OVP: Duel in the Sun (1946)

Film: Duel in the Sun (1946)

Stars: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Lionel Barrymore, Herbert Marshall, Lillian Gish, Walter Huston, Charles Bickford, Harry Carey, Butterfly McQueen

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Jennifer Jones, Supporting Actress-Lillian Gish)

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

As we discussed last week, Gregory Peck's initial career took off like a rocket, with huge hits such as The Yearling, Spellbound, and The Valley of Decision making him a household name pretty much overnight.  The late-1940's, though, were something of a disappointment.  He starred in another Hitchcock film, The Paradine Case, which was a big flop, as well as the western Yellow Sky and the romance The Great Sinner, neither of which set the box office on fire.  While Twelve O'Clock High and The Gunfighter would bring life back to his career, during this time frame he only had two really notable films.  The first was Gentleman's Agreement, which won the Best Picture Oscar (and got Peck his third nomination) and was a massive success, but one that I've seen before so it wasn't eligible for this series.  The second was one I had heard legend of after reading about movies for 25+ years, but somehow had avoided actually watching: David O. Selznick's infamous follow-up to Gone with the Wind, the soap opera western Duel in the Sun, our movie for today.

(Spoilers Ahead) Based on the novel by Niven Busch, Duel in the Sun is the story of a young biracial woman named Pearl Chavez (played by the very much not biracial Jennifer Jones), the daughter of a white father and a Mexican mother.  After her father (Marshall) kills her mother for having an affair, she's sent to live with his childhood sweetheart (and second cousin) Laura Belle (Gish) on a giant ranch she lives on with her husband Senator Jackson McCanless (Barrymore) and their two sons the proper Jesse (Cotten) and the lascivious Lewt (Peck).  This sets up an inevitable love triangle between the two men and Pearl, with her drawn to Jesse's decency, but clearly there is a hormonal attraction between she & Lewt that cannot be denied in the Texas heat.  Along the way, she tries to find ways of escaping Lewt, including marrying Sam Pierce (Bickford), but Lewt kills Sam, making him a fugitive from the law, but still Pearl can't stop her desire for him.  When it becomes clear that Jesse can save her, even after he's shot by Lewt trying, Pearl understands that the only way that she'll break free of Lewt is to kill him, which she does...but in the process, she also ends up in his arms, their desire in life to be together impossible to deny, even as they're literally murdering each other.

Duel in the Sun was not, it has to be said, Gone with the Wind.  Selznick's obsession with equalling his previous film's success, particularly with the woman he was obsessed with & having an affair with at the time, Jennifer Jones, is kind of the stuff of Hollywood legend.  This was a deeply troubled shoot, and cost nearly $8 million to make & promote, which was basically unheard of at the time, and so despite a solid box office, it barely broke even.  The problem, of course, was that it wasn't Gone with the Wind (nothing is, quite frankly, though Titanic probably comes close enough to earn comparison)-chasing that dragon is the stuff of heartache, even for the man who initially produced it.  The film is tackier, it's less enthralling, and no aspect of the production quite lives up to that film.

If you get past that comparison, though, it's not a bad movie even if it's clearly a "bad" movie.  The film rarely makes a lot of sense, but it goes off of impulse, all id and no ego.  But it's entertaining throughout.  The score is fun, the cinematography is really horny but it works (the cameramen are obsessed with the gorgeous Jones & Peck in all of their carnal lust).  The acting is bizarre, but not boring.  Jennifer Jones, whom I've seen enough of at this point to be able to say she wasn't a very good actress, makes so many choices, swinging for the fences in every scene, but it kind of works with the unbalanced nature of the script.  Save for Beat the Devil, this is undoubtedly Jones' most intriguing performance (at least of what I've seen), and while she's not Oscar-worthy, she certainly is something.  Lillian Gish is a bit bland in the only film that she'd be nominated for an Oscar for (it's a pity it wasn't for The Wind or The Night of the Hunter instead), likely getting it with one deathbed confessional, but overall playing a kindly matron in one of Oscar's worst Supporting Actress lineups.  Butterfly McQueen is playing basically the exact same character she got in Gone with the Wind, channeling Prissy as if that will get Selznick literally back to his original movie (she's the only principle actor to appear in both films).

And as for Gregory Peck?  His casting is...a choice.  I've talked about this a bit, but it's strange that Peck would become most associated with To Kill a Mockingbird, a film where he exudes absolute no sex appeal, because his exaggerated face (big eyes, pouty lips) and lanky frame were used to make audiences thirsty in the mid-1940's, and that's definitely the case here.  He looks hot in Duel in the Sun.  The only problem here is that Peck is not meant to be playing a "sexy math teacher" vibes like he'd play in most of his films of this era, but instead is supposed to be a dangerous "bad boy you make out with under the bleachers" sort of vibes, a forbidden sexiness that you know is wrong but you can't help it.  Peck, though, is not good at this-he's too inherently decent, and playing a villain here who also has to turn you on...it just doesn't work.

OVP: The Yearling (1946)

Film: The Yearling (1946)

Stars: Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman, Claude Jarman, Jr.

Director: Clarence Brown

Oscar History: 7 nominations/3 wins (Best Picture, Director, Actor-Gregory Peck, Actress-Jane Wyman, Art Direction*, Cinematography*, Film Editing, Juvenile Oscar-Claude Jarman, Jr.)

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

We're going to start our month devoted to Gregory Peck in 1946, about the time that Peck was finishing his first run of fame as a leading man.  Peck was a very quick study in Hollywood.  A back injury during a dance class prevented him from serving in World War II (the studio said it was a rowing accident, as it didn't want its handsome star to be skipping his military duty due to a lesson from Martha Graham), but unlike most stars we'll profile this year, he basically jumped straight into leading roles, and had quick success of it.  Though Days of Glory (his first movie) bombed, The Keys of of the Kingdom was a critical success, and won him his first Oscar nomination on only his second film (he'd lose to Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend).  He'd follow that film with two commercial smash hits-The Valley of Decision with Greer Garson, which was the highest-grossing film of 1945, and the well-regarded Spellbound with Ingrid Bergman, which was a huge hit for United Artists, and made the gorgeous Peck into something of a sex symbol.  This leads to The Yearling, which is our movie today, the film that won Peck his second Oscar nomination and was another big hit for the artist, who had just turned thirty & in the course of two years become one of the most bankable stars in North America.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling written by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and is the story of the Baxter family: father Penny (Peck), mother Ora (Wyman), and son Jody (Jarman).  Jody is the only living child they have after the others all died young, and Ora struggles to show affection for Jody for fear that he'll also be taken from her.  They live in a cabin in rural Florida, and try to make by with just each other, though Jody longs for a pet since he doesn't have any siblings.  Eventually, after his father kills a doe, he adopts a young fawn whom he names Flag (due to its tail), and loves it to the point where it's a household pet.  But Ora struggles with it, and eventually it becomes too much of a nuisance, eating up their cash corn crop that they were going to plant to buy a well.  Penny orders Jody to kill the deer, but instead he tells it to leave.  Because it's domesticated, it finds its way back to the farm, and Ora accidentally shoots it, injuring it, and Jody is forced to kill it to put it out of its misery (according to Hollywood legend, a young Maureen Reagan refused to speak to her mom for two weeks after watching the film she was so mad at her shooting the deer).  Jody runs away from the farm, but is eventually found and reunited with his family, including his mother who can now show him love, as she realizes that God won't take her final child away from her, as he has reached the stage of being a "yearling" (a term for a year-old deer who can fend for himself).

