your latitude with the two stars.  I personally adore Fred Astaire, and will watch him in anything, so I liked the movie even if the film's plot is absurd.  It's silly after a while that when Astaire's Fred starts to fall for Leslie's Joan that he doesn't just come out and tell her that he's a pilot, after all, he's going to have to eventually & leaving her behind feels a bit bizarre.  But it's short & sweet & to the point, and a fun way to spend a Sunday morning while you're folding laundry.

The film's two Oscar nominations are bizarre, though, as I mentioned above.  The film was nominated for Scoring, which is logical (it is a musical), though it doesn't have a lot of interesting dancing for an Astaire picture (only a couple of numbers with Leslie), and only three really significant songs.  One of them, "My Shining Hour" is pleasant & reprised, with Leslie & Astaire dancing wordlessly to it  It's lovely, truly-there's nothing wrong with this nomination...

...except that this movie features "One for My Baby," which I assumed initially was already a standard that Astaire had had put into the film (this happened a lot in this era).  That wasn't the case-"One for My Baby," a ballad that has been popularized by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Bette Midler (who famously sang it on the final Johnny Carson episode of The Tonight Show) was written specifically for Astaire for this film, meaning it was eligible for the Oscar.  The number is dynamite in the film, with a lovelorn Astaire singing it to a bartender, knowing he can't be with the girl he loved because he's shipping out, and while I get that "My Shining Hour" is a good song & great within the confines of the film, this is arguably the most important song of Astaire's career, and I don't honestly get how "One for My Baby" didn't get the Oscar citation.

OVP: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)

Film: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)

Stars: Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Akim Tamiroff, Katina Paxinou

Director: Sam Wood

Oscar History: 9 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Actor-Gary Cooper, Actress-Ingrid Bergman, Supporting Actor-Akim Tamiroff, Supporting Actress-Katina Paxinou*, Cinematography, Art Direction, Film Editing, Score)

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

As we mentioned when we introduced our month devoted to Ingrid Bergman, the actress got her start in Swedish cinema in the earliest part of her career, but moved to Hollywood in 1939.  She didn't speak English well, and initially assumed that Intermezzo would be her only American film before returning back to Sweden.  However, Intermezzo was a big hit, and David O. Selznick decided to continue to invest in Bergman's career, keeping her in Hollywood to make additional films.  While Intermezzo would've been a fine place for us to start our look at Bergman's career (I've never seen it, I will admit), we're going to start a few years in, when she was a bit more established, but in the wake of Casablanca, was about to become an all-timer level star.  Casablanca, despite winning the Best Picture trophy in 1943, wasn't the film that won Bergman her first Academy Award-it was instead the picture we're going to start our month with, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

(Spoilers Ahead) For Whom the Bell Tolls is a bit of a "bottle episode film" in that most of the action takes place during the Spanish Civil War in caves near a key bridge that will help to cutoff support for Franco's mission.  Robert Jordan (Cooper), an American language teacher, is tasked with blowing up the bridge to help the anti-fascist cause, and there he meets a group of guerrilla fighters, led by Pablo (Tamiroff) and Pilar (Paxinou).  Pablo is skeptical of helping Robert, but both Pilar and a young woman named Maria (Bergman) overrule him, and begin to help the cause.  In the end, after a lot of detours (more in a second), they are able to blow up the bridge, but at a price-Robert dies in the endeavor, and Maria (whom he has fallen in love with) must leave him behind to take on Franco's men in order for them to have a chance to escape.

That's basically the plot...of a nearly three-hour movie.  For Whom the Bell Tolls was noteworthy to me less as an early indicator of what Bergman could achieve or for being a major Oscar player, and more because it went on forever with nothing happening.  The movie's plotting is egregiously slow, as if they wanted to add an extra season onto a film, and it doesn't really serve a purpose.  Hemingway's novels, for those who are fans (I am not), are about introspection, about men fighting against the elements and themselves, but this movie doesn't service any of that.  It's just three hours of intense toxic masculinity, peppered with female characters that are badly underwritten.

The film won nine Oscar nominations, and some of the tech ones I can get behind to a degree.  The cinematography is beautiful, though it's more because I am a fan of early Technicolor than because it's doing a lot of interesting things (the moonlight is lovely, but at this point I feel like you need more from the film).  Same with the score-yes, it's solid, but it's also not particularly impressive on its own merit (which is weird because this was the first film score to ever be recorded by itself on a vinyl record).  The remainder I was less-involved with, as the editing is nonexistent (seriously-this movie is too long even by our modern "all movies are too long" attitude), and the art direction...it's just a bunch of caves!

