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.

Charley's Aunt (1941)

Film: Charley's Aunt (1941)

Stars: Jack Benny, Kay Francis, James Ellison, Anne Baxter, Edmund Gwenn, Laird Cregar, Richard Haydn

Director: Archie Mayo

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

Well, I basically just skipped last week not only on the blog, but also in our Saturday article (I feel like we can all be forgiven for being distracted this past week).  This kind of works out for Jack Benny, though, because we get to look at twin sides of Benny's late film career as we close our month with him.  Much of the movies that Benny did were in the 1940's, when he was a big radio star but wanted to make it as a legitimate actor.  Last week we talked about both To Be or Not To Be and George Washington Slept Here, both films that are generally considered to be critical successes.  Today we're going to talk about two films, the first of which was a big deal, and arguably the closest that Benny came (save for To Be or Not To Be) to actually acting, and not just playing himself.  Later today (hey, it's still Saturday!), we're going to talk about the end of Benny's career, and the film that would become a running punchline for the rest of his career because the actor so despised it (and its failure).

(Spoilers Ahead) Charley's Aunt is based on a play by Brandon Thomas that was told a few times in the early days of cinema.  It's about three friends: Jack (Ellison), Babbs (Benny), and Charley (Haydn).  Jack & Charley are desperately in love with two girls Amy (Baxter) and Kitty (Whelan), but assume that without money they can't convince the girls and their guardian Mr. Spettigue (Gwenn) to allow them to marry.  When Jack finds out he's broke and Charley's wealthy aunt doesn't show up, they put Babbs in a dress and make him pretend to be Charley's aunt, hoping that she'll convince the girls to marry them.  Things fall apart, though, when Mr. Spettigue falls madly in love with Babbs in drag...and when the real aunt (Francis) shows up...and falls in love with Babbs.

This sounds like it should work as a comedy, so I get why this was a popular story, but I wasn't a fan of it.  The supporting cast, despite boasting film veterans Baxter, Gwenn, & Francis, are all a bit dull and don't do much with the material, and the rest of the supporting cast can't hold up.  It doesn't help that Ellison & Haydn are so boring as to be interchangeable (as, to be fair, are Baxter & Whelan) or that the jokes all feel dated even in 1941-how many times can you go to the same "man in a dress" well and expect that alone to be a joke, Classical Hollywood?

I have to say, for the first time, that Benny also doesn't work for me here.  This is the closest he's come to playing another person; while there's definitely scenes where he's going after the Benny schtick that he'd become famous for, he largely is playing Babbs as a real person...but he's not a strong enough chameleon to pull it off.  This happened quite a bit with comedians of Benny's era-Cary Grant was marvelous at playing Cary Grant...which is why he rarely played anything else.  Benny in a different motif didn't work.  His jokes didn't land as sharply as they should have, and the film itself feels stale & lifeless & overlong.

Saturdays with the Stars Season 3 Finale

Two of our stars, Shirley & Grace

With this past week's viewing of The Seduction fo Joe Tynan, we are officially done with our third season of "Saturdays with the Stars."  I really like to find a moment before I start the new season (which, unlike past seasons, I haven't told you the theme of & will be doing so in the coming days, as we will indeed do a fourth season starting on Saturday) to discuss the season, talking about what I learned, and also focusing on some of the best of the year's movies/performances.

When I decided to do this theme, I wanted to see how it would turn out picking twelve women who had really nothing in common other than Alfred Hitchcock.  You couldn't find stars as divergent in the way that cinematic history or even contemporary audiences treated them as, say, Maureen O'Hara & Barbara Harris or Shirley MacLaine & Margaret Lockwood.  Hitchcock wasn't always successful with his leading ladies, but it does show what a versatile director he was that he continually tried new things, occasionally making masterpieces but just as often strange curiosities.

It also showed, especially in our month devoted to Tippi Hedren, how Hitchcock's legacy is at once peerless in quality but blemished by the director himself.  Hitchcock was a complicated man, one who brought the downfall of a career or two (Hedren's career, as we discussed, never flourished the way it might have with a less authoritarian mentor), but who also clearly made some of the best films ever made.  What was great about this year was not just focusing on him, but getting to see unknown chapters in these twelve women's lives (I love that I stick to the rule of seeing only films I haven't seen before, because it means every week I get to see a new facet of an actor I thought I knew well, but frequently have my perceptions changed).  As I continue to watch deeper and deeper cuts from Old Hollywood (after three seasons devoted to it on the blog, it seems like watching fresh viewings demands getting into the rafters of these icons' IMDB pages), I am reminded once again how this period of Hollywood has countless movies & careers left to explore.  Thank you so much for playing along!

