OVP: The General Died at Dawn (1936)

Film: The General Died at Dawn (1936)

Stars: Gary Cooper, Madeleine Carroll, Akim Tamiroff

Director: Lewis Milestone

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Akim Tamiroff, Score, Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

Madeleine Carroll's career in movies was relatively brief, and we'll talk about the end of it next week a little bit, but her two pairings with Alfred Hitchcock made her a marketable star in America, and as a result she signed a contract with Paramount, becoming the first really important British actress to get a star contract from a major studio.  This led, of course, to her working with the pride-and-joy of the Paramount lot, Gary Cooper, in The General Died at Dawn, our picture today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The plot of The General Died at Dawn is confusing.  Essentially what the movie is about is O'Hara (Cooper), a man living in a war-ravaged China, attempting to give ammunitions to the peasants to fight General Yang (Tamiroff), who is mad & acts as a tyrant in the countryside.  Judy's (Carroll) father is in league with Yang, and she's essentially tasked to "distract" him (i.e. use her feminine wiles to get after Cooper), but in the process of course falls in love with him.  In the end, Yang & Judy's father both die (the latter dying literally at O'Hara's hands, and yet the romance still remains a thing), and the ammunitions are saved.

The General Died at Dawn shouldn't work.  This is a film that is incredibly convoluted, with a tacked-on love story & nondescript character actors playing their parts as two-dimensionally as possible...but it does.  The film is moody, often disjointed, but that works in its favor somehow.  There's a madcap aspect to it, as if we're meant to be confused alongside Cooper's O'Hara that I liked about the movie, and it's way better than it has any right to be.

Part of that are the performances.  Carroll is great here, as is Cooper (and both are jaw-droppingly gorgeous).  Carroll, as we've seen this month, is an actress whose glamour & beauty got in the way of her getting to play a part to its fullest (the directors wanted to bring forward her looks more than her performance), but Milestone doesn't do that.  He actually allows Carroll to get some real acting in, and while she's tasked with a ridiculous part (the scenes where she essentially writes off her father are so bizarre), she shows she has the talent to sell an offbeat part to the audience.

The film won three Oscar nominations, to varying reviews.  The Score is fine if unimpressive (sturdy, standard-fare action movie from the 1930's sort of bounce), but the real winner is the cinematography.  Victor Milner's work here is some of the best I've seen from the mid-1930's, atmospheric & cool.  It recalls in some ways what we'd eventually get from Gregg Toland in The Long Voyage Home and Citizen Kane (though not quite that sophisticated)-using the lighting in a way you didn't really see in 1930's cinema, and it's genuinely impressive.  The film's third nomination is for Akim Tamiroff, and yes, he's sporting yellowface onscreen.  Even discounting the significant racism involved, Tamiroff's work here is rudimentary-he gives Yang very little other than a sense of menace, and there's no nuance or personality in what he's doing.  This was the first year of the supporting categories at the Oscars, and thankfully they quickly started picking better work than this.

OVP: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Film: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Lizabeth Scott, Kirk Douglas, Judith Anderson
Director: Lewis Milestone
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Motion Picture Story)
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 Lizabeth Scott-click here to learn more about Ms. Scott (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Lizabeth Scott became a star by the sheer force-of-will of mega-producer Hall Wallis.  Unlike virtually every other star in our series, Scott didn’t really have a wilderness or supporting part period-she made 22 films in her career and 21 of them she got star billing.  The reason for that is The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, a film that she got to be ranked alongside Barbara Stanwyck & Van Heflin despite being a virtual unknown (to underline point here, below-the-line but with nearly as large of a part is Kirk Douglas in his screen debut, who without Wallis pushing him wasn’t given the same level of publicity as Scott).  Barbara Stanwyck at the time protested (she didn’t share star billing with anyone that wasn’t her equal), but Wallis insisted, and Martha Ivers delivered enough to make Scott the star that Wallis wanted.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is a well, strange, movie.  The film hearkens back to a young Martha (played by Janis Wilson as a child, Stanwyck as an adult) trying to run away with Sam (eventually to be played by Van Heflin).  The problem is she’s the richest girl in town, and her aunt (Anderson) is cruel & domineering of her.  Martha attempts to escape one night with Sam but in the process accidentally kills her aunt.  Certain to be sent to jail and see her life ruined, she is convinced by a greedy tutor (Roman Bohnen) that he’ll keep her secret, and eventually pushes Martha onto his son Walter (Douglas) who will then inherit her family fortune and political power.  The film cuts to the characters’ adulthood, where Sam is going through town and learns that Martha is still there, successful as ever, and befriends she and Walter, who find Sam suspicious and try to run him out of town (or even have him killed) as they assume he saw Martha kill her aunt and will tell that they let an innocent man go to the chair for Martha’s crime.  The movie eventually ends with a murder-suicide between Martha & Walter, and Sam runs off into the sunset, letting this chapter of his life go.

