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.

The Skin Game (1931)

Film: The Skin Game (1931)

Stars: CV France, Helen Haye, Jill Esmond, Edmund Gwenn, John Longden, Phyllis Konstam

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

(Throughout the year, in connection with our 'Saturdays with the Stars' series, I am watching every gap I have in Alfred Hitchcock's filmography in what we're calling 'Sunday Leftovers.'  Every Sunday, I'll be watching a Hitchcock film that I've never seen before as I spend 2021 completing his filmography)

I love the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but I am learning as we're going along with this Sunday Leftovers series that watching a man's full filmography, particularly when he has a robust early filmography, can be a bit demanding (which is why we are consistently running late on this series).  Hitchcock's filmography makes this demanding in a strange way for me because so many of his films take place in the early Sound Era, which is my least favorite time frame for film.  While there are great sound movies during this period (King Kong, Dinner at Eight, Duck Soup), from 1927-33 I am generally wishing that the movies had just shut up (particularly considering how the best Silent Era movies took place in the late-1920's).  This is personified with The Skin Game, a movie with an intriguing plot, but one that gets totally glossed by in the early sound technology.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about two feuding families: the Hillcrists, Jack (France) and Ivy (Haye, and it's Helen Haye-not Oscar-winner Helen Hayes, though their remarkably similar names had me thrown off as well), who are a longtime upper class family in the English countryside, and the nouveau riche Hornblowers, including their patriarch Mr. Hornblower (Gwenn), his son Charles (Longden), and his pregnant daughter-in-law Chloe (Konstam).  The Hornblowers are buying up much of the land around the Hillcrists, obstructing their view by putting up factories.  When one last parcel of land is up-for-sale, they get into a bidding war that leads to the Hornblowers winning the land, but before they can do anything with the property, Ivy has a catch-she knows that Chloe used to be a prostitute, and as a result she blackmails Hornblower into causing a scandal for his family (and incoming grandchild) if they put up factories.  They swear an oath not to say anything in exchange for the land remaining untouched, but Chloe's guilt & the gossip this stirs up is too much for her, and she kills herself.  Angered by the Hillcrists' blackmail killing his future grandchild, Hornblower goes back on the deal, destroying the last views of the Hillcrist estate.

There's something fascinating in this movie, I'm not going to lie, as it's a good plot.  I love stories about the minutia of rich people, and how you can use seemingly silly things (like a parcel of land & the view it provides) and turn it into a much more dire set of circumstances (i.e. the reputation & life of a young woman).  Hitchcock even tries to preserve the majesty this had in previous iterations by hiring Gwenn & Haye, both of whom were in the 1921 silent version of this picture.  The late scenes where Gwenn, a fine actor then as well as later (he'd eventually win an Oscar for Miracle on 34th Street) tells off the Hillcrists & promises revenge, are solid stage work.

But this isn't a play, and huge stretches of the film are exceedingly dull.  The auction scene goes on at a glacial pace, and doesn't have the excitement it would have if this film was made a decade later, and the dialogue becomes interchangeable between, say, Chloe and the Hillcrists' daughter Jill.  Combine in that Chloe's prostitution isn't actually mentioned (though it's heavily implied for anyone who can remotely read between the lines), and there feels like 30% of the film just having shocked people trying not to say Chloe's "sin."  As a result, what might have been a great film gets bogged down as Hitchcock (like nearly all directors of this era) trying to capture what sound-in-film would feel like.  As a result, The Skin Game becomes like many Hitchcock movies of this era-only necessary if you're a completionist.

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

Picture: The Trouble with Harry (1955)

Stars: Edmund Gwenn, John Forsythe, Shirley MacLaine, Mildred Natwick, Mildred Dunnock, Jerry Mathers

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: The film received a number of what we'd consider today to be "traditional" precursor citations-MacLaine won a Golden Globe & was nominated for a BAFTA, while Hitchcock was cited for the DGA.  But it didn't get any nominations overall at the Academy Awards.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Shirley MacLaine-click here to learn more about Ms. MacLaine (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

