The Sun Also Rises (1957)

Film: The Sun Also Rises (1957)

Stars: Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, Mel Ferrer, Errol Flynn, Eddie Albert, Juliette Greco

Director: Henry King

Oscar History: No nominations

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.

Errol Flynn, one of the most consistently strong performers at the box office for Warner Brothers for nearly 18 years, ended his career with the studio in 1953.  At that point Flynn was in his mid-40's, and while his handsomeness was still there, years of drinking & health problems made it unlikely that he could achieve some of the stunt acrobatics that were a huge calling card in his early fame.  After going broke trying to self-finance The Story of William Tell (a film that never was actually released), he started to make bad decisions with his career, making B-movies, choosing poor projects like Istanbul & The Big Boodle, and only really had one important film left in him, where he would have to endure the indignity of being fourth-billed, here against a guy who for much of the 1930's & early 40's, one could argue Flynn was a more important action star than, Tyrone Power.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Sun Also Rises is a glossy Fox film that tackles Ernest Hemingway's famed novel.  This is where I'm going to confess something that doesn't often come up on this blog: I don't particularly care for Ernest Hemingway's writing, and in some ways that translates to the screen.  A lot of the novel's strength comes from discussions about Jake's (Power) impotence, both as a man who has moved on from a war (and a nation that has stolen his virility without much thanks), and that comes across in the movie...to a degree.  The Hays Code was getting hit a little bit at the time (if you look at posters for this film, they say very clearly "Not Suitable for Children" and that's because they use the actual word "impotence" in the film), but that lack of sexual stamina is lost in the movie because they can't really discuss it as the Code still drove a lot of scripting decisions.  It doesn't help that Power is at least ten years too old for this part (it's hard not to wonder how different this might've been in the hands of an actor like Marlon Brando, who was closer to the age Jake is in the novel), and that they aren't really able to point out how Ava Gardner's Lady Brett absolutely loves sex, and while she takes on some "lovers" in the film they aren't really hinted at in an oblique way.  It all feels dry and neutered (pun truly unintended...only caught the double entendre while editing this article).

Flynn's character is essentially a cad, one who can satisfy Brett (which Jake can't, even though they're in love with each other), but isn't honorable and is a giant walking fuck boy.  This isn't a new part for Flynn, but I will say that, even robbed of much of his charisma (and a decent script), Flynn is the best part of this movie because there's an unrest in his performance that I found really melancholy.  He plays his Mike as a man who knows he's a failure and likely to die unsatisfied...but also can't stop himself.  Flynn would die of a heart attack, exacerbated by cirrhosis & fatty degeneration of the liver, just over two years later at the age of only 50.

That is not where Flynn's story ends though, and in many ways it was only beginning.  In terms of Classical Hollywood stars, only Marilyn Monroe can rival Flynn for things we found out about him after his death.  For starters, there are allegations that Flynn had a sexual affair late in his life with 15-year-old actress Beverly Aadland, whom he would make his last movie Cuban Rebel Girls with (during which time Flynn spent much of production becoming pals with Fidel Castro).  There have also been a lot of debates about his politics, with some accusing Flynn of being a fascist, specifically the highly-publicized biography by Charles Higham which also alleged that Flynn was bisexual and was a Nazi spy.  There is no evidence of him being bisexual or a spy (he was investigated by the FBI, and they didn't find evidence of this), but it is a case where he was friends with Herrmann Erben, who was a Nazi intelligence officer during World War II, and whom Flynn was friends with until at least 1940 (after meeting on an expedition to Spain in the 1930's), and possibly throughout World War II.

This was not the only friendship that Flynn had that caused headlines after his death.  A correspondence with Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard was uncovered in Penthouse magazine in 1982 by Hubbard's son Ronald, and the two would engage in sexual & drug-induced debauchery together.  It's worth noting we haven't heard from Flynn's son Sean, a photojournalist, about him because he would disappear in 1970, likely being killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (we talk about this more in one of our Unsolved Hollywood mysteries articles here).  All-in-all, Flynn's life is remarkably complicated by the many things he was never asked about as they came to light after his death, making his star persona one of the most challenging to tackle beyond the big screen.

