The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953)

Film: The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953)

Stars: Debbie Reynolds, Bobby Van, Bob Fosse, Barbara Ruick

Director: Don Weis

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

Debbie Reynolds was always meant to be a star.  After she won the Miss Burbank contest in 1948, she apparently was so in-demand that Warner Brothers and MGM tossed a coin to see who would get to sign her.  Warner won, but it was at MGM that she would make her early mark in musicals, first with Two Weeks with Love, and then in the film that would make her a star for all time, Singin' in the Rain.  While the film wasn't nearly as much of a success as it is now (it made a small profit, which honestly for MGM in the 1950's was sometimes a stretch for their musicals), and it wasn't up for too many awards (just Best Supporting Actress amongst the major categories), it was well-received, and it made Reynolds a proper star.  Over the next few years, she'd frequently be cast in young ingenue roles, the kinds a decade before would've been taken by America's last sweetheart, June Allyson, and one of those was as a college freshman in The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, which would have enough of a cultural impact that it would eventually become a TV series, launching the career of actor Bob Denver.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Dobie Gillis (Van), who has just come to college but is more excited about "enjoying" life than "working" through it.  He meets on his first night, three people: Pansy (Reynolds), his soon-to-be-girlfriend, Charlie (Fosse) his equally unambitious new roommate & best friend, and Lorna (Ruick), who is smitten with Dobie but it's Charlie who actually falls for her.  The four of them go off on a series of adventures together, which eventually results in Dobie & Pansy both failing out of school.  Pansy moves to New York City, while Dobie stays in school because his English instructor assumes he's a literary genius (as he cribbed an essay from a book in the library).  The two can't be apart, though, and through a series of misunderstandings, the two of them end up together, with Pansy's father's reluctant approval AND in the process they save the school magazine from going under.

The movie is kind of your textbook teenybopper flick of the era.  Much of what would happen in The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, which runs as a year-in-the-life of these four students, would eventually be absorbed by television.  There's at least 3-4 episodes of a TV sitcom here, and the only thing really holding it together are the key actors' personalities, much like television.  At this point TV sitcoms were just starting to come into their own, so you actually see a lot of movies like The Affairs of Dobie Gillis come out around this time, with basically the movie substituting for a TV episode.

But that doesn't mean it's not fun, though I will own that the weirdest part about this isn't that I was drawn to Reynolds, who is fine but a bit too simple as Pansy, nor to Bob Fosse (and yes, this is the Bob Fosse, the legendary Oscar-winning director), who is nothing special here, though he does get to show off his dancing skills (including that upturned hat move he'd become iconic for).  No, the real star here is Bobby Van, who never really took off as a leading man (he'd have more success on Broadway and as a game show panelist in the 1970's), but is so much fun.  He's adorable (the dimples on this man...you will want to kiss your television), and he lands pretty much every joke, even the ones that aren't funny.  I kind of wish that he'd been given more to do after this, because there's so much potential in his title character.

OVP: The Naked Spur (1953)

Film: The Naked Spur (1953)

Stars: James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker, Millard Mitchell

Director: Anthony Mann

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

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

His work with Anthony Mann opened up a new chapter in Jimmy Stewart's career, and one that led to far more interesting films being made by the actor in the 1950's than he had made in the 1940's.  This included Anatomy of a Murder in 1959, which dealt with the subject of rape (groundbreaking for its time), and won Stewart his fifth & final Oscar nomination.  But more importantly in film history, this is the decade when he worked repeatedly with Alfred Hitchcock.  Stewart's relationship with Hitchcock actually preceded the 1950's, when he appeared in 1948's Rope for the director, but critics at the time were divided on the film, and on Stewart in the lead role (I tend to agree with them that he is poorly chosen, and perhaps a star with more natural sexuality onscreen like John Garfield would've been a more suitable choice).  However, his work in the 1950's is harder to dismiss.  Between 1954 and 1958, he made Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo, an enviable list from the standpoint of 2022 even if it wasn't quite as glowing in 1959.  It's hard to believe now, but Vertigo, which is considered by many to be the greatest film ever made (and features Stewart in what is likely his best acting performance), was disliked by critics at the time.  While there were hiccups critically & commercially for Stewart in the decade, it's hard not to look at what he did in the 1950's and think of it as the best qualitative chapter of his career, and that includes our movie today, the chilling The Naked Spur.

(Spoilers Ahead) In the wake of the Civil War, Howard Kemp (Stewart) chances upon Jesse Tate (Mitchell), a grizzled prospector, and he makes a deal with him.  If he can help him find the man he's looking for, Ben Vandergroat (Ryan), he will give him $20.  As they move, they come across first Roy Anderson (Meeker, brilliantly sexy in this role & threatening to steal the entire movie in all of his scenes), a morally questionable former cavalryman, and then they come across both Vandergroat & his female companion Lina Patch (Leigh).  It is revealed at this point that Howard tricked Jesse, as Ben is worth far more than $20...there's a $5000 reward for his capture, and so, after some debate, Jesse, Howard, & Roy decide to split the money by bringing Ben into town, getting their reward and letting him hang in the process.  Along the way, though, they face the difficulty of Ben pitting them against one another, and Lina, who believes in Ben's innocence, trying to convince them to stop the endeavor entirely.

The Naked Spur feels like a setup for a western, and indeed what I just profiled is only about 30 minutes into a 90-minute movie.  But it's worth noting that the film doesn't take the easy way out here.  While there are technically other actors who show up after this in very small, extra work, but instead remains these five performers, as we never actually get to town & see them collecting the reward.  Instead what we get is a chamber play of sorts, filled with psychological drama, betrayal, and trauma, as we learn that Howard was once betrayed by the woman he loved & lost his ranch, which is what he's trying to get back with this arrest.  It works really well playing this as a bottle episode of a western, us never leaving the shifting dynamics of these five as they learn more about each other and shift alliances, frequently to their doom.  Westerns almost never got nominated for writing Oscars in the 1940's & 50's...it's a testament to how perfectly this is structured that this one did.

I had planned on introducing Stewart this week with Hitchcock because you can't discuss Stewart without discussing Hitchcock, but I was surprised by how clear the parallels are between his Howard Kemp and Scottie Ferguson, his character in Vertigo.  Both are obsessed with women who betray them, both are given the opportunity to be with a more conventional woman who genuinely loves him, and both want something that they know is impossible.  Plus our love interest is Janet Leigh, star of Hitchcock's most famous film Psycho!  Unlike Scottie, Howard ends up with the woman who loves him in this movie, and it works, but it's a question mark if that will be how this ends, and that tension is brought on by the way that Stewart plays Howard, loose, angry, & miserable...it's hard to see much of George Bailey behind an actor who was clearly stretching his public persona, and doing it beautifully.

