The Baron of Arizona (Samuel Fuller, 1950)

Vincent Price and Ellen Drew in The Baron of Arizona

Cast: Vincent Price, Ellen Drew, Vladimir Sokoloff, Beulah Bondi, Reed Hadley, Robert Barrat, Robin Short, Tina Pine, Karen Kester, Margia Dean, Jonathan Hale, Edward Keane, Barbara Woddell. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller, Homer Croy. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Production design: Jack Poplin. Film editing: Arthur Hilton. Music: Paul Dunlap.

"An occasionally true story" goes the tag line to Tony McNamara's delicious The Great, a miniseries about Catherine the Great. It's certainly a phrase that applies to almost every biopic ever made, but especially to Samuel Fuller's The Baron of Arizona, the second of his feature films as director, sandwiched between two better-known movies, I Shot Jesse James (1949) and The Steel Helmet (1951). The film purports to tell the story of James Addison Reavis, a fraudster par excellence who tried in 1880 to lay claim to virtually the entire United States territory of Arizona. The real story of Reavis's scheme is far more complex and far less romantic than the one Fuller carved out of it. Fuller's version is full of shady doings in a monastery, a hair-breadth escape abetted by Spanish gypsies, high-rolling arrogance, near death by lynch mob, and sentimental true love, everything that could allow Vincent Price to play both dashing and disreputable. You can probably sense Fuller feeling his way as a director in the movie -- it's not quite as solidly grounded as either of the ones that flank it in his filmography -- and its budgetary shortcomings are evident. But few directors could do as much with so little.

Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941)

Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941)

Cast: Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Beulah Bondi, Edgar Buchanan, Ann Doran, Eva Lee Kuney, Leonard Willey, Wallis Clark, Walter Soderling, Jane Biffey. Screenplay: Morrie Ryskind, based on a story by Martha Cheavens. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Otto Meyer. Music: W. Franke Harling.

Penny Serenade was released in April 1941, which explains the cozy, rosy japonaiserie of the scenes set in the country that would be vilified by Americans after Pearl Harbor, only eight months later. The idyllic sojourn of the Adamses in Japan would be brief, however, cut short by an earthquake that brings on Julie Adams's miscarriage, complications of which leave her unable to bear the children she so longs for. But that's only the beginning of their misfortunes, which left many moviegoers holding soggy handkerchiefs. The phrase "they don't make 'em like this anymore" comes to mind, except that they do: Millions of people tune in every week to follow the fortunes of the Pearson family on This Is Us. It's easy to dismiss this kind of cathartic cinema and its TV descendants, but it serves a need that shouldn't be dismissed cynically. We may prefer the Irene Dunne and Cary Grant of The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) and My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940), but their starry presence helps lift Penny Serenade out of the vale of tears. Grant earned one of his two Oscar nominations -- the other was for None But the Lonely Heart (Clifford Odets, 1944) -- for this film. The Academy always prefers acting that shows over acting that naturally arises out of a performer's established persona, and while his performance is by no means one of Grant's best -- there are dozens more that could be cited as essential for their Cary-Grantness -- it does make Penny Serenade more watchable than it might be today. Dunne is less challenged by her role: Noble suffering was her forte in most of her films; comic giddiness was the exception. But she doesn't overdo it here. Everything else, however, is overdone: the chubby moppets who play the Adamses' adopted daughter at different ages; the motherly rule-bending adoption agency head played by Beulah Bondi; the gruff but tender chum known as Applejack and played by Edgar Buchanan; the sentimental old songs that key each flashback. It comes as a shock to learn that so much of this tearjerking was done by screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, who got his start writing gags for the Marx Brothers and was the screenwriter for Gregory La Cava on the screwball My Man Godfrey (1936) and the acerbic Stage Door (1937).

Our Town (Sam Wood, 1940)

 

Our Town (Sam Wood, 1940)

Cast: William Holden, Martha Scott, Frank Craven, Thomas Mitchell, Fay Bainter, Beulah Bondi, Guy Kibbee, Stuart Erwin, Doro Merande, Philip Wood. Screenplay: Thornton Wilder, Frank Craven, Harry Chandlee, based on a play by Thornton Wilder. Cinematography: Bert Glennon. Production design: William Cameron Menzies. Film editing: Sherman Todd. Music: Aaron Copland.