OVP: Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

Film: Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

Stars: Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, Una O'Connor

Director: Billy Wilder

Oscar History: 6 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Actor-Charles Laughton, Supporting Actress-Elsa Lanchester, Film Editing, Sound Recording)

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

Marlene Dietrich spent much of World War II doing USO tours.  Dietrich was vehemently anti-Nazi (funding efforts to help Jews and political prisoners flee Germany in the late-1930's), and was one of the most active figures on the USO tour (it's hard not to wonder if she was slightly overcompensating given that to be the most famous German actor in Hollywood at the time would've made her being indifferent to the war effort basically impossible without fan backlash).  But post-WWII, Dietrich's film career floundered.  Though she was still ravishing (she would remain a sex symbol for the remainder of her public life, and would trade on it long after society allowed most women to), and would appear in films by important directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, & Stanley Kramer would all eventually call), it was never quite as magic as it was in her early days in Hollywood.  The closest she might've come was Witness for the Prosecution, which was intended at the time to be a vehicle for Dietrich to get an Oscar nomination, and while much of those involved (including her castmates Charles Laughton & Elsa Lanchester) got nominated for it, she did not...though she should have.

(Spoilers Ahead-And I mean it this time!) The film is based on a play by Agatha Christie, and starts with Sir Wilfred Robarts (Laughton), a barrister who is currently recovering from a heart attack.  He is coaxed (against the wishes of his nurse Miss Plimsoll, played here by Laughton's real-life wife Lanchester) into a case to defend Leonard Vole (Power), a man accused of killing an older woman for the inheritance, after he supposedly seduced her.  We also meet Vole's wife Christine (Dietrich), who appears distant at first, and it's not entirely clear if she wants him to get off (or if she believes he's innocent).  Vole's case looks increasingly hopeless when Christine is a witness not for the defense, but for the prosecution, and admits that Leonard's alibi is a lie.  However, a mysterious woman comes and gives Sir Wilfred letters indicating that Christine is lying-that she's been having an affair and perjured herself by claiming the alibi isn't the truth.  He shows the jury these letters, and she confesses from the witness stand that she lied...that Leonard was with her that night, and couldn't have possibly been the killer, and she & her lover Max wanted to implicate Leonard so she could leave him.  Leonard is acquitted, and everything seems rosy...

...or so it seems with ten minutes to spare.  Witness for the Prosecution was one of the first films to really underline the concept of "don't spoil the ending" to the point that they included it in the ad promos and had a voiceover over the ending instructing people not to spoil the ending for others.  This is because the ending is a true twist.  It turns out that Christine does love Leonard, and played this role because he is guilty, but figured the only way that the jury would believe her is if she was a cold, unloving spouse (something that Sir Wilfred hints at early in the picture).  So she perjures herself, sending herself to jail, and it's also revealed that Dietrich was the actress playing the unrecognizable mysterious woman.  In a further twist, it turns out that while Christine loved Leonard, Leonard did not love her back, and was having an affair with a younger woman.  Freed by double jeopardy, he now gets a small fortune and can marry his younger mistress, but Christine feeling betrayed and headed to jail for Leonard, kills him...and Sir Wilfred, horrified by what she's endured, proclaims that he will get her off in the closing scenes.

The movie received six Academy Award nominations, and they're all well-earned.  The editing & sound mixing aren't showy, but they're definitely top rate (as are the cinematography, score, and especially the art direction).  The makeup (more on that in a second) would've surely gotten a nomination in a different era.  Most of the cast is splendid.  I loved the dottering comedy between Laughton & Lanchester.  Laughton leaned in heavily on this part, one of his last great roles, and it feels like it was written for it he bombasts and orates so well, and Lanchester (thanks to years of living with him) shows a marital chemistry that could be silly but comes across beautifully in the film.  Una O'Connor is also good as a scorned maid (who would've otherwise gotten the inheritance).  I don't entirely like Tyrone Power here, who I think is too much (especially when he's being dramatic during Dietrich's testimony), but this is a 6-time Oscar nominee that should've gotten more citations.

And one of those should've been Dietrich.  Dietrich was largely expected to be nominated (she'd even recorded a new opening to her cabaret act where she was introduced as "Oscar Nominee for Witness for the Prosecution, Marlene Dietrich," and was devastated when she somehow didn't make it.  Looking back with her, I'm devastated too.  Dietrich nails her courtroom scenes, completely keeping you guessing the entire time, but in retrospect it's clear what was there (that she was always on Leonard's side).  It's a very tricky part, made even more difficult by Dietrich playing the unrecognizable mysterious woman.  I'll be real here, the accent was SO different than Dietrich's normal sultry German baritone that I completely missed that it was Dietrich playing the part, so the twist totally threw me.  The publicity around the twist ending surely hurt Dietrich's chances, because they couldn't publicize her two roles, and how different/good they both were.  But of all of the 1957 Best Actress nominees I've seen so far, she's better than all of them-this was a crime that she didn't get into the field, or honestly win it all.

