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.

Something to Sing About (1937): James Cagney made this musical at Poverty Row studio Grand National after leaving Warner Brothers. Sadly, although it got pretty good reviews, it proved too expensive and lavish for the studio to bear, and led to its collapse, meaning Cagney was soon forced back to Warner. But, in the meantime, this comedy is something of a hate letter to Hollywood, satirising many of the things he resented about the studios. He plays a dancer and musician who is wooed by a major studio but finds he is expected to change his whole personality and keep quiet about the fact that he is married – even entering on a bogus romance with a co-star in the interests of publicity. There is also criticism of racism in Hollywood, as a Japanese-American budding actor finds himself forced to be a servant in the studio and speak with a put-on Japanese accent. Unfortunately, I don’t think Cagney’s screen wife in this, Evelyn Daw, has much star quality and her singing voice is unbearably shrill. But, all the same, the film has a lot going for it, and there is a memorable scene where Cagney gives Daw a quick acting lesson, showing her how he widens his eyes on camera to give a feeling of shock and surprise. You can see him delighting in his own power, although I’m glad he doesn’t give away too many professional tricks.  Cagney also starred in at least three  more “films about films”, patchy pre-Code Lady Killer (1933), where he plays a gangster turned actor, madcap comedy Boy Meets Girl (1938), where he and Pat O’Brien go over the top as a pair of lazy screenwriters, and the great biopic Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), one of the many films I want to write a full review of some day, where Cagney is devastating as Lon Chaney and gives a glimpse of what he would have been like as a silent actor himself.

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place

In a Lonely Place (1950): Humphrey Bogart is at his greatest in Nicholas Ray’s compelling film noir, as a hard-drinking, troubled and violent screenwriter who might or might not be a murderer. This is primarily a crime mystery and a dark love story rather than a film about Hollywood, but the setting is important all the same. You definitely get a feeling of how hard it is to stay in the game, and how easy it would be for Bogart’s character to be thrown on the scrapheap and not make any more films. Bogart also made another great film about films, The Barefoot Contessa with Ava Gardner, though I feel that movie comes unstuck near the end when it forgets about satirising Hollywood and lurches into an unlikely murder mystery plot.

Play It Again, Sam (1972): Talking of Bogart, I only recently saw this Woody Allen comedy where Allen pays homage to Casablanca, wryly reworking the plot and even introducing Bogart as a character, who treats Allen to various outrageous hard-boiled diatribes on how to treat “dames”. To be honest, the scenes with Jerry Lacy as Bogie aren’t my favourite parts of this movie – the scenes with Allen and Diane Keaton  neurotically messing things up for themselves without his help are even funnier, and show the way forward to Annie Hall. But anyway, for anyone who likes Bogart, Allen or both, it isn’t to be missed! Allen has made quite a few films about films over the years, from Stardust Memories and The Purple Rose of Cairo to Hollywood Ending - and he often pays tribute to other movies and directors in his other films, too.

Cinema Paradiso (1988): Nearly everyone loves this film, and so do I. It might be sentimental at times, but it certainly shows how cinema casts its spell over a young boy who goes on to dedicate his life to it, moving from being taught the tricks of a dying trade by an ageing projectionist to becoming a director himself. And I love the reel at the end where all the kisses removed by the projectionist, Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), together with the disapproving local priest, are triumphantly restored.

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.

Michelle Williams plays Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, but it is actually young actor Eddie Redmayne who takes the role most similar to the one Monroe herself plays in The Prince and the Showgirl. He plays fresh-faced young third assistant director Colin Clark, whose diary and memoirs were the inspiration for Adrian Hodges’ script. Colin is drawn to the troubled actress, several years older than him, and builds an unlikely bond with her, which turns into a tentative, probably chaste love affair. Similarly, in the earlier film, Monroe’s character, clumsy understudy Elsie from the Coconut Club with her one white dress, is drawn to Grandduke Charles (Olivier) the Regent of the fictional Balkan country Carpatha, who is older than her, and weighed down both by his present responsibilities and by his past.

In each film, the celebrity/royal is unbearably autocratic and calls all the shots. Monroe and Charles both send cars or carriages for their latest love interests when they want to see them, but ignore and send them away when they are busy with something or someone else. However, with both the Prince and the actress, there is a feeling that, beneath the spoilt surface and demanding behaviour, there is an inner loneliness. Both of them need someone they can talk to and trust, and nobody in their paid entourage really fits the bill. Elsie and Colin are partly seduced by the glamour of all this, as I said earlier, and flattered to be chosen by someone who could have anyone they want. But they also see and respond to the real person behind the mask.