Street Scene (King Vidor, 1931)

Estelle Taylor, Beulah Bondi, and Eleanor Wesselhoeft in Street Scene

Rose Maurrant: Sylvia Sidney
Sam Kaplan: William Collier Jr.
Anna Maurrant: Estelle Taylor
Emma Jones: Beulah Bondi
Frank Maurrant: David Landau
Vincent Jones: Frank McHugh
Steve Sankey: Russell Hopton
Mae Jones: Greta Granstedt
Greta Fiorentino: Eleanor Wesselhoeft
Bert Easter: Walter Miller
Abe Kaplan: Max Montor
Shirley Kaplan: Ann Kostant
Dick McGann: Allen Fox
Karl Olsen: John Qualen
Willie Maurrant: Lambert Rogers
Filippo Fiorentino: George Humbert
Laura Hildebrand: Helen Lovett
Alice Simpson: Nora Cecil

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Elmer Rice
Based on a play by Elmer Rice
Cinematography: George Barnes
Production design: Richard Day
Film editing: Hugh Bennett
Music: Alfred Newman

Eighty-seven years later, King Vidor's Street Scene remains one of the best translations ever made of a stage play into a movie. I think it's largely because Vidor and screenwriter Elmer Rice, adapting his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, avoided the temptation to "open out" the play. The focus of both play and film has to be the façade of the tenement house in which the characters live. Director and writer resist the temptation to go inside, even to show the double murder that forms the climax of the drama. Vidor does give the setting a little more context, with shots of the street and the city rooftops, and there's a scene inside a taxicab arriving at the brownstone, as well as a swish-pan montage of faces popping into windows along the street as people hear the gunshots. But virtually all of the action takes place where it should: on the front steps and in the flanking and upper-story windows of the tenement. What keeps Street Scene from bogging down as one-set films tend to do is the constant mobility of the camera, seeking out a variety of angles on the characters as they come and go. Several of the actors, including Beulah Bondi, John Qualen, Eleanor Wesselhoeft, George Humbert, and Ann Kostant, had performed their roles on Broadway, so they were already keyed into the kind of ensemble playing that Street Scene demands. This was Bondi's film debut, and she's a standout in the key role of the malicious gossip Emma Jones, a hypocrite whose son is a bully and whose daughter behaves like what Emma would call a tramp if she were someone else's daughter. The newcomers to the play also handle themselves admirably, especially Sylvia Sidney and Estelle Taylor as Rose Maurrant and her mother, Anna. The weak link in the cast is William Collier Jr. as Sam Kaplan, who comes across as something of a wuss, unable to defend himself against the bullying Vincent Jones, and a sap in his love scenes with Sidney's Rose, making us wonder what she sees in him. Street Scene also trades a little heavily in stereotypes: the Italians who love music, the Irishman who's a drunk, the Jews who are somewhat isolated from the rest of the tenants, and even the Swede with a comic accent -- one of John Qualen's specialties. Like most of the films produced by Sam Goldwyn, Street Scene has high production values, particularly Richard Day's set, which was modeled on Jo Mielziner's Broadway set; the cinematography by George Barnes with some uncredited assistance from Gregg Toland; and Alfred Newman's score, which features a bluesy Gershwinesque theme that he would re-use in half a dozen other movies even after he left Goldwyn for 20th Century Fox.

Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)

Beulah Bondi in Make Way for Tomorrow

Lucy Cooper: Beulah Bondi
Barkley Cooper: Victor Moore
Anita Cooper: Fay Bainter
George Cooper: Thomas Mitchell
Harvey Chase: Porter Hall
Rhoda Cooper: Barbara Read
Max Rubens: Maurice Moscovitch
Cora Payne: Elisabeth Risdon
Nellie Chase: Minna Gombell
Robert Cooper: Ray Mayer
Bill Payne: Ralph Remley
Mamie: Louise Beavers
Doctor: Louis Jean Heydt

Director: Leo McCarey
Screenplay: Viña Delmar
Based on a novel by Josephine Lawrence and play by Helen Leary and Nolan Leary
Cinematography: William C. Mellor
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Bernard Herzbrun
Film editing: LeRoy Stone
Music: George Antheil, Victor Young