If that movie reads as Old Yeller, well, it kind of is.  Though Rawlings' book predates Fred Gipson's novel by nearly twenty years, the story of a boy & his dog has aged better in the public consciousness, and it's hard not to see the direct corollaries between the two.  The difference between the movies is that while the 1957 film became a family classic (and a massive hit) for Disney, it did not command seven Oscar nominations.  There's very little evidence in the annals of the Best Picture that "family" films have any welcome there, and this is one of the few movies of its kind to make the cut.  Given that distinction, it's a pity it's not better.  As a whole, the movie works-it's not a bad movie (evidenced by my 3-star rating above), but it's also not special.  The movie looks terrific because the glowing cinematography (conducted by three men, one of the only times the Cinematography Oscar went to three people for one film) kind of blinds you it's so ravishing, but there's very little there (the titular fawn doesn't even show up until an hour into the movie), and I suspect Oscar got soft for it because MGM sank a fortune into the picture (it cost nearly $4 million, which at the time was an exorbitant amount for a movie), and while it earned it back, I have to imagine the studio pushed for nominations for their large investment.

After Cinematography, though, the film's remaining nominations feel a bit at a loss.  I've never been a fan of Jane Wyman, and while she's better here than she usually is (I think she finds a restraint and the natural makeup look allows more expression in her face), it feels like she's always telegraphing to the audience (we get it, you can't show your children love...you don't have to underline it with every sentence).  Jarman, who won a Juvenile Oscar for this film, is from the "overly-expressive" school of child acting that was the norm in 1940's movies.  The Art Direction was good, but hardly inventive, and the editing...the movie is too long, and occasionally feels like it isn't well-organized (particularly the scenes with Jody's "sweetheart" that come out of nowhere).  As for Peck?  Well, Peck has probably never looked better, his sexy, expressive face & lanky frame a perfect fit for a too-short cabin and dewy camerawork, but he doesn't add much here other than being a stoic figure & a playmate of sorts for Jody.  This isn't his best work, or his best Oscar nomination.

OVP: A Stolen Life (1946)

Film: A Stolen Life (1946)

Stars: Bette Davis, Glenn Ford, Dane Clark, Walter Brennan, Charlie Ruggles

Director: Curtis Bernhardt

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Special Effects)

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

Walter Brennan worked his whole life, but weirdly Oscar gave up on him after 1941.  This is unusual not necessarily because Brennan has a lot of performances that warranted nominations in the years that followed.  After all, while Brennan was always a sturdy, scene-stealing presence in film he wasn't necessarily someone who, in my opinion, was given a lot of super plum roles in movies that demanded Academy attention in the way that say, Claude Rains was.  But it is odd because after Sergeant York, Brennan appeared in some really, really good movies, much better than any of the films that he actually won an Oscar for.  This week we're focusing on a film from 1946, and next week we're going to jump ahead a few decades (Brennan's long career demands some edits), so it's worth noting that between Sergeant York and into his run as a TV star on The Real McCoys, he appeared in film classics like To Have and Have Not, My Darling Clementine, Red River, and Rio Bravo, all of which are superb (and frequently clumped with the word "masterpiece").  None of these movies got Brennan another Oscar nomination, however, and while it's hard to say the man wasn't getting his due from the Academy (three statues is more than enough for even the greatest of thespians), this drought feels odd.  As I have seen all of Brennan's biggest classics from this era, we're going to focus today on another high-profile film, this one he did with Bette Davis & Glenn Ford: A Stolen Life.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie follows Kate Bosworth (Davis...and only upon proofreading this review did I realize she shares a name with the Blue Crush actress), a wealthy heiress who is making a go of it as an artist (unsuccessfully) who goes to stay with her sister Pat (also Davis), but on the way falls for a young man named Bill Emerson (Ford) who gives her a ride to the island that Pat lives on.  To try and get closer to Bill, Kate offers to paint Bill's friend Eben Folger (Brennan), who is a cranky lighthouse operator who doesn't love being part of the matchmaking (though he secretly respects Kate).  Pat, however, is a bit man-hungry and also wants whatever her sister has, and goes after Bill as well, and as she's showier & more glamorous, she gets him.  Kate takes up briefly with a poor artist named Karnock (Clark), whom she clearly has some feeling for, primarily because he's the only guy willing to tell her she's not a good artist, but it goes nowhere-she still loves Bill.

This is where the film goes into the deep end, literally and figuratively.  Pat & Kate go out on a boat, and while they're out on the sea, the boat capsizes, and Pat drowns.  However, as she's trying to save her, Kate gets Pat's wedding ring and manages to slip it on...with everyone assuming since they're twins that Kate is Pat, and Kate, desperate for Bill, goes along with the ruse.  This ends up being a fool's errand when she realizes that Pat & Bill's marriage is basically kaput, as Pat has been cheating on him, and though they eventually end up together (when Pat reveals that she's Kate), we get multiple scenes with Kate learning uncomfortable truths about her late sister.

The film strains credulity, obviously.  The idea that a man couldn't tell his own wife apart from her sister (never mind that ANYONE else couldn't tell them apart either, even though they have polar opposite personalities) is absurd.  But if you get past that, it's kind of a silly fun melodrama.  This was during the nadir of Davis career, or at least one of them (Davis, like most long-lasting Classical Hollywood stars, had a lot of ebbs-and-flows in her career), when most of the best roles on the Warner Brothers lot were going to Joan Crawford post her Mildred Pierce Oscar win.  This film made a fortune when it first came out (there was still demand for Davis), but it was not well-received by critics, and would be followed by a series of flops for the performer, who would have to wait another four years before the crown jewel of her career, All About Eve.  But with enough distance, I liked this-it's stupid, but Davis is great in both roles & a joy to watch.  Weirdly, this is one of two films that stars Davis as her own sister-anyone else think I should check out Dead Ringer?

Two quick notes before we go.  You'll notice I didn't mention Brennan, and that's because he's barely in the movie.  He plays the curmudgeonly old man well (it's Walter Brennan, that's his raison d'être) but he disappears from the back half of the movie and has little impact on the plot, so there's not a lot to say about him.  And the film won one Oscar nomination, for Best Special Effects, and while it's a relatively singular effect, the one scene early in the film when both sisters are introduced and Davis shares the screen with herself is quite impressive.  Particularly given this had to be done entirely with trick photography rather than CGI, you see no seams onscreen indicating when Davis is working with no one or a body double.  It didn't win, but the nomination was well worth it.

Sentimental Journey (1946)

Film: Sentimental Journey (1946)

Stars: John Payne, Maureen O'Hara, William Bendix, Cedric Hardwicke, Connie Marshall

Director: Walter Lang

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

John Payne's film career, if it's remembered at all by modern audiences, is remembered for his association with a holiday classic.  In 1947, Payne played Fred Gailey, the romantic led in Miracle on 34th Street, which would become a major hit for 20th Century Fox and a huge player at the Oscars that year, nominated for Best Picture and winning Best Supporting Actor for Edmund Gwenn.  I've seen Miracle many times through the years, so it obviously doesn't qualify for a series where I'm only watching movies for the first time.  However, Payne made a film the year before that also featured Maureen O'Hara (his Miracle costar) and a young child, here Connie Marshall, called Sentimental Journey, which like Miracle was a box office success.  As a result, I figured that the combination of Payne & O'Hara felt like a good way to mark Miracle with something new.  Unfortunately for me, the costars are where Sentimental Journey ends its overlap with the celebrated Christmas perennial.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie features Bill (Payne) and Julie Wetherly (O'Hara), a childless couple who spend their days making beautiful New York theater together while summering in what appears to be a posh Hamptons home.  One day, Julie, who is a bit of a dreamer, meets a kindred spirit-a young orphan girl named Hitty (Marshall) who spends most of her time fantasizing about Camelot and other long-ago fantasy worlds.  Julie wants to adopt the girl, and though he's tepid to the suggestion, Bill goes along with it.  But's it's clear Bill & Hitty don't get along, with him not understanding the dreamworld that Julie shares with her, and their marriage is facing a strain to the point where Julie is going to give Hitty back to the orphanage...when suddenly she dies of a heart attack.  This sets up a bizarre third act where Hitty & Bill mourn Julie's loss in different ways, but instead of Bill growing to realize he needs to change his life for his adopted daughter, instead Julie's ghost teaches Hitty how to take care of Bill first. This results in them becoming codependent on each other in the same way they were Julie when they were alive.

