Notes on 15 Early-1940s American Movies

It All Came True (1940, 3.4 stars) is quite silly, with a gangster played by Humphrey Bogart hiding in a boardinghouse, where true crime fan ZaSu Pitts recognizes him, and he shows a heart of gold in rescuing the boarding house from bank foreclosure by... turning it into a nightclub, where Ann Sheridan gets the chance to sing... Totally unbelievable but somewhat amusing.

Honeymoon for Three (1941, 3.2 stars) seems to me to have been influenced by "The Man Who Came to Dinner." It would have to be the play, since the screen adaptation was still a year in the future. Ann Sheridan was in both movies, but played the Bette Davis part in "Honeymoon," that is the wry secretary to writer George Brent in a farcical Cleveland stop on a book tour. A college sweetheart of the writer (Osa Massen), who is convinced that she is the model for the heroine of his latest novel and throws herself at him. Her husband, slyly played by Charlie Ruggles, would be delighted to overload her and never again hear himself compared to the Great Man... who is engaged to his secretary. A blonde Jane Wyman is not very funny. For that matter, neither is Brent. Ruggles doesn't have to steal scenes: they are given to him. Sheridan looked great and was the most sympathetic character in the farce. The lawyers desperate for some business were pretty funny, the shocks for the waiter serving Brent at two tables overdone.

Those familiar either with the Hollywood Production Code of the time or the title's allusion to Christopher Marlowe's poem or who notice which two names are above the title will know how "Come Live with Me " (directed by MGM glamor filmmaker Clarence Brown, 1941, 3.2 stars) will turn out, even before the skinny but handsome young James Stewart, who agreed to marry the very beautiful Viennese refugee Hedy Lamarr to keep her from being deported back to "what used to be Austria" by the INS (an unusually benign Barton MacLane). Lamarr's charcter has been the mistress of Ian Hunter, a publisher whose wife (Verree Teasdale) likes the manuscript Without Love and roots for the marriage of convenience to turn into mutual love even before she realizes that the married man in Stewart's novel is her husband. Marriages, regardless of the reasons into which they were entered or whether they were consummated, were sacred to the Production Code, though it could take until the last reel for characters to realize they belonged with the partner to whom they were married. There is a wise old country grandmother (Adeline De Walt Reynolds) and very hokey fireflies.

Two-Faced Woman (1941, 2.8 stars) was Greta Garbo's last movie, a screwball comedy that its director George Cukor did not think was funny and did not appeal to wartime audiences. It has some great skiing stunt work and the last five minutes are worth watching. There are some traces of what led the Catholic Legion of Decency to condemn what Cukor filmed which they judged as having "immoral and un-Christian attitude toward marriage: impudently suggestive scenes, dialogue, and situation; suggestive costumes." Louis B. Mayer had it recut with the husband recognizing the hoax from the start, although the movie's story still plays at adultery and has some suggestive costumes for Garbo's party girl guise.

Her Cardboard Lover (1942, directed by George Cukor, 3 stars) was a less-than-inspired 1930s screwball romantic comedy that fell particularly flat with wartime audiences. Robert Taylor's comic timing was surprisingly deft and George Sanders was honing his cad persona. Norma Shearer refused to play her age and was a better "straight man" than comedienne. Still, the movie has its moments, including a young Chill Wills as a judge and Taylor in Shearer's satin pajamas and bunny slippers., plus others of Taylor rousing Sander's (easily-roused) disgust. Pretty-boy Taylor and the refusing-to-age Metro star Shearer were better together in the rescue from the Nazi/romance "Escape" (1940).

The More the Merrier (1943, directed by George Stevens. 3.2 stars) is a late screwball comedy I'd long wanted to see, being a fan of sorts of Jean Arthur and Charles Coburn (who won a supporting actor Oscar in it). Joel McCrea was not bad, but was not Cary Grant (whose last screen appearance was in the Coburn role in a remake moved from WWII D.C. to Tokyo during the 1964 Olympics). I'd have been merrier if the movie (both versions, in fact) about housing shortages and eyebrow-raising cohabitations (leading to romance) had been shorter.

Pretty much nothing in the book that actor Willard Robertson wrote was allowed by the censors to be filmed in the 1942 "Moontide"- prostitution, getting away with murder, cannibalism, etc. Fritz Lang began the movie with the great cinematographer Lucien Ballard, but did not want to make the happy-ending romance mogul Darryl F. Zanuck wanted to make, so the movie was taken over by the more amenable Archie Mayo (Petrified Forest, Angel on My Shoulder) and the dark and foggy look was brightened up by Charles Clarke (Miracle on 34^th St.).