OVP: The Caddy (1953)

Film: The Caddy (1953)

Stars: Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Donna Reed, Barbara Bates

Director: Norman Taurog

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"That's Amore")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

We talked last week about how Donna Reed's career throughout the 1940's was a struggle, with her getting one iconic part (It's a Wonderful Life) to go with a series of forgettable westerns & dramas.  This week, though, we're going to talk about what was the most successful chapter, both commercially & critically, during Reed's career (while it was happening-lest we forget, It's a Wonderful Life became a holiday landmark in the decades that followed, not at the time).  In 1953, during her time at Columbia, she had two films that were released days apart: the first of the two was The Caddy, a movie that she was on loan to Paramount for that brought her into the company of Martin & Lewis in a huge hit...hence it being our movie today.  The bigger deal, though, was that she also had an even bigger hit coming out for her home studio of Columbia, Fred Zinnemann's landmark epic From Here to Eternity.  Playing the role of Lorene Burke in the film, Reed got the best notices of her career, and quickly found herself competing for an award she'd had to watch others try for for decades: the Oscar.  Up against impressive competition (including Grace Kelly & Geraldine Page), Reed won the trophy, her first and only Oscar nomination/win. As we'll see today, though, while her career was arguably in the best state it'd been in in a while, From Here to Eternity (where, it has to be noted, she won a supporting Oscar despite having spent a decade attempting to achieve leading lady status) was more fluke than the rule.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Joe Anthony (Martin) and Harvey Miller, Jr. (Lewis), who are at the beginning of the film a noted comedy duo who are telling the story of their lives before a big show. We see their humble beginnings, with both men struggling to find their place in the world until we discover that Joe is an excellent, even pro-worthy golfer.  He initially does this in partnership with Harvey, who is a superb caddy, but Joe lets the fame go to his head, particularly as he attempts to woo a wealthy socialite Kathy Taylor (Reed), and mistreats his friend.  In the end, they find their friendship & their unorthodox families are worth more than the pro circuit...and instead launch a successful career in show business, where they are openers for another legendary comedy duo: Martin & Lewis (playing themselves).

I've seen a few Martin & Lewis films, and while I generally love their banter, I always think they work better when they're doing a schtick onstage than pulling along a story.  Neither of these men are great actors, and the plots are so formulaic they make an Astaire & Rogers musical look original.  The calling card in the movies is frequently the cameos, which here are a series of legendary golfers (including Ben Hogan & Sam Snead) playing themselves.  This would be indistinguishable from their other movies were it not for one of the musical numbers they throw in about a third through the musical.  Martin sings (for the first time) one of his signature numbers, the ridiculous & romantic "That's Amore!"  This is not a good song lyrically (it was infamously mocked on the Dean Martin Roasts by Orson Welles), but it works so well.  Here, it's sung by both Martin & Lewis, but it's really Dean who keeps it alive.  That flawless, lazy baritone feels so warm & inviting, you honestly feel surrounded by the pasta he's crooning over.

The film features Donna Reed as another indistinguishable love interest.  The Caddy in conjunction with From Here to Eternity should've been a big deal for Reed.  Obviously one won her an Oscar, but The Caddy was also a huge hit, particularly internationally (this is one of the films that cemented Jerry Lewis's legendary status in France, where he was hailed as a comedic genius).  But Martin & Lewis got the credit there, and James Jones got the credit for From Here to Eternity.  Reed was soon getting upstaged by bigger stars like Elizabeth Taylor & Dana Andrews in her later pictures.  We'll talk about that later today when we profile one of those films, and what ultimately led to the TV show that would cement Donna Reed's legend, for better or worse.

It Happens Every Thursday (1953)

Film: It Happens Every Thursday (1953)

Stars: Loretta Young, John Forsythe, Frank McHugh, Edgar Buchanan, Jane Darwell

Director: Joseph Pevney

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on 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.

Sometimes with these Saturdays with the Stars months, we complete a year with a lot of untold chapters from the actor's life.  That's not going to be the case for Loretta Young.  Last week, we talked about the pinnacle of Young's career, the late 1940's, when she made massive hits, starred in a holiday classic, & won an Oscar.  Young, however, was in her late thirties at that point, which has always been a "sunset" time for actresses in Hollywood, and was particularly during the Classical Hollywood era.  By the early 1950's, though she was still working, her film career had started to wane, and today's movie, It Happens Every Thursday, was the final theatrically-released film that Young made in her career...though as we'll get to in a second, she had a surprisingly long second act as a performer.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie in many ways resembles the films we were discussing last week, with Young playing a perfect wife in a romantic-comedy.  The movie is about Jane MacAvoy (Young), a woman who is trying to find a new life for she & her husband Bob (Forsythe) as they are expecting a baby, so they move to California and buy a small-town newspaper, not realizing that it is unsuccessful.  Initially they struggle to establish the paper, but soon find that a certain kind of soft journalism (involving guessing old photos of townspeople) sells well, and they begin to take off.  When they realize that they'd been forgoing actual journalism by ignoring a drought, Bob hires an Air Force expert to use dry ice to try to get it to rain.  While the stunt doesn't actually happen, a downpour follows anyway, and when that leads to flooding, the MacAvoys are nearly run out of town before they convince the newspaper readers that the flooding (which soon ends) is not their fault.

The movie is, for lack of a better word, stupid.  The plot as described is exactly how it plays out in the movie, and you'll be forgiven for thinking "that sounds kind of silly" because it's how it plays in the film.  A lot of your mileage on this movie will depend on your tolerance for Young's sickly sweet persona, and while I have gained a newfound respect for the actress this month with intriguing work in Midnight Mary and The Stranger, she's not a favorite yet, and certainly not to the point where I'll forgive a movie this ridiculous.  Even if you watch it in suspended belief, you're going to get bored.

Young's film career ended with this picture, but it wasn't the end of her career.  The actress quickly transitioned to television, starring in an eponymous anthology series for NBC, which she hosted and frequently starred in as an actress.  The show became known for its trademark opening, with Young opening-and-closing a set of doors, and then coming out & twirling in a gorgeous evening gown.  I highly recommend you google it, as it's as over-the-top as you'd hope, and the series was a ratings & critical success, being in the Top 30 in several seasons and winning Young three Emmys.  The actress would largely retire from acting after this, just briefly coming back in the 1980's long enough to win a Golden Globe for the TV movie Christmas Eve, but mostly devoting her life to her political causes (she was a diehard Republican who campaigned for Eisenhower, Nixon, & Reagan) and Catholic charities before dying at the age of 87 in 2000.  Next month, we're going to talk about a leading man contemporary of Young's (though they never made a movie together), who like Young, starred in a major holiday classic in the 1940's and got a second act in television during the 1950's.

The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

Film: The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

Stars: Edmond O'Brien, Frank Lovejoy, William Talman

Director: Ida Lupino

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

During the first 35 years of the Directors Guild of America, only three women were admitted as members. The first was Dorothy Arzner, whose musical drama Dance, Girl, Dance has since been hailed as a classic.  The third was Elaine May, who made her first feature film in 1971 after decades of appearing alongside Oscar-winner Mike Nichols in a comedy tour (she'd go on to make some of the most singular comedies of the 1970's).  The second, though, is best known to most as an actress, not as a director.  We've talked a lot about Ida Lupino on this blog through the years, particularly in 2019 when she was honored as one of our Saturdays with the Stars.  We profiled her film The Bigamist that month, when she became the first woman to direct herself in a major studio movie.  But we didn't talk about arguably her most well-known film.  That would be The Hitch-Hiker, which doesn't feature Lupino at all behind the camera, and was made by her production company The Filmakers in 1953.  The movie was the first noir to be directed by a woman, and has since been hailed as something of a landmark thriller.  I was curious, given my total adoration, what I'd feel like when she totally gave up on the front-of-the-camera and immersed herself behind it.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Hitch-Hiker is largely a trio.  While there are other characters, they don't matter in this film, as we see friends Roy Collins (O'Brien) and Gilbert Bowen (Lovejoy), who pickup a hitchhiker on their way to a Mexican fishing trip.  Once he's in the car, they realize that the hitchhiker is noted serial killer Emmett Myers (Talman), who is trying to flee into Mexico & disappear from the law.  Along the way, the men start to become terrorized by Emmett, with him even forcing them to play a game of "shoot the tin can" while Roy holds the tin can & Gilbert shoots (and thankfully doesn't miss).  When their car breaks down, they have to take off on foot, with Emmett ridiculing Roy who hurts himself when they attempt escape, making getting away impossible for him.  At the end, the law finally catches up with Emmett, with the two men finally freed, but forever changed.

