Saturdays with the Stars Season 4 Finale

Two of our stars this year, Lucille Ball & Ann Sothern

We ended the year on a Saturday (a first for our series), so I wasn't able to get this recap out in 2022 like we normally do, but I didn't want to finish our fourth season of Saturdays with the Stars without our annual recap.  While we are headed into a new season this coming Saturday focusing on western stars, I would be remiss if we didn't take a moment to talk through actors in television, and what I learned from our fourth season.

This year was really interesting for me for a couple of reasons.  For starters, it was really the first season where I didn't have "stars" at the center, and of course it was our first season with men.  As a result, there were actors this year where I was watching a movie where they barely showed up, character actors in Old Hollywood being harder to track their "most significant" roles.  As a result, our annual discussion below of "favorite performances" I ended up in some cases having less options.

But I also kind of loved that, as it underlined the main thesis of this year: that television gave these performers an opportunity that movies simply couldn't.  Some of these actors had great potential, but the public (or the studio heads) couldn't see it for what it was, and TV brought that talent out in them.  Others, quite frankly, needed the banality of television compared to the "make an impact every time" culture of movies because their star personas weren't as curated.  We'll be getting back to star culture in 2023 (while they might occasionally take supporting parts depending on our film, all 12 of our stars this year are generally considered to be "leading players"), I won't forget that lesson as I continue to watch the twelve stars we watched this past year in other films in the decades to come.  Below, I have created a little list celebrating the best of this year's stars.  Thank you so much to everyone who joined us for part or all of this year's season-I'm excited to have you back for season five's "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood"!: 

Favorite Performance from Each Star 

January: Lucille Ball-Dance. Girl. Dance.

February: Jack Benny-George Washington Slept Here

March: Eve Arden-Comrade X

April: Ann Sothern-Lady in a Cage

May: Robert Young-They Won't Believe Me

June: Spring Byington-BF's Daughter

July: Loretta Young-Midnight Mary

August: John Payne-Silver Lode

September: Ward Bond-The Wings of Eagles

October: Walter Brennan-Come and Get It

November: Donna Reed-The Last Time I Saw Paris

December: Barbara Stanwyck-Baby Face

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

Eve Arden

Lucille Ball

Jack Benny

Ann Sothern

Barbara Stanwyck

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Lucille Ball, Dance. Girl. Dance.

Barbara Stanwyck, Baby Face

Barbara Stanwyck, The Furies

Ann Sothern, Lady in a Cage

Loretta Young, Midnight Mary

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

Baby Face

Dance. Girl. Dance.

Forty Guns

The Furies

George Washington Slept Here

Lady in a Cage

Rio Bravo

The Stranger

They Were Expendable

They Won't Believe Me

Top 10 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Stars...and Yes, Alphabetical)

Judith Anderson, The Furies

James Caan, Lady in a Cage

Charles Coburn, George Washington Slept Here

Olivia de Havilland, Lady in a Cage

Susan Hayward, They Won't Believe Me

Walter Huston, The Furies

Percy Kilbride, George Washington Slept Here

Edward G. Robinson, The Stranger

John Wayne, Rio Bravo

Orson Welles, The Stranger

Our Miss Brooks (1956)

Film: Our Miss Brooks (1956)

Stars: Eve Arden, Gale Gordon, Don Porter, Robert Rockwell, Jane Morgan, Richard Crenna, Nick Adams

Director: Al Lewis

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

I am going to attempt something that I don't entirely know if I'll be able to pull off today with another Saturdays with the Stars double-feature (it's entirely possible that this becomes briefly into Sunday).  The copy of the movie that I wanted to watch later today for a double feature (I'm aware we missed last week) isn't great, but I'm going to hunt for a better copy later today or I'm going to find a different movie as I don't like leaving Eve Arden totally in the lurch with only three films for the month (she's such a good & varied actress, I want at least one of her post-Our Miss Brooks films to be watched).  So for now, with hope in my eyes, we're going to start out with Our Miss Brooks the big-screen adaptation, and hopefully we'll finish off her month later today or early tomorrow (and in April, we get back to once a week...that's more me begging the universe to calm down after an unmanageable March).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Connie Brooks (Arden), an English teacher who has recently moved to town and gotten a job at a local school.  It's there that she meets the biology teacher Mr. Boynton (Rockwell), whom she becomes enamored with who largely is oblivious to her romantic pursuits of him.  Meanwhile, Connie is asked to tutor Gary Nolan (Adams), the son of the richest man in town Lawrence Nolan (Porter), who also takes a shine to Connie.  A side plot involves Connie's boss Mr. Conklin (Gordon) trying to run for school superintendent, in hopes of gaining more power over his situation.  These two worlds collide when Connie becomes his campaign manager after Conklin promises Boynton a promotion...and a salary that would grant her an engagement ring.  In the end, while Conklin doesn't get that job (he quits after he realizes it won't pay well enough), Connie still gets her man (even if her engagement ring is stolen by a chimpanzee at the zoo).

