WING AND A PRAYER (1944)

My own preferences in WWII movies are either homefront narratives or the propaganda-laden movies from early in the war (set both at home and overseas). But this combat film from later in the war, set entirely on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, is entertaining and interesting. The movie presents itself as a true story, though it seems to be, at best, a composite of several different possible real-life scenarios. As the U.S. public, months after Pearl Harbor, waits and wonders why the Navy hasn't retaliated against the Japanese in the Pacific, the men on one carrier are even more frustrated when they get orders *not* to engage the Japanese in the air, no matter what. It turns out that ship is a decoy, being sent from place to place in the South Pacific to make the enemy think that the American fleet is weak, scattered, and disorganized, while the Navy is actually building up for the battle of Midway. Don Ameche is the commander of the ship and Dana Andrews is the leader of the pilots. There are occasional clashes between men, often due to movie star turned flyboy William Eythe, but by and large, the cliches of the "men in wartime" movies are avoided (or, perhaps, just hadn't been established yet). One kid, Kevin O'Shea (who made 3 movies in 1944, then seems to have left the business) is grounded due to health problems both physical and mental, but gets a chance to redeem himself in the end. Richard Jaekel, Henry Morgan, and Glenn Langan (more well known as THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN in the late 50's) are in the cast; Cedric Hardwicke has a small role in the beginning as an admiral. There's a scene in which the men watch a clip of Betty Grable from TIN PAN ALLEY. The climactic battle, when they are finally allowed to retaliate, is presented mostly over the radio, broadcast throughout the ship. Some authentic carrier footage adds to the atmophere. Quite good--a notch above the average, at least--and Ameche is especially fine playing a bit against type as the stoic commander.

DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY (1934)

The first half of this movie and the last few minutes are quite good, but most of the middle is deadly dull, making this not quite the classic that its reputation would suggest. It's based on a play, though it works best when it's opened up beyond its stagy and melodramatic roots. Sir Guy Standing is a duke who is holding a weekend house party for a visiting dignitary, Prince Sirki; as the film opens, the prince hasn't arrived yet and two cars full of arriving guests, racing their way through the night, feel a mysterious shadow pass over them just before an accident in which, miraculously, no one is hurt. Later, in the best scene in the film, Death, as a dark-robed Grim Reaper figure, visits the Duke. As the title suggests, Death has decided to take a holiday among the living to find out why he is so feared. Prince Sirki has died and Death takes his form (Fredric March). He is appropriately ill at ease at first in human interaction, but soon warms to the guests, especially Grazia (Evelyn Venable). Two other women, Katharine Alexander and Gail Patrick, set their sights on the prince, but it is Venable who is mesmerized by him without understanding why. At the end of his holiday, the question is, will March take Venable with him as he returns to the infinite. The sets are beautiful and the photography is striking, especially in the first half hour when shadows are used quite well. The romance plot feels like DRACULA in mood, with the death-obsessed woman fascinated by a charming but deadly male. The special effects used for Death's first appearance are great, making Death a paradoxical figure of both dark solidity and transparency. Henry Travers, more famous as the supernatural Clarence in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, plays a house guest. Kent Taylor plays Venable's boyfriend, who really doesn't stand much of a chance against the mysterious prince. Despite the doldrums of the middle, the film is worth seeing, and is available (though currently out of print) on DVD in a package with the recent Brad Pitt remake, MEET JOE BLACK.

A CONNECTICUT YANKEE (1931)

My *second* Will Rogers movie, and more fun than JUDGE PRIEST. I find Mark Twain's novel rather heavy-going, but this is a delightful movie. I still don't see Rogers as much of an actor, but when he gets off his dry zingers, he usually hits the mark. He plays the owner of a radio repair shop (and radio station) in a small Connecticut town--we first see him as he introduces a vocal group on the air who sing "Times Are Hard, But So's Your Old Man." On a stormy night, Rogers has to deliver some parts to a creepy mansion; while there, he meets an eccentric group of folks. One young man (Frank Albertson) is dressed up in a suit of armor, chasing a young woman (Maureen O'Sullivan) around the house. Another woman (Myrna Loy) seems to be after both of them. The wacky patriarch (William Farnum) claims to have invented a machine that can tune into sound waves from the past. Soon after Rogers hears what seems to be a message about King Arthur, a suit of armor falls on him. He is knocked out and dreams that he's back in Camelot and the various family members (as in WIZARD OF OZ) are present as well: Farnum is the King, Loy is Morgan Le Fay, etc. Rogers uses his knowledge of future events and technology to become Sir Boss and he introduces telephones, cars, guns, and tanks, and eventually a bomb with which to fight the evil Loy.

The sets and costumes are fine, especially in the creepy old house at the beginning. There are some amusing lines: On arrival, Rogers asks the Camelot citizens, "Canst tellest me where in the helleth I am?" There are jabs at topics such as government, warfare, and business, and Rogers says that advertising is what "makes you spend money you haven't got for things you don't want." (Guess there's nothing new under the sun!) Rogers' best acting is when he uses his foreknowledge of a solar eclipse to appear to be conjuring the eclipse himself. He also gets to lasso a knight during a tourney. Loy and Albertson are good, but O'Sullivan doesn't have much to do. The bitter tone of Twain's finale is carried over here, although the ending, back at the old house where Rogers discovers why everyone was acting strange, is upbeat. Overall, grand fun and highly recommended.

JUDGE PRIEST (1934)

My first Will Rogers movie, though because I saw a very poor quality public domain print of this. I'm not sure I should even be reviewing it. The image was murky and there were several jagged cuts where footage seemed to be missing. Rogers, a beloved folksy humorist, plays a beloved folksy judge in a small town in Kentucky. We get a sense of his everyday life in the casual opening section of the film. Rogers' nephew, played by Tom Brown, comes home with a newly minted law degree. He's in love with Anita Louise, a girl of questionable background, and Brown's mother (Brenda Fowler, who seems to be doing an Edna May Oliver imitation without much success) frowns on the match. Luckily, Rogers is on Brown's side and helps to clear the way for Brown to court Louise. There is a lovely summer evening scene where Rogers recalls his late wife (with one of my favorite songs, "Love's Old Sweet Song," playing in the background). Eventually, the rather unsavory man who fathered Louise (David Landau) is charged with attacking another unsavory man, Frank Melton, and Brown becomes Landau's lawyer. The somewhat incoherent ending dashes any real resolution for a sentimental finale in which a minster invokes love, forgiveness, and the Confederacy, and a "Music Man"-like parade ends the film. Henry B. Walthall and Charley Grapewin are also in the cast. Rogers doesn't seem like much of an actor, coming off like an ameteurish mixture of Andy Griffith and Lionel Barrymore, but I assume this laconic acting style was part and parcel of his overall comic persona. Landau is good, as usual, in creating a mean character you love to hate, though his character is redeemed in the end. There are some cringe-inducing black stereotypes, personified by Stepin Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel, and sadly, McDaniel isn't able to transcend her badly written part as she usually does. Still, an interesting chunk of period Americana.

DANTE'S INFERNO (1935)

A traditional morality tale that runs the gamut from Cecil DeMille (sexy fire and brimstone trappings) to James Cameron (some soapy melodrama right out of TITANIC). Spencer Tracy is a coal shoveler on a ship who has ambitions for a better life. After getting fired, Tracy gets a job at a carnival helping out Henry B. Walthall, the owner of an attraction called Dante's Inferno. Basically, Walthall dresses up in a black robe and in a cheap Hell-like setting, preaches to his customers, but soon Tracy revamps the whole thing into a spectacular recreation of the various circles of Hell and it becomes a big hit. In a few years, he has married Walthall's daughter (Claire Trevor) and is raking in the bucks as the owner of an amusement company. When an inspector tells Tracy that his Inferno is unsafe and needs major repairs, Tracy bribes him to keep quiet; that night, the attraction collapses, killing some visitors and seriously injuring Walthall. At the old man's bedside, Tracy has a vision of Hell that scares him for a time, but does not lead to any substantial change in his character. Trevor lies for Tracy at a court hearing on the accident, then leaves him, taking their son (Scotty Beckett). The Titanic-like climax of the film takes place on the maiden voyage of Tracy's new offshore gambling liner; with Tracy's boy on board, the ship catches fire, causing much panic and putting Beckett in danger. Will this be Tracy's tragedy or redemption? Tracy is fine, as usual, as are Trevor and Walthall, though they aren't given much to do. The real attraction here is the "vision of Hell" sequence, filled with special effects, cool sets, and half-naked sinners writhing in agony. Most of it, or even all of it, consists of footage from an old silent movie, but it is integrated well. Also notable for a brief but impressive appearance by Rita Hayworth (when she was still billed as Rita Cansino) as a fiery dancer on the doomed liner.

SECRET SERVICE OF THE AIR (1939)

A very enjoyable second-feature action film that spawned a brief series starring Ronald Reagan as pilot Brass Bancroft. In this film, he's a commercial cargo pilot with a yen to be a government spy. He gets his chance when an agent on the track of an illegal alien smuggling ring is found dead, dumped out of a plane over a desert, along with several other men. The midair dumping scene is startlingly graphic for a 30's film, though the slow motion involved gives it an artificial feel. James Stephenson is the head of the smuggling ring; John Ridgely is the pilot who sends the men to their deaths. Reagan is recruited for spy work, framed for a crime by the Feds, and put in prison to make contact with a man assumed to be part of the ring. They break out and Reagan gets a job with Stephenson in an attempt to catch the bad guys red-handed. Eddie Foy Jr. does a surprisingly good job in a comic relief sidekick role as a co-pilot. B-movie workhorse John Litel is fine as Reagan's boss. A couple of handsome Warner Brothers B-film stock players, Anthony Averill and Larry Williams, are present; a bland blonde named Ila Rhodes is the leading lady but really only has a small part--romance is, at best, only a secondary concern for Brass Bancroft. The hour-long film plays out like a serial which has been cut down to the bare minimum with good action and fisticuff scenes, but some missing plot points. Good fun for those who don't expect too much.