The acting is overall pretty bad.  Cooper, who I know many people have allergies to, is not someone I dislike (he's obviously handsome, and occasionally interesting though so far I've preferred him in comedies), but he does nothing with this role.  He plays Robert as wallpaper drying, as if he is trying to read a line from a cue card.  Paxinou & Tamiroff were both nominated (Paxinou even won), but these are one-note performances on the periphery of the picture (both actors are in brownface). Tamiroff does his usual "evil villain" schtick, bringing little to the overall role, while Paxinou gets something to do in her speech about her youth & long-gone beauty (this is surely what won her the Oscar), but it's not enough.  And it's not important enough to the overall movie-for a film that is three hours long it doesn't give any character much growth.

Which leads us to Bergman.  Bergman is one of my favorite actresses, and I'm used to Oscar not picking her best roles, but it's absurd to me that they say her play Ilsa Lund and thought "huh, let's pick that movie where she complains about being ugly because her hair is short for three hours, even though she's still the most beautiful woman in the world."  Bergman is listless and unable to lift this up-there's no fire in this performance, none of the organic signature that would mark her best work.  I cannot comprehend why they picked this, one of her least performances, over her best work in Casablanca, and I am going to try & remember this when I defend the Academy next time against someone who says "they nominate the wrong performances"...because this is a textbook case.

OVP: Five Graves to Cairo (1943)

Film: Five Graves to Cairo (1943)

Stars: Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, Akim Tamiroff, Erich von Stroheim, Peter van Eyck

Director: Billy Wilder

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Art Direction, Cinematography, & Film Editing)

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.

We are not going to move too far into the future of Anne Baxter's career this week, though we are going to move to a different studio momentarily.  Last week we took a look at Baxter's career in 1942, when she graduated from teenager to adult onscreen with both The Pied Piper and The Magnificent Ambersons.  Baxter, though, as a leading woman during this era seems to struggle in terms of finding films that were the correct fit for her (and one could argue, as we move further into the years, that this was the case her whole career).  We'll talk more about this in a second, but at this point Baxter was cranking out a lot of "love interest" roles, and the best-remembered of the bunch was Five Graves to Cairo, which she did for Paramount rather than her typical studio of Fox.  The film, like last week's, is another World War II drama filmed within the confines of the war (this was actually a pretty common typecasting for Baxter-she found a lot of success in the early 1940's as a woman in war movies), focusing on a fictionalized story about the campaign in North Africa.

(Spoilers Ahead) In the opening sequence, John Bramble (Tone) wanders, dumbstruck, out of the desert into a hotel owned by Farid (Tamiroff), with the help of Mouche (Baxter), a French maid.  Once Bramble comes to, he has to pretend to be a dead waiter that they have buried in the basement, as the Germans have come to stay at the hotel & the only way he'll survive is by pretending not to be British.  The Germans include Field Marshall Erwin Rommal (von Stroheim), at the time of this filming the most famous military leader in the Third Reich, who develops a rapport with Bramble, and through this rapport Bramble figures out how Rommal is planning on campaigning through North Africa with limited supplies (by using the letters on the map that spell "Egypt" as secret supply dumps, hence the "Five Graves of Cairo").  Bramble escapes, but while he's trying to leave one of Rommal's aides, Lieutenant Schwegler (van Eyck) catches that he's the dead waiter, and he has to kill him.  Mouche briefly takes the blame for the death, though, so that Bramble can escape & help stop Rommal in his tracks, helping the war effort.  This costs her her life, which Bramble realizes when he goes back for her, and puts a parasol, something she'd long-desired, to place over her grave.

I talked about this last week, but I find war films filmed during a war, specifically World War II, fascinating because it wasn't crystal clear who was going to win.  During filming (which, if the internet is correct, was a few weeks in January & February), Rommal was still in charge of the campaign in North Africa (the Battle of Medenine would be waged after production but before this film came out), and so was a formidable opponent, albeit one who was losing the tide of the war.  This makes the Rommal character in Five Graves to Cairo the most interesting figure in an otherwise underwhelming movie.  Von Stroheim is quite good as the military commander, playing him as a figure more focused on flexing his own intellectual prowess than caring about the politics of his decisions (mirroring historians' problematic trouble with this particular leader, who would eventually commit suicide as a result of a coup attempt against Hitler).  The rest of the film struggles to match him, though, particularly with Tone as kind of a blank canvass performance in the lead (he's very handsome, but nothing else about his performances really sing with me, even his Oscar-cited work in Mutiny on the Bounty was just okay).  The movie also doesn't really know what to do with its domestic trappings.

The film won three Oscar nominations, two of which I enjoyed: the art direction & the cinematography.  The film's hotel setting is full of some fun detailing (I love not only the rubble-drenched basement with a body under it, though there's not enough comic maneuvering with this particular situation for my taste), as it does look like an abandoned hotel in the middle of the desert that might otherwise be left for the elements.  The cinematography is great in the opening sequence, where there's a cool shot of a tank meandering through the desert with a bunch of corpses on it (I initially thought we were going to get a much less conventional film), and the film is well-lit (but more conventional) as the movie continues.  Every actor has a moonlight-drenched face, and this works well with a comely pair of leading performers.  As I mentioned above, though, the film is juggling too many narratives without enough focus, which is basically the definition of rough editing, so I'm not cosigning with the Academy in that regard.