As the music ("Let Me Call You Sweetheart") swelled, and the train taking her husband to California pulled out of the station leaving Lucy Cooper alone on the platform, I muttered, "Please end it here. Please end it here." And so Leo McCarey, bless him, did. He could have, as the studio wanted, moved on to a mawkish conclusion, pulling a sentimental rabbit out of the hat in which their children relented and found a place where Barkley and Lucy Cooper could live together, but thank whatever gods preside over cinema, he didn't. I knew, before my reading confirmed it, that Yasujiro Ozu must have seen Make Way for Tomorrow -- or as seems to have happened, his scenarist Kogo Noda did. This is one Hollywood picture from the '30s and '40s that has its head on straight, keeping its heart in the right place. The film gives us complex, fallible characters instead of sugary and vinegary stereotypes: The elder Coopers are as much to blame for the predicament in which they find themselves as their children are for not finding a satisfactory way to resolve it. As an aged parent, one who once faced the problem of an aged parent, I find the film's willingness not to lay blame on anyone refreshing: Barkley Cooper should not have allowed himself to get in the financial difficulty in which he finds himself; he and Lucy should have come clean to the offspring about their money difficulties long before they did. And though it's easy to see the children as hard-hearted and selfish -- the film does tilt a little more in that direction than it might -- what we see on the screen makes clear that housing Lucy and Barkley is a little harder than it ought to be. She seems oblivious to the burdens she puts on George and Anita, and he is a cantankerous handful for Cora and Bill, refusing to follow the doctor's instructions. McCarey and his wonderful cast handle all of this superbly, with McCarey not only stubbornly refusing to provide a conventional movie ending, but also withholding some information a lesser director would have made much of, such as what Rhoda did when she disappeared that night, or what Barkley said to his daughter on the telephone when he informed her that he and Lucy weren't coming to their farewell dinner. (I think it's better that we don't know what he told her to do with that roast she was planning to serve.) A small, surprising treat of a movie.

The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945)

The Southerner is perhaps the best of the films Renoir made during his wartime exile in the United States, which is not to say that it ranks with his French masterpieces that include Grand Illusion (1937), La Bête Humaine (1938), or Rules of the Game (1939). It does, however, stand up well against the better American films of 1945, such as Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz), Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock), or Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl). It also earned him his only Oscar nomination as director: He lost to Billy Wilder for The Lost Weekend, but he was presented an honorary Oscar in 1975. The film was also nominated for sound (Jack Whitney) and music score (Werner Janssen). The Southerner feels less authentic than it might: Renoir was unable to overcome the Hollywood desire for gloss, so Betty Field looks awfully healthy and well-coiffed for the wife of a hard-scrabble cotton farmer whose family lives in a shack with no running water and whose youngest child almost dies of "spring sickness" -- a form of pellagra caused by malnutrition. Zachary Scott is a little more credible as her determined husband, Sam Tucker, a cotton picker who decides to start farming on his own. The role is a sharp contrast to his performance the same year in Mildred Pierce, in which he's a slick con man -- the kind of role he found himself playing more often. The cast also includes Beulah Bondi as Sam Tucker's grandmother, J. Carrol Naish as the Tuckers' stingy neighbor, and Norman Lloyd as the neighbor's nephew and man-of-all-work, who tries to drive the Tuckers off their land. Renoir is credited with the screenplay along with Hugo Butler, who did the adaptation of a novel by George Sessions Perry, but it was also worked on by an uncredited William Faulkner and Nunnally Johnson.

Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, 1940)

Mitchell Leisen directed two films from screenplays by Preston Sturges. The first, Easy Living (1937), is one of the great screwball comedies, in which fat cat Edward Arnold throws his wife's fur coat out of their penthouse window and it lands on penniless Jean Arthur, who is riding by on the top deck of a double-decker bus. Wackiness ensues. But Sturges was so unhappy with what Leisen did with the other script, for Remember the Night, that he decided to direct his own screenplays for then on, resulting in one of the greatest of writer-director careers. He was, however, so delighted with Barbara Stanwyck's performance in Remember the Night that he created one of his best movies, The Lady Eve (1941), for her. Stanwyck and her co-star, Fred MacMurray, are in fact the best thing about Remember the Night, on which Leisen could never find the right handle. It starts as screwball comedy, with Stanwyck playing Lee Leander, a compulsive shoplifter whose theft of a bracelet lands her in court being prosecuted by assistant district attorney John Sargent (MacMurray). It is just before Christmas, and when the judge rules for a continuance until after the holidays, Sargent good-heartedly arranges for Lee to be released on bail rather than spend the holidays in jail. When defendant and prosecutor find that they are both from Indiana, he decides to give her a lift home. Naturally, they fall in love, and not so naturally, the movie falls to pieces. It devolves into a sentimental nostalgia piece, with a few good lines and some nice performances, particularly by Beulah Bondi as Sargent's mother, Elizabeth Patterson as his maiden aunt, and Sterling Holloway as his simple-minded cousin. But the problem is that they have to return to New York and she has to face him as prosecutor, not as fiancé. The Indiana scenes are preposterous: Sargent's family lives on a farm near a small town that seems untouched by the 20th century, a place without electricity where the chief amusements are taffy pulls and barn dances. It's possible that Sturges could have resolved all of this better than Leisen does, but the material needs a consistent touch that the director is unable to provide.