I wanted to see Mr Skeffington because it stars Bette Davis, who is one of my favourite actresses. However, I ended up feeling that Claude Rains gives by far the stronger performance in this movie, which saw them both receiving Oscar nominations.

Bette Davis and Claude Rains

I was also interested to see it because I’d read that it is one of Hollywood’s first films to tackle anti-Semitism, and I’ve recently seen a couple of other films which look at this – but there isn’t as much about this theme as I’d expected. There are some brief, painful scenes where the Jewish hero, Job Skeffington (Rains) is shown being cruelly snubbed by members of society – and towards the end of the film there is some limited suggestion of what the Nazis were doing in Europe, leading to a shocking climax. However, most of the movie in fact focuses on Mrs rather than Mr Skeffington and on her struggle to come to terms with growing old and losing her looks – something which is unfortunately  portrayed by Bette Davis wearing unconvincing wigs and  inch-thick make-up.

I was interested to read an article in today’s Guardian about classic little-known children’s films. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the main movie discussed in the piece, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T, but it sounds intriguing.

I’ve watched quite a few 1930s and 40s films giving down-to-earth portraits of men’s working lives, including a number about the armed services – but haven’t come across all that many older movies about women at work, or at war.

However, thanks to the UK TV station Film 4, now I’ve seen this British wartime propaganda film about the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service), directed and narrated by Leslie Howard, which was quite an eye-opener to me. It isn’t a masterpiece, but I  think it has worn pretty well, despite the patronising title and an occasionally heavy-handed commentary from Howard, for instance, quoting lines from poems about women’s traditional role as they are seen carrying out military tasks. He is only briefly glimpsed from the rear – in what sadly turned out to be his last film appearance before his own death in the war.

After Howard opens the film by picking out seven women in a crowd at a railway station to be his heroines, the rest of the movie gives  what looks to be a realistic portrayal of life for these characters, all from different backgrounds. I was impressed that there is no attempt to make any of them look particularly glamorous, and the real hard work is not glossed over. The meals and dormitories seem very realistic.

Just a short review today as I don’t have time for one of my epics, you may be relieved to hear! In all honesty, I also don’t have all that much to say about Devil Dogs of the Air, which is a light comedy-drama, though it does feature some spectacular aviation footage. However, I thought I’d write something about it before it fades in my mind.

On the face of it, there are quite a few similarities between this movie , directed by Lloyd Bacon, and one of my favourite James Cagney films, Howard Hawks’  Ceiling Zero, made later in the same year. Both see Cagney playing a daredevil pilot, and both team him with Pat O’Brien as a long-suffering old friend in a position of command. (They are mail pilots in Ceiling Zero, fleet marine force aviators here.) Cagney even makes almost the same entrance in both films. In each case his character has had quite a build-up before he appears, and is first seen in a plane doing daring aerobatics, before cheekily throwing himself into a dismayed O’Brien’s arms on landing.

Yet the two movies feel very different to watch – partly of course because Devil Dogs is mainly comedy and Ceiling Zero mainly drama, but also, I think, because Hawks’ film gives so much more complexity to the characters.  In Ceiling Zero Cagney’s character, “Dizzy” Davis  is in his mid-30s (with a thin moustache to make him look a little older and more dashing), getting rather old to fly and also finding his life of womanising starting to wear thin.

Looking at still photographs from this movie, set in post-war Paris and loosely adapted from a short story by Ernest Hemingway, I was expecting film noir. The fact that it stars great actor John Garfield, opposite French actress Micheline Presle (billed here as Prelle), added to this expectation.

However, although some scenes do have that moody, brooding quality, and the shadowy black-and-white camerawork adds to this, the film as a whole is a strange mixture of noir and sentimentality. Director Jean Negulesco and screenwriter Casey Robinson both made some great films, but in this one they seem to be caught between two stools, with flashes of brilliance in between scenes which unashamedly manipulate the emotions. As many reviews point out, the main plot  is almost like a reworking of The Champ, moved from the boxing ring to the racecourse.

One of the biggest attractions of this film is the footage showing Paris in 1950. By coincidence, I’ve just seen the new film Julie and Julia, which is also set in the city around this period. But the real black-and-white footage of the post-war bars and streets has a battered quality to it which a movie made in 2009 can’t quite recapture, although that is not to say anything against Nora Ephron’s film, which I liked very much.

This is my second – last-minute! – contribution to the Robert Wise blog-athon, being hosted at the Octopus Cinema website. I’ve just re-watched this Western starring my favourite actor, James Cagney, which is the tale of a tough, driven owner of a horse ranch in Wyoming, and wanted to write down a few thoughts about it.

