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

It Happens Every Thursday (1953)

Film: It Happens Every Thursday (1953)

Stars: Loretta Young, John Forsythe, Frank McHugh, Edgar Buchanan, Jane Darwell

Director: Joseph Pevney

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

Sometimes with these Saturdays with the Stars months, we complete a year with a lot of untold chapters from the actor's life.  That's not going to be the case for Loretta Young.  Last week, we talked about the pinnacle of Young's career, the late 1940's, when she made massive hits, starred in a holiday classic, & won an Oscar.  Young, however, was in her late thirties at that point, which has always been a "sunset" time for actresses in Hollywood, and was particularly during the Classical Hollywood era.  By the early 1950's, though she was still working, her film career had started to wane, and today's movie, It Happens Every Thursday, was the final theatrically-released film that Young made in her career...though as we'll get to in a second, she had a surprisingly long second act as a performer.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie in many ways resembles the films we were discussing last week, with Young playing a perfect wife in a romantic-comedy.  The movie is about Jane MacAvoy (Young), a woman who is trying to find a new life for she & her husband Bob (Forsythe) as they are expecting a baby, so they move to California and buy a small-town newspaper, not realizing that it is unsuccessful.  Initially they struggle to establish the paper, but soon find that a certain kind of soft journalism (involving guessing old photos of townspeople) sells well, and they begin to take off.  When they realize that they'd been forgoing actual journalism by ignoring a drought, Bob hires an Air Force expert to use dry ice to try to get it to rain.  While the stunt doesn't actually happen, a downpour follows anyway, and when that leads to flooding, the MacAvoys are nearly run out of town before they convince the newspaper readers that the flooding (which soon ends) is not their fault.

The movie is, for lack of a better word, stupid.  The plot as described is exactly how it plays out in the movie, and you'll be forgiven for thinking "that sounds kind of silly" because it's how it plays in the film.  A lot of your mileage on this movie will depend on your tolerance for Young's sickly sweet persona, and while I have gained a newfound respect for the actress this month with intriguing work in Midnight Mary and The Stranger, she's not a favorite yet, and certainly not to the point where I'll forgive a movie this ridiculous.  Even if you watch it in suspended belief, you're going to get bored.

Young's film career ended with this picture, but it wasn't the end of her career.  The actress quickly transitioned to television, starring in an eponymous anthology series for NBC, which she hosted and frequently starred in as an actress.  The show became known for its trademark opening, with Young opening-and-closing a set of doors, and then coming out & twirling in a gorgeous evening gown.  I highly recommend you google it, as it's as over-the-top as you'd hope, and the series was a ratings & critical success, being in the Top 30 in several seasons and winning Young three Emmys.  The actress would largely retire from acting after this, just briefly coming back in the 1980's long enough to win a Golden Globe for the TV movie Christmas Eve, but mostly devoting her life to her political causes (she was a diehard Republican who campaigned for Eisenhower, Nixon, & Reagan) and Catholic charities before dying at the age of 87 in 2000.  Next month, we're going to talk about a leading man contemporary of Young's (though they never made a movie together), who like Young, starred in a major holiday classic in the 1940's and got a second act in television during the 1950's.

OVP: Mother is a Freshman (1949)

Film: Mother is a Freshman (1949)

Stars: Loretta Young, Van Johnson, Rudy Vallee, Barbara Lawrence, Betty Lynn

Director: Lloyd Bacon

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume Design)

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

When I first started this season, I talked about how I wanted to look at Loretta Young's career in part because I felt like I'd shortchanged her in terms of my opinion.  Young has always been name-checked (by me) as one of my least favorite Golden Age stars, mostly because I associate her with milquetoast roles.  As we've seen throughout this month, though, she also had room for great acting ability (The Stranger) could play ballsy roles (Midnight Mary), and had a complicated offscreen life that is still debated to this day (Call of the Wild).  Certainly, I will admit that my opinion of Young has changed...but not entirely.  We are now entering the tale-end of Young's film career, a time that was arguably her most successful.  She won an Oscar for The Farmer's Daughter in one of the biggest upsets in Academy history to that point (the smart money was on Rosalind Russell to win), and got a second nomination for Come to the Stable.  She also starred in what might be her best-remembered film, The Bishop's Wife, which became a holiday classic of the era.  But Young plays all of these parts too simply, and none of them deserved the praise for her that they got (save for The Bishop's Wife, honestly none of them are good movies).  I couldn't ignore this era even though I'm trying to rebrand Young a bit, and so from this peak period where she was making a lot of money in some of her least interesting work, I chose the romantic-comedy Mother is a Freshman, another hit starring Van Johnson.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie's premise reads less like a Classic Hollywood film and more like something out of a 1980's sophomoric comedy.  Abby Abbott (Young) lives with her teenage daughter Susan (Lynn) in a posh New York apartment.  She's raising her on her own because her husband died, and she suddenly realizes that she's broke, and while she has a trust fund that will pay out, it will only pay out once a year, and so she has months to live in destitution.  A weird clause at a local university, though, allows her to use a scholarship named after her grandmother if she attends the school, and so she enrolls as a freshman at the same school as her daughter.  Things become complicated when we learn that Abby is crushing on one of her professors, Richard Michaels (Johnson), but Richard has the hots for the new freshman Abby, and he doesn't know that she's Susan's mother.  Hijinks ensue before everyone ends up where they're meant to be, particularly a hapless Rudy Vallee as a lecherous lawyer named John Heaslip who is also lusting after Abby as well.

