OVP: They Were Expendable (1945)

Film: They Were Expendable (1945)

Stars: Robert Montgomery, John Wayne, Donna Reed, Jack Holt, Ward Bond

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Sound Recording, Effects)

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

All right, I'm aware I skipped the first week of Ward Bond (in the US last weekend was Labor Day and I had family in town & in the year of 2022 we focus on spending time with loved ones at the expense of our responsibilities-that's just the rules), but we won't be skimping on him today, as we're going to do our first ever double-feature so that he gets a full month of movies.  As a result, we're going to talk about a huge chapter of Ward Bond's career in the next few hours.  Bond started as a character actor, and largely stayed there.  Working in B-Grade films in the early 1930's, he did eventually graduate to A-Grade pictures, but almost always as a random "friend of the hero" or a villain of some sorts.  I watched They Were Expendable with my parents last weekend while they were in town, and at one point my mom said "why does he look so familiar?" and it's because Bond's real claim to fame is the breadth of his filmography, and just how many movies he's made.  Bringing Up Baby, Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, The Maltese Falcon, It's a Wonderful Life, The Searchers...he is somehow in all of these landmark classics, but always as a bit player or side part.  I have seen all of these movies so I can't watch them for this project, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention them as we kick off our month devoted to Bond, as he's a true character actor, though one who is familiar to virtually any person who has ever watched a classic film.

(Spoilers Ahead) Made in the waning days of World War II, They Were Expendable is the story of a team of men who command a squadron of US Navy PT Boats in the South Pacific.  Lt. John "Brick" Brickley (Montgomery) is sure that they will be an asset to the navy, but his commanding officers remain skeptical, and his friend Lt. JG "Rusty" Ryan (Wayne) is hoping to get his own command, and nearly goes for it when Pearl Harbor is bombed, throwing his entire world into chaos.  The film that follows shows the divergent paths these two men's careers take, with Brick becoming a war hero, his PT boat experience used to sink a Japanese cruiser, while Rusty (sidelined with blood poisoning) falls in love with a nurse named Sandy (Reed) on land, their romance doomed to failure both because it's impossible to fall into a longterm relationship while at war and because the evacuation of Bataan leaves Sandy behind, certain to die in the process.

This is where the title comes from, and where the most powerful scene in the movie is.  The war is not subtle about the "have's and have not's" of battle, with a large section of the film's middle devoted to the evacuation of General MacArthur into Australia while men around him perish to get him there.  The final scenes of the movie show that Brick & Rusty escape, but others, like Chief Mulcahey (Bond, who has a small part that is most notable for him crooning to Donna Reed through an open window...which he also more famously did in It's a Wonderful Life) are left to die.  Brick & Rusty are too valuable to the war effort to be left behind, even if the unmarried Rusty tries to switch with one of the married infantryman when there are not enough seats in the end of the movie.  It's a killer, rough ending particularly in an era where most WWII films were just populist propaganda, and on top of astounding cinematography and unreal visual effects, a really great forgotten epic.

The film was a critically-important one in the career of John Wayne, which I'd be remiss to not mention before we leave.  Wayne is the most famous WWII Hollywood draft dodger less because he was the only one to do it, and more because Wayne's onscreen persona frequently had him wearing a military uniform, thus making an odd juxtaposition to a man who never actually served.  This came to a head when director John Ford would berate Wayne, his longtime friend whom he thought a coward for skipping out on his patriotic duty, in front of the entire cast & crew of They Were Expendable.  Particularly when juxtaposed with his fellow leading man Robert Montgomery (who had been an ambulance driver at Dunkirk and rose to the level of lieutenant commander in the US Navy), Wayne made for easy mockery by Ford, and it took Montgomery eventually stepping in for the two men to finally make peace.  They would do so in the coming years alongside our star Ward Bond, who would make multiple movies with Ford & Wayne, one of which we'll discuss next week.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941)

Film: Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941)

Stars: Carole Lombard, Robert Montgomery, Gene Raymond, Jack Carson

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 Carole Lombard-click here to learn more about Ms. Lombard (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we discussed Carole Lombard's sojourn into more dramatic pictures with Vigil in the Night, one of several attempts Lombard made from 1939-40 to win an Academy Award.  Lombard, though, didn't take that Oscar & the public didn't appreciate her in such a role, so she went back to making comedies.  This, weirdly enough, led her to Alfred Hitchcock.  Hitchcock had initially wanted to direct Lombard in a dramatic picture, something that would be inline with what she'd been attempting, but Lombard wanted a comedy.  The result is one of the Master of Suspense's most unusual films.  While Hitch oftentimes would put black humor into his films, this is a straight-up romantic comedy with very little hinting on either side of the conversation of something more macabre, and wasn't the film that Hitchcock wanted to make (he was dismissive of the picture in later years).  It is, however, a very good movie, and a solid showcase for Lombard & Robert Montgomery as the leads.