Dietrich would have a very long life, and an equally long career, but while she'd have two more major movies (1958's Touch of Evil and 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg), most of the rest of her career was performing a legendary one-woman act that she would sell to sold out audiences for decades around the world, from the early 1950's all the way to the mid-1970's, when her health started to fade to the point that she couldn't handle the rigors of performing live.  She eventually did voiceover work (she did not appear) for an Oscar-nominated documentary about her life called Marlene (made by her Nuremberg costar Maximillian Schell).  Dietrich died in 1992 at the age of 91 from kidney failure.  Next month, we are going to take an unusual approach to our Saturdays with the Stars' headliner, looking at his long career in westerns through the lens of one specific director, as the two together made one of the most critically-acclaimed actor-director pairings of the era.

OVP: The Luck of the Irish (1948)

Film: The Luck of the Irish (1948)

Stars: Tyrone Power, Anne Baxter, Cecil Kellaway, Lee J. Cobb, Jayne Meadows

Director: Henry Koster

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actor-Cecil Kellaway)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 Anne Baxter-click here to learn more about Ms. Baxter (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

For the first two weeks of this month, we discussed how Anne Baxter was given roles that typically led to a proper kind of stardom, someone that would graduate from "love interest roles" to major lead player.  That didn't happen for Baxter, though.  While today it's common for leading actresses to take on plum supporting parts in films (think of someone like Meryl Streep or Glenn Close oscillating between lead/supporting roles), that was not something that stars did in the 1940's-you were either an above-the-line figure, or someone who got supporting parts.  Baxter doing this always makes her career's success hard-to-grasp.  She won an Oscar in 1946 for Best Supporting Actress for The Razor's Edge, then four years later was nominated for Best Lead Actress for All About Eve-it was a pretty short list at the time of actors who had been cited for both categories.  But in between those two classics, she starred in a number of forgotten films, one of which got onto Oscar's radar for her costar Cecil Kellaway, and that's the picture we're looking at today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Luck of the Irish centers around reporter Stephen Fitzgerald (Power), who during a trip to Ireland meets a beautiful young woman named Nora (Baxter), with whom he becomes somewhat smitten but doesn't make a proper move on since he's soon headed back to his job in NYC.  He also, it's worth noting, meets a leprechaun we eventually learn to be named Horace (Kellaway), who gives him a piece of gold.  When he returns to NYC, he finds out his boss Mr. Agur (Cobb) is going to run for the Senate, and his daughter Frances (Meadows) has designs on Stephen getting both the top job and her hand in marriage.  What throws a wrench in this is both Nora & Horace are now in NYC, the first by chance & the second by magic, to remind him of the simple life he might be able to have in Ireland.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which one the movie ultimately gives him (but Baxter's name is above the title for a reason).

The plot itself is a bit hard-to-follow, and quite meandering.  Power's character is a man-at-a-crossroads, but his complicated relationship with his politician boss sometimes borders on him seemingly misusing his position, and other times he just wants to live the simple life.  Jayne Meadows as the ambitious daughter is also a bit ridiculous.  Kudos to the casting director for not typecasting, but Meadows is a poor choice for such a part, and can't really land it.  One honestly wonders why they didn't just switch Baxter & Meadows' parts, as both would've been better in the other role.  Our star-of-the-month fails to deliver here in terms of her character, though her Irish accent work is superb (Anne Baxter never phones in the accent).

The film's one Oscar nomination is harder to begrudge, even if it's not great acting.  Cecil Kellaway is adorable as the man with a pot-of-gold, and as it was his first nomination, I'm not going to complain too heartily, but let's be real here-he got this for playing a sweet old man, not for actual acting.  There's nothing noteworthy here other than scene-stealing, and the nature of the part makes it so that any actor would've pulled that off.  Being pleasant helps lift an otherwise routine (and misguided) movie, but it doesn't deserve an Oscar.  That being said, of course, it'd have been kind of funny if the Academy had followed giving Santa Claus an Oscar by rewarding a leprechaun.