The film is harmless, but also charmless.  Young doesn't really have the verve to make this work, and this is what I was dreading in doing a month devoted to her-that I'd get a month of surface-level films about a beautiful woman played in an uncomplicated manner (thankfully, up until now not the case).  She has no chemistry with Johnson (though he's superb in Brigadoon, not one of my favorites overall from this era), and Vallee, the first pop heartthrob of modern music, is completely unnecessary to keep the plot rolling.  This is not a good movie, and it's sad that this is the type of film that Young would long be associated with by film fans.

The movie got a nomination for Best Costume Design, which might be a surprise if you didn't know going into it.  I assume that the thrill here was seeing Young, known for period pieces and at this point nearly forty, wearing the fashions of the modern youth at the time, but save for one gorgeous hot pink gown (that she wears before her "transformation" and honestly it's barely photographed head-to-toe) there's nothing memorable in this picture, and it feels like a weird nomination, even if it's always nice to see the Academy honoring contemporary design, even if that "contemporary" design is 35 years older than me.

OVP: The Stranger (1946)

Film: The Stranger (1946)

Stars: Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Philip Merivale, Konstantin Shayne

Director: Orson Welles

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Motion Picture Story)

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

The last two weeks we went through some wild shifts in Loretta Young's career and public persona.  While she'd been able to pull off some unique and more audacious roles in the early 1930's, the Hays Code and Young's relative conservatism offscreen led her to play very similar "beautiful saint" type roles for much of the rest of her career.  This was solidified in terms of her public persona in the 1940's with her three-decade marriage to Tom Lewis, providing even less fodder for Hollywood gossip rags after her quickie annulment marriage in the early 1930's and association with Clark Gable.  However, Young did make one film in the 1940's that feels atypical & also is widely-celebrated today, and before we get to a relatively typical film that we'd expect from Young during this era next week, we're going to discuss probably the best movie she ever made, and for sure the film that stands up the best upon scrutiny decades later: Orson Welles' The Stranger.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in the immediate aftermath of World War II, in an idyllic Connecticut town.  There we find Professor Charles Rankin (Welles) who is about to marry the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice named Mary (Young).  We also learn that the man we've been tracking for the first ten minutes of the movie, a war criminal named Meinike (Shayne) is looking for Rankin, and knows him to actually be Franz Kindler, a Nazi and the architect of the Holocaust.  Kindler murders Meinike to cover up his intentions, which are to wait out in this Connecticut town until the Nazis "inevitably" come to power again.  The only problem for Kindler is that a detective named Wilson (Robinson) is on his trail, knowing of Kindler's obsession with clocks (which Welles spends much of the film working on the large town clock) and that Meinike is the only person who knows his real identity.  This sets up a game of chess between the two men (or checkers, as it were, which play as a subplot metaphor between Kindler & Wilson), with Kindler trying to find a way to cover his tracks...potentially even if it means having to kill Mary to do it.

The Stranger is really well-constructed.  Welles never really made a bad movie in my opinion, and this one with the backing of a studio (RKO) meant that he could spend money, and it doesn't go to waste.  The art direction is superb, as is the cinematography (all of those random angles in the clock tower make it harder to know exactly what is happening, which adds to the suspense of the final face-off between Young, Robinson, & Welles).  Robinson & Welles play well together, and I wasn't entirely sure they would (they're both very stylized actors, but Robinson is more sandpaper and Welles is more cashmere, and I thought that wouldn't gel but it does).  The film was nominated for Best Motion Picture Story, and the way that it's structured (no tight ends-at less than 90 minutes this is a taut film) it's hard to argue with this inclusion.  I love the way that late in the film a plan that Kindler has executed works perfectly as far as he's aware...only to discover later that Mary has accidentally screwed it up by not knowing what the plan is about.  Or the way that Wilson realizes that Kindler is suspicious not because of his bombastic views on fascism, but instead because of his casual antisemitism which shows his actual beliefs.  It's good stuff, and I get why The Stranger is the one film in Welles' directorial filmography that was an unquestioned hit for the studio.

As for our star?  While she's not in the same league as Welles & Robinson in terms of elevating her role, she's really good in this.  It's a smaller part (despite Young's position on the poster, we'd consider this a "supporting" role today as the leads are Robinson & Welles), but she's perfectly-cast here.  Welles knows exactly how to play off of Young's real-life persona with his director, having her play the "perfect wife" but showing how that can make her complicit in some really ugly things.  To Young's credit, she nails the part exactly the way that you'd need to make it chilling.  We know Kindler is evil, we know Mary is good...but the film makes a point of showing that Mary knows far more about Kindler's actions (even if she doesn't know he's a Nazi) to the point where she's covering up a murder the back half of the film, putting multiple people's lives at stake.  Throw in her really strong third act when she finally wants revenge on Kindler & to take him down, and you've got a great piece-of-work from the actress, and one that stands apart in her collective filmography.