HITTING A NEW HIGH (1937)

Mediocre RKO musical which established once and for all that opera singer Lily Pons would never be a movie star. Pons plays Suzette, a singer with a pop band headed by boyfriend John Howard (Kittridge in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY). Her dream is to sing opera, but Howard keeps her away from her goal. A promoter, Jack Oakie, has a scheme to help her: he takes her to Africa and passes her off as Oogahunga, a legendary bird girl to be discovered by opera lover Edward Everett Horton. Back in New York she keeps up a double life, singing with Howard and preparing to make her opera debut with Horton's backing. Eric Blore, a clarinet player, sees an opening and makes a public claim to be the bird girl's father. Subterfuge and double crosses abound. I think there was a happy ending for all concerned, but frankly I lost interest in following the convoluted plot. Pons and Oakie both lack charisma; Horton and Blore provide a couple of good moments, and Howard has some potential in the beginning as a romantic leading man, but the movie loses steam quickly. The "fake bird girl" idea isn't bad; perhaps Fred & Ginger could have pulled it off. There is one good song, "Let's Give Love Another Chance," but that's not enough for me to be able to recommend the movie. Directed by Raoul Walsh, who was better with his later tough-guy pictures (THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT, HIGH SIERRA, WHITE HEAT).

AERIAL GUNNER (1943)

A wartime B-picture with mostly squandered potential--MGM or Warners could have done more with it. Chester Morris is "Foxy" Pattis, a lowlife fellow whose former friend (Richard Arlen) has become a district attorney whom Morris holds responsible for his father's death. Arlen enlists in the Army Air Corps and Morris is drafted; naturally, they both wind up at the same flight gunnery school. Morris is in charge of training a group of men including Arlen, Jimmy Lydon as a delicate kid whose father was killed at Pearl Harbor, and Dick Purcell as a guy with a knack for mechanics. The animosity between Morris and Arlen grows, especially when they both vie for Lydon's sister, Lita Ward (not a looker even by B-movie standards). Lydon can't quite cut it in training and dies in an accident during maneuvers. Ward blames Morris and cozies up to Arlen. Finally, in the South Pacific in real combat, after an inspiring speech from the doomed Keith Richards (rather handsome and no relation to the Rolling Stone), the men are put in a situation where one chooses to sacrifice himself for the other. Arlen is awfully stiff and romantically uninspiring. Morris, heading toward middle age, looks good in an Army buzz cut and does a fine job given the limitations of the writing and production--it's too bad he didn't get more soldier roles--although I confess I kept thinking the film would be more interesting with Errol Flynn or Dennis Morgan. Robert Mitchum has a good scene early on as a rival of Morris's.

ZOO IN BUDAPEST (1933)

A whimsical romance, shot in gauzy soft-focus with some nice trimmings along the way but not much substance. Gene Raymond is a zookeeper in Budapest; he's a bit on the youthful eccentric side, always in trouble for punishing folks who don't take the animals seriously, like when he steals a fur from a visiting woman. Loretta Young is an orphan, just turned 18 and about to be forced into work; she's been planning an escape during one of the orphanage's zoo trips and finally her friends talk her into going through with it. Raymond, who has been flirting with her for some time, helps her hide after closing hours. Complicating things for the couple is a child who escapes from his nanny and gets lost in the zoo. Soon a full-scale search for all three is underway and in the last third, the movie becomes sort of an animal disaster film with maurauding tigers threatening our trio, along with a disgruntled co-worker of Raymond's (Paul Fix). Raymond looks the part, all blondness and smiles, and Young is fine, but the whimsey that should be applied with a light touch winds up feeling awfully forced. O. P. Heggie is the zoo director who has some empathy for Raymond; Margaret Hamilton has a couple of lines as the orphanage director's assistant. The cinematography is nice, giving the film a unique fairy tale atmosphere, but the whole thing is too heavy-handed to really succeed.

CHANDU THE MAGICIAN (1932)

This film was the highlight of my October viewing this year. Most critics don't care for it, but I liked it a lot, perhaps because my expectations were low. The movie is not a serial but is structured like one, with lots of fast-moving and episodic cliffhangers. The only real liability is lead actor Edmund Lowe, who is rather stiff and uninspiring. He plays Frank Chandler, an American who has spent years in India studying the way of the Yogi. He is renamed Chandu by his teacher and sent back into the world to deal with the threatening evil of Roxor (Bela Lugosi), who has kidnapped Henry B. Walthall, the maker of a powerful "death ray"--although why a gentle old "good guy" would have spent years inventing a death ray is never explained. Walthall refuses, even under torture, to give Lugosi the last bits of information needed to make the ray operative. The scientist's family comes under attack by Lugosi's henchmen and it's up to Chandu to save the day. He's accompanied by a comic relief sidekick (Herbert Mundin) who is amusing for about five minutes, but soon becomes a real pain in the ass. Along the way, Chandu also meets up with an exotic past lover (Irene Ware) and is saddled with Walthall's son (Nestor Aber) and daughter (Betty Vlasek) who eventually have to be rescued from evil clutches.

There are lots of nifty effects: Chandu can transport his astral self to give the appearance of being in two places at once; he causes Mundin to see a miniature version of himself whenever he starts to get drunk; a stone statue comes to life (quite a startling surprise); a cell floor opens up slowly, threatening the family with a long fall into a pit; Chandu turns guns into snakes (sort of a Charlton Heston-as-Moses thing) and vanishes from his clothes, leaving them standing empty in midair. Lugosi chews the scenery wonderfully; his overacting (entirely appropriate for the supervillain character) helps to compensate for Lowe's blandness. The most spectacular scene is when Lugosi imagines the destruction of New York and London with the death ray. Weldon Hayburn is Abdullah, Lugosi's darkly handsome henchman. Co-director William Cameron Menzies, famous for the production design of THINGS TO COME in 1936, was probably responsible for the interesting look of the film which must have had an impact on the Indiana Jones movies. Atmospheric, fast-paced, and fun. A serial spinoff was done a couple years later with Lugosi as Chandu, which I'm trying to track down.

FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958)

A B-movie sci-fi classic, mostly due to the grotesque title monsters which are invisible until the last 20 minutes or so when they are unleashed in a gory (for its time) and somewhat cheesy climax. In a Canadian village near the U.S. border, people are mysteriously dropping dead with their spinal cords and brains sucked out of them. Some try to blame it on nuclear power experiments at a nearby Air Force base. Marshall Thompson is a major investigating the deaths and Kim Parker is his love interest, a local girl whose brother is gung ho against the Americans. The combination of a woodsy setting, paranoid locals, and a male-female "detective" duo gives the first part of the film an "X-Files" feel. Eventually we discover the culprit is Parker's boss, eccentric Professor Wingate (Kynaston Reeves), who is doing psychic research (we see a copy of a book called "Sibernetics" on his desk!).

It turns out that Reeves, by stealing power from the base, has created "thought creatures" which have gotten out of his control--shades of FORBIDDEN PLANET. When they're invisible, we can hear them as they wrap themselves around a victim's head and slurp away. When they become visible near the end of the film, they look like flying brains with attached spinal cords, or a little like gigantic sperm--shades of ERASERHEAD! The climax, with our heroes trapped in a house while the creatures attack, plays out like a cross between THE BIRDS and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The fiends can be killed with bullets, which leads to a gorefest (albeit in black and white) of split and oozing "brains" all over the place. Terry Kilburn (Tiny Tim from MGM's 1938 CHRISTMAS CAROL) is Thompson's sidekick. The chief engineer at the plant (played, I think, by E. Kerrigan Prescott) comes off like an 80's pop star, with an amazingly flamboyant hairdo. Thompson is a bit wooden, but not bad, and even a little sexy in his scenes with the even more wooden Parker. Nowadays, not all that scary or gory, but interesting as a pre-splatter era relic, and perhaps as an influence on a number of later films.

THE CRIMSON CULT (1968)

One of Boris Karloff's last movies, very loosely based on a Lovecraft story, "Dreams in the Witch House." The opening is set at a Satanic ritual, lit with deep reds and greens, with a man being forced to sign his soul over to the devil. The man is an antiques collector who was spending time in the village of Graymarsh. When he doesn't return home, his brother (Mark Eden) goes looking for him, arriving at the village during a festival commemorating the burning of a local witch hundreds of years ago. The atmosphere is decadence-lite; some of the people in this scene reminded me of the "unconventional conventioneers" in ROCKY HORROR. Eden stays at a lodge run by Christopher Lee; he cozies up to Lee's lovely daughter (Virginia Wetherall) and meets a creepy old professor who is confined to a wheelchair (Boris Karloff). Eden has bad dreams involving Satanic rituals before he discovers what happened to his brother. The climax involves more rituals, Barbara Steele in green body paint, a plump-assed half-naked man squeezed into a bad S&M outfit, and some fire. Despite its bad reputation, this is no worse than the typical Hammer film of the period. You could certainly do worse. Karloff is no longer robust, but he turns in a good performance. Steele has few, if any, lines. Michael Gough is a creepy butler who winds up dead for no discernible reason. Aka THE CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR.

BLUEBEARD (1944)

A nifty little Poverty Row thriller; if not really all that thrilling, at least interesting to watch. John Carradine gives perhaps the best performance of his career as puppeteer Gaston Morrell; living in Paris, he puts on elaborate puppet shows in the public park and does some painting on the side. We discover that he is compelled by some psychological quirk to seek out beautiful women to paint, then kill, dumping their bodies in the Seine. Jean Parker strikes up a friendship with Carradine and eventually figures out his secret, but not before her sister (who has been working with the police as a decoy) becomes his latest victim, and not before she herself winds up in danger. There is an unusual interlude featuring an operatic puppet version of Faust that has nothing to do with the film or its themes, that I could see. Directed by cult figure Edgar G. Ulmer with an expressionistic look and cockeyed camera angles during flashbacks (that reminded me of the way the action scenes in the 60's TV show "Batman" were shot). Nils Asther (on the downcurve of his career) plays the chief inspector; Ludwig Stossel is an art dealer who plays an important role in the plot developments. The background music often feels inappropriate, as though chosen at random from someone's classical music collection. As in many of the sub-B films of the era, the writing is shoddy and underdeveloped, but the look and feel of the movie make it watchable. Carradine, who certainly chewed the scenery in many of his supporting roles in big studio films, is the soul of discretion here, never overplaying a part that could have easily gone over-the-top. Often categorized as a horror film, but more a mood piece.

EARTHBOUND (1940)

In his film guide, Leslie Halliwell calls this "Topper without laughs," and I couldn't describe it better. Warner Baxter is a businessman who is vacationing with his wife (Andrea Leeds) in the mountains. He is called back to town by his trusted assistant (Henry Wilcoxon) to take care of an important matter, but it turns out that Wilcoxon's wife (Lynn Bari), an old flame of Baxter's, forged the telegram. She wants to leave Wilcoxon and rekindle their affair. Baxter turns her down and she shoots him dead in his apartment. Wilcoxon, who comes upon the scene, takes the blame and stands trial, but Baxter's restless ghost (who doesn't realize right away that he's actually dead) tries to influence the proceedings so that justice is done. Charley Grapewin is a ghostly angel figure who carries a Bible and serves as a (not terribly helpful) guide to Baxter, who comes to realize that he is now "a dead man haunted by the living," a theme which has been explored by recent films like THE SIXTH SENSE and THE OTHERS. The ghost effects are pretty good, though Baxter is rather wooden and perhaps just a bit long in the tooth to be fought over with such passion by two lovely young women. Also with Elizabeth Patterson and Ian Wolfe. Interesting, mostly because it doesn't seem to be very well known; it would have been a better movie if the Wilcoxon and Grapewin characters had been more fleshed out. A remake of a 1920 silent film. Fox Movie Channel is showing it this month.