We're used to the concept of big-screen continuations of television series today, with shows like Sex and the City and The Simpsons pulling their universe onto the big-screen and using that as a new launchpad for the future of the show, but that's not really what Our Miss Brooks is.  While much of the original show's cast (including Arden, Gordon, Rockwell, Morgan, & Crenna) were brought in for this, it was a reboot.  After all, the original series (which had gone off of the air in 1956, when this was released) had ended with Connie marrying Mr. Boynton as well, so this was duplicative of the show, and basically started it from the beginning again.

As a result, the movie, while charming, plays as a stretched out episode of a sitcom more than a film, and doesn't quite work.  It's easy to see why this was a successful sitcom through this lens, of course-Arden is funny, making every lusty side eye from Connie pull off beautifully, and she & Gordon are quite fun together as adversaries turned reluctant partners.  But the movie repeats itself & the comedic bits feel too sitcom-y to work in the confines of a larger movie...it isn't really adapted for the big screen in this sense.  I liked it for what it was, but the seams are showing.  As a result, I leave a bit mixed on the idea of this, but like that Arden had success, and get why this was the role that would win her an Emmy Award.

OVP: Comrade X (1940)

Film: Comrade X (1940)

Stars: Clark Gable, Hedy Lamarr, Oskar Homolka, Felix Bressart, Eve Arden

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Story)

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 Eve Arden: click here to learn more about Ms. Arden (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Eve Arden's career was quite long.  One of the advantages of being a character actress is that while she was never as big of a star as she was during her Our Miss Brooks days (we'll talk about that next week), she didn't have to worry about finding headlining vehicles & could go back to high-profile character work after her television success, unlike actors like Lucille Ball & Jack Benny who had largely eschewed supporting work.  So today we're going to cover one of the many, many films that Arden made in the 1940's & will move into the 1950's next week with Arden.  Arden spent much of the decade as a steady presence in the movies, frequently playing the best friend or assistant to one of the main characters.  This is how she ended up getting her sole Oscar nomination, playing Joan Crawford's best friend in 1945's Mildred Pierce.  Arden lost that Oscar to Anne Revere, but it served as a reminder of what a good performer she was, and makes her one of the only actors we're going to profile this year that got recognition of their talents from the Academy prior to making a big name for herself in television.  I've seen Mildred Pierce before (Arden is quite good in it, if somewhat overshadowed by Crawford & Ann Blyth playing the worst daughter in film history), so I couldn't watch it for this project, so we're going to focus on another film that was cited by the Oscars in the 1940's, and weirdly (I pick all of these films months in advance) feels uncomfortably prescient of our current world situation: Comrade X.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in the Soviet Union circa 1939, where Mac Thompson (Gable) is a reporter who is secretly writing under the pseudonym "Comrade X" writing scathing stories about the Soviet government and the situation in Moscow.  Mac is blackmailed by his valet Vanya (Bressart) into keeping his identity secret, but only if Mac can figure out a way to get his daughter Theodore (Lamarr) out of the country, as her politics have made her a target for imprisonment.  The problem for Mac is that Theodore doesn't want to leave-she's a devout communist, and is wholly devoted to the Soviet cause, so Mac has to trick her into thinking that he is anti-American.  This unfolds primarily in one day, with Mac eventually marrying and falling in love (in that order) with Theodore, and by the end of the movie both of them are on the side of America, and particularly the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The movie is an unusual artifact if you study Hollywood's shifting attitudes toward Russia in the late-1930's and early-1940's.  Comrade X, like the previous year's more successful Ninotchka, is very anti-Soviet and anti-Communist, making everyone, including Lamarr, look like idiots for supporting the Soviet government.  This would change less than a year later when both the United States would enter World War II and Germany would invade Russia & Ukraine (in fact, there's a late plot point in Comrade X where a fictional invasion of Russia from Germany changes Theodore's mind about her country...weirdly predictive of real life), creating a temporary alliance with the United States that would lead briefly to pro-Soviet films like Song of Russia to come out...which would then be used later in the decade as grounds for HUAC investigations into a number of different actors & performers.  Actor Robert Taylor, who starred in Song of Russia, would be the only major Hollywood star to publicly name names in front of Congress, in part because of his initial connection to this movie. But at the time, stars like Gable, Lamarr, & Arden were not put into a position that might have made their careers difficult later, as this film is very much about mocking the Soviet Union.  And of course, in the decades that followed, Hollywood would continue to have an uneasy attitude toward depictions of Russia in everything from James Bond to the 1980's Cold War classics like WarGames...similar to the world's uneasy relationship with a combative Russia, a relationship still dominating headlines today.