Call of the Wild (1935)

Film: Call of the Wild (1935)

Stars: Clark Gable, Loretta Young, Jack Oakie, Reginald Owen, Frank Conroy

Director: William A. Wellman

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

Last week we talked about Loretta Young's Pre-Code era, which had a surprisingly excellent film called Midnight Mary at its center.  But the Hays Code was fully in effect by the mid-1930's, and may well have been the end of Loretta Young's career had it not been for some quick thinking from the publicity-minded actress.  In 1935, Young made Call of the Wild, a movie that was relatively uneventful in terms of its theatrical run-it starred two big names (Young & Clark Gable), but it won no Oscar nominations, wasn't a particularly big hit, and paled in comparison to Gable's other movie that year, the Best Picture-winning Mutiny on the Bounty.  But the film would become one of the biggest & most consequential of Young's life (if not necessarily her career), and would continue to be debated for decades to come due to the off-screen relationship between Gable & Young.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is based on the classic novel by Jack London, and is about Jack Thornton (Gable), a gold prospector who along with his pal Shorty (Oakie) go out looking for a hidden gold strike that only they and two other people know about.  We soon learn that half of the other team may be dead, but he's left his wife Claire Blake (Young) behind.  Initially Claire dislikes Jack, but hate turns to love, and she joins their expedition, looking for the gold with Jack, Shorty, and Jack's dog Buck (who is, if you've read the book, the real star of Call of the Wild).  Things turn sour when another group of men, when a bunch of other men try to steal the gold, letting it fall into a river as they drown fleeing from taking the fortune at gunpoint, and Jack has to let both Claire (whose husband has returned) and Buck (who cannot fight his instinct to go run with wolves) go before he can finally be free of the "call of the wild."

The movie is not good, but it's not bad either.  Young & Gable don't have great chemistry, and honestly this is the kind of Young I'm not a fan of onscreen.  Compared to Midnight Mary last week, where she played a woman of the world, here she's a haughty, prim-and-proper type that would become her bread-and-butter as an actress in the coming decades but she comes across as too matronly to be interesting onscreen.  Gable has far better chemistry with Buck the Dog, who genuinely steals all of his scenes and is adorable, but Buck isn't in enough scenes, and the villains feel too ridiculous to be true.  Not a winner.

The reason I picked this movie, though, is because of the weird chapters it had decades after the fact.  Young & Gable had some sort of relationship (more in a second) off-screen during the filming of this movie, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, Judy.  Gable was married to Maria Langham at the time and Young was between marriages, so the scandal becoming public surely would've killed Young's career, likely Gable's as well.  As a result, Young kept the birth hidden, and for the first 18 months of Judy's life, she didn't spend time with her mother, until later Young "adopted" her.  Judy Lewis (last name from Tom Lewis whom Young would be married to for most of Judy's childhood) would spend much of the first couple of decades of her life thinking she was adopted until her husband finally told her the truth, and her mother confirmed it to her.  Decades after that (in the mid-1990's) Lewis published a book confirming the shocking scandal, which resulted in a riff with her mother than would last over three years.  Young would later confirm in her posthumous autobiography that Lewis was Gable's daughter from her time on this set.

That would seemingly have been the end of it, but it wasn't.  Shortly after Lewis's death, her sister-in-law Linda Lewis said that it was not, in fact, a romance between Young & Gable that resulted in Judy, but instead the result of Gable raping Loretta Young on the set.  Lewis claimed that Young had not consented, and had hidden this fact because she considered what she'd done to be "adultery" which to the devoutly Catholic Loretta was a mortal sin.  Young died two years after she purportedly told Linda Lewis about this, and Gable, Young, and Judy Lewis were all dead when Linda Lewis made this public in 2015.  For what it's worth, while Young does acknowledge that she had an affair with Gable on the set of Call of the Wild, she does not call it rape in her memoirs.  As a result, we'll never entirely know what really happened in one of the most scandalous Hollywood moments of the 1930's.

Midnight Mary (1933)

Film: Midnight Mary (1933)