MURDERS IN THE ZOO (1933)

This thriller, top heavy with comic relief, is often categorized alongside the classic horror films of the 30's, but there's nothing supernatural here and, once you get past the first two minutes, there's not much that's truly creepy. In the famous first scene, we see big game hunter Lionel Atwill in a jungle, sewing shut the lips of a young man whom Atwill suspects of flirting with his wife (Kathleen Burke) and leaving him to the tender mercies of the wild animals. The shot of the victim running directly at the camera, wide-eyed and trying to scream, is truly shocking and surprisingly graphic--the scene would almost certainly never have been allowed under the Production Code of two years later. But soon the movie settles down into a fairly run-of-the-mill suspense story, set at an American zoo where Atwill is a major benefactor. His wife strikes up a casual relationship with handsome John Lodge (later the studly Count Alexei in THE SCARLET EMPRESS). When Atwill finds out, it's clear Lodge will be the next to die--and he is, apparently bitten by a black mambo snake at a fancy catered dinner at the zoo. But why can no one find that pesky snake? Charlie Ruggles, as the zoo's alcoholic PR director, finds his job hanging in the balance unless the killer is caught. I normally like Ruggles, but here, his comic relief completely drains the picture of the tension that Atwill and the director A. Edward Sutherland work so hard to achieve. Randolph Scott and Gail Patrick are the romantic leads, and ultimately instrumental in capturing Atwill, but not before he strikes one more time. This is not a bad movie at all, but if you go into it expecting it to be the equal of any of the Universal classics of the era, you'll be disappointed.

SCREAM OF FEAR (1961)

This unsung B-thriller, also known as TASTE OF FEAR, is surprisingly entertaining. It doesn't take long to realize that the story has its roots in the French classic DIABOLIQUE, but that doesn't spoil enjoyment of the film. Susan Stasberg is a wheelchair-bound woman visiting her father, whom she hasn't seen in years. He lives on the French Rivera with his second wife (Ann Todd) whom Strasberg has never met. When she arrives, the father is off on a business trip and Todd welcomes her warmly. That night, Strasberg sees what seems to be the dead body of her father seated in a sun room. Over the next few days, more sightings occur until Strasberg begins to fear that either her father really is dead, or that she is losing her sanity. Other characters include a town doctor (Chistopher Lee) and a handsome chauffer (Ronald Lewis) who both seem to be trying to help Strasberg find her father (but who is really helping and who is really hindering?). The "Diabolique" twist occurs, but the movie has a couple more tricks up its sleeve, one of which I definitely did not see coming. The movie has a nice black and white look and the house is pretty cool, set around an outdoor courtyard. We get to see the hunky Lewis in a very skimpy bathing suit (oh, those randy Riverians!). It's a Hammer film, but doesn't feel or look at all like one. Well worth seeing, twice if possible. BTW, neither title makes any particular sense.

THE WALKING DEAD (1936)

Warner Brothers largely sat out the horror trend of the 30's but this one makes me wish they had done a few more. It's part gangster movie, part horror thriller, with a dash of grim spirituality. Ricardo Cortez is a lawyer, and the ringleader of a gang of well-heeled gangsters who issue an anonymous death threat against a judge if he rules against a gang member. The judge finds the defendent guilty and the gang murders the judge, pinning the crime on ex-con Boris Karloff, a hulking and simple-minded but gentle man. Just before Karloff's execution, a couple of witnesses (Marguerite Churchill & Warren Hull) finally come forward, but Cortez fixes it so the news doesn't reach the authorities until just after the switch has been pulled on Karloff. However, Churchill's boss, Edmund Gwenn, a doctor, uses the experimental Lindbergh Heart to resuscitate Karloff. He returns to life with almost no memories but he does seem to have a mission: to bring the real killers to justice. One by one, he visits the gang members and, though never directly killing them, does bring about their deaths.

Karloff, with his shorn hair, looks younger than I've ever seen him. There are many references to his role as the monster in FRANKENSTEIN, including his electrified revival in a lab; Gwenn echoing Colin Clive's "It's alive!"; and an Elsa Lanchester white streak in Karloff's hair when he is reanimated. Karloff's execution is shot well, with a single cello player seated in the shadows and playing at Karloff's request as he heads to the chair. A later scene, of Karloff playing piano to a roomful of invited guests including the gang members, is also effective. The young lovers (Churchill & Hull) seem especially callow here, with little reason given for their refusal to speak up on Karloff's behalf, and no reason at all given for their later decision to do so. Cortez is good, as is Gwenn in a limited role, but Karloff is excellent, with his truly creepy faraway trance-like stare after his revival. Gwenn wishes that Karloff could tell more about the afterlife, and the possibility is presented that Karloff is actually on a mission from God, or whatever is on the other side. Short, atmospheric, and unique.

CALLING PHILO VANCE (1940)

A B-movie remake of 1933's THE KENNEL MURDER CASE with the addition of wartime spies. The nifty opening sequence, set in Vienna, seems to promise an atmospheric spy thriller, but after the first ten minutes, the movie settles down to a more typical B-budget locked-room mystery. Philo Vance (James Stephenson) has been overseas trying to find out if American aircraft secrets are being sold to foreign governments, but he is caught and deported. Back in the U. S., the man with the aircraft secrets is murdered, apparently while locked in his windowless room. Vance investigates, and more murder and mayhem occur. Margot Stevenson is Hilda, a relative of the dead man. A dissipated looking Ralph Forbes and the sinister looking Martin Kosleck are suspects. There is a dog named Baron Munchausen and Vance has a terrier named McTavish who acts a lot like Lassie. The scenes where Vance is working out what happened, shot from the point of view of the killer, are well done, but overall the movie doesn't rise above its budget. Edward Brophy is OK as the requisite bumbling cop, but Margot Stevenson is terrible; she went on to do a few more movies in 1940, then basically left the business. James Stephenson, so good as Bette Davis' lawyer in THE LETTER, was fine in the title role, but his untimely death the next year halted any plans for a series.

MAD LOVE (1935)

The rare MGM horror film that can be ranked with the best of the Universal horror films of the period. An atmospheric visual treat directed by Karl Freund (who, for Universal, directed THE MUMMY and was director of cinematography for DRACULA). Peter Lorre gives one of his best performances as Dr. Gogol, a surgeon with an obsession for Frances Drake, a performer at the Theatre of Horrors (inspired by the real life Grand Guignol). Lorre's a regular, watching from his box, and when Drake announces her retirement to spend more time with her husband, pianist Colin Clive, Lorre buys a wax statue of Drake that the theatre was going to melt down, and puts it in his chamber. An early scene of Lorre watching, with growing sadistic pleasure, Drake being tortured onstage, is quite creepy. Clive, a bit of a neurotic, as he is in most of his pictures, is in a train wreck; his hands are destroyed and Lorre amputates them, attaching the hands of an executed killer (Edward Brophy, normally known for his comic cops or thugs) who was handy with knives. Clive doesn't know his hands aren't *his* anymore, but he does notice that, while he can no longer play piano, he does seem to have a new fondness for knives and begins to think he's going insane.

The real story here isn't that of the pianist with the transplanted hands, but of the obsessed doctor, who hatches a plan to hasten Clive's insanity, hoping to get Drake by default. There are two spectacular scenes in the last half: one has Clive meeting a person he thinks is the beheaded knife killer come back to life, with a strapped-on head and robot-like hands; the climax has Drake in Lorre's rooms, breaking the stature of herself and standing in for it when Lorre returns. The shadowy sets are expressionistic, as in CALIGARI, and there's a lot of play with mirrors. A scene of a cockatoo flying (more or less) directly at the camera may have inspired a similar shot in CITIZEN KANE (Gregg Toland was a cinematographer for both films). There is some blah comic relief from Ted Healy that does not intrude on the somber mood too much. Keye Luke (one of Charlie Chan's sons) is Lorre's assistant. May Beatty has a couple of good moments as Lorre's addled maid who keeps the cockatoo on her shoulder. Drake looks good but is rather bland, but it's all Lorre's show, aided by Freund and Toland. Well worth checking out.

FAUST (1926)

F. W. Murnau's silent classic, based on a legendary tale made famous by Goethe, has some stunning fantasy/horror effects in the beginning, but it soon settles down into a rather humdrum romantic melodrama. The devil, Mephisto (Emil Jannings), and an archangel (Werner Fuetterer) are debating the nature of man and wind up making a bet: if Mephisto can corrupt the human Faust (Gosta Ekman), than the devil can have Faust and all of mankind. The devil descends onto a village, his bat-wing cloak enveloping the entire town, in a very spooky scene that must have influenced Disney's animators when they were concocting the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence of FANTASIA. He brings the plague with him and Faust, a doctor, is overwhelmed by the horror and calls on the devil to help him. Mephisto gives Faust his youth back; Faust has an affair with the world's most beautiful woman (Hanna Ralph) and falls in love with the virginal Gretchen (Camilla Horn). In the meantime, the devil, now in a younger form as well, romances Gretchen's mother and aunt. Soon Faust sleeps with Gretchen; he is run out of town and she, pregnant without benefit of marriage, is put in the town stocks as punishment for her transgression. After she has her child, she is turned away by all the townspeople during a mighty snowstorm. She hallucinates a cradle in the snow and puts her baby in it; when the baby dies, she is condemned as a murderer and sentenced to die at the stake, setting the stage for Faust's attempt at redemption.

The visuals, in the areas of both effects and settings, are wonderous throughout. The conjuring of the devil at a crossroads, the devil's cloak scene, the flight of Faust and the devil around the world, and the burning of the words of the devil's contract into parchment are all carried off quite well. The younger Mephisto looks a bit like comic actor Eddie Izzard, and his reactions of nausea to the mass and to holy icons are amusing. Once Gretchen enters the scene, the movie slows down, but it does pick up a bit at the end. It is difficult for me to judge silent era acting, but everyone does a fine job, not seeming too overblown by today's standards. Generally, I would recommend this, especially for nighttime October viewing.