If you're reading that paragraph and thinking "that sounds unhealthy, and a little creepy"...you'd be right.  Sentimental Journey is obviously a product of its time, and in 1946 women, even young girls, were trained from an early age to be wives-and-mothers, but even under that guise Julie telling her adopted daughter from beyond-the-grave how to make her widower husband's favorite meals and plays his favorite music...it's off-putting, and I hated it.  I'm usually onboard with a sudsy melodrama of this era and I try not to judge a movie too harshly if it is mirroring the morals of its time, but this one was a step too far, and I wasn't having it once O'Hara died.

It doesn't help matters that Payne is a completely asshole.  He plays his Bill as a louse who has to rely upon his wife for mothering as much as he does the wifely needs, despite being a grown man.  When he tries to bond with Hitty, he doesn't remotely try to understand this young girl's world of make believe, and the movie tries to frame it as perfectly understandable even if it's really about a grown man abandoning a girl to an orphanage because she's "a little different."  I'll admit it-with one more film left from Payne coming up next week, I'm really drawing a blank on finding a lot to love in his film career save for Miracle, where he gives like the fourth best performance in the movie as it is.

OVP: The Dolly Sisters (1945)

Film: The Dolly Sisters (1945)

Stars: Betty Grable, John Payne, June Haver, SZ Sakall

Director: Irving Cummings

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"I Can't Begin to Tell You")

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

World War II is a fascinating time frame in Hollywood partially due to the impact that it would have on the legends of some actors' careers.  Certain stars, specifically Jimmy Stewart & Henry Fonda, ended up having some of the most fruitful years of their career after the War, using their service careers as a way to launch the next stage of their stardom.  Other actors like John Wayne never served, in part out of fear that the opportunities (and plum paydays) that were there for them before the war might be taken away if they stopped working.  John Payne was somewhere in the middle of these two.  Payne did not see active battle, but did serve briefly as a flight instructor for the Army Air Corps until September 1944.  Payne, though, wasn't the star that Fonda or Stewart had been before, and when he came back to Hollywood, his options were limited.  His first major film after the end of the war was once again him playing second fiddle to one of the Fox lot's leading ladies (Betty Grable).

(Spoilers Ahead) The Dolly Sisters is about two sisters Jenny (Grable) and Rosie Dolly (Haver) who are trying to break into show business.  Thanks to a chance meeting with a songwriter named Harry Fox (Payne), they meet Oscar Hammerstein and suddenly become major stars as a sister act.  The only problem is that Harry & Jenny are in love, and Harry is jealous of his wife being more famous than him, and wants her to perform with him on the road.  This doesn't happen, though-Jenny won't abandon her sister, and as a result she & Harry divorce during World War I.  While Harry is off fighting, and eventually becoming famous, Jenny becomes a gambling addict & gets involved in a car crash that nearly kills her.  The film ends with the two of them, despite Harry having a girlfriend (who conveniently dumps him when she sees he still loves Jenny), singing onstage with Rosie, a happily ever after for all three.

The Dolly Sisters is based on real-life sisters who had a decidedly different life.  Their real life was far more scandalous than a movie in 1945 would allow.  In real life Jenny never reunited with Harry Fox, and instead spent much of the 1920's romancing a series of monarchs (which is only briefly alluded to in this movie), and both sisters broke up their act (sometimes for show to sell tickets) and occasionally swapped lovers.  Jenny ended up marrying again, but the depression following a car accident caused her to tailspin, and she committed suicide in 1941 by hanging herself.  Rosie never really got over this, retreating from the public eye, attempting suicide herself in 1962 (unsuccessfully) and dying of a heart attack in 1970.

Suffice it to say, these women are fascinating, but this movie isn't.  Without the ability to show what these sisters' painful personal lives were really like, the movie feels adrift, and Grable & Haver (who purportedly didn't like each other in real life) have very little chemistry together.  Worst of the trio, though, is Payne.  I'm hoping in our final two weeks we get to a John Payne performance that I enjoy, but man is his Harry a charmless ass.  He basically blackmails his successful wife into giving up her career so she can support his unsuccessful one...which causes her to go into a deep depression that nearly ruins her life, and yet we're supposed to be happy they end up together?  I don't think so, and Payne doesn't see to be able to find any sort of personality in this cad of a love interest.  The film's score is nothing to write home about (Grable & Haver join the cavalcade of classic film stars who did blackface with the horrendously racist "The Darktown Strutters Ball"), even the slumber-inducing ballad "I Can't Begin to Tell You" which won an Oscar nomination in 1946 (not sure what the deal is with it coming a year after the film's release) is totally forgettable.

OVP: The Stranger (1946)

Film: The Stranger (1946)

Stars: Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Philip Merivale, Konstantin Shayne

Director: Orson Welles

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Motion Picture Story)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Loretta Young: click here to learn more about Ms. Young (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The last two weeks we went through some wild shifts in Loretta Young's career and public persona.  While she'd been able to pull off some unique and more audacious roles in the early 1930's, the Hays Code and Young's relative conservatism offscreen led her to play very similar "beautiful saint" type roles for much of the rest of her career.  This was solidified in terms of her public persona in the 1940's with her three-decade marriage to Tom Lewis, providing even less fodder for Hollywood gossip rags after her quickie annulment marriage in the early 1930's and association with Clark Gable.  However, Young did make one film in the 1940's that feels atypical & also is widely-celebrated today, and before we get to a relatively typical film that we'd expect from Young during this era next week, we're going to discuss probably the best movie she ever made, and for sure the film that stands up the best upon scrutiny decades later: Orson Welles' The Stranger.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in the immediate aftermath of World War II, in an idyllic Connecticut town.  There we find Professor Charles Rankin (Welles) who is about to marry the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice named Mary (Young).  We also learn that the man we've been tracking for the first ten minutes of the movie, a war criminal named Meinike (Shayne) is looking for Rankin, and knows him to actually be Franz Kindler, a Nazi and the architect of the Holocaust.  Kindler murders Meinike to cover up his intentions, which are to wait out in this Connecticut town until the Nazis "inevitably" come to power again.  The only problem for Kindler is that a detective named Wilson (Robinson) is on his trail, knowing of Kindler's obsession with clocks (which Welles spends much of the film working on the large town clock) and that Meinike is the only person who knows his real identity.  This sets up a game of chess between the two men (or checkers, as it were, which play as a subplot metaphor between Kindler & Wilson), with Kindler trying to find a way to cover his tracks...potentially even if it means having to kill Mary to do it.