(Spoilers Ahead) This is not, for the record, a precursor to the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie film (which I like, btw-that's a guilty pleasure movie).  It is instead the story of Ann (Lombard) and David (Montgomery), a couple who have been married for a bit, and while they love each other, bicker constantly.  One morning, David tells Ann over breakfast rather nonchalantly that he wishes they'd never gotten married, because he misses his independence.  David gets his wish, finding out that due to a quirk in Idaho law (where they wed) they didn't actually legally get married.  Ann finds out about this as well, but realizes that David isn't going to tell her (and perhaps make her a "bad girl" by sleeping together while they aren't married), and kicks him out of their house.  Ann then decides to start dating other people, with David attempting to win her back by getting her fired from her new job (allowing for no financial independence) and trying to bust up her relationship with his former friend Jeff (Raymond).  Things come to a head when the three of them are trapped at a ski lodge together, and they realize that despite their constant bickering, they love each other, and the film ends happily.

The movie is charming, and winning mostly because of the two leads.  I give-or-take on Robert Montgomery for the most part, but apparently love him in 1941 between this and Here Comes Mr. Jordan (both of which I thoroughly enjoyed).  He definitely plays his part well here as a man who doesn't realize that he batted out-of-his-league on the first go, and thinks that the grass is greener (when it isn't).  This is shrewd direction from Hitch/Montgomery, capturing the essence of such a man who we can tell from the outside got a good deal, and it's wonderfully underlined by Lombard.  Our star plays this well, reminding not only David but also herself that she's worthy of love, and can get a life beyond herself if she wants...even if she really does just want David.  Filled with lovely comic set-pieces & fun back-and-forth, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a winner & makes you wonder what would've happened if Hitchcock had made more comedies in his later years.

The film, tragically, would be the last movie starring Lombard to be released in her lifetime.  She would make one more movie (the classic To Be or Not To Be), before her death.  On January 16, 1942, Lombard, her mother, and press agent, were coming home from a war bonds fundraising event, when the plane crashed into the side of a mountain outside of Las Vegas, killing everyone on board.  Her husband Clark Gable was bereft when he realized his wife had died, and though he'd remarry twice after her, he would end up buried next to her when he died some two decades later.  Joan Crawford replaced Lombard in the last film she'd been scheduled to make, They All Kissed the Bride, and gave her entire salary to the Red Cross in honor of their work in the aftermath of Lombard's death, and her final movie To Be or Not To Be had to be edited (to great expense) to cut one line from the film where Jack Benny proclaims "What could happen on a plane?", an eerie query in conjunction with Lombard's tragic death.  Carole Lombard, a screen legend & one of the best of her era, was only 33 when she died.

Next month, we're going to jump a little bit out of chronology into the 1950's (we'll do one more of Hitch's 1940's leading ladies in July but because of the depth of her career I wanted a month with five Saturday's, which June doesn't have), so we'll instead move to an actress that jumped from genre-to-genre throughout the 1940's, but ended up finding her footing later in her career with two massive Best Picture nominees that would seal her stardom.  We'll find out who that is on Tuesday!

OVP: Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)

Film: Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)
Stars: Robert Montgomery, Evelyn Keyes, Claude Rains, Rita Johnson, James Gleason
Director: Alexander Hall
Oscar History: 7 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Actor-Robert Montgomery, Supporting Actor-James Gleason, Director, Adapted Screenplay*, Motion Picture Story, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

We are going to finish our week-long look at the Supporting Actor category with another repeat in years (unlike the two 2003 films, this was completely accidental and had more to do with what movies were leaving Criterion than anything else).  Today's film is also unusual because it's not what you'd expect from a Supporting Actor lineup.  If you just looked at the "Stars" line up top, you would assume that the Supporting Actor nominee that was coming out of Here Comes Mr. Jordan would be Claude Rains.  Rains, after all, was nominated for four Academy Awards throughout his career, and this was in the sweet spot when he was getting those nominations.  However, it is in fact James Gleason who is the nominee in this bunch, getting his sole Oscar nomination.  Unlike Rains, who is a pretty common name amongst Classic Hollywood fans, Gleason isn't a character actor that's easily identifiable today, and one whose work I was super familiar with.  I'd seen him in two of his biggest classics (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and The Night of the Hunter), but those are small parts and are overshadowed in my memory.  At the time, Gleason was famous in the way TV stars of the coming decades would be for his roles in the Hildegarde Withers and Higgins Family movie serials.  Was he a worthy nominee, and why precisely was he chosen over someone more Academy-friendly like Rains?  Let's find out, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) Here Comes Mr. Jordan is a tale you might already know, as it was remade in 1978 with Warren Beatty in the film Heaven Can Wait.  If you don't, here's the gist.  Joe Pendleton (Montgomery) is a world class boxer, someone who is poised to break out into the big time before he dies in a plane crash...or at least we initially think he dies in a plane crash.  It turns out when he gets to heaven that the angel who took him did so too early, as Joe was going to survive the crash, and live another fifty years.  Joe's body, though, has been cremated, and so the angel's superior Mr. Jordan (Rains) has to do something else-he has to find another body of someone who has just died for Joe to take over.  They settle on Bruce Farnsworth, a ruthless businessman who has just been murdered by his wife Julia (Johnson).  He chooses to do so to help Miss Logan (Keyes), a young woman whose father has taken the fall for Farnsworth, and thus will soon have both of their lives ruined.  Once in the body, he falls for Miss Logan and begins to train to become the champ as Farnsworth, eventually winning over with the help of Pop (Gleason), his old boxing trainer, the only person who knows Farnsworth's real identity.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan is clever and really sweet.  It's the sort of movie that I think if you were new to old Hollywood movies or easily jaded you'd mock pretty much from the start, but as I am neither new to this kind of movie nor jaded, I loved it.  Montgomery is not an actor I think of as particularly versatile, but he's well-cast as Joe Pendleton, a lug who has a big heart.  The story is ingenious, and the script is fun, getting in some solid one-liners (particularly from Rains & Gleason), and showing us a tale that could probably be remade a second time today, perhaps with a comic actor like Rebel Wilson or Tiffany Haddish.  The cinematography nomination is unusual (there's very little boxing in this boxing movie, which is usually where this might come from), but not bad (particularly the way that Farnsworth's mansion is lit), and the direction is tidy, if conventional.

