OVP: The Shootist (1976)

Film: The Shootist (1976)

Stars: John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, James Stewart, Richard Boone, John Carradine, Sheree North

Director: Don Siegel

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

By the 1970's, John Wayne as a persona was not something the hip, New Hollywood cinema had an obvious fit for, but the actor was bankable & kept working.  True Grit had been a proper hit, and he actually ended up acting for much of the decade while other headliners of his generation like Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart had to sit back and take supporting parts.  Films like Big Jake, The Cowboys, McQ, and Rooster Cogburn (a sequel to True Grit) all made money, and it was pretty clear at this point that it wasn't going to be changing tastes that eventually stopped John Wayne, but instead Father Time.  That came to pass in 1976 with The Shootist.  Wayne once again donned his cowboy hat and spurs, but this would be the last time that he would.  Fittingly, in many ways it recalls a film that he once turned down (The Gunfighter), and stars a host of major names of the past to watch him in his final ride.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Shootist takes place over the course of a single week, and starts with gunfighter JB Brooks (Wayne) finding out from his physician, Doc Hostetler (Stewart) that he is dying of cancer, and will soon die of that if he doesn't go out in a blaze of glory.  The film then becomes a series of vignettes, with Brooks meeting with a number of people from his past, many of whom are trying to profit off of their connections with a famous gunslinger since he will no longer be able to gain from it himself.  During this time, he lives in a boarding house run by Bond Rogers (Bacall), a widowed mother of a young man named Gillom (Howard) who is fascinated by Brooks' history of violence and death.  As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Brooks will not go down to cancer, but instead (in a very rare moment for a John Wayne film, as the actor only died a handful of times onscreen during his fifty-year career) he is killed in a gunfight, one that hopefully turns off Gillom (who flees rather than engages, despite his obsession with this type of violence) and protects the next generation from the mistakes of the past.

The Shootist on its merits is an oddly-structured film.  The vignettes take a bit to get used to, particularly given that you rarely can tell which characters are going to stick around and which you need to invest into, and honestly, because in many cases actors like John Carradine & Harry Morgan feel less like they are paying tribute to the film itself, and more are there marveling at Wayne, doing his final ride.  That morbid curiosity, quite frankly, is what makes The Shootist worth something.  If you take it just as a movie, it's okay, but forgettable.  But understanding that Wayne, one of the most important figures of the Old Hollywood era, was coming to an end (in many ways taking that era with him), something that Wayne himself likely understood given his age, it makes the film a lot more powerful.  It helps that Wayne is very solid in this movie, playing the part with a type of desperation, a type of bargaining, that feels unusual for the two-dimensional actor, giving a fine performance (a worthier performance to give him an Oscar for than True Grit if the Academy had been inclined).

Wayne never made a movie again.  Contrary to common belief, Wayne wasn't battling cancer when this film was made, though he did struggle with a serious case of influenza during the filming of the movie.  In 1979, though, he was afflicted with it when he was given the task of handing the Best Picture Oscar to The Deer Hunter (a movie, let's be honest, the conservative Wayne probably loathed), and if you look at the clip you can see a visibly shaken Wayne, getting a standing ovation (which in those days of the Academy were quite rare) while longtime colleagues like Gregory Peck & Laurence Olivier look on the verge of tears.  Wayne opened the presentation, a little winded and his voice breaking just slightly, with "(Oscar) and I are both a little weather-beaten, but we're both still here, and plan to be around for a whole lot longer."  The Hollywood icon would be dead just 9 weeks later.

With us finishing John Wayne month, the quintessential cowboy in our year devoted to the leading stars of westerns, next month we're going to move into a new chapter in our series.  For the final five months of 2023, we'll focus on actors who made their name in westerns during the New Hollywood era, when the western went through a transformation and would eventually fall out-of-fashion.  We'll start with an actor who who would become synonymous with the western, despite hailing from a place far from the American West.

The Mummy's Ghost (1944)

Film: The Mummy's Ghost (1944)

Stars: Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, Robert Lowery, Ramsay Ames

Director: Reginald Le Borg

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

Lon Chaney, Jr. is not an actor of great distinction, but he is an actor with a great distinction.  Chaney's career was marked by horror.  Though he initially had some success as a serious actor (his most famous role was as Lennie in Lewis Milestone's classic Of Mice and Men), after he signed a long-term contract with Universal Studios & had success using his father's moniker in The Wolf Man, Chaney would make horror films for the remainder of the career.  As a result, he would become the only actor in film history to play the Wolf-Man, Frankenstein's Monster, Count Dracula, & the Mummy in English-language studio films.  Chaney's life was plagued by alcoholism, but he worked up until his death; though he lived longer than his rivals Boris Karloff & Bela Lugosi, he died younger than them.  We won't have time to get to these films this month, but like these two men Chaney also went into independent film as his career waned, making his final picture Dracula vs. Frankenstein in 1971 for exploitation filmmaker Al Adamson.

(Spoilers Ahead) Like most of the Mummy films, we have two concurrent plots that are being set up for a showdown.  On one hand you have Yousef Bey (Carradine), who is trying to bring back Kharis (Chaney) aka the Mummy and reunite him with Ananka, his one true love.  On the other hand we have a young student named Tom Hervey (Lowery) who is romancing a beautiful Egyptian woman named Amina (Ames).  When Kharis is awakened, he also entrances Amina, and this continually happens throughout the film as Kharis kills others & is able to keep Amina under his spell.  As is the wont of these movies, we soon learn that Amina is the reincarnation of Ananka, and though Tom protests, this is her inescapable doom.  Yousef Bey kidnaps her (and briefly falls in love with her), but after Kharis kills him too, Amina starts to age, and therefore resemble the mummy, aging until her eventual death.  A horrified Tom looks on as his love & the mummy sink into a swamp (more than likely just waiting for the sequel).

The Mummy franchise, of all of the Universal Monsters, is the franchise with the most diminishing returns.  This is partially because it's the weakest initial entry (even if it's still a good movie), and also because unlike Dracula, the Wolf Man, or even Frankenstein's monster, there's not a lot of personality in the sequels (in the first film, Boris Karloff gives him much more sway but he also gets to speak...that ends in the sequels).  As a result, you need side characters to invest in, and this franchise didn't have an Ygor or a shrieking Una O'Connor to keep you interested.  Even John Carradine's spooky priest is largely sidelined throughout the movie even if he's the only character you care about.