Comrade X, though, isn't a particularly good movie.  The story for which it was cited feels like a retread of Ninotchka, and doesn't have a lot to say beyond "Lamarr's character is stupid, Gable's is smart."  It's helped a bit by Gable & Lamarr having good chemistry, and the supporting cast, specifically Arden as Gable's former flame & now fellow wise-cracking journalist, works well, but they can't save a pretty sloppy piece of anti-Russian cinema, which is focused more on casting stereotypes than grounding us in a real relationship between Gable & Lamarr.  Arden, for the second time this month, is a key supporting player but not in a lot of the movie, just two extended sequences that are crucial to changing the tone of the movie.  Next week, though, we're going to look at a movie from Arden where she would take the top of the marquee, and talk about how that came to pass.

At the Circus (1939)

Film: At the Circus (1939)

Stars: Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, Kenny Baker, Florence Rice, Eve Arden, Margaret Dumont

Director: Edward Buzzell

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

Eve Arden's film career, as I mentioned when I kicked off our month devoted to her, is an unusual one for this series that poses some challenges.  Over the past three years & two months, we've devoted our series exclusively to headliners.  Though sometimes we've had them in smaller parts (Lena Horne comes to mind), by-and-large I've been able to pick out films that were significant to these actors' careers or at least picked films where they dominated the picture.  But Arden was never a traditional headliner in movies the way she ended up being in television.  Instead, especially in the earlier days of her career, she was a scene-stealing character actor, and so it's difficult to find movies where she had a significant part without royally spoiling the movie for myself (which I'm not going to do as that's half the fun of watching movies-finding out what comes next).  During the period between Stage Door and Mildred Pierce (which would win her her only Oscar nomination), in particular, she was in a lot of movies but not all of them were signature parts.  So we're going to instead hedge our bets as we start out this month by picking a movie where Arden had significant costars, three to be precise: Groucho, Harpo, & Chico Marx in At the Circus.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Jeff Wilson (Baker), a man who is hopelessly in love with his circus performer girlfriend Julie (Rice), who has been disinherited by his aunt Susanna Dukesbury (Dumont) for disgracing the family name by pursuing a woman not of their family's stature.  Jeff owns the circus Julie works at, and is about to lose the circus to a ruthless businessman, and the only way he can keep it is by getting back $10,000 that was stolen from a gorilla cage (it sounds stupid, it mostly works in the confines of the script, though).  Jeff, of course, enlists the help of the Marx brothers: Attorney Cheever Loophole (Groucho), circus employee Tony Pirelli (Chico), and performer Punchy (Harpo).  This involves them eventually swindling the money out of Jeff's aunt, and a standoff not only with Aunt Susanna, but also the businessman and the gorilla...which allows Jeff to come out on-top with both the circus & his now-fiancee.