BOWERY AT MIDNIGHT (1942)

A par-for-the-course Monogram thriller, not the worst of the sub-B films of the era, but not the best. Bela Lugosi plays a professor of criminal psychology who seems to have a decent reputation as a scholar; by night, using a different identity, he runs a charity mission in the Bowery that is actually a front for a crime ring. So Lugosi is playing one man with two names and three personas! The gang commits hold-ups but usually leaves a gang member or relatively unwitting confederate dead at the scene. Wanda McKay (quite colorless and charmless) is a young woman who works at the mission; John Archer plays the oldest college student in Christendom, a rich boy who is in Lugosi's class and happens to know McKay. He decides to go to the mission to do research on the psychology of the homeless and discovers Lugosi's secret. He is killed for his troubles, but in an incredibly underdeveloped plot thread, it turns out that Lew Kelly, an accomplice of Lugosi's, can bring the dead back to life as zombies, whom he keeps in a secret cellar room. Cop Dave O'Brien (who may be familiar from the Pete Smith comedy shorts) manages to break the ring up and, apparently, the zombies are all brought back from death to normal life. Lugosi is OK, but Tom Neal (B-movie star known primarily for his lead role in DETOUR a few years later) is actually quite good as a thug in a performance that wouldn't have been out of place in a better grade Warners crime film. An amusing line spoken to a guy with a gun: "Don't get gay just because you're handy with a heater!" Bernard Gorcey (father of Bowery Boy Leo Gorcey) plays a shopkeeper--and there's a Bowery Boys movie poster visible in one scene. The movie's plot has potential, but it's mostly wasted by sloppy writing and drab production values; the only real atmosphere the film has is due to Lugosi's scenery-chewing, and the zombies' occasional wanderings.

THE BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW (1970)

In 17th century England, a farmer (Barry Andrews) is plowing a field when he uncovers a buried skull (with fur and a still-fresh eyeball in it). This news sweeps the countryside and apparently leads a rebellious group of adolescents, led by a lovely young woman named Angel (Linda Hayden), to begin worshipping the devil. A number of people wind up with patches of fur in strange places on their bodies, and in a plot development that wasn't terribly clear to me, the group of teenagers hunt these people down, cut the skin off, and uses these pieces to create a living Satan figure (or, perhaps, a resurrection or reanimation of the devil, if one believes that the skull belonged to the original Satan). Many townsfolk wind up deformed or dead. There is some gore and some nudity along the way (including a fairly powerful rape scene) to a silly climax wherein a judge (Patrick Wymark) who has not been very sympathetic for most of the film, turns good guy and slays the Beast with a sword. Not a very powerful Satan, I guess, more a secondary demon than The Devil. Overall, the film is too incoherent to be truly scary or much fun, though there are a few atmospheric moments. There are lots of shaggy-haired 70's-looking actors and a lot of drab exterior shooting. It's also been known as SATAN'S SKIN, which is a somewhat more accurate title.

THE LODGER (1944)

It's October again and time to focus on horror and sci-fi films. This one is a real classic. Actually, it's one of two classics that director John Brahm did with actor Laird Cregar (the other, HANGOVER SQUARE, I hope to review later this month). Based on a well-known pulp thriller from 1913, this is a fictionalized story of Jack the Ripper. During the height of the Ripper's reign of terror, Cregar, a mysterious doctor who specializes in pathology, comes to lodge at a respectable house run by husband and wife Cedric Hardwicke and Sara Allgood (with lovely daughter Merle Oberon also living there). Slowly, we (along with Hardwicke and Allgood) come to suspect that Cregar may be the Ripper. At first, Cregar, who carries around an ominous black bag and conducts odd experiments in the attic, falls under some suspicion but the family trusts him and he begins to form an attachment to Oberon, a dance hall girl on the verge of bigger things. She seems to genuinely like Cregar as a friend, but is dallying with George Sanders, a Scotland Yard inspector who is on the Ripper's trail. Is Cregar the infamous killer, and is Oberon in trouble? Or is he a red herring? The spooky atmosphere, with lots of shadows and fog, is kept up throughout, along with many interesting stylistic touches, like shots framed by doors, or up and down stairs; a mirror motif is present as well, with one particularly creepy scene of Cregar and Oberon reflected in multiple mirrors. There's an amusing scene of Sanders flirting with Oberon as he takes her on a tour of the Black Museum, a place filled with dastardly crime and torture implements. The whole cast, especially Cregar, is fine, though Oberon isn't always successful as a common show girl. Very atmospheric; great October viewing.

WHEN STRANGERS MARRY (1944--aka BETRAYED)

A Poverty Row B-noir that can hold its own up against most any 40's B-film from Warners or RKO. In the opening, Dick Elliott plays a drunken conventioneer in a papier-mache lion's mask who carelessly throws around a lot of money at a hotel bar in Philadelphia. We see a man (from behind) chat up the drunk. Next morning, Elliott is found dead (in the lion mask) by the maid. Meanwhile, Kim Hunter, a young newlywed from Ohio, has arrived in New York City to meet her husband (Dean Jagger), a salesman who was supposed to show up there from Philadelphia. They married in a hurry, after only three dates, and when he doesn't show up, she confides in an old boyfriend (Robert Mitchum) who is coincidentally staying in the same hotel she's in. Jagger eventually shows up but is acting strange, like he's hiding something. The plot takes a few twists from there, some predictable, some not, to a satisfying ending.

For such a cheap and quickly made film, it looks pretty good, making the best of limited sets and a small cast. The single best set is of a Harlem dance club populated with many extras and a joyous dancing couple who get the spotlight for a minute, in a scene that really doesn't have much to do with the plot, but does add some interesting atmosphere. Noir conventions like jazzy music, dark streets, and blinking neon signs are present. The climax involves a Hitchcockian scene of a crucial letter stuck in a mail drop. The actors (who all went on to bigger things) are good, though the characterizations, especially of the two men, leave much to be desired, a problem of writing, not acting. In a nifty in-joke scene, Hunter uses a photo of the movie's director, William Castle, as a decoy for the cops. Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon on TV's "Batman") plays a cop; Elliott, the dead man, played the mayor of Mayberry on "The Andy Griffith Show." Not necessarily one to hunt down, but a pleasant surprise if you run across it on cable (as I did, on Encore Mystery).

SADIE MCKEE (1934)

At the tail end of the pre-Code era came this interesting film (a little comedy, a lot of drama, and even some music) about a girl who seems to be bad but is really almost too good to be true. Joan Crawford is the daughter of a cook to a rich family; Franchot Tone is the rich son, a lawyer. Tone sees Crawford after a couple of years away and, in a plotline used years later in SABRINA, is swept off his feet. The light tone of their flirtation is shattered when Crawford, helping to serve dinner, overhears Tone badmouth her boyfriend (Gene Raymond) who was fired by the family because of suspicion of thievery. Crawford goes bananas and berates Tone at the dinner table, then storms out, heading to New York City with Raymond. They get a cheap apartment by saying that they're married, and in a scene that probably wouldn't have been possible a few months later when the Production Code was being enforced, we see Crawford and Raymond spending the night together--at the fadeout, she's in bed and he's in a chair, but still...

The next day, they both land nightclub jobs; Crawford is a dancer in town, but Raymond hooks up with Esther Ralston and goes on tour with her, leaving Crawford alone in the big city. She winds up marrying chronically drunk millionaire Edward Arnold in order to save his life, then some time later, discovers that Raymond has been dumped by Ralston and is languishing sick and alone. More sacrifice and melodrama is ahead for all, including Tone who reenters the picture. That's a lot of plot for a 90 minute movie but it all comes off pretty well. Crawford is very good, as is Arnold, though his drunk routine gets old fast. Leo G. Carroll has a nice bit as Arnold's butler, who is antagonistic toward Crawford because he thinks she's just a golddigger, and Jean Dixon is a kindly landlady. Basically, everyone winds up a good egg at heart. I'm not a big fan of the fair-haired, passive Raymond, but he's OK here, and he gets a very nice scene (the aforementioned bedroom scene) where he plays the ukelele and serenades Crawford by singing "All I Do Is Dream of You." Another song, "After You've Gone," is sung by a nighclub band to the drunken Arnold. Ralston is remarkably modern looking. Tone is his usual bland self, mostly standing around looking shocked and angry. Overall, very entertaining; an underrated gem.

THE PAWNBROKER (1965)

Rod Steiger is the title character, the manager of a pawnshop in Harlem; he survived the Holocaust but he saw his family degraded and killed. He has become numb to both the joys and the suffering of the people around him (his family, his acquaintances, and his customers). People's sob stories, told as they dicker with him for more money, don't affect him, and neither do attempts by others to initiate friendly relationships. A neighborhood woman (Geraldine Fitzgerald) tries for something like a romance, but is rebuffed. Jaime Sanchez is a worker at the pawnshop who tries to approach him as a mentor, but Steiger is reluctant to be even that. Brock Peters is a gangster who owns the building and uses the shop as a money-laundering front. Peters' pimping brings back horrific memories to Stieger of seeing his wife raped by Nazis. In the end, Sanchez, who has been looking for a way out of the thuggish life he seems destined for, helps his pals rob the pawnshop, an event that leads to the inevitable tragic ending. Flashbacks to Steiger's past are done mostly in lightning-fast glimpses. The black and white cinematography enhances the bleak atmosphere, though the loud Quincy Jones score doesn't really fit. There is an interesting visual motif of fences and gates to reinforce Steiger's separation from humanity. Steiger is very good, but so is Jaime Sanchez, an appealing actor whose career didn't take off like it should have. A 60's classic of alienation that fits right in with movies like DARLING, THE COLLECTOR, and BLOW-UP.

A YANK IN THE R.A.F. (1941)

One of several pre-war propaganda films set in England designed to promote our eventual entrance in the war. Ultimately, however, this one is more focused on characterization and romance. Tyrone Power is an American pilot who is paid to fly planes being "loaned" to Canada and flown to England (this was a way of technically remaining neutal before Pearl Harbor). Power has no particular stake in the war effort until he meets up with old flame Betty Grable over in London; to impress her, he joins the Royal Air Force. He winds up with a rival for Grable's affections (John Sutton). Power is cocky and impatient; when his first flying assignment culminates in dropping leaflets over Berlin instead of bombs, he decides to drop the leaflets by the box and manages to put out a few searchlights on the ground. Soon, the missions get more dangerous and a friend (Reginald Gardiner) dies heroically. This causes Power to gain more respect for his job and he winds up in a life-threatening position at Dunkirk. I like the fact that the movie has a little more to it than the typical propaganda piece of the time, and it's interesting that Power's character is mostly rather unlikable, even in the end. He meets Grable when posing as a volunteer during an air raid drill and at the very end, he is still using subterfuge to get ahead romantically. Apparently, some of the airplane footage was shot under dangerous circumstances, though the nighttime scenes are patently artificial (but still effective). Not an important film, but entertaining.

KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY (1945)

A WWII propaganda film without much propaganda. In fact, it's barely a war movie at all--it's really a story of female bonding in the military that doesn't bother to make much of use its wartime background, perhaps because it came out fairly late in the war (spring of '45). Lana Turner is a rich playgirl who is in danger of losing her inheritance because of her decadent ways, so she joins the Womens Army Corps to prove her mettle, then plans on skipping out on her military obligation as soon as she gets the money. Laraine Day is the gung-ho daughter of a general (Henry O'Neill). Susan Peters is the quiet, seemingly more vulnerable one whose husband is at the front. The three bond, then fight, then bond, etc. Turner and Day spend most of the movie at each other's throats and Peters keeps trying to be loyal to both of them. The playgirl winds up finding that being a WAC is inspiring and gets serious about officer training, but Day isn't convinced that she's got the right stuff, leading to complications that affect all three of them. Agnes Moorehead has a small but important role as an officer who has to step in at a crucial point. There's an interesting supporting cast including June Lockhart, Lee Patrick, and Natalie Schafer (Mrs. Howell from "Gilligan's Island"). Naturally, Turner's high society pals are portrayed as unpatriotic, drunken fops. An amusing line, from Day to Turner: "I'll slap you right across that smirk that you call a smile!" Worth seeing mostly for Turner and Day.

TWO GUYS FROM TEXAS (1948)

This weak follow-up (but not sequel) to TWO GUYS FROM MILWAUKEE has Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson as a vaudeville team who, while driving through Texas, are stranded at a dude ranch. Dorothy Malone, the owner, is a bit wary of putting the two up while the police look for their stolen car but Penny Edwards, an old friend and ex-partner of the team, vouches for them. Predictable romantic complications occur along with the particularly bizarre plot twist that Carson has a phobia of all animals. Fred Clark, a veterinarian who is hired by Morgan to get the roots of Carson's problems, decides it all stems from romantic insecurity. Forrest Tucker, looking quite young and fair, is a local cop who who is set to marry Malone. The car thieves show up and make even more trouble for the leading men before everything gets worked out for the best. The silly storyline is just an excuse for the frequent and fairly bland songs (except for one clever number, "I Wanna Be a Cowboy in the Movies") and comedy routines. Bugs Bunny has a cameo. Whatever appeal this movie has is solely due to the charms of Morgan and Carson, but I think even their fans will be glad to see this one end.

TWO GUYS FROM MILWAUKEE (1946)

In the post-war years, Warner Brothers tried to make Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson a comedy/musical team. The two are amiable enough and Morgan always makes a convincing romantic lead, but they mostly come off as a B-grade version of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Though they had appeared together in a few movies earlier in the 40s, this was the first of their lead pairings and it's their best (though THE TIME, THE PLACE, AND THE GIRL is quite fun as well). Morgan plays a European prince (with absolutely no trace of an accent) who arrives in New York City on the eve of an important vote in his country on whether to keep a monarchy or go democratic. He wants to see life as a commoner and gets his guardian (S. Z. Sakall) to give him 24 hours of liberty (away from bodyguards and press) to experience America on his own. After he sneaks off his train, he meets up with a friendly cabbie (Carson); they get drunk and spend the night at Carson's house where he lives with his sister (Rosemary DeCamp) and her little daughter. The next morning Carson finds out Morgan's real identity (after having crashed in the same bed, Carson blurts out, "Me—sleeping with a prince!") and Carson agrees to keep Morgan's secret. Soon, Morgan winds up sweet on Carson's girl (Joan Leslie) and complications ensue. By a little past the halfway point, the plot machinations become a bit tedious but the actors keep it watchable. Janis Paige is another love interest, and John Ridgely and Franklin Pangborn have small roles. There are references to THE BIG SLEEP and GASLIGHT, and Lauren Bacall (whom Morgan has wanted to meet all along) and Humphrey Bogart have cameos in the last scene. The climax of the story involves an out-of-the-blue pro-democracy speech that Carson makes over the radio, in a sudden burst of post-war patriotism. Overall, the chemistry between Morgan and Carson makes the movie enjoyable.

HAVING WONDERFUL TIME (1938)

A potentially interesting plotline is done in by a miscast star. Ginger Rogers plays a young working-class woman from the Bronx who saves up money to treat herself to a 2-week vacation at a mountain camp in the Catskills. She hopes to meet some smart and charming people, and she does fall in with some lively female friends, including Eve Arden (with a wildly broad accent) Lucille Ball, and Peggy Conklin, but she takes an instant dislike to the smartest and most charming male in the vicinity, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., a law school student working at the camp for the summer. Of course, since Rogers and Fairbanks are top-billed, we know they'll eventually get together, even though they never really seem like a good match. Red Skelton is Itchy, the slapstick social director, in his first movie role. Jack Carson has a couple of scenes as Rogers' neighborhood beau; Lee Bowman is Buzzy who becomes a romantic complication; Grady Sutton and Allan Lane are also in the cast, and apparently Ann Miller had a few scenes which were cut before release. For a short movie, it wears out its welcome rather quickly, after a breezy 20 minutes or so. Noteable for a character's use of the phrase "truckin'." The real problem with the movie may be that, in the original play, Rogers' character was Jewish (and I imagine, so was Fairbanks), but any ethnic humor or situations are missing from this version and it becomes simply an uninspired, run-of-the-mill romantic comedy.

CHAMPAGNE FOR CAESAR (1950)

A very funny satire (fairly over-the-top for the early 50's, I would imagine) of TV game shows that remains relevant today. Ronald Colman is Beauregard Bottomley, an unemployed scholar and maybe the smartest man alive; he lives in a Hollywood bungalow with his sister, Barbara Britton. It's not clear why he doesn't have a job, but consistent characterization is not the film's strong suit. He applies for a job working on demographics for Milady Soap Company ("the soap that sanctifies") as they are beginning to test a new hand soap that doubles as a toothpaste. In his meeting with Milady's president, Burnbridge Waters (Vincent Price), Colman makes a joke about foaming at the mouth and Price refuses to hire him. To get revenge, Colman becomes a contestant on a TV quiz show that Milady sponsors. He knows all the answers and keep returning week after week, doubling his winnings and threatening to bankrupt the company. Price hires a very smart and lovely lady, Flame O'Neill (Celeste Holm), to probe him for his weakness. Meanwhile, Colman's sister falls for Art Linkletter, the host of the quiz show and soon Colman is in love with Holm. Then things really start getting wild.

The whole cast is good here, but Price is the standout, being very funny in a way that he was never allowed to be again once he was typecast as a horror star. His character is a pretentious cad who slips into trances in the middle of casual conversations; his underlings say that he is "no longer on this plane." Linkletter is much better than I would have expected, considering his real-life TV host duties and the fact that this is his only movie acting job ever. The Milady headquarters is a surreal place with sculptures of human arms (a la Cocteau's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST) jutting from the walls and holding soap bubbles, and disembodied voices serving as receptionists. Ellye Marshall (later one of the CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON) is fun as Frosty, a bit player in the movies ("she does her work a little bit here, a little bit there...") who is a neighbor of Colman's. There is clear evidence of one major deleted scene toward the end with Price in a dripping wet suit—we have no idea how he got that way. Caesar is Colman's parrot, voiced by Mel Blanc, who is always asking for a drink. A very funny movie which doesn't crop up on cable much but is now available on DVD.

THE BRIDE WALKS OUT (1936)

Another anti-feminist comedy-fable from the Production Code 30's. Barbara Stanwyck is making good money as a model but her boyfriend (Gene Raymond) wants her to quit her job and marry him, a poor and stuggling engineer. She doesn't want to quit but is eventually persuaded. Soon they are in debt and their furniture is repossessed on New Year's Eve, but a drunken playboy (Robert Young) who has admired Stanwyck for some time gets the furniture back before Raymond knows what has happened. Soon Stanwyck is back at work behind her husband's back; of course, he finds out, they split up, Young threatens to step in, Raymond wants her back, etc. Guess what? Raymond gets her back and she agrees not to work (despite many unpaid bills). The chemistry between Stanwyck and Young is good, which unfortunately highlights the relative lack of chemistry between Stanwyck and Raymond. Helen Broderick (in her usual role as the best friend, and the real reason to watch the movie) and Ned Sparks are quite good as a bickering couple. Billy Gilbert and Hattie McDaniel have small roles. One dialogue gem: Sparks: "You didn't have a rag on your back when I met you"; Broderick: "I've got plenty of them now!" Another one: Stanwyck: "Why did you get married?"; Broderick: "I dunno--it was raining, we were in Pittsburgh..."

THE GLASS KEY (1942)

An archetypal hard-boiled film noir, based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, which clearly was an influence on the Coen brothers when they made MILLER'S CROSSING. The convoluted plot doesn't matter as much as the character dynamics. Brian Donleavy is a big-shot political boss and Alan Ladd is his trusted right-hand man. Donleavy decides to support a judge (Moroni Olson) in an election and winds up sweet on the judge's daughter (Veronica Lake). Ladd isn't sure the whole thing is such a good idea as it sets up some bad blood with a gangster (Joseph Calleia). The judge's son, an effete wimp played by Richard Denning, ends up dead and Donleavy is implicated, partly because his sister (Bonita Granville) was dating Denning. Ladd, as his counterpart Gabriel Byrne does in MILLER'S CROSSING, seems to betray his boss but is actually sniffing around trying to clear Donleavy. There is more, but that's the crucial plotline.

Ladd ends up in the hands of Calleia's goons and suffers an extensive and brutal beating (more precisely, a series of beatings) from brawny William Benedix. Many critics find homoeroticism in this relationship, as Benedix keeps calling Ladd "sweetheart" and seems unduly excited about dishing out the beatings. Ladd's make-up after he's been worked over is unusually realistic for the era; his face is pulped and he's almost unrecognizable. He escapes in a great sequence involving a fire, an awning, and a kitchen. There is a subplot with a shady newspaper editor and his wife, with whom Ladd flirts. Dane Clark has a small role as a thug who gets thrown through a plate glass window in an early scene, then gets more punishment later on. Lillian Randolph, the Bailey's maid in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, is a nightclub singer. The happy ending is rather improbable (and apparently quite different from the novel's outcome), but it doesn't ruin what's come before. The most interesting scene is the one where Benedix catches up with Ladd and takes him up to his squalid little room to finish the beating (to the death, perhaps)--the tension is high, but the violence, when it comes, winds up aimed at a surprising target. I'm not really a big Alan Ladd fan, but he's very good here; Lake doesn't have a lot to do. Quite good, and a must see for fans of film noir and/or the Coen Brothers.