The movie is based on the real-life criminal Billy Cook, who killed five people and then took multiple people hostage as he tried to flee.  It's violent, though probably not as violent as you'd expect.  The movie is 71-minutes long (considering The Filmakers was producing it on a shoestring budget, this makes sense), and I suspect giving it another 20 minutes you might have had a classic on your hand, given how good Talman is as Emmett.  A longer runtime would've allowed Lupino time to flesh out Collins & Bowen, who at the time would've read as pretty different to the public (O'Brien being a well-known character actor), but decades later, they almost register as Rosencrantz & Guildenstern given how little O'Brien's cultural cache has remained.  This results in the movie being a bit misbegotten.

But it does show the talent of Lupino that she clearly did all she could with an undercooked concept and no money.  Lupino's name as a director was largely made in women's pictures, melodramas that were similar to the ones she made when she was a headliner at Warner Brothers in the 1940's.  Lupino spent much of that decade being overshadowed by Bette Davis, never getting the career she hoped for even though she definitely had the talent.  Lupino would make The Bigamist later that year, but wouldn't make another film for 13 years when she made an unlikely switch to make the family flick The Trouble with Angels with Rosalind Russell & Hayley Mills (her final picture).

Previous Films in the Series: Murder My Sweet, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, The Killers, The Big Sleep, Daisy Kenyon, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Woman on the Beach, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, The Asphalt Jungle, Night and the City, They Live By Night, Gun Crazy, In a Lonely Place, Sweet Smell of Success, The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, The Killing, The Long Goodbye, Body Heat

The Blue Gardenia (1953)

Film: The Blue Gardenia (1953)

Stars: Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, Raymond Burr, Jeff Donnell, Nat King Cole

Director: Fritz Lang

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

Last week when we talked about Ann Sothern's career with Words and Music, I noted that her celebrity was starting to wane with the Maisie films no longer in production.  However, Sothern's career would hit its low point in the next few years.  Despite critical hosannas for A Letter to Three Wives, arguably her magnum opus as an actress (she wasn't nominated for an Oscar but should've been), coming out to critical acclaim & commercial success in 1949, her health overcame any possibility at a comeback.  Sothern battled hepatitis for three years, causing MGM to cancel her contract (which was legal to do at the time), and leaving her flat broke.  During that time frame, Sothern barely worked, and by 1953 was in desperate need of money, only doing supporting work in films like today's The Blue Gardenia because she needed to pay her mounting debts.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about three women who live together, including Crystal (Sothern), a flirtatious girl-about-town and her primmer friend Norah (Baxter), who is pining for her soldier fiancé to return from the Korean War.  When it turns out that her soldier will not return, and has in fact run off with another woman, Norah decides to spend the night being romanced by a known playboy Harry Prebble (Burr).  After getting drunk with Harry, she goes back to his place, and he attempts to rape her, at which point she hits him over the head.  The story blacks out from there, but the next morning Harry is dead, and Norah assumes that she killed him.  So do the cops, who find her shoes at the place, and along with reporter Casey Mayo (Conte), look for the shoes' owner in a macabre twist on the Cinderella story.  Wracked with guilt, eventually Norah comes forward, but as we learn in the film's final moments, it was another scorned love (whom the censors wouldn't be able to say was pregnant out-of-wedlock, but any viewer can see that's the case in plain sight based on her dialogue), who killed Harry when he refused to marry her, with a passed out Norah nearby to take the blame.  The film ends with Norah & Casey both free to pursue a romance themselves, Norah moving on.

As you can tell from that description, this is not Ann Sothern's movie-she is very much the supporting player in this picture, though you'd be forgiven for wishing she wasn't.  Sothern's work is the best of the bunch, giving a sass from the sidelines that was her trademark.  Baxter at its center, never a subtle actress, cannot handle the weight of playing the bereft Norah, portraying her as nearly inhuman as the movie movies on, certainly not someone that would plausibly stay under the radar of the police as they frequently find their way in her path.

Therefore I don't subscribe to the critical reclamation of this particular movie.  In 1953, this film received lousy reviews but many have credited it in the years since as a dark noir, one that feels like a solid indictment of the McCarthy era...but I don't buy it.  Baxter, an actress occasionally capable of greatness (specifically her two Oscar-nominated roles), is too stylized to land her part, and the movie is too realistic to be camp...as a result it comes across as a lousy melodrama.  Unfortunately for our star this month, this meant that Ann Sothern would not get a big film comeback...but within a few months, television would prove that she wouldn't need one to get back into the spotlight.

OVP: Mogambo (1953)

Film: Mogambo (1953)

Stars: Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Donald Sinden

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Ava Gardner, Supporting Actress-Grace Kelly)

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

As I mentioned in our kickoff to Grace Kelly Month, Kelly's story is not one of a robust amount of struggle in terms of getting into the upper echelons of Hollywood (in fact, more than almost any major star of the era, it's hard to find an actress who struggled less to make it in the industry).  A swiftly successful career in theater & television opened up doors for Kelly, first in Henry Hathaway's Fourteen Hours and then in the first of several genuine classics Kelly made, Fred Zinnemann's High Noon.  High Noon was a success, winning Kelly's costar Gary Cooper an Oscar, but her notices were middling, and she was worried she might be considered "just a pretty face" in Hollywood despite getting a lot of opportunity from the picture.  However, when Gene Tierney (who was off being wooed by Aly Khan at the time) dropped out of Mogambo, Kelly jumped at the opportunity to work with screen legends Clark Gable & John Ford in the role that would change her life.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Victor Marswell (Gable), a big-game hunter who spends much of his time trapping animals in Africa to send to zoos and circuses.  He meets Eloise "Honey Bear" Kelly (Gardner), a fortune-hunter who is trapped on their safari briefly.  Though initially they dislike one another, that animosity melts into attraction, and they clearly sleep together (despite not being married).  Honey Bear leaves, and in her place is Donald (Sinden) and Linda Nordley (Kelly), a couple that want to safari to record the gorillas, which Victor refuses to do because it's too difficult to find the gorillas.  However, slowly Linda begins to wear him down, and despite being a prim married woman, she & Victor begin to have a love affair.  This is complicated further when Honey Bear, obviously still in love with Victor, returns, and has to hide their relationship so as not to scandalize Linda.  As the film progresses, Victor clearly loves Linda, and wants to be with her, but doesn't have the guts to break up their relationship, so instead she has Linda catch him with Honey Bear, and in anger she shoots him.  The film ends with Honey Bear claiming that Linda was right to shoot him (since he'd been making advances on her, a lie only the audience and the love triangle knows), and though they have some friction, Honey Bear & Victor end up together while Linda & Donald return to domesticity.

The movie, if it sounds familiar, is somewhat based on a different Clark Gable film, Red Dust, which we reviewed for the blog a few years back for a different season of Saturdays with the Stars.  If you click that film's review, you'll see that I loved Red Dust...and if you look above, you'll see that I did not love Mogambo.  The difference here is the performances.  While Gable is in the same role, he doesn't have the same kind of chemistry with either of his leading ladies that he did with Jean Harlow.  Ava Gardner makes out the best of the two, as she's giving a decent performance (it's the only bit of light in the movie), as Honey Bear, though it's an easy part that Gardner nails thoroughly.  This was the only Oscar nomination in her long career, but it's not the best that Gardner could do-she plays a spunky, jaded lover, but they don't lean in hard enough into the sultriness that Gardner would brilliantly capture in earlier film noir.