The movie is silly fun.  At the Circus is not generally considered one of the more important Marx Brothers movies, and critics at the time were less-than-kind.  While their criticism fell more on the Brothers, who had been doing this schtick for a while in 1939, honestly the biggest bummer for a modern audience who doesn't always get a Marx Brothers comedy every year, is that they felt the need to put a vapid love story central stage rather than give us more time with Groucho & Harpo (Chico, as always, is a love-it-or-leave-it scenario).  The best parts of the movie are of course Groucho pitching fake woo at Margaret Dumont (or is it real...you can never quite tell with Groucho), and his marvelous singing of "Lydia the Tattooed Lady."  While the rest of the musical score is largely forgettable, "Lydia" (which I first heard a year later in The Philadelphia Story) is fully-realized hilarity, and I loved it.

As for our star Eve Arden?  We came up a bit of a goose egg in terms of Arden's importance to this plot.  The actress is in only a couple of scenes, the primary one being with Groucho where she has to trick him so that he doesn't find the $10,000 she's hidden (she's the spy within the circus operation), which she does successfully by getting him to be part of her acrobatic act.  Arden nails a small role, and looks quite impressive aboard the trapeze in this movie, using her tall frame for maximum grace & comic effect.  You're left wishing that they would've gotten rid of Jeff & Julie all-together, and given Arden's villainous acrobat more to do.

Saturdays with the Stars: Eve Arden

Each month of 2022 we will be taking a look at one-time film actors who became foundational figures in the early days of television, stretching from the early 1950's into the mid-1960's.  Last month, we talked about Jack Benny, who despite an early contract with MGM was never able to become a leading man with the studio, but would instead become one of the most famous names in radio & television comedy.  This month, we're going to switch pace a little bit, focusing on an actress who was never a proper headliner like Benny or January's Lucille Ball, but instead consistently had key character actor parts, including one that would result in an Oscar nomination, during her career in movies.  It was television, though, that would give her the central marquee when she would become a headliner in one of the more popular sitcoms of the mid-1950's.  This month's star is Eve Arden.

Arden was born the daughter of a gambler (whom her mother, who worked as a milliner, would quickly divorce) in Northern California.  While at a convent boarding school, she developed a taste for theater, which would lead her to join a touring company after she finished high school.  This brought her to Hollywood, and a supporting part in Song of Love.  She didn't initially take to the movies, and for much of the 1930's Arden worked in New York, taking on a number of featured roles in Broadway comedies.  It was in 1937, though, when she signed a long-term contract with RKO, that she became a regular in movies upon the success of Stage Door (which also featured future TV superstar Lucille Ball as her roommate).

Arden's career throughout the 1940's frequently had her playing the same style of part, that of a tall, wisecracking, world-weary woman that would provide comic relief regardless of the genre of the picture.  This led to her greatest film success, as Joan Crawford's best friend in Mildred Pierce, which would glean Arden her only Oscar nomination.  But as the 1940's closed, it was in radio that Arden was gaining most of her success, featured on Danny Kaye's variety show (the two were reportedly romantically involved), and after that was cancelled, on the show Our Miss Brooks, which was a massive hit on radio (to the point where Arden was named an honorary Member of the National Education Association) and then graduated to television, where the show was equally popular, and won Arden one of the first ever Emmy Awards for Best Actress.

Arden, if she's spoken of at all today, is likely remembered for her roles in the Grease musicals.  Our Miss Brooks is not I Love Lucy, even if it rivaled it for popularity at the time; it is not a show that has become ubiquitous in pop culture.  And Arden is not a typical actor to feature in our Saturday series because, outside of her work on television, she was never a leading woman; we have never featured a true character actor in this series, which has made confirming that she's got key roles in films that I haven't seen of hers difficult without spoiling them for myself.  But as Arden is someone I've always enjoyed onscreen, and because she is a quintessential definition of someone who "couldn't make it in movies, but was a huge success in TV" I thought she was the perfect fit for our series this March, and so TMROJ will also be bringing her to the top of the call sheet.