As a result, even with a morbid & melancholy ending, this is dull & uninventive.  We have one more Mummy film left which we'll do on Thursday, but I will admit right now that I don't have a lot of hopes for it before we switch into some better-reviewed fare & finish out the month with a classic.  For now, though, Lon Chaney's name continues to be an "ehh" for me-after seeing almost a dozen of his movies, I just don't understand why he became such a big, bankable name in show business other than luck of having a famous father & some fantastic makeup artists.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Revenge of the Creature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob, The Masque of the Red Death

The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944)

Film: The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944)

Stars: Jon Hall, Leon Errol, John Carradine, Alan Curtis, Evelyn Ankers, Gale Sondergaard, Lester Matthews

Director: Ford Beebe

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

We are today not only hitting the halfway point of our Golden Age Horror marathon (hopefully you've been enjoying the series!), but also hitting the finale of our many Inivisible Man franchise installments.  In the original run of the series, Universal made five pictures that are part of the "Canon" for the franchise, though they were loosely connected, with strange interludes into romantic comedy (The Invisible Woman) and wartime propaganda (Invisible Agent).  The finale of their original run, though, is focused back on the mad man fantasies of someone the world can't see...though sadly it is also a complete failure, losing a lot of the "sacrificed humanity" angles of the picture by making the titular character too vicious to redeem.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Robert Griffin (Hall), who has just escaped from a sanitarium after murdering two orderlies, and goes to visit his old friends Sir Jasper (Matthews) and Lady Irene Herrick (Sondergaard), who were supposed to safeguard a joint diamond mine venture the three had, but the fortune has been lost while Robert was locked up.  Robert says as recompense, they have to let him marry their beautiful daughter Julie (Ankers), but they refuse & have him ejected from their home.  Robert gets his revenge by coercing Dr. Peter Drury (Carradine) to make him invisible, and he uses this to blackmail the Herricks, forcing them to sign over their entire estate to him & let Robert marry Julie...if he can get his visibility back.  Robert can get it back, but only through the blood of another human being (which would kill them), and only for a short while.  He does this at first through killing Dr. Drury, and then by trying to kill off Mark (Curtis), Julie's real intended.  Before he can kill Mark, though, he is attacked by Dr. Drury's (invisible) dog, and is killed, never fulfilling his revenge.

As I mentioned, this movie hues more closely to what we'd expect from the earlier pictures in the Invisible Man franchise, but it also is pretty limp.  Hall is not Claude Rains or Vincent Price, and that shows when he basically just plays his creepy lead character as uncomplicated & filled with hate.  It doesn't help that his revenge is gross on-the-surface.  He's not a wronged man for much of the film (it's never clear if Jasper & Irene actually misused his money or just lost it while he was gone), and trying to blackmail their daughter into a lifetime of servitude seems unusually gross.  That the heinousness of his demands feels so glossed over is the weirdest part of The Invisible Man's Revenge.

The movie features two actors who were regular players in the Universal canon.  John Carradine here plays the mad scientist, and is the best part of the movie.  Carradine made hundreds of films (his Wikipedia page lists 233 movies, and it's almost certain he made appearances in more), making him one of the most prolific actors in Hollywood (unlike someone like Eric Roberts, who I feel makes independent films as stunts, virtually all of Carradine's films were for either major studios-he only occasionally was part of Poverty Row films, which makes Carradine's achievement more impressive in my estimation).  He's always good, but is sidelined for much of the picture, taking away his joy.

Evelyn Ankers also appeared here, and has appeared throughout our three seasons.  I'll be honest, I couldn't pick out Ankers in a lineup despite seeing all of these films-the women's roles, unless you get something where they're an actual monster like Bride of Frankenstein or Dracula's Daughters, are so underwritten in Universal Monster movies you can have someone like Ankers, who appeared as the love interest of the Invisible Man, the Frankenstein Monster, & the Wolf-Man without making much of an impression.  On Tuesday, we'll go with arguably the king of the Universal Studios lot during this era, and talk about the contributions of the one man who donned virtually every guise in the Universal Monster canon.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Revenge of the Creature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob, The Masque of the Red Death

OVP: Of Human Hearts (1938)

Picture: Of Human Hearts (1938)

Stars: Walter Huston, James Stewart, Beulah Bondi, Gene Reynolds, Charles Coburn, John Carradine

Director: Clarence Brown

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actress-Beulah Bondi)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

We are continuing our look at some of the films of 1938 today with Of Human Hearts, a Clarence Brown religious melodrama from the era.  This was still in the time period where Jimmy Stewart, who would become one of the most important figures in Hollywood for much of the next 25 years, was finding his footing, not getting top billing even in movies where arguably he was the most important figure, and where it's clear the studio didn't really understand what they had, giving him movies that, for my money, were totally below him.  Of Human Hearts is a movie that probably resonated at the time because it was serious & about serious, run-of-the-mill people, but in retrospect it totally reads differently, and is honestly a genuinely bad movie from my perspective because it has no concept of its characters.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Jason Wilkins (Reynolds as a boy, Stewart as an adult) who is raised by a stern preacher Rev. Ethan Wilkins (Huston), one who practices what we'd consider now to be child abuse but at the time was just considered "discipline."  Jason wants to be a medical doctor, one who isn't poor & suffering like his parents make him be, but when he becomes an adult he turns his backs on them, using them for money to some degree but never really caring what happens to them, which in the case of his mother is unfortunate as she has sacrificed repeatedly for him.  In the end, Jason does learn that his mother sacrificed for him, and after a weird turn during the Civil War (more on that in a second), Jason comes home to his mother, finally learning the cruelty of his ways and gets her forgiveness.

The film suffers almost throughout for being too melodramatic for its own good.  Stewart's Jason is a selfish asshole, and there's not really an indication as to why.  I get why they don't have him redeem his relationship with his father (who is also an asshole, and one whose redemption arch I didn't really need), but why does he treat his mother like dirt, particularly after the death of his father?  There's no logical explanation, and the film suffers as a result.  Bondi definitely plays the part we're meant for her (saintly martyr mother), but it's not an interesting role, and it's a sympathetic rather than a good performance.  Oscar had much better options in other roles where she played Stewart's mother (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life).

That being said, Of Human Hearts is noteworthy for one specific reason.  Character actor John Carradine shows up late in the film (no surprise there-he showed up in hundreds of movies), as Abraham Lincoln.  The Lincoln cameo initially feels like he's giving Jason an award for his stellar medical work on the field, but it turns out this is a guise, as Lincoln, in the middle of the freaking Civil War, is giving Jason a lecture about how "he needs to write to his mother."  It's bonkers-what the hell is this even about?!?  It's so weird I almost gave this two-stars for sheer wackiness, but honestly this bizarre left turn isn't enough for me to recommend it.

OVP: Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938)

Film: Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938)

Stars: Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, Jack Haley, Jean Hersholt, John Carradine

Director: Henry King

Oscar History: 6 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Motion Picture Story, Original Song-"Now It Can Be Told," Scoring*, Art Direction, Film Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

When we think of classical Hollywood musicals of the 1930's through the early 1950's, what we initially name-check are almost always the MGM musicals of the era.  Films like The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, and Singin' in the Rain were all from the same studio.  Other studios, of course, were making musicals, most importantly 20th Century Fox, but Fox's best-remembered musicals would come in the 50's & 60's, when they would adapt the Rodgers & Hammerstein productions The King & I, South Pacific, and The Sound of Music, the latter of which basically saved the studio from bankruptcy.  Their musicals from the 1930's and 40's were hits, some pretty big hits, but none have the same kind of cache now that they did in their era.  Today we're going to revisit one of those films (a blockbuster hit), Alexander's Ragtime Band, which was cited for six Oscars, including Best Picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Alexander (Power), a young classical composer who joins a band (to his family & professor's chagrin) of ragtime musicians, and who luck into a gig at a nightclub partially because they are joined by singer Stella Kirby (Faye), another performer on the rise.  Stella & Alexander fight it out, but are clearly falling for each other in an "opposites attract" situation, and both are on their way up, though when a producer decides he only wants to give Stella a big break (not the band), Alexander gets jealous & they break it off.  World War I looms, with Alexander and some members of the band getting drafted, and while he's away, Stella marries the band's piano player Charlie (Ameche), and they have success but it's clearly not enough to keep their marriage afloat, and they divorce.  Meanwhile, Alexander is back & having great success with his band, including new lead singer Jerry Allen (Merman), who is in love with him but knows that he still pines for Stella.  The film has a "will they or won't they finale" with Alexander performing "Alexander's Ragtime Band" at Carnegie Hall, and as you would suspect for a movie from 1938, they do, in fact, end up together.