With Shirley MacLaine, we begin with Hitchcock, because with Shirley MacLaine, her cinematic journey began with Hitchcock.  As I'll likely bring up in pretty much every review we do this month, Shirley MacLaine is who I consider my favorite actress of all time, but I'd never seen her debut film, which despite the third-billing up top was very much a lead role (she got the "Introducing Shirley MacLaine" title credit, which made me squeal with delight while watching it).  MacLaine had gotten to Hollywood through an unlikely path.  After spending a couple of years on Broadway doing chorus work (MacLaine's first great love was not acting, but dance, something that would feature prominently throughout her career), MacLaine landed the understudy role in The Pajama Game after star Carol Haney injured her ankle (Haney, who won a Tony Award for this part, had a steep career fall after a promising start following this incident, proving that Hollywood cliche "for one star to rise, another must fall").  This led to Hal Wallis seeing her in the role, and signing her to a contract with Paramount, where her first film was The Trouble with Harry.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Trouble with Harry is a comedy, albeit a macabre one (in a strange coincidence, our Sunday Leftovers piece tomorrow is also going to be a comedy from Hitchcock, which was not a genre he frequented).  The movie takes place in Highwater, Vermont, where several residents find a dead body of a man they learned to be named Harry up on a hill.  The question, of course, is how he died, and several people worry as the film progresses that they are the cause.  They include Captain Wiles (Gwenn), who initially believes he shot the man while rabbit-hunting-in order to cover up the accidental crime, so he & local artist Sam Marlowe (Forsythe) bury the man, but it turns out that he had instead actually shot a rabbit.  Both Jennifer Rogers (MacLaine), Harry's estranged wife, and prim Miss Gravely (Natwick) are worried they killed him, both by hitting him with blunt objects, but as we learn by the end of the picture Harry, despite being buried & unburied throughout the entire film by the guilt-ridden quartet, died of natural causes.  The film ends happily, with both Jennifer & Sam and Captain Wiles & Miss Gravely ending up together.

The Trouble with Harry was something of an experiment for Hitchcock-he wanted to see what a film led by character actors and "non-stars" would do at the box office.  MacLaine was doing her first film, Forsythe was relatively early in his career, and Gwenn/Natwick were hardly newcomers, but were well-known as character actors, not headliners.  This ended up being an experiment that would end in failure-The Trouble with Harry was a commercial flop, and critics weren't entirely won over either.  Certainly compared to Hitchcock's massive recent hits with Grace Kelly, the film did not meet expectations and it doesn't feel like a coincidence that his next movie starred established stars Jimmy Stewart & Doris Day.

This is a pity, because there's not any trouble with Harry-it's a delight.  The cinematography is gorgeous (the bright red-and-orange foliage of autumn in Vermont sings in Technicolor), and the Bernard Herrmann score (his first partnership with Hitchcock) is playful & fun.  I loved the entire cast-everyone is hitting a home run of the four main quartet.  Forsythe plays his rugged hipster with a wink, Gwenn & Natwick are grand as a pair of clumsy, unexperienced lovers, and MacLaine starts out her film career totally captivating.  Jennifer is a hard role to play-she's at once alluring, bold, & needs to be absurd without ever feeling like she isn't real.  This would be a recipe that MacLaine would perfect throughout her career, especially the first decade of it, and honestly I'd struggle to think of any other actor of her generation who wouldn't have overplayed the mysterious elements of Jennifer, ruining the comedy, so well done to Paramount for casting her so well so early in her career.

MacLaine is the first of the stars we've profiled this year who not only worked with Hitchcock, but has gone through the modern circuit of talk shows so she's discussed Hitchcock.  She only worked with him the one time (her leading man Forsythe would partner with him a decade later in Topaz), and her comments about him aren't as problematic as some of the other actresses who would work with him during this era, though it's worth noting that in interviews she's clearly aware of his behavior with some of the blonde actresses who would bookend Harry (in an interview for the Hudson Union, MacLaine would say "I was not blonde & ethereal, so he wasn't going to jump at me").  Instead the most common stories MacLaine talks about are his appetite (starving off of years on Broadway, she gained 15 pounds eating with the director during the film until the studio called & demand she stop), and his bizarre directing style (using Cockney riddles to get her to relax on set).  She would later state that he was "colorfully cruel" and that his actors were "insignificant"...neither of which sounds good even if MacLaine tries to make light of them.  All of this is to say as we try to reconcile Hitchcock the man with the movies that we love so much, MacLaine isn't the most damning of the women he'd work with, but she's also far from complimentary.  We'll move beyond Hitchcock, though, in the coming weeks (as MacLaine did), and get to three major gaps I have in MacLaine's extensive filmography.