That said, Gardner is miles ahead of Grace Kelly who, I'm sorry to say in a month devoted to her, is actively not good in Mogambo.  Kelly is given the more interesting, if also more difficult part.  Linda is a woman who has lived in a glass cage, always being asked to be perfect, and she's feeling something for the first time.  Unlike Gardner's Honey Bear, there's not a lot to like in her, and Kelly underscores that by making her seem stiff, guarded, & without any feeling.  Her romance with Gable should be steamy, a haloed saint deigning to come to life & play among the mortals, but Kelly can't get that across.  Instead she plays Linda as wooden & two-dimensional...I'm honestly flummoxed how Kelly got this Oscar nomination.  Gene Tierney, a more experienced actress, would've been a better choice.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the real story of Mogambo wasn't what was going on onscreen, but offscreen, as the filming of this movie is the stuff of Hollywood legend.  Gable & Kelly were having an affair (this is basically taken as gospel even if neither party seems to have ever officially stated that it was happening), which would be something of a pattern for Kelly during her filming (we'll talk about this in the coming weeks).  Gable, Gardner, & Donald Sinden all fought repeatedly with director John Ford, and Gardner had to be flown off location after she got stuck with a bad case of dysentery.  Of course, this might've been the least of her worries.  Gardner was in one of the rockier patches of her legendary marriage to Frank Sinatra, and determined not to have a permanent connection with her husband, got an abortion during filming (the two would divorce, childless, in 1957).  Next week we're going to move just a year into the future of Kelly's career, but with it we're going to move beyond the early whiffs in her career to the one director who knew exactly what he had when she got onscreen.

I Confess (1953)

Film: I Confess (1953)

Stars: Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, Karl Malden, Brian Aherne, OE Hasse, Dolly Haas

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on 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.

Similar to last month, we're going to end our month devoted to the career of Anne Baxter with the reason she's included in this series, her teaming with Alfred Hitchcock.  We've already discussed this a bit, but Baxter nearly was cast in 1940's Rebecca, but was deemed too young for the role by Hitchcock himself.  13 years later, he was ready for her, though, with today's film I Confess.  In 1953, Baxter was not the ingenue that she'd been when Hitchcock had first met her.  Last week we talked about her in the 1948 film The Luck of the Irish, but in 1950 she'd have what would be her defining role, and her sole nomination for Best Actress, as the titular Eve Harrington in All About Eve.  While that was a huge hit, Baxter decided not to sign again with Fox three years later, and instead became a freelance actor, with I Confess being her first film under this newfound status as an artist-for-hire.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Father Logan (Clift), a priest who has heard the confession of German immigrant Otto Keller (Hasse), who has murdered a man he was trying to rob.  Keller knows that Logan is bound by the sanctity of the confessional, and therefore cannot tell a sole his crime.  In the coming days, though, Inspector Larrue (Malden) begins to suspect Logan is the killer, and indeed it does feel like he's done some suspicious things, and has an unusual relationship with Ruth Grandfort (Baxter), the wife of a local politician.  As the film wears on, we learn that Ruth & Father Logan were once in love, but when he went off to fight in World War II they split apart.  They reconnected years later, and spent a (chaste) night together when she was married, and both were being blackmailed by the man that Keller murdered, threatening to cause a scandal for catching them together in such a compromising position.  As the film wears on, Father Logan stands trial, and while he's found not guilty, the public is not convinced.  In the end, though, Father Logan is exonerated when, after killing his wife who is about to expose his secrets, Keller confesses in a gunfight with the police & Father Logan, the latter never breaking the sanctity of the confessional despite being put through great trial.

I Confess is one of the least famous movies in Hitchcock's filmography of the 1950's, and considering the very buzzy cast here, I was genuinely curious as to why.  The reason, it turns out, is that the movie itself isn't particularly good.  The film casts Clift as a sexless lover, and one could make a sincere argument that he's supposed to be gay (many Clift characters of this era you could make that argument about the closeted actor), but he doesn't work as the lead.  Baxter has stated since then that Clift's heavy drinking & depression made him a difficult leading man to work with, and one wonders if she would've pulled off better chemistry with a James Mason or Farley Granger in the lead role.  As it is, the movie drags and is a bit tedious with a tepid chemistry between the two leads, and no one comes out the better here.  This is perhaps the least of all of Hitchcock's films from this decade.

Anne Baxter would continue making movies for most of the 1950's, and would have one of her most iconic roles three years later as Nefretiri in The Ten Commandments (give or take All About Eve, this is what modern audiences most associate her with now), but like many actresses of her era, she began the shift to television, making appearances on Dr. Kildare, Ironside, and Batman.  Her most noted role was in Hotel, in the 1980's, a series she'd do until her death in 1985 from a stroke, a role that she'd win when a different actress dropped off of the project...in a true sense of life imitating art, that woman was Bette Davis.  Next month, we're going to take a trip back to the 1940's as we briefly break chronology to talk about one of Classic Hollywood's most lasting figures, and one of Hitchcock's favorite leading ladies.

OVP: Above and Beyond (1952)

Film: Above and Beyond (1952)
Stars: Robert Taylor, Eleanor Parker, James Whitmore, Larry Keating
Director: Melvin Frank & Norman Panama
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Motion Picture Story, Score...though for some reason the nominations were for 1953 even though the film was released in November 1952, hence the tag below)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

One of the unusual aspects of films based on real-life, living figures is that while we assume the chapters of that person's life that are important are over if they have a movie being made about them, that's not technically the case, and is weirdly not the case for Above and Beyond, the second in our weeklong look at Oscar nominees for the writing categories.  This film, made in 1952, hosted recent history as its subject (the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan), had only happened seven years prior.  As a result, the characters played in the film by Robert Taylor, Eleanor Parker, and James Whitmore were all alive in real life, and in the case of two of them, still making major decisions in their lives that would make this movie complicated in the years that follow.  First, though, let's ground ourselves in the plot.

(Spoilers Ahead) As I mentioned, the film is about the top secret Manhattan Project, the codename for the military mission that planned the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II.  The military leader in charge of the operation is Col. Paul Tibbets (Taylor), a serious man who is chosen for his disciplined approach, and who is advised by his friend Maj. Bill Uanna (Whitmore), someone even more somber than Tibbets.  Tibbets has a young family, including a wife Lucy (Parker) and two sons, one who is only an infant.  In order to keep the secrecy of the mission, all of the military men's families are moved onto the base, and as a result, Lucy is in close quarters with her husband & children, but struggles to understand why Paul is so strict with everyone, and so secretive with her.  As the film progresses, their marriage becomes strained, to the point where she actually leaves him right before the bombing.  After the successful attacks in Japan, the couple is reunited, their past squabbles discarded...

...or so we think.  In real life, Paul & Lucy Tibbets did reconcile after a rough patch in their marriage during the planning of the Hiroshima attacks, but that didn't stick.  Paul's devotion to his career was something that Lucy couldn't ignore, and they eventually truly divorced in 1955, and Paul remarried the next year to a French woman, with whom he had a third son (I can't find anything about whether or not Lucy remarried).  As a result, this is one of the only films I can think of where the couple centered in the love story ended up breaking up after the movie was made (unlike something like First Man where we know that they'll breakup in real life but they just didn't show that onscreen).