The 20th Century Fox musicals of this time frame follow not only the same plot formulas, they nearly always repeat the same stars.  You may remember we featured Alice Faye in a Saturdays with the Stars a few years ago, and we profiled films she made with both Power & Ameche (the former would make three films together, the latter would make six).  As a result, the films feel interchangeable, and as I've seen a lot of Alice Faye movies from this time frame, I know the formula well, and also to know based on billing whether or not she's going to end up with Don Ameche in the end (here, of course, she doesn't as Power is the headliner).

This basic story work makes the film feel more like a jukebox musical than the more complete productions happening at MGM at the time, which had more centralization on story and grand production numbers.  Most of the songs in the musical are not original to it (we'll get to one of the ones that was in a second), and very few of them are full production numbers with lots of dancers & choreography.  While we do have a few costume changes (most notably "Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil" with Ethel Merman sashaying in a horned headband amid a group of sparkling demons), this is a movie that's really just about the music.  It helps that they hired two actresses who can genuinely sing.  Alice Faye is one of my favorite underrated performers of this era, and she's luminous as ever as Stella, giving her just enough depth and longing to make the paper-thin plot feel fuller, and her voice is a melodic lullaby. Merman, of course, brasses up some of the band's biggest numbers, and while a little bit of Merman can go a long way, it's weird (in a good way) to see her playing such a young figure as most of her most iconic roles (like Mama Rose) come from figures out of their youth.

As a result, your patience for this film is going to be tried by how much you can handle a musical with very little plot or grand choreography, and mostly just focused on some good-time songs.  Mine resides right in the middle, mostly because of my love of Ameche & Faye (I always cheer for them to end up together even though it's more a 50/50 split in their pictures).  The Irving Berlin songs sound great, and are brimming from every corner so you get your money's worth on the Oscar-winning scoring from Alfred Newman.  The original song "Now It Can Be Told" honestly falters amidst so many outright classics, in many ways echoing songs like "I Move On" and "Learn to Be Lonely" in later years where an addition that scores an Oscar nomination can't compete with the classics.  It's pretty, but it's just not special with so many iconic ditties.  The nomination for editing is a weird one, perhaps getting it for so many production numbers in one movie (though, again, it's less the production and more just the singing that stands out there), though the art direction feels more at-home; all of the stages feel like true, distinct  venues rather than just different window dressing, and as a result it genuinely feels like you get a sense of where the band is headed in terms of their theater's stature as the film progresses.

Two last things before we go, both because they struck me as unusual.  We talked yesterday in regard to a different 1938 Best Picture nominee, Four Daughters, how John Garfield's acting style felt weirdly out-of-place compared to the bright-and-bubbly portrayals from the Lane sisters.  Alexander's Ragtime Band has that too from omnipresent character actor John Carradine, here playing an unnamed taxi cab driver.  Carradine is in literally hundreds of movies during this era, so him showing up is not a surprise, but his performance-style is so at-odds with the rest of the movie, particularly dove-eyed Alice Faye, that it feels unusual.  He drives Faye around, and you almost feel like he's about to kidnap her & bring her into a completely different movie.  It's not a bad performance (I quite liked it), but it's so atonal to the film that it feels like this strange interlude in the picture where you think it might turn sinister (it doesn't help matters that one of Carradine's most iconic roles is playing Count Dracula in this regard).  I couldn't leave without at least mentioning this bizarre late-act swing in an otherwise conventional movie.

The last thing was a dumbstruck moment for me personally.  One of the songs that is sung in the song is "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," which is a Berlin number performed by Jack Haley in the movie.  I know this song very well, but had no idea until watching it this past weekend that it had been written by Irving Berlin...I honestly thought it had been written by my dad.  My dad, when I was a kid, would make up little songs to sing to my brother & I, and one of the songs that I remember most was him singing a (slightly different lyrics, but the same exact tune) version of this number to us when he was waking us up in the morning in lieu of an alarm clock.  I had no idea until I was literally watching this movie that this was not, in fact, one of his made up songs, which I found hysterical as a man in his mid-30's, apparently somehow believing his father is Irving Berlin.

Myra Breckinridge (1970)

Film: Myra Breckinridge (1970)

Stars: Raquel Welch, Rex Reed, John Huston, Mae West, Farrah Fawcett, John Carradine

Director: Michael Sarne

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 Raquel Welch-click here to learn more about Ms. Welch (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I'm going to be honest here, it feels kind of mean to put this movie next in our month devoted to Raquel Welch.  We aren't going to be jumping super far after 100 Rifles here for Welch chronologically, and I'll be real that based on the cast list & the genre, I assumed that I'd have liked 100 Rifles more than I did, so we're going to have our third 1-star movie in a row for the actress today.  But it would be irresponsible to talk about Raquel Welch's career and not bring up the nadir of her stardom: Myra Breckinridge.  We'll get into this below, but initially one would've thought that Welch was making a good decision here.  The original novel (by Gore Vidal) on which this story is based was a big deal.  It was certainly controversial (many called it pornographic), but it was celebrated by some (Harold Bloom included the novel in The Western Canon), and for an actress like Welch, who was trying to be taken seriously by her peers, investing in a movie that might do that made sense.  Instead, it nearly wrecked her career (and in some ways caused irreparable damage), and pretty much every person involved with the movie has since opined it was an unmitigated disaster, destroying the lives of several involved & generally being considered one of the worst movies ever made.

(Spoilers Ahead) All right, this is a very strange movie, and one that is not sensitive to today's views on transgender issues, so I'm going to be matter-of-fact in describing the plot as accurately as they did at the time.  We open with Myron Breckinridge (Reed), undergoing an experimental surgery at the hand of a surgeon (Carradine, in a cameo).  He is then transformed into a beautiful woman, Myra (Welch) who goes to see Myron's Uncle Buck (Huston) under the guise that Myra is Myron's widow, rather than telling the truth.  Myra is entitled to a portion of Buck's school, and when Buck refuses to give over the school, Myra insists on teaching at the school while Buck comes up with the money.  While there, she meets two "all-American specimens," masculine, handsome Rusty (Herren) and feminine, blonde Mary Ann (Fawcett).  In her quest to "destroy the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood," (that's a direct quote from the movie) Myra sets out to seduce both of them, first Rusty (which she does by raping Rusty with a strap-on dildo), and then after Rusty breaks up with Mary Ann, she starts sleeping with the blonde.  Eventually Uncle Buck concludes Myra isn't who she says she is with him trying to get her to admit she's a con artist, and then she exposes herself (and her apparently still-present testicles) to Uncle Buck, showing that she is Myron.  After this, we see that Myron has just been dreaming all of this-the people were figments of his imagination (Mary Ann was his nurse, and on a nightstand seen by the audience but not Myron as the film concludes, is a picture of a magazine featuring a headline & cover story about "Raquel Welch").