OVP: Louisa (1950)

Film: Louisa (1950)

Stars: Ronald Reagan, Charles Coburn, Ruth Hussey, Edmund Gwenn, Spring Byington, Piper Laurie

Director: Alexander Hall

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound Recording)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

An unexpected theme over the last month on this blog has been me revisiting the very strange Best Sound Recording nominations of the 1940's & 50's at the Oscars.  I've talked about this a few times, but sound nominations today seem to have a logic, even if it's not a solid one.  Musicals, action films, Best Picture nominees...it's pretty easy to understand the why behind each sound nomination that happens at the Oscars.  That wasn't the case in the 1950's, though, as we'll see once again today with Louisa, a romantic-comedy that has literally nothing special about its sound design, and at the time its sound designer (Leslie I. Carey) had only even been nominated once before.  As for the film itself?  Let's find out!

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about the Norton family.  Hal (Reagan) has had his widowed mother Louisa (Byington) move into their home, much to the chagrin of the rest of the family.  Louisa frequently critiques his wife Meg (Hussey) as well as his two children, particularly daughter Cathy (Laurie, in her film debut), and is deeply opinionated about everything.  She eventually apologizes to a green grocer, Henry (Gwenn), she yelled at, seeing how persnickety she has become, and they start dating.  This makes Hal upset, not wanting to see his mother with a new man, but things take a turn when during a social event, Louisa meets Hal's boss Abel (Coburn), who also takes a fancy to Louisa, setting up a rivalry between Abel & Henry that ends with Henry ultimately winning Louisa's affections, and in the process also winning over Louisa's family.

The film is fun, especially in 1950's Hollywood, because the focus isn't really on the romantic adventures of the headliners.  In most movies it'd be Reagan & Hussey whose romance would take central stage, but instead we have Byington, Gwenn, & Coburn, scene-stealers all, get the central romance.  This works better in theory than execution though.  None of the actors seems to take advantage of this new centerstage the way you'd hope (Coburn comes across the best), and while Reagan, a generally limited actor, is better at comedy than he ever was at drama, he has little chemistry with either Hussey or Byington, and as a result the film drags as we hit the last 40 minutes or so.

The Sound recording nomination, as I said, is bizarre.  Nothing stands out from the sound work.  The score is minimal (and not memorable), and while there is a western-themed dance sequence, it's not outstanding & really just involves a couple cheating at the limbo.  Other than that...it's literally just talking.  Nothing noteworthy or technically challenging...I have no explanations as to how this got nominated, and shall stop ruminating on it as it's been driving me bonkers since I saw the film how the Academy even noticed it (it's the film's only nomination!)

OVP: The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)

Film: The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)
Stars: Jean Arthur, Robert Cummings, Charles Coburn, Edmund Gwenn, Spring Byington
Director: Sam Wood
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Charles Coburn, Original Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

On Day 3 of our week devoted to the category of Best Supporting Actor, we're going to go way back, all the way to 1941, just six years into the category even existing.  This nomination happened during the peak of Jean Arthur's career, when she was practically printing money for the studio, and indeed, with The Devil and Miss Jones, Arthur was getting another hit.  I've always found Arthur's career to be kind of fascinating (she'd make an awesome "Saturdays with the Stars" figure in the future), considering her onscreen persona (bubbly, warm, the girl-next-door) was so different than what she was like in real-life (extremely private, bordering on the antisocial).  In many ways she was more comparable to Greta Garbo than Carole Lombard offscreen.  Her films oftentimes got nominated for major Oscars, though only once for her (1943's The More the Merrier), and that was the case for The Devil and Miss Jones, where Charles Coburn would get the first of his three Oscar nominations in the 1940's.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about John P. Merrick (Coburn), a tightfisted, cranky old millionaire who owns a string of department stores in New York.  He is trying to bust open a union that is forming in his store, which could deprive him of his profit margins, and so he goes undercover as a shoe clerk named Thomas.  There he finds out that the managers treat the employees very poorly, and his only friend is a woman named Mary (Arthur) whose boyfriend Joe (Cummings) is the union ringleader.  He also starts to fall in love with an elderly store clerk Elizabeth (Byington), and appreciate the travails of his employees.  However, when his identity is found out (and Mary & Elizabeth feel betrayed by his lying), he is forced by the board to choose between supporting his employees or continuing his lavish (lonely) lifestyle.