Don't think I forgot about our star.  I once remember someone saying that Philip Seymour Hoffman was a "movie star in a character actor's body," but with Baxter, a few films in, it's kind of the reverse-she was conventionally a quite attractive woman, but her performances all ring like they're supposed to be invisible, fitting into the confines of the script through solid character acting.  She doesn't know how to centralize a misguided attempt at a love story (particularly one where we're supposed to assume she's willing to sleep with Lt. Schwegler to help her imprisoned brother in France, something the Hays Code isn't going to condone). As a result, this is a case where Baxter feels miscast.  Next week we're going to move further into the decade, past the end of the war, and into a genre that I am genuinely excited to see what Baxter does with it as it feels completely outside of her expectations, or really of what we'd expect of most actresses of the era: a fantasy film.

OVP: Bombardier (1943)

Film: Bombardier (1943)

Stars: Pat O'Brien, Randolph Scott, Anne Shirley, Eddie Albert, Walter Reed, Robert Ryan

Director: Richard Wallace

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Special Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Yesterday I made the comment (while reviewing When Ladies Meet) that frequently films of the 1930's & 40's were some of the best when it came to actually putting major actresses in leading roles opposite each other, actually caring about the stories of women rather than just focusing on their relationships with men. That doesn't mean the era was completely impervious to movies that just focused on the stories of men, with women merely props that are there to be ogled (but even then are criticized for being a distraction).  This is sadly the case with Bombardier, a 1943 war picture where there is just one woman in a major role (Anne Shirley, one leg of a love triangle), but is more focused on the importance of bombardiers (the crew that would drop bombs) during World War II.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in 1941 (spoiler alert: Pearl Harbor is going to be mentioned), with two bombardiers in the US Army Air Corps, Major Chick Davis (O'Brien) and Captain Buck Oliver (Scott) at odds on how to handle a new class of recruits, taking different attitudes about the young men's readiness to be bombardiers.  They also are clearly in love with the same woman, Burt (Shirley) whose brother Tom (Albert) is one of the new cadets, but is afraid of flying.  The film continues with the men enduring hardship & accidents, including at one point Tom heroically saving another man in a sequence...only to as a result fall without a parachute to his death (more on that in a second).  The ending of the film (which at 99 minutes still feels long) has Buck taken prisoner by a group of Japanese soldiers, and sacrificing himself to destroy the Japanese camp, as he signals to the troops to bomb the encampment even though it will mean his death.

War films of this ilk are always a struggle for me.  For starters, films made in the 1940's tend to not be particularly sensitive in terms of the opponents during World War II, and the depiction of the Japanese enemies in the film is super offensive & stereotypical.  In addition, films of this era that focus solely on men have toxic masculinity issues.  Anne Shirley's Burt is simply a prize to be won between the men, a beautiful bauble that is there to cry & be flirted with, but not an actual person.  And the film kills off Eddie Albert's Tom (bravely, in easily the most jaw-dropping sequence in the movie), halfway through...but Eddie Albert was the only person keeping the film from being a total dirge, which it is for the second half of the movie.

The film was made in complete cooperation with the Air Force, and as a result the effects are kind of impressive, if relatively routine after a while.  They filmed on the Kirtland Army Air Base, and some of the film's photography is of actual fighter planes, and the film's bombings are realistic, though not quite what you'd expect from a movie of this era (though I though the trick photography in the scene with Albert trying to save his fellow airman, and then dying in the process, was genuinely frightening & well done).  I also have to knock off a point, though, for a throwaway moment where Pat O'Brien for some reason has to ward off a moth, which is clearly a visual light trick, and so bizarrely inconsequential to the plot I had to rewind to wonder if it was just a take that was done incorrectly.

OVP: Lady of Burlesque (1943)

Film: Lady of Burlesque (1943)

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

Director: William A. Wellman

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

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

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

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

The Man in Grey (1943)

Film: The Man in Grey (1943)

Stars: Margaret Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert, James Mason, Stewart Granger