Stars: Loretta Young, Ricardo Cortez, Franchot Tone, Andy Devine, Una Merkel

Director: William A. Wellman

Oscar History: No nominations

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

Loretta Young's career is unusual in that the earliest parts of it seem effortless.  She was a child actress after her family moved from Utah to Hollywood, and while she wasn't as successful as her sister Gretchen, she quickly got into movies, and even as a teenager was a WAMPAS Baby Star and acting opposite Lon Chaney (then one of the biggest stars in silent pictures) in the late 1920's.  Young's career, as we'll track, is sometimes hard to define because other than her two Oscar-nominated roles and The Bishop's Wife, which all happened over two decades into her career and in rapid succession, she was a consistent headliner but never someone who made a particularly strong mark on Hollywood.  So as we piece together her career, we're going to focus on five films that happened during key moments in Hollywood, and talk about how Young adapted to a town that was still reeling from the advent of talking pictures, and starting next week, the Hays Code. This week, though, we have Young in one of her more salacious roles, a Pre-Code drama called Midnight Mary.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told in flashback, as Mary Martin (Young) we see in the opening scenes is being tried for murder, and we understand through flashback what led to this moment.  Mary, from a young age, was given the fuzzy end of the lollipop, accused of crimes she didn't commit & growing up in poverty.  This put her into the company of a criminal crowd, as this was the easiest way to make money (though, to the film's credit, it gives Mary enough utility to make the choice to go into crime rather than just forcing her into it).  She chances upon a wealthy lawyer named Tom Mannering (Tone) who gives her a chance at a better life, but at this point the cards are dealt.  When Mary is finally found by the police for her life of crime, she makes it look to Tom like she'd conned him for his money, rather than admit she fell in love with him but can't bear to inflict on him the shame of being in love with a criminal.  Later in the film, when she kills her abusive boyfriend Leo (Cortez) as he's going to go for Tom & kill him out of jealousy, rather than admit what happened, she is willing to go to the chair to save Tom's dignity...but Tom storms in at the last second and sacrifices his honor to save the woman he loved, and they live happily ever after.

The movie sounds schmaltzy, but it doesn't read that way except for the last ten minutes.  The film's Pre-Code looseness helps a lot, making Mary's criminal cronies feel very real while also genuinely scary.  There's a scene where Leo is beating Mary senselessly in the next room, and his associates, celebrating one of them becoming a father, instead of stopping Leo turn up the music with knowing glances to each other, understanding that "Mary deserved it" even as they're celebrating another woman in their lives making them so happy.  It's a nasty bit of informed toxic masculinity, which runs rampant through the film, and is a good testament to why we need more female writers in every era of Hollywood (this was written by Anita Loos & Kathryn Scola).

The other reason the film doesn't read as schmaltzy, and I can't believe I'm saying this, is Loretta Young.  Young is not my favorite actress, as I said when I introduced this month, and one of the reasons I picked her was because I didn't like the idea of such a celebrated screen star having nothing for me to point to as "that's the role you should start with."  Now I have that.  Young plays this role differently than someone like Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Crawford might have, actresses known for playing tough-as-nails figures who can make it in a man's world largely by emulating the behavior of men.  The best parts of Mary's story, though, are that she can't make it in a man's world-that she needs to rely upon her femininity to get by, and sometimes she falls.  It makes the film more realistic, and Young's performance feel so true to a woman who knows she'll never get better than this, so she might as well make do.  A very strong piece-of-work right out the gate, making me excited we might find more hidden gems this month.

Saturdays with the Stars: Loretta Young

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 Spring Byington, a character actress who specialized in mother's and aunt's until she became a December Bride in the 1950's, finally graduating to leading actress.  This month, we're going to play a little bit with the formula by picking an actress who was a big deal in the 1930's & 40's, but whose star persona has largely been forgotten by modern audiences, and is perhaps best known today for her eponymous drama anthology that ran the bulk of the 1950's.  This month's star is Loretta Young.

Loretta Young (born Gretchen) is the first star we've profiled so far who started working in films pretty much from her childhood.  Her first silent film she made when she was just three-years-old, and along with her sisters regularly appeared in films as a child, and started to go by Loretta in her billing at age 15.  Young was pretty much a go-to star throughout the 1930's & 40's, and made as many as eight films a year during the peak of her fame, starring opposite Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Orson Welles, & David Niven

Young is a bit of a cheat to include this season.  Unlike people like Lucille Ball & Jack Benny, she hit the peak of her career.  She was regularly a major star throughout over two decades of headlining parts, and she even won an Oscar for 1947's The Farmer's Daughter.  Yet, if you asked even a devoted film fan to name 4-5 of Young's movies, they'd struggle outside of her two Oscar-nominated roles, and even then it's not like The Farmer's Daughter or Come to the Stable are regularly name-checked as fine films.  If anything, Young's entire persona today, if she's remembered at all, is for twirling through a door frame in an elegant ballgown at the start of her series.  On a personal note, as well...I'm not a big Loretta Young fan.  I've never seen a film that really called out "this is it for me" and as she's one of the few big name stars of that era without such a title, I wanted to rectify that.  So throughout July, we're going to look at the at one-time big deal titles of Young's film and see which ones should be rescued as "rediscovered classics" and which ones, well, should remain where they are.

OVP: The House of Rothschild (1934)

Film: The House of Rothschild (1934)