OVP: Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938)

Film: Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938)

Stars: Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, Jack Haley, Jean Hersholt, John Carradine

Director: Henry King

Oscar History: 6 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Motion Picture Story, Original Song-"Now It Can Be Told," Scoring*, Art Direction, Film Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

When we think of classical Hollywood musicals of the 1930's through the early 1950's, what we initially name-check are almost always the MGM musicals of the era.  Films like The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, and Singin' in the Rain were all from the same studio.  Other studios, of course, were making musicals, most importantly 20th Century Fox, but Fox's best-remembered musicals would come in the 50's & 60's, when they would adapt the Rodgers & Hammerstein productions The King & I, South Pacific, and The Sound of Music, the latter of which basically saved the studio from bankruptcy.  Their musicals from the 1930's and 40's were hits, some pretty big hits, but none have the same kind of cache now that they did in their era.  Today we're going to revisit one of those films (a blockbuster hit), Alexander's Ragtime Band, which was cited for six Oscars, including Best Picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Alexander (Power), a young classical composer who joins a band (to his family & professor's chagrin) of ragtime musicians, and who luck into a gig at a nightclub partially because they are joined by singer Stella Kirby (Faye), another performer on the rise.  Stella & Alexander fight it out, but are clearly falling for each other in an "opposites attract" situation, and both are on their way up, though when a producer decides he only wants to give Stella a big break (not the band), Alexander gets jealous & they break it off.  World War I looms, with Alexander and some members of the band getting drafted, and while he's away, Stella marries the band's piano player Charlie (Ameche), and they have success but it's clearly not enough to keep their marriage afloat, and they divorce.  Meanwhile, Alexander is back & having great success with his band, including new lead singer Jerry Allen (Merman), who is in love with him but knows that he still pines for Stella.  The film has a "will they or won't they finale" with Alexander performing "Alexander's Ragtime Band" at Carnegie Hall, and as you would suspect for a movie from 1938, they do, in fact, end up together.

The 20th Century Fox musicals of this time frame follow not only the same plot formulas, they nearly always repeat the same stars.  You may remember we featured Alice Faye in a Saturdays with the Stars a few years ago, and we profiled films she made with both Power & Ameche (the former would make three films together, the latter would make six).  As a result, the films feel interchangeable, and as I've seen a lot of Alice Faye movies from this time frame, I know the formula well, and also to know based on billing whether or not she's going to end up with Don Ameche in the end (here, of course, she doesn't as Power is the headliner).

This basic story work makes the film feel more like a jukebox musical than the more complete productions happening at MGM at the time, which had more centralization on story and grand production numbers.  Most of the songs in the musical are not original to it (we'll get to one of the ones that was in a second), and very few of them are full production numbers with lots of dancers & choreography.  While we do have a few costume changes (most notably "Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil" with Ethel Merman sashaying in a horned headband amid a group of sparkling demons), this is a movie that's really just about the music.  It helps that they hired two actresses who can genuinely sing.  Alice Faye is one of my favorite underrated performers of this era, and she's luminous as ever as Stella, giving her just enough depth and longing to make the paper-thin plot feel fuller, and her voice is a melodic lullaby. Merman, of course, brasses up some of the band's biggest numbers, and while a little bit of Merman can go a long way, it's weird (in a good way) to see her playing such a young figure as most of her most iconic roles (like Mama Rose) come from figures out of their youth.

As a result, your patience for this film is going to be tried by how much you can handle a musical with very little plot or grand choreography, and mostly just focused on some good-time songs.  Mine resides right in the middle, mostly because of my love of Ameche & Faye (I always cheer for them to end up together even though it's more a 50/50 split in their pictures).  The Irving Berlin songs sound great, and are brimming from every corner so you get your money's worth on the Oscar-winning scoring from Alfred Newman.  The original song "Now It Can Be Told" honestly falters amidst so many outright classics, in many ways echoing songs like "I Move On" and "Learn to Be Lonely" in later years where an addition that scores an Oscar nomination can't compete with the classics.  It's pretty, but it's just not special with so many iconic ditties.  The nomination for editing is a weird one, perhaps getting it for so many production numbers in one movie (though, again, it's less the production and more just the singing that stands out there), though the art direction feels more at-home; all of the stages feel like true, distinct  venues rather than just different window dressing, and as a result it genuinely feels like you get a sense of where the band is headed in terms of their theater's stature as the film progresses.

Two last things before we go, both because they struck me as unusual.  We talked yesterday in regard to a different 1938 Best Picture nominee, Four Daughters, how John Garfield's acting style felt weirdly out-of-place compared to the bright-and-bubbly portrayals from the Lane sisters.  Alexander's Ragtime Band has that too from omnipresent character actor John Carradine, here playing an unnamed taxi cab driver.  Carradine is in literally hundreds of movies during this era, so him showing up is not a surprise, but his performance-style is so at-odds with the rest of the movie, particularly dove-eyed Alice Faye, that it feels unusual.  He drives Faye around, and you almost feel like he's about to kidnap her & bring her into a completely different movie.  It's not a bad performance (I quite liked it), but it's so atonal to the film that it feels like this strange interlude in the picture where you think it might turn sinister (it doesn't help matters that one of Carradine's most iconic roles is playing Count Dracula in this regard).  I couldn't leave without at least mentioning this bizarre late-act swing in an otherwise conventional movie.

