THE BANK DICK
***
USA
A disreputable drunkard unwittingly foils a bank
robbery and is appointed bank guard.
A loose, inconsequential bricolage of setups. Sort of funny, but lacking
structure and drive. As a performer however, Fields is matchless, and this proved
to be his last major role.
dir: Eddie Cline
wr: W.C. Fields
cast: W.C. Fields, Cora Witherspoon, Grady Sutton, Una
Merkel, Evelyn Del Rio, Jessie Ralph, Franklin Pangborn, Shemp Howard
THE BLUE BIRD
*½
CHRISTMAS IN JULY
***½
USA
Preston Sturges' second film, this slapstick comedy with a social
conscience counts as a minor one compared to the classics he churned out
during the WWII period. It isn't as rich and manic as the best of them,
but it is clever and very likable in its own right. Dick Powell plays a $22-a-week clerk
who is tricked into believing he has won $25,000 at a slogan contest.
Overlapping dialogue ensues.
wr/dir: Preston Sturges
cast: Dick Powell, Ellen Drew, Raymond Walburn, Alexander Carr, William
Demarest, Ernest Truex, Franklin Pangborn, Georgia Caine, Ferike Boros
FANTASIA
****½
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
***½
USA
An American journalist is sent to Europe and
ends up caught in the middle of a spy ring.
Anti-Nazi propaganda that drags in spots, but often comes alive in
memorable, quintessential Hitchcock setpieces. This was his first
Hollywood picture. Rebecca was his second.
dir: Alfred Hitchcock
cast: Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George
Sanders, Albert Basserman, Robert Benchley, Edmund Gwenn, Eduardo
Ciannelli, Robert Benchley, Harry Davenport, Martin Kosleck
GASLIGHT
***
UK
Four years after the Brits adapted Patrick Hamilton's play - about a rich
Victorian bride whose foreign-accented and therefore sinister husband
convinces her she's going through a mental breakdown - MGM re-made it into
the bloated, expensive version for which George Cukor earned Ingrid
Bergman her first Academy Award. As part of their copyright claim MGM also
destroyed what they thought was every print in existence, though evidently
they missed one.
Whatever tension the original conjures up has little to do
with the flaky bride, who accepts her insanity a little too readily, and
much more to do with the monstrous husband, whose manipulation of her is
enraging. The photography by Bernard Knowles is often elegant, though
there isn't much room for atmosphere in the cramped British National
backlot.
The four or so people familiar with this version tend to
claim it is the superior one. And it is, probably, if only because it's
shorter.
dir: Thorold Dickinson
ph: Bernard Knowles
cast: Anton Walbrook, Diana Wynyard, Frank Pettingell,
Cathleen Cordell, Robert Newton, Minnie Rayner, Jimmy Hanley
GO WEST
***
THE GRAPES OF WRATH
*****THE GREAT DICTATOR
****½
THE GREAT MCGINTY
****½
HIS GIRL FRIDAY
*****
USA
Maybe the things I miss most about Hollywood in the age of studio
contracts and vertical integration are the overlapping dialogue and the
good-looking people who mastered it. In this famously frenetic newspaper
comedy with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell at their peak - driven as they
are by Howard Hawks and his incomparable gift for giddy chaos - so many
people talk so fast at any one time that it becomes difficult to figure
out what's happening when and to whom exactly. And it becomes more
difficult yet to care about such formalities when you're having an
absolute ball.
dir: Howard Hawks
wr: Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur
ed: Gene Havlick
cast: Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy, Gene
Lockhart, Helen Mack, Porter Hall, Billy Gilbert, Abner Biberman,
Ernest Truex, Cliff Edwards, Clarence Kolb, Alma Kruger
KITTY FOYLE
***
USA
For her first
Serious lead
role Ginger Rogers dyed her hair brown, and it won her the Academy Award.
She plays a working class girl who falls in love with – and pregnant to –
someone ‘the Sixth’ and he loves her too, but he loves money more. It’s
one of her weaker performances. She’s charming enough in the lighter
scenes but the drama makes her awfully self-conscious. Her reaction is to
take on a hushed, turgid tone.
dir: Sam Wood
cast: Ginger Rogers, Dennis Morgan, James Craig, Edward Cianelli,
Ernest Cossart, Gladys Cooper, Odette Myrtil, Mary Treen, Katharine
Stevens
THE LETTER
***½
THE LONG VOYAGE HOME
***½
THE MARK OF ZORRO
***
MY FAVORITE WIFE
****
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NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH
****
UK
An espionage thriller explicitly patterned after Hitchcock's The Lady
Vanishes, though with an added element of gravity since it was made
and partly takes place during wartime. Because everybody communicates in
flawless English, it gets difficult to discern who's from which country
and how they became such experts at adopting foreign nationalities and
blending in with the natives. But don't let plausibility interfere with a
cracking yarn, with typically witty Launder-and-Gilliat-penned banter and
exciting setpieces orchestrated by then-rising-talent Carol Reed.
dir: Carol Reed
wr: Sydney Gilliat, Frank Launder
ph: Otto Kanturek
cast: Rex Harrison, Margaret Lockwood, Paul Henreid, Basil Radford,
Naunton Wayne, James Harcourt, Felix Aylmer, Wyndham Goldie
OUR TOWN
**½
THE PHILADELPHIA STORY
*****
USA
A priggish heiress is forced to deal with an ex-husband and two gossip
magazine reporters on the day before her second wedding.