The Stranger is really well-constructed.  Welles never really made a bad movie in my opinion, and this one with the backing of a studio (RKO) meant that he could spend money, and it doesn't go to waste.  The art direction is superb, as is the cinematography (all of those random angles in the clock tower make it harder to know exactly what is happening, which adds to the suspense of the final face-off between Young, Robinson, & Welles).  Robinson & Welles play well together, and I wasn't entirely sure they would (they're both very stylized actors, but Robinson is more sandpaper and Welles is more cashmere, and I thought that wouldn't gel but it does).  The film was nominated for Best Motion Picture Story, and the way that it's structured (no tight ends-at less than 90 minutes this is a taut film) it's hard to argue with this inclusion.  I love the way that late in the film a plan that Kindler has executed works perfectly as far as he's aware...only to discover later that Mary has accidentally screwed it up by not knowing what the plan is about.  Or the way that Wilson realizes that Kindler is suspicious not because of his bombastic views on fascism, but instead because of his casual antisemitism which shows his actual beliefs.  It's good stuff, and I get why The Stranger is the one film in Welles' directorial filmography that was an unquestioned hit for the studio.

As for our star?  While she's not in the same league as Welles & Robinson in terms of elevating her role, she's really good in this.  It's a smaller part (despite Young's position on the poster, we'd consider this a "supporting" role today as the leads are Robinson & Welles), but she's perfectly-cast here.  Welles knows exactly how to play off of Young's real-life persona with his director, having her play the "perfect wife" but showing how that can make her complicit in some really ugly things.  To Young's credit, she nails the part exactly the way that you'd need to make it chilling.  We know Kindler is evil, we know Mary is good...but the film makes a point of showing that Mary knows far more about Kindler's actions (even if she doesn't know he's a Nazi) to the point where she's covering up a murder the back half of the film, putting multiple people's lives at stake.  Throw in her really strong third act when she finally wants revenge on Kindler & to take him down, and you've got a great piece-of-work from the actress, and one that stands apart in her collective filmography.

She-Wolf of London (1946)

Film: She-Wolf of London (1946)

Stars: June Lockhart, Don Porter, Sara Haden, Jan Wiley, Lloyd Corrigan

Director: Jean Yarbrough

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 entering the final week of our Halloween Classic Horror Month, and with that we're hitting the conclusion of our three years worth of Universal Monster Movies.  Today we are discussing the finale of the initial Wolfman series, and we're weirdly getting a break from Lon Chaney Jr. even though this is the part that made him a star.  Instead, we're going to head into a mildly different direction, one that is more about bumps in the night than opulent makeup & iconic monsters with She-Wolf of London, a spinoff of the series featuring future TV staple June Lockhart.

(Spoilers Ahead) Set at the turn-of-the-century, we see Phyllis Allenby (Lockhart), a beautiful-but-sheltered woman who is engaged to be married to the wealthy Barry Lanfield (Porter).  She lives with her Aunt Martha (Haden) and cousin Carol (Wiley), though we learn early in the film that they aren't actually her relatives, but instead are her relatives through Martha's relationship with Phyllis's late father (first as his intended, then as his housekeeper when she spurned him...basically they are in a position they have no legal standing to be in since they're living in Phyllis's house without any claim to her fortune).  Phyllis starts to believe that the murders that are occurring in the nearby parks are actually the result of her turning out to be a werewolf, a legend associated with her family, but as we continue, it becomes pretty obvious that there is no werewolf, and it is Aunt Martha trying to drive Phyllis mad, and in the process both keeping her access to the fortune and securing Barry for Carol, ensuring she marries a wealthy man in the way that Aunt Martha didn't.  In the end, Barry & Phyllis end up together (and Carol ends up with her penniless lover), while Aunt Martha falls down the stairs and stabs herself in the heart in the process.

She-Wolf of London is unusual in the long run of Universal monster movies for a variety of reasons.  For starters, it's one of the only (I think the only-I've got one more to go but so far this is it) films in the series to not actually feature the titular monster.  Aunt Martha is not a werewolf (though she is a cold-blooded murderer), and so the title character doesn't actually exist, and is just a figment of everyone's imagination.  It also is more plot-heavy as a result.  You do, in fact, need to pay attention because most of the clues are given to you in the first few minutes of the film, and though it's not a hard-to-follow plot, it is a film that has a plot, unlike most of the Mummy movies we've been frequenting in the past few weeks.

The problem is that it's just not very good.  While some of the parts are plum, particularly Aunt Martha, the actors in them aren't strong enough to keep this campy or scary enough to hold your attention.  It's not an actively bad movie, but it's more disappointing because there's promise here.  Lockhart would eventually become not just the toast of Broadway, but a television staple in the decades to come as a series regular on Lassie, Lost in Space, and Petticoat Junction, but so new to her career (she was not yet 21 when this was released), she doesn't have this role down, and Sara Haden (most famous today for her work on the Andy Hardy pictures), is trying her best to be Judith Anderson, but she's...not talented enough to pull it off.  She-Wolf of London therefore becomes a missed opportunity rather than a failure with this ensemble.

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 Curse, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Mummy's Ghost, The Uninvited, 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 Green Years (1946)

Film: The Green Years (1946)

Stars: Charles Coburn, Tom Drake, Beverly Tyler, Hume Cronyn, Gladys Cooper, Dean Stockwell, Jessica Tandy

Director: Victor Saville

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Charles Coburn, Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I got asked recently whether it was hard to write reviews of bad movies, and I answered honestly that it wasn't.  Bad movies can be fascinating even if they're bad, because of the ways that they're bad.  A bad movie has a perspective, it has something to say & it just totally gets lost in saying it.  The harder reviews (for me) to write are movies that just sort of sit there.  These kinds of movies exist every year, but they do show up in a specific style in the 1940's, when the world had endured a difficult war & people wanted to see pleasant things with limited conflict.  The most famous examples of this type of film are Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, which are not so much movies as a series of motifs that have very little conflict & clear answers to every problem that comes along.  I don't enjoy these types of movies because while I get why they exist, they are not compelling in retrospect, and unfortunately for me, The Green Years falls into this category.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is centered around Robert Shannon (Stockwell as a boy, Drake as an adult), an orphan who must live with relatives, and becomes attached to his great-grandfather Alexander Gow (Coburn), an unkempt fellow who serves as an unlikely role model for the straight-laced young lad.  The movie expands upon their relationship, and the complicated day-to-day life of this poor Scottish family as they enter the modern age & World War I, and shows how Robert becomes a doctor against the odds.

Like I said, the film doesn't really have much there-there's no proper conflict to the film.  Hume Cronyn is meant to play the villain, but really all he does is sit there hoarding nonexistent fortunes, and most of the plot is "we're poor, and who will get the money?"  There are major moments of pain (including two out-of-the-blue deaths, one a bit galling as a classmate of Robert's is run over by a train, thus giving Robert a scholarship opening to go to medical school), but they don't register & the film doesn't know how to capitalize on them.  It's not helped by the fact that Drake & Beverly Tyler's romance is a dud, and you don't want to spend any time with the main characters.  I'm going with the rare 1-star not exactly because it was bad, but because it has so little risk, and even that risk doesn't pay off.