Stars: George Arliss, Loretta Young, Boris Karloff, Robert Young

Director: Alfred L. Werker

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Picture)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 Robert Young: click here to learn more about Mr. Young (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Robert Young is an odd actor to pick for a series like this not because he doesn't fit the bill (in many ways he's the very definition of an actor who "made it big in TV after never landing in film" but because much of his film career doesn't have a lot of differentiation.  Unlike some stars we've profiled this year like Ann Sothern or Lucille Ball, his career doesn't have a lot of chapters.  Young began his career at the beginning of the Sound Era, initially working much of the first 15 years of his career at MGM, playing opposite big stars on the lot like Norma Shearer & Joan Crawford.  Young graduated from supporting work to love interest or third lead work rather quickly, and stayed there.  As a result, it's harder to fit a narrative around Young's work early in his career, but suffice it to say in 1934 he was clearly relegated to B movies on the MGM lot, working in a half dozen pictures a year at the time, and didn't appear to create much fuss over this.  One exception in his early career was when he was loaned to United Artists for a prestige biopic starring George Arliss, which was a big hit for the studio and won a Best Picture nomination: The House of Rothschild.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about the famed banking family the Rothschilds and their humble beginnings in a Jewish ghetto in Prussia which would, throughout the film graduate to them becoming the wealthiest family in Europe, helping to fund the Napoleonic wars (this film is not historically accurate, so I'm summarizing the plot, not the actual history).  The movie focuses first on the banking family's patriarch Mayer Rothschild (Arliss), who on his deathbed makes his five sons promise they'll always pursue wealth over all else.  As grown men, the smartest of the five Nathan (also Arliss) begins to grow his banking capital, frequently with the hurdle of anti-semitism, as some of the nobility refuses to interact with Nathan because he's Jewish, principally Count Ledrantz (Karloff, startlingly young without his typical Universal Monster movie makeup).  This causes Nathan to forbid his daughter Julie (Loretta Young) to see Captain Fitzroy (Robert Young), who is not Jewish.  By the end of the movie, though, money ends up being the true unifier, and Nathan is not only accepted into society but becomes a Baron, one who can condone Fitzroy & Julie's relationship.

It's always important to remember context when it comes to older movies.  In 1934, a film about anti-semitism was noteworthy, and it was particularly noteworthy given the parallels to what was going on in Europe at the time, with Hitler's rise to power on the backs of anti-Jewish rhetoric.  As a result, you'd almost be forgiven for thinking that this film being dated but still a hit was worth it; after all, who can argue against a movie, even a bad one, if it is espousing tolerance?

But The House of Rothschild to a modern audience reads as deeply antisemitic, showing the Jewish characters as money-loving & duplicitous.  Yes, they frequently get the upper-hand in arguments & overt antisemitism in the film (like when Count Ledrantz won't allow Rothschild to have a contract because of his ethnicity) is never rewarded, but the film plays into ugly Jewish stereotypes, and feels like the rare film about tolerance that reads as unflinchingly problematic and honestly, quite hateful.

On top of that, the movie is terrible.  It weirdly reads as a Big Short of its era, with Rothschild using difficult-to-understand stock market & loan maneuvering to ruin his opponents, and so you'd be forgiven if you didn't understand some of the more technical aspects of the film.  But Arliss (who, it should be noted, is not Jewish despite his most iconic parts being that of Jewish protagonists), is dreadful, every bit as bad as his Oscar-winning role as Benjamin Disraeli, and particularly bad as the Rothschild patriarch.  No one is good in this, not even Karloff (who is usually excellent even with bad material).  Our star is relegated to only a couple of scenes, and is largely window-dressing...he doesn't do much other than make out with Loretta Young (not a bad gig if you can get it, but still).  While this was a hit, it's easy to see why Young wasn't suddenly on critics' radars after a movie this banal.

Oscar-Connected Lost Films, Part 2

Last week, we chronicled through the Top 10 missing Oscar-nominated films (the films that keep my OVP-loving heart up at night knowing that I'm doomed to failure even if I manage to hit most of the pictures).  Today, however, I decided to try a slightly different tack (one that includes a bit more of a list).  Here we have lost films starring Oscar-nominated actors or directed by Oscar-nominated directors.  While this list is far from complete, these stand out in my mind as some of the more important feature-length films that are hopefully still in someone's attic.

Note: While I couldn't include every missing feature-length film starring an Oscar nominee, I'm curious about which ones are on your "where is it?!?' list, so please share below in the comments!

12. Tenderloin (1928)

Directed by future Oscar winner Michael Curtiz and starring Dolores Costello and Conrad Nagel, the film is in a weird place in history as it's the second Vitaphone feature, and reportedly featured the first feature where actors actually spoke their lines (though the dialogue was so hammy people actually laughed when it first came out).  Considering its place in history, you'd think this would have hung on, but it's still considered lost.

11. Lilies of the Field (1924)

While it shares the name of an Oscar-winning film, it actually has no connection to the movie starring Sidney Poitier.  Instead, it gets its AMPAS connection through leading lady Corinne Griffith, who would be one of the first women ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress (in The Divine Lady).  The film sounds pretty messed up, and I'm curious to see how the sexual politics of the period play out, but like all of the other eleven films on this list, it's lost for now.

10. Red Sky at Morning (1944)

One of several missing films from the early career of future Oscar-winner Peter Finch, this one struck me as odd simply because of its late release date.  While portions of films from the 1940's and 50's are missing (most famously A Star is Born), this entire movie (about a sailor who falls in love with the wife of a captain) is completely gone, which is unusual for a film with a now recognizable star.

9. The Promise (1969)

By far the latest film on this list, and the only one that features a currently living Oscar nominee that I can find.  Sir Ian McKellen, very early in his career, made the first big-screen adaptation of an Aleksei Abuzov play, that is now considered lost.  Weirdly, it featured another actor who'd gained some fame the year previous (John Castle) for starring in an Oscar-winning film (The Lion in Winter) and was reusing Oscar-winning sets from the previous year's Best Picture winner Oliver!, so how this remains lost is also a mystery.

