The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Film: The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Stars: Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas, May Whitty

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

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

As I mentioned in our initial writeup, Margaret Lockwood's career as a proper headlining star began in 1938 with Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, which we're investigating today.  That doesn't mean she hadn't worked in pictures before this film, though.  Lockwood was classically trained as a stage actress in London, and had been doing random work with little success for several years before her breakout, including a film with Michael Powell, and frequently getting cast opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.  Her career wasn't taking off the way she would've hoped, though, until 1938, when she got cast in Carol Reed's Bank Holiday, which was a hit (making her a name), and cemented her stature with The Lady Vanishes, which was one of Hitchcock's most popular films of the 1930's.  Hitchcock, who disliked Redgrave but adored Lockwood (he called her a "star of hitherto unanticipated possibilities") made a pretty big name for himself with this movie, and it stands on the precipice of Hitchcock's career as the final of his "British pictures" before signing with David O. Selznick, making Rebecca, and well, becoming HITCHCOCK.

(Spoilers Ahead) But I'm getting ahead of myself-we first need to discuss The Lady Vanishes, which is a treasure.  The film is set initially in an invented country where a number of guests at a ski lodge are stuck for the night due to an avalanche.  Among them are Iris (Lockwood), a beautiful woman doomed to a boring impending engagement, Gilbert (Redgrave) a scamp of a musician whom Iris takes a quick dislike toward, and Miss Froy (Whitty), a kind old woman who enjoys the music of a troubadour outside her window.  The next day all three are on a train bound for England with a variety of figures, including Caldicott & Charters (more on them in a second), two men attempting to get to a cricket match.  On the train, though, Miss Froy suddenly goes missing despite not having a stop, and what's weirder...no one on the train seems to believe Iris when she tells them she's gone, even people who saw her on the train.  I won't get into every nook-and-cranny of the story, but suffice it to say, sometimes conspiracy theories can be true, and it does appear that there's an entire train out to gaslight Iris (and eventually Gilbert, who becomes her love interest) in hopes of keeping Miss Froy's location at bay.

The movie is hailed as Hitchcock's best film of this period, and it's easy to see why-it plays fresh & quick, a great mystery with a number of colorful characters.  Caldicott & Charters would in fact become something of a thing in the following years, with the actors bringing them to other film, television, & radio shows (they are hilarious as a sort of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern for the Hitchcock set).  The plot is juicy, fast-paced, and filled with a lot of hilarious site gags (particularly fun is Catherine Lacey as a brassy "nun"), and it is honestly captivating from start to finish.

And our leads are great!  May Whitty gets sidelined for large chunks of the film but is as pleasant as ever as Mrs. Froy, and Michael Redgrave (in his first major role) is a scalawag who pairs beautifully with our lead Margaret Lockwood.  I will admit that with Lockwood, I had seen virtually none of her movies so I didn't know what to expect, but if this is any indication of her talents, we are in for a treat this month.  Lockwood is witty, spry, & takes a "damsel in distress" role & turns it on its head, totally being willing to take on the action (she hits a man over the head with a bottle at one point), and playing her Iris as a modern woman.  Honestly-I wasn't expecting the week after Dead End was my first home run of 2021 to fall so soon, but I can't deny it when it happens...for the first time ever, we're doing consecutive five-star movies.

OVP: Green Dolphin Street (1947)

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

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

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

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

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

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

OVP: Conquest (1937)

Film: Conquest (1937)
Stars: Greta Garbo, Charles Boyer, Reginald Owen, Henry Stephenson, May Whitty, Maria Ouspenskaya
Director: Clarence Brown
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Actor-Charles Boyer, Art Direction)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

One of the most popular posts in the run of the Oscar Viewing Project thus far has been that of the Garbo/Brown collaboration in Romance, so when I saw that Conquest was buried in my TiVo, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to unearth another Garbo/Brown collaboration and make it my Saturday Morning Movie, and the next OVP film.

