Carrying on with my series where I pick five films which have some kind of loose thematic connection – not necessarily the best or even my favourites, but five which interest me. Anyway, films about films seem to be my theme of the moment, as I’ve recently written postings about The Artist and My Week with Marilyn. So here are another five self-regarding movies. Be warned, there are spoilers in my first choice for anyone who doesn’t know what happens in the various versions of A Star Is Born.

Constance Bennett and Lowell Sherman

What Price Hollywood (1932): This melodrama directed by George Cukor was the first version of the A Star Is Born story (as far as I know, anyway). It gives a very bitter picture of a Hollywood which chews people up and casts them aside. Lowell Sherman is absolutely stunning as the washed-up drunken film director Max Carey, dominating the film and drawing on his own real-life drink problem. Constance Bennett is also excellent as ambitious waitress turned rising star Mary Evans, but her romance with millionaire Lonny Borden (Neil Hamilton) doesn’t really ring true and is a weak spot in a powerful film. I also love William A Wellman’s A Star Is Born (1937), which is very much a reworking of the same story, with great performances by Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, and the George Cukor remake, with Judy Garland and James Mason – just a shame that the complete version of that one is lost. But, anyway, Cukor’s pre-Code version has a witty toughness all of its own. And the suicide scene is unforgettable, focusing on the agony of the man whose life is over, and not seen as some kind of noble gesture to the rising star he loves, as in the remakes.

Films about classic cinema are proving very popular at the moment. There’s The Artist, a tribute to silent cinema – and My Week with Marilyn, starring Michelle Williams, Eddie Redmayne and Kenneth Branagh, which goes behind the scenes of the making of The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957. After watching this alternately amusing and bitter-sweet slice of nostalgia, I saw the earlier film (yes, I know it would have made more sense to do this the other way round!), and was struck not only by how well the new movie captures its mood at times, but also, to my surprise, by the similarities in theme between the two.

Each of these two movies is a period piece – with the new film being directed by Simon Curtis, who also helmed the BBC’s costume drama Cranford. (He brings the same loving attention to detail to this film as he did in that mini-series, both in re-creating the 1950s and in showing the 1950s’ version of 1911 in the restaged movie scenes.) Each is set against the background of a major event – a royal wedding in one, the making of a great film in the other.  Also, each film is about a couple temporarily thrown together by circumstances, although they are from different worlds. And each shows a younger person who isn’t famous seduced by the fame and glamour surrounding an older, damaged stranger, but having to come back down to earth and return to real life at the end.

I’ve decided to do a new series of postings which will appear on my blog every Monday and will be picture-led, picking out five films on a particular theme. These are not necessarily the “best” five or even my five favourites, but just a selection that interested me. It would be good to hear  other people’s suggestions for each theme. Since I’ve just posted on the wonderful performance by Uggy (or is it Uggi? or Uggie? I’ve seen all these spellings, and don’t suppose the dog minds too much which it is!) in The Artist, I’m starting off with a look at a few talented dogs in films – although I intended just to write a line or two on each, I’ve got slightly carried away about a couple of them, so I put those at the start!

Sinatra with Snuffy the dog in 'Pal Joey'

1. Pal Joey (1957): I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to Frank Sinatra lately and watching his films too. I could listen to his voice endlessly. To be honest, Pal Joey, directed by George Sidney, isn’t one of my favourites out of his films – a lot of the nightclub scenes are messy, sexist and depressing, and it doesn’t have the power of the stage musical, as far as I can remember from seeing it years ago. However, I do love the relationship between Sinatra as Joey and Snuffy, the terrier he reluctantly adopts after chatting to it in a pet shop to impress the dancing girls who surround him. The dog (a Cairn terrier, I believe) is very talented and there are some sweet, funny scenes where it dips a bagel in some coffee (presumably this is actually dog food!) as an endearing trick  - living on its wits and charm just as Joey has to. The scenes with the dog are part of the softening of the character, who is a lying womaniser with few redeeming qualities in the original stage show – but, anyway, for me they are among the best parts of the film. (There is also a dog featured briefly as a sort of double for Sinatra’s character in Young at Heart (1954), a film I love, where heroine Doris Day takes in a puppy which is the runt of the litter at the start of the movie, and refuses to give up on it. Later she also refuses to give up on Sinatra, playing a depressed musician.)

Clark Gable and Buck the St Bernard

2. The Call of the Wild (1935): Buck the dog is the central character in the original novel, by Jack London, but for his film version William Wellman introduced a human drama and relegated the St Bernard dog to a supporting role. Nevertheless, the scenes of the dog with Clark Gable are very touching, as they head into the 19th-century Yukon searching for gold. Both of them are rebels against society, longing to get back to nature, so once again there is the element of doubling between dog and owner which so often seems to turn up in films. I’ve found that my review of this film is one of the most popular postings on this blog, doubtless largely because of the pictures I’ve gathered together. Sadly, I don’t have one with both Gable and Loretta Young together with the dog. (Another Wellman film where a dog plays an important role is The Light That Failed (1939), an adaptation of Kipling’s novel with Ronald Colman as a drunken artist who is going blind. He constantly talks to his dog, who probably features in nearly as many scenes as Uggy in The Artist – but sadly I haven’t been able to find any pictures of Colman with the dog. This is a film I keep meaning to review, so when I do I will find a still or two to put this right!)

