The Divorce of Lady X (Tim Whelan, 1938)

Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in The Divorce of Lady X

Cast: Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, Binnie Barnes, Ralph Richardson, Morton Selten, J.H. Roberts, Gertrude Musgrove, Gus McNaughton, H.B. Hallam, Eileen Peel. Screenplay: Lajos Biró, Ian Dalrymple, Arthur Wimperis, based on a play by Gilbert Wakefield. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Lazare Meerson. Film editing: Walter Stovkis. Music: Miklós Rózsa. 

Screwball comedy movies, in which an otherwise sober and respectable male, usually a lawyer, a professor, or a businessman, is prodded into absurd behavior and outlandish situations by a giddy, beautiful, and usually rich female, seem to be a particularly American genre. They may have their antecedents in the French farces of Feydeau and Labiche, but they need that American sense, particularly common in the Great Depression, that the rich are idle triflers, not to be trusted by everyday hard-working folk. Which may be why the British attempt at screwball seen in The Divorce of Lady X is a bit of a misfire. Merle Oberon plays the madcap lady in the film, who delights in deceiving and annoying the barrister played by Laurence Olivier until he inevitably falls in love with her. One problem with the film lies in the casting: Olivier's vulpine mien is not one that easily expresses naïveté, which the barrister Everard Logan must possess in order to fall for Leslie Steele's wiles, when she allows him to believe that she's really the scandalous Lady Mere. The real Lady Mere is played by Binnie Barnes, and the subplot revolves around the desire of her husband, played by Ralph Richardson, to divorce her, with the aid of Logan in the dual role of both barrister and corespondent -- how he got into that predicament is the rather clumsy setup for the film. Barnes and Richardson are far better suited to this kind of comedy than Oberon and Olivier, and they contribute some of the more amusing moments in the movie. It's filmed in the rather wan hues of early Technicolor, which only contribute to the general sense of underachievement.

Knight Without Armor (Jacques Feyder, 1937)

Robert Donat and Marlene Dietrich in Knight Without Armor

Countess Alexandra: Marlene Dietrich
A.J. Fothergill: Robert Donat
Duchess: Irene Vanbrugh
Vladinoff: Herbert Lomas
Col. Adraxine: Austin Trevor
Axelstine: Basil Gill
Maronin: David Tree
Poushkoff: John Clements
Station Master: Hay Petrie
Drunken Commissar: Miles Malleson

Director: Jacques Feyder
Screenplay: Frances Marion, Lajos Biró, Arthur Wimperis
Based on a novel by James Hilton
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Production design: Lazare Meerson
Film editing: Francis D. Lyon
Music: Miklós Rózsa

After the success of his film Carnival in Flanders (1935) Belgian director Jacques Feyder was lured to England by Alexander Korda to make Knight Without Armor, a rather preposterous thriller in which a British spy helps a Russian countess escape from the turmoil of the Russian revolution in 1917. He had two top-rank stars to work with: Robert Donat had just made a name for himself in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935), in which he showed his skill at making outlandish thriller situations plausible, and Marlene Dietrich was looking for roles that would remove the "box-office poison" label that distributors had pasted on her after the failure of her last films for Josef von Sternberg, in which she had become an over-stylized figure. Knight Without Armor allows Dietrich to loosen up quite a bit, to get her hair mussed and her face dirtied as she goes on the run from the warring Red and White factions of the revolution. She does, however, get a chance to glam up, first as the pre-Revolution countess and then, when she's rescued by the Whites, to take a bubble bath and put on a gold lamé gown that has somehow been found for her. But Dietrich in disguise as an ordinary Russian woman is ridiculous: One look at those plucked and penciled-in eyebrows would give her away in a second. It's a silly film, a concoction of cliff-hanging moments, in which the denouement depends on a Russian commissar becoming so sentimental about the imperiled couple that he commits suicide to help them escape. But both Dietrich and Donat are game for whatever the script throws at them, and there are some bright moments. While waiting at a station for a train, they discover that the station master has gone mad: He announces trains that don't appear, and when Donat's character says he doesn't see them, the station master shushes him, explaining, "Trains that are seen get blown up." If Feyder had been able to sustain this sense of the lunacy prevalent in the revolution, Knight Without Armor might actually have been a good film.

Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942)

Ronald Colman in Random Harvest

Charles Rainier: Ronald Colman
Paula: Greer Garson
Dr. Jonathan Benet: Philip Dorn
Kitty: Susan Peters
Dr. Sims: Henry Travers
"Biffer": Reginald Owen
Harrison: Bramwell Fletcher
Sam: Rhys Williams
Tobacconist: Una O'Connor
Sheldon: Aubrey Mather
Mrs. Deventer: Margaret Wycherly
Chetwynd: Arthur Margetson
George: Melville Cooper

Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Screenplay: Claudine West, George Froeschel, Arthur Wimperis
Based on a novel by James Hilton
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Harold F. Kress
Music: Herbert Stothart

It's a good thing that amnesia is as rare an affliction in real life as it is, because it gives the crafters of melodrama free rein to imagine its effects, such as the case of what might be called "double amnesia" that plagues Charles Rainier in Random Harvest. For not only does Rainer forget who he is once, after suffering shell shock in the trenches of World War I, he then forgets what happened to him during that bout of amnesia after being hit by a taxi and brought back to his senses. That is, having once forgotten that he was heir to a lucrative family business, he now forgets that he wandered away from the asylum where he was being treated and fell in love with Paula, a music hall performer who devoted herself to him as he launched a career as a writer named John Smith -- she calls him Smithy. But plucky Paula learns the truth about her Smithy, goes to business school and learns to be a high-powered corporate secretary, and gets herself hired as Charles Rainier's executive secretary -- all without revealing the truth about that lost passage in their lives. Was ever such nonsense taken seriously? Yes, indeed, because it's filmed through MGM's highest-quality gauze, with Ronald Colman at his handsome stoic best and Greer Garson at her plummiest and dewiest, full of trembling self-sacrifice. It was a huge hit, partly because it hit wartime audiences where they lived: separated wives and husbands, uncertain whether they they would be reunited and made whole again. Today, we can look back on Random Harvest with irony, or view it as a product of a particular period of Hollywood history that will never come again. But it's made with such affection for its improbabilities, which are manifold, that I can't help admiring it.