If only the actual film was as interesting as this strange tidbit.  Above and Beyond is a boring, sloppy movie.  The film's story getting nominated is a joke, because it's arguably the picture's least successful element.  The entire romance plotline is repetitive & ridiculous (the military and bombing sequences are much better).  Parker is given a flighty, underwritten woman to play, and she fails miserably in grounding Lucy.  Every scene Lucy seems to have no rational concept as to why her husband might keep the military secrets from her, and is upset at every little inconvenience in her marriage despite begging Paul to have her come to stay with him.  This apparently is a little true to real life according to reports I found online, but it makes the Lucy character ridiculous, and you understand that their marriage is not the kind that could support a military career as it's too clingy & needy.  There's really no saving the film, though, from the Lucy character, and Parker doesn't even try to keep her grounded.  The film's score was also nominated, but it's a snore-it's just commonplace war movie cliche (drums, brass, and musical cues that are completely unoriginal to a war movie).

OVP: All the Brothers Were Valiant (1953)

Film: All the Brothers were Valiant (1953)
Stars: Robert Taylor, Stewart Granger, Ann Blyth, Betta St. John, Keenan Wynn, James Whitmore
Director: Richard Thorpe
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We continue on our week devoted to Best Cinematography not far from The Big Sky chronologically but definitely in terms of what we're trying to achieve onscreen.  While The Big Sky is in the wheelhouse of at least a couple decades worth of westerns, All the Brothers were Valiant was one of the many 1950's event films that were filmed in Technicolor, a hyper-satured style that made the color truly pop onscreen during the era.  I love Technicolor as a visual medium, though it's obvious that it matured from its earlier roots (where it felt almost like painted glass on the screen) to its heyday in the 1950's.  The technical achievement is particularly groundbreaking in terms of movies at sea, which is where we're at today with All the Brothers were Valiant.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about two brothers, one of whom (Granger's Mark Shore) "dies" in the film's opening scenes, while the other (Taylor's Joel Shore) takes up where his brother left off and captains a whaling ship that is sailing around the world.  Joel has recently married Pris (Blyth), who was at one point madly in love with Mark, but obviously with him being dead, that relationship is going nowhere & she marries his brother.  Little do we know, Mark's still alive and up to some mischief, essentially intent on retrieving a fortune's worth of pearls that are onshore, guarded by some of the inhabitants of the island with which they've been trading, but in order to take them, he'll have to mutiny the ship since Mark knows having the pearls onboard would cause backstabbing among the men.  The ship does mutiny, but in the end Mark & Joel join each other in the fight (not before, of course, we've seen some back-and-forth in their love triangle with Pris, including an adulterous kiss), and are able to stave off the mutiny & repair their relationship.

All the Brothers were Valiant is, spoiler alert, not a good movie.  The production of it was extremely troubled, and while we romanticize famous movies with rough productions (like Casablanca), this film is an example of when that can go wrong.  Only Taylor was originally supposed to be in the movie (Granger's part was going to go to Spencer Tracy, Blyth's to Elizabeth Taylor), and while the movie was a hit (something Robert Taylor was good at), Granger in particular wasn't a fan of the movie, and he was right.  The film's plotline is repetitive & thin (particularly for a film that's only 100 minutes long), and Blyth is terrible in the movie, acting excessively flighty & overreacting to the supposed cowardice of her husband not wanting to pursue the pearls.

The only thing that saves the film are the production values, namely the cinematography.  Oscar has a long history of nominating good movies in tech categories where their achievement is mediocre, but this is a case where a bad movie got cited for its one really strong achievement.  The moonlight shots are beautifully done on this film, and the sea battles, especially the whaling sequence, is fresh & extraordinary (and gross when you consider that whaling is heinous, but cinematically it pops here).  1953's Color Cinematography category is turning out to be something on an embarrassment of riches-I've seen four of the films (All the Brothers, Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, Lili, and Shane), and all were home runs.  However, unlike Shane and Lili (which I adore), All the Brothers doesn't have anything else to recommend it other than the cinematography.

Beat the Devil (1953)

Film: Beat the Devil (1953)
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre
Director: John Huston
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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 Gina Lollobrigida-click here to learn more about Ms. Lollobrigida (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.


We are not, sadly, going to start where I wanted to start with Gina Lollbrigida's career.  One of the heartbreaking things for classic film fans in the age of streaming is that with the focus on the new, and with the same streaming platform randomly trading back-and-forth something like Back to the Future II or Cliffhanger, we end up in a situation where certain movies are never brought forward for streaming, and are almost impossible to find on home video.  Thus is the case for Lollobrigida's first breakthrough role, Bread, Love and Dreams, which despite starring two major Italian actors (Lollobrigida and Vittorio de Sica), winning the Silver Bear at Berlin, and being an Oscar nominee (Best Motion Picture Story), is next-to-impossible to find even an affordable copy.  Hopefully someday Criterion takes pity on us here, but until then, we're going to start with Lollobrigida's first major English-language film, Beat the Devil.


(Spoilers Ahead) Beat the Devil sounds in many ways like the sort of standard-fare we'd expect uniting Humphrey Bogart with John Huston.   Bogie plays Billy Dannreuther, a broke (but formerly rich) American who is working with a group of criminals, led by Paterson (Morley), who are trying to buy up uranium-rich land in North Africa for cheap, scoring an easy buck.  Paterson has had a man who was suspected of going after the same property killed, and Billy and his wife Maria (Lollobrigida) are trying to keep their heads down.  Suddenly a British couple make their acquaintance: Harry (Edward Underdown) and his wife Gwendolen (Jones).  The two accidentally set off the alarms of Paterson when Gwendolen, who is soon madly in love with Billy and starts having an affair with him, brags about her husband but is overheard by Paterson's accomplice Julius (Lorre), who assumes that Gwendolen's lies are true.  They set off on a boat together, where "destiny lends a hand" allowing Harry, of all people, to purchase the land that Gwendolen lied about him buying (almost completely by accident), her running back to him, Billy & Maria getting nothing, and Paterson & his cronies ending up in jail.

This sounds like boilerplate film noir, but it doesn't play that way in the movie.  For starters, you might not know this if this is the first time you've seen a movie like this (you should watch The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre before tackling Beat the Devil), is that it's funny, and not because it's so-bad-it's-hilarious-it's meant to be funny.  Beat the Devil was not a hit at the time, but has developed a cult following in the years since primarily because it's one of the first straight-up camp spoofs, not in the way Abbott & Costello would do with the Universal monsters, but instead in a subtler way.  The villains are played as buffoons, and frequently you'll have what in a noir would be an obvious twist (a guy like Harry never lives through a traditional noir), go the complete opposite direction.  The best example of this is toward the end, when it looks like Paterson is about to get away with a lenient cop, and then Gwendolen shouts out the entire criminal plot, accusing Paterson of murder, and she isn't put in danger nor does the cop doubt her.  The penultimate scene has virtually no climax-just what would likely have happened in real life, rather than the expected chase or bullet Bogie will have to take for the female lead to protect her.

Lollobrigida supposedly hated making this movie, complaining that Bogart & Huston made fun of her.  Indeed, the production of this film is kind of legend (one of several "Bogie & Huston want a vacation" sort of films they made together, and one where Truman Capote was writing the script as they went along), so it's fare to assume that this was rough on Lollobrigida, acting in a language that wasn't her primary for the first time.  It shows in the script, too-Lollobrigida is fine, but ancillary, and isn't asked to do more than look beautiful.  It's actually Jennifer Jones (who I'm not really a fan of), who gets the best part in the whole movie, totally selling the blonde, air-headed beauty & underlining the camp of the film better than any other actor.

