OVP: Objective, Burma! (1943)

Film: Objective, Burma! (1943)

Stars: Errol Flynn, James Brown, William Prince, George Tobias

Director: Raoul Walsh

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Film Editing, Score, Motion Picture Story)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Errol Flynn: click here to learn more about Mr. Flynn (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

To talk about Errol Flynn, you cannot ignore the almost cartoonish difference between the flawed-but-noble heroes that he perfected on the big screen, and the debaucherous nature of his real-life persona, which was brought to the foreground in 1942 when Flynn was accused of statutory rape by two teenage girls.  To note, Flynn at the time was still a huge movie star, having just finished releasing Desperate Journey with Ronald Reagan to enormous box office days before the accusations-Warner Brothers was not in a position to just cut him given the box office receipts.  But the scandal was huge, as the shocking details of what happened were spread in papers across the country.  Attorney Jerry Giesler, at one point the most famous lawyer in Hollywood, was able to get Flynn acquitted, mostly by destroying the reputations of the women who accused Flynn of rape.  But something happened in the wake of this scandal that would not be the case for a number of other figures (like those of Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, & later Ingrid Bergman): Flynn emerged with a different reputation, but one that largely still had box office draw even in the immediate wake of the scandal, and was still allowed to work regularly in Hollywood

(Spoilers Ahead) That can be seen in the movie Objective, Burma!, which was released just over two years after the trial, and was by pretty much all accounts a hit, and it wasn't Flynn's only one of this period.  Gentleman Jim was released during the height of the coverage to success, and both of the (now largely forgotten) movies that Flynn released in 1943 were also hits.  In fact, Flynn would be successful for much of the mid-1940's...but he'd do so in very different pictures.  Objective, Burma! is a good example of that.  The film is a fictionalized telling of the Burma Campaign during World War II, with Flynn playing an army captain whose platoon is trudging through the jungle, in near constant danger from the Japanese.  The film is one of several movies that were released during the Golden Age of Hollywood that favored realism over a more fictionalized, personalized storytelling method, in many ways resembling more a documentary film (which was a familiar format to audiences during WWII due to newsreels), than a more traditional storytelling technique.

As a result, the film is technically really impressive.  The special effects, especially during some of the early attack scenes when we see an entire army camp decimated by timed explosions, are wonderful, and the sound work & cinematography are strong.  But the movie itself is a bore.  With the exception of George Tobias (the future Mr. Kravitz on Bewitched), none of the numerous side characters stand out, and frequently you're left watching their deaths be mourned onscreen with an internal monologue of "which guy was this again?" all of which makes the film's three Oscar nominations (for editing, writing, and music) feel a bit like a head-scratcher: why are we awarding these when the special effects or sound work are the actual calling card here?

Flynn, as well, feels muted to the point of being boring, something that never crossed my mind during his Captain Blood and Robin Hood era.  Whether intentionally or not, much of the work that Flynn stars in that I've seen after his trial feels a bit too noble, as if the studio was scared to put him into films where he could be seen as a rake or a cad...because it suddenly felt too close to home.  This would cause his career in the late 1940's to suffer, as audiences who had been more than willing to give in to a controversial celebrity in the wake of his trials because they still loved him so much, weren't willing to give in to the studio wanting to clean up his image onscreen to protect them from the public confusing real life and fiction too much.  It wasn't until the studios finally let him play another sex-pursuing hero in The Adventures of Don Juan in 1948, that audiences truly returned home, and allowed him to be a dependable box office draw into the early 1950's.

This is all to say that Flynn's reputation, and much of his modern association (if you ask lay moviegoers what they know about him today, it will be the statutory rape allegations) did not have the impact on his career that later major movie stars like Mel Gibson or Johnny Depp would receive when they had scandals threaten their careers.  Gibson & Depp would see their careers largely evaporate, but despite some setbacks in the years after the war, Flynn largely got away fine from this scandal-it is only history that really hurt him, but if you look at what his career was like, he paid a surprisingly small price for one of the biggest scandals of Hollywood's Golden Age.

OVP: The Naked City (1948)

Film: The Naked City (1948)

Stars: Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Don Taylor, Frank Conroy

Director: Jules Dassin

Oscar History: 3 nominations/2 wins (Best Cinematography*, Editing*, Motion Picture Story)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

When it comes to film noir and Oscar, it's largely an "admire from a distance" situation.  Oscar did give a Best Picture statue to a film noir (The Lost Weekend), though it was one with a much more serious tone & tenor than you'd normally find in the genre, and usually they kept the statues at a distance.  There are exceptions, though, and one of them is The Naked City from 1948, which won two Oscars (for Cinematography & Editing), and was nominated in one of the writing categories.  The Naked City is probably the most famous American film we're going to get to this month, and certainly the most-lauded.  Hailed as a landmark in 1948, it would be formative in entertainment in the years that followed, particularly when it comes to television.  In many ways, The Naked City eschewed some of the more traditional aspects of the film noir genre, and instead created the formula for the police/detective procedural that would be popular in everything from The Untouchables to Law & Order.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie follows Dan Muldoon (Fitzgerald), an aging detective who is assigned a case to investigate the brutal murder of a young ex-model named Jean, who was drowned in her bathtub.  The motives are not clear as to why she was killed, though robbery is suspected (her jewels are missing), but Muldoon wants to know more, and starts to investigate the people in Jean's life, including Frank Niles (Duff), his chief suspect when it becomes clear that he has had a relationship with both the dead model and her friend Ruth (Hart), whom he's actually engaged to.  Frank eventually confesses to stealing the jewels as part of some con jobs he and Jean had perpetrated, but he turns out not to be a killer.  In a long chase that happens on the Williamsburg Bridge, it's another accomplice who killed Jean, and Frank is cleared on the murder.