William Powell and Myrna Loy with Asta

3. The Thin Man (1934): Asta must be one of the most popular movie dogs ever, making a perfect team with William Powell and Myrna Loy in this sparkling comedy-mystery, directed by W.S. Van Dyke. The dog’s original name was Skippy, but eventually this was changed to Asta as the wire-haired fox terrier went on to feature in the next two films in the series – later being replaced by lookalikes. So far I have only seen the first film in this series, but I intend to catch up with all the others, hopefully during the coming year.

Richard Barthelmess as David with Rocket the dog

4. Tol’able David (1921): I’m a fan of actor Richard Barthelmess, but so far I’ve mainly seen his talkies rather than his silent films, even though the silents are probably more famous. However, I have seen and admired this famous silent, directed by Henry King, a melodrama where Barthelmess starts off playing a young boy who is forced to mature as he confronts tragedy and cruelty. The opening of the film has some blissful country scenes of David playing with his pet dog, Rocket, who sadly goes on to meet a tragic fate.  In fact, cruelty to the dog by a brutal neighbour is what starts the whole chain of melodramatic events unfolding.  According to the cast list, it appears that Rocket’s real name was Lassie.

Christopher Lloyd with Einstein the sheepdog

5. Back to the Future (1985): This Robert Zemeckis time travel adventure is rather later than most films I write about here, but it’s a big favourite with my whole family, especially my teenage son – and one of his best-loved sequences is the scene at the beginning, where eccentric Dr Emmet Brown (Christopher Lloyd) has come up with an amazing Heath Robinson apparatus to feed tinned food to Einstein the sheepdog. Einstein seems rather more interested in the food than he is in the scenes where he gets involved in time travel!

So, does anyone have any thoughts on any of these movie dogs, or do you have other favourites? And what about movie cats? I’m really more of a cat person than a dog person, but I’m struggling to think of many.

Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo in 'The Artist'

A belated Happy New Year to everyone visiting this blog, and thanks very much for all your support. I intend to update more this year, hopefully at least once a week, so watch this space! This will mean keeping my postings shorter, as I have been promising for ages… though I may relapse into long-windedness when I write about one of my favourite actors or directors.  Anyway, up to now I haven’t written about any new releases on this blog, as I’m concentrating on films from the past,  but in the last week I’ve seen two acclaimed new films which are about classic movie-making, The Artist and My Week with Marilyn, so I thought it would make a change to write something about each of them.

I liked both, especially The Artist, which feels almost like a film made for me personally – though I know many others feel this too. For one thing, it is  a loving homage to films made between 1929 and 1932, a period covering the death of silent films and the birth of  pre-Code talkies, which I have been discovering over the last couple of years. (The hero, played by Jean Dujardin,  looks uncannily like John Barrymore, one of my favourite actors, in some of his swashbuckling roles, especially when he turns his head and is glimpsed in profile.) For another, the plot is yet another version of  A Star Is Born, and I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the past year watching and writing about various versions of this endlessly reworked story.

Even more good news on Wellman DVD/Blu-ray releases. Kino Classics recently announced it would be releasing a restored print of  Nothing Sacred (1937) this month, and it is now doing the same for another great  Wellman film from the same year, A Star Is Born, starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, which will be released in February. The artwork for this one looks great, and, as with Nothing Sacred, it is being advertised as an “authorized edition from the estate of David O Selznick from the collection of  George Eastman House”. Both these films were previously only available in a whole variety of cheap DVDs with badly faded Technicolor, so it will be great to see them restored to their full glory. There won’t be any special features apart from the trailer, though, and there seems to be no definite information on whether these are just region 1 releases or whether they will play in other regions’  DVD/Blu-ray players .

In the interests of obsessive completism, I thought I’d mention that I’ve just watched another rare 1930s William Wellman film. Sadly, however, if I’m honest, on this occasion the thrill of anticipation was greater than the pleasure of seeing the movie, The President Vanishes, which I think is by far the weakest offering I’ve seen from this director. I can’t really review it properly as I’ve only seen it once in a dire print, but will just make a few brief comments and post a few pictures.

I’d hoped for a lot from this film, which was made in late 1934, a few months after the enforcement of the Hays code, and released at the start of 1935. It has a good cast, headed by Edward Arnold, with a small part for a very young Rosalind Russell. It also has a plot which sounds intriguing on the face of it, adapted from a novel by Rex Stout. It’s about industrialists and businessmen trying to get America involved in a European war in order to boost the economy and the arms trade. The businessmen bankroll a shady Fascist organisation, known as the Grey Shirts, in order to stoke up public opinion, but, when the peace-loving President (Arthur Byron) is apparently abducted, the pro-war bandwagon is abruptly derailed. You don’t exactly have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out very early on in the 80-minute movie that the President engineered his own abduction.