OVP: Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953)

Film: Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953)
Stars: Robert Wagner, Terry Moore, Gilbert Roland, J. Carrol Naish, Peter Graves
Director: Robert D. Webb
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Oscar nominations for technical achievements are always a mixed bag...in fact, almost always when you're looking at a film that's more noted for technical achievements, it's a mixed bag.  Technology is always evolving, and unless you're there for the moment it starts to wow you, it's hard to comprehend what the world was like before it.  This is the case if you're coming across the 1953 adventure film Beneath the 12-Mile Reef for the first time.  The film, a big hit at the time but almost completely forgotten now, was one of the earliest examples of Cinemascope, a type of widescreen shooting process that was popular throughout the 1950's & 60's, and was the first such use of the style featuring scenes shot underwater.  Underwater shooting has since become something of a staple of not just in narrative movies, but also documentaries and especially television (think pretty much everything David Attenborough has ever done).  While it wasn't the first film to be shot underwater (movies had used this technique since the early 1940's), it was an extraordinary step-forward and one of the pioneers of the process, filmed three years before Jacques Cousteau's landmark The Silent World.

(Spoilers Ahead) The plot of the film is relatively simple, and you'd be forgiven if you find it mildly hard to follow due to conflicts just sort of emerging without warning.  It centers on a father Mike (Roland) and son Tony (Wagner) team of Greek sponge hookers (yes, that is the term they used, and it's also my new favorite job title), who go deep-sea diving in hopes of finding sponges in Key West in the early 1950's (this is right before this became a largely dormant process because it was destroying local sponge populations & synthetic sponges made the practice completely unnecessary).  They quarrel with the locals, and exchange plenty of xenophobic insults, all-the-while Gwyneth (Moore), the lovely young daughter of one of the key local fishermen who keep trying to sabotage Mike & Tony's boat & livelihood, falls for Tony.  Mike dies in a freak fishing accident, and afterward the locals burn Mike's boat.  After this, there is something of an accord between the two fishing teams, Tony & Gwyneth randomly get married, and then Tony proves that he can handle the deep sea diving like his father, even on the forbidden 12-mile reef.

The movie itself is a snooze.  The central romance between Wagner & Moore is unbearably wooden.  I don't have a lot of experience with Robert Wagner as an actor (a lot of his success came in television in the 1970's and 80's, which is not my field of expertise), but if this is any indication, his stardom seemed to come from his intense beauty & startlingly modern physique than any actual acting talent.  He spends most of this movie shirtless, but his line deliveries are atrocious & the casual ethnic slurs being tossed around about Greeks in regard to Wagner feel particularly wrong considering the actor's ancestors hail from Norway & Germany.

The one calling card to this movie is its cinematography, which is impressive, at least underwater.  Cousteau went out into nature, but this appears to largely have been filmed on location so I'm not sure why it doesn't get similar credit to pioneering this technology, though obviously some of the underwater creatures aren't real.  Shot in color, the scenes underwater would have been considered riveting for the time.  Even compared to where this technology would go within a decade it feels hard to compare it to our modern-day advances, but for its time it was revolutionary stuff, and I get why this was celebrated even if the actual artistry of the cinematography is limited by the technology, and nothing above-ground is of much intrigue.  Thus, this is another movie that is easier to appreciate as a curiosity than on its actual merits, because while it was an advancement at its time, we don't have that lens now, and thus are just left with a crumby script & bad acting.

OVP: How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)

Film: How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)
Stars: Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, Rory Calhoun, William Powell
Director: Jean Negulesco
Oscar History: 1 nominaton (Best Costume Design)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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 Betty Grable-click here to learn more about Ms. Grable (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Despite having been a major star for over ten years, even in the early 1950's, Betty Grable's pictures were still hits.  She had been in the Top 10 biggest box office draws of every year since 1942, and in 1950, despite a relatively ripe age of 34 (which was a bigger deal in the '50's than it would be now), she was still the highest-grossing actress in America.  However, her star started to fall apart when she demanded that Fox acknowledge that she'd been a consistent draw by requesting more artistic freedom and a giant paycheck.  This led to Grable missing out on a big opportunity-Fox's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was a huge hit and gave a boost to the woman that was expected to succeed Grable as the top actress on the Fox lot, Marilyn Monroe.  Grable eventually came back to Fox, but they had a bit of a punishment for her in their next picture-casting her as a gold-digger opposite Monroe and Lauren Bacall, both of whom were a decade younger than Grable.

(Spoilers Ahead) How to Marry a Millionaire is a pretty slight film, and one that focuses on three women looking to get rich husbands: scheming Schatze (Bacall), naive Loco (Grable), and ditzy Pola (Monroe).  The three find a posh Manhattan apartment, and start selling off furniture in the hopes of finding a rich husband, but one-by-one they fall not for the actual millionaires like William Powell's JD Hanley, but instead for lumberjacks or criminals, or in Schatze's (the character most determined to stick to the plan) case, Tom, a man she assumes to be a grocery store clerk but who is instead wealthier than any of the men they pursue.  All of the women end up marrying for love, and in Schatze's case, accidentally it comes along with $200 million.

The film is not, unfortunately, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a picture I adored.  It's considerably drier, with only the three leading ladies adding anything to these happenings (Powell is a bore, which is a damned shame coming from the guy who made The Thin Man and My Man Godfrey so bubbly).  It's still fun, of course.  Bacall is ballsy (and gets a great joke about the "old guy in The African Queen" at one point), and Monroe is always fun to watch, and even Grable gets to have some game moments with a man who is looking to have an affair, but there's not enough laughs here.  We don't really get a sense for who these women are other than cartoons, and there aren't memorable musical numbers or someone who is as willing as Jane Russell is to commit to the cartoons the women are asked to play.

Grable's month, as a result, ends with a movie with some promise but ultimately a picture that flirts with a 2-star rating even if it's more a questionable three.  I'll admit to not finding much in Grable's extensive filmography this month to lend to her, disappointing after the joys of Jean Harlow in January.  Grable's career quickly petered out after this, the last significant picture of her time in Hollywood.  After Millionaire she turned down another role that would go to Monroe (There's No Business Like Show Business), something she was fine with; despite press at the time, Monroe & Grable got along famously, to the point where Grable requested her for what would be her last film How to Be Very, Very Popular (the Monroe part would go to Sheree North).  Grable would be turned down for the lead role in 1956's Guys and Dolls, making her quit the industry, and then became a headliner in Vegas until her death in 1973 of lung cancer at the age of 56.  Next month, we will move to a different star of the 1940's who would also find herself in the 1950's looking to Las Vegas, but not before having one of the most eclectic (and unfair) careers of any star in Classic Hollywood.

The Bigamist (1953)

Film: The Bigamist (1953)
Stars: Joan Fontaine, Ida Lupino, Edmond O'Brien, Edmund Gwenn
Director: Ida Lupino
Oscar History: No nominations
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 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.