Director: Leslie Arliss

Oscar History: No Nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Margaret Lockwood-click here to learn more about Ms. Lockwood (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The Lady Vanishes was a hit, and certainly made Alfred Hitchcock's career, but Margaret Lockwood wasn't as lucky.  She traveled to the United States to make films, but they weren't particularly successful, and American directors didn't know what to do with her talents in the way that Hitchcock did.  She starred in lower-billed roles against Shirley Temple & Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., but she didn't connect with American audiences & so she went back to British cinema to continued fizzling failure, and it's possible her career might have ended there, with one big hit under-her-belt & the rest just not connecting.  That is, of course, unless The Man in Grey hadn't come along.  Made in 1943, the movie was a surprise smash, and even critics enjoyed it (though nowhere near as much as audiences).  The first of what are now known as the "Gainsborough melodramas," The Man in Grey graduated Lockwood to the biggest names in British cinema, and while she never really succeeded in American pictures, she would stay a major draw at the British box office for the remainder of the decade.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in flashback, and is about the friendship between two women: Hesther (Lockwood), a proud woman who was once wealthy but has now lost her family fortune, and Clarissa (Calvert), a sweet heiress who wants to befriend Hesther.  The two have a falling out when Hesther runs off in an ill-advised marriage, and during their absence Clarissa marries Lord Rohan (Mason), who doesn't love her but wants to find an acceptable mate to carry on his line.  Clarissa is in love with Rokeby (Granger), but Rohan won't let her leave, despite the fact that after Hesther returns, it turns out he's in love with her.  While no one is happy in this scenario, it is Hesther who finally has enough, and when Clarissa comes down with a fever, she puts the fire out & opens the windows, essentially forcing her to succumb to pneumonia.  Before Hesther can marry Rohan, though, he realizes what she's done, and while he won't turn her in to the police, he decides he should inflict his own punishment-and beats her to death.

I have a confession to make-normally I watch these films chronologically, but I happened to watch next week's film first, so I actually know next week's movie is similar to this week's but better.  Part of that is that this film doesn't put Margaret Lockwood, whom I've discovered is an acting treasure, front-and-center.  Her Hesther is a side character, underwritten & underrepresented on the screen for Clarissa & her random inanities getting center stage.  This makes the film's latter half, which is still enjoyable, less riveting.

But I can't deny that Lockwood, even with a smaller part, doesn't own the screen.  As a woman bitter about her position in life (she wanted money, she felt she deserved it, and if love happened to come with it, that was incidental), she plays her role perfectly, reducing everyone around her to mere hurdles as she struggles to get her own way.  I loved the penultimate scene of the movie, even if it's far crueler than even Hesther deserved (where she's essentially beaten to death by her lover for killing his wife), as it's so out-of-character for a film of this era (there's no way that this movie could have been made in the United States at the time).  As I said, next week you'll discover that this leniency from the British film board could create one of the most scandalous pictures I've seen from the 1940's, one that puts Lockwood & her newfound penchant for villainy center stage.

OVP: So Proudly We Hail! (1943)

Film: So Proudly We Hail! (1943)

Stars: Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, Veronica Lake, George Reeves, Sonny Tufts

Director: Mark Sandrich

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Supporting Actress-Paulette Goddard, Visual Effects, Original Screenplay, Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Watching films made during World War II about World War II is such a strange situation.  This isn't a unique reality-films have been made during wartime about those wartimes in years since, particularly the wars in Afghanistan & Iraq (from an American perspective), but World War II has such finite dates & involves so many global players that watching those films during the war, about a war that the actors & filmmakers don't know the ending to is a bit surreal.  This is the case for So Proudly We Hail, a movie about American nurses who serve in the Philippines at the commencement of the war, leading up to the eventual surrender in the islands (and the Bataan Death March).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told largely in flashback, as the women, including Joan (Goddard), try to instruct the captain of the ship they've been rescued from why Janet (Colbert) is unable to speak & is basically catatonic.  In the flashback, the women talk about the harshness of wartime life, but also about their friendships and romances.  Both Joan & Janet fall in love, the former with a lug of a soldier nicknamed Kansas (Tufts), and the latter with Lt. John Summers (Reeves), a romance that threatens her being courtmartialed.  Along the way they meet another lieutenant, Olivia (Lake) who is scarred from the war & the death of her fiancé, which eventually bonds her to the other girls once she admits the pain she's been going through.  We eventually learn that Janet is haunted by how she left behind John, whom she marries in a rush as they are evacuating, but gets some assurance that he could be alive, and they'll have the farm they always dreamed of in America, thus making her speak again.

So Proudly We Hail is not a good movie (though it's not horrendous-two stars seems more than fitting).  The film is overlong, and it's pretty sappy.  I am a relatively consistent Claudette Colbert fan, but this isn't much for me.  Colbert is melodramatic & weirdly bad in this film.  Her breakdown on the dock is cringe-y, and her relationship with Reeves makes grounding her character difficult to do.  She plays her role as a boring saint (critics of her may claim she does this too often which I don't agree with), and the anchor of having a lead that doesn't fit the film makes the  movie kind of a drag.

Strangely, it's Veronica Lake, an actress I find fascinating (but is nowhere near the talent of Colbert) that totally nails her small part, and probably would've made the worthiest nomination of the bunch.  Her racist soldier suffering from PTSD after the death of her fiancé during the Pearl Harbor attacks ultimately cannot kill Japanese patients like she wants, and has to (in a gorgeous scene where she lets her down for the only time in the film, suddenly becoming VERONICA LAKE) sacrifice herself in order to save the rest of the nurses.