The nomination for Gleason makes sense in some regards, though I did leave wondering more so why they didn't go to the more favored Rains.  Both actors have meaty parts-this isn't a case where Rains character is boring, and I preferred his performance to Gleason's in that it's more sophisticated & a-characteristic of the rest of the film.  But Gleason lands his comic bits, and is playing the more traditional role for Oscar; actors ranging from Burgess Meredith to Clint Eastwood to Paul Giamatti have been nominated for playing the tough-talking boxing trainer in the corner, as the sweet science is Oscar's favorite sport.  While this never rises above cliche and two-dimensional, it still works within the confines of the film, is quite amusing, and it's hard to begrudge a longtime character actor getting their moment in the sun.

OVP: Ride the Pink Horse (1947)

Film: Ride the Pink Horse (1947)
Stars: Robert Montgomery, Thomas Gomez, Wanda Hendrix, Andrea King, Fred Clark
Director: Robert Montgomery
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actor-Thomas Gomez)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.

One of the best things about getting below-the-surface this month and catching a few noir films that, while famous, aren't necessarily ones that are ingrained in our society (like Double Indemnity or The Third Man) is that you discover a flick like Ride the Pink Horse.  Directed by and starring Robert Montgomery, famous for his dapper comedies but here the complete antithesis as a greedy, snarky blackmailer, Ride the Pink Horse is really good...and kind of weird.  The film, taking place in a border town between Mexico and New Mexico (an unusual setting for the urban film noir genre), is pretty violent, but also brutal in its cynicism.  The film has a great desperation, a ticking clock that puts a genuine sense of urgency and question around how the movie itself is going to end.

(Spoilers Ahead) The picture focuses on Gagin (Montgomery) a man in town trying to avenge his friend who has incriminating evidence against a crime boss named Hugo (Clark).  Initially, we're meant to assume that Gagin is altruistic, the sort of Gary Cooper-esque figure that comes to town to collect the debts of his fallen comrade (it's hard to watch this film and not assume that High Noon wasn't heavily borrowing from the picture), but as the film progresses it becomes clear that altruism is not Gagin's intention-he just saw a chance to blackmail a wealthy man, and in an era noted for soldiers trying to understand their place in the world after the war, he's someone that wants a fast answer to a complicated problem-"where is my life headed?"

The film takes Gagin through the underbelly of this small town, and along the way he befriends Pila (Hendrix), a young woman who helps him out despite him mocking her (it's meant to be a love-hate situation as the film progresses, but I read it more as a father-daughter relationship considering the 24-year age gap between Hendrix & Montgomery in real life), as well as a carnival operator named Pancho (Gomez), which is where the strange title comes in-in one crucial scene Pila rides a pink horse around on the carousel.

The film is strange in part because of its setting-we're not used to seeing noir in the country, but Ride the Pink Horse plays this to its advantage.  While in New York or Los Angeles it'd be easy for Gagin to hide from Hugo as he tries to hunt him down and get the evidence (to destroy it before the police get access to it), in this small village there's only so many places to go, and the locals (other than Pila & Pancho) are reluctant to help such a man until he finally (this is a Hollywood picture) does start to become the altruistic good guy more concerned with protecting Pancho & Pila than gaining access to the money.  As a result, though, we get a pretty desperate, dark film (the entire subplot with Andrea King's Marjorie is fascinating as someone who is willing to double-cross both Hugo & Gagin, and I left wishing I could have watched the entire film from her perspective), but an under-sung film noir classic.  The movie won Gomez an Oscar nomination, which isn't surprising if you see the film-he has that sort of boisterous scene-stealer vibe here that the Academy loved to go for in the 1940's, though most of his work is surface-level.  Pancho doesn't really exist anywhere other than to be noble in helping Gagin, and to some degree Pila, and one wonders if this is the sort of "longtime character actor gets his 15 minutes" sort of citation that the Academy still does in the supporting fields.