8. Men of Tomorrow (1932)

One of those films where you didn't know what you had until it was gone, the film actually stars Maurice Braddell and Joan Gardner, but it was the supporting cast that calls out a bit more ferociously, featuring Oscar-nominee Merle Oberon and future Oscar-winner Robert Donat in his film debut.  The film apparently was a bit salacious and had to be trimmed for re-distribution (and was dubiously marketed in the United States in 1935 because Oberon and Donat were headliners at that point, even though they weren't the stars of the picture).

7. White Man (1924)

One of the earliest films on this list, White Man would be a largely forgotten film starring Kenneth Harlan and Alice Joyce were it not for a bit part (that of Joyce's brother) played by one of the biggest leading men in Hollywood history: Clark Gable.  Yes, the future Oscar-winner made his film debut in a small role in this film, now largely lost (perhaps due to the fact that Gable wouldn't be a huge star for a bit longer after this).

6. Convention City (1933)

A plethora of big name actors are featured in this film, including Joan Blondell, Adolphe Menjeu, Dick Powell, and Mary Astor, 75% of which were Oscar nominees (Menjeu even was a nominee already at that point).  But what sets this film apart is that it is apparently quite scandalous, with a number of double entendres and Blondell's costume budget being smaller than Jack Warner wanted it to be.  As a result, it's one of those movies that you want to see more out of shock value than anything else.

5. The Forward Pass (1929)

This would be worthy of inclusion simply based on the premise alone: how many movies in cinematic history have ever been made about football, and turned into a musical?  Throw in Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and future Oscar-winner Loretta Young and the intrigue is factored up.  But it's a cameo by a 22-year-old John Wayne (in one of only a couple of his films that are considered lost) that makes me truly curious-what was John Wayne like at 22?!?

4. The Callahans and the Murphys (1927)

Toward the top more for the director of the film, and what he was able to do with his leading lady in other films.  George W. Hill, while never an Oscar nominee, managed to helm two major Oscar contenders early on in the Academy's history: The Big House, which was an early Best Picture nominee, and Min and Bill, which won Marie Dressler (who stars in Callahans and the Murphys) her only Oscar.

3. For the Love of Mike (1927)

Another film with a man who'd later bring his leading lady an Oscar, but here we have even bigger names than Hill and Dressler: Claudette Colbert and Frank Capra.  Seven years before both of them won Oscars for It Happened One Night, these two screen icons made a silent picture (Colbert's only one), which bombed and almost caused Colbert to quit the movies.  Thankfully she didn't and went on to make decades of classics, but this one is sadly not one that can be discovered by new film audiences.

2. Hollywood (1923)

What gets a film you've never heard of into the Top 2?  Well, it's that literally every major star of this era somehow managed to make it into the film!  Yes, while the leads are a pair of unknowns (Hope Drown and Luke Cosgrave), you have everyone from Will Rogers to Douglas Fairbanks Sr. to Baby Peggy, as well as six-Oscar nominated/winning entertainers (Gloria Swanson, Betty Compson, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Mary Astor, and Cecil B. DeMille), all made more impressive as the Oscars hadn't even happened when this came out.  Throw in one of the only screen appearances Fatty Arbuckle made after his arrest, and you have arguably the biggest curiosity on this list.

1. The Mountain Eagle (1927)
An easy choice for the list, as The Mountain Eagle is the only lost film of Alfred Hitchcock's extensive filmography.  Hitch reportedly hated the film (and the production was apparently a nightmare) and was glad it was gone, but for the legions of his fans (myself included) it remains a film that we most hope is discovered in someone's attic.  I mean, it's hard to really compare with finally getting the only missing feature-length film from Alfred Hitchcock.

OVP: Eternally Yours (1939)

Film: Eternally Yours (1939)
Stars: Loretta Young, David Niven, Hugh Herbert, Billie Burke, C. Aubrey Smith, ZaSu Pitts, Broderick Crawford
Director: Tay Garnett
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Loretta Young is not a name that inspires a lot of confidence in me as a filmgoer.  When I told my brother I watched a Loretta Young movie the other night, in fact, his first comment was "an evening with the Republicans!" which is pretty accurate.  Young's films usually border on the overtly sincere and far too simplistic, and while her politics are hardly a reason to indicate that's the why behind this formula (there were far too many Republicans in Hollywood during the Golden Age to assume that all of them made puritanical films) it does always feel like the case, particularly in a film like Eternally Yours, which goes to incredible pains to underline Young's virtue even when her marriage to a successful magician goes on the rocks.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Anita (Young) who is engaged to be married to Don (Crawford), but during her bridal shower she falls for a talented magician named the Great Arturo (Niven).  She eventually takes over as his assistant and they get married, but after a drunken night Arturo boasts to a reporter that he can jump, bound by chains, from a plane and get out of the trap to activate the parachute before he hits the ground.  The feat is easily the coolest scene in the movie (and is repeated multiple times as they clearly had a winner), and his Houdini routine is obviously a rousing success, but despite Anita's protestations he continues to do it again and again, gaining huge fame and wealth in the process.  When he has no time for her in face of his work, she runs away to Connecticut to a house she secretly had built and gets a divorce, or so she thinks.