The movie, as I said, is questionable when it comes to being a film noir, more so being a "crime picture" as Hart's character is surely not a femme fatale in a normal sense (the dead Jean, who has ruined multiple relationships as a corpse, is far more fitting of that title but she never actually speaks).  Instead, it feels more like a police mystery, which we don't really have anymore (because those are largely relegated to television), but in 1948 was still a thing that you couldn't see in your home.  Because it's formative, it does toe-the-line between being a bit dull even if it was exciting in 1948, but it still is a mystery you genuinely want to get to the end of when Fitzgerald solves the case.

The Naked City's coolest attribute is where it was filmed.  The movie takes place in New York City...but so does the production.  The picture includes a title card at the beginning calling out that it was actually filmed in New York, which means that the chase at the Williamsburg Bridge is actually on the Williamsburg Bridge.  This adds an authenticity that you wouldn't normally find in a movie like this, and it shows up in the more naturalistic cinematography, particularly during the chase sequence at the end.  Combined with the editing techniques (building suspense alongside real-world onlookers), and the way it capitalizes on a lot of twists and turns, I get why this is considered a classic of the genre, even if it's not a movie that stands out in the same way that Out of the Past or The Third Man do years later.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Call Northside 777, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai

OVP: The Stratton Story (1949)

Film: The Stratton Story (1949)

Stars: James Stewart, June Allyson, Frank Morgan, Agnes Moorehead

Director: Sam Wood

Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Motion Picture Story*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on June Allyson: click here to learn more about Ms. Allyson (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We don't really think about this anymore, but one of the best aspects of the Classical Hollywood era was that, while they weren't really big on sequels (they had them, mind you, but the concept of a tentpole wasn't a thing), they did tend to milk cinematic pairings until they were no longer adored by the public.  Had Barbie been as big of a hit in 1949 as it was in 2023, the studios would've basically forced Margot Robbie & Ryan Gosling into another 3-4 more movies, knowing that the public would show up to cheer them on.  This is something that happened to June Allyson a lot, and honestly I wish studios would do more of now (I like capitalizing on movie stars more than I like capitalizing on franchises).  We talked about this initially with Van Johnson in Two Girls and a Sailor, but this week (and next week) we're going to focus on maybe the most-remembered of her pairings.  Even though she would ultimately make more movies with Johnson or Peter Lawford, June Allyson's most beloved pairing to modern audiences is probably with Jimmy Stewart.  The two made a trio of movies together, all of them big hits, and in the case of The Stratton Story, Allyson's favorite picture from her whole career.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie talks about now largely-forgotten baseball player Monty Stratton (Stewart), at one point a promising pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, who would end up sidelined during his prime after a freak accident where he accidentally shot himself in the right leg, forcing it to be amputated.  The film focuses on his career from the beginning to end, including being raised by a thorny mother (Moorehead) and being recruited by a sweet baseball scout (Morgan).  Along the way, he marries the love of his life Ethel (Allyson).  The movie spends a long time on his recovery, which is less physical and more emotional, until Monty decides to take his glove back to the baseball field, and remarkably stages a (true-to-real-life) minor league comeback, even as an amputee.

The movie won an Academy Award for Best Motion Picture Story, a category that's a little hard-to-understand to modern audiences, but essentially boils down to "best idea for a movie" and in that way, it generally works.  This is a movie film, one that tells the story of a hero who overcame the odds, and it does the best thing that biopics can do-it tells you a new tale of a person you didn't know about.  But it also doesn't really work.  The first hour of the film is a snore, giving us virtually nothing but repetition and basically feels like it's explaining the concept of baseball, which (I'm sorry) in 1949 was not something America needed a lesson upon.  So I'm in the middle on that statue, even if I understand why it happened.

The film's back half is much better, and easily to invest upon.  A broken man overcoming the odds is the subject of a lot of Jimmy Stewart's best films, and he definitely nails this part.  His boy-next-door charm plays well with Allyson's girl-next-door pluck, and I get why the studio saw not just the dollar signs at the box office, but also them playing off of one another and understood this was a formula worth repeating.  I just wish that they were in a stronger movie, especially in the first half.

OVP: Original Story (1931-32)

OVP: Best Original Screenplay (1931-32)

The Nominees Were...

Frances Marion, The Champ

Grover Jones & William Slavens McNutt, Lady and Gent

Lucien Hubbard, The Star Witness

Adela Rogers St. Johns & Jane Murfin, What Price Hollywood

My Thoughts: A lot of categories for 1931-32 we are skipping over.  Editing, Makeup, Visual Effects, even Sound & Score...not categories in the 5th Academy Awards.  But today we are going to be doing something we haven't done since we started this series-introducing a new category.  From 1927 to 1956, the category of Original Story (also known as "Motion Picture Story," and "Best Story"...we'll call it "Original Story" in the title and "Motion Picture Story" in the tags to hopefully catch the largest number of curious readers) existed, for many years concurrently with the category of Original Screenplay.  This led to some confusion (including by me) over what this exactly is.  Based on my reading, the difference is largely that a screenplay is the finished product (including dialogue) that is used in the film, while the story is a broader based idea (similar to a film treatment) that outlines the concept of the film.  That is how we're going to treat it (and also, because it's such a loose category, we're skipping it for the My Ballot even though we'll obviously do it every year for the OVP, but we'll get to that later).  In 1931-32, there were four nominees.