That's the plot in essence, though there are other aspects to the film worth mentioning (specifically that Reed's Myron continues to appear to Myra, frequently lusting after both Mary Ann & especially Rusty from afar, as a figment-of-her-imagination, and a strange subplot involving Mae West's Letitia van Allen as a casting couch-agent who at one point beds an extremely young, pre-mustache Tom Selleck).  But this is enough for you to understand we're in uncharted territory plot-wise, right?  A few years after the fall of the studio system, Frank Capra has officially left the building.

Myra Breckinridge could have been a cult classic.  It has those trappings, just a few years away from the quintessential (and not entirely dissimilarly-themed) Rocky Horror Picture Show.  But Myra is terrible, and not even some of its campier elements can save it.  Myra as played by Welch is a cartoon, a cruel, vicious cartoon, insensitive, degrading, & violent.  She's a weird juxtaposition of celebrating Old Hollywood (in many ways mirroring film critic Red Reed himself in that regard) and wanting to totally defy gender norms.  Her sexuality at the end feels a bit confusing (it feels like her lust after Mary Ann is more real than her lust after Rusty, even though Myron generally feels like he's a gay man in our meetings with him in apparition).  And putting Myra aside, the movie is littered with terrible performances (including from actors like Huston, who are brilliant in other movies), and a plot that vacillates between dumb comedy & abject horror.  Particularly in its strange treatment of the character of Rusty (who is literally raped for laughs at one point in the film), it's just mind-bogglingly awful.

And that was the public reaction.  Myra Breckinridge was an abject disaster for all involved.  Mae West (who came out of a 27-year film retirement to do this movie) & Raquel Welch feuded repeatedly on the set, and the whole film went over budget quickly.  As word spread of what the movie was about (and that it was going to get an X-Rating, one of only two such films to be released by Fox with such a distinction), the use of old footage of movies in the picture was removed due to lawsuits from the original stars; Loretta Young & Shirley Temple (then a UN Ambassador, so even the White House go involved on her behalf) both successfully sued to have footage of themselves removed from the film (though other footage of Temple was still used during the opening of the film).  And the end product was savaged by critics, was a flop at the box office, and since then West, Vidal, Welch, & Fawcett have all publicly disavowed the film.  Sarne never directed another major studio film again, and eventually had to find work as a waiter at a pizzeria to make ends meet.

This also caused big issues with Welch's career.  Welch thought when she was signing up for this film she was taking her career in a different direction, a more serious one like we saw with Ann-Margret in Carnal Knowledge last month.  Instead, she became something of a joke, and never really got to do a film that was considered "important" in the 1970's.  Next week we're going to take a look at arguably the closest that Welch ever came to actual critical credibility, but it's worth remembering that unlike several of the women we profiled this year, Welch never actually was considered a serious actress (even in hindsight), and a lot of that damage lies squarely at the feet of Myra Breckinridge.

OVP: Drums Along the Mohawk (1939)

Film: Drums Along the Mohawk (1939)
Stars: Claudette Colbert, Henry Fonda, Edna May Oliver, Eddie Collins, John Carradine, Ward Bond
Director: John Ford
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actress-Edna May Oliver)...there's some confusion over whether this was also cited for Best Cinematography, and I'd love if someone reading this might help me out on what is "official" in terms of nominations, as IMDB and Inside Oscar list this as being of the nominees for Best Color Cinematography in 1939, but the AMPAS database officially doesn't list it, saying the only unofficial nominees were Gone with the Wind and The Private Lives of Elizabeth & Essex.  I defer to the AMPAS database as my source-of-truth for the OVP, but if anyone has more clarification or sources, I'd love to read them.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

We're continuing on our week devoted to the Best Supporting Actress category with Drums Along the Mohawk, a massive hit from that year that seemed to sprout a classic every week: 1939.  The film might have major, Oscar-winning stars headlining it (Fonda & Colbert), but it was actually character actress Edna May Oliver who won her sole Oscar nomination for her work in the film.  Oliver was not that old when she played Mrs. McKlennar in the film (she was just 56, and was clearly made up to be much older in the picture), but at that point she'd had a long career in both the stage & in pictures.  She originally made her name in the Hildegarde Withers films (about a spinster sleuth, and yes, please sign me up to watch all of those as "spinster sleuth" is about as much of a calling card as I can get), but if you recognize her today at all it's probably from the 1940 Pride & Prejudice where she played the quintessential Austen villain, Lady Catherine De Bourgh.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is set during the Revolutionary War, and follows a young couple who are trying their hand at frontier life.  Lana (Colbert), is from a wealthy family, while her new husband Gil (Fonda) comes from more modest means.  Initially when they move out, Lana struggles, even screaming when a Native American that is friends with Gil shows up at her door.  She starts to adjust to life working the land, and they begin a family (though of course there is the initial miscarriage that seemed to always happen in movies of this era).  When the family becomes unable to stay on their land (due to raids from unfriendly Native Americans, who are led by an Englishman played by John Carradine), they move in with Mrs. McKlennar (Oliver), a spinster who enjoys their company, though during a late raid she is shot by an arrow & killed, leaving her farm to the young couple.  The film ends with a gigantic fight that the men win, aided in no small part by Gil, and the announcement of a new country (America) when Cornwallis surrenders to Washington.

The movie was John Ford's first Technicolor movie, and if you know me at all, you know that I love John Ford, and the man knew how to make a beautiful film in Technicolor (just look at something like The Quiet Man or Fort Apache), and this looks gorgeous.  As I mentioned above, this was kind of nominated for Best Cinematography (the best I can tell it was on what would have been the 1939 equivalent of a bakeoff), and it deserves it-Colbert, in particular, looks radiant in the moonlight.  That said, the movie ages badly (and probably wasn't progressive even at the time) for their depictions of the Native Americans, somehow both portrayed as cruelly cunning & as oafish, and it pulls you out of the movie.  The leads, two I generally like, don't help at all.  Fonda plays the character too flat, and Colbert's part was somehow written by a woman (Sonya Levian) & still she behaves like a damsel-in-distress every chance she gets, screaming & fainting & whining.  It's a pretty ugly, dated movie, and one that has little enjoyment save for the Cinematography.

That includes Oliver's work.  Her Mrs. McKlennar is welcome relief, to be sure-this film needs a jolt, and she's the kind of comic icing that provides such relief, but I don't know that it's fine acting in any capacity.  She rarely gets quiet moments, and her body & face are used as derision without it being earned (we don't feel she, or even the writers, are in on the joke).  It's a loud, brash performance that was pretty par for this category in its first decade, but even adjusting for modern tastes, this isn't all that funny or fun.