This week we will conclude our month-long look at Ida Lupino.  Lupino has been a discovery for me throughout November, someone who I had heard of but never really followed, and only seen in a smattering of things like her TV spots on Batman and The Twilight Zone.  This month, I've really enjoyed finding an actress that genuinely didn't get her do in her era but was a particularly fine performer who frequently got saddled with less-than-inspiring scripts and storylines that were beneath her talents.  It's difficult to imagine what might have been if Lupino had been, say, given one or two the iconic roles that went to her peers Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, & Barbara Stanwyck, as she was clearly up for a Mildred Pierce or Double Indemnity if it suited her.  Unlike most actresses we've profiled who started to migrate away from screens when the parts got lousy, Lupino took her fate into her own hand, becoming the only significant female film director of the Classical Hollywood era.  We likely could have devoted a whole additional month to Lupino's work behind-the-camera, but this is a series that is focusing on stars in front of the camera, so we will only profile one of her directorial achievements: The Bigamist, a 1953 picture that made history as the first Hollywood studio film to have the same woman both on the screen and in the director's chair.  As a result, Lupino was a trailblazer for women such as Barbra Streisand, Jodie Foster, Angelina Jolie, & Diane Keaton who would also star in their own directorial achievements.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film gives Fontaine & Lupino top billing, but the titular and main character is Edmond O'Brien's Harry Graham, a seemingly mild-mannered salesman who is trying to adopt a child with his confident, businesswoman wife Eve (Fontaine).  While investigating them for whether they'd make good parents, the adoption officer Mr. Jordan (Gwenn) discovers that Harry has been leading a double life, and is in fact married to another woman named Phyllis (Lupino), with whom he has a young son.  Repulsed, Mr. Jordan initially wants to contact the police, but Harry insists that he hear his story, and in it we learn that he is a man who was in a stilted marriage, and who genuinely fell in love with another woman, got her pregnant, and then married her to "do the honorable thing."  Despite Mr. Jordan forgiving him, Harry feels the need to come clean, and the film ends with an unusual amount of ambiguity, as while the judge is sympathetic to Harry, he passionately calls out that it will be the women in his life who will decide his ultimate fate, and both women don't show their leanings before the end card scans (and for the record, neither does the judge as we don't know what he'll sentence).  We're left with a lot of heartache, but no answers from Eve or Phyllis if either will take back the man who lied to them, but lied because he genuinely loved them both.

The movie is short, and was a blip of a picture when it was first released.  RKO was initially going to release the film, but dropped out (perhaps because of the movie's touchy subject matter, a trait of Lupino's as a director as she'd also discuss rape in Outrage and serial killers in The Hitch-Hiker, both of which caused her headaches with censors), and so Lupino's production company had to release the film themselves.  Even with several big name stars, that's a tall task for a minor studio with a pioneering director.

It probably helped Lupino, though, in selling the film that it's really good.  The Bigamist handles its subject matter with a calm, level-headed demeanor, proving that while there are complicated feelings and attitudes here, there are no villains here.  Harry never blames Eve's infertility or her ambition for being the reason he stepped out on her (he tries on occasion, but the movie is quick to deter him from blaming his wife for her own career).  The movie also doesn't make Phyllis out to be a harlot or some sort of gold-digger; if anything, they underline that she didn't want to get married and is willing to have their baby as a single mother, not wanting to "marry him that way."  It feels a bit sexist of me to attribute this care to Lupino's gender, the way that she is able to have both Eve and Phyllis be real, fully-fleshed women who have their own pursuits but still are in love with the same man.  After all, other directors like Nicholas Ray were able to have this sort of sensitivity for their characters.  But it's perhaps more telling the way that Lupino handles the behind-the-screen scenes as a director with a long history as an actor, as she makes sure to use her performer's natural gifts (O'Brien's everyman lunkheaded charm, Fontaine's casual elegance, Lupino's brash initial standoffishness) to aid her story.  The Bigamist is proof that Lupino was a damned fine director, and it's hard not to imagine what she would have accomplished given a bigger budget and more sway from the powers-that-be.

Instead, The Bigamist would be Lupino's penultimate directorial achievement, and the last one of the 1950's.  She'd continue starring in the occasional noir film (including While the City Sleeps which we looked at for Rhonda Fleming's month), but mostly migrated to television as an actress and a director.  She'd only make one more feature film, the 1966 Columbia movie The Trouble with Angels with Rosalind Russell & Hayley Mills.  Next month, we will conclude our first season of "Saturdays with the Stars" with one last starlet, a Hollywood actress who also turned her stint in the movies into more memorable success in other fields.

Scared Stiff (1953)

Film: Scared Stiff (1953)
Stars: Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Lizabeth Scott, Carmen Miranda, Dorothy Malone (plus two hilarious cameos I won't spoil here, but I do tag below)
Director: George Marshall
Oscar History:  No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on 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.

The career of Lizabeth Scott was incredibly short for a woman that was the lead for 21 of her 22 pictures.  When we think of careers of major stars, they slip quietly into the night, their fame slowly downgraded as they move into lesser and lesser roles/films, eventually getting to play parents and judges and more dismissible parts.  Scott didn't do that.  While she did occasionally make films after her partnership with Hal Wallis (whose obsession with her fueled much of her stardom, though it's kind of distasteful to give him too much of the credit since she was clearly a hit with audiences for a time), Scott's movie star career ended just a few short years after it began, sputtering out in the mid-50's.  Therefore, we're going to end our month-long journey with her penultimate film for Wallis, and her playing weirdly both against-and-within type, as a mysterious, tortured heiress in the middle of a criminal ring...who is aided by the slapstick stylings of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on Larry Todd (Martin), a cool lounge singer who is caught romancing a mobster's girlfriend (Malone) and his bumbling best friend, busboy Myron (Lewis).  The two go out on the run with Larry romancing an heiress Mary (Scott) who has just inherited her family's home, a small island off of the coast of Cuba.  The film sets into play a number of hijinks as the trio try to evade the mobsters who are trying to get after Larry & Myron, all the while trying to understand why Mary keeps getting threatening messages to sell her island and not to go there.  We learn soon that the island is haunted, but it's also very much being guarded by someone who has been in plain sight the whole picture, and we get an ending where Mary & Larry get the treasure, and live happily ever after while Myron is left to tag along.

I believe this is the first actual movie of Martin & Lewis I've ever seen, usually only watching their standup acts together or television appearances as themselves.  However, it's not hard to realize that Larry and Myron are pretty disposable as characters, and really they're just playing their big-screen personas here.  Based on a cursory look around the internet, this appears to be one of their best-loved pairings, but I'm not super familiar with the critical consensus on their pictures-if you have thoughts on the best Martin & Lewis movie, I'd be curious to know, as I quite liked their chemistry here.  There's an ease here, and Lewis is hilarious if repetitive, and while some of the jokes are so well-known that they're antiques, you can't hide star charisma, which is what both these men have.  The musical numbers in the film are pretty disposable (there's one where they literally sing the word "enchilada" seemingly a 100 times), but it's pretty fun.  There's also a cameo by Bing Crosby & Bob Hope at the very, very tail of the movie that made me do a spit-take I was so shocked it came out of left field.

Scott, in our final film profiled this month, seems more at ease here than she has in any other role we've seen.  After nearly a decade of playing similarly-designed femme fatales and damsels-in-trouble, it's great to see her play with this character a bit and milk her sturdy delivery and incredible beauty for laughs. It's interesting to see Scott getting to play with this motif a bit, never scoring the biggest laughs (Lewis is there for a reason), but at least having a ball in the picture, against someone like Carmen Miranda, who essentially also plays herself here, in her last role.  Miranda more than almost any other actor in Hollywood's Golden Age, got stuck playing the same character over-and-over again, and it's weird to contradict here Scott, who did get some room to breathe with her character despite as we've seen this month routinely being typecast, and Miranda, who was never given that sort of leverage when she was typecast herself.  Miranda's character feels unfortunately disposable as a result-there's a scene where she's randomly missing for seemingly no reason (other than for Lewis to dress in her famous fruit hat), and then shows up in a future musical number, no questions asked.  Scott at least is afforded more courtesy with her character, and I feel like I leave understanding a bit more of her talents.  Next month we'll investigate a different actress who also got her start in noir, but soon expanded into proper leading lady roles throughout the 1950's...something she'd later regret.