The movie, for those unfamiliar, is about Napoleon Bonaparte (played by Boyer) and his mistress, Countess Walewska (played by Garbo).  The film follows the first meeting between Bonaparte and Walewska, where she shows that she adores him as if like a God because she believes he will liberate her beloved Poland.  As the movie goes on, she grows disdain for him as he's clearly interested in her for "only one thing" and proves that he is just a man.  Then, quite suddenly (too suddenly, if you ask me), she decides she is back in love with him (but first she is abandoned by her husband for betraying him by trying to free Poland with her feminine whiles).  We see her by his side as he first becomes the great Emperor of Europe, and then when he is banished to Elba and defeated at Waterloo.  Throughout, she remains devoted even as he strays and marries another woman.  All-in-all, an exhaustingly epic story, and very ambitious for its time period (the film cost an exorbitant amount of money, and was actually a sizable flop at the Box Office when it first came out).

Because this is Clarence Brown, and because this film is made in 1937, Garbo's character is as saintly as can be, and her intentions always look noble, even if on the surface they are not.  My biggest problem in the film had to be the quick-turnaround for Walewska about her love for Napoleon.  While it's certainly believable that she fell in love with his power or developed some Stockholm Syndrome, since this is 1937, we don't get to see that and considering Brown's rather sexist treatment of women, I'm not willing to give him the benefit of the doubt; the Countess's unwavering devotion to Napoleon, and so suddenly, makes it hard to swallow the role and the film's love story.  This is a woman he basically forced into being his mistress, and yet we get little indication that Garbo resents him for it, even though she almost certainly would have.

I rather enjoyed the supporting parts played by Whitty and Ouspenskaya, both strong character actresses of the 1930's and both with far more realistic reactions to this egotistical emperor.  Whitty, his mother, acknowledges his weaknesses even when Garbo doesn't, and Ouspenskaya, a Countess Dowager whose mental capacities are gone (she still thinks that her friend Louis XVI is ruling France when Napoleon enters the picture), are strong character bits that the film probably needed more of-by far the best acted scene in the film, in my opinion, is the wry scene with Ouspenskaya and Boyer while they are playing cards.  Ouspenskaya thinks Napoleon is mad because he is an emperor, even though she is obviously the mistaken one.  This sense of fun is missing severely from the rest of the film, and with an actor with such an eye twinkle as Charles Boyer, that seems like a wasted opportunity.

Boyer received one of the film's two Academy Award nominations, his first of four nominations for Best Actor (he would never win, though he would win an Honorary Oscar certificate in 1942).  There's definitely a lot one can say about Boyer-he has presence, for certain, and he has the onscreen chutzpah to pull off a character like Napoleon, but his tendency toward the overcooked, and his ability to constantly be switching from love to anger and nothing in-between is a pale comparison to, say, the haunted work that Fredric March does as a fading movie star/alcoholic in A Star is Born from the same year.  The film's other nomination, however, is far more up my alley-the millions of dollars that they spend on the budget to create the elaborate castles and houses that litter the continent of Europe were well spent, as every scene creates that decadent luxury that one associates with this period in European culture.  Bonus points go to the film's opening scene, when we see a gorgeous and stately manor torn asunder by horses braying around the foyer (it sounds weird, but totally works on-screen).

All-in-all, I gotta say I'm still not impressed with Brown, and am starting to lose a little bit of hope that I ever will be (though with five more of his Best Director nominations to go, I'll have ample opportunities to change my mind).  The film's complete lack of character development, and the overwrought performance by Boyer move this to 2-stars, though the handsome production design, strong (female) supporting work, and the luminescence of Garbo keep it from falling into the 1-star column.

And, as always, we end with some food for thought-what'd you think of Conquest?  Is there a Clarence Brown film that would win me over?  And which Garbo film shall we take a journey to next?  Don't be shy-comment away!

OVP: Lassie Come Home (1943)

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

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

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

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

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

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