House of Dracula (1945)

Film: House of Dracula (1945)

Stars: Lon Chaney, Jr., Onslow Stevens, John Carradine, Martha O'Driscoll, Jane Adams, Glenn Strange

Director: Erle C. Kenton

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

On Tuesday, we had the first of a trio of monster mashups (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man), where some of Universal's most famous monsters began interacting with each other.  Today, we get something of a conclusion to that series.  While the traditional movie monsters of Dracula, the Wolf Man, & Frankenstein would show up in future films (specifically the horror comedies starring Abbott & Costello), and obviously would be revived in countless later decades, this is kind of the end of the road for these characters in the traditional sense within the Universal canon.  Going forward, either they were played for laughs, or they aren't really in the traditional first-run of the Universal canon.  We're not done with Universal monsters yet this month, and we'll need to do one more season for me to fully have seen all of these movies (my hope is that I'll get this fully off the bucket list next October), but this is a bit of an end of an era, particularly for the creature that started this series, Frankenstein (as I've now seen all seven of his original horror films).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film initially is entirely about Dracula (Carradine), who is meeting with Dr. Franz Edelmann (Stevens), supposedly trying to find a cure for his vampirism.  Dr. Edelmann is assisted by two women, the beautiful Milizia (O'Driscoll), and Nina (Adams), who has a hunchback (thus throwing in a Lon Chaney Sr. era "monster" into this mix though to modern audiences this doesn't register in the same way it would've in the 1940's).  Dr. Edelmann must get good monster ratings on Angie's List, as soon Larry Talbot (aka the Wolf Man, aka Lon Chaney, Jr.) shows up at his door, also wanting to cure his condition.  Edelmann does know what he's talking about, initially giving Dracula blood & having this seemingly work, but Dracula falls victim to his own lusts when he can't resist seducing Milizia, and Dr. Edelmann kills Dracula to protect her.  Afterward, though, Dr. Edelmann goes mad as he starts to turn into some kind of monster due to Dracula's blood, and while he is able to cure the Wolf Man before he does, in the end a cured Larry Talbot kills Dr. Edelmann, who in his madness is trying to revive the Frankenstein monster (Strange), and buries the monster in yet another exploding castle, with poor Nina inside.

The movie really should've been called Dracula Meets the Wolf Man, as Frankenstein is pretty much an afterthought here (it's worth remembering that though Boris Karloff starred in the best-remembered Frankenstein pictures, Strange played the role just as many times), only showing up midway through the movie.  The film itself is fascinating in a different way (not just because it basically dismisses the most popular monster in the franchise) but because if this is seen as an ending for the series, the Wolf Man gets a genuinely happy ending to his story.  Larry Talbot is cured in this movie, something that doesn't happen in the other pictures, and while Chaney would return to the role in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, that kind of took place in a different universe, and so if you are a "canon" person, Talbot gets a happy ending, even if Dracula & the Frankenstein Monster once again are killed at the end of this picture.

This is the only interesting part of House of Dracula, though.  I honestly should give this one-star, as it's not well-constructed, and in particular Carradine's Dracula is badly written, as if the writers don't know what to do with a man who is actually evil, and not just so by circumstance (the irony of his being the weak link is that based on other roles Carradine is by far the best actor on this cast sheet).  The mad doctor angle is played for more fears than we've seen in the past, but Edelmann's character feels off, and not interesting enough for you to not want to know more about the monsters.  However, I had a good time-I'm learning that this is one of those rare guilty pleasures for me that I'm willing to look past the flaws, and so I'm going to go with 2-stars here.  As I said, we are not done with the Universal monster movies quite yet, but this will be the last of the more horror-minded Frankenstein, Dracula, & Wolf Man pictures we're watching this month, so if you have enjoyed our takes, bring your thoughts about these monsters to the comments!

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Werewolf of London, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, The House of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Masque of the Red Death

OVP: Cheyenne Autumn (1964)

Film: Cheyenne Autumn (1964)
Stars: Richard Widmark, Carroll Baker, Karl Malden, Sal Mineo, Dolores Del Rio, Ricardo Montalban, Gilbert Roland, Arthur Kennedy, Patrick Wayne, Elizabeth Allen, John Carradine, James Stewart, Edward G. Robinson
Director: John Ford
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

We conclude a week's worth of all-star films from all walks (horror, musicals) with a western, one that expanded 155 minutes and managed to have time for a plethora of stars crawling out of the woodwork (it also, weirdly, has a connection to The Swarm in that both films feature Oscar-winner Ben Johnson, albeit here he is in an uncredited cameo).  Cheyenne Autumn is a bit of a bittersweet picture not just because it's very somber (plot coming in a second), but also because it's the end of the line for a director we have discussed on this blog a lot through the years-John Ford.  While Ford would make one more feature film (1966's 7 Women with Anne Bancroft & Sue Lyon), this was the final western that the director would make, and as a result is something of a sendoff of Ford's own career.  I love John Ford's westerns as a rule (alongside film noir, the western is my favorite Hollywood genre), so this is definitely right up my alley.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is long, and has a lot of plot, including a completely ancillary to the story middle section.  The main story is about a Cheyenne tribe of 300 moving from Oklahoma territory to Wyoming, led by two chiefs (played by Roland & Montalban in the film).  They are being watched & pursued by Captain Thomas Archer (Widmark), who is sympathetic to their plight, and are joined in their journey by a Quaker woman named Deborah (Baker) who is teaching the tribe's children to speak and read English.  Along the way they get into a battle at Fort Robinson, led by the drunk Captain Wessels (Malden, and in a strange twist for a western, alcoholism isn't meant as a sign of endearment here), and attract the attention of Secretary of Interior Carl Schurz (Robinson), who comes and states that the tribe can return to their home, and he'll work with Washington to ensure that promise can be kept (though he pointedly calls it a "gamble" since he knows "promise" is a broken word to the Cheyenne).  The film ends with the Cheyenne tribe returning home...and with Sal Mineo's Red Shirt being killed for sleeping with another man's wife.

If that last sentence seems out-of-place, well, it does a little bit in the movie too.  The film is gorgeous (cinematography was a well-earned nomination, with William Clothier painting Monument Valley in a wash of sandy color, and really these stand up with films like The Quiet Man and The Searchers in terms of beauty from Ford's filmography), but it's incredibly disjointed.  Mineo's character never actually speaks in English (supposedly this is because Ford was worried that Mineo's thick Brooklyn accent would be impossible to overcome), but as a result you see a very famous actor in a dismissible part, and you put the crux of the film on us connecting to a somber final battle between Mineo & Montalban's Little Wolf.  It doesn't work.

That said, a lot of the film doesn't work that well even if it's all pretty.  Widmark is stoic, Baker angelic, and Robinson wry, but they don't add anything of value to the film-it just sort of meanders.  It isn't often I wish a film starred John Wayne, but one wonders if the natural gravitas Ford could pull out of Wayne would have been a better fit for the lead than Widmark.  As it is, there's nothing truly great going on through two-thirds of the film, and you'd be forgiven for skipping this if you're just skimming through Ford's filmography...