The first of those nominees is maybe the most famous story of all time, at least when it comes to the Oscars, though you wouldn't know it at first.  What Price Hollywood is the tale of a young waitress who rises from nothing to become the biggest actress in Hollywood, all while another man sees his power decline.  Yes, What Price Hollywood is essentially the story of A Star is Born, so much so that RKO considered filing a lawsuit against David O. Selznick over plagiarism.  But the film actually is a spin on the story, less a classic and more invested in the female lead than her male counterpart.  The man who falls is not her lover, but instead just a friend, and the film's fresh takes on feminism are honestly refreshing for 1932.

Our second nominee is also playing with a classic story, one that would be remade later called The Champ.  The concept of a washed-up boxer trying to prove his worth to his son was actually pretty refreshing in 1931, and the film plays it well.  It's helped that Beery & Cooper have strong chemistry together, but the detailing with the story (the wealthy unknown mother, the juxtaposition of rich/poor, talent/no talent, and lost dreams) is really strong.  The Champ is not a movie that I love as much as some of my friends (I am featured on an episode of Gilded Films podcast if you want to hear me talk about this movie and all of the 1931-32 Best Picture nominees more in-depth), but I am very aware of how strong the story is-this was a smart choice by Oscar.

We'll move next to The Star Witness, a nomination that I can't defend in nearly the same breath as the first two pictures.  To give it credit, the gangster film had not yet reached its most formulaic spot in 1931.  Films like The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, & Scarface all came out in a 15-month period between January 1931 and April 1932, and would be foundational for the genre until the 1970's...but this isn't those movies, and really it neither invites a lot of the tropes nor is it particularly strongly executed.  It's hard to not judge the dialogue when it comes to story, but let's just say that isn't helping the matters either and the film feels rudimentary, even for a genre in its infancy.

The final nomination is Lady and Gent, which is a twist on the boxing trope, where a boxer's gal decides to adopt a young child, completely out of her nature.  The movie is solid, don't get me wrong, but I don't know if it deserves a lot of credit for the story, but more so the great work by Wynne Gibson as the picture's lead.  It does have a bit of Pre-Code naughtiness (if you ever wanted to hear John Wayne make a joke about cocaine, this is your movie), but it's just solid work in terms of the story, not really creating a trope or breaking into something properly original.

Other Precursor Contenders: We've been through this already, and I'll be honest-I know so little about this category that I'm not going to hazard a guess at who was in contention.  It's also worth noting that original screenplays were REALLY hard to come by in this time frame, so honestly it may well have been a film that wasn't nominated anywhere else (which is true for all but The Champ in this lineup).  If you have theories, I'm all ears in the comments.

Films I Would Have Nominated: We will do original screenplay instead of original story for the My Ballot, but I think Monkey Business, a charming little diversion from the Marx Brothers, would be a safe bet for either category on my personal ballot.

Oscar’s Choice: Oscar gave the trophy to The Champ, the only Best Picture nominee here, probably over What Price Hollywood.  It's worth noting that in a nicely progressive moment for the Academy, both films featured female screenwriters, which was quite unusual in the early 1930's.

My Choice: I'm going to do the reverse, giving What Price Hollywood our first Motion Picture Story Oscar, here over The Champ, as I think it being the most important building block for the Hollywood myth cannot be denied.  Lady and Gent is in third, followed by The Star Witness.

Those are my thoughts-what about you?  Are you hoping to become a star with me, or do you want to enter the ring with Oscar?  Why do you think Oscar picked so many gangster films in this category in its infancy?  And since it's new-are we all in agreement this is the best way to judge Original Story?  Share your thoughts below!

Also in 1931-32: Art Direction, Cinematography, Previously in 1931-32

OVP: The Gunfighter (1950)

Film: The Gunfighter (1950)

Stars: Gregory Peck, Helen Westcott, Millard Mitchell, Jean Parker, Karl Malden

Director: Henry King

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Motion Picture Story)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Gregory Peck: click here to learn more about Mr. Peck (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we talked through last week, headed into 1950, Peck had had a few years of alternating success-and-failure.  Films like Gentleman's Agreement and Twelve O'Clock High had succeeded, but there was enough question mark with other films flopping that it wasn't clear how Peck would hold up in the dawning era of television.  While our movie today, The Gunfighter, was not a commercial success, Peck would soon recover the following year with Captain Horatio Hornblower (which we discussed a few years ago when our Star of the Month was his leading lady Virginia Mayo), which would start a run of successful films for Peck...that wouldn't necessarily be critical hits.  David and Bathsheba, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Roman Holiday, and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit would all be big hits for the actor, but with the exception of Roman Holiday none of them were well-received by critics.  During this time frame, Peck fought his profile as a western star, frequently turning down roles for fear of typecasting, including the lead role in High Noon that would win Gary Cooper an Oscar.  An exception to that was The Gunfighter, our movie today, which was the reverse of much of his 1950's work-a middling commercial performance, but a success with the critics.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie starts with a headstrong cowboy named Eddie trying to start an argument with Jimmy Ringo (Peck), a gunslinger whose reputation within the confines of the film rivals that of Wyatt Earp.  He shoots him dead, but it underlines the main point of Ringo's life.  A youth that made him a legend (and a criminal) has turned into a curse, as he is now hounded by men trying to shortcut to their own legend.  Chased out of town by this man's brothers, he returns to his home town, where he meets an old friend who is now the local marshall Mark Strett (Mitchell), and tries to find his wife Peggy (Westcott), who is under an assumed name because of fear that people will know her (and her son's) connection to Ringo.  There he tries to sort out his life, and we learn of his regret over leaving his wife & son, as well as we understand that part of the Ringo legend is just that, but it's impossible to escape.  In the end, another cowboy shoots the youth who has spent much of the film bragging about being just as good as Ringo (to the point where he also tries to shoot him), shoots Ringo in the back.  Ringo, dying, insists that the youth not be hanged but instead have to endure the shadowy half-life he's been forced into, as men will soon try to prove themselves against "the man who shot Ringo."

The Gunfighter was nominated for Best Motion Picture Story, and man was that earned.  There are aspects of the film that honestly function more as an episode of The Twilight Zone than as a standard western.  The film has a thoughtful treatise on what it means to make mistakes in your youth that haunt you.  You understand as we go that much of Ringo is myth, not real (for example, he disputes with an old woman exactly how many men he's killed, claiming it's far less than what she's heard), but it's something he can't escape.  His ability to have a normal life is stolen from him not by anyone else, but by his own misdeeds.  The ending is vicious, with him inflicting that pain, one far worse than a hanging, onto the young man who has no concept of what he's just done to himself by trying to steal a legend rather than earn it.

Peck is very good in this movie, and I personally found the mustache (which producer Darryl Zanuck hated), quite fetching & a good look for him.  He embodies the spirit of a man who once threw his life away, but who desperately wants it back even if he's still slightly too immature to understand at the outset that that's impossible.  The rest of the cast, though, is underwhelming and keeps this from being a classic.  Helen Westcott so underplays Peggy that you secretly wish Jean Parker (who is a saloon girl) was taking on the part as at least it would have some life to it, and Millard Mitchell, a constant presence in westerns of this era, is kind of boring in a key role as a marshall trying to protect Ringo (but more so trying to protect his own reputation due to his connection to Ringo).  Even Karl Malden as a barkeep is given nothing to do.  These side parts are crucial in giving us the more human side of Ringo, but instead of giving us the complicated reading the remainder of the picture does of legend, they feel kind of like filler.

OPV: The Pride of the Yankees (1942)

Film: The Pride of the Yankees (1942)

Stars: Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Babe Ruth, Walter Brennan, Dan Duryea, Elsa Janssen

Director: Sam Wood

Oscar History: 11 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Actor-Gary Cooper, Actress-Teresa Wright, Art Direction, Cinematography, Special Effects, Film Editing*, Score, Sound, Motion Picture Story, Adapted Screenplay)

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 Gary Cooper: click here to learn more about Mr. Cooper (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we talked about how Gary Cooper became a star with The Virginian, but this week we're going to talk a little about how he became a legend.  Cooper is an odd conundrum for modern cinephiles, partially because as an actor he (despite two Oscars) isn't everyone's cup of tea.  The stoic handsomeness was frequently miscast, and while he has his legendary roles (specifically High Noon), much of his legendary years in Hollywood are forgotten or haven't aged as well.  But from the mid-1930's (when he did Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and won his first Oscar nomination) to the mid-1940's Cooper was about as untouchable as you could get in Hollywood, and frequently took on the role of outsized hero.  He did this while having a very colorful personal life (which we're going to explore more fully next week) bedding half the women in Hollywood.  One of the legendary roles that Cooper undertook during this time was of Lou Gehrig who had died the year before from the disease that was eventually named after him in The Pride of the Yankees.  That's the movie we're covering today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a relatively traditional biopic focusing on Lou Gehrig's (Cooper) life, the son of German immigrants who wanted a better future for him, but one through education.  However, Gehrig's incredible talent for baseball becomes too impossible to deny as the film progresses, and he's recruited to the New York Yankees, where he become a star to rival Babe Ruth (played, somehow, by the real-life Ruth who had been retired for seven years at this time & had to lose a significant amount of weight before he could play himself).  He also falls in love with a woman named Eleanor (Wright), who is the sweet girl next door who has to fight his domineering mother until Lou steps in.  After an unparalleled career in baseball, Gehrig was diagnosed with what we now know is ALS (aka Lou Gehrig's Disease), and must step down from baseball as he will be unable to be alive much longer after retiring, and the movie ends with him retiring with the famous "I'm the luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech which is what you instantly know this movie from even if you've never seen it.

In 1942, Lou Gehrig would've been as famous as LeBron James would be today, and so weirdly the film focuses relatively little on his baseball feats, which are impressive, save for his incredible consecutive games played streak that Cal Ripken broke in 1995 (fun personal fact-one of the only sports memories I have with my dad, as I was not a sport-watching child, was watching Cal Ripken break that record on the tiny 13-inch TV in our basement, as my dad insisted my brother & I watch it as it was a record that would stand forever).  This decision is a mistake-Gehrig's life was pretty picturesque, at least from what we see in the movie, and given the real-life Ruth is playing himself here, they totally skip over the two legend's complicated relationship with one another (including allegations that Ruth slept with Gehrig's wife before she married Gehrig).  Even by the definition of a biopic of this era, this movie is incredibly vanilla, bordering on propaganda to Gehrig's memory.

That said, I loved the last fifteen minutes of this movie, and it made me wish the rest of the movie had earned them.  There's something so beautiful about what Cooper does with Gehrig, knowing he's dying, and both the little boy (who earlier in the film was said he wouldn't walk again) going up to a stoic Gehrig & saying he did, in fact, walk, and then the farewell speech...it's a beautiful ending, and feels like a lovely testament to the way that we all have to, eventually, play our last game.

The film won 11 Oscar nominations, making it one of the only remaining films that has received 11+ Oscar nominations that I've never seen (just Gandhi and Becket can out do it on my missing OVP titles list).  Cooper is too old for this part, and feels too mundane up until those last fifteen minutes when he (pardon the expression) knocks it out of the park.  Teresa Wright's Best Actress nomination is weird, both because she's given nothing to do and because there were better options that year (hello-Carole Lombard in To Be or Not to Be!).  The story concept is arguably better than the tepid screenplay, but neither are breaking much new ground, and while I liked the sound in the last ten minutes, there's nothing noteworthy about the rest of the film.  The art direction is standard-fare...you never actually feel like you're at Yankee Stadium in the movie, but just a sound stage.  The editing is arguably the film's best element, which is what it won its Oscar for, because it does do a decent job of showing the passage of time, but it's nothing compared to something like Citizen Kane or Now, Voyager that year.  The cinematography is noteworthy because of the lighting effects that were used to try to de-age Gary Cooper...which barely work.  This is true of the Special Effects, which is a truly weird nomination because other than some matte screens behind Cooper, there's nothing special about these effects other than the lighting.  There are apocryphal stories that Cooper (who was right-handed in real life, unlike the famous southpaw Gehrig), had to have trick photography to recreate certain baseball scenes, which would be impressive for the time, but research indicates that at best happened in one brief scene, and not most of the baseball scenes where Cooper learned to bat as a lefty.

OVP: Ball of Fire (1941)

Film: Ball of Fire (1941)

Stars: Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Dana Andrews, Oskar Homolka, SZ Sakall, Henry Travers, Dan Duryea

Director: Howard Hawks

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Actress-Barbara Stanwyck, Score, Sound, Motion Picture Story)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

We are running behind again this month (I'll try to be more timely in 2023, as we'll be kicking off our fifth season in the next week), but I'm going to attempt to do two Stanwyck movies today and get ahead of her films in the coming days so we have a full five movies in December (she's too big of a star to skip one of our Saturday's).  We're going to start with a conversation about 1941, inarguably the best year of Barbara Stanwyck's career.  We last left Stanwyck with Baby Face, which was a hit during the Pre-Code era for its saucy content, but by the early 1940's Stanwyck didn't need gimmicks to get people into their movie seats-she was a headliner in every aspect.  She got her first Oscar nomination for the 1937 weepie Stella Dallas, and despite not having a studio contract during this era, was in such demand (and so well-respected) that she was cranking out major hits, including three iconic ones in 1941: The Lady Eve, Meet John Doe, and Ball of Fire, for which she won her second Oscar nomination and which is our film today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie has a rather preposterous setup for a romantic comedy, even by rom-com standards.  Gary Cooper plays Bertram Potts, a grammarian who along with a number of other dotty professors (seven, to be exact, mirroring the seven dwarves), are writing an encyclopedia.  Through a chance encounter, they come across Sugarpuss O'Shea (Stanwyck), a nightclub performer who is involved with a gangster named Joe Lilac (Andrews).  As Lilac is wanted by the police, she goes into hiding for a few days to stay out of sight, during which time she stays with Potts, who is studying her vernacular to try to include modern slang in the encyclopedia.  They start to fall for each other, but Sugarpuss has a problem-Lilac wants to marry her, not out of love but so she can't testify against him, and he eventually kidnaps all of the professors to blackmail her into it.  Thankfully, through ingenuity, they free themselves, save the day, and Bertram & Sugarpuss end up together.

The movie is cute, as cute as you'd assume given those involved and the silliness of the plot.  Though they're all interchangeable, the old men who are, even in their advanced age, shellshocked by the appearance of a beautiful woman and encouraging of the relationship Bertram can have with her, steal a lot of scenes.  The movie, though, never rises to the level of a classic-this is a good movie, not a great one, not as sharp as it should be or quite as funny as it ought to be (it's not The Philadelphia Story).  I think, like so many films like this of the era, the nominations for Sound & Score are fine.  There's nothing special there, but it got in because everyone else did (they would have over 20 nominees in some categories, including in Best Score for Ball of Fire's year, so a lot of middling amongst the genius).  The Story nomination makes more sense, especially over screenplay, as the idea behind it is far cuter than the execution.

With Stanwyck & her "year of classics," while I will admit that The Lady Eve is the best of these three (both in terms of the actual movie and in terms of what Stanwyck was doing onscreen), Ball of Fire is some great stuff from Stanwyck.  She plays well off of an against-type Cooper, and has such sass & pizzazz that this would've made a fine win for her.  I partially wonder if Stanwyck missed with Oscar overall because she didn't have a studio rooting for her to get a trophy in the way that Ginger Rogers or Jennifer Jones would've in the same era, but in 1941, I honestly think the only people who were going to take trophies were the De Havilland's.  Oscar made a huge stink about Olivia & Joan competing against each other, and it delivered in both of their star legends for the decades to come as the sisters...did not handle it well when the younger Joan beat her big sister for the statue.

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.

OVP: Meet John Doe (1941)

Film: Meet John Doe (1941)

Stars: Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward Arnold, Walter Brennan, Spring Byington, James Gleason

Director: Frank Capra

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Motion Picture Story)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

Last week we talked about Spring Byington's long success in The Jones Family films, a B-Picture comedy series that is almost completely forgotten today despite 17 films being made in the franchise.  During the time that she was making The Jones Family, though, Byington was working on more serious or better-remembered films.  One of those movies was You Can't Take It With You, which won her her only Oscar nomination.  Despite the film being a Best Picture winner, Byington lost that statue to Fay Bainter, and I have seen it multiple times (you can read my review of it here) so it wouldn't be eligible for this month's series (all of the screenings for Saturdays with the Stars are "new to me" viewings).  But I wanted to acknowledge this period of her career, and lo-and-behold, Frank Capra (who liked to repeat his actors) made another well-regarded film a few years after You Can't Take It With You called Meet John Doe, which is our movie selection for today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a newspaper reporter named Ann Mitchell (Stanwyck), who is being fired from her job as part of a recent merger from noted millionaire DB Norton (Arnold).  In her final article, she makes up a man named "John Doe" who proclaims he is going to jump off of city hall on Christmas Eve because he is protesting society's ills.  The news story goes, to use modern parlance, "viral" and Ann is hired back to profile the guy...but the problem is he doesn't actually exist.  Ann & her editor Henry Connell (Gleason) do a casting call, and find Long John Willoughby (Cooper), a former baseball player who has become a railway tramp to take the job.  Despite the protestations of his friend the Colonel (Brennan), he does the job to get money to fix his arm so he can play baseball again, and he begins to make a pitch for a kinder, more decent America where we are friendly to our neighbors, and says that's what it'll take for him not to commit suicide.  When the John Doe movement catches on, becoming insanely popular, Willoughby & Ann find out that the whole movement, which has been paid for by Norton, is a sinister plot to launch the millionaire's presidential career, using Willoughby's goodwill endorsement as leverage to a campaign.  After Willoughby refuses, Norton outs him as a conman, and soon the John Doe Movement comes tumbling down.  Willoughby then finds himself actually trying to commit suicide on Christmas Eve, but before he can both Ann and members of the remaining John Doe clubs beg him to stop, saying that this movement is now bigger than him or Norton.  He stops, and he & Ann walk off together into the Christmas night.

Frank Capra liked to repeat himself, and just based on that description, you'll assume (correctly) that this is just an amalgamation of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the soon-to-come It's a Wonderful Life.  While generally well-regarded, this is not considered in the same league as those movies by most modern cinephiles, and for my money it's because it's a bit mucky in its politics.  It's hard to imagine the deeply conservative Barbara Stanwyck signing off on a script that is pro-union & honestly has something of a socialist message, with neighbors giving their fellow citizens part of their money or a job when they're down on their luck...this film would give Tucker Carlson a heart attack.  But it's also a bit of American propaganda, heavily implying it's the pluck & determinism of the "common" American people (and notably it's white people-the only people of color we see are servants, and not part of the "John Doe" clubs) that causes this grit.  Let's just say that the film's politics are messy, and kind of deter from the more clear-cut messaging of Mr. Smith and Wonderful Life.

The film is otherwise fine.  Stanwyck is the standout, but Cooper & Arnold are also serviceable in these roles.  Stanwyck & Cooper were having big years: they both made Ball of Fire together (for which Stanwyck was nominated for an Oscar), Stanwyck was making the comedy classic The Lady Eve with Henry Fonda, and Cooper was winning his first Oscar for the biggest film of the year, Sergeant York.  Not too shabby.  You'll notice I haven't mentioned our star Spring Byington, and that's because she's not in much of the movie.  She plays Stanwyck's overly sweet mother (John Doe's spirit was largely an extension of Ann's generous-to-a-fault parents), and is only in like 3-4 scenes.  Her best scene is late in the picture with Cooper, where she convinces him that he needs to ask Ann to marry him, as she knows (even if Ann doesn't yet) that Willoughby is in love with her daughter.  Byington has a bit of melancholy in this scene (knowing she's about to lose her daughter to the next stage of her life, and as a result will enter the last stage of hers) that I really liked, and showed how she was the kind of actress who made an impression even with the smallest of parts.

OVP: Comrade X (1940)

Film: Comrade X (1940)

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

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Story)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

OVP: The Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935)

Film: The Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935)

Stars: Jack Benny, Eleanor Powell, Robert Taylor, Una Merkel, Sid Silvers, Buddy Ebsen, June Knight

Director: Roy Del Ruth

Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Original Story, Dance Direction*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

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

We're going to start a few years into Jack Benny's career primarily because Benny's early film career, with the exception of one film, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, has nothing really of note.  He signed a contract in 1929 with Irving Thalberg to work at MGM, but after his movie Chasing Rainbows flopped, Benny was basically out of the film industry and quickly returned to Broadway, and then radio in 1932.  Radio would become the primary home of Benny's career for most of the next twenty years, as his eponymous radio show would be what he was most known for until his TV show in the early 1950's.  That being said, Benny would continue to make a number of movies, still trying his hand at a film stardom that would never happen.  One of the more important films from this portion of his acting career, when he was starting out as a big radio star was MGM's The Broadway Melody of 1936, which he gets prime billing on even though he's definitely third lead behind two figures who were about to become superstars on the MGM lot, Eleanor Powell & Robert Taylor.