Favorite Performance from Each Star

January: Madeleine Carroll-The General Died at Dawn

February: Sylvia Sidney-Sabotage

March: Margaret Lockwood-Cast a Dark Shadow

April: Maureen O'Hara-Rio Grande

May: Carole Lombard-Twentieth Century

June: Anne Baxter-The Luck of the Irish

July: Ingrid Bergman-Autumn Sonata

August: Grace Kelly-Dial M for Murder

September: Shirley MacLaine-The Children's Hour

October: Julie Andrews-Thoroughly Modern Millie

November: Tippi Hedren-Marnie

December: Barbara Harris-Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?

5 Favorite Actresses of the Year (Alphabetical, and based solely on the films we watched as a collective & not on the rest of their careers)

Ingrid Bergman

Barbara Harris

Margaret Lockwood

Carole Lombard

Shirley MacLaine

5 (err-6, I couldn't corner down) Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Ingrid Bergman, Autumn Sonata

Ingrid Bergman, Journey to Italy

Margaret Lockwood, Cast a Dark Shadow

Margaret Lockwood, The Wicked Lady

Carole Lombard-Twentieth Century

Shirley MacLaine, The Children's Hour

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

Autumn Sonata

Cast a Dark Shadow

The Children's Hour

Dead End

Dial M for Murder

Journey to Italy

The Lady Vanishes

The Trouble with Harry

Twentieth Century

The Wicked Lady

Top 10 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Leading Ladies)

Diane Baker, Marnie

John Barrymore, Twentieth Century

Dirk Bogarde, Cast a Dark Shadow

Humphrey Bogart, Dead End

Sean Connery, Marnie

Audrey Hepburn, The Children's Hour

George Sanders, Journey to Italy

Claire Trevor, Dead End

Liv Ullmann, Autumn Sonata

John Williams, Dial M for Murder

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: The Luck of the Irish (1948)

Film: The Luck of the Irish (1948)

Stars: Tyrone Power, Anne Baxter, Cecil Kellaway, Lee J. Cobb, Jayne Meadows

Director: Henry Koster

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actor-Cecil Kellaway)

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.

For the first two weeks of this month, we discussed how Anne Baxter was given roles that typically led to a proper kind of stardom, someone that would graduate from "love interest roles" to major lead player.  That didn't happen for Baxter, though.  While today it's common for leading actresses to take on plum supporting parts in films (think of someone like Meryl Streep or Glenn Close oscillating between lead/supporting roles), that was not something that stars did in the 1940's-you were either an above-the-line figure, or someone who got supporting parts.  Baxter doing this always makes her career's success hard-to-grasp.  She won an Oscar in 1946 for Best Supporting Actress for The Razor's Edge, then four years later was nominated for Best Lead Actress for All About Eve-it was a pretty short list at the time of actors who had been cited for both categories.  But in between those two classics, she starred in a number of forgotten films, one of which got onto Oscar's radar for her costar Cecil Kellaway, and that's the picture we're looking at today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Luck of the Irish centers around reporter Stephen Fitzgerald (Power), who during a trip to Ireland meets a beautiful young woman named Nora (Baxter), with whom he becomes somewhat smitten but doesn't make a proper move on since he's soon headed back to his job in NYC.  He also, it's worth noting, meets a leprechaun we eventually learn to be named Horace (Kellaway), who gives him a piece of gold.  When he returns to NYC, he finds out his boss Mr. Agur (Cobb) is going to run for the Senate, and his daughter Frances (Meadows) has designs on Stephen getting both the top job and her hand in marriage.  What throws a wrench in this is both Nora & Horace are now in NYC, the first by chance & the second by magic, to remind him of the simple life he might be able to have in Ireland.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which one the movie ultimately gives him (but Baxter's name is above the title for a reason).

The plot itself is a bit hard-to-follow, and quite meandering.  Power's character is a man-at-a-crossroads, but his complicated relationship with his politician boss sometimes borders on him seemingly misusing his position, and other times he just wants to live the simple life.  Jayne Meadows as the ambitious daughter is also a bit ridiculous.  Kudos to the casting director for not typecasting, but Meadows is a poor choice for such a part, and can't really land it.  One honestly wonders why they didn't just switch Baxter & Meadows' parts, as both would've been better in the other role.  Our star-of-the-month fails to deliver here in terms of her character, though her Irish accent work is superb (Anne Baxter never phones in the accent).