Hollywood's wisest and wittiest dramedy, this belongs to the exclusive
class of pictures that reveal further shades and insights upon each
repeated viewing, and the experience is never less than joyous. Perhaps it
was necessary for a particularly intelligent piece of theatre to achieve
financial success on Broadway before this kind of maturity and depth of
character could be OK'd by a Hollywood studio. Almost all concerned never did
anything better, and this includes a remarkable director and some of the
greatest stars that ever lived.
dir: George Cukor
wr: Donald Ogden Stewart
cast: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Ruth
Hussey, John Howard, Roland Young, John Halliday, Mary Nash,
Virginia Weidler, Henry Daniell
PINOCCHIO
****
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
****½
USA
If it wasn't practically forgotten, this would be the definitive Austen
adaptation. At her most charming and ineffably graceful, Greer Garson is
Elizabeth Bennett, while at his most dashing and relaxed, Laurence Olivier
takes on Mr. Darcy. They're both, of course, visibly closer to middle age
than their characters' true age, but their chemistry compensates.
A man called Robert Z. Leonard was hired to direct and he
keeps things animated and zipping at a steady pace. Wisely enough, the
script - co-written by Aldous Huxley, no less - is more faithful to
Austen's spirit than to her plot, and the picture wraps in less than two
hours, well below mini-series length.
dir: Robert Z. Leonard
wr: Aldous Huxley, Jane Murfin
cast: Greer Garson, Laurence Olivier, Mary Boland, Edmund Gwenn,
Edna May Oliver, Maureen O'Sullivan, Ann Rutherford, Frieda
Inescort, Karen Morley, Heather Angel, Marsha Hunt, Bruce Lester,
Ewdard Ashley, Melville Cooper, E.E. Clive
REBECCA
****½
USA
A classy, compulsive Gothic melodrama, adapted from Daphne du Maurier's
bestseller (with clear influences from Charlotte Brontë). It bears the
stamp of Selznick far more clearly than that of Hitchcock - there aren't
any flashy setpieces that signal the master's touch, and the picture is a
lot wordier than most of the others he made. But Hitch did tell his
fragile leading lady that the entire cast and crew despise her, which may
have helped keep her appropriately - and charmingly - wide-eyed and
intimidated for much of the shoot. Judith Anderson spits lines at
her with relish as the housekeeper with a crush on her former mistress.
dir: Alfred Hitchcock
wr: Robert E. Sherwood, Joan Harrison
ph: George Barnes
m: Franz Waxman
cast: Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, Judith Anderson,
George Sanders, Nigel Bruce, C. Aubrey Smith, Reginald Denny, Gladys
Cooper, Florence Bates, Melville Cooper
REMEMBER THE
NIGHT
****
THE SEA HAWK
***½
THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER
****
THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT
***
USA
Two brothers struggle as truck drivers and one
is maligned by the unwelcome advances of his boss' wife.
Efficient, entertaining melodrama, made memorable in part by Lupino's spectacular
scenery-chewing.
dir: Raoul Walsh
cast: George Raft, Ida Lupino, Ann Sheridan, Humphrey
Bogart, Alan Hale, Roscoe Karns, Gale Page
THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD
***
UK
A lot of perfectly respectable people hold this Arabian Nights tale in
high regard. It's partly a remake of a Douglas Fairbanks vehicle made in
1924 under the same title, and despite the added bonus of sound and soft,
rich Technicolor, this one lacks the first version's atmosphere. The score
is suffocating - it never stops and it's filled with English choir women -
and the wooden romantic leads - a poor man's Erroll Flynn and Hedy Lamarr
- don't help either. The entire thing is pitched at an even volume, so
that none of the potential setpieces stick out or carry any weight. The
special effects, which may be the main reason the picture exists, now seem
too corny to warrant a suspension of disbelief (you enjoy them better as
comic relief).
dir: Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, Tim Whelan, Zoltan Korda,
William Cameron Menzies, Alexander Korda
ph: Georges Périnal, Osmond Borradile
cast: Conrad Veidt, Sabu, John Justin, June Duprez, Rex
Ingram, Miles Malleson, Morton Selten
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