The film won two Oscar nominations, for Best Supporting Actor & Cinematography.  Coburn could play this part in his sleep, and while it's fun, there's nothing much to it.  He's playing this role simply as a warm old man who is cantankerous...and yet is generous from the get-go with this orphaned boy.  He's supposed to be cantankerous, but they don't even bother to have him thaw to the boy as the film progresses.  The Cinematography is a nonstarter for me as well-nothing distinguishes the mostly interior scenes, and there's barely any closeup shots that work well.  Overall, it's the type of movie that you won't remember, which makes it an even greater sin than merely being bad.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

Film: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
Stars: Lana Turner, John Garfield, Cecil Kellaway, Hume Cronyn
Director: Tay Garnett
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

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

By 1946, Lana Turner would have been forgiven for being tired of her career.  She had been a star at MGM for years at this point, and had gone a long way from where we saw her in Love Finds Andy Hardy last week.  Turner, who collected husbands with the frequency people usually only reserve for birthdays & filing their taxes, had been married three times during her early years at MGM, and given birth to her only child, Cheryl.  Her film work was less inspired, though.  She starred opposite major leading men of the era (Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, & James Stewart), to name a few, but with the exception of 1942's Johnny Eager, none of them are well-remembered today, and it's probable that Turner herself wouldn't be either were it not for today's film, which started an entirely new career for Turner as a more serious actress.  Today, we go to the film noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows drifter Frank Chambers (Garfield), a man who shows up one day at a gas station where he meets a gruff old drunk Nick (Kellaway), who is married to an alarmingly beautiful, much younger woman Cora (Turner).  Cora and Frank, away from Nick's drunken gaze, start a passionate love affair that results in them eventually wanting to kill Nick.  The two have a half-hearted attempt that goes awry when a cat knocks out the power, scaring Cora from murdering her husband and just injuring him.  Nick doesn't remember the attack, but this puts them in the crosshairs of the law.  Despite this, they go ahead and actually kill Nick, trying to make it look like a traffic accident but are discovered by a district attorney who arrests Cora for both Nick's death and for attempting to kill Frank (who is injured in the car accident).  Her sleazy lawyer (Cronyn) manages to trick her into signing a confession, but doesn't give it to the DA, and instead just proves to her that she's capable of turning on Frank (as he has already done with her).  She get off on a technicality, getting manslaughter (that turns into probation), and the two continue living together, eventually marrying to try and ebb simmering gossip about the two, but they despise one another.  The two both seem like they're on the brink of killing one another, and then Cora has a change of heart, giving Frank the opportunity to let her drown, but he doesn't, and they are about to start a new, cooler life together when a car accident (a real one this time) results in Cora dying, and Frank being charged with her murder.  Even though he's innocent this time, he accepts that he was guilty of murdering Nick, and this is a fitting punishment, especially without the woman he loved.

The film, as you can tell, is thickly-plotted (as is the wont of most noir, where body counts are high & the betrayal is omnipresent).  However, up until the last ten minutes or so, you won't give a damn because Postman is glorious.  It's seedy, ruthless, and sexy-as-hell.  Turner & Garfield have a smoldering chemistry that works miracles onscreen, and while Kellaway is miscast (you never really understand why Cora married such a louse in the first place or why she doesn't particularly like him since he seems like he's been like this forever), Cronyn is superb and nasty in the supporting role.  If this was the type of film that got Oscar nominations, he would have been on the Academy's shortlist for sure (I suspect he'll be on mine).

The ending I didn't love.  I have not read the classic novel by James M. Cain (I'll probably give it a couple of years before I do so that it feels at least a little new & fresh), so I don't know if the ending is that much different from the film's, but I don't entirely buy that Cora, as portrayed here, would have forgiven Frank, and it feels like a rushed ending after so much cruelty and plotting back-and-forth.  Shouldn't Cora, always ready with the upper-hand (or the world ready to give it to her) have lived through the finale, or at least have run off with Cronyn's lawyer, tricking Frank into taking the fall for a murder that didn't happen?  I guess I just kept hoping we'd found out she made it, as it's hard to imagine a car accident would have felled such a spirit.

That's because Turner is amazing in Postman.  I've seen a few of Lana Turner's movies, including her Oscar-nominated work in Peyton Place, and I have to say-she's never been better.  We don't need the saucy melodrama of Turner's real life to sell this movie-it's all just a great performance from an actress at the top of her field.  Turner has never looked more radiant, and never been more sexy.  The femme fatale trope has been a savior for other actresses, and the downfall of more still, but Turner not only gives us a great performance, it's a genre-topping one.  She quickly joins the ranks of Jane Greer in Out of the Past or Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place as one of the better femme fatales in the genre.  It's no wonder MGM saw this performance and thought, "maybe we're under-serving this actress."  Next week, we'll see what happens when Turner gets a more traditionally "awards bait" role as she encounters one of the giant epics of 1947.

Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)

Film: Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)
Stars: June Allyson, Lucille Bremer, Judy Garland, Kathryn Grayson, Van Heflin, Lena Horne, Dorothy Patrick, Van Johnson, Tony Martin, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Robert Walker, Cyd Charisse, Angela Lansbury
Director: Richard Whorf (Vincente Minnelli, Busby Berkeley, Henry Koster, & George Sidney all also directed scenes in what sounds like a rough shoot, but none were credited)
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.

For the past two weeks we have focused on the two major highlights of Lena Horne's film career during Classical Hollywood.  Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky were big deals, major motion pictures that starred African-American casts and were distributed by major studios.  However, these were anomalies.  For much of Horne's career in the 1940's and 50's, her film career was that of mere cameos.  Frequently she'd appear in films like Thousands Cheer, Swing Fever, and Ziegfield Follies as nothing more than someone that could belt out a classic tune, and then move on with the plot, oftentimes playing herself or simply a "famous singer."  This was because, since Horne was not playing stereotypical roles like maids or servants, she couldn't be seen in movies of the era in the South, and the studio couldn't afford to put her in major productions for risk that the lack of a southern box office would mean they couldn't recoup some of their investment.  This becomes particularly bitter with a movie like Till the Clouds Roll By, a 1946 MGM extravaganza, but we'll get to why in a second.

(Spoilers Ahead) Till the Clouds Roll By is the first of a quartet of biopics produced by the studio during this era where it's loosely based on the life of a famed composer (in this case Jerome Kern, as played by Robert Walker), but mostly it's an excuse for the studio to put its biggest musical stars into the picture singing the greatest hits of those composers (worth noting that the second of these films, Words and Music, also starred Lena).  As a result, the plot here is a bit thin, even by the standards of a 1940's musical.  We have Kern, falling in love with his wife Eva (Patrick), being mentored by another composer James Hessler (Heflin), and eventually trying to find some sort of path for Hessler's daughter Sally (Bremer) when she turns out spoiled & eventually, a runaway.  All of this is told in flashback by Kern to his cab driver on the night of Show Boat's premiere, which would help him to reach a new echelon of success.

The film on its merits is, well, a mixed bag (charitably).  I actually knew very little about Kern's life, and it's worth noting that while there are countless standards here, you might not be as familiar with him as you'd think either.  With the exception of Show Boat, while his songs are still well-known from other shows, none of his musicals are really done anymore, and so he's not recalled in the same way that someone like Rodgers & Hammerstein or Lerner & Loewe might be today since their films/musicals are more frequently revived.  However, the acting in this portion is dreadful (even performers as gifted as Walker or Heflin can't sell this dreck), and you spend the entire movie wishing they'd get back to the singing.

That's because the musical numbers in Till the Clouds Roll By are sublime.  Angela Lansbury sings for the first time onscreen in the cheeky "How'd You Like to Spoon Me" and Judy Garland (very pregnant with Liza Minnelli during the shoot) is at her "awe shucks" best with "Look for the Silver Lining."  Some of the numbers are cut short (at 135 minutes, this is a particularly long film) to make way for the unnecessary plot, such as Dinah Shore's "The Last Time I Saw Paris" and, most regrettably, a ballet between Cyd Charisse & Gower Champion to "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," but you'll leave being enchanted by these numbers.