The last thing was a dumbstruck moment for me personally.  One of the songs that is sung in the song is "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," which is a Berlin number performed by Jack Haley in the movie.  I know this song very well, but had no idea until watching it this past weekend that it had been written by Irving Berlin...I honestly thought it had been written by my dad.  My dad, when I was a kid, would make up little songs to sing to my brother & I, and one of the songs that I remember most was him singing a (slightly different lyrics, but the same exact tune) version of this number to us when he was waking us up in the morning in lieu of an alarm clock.  I had no idea until I was literally watching this movie that this was not, in fact, one of his made up songs, which I found hysterical as a man in his mid-30's, apparently somehow believing his father is Irving Berlin.

Nightmare Alley (1947)

Film: Nightmare Alley (1947)
Stars: Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker, Ian Keith
Director: Edmund Goulding
Oscar History: No nominations
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.

I want to admit right now two things about this series-I did not watch these movies in chronological order, and that I frequently refer to movies on this list as "surprisingly bleak."  While I'd always been a connoisseur of film noir, as it'd been my favorite genre, going into some of the "deeper cut" classics that have littered throughout this month, I came to realize that the lower budget you got, the more likely that it would turn into a film like Detour, so black that there's no redemption for the main characters.  Which made Nightmare Alley a surprise for me.  Nightmare Alley had a proper budget, rare for a film of the era, and had legitimate, established stars like Tyrone Power & Joan Blondell in the leads.  The film was a flop at the time, perhaps because it is exceedingly grim (with one more film to go in my screenings, it's by far the grimmest of all of the movies we'll profile this month), which makes its rescue from critics all the more remarkable.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Stan Carlisle (Power), a man who serves as a carnival barker, and must be a recent hire as he's fascinated by everything at the carnival, particularly the act between a husband and wife team of Zeena (Blondell) and Pete (Keith), as well as an unseen "Geek" who serves an almost inhuman lifestyle, taking hits of booze or drugs as payment for opening the freak act, biting the heads off of live chickens.  Stan wonders how a man could stoop to such a level, foreshadowing that could have been less clunky in my opinion.  Stan accidentally kills Pete, who is an alcoholic by switching his moonshine with wood alcohol, and takes over in the mind-reading act with Zeena, also romancing her.  He's more interested in the younger Molly (Gray, an actress who went to my alma mater!) and marries her after he's caught having sex with her (it's just kissing in Nightmare Alley, but we know what's up).  Eventually he recasts Zeena with Molly in their act and starts performing night club events, teaming up with a corrupt psychiatrist Lilith Ritter (Walker), who makes a tape of him confessing to guilt over Pete's death behind his back.  Lilith & Stan team up, using the secret tapings Lilith makes of all of her wealthiest clients to convince Stan he can speak with the dead, and it almost works until Molly confesses to one of the clients that she is not his dead lover (he sees her as a spirit from a long distance), ruining Stan's plan, and Lilith runs off with all of the money Stan has by blackmailing him, saying she'll say he's mentally disturbed if he tries to take the money. Molly returns to the circus, and Stan, ruined, turns to alcohol, becoming such an addict that he has to, you guessed it, become a "geek" in the same carnival.

The movie ends differently than the novel by William Lindsay Gresham, where Stan is clearly doomed to drink himself to death as a geek.  Here, Stan is reunited with Molly, though it might end up being the same finale, and honestly worse for her as it echoes the enabling relationship between Zeena & Pete from the beginning of the movie.  Stan is destined to die a terrible death, at best emulating Pete as he'll clearly never recover, and in the process Molly's dreams are dashed (since she'll give up her youth taking care of a ruined man rather than trying to find a nice, capable guy to settle down with).  This sort of bleakness is shocking, especially against the moral nastiness displayed by pretty much everyone other than Molly in this film.

Blondell's Zeena ultimately cares for her husband, but is punished for straying into the arms of the handsome Stan (even though he's a sneaky, eventually drunk con man, he still looks like Tyrone Power so you can't really blame a girl) by having him die & her getting screwed out of their code.  Best of all, though, is Walker's Lilith.  Walker gives her a hardened femme fatale, someone who is smarter than Stan even though he doesn't realize it (and quite frankly neither does the audience at first), and who in a rare circumstance gets away with her crimes.  She packs up with the cash, selling out her profession and perhaps her soul, but she doesn't die or get anything other than the easy life after bilking the precious memories of her rich clients.  I'm struggling to think of a character this morally bankrupt in this era that pretty much gets away with everything, and I can't.  I don't know how this didn't run afoul of the Hays Code, but it might be the best corollary I've ever seen of what would eventually become a staple of neo-noir: the victorious villain.