The Big Heat (1953)

Film: The Big Heat (1953)
Stars: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin, Jeanette Nolan, Alexander Scourby, Jocelyn Brando
Director: Fritz Lang
Oscar History: No nominations
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.

The Big Heat is our second film from Fritz Lang this month, our first being the kickoff to the Film Noir series The Woman in the Window.  Lang had a fascinating life, having his political beliefs come into the crosshairs of both Joseph Goebbels & Joe McCarthy, he also made landmark pictures early on in his career like Metropolis and M, the latter of which served as a precursor to his future work as arguably the most important director in the film noir genre.  Today we go with what many would consider his most important Hollywood movie, The Big Heat.  The film, one of the more storied Columbia film noir productions, is a startling, violent film, and one of the darker film noir pictures we've come across so far in this series, anchored by a truly spellbinding performance from Gloria Grahame.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie starts with the suicide of a police officer, being investigated by Sergeant Dave Bannion (Ford), a tough-as-nails police officer who has a seemingly idyllic life at home with his wife Katie (Brando, and yes, she is the older sister of Marlon Brando-did you know he had a sister who was an actress?).  This all changes when he starts investigating the crime, and more importantly the connected crime of the death of the police officer's lover Lucy.  Soon he is the target of threats, and then in a shocking mid-film twist, his wife Katie dies after an assassination attempt mistakenly targets her rather than Bannion.  This causes Bannion to spiral, quitting the force after realizing that the Police Commissioner is essentially in bed with the mob boss Lagana (Scourby) who put the hit out on his wife, and begins to form a sort of vigilante justice against Lagana, and two of his hit men, one being Vince Stone, played by an early-in-his-career Lee Marvin.  The film shifts when Stone's girlfriend Debby (Grahame) starts to turn on him, giving Bannion information after realizing that Vince's abuse could hurt her some day (he attacks another woman at the bar).  Eventually this leads to  Bannion finding justice for his wife, but also with Debby's death during a shootout with her ex Vince, who is arrested & we see Bannion return to the force.

This is relatively standard film noir-fate, but what makes The Big Heat stand out in the years since is the shocking depictions of violence in the picture.  About two-thirds of the way through the picture, you realize that Lang is pushing the boundaries of what would have been acceptable in the 1950's at the time by having an offscreen fight between Vince and Debby end with Vince throwing scalding coffee at Debby's face, maiming her.  You'd think that, to spare the audience the trauma of seeing gorgeous Gloria Grahame with burn makeup or scarred, they would have also killed her off off-screen, but that isn't the case.  I'm struck that it was Gloria Grahame of all people who volunteered to do this (considering how famously vain she was in real life), but she then wears a mask for the remainder of the film, except during the shootout where she takes it off and has permanent scar makeup all across her porcelain face...and retaliates against Marvin by throwing coffee in HIS face, making him endure the same fate.

Grahame is superb in this role.  While I've never been super partial to Glenn Ford (he's good here, if we're judging on a curve, but he always feels too stoic and inward of an actor, never getting into the expressiveness I'd expect from such a well-scripted part), Grahame is marvelous.  She plays Debby as a little girl lost, one who has seen the world and knows more than she's saying, but plays dumb to keep out of trouble, only risking her neck when she realizes that her fate will eventually be at the hands of Vince (which she's right about, as we horribly learn later in the picture).  Grahame was coming off of an Oscar win at the time, and was about to see her career shallow in the coming years with plastic surgery mishaps and a scandalous personal life, but The Big Heat is a reminder of how she was truly one of the best actresses of her generation, one who worked in genre films and as a result never got the credit she was due.

Previous Films in the Series: Pickup on South Street, Gun Crazy, Night and the City, In a Lonely Place, They Live By Night, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Killers, The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep

OVP: Pickup on South Street (1953)

Film: Pickup on South Street (1953)
Stars: Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Richard Kiley
Director: Samuel Fuller
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actress-Thelma Ritter)
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.

Thelma Ritter was, as we stated in our A Letter to Three Wives review last month, in 1949 so little known that even with a pretty large part, she didn't merit a screen credit.  By 1953, though, she had amassed four Academy Award nominations consecutively, a huge deal for a character actress in her fifties-she'd do it twice more before her career ended.  Ritter famously never won the Oscar itself, making her the most-nominated actress in the history of the Academy to never win a competitive trophy (up until this last year, when she was overtaken by Glenn Close), and one of the questions I've frequently asked myself in the years since was-when did she come the closest?  There's no actual way of knowing this, but Ritter usually was a sturdy side presence, a whip-smart comic persona who gets the last laugh, but was largely inconsequential to the plot.  Then I chanced upon 1953's Pickup on South Street, and it became very apparent what the "crown jewel" of Ritter's career was, and where, if she was ever going to win an Oscar, it was going to come from.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses, like so many of our noir pictures this month, on a down-on-his-luck guy, here named Skip McCoy (Widmark).  In the opening scenes of the film, he steals the wallet of Candy (Peters), who is carrying around a top secret government microfilm for her ex-boyfriend Joey (Kiley).  Joey is, in fact, a Communist spy, and selling these secrets to the Russians.  Candy has been promised that Joey will leave her life forever if she gets back the microfilm, so she goes to his small one-room shack on the waterfront to find it, and tries to seduce Skip, but in the process she's both A) roughed up by him and B) suddenly falls in love with him (feminist this film is not).  Unsuccessful in getting the documents back, she goes to Joey, who then intends to kill Skip.  Eventually, after a lot of back-and-forth, Skip does the proper, patriotic thing, and turns in the microfilm rather than trying to blackmail Joey to get cash for it, and he & Candy go on their merry ways, Joey headed to jail.

This is pretty standard-fare film noir, and while it's good (Peters & Widmark both are great, and have terrific chemistry), I'd argue that its best element is Ritter as a side character.  Ritter plays Moe, a professional informant for the police who will sell out her friends...for a price.  She's the one who initially pinches Skip for the robbery (something he doesn't begrudge her-she's gotta eat too), and for a while you kind of assume it's yet another washerwoman style role for Ritter, who is too kindly for this world of thugs.  But as the film progresses, she gets to show her dreams, and really fleshes out her side character in a way you wouldn't expect from such a part.  She gets a killer (literally-she dies) monologue at the end of the film with Kiley, who is intent on murdering her if she doesn't finger Skip, and just aces it.  She's trying to save for a fancy funeral, a way to send her off in elegance that she never got to enjoy in life, and gives a great soliloquy to Kiley about being old, being tired, but not understanding a way of not continuing on.  It's marvelous-in one great scene she shows the entire life of a woman, totally selling her as someone worthy whom life kept giving bad hands.  It's the best I've ever seen Ritter, and makes this her most deserving Oscar nomination.

This is what stuck out to me while watching the movie.  The film is noted for its deeply anti-Communist plotline, taken at the height of the Red Scare, which might rub some people the wrong way (though to my knowledge no one associated with this picture "named names"), but it's interesting and has fun dialogue.  However, it's Ritter that makes this film worthwhile, creating a woman emerging where most people just saw shadows.

Previous Films in the Series: Gun Crazy, Night and the City, In a Lonely Place, They Live By Night, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Killers, The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep