OVP: The Citadel (1938)

Film: The Citadel (1938)

Stars: Robert Donat, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Richardson, Rex Harrison, Penelope Dudley Ward

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Actor-Robert Donat, Adapted Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

When you are reviewing films, you need to be aware of your own particular genre biases.  I see a lot of movies, frequently ones that are favored by the Oscars (due to our ongoing "Oscar Viewing Project" on the blog), and with that it becomes a situation where genres that the Academy favors, but I don't, become a point-of-contention unless a movie is truly great (and thus genre becomes irrelevant).  This is never more true than "uplifting dramas," which have been a staple of the Academy's for decades (though in recent years this have largely been true stories or biopics rather than based on wholly original creations), a genre that I don't find all that interesting.  The Citadel is a good example of this.  This is a fine film, it has a lot of vigor and fulfills its purpose-it's a worthwhile undertaking.  But I must admit that while I can respect the film, I didn't like it.  Let's get into why, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is the story of Andrew Manson (Donat), an idealistic young doctor who goes to a coal mining community in Wales and starts to treat tuberculosis.  He starts out as someone who works entirely by-the-book, but finds that bending the rules is a better way to get solid treatment for his patients (and earn their respect).  He is a far better doctor than they would normally be able to afford, but resists calls to go after bigger paychecks.  However, after his research is destroyed by the nearby miners, he moves to London, with a newly-found wife in tow, a local schoolteacher named Christine (Russell), and begins to practice a type of pseudo-medicine where he treats wealthy people for ailments that aren't real (essentially hypochondriacs), for a life of comfort, prestige, and wealth.  His wife doesn't like this, seeing the sort of man that her husband is becoming, and this all comes to a head when Manson's old friend Denny (Richardson) shows him that he's changed, and when Denny dies after an accident at the hands of one of Manson's fellow charlatan doctors, he decides to return to what he was good at, curing the sick & impoverished people who don't get fair access to healthcare.

The Citadel is surely a movie that, while parts of it are a bit green (more on that in a second), has a message that is sadly resonant over eighty years later.  The film is set in the UK, but even as an American now I can see that access to quality healthcare is largely the dictate of a person's financial status.  Medicine & surgery are expensive, frequently bankrupting people in a near criminal way, and almost always attached to your employment status, so the wealthiest people can gain access to treatments that poor people would only dream of seeing-in this way, The Citadel still feels quite relevant today.

But for me, it struggles in this conversation by having Manson played less-than-complexly, which is a shame because as written this is a complicated character.  Manson has a point here-he is fought, frequently, by the people that he's trying to help.  The scene at about the movie's midpoint where the local miners, spurred on by rumors about what he's doing to laboratory guinea pigs and fears of the unknown around him in his research into the adverse effects of coal mining on your health (something we take for granted today), destroy his work, the work that's literally trying to save their lives, is harrowing stuff.  It's the kind of crux that should have been intriguing for the audience-Manson is essentially being punished for doing the right thing, other people's prejudices getting in the way of him saving their lives (I don't need to make the obvious Covid vaccine allusion to show you this is also still relevant, mostly because if you're reading this you were surely thinking it), and it should inform the character quite a bit.

But Donat plays Manson as kind of naive, never imagining him in a serious way.  The English actor, who won his first Oscar nomination for this performance, was three years removed from his classic work in The 39 Steps (which I like & enjoy him in, for the record), but this doesn't have that film's finesse.  It's the kind of work that screams "GREAT ACTING!" in a major way, mostly because it's a series of lengthy, oftentimes powerfully-delivered monologues, but there's nothing happening below the placid surface here.  His switch into a snobbish fop is so full, but you don't get any hints of that coming in the first half.  Donat doesn't find a way to bridge the man that he's playing between the three acts, and the film suffers.  Rosalind Russell is better as his fellow lead, particularly in the film's first half when she gets to play a sharper character, getting at least some good chemistry moments with the befuddled doctor, though as the movie's melodrama wears on, she begins to falter as well into subdued dramatics (potentially unpopular opinion-I've never liked Roz Russell in a drama despite that being kind of what the Academy always found her useful for, but I think she's aces at comedy).

All of this dampens my enjoyment of The Citadel.  It's a good movie on a technical level, and so I'm giving it three stars.  The early courting scenes with Donat/Russell are fun, and the script is well-constructed & the directing is efficient.  But I didn't feel it-the message here is important, and it carries a lot of weight even today, but Donat's inability to elevate Manson through the film's three acts kept me from loving it in the way that I would something like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and there is so little outside of what he's doing onscreen to latch onto (I believe he's in every single scene in the movie if memory serves correctly) that I left respecting, but not loving, what had just happened.

The 39 Steps (1935)

Film: The 39 Steps (1935)

Stars: Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Mannheim, Godfrey Tearle, Peggy Ashcroft, Wylie Watson

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

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

In writing up the Saturdays with the Stars series over the past two years, we get a lot of deep cut films.  We've had movies that I'd never heard of, not even in a footnote or a "virtually unknown" way...just movies that I never knew existed until this series.  And then there are times where I sheepishly have to confide that I haven't seen a bonafide classic, and that's where we are today.  Madeleine Carroll's career was filled with an enormous number of hits, made with some of the most important leading men & directors of the 1930's, but when it comes down to it, her story is really about The 39 Steps.  While movies like Vertigo and Psycho are the first go-to's for the director, The 39 Steps is chronologically the first movie of his that pretty much everyone involved has universally-praised as a masterpiece, and is the most important film of Madeleine Carroll's life.  Nearly 90 years after the film came out, it's worth confessing-it's also still really good.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie's plot is complex, even for Hitchcock, but I'll get through it so we have some grounding before we get to the actual quality of the movie.  The film is about Richard Hannay (Donat), an ordinary man who witnesses a man who can recall anything at a side show called Mr. Memory (Watson).  Shots are fired in the theater, and on his way out Hannay meets Annabella Smith (Mannheim) whom he convinces to come back to his apartment, and there she says she's a spy, and is trying to protect British intelligence, alluding to the enigmatic "39 Steps."  After she is found dead the next day, the police assume Hannay to be the murderer, and he becomes a fugitive to prove his innocence.  Along the way he meets Pamela (Carroll), a beautiful woman whom he becomes handcuffed to at one point, and who doesn't trust him, but because they're thrown together they have to work together to prove what the 39 Steps is, as both are in real danger if its secret is not discovered.

The movie is good up until the last moments, when it becomes truly great.  The film is prototypical Hitchcock in the ways that it takes an ordinary man (Donat here, but you see shades of later leading men like Jimmy Stewart & Cary Grant in his work), puts him in an extraordinary situation, and sees how he handles it.  But the climactic scene is shocking & delicious.  Hannay suddenly realizes that the code is hidden not on paper, but instead Mr. Memory himself has memorized them & will be used to smuggle the secrets out of the country.  He confronts him onstage, thus spoiling the men's plans, with Mr. Memory dying as he compulsively tells the men his secrets.  It's a brilliantly-constructed thriller move, one with a great "aha" moment (I'll admit-I hadn't figure out this was where the story was headed even though it's obvious in retrospect), and literally I got goosebumps.  Honestly, the only real complaint I had about the movie is that it was too rushed-Hitch a few years later would've been able to add more tension to the story, and made the remainder of the pacing worthy of his magnificent climax.

Madeleine Carroll is fun, if perhaps slightly wrong for the tone of the film.  There are moments in the middle of the movie where it almost feels like we're watching It Happened One Night with rich banter between Donat & Carroll, but it takes you out of the picture as it feels tonally wrong.  The two have great chemistry, though, and she looks like a Hitchcock leading lady.  This movie made her a star, though not without some caveats.  This year with Hitchcock we take the good with the bad, but we don't hide the latter, and the director, notorious for putting his leading ladies through the ringer, at one point literally handcuffed Donat & Carroll together (lying about whether or not he still had the key) so that they could understand better what their characters went through.  As a result, you can actually see real welts on Carroll's wrists in the film that weren't makeup-that was a result of Hitchcock's "prank."  This wasn't enough, though, to make Carroll not work with him again, and next week we'll take a look at their second pairing.

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: Vacation from Marriage (1946)

Film: Vacation from Marriage (1946)
Stars: Robert Donat, Deborah Kerr, Glynis Johns, Ann Todd, Roland Culver
Director: Alexander Korda
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Original Story)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I'm going to be honest here, the idea of a film starring Robert Donat and Deborah Kerr was not what I was hoping to catch as I plowed through a few recent Oscar-nominated pictures that were languishing around my DVR.  I love Deborah Kerr in her own way, but mostly when she's falling in love with Cary Grant while drinking pink champagne.  Her films in the 1940's (Note: I've never seen Black Narcissus) have never been something I've gravitated toward, and in some ways I feel a little bit like she's too stoic and occasionally even entering Rosalind Russell (when she, too, is not starring opposite Cary Grant) territory with her performance.  This was unfortunately the case for Vacation from Marriage, a film that admittedly has an interesting script but never really seals-the-deal in terms of crossing over into being a compelling motion picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows a drab and uninspired married couple Robert (Donat) and Cathy (Kerr) who are living a dull and relatively pointless existence in London in 1940.  Their lives dramatically alter, however, when they are both brought into the war effort, Robert in the Royal Navy and Cathy in the Wrens.  Once in the Navy, their zeal for life is renewed, and both become self-confident, charming people (you know, the kind that only movie stars can become somehow overnight).  They also both fall in love with other people, (Culver and Todd), but out of duty they stay together, even though both, now transformed, dread the idea of ending up with the sallow creature they think is waiting for them once the war is over.

Of course, they end up meeting and finding that they are both more gregarious and lively, but Cathy learns the truth of Robert's initial ill opinion of her, and she initially abandons him before finally relenting and getting back together.  It's the sort of ending you assumed was bound to happen, though the script itself occasionally hints that there might be something more interesting there.  After all, the film shows the way that war can transform, something that we see frequently in single men but rarely in women which was a nice change, and we also get to look at marriage in a way that we don't usually do so in classic Hollywood (marriage is usually the ending, never the beginning, of the story).  The best scenes of the film are late in the picture when it feels like Cathy and Robert won't end up together, and perhaps they shouldn't.  Hollywood would never allow for such a thing for a married couple (or, more importantly, two bankable stars), but clearly they stifled each other initially when they were together and likely only married out of convenience-it's not out-of-the-question to assume that they should stay split in order to keep their self-esteem in check.

However, they do end up married, and neither performer is wonderful in their actual role.  Donat, an actor who was a major headliner at the time (though this was his final film for MGM, and weirdly Kerr's first), is fine as a boorish and predictable naval officer, and Kerr goes through the motions of first being dowdy (which never looks good on the glamorous actress-the makeup department always goes overboard trying to dampen her natural beauty), and then a coy but loyal wife.  Arguably the best presence in the film is scene-stealing veteran Glynis Johns, who during the 1940's randomly showed up in a myriad of films before eventually becoming "Sister Suffragette" and sending in the clowns.  She's a blast as Kerr's instantly lovable friend, and I loved her constant scheming in the picture.  However, that's not much to recommend the film and even Johns has been better in other movies.  All-in-all, it can best be described as a botched delivery that likely worked on paper.

Those are my thoughts on this film-how about yours?  Anyone a fan of the film (also called Perfect Strangers)?  Where does it rank in your personal list of favorite films starring Donat or Kerr or Johns?  And what is your favorite Classical Hollywood film on marriage?  Share your thoughts below!