Previous Films in the Series: Ride the Pink Horse, The Killers, The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep

OVP: Blood and Sand (1941)

Film: Blood and Sand (1941)
Stars: Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Rita Hayworth, Alla Nazimova, Anthony Quinn, J. Carrol Naish, Lynn Bari, John Carradine, Laird Cregar
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Cinematography-Color*, Best Art Direction)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Linda Darnell-click here to learn more about Ms. Darnell (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we spoke through in the kickoff to Linda Darnell month, Ms. Darnell's career essentially had two acts, one from 1940-43 where she was instantly praised for her unrivaled beauty and given little else to do in films but be ravenous, and then after a hiatus that nearly ended her career, she reclaimed her throne as a matinee idol in the late 1940's when she was given significantly better parts in pictures like Fallen Angel and A Letter to Three Wives before her personal demons made it impossible for any future comebacks.  Due to these gaps, I decided to spread our month into two halves as well, with our first two pictures coming from the fledgling years of Darnell's career, and the final two from after she mounted a comeback.  This week we take a look at another pairing of Darnell with Tyrone Power (whom we saw her with in The Mark of Zorro last Saturday), their final onscreen pairing after four successful pictures, and also a movie with her starring opposite one of the biggest icons of the 1940's, who at that point wasn't famous enough yet to get billing over Darnell, but would soon eclipse her career in pretty much every way imaginable: Rita Hayworth.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is unique in its subject matter in a lot of ways, as it's the rare giant epic that also is clearly a message picture.  We follow Juan Gallardo (Power) from his years as a young child, defending his slain father who was once the greatest bullfighter in Spain.  As he ages, a cocky Juan Gallardo learns to in fact take his father's place, and subsumes him in the national consciousness as one of the greatest matadors of his era.  The movie counters this rise with Juan Gallardo's interactions with women, including his housemaid mother (Nazimova) and bratty sister (Bari, always playing the villainous role, and with three films now in our Saturdays with the Stars series, the unofficial "Forgotten Star" on a series about "forgotten stars" as she won't be getting her own month but probably should have at this point).  He also has two major romantic pursuits Carmen (Darnell), a pious woman whom he marries and has loved since they were children, and Dona Sol (Hayworth), a gorgeous heiress who seems to bounce from man-to-man and has a thing for matadors.

The film is really Power's, and probably shouldn't have been included in this series though technically he shares above-the-line billing with Darnell in virtually every poster I could find.  It was an important picture for both, a huge hit and one that kept them at the top of matinee screens for a few more years, but Power owns the picture in terms of screentime, and Darnell is given little to do.  Even in the ending of the movie, when Power's character dies in a surprisingly solemn finale (we see Anthony Quinn as the next successor to Juan Gallardo, certain to also die at the hands of a bull the same way his former friend did), Carmen has little to do but mourn and weep, and while some would argue that playing a pious woman was a nice change of pace compared to the latter aspects of Darnell's career, it's hard to think of this as her picture, and quite frankly it's not even banking that much on her looks, which was Darnell's complaint at the time.  Certainly when you compare her to Hayworth, given a seedier role but landing it with much more aplomb and glamour.  Hayworth, the superior actress, steals the movie in every conceivable way, and was clearly destined for stardom.  A few months later she'd appear in the massively successful You'll Never Get Rich with Fred Astaire, and wouldn't be relegated to third billing in a movie again for two decades.

The movie received a pair of well-earned Academy Award nominations that year, neither of which were reliant on the staid acting and repetitive screenwriting (though like I said-strong ending).  The cinematography is gorgeous-shot in Technicolor, the bullfight scenes gave me chills and though shot at wide angle (there's no plausible way you'd assume Power was actually onscreen with the dangerous bulls), it works brilliantly.  The love scenes are lensed compellingly, great melodramatic stuff, and honestly even the gaudy touches work with the film.  The same could be said for the art direction-it's terrific to watch all of the stadiums recreated, and you don't really feel like you're on a Hollywood sound stage even when you are.  It's obvious that Blood and Sand was borrowed by other epic directors years later, as the giant, expansive sets of the 1940's/50's are borrowing from this film as much as early DeMille, so there's clear influence going on here, and I loved the cavernous effect they occasionally make to imply Juan Gallardo's life is empty.  Technically the film is very impressive (sound work's great too), but aside from Hayworth the substance of the film is weirdly lacking.