The movie was the first (there was only one more) of the movies Jean Gabin made in Hollywood (having appeared in seminal noirs directed by Marcel Carné in France during the late-1930). His character, Bobo(?!) doesn't make much sense (in addition to censorship blockades, there was also a change of writers from Nunnally Johnson to John O'Hara). Ida Lupino's character, Anna, could not be shown to be a prostitute, but she did well as a vulnerable woman rescued by and taken in by Bobo-to the dismay of Tiny, Thomas Mitchell's character, who plays at being a sort of George from Of Mice and Men , managing the volatile Bobo (Gabin), but in fact is more Lennie from that novella (with Lupino not a tramp like Curley's Wife, but still a fatal catalyst). As a waterfront bar philosopher, Claude Rains played against type in another underwritten part. A dream scene and the relentless slow-motion chase across the breakwater near the end have a noirish look, but the movie is far more a syrupy romance between misfits than a noir, even with suspicions of murder shared by a character too drunk to remember what happened. I'd give the DVD bonus features 4+ stars, but the movie can't rate more than 3-star, despite some interesting characters and aspects.

I think that Ida Lupinowas very good as Jennifer Whittredge on a spring-of-1939 buying trip to Warsaw assisting silly antique buyer played by Mary Boland. The sensible Ms. Whittredge bewitches an aristocrat from a particularly feudal family played by the ever-noble but usually wishy-washy Paul Henried (Casablanca). Even with solid performances from Michael Chekhov and Victor Francen as Count Stefan's very different uncles and from Lupino, In Our Time (1944, directed by George Sherman) is puzzlingly dull until it gets out-and-out preposterous in its last quarter hour, as Count Stefan inspires the peasants he his wife have been modernizing to a scorched-earth strategy and goes off to a doomed defense of Warsaw despite his experience in the cavalry trying to fight the tanks of the Nazi blitzkrieg. Franz Waxman threw musical oil on the flames, especially in the uplifting coda about defeating the Nazis "in our time" that is followed by exhortation to "Buy War Bonds." I expect the propagandistic ending, but the cross-cultural, cross-class romance of the first hour and a half is not only movie-false but boring. 2.2 stars

Cornered (directed by Edward Dmytryk, 1945, 3.4 stars) must be one of the first movies about hunting down Nazis (and, in this instance, French collaborators) who had escaped to South America. Dick Powell played an American flyer who had married a French resistance fighter who had been slain. More than a little crazed he goes to Buenos Aires, where Walter Slezak plays games with him and the Nazi network and the anti-Nazi network. The plot is oscillates between opaque and implausible, but there's some great noir photography and Powell in Phillip Marlowe mood, getting knocked about and fooled, but persisting.

The Horn Blows At Midnight (1945, directed by Raoul Walsh, not my idea of a fantasy comedy director, 2.8 stars) has Jack Benny as an angel playing trumpet (not violin!) dispatched to sound the earth's last trumpet. It's more silly than funny even with Jack Benny's deadpans.

Conflict (1945, directed by Curtis Bernhardt, 4 stars) features one of the many battles of wits on screen between Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet (the best-known of which were in "The Maltese Falcon" and "Casablanca"). In this outing, Greenstreet played an amiable psychiatrist, Bogart an engineer who wanted to trade in his nagging but chicly-dressed wife (Rose Hobart) for her younger, seemingly sweeter sister (Alexis Smith in some very unflattering get-ups). A psychological twister more than a thriller (and not a noir, though the daytime pawnshop and empty apartment scenes relate to the doubts and fears in dangerous peril-filled cities of noirs), it kept me uncertain about what was going on, even though I noticed the most important clue registering.

Robert Wise's apprentice direction of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body Snatcher (1945, 3.2 stars) is a slow 73 minute movie about supplying corpses for medical training in 19th-century Edinburgh. Boris Karloff has a complex role, Russell Wade a very uninteresting protagonist. The movie has creative use of sound but hackneyed use of shadows (though that is preferable to the gorefests of today's horror movies).

The Southerner ( 1945, 3.4 stars), adapted and directed by Jean Renoir, whom I consider an overrated auteur and most of whose films mix greatness and ploddingness, begins very sentimentally and ends almost as sentimentally. In between, there are some surprisingly adept action scenes (two fights and braving a flooded river). As Grannie, Beulah Bondi hams mercilessly, while Randolph Scott attempts to be suave and rural (a struggling sharecropper rather than a spoiled quasi-gigolo or socialite) at the same time.

Strange Illusion (1945, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, 2.7 stars) The suspicions of a college student (Jimmy Lydon) that his mother's (Sally Eilers) new romance (the very-dapper mustachioed Warren William) killed his father and an earlier wife lead him into an insane asylum run by a psychiatrist in the Dr. Caligari mode. I don't see the basis for Ulmer's posthumous reputation. The dream sequences are very hokey, the story is told with no particular flair or (especially for a B movie) speed. Warren William's performance is the only one of any subtlety (ham that he could be and was in other roles).