Michelle Williams and Eddie Redmayne

Having said all this, I wouldn’t want to push the similarities between the two films’ characters too far. There are also important differences. Elsie in The Prince and the Showgirl is less ambitious and rather more likeable than her 1950s male counterpart, partly because of Terence Rattigan’s great script, adapted from his own play The Sleeping Prince, and partly because Monroe herself gives the character so much warmth. You never feel that Elsie is on the make, trying to work out whether the Prince could help her career – whereas I do think there is this feeling occasionally in My Week with Marilyn. Colin had appeared to be falling in love with costume assistant Liz (Emma Watson), but he quickly drops her when it becomes apparent that Marilyn Monroe might be interested. Liz herself suggests to him that he sees a possibility of  trading up, and he doesn’t deny this. I suppose another way of seeing this is that Elsie is really falling in love with her Prince, even if their hoped-for reunion in 18 months’ time seems likely to be just a dream – but Colin’s flirtation with Marilyn will just be one week out of his life, something for him to remember, and trade on, later.  Redmayne is excellent at making Colin  genuine and kind, but at times showing a hint of calculation below the charm.

Taking on the role of a film legend must be a daunting challenge for any actor – because anyone watching their take will be so familiar with the original, and constantly making comparisons. I’d say both Williams and Branagh walk this tightrope successfully, however. Most of the time they both channel the great actors they are portraying rather than imitating them, bringing out the fears and insecurities behind the image. It helps that they are almost always seen at one remove. I don’t know how accurate the film is in factual terms, but after all they are not just playing Monroe and Olivier, but playing those actors as they are seen through the star-struck eyes of Colin.

Kenneth Branagh as Olivier

Williams is especially good at getting the two different sides of Monroe, and showing how she switches from one to the other when the cameras start rolling or adoring fans move into sight. Suddenly she is Marilyn, and striking her famous poses. At times Branagh’s re-creation of Olivier’s mannered way of speaking might border on caricature, but I think he just about gets away with it, as one great Shakespearean actor/director paying homage to another.  And he also has scenes suggesting the insecurity beneath the brilliance, especially one where he looks into the mirror at his face, and says one or two lines anticipating a later film, The Entertainer. Writer Adrian Hodges  portrays Olivier as quite similar to the Grandduke – he too is determined and demanding and wants to get his own way, with constant clashes between him and Monroe. As I’m a big fan of Olivier,  I found I was automatically more sympathetic to his character  than I should really have been in terms of the script!

I’ll stop here as I don’t want to write too much, but will just say there is a great deal more to both films than this, above all the humour  - and also they both have wonderful supporting casts. I especially enjoyed Dame Sybil Thorndike’s performance in The Prince and the Showgirl, and Dame Judi Dench playing Dame Sybil in My Week with Marilyn, as well as Zoe Wanamaker as Monroe’s Method acting coach, Paula Strasberg.

For further reading, here’s a link to Jon’s review of My Week with Marilyn at his blog Films Worth Watching, and another to a piece from the Kitty Packard Pictorial blog on The Year Classic Film Made a Comeback, looking at The Artist, My Week with Marilyn, Hugo and Midnight in Paris.

Oliver and Monroe in 'The Prince and the Showgirl'

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.

The film is shot in black and white and almost all of it is silent, except for the music on the soundtrack, beautifully re-creating the vanished world of 1920s Hollywood. Actor George Valentin (Dujardin) and his devoted pet dog star in a succession of swashbuckling hits, but it all abruptly comes to an end when talkies are introduced in 1929 – just as it did for many actors in real life. George’s French accent means he will not be wanted for talking pictures, and he must make way for newer stars like the beautiful extra whom he briefly flirted with and encouraged, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo, whose vibrant, dazzling screen personality appears to be modelled on Clara Bow). There is a painful scene where George overhears Peppy giving an interview in a restaurant, gloating innocently over the triumph of her youth and beauty and how the old must give way to the young – and he gets up from his table to tell her sarcastically that he is doing just that. “I give way to you.”