The film then takes a rather ludicrous turn where poor, hapless Broderick Crawford (who, let's face it, can't remotely compare to David Niven) comes back into the picture, proposes marriage to Anita and then they get married on a boat.  The marriage is never consummated, though, through a series of ridiculous twists and turns that involve Arturo distracting Don's boss and we learn after a while that Anita is in fact not divorced, and she and Arturo, after a near-suicide attempt, are brought back together.

The film fails in so many ways, not least of which is that Anita sticks to exactly zero of her principles.  I know that bringing feminism into a film in the 1940's where the female character isn't a murderer is a tough sell, but seriously-Anita gets back together with Arturo despite having some fairly grounded objections against him constantly putting his life in danger.  The film also goes to eye-rolling pains to underline that she doesn't have sex with Don, despite the fact that they are married, which feels like it was something that the prim Young (the actress) threw into the film but it feels weirdly and bizarrely expositional and not really that important considering that Arturo feels a little bit like a cad who probably slept with his new assistant Lola (they don't go to the same levels to protect her virtue).

The movie received a sole Oscar nomination, for Werner Janssen, whose work I've never really taken to in the movies and I'm a bit surprised that he landed six nominations so seemingly-out-of-the-blue.  Though he had a pretty pedigreed career as a conductor (becoming the first American to ever lead the New York Philharmonic) his scores always feel a bit, well, pedantic, and Eternally Yours music is thin, omnipresent, and relies so heavily on a bassoon you half expect a dog to come bouncing out and for Loretta Young to randomly turn into Irene Dunne.  This was during the era when scores were nominated without much bound (there were thirteen nominations that year), and I feel like this was simply United Artists getting its seat at the table.

Those are my thoughts on this film-what about yours?  Do you have a similar sort of reaction to films that star Loretta Young?  Would having a dashing David Niven jump out of a plane cause you to divorce him?  And what precisely am I missing in the appeal of Werner Janssen-is there a film that will change my mind about him?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

OVP: Kentucky (1938)

Film: Kentucky (1938)
Stars: Loretta Young, Richard Greene, Walter Brennan, Douglass Dumbrille
Director: David Butler
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Supporting Actor-Walter Brennan*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I've been royally remiss lately in my Oscar Viewing Project watching, as my TiVo and increasingly full Genie (not to mention dust-collecting Netflix DVD's) can all attest.  I could blame a lot of things, but the fact that there just is never enough time (he said, pretending to be Burgess Meredith) to do all the things you want can be blamed most heavily.  However, I'm using this weekend as a Clean-Out-the-TiVo event (so I can cancel my subscription and just use the Genie).  As a result, throughout the next week, you're going to be seeing a plethora of films from different genres and time periods, bound together by nothing more than a random Oscar nomination.

Spoilers Ahead We'll start this series of write-ups with Kentucky, an early Technicolor picture from 20th Century FOX starring Loretta Young and Richard Greene.  The film starts during the Civil War, with two rivals (the Goodwins and the Dillons) taking different stances in the war, which ultimately leaves Mr. Dillon (who supported Lincoln) fairly wealthy and Mr. Goodwin (who supported Davis) ends up flat broke, and eventually dead, at the hands of Mr. Dillon.  This sets up a remarkable feud that goes on to the present day, which happens to be 1938.

The film then follows the instant attraction between young Sally Goodwin (Loretta Young, in one of her only four color film roles) and Jack Dillon (Richard Greene, who with his Grand Canyon dimples and pleading eyes looks like a cross between Harry Styles and Dana Andrews).  They flirt quite readily at a horse race (both families are titans of the horse-racing industry), with Sally not knowing Jack's heritage.  Sally's father dies and as a result Sally must sell all of her horses, but thanks to a bet her father made before he died, she gets to keep one.  Jack, still under the guise of a rambling horse trainer, offers to train the animal, who like all horses in the movies starts out a runt and ends up a champion.

The film clearly is borrowing from Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers routine, but there's no need for poison and Friar Lawrence here.  Once Sally discovers Jack's true identity, she quickly realizes that he genuinely loved her (this is a film from 1938, after all), and ends up in his arms after her horse wins the Kentucky Derby.

The film would be a typical forgotten love story were it not for that old codger of the American Cinema, Mr. Walter Brennan.  Robert Osborne introduced this film (I watched it on Turner Classic) and made the sarcastic comment about Brennan being only 44 when this film was made, but he played a man who was "in his sixties...or perhaps 125; no one could ever tell with Brennan."  This is so true-I often wonder if there's any actual proof that Walter Brennan wasn't born a cranky old man.