Instead it was Paulette Goddard who won the Oscar nomination for this film, the only one in her career and though Lake's the better of the two (for my money), it's easy to see why they went with Goddard as she breathes some oxygen into an otherwise dour movie.  She's terrific, flirting with Tufts repeatedly (they have a great rapport), and toes the line between man-hungry & dismissive of men (since they always pay attention to her).  She doesn't get any of the big scenes like Lake does, but she's energy & that's more than welcome.

Before we go, the film received two more nominations I should note.  The Cinematography is big, but not all that outstanding.  The Visual Effects are also big (the giant shots of the boats is gorgeous, and the one cinematography moment that feels fitting of the nomination), but I don't know that they're all that noteworthy compared to other things that we had seen before.  All-in-all, other than Goddard none of these nominations feel all-that-earned, and like they were rewarding the concept of these brave women more than the movie that housed them.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

Film: Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
Stars: Lon Chaney, Jr., Ilona Massey, Patric Knowles, Lionel Atwill, Bela Lugosi, Maria Ouspenskaya
Director: Roy William Neill
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

The Frankenstein movies might be my favorite franchise of the Universal Monsters (I also love Creature from the Black Lagoon, but haven't gotten to a lot of the sequels), but weirdly I skipped this movie the last time we did an October Horror Month on the blog, heading right into House of Frankenstein, the sixth movie in the series.  As a result, we're going to backtrack a little bit before we go forward (this will not be the final appearance of Frankenstein before our season is over), moving into a story that began the 1940's real cache of teaming up the monsters from multiple different pictures, something that would continue for the bad (some of the mid-1940's sequels left something to be desired) and the glorious (the genius Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, out-and-out the best film in the whole Universal canon).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film, though it involves Frankenstein, really centers on the Wolf Man, who at this point had not had another sequel to the launch of the franchise in 1941.  The movie takes place a few years after that film, with Larry Talbot (Chaney) dead, and surrounded by wolfsbane, which is keeping him so.  When grave robbers take his body out, he returns, and of course there's a full moon, so he kills these men & starts terrorizing the countryside.  The Wolf Man knows what he's doing is wrong, and tries to stop himself by finding a cure, seeking out the gypsy woman Maleva (Ouspenskaya) who knows of Larry's curse, as her son Bela made him a werewolf.  She sends him to the home of Ludwig Frankenstein, whom she thinks might be able to help him, and though he's dead he comes across his monster (Lugosi), who is then unleashed & causes havoc upon the village, with the aid of another curious young doctor (Knowles) who is also treating Larry, and on the night of a full moon, both monsters are unleashed quickly.  The two face off in the final moments of the film, while a flood comes to rush & destroy the Frankenstein Castle, presumably sweeping them away to their death (but we, of course, know better).

The Frankenstein sequels, like all of the Universal movies, can be watched out-of-order without issue-they're isolated tales, and the plot is pretty easy to follow even if you watch them out-of-sequence.  However, they are all the same spectacular story, which makes Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man so odd because of the previous casting decisions.  Chaney, for example, plays Larry Talbot here, but he'd also just played the Monster in Ghost of Frankenstein (at one point Universal considered putting Chaney, the film's biggest star at the time, into both roles but Chaney refused considering the demands on him in terms of the makeup chair), so the Frankenstein role is one he had just played in the previous film.  Even stranger is that Bela Lugosi was also in that film, playing Igor, and at the end of the film Frankenstein's brain is switched with Igor's but his face was not so now he looks like the previous film's Igor as Frankenstein.  And even more bizarre, Lugosi is also in The Wolf Man, playing the role of Bela, so between these three films in the franchise, Lugosi is playing three different parts (and since in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein Lugosi is brought back in the form of Dracula, four characters in the original Universal Monster multiverse are played by Bela Lugosi).

If you found that paragraph geekily delightful, then you'll probably like this movie, which I did.  Neither Chaney nor Lugosi are as good of actors as Boris Karloff, but this is Chaney's best character in the canon, and the script isn't too demanding on his acting abilities.  The same is true for Lugosi (wasted as the monster), but the script hums, and there's a perverse pleasure in seeing the Universal Monsters' lives start to be interwoven into the same narrative.  It might not be masterful moviemaking, but it's fun & quick & hit the right balance between camp & thrills.