Jean Dujardin and Uggy the dog

In all the versions of A Star Is Born which I’ve seen, the star on the wane hits the booze while his young replacement rises to fame. George does just the same in this film, with haunting scenes of him alone in his untidy flat, surrounded by empty bottles. However, the difference in this film is that he only starts drinking after his career is already ruined, drowning his sorrows rather than creating them. For all its apparently sweet and frothy surface, this film possibly has a bleaker message than Wellman and Cukor’s versions, because it shows that you don’t have to be a drunk, or to do anything wrong, to find yourself replaced by a younger generation. Time, and the relentless advance of technology, are enough. I’ve read some reviews of this movie which have claimed that its drama is shallow and there is no subtext, but anyone working in a dying industry would surely disagree.

However, despite and around this bleak core, the film is great fun to watch. Guillaume Schiffman’s black-and-white camerawork is endlessly inventive, with wonderful scenes like the one where Peppy’s legs are seen dancing behind a screen while her face is hidden, and the pastiche scenes from silent films, such as George fighting duels, or sinking into quicksand (all too symbolic) are beautifully done.

Above all, George’s dog gives an astonishing, comic and scene-stealing performance, often acting  out what his master is feeling. There’s an interesting review of the film by Anne-Katrin Titze at Eye For Film where she says: “I asked Hazanavicius at the press conference, if he felt he didn’t have enough challenges making a silent film in black and white and had to add a rambunctious dog to half of the scenes. He answered that he saw George and the dog (Uggy is his real name) as “one character with two bodies”.”

All in all, I’d definitely recommend this film to anyone interested in 1920s and 30s cinema, and I’m hoping it will get some Oscar nominations, which seems highly likely.

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.

Edward Arnold as the minister of war

This politically charged plot led to a row between producer Walter Wanger and Will Hays (for once,  controversial censor Joseph Breen was apparently happy, as there was no sex, but Hays was the one to be outraged!) The film’s release was delayed as Hays and Wanger argued over the content, but I don’t think much was cut in the end, as far as I can gather from the articles I’ve read.

All this behind-the-scenes conflict seems as if it was probably more interesting than the film itself.  The war itself is  far too vaguely described for the wider plot to make much sense – who is supposed to be fighting whom, and why? Another  problem is that none of the characters are all that interesting or realistic. The President and his wife (Janet Beecher) are incredibly saintly, fussing sweetly over the whereabouts of his missing wrist watch. By contrast, the various industrialists and money men are like cartoon baddies, constantly spelling out their evil plots to one another in ludicrously simple terms. There are also so many of these characters that I found it impossible to remember which was which.  The dialogue is leaden and often preachy, despite the involvement of a whole string of writers including the usually brilliant Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

Arthur Byron as the saintly President

Edward Arnold doesn’t get much screen time as the war minister, and is mainly seen behind a desk, so he can’t be as fiercely energetic as he is in some of his other roles. Wellman favourite Andy Devine has a lovable simpleton role as a “grocery boy” for the President, but, although he does bring in some humour, his role is cloyingly sweet too. About the only times the film comes alive are during a dinner party scene where smooth-talking lobbyist’s wife Rosalind Russell entertains some of the politicians, and in the romance between secret serviceman Paul Kelly and the President’s secretary, Peggy Conklin.

A fascist rally is genuinely chilling, but this scene is over very briefly. Oh yes, and there is also a prolonged rainstorm towards the end of the film, just to remind us who is directing. I suspect Barney McGill’s cinematography would add a lot to the film if I had seen it in a better print, especially in these scenes, but all in all I was sadly disappointed by the movie. I have to wonder what on earth went wrong in its making, and whether the studio interfered a lot – usually Wellman is quite devastating in his portrayal of injustice and social issues, and I would have thought he could make businessmen discussing war plans in a cosy room every bit as menacing as his gangsters, but it just doesn’t work.

Peggy Conklin as the President's secretary

Paul Kelly, Peggy Conklin and Arthur Byron

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.

The film moves at a breathless pace and packs a great deal into just 72 minutes. As with so many pre-Codes, it was originally intended to be longer and some footage was cut before release, and there is a long list at the imdb of actors whose scenes were never shown. George Raft was supposed to be in it but his footage sadly fell by the wayside. However, while I wish those missing scenes had been preserved, the film does feel complete as it is, unlike some other movies where footage was cut.