...except the sequence with Jimmy Stewart as Wyatt Earp totally makes up for it.  There's no real point to this long sequence-it's not important to the plot at all, and feels more like a short film buried in the picture than anything else, but it's hilarious & completely awesome.  Stewart is at his fumbling best here, playing the sharpshooting Wyatt Earp so well you kind of wonder why this isn't crowed about more by his fans.  There's a scene where he, John Carradine's Jeff Blair, and Arthur Kennedy's Doc Holliday are playing poker while all hell is breaking loose (and Elizabeth Allen's Miss Plantagenet, a lady of the evening, is trying to convince Wyatt Earp they've met before) and you'll cackle.  The whole chase sequence is great, the ending obvious but still terrific delivery.  I haven't seen enough of 1964's Best Supporting Actor contenders to say this with certainty, but I totally would have considered Stewart for an Oscar nomination here, as this is a triumphant extended cameo.

OVP: Around the World in 80 Days (1956)

Film: Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
Stars: Cantinflas, David Niven, Shirley MacLaine, Robert Newton
Director: Michael Anderson
Oscar History: 8 nominations/5 wins (Best Picture*, Director, Cinematography*, Film Editing*, Score*, Adapted Screenplay*, Costume Design, Art Direction)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

As I start to work my way through my "Quarantine To Do List," one of the tasks I'm working on is finally starting to make my DVR manageable again.  Right now, if I had to guess, there have to be at least 70 Oscar Viewing Project films on that thing (not to mention three episodes of Westworld, which I tend to stockpile as I genuinely like the show, but it can be convoluted if you don't have a few in a row to watch), and I keep putting more random films on there, so it's high-time I start conquering it (like many of you, I suspect, I'm working on a lot of projects that I've put off for a while, and this is a big one for me).  We're going to kick off this clean-up (expect a few truly random movies to be headed your way in the next couple of months) with a bit of a bang-the rare (for me) unseen Best Picture winner, Around the World in 80 Days.

(Spoilers Ahead) When I mentioned that I was seeing Around the World in 80 Days to a friend yesterday, their reaction was one of "eek!" more than anything else, as the Jules Verne adaptation is notoriously one of Oscar's least-celebrated top prize recipients.  The film itself is, in fact, very long, which is rarely a good sign for a movie that enjoys a bad reputation.  Essentially, for those who didn't read the book as a kid, the story is about Phileas Fogg (Niven), a punctual English gentlemen with something of a stubborn streak, and his manservant Passepartout (Cantinflas), whom he hires for an expedition around the world.  Fogg has made a bet with men at his club that he can circumnavigate the globe in under 80 days, and as he continues all of the United Kingdom begin tracking his expeditions.  Along the way he and Passepartout get into a series of adventures, including bullfighting, riding an elephant, and a train robbery.  They are accompanied for much of the trip by Princess Aouda (MacLaine, in an unfortunate case of brown-face from my favorite actress) and Inspector Fix (Newton), who is determined to prove that Phileas Fogg has robbed the Bank of England, but is continually thwarted in his efforts to arrest him.

Around the World in 80 Days isn't as bad as its reputation, but it's not a good movie & it's laughable in the same year as The Searchers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Written on the Wind, The Wrong Man, The Ten Commandments, and Giant that the Academy chose this of all movies to be its standard-bearer.  It's fun to watch, even if it's not funny at all, and I think it's meant to be.  At the time Cantinflas (who would get a Golden Globe win but no Oscar nomination, a rarity for a Best Picture winner) was a huge star in Mexican cinema, and was enjoying here his breakthrough into mainstream American film, but so much of his humor is based on either physical tricks that aren't particularly funny in hindsight (mistreatment of animals is a bigger part of this movie than you'd think, and it feels kind of icky in hindsight) or trading on racial humor.  I get what he's trying to do here, but it doesn't work sixty years after the fact, and no one else in the movie, not even Niven or MacLaine (both very good actors with the right material), are able to make much of the film.

The enjoyment in hindsight are the cameos and the sets.  Producer Mike Todd filmed a lot of the movie on-location, so you literally see scenes across the world that are actually quite wonderful.  Despite the story being a snore, the set designs are fun (especially in Spain & Japan), and the cinematography is expansive & lovely; I rarely have this complaint, but the only thing you can really fault the cinematography for is a lack of closeups.  It explores expansive vistas & makes sure that Todd got his money's worth.  The other Oscar nominations are less inviting.  Costumes are fine, but repetitive & not breaking new ground, while the editing is lacking (three hours without enough laughs is a struggle).  And the score is reliant on too many stereotypes and cliches when it comes to the music of the country they're in to really be interesting.

But the movie is nearly saved by the sheer volume of cameos.  This was one of the first films to employ a plethora of "guest appearances" from major stars of the era, and it keeps the otherwise humdrum plot ticking as you play "I Spy."  Some of these figures aren't as famous today, so it's a bit of a guessing game, but if you know even the remotest bit about classic Hollywood, you'll recognize a few figures.  Chief among my favorites were Marlene Dietrich as a saloon girl, Frank Sinatra as a piano player, Buster Keaton playing a train conductor, and John Carradine as an easily-vexed colonel, but there's enough here to keep you intrigued even while the movie slogs.  The film was a massive hit, proved Mike Todd a boy wonder (who was cut down in his prime), but it's really only the cameos and the location shooting that should be celebrated here.  After a long wait, I can confirm this is no "best" picture.

OVP: Blood and Sand (1941)

Film: Blood and Sand (1941)
Stars: Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Rita Hayworth, Alla Nazimova, Anthony Quinn, J. Carrol Naish, Lynn Bari, John Carradine, Laird Cregar
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Cinematography-Color*, Best Art Direction)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Linda Darnell-click here to learn more about Ms. Darnell (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we spoke through in the kickoff to Linda Darnell month, Ms. Darnell's career essentially had two acts, one from 1940-43 where she was instantly praised for her unrivaled beauty and given little else to do in films but be ravenous, and then after a hiatus that nearly ended her career, she reclaimed her throne as a matinee idol in the late 1940's when she was given significantly better parts in pictures like Fallen Angel and A Letter to Three Wives before her personal demons made it impossible for any future comebacks.  Due to these gaps, I decided to spread our month into two halves as well, with our first two pictures coming from the fledgling years of Darnell's career, and the final two from after she mounted a comeback.  This week we take a look at another pairing of Darnell with Tyrone Power (whom we saw her with in The Mark of Zorro last Saturday), their final onscreen pairing after four successful pictures, and also a movie with her starring opposite one of the biggest icons of the 1940's, who at that point wasn't famous enough yet to get billing over Darnell, but would soon eclipse her career in pretty much every way imaginable: Rita Hayworth.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is unique in its subject matter in a lot of ways, as it's the rare giant epic that also is clearly a message picture.  We follow Juan Gallardo (Power) from his years as a young child, defending his slain father who was once the greatest bullfighter in Spain.  As he ages, a cocky Juan Gallardo learns to in fact take his father's place, and subsumes him in the national consciousness as one of the greatest matadors of his era.  The movie counters this rise with Juan Gallardo's interactions with women, including his housemaid mother (Nazimova) and bratty sister (Bari, always playing the villainous role, and with three films now in our Saturdays with the Stars series, the unofficial "Forgotten Star" on a series about "forgotten stars" as she won't be getting her own month but probably should have at this point).  He also has two major romantic pursuits Carmen (Darnell), a pious woman whom he marries and has loved since they were children, and Dona Sol (Hayworth), a gorgeous heiress who seems to bounce from man-to-man and has a thing for matadors.