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 Mummy's Tomb, 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: Cabin in the Sky (1943)

Film: Cabin in the Sky (1943)
Stars: Ethel Waters, Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong
Director: Vincente Minnelli
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"Happiness is a Thing Called Joe")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

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

It's not entirely clear if MGM, when it signed Lena Horne, had any intention of turning her into a proper movie star.  Though she was the first black performer signed to a legitimate star contract, the studio wasn't able to give her significant roles in major films due to laws in the South that forbade black performers from appearing in non-stereotypical parts (such as servants or slaves).  This meant that Horne only had one significant role in her time at MGM (last week's film, Stormy Weather, where she got the lead she was at Fox), as Georgia Brown in the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky, a very early film in the career of Vincente Minnelli.  We'll talk more about the rest of Horne's career at MGM next week, but as a film actress in Classical Hollywood, this was the biggest moment of her time at the studio that made it its business to ensure its contract players became stars.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a musical-comedy, and a picture with something of a familiar premise, though an enjoyable one.  Here we have Little Joe (Anderson), a gambler who is married to a sainted woman named Petunia (Waters).  Little Joe is always on the wrong side of the law, gambling and finding himself in trouble, so when he dies, he is sentenced to go to hell.  However, Petunia begs the lord to spare him, and so Little Joe is given six months to change his ways, but there's a catch-he won't have any memory of the afterlife, and such must find his way by himself.  An angel (Kenneth Spencer) and a demon (Rex Ingram) guide him toward their own sides, with Petunia being a strong influence, but soon Joe is no match for the demon's whiles of money and a sexy new girlfriend, Georgia Brown (Horne).  The film ends with Little Joe realizing that he loves Petunia, but it's too late-he's going to hell while she's going to heaven.  A repentant Georgia Brown gets Little Joe into heaven, but it turns out it's all been a dream-Little Joe is back with Petunia, and vows to live a decent life from now on.

The film is brimming with cliche, but honestly, you will not care because Cabin in the Sky is amazing.  I loved it.  The performances are interesting, with snappy one-liners (the scene where Horne & Waters, now dressed like a showgirl, throw shade at each other is delicious), and the musical numbers are spectacular.  I don't know a lot about Ethel Waters as a performer-I've never seen her most famous role, as Dicey in Pinky (for which she was nominated for an Oscar), but she nails this part.  At times saintly, at other times sexy as hell (the high kicks!), she steals the entire damn movie and has both actorly and movie star charisma to match.  Real talk-I don't understand why we don't talk about Waters as a performer more often, because if she was capable of this, it's a great tragedy that she never was afforded more significant roles (and you can bet Pinky just got bumped up on my "to do" list).

Horne is a supporting part, despite third billing, but she's having a grand time here.  She gets to play a vixen (there's a famous deleted scene where she's singing in a bubble bath that was cut by the censors), and she is having a blast doing it.  Her musical number of "Honey in the Honeycomb" is flirty & fun, and she is great as the woman trying to sway Little Joe down the wrong path.  But the best musical number in the film belongs to Waters, singing "Happiness is a Thing Called Joe."  It says something about Waters that this tune has been covered by everyone from Peggy Lee to Judy Garland to Bette Midler (some of the great singers of the American songbook), but I've never heard it sung with as much meaning and passion as I did Waters.  The film lost to the equally classic "You'll Never Know" by the magnificent Alice Faye (we talked about this movie here, and man is this going to be a tough OVP), but honestly-it's just one of many magical moments in a film that is way better than its reputation.  Horne should have become a star off of this-next week we will explore what happened when that didn't occur.

Stormy Weather (1943)

Film: Stormy Weather (1943)
Stars: Lena Horne, Bill Robinson, Cab Calloway, Katherine Dunham, Dooley Wilson
Director: Andrew L. Stone
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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


Looking at the career of Lena Horne presents a unique challenge that we haven't encountered in profiling any other star for this series to date.  While we have looked at actresses who were lesser-known (think Ruth Roman last year), they were still "leading ladies" long enough to come up with four films where they played a central role in the picture.  Otherwise, of course, they wouldn't generally be considered "stars."  This isn't really the case for Horne.  When she signed her contract with MGM in 1942, it was historic (the first African-American performer to sign a long-term star contract with a major studio), but MGM still had to deal with a South that wasn't willing to accept a black woman as a leading actress, and because there were few other black actors of her stature (and miscegenation laws precluded her from having an onscreen romance with a white man), she really only had small, cameo roles throughout her entire time at MGM...with two exceptions, only one of which was at her studio.  The first of those was Stormy Weather, a film made not for MGM but for Fox, which was one of the first major studio endeavors to feature a nearly all-black cast.


(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Bill Williamson (Robinson), a great dancer who is struggling to make a name for himself as a performer alongside his randy friend Gabe (Wilson).  They meet the beautiful Selina Rogers (Horne) on a night when she's singing (she's the sister of one of their fellow soldiers), and Bill is instantly smitten.  Selina takes a shine to him as well, though another headliner is staking his claim on her heart (here played by Babe Wallace).  The film shows how Bill continues to take a shine to Selina and welcomes stardom, but she chooses show business over him until the last act, while also indicating that Gabe's troublesome ways with women paid off as we see a flash forward to the future where he has multiple children.  The movie ends with Bill and Selina reunited on the stage again, perhaps willing to start their romantic relationship once more.