And no songs are more enchanting than Lena Horne's two numbers, for my money the best in the production (and look at that cast list-this is hardly an ensemble filled with backbenchers).  Her "Why Was I Born?" is regal & glorious.  Horne once opined in an interview (with Judy Garland, oddly enough) that she always struggled to "sing pretty," but I don't know that anyone has ever looked so glamorous while singing in Classical Hollywood-if they have, I can't recall it.  Watching this scene, you'll either cry because you're moved, or because you are so angry that MGM couldn't have given Horne some proper classic musicals during this era.

Because, as the other song showed, Horne never really got a chance after Stormy Weather & Cabin in the Sky.  Here she sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" from Show Boat, one of the biggest numbers for Julie Laverne.  Horne desperately wanted the part when MGM decided to make the actual film, and in fact her costar here Kathryn Grayson (who plays Magnolia Hawks in Clouds' production of Show Boat) ended up playing the part she plays in this 1946 film when the big-screen Show Boat was made in 1951.  However, thanks to the Hays Code banning interracial romance onscreen, Horne's part was given to her friend Ava Gardner, a white woman despite the part being written for a biracial woman.  As a result, a role that Horne was born to play (and does so beautifully here) went to a woman who didn't even end up singing onscreen.  Combined with her regret over not getting the title role in Pinky (which won Jeanne Crain, another white woman playing a biracial performer, an Oscar nomination), Horne essentially left Hollywood for Vegas and the nightclub circuit.  Next week we will conclude our look at Horne with one last film role, far removed from the oppression Classic Hollywood put on her acting career.

OVP: The Killers (1946)

Film: The Killers (1946)
Stars: Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien, Albert Dekker, Sam Levene, Vince Barnett
Director: Robert Siodmak
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Director, Original Score, Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.


During the classical era of Film Noir (the 1940's and 50's), the genre only enjoyed mild success with Oscar.  Just six films (The Letter, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, Crossfire, and Sunset Boulevard) were cited for the Best Picture, none of them winning (in fact, unless you consider The French Connection to be a noir film, you have to wait until 2007 for a proper noir film to win, even if it's neo-noir).  However, a weird thing happens when you expand to Best Director, as the number of films cited nearly doubles.  One of these films is The Killers, a film that did surprisingly well in 1946 with Oscar despite starring a newcomer (this is Burt Lancaster's film debut) and an actress that Oscar usually kept at arm's length (Ava Gardner), scoring a quartet of nominations and likely coming close to a Best Picture citation.  This trivia is worth remembering as we explore the film, knowing that it's one of the few films we're profiling this month that was genuinely critically-acclaimed at the time of its release, and not just rescued later by cinephiles.


(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers around the Swede (aka Ole Andreson, aka Pete Lund, aka Burt Lancaster), who is being pursued by two men, hired killers who stand up the diner where the Swede frequently eats, and eventually find him in a hotel room where they shoot him in cold blood, but weirdly the Swede doesn't run from his impending death or struggle, but just lets it happen.  We then see insurance investigator Jim Reardon (O'Brien) look into the life of the Swede, feeling that there is something fishy about his death.  He tracks down the Swede's identity, and hears the story of his life through a series of interviews, getting closer & closer to the truth, and eventually learning that the Swede once staged a robbery with a criminal "Big Jim" Colfax (Dekker) and successfully pursued Big Jim's girlfriend Kitty Collins (a dynamite moniker, and perhaps one that could only be sported by an Ava Gardner character).  The Swede is accused of running off with the money, but this is actually part of a long con by Kitty and Big Jim, who never broke up and are in fact married in domesticity years later, and have essentially put the fix on the Swede, knowing that he must die or the other men in the heist could someday figure out that it was Big Jim who was the double-crosser, not the Swede.  The film ends with Big Jim dying in a shootout, seconds before he might help save his wife from the chair with a deathbed confessional.

The movie is based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway, though only the first twenty minutes focuses on Hemingway's original work, and it shows in the sense that the first twenty minutes is arguably the tightest of the picture.  This sounds like an insult, as almost none of the characters who matter in the picture (those played by Lancaster, Gardner, O'Brien, and Dekker) are actually a part of the first twenty minutes, but just know that there's a tightness to those first twenty minutes that would be impossible to carry forward through a 100 minute picture, and if that had occurred this would rank as a classic in the vein of Double Indemnity or Laura, rather than a more "forgotten classic."

Still, the rest of the movie is pretty great, even if it never hits the emotional high of those first opening scenes.  There are clear parallels to Citizen Kane here, with the Swede being dead for nearly the entire movie (so it's the how not the what that the audience is curious about), but the interesting twist compared to Welles' magnum opus is that Charles Foster Kane is the most famous man in the country, while the Swede is so unknown to even those closest around him that many of them don't know his real name, and in a lot of ways he dies a mystery, a tool to be used or projected upon by those around him..  The only thing we do know is that he is desperately, hopelessly in love with Kitty Collins, enough so that it causes his own demise.  Lancaster was making his screen debut with The Killers (which was the cover photo of the book that I mentioned in our series kickoff), and may be giving the best performance from him that I've seen.  He's swaggering, sexy, and with a great deal of brute malice in his work that instantly shows the draw of the Swede and also why it's so easy for Kitty to con him.  Gardner is good, but doesn't quite sink into the character the way, say, Barbara Stanwyck would have given the same material.  Still, Gardner has never been so glamorous and beautiful, and considering how the role is written, she really doesn't need to be much more than an object of desire.  Best of all is Vince Barnett as a ginned-out former cellmate of the Swede's.  Barnett gets an awesome soliloquy in the middle of the picture about the stars and planets, to the point where if this was in contention for a Best Picture nomination, he was probably in the cards for a Best Supporting Actor nomination.  Though he doesn't get the same level of credit as ubiquitous character actors like John Carradine & Ward Bond do, Barnett appeared in hundreds of movies (though IMDB lists less, his obituary has him pegged at 400 movies...even if we just count his IMDB page it's a lengthy CV), so this might have been an appropriate way to honor his work in hindsight.

Previous Films in the Series: The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep (1946)

Film: The Big Sleep (1946)
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone
Director: Howard Hawks
Oscar History: No nominations-film noir usually struggled in this department, but it seems weird that such a storied movie didn't land somewhere.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.

All of the films we're profiling for our Film Noir Series this month are classics, movies that I have desperately wanted to see that arguably I should have seen by this point but hadn't.  That being said, there is perhaps no movie we are going to chronicle this month that is more of a celebrated classic than The Big Sleep, and it's arguably the movie I'm most hanging-my-head-in-shame over having never seen prior to this project.  The second of four films that Bogie & Baby starred in together is frequently cited as their best (and weirdly the only one of the quartet that I hadn't seen already, as I'd even watched the strange Dark Passage), and serves as the catalyst of this series.  Hopefully you've seen it, because considering how convoluted the plot is, I'll need your help in the comments to sort it out.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie features Philip Marlowe (Bogart), a private detective hired by a wealthy, dying man who is trying to pay off the gambling debts of his youngest daughter Carmen (Vickers).  As he leaves, he is confronted by Carmen's older sister Vivian (Bacall), who is recently divorced and suspicious of the man her father has hired.  Marlowe begins investigating, assuming that he's less going to be going after the gambling debts and more investigating what happened to the dying man's protege Sean Regan, and soon finds himself covering up a murder, as a drugged Carmen is found at the home of a crooked used bookstore owner (stay with me now, it's going to get harder to follow in a second), and begins to investigate to try to figure out what really happened.  Carmen is clearly a suspect, as is Vivian, but it's a criminal ring that revolves around a man named Eddie Mars (Ridgely) that seems to be the proper culprit.  We see Marlowe go through seedier back alleys and deals (there's a running gag about him essentially collecting guns they're so often in his face), but eventually he outsmarts Mars, who while he may not have been the killer, at least of Regan (it's heavily implied that it's Carmen who is the killer, though never confirmed outright), he did certainly kill a man in cold blood, and deserved his bloody ending (by the laws of Hollywood).  The movie ends with Marlowe framing a dead Mars for the murders, with the assurance that Carmen will get help, and ends up in an embrace with Vivian, with whom he's fallen in love during the picture.