This movie was originally intended as a vehicle for James Cagney, who had starred in Wellman’s classic  The Public Enemy the previous year, but he didn’t take the role in the end, for whatever reason. I suspect the character was called “Jimmy” when the studio thought he would be playing the role – and one of the gossip paragraphs used as links between the scenes features an obscure story about Cagney, which looks to be some kind of in-joke.  I can’t help wondering how he would have played the role and suspecting that he would have made the character more intense and driven. However, Fairbanks gives a fine performance, and, with his upper-crust accent, he is believable as a gossip columnist mixing with celebrities in the early hours and then sharing their secrets with the public. (The film is based on a novel by Rian James, himself a newspaper columnist who had an adventurous background as a foreign correspondent, stunt pilot and much more, and there are intriguing mentions of Jimmy having a similar past, being known as the “great Russell” – but this isn’t really explored, as the film sticks to the gossipy here-and-now.)

Lee Tracy, Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Ann Dvorak

Russell writes a column similar to Walter Winchell’s real-life syndicated feature On Broadway, full of  scandal and innuendo about the famous people he spots in restaurants and nightspots. The movie opens with his newsdesk ringing to remind him that he needs to get to a job that evening – it’s 5pm and he hasn’t got up yet. However, he’d be well advised to get as much sleep as he can, since I don’t think he manages to go to bed again in the whole film, and well before the end of it he is staggering around wearily ordering himself “a gallon of black coffee”.

Russell doesn’t actually do all that much work, and rarely goes near the office, but he plays hard. When they are not in nightspots, he and pal Stanley Fiske (Tracy) hang out in an art deco apartment with a wall lined with books, at least a couple of which are fake volumes hiding a supply of bootleg hooch. They leave the door unlocked when they go out in case a friend pops by and wants a drink. There’s a lot of tomfoolery between the two, and their friendship comes across through this. Wellman is very good at portraying buddy relationships, as with Tom and Matt in The Public Enemy.

Jimmy is madly in love with aspiring actress Mary Wodehouse (Frances Dee), constantly giving her rather cheesy compliments. Mary  is also deeply in love – with herself. Dee is very charming as Mary, but makes it apparent that she is far more interested in her own looks and prospects than she is in worrying about the lovelorn Jimmy. She’s only too happy to stand him up at the last minute when a better offer, such as a trip to the opera with a rich admirer, comes to hand. However, she does turn to her loyal suitor for help when she runs into trouble, after writing cheques on an empty bank account for a string of “essentials” like designer clothes and expensive face creams. I was interested to note that her bills are all for things she doesn’t need, in order to ensure her character doesn’t become too sympathetic – in the Great Depression, many of the audience would have been able to sympathise with a character faced with debts they couldn’t pay, but probably not with someone spending a thousand dollars on make-up.

Lee Tracy and Ann Dvorak

Of course, this whole storyline is partly scoffing at women for supposedly being gold-diggers and wasting money on frills, and  the trailer for the film, available at the TCM website, goes on this angle quite heavily, with the words on the screen claiming that the movie is all about “the unfair sex – those cheating charmers who have taken love out of the parlor and put it on a gold standard!” This isn’t really what the film feels like, though. Mary might have “a price tag on her emotions”, to quote another line from the trailer, but the real heroine, Sally (Ann Dvorak)  isn’t a gold-digger, and is down-to-earth, funny and genuinely in love with Jimmy. By contrast, Mary’s penniless elderly aunt, Hattie (Cecil Cunningham) certainly was a gold digger in her day, and thinks grimly back to her own past as a chorus girl as she calculates which man will be the best bet to pay Mary’s debts. The presence of her character shows the stakes that Mary is playing for, as she strives to avoid ending up like Aunt Hattie herself.

What’s more, Mary herself stays likeable, if shallow and frothy, because Dee brings a warmth to the character. And you have to feel sympathetic to her when a gangster, Eddie Shaw (Lyle Talbot in one of his very first roles) buys up her bounced cheques  and makes it clear he would like payment in kind – setting the scene for some melodramatic plot twists towards the end of the film.

Jimmy might not be prepared to take on the mob for the sake of the public, but he will do it for Mary. He heads off to Atlantic City for a confrontation with Eddie, but finds himself faced instead with Eddie’s goonish sidekick Bernie Olds, played by Warren Hymer in a scene-stealing comic performance. One of my favourite moments in the whole film comes when Jimmy walks in from the heavy rain to be faced by Bernie. Holding him at gunpoint, Bernie barks his fearsome instruction: “Take your coat off, you’re all wet!”  The whole scene with the two of them holed up together in a hotel room becomes increasingly hilarious as Bernie decides to amuse himself with some ridiculous and dangerous practical jokes, reminiscent of those Jack Oakie’s character plays in another early 1930s film from Wellman, Looking For Trouble.