End of Summer Catch-Up

THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1935)
The first English-language sound version of Dumas' novel, and a very drab and low-spirited movie. Walter Abel, a solid supporting actor who I liked very much as the manager in HOLIDAY INN, is totally miscast as the youthful, romantic D'Artagnan. Paul Lukas, another actor I usually like, seems a bit too old to play Athos, leader of the Musketeers. He's clearly a pro, however, which is more than can be said for much of the rest of the cast. The whole thing comes off like a bunch of amateurs found some cool sets, costumes, and movie cameras lying around an abandoned studio and decided to have at it. A stage actress named Rosamond Pinchot does a nice job as the queen; this is the only movie she ever made. Heather Angel is OK as Constance, Abel's love interest. The swordplay is unconvincing and the cinematography uninspired. Stick with the glossy MGM version with Gene Kelly.

YES MY DARLING DAUGHTER (1939)
A romantic farce that set off quite a stir among the censors. It's all about what happens when a young unmarried couple (Priscilla Lane and Jeffrey Lynn) head off for a weekend together at a private cabin in the woods. Fay Bainter plays Lane's mother, a woman who in the past had been a Greenwich Village bohemian feminist but who now holds more solidly middle-class suburban values. Lynn is about to leave for three years overseas and he and Lane decide a last weekend together is in order. Even though we're pretty sure nothing untoward will happen, their plans still send the family into conniptions. A strong supporting cast includes Ian Hunter as the father and May Robson as the lively grandmother, who is the catalyst for the story's last act (in which almost everyone spend the night in jail). Roland Young is his usual fine self as a former friend (and, we are to assume, lover) of Bainter's from the old days who happens to show up for the weekend. Things work out in the end, though only through the sacrifice of character consistency and a sense of reality. Fun if seen as a period piece (the central premise would hardly cause a stir today).

YOUNG IDEAS (1943)
Silly B-movie fluff which wastes completely the potential of its two adult stars. Mary Astor plays a widow who impulsively marries a rather stuffy professor (Herbert Marshall). Her kids (Susan Peters and Elliot Reid) plot to get them to divorce so they can leave their boring college town and move back to New York City. Astor is reliable as always, but the plot never rises above Brady Bunch-type sitcom shenanigans. Richard Carlson is a young academic who Peters secretly marries. George Dolenz, father of Monkee Mickey Dolenz, is in the cast, and supposedly Ava Gardner has a bit part, though I didn't see her.

Two Pre-Code "Complicated Women" Movies

BLONDIE JOHNSON (1933)
Joan Blondell is a poor girl screwed over by the world: she quits her job when the boss harasses her, and her sick mother dies when Blondell can't pay for her medical costs. She works her way up through the rackets, becoming a gangster's moll and eventually taking over as head of illegal activities in the city. She's sitting pretty, but without the man she loves (Chester Morris); through a misunderstanding, she thinks he ratted her out to the cops and she has him set up for a kill. She finds out the truth and tries to stop the hit. Blondell's character is interesting in that she feels totally justified turning to crime to get back at a society that has done her no favors. At the same time, she steadfastly guards her "purity" and comes off as a good girl, despite her involvement in crime. Morris is hot but his character is passive and ineffective--Blondell has to goad him into getting ahead, then drives him out when she finds out he's marrying someone else. Also with Allen Jenkins and Claire Dodd, and a Japanese actress named Toshia Mori in a unstereotyped part. Sterling Holloway has a fun bit as a streetwise taxi driver--maybe the only time he's ever played a character who could be called streetwise.

SHE HAD TO SAY YES (1933)
Loretta Young is a secretary in love with Regis Toomey, a business hotshot (in sales, I think). They spend hours a day making out, or so it's implied. The big boss decides that business would be improved if the secretaries started showing visiting customers a good time in the evening. Young doesn't want to get involved, but as a favor to Toomey, she agrees to do it one time with the handsome Lyle Talbot. He misreads her intentions but she escapes with her virtue intact and Talbot is properly chastised. He falls for her just as she discovers that Toomey is flirting with an office floozy. There are further complications, but suffice to say that in the rushed conclusion typical of many short 30's movies, Young and Talbot work things out. As other reviewers have noted, it isn't really a happy ending since we get the sense that she is settling for the lesser of two evils in choosing Talbot over Toomey (or maybe she's just choosing purely based on looks!). Busby Berkeley directed, and one early scene in a nightclub shows a bit of the flair he would bring to musicals a little later in the decade.

IS PARIS BURNING? (1966)

A dramatization of the liberation of Paris during WWII with an all-star international cast (mostly French). The non-fiction book that the film is based on is presented somewhat like an oral history as we follow dozens of people, Allies and Germans, through the days of liberation in August of 1944. The movie doesn't do a very good job of setting up the context of the events. I'm pretty sure I would frequently have been at sea if I hadn't just read the book (which is the reason I rented the movie). The closest thing the movie has to a cental character is the Nazi officer (General von Choltitz, played by Gert Frobe, better known as Goldfinger) who is put in charge of defending Paris after the Normandy invasion; if he cannot hold the city against the inevitable attack by the Allies, Hitler orders him to destroy it. Frobe does a nice job as the confused man who wants to follow orders but can't bring himself to be responsible for the destruction of such a beautiful city--it's made clear in the book but not in the film that Choltitz believed that Hitler had become an ineffective leader and a raving madman. Another problem for the Germans (and to some degree, the Allies) is the Resistance, or more precisely the various Resistance groups that are squabbling about the timing for an uprising in Paris. Pierre Vaneck is the Resistance representative who goes through enemy lines to make contact with the Allies (Kirk Douglas is General Patton). Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo play other Resistance fighters; Charles Boyer is a doctor who helps Vaneck on his mission; Orson Welles is a Swiss diplomat.

Others in the large cast (mostly with only a few minutes of screen time) are Simone Signoret, Anthony Perkins, Glenn Ford, Yves Montand, and Leslie Caron. There are some nicely surreal moments, one with a fancy hotel lobby in flames, and another with Resistance fighters carrying on a fierce battle from an old lady's apartment while she causally sips tea. The movie is in black & white, which allows smooth integration of actual footage of the street fighting and celebrating that accompanied the city's liberation, though the last shot (an aerial view of present-day Paris) suddenly turns to color. At three hours, the lack of a central hero works against the cohesion of the various plot elements. Vaneck, Delon and Belmondo (all quite handsome) get a fair amount of attention, but we never get to know them as characters and they mostly vanish in the last hour. This is infamous for being a badly dubbed film--it's in English and it seems like almost all the dialogue, even that of the American actors, is post-dubbed. It does hurt the film a bit, but I got used to it. Recommended, especially if you're already a war buff, though be warned that this is not a traditional war film with a lot of bloody battle scenes.

THE FALCON TAKES OVER (1942)

The best Falcon film I've seen yet (I've also seen THE FALCON IN HOLLYWOOD and THE FALCON'S ALIBI), perhaps partly because it's based on a Raymond Chandler novel, "Farewell My Lovely." George Sanders gets tangled up in a murder at a nightclub, Club 13; the manager is killed by ex-con (and ex-wrestler) Ward Bond, and Sanders' sidekick (Allen Jenkins) is forced into driving the getaway car. Sanders' fiancee is out of town and a lovely rookie reporter (Lynn Bari) accompanies him as he investigates. It turns out that Bond is searching for a mysterious damsel named Velma, who done him wrong. Other fishy characters include a fey rich guy (Hans Conreid), a psychic (Turhan Bey), and a beautiful blonde (Helen Gilbert). The supporting cast includes James Gleason as a cop and Anne Revere as a scared underling. Most of the cast members only get one good scene before getting bumped off. Bond comes off a bit like the Frankenstein monster, threatening to break people's necks with his bare hands. The plot is more coherent than the average B-mystery, fairly easy to follow until the end, and the fates of the characters are satisfying. There is quite a bit of humor, with Jenkins referring several times to "corpus delicious," and Sanders telling someone that he never drinks before sunset, but "after that, the deluge." At 65 minutes, it clips along nicely.

STAGE DOOR CANTEEN (1943)

This is the New York City version of HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN, a wartime revue set at a USO club for soldiers. As with the Hollywood version, this one has a thin plot line involving a forbidden romance and features stars acting like "normal" folks as they volunteer at the club. As far as the story goes, Lon McAllister is California, a naive boy looking for his first kiss; Sunset Carson is Tex who falls for a li'l old Southern gal; William Terry is Dakota, who has sworn off women for the duration, but who winds up involved with the icy Cheryl Walker. He also helps his buddy Jersey (Fred Brady) write love letters to his gal. Marjorie Riordan is sweet on California and, as a hostess at the club, isn't supposed to get involved with the men, but she eventually gives California his kiss, if a rather anti-climactic one. The somewhat tedious story is broken up with lots of songs: Peggy Lee croons "Why Don't You Do Right," the song made famous 40 years later by Jessica Rabbit; Ethel Merman belts out lustily about marching through Berlin; Gracie Fields sings about killing Japs, then performs "The Lord's Prayer." There are big band numbers by Count Basie, Xavier Cugat, Benny Goodman, and Kay Kyser. George Jessel does a vaudeville routine set in a phone booth; Katherine Cornell plays Juliet to a GI's Romeo. Other celebs who pop in include Edgar Bergen, Merle Oberon, Gypsy Rose Lee, Judith Anderson and Talullah Bankhead. Katharine Hepburn, playing herself in a short bit at the end, comes off just like one of her film characters. As one might expect, the comics and musicians are fine, but the filmmakers didn't quite know what to do with the actors (particularly those like Cornell, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne who didn't do many movies), and they seem a bit at sea. The movie is good for one go-around, but it's not a keeper.