The film's one Oscar nomination is harder to begrudge, even if it's not great acting.  Cecil Kellaway is adorable as the man with a pot-of-gold, and as it was his first nomination, I'm not going to complain too heartily, but let's be real here-he got this for playing a sweet old man, not for actual acting.  There's nothing noteworthy here other than scene-stealing, and the nature of the part makes it so that any actor would've pulled that off.  Being pleasant helps lift an otherwise routine (and misguided) movie, but it doesn't deserve an Oscar.  That being said, of course, it'd have been kind of funny if the Academy had followed giving Santa Claus an Oscar by rewarding a leprechaun.

OVP: Five Graves to Cairo (1943)

Film: Five Graves to Cairo (1943)

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

Director: Billy Wilder

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

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

OVP: The Pied Piper (1942)

Film: The Pied Piper (1942)

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

Director: Irving Pichel

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

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturdays with the Stars: Anne Baxter

Each month of 2021 we will be taking a look at the leading ladies of some of Alfred Hitchcock's many celebrated classics; we'll be doing this series chronologically to when they first entered Hitchcock's filmography.  Last month we looked at Carole Lombard, an actress whose career seems to run counter to everything we understand about Alfred Hitchcock's work, but who managed to convince the famed director to make his one American comedy.  This month, we're going to conclude our trilogy of famed actresses who aren't instantly name-checked as "Hitchcock's leading ladies" despite their celebrity with an actress who definitely made a Hitchcock film where she got above-the-line billing, but isn't known for that film when you think of her biggest roles.  However, unlike Lombard or Maureen O'Hara before, this month's actress very much fits into the cool, enigmatic elegance that Hitch would make his signature (even if she didn't sport his favorite hair color).  This month, our star is Anne Baxter.

Anne Baxter was born two hours northwest of Carole Lombard's home town in Indiana, in the lighthouse-laden Michigan City.  She had a posh upbringing, the daughter of a Seagram executive and the granddaughter of legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright.  She went to boarding school in New York, where she got to see a Broadway performance from Helen Hayes that changed her life, inspiring her to be an actress.  Though theater was a struggle (she was dismissed at a young age by Katharine Hepburn), she eventually went to Hollywood, where she nearly had a very different career thanks to our director in question: Baxter auditioned for the Joan Fontaine role in Rebecca, but Hitchcock didn't want to cast her as she was "too young."  Still, she got a Fox contract, and had star billing in major movies like The Pied Piper within two years.

Baxter's role with Hitchcock is in one of his least-known pictures of the 1950's, I Confess, and it's rarely talked about today.  In fact, if you're looking for more information about Baxter's relationship with Hitchcock, you're far more likely to find discussion of her failed attempt to get the lead in Rebecca than any talk of this film, so once again we don't have a leading lady that (publicly) said much against Hitchcock (it seems like Baxter had more trouble with her leading man Montgomery Clift).  Baxter is a weird choice for me this month because I have seen all of her three most famous films (The Razor's Edge, All About Eve, The Ten Commandments) & I only feature movies I've never seen before for Saturdays with the Stars, but she is not center stage in any of these films, and so this month I want to explore what it's like with Anne Baxter at center stage, getting top billing, including her (much-delayed) picture with Alfred Hitchcock.

82. Anne Baxter (All About Eve)

82. A few days ago, I sank into the delicious playwright's wife Karen Richards (Celeste Holm, #86), and stated that she distinguishes herself from a mouth-watering cast. Well, this wasn't to say that there weren't other members of that cast that deserved a spot on this list as well, as can be seen from the woman on the left.

While Bette Davis's immortal role of Margo Channing may not always equate itself with Bette Davis for me (I've also got Baby Jane Hudson and Charlotte Vale vying for my attentions), Anne Baxter is Eve Harrington in my eyes. That perfect hair, that cool, rehearsed demeanor, that heart of a vixen trapped in the body of a mouse ("no, not mouse, never mouse, if anything rat"). Baxter may have played other roles well (such as her Oscar-winning turn in The Razor's Edge), but it is with this dewy-eyed creation that she wins over any naysayers. From her sparkling tete-a-tete with George Sanders in the hotel to her pure Hollywood awards acception speech to the final, strings-soaked curtain call, she owns Eve Harrington, and bewitches the audience. Movie villains may come and go-Anne Baxter and Eve Harrington are forever.

A film festival with Anne Baxter may seem pointless (after all it, was Easter yesterday-you already saw The Ten Commandments). Therefore, I recommend two other are-they-good-or-evil? films: Charade, with Cary Grant's character switching every-which-way-he-can, and North by Northwest, again with Cary Grant (but this time it's Eva Marie Saint who keeps you guessing).