The film is really Power's, and probably shouldn't have been included in this series though technically he shares above-the-line billing with Darnell in virtually every poster I could find.  It was an important picture for both, a huge hit and one that kept them at the top of matinee screens for a few more years, but Power owns the picture in terms of screentime, and Darnell is given little to do.  Even in the ending of the movie, when Power's character dies in a surprisingly solemn finale (we see Anthony Quinn as the next successor to Juan Gallardo, certain to also die at the hands of a bull the same way his former friend did), Carmen has little to do but mourn and weep, and while some would argue that playing a pious woman was a nice change of pace compared to the latter aspects of Darnell's career, it's hard to think of this as her picture, and quite frankly it's not even banking that much on her looks, which was Darnell's complaint at the time.  Certainly when you compare her to Hayworth, given a seedier role but landing it with much more aplomb and glamour.  Hayworth, the superior actress, steals the movie in every conceivable way, and was clearly destined for stardom.  A few months later she'd appear in the massively successful You'll Never Get Rich with Fred Astaire, and wouldn't be relegated to third billing in a movie again for two decades.

The movie received a pair of well-earned Academy Award nominations that year, neither of which were reliant on the staid acting and repetitive screenwriting (though like I said-strong ending).  The cinematography is gorgeous-shot in Technicolor, the bullfight scenes gave me chills and though shot at wide angle (there's no plausible way you'd assume Power was actually onscreen with the dangerous bulls), it works brilliantly.  The love scenes are lensed compellingly, great melodramatic stuff, and honestly even the gaudy touches work with the film.  The same could be said for the art direction-it's terrific to watch all of the stadiums recreated, and you don't really feel like you're on a Hollywood sound stage even when you are.  It's obvious that Blood and Sand was borrowed by other epic directors years later, as the giant, expansive sets of the 1940's/50's are borrowing from this film as much as early DeMille, so there's clear influence going on here, and I loved the cavernous effect they occasionally make to imply Juan Gallardo's life is empty.  Technically the film is very impressive (sound work's great too), but aside from Hayworth the substance of the film is weirdly lacking.

Fallen Angel (1945)

Film: Fallen Angel (1945)
Stars: Alice Faye, Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell, Charles Bickford, Anne Revere, John Carradine, Percy Kilbride
Director: Otto Preminger
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Alice Faye-click here to learn more about Ms. Faye (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

And so we conclude our short time with Alice Faye as our Star of the Month, largely where Ms. Faye herself ended her career.  We profiled a bit in our overview of Alice Faye's career (see the link above) why Fallen Angel was such a big moment in her career, and largely ended it (long story short-Faye caught on to Darryl Zanuck trying to screw her over to give a better part to Linda Darnell, and she wasn't having it so she left show business, leaving Zanuck without one of his biggest stars).  Faye would work again decades later, most notably in 1962's State Fair (where she had to play second fiddle to Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, & Ann-Margret, a new generation of musical stars), but this was it for her time as a headliner.  Considering the director here is better than any we've profiled so far in Faye's career (real talk-Otto Preminger may be the finest director we've hit for any Saturday with the Stars articles, give or take Vincente Minnelli), I was curious if Faye had overreacted, or if she indeed gets screwed over by Zanuck.  What I found was that Faye, if she had assumed she'd get the better part, was justified in her storm off, but neither actress is saving a particularly strong picture with Fallen Angel.

(Spoilers Ahead) Fallen Angel is about a love triangle in a small town between a conman of sorts Eric Stanton (Andrews), a "loose" waitress at a local diner Stella (Darnell), and the prim organist who happens to be a wealthy heiress June Mills (Faye).  Eric is intent on marrying Stella by any means necessary, but she won't go with him unless he has some money, so he tries to steal it from June, first by tricking her into giving it to him and then by marrying her to get to hers and her sister Clara's (Revere) inheritance.  This doesn't entirely work, though, because June is genuinely in love with Eric and Stella soon finds herself dead, with us assuming Eric didn't do it, but we aren't entirely sure who did.  The movie follows with Eric confessing to being a cad and then slowly falling for June (for real this time), trying to prove his innocence.  At the end of the movie, yet another guy obsessed with Stella, the detective investigating her murder (Bickford), turns out to be the killer, with Eric & June going off into the sunset together.


The film has a lot of great makings of a movie, including reuniting Andrews & Preminger, who just a year earlier had made the cinematic masterpiece Laura, which this film was clearly trying to duplicate both creatively and financially.  While it was a modest hit, it never really approaches Laura in terms of its quality.  Everyone was right to single out Darnell's Stella, who is given less screen time than I would've assumed considering her billing and star status at the time, but she's the best part about the movie.  Her Stella is dangerous, nasty, and clearly the sort of film noir character that, nowadays, would be having sex with guys just to mess with them.  She works every guy in the film, either to get what she wants or occasionally just to screw up their lives, and she looks great doing it.  The movie's best parts are all Darnell, and it falls to pieces in the back half when she disappears, and we're left with a relatively lousy mystery.  Even with a really great supporting cast (John Carradine as a conman medium! Anne Revere as an enigmatic spinster! Percy Kilbride as a lovelorn cook!) giving solid work, its script just isn't that good, and feels hollow when you compare it to the heights that Laura achieved.

Faye, for the first time this month, feels out of her element.  I wonder what the additional scenes would have been like, if they would have added some depth to her work or if this wasn't a genre that she could pull off, but she feels too mousy to be interesting compared to the stellar work that Darnell is playing.  We're meant to root for June, but what is there to root for other than she seems like a nice girl?  Her previous iterations were so compelling because they took seemingly "gold-hearted gals" and made them interesting.  Here, though, she's left with little to do other than be upstaged, and though it's a bummer that she didn't make any major movies again, perhaps the lesson of Alice Faye is that she was never given a proper shake to begin with.  Despite clear talent, beauty, and incredible star charisma, none of her movies that we profiled this month ever felt worthy of her.  One has to wonder what, a decade later, someone like Gene Kelly or Stanley Donen could have made of such a rare talent.  At the very least, while she didn't get the decades of star legend that some of her peers would get, she did seem to have a genuinely happy life with her husband Phil Harris for the next fifty years.  Unfortunately, as you'll soon see, our May Star of the Month wasn't so lucky.