You’ll notice two things in that description-one, it sounds normal but it’s not.  Martha is diabolical, and more than willing to dispose of people in order to get what she wants.  The film feels a bit gimmicky in Stanwyck’s performance, letting her play Martha as wild-eyed as she possibly can.  It kind of works because she’s such a good actor she can do scenery-chewing with great aplomb, but it’s not particularly strong acting, especially when you consider that Stanwyck is capable of a role like Phyllis Dietrichson, the grand teton of femme fatales.  Arguably the best performance in the film comes from Kirk Douglas, playing a sniveling man capable of both murder and being totally whipped by his hot wife.  Douglas rarely played this kind of weak character in a career that would find him most identified with Spartacus or western heroes, but he’s really good in the part.

The second thing you’ll notice is that I don’t talk about Scott’s character at all, and that’s because she’s totally unnecessary for the actual film.  She plays the love interest for Van Heflin’s Sam, Toni.  Toni has some petty crime under her belt, and is blackmailed by Walter to get to Sam, but she’s ancillary to the main showdown between Martha, Walter, and Sam, and it’s easy to see how Scott would’ve gotten lower billing if it weren’t for Wallis. Her performance is…fine.  It’s a throwaway part, and she doesn’t elevate it the way that Douglas does, but as I’ve read about Scott, she became famous so fast that she struggled with learning how to act while getting to headline proper films (with her beauty & husky voice, she was unkindly compared to Lauren Bacall).  We’re going to get to some of the peak Scott performances in a few weeks, but this week-and-next we’ll be staying in the earliest reaches of her career, where she starred with luminaries like Stanwyck & Douglas, and struggled to stand out.

OVP: The Racket (1928)

Film: The Racket (1928)
Stars: Thomas Meighan, Marie Prevost, Louis Wolheim
Director: Lewis Milestone
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Picture)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

For those of you who are not fans of the Olympics (judging from the traffic, that may not be a lot of you), you may have been wondering what has become of the Oscar Viewing Project.  Never fear, while I did take a slight break to watch the world's greatest athletes and discuss the Republicans' nominee for Vice President, we are going to be returning hot and heavy into the films that Oscar deemed worthy.  I have a lot of fun stuff planned for September as well-more Oscar films, theatrical releases, September TV show premieres, the U.S. Open, the Democratic National Convention (I will be recapping all of the televised nights), and possibly more-so hang onto your hats and pray that I don't get distracted by shiny objects.

To welcome both you and I back to Oscar Viewing, I thought it would be great fun to go with not only our first Silent Era film, but also one of the first three films to be nominated for Best Picture.  At the first Academy Awards, Best Picture was broken out into two categories-Outstanding Production and Unique and Artistic Production.  Unique and Artistic Production got canned, though considering that the masterworks Sunrise and The Crowd were amongst the films in that category, it sort of makes you wonder what sort of course the Academy Awards would have taken had they stuck with the category.  This is my first of the three films in the Outstanding Production that I've seen, and while Seventh Heaven (the other losing nominee) could pop up at any time, I've decided to save the ultimate winner of this category, Wings, for my final OVP movie.  So it may take a bit of time, as I've got 2249 films to go!

But let's start that countdown with this film, directed by Lewis Milestone, who scored two Oscars in the first three years of the Oscars, and is noted for his big pictures, as well as his massive ego.  Considering the film was produced by Howard Hughes, also famously sure of himself, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall on this set.  Milestone's epic masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front relied largely on the naivety of some of his characters, as they slowly became world-weary men.  He's less sturdy here, where all of the characters have long-established relationships, and while it's hard to call them cliches since it was 1928 and film hadn't been around long enough to deal in cliches, the wise-cracking mob moll (Prevost), a justice-defying crime boss (Louis Wolheim, who would also memorably work with Milestone in the aforementioned AQOTWF), and the unflappable cop with a solid moral compass (Meighan) are such standard and overused tropes that you feel like you've already seen the film halfway through it.  This isn't necessarily Milestone's or Hughes's faults, but what is their fault is the way it treats Meighan in particular-it seems unbelievable that someone with the experience he has would, for example (SPOILER ALERT) leave his star witness meandering around the police station where Wolheim's mob boss is able to shoot him, rather than locking him up.  The best part of the film has to be Prevost, all Mae West spunk and able to seduce any man in her path, except oddly our two stars.  Prevost would be one of the more tragic stars of the 1930's, purportedly having an affair with Hughes (though really, what starlet didn't sleep with Hughes at some point during the 30's?), and becoming an alcoholic after this film.  She died of heart failure at the age of 38 (Joan Crawford, a longtime friend, paid for the funeral as Prevost was broke).

Overall, the film was a bit of a disappointment considering the heights that Hughes and Milestone were able to reach later in their respective careers, but I'll turn it over to you now.  Have you seen The Racket, and does it rank alongside of Wings or Seventh Heaven (or Sunrise and The Crowd, for that matter), in your opinion?  Do you have a favorite Marie Prevost performance?  And have you been doing any Oscar-viewing while I've been slacking off?  Do tell!