OVP: Stage Door (1937)

Film: Stage Door (1937)

Stars: Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou, Gail Patrick, Constance Collier, Andrea Leeds, Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, Ann Miller

Director: Gregory La Cava

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actress-Andrea Leeds, Adapted Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

The "more than five" window of the Best Picture race for the modern Oscars started in 2009, but it wasn't always like that.  Prior to 1944, the Best Picture race was a rotating number, peaking at one point with as many as 12 nominations for the category.  As a result, like today, you get some films that you wonder if they would've been nominated in a five-wide field or not.  That was one of the thoughts I had while watching Stage Door recently, a movie that features a cavalcade of major actresses, not just of that era but more so of the upcoming era; women like Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, & Ann Miller were all breaking out in a big way with this movie.  I was surprised after watching that the film had also been nominated for Best Director, not because it's not well-directed (it is) but because our modern preconceptions of films starring women (and the male-friendly AMPAS) is to assume such a picture can't score both, and thus be one of the "would've made it to five" films (which it appears Stage Door was).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a group of women who live in a boardinghouse, many of them aspiring actresses who are trying to land their lucky break.  A new girl, Terry (Hepburn) moves into the house, and her worldly attitude & love of Shakespeare make her an object of ridicule, particularly for Jean (Rogers), a wisecracking dancer who is forced to be her roommate.  It turns out that Terry doesn't need to be there-her father is very wealthy, and she's trying to strike out on her own against his wishes.  The two start to patch things up, and Terry befriends the rest of the girls including unlucky-in-love Judy (Ball), sarcastic Eve (Arden), and especially Kay (Leeds), who is desperate for a part in Anthony Powell's (Menjou) new play.  When Terry gets the part instead (initially on the wishes of her father, who is secretly backing the play in hopes of getting his daughter back after it fails), Kay, frustrated from unemployment & starving for her art, kills herself on opening night.  Terry, bereft from the grief, gives a good performance in the play, and becomes a star.  Despite this, she stays on at the boardinghouse, where her new family resides.

The film is unusual, in that it's clearly meant to be a fluffy, light comedy for the first hour, and then it takes a dark detour in its last few minutes.  The death of Kay is a left field twist, something I didn't really expect (I assumed she'd be rushed to a hospital & get the part that she was meant for that instead went to Hepburn's Terry).  It feels like a cheat to me, and one that kind of leaves a bitter taste in the movie, as it totally upends all of the fast-talking girls, and it feels like it's trying to teach the actresses a lesson that they didn't really deserve-they're just young women trying their best (and Terry's greatest sin was *GASP* being ambitious).  The death of Kay makes the film too off, and while it's still a good movie, it disappears some of the best attributes that made you fall in love with it in the first hour.

The film won four nominations, and three of them I don't have a problem with.  Like I said, this is a good movie, a great one in parts, but it's too sporadic & spastic in the way it handles the genre shift, and so it's simply a good movie.  The direction & writing is in a similar situation-good in both its comedic & dramatic shifts, but it can't combine the two.  Leeds, though, isn't the right fit.  Yes, her character is tragic, but that's all she is-there's no depth here.  It's hard to imagine someone looking at this performance and thinking "best in cast."  Obviously Ginger Rogers & Kate Hepburn aren't supporting parts, but they're both terrific.  Rogers is delicious, some of the best I've seen from her (Rogers was always better in comedy than in drama), and Hepburn is glorious, especially when she has to perform right after Kay's suicide.  If I had to pick a supporting player to honor from the movie, I might go with Eve Arden (though Lucille Ball is good in the role that put her on the map as a character player)-she's quintessential Arden (there's nothing to her Eve), but she (and her cat) steal every scene they do together.

OVP: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Film: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Stars: James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, Arthur O'Connell, Eve Arden, Kathryn Grant, George C. Scott, Joseph N. Welch
Director: Otto Preminger
Oscar History: 7 nominations (Best Picture, Actor-James Stewart, Supporting Actor-George C. Scott, Supporting Actor-Arthur O'Connell, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

All right, we are on Day 2 of our week devoted to Best Supporting Actor.  One of my favorite things about doing reviews this way (where there's a common Oscar theme, but generally the films have little else in common, hopefully proving both the depth of each category within the Academy and forcing me to have a little bit more structure to knocking out some more great movies) is that when a movie gets a lot of nominations, you don't necessarily think of it first as a nominee in a category like Best Supporting Actor.  This is especially true for Anatomy of a Murder.  If you think of this movie today, it's obviously going to be as a "classic courtroom drama" one of the harbingers of eventual hit television series like The Defenders.  If you think of it in relation to Oscar, it's almost certainly going to be for its Best Picture nomination (weirdly the split in 1959 that meant Otto Preminger wasn't nominated was that Billy Wilder was for Some Like It Hot) or for being Jimmy Stewart's final nomination for Best Actor, which he lost to Charlton Heston during the Ben-Hur sweep.  However, Anatomy of a Murder is the only film we're going to profile this week that received two nominations for Best Supporting Actor, one for steady character actor Arthur O'Connell and the first nomination for a man who would one day turn down the Oscar: George C. Scott.

