Notes on Late-1930s Movies

The blockbuster 1936 movie from the blockbuster best-selling (and deservedly forgotten) novel Anthony Adverse won four Oscars, including ones for Tony Gaudio's cinematography, Gale Sondegaard's malicious smiling, and Erich Korngold's overblown and unmemorable score. I've never seen Frederic March worse. He and the very lovely young Olivia de Haviland had no chemistry and he looked bored around the world and through the long, long, long (142 minute) movie. (1.8 stars)

Swing Time (1936, directed by George Stevens, 4.5 stars) is one of the two best Astaire-Rogers movies (I prefer "Top Hat" from the year before). The last dance number on an ultra-art deco set with a pair of curved stairways is phenomenal, not just for what the two do, but that there are only two cuts (in "Moulin Rouge" or "Chicago" there would be at least 50). The second bananas (Victor Moore and Helen Broderick) are funny. Although "Swing Time" has "The Way You Look Tonight" as its leitmotif (first sung within the movie by Astaire), I think there is too much singing. And as much as I love the dance number with Astaire dancing to three silhouettes of himself (they go off on their own at one point, bewildering him), even in tribute (to William "Mr. Bojangles" Robinson) there is something very creepy about blackface (there's also a stereotyped black valet).

Jean Harlow played chorus girls gold-diggers more than once, though she was not much of a dancer and, at least in Reckless (1936, 3/7 stars), was dubbed in the songs. She made it with William Powell, to whom she was affianced at the time, and the story bears more than a passing resemblance to the suicide of her second husband Paul Bern. Powell and May Robson are good together. Rosalind Russell, a supporting player, also gets to be noble as the fiancée from the same social circle whom Tone jilted when he married the chorus girl.

In Suzy (1936, 3 stars) Tone played what Harlow mistook as a rich potential husband but married anyway. Later, after a Cary Grant song, she marries a rich French playboy. In both movies, she is the target for many snide comments, and perseveres, trying not to show she has been stung by them. Aside from the singing. Grant who treats her very badly, "Suzy" is notable for showing the counterfeiting of a war hero (the gallant pilot played by Grant).

It's Love I'm After (1937, directed by Archie Mayo, 4.4 stars) has too much Shakespeare-declaiming by Leslie Howard, but then he is playing a big-time ham. He's not as funny as John Barrymore or Richard Dreyfuss playing ham actors, and has a predictable plot to overcome. However, he is aided by a real comedian playing his dresser, Eric Blore as Digges, who specialized in bird calls when he was part of a vaudeville act (and continues to do them to signal to his employer). As Howard's perpetual fianc é e Bette Davis get to chew up (and pile up) some scenery, and Olivia de Havilland plays an ingenue infatuated by the Great Actor and believing he can do no wrong. Davis, de Haviland, and Howard are not names that would pop up on any list of comic actors from the Hollywood golden age of screwball comedies, but their iconic roles in dramas and melodramas increases the enjoyment of this movie for those who are familiar with the larger body of their screen work. (Davis became a star torturing Howard in "Of Human Bondage" in 1934; Davis, Howard, and Bogart had been in "The Petrified Forest" the year before "It's Love"; de Haviland beat out the competition for Howard in "Gone with the Wind" two years later, etc.) The eternally bright-eyed but flustered Spring Byington is also on hand to add to the fun. BTW, it's de Haviland who is after love (wanting to play Juliet to Howard's Hamlet (he appears as both Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet with Davis playing Ophelia and Juliet). Davis is seeking a wedding band. Howard and Digges Blore trying to be helpful (with comically disastrous results). "It's Love" is definitely funnier than "Stand-In."

That Certain Woman (1937) a four-hankie weepie, directed by Edmund Goulding, 3.2 stars) in which Bette Davis is prim and noble, and smokes not a single cigarette, as the upper-class bigot played by Donald Crisp dominates Henry Fonda, playing his playboy son in love with Davis. Davis could do noble ("Dark Victory," also directed by Goulding, the end of "Jezebel" with Fonda the next year), but when she was selfish she was generally more entertaining (The Letter, The Little Foxes, etc.).