The Big Sleep is perhaps best known for its convoluted plot, and while I rarely have my cell phone out when I see a movie (it's a respect thing), this one I made sure to keep it buried as there are a lot of characters, and not every question gets answered.  Famously, director Howard Hawks had no idea based on the book what happened to the chauffeur, and so he telegrammed Raymond Chandler, the author of The Big Sleep...who also couldn't figure it out (real talk-I just saw the movie and I'm not entirely sure either).  The movie chops a lot of the more salacious aspects out of the novel, including a subplot involving the bookstore owner being both a pornography peddler and the gay lover of Vivian's ex-husband, neither of which would have worked in mid-1940's cinema.  To make matters more bizarre, there are essentially two different versions of this film, the one that was released in 1946 (nearly a year after production had completed) and one from 1945, which was eventually released in 1997 (with Hugh Hefner of all people leading the charge to make the original version of the film available to the public) and also is a common version of the picture that floats around in the ether.  The best way to tell the difference is the small but crucial role of Mona Mars is played by two different actresses: 1945 had Pat Clark and 1946 featured Peggy Knudsen (for the record, I saw the 1945 version, but for symmetry's sake we're going to say 1946 because that's when the film was originally released).

All of this is to say that The Big Sleep is a lot of work, and not always in a good way.  There's too much plot here, and while the twists are fun, they don't always make sense, and it's not a particularly good mystery that doesn't seem to tie together the loose ends (or leave enough clues for you to figure things out on your own).  The production of this movie is legendary, but the film it produced isn't as fun as some of the other movies with this iconic duo.  Bogart is marvelous as Philip Marlowe, though, and just based on his work here it's probably worth the "classic" label this movie achieved. He's wry, sexy, and plays this role with an assuredness that even one of cinema's most confident leading men rarely duplicated.  Bacall is gorgeous, but she's been better.  This was very early in her career, and she seemed to be getting her bearings still as an actress, more sliding on her natural charisma than talent.  The movie is basically stolen from her by the supporting women, all of whom are uniformly good.  Dorothy Malone plays a horny bookshop owner (for real...is this the prototype for the slutty librarian trope?), who seduces Bogart on a rainy day for some afternoon delight (it's staggering to me that this scene made it past the sensors...perhaps they were also mesmerized by Malone, who got her big break here and was headlining films within 2 years of its release).  Sonia Darrin (the only living cast member of the movie) wasn't credited for the film as the femme fatale Agnes thanks to a fight her agent had with Jack Warner, but she's supremely fun sparring with Bogart.  Best of all is Vickers, who steals every scene she's in as the drunk, oversexed Carmen.  Best known today as one of the many wives of Mickey Rooney, there's a raw, cutting edge to this performance that the rest of the film lacks and that feels a bit jarring even for 40's noir, and you kind of wish if they were going to make two versions of the film, one would have been entirely from her perspective.  This great acting makes up for a plot that stretches too thin for my tastes, and while I get the classic angle of the picture enough to warrant a "thumbs up," we'll get to better movies as this month progresses & we take a peak at more storied noir.

Previous Films in the Series: The Woman in the Window

OVP: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Film: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Lizabeth Scott, Kirk Douglas, Judith Anderson
Director: Lewis Milestone
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Motion Picture Story)
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 Lizabeth Scott-click here to learn more about Ms. Scott (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Lizabeth Scott became a star by the sheer force-of-will of mega-producer Hall Wallis.  Unlike virtually every other star in our series, Scott didn’t really have a wilderness or supporting part period-she made 22 films in her career and 21 of them she got star billing.  The reason for that is The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, a film that she got to be ranked alongside Barbara Stanwyck & Van Heflin despite being a virtual unknown (to underline point here, below-the-line but with nearly as large of a part is Kirk Douglas in his screen debut, who without Wallis pushing him wasn’t given the same level of publicity as Scott).  Barbara Stanwyck at the time protested (she didn’t share star billing with anyone that wasn’t her equal), but Wallis insisted, and Martha Ivers delivered enough to make Scott the star that Wallis wanted.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is a well, strange, movie.  The film hearkens back to a young Martha (played by Janis Wilson as a child, Stanwyck as an adult) trying to run away with Sam (eventually to be played by Van Heflin).  The problem is she’s the richest girl in town, and her aunt (Anderson) is cruel & domineering of her.  Martha attempts to escape one night with Sam but in the process accidentally kills her aunt.  Certain to be sent to jail and see her life ruined, she is convinced by a greedy tutor (Roman Bohnen) that he’ll keep her secret, and eventually pushes Martha onto his son Walter (Douglas) who will then inherit her family fortune and political power.  The film cuts to the characters’ adulthood, where Sam is going through town and learns that Martha is still there, successful as ever, and befriends she and Walter, who find Sam suspicious and try to run him out of town (or even have him killed) as they assume he saw Martha kill her aunt and will tell that they let an innocent man go to the chair for Martha’s crime.  The movie eventually ends with a murder-suicide between Martha & Walter, and Sam runs off into the sunset, letting this chapter of his life go.

You’ll notice two things in that description-one, it sounds normal but it’s not.  Martha is diabolical, and more than willing to dispose of people in order to get what she wants.  The film feels a bit gimmicky in Stanwyck’s performance, letting her play Martha as wild-eyed as she possibly can.  It kind of works because she’s such a good actor she can do scenery-chewing with great aplomb, but it’s not particularly strong acting, especially when you consider that Stanwyck is capable of a role like Phyllis Dietrichson, the grand teton of femme fatales.  Arguably the best performance in the film comes from Kirk Douglas, playing a sniveling man capable of both murder and being totally whipped by his hot wife.  Douglas rarely played this kind of weak character in a career that would find him most identified with Spartacus or western heroes, but he’s really good in the part.

The second thing you’ll notice is that I don’t talk about Scott’s character at all, and that’s because she’s totally unnecessary for the actual film.  She plays the love interest for Van Heflin’s Sam, Toni.  Toni has some petty crime under her belt, and is blackmailed by Walter to get to Sam, but she’s ancillary to the main showdown between Martha, Walter, and Sam, and it’s easy to see how Scott would’ve gotten lower billing if it weren’t for Wallis. Her performance is…fine.  It’s a throwaway part, and she doesn’t elevate it the way that Douglas does, but as I’ve read about Scott, she became famous so fast that she struggled with learning how to act while getting to headline proper films (with her beauty & husky voice, she was unkindly compared to Lauren Bacall).  We’re going to get to some of the peak Scott performances in a few weeks, but this week-and-next we’ll be staying in the earliest reaches of her career, where she starred with luminaries like Stanwyck & Douglas, and struggled to stand out.