(Spoilers Ahead) Anatomy of a Murder has a lot of characters, but I'll attempt to summarize here.  At the center of the story is Paul Biegler (Stewart), a down-on-his-luck lawyer who recently lost his race for district attorney, and as a result is cash-strapped, unable to pay his secretary Madge (Arden) as he spends most of his time with his drinking buddy Parnell (O'Connell).  A case lands in his lap of a man  named Frederick Manion (Gazzara), a war veteran accused of murdering the man who raped his wife Laura (Remick).  Biegler tries the case on temporary insanity, as unlike a lot of dramas we would have seen at the time (where the defendant would be truly not guilty), there's never any question that Manion killed the man who raped his wife.  The film's central storyline largely unfolds in the courtroom, with Stewart and the prosecuting attorney Claude Dancer (Scott) going against each other in a series of rapid fire questioning rounds with witness after witness, until finally it's Mary Pilant (Grant, in one of the only roles she'd do after her marriage to Bing Crosby) provides enough evidence to the fact that her father raped Laura that they dismiss the charges against her husband.

There are a lot of things to unpack with a movie like Anatomy of a Murder, which at nearly three hours long (though it never feels like that, and indeed I was having so much fun I would have happily gone on for another hour) has a lot of plot.  The film at the time was landmark.  It was banned for a period in Chicago because it spoke so frankly about sex (this is the earliest chronologically I've ever seen a film use the word "sperm," for example), and is not shy about the realities of what happened to Laura Manion.  It's particularly interesting because of the way that Laura Manion is depicted in the film.  In Classic Hollywood, rape victims were almost always played as virginal saints (think of Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda or Hope Lange in Peyton Place)-Laura Manion is not a virgin (she's been married twice) and is not shy about clearly liking sex & liking that men are attracted to her.  That the film manages to show a woman of her proclivity as being a rape victim (that it shouldn't matter what a woman looks like, "no means no means no" is always right) is really progressive, and something I wasn't expecting going into this picture.

This boldness really hits well with the film though-this is a movie that cares about detail, cares about telling a complicated story.  We leave not really knowing if Fred Manion is guilty or not, or whether Stewart's Biegler (who gave him the idea of temporary insanity in what bordered on witness tampering) simply let a guilty man off by trying a different case (essentially stating that the man he killed wasn't worth a war veteran going to jail).  We also don't have a sense that the Manions live happily ever after-the ending heavily implies that Laura & Fred had a violent squabble, and that they are headed into another town to start over, but with the same character defects they had here.  It is only Biegler who has learned from this that he can move on past his election loss, and start helping he, Madge, and Parnell continue to make a living going forward.  It's the sort of open-ended finale you'd struggle to find even in modern day movies, and the ease with which it happens is enviable.

The Oscar nominations were uniformly strong-lots of strong competition when we eventually get to this year in the OVP, but know that Anatomy is coming with a winning hand.  Stewart is charming, but finds a rascal in his Paul that is fantastic, and proof that his career-best work in Vertigo the year before was no fluke-he was on a role.  The Cinematography is splendid, as is the editing, with the moving camera of the courtroom scenes working overtime to give us looks at being, in turn, the witnesses, the jury, the judge, and the lawyers.  I loved the screenplay too-it's hard to pull off a legal thriller and have people curious what will happen in the end, but they did just that, and the care that they handled the sensitive nature of the movie (but didn't handle it with kid gloves) is brilliant.