I discuss the ending in this next bit. 

Douglas Fairbanks Jr

However, the most characteristic and memorable scene is the movie’s climax, where Jimmy goes to confront Eddie in his apartment, but sees Aunt Hattie leaving after murdering him. Jimmy then goes into the flat, finds Eddie’s body, and throws him off the roof, after first setting the scene to make it look like a drunken accident. Most of this is done as a silent scene, with striking, moody cinematography from Sidney Hickox and the only sound coming from jaunty jazz music as Fairbanks carries out his sinister errand in the torrential rain. It’s all laced with extremely black comedy, and reminiscent of the famous rain scene where Cagney is shot in The Public Enemy.

There are more twists to come, as Jimmy feverishly completes his cover-up of the murder, only to be jilted by Mary when she goes off with a richer love rival. He still gets a happy-ish ending, though, as first he gives a little speech about how he has learned that “love is a racket”, and now intends never to fall in love again. But, as the film ends with Fairbanks and Dvorak gazing into each other’s eyes, it seems unlikely he will keep that resolution.

The whole way that the murder is swept under the carpet and followed by a romantic comedy ending would never have been possible under the code, as TCM’s article on the film points out. There is another good article on the film at Moviediva.

Many thanks to Cagneyfan for putting me on to this movie, which I really enjoyed – the whole mood of it reminds me a lot of Looking For Trouble, which I also love.

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!

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.

Nancy Carroll and Fredric March

Nancy Carroll, who played a singer  in Wellman’s Dangerous Paradise, made earlier the same year, is here cast as former Follies dancer Peggy, though she is never actually seen dancing or singing. She has given up the stage to marry a millionaire financier, C Morton Gibson (Frank Morgan), but is finding that wealth has its price. Peggy half-heartedly tries to be a model wife, but is tempted back to her old, easier way of life when an old flame, penniless musician Paul (Fredric March) arrives back from a trip to Europe. Soon the two of them are giggling together non-stop as they reminisce over old times, and indulging in kooky practical jokes, which seem to amuse them a lot more than they do anybody else.

Stranded in the rain when a car breaks down, the couple break into a stranger’s house, where they make themselves hot drinks, play the piano and dress up in bearskin rugs, in a self-consciously silly sequence which has a screwball feel about it. However, the laughter has to stop when the police turn up to arrest them and they nearly land up in court – though they get away with it when the officers realise that the woman involved is the wife of such a rich and important man.

In the car on the way back, Paul gives an extraordinary speech to Peggy where he tells her that her life is ghastly because she doesn’t have laughter. “You’re rich. You’re dirty rich, and only laughter can make you clean.”  To put it another way, money isn’t enough without love. Eventually Peggy tells her husband that she is leaving him – something which in turn makes him laugh, a little. He can’t quite believe she would throw all their wealth away.   Morgan is good at giving his characters a kind of poignant pomposity, and he certainly does that with Morton. He dresses up as Napoleon for an over-the-top costume party, and buys his wife elaborate jewellery – but he seems to be really in love with the stock market. Carroll and March are both very good in their roles, but I’d have to say that for me Morgan steals every scene he appears in.

Morton’s fabulous wealth underlines the fact that this is very much a Great Depression film, where everyone makes decisions because of money, or the lack of it. Starving artist Ralph (Glenn Anders),  pining away with unrequited love for Peggy, is tempted to woo her stepdaughter Marjorie (Diane Ellis) instead simply for her money – echoing the bargain that Peggy herself made. In the  opening sequence of the film, Ralph phones Peggy up to tell her he plans to shoot himself, but she won’t take his call – so he laughs as he leaves a message with the maid. His suicide is postponed until towards the end of the film, but the desperate note of his laugh remains as a backdrop to everything that follows.

This film wasn’t very successful at the box office, with moviegoers hit by the Depression probably finding it hard to sympathise with a poor little rich wife. However, it is very entertaining to watch even in a washed out print where you can’t see the faces half the time – so I’m very glad I got the chance to see it, and would like to thank mdean for recommending it.

Nancy Carroll and Frank Morgan in his Napoleon costume

Nancy Carroll and despairing artist Glenn Anders

Nancy Carroll comforts stepdaughter Diane Ellis