OVP: The Mark of Zorro (1940)

Film: The Mark of Zorro (1940)
Stars: Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Basil Rathbone, Gale Sondergaard, J. Edward Bromberg
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Linda Darnell-click here to learn more about Ms. Darnell (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The career of Linda Darnell can be broken up into two parts, largely before-and-after her work in Fallen Angel, which we profiled last week as the final starring role in the career of Alice Faye.  We’ll also split our series about Darnell into two parts, with a pair of films from the first half of her career pre-Fallen Angel, and then two post Fallen Angel when her career as a proper leading woman (rather than just “the love interest”) took off, with her landing critically-lauded and more important pictures before her career derailed permanently in the early 1950’s.  This week, we will profile her work with her most famous costar, Tyrone Power, in a massive hit for FOX that was seen at the time as a reaction to Warner Brothers success with The Adventures of Robin Hood.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film tells the story of Don Diego Vega (Power), a wealthy young man who returns to California from Spain to find that his father is no longer in charge of Los Angeles, and instead he is being backed by a corrupt mayor (Bromberg), whose true muscle in office is the cruel Captain Esteban (Rathbone).  Don Diego comes across as a dandy (and quite frankly, there’s a LOT of coded language implying that he’s pretending to be gay), but it’s all an act-he’s actually Zorro, the masked bandit who steals from the rich and gives back to the poor. Zorro comes across a beautiful woman Lolita (Darnell), who at first is disgusted by Don Diego even though she’s smitten with Zorro, and then eventually falls for them both, realizing they are one in the same.  Don Diego fights Esteban to the death toward the end of the film, sending the corrupt mayor back to Spain & getting the girl while saving the city, a fitting & quick ending to a surprisingly brisk film.

The movie is a remake of a Douglas Fairbanks picture from 1920, and you can kind of see the lines from the Silent Era into the sound.  The most thrilling aspects of the movie are all action that could have worked without dialogue, with my favorite being an incredible jump from a bridge where Zorro, mounted on a horse, jumps into a real river and somehow stays atop the animal (it’s hard to imagine anyone, much less Power, doing this stunt in the era before CGI).  However, the movie’s actual scripted parts fall flat, even with Bromberg & character actress Gale Sondergaard as his horny-for-Power wife providing some comic relief.  Even the Oscar-nominated score fails to impress, frequently feeling rather banal & while bouncy, not particularly memorable or in aid to the film itself.

Darnell’s major complaint about her earliest starring films was that she didn’t have anything to do except look beautiful…this feels like a pretty valid criticism of The Mark of Zorro.  Darnell’s performance here is nothing above ordinary, with her looking beautiful but given little to do except be commented upon.  There’s a scene where she’s talking with Zorro dressed as a monk (she doesn’t know it’s Zorro or Don Diego at this point), and she seems stunned that someone thinks she’s pretty since she’s only ever heard that from her maid, which feels vaguely absurd as she clearly has access to a mirror.  Power is considerably better, dashing and funny and occasionally a bit more camp than you’d expect a film to be self-aware enough to achieve in 1940. This is the third of the four films I’m profiling of Darnell’s that I’ll be seeing this month, so I know she’s capable of more, and it’s a pity she’s mostly an ornament for Zorro to win here rather than adding much else to the picture.

OVP: In Old Chicago (1937)

Film: In Old Chicago (1937)
Stars: Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Alice Brady, Andy Devine
Director: Henry King
Oscar History: 6 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Supporting Actress-Alice Brady*, Score, Sound, Original Story, Assistant Director*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Alice Faye-click here to learn more about Ms. Faye (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Alice Faye's career trajectory is odd because rather than having a nice curve, it just sort of stops in 1944, when Faye walked off the FOX lot and never returned despite being a proper star still.  However, the beginning is much more traditional, and after making a splash in George White's 1935 Scandals (which is not available on any streaming platforms #iwilldieonthissoapbox), she cemented her stardom with In Old Chicago, which purportedly was being considered for Jean Harlow before her untimely death at the age of 26.  This film, which teamed her with Don Ameche and Tyrone Power (by far her two most frequent costars), was considered one of the most expensive films of the era, thanks to its gargantuan recreation of the Great Chicago Fire, and was nominated for six Academy Awards, winning two including Best Supporting Actress for Alice Brady.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place in three parts.  There is the opening scene, an odd one where the O'Leary family is idiotically racing a train, and then suddenly Mr. O'Leary dies leaving Mrs. O'Leary (Brady) to raise her three sons as a washerwoman, the eldest of two are Dion (as an adult played by Power) and Jack (as an adult played by Ameche).  As adults, these two men have pursued completely different life courses, with Jack a respectable (if frequently unsuccessful lawyer) and Dion a sneaky saloon owner & gambler, who is in love with a singer named Belle (Faye), whom his mother forbids him from marrying.  Eventually, in hopes of eliminating his competition who once humiliated him, Dion tricks his brother into running for mayor, and thanks to some dirty blackmailing of the police commissioner on Dion's behalf, he wins.  The film then routinely pits Dion and Jack against each other, with Dion going to extraordinary lengths to hurt the bond with his brother, even at one point tricking Belle into marrying him so that she can't testify against him.  All of this comes to a head in the final twenty minutes of the movie, where Mrs. O'Leary's cow (a legend in real life, but not here apparently) kicks a lantern and burns the city to the ground.  In the fire, Jack dies and Dion finds redemption, with Mrs. O'Leary forgiving Belle for, well, being a singer & approves of their union.