As you might imagine (this is a Classic Hollywood movie, after all), Merrick chooses to help his employees, marrying Elizabeth and living happily ever after (if a good deal less rich than before).  The movie is sweet, if totally predictable.  It's the kind of film where if you're open to a good time and something pleasant, it'll satisfy you, but if you can't take saccharine that day, I'd avoid.  The script is predictable but humorous (my favorite sight gag being when Merrick has to bribe a child to buy the most expensive shoes in the store...and she still doesn't want to wear them because they're so hideous), and the cast is charming.

The film has Arthur & Cummings as its leads, but they aren't really the central figures in the story.  Today Coburn's nomination would surely be accused of category fraud, as he's undoubtedly the film's central character and thus I'm going to take a point off for him being the lead as is my wont in these situations (though unlike, say, Brad Pitt, Coburn was in the category that most of his roles would end up being, just not this one).  Coburn is warm, curmudgeonly, and gives a full performance.  I feel like this is the type of performance he almost always ends up giving (he was definitely typecast), but that doesn't mean it's not effective within the script.  His cold thaw is the best part of the movie, and while this isn't legendary acting, it's sturdy character work that builds up a picture, which is what you'd hope for in a Supporting Actor.

OVP: Green Dolphin Street (1947)

Film: Green Dolphin Street (1947)
Stars: Lana Turner, Van Heflin, Donna Reed, Richard Hart, Frank Morgan, Edmund Gwenn, May Whitty, Gladys Cooper
Director: Victor Saville
Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Cinematography, Special Effects*, Sound, Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

Last week we talked about the film that graduated Lana Turner from playing the "random beautiful love interest" to a proper leading lady, someone who might be able to handle meatier roles after her triumph in The Postman Always Rings Twice.  This lasted only for a little while, but it did result in a number of high-profile films (and hits) in Turner's career, one of which we're going to talk about today.   A year after Postman, Turner emerged in one of the new, "more quality" roles that was now being afforded her, Green Dolphin Street, which would prove that she was at her peak in terms of financial viability for the studio (the movie was MGM's highest-grossing picture of 1947), but it also showed some of the limitations of Turner's acting ability, never quite understanding the woman who had sizzled across movie screens the year earlier.

(Spoilers Ahead) At 142 minutes, Green Dolphin Street (it gets the name from the ship in the film and a street in the town where the film is set) is a long movie, so I'll try and summarize the plot in a paragraph but might gloss over some points.  Essentially, you have two sisters, Marguerite (Reed) and Marianne (Turner), who fall in love with the same man William (Hart), who happens to be the son of their mother's former lover, played here by Frank Morgan (Edmund Gwenn is their father, Gladys Cooper their mother, and Dame May Whitty a Mother Superior in a pretty star-studded supporting cast).  The two sisters similar names get them in trouble when William, after being branded a deserter in the navy (he fell for an Asian prostitute in a problematic scene in the film, as she then robs him & leaves him out-in-the-cold to die), gets drunk and proposes to Marianne, when he means to propose to Marguerite, whom he claims is his true love.  Marianne goes, and convinced by his friend Tim (Heflin), who is in love with Marianne & doesn't want her dishonored, William proposes to her.  You can see where this is going-Marguerite becomes a nun, Tim shares his love for Marianne, but she rejects him because she loves William, and William realizes in the end that it was Marianne he was meant for.  Oh, and there's an earthquake.

That earthquake is what the film is most famous for.  The film was nominated for four Oscars, and won one, and boy did it deserve it.  In an era prior to computer-generated effects (and location shooting, apparently because that could not look more like California if it tried), the film manages to have a gigantic earthquake sequence that shows the ground shifting, trees crashing, and then follows it with a spectacular flash flood that nearly drowns Richard Hart (I left quite petrified, and it was said in reviews of the film at the time that the audience could practically feel the earth shake from the movie).  The Oscar is richly-deserved, but it's the only nomination I'm getting behind.  The cinematography is fine (it's nice to be outdoors, I guess), but not all that compelling (mood lighting on a woman as beautiful as Lana Turner isn't groundbreaking), the editing is clumsy (the film drags on too long, and they use at least one shot twice during the earthquake scene), and the sound, outside of the earthquake scene, isn't important at all (also, it's not entirely clear during that scene who is screaming).