James Cagney with the horses

This is a lavishly-produced film, in Cinemascope and Technicolor, with beautifully colourful, wide shots of the rolling grass prairies that almost take your breath away. The dazzling scenery does become disconcerting at times in the movie, as sometimes violent and disturbing  events unfold  against a backdrop almost as lovely as the Alps in Wise’s The Sound of Music (of course, bad things are happening  inside the houses there too.) I suppose the contrast between the scenery and the events must be part of the point, but I’m not sure it always works all that well – sometimes I found myself wishing the lighting would be just a little less bright.

In the opening scene, young stranger Steve Miller (Don Dubbins) wanders into Jeremy Rodock’s valley, and almost immediately meets ranch owner Rodock (Cagney) himself, who is shot in a gunfight with horse thieves. Despite his wound, Rodock is determined to avenge himself on the thieves and insists on continuing to ride his horse until he faints in the saddle.  He then insists that Steve must cut the bullet out of  his back to save his life. There’s a  moment of dark comedy afterwards when Rodock – the one who has  just undergone the operation without anaesthetic!  -  asks a half-fainting Steve: “How do you feel?”

When you look at the list of Robert Wise’s movies, it seems amazing that he isn’t better-known – which is why it is so good that Joshua over at Octopus Cinema has organised a blog-a-thon about his work, to which this is a contribution.

Somebody Up There Likes Me, starring Paul Newman and Pier Angeli, is one of my favourites out of his movies that I’ve seen so far, and if anything it seems to get better with repeated viewings. I hesitated before watching  because, on the face of it, it’s a boxing movie – a biopic of world middleweight champion Rocky Graziano, based on his autobiography –  and I’m not a fan of the sport. However, it’s really far more than that,  showing how Graziano, originally called Barbella, grew up in poverty and dabbled in crime before turning his life around,  and the fight scenes, powerful though they are, take up only a relatively small part of this movie.

After first seeing the film on TV, I’m very glad I got hold of the DVD, since it has a good commentary track with detailed reminiscences by Wise himself as well as contributions from Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese. Film historian Richard Schickel mentions in the commentary that one reason Wise is sometimes overlooked might be that he isn’t identified with any particular genre, but worked in just about  all of them.  Bearing this out, it strikes me that this film alone touches on many genres in the space of under two hours – starting out as a cross between a gangster movie and a film about juvenile delinquents, then turning into a prison movie and briefly an army one before it really gets into the boxing story, which is also a romance.  The film focuses just as much on Rocky’s relationships with his mother (Eileen Heckart) and his girlfriend and later wife, Norma (Angeli) as it does on the boxing.  Indeed, the posters and lobby cards I’ve seen, possibly designed to persuade women to go to a boxing picture,  seem to go more on the romance than on the fighting.

I’ve rather belatedly discovered in the last few days that there is a blog-a-thon about the film director Robert Wise just starting now at the Octopus Cinema website. I don’t know all that much about Wise as a director, but, looking at his astonishing body of work, which stretched from the 1940s right through to 2000 and included the classic musical West Side Story, I’d love to find out more.

So  I’ll hope to read along with the reviews and also contribute one or maybe two myself over the week, depending on how the time goes.  I really enjoyed the early Howard Hawks blog-a-thon at Only the Cinema earlier this year and would be interested in taking part in more of these events in the future, so, if anyone hears about any which might be up my street, please let me know.

I already knew Frank Sinatra was a good actor, after seeing his impressive supporting performance in From Here to Eternity. However, I didn’t realise quite how good until seeing him in this little-known noir thriller, directed by Lewis Allen, where he just burns up the screen as a hired assassin out to kill the US President.

I’ve read on various websites that Sinatra had the movie withdrawn from circulation after the assassination of JFK because it was reported that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched the film just days before carrying out the killing. However, there’s a comment at the imdb saying that Sinatra in fact had nothing to do with the decision to withdraw the movie. In any case, there are one or two chilling similarities, especially in the scenes with a sniper standing at a window – and it’s easy to see why there might have been little appetite for watching the movie  after the real-life tragedy.

The Independent newspaper in the UK published a fascinating interview with Olivia de Havilland earlier this month – I’ve just belatedly caught up with it and am passing on the link for others who had missed it. She says quite a lot about her feelings for Errol Flynn.  Apparently she is hoping to have a first draft of her autobiography finished by September.

The headline is slightly misleading, as it claims she is the last of the 1930s Hollywood legends, whereas in fact there are one or two others still alive, including, of course, her sister, Joan Fontaine – Olivia refused to make any comment in the interview on their famous feud.

I actually came across this interview via scarlettohara.org, a blog about Gone With the Wind and Vivien Leigh, so will pass on the link to that too. Since this post is about Olivia de Havilland, I can’t resist including a picture of her with James Cagney from The Strawberry Blonde, which is one of my favourite movies – and yet another one I really want to write about…