YOU'RE TELLING ME! (1934)

One of the few W. C. Fields movies I've seen where the plot actually counts for something, at least for a while. Fields plays Sam Bisbee, a dreamer who spends most of his time coming up with offbeat inventions in his back room, most notably a chair that knocks out the person who sits in it. His most promising invention is a puncture-proof tire. His sweet daughter (Joan Marsh) wants to marry a boy (Buster Crabbe) from a high society family, but the boy's mother (Kathleen Howard) obejcts strongly to Marsh's background, especially her somewhat disreputable and occasionally drunken father. Fields hopes that the sale of his tire to a tire company will impress Crabbe's mother and facilitate the marriage, but the demonstration goes awry. On the train home, Fields thinks about suicide, but then mistakenly believes that a female passenger (Adrienne Ames) is about to take poison and so he "saves" her. Fields actually *acts* here, fleshing out his character in a way that he usually didn't bother with in his later movies. It turns out that Ames is a princess touring America ; charmed by Field's chivalry, she visits him at home (leading to rumors of an affair) and winds up boosting his reputation and helping him sell his invention. The plot stops dead in the last 10 minutes as Fields does his famous slapstick gold routine (culled from an earlier short film); I found the bit to be rather tedious but it doesn't really hurt the movie. Other reviewers have commented that we see a "kinder & gentler" Fields in this film, which is mostly true, but it still ranks with his best. The opening, where he comes home drunk, is one of his best routines ever.

STAR! (1968)

I avoided watching this notorious flop musical, one of a string of big disasters from the late 60's that killed off the musical genre for decades, until I could see it letterboxed. It turns out that it's not a bad movie at all; it's quite watchable with good if not overly imaginative production numbers and some fine performances, though Julie Andrews never fully inhabits the role of Gertrude Lawrence, a British star of stage and screen. The film had the misfortune to be released in the same season as Barbra Streisand's FUNNY GIRL, about American Fanny Brice; both are long movies about past stars of the musical stage and both are constructed as long-view stories of the rise of their careers and the highs and lows of their love lives. Unlike the Streisand film, STAR! confines its songs to the stage and uses mostly period music (some of it by Noel Coward, a real-life friend of Lawrence's, and played by Daniel Massey in the film). However, few of the songs are memorable--in fact, the only one I can recall a few days after watching the movie is George Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me."

The movie begins a bit like CITIZEN KANE, as we watch a newsreel version of the life of Gertrude Lawrence. It turns out that Lawrence herself (Andrews) is watching the film and she stops at several points to comment on the truth behind the footage. We see her get her start in a music hall, in a mediocre act with her parents which provides an amusing opening number. She manages to forge ahead largely through sheer force of will; her life-long friendship with Noel Coward helps her career and we see her become a genuine star even as she keeps messing up her romantic relationships with a variety of men including John Collin as a helpful stage manager who becomes her first husband, Michael Craig as a titled diplomat, Robert Reed as an American actor, and Richard Crenna as a financier and would-be theatrical producer. Jenny Agutter plays her daughter is who around for a few minutes just so we can see that she is loved but neglected by her mother. In addition to guilt over her failed relationship with Agutter, we also see Andrews weather a breakdown (mostly physical, it seems) and near-bankruptcy before she triumphs for good at the end. There is a particularly amusing moment when we see Andrews and Massey act out a racy scene from Coward's play "Private Lives" for the Lord Chamberlain (the official state censor), but the happy and sad times aren't always effectively presented. Anthony Eisley has about one minute of screen time as a quickly forgotten beau, and Jock Livingston plays the critic Alexander Woolcott, who calls Lawrence "Goddess." Robert Reed, whom I mostly know as Mike Brady, is surprisingly good here and it seems a shame that TV robbed him of a broader career in movies. Not a movie you have to seek out, but not nearly as bad as its reputation would suggest.

EVER IN MY HEART (1933)

An interesting melodrama with mixed messages about love, loyalty, and prejudice. Set during WWI, the story centers on Barbara Stanwyck, a New England blueblood; when we first see her, she is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her beau, Ralph Bellamy, from overseas. But when Bellamy arrives, he has a German pal, Otto Kruger, in tow and Stanwyck winds up smitten with Kruger, to the consternation of her family (including brother Frank Albertson and grandmother Laura Hope Crews). Bellamy steps aside and Stanwyck marries Kruger, who becomes a U. S. citizen and is slowly accepted by her family. However, the sinking of the Lusitania triggers a wave an anti-German sentiment; despite Kruger's best attempts to show how American he has become, the townspeople shut him out and he loses his teaching position at the local college. After their young son dies (of the flu, I think), Kruger goes back to Germany; Stanwyck divorces him and goes to Europe as a volunteer nurse. She meets up by accident with Kruger and realizes he is spying on American troops. Torn between her remaining feelings for Kruger and loyalty for her country (especially since her brother is at the front), she spends one last night with Kruger and then takes drastic measures to solve her problem (a solution that would not have been possible under the Hayes code a year later).

The movie's handling of the issue of wartime prejudices must have seemed particularly apt just a few years later as Hitler began his European invasions. Even now, after the events of September 11, 2001, the message is applicable (and given human nature, may never go out of date). Kruger is presented initally as a good man; it is the overwhelming nature of the town's prejuidce against him that drives him to his acts of betrayal. I had a problem with the "love at first sight" aspect of Stanwyck's first meeting with Kruger--he just isn't portrayed as all that charming or dashing (poor Ralph Bellamy never seems to have much luck with the leading ladies!). Ruth Donnelly is underused as the family maid; Clara Blandick and Elizabeth Patterson are also in the cast. A quote from the film might be seen as its message:--"Folks can't get away from what's bred in their blood and bones"--but the film ultimately takes a view that is more complicated and interesting than that.

POSSESSED (1931)

Joan Crawford made two movies with this title, the second one was released in 1947. Plotwise, they have nothing to do with each other. This one is an interesting pre-Code melodrama, written by Lenore Coffee, which centers on the idea of woman as economic commodity. Crawford is a factory worker who yearns for a better life. Nice guy Wallace Ford wants to marry her, but she's not ready to settle down so she heads for the big city. In record time, on a train to the city, she meets a rich man (Skeets Gallagher) who she thinks will be her sugar daddy, but when she shows up at this apartment, he sends her away. Her disappointment is short lived, however, as rich lawyer Clark Gable (much younger and handsomer than Gallagher) is around to step in. For years, she is his mistress, kept in luxury, but he refuses to marry her for reasons involving a previous marriage (and divorce) and the potential for scandal when he decides to run for political office. Once he's in place to run for governor, his advisors suggest that he dump Crawford. As it happens, old flame Ford comes back into the picture around this time and misunderstandings and betrayals engulf all three, leaving Crawford to have to make a decision about doing the right thing (and what that right thing might be). The moral complexities here are nicely presented, in several shades of gray. Crawford wants things for herself, is ambitious, and doesn't mind getting ahead however she can, but old double standards get in her way. A well acted film with interesting social commentary that would not have been possible under the Hayes Code.

THE BLUE GARDENIA (1953)

This Fritz Lang thriller has many trappings of film noir (although with a female lead) but despite a strong opening, it's not as moody or intense as it should be, turning into more ordinary melodrama along the way. Anne Baxter gets dumped, via mail, by her boyfriend in Korea. Depressed, she gets a phone call from artist Raymond Burr, who thinks he's talking to her roommate (Ann Sothern). Baxter meets Burr for a date, gets quite drunk, and winds up at his place. He gets too forceful with her, she defends herself with a poker, then passes out. The next morning, Burr is dead and Baxter assumes she killed him. Slowly, a web of circumstantial evidence closes in around her (with George Reeves as a cop putting the clues together) and she decides to trust Richard Conte, a reporter who promises to clear her name. The paranoid atmosphere is well done, with lots of scenes of phones and evesdropping (Baxter & Sothern are telephone operators). It's perhaps a little too clear to us that Baxter is innocent, though there is some nice misdirection involving Sothern's character. Ultimately, the identity of the killer (a minor, left-field character) is unimportant; the relationship between Baxter and Conte is the center of the last half of the film. Jeff Donnell is the third roommate and Nat King Cole has a cameo singing the title song at the title cafe (which is otherwise not terribly important to the plot). Baxter is good, as is Sothern, who looks much younger than her years. OK, but not terribly compelling.

THE GHOST COMES HOME (1940)

A trifle, occasionally irritating but worth watching for a few of my favorite supporting actors. I have to imagine that even in 1940, this plot was a bit far-fetched for people's tastes. Frank Morgan plays a mild-mannered pet store owner in a small town; his family loves him, but his wife (Billie Burke) wishes he were a bit more ambitious. Through a needlessly complicated plot machination involving a plan to visit a rich school pal who now lives in Australia, Morgan heads off for New York City but never makes it to the liner for Australia, winding up instead in jail for 30 days on a "drunk and disorderly" charge. Meanwhile, the liner sinks and Morgan is presumed dead. The family gets a good chunk of insurance money and sells the pet store; though they genuinely miss Morgan, they are in much better financial shape than ever. Morgan eventually returns, scaring the Dickens out of everyone, and soon they all realize that, in order to avoid a fraud charge, Morgan must remain "dead," relegated to living in the attic. Tiring of this plan fairly quickly, Morgan lets a tyrannical streak show, terrorizing the family with his demands and soon everyone is looking for a way out. And that's only about two-thirds of the plot! Ann Rutherford is the daughter, who falls for John Shelton, a snobbish NYC bandleader who disses everyone when he's in town for a gig, but who redeems himself by helping Morgan out while he's in the Big Apple. Reginald Owen, playing against type, is a band member who plays a crucial role in a real estate scam the family runs against shiftless Donald Meek. Frank Albertson and Nat Pendleton are also in the cast. Amusing in spots; I like Morgan but he's awfully hammy here. Despite a few plot loopholes, the scam is nicely pulled off and provides a satisfying ending.

BERLIN EXPRESS (1948)

I agree with a couple of IMDb reviewers who think that this is actually a more interesting movie that the similarly themed THE THIRD MAN. Both are somewhat moody stories of post-war intrigue; the Carol Reed movie may have more depth, but this is much more fun to watch, and almost as effective. On a train from Paris to Frankfurt, a German who is supposed to be an important figure in the reconstruction of post-war Germany is assassinated, only it turns out that the killers got the decoy. The real diplomat (Paul Lukas) is temporarily safe, but later he is kidnapped and his secretary (Merle Oberon) gets a multinational group of passengers to help her and the Army search for him. The group includes Robert Ryan as the resourceful American, Robert Coote as the Brit, and Roman Toporov as the Russian (the one who is the most conflicted about joining in). Location shooting in Berlin and the ruins of Frankfurt add to the film's atmosphere. The opening section of the movie has too much spoken narration as exposition, but this gets better as the movie goes on. The scenes on the train are well shot; the main characters are all introduced as we see them enter their compartments through the windows. The group comes off a bit like a bunch of Hardy Boys, which is meant as a compliment here. There are good action scenes throughout, especially toward the end. There are also some nice Hitchcockian moments, one with a mind reader and a clown in a sinister nightclub, and one near the end as we see a character being strangled through a reflection in a train window as Ryan and Oberon, blithely unaware, continue chatting. Ultimately, Lukas's mission is successful, although we are left with some pessimism about the possibility of lasting peace. Jacques Tourneur directs with his usual understated flair. Highly recommended.