And as for our Supporting Actors?  Honestly, it's hard to tell which one's better.  Scott gets the showier role-the first hour or so you're going to wonder how he was nominated, but once you get into the film, you see his power and gravitas, particularly in his cross-examination of Lee Remick's Laura (Remick, who was cited by the Globes, had to have just missed with Oscar and it's disappointing she wasn't cited even in a strong field, as she's sensational & maybe the best performance in the movie, give or take Stewart), and suddenly you're wondering how he didn't win the Oscar, as this is the sort of performance that wins.  O'Connell's isn't the type that wins, but it's wonderful to watch his chemistry with Stewart, and the laid-back approach of his character.  There's layers in his work as it unfolds.  He's a drunk who was perhaps saved from being a lost cause by his friendship with Biegler, and the potential he saw in him, though O'Connell never gets the "I'll give up the booze!" sort of scene that would normally be required of an actor playing an alcoholic to get nominated.  Oscar wisely picked these two men as his nominees rather than the Globe-cited Joseph Welch, who portrays the judge.  Welch would have been an understandable if gimmicky choice that Oscar might have eaten up-he had been Chief Counsel for the Army during the McCarthy hearings, and was seen as the most important figure in taking down Sen. McCarthy (whose crusade, of course, had destroyed the careers of dozens of Hollywood figures).  This was his only role, and one he took on a lark-he's fine, if not particularly impressive in a plum role, and I'm glad if they were only going to give two citations to Anatomy, they went with O'Connell & Scott.

OVP: Cover Girl (1944)

Film: Cover Girl (1944)
Stars: Rita Hayworth, Gene Kelly, Lee Bowman, Phil Silvers, Leslie Brooks, Eve Arden, Otto Kruger
Director: Charles Vidor
Oscar History: 5 nominations/1 win (Best Scoring*, Art Direction, Cinematography, Sound, Original Song-"Long Ago and Far Away")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

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

When discussing the films of Rita Hayworth in the early 1940's, every single one of them seems to be followed by "Film X made Hayworth a star!" and in some ways they are all right, and in other ways they're wrong.  Hayworth by 1944 was pretty much a household name, and was someone who could clearly open movies (and get top billing, as she did with this picture).  Her work with Fred Astaire had guaranteed her opportunity, but she wasn't really in the stratosphere in the way she would be soon, and that stratosphere came with Cover Girl.  Teamed with Gene Kelly (in may ways this is also the "film that made Kelly a star!") this musical was a massive hit for Columbia, enough so that, from here on out, no one was calling Hayworth's work "the film that made her a star," but simply "she was a huge star, period."  What was it about Cover Girl that so sparked the imagination?  Let's find out, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Rusty (Hayworth) a chorus girl in her boyfriend Danny's (Kelly) nightclub who by a freak chance-of-fate gets hired to be the cover girl for Vanity magazine (it feels very akin in the film to Vanity Fair).  She gets the job in part because the magazine's publisher John Coudair (Kruger) thinks she bares a striking resemblance to her grandmother, whom he loved in her youth (and indeed, Hayworth does play this role in flashbacks).  The film alternates between both women's fates, and both end up meeting the same end.  Both are given a chance at fame-and-fortune, potentially marrying a wealthy man who adores them, but instead stick with the simple life with the men who first pursued them there.

The plot here isn't breaking new ground, but the music is divine.  The film is early in Kelly's career, and is marked as the first of his films to have some of his choreography & direction (which to that point with MGM he hadn't been able to impose onto his films).  As a result, we get some of the astonishing precision of Kelly's best musicals coming out in full-force here, from the joy of "Make Way for Tomorrow" to the hilariously cheeky "Poor John" to the soaring "Long Ago (and Far Away)."  It's hard not to see a lot of Singin' in the Rain in some of the choreography, particularly comparing "Good Mornin'" to "Make Way for Tomorrow" and "Cover Girl" to "Beautiful Girl" from the movie, and I'm surprised that Google didn't show more similarities between the two when I did a search.  Perhaps Cover Girl isn't as discussed today to make that connection?

Either way, this is a gem.  Eve Arden practically steals the whole movie as a wisecracking assistant to Kruger's boss, and Hayworth has never looked so glamorous.  The film's plot doesn't always make sense, but the production design is so splendid you won't care.  The film won five Oscar nominations, and deserved them all.  The score is light and winning, the sound work excellent (particularly considering how well they do to make Hayworth's lip-syncing feel natural), and the lighting is delicious, the shadow work in "Long Ago" being a particular highlight.  Hayworth would weirdly find herself steering further away from musicals shortly after this, moving into drama and noir (our final two pictures from her this month will focus on this period of her career), but for those who only think of Hayworth from Gilda and The Lady from Shanghai, it's kind of bliss to watch her be so genuinely happy in a picture like Cover Girl.