There's a lot to unpack with In Old Chicago, and I'm going to start with two of the biggest issues I had with the film: Tyrone Power's character is an awful human being, and Alice Brady's Mrs. O'Leary is a horrible cliche.  Dion has multiple moments of duplicity, but when he starts turning it onto his brother Jack (who is a genuinely good guy and should be our hero) and his feisty love interest Belle, it ruins my idea of him ever getting redemption.  Let's be real here-Jack ends up dying trying to save his brother, who wouldn't have needed saving if Dion hadn't sent the mob to try and kill Jack in the first place (even though Jack was just following the law).  Jack also basically tries to rape Belle in the beginning of their romance, which in the 1930's was a more common cinematic trope than you'd think (just watch literally any Errol Flynn movie), and then spends the rest of the movie emotionally abusing her, using her love for his own gain, and also assaults her again halfway through the movie.  There's a recurring "gag" where Belle's maid Hattie (played by Madame Sul-Te-Wan) runs to the police to arrest Dion, to just have the two be kissing when she returns.  Basically the joke is that Tyrone Power is so ludicrously handsome that no woman would possibly turn down sex with him.  I'm all for adjusting to the time period when you consider a movie, but this felt gross even by the standards of 1937 (technically 1938, but we use the years they were nominated for Oscars on this blog).

(Side Note-do yourself a favor right now and google Madame Sul-Te-Wan, who I knew nothing about before seeing this film, but realized afterwards that I had seen her in more pictures than I had Faye.  She was the first black person ever put under a contract in Hollywood, was the daughter of slaves, and had a career that spread from The Birth of a Nation to Carmen Jones, costarring alongside stars as famous as Jane Wyman, Barbara Stanwyck, Lucille Ball, & Veronica Lake at different points in her career.  She'd make a fascinating biopic if anyone would like to think outside of the box.)

Brady, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily have a lot of problematic aspects to her performance, but she's soooo hammy it's kind of hilarious she won an Oscar for such a character.  Her Mrs. O'Leary is pious, constantly finding the problems with her child but treating her husband as a saint, even though in our brief time with him he seems kind of like an idiot.  She feels like the sort of one-dimensional work that was popular in the era, but that style of acting is completely out-of-style today.  That she won an Oscar for such work feels odd, and considering how inconsequential she is to the plot, her story arch is a bit of a stretch.  The film received a sextet of nominations, the others slightly more earned.  The score is serviceable, interesting during the firefighting sequences, while the sound is excellent thanks to the action set-pieces.  The story itself is a bit too hammy and requires too many suspensions-of-belief for my taste, particularly when you compare it to the fantastic A Star is Born that was competing against it.

But the Best Picture nomination lands right in the middle for me, and that's because while Power & Brady are both disappointments in the film, the movie has two great assets: that final fire sequence and Alice Faye.  The fire sequence is mesmerizing, and staggering considering they had no access to CGI at the time.  I'm honestly surprised that this didn't win Best Picture at the time as a result of these scenes, which required controlled sets, and were so dangerous that women (save the three female stars) weren't allowed on set.  These scenes are really interesting, and fascinating to watch staged, and part of the reason I had to give this a 3-star even though it had so many problems.

The other is Alice Faye-I loved her in this movie.  She has a natural comedienne's gift, finding the perfect chemistry with both Power & Ameche, and still grounding her character without making her a saint or a woman scorned.  She manages to realize her love for Dion doesn't make sense, but she still leans into it, and her singing is great.  In many ways she feels like a hybrid between Jeanette MacDonald & Barbara Stanwyck, and I instantly understand how this movie made her a star.  Considering I'd never seen one of her films before, I'm really hoping that this is an indication that we're in for a fun month.