Frances Dee and Douglas Fairbanks Jr

Countless movies from the 1930s feature fast-talking, fast-living  journalists, armed with battered old typewriters, phones and bottles of whiskey. Some of these reporters are fearlessly determined to expose corruption at any cost. Others, however, are quite the opposite, and the (anti)hero of Wellman’s quirky romantic comedy-melodrama Love Is a Racket is a case in point. Gossip columnist Jimmy Russell, played by a very young and handsome Douglas Fairbanks Jr, isn’t interested in putting his neck on the line. When he hears about a juicy story involving New York mobsters fixing the price of milk, he can’t get to the phone fast enough…  to keep it out of the paper!

This is one of six movies made by Wellman in 1932, during his amazingly prolific pre-Code days. Made under contract at Warner, it has the studio’s gritty style, but is also stamped with the director’s personality, as it lurches from witty dialogue to  black humour, practical jokes and slapstick. Also, about half the film seems to take place in torrential rain, Wellman’s favourite type of weather. There’s a great cast, with Lee Tracy, the original stage star of  The Front Page, as Fairbanks’ best buddy and newspaper colleague, Frances Dee as our hero’s on-off girlfriend, and Ann Dvorak, one of my favourite 1930s actresses, in a sadly small role as his pal who wants to be something more. Even with all this going for it, this film isn’t on DVD as yet and is one of the director’s more obscure early works. But it has recently been shown on TCM in the US, so there must be  a chance it will soon get released on Warner Archive.

Clara Bow in 'Wings'

Wow! I’ve just written a posting about all the Wellman goodies coming out on DVD – and now comes the news from the wonderful Classicflix blog that his silent masterpiece Wings (1927) (winner of the first Oscar for best film) is coming out on DVD and Blu-ray from Paramount in January. They have now updated their site to say that it will have one bonus feature on the standard release and three on the Blu-ray, one of which is about the restoration of the film.

The artwork looks great although sadly it doesn’t include Wellman’s name.  Anyway, I’m very excited about this. I don’t know whether or not the release will be for all regions, but it sounds great.  Let’s hope there is even more to follow!

William Wellman and Dorothy Coonan on the set of 'Wild Boys of the Road '

It’s been a while since I did any full reviews of William A Wellman movies here, but I have been watching more of his work in the meantime and have updated my Wellman page with brief details of all the films of his I’ve seen so far (40-plus.) I do also have a couple more of his films which I haven’t got round to watching yet, and there are a few more available which I haven’t bought yet, so I will carry on updating, and hopefully review some more of them too.

Anyway, I’m delighted to say that my page is already getting out of date, because Warner Archive has just announced that it is releasing three more of his titles on DVD. I’m especially excited at the release of his great pre-Code Safe In Hell (1931), starring Dorothy Mackaill in a brilliant performance as an ex-prostitute who runs away to a Caribbean island after killing an ex-boyfriend.

The other two are later titles, which I haven’t seen as yet. One is My Man and I (1953), starring Shelley Winters as an alcoholic bar girl befriended by Mexican farmhand Ricardo Montalban. The other is Wellman’s very last film, Lafayette Escadrille (1958), starring Tab Hunter and David Janssen, and with a small part for Clint Eastwood. This returns to the theme of the director’s first big success, Wings, by focusing on First World War flyers. I have seen an interview with Wellman where he talks about this film and about how upset he was by the studio changing his ending and also imposing a title –  he had already had a lot of interference with many other films, but you get the impression this one broke his heart. (He himself  didn’t fly with the Lafayette Escadrille, as usually stated, but with the Lafayette Flying Corps.) Anyway, this film is already available on a French DVD from Warner, but this is said to be a remastered edition, so I’m not sure which would be the better buy. The French DVD is probably a pressed one rather than a DVR, but maybe this is a better print?

It’s also good to hear that classic screwball comedy Nothing Sacred (1937), starring Carole Lombard and Fredric March, is being released by Kino on both DVD and Blu-ray on December 20 in a new “authorised edition from the estate of David O Selznick and the collection of George Eastman House). Should be much better than all the faded public domain copies on the market!

I’ve finally managed to see pre-Code romantic comedy Laughter, starring Nancy Carroll, Fredric March and Frank Morgan. It was in a very poor print online (at good old YT), but I’m just happy to have seen it at last. It has never been released on DVD – probably because neither of the two main stars is a top name now, and nor is director Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast, who only made a handful of movies before leaving Hollywood. There is no chance of it turning up on TV in the UK, where I live, though there is a chance it may appear on TCM in the US, which serves up such an amazing array of early 1930s films. Although this film isn’t very well-known I’ve found a few nice pictures of it, so you might be interested if you scroll down to the end!

The title Laughter might sound as if this film is an uproarious farce , but far from it. In fact it is a blend of sophisticated comedy and melodrama, with some sharp, witty dialogue from screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart.  This is a film which has attracted a lot of interest and discussion over the years as a precursor to the screwball comedies of a few years later, and there is a long piece on it in the wonderful book I’m slowly reading my way through at the moment, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges by James Harvey.