Brennan won his second Academy Award for this performance, and while his routine is standard Brennan, there's a likability about him-he lands his jokes (some of which are still funny 75 years later) and steals every scene from Young, an actress who is very beautiful but generally does nothing for me on the screen (I've never seen her play a role I really latched onto, and this is no exception).  This is the first of 1938's Supporting Actor nominees I've seen, oddly enough, so I cannot say where Brennan will end up ranking, though I would put his performance somewhere around three stars, much better than the film.  I will say, though, that Brennan has a special spot in every Oscar trivia hound's heart, as his three Oscars in five years is a record that no actor will break, ever.

Those are my thoughts on Kentucky-if you've seen it, share yours.  If you haven't, discuss what your favorite Loretta Young and Walter Brennan roles are.  Or if you also have a school girl crush on Richard Greene.  Or what performance from 1956 or 1982 (the only other two years where I've never seen a Supporting Actor nominee) I should investigate first!

OVP: Come to the Stable (1949)

Film: Come to the Stable (1949)
Stars: Loretta Young, Celeste Holm, Hugh Marlowe, Elsa Lanchester, Thomas Gomez
Director: Henry Koster
Oscar History: 7 nominations (Actress-Loretta Young, Supporting Actress-Elsa Lanchester, Supporting Actress-Celeste Holm, Cinematography, Art Direction, Original Song-"Through a Long and Sleepless Night," Motion Picture Story)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

As we've been taking this journey through Oscar's many, many decades of film, we've come across stars that stood the test of time (your Crawford's, your Garbo's), and yet more often than not, we spend time with the stars that highlighted a certain era with a stunning brightness, then slowly flickered out of the big screen and out of memory.  Since this is our first visit to 1949 (certainly not our last-I've got a load of missing films this particular year), that may explain why this is our first introduction to the lovely and talented and very sweet Loretta Young, and no review of Come to the Stable would be complete without first talking about Loretta.

For those unfamiliar, and I must say that I'm not an expert, having only seen this and her Oscar-winning work two years earlier in The Farmer's Daughter, I'm trying to find a modern-day counterpart, but am at a loss, as there's really nothing super modern about Loretta Young.  Yes, she's incredibly beautiful (those eyes, my god!), and yes, she's got acting chops, but her general calling card is that she's largely playing a saint, both on screen and off, in almost every role that she tackles.  With that, you know what you're expecting when you see her on-screen-altruism and truth, but with a spine of steel to go with it.  This authenticity might make her seem a bit pious and dated, but it also lends itself well to certain roles, in particular her work here.

Come to the Stable is the story of two nuns (Young and a woefully miscast Celeste Holm, but I'll get there in a second) who come from France to create a hospital for children in the middle of New England, but run into a bevy of problems, primarily that they have no money or land to speak of to create the hospital.  The film occasionally winks at this problem, particularly in the naivete of the nuns when they venture into New York City to secure the land or their frequent run-ins with the always welcome Dooley Wilson (though, being that he's there and that a beautiful piano-ready ballad features heavily in a subplot, Henry Koster missed a huge opportunity by not putting the two together). However, the occasional depths into slapstick, while fun, don't aid the fact that the plot is incredibly thin-come on, you know those nuns are going to overcome every obstacle to get the hospital made, particularly when everyone seems to bend over backward after admiring the glistening halo the cinematographer seems to perch over Loretta Young's head, so awash in light is she throughout the film.

The problem, and I'm sorry to say this, may have been just as much the casting director's fault as it is Koster's.  Young, it seems, is the only actor that doesn't seem out-of-place within the film.  This makes sense, as this was her big vehicle and she was a huge box office draw at the time, but that doesn't excuse, say, the many teeterings and totterings of Hugh Marlowe's character, not sure if he's a villain or just annoyed, and since his character arch is so crucial to the film, it seems weird that he's missing for half of it.  Additionally, there's Elsa Lanchester, as the doddering Ms. Potts, who can't decide if she's kooky or meek or just in awe of the crazy antics of the nuns, but she spends a lot of time with her mouth gaping open.  And then, of course, is the very talented Celeste Holm, who dons a "now you hear it, now you don't" French accent and her job description seems merely to agree with whatever Young's character says.  This is fine, were it not for the facts that Holm got an Oscar nomination for this one-note role, that Holm is a superb actress who can do great things given the opportunity, and that Holm and Hugh Marlowe would just one year later have bitingly good chemistry in one of the great films, All About Eve.

Come to the Stable received seven Academy Award nominations, and like I said previously, the Holm and Lanchester ones in particular are hard to swallow.  I'm also not a huge fan of Young's nomination, though it is understandable considering she does saintly well, though she can't compete with ultimate winner Olivia de Havilland in her march toward bitterness in The Heiress.  I'm still waiting to see Pinky from 1949, which also featured three nominated women, and am hoping I will respond better to that film.  As for the techs, the art direction nomination seems generous considering the limited sets and how little interaction the cast has with the interchangeable New England cottages, but the Cinematography is strong and the original song, so lush and torchlit, may be unnecessary to the plot, but is probably the best of the Academy-recognized attributes.

What about you-are you a fan of this film, or Young's in particular?  Do you think that any of the three ladies deserved mention against the competition in 1949 (or that the film deserved a win for its rather high nomination count, which featured no victories)?  And is there a modern day equivalent of Young that I'm not thinking of?