The House of Frankenstein (1944)

Film: The House of Frankenstein (1944)
Stars: Boris Karloff, J. Carrol Naish, Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, Glenn Strange, Elena Verdugo
Director: Erle C. Kenton
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

While we may still have one more dance with Frankenstein, this is our last dramatic entry with the monster who has in many ways defined our Classic Horror Movie month.  I have had such a good time watching these films, and there are so many left for me to see that we won't get to this month (including two more Frankenstein pictures-Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Dracula), that I think I'll probably do a sequel to this next October (it wouldn't be a monster movie without a sequel), but for now let's get into our last (dramatic) moment with the monster, this time played by Glenn Strange.

(Spoilers Ahead) After nearly a decade of monster movies, Universal Studios was trying to find a way to spice up the monster movie franchise, and like most series that are toward the end of their run hoping to boost ratings, they relied upon gimmicks and "special events."  As a result, we get the first film in the series to feature Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein's Monster, albeit in abbreviated storylines.  The film focuses on Dr. Niemann (Karloff), a mad scientist who escapes from prison with his hunchbacked sidekick Daniel (Naish), and together they set off to both seek revenge against those who imprisoned Niemann as well as to recreate the work of Niemann's hero, Dr. Frankenstein.  Initially they meet a man who has Dracula's bones trapped in his cart of curiosities, and after killing him, Niemann brings Dracula (Carradine) back to life, only to quickly have Dracula die (after he has time to seduce a young woman, of course), when he is caught in the sun.  Then we go to Dr. Niemann's lab, where he unfreezes the monster and the Wolf Man (Chaney), and tries to do some more brain-swapping to bring the monster back to life, but in the process his hubris causes his downfall.  The Wolf Man is killed by the gypsy Ilonka (Verdugo, who sadly died just last year) with a silver bullet after she falls in love with his human form, and Daniel, angered at the doctor for not giving him a new body so he can impress Ilonka, causes a chain reaction that kills himself, Dr. Niemann, and the monster...until of course the monster will return in a sequel.

The movie is short despite the heavy lift of plot that I just name-checked there, and that's a large part of the problem.  The movie has too many plots, and largely skates by the entire Dracula story, not really involving him in much of the rest of the film (Carradine, arguably the most prolific Hollywood actor of all time, played Dracula again in a sequel so someday I'll see if they make more of his work as the Count, as I found him somewhat dashing in the role).  The movie reminds me in a way of modern-day comic book movies, where there are too many headliners, and as a result no one is particularly compelling.  Certainly the best of the bunch is Karloff (and while I've ragged on him a lot, this is one of the better performances I've seen from Lon Chaney, Jr.), but this has more to do with Karloff's strong acting ability in general than anything interesting to do with Niemann.  Overall this is a pretty forgettable chapter other than finally getting all three of these monsters onscreen together.  It's titillating when they unveil each monster, but what follows is a bit blasé.

Since we've been learning a bit about horror movie classics throughout this month, I can't leave without the anecdote about why Bela Lugosi isn't in this film.  Originally, Lugosi was supposed to reprise his role as Count Dracula, which would have been the first time since the original 1931 hit that he played the part.  However, Boris Karloff was doing a theatrical run of Arsenic and Old Lace, and the studio wanted to get Karloff to play Dr. Niemann in this film, so they waited and by the time he was available, Lugosi had a prior engagement...in a theatrical run of Arsenic and Old Lace.  This was Karloff's final appearance in any of the classic-run Universal horror films, and so we never got to see Lugosi's Dracula meet Karloff on the big screen.  Lugosi would finally be able to reprise his role as Dracula a few years later in the smash hit Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which (Netflix-willing) may be our final movie of this marathon...though they've been a little bit unpredictable in what they're sending me so I make no promises (just hopes).

This Month We Are Seeing As Many Classic Horror Movies from the Pre-1970 Era as Possible.  If you want to check out some of our past reviews, here they are:

Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, Mad Love, Son of Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Mummy, Freaks, The Ghost of Frankenstein, It Came from Outer Space

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972)

Film: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972)
Stars: Woody Allen, John Carradine, Lynn Redgrave, Burt Reynolds, Tony Randell, Gene Wilder, Louise Lasser, Lou Jacobi
Director: Woody Allen
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

There is something completely cinematic about the work of Woody Allen.  I realized this as I watched the bunny-laden opening credits of one of his more abstract and out-there movies, Everything You Always... the other day when I was trying to make it through my FilmStruck queue.  Perhaps it's because I've grown up with his movies, or that Woody's films are an annual sojourn (he's one of the only filmmakers I will go to the cinema no matter what the reviews, plot, or actors are-I always catch his movies in theaters), but the way he structures them, never letting sequels or mandatory happy endings get in the way of his pictures.  Woody's movies, quite frankly, never really end-they just seem to start a new chapter as the closing credits start.  So it was bizarrely appropriate to see one of the great writers of the movies tackle what is essentially a series of short stories (about sex, naturally), in something I wouldn't have expected from Allen, but of course is a picture only he could have created.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie unfolds in seven unconnected chapters, all with questions about sex that "you were too afraid to ask."  As a result of this and its relatively brisk running time (88 minutes), the movie never stays with a particular sketch for very long, and it moves along rather quickly even in the vignettes that aren't quite as funny.

Like most such movies, there is a pacing and structural problem in that some of these stories are better than others, and as sexual mores have dramatically shifted since the 1970's, there are scenes that are a bit cringeworthy, or it's hard to tell whether say, the laissez faire attitude about a sexual act is actual ambiguity due to the time period or whether Allen is trying to strike a nerve with the audience.  The best example of this is a What's My Line-inspired panel where television personalities like Regis Philbin and Pamela Mason casually guess a man's sexual perversions, casually throwing out terms like "rapist" as if they're guessing he's a librarian.  I suspect that even in the 1970's this was meant to imply shock value, but it's a bit dated in hindsight, and was probably a lot edgier and more significant at the time that I'm able to give it credit for being.

Still, though, the movie's best vignettes are able to move passed this dated nature and are just flat-out hilarious.  Allen's fame for getting the perfect cast balance is on full-display in the final two sketches, by-far my favorites of the bunch.  The penultimate sequence is a Frankenstein-meets-The Blob parody, but instead of a traditional monster, we get a gigantic breast terrorizing the city.  Allen casts John Carradine as a mad scientist, glibly playing with Carradine's famed on-screen persona by having his character perform insane (and truly unnecessary) experiments on sexuality, then allowing the giant breast he creates roam the countryside.  It sounds weird, and it is, but it works marvelously.  The final sequence achieves a similar sort of perfect absurdity, with Burt Reynolds and Tony Randall playing mission control directors in a man's penis, trying to guide a guy to ejaculation while on a date; Woody Allen plays an apprehensive sperm in this scene, frequently wondering if it's worth sacrificing himself in hopes of fertilizing an egg.  It's classic Allen-style comedy, and a riot.

All-in-all, the movie worked for me.  There are sequences that aren't quite as good as others, and as you might suspect some of the feminist angles of a 40-year-old movie about sex aren't always as sharp as they should be, but part of me wishes that Allen had taken this sort of approach more often to his pictures, telling quick tales with an overriding theme.  If you've seen the picture (or read the book), please weigh in with your thoughts or what your favorite scenes are below!