This is all to say that Green Dolphin Street is probably the type of movie that Turner was hoping for, but it's not what she wanted.  She's taken seriously as an actress here-it's easy to see a more storied thespian like Bette Davis in the role that Turner plays here, and she gets big, meaty speeches.  But the movie doesn't care much about defining her Marianne, and she doesn't either.  This is a woman who is strong, but also needs to be taken down a peg according to the script...but is constantly credited for being strong.  Turner gets off better than Reed, who is just there to look pious, and it's never clear exactly why Hart's William is in love with her since they barely spent any time together, and it's obviously Marianne who challenges & intrigues him.  Heflin is the best part of the film (and let's be honest, the best actor of the main four quartet in general), but he's inconsequential to the plot, and it's never clear again why he's fallen for Marianne, since an early scene shows he doesn't like strong women.  All-in-all, this is a lousy film with one truly great sequence in its center, the kind of "important" film that scoops up awards & box office, but feels utterly disposable afterward.  Turner was better off with the lower-budget but higher-quality Postman.

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.

OVP: Lassie Come Home (1943)

Film: Lassie Come Home (1943)
Stars: Roddy McDowell, Donald Crisp, May Whitty, Edmund Gwenn, Elsa Lanchester, Nigel Bruce, Elizabeth Taylor
Director: Fred M. Wilcox
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Cinematography-Color)
Snap Judgment Rating: 4/5 stars

"A classic is something everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read," said Mark Twain, and occasionally, it feels that way with the cinema.  Granted, movies like Casablanca and The Godfather are well worth everyone's time and some of my favorites, but I kind of see his point.  I've invested the time in a movie like The Jazz Singer-I was better off with the random AFI clips than actually seeing the film.  The Birth of a Nation has moved to the bottom of my Netflix list more times than I can count.  So I went into this movie, the cinema's first introduction to the most beloved dog committed to celluloid (sorry Rin Tin Tin) with a bit of hesitation.  It hasn't survived in the sense that The Wizard of Oz or The Miracle on 34th Street have-I was guessing that I'd run into a saccharine, bloated nightmare of a film that would be two parts treacle and one part "aged poorly."  Thankfully, this was (mostly) not the case.

The movie is about a young boy whose parents (Donald Crisp and Elsa Lanchester, who really does look like Shirley Jones in this film, doesn't she?) have sold his dog to a rich Duke and his granddaughter, but the dog keeps running back to his master, played by an adorable Roddy McDowell.  The Duke, however, is bound for Scotland, and thinks this is the end of the running away since the boy and his family live in Yorkshire, England.  Of course, the dog has other plans and starts a wild adventure home that has been told countless times with both dogs and war horses alike.

The movie has just enough sense not to focus too much on any one particular set of British character actors for very long.  Nigel Bruce is his boisterous self as the Duke, and in one of her earliest roles, a young Elizabeth Taylor plays his granddaughter.  Liz is almost certainly the most identified character in the promotions for the film these days (outside of the collie), but she has a bit role and the dog quickly moves on to a host of characters, most notably Dame May Whitty, who plays a lonely old woman who takes in the dog after he swims into England, and Edmund Gwenn, free of his Santa Claus beard and armed with the most adorable of little dogs named Toots (which in my opinion steals the film's second act away from Lassie herself).  The ending of the film, as expected, brings tears to your eyes right around the time the entire town recognizes this brave dog, limping her way back to her owner.  Only a heart of stone could stay intact while watching dog and owner reunited, even if you've seen it copied in a hundred other movies and know that there's quite a bit of sap to mingle with those tears of joy.

The Cinematography, the only aspect of the film to be nominated, is handsome and shiny technicolor, but like most technicolor, it becomes a bit much at times and somewhat distracting and saturated.  Overall, though, Leonard Smith, who three years later would win a shiny golden man for the equally revered The Yearling, finds a strong light throughout the movie.

What about you?  What are your fondest memories of Hollywood's Best in Show?  Do you also think that Elsa Lanchester bares a resemblance to Mrs. Partridge?  And what child stars do you wish had followed Roddy McDowell and Elizabeth Taylor's leads and become stars as adults?