My Darling Clementine (1946)

Film: My Darling Clementine (1946)
Stars: Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature, Cathy Downs, Walter Brennan
Director: John Ford
Oscar History: Despite the iconic nature of this film and Ford's clear fanbase at the Academy, this wasn't nominated a single Oscar.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Linda Darnell-click here to learn more about Ms. Darnell (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I had hoped to have our Linda Darnell picture this week be Forever Amber, the ill-fated 1947 movie that featured Darnell in full Scarlett O'Hara-mode.  The movie could have been a breaking point in Darnell's career, but it wasn't and she followed up with some of her best-regarded work (plus, that movie is so infamous that it's one I'm going to have to see eventually, if only for the OVP).  Unfortunately, my DVR filmed that in the middle of a blizzard, and as a result I only got 28 minutes of the movie, and because we live in a world where "streaming is replacing everything, but somehow the movies you want are never on streaming" I didn't have another way to catch it.  So we're going to go to a considerably better-regarded Darnell picture, possibly the most well-known and well-loved movie in her filmography, though one I was skipping because I suspected, like most John Ford westerns, that the men would get the heavy lifting in terms of performances, and I was right.  Still, even if this feels a bit unfair to put in a month celebrating Linda Darnell, it's a damn good picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Wyatt Earp (Fonda), a legendary lawman from Dodge City who comes to Tombstone, Arizona, and is made the marshall after throwing out a drunk man who is trying to shoot the town up.  He takes this job because his sensitive brother was just murdered, the necklace he bought for his sweetheart stolen in the process.  He soon meets Doc Holliday (Mature), an outlaw who is haunted by personal demons (he's clearly ill) and used to be a surgeon.  Two women surround Doc's life, his hot-tempered singing lover Chihuahua (Darnell) and the recently-arrived Clementine (Downs), who used to be his love but is now being pursued by Wyatt Earp.  The film follows their burgeoning friendship until one of Earp's other brothers is killed by Old Man Clanton (Brennan), who also killed Earp's first dead brother.  This results in the legendary "Shootout at the OK Corral," where all of the Clanton's die, as well as Doc Holliday (Chihuahua has already died from a stray bullet from the Clantons, in a movie with a high body count).  The movie ends not with a pursued relationship between Clementine & Earp, but with him riding into the sunset while she stays behind to run a school, letting him pass into legend.

The movie is really good.  It doesn't resemble history even a little bit (Earp wasn't actually the central figure in the shootout despite popular culture making him the star-his brother Virgil was the most important figure in the shootout).  This wouldn't even be worth mentioning in a movie of this era (factual accuracy wouldn't be en vogue for a few more decades), but for the random trivia that John Ford once met the real-life Wyatt Earp, and actually discussed the shootout with him years before this film was made, and used some of the facts of the shootout in the picture.  It's a thrilling scene regardless of its relation to the truth, as Ford does some really marvelous long shots where other directors would have done closeups, and considering how central closeups were to the rest of the movie, I was stunned that this wasn't the case.  The movie is a fun western from start-to-finish; it's not treading new territory, or finding some of the darkness that Ford's westerns like The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance would eventually contain, but Fonda & Mature are both great in the lead roles, and the movie comes along briskly (just under 100 minutes).

As for our star of the month, sadly, she's relegated to basically a supporting part despite her leading lady billing.  The film's stereotypes about Latina women are pretty egregious (she's referred to as a "wildcat" multiple times), and there's nothing here for her to do but be jealous of Clementine, lust after Mature, and then die beautifully, her entire life made more worthy by looking gorgeous while she's on the operating table.  She's so ancillary to the plot that she doesn't even get a proper death scene, and one could argue that Downs gets the bigger role.  At the time, Darnell was a major star in the middle of a comeback while Downs was a nobody who was about to enjoy a very brief period as a leading woman (that ended when, according to Hollywood gossip, she wouldn't sleep with Darryl Zanuck); she'd eventually get rediscovered by film audiences decades later when the Poverty Row films she made in the 1950's (schlocky Sci Fi pictures), were discovered by camp film fans.  So much of Darnell's film career was spent with her playing the beautiful love interest, which is why I was bummed we couldn't put her center stage with Forever Amber this week.  Thankfully, next week (our final film with Darnell), we'll get a treat as she'll be giving her best performance by far we've profiled, and it will be the gentlemen taking the backseat.

OVP: The Blue Dahlia (1946)

Film: The Blue Dahlia (1946)
Stars: Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, William Bendix, Howard da Silva, Doris Dowling
Director: George Marshall
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

There's no genre in probably all of filmdom that I love more than film noir.  I have a penchant for "women who lie to themselves," romantic epics, and cerebral dramas, but at the end of the day you put me in front of a detective film with a jaded lead and a beautiful but dangerous woman in his romantic sights and I'm truly set.  This is why I picked The Blue Dahlia off of my DVR (again-trying to clean that thing out a bit over the next month), hoping that some interactions with the likes of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake would be a great start to the week.  Unfortunately, the film doesn't have enough of a vested interest in its supporting cast and can't hold together its mystique (likely due to some famed offscreen issues with writer Raymond Chandler) to really graduate to a classic film noir.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Johnny Morrison (Ladd), a discharged US Naval officer who is coming home to see his wife Helen (Dowling), only to find that she's clearly having an affair and throwing a gigantic party and killed their son in a drunk driving accident (it's a lot to take in in the first ten minutes of the movie).  Johnny threatens to kill his wife, but doesn't, and leaves, eventually meeting a woman on the street named Joyce (Lake), while Helen manages to get into all sorts of mischief, eventually blackmailing her lover and going home (unknowingly) with one of her husband's best friends.  Helen is found killed, and naturally Johnny is suspected, but while on the run-from-the-law he pursues the truth and eventually discovers the real killer.

It's the stuff of classic detective boilerplate, and with a writer like Chandler one should assume that it'd be better than it is, but the film lacks a few key elements that make for a truly interesting film noir.  For starters, the side characters, and really all of the characters, aren't that interesting.  Casting Ladd as the main character makes sense, but the rest of the cast isn't distinctive enough, and in particular the women don't stand out enough in the cast.  Chandler purportedly hated the film's leading lady, nicknaming her Moronica Lake, and while she was famously difficult to work with, he didn't give her a lot to do in the role other than occasionally seem mysterious and pretty.  It's hard not to think that a better actress like Rita Hayworth or Gene Tierney might have been able to find something stronger in the part, but Joyce is underwritten, and Helen is a bit of a cartoonish harpy-overall, his treatment of women isn't strong, and his work with men is hardly distinctive, not drawing the characters diversely enough, save for William Bendix' drunk-and-frightened Buzz, the highlight of the picture.

The ending also doesn't work.  Purportedly this was the studio's fault, as Chandler initially meant for Buzz, while in a blackout, to be the killer, and this made the most sense as it was disturbing and played into a number of the red herrings (as Buzz was arguably the only character who had no legitimate reason to want Helen dead), but the producers didn't want a naval officer to be portrayed as the killer so Chandler changed the ending and as a result sacrificed what was working in the film (the natural weirdness of a mystery where the killer was the only person who didn't want the victim dead).  By doing this, they might have appeased audiences but they hurt the film overall, and as a result it's a pretty lousy detective film.  There's moments to enjoy (I liked Lake's chemistry with Ladd better here than I did her films with Fredric March and Joel McCrea, and I get why they were paired together quite often), but overall this is pretty disappointing.

Those are my thoughts on this detective film.  It's relatively well-reviewed, so I'm likely in the minority here-anyone want to come to the picture's rescue?  Is it weird that this film essentially is remembered now for its connection to the entirely unrelated Black Dahlia murder?  If you haven't seen it, weigh in on your thoughts on Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, and Raymond Chandler in the comments!