The plot of Stormy Weather is thin, even by 1940's musical standards, and I'll be real here-the movie isn't that good.  Putting aside the very, very big age gap between Horne and Robinson as paramours (at the time, Robinson was 65 and Horne was 26, and probably the only reason they were paired as they were two of the rare well-known black performers at the time), the movie goes on jaunts and tangents, and doesn't seem to have much interest in the two as a romantic couple.  It's hard to blame the movie too much for this (I would imagine considering its place in history that it's going to be a struggle to put anything but musical numbers into a movie like this, for risk of Fox making a political statement), but it has to be said that as a modern viewer, it's hard to appreciate this as a cohesive picture rather than just an almost variety act, even if I understand its historic significance.

That said, some of the musical numbers are fun.  Fats Waller (who died shortly after this movie was made) does a terrific version of "Ain't Misbehavin" and Ada Brown accompanies him in the saucy "That Ain't Right."  Robinson is still one of the great dancers, but it's hard not to think of how much better his jumping on drums would have been twenty years earlier when he was in his prime.  The best scene of all is Horne singing what would become her signature song, the titular "Stormy Weather."  There's an extended sequence of Katherine Dunham dancing during this number (I gasped initially when I thought some of the background dancers were topless, but instead it was just a visual trick as they wore sheer leotards), but it's Horne that brings it together.  Her powerful vocals and ability to put real emotion in them makes me excited as we continue to look at her this month, and also disappointed that she only got two chances to see her lead a picture-we'll get to the other movie she headlined next week.

The Hard Way (1943)

Film: The Hard Way (1943)
Stars: Ida Lupino, Joan Leslie, Dennis Morgan, Jack Carson, Gladys George
Director: Vincent Sherman
Oscar History: The film received no Oscar nominations, but Lupino won the New York Film Critics Circle Award, and was clearly close to being an Oscar nomination.
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 Ida Lupino-click here to learn more about Ms. Lupino (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Our "Saturdays with the Stars" series this season has focused on actresses who were major names in their era, but never received the blessing of Oscar-women that couldn't quite translate their names above the title into at least one citation from AMPAS.  That doesn't mean, however, that these women didn't come close to getting nominated.  Our series features three Golden Globe nominees (Cyd Charisse, Ruth Roman, and the woman whom we'll feature next month), as well as Linda Darnell, who was in serious conversation for a nomination at least twice (for Fallen Angel and A Letter to Three Wives), but none got quite as close as Ida Lupino in The Hard Way.  Only six women have ever won the NYFCC Award for Best Actress and not been an Oscar nominee eventually (and four are still alive, so they could well shorten that list)-one of them is Lupino.  She was widely assumed at the time, in fact, to be Warner's best shot at a contender in the Best Actress race, but a surprise nomination for Joan Fontaine in The Constant Nymph robbed Lupino of her only real shot at a nomination.  Let's see if Oscar got it wrong, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is centered around two sisters Helen (Lupino) and Katie Chernan (Leslie).  The movie watches as Helen wishes of getting out of a loveless marriage by any means necessary, and views her beautiful younger sister's show business dreams as a way to get there.  They cut a lucky break when Katie marries Albert Runkel (Carson), one half of a vaudeville duo who, along with the handsome Paul Collins (Morgan), whom Helen is drawn to, welcome Katie into their act and eventually Katie has eclipsed both of them, thanks to Helen's guiding hand.  The movie continues with Helen driving her sister further into stardom but in more nefarious ways, sacrificing her romantic happiness (twice) and once even ruining the chances of an alcoholic former starlet (played in a terrific little part by Gladys George) at a comeback.  The film ends with Katie finally giving up her sister to pursue Paul (long after first husband Albert has died from suicide), and Helen attempts suicide herself, realizing that she's given up so much of her life for a sister who wants nothing to do with her.

The film is fascinating even if it's heavy-handed.  The movie is a thinly-veiled (but still fictional) look at the early career of Ginger Rogers, with Lupino taking on the role of Rogers' notoriously ambitious mother Lela.  It'd have been more interesting if they'd stuck to Rogers' real-life, however, as the film's first half is considerably better than the second half, when the movie decides to treat Lupino like a villain rather than how she'd be treated today, as a cutthroat businesswoman who is determined to succeed (which, admittedly, some men would still consider a villain but I'm gay so I had more of a "YASS KWEEN!" reaction to Lupino throughout this movie).  In real life, Rogers didn't give up her career for a man-she in fact had one of the most storied, sustained careers in Hollywood for most of the Golden Age, but was never lucky in romance-she was married five times, and all marriages ended in divorce, and without children.  Rogers was by pretty much anyone's definition one of the most successful women of her era, but this movie's anti-feminist leanings toward the end would have indicted her in real life (by way of Katie) for choosing her flourishing career over a man who wanted her to be his maid & cook, and celebrate only his victories.  It's really disappointing that this is how this movie ended up, rather than emulating a film like All About Eve a few years later where the main character got to be both successful and have a love life, but the writers insist that we laud Katie for wanting marriage more than a career, and attempt to kill off Helen for doing the same.