THE GREAT WHITE HOPE (1970)

I must admit that the main reason I watched this was because it has Chester Morris in a small role (and his last role--he died, an apparent suicide, just before the film was released), but the real reason to appreciate this movie is that it is proof that James Earl Jones once had a full-blooded acting career; it seems that Hollywood couldn't quite figure out how to best use him until they discovered his voice-over talent. Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, this is a fictionalized version of the life of boxer Jack Johnson (here named Jack Jefferson), the first black heavyweight champion. A brash, confident person who is uncomfortable being held up as a token figure standing in for his entire race, he takes a devil-may-care attitude toward living his life to its fullest in the public spotlight. When he flaunts his white girlfriend (Jane Alexander), the powers that be, in both the sport and the law, have a reason to try to take him down. He is arrested (because miscegenation laws prohibit him from taking Alexander across state lines) but escapes the country before he can be imprisoned. He keeps his boxing career going for a time, but eventually things start to fall apart. He drives Alexander away--I think he believes he does it for her own good, but it's still a startlingly cruel act--and she kills herself, which takes much of his spark away from him, leading to a sad but somewhat hopeful ending. For a boxing movie, there are very few scenes of boxing until the final bout in Havana. Knowing Jones mostly as the voice of Darth Vader, or in small roles in movies like FIELD OF DREAMS, I was stunned at how good he is here. He makes his complex character fierce but thoughtful and we are sympathetic with him throughout. Alexander is almost as good in her first movie role--both of them were rightfully nominated for Oscars. Chester Morris is a big-shot, old-time boxing promoter who actually seems a bit torn about his own role in Jones' downfall; other cast members include Hal Holbrook, Beah Richards, and Robert Webber, but this is largely a two-person show.

PRIMROSE PATH (1940)

An odd little melodrama that might have been more interesting had it been done in the pre-Code years and with a different lead actress. Set, I think, in Florida, or at any rate, near a beach community, Ginger Rogers plays a young girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Her mother (Marjorie Rambeau, nominated for a supporting actress Oscar) is married to a broken-down, alcoholic scholar without a job (Miles Mander), but she apparently worked in the past (and perhaps in the present) as a prostitute, as did Rogers' grandmother (Queenie Vassar). Rambeau must feel that whoring is in the blood, because we get hints that she is thinking of pimping for her own daughter--though being a film made under the Production Code, this is all rather oblique. Rogers, fresh-faced and a bit tomboyish, meets up with handsome Joel McCrea who works in a beachfront diner and the two hit it off. They get married, which allows Rogers to think she'll be able to escape her tawdry family situation. She gets a job at the diner (Henry Travers is the good-hearted boss) and there is a nice scene of Rogers and McCrea trading "Cheers"-like quips with the clientale. But soon, McCrea finds out about her background and, thinking he's been played for a fool, leaves her. After a few melodramatic plot developments, they wind up together at the end. Joan Carroll, the middle daughter in MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, is Rogers' kid sister; Charles Lane is a rich friend/client of Rambeau's. The mean grandmother is the most interesting character and Vassar is good in the role; she should have had more screen time, and should also have had a stronger comeuppance for all her mischief, since she is the one who deliberately lies to McCrea and causes him to leave Rogers. The beach and sea settings are nicely detailed and realistic. Rogers, who was almost 30, is stuck playing a part way too young for her, which defuses the situation a bit--it would have been much more effective for an actress in her early 20's to play the part.

GANGWAY FOR TOMORROW (1943)

There was much potential here for an interesting movie, but the B-level budget and overriding propaganda concerns sort of sink the material. The film's frame is a car-pool ride by six people to their war manufacturing job. The co-workers have never really gotten to know each other very well, and the mild-mannered driver admits to the rest that, in conversations with his wife, he has made up backgrounds for all the other five. As the driver tells each person what he imagines about him or her, we get a fleshed-out interior monologue about how each one came to doing war work. The first and best story has Margo as a French nightclub singer and resistance fighter whose small cell is betrayed; her handsome lover (Bruce Edwards) and the rest are executed, but she gets away and makes it to America. The others: Robert Ryan is a race car driver who can't join the Air Corps with his buddies because of injuries he sustained in a crash; John Carradine is a hobo who is moved by a patriotic speech (by judge Harry Davenport) to find gainful employment; Amelita Ward is a former beauty queen whose show biz dreams amount to nothing; James Bell is a prison wardern who has to execute his own brother. Most of the individual stories are interesting but suffer from underdevelopment (especially Bell's with its noirish look and its unexplored psychological content). One of the best scenes is a direct steal from CASABLANCA: Margo manages to break into a radio speech by Hitler to lead her fellow citizens in a sing-along of the Marsellaise.

LURED (1947)

Interesting mystery directed by Douglas Sirk, better known for his glossy soap-opera melodramas of the 50's. Despite some occasional film noir tone, this is a fairly traditional detective story set in the present, but with an Edwardian feel. Someone is kidnapping and apparently killing young women in London, women he's met through the personals ads, then sending poems (which quote from Baudelaire) to Scotland Yard. The latest woman to vanish is a friend of dance hall girl Lucille Ball, an American stranded in England when her show flops, and she volunteers to help the police catch the killer by answering suspicious ads. There are any number of suspects: Boris Karloff as a nutty dress designer; George Sanders as a playboy nightclub owner who romances Ball; Cedric Hardwicke as Sanders' staid business partner; and Joseph Calleia as the head of a white slavery ring. A strong supporting cast includes Charles Coburn, Alan Napier, and Alan Mowbray. Most notable is George Zucco as a Scotland Yard man who acts as bodyguard to Ball. Uusally Zucco plays a creep or a villian, but here he is downright heroic and quite charming. Ball is serviceable throughout, but her supporting cast outshines her. There is nice work with shadows and, though it displays little of the visual flair of Sirk's later films (like ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS), the sets are impressive. Quite a good thriller, highly recommended.

MORE MIDSUMMER CATCH-UP

THE DARK MIRROR (1946)--This would seem to be an early entry in the psychological thriller genre that thrived after WWII; it also has a film noir atmosphere, though not many other trappings of that kind of movie. A man is murdered and a woman is seen leaving the scene. The problem is that the suspect who matches the description of the woman is Olivia De Havilland, who plays identical twins: Ruth, who seems sweet and mild, and Terry, a little on the bitchy and edgy side. De Havilland does a nice job distinguishing subtly between the two, so much so that I had some trouble keeping track of which twin was which (an intentional problem, I imagine). It develops that one of the sisters is trying to "gaslight" the other, which throws a monkey wrench into the whole situation. Thomas Mitchell is the investigating cop and Lew Ayres is a psychiatrist who does some investigating of his own and winds up falling for Ruth. The picture is drably shot, but the twin effects are good, and the story builds to an exciting climax.

BACKGROUND TO DANGER (1943)--A bland attempt to produce another CASABLANCA without Bogart. George Raft, who had once been in the running for the part of Rick Blaine, plays an American on a train to Turkey during WWII. He gets involved with a shady woman (Osa Massen) who is trying to pass secret plans along to someone; she is killed and Raft winds up with the plans, a German forgery that claims that Russia is about to invade neutral Turkey. The Nazis, led by Sidney Greenstreet, want to leak the plans to the press to force Turkey to take up with the Germans. Peter Lorre and Brenda Marshall are also trying to get their hands on the documents, but Raft can't tell what their intentions are. Turhan Bey has a thankless role as a protector of Raft's who winds up dead. Raft himself is deadly dull, but he does get to do his somewhat famous coin-flipping routine. Lorre has a buzz cut which suits him and makes him less slimy than usual. For me, the high point of all these tedious proceedings was watching Greenstreet get to do one of his trademarked belly laughs.

THE SMILING LIEUTENANT (1931)--A Lubitsch operetta, fluffy but of little consequence. Maurice Chevalier plays a soldier who has the hots for violinist Claudette Colbert, but while he's flirting with her one day, a visiting princess (Miriam Hopkins) assumes his winks are meant for her. To save face and avoid a diplomatic scandal, he woos and marries the princess. She's rather plain and inexperienced in the ways of love, so Colbert ends up teaching her how to sex up her relationship. Though Colbert is more likeable, conventional morality wins out; Chevalier and Hopkins wind up happy together, and Colbert gracefully bows out. There are some nice Lubitsch touches, but overall not a terribly memorable film (bear in mind that I'm not a Chevalier fan, though I do usually like Lubitsch and Colbert). There is a very funny breakfast song with a line about invading the marmalade. The song where Colbert gives advice to Hopkins, "Spice Up Your Lingerie," is also fun. Charles Ruggles is in the cast, in a too-small role.

THE BIG BROADCAST OF 1938 (1938)

The last of my recent Bob Hope viewings is also the least of them. This is a particularly dippy musical variety movie; the genre seemed to be dying out at the time and this film is evidence of why. The threadbare plot centers around the race of two ocean liners from America to Europe. One of the ships has an experimental supplementary power source known as "radio power," an invention of hunky Leif Erickson. W. C. Fields plays the nutty twin brother of the head of one of the ocean liner companies; because he is such a klutz, he is sent to travel on the rival ship (arriving from the air in a bizarre winged scooter) in hopes that he will hinder its voyage, but he mistakenly winds up on his own company's liner. The only other narrative thread involves Bob Hope as a radio MC who is running from a gaggle of ex-wives who want him to pay up on his alimony. His current suitor, Dorothy Lamour, winds up attracted to Erickson, and one of Hope's exes, Shirley Ross, falls back in love with him, largely via their rendition of Hope's signature song, "Thanks for the Memory." Martha Raye is along for the ride, shattering mirrors just by looking at them--it actually is one of the funnier gags in the film. The rest of the cast consists of mostly forgettable musical specialty acts. The last number is a long history of the waltz that is suitably spectacular in looks but does drag on. There is a silly cartoon sequence set to music by Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm Orchestra, and W. C. Fields (I assume no relation to Shep) gets off a few good lines like this one: Fields: "I feel like a June bride!" Straight man: "How does a June bride feel?" Fields: "I wonder, I wonder..." The movie is not especially memorable--if you want a more consistenly funny variety film, check out STAR SPANGLED RHYTHM--but "Thanks for the Memory" really is, with Hope even seeming to get in an improvised chuckle or two.