(Spoilers Ahead) Like many of the musicals in the Broadway Melody series (which would spawn four films in its combined run), the movie's plot is secondary to the musical numbers, but essentially we have Broadway producer Robert Gordon (Taylor) who is being wooed by his wealthy backer Lillian Brent (Knight), but is clearly destined to pine for his childhood sweetheart Irene Foster (Powell), newly in town & looking for a gig in his show.  Gordon is being chastised by newspaper writer Bert Keeler (Benny) who is being forced to disparage Gordon, even to the point of making up an actress that Gordon can't get into his show, in order to sell newspapers.  When Irene pretends to be that actress, unbeknownst to be both Bert & Robert (she's in disguise), everything comes crashing down for them all...until of course everyone involved gets their happy endings.

The movie is cute, and was a pretty big deal for pretty much all involved.  Eleanor Powell got her first leading role here, and as the movie was a smash hit, she'd soon become one of the bigger stars on the MGM lot (she also does a terrific impersonation of Kate Hepburn that's honestly worth the price of watching alone).  Tap dancer Buddy Ebsen also got his film debut here as a wayward friend of Irene's.  The film won three Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture, making it (at least nominally) the first sequel to ever be cited for the prize.  In retrospect this isn't a great movie, but it has some funny one-liners and unlike many musicals of the era, at least it makes sense (a plus for the Original Story category).

It's the music, though, that is the best part.  It's sometimes hard to tell with films of this era what is an original and what isn't, but it does appear (at least from what I can find on the internet, correct me if I'm wrong oh readers) to include such standards as "You Are My Lucky Star," "Broadway Rhythm," "I've Got a Feelin You're Foolin" and "Sing Before Breakfast" in their original incantation, which makes the fact that it didn't get a Best Original Song nomination a true crime.  The best numbers are probably Powell's manic tap dancing to "Broadway Rhythm" (honestly, it's a race between Powell & Ann Miller over who was the best hoofer in Classic Hollywood), and Buddy & Vilma Ebsen tripping the light fantastic while dressed like Seurat characters to "On a Sunday Afternoon."  There are a lot of great musicals in 1936 to compete for Dance Direction, so I can't say for certain whom I would've picked for the Oscar, but know that AMPAS did itself proud by giving Broadway Melody this prize.

And Mr. Benny?  He's really funny.  The persona of this character is very similar to the "Jack Benny" creation he would have on his television show, but it works.  He lands virtually all of his punchlines, frequently at his own expense, and plays the "villain" with enough charm that his about-face at the end (when he helps a forlorn Powell), feels authentic.  This isn't a great performance, but it works within the confines of the movie...I am curious as we go throughout the month to see if this is all Benny could play, or if he has more in him than just "Jack Benny" but he was very good at playing Jack Benny.

OVP: San Francisco (1936)

Film: San Francisco (1936)

Stars: Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, Spencer Tracy, Jack Holt

Director: WS van Dyke

Oscar History: 6 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Director, Actor-Spencer Tracy, Original Story, Assistant Director, Sound Recording*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

If you spend a lot of time on Film Twitter or the online awards circuit, you will find that one of the bigger conversations discussed is "category fraud."  This, for those unfamiliar, is when someone who is clearly a lead player tries for a supporting nomination because they think it will be easier to get the nomination.  The debate runs the gamut between clear cases of fraud (Rooney Mara in Carol comes to mind) to cases where it's more debatable (think Jennifer Lopez in Hustlers).  I'm not in favor of this, and as a general rule when we do our OVP acting write-ups, I make a point of docking one point from any lead performance committing category fraud.  But the opposite occasionally happens, and I will admit...I don't have quite the same problem with it.  This is when a supporting performance for some reason pushes for lead-it's less common, but it's a peculiarity throughout the Oscars.  Perhaps the most flagrant example of this happened the very first year of the supporting categories, when Spencer Tracy was nominated for lead actor...for a performance that clocks in at less than 15 minutes.

(Spoilers Ahead) San Francisco is about Mary Blake (MacDonald), a broke young woman who is trying to make it as a singer.  She encounters Blackie Norton (Gable), who (because she sings like Jeanette MacDonald) pretty much hires her on the spot.  The two start to fall in love, but there's an unease about how they picture domesticity-Mary wants to continue her career to greater heights, whereas Blackie wants her to continue to sing for his nightclub.  This causes a rift in their relationship, where Mary ends up engaged to another man.  The film culminates with a showdown as Mary tries to (against Blackie's wishes) save his club from financial ruin after she leaves it...only to have the 1906 San Francisco earthquake interrupt their fight, killing hundreds in the process, including Mary's new fiancee.  Mary & Blackie reunite, potentially as lovers but certainly as grateful friends, before the ruins of San Francisco morph into a then-modern day San Francisco.

The movie itself, I'll be honest, is a snore.  I love me some Clark Gable, but Jeanette MacDonald...is only good because she's not Nelson Eddy (who is the worst).  Sure she can sing, but her screen persona is so vacant & too wishy-washy.  She reminds me of an operatic Loretta Young, and that is not meant as a compliment.  The one impressive moment of the film is surely the earthquake, and yes-that's spectacular.  I honestly was floored by how it seemed to come out-of-nowhere (even though it had been regularly telegraphed), and in a world without CGI, it has a proper sense of danger & unrest.  If there was a Special Effects Oscar in 1936, San Francisco would've been an easy sell for the win.

But the nominations that did happen, I'm not onboard with.  Directing (and assistant directing) feels like the only thing that's worthwhile is the earthquake scene, but that's maybe 15 minutes of the movie-I can't get behind that.  The story itself is confusing, boring, and pretty repetitive.  I will say that the sound recording gets a thumbs up from me though-between the earthquake & MacDonald's crazy high notes, there's a lot of sound recording here, and I think it comes together well, if not as well as something like Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz just a couple of years later.