That being said, the acting is swell here.  I already lauded George, but Leslie is good in her naive (but not fully naive) role as Katie, always willing to look the other way even when she knows what her sister is doing (still-one wonders what someone like Judy Garland, a more singular talent, would have done with this role).  Best of the bunch, though, is Lupino.  I'm still deciding who my favorite stars are of the women we've profiled in this series, but I can say without much hesitation that Lupino is the best actor of the bunch.  She knows what she's got with a complicated, complete role like Helen, and she nails it, finding nuance, verve, and just enough melodrama to elevate the movie in ways the script can't seem to understand.  This is the best performance we've seen from her, and while I haven't completed the 1943 Oscar lineup list, Lupino would have been a really worthy inclusion as a nominee.  It's hard not to think of what that would have meant for her career (considering how much Warner Brothers was dominating that particular ceremony with Casablanca and Watch on the Rhine, she might even have won!).  Instead, her acting career would begin to wane soon after this, and her cinematic career would take a decidedly different turn...but we'll get into that next week.

OVP: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)

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

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

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

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

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

OVP: Princess O'Rourke (1943)

Film: Princess O'Rourke (1943)
Stars: Olivia de Havilland, Robert Cummings, Charles Coburn, Jack Carson, Jane Wyman
Director: Norman Krasna
Oscar History: 1 nom/1 win (Best Original Screenplay*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Do you ever see really old movies and realize what masterpiece they clearly inspired?  Not just in terms of sequels and all of that, but in the sense that the film clearly inspired a much better movie down the road?  That was my feeling throughout the entirety of Princess O'Rourke, a comedy short on charms and laughs but thick on a really cute idea which would be used more elegantly and grandly in Roman Holiday a decade later.  But this is the film that I've been dealt next to review (with its Oscar-in-hand), and so I'll give it my best.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is one of those movies that you feel instantly like you've already seen and that you know will leave you pretty quickly after you're done with it, but it's not what you'd call a bad movie by any means.  The film follows Princess Maria (de Havilland) a princess exiled from her country during World War II who is living in a posh Manhattan hotel until the war is over, and during a case of being on sleeping pills while flying under an assumed identity (it makes sense in the movie) meets and falls for a commoner, an American pilot named Eddie O'Rourke (Cummings).  She likes the idea of being a normal person for a while, and eventually falls for Eddie, but cannot marry him because she's a princess.  The film takes a ridiculous turn in the final act, rather than the bittersweet direction Roman Holiday took, and actually has them get married by a Supreme Court judge with the aid of President Roosevelt's dog Fala (this makes less sense in the movie).

The movie is pretty dull and lifeless, though it does have the aid of Robert Cummings gamely playing the leading man.  Cummings, who is best known for his roles in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboetur and Dial M for Murder, is wildly likable and pretty cute as Eddie, a man who has trouble understanding his new wife's many duties (and while this occasionally veers into sexism, it takes a LOT longer than you'd expect).  I also enjoyed the banter he achieved with Jane Wyman and Jack Carson who play his best friends.

De Havilland, on the other hand, is like cinematic Valium.  I love de Havilland in general, but this is easily the driest work I've ever seen from her, but there is a reason for that.  Princess O'Rourke is the famed film that created the de Havilland Law, which stipulated that an actor could only be under contract to a studio for seven years.  At the time, the very hard-working de Havilland was one of Warner Brothers biggest stars but she felt they were taking advantage of her in this way by giving her trifling scripts (seeing the movie, she had a point).  Therefore, she sued to get out of her contract and won.  This may sound antiquated today when actors rarely have devotion to a studio, but this is still a rule used today (Chris Evans, for example, could only be under contract to play Captain America for seven years before Disney would have to renegotiate).

Overall, though, this is a pretty unsatisfying nomination and win for the Oscars, and perhaps it was just a recognition for Norman Krasna, who had been nominated three times previously without a victory and also directed the film.  His competition, though, included Lillian Hellman and Noel Coward, neither of which ever won an Oscar (as well as Dudley Nichols, who famously was the first person to refuse his Oscar), so this doesn't seem particularly compelling reasoning in hindsight.  All-in-all I have trouble believing this is where the OVP will land even if I haven't seen any of the other nominees.

Those are my thoughts on Princess O'Rourke-how about yours?  Have you seen the movie?  If so, what'd you think?  And if not, weigh in on Olivia de Havilland and Robert Cummings and some of your favorite performances of theirs.