Stand-In (1937, directed by Tay Garnett, 3.2 stars) is a bit of screwball comedy that turns into something of a protest movie (and a fantasy of a workers' revolution in Colossal Studios). Leslie Howard plays an ultra-serious, arrogant number cruncher who needs to be jolted (as he was more wittily the next year in "Pygmalion"). The movie business and Joan Blondell supply the jolt, and Blondell carries the movie. (Humphrey Bogart plays a noncomic part as a movie producer who is set up to be fired and then has a comic scene, though it's only a sight gag.)

I was impatient with Man-Proof (1938, 2.5 stars), but made it through Rosalind Russell's long speech to the usual straying husband returning to his wife conclusion. Walter Pidgeon is less caddish than heedless and immature, but I hate to see Myrna Loy being hurt. Her drunk speech is fairly amusing despite my impatience with drunks being represented as cute.

The Mad Miss Manton (1938, 3.7 stars) looks like something of a warmup for the great comedy costarring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, Preston Sturges's "Lady Eve." It is a silly tale of an irresponsible socialite (Stanwyck) pilloried by a contemptuous newspaper columnist (Fonda). Although corpses keep disappearing making her look foolish, there is a real murderer about, and the two stars come together and save each other.

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939, 4 stars), directed by Michael Curtiz from a play by the then prestigious Maxwell Anderson, was a vehicle for Bette Davis to oscillate between an insecure and unattractive woman besotted with the debonair Errol Flynn and the ruthless queen Elizabeth I. She ultimately turns out to be her father's child. There are lengthy scenes of Essex in the field, but no action. Those scenes are just as stagy and talky as the ones in court, but lack the fire and ire of Davis's queen. Flynn was charming and Davis histrionic. Olivia de Haviland (not yet pretending to be a plain woman) was quite lovely as the main lady-in-waiting, and Donald Crisp (just before his Oscar-winning role as the patriarch in "How Green Was My Valley") was the supplier of sage counsel as Francis Bacon. The color photography seemed unnecessary given the ultra-white makeup of the queen (though it was offset by her very red wig), but showed the very tall Vincent Price in very laughable pink tights. (What a ham Price was, which reminds me of the 1951 Robert Mitchum/Jane Russell resort noir "His Kind of Woman," in which he is hilarious playing a parody Errol Flynn.)

Walter Huston famously said that he wasn't paid to sell good lines, but to put across bad ones. He often did. So did Warren William. For both of them, putting across bad lines frequently involved overacting. It's a bit difficult to believe Walter William being overcome by passion of any sort, and especially any aroused by his boring (though gracious) clothes-horse of a wife (Gail Patrick) in "Wives Under Suspicion ," the tame and uninspired 1939 remake by James Whale of his more visually striking "Kiss Before the Mirror" made only five years earlier, but, presumably, too risqué to be rereleased after the Motion Picture Production Code began to be enforced. Frank Morgan switched roles from attorney to defendant from one version to the other, and, unfortunately, Gloria Stuart and Walter Pidgeon did not return. The story is mechanical with coincidences that strain credulity, but Warren William gave it his all. The only interesting visual touch was the courtroom set with the judge raised to an exaggerated height. (3 stars)

On Borrowed Time (1939, directed by Harold S. Bucquet, 3.3 stars) has one of the more tolerable crotchety grandfather performances by Lionel Barrymore, who traps Death, played by Cedric Hardwicke with a very dry wit, in a tree. The kid (Bobs Watson) is annoying, but Beulah Bondi added pathos, and Una Merkel menace (more so than Death).

(See also my notes on early 1930s movies, early 1940s movies, and annotated list of the best movies of 1939.)