Which brings us back to Spencer Tracy.  Tracy's nomination is genuinely confusing.  His priest is a chauvinist (a trope for the actor), one who condemns MacDonald for dressing too provocatively in one scene.  But he's also barely there, and pretty much an afterthought (I didn't include him in the writeup for a reason)-if he weren't Spencer Tracy, you wouldn't notice this character.  I'm at a loss on how this happened.  If MGM wanted a lead actor for San Francisco, Gable was right there and a big star.  If they wanted Tracy for a film, he was considerably more engaging in Fury, which was also an MGM property and one that was nominated for a writing Oscar so it was in the Academy's purview.  I'm not confused as to why Tracy was marketed as lead (it would take until the 1970's before we'd more regularly start seeing leading actors attempt supporting nominations on the regular), but I'm baffled as to why the Academy bought it.

OVP: Test Pilot (1938)

Film: Test Pilot (1938)

Stars: Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy, Lionel Barrymore, Marjorie Main

Director: Victor Fleming

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Story, Film Editing)

(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

MGM circa 1938 boasted of having "more stars than there are in heaven," and surely this was the case for the studio with a movie like Test Pilot.  The film features three of the biggest headliners of the era (Gable, Loy, & Tracy...plus Lionel Barrymore to boot!), and truly stunning aerial photography, and was cited for Oscar's top prize based on these stars & the film's significant profit.  However, I had seen Test Pilot maybe 10 years ago, and I had poor memories of it.  I didn't really care for the film initially, though it was so forgettable I honestly was curious as to why it had left a bitter taste in my mouth, particularly considering my passion for some of the actors.  Upon revisit, I was struck by a few things I didn't remember (we'll get there), but I feel like I was right-this movie doesn't really work despite having such magnetism on the call sheet.  Let's talk about why.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Jim Lane (Gable), an ace test pilot who recklessly jumps from dangerous plane to plane (and from woman to woman), much to the chagrin of his buddy Gunner (Tracy) and boss Drake (Barrymore).  One day, he crash lands in Kansas, and there he meets the beautiful Ann Barton (Loy), a country girl who is engaged to another man but who is clearly destined for Jim.  They end up together, marrying, but this isn't happily-ever-after (it's only about 30 minutes into the movie).  Instead, we get a dose of what this marriage is like, with Jim clearly an adrenaline junkie who can't give up his day job (and doesn't want to), and both Gunner & Ann on the ground, holding their breath as Jim nears death repeatedly (including one sequence where he barely lives, but one of his fellow pilots dies, a moment that is so telegraphed when they randomly introduce his wife & three kids that the set directors might as well have put a gigantic neon sign above the actor's death saying "destined for the morgue").  The climax of the film has Jim crash landing, and in the process he lives but it's Gunner who dies, which is enough to push Jim to give up this life for good, allowing him to have a grounded life with Ann & their family.

There are things to like in Test Pilot, and I don't want to push those aside.  For starters, it's interesting to watch a film from 1938 about a troubled marriage.  This isn't something we're used to in romances of this era, where "I do" is almost certainly followed by an end card, and it's interesting to see how Hollywood approaches a troubled domesticity between two of its biggest leading players.  I'll also point out right now that the aerial stunts & photography, particularly the landing in Kansas, are impressive for 1938 & this is the kind of film that would've surely gotten a VFX nomination (deservedly) had that category existed in 1938.

But the movie suffers as it goes on because it almost has whiplash it oscillates so frequently across genres.  The movie casts Loy & Gable, two of the era's most charming figures, and occasionally lets them play off of each other (which is a blast), but more often-than-not their courtship veers into sanctimonious, expositional melodrama, with Loy repeatedly underlining the pains she has of being in love with a man who is wrecklessly putting his life in danger.  This isn't necessarily a bad idea for a film, but it's so oft-repeated, with it being clear how it will end (it's not like Gable's going to pick his job over his wife), but it doesn't find a way to modulate its tone-every five minutes we're laughing then so shuddered with dramatics you almost feel guilty for being charmed by the two leads.  It doesn't know what to do with its story, and as a result it becomes a bit of a slog to get through.

The leads aren't able to bolster the movie either.  Loy & Gable clearly want this to be a spry romantic comedy-their acting styles are well-suited for one another, but when it's dramatic they can't pull it off, particularly Loy, who is the actor I like best in this movie generally, but she can't make her contradictory Ann make sense.  Weirdly, it's Spencer Tracy who is by-far the best person in this film.  I am not a Spencer Tracy cheerleader (hence the weirdly), and I'd pick Gable or Loy over him any day of the week, but Tracy is quite good as Gunner, giving him a wearied gruffness that I liked.  Two years removed from San Francisco (for which Tracy won an Oscar nomination but Gable didn't), this is another case where Tracy is taking the film wholesale away from Gable, who was the better movie star but not the thespian that Tracy was.  It's worth noting that Tracy's Gunner does have something of a queer sensibility (he doesn't seem to have any real romantic entanglements other than fretting about Clark Gable), which is perhaps too generous of a reading of Test Pilot, but I did see those shades as the movie continued.  Without this interpretation, Test Pilot doesn't have much to lend to it-for a movie that feels long, it's just the same story over-and-over again...to use the vernacular of the